Using pictures of Froebel School, a site of the 1973 student uprisings in Chicago, and made in a workshop with artist and educator Nicole Marroquin
Jane Jacobs vs. The Power Brokers by Sarah Mirk and Jackie Roche
“How the patron saint of progressive urban planning’s ideas and ideals were implemented - and corrupted.”
Performing Statistics
“Over the course of those four years as part of ART 180, and in partnership with Legal Aid Justice Center and later RISE for Youth, Performing Statistics helped advocates close a youth prison, change laws and policies on school suspensions and expulsions, and advance Virginia’s investment in community-based alternatives to incarceration. The project has been seen by tens of thousands of Virginians, been introduced to 20,000 classrooms through the Amplifier Foundation, and has trained more than 150 officers and recruits in the Richmond Police Department. This profound impact has happened in a short amount of time, and now it’s time for the project to extend beyond Richmond and beyond Virginia.” - Performing Statistics Website
Challenging the Established Picture by Mark Sealy and Magnum Photos
“Archives capture history insomuch as they enshrine the perspectives of those who have been privileged enough to narrate and control how it is recorded. At the core of Mark Sealy’s work is a motivation to challenge the notion of archives as singular repositories of historical truth-telling, which he argues has influenced not just the history of photography, but our collective understanding of history itself. By being open to diverse perspectives, Sealy aims to broaden our understanding of history, and expose the power structures that have, and continue to, allow established narratives to dominate.
“I think once we get ourselves over the idea that photography is not this fantastic invention, the undisputed eye of the world, but is just another dominant tool used to narrate Eurocentric perspectives, then I think we’re in a place where we can begin to unpick photography’s social meanings through the prism of different ways of seeing… It’s a form of curatorial resistance work. It’s about understanding that things aren’t always the way that powerful cultural institutions tell us that they are.” The solution lies in locating “our silent history”, as he described it when speaking at a Magnum talk on archives at the Barbican.” -Magnum Photos
"It’s a form of curatorial resistance work" - Mark Sealy
Muslims in Brooklyn by Kameelah Janan Rasheed Brooklyn Historical Society
In 2017, Brooklyn Historical Society launched Muslims in Brooklyn, a multi-year, public arts and history project to amplify stories of Brooklyn’s diverse Muslim communities.
For well over a century, Muslims have lived, worked, and prayed in Brooklyn, making it a major center of Muslim life for New York City and the nation. As such, the histories and experiences of Brooklyn’s Muslim communities hold great resonance for national conversations on religious diversity and pluralism.
The Francis Effect by Tania Bruguera
Episode #211: This episode of ART21 "Exclusive" features artist Tania Bruguera collecting signatures as part of her socially engaged performance project "The Francis Effect" (2014). For fifteen weeks Bruguera stood outside of the Guggenheim Museum in New York asking passersby to sign a petition to Pope Francis that requests Vatican City citizenship for undocumented immigrants. "A lot of people know it's impossible," says Bruguera. Yet she believes "the impossible is only impossible until somebody makes it possible." In her engagement of our political imaginations, Bruguera demonstrates the power of art to change perceptions and mobilize political action. Tania Bruguera explores the relationship between art, activism, and social change, staging participatory events and interactions that build on her own observations, experiences, and understanding of the politics of repression and control. Her work advances the concept of arte útil, according to which art can be used as a tool for social and political empowerment.
Learn more about the artist at: http://www.art21.org/artists/tania-br...
Sign the petition at: http://dignityhasnonationality.net/sign
CREDITS: Producer: Ian Forster. Consulting Producers: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Ian Forster. Camera: Rafael Salazar & Ava Wiland. Sound: Ava Wiland. Editor: Morgan Riles. Translation: Michela Moscufo. Artwork Courtesy: Tania Bruguera. Special Thanks: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum & Rebecca Mir. Theme Music: Peter Foley.
