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kemetic-dreams · 1 year ago

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Jo Ann Gibson Robinson ,unsung activist (April 17, 1912 – August 29, 1992) was a civil rights activist and educator in Montgomery, Alabama.Known for initiating the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, AL, USA

Born near Culloden, Georgia, she was the youngest of twelve children. She attended Fort Valley State College and then became a public school teacher in Macon, where she was married to Wilbur Robinson for a short time. Five years later, she went to Atlanta, where she earned an M.A. in English at Atlanta University. After teaching in Texas she then accepted a position at Alabama State College in Montgomery. It was there she joined the Women's Political Council, which Mary Fair Burks had founded three years earlier. In 1949, Robinson was verbally attacked by a bus driver for sitting in the front "Whites only" section of the bus. Her response to the incident was to attempt to start a protest boycott. But, when she approached her fellow members of the Woman’s Political Council with her story and proposal, she was told that it was “a fact of life in Montgomery.” In late 1950, she succeeded Burks as president of the WPC and helped focus the group's efforts on bus abuses. Robinson was an outspoken critic of the treatment of African-Americans on public transportation. She was also active in the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

The Women's Political Council had made complaints about the bus seating to the Montgomery City Commission and about abusive drivers, and achieved some concessions, including an undertaking that drivers would be courteous and having buses stopping at every corner in black neighborhoods, as they did in European areas. After Brown vs. Board of Education, Robinson had informed the mayor of the city that a boycott would come and then after Rosa Parks arrest, they seized the moment to plan the boycott of the buses in Montgomery.

On Thursday, December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to move from her seat in the African area of the bus she was travelling on to make way for a white passenger who was standing. Mrs. Parks, a civil rights organizer, had intended to instigate a reaction from white citizens and authorities. That night, with Mrs. Parks permission, Mrs. Robinson stayed up mimeographing 52,500 handbills calling for a boycott of the Montgomery bus system. The boycott was initially planned to be for just the following Monday. She passed out the leaflets at a Friday afternoon meeting of AME Zionist clergy among other places and Reverend L. Roy Bennett requested other ministers attend a meeting that Friday night and to urge their congregations to take part in the boycott. Robinson, Reverend Ralph David Abernathy, two of her senior students and other Women's Council members then passed out the handbills to high school students leaving school that afternoon. After the success of the one-day boycott, African citizens decided to continue the boycott and established the Montgomery Improvement Association to focus their efforts. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was elected president. Jo Ann Robinson became a member of this group. She had denied an official position to the Montgomery Improvement Association because of her teaching position at Alabama State. She served on its executive board and edited their newsletter. In order to protect her position at Alabama State College and to protect her colleagues, Robinson purposely stayed out of the limelight even though she worked diligently with the MIA. Robinson and other WPC members also helped sustain the boycott by providing transportation for boy-cotters.

Robinson was the target of several acts of intimidation. In February 1956, a local police officer threw a stone through the window of her house. Then two weeks later, another police officer poured acid on her car. Then the governor of Alabama ordered the state police to guard the houses of the boycott leaders. The boycott lasted over a year because the bus company would not give in to the demands of the protesters. After a student sit-in in early 1960, Robinson and other teachers that had supported the students, resigned their positions at Alabama State College. Robinson left Alabama State College and moved out of Montgomery that year. She taught at Grambling College in Louisiana for one year and then moved to Los Angeles and taught English in the public school system. In Los Angeles she continued to be active in local women's organizations. She taught in the LA schools until she retired from teaching in 1976. Jo Ann Robinson was also a part of the bus boycott and was strongly against discrimination.

#african #kemetic dreams #afrakan #africans #afrakans #brown skin #brownskin #Jo Ann Robinson #alabama state college #macon #fort valley college

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edwinspaynes · 10 months ago

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In ur HC, what novels and fandoms would AU Modern day, Historical TSC be into rn?

Follow up, if each of them had a Tumblr , what would their blogs about be and why?

I'm just going to do my favourite characters, hope that's alright!

MATTHEW

Tumblr handle: @/wilde-wanderer. He posts travel content and dog pics a lot, and there's a lot of crossover with his travel Instagram. He also is in the Oscar Wilde fandom for sure and posts a ton of Ben Barnes thirst traps (@belle-keys, thinking of you).

5 books he'd love, because he's a romance and fantasy lover like me (queer books are blue):

The Charm of Magpies seriously. It's got Wildean weird vibes and also is just genuinely an oddball series unlike any other.

Don't Want You Like a Best Friend by Emma Alban (this is NEW btw and incredibly good, an immediate favourite

By Any Other Name by Erin Cotter

The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty

The Carnivale of Curiousities by Aimee Gibbs

ALASTAIR

If he had Tumblr, I think his handle would be @/grumpycatcarstairs. But he'd post minimally and just let it sit and sit forever. Periodically, Thomas would remind him it exists. He'd just post aesthetic paintings and cPTSD content.

5 books he'd love, because he likes mysteries and philosophical works that make him think:

The Six of Crows duology by Leigh Bardugo

The Scythe trilogy by Neal Shusterman

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

The Sins of the Cities series by KJ Charles

Not really modern, but after his time. I think Maurice by EM Forster would hit him hard in the solar plexus.

THOMAS

His handle is @/thomas-the-tree. He's a pretty active Tumblrina and he posts a lot of his own content, mostly aesthetics and moodboards. Maybe some stimboards ala @caterpillarstims. He also posts a lot of positivity for people with mental illness.

5 books he'd love because he loves both action and comfort literature:

The Sum of All Kisses by Julia Quinn

Two Rogues Make a Right by Cat Sebastian

The Heartstopper comics by Alice Oseman

A Lady for a Duke by Alexis Hall

Stalking Jack the Ripper series by Kerri Maniscalco

CORDELIA

I am of the strong belief that her handle would be @/kickitwithcordy and she'd have a sideblog for Cortana pics called @/kickitwithcortana. She and Alastair would also have a joint blog called @/kickitwiththecarstairs, but it's mostly on YouTube and they just have gossip videos. There's a full one where they roast Matthew's famous travel Insta.

