Two Iraqi artists and one Palestinian artist

Hana’ taught at the College of Fine Arts, Baghdad University. She also earned a Ph.D. in art theory there.  Art students came from all over the Middle East and Europe, and could attend free of charge. Saddam Hussein abolished private universities. Now the University where she taught has lost its faculty to diaspora, it building was ravaged, its library destroyed and private universities are returning to Baghdad.

She told me of the deep contradictions of life under Saddam Hussein, there were no elections and if you joked you could die, but prior to sanctions she could travel freely. She had six works purchased by the government in the Modern Art Museum.
During the sanctions, Hana’ went to the archeological museum for inspiration.
She stated that she belongs to a group of artists who are pursing the theme of ruins, who all belong to what she called the “80s” generation in Iraq. They include Kareem Risan who left in 2004 for Syria and now lives in Canada, and Nazar Yahya who is in Jordan.

At the end of my trip I visited a second Iraqi artist, Dia Azzawi. He is older than Hana’. He has a degree in archaeology in 1962 from Baghdad University, then a degree in Fine Art in 1964. He worked at the archeology museum until the mid 1970s when he left Baghdad. He said it was “politically obvious that he could not stay. “

He is also a collector of contemporary art from Iraq.
He suggested to other artists the idea of  book art, a new format for Iraqi artists that was easily transportable. Selections from his book art collection have been shown in the U.S. in several venues with the title Dafatir, curated by Nada Shabout.

Azzawi  is also a curator. He has just created an exhibition called My Homeland of the work of seven Iraqi artists in Dubai and is also contemporary art advisor and curator for the Qatar Museum. 
He explained to me that there is a big market in fake contemporary Arab art. As the market demand has grown for contemporary Arab art, particularly among the emirates, who have a lot of money, but don’t know much about contemporary art, the collecting of works of name artists has led to the production of fakes. Jawad Salim for example, a was a premier Iraqi modern artist who was commissioned in 1958 to create the  Monument to Liberty in Baghdad, by the newly created Iraqi Republic (1958 – 1963, led by Abd al-Karim Qasim whose ties to Nasser led to his assasination by Baathists in collusion with the CIA)   Jawad Salim died in 1961 before his sculpture was completed. His work is currently being forged from old photographs.

Finally, the work of Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour is in an exhibition in Paris. Above you see her Palestinauts. I have followed her video work for two years and I think she is one of the most talented video artists addressing Palestinian issues (and the competition is stiff)

This show featured “Intergalactic Palestine. “All of her videos are riffs on populist genres, from cooking shows to horror movies, with the deeper metaphor of the anguishing condition of Palestine. But her trademark is that we laugh as we cry.
This video is a riff on science fiction about space. She even uses a remastered sound bite from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 “A Space Odyssey.” 
It starts with the artist, as a Palestinaut (cosmonaut plus astronaut), in her space ship, getting ready for take off. We hear “Jerusalem, we have a problem” , then “everything is back on track.” She lands on the moon and plants the Palestinian flag, walking carefully in her moon boots. She declares ” One small step for Palestinians, One giant leap for mankind” as she waves to the earth. Then she floats away into space and disappears.

The artist has explained ” The work reflects the fact that Palestinains are in limbo, without a state, as their homeland shrinks like a spot on the horizon . . . The moon landings reflect a widespread anxiety,  that in leaving home, we might never be able to return home again.Yet because this anxiety is universal, the pain of the real forced exodus of the Palestinians is doomed to remain a private grief, forgotten by the rest of the world.”

T.J. Clark on Guernica

Two great minds, Picasso and T.J. Clark matched in a lecture. At first I was dubious, when the first statement Professor Clark made was “Space was the form truth took for him as a painter.” This seemed unduly formal, detached. But by the end I was fascinated, and only slightly unhappy, with his analysis. At the beginning Clark declared “The twentieth century appeared in his (Picasso’s) work as a way of life coming to an end. … It was the end of the “room” in art, the world view of being and having was shattered to the core.” ( these quotes are based on my notes they are not exact). He did not elaborate on this comment, about which much can be said.

What I will add is that the metaphor of the room as a secure domestic place filled with our objects as the focal point of life, based on capitalism, acquisition, and obvliviousness to the rest of the world, was destroyed in World War I ( of course that isn’t true, it was only the hegemony of the British Empire that was destroyed) – but the painters in that crucial early twentieth century era sensed the impending destruction and  altered the domestic space in art into the layered, complexity of cubism. (Clark confusingly later refers to the destruction of Cubist “room-space” by Picasso, the Cubists were not actually concerned with room space, but with disrupting it, in my opinion. I think Clark overprivileges Picasso)

OK
Then point 2 , which was the most compelling insight for me, was that this was “the new face of war” of what has become the war on terror, our permanent war forever. We know that this is the first representation in art of deaths of civilians by bombing from the air ( the Germans were testing new planes in collaboration with Franco, just in case you need that fact filled in). Such a death is now so commonplace that we digest it with our breakfast.

Professor Clark stated that “”certain kinds of death break human contact” There is a “special obscenity” of this new death. “Privacy is torn apart, the room gives way to the street.” And this new reality led to Picasso’ s new way of imagining a public and political that is outside, rather than the interior sexual domesticities that had been his focus. ( Well there are the Three Musicans, from just after World War I, they are in an ambiguous space and they are scarey and scared).

