Founded in 1987, AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) is an international non-partisan group dedicated to ending the AIDS crisis. ACT-UP utilizes direct action and devotes itself to political agitation around legislation and policy changes that can make a difference in the lives of AIDS-affected individuals. During its peak years, ACT-UP spent   …Continue Reading

Kalle Lasn was in a supermarket, about to pay a quarter for use of a shopping cart, when the idea of Adbusters came to him. Soon after, in 1989, Adbusters magazine was released in Vancouver as a local quarterly, chock-full of “culture jamming” design: the alteration and parody of advertisements   …Continue Reading

The April 6 Youth Movement played a key role in ending Hosni Mubarak’s twenty-nine-year stint as Egypt’s president. It began as a Facebook group expressing solidarity with protesting industrial workers in al-Mahalla al-Kubra. The protests escalated to calls for a national strike, and on April 6, 2008, thousands of Egyptians   …Continue Reading

The Art and Revolution Collective was a San Francisco group that worked in the carnivalesque puppet-and-mask performance style made famous by Bread and Puppet Theater. Their first major action was at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1996 and involved a twenty-foot-tall puppet called the “Corporate Tower of Power.”   …Continue Reading

The Artist Network (AN) of Refuse & Resist! (R&R!) used art to create a colorful culture and community of resistance. R&R! was a non-partisan, national activist organization, founded in New York in 1987 by lawyers, artists, activists, students and other youth who saw a trend in the U.S. toward greater   …Continue Reading

The Bread and Puppet Theater wrote in their 1984 Cheap Art Manifesto: “ART IS FOOD. You can’t EAT it BUT it FEEDS you.” Their name refers to the practice of giving out free bread after each of their performances. Although their early work focused on issues specific to New York,   …Continue Reading

The Center for Tactical Magic (CTM) is a Bay Area collective that creates installations and exhibits that subvert the role of illegitimate power in society. Notable for the historical and technological components of their actions, CTM often re-purposes established symbols of oppressive power in unexpected, anti-oppressive ways. One such action   …Continue Reading

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) is a community-based farmworker organization headquartered in Immokalee, Florida, with over 4,000 members. The CIW seeks modern working conditions and fair treatment for farmworkers, and empowers individual members and Florida farmworkers as a whole through continual reflection, analysis and education. In 2001 the CIW   …Continue Reading

Robbie Conal is an LA-based guerrilla poster artist known for his grotesque portraits of political figures. Conal studied art at Stanford in the ’70s, but his politics led him outside the traditional art establishment and toward guerrilla art. The filmmaker Clay Walker made a documentary about him in 1992 (“Post   …Continue Reading

The Deconstructionist Institute for Surreal Topology (DIST), a loose-knit group based in Canada and the UK, specializes in “Revolutionary Studies and the advancement of Applied Autonomy.” At the Free Trade Area of the Americas protests in Québec City in 2001, their Permanent Revolution pamphlet inspired the formation of a Medieval   …Continue Reading