In the 1980s, sexist, racist, and militaristic war toys were heavily marketed by the major toy companies, and they became increasingly popular (especially because TV regulations no longer prevented whole shows from being program length commercials for toys, a la GI Joe.)
Note before the post: This article is great in highlighting a specific case of creative activism in the streets of New York City, but also gives some contextual background to how this project manifested.
On a sidewalk in the Village in downtown Manhattan, an African-American woman leans on her elbows and knees, wearing only black underpants. Scrawled in black marker all over her body are the words "Ain't I a Woman?"
National Public Radio (NPR):
There's no historical marker outside Jacob Lawrence's childhood home in New York City's Harlem neighborhood.
But Khalil Gibran Muhammad, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, has an idea of what it might say: "Here lived one of the 20th century's most influential visual artists, a man named Jacob Lawrence, who was a child of southern migrants."
"When it comes to the effects of the virus on black lives, the roots run deep.
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This is one of the hardest illustrations I’ve ever done. Not because of the tree - but because of the overwhelming nature of the subject at hand. Seeing headlines like “Blacks are Dying at Higher Rates from Covid-19” SHOOK me!
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Matika Willbur was given a grant by Kickstarter (the worlds largest funding platform for creative projects) to travel around the U.S. for a year and photograph Native America. The goal of the 562 project is to change the way we think of the Native American race, by shifting our collective consciousness and creating a positive lasting legacy of Native America.
Harry Belafonte, the singer, actor and activist whose wide-ranging success blazed a trail for other Black artists in the 1950s, died on Tuesday at age 96.
TYRE NICHOLS WAS a photographer with an eye for the natural world. He was especially drawn to landscape portraiture, its calm and innocence. It is said that Nichols liked to crane his lens skyward, capturing what sunlight he could before it dissolved into the horizon. As he drove home after taking photos on January 7, he was pulled over by the Memphis police and what happened next was as tragic as it is terribly commonplace. Tyre Nichols is dead at 29.
The sneaker brand Converse has commissioned an indigenous artist in Australia to create a gigantic mural with a surprising twist. The Melbourne mural plays homage to indigenous urban identity and was painted with a special type of pollution-absorbing paint that “cleans the air,” according to the agency behind the project, Amplify.
In 1996, filmmaker John Akomfrah created the character of the Data Thief as a narrative device to offer an insightful study of Afrofuturism in his film The Last Angel of History, which links Black musicians including George Clinton, Derrick May, and Sun Ra to Akomfrah’s thesis about the role of technological fantasy in Black artistry across genres and mediums.
The Folded Map Project is a project by Tonika Lewis Johnson, a photographer and community activist from Chicago. The project aims to investigate and change the racial and economic segregation that affects the city and its residents.
Topless queer men light spliffs on the beach. A trans man injects testosterone on the toilet. Drag queens nonchalantly scroll through their phones and smoke. These are just some of the images that make up the new book from Leo Adef. Titled WARP, it’s comprised of photographs captured across four years spent in Barcelona's queer underworld
Grandmas diving for seafood while immigrants wrestle with identity. Scrambling for self-worth in the face of suicide. Rock music in the face of fear. A noir murder mystery. Musings on death.
In this series featured in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, artist Alexandra Bell edited headline pages from the New York Daily News in 1989 concerning the case of the Central Park 5. Through redaction, highlighting, and censoring, Bell shows how the teens accused of this crime were painted as a pack of animals by the media.
AeroMexico unveiled a program called “DNA Discounts,” which offers discounts on flights to Americans who can show by taking a test that they have Mexican DNA.
The amount of the discount depends on the percentage of Mexican ancestry. For example, a person who has 15% Mexican heritage qualifies for 15% off.
Over the winter break, I was actually able to see the recently re-decorated Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond, Virginia. After the height of the Black Lives Matter Protests over the past summer, it couldn’t be torn down, but it was fully wrapped with protest art. All phrases and slogans (such as Black Trans Lives Matter, ACAB, Etc.) were in full display over the statue of the infamous Confederate General.
This has been a racially-charged year. How one challenges the status quo is an individual choice and many opt for artistic expression. Artistic expression can personified most visually on the body and while black pride tees are big, nail art is just as big and just as communicative.
The user muchachafanzine on instagram is an activist who writes a "decolonial native xicana feminist fanzine". They are an online activist and they spread their message through their page, the zine, and through merchandise. Daisy Salinas began Muchacha Fanzine as a feminist punk zine in 2011. Over the years, Muchacha has grown into a larger, submission-based compilation of work by marginalized voices from around the world.
In 2013, Ghana ThinkTank received a Creative Capital Award for Emerging Fields, enabling them to begin the multi-year ThinkTank at the Border project. In this project, they are collecting problems from civilian border patrols like the Minutemen, "Patriot" groups, and Nativist organizations, and bringing them to be solved by think tanks of undocumented workers in San Diego and recently deported immigrants in Tijuana.
A group of young black women poised to graduate from the United States Military Academy gathered on the steps of West Point’s oldest barracks last week in traditional gray dress uniforms, complete with sabers, for a group photo. Known as an “Old Corps” photograph because it mimics historical portraits, it was nearly identical to thousands that cadets have posed for over the decades, with one key difference: The 16 women raised their clenched fists.
The performance artist James Luna, who died in 2018 at age 68, had a wicked sense of humor, which made his explorations of the way that Indigenous people have long been objectified, especially in museums, painfully piquant.
I was born in the 90s, but I’m not a Born Free; it was before South Africa became a democracy. Many believe that my generation doesn’t have anything to protest against. Given that police threw stun grenades at a student protest outside parliament last month, that is far from the truth.
CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police say no one was arrested during a loud – and very colorful – KKK rally and counter-protest in uptown Charlotte Saturday afternoon.
Members of the National Socialist Movement joined the Ku Klux Klan for an anti-immigration rally at Old City Hall on West Trade Street, but the counter-protesters outnumbered them at least five to one.
Marcel Duchamp, father of the readymade, forced the world to consider mundane things as significant objects, worthy of greater-than-average contemplation — yet his bicycle wheel, shovel, and urinal didn’t come freighted with all that much history.
The questions that London-based collective One Of My Kind (aka OOMK) explore are those of identity and belonging—issues that are experienced by everyone regardless of whether they grew up defining themselves based on the music they listen to, the hobbies they enjoy, or the religion they practice.