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Julia Morgan was the first woman to receive a certificate in architecture. She worked on the Hearst Castle but also focused on helping women with her designs.

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Julia Morgan: Iconic architect - Berkeley Engineering

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Julia Morgan, who graduated in 1894 with a degree in civil engineering, was an architectural pioneer and “a true California gem.”

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William McDonough is an American architect who was a dean of architecture at the University of Virginia. He also works in green sustainably and designed the Vmware Palo Alto campus where I work.

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Find out why William McDonough made the 2023 TIME100 Climate list

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Jacob Armstead Lawrence (September 7, 1917 – June 9, 2000

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Jacob Armstead Lawrence (September 7, 1917 – June 9, 2000

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Jacob Lawrence was an American Artist known for his series of paintings documenting the great migration of southern African Americans to the North. His paintings were extremely telling in showing the experience of black people in the northern states.

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©2024 The Phillips Collection, 1600 21st Street, NW, Washington, DC

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Dorothea Lange (born Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn; May 26, 1895 – October 11, 1965)

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Dorothea Lange (born Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn; May 26, 1895 – October 11, 1965)

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Dorothea Lange was famous for her photography of the Migrant mother. Her subject was a Cherokee woman and mother of seven who was destitute migrating from Oklahoma to northern California in the hopes of finding a job in the fields. She promised the woman that after she spread the word of how things were for them she would send help to the camps and by the time the aid reached the camp the famous migrant mother and family had moved on.

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Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing - Frist Art Museum

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Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) is widely recognized as one of the most important documentary photographers of the twentieth century. She was a prominent advocate of the medium’s power to effect change and used her camera as a political tool to expose what she saw as injustices and inequalities. Lange was also a formidable woman of remarkable […]

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Christina Fernandez is a photographer/associate professor. She is based in Los Angeles, and her social and political commentary are subject to her Mexican heritage. Fernandez's work has been featured in Museums and galleries since 2007.

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Metro Silicon Valley | Silicon Valley’s Leading Weekly

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Christina Fernandez Double-Exposes at SJ Museum of Art Exhibit

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Christina Fernandez’s first monographic museum exhibition, Multiple Exposures, is a survey that prominently features her photography.

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William L. O'Neil ( born 1935-March - 2016)

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William L. O'Neil ( born 1935-March - 2016)

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The text in this article was taken from Williams Book. He was a Know for documenting Radicals and being a hsitorian of revoutionary periods of time.

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Negroes, by far the largest racial minority, were as segregated and discriminated against during the war as before it. But manpower shortages and the President's need for black votes combined to make the picture somewhat brighter than it might have been. The mobilization plan of 1940 called for proportionately half as many blacks as whites to be drafted, and those were to be confined largely to service rather than combat units, excluded entirely from the Army Air Corps and Marines, and from the Navy except as messmen.

Military discrimination became a political issue in that election year, and to hold the Negro vote Roosevelt forced the Army to say that it would become 10 percent black, giving roughly the same ratio of Negroes to whites that obtained among civilians. This did not go far enough, and in response to further pressure the Army announced that it would form a number of black combat units, promote a Negro Colonel to the rank of Brigadier General, and appoint Negro advisors to Secretary Stimson and Selective Service Chief Brigadier General Lewis B. Hershey. These actions kept black voters in line, even though Negroes continued to serve in segregated units.

In 1942 they were still underrepresented in the military; a situation not only politically unwise but a waste of manpower. Consequently, Roosevelt ordered the Navy, much against its will, to enlist Negroes for general service. The Army General Staff suggested that racially integrated units be formed. This proved to be too radical a step, despite the added difficulty involved in building segregated training camps. However, except by the Air Force, officer candidate schools were integrated as an economy measure. At the end of 1944 there were more Negro officers than could be placed because of the Army's insistence that only whites command Negro units. Another rule was that no black could be ranked higher than the lowest rated white in any unit, which meant in most cases that Negroes could not rise above first lieutenant. This was justified on the ground that black troops preferred white officers, which was untrue, particularly as so many white officers were Southerners with racist attitudes offensive to Negro troops.

By the same token, white officers seldom wished to be assigned to Negro units. If they were hard on the troops, charges of discrimination resulted; but if they stood up for their men they were often scorned by peers and accused of being "nigger lovers." Commanding Negro soldiers was onerous, too, as 70 percent to 90 percent scored in the lowest Army classification test categories, compared to only 20 percent to 40 percent of whites, so training them took longer and required more patience. To prevent outbreaks of violence by or against them, commissioned whites often had to patrol black housing areas and undertake other duties in addition to their own that commanders would not trust to Negro officers. In the South, white officers of black units were discriminated against socially. Everywhere it was believed that they were made to command black troops as some kind of punishment. Understandably, white officers hated being assigned to Negro units and schemed constantly for transfers.

In addition to suffering from reluctant commanders, segregation, and discrimination, Negro soldiers often were victims of violence, especially in the South, scores being killed or wounded during the war. Often these casualties resulted from fights between black soldiers and white soldiers and civilians, but even minor violations of local racial codes were punishable by death. In March 1942 Sergeant Thomas B. Foster of the black 92nd Engineers Battalion was shot five times and killed by Little Rock, Arkansas police for questioning the methods being employed by MPs in arresting a drunken Negro soldier. There were race riots and fights between black and white servicemen all over the world. The resulting low morale among black troops was attributed by John McCloy to Negro oversensitivity and the fault-finding Negro press. As the pressure did not go away, in 1944 he ordered the desegregation of all facilities on military posts-an edict that was seldom observed or enforced.

As late as the spring of 1943 only 79,000 out of a total of 504,000 Negro soldiers were overseas because commanders did not want black combat units. The Army solution was to begin converting them to service troops, who were accepted -- the more menial the work the better. When Representative Hamilton Fish (R-NY), who had commanded black soldiers in World War I, asked Stimson to explain this policy, he was told that Negroes "have been unable to master efficiently the techniques of modern weapons." Stimson also denied that the War Department was trying to keep blacks out of combat, though in fact it was. Thus, only one black division was ever committed to battle, the 92nd Infantry. It did poorly on the Italian front owing to acute morale problems, which the Army's own investigator told the press had been caused by segregation. The Navy; for its part, assigned blacks to labor units after being ordered to expand their role beyond that of messmen. Only after riots broke out did it begin to integrate a handful of auxiliary ships.

There were minor exceptions to the rule that Negroes were seldom allowed to fight, and even more rarely given the means to do so effectively. The black 99th Pursuit Squadron was a great success, as were a small number of black combat units in the Ground Forces. During the Battle of the Bulge Negroes in the Army Service Forces were allowed to volunteer for infantry platoons. Thousands did so and performed well in combat--although many were rushed to the front with little or no training. The tiny Coast Guard, which totaled only 240,000 men compared to the Navy's four million, was outstanding, commissioning 700 Negro officers to the Navy's 58. But, on the whole, blacks were underutilized by the military in World War Il -- a blunder, given the manpower shortage, as well as an injustice.

Despite everything, the black experience of war had long term benefits beyond their eligibility for the GI Bill of Rights. A recent study suggests that Negro veterans gained a larger view of the world and of their own capabilities. The most obvious evidence of this is that so many did not return to the South, whose caste-like social system closed off most opportunities for advancement. By 1950 more than half of all black veterans were living in a different region from where they had been born, compared to about a third of Negroes in the same age group who had not served in the military. This was important because in 1949 each additional year of age added $75 to the annual income of whites, but only $20 to that of blacks -- unless the latter had moved to the North, in which case their rate of increase was the same as for whites. For whites, each year of military service was worth as much to their later earning power as an additional year of education, but for blacks each year of service was worth up to three years of education. It is one of the few happy ironies of the war that the military, which did not want blacks in the first place and did everything possible to make them feel inferior, benefited them all the same.

For black workers World War II opened up opportunities that had never before existed. This too was inadvertent, for, like the armed services, industry had no plans to utilize Negroes. In 1940 there were 5,389,000 employed blacks, of whom 3,582,000 were male, almost none working at well-paid defense jobs. Further, in a survey made by the U.S. Employment Office, more than half of responding defense contractors said they would not hire Negroes in future. This situation outraged A. Philip Randolph, President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the only black union of any consequence, who called for a Negro march on Washington to protest against job discrimination. As the old AFL unions were for whites only and the CIO unions too new to have many black officers, Randolph was the ranking Negro trade unionist in America and commanded great respect. His call was supported by Walter White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading civil rights organization.

Despite the pleas of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia of New York and others not to impair the defense effort or embarrass the President, Randolph went forward with his plans and it was expected that 50,000 Negroes would turn out on July 1, 1941. Four days before the scheduled march, FDR invited a group of leaders -- including Randolph and White -- to meet with him, and the result was Executive Order 8802. It established what became a Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) that would also work on behalf of Jews, aliens, naturalized citizens, Asians, Hispanics, and American Indians. It would enjoy considerable success, aided greatly by labor shortages that forced employers to lower old barriers. By 1944 blacks held 7.5 percent of all jobs in war industries, which was less than their share of the population but still a major improvement.

The industries that resisted hiring blacks, or did so only at the lowest levels, were frequently those dominated by racist labor unions. The Machinists and Boilermakers between them represented 30 percent to 40 percent of airframe workers and over a fifth of shipyard employees, but the Machinists were lily white and the Boilermakers restricted blacks to segregated and voteless locals. Of the 31 national unions that openly discriminated against blacks, 19 were in the railroad industry, most refusing to change their practices despite FEPC orders and court rulings. White workers frequently Went on strike to protest the hiring or promotion of Negroes. When the Philadelphia Transit Company was struck to protest the upgrading of eight Negro porters to drivers, it had to be taken over by the Army.