American Alphabets by Wendy Ewald
“While the United States has become increasingly diverse since then, the culture of our schools has remained much the same as in my childhood: white middle-class. American Alphabets is an attempt to remake the buildings blocks of our language to reflect our differing cultures. The young people I worked with chose the words and suggested the imagery of their alphabets. I created a Spanish alphabet with Spanish-speaking children of immigrant farm workers. The words they chose—like nervioso or impostor—were symptomatic of their uprooted way of life. Taken as a whole, their lists of words amounted to a kind of cultural self-portrait. Students in Cleveland worked with me on an African Alphabet and girls in a private school on a Girl’s alphabet. At the Queens Museum I collaborated with Arabic speaking middle school students to create the Arabic Alphabet. The students had emigrated with their families from Egypt, Jordan, Algeria, Morocco and Lebanon.” Wendy Ewald
Colonial White Project by Charlotte Lagarde
“When I moved to Connecticut in 2017, I learned that the walls of our home were painted with Patriot White and Opulence White. Looking for alternate whites, I stumbled across a paint color called Colonial White. I was stunned. I grew up in France, which has a continuous history of colonization and where the word colonial is used to represent that oppression and supremacy. But in the US and especially in New England, the word colonial has become ubiquitous. And I wondered how can the word colonial be reduced to an architectural style? But then looking at it again, I thought that the paint chip Colonial White is actually making visible the reality of America and its history.
By asking participants to visually merge the Colonial White paint chip with a place/object/situation that embodies colonial white to them, I am hoping to reframe the term colonial in its historical and present context amid a collective reflection and conversation about structural racism.” Charlotte Lagarde
Slave Rebellion Reenactment by Dread Scott
“Slave Rebellion Reenactment is a conceptual community-engaged performance that will restage and reinterpret Louisiana’s German Coast Uprising of 1811. This was the largest rebellion of enslaved people in United States history and took place outside of New Orleans. SRR will animate a suppressed history of people with an audacious plan to organize, take up arms and seize Orleans Territory, to fight not just for their own emancipation, but to end slavery. It is a project about freedom.
The artwork will involve hundreds of reenactors in period specific clothing marching for two days covering 26 miles. It will be reenacted upriver from New Orleans in the locations where the 1811 revolt occurred—the chemical refineries and trailer parks that have replaced the sugar plantations forming its backdrop.” By Dread Scott
John Brown Song! by Laylah Ali
“In spring of 2013, I asked various people I know if they would sing "John Brown's Body," a song that became popular during the American Civil War. (The song was also lyrically transformed in 1861 by abolitionist and John Brown sympathizer Julia Ward Howe into the still-famous "The Battle Hymn of the Republic.") There are several versions of the John Brown song and participants could choose which version they wanted to sing. I gave them little guidance except to ask that they video themselves if possible and sing as many verses as they could. What follows are their responses.” Laylah Ali
Catherine Opie Portraits
Catherine Opie: The self portraits were in some ways what ended up launching launching me into the larger art world. I made “Self-Portrait/Cutting” on my back and it’s two stick figure girls with skirts, sort of what a kindergartener would draw of their family– a little house with a smokestack.
And then because we’re dealing with issues in 1993, still in the AIDS epidemic actually, the kind of polarizing politics of the time and realizing that this image spoke in many different ways. And then to literally have it cut in your skin so that the blood begins to be part of the discourse, was a way for me to begin to really deal with larger issues of homophobia and what it is to be in our bodies and to be identified as queer beings.
[The person who drew this on my back was] a really amazing artist here in Los Angeles by the name of Judie Bamber and she was part of the larger leather community that I was a part of. I had her practice on chicken breasts in the kitchen before she did it. And every time she would make a mark, her hand would shake. My friends kept having to calm her down and tell her that is was OK and that it was consensual and I was asking her to help me make this piece.
Mining the Museum by Fred Wilson
When: April 3, 1992 —February 28, 1993
Where: Baltimore
In 1992, a huge sign was hanging from the facade of the Maryland Historical Society announcing that “another” history was now being told inside. The sign referred to African-American artist Fred Wilson’s exhibition project “Mining the Museum,” which presented the museum’s collection in a new, critical light.[1]
The Jerome Project (My Loss) by Titus Kaphar
“Titus Kaphar’s The Jerome Project (My Loss) belongs to a larger series of the same title that the artist began in 2011. Searching online databases for his father’s prison records, he found dozens of individuals listed who shared his father’s first name, Jerome, as well as his last name. Struck by this discovery, he created portraits of each Jerome, based on their mug shots. The paired panels on view here show Kaphar’s own father. The panels draw on the visual tradition of Byzantine icons, specifically depictions of Saint Jerome, patron saint of librarians, scholars, and translators.
