Thrive Collective mobilizes students, parents, artists, and community stakeholders to partner with public schools for transformational change. They function both as a matchmaker and direct service provider of arts and mentoring programs that cultivate the character and competencies necessary for students to thrive in today’s world.
The average crow takes less than two hours to travel from Sing Sing maximum-security prison to the Whitney Museum of American Art, institutions separated by just 32 miles of land along New York’s Hudson river. Yet few humans journey between them – museums and prison are at opposite ends of our society’s self-imaginings, and their populations tend not to intersect.
Stop Telling Women to Smile is a street art project by Tatyana Fazlalizadeh that addresses gender based street harassment.
Street harassment is a serious issue that affects women world wide. This project attempts to take women's voices, and faces, and put them in the street - creating a presence for women in an environment where women are a lot of times made to feel uncomfortable and unsafe - outside in the street.
For the past five years, we’ve screened SIMA juried films in communities and classrooms across six continents and witnessed an increasing demand to use the inspirational force of documentary filmmaking to build a global digital community around today’s most pressing issues.
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.
Visions from the Inside is a project enlisting 15 artists from across the country to create a piece of art based off letters from women in detention. The initiative, a collaboration between CultureStrike, Mariposas Sin Fronteras and End Family Detention, illuminates the horrific realities of life inside some for-profit detention facilities in the U.S., as well as the resilient spirit that keeps the inmates going.
One of the oldest forms of human expression is art, so it’s no surprise that art is constantly used to critique another of humanity’s oldest practices, violence and war. In the world of art activism, the power of creativity and innovation has been used to create commentary about war since the beginning of time. Art that speaks out against the atrocities of violent conflict embodies empathy, care, and a plethora of other human emotions.
Dismaland was an experimental and interactive art installation that mimicked and mocked similar attractions and characters of the Disney franchise. He later referred to it as a ‘bemusement park.’ Although the bemusement park seemed to disappear as suddenly as it arrived, the exhibition lives on in the collective memory of the British public.
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.
Colony collapse disorder is a colossal issue – and artist Louis Masai wants you take notice. His street art project “Save the Bees” aims to catch your attention by covering the walls of London with bees. Bees are extremely important to agriculture as they pollinate plants - yet entire colonies are disappearing without a solid reasons (there are theories, mostly about pesticide ingredients).
The kidnapping and enslavement of African people was the life-blood of transnational corporations like the "Royal African Company." In law, these human resource corporations were called "artificial people." Their human cargo was called "cargo."
Anjali Mehta is an illustrator from New Delhi, India. She is primarily known for her graphic shapes, gentle lines, bold colors, and strong female subjects. She is also designing a series titled Enroute Extinction that uses the same bright colors and familiar layout of a postage stamp. This series highlights animal species in India that are at risk of extinction.
Homeworkers 1977 is the central piece of a multidisciplinary project that comprised photographs, interviews, news clippings and a large canvas documenting the situation of non-unionised women doing manual work at home.
Artist Bryan Lewis Saunders took it upon himself to draw a self portrait every time he took a psychoactive substance. These ranged from zoloft to morphine to marijuana and it is an amazing subjective experience to witness. We can almost get a taste of what each drug must feel like on the inside, at least to Saunders, and an experiment like this raises some important questions like what are drugs and what place do they have in society?
Beginning in February 2014, the New Museum will present the first US museum exhibition devoted to the work of Polish artist Paweł Althamer. The exhibition “The Neighbors” will include a new presentation of the artist’s work, Draftsmen’s Congress, originally presented at the 7th Berlin Biennial (2012).
Visual artist Alexandre Orion removes soot in an artful manner to produce skulls in the tunnels of the polluted city of Sao Paulo. Orion does so in an attempt to create intervention, raise awarenes, and decrease pollution. "From the ocular cavities of so many dead, his work looks out on the living and interrogates people passing by; it quietly criticizes our omission, our comfortable acceptance of pollution." ( Jose De Souza Martins)
This is a prime example of the marriage of art and activism. The Silence = Death poster is simple but extremely powerful representation of the obstacles the AIDS movement was facing (suppression of gay people + their problems, lack of awareness surrounding the pandemic).
Kheris Rogers, an 11-year-old entrepreneur from Los Angeles, has made history at New York Fashion Week as the youngest fashion designer ever to present. Kheris became an internet sensation earlier this year after her sister posted photos of her promoting her unapologetic Flexin' in My Complexion apparel line.
The minaret of the Jara Mosque in Gabes towers over its surroundings. Formed of golden brick, it jolts up from the flat, sand-colored cityscape around it, all the better to broadcast the call to prayer across the coastal city.
The Red Sand Project is a participatory art installation and social awareness project created by artist and activist Molly Gochman in 2014. The project aims to raise awareness about human trafficking, which is a global issue that affects an estimated 40 million people, including men, women, and children who are subjected to forced labor, sexual exploitation, and other forms of exploitation.
This is the sixth piece of the series Tatlin’s Whisper which examines the relationship between apathy and anaesthetization of the images in the mass media. This series intends to activate images, well-known because of having been repeatedly seen in the press, but are here decontextualized from the original event that gave way to the news and staged as realistically as possible in an art institution.
Priya’s Shakti is an augmented reality comic blending Indian mythology with modern storytelling. It follows Priya, a rape survivor turned superhero, challenging cultural taboos around sexual violence and empowering women through art and technology.