ArtsEverywhere extends invitations to writers, artists, leaders, and critical thinkers in diverse fields and sectors. We create open spaces for dialogue about the value that the arts bring to all aspects of our communities and societies.
Women of the Cold Mountains
24 hours, 24 women, 24 photographs. As is true of nearly everywhere on earth, the women captured in this photo series not only take care of their children and families....
Now We Know We Can Reclaim the World We Want: A Conversation with Pony Zion and Benji Hart
On the evening of Friday, April 19th, 2019, at the invitation of ArtsEverywhere, Pony Zion (De’von Webster) and Benji Hart (Benji Ninja) gathered in a conference room at The New...
Vogue is Not for You: Deciding Who We Give Our Art To
This essay accompanies Benji Hart’s conversation with Pony Zion, “Now We Know We Can Reclaim the World We Want.” It was originally published on Benji Hart’s Radical Faggot blog on...
The Church of OVAH: Transcendence in the House Ballroom Scene
For centuries the Christian church has fractured time and time again when the Church did not or would not meet the needs of a community. The subsequent Christian denominations, sects,...
Live to be Legend
In February this year, Arbert Santana, my friend and collaborator, died in a hospital in New York City. I miss him. Deeply. The last time I saw Arbert alive he...
400 Years of Inequality
400 Years of Inequality is a diverse coalition of organizations and individuals calling on everyone — families, friends, communities, institutions — to plan their own solemn observance of the anniversary...
Imagining Future Cities in an Age of Ecological Change
The guidelines of the prompt were very simple. Stories had to be set in a city in the distant future (i.e. in or near the year 2099), be 1,000 words...
Horizontes Errantes (Wandering Horizons)
Artists: Jonathas de Andrade (Brasil), Pilar Quinteros, (Chile), David Guarnizo, (Colombia), Christian Salablanca (Costa Rica), María José Argenzio, (Ecuador), Karina Aguilera Skvirsky, (Ecuador), Angélica Alomoto (Ecuador), Rometti Costales (Francia &...
An Iceland Story: Artists Who Inspire Public Engagements
Folk singer, poet, and gay rights activist Hörður Torfason began his weekly demonstrations in front of the Parliament building in Reykjavik on October 11, 2008, a couple of days after...
Compelled by the Ephemeral and Fleeting: A Conversation Between Ajamu and Pato Hebert
In the summer of 2018, London-based artist, archivist, and curator Ajamu and New York and Los Angeles-based artist, educator, and organizer Pato Hebert collaborated on an exhibition in Amsterdam and discussed Ajamu’s residency with...
The Curse of Geography: Qinghai-Tibet Plateau
http://curseofgeography.artseverywhere.ca The Curse of Geography is an on-going series of investigative reports focused on the relationship of geographic isolation or proximity on social justice, human rights and public policy in...
Tactics and strategies of racialized artists:
some notes on how to circumvent the art world’s terms of inclusion
I have been thinking about what it means to be a racialized person in the arts, and what kinds of tactics and strategies we’ve developed to move through these spaces....
Police Violence and the Art of Organizing
ArtsEverywhere is working with Families United 4 Justice and the Forced Trajectory Project to co-produce a series of personal narratives by family members, in a small effort to create counter-narratives...
I Never Preferred Blondes
Disturbing and disheartening, the confirmation of Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court was a blatant show of elite power. It was a show of fellow misogynists propping up an accused...
Between Paper and Concrete
Between Paper and Concrete: a visual inquiry into the history of housing policy in Toronto. How do the legacies of past housing policies shape the lives of Torontonians today? What...
Meaning or movement?
Objects or rhythm?
What ways of being become viable when art is able to interrupt our satisfaction with the intellectual, affective, relational and performative economies we are invested in? What are the conditions...
To Walk Amidst Collapse
Clique aqui para texto em português. Photo credit: Camila de Sousa We were surprised by the storm that arrived at dawn, as not even at the peak of summer had it...
Feeling the Vibration of the Periphery: A Conversation
September 8, 2017, New York City Editor’s Note: This conversation was sparked by Cláudio and João’s visit to New York in the late summer of 2017, which Kendra was alerted...
