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Azikiwe Mohammed at 5 Eldridge Street in Manhattan, the location of the Black Painters Academy (image courtesy of Azikiwe Mohammed)

Azikiwe Mohammed's idea for the Black Painters Academy came to him when he heard about a friend who had attended one of the popular "paint and sip" classes in her neighborhood. The works that were presented as references for what to paint, however, were all mostly from the Western canon, and by primarily white artists.

"It's always this overarching white history starting point that everybody's coming from," Mohammed told Hyperallergic. "The object is disseminated throughout the entire room, and everybody paints the same thing, further spreading that history."

Although art museums and galleries have made some strides in diversifying their exhibitions in the last few years, shows dedicated to Black painters are still the outlier. And encounters with their work are not the institutional norm, especially for those who did not receive an in-depth art education. What if that could change?

In response, Mohammed conceived of the Black Painters Academy, set to open early next year, as a school where aspiring painters can learn from the rich history of Black art. Classes will be entirely free of charge and open to students of all ages, young and old. He especially hopes to engage those who may not have access to painting classes or feel unwelcome in such spaces, including many people of color.

"You're seeing a lot more Black identifying painters in the field moving around, more Black objects. It's incredible, it's absolutely beautiful to see," said Mohammed. "But where are the other ones? What if we had a building where we could help make some more?"

A painting by Azikiwe Mohammed, "Places I've Been With Helicopters #3 / A Modern Zong Massacre" (2020), acrylic and gouache on board, 40 x 24 inches (courtesy of the artist and Mindy Solomon Gallery)

The academy will be located at 5 Eldridge Street in Manhattan's Chinatown neighborhood, and the artist has launched a Kickstarter to help raise funds for the first year of operations. With 144 individual backers so far, the project has raised $9,000 of its $18,000 goal.

At Black Painters Academy, every student will receive a free black canvas, paint, brushes, and a lesson on Black art history taught by Mohammed himself. Other artists of color, such as Steve Locke and Carlos Rosales-Silva, will be joining as guest teachers.

"A painter's currency are the secrets and tricks they gather over their years of working. I want to help people find their secrets. Historically the examples we have been presented in this field center on a white art history that excludes us at every turn," Mohammed says in a statement describing the project. "I aim to offer a different departure point."

Another feature will distinguish the school from other models, says Mohammed: "success will be built-in." What that means, he explains, is doing everything possible to make the classes feasible for participants. If they can't finish their painting during the session, they can return and keep working on it. If they don't have space to store their work, it will be kept in the space. (Mohammed also plans to auction the works that students leave behind every semester, starting at $50, to benefit organizations working to put art classes back in public schools.)

The artist's long-term goal is to turn Black Painters Academy into a mobile school so the classes can reach people with limited time, access to transportation, and other factors that might impede them from participating.

"As Black people, we're often told that we're not allowed space," he said. "We are making this space to make sure that we have it." Classes will be made available on a first come, first serve basis, with priority given to Black, Brown, and other students of color; still, Mohammed emphasized that the school will be open to everyone.

"Just because we're saying yes to us doesn't mean we're saying no to you. If you tell me you also don't have space, the door is open, just come on in."

The Black Painters Academy is expected to open in January 2021 and operate at limited capacity or digitally during the COVID-19 pandemic. Donations to the fundraiser can be made here.

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Introducing the Black Painters Academy, a New School Dedicated to Black Art History

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Azikiwe Mohammed's idea for the Black Painters Academy came to him when he heard about a friend who had attended one of the popular "paint and sip" classes in her neighborhood. The works that were presented as references for what to paint, however, were all mostly from the Western canon, and by primarily white artists.

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Art and Activism

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Maggi Hambling's "A Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft," unveiled in Newington Green, London, is the world's first memorial to the feminist pioneer (photo by Ioana Marinescu, courtesy of Hugh Monk)

Two hundred years after her death, the world's first and only memorial sculpture to Mary Wollstonecraft, the British women's rights advocate and writer widely known as the "mother of feminism," will be unveiled tonight in London. Much of the online reception of the new landmark this week, however, has been anything but celebratory: social media is rife with expressions of disbelief and derision over the sculpture, particularly for its inclusion of a nude female figure.

"So when Mary Wollstonecraft said women should be granted 'respect for their abilities and virtues' over two centuries ago, she really meant I want to be immortalised in 2020 with my tits out," tweeted Maya Oppenheim, the Women's Correspondent at the Independent.

Created by British artist Maggi Hambling and cast in silvered bronze, the sculpture depicts a small figure of a nude woman emerging from a tree trunk-like amalgamation of abstracted female forms. Inscribed on its base is a famous citation by Wollstonecraft: "I do not wish women to have power over men, but over themselves."

The work was installed in Newington Green, where the writer established a girls' boarding school in 1785. Wollstonecraft is known for her seminal book "Vindication of the Rights of Woman" (1792), the first publication in English to argue for the equality of men and women. She died at the age of 38 after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary Shelley, who would go on to author the classic novel Frankenstein (1818).

Hambling's sculpture was made possible through the fundraising campaign " Mary on the Green," launched 10 years ago with the aim of memorializing Wollstonecraft and diversifying London's monuments, 90% of which commemorate men. In 2019, the campaign reached its target of £143,300 (~$189,695) needed to fund the work.

But Hambling's decision to include a nude female body in her piece, specifically a slender, conventionally attractive one, has been viewed by some as inconsistent with Wollstonecraft's feminist achievements. "An incredible mind reduced to a Barbie doll on a mound," reads one Tweet.

Another Twitter user shared a side-by-side comparison of the new sculpture and a contemporary oil portrait of Wollstonecraft - gray-haired, clothed, and comparably plump. Though Hambling's figure is not meant to be a likeness of Wollstonecraft, representing instead "the everywoman," people have noted that its idealized proportions are hardly universal.

The artist defended the portrayal, telling the Evening Standard, "As far as I know, she's more or less the shape we'd all like to be."

The controversy around Hambling's work is redolent of another recent polemic over a statue that was intended to empower women. Luciano Garbati's " Medusa With The Head of Perseus," a seven-foot-tall nude bronze, was recently installed across the street from a federal courthouse in New York City where convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein was tried. Garbati sought to reimagine the Greek myth of Medusa so as to revindicate its female protagonist, but the statue similarly came under scrutiny for what some saw as an overly sexualized representation - a male-centric vision of women, complete with full breasts, a flat stomach, and hairless genitalia.

That very last accusation, at least, cannot be leveled at Hammond's rendering. The figure in the Wollstonecraft memorial features a prominently un-manicured pelvic area, leading the feminist publication Jezebel to run the headline, "New 'Everywoman' Statue Goes Bush-Out for Feminism."

Though Jezebel staffer Emily Alford seemed to sincerely applaud its "truly magnificent bush," her piece echoed larger concerns with the work. "She's certainly the shape contemporary media has told us men would like us to be, just like the old Vindication advocated," she wrote.

Ahhh so when Mary Wollstonecraft said women should be granted "respect for their abilities and virtues" over two centuries ago, she really meant I want to be immortalised in 2020 with my tits out pic.twitter.com/4usEJD5Ogo
- Maya Oppenheim (@MayaOppenheim) November 10, 2020

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The World Got Its First Memorial to Feminist Giant Mary Wollstonecraft ... and It's a Tiny Female Nude

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Two hundred years after her death, the world's first and only memorial sculpture to Mary Wollstonecraft, the British women's rights advocate and writer widely known as the "mother of feminism," will be unveiled tonight in London.

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Political cartoonists have had a lot of work on their hands ever since Donald Trump won the election in 2016. His presidency threw the news cycle, and American politics in general, into a frenzy. Edel Rodriguez, a New York-based painter and illustrator, is one of the most prolific among them. In recent years, he has produced biting cartoons against the Trump administration on an almost daily basis, posting many of them on his Instagram and Twitter pages.

Rodriguez's work has been featured on the covers and pages of leading publications like the , Time Magazine , New York Times , Der Spiegel , and others. He has also illustrated nine children's books and created film posters for PBS , among many other projects. His work has been displayed in a number of exhibitions and is included in the collections of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC, and the New Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut.

Born in Havana, Cuba, in 1971, Rodriguez came to the US as a refugee at the age of eight. His work carries the sensibilities of an immigrant, with cogent responses to the Trump administration's strict immigration policies. In one of his illustrations, the current president is seen directing his golf stick at an immigrant child coiled in front of him. A cover Rodriguez created for the German magazine Der Spiegel , made shortly after the white nationalist march in Charlottesville in 2017, shows the president wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood. Rodriguez has also produced agile responses to the events of 2020, from Trump's mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic to his efforts to disrupt and discredit mail-in voting, among other missteps and calamities.

As Americans vote in record numbers, we caught Rodriguez for a conversation on his work and the uncertain times we live through.
Hyperallergic: You produce new work almost every day. Have you always been so prolific, or is it an outcome of the Trump era?
Edel Rodriguez : I've always been drawing and painting, but lately I've been focusing more on US politics because it feels more urgent to deal with these topics. Political cartoons are actually a small part of my artistic practice, but they've been getting the most attention because the public is really concerned about these issues.
H: How does your background as a Cuban immigrant to the US inform your work and views?
ER: Being an immigrant informs my views deeply. I think the US should be a country that welcomes immigrants and refugees the way it has for hundreds of years. That's not what's happening now. I was welcomed into this country as a refugee from a communist dictatorship. Trump's Muslim Ban was one of the things that set me off to speak out about political issues.
H: The common perception in American politics is that Cuban-Americans lean towards the Republican party. What's your opinion on that?
ER: Trump's propaganda has been enticing to Cuban-Americans. When you tell Cuban immigrants that you're going to destroy totalitarianism in Cuba, as Trump did, of course they're going to support you. But has Trump done anything to end communism in Cuba? The answer is no.
H: Are you anxious about the results of this election?
ER: I'm anxious; I think everybody is. There are a lot of causes for anxiety. This election will define this country to the rest of the world. If we elect Trump, we will be seen as a country that reelected a fascist.

I'm also tired. I want to get back to not having to think about politics every day. We spent the last four years riding a fast car with a drunk driver. I want to get off the ride and relax.
H: Your work is unabashedly critical of Trump and his administration. Do you consider your political cartoons to be a form of activism?
ER: I'm a concerned citizen who thinks that artists should have the freedom to express their opinions. I know that there are people who look at my work in places like Iran, Turkey, China, and Cuba who don't have that freedom. With all the insanity that is happening, it's important to me to show that the United States is a country where people can still speak their minds openly.

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Slick Political Cartoons Offer Incisive Critiques of Trump

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Political cartoonists have had a lot of work on their hands ever since Donald Trump won the election in 2016. His presidency threw the news cycle, and American politics in general, into a frenzy. Edel Rodriguez, a New York-based painter and illustrator, is one of the most prolific among them.

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Art and Activism

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A 70-foot wall made entirely of cheese, erected near the US-Mexico border as a critique of the current government's immigration policies, has been destroyed - and the artist behind the work is suing Trump's border wall contractors for allegedly dismantling it.

Cosimo Cavallaro began working on the sculptural installation, "Cheese Wall," in March 2019. The Canadian-Italian artist leased a private property in San Diego County to create a barricade out of bricks of expired Cotija, a Mexican cheese named after a town in the state of Michoacan. Cavallaro's often works with perishable materials to highlight the problem of waste, both in terms of material accumulation and financial extravagance.

In a complaint filed in San Diego federal court, Cavallaro claims that employees of the construction company SLSCO, hired by the Trump administration to fortify the US-Mexico border wall, "knowingly and willfully trespassed onto the site and destroyed the Cheese Wall" on or around October 2019.

Cosimo Cavallaro's "Cheese Wall," built of blocks of Cotija cheese, before it was destroyed. (photo by Alan Shaffer; courtesy of Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP)

The suit rests on a potential violation of the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990, conversion, private nuisance, and trespass. Cavallaro also claims he was "deprived of the opportunity to communicate his artistic message through the Cheese Wall" and "to see the Cheese Wall, at its full length, stand in contrast to the border wall."

"The loss of Cos's work has been devastating to him," Melinda LeMoine of Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP, who is representing Cavallaro, told Hyperallergic.

"For years, he worked to bring his vision of the Cheese Wall to life, only to have trespassers tear it apart and bury it in the dirt. He has never sued anyone before. But he felt that he had no choice here. He cannot recreate what is lost, but he can stand up for what is right," she added.

Cavallaro standing at the former site of his destroyed "Cheese Wall" near the US-Mexico border. (photo by Alan Shaffer; courtesy of Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP)

The artist is seeking damages, attorneys' fees, and costs.

When Trump took office, he promised to build a "big, beautiful" wall along the Southwest border to keep out what he falsely described as an influx of Mexican criminals. According to recent analyses, the (now possibly lame-duck) president has built 15 miles of new primary barrier and 350 miles of replacement or secondary barrier; another 221 miles are still under construction. That is a far cry from the 2,000-mile stretch of concrete he had committed to during his 2016 campaign.

In a 2019 interview, Cavallaro said that his installation was meant to "show and expose waste." The sculpture was supposed to stand at 1,000 feet and was still under construction when it was torn down. By then, it stood at six feet high and contained more than 400 Cotija bricks.

"I don't like walls," Cavallaro said. "This is a wall that I can handle, that I'm willing to live with. This wall is perishable, it will not last."

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Artist Sues Trump's Border Wall Contractors for Destroying His "Cheese Wall"

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A 70-foot wall made entirely of cheese, erected near the US-Mexico border as a critique of the current government's immigration policies, has been destroyed - and the artist behind the work is suing Trump's border wall contractors for allegedly dismantling it. Cosimo Cavallaro began working on the sculptural installation, "Cheese Wall," in March 2019.

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Art and Activism

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While no book on an artist can possibly encapsulate their full oeuvre, Rebecca VanDiver noticed something about most of the scholarship on Loïs Mailou Jones. Almost always, only two of her major paintings were mentioned, and they were created almost three decades apart. Where, then, was the research on all the artwork Jones produced in between?

That premise guided the writing and research of VanDiver's new book Designing a New Tradition: Loïs Mailou Jones and the Aesthetics of Blackness, published by Penn State University Press. An assistant professor of African American Art at Vanderbilt University, VanDiver largely organized the text around significant locations in Jones's career: Washington DC, Paris, Haiti, and Africa (particularly West Africa). The book surveys decades of Jones's work, from the 1920s to the 1990s. Inevitably, this covers major shifts in American history, including "cultural conceptions of blackness and associated definitions of what constitutes black art," VanDiver writes in the introduction.

Designing a New Tradition: Loïs Mailou Jones and the Aesthetics of Blackness by Rebecca VanDiver (published by Penn State University Press)

While VanDiver has plenty to cover about the artist's contributions, her prose leaves room for a nuanced look at Jones's upbringing. She acknowledges the financial privilege Jones had growing up in New England to an upper-middle class family (her mother had a cosmetology business and her father was a lawyer). When she started looking for studio art teaching positions, Jones initially bristled at the suggestion of considering schools in the South - in VanDiver words, the artist had her "own preconceived notions about the Southern black population." But Jones's journey to a new teaching job at the Palmer Memorial Institute (PMI) in North Carolina would start to open this worldview.

In 1930, Jones began a teaching career at Howard University. Even though she was there for nearly five decades, while producing her own art, scholars "have often relegated her to the middle or back of the pack," VanDiver writes in the book's introduction. In the artist's archives, VanDiver found numerous letters in which Jones laid out her accomplishments at the university, hoping for a promotion. Yet she never got the career advancement she wanted.

"That is a story that really resonates with women today, still, in terms of the type of self promotion that we have to do in order to garner appreciation and recognition for the work that we're doing," VanDiver told Hyperallergic.

Loïs Mailou Jones, "Negro Youth" (1929), charcoal on paper, 29 × 22 inches (Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, bequest of the artist, courtesy Loïs Mailou Jones Pierre-Noël Trust)

Jones's early career shows an interest in landscape painting and textile design. Around the 1930s, she also created illustrations, including work for the publishing house Carter G. Woodson, a cofounder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH). Her oil paintings during this decade show vibrant colors and intricate patterns (influenced by her textile background); she found inspiration in African culture and objects, an ongoing theme in her work. The 1938 "Les Fétiches," one of the main pieces that VanDiver has noticed in scholarship about Jones, shows her ability to produce energetic and bold compositions, even while creating more traditional still lifes around the same time period. While in Haiti during the summer of 1954, VanDiver writes, Jones created around 30 paintings; she captured the landscape and female vendors around her. By the early 1960s, she was focused primarily on collage.

"Jones's use of collage to interpret Haitian vernacular religious visual culture into high art was linked to actual cultural practices but also to her struggle to find a suitable visual language for her diasporic encounters," VanDiver writes.

These are just a few of the conceptual explorations and shifts in medium that Jones undertakes. Yet her contributions remain overlooked in their true breadth, VanDiver argues. This, despite the fact that Jones also made history. While Jones is a "first" in many ways throughout the decades - Jones's 1972 retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston was "the first solo show given to an African American female artist at an American museum," VanDiver writes - the book is more interested in analyzing her work in a manner worthy of any artist making an impact in the 20th century. Not just through her art, but also her scholarship and teaching.

Loïs Mailou Jones, "Église Saint Joseph" (1954), oil on canvas, 23 1/8 × 28 inches (Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, bequest of the artist, courtesy Loïs Mailou Jones Pierre-Noël Trust)

For a casual art lover, the text might feel a little heady; for the academic, the book asks that Jones's artwork not be divorced from the political changes during her career. Yet VanDiver hopes it can appeal to readers with other interests, as well. She told Hyperallergic, "That was really my hope, that it would be something that would appeal not only to art historians, but also to the more general reader who is interested in Black America - what it means to be Black in the 20th century, what it means to be Black in the 21st century."

There's a photo, which didn't make it into the book, of Jones at the Corcoran Museum of Art in the early 1970s at a panel on women in the visual arts. VanDiver describes the event as "part of this institutional reckoning that happens in the 1970s, where you start to see major art institutions having to grapple with their sexism and the racism of the prior decades." Jones is one of "maybe two or three Black women in the photo," and she holds a microphone. The artist appears repeatedly in these major moments in US history, including "the exclusion of Black women in the feminist art movement of the 1970s," VanDiver explains. After so many decades of being overlooked, Jones was ready to speak.
Designing a New Tradition: Loïs Mailou Jones and the Aesthetics of Blackness is published by Penn State University Press and is available online and in bookstores.

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As arts communities around the world experience a time of challenge and change, accessible, independent reporting on these developments is more important than ever.

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Related

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Loïs Mailou Jones, an Artist and Educator Who Made History

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While no book on an artist can possibly encapsulate their full oeuvre, Rebecca VanDiver noticed something about most of the scholarship on Loïs Mailou Jones. Almost always, only two of her major paintings were mentioned, and they were created almost three decades apart. Where, then, was the research on all the artwork Jones produced in between?

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Art and Activism

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One of the unfortunate side-effects of the COVID-19 pandemic has been a surge in xenophobic and racist attacks against Americans of Asian descent. New York, one of the world's most multicultural cities, is not excluded from this trend; the city's Commission on Human Rights reports more than 566 reports of discrimination, harassment, and bias related to the coronavirus since February. Of these, 184 targeted Asian and Asian-American people, more than seven times the number of complaints received over the same time period last year.

Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, an artist in residence at the Human Rights Commission, addressed this concerning phenomenon with an ad takeover of the Atlantic Avenue subway station in Brooklyn. Titled " I Still Believe in Our City," the public art installation celebrates New York's diversity with a series of 45 panels featuring vibrantly colored portraits of Black, East Asian, and Southeast Asian residents of the city. These portraits are accompanied by anti-discriminatory messages like "I did not make you sick," "This is our home too," and "I am not your scapegoat."

"I did not make you sick," "This is our home too," and "I am not your scapegoat."

The eye-catching panels combine patterns of flowers that carry a symbolic meaning in Chinese culture. Some signify resilience, friendship, and solidarity, while others symbolize protection and longevity. In addition, some of the panels cite statistics on the racial discrimination against Asian-Americans, including an incident that happened at the Atlantic Avenue subways station in March, when a 26-year-old Asian-American man reported being spat on and threatened with murder for "spreading the coronavirus."

The March incident is one of the reasons why Phingbodhipakkiya chose the Atlantic Avenue terminal as the site for her project. Another is that the station connects historically Black and Asian and Pacific Islander (API) neighborhoods like Chinatown, Koreatown, Sunset Park, Crown Heights, and Bedford-Stuyvesant. The station is also in close proximity to Brooklyn's Barclays Center, where many of the summer's Black Lives Matter protests took place. Several of Phingbodhipakkiya's panels are dedicated to expressing solidarity with the Black community's struggle for justice and equality.

"I've been proud to call myself a New Yorker for the last 14 years," Phingbodhipakkiya said in a statement shared with Hyperallergic, "but the pandemic opened up an ugly side of the city."

"So many of my friends and people who look like me have been harassed, told to 'go back,' had our basic humanity denied," the artist continued. "My goal with this series was to turn these hurts into something beautiful and powerful."

Panels reading "Abolish brutality," "Justice," and "Dismantle oppression"

"Over the past seven months, New York City has experienced deep tragedy, and, for some, that tragedy has been compounded by stigma and discrimination," Carmelyn P. Malalis, Chair and Commissioner of the NYC Commission on Human Rights, said in a press release announcing the project.

"Despite being confronted with anti-Asian bias and rhetoric, Asian and Pacific Islander [API] New Yorkers continue to fight for our city, for our neighbors, and for justice," Malalis continued. "Amanda's art gives us something beautiful, moving and celebratory when we need it most and it encourages API New Yorkers to remain visible and proud."

Starting November 26, additional panels will be placed across the city, including LinkNYC kiosks and bus shelters. If you have witnessed or experienced discrimination or harassment in New York City, you can report the incident by calling 212-416-0197 or online at the commission's website. The commission's staff speaks over 30 languages and reports can be filed anonymously.

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"I Am Not Your Scapegoat": Artworks Denounce Increasing Anti-Asian Bigotry

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One of the unfortunate side-effects of the COVID-19 pandemic has been a surge in xenophobic and racist attacks against Americans of Asian descent. New York, one of the world's most multicultural cities, is not excluded from this trend; the city's Commission on Human Rights reports more than 566 reports of discrimination, harassment, and bias related to the coronavirus since February.

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Photography

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National Museum of African American History and Culture

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Photograph by

Terry, Roderick, American

Subject of

Unidentified Man or Men

Million Man March, American, founded 1995

Printed by

Penn Camera, American, 1954 - 2012

Medium

silver and photographic gelatin on photographic paper

Dimensions

H x W (Image): 10 5/8 x 13 11/16 in. (27 x 34.8 cm)

H x W (Sheet): 11 x 14 in. (27.9 x 35.6 cm)

Description

This black-and-white photograph depicts two men holding a long white banner. Written in black text it reads "AFRIKAN HOLOCAUST / 400 YRS AND STILL / IN PROGRESS." The word STILL is underlined. There is also a hand drawn picture of the African continent bleeding. The figure on the left wears a beret, dark shirt, sunglasses and combat boots. He carries a small flag in his left hand and a large white flag with writing in his right. He looks directly at the viewer. The other figure wears a baseball cap and sweatshirt, and looks to his left. The strap of a bag is visible over his left shoulder. Behind them is a milling crowd of men with the Washington Monument in the background.

Place depicted

National Mall, Washington, District of Columbia, United States, North and Central America

Portfolio/Series

One Million Strong

Classification

Media Arts-Photography

Type

gelatin silver prints

Credit Line

Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of Roderick Terry

Object number

2013.99.15

Restrictions & Rights

© Roderick Terry

GUID

http://n2t.net/ark:/65665/fd5b3f18d55-8223-4822-b2a9-4248e76b63f2

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This black-and-white photograph depicts two men holding a long white banner. Written in black text it reads "AFRIKAN HOLOCAUST / 400 YRS AND STILL / IN PROGRESS." The word STILL is underlined. There is also a hand drawn picture of the African continent bleeding.

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Does the history of photography, in actuality, start in 1492? In her latest tour de force, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay reframes the history of photography, the archive, and the museum by proposing that the camera's "shutter" is a "synecdoche" for imperialism as a whole. Plunder, objectification, and, most elementally, systemic, and bodily violence are organizing features of photography, archives, museums, and the discipline of history itself - all of which serve as imperial technologies of extraction, conquest, control, and dehumanization.

1492 stands adjacent to the 1948 expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians from Palestine and the demolition and erasure of more than 400 of their villages, as well as to the French conquest of Algeria in 1830, which marked the beginning of 150 years of bloody, settler-colonial rule. Azoulay's stacking of myriad 1492s reveals that photography is more than a craft or practice; rather it is a relationship that upholds empire, enforcing and reproducing the epistemology of racial capitalism and cis-heteropatriarchy.

Photography's collaboration with the historian's "craft," the museum's value, and the imperial archive serves to regulate the ways in which stories of multiple (and ongoing) 1492s are told, how lives are (under)valued, voices are suppressed, and resistance is quashed. Azoulay's book stays close to the materiality of objects and images, providing us with readings that show both their liberatory and violent possibilities. She holds close the surface of material objects - whether "art" or anthropological artifacts - emphasizing the experiences they embody as "plundered" objects, purloined by philanthropists, conquerors, states, artists, and academics. These physical, discursive, and commercial processes convert misappropriated objects to ones of knowledge, "elevating" aestheticized objects that conceal the murder of their social (and physical) origins.

Despite its ability to pose alternate forms of "cocitizenship" (by opposing a sense of citizenship based on exclusion and violence), photography is an accomplice in systems of extraction and exploitation. In these days of toppling monuments - objects which have functioned as reminders to Black and Indigenous people of "their place" in a white supremacist, settler colonial society - Potential History offers us methods as much as lessons.

Azoulay provides examples of how photography (as object, art, document, or anthropological artifact) deprives subjects of their rights and being. A relevant current example is Tamara Lanier's legal case against Harvard University, regarding the images of her great-great-great grandfather Renty (and Delia, his daughter). An enslaved African, kidnapped from the Congo, Renty was sold and forced into slave-labor on the South Carolina plantation of B.F. Taylor. The photographs were commissioned in 1850 by the Swiss-American Harvard Professor, Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz. In the course of pandering to monied-Southern audiences, Agassiz hired J.T. Zealy, a white South Carolinian photographer with deep connections to enslavers, to make a series of daguerreotypes of six black enslaved people, including Renty and Delia, to mark the physiological and phrenological particularities between the races.

For Azoulay, Renty's and Delia's portraits form a condensation point between legal, historical, institutional, and discursive forces. Lanier's lawsuit against Harvard and the University's Peabody Museum, the images and the stolen lives they represent, and the history behind the production and maintenance of these photographs present concrete instantiations of the main targets of the book's critique: photography, history, museums, archives, and educational institutions. Azoulay seeks "companions," such as Renty, with whom to walk and unlearn imperial legacies in hopes of retrieving "other modalities of sharing the world."

Much of Potential History 's 500 pages bear particular relevance to this moment of racial reckoning and faltering of neoliberal capitalism. As mass movements mobilize in the streets against anti-Black police brutality, white supremacy, and systemic, structural racism, her call for reconceptualizing "the strike" to include historians, artists, photographers, museum workers, and "the governed" seems poignant. The issue of reparations (and "return") likewise remains a central part of unlearning history because compensation and racial justice reach beyond the necessity of recompensing those who directly experience the legacies of the enslavement of Black people and the theft of land from Indigenous peoples, including Palestinians. For Azoulay, reparations represent the intent to recover a "worldly human condition, worldly sovereignty" and "a rejection of the imperial principle" that today dictates the normalcy of settler colonial regimes and racial capitalism globally.

What is compelling about Azoulay's book is not newness, a concept she critiques as an effect of the temporality of imperialism. For those of us contemplating methodologies by which to decolonize photography, Potential History presents "nonimperial approaches" in order to unlearn how we look, receive, experience, and deploy images. One outstanding example is her reading of photographs of Allied soldiers "fraternizing" with German women in post-WWII destroyed Berlin. These images act as a placeholder for the "untaken photographs of rape" in the "as-yet-unacknowledged" archive of the shutter - a technology of the imperial scopic regime, which operates via sexual violence. This violence saturates the very ontology of Europe's "progress," resonating from Palestine to the Congo to Black America. Azoulay's theorizing of the untaken photograph permits us to see before the hegemony of the shutter in order to recognize what formerly colonized peoples already know: "liberation" is predicated on the precarity and vulnerability of others.

Azoulay's self-location as a Israeli Jew (who no longer identifies with the settler colonial citizenship of her birth) occupies the background of this book, which "is deliberately written from the position of a citizen, necessarily also a citizen-perpetrator." One might certainly ask whether unlearning is enough. Or, is the will to unlearn a privilege itself of racialized, imperial logos?

In rereading Potential History in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and countless others in the United States, and of Iyad Hallaq and Ahmed Erakat (and countless others) in occupied Palestine, I wondered how quickly the overwhelming reality of constant violence against Black, Palestinian, and Indigenous folks will be reified into art objects and photographs in magazines. How quickly will these images of unwilling martyrs become icons inviting us to "reform" rather than abolish police, prisons, and the legal system (the most incorrigibly racist institutions in the United States)?

Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019) by Ariella Azoulay is available on Bookshop.

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Can We Unlearn Imperialism? Ariella Azoulay Offers Methods and Lessons

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In Potential History, the violence of photography saturates the very idea of European "progress," resonating from Palestine to the Congo to Black America.

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Amin Husain and Nitasha Dhillon on Working to Decolonize the Art World

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In this two-part conversation, two of the leading activists in the New York art community talk about their lives, work, and what's next.

I've been wanting to do a major interview with Amin Husain and Nitasha Dhillon for years. As the duo behind MTL+ Collective and organizers with Decolonize This Place, FTP, Gulf Ultra Luxury Faction (GULF), and other groups through the years, they've played an active role in pressuring New York's art community and institutions to deal with the issues that have long been overlooked. Though well known for organizing with a focus on worker, indigenous, Black, Palestinian, and migrant rights, both Husain and Dhillon are also artists.

In this wide-ranging, two-part conversation, I speak to Husain and Dhillon, who came to our studio back in May, before the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed, about their lives, ideas, and what they think of an art community that is still grappling with notions of justice, freedom, and equality.

Part one is a shorter 34-minute interview to introduce you to the pair and their lives, while part two (81 minutes) offers a closer look at their work and the various challenges they've faced with the Guggenheim Museum and the Brooklyn Museum, while offering some insights into what's next.

Instead of music for this episode, I've incorporated the sounds of various protests where I've encountered the pair, including the 2017 Anti-Columbus Day Tour at the American Museum of Natural History.
Subscribe to Hyperallergic's Podcast on iTunes, or anywhere else you listen to podcasts.

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Amin Husain and Nitasha Dhillon on Working to Decolonize the Art World

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In this two-part conversation, two of the leading activists in the New York art community talk about their lives, work, and what's next. I've been wanting to do a major interview with Amin Husain and Nitasha Dhillon for years.

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Luna was preoccupied with self-presentation in a society that, in its pursuit of whiteness, has never been able to recognize Native Americans as individuals.

Nearly 20 years ago - on April 2, 1991, to be exact - James Luna (1950-2018) stood on a platform inside the Whitney Museum of American Art, downtown at Federal Reserve Plaza, and invited members of the audience to join him by announcing:

Take a picture with a real Indian.

Take a picture, here tonight in New York City,

Take two. Leave one. Take one home.

America loves to say "our Indians,"

America likes to name cars and trucks after our tribes and people.

America doesn't know me.

Take a picture with a real Indian.

Take a picture tonight, free.

A short distance in front of the platform, which was flanked by three cutouts of Luna (wearing a breechcloth in two and a short sleeve pullover shirt and beige pants in the third), a photographer with a Polaroid Instant Camera and a tripod-mounted camera waited to photograph whoever chose to join the artist.

From what I can gather, two shots were taken with Polaroids, while another camera documented the performance, including members of the audience, in black and white, and a video camera recorded the entire event.

The props used in this performance, along with a sampling of the photographs and videos, are presented in the exhibition James Luna: Take a Picture with a Real Indian, at Garth Greenan Gallery (September 10-December 19), the first since the artist's death.

In addition to artifacts, photographs, and videos from that fabled performance, the gallery has presented two sets of three large-scale photographs, both titled "Half Indian/Half Mexican" (1991 and 2010), one in black and white and the other in color. The proximity of these projects underscores Luna's preoccupation with identity.

Being of Payómkawichum, Ipi, and Mexican descent, Luna explored how he was seen in "Half Indian/Half Mexican." Each photo set consists of three views of Luna: right profile, frontal, and left profile.

