Art

4 Potent Lessons In Creative Cultural Activism From Myanmar

March 12, 2015 Nadine Bloch, www.wagingnonviolence.org Strategize! Art, Creative Resistance, Fun, Myanmar

The legacy of the brutal Burmese regime that kept glamorous challenger Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest and its tightly controlled society closed off to outside influences had seemed poised for real change. Just a month ago, as the early sunlight spread across the Bagan plain lighting up hundreds of ancient pagodas and warming up a sizable gaggle of tourists (including myself) perched high on one of the structures to witness the sunrise, it seemed clear that a new day was dawning. As part of the inaugural Beautiful Rising workshop, we had gathered in Yangon the week before to hear stories of resistance and begin to tease out the shared lessons that these events held for frontline activists.

“Zuccotti Park” Musical Shines Light On Occupy & Economic Justice

February 28, 2015 Michael Levitin, www.occupy.com Create! Art, Occupy

It's not easy writing a play about injustice in America today – much as it's not easy telling the complex, multi-layered story of the Occupy movement. But that's what writer Catherine Hurd set out to do with her new musical "Zuccotti Park," which premieres in New York City on Thursday, Feb. 26, at the Venus Adonis New York Theater Festival. For starters, when tackling something as sprawling as Occupy, what issues get addressed first? "One was obviously the mortgage crisis, where people were pushed into these shady purchase agreements by [companies like] Countrywide, when they didn't have the money to buy a house in the first place – some who didn’t even have $1,000 in savings," says Hurd, speaking last week from her home near Davis, Calif.

Bansky’s New Work In Bombed Out Palestine

February 27, 2015 Kali Holloway, www.alternet.org Resist! Art, Palestine

Street artist Banksy posted photos and a short film on his website of works he recently put up in the streets of Palestine. In the aforementioned mini-documentary, the artist offers a satirical travelogue of Gaza’s bombed-out ruins. One photograph depicts a Banksy mural of a kitten. The UK artist includes a caption: "A local man came up and said 'Please - what does this mean?' I explained I wanted to highlight the destruction in Gaza by posting photos on my website – but on the internet people only look at pictures of kittens." The video, satirically titled “‪Make this the year YOU discover a new destination,” features onscreen text welcoming viewers to Gaza and observations such as “Locals like it so much they never leave (Because they’re not allowed to)” and “Development opportunities are everywhere (No cement has been allowed into Gaza since the bombing).”

More Than 700 UK Artists Pledge To Boycott Israel

February 19, 2015 Sarah Living, www.electronicintifada.net Resist! Art, Israel, Palestine, United Kingdom (UK)

More than 700 creative professionals living in the United Kingdom – including writers, visual artists, actors, musicians and many others – have signed up to a pledge to boycott collaboration with Israeli state-funded projects. Disclaimer: I have the privilege of being one of them. The announcement marks a significant step for the UK cultural boycott campaign. There have been many open letters and other statements of support for Palestine from UK artists, but the website and pledge bring together a huge number of creatives in one coordinated effort. Songwriter and children’s author Leon Rosselson, a signatory to the pledge, posted the video (see top of this post) of him performing the song “The Ballad of Rivka and Mohammed” as his statement. The full range of artists’ statements can be found on the pledge website.

Letter: Over 100 Artists Announce A Cultural Boycott Of Israel

February 16, 2015 Artists For Palestine, www.theguardian.com Organize! Art, BDS, Israel, Palestine

Along with more than 600 other fellow artists, we are announcing today that we will not engage in business-as-usual cultural relations with Israel. We will accept neither professional invitations to Israel, nor funding, from any institutions linked to its government. Since the summer war on Gaza, Palestinians have enjoyed no respite from Israel’s unrelenting attack on their land, their livelihood, their right to political existence. “2014,” says the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, was “one of the cruellest and deadliest in the history of the occupation.” The Palestinian catastrophe goes on. Israel’s wars are fought on the cultural front too. Its army targets Palestinian cultural institutions for attack, and prevents the free movement of cultural workers.