Amizade como ativismo / Friendship as Activism
This piece opens with excerpts from Ajamu’s journal, talking about his process as an ArtsEverywhere artist in residence working with Black queer communities in New York, São Paulo and Toronto....
From Where Do You Speak?: Locating the Possibility of Decolonization in Krista Belle Stewart’s Seraphine, Seraphine
Two moving-image portraits of a woman—captured nearly fifty years apart—play alongside each other, the few inches between them charged with the weight of intimate and social histories. On the left,...
The Curse of Geography: Badakhshan
http://curseofgeography.artseverywhere.ca The Curse of Geography is an on-going series of investigative reports focused on the relationship of geographic isolation or proximity on social justice, human rights and public policy in...
Climate Denier
*Press on the image to zoom and navigate. I woke up one morning in May, surrounded by the leafless trees of a brown wintery-looking New England countryside that wouldn’t experience...
Cruising Quito: Notes on Grindr, Queer Codes, and Post-AIDS
Cruising Quito was a project that I developed in the framework of Queer City Quito, from June 28 to July 8, 2017. The project included a residency at No Lugar,...
SOY PAISAJE (I AM LANDSCAPE)
A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at. – Oscar Wilde[1]Since 2013, artists and activists have been invited to participate in an arts...
The Curse of Geography: Western Newfoundland
http://curseofgeography.artseverywhere.ca The Curse of Geography is an on-going series of investigative projects focused on the relationship of geographic isolation or proximity on social justice, human rights and public policy in...
When Knights Come Calling
When I read that the 2018 theme for National Women’s History Month was Nevertheless She Persisted, referring to Mitch McConnell’s attempt to silence Elizabeth Warren from speaking in Congress, this piece...
The Very Best Day
On March 3rd, 2018, the main pre-election rally for Vladimir Putin took place at the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow. Tens of thousands of public sector workers were brought in from...
Learning Hope and Assembling sKin
This is a response to eight works in Pedagogy, Otherwise, which I feel connected to through friendships and encounters in two transnational collectives of radical learners and educators – the...
Letters to Moth V
“The Lonely Letters” is an autobiofiction in which I attempt to think the relationship of quantum theory, mysticism, relationality, and blackness together by considering the sound and noise of Blackpentecostal...
Selfie
Growing up on the West Coast of Canada, I’ve always felt that the American fascination with guns was bizarre, misguided, and dangerous. It’s hard to understand from a Canadian perspective...
Letters to Moth IV
“The Lonely Letters” is an autobiofiction in which I attempt to think the relationship of quantum theory, mysticism, relationality, and blackness together by considering the sound and noise of Blackpentecostal...
Dictionary of the Queer International: Call for Participation
We live in a peculiar era when both universalism and intersectional solidarity are retreating while regional powers become stronger in a globalized world, with the resulting race to the top...
Dispatches from the Ghost Ship
This content was removed to protect the identities of the subjects. Details can be found here.
Bite My Pussy, Fascist!
In solidarity with all self-identified women and the men that love us who are standing up today at the Women’s Marches around the world against hate, intolerance, and destruction in...
Letters to Moth III
“The Lonely Letters” is an autobiofiction in which I attempt to think the relationship of quantum theory, mysticism, relationality, and blackness together by considering the sound and noise of Blackpentecostal...
The Radical Education Workbook, Part 5: Reading List
Arts Everywhere is pleased to republish the Radical Education Workbook (The other parts in this publication are available at the links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4). This final section...
The Radical Education Workbook, Part 4: Using the Pedagogies of the Oppressed
Arts Everywhere is pleased to republish the Radical Education Workbook (Other sections published thus far: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). The PDF with the entire Radical Education Workbook as it originally...
BLACK POLITICS: THE BODY IN PROTEST
A PROGRAM OF SELFCARE FOR NAKED ACTION
Nudity is a decolonizing projectile bullet for radicalized bodies that are marked by difference. It is violent; it is performance; it is activism; it is contradictory; it is indestructible. Therefore,...
Letters to Moth II
“The Lonely Letters” is an autobiofiction in which I attempt to think the relationship of quantum theory, mysticism, relationality, and blackness together by considering the sound and noise of Blackpentecostal...
