Op-eds and Editorial Notes

I am a passenger in this neighborhood, in this country…on this pale blue dot hurtling through the cosmos. I race my three-year-old daughter up the stairs of the Kiosko Azteca pyramid in Denver’s La Raza Park to show her David...

Goya’s series of fourteen Black Paintings occupy a massive white room in the Prado in Madrid. I’ve never stood before them, but as a painter I’ve long studied his work. The paintings are confounding—considered too dark and depraved to be...

Guelph, Ontario is a small university town an hour west of Toronto known for its environmentalism, agriculture and veterinary studies, and its small vibrant arts scene. It’s also the home of the ArtsEverywhere festival and is the Canadian headquarters for...

On the morning of February 21, 2012, I woke up around 3AM, hands and feet shackled to a gurney at Bellevue Hospital in NYC. Blood was pounding in my brain, my vision blurred. I was surrounded by the nurses who...

The latest novel pandemic has highlighted the fragility of our consumptive practices in North America. We demand that all fruit be available at all times, that our furniture complements our walls, that the price of our electronics fits within our...

There’s fear in the air, pulsing through the fiberoptic veins of cyberspace. Uncertainty clings to every interaction, as restaurants, bars, cinemas and schools are shuttered in cities around the world and commerce comes to a grinding halt. On one hand,...

‘We showed them,’ they croaked, spittle oozing down their sausage roll encrusted chins. Good old fashioned British drool mingling with cheap leftover lager. None of that continental rubbish. The drunken “Leave” voters—a merry band of Brexiteers—wave their cheap, tiny plastic...

Banner image: “Union Jack vor dem Zerfall” by Tim Reckman and used under Creative Commons (CC BY 2.0). As the dust settles after the first December general election held in eleventy-seven and four-sixteenth years—much like the detritus of a Christmas...

Halloween in Derry is no small affair and is considered by some to be the best in the world. What started as a local tradition—free punch for getting dressed up—was commodified into a carnivalesque crowd-pleaser. Inside the city center, cat...

Recent conversations at ArtsEverywhere with artists and journalists evoke perceptions of an imminent future marked by a further eradication of spaces for constructive civil discourse and disagreement. As social media perpetuates cults of personality, viral hatreds escalate to violent targeting...

Every generation believes that their struggles in the face of socio-political global upheaval are worse than that of previous eras. Is today’s creeping darkness of rising nationalism, fascist authoritarianism, and vast economic inequality calling for greater social unrest in North...

A week after the opening of Dispatches from the Ghost Ship at the Queens Museum in July, artist Jacob Cohen was approached by his employers who relayed a threat levied by the Department of Corrections (DOC). The exhibition included over...

The destruction by fire of the National Museum in Brazil this week is a blow to the world’s cultural history. Buried near the end of a number of mainstream media articles about the massive loss of the museum’s collection (90%...

(Banner image: Chto Delat, Monument to the Century of Revolutions, 2017, installation at Toronto’s Nuit Blanche. Photo credit: Dmitry Vilensky.) Over the past couple weeks (months… years…) I have found it impossible to escape a constant barrage of images. Children in...

I was busy and distracted when the most recent ArtsEverywhere post arrived with its heading “Putin’s Very Best Day.” As I clicked through various posts to get a sense of where the entanglements of Nikolay Oleynikov and Alessandra Pomarico would...

Last Sunday, one week before the Russian presidential elections, with my punk band I took part in a benefit gig to support five young antifascists who were recently kidnapped, detained, and tortured by the FSB special agency, called the Centre...

I am the space of protest. (dedicated to those who take to the streets) This one is dedicated to protest. To those people who resist being jaded and all forms of nihilism, pessimism, discouragement, or comfort and instead, they take...

In his essay, Michael Roberson reminds us that the immense resilience and creativity of the House | Ballroom community are deeply historical and politicized. Roberson writes from within “a freedom movement, a radical pedagogy, and a spiritual formation in response...

In his 1988 essay entitled “The City as Wave-Trough in the Image Flood”, Vilém Flusser offers a novel way to conceive of an urban centre: as a weighted place that imposes on a gravitational field and draws people towards it....

ArtsEverywhere, and its host organization, Musagetes, are deeply invested in practices of improvisation, musically and otherwise. One of our partners, the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation, based at the University of Guelph, has developed an extensive body of...

It is impossible to list the multitude of experiences and assumptions that each of us brings to every action and interaction. In our current state of affairs, it is ever more crucial to find ways of understanding our multi-faceted selves,...

Be it through mass displacements; transnational migration of ideas or bodies; or a transition of gender, thought, or lives, these three articles demonstrate how the connectedness of the world—beyond its economic interdependence—can bring us to different ways of experiencing the...

Our world is criss-crossed with borders. But what happens when those borders begin to entangle and the spaces in-between begin to overlap again? Three contributors to ArtsEverywhere offer contrasting, but complementary conceptual frames for thinking about this. Raphael Daibert, writing...

An idea has been echoed by three writers from vastly different latitudes: the concept that political (and thereby personal) trauma is physically housed in the body. This trauma can be passed down from generation to generation, especially to receptive bodies...

The telling of personal histories and the sharing of anecdotes offer glimpses into the ways of knowing that guide inquiry, analysis, and reflection. Ashon Crawley, Mike Young, and Vanessa Andreotti share their personal stories as a way to access others’...