For the first time since its controversial installation in 1989, the I.M. Pei-designed Louvre Pyramid has been decorated in a museum-sanctioned act of anti-capitalist activism.
“Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.” Mahatma Gandhi
#FUEELESTADO is a project about the lack of social justice and the gross human rights violations in Mexico. It examines the conflict between state power and personal autonomy and responsibility, a conflict that, in Mexico, involves missing persons and unidentified bodies and that can’t be silenced anymore.
Games for Change is a community of game designers, activists, artists and individuals focused on creating and using digital games for purposes of social change. Games for Change is a large and loose community, but it has a major nonprofit organization at its center, who organizes the majority of the meetups and work of the movement.
If you visit the Art AIDS America exhibition expecting to see activist slogans and memorial pieces along with some art-world superstars, you won’t be disappointed—Keith Haring, Robert Mapplethorpe and the “Silence = Death” slogan are present and accounted for—but you might also walk through the show scratching your head in confusion.
Have you ever wanted to see current or potential innovations for poverty or the environment without having to do a lot of researching or reading? Have you ever thought of an idea and wanted to tell the world about it and get feedback? Howitcouldbedifferent.org was founded for these purposes - to enable people to easily see, share, and suggest ideas in different categories.
On December 2014 I've been artist in residence at MANY MINI RESIDENCY a short-term residency program organized by Sarrita Hunn and Ryan Thayer and hosted by GYB BYG in Mexico City. During my 12 hour residency I’ve worked on the case of the 43 students from Normal Rural de Ayotzinapa who went missing while in the custody of Iguala’s police force in September 2014.
On 27th January 2013, the participatory project titled 175 hectares has run through the streets of the city of Trento (Italy). All the community has traced a line of white chalk that measures 6.3 km and the area included was 175 hectares: the exact surface area of the extermination camp of Birkenau (Auschwitz II, Poland).
Nowhereisland was an island which journeyed from the High Arctic region of Svalbard to the south west coast of England in summer 2012. As it made this epic journey, it travelled through international waters, whereupon it became the world's newest nation - Nowhereisland - with citizenship open to all.
"Nearly 2 million decaying Goodyear tires lie submerged off the coast
of South Florida, decrepit hunks of rubber that have gradually succumbed
to the pressures of tides and tropical storms. The steel cables that
once strung them along the ocean floor have snapped, and many have
drifted into the natural reefs only 70 feet away, permanently scarring
them. What is now a 36-acre underwater junkyard was once the
Decolonize Me features six contemporary Aboriginal artists whose works challenge, interrogate and reveal Canada’s long history of colonization in daring and innovative ways.
“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.
We Animals is an ambitious project which documents, through photography, animals in the human environment. Humans are as much animal as the sentient beings we use for food, clothing, research, experimentation, work, entertainment, slavery and companionship. With this as its premise, We Animals aims to break down the barriers that humans have built which allow us to treat nonhuman animals as objects and not as beings with moral significance.
Valentine Peace Project (VPP) Community Valentine actions started on the streets of Los Angeles with the sharing of thousands of poems on peace and expressions of love given out wrapped around carnations and later Fairtrade roses. Students also made paper flowers to give out with their own written reflections or submissions selected from Valentinepeaceproject.org.
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.
A is for Activism is a children's book developed by Innosanto Nagara, an author illustrator and founding member of the Design Action Collective, a worker owned cooperative design studio in Oakland that is dedicated to “serving the Movement.” The book includes playful rhymes for each letter stressing the importance of civic engagement and a participatory democracy.
On Tuesday, May 8, in the midst of final exam week, a group of female first-year students performed a public art action at UC Berkeley to call attention to the UC Regents’ privatization of what was once the premier public university in the country.(See photos below)
Enmedio member Leonidas Martín at Creativetime 2012 (New York). His presentation “How to Disrupt the Financial Order with Humour, Creativity and a Dose of Mischief” is priceless. Watch the video and laugh.
Students at the NYC iSchool, a high school in Manhattan, worked for 9 weeks to create works of activist art with art teacher Gretel Smith. We were lucky enough to have Stephen Duncomb and Steve Lambert from the Center for Artistic Activism come to our class to teach a lesson inspiring students to think like activists; they came back later to critique students’ works-in-progress.
Africa has had a devastating history of blood diamond wars. Blood diamond refers to a diamond mined in a war zone and then sold to finance an invading army's war efforts, usually in Africa where more than two-thirds of the worlds diamonds are extracted.
This site specific social / political word play was painted on the exterior wall of Johannesburg's largest diamond trader Jewel City.
In a twist on the Broken Windows Theory, street artists are using their skills to combat urban blight in Baltimore with "The Slumlord Project". By drawing the attention of neighbors to abandoned and vacant properties and giving pertinent ownership information to take action on, 17 artists are spray painting and wheat-pasting in a D.I.Y.
Artistic Activist, Charlotte Claire, is at the forefront of initiating revolutionary change in mental health care. Her project, The Babyfacedassassin, is dedicated to improving mental health care and inspiring people to care for their mental health.
Camp Mossandsticks, named after moss and sticks--two of the most rudimentary tools with which one can spark fire--is a site for young women and girls to become resourceful, defiant, and self-sufficient revolutionaries of today. Started on November 6, 2012, the camp hosts workshops to spark the attendees’ inner political flames, challenging them to confront disenfranchisement created by the status quo and to take matters into their own hands.