By Kim Bellware in Huffington Post – Janelle Monàe’s Friday morning performance on NBC’s “Today” was lively, original and cut short — right when she started to talk about police brutality. The “Tightrope” singer appeared with collaborators from her new custom record label, Wondaland, in support of the collective’s new EP, “The Eephus” (see her interview with “Today” above). At the end of her performance of “Hell You Talmbout,” a rousing protest song for the Black Lives Matter movement, Monàe told the crowd: Yes Lord! God bless America! God bless all the lost lives to police brutality. We want white America to know that we stand tall today. We want black America to know we stand tall today. We will not be silenced…
By Sarah Cascone in Artnet – “Escaping Time: Art From U.S. Prisons,” an exhibition opening this weekend on Governor’s Island, looks to highlight the power of rehabilitation. Featuring 200 artworks including pieces by noted prisoner-turned-painter Anthony Papa as well as condemned killer Charles Manson (but not by recently-killed escapee Richard W. Matt), the show also serves as a reminder of the island’s historic past. Today, Governors Island is New York’s summer playground, a picturesque island full of art, bike trails, and shaded picnic spots, but not that long ago, its 19th-century fort, Castle Williams, was actually used as a prison, first during the Civil War, and later for offenders within the US Army. “Art offers prisoners a new conviction that, although their circumstances may seem inescapable, their memories, experiences, and hopeful dispositions are preserved,” explained curator Anastasia Voron, director of exhibitions at New York’s Wallplay, in a statement.
By Ted Rall in A New Domain – As an editorial cartoonist for The Los Angeles Times, I have drawn numerous cartoons critical of the Los Angeles Police Department’s abuse, corruption and heavy-handed incompetence. Now it seems the LAPD has gotten even: It has convinced the Times to fire me. At issue is a blog I wrote to accompany my May 11, 2015 cartoon for the Times. It was about an announced LAPD crackdown. Not on violent crime, but jaywalking. I opened with a personal anecdote from nearly 14 years ago, when a Los Angeles police officer ticketed me for jaywalking on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood. The date was October 3, 2001. I’ll get into the allegations below the fold. But first, here is a far-from-complete sample of LAPD-related cartoons I’ve drawn for The Times and some other publications. . .
By Sane Energy Project – Many are familiar with the Canadian artist who stopped an oil pipeline from crossing his property by copyrighting the top 6″ of his soil. Now, an American artist has been tapped by a team of advocates hoping to do the same with the Spectra AIM (Algonquin Incremental Market) pipeline. The high-pressure AIM pipeline would transit within one hundred and five feet of the Indian Point nuclear facility. In February 2015, a group of New York State residents, responding to the abuse of eminent domain that has already been demonstrated by pipeline companies (such as Williams, the builder of the Constitution pipeline), and is threatened by Spectra in the multiple states that AIM would cross, decided to take action.
By Black Girl With Long Hair – As a time traveler I’m very invested in the past and our future. I see myself, the people who built this city and country as one. They deserve so much recognition for their sacrifice and contributions, something that is still being denied them. There was a force deep inside of me that needed to pay homage to those who played a pivotal role in the early history of this city, and the spaces in which they existed. I wanted to uncover those places where a tangible link to the past exists. Being a documentarian at heart I wanted you to feel and see those spaces, let your mind wonder. What does a Black body look like today in the place where they sold human beings 250 years ago? No other medium but photography and film could do that.
By the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. We are excited to share with everyone these Labadie Collection posters. Acquired over the past 100 years, they range in topics from anarchism (our strongest collecting area) to civil liberties, anti-colonialism, anti-war/pacifism, feminism, labor, youth and student protest, ecology, Occupy, and more. Due to their format, until now, we have only been able to provide very limited access. Our hope is that they will get more use now that everyone can view them. This was a joint effort which included highly qualified staff from several units in the Library: Conservation, Copyright Office, Digital Library Production Service (DLPS) and Special Collections.
By Priscilla Frank in Huffington Post – In 2011, street artist JR made a call to art and a call to action — a call he hoped would reach people around the world. “I wish for you to stand up for what you care about by participating in a global art project,” he said. “And together, we’ll turn the world inside out.” “Inside Out” is the name of the project, which challenges people around the globe to share their portrait and a message they believe in. Thus far, the project has attracted over 200,000 people from 112 countries, from Ecuador to Nepal to Palestine. Issues addressed range from climate change to gender-based violence, all communicated through the simple yet striking image of a large, black-and-white pasted portrait.
By Araz Hachadourian in Yes Magazine – A recent study revealed that nearly half of people between the ages of 13 and 22 have experienced online harassment. Of those surveyed, one-third did nothing when they saw someone else being bullied. It’s an issue the members of the historically Latino Pregones Theater in the South Bronx, New York, saw in their community. So they wrote a play about it—and not just any play. They used a tradition of avant-garde theater to make sure that audience members leave better prepared to take action when they see cyber-bullying take place in their lives. The play is part of a program called “Pregones Emotions,” a blend of traditional theater, improv, and audience participation that the group started performing with local middle schools in 2006.