In the color set, which is dated 2010 and echoes the earlier black and white work, the leftmost photograph shows him in profile, facing right; his face is clean shaven and his shoulder-length, salt-and-pepper hair is tucked behind his ear. The profile shot of his left side shows him with a beard and mustache, his hair combed so that it does not hang down. In the frontal view his visage is split between the two looks.

The profile shots, each literally showing a different side of Luna's face, look impassively at the middle image of his partially shaven face.

I moved a chair placed in front of the platform with the three cut-outs of Luna to sit with these photographs. I suppose part of it has to do with being biracial, with having a father who was half-English and half-Chinese, and being mistaken for other ethnicities in my life, but I don't think that was the only reason I sat in front of these photographs for a long time, reflecting upon what I saw: a man looking at his mixed identity from two different perspectives.

The division in Luna's face stirred up so many feelings I have had about the emphasis America places on identity and the abhorrence I have felt in my life about claims to racial purity and assimilation, and the judgments made solely on the basis of the way someone looks. I hardly think I am alone in this.

Luna was preoccupied with self-presentation in a society that, in its pursuit of whiteness, has never been able to recognize Native Americans as individuals, choosing either to invent or demean them. The art world is not free from this onerous behavior.

One only has to look at Andy Warhol's portfolio of 10 prints, Cowboys and Indians (1986), which includes images of John Wayne, Annie Oakley, and President Theodore Roosevelt, alongside General George Armstrong Custer, to see how deeply imbedded America's denial of the genocidal destruction of Native Americans remains to its self-image.

Instead of doing any real research into the subject, Warhol took photographs of artifacts in the National Museum of the American Indian, New York, and paired them with mass media images. Long interested in surfaces, Warhol, in this project, arrived at something that was superficial and lazy.

In his performance Take a Picture with a Real Indian (1991), Luna directly challenges this widespread denial, as he makes the viewer complicit, as both participant and witness.

As with "Half Indian/Half Mexican," I was riveted by the video clips of what happened at Luna's carefully staged, seemingly casual performance. The fact that the performance was spread across three monitors made it difficult to see the entire spectacle; my attention shifted (as it might have had I been there) from one incident to another.

This was Luna's genius; he consistently made work that cut through America's refusal of Native American self-representation, while, at the same time, exposing the nation's ugly, deeply ingrained history and perpetuating mechanisms, from sports team names and logos to, as he said in his performance, the "names of cars and trucks." He did this with an unrivaled economy, and by pulling the audience in and making them participants.

I kept wondering what the people who stood next to Luna and had their photo taken would have said about the experience. Was it just a fun thing to do at an art event? Or was it more than that? Did the participants learn anything from the experience? Did they think it about later, as time passed? What about the families? That's really what held my attention - seeing parents and children standing beside Luna, as if he were an object, which in some sense he was. I admit, I could not stop looking and wondering.

Ideally, the Whitney Museum, which hosted this performance, would add the documentation to its collection and periodically exhibit it in the museum lobby.

Even though years have passed since Luna walked through the audience, saying the words I cited at the beginning of this review, and climbed onto the platform, it spoke directly to me and, I would like to think, to anyone who sat down and opened up to what they saw.
James Luna: Take a Picture with a Real Indian continues at Garth Greenan Gallery (545 West 20th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through December 19.

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How James Luna Exposed the Mechanisms of American Racism

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Luna was preoccupied with self-presentation in a society that, in its pursuit of whiteness, has never been able to recognize Native Americans as individuals. Nearly 20 years ago - on April 2, 1991, to be exact - James Luna (1950-2018) stood on a platform inside the Whitney Museum of American Art, downtown at Federal Reserve Plaza, and invited members of the audience to join him by announcing: Take a picture with a real Indian.

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Building on an influential 1977 feminist exhibition, the Smithsonian's updated edition takes a more inclusive approach, adding further nuance to the question of how and who gets to define feminist art.

In 1976, activists Ruth Iskin, Lucy Lippard, and Arlene Raven sent pink postcards to hundreds of artists: "If you consider yourself a feminist," the postcards' prompt read, "would you respond by using one 8 1/2 x 11 [in.] page to share your ideas on what feminist art is or could be." The responses were exhibited the following year at the Los Angeles Women's Building in the original What is Feminist Art? exhibition.

In honor of the centennial of the 19th Amendment's passage, an updated show with the same name is being presented at the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art and online, and places some of the 1970s responses alongside new works by contemporary artists who were posed the same question. The results range widely in form and content, from candid handwritten manifestos to provocative photo collages. Mary Edellson's typed response begins, "I had so much trouble with this question that I tried typing on pink paper and that didn't even help" (between 1976 and 1977). Laura Kina's portrait depicts artist Aram Han Sifuentes (2019) at work on a protest banner that reads, "SHUT THE FUCK UP," while Ana Mendieta responds with an image of an umbilical cord magnified underneath a microscope (1976). Together, these works give us insight into feminist art movements from the last 40+ years - their varied visions, accomplishments, and limitations.

Many works from the original 1977 exhibition reflect concerns about an art world and larger culture that silences women's voices and excludes their creative contributions. As performance artist Jerri Alyn writes in her response to the prompt, "I have become aware of how little room there is for me." In a typed statement (1977), early feminist art movement pioneer Judy Chicago describes a narrative about a woman entering an art museum, and feeling alienated by what she finds there: "She felt her vision of the world receding before the power of so many images which distorted her body, denied her mind and asserted her womanliness only as a passive presence, never as an active force." Chicago's piece calls to mind how much work still needs to be done around gender parity in the art world over forty years later: between 2008 and 2018, artwork by women represented just 11 percent of acquisitions and 14 percent of exhibitions at 26 major museums, according to a study by artnet News and In Other Words.

Still, other pieces from the '77 show explore the risk of "token acceptance" of individual women artists. Martha Rosler questions, in her manifesto response, "whether to be satisfied with gaining entry into the [...] system that has made it part of its business to keep women out of the running, or to insist that the principles of these systems change" (1977).

More inclusive in terms of race, ethnicity, and gender identity than the 1977 exhibition which featured mostly white, mostly cis artists, the 2019 collection adds nuance to the question of how to define feminist art, and and emphasizes the importance of considering who gets to frame these decisions. As Howardena Pindell writes in a typed statement, "Feminists should not make the same errors as patriarchy: racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, ageism, and genocide" (2019). Featuring a photo of a group of women hugging, Tanya Aguiñiga's collage (2019) draws attention to how, historically, feminist movements have often foregrounded the experiences of white women with text reading, "LABEL UNDER / IMMIGRANT, FEMALE, ARTISTS OF COLOR, / FUCK YOUR ERASURE / COLONIALISM, PATRIARCHY / ALWAYS DOIN FREE EMOTIONAL LABOR FOR YOU."

Relatedly, textile artist LJ Roberts questions the exhibition's lack of honorarium for participants, noting in a white typescript statement set against a black background, "As a queer, gender non-conforming, non-binary person in the arts [...], being asked to produce work for free undermines critical goals that feminist art aims to achieve." Roberts concludes, "This is feminist art (all too often)" (2019).

The openness of the exhibition's 8 1/2 x 11-inch page prompt - and the sheer variety of responses - captures an inclusive spirit that counters the "objective" truths of patriarchal knowledge; instead of just one definition, hundreds of them vibrate against each other energetically. "Feminist art has existed on this continent long before the need for the word feminism," points out jeweler and metal artist Kristen Dorsey (2019), highlighting feminism as a historical continuum, and foregrounding the goal of making things better for the next generation.

Archives of American Art Interim Director Liza Kirwin explained over email to Hyperallergic that the exhibition's organizers "wanted to encourage visitors across generations to consider the question from their lived experience." This show reminds us that feminist art is multifarious, ever-expanding, sometimes flawed, and, like all social movements, slowly making progress with numerous mistakes along the way. It is "necessary but not sufficient," as Terry Wolverton writes (2019), "The spiral never ends."

What is Feminist Art? continues through November 29 online and at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art (The Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture, 1st floor, 8th and F Streets, NW, Washington, DC). The 2019 exhibition was curated by Mary Savig with a curatorial advisory committee including Nao Bustamante, Alexandra Chang, Jaclyn Roessel, and Legacy Russell.

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Revisiting the Question "What Is Feminist Art?"

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Building on an influential 1977 feminist exhibition, the Smithsonian's updated edition takes a more inclusive approach, adding further nuance to the question of how and who gets to define feminist art. In 1976, activists Ruth Iskin, Lucy Lippard, and Arlene Raven sent pink postcards to hundreds of artists: "If you consider yourself a feminist," the postcards' prompt read, "would you respond by using one 8 1/2 x 11 [in.]

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Davis recognizes that grids, networks, and circuits are not purely a product of the art world, and there are myriad contexts in which the government and corporate America deploy them.

HUDSON, New York - In 2016, Lisa Corinne Davis published an important essay in artcritical, "Towards a more fluid definition of Blackness." In it, she writes:

Many African-American artists feel the obligation to represent Blackness. My position as an abstract painter allows me to manifest my own sense of self - my black self - as an expression of self-determination and freedom, while avoiding an oppositional stance. I do not believe this position is "post-racial" since I am not sure that that is possible. Yet the current system of how to include black artists in the mainstream seems to be stuck in tropes from the past. I do not want to negate discussions of race and racism in art, but I do want to open the conversation by detaching Blackness from a narrow racial term, allowing it to be more pliable. This will not cause current and historical racial differences to cease to exist, but it will enable artists who are not foregrounding Blackness in their work to become equally important members of the conversation. By rupturing accepted racial boundaries, subtlety and aesthetics will play a social role in the expansion of that conversation.

Davis's comments reminded me of something that Stanley Whitney said to me in an interview nearly a decade earlier ( The Brooklyn Rail, October 2008):

With African-Americans, race is always a big issue, and how the art answers the call to race. Everyone understands how to be a doctor or a lawyer - a social activist - to answer the call to race, but what does painting have to do with it? [...] Being an abstract painter, what does that do? Where does that fit in? People have a hard time with that.

As Black artists of different generations, who moved to New York to pursue painting and elected to become abstract artists, Davis and Whitney have had to find ways to respond to, negotiate with, and push back against the expectation that their work should embody an overtly political component.

In her current exhibition, Lisa Corinne Davis: All Shook Up at Pamela Salisbury Gallery (through November 2), accompanied by an insightful catalogue essay by the noted art historian Nancy Princenthal, Davis's long pursuit of layering multiple visual systems and schemas has - to my eye, at least - reached a new state of visual resolution, one that feels deliberately unstable, approaching collapse or collision. With this breakthrough, multiple ways of reading her work have come into starker focus.

The 15 vertically oriented works are all in either oil or oil and acrylic on canvas, panel, or paper. In scale, they range from 14 by 12 inches to 60 by 45 inches. Compositionally, they share the superimposition of open linear structures over one another. These structures evoke skewed and decomposing grids, disturbed networks, circuitry, collapsing and crashing systems, cells, and even fishnets, pipes, and girders - elements from both the virtual and physical world.

In addition to these features, she includes puzzle-like parts in solid colors and linear bands arranged at various angles, as well as different-colored planes, often abutting each other, spanning part of the canvas, like a path of flat or uneven paving stones.

Looking into Davis's paintings, we cannot tell how far back they go; this suggests a depthless space that shares something of our experience of a digital screen. Although she uses green and/or blue in every work, she does not seem to have a set palette. She often uses punning alliteration in her titles, such as "Flitting Foundation" (2019) and "Miraculous Measure" (2020). They summon a range of associations regarding how the corporate world and government develop ways to identify the individual.

Whereas Whitney composes by laying down rectangles of color, which he goes over or changes, within a non-overall grid, Davis layers together different structures and forms, which she might scrape down, leaving a ghostly echo, before beginning again. As Princenthal points out, citing a statement by Davis, "the paintings begin on canvas, with paint." One could define Davis as an incremental process painter, as the layers of marks don't follow any obvious trajectory.

What differentiates her recent paintings from those I saw a few years ago is that the relationship between the parts and structures seems tighter. By that, I mean that as we shift our focus between the open structures and the various forms, we do not get caught up in the eccentricity of a part. Instead, our attention shifts back and forth smoothly.

While these paintings might not initially seem overtly political, I think it would be wrong to reach such a conclusion. We live in a world where everything we do is political, from whether or not we buy a can of Goya pinto beans to whether or not we believe that birth control is a private decision in which the government has no right to interfere. Davis recognizes that grids, networks, and circuits are not purely a product of the art world, and there are myriad contexts in which the government and corporate America deploy them.

Davis's overlaying of structures underscores the fact that numerous organizations have developed innumerable methods to track and identify all of us, in order to discern how and where we fit into a larger pattern. Once we begin to see her painting through this lens, another consideration begins to grab hold. What might a color or a sequence of colors stand for? Color - as we know from experience - is neither neutral nor equal.

At the same time, the twisted and slanted angles at which the linear configurations intersect and overlap, the refusal to settle for the comforts of an overall structure, can be seen as Davis's determination to undo the grid's hold on us. Cognizant that each of us is constantly being tracked, and that our behavior is being registered and fed into a series of overlapping systems designed to decipher what we are up to, Davis's colors also take on a different meaning. What might they be a code for?

This sense of color further distinguishes her work from other abstract painters. My only suggestion is that she bring in more of the highly artificial colors that are available in acrylic, as this would accentuate the singularity that she has already attained.

Davis adds more twists to our experience when she titles a work on paper "Registered Impersonation" (2020) or a painting "Captious Computation" (2019). What does it mean when a computer is programmed to record our trivial faults? Is this the brave new world we are headed toward? The artist's ability to call forth the invisible world, in which we are constantly leaving traces of our presence, injects an unexpected and much-needed jolt into abstraction.

In "Specious Position" (2020), Davis divides the painting horizontally into two unequal areas, with the painting's upper quarter defined by an unloosened grid of white lines on a blue ground. Over this seemingly rumpled surface she has drawn thick brown lines dividing the grid into separate states. Below this grid are two more grids, one composed of blue lines and the other of turquoise on a white ground. Both of the lower grids overlap each other, so that we might read them as a single unit or as two distinct but related schemas.

The tension between the separate states and overlaid grids, and their gesture toward unity and uniformity, is key to the painting. There is constant pressure felt with every overlay, division, element, and intersection. Together, they might lead us to reflect upon what stances we have taken and why.

Lisa Corinne Davis: All Shook Up continues at Pamela Salisbury Gallery (362 1/2 Warren Street, Hudson, New York) through November 2.

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Lisa Corinne Davis Critiques Corporate America Through Abstract Art

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Davis recognizes that grids, networks, and circuits are not purely a product of the art world, and there are myriad contexts in which the government and corporate America deploy them. HUDSON, New York - In 2016, Lisa Corinne Davis published an important essay in artcritical , "Towards a more fluid definition of Blackness."

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Abigail DeVille with her sculpture in Manhattan's Madison Square Park. Credit... Tonje Thilesen for The New York Times

In her first New York solo exhibition at Madison Square Park, Abigail DeVille conjures a long line of freedom fighters.

Abigail DeVille with her sculpture in Manhattan's Madison Square Park. Credit... Tonje Thilesen for The New York Times

When Abigail DeVille began site research for her public art project in Manhattan's Madison Square Park, she stumbled on a wild 1876 photograph of the Statue of Liberty's detached hand and flaming torch in the park. For six years, the surreal fragment was on view there to generate excitement and raise funds for the pedestal to hold the colossal statue coming to New York from France.

"History had already done it for me," said Ms. DeVille, who knew instantly that the giant torch was the perfect form to contain materials and metaphors conjuring the struggle for liberty in America, past and present.

The installation titled "Light of Freedom," the 39-year-old Bronx artist's first solo exhibition in her hometown, opens on Oct. 27 in the park just north of East 23rd Street. There a 13-foot-tall, rusted lattice structure evokes the silhouette of Lady Liberty's torch. Inside the handle is a weathered schoolhouse bell, a visual "call to action" according to Ms. DeVille. Dozens of mannequin arms, painted blue, are clustered inside the armature of the flame shape, suggesting both a wave and the hottest part of fire.

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Dozens of mannequin arms are clustered inside the armature of the flame shape, suggesting both a wave and the hottest part of fire. Credit... Tonje Thilesen for The New York Times

This summer, Brooke Kamin Rapaport, the deputy director and chief curator at the Madison Square Park Conservancy, approached Ms. DeVille about making a piece that could address the tumultuous political moment and protests erupting across the nation after the killing of George Floyd.

"The program needed to pose the question of how public art right now can impact people and communities and respond in civic space to this unprecedented time," Ms. Rapaport said.

While an accelerated timeline for the conservancy, three-months lead time for the artist was "almost luxurious," Ms. DeVille said, laughing heartily earlier this month at her small Bronx studio, where mannequin limbs cascaded in an unruly mountain. In 2017 alone, she completed 14 on-site projects, including in Los Angeles, St. Louis, Pittsburgh and Miami. "I usually just land somewhere, research, gather materials and then install happens over two weeks," she said of her itinerant practice.

Inside the handle is a weathered schoolhouse bell, a visual "call to action" according to Ms. DeVille. Credit... Tonje Thilesen for The New York Times

The artist often uses mannequins as a generic stand-in for humanity. Credit... Tonje Thilesen for The New York Times

In her research for "Light of Freedom," including Ric Burns's 1999 series "New York: A Documentary Film" and a 1977 article in The New York Times, she learned that 11 Angolans were the first Blacks brought to New Amsterdam in 1626 by the Dutch West India Company. After successfully petitioning for their freedom in 1644, some were later granted land to farm just south of the future Madison Square Park, as a buffer between the Dutch settlements downtown and the Native peoples further north.

In the years after the British took over the city, "Black people's lands were confiscated," Ms. DeVille said, calling that dispossession the first wave of centuries of gentrification upending lives and pushing Black communities to the margins.

The artist elevates their continual pushback for justice, writ large by the Black Lives Matter movement, in the torch's flame, crowded with the outstretched mannequin arms as an image of both oppression and exultation. "'If there is no struggle, there is no progress'," she said, quoting a Frederick Douglass speech that has informed how she approached the piece.

Ms. DeVille "collapses how we think about past, present and future time, especially for Black Americans' narratives," said Deana Haggag, the president and chief executive of United States Artists. In her former role as executive director at the Contemporary museum in Baltimore, Ms. Haggag commissioned the artist in 2016 to make an installation examining the city's former Peale Museum, where she contextualized the history of Black protest in Baltimore a year after Freddie Gray's death in police custody.

Ms. DeVille got her first big break in 2005 while a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology. She was one of eight unknown artists, selected by the dealer Jeffrey Deitch, to land a roll on the short-lived reality TV show "Artstar." "It was really a casting call because it was your work and what you were wearing," Ms. DeVille said.

Ms. DeVille was influenced by her grandmother's penchant for collecting houseplants, silverware, appliances, clothing and other random throwaways from her neighbors. Credit... Tonje Thilesen for The New York Times

When the show premiered, Mr. Deitch told The New York Times that Ms. DeVille's work had matured the most over the course of filming. He sold one of her inventive large-scale collages to a Belgian collector for five figures. "That was a big encouragement to keep going on this path," she said.

While at Yale University, where she received a master's in fine arts in 2011, Ms. DeVille was influenced by her grandmother's penchant for collecting houseplants, silverware, appliances, clothing and other random throwaways from her neighbors, calling her the "unofficial archivist" of her housing project in the Bronx. The objects were "the silent witnesses of all these people's lives," said Ms. DeVille, who surreptitiously carted some items back to school. "That shaped the way I thought about material."

At Yale, she incorporated some of these castoffs into her first installation piece, "New York at Dawn," her response to a Federico García Lorca poem referring to "a hurricane of black doves that paddle in putrescent waters." That was also her first use of a mannequin as a generic stand-in for humanity.

"It can speak very quickly to larger societal concerns," said Ms. DeVille, who sees herself working in the lineage of assemblage artists that include Noah Purifoy, Robert Rauschenberg and Louise Nevelson. At her studio, a mannequin wearing a space helmet and yards of glittery chain necklaces is a work in progress for the group show "Pedestrian Profanities," curated by the artist Eric N. Mack and opening at Simon Lee in New York on Oct. 29.

The piece summons "a long line of freedom fighters who have been protesting to exist in this nation from the very beginning," Ms. DeVille says. Credit... Tonje Thilesen for The New York Times

For Madison Square Park, she has contained her torch within scaffolding, which she sees as a metaphor for the continual labor involved in the building of freedom and also as a ladder symbolizing how different groups have ascended, at times on the backs of others.

"It's not that the Statue of Liberty is a myth - this place has been a refuge for lots of people," Ms. DeVille said. She gilded the scaffolding to refer to Emma Lazarus's famous poem about the statue that includes the line, "I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

But Ms. DeVille's "Light of Freedom" commemorates the kind of efforts that have not been talked about or have been lost to history. "It's a response to what happened this summer and what's continuing to happen in terms of the calls for this racial reckoning," she said. "It's a monument to all of those things, and there is joy in that."

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Reimagining Lady Liberty's Torch to Meet This Moment

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In her first New York solo exhibition at Madison Square Park, Abigail DeVille conjures a long line of freedom fighters. Abigail DeVille with her sculpture in Manhattan's Madison Square Park. Credit...

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On a hill overlooking Richmond, the city unveiled a vibrant new mural of civil rights hero Rep. John Lewis on Wednesday.

The mural is named "Good Trouble," a reference to a phrase Lewis often used, and it now adorns the side of the Powhatan Hill Community Center in the city's Fulton Hill neighborhood. It's the first of many murals planned by the Walls to Windows campaign spearheaded by Advocates for Change, a local nonprofit that fuses activism with art.

"This stands as a reminder," said Cynthia Newbille, Richmond City Council president and representative for the 7th district where the community center resides. "We will never be able to pass here without looking and being inspired."

Over the span of two weeks and almost 70 hours, Josh Zarambo used a mixture of paint brushes and spray paint to complete the mural.

"It was exposure for myself," Zarambo said, "and I thought I can do the same for the community and for people who didn't know who he was to discover them through art or something creative and colorful."

"Good Trouble" is a reference to a phrase Lewis often used throughout his career. Here's a June 2018 tweet, one of his most popular:

"Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble. #goodtrouble"

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'Good Trouble': Richmond community center unveils vibrant new mural of Rep. John Lewis

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On a hill overlooking downtown Richmond, the city unveiled a vibrant new mural of civil rights hero John Lewis on Wednesday. The mural is named "Good Trouble," a reference to a phrase the congressman often used, and it now adorns the side of the Powhatan Community Center in the city's Fulton Hill neighborhood.

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To the Polls 2020 features murals by six Philadelphia-based artists, including a jubilant altar to "our voting rights ancestors."

Artists all around the United States are doing their best to inspire people to vote, designing everything from large city billboards to catchy images that are downloadable at home. In Philadelphia, artists have erected brilliant murals in the middle of John F. Kennedy Plaza (better known as LOVE Park, after Roberta Indiana's sculpture, which has graced the space since 1976). The nonpartisan initiative is run by Mural Arts Philadelphia, which is considered the nation's largest public art program and has typically commissioned between 50 and 100 murals annually for the past 35 years.

To the Polls 2020 was organized with curator Conrad Benner, and features murals by six Philadelphia-based artists. One of them, Candy Alexandra González, created a jubilant altar "to our voting rights ancestors" who fought hard for the vote, with text in both Spanish and English. Khalid Dennis has created a defiant mural in honor of those who have died at the hands of police, titled "Vote 2 Breathe." In a statement, he said, "Vote for those who no longer can."

The messages of these murals are not only loud and clear, but also colorful and hopeful. "I want an energy that is warm and loving and shows the connection between what we love and voting," said Kah Yangni of their mural. To the Polls 2020 also considers those who can't legally vote in the US, giving them the option to cast a symbolic vote at Aram Han Sifuentes's "Voting Station for the Disenfranchised" (or they can just go to officialunofficial.vote).

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Colorful and Loving Murals in Philadelphia Are Inspiring People to Vote

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To the Polls 2020 features murals by six Philadelphia-based artists, including a jubilant altar to "our voting rights ancestors." Artists all around the United States are doing their best to inspire people to vote, designing everything from large city billboards to catchy images that are downloadable at home.

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El Museo del Barrio celebrates its own electric history, and present, in a show about the Puerto Rican workshop Taller Boricua.

Marcos Dimas's portrait of the independence fighter Lolita Lebrón (circa 1971) in the exhibition "Taller Boricua: A Political Print Shop in New York" at El Museo del Barrio. Credit... Marcos Dimas and El Museo del Barrio

The marketing of modern and contemporary art from Latin America is one of the cultural success stories of the globalist decades. What was once a niche interest has gradually been gaining a solid, if still limited, presence in some of our big North American museums.

Exactly the opposite is true of Latino art, now often referred to by the gender-neutral name Latinx in the cultural world, and loosely defined as work made by artists of Latin American birth or descent but who live primarily in the United States. Apart from the work of a few stars - notably Jean-Michel Basquiat - Latinx art has scant institutional support or auction clout.

Such lack of attention is dictated by the politics of class, economics and race. And resistance to this reality is always percolating somewhere, which is the basic story told at El Museo del Barrio by the impassioned archival exhibition, "Taller Boricua: A Political Print Shop in New York."

El Taller Boricua, which also officially called itself the Puerto Rican Workshop, opened in the barrio of East Harlem 50 years ago, in 1970, a year after El Museo debuted in the same neighborhood. Both were artist-run, community-serving initiatives housed in low-rent quarters. With overlapping membership, and inspired by the example of the Black Power movement, both were responses to the experiences faced by brown-skinned, working-class immigrants to the United States.

The workshop's original members - Marcos Dimas, Adrián García, Manuel "Neco" Otero, Mart í n Rubio and Armando Soto - were art-school-trained Puerto Rican artists living in New York City.

Their goals in organizing the workshop were both idealistic and pragmatic. They wanted to establish a collectively run center for art production and teaching in a city that excluded artists of color from its elite institutions. And they wanted to make art shaped by the cultural traditions - including African, Hispanic, Indigenous Caribbean - that contributed to Latinx identities.

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In short, they approached art as politically instrumental and found ways to put it into popular circulation. They took the role of artist and activist to be inseparable. Although the range of subjects Taller artists tackled was broad, revolution was the common theme.

That theme is detailed, loud and clear, at the start of the show in a 1973 painting by Carlos Osorio that embeds the word "Revolución" in a visual conflagration of red and yellow pigment. Mr. Osorio (1927-1984) was one of the earliest and oldest artists to join Taller Boricua and El Museo in their start-up years; Rafael Tufiño (1922-2008) was another.

Born in Brooklyn, he grew up in Puerto Rico and studied art in Mexico, returning to New York in the 1960s. Like Mr. Osorio, he was a painter, but it was his fine-grained, socialist realist-style prints of laborers and peasants that became influential within the East Harlem art community.

Prints were an ideal communicative tool. Cheap to produce in unlimited numbers, easy to distribute, and available to everyone in the form of posters, fliers and newsletters, they were adaptable to a wide range of ideological persuasion and promotion, as the show suggests.

Heroes are commemorated, as in Mr. Tufiño's 1970 linocut portrait of Pedro Albizu Campos (1891-1965), the visionary president of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, who served repeated prison terms battling United States control of the island. Mr. Dimas contributes a striking quadruple image of another independence fighter, Lolita Lebrón, who spent 25 years in a federal prison after participating in a 1954 armed attack on the Capitol building in Washington.

And from Fernando Salicrup (1946-2015) - an early Taller Boricua artist and eventually, with Mr. Dimas, the workshop's director - comes a tender, luminous lithographic image of Julia de Burgos, a Puerto Rican-born poet and activist who died an alcoholic in an East Harlem hospital in 1953. (El Taller continues to maintain an exhibition gallery in Barrio art center named for her.)

If these prints package politics in a language of praise, others give a voice to protest. When, in 1970, Julio Roldan, a member of the militant Young Lords - the Latino equivalent of the Black Panthers - was found hanged in his cell in the Tombs, described by the police as a suicide, the Puerto Rican community hit the streets and artists papered the city with accusatory broadsides. They would do so again four years later when a Taller Boricua artist, Mart í n Pérez, known as Tito, died in police custody, also allegedly by his own hand.

Prints were a way to call a community together for militant action, but also for festivities. And it is promised pleasures we find in a group of event posters designed by the New York-born artist Manuel Vega, known as Manny. Rich in color, rococo in detail, they advertise outdoor spectacles like the Three Kings Day parade, still presented annually by El Museo, and smaller, semipublic ones like the rooftop "under the stars" dances organized to benefit El Taller.

Interaction between the two institutions in the early years, though not without conflicts, was close, and this made practical sense. Few members of Taller Boricua were exclusively printmakers; most were primarily painters and sculptors. Even if they weren't gearing their nonprint work to display in conventional museums, a museum was the logical place for it. The exhibition's final gallery, with its installation of large-scale objects by three originating Taller members - Nitza Tufiño, Jorge Soto Sánchez, and Mr. Dimas - makes this clear.

Ms. Tufiño, the daughter of Rafael Tufiño, extends traditional printmaking in a beautiful 1979 series of abstract silk-screens sewn with panels of colored thread. She is also a painter and muralist who makes imaginative use of themes from ancient Indigenous Caribbean culture, as in a large 1972 picture done in acrylic and charcoal called "Pareja Taina" ("Taino Couple").

This painting, like much of the work in the show, is now in El Museo's permanent collection. So are several large-scale assemblage reliefs by Mr. Dimas and Mr. Soto Sánchez (1947-1987), objects that more or less reverse the trajectory of popular prints. Where prints were often made for display in the street, the reliefs brought the street - barrio street refuse, that is - into the studio, where the artists attached it to canvases. In both cases, in different ways, the divide between art and life was breached.

It was smart of the show's organizers - Rodrigo Moura, El Museo's chief curator, and Noel Valentin, its permanent collection manager - to have added these highly personal mix-media objects - Mr. Soto Sánchez calls one of his reliefs "Self-Portrait" - and take the show beyond its "political print shop" title.

No doubt one reason Latinx art remains, as a category, unalluring to the market is that it is perceived as being both too narrow and too broad. On the one hand it is identified with a specific politics, defined by "the street," "the people," in which the mainstream art world has little sustained interest.

But at the same time, Latinx art is hard to pin down. It crosses national borders, mixes social histories, and spans the color range, encompassing Black, brown, red, yellow, white, and mixtures of all of those. (A 2020 book, "Latinx Art: Artists, Markets, Politics" by the cultural anthropologist Arlene Dávila, lays out all these contradictions.) To an art world reliant on pitch-ready hooks and slots, it feels unexotically diffuse and ignorable.

This dismissive perspective is racist, and classist, and just plain wrong. It is the necessary job of El Museo del Barrio, a formative Latinx institution, to correct it. The museum has announced that the present show will be the first in a series of three, spread over as many years, to explore its own early history. That history is, of course, a quintessentially Latinx history, and the subject is immense. If El Museo did nothing more, from this time forward, than focus its attention on Latinx art and its complex past and electric present, it would have its hands, and its galleries, more than full.
Taller Boricua: A Political Print Shop in New York
Through Jan. 17 at El Museo del Barrio, 1230 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan;212-831-7272, elmuseo.org.

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Honoring Latinx Art, Personal and Political

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El Museo del Barrio celebrates its own electric history, and present, in a show about the Puerto Rican workshop Taller Boricua. The marketing of modern and contemporary art from Latin America is one of the cultural success stories of the globalist decades.

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Indecline, an activist collective, wants to grab headlines with an ambitious schedule of illegal public displays.

Indecline's provocative statues, like this one of President Trump in San Francisco, are inevitably removed quickly - but not before images are shared on social media. Credit... Indecline

This article is part of our latest special report on Museums, which focuses on the intersection of art and politics.
SAN FRANCISCO - A towering persona stands in the police criminal evidence warehouse here: a 6-foot-5, clay-and-silicone sculpture depicting a naked Donald Trump, with grotesquely exaggerated features, including a protruding belly.

The police seized the statue during the presidential campaign in August 2016 when Indecline, an anonymous activist art collective, caused a sensation by placing figures in prominent public spots in San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Cleveland and Los Angeles.

The collective said it planned to grab headlines again this year with its most ambitious schedule yet of illegal street displays.

Indecline's agenda goes beyond presidential politics. Other subjects include gun violence, with a display scheduled for Las Vegas, scene of a mass shooting in which 58 people were killed and more than 800 injured at a concert in 2017.

It would be an audacious, possibly offensive act in a city still recovering from the tragedy, but it is emblematic of Indecline. The group, which had troubling beginnings, has evolved after nearly two decades to become celebrated for political art, even though the artists themselves are unknown.

