Paulo Grangeon’s 1,600 Pandas.
French sculptor Paulo Grangeon used an unlikely medium to illuminate the reality of animal endangerment across the world. For his traveling exhibit, “Pandas on Tour,” he created 1,600 papier-mâché bears meant to represent the actual number of pandas left on the planet (recent estimates actually place the number slightly below that, at 1,596). Launched in 2008 in collaboration with the World Wildlife Fund, Grangeon’s project has traveled to landmarks in more than 20 countries, including the Eiffel Tower.
French painter Jules De Balincourt has a way of balancing the biting with the blasé, fusing prismatic folk art with social commentary in a way that keeps both extremely palatable. His 2003 New York show Land of Many Uses consisted of 57 paintings in varying mediums that were aggressively political, but avoided being off-putting simply through the playful nature of their compositions, making contemplation of political themes—such as how we perceive the world through the way we draw our maps or the idea of "Peaceful Protest" an easy, intellectual joy.
French artist Mathilde Roussel created a series of living grass installations that take the shape of human beings. Made of recycled material and fabric filled with soil and wheat grass seeds, the pieces are meant to symbolize the centrality of food. “Observing nature and being aware of what and how we eat makes us more sensitive to food cycles in the world — of abundance, of famine — and allows us to be physically, intellectually and spiritually connected to a global reality,” the artist explains.
600-or-so altered ads are the work of street artists working with Brandalism, a shadowy group that since 2012 has replaced European billboards with activist messages and art. Billboards in Paris were vandalized just prior to the Paris Climate talks in 2015
The witty caricatures of Honoré Daumier made him one of the most widely recognized social and political commentators of his day and even landed him in jail for insulting the reigning monarch.
JR's Dreamers in Tecate
Located in Mexico but oriented toward viewers in the United States, French artist JR's enlarged photograph of a one-year-old Dreamer peeking over the border fence elegantly captures what's at stake in the debate over U.S. immigration policy: the lives and dreams of people brought to the United States as children (those protected under the DACA programare known as “Dreamers”). A month after the installation, JR hosted the photo's subject, Kikito, and the toddler's family at a binational picnic nearby, with diners seated around a long table bisected by the border; aerial photographs of the meal reveal that the table was in fact a canvas, covered with a giant photograph of a pair of eyes that JR has confirmed belong to a Dreamer. By supersizing facial features to compete with the proportions of the border wall, JR elevates humanity above politics.