What kind of painting do you make in the face of the killing of an unarmed civilian by a police officer? What type of drawing sums up the pain of more than a century of institutional racism?
activism
Posted inArt
When Women Fought Nukes with Anarchy and Won
Brooklyn’s Interference Archive is showcasing the work of the women who occupied the area surrounding England’s cruise missile installation, reshaping British public opinion and attracting international attention to the nuclear arms race.
Posted inArt
Emma Goldman Papers Project Faces Uncertain Future
The 34-year-old Emma Goldman Papers Project is in limbo after losing its affiliation with UC Berkeley and running through its funding.
Posted inArt
The Designs of Dissent
LONDON — Two inflatable cobblestones, outsized and dully metallic, hang from the ceiling. It’s implicit: these are material agents of anarchy, the airborne heralds of revolution.
Posted inArt
Three Decades of Anti-Apartheid Activism Now Available Online
Three decades of activist material from what is one of Great Britain’s most intensive international grassroots political organizations is now online.
Posted inArt
Building a Museum of Activism
You can put many things in a museum — paintings, sculptures, skeletons, interactive displays illustrating mathematical concepts — but what about activism? How do you exhibit it while also keeping it, or insisting that it is still, alive?
Those are questions facing Bill Di Paola and Laurie Mittelmann, the founders of the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space (MoRUS), which opened quietly last winter in the East Village.
Posted inNews
Chalk Activist Triumphs over Big Bank
LOS ANGELES – Political activist Jeff Olson was acquitted today of vandalism charges brought against him by the city of San Diego in a case that even the mayor called “nonsense prosecution.”
Posted inArt
The Artists Who Gave Domestic Workers Toy Grenades
HONG KONG — “I wanted to enter Hong Kong homes forcefully, allowing these mechanisms of art to become a platform of conspiracy for the Filipino domestic workers.” Sun Yuan and Peng Yu discuss their photographic series on view at Art Basel Hong Kong.
Posted inArt
Revisiting the Radical Energy of 1968
Currently on view at the Oakland Museum of California is The 1968 Exhibit, which focuses on the culture of that unforgettable year. Organized by the Minnesota History Center, the Atlanta History Center, the Chicago History Museum, and the Oakland Museum, this expansive show explores the tumultuous year whose highlights include human space travel, the assassinations of both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the rise of the Black Panthers, the Beatles, and hippie culture, the first wide use of plastics, and many other things.
Posted inArt
The Power of Mobile Guerrilla Light Projections
It all started last fall, with the bat signal seen round the world. On the November 17 Day of Action, a group of Occupy Wall Street activists projected a series of phrases and statements onto the Verizon building near the Brooklyn Bridge. “99% … Look around, you are part of a global uprising,” the statement read in part, the words silently imprinting themselves onto a symbol of corporate power and from there onto viewers’ minds. It felt like an exciting, game-changing moment. Plus, this was something OWS-related that the media could easily latch onto, an image! The story went viral.
Posted inArt
Hell Hath No Fury Like a Pandemic Scorned
The slogan “Silence=Death” remains one of the most recognizable images from the art produced during the AIDS crisis in America. Created by the activist art collective Gran Fury, it complemented a movement of creativity that held social change as its core. Now, over 30 years since the term “AIDS” was first recognized, the collective’s retrospective Gran Fury: Read My Lips at NYU captivates this tumultuous time in American history and shows us that, perhaps, we haven’t progressed much.
Posted inArt
AIDS, Art and Activism: Remembering Gran Fury
Long before Facebook and Twitter made getting a message out to a mass audience as simple as a couple of clicks, the art/activist collective known as Gran Fury used a heady combination of bold graphic design, guerrilla dissemination tactics, and art institutional support to communicate the urgency of the AIDS epidemic in light of disastrous government and political inaction.