https://vimeo.com/114980972
"Probably one of the most important and timely shorts for America this year. Reinaldo Marcus Green's film addresses the upsetting aspects of New York City's stop-and-frisk policies with sensitivity and insight."
-Jeff Bowers, VICE (http://bit.ly/1mU7HHQ)
"A Night of Philosophy and Ideas is a thinker’s lollapalooza. The free, 12-hour weekend lyceum at the Brooklyn Public Library includes spirited debate, live music, theater, performance art pieces, and film screenings. At any given hour, five or six different events will be taking place simultaneously. Visitors are encouraged to come and go as the spirit moves them.
"It appears that Banksy has struck again, this time painting the brick wall of the former Reading Prison in Berkshire, England, where Oscar Wilde was jailed for two years over his “indecent” affair with Lord Alfred Douglas.
DAMN. Kendrick Lamar opened the 2018 GRAMMYs with a powerful and political performance of his hit, "XXX.'" The rapper featured an army of face-covered soldiers marching in the background of an American flag, that quickly turned into a "satire" taking a jab at the current political climate in the United States.
Following the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, corporations jumped on the opportunity to commodify the Black Lives Matter movement. In June of 2020, Netflix launched a Black Lives Matter collection, and by December, they had released Cops and Robbers, an animated short about racial injustice.
Tamms Year Ten is an all-volunteer grassroots coalition of artists, prisoners, men formerly incarcerated in Tamms, family members and other people of conscience. In 2008, at the ten-year anniversary of the opening of the Tamms supermax prison, the group launched a legislative campaign to call for its reform or closure. Men were originally supposed to be there for one year—but at that point 1/3 of them had been in solitary confinement the entire decade.
A small group of gay rights activists gathered outside the Russian Embassy in Beijing on Valentine’s Day to protest Russia’s antigay laws.
Behind a rainbow banner that read “To Russia with Love,” a dozen activists cheered as three couples puckered up and kissed in front of a countdown clock for the Sochi Winter Olympics outside the embassy’s tall walls.
Caucus-goers in Des Moines will arrive to a disturbing sight on Monday, with dozens of chain-link cages appearing to hold migrant children cropping up across the city overnight.
In an effort to prepare against chemical, biological and radiological attacks in the New York subway, the New York Police Department has announced plans to release harmless gases into the city’s streets and subway stations to better understand the pathways of airborne contaminants. Officials will use more than 200 sensors, set up throughout all five boroughs, to track these benign gases as they disperse.
Veteran Industrial band Skinny Puppy have objected to their disturbingly dark music being played to discombobulate inmates at Guantanamo, and plan to “charge” the government for doing so. They are not the first band to express such objections.
At least nine protesters were arrested during a protest Tuesday at Geo Group headquarters — a Florida-based private prison company that operates facilities nationwide.
"This project was launched in the wake of the police shooting of 16-year old Brooklyn resident Kimani Gray. Blue NYPD barricades left in piles around the city were spray-painted with the names of people killed by police, then re-deployed in public space."
ICE [Immigration & Customs Enforecement] is now heavily recruiting, in part with offers of a $50,000 signing bonus. ICE has run roughshod over the Constitution, targeting people via racial profiling, failing to give people their constitutional rights of due process, and whisking them off to prisons abroad.
One of the most pressing questions before us in the United States now is how to resolve the tension between our personal visions and needs, on the one hand, and the demands of being a member of a community, on the other.
A new exhibition titled “Afrofuturism: A History of Black Futures” will debut at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) to examine Afrofuturist expression and culture as it relates to music, activism, art, and more.
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
In its thirteenth year, the annual Miss Talavera Bruce beauty pageant is held in unlikely surroundings: a women’s prison in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The Instituto Penal Talavera is the only maximum-security women’s prison in the city with inmates serving life sentences for murder, fraud and drug trafficking.
Jo’Artis Ratti is sure he looked intimidating to the police officers who were suddenly confronted by his agitated dancing at a California protest Sunday.
“I’m 210 pounds,” said Ratti, 35. “I have tattoos on my neck. I don’t have a passive energy; I’m very enthusiastic. And I know this looks unfamiliar.”
It all started a few months ago, when the Minneapolis Institute of Art got a phone call from Valerie Castile.
Castile is the mother of Philando Castile, the 32-year-old black man who was shot and killed by a police officer in 2016. Valerie Castile has since founded the Philando Castile Relief Foundation, which helps victims of gun violence.
In this series featured in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, artist Alexandra Bell edited headline pages from the New York Daily News in 1989 concerning the case of the Central Park 5. Through redaction, highlighting, and censoring, Bell shows how the teens accused of this crime were painted as a pack of animals by the media.
After J.Cole posted a song that implies that Noname can get her message across to a wider audience if she changes her tone, she releases another song in response. However, instead of explicitly responding to his critique, she uses the controversy to shed light on the death of Black female activist Oluwatoyin Salau, who was killed by her assaulter.
Anthony Papa was arrested for a drug crime and with no prior offenses was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison for violating New York's harsh drug laws. While in prison, Papa began to document his inner struggles via painting and ultimately earned a pardon from New York governor and has gone on to actively fight the drug war in his years since release.
You could hear their chants from the White House.
On June 6, hundreds of activists and protesters gathered on Black Lives Matter Plaza, a two-block section on 16th Street in Washington D.C. that was renamed amid BLM protests.
Alzayer put cages around Boston's "Make Way for Ducklngs" statues, separating the baby duckling statues from the mother. The original statues were created in 1987 by Nancy Schon and the mallard family is based on the children's book by Robert McCloskey.
The group known as Kalpulli Yaocenoxtli, which practices Mexican Nahua dance, song and drumming, is a frequent presence at Black Lives Matter protests in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Its dancers first took to the streets in solidarity with the movement after the death of Jamar Clark, who was shot and killed by Minneapolis police in 2015.