"Indecline's body of work is predominantly illegal activities, virtually all of them felonies," said the group's spokesman, who declined to give his name. "That's the predominant reason we stay anonymous."

In recent years the artists removed commercial billboards to turn them into tents for homeless people in Oakland, Calif., and transformed a suite in Manhattan's Trump International Hotel and Tower into a rat-infested presidential jail. After the deadly 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., Indecline hung clownish Ku Klux Klan effigies from a tree in a Richmond park.

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In "People's Prison," Indecline transformed a suite in a Trump hotel into a rat-infested presidential cell. Credit... Jason Goodrich

Ron English, the contemporary artist nicknamed the godfather of street art, called Indecline "the Beatles of political art."

"They are this new thing that's taking something that has been done for millennia and making it fresh and new and capturing a new market, bringing it to a new generation," Mr. English said.

The art itself is fleeting, typically removed by the authorities shortly after installation. The K.K.K. exhibit in Richmond, for example, was cordoned off as a crime scene almost immediately.

The Trump statues in 2016 were seized within hours, although the San Francisco version remained in the city's Castro neighborhood for an entire day. The local police declined requests to view the statue in its current lockup, where it remains even though the district attorney and city attorney ultimately decided not to press charges.

"It's in a secure location," said Officer Robert Rueca, a San Francisco Police Department spokesman.

With so little public display time, Indecline's work often gets wider exposure via the news media. The group also photographs and videotapes its work to distribute on social media.

"These things aren't meant to really stay up very long," said the artists' spokesman. "Much of this is built for the day of instantaneous posting and social media, so it lives indefinitely on the internet."

Heather E. Dunn, a professor at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts in Portland, Maine, said Indecline represents a hybrid of artist and activist known as "artivists."

"It's a way to engage the masses that maybe wouldn't go to a museum," Ms. Dunn, an expert in street art, said. "It's a way to bring art to them. It's a way to bring a political message to them. In a lot of ways, I find that street art is more powerful than just about any other art that's being made at the moment."

Ms. Dunn said that even though illegal art created on other people's property had long existed, street art with a more political focus gained momentum in the United States in the 1980s, when new laws in places like New York changed graffiti from a misdemeanor to a more serious crime. The art became a de facto antigovernment act.

Now, with heightened security and surveillance, the decision by some artists to be anonymous is an additional act of resistance. "It's really hard to remain anonymous in the culture that we have right now," Ms. Dunn said. She noted other street artists doing similar political work, like Denis Ouch in New York and Plastic Jesus in Los Angeles.

Indecline's anonymous status is due, in part, to a dark past. The group was born amid outrage and legal strife with the 2002 video "Bumfights: A Cause for Concern."

As young men, the group's four original members encountered homeless people in Southern California and Las Vegas, and "we created this shockumentary," Indecline's spokesman said.

"We start filming the going-ons of the homeless community, which for us was this really eye-opening experience," he said. "Like, people are pulling their teeth out with pliers because their teeth hurt, and they're drinking, they're fighting, they're doing whatever. It's insanity. And so 'Bumfights' was supposed to be kind of a wake-up call."

Instead, the video was widely condemned as exploitative and demonizing. Scenes depicted homeless men performing seemingly dangerous stunts and acts of cruelty and violence for the camera. But the video became a sensation when promoted by radio's Howard Stern, and 300,000 copies were sold at about $20 each.

The filmmakers, Daniel Tanner, Zachary Bubeck, Ryen McPherson and Michael Slyman, faced lawsuits and criminal charges. Plea bargains and settlements followed. The collective today consists of new members scattered across the country, but two of the founders remain active in the group, according to the spokesman.

Indecline has not monetized its notoriety on the scale of other street artists like Shepard Fairey or the anonymous Banksy, whose works can sell for millions. Instead, the spokesman said that collective members have jobs to support themselves, and that the group takes donations and sells merchandise to help fund projects.

Still, there are signs that Indecline could be headed toward a more mainstream future.

Two German galleries recently displayed a version of the Trump prison cell. The collective is producing a documentary about resistance art, featuring prominent artists, like Mr. Fairey. There's also a satirical political play planned for September and a book in the works.

If all of that does not sound abrasive enough for Indecline, well, "This year we're also going to try to team up with PornHub, and we're going to direct our first porno," the spokesman said. "A political porno film."

Will it feature Stormy Daniels, a pornographic film actress linked to Mr. Trump? "She's definitely someone we'll be contacting," the spokesman said.

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From Homelessness to Donald Trump, This Art Group Takes on All

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Indecline, an activist collective, wants to grab headlines with an ambitious schedule of illegal public displays. This article is part of our latest special report on Museums , which focuses on the intersection of art and politics.

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Big City

Shia LaBeouf, in red hat, at his "He Will Not Divide Us" installation outside the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens last month. Credit... Justin Lane/European Pressphoto Agency

The occasion of Harry Belafonte's 90th birthday landing within a few days of the 89th Academy Awards on Sunday makes it a good moment to think about what celebrity political activism looked like a half-century ago, when Mr. Belafonte's service in the civil rights movement involved acting as a confidant to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and what it looks like now. Given the current tensions, the Oscars are sure to deliver a number of speeches, in greater volume than might ordinarily be expected, devoted to doing more than merely thanking the good people at Warner Bros. and William Morris Endeavor. Even if our sympathies perfectly line up with the substance of what is said, many of us will find ourselves annoyed - at the prospective opportunism, the posturing, the stridency, the absence of connection in some cases between words and meaningful action.

Hollywood, for the most part, has positioned itself as one of Donald J. Trump's chief institutional antagonists, and yet only a nation that had fully absorbed the values of show business could have elected him president. A culture that put a man whom many view as a pathological narcissist at the top of American government has also produced, rather logically, a response to his various offenses, among entertainers, that is tainted by a similar self-regard.

Consider the recent adventures of Shia LaBeouf, a former Disney Channel performer and star of the "Transformers" franchise (whose name precedes that slightly cringe-making combination of words in any Wikipedia entry: "Shia LaBeouf is an American actor, performance artist and filmmaker"). In collaboration with his artistic partners Luke Turner and Nastja Sade Ronkko, Mr. LaBeouf mounted an exhibit, " He Will Not Divide Us," on an exterior wall at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens on Jan. 20, the day President Trump took office.

Perfectly suited to social media's ethos of self-reference, the project aimed to have passers-by look into a camera and speak the words, "He will not divide us." The footage was streamed live, online - art as reality television - but what it ultimately intended to achieve is unclear. The piece was to be in place for the duration of the Trump presidency, although the artists maintained from the outset that the installation was not an expression of partisanship but rather a "participatory performance artwork resisting the normalization of division."

An early fan of the piece was Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer, chairman of the Council's Cultural Affairs Committee, who represents the Astoria district that is home to the museum. "I went the first day it was up, in the morning to watch," Mr. Van Bramer told me, "and I thought it was really powerful and really moving." Soon after, though, the exhibit began to attract white supremacists who came to vocalize their malice. On Jan. 29, Mr. Van Bramer, a Democrat, held a rally at the site, to which hundreds of Queens residents came, to condemn the vitriol and support inclusion, but the artists complained that the event reframed their original message as anti-Trump when it wasn't.

What seemed to elude their understanding is that you can't call something a "participatory performance artwork" and then get angry when people participate on their own terms, especially if, in fact, the artwork encroaches on public space.

Mr. Van Bramer's constituents, however, soon started calling his office and telling his staff that they were afraid of the presence of neo-Nazis gathering at the site. "The idea of an installation up for four to eight years sounds great," he said, "but it was freaking people out on the block in a major way." At one point, Mr. LaBeouf got into an altercation with someone at the site and was arrested. In addition, the nearby 114th Precinct had received calls, Mr. Van Bramer said, from as far away as South Carolina and Britain threatening bombs and gunmen at the site. The exhibit then required a constant police presence, which was obviously a drain on resources.

Citing public-safety concerns, the Museum of the Moving Image decided to close the exhibition earlier this month. "The cops could be in the Queensbridge Houses," Mr. Van Bramer said, referring to a large public housing complex in the area. "Instead they are watching an installation."

Infuriated by the termination, the artists issued a statement saying the museum bowed to political pressure and had ignored their early requests to "act responsibly in moderating" the hate speech, as if there were an obvious path to accomplishing that. "I can honestly say I have never seen one of his movies," the councilman told me, "but after this I can definitely say I'm not a fan of Shia LaBeouf, who showed no concern for the community." According to Mr. Turner (who spoke on behalf his collaborators), the artists heard from only a single resident about noise, and after a conversation, he said, she was no longer concerned. "This is not indifference," he said.

Once the piece was taken down in Queens, it moved to a theater in Albuquerque, where the artists themselves dismantled it on Thursday morning after gunshots were heard in the area.

The artists no doubt see this as censorship, but the enemy in this drama is not a museum in Queens or a politician responsive to voters or even a narcissistic creative class. It is the racial and ethnic exclusionists so undone by a work of anodyne conceptual art, created in part by a movie star, that they are compelled out of the dark crevices of the internet and into the sun.

Celebrities are lightning rods in a literal sense. The real work of combating bigotry is handled not by groovy street theatrics but by the hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who march and protest and call their legislators.

Not too long ago, the right wing extremist Milo Yiannopoulos, who resigned this week from Breitbart News and lost a book contract, called Democrats "the party of Lena Dunham,'' by which he meant the party of elite self-infatuation. The description was not entirely off base. Ms. Dunham, who endures virulent attacks from conservatives that far exceed her negligible wrongdoing, still, nevertheless began her speech at the Democratic National Convention this past summer, saying, "I am Lena Dunham, and according to Donald Trump, my body is probably, like, a 2," as if the general charges of misogyny surrounding him were secondary to how critically he may view her.

At the Women's March on Washington last month, Ashley Judd surely endeared herself to not a single factory worker in Michigan when she raised the issue of female actors getting paid less than their male counterparts. Let the Bastille be stormed for the right of everyone to make $20 million a picture.

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Shia LaBeouf and the Pitfalls of Celebrity Activism (Published 2017)

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Big City The occasion of Harry Belafonte's 90th birthday landing within a few days of the 89th Academy Awards on Sunday makes it a good moment to think about what celebrity political activism looked like a half-century ago, when Mr. Belafonte's service in the civil rights movement involved acting as a confidant to the Rev.

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A town-hall meeting on racial and economic issues at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis. Credit... Regina Martinez for The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts

In Detroit a contemporary-art museum is completing a monument to an influential artist that will not feature his work but will instead provide food, haircuts, education programs and other social services to the general public.

In New York an art organization that commissions public installations has been dispatching a journalist to politically precarious places around the world where she enlists artists and activists - often one and the same - to write for a Web site that can read more like a policy journal than an art portal. And in St. Louis an art institution known primarily for its monumental Richard Serra sculpture is turning itself into a hub of social activism, recently organizing a town-hall meeting where 350 people crowded in to talk about de facto segregation, one of the city's most intractable problems.

If none of these projects sound much like art - or the art you are used to seeing in museums - that is precisely the point. As the commercial art world in America rides a boom unlike any it has ever experienced, another kind of art world growing rapidly in its shadows is beginning to assert itself. And art institutions around the country are grappling with how to bring it within museum walls and make the case that it can be appreciated along with paintings, sculpture and other more tangible works.

Known primarily as social practice, its practitioners freely blur the lines among object making, performance, political activism, community organizing, environmentalism and investigative journalism, creating a deeply participatory art that often flourishes outside the gallery and museum system. And in so doing, they push an old question - "Why is it art?" - as close to the breaking point as contemporary art ever has.

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Marisa Mazria Katz interviews a musician in Nairobi, Kenya, for Creative Time Reports, run by a New York nonprofit. Credit... Hassan Ali Noor/Creative Time Reports

Leading museums have largely ignored it. But many smaller art institutions see it as a new frontier for a movement whose roots stretch back to the 1960s but has picked up fervor through Occupy Wall Street and the rise of social activism among young artists.

"Say what you will, this stuff is happening, and you might want to put your head in the sand and say, 'I wish it was 40 years ago and it was different and art was more straightforward,' but it's not," said Nato Thompson, the chief curator of Creative Time, a New York nonprofit that is known mostly for temporary public art installations but has been delving deeply into the movement.

Works can be as wildly varied as a community development project in Houston that provides both artists' studios and low-income housing, summer camps and workshops for teenagers run by an artist collective near Los Angeles or a program in San Francisco founded by artists and financed by the city that helps turn yards, vacant lots and rooftops into organic gardens.

Art of this kind has thrived for decades outside the United States, mostly in Europe and South America, but has recently caught fire with a new generation of American artists in what is partly a reaction to the art market's distorting power, fueled by a concentration of international wealth. Many artists, however, say the motivation is much broader: to make a difference in the world that is more than aesthetic.

"The boundary lines about how art is being made are becoming much blurrier," said Laura Raicovich, who was hired last year by Creative Time as its director of global initiatives and to run a Web site called Creative Time Reports.

The site's recent pieces include a video by an Egyptian-Lebanese artist about Tahrir Square, the locus of the Egyptian uprising two years ago, and a short film about family debt in America made by a self-described "debt resistance" art collective with roots in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

"We're not trying to do what journalism does," Ms. Raicovich said. "But we think artists can supplement and complement it through a different lens. And what they're doing is art."

Social-practice programs are popping up in academia and seem to thrive in the interdisciplinary world of the campus. (The first dedicated master of fine arts program in the field was founded in 2005 at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and today there are more than half a dozen.) But for art institutions the problems are trickier: How can you present art that is rarely conceived with a museum or exhibition in mind, for example community projects, often run by collaboratives, that might go on for years, inviting participation more than traditional art appreciation?

At the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, a private institution founded by the collector and philanthropist Emily Rauh Pulitzer that opened in St. Louis in 2001, the staff for many years included two full-time social workers who helped former prison inmates and homeless veterans as part of the curatorial program. And in December the foundation, responding to a 2012 BBC report about racial and economic disparities in St. Louis, held a town-hall meeting on the issue. The goal was to open a dialogue with people who live near the institution, which sits near a stark north-south divide between mostly white and African-American neighborhoods.

"We hoped maybe 100 people would show up, and more than 350 did," said Kristina Van Dyke, the foundation's director, who collaborated with the Missouri History Museum in organizing the event. As the foundation approached its 10th anniversary, she said, "we wanted to start envisioning art more broadly, as a place where ideas can happen and action might be able to take place."

"The question became: Could we effect social change through art, plain and simple?" she said, adding that the foundation is now exploring ways to orient its programming toward design projects that would help the poor, for example. "To me art is elastic. It can respond to many different demands made on it. At the same time I have to say that I don't believe all institutions have to do these kinds of things, or should."

Some in the art world feel that all institutions (and artists) should resist the urge completely. Maureen Mullarkey, a New York painter, wrote on her blog, Studio Matters, that such work only confirmed her belief "that art is increasingly not about art at all." Instead, she argued, it is "fast becoming a variant of community organizing by soi-disant promoters of their own notions of the common good."

But many institutions, especially those in cities and neighborhoods with pressing social problems, see the need to extend their reach.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, for example, is constructing a final work by the artist Mike Kelley, who committed suicide last year, that will function as a kind of perpetual social-practice experiment. Although Kelley was never identified with the movement, he specified before his death that the work, "Mobile Homestead" - a faithful re-creation of his childhood ranch-style home that will sit in a once-vacant lot behind the museum - should not be an art location in any traditional sense but a small social-services site, with possible additional roles as space for music and the museum's education programs. Whether visitors will understand that the house is a work of art and a continuing performance is an open question. Smaller institutions like the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Queens Museum of Art, which is acknowledged as a pioneer of social-practice programming, have also begun bringing the movement into the spotlight. ( Tania Bruguera, a New York artist who is known for helping immigrants and has been supported by the Queens Museum and Creative Time, sometimes explains social-practice art with an anti-Modernist call to arms: "It's time to restore Marcel Duchamp's urinal to the bathroom.")

Still, the political nature of the movement propels it into territory that is unfamiliar to many artists and art institutions. Last year, for example, a group of artists boycotted a summit meeting that has been held annually by Creative Time since 2009, saying they objected to the participation of a digital art center supported by the Israeli government. (Creative Time later made clear that the meeting received no funds from the organization or the Israeli government.)

Mr. Thompson of Creative Time said that many of the most dedicated social-practice artists see a huge divide between themselves and the commercial art world. "There are artists who don't want to be the entertainment," he said. "During a crisis of vast inequity they don't want to be the sideshow, off to the side juggling."

Caroline Woolard, a 29-year-old Brooklyn artist whose projects include collaborating on temporary "trade schools" where classes are paid for through bartering, said she became a social-practice artist not because she objected to the commercial or institutional art sectors but because she felt that the art world was too isolated.

"It was the realization that the types of people who went to cultural institutions - museums or galleries - were such a small section of any possible public for the kind of work I was interested in," she said. She added, though, that she believed the movement would only broaden, and that museums and even the commercial art world would have to find a way to get involved.

"I do think that there will be ways for new kinds of collectors to emerge who will support these kinds of long-term projects as works of art," said Ms. Woolard, who was recently asked by the Museum of Modern Art's education department to take part in a social-practice program, "Artists as Houseguests: Artists Experiment at MoMA," over the next few months.

Pablo Helguera, who is organizing the experiment as the director of adult and academic programs in MoMA's education department, said that departments like his, as opposed to curatorial ones, are often the doors through which social-practice artists enter the museum world.

"There have always been artists working this way, but we started seeing more and more of them," Mr. Helguera said. "My theory is that the shift began happening sometime after 9/11. I think it was the question 'What is the meaning of making art in the world like it is today?' "

Mr. Helguera, who has written a book on the subject, "Education for Socially Engaged Art," added that galleries and museums are only now beginning to scope out the movement's contours. "The art world has these expectations," he said. "It's like you're supposed to deliver your fall collection and your spring collection, and then what are you doing for the summer, for the art fairs and the biennials?"

"But this kind of work doesn't operate according to that calendar," he said. "It might mean a connection with some community or group of people for years, maybe some artist's whole life. It's hard to bring to the public. Sometimes it's hard to define."

Even those who live in the world of socially engaged art sometimes need help defining it. Justin Langlois, a Canadian artist, recently wrote a wry David-Letterman-style list of questions that artists can pose to themselves to determine whether they are indeed practicing social practice. Question No. 19 was "Can your work be critiqued by a painter?" Question No. 22: "If your project was a math equation, did the sum always end up as a critique of capitalism?" And the final question: "Were you asked to explain the reason you think your project is art?"

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Outside the Citadel, Social Practice Art Is Intended to Nurture (Published 2013)

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In Detroit a contemporary-art museum is completing a monument to an influential artist that will not feature his work but will instead provide food, haircuts, education programs and other social services to the general public.

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Documenting These Last Few Years In Order to Survive Them

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Morgan Bassichis's The Odd Years is a visual, poetic diary that is perhaps best read as an endurance piece.

Every Monday during the entirety of 2017 and 2019, the artist Morgan Bassichis, known for their comical performances rooted in musical theatre, wrote themselves a to-do list. Scribbled with a thick, red pen on envelopes, flyers, book pages, and other miscellaneous scraps of paper (as well as, on several occasions, on their phone), Bassichis's notes speak to the use of humor as a way of coping in times of political crisis. These to-do lists have now been compiled in a visually striking artist book titled The Odd Years, published by Wendy's Subway.

The artist's to-do items range from hilarious resolutions such as "Find Out If Stealing from Dean & Deluca Is Activism" and "Don't Make Kristen Stewart the Enemy," to more urgently political messages, like "Ban the Military" and "Abolish President's Day but Also Presidents." The lists provide a wonderful glimpse into Bassichis's investment in both humor and activism as intrinsic parts of their daily life. A necessary reminder that the two aren't mutually exclusive is manifested in amusing chores such as "Replace the Government with Chia Seeds" and "Turn the Police State into a delicious tahini dressing."

Taking a more serious note on April 17, 2017, Bassichis's to-do list reads: "Abolish the idea of war, the idea of prison, the idea of police, the idea of America, the idea of citizens, the idea of checkpoint, the need to know what will come after." Reading this statement today, it seems to hold a prophetic quality.

While many of us have only recently awoken to the corruptions of power prevalent in our society, Bassichis is a seasoned political organizer. During a virtual event organized in conjunction with the book release, they were able to raise over $2000 in only an hour, to contribute to housing for Lady O, a New-York-based abolitionist and freedom fighter. The event was also a testament to the intimate queer community Bassichis has built around themselves, with artists such as Tourmaline and Jibz Cameron (aka Dynasty Handbag) expressing their love and support for the performer.

The book is haunted by the legacy of beloved art historian Douglas Crimp, whose commitment to cultural activism was unwavering. Three days after Crimp's death in 2019, Bassichis's list includes only one item: "Keep Learning From Douglas," penned down on a page from Crimp's 1988 AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism publication. At the end of the book, Bassichis has also provided the reader with an index, which reveals that "Abolition," "Gay Pride," and "Slogans" are the most recurring terms in these lists.

The Odd Years is a visual, poetic diary that is perhaps best read as an endurance piece, demonstrating a certain stamina necessary to wake up every Monday morning and assert a series of tasks. More than traditional "to-do's," Bassichis's lists are ingredients for how to stay organized during the tumultuous times of Donald Trump's presidency, how to care about community while also practicing self-care, and most of all: how to maintain a sense of humor.

2017 and 2019 were odd years indeed. I cannot wait to see what Morgan Bassichis does with 2020.

The Odd Years, by Morgan Bassichis (Wendy's Subway, 2020), is now available on Bookshop.

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Documenting These Last Few Years In Order to Survive Them

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Morgan Bassichis's The Odd Years is a visual, poetic diary that is perhaps best read as an endurance piece. Every Monday during the entirety of 2017 and 2019, the artist Morgan Bassichis, known for their comical performances rooted in musical theatre, wrote themselves a to-do list.

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Taylor Payne was living a mile away from Ferguson, Missouri, on Aug. 9, 2014, the day that police officer Darren Wilson fatally shot unarmed teenager Michael Brown.

In the following weeks and months, Payne was among those who protested the killing and continued her work as a community organizer. That November, at an activist training, she met CheyOnna Sewell, an activist living in St. Louis at the time who "was always knitting," Payne recalled.

In October 2014, Sewell and Payne helped form the Yarn Mission, a knitting collective aimed at fighting racial injustice through community organizing and by supporting black creators' work. The quiet setting of a knitting circle has helped them discuss difficult topics, Payne said. "A lot of times what we're talking about is really traumatic," she said. "It's the only way I'm able to talk about a lot of the things that have happened in Ferguson and continue to happen in St. Louis."

Recent marches such as the Women's March on Jan. 21 and the March for Science on Saturday have brought knitting into the international spotlight and lured newcomers to a symbol of activism that dates back hundreds of years.

Academics and historians say that these new knitters are tapping into a long history of needle arts in the U.S. that is inextricably bound up in race, gender and class issues. Its recent popularity is only the latest chapter.
'Socks for Soldiers' and 'liberty caps'
For much of American history, "Women were limited in lots of areas of public activity. They were not supposed to be visible in public," Katherine Durack, former associate professor at Miami University, told the NewsHour Weekend. "It makes sense, then, that needle arts would be an important means of expression and that includes political expression."

Before the American Revolution in the 1760s, most clothing was homemade and needle arts were a vital part of women's education. Sewing and knitting were not only necessary skills but also political tools for the women involved in resisting authority.

In defiance of British taxes on textiles and other products, women in the colonies eschewed British-made clothing by creating homespun cloth. Families and churches would hold spinning bees, competing to see who could create the most yarn. During this era, "Women's role as buyer of the family goods became pivotal in colonial resistance. ... By boycotting British fabrics and reverting to intensive domestic textile manufacture, women stood ready to contribute equally toward the Revolution," Laura Sapelly wrote in her in her Pennsylvania State dissertation " Pedagogies of Historical and Contemporary American Sewing Circles."

Women also used needlework to create uniforms for soldiers during the Revolution, though some found unexpected uses for the craft. As the British occupied Philadelphia in 1777, Molly "Old Mom" Rinker, a tavern owner in Philadelphia, reportedly hid information about their troop movements in balls of yarn. She would pretend to knit on a rock overlooking Wissahickon Valley and drop them to Gen. George Washington's troops below.

Meanwhile, the revolution in France was stirring, and along with it came a new era for women's political involvement in the country. As leftist groups in France planned to overthrow the monarchy, they rallied around the red Phrygian caps, "liberty caps," which were based on hats that emancipated slaves wore in ancient Rome.

Though women were involved in political debate and many supported the Revolution, their male compatriots worried that fighting and donning liberty caps in public would upend gender roles, said Jennifer Jones, Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. Scholar Bernard A. Cook wrote that at the time, the right for women to bear arms "was seen as an insult to the physical superiority and fashionable difference between men and women, because armed women, for reasons of comfort and gender subversion, often dressed like men and wore male symbols, such as the red cap of liberty."

Throughout the early days of the country, and throughout much of the 19th century, women's approach to knitting and other needle arts also underscored existing class and racial divisions. Middle-class and wealthy white women were free to take up needlework selectively, and for either leisurely or political causes, while lower-income or marginalized women turned to it for income and survival.

At the time, among the upper classes, knitting was "reduced to charity work by well-off women with excess time," Tove Hermanson, a writer on fashion and culture, wrote. But it continued to provide an important source of income for many others, including freed slaves; Hermanson wrote that in 1864, the abolitionist Sojourner Truth taught "sewing, knitting and cooking" to refugee camps of emancipated slaves to help them financially support themselves.

And during the movement for abolition, sewing circles continued to serve as a place for women to exchange ideas and talk about political work. The Liberator, an abolitionist newspaper published by William Lloyd Garrison between 1831 and 1965, wrote on Dec. 3, 1847:

"Sewing Circles are among the best means for agitating and keeping alive the question of anti-slavery. ... A friend in a neighboring town recently said to us, Our Sewing Circle is doing finely, and contributes very much to keep up the agitation of the subject. Some one of the members generally reads an anti-slavery book or paper to the others during the meeting, and thus some who don't get a great deal of anti-slavery at home have an opportunity of hearing it at the circle."

Women in the Confederacy also urged other women to contribute to political efforts through knitting. In her 1863 poem "Socks for the Soldiers," Georgia-born Confederate poet Carrie Bell Sinclair wrote: "Oh women of the sunny South / We want you in the field; / Not with a soldier's uniform, / Nor sword, nor spear, nor shield; / But with a weapon quite as keen- / The knitting needle bright- / And willing hands to knit for those / Who for our country fight."

Following the Civil War, and as reformist movements like temperance took hold in many parts of the country, women organized sewing bees to create quilts and other goods whose sale could support those causes. During this time, as women sewed overtly political messages and images on banners and quilts, "The quilt became a political agent for temperance women," Sapelly told the NewsHour Weekend. "It expressed their support of the cause, even if it was on a bed [or] if it was hung on a wall."
'The great crochet question'
For decades, knitting and sewing had provided a path to political involvement for women - but also one that maintained traditional gender roles.

Those tasks were also used by anti-suffragists to mock women's potential political participation, such as in a cartoon published in the Punch's Almanack in 1853.

As women's suffrage movements gained steam in the U.S., many of its leaders rejected traditionally "feminine" tasks. "Their stance was, these were radical women and they felt that they need to take a stance on sewing and knitting and any kind of needlework," Sapelly said.

In the meantime, women's magazines in the U.S. "separated 'real' women - those who continued to sew or knit - from those wanting the vote," Sapelly wrote in her dissertation. These publications excluded black and poor women, instead establishing the face of needlework as white and middle class.

But some suffragists used the imagery of needle arts to further their cause and appear non-threatening to anti-suffragists, who had decried them as "unsexed" and unwomanly. In 1920, after the 19th Amendment passed Congress and suffragists waited for individual states to ratify it, suffrage leader Alice Paul posed on the cover of Suffragist magazine as a modern-day Betsy Ross.

Paul "appeared as a domestic archetype: woman seated, wielding just the familiar threaded needle, eyes dropped demurely on the household chore," J.D. Zahniser and Amelia R. Fry wrote in " Alice Paul: Claiming Power."

The image projected a non-threatening stance by suffragists, Sapelly said. "It's like communicating, we're not going to stop being women if we get the vote," she said. "We'll still probably be sitting quietly in the sewing room and doing our needlework."
Drawing the line
The Riot Grrrl feminist punk movement of the 1990s brought new political significance to DIY culture, encouraging feminists and others to take up crafting in order to resist corporations. "Personalized and unique hand-knit objects have been used to eschew mass production in favour of non-corporate, small-scale production, often in support of women-owned local suppliers, yarn shops, and designers," Beth Ann Pentney wrote for the feminist journal " thirdspace."

Since then, a number of independent knitting projects have called attention to progressive causes. The 2005 Wombs on Washington project rallied people to create knitted wombs to support pro-choice legislation, and two years later, the Stitch for Senate initiative called on people to knit helmet liners for U.S. senators to call for withdrawal from Iraq.

But knitters, particularly those critical of President Donald Trump's administration, say they see a resurgence in people's interest in knitting as a political tool in recent months, particularly around the Women's March with the creation of "pussyhats," and again before the Science March. Online, a number of groups - including "The Resistance Knitters" and a March for Science crafting group on Facebook - are encouraging people to use their work for political causes.

For the Science March on April 22, Heidi Arjes, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, designed the "resistor" knit hat, which shows a battery and three electronical devices called resistors. Along with two other postdoctoral fellows, she also helped organize Project Thinking Cap, which encouraged March for Science attendees to knit hats in green or blue shades. Her design received thousands of shares online.

"I never associated knitting with having as much power as my science and now I'm realizing that it really does," she said. "Knitting is a way I can reach people."

Karida Collins, owner of Baltimore hand-dyed yarn store Neighborhood Fiber Co., was reluctant to address politics in her business for a long time. "There are certain things you don't bring to the yarn store," she said. "You don't want your customers arguing with each other."

But after the election, she sent an email to her store's listserv, saying that her business was "opposed to policies of homophobia and xenophobia and white nationalism." She acknowledged that voicing the opinion could be risky for the business. But "I felt like I needed to draw a line in the sand," she said.
This post has been updated to reflect that colonial-era spinning bees were held to create yarn.

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Stitch by stitch, a brief history of knitting and activism

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Taylor Payne was living a mile away from Ferguson, Missouri, on Aug. 9, 2014, the day that police officer Darren Wilson fatally shot unarmed teenager Michael Brown. In the following weeks and months, Payne was among those who protested the killing and continued her work as a community organizer.

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In 2013, Project Semicolon began to take the world by storm in a global movement to support those who struggle with self-harm, addiction, and suicidal thoughts. The initiative spawned, among other things, tattoos of semicolons as a symbol of "not the end, but a new beginning." Inspired by this call-to-action, graphic designer Eisen Bernardo created his own twist on the social campaign. In his series #keepittogether, he replaces the semicolon with a paperclip and uses it in art depicting mental illness and disorders.

Employing the fastener in a variety of colors and compositions, Bernardo uses it as a vehicle for representing afflictions like anxiety, addiction, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Depending on the symptoms, the paper clips are grouped together, meticulously arranged, or in the case of depression, left alone in the center of the composition. "Through these minimalist illustrations," he describes, "I hope to promote awareness and understanding of the alarming problem."

Why the paper clip? "A paper clip is a very simple innovation," Bernardo writes. "It is just a twisted metal but it can keep things together (not permanently though, but still). I even have a paperclip tattoo to remind myself every day that'I should keep things together.'" As for his symbolic choice of the paperclip, Bernardo explains: "It has a starting point and an endpoint. There is also direction of movement that can depict how people live their lives." Like the semicolon, it too symbolizes life.

Inspired by Project Semicolon, designer Eisen Bernardo has used paperclips in art depicting mental illness and disorders.

Depending on the symptoms of the disorder, the paperclips are grouped together, scattered, or are all alone.

"I hope to promote awareness and understanding of the alarming problem."
Eisen Bernardo: Behance | Instagram
My Modern Met granted permission to use photos by Eisen Bernardo.

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Artist Brilliantly Illustrates Different Mental Disorders Using Only Paper Clips

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In 2013, Project Semicolon began to take the world by storm in a global movement to support those who struggle with self-harm, addiction, and suicidal thoughts. The initiative spawned, among other things, tattoos of semicolons as a symbol of "not the end, but a new beginning."

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What struck me most in moving through the arc of Lacy's career is what varied and thoughtful work she's produced decade after decade, no doubt the result of her preference for collaboration.