Youth Food Justice Zine: Call For Submissions

February 12, 2015 Youth Food Justice, www.youthfoodjusticezine.wordpress.com Organize! Art, Food and Agriculture, Media, Youth

We want to include as many voices in this zine as possible! Send us your art (drawings, lyrics, slam poetry, photos, collages, rhymes, reflections etc.) and writings around food justice work. Know of any amazing youth groups doing work around food justice? Know of someone in your community that needs to be interviewed? This is your opportunity to do some multimedia investigations and send us your results. You can also help us out by sharing this call for submissions in your social media networks and in person to friends who might be interested in submitting. The goal is to make a zine that lifts up the voices of youth food justice activists as well as intergenerational narratives around youth power within the context of the United States.

Rolling Monday Mourning Protests Begin At Mayor’s House

February 11, 2015 Rebecca Rivas, www.stlamerican.com Resist! Art, Ferguson, Michael Brown, police brutality, Politics

Carrying a coffin and tombstones with the names of those shot and killed by police, protestors led a funeral procession down Mayor Francis Slay’s street in South St. Louis at 6:45 a.m. on Monday, February 9. They left the coffin on his doorstep, rang the doorbell and began making loud mourning cries in front of his house on the 3800 block of Robert Avenue. Frederic Chopin’s Funeral March played in the background, as the group of about 25 – all dressed in black – stuck the fist-shaped tombstones in Slay’s front lawn. “This is Monday Mournings,” said Elizabeth Vega, leader of the activist group called the Artivists. “We are here because the mayor has repeatedly locked us out of City Hall. So we know need to come to his house. This is putting all people in power on notice.”

Changing Domestic Violence Culture One Quilt Square At A Time

January 26, 2015 Victoria Law, www.wagingnonviolence.org Educate! Art, domestic violence, Florida

Two hundred years ago, quilts were an integral part of the Underground Railroad. Abolitionists sewed patterns into the squares of their quilts. They then hung the quilts in their yards, ostensibly to air them out. Runaway slaves could use the squares to identify friendly people, possible guides, preparations and directions towards freedom. This Tuesday, January 27, quilt squares will once again serve as a beacon towards freedom. In Jacksonville, Fla., the lawn outside the Duval County Courthouse will beblanketed with quilt squares. The reason: to bring attention to and protest the continued prosecution of Marissa Alexander, a black woman, mother of three and domestic violence survivor. Collected by the Monument Quilt, an ongoing project that crowd-sources stories of domestic and sexual violence, each of the 350 four-foot by four-foot squares contains a message about domestic violence or sexual assault.

Why Movements Should Care About Azealia Banks

December 28, 2014 Kate Aronoff, www.wagingnonviolence.org Educate! Art, Hip Hop, Politics, Racism

The #BlackLivesMatter movement is quickly creating a national context whereby celebrities across industries are being forced to take sides. To date, sports stars have been the most active in their support of the movement. As it grows, more TV, movie and music personalities are likely to follow suit. Iggy Azalea’s racism, then, isn’t just in poor taste, but also beginning to fall out of step with a new mainstream of dialogue on race in the United States, one being crafted by organizers both online and in the streets. It’s a context, like that of the 60s, which gave artists like Harry Belafonte an even wider audience, and made his messages — not dissimilar from those of King and other movement leaders — resonant with increasingly broad swaths of the American public. Hip-hop artists have kept a critical consciousness on race alive in the United States, even as other genres — and a number of mainstream hip-hop artists — have drifted back towards a detachment from politics.

Art Broadens Conversation About Police Brutality

November 1, 2014 Geoff Gilbert, www.indypendent.org Resist! Art, Ferguson, New York City (NYC)

Millennial Activists United and Lost Voices, two youth activist groups operating on the ground in Ferguson. Through poetry, graphic art, film screenings and music, the participants explored connections between recurrent police brutality and larger problems of systemic racial inequality and state and economic violence that, in today’s supposedly ‘post-racial’ America, affect communities of color. The #NYCStandsWithFerguson showcase is part of a growing movement of black youth organizing according to a common experience, a process that has begun in the aftermath of the high-profile killings of unarmed black youth like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Renisha McBride. For the artists, some of whom traveled from Philadelphia and New Hampshire, and their audience of close to 70 people, art functioned as the means to articulate and engage with an experience of systematic racial profiling, mass incarceration, educational deprivation and chronic economic underinvestment.

