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[the-artist-named-ba]

What "abolish the police" doesn't mean:

Privatize the police.

Give the police less money.

Rename the police.

Shrink the police.

Diversify the police.

Give the federal government control of the police.

Repaint the police cars.

Get rid of police unions.

Maybe take tanks away from the police?

Fire police and then hire some again.

[the-artist-named-ba]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/05/dear-white-people-please-read-white-fragility/

[the-artist-named-ba]

“Go where your loneliness is understood. Leave footprints of compassion along the way.”

— juansen dizon

[the-artist-named-ba]

THE OYSTER AND THE PEARL: What Motivates Us To Create

By Ellen Joy Johnson

Lately, I've been thinking about what motivates us to create. I've been contemplating why some people can create works of great beauty under great duress. I've been wondering why sometimes you feel so motivated and other times you don't want to do a thing. 

Recently, I've seen a tremendous amount of motivation for people to get involved in our government and creating new organizations and jobs. You'd think after all the disappointment and disillusionment that it would be just the opposite. Instead, there is a renewal of energy and enthusiasm to create new ideas out of the old paradigms. Certainly the typical "struggling artist" is known for creating some of their most innovative work in turmoil when in better days their creations very often become mediocre or non-nonexistent. So what is it about struggle that motivates and reaps its own rewards? And dare I even use that word "struggle" around a plethora of abundance seeking souls who have eliminated the word from their vocabularies? Perhaps it is in our negative view of the word that we find its hardships and not in what the word has to offer us in its deeper wisdom. 

I often think of nature and how life appears to struggle to perform a dance of beauty in the pushing of the soil, in the breaking out of an egg shell, as a web being tediously sown over and over, in a caterpillar weaving a cocoon coat, and in the irritation of the oyster to make a pearl. In our desire for the quick, drive-in "happy meal" society have we lost the concept of the value of toil bringing us to a superior level of creative craftsmanship? Or have we just become so complacent from sitting in front of media screens that we no longer can enjoy the challenge that life offers.Maybe what we don't realize is that our strife is what motivates us. 

The process of living life and experiencing the entire myriad of emotions from heartache, anxiety, love, fear, and passion.is what stimulates formative action. The truth is that the creation of beautiful songs, paintings, dances, books and so on, have occurred because of the realities of living in the world. Whether we are inspired by brilliant sunsets, flowers with mesmerizing aromas, the exhilaration of pleasure and the power of positive energy or the conflict of our surroundings, all of these are without a doubt a motivating force for creative endeavors. 

But instead of judging how we obtain our innovation and enthusiasm to create, let us acknowledge and embrace every bit of what is motivational and give birth to that which we express from each and every life experience.We might discover that by accepting our life we will never lose our motivation to create. After all, our life may be our greatest creation. •

[the-artist-named-ba]

This mural was designed by Barbara Jo Revelle, the former director of the School of Art and Art History at the University of Florida in Gainesville, who won a $100,000 commission in 1999 to create a piece of public art based on the history of our city. Revelle created the 100-foot-long mural of 1-inch square photographic mosaic tiles depicting Florida's Seminoles, African-American union soldiers, and cattlemen. In an unpublished dedication to the piece, Revelle wrote: "I dedicate 'An Alternative History of Fort Myers' ... to those Native Americans who died in the First, Second and Third Seminole Wars, and to their survivors, the present-day Seminoles in Florida.

"The United States Government spent much of the first half of the 19th century trying unsuccessfully to dislodge about 5,000 Seminoles from Florida. ... The Seminole people — including elders, women, and children — were hunted with bloodhounds, rounded up like cattle and forced onto ships that carried them to New Orleans and up the Mississippi. ...

"The toll in human suffering was profound and the stain on the honor of a great nation, the United States, can never be erased.”

The idea of having a picnic beneath the mural was a reference to the disconcerting tradition of people bringing picnics to watch lynchings or battles during the Civil War. The all-white clothing and all-white food they ate was a reference to the history of white supremacy that continues to haunt our nation. The Jenny Holzer quote painted on the inside of the panels reads, “Some days you wake up and immediately start to worry. Nothing, in particular, is wrong, it’s just the suspicion that forces are aligning quietly and there will be trouble.” Viewers who hoped to understand the piece could not remain passive and inert. They had to walk around it in order to piece together the text; their view of the students on the inside interrupted by panels which reflected a distorted image of themselves and the surrounding space. To complete the multi-sensory experience, the students recorded a sound piece, layering Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (which he wrote while under the spell of the French Revolution and which is often described as “fate knocking at the door”) underneath recordings of various news stories related to climate change, financial and political corruption, and racial violence.

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As they explain in their artists’ statement,

“We are bombarded by so many images, so much information, that we become desensitized: horrific stories of human cruelty become normalized as we swipe to the next meme, the next post. Out of sight, out of mind. Like Nero, we fiddle while Rome burns.”

[the-artist-named-ba]

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art classrooms are the opposite of liminal space

[the-artist-named-ba]

“Womanism is simply another shade of feminism. It helps give visibility to the experience of black women and other women of color who have always been at the forefront of the feminist movement yet marginalized and rendered invisible in historical texts and the media”

- Alice Walker

[the-artist-named-ba]

The Guerrilla Girls have designed a participatory chalkboard installation for visitor “complaints” and covered the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery floor-to-ceiling with an immersive selection of the group’s most notable public art/protest poster campaigns

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Never forget February 14, 2018.

Artwork by Howie Sneider. 

https://www.instagram.com/softsculpture/

[the-artist-named-ba]

“In 1912 ... the idea of describing the movement of a nude coming downstairs while still retaining static visual means to do this, particularly interested me. The fact that I had seen chronophotographs of fencers in action and horse galloping (what we today call stroboscopic photography) gave me the idea for theNude. It doesn't mean that I copied these photographs. The Futurists were also interested in somewhat the same idea, though I was never a Futurist. And of course, the motion picture with its cinematic techniques was developing then too. The whole idea of movement, of speed, was in the air

My aim was a static representation of movement, a static composition of indications of various positions taken by a form in movement—with no attempt to give cinema effects through painting. The reduction of a head in a movement to a bare line seemed to me defensible”