SAN FRANCISCO - Suzanne Lacy: We Are Here, currently at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, is a much-deserved retrospective for a prolific, pioneering artist whose socially engaged work has never been more timely. Even across two venues, the exhibition can barely contain nearly five decades of effusive productivity that includes photographs, video, installation, texts, maps, recordings, sculpture, performances, and more - mostly done in collaboration with others. Some viewers may find this range overwhelming, but despite the abundance, Lacy's art is always recognizable as hers. From her earliest social practice pieces in the 1970s, her work has confronted issues of gender, violence, race, aging, and capitalism, among other pressing sociopolitical concerns, through a striking visual language that is at once alarming, witty, moving, eye-opening, and, often, beautiful.

Lacy's themes are spelled out before you even get to the seventh floor at SFMOMA. The stairs from the ground floor to the exhibition spaces bear messages in black letters on yellow: Who's winning the war on women? Is VIOLENCE gender neutral? Whose LABOR is invisible? Lacy similarly lined the front steps of the Brooklyn Museum in 2013.

Other pieces in the retrospective have been "reactivated" (Lacy's term) at SFMOMA, which looks at the artist's entire career, and at YBCA, which focuses more on her collaborations with Bay Area youth. It's a somewhat depressing commentary on social progress that her work has proven perennially relevant. Violence against women, for example: In 1977's Three Weeks in May, Lacy stenciled RAPE in red on a map of reported rapes in Los Angeles - heavy red print for those officially reported and fainter red stamps for the estimated nine other rapes statistics say go unreported for every one that is. By the end of three weeks Lacy's golden map was covered in a red web of RAPE. In January 2012, she created a new version. Both are profoundly disturbing, but aesthetically appealing. "I care about the look of these things more than anybody would realize; I believe in that level of attention to detail," she told the Los Angeles Times in 2012. "It's not a strategy - more recognizing that people are moved by visually powerful phenomena."

Lacy's Alterations, originally done in 1994-95 and reactivated now at SFMOMA, likewise reflects multiple social issues - women's work, immigration, patriotism, capitalism - while nodding to conventional depictions of women in art. In Lacy's piece, women hand-stitch fabric from towering piles of red, white, and blue cloth that are replenished every evening, creating an endless stream of work that calls attention to San Francisco's own garment district, where mostly female immigrant labor sews to feed America's consumer maw, and to feed their families. Sewing is a double bind for women in art, signifying both virtuous women's work and sex (the old in and out).

The Circle and the Square (2015-17), an event and installation in an unused textile mill in Pendle, England, similarly engages with the textile industry, immigration, global capitalism, and community. Part of a two-year collaboration with In-Situ, a local nonprofit, along with an interfaith initiative called Building Bridges Pendle, a film documenting one of the events broadcasts sacred music through the gallery, while side-by-side screens contrast mostly white participants on the left and mostly Sufi on the right, singing and chanting together.

What struck me most in moving through the arc of Lacy's career is what varied and thoughtful work she's produced decade after decade. Some of this sustained energy is no doubt, at least in part, the result of her preference for collaboration. The show's thorough, excellent catalogue lists two full pages of collaborators, from all walks of life and experience.

Maybe it's coincidence, but the further into the exhibition I went - passing pieces on animal cruelty, aging, plastic surgery, rape, and other forms of violence against women - the fewer people were with me. By the time I reached the back wall, only two other women were still looking. One said, "Let's change, Joyce. This is dealing with some very heavy subjects," and they went back the way we came.

It's too bad, because the history up ahead was not to be missed - for example, maps, photos, and telegrams from International Dinner Party, an homage to her former teacher; to mark the 1979 opening of Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party at SFMOMA Lacy organized more than 200 women to host dinners worldwide. It was a pre-internet feat that included such significant artists as Mary Beth Edelson, Ana Mendieta, and Louise Bourgeois.

Lacy's passion for bringing people together is a hallmark of her work. In Dinner at Jane's from 1993 she invited an international roster of feminists to Hull-House in Chicago for dinner and discussion. Watching the documentary of legendary activists like Dolores Huerta, Devaki Jain, Wilma Mankiller, Magdalena Abakanowicz, and Gloria Steinem talk, listen, and eat with gusto is profoundly cheering. At one point in the film someone asks Susan Faludi to speak up, saying she's too quiet. Faludi responds, quietly, "I write very loudly."

I somehow doubt that anyone has needed to ask Suzanne Lacy to speak up, but who knows? Her art, though, is unapologetically loud, discomfiting, demanding. I'm here for it.

Suzanne Lacy: We Are Here continues at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (151 Third Street, San Francisco, California) and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (701 Mission Street, San Francisco, California) through August 4.

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Suzanne Lacy's Powerful Legacy of Feminist Collaboration

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What struck me most in moving through the arc of Lacy's career is what varied and thoughtful work she's produced decade after decade, no doubt the result of her preference for collaboration.

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Week in Review: Whitney Biennial Postponed to 2022; Guggenheim Union Protests at Reopening | Revue

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David Adjaye was awarded the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) gold medal. | Guardian

The inaugural Marian MacDowell Arts Advocacy Award will be awarded to ARRAY, Ava DuVernay's media company and arts collective. | McDowell News

Vincent Namatjira was named the recipient of the Archibald Prize. | BBC

Peter Eleey will step down as Chief Curator at MoMA PS1. |

James P. Folsom will retire as director of the botanical gardens at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.

Tim Griffin will step down as director and chief curator of the Kitchen.

Ebony L. Haynes was appointed director of a soon-to-open outpost of David Zwirner Gallery with an all-Black staff. | New York Times

Cyrée Jarelle Johnson was named the Brooklyn Public Library 's inaugural Poet-in-Residence.

Tyler Mitchell is now represented by Jack Shainman gallery. | Artsy

Kevin Young was named director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. | NPR

Robert Bechtle (1932-2020), photorealist painter |

Christiane Eda-Pierre (1932-2020), soprano opera star | New York Times

Michael Lonsdal (1931-2020), actor known for his role as a Bond villain |

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Week in Review: Whitney Biennial Postponed to 2022; Guggenheim Union Protests at Reopening

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David Adjaye was awarded the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) gold medal. | Guardian The inaugural Marian MacDowell Arts Advocacy Award will be awarded to ARRAY, Ava DuVernay's media company and arts collective. | McDowell News Vincent Namatjira was named the recipient of the Archibald Prize.

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Podcast: Amin Husain and Nitasha Dhillon on Working to Decolonize the Art World | Revue

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Podcast: Amin Husain and Nitasha Dhillon on Working to Decolonize the Art World

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Amin Husain and Nitasha Dhillon on Working to Decolonize the Art WorldIn this two-part conversation, Amin Husain and Nitasha Dhillon, two of the leading activists in the New York art community talk about their lives, work, and what's next.Listen to Part 1Listen to Part 2Subscribe to the Hyperallergic Podcast on Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you listen to podcasts.If you are enjoying our podcast, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts!

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In 2006, at the state correctional institution at Graterford, Pennsylvania, he joined a program run by Mural Arts Philadelphia, a group known for using public art to both beautify and address social issues in the city.

Hough and other inmates created works on fabric that were later transferred to walls around Philadelphia, like the one by the Rail Park, which involved help from prominent artist Shepard Fairey. It's called The Stamp of Incarceration.

Jane Golden is the founder of mural arts.

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Philadelphia DA explores new role for arts in the criminal justice system

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Mixing art with criminal justice has become increasingly common in the U.S. The work often tackles complex subjects of redemption and reform. Jeffrey Brown traveled to Philadelphia to explore a program that brought art to an unexpected part of the justice system: the office of the city's top prosecutor.

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The threads of time: 5 Amazing artists using yarn - TextileArtist.org

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Spinning fiber into yarn is such an ancient art that its origins are lost in the mists of time. The oldest recovered artifacts made with yarn are string skirts that date from up to 20,000 years ago. The craft is steeped in history and tradition. When a contemporary textile artist chooses to work in yarn the results can be breathtaking.

In this article, part of our Discover... series, we introduce you to 5 incredible artists who are prepared to challenge our preconceptions by bringing yarn firmly into the 21st century.

Lindsay Obermeyer

Lindsay Obermeyer is an artist, designer, author and educator with a passion for the textile arts. For twenty five years, she's been exhibiting her work in galleries and museums around the world. Lindsay's art is in the permanent collections of Sweden's National Public Art Council, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, and the Racine Art Museum among others.

Lindsay says "I am fascinated with patterns in all forms. I listen for repeats in music as it plays on the radio. I look for the single motif in a complex cloth."

Her creations in yarn cover an assortment of global issues including our fragile ecosystem and have a bold, pertinent voice.

For more information visit: www.lbostudio.com

Patricia Waller

Patricia Waller is a textile artist based in Berlin, Germany. Her work often depicts characters associated with childhood giving them a macabre twist, exploiting the yarn to it's full artistic potencial. We are confronted with clowns, monkeys and a range familiar cartoon charaters in unfamiliar situations. The yarn creates a comical narrative but beware it's sinister after taste! She currently has exhibitions at the Deschler Gallery, Berlin, and Tobias Schrade Gallery, Ulm, Germany.

For more information visit: www.patriciawaller.com

Dave Cole

Dave Cole is an American contemporary visual artist specialising in sculpture. His work is characterised by an interest in politics, patriotism, nostalgia, and masculinity. Dave lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island. His combined passion for yarn and sculpture have given him the freedom to push bounderies and create an astonishing and arresting body of work
For more information visit: www.davecoledavecole.com
Tatyana Yanishevsky

Tatyana is an artist and technologist also living in Providence, Rhode Island. Her practice includes knitting, building structures out of steel, sewing and embroidering, making rubber molds, casting resin, building circuits, collecting small dead animals, working on her house, and thinking by the woodstove.
For more information visit: www.knitplants.com
Tatyana also works as an environmental consultant and often travels abroad. Her passion for nature and the outdoors is evident in her intricate designs and the yarn becomes a delicate thread in which her flowers and plantlife bloom.

R. John Mertens
For more information visit: Want to shout about your favourite yarn artist? Tell us about them in the comments section below. www.robertmertensartist.com
R. John Mertens is an artist and recording engineer. His interests combine post-modernism, post-minimalism, post-structuralism and the post-apocalypse. His work is characterised as sound, fiber, performance installations; which function to question forms of pedagogy, interaction, folklore, historicity, and contemporary craft.

He has shown nationally and internationally with recent exhibits at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland OR and Scythia Arts Center in Kherson, Ukraine.

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The threads of time: 5 Amazing artists using yarn - TextileArtist.org

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Spinning fiber into yarn is such an ancient art that its origins are lost in the mists of time. The oldest recovered artifacts made with yarn are string skirts that date from up to 20,000 years ago. The craft is steeped in history and tradition.

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Spinning a Yarn or Two: The Subversive Art of Crocheting | Article | Culture.pl

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Spinning a Yarn or Two: The Subversive Art of Crocheting

Knitting and crocheting - anyone who thinks that these are out of style couldn't be more wrong. Here's a look at some of the Polish artists who have joined the world's trend and taken the old tradition to the streets, literally. Knitting as a street art? No way you say. So let's have a look at what it's all about.

Over the last few years, a practice called yarn bombing - the use of knitted or crocheted cloth to modify and beautify one's surroundings - emerged in the US and has spread worldwide. Yarn bombers have been seen targeting existing pieces of graffiti for beautification. More often than ever, residents in many cities around the world have awoken to find knitted cozies hugging tree branches, sign poles or local monuments, which gain attention anew.

While yarn installations - called yarn bombs or yarn storms - may last for years, they are considered non-permanent, and, unlike other forms of graffiti, can be easily removed if necessary. So while other forms of graffiti may be expressive, or territorial, and often categorized as vandalism, yarn bombing seems initially to be about reclaiming, personalising and beautifying public places. It has since developed with groups knitting and crocheting graffiti worldwide, each with their own agendas and public graffiti knitting projects.

Olek

Agata Oleksiak, otherwise known as Crocheted Olek, is a Polish-born artist living in the United States. According to the artist, she treats her work outside of the yarn bomb movement and she feels that her art explores sexuality, feminist ideals and the evolution of communication through colours, conceptual exploration and meticulous detail. With the old-fashioned technique of crocheting, she has used the ephemeral medium of yarn to express everyday occurrences and inspirations hoping to create a metaphor for the complexity and interconnectedness of our body and psychological processes.

One of Olek's recognisable traits is the bursts of bright colours which often mask political and cultural critiques woven into the fibers of her installations, mirroring her respect for artists and writers. She highlights that which already exists in the current time and environment. Her transformation of public spaces and objects reflects cultural evolution, mirroring the public response, from those watching and from those within the art community.

The artist explains:

My work changes from place to place. I studied the science of culture. With a miner's work ethic, I long to delve deeper and deeper into my investigations. My art was a development that took me away from industrial, close-minded Silesia, Poland. It has always sought to bring color and life, energy, and surprise to the living space. My goal is to produce new work and share it with the public.

Her intention is clear, and like other artist in today's world working in other mediums, her imperative is to give feedback to the economic and social reality in their community.

Julita Wójcik

Another Polish artist who has strongly worked with her community's response to the world of today is Gdańsk's own Julita Wójcik, better known for her Warsaw Rainbow installation that fired up the public's attention last year. For those of you who have not heard of the events surrounding the piece, the work, a giant rainbow made of artificial flowers was meant to serve as a symbol of peace and tolerance for Polish and European society, unfortunately some didn't see it the same way and the installation became a source of frustration for certain groups in the community who vandalised the piece on several occasions by setting it on fire. To read more about the vandalisation of this piece and the public debate around it, see our article Seven Questions About Poland's Most Divisive Artwork.

Before Rainbow, however, Wójcik took to the art of crochet and adopted it as a critique of its supposedly intrinsically feminine character. She created several crocheted sculptures and wall pieces depicting communist era prefab buildings. Her piece titled Falowiec ( Waver), pictured above, is the most frequently loanded out piece of the collection of of the Zachęta National Art Gallery in Warsaw.

Inspiration, however, does not mean affirmation, and Wójcik often engages in criticism of an everyday environment, by introducing an element of irony, playing with scale, surprising material illusions, or reworking a concrete legacy into a knitted form, as if commenting ironically on the monumentality of architecture, in this case. It is no wonder that she has also been called the "chronicler of provincial home aesthetics".

Monomoka

Speaking of home aesthetics, here's Monomoka - a Polish design group known for its unique furniture crocheted out of linen, wool and cotton. Created by twin sisters Monika Gwiazdowska and Katarzyna Gwiazdowska, and in 2008 joined by Piotr Saladra, Monika's spouse. Graduates of the Department of Architecture at Wrocław Polytechnic, Monomoka's works draw inspiration from biological processes than can be observed in nature. Pieces like the Hive and Artichoke seats, or the kernel-shaped Lentil stool, as well as the Sleeping Mice ottoman, which looks a silkworm's cocoon and gathers together some 1500 little linen balls, all illustrate a fine craftsmanship of the medium. And even though the production of Monomoka's furniture is incredibly time-consuming, with each item taking up to a few months to build, the effects are really worth it.

NeSpoon

Another artist who has taken the medium as her form of expression is Warsaw-based NeSpoon who uses ornate lace patterns in her unique brand of street art that translates into ceramics, stencils, paintings, and crocheted webbing installed in public spaces. NeSpoon refers to her art as "public jewelry", and not unlike a lot of other yarn bombers across the globe, she sees her work as an act of beautification by turning abandoned and unadorned spaces into something aesthetically pleasing.

Monika Drożyńska

Monika Drożyńska, a Cracovian artist, takes a more inner approach and utilises the medium to document a more personal approach. One such piece titled The Rest is described as a work in progress, conducted since 2009. It is a scarf made during leisure time - a scarf which is 5 metres coiled into a roll. It is made with a crochet hook with crewel in various colours, each of which is assigned to the year in which the project is continually being conducted, i.e. 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, and so on. The piece is described as an attempt to materialize time, amount of movement and the counting of individual moments between earlier, now and later - between a stitch, a section and a colour. In the course of time, the growing form of the object reflects the accumulated experiences of everyday life. The passage of time and the ageing of the artist benefit the object, which becomes more and more attractive, growing like a tree trunk. To read more about the artist's project in Austria, see Monika Drożyńska's Works in Zurich. More of her works can also be found on her blog, Haft-miejski (literally meaning Urban Stich).

Koniaków Traditional Crochet Lace

Traditionally, one must also remember that the crochet technique, in its traditional ethnic sense, is also very strong in Poland and Koniaków, a village in the Beskid mountain range in the South-West of Poland is the home of this regional speciality nowadays famous the world over. The items of crocheted lace incite the awe of ethnographers, who call them a "world represented through talented hands". The skilled crochet hook operators apply their imagination and sense of beauty and choose from a series of some 2200 patterns to convey the world that surrounds them.

The folk artists are constantly searching for ways in which to adapt traditional ornamentation to fashionable, contemporary forms. This search once resulted in the creation of crocheted lace g-strings, an item which proved controversial as it divided the community. In a talk with Culture.pl, Barbara Juroszek, from the Regional Cultural Centre, commented:

Some said that it's a disgrace that the same lace that decorated altars and stoles would now decorate... well, something else. Others set themselves to work, creating a collection of women's and men's underwear, and the whole scandal basically won this local speciality some major publicity.

So whether you are a folk artist or revolutionary artist who has a different agenda, why not place a slip-knot loop on the hook, pull another loop through the first loop, and repeating this process to create a chain... and the rest, as they say, is history. And like many of the artists mentioned, a rewriting of history that scrutinised the intristic nature of a feminised art form.

...and Karol Radziszewski

Although the examples selected by us are works created by women, there is also a subversive reclaiming of the medium by a man, the Polish artist Karol Radziszewski. In his project, Fag Fighters, by subversing the medium and adopting it in his work, he intercepts and amplifies the stereotype-based conservative discourse - wherein no aggressivity can be ascribed to the homosexual man - and transforms it into an asocial, anarchic and subversive fantasy. Furthermore, in a prologue to this piece, we learn that the pink balaclavas were crocheted by none other than the artist's grandmother, who was completely unaware of the purpose of her work - in this way, Radziszewski highlights the split between his identity and the default perception of the self.
Author: Paulina Schlosser 31/07/2014 Sources: culture.pl, olek.nyc.com, karolradziszewski.com, Haft-miejski.blogspot.com, press release
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Spinning a Yarn or Two: The Subversive Art of Crocheting

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Knitting and crocheting - anyone who thinks that these are out of style couldn't be more wrong. Here's a look at some of the Polish artists who have joined the world's trend and taken the old tradition to the streets, literally. Knitting as a street art? No way you say.

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These Artists Are Giving Knitting a Place in Art History - Artsy

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Subversive knitting. Radical crocheting. These phrases may sound contradictory, but marrying "craft" to "cool" has become commonplace in the last decade, as once-dowdy domestic hobbies have metamorphosed into trendy pastimes for the creative set. (Think knitting-focused Instagram accounts that draw hundreds of thousands of followers, and viral articles featuring knitted pajamas for chilly elephants.) In this atmosphere, the art world, too, has seen an uptick in the use of knitting and crocheting as a medium. But this is by no means a new phenomenon among artists.

As early as the 1970s and '80s, artists like Louise Bourgeois, Faith Wilding, and Rosemarie Trockel employed knitting and crocheting as both a material and a feminist tool, connecting the history of craft as "women's work" to that of repressive domesticity. Since then, countless contemporary artists have built on the work of these feminist pioneers, using knitting and crocheting to mine a wide range of themes. Below, we highlight eight creatives that prove knitting and crocheting can be boundary-pushing, politically charged mediums.

Yang builds her mesmerizing, delightfully absurd sculptures from everyday objects ranging from frosted lightbulbs to hair rollers to fake plants to hand-knitted cosies. While not all of her works incorporate knitted and crocheted elements, allusions to craft and homemade trinkets appear across her oeuvre. When paired with industrial materials and commercial products like clothing racks, Venetian blinds, and canned goods, they become icons for contradictory feelings of belonging and alienation, safety and suffocation that domestic life can inspire. These are dichotomies with which Yang, who splits her time between Seoul and Berlin, is intimately familiar, and they emerge in big, immersive works like Sallim (2009), an abstract reimagining of her Berlin kitchen, and Cup Cosies (2011), as well as a cohort of small plastic cups blanketed with knitted covers.

Genger's crocheted sculptures are most succinctly described as monumental. For a 2013 public installation in New York City's Madison Square Park, she looped and stitched 1.4 million feet of lobster-fishing rope into immense, meandering forms that, from afar, resemble outdoor sculptures by modernist male greats, like Claes Oldenburg or Richard Serra. But there is one key difference: Genger uses a technique traditionally associated with women and craft. This is the crux of the American artist's practice, which reimagines, enlarges, and subtly lampoons big, hard-edged works made by men. In this way, Genger draws an approach oft-described as "women's work" away from a domestic environment and emphatically plants it in the public sphere.

Goldrajch's crocheted masks investigate central themes of his practice: the impact of hierarchical terms like "insider" and "outsider," and "high" and "low," on the art world. The Israeli, Brussels-based artist fuses a technique traditionally associated with craft (one still struggling for art-world legitimacy) with subjects drawn from the paintings of celebrated artists, like James Ensor, whose work hangs on walls of big-name institutions. In this way, Goldrajch brings to light limiting prejudices-toward certain materials and artists-that institutions and traditions often reinforce.

Drain began knitting as a student at RISD in Providence, a city that was once the center of the American textile industry. Since then, he's incorporated both knitting and embroidery into his diverse sculptural practice in order to synthesize the history of craft and artmaking with contemporary culture and technology. Sweaters patterned to resemble pixelated 1980s video games and early computer iconography tap into the proliferation, and obsoletion, of new trends and innovations. Drain has also embedded knitted elements into multimedia sculptures. Their angular patterns, made from uniform webs of yarn, at once refer to the networked, viral nature of contemporary technology and the undying human desire for physical comfort.

The Polish, New York-based artist, who goes simply by Olek, has crocheted potent political messages-both overt and subliminal-across city streets since 2002. To underline the importance of expression and play, no matter the environment, she has covered bicycles and carousels in hand-crocheted, neon-hued sheaths, as well as dressing people up in her textiles. She also uses her work to communicate urgent social issues, from free speech to refugee relief to women's rights. Case in point: during last year's election cycle, she crocheted a 16-by-46-foot banner, which was tacked to a New Jersey highway billboard, depicting Hillary Clinton's face and the candidate's viral hashtag #imwithher. In the last month, she's also created anti-racism and feminist messages on public walls (a quote from Martin Luther King Junior in London's Shoreditch neighborhood) and on protest signs ("Love Always Wins" at the Women's March on Washington)-all with her trademark threads.

Brazilian artist Neto's immense installations resemble giant swollen body parts, aroused sexual organs, and gooey, dripping stalactites. And he achieves their organic, fluid contours by suspending sprawling networks of crocheted yarn, weighed down with heavy objects like glass balls, from tall ceilings. Across his body of work, loosely-woven, crocheted and knitted sheaths allude to cellular structures, human skin, or celestial constellations. Other sculptures draw on the history of craft and culture in his native Brazil by embedding objects from everyday life, like beer cans and green coconuts, into webs dyed to conjure the vibrant colors of Rio de Janeiro's streets. In this way, Neto explores the connections between molecular science, human life, and the overarching cosmos-from the micro to the macro.

Jackson is interested "in the role of objects in a good life," as she's explained. She makes "non-traumatized" objects that fuse craft mediums, like knitting and crocheting, with symbols representing nature, joy, and other calming, comforting forces. Both her materials and the images and garments she forges from them-blankets covered in icons of a waning and waxing moon, sweaters embedded with serene illustrations of the sea or baskets of fruit-allude to the soothing power of the natural world, one that contemporary cultures tend to ignore in favor of technology and industry. She also lends her self-taught knowledge of textiles and knitting to the collaborative furniture she makes with her husband, painter Chris Johanson. Like the rest of her work, these chairs and couches are meant to be lived with, worn, and nestled into.

Chandler uses the graphic quality of the crocheted technique (whose stitches create blocks of color and hard-edged patterns) in order to emphasize certain physical characteristics of her smiling, cartoonish subjects. In Rainbow Bright(2015), for instance, the thick, rainbow-hued lines that underline two red nipples signal that the character has undergone a double mastectomy, perhaps as part of a sex change. Observed closely, many of Chandler's figures proudly bear the marks of gender reassignment or joyfully resist rigid genders. Both the subjects in Erica (2015) and Under Construction (2015) are decorated with vertical lines where a penis or vagina might be, which could read as either, both, or simply a colorful undergarment. His use of crocheting, a hobby associated with female domesticity, further emphasizes her celebration of gender subversion.

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These Artists Are Giving Knitting a Place in Art History | Artsy

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Think knitting is just for grannies? These creatives prove knitting and crocheting can be boundary-pushing, politically charged mediums.

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Jo Hamilton – Painting with yarn - TextileArtist.org

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Scottish-born artist Jo Hamilton currently lives and works in Portland, Oregon. She graduated from the Glasgow School of Art with a degree in drawing and painting before moving to the United States. Jo's large scale work uses knotted yarn to crochet portraits, cityscapes, giant male nudes and mysterious masked women.

In our interview with Jo we learn more about 'painting with yarn', she explains why her studio is surrounded by colour and tells us about the challenges of re-examining traditional fine art subjects.

Colour, making and representation
TextileArtist.org: What initially captured your imagination about textile art?
Jo Hamilton: I grew up in a family of knitters and crocheters, so I was very familiar with yarn crafts from a young age. I have always had a love of colour, making and representation and I have a respect for art that reveals how it is made.
What or who were your early influences and how has your life/upbringing influenced your work?
My Mum and my Gran both knitted and crocheted and I learned both when I was quite young, about 6. I took up crochet again as a teenager and used it to make presents for friends.
What was your route to becoming an artist? (Formal training or another pathway?)
I went to Glasgow School of Art at the age of seventeen, graduating four years later. Although I studied drawing and painting there, after art school I was still searching for my ideal and undiscovered medium. It took me years to learn how best to marry my traditional craft and fine art backgrounds. I continued to draw and paint for years and then eventually the crochet took precedence.

Trial and error
What is your chosen medium and what are your techniques?
My chosen medium is crochet. My technique is to work directly from a photograph, usually beginning in the middle and working out until it is finished. I don't use any graphs, patterns or sketches, I just eyeball it. There is a lot of trial and error; I can test out many different colours until I am satisfied, and there is also a lot of ripping out and redoing. Each piece takes many hours of work.
How would you describe your work and where do you think it fits within the sphere of contemporary art?
My work could be described as 'painting with yarn', but that makes it sound much simpler than it is. In the last ten years there has been a resurgence of craft-based fine art in the US, the UK and Europe.
Tell us a bit about your process and what environment you like to work in?
When I start a piece I pull the colours of yarn that I'm going to use from the shelves that line my studio walls and lay them out on the futon where I work. As I get further into each piece I need to grab more and more and so by the time I'm finished I have a big pile of everything I've used; all the yarn that constitutes the palette for that particular piece. The walls of my studio are lined with shelves full of yarn, mostly found in thrift stores over the years, all arranged by colour and tone. It's a very inspiring environment, surrounded by that much colour.

Going back to basics
Do you use a sketchbook?
I don't do any kind of preparatory sketching or drawing for my crochet work, I just go straight into it. So my sketchbook is more like a journal or a planner; these days it has much more writing than drawing in it.
What currently inspires you and which other artists do you admire and why?
Right now I'm inspired very much by the work and life of Louise Bourgeois. I had been familiar with her sculptures, but recently I found an amazing book of all her work in fabric. I also love that her art career began in earnest when she was about 40, and continued for almost another 60 years. I also admire the work of Alice Neel, Howard Hodgkin, Matisse, Patrick Caulfield, among others.
How has your work developed since you began and how do you see it evolving in the future?
In a way when I began working with crochet in this way I felt like going back to basics a bit to see just what I could achieve. So I've been re-examining and revisiting some of the genres of traditional fine art- portraiture, landscape, nudes, and so on. The nudes especially were a self-imposed challenge; I felt that if I could that if I could convincingly render a nude in crocheted yarn, I would prove to myself that I could really crochet anything. I also couldn't resist the contradictions and the humour inherent in such an undertaking; this towering reclining male nude composed of a profusion of soft and tiny knots, made from a medium and process usually associated with feminine domestic pastimes. I've now completed two realistic-ish males nudes, and dozens of portraits so I feel like my work may be heading towards abstraction. Not complete abstraction, but a certainly a distortion or exaggeration of representation, and maybe a bit of playfulness with pattern and materials.

Advice and recommended resources
What advice would you give to an aspiring textile artist?
Don't be afraid to experiment, you might discover something no-one else has done. Take note when you are inspired but things you see - the things you love to look at become a part of you and can later feed your work for years to come.
Can you recommend any books for textile artists?
Louise Bourgeois: The Fabric Works.
Textile Art Around the World, Ellen Bakker
My own art catalogue, available through my website!
What other resources do you use? Blogs, websites, magazines etc.
I'm not too much of a blog reader. But I use the public library quite a bit!
What piece of equipment or tool could you not live without?
A crochet hook.

Talks, workshops and exhibitions
Do you give talks or run workshops or classes? If so where can readers find information about these?
I am starting to get requests for talks and workshops. I taught a workshop this June at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Tennessee. I post plenty of information on the News page of my website: www.johamiltonart.com

And I have a facebook page too, a bit less formal than the website: www.facebook.com/johamilton4rt
How do you go about choosing where to show your work?
I don't always get to choose! I've had many exhibition opportunities come to me through my website, and I also apply for certain things through the Call For Entry website. For artists I produced a small catalogue for my first solo museum show that opened in March at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in Eugene, Oregon, and I hope be able to use that to introduce my work to some of my most coveted museums and galleries later this year.
Where can readers see your work this year?
I have a solo show in February 2015 at the Laura Russo Gallery in Portland, and a selection of portraits at Archer Gallery in Vancouver, WA this month.
For more information please visit: johamiltonart.com
If you've enjoyed this interview with Jo let us know by leaving a comment below

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Jo Hamilton - Painting with yarn - TextileArtist.org

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Scottish-born artist Jo Hamilton currently lives and works in Portland, Oregon. She graduated from the Glasgow School of Art with a degree in drawing and painting before moving to the United States. Jo's large scale work uses knotted yarn to crochet portraits, cityscapes, giant male nudes and mysterious masked women.

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Grayson Perry discusses craft and art - YouTube

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Grayson Perry on crafts vs art - the Guardian - YouTube

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Grayson Perry on crafts vs art - the Guardian

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Is there a difference between art and craft? - Laura Morelli - YouTube

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Is there a difference between art and craft? - Laura Morelli

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David Byrne and Spike Lee Consider the Oxymoron of "American Utopia"

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American Utopia, Lee's film of the stage show, recontextualizes some of Byrne's greatest hits as musings on modern life.

It's tempting to say this about any piece of media that brings even a semblance of joy during this terrible year, but David Byrne's American Utopia genuinely feels like a balm. The stage show, which ran from late 2019 to early 2020 at New York's Hudson Theatre, exists somewhere between a concert and a musical. Premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival's 2020 online edition, the film adaptation, directed by Spike Lee, is a fascinating deconstruction of live performance, emphasizing negative visual space and human connection over pyrotechnics.

As Byrne takes the stage, the recollection of Jonathan Demme's equally joyous 1984 Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense is plain, what with the simple stage assemblage and costuming. It's perhaps a reminder of how things have and haven't changed in the time since. But while the original stage show and this film adaptation are absolutely in conversation with Stop Making Sense, Lee still makes it feel distinct. He applies his own visual stamp and a more intimate setup, especially as the show draws closer to its conclusion. He privileges Byrne's audience with unique angles afforded by the camera, getting close-ups, providing new views of the choreography via aerial shots, and generally making this a cinematic experience rather than simply a filmed show. He adds flair to Byrne's minimalist sensibilities.

For his part, Byrne is the same as he ever was - humanist, good-humored and often a little self-deprecating, and most of all egalitarian. He's the focal point of an ensemble, rather than an all-consuming presence. He's still trying to make sense of the world through Dadaist art, world music, close friends and collaborators, and his audience. The big questions he asks about the American state of being in between the songs provide new context for everything from classics like "Burning Down the House" and of course "Once in a Lifetime" to modern collaborations like "I Should Watch TV" (written with Annie Clark, aka St Vincent) or a retooling of X-Press Z's house track "Lazy." Some numbers are updated dissections of modern living, while others are more focused on finding joy in showmanship. "Looking at people? That's the best," Byrne says as "This Must Be the Place" thunders to life.

