This upcoming Friday, November 26 the 5th Freedom To Create Prize will be announced in Cairo, Egypt. The prize celebrates the courage and creativity of artists who promote social justice and who are “the voices of courage, unity, strength, reconciliation healing and hope.”
The Freedom to Create Prize so closely aligns with what we do here at Art Threat, I’m going back in time this week to highlight the two winners from 2009 before fast forwarding to this year’s inspiring artists.
Mohan Makhmalbaf is, by any definition of the term, a remarkable man. He was granted the 2009 Freedom to Create Main Prize for his years of dedicated work creating films which explore and comment on the Iranian state and its people. Raised in Iran, Makhmalbaf left the country in protest against Iranian dictatorship in 2005 when Ahmadinejad came into power.
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This weekend marks the 5th annual Honk festival in Somerville, MA, a celebration and gathering of activist street bands from across North America. These are the musicians who protest with instruments, costumes and rowdy improvised dance beats – the marching bands who put festivity into political resistance and a little bit of order into boisterous crowds. It is an often overlooked and yet vital aspect of protest gatherings around the world.
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When I was still a student at Simon Fraser University the city and working at The Peak I managed to get my hands on a copy of plans for the Woodward’s development a full year before the official announcement that the SFU School for Contemporary Arts would make a home there.
I’ll admit, I snuck it from the student union offices because I’m nosey and have to know everything. But what I saw made me excited. Excited that the School for the Contemporary Arts at SFU would FINALLY have a home that wasn’t a set of trailers placed helter skelter behind campus. Excited that they’d be getting a real home after 40 years of promises. Excited even though I wasn’t a contemporary arts student.
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This post originally appeared on Hyperallergic.
It’s impossible to escape the heated rhetoric around Park51 in lower Manhattan. The proposed community center for some of the city’s Muslim population has been called everything from the Ground Zero Mosque, which is the preferred term of the right wing media, to labels more appealing to the left, such as the Cordoba Center — though the developer prefers to call it Park51. No matter your political preference, the fact is you probably have an opinion about the issue.
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It has begun! In late August, a group – or project – calling itself the Toronto Street Advertising Takeover (TOSAT) reclaimed 41 advertising posts and about 25 larger billboards in the city of Toronto.
The “interventions” included painting over, pasting over and replacing advertising kiosk images with artwork and anti-consumer and anti-advertising graphic images from more than 60 international artists. Approximately 90 individual ads were “reclaimed”.
The takeover was orchestrated by 15 local artists lead by Jordan Seiler, a New York City–based street artist, well-known for his similar 2009 reclamation project in New York. The group was briefed on how to gain access to the kiosks and then issued a make-believe letter of permission from an advertising company stating that the company had “graciously donated over 20 Core Media Pillars to the Municipal Landscape Control Committee public arts program division,” among other fictional things. The kiosks were targeted in a 2-hour period on a Sunday afternoon; billboards were reclaimed later that night.
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In the wake of the recent racist attack on a Muslim cab driver in NYC, I’m particularly interested in the public reaction to the latest project by Tehran-born, Big Apple-based artist Amir Baradaran. For one week beginning September 9, Baradaran will debut Transient, a series of 40-second video installations infiltrating New York’s taxicabs.
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Glenn Beck helped cement his reputation as a misinformed art critic today during his massive right-wing “Restoring Honour” rally, which was disturbingly organized on the anniversary — and in the exact location — of Martin Luther King’s historic “Dream” speech.
Perched in front of 300,000 monochromatic faces, Beck gave an architecture lesson concerning the design of the Washington Monument. The story is retold beautifully by L.A. Times art critic Christopher Knight, who goes on to explain the ironic hilarity of Beck’s latest folly.
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