The panels were painted on flat gold-leaf backgrounds and then partially submerged in tar. Initially, the level of the tar reflected the percentage of each lifetime spent in prison. But Kaphar abandoned that formula in acknowledgment of incarceration’s lingering aftereffects, such as difficulty securing employment and loss of voting rights.” -Brooklyn Museum
Where We Come From by Emily Jacir
“For most people the question “Where are you from?” can be answered in a word. Paris, Delhi, Tokyo, Kiev. For a Palestinian, there are several ways of responding, all of them complicated, leading back to a place that is beyond reach or that no longer exists as an Arab town. Lydda today is Lod, home to Tel Aviv airport, but it was an Arab town along with Ramleh, whose 60,000 citizens were evacuated by Israeli forces in 1948. Fifty-plus years later, how can a young man born in Kuwait and now living in Detroit still say that he comes from Lydda? The point is, of course, that he does.”
Anti-Columbus Day Tour
“Rename the day. Remove the statue. Respect the ancestors. We heal.”
Download Anti-Columbus Day tour brochure of the American Museum of Natural History here. Provided by Decolonize This Place
A Conversation With Native Americans on Race By Michèle Stephenson and Brian Young
“What does it mean to be a Native American today? ln our latest installment of The Times’s Conversation on Race project, we set out to include as many perspectives on native identity as possible.
And there are many perspectives indeed. For this film, we spoke to dark-skinned and light-skinned individuals. Those whose ancestry ranges from one-sixteenth to four-fourth. People younger and older. And those who follow their tribe’s religion to those that follow Bible-based beliefs. We heard from people with backgrounds from as far as Arizona Navajo to the northeastern United States, and even interviewed Hawaiian and South American native individuals living in New York City.” NYTimes Op Docs
Take a Picture with a Real Indian by James Luna
Performance artist James Luna, a member of California’s Luiseño tribe, likes to blur the boundaries of his Native American culture. This past Columbus Day, he stood in front of Washington, D.C.’s Union Station and invited passersby to take his picture.
9102000 by Cameron Rowland
“Walking through Cameron Rowland’s solo exhibition, 91020000, is a sobering experience. Here, the Philadelphia-born artist, who has been exhibiting in galleries for only a few years now, presents a body of work that is as disquieting as it is inspiring. The artist, known for displaying ready-made objects that are obtained through abstruse economic exchanges, showcases work that transcends its own objecthood as commodity, revealing a language (and history) of social and racial hierarchies.
This is the case in 91020000, its title derived from Artists Space’s customer account number with Corcraft, a company that manufactures affordable commodities to sell to government agencies, schools, and non-profit organizations (i.e. Artists Space). Mr. Rowland, through his partnership with Artists Space, purchased four courtroom benches made of oak, a particleboard office desk, and seven cast aluminum manhole rings. All are carefully strewn about the SoHo loft space, leaving the viewer to observe in silence these everyday, recondite objects. It is not until one picks up the accompanying leaflet, which includes a short essay by the artist along with captions for each piece in the exhibition, that we learn the aforementioned objects were made by the cheap labor of New York State’s prison inmates.” By Terence Trouillot for Brooklyn Rail
RAICES #NoKidsInCages
Over 3000 children were separated from their parents at the border. They live in cages. Sleep on the floor. They cry out and are not comforted.
They’ve spent an average of 154 days away from their parents. They’ve been shuttled around between 17 different states. They sleep under $0.68 blankets in freezing temperatures.
This is not history. This is happening now. Hundreds more have been separated. 6 children have died.
#NoKidsInCages is about the children. We cannot be a nation that separates families.
For those who’ve forgotten, it’s time to remember and raise our voices. For those who didn’t know, it’s time to understand the plight of these innocent children.
SHARE their stories online. ACT by telling Congress to pass Bill HR-541 – Keep Families Together Act. And SUPPORT organizations that are fighting to save and reunite children separated at our border.
We’re supporting RAICES, an organization on the frontlines providing free and low-cost legal & social services to immigrant children, families, and refugees. You can donate to them below.
Source: https://nokidsincages.com/
From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried
“With From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, Carrie Mae Weems reveals how photography has played a key role throughout history in shaping and supporting racism, stereotyping, and social injustice.
Weems re-photographed and enlarged these images and printed them through colored filters: two blue-toned images bookend a grouping of images printed in red. She framed the red-toned prints in circular mattes, meant to suggest the lens of a camera, and placed all of the prints beneath glass sandblasted with text. About her choice of text the artist has said: “I’m trying to heighten a kind of critical awareness around the way in which these photographs were intended.” She hopes this strategy “gives the subject another level of humanity and another level of dignity that was originally missing in the photograph” - MoMA