For all of American Utopia 's joy in revisiting these classics, it also has surprising urgency, full of calls to action, specifically around contemporary Black protest. Colin Kaepernick appears on screen as Byrne and his band take a knee and raise their fists, and one of the closing numbers is a cover of Janelle Monae's "Hell You Talmbout." That protest song first came out in 2015, and lists some of the Black people killed, mostly by police, up until the point she performed it. Here it's updated to include a few names from this year alone: George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery. The most telling sign of Lee's presence is the confrontational construction of this performance, cutting it with scenes of protests featuring people holding gaze with the viewer, carrying placards and pictures of these stolen lives, with many more names in bold red text that engulf the screen.

The term "American Utopia" is knowingly oxymoronic. A lot of the show is dedicated to wondering how things can be fixed, if they ever will be. But at the same time, it's hard to watch Byrne's warm and humanistic performance without grinning from ear to ear. The American Utopia doesn't exist, but for a couple of hours, the possibility feels a little more hopeful. Even such temporary escapism and affirmation is more than welcome.

American Utopia is currently playing as part of the Toronto International Film Festival. It premieres on HBO October 17.

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David Byrne and Spike Lee Consider the Oxymoron of "American Utopia"

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American Utopia, Lee's film of the stage show, recontextualizes some of Byrne's greatest hits as musings on modern life. It's tempting to say this about any piece of media that brings even a semblance of joy during this terrible year, but David Byrne's American Utopia genuinely feels like a balm.

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Leslie Thomas wants to shock you. She wants to anger you. And above all, she wants you to do something.

She's not talking about run-of-the-mill, "Hey buddy, watch your step" angry or TMZ sleaze shock. She's talking about the great humanitarian and social crises of our time, like in Darfur, Afghanistan or Myanmar. And yes, she's talking to you.

Ms. Thomas, an architect turned activist, is the founder of Art Works Projects, which uses photography to raise awareness of human rights concerns and spur action. Over the last five years it has mounted exhibitions and presented large-scale public slide projections on various themes. It has now published a book of images with accompanying posters and curriculums on the lives of women in Afghanistan. A wide-ranging retrospective opens in Slovenia on Tuesday.

"My goal is to be the most emotionally manipulative person possible," she said, candidly. "Then I want to forge an emotional connection and get you to call or write and do something."

Paula Bronstein/Getty Images

When she was 12 years old, her father, an amateur photographer, took her to see a W. Eugene Smith show, which included his images from Minamata, Japan, where people had been victims of mercury poisoning.

"I grew up with the Ansel Adams postcards and the Sierra Club stuff all over our house," she said. "Then my father took me to the Smith exhibit, where I saw ' The Walk to Paradise Garden.' My dad said: 'Yeah, that's a photo. But let me show you another one.' He showed me Tomoko in her bath. I just crumbled to my knees. It was the 'Pietà.' After that, photojournalism always meant something to me."

Though she thought she would be a journalist, she became an architect instead. She found herself drawn to making something rather than writing about something. Later, she went on to work as an art director on films, including "Introducing Dorothy Dandridge."

Then she saw something that changed her course.

She had been reading about the genocide in Darfur and was struck by a photo of a boy whose face had been smashed because of his ethnicity.

"I was holding my own son at the time and was simply horrified that this was going on while the world stood by," she recalled. "It was the middle of the night and I was so totally enraged that all I could do was write everyone I knew a letter asking them if they would join me in doing something. Anything."

She wondered why a photo was needed at all, given the topic. But then she thought again. Maybe photos could move people to take action. Maybe she would do a documentary. Maybe she could project the images on the sides of buildings, turning open space into an open-air gallery.

"I didn't know any photographers, I didn't have any money and I didn't know any film editors," she said. "Other than that, it was a natural fit."

She approached about 100 museums with the idea of the public projections. All turned her down, until the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles took her up in 2006. Over the next two years, the Darfur work was seen in dozens of venues, followed by a project on sexual violence against women in the Democratic Republic of Congo and another on child labor and human trafficking.

Working in the space between art and activism, Ms. Thomas says she has to carefully balance her approach and goals. She does not want to preach to the converted - the likely audience in a museum setting - but reach a wider audience who may not be up on the news. She provides information on the issues, so that people have a context and perhaps an idea what they can do to get involved.

Nor does she want viewers to feel overwhelmed, which is why she carefully selects images that outrage along with images that inspire.

"You have to hit it right," she said. "You have to show them something they can identify with. You want them to be angry. You want them to do something. You can't just shut them down. You have to give somebody something to fight for."

Her Afghanistan project - "Women Between Peace and War" - is timed to keep in the spotlight the challenges facing women there as the foreign military presence prepares to wind down. Featuring the work of Stephanie Sinclair and Ron Haviv, among others, it is organized around themes including health, education and political participation. The range is varied, both in subject and emotion; subjects include a young female boxer and an 11-year-old bride.

The book, which includes posters that can be hung in classrooms, is intended for schools, and her group has already been discussing its use in a human rights curriculum in Chicago, where Ms. Thomas lives (and still works as an architect). She aims for an initial press run of 500 copies.

Financing these ventures is not easy. Foundations that fund the arts are sometimes uncomfortable with her issue-oriented work, while human rights groups sometimes think that the images are too nice. Others ask her how she measures her group's impact.

"Humanitarian aid is easy to figure out," she said. "Advocacy is harder. You're trying to move people and policy, and that is like molasses. It takes a long time."

You have to be patient. You have to be O.K. with failure. And you have to find comfort where you can. Even if it's just in one person.

"You have to take solace in small moments, like changing an attitude, or somebody bothering to take the time to listen to someone's story."

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Leslie Thomas wants to shock you. She wants to anger you. And above all, she wants you to do something. She's not talking about run-of-the-mill, "Hey buddy, watch your step" angry or TMZ sleaze shock. She's talking about the great humanitarian and social crises of our time, like in Darfur, Afghanistan or Myanmar.

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An Rong Xu for The New York Times Credit

MONTCLAIR, N.J. - My routine is the same every morning: I wake up, pour a cup of coffee and write to the president - or occasionally, to another politician. This month, I'll mail my 450th postcard to Washington.

The house is quiet as I feverishly fill every bit of white space with suggestions and complaints. My husband sits across the table, holding the newspaper at an arm's length because he refuses to wear reading glasses.

Our opposite stances illustrate the way we approach the news: I dive in, consumed by news alerts and social media. My husband assesses the situation from a distance, joining the churn only once or twice a day. By the time he wraps his mind around a story, editorials have been written. Rallies have been organized. On the rare occasions he uses social media, he does it from our dog's account.

Nevertheless, I persist in engaging him in conversation about my postcards. I'll say, "Can you believe the killer legally bought 33 guns in 11 months/Kids are living in cages at the border/Trump joked about climate change again? "

"No," he says mildly, "I can't believe it."

"Seriously? That's all you've got?"

"It's awful. I don't know what else you want me to say." Then he gets up to put dinner in the slow cooker, leaving me to seethe alone.

It's not that my husband doesn't care. He cares deeply. He pays attention, donates and votes. I do these things too, but I also wake up in the middle of the night with rage prickling at my scalp. I grab the bullhorn at marches. I sign up to phone-bank. And I write postcards. As Margaret Atwood said, "A word after a word after a word is power."

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Some of the author's postcards to politicians. Credit... An Rong Xu for The New York Times

I've always been an enthusiastic correspondent. My grandfather and I exchanged weekly letters throughout my childhood. When my sister went to school in Dublin, the two of us spilled more secrets by aerogramme than we ever had when we were living under the same roof. I saved her letters; and later, ones from my then-boyfriend, now-husband, when we lived in different cities. They were 10-pagers, full of warmth, wit and plans. I still get a fluttery feeling when I see his handwriting on an envelope, even if it's just a utility bill.

So it seemed as though I was upholding a fine tradition when I wrote a month of Clinton-themed postcards to put in my younger daughter's lunch box in the lead-up to the 2016 election. The notes were meant to be a countdown to victory, each featuring a bit of trivia: Hillary's original middle name (Diane), her childhood vacation spot (Lake Winola in the Poconos). But when Donald Trump won (sort of), my cheeks burned over the time I'd wasted searching online for "Rodham family recipes" while his base was gathering steam.

Two days after the inauguration, 10 hours after I came home from the Women's March, I wrote my first postcard to an elected official - my senator, Cory Booker. I told him that I like to organize ("anything but bake sales") and that I wanted to help.

I showed the postcard to my husband, who said, "Do you really think he's going to give you an assignment?" This was not the encouragement I was looking for.

I said, "Be honest, do you have any idea what it feels like to be a woman right now?"

He said, "No, but I don't think Cory Booker does, either."

I decided to write one postcard a day for the first 100 days of the administration, and I created an Instagram account where I shared my "craftivism" (it's a thing). Within 48 hours, @100postcards had 200 followers. When I reminded my husband to follow me, he said, "Liz, I've been following you for 20 years."

The hundredth day came and went, and I kept writing. In the past two years, I've written postcards from hotel rooms, hospital rooms and the orthodontist's office. My kids have grown a combined height of one foot. My husband's hair turned gray. (Mine already was.)

The author at home writing her postcards. Credit... An Rong Xu for The New York Times

My motto for the postcards is, "Mostly respectful, but not always." I try to connect the dots between what's happening in the world and what's happening in my life - not because I'm self-centered, but because I think a leader should hear individual voices along with the chorus. I've told President Trump about my grandmother, an Irish immigrant who raised four children (all winners) and presided over our Easter lamb with hard-earned majesty. I told him about my dad's five-year battle with cancer, how I cannot imagine a family surviving such a crisis without health insurance.

Reading that last one, my husband said: "Wow. You really went there."

My eyes narrowed as I watched him spread our 10-year-old's socks across the dining room table and match them as if it was the most pressing matter in the world. I said, "Can I ask you a question?"

"Of course."

"Why don't you like my postcards?"

"I like them. I just ... don't get them." He closed his eyes - as in, Yes, we're going there. "I mean, what are you hoping to accomplish? "

That is a hard question to answer.

The White House has never responded to my postcards. But I believe they've been read by someone - my mail person, an intern, maybe even Sarah Huckabee Sanders. I also know my messages are being received on Instagram by almost 10,000 people, many of whom write to say they feel reassured by the community they find there. As the famous quote goes, "We read to know we are not alone."

My husband still doesn't love hot takes or rants, and he still isn't comfortable with the public nature of my revelations. He didn't think it was funny when I called the president a pig. (In my defense, this was after Mr. Trump called some immigrants "animals.")

But the two of us continue to come to the table every morning. Occasionally he'll glance up from the newspaper and try to guess whom I'm writing to; sometimes he's right. What matters is this: We both love words, we just deploy them differently. I'm glad to be married to someone who measures his, and my husband understands that writing is the way I blow off steam. Our life together is the best story I have to tell. So I keep telling it.

Elisabeth Egan is the author of "A Window Opens" and the chief correspondent at @100postcards.
The Times is committed to publishing Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Opinion | Pour Your Rage Into a Postcard to the President

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MONTCLAIR, N.J. - My routine is the same every morning: I wake up, pour a cup of coffee and write to the president - or occasionally, to another politician. This month, I'll mail my 450th postcard to Washington. The house is quiet as I feverishly fill every bit of white space with suggestions and complaints.

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"The reason I'm an artist," she once said, "is because it's a place where you can be totally free."

The artist May Stevens in her studio in SoHo in 1974. She was part of a generation of artists who saw art as an instrument of progressive politics and personal liberation. Credit... Joyce Ravid/Ryan Lee Gallery

May Stevens, a painter who for more than 60 years devoted her art to political causes like the civil rights, antiwar and feminist movements, died on Dec. 9 in Santa Fe, N.M. She was 95.

The Ryan Lee gallery, which represented her in New York, said the cause was Alzheimer's disease. She died at an assisted-living and memory-loss facility.

Ms. Stevens was part of a generation of activist artists that also included her husband, Rudolf Baranik, and their close friends Leon Golub and Nancy Spero. Through the rise of Minimalism and Conceptualism, these artists adhered to an older tradition of expressive painting, and to a belief in the value of art as an instrument of progressive politics and personal liberation.

"The reason I'm an artist," she said in an interview with the art historian Patricia Hills for the 2005 book "May Stevens," "is because it's a place where you can be totally free. No one is going to prevent me from doing political work when I want to, and no one is going to make me do it if I don't want to."

Ms. Stevens came from a working-class family, and she understood early that class as a shaping force often went unspoken of both in art history and in the liberation movements in which she would be immersed.

"When we think back to the past and our ancestry - historically where people have come from - we always think of the knights and ladies, and not necessarily those who tilled the soil and turned the earth, which is where most of us come from," she told Ms. Hills.

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Ms. Stevens's paintings and prints titled "Freedom Riders" (1963) were inspired by the civil rights activists who traveled the segregated South registering black voters. Credit... Ryan Lee Gallery

May Stevens was born in Dorchester, Mass., on June 9, 1924, and grew up in nearby Quincy, south of Boston. Her father, Ralph, worked as a pipe fitter in the Bethlehem Steel shipyards in Quincy. Her mother, Alice Dick Stevens, was a homemaker. Her younger brother, Stacey, died of pneumonia when Ms. Stevens was 17.

After graduating from the Massachusetts School of Art (now the Massachusetts College of Art and Design) in 1946, Ms. Stevens moved to New York City to study at the Art Students League. There she met Mr. Baranik, a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania; they married in 1948. The couple had one child, a son, Steven, also an artist, who died at 32 in 1981, a suicide.

Ms. Stevens's lifelong pattern of producing work in thematic series began in 1963 with a solo exhibition, at the Roko Gallery in Manhattan, of paintings and prints titled "Freedom Riders," inspired by the civil rights activists who traveled the segregated South registering black voters. Much of that work was based on images lifted from newspapers and television.

Her opposition to the war in Vietnam inspired her best-known body of paintings, the "Big Daddy" series. Its central image, of a grim, phallic-headed, white-skinned man, was based on an early portrait she had made of her politically conservative father, whom she described as pro-war, racist and misogynistic. Done in a crisp Pop style, his figure represents an attitude of hostility toward difference that she saw as embedded in patriarchal American culture.

Ms. Stevens's opposition to the war in Vietnam inspired her best-known body of paintings, the "Big Daddy" series. Credit... Justin T. Gellerson for The New York Times

Ms. Stevens became increasingly involved in the feminist movement in the 1970s. Along with several artists and writers - including Mary Beth Edelson, Harmony Hammond, Joyce Kozloff, Lucy Lippard, Mary Miss and Miriam Schapiro - she was a founder of the Heresies Collective, which published the influential journal Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, to which she contributed essays.

From 1976 to 1978 she produced a painting series titled "Ordinary/Extraordinary," which paired portraits of her Irish-American mother, whose spirit she felt had been crushed by marriage, with images of the Polish-German Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, who was killed for her social beliefs and whom Ms. Stevens referred to as her "spiritual mother."

Ms. Stevens said that her aim in this series was to erase the idea that one woman's public struggles were of greater value than another's private ones.

In her interview with Ms. Hills, she said of her depictions of her mother: "For me, she's not just a single person, because we all know this person. We all know her, and we may become her, as aging is a problem, as illness is a problem, as being a woman who does not fulfill herself is a problem."

In "Alice in the Garden" (1988-89), Ms. Stevens depicted her elderly mother alone, afflicted with dementia and confined to a nursing home - as Ms. Stevens herself would eventually be. Credit... Ryan Lee Gallery

In "Alice in the Garden," a later five-panel painting that suggests a secular altarpiece, she depicted her elderly mother alone, afflicted with dementia and confined to a nursing home - as Ms. Stevens herself would eventually be.

Her late works, from the 1990s and early 2000s, were done after Mr. Baranik's death in 1998. Her last major body of work consists mostly of seascapes and river scenes, with no figures but with quotations from female writers woven into the natural panorama and images of disembodied hands pouring ashes into flowing water.

In 1999, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, had a retrospective of Ms. Stevens's work, the first it had ever devoted to a living woman artist. In 2006, she was the subject of a solo exhibition that opened at the Minneapolis Institute of Art and that traveled to the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington.

Two of her "Big Daddy" paintings are featured in the current reinstallation of the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection galleries. Another from the series is in the traveling exhibition "Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965-1975," organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and on view at the Minneapolis Institute through Jan. 5. A show of her Rosa Luxemburg series recently closed at Ryan Lee.

Ms. Stevens in front of one of her "Big Daddy" paintings in about 1976. Credit... Dana Michener, via Ryan Lee Gallery

Before her move to New Mexico with Mr. Baranik in 1996, Ms. Stevens taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York for 35 years. In 2001, she was the recipient of the College Art Association' s Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement.

She leaves no immediate survivors.

Ms. Stevens once said of her lifetime of art and activism: "The idea was to make your own life by taking action and going beyond ordinary existence. Just earning a living, not living a mental life, and not trying to change things was a life that was frightening to me. You become human only when you make this great struggle for realizing your life and making it count."

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May Stevens, Who Turned Activism Into Art, Is Dead at 95

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"The reason I'm an artist," she once said, "is because it's a place where you can be totally free." May Stevens, a painter who for more than 60 years devoted her art to political causes like the civil rights, antiwar and feminist movements, died on Dec. 9 in Santa Fe, N.M.

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A beginner's guide to the new wave of feminist activist art
13/05/16, 12:15 AM
'Bindi', acrylic on canvas, by Maria Qamar, aka HateCopy. Photo: Hate Copy Instagram

There are few conversations as snooze-inducing as the one that insists great artists are always white, male geniuses. The fact that the art world, an arena that owes its lifeblood to originality and creative expression, can be about as inclusive as a board meeting has nothing to do with merit and everything to do with a system whose institutions and valuing mechanisms are often invested in maintaining the status quo.

But from Fluxus, a '60s collective whose performances often revolved around the female body (Yoko Ono was an early member) to Henry Darger, a self-taught painter and janitor whose intricate murals paved the way for the likes of Grayson Perry, some of history's most interesting artists worked outside the traditions of race, gender and class.

Although you won't catch art's new wave of change-makers inviting strangers to snip off their clothing or confining themselves to their apartments, these four creators are re-imagining art world activism for a new generation - with powerful results.

Thought-provoking works by feminist artists that put it to the patriarchy and challenge the status quo.

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Andrea Bowers champions the women corporate feminism forgets. In February this year, the Los Angeles-based artist - whose defining pieces include 2010's No Olvidado (Not Forgotten), a 96-foot long drawing that stamped the names of people who died crossing the Mexican/US border over a ghost-like fence - launched 'Whose Feminism Is it Anyway?', a show that features arresting portraits of trans women of colour at Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York.

"I was saddened by the amount of transphobia I was hearing from so many so-called feminists and believe that my liberation is linked to the liberation of trans women," says Bowers, whose portraits adorn trans activists such as Jennicet Gutierrez, Johanna Saavedra and CeCe MacDonald (who embraced activism after she was assaulted in a men's prison) with the symbols of political struggle, such as guns, ribbons and bricks.

"Trans women of colour face devastating amounts of violence and are fighting for gender emancipation, living wages, the end of the Prison Industrial Complex and an immigration policy that criminalises communities of colour," she says. "I wanted to re-insert them into a feminist activist history [from which they are] entirely absent and honour them for their actions and not just their appearances."

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Visibility is a serious issue for female artists. According to a May 2015 report in Art News, women accounted for just 29 per cent of solo shows at the Whitney Museum since 2007 and London's Tate Modern has only dedicated 14 per cent of its exhibitions to female artists in the same period. Enter Girls Only.

Dreamt up two years ago by curator Antonia Marsh, this art collective puts on residencies and exhibitions that offer female artists a platform for showing their work, along with support and solidarity to help them realise their artistic ambitions. So far, the collective, which has collaborated with artists and photographers such as Kate Falcone and Indigo Lewin, has shows in London, New York, Copenhagen and Mumbai and staged a secret exhibition (featuring photography, drawing and sculpture as well as dildos and dick pics) at Art Basel.

"Everyone knows there's a disparity in the art world," said Marsh in a January 2015 interview with Dazed. "The project doesn't come out of any sort of anger towards patriarchy in the art world, which, of course, I maintain. I don't think that there are enough opportunities for females in the arts, so all I can really do is try and make some."
Kimberley Drew, aka Museum Mammy
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Heard of Tony Whitfield, Renée Green or Sondra Perry? If not, you may want to follow Kimberley Drew.

The 25-year-old internet activist, who's also the online community producer for New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, is the force behind @MuseumMammy and the Black Contemporary Art Tumblr - spaces that double as digital museums intent on highlighting the black contemporary artists overlooked by major institutions and providing a corrective to a canon that's blindingly white.

Drew - who counts over 97,000 Instagram followers and posts drawings, paintings, installations and photography by artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kara Walker and Carla Williams - started her projects after realising that the version of art history she was taught in college omitted the ways in which black creators have shaped the trajectory of contemporary art.

"I didn't realise how overwhelmingly white art history was because I never equated art with whiteness," Drew says in a November 2015 interview with Lenny. "I come from a family of people who are very creative, and creativity was this thing that was totally open-access. Art was always around, and whenever the family would gather, we went to museums. I never felt uncomfortable in a gallery space, but it's great to hear from people who do feel that way so I can try to figure out how to create better spaces for [them]."

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Gossiping aunties. Overzealous parenting. Whitening cream. If you're a member of the South Asian diaspora, chances are that you'll connect with Maria Qamar (who goes by the moniker HateCopy), a 25-year-old Pakistani-Canadian artist whose pictures, distributed via Instagram, are a slyly subversive commentary on the experience of growing up between cultures via images made famous by the pop artist Roy Liechtenstein.

Qamar, whose work has been profiled by the BBC, Buzzfeed and Vogue India, is fast gaining an international profile and started making art after losing her day job in advertising last year. "I think it's exciting that women of colour are using social media to share their artwork," she says in a March 2016 cover story in Elle Canada. "I hope one day we'll have our own galleries - instead of trying to jam our work into galleries that won't take us."

21 striking displays of feminist art activism

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A beginner's guide to the new wave of feminist activist art

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13/05/16, 12:15 AM 'Bindi', acrylic on canvas, by Maria Qamar, aka HateCopy. Photo: Hate Copy Instagram There are few conversations as snooze-inducing as the one that insists great artists are always white, male geniuses.

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Tori Amos. Occupation Musician. Age 56 Status Married. Best known for Her 1992 album, Little Earthquakes. Currently Publicising her new book, Resistance.

Tori Amos: "People who trust the artistic process aren't afraid of sharing what they've learnt."

My maternal grandfather, Poppa, lived in Newton, a town in North Carolina so small the train didn't stop there. He worked at the hosiery mills, but didn't let that define him. He was a storyteller and could weave a tale about anything. We'd take a walk and a mound of dirt would become a whale. He had a wonderful tenor voice and sang to me as a child. He recognised my musical abilities first. I wonder if I didn't receive those from him.

Poppa was very influenced by his grandmother, who was Native American and had been an indentured servant to a white man. That's where his feminism came from.

Poppa and Nanny saved hard to send my mum, Mary, to college. They wanted her to have a life of freedom, rich with intelligence. But when Mum fell for my father, Ed, she put all that aside. Hence, Poppa and Nanny didn't attend their wedding during Mom's freshman year. The benefit was that Mum put everything into me.

My paternal grandmother, Addie, was a teacher and a missionary. Her philosophy was, "You give your soul to God and your body to your husband." At five years old, I said, "And what is left for me, Grandma?" I got in big trouble for that. But Poppa defended my view: "Don't interfere with my education of little Myra Ellen [Tori's birth name]." They would listen to Poppa, because you just did.

Poppa died when I was nine. He was my best friend. I went to his grave and cried daily because I couldn't hear the stories any more.

My father, who's now 91, was a reverend at the Rockville United Methodist Church in Maryland. He was tenacious and stood up for what he believed in, like when he went to a record company, pounded his Bible and told them they were cheating me.

I won a scholarship to the Peabody Conservatory at the age of five. My father envisaged that I'd be on the concert stage in my teens. But when I was kicked out for rebelliousness at 11, he couldn't accept my failure. So at 13 he drove us to Georgetown, in Washington DC, to find a smaller platform where I could perform.

A gay bar was the only place in Georgetown that accepted me. My father, in his clerical collar, would watch while I played upright piano. He copped a lot of flak from the church. My older sister, Marie, believes this hurt his career.

I discovered Robert Plant, Led Zeppelin's lead singer, when I was eight. I was a bit sweet on John Lennon, too. The truth was that I wanted to be a performer; I wanted to inhabit that space. That voltage.

I was voted homecoming queen at high school. Some classmates like Jeff Black, who later became an IT gazillionaire, leveraged the nerd vote. I'm not delusional - I was never the cutest egg in the hen house.

When I played in bars, I dealt with lots of lubricated men: they changed songs to disgusting things, spilled beer on the piano and on me, then tried to wipe it off. If one made a request, I'd disarm him with, "Does your daughter have a favourite song?"

I met my husband, sound engineer Mark Hawley, in 1994. He'd been hired by my tour manager because he said he could make me sound better, and he did. I was in another relationship at that time, and Mark had his own life. But friends said, "You're crazy about this quiet British person." So I bought him a cup of tea and then we went on a date. We've been together since.

English author Neil Gaiman is godfather to our 19-year-old daughter, Natashya. We became buddies after he heard my song Tear in Your Hand, from my debut album Little Earthquakes. While writing it, I'd been introduced to his Sandman comic-book series and couldn't put them down. I referenced Neil in that song's lyrics. Neil has been very supportive of me. People who trust the artistic process aren't afraid of sharing what they've learnt.

My book, Resistance, is about standing up to oppressive and damaging men. I've known women who have talked themselves into relationships with these types of men. I don't understand why. Maybe it's because they didn't have a Poppa.
Resistance (Hachette) by Tori Amos is on sale now. This article appears in Sunday Life magazine within the Sun-Herald and the Sunday Age on sale June 28.

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Tori Amos: 'My book is about standing up to oppressive and damaging men'

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Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size Tori Amos. Occupation Musician. Age 56 Status Married. Best known for Her 1992 album, Little Earthquakes. Currently Publicising her new book, Resistance. My maternal grandfather, Poppa, lived in Newton, a town in North Carolina so small the train didn't stop there.

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Forrest Neander's paintings are styled by weaving colors and textures, acrylic on canvas. His brushes of choice are his very own hands, dipped in paint to create sweeping abstracts. Forrest's mother, Julia Neander, says painting is Forrest's way of expressing himself as a person with disabilities who communicates nonverbally.

"Art makes me feel happy, and I like to share my art with others," said Forrest, who is no stranger to the arts scene. His most recent showing was at an exhibit in Shoreline titled "Coming Home," arranged by a local youth-led initiative called Student Art Spaces.

Founded in 2018 by two high school students, the Seattle-grown organization's mission is to "amplify student voices in art through gallery exhibitions and events." At its center, SAS is about equity for young people and making the art world accessible to young people, especially young people whose identities have been consistently marginalized and sidelined.

"Artwork for people with disabilities is a whole other underserved population," Julia Neander said of the various needs.

Forrest has been painting since 2011 and has sold multiple paintings, but it's still not easy to break into the arts scene. Julia sees the pivot to move online in covid as a time of transition for the arts - something SAS has done increasingly well. When an effort such as SAS purposefully looks to bring in all kinds of young artists, it changes who has access and is then visible to the world.

"You'd never imagine that people with different abilities could be so creative and make something so wonderful," Julia said of the many people with disabilities who express themselves with art. If it weren't for the exclusivity of museums and gallery spaces, this would not be a surprise.

Disparity and tokenization

Taylor Wang and Alice Mao founded SAS in 2018 in Issaquah, springing to action when they saw an art world where artists, curators and decision makers at art institutions around the country were overwhelmingly white. Wang found that disparities existed in every aspect of the art space. A 2019 study, which surveyed 18 museums, found that men accounted for 87.4 percent of their artists. When it came to race and ethnicity, the disparity was also striking; 85 percent of the artists were white, 9 percent were Asian, 2.8 percent Latinx, 1.2 percent Black and 1.5 percent other.

Statistics on the numbers of professional artists who are people with disabilities are hard to come by. A report by the National Endowment for the Arts, Art Works and the National Disability Center noted that disabled communities in the art world were often an "afterthought" when it came to diversity in the field.

As for ageism, even when young talent is recognized, youth artists become a "placeholder" of sorts. SAS founder Taylor Wang has been in this position before, where the excitement of being a young person in a room full of seasoned professionals slowly wears away.

"Then you find out you are just there for the token points, like being the only representation for the entire generation," Wang said of the way tokenization strips young people of agency and the right to represent themselves. The SAS mission is to reclaim agency, Wang said, "making sure youth don't feel tokenized in these spaces and that their voices are actually being heard and taken into account."

SAS has turned out to be sustainable, replicable and adaptable to a shifting world. It has managed to create a nationwide and increasingly worldwide network of young artists and activists, which is only growing in an online-centered covid world. There are currently 21 chapters, most of them in the U.S., but with more opening up around the world in Australia, Canada, India and Qatar. Collectively, they have showcased over 200 artists and reached more than 500 people.
Transforming the art space
Wang has loved creating visual art since she was a child, but she struggled to see people who looked like her receiving recognition in the gatekept world of galleries and shows. "I didn't see anyone I could look up to in the art world necessarily, especially [no] Asian females who are doing art and actually making a living off of it - being exhibited at museums and galleries," she said.

This access barrier wasn't just imposed from the outside through arts institutions.

In Wang's Chinese and immigrant community, she received messages that art was not a real profession, and that being a doctor or lawyer - as cliché as this sounds - was the right way to go.

Only after Wang started to get involved with youth arts initiatives at the Bellevue Art Museum and Seattle Art Museum could she glimpse a future where art was more than a hobby. The game changer was being able to exhibit her art in gallery spaces: the art world's public stage.

"For me, exhibiting and being able to showcase my work in these amazing places, like Seattle Art Museum and Bellevue Art Museum, it kind of gave me a confidence boost," she said.

The main platform for artists to gain recognition is through gallery shows, and the process to get there is competitive and expensive, leading to the age-old perception that a creative career is only for people who can afford it. In one recent transaction, Wang spent $200 framing works of her art and shipping them to a gallery.

"I was wondering how many people have not had this experience because they couldn't afford the entry fee or they feel like the space isn't meant for people like [them]," Wang said.

"SAS was really about derailing that sentiment and instead replacing it with 'art is for everyone.' No matter what background you are from, you can definitely pursue art professionally or as a hobby - whatever you can see yourself making art as."

Whether or not art as a profession is accessible to someone who is not white, male or able, within the narrow labels society pins on people, is perpetuated by many things: paywalls, lack of representation and institutional expectations that privilege certain types of content. The themes present in institutional galleries are Eurocentric. Also, Wang points out how often women are objectified in artistic renderings, often by male artists.

SAS directly challenges that myopic vision of "art." SAS shows represent a variety of individuals and their identities and grapple with the socio-political issues that are important to Gen Z today.

Their first gallery show, titled "The Modern Youth Identity," took place from Aug. 31 to Sept. 2, 2019, and attracted over 200 people - with artwork from around the country and the world. Mao and Wang raised $4,000 to cover the costs of shipping and framing all the artists' work. The themes that emerged during the show focused on the realities young people face today, with a majority of participants being young, female-identified, queer, Black and Indigenous people of color. The exhibit grappled with school shootings, gun violence, climate change, mental health and media use - all widespread, politically heavy issues that weigh on the personal lives of young adults today.

For these artists, the work isn't just about aesthetic beauty or even individualized self-expression. It's much more than that. When young people are given a platform to showcase their reading of the world through their own artistic expression, the result is activism and education that reaches across generational divides.

Their first exhibit, "The Modern Youth Identity," was housed in an art school. Many visitors were adults in their 50s and 60s who had experienced their formative years in a very different time.

"So we had this really great intergenerational learning going on where they were able to take something away from the art that would not have been possible through just reading a CNN article," said Wang. "It was really great to see these themes not just reflect in the work but how they are impacting others to just change their mindsets, change their actions even, and really translate into the real world, which is honestly a huge part of what art can do." Wang says the connections built across generations and perspectives and the potential they had to change people's worldview has remained at the core of SAS projects.
Creating online communities in a COVID world
As this past summer saw an uproar against police brutality and the Black Lives Matter protests have become the largest movement in U.S. history, SAS has pivoted to support the cause for antiracism. Groups around the country have come up with different fundraising ideas, and Wang is heartened to see how chapters rallied to raise funds for the BLM movement by selling original artwork.

"I saw this recurring theme that youth are trying their best to engage with these heavy-hitting topics - whether it is mental health or even just violence on a very real racial level [and] sexism, misogyny - which we felt weren't being talked about enough in galleries, museums," said Wang.

SAS defies the institutional barriers that allow for gatekeeping: competition and the strict standards of what is considered professional art.

The youth-led initiative is not only a space for young artists to show off work; young people are the decision makers and have choice at every step of the process.

