Posts by Miss Rosen

Everything You Need to Know About Standing Rock

Posted on February 9, 2017

Native Americans march to a burial ground sacred site that was disturbed by bulldozers building the Dakota Access Pipeline on September 4 near Cannon Ball, North Dakota. (Getty)

What is the latest news on the Dakota Access Pipeline?

On Tuesday, February 7, the US Army Corps of Engineers announced that it will grant the final easement for the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) to cross the Missouri River. The Corps is skipping both the Environmental Impact Statement as well as the congressional notification period required by law. These actions have been taken in response to a Presidential Memorandum that ordered, “the acting secretary of the Army to expeditiously review requests for approvals to construct and operate the Dakota Access Pipeline in compliance with the law.”

Yesterday, members of the Senate and House Natural Resource Committees have issued a letter to the President denouncing the Trump Administration’s tactics, stating, “This blatant disregard for federal law and our country’s treaty and trust responsibilities to Native American tribes is unacceptable. We strongly oppose this decision and any effort to undermine tribal rights. We urge you to immediately reverse this decision and follow the appropriate procedures required for tribal consultation, environmental law, and due process.”

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: Crave

Winning the Fight to Bring the Coral Reefs of the Florida Keys Back to Life

Posted on February 8, 2017

Photo: Key Largo, Fl. Rick Loomis/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images.

Since the late 1970s, the coral reefs throughout the Florida Keys and the Caribbean have experienced unprecedented declines, with massive losses in the population of local staghorn and elkhorn reef-building corals. In recent decades, an estimated 25 to 40 percent of the world’s corals have died due to rising seawater temperatures, ocean acidification, and coral bleaching—all symptoms of climate change. Fortunately, Dr. David Vaughan is leading the Coral Reef Restoration project to bring these vital biospheres back to life, just as the reefs had reached an all-time low.

The Executive Director at the Mote Tropical Research Laboratory in Summerland Key, Florida, Dr. David Vaughan is the manager of the Coral Reef Restoration program. In 2013, he developed “microfragmenting,” a technique that allows him to create coral colonies that grow at 25 to 50 times fast than in the wild. This quick-growth process has enabled the team to develop culture or propagation for more than 20 species of reef-building hard corals that can then be transplanted to dead or dying reefs in the Keys.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: Art

The Vast Treasures of The Met Now Available in the Public Domain

Posted on February 8, 2017

Artwork: Egyptian, Fragmentary Head of a Queen, 1352-1356 B.C.E. Image provided by The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

On Tuesday, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, made about 375,000 public-domain images available for commercial and scholarly use through Open Access for anyone with a Creative Commons Zero license. This policy, which introduces partnerships with Wikimedia, Artstor, the Digital Public Library of America, Art Resource, and Pinterest, allows people from all walks of life free use of a vast range of digital images and data in from The Met’s vast history, collection, exhibitions, events, people, and activities.

Although the initiative was considered controversial when it was first introduced, as society continues to adapt itself to a digital interface, the movement to digitize and share works in the public domain has made major leaps and strides, recognizing that the open content movement is a necessity of modern life.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Artwork: Jean-Léon Gérôme, Bashi-Bazouk, 1868-69. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Categories: Africa, Art, Crave, Painting, Photography

Long Live Frederick Douglass, Man of the New Millennium

Posted on February 6, 2017

Photo: Frederick Douglass, circa 1960,s courtesy of Picture History/Wikimedia Commons.

On February 1, Donald Trump kicked off Black History Month with a breakfast meeting where he quixotically announced, “I am very proud now that we have a museum on the National Mall where people can learn about Reverend King, so many other things. Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.”

The public quickly took note, wondering if the President was aware that Douglass had died in 1895 at the age of 77. Not to be missed amid the head scratching and jokes is the fact that Douglass continues to be one of the most prolific, influential Americans of our time. In recent months, his work has inspired the publication of two new books, a magazine, and an exhibition of photography and art.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: Art, Books, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography

Devin Allen Awarded the Inaugural Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship

Posted on February 6, 2017

Photo: © Devin Allen, courtesy of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum

The Gordon Parks Foundation has named photographer Devin Allen as one of two inaugural recipients of a new fellowship program. Allen, who was born and raised in West Baltimore, catapulted to national fame when his documentary photograph of an unidentified black man running from a phalanx of police made the cover of Time magazine in May 2015 – only the third time the work of an amateur photographer had ever received such prominent placement.

The photograph was taken on April 25, 2015, as Allen documented the Baltimore uprising in the wake of the extrajudicial execution of Freddie Gray. Allen, who grew up just five minutes away from the site of Gray’s fatal encounter with the police on April 12, told Crave last year, “People don’t understand Baltimore. They only think of ‘The Wire’…it’s worse than that. But we have a strong community. My city is real. There’s no sugar coating. It’s a small city. In twenty, thirty minutes I can be anywhere. You see the issues the people face. That’s why I love it so much. If you’re from Baltimore you can make it anywhere.”

Indeed, Allen has shown the world he has what it takes to make it. Committed to his community, he established “Through Their Eyes,” a project that trains Baltimore students in underfunded public school in photography. The mission is to arm the youth of his city with cameras, not guns, and to show them how to spread “hope and love through art.”

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: Art, Crave, Photography

Manuel Alvarez Bravo

Posted on February 4, 2017

Photo: Manuel Alvarez Bravo, The Daughter of the Dancers (La hija de los danzantes). 1933. Gelatin-silver print. 9 1/4 x 6 11/16″. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase.

