ART THAT INSPIRES US TOWARDS JUSTICE & STRONG ALLIANCES FOR CHANGE
AUGUST 2021 ISSUE
Ta-Nehisi Coates
"But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body." Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
The quote is from the website Marie Claire titled Black Lives Matter Quotes That Are Powerful, Informative, and Necessary
"To be an artist, means never to avert one's eyes." Akira Kurosawa
War on the Body: Slavery, Genocide & White Supremacy
By Brooke Helmick
This project initially began as a class assignment, but the more I thought and worked and drafted, the more connected to this work I became. I wanted to develop a work (however painful it was to create) that showed the America I had come to see. Far from white picket fences and burgers on the Fourth of July, this America (arguably the more accurate version) was nothing like what I had learned about in grade school. As Americans, we might want to contend that our nation was built on freedom, liberty, and justice for all. Yet in spite of the ideologies that we claim to uphold, our true history paints a very different picture. Amidst committing genocide, forcing sterilizations, experimenting on minority communities, removing peoples from their lands, and holding slaves, the U.S. was also promising to uphold democracy and freedom. When choosing the images, I concentrated on centering the most marginalized voices. I asked myself: what were the stories I wish I had heard? Our textbooks are missing pages. We must speak not only of the “entrepreneurial spirit” or “American dream”, but of the people who experienced firsthand the brutality of the state. While I was building this work my heart hurt. I ached for those who were killed or experienced violence; those whose names we’ll never know and faces we’ll never see. My hope with this work is to ask us to sit for a moment and reflect on our personal politics to identify our role in upholding systems of oppression and actively work to undo, disrupt, and dismantle these violent institutions.
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WE ARE CALLING FOR SUBMISSIONS for the OCTOBER 2021 Issue: PROTECTING THE RIGHT TO VOTE: a clarion call for the people.
We’re actively seeking submissions - artworks, essays, and poetry - that address the right to vote.