David Schonauer
The Atlantic Wednesday February 22, 2017
Oakland, California-based
filmmaker Ivan Cash recently traveled across the bay to document a San Francisco protest against President Donald Trump’s travel ban on
people from predominantly Muslim countries, and the result is a thoughtful short documentary titled Signs of the Times, which is on view now at The Atlantic. In the film, protesters explain why
they are holding particular signs. Cash says his goal with the project was to “explore the art of protest and why people choose the messages they do.” Read the full Story >>
KCUR Tuesday November 17, 2020
In 2005, Keith Davis brought the renowned Hallmark Photographic Collection to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City and founded the museum's photography department. Last month, the museum announced it was cutting its budget by 25 percent and laying off 36 staffers to cope with financial challenges due to the coronavirus pandemic. KCUR reports that Davis has resigned in protest of the termination of Jane L. Aspinwall, a curator and collections supervisor of photography. Read the full Story >>
ARTnews Tuesday December 18, 2018
The activist group Angry Asian
Girls Association recently led a protest at the foundation C/O Berlin, timed with the opening of an exhibition of work by noted Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki. The protest was intended to bring
attention to allegations made by the Japanese model Kaori, who said in an online post earlier this year that Araki photographed her without a contractual agreement and sometimes did not pay her money
owed. “He treated me like an object,” Kaori wrote. “Now is the time to seek . . . new terrain in the Art world, getting past through the times of sexual exploitations by male
predators,” Angry Asian Girl Association noted at Facebook. Read the full Story >>
The Huffington Post Monday February 27, 2017
Dozens of independent movie
theaters nationwide are preparing to screen the circa-1980s film adaptation of George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984 to protest President Donald Trump’s proposed plan
to eliminate humanities agencies such as the National Endowment for the Arts. The film, which stars the late John Hurt, will been screened in more than 85 theaters across 34 states on April 4. That
date, notes The Huffington Post, marks the first time the story’s protagonist writes in his diary - a major act of resistance against the authoritarian state in which he lives. Read the full Story >>
By Peggy Roalf Thursday October 5, 2017
Protest art—straight from the streets and backyards of the angry, the oppressed and their supporters—is everywhere today, from museum exhibitions to talks, demonstrations and workshops.
Over time, protest art has taken shape in many different formats, materials, and methods, with woodcuts often rising to the forefront. In its most basic form, a woodcut can be made today by
anyone who can find a discarded … Read the full Story >>
ARTnews Tuesday September 5, 2017
In one of the largest single
acquisitions of Japanese photography by an American institution to date, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., has acquired 11 photographs by Japanese artists, including
Takashi Arai, Minoru Hirata, Eikoh Hosoe, Miyako Ishiuchi, and Tatsuo Kawaguchi. Interest in Japanese photography may be rising in the American art world after after a recent survey of Japanese
avant-garde photography that originated at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and after an exhibition about protest photography in 1960s Japan at the Art Institute of Chicago, notes Art News. Read the full Story >>
The New York Times Wednesday January 18, 2017
Plenty of photographers have
called appropriation artist Richard Prince’s work fake. Now he has called one of his own images “fake art.” The New York Times reports that in an act of protest against Donald Trump,
Prince has returned a $36,000 payment he received in 2014 for a work that depicts Ivanka Trump, a collector of contemporary art. Prince tells the Times that in 2014 he was approached by an art adviser
with a request that he make a painting based a post from Ivanka Trump’s Instagram feed. Read the full Story >>
By Peggy Roalf Thursday April 27, 2017
PROTEST May Day, or May 1st, has historically been a day of protest, and 2017 is no exception. On Monday, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics will host a book
launch and festive reception with DJs for Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production. The press release states: The refusal to participate in an
oppressive system has long been one of the … Read the full Story >>
Popular Mechanics Wednesday August 31, 2016
November 5, 1999, was “Burn All GIFs Day,” created as a protest against a file format that was already showing its age: The GIF, notes Popular Mechanics, “offered support for a
paltry 256 colors. Its animation capabilities were easily rivaled by a flipbook. It was markedly inferior to virtually every file format that had followed it.” And yet, the GIF is now the ruler
of the internet, an art form unto itself. One reason why: Behind the looping animation you see, there is often no GIF at all. Read the full Story >>
By Peggy Roalf Wednesday September 20, 2017
Could it be that President Donald J. Trump has done society a favor by offering so many reasons to mount protest rallies? “Dump Trump.” “I am a PERSON, not a PUSSY.”