Again, there is much elaboration possible. Clark showed us an odd sketch in outlining this movement outdoors, but he did not show the famous bone paintings of the early 1930s which are all on the beach and, to me presage, the nightmare of Guernica in thier frightening shapes. But of course one difference is that those giant “vagina dentata” heads are threatening, whereas in Guernica they are being attacked. He also failed to every mention the “dreams and lies of Franco,” that well known etching series. It presages Guernica in many ways, it is set outside, it has direct formal connections. When I asked about it in the questions, he first said it was not relevant, than brilliantly backtracked and rethought it as he talked about it.

A major point in the lecture was the enormous scale of the Guernica (mentioned again in the “dreams and lies” answer which he reminded us were tiny) the largest painting he ever did (of course determined by the scale of the site for which it was commissioned, not Picasso’s inclinations.) It was this scale as well as the subject AND the site itself, the pavilion of the Spanish Republican government as it fought for its life against unified fascist forces of church and state, that forced Picasso to change his way of working as well as out of his self referential narcissism.  The result is a monumental homage to the doomed people of Guernica. It is not the first time that the female victims of war have been represented, (look at Kathe Kollwitz), but it is because it is by Picasso, the most famous.

One of the most intriguing parts of the lecture was Clark’s detailed analysis of how Picasso achieved this transformation of his inclinations to represent the interior, personal, and the sexual, to the exterior public death, by his removal of sexual references, of references to Greek, to males, his step by step ( based on those daily photographs by Dora Maar) changes in the relationships in the painting.

But then Professor Clark declared that in the painting we have “flatness finding its feet”  ( it was a pun too, as he emphasized the feet in the painting) . WHAT, we are talking about re defining the idea of pictorial space in response to tragedy, and we have “flatness”. Flatness is of course that tiresome idea of Clement Greenberg’s. The flatness here is defined by Clark as “the collapse of modernity” . That’s not hard to disagree with as an idea,  but actually there isn’t flatness in Guernica,  it has all sorts of erratic spatial relations, and it is the erratic relationships that suggest the tragedy, as far as I am concerned. Some of the figures are flat, some of them are in the extreme surface of the painting, but others are not, particularly at the bottom of the painting, there is an indication of recession or at least volume. ( he talked a lot about the bottom of the painting as a complex problem) But the flatness here is, then, humanity run over by a war machine.

Clark’s final statement that these are “hieroglyphics of states of agony” was wonderful.
His lecture was about HOW an artist transforms his personal response to disaster into the elements of a painting, and for Picasso, according to Clark, it was in the transformation of space.

Of course, this almost eliminates the content completely. The bull, the light, all symbolism. The possiblity of resistance is nil, mankind is simply a victim and of course that is the case so often in war, the human is simply a pawn in a system of power, and this is the representation of that moment according to Clark. But emptying all content, except the moment of bombing, I think is unduly flattening the painting. Eliminating all reference to resistance (the woman flying into the center with that incredible light which for me suggests humanity and resistance) makes this image only one of despair.

Clark has become a formalist? Or is he re defining formalism in a social context.  I think the latter.  I hope so. I hope this is slight of hand, play the vocabulary of formalism into a new context. Clark is, of course, of that particular breed, academic marxists. They are all brilliant, but on some level, they all disturb me. They are so dry and removed from feeling the horrors. Their social concern for the state of the world is undoubtedly real, but their writing is so turned inward that it contradicts what Marx realized was necessary in the age of industrial capitalism, resisting oppression through collective action in public spaces.  Clark and Picasso’s public space (or ambiguous public private space) actually is not a committed activist space. We know what happened next to Picasso, he joined with the Communists and the Resistance during the Occupation of Paris. Then he went back to his old domestic ways for the most part in his later years. We have to acknowledge that Dora Maar was the radical that really was a key to Guernica.

Two plays about war and one "quilt"

Theaters can make statements about war, directors care, but sometimes it is a little ambiguous what the plays actually say. Two plays in Seattle, Henry V and An Iliad (a modern play performed by one actor, that refers back to the classic but also inserts contemporary references), each one is obviously responding to our permanent war culture.

The first Henry V by Shakespeare is really celebrating victory against long odds in war. It was used to rally the British morale during World War II, with a film version starring Laurence Olivier. Prince Hal was a pretty wild kid, but he became King Henry V.When the Church gives him a chunk of money (to avoid having their lands confiscated according to the play’s beginning), he’s off to war in France, based on some shakey premise that France is actually belonging to the English because of way back when family connection (that sounds like Israel in Palestine). Anyway off he goes and he beats the complacent French at Agincourt because (although this wasn’t emphasized but my knowledgable husband informed me) they use the older technology of the longbow while the French used a cross bow with a shorter range. The real story of the war not included in this play, is rather grim, with many women and children dying in a siege.

So is this an anti-war statement??? The Director said in the program that her best friend’s son was in Afghanistan. It seems to me the play was an homage to the courage of soldiers.
But then there is Shakespeare’s own perspective. It has been said that on the one hand he creates heartfelt speeches by King Henry, on the other hand suggests he is ruthless, and his men mock him.

This play was commissioned by Queen Elizabeth because the Irish troubles had already begun, so perhaps it was intended to give heart to the British. But, of course, underlying it, is the ordinary people and their ordinary thoughts, always a feature of Shakespeare. And of course they were wet, dirty and sometimes uninterested.

To further mitigate its anti war statement, in this production there was a