5 books she'd love about kickass women:

Girl, Serpent, Thorn by Melissa Bashardoust

A Stitch in Time by Kelley Armstrong

The Divine Rivals duology by Rebecca Ross

Innocent Traitor by Alison Weir

The Rhapsodic series by Laura Thalassa

James, of course, always reads them aloud to her even when they're not to his personal taste. <3

#matthew fairchild #alastair carstairs #thomas lightwood #cordelia carstairs

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blithesrps · 7 months ago

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Act I Scene V

“Now we’re talking! Finally some good shit.”

John Rocket slammed his mug down on their makeshift table, wiping the foam from his stubble with a massive forearm before sliding the cup over the table into the waiting hands of Kite Wisterly. She giggled, taking the mug and spinning on her heels to pour another ale out of the cask they’d swiped as a reward for their fifth successful intel mission complete. They’d just set up camp for the night, crates and logs forming their furniture around a crackling fire. It had been almost a little anticlimactic, how smoothly everything had gone, but perhaps that was just a sign of their team beginning to click.

They were certainly an odd bunch, but then again, so had been everyone recruited by Styx for the Nyx Initiative. It had taken some adjusting to get to know one another’s strengths and weaknesses, but after almost a year of training together as a team they were finally moving like a well oiled machine.

“What about you, Z?” Kite asked as Rocket took his now full mug back with a rumble of thanks.

“Nope,” the stoic woman replied, not opening her eyes from where she leaned back in a tilted chair, cigar lazily rolling between her lips.

“If you’re offering, love, I’ll take another,” piped up a fox beastman tapping away at an encrypted tablet beside Z. Kite rolled her eyes but acquiesced, miming spitting in his mug and making Rocket laugh. With Caesar Cotter served, Kite poured herself a mug. Generally her tastes preferred a more delicate brew, but hey, when in the field one couldn’t get picky, could they? As her ale pulled to a head, she tilted the cask, judging what remained inside.

“We’re just about finished. Where’s the captain?” Kite asked.

“Ara doesn’t drink,” Caesar replied, flicking his gaze up from the tablet.

“Does sometimes,” Z interjected, flicking her ash onto Caesar’s tail and getting the chair beneath her kicked as a result.

“Very well, she doesn’t drink on missions,” Caesar amended as he dodged a retributionary swat, putting the tablet down and stretching. Still…it was unusual for her to disappear without saying something.

“She’s a big girl, don’t worry about it,” Rocket grunted, “Cotter, pass those cards over and stop working. Reports can wait until extraction tomorrow.”

“Can they? We’re still in enemy territory, you know. If our throats are slit in the night however will Styx get their intelligence? I hear those soldier slaves they breed here are no joke.” Caesar obeyed nonetheless, grabbing the cards and coming over as Kite cheered happily. She flashed hopeful eyes at Z until the woman groaned and stubbed out her cigar, coming over to join as well.

“One game, then we track down the boss,” she said, settling on her seat and picking up the cards Rocket dealt her.

“Yeah, yeah. Kite, slide that keg over so we can top off.”

Soon a jumble of coins, gum, cigarettes and other detritus had filled the center of the table, Rocket was dealing the third game, and Ara still had not returned.

She was in the belly of the beast.

Her every sense was on fire, screaming at her to flee. The smell of the cold tunnel walls, the sound of creatures skittering in the dark, the taste of her own fear on her tongue…it was all Ara could do to keep moving forward.

Because she had to. She had to. It had already been so long. There was as good a chance that Rat was dead as alive. In fact, Ara had been trying the whole mission to convince herself he was dead. If she believed it first, she might fool herself into thinking the despair would hurt less when it was confirmed.

The hive tunnels were still. She had passed only three hivechildren since entering her old hive, two busy rutting in a corner and one skittering down a tight tunnel with blood on his hands. Few hivechildren roamed at night, knowing the dangers that awaited them if they did. The guards, Ara found, followed the same pattern they had when she’d been there. There was no reason to change them, she supposed.

Hivechildren did not escape.

As she tread deeper, Ara was heavy with the knowledge that she too had never technically escaped. She’d been dragged away by the underground river, half drowned and rescued only by magic. That had been luck, perhaps a blessing, but no escape. The further Ara walked in, the louder hissed the voice that said she would not be able to claw her way back out again.

The voice sounded like Thorn.

If she met him, Ara knew she’d have to kill him. If Rat was dead, she would kill Thorn regardless. A part of her wanted to hunt him down first, see the look on his face when he realized she had lived and come to claim retribution. But Ara also knew it would not be an easy fight, and she wouldn’t risk blowing her cover unless she could accept that it might be the last thing she’d do.

She was coming up to the central barracks, a curling room with hundreds of cells that housed the hivechildren. Their whispers and soft breathing echoed like waves lapping on a pebbled shore. Somewhere, someone was sobbing. Ara felt her chest tighten, and she had to stop until she could breathe again.

She had left most of her clothing at the mouth of the air shaft she’d used to break back into the hives. Stripped to her underthings, barefoot and rubbed with dirt, Ara knew she would still stand out from her kin if anyone looked closely at her. Over her time at Night Raven College, she had gained weight and muscle, too healthy to pass as a hivechild. She only hoped her slim disguise would get her far enough.

On silent feet, Ara moved through the shadows. Slowly she climbed the spiraling walkway, passing the open mouths of cells with a carefully confident gate. She belonged here, Ara told herself, she was one of them.

At last, Ara reached Rat’s cell. She hesitated, hovering beside the edge. She could hear breathing from inside, but not well enough to know if it was Rat. Fear of what she would find kept her frozen, unable to step forward and face the truth. Then, from the cell, came a whispered voice.

“G-g-go away…I d-d-don’t have any m-more t-t-tokens…I d-d-don’t have anything…”

Ara let out a long breath, then without moving into sight, she whispered back.

“Rat. It’s me.”

–

It was silent in the Styx extraction sub. They’d made the pick up effortlessly, filing their gear and bodies into the waiting mouth in less than ten minutes. There were no witnesses, no evidence left behind. All things considered, their mission had gone seamlessly.

But they were leaving with one more body than they had come with.

