Alfredo Jaar

Alfredo Jaar is an artist, architect, and filmmaker who lives and works in New York City. He was born in Santiago de Chile. Jaar has realized more than sixty public interventions around the world and more than fifty monographic publications have been published about his work. He became a Guggenheim Fellow in 1985 and a …

Webinar #20: The First Female President Of The USA

Margaret McCarthy has served as the First Female President of the United States for over a year, since January 2017, creating through performance an imaginative counter world in which the US is run by a female president. We’re honored to host Margaret on this webinar, where, being a fearless leader, she will talk about failure. What happens …

The Artistic Activism Grants 2017!

Last year, we were able to give out grants to some of the thousand-ish C4AA workshop alumni. These artistic activists in Croatia, Ireland, The Netherlands, Germany, the UK, and Hungary created seven artistic actions to increase public engagement with the seriously problematic issues of the lack marginalized communities’ access to public health care. Throughout 2017, …

Ideas To Action Exercise

Ideas to Action People move through multiple stages when changing their behavior. We’ll practice developing tactics to address one step. STEP 1: Roll the Dice 4 minutes Say hello and get to know each other. Roll your dice Exposure (roll again) Attention Interest Comprehension Skill Acquisition Agreement (roll again) Recall Information Search & Retrieval Decision …

Imagining Utopia

In order to change the world we live in we need to be able to imagine the world we desire. Through the Imagining Utopia workshop, CAA faculty work with groups – ranging from elementary school students to seasoned grassroots activists – to stimulate their imagination of what could be. Beginning with presentations of dreams of …

ÆFFICACY

Effect (v.) “To bring about (an event, a result); to accomplish (an intention, a desire).” Affect (v.) “To have an effect on the mind or feelings of (a person); to impress or influence emotionally; to move, touch.” (Oxford English Dictionary) When it comes to bringing about social change, effect and affect are intertwined. Artistic activism …

AXES OF ART AND ACTIVISM

The terrain of artistic activism and activist art is vast, and there is no one coordinate of success. In order to map some of this landscape we’ve created the following axes where one might situate particular practices and thereby better determine relative success. A work-in-progress. You can download the PDF here. Risë Wilson, George Perlov, …

Report on interviews with trainers & field-defining organizations

Download: Report on Interviews with Trainers Field-Defining Organizations March 2017 Background Following the development of a literature review last year on measuring the impact of artistic/creative activism, The Center for Artistic Activism (C4AA), conducted interviews with artistic activism trainers and other “field-defining” organizations to expand the learning for this part of the Æfficacy project. This …

ÆFFICACY Project

Measuring the Impact of Artistic Activism AKA “The Æffect Project” In 2015 the C4AA teamed up with George Perlov, former VP of Research at the Ad Council, and currently with George Perlov Consulting,  to study the æffect of artistic activism. What we’re looking for are answers to the question “Does Artistic Activism Work?” and what …

ÆFFECT ADVISORY BOARD

Artistic Activism Efficacy Advisory Board   Kenneth Bailey — Founder, Design Studio for Social Intervention Luis Camnitzer — Independent artist James Chung — Founder, Reach Advisers Brett Davidson — Program Director, Open Society Foundations Kathy Eldon — Founder, Creative Visions       Deborah Fisher — Executive Director, A Blade of Grass Jessica George — Executive Director, Revolutions …

LITERATURE REVIEW

Center for Artistic Activism Measuring the Impact of Artistic Activism Literature Review Report DRAFT March 25, 2016   Background Social change is hard. Over the years, social issue campaigners and activists have employed a variety of marketing and communications efforts to attract public interest to their issues and causes to varying degrees of success. More …

Join Actipedia

Actipedia is an open-access, user-generated database of creative activism. It’s a place to read about, comment upon, and share experiences and examples of how activists and artists are using creative tactics and strategies to challenge power and offer visions of a better society. Actipedia draws case studies from everywhere: original submissions, reprinted news articles, snippets …

Press: We Make Money Not Art on Center for Artistic Activism

Yesterday, We Make Money Not Art featured our webinars and one of our favorite examples of truly artistic activism, the occupation of Alcatraz Island by Native American activists in 1969. We talk about this in our trainings as one example of fully realized creative activism that incorporates spectacular story, imagery and humor in a strategic …

What Would Jesus Do? (as a Creative Activist)

By C4AA Co-Founder Stephen Duncombe My proselytizing here is of a political rather than religious nature. It isn’t the divine figure of Christ I am interested in but the purely historical Jesus, a radical Mediterranean Jewish peasant building a revolutionary movement two millennia ago. Jesus of Nazareth was an activist, and, judging by the two-thousand …

Artistic Action: Sex Worker Rights in Dublin

As part of our Arts Action Academy in December 2016 in Dublin, sex workers, artists and activists created and performed this creative action to raise awareness about, and fight against, laws that criminalize sex workers. All of this was conceived and implemented by the Academy participants in 24 hours as the last day of our intensive AAA training. …

5 Ways to Up Your Artistic Action Game

Here are 5 things you can do if you want to make change in the world: 1. Steal from the Past Borrow from successful creative movements (video). Make time to be inspired by others (check out Actipedia). 2. Know How to Manipulate Change Minds Use cognitive and behavioral science to understand how to make change starting …

Beatrice Glow

It’s a long wave. I think of everything as being interdependent or part of an ecosystem, philosophically and biologically. There are urgent moments of crisis where the waves are crashing on the land, which are the moments that activists quickly rise to. But then there’s the long waves, behind them, that are holding a space. …