In Louis Armstrong’s study in the Queens home he shared with his fourth wife, Lucille, bookshelves were filled with reel-to-reel recordings he made as a sort of audio diary. Those tapes and his letters — read by the rapper Nas — lay the foundation for the director Sacha Jenkins’s documentary “Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues.”
“My intention was not to disappear in the environment but instead to let the environment take possession of me” Said Liu Bolin. With his strong photography, Bolin vanishes into the city, creating a powerful statement about our relationship, as humans, to our surroundings.
In 1900, Montgomery, Alabama had passed a city ordinance to segregate bus passengers by race, and conductors were empowered to assign seats to achieve that goal. The first four rows of seats on each Montgomery bus were reserved for whites, and buses had "colored" sections for black people generally in the rear of the bus, although blacks composed more than 75% of the ridership.
Featuring photographs that represent a unique collaboration between men held in supermax prisons and the photographers who fulfilled their requests.
Curated by Laurie Jo Reynolds, Tamms Year Ten, Jeanine Oleson, Parsons The New School for Design, and Jean Casella, Solitary Watch.
In December – as many around the globe were preparing for the holidays – Sama, a former attorney, remained hunkered down in her house in Kabul, Afghanistan, trying to comprehend how her world had changed.
This special EDition is a revolutionary chant against the menacing cantankerous demonic , satanic COVID 19. And again doubles as a bold and poetic supplication to the great Almighty God to release us off this pandemic bondage. This Edition is a poetically driven spiritual prayer for freedom of expression and freedom after expression.
Beyoncé delivered an intensely, unapologetic celebration of Black and HBCU culture at the Coachella Festival 2 weekends in a row. Not only were her performances some of the best live performances to date but they sent a pretty significant message to the world.
Here are some assessments of this beautiful demonstration of Blackness and Black Girl Magic:
From BBC News:
Spread over three institutions — the Bronx Museum of the Arts; El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem; and Loisaida Inc., a cultural center in the East Village — this show departs from straight political history by presenting the Young Lords as a cultural phenomenon as well as an ideological one, with a highly developed instinct for visual self-projection, right down to having an official party photographer, the gifted Hiram Maristany.
As the No. 59 bus hurtled down Ratchadamnoen Klang road in Bangkok's Old Town, its passengers diverted their attention from the intense midday heat to a small crowd on the concrete below. About 25 people were marching and chanting, photographers scuttling in front of them.
Adrian Piper's "Funk Lessons" (1982-84) was a series of performances and collaborative events in which the artist taught white participants about black funk music, its culture, and its history, aiming to deconstruct stereotypical ideas about Black culture.
The American rapper’s performance of 'Stand Up for Something' with singer Andra Day has gone down as one of the highlights of this year’s Academy Awards.
Common used his Oscars performance to condemn Donald Trump’s “hate” and the National Rifle Association.
The American rapper’s performance of “Stand Up for Something” with singer Andra Day has been held up by many as one of the highlights of this year’s Academy Awards.
In the mid early 2000s, religious advocates tried a new strategy: promoting the theory of “intelligent design” to be taught in schools. As the Kansas School Board considered the argument, Prophet Bobby Henderson saw an opportunity. His now famous, “Open Letter to the Kansas School Board” began:
In a single hour, Beyoncé's Lemonade re-wrote the textbook definition of what a visual album should look like. The genre-bending music it introduced will define the struggles a generation was enduring in 2016, specifically for black women. The project transcends every definition pop has ever had; blending R&B, contemporary rock, country, reggae, soul and hip-hop in its 12 tracks, occasionally fusing several of these into a single song.
‘In Her Shoes’ was a street exhibition of stories from women and men affected by the 8th Amendment of the Irish Constitution. These stories were selected from the ‘In Her Shoes’ project Facebook page. We hung copies of the stories on ribbon between trees and provided pens, paper and a seating area for people to sit down and write a response to the stories if they chose.
ScareMail is a web browser extension that makes email “scary” in order to disrupt NSA surveillance. Extending Google’s Gmail, the work adds to every new email’s signature an algorithmically generated narrative containing a collection of probable NSA search terms. This “story” acts as a trap for NSA programs like PRISM and XKeyscore, forcing them to look at nonsense.
In a sleepy town in Iranian Kurdistan, people take off their winter coats. It is evening, and outside one can just about discern the silhouettes of the mountains that lead to the Turkish and Iraqi borders. Inside, some 60 people fill the small community centre with a clammy heat. But it is not just warmth they are after. They have come for poetry.
The Fast for Families on April 7-9 is the culmination of a month of action involving more than 1200 women fasting through 70 events in 35 states as well as in Washington, D.C., and Mexico City.
When Patricia Stonefish returned home to the United States from Egypt in 2014, she brought with her a new outlook for conceptualizing women's self defense. Having seen firsthand the benefits and empowerment of Taekwando/ Hapkido/ Gumdo classes for Egyptian women during and after the revolution in 2011, she decided to put her decade of martial arts training to good use on home turf.
NEW YORK — Hours after police removed an illicit bust of Edward Snowden from its perch in a Brooklyn park on Monday, artists replaced it with a hologram.
The group of artists — who collectively call themselves "The Illuminator" and are not related to the trio behind the original sculpture — used laptops and projection equipment to cast an image of Snowden in a haze of smoke at the spot where the sculpture once stood.
Russia is the midst of a strict COVID-19 lockdown. Although protesters cannot take to the streets, they are still holding mass demonstrations — digitally.
Gran Fury was an AIDS activist artist collective from New York City consisting of 11 members, all artists - but action, not art, was the aim of the collective. Gran Fury member Loring McAlpin described the collective's mass-market ambition to “...fight for attention as hard as Coca-Cola fights for attention.”
El acoso sexual a las mujeres en México, no es novedad. Desde un chiflido o grito de “mamacita” en la calle hasta una alarmante cifra de seis feminicidios diarios, la violencia machista es un asunto cotidiano.
Lo que sí es novedad es que este año las mujeres no se estén quedando calladas, y que salgan a las calles, ya no con miedo, sino con determinación de defender su derecho a ser respetadas.
One film to change the world. Curated every month.
BURDEN OF PEACE follows Guatemala’s first female Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz in her fight against impunity.
Throughout April 2018 a global audience came together to watch BURDEN OF PEACE, and to dig deep into the issues of women in power with our action kit, bonus features and Impact Talks podcast.