“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 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.”
Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability by Jack Halberstam
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quvWUlus6ao
Run time: 1hr 25min
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.”
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
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
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.