Bad as job discrimination was, it paled alongside racial violence. Attacks on blacks were everyday occurrences in the South, where lynchings continued throughout the war, but they now become common elsewhere. The year 1943 opened with a series of racial clashes. Fights between white and black gangs in Newark, New Jersey resulted in the death of one Negro. A black soldier was killed in a race riot in Centreville, Mississippi. A riot among soldiers in El Paso, Texas caused two deaths, and at Camp Stewart, Georgia a gun fight between Negro soldiers and military policemen resulted in five casualties -- one fatal. When 12 blacks were promoted at a shipyard in Mobile, Alabama, white workers ran wild, seriously injuring 20 Negroes. A race riot in Beaumont, Texas left two blacks dead and 50 injured. Not all the attacks were against Negroes. In California, riot victims were usually Mexican-American youths known as "zooters" or "zoot suiters" because of their colorful apparel, the zoot-suit having a very long jacket, heavily padded shoulders, and balloon trousers with tight cuffs. In June mobs of servicemen, egged on by civilians, began beating zoot suiters and continued doing so until the zoot-suit was no longer seen in public.

Life Magazine, 7/5/43.

On June 15 and 17 there were minor race riots in the Detroit area, where an influx of blacks had worsened an already acute housing shortage. June 20, a Sunday, was unusually warm, with temperatures reaching 90 degrees, leading thousands of people to jam Belle Isle in the Detroit River seeking relief. Fights broke out all day and by 11:00 PM. had degenerated into mob violence. Downtown a black mob, inflamed by rumors, seems to have rioted first, after which whites retaliated, with police support and approval hunting down and killing blacks. After several days of mob violence, federal troops were called in to restore order -- by which time some 35 people, a majority of them black, were dead, over 700 were wounded, and 1,300 were under arrest. Seventeen blacks were shot by the police, who reported in every instance that the victim had been looting. Although whites looted and burned too, none was shot by policemen.

Given the appalling amount of racial violence during the war, some of it to be sure instigated by blacks but more often provoked against them, there was no reason to be optimistic. Yet amid the turmoil momentous changes were developing. In his aptly titled book New World A-Coming, one black journalist pointed out some that were already visible in 1943. 12 Negro voters had become politically significant in 17 Northern states with a total of 281 votes out of 531 in the Electoral College. In Harlem, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. was already a rising star. He would be elected to Congress in 1944, becoming the first Negro to represent an inner city district. Rising wages and an increased political awareness were leading blacks to join the NAACP in unprecedented numbers. It would multiply tenfold during the war; achieving a dues-paying membership of half a million by 1945.

There were some 230 black newspapers with 2 million readers -- among them one daily, the influential Atlanta Daily World -- which were served by the Associated Negro Press of Chicago. The black press was now able to make up for the white media's habit of ignoring news of interest to Negroes. Many small changes were taking place locally that in the aggregate would prove to be important. In Little Rock, after the murder of Sergeant Foster, and despite the opposition of the Policeman's Association, eight Negro officers were hired. Later the Federal Court of Appeals, in an unrelated case, ordered Little Rock to equalize the salaries of white and black school teachers. Small steps, to be sure, but inch by inch the rock of segregation was being chipped away.

Another important element, taken for granted at the time but for Negroes a source of strength that would be greatly missed later, was that a majority of black children were still being raised in two-parent families. Negroes were poor, but they lived in viable communities and had a working family system. These resources, together with wartime gains, did much to make possible the civil rights revolution of the fifties and sixties.

Because a handful of German Jews did reach the United States, and Japanese-Americans and Negroes improved their position later, does not change the shameful record just discussed, which had practical as well as moral implications. Though American production astounded the world, there were barely enough people to do the job and also meet military requirements. Had German Jews been admitted earlier, and Japanese-Americans and blacks fully utilized the war effort would have benefited proportionately. There is no way of calculating how much prejudice cost the nation in lost workers and soldiers but it had to be very great.

Above and beyond the physical harm was the moral cost to the nation. America represented itself to the world as the land of the free and the home of the brave, but this was only a half-truth. Bravery was commonplace in the war, fairness to minorities infrequent. American democracy, which boasted of providing equal justice to all, failed to make good on its pledge in the one area above all others by which democracy is tested. Later generations would have to redeem the promise of American life.

Though less brutally treated than minorities, working women also suffered from discrimination, a fact which remains astonishing for, in most war plants, however well or badly run, the key problem was the manpower shortage to which women were the solution. A few figures make this clear. Of the 9 million additional persons who entered the labor force during World War II, some 3.3 million represented natural increase, the balance coming from people who would not otherwise have been employed. Boys and girls left school early to work in factories, or at least to replace those who had moved up to better paying jobs. Old men came out of retirement to fill in for youths who had been drafted. The most numerous new adult workers were married women, despite the prejudice against them. In 1936 a Gallup poll had disclosed that 82 percent of male, and three quarters of the female respondents believed that wives with employed husbands should not work. War did not change these attitudes as much as might be supposed, because American democracy had not yet reached the point where gender was seen as irrelevant to the full exercise of personal rights and capacities.

Fortunately for the war effort, married women joined the labor force anyway. Between 1940 and 1944, the number of employed women rose by half, reaching a high of 19 million, and, for the first time in American history, married women outnumbered singles. This was not a matter of choice but of need. When the supply of white males and single white females was exhausted, employers had no alternative but to hire married women and blacks. However, unlike today, and despite the fact that the basic allotment for a serviceman's wife was only $50 a month (worth perhaps $500 today), young mothers remained at home. The number of women workers under the age of 35 increased just half a percent more than if there had been no war. The Women's Bureau found that only 32 percent of the married, widowed, or divorced women in the work force had any children under the age of 1 -- in half of these cases only one.

Women over 35 years of age accounted for 60 percent of the increase. There were several reasons for this. The government did not want young mothers to work, Chairman Paul McNutt of the War Manpower Commission issuing a directive saying "No women responsible for the care of young children should be encouraged or compelled to seek employment which deprives their children of essential care until all other sources of supply are exhausted."13 Few efforts were made to assist employed mothers of young children. Though some department stores, led by Bloomingdale's of New York, set up defense plant branches, most stores kept the same hours as in peacetime, leaving women coming off the day shift with little or no time to shop for food and other necessities.

Only 130,000 children were served by the Lanham Act, which provided federal subsidies for child care. Part of the reason was that mothers mistrusted, often rightly so, the quality of jury-rigged facilities. In other cases, nursery fees were so high that working women could not afford them. Notable exceptions were the Kaiser Corporation's shipyard care centers, open 24 hours a day and staffed by child development experts. The excellence of these centers and their success in persuading young mothers to use them was, for the most part, an example that persuaded few employers.

Great Britain, where the labor crunch was more severe, showed how much more could have been done. Britain conscripted women between the ages of 19 and 30, offering them a choice between the armed services and essential war work, and, although this was not rigorously enforced, expected most women under the age of 60 to contribute in some way to the war effort. Child care support was provided on a much larger scale than in the United States, stores were required to remain open late, and in others ways the state did a good deal to make motherhood and employment compatible. As a result, it was estimated that eight married women out of 10 between the ages of 18 and 40 were in either the armed services or industry.

Though American support was never this good, the work force changed. In 1940 about half of the 11 million working women held poorly paid clerical, sales, and service jobs. The one-fifth engaged in manufacturing were concentrated at the low end, mostly in textile and clothing factories. Four years later.

At the peak of women's wartime employment, in 1944, the percentage of the female labor force in clerical, sales and service jobs had declined to 34 percent. Although the entrance of over three million women into manufacturing represented a significant 140 percent increase over the figure for 1940, the 460 percent increase in the number of women employed in production in the "war industries" --metals, chemicals and rubber -- that had employed few women before the war, was even more dramatic. Of equal importance, the war offered many women upward occupational mobility. Although 49 percent of the women employed in war industries in March 1944 had not worked before the war, 27 percent had shifted from other occupations.
&nbsp&nbsp --Nancy Gabin, "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle Can Build Tractors, Too." Michigan History Magazine (March/April 1992), p.19.

Officially, the American view was that married women were only working for the duration and would return home when it was over. There were many exceptions to this rule even in 1940, when 15 percent of married women held outside jobs. After that the proportion of married women who joined the labor force increased to one in four in 1950 and then to over half in 1980. The proportion who were active mothers rose as well, so that by 1980 three out of five married women with children aged 6 to 17 were in the work force, and two out of five with children under the age of 6. By June 1987 more than half of all women, 51 percent, to be exact, who had given birth during the previous year were gainfully employed. Thus, while the prominent role played by married women in wartime was seen as a temporary expedient, it marked an historic change from a relatively small female work force dominated by young singles, to an immense force comprised for the most part of older, married, or formerly married women.

The experience of women in the auto industry typified how this transition was effected. As conversion to defense work picked up, the United Automobile Workers (UAW) union, though among the most progressive in the country, shared the common concern over getting unemployed men back to work. Its annual convention in August 1941 resolved to oppose "any attempt to train women to take the place of men on skilled jobs until such time as all the unemployed men have been put back to work."

However, to keep wage rates up in case worse came to worse, the delegates also declared that women should receive equal pay with men if they held identical jobs. That the UAW meant to protect men anyway became clear in October, when it filed a strike notice against the Kelsey Hayes Wheel Company in Detroit, demanding "the removal of all girl employees from machine work" -- which was, in the union's view, "a man's job." When two more women were hired, male workers staged a walkout, forcing the company to remove women workers from skilled jobs and limiting them to 25 percent of the local work force.

So long as men remained unemployed, the UAW was determined to keep women out of its plants. It was also determined in practice, as at Kelsey Hayes, to see that men earned more than women for doing the same work. Because employers seldom wished to fight the union on this issue, most new hires were male. Thus, the female proportion of the auto industry's work force steadily declined between 1939 and 1941. When the auto industry began to convert to war production after Pearl Harbor, there were massive temporary layoffs. As employment began to rise again, men were rehired at a much greater rate than women.

