Asian Americans standing up for themselves, the Black Lives Matter movement, and their home: New York City
In 2020, as COVID-19 flared through New York City and NYC hospitals saw a spike of nearly 200,000 patients, Asian and Pacific Islanders (APIs) faced an added threat: blame, racism, and xenophobia.
Artists Dionne Bonner, Kenya Adams, Gwen Jones, and Charles Taylor planned the creation of the Black Lives Matter mural in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Additional artists Breyahna Monet and Danielle Jordan joined the project in the second phase and helped complete the mural painting project.
Project Catalyst specializes in designing culturally rich entertainment experiences that re-imagine the empowering possibilities of cinema and media from a multicultural perspective. Project Catalyst exemplifies the efficacy and essential value of art and cinema at the intersections of social justice and the modern technologies of everyday life.
At the age of just 30, Palesa Ngwenya is helping transform these areas through her position as development coordinator of Maboneng Township Arts Experience. “We turn homes in the townships into art galleries,” says the young South African woman, who grew up during apartheid. “It’s about showing people that you can use what you have to do things that can change your life."
New York artist Donna Choi wanted to create a “weird, memorable way” to discuss fetishization of Asian women, so she put together a satirical series about how to diagnose Yellow Fever—the specific obsession many Western men have with Asian culture.
The over-the-top series is a discussion of race crafted for the attention span of the Internet.
I emailed with Choi about her thinking behind the Yellow Fever series.
The Paris-based collective Claire Fontaine displays a neon sign that spells the words ‘Foreigners Everywhere’ in Arabic. Since this sign was installed strategically above the gallery’s wall-length window – facing in the street – in the edition of the show I saw, at Parsons in New York, it interacted not only with Parsons’ exhibition site but also with the urban environment beyond it.
A popular theme throughout media is the relationship between technology and art. While art is often bolstered and disseminated through technology, discussions arise of how technology both positively and negatively affects content. Caroline Sinders’ exhibition Within the Terms and Conditions explores the way content has been spread online.
The questions that London-based collective One Of My Kind (aka OOMK) explore are those of identity and belonging—issues that are experienced by everyone regardless of whether they grew up defining themselves based on the music they listen to, the hobbies they enjoy, or the religion they practice.
In September 1971, after years of mistreatment and months of simmering tensions, more than 1,200 of the 2,200 inmates at the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York took control of the prison in protest of its substandard conditions and openly racist corrections officers.
Samaria Rice, left, and Terrence Spivey welcome the crowd at the Tamir Rice Sweet 16 event to raise funds for a new youth oriented cultural center Thursday, June 14th, 2018, at the Cleveland Museum of Art in Cleveland, Ohio. Photo by Tim Harrison/Special to The Plain Dealer
Inspired to carry on Tamir's legacy
"SOA Cycle, and what it later became, which is called the Democracy Cycle, is a group of seven large works that approach the question of democracy. What is democracy? How is it constructed? How is it implemented? Is it something that is to be thought of in relation to its political influence? Or is it something that plays out in terms of cultural and social, and even emotional terms, for instance?
A video that was first posted on X (formerly Twitter) on November 8, of a Congolese man setting himself on fire has gone viral. The gruesome clip has started a discussion on whether a genocide is occurring in the DRC and is being ignored by both Africa and the rest of the world.
There were still bloodstains outside the Midwood Mobil gas station on Friday night; a fresh sign taped to a lamppost read “A Hate Crime Happened Here.” This is the place where, less than a week prior, 28-year-old O’Shae Sibley, a gay Black dancer and choreographer, made a pit stop with friends after a Jersey beach day.
2020 was the year of when protest music blared everywhere. For a long period, Black people struggled against police brutality and in the uproar of George Floyd's murder, BLM protests instantly swept over the country. Of the many protest music that was released that year, trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire wrote a song that would spearhead raging sentiments towards racial injustice beyond just jazz.
Just weeks after activists staged an alternative tour of the American Museum of Natural History to call for its removal, among other things, the equestrian statue of Teddy Roosevelt was vandalized early Thursday morning.
In 2013, Ghana ThinkTank received a Creative Capital Award for Emerging Fields, enabling them to begin the multi-year ThinkTank at the Border project. In this project, they are collecting problems from civilian border patrols like the Minutemen, "Patriot" groups, and Nativist organizations, and bringing them to be solved by think tanks of undocumented workers in San Diego and recently deported immigrants in Tijuana.
Emory Douglas joined the Black Panthers in January 1967 at the age of 23, just three months after Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the party. Douglas, who had studied graphic design at San Francisco City College, swiftly became the organization’s minister of culture and the art director in charge of its eponymous newspaper.
They call themselves feminist masked avengers in the tradition of Robin Hood, Wonder Woman and Batman. They wear costume gorilla masks to remain anonymous, and they are devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the visual art world internationally.
The Transborder Immigrant Tool is a ECD 2.0 (Ricardo Dominguez, Brett Stalbaum, Amy Sara Carroll, Micha Cárdenas, Elle Mehrmand) project designed to repurpose inexpensive used mobile phones that have GPS antennas (through the addition of proper software which the TB project is designing) to provide emergency personal navigation, helping to guide dehydrated immigrants to water safety sites established by activists and to provide poetic audio nourishment
On a sidewalk in the Village in downtown Manhattan, an African-American woman leans on her elbows and knees, wearing only black underpants. Scrawled in black marker all over her body are the words "Ain't I a Woman?"
Across the street, another woman lies face down, sunbathing on a large sheet of tinfoil. The sentence "White Supremacy Is Terrorism" is inked across her white skin, which is turning pink under the hot sun.
"The No Papers, No Fear ride for justice.
Riders are undocumented people from all over the country, including students, mothers and fathers, children, people in deportation proceedings, day laborers, and others who continue to face deportation, harassment, and death while simply looking for a better life.