They approach curation and gallery creation from a more collaborative mindset than the traditional hierarchy in art and cultural institutions. Young people get hands-on experience organizing a show and curating alongside having their own art featured. While they certainly don't do this alone, partnering with local arts and equity groups, they create and execute the roadmap from start to finish.

The young leaders are turning to online platforms to build exhibiting and performing spaces online. SAS Canada and SAS New York City organized separate virtual open mic nights in July.

Student Art Spaces also launched an online, teen-curated zine called "Art during a pandemic" that was recently nominated for the UN Sustainable Development Goals Solidarity in Action Awards, which seeks "creative, scalable and transformative initiatives worldwide that mobilize and inspire."

Wang is clear that SAS should remain a youth-based movement incorporating high school- and college-aged young adults. Passing on the torch will then become paramount to the initiative's mission. "We are looking at ways to transition because once we get older, we want to be able to give this platform and kind of pass it on to a new generation of artists," she said.

Student Art Spaces is continuing to organize online as the world shifts to prevent COVID, but the flagship Seattle chapter is planning a gallery show in Bellevue this upcoming fall. While sharing artwork online has the opportunity for connection during a time of physical distancing, nothing quite beats the exhilaration and experience of seeing a piece of art in person, especially if it is your own.

"It's really a make-or-break thing," Wang said. "These exhibitions can really give young artists a confidence boost. Without it, they might not even be going down that path."
Kamna Shastri is a staff reporter covering narrative and investigative stories for Real Change. She has a background in community journalism. Contact her at kamna@realchangenews.org. Twitter: @KShastri2
Read more in the Aug. 19-25, 2020 issue.

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Forrest Neander's paintings are styled by weaving colors and textures, acrylic on canvas. His brushes of choice are his very own hands, dipped in paint to create sweeping abstracts. Forrest's mother, Julia Neander, says painting is Forrest's way of expressing himself as a person with disabilities who communicates nonverbally.

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When politics are brought up, it invokes a series of reactions. Some may jump at the term, desperate for any chance to share their bona fide beliefs. Others will recoil, either because of their discomfort in disclosing their political dispositions or embarrassment at their ignorance of the topic. Politics can ruin friendships, first dates and Thanksgiving dinners - particularly now, at a time during which one's politics has seemingly become the defining pillar of their character. In this polarized state that too often turns ugly, it may seem ridiculous to try and find any beauty in the chaos.

Yet, that it is exactly what many have set out to do. To people of all ages and backgrounds, the tumultuous country they have found themselves living in is not one where they feel defeated, but rather compelled to fight on. With every shocking decision and revolting remark, there is a new protest, a new fundraiser, a new movement looking to help anyone that may need it. In the darkness of prejudice and intolerance comes the fire of activism, and there is no better way to express such passion than through the universal medium of art.

The Center for Artistic Activism, based in New York City, defines artistic activism as "a dynamic practice combining the creative power of the arts to move us emotionally with the strategic planning of activism necessary to bring about social change." Simply put, this form of art is meant to make the viewer feel something powerful; to make them want to promote change. In 2014, during a seemingly unending string of mass shootings, artist Michael Murphy created an installation of toy guns shaped as the United States. During the Women's March, news sources hung onto pictures of hand-woven pussy hats and personally made signs. These images provoked thought, hope and a desire to make the future different.

Amplifier is a design lab based in Seattle. Its specialty is activist art and its mission is to "flip artists into activists, and observers into participants," according to its website. While you may not have heard of Amplifier, you have definitely seen the work of its artists. The now-iconic image of a woman wearing an American flag hijab was a part of Amplifier's "We The People" campaign, which its website describes as "a nonpartisan campaign dedicated to igniting a national dialogue about American identity and values through public art and story sharing."

In an email interview with The Daily, Deputy Director of Amplifier, Cleo Barnett explained the "We The Future" campaign as a way of "moving energy and ideas from our streets into our classrooms."

Following the success and impact of "We The People", Amplifier has moved on to a new project: supplementing education with art. The organization's latest campaign, titled "We The Future", looks to replace traditional classroom posters and resources with ones made by more diverse and activist-minded artists. Young leaders from various social movements including gun control, climate protection, immigration and voting rights are being represented through art and stories to inspire the next generation of activists. The hope is that by seeing activists that more closely align with themselves, rather than old, white presidents or an outdated propaganda poster, students will in turn feel an internalized need to participate.

Barnett reiterated the goals of Amplifier as a way to ignite creativity and promote representation.

"Our goal is to reclaim and rebuild an American identity rooted in equality, dignity, diversity, truth and beauty," Barnett wrote, "For young people who are not used to seeing themselves in history books or on the walls of classrooms, what Amplifier and its partners are distributing is more than art."

Bayeté Ross Smith is a multimedia artist, filmmaker and educator who has previously done work with Amplifier. As a photographer, his work often falls under the category of turning observers into participants.

"Far too often people will take a very surface approach to (social issues) and won't dig deeper," he said in a phone interview with The Daily. "That often means that we're not getting involved in constructive and productive exchanges of ideas. ... You see the work I do and you have a certain reaction to it, my hope is one will question why they had that reaction, the validity of that reaction and why their reaction was different from someone else's."

When it comes to viewing art, the way one receives and is impacted by a piece comes down to perspective.

"I think one's personal foundation is always the foundation for the lense through which they see the world," Smith said. "If we were all sitting in the same room and we were to photograph it, all of our photographs would look a bit different. They'll all technically be truthful, but they'll still be vastly different. You can see the same thing from different perspectives and see various forms of truth, it's just important to be aware of how our perspectives impact us."

Using art as a form of activism is not an exclusively contemporary concept. For decades, the voices of the oppressed are most strongly shown in the literature and artwork they create. This creativity has filtered through generations, impacting the modernized form of various historical movements and weaving itself into the public sphere. A controversial example of this is Beyoncé's use of the style of the Black Panther Party in her 2017 Super Bowl Halftime show to support to the Black Lives Matter movement and the issues facing the Black community. Much of the Black Panther Party's image and protest was projected in its style, as it challenged conventional looks of the time. Their daring artistry has stood the test of time, as has the legacy of a magnitude of social movements from American history.

On the special collections floor of the Hatcher Graduate Library, the Labadie Collection is housed in hidden stacks. An anthology of pamphlets, posters, buttons, newspapers and other materials from activist movements dating back to the early 20th century, the collection has been a part of University archives since 1911. It was donated by Joseph Labadie, a Mich. native who was active in the anarchist and labor movements of the late 1800s.

Julie Herrada has been the curator of the Labadie Collection since 2000. Before that, she was assistant curator for six years. She says while the collection still gathers modern anarchist and labor literature, it has grown into a selection of a variety of activist materials from around the United States and the world.

"The original donation from Joseph Labadie was early-19th-century materials on labor movements, socialist and anarchist movements, then with each curator it grew in size to include those contemporary movements of the day," Herrada said in an interview with The Daily. "Whatever was happening within the time period of the curator, they could start collecting that and adding so the collection included all forms of social protest and all countries, so it has an international scope as well."

The existence of the Labadie Collection, and particularly its earlier pieces, makes for a vital comparison of activist art from over a century ago to an image created today. While the anarchist and labor movements that started the collection may now seem dormant, that does not diminish its importance.

"I think it's important for people who are in college now to know that these the movements had relevance and were important in their time and how people spread the word about those messages," Herrada explained. "You can look at something online and you will really not get the same feeling about it as if you're holding it in your hands. Maybe hundreds of people held it in their hands and maybe the first person who held it in their hands was the person who created it. It gives you a sense of excitement about connecting to the past."

Connections to the past are exactly what viewers of the Labadie Collection are looking for. Herrada said the collection is often visited by classes at the University - three had observed the pieces just on the one day we held our interview - and students and professors alike generally have the same response.

"When they are reading some of the documents from 50 years ago they see how relevant the content is to today," Herrada noted. "It's something that could've been written yesterday, as opposed to 50 years ago, and I always see them kind of surprised by that. We've come so far in our society but yet we are still arguing about these same things."

Whether it is the advancement of labor rights, the recognition of transgender individuals or the continuation of the fight for civil rights, the United States has experienced expansive social crusades for centuries. Though the outright goal of these activists may differ, their core values remain the same throughout movements. Be it laborers campaigning for fair treatment and working conditions or the LGBT community demanding basic human rights, activism grows out of admitting something is wrong and unjust and demanding to live your life - while inspiring others to do the same - in any way that can make a difference.

So many people brush aside social issues because they have heard about it but don't know enough or they think someone else is taking care of it. Art has the power to change this indifference. It transcends language and backgrounds to reach people in a way that transforms the problem into something tangible, something that applies to them. Unlike speeches, news reports and monotonous facts, art conjures emotions and thoughtfulness. As Smith said, "You now feel in your heart that responding to this event or occurrence or dynamic in the world is an important and relevant part of your daily life. Art takes things that we may be able to intellectualize, and makes them actively relevant to our daily experiences in a provocative and compelling way."

According to Amplifier's Deputy Director, Cleo Barnett, "Art is more than beauty or decoration: It is a weapon and a shield. Art has the power to wake people up and serve as a catalyst for real change. It is a megaphone for important but unheard voices that need amplifying. It is a bridge that can unite movements with shared values in ways other mediums cannot. Art gives us symbols to gather around, builds community, and helps us feel like we are not alone."

To learn more about the work of Amplifier, Cleo Barnett or Bayeté Ross Smith visit amplifier.org and bayeterosssmith.com.

The Labadie Collection may be viewed by request on the sixth floor of the Hatcher Graduate Library.

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Show me what democracy looks like: The intersection of art and activism

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When politics are brought up, it invokes a series of reactions. Some may jump at the term, desperate for any chance to share their bona fide beliefs. Others will recoil, either because of their discomfort in disclosing their political dispositions or embarrassment at their ignorance of the topic.

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Feminists Take Over Federal Building in Mexico City and Use Painting as a Weapon

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Feminists Take Over Federal Building in Mexico City and Use Painting as a Weapon

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In protest of femicide, the artists painted over portraits of all-male historical figures hanging in the National Human Rights Commission.

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Artist Bisa Butler paints with fabric. Through stunning contemporary quilts, she crafts life-sized historical portraits of Black men, women, and children whose stories may have been forgotten or completely overlooked.

Using a variety of fabrics, Butler employs a painterly approach to how she produces her work. She layers fabrics as a painter would layer pigment and pieces each element together-down to the highlight on a nose or the shading on a lower lip. This meticulous part of her artistic practice can take about 200 hours, as some of the quilts are 88 inches long. Once everything is pieced together, Butler uses a long arm quilting machine to stitch it in place.

In creating her monumental quilt art, Butler is bringing history to light. "My community has been marginalized for hundreds of years," she writes in her artist statement. "While we have been right beside our white counterparts experiencing and creating history, our contributions and perspectives have been ignored, unrecorded, and lost. It is only a few years ago that it was acknowledged that the White House was built by slaves. Right there in the seat of power of our country African Americans were creating and contributing while their names were lost to history.

"My subjects are African Americans from ordinary walks of life who may have sat for a formal family portrait or may have been documented by a passing photographer," she explains. "Like the builders of the White House, they have no names or captions to tell us who they were."

Butler is both fascinated by and feels connected to the folks she depicts. "I feel these people; I know these stories because I have grown up with them my whole life," she explains, having listened to her elders and heard about their struggles as well as their unconditional love of family.

Though represented in colorful patterned fabrics, the portraits highlight the quiet dignity of her subjects as the figures engage with viewers by looking them in the eye. "I am inviting a reimagining and a contemporary dialogue about age-old issues, still problematic in our culture, through the comforting, embracing medium of the quilt. I am expressing what I believe is the equal value of all humans."

Artists Bisa Butler paints with fabric to create powerful portraits of Black men, women, and children whose stories are often overlooked by history.

My Modern Met granted permission to feature photos by Bisa Butler.

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Quilted Portraits Honor the Stories of Black Men and Women Who Are Forgotten by History

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Artist Bisa Butler paints with fabric. Through stunning contemporary quilts, she crafts life-sized historical portraits of Black men, women, and children whose stories may have been forgotten or completely overlooked. Using a variety of fabrics, Butler employs a painterly approach to how she produces her work.

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I grew up in Santa Cruz, a then-sleepy beach town in Northern California that had a severe hippie hangover well into the 1970s and '80s. The soundtrack of the 1960s was omnipresent, as were reminders of Vietnam. I clearly recall the father of my best friend in third grade; he had lost a leg fighting in the war. It was a normalcy to hear and see such things, making the protest music of the decades before a relevant score to the landscape around me.

As an educator, I have often asked my college-age students what songs or artists they think are making the same sort of timely yet timeless songs. I always start off by playing them songs from Rage Against the Machine's debut album, which, to this day, gives me the chills and brings tears to my eyes as not much has changed since I was 18 years old and working with the band. Arguably, many things have gotten quite worst. So I recently revisited some of the key songs and albums that shaped my own formative years. I found many of them heart-breaking in that the messages within the melodic tracks could be written today. It was uplifting, though, to know or at least hope that such beautiful pieces of art may still, in the words of Sam Cooke, inspire a change to come.

"A Change Is Gonna Come" by Sam Cooke (1964)

A couple years ago, I showed a video of this to my college students. The film footage was entirely from the Obama campaign in the U.S. It was insanely uplifting and hopeful. Yet taking the same song and putting it in 2020 context, one is hard-pressed to see if any real progress had been made, or if we are just re-treading the past in a variety of new ways. Cooke famously wrote the song after he and his crew were turned away at a whites-only motel in Louisiana. One of the amazing things about this classic is how any small triumph can be interpreted as Cooke's "change" finally arriving, be it in perhaps in more diminutive steps than could be hoped for. However, tragedies such as George Floyd's murder give Cooke's ode an even more alarming meaning, as we are still "back down" on our "knees," still praying, still hoping:

Oh, when I go to my brother
I'd say brother, help me, please
But he winds up knockin' me
Back down on my knees.

There been times that I thought I wouldn't last for long
Now I think I'm able to carry on
It's been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change's gonna come, oh, yes, it will.

"Mississippi Goddamn" by Nina Simone (1964)

The raw urgency in this song makes it no surprise that Simone penned it from start to finish in less than an hour. Recorded at the Carnegie Hall in front of a largely white audience, the song is Simone's enraged reaction to both the assisination of American Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers and the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, which killed four Black children in Birmingham, Alabama. The song's swinging boom-ba, boom-ba structure may be deceivingly upbeat until Simone's tangible anger crashes down on even the most passive listener. The call and response bridge, reeling off the various horrible stereotypes of Black Americans and the "too slow" correcting of injustices is disturbingly current:

Me and my people just about due
I've been there so I know
They keep on saying, "Go slow!

But that's just the trouble, "Do it slow"
Washing the windows, "Do it slow"
Picking the cotton, "Do it slow"
You're just plain rotten, "Do it slow"
You're too damn lazy ...

"Maggie's Farm" by Bob Dylan (1965)

My literary agent recently told me that hearing this song at a key moment in his life - he was waiting tables and praying for a break in the publishing world - gave him the proverbial gumption to follow his dreams. I love this anecdote, as it captures the insane impact that hearing a certain song at a specific time can have. But I also find it extremely sad, as the "Farm" that Dylan rails against could be the framework for any sort of normative culture we find ourselves in:

I got a head full of ideas
That are drivin' me insane.

At the time of release, Dylan was already being hailed as a key figure in counterculture; this makes the message of "farm" that much more chilling, as the pressing forces of societal hegemony seems to always move what has meaning to make change into a consumerable good with little to none of its original connotations. Seeing an array of Kurt Cobain T-shirts at H&M or a Joy Division hoodie at Primark offers a toothless reminder of the impossibility of successfully walking the line of art and commerce while affecting long term results.

"For What It's Worth" by Buffalo Springfield (1966)

This was one of my favorite songs as a child. I obviously had no idea what it was about. Going back and taking a close listen to it as an adult is terrifying, as the words could have been penned in the last three months. Though often touted as an anti-war song, the track was written by lead songwriter Stephen Stills in response to the Sunset Strip curfew riots which happened in November 1966. Buffalo Springfield had been recently installed at the legendary strip music venue Whisky A Go Go as the house band. However, other local residents and businesses hated the emerging late-night youth culture going to clubs along the strip and lobbied for a strict 10 p.m. curfew on the road. A massive demonstration was arranged for November 12, which began peacefully but ended in unrest with attendee Peter Fonda being handcuffed by police. Some clubs were eventually forced to shut due to the unrest in the area, but, in time, the after-hours nature of the area became not only tolerated, but celebrated.

Looking at lyrics are mind-blowing, as they read perfectly for capturing that moment 50 years ago while still being completely current:

There's battle lines being drawn
Nobody's right if everybody's wrong
Young people speaking their minds
Getting so much resistance from behind.

"Respect" by Aretha Franklin (1967)

Originally written and performed by Otis Redding, Franklin's changes to his lyrics and structure transform this into a timeless anthem. Maybe not a "protest" song in the traditional sense and more a declaration of worth, "Respect" earned Franklin two Grammy Awards and provided generations of women with the musical motivation to love themselves. In a time of #MeToo, the erosion of women's reproductive rights in the U.S., and what the Independent calls a "bulletproof" glass ceiling for women in promotion and pay, we should all be demanding "our propers," as Franklin belts out, for our hard grind.

I'm about to give you all of my money
And all I'm askin' in return, honey
Is to give me my propers when you get home

I'm about to give you all of my money
And all I'm askin' in return, honey
Is to give me my propers when you get home

"Say It Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud" by James Brown (1968)

This huge song by the Godfather of Soul will have anyone of any creed singing along and loudly proclaiming the magnificent chorus. Written by Brown with saxophonist and bandleader Alfred Ellis, the anthem is a rallying cry for Black empowerment:

I've worked on jobs with my feet and my hands
But all the work I did was for the other man
And now we demands a chance to do things for ourselves
We tired of beatin' our head against the wall
And workin' for someone else.

Brown drafted in 30 kids from the Watts and Compton neighborhoods of Los Angeles to add extra punch to the call-and-response portion of the track. As he demands, "Say it loud!" the kids counter, "I'm Black and I'm proud!"

Don't miss a beat!

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6 Protest Songs From the 1960s We Should Listen to Today | Discogs

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I grew up in Santa Cruz, a then-sleepy beach town in Northern California that had a severe hippie hangover well into the 1970s and '80s. The soundtrack of the 1960s was omnipresent, as were reminders of Vietnam. I clearly recall the father of my best friend in third grade; he had lost a leg fighting in the war.

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Intentional violence against the sanctity of the female body.

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Intentional violence against the sanctity of the female body.

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A recent resurgence of punk-powered feminism - or is that girl-powered punk? - raises the question: What was, or is, riot grrrl? A movement, a genre, an era, a scene?

The spelling itself is disputed: some OGs (original grrrls) argue two rs, others three; some just say girl. The term originated around 1991 almost as a joke, an offhand comment that got written into mimeographed fanzines that circulated among punk rock and feminist communities first in the Pacific Northwest and the Northeast, then across the country, and eventually around the world. There was a decentralized but effective network of activist chapters that organized protests and performances, made art and zines, and also just sat around and talked - raising consciousness one girl at a time. And of course, there were recordings: handmade cassette tapes, small-label 45s, EPs, LPs and even CDs.

Politically, riot grrrl blasted feminism into the future: Centering the needs of a new generation via direct-action strategies, witty mantras and slogans such as "girl power" and "support girl love," it became one of the most visible branches of what was dubbed third wave feminism. But materially the music was old-school, arguably the last blast of a predigital age. The mantra of the day was "do it yourself." If you wrote a good song, you recorded it as quickly and cheaply as you could, then pressed it up and stuck it inside some cut-up-graphics-style paper sleeve. The songs were put out by regional labels like K, Kill Rock Stars, Chainsaw, Outpunk and Dischord. Some first saw the light of day on compilation albums like the "International Pop Underground Convention," "Stars Kill Rock" and "Move Into Villa Villa Kula."

No pledge or stamp made an act riot grrrl. The bands below generally contained members who identified as such, or performed at shows organized by local chapters, or sang about feminist issues over adamantly under-processed music from 1991 to 1996. Some were what the poet Tracie Morris calls "riot grrrl adjacent": They existed before or formed simultaneously but separately from the activist centers. Before, beyond and beside riot grrrl there was an uprising of ferocious female acts playing music that was generally heavier and less overtly political: the Lunachicks, Frightwig, L7, Babes in Toyland, the Nymphs, Hole, the Gits. But that's another list.

Leapt upon by the media, riot grrrl disappeared almost as quickly as it materialized - too stubborn or scared to plunge or get sucked into the mainstream. But its influence has persisted, resurfacing in the last decade with the traveling art exhibition "Alien She," books including the young adult novel "Moxie" (optioned by Amy Poehler's film company), and untold numbers of bands, most famously Pussy Riot. In the wake of this riot grrrl renaissance, or resurgence, the OGs are reclaiming their place in history, and their spot on the stage. In the past year, Kill Rock Stars produced a podcast commemorating the 25th anniversary of Bratmobile's debut album, "Pottymouth," and two key groups - Bikini Kill and Team Dresch - have reunited for tours and are rereleasing albums. Bikini Kill played its first show in more than two decades on April 25; tickets sold out immediately for its limited tour.

This is a list of essential riot grrrl music, one song per artist - a starting point, not a totality. If you don't like our list, make your own. That's the point, really. Do it yourself. EVELYN McDONNELL

The Seattle grunge band 7 Year Bitch was generally considered riot grrrl adjacent, but few tracks expressed the radical rage of the era better than this primal scream anthem condemning sexual assault. The vocalist Selene Vigil shouts each word of the title in ascending tones, as if she's emphatically stating a point that should be obvious. E.M.

The Washington quartet Autoclave - not riot grrrls per se, but fellow travelers - was a decisive matrix for two of the city's most creative musicians: the extraordinary guitarist Mary Timony (who would go on to Helium and Ex Hex, as well as a fruitful solo career) and the bassist Christina Billotte (who switched to guitar in Slant 6 and Quix*o*tic). The band's self-titled compilation is a treasure trove of arrhythmic beats and elliptical lyrics, and its debut single, "Go Far," showcases confident, understatedly sophisticated songwriting. ELISABETH VINCENTELLI

It starts with a declaration of war: "We're Bikini Kill, and we want revolution girl-style now!" An audacious proposition follows: Be yourself. The first song on the first record by Bikini Kill established the bulwark for the battle to come. The guitarist Billy Karren's squeals of feedback are like an amplified throat clearing, while Kathi Wilcox's bass delivers marching orders. Kathleen Hanna speaks directly and intimately to a female audience - "Hey girlfriend!" - then Tobi Vail rapid-fires on the snare, and nothing would ever be the same.

"Rebel Girl," from the same record, is known as the definitive riot grrrl anthem, the ultimate snapshot of the genre's power-punk music and feminist heroism. But "Double Dare Ya" tossed the boys to the back of the room and pulled the girls to the front with its siren call. Hanna's vocals are a marvel of emotional swagger, humor and rage as she speaks to adolescent hearts in the language they know: mocking the nagging of parents, the bullying of boyfriends and the patronizing of the patriarchy, then finally shouting the call to arms of daredevil friends: "You do have rights!" E.M.

The University of Oregon students Allison Wolfe and Molly Neuman were an integral part of the riot grrrl origin story - their zine "Girl Germs" was a cut-and-paste feminist samizdat that first came out in early 1991. Naturally, a band followed, with Erin Smith, from Washington, joining on guitar. Unlike many of its peers, Bratmobile made records that almost matched its live shows' intoxicating rush - its motto was just as much get up and fight as get up and dance. Wolfe favored old-fashioned cat's-eye glasses and vaguely retro summer dresses, upending decades of expectations about women in rock bands: Here was someone who looked like a prim librarian spitting out acid-tongued harangues and taunts. On "Love Thing," from the band's debut album, "Pottymouth," Neuman's implacable, driving beat and the surfy lines Smith wrings from her vintage teardrop Kapa guitar keep pushing Wolfe's sing-screaming. The lyrics have acquired a prescient, bitter resonance in the age of #MeToo, and yet the song pulses with the infectious rock 'n' roll élan that characterized Bratmobile. E.V.

After Bratmobile disbanded (temporarily, it would turn out), Wolfe and Smith formed Cold Cold Hearts with the Cutthroats bassist Nattles and the drummer Katherine Brown. Everything about that combo was bare-bones: its discography (one 7" and one album), its songs (under two minutes) and its production (minimal but poppy). But Cold Cold Hearts burned bright and was funny, too, fully indulging in the humor that marked Bratmobile's best songs. Smith's playing on "Any Resemblance...," from the band's self-titled LP, is a frantic hybrid of the B-52's and the Cramps at warp speed. Wolfe's line "Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental" may well poke fun at riot grrrl's close-to-the-vest lyrics, or perhaps at the internecine battles that eventually drove wedges among bands, musicians and fans. E.V.

The sisters Amy and Wendy Yao formed Emily's Sassy Lime (it's a palindrome) with their high school friend Emily Ryan in Southern California, legendarily after sneaking out of their houses to see Bratmobile and Bikini Kill. They played primitive shambolic pop in the spirit of the Shaggs and Shonen Knife. This song, from their debut album, "Desperate, Scared, But Social," is a quintessential punk plaint against the Man. E.M.

"Watchmaker" just may be a response to the press's response to riot grrrl. "I want to rip off your best catchphrase/Smear your face across the music page," Carrie Brownstein snarls over Becca Albee's guitar and CJ Phillips's drums on the band's second and last album, "Such Friends Are Dangerous." "Watchmaker" is at once clever (the chorus "I asked you what time it was/Not how to make a watch" remains an excellent riposte to mansplaining) and fierce - Brownstein lets rip the roar that Sleater-Kinney fans would come to know well. E.M.

Created at the dawn of the 1980s in Toronto, this band anticipated both the riot grrrl and queercore scenes, which it bridged when these movements were in full bloom in the early 1990s. The quintet, led by the singer Caroline Azar and the guitarist G.B. Jones, found inspiration in the outer reaches of pop culture (B movies, underground artists like Tom of Finland), which it spat back out coated in a singularly irreverent brand of feminism. Jones, also an accomplished visual artist, influential zinemeister and Super 8 auteur, helped make Fifth Column as much a witty conceptual art project as a polemical rock band. E.V.

A side project from Bratmobile's Neuman and Bikini Kill minus Hanna, Frumpies embraced recorded-in-a-tin-can production values, fuzzed-out guitar and sing-songy vocals. The band didn't put out much music - a handful of 7" singles between 1993 and 2000, collected in the anthology "Frumpie One-Piece" - but each of its tracks, like "Eunuch Nights," summoned the glorious abandon of hundreds of garage bands and reclaimed lo-fi as the sound of American girls. E.V.

Riot grrrl's frank, open views about sexuality and body politics were groundbreaking, and the movement extolled female solidarity and friendship. But it took the emergence of Gossip to get a heroine who proudly called herself a "fat, feminist lesbian": Beth Ditto. On the early song "Where the Girls Are," the trio meshed a melody line reminiscent of the Sonics' "Have Love, Will Travel" with to-the-point lyrics: "Come on home with me tonight/Let me love you all night long." Ditto, who had fled Arkansas for the more tolerant pastures of Olympia, Wash., also brought soulful stylings and a powerful belt to the riot universe, heretofore dominated by deliberately artless snarls. E.V.

Few 21st-century bands have genes like girlSperm, commonly known as gSp, which includes the OG Tobi Vail and Layla Gibbon from Skinned Teen alongside Marissa Magic. The trio's self-titled debut EP barrels through 10 songs in 15 minutes. The combination of serrated guitars and alternately affectless and shouty vocals feels timeless, as much riot grrrl as no wave. E.V.

This essential first-wave riot grrrl band - made up of the guitarist Corin Tucker (later of Sleater-Kinney) and the drummer Tracy Sawyer - released a debut four-song 7" that was supremely unsettling in its raw intensity: These women knew. "Me & Her" is one of the best songs ever written about how torturous female friendships can be. "You don't understand a girl who's passionate for another girl," Tucker sings. "One day I think I love her then I think I want to kill her." E.V.

The London band Huggy Bear was proof that riot grrrl could leap not just from one American coast to the other, but across the Atlantic. While the group closely embraced the riot grrrl aesthetic, down to scribbling messages on their arms in black Sharpie, a major difference was that one of the quintet's two men, Chris Rowley, often took the mic. "Her Jazz," however, features the group's main female singer, Niki Elliott. The lyrics confront male allies, as we'd call them now, demanding they reconcile their actions with their rhetoric: "Boy/girl revolutionaries/You and me/That's what you told me/So show me!" The sound is excited and excitable, with Elliott biting into the words one second, polishing them the next. And if that boy stepped out of line? "I'll run you over/Watch me." The band performed the track in full agit-pop mode on the Channel 4 show "The Word" in 1993. E.V.

Wait, Kathleen Hanna could be relaxed and funny? She could sample Lesley Gore and the Cars? With Bikini Kill on a break, Hanna sat down in her apartment and recorded a solo album under the name Julie Ruin. Up until this point, the sounds of the moment seemed to have passed riot grrrl by, and the movement's adherence to a garage aesthetic was partly a political move: Men often kept women out of bands by arguing they lacked conventional technique, and riot grrrl proudly reclaimed a certain kind of rock primitivism. Hanna's "Julie Ruin" album made prominent use of lo-fi samples and loops, extending the zine's cut-and-paste visuals to the sonic realm. They gave songs like "V.G.I." an indisputable groove that paired well with Hanna's emerging playfulness - a combination she would maximize in her next project, Le Tigre. E.V.

Born in 1992, this coed London quartet was closely associated with riot grrrl, sharing stages with Bikini Kill, Huggy Bear and Pussycat Trash. But the band's protean, relatively sophisticated songwriting and production never fit the rough-and-ready template embraced by most of its peers - Linus leaned more toward musically ecumenical indie rock, albeit with unabashed feminist politics. With its shimmery guitar washes, melodic bass line and deceptively soothing vocals, the single "Super Golgotha Crucifixion Scene" is borderline shoegaze and may well be the most pop entry in this list. E.V.

A pure pop moment amid the din of revolution, Mary Lou Lord was the movement's Melanie: a starry-eyed, sweet-voiced, superfan troubadour paying tribute to (and at one point mimicking) Bob Dylan, of all people. An all-star female band - Vail and Wilcox of Bikini Kill and the inimitable Donna Dresch - give the melody its muscled momentum. The music delivers a rush of joy, but the lyrics capture the heartache of the time in tragically prescient fashion: Lord was calling out to her ex, Kurt Cobain, a lament we would all be singing a year later. E.M.

Because of their geographic, sonic and political proximity, the Vancouver duo Mecca Normal got swept up in the categorization of riot grrrl, but in fact, Jean Smith and David Lester had helped inspire Hanna to pick up a microphone. They have also survived the moment, still collaborating to this day. "I Walk Alone," from their first album, set the tone for much of what was to follow. It's the anthem of a woman staking her claim to independence, solitude, home, safety, the streets and freedom. Bold, blunt, raw and feminist, it remains timely and necessary. E.M.

No wonder Britain was so quick to embrace riot grrrl: The country had spawned proto-riot punk bands like X-Ray Spex, the Raincoats and the Slits, after all. The London-based Skinned Teen's three members were around 14 when they started their band, inspired by Bikini Kill and Huggy Bear. If they sounded as if they'd picked up their instruments for the first time mere hours earlier, well, that was pretty much the case. Driven by a simple but ruthlessly efficient bass line, "Pillow Case Kisser" addresses someone who thinks they may never amount to much and is oddly sympathetic despite the taunting delivery. E.V.

On a purely musical level, song per song, Slant 6 made arguably the best album of the riot grrrl era, "Soda Pop*Rip Off." The genius guitarist and vocalist Christina Billotte (formerly of Autoclave) leads the bassist Myra Power and the drummer Marge Marshall through 16 power-trio ravers. Named after a vintage engine, Slant 6 plays its songs like racecars - it's drag music fueled by high-octane girl power. (Imagine an amalgam of Dick Dale and Nancy Sinatra fronting the Who.) "Poison Arrows Shot at Heroes" improbably turns the title's five words into a waterfall melody that hints at treason and revolution. I have listened to this album countless times and I don't really know what the songs are about. But I know how they make me feel: excited, anxious, exhilarated, pissed, provoked, panicked, driven. E.M.