The boy’s name was Rat, which Caesar had countered was not much of a name at all before Ara silenced him with a sharp glare. None of them understood where he had come from. Ara did not talk about her past, beyond that she had come from this continent and that she was something called a ‘hivechild’. Presumably so was this boy, though he and Ara could not have been more different.

If they had questions or protests, none were voiced. Ara rarely demanded the obedience she was entitled to as lead of their small team, but when she did, it was absolute. Caesar could only assume that the boy had been a secret part of their mission only divulged to Ara, though Rocket suspected she had gone for him without the permission of their benefactors.

Regardless, none of them were about to argue against taking him with. The kid looked like shit. He had one bruised and swollen eye and was favoring his right leg, the bones in his arms jutting out around lean muscle. Before arriving at camp he must have washed in a river, because he had shown up dripping and shivering, very much indeed like a rat that had leapt from a sinking ship. Ara had forced him to pace himself, but he hadn’t stopped eating since she’d introduced him, slowly working his way through Ara’s remaining rations and one of Kite’s that the girl had offered him. They may have been skeptical, but they weren’t monsters.

“Hey. Do you need a sweater? Cold?” Caesar was presently trying to mime to the boy, rubbing his hands over his arms and speaking slowly.

“He can understand you,” Ara answered coolly, Rat flicking his gaze up to her before back to Caesar’s feet.

“And how should I know that?” Caesar huffed poutily, even as he dug into his bag for his spare sweater. He held it out, giving it a shake when Rat didn’t reach for it. He waited for Ara to nod and only then took it, quickly pulling it over his head and giving a soft gasp of relief at the warmth. Kite watched his all from where she was curled against Z’s thigh, eyes slightly narrowed in a catlike contentment.

“Almost home kids,�� Rocket called back from the pilot’s seat, where he was lazily watching the auto-pilot guide them back to Styx. Caesar noted Ara’s shoulder’s falling in the slightest betrayal of relief. He tutted his tongue, leaning his head back and closing his eyes.

That was trouble he wanted no part of.

#in which ara goes back for rat #and we meet some new characters #i love the crew they are characters that have followed me through many timelines #What is the Nyx Initiative? How did Ara become captain of an infiltration team?#all questions that will be answered in time #ideally i would be posting these chronologically but muse don't be like that #blithes ocs: the crew #blithes ocs: ara #blithes ocs: Rat

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smile-siehstduesauchganzerhdfilm · 1 year ago

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❍❍❍ Thanks for everything and have fun watching❍❍❍

Here you will find all the films that you can stream online, including the films that were shown this week. If you’re wondering what to see on this website, you should know that it covers genres that include crime, science, fi-fi, action, romance, thriller, comedy, drama, and anime film. Thanks a lot. We inform everyone who is happy to receive news or information about this year’s film program and how to watch your favorite films. Hopefully we can be the best partner for you to find recommendations for your favorite films. That’s all from us, greetings! Thank you for watching The Video Today. I hope you like the videos I share. Give a thumbs up, like or share if you like what we shared so we are more excited. Scatter a happy smile so that the world returns in a variety of colors.

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innotofproject · 2 years ago

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Show Notes: Just Above Midtown

This episode focuses on the Just Above Midtown gallery run by Linda Goode Bryant from 1974-1986, as well as the accompanying Changing Spaces exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art from October 9, 2022 to February 18, 2023.

Written, produced, and edited by Eddie Yoffee. Special thanks to Grace Jackson.

Bibliography for this Episode:

Booker, Eric, et al. Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces. Edited by Linda Goode-Bryant et al., Museum of Modern Art, 2022.

Buhe, Elizabeth. “Just above Midtown: Changing Spaces.” Studio International: Visual Arts, Design and Architecture, 25 Oct. 2022, https://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/just-above-midtown-changing-spaces-review-museum-modern-art-new-york.

Cotter, Holland. “Jam, a Gate-Crashing Gallery, Expanded the Idea of Blackness.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 6 Oct. 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/arts/design/just-above-midtown-gallery-exhibit-moma-art.html.

D’Souza, Aruna. “Senga Nengudi.” 4Columns, 14 Apr. 2023, https://4columns.org/d-souza-aruna/senga-nengudi.

Harting, Florence. “Nearly 50 Years Later, a Pioneering Gallery for Artists of Color Finally Gets Its Due.” Cultured Magazine, 19 Sept. 2022, https://www.culturedmag.com/article/2022/09/19/gallery-black-artists-exhibition.

“Just above Midtown: Changing Spaces: MoMA.” The Museum of Modern Art, https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5078.

Mooallem, Stephen. “Linda Goode Bryant's Art Revolution.” Harper's BAZAAR, 15 Sept. 2022, https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/art-books-music/a40823603/0164-0288-seeds-of-imagination-september-2022/.

Pinckney, Darryl. “Just above Midtown.” 4Columns, 13 Jan. 2023, https://www.4columns.org/pinckney-darryl/just-above-midtown.

Project EATS, 2023, https://projecteats.org/.

Tavangar, Anisa. “The Big Review: Just above Midtown at the Museum of Modern Art ★★★★★.” The Art Newspaper - International Art News and Events, 4 Nov. 2022, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/11/04/the-big-review-just-above-midtown.

Additional Sources:

Cahan, Susan, et al. Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power. Edited by Mark Godfrey and Whitley Zoé, Tate Publishing, 2017.

Choi, Connie H, et al. We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85: A Sourcebook. Edited by Catherine Morris and Rujeko Hockley, Brooklyn Museum, 2017.

D'Souza, Aruna, et al. We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85, New Perspectives. Edited by Catherine Morris and Rujeko Hockley, Brooklyn Museum, 2018.

D'Souza, Aruna, et al. Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts. Badlands Unlimited, 2018.

English, Darby. 1971: A Year in the Life of Color. University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta, editor. How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Haymarket Books, 2017.

Whitley Zoé, and Marion Perkins. The Soul of a Nation Reader: Writings by and About Black American Artists, 1960-1980. Edited by Mark Godfrey and Allie Biswas, Gregory R. Miller, 2021.

Podcast transcript available below.

