Posts from the “Crave” Category

All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50

Posted on October 15, 2016

Emory Douglas, untitled (On the Bones of the Oppressors), 1969. Poster, 20 x 13.5 in. Collection of the Oakland Museum of California. All Of Us Or None Archive. Gift of the Rossman Family.

Fifty years ago today, Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense to protect the citizens of Oakland, CA, from abuses of the state. Under the protection of the Second Amendment, the created armed citizens’ patrols to monitor police officers and challenge police brutality. “Our position was: If you don’t attack us, there won’t be any violence; if you bring violence to us, we will defend ourselves,” explained Seale, who was inspired by the Black Nationalist philosophy of Malcolm X.

Following the Great Migration, the demographics Oakland had been transformed by a new generation of African Americans living in a community ruled by de facto segregation. This was a new type of apartheid that hid its hand covertly instituting policies likes redlining that denied services like banking, insurance, healthcare, mortgages, credit cards, and retail to the black community. Combined with high unemployment, underfunded public schools, and substandard housing, a new form of poverty emerged, and the state, under then-Governor Ronald Reagan, sanctioned violence against.

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Emory Douglas, Afro-American Solidarity with the Oppressed People of the World, 1969. Poster, 22.75 x 14.875 in. Collection of the Oakland Museum of California. All Of Us Or None Archive. Gift of the Rossman Family.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions

Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series

Posted on October 14, 2016

Artwork: Jacob Lawrence. The Migration Series. 1940-41. Panel 15: “Another cause was lynching. It was found that where there had been a lynching, the people who were reluctant to leave at first left immediately after this.” Casein tempera on hardboard, 18 x 12″ (45.7 x 30.5 cm). The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C. Acquired 1942. © 2015 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.

Over a period of six decades, more than six million African Americans moved from fourteen states in the South, seeking a better life for themselves and their families in the Northeast, Midwest, and West parts of the country. The first wave of the Great Migration occurred between 1910-1930, as about 1.6 million people left rural areas and moved to industrial cities in search of work.

The Great Migration was one of the largest, most rapid movements in history. Spurned on by acts of homegrown terrorism including lynching, murder, and church burnings, as well as apartheid under Jim Crow laws, African Americans became refugees in their own country.

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Jacob Lawrence. The Migration Series. 1940-41. Panel 58: “In the North the Negro had better educational facilities.” Casein tempera on hardboard, 18 x 12″ (45.7 x 30.5 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mrs. David M. Levy. © 2015 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY

Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Painting

The True Story of “The Central Park Five’

Posted on October 13, 2016

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The Central Park jogger case was a horrific crime made all the more worse by a heinous miscarriage of justice that put five innocent teenage boys in jail for a crime they did not commit. The scars these men bear were ripped open once again on Friday, October 14, when Donald Trump told CNN that he believes the Central Park Five, as they are known, are guilty despite DNA evidence and a confession that exonerated them in 2002.

Yesterday, in an interview with The Washington Post, Yusef Salaam, one of the Central Park Five, spoke out against Trump’s latest attack: “When I heard Trump’s latest proclamation, it was like the worst feeling in the world. I felt as if I couldn’t breathe. Since I was 15, my life has never been my own. I had no control over what happened to me. Being in the spotlight makes me wary and self-conscious again. I am overwhelmed with a nagging fear that an overzealous Trump supporter might take matters into his or her hands.”

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Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Crave, Manhattan

OFF WHITE: Curated by Akintola Hanif

Posted on October 12, 2016

Artwork: Adrian A. Franks, 10 Shots For Help, 2013, Digital giclee on watercolor paper, 60 x 39 inches.

The concept of “race” is a political, social, and economic construct designed maintain a system of double standards that sees one group benefit through the oppression and exploitation of everyone else. Its roots were planted in the Virginia colony during the late 1600s, when political leaders found themselves loathe to give up their bond servants, and the children born unto them, after their period of servitude had been completed. At the same time, it became clear peasants were as difficult to govern in the New World as they had been in the Old. Peasants were prone to band together and rise up against the ruling class, with no thought towards the fact that their ancestries differed from one another.

