On November twelfth, 2008, over 80,000 copies of a replica of the New York Times were distributed in several cities around the United States. The paper included 14 pages of “best case scenario” news set nine months in the future.
See the The New York Times Special Edition website.
The Strangers Project is a celebration of the stories we’re surrounded with every day—both from the strangers we share our space with every day, and our own stories we carry. It’s about a connection with ourselves, with people around us, and with something greater than ourselves.
Kokumo, pronounced "koh-koo-mah", is a trans gender activist whose very name embodies her bold path of resistance. Taken from the West African dialect Yoruba, Kokumo means "this woman will not die." Kokumo chose her name in response to constantly being told that she would die of AIDS while growing up.
“As an educator, I want people to have a sense of empowerment. I want them to have ownership of their own creative experience. It’s a very humane thing knowing we are inherently creative.”
In a sleepy town in Iranian Kurdistan, people take off their winter coats. It is evening, and outside one can just about discern the silhouettes of the mountains that lead to the Turkish and Iraqi borders. Inside, some 60 people fill the small community centre with a clammy heat. But it is not just warmth they are after. They have come for poetry.
Mine is not Arts for the sake of Arts. It is a revolutionary INSGINA carved into the artistic plaque of my DNA to speak FREEDOM of expression and then freedom after EXPRESSION. The footprints of my revolutionary walk are dipped in the paths of RESISTANCE. My Ideological Swag -word is CREATIVITY. My spiritual birth mark is RESILIENCE. My revolutionary slogan is a nonviolent but a poetic fist of MASS INSTRUCTION. I am non-selfish believer.
To state or chant ‘BLACK LIFE’S MATTER’ is not to say other lives don’t matter, it’s a reminder that four hundred years and counting, black lives didn’t matter enough. Not during the dark era of slave trade and its horrors on the African, not after slavery ended and blacks were left holding the short end of the stick.
In “Speech/Acts,” a group exhibition organized by Meg Onli at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Kameelah Janan Rasheed and Tiona Nekkia McClodden stood out as artists who take up voices, histories, and experiences that can help audiences move forward and endure in the future.
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 elimination of Net Neutrality is a much bigger issue than most people would like to admit. This issue stems far from just an issue dealing with an open internet, free from biased control of the internet service providers, whom which we rely on.
Thich Nhat Hanh reads his poem "For Warmth" in Vietnamese, Krista Tippett reads the translation in English, excerpted from the episode "Mindfulness, Suffering, and Engaged Buddhism."
On an unnamed part of the internet, young adult author Gwen C. Katz found a delightfully deluded male author claiming that his facility with writing natural women characters constituted an unassailable rebuke to the idea that we need diverse authors to write diverse viewpoints. If a male author can write a woman this convincing, surely there’s no need for the #OwnVoices movement!
Yumi Ishikawa, a Japanese actress, freelance writer, and part-time funeral parlor worker, started the #KuToo Movement because she feels it’s unfair she has to wear heels at work. She also feels that being required to wear heels is rooted in a cultural problem, one much deeper than physical discomfort.
Reading the introduction to Animal Farm by Christopher Hitchens a few years ago, I was stunned to learn that George Orwell, then a struggling writer in London, worked by letter with a group of refugees to publish the novel in Ukrainian in the displaced persons camps of postwar Europe.
A series of creative workshops for sex workers, including a 7-day workshop modeled on the C4AA Art Action Academy. The workshops enabled sex workers to tell their own stories, and shift the narratives and stigma around sex work, and videos created during the workshop have been shown at festivals in New York and Berlin.
grrrRoar! Ecology is sexier when you focus on women and fanged beasts. Fashions in leopard print help us make that connection globally and online. Polluters at least pause at the reminder that nature isn't dead yet and in fact stirs the same passion as the woman you just met who's saying something about "Fanged Wilds"!
Counterspace is an independent curatorial platform functioning as the first decolonial thinktank mapping cultural activism worldwide. It shapes collectively decolonial toolkits with common tools and resources, and a global directory browsable by continent, praxis, and social construct, as a Beuys-inspired ‘social sculpture’ revisited, and an alternative map of the universe.
Express and Create, Solidarity and Support" is a slogan that summarises the aims of HeadSpace, a new, non-profit, artistic magazine that accepts submissions on the theme of mental health. It is entirely run by volunteers and mostly distributed for free in psychiatric wards and other places that cater to people with mental health problems. The first issue was launched in May 2013 in Dublin.
Dr. Stella Nyanzi, a Ugandan medical anthropologist, activist, and writer, was convicted after writing and posting a poem online, in which she criticized Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and his mother. In November 2018, Ugandan authorities charged Dr. Nyanzi with “cyber harassment” and “offensive communication” under Sections 24 and 25 of the 2011 Computer Misuse Act, and detained her in connection with the poem.
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.
The outbreak of the coronavirus has brought international scrutiny down on China’s political system. Again. A few commentators have applauded the efficiency of the Chinese Communist Party’s response, but most have zoomed in on its weaknesses. Some have even blamed the party itself for the outbreak, calling the disease a “Communist coronavirus” or “the Belt and Road Pandemic.”
The Declaration of Sentiments, also known as the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, is a document signed in 1848 at the first women's rights convention to be organized by women. Held in Seneca Falls, New York, the convention is now known as the Seneca Falls Convention. The principal author of the Declaration was Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who modeled it upon the United States Declaration of Independence.