The Radical Education Workbook, Part 3: Self Organisation
Arts Everywhere is republishing the Radical Education Workbook (Other sections published thus far: Part 1, Part 2). The PDF with the entire Radical Education Workbook as it originally appeared, is available here. Self...
The Radical Education Workbook, Part 2: Collectivity
Arts Everywhere is republishing the Radical Education Workbook (Other sections published thus far: Part 1). The PDF with the entire Radical Education Workbook as it originally appeared, is available here. Collectivity Circle...
The Radical Education Workbook, Part 1: Challenging Imposed Curricula
Republishing the Radical Education Workbook Introduction by Alessandra Pomarico The Radical Education Workbook was produced in 2010 by the Radical Education Forum and the art and political collective Ultra-red, at...
The Unbribables and the Risk of Dissent
The recent scandalous arrest of the Belgrade-based artist Vladan Jeremić, which happened in the Serbian capital at the re-opening of the Museum of Contemporary Art—after 10 years of closure—has angered...
Letters to Moth I
“The Lonely Letters” is an autobiofiction in which I attempt to think the relationship of quantum theory, mysticism, relationality, and blackness together by considering the sound and noise of Blackpentecostal...
Forced Trajectories: Creating Counter-Narratives to Police Violence
Introduction Sidd Joag On June 16th, 2017, ArtsEverywhere was set to publish Nissa Tzun’s piece, “Forced Trajectories: Creating Counter-Narratives to Police Violence.” That evening, Officer Jeronimo Yanez was acquitted of...
Ukraine’s Battle with Russia Moves to the Classroom
This article was originally published by Coda Story. The bell rings for the end of lessons at Bakhmut’s School Number 18 in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, and children...
From Taxes to Yemen
This piece was drawn out of the utter frustration I’ve felt over the last two years, while watching Yemen continue to degrade into a famine-stricken, disease-ridden country. A quarter of...
Centering Indigenous Bodies, Thought and Practice
The gathering Under the Mango Tree — Sites of Learning, that was organized by aneducation of documenta 14 and ifa, acted as an open forum to explore the notion and practice...
Open Letter from documenta 14 artists:
On the emancipatory possibility of decentered exhibitions
We the undersigned artists, writers, musicians, and researchers who participated in various chapters of the current documenta 14– Exhibition, Parliament of Bodies, South as a State of Mind, Listening Space,...
Belonging as a Cultural Right
This article originally appeared in the Journal of Othering & Belonging and is reprinted with permission of the author and the publishers at the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive...
documenta 14 team speaks out about value production of the arts
Editors’ Note: ArtsEverywhere expresses its solidarity and support to the curatorial and management team of documenta 14, a multi-layered mega-exhibition that raised complex and, at times, controversial questions. In Kassel and Athens, documenta 14 frames critical...
Against Simple Answers: The Queer-Communist Theory of Evald Ilyenkov and Alexander Suvorov
The following essay was written in today’s Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, one of the Central Asian republics of the former USSR. It was translated by Giuliano Vivaldi, and was...
Performing the Struggle: Chapter Three
Scars, Giant Face, Ferocious Breakdance, and Other Learning Props to Perform the Struggle: A Play as Remembered by a Participant
This is chapter three of three. For the first chapter in the series, please click here. For the second chapter in the series, please click here. Cast: Abimbola (Abimbola Odugbesan)...
Performing the Struggle: Chapter Two
Away from Home in Lecce
This is chapter two of three. For the first chapter in the series, please click here. For the third chapter in the series, please click here. Foreign Postcards: A Series of...
Performing the Struggle: Chapter One
Just as the way we perform changes, so should our sense of “voice.” In our everyday lives we speak differently to diverse audiences. We communicate best by choosing that way...
Artists in the Field: A rare History of Artistic Interventions and Transformative Actions
What do a conceptual longhouse, an ephemeral dining pavilion, an opera singer in the woods and a photographer in a river all have in common? They’re all rare sitings. Over...
The Effect of Iteration on Urban Form, Part II: Iteration in an Ecosystem
In the Lille citadel example that we saw in part one, we could observe a building technology achieving greater complexity over time, as each iteration survived or failed a new...