When the supply of unemployed men disappeared prejudice had to weaken. By November 1943, when their numbers peaked, there were 203,300 women in auto factories, constituting 26 percent of the labor force. In some plants the rise was far more dramatic, rising from zero women in Ford's River Rouge complex in 1942 to 5,000 one year later. Wage rates, however, remained unequal, the UAW, contrary to its prewar stand, insisting on differential wages for what were defined as "male" and "female" jobs. Seeds of change were planted just the same. Even before V-J Day, the UAW International Executive Board recommended eliminating job classifications by sex. When women were laid off at the end of the war in favor of inexperienced men, they did not go quietly. At Ford's Highland Park plant, 200 women picketed the employmenf office, bearing signs reading "Stop Discrimination Because of Sex" and "The Hand that Rocks the Cradle Can Build Tractors, Too." In the short run they lost -- but today women do work on assembly lines, just as they did during World War II.

For American industry as a whole, practices varied widely. In Boeing's facilities in Seattle they made up 47 percent of the work force. In Seattle women held 1.8 percent of the jobs at one shipyard, 21 percent at another. Despite regional differences, the total number of women in war industries soared, in Detroit alone the figure rising from 46,800 to a high of 215,000 female industrial workers. Apart from patriotism, the chief reason why women poured into factories -- dirt, noise, and danger notwithstanding -- was money. Even without wage parity, women earned more as factory workers than in their previous jobs. By 1945 at Willow Run, one-third of the women workers had experienced pay raises of 100 percent since the war began, compared to one-ninth of the men.

Though the prejudice against working women declined, or rather was suspended for the duration, one thing that did not change was the refusal to take full advantage of women's potential. Black women were discriminated against in war plants even more than white women, not only by employers but by workers. During one two-week period in Detroit there were live "hate" strikes occasioned by the employment of black women. Yet black women were more eager than whites to work. While the participation rate of all women in the Detroit work force rose from 29.5 percent in 1940 to 39.7 percent in 1944, the rate for nonwhite women went from 31.6 percent to 48.8 percent. By 1945 the percentage of employed black women who were in private household service had declined from 60 to 45. As a woman later said: "Hitler was the one that got us out of the white folks' kitchen." They would not go back.

Even when labor was in shortest supply, little was done to relieve women of domestic duties that impaired their job effectiveness. In Seattle's war industries during 1943 women workers were more than twice as likely to be absent from work as men. The War Manpower Commission believed that 100,000 worker hours were lost per month in Detroit because women took days off to do their laundry. In Baltimore the quit rate for women workers was 6.16 percent, compared to 4.78 for men. If shopping and laundry services, hot takeout meals, and more and better nurseries had been more widely available, all these losses could have been cut. It would probably have made some difference too if women workers had been promoted and paid equally with men. In 1944 the average wage for working women was $31.21 per week compared to $54.65 for men. Even the high degree of unionization during wartime had no effect, union leaders developing little interest in the special problems of women.

When efforts were made to deal with women's entry into the industrial work force too often their quality was poor. Some factories hired female counselors, but in the absence of supporting services what they could do was painfully limited. Susan Laughlin, a counselor who had no special qualifications for the job except a sympathetic personality, recalled that she once arranged an abortion for a married woman who had been raped after passing out at an office party. More often she was called upon to deal with such problems as when "a girl had come in a bare midriff, and all the men were hitting themselves with hammers." Mostly, however, counselors or "plant matrons" were expected to prevent women from having sex on company time.

On the other hand, there was some concern for safety problems peculiar to women workers -- at least on the publicity level. In 1943 the War Production Board asked Veronica Lake, a popular movie star whose trademark long blonde hair fell over part of her face, to adopt a more conservative style. The problem, officialdom reported, was that 20,000 Lake imitators in defense plants were at risk of being caught by the hair in machinery. Miss Lake was cooperative, saying that she wore her hair up most of the time anyway, to keep it out of electric fans, the buttons of friendly men, revolving doors, and other hazards. "This request from the Government is not only a pleasure, it's a relief," she insisted patriotically.

Given the stereotyping and the misogyny, and the mass media's habit of trivializing what they did, what is remarkable is that so many women did find jobs in defense plants. They were essential to the war effort -- yet, like minorities, they could have contributed even more but for the prejudices against them. Here as well, American democracy had far to go and much to learn.

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Negroes, by far the largest racial minority, were as segregated and discriminated against during the war as before it. But manpower shortages and the President's need for black votes combined to make the picture somewhat brighter than it might have been.

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Charles and Ray Eames- Charles           (Born June 1907- August 1978)

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Charles and Ray Eames- Charles           (Born June 1907- August 1978)

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Charles and Ray Eames were pivotal American designers of modern architecture and furniture. Known for further work in the mid-20th century, they pioneered using molded plywood and fiberglass, creating iconic pieces like the Eames lounge chair and ottoman. Their contributions extended to architecture, industrial design, and film, emphasizing functionality and innovation. Their legacy continues to influence contemporary design.

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Charles and Ray Eames: Modern Furniture and Architecture

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Charles and Ray Eames are two American designers that shaped 20th-century design and architecture. Read along to discover more about the famous couple.

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Betty Friedan (born February 4, 1921- February 4, 2006)

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Betty Friedan (born February 4, 1921- February 4, 2006)

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Friedan Dinner was an American feminist, writer, and activist best known for her 1963 book Defend Feminine Mystique. This work is credited with barking the second wave of feminism in the United States by addressing the dissatisfaction of many housewives with traditional roles I guess they are called trad wives, they cofounded the National Organization for Women in 1966, serving as its first president and advocating for gender, equality, workplace rights, and reproductive freedom. She was kind of a badass.

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Betty Friedan and America’s forgotten feminists

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Two new books aim to refresh a movement’s collective memory

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In the 1980s, Frieda developed Afrofemcentrism, an art history perspective that focuses on black women artists, shaping the art worldview of African and African-American women, both locally and nationally.

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Judith Baka is an artist and activist recognized for the Great Wall of Los Angeles, a mural created in 1976 that spans a quarter of a mile long that Tujunga wash. It depicts California's history with an emphasis on marginalized communities, a lot of Hispanic people, and cultural ideas from the Hispanic cultural perspective, which aims to promote cultural awareness and social justice through the public.

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We are excited to invite you to an unforgettable evening with Judy Baca as she reflects on her work and its impact, marking the closing of Painting in the River of Angels: Judy Baca and the Great Wall. Following this closing, enjoy an engaging conversation and reflection on art with Judy Baca, Ed Ruscha, and Vincent Valdez, three remarkable artists, at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.

Two Events | July 16th, 2024
6 pm SPARC's Closing of the Painting in the River of Angels: Judy Baca and the Great Wall
Location: Resnick Pavilion at LACMA
RSVP required: info@sparcinla.org

7 pm A Conversation Between Artists: Baca, Valdez, Ruscha
Location: Academy Museum of Motion Pictures
RSVP required via LACMA

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The Closing Events of Painting in the River of Angels: Judy Baca and The Great Wall - SOCIAL AND PUBLIC ART RESOURCE CENTER

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We are excited to invite you to an unforgettable evening with Judy Baca as she reflects on her work and its impact, marking the closing of Painting in the River...

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Martha Rusler's video on semiotics explores how signs and symbols convey meaning in visual culture, emphasizing the role of contexts in interpretation. It encourages analysis of the cultural implications behind images. I thought the video was so cool, and I loved the way that she expressed what I found to be her concern about why a woman was in the kitchen in the first place.

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Martha Rosler. Semiotics of the Kitchen. 1975 | MoMA

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Martha Rosler. Semiotics of the Kitchen. 1975. Video (black and white, sound). 6:19 min. Gift of the artist and Galerie Nagel, Berlin. 583.2012. © 2024 Martha Rosler. Media and Performance

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Yoko Ono is a conceptual artist recognized for her influential work in her 1964 performance cut piece. She invited audience members to cut her clothing while she sat passively exploring themes of vulnerability and audience engagement and performance art, I felt that this work was very important because she visually explained the dynamic between men and women at that time, in my opinion.

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Michael Heiser is an American artist known for his large-scale earthworks and conceptual art, focusing on themes of space, time, and human-environment relationships. Key works include Double Negative, a major excavation in Nevada, and City, an ongoing project in New Mexico, both characterized by their impressive scale and the interplay between neutral and man-made elements; I think this is the way that he is creating art with already made earth materials and adding to them to intertwine his vision.

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‘Manliest artist in history’ arrives to gala with his dog

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During dinner, honoring Walter De Maria, the dog even barked along with the applause.

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Robert Smithson  (January 2, 1938—July 20, 1973)

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Robert Smithson  (January 2, 1938—July 20, 1973)

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Robert Smithson was an American artist recognized for his land art, especially the spiral jetty created in 1970, situated in the Great Salt Lake, Utah. The large earthwork consists of a spiral jetty made from basalt rocks and earth. It examines themes of nature, time, and human impact on the environment, this piece was beautiful, and watching the film made me feel very inspired about art, what creative people are making the art for, and how it will impact later in life.

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Red is the most joyful and dreadful thing in the physical universe, it is the fiercest note, it is the highest light, it is the place where the walls of this world of ours wear the thinnest and something beyond burns through.