The Art Of The Indigenous Protest Movement

October 27, 2014 Lisa Sproull, www.cultmontreal.com Resist! Art, Canada, Colonialism, indigenous

These issues are so large it can be hard to know what action to take for individuals invested in anti-oppressive politics. Sometimes it’s a matter of creating spaces for dialogue to occur among our own peers and communities. Back in August, a group of Montreal based artists have done just that by organizing a convergence called Decolonizing Street Art, which brought together artists, activists, youths and community members from Montreal and beyond to engage in making art and in conversation with a focus on decolonization. The artworks created during the convergence can be found in the Petite-Patrie neighbourhood in the general area bound by Beaubien to Jean-Talon and Parc to St-Urbain, and include works by organizers and Montrealers Cam and Zola, Swarm (Toronto), Jessica Sabogal (San Francisco), Bandit (L.A.), lmnopi (Brooklyn), Chris Bose (Kamloops) and Nigit’stil Norbert (Yellowknife).

UC Berkeley Shuts Down Beehive Collective Art

October 24, 2014 Sue Udry, www.defendingdissent.org Resist! Art, Berkeley, Drought, Freedom of Speech and Assembly, GMOs

Students at the University of California at Berkeley were forced to bring an art project on drought and California water policy to the main campus on October 21 after a dean prevented them displaying it at Gill Tract Community Farm, an “urban farm” in nearby Albany run by the university and community volunteers. The students say that Steven Lindow, executive associate dean of Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources, kicked the exhibit—a collaboration with the Beehive Collective, a political art group based in Maine—off the farm for clearly political reasons. They say that Lindow is tied to the genetically modified organism industry, and their event criticized Proposition 1, a state ballot initiative supported by the GMO industry.

Underground Rally Defends Subway Performers From Abuse

October 23, 2014 Yari Osorio, www.liberationnews.com Resist! Art, Human Rights, New York City (NYC), police brutality

Over 50 people gathered on a busy NYC subway passageway connecting the G and L Lines the afternoon of Oct. 21 to show support to the men and women who perform on NYC subway trains and platforms. The rally was called in response to the rapid increase in NYPD false arrests and tickets of subway performers. BuskNY, a subway performer advocacy group and New Yorkers Against Bratton held a rally to protest the recent arrest of Andrew Kalleen. Andrew is a 30-year-old guitarist whose arrest was caught on camera and subsequently went viral. In the video, the NYPD officer can be clearly heard reading out loud the specific statue allowing Andrew to perform before forcefully arresting the young guitarist anyway. At today’s protest Liberation News interviewed Andrew who told us he has been performing on NYC subways since December 2008. In that time, he has been ticketed, ejected, harassed and arrested multiple times despite the legality of performing for tips in subway stations.

Police Get Mike Brown Mural Removed In Trenton

October 21, 2014 Jenna Pizzi, www.nj.com Resist! Art, Ferguson, Michael Brown, New Jersey (NJ)

TRENTON – A mural was painted over Monday afternoon after Trenton police expressed concern that the painting, depicting Michael Brown, a Ferguson, Mo., teen who was fatally shot by police in August, sent the wrong message about community and police relations. The painting depicted Brown’s face with the caption “Sagging pants … is not probable cause.” Will "Kasso" Condry, the artist behind the mural, said he wanted to start a conversation about racial profiling. The Trenton Downtown Association elected to remove the image after hearing concern from police officers that the mural sends a negative message about the relationship between police and the community. The mural was painted by artists from the Sage Coalition about two weeks ago on a gate covering the entrance to a vacant storefront on the corner of North Broad and Hanover streets to cover an illegal advertisement for a nearby liquor store.

How Public Art Builds Safer, Stronger Neighborhoods

October 20, 2014 Anna Clark, www.freshwatercleveland.com Create! Art, Detroit, Housing

Art that merges with the landscape brings human presence, safety, and physical activity into the city’s spaces. This kind of art triggers more than one sense: it is something you move in, touch, and, in some cases, even eat. In Detroit, a spread-out city of single-family homes that is difficult to traverse and pockmarked by vacancy, these artistic interventions are an uncommonly powerful nexus of community life. They create welcoming traffic, as well as opportunities for neighbors to interact and work together. And rather than being a temporary show, in the style of a traveling exhibition or ephemeral installation, this is art for the long-term. It is for a city with a future.

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