Art &
Activism
Art has always done something that policy cannot. It holds what language alone cannot carry. It preserves what erasure attempts to destroy. It moves people before they know they are being moved.
These are twenty years of conversations with artists, musicians, filmmakers, designers, and activists who refuse to separate the aesthetic from the ethical. No institution assembled this combination of voices. No curatorial brief produced it. It emerged from paying attention, being aware, seeking answers, which is its own form of activism. Connecting ideas, forming independent conclusions, challenging narratives, and using creativity as a tool to raise awareness, pursue justice, and, when necessary, disrupt.
8,000 artists signed an open letter calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Velasco published it. Within days he was dismissed. Eighteen years at Artforum, six as editor-in-chief, building a platform that confronted race, gender, politics, and power. Publishing is activism. Erasure is activism. There is no neutral position.
Born in Iran, living in exile in New York. Persian poetry inscribed across the faces of women where a veil might lay, breaking the silence imposed on them. Venice Biennale Prize 1999. Silver Lion, Venice Film Festival 2009. Barred from entering her native country. Still making the work.
Dragged from the Italian Parliament during a hunger strike. Screaming in a supermarket about Gaza. Museum interventions that went viral worldwide. "Disruption is empathy in action. We don't ask for change. We build it."
When institutions fail, art preserves. Fabric, canvas, sound, and object as containers for what cannot be held any other way.
Jazz, hip-hop, collaboration across borders. From Nina Simone to Africa Express, every battle has had its soundtrack.
The handmade, the slow, the embroidered. Colonial systems dismissed these as inferior. These artists demonstrate they were never minor.
Editorial independence is not a value corporate structures share. What happens when the institution becomes the obstacle to truth.
From shark fishermen in Indonesia to climate activists in Italian museums. The planet demands a witness. These people show up.
Chapter III
A digital exhibition weaving together art, historical narratives, and scholarly insights to illuminate the Palestinian experience. Stories often marginalized, voices frequently silenced.
Featuring Rosalind Nashashibi, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Jumana Manna, Nicholas Galanin and others, each interrogating displacement, solidarity, and survival. Nashashibi's paintings, stamped with "UNRWA," juxtapose grace with siege. Birds symbolizing both fragility and omens of crisis.
"The systematic denial of historical context has created a void. Art must fill it. By centering contemporary diasporic artists, Falastin resists historical amnesia. It is a call to witness, learn, and engage with a narrative too often suppressed."
There is a distinction that matters and is rarely made: between an artist who makes political work and an artist who cannot look away. The first is a position. The second is a condition. The people in this collection are mostly the second kind. They did not decide to become activists. They decided to keep looking, and their looking became their practice.
Nafsika Skourti begins by thinking about youth and freedom. The more she thinks about freedom, the more she understands that freedom has always been fought for. Shirin Neshat insists she never wanted to make political art. "My work is politically charged because of the life that I have lived." Michele Giuli erupts in a supermarket because the silence was unbearable. Madison Stewart picks up a camera at fourteen because the sharks she loves are disappearing and she cannot find any other way to respond. Ariela Suster watches violence take over El Salvador and decides to fill the void with leatherwork and wages.
"In activism, you differentiate between good and evil and right and wrong, but in art you allow the audience to draw their own interpretation. You cannot decide for them who is good and evil."
Faiza Butt works in ink dots, one at a time, building images that reference Persian miniature traditions while dissecting colonial legacies, gender constructs, and the vilification of Muslim men in contemporary media. "My activism is in the details. In reclaiming the decorative." This connects her practice to Nafsika Skourti's embroidered thobes, to Sujata Setia's cuts on A4 paper, to the artisans in Baabda Women's Prison whose hands made Sarah Beydoun's bags stitch by stitch.
Elom 20ce traces a different lineage but arrives at the same place. Nina Simone. Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln. Abdullah Ibrahim using jazz as a weapon against apartheid. "Where there is struggle, there is music." Celine Semaan builds Slow Factory at the intersection of fashion, climate justice, and open education. Anne de Carbuccia travels to the world's most remote locations to document what is being destroyed, one image at a time. The forms are different. The refusal is the same.
