Logic, a rapper known to incorporate meaningful messages with his music, recently released his newest track, “1-800-273-8255.” Covering topics of depression and suicide, the song and its subsequent music video uses the phone number of a national suicide hotline as its title.
Indigenous people in Minneapolis supporting Black Lives Matter cite similar struggles
Jingle dress dancers held a ceremony at the intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis on Monday, the place where George Floyd was killed by police last week.
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.
In this solo work, Gómez-Peña tests brand new material dealing with radical citizenship and what he terms “imaginary activism,” combining live art, literature, theory, and pedagogy in a wonderfully strange mix. Not one solo performance is ever the same.
Black Lives Matter has pushed the national conversation on race—but the trauma and pain behind the fight against systemic racism can weigh heavily on black organizers and the communities they serve.
This was the case for Kleaver Cruz, a 27-year-old writer and community organizer at Black Lives Matter: NYC. A few days after Thanksgiving, he woke up deeply saddened, physically unable to move.
This has been a racially-charged year. How one challenges the status quo is an individual choice and many opt for artistic expression. Artistic expression can personified most visually on the body and while black pride tees are big, nail art is just as big and just as communicative.
In keeping with his activist turn on 2016’s 4 Your Eyez Only, J. Cole’s new album, KOD, is an exploration of addiction. The title has three different meanings that all speak to this aim: Kids On Drugs, King OverDosed, and Kill Our Demons. Each feeds into the next in this narcotic odyssey.
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.
The Black, Dallas-based artist Jammie Holmes put George Floyd’s final words in a place where everyone could see them: the sky. Five days after Floyd was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis on Saturday, May 30th, Holmes’s piece took flight across Detroit, Miami, Dallas, Los Angeles, and New York. Airplanes carrying banners flew between the hours of 11:30 a.m. and 9 p.m. EDT.
Without having been commissioned—or even given legal permission at all—Haring set out to create Crack Is Wack on the wall of an abandoned handball court in a park at 2nd Avenue and East 128th Street on June 27, 1986. Upon the completion of the mural, Haring was arrested by the New York City Police Department for vandalism of city property and faced potential jail time in addition to heavy fines.
Text by Jessica Stewart
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In Virginia, one artist is helping his community reclaim a controversial monument in the name of Black Lives Matter. The Robert E. Lee Monument now stands as the only remaining Confederate statue on Richmond's historic Monument Avenue. While litigation ties up the statue's removal, light projection artist Dustin Klein is using his art to change the meaning of this contentious monument.
The International Harlem Fine Arts Show (HFAS) is the largest traveling African Diasporic art show in the United States. Inspired by the Harlem Renaissance, HFAS provides a platform for African Diasporic visionaries and American visual artists to exhibit and sell their artwork. The show also aims to create economic empowerment, educational opportunities and professional recognition within the multicultural community.
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.”
My skin is black,” the first woman’s story begins, “my arms are long.” And, to a slow and steady beat, “my hair is woolly, my back is strong.” Singing in a club in Holland, in 1965, Nina Simone introduced a song she had written about what she called “four Negro women” to a young, homogeneously white, and transfixed crowd.
About: Hundreds of people came out to attend a decolonization tour of one of New York’s most popular museums.
Written by Elena Goukassian on October 10, 2017
This series of protests began on the UCT campus in an effort to remove the bronze statute of Cecil Rhodes in the center of campus due to the belief that Rhodes represents the oppressive colonization of South Africa that eventually led to apartheid.
Last November, when you Googled the phrase “ugly Black woman,” Vanessa Rochelle Lewis’s photograph was the second to come up.
“Which I’m offended by,” says Lewis, a Bay Area–based artist and writer, “since I’m an Aries and I like to be number one in everything.”
Drama Queens Ghana's “MoonGirls” is an Afrofuturistic graphic novel series. Through an Afrofuturistic lens, “MoonGirls follows the adventures of 4 African "supersheroes" with varying superpowers to save the world from a diverse range of forces; from patriarchy, rape culture to pollution and global warming.
By COREY KILGANNON
There was something odd about the ice cream truck that pulled up to the curb on Park Avenue near 67th Street on Friday, with its proletarian color scheme and its overdressed driver with the subversive grin.
Kwame Brathwaite, the photographer and activist whose work gave a visual identity to the “Black is Beautiful” movement, died on April 1. He was 85.
The news was shared by his son, Kwame Brathwaite, Jr., in an Instagram post. “I am deeply saddened to share that my Baba, the patriarch of our family, our rock and my hero has transitioned,” Brathwaite, Jr. wrote. “Thank you for your love and support during this difficult time.”
"WILD: Act I" is a film demonstrating the power of creativity in constraint. Using moving choreography performed by Elijah Lancaster and vivid imagery displayed on three walls in a mock cell, Jeremy McQueen gives voice to young Black and Brown men caught in the criminal 'justice' system.
The artist in close collaboration with AMI (Assembly of Indigenous Migrants of Mexico City) has created a series of monographs made by students, through ‘tequio’: a communal system of organisation expressed in collaborative practices, mandatory and unpaid work. The goal of the project is to offer information about the lifestyle and culture of these indigenous communities, which live in Mexico City.
The beacon flashed incessantly. On. Off. On again.
Like some sort of traffic light gone crazy, it pierced the thick nighttime mist hovering over San Francisco Bay. The light sent a message five miles across the dark waters from Ghirardelli Square to Alcatraz Island. There, cheers erupted as the light flashed the words, "Go Indians!"
The Ogden Ar(t)chives Mailbox is a community project that was initiated by Ogden poet, Angelika Brewer. The project involves a metal sculpture of a mailbox, which has various decorative elements such as a typewriter, a birdcage, and a heart. The mailbox serves as a platform for the public to submit their creative works such as poems, drawings, letters, or anything that can fit in an envelope.