Over the past decade Migrate Art has operated on the core belief that contemporary art can be a catalyst for real change in the world. Since our first auction sale in 2016, we have worked with over 80 leading artists and raised over £2 million for charitable causes. We have seen firsthand how art sales can support vulnerable communities facing unemployment, homelessness and the challenges associated with living as a refugee. Below we highlight five contemporary artists who continue to motivate us with their dedication and conviction, and for using their practice to inspire viewers to contemplate, scrutinise and act.
Artists have continued to find creative ways to disrupt the status quo. Modern and contemporary artists, especially, have grown sensitive to the political pulses shaping their practice. For many, the making and business of art has offered a unique opportunity to effect public critique of dominant concerns which include that of political regimes, the control of information, migration, globalisation, technology, capitalism, racism, sexism, homophobia, the climate crisis, to name a few. Highly responsive to the needs of their immediate loci, these artists share a common belief in the sociopolitical ‘use value’ of their work as tools that can move viewers to action and enact meaningful change. Central to these practices has been the public sphere which has become one of the most significant arenas of display and engagement; larger-than-life works are being exhibited not only in galleries and museums but street corners, fountains, advertisement screens, subway stations, schools and hospital walls. Although artists embrace all materials at their disposal, from easel painting to new media installations and architectural forms, emphasis is being placed on legibility: the recycling of political and national symbols, straightforward lines, direct pictorial modes, clear language, lucid messages, recognisable iconographies, all of which seek to engage community dialogue and address shared concerns.
1. Jenny Holzer (b. 1950, USA)
Jenny Holzer is an American neo-conceptual artist combining art and activism on the big screen. Since the 1970s, Holzer has plastered provocative messages through posters, LED screens, advertising billboards and large-scale installations in cities like New York, Los Angeles and London. Her work has stopped pedestrians in their tracks, encouraging meditation on questions that echo on personal and political levels. Amongst the artist’s best-known aphorism are ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE and YOUR OLDEST FEARS ARE THE WORST ONES, which was shown as an LED sign and on billboards in Times Square. A leading figure in the field of ‘word art’ (including contemporaries Guerrilla Girls and Barbara Kruger) Holzer’s work exclusively uses capitalisation and bold, flashing lettering—a decision she has explained as showing the urgency of its subject matter. Holzer came to recognition for her 1970s series Truisms in which she anonymously hung sheets of text in the streets of Manhattan with provocative messaging, replicating the visual currency of advertisement to reach a broad audience in the fast-moving cityscape. A participatory aspect was highlighted in this early series as New Yorkers provided hand written responses directly on the posters. Since then, Holzer’s work has been overtly feminist, speaking to the variegated forms of sexual violence encountered by women across public and private life.
Jenny Holzer, Untitled (Don’t Talk Down to Me), 1979-82
From Truisms (1977–79); Inflammatory Essays (1979–82), 1984
Jenny Holzer, Truisms, 1982
2. Kara Walker (b. 1969, USA)
New York-based artist Kara Walker draws inspiration from colonial-era pictorial and representational modes to investigate the perseverance of racist ideologies in the Western world. Most distinct are the artist's largely anonymised, blacked-out silhouettes structured around well-known narratives of the American South referencing the history of antebellum advertisement, historical textbooks and news imagery. Walker’s A Subtlety (2014) gained her international recognition as an artist working with sculpture on a monumental scale. Installed in The Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, a prolific site of colonial-era sugar production, Walker's team built a 35-feet tall sphinx figure coated with fine white sugar and fifteen “attendants” based on blackamoor stereotypes coated in molasses. The head of the sphinx was formed as a racialised Southern “mammy” figure wearing a kerchief, and an overtly sexualised body. In 2019, Kara Walker became the first black woman to exhibit at the Turbine Hall in London. For this monumental work, Fons Americanus, Walker designed a functioning water fountain beckoned with allegorical carvings relating to the transatlantic slave trade and Britain’s murky involvement within it. Fitted with a lynching tree, sailing ships and drowning Black bodies, the work used the taken-for-granted mode of public commemoration to flatly confront the disgust and desire wrapped up in the workings of colonial histories.
