Art Archives - Page 2 of 7 - Foreign Policy In Focus

Tengo un Dream

by V. Noah Gimbel | Sep 26, 2011

On August 26, just three blocks from San Francisco’s iconic City Hall, the veil was lowered from a 100-foot-wide, 30-foot-tall mural on the wall of the city’s Quaker Meetinghouse. Declaring “No Human Being is Illegal, y Cada Uno Tiene un Sueño” (and each one has a dream), the piece is the work of an immigrant-rights youth group called “67 Sueños” (67 Dreams) whose mission is to raise awareness of the plight faced by the estimated 67 percent of migrant youth who would not benefit from the provisions of the DREAM Act.

Art v. State

by John Feffer | Jun 28, 2011

In the vast exhibition hall of London’s Tate Modern, the installation looks from a distance like a huge patch of gravel. Perhaps it is the first stage of a construction site or the last stage of a demolition. Only when you come closer and crouch down can you identify the little objects. A discerning eye might determine that they are reproductions. The rest of us rely on an accompanying video about Ai Weiwei’s project, which explains that the Chinese artist had commissioned a village of artists to produce the porcelain objects and paint them to resemble the real thing. What from far away looks like a gravel parking lot is actually one hundred million artfully produced sunflower seeds.

Breaching the Wall through Art

by V. Noah Gimbel | Jun 6, 2011

The wall that divides Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories is ugly and oppressive. It is far from a work of art. But now it is the subject of art. The Jerusalem Fund Gallery’s new exhibition “Breaching the Wall” displays works of 11 different artists that reflect their feelings and artistic reactions to this eight-meter-high concrete wall that runs for 520 kilometers (64 percent of the planned length).

Iraq’s Starving Artists

by Shaun Randol | Apr 7, 2011

The exhibition, “Artists in Exile: Forgotten Iraqi Refugees in Syria,” seeks to bridge cultural gaps between the United States and Arab and Middle Eastern countries.

The Refugee Child Photographers

by V. Noah Gimbel | Mar 24, 2011

Lebanese photojournalist Ramzi Haidar was in Iraq covering the refugee crisis in 2003. Passing the time between assignments, Haidar talked and played with children who were curious about his equipment. Seeing what they saw and how they saw it, he became intrigued by the potential of child photographers to document the devastating circumstances in which they found themselves. Unlike adults who may have become jaded and cynical to a seemingly hopeless situation they did nothing to create, children are innately positive and open-minded.

Ian McEwan: Speaking Half-Truths to Power

by Marc Estrin | Feb 23, 2011

In the midst of cries for freedom in the Middle East and Africa, novelist Ian McEwan claimed the Jerusalem Prize for Literature. Although I acknowledge McEwan’s accurate listing of major Israeli crimes, and admire his courage in enumerating them to such an audience, I found the speech on the whole to be intellectually, and perhaps psychologically, dishonest.

Interview with Wendy Navarro

by Blair Murphy | Feb 21, 2011

Wendy Navarro is an independent art critic and curator currently based in Barcelona, Spain. Since the mid-1990s, Navarro has been an active curator at the Visual Art Development Center in Havana, Cuba, while working as an editor of the magazine ArteCubano, and lecturing about Cuban contemporary art at the Higher Institute of Art and Havana University. She talks here with Blair Murphy, of the Washington Project for the Arts, about art and its relationship to U.S.-Cuban relations, globalization, and political utopias prior to her talk this week in Washington, DC.

Art, Activism, and Permaculture

by Lars Kwakkenbos | Jan 20, 2011

Infamous for fomenting mass disobedience on bicycles during the Copenhagen climate Summit, touring the UK recruiting a rebel clown army, running courses in post-capitalist culture and falling in love with utopias, the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination exists somewhere between art and activism, poetry and politics. The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination is not an institution or a group, not a network nor an NGO, but an affinity of friends who recognize the beauty of collective creative disobedience. It treats insurrection as an art, and art as a means of preparing for the coming insurrection.

The Cultural Assassinations of Baghdad

by Qasim Sabti | Oct 20, 2010

When the American tanks had completed their task breaking down the gates of the Art Museum, the first person to reach the main gallery, which was filled with hundreds of paintings by contemporary artists, was—unfortunately—a thief.

The Spectacle of the Disappeared

by Vicente Garcia Groyon | Oct 7, 2010

Translating a play usually involves only translating the source text’s language while retaining details of periods, characters, names, settings, etc. In the Philippines, a concerted nationalistic effort begun in the late 1960s saw classics of world theater translated into Tagalog.