Conscious Lee is a public awareness project to help people value and protect their rivers. Rivers are rich sources of life and are vital for clean water. They are beautiful spaces to connect with nature. We all need to appreciate our rivers. We can all help river wildlife and protect this natural amenity for future generations.
"Brazilian artist Mundano is used to spending his time on the road and in the streets, making art as an act of protest. Known for leaving his colorful works of graffiti on walls around the world, Mundano is especially dedicated to issues of environmental and social justice and spotlighting the overlooked work of Brazil’s trash collectors through his Pimp My Carroça campaign.
Graffiti art is particularly viewed as a powerful form of social protest, and the (illegal) act of defacing can be as important as the message itself. Artist Void One has been arrested on numerous occasions for his politically-charged interventions.
“I didn’t set out to make political art but art is a platform where I can vent my frustrations” – Void One.
By Summer Dawn Hortillosa
Jersey City’s got an art scene of movers and shakers but few can say they’ve done what David McCauley has in the past two years.
ONGOING ORGANIZATION:
CALLED: Iranti [pronounced írantì] is the Yoruba word for ‘memory’. Largely found in South West Nigeria and parts of Benin Republic, the Yoruba people consider memory a prized form of intelligence which determines how often one remembers what they see and hear.
As Black History Month commemorations start to wind down, one festival is just gearing up. Afropunk the Takeover — Harlem, running from Tuesday through Feb. 25, will celebrate black culture with music, art, film screenings, discussions and comedy.
Unveiling the Unseen
BlindWiki is a location-based audio network where citizens who are blind or partially sighted use smartphones to share their findings by posting sound recordings. The platform does not just contain information about difficulties and barriers but is also a repository for experiences, opinions and stories, generating a creative and collaborative cartography of the unseen.
Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American artist who rose to fame in the 1980s. He is known for his graffiti-inspired paintings that often engage with issues surrounding racism and inequality. Basquiat's work challenged the status quo and incited a powerful social commentary on the struggles of marginalised social groups.
Henry Taylor (born 1958) is an American artist and painter who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He is best known for his experimental figurative paintings and exploration of contemporary and relevant historical social issues. Taylor rewrites art history, often with art historical references, to amplify Black people who have been overlooked or undermined by the canon and systems of power and control.
The Amplification Project: Digital Archive for Forced Migration, Contemporary Art, and Action (https://theamplificationproject.org) is a crowdsourced community digital archive aiming to raise the visibility of art and cultural productions inspired, influenced, or affected by forced migration and refugeehood.
Italian street artist Blu was recently in Mexico to participate at the ManifestoMX Street Art Festival where he completed this intense and politically charged mural in opposition to the Mexican authorities.
Lesbians 101 is a full-color, 16 page magazine-sized comic book packed with light-hearted education based on the most common set of questions lesbians frequently get.
As the summer warms up, bringing with it sleeveless tops, Xiao Meili, a women’s rights advocate, is collecting photos of women’s armpits. Her goal: to challenge a growing belief in China that a woman must have hair-free armpits to be attractive.
DOHA — In an interview with the Paris Review in 1993, the late Toni Morrison once said,
I think of beauty as an absolute necessity. I don’t think it’s a privilege or an indulgence. It’s not even a quest. I think it’s almost like knowledge, which is to say it’s what we were born for.
Since her breakout show, Penis Nailed to a Board, held at south London’s City Racing gallery in 1992, British artist Sarah Lucas has never shied from making a statement. Working with sculpture, photography and installation, the Goldsmiths graduate and prominent YBA member has honed her provocative and playful oeuvre to question culturally prescribed notions of femininity and sex.
All those who practice surfing know firsthand the serious problem our beaches face: pollution. While some only complain, others do something about it. Two Brazilian surfers decided they could help raise public awareness of the need to protect nature of the proliferation of plastics used in the oceans through a novel idea: create surfboards plastic bottles.
The Acción Poética movement is a literary phenomenon that began in Monterrey, Mexico in 1996. It was founded by Mexican poet Armando Alanis Pulido and involves painting and intervening abandoned walls in cities with fragments of poetry. The content is usually love poems or optimistic phrases. Also, some phrases refer to the current situation in the cities (though one of their rules is to not talk about politics or religious beliefs).
The Mueller Report, important as it is, has not been read by most Americans. While perhaps written in more accessible language than other federal reports, there have been efforts to bring it into other formats: audio books, performances, and The Mueller Report presented in graphic novel form by Barbara Slate.
On May 12, 2008, a massive earthquake in China’s Sichuan province killed approximately 90,000 people. Ai Weiwei created this serpentine sculpture, made of backpacks, to commemorate the more than 5,000 school children who were killed when their shoddily constructed schools collapsed.
The Stanford Daily:
There is no word short of “spectacular” that better describes the experience of examining “Pan American Unity,” Diego Rivera’s 1940 mural, housed since 2021 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). The piece is the crux of SFMOMA’s soon-closing exhibition, “Diego Rivera’s America,” curated by James Oles and Maria Castro.
ATHENS — The young man climbed a 30-foot scaffold on a building in central Athens and dipped a brush into a tray of gray paint. With rapid flicks of his wrist, he outlined a haunting image: a baby with two faces, looking simultaneously into an abyss and toward the sky, its vacant eyes searching for a future that was not there.
Bob and Roberta Smith has been at the forefront of activist art for 2 decades; so who better to ask about how art is responding to these politically bleak times?
“As a Black woman, I can grow absolutely anywhere," Aiyanna explains. "I can adapt to any storm, any weather, any changes. In the Black community, that's something that we're really good at.”
So when Aiyanna, 25, was asked to contribute the first L in a Black Lives Matter mural made by a group of artists in downtown Charlotte, North Carolina, she knew her letter would include a flower person.
The Protest Banner Lending Library is a space for people to gain skills to learn to make their own banners, a communal sewing space where we support each other’s voices, and a place where people can check out handmade banners to use in protests.