Poetic Rage, Anti-colonial Avant-gardes

An excerpt of Interior Frontiers

This essay distills what I see as a fugitive, peripatetic set of counter-colonial avant-gardes, innovative and mobile to different degrees, challenging both what avant-gardes do and who are included among them. I do not treat them as a movement but as convergent spaces of work and thought, of “counter-conducts,” of ...
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Poetic Rage, Anti-colonial Avant-gardes

The Walls of Santiago

How the Joker and Pikachu become symbols of the Chilean social uprising, in an excerpt from Terri Gordon-Zolov and Eric Zolov’s new book

Humor provided a powerful weapon in the fight to topple the civic-military dictatorship. The radical deprivation of human rights during the Pinochet regime had secondary costs, among which were the loss of a sense of freedom, spontaneity, and overall well-being. ...

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The Walls of Santiago

Turning Art into a Political Weapon

Scholars Terri Gordon-Zolov and Eric Zolov discuss the aesthetics and significance of the Chilean estallido

Wearing protest iconography was also a way to support the movement. And it was potentially risky. You could wear a handkerchief to cover your eyes from tear gas or to make yourself more anonymous or you could wear a green scarf to support reproductive rights. ...

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Turning Art into a Political Weapon

Souvenir

Adapted excerpt from Activities of Daily Living

For her project about the Artist—at least that’s what she was calling it for now, a project—Alice read all that she could find about his yearlong performance works before he renounced making art altogether. There was the year he locked himself in a cage. The year he punched a time clock ...
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Souvenir

How Charlie Brown Remained A “Good Man”

Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz went to great lengths to avoid political controversy. But as culture became more political, he navigated that challenge with skill and grace

_____ Charlie Brown had a hard time choosing sides. This was always part of the humor of his character. It was also one of the many things he hated about himself. On New Year’s Eve 1965 Charlie Brown, the star of cartoonist Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts, decided to change: he would be decisive, clear-cut, ...
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How Charlie Brown Remained A “Good Man”

What Can’t be Contained

A conversation between Alexandra Délano Alonso and Macushla Robinson

_____ In March of 2020, with the pandemic devastating New York and Queens being declared the “epicenter of the epicenter” it felt impossible to find words to describe the uncertainty, the losses, the distance. Over the coming months, Alexandra Délano Alonso gathered images and fragmentary language to hold what was (and still ...
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What Can’t be Contained

Thinking Design through Literature

Identity: The cultural politics of things and places

_____ Where design projects possibilities, literature activates their potential and shows their effects. Brought together in Thinking Design through Literature, they form a new and wider tributary in the thought of things and places.  That said, in this excerpt from the chapter on culture, readers will note that the word ‘design’ ...
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Thinking Design through Literature

Teaching Through the Pandemic

In a course about memorializing HIV-AIDS, students learned about community by making one

_____ Everyone involved in education has found the past year to be a special challenge for teaching, learning, and simply making it from one day to another. But how do you teach students about a pandemic during a pandemic? In December 2020, queer historian Dan Royles interviewed Theodore (Ted) Kerr and his ...
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Teaching Through the Pandemic

Broom Swept

Failure tells a tale about capitalism too

_____ What closes and then darkness, what opens and then bright?Before the horn has risen,where hides the lord of light? —Tian Wen, A Chinese Book of Origins  How you frame something is a moral decision. —Babette Mangolte On Mercer Street, on the island of Manhattan, and just before the city paused, walking in a southerly direction ...
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Broom Swept

The Urn

How I Stopped Loving Design

Despite the disappointment, something very valuable was salvaged from our conversations. We had been sharing our enthusiasm for the writers Jerzy Pilch and Olga Tokarczuk when Pawel introduced me to the work of  Marcin Wicha.  Wicha is as sardonic as Pilch and Tokarczuk, and like them, he writes about politics. ...
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The Urn

5 Charts that Explain COVID-19 Impacts in NYC

Social Vulnerability Indicators Predict Inequity in NYC COVID-19 Cases

Once again frontline, low income and communities of color are most impacted. At the time of this writing, there have been 147,297 confirmed cases and 15,869 deaths in New York City, with the City on mandatory “P.A.U.S.E” until May 15, 2020. In early March, the Urban Systems Lab team asked the question, ...
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Evoking Artist As Mother

An Interview With Myla Goldberg

Hayleigh Santra [HS]: How did you come up with the idea for Feast Your Eyes? Myla Goldberg [MG]: For me, the book started with a question: Is it possible to be both an excellent artist and an excellent parent, or to be one of those, do you have to kick the ...
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Evoking Artist As Mother