Born on June 30, 1902, in Mexico City, Leopoldo Méndez would become one of Mexico’s most significant and beloved graphic artists of the twentieth century. Méndez was one of eight children in a poor household. At a young age, Méndez used art as a means to bring joy to the Mexican community and attended the Academy of San Carlos located in Mexico City.
Mexican truck operators, members of the national transporters union (Trabajadores de la Alianza Mexicana de Organización de Transportistas A. C. (Amotac) ) organized a national strike across the most important and circulated freeways of the nation. Hundreds of cargo vehicles blocked the way, preventing other vehicles to continue on their route.
Renowned Cuban artist Tania Bruguera surprised a Bogota audience in September when she lined up three people directly involved in the Colombian conflict for a chat. The real performance however, started when a waitress emerged with a tray of neatly organised lines of cocaine, and began offering them to members of the audience.
The Canadian artist collective General Idea found its drive in the AIDS epidemic, becoming aesthetically and conceptually refined in the in the 1970s and ’80s, after long forays into absurdity and performances evocative of Dada and Fluxus.
Vem Pra Rua is a nonpartisan, democratic, and pluralist movement that emerged in response to society’s fight for a better Brazil. Brazilians of all regions, social classes, and ages began mobilizing at the end of 2014—building on the 2013 marches that protested corruption, inequality, and other socio-economic and political problems.
FloodNet was a conceptual artwork and a tool for online collective action.
Developed by the collective Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), it took the form of a Java applet that allowed users to send useless requests or personalized messages to a remote web server in a coordinated fashion, thereby slowing it down and filling its error logs with words of protest and gibberish—a kind of virtual sit-in.
Many artists are inspired to bring climate change into their work after a direct experience with it. Catherine Sarah Young hopes her work helps people understand and talk about their experiences with climate change.
In March this year, less than 100 days since he took office again, Luis Castañeda Lossio, Mayor of Lima, announced that the Municipality would remove the street art murals painted on the walls of downtown Lima’s historical city streets. “Lima has to recover all the architectural quality it has. They have chosen us and we will comply with the obligation that the population has consigned us,” said the mayor.
Samuel Ruiz and The Zapatistas
The Catholic Church has traditionally been linked to the right and the conservative politics, especially in Latin America. However, there are a few examples in which this apparently conceptual bond has been challenged.
Entre el 2004 y el 2014 se registraron 982 víctimas de ataque con ácido en Colombia. En el 41 por ciento de los casos, el agresor no fue identificado. El aumento de casos llevó a que en enero pasado se promulgara una ley que endurece los castigos contra ese flagelo y con la que se busca reducir al máximo esta situación en todo el país.
Warscape Sonata is a transmedia project that documents and perform audiovisual information related to the current drug war in Mexico. Twitter hashtags, youtube viral videos and mass media are used as creative sources to document the militarized Mexico.
In Women Are Heroes, JR introduces women who sometimes look death in the face, who go from laughter to tears, who are generous, have nothing and yet share, who have had a painful past and long to build a happy future.
Thousands took to the streets in Lima, Peru, on March 11 to protest conservative presidential frontrunner Keiko Fujimori, daughter of former dictator Alberto Fujimori, and demand that her candidacy be revoked amid accusations of vote buying.
The streets of Santiago are once again alive with the spirit of revolution. For weeks now, working-class Chileans have occupied national monuments and blocked major intersections in protest of widespread inequality. They desire full reform — a request so long in the making that it is practically tradition. The country’s floundering political elite offer half measures while dispatching riot police and the military.
New York Times
January 28, 2012
By SIMON ROMERO
SÃO PAULO, Brazil — This mega-city’s authorities have waged war for years against what they call “visual pollution,” banning billboard advertising, demolishing abandoned skyscrapers and planning to raze concrete eyesores like the elevated highway known as the Big Worm.
A new exhibition at The Shed in New York is a colour-soaked, eye-opening look into Yanomami life – an Indigenous culture in the heart of the Amazon rainforest
FEBRUARY 13, 2023
TEXT: Violet Conroy
Five hundred volunteers with shovels gathered at a huge sand dune on the outskirts of Lima, Peru, and over the course of a day moved it by several inches. Alÿs developed the idea after first visiting Lima in October 2000. The political context was inescapable: “This was during the last months of the Fujimori dictatorship. Lima was in turmoil with clashes on the streets, obvious social tension and an emerging movement of resistance.
A group of young adults under the name of "Love Tijuana" (Amemos Tijuana) celebrated the one year "Birthday" of a pothole located at the Via Rapida (Tijuana's Freeway) with balloons, banners, and even hats.
A wall will go up in Washington Square Park on Sept. 7, but come down by the end of the day.
Called “Muro,” this wall will be the artist Bosco Sodi’s first public installation in New York, in partnership with Paul Kasmin Gallery. It will be more than 6 feet high and about 26 feet long, made with 1,600 clay timbers fired in Oaxaca, Mexico.
In response to an earlier project called "Daily Bread, Gregg Segal collaborated with the United Nations Refugee Agency to bring awareness to the crisis of refugees fleeing Venezuela through his project "Un-Daily Bread."
Over the course of 3 years, from 2006 until 2009, the production team behind the film Wasteland (2010), also known as "Lixo Extraordinário" followed Brazilian, Brooklyn-based mixed-media artist, Vik Muniz, as he traveled back to Brazil to create self portraits with the catadores (tr. garbage pickers) of Jardim Gramacho, one of the largest city dumps in the Americas.