“I can just picture myself going up in the elevator and into this very small gallery. It had a lot of power, of course—this true New York energy… We all felt like we were a part of something, that we were seriously part of some significant leap forward with art, with theory.” — Senga Nengudi, artist.

Hello, and welcome to In, Not Of, a podcast dedicated to providing short histories of alternative art spaces for Black and Indigenous creatives. Today’s episode focuses on the Just Above Midtown gallery and the recent Changing Spaces exhibition produced by the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Linda Goode Bryant, the visionary behind Just Above Midtown, or JAM, is actually the source of the title of this project, In, Not Of. When JAM was founded, Goode Bryant described it as being intentionally “in, not of the art world.” The gallery was originally located, as the name suggests, just above midtown, only a little ways away from Manhattan’s commercial gallery district. In 1974, when Goode Bryant opened the gallery, the art scene was primarily white and offered few opportunities for artists who fell outside of the norm. Goode Bryant wanted to provide a space for artists of color to experiment and exhibit their work, and that space became the gallery and laboratory we are discussing today.

JAM faced a number of challenges and obstacles from the very beginning. Beyond the general sentiments of the art world at the time, within the Black community there was a strong divide between representational and non-representational artists. This division rose to prominence in the 1960s alongside the question, “what is Black art”? What followed was a debate about defining a Black aesthetic, and the responsibilities of Black artists to their communities. Some people believed that art needed to provide recognizable messages of a political and culturally-specific nature, which abstract art, in their minds, invariably failed to do. Others were more interested in abstraction and tended to define Black art simply as art made by Black people. The debate existed across coasts, with no sense of national unity. Goode Bryant was interested in providing opportunities to artists from all over the country, regardless of the inevitable butting of heads that would result from that decision.

An early instance of backlash occurred at a solo show for David Hammons in May of 1975. Hammons was already somewhat established in California, where he had begun making a series of “Body Prints,” in which he covered his skin, clothes, and other materials in various forms of grease, made outlines on large white sheets of paper by pressing himself into them, and then covered the grease in powdered pigments. This work is what initially caught Linda Goode Bryant’s eye for JAM, but Hammons had a different display in mind at the gallery. He created sculptures out of non-traditional materials such as greasy paper bags, barbecue bones, and clippings of hair he’d gotten from barber shops. On opening night, there was so much outrage that Bryant took the opportunity to stage an impromptu debate about what kind of materials were acceptable to use in one’s art, finally bringing the audience to the conclusion that, while different from his previous work, the Hammons show still had merit. And since many people, Goode Bryant herself included, were still interested in that previous work, another opportunity presented itself: JAM hosted a print-in workshop in which visitors to the gallery were able to make their own body prints alongside Hammons.

Outside of traditional art shows, JAM’s programming included many types of workshops and other forms of community engagement. One of Goode Bryant’s initial concerns was establishing an infrastructure for Black collectors to engage with artists in order to bolster the community and provide support for the art that was being made. It became clear to her that selling art was about relationships, and so JAM needed to bring people together—this led to the establishment of the Brunch with JAM program, which was a series of lunch-time talks by members of the art world from curators to historians to critics. JAM provided cheap, homemade meals to accompany the series.

In 1980, Just Above Midtown moved from its Fifty-Seventh Street location to a warehouse in Tribeca, providing the gallery with significantly more space than before, which Goode Bryant intended to make full use of. From its very beginning, JAM was a place where Black artists could display their work, not in isolation but alongside their white counterparts. Goode Bryant was looking to explore this concept more, in order to let audiences decide for themselves if there was a real difference in the quality of the works. Of course, the choice to move to Tribeca was not just about including more white artists, but also about bringing the gallery further downtown in order to interact with other experimental artists, and now that they had more space they could also explore various modes of performance art and media that were previously inaccessible.

However, complaints from neighbors about late night events led to JAM having to relocate once again, this time to SoHo in 1984. This was to be the final iteration of Just Above Midtown. At the beginning of this episode, I referred to JAM as not only a gallery, but a laboratory. Goode Bryant herself described the project that way, and one of her goals for the new location was to provide a space for artists to work without the pressures or responsibilities of exhibiting and selling works in a commercial setting. Alongside that conceit, Goode Bryant also wanted to offer opportunities for the incorporation of new technologies in film and sound. As Kellie Jones writes, by the time JAM made its final relocation, “the curatorial process was no longer memorialized in objects but contained in living possibilities that held out ‘an alternative or corrective to the failures of mainstream institutions and ideologies.’”

The original intentions of JAM had evolved and shifted over the years, moving away from involving the Black community in standard consumerist art practices and instead towards a reshaping of the art world’s entire infrastructure. On this level, and on a more practical financial level, Just Above Midtown was not designed to be a permanent space—in many ways, this was a known impossibility, particularly because much of the project was financed with credit card debt that Goode Bryant herself incurred. By 1986, JAM had gotten into hot water with multiple landlords and the IRS, and it was no longer tenable to maintain the space. JAM closed its doors in SoHo in August, but several interdisciplinary projects continued around New York with the support of the staff up until 1989.

Though JAM no longer exists, many of the artists involved in its programming continue to make work today, making use of the creative and professional connections that were forged. Goode Bryant has pursued a number of projects across a variety of media, including her 2003 documentary project, Flag Wars, which explores conflicts around gentrification in a neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio.

More recently, Goode Bryant is the visionary force behind Project EATS, which she founded in 2009. The project has established several neighborhood-based farms in New York, which provide places for community programming, food pantries, farm stands, and even, in one location, prepared food. Alongside the farm sites, Project EATS runs the Art Inside/Out program, which is a series of artist commissions that aims to bring art outside of the museum and into local communities. The program works with several artists who exhibited at JAM, incorporating their art into installations at their farms and creating a spiritual successor to the boundary-pushing work of Just Above Midtown.

Senga Nengudi reflected back on her time at JAM, saying: “It’s sort of like when you throw a rock into a pond and it ripples outward in concentric circles, that’s how JAM was. It just kept expanding from the center, which was Linda. It kept expanding and getting larger and more beautiful.”

