The White Pube takeover billboards to address systemic injustices and inequalities in the art world

BuildHollywood, an independent media group operating in the outdoor space, has launched a new collaboration with The White Pube. The latest instalment in its Your Space or Mine campaign, which gives artists and creatives a platform on the street, The White Pube’s installation is a series of posters and billboards designed “to address some of the systemic injustices and inequalities within the art world.”

Since 2015 The White Pube’s founders Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad have continuously addressed “The overly stale, pale and male state of the art industry,” via its online art magazine. In turn creating a conversation that is “anti-elitist, anti-white-washing, anti-patriarchy”, the pair explore the gap between art, the market, institutions and people, aiming to break these areas down “to come out with something more meaningful to a wider network of people who visit their website,” explains a release on this latest collaboration. Outside of its online publication, The White Pube now also includes a podcast, a Writers Grant and a Successful Funding Application Library.

The White Pube’s project with BuildHollywood – who encompass several out-of-home creative agencies including Jack, Jackarts and Diabolical – appears as a visual extension of the publication’s aims. Across billboards and posters in Gabrielle and Zarina’s respective home cities of London and Liverpool, The White Pube present its “ideas for a new art world”. Centring around six “direct and ambitious suggestions as to how things might be improved for the many and not just the few.”

The pieces will be featured across the cities for three months, with artworks changing every two weeks. Presented on purposefully bold colour backgrounds, each intervention is presented in black text to grab the attention of passers-by and includes “plain speaking ideas” such as “Universal Basic Income and affordable housing so that everyone, including artists, can make a living” or “Curators should ask the public to see what they think galleries and museums should be used for” through to, “dear museums, give back all stolen objects”. On the project Zarina and Gabrielle add: “In our minds, we’ve been laughing at it as: millennial Jenny Holzer, in Twitter speak, and with a vey specific agenda. Think we just wanna proselytise a bit, but not too preachy – a nice middle ground for the ~ saying what everyone’s thinking ~ crowd.”

Stemming from the pair regularly noticing the multifaceted problems within the creative industry, Gabrielle and Zarina note that often “they’re all the same 5/6 problems that express themselves in all these kinda obscured convoluted n different ways,” they explain. “I think we wanted to plop these lil aphorisms out there, as simple, feasible solutions; almost to prove how easy solutions can be if change is sincerely sought. None of these things are particularly radical, they’re just common sense, but for some reason the creative industry operates in this wild space that makes them seem outlandish,” the pair conclude. “Maybe they’re also manifestations, lmao! 2021, new year new me manifestations for the world – universe, make it happen plssss.”