"Last Words" - Shirin Barghi"I created these images to raise awareness about racist police violence in America and as an expression of solidarity."
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"It makes you want to throw up both your hands and holler, 'Don’t Shoot!' You do not doubt that they will, and you halfway wish they would, again, here and now. 'Don’t shoot!' or 'Go on and shoot!' What’s the difference?" - Jared Sexton, Unbearable Blackness
"Against the Wall" - Harry Belafonte / Sankofa.org
Against The Wall from Against The Wall on Vimeo.
"Somehow cell phone video, dash cam video and news media flashing before our very eyes, hour after hour, the murder and victimization of black and brown bodies has desensitized us. By using the faces of those we recognize, familiar faces, we look to re-sensitize the community to really see the problem." - Sankofa.org
“Our visibility brings a certain amount of power. But we are wary that it can easily be co-opted, reconfigured in a certain way that we didn’t intend. There’s tension over the lack of control over our own narrative.” - Dayna Chatman, PhD student at USC, from "Black Twitter" (The Washington Post)
Black Trans Lives Matter by Micah Bazant
Micah is working on the Trans Life and Liberation Art Series – a weekly collaborative project that aims to amplify + honor communities on the frontlines of the trans justice movement. At this time of intense violence and oppression, it celebrates trans people of color in life, and not just in memoriam. Micah is also a co-creator of and participating artist in the Trans Day of Resilience art project, that grew out of their work over the past 10 years, making art as a practice of love and solidarity with trans justice and racial justice movements. In August 2015, they were asked by members of Black Lives Matter Bay Area to create these posters of Black trans women and femmes who had been murdered.
"A movement based on a single identity [...] would always fall short because of the ways in which its rhetoric failed to expose the malleability of all identity claims." - E. Patrick Johnson, Queer Theory
Spoken Word
"Black Privilege"- Crystal Valentine
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"cuz he's black"- Javon Johnson
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"Da Rules"- Marvin Hodges, Em Allison & Saidu Tejan-Thomas
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"Traumatic narratives in rap – centered around violence, death, imprisonment, drugs, and poverty – contextualize (young) black men’s experiences and influence the rendering of these as normal. [...] It is more profitable – and easier – to recognize and pay for a painful narrative than a complex one." - Regina Bradley, Fear of the Sonic [Un]Known
"Murals of Pain"
Reactionary Artpieces in Response to the Murder of Freddie Gray
"[Trayvon Martin’s] death is akin to a mix-tape; the 9-1-1 tapes that document the moments that precede and succeed his death contain a collective of voices (and static) from those who sonically witnessed his demise and, indeed, speak for Martin. [His] trauma and pain is rendered visible through those sounds. Both [Jordan] Davis and Martin are members of a hip hop generation; both are made visible via their attachments to a sonic hip hop aesthetic; and both have been sustained in public memory via the (sonic) traumas framing their bodies and narratives. This peddling of trauma also parallels the push for a post-racial and colorblind American (popular) culture by dismissing their lack of urgency as 'art.'" - Regina Bradley, Fear of the Sonic [Un]Known
"Viral: 25 Years from Rodney King"
“I was sitting in an LA café when I heard other diners on their mobiles, reporting how the Grand Jury had decided not to indict Darren Wilson, the officer who shot Mike Brown. [...] I’m old enough now to have lived through three or four waves of public interest and protest on American police brutality, followed by periods of disinterest as other issues have taken precedence. So although there are a lot of pieces available depicting the Oscar Grant or Trayvon Martin case, there are inadequate amounts of work depicting lesser-known cases. Before I put out a call for art for both the LA and Oakland exhibitions, I created a spreadsheet covering the entire 25 year period covered by the show. I documented at least four cases for each year along the timeline—over 100 cases—and sent this to artists who expressed an interest in submitting so they could consider depicting cases that nobody knew about.” - Daryl Elaine Stenvoll-Wells, Curator of "Viral"
"Flint" - TiRock
"Flint" by TiRock. Art Basel in Miami. pic.twitter.com/7iW6XgQB6Q
— NANA JIBRIL □ (@girlswithtoys) December 5, 2016
Art Basel in Miami
"After a militant civil rights struggle led to new ways of knowing and those ways of knowing were systematically ignored by elites within the power structure, it became evident that the root of white supremacy was not ignorance but the desire on the part of unenlightened white people to maintain their dominance over black people in this nation and around the word." - bell hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men And Masculinity
"Racism is a combination of prejudice, discrimination, violence, and institutions that reproduce racial inequality and injustice, regardless of intent. [Anti-blackness] is about the debasement of black humanity, utter indifference to black suffering, and the denial of black people’s right to exist. When well-meaning people shy away from discussing anti-blackness, they cede the discussion to people like Rudolph Giuliani, who suggest that black people are exterminating themselves, and “black crime” is the root cause of black suffering." -Michael P Jeffries, “Ferguson must force us to face anti-blackness"
Some #BlackGirlMagic for a dose of positivity:
"Good As Hell" by Lizzo
"Our struggle matters." - Lizzo
"The erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough. A women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic demand from most vital areas of our lives other than sex." - Audre Lorde, The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power