Installation view, Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, Los Angeles, USA, 2008
Installation view, A Subtlety, New York, USA, 2014
Installation view, Fons Americanus, London, UK, 2019
3. JR (b. 1983, France)
A photographer and street artist from France, JR is known for his black-and-white portraits, large-scale installations and monumental trompe l’oeil plastered onto public buildings. For over two decades, the artist has worked with local communities across the world to spotlight subjects that are often shadowed by their socio-political circumstances. His practice focuses on the human subject to draw out issues ranging from the disenfranchised communities of the Parisian banlieues to the effect of migration policies during Trump-era border control and gendered poverty and violence in the Brazilian favelas. A constant is the emphasis on community engagement: the artist frequently invites his subjects as active participants who are encouraged to take agency over their represented image. Amongst JR’s work is the Oscar-nominated film Faces Places (2017) which followed the story behind a series of large-scale portraits made by subjects residing in rural France. These portraits were then plastered onto buildings and public spaces. Most recently, JR’s La Caverne du Pont Neuf was unveiled in Paris as a temporary large-scale installation on the oldest standing bridge in the city. Inspired by the quarries from which the bridge’s stones were originally sourced, the installation transformed the bridge into a temporary cavern, allowing visitors to walk through a darkened, chamber-like passage filled with visual illusions, ambient scent and a soundscape.
JR, Migrants, Picnic Across the Border, Mexico/USA border, 2017
JR, Inside Out, London, UK, 2021
JR, La Caverne du Pont Neuf, Paris, France, 2026
4. Oscar Murillo (b. 1986, Colombia)
Oscar Murillo is a Colombian interdisciplinary artist working across painting, sculpture, drawing, installation, film and live performance. Interested in themes central to globalisation and cultural exchange, and drawing from personal experiences of displacement, the artist works with recycled materials and in collaboration with participants, disrupting the traditional ‘hand of the maker’ model in contemporary art. In his Frequencies (2013) project, Murillo affixed canvases to school desks around the world, asking students to fill their surfaces as they wished; the results were exhibited in Venice in the show All the World’s Futures. As part of Tate’s Turbine Hall commission, Murillo produced The Flooded Garden (2024), a monumental blank-canvas arena fitted on scaffolding as a temporary drawing garden. Inspired by Monet’s paintings of his flower garden in Giverny, Murillo invited participants to cover the surface of the vast, curving canvases with bold colourful marks. More recently, Murillo’s Social Mapping (2025) unrolled blank canvases in public spaces across the world including on the streets of London, Limbe, Manila, Marrakech, Mexico City, New York and São Paulo. The participatory and open-ended project allowed participants to fill the blank canvases as they wished, and marked an expansion of Murillo’s interest in the potential of contemporary art to bring communities together in the exchange of ideas. The artist was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2019.
Installation view, Oscar Murillo, Social Cataracts, Basel, Switzerland, 2022
From Oscar Murillo, Frequencies, begun 2023, across 350 schools over 30 countries
Installation view, Oscar Murillo, The Flooded Garden, London, UK, 2024
5. Assemble Collective (est. 2010, UK)
Assemble Collective is a London-based organisation working across architecture, art and design practices to address pressing social, economic and environmental challenges. Established as a group of ten friends, the collective has grown their fight against ‘corporate gentrification’ through research, curation, teaching and diverse design practices. A key tenet of the collective is defending the public right to open-access cultural spaces through creative, grassroots collaboration. Notable projects include the debut project, a disused petrol station turned DIY-cinema on Clerkenwell Road, as well as a sculptural skatepark in Folkestone, a secondary-school garden in North London and a free-access play park in King’s Cross. An early, ambitious project Granby Four Street helped regenerate Liverpool’s Toxteth Estate which had been one of the most ethnically diverse areas in the country before falling largely derelict as a result of poor urban planning and protracted neglect. The Collective worked with local residents and artists to bring back a once-thriving, creative community to the houses and streets of central Liverpool. As a result of their work, in 2015 Assemble Collective was awarded the Turner Prize- the first collective and the first architecture studio to win the award. Their showcase was a 1:1 model of a Granby House shell from Toxteth Estate finished in pink plaster; it was fitted with with twenty seven locally-manufactured, hand-made products across ceramics, woodwork and textiles all of which were available for purchase throughout the duration of the exhibition in support of funding community-driven design.
Assemble Collective, The Cineroleum, London, UK, 2010
Assemble Collective, Skating Situations, Folkestone, UK, 2021
Installation view, Assemble Collective, Turner Prize Exhibition, Glasgow, Scotland, 2015