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.

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

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