In Harlem during the 1920s, African Americans were forced to pay unreasonably high rent prices for spaces that were cramped and narrow. At the same time was the Great Migration — many who were living in the south moved north in order to acquire industrial jobs. The result was an influx of people living in…

Santiago Sierra’s work, titled 160 cm Line Tattooed on 4 People El Gallo Arte Contemporáneo. Salamanca, Spain. December 2000, is exactly what it says it is. Like many of his works, Sierra hired people off the street to be human props. In this case, four heroin addicts would be paid with a shot of heroin…

Roman Ondak’s 2003 piece Good Feelings in Good Times uses the action of waiting in line to create an open dialog. This piece is as simple as it seems: actors are paid to act natural while waiting in line somewhere in a museum. The line stays until it eventually dissolves, collecting unknowing participants. At this…

The São Paulo Museum of Art structures itself to allow the ground floor to stay as a public plaza. When it’s grounds were given to the city hall, they were given under the pretenses that the land’s view was never to be compromised. By creating the structure of the art museum underground and elevated above…

W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits used data visualization to show an international audience how far African-Americans had gotten just 35 years after slavery. In these posters, Du Bois’s shows things like the amount of wealth held by African-Americans, literacy rates, and publication information. Although these charts caught eyes through their bright colors and intuitiveness, what…

The Cineroleum is a project by Assemble architecture studio that transformed an abandoned gas station in the UK into a cinema. The project was different than other redevelopments because it was self-initiated and cost-effective; Assemble completed the project using over 100 community volunteers and locally sourced materials. In fact, almost none of the original station…

The City of Northfield is transforming its sidewalks into poetry — literally. The Sidewalk Poetry Project, launched in 2011, has been imprinting poems into residential sidewalks ever since. Each year, Northfield residents are invited to enter their poetry into a competition. A jury then selects their favorites to be added to the streets. This project…

Since Americans continue to live in a society underpinned by the lingering notion of the American Dream, where people work hard for themselves to achieve success, community gardens uproot this common ideology by instead underlining the importance of the collective–of sharing not only food and labor, but also community values, knowledge, and camaraderie. While community gardens are not…

On Mother’s Day in 1987, 430 Minnesotan women all over the age of 60 gathered in Minneapolis under the direction of artist Suzanne Lacy in order to combat media conceptions of older women by asserting their importance and underutilized ability as an older demographic. Lacy’s two-year project investigating the experiences and perceptions of older women…

Artist Patrick Dougherty creates sinuous stick structures all over the world, drawing inspiration and whimsy from his childhood spent playing in the woodlands of North Carolina. While these structures are meant to cultivate a playful rapport with the viewer, they also create necessary tension between the permanence of a structure and its submission to nature….