The most recent iteration of Just Above Midtown occurred earlier this year in the form of the Changing Spaces exhibition which ran from October 9, 2022, to February 18, 2023 at the Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition was a collaboration between MoMA and the Studio Museum in Harlem, whose current Director and Chief Curator, Thelma Golden, alongside many others, put together a beautiful tribute and re-imagining of the gallery.

Representing JAM at MoMA was certainly a challenge, but one that the organizers successfully met. Reviews of the exhibition were overwhelmingly positive, with visitors remarking on how well curators were able to lay out the different eras of JAM and represent the vast variety of visual art, performances, and collaborations that occurred thanks to the art workers involved with the gallery. Goode Bryant’s record-keeping proved to be essential to the exhibition, as a wall of receipts and messages demonstrated the financial difficulties that faced JAM throughout the gallery’s existence, making clear to audiences the individual work and mutual aid that went into keeping JAM afloat.

The presentation of Just Above Midtown at the Museum of Modern Art was successful not only because of the support the exhibition received, but because so many of the people who were involved with JAM and Goode Bryant are still invested in the cause: MoMA’s exhibition therefore is a celebration of the foundational work Goode Bryant and so many others did in order to make space for artists of color within the art world. While there are obviously still many obstacles facing Black artists today, the Changing Spaces exhibition provides hope by showing that though JAM’s doors may be long closed, the spirit of the gallery lives on.

The information from this episode comes in large part from the exhibition catalog for Changing Spaces, as well as the Museum of Modern Art’s digital record. These sources and accompanying images can be found linked on the podcast’s page.

This has been In, Not Of. Thank you for listening.

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confessions-heartland · 2 years ago

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“Finn keeping secrets from Amy in season 16 is quite the storyline and Amy’s reaction to a female answering Finn’s door was perfect! Maybe Amy finally realizes how much she hurt Ty with her secrets and lies about Prince Ahmed. Let’s hope the writers aren’t setting us up for a Amy/Caleb relationship.“

#heartland #Prince Ahmed Al Saeed #jade hassoune #amy fleming #amy fleming borden #amber marshall #caleb odell #kerry james #finn cotter #robert cormier #ahmed/amy #ahmed/caleb #ahmed/finn #amy/caleb #amy/finn #caleb/finn #confessions #heartland confessions

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multiverseofseries · 29 days ago

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Smile: Se il sorriso è sinonimo di morte

La recensione di Smile: il nuovo film horror con Sosie Bacon ci ricorda che un sorriso può anche essere sinistro, beffardo, mortale.

Smile: Sosie Bacon in un'immagine

Un sorriso è quanto di più bello possa capitare a una persona. Hai di fronte a te qualcuno che ti sorride, e immediatamente ti senti a tuo agio. Come vedremo in Smile un sorriso può anche essere sinistro, beffardo, mortale. Lo si è ampiamente visto nella storia del cinema: pensiamo al ghigno di Jack Nicholson in Shining, o al sorriso beffardo del Joker. E la lista potrebbe andare avanti. In Smile un sorriso, altamente inquietante e sinistro, appare sul volto di una persona. Se vedete quel sorriso, è meglio scappare. Perché è sicuro, o quasi, che state per morire. Smile vive su questo spunto molto interessante, ma finisce per sviluppare una trama e un finale incoerenti, e per essere un film che, in generale, abusa troppo del jumpscare invece di creare la giusta atmosfera e la giusta tensione. Qualche brivido, però, ce lo regala.

Il sorriso che uccide

Smile: Sosie Bacon in una scena

Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) è una psicoterapeuta che lavora con passione in un ospedale ed è dedita anima e corpo ai suoi pazienti. Un giorno, all'improvviso, vede una paziente morire proprio davanti ai suoi occhi: la donna dice di aver visto qualcosa di fronte a sé e comincia a urlare. Un attimo dopo è calma, lucida e ha un sorriso agghiacciante stampato sul volto. Prende il frammento di un vaso e si taglia la gola. Da quel momento Rose si sente perseguitata. Una sorta di entità sembra passare da una persona all'altra, facendo presagire segnali di morte. Su queste persone appare un sorriso malefico e poi finiscono per uccidersi infliggendosi ferite mortali o subendo atti di violenza fisica.

Come It Follows, The Ring, Final Destination

Smile: Sosie Bacon in una sequenza

Sul senso inquietante che può trasmettere un sorriso si potrebbe scrivere un libro e la storia del cinema ne è piena. La cosa interessante di Smile, però, è soprattutto quello schema di un pericolo che non ha un volto e passa da una persona all'altra. In Smile non c'è un vero villain, un vero assassino, né un Freddie Kruger né un Mike Myers. C'è un costante senso di pericolo che si trasmette da una persona all'altra senza che, apparentemente, si possa prevederne lo sviluppo. È uno schema non originale, ma che è sempre interessante. Ricorda a tratti It Follows, in cui all'improvviso le persone, catturate da un'entità, iniziavano a seguire in modo lento e inesorabile chi volevano uccidere. Ma possiamo anche pensare alla struttura di The Ring, o a quella della saga di Final Destination. Sono tutti i casi in cui il pericolo, e quindi la morte, viaggiano da una persona all'altra in una sorta di passaggio di testimone.

Quel senso di contagio, o di persecuzione

Smile: Sosie Bacon, Kyle Gallner in una scena del film

A livello metaforico, che si parli di Smile, di It Follows o degli altri modelli, è uno schema che evoca cose ben precise. Da un lato il contagio: un'entità che passa da una persona all'altra sembra quasi voler simboleggiare un virus e assistere a uno schema di questo tipo, dopo gli anni che abbiamo passato, dà un senso molto particolare alla storia. Dall'altro, soprattutto in Smile o in It Follows, c'è il senso di persecuzione, di accerchiamento. È quel non sentirsi sicuri e avere la percezione che il pericolo non sia legato a una persona precisa, ma possa arrivare ovunque. È un senso di precarietà e di insicurezza che molte persone, nella vita, arrivano a provare.