"We are drowning in images, scrolling, consuming. And yet, people are still drawn to what is handmade, what is slow. That gives me hope. In this AI-driven age, the human creative act will become more valuable, not less."
"The people featured in this collection were not assembled to make an argument. I discovered them somehow over the past few years, because something in their work refused to separate the aesthetic from the ethical. That refusal is the argument. No institution assembled this combination of voices. No curatorial brief produced it. It emerged from paying attention, being aware, seeking answers, which is its own form of activism."
URBAN
ART
I really started paying attention to urban art as an art form while living in Beirut in the early 2000s. The walls there were not decoration — they were a running conversation between the city and itself. What I saw on those walls changed how I understood what art could do and where it could live.
Urban art has evolved from NYC subway vandalism in the 1960s into one of the most politically serious and globally influential art forms alive. The wall was always a canvas. It took the world a while to understand that.
NYC subway trains. Spray paint. Tags claiming public space. A rebellious underground with no gallery ambitions.
Tags evolve into pieces — 3D lettering, wildstyle. Keith Haring. Hip Hop carries it worldwide.
Stencils, wheat-paste, murals. Banksy. Arabic calligraphy on Beirut walls. Political messages at scale.
Galleries and auction houses. The tension between the street and the institution becomes the defining question.
Naples murals for Palestine. Arabic calligraphy fused with graffiti. Rubble turned into murals of resilience.
Graffiti in Lebanon is not decoration.
It is a visual diary of everything the country has survived.
Beirut’s walls in Gemmayzeh, Mar Mikhael, and Hamra have carried political and social commentary since the civil war. The 2019 revolution transformed urban art into a form of collective memory-making in real time.
Artist Yazan Halwani paints murals of revered Lebanese and Arab figures on prominent city walls as cultural reclamation. “What I try to do is write the stories of the city, on its own walls — creating a memory for the city.”
“Without regional borders or constraints, Arabic Graffiti showcases artists who merge Arabic script and calligraphy styles with the art of graffiti writing — treating this sensitive tradition with contemporary vision.”
Pascal Zoghbi & Don Zaza · Arabic GraffitiArabic Graffiti offers something Western urban art history rarely considers: the meeting of a thousand-year calligraphic tradition with the radical act of the unauthorised mark.
CASTALDO
A photojournalist who spent four years documenting life in the occupied Palestinian territories and then brought those images back to the walls of Naples. His stencils transform photographs taken in the West Bank into street art depicting Palestinians at checkpoints, mothers, children — the faces of a people whose story he has been telling since 2008.
His series Holy Mothers of Gaza places images of slaughtered children alongside Holy Mary figures throughout the alleys of the city.
“The tear of the icon becomes an act of necessary sorrow; it is the wound that heals, unites, and moves us to compassion.”
Brought graffiti-style art into public spaces and galleries simultaneously — proving the wall and the white cube were never opposites.
Ironic, politically charged stencil work. Recently painted journalist Zehra Dogan on the Houston Bowery Wall.
The Hope poster. The OBEY campaign. Politically active work moving between the street, the gallery, and presidential campaigns.
Murals of Lebanese and Arab figures on Beirut’s walls. Writing the city’s stories on its own surfaces.
Invented 3D graffiti in 1993. 70 subway cars. 500 club murals. David LaChapelle, Madonna, Elton John.
Portraits hidden inside calligraphy. Action painting meets Arabic script. Grand Palais. Fondation Cartier.
Miami’s muralist. Fine art with graffiti roots. Kinetic and bright, rooted in the street.
Classical Arabic script meets the spray can. The book and movement that mapped a global phenomenon.
Where calligraphic tradition meets contemporary visual language.
Urban art in a Beirut gallery context — the wall moving indoors.
An early example of urban art moving into an exhibition context.
What gets lost and what gets kept when the street moves inside.
Where urban energy meets fine art practice.
Contemporary visual practice with roots in street culture.
Urban art in a New York gallery space.
The visual language of the street in a broader artistic practice.
Graffiti roots reaching into three dimensions and onto the gallery wall.
A generation of urban artists — the new wave of a movement begun on subway trains.
The city that made graffiti and the photographer paying real attention to New York.