-G.K. Chesterton

My concern with salt lakes began with my work in 1968 on the Mono Lake Site-Nonsite in California. 1 Later I read a book called Vanishing Trails of Atacama by William Rudolph which described salt lakes (salars) in Bolivia in all stages of desiccation and filled with micro bacteria that give the water surface a red color. The pink flamingos that live around the salars match the color of the water. In The Useless Land, John Aarons and Claudio Vita-Finzi describe Laguna Colorada: "The basalt (at the shores) is black, the volcanos purple, and their exposed interiors yellow and red. The beach is grey and the lake pink, topped with the icing of iceberg-like masses of salts." 2 Because of the remoteness of Bolivia and because Mono Lake lacked a reddish color, I decided to investigate the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

From New York City I called the Utah Park Development and spoke to Ted Tuttle, who told me that water in the Great Salt Lake north of Lucin Cutoff, which cuts the lake in two, was the color of tomato soup. That was enough of a reason to go out there and have a look. Tuttle told my wife, Nancy Holt, and myself of some people who knew the lake. First we visited Bill Holt who lived in Syracuse. He was instrumental in building a causeway that connected Syracuse with Antelope Island in the southern part of the Great Salt Lake. Although that site was interesting, the water lacked the red coloration I was looking for, so we continued our search. Next we went to see John Silver on Silver Sands Beach near Magna. His sons showed us the only boat that sailed the lake. Due to the high salt content of the water it was impractical for ordinary boats to use the lake, and no large boats at all could go beyond the Lucin Cutoff on which the transcontinental railroad crossed the lake. At that point I was still not sure what shape my work of art would take. I thought of making an island with the help of boats and barges, but in the end I would let the site determine what I would build. We visited Charles Stoddard, who supposedly had the only barge on the north side of the cutoff. Stoddard, a well-driller, was one of the last homesteaders in Utah. His attempt to develop Carrington Island in 1932 ended in failure because he could not find fresh water. "I've had the lake," he said. Yet, while he was living on the island with his family he made many valuable observations of the lake. He was kind enough to take us to Little Valley on the east side of the Lucin Cutoff to look for his barge-it had sunk. The abandoned man-made harbors of Little Valley gave me my first view of the wine-red water, but there were too many "Keep Out" signs around to make that a practical site for anything, and we were told to "stay away" by two angry ranchers. After fixing a gashed gas tank, we returned to Charles Stoddard's house north of Syracuse on the edge of some salt marshes. He showed us photographs he had taken of "icebergs," 3 and of Kit Carson's cross carved on a rock on Fremont Island. We then decided to leave and go to Rozel Point.

Driving west on Highway 83 late in the afternoon, we passed through Corinne, then went on to Promontory. Just beyond the Golden Spike Monument, which commemorates the meeting of the rails of the first transcontinental railroad, we went down a dirt road in a wide valley. As we traveled, the valley spread into an uncanny immensity unlike the other landscapes we had seen. The roads on the map became a net of dashes, while in the far distance the Salt Lake existed as an interrupted silver band. Hills took on the appearance of melting solids, and glowed under amber light. We followed roads that glided away into dead ends. Sandy slopes turned into viscous masses of perception. Slowly, we drew near to the lake, which resembled an impassive faint violet sheet held captive in a stoney matrix, upon which the sun poured down its crushing light. An expanse of salt flats bordered the lake, and caught in its sediments were countless bits of wreckage. Old piers were left high and dry. The mere sight of the trapped fragments of junk and waste transported one into a world of modern prehistory. The products of a Devonian industry, the remains of a Silurian technology, all the machines of the Upper Carboniferous Period were lost in those expansive deposits of sand and mud.

Two dilapidated shacks looked over a tired group of oil rigs. A series of seeps of heavy black oil more like asphalt occur just south of Rozel Point. For forty or more years people have tried to get oil out of this natural tar pool. Pumps coated with black stickiness rusted in the corrosive salt air. A hut mounted on pilings could have been the habitation of "the missing link." A great pleasure arose from seeing all those incoherent structures. This site gave evidence of a succession of man-made systems mired in abandoned hopes.

About one mile north of the oil seeps I selected my site. Irregular beds of limestone dip gently eastward, massive deposits of black basalt are broken over the peninsula, giving the region a shattered appearance. It is one of the few places on the lake where the water comes right up to the mainland. Under shallow pinkish water is a network of mud cracks supporting the jig-saw puzzle that composes the salt flats. As I looked at the site, it reverberated out of the horizons only to suggest an immobile cyclone while flickering light made the entire landscape appear to quake. A dormant earthquake spread into the fluttering stillness, into a spinning sensation without movement. This site was a rotary that enclosed itself in an immense roundness. From that gyrating space emerged the possibility of the Spiral Jetty. No ideas, no concepts, no systems, no structures, no abstractions could hold themselves together in the actuality of that evidence. My dialectics of site and nonsite whirled into an indeterminate state, where solid and liquid lost themselves in each other. It was as if the mainland oscillated with waves and pulsations, and the lake remained rock still. The shore of the lake became the edge of the sun, a boiling curve, an explosion rising into a fiery prominence. Matter collapsing into the lake mirrored in the shape of a spiral. No sense wondering about classifications and categories, there were none.

After securing a twenty year lease on the meandering zone, 4 and finding a contractor in Ogden, I began building the jetty in April, 1970. Bob Phillips, the foreman, sent two dump trucks, a tractor, and a large front loader out to the site. The tail of the spiral began as a diagonal line of stakes that extended into the meandering zone. A string was then extended from a central stake in order to get the coils of the spiral. From the end of the diagonal to the center of the spiral, three curves coiled to the left. Basalt and earth were scooped up from the beach at the beginning of the jetty by the front loader, then deposited in the trucks, where upon the trucks backed up to the outline of stakes and dumped the material. On the edge of the water, at the beginning of the tail, the wheels of the trucks sank into a quagmire of sticky gumbo mud. A whole afternoon was spent filling in this spot. Once the trucks passed that problem, there was always the chance that the salt crust resting on the mud flats would break through. The Spiral Jetty was staked out in such a way as to avoid the soft muds that broke up through the salt crust; nevertheless there were some mud fissures that could not be avoided. One could only hope that tension would hold the entire jetty together, and it did. A cameraman was sent by the Ace Gallery in Los Angeles to film the process.

The scale of the Spiral Jetty tends to fluctuate depending on where the viewer happens to be. Size determines an object, but scale determines art. A crack in the wall if viewed in terms of scale, not size, could be called the Grand Canyon. A room could be made to take on the immensity of the solar system. Scale depends on one's capacity to be conscious of the actualities of perception. When one refuses to release scale from size, one is left with an object or language that appears to be certain. For me scale operates by uncertainty. To be in the scale of the Spiral Jetty is to be out of it. On eye level, the tail leads one into an undifferentiated state of matter. One's downward gaze pitches from side to side, picking out random depositions of salt crystals on the inner and outer edges, while the entire mass echoes the irregular horizons. And each cubic salt crystal echoes the Spiral Jetty in terms of the crystal's molecular lattice. Growth in a crystal advances around a dislocation point, in the manner of a screw. The Spiral Jetty could be considered one layer within a spiraling crystal lattice, magnified trillions of times.

This description echoes and reflects Brancusi's sketch of James Joyce as a "spiral ear" because it suggests both a visual and an aural scale, in other words it indicates a sense of scale that resonates in the eye and the ear at the same time. Here is a reinforcement and prolongation of spirals that reverberates up and down space and time. So it is that one ceases to consider art in terms of an "object." The fluctuating resonances reject "objective criticism," because that would stifle the generative power of both visual and auditory scale. Not to say that one resorts to "subjective concepts," but rather that one apprehends what is around one's eyes and ears, no matter how unstable or fugitive. One seizes the spiral, and the spiral becomes a seizure.

After a point, measurable steps ("Scale skal n. it. Or L; it. Scala; L scala usually scalae pl., I.a. originally a ladder; a flight of stairs; hence, b. a means of ascent") 5 descend from logic to the "surd state." The rationality of a grid on a map sinks into what it is supposed to define. Logical purity suddenly finds itself in a bog, and welcomes the unexpected event. The "curved" reality of sense perception operates in and out of the "straight" abstractions of the mind. The flowing mass of rock and earth of the Spiral Jetty could be trapped by a grid of segments, but the segments would exist only in the mind or on paper. Of course, it is also possible to translate the mental spiral into a three-dimensional succession of measured lengths that would involve areas, volumes, masses, moments, pressures, forces, stresses, and strains; but in the Spiral Jetty the surd takes over and leads one into a world that cannot be expressed by number or rationality. Ambiguities are admitted rather than rejected, contradictions are increased rather than decrease - the alogos undermines the logos. Purity is put in jeopardy. I took my chances on a perilous path, along which my steps zigzagged, resembling a spiral lightning bolt. "We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origin. At last, we have succeeded in constructing the creature that made the footprint. And lo! It is our own". 6 For my film (a film is a spiral made up of frames) I would have myself filmed from a helicopter (from the Greek helix, helikos meaning spiral) directly overhead in order to get the scale in terms of erratic steps.

