“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
Teaching Racism as an Idea
“If we teach students to see racism as an idea that's expressed through behaviors, institutions and cultures rather than an immutable character trait, we free them to see things more accurately and with more openness to change, argues Cyndi Kernahan.” -Inside Higher Ed
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
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
A Class Divided
One day in 1968, Jane Elliott, a teacher in a small, all-white Iowa town, divided her third-grade class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed groups and gave them a daring lesson in discrimination. This is the story of that lesson, its lasting impact on the children, and its enduring power 30 years later.
Watch the film on PBS here.
Run time 53min 5s
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
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
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
Counternarratives by Alexandra Bell
“Bell critiqued the Times’s coverage of the death of Mike Brown, in 2014, in which the paper ran side-by-side profiles of the victim and his killer, Darren Wilson, under the joint headline “Two Lives at a Crossroads in Ferguson.” Bell and many other readers felt that the framing of equivalence, and of tragic coincidence, diminished what had happened that August afternoon. Bell erected a diptych of her own, with Wilson’s profile whittled down to read, simply, “Officer Darren Wilson fatally shot an unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown.” The second panel bore the new headline “A Teenager with Promise,”” By Doreen St. Felix for The New Yorker
Photo Request from Solitary →
Photo Requests from Solitary (PRFS) is a participatory project that invites men and women held in long-term solitary confinement in U.S. prisons to request a photograph of anything at all, real or imagined, and then finds a volunteer to make the image. The astonishing range of requests, taken together, provide an archive of the hopes, memories, and interests of people who live in extreme isolation.