L'abuso del jumpscare

Smile: Kyle Gallner in una scena del film

Tutti questi spunti, poi, si inseriscono nella realizzazione del film. Che è quella di un horror piuttosto classico dove la regia sceglie di puntare, prima di tutto, a spaventare lo spettatore e a sollecitarlo di continuo in questo senso. Smile ha un uso reiterato, quasi un abuso del jumpscare, quella tecnica che unisce movimento e suono in modo che lo spettatore salti dalla sedia. Alcuni sono realizzati in maniera studiata e sapiente da regalare qualche brivido, ma l'uso continuo finisce per svelare subito il gioco del film, a scapito dell'atmosfera e della tensione. Ma è tutto il suono in Smile che è particolarmente curato: fate caso al rumore, eccessivo, di quando la protagonista apre una scatoletta con il cibo per gatti.

Sosie Bacon, figlia d'arte

Il finale, poi, ci sembra svilupparsi in modo piuttosto incoerente rispetto alle premesse del film, alle regole del gioco così come ci erano state presentate e una serie di attori in overacting ci sembrano nuocere ulteriormente al film. Ci sembra spesso in overacting anche la protagonista Sosie Bacon, figlia di Kevin Bacon, che evidentemente deve aver preso molto da lui. È un'attrice che però ha sicuramente delle grandi doti, e una delle notizie migliori di Smile è proprio lei.

Conclusioni

In conclusione il film Smile vive su uno spunto molto interessante, ma finisce per sviluppare una trama e un finale incoerenti e per abusare troppo del jumpscare invece di creare la giusta atmosfera e la giusta tensione. Qualche brivido, però, ce lo regala.

👍🏻

Lo spunto è molto interessante.

La struttura narrativa, con il pericolo che passa da una persona all'altra, rimanda a It Follows.

Sosie Bacon è un'ottima attrice.

👎🏻

Il film abusa del jumpscare, invece che puntare a costruire la giusta atmosfera.

Il finale ci pare incoerente con le premesse e la logica della storia.

#smile #movie #film #recensione #review

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ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly · 2 months ago

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By M.H. Miller

Sept. 16, 2024

IN THE SUMMER of 1970, as part of the group exhibition “Information,” one of the first major surveys of conceptual art, the artist Hans Haacke presented a work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York called “Poll of MoMA Visitors.” Museumgoers were given slips of paper to deposit into one of two plexiglass boxes. On the wall was a sign about Nelson Rockefeller, then in his third term as governor of New York and running for a fourth. “Question,” it read, “Would the fact that Governor Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon’s Indochina policy be a reason for you not to vote for him in November? Answer: If ‘yes,’ please cast your ballot into the left box; if ‘no,’ into the right box.”

The Rockefeller family helped found MoMA in 1929. In 1963, Nelson’s brother David was elected the chair of the museum’s board of trustees. As governor, Nelson Rockefeller had begun calling for a broadening of the war in Vietnam and a South Vietnamese-led invasion of Cambodia and Laos as early as 1964. That wasn’t the family’s only connection to the conflict. Henry Kissinger, who worked for the Rockefellers in the 1950s and advised Nelson on his presidential campaigns beginning in 1960, was also Nixon’s national security adviser and the chief architect of the secret carpet bombing campaign of Cambodia that began in 1969 and is estimated to have killed more than 150,000 civilians. It led to the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, which Nixon announced on TV on April 30, 1970. The following day, students began demonstrating across the country in numbers that would soon reach the millions and, on May 4, the National Guard opened fire on protesters at Kent State University in Ohio, killing four.

Tensions were high at MoMA as well, where “Information” opened that July. Haacke kept the exact content of his work secret until he had finished installing it. Unlike a lot of conceptual art, it was simple but, in looking critically at a figure of great behind-the-scenes power at MoMA from the vantage point of an artist exhibiting at the museum, Haacke had created an entirely new art form. David Rockefeller was furious about the exhibition; Nelson Rockefeller’s office called John Hightower, the museum’s director, to ask for Haacke’s poll to be removed, but the work remained. It was among the factors that eventually led to Hightower’s forced resignation. Haacke would quickly become an art-world pariah. For a Guggenheim Museum show scheduled for the following year, he had created a new work called “Shapolsky et al.,” for which he used public records to chart the real estate holdings and shell corporations of the New York City landlord Harry Shapolsky, whom the district attorney had accused of being “a front for high officials of the Department of Buildings” and who had been found guilty of rent gouging. Because of the Shapolsky work, as well as another similar piece about a pair of real estate developers, the Guggenheim’s then-director, Thomas Messer, canceled the exhibition, describing Haacke’s work as “an alien substance” that he would not allow to “[enter] the art museum organism.” The curator Massimiliano Gioni, who co-organized a 2019 solo show of Haacke at the New Museum — the only major American museum ever to give him one — compared the Guggenheim’s censoring of “Shapolsky et al.” to the “legendary refusal of ‘Nude Descending a Staircase,’” referring to Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 Cubo-Futurist painting that was rejected from a Paris exhibition for being, as Duchamp would later describe it, too disrespectful of the nude form. “It’s such a defining moment,” Gioni said of Haacke’s canceled show. “It must have shocked him, but it also proclaimed his integrity, which is at a level that is still uncomfortable for some institutions.”

Before Haacke, museums were considered, in the words of the New York Times critic Holland Cotter, “genteel and politically marginal.” Robber barons might have donated to them to enhance their social clout, but such cultural largess was seldom questioned. Today, though, when phrases like “artwashing” and “toxic philanthropy” have entered the lexicon to describe the role that museums and other cultural organizations play in boosting the images of corporations and billionaires, Haacke’s work is more than just relevant — it’s prophetic. With persistent clarity, he seemed to understand, half a century before anyone else, the stakes of the uncomfortable relationship between art and politics.

ONCE A WEEK for three weeks last May, I met Haacke, who’s 88, at the Bus Stop Cafe on Hudson Street, an almost monastic diner of the kind that doesn’t really exist in Lower Manhattan anymore, where there was never any trouble getting a seat, no one was on a laptop and the waiter didn’t care that we never ordered any food. Each time, Haacke had a glass of cranberry juice. He always brought his son Paul, 47, who’s an adjunct professor of humanities and media studies at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and who didn’t say much other than to delicately push back on a date or some other small detail. (Paul had once worked as a fact-checker at magazines and now assumed that role for his father.)

