Tranvía Cero is a group of artists from Ecuador who have been creating artistic projects with the aim to empact community lives and change the ideas of art as an exclusive terrain. The describe their goal as a redefinition of art through the social engaging experiences.
The Heidelberg Project is an outdoor art project in Detroit, Michigan. It was created in 1986 by artist Tyree Guyton and his grandfather Sam Mackey ("Grandpa Sam") as an outdoor art environment in the McDougall-Hunt neighborhood on the city's east side, just north of the city's historically African-American Black Bottom area.
In 2009, clergy from El Oratorio Don Bosco in Italy moved to Polloc, a remote town in Peru near Cajamarca, and began to build a mid-sized cathedral. In conjunction to the construction, they opened up a workshop next to the construction site for the local youth to engage in art-making programming after school and on the weekends.
Art in Odd Places (AiOP) presents visual and performance art in unexpected public spaces. AiOP also produces an annual festival along 14th Street in Manhattan, NYC from Avenue C to the Hudson River each October.
Born in China in 1941, artist Lily Yeh experienced first-hand the ravages of that country’s civil war when her family became refugees, fleeing to Taiwan as the communists took over. That personal story and the story of Yeh’s global art activism with communities from North Philadelphia to Rwanda and China is the subject of a new documentary film, The Barefoot Artist, now in post-production and ready for viewing later this year.
Sam Durant is an LA based artist who engages in social, cultural and political issues through his interactive public sculptures. Durant is interested in investigating historical narratives and their contemporary communities. From 2005-2010 Durant was part of the collective Transforma Projects, a grassroots cultural rebuilding initiative in New Orleans. One of his most recent interactive public sculptures Scaffold is on view at the Hague.
The Immigrant Yarn Project (IYP), organized and created by Cindy Weil was a massive work of public and democratic (crowd-sourced), yarn-based art honoring our immigrant heritage and promoting tolerance, difference, and community. Weil reached out across the state and beyond to collect yarn-based creations by immigrants and their descendants.
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.
Last August, as protesters marched in Ferguson, Missouri, after the death of Michael Brown, the 18-year-old unarmed teen shot by a police officer, another group of activists began thinking about how to incorporate the creative community into the movement. The result is Manifest:Justice, a free pop-up art show taking place in Los Angeles.