Tag: activism

Categories
Future Imagemakers Media Projects

#HereIsMyAmerica

What do people fail to understand about the lives of black Americans? Or the lives of anyone of color?

#HereIsMyAmerica – The New York Times

Future Imagemakers Lead Teacher Bayete Ross Smith is now embedded as an artist at The New York Times with Race/Related, a collaboration with the independent documentary showcase POV.

The portraits above show me in a variety of different clothing, all of it my own. On any given day, you might encounter me in one form or another.

It’s all part of a larger series I created, which also involved people of different backgrounds and genders. In every case, the facial expressions and lighting stay the same; all that changes is the subject’s clothing.

So the question is: What personal preconceptions do you, or any viewer, project onto me? Or others?…

#HereIsMyAmerica — a project we’re launching here and on Instagram — is an attempt to counter that simplistic approach.

Read More

Categories
Education Resources

How to Teach Kids About What’s Happening in Ferguson

How to Teach Kids About What’s Happening in Ferguson
from Atlantic Magazine

A list as compiled by a community of teachers, academics, community leaders, and parents to teach about some aspect of the national crisis in Ferguson, Missouri and to teach/talk about race.

More on twitter #fergusonsyllabus

Categories
Resources

Language Justice

Just learned of this collaborative team, Antena. I have met them at a bi-lingual conference where they have incorporated translation as an active and integral part of the conference. They make installations, publish books as well as offer translation.

Antena uses writing and multilingual space-building as conduits for a collective creative activist practice that reimagines the power of language. Antena works at the intersection of multiple fields of artistic and political experimentation: writing, literary social practice, interpretation, translation, language justice, performance, installation, book-making, public interventions and radical pedagogy. Each provides us with a context, a vocabulary and a set of principles. We conceptualize our artistic work as social sculpture, a revisioning of the dominant monolingual U.S. way of doing literature, community-building and street-level performance.Some of our core working principles:Language justice is social justice.

Everyone has the basic human right to speak in the language(s) in which they feel most comfortable at a given time. The purpose of creating a dynamic and functional multilingual space is to make it possible for people to express themselves in whichever language they wish, and to be heard and understood by others in the room, regardless of whether they speak the same language.

Categories
Resources

A blade of grass – Fellowship Guidelines

 

FELLOWSHIP FOR SOCIALLY ENGAGED ART
from A Blade of Grass – Guidelines

A Blade of Grass, a new funding organization that nurtures socially engaged art, is pleased to announce the launch of the ABOG Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art. Seven Fellows will be selected to receive an unrestricted stipend of 20,000 USD to realize an innovative community-based project. The program will also offer tailored professional support to socially engaged artists including documentation and assessment of each project, and workshops that teach skills that are particularly relevant to artists working directly with communities to enact social change. 

Categories
Media Projects

Girls Tweeting Not Twerking Their Way to Power

Girls Tweeting Not Twerking Their Way to Power – NYTimes.com.

great article an what girls are doing through collaborations like our friends at Spark. Here is an excerpt:

Online petitions, like the one leveraged in this campaign, are quickly becoming one of the central strategies for girls and young women creating greater awareness of sexism, and a cost or accountability for those who practice it. Girls like Rios have become modern day Davids taking on the Goliaths of our time — multinational corporations like Facebook and Lego, and media giants, like Seventeen magazine and Clear Channel.

The primary platforms for petitions of this ilk are Change.org and WeAreUltraviolet.org — the latter focuses exclusively on gender-related campaigns. Beyond that, a variety of organizations support girls and women to create online campaigns — more broadly called “online organizing” — such as SPARK and Women, Action & Media (WAM), which now does a monthly campaign. I spoke with representatives from these organizations, along with those they’d targeted, about a breadth of campaigns to understand what can be accomplished and what’s still proving elusive.

read entire article

vist SPARK

Categories
Community Programs

The New Activists: Students in the Community

Watch this inspiring promo for Imaging America’s web series on The New Activists. 

“The New Activists: Students in the Community” is Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life’s web series featuring students bringing their knowledge to collaborations with community members to address important community-identified problems and opportunities. 

Click here to see the entire videos.

Categories
Community Programs Media Projects

Bangladeshi photo agency Drik

Inspring piece in today’s Lens Blog:

Wresting the Narrative From the West 

… Shahidul Alam’s Pathshala school has produced dozens of world-class photographers and given Bangladesh a reputation for exceptional photography. The Chobi Mela photo festival, which Mr. Alam started in 1999, brings photographers from around the world to the capital, Dhaka, and promotes local image-makers and documentarians. His photo agency, Drik, which he started in 1989, sells stories made by Bangladeshi photographers to media outlets worldwide and encourages its photographers to cover stories the way they want to, and not to try to fit a script imposed by outsiders.

Categories
Resources

Arts in a Changing America

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Came across this blog today exploring the social function of art
with posts by a wide range of artists and writers.

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.Our aim, niche, and focus is simply: the intersection of arts and changing demographics in the U.S. and the Americas.

We welcome submissions from emerging as well as professional “cultural reporters” who have their ear to the ground of what is happening artistically in communities, places, media, and among groups and publics not normally or regularly covered by mainstream art critics and publications.

Read  more about them

Topics page

Categories
Media Projects Resources

JR & the Inside Out Project

The French artist known as JR works relatively anonymous. After finding a camera in the Paris Metro, he began to study street art around Europe. Before winning a Ted Prize in 2011, JR created projects in Paris, Shanghai, Spain, Los Angeles.

The most interesting and socially engaging in my opinion is the Face 2 Face project in which he posted portraits of Israeli and Palestinian on each side of the separation wall of the two states. Many said it was impossible as it was high illegal, but it managed to be completed. The aim was to show how similar these two peoples were. I feel that though the images were humorous and light, they spoke about a much deeper level of unity. These people are brothers, yet they fight and kill each other.

After many successful but difficult projects, JR applied and was awarded a Ted Prize for his project, Inside Out. JR called for “a global art project” at the Ted Conference. This new project has extended what JR himself does with posting black and white portraits in urban areas. Inside Out allows for people around the world to submit portraits of their own. These portraits are then printed by the project and sent back in order to display in a public space. Guidelines have you group together with at least 5 other people with the same statement of purpose and then Inside Out makes it happen. The project is ongoing and submissions can be made on the site here. JR has recently brought a facet of his project that involves photo booths to Times Square in NYC. Check out the New York Times article here. I find this project so inspiring because you have so many voices just waiting to be heard all around the world. Many do not have the resources to have that voice heard. Inside Out gives these people the opportunity to share their stories with us, while creating a common ground.

 

 

 

 

 

Categories
Community Programs Media Projects

D.C. students use photography to protest school security – The Washington Post

D.C. students use photography to protest school security – The Washington Post

The small band of guerrilla photographers spread out in schools across the District, snapping photos of metal detectors, police pat-downs, and scuffles between security guards and students. read more

The student photographers Critical Exposure, a nonprofit photography program that teaches youth to use the power of photography and their own voices to become effective advocates for school reform and social change, based in Washington, D.C.