By Andrew O’Hehir in Salon – I have nothing but love – well, let’s say almost nothing – for the Yes Men, the pair of activists, performance artists and culture-jammers who have repeatedly proved that it’s impossible to go too far in making fun of capitalist greed. These are the guys who have staged several of the most epic attention-getting pranks in recent political history, including driving down Dow Chemical’s stock price by staging a press conference to announce that Dow was taking full responsibility for the 1984 disaster that killed nearly 4,000 people in Bhopal, India, and would spend up to $12 billion on medical care, environmental cleanup and related research. As with the Yes Men’s other most effective actions, the key to the Dow ventriloquism lay in stretching plausibility not quite to the breaking point – is it dimly conceivable that a multinational chemical corporation might actually behave like a responsible global citizen?
By Robert J. Burrowes – I have just read Andre Vltchek’s new book ‘Exposing Lies of the Empire’. http://badak-merah.weebly.com/exposing-lies-of-the-empire.html Let me tell you something about this book of 800 pages. Vltchek writes with passion and poetry, describing the true horror experienced by the world at large, living at the gunpoint of the imperial powers, while also describing and drawing you into a world of progress, culture and refinement that exists in some places and, so we are tantalised, might exist elsewhere too and even, perhaps, one day for us all. If you want to begin to understand Vltchek himself, you should start with the chapter headed ‘Solitude of an Internationalist: Our Leningrad’.
By The Editors of ARTnews – Eight new ‘Morning Links’ to news on the art world! 1)Yesterday, MoMA staff protested healthcare cuts outside of the museum. 2) Pierre Audi, founder of the Almeida Theater in London, has been named the new artistic director of the Park Avenue Armory. 3)As the New York City Opera is bankrupt, they are considering undergoing a reorganization in order to legally be able to accept millions of dollars from Pierre DeMenasce, who left 10 percent of his $70 million estate to the opera in his will. 4) Due to the recent acquisition of a collection of works by John Singer Sargent, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston will be creating a John Singer Sargent Archive, which will be held at the Forsythe Institute across from the museum.
By Michael Fox and Ryan Harvey in TeleSur – Artist and activist Ryan Harvey, co-founder of Firebrand Records with Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello, gave teleSUR en exclusive interview about the new distribution label. Harvey, who is also a teleSUR blogger, explains that over the next year Firebrand hopes to build the roster and help artists achieve more recognition through both promotion of their releases, tours, and other projects, and through cross-pollination from the collective nature of the label: “Firebrand is a new project because of it’s scope: we are both international and multi-genre, but more importantly, we are offering a mechanism whereby artists don’t have to worry about political or social censorship surrounding revolutionary ideas about human rights, for instance, to hope to get real professional promotion and distribution.”
Dozens of teddy bears that memorialized Michael Brown were removed from a site on Canfield Drive in Ferguson, Missouri, on Wednesday afternoon. The memorial will be replaced by a permanent plaque honoring Brown, who was fatally shot by a police officer in August 2014. Michael Brown Sr., the slain teen’s father, appeared with Mayor James Knowles in the Ferguson Community Center to unveil the plaque. Brown Sr. acknowledged that the current memorial site has become a safety concern and that he is content with a new, permanent replacement. The announcement came on what would have been Brown’s 19th birthday, and followed a press conference announcing that Canfield Drive, the street where Brown was shot, would be repaved within the week.
More than four decades after Chilean folk singer Victor Jara was tortured and executed in Santiago’s Chile Stadium, in the wake of the military coup that brought dictator Augusto Pinochet to power in 1973, an army lieutenant accused of killing the musician will face a civil lawsuit in the United States. A U.S. district court in Florida agreed this week to hear the case against Pedro Barrientos Nuñez, the former lieutenant now residing in south Florida, who is alleged to have assassinated Jara, the poet and songwriter who became an iconic symbol of the struggle against Pinochet’s regime and one of Latin America’s most prominent protest singers. The U.S.-based Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA), which filed the lawsuit on behalf of Jara’s wife and daughters, reacted with mixed emotions after the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida agreed to hear the case.
Shared vulnerability is empowerment. This is a theme embraced by other activists around the country. It might be the key to an emerging thread: the ethical prerequisites to a consciousness of economic justice. In my work promoting cooperative economic structures and policies, I wanted to know more about the precise role played by consciousness. On the one hand, as Karl Marx wrote, “Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.” One doesn’t merely imagine oppression away, and the new age obsession with language and symbol change can often become a substitute for real material change. On the other hand, our values inform our behavior, and even the most scientific-minded revolutionaries like Leon Trotsky emphasized that consciousness must precede (and accompany) revolution.
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