Desperate to find a solution to these quandaries, the leaders of Virginia invented a new group of people, legislating “whites” into existence in 1691. Under these new laws, they established the concept of race, where “whites” were given certain rights that “blacks” were denied. Divide-and-conquer is one of the oldest tricks in the book, and the played the card for it all it was worth. At the close of the seventeenth century, race was beholden to legal and economic control, weaving injustice into the fabric of the nation before it even existed as such.

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Categories: Art, Brooklyn, Crave, Exhibitions

Ava DuVernay: 13TH

Posted on October 10, 2016

Image: Courtesy of Netflix

“The bottom line is, if you’re white in America, you have no idea what it’s like to be black,” Newt Gingrich declares in 13TH, the new documentary by Ava DuVernay now screening on Netflix. Titled after the Thirteenth Amendment, which legalizes slavery in the case of incarceration, the film exposes the way in which African Americans have been systematically criminalized in order to create and feed the prison industrial complex.

The film’s release comes at a pivotal time in U.S. history, as we are witnessing the rebirth of a new Civil Rights Movement to counter the abuses of power by the police, courts, prisons, and corporations under the 13th Amendment. While the media besieges the nation with images of lynchings sanctioned by the state, which simultaneously activate PTSD in their intended victims and thrill the bloodlust of the predators, we are inundated with the media’s fixation on Donald Trump’s calls to return to a time in our history before Civil Rights existed at all.

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

Covert Operations: Investigating the Known Unknowns

Posted on October 6, 2016

Photo: Ahmed Basiony, 30 Days of Running in the Place (still), 2010-2011. Two-channel color digital video installation with two-channel soundtrack; run time and dimensions variable. Footage from the 2010 performance of 30 Days of Running in the Place and the 2011 Tahir Square protests, edited by Shafy El Noshokaty, courtesy of the Basiony Estate. ©Basiony Estate.

“People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think,” Aldous Huxley observed, ominously portending the Digital Age that has taken hold. Since 9/11, we have entered into a new age, one in which our privacy is being eroded without our knowledge or consent, as we find our lives becoming more and more embroiled with the Internet.

Orwell’s vision of Big Brother has arrived in full, as telecommunications companies including Verizon, Google, Microsoft, and YouTube have been reported to work hand-in-hand with the NSA, while platforms like Facebook have partnered with the state of Israel to monitor posts. Just this week, Yahoo admitted to complying with a classified United States government directive, searching all of its customers’ incoming mail for specific information at the behest of the NSA and the FBI. It is not known what information officials requested other than “a set of characters.”

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Categories: Art, Books, Crave

In the Tower: Barbara Kruger

Posted on October 5, 2016

Artwork: Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Know nothing, Believe anything, Forget everything), 1987/2014 screenprint on vinyl overall: 274.32 x 342.05 cm (108 x 134 11/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of the Collectors Committee, Sharon and John D. Rockefeller IV, Howard and Roberta Ahmanson, Denise and Andrew Saul, Lenore S. and Bernard A. Greenberg Fund, Agnes Gund, and Michelle Smith © Barbara Kruger

You have seen it a million times in your minds eye: across a black-and-white photograph, a red bar runs. Against the red, words are written in white Futura Bold typeface. It is the work of American artist Barbara Kruger (b. 1945), so iconic no less than Supreme used it as inspiration for their logo, perhaps unironically referencing her famed 1987 work that called out consumer culture with the words, “I shop therefore I am.”

Three decades ago, Kruger brought us to the edge. We looked into the abyss and saw ourselves staring back at us, with a queasy smile of recognition. Fast forward to 2016, where many people proudly see themselves as brands. They take selfies and layer those photographs with words, unwittingly incorporating the very aphorisms Kruger has been speaking throughout her career. It’s a bit like the snake eating its tail and it becomes clear: progress is simply forward motion in time. Revolution is when the circle spins 360 degrees, returning to its starting point. We’ve been here before, haven’t we?

