Muse/News: Protest art, citizen journalists, and radical quilts
SAM News
Brangien Davis of Crosscut reflects on art that protests and protest art, highlighting an 8-bit video game created by The Black Tones, Barbara Earl Thomas’s intricate paper cuts (to be featured in an upcoming show at SAM), and a “speculative fiction” press release imagining if SAM dissolved (which was erroneously published).
“Some art that erupts during social upheaval is momentary, some persists in minds and hearts, whether a poster, a painting, a flag, a fist or maybe even a video game.”
Local News
Jasmyne Keimig of the Stranger continues to cover both the action and the art around the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP); this week, she notes that “The Bathrooms at Cal Anderson Park Look Sick” after a recent paint job by two volunteers.
The Seattle Times features a comic from Lyla Dalnekoff, the 11-year-old creator of drawingthroughit.com. She explores our “new normal” and asks “what are you most excited to do once coronavirus pandemic restrictions are lifted?”
Crosscut’s Agueda Pacheco Flores and Margo Vansynghel interview Omari Salisbury, Tessa Hulls, and Ulysses Curr, three citizen journalists who have been documenting CHOP. With portraits by Dorothy Edwards.
“Hulls says she prefers to see herself as a ‘bullhorn,’ amplifying the voices and stories that larger media outlets or reporters who don’t cover the protests from the ground might miss.”
Inter/National News
This week, opinion pieces by arts and culture leaders from around the country:
Yesomi Umolu of the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago outlines “15 Points Museums Must Understand to Dismantle Structural Injustice.”
Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, asks, “Are you willing to give up your privilege?”
Dr. Kelli Morgan, a critical-race and cultural historian, addresses the expressions of white supremacy she sees in the museum field.
“If we are to eschew this exclusionary culture in American art and its institutions, it is imperative that we change the value system upon which both our art museums and our art history is founded.”
And Finally
Wrap yourself in the radical quilts of Rosie Lee Tompkins.
– Rachel Eggers, SAM Associate Director of Public Relations