Sleater-Kinney formed out of the ashes of riot grrrl - specifically of Heavens to Betsy and Excuse 17, whose members Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein had toured together and dated. They went through a couple of drummers before finding a perfect fit: Quasi's Janet Weiss. With the demise of most of the genre's other flagship acts, S-K became riot grrrl's banner carriers, somewhat reluctantly, and "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone" became one of the last great revolution girl-style anthems, a note-perfect statement about the importance of girls having female role models. With their call-and-response guitars and vocals in which Tucker and Brownstein finished each other's sentences, Sleater-Kinney also achieved a level of musicianship that not all of their peers could claim, or wanted. E.M.

This B-side of the only single put out by Hanna, Sharon Cheslow (of Chalk Circle) and Dug E. Bird (a.k.a. Doug Birdzell) offers a rare, slow, dose of melancholia from the era: a pretty song about how terrible pretty is. When Hanna sings "I really liked you" over the slow slide of a bass string, it's a moment of heartbreak - the finger on the point where pain begins, before it turns into rage. E.M.

Riot grrrl music could be loud and angry like Tribe 8, silly and poppy like Tiger Trap, or string-driven folk like the Seattle duo Tattle Tale. Jen Wood and Madigan Shive were teenagers when they formed the band, which built the template on which Tegan and Sara and Girlpool later erected their empires. "Glass Vase Cello Case" features acoustic guitar arpeggios, the mournful strains of a cello and the singers' soft harmonies. Originally released on the band's "Sew True" album, this track was featured in the film "But I'm a Cheerleader. " E.M.

Team Dresch, who have reunited and are playing anticipated shows this summer, are seriously skilled musicians who don't let their shredding get in the way of their self-expression. They're a sort of riot grrrl supergroup named after their superheroine guitarist/bassist Donna Dresch (Screaming Trees, Fifth Column, Dinosaur Jr.) that features members of Adickdid (Kaia Wilson), Hazel (Jody Bleyle), Calamity Jane (Marcéo Martinez) and Vitapup (Melissa York). Wilson and Bleyle trade singer/songwriter duties over thrashing rhythms and monster riffs. "Uncle Phranc," named after the self-identified "Jewish lesbian folk singer" of California punk fame, is about the importance of choosing one's own families when the folks we are given at birth don't understand or support our choices in love. Imagine Indigo Girls mashed up with Black Sabbath. E.M.

The Sacramento quartet Tiger Trap played rapidly strummed, jangly pop that sounded like it could have come from the New Zealand indie scene of the time. The instruments in "Supreme Nothing" tumble and trip as if they are going to fall apart at any minute, but instead they climb higher. Rose Melberg and Angela Loy sing steadfastly on top of the anarchy in girlie voices, not letting the nihilism of the music and the lyrics sour their day. E.M.

With hilarious lyrics about sexual role playing and theatrical stage antics like dildo dismemberment, the San Francisco group Tribe 8 tended to get dismissed as a novelty act. But there was serious social commentary beneath its thundering hard-core riffs, and some of its former members have become transgender pioneers. This song describes a generational shift, from the folky lesbians of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival (which Tribe 8 played multiple times, despite protests its first year there) to the tattooed lesbians of punk. E.M.

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Riot Grrrl United Feminism and Punk. Here's an Essential Listening Guide. (Published 2019)

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A recent resurgence of punk-powered feminism - or is that girl-powered punk? - raises the question: What was, or is, riot grrrl? A movement, a genre, an era, a scene? The spelling itself is disputed: some OGs (original grrrls) argue two rs, others three; some just say girl.

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Feminism and Human Rights - Activism in Art

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Feminism and Human Rights - Activism in Art

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Yoko Ono - A Groundbreaking Artist, Activist and Fighter behind the Myth of her Name | Widewalls

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Yoko Ono art has been underappreciated, derided and often mocked, but her pioneering work has been undeniably groundbreaking and inspiring for all generations

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Banksy strikes again!
“As agile as she is pink”

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The artist's bright pink motor yacht has already rescued 89 refugees in distress in the Mediterranean.

Update, 08/30/20, 8:42am EDT: It is being reported by Reuters and others that the Banksy boat has issued calls for help as the boat was overloaded and stranded in the Mediterranean.

Banksy, the anonymous graffiti artist known for his surreptitious interventions in urban spaces, has struck again. This time, however, the work is not a mural or a stenciled subway car, but a migrant rescue boat that has already helped 89 refugees crossing the Mediterranean.

The artist bought the bright pink motor yacht with proceeds from the sale of his artwork in order to rescue migrants making the perilous passage to Europe from north Africa - a risky endeavor that accounts for thousands of deaths each year. According to the Guardian, the boat set sail from the Spanish seaport of Burriana on August 18 and is now searching for a safe seaport to disembark its passengers.

Named after Louise Michel, the 19th century French feminist and anarchist, the boat features elements of Banksy's idiosyncratic visual language, added by the artist using a fire extinguisher. A painting of a girl in a life vest holding a heart-shaped flotation device recalls the famous " Girl with Balloon " murals that he has reproduced over the years, including in 2014 in commemoration of the Syrian civil war.

The refugee crisis has been a prominent theme of Banksy's work. Last month, the artist donated the proceeds from sales of a triptych depicting life jackets and buoys floating on the Mediterranean sea to the Bethlehem Arab Society for Rehabilitation, a hospital in the West Bank.

In September 2019, Banksy reached out to human rights activist Pia Klemp, a ship captain for the German NGO Sea-Watch that works on rescue missions in the Mediterranean. "I've read about your story in the papers. You sound like a badass," Banksy reportedly wrote to Klemp. "I am an artist from the UK and I've made some work about the migrant crisis, obviously I can't keep the money. Could you use it to buy a new boat or something? Please let me know."

24h after they were rescued, the 89 survivors are safe onboard the #LouiseMichel.
After dealing with dehydration, fuel burns and injuries from the torture they suffered in Libya, they have a moment of respite. Together with the crew, they are waiting for a Port of Safety. pic.twitter.com/jJpJaHt3NB

- LouiseMichel (@MVLouiseMichel) August 28, 2020

The 102-foot-long yacht was previously owned by French customs authorities and customized to perform search and rescue, according to the project's website. As "agile as she is pink," the Louise Michel hopes to outrun the Libyan coastguard, which regularly captures migrants at sea and takes them to detention camps in Libya. In the overflowing, under-resourced refugee camps, migrants face poor sanitary conditions and even torture and rape; the International Organization for Migration reports that more than 7,600 migrants have been returned to Libya this year.

The crew, composed of activists and volunteers, is providing live updates of the Louise Michel's rescue activities on its website and on Twitter at @ MVLouiseMichel.

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Banksy Purchased and Decorated a Migrant Rescue Boat

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The artist's bright pink motor yacht has already rescued 89 refugees in distress in the Mediterranean. Update, 08/30/20, 8:42am EDT: It is being reported by Reuters and others that the Banksy boat has issued calls for help as the boat was overloaded and stranded in the Mediterranean.

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One of the most striking aspects of the rehang at the new Museum of Modern Art is the juxtaposition of two works on the fifth floor, created more than a half century apart - Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" (1907), alongside Faith Ringgold's "American People Series #20: Die" (1967), the latter inspired by Picasso's "Guernica" (1937), which used to hang at MoMA before it was returned to Spain in 1981.

Both are colossal paintings, featuring overlapping figures of roughly life-size proportions. Ringgold's "Die" depicts a violent interracial street riot, while Picasso's "Les Demoiselles" employs radical Cubism to produce disjointed, fractured female figures, two with mask-like faces. Things are falling apart, and it isn't pretty. When the museum reopened last fall, New York Times art critic Holland Cotter called the pairing "curatorial genius."

Now Ringgold, who was born in Harlem 89 years ago, is in the spotlight again, this time for making art that speaks to the moment, 2020's remarkable Black Lives Matter moment. In her decades-long career, she has prided herself on being in touch with the zeitgeist.

"I became fascinated with the ability of art to document the time, place and cultural identity of the artist. How could I, as an African American woman artist, document what was happening all around me?" she has said about the creation of "Die," which resonates so strongly today.

"I wanted to show a kind of abstraction of what the fights were really all about. And it had a lot to do with race and class. It was to make sure that certain people on the bottom don't get to the top. This was going on then, it's happening now."
Spinning Narratives
Call her an activist artist who creates brilliantly colored paintings, posters, soft sculptures, story quilts and children's books - some 17 in all - beginning with the beloved "Tar Beach" (1991). She is a master storyteller and social commentator, spinning narratives across mediums with results that are both visually appealing and consciousness-raising.

MoMA's made-for-the-pandemic Virtual Views series presents a video Q&A with the artist and senior curator Anne Umland, poetry inspired by "Die," Ringgold's playlist (she shares some of her favorite music to paint by), a reading of "Tar Beach" by the author, and a wealth of children's activities.

After earning two degrees in art education from City College in the 1950s, Ringgold taught in the public schools and devoted her spare time to establishing herself as a professional artist. When she approached a gallerist, Ruth White, with her landscapes and pretty flowers, her efforts were scoffed at.

"You can't paint like this," Umland recalls White saying to the artist in the video Q&A, meaning she should paint her experience - her experience as an African-American woman living in 1960s America, bearing witness to the historic struggle for civil rights.

"American society just keeps repeating itself ... Art should, too ... Being impressed, being inspired by the times we live in. Ruth White's gallery was right: You can't do this. Do your own time and place," Ringgold says.

"American People Series #19: U.S. Postage Commemorating the Advent of Black Power" (1967) makes the point, with the aspirational slogan "Black Power" splashed along the painting's diagonal, but, tellingly, only 10 black faces (in a sea of 90 white faces) are discernible. It "shows you how little power that was," Ringgold says of the patent disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality on the ground.
"Hate is a Sin"
She became a feminist and demonstrated outside the city's museums in the late 1960s and early '70s, lobbying for more representation ("50%!") of women and black artists in programming. During a protest at the Whitney, a bystander directed the N-word at Ringgold, in the presence of her two daughters.

In 2007, she recorded the incident in a subversive print of the Confederate flag, emblazoning the words "Hate is a Sin" across the face of the flag and detailing the episode in an inscription along the border. In 2018, the Whitney owned the offense, quite literally, when it purchased the screenprint and displayed it.

This artist is especially revered for her story quilts, which mostly focus on the experience of African-American women. The first, "Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima?" (1983), imagines the original mammy character on the pancake box as a full-fledged human being with a real-life story, told in words and pictures on small squares. She has a family and a job as a restaurant owner; she's an entrepreneur.

As Umland says, "You took something that was controversial and degrading and turned it into something inspiring and beautiful." And she did it nearly 40 years before Quaker Oats announced on June 17 that it was dropping the Aunt Jemima logo and image - the latter updated but based on a racial stereotype - and rebranding its products in response to the recent Black Lives Matter protests.

A viewer asked Ringgold during the Q&A what her artistic response to the demonstrations would be. Her answer: "I'm gonna do some work on it. I have to see which way I'm going exactly. This is a very difficult time for me. It's gonna take me a while to see it, and feel it, and do it."
"Virtual Views: Faith Ringgold" at MoMA: https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5233

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One of the most striking aspects of the rehang at the new Museum of Modern Art is the juxtaposition of two works on the fifth floor, created more than a half century apart - Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" (1907), alongside Faith Ringgold's "American People Series #20: Die" (1967), the latter inspired by Picasso's "Guernica" (1937), which used to hang at MoMA before it was returned to Spain in 1981.

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Faith Ringgold photographed in New Jersey on November 23, 2015.KATHERINE MCMAHON

In 1963, Faith Ringgold was 32, the mother of two daughters, and on the hunt for a gallery to show her work. To say that it was difficult for black artists to find gallery representation at that time would be a gross understatement. Nevertheless, as Ringgold tells it in her memoirs, We Flew over the Bridge (1995), she was unrelenting in her search, and one day she had a meeting with Ruth White, who ran a gallery in Manhattan on 57th Street.

The artist's second husband, Burdette Ringgold (everyone calls him Birdie), went along too, carrying her paintings, as he always did. "We never showed [galleries] books or slides," Ringgold told me one morning in her studio at her home in Englewood, New Jersey. "We used to bring in the actual art because I didn't want to hear anything about, 'Yeah, but I can't see it. I don't know what you do.' "

Ringgold showed White her paintings-still lifes and landscapes in what she called "French" colors, which were very much in line with the gallery's focus. The dealer studied the work, the artist told me, then said to her, "You"-pause-"can't"-pause-"do that."

"What is she talking about? I was taught that!" Ringgold remembered thinking. "She says I can't do that. I can do anything I want! Hmmm. Hmmm. That's interesting!"

Driving back to Harlem, she and Birdie talked about what had happened. "I said to him," Ringgold continued, " 'You know something? I think what she's saying is-it's the 1960s, all hell is breaking loose all over, and you're painting flowers and leaves. You can't do that. Your job is to tell your story. Your story has to come out of your life, your environment, who you are, where you come from.' "

The encounter was transformative. Over the next few years, Ringgold would produce some of the most searing depictions ever made of race relations in America, beginning with her "American People" series of paintings, which presents interracial tensions with unflinching clarity. In The American People Series #2: Between Friends (1963), a white woman and a black woman eye each other, close up but from a vast psychological distance. In The American People Series #1: Members Only (1963), six menacing, white faces, cloaked in shadows, stare down the viewer.

"[I realized] I can't tell your story, I can only tell mine. I can't be you, I can only be me," Ringgold told me. She stopped for a moment. "OK. I don't know that's exactly what she meant," she said of White. "But as far as I was concerned, it was. And I started painting."

The street that Ringgold lives on in Englewood is lined with large bushes and trees, which makes it hard to spot address numbers. But driving slowly down her block of nondescript suburban houses, it was immediately obvious which was hers-the one with a mosaic on the facade, depicting a young girl soaring across a brilliant blue sky. The image is of Cassie Louise Lightfoot, the eight-year-old star of Ringgold's story quilt Tar Beach (1988), adapted in 1991 into an award-winning children's book. (Ringgold went on to write and illustrate 16 more books for children.)

Ringgold met me at the door warmly, wearing a black jacket over a tie-dye-style top, all purples and blues, and a thin black bonnet embroidered with flowers. She is 85 but still hearty (her great-great-grandmother lived to be 110), bustling up the stairs to an airy studio she had built atop her house.

Scattered around the studio were folders bulging with materials documenting Ringgold's nearly 70-year career of art and activism. These were being collected in preparation for the Faith Ringgold Study Room that the University of Maryland's David C. Driskell Center, which focuses on African American artists and artists from the African diaspora, is planning. "One of the roles that the Driskell Center should play is being a means by which artists are honored," its director, Curlee Raven Holton, told me. "They're not always honored in the way that they should be. Faith was on the top of that list."

While Ringgold's narrative quilts, which she began making in the 1980s, have garnered her popular acclaim, the extent of her achievements remains too little known. "What I am interested in doing is showing the development of my work from the beginning," Ringgold said. She showed me into her office, where high up on the wall, next to photographs of relatives and ancestors, was a dark still life, recalling later Braque. She made the work in 1948, as an 18-year-old student at City College's School of Education.

Ringgold's original plan had been to study art. But when she showed up at City College's School of Liberal Arts, she was informed that it did not admit women. "They're sitting there trying to make me understand that I cannot get a liberal arts degree there," she said, "and I am refusing to understand. And out of it, one woman says"-Ringgold dropped her voice to a whisper-" 'She can do it. Let me tell you how. She can [enroll in the School of Education] and major in art.' "

Ringgold's mother, a fashion designer, was relieved by the teaching degree. The artist's grandfather on her mother's side had been a teacher in the South, and there was a strong emphasis on education on both sides of the family.

And it provided a solid, though incomplete, foundation for Ringgold. "I got a fabulous education in art-wonderful teachers who taught me everything except anything about African art or African American art," she said, starting to laugh, "but I traveled and took care of that part myself."

After graduating, Ringgold earned a master's degree in art, taught in New York public schools, and raised her children, Michele and Barbara, having split with her first husband, Robert Earl Wallace, a musician who would later die of a heroin overdose. She began spending more time with Birdie, a close friend of the family. In 1962 they married.

Ringgold was honing her art all the while, and meeting fellow artists. After being rebuffed by White, she wrote to Romare Bearden, hoping to join his freshly formed Spiral group. While Bearden did not invite her to be a member of the collective, he did write back that he enjoyed her slides, adding, "Don't despair, just continue to work hard." She did. Spotting the red-green-and-black Marcus Garvey flag outside a building one day, she headed inside; there she met Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) and landed a spot in a show that his Black Arts Repertory Theatre was staging in public spaces throughout Harlem in the summer of 1966.

That same year, Spectrum, a co-op gallery in Midtown Manhattan, run by Robert Newman, invited Ringgold to join its roster. A solo show was put on the calendar for late 1967, but a problem quickly arose. "Everybody in the gallery was doing these large, huge things. It was that time," she told me. "I was living in an apartment where I was limited as to how big the work [could be]." And so Newman gave her the keys to the gallery for the summer so she could use it as a painting studio, and her mother took her daughters. "I wasn't going to be able to pay attention to them," she said, "and you can't have kids you don't pay attention to. OK, so they went off to Europe, I stayed home. I actually left my husband"-she was laughing now-"because I had to be free to do the paintings."

That summer she produced a group of astounding pieces, including The American People Series #20: Die, showing a brutal race riot as a tangle of naked black and white bodies spilling blood; The American People Series #19: U.S. Postage Stamp Commemorating the Advent of Black Power, consisting of a grid of faces with one diagonal formed by black faces and the other by the phrase BLACK POWER; and The American People Series #18: The Flag Is Bleeding, in which bloody stars and stripes overlay an image of three people-a white man, a white woman, and a black man with a knife-standing arm in arm.

In 2010, the Neuberger Museum of Art, at Purchase College in New York, mounted an exhibition of Ringgold's paintings from the 1960s. The show was met with rapturous reviews, and a handful of major institutions have added work from that period to their collections, including the Harvard Art Museums, which in 2014 acquired Black Light #8: Red White Black Nigger (1969), a painting that riffs on Jasper Johns's 1959 Out the Window. In it, Ringgold eschews Johns's brushy marks for a crisp design, replacing the words RED, YELLOW, and BLUE with RED, WHITE, and BLACK. Floating behind each word is another, larger one: NIGGER.

"To my mind and eye, [those pieces] inform everything else she did, and you really cannot fundamentally understand the rest of her body of work without seeing it in the context of that first work," said Tracy Fitzpatrick, who helped curate the 2010 show and now directs the Neuberger. Among Fitzpatrick's duties for the exhibition was to arrange the loan of For the Woman's House (1971), a mural that Ringgold made of women working as basketball players, police officers, bus drivers, and other male-dominated roles. The ideas for the subjects came from prisoners at the Women's House of Detention on Rikers Island in New York City, where the mural was installed.

The 1960s were a time of protests, and Ringgold was often front and center. When the Whitney Museum organized a show about 1930s American sculpture in 1968 that included not a single black artist, she mobilized demonstrations. "Faith was the one who just took the bit in her teeth and ran with it," the critic Lucy Lippard said in a phone interview. The first time Ringgold was called a nigger, she has said, was during one of those protests, by a man taking his daughter to the museum.

Though Ringgold sold a few paintings from her first two solo shows, she often talks about that period as one in which she had nothing to lose. She was still an outsider in both the art world and its protest movement-one of a small number of women of color involved.

Faith Ringgold in her studio, 1969.
COURTESY THE ARTIST & ACA GALLERIES

In 1970, Ringgold joined with Lippard and others to protest the male-artist-dominated Whitney Biennial as part of a group called the Ad Hoc Women Artists' Committee. They left eggs and women's products in the museum with the words "50% women" written on them. (Ringgold's daughter Michele was an active participant in the protests. She would later become a pioneering culture critic.)

"I remember Faith's idea was to have these whistles," Lippard said. "She gave us whistles. When you got in the stairwell, [you would] blow the hell out of the whistles. They would come running to see what it was, and all you had to do was slip it in your pocket and wander off." The actions, she said, continued for a few months. Those who ran the museum were "pissed," she told me, "but there wasn't a whole lot they could do."

The authorities were less forgiving that same year when, to protest the arrest of gallerist Stephen Radich for showing works by Marc Morrel incorporating the American flag, Ringgold helped put together a show of art featuring flags at the Judson Memorial Church in the West Village. "How dare you tell artists what they can do?" Ringgold said. "That's the beginning of some really bad funk-bad, bad, bad." On the penultimate day of the exhibition, plainclothes officers showed up and arrested two of the curators, Jon Hendricks and Jean Toche, along with Ringgold's daughter Michele, giving up the latter only when Ringgold explained that, no, it was she who should be arrested. Eventually they had to pay fines.

Around this time, Ringgold also made posters for the Black Panthers and the imprisoned Angela Davis-crisp, punchy prints with slogans like "All Power to the People" and "Free Angela"-but that did not quite work out as planned. "They didn't like them," she said. "I couldn't get them to appreciate anything." The Panthers wanted a poster that read, "Kill whitey," Ringgold told me. "Political people don't seem to understand art," she said. "It's not what they're trying to do. And if it is, let them do that. Don't tell me what to do, because I have to look at this many years from now and be happy that I did it, not unhappy. And I would be unhappy with the 'Kill whitey.' It's not my thing."

Nineteen seventy-two brought another major shift in Ringgold's work. During a visit to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, she began talking to a guard who had lived in Harlem. He pointed her in the direction of the museum's Tibetan thangkas, paintings on thin cloth framed with silk brocade. Ringgold was enchanted with the medium and returned to the States determined to experiment with it. With sewing help from her mother, she began what she termed the "Slave Rape" series, brutal images painted on fabric and surrounded, thangka-like, by pieced cloth borders. "It's a fabulous way to work because what happens is I can roll [the painting] up-I don't care how big it is-and take it myself," she told me.

In the 1970s, Ringgold also made remarkable masks and soft sculptures (the first was of Wilt Chamberlain, "because Wilt was like a sculpture-7 foot 3, my God!") and began doing performances, like The Wake and Resurrection of the Bicentennial Negro (1976), in which a pair of children are mourned by family members and people in the audience. Ringgold designed costumes for the family to wear. "I thought that up because [African Americans were saying], 'We're not going to celebrate that [U.S.] bicentennial because we weren't free.' I said, 'I'll tell you what, we won't celebrate, but let's have a wake and resurrection.' "

"Oh, it was a very interesting time," Ringgold said of those years. "People were really very dedicated to each other, to their freedom and support of one another. And I felt that I had something to say, and I wanted to say it."

And then, in 1980, came the story quilts, narrative paintings on canvas surrounded by patchwork cloth borders and turned into quilts, picking up a craft Ringgold's great-great-great-grandmother had worked in as a slave for her masters. Her mother assisted early on. The quilts' subjects range from Michael Jackson's "Bad" video to Ringgold's weight loss to Pablo Picasso. They found buyers. "We sold out all of her shows, without question," said the now-retired dealer Bernice Steinbaum, who began representing Ringgold in the mid-1980s in New York, after visiting her 1984 retrospective at the Studio Museum in Harlem. "I went up, saw it, and fell passionately in love," she said.

But Ringgold's quilts have never quite been taken seriously by most major museums, perhaps because of their craft associations, whimsical range of subjects, or faux naive painting style. Neither the Museum of Modern Art nor the Whitney Museum owns one-though the latter has a 1971 collage calling for the release of Angela Davis. The Guggenheim has owned her masterpiece since the year it was made, 1988, but has never put it on view in New York.

That said, last fall the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, snapped up one at auction for a cool $461,000, a new record for Ringgold for a public sale by a multiple of 30. It dates to 1989 and was commissioned by Oprah Winfrey as a gift to Maya Angelou for Angelou's 61st birthday. "One of the things that is extraordinary about [Ringgold's] quilts in general, but this one in particular, is that it has these layers that intersect with each other," said Margaret C. Conrads, the museum's director of curatorial affairs. "There's painting, quilt making, text-there's high art, craft, figuration, abstraction, the visual aspects, narrative storytelling."

Near the end of our day together, Ringgold started going through flat files, pulling out posters she made in the 1970s. One is a map of the United States in red and green-another Johns reference. It is titled United States of Attica, after the prison uprising there in 1971. In black text, all over the map, are written instances of bloodshed-riots, massacres, battles-from throughout American history. She could not fit everything she wanted to include. "I saw-you can't do that, because it's becoming more and more violent," she said. And so, on the bottom of the poster is a simple directive in black block letters: "This map of American violence is incomplete / Please write in whatever you find lacking."

Andrew Russeth is co-executive editor at ARTnews.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Spring 2016 issue of ARTnews on page 90 under the title "The Storyteller."

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The Storyteller: At 85, Her Star Still Rising, Faith Ringgold Looks Back on Her Life in Art, Activism, and Education

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In 1963, Faith Ringgold was 32, the mother of two daughters, and on the hunt for a gallery to show her work. To say that it was difficult for black artists to find gallery representation at that time would be a gross understatement.

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Benny Andrews - Museum visitor’s review. 

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Benny Andrews - Museum visitor’s review. 

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Upon my ascension to the 4th floor wing of the Museum of Modern Art, I was immediately struck by the striking form of a large Benny Andrews collage hanging in the lobby. The work "No More Games" (1970) which was created around the time the Rhino Horn Group was formed, is a collage inspired by the social turmoil of the Civil Rights movement at home and the Vietnam War abroad. The large scale collage was purchased by the museum in 1971 through the Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Fund. Rockefeller was a heavily involved and influential figure within MoMA and served twice as the museum's director. The work of Bob Thompson has also appeared in this very spot on occasion (coincidentally?).

While I'm more than happy to see this work on view at MoMA, its seclusion from the rest of the "Painting and Sculpture II" wing is troubling. It doesn't help to establish or suggest the major role that Andrews (and Thompson) had on the continuation of figurative art that presented an alternative to the Abstract Expressionism and Proto-Pop art that is a staple of the 1950s/60s rooms. Andrews and Thompson were part of a group of seminal artists during the Second Generation of Abstract Expressionism who returned to representational imagery. Both were also important for addressing the transforming social environment in their work. Aside from his studio practice, Andrews was significant for his activism which interrogated the ways in which institutions and the art world presented and displayed the work of non-white artists. It is therefore even more curious and unfortunate that this display of his work divorces it from its social and aesthetic context. There has been a notable lack of African American artists' works on display in many major museums and galleries. In what I believe/hope will be a sign of good things to come, MoMA recently hired art historian Darby English to provide consultation and contextualization on their collection of African American art. I was happy to see the work of Sam Gilliam included in a section of late 60s and 70s abstract painters on the 4th floor. Perhaps there will soon be a day when artists like Andrews, Thompson, Emilio Cruz, Earle M. Pilgrim, Norman Lewis, Merton Simpson, Edward Clarke, et al., will be at the forefront the dialog of essential artists during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, and art of the 1950s onward.

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Upon my ascension to the 4th floor wing of the Museum of Modern Art, I was immediately struck by the striking form of a large Benny Andrews collage hanging in the lobby. The work "No More Games" (1970) which was created around the time the Rhino Horn Group was formed, is a collage inspired by...

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Directed by Sini Anderson 1 hour 12 minutes; not rated
Kathleen Hanna, the feminist punk hero of the 1990s and beyond, is the main event of the fast-moving documentary "The Punk Singer." Directed by Sini Anderson and co-produced by the music video veteran Tamra Davis, the film is less about music than it is a celebration of Ms. Hanna: most famous as the frontwoman for the poster band Bikini Kill and later for Le Tigre. Though freshly rendered with lively interviews and concert video clips full of prickly, lo-fi energy, Ms. Hanna and her message of empowerment are disappointingly translated very nearly into a cult of personality in this film's idolizing portrayal.

To a certain extent, the building up feels like pent-up recompense for the hostility that Ms. Hanna faced and confronted. From early poetry performances through Bikini Kill's "girls to the front" shows, she's shown singing and advocating for a woman's right to be her own protagonist and antagonist. Band members and leading lights fling out one-liners and dish tidbits from the scene.

Ms. Hanna herself appears in new interviews and in footage showing her dealing with the effects of Lyme disease. (The illness led to her uncharacteristic quiet during the mid-2000s.) The film shifts gears from the Bikini Kill parts to depict her climb back into the spotlight (doted upon by her husband, Adam Horovitz of the Beastie Boys). The poignancy of being betrayed by her body, after fighting for the prerogative of its use and portrayal, is the film's subtlest undercurrent.

Ms. Hanna's creativity and force are catching. But other voices are needed to evaluate her achievements with a fuller sense of cultural context and perspective.

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Directed by Sini Anderson 1 hour 12 minutes; not rated Kathleen Hanna, the feminist punk hero of the 1990s and beyond, is the main event of the fast-moving documentary "The Punk Singer."

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By Tori Campbell

Introduction: Artist Documentaries

As Gerhard Richter once proclaimed, "To talk about painting is not only difficult but perhaps pointless, too. You can only express in words what words are capable of expressing, what language can communicate. Painting has nothing to do with that."

But the relatively new medium of film might have something to do with it. The following artist documentaries are beautiful examples of how film can capture and craft engaging narratives around the life, work, and intentions of artists. Join us from the comfort of your own home and dive into the minds of some of the most idiosyncratic, influential, eccentric and captivating artists of the last few decades.

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The 2012 film Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry explores the intersection of art and activism in the life and work of Ai Weiwei. The internationally acclaimed artist has gained more and more attention in recent years for his bold social activism and subsequent 2011 arrest by the Chinese government. The documentary is a timely reflection of the growing global interest in the man, his life, and his work. The dynamic film was documented by Beijing-based filmmaker and journalist Alison Klayman from 2008 to 2010, providing a never-before-seen glimpse at not only Weiwei's art, but also his courageous and controversial acts of politicised protest. This exploration allows a surprising secondary character to enter the frame - contemporary China. With artistic and activist activities inextricable from the Chinese context Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry ultimately ends up casting meaningful light on the complex culture and politics of the country. View the documentary winner of the 2012 Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival, here.

Directed by Corinna Belz, the woman behind the 2007 short film Gerhard Richter's Window, Belz returned four years later with a directorial thirst for more. The 2011 feature-length documentary Gerhard Richter Painting is a deeply immersive exploration of the creative process of one of the world's most renowned and influential painters living today. Featuring rare archival material of the artist at work, as well as glimpses into his studio and its decades-long closely guarded privacy,, the documentary is an all-access-pass to Richter's work and process. Complemented by a series of interviews with the artist, his contemporaries, and his critics; Belz's full-length film exploration of Richter's process grants the audience a unique fly-on-the-wall perspective of his working methods. The masterful direction of this documentary makes the film itself into a work of art. See for yourself, here.

Notoriously controversial and courageous, Marina Abramović's conceptual and performance art has been pushing her audiences well beyond their point of comfort for over four decades. The 2012 film The Artist is Present closely follows Abramović as she prepares for and executes a massive retrospective of her work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Seeking again to entice the ever recurring question "but why is this art?" out of her viewers, she decides to sit seven hours a day, six days a week with her audience. Across a small table, one by one, viewers are invited to sit with the artist and experience her while she blankly confronts them, face to face. The documentary offers intimate access to Abramović, and the power of her work is expressed and compounded by not only the testimonies of fellow artists and art critics but especially of the museum-goers who tearfully and wordlessly react to her and her art. View the moving documentary, here.

The Radiant Child

The 2010 film The Radiant Child follows the art and life of Jean-Michel Basquiat as directed by the late artist's close friend Tamra Davis. By incorporating interviews with friends and the fellow artists of the 1980s downtown New York art scene with archival footage of Basquiat himself, the man behind the artwork is able to shine through. In this intimate documentary his neo-expressionist art is complemented by his iconoclastic nature as a successful black artist during a time when minimalist, conceptual art was the prevailing fad. The film leaves the audience wanting more, wishing that Basquiat himself could sit down with the film crew in 2010 to discuss his work, and the life of the magical man behind it. Nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival in 2010, you can stream the whole film, here.

Arguably the most famous graffiti artist in history, Banksy, has become a celebrity while staying anonymous. Active since the 1990s, his work has gained more and more attention throughout the years, fuelled by the mystique of the man and the large sums his works garner at public auction. The documentary Saving Banksy follows the story from its start in 2010, when Banksy visited San Francisco and left his mark throughout the city. Once his work steadily began to disappear, a man who's building was graced with Banksy's work decided to have it taken down for preservation. This act marks the beginning of a larger debate that the documentary explores and captures between artists and the public about artistic ownership, the rights of the public, and monetary versus cultural value. Rent or purchase the documentary, that was awarded the Most Innovative Documentary Feature in 2017 by Hollywood Film Festival, here.

