Category Archives: Art/Media History

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

The Radical Legacy of Hannah Höch

The Radical Legacy of Hannah Höch, One of the Only Female Dadaists
by Alina Cohen, artsy.net

Photomontages were the original remix. In the early 20th century, a group of European artists spliced together images they’d found in popular media, creating singular artworks via a strategy of sampling. The results show both individual statements by their makers and cross-sections of visual culture from a particular historical moment. While these creators called their movement by the nonsense word “Dada” (“DADA, as for it, it smells of nothing, it is nothing, nothing, nothing,” said artist Francis Picabia), their strange new artworks offered significant polemical ideas about gender, politics, and creativity during a particularly tumultuous era in Western history. 
….

Hannah Höch, one of the few female members recognized by the movement, offered a refreshing antithesis to such macho constructions. Her own photomontages offer kaleidoscopic visions of German culture during the interwar era, often from a distinctly queer, feminist perspective.
READ entire article.

Meryl Meisler: Vintage 70s Self-Portraits 

Playing dress up and shooting self-portraits at her parents’ house in the suburbs coaxed Meryl Meisler out of the closet and into herself.

Vintage 70s Selfies Show an Artist Discovering Her Sexuality

“Growing up in Long Island during the 1950s and 60s, Meryl Meisler had the typical suburban life: girl Scouts, ballet and tap dance lessons, and prom. But while she loved her family and friends, she didn’t quite fit in. She quickly realized she didn’t want to be a housewife, teacher, nurse, or a secretary—pretty much the only options available to young women at that time…” [read more]

{They should be referred to as self-portraits! http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/whats-the-difference-between-a-selfie-and-a-self-portrait/}

Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik is considered by many to be the inventor of video art.

Electric Superhighway, 1995

Electric Superhighway, 1995

Nam June Paik links in honor of his exhibition at the Asia Society until Jan 4, 2015

Comprehensive list of works and full bio

VIDEO LINKS

Great short video discussing how Nam June Paik predicted the Internet Age

Good Morning Mr. Orwell
(Initially broadcast on New Year’s Day, 1984)
Nam June Paik’s rebuttal to Orwell’s dystopian vision of 1984, is the first international satellite installation by Video Art pioneer Nam June Paik. Paik’s transcultural satellite extravaganzas links different countries (France, Germany, US), spaces, and times in often chaotic but entertaining collages of art and pop culture, the avant-garde and television. Paik saw Good Morning Mr. Orwell as a rebuttal to Orwell’s dystopian vision of 1984.
>> More Info on project from Asia Society

MORE RESOURCES
Nam June Paik website has a good overview essay on Paik’s work, The Worlds of Nam June Paik by John Hanhardt, former film and video curator at the Whitney and Guggenheim and is now the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s video-art curator.

Nam June Paik on ubuweb

Nam June Paik and Modern Technology Timeline

TV Buddha, Buddha and video with live feed

Watchdog, TV robot

 

Frederick Douglass’s Faith in Photography

Frederick Douglass’s Faith in Photography
How the former slave and abolitionist became the most photographed man in America.
By Matthew Pratt Guterl, New Republic

“New, cheaper techniques of reproduction, Douglass believed, allowed for a truer, more precise impression of the person on display. They also made it possible for the subject of the photograph to determine, to some extent, how people read and understood the image. Frame by frame, the authors of the volume show how carefully Douglass tried—in an age where, for so many people of color, this was simply unimaginable—to control meaning.” [read complete article]

Web Interventions on Whitney Museuem’s website

 

“good morning good night” by JODI 2011-2015

The Whitney museum’s website gets “hacked” every day at sunrise and sunset – Quartz

Introduced with the re-launch of whitney.org in 2009, Sunrise/Sunset is a series of Internet art projects commissioned by the Whitney specifically for whitney.org to mark sunset and sunrise in New York City every day. Unfolding over a timeframe of ten to thirty seconds, each project accompanies a transition of the website’s background color from white (day) to black (night) and vice versa.
Curated by Christiane Paul, the Whitney’s adjunct curator of new media

Stephanie Rothenberg’s “Outlook: Untitled” 2010-11

Flipping (Virtually) Through a Book of Cubo-Futurist Poetry

From Hyperallergic:

Life is shorter than the squeal of a sparrow.
Like a dog, regardless, sailing
on an ice floe down the river in spring?

Vasily Kamensky, with illustrations by David and Vladimir Burliuk, ‘Tango s korovami : zhelezobetonnyi︠a︡ poėmy’ (Tango with Cows, 1914), showing “Telephone” (all images courtesy the Getty Research Institute)

So opens the title poem of Tango with Cows, a 1914 book by Vasily Kamensky, with accompanying drawings by David and Vladimir Burliuk. All three artists were members of the group Hylaea, whose 1912 manifesto, “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” is often cited as formally starting the Russian Futurist movement. Unlike the Italian Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s “Manifesto of Futurism,” which proposed not only a new relationship to art but to all of life as well, “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” was more specifically concerned with upending the literary status quo. [read more]

…The book, in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Getty — which has made its version available digitally

 

Un Chien Andalou – THE GAME!!

Slicing Up Eyeballs in a Surrealist Game

The startling 1929 surrealist silent film Un Chien Andalou made by Luis Buñuel in collaboration with Salvador Dalí is now a deeply unsettling video game. If the infamous eye slicing scene makes you recoil at its memory, wait until a digital moon soundtracked by hideous stretching noises morphs into a gaping oculus, and your only release from its revolting gaze is to slash it down the pupil.

via Hyperallergic

[interesting to think of this project in relation to Perry Bard’s Man with a Movie Camera: A Global Remake.]

Photogrammar

Photogrammar
Photogrammar is a web-based platform for organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United State’s Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI).

Tree Map Visualization of 1942 Classification System

story about the project on NPR

More information on the project