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Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions

Meryl Meisler & James Panero: Bushwik Chronicle

Posted on October 4, 2016

Artwork: A Garden Grows in Bushwick 1988, 16″ x20″ Acrylic Paint on Cibachrome Print © Meryl Meisler 2016.

On the northern edge of Brooklyn lies Bushwick, the largest Latino community in the borough. Comprised primarily of Americans of Puerto Rican and Dominican descent, the neighborhood has produced leaders like Nydia Velázquez, the first Latina elected to the United States Congress and actress and activist Rosie Perez.

By the early 1970s, it became devastated under the federal policy of “benign neglect,” as well as the Nixon White House’s drug war, which flooded the neighborhood with heroin. By the late 1970s, arson had taken its toll, leaving Bushwick looking like a third world country. Yet, despite it all, the community persevered.

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Categories: 1980s, Art, Brooklyn, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography

The Making of a Fugitive

Posted on October 3, 2016

Artwork: Dennis Adams, Patricia Hearst – A thru Z, 1979/90. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, gift of Howard and Donna Stone. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago.

On August 7, 1970, Jonathan Jackson, a 17-year-old African-American high school student brought three guns into the Marin County Hall of Justice during the trial of San Quentin inmate James McClain. Jackson, McClain, and Black Panther party inmates Ruchell Magee and William A. Christmas took Superior Court Harold Haley, Deputy D.A. Garry Thomas, and thee female jurors hostage. The group exited the courthouse and attempted to flee in a van. The police opened fire, starting a shootout that left Jackson, Haley, McClain, and Christmas dead.

It soon came to light that that Jackson’s guns had been purchased two days prior to the incident by Angela Davis, then an assistant professor In the philosophy department at UCLA. The state of California considers “all persons concerned in the commission of a crime, whether they directly commit the act constituting the offense…principals in any crime committed,” and charged Davis with “aggravated kidnapping and first degree murder in the death of Judge Harold Haley.” *

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

The Largest Prison Strike in US History is a Call to Action Against Slavery

Posted on September 30, 2016

Image: The joint resolution proposing the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified December 6, 1865, and abolished slavery, except as punishment for a crime. National Archives

What is happening in the United States prisons?

On September 9, 2016, more than 24,000 inmates from at least 29 prisons in 12 states staged the largest coordinated work strike in United States history to mark the 45th anniversary of the violent uprising at Attica prison.

Despite the fact that it is illegal to organize prison strikes, it continues to this day. This past weekend, a group of guards at William C. Holman Correctional Institute in Atmore, Alabama, joined the strike in solidarity with the prisoners.

How did the strike begin?

A group of inmates at Holman, organized as the Free Alabama Movement (F.A.M.), organized the Nationwide Prison Workstrikes, Boycotts and International Protests in solidarity with ongoing strikes at Florida, South Carolina, and Texas as a call to action against slavery in America.

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Categories: Crave

Walter Robinson: A Retrospective

Posted on September 28, 2016

Artwork: Picture Perfect Kill, Acrylic on canvas 2012, Mima and César Reyes Collection, Puerto Rico

American artist Walter Robinson (b. 1950) moved to Manhattan in 1968 to study art history and psychology at Columbia University, and quickly became a fixture on the art scene. He wrote for Art in America, co-published Art-Rite, was arts editor of The East Village Eye, and editor of artnet, as well as a prolific painter in his own right.

In celebration of his work, curator Barry Blinderman has organized Walter Robinson: A Retrospective, the inaugural exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch, New York, currently on view through October 22, 2016, which is accompanied by a monograph published by the University Galleries at Illinois State University. Featuring 714 paintings made between 1979-2014, Robinson’s work explores the relentless America desire to commodify everything. Blinderman speaks with Crave about Robinson’s work.

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Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Painting