“Make America Queer Again.” “Impeach Hate Speech.” In the weeks leading up to the Women’s March on Washington this year, for example, Chicago’s Newberry
Library issued a call for Pussy Hats and protest … Read the full Story >>
By Peggy Roalf Thursday March 16, 2017
Jenny Goldstick: This image is created by (top to bottom) Barbara Geoghegan, Alex Beguez, Jenny Goldstick, and Nadia DeLane. We are a group of female art makers who are
diverse in so many ways and yet we unify under the common denominator of visual storytelling. We collaborated together on an exquisite corpse (completed in-person, then scanned and finished
digitally). The resulting image is … Read the full Story >>
Radio Free Asia Tuesday September 5, 2023
A photography professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Art and Design has been refused entry to Hong Kong for the second time, further evidence that an ongoing crackdown on dissent under a draconian national security law could affect which foreign nationals are allowed to travel to the city, notes Radio Free Asia. The photographer, Matthew Connors, was denied entry in 2020, immediately after the 2019 protest movement, but is still allowed to visit North Korea.
Read the full Story >>
Esquire Tuesday July 19, 2016
Your welcome, Republicans: A while back we mentioned that artist Spencer Tunick was looking for women to pose nude at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland … and he apparently found
them: Esquire has a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Tunick’s “Everything She Says Means Everything” photo project early on Sunday morning, which involved 100 naked women
wielding mirrors to shine some light into the Quicken Loans Arena in protest of Donald Trump. Read the full Story >>
By Peggy Roalf Friday March 10, 2017
After being inundated with hateful rhetoric for months of
campaign, I could not get his image out of my head, most disturbingly even in sleep. This portrait is my first attempt to remove him… it works... for awhile… then I make another.
“Fool’s Gold” is collaged with assorted debris. The faces are getting progressively more hideous, reflecting the reality through my eyes. I’m in … Read the full Story >>
By Peggy Roalf Thursday May 3, 2018
Frieze New York
2018—the seventh edition of the 'London import—has delivered on its promises for this year. From the commissioned Black Dada Flag (Black Lives Matter) by Adam Pendleton,
which will fly over Randall’s Island Park until November to the Live program that features Lara Schnitger’s Suffragette City, a hybrid performance (above)
in its New York debut, the fair has become as much … Read the full Story >>
By David Schonauer Wednesday February 1, 2017
What happens when an artist disavows his own work? The photographer and painter Richard Prince did just that recently when "disowned" his 2014 Instagram portrait of Ivanka Trump, calling it "fake art"
and returning $36,000 he had been paid for its original sale. Prince said he did it as a protest against Ivanka Trump's father, President Donald Trump. But the move has raised questions … Read the full Story >>
TIME LightBox Tuesday March 15, 2016
More than 80 prominent photographers and artists — including war photographer Don McCullin — are demanding a reversal on the controversial decision to move a historic photo archive from
Britain's National Media Museum in Bradford, notes Time LightBox. The archive of 400,000 objects was set to join the existing 500,000-piece archive in a new International Photography Resource Centre
at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. “It is narrow-minded to centralize everything in the capitalist city,” says photographer Brian Griffin. Read the full Story >>
The Los Angeles Times Friday August 10, 2012
What a fun summer it’s been at LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art! Last month, artist John Baldessari resigned from the museum’s board to protest the leadership of director Jeffrey
Deitch, who is committed to draw crowds with pop culture-oriented shows. Other artists, including Barbara Kruger, also resigned. As Artinfo recently noted, Deitch has found himself on
the defensive. Now, reports the Los Angeles Times, he may be taking a none-too-subtle jab at Baldessari by scheduling a day-long pop music event inspired by a famous Baldessari
video. See? Fun. Read the full Story >>
PDN Wednesday March 27, 2019
Four jurors for this
year’s Magenta Foundation Flash Forward emerging-photographer competition have withdrawn in protest of the
competition’s major sponsor, TD Bank Group, notes PDN. The bank is one of several financial institutions that have provided financing for the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline, the $3.8
billion oil pipeline from North Dakota to Illinois. Three photography organizations, Authority Collective, Natives Photograph and Women Photograph, also wrote an open letter to the organization asking
it to reconsider its funding from TD Bank. Read the full Story >>
The New York Times Friday March 5, 2021
Benedict J. Fernandez, a professed “photo-anthropologist” who captured the persona of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the fervor of the King era’s protest movements before mentoring a generation of professional photographers, died on Jan. 31 at his home in Oxford, N.Y., notes The New York Times. He was 84. While working as a crane operator in Brooklyn and at the Bethlehem Steel shipyard in Hoboken, N.J., Fernandez photographed fellow workers for a project he called “Riggers.” He got a lucky break when, after giving another photographer some rolls of spare film, the photographer introduced him to Alexey Brodovitch, the renowned art director of Harper’s Bazaar. Read the full Story >>
