Marcel Duchamp, father of the readymade, forced the world to consider mundane things as significant objects, worthy of greater-than-average contemplation — yet his bicycle wheel, shovel, and urinal didn’t come freighted with all that much history.
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 Taylor rewrites art history, often with art historical references, to amplify Black people who have been overlooked or undermined by the canon and systems of power and control.
In 2023, it is impossible to be an apolitical artist in Eastern Europe. As war rages on in Ukraine, art serves as a powerful and necessary tool, according the members of the Sunflower Solidary Community Center in Warsaw: Maria Beburia, Sebastian Cichocki, Kuba Depczyński, Taras Gembik, Yulia Krivich, Kaja Kusztra, Natalia Sielewicz, and Bogna Stefańska.
Indigenous people in Minneapolis supporting Black Lives Matter cite similar struggles
Jingle dress dancers held a ceremony at the intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis on Monday, the place where George Floyd was killed by police last week.
“It could have been me,” Jean-Michel Basquiat would say at the mere mention of the untimely death of Michael Stewart. Stewart, a 25-year-old artist, was allegedly drawing on the walls of the subway on 15 September 1983 when he was approached by transit cops who then placed him under arrest.
David Černý has been called "l'enfant terrible" of Czech art. Since 1991, Černý continues to produce some of Czech Republic’s most famous political sculptures. His grand sculptures are almost always mocking the system through humor. Many of his well-known pieces remain as public art and have sparked much conversation. Examples of these can be found littered around Prague.
"Beginning in 1910, the Mexican Revolution spawned a cultural renaissance, inspiring artists to look inward in search of a specifically Mexican artistic language. This visual vocabulary was designed to transcend the realm of the arts and give a national identity to this population undergoing transition.
National Public Radio (NPR):
There's no historical marker outside Jacob Lawrence's childhood home in New York City's Harlem neighborhood.
But Khalil Gibran Muhammad, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, has an idea of what it might say: "Here lived one of the 20th century's most influential visual artists, a man named Jacob Lawrence, who was a child of southern migrants."
At the New Orleans Swing Dance Festival the all African-American dance troupe The Rhythm Ambassadors were presented along side an African-American iteration of the Preservation Hall All-Star band with African-American vocalist Taryn Newborne to deliver the message that the African-American Lindy Hoppers were going to be protest until their rhythm is better presented...i.e.
Fundacion Voces and Festival Mulafest got together to promote creative ideas for social change. They started a campaign in social media to ask people to donate their Vespa motorcycles. After they collected the Vespas donated by the people, they put them together again and invited known artists to intervene them.
Godfrey Mwampembwa, popularly known as Gado, has been holding politicians accountable for nearly 30 years. Now, his concern has shifted to the coronavirus.
In a quiet office on the third floor of a building in Nairobi’s central business district, the cartoonist known by his pen name, Gado, was sketching a satire about the coronavirus.
“Piano Stairs” is an interactive playful musical stairway installation created into the Odenplan underground station of Stockholm to make people use stairs more often than elevator. The project was part of a Wolkswagen initiative called “The fun theory” whose main objective and mission is to “change people’s behaviour for the better by making it fun to do.”
Hundreds of artists, cultural workers and activists gathered on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue in New York on Sunday (24 March), demanding that the most visited museum in the US publicly call for a ceasefire in the war in Gaza and commit to preserving Palestinian cultural heritage.
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.
Drag Out The Vote™ is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that works with drag performers to promote participation in democracy. We educate and register voters at drag events online and offline, by organizing local and national voter activations. Led by fierce drag kings and queens across the nation, we advocate for increased voter access and engagement in 2020 and beyond.
It all started a few months ago, when the Minneapolis Institute of Art got a phone call from Valerie Castile.
Castile is the mother of Philando Castile, the 32-year-old black man who was shot and killed by a police officer in 2016. Valerie Castile has since founded the Philando Castile Relief Foundation, which helps victims of gun violence.
The inspiration for the creation was the Common Snapping Turtle. A big shout-out to local member, Kristin Rubin and local college students, Sarah Lockhart and Alanis Gonzalez, for their assistance in the construction of the artwork.
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.
“My image was inspired by the #MeToo Revolution, my personal experiences with the male gaze and a healthy amount of frustration and repulsion. What I hope to convey in this image is the sense of verbal, physical and energetic male ownership that is placed on women in society.”
— Beata Kruszynski is a freelance illustrator and art teacher in Ontario, Canada.
“Girl’s Day” in China was supposed to be a way for boys on college campuses to show the girls how much they care. This year it went too far.
Have you heard about “Girl’s Day?” It’s a big holiday for Chinese college students. Every year on March 7, students throughout the country celebrate the day as a campus version of International Women’s Day.