Category Archives: Activism

1619

The 1619 Project – New York Times

The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times led by Nikole Hannah-Jones, observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are. Read interactive version online or you can download a pdf of the entire August 18 New York Times Magazine here: https://pulitzercenter.org/sites/default/files/full_issue_of_the_1619_project.pdf


Women in Migration

Free download

Available to purchase, read or download here: https://openbookpublishers.com/product/840.

This book came out of conference in Florence, Italy that I was honored to be a part of. It is an incredible resource.

Introduction: Women and Migration[s]
Deborah Willis, Ellyn Toscano and Kalia Brooks Nelson

Part One: Imagining Family and Migration 11

  1. Between Self and Memory
    Ellyn Toscano
  2. Fragments of Memory: Writing the Migrant’s Story
    Anna Arabindan-Kesson
  3. A Congolese Woman’s Life in Europe: A Postcolonial Diptych of Migration
    Sandrine Colard
  4. Migrations
    Kathy Engel

Part Two: Mobility and Migration

  1. Carrying Memory
    Marianne Hirsch
  2. Making Through Motion
    Wangechi Mutu
  3. Strange Set of Circumstances: White Artistic Migration and Crazy Quilt
    Karen Finley
  4. Nora Holt: New Negro Composer and Jazz Age Goddess
    Cheryl A. Wall

Part Three: Understanding Pathways

  1. Silsila: Linking Bodies, Deserts, Water
    Sama Alshaibi
  2. My Baby Saved My Life: Migration and Motherhood in an American High School
    Jessica Ingram
  3. Visualizing Displacement Above The Fold
    Lorie Novak
  4. Unveiling Violence: Gender and Migration in the Discourse of Right-Wing Populism
    Debora Spini
  5. A Different Lens
    Maaza Mengiste
  6. Reinventing the Spaces Within: The Early Images of Artist Lalla Essaydi
    Isolde Brielmaier
  7. Swimming with E. C.
    Kellie Jones

Part Four: Reclaiming Our Time

  1. Kinship, the Middle Passage, and the Origins of Racial Slavery
    Jennifer L. Morgan
  2. Black Women’s Work: Resisting and Undoing Character Education and the ‘Good’ White Liberal Agenda
    Bettina L. Love
  3. Filipina Stories: Gabriela NY and Justice for Mary Jane Veloso
    Editha Mesina
  4. Women & Migrations: African Fashion’s Global Takeover
    Allana Finley
  5. What Would It Mean to Sing A Black Girl’s Song?: A Brief Statement on the Reality of Anti-Black Girl Terror
    Treva B. Lindsey

Part Five: Situated at the Edge

  1. Fredi’s Migration: Washington’s Forgotten War on Hollywood
    Pamela Newkirk
  2. Julia de Burgos: Cultural Crossing and Iconicity
    Vanessa Pérez-Rosario
  3. Sarah Parker Remond’s Black American Grand Tour
    Sirpa Salenius
  4. Making Latinx Art: Juana Valdes at the Crossroads of Latinx and Latin American Art
    Arlene Dávila
  5. Moving Mountains: Harriet Hosmer’s Nineteenth-Century Italian Migration to Become the First Professional Woman Sculptor
    Patricia Cronin

Part Six: Transit, Transiting, and Transition

  1. Urban Candy: Screens, Selfies and Imaginings
    Roshini Kempadoo
  2. Controlled Images and Cultural Reassembly: Material Black Girls Living in an Avatar World
    Joan Morgan
  3. Supershero Amrita Simla, Partitioned Once, Migrated Twice
    Sarah K. Khan
  4. Diaspora, Indigeneity, Queer Critique: Tracey Moffatt’s Aesthetics of Dwelling in Displacement
    Gayatri Gopinath
  5. The Performance of Doubles: The Transposition of Gender and Race in Ming Wong’s Life of Imitation
    Kalia Brooks Nelson

Part Seven: The World is Ours, Too

  1. The Roots of Black American Women’s Internationalism: Migrations of the Spirit and the Heart 
    Francille Rusan Wilson
  2. ‘The World is Ours, Too’: Millennial Women and the New Black Travel Movement
    Tiffany M. Gill
  3. Performing a Life: Mattie Allen McAdoo’s Odyssey from Ohio to South Africa, Australia and Beyond, 1890–1900
    Paulette Young
  4. ‘I Don’t Pay Those Borders No Mind At All’: Audley E. Moore (‘Queen Mother’ Moore) – Grassroots Global Traveler and Activist
    Sharon Harley
  5. Löis Mailou Jones in the World
    Cheryl Finley

Part Eight: Emotional Cartography: Tracing the Personal

  1. The Ones Who Leave… the Ones Who Are Left: Guyanese Migration Story
    Grace Aneiza Ali
  2. The Acton Photograph Archive: Between Representation and Re-Interpretation
    Alessandra Capodacqua
  3. Reconciliations at Sea: Reclaiming the Lusophone Archipelago in Mónica de Miranda’s Video Works
    M. Neelika Jayawardane
  4. Transnational Minor Literature: Cristina Ali Farah’s Somali Italian Stories
    Alessandra Di Maio
  5. Seizing Control of the Narrative
    Misan Sagay
  6. Migration as a Woman’s Right: Stories from Comparative and Transnational Slavery Histories in the North Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds
    Gunja SenGupta
  7. The Sacred Migration of Sister Gertrude Morgan
    Imani Uzuri

Now that you have seen the table of contents, you will really want the free download

Making a website accessible

12 ways your website is inaccessible to those with chronic illness

Too often as we put our blogs together we think about what we like personally but don’t really give a lot of thought to how others may view the same pages. In the end, the goal is to have others to be able to read our blogs and enjoy them, but are we making small mistakes that could be making it difficult for others to enjoy our blogs? Here are a few thoughts from some of our bloggers on things that often make it difficult for them to access blogs and websites.

link to article

I will be adding underlines to my links.

