Artist eL Seed fuses the beauty of Arabic letters with the modern art of graffiti — an art form he calls calligraffiti. He paints colorful, undulating messages of hope and peace on buildings all over the world — from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, to the bridges of Paris (the city where he was […]
The image itself looks laid back enough — a 20-year-old man in a hoodie and jeans, walking through New York City. Except that this image is 150 feet tall and pasted on a plaza near the Flatiron Building. Cabs and cars flow around him while pedestrians scamper past. This image, created by TED Prize winner JR, […]
Alexandre Farto spends his days creating towering works on the buildings of Lisbon and London — portraits of people that mirror urban decay, dissolving into scratches and splatters. Their stretched-out visages gaze over these cities with solemn, elegant omniscience. Meanwhile, Shai Dahan adorns walls, facades and barriers in Gothenburg and Borås with colorful odes to […]
Yesterday, while our staff finished last-minute preparations for TEDGlobal 2014, a kind of hush fell over the streets of Rio de Janeiro as Brazilians voted in their presidential election. In a race between more than 10 candidates, President Dilma Rousseff emerged as the front-runner, taking 41.5% of the vote, with runner-up Aécio Neves capturing 33.7% of the vote. The two are […]
JR is an artist with a desire to transform our collective streets — from French public houses to Brazilian favelas. As he describes in his talk from TED2011, JR headed to the barrier wall between Israel and the Palestinian territories for his project “Face 2 Face,” pasting massive portraits the size of houses on either […]
On November 17, 2012, in a village in Assuit-Egypt, a train crashed into a school bus killing 51 children. These kinds of accidents have always been brushed aside as random acts of chance. The minister of transportation resigned as a result, and the families of the children were compensated financially. There was a huge public outcry […]
[ted id=1537] Two years ago, Lebanese-Egyptian artist and historian Bahia Shehab was invited to join an exhibit commemorating 100 years of Islamic art in Europe. The catch: she had to use Arabic script in her work. “As an artist, a woman, an Arab and a human being living in the year 2010, I only had […]