“How the patron saint of progressive urban planning’s ideas and ideals were implemented - and corrupted.”
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.
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 Danger of a Single Story by Chimamanda Adichie
Watch TED Talk here. July 2009.
“Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.”
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
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