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Political Art

Artivism, Creativity And Political Change In Spain

By Esther Ortiz for Equal TImes - “With the 15M movement the need arose to develop innovative ways of protesting and fighting in order to rally indignant citizens who were not activists, people who were ready to take to the streets but not in the traditional way. That is when the collective imagination emerged to mobilise them,” recalls Mónica Hidalgo, spokesperson for No Somos Delito, literally ‘We Are Not Crime’ in English. This citizens’ platform bringing together over 100 collectives came into being in 2012 in response to the first draft of the Penal Code reform, immediately followed by the Ley de Seguridad Ciudadana (Public Safety Law), both of which came into effect in July 2015.

Using Public Art To Narrow The Gaps

By Staff of Inequality.org - On September 21, 1976, agents of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet carried out a brutal assassination in the heart of the U.S. capital. Orlando Letelier, a vocal Pinochet critic and leading thinker on global economic inequality, was killed in the attack, along with Ronni Karpen Moffitt, a 25-year-old American colleague of Letelier’s at the Institute for Policy Studies. Forty years later, this tragic event continues to stoke the flames of activism for social and economic justice around the world. One of the people who picked up the torch is Orlando’s son Francisco Letelier.

Poitras Exhibit Turns U.S. Govt Threat To Liberty Into Political Art

By Lucy Komisar for The Komisar Scoop - Art as politics reaches new intensities in the Whitney Museum’s disturbing and powerful new exhibit of filmmaker Laura Poitras’ selection of videos and documents to define the U.S. government’s threats to liberty after 9/11. The exhibit opens in New York Feb 5 and continues till May 1, 2016. Astro Noise, the name of the show, comes from the faint background disturbances of thermal radiation left over from the Big Bang, the start of our universe.

Why Are Cops Taking Beyoncé’s Black Affirmation As An Attack?

By Natasha Lennard for Aljazeera - Beyoncé’s impeccable Super Bowl halftime show on Sunday drew an estimated 104 million viewers, but members of the National Sheriffs’ Association were not among them. Gathered in Washington, D.C., for their annual legislative meeting, the members of the organization, which is tasked with improving police professionalism, turned off the TV set midgame when the superstar performed part of her new single, “Formation.” The association’s president told The Washington Examiner about this petty boycott, stating that the cops were angered that the NFL permitted the performance of what is, in their view, an anti-police song.

Why Banksy’s Art Is Such A Deadly Political Weapon

By Lizzie Crocker for The Daily Beast - In a 2007 interview with The New Yorker, Banksy, the subversive British graffiti artist, was asked what drew him to his work. “I used to want to save the world,” he responded dryly, “but now I’m not sure I like it enough.” The paradox of that sentiment has been a constant in his stencilled paintings, a portfolio of facile one-liners manifested in text and images. Banksy’s most recent creation popped up over the weekend in London, on a wall opposite the French embassy: a mural re-imagining an iconic image of Cosette from the musicalLes Misérables, crying as a cloud of tear gas envelops her.

The Enemy Is The Ruling Class

This is an excerpt from American Autumn: an Occudoc. Get the full movie for FREE by emailing at AcronymTV@gmail.com with American Autumn in the subject line. Text, Animation & graphics by AJ Russo: Original; music by Goldi: Written, produced, and Directed by Dennis Trainor, Jr. “The Labor Movement has been kicked around now for quite a while and they have to fight. They see people fighting, and they see they are fighting the same enemy. This (Occupy) movement has show such an eagerness to reach out to the mainstream of the American public- and the Unions represent the organized part of that… The focus on the 1% and the first time in an American movement (I don’t think even in the 1930’s that the communist party did this in their mass work. I don’t think even they identified the enemy as the ruling class.” – Jackie DiSalvo | Occupy Wall Street Organizer
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