Racism
The writer of Bunk on American hucksterism, racism, plagiarism, and why we believe what we want to believe.
Two improvisers and composers discuss their involvement in New York’s experimental music scene.
A 1971 photograph by Jan van Raay shows artist Cliff Joseph leading a group of artist-activists—members of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC)—in the dead of winter protesting the Whitney Museum’s controversial exhibition Contemporary Black Artists in America (months before its opening on April 7, 1971).
“I can’t distill it all,” Evie Shockley confesses in her contribution to this vital and multifarious print offshoot of Claudia Rankine’s online Open Letter Project.
I met Claudia Rankine in a parking lot after a reading, where I said crazy fan things like, “I think we see the same thing.”
Bill Orcutt discusses his new solo album A History of Every One, bending genres in Harry Pussy, Bob Dylan, authenticity, and the history of blackface.
Artist Tia-Simone Gardner and Dr. Jeffreen Hayes of the Birmingham Museum of Art discuss the museum’s contribution to the 50 Years Forward campaign, marking the 50th anniversary of the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.
It’s high noon in Bruneville. Not a cloud in the sky.
Some images in life and art remain seared in one’s memory because of their sublime effect and power. Such images are found and masterfully constructed in the films of Cauleen Smith.
The legendary animator and filmmaker Ralph Bakshi, innovator of documents of generational angst like Fritz the Cat and Coonskin, has turned to visual art.
How does national identity influence the interpretation of an artwork?
Johannesburg to New York, a joint exhibition by Samson Mnisi and Cannon Hersey, at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts succeeds, ultimately, at inspiring unity.
Montana Wojczuk reviews the documentary William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe.
My first grade teacher explained to us why we shouldn’t put coins in our mouths.
Keith Mayerson on how Randy Wray’s paintings and sculptures channel a Southern gothic sensibility through a 21st-century surrealist technique. Mayerson is currently showing work at Derek Eller Gallery.
Justin Peters is told by his department how he must teach the Great Books course he has been assigned.
Ellen Douglas’s Truth: Four Stories I Am Finally Old Enough to Tell contains scattered tales and facts gathered from her relatives, and the residents and archives of the author’s community.
Maurice Berger and Patricia Williams are old friends from very different backgrounds who have been dialoging on race for years. This time we were lucky enough to sit in as they take on the widening gap in America’s race relations.
Rilla Askew’s first novel, The Mercy Seat, stems from her family’s stories of the migration west to Oklahoma. This novel tracks the legacy of that journey: the violence, the clash of native and European cultures and the pioneers.
Out on the road, Los Lobos’s Louis Pérez and King Changó’s Andrew Blanco get down on ska, Godzilla and growing up Latino in the new America.