Chemically speaking, our blood is analogous in composition to the primordial seas. Following the spiral steps we return to our origins, back to the same pulpy protoplasm, a floating eye adrift in an antediluvian ocean. On the slopes of Rozel Point I closed my eyes, and the sun burned crimson through the lids. I opened them and the Great Salt Lake was bleeding scarlet streaks. My sight was saturated by the color of red algae circulating in the heart of the lake, pumping into ruby currents, no they were veins and arteries sucking up the obscure sediments. My eyes became combustion chambers churning orbs of blood blazing by the light of the sun. All was enveloped in a flaming chromosphere; I thought of Jackson Pollock's Eyes in the Heat (1946; Peggy Guggenheim Collection). Swirling within the incandescence of solar energy were sprays of blood. My movie would end in sunstroke. Perception was heaving, the stomach turning, I was on a geologic fault that groaned within me. Between heat lightning and heat exhaustion the spiral curled into vaporization. I had the red heaves, while the sun vomited its corpuscular radiations. Rays of glare hit my eyes with the frequency of a Geiger counter. Surely, the storm clouds massing would turn into a rain of blood. Once, when I was flying over the lake, its surface seemed to hold all the properties of an unbroken field of raw meat with gristle (foam); no doubt it was due to some freak wind action. Eyesight is often slaughtered by the other sense, and when that happens it becomes necessary to seek out dispassionate abstractions. The dizzying spiral yearns for the assurance of geometry. One wants to retreat into the cool rooms of reason. But no, there was Van Gogh with his easel on some sun-baked lagoon painting ferns of the Carboniferous Period. Then the mirage faded into the burning atmosphere.
From the center of the Spiral Jetty
North - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

North by East - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

Northeast by North - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

Northeast by East - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

East by North - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

East - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

East by South - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

Southeast by East - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

Southeast by South - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

South by East - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

South - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

South by West - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

Southwest by South - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

Southwest by West - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

West by South - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

West - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

West by North - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

Northwest by West - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

Northwest by North - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

North by West - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

The helicopter maneuvered the sun's reflection through the Spiral Jetty until it reached the center. The water functioned as a vast thermal mirror. From that position the flaming reflection suggested the ion source of a cyclotron that extended into a spiral of collapsed matter. All sense of energy acceleration expired into a rippling stillness of reflected heat. A withering light swallowed the rocky particles of the spiral, as the helicopter gained altitude. All existence seemed tentative and stagnant. The sound of the helicopter motor became a primal groan echoing into tenuous aerial views. Was I but a shadow in a plastic bubble hovering in a place outside mind and body? Et in Utah ego. I was slipping out of myself again, dissolving into a unicellular beginning, trying to locate the nucleus at the end of the spiral. All that blood stirring makes one aware of protoplasmic solutions, the essential matter between the formed and the unformed, masses of cells consisting largely of water, proteins, lipoids, carbohydrates, and inorganic salts. Each drop that splashed onto the Spiral Jetty coagulated into a crystal. Undulating waters spread millions upon millions of crystals over the basalt.

The preceding paragraphs refer to a "scale of centers" that could be disentangled as follows:

(a) ion source in cyclotron

(b) a nucleus

(c) dislocation point

(d) a wooden stake in the mud

(e) axis of helicopter propeller

(f) James Joyce's ear channel

(g) the Sun

(h) a hole in the film reel.

Spinning off of this uncertain scale of centers would be an equally uncertain "scale of edges":

(a) particles

(b) protoplasmic solutions

(c) dizziness

(d) ripples

(e) flashes of light

(f) sections

(g) foot steps

(h) pink water.

The equation of my language remains unstable, a shifting set of coordinates, an arrangement of variables spilling into surds. My equation is as clear as mud-a muddy spiral.

Back in New York, the urban desert, I contacted Bob Fiore and Barbara Jarvis and asked them to help me put my movie together. The movie began as a set of disconnections, a bramble of stabilized fragments taken from things obscure and fluid, ingredients trapped in a succession of frames, a stream of viscosities both still and moving. And the movie editor, bending over such a chaos of "takes" resembles a paleontologist sorting out glimpses of a world not yet together, a land that has yet to come to completion, a span of time unfinished, a spaceless limbo on some spiral reels. Film strips hung from the cutter's rack, bits and pieces of Utah, out-takes overexposed and underexposed, masses of impenetrable material. The sun, the spiral, the salt buried in lengths of footage. Everything about movies and moviemaking is archaic and crude. One is transported by this Archeozoic medium into the earliest known geological eras. The movieola becomes a "time machine" that transforms trucks into dinosaurs. Fiore pulled lengths of film out of the movieola with the grace of a Neanderthal pulling intestines from a slaughtered mammoth. Outside of this 13th Street loft window one expected to see Pleistocene faunas, glacial uplifts, living fossils, and other prehistoric wonders. Like two cavemen we plotted how to get to the Spiral Jetty from New York City. A geopolitics of primordial return ensued. How to get across the geography of Gondwanaland, the Austral Sea, and Atlantis became a problem. Consciousness of the distant past absorbed the time that went into the making of the movie. I needed a map that would show the prehistoric world as coextensive with the world I existed in.

I found an oval map of such a double world. The continents of the Jurassic Period merged with continents of today. A microlense fitted to the end of a camera mounted on a heavy tripod would trace the course of "absent images" in the blank spaces of the map. The camera panned from right to left. One is liable to see things in maps that are not there. One must be careful of the hypothetical monsters that lurk between the map's latitudes; they are designated on the map as black circles (marine reptiles) and squares (land reptiles). In the pan shot one doesn't see the flesh-eaters walking through what today is called Indochina. There is no indication of Pterodactyls flying over Bombay. And where are the corals and sponges covering southern Germany? In the emptiness one sees no Stegosaurus. In the middle of the pan we see Europe completely under water, but not a trace of the Brontosaurus. What line or color hides the Globigerina Ooze? I don't know. As the pan ends near Utah, on the edge of Atlantis, a cut takes place, and we found ourselves looking at a rectangular grid known as Location NK 12-7 on the border of a map by the U.S. Geological Survey showing the northern part of the Great Salt Lake without any reference to the Jurassic Period.

... the earth's history seems at times like a story recorded in a book each page of which is torn into small pieces. Many of the pages and some of the pieces of each page are missing ... 7

I wanted Nancy to shoot "the earth's history" in one minute for the third section of the movie. I wanted to treat the above quote as a "fact." We drove out to the Great Notch Quarry in New Jersey, where I found a quarry facing about twenty feet high. I climbed to the top and threw handfuls of ripped-up pages from books and magazines over the edge, while Nancy filmed it. Some ripped pages from an Old Atlas blew across a dried out, cracked mud puddle.

According to all we know from fossil anatomy that beast was comparatively harmless. Its only weapons were its teeth and claws. I don't know what those obscene looking paunches mean - they don't show in any fossil remains yet found. Nor do I know whether red is their natural color, or whether it is due to faster decay owing to all the oil having dropped down off them. So much for its supposed identity. 8

The movie recapitulates the scale of the Spiral Jetty. Disparate elements assume a coherence. Unlikely places and things were stuck between sections of film that show a stretch of dirt road rushing to and from the actual site in Utah. A road that goes forward and backward between things and places that are elsewhere. You might even say that the road is nowhere in particular. The disjunction operating between reality and film drives one into a sense of cosmic rupture. Nevertheless, all the improbabilities would accommodate themselves to my cinematic universe. Adrift amid scraps of film, one is unable to suffuse into them any meaning, they seem worn-out, ossified views, degraded and pointless, yet they are powerful enough to hurl one into a lucid vertigo. The road takes one from a telescopic shot of the sun to a quarry in Great Notch New Jersey, to a map showing the "deformed shorelines of ancient Lake Bonneville," to The Lost World, and to the Hall of Late Dinosaurs in the American Museum of Natural History.

The hall was filmed through a red filter. The camera focuses on a Ornithominus Altus embedded in plaster behind a glass case. A pan across the room picked up a crimson chiaroscuro tone. There are times when the great outdoors shrinks phenomenologically to the scale of a prison, and times when the indoors expands to the scale of the universe. So it is with the sequence from the Hall of Late Dinosaurs. An interior immensity spreads throughout the hall, transforming the lightbulbs into dying suns. The red filter dissolves the floor, ceiling, and walls into halations of infinite redness. Boundless desolation emerged from the cinematic emulsions, red clouds, burned from the intangible light beyond the windows, visibility deepened into ruby dispersions. The bones, the glass cases, the armatures brought forth a blood-drenched atmosphere. Blindly the camera stalked through the sullen light. Glassy reflections flashed into dissolutions like powdered blood. Under a burning window the skull of a Tyrannosaurus was mounted in a glass case with a mirror under the skull. In this limitless scale one's mind imagines things that are not there. The blood-soaked dropping of a sick Duck-Billed Dinosaur, for instance. Rotting monster flesh covered with millions of red spiders. Delusion follows delusion. The ghostly cameraman slides over the glassed-in compounds. These fragments of a timeless geology laugh without mirth at the time-filled hopes of ecology. From the soundtrack the echoing metronome vanishes into the wilderness of bones and glass. Tracking around a glass containing a "dinosaur mummy," the words of The Unnameable are heard. The camera shifts to a specimen squeezed flat by the weight of sediments, then the film cuts to the road in Utah.

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Red is the most joyful and dreadful thing in the physical universe, it is the fiercest note, it is the highest light, it is the place where the walls of this world of ours wear the thinnest and something beyond burns through. -G.K.

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Angela Davis is an activist and scholar known for her work and civil rights. In her song, Strange Fruit, she addresses the racial injustices and the history of lynching in the US. The song serves as a commentary on social consciousness, highlighting the struggles of African Americans and the importance of awareness and activism. She is a social justice warrior, and it is important to know who she is.

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National Museum of African American History and Culture

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Angela Davis (b. 1944) is an American political activist, professor, and author who was an active member in the Communist Party and the Black Panther Party.

She is most famous for her involvement with the Soledad brothers, who were accused of killing a prison guard. During George Jackson's trial in August 1970, an escape attempt was made at gunpoint and several people were killed. Davis was accused of taking part in the event and was charged with murder. Evidence showed that the guns were registered to her and rumors said she was in love with Jackson, which later proved untrue. Davis went into hiding and was placed on the FBI's most wanted list. She spent eighteen months in jail, which led to the "Free Angela Davis" campaign and the Angela Davis Legal Defense Committee. In response, John Lennon and Yoko Ono wrote "Angela" and the Rolling Stones wrote "Sweet Black Angel."

In 1997, Davis came out as a lesbian during an interview with Out magazine. Since then, she has continued to tackle oppression faced by the black community, women, and the LGBTQ+ community. After spending time traveling and lecturing, Davis returned to teaching. She served as a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she taught courses on the history of consciousness. Her interests inprisoner rights led her to found Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish the prison-industrial complex. Davis is the author of several books including Women, Race, and Class (1983) and Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003).
View objects relating to Angela Davis
Top image: Revolutionary by Wadsworth Jarrell, 1972. © Wadsworth Jarrell. 2010.3.1

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Angela Davis (b. 1944) is an American political activist, professor, and author who was an active member in the Communist Party and the Black Panther Party. She is most famous for her involvement with the Soledad brothers, who were accused of killing a prison guard.