The Effect of Iteration on Urban Form, Part I: Fractals and the Creation of Complexity
Part two of this essay can be found here In a previous article I proposed that we adopt a perspective on preservation that allowed for transformation and change of what...
Dissident Geographies: São Paulo, Athens, and Beyond
An event called Queer City is, per se, an invitation to inhabit the oxymoron as an epistemological position. Can a queer city exist? What would it look like? Who would...
In Ghana, Visions of Queer Friendship and Love
This article is part of a series produced in collaboration with Aperture magazine and Contemporary And, coinciding with Aperture’s summer 2017 issue, “Platform Africa.” In his series Just Like Us (2016), the photographer...
Reclaiming Cartography, Photography, and Colonial Imagery
Fifty-eight years ago, the Malagasy Republic was declared an autonomous state within an association of countries known as the French Community. Much like other nations that fought for independence well...
The Game of Non-Distinction
As an ideological reaction to the ongoing invasion of Russian troops, separatist attacks in Eastern Ukraine, and the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and as a gesture towards establishing a...
Forget the “Event”: Contemporary Radical Thought, the Legacy of 1917 and post-Soviet Politics
The editors of ArtsEverywhere recommend that you read Nikolay Oleynikov’s “Ways of Seeing the New Russian Colonialisms: Writing on and from Post-Soviet Territories” for an introduction to the history of...
Gentrifying the Commons // Commoning Gentrification
This essay was originally published in the journal (Un)usual Business vol.1. View/Download the issue. Resisting Enclosure through Creative Commoning in Kanaleneiland Lively District: With the development of the renewal area Kanaleneiland aims to...
I’m With Her
Recently the US Congress passed a healthcare bill to repeal and replace Obamacare with one of the most disturbingly elitist, barbarian and almost Palaeozoic pieces of legislation I’ve ever heard...
Haawiyat: A Syrian Comic for Syrian Children
After fleeing Syria, a nation badly bloodied by civil war, refugees are finding themselves trapped in migratory limbo for long stretches of time as they await placement in foreign, and...
The Emerging Indie Music Industry in Saudi Arabia
During his performance for a group of students in New York in April, Saudi musician Diya Azzony prompted the audience to ask him questions about anything from his musical technique...
Activating Humanities Knowledge: Human Rights Pedagogy and Community-Based Education
The following is an excerpt from Ajay Heble’s Introduction to Classroom Action: Human Rights, Critical Activism, and Community-Based Education, a book (edited by Heble, with chapters by his former students)...
A 15 Year History of Radical Hosting: From Wooloo to Human Hotel
2011, NEW YORK CITY: OCCUPY WALL STREET On Saturday, the 29th of October 2011, the first snowstorm hit New York City and Occupy Wall Street. My son was ten months...
Open Casket
Controversy engulfed the Whitney Biennial recently over the inclusion of Dana Schutz’s “Open Casket”, an abstract painting that depicts the violently mutilated body of Emmett Till who was murdered by two white...
The Spectres of Munich
This essay is the first in a series entitled Ways of Seeing the New Russian Colonialisms: Writing on and from Post-Soviet Territories, curated by Nikolay Oleynikov for ArtsEverywhere. A series description...
Ways of Seeing New Colonialisms: Writing on and from Post-Soviet Territories
Summary How can we analyse Russia’s renewed colonialism and global expansionism that affects the geopolitical tectonic shifts of today? Is Putin the successor of the USSR or of Tsarist Russia?...
The City as Wave-Trough in the Image Flood
Translated, with an introduction by Phil Gochenour. By permission of the University of Chicago Press. While theorists such as Niklas Luhmann, Norbert Bolz, and Friedrich Kittler have begun to rise...
Can a mestizo asshole speak?
A collection of essays, artistic contributions, and two inserted zines, Queer City, a reader was developed as part of an 18-month inquiry in São Paulo. Initiated by Lanchonete.org and ArtsEverywhere/Musagetes, the...
Notes on Language: At the Foot of W̱MIEŦEN
ArtsEverywhere asked poets Tim Lilburn and Philip Kevin Paul to write about their experiences as a student (Lilburn) and teacher (Paul) of SENĆOŦEN, the language of the W̱SÁNEĆ—the original tongue of the Saanich...