Haacke isn’t reclusive, but he has tried his best to let his work speak for itself. He’ll occasionally agree to interviews but, as a rule, he won’t show his face in photographs. (Being photographed “would be a problem for me,” he said, the only time he adopted a slightly severe tone.) He’s rail thin, with a neatly trimmed gray beard and perfectly circular glasses, and wore a loosefitting flannel shirt. It was difficult to square what I knew of his work, unforgiving in its critique of wealth and power, with the man himself, who was reserved, friendly and at times so mild-mannered that his voice was inaudible under the sound of buses screeching to a halt a few feet away. He’s one of the most censored artists of the past 100 years, and yet he seemed incapable of expressing anger or resentment. This is how he described “MoMA Poll,” as it is now commonly known: “People would answer yes or no to a question that I put up. And for about 16 years after that, I was not invited to participate in anything at the Museum of Modern Art.” The most animated I saw him was when one of his neighbors from the nearby Westbeth apartment complex — the subsidized artist housing where Haacke has lived since 1971 — zoomed around the corner in an electric wheelchair. “Look how fast she’s going!” said Haacke, who was also using a wheelchair after a recent surgery. He sounded concerned and vaguely envious.

Haacke had been preparing for a major exhibition in Frankfurt that will open at the Schirn Kunsthalle in November and travel to the Belvedere Museum in Vienna. He also currently has work on view in New York, in a group show dedicated to the American flag at Paula Cooper Gallery. The Frankfurt show, a career retrospective, includes many artworks about his native Germany, among them another influential, often suppressed piece, 1981’s “Der Pralinenmeister,” about Peter Ludwig, a chocolate manufacturer and one of Germany’s most famous art collectors. Across 14 framed panels that include photographs of Ludwig and his factory workers, Haacke wrote a text detailing the overlap between patronage and commerce: Ludwig received tax advantages from donating artworks and displaying his collection publicly and would loan artworks to cities where he produced or distributed his chocolate. “Der Pralinenmeister” also notes that Ludwig’s factories housed female foreign workers in on-site hostels that didn’t offer day care, so women who gave birth were forced to leave or find foster homes for their children — or give them up for adoption. According to Haacke’s text, the company’s personnel department stated that it was “a chocolate factory and not a kindergarten.” Ludwig, who died in 1996, was reportedly interested in buying the work, perhaps to remove it from circulation, but Haacke wouldn’t sell it to him.

In works like “Shapolsky” and “Der Pralinenmeister,” Haacke said, “I had to do research like a journalist does.” He’d scour documents, noticing details that other histories ignored, and present facts, often via text, in a detached, almost omniscient voice. Early on, he was influenced by the American art writer Jack Burnham, who developed what he called systems aesthetics in the late ’60s, which Haacke described as “everything is connected to everything else.” (The subtitle of “Shapolsky” identifies it as “A Real-Time Social System.”) Through art, people like Ludwig had managed to quite literally buy themselves good will. Or as David Rockefeller put it in a quote that Haacke engraved on a plaque that he hung at an earlier show at the New Museum in 1986, “Involvement in the arts … can provide a company with extensive publicity and advertising, a brighter public reputation and an improved corporate image.”

HAACKE WAS BORN in Cologne in 1936, the same year that the Nazis marched into the demilitarized Rhineland. His father, a member of the center-left Social Democratic Party, worked for the city; when the Nazis took over, they demanded that everyone in Cologne’s government join the party. Haacke’s father refused and went to work as an accountant.

One of Haacke’s first memories is from when he was 6. “There was an air raid alert during the night, and we were in the basement, trying to wait it out,” he said. “The next morning, when I walked to school on the street where we lived, one building had been hit by a bomb. It was burned out. Otherwise, no other building was hit. I will never forget that.” Why that building and not his? He’d spend the rest of his life trying to extract meaning from such seemingly random events.

In 1956 he moved to Kassel, an industrial town in West Germany within 30 miles of Soviet-occupied territory. He wanted to attend the Kunsthochschule Kassel because, he said, it was “the only art school at that time that was still somewhat in the tradition of the Bauhaus,” which had taken a multidisciplinary approach to teaching subjects as diverse as pottery and typography. His plan was to become a high school art teacher.

Kassel is best known today as the location of Documenta, one of the world’s most important contemporary art exhibitions, held every five years. In 1959, in Documenta’s second iteration, Kunsthochschule students were tasked with running its day-to-day operations, and Haacke, who worked as a security guard and helped with installation, also took pictures, producing his first major work, “Photographic Notes, Documenta 2, 1959.” In a deadpan style, he showed visitors interacting with the exhibition and, in doing so, created a snapshot of Cold War-era West Germany. In one image, a little boy has his back turned to an abstract canvas by Wassily Kandinsky, who had been featured in the Nazis’ 1937 exhibition of so-called degenerate art; the child’s face is buried in a Mickey Mouse comic book instead.

Though he mostly studied abstract painting, he spent much of the ’60s thinking about how to reinvent the medium of sculpture. He met Linda Snyder, a Brooklyn native who had just finished her bachelor’s degree in French, in 1962, while he was in the United States on a Fulbright to study art. They married in Germany in 1965 and returned to the States by ocean liner. (They have one other son, Carl, a tech entrepreneur.) Upon reaching New York Harbor, Haacke received a telegram inviting him to put on a solo exhibition at the Howard Wise Gallery; his friend Otto Piene, a German artist who showed there, had arranged it as a wedding present. (“It was like a fairy tale,” Haacke said of his arrival in Manhattan. “I really was very lucky.”) Initially working out of a one-room studio on the Bowery, he made sculptures that featured natural materials: filling a plexiglass container with water that gradually evaporated and condensed, placing a white sheet above fans so that the material rippled endlessly, planting grass on a mound of dirt. His sculptures foreshadowed his later career, showing an artist obsessed with cause and effect, with decisions and their repercussions.

The shift in his work from physical and ecological systems to overtly political ones dates roughly to 1968. Following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., he wrote a letter to Burnham: “Linda and I were gloomy for days and still have not quite recovered. The event pressed something into focus that I have known for long but never realized so bitterly and helplessly, namely that what we are doing, the production and the talk about sculpture, has no relation to the urgent problems of our society. … Not a single napalm bomb will not be dropped by all the shows of ‘Angry Arts.’ Art is utterly unsuited as a political tool. … I’ve known that for a number of years, and I was never really bothered by it. All of a sudden it bugs me.”