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Donovan is a folk singer and has been known to give a little political commentary through his music. He has made many hits that people still listen to today. I just did a paper on him for this class about his song And the war goes on.

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Lawrence "Kris" Parker (AKA) KRS-ONE  (born 1965)

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Lawrence "Kris" Parker (AKA) KRS-ONE  (born 1965)

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KRS—One, whose real name is Lawrence Parker and who was born in 1965, is a prominent American rapper and activist celebrated for his insightful lyrics and impact on hip-hop culture. He rose to fame in the late 1980s with songs that tackled social issues and education. He is also acknowledged for advocating hip-hop as a vehicle for activism.

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"We all planned our goals. We knew exactly what we wanted to do and where we wanted to go. I feel...in a way...us as a group, we don't mourn..."

That was KRS-One talking about the rise of his group, Boogie Down Productions, and the aftermath of a murder that should have devastated him and his crew. B.D.P. should have been riding high on the success of their debut album, Criminal Minded. But the aftermath of their breakthrough project was overcast by a shroud of death and despair. Scott La Rock was murdered just six months after BDP's first album was released, and it briefly threw the future of the group in doubt. But KRS-One was emboldened to soldier forward and immediately set about recording the second B.D.P. album. Grieving would only be a moment, he decided, once that moment was done, it was time to get to work.

"We had our chance for mourning," KRS-One added in that 1987 interview. "You have that one day, you cry it out-and that's it. We don't mourn and keep going and keep going and keep going. You celebrate, if anything, because we're advancing constantly. If we had flopped, then I would be sad that Scott's gone. 'Our career went down the drain' and this and that. His son will live with what he didn't have materially. So everything's straight."

Kris Parker's dedication wasn't callous; it was cathartic. He would honor his fallen partner by using his senseless and tragic death as a catalyst for change. And the first change was in KRS-One himself. Scott's murder drove KRS to push B.D.P. into a more socially-aware direction. His rhymes had always been intelligent: Criminal Minded examined street life from a raw, real but thoughtful perspective. His street tales felt more like commentary than glorification, but this time around, there would be no mistaking the message. KRS was going to offer an alternative to the grimness and hopelessness of 80s New York City and urban decay. A young fan was stabbed to death at the Dope Jam Concert, held Sept. 10, 1987 at Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum. And in the aftermath, KRS decided how he was going to speak to his people.

He wanted to teach through his music.

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But there were other major changes affecting B.D.P. KRS would keep the group moniker going without his fallen friend; bringing in longtime affiliates like D-Nice (technically the group's unofficial third member already), Just-Ice, KRS-One's brother Kenny Parker, and his new wife, Ms Melodie. It made the B.D.P. Posse a more familial affair, even if the actual sound of Boogie Down Productions' new album was going to come mostly down to KRS and Kenny Parker.

And there was also the issue of B-Boy Records. Boogie Down Productions was the label's biggest success by far, and the label's founders Jack Allen and Bill Kamarra were drowning in debt and there were rumors the company was a front for more illicit activities like pornography. KRS orchestrated an exit from the label, after discovering that he was not legally bound to B-Boy; Allen and Kamarra more or less signed Scott and B-Boy to a production deal and Kris was a free agent. B.D.P. was subsequently the subject of a small bidding war, before landing with Benny Medina on Jive Records. The leap to a major would prove fruitful for B.D.P. as they got ready to release the follow-up to Criminal Minded.

The Dope Jam killing, along with gang violence at Run-D.M.C. shows in 1987, led to widespread media criticism of rap concerts as hotbeds for violence. "These media attacks were not new," wrote music journalist Nelson George in 1990's Stop The Violence: Overcoming Self Destruction. "There have always been people who didn't like rap or the way its stars dressed or who felt intimidated by it's passionately committed, inner-city audience. The Nassau Coliseum violence gave these folks new ammunition. They didn't want to understand the music. They didn't write about protecting rap fans from young thugs. They didn't write about the responsibilities of the promoters or the security forces to prevent such occurrences. They didn't make distinctions between teh gangsters and their victims, or acknowledge the strong, positive messages of many rappers. Instead they spread fear."

At a time when popular music was addressing everything from apartheid ("Sun City") to famine ("We Are The World"), urban violence hadn't become a cause célèbre. As KRS adopted the mantle of "The Teacha," he teamed with George and launched the Stop The Violence Movement, an organization devoted to addressing the rising bloodshed. With a financial boost from Jive Records, KRS set about recruiting prominent recording artists for a project to help address what was going on in the community. But in the meantime, he still had a day job of being one of the dopest emcees on the mic.

"My Philosophy" was the first single from the new B.D.P. album and it firmly announced KRS-One Mach II.

The single was a call-to-arms for the culture; it signaled that Boogie Down Productions was not going to fold in the wake of Scott La Rock's murder. It also announced KRS-One as a socio-political emcee and cultural commentator, with the song and video paying homage to Scott and urging a cease to the violence. It set the stage for By All Means Necessary, which featured KRS polished his skill while elevating his topicality.

Over minimalist production that echoes ... Minded without retracing it, KRS addresses the drug trade as exploitative and capitalism run amok on "Illegal Business"; the Jungle Brothers drop in on the safe sex anthem "Jimmy," a comedic tour-de-force that highlights the unusual chemistry between the Native Tongues eclectics and those brash b-boys from the Bronx.

With the release of By All Means Necessary, Public Enemy's It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back, and Eric B. & Rakim's Follow The Leader, 1988 was (and remains) seen as a year that consciousness in Hip-Hop rose to the forefront. With more eyes on Hip-Hop than ever before, the mainstream was beginning to recognize rappers as mouthpieces for a generation of young Black people who-even across mainstream Black platforms-had been greatly overlooked.

Along with assuming leadership of B.D.P., another new element in KRS-One's life was marriage. He and Miss Melodie tied the knot in 1987.

Kris Parker and Ramona Scott met around the same time Kris had met Scott Sterling, when Parker was living in the Franklin Armory Men's Shelter where Sterling worked as a social worker. KRS-One would show up at parties where Scott La Rock was DJing and Scott worked at the clubs. KRS and Ramona became an item, and he soon moved out of the shelter and in with Scott and her family. "Just to give you a picture of what that was like, she, her sister, Pam, and her mother lived in a very small apartment," he recalled in 1990. "It was all they could afford. After the whole family knew my position in life, they said, 'Well, why don't you come and stay with us?' And I was-the way I was raised, I mean, a man in a house with three women-I said, "I'll come when I get a job; I'll come when I have something to offer.'"

KRS and Scott were serious about Hip-Hop, and Ramona was serious about supporting Boogie Down Productions.

"We had a family meeting one night, and they were asking me, 'Well, what is it you want to do? What is it you're going to do with your life?'" he explained. "I said, 'Well, I'm going to be the number-one rap artist out there. Period. However I get there is how I'm going to get there, but I will be there eventually. I am looking to settle down.' Then they looked at each other, but there was a belief. There was a faith. I'm in her house."

Boogie Down Productions exploded, and Miss Melodie was right there. As KRS reconfigured the B.D.P. banner, she became an integral part of how the crew moved forward, and memorably contributed to what would be a landmark moment for Hip-Hop and the Stop The Violence Movement.

In January of 1989, KRS and Nelson George recruited a litany of legendary Hip-Hop artists from around New York City.

Public Enemy, Daddy-O, MC Delite, Wise and Frukwan of Stetsasonic, Doug E. Fresh, Just-Ice, Kool Moe Dee, MC Lyte, Heavy D joined KRS-One, D-Nice and Miss Melodie on a track co-produced by KRS and D-Nice with Hank Shocklee. "Self Destruction" was a rallying cry against death and crime in the community, and proceeds from the single went to the National Urban League. Rappers weren't just selling records, they now had a level of importance with young people that was impossible for anyone to ignore.

With "Self Destruction" and the Stop The Violence Movement, KRS-One had thrust himself into the center of that conversation. He was often compared to his contemporaries as commentators for the culture.

"I see Rakim more or less as a silent figure," he told Charlie Ahearn in a 1990 conversation with Interview Magazine. "[He's] someone who is just respected, with no words-don't say much, don't do much-but he is someone who is respected because of his beliefs in Islam. In Chuck D I see the militant. I see the front lines. I see the one who is going to die first. And in myself I see the middle, the organizer of the two. I'll go second. But we're all going to go. You know what I mean. There has always been a conscious effort to destroy any upliftment of the Black race, whether that be physically, mentally, psychologically, morally, culturally, or economically."

I see Rakim more or less as a silent figure, someone who is just respected, with no words-don't say much, don't do much-but he is someone who is respected because of his beliefs in Islam. In Chuck D I see the militant. I see the front lines. I see the one who is going to die first. And in myself I see the middle, the organizer of the two. I'll go second. But we're all going to go..."

- KRS-One (INTERVIEW Magazine, 1990)

Even with the emergence of "The Teacha," and the undeniably sociopolitical focus of By All Means... (down to the album's iconic, Malcolm X-evoking cover artwork), Blastmaster KRS-One is still in full effect as the cockiest, most bombastic emcee in Hip-Hop. The anthemic "I'm Still #1" is quintessentially KRS: arrogant, charismatic, and unflinchingly brash. Over a brilliant flip of "Cramp Your Style' by Ray Love's All The People, KRS brings Bronx block party energy to the recording booth, in a performance for the ages. The confrontational "Ya Slippin'" flips Deep Purple's "Smoke On the Water" in a quasi-sequel to Criminal Minded's AC/DC-quoting "Dope Beat," as KRS lets you know you shouldn't bet against him in a battle. And "Part Time Suckers" breaks down sucka emcees by dissecting the art of emceeing itself; in one of the best examples of KRS-One's elevated view of rhyming.