Radical Pedagogy is NOT
Part one: To no list Foreword by Alessandra Pomarico (inspired by many). It was a real struggle to define, in a 10 minute text, “the partisan No” that originates and...
Queer Vegan Manifesto
A collection of essays, artistic contributions, and two inserted zines, Queer City, a reader was developed as part of an 18-month inquiry in São Paulo. Initiated by Lanchonete.org and ArtsEverywhere/Musagetes,...
The Enjoyment of the Pariah: Technologies to exist at the margins [of the State]
A collection of essays, artistic contributions, and two inserted zines, Queer City, a reader was developed as part of an 18-month inquiry in São Paulo. Initiated by Lanchonete.org and ArtsEverywhere/Musagetes,...
I drag you with me: ancestry and contemporary practice
I drag you with me: ancestry and contemporary practice (a conversation between Raphael Daibert and Edgar Calel) Edgar Calel came to São Paulo for a three-month residency that extended to...
Deep Listening at the End of the World
Deep Listening at the End of the World[1] I’m sitting beside the ocean at the end of the world singing with a wave. A rhythmic low whoosh, and a building...
Learning to learn in a context of war
Ecoversities Gathering of Kindred Folk Re-imagining Higher Education Introduction by Kelly Tamey and Udi Mandel, co-hosts of the unconference with Manish Jain There is a knowledge movement slowly building all...
The body remembers when the world broke open
I have said this twice before, but I will say it again:[1] I am trying to figure out how to be in this world without wanting it, and perhaps this...
Really Useful Knowledge
The following text originally appeared in the catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition Really Useful Knowledge, curated by What, How & for Whom/WHW and organized and produced by...
Insurgent Learning and Convivial Research: Universidad de la Tierra, Califas
Insurgent Learning and Convivial Research: Universidad de la Tierra, Califas[1] Knowledge production has increasingly become central to emancipatory projects. More and more people in struggle recognize the importance of learning...
Qalandiya International — A Palestinian Biennial
the dove’s collar a star abandoned on the roof and a winding alley leading to the port This sea is mine This sea air is mine —Mahmoud Darwish1In Palestine, the...
The Tangled Histories of Disconnected Places
This interview of artist Lucia Nhamo, conducted by Aïcha Diallo, originally appeared at ContemporaryAnd.com. Lucia Nhamo was awarded the Goethe/Lanchonete residency prize at Bamako Encounters in 2015. The Goethe Institut and Musagetes/ArtsEverywhere...
Don McKay on Defamiliarization
Don McKay was out raven-watching one day in New Brunswick a number of years ago. Before moving there from Ontario, he hadn’t observed ravens intimately, so they hadn’t yet become...
In The Cracks of Learning (Situating Us)
As a preamble, I’d like to clarify that everything I attempt to contribute in the following text on the subject of pedagogy is a recollection of ideas that have been...
This Land is MY Land
I drew this comic illustration on the cover of the New York Times Magazine after watching a video of Alt-Right supporters in the US vigorously hailing Trump in genuine Nazi...
Fictioning Names
Berry Berry. Sometimes fictions function to produce memory. And the genius and beauty of Barry Jenkins’s 2016 film Moonlight is not in its being presumably a universal story to which we...
The Communicative Ecology of Artist Rights
Even as the relationship between the fields of arts, culture and human rights becomes more defined, the global community of organizations, networks and civil society initiatives working at that intersection,...
Relocating: Emad Tayefeh
It cost Emad Tayefeh $10,000 to bribe Iranian border guards for safe passage to Turkey, $2,500 of which was financed by the advocacy organization Freedom House. While living as a...
I Dream Feeling, Otherwise
I woke up crying. It was a January morning, the 23rd, and I missed someone. Some family member, or some acquaintance, or some stranger — it matters not — died...
Nasty Grrrl Baby (2016)
I think most people living in the United States are incredibly sick of this never-ending election season. The sickening, overt misogyny we are subjected to on a regular basis, which...
Ideology On Ice
The American Dream, a four-ton, 30-foot-long, ice sculpture by LigoranoReese, is the most recent of the artist duo’s Melted Away series and the molten heart of its American Dream Project....