As an artist, he knew he couldn’t stop a war or influence an election. (Most respondents of “MoMA Poll” seemed disinclined to vote for Rockefeller, but he won a fourth term as governor and served as vice president under Gerald Ford.) Yet “MoMA Poll” helped change how the public thought of the art they saw in a museum and its relationship to the world at large, and Haacke’s work ever since has been as unsparing and revelatory. In 1971, he began conducting demographic surveys of exhibition visitors at the Milwaukee Art Center, the John Weber Gallery in New York and other venues, creating one of the first empiric statements about the art business’s liberal insularity; in 1975, he charted the rise of art as an investment opportunity by tracing, across text panels, the provenance and sales history of Georges Seurat’s 1888 painting “Les Poseuses” (small version), which had passed through, among others, the hands of a Luxembourg-based holding company. And at the 1993 Venice Biennale, only a few years after German reunification, in an installation he titled “Germania,” he destroyed the marble floor of the German pavilion, which had been remodeled by the Nazis in 1938, and hung a picture of Adolf Hitler visiting the Biennale in 1934. At an optimistic moment for democracy and Germany, Haacke reminded people to consider the dark past alongside any brighter future. Paula Cooper, Haacke’s dealer, described waiting in line for the show behind Peter Ludwig. “He didn’t look happy,” she said.

TODAY, HAACKE OCCUPIES an unusual place in the contemporary canon: He has been illustrious and canceled, critically revered and commercially undervalued. He supported himself by teaching at Cooper Union for 35 years, and Gioni told me that he’s one of the only artists of his caliber who still owns much of his work. “Hans is extremely successful,” Gioni said, “but he lives his success in ways that are rarely celebrated by the art industry. He’s Franciscan in his modesty.” The art historian Benjamin Buchloh, who considers Haacke to be one of the most important postwar figures, said with disappointment that at this moment in time, “nothing could be further from the mind of the New York art world than Hans Haacke.” That his 2019 retrospective in New York was at the New Museum and not, say, MoMA “shows that institutions don’t feel comfortable with the challenge he poses, even now,” Buchloh said.

We often think of artists as being ahead of their time. Perhaps Haacke was so far ahead of his that it’s not fair to expect the world to catch up to him, this man who, out of what Gioni described as a “perverse form of love,” held museums to a higher moral standard than most religions require of their practitioners. One can, however, see his legacy in the rise of activist groups like the Guerrilla Girls in the 1980s, who’ve critiqued art institutions for their exclusion of female artists, and more recently Just Stop Oil, Occupy Museums and the photographer Nan Goldin’s P.A.I.N., which have forced museums to sever ties with collectors who came by their wealth through profiteering, like the Sackler family with their opioid fortune. Despite Haacke’s work being uncommercial, his influence has seeped into the wider culture, an uncommon feat for a conceptual artist. In reminding the public that museums, like universities, don’t exist on some higher plane above the scrum of politics and business but are in their own way corporations making decisions that can be as calculated as a bank’s, he created a subgenre of art that is now so widespread that we take its very existence for granted. His heirs include Darren Bader, Andrea Fraser, Walid Raad, Fred Wilson and any artist who has made the structural flaws of the art business into their subject. In the years since “MoMA Poll” went up, cultural institutions in general have been forced to look more closely at the sources of their funding. There was great outrage over the Koch brothers, for instance, who have long used their fortune to prevent federal climate change regulations, putting their names on the facades of venues like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Often the uproar fizzles out. (The public space in front of the Met was renamed the David H. Koch Plaza in 2014.) But it was Haacke who helped show people where to direct their indignation.

Unlike some of his peers, though, Haacke has never been a spokesperson for the causes championed in his work. His art isn’t didactic. He’s blunt but measured, driven by inquiry rather than impulse. He didn’t have a lot to say about the current state of the art world, where censorship and fear among galleries and museums navigating political fault lines have increased of late. He had spent too much of the last year in a hospital bed, unequipped to perform his usual investigations. The conduct of the art business — and the possibility of art actually influencing politics — was now a younger generation’s responsibility.

But Haacke had certainly left them an interesting road map. In our last meeting, we discussed what is probably his most hopeful work, “Der Bevölkerung” (2000), whose title translates as “To the Population.” It’s an enormous trough of soil with that phrase spelled out in neon letters, permanently installed in the courtyard of the Reichstag, the German parliament in Berlin. The idea was that throughout the year, representatives would bring soil from their districts, and it would mix together, home to whatever sprouted in it, a metaphor for the democratic experiment. The phrase “Der Bevölkerung” is a play on the inscription on the facade of the Reichstag: “Dem Deutschen Volke,” which means “To the German People.” Haacke proposed the work in 1999, at a time of increased migration to Germany from Turkey and other predominately Muslim countries. “Rather than a dedication to the German people, I wanted a dedication to the people who live in the country,” Haacke said, not just “those who were native German, so to speak.” The center-right Christian Democratic Union, which then held a majority of seats in parliament, was “solidly against” Haacke’s idea, he said, and pushed for the 669-member body to debate whether to let him install his art at the Reichstag.

“There was furious resistance to my proposal,” said Haacke, who attended the proceedings in April 2000. “I didn’t believe that it would pass. In the end, it did [by] two votes.” Among those in favor of the work were two women who voted against their own party, and one of them, Haacke said, “was from Nuremberg, where the Nazis were prosecuted for crimes against humanity.”

Next year is the work’s 25th anniversary. Anti-immigrant sentiment is on the rise in Germany, as in many Western nations, and the far right has gained more power there. But, Haacke told me, “things have changed. After a while, a considerable number of people from the parties that had voted against ‘Der Bevölkerung’ have contributed soil.”

It’s not only soil. In it are seeds from plants, and their blooming has become an annual ritual. “I insisted it should not be a garden,” Haacke said. “It was a wild growth.” More important, he added, “it’s ongoing.” The work wasn’t complete. By design, it never would be.

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