How to Draw a Bunny

How to Draw a Bunny is an ambitious attempt to understand the mysterious life - and death - of collage and correspondence artist Ray Johnson. Directed by John Walter, the 2002 investigative documentary explores the oft-overshadowed artist, a man left in the dust of the cult of personality surrounding Warhol and other Pop Art figures. Interviews with fellow artists including Chuck Close, Roy Lichtenstein, Christo, Judith Malina, and James Rosenquist makes the film a star-studded recognition of this iconic talent, heralded for years as the ultimate artists' artist. Winner of the Special Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival in 2002 and the Grand Prix du Public at the Rencontres Internationales de Cinema in Paris, the film sheds some light on this mysterious and reclusive man, proclaiming him New York's most famous unknown artist. Want to know about Ray Johnson yourself? Watch the film now: here.

Read More

Relevant sources to learn more

Many film festivals are offering streaming services right now, start by exploring the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam's over 800 films
Want to see more things from the comfort of your home? Check out some of Artland's many 3D Gallery Tours

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The Storytellers' Stories: The Best Documentaries About Artists. | Artland Magazine

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By Tori Campbell As Gerhard Richter once proclaimed, "To talk about painting is not only difficult but perhaps pointless, too. You can only express in words what words are capable of expressing, what language can communicate. Painting has nothing to do with that." But the relatively new medium of film might have something to do with it.

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This isn’t activism, it’s just awesome! 
I love craft art!

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This isn’t activism, it’s just awesome! 
I love craft art!

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The Radical Quilting of Rosie Lee Tompkins (Published 2020)

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A triumphal retrospective at the Berkeley Art Museum confirms her standing as one of the great American artists — transcending craft, challenging painting and reshaping the canon.

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Activism in Art- chronicles of social changes.

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Activism in Art- chronicles of social changes.

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Norman Rockwell’s “The Problem We All Live With,” a Groundbreaking Civil Rights Painting

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Learn more about Norman Rockwell’s most celebrated Civil Rights painting: The Problem We All Live With.

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During an interview featuring music legend Dolly Parton, the feisty superstar made a memorable comment concerning recent U.S. protests: "I understand people having to make themselves known and felt and seen, and of course Black lives matter. Do we think our little white a**es are the only ones that matter? No!" Parton's remarks not only made headlines but also caught the attention of artist Kim Radford who immediately drew new inspiration from it.

The Nashville-based muralist was already crafting a work of Parton on the side of The 5 Spot music venue when she stumbled across an article featuring Parton's words. "I looked at her quote in particular and it was so sassy and a sensitive comment about something's [sic] that got a lot of friction in the air right now," Radford told a local reporter. "And she just treated it just like Dolly does: lovingly. And it was just perfect." Radford then incorporated the quote into her project. The lively mural features a bright-smiled Parton, and her signature larger-than-life curly blonde hair. Parton is also surrounded by flowers and sparkles, but above her rests her comment about protestors. The comment is displayed airily with a butterfly conveniently blocking out the expletive

Radford admits that it all was a "happy coincidence" and just couldn't help but add more of Parton's essence into the mural. "I wanted it to be a real display of an icon, [in a] fun, bright, artistic way," she says. "It's a representation of an icon that Americans and really people across the globe are really proud to know and love her music." According to Radford, the mural has become a popular spot for tourists and selfie lovers and is something for her and others in the community to simply take pride in.

Artist Kim Radford created a lively mural of Dolly Parton and incorporated the iconic singer's sassy and sweet remarks on Black Lives Matter.

Here's the mural in its early stages.

Here are other beautiful works by artist Kim Radford:

Kim Radford: Website| Instagram | Twitter
The 5 Spot: Website| Instagram

My Modern Met granted permission to feature photos by Kim Radford.

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Dolly Parton's Black Lives Matter Statement Is Now a Mural in Nashville

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During an interview featuring music legend Dolly Parton, the feisty superstar made a memorable comment concerning recent U.S. protests: "I understand people having to make themselves known and felt and seen, and of course Black lives matter. Do we think our little white a**es are the only ones that matter?

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When the killing of George Floyd sparked protests throughout the world, street artist Tristan Eaton was there to show solidarity and support for the Black Lives Matter movement. He has his studio in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles and discovered that a march was headed to the area. Eaton also noticed that local business owners had boarded their windows as a precautionary measure, and he saw it as an opportunity to paint on the proverbial blank canvases. Eaton contacted Café de Leche with the offer to depict Martin Luther King Jr. on the plywood covering their shop.

Over the course of an afternoon, Eaton created a powerful portrait of Dr. King. Featuring a monochromatic rendering made using spray paint, the image also had the words "justice" and "equality" emblazoned across the composition. His artwork made an impact; during the anti-racist demonstrations in Highland Park, protestors stopped and knelt to honor Floyd.

Sadly, the mural of Dr. King did not last. One night, a woman rolled white paint onto his face and wrote anti-Black slurs onto the painting. Eaton, however, was undeterred. Upon finding out that the portrait had been defaced, he arrived shortly after and created another painting. This time, it was of Malcolm X. The smiling portrait, which now includes the words "no justice" and "no peace," had another addition in the background: the names of Black people killed by police brutality written in a graffiti style by Korea from LTS Crew. The street art is still up and on view at the intersection of Avenue 50 and York boulevard.

We spoke with Eaton about creating these two murals as well as the role that public art plays in expressing our humanity. Scroll down to read My Modern Met's exclusive interview with him, which has been edited for clarity and condensed for length.
How did your mural of Martin Luther King Jr. come about? With the mural vandalized, how did you decide to depict Malcolm X?
The reason I painted it was because at the beginning of all the Black Lives Matter protests that were happening-when things were pretty hot-there were a lot of upsetters who were joining the protests and looting and all kinds of violent stuff that was changing the tone and tenor of the entire anti-racist demonstrations. And as the majority of LA shops boarded up their storefronts, I heard that Highland Park, where my studio is, had protest plans. I thought, "Okay, we need to do something larger, visually, to show solidarity." I went next door and asked the coffee shop ( Café de Leche) if they wanted me to paint their shutters. And they were like, "Okay, cool. Go for it."
You had some additional help with the Malcolm X mural, correct? What role do murals, and street art in general, play in our society?
So, I literally painted it in one day. I think half a day, even. I started around 2 PM and painted Martin Luther King. And I'm still happy I did because when the protest came, the entire march was like, I don't know, a few thousand people. It was a really good turnout and everyone stopped at the corner right in front of my mural and did a moment of silence and took a knee. It was a great, beautiful moment.

I was up mega early at home watching the James Baldwin documentary I Am Not Your Negro and while watching it (on a projector screen in my house), there's a section where he talks about Malcolm X. And as it came to that section, I paused it and took a photo because there's a portrait of him that I hadn't seen before, which is of him smiling.

About 45 minutes later, I got the message that the MLK mural had been defaced. I told the owner of the building, "Okay, I'll be down there in half an hour." So I took the photo from the projector screen, printed it out, drove down to my studio, got my paint, and I was repainting it by noon. And I knew I wanted to paint Malcolm X over it because there's kind of a theme, which is a peaceful protest, you know, wanting change. People are tired of waiting for change, so now it's time to demand it. And, I felt like following up MLK with Malcolm X fits that tone.

I painted the portrait, and there's an artist that works for me who's a graffiti writer named Korea from the LTS crew. I had him paint the names of victims of police brutality in the background.

There's a huge spectrum when it comes to public art, street art, etc. You have everything from gigantic sculptures and gigantic public mural works to the wild chaos of illegal graffiti and illegal street art. And, you know, all of them are sparks of life and humanity in a landscape of brick and cement.

I think that at its core, public art just reminds people that we're alive and that we're human and creative. When we live in these city landscapes that are just so bleak and boring and depressing, it's a lifesaver sometimes to see an explosion of color and to remind us that the world is made by hands. You can change the world in a simple way just by painting it.
Has anything changed for you now that the mural has gone up?
I think that fact is inspiring, but then furthermore, public art can tell stories, and stories are how we identify with each other and connect to each other. That's important because public art can also memorialize historic moments and historic people. And that's important for us too, for our identity and for our pride in who we are, and the symbolism of what kind of people we want to be.

(continued) When we erect a statue of a Confederate soldier or Confederate slave owner, that has power. It shows how important and powerful public art can be-a lot of those statutes weren't erected in the 1800s. They were erected in the 1940s through the 1970s and as a direct response to voting rights and civil rights. These racists can say, "This is how we think it should be now." I think it's time for a sea change.
What else have you been up to? Anything exciting on the horizon?
I'm happy to see the Confederate flag coming off the Mississippi flag. I'm happy to see all of these things change because they're symbols of a racist slave-owning nation. And, you know, it's time for a reckoning for that, and visual symbolism is a lot of how we move forward in a new world after changes have happened.

A lot of artists like me have a responsibility to contribute to that fabric and to be creating imagery that supports those ideas. There are things that you want to say that you don't have the words for. And that's why we paint.

I've had Black artists reach out to me, asking me how to get on or how to rise within this world of public art and street art. And the truth is, a lot of the people that organize mural projects, mural festivals, etc., are desperate and hungry for more diversity, more women, or people of color in this field.
Tristan Eaton: Website | Instagram | Facebook
I am very proud to say that I look out for younger artists. I look out for all kinds of artists that need a leg up. And, since doing the murals, I've got a lot of young artists reaching out to me and it's really cool to connect them with people that produce murals. There aren't enough people of color doing mural work. There aren't enough women doing mural work.

I did a project to raise money for the Museum of Graffiti in Miami. It's run by Alan Kat and MARE, who are both artists of color who started the museum. Years ago, I did a painting about the Black Panthers that touches on the larger history of protests. The idea was to remind people that protesting is in our blood. It's nothing new. This is how big change happens. I used that painting to make a print release to raise money for the Museum of Graffiti, and it did really great. We raised $18,000 for them.
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I'm organizing a mural right now in New York. I have some walls that I've been running for about 10 years in Williamsburg that I'm using right now to feature three Black artists.

(continued) I've also been creating artwork for Montefiore, which is the main hospital in the Bronx that was at the epicenter of the New York COVID-19 outbreak. The work that I've made for them is on a 13-story-tall mural by Madison Square Garden. It was a really cool project to do, to show positive support for all the nurses in New York and first responders.

My team and I are very fortunate. We've lost a lot of projects, of course, but we've gained a lot of other special ones at the same time.

My Modern Met granted permission to feature photos by Tristan Eaton.

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Mural of Martin Luther King, Jr. Was Defaced, So Street Artist Repainted It With Malcolm X [Interview]

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"There's kind of a theme, which is a peaceful protest, you know, wanting change. People are tired of waiting for change, so now it's time to demand it. And, I felt like following up MLK with Malcolm X fits that tone."

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Dialogue on improving female representation 

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Dialogue on improving female representation 

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From Disney's depiction of Mulan to Studio Ghibli's Princess Mononoke, female warriors in animated films are undoubtedly legendary-but a rarity. Women in fantasy art and film are still vastly underrepresented, especially characters that embody diversity. Artist Yael Nathan seeks to change this. She's created an illustrated series of powerful women warriors that represent many shapes, sizes, and skin colors.

Female heroines are often depicted as young, physically fit, and attractive (by society's standards). However, Nathan's illustrations showcase a far more realistic representation of women. From an elderly mountain ranger to a curvaceous eagle trainer, each character tells a story. Every warrior wears their own battle-ready costume and holds their weapon of choice. Many even have their own animal sidekick, such as one character who rides on a dinosaur. But regardless of their design, Nathan's series shows that women of all kinds are strong, empowered, and worth celebrating.

We recently caught up with Nathan to ask her more about her Warriors series. Read on for My Modern Met's exclusive interview. And if you love this series, you can download a free PDF of all of the artists' illustrations here.
When did you first start illustrating? Why do you enjoy illustrating? What inspired your women warriors series? How long have you been working on the series? Are you inspired by any real women in your life? Or are the characters entirely fictional?
I started drawing as a kid, like most children. I just never stopped. I studied animation at the Bezalel Art Academy in Jerusalem and when I graduated I went on to work in an animation studio, then onto high-tech and game studios. However, throughout my professional career, I've always drawn and created personal illustrations and comics.
Can you describe the backstories of some of the characters? Do you have any new projects you're working on and would like to share? 15+ Feminist Fashions to Empower the Strong Women in Your Life Disney Princesses Are Reimagined as Modern-Day Women in Glam Transformations Mattel Unveils More Barbie Dolls to Celebrate the Diverse Beauty of Black Women Growing Database of "Women Who Draw" Spotlights 5,000+ Female Illustrators Yael Nathan: Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter
I love the ability to easily tell a story with my art. I usually start a drawing or comic frame with a general idea of the final result I want to achieve, but as I draw, ideas begin to develop that will help me tell a better story-whether it's the staging of the frame, the character's expression, interactions with other characters, or even small details that will enrich the character.

My own journey to self-acceptance. And I also started to view the world and people in it as powerful and worthy-no matter how they look. Everyone has a journey and we all overcome difficult things. I spent many years convinced of certain truths about people and saw the world as black and white. Through a journey of introspection and exposure to the body-positivity movement online, I saw so many great examples of courageous women, unafraid to live their lives as they wanted and I slowly began to change my beliefs and started to draw more women. At first, they were very stereotypically pretty, but then I started seeing beauty in the diversity of shapes and to see the power in all those women.

Not long, just in the past few months. But the journey that led me to these characters has taken years.

Each illustration is usually an amalgamation of real women in my life and photos that inspire the pose or attitude. I'm also influenced by various fashion items and weapons. They help me create a little story I have in mind about the woman I'm painting.

They don't really have backstories, it's more of a general idea of their profession or location. For example, the older woman with the large dog is a ranger who lives alone in the mountains, helping those who are lost. Her dog is her companion and her guard.

I'm currently working on a personal comic that is loosely based on the aesthetic of my warrior women. I'll release it in parts on my Instagram soon. You can also see all of my comics with writer Ehud Lavski here.

My Modern Met granted permission to feature photos by Yael Nathan.

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Illustrator Imagines Powerful Warriors as a Diverse Group of Strong Women [Interview]

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From Disney's depiction of Mulan to Studio Ghibli's Princess Mononoke, female warriors in animated films are undoubtedly legendary-but a rarity. Women in fantasy art and film are still vastly underrepresented, especially characters that embody diversity. Artist Yael Nathan seeks to change this.

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The year 2020 has proven itself to be full of unprecedented, world-changing events. Trying to keep up with, or attempting to recollect, all the swiftly moving parts or key civil rights movements can be daunting. But thanks to a research project from The University of St. Thomas, the opportunity to properly process some of this era's most significant moments through artwork is now digitally available. Called the Urban Art Mapping George Floyd and Anti-Racist Street Art, it's a database that functions as a free virtual art library.

The catalog is intended to preserve the protest art that has been appearing on the likes of sidewalks and streets so that future generations have access to it. It began with a focus on Minneapolis but continued to expand with every new submission the team at St. Thomas received; there are now over 1,000 artworks from around the world. Each piece in the database includes information such as the artist, the story behind its creation, and where it is located.

The pieces of street art are deeply moving and unique to each community they were created in. They are powerful works that memorialize victims of police brutality while providing some solace and promoting lasting conversation about police accountability.

Those who've worked on the project hope the same is felt when visiting the virtual museum. "This database will serve as a resource to show people that there was this powerful movement and an articulation of anti-racist messages and art that came out of this movement," Dr. Todd Lawrence, one of the project creators, says. "People can try to paint over and wash it off, but we hope that because of our database, it can't be washed over completely."

The team also desires to document the evolution of different artworks. One example is the George Floyd memorial, which continues to change daily. By including details such as updated pictures of the pieces at different points in time, the team hopes to capture their transient nature. "What's on the walls is an expression of people's feelings, people's response to what's happening at any given moment," Dr. Lawrence remarks. "Time affects how these messages get expressed."

Because these pieces aren't considered traditional works of art, some museums have expressed their lack of interest or desire to highlight them in the ways the artists and activists intended. This database offers a more community-centric alternative. Another bonus, according to the research team, is that when digitizing these works, the images wouldn't be at risk of disappearing or being stored in a museum basement, but actively featured and apart of the museum.

The same team has also created a duplicate gallery that is a COVID-19 Street Art Database. They hope it will provide people with a way to examine, presently and in the future, the impact COVID-19 has had on communities worldwide.

The University of St. Thomas has created a database cataloging George Floyd and anti-racist street art.

Urban Art Mapping George Floyd and Anti-Racist Street Art: Website| Instagram | Twitter
h/t: [ OpenCulture]

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This New Digital Archive Preserves Black Lives Matter Protest Art From Around the World

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The year 2020 has proven itself to be full of unprecedented, world-changing events. Trying to keep up with, or attempting to recollect, all the swiftly moving parts or key civil rights movements can be daunting. But thanks to a research project from The University of St.

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On a beach in Port Aransas, Texas, a sculpture of Abraham Lincoln shows him seated in anguish. With his head buried in his hand, he sits atop a crumbling monument. The scene is as poignant as it is awe-inspiring because Lincoln and his throne are crafted completely out of sand. Damon Langlois is the artist behind this sand sculpture and its incredible details that include the likeness of the 16th President and deep "cracks" in the seat base. The piece, called Liberty Crumbling, recently won first place in the 23rd annual Texas SandFest, the largest native sand sculpture competition in the U.S.

There's no denying that the subject of Langlois' reimagining of the Lincoln Memorial doesn't comment on the current state of domestic and world affairs. He doesn't intend for it, however, to have a certain political leaning. "It's not really a partisan statement since it affects everyone who believes in freedom," Langlois explains to My Modern Met. "I think this is why the sculpture had such broad appeal. No matter who you vote for you probably feel this in some way."

Langlois spent four days working on Liberty Crumbling. "It took one full day to make 'the pound-up,' " he describes, "which is sand compacted into wooden forms with lots and lots of water." Those pieces are then carved away, and the removed sand reveals the sculpture. It's no easy feat. "The time pressure is immense and I just barely finished the sculpture, working up until the last second!"

The road to creating Liberty Crumbling has been a long one. It started nearly 30 years ago when Langlois joined a competitive sand sculpture team called the SandBoxers; he considers it the official start of his sand sculpting journey. "Back then it [sand sculpting] was a much different scene," he says. "Let's just say there were a lot more shovelers than artists." But as Langlois has continued to hone his craft, he can easily articulate why he loves it so much. "I enjoy its intense nature, both physically and mentally. It combines illusion, artistry, engineering, perseverance, and character." On a larger scale, it's also about living in the moment. "A sand sculptor accepts the ephemeral nature of their work and does it for the act of doing it," he says. "Nothing is forever."

Artist Damon Langlois created an award-winning sand sculpture called Liberty Crumbling. Here's a peek into the process.
Towering Sand Sculpture in Germany Breaks World Record for Tallest Sandcastle Massive Sand Sculptures Bring Life Under the Sea to the Surface Incredible "Bleeding" Sand Sculpture by Guy-Olivier Deveau Damon Langlois: Website | Instagram
My Modern Met granted permission to feature photos by Damon Langlois.

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Massive Sand Sculpture of the Lincoln Memorial with a Crumbling Base Pops Up on a Texas Beach

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On a beach in Port Aransas, Texas, a sculpture of Abraham Lincoln shows him seated in anguish. With his head buried in his hand, he sits atop a crumbling monument. The scene is as poignant as it is awe-inspiring because Lincoln and his throne are crafted completely out of sand.

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Activism in Art - Black Lives Matter
Richmond Va artist https://www.srossbrowne.com/srossbrowne/statement.html

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Rather than asking how you are, I'm gonna co-opt an old Farsi greeting: May you not be tired. I'm Carolina A. Miranda, staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, with this week's essential culture news - and healing dances.

Essential image

Art in honor of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter has popped up all over Los Angeles. The Times' Dorany Pineda tracks down some of the pieces that have materialized on walls, barricades and construction fences. "It's my way of speaking up," says artist Misteralek of why he created his tribute to Floyd in Watts.

Times columnist Robin Abcarian reports on Jules Muck (the artist also known as MuckRock), who has peppered Venice with portraits of recent victims of police violence, including Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Tony McDade.

Your essential guide to the arts in L.A.

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The names of people killed by police, woven out of colorful fabric, have materialized on a chain-link fence around the Silver Lake Reservoir. Deborah Vankin speaks to project co-organizer Eli Caplan: "If the reservoir was 10 times as big, we would still have an abundance of names left over."

The uprisings and culture

Charles McNulty looks at how the moment is playing out in the world of theater. Playwrights of color wrote a public letter of protest that was signed by dozens of theatrical figures, including Suzan-Lori Parks, Viola Davis and Quiara Alegría Hudes. "We see you," it reads. "We have always seen you. We have watched you pretend not to see us." McNulty writes, "Much in the letter is necessary and overdue."

Marie Cisco, a producer who has worked for the National Black Theatre and the Public Theater in New York, created a public Google spreadsheet of institutions that were not speaking up in response to Floyd's killing. But speaking up is not enough. "We need to see and hear detailed action steps," she tells The Times' Jessica Gelt.

L.A. choreographer Jacob Jonas has been taking heat for an Instagram post that shows a dancer bracing himself acrobatically on a police officer, accompanied by the statement: "it's not white vs. black. It's everyone against racists." Culture writer Makeda Easter reports on the criticism he has received, including from David Mack, director of Invertigo Dance Theatre.

Times writer Daniel Hernandez examines seven rapid cultural shifts that have happened since the killing of George Floyd. Chief among them: the shift from "nonracist" to "antiracist."

In the wake of the protests, the Philadelphia Museum of Art issued a statement that criticized "destruction of property" and said, "Every individual life matters." Now five Black employees have issued a counter-statement saying that they were "individually taken aback by the lack of compassion and empathy."

And SFMOMA disabled comments on a social media post after a former employee, who is Black, criticized the museum for using the work of Black artists to make a statement in support of Black lives, but without accompanying institutional reflection. "You can't stand behind the work of Black people to do the work you need to do inside," wrote Taylor Brandon, who left the museum in April.

When barricades went up around the White House, protesters laced them with art: posters, flowers, paintings, signs and photos. Now volunteers have been gathering some of that ephemera to see if it might be preserved in the city's museums, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Dance has been a major feature of the protests - expressions of which have gone viral via the internet. "At the center of many of these videos are dancers expressing pain and joy," writes critic Siobahn Burke, "affirming that they are alive."

Critic Kambole Campbell wasn't too impressed by all the black squares that popped up on social media in support of the uprisings: "It mostly clogged up social media feeds with plain and meaningless black squares, sweeping away and subsuming more useful content spread via the BlackLivesMatter hashtag."

Since we're on the subject of black squares: Greg Allen writes on the history of Kazimir Malevich's "Black Square" and why abstraction can't exist outside the world of race and politics.

Faith Ringgold, whose painting of a riot faces a room full of Pablo Picassos at the Museum of Modern Art, had found herself feeling creatively blocked by the pandemic. The uprisings have given the 89-year-old artist renewed vigor: "I'm not done yet."

There's an excellent convo with artist Dread Scott on Tyler Green's Modern Art Notes podcast. The artist has long engaged issues of racism, police violence and civil rights in his work.

Marcus Anthony Hunter, who coined the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, led a discussion with a group of L.A. writers about the moment. It's good reading, and features words from novelist Walter Mosley, poet Luis Rodriguez, novelist and editor Jervey Tervalon, journalist and author Jean Guerrero and historian Gerald Horne.

Monuments men

Confederate statues and colonial monuments have been coming down fast and furious.

In Minnesota, protesters took the head off a statue of Christopher Columbus. In Richmond, Va., a monument to Confederate leader Jefferson Davis was torn down. In London and Bristol, statues of prominent slave traders are now kaput. And, in Antwerp, a statue of King Leopold, the Belgian king whose colonial incursions in the Congo led to the deaths of millions, was removed after being set on fire and spattered with paint.

There are countless other examples. ARTnews has a continually updated list.

The Tennessee State Capitol, however, is not quite as enlightened, and will be holding on to its bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate Army general who was also the Klan's first Grand Wizard. It was installed in ... 1973.

Also, for now, Richmond's statue of Robert E. Lee will remain in place - owing to an 1890 deed produced by a local resident. A judge has ordered that the statue remain in place until the deed is interpreted.

In the meantime, a group has launched a Change.org petition to replace Lee's monument with a statue of Oderus Urungus (born Dave Brockie), the late lead singer of the heavy metal band Gwar.

Remember the pandemic? Its effects are still reverberating throughout the institutions of culture.

Deborah Vankin and Jessica Gelt take a hard look at museum reopening plans. Los Angeles County says museums can begin to reopen, but more than a dozen institutions say they may not reopen for weeks, if not months. As they report: "Many museums said they need time to carefully review and implement the county's guidelines, which include limiting the number of people allowed on the premises, checking for COVID-19 symptoms such as coughing and fever, and instructing guests to use hand sanitizer and wear face coverings."

The Huntington is getting ready to open its gates - but just to the outdoor areas. Most of the museum's 16 themed gardens, covering 130 acres, will be open to the general public starting July 1 by advance reservation and with the usual safety precautions.

The Annenberg Space for Photography is shutting down. The exhibition space, founded by philanthropist Wallis Annenberg a decade ago, has been closed since mid-March due to the pandemic. The Annenberg Foundation says it will redirect those funds toward pandemic recovery, including "public health, food insecurity, economic recovery," spokeswoman Elizabeth Armour tells The Times' Deborah Vankin.

In addition, SFMOMA will lay off an additional 55 staff members from departments across the museum.

There's an interesting piece by Kim Tingley about how post-COVID design can draw lessons already learned by architects designing better spaces for individuals who are deaf or have autism.

As cities begin to reopen and contend with the financial wreckage of the pandemic, they will have to think of new ways to support their communities economically and urbanistically. The CitySpeak podcast has a good interview with Bruce Katz, co-author of "The New Localism," about that. He makes some interesting points about collective work and how U.S. cities often undervalue their fallow land.

Plus, a few ideas for how cities might be safely reimagined for older, more vulnerable residents.

The best arts online

"Justice too long delayed is justice denied." Times classical music critic Mark Swed recommends giving this moving excerpt of Oakland-based composer Zachary Watkin's "Peace Be Till" a good look. The work is inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter From the Birmingham Jail" and features words by Dr. Clarence B. Jones and music by the Kronos Quartet.

Swed tells me that the film has some poignant connections: "The grandfather of the film editor, Evan Neff, a photographer who often works with the quartet, was a carpenter who flew out from San Francisco in 1965 to join the march on Montgomery and who built the stage MLK stood on."

Helder Guimarães' hit Zoom performance, "The Present," staged by the Geffen Playhouse, has been extended for a third time until October. The story, told over a series of magic tricks, touches on the performer's previous experience with quarantine.

Matt Cooper has the best online happenings, including Liza Minnelli's concert special (with outfits by Halston!) and the virtual edition of the 74th Ojai Music Festival - which is free to stream through Sunday. After that, nightly streams will be available on-demand.

You can find all of our culture listings on our "Things to Do: Arts & Culture" page.

Passages

Lennie Niehaus, a jazz pioneer and film composer - his credits include scores for his old Army buddy Clint Eastwood's movies, including "Bird" and "Unforgiven" - has died at the age of 90.

Robert Northern, a master of the French horn who migrated fluidly between classical music and jazz, and who in his 20s played on important jazz recordings with Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane, has died at 86.

Tyrone Proctor, a pioneer of the 1970s L.A. dance style known as waacking, which went from underground gay clubs to global phenomenon, has died at 66. Makeda Easter tells his story - about how he got on "Soul Train" by sneaking into the back of the studio lot in someone's trunk.

In other news

- Archeologists in London have unearthed what is believed to be the city's oldest theater building, dating to the 1560s.
- There is a petition circulating online to turn Harlem's Apollo Theater into a Broadway house and it has drawn thousands of signatures.
- Metropolis magazine has a good interview with architect Mabel O. Wilson about her upcoming book on race and Modern architecture, as well as an upcoming exhibition she helped organize at MoMA that will examine blackness and architecture in the U.S.
- A historical look at how the Los Angeles Free Press covered protest and police brutality.
- Artist Sterling Ruby has made a film about the California prison system. Architecture writer Mimi Zeiger interviews him on about the landscape of incarceration.
- A profile of classical music's newest star: cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, all of 21, who became internationally known after his performance at Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's wedding.
- The next Los Angeles Times book club will feature Walter Thompson-Hernández and his book, "The Compton Cowboys." My colleague Angel Jennings will host. Excited for this one.
- And, something rilly rilly important: The best houseplant for your zodiac sign.

Last but not least ...

The 1918 flu pandemic devastated Native American communities. Montana-based powwow dancer Rose Bear Don't Walk keeps alive a dance from the era created to bring healing and hope.

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Essential Arts: The memory of George Floyd lives on in murals

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Rather than asking how you are, I'm gonna co-opt an old Farsi greeting: May you not be tired. I'm Carolina A. Miranda, staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, with this week's essential culture news - and healing dances. Art in honor of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter has popped up all over Los Angeles.

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Barter town art, 16×20 framed on plaster ,( tape on t.p). ..mix media , art .. biding starts at $120.000. , please bid under this photo , no less than 5$ increments please ... thank you for...

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Slated for the upcoming cover of TIME, the border surrounding the painting will include the names of 35 American Black men and women who have lost their lives due to police brutality and racist vigilantism.

A painting of a grieving Black mother by artist Titus Kaphar will adorn the cover of the upcoming issue of TIME magazine, which will be available in print on June 15.

The classic TIME red border framing the painting will include the names of 35 American Black men and women who have lost their lives at the hands of police and racist vigilantes.

Titled "Analogous Colors," the painting depicts a sorrowful mother holding her child. Kaphar cut out the canvas, leaving a hollowed-out silhouette of the child to show the mother's loss.

"In her expression, I see the black mothers who are unseen, and rendered helpless in this fury against their babies," Kaphar wrote about the protagonist of his painting in a poem accompanying the painting. He continued:

As I listlessly wade through another cycle of violence against Black people,

I paint a Black mother...

eyes closed,

furrowed brow,

holding the contour of her loss.

George Floyd, the unarmed Black man who was slain by Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin, called out to his deceased mother while struggling to breathe under the officer's knee for nearly nine minutes.

Floyd's mother, Larcenia Floyd, died in May of 2018.

In his poem, Kaphar continued:

My Black mother rescues me yet again.

I want to be sure that she is seen.

I want to be certain that her story is told.

And so,

this time

America must hear her voice.

This time

America must believe her.

Kaphar, an internationally acclaimed artist, had created another cover for TIME in 2014 to mark the protests in Ferguson against the killing of Black teenager Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson. Titled " Yet Another Fight for Remembrance" (2014), the painting featured Black protestors, arms in the air, covered with brushstrokes of white paint, a technique that Kaphar has used in other works.

"One Black mother's loss WILL be memorialized," Kaphar wrote in his essay. "This time I will not let her go."

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Artist Titus Kaphar Honors Victims of Racist Killings

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Slated for the upcoming cover of TIME, the border surrounding the painting will include the names of 35 American Black men and women who have lost their lives due to police brutality and racist vigilantism.

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A new mural in Poland is helping people breathe a little easier thanks to special paint. As part of the Converse City Forests project, Polish artists Dawid Ryski and Maciek Polak came together to design a piece of public art in Warsaw. The results aren't only aesthetically beautiful, but environmentally friendly, too. The artists' vision, which was executed by Good Looking Studio, came to life using paint that actually cuts down on pollution.

So, how does the unique pigment work? This photocatalytic paint is activated by light to break down pollutants and turn the substance into harmless nitrates, thus improving air quality. In fact, the City Forests project aims to "plant" trees in areas where they don't grow. For instance, the Warsaw mural is located next to the Politechnika metro station, a busy hub of activity. Converse estimates that the enormous piece of public art has the cleaning power of 780 trees.

The overall concept of the Warsaw mural brings together the urban environment and nature. Ryski focused on the architectural elements while Polak took charge of the natural motifs that flow across the building. By combining their skills, they were able to create a harmonious and balanced composition that speaks to the campaign slogan "Create Together for Tomorrow."

The goal for the entire project is to produce art that equals 3,000 trees. With work planned in Sydney, Sao Paolo, Lima, and Bogota, as well as many other cities, there seems to be nothing holding them back from reaching their goal.

As part of the Converse City Forests project, artists painted a special mural in Warsaw.

Made with air-purifying paint, the mural actually helps improve air quality.

This one mural alone has the purifying power of 780 trees.

Converse City Forests: Website

My Modern Met granted permission to feature photos by Good Looking Studio.

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This Eco-Friendly Mural Uses Special Paint That Eats Smog To Help Clean the Air

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A new mural in Poland is helping people breathe a little easier thanks to special paint. As part of the Converse City Forests project, Polish artists Dawid Ryski and Maciek Polak came together to design a piece of public art in Warsaw. The results aren't only aesthetically beautiful, but environmentally friendly, too.