 

Doris Salcedo inspiration

One of my art heroes who continues to inspire me…

“The act of sewing together each piece of cloth in an act of reparation, of knitting our own peace and is especially important at this time of uncertainty,” -Doris Salcedo

Participants in an artistic intervention by Doris Salcedo at the Plaza de Bolívar in Bogotá, Colombia, Oct 11, 2016 Photo: Leonardo Muñoz/EPA

Participants in an artistic intervention by Doris Salcedo at the Plaza de Bolívar in Bogotá, Colombia, Oct 11, 2016 Photo: Leonardo Muñoz/EPA

DORIS SALCEDO, has covered Bogotá’s central plaza in a massive white shroud.

In an act of protest against a civil conflict that has raged for more than 50 years, the plaza was covered in a massive white shroud bearing the names of the war’s many victims.

The public statement of mourning by artist Doris Salcedo was temporarily installed as the country grapples with the rejection of a peace deal with leftist Farc rebels that would have ended the war. [read more]

More on the intervention in an article on Hyperallergic

Watch this video for more on/by Doris Salcedo >>

And even more on this great artist on Art 21

And her Guggenheim exhibition is a great resource.

Social in Practice – Superflex

Superflex’s Hospital Equipment Goes to Gaza
—artnet News

“Casualties of recent fighting in the Gaza Strip may well find themselves undergoing surgery atop an operating table that is also an artwork. In what the three-man Danish collective Superflex calls a “readymade upside-down,” the artists organized for a museum exhibition of top-of-the-line medical equipment which then went to a setting defined less by well-heeled visitors than by life-threatening injuries.

 As a result, Al-Shifa Hospital is the beneficiary of some $90,000 worth of goods,..” read more

Faith Ringgold Looks Back on Her Life in Art, Activism, and Education

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

“[I realized] I can’t tell your story, I can only tell mine. I can’t be you, I can only be me,”

An important and inspiring read with need to know history > The Storyteller: At 85, Her Star Still Rising, Faith Ringgold Looks Back on Her Life in Art, Activism, and Education

Faith Ringgold, The American People Series #20: Die, 1967.

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

Faith Ringgold, Tar Beach, 1988.

www.faithringgold.com

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

 

 

MOVING TARGETS: THE WORK OF LAURA POITRAS

Great piece from ArtForum on the Laura Poitras exhibition at the Whitney. Includes excerpts from her diaries.

MOVING TARGETS: THE WORK OF LAURA POITRAS by Stephen Squibb – artforum.com

excerpt from diaries:

By asking people to lie down in Bed Down Location, I want them to enter an empathetic space and imagine drone warfare—not simply to understand it from news articles but to ponder the sky and imagine that there is a machine flying above you that could end your life at any moment. What does that feel like? Many people in the world are living under skies where that is a reality. [read article]

Holland Cotter in the NY Times also has a good, informative review

Images from Laura Poitras’s “Anarchist” series, which are drawn from documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden.

[The title, Astro Noise, refers to the faint background disturbance of thermal radiation left over from the Big Bang and is the name Edward Snowden gave to an encrypted file containing evidence of mass surveillance by the National Security Agency that he shared with Poitras in 2013. ]

 

W.A.G.E. ::: wo/manifesto

wo/manifesto

W.A.G.E. (WORKING ARTISTS AND THE GREATER ECONOMY) WORKS TO DRAW ATTENTION TO ECONOMIC INEQUALITIES THAT EXIST IN THE ARTS, AND TO RESOLVE THEM.

W.A.G.E. HAS BEEN FORMED BECAUSE WE, AS VISUAL + PERFORMANCE ARTISTS AND INDEPENDENT CURATORS, PROVIDE A WORK FORCE.

W.A.G.E. RECOGNIZES THE ORGANIZED IRRESPONSIBILITY OF THE ART MARKET AND ITS SUPPORTING INSTITUTIONS, AND DEMANDS AN END OF THE REFUSAL TO PAY FEES FOR THE WORK WE’RE ASKED TO PROVIDE: PREPARATION, INSTALLATION, PRESENTATION, CONSULTATION, EXHIBITION AND REPRODUCTION.

W.A.G.E. REFUTES THE POSITIONING OF THE ARTIST AS A SPECULATOR AND CALLS FOR THE REMUNERATION OF CULTURAL VALUE IN CAPITAL VALUE.

W.A.G.E. BELIEVES THAT THE PROMISE OF EXPOSURE IS A LIABILITY IN A SYSTEM THAT DENIES THE VALUE OF OUR LABOR.

AS AN UNPAID LABOR FORCE WITHIN A ROBUST ART MARKET FROM WHICH OTHERS PROFIT GREATLY, W.A.G.E. RECOGNIZES AN INHERENT EXPLOITATION AND DEMANDS COMPENSATION.

W.A.G.E. CALLS FOR AN ADDRESS OF THE ECONOMIC INEQUALITIES THAT ARE PREVALENT, AND PROACTIVELY PREVENTING THE ART WORKER’S ABILITY TO SURVIVE WITHIN THE GREATER ECONOMY.

W.A.G.E. ADVOCATES FOR DEVELOPING AN ENVIRONMENT OF MUTUAL RESPECT BETWEEN ARTIST AND INSTITUTION.

W.A.G.E. DEMANDS PAYMENT FOR MAKING THE WORLD MORE INTERESTING.

Founded in 2008, Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.) is a New York-based activist organization focused on regulating the payment of artist fees by nonprofit art institutions and establishing a sustainable labor relation between artists and the institutions that contract their labor.