I am more than just a recording artist kicking dust/I'm a sandstorm taking human form..."

- "Part Time Suckers"

Criminal Minded is BDP's first album, but it was on By All Means Necessary that KRS-One evolved into the persona that so many fans know today. The second album is where "The Teacha" was truly born, when Kris Parker took the tragedy of his friend's murder and turned it into an instrument to wake people up about what was going on in the community. And KRS would hold firm to that image and ethos for the remainder of his career. It doesn't matter if it's fashionable or not, The Teacha has remained The Teacha. He would build on By All Means Necessary on 1989s Ghetto Music: The Blueprint Of Hip-Hop and 1990s Edutainment; a run that cemented Boogie Down Productions as having one of the all-time great album runs in Hip-Hop.

In many ways, By All Means Necessary is B.D.P.'s most definitive work. And it remains a landmark for an emcee who wasn't done reinventing himself, or challenging his contemporaries and his audience.

READ MORE

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Classic Albums: 'By All Means Necessary' by Boogie Down Productions

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On BDP's second album, KRS-One reinvented himself. The Blastmaster became The Teacha

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Henry Chalfont is a well-known American photographer and filmmaker celebrated for capturing the vibrant Street art scene of New York City in the 1980s, especially graffiti and breakdancing. His work has played a crucial role in highlighting and enhancing their appreciation of urban art cultures. Also, he is recognized for participating with various artists and hosting important exhibitions.

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Henry Chalfant's chronicle of graffiti art is examined in an exhibit at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Taidgh Barron/NY Post

When Henry Chalfant sees ads on the sides of today's subway trains, he often mistakes them for the graffiti he used to photograph in the 1970s and '80s.

"I think, 'Oh my God, window down,'" he tells The Post, using the phrase for graffiti done underneath subway car windows.

New York's days of painted trains are decades gone, but an exhibit featuring Chalfant's prolific body of work documenting their heyday resurrects the era at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Through March 8, "Henry Chalfant: Art Vs. Transit, 1977-1987" allows graffiti-heads to relive the era through a re-creation of the "Style Wars" co-producer's Manhattan studio, to-scale re-creations of tagged-up trains and prints and ephemera showing the Bronx during hip-hop's birth - all while a boombox blares from the corner.

"The unexpected was constantly happening," Chalfant, 79, says of the decade his work spans. "In terms of culture and art and what your day would be like. I am nostalgic for that."

To capture "burners" - the most complex, photo-worthy graffiti murals - he staked out subway stations. "I would catch [the shot] while the train was on the opposite platform waiting to pick up passengers," he says. Only twice did he go into train yards to shoot. One wall features video footage of trains pulling in and out of stations.

While he misses the NYC of yore, Chalfant doesn't mourn it. "'We may have lost the trains, but we've gained the whole world,'" he says, borrowing a quote by graffiti writer Mare 139, which appears in the exhibit.

In 1989, the MTA was able to end subway graffiti by introducing a new fleet of cars and aggressively removing the tagged ones - but by that point, graffiti had become an international movement. In the exhibit's first room, a timeline charts graffiti's rise through mainstream media as vintage interviews with Chalfant play.

The exhibit's name is dedicated to street art's loss to transit policy, at least in NYC. "'Art versus transit,' the title, comes from a painted train sometime in the early '80s," Chalfant says. Don't bother looking for a shot of the car that bore those words, though. "That picture is not in the show," he says, "'cause I never got it."
"Henry Chalfant: Art Vs. Transit, 1977-1987" is on view through March 8 at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1040 Grand Concourse. Admission is free.

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Relive the subway's graffiti-filled glory at this Bronx exhibit

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When Henry Chalfant sees ads on the sides of today's subway trains, he often mistakes them for the graffiti he used to photograph in the 1970s and '80s. "I think, 'Oh my God, window down,&#82...

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Pepon Osorio is an artist recognized for his impactful piece titled "No Crying Allowed in the Barbershop." This piece of art delves into themes of masculinity and the way men express their emotions, particularly in the culturally charged setting of a barbershop. By challenging conventional ideas of masculinity, Osorio invites discussions about vulnerability and emotional well-being among men.

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Pepón Osorio, best known for large-scale installations, was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, in 1955. He was educated at the Universidad Inter-Americana in Puerto Rico and Herbert H. Lehman College in New York, and received an MA from Columbia University in 1985. Osorio's pieces, influenced by his experience as a social worker in The Bronx, usually evolve from an interaction with the neighborhoods and people among which he is working; he says, "My principal commitment as an artist is to return art to the community."

A recent example is Tina's House, a project created in collaboration with a family recovering from a devastating fire. The house-a tabletop-size art piece-tells the story of the night of the fire and those affected, and is traveling the country in a series of Home Visits: a home visit invites a new family to live with the artwork for a period of at least one week, allowing the story of Tina's House to be told in many homes and environments.

Osorio's work has been shown at Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; El Museo del Barrio, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; El Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico; and El Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico. Pepón Osorio lives in Philadelphia.

Pepón Osorio discusses his Home Visits, instances in which a new family lives with an artwork for a period of time, allowing the story of each piece to be told in many homes and environments.

In this interview, Pepón Osorio talks about his 2003 installation piece, Scene of the Crime (Whose Crime?), which the artist is shown installing at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico in Season 1 of Art in the Twenty-First Century.

It's hard to explain what I'm trying to do as an artist, because I don't fit the artist description.

Art21 is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization; all donations are tax deductible to the fullest extent of the law.

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Art21 is a celebrated global leader in presenting thought-provoking and sophisticated content about contemporary art, and the go-to place to learn first-hand from the artists of our time. A nonprofit organization, Art21's mission is to inspire a more creative world through the works and words of contemporary artists.

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Coco Fusco is an American artist, writer, and educator who works across various disciplines. She is recognized for her exploration of identity, race, and gender in her art. By blending performance, video, and installation, Fusco challenges societal norms and encourages meaningful conversations. Her work often tackles cultural representation and the intricacies of modern life.

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Rita Raley is a prominent American scholar and professor recognized for her contributions to digital humanities and media studies. Her research examines how technology interacts with literature and culture, particularly how digital spaces influence human experience and communication.

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Rita Raley | Comparative Literature Program - UC Santa Barbara

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Rita Raley is Professor of English, with courtesy appointments in Film and Media Studies, Comparative Literature, and Global Studies. Her primary research interests lie at the intersection of digital media and humanist inquiry, with a particular emphasis on cultural critique, artistic practices, language, and textuality. She is the author of Tactical Media (University of Minnesota, 2009), co-editor of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2 (2011), and has more recently published articles on interventionist media arts practices, digital poetics, and global English. She has had fellowship appointments at the National Humanities Center and UCLA, as part of the Mellon-funded project on the Digital Humanities, and has taught at Rice and the University of Minnesota. In Spring 2011 she held a short-term Fulbright appointment with “ELMCIP: Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice” at the University of Bergen, Norway; and in December 2011 she was a writer in residence hosted by the Dutch Foundation for Literature in Amsterdam. In 2012-2013 she was a visiting Associate Professor in English at NYU. She co-edits the “Electronic Mediations” book series for the University of Minnesota Press and is an Associate Editor for ASAP/Journal.

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Jacques Servin ( AKA -THE YES MEN) (born in 1963)

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Jacques Servin ( AKA -THE YES MEN) (born in 1963)

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Jacques Servin is an artist and activist who is a co-founder of the critical art collective "The Yes Man." He is recognized for employing satire and media manipulation to highlight social and political issues, aiming to raise awareness and spark conversations. Through his creative and engaging approaches, he critiques corporate practices and advocates for social justice.

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Suzanne Lacey is an American artist celebrated for her contributions to social practice and feminist art. Her decade-long project, "The Inheritance," dives into themes of aging, memory, and community through storytelling that bridges generations. By involving a variety of participants, Lacy encourages conversations and reflections on the intricacies of personal experiences.

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Suzanne Lacy // About the Artist - Creative Time

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Based in Los Angeles, Suzanne Lacy is an internationally renowned artist and pioneer in socially engaged and public art, producing groundbreaking works.

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Tania is a Cuban artist and activist recognized for blending art with political and social themes. Through her performances and installations, she invites audiences to engage in important conversations about power, migration, and human rights. Her work aims to foster social change and uplift the marginalized community

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Tania Bruguera was born in 1968 in Havana, Cuba. Bruguera, a politically motivated performance artist, explores the relationship between art, activism, and social change in works that examine the social effects of political and economic power. By creating proposals and aesthetic models for others to use and adapt, she defines herself as an initiator rather than an author, and often collaborates with multiple institutions as well as many individuals so that the full realization of her artwork occurs when others adopt and perpetuate it.

She expands the definition and range of performance art, sometimes performing solo but more often staging participatory events and interactions that build on her own observations, experiences, and interpretations of the politics of repression and control. Bruguera has explored both the promise and failings of the Cuban Revolution in performances that provoke viewers to consider the political realities masked by government propaganda and mass-media interpretation. Advancing the concept of arte útil (literally, useful art; art as a benefit and a tool), she proposes solutions to sociopolitical problems through the implementation of art, and has developed long-term projects that include a community center and a political party for immigrants, and a school for behavior art.

Tania Bruguera attended art schools in Havana, including the Instituto Superior de Arte (1987-92), and received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2001). She received a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship (1998), and has been awarded residencies at Skowhegan (2002); Headlands Centers for the Arts (1998); Fundación Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Maracay (1998); Art in General (1997); and ART/OMI (1995). Major exhibitions of her work have appeared at the Van Abbemuseum (2014); Queens Museum (2013); National Museum Wales (2012); Havana Biennial (2010, 2003, 2000); Neuberger Museum of Art (2010); Venice Biennale (2009, 2001); Tate Modern (2008); Moscow Biennial (2007); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2006); Shanghai Biennial (2004); Istanbul Biennial (2003); Documenta (2002); San Francisco Art Institute (2002); SITE Santa Fe Biennial (1999) and the São Paulo Bienal (1996). Tania Bruguera lives and works in Queens, New York.

