Instagram art project spreads awareness about femicides in Mexico

Advancing Women Artists (AWA) is a nonprofit foundation that has identified around 2,000 pieces of art by women artists that were forgotten or stored away in Italy’s museums and churches. The organization has financed the restoration of 70 works from the 16th to the 20th centuries. Although women generally couldn’t study or devote themselves to art, some of the artists’ works were known during their times but disappeared from public writings around the 19th century. AWA’s work restoring, documenting, and exhibiting women’s art has contributed to increased interest in and awareness of art by women.

A partnership between Venice’s Uffizi Gallery and Indiana University is providing new access to the Uffizi’s collection of ancient sculpture. The Uffizi Digitization Project provides a web interface for visitors to see the work in interactive three-dimension scans.

For individuals who are homeless or otherwise disadvantaged, art can be more than therapeutic—it can be lucrative. ArtLifting, a public benefit corporation started in Boston, MA, specializes in helping homeless and disabled artists sell their art. Business including Staples and Microsoft have bought art for their offices. ArtLifting splits the profits with artists and also funds art programs.

An unlikely relationship between Frances Jalet, an attorney, and Fred Cruz, an inmate, led to some of the most historic rulings against the Texas Department of Corrections. Jalet became a plaintiff in one of the suits, and alongside two dozen other inmates, called the Eight Hoe squad, they drafted a lawsuit. Despite targeted attacks against Jalet and the inmates by prison leadership, they won in the courts. In 1980, a federal judge declared that the Texas Department of Corrections was operating unconstitutionally.

Tate Modern’s 2017 exhibition on painter Amedeo Modigliani included a virtual reality recreation of Modigliani’s final studio in Paris. Seated on wooden chairs with VR headsets on, visitors can explore the studio and hear firsthand accounts of the space from Modigliani’s friends.

Through poetry, Seattle's Civic Poet collected the stories, observations, and creativity of past and present residents. These poems were entered into a Poetic Grid, an online interface that connected the writing on a map to the specific location being addressed.

While not without challenges, Starlink, a satellite technology company, played a pivotal role in bringing internet service to rural communities around the Navajo Nation in New Mexico. Community members, the Cuba Independent School District, tribal councils, and Starlink worked together to install widespread internet connectivity, which has improved academic performance for their rural students.

A rural county in Texas brought broadband access to locals with the help of internet service provider Nextlink, the Citizens Broadband Radio Service and Tarana Wireless. Following a $2.6 million investment, over seven months, the partners built infrastructure that offers download speeds of 100 megabits per second and upload speeds of 20 megabits per second.

When Facebook rolled out its Free Basics program offering internet services through a company-controlled portal, Indian activists launched the Save the Internet campaign to oppose the initiative and the practice of "zero-rating" on the grounds that these practices violated Net Neutrality. Through marches, social media organizing, and viral videos, the movement was able to sway public opinion and the Indian regulatory authority ultimately outlawed zero-rating.

Several groups are preserving digital content related to the capital insurrection to ensure it is archived in case it gets deleted. A subreddit thread collected thousands of Tweets, Snapchats, and other videos to upload to the cloud, while the Woke Collective ensured the survival of livestreams by publishing them on its own YouTube and Twitch accounts. Efforts to crowdsource the identification of members of the mob include the Instagram account, @homegrownterrorists, and the journalism site, Bellingcat, which invited contributions to a publicly editable Google spreadsheet of links.