I can still remember the first art show I ever reviewed. It was the Manuel Alvarez Bravo retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, which was 20 years ago this month. I was on assignment for The Village Voice, writing for this brand new thing folks were calling “The World Wide Web.”

I stepped into my first press preview and had a croissant, picked up a folder I still have (and I keep nothing) with an image a woman looking through a porthole in the wall. I was mystified, intrigued, and absolutely enthralled. I can still remember the first line of the review: “A man lies dead in the dirt, his hair slicked with blood like it was gel.” I knew then this was all I ever wanted—needed—to do. Be still and listen for the words that weave the spell.

It’s been a rather round about road, such is life, and on this, the 115th birthday of Alvarez Bravo, I give thanks. It all began with a photograph and the urge to give voice to the thousands of words that speak every language at the same time deep within the silent realm of a picture hanging on the wall.

Categories: Art, Exhibitions, Latin America, Photography

Meet Awol Erizku, the Man Who Photographed Beyoncé’s Maternity Pictures

Posted on February 3, 2017

Courtesy of Beyonce’s Instagram

Crave fave Awol Erizku has made headlines worldwide as the artist who photographed Beyoncé’s pregnancy photographs. The superstar wowed the world on the first day of Black History Month when she posted a portrait of herself on Instagram wearing nothing but a bra, panties, and veil, showing her bare belly swelling with life, with the announcement that she and Jay Z are expecting twins. That post, which set the internet aflame, now has more than 9.2 million likes.

Seated in profile in front of an enormous wreath, Beyoncé evoked the goddess of fertility and the rites of spring. Yesterday, ARTNews reported that a source close to Nina Johnson gallery, Miami, revealed that Awol Erizku confirmed via text that he took the photograph.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

“Vision and Justice,” Sarah Lewis’s bestselling issue of Aperture Magazine

Categories: Art, Crave, Photography

Symbols: A Handbook for Seeing

Posted on January 31, 2017

Photo: (Triangle) “Pyramids” Courtesy of The Monacelli Press.

The human mind is a magical, mysterious place where things are (as much as they not) what they appear to be. Within the mind, layers are added to experience in the form of narration, translation, and interpretation in search of the great, vast overwhelming call for meaning in this majestic and monstrous world. There are so many questions we ask ourselves when we behold that which lays before our eyes. The desire to know can become a need, as our mind is inclined to require a structure upon which it can operate.

So we find ourselves in this curious space where we both seek and receive information that we do and do not understand. Most of us are disinclined to the rigors of critical thought, for it drains us of illusions and fantasies and replaces it with a state of ongoing doubt. It is far easier, and less unnerving, to skate along the surface of life–though invariably the ice is thin in places we may not foresee. Thus, the questions show themselves. Who the what now—and can someone tell please me why?

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Categories: Art, Books, Crave

Signs of Our Times

Posted on January 28, 2017

Farah Behbehani, Love rests on no foundation II. Courtesy of Merrell Publishers

We are witnessing acts of ignorance and arrogance so epic they are nothing short of crimes against humanity. When I wrote a review of Signs of Our Times: Calligraphy to Calligraffiti (Merrell) just a couple of days ago for Crave Online, I didn’t foresee the Muslim Ban figuring into things. I just wrote a few words about the beauty of a people that honored the Second Commandment to the letter of the law, one that was born of a grace and beauty that elegantly combines with the subversive eloquence of questioning the status quo–for it is the realm of artists to subvert assumptions that have grown stale and old. But here we are on the precipice, pushed to the edge by a psychopath who speaks for the descendants of Columbus. I don’t have answers but I am inclined to break free of the paradigm built on ignorance, arrogance, and the privilege that suggests the crimes of this country do not fall on my shoulders.

Read the Story at Crave Online

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Crave

Yuri Dojc: Last Folio

Posted on January 26, 2017

It was written. And then it was lost. But prophecies must reveal themselves. This is the story of serendipity, of miracles, of discovery that can only happen by the right person at the right time in life.

Yuri Dojc was born into one of the few surviving Jewish families in Slovakia in 1946. During the war, the nation had eagerly aligned itself with Germany, seizing Jewish businesses, closing schools, and carting the peoples off en masse to concentration camps where few lived to return. His parents escaped such a fate by fleeing to the mountains and hiding in a bunker outside a village that kept their presence a secret.

After the war, the Jews who returned or remained were careful to hide their identities. Dojc remembers, “You have to understand the history. Being a Jew was unpopular. You don’t tell anyone. You hide that because if you tell them, you might not have any friends. No one in their right mind would come out and do this.”

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: Art, Books, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography

Gordon Parks: I AM YOU

Posted on January 25, 2017

Photo: Untitled, Harlem, New York, 1948, by Gordon Parks. Courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation.

“I picked up a camera because it was my choice of weapon against what I hated most about the universe: racism, intolerance, poverty. I could have just as easily picked up a knife or gun, like many of my childhood friends did,” American photographer Gordon Parks (1912-2006) revealed.

Parks understood that photography possessed the power to change the way we see and understand the world by speaking a language entirely its own. Seeing is believing, as the old saw goes, which is why representation matters. But representation is only the first step; truth is the pinnacle to which great artists aspire to reach.

Parks was not only a master of the medium, he was an activist using his work to propel political and social change throughout the twentieth century. He decided to become a photographer while working as a waiter in a railroad dining car, after observing passengers read picture magazines for pleasure. At the age of 25, he purchased his first camera and began to shoot, never putting his weapon down until the Lord called him home.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Photo: Untitled, Shady Grove, Alabama, 1956, by Gordon Parks. Courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Books, Crave, Photography