Links:
Artist's website
Immigrant Movement International

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Conversation Starter

Investigating stories of silenced or marginalized communities, artists have employed their practices as tools for effecting change.

Interview

Tania Bruguera explains the term Arte Útil in relationship to the social responsibility of art. Interview by Susan Sollins at the Queens Museum in Queens, New York, on March 24, 2014.

Teaching with Contemporary Art

Educator-in-Residence Nick Kozak offers politically neutral ways of teaching on protest art and activism in the classroom.

Deep Focus

Artist and co-curator of "Monument Lab" Ken Lum shares the findings of this public engagement project, which served as a participatory exercise in spatial production, and questioned the role of monuments and public art in civic spaces.

Teaching with Contemporary Art

Educator-in-Residence Joseph Iacona shares the impact socially engaged artists have in classrooms with trauma-impacted students.

Art21 is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization; all donations are tax deductible to the fullest extent of the law.

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Art21 is a celebrated global leader in presenting thought-provoking and sophisticated content about contemporary art, and the go-to place to learn first-hand from the artists of our time. A nonprofit organization, Art21's mission is to inspire a more creative world through the works and words of contemporary artists.

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Audrey Lorde was a powerful American poet, SAS, and civil rights advocate who focused on issues of race, gender, and sexuality in her writing. Joy Harjo, the first Native American US poet, Lorette, resonates with Lord themes, especially in their shared commitment to uplifting marginalized voices and promoting social ju

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A self-described "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," Audre Lorde dedicated both her life and her creative talent to confronting and addressing injustices of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia. Lorde was born in New York City to West Indian immigrant parents. She attended Catholic schools before graduating from Hunter High School and published her first poem in Seventeen magazine while still a student there. Of her poetic beginnings Lorde commented in Black Women Writers: "I used to speak in poetry. I would read poems, and I would memorize them. People would say, well what do you think, Audre. What happened to you yesterday? And I would recite a poem and somewhere in that poem would be a line or a feeling I would be sharing. In other words, I literally communicated through poetry. And when I couldn't find the poems to express the things I was feeling, that's what started me writing poetry, and that was when I was twelve or thirteen."

Lorde earned her BA from Hunter College and MLS from Columbia University. She was a librarian in the New York public schools throughout the 1960s. She had two children with her husband, Edwin Rollins, a white, gay man, before they divorced in 1970. In 1972, Lorde met her long-time partner, Frances Clayton. She also began teaching as poet-in-residence at Tougaloo College. Her experiences with teaching and pedagogy-as well as her place as a Black, queer woman in white academia-went on to inform her life and work. Indeed, Lorde's contributions to feminist theory, critical race studies, and queer theory intertwine her personal experiences with broader political aims. Lorde articulated early on the intersections of race, class, and gender in canonical essays such as "The Master's Tools Will Not Dismantle the Master's House."

Lorde's early collections of poetry include The First Cities (1968), Cables to Rage (1970), and From a Land Where Other People Live (1972), which was nominated for a National Book Award. Later works, including New York Head Shop and Museum (1974), Coal (1976), and The Black Unicorn (1978), included powerful poems of protest. "I have a duty," Lorde once stated, "to speak the truth as I see it and to share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigating pain." Lorde's later poems were often assembled from personal journals. Explaining the genesis of "Power," a poem about the police shooting of a ten-year-old black child, Lorde discussed her feelings when she learned that the officer involved had been acquitted: "A kind of fury rose up in me; the sky turned red. I felt so sick. I felt as if I would drive this car into a wall, into the next person I saw. So I pulled over. I took out my journal just to air some of my fury, to get it out of my fingertips. Those expressed feelings are that poem."

Her poetry, and "indeed all of her writing," according to contributor Joan Martin in Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation, "rings with passion, sincerity, perception, and depth of feeling." Concerned with modern society's tendency to categorize groups of people, Lorde fought the marginalization of such categories as "lesbian" and "black woman." She was central to many liberation movements and activist circles, including second-wave feminism, civil rights and Black cultural movements, and struggles for LGBTQ equality. In particular, Lorde's poetry is known for the power of its call for social and racial justice, as well as its depictions of queer experience and sexuality. As she told interviewer Charles H. Rowell in Callaloo: "My sexuality is part and parcel of who I am, and my poetry comes from the intersection of me and my worlds... [White, arch-conservative senator] Jesse Helms's objection to my work is not about obscenity ... or even about sex. It is about revolution and change."

Lorde was a noted prose writer as well as poet. Her account of her struggle to overcome breast cancer and mastectomy, The Cancer Journals (1980), is regarded as a major work of illness narrative. In The Cancer Journals, Lorde confronts the possibility of death. Recounting this personal transformation led Lorde to address the silence surrounding cancer, illness, and the lived experience of women. For example, Lorde explained her decision not to wear a prosthesis after undergoing a mastectomy in the Journals: "Prosthesis offers the empty comfort of 'Nobody will know the difference.' But it is that very difference which I wish to affirm, because I have lived it, and survived it, and wish to share that strength with other women. If we are to translate the silence surrounding breast cancer into language and action against this scourge, then the first step is that women with mastectomies must become visible to each other."

Lorde's 1982 novel, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, was described by its publishers as a "biomythography, combining elements of history, biography and myth." Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984) collected Lorde's nonfiction prose and has become a canonical text in Black studies, women's studies, and queer theory. Another collection of essays, A Burst of Light (1988), won the National Book Award. The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde was published in 1997.

In 1981 Lorde and fellow writers Cherríe Moraga and Barbara Smith founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, which was dedicated to furthering the writings of black feminists. Lorde would also become increasingly concerned over the plight of black women in South Africa under apartheid, creating Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa and remaining an active voice on behalf of these women throughout the remainder of her life. Lorde addressed her concerns to not only the United States but the world, encouraging a celebration of the differences that society instead used as tools of isolation. As Allison Kimmich noted in Feminist Writers, "Throughout all of Audre Lorde's writing, both nonfiction and fiction, a single theme surfaces repeatedly. The black lesbian feminist poet activist reminds her readers that they ignore differences among people at their peril ... Instead, Lorde suggests, differences in race or class must serve as a 'reason for celebration and growth.'"

Lorde's honors and awards included a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. A professor of English at John Jay College and Hunter College, Lorde was poet laureate of New York from 1991-1992. Warrior Poet (2006), by Alexis De Veaux, is the first full-length biography of Audre Lorde.

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A self-described "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," Audre Lorde dedicated both her life and her creative talent to confronting and addressing injustices of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia. Lorde was born in New York City to West Indian immigrant parents. She attended Catholic schools...

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Joy Harjo is a celebrated native American poet and the first indigenous person to serve as you.S.poet Laureate. In her book Poet, warrior, she weaves together her personal stories and Indigenous history, sharing her journey as a woman, artist, and activist. The work dives into themes of identity, resilience, and the healing nature of poetry.

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Adrienne was a significant American poet, SAS, and feminist intellectual recognized for her impactful examination of gender, sexuality, and social justice in her writing. Throughout her extensive career, she earned various accolades, such as the National Book Award and the MacArthur Fellowship.

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Alexander was a creek, Indian poet, writer, and journalist who made his mark in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is recognized for his significant contributions to Native American literature, often exploring things of identity, culture, and the struggles of indigenous communities. He was an active advocate for native rights.

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Alexander Lawrence Posey, born August 3, 1873, was a Muskogee Creek poet, journalist, and humorist known for his poems and Fus Fixico letters, a series of satirical letters written from his fictional persona, Fus Fixico, that commented on local and national politics of the time. He served as the editor for the Eufaula Indian Journal before passing away on May 27, 1908. The posthumous The Poems of Alexander Lawrence Posey (Crane Printers), which was collected and arranged by Posey's wife, was published in 1910.

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Alexander Posey - Alexander Lawrence Posey, born August 3, 1873, was a Muskogee Creek poet, journalist, and humorist known for his poems and Fus Fixico letters.

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John Miller was a Lakota spiritual leader dedicated to native American healing and spirituality. He established the Dakota 38+2 ceremonial ride to honor the 38 Dakota men executed in 1862 and the two hanged in 1865. This annual event promotes healing, unity, and awareness of the indigenous injustices and cultural heritage.

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Lakota spiritual leader Jim Miller, founder of Dakota 38+2 ceremonial ride, dies at 74

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James “Jim” Gerald Miller, 74, Lakota spiritual leader and founder of the Dakota 38+2 rides, died on March 3 from cancer at his home near Porcupine, S.D.

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Silas Haggerty, known as Smooth Feather, directs the Dakota 38+2 ceremonial ride documentary, which pays tribute to the 38 Dakota men executed in 1862. The annual event highlights historical injustices, fosters healing, and promotes unity among native American communities while honoring their cultural heritage

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From Melinda Moulton:

Silas Hagerty - Founder and Director of Smooth Feather Youth

Silas started Smooth Feather Youth in 2017 and since that point has been collaborating with many inspiring filmmakers, musicians and graphic artists and outdoor enthusiasts to create a wide variety of programming for youth. In 2012, Silas moved back to his home state of Maine and bought the old theater in Kezar Falls which has been a passion of his to restore. This 1880s theater is now a venue for all our youth programming and also a location for many events we host for the entire community.

For more information visit: smoothfeather.org
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From Melinda Moulton:Silas Hagerty - Founder and Director of Smooth Feather YouthSilas started Smooth Feather Youth in 2017 and since that point has been collaborating with many inspiring filmmakers, musicians and graphic artists and outdoor enthusiasts to create a wide variety of programming for youth.