RadioFreeLiberal.com

Syrian artist Abdalla Al Omari left his home country in 2012, the year that the battle between rebels and government forces reached the streets of Damascus and Aleppo.

Displaced and angry, Omari sought asylum in Brussels in 2014. That's when he started a series of paintings portraying the world's most powerful and influential figures as if they were in the same position he had found himself in.

Omari portrayed the likes of Russian President Vladimir Putin, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and former president Barack Obama as dirty, disheveled and starving refugees lining up for food. His exhibit, “The Vulnerability Series,” which features at least a dozen paintings of world leaders, is on display until July 6 at the Ayyam Gallery in Dubai.

Syrian artist Abdalla Al Omari left his home country in 2012, the year that the battle between rebels and government forces reached the streets of Damascus and Aleppo.

Displaced and angry, Omari sought asylum in Brussels in 2014. That's when he started a series of paintings portraying the world's most powerful and influential figures as if they were in the same position he had found himself in.

Omari portrayed the likes of Russian President Vladimir Putin, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and former president Barack Obama as dirty, disheveled and starving refugees lining up for food. His exhibit, “The Vulnerability Series,” which features at least a dozen paintings of world leaders, is on display until July 6 at the Ayyam Gallery in Dubai............

It's like a bike-sharing station, but with what appear to be AR-15 rifles.

No, the "gun-sharing station" in Daley Plaza is not actually real, it's more a symbolic piece of public art.
The exhibit, called the "Chicago Gun Share Program," holds a row of 10 replicas of AR-15 rifles. The exhibit is structured to make it look as though getting a weapon is as easy as renting a bike.
The protest art piece is an illustration of how easy it is for an ordinary citizen to obtain an assault weapon and came about as a partnership between Chicago-based advertising agency The Escape Pod and gun safety organization the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence............

Did you vote?

I found tn mannequins too strange for me.

I would say he's a more expressive painter than dubbya bush. That's damning with faint praise, though. He's onto something regarding post-post-modern politics, but I'm not sure what. Also, I doubt that drumpf ever had chest hair.

Critically, the best I can say is that it's very L.A.. Cartoons for a cartoonish city. Unfortunately that means that about 20 people I can think of are doing it better. He'll outsell them all combined, though, because he's a celeb. There are people who pay collector's prices for celebrity art just because it's by celebrities.

There's some great polemic art being made in L.A.. I wish I could find a reproduction of the Big Gulp painting made during the Iraq war, but since a great many other artists have used that title, it's buried under other people's stuff in searches.

I've seen a lot of pictures of the Gun Sharing Station. I consider that to be a work of genius. Street art is some of the best stuff going.

The small girl cowers beneath an open school desk, clutching a leg as she gazes into the distance with a look of fear in her eyes. The scene appears in sculptures produced with the help of Manuel Oliver, an artist who lost his 17-year-old son in the Parkland, Florida, mass shooting earlier this year.

Actual desks make up part of sculptures, Chicago's WSL-TV reported, with the cowering girl produced from 3D printing — an intentional nod to the controversial rise of print-at-home guns.

"We want you to feel unsettled," Sean Leonard, an advertising professional who worked with Oliver on the project, told WSL-TV.

Leonard and Oliver worked with Giffords, the gun control group founded by shooting survivor and former congresswoman Gabby Giffords, to produce 10 of the sculptures titled "The Last Lockdown."

Etched into the tops of each desk are stats on gun violence — "22 kids are shot every day in America," one reads — along with a number to text to prompt voter registration, according to a statement from the nonprofit.

Oliver said the art-fueled activism comes in memory of his son, Joaquin Oliver.

“It’s too late for us to save Joaquin from gun violence, but through art my family and I are making sure that we protect the rest of the kids out there,” Oliver said...............