On Saturday, June 22, a group of friends will meet at one of the more than 4,000 natural gas wells that have been drilled by hydrofracking in Pennsylvania. Instead of picket signs, however, they'll be carrying a picnic basket. For an event they're calling "Picnic on the Gas," they'll strive to show that it is possible to live with creativity and even joy in gas drilling country.
In the country formerly known as Burma, these free thinkers are a force in the struggle for democracy.
By Joshua Hammer
Photographs by Adam Dean
Smithsonian Magazine, March 2011
From Black Power to Migrants’ Power
BY Robin Cembalest POSTED 01/22/13
As ’60s activist art enters museums, a new generation is creating an iconography of protest for today
ArtistsActivists is a youth empowerment and advocacy organization started in 2011 by graduate students at Yale University. Through the various ArtistsActivists programs, artists and designers share their skills with young people around the world. Since more people are joining our team bringing with them certain skills and project ideas, the Artists Activists mission is constantly evolving.
The Resistance Arts Trust Political Action Committee is a Super PAC with the mission of challenging great Artists to create public works of political art meant to inform communities, start conversations and drive media coverage on progressive issues, and empowering artists and the arts to a greater role in American political discourse.
The project (created in 2009-2010) consists of painted plats and posters depicted with drawings of police torture scenes. Images also include snippets of email exchanges. The plates have been exhibited in numerous galleries in Ukraine, and posters were hung in public spaces.
In a gallery in Hong Kong’s Chai Wan district last week, during the city’s third annual installment of the international Art Basel fair, the Beijing-based artist Huang Rui introduced a new live work called “Red Black White Grey.” At the start of the performance, four affectless women walked onstage wearing trench coats, then disrobed one by one as Huang, who is sixty-three, slathered their bodies with black and then white paint.
Turf the Turf hopes to inspire you to reconsider your front lawn by sharing existing examples of creative uses on a fun bike tour around the city of Kelowna. There are many options, such as xeriscaping (using native plants), front yard gardening or even installing original art that can display your creativity and offer you new ways to relate with your environment and your neighbourhood.
Artist Michael Landy catalogued, inventoried, and systemically destroyed all of his possessions for the 2001 public installation Break Down, commissioned by British arts organization Artangel. It took him three years just to itemize the 7,227 objects included in the project.
Hello and thanks for viewing.
This was a little installation that took place in the beauty of West Texas. The goal was to reorientate the site specific Prada Marfa into something more relevant, TOMS Marfa. Prada Marfa, being in the middle of nowhere, a structure placed as sort of a apocalyptic trophy for the high art world meant to challenge time; TOMS Marfa was to accelerate that vision with 2014 subject matter.
“The Split”, 26"H x 20"W x 18"D (aluminum, physics books, iPod running a countdown timer program, light, shadow) uses the shadow of a “High School Physics” book to represent World Trade Center, Building #7 that fell into its own footprint at free fall speed (6.5 seconds) on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. We were told that fire caused it to fall, but that is impossible and defies the basic Laws of Physics.
As the New Museum’s 2023–24 Artist-in-Residence, Camilo Godoy will create a performance exploring movement, breathing, and mourning practices. The title of his residency is borrowed from an embroidered work made by the queer Paraguayan artist Feliciano Centurión in 1995, the year before he died of AIDS-related complications.
On Tuesday evening, at the end of an action staged by Occupy Museums at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to protest the unveiling of the David H. Koch Plaza, three members of The Illuminator were arrested. Earlier in the evening, police had moved protestors to a cordoned area on the opposite side of the street from the museum; a substantial police presence remained throughout the evening, but no other arrests took place.
The Democracy Machine! is a performative sculpture that gives participants the opportunity to experience the thrill of democracy in action, in a competitive game that challenges people to work together toward understanding a better society. Using the spectacle and play of performance drawn from Las Vegas Casinos, gambling machines and game shows, The Democracy Machine!
On September 5th, 1991, I put a giant condom over Jesse Helms’ house. Why? Because, as the condom said, “Helms is deadlier than a virus.” Senator Jesse Helms was one of the chief architects of AIDS-related stigma in the U.S. He fought against any federal spending on HIV research, treatment or prevention.
Serene colors and technical set pieces create a surreal ambience as performers delicately hover into the black void above the stage. These performers belong to Kinetic Light, an "internationally-recognized disability arts ensemble". In 2022, the ensemble performed Wired, a "potent contemporary aerial dance performance that explores race, gender, and disability stories of barbed wire in the United States".
Tate Modern considers activists' wind turbine for art collection: Liberate Tate, an art collective who object to BP sponsorship, have offered the 16 metre turbine blade to the gallery
A 1.5 tonne, 16.5 metre-long wind turbine blade carried last month to the Tate Modern by artists objecting to the gallery's sponsorship by oil company BP is being considered for the national art collection.
The Women Are Heroes project has various steps in Africa, in Kenya, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Sudan.
In January 2009, 2000 square meters of rooftops are covered with photos of the eyes and faces of the women of Kibera, in Kenya. Most of the women have their own photos on their own rooftop and for the first time the material used is water resistant so that the photo itself will protect the fragile houses in the heavy rain season.
The KLE - Kit de Libertad de Expresión (or Freedom of Speech Kit), is a portable digital device that allows people from all over the world to participate to remote protests by sending and displaying text messages in public space. The interactive banner is (unsurprisingly) inspired by the record number of social protests that took place in Spain in 2011. It is estimated that over 23.000 demonstrations have been organised that year around the country.
El albañil anarquista Lucio Urtubia falsificó miles de cheques del First National City Bank, en la segunda mitad de los años setenta, hasta prácticamente llevar el banco a la ruina. Urtubia donó el dinero así generado a diversos movimientos de guerrilla europeos y latinoamericanos.
Project IMPACT is an 8-week leadership-through-storytelling workshop for teen survivors of commercial sexual exploitation. The goal of Project IMPACT is to introduce survivors to the idea that sharing their stories is a powerful advocacy tool that can impact the legislative process and work to combat sex trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation.
The Uganda National Contemporary Ballet (UNCB) presented a new powerful and moving production advocating for the child soldiers all over the world at the National Theatre in Kampala.