Multi-layered Selves: Colonialism, Decolonization and Counter-Intuitive Learning Spaces
As I wondered about the best way to write this text, two related events caught my attention. First, I received a call for publications with the title “After De-colonizing…What?” issued...
Solange Farkas: Video Art Finds a Home in Brasil
Since the first edition of the Videobrasil festival, a festival dedicated to video art and artists, the organization Associação Cultural Videobrasil, which was formally established as a nonprofit by Solange...
We Have a Past and a Future
A review of Dazzle Camouflage: Spectacular Theatrical Strategies for Resistance and Resilience by Ezra Berkeley Nepon. 2014. ISBN-13: 9780692595350. E. Nepon. 154 pages. Buy the book. Dazzle Camouflage: Spectacular Theatrical Strategies for...
All We Have is Each Other
All We Have is Each Other[i] The path across diversity needs to be re-imagined and re-constructed constantly.[ii] The key to this re-imagination and re-construction is in working together, but this...
The Gang and the Government
This comic started with an unexpected experience I had going to a Jane’s Addiction concert in Port Chester, NY a couple of months ago. The police presence at the concert was...
The Rivers Have Called Upon Us
As I was reading Musagetes’ Manifesto on Economic Dignity and getting all passionate about activism, the usual disturbing and stressful noise from the construction of a new ferry pier next...
There’s So Much Giant Single-Word Public Artwork in New York City
Next month, Public Art Fund is installing Martin Creed’s “Understanding,” a 50-foot rotating neon sign, on Brooklyn’s Pier Six. That’s about a 20 minute walk through the Brooklyn Bridge Park...
The American Dream Project
We’re melting. We, the people of the United States, who 230 years ago dreamed of forming a more perfect union. The American Dream is of a people who are decent,...
America’s Selfie Moment is Actually Mine
How iconoclastically mundane to claim a dream for a nation — we are all in each other’s dream, whether asleep or not. I think of the alliteration, the sprung rhythm...
Torpor and Awakening
This text is an adapted transcript of a keynote presented at the Indigenous Scholars Conference: Indigenous Epistemologies: Re-Visioning Reconciliation on 26 March 2015, at the University of Alberta. It has...
Giardino Ammirato: re-imagining public space at the Spring Session of Free Home University
The 2016 Spring Session of Free Home University started with a desire to take care of the public garden adjacent to the Ammirato Culture House, a hub for artistic social...
From the Editors: What is the first sound from the future?
When Musagetes conceptualized ArtsEverywhere in early 2015, we determined that many voices must be present side-by-side across all of the issues and themes that intersect throughout the online platform. (Read...
Alternative Institutions and Intimate Counter-Publics: Chto Delat’s School for Engaged Art and Rosa’s House of Culture
The following essay is the first in a monthly series on pedagogy, edited by Alessandra Pomarico, co-curator of the Free Home University in Lecce, Italy. Alessandra introduces the series here....
Formes pour vivre: An Experiment in Ecological-Environmental-Scientific Poetics
In this short essay my aim is modest and two-fold. First, I would like to share with you a story about an experiment in ecological-environmental-scientific-poetics that worked out beautifully. It worked...
Acting Locally: How Artists Can Shape the Nature of Change in their Communities
Two young women carefully balance freshly packed artworks as they embrace their hosts and exit a small bungalow just off the boulevard. They are in town from St. Louis, having...
Knowing vs. Doing: Propelling Design with Ecology
A review of Projective Ecologies, edited by Chris Reed and Nina-Marie Lister. 2014. ISBN: 1940291127. ACTAR, Harvard Graduate School of Design. 314 pages. Buy the book. Several months ago, I reviewed...
Improvising Freely: The ABCs of an Experience
The following text is excerpted from Lê Quan Ninh’s book, Improvising Freely: The ABCs of an Experience, translated from the French by Karen Houle with assistance from Pegleess Barrios & Melissa...
Improvisation & Policy: Notes for a Roundtable
A Roundtable on Improvisation & Policy will be convened by ArtsEverywhere, Musagetes, and the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI) on May 7, 2016. The roundtable will consider the following two questions:...
Decolonization, Reconciliation, and the Extra-Rational Potential of the Arts
On 11 June 2008, the gravity of a state-sponsored process that began more than 120 years earlier was finally acknowledged in the Canadian House of Commons. Inside the chamber, settler...
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner: The Rising Contemporary African Art Brand and the Burden of Africanness
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? borrows its title from Sidney Poitier’s 1967’s epic comedy-drama, a fitting metaphor, in reference to the astute observation of art historian Chika Okeke-Agulu that African artists have...
Come on, don’t be so white!
Rebelling against old thought patterns and stereotypes is a survival strategy for many artists of African heritage. And Europe still has a lot to learn in this respect. A sunny...
How laws evolve according to Lee Smolin, Time Reborn
A review of Time Reborn by Lee Smolin (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013) Years ago my now deceased sister and I would exchange letters, keeping each other abreast of daily life events–and...
Artists, Vagabonds, and an Accidental Nature Reserve in San Francisco Bay
A review of Refuge in Refuse: Homesteading Art and Culture, an exhibition curated by Robin Lasser, Danielle Siembieda, and Barbara Boissevain at SOMArts, San Francisco, USA. For such a far-reaching social and...
Up From the Basement: The Artist and the Making of the Just City
Governance, despite its own hopes for a universality of exclusion, is for the inducted, for those who know how to articulate interests disinterestedly, those who vote and know why they...
Social Practice Artwork: A Restaurant and Garden Serving up Connections to Urban Nature
Can an urban garden help us remember what it means to be human? Three months ago, we opened a slightly audacious restaurant and garden in a working-class suburb of Osaka,...
Abandoned and Auctioned, an Old House Finds a Future in Flowers
A review of Flower House Detroit, which ran October 16-18, 2015 at 11751 Dequindre St, Hamtramck, Michigan. Once again, something amazing and ephemeral has appeared in Detroit. Flower House Detroit (which was actually...
Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars
Review of Camille Puglia’s Glittering Images (Vintage, 2013) Paglia’s Sexual Personae burst upon the scene at the beginning of the 90s and a storm of controversy followed. Academics, art critics,...
Sex of the Oppressed
Sex of the Oppressed was first published in Russian by the Marxist Free Press (2013). What follows is the author’s Foreword to the book. The English translation by Jonathan Brooks...
Uno specchio per cinque (A mirror for five) — a serial story
Uno specchio per cinque (A mirror for five) is the title of a series of five episodes of a story conceived and written by the artist group Lu Cafausu as...
Why Design Matters
My vision for a just city is one where design and its power as a tool against inequality is leveraged for the benefit of all residents. As the director of...
Creative Place-Making—This is The Nature of Graffiti
Nature is all around us. Plants, animals, soil, air and water inhabit and animate our daily lives, whether you live in the country or in the city. We are invigorated...
More Precisely
Born in Harlem, James Baldwin was 63 years old when he died in 1987, his life bearing witness to significant social upheavals including the African-American civil rights movement of the...
Gracefully Post-Human?
Paradigm shift is not the evacuation of power, but rather its redistribution. Speaking at the University of Toronto in early February, feminist scholar Rosi Braidotti speculated on the impotence of...
The Spirit of All Over the Map
If a community is a safe haven from a world where people are ordinarily crushed and diminished into spectators as Paulo Freire wrote in Education for Critical Consciousness (1973),[i] then...
Exhibition Anatomy
CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN Since the late 1950s, the life of Carolee Schneemann (1939–) has been expressed through her artistic practice, first with the medium of paint and then through the medium...
Urban Encounters with Curatorial Collective Aisle 4
The built city shifts from being an articulation of zones and maps and blueprints to something that has tone, tempo, and flavour when its inhabitants step out of their doors,...
Parade of Noises
Rich Marsella’s music practice embraces wild sounds and elements of chaos. As an avant garde musician and composer, music gets exciting for him when noise is introduced into musical compositions...
Resilience Theory, from the Sciences to the Arts
While resilience is a quality that can be ascribed to the toughest amongst us, resilience theory is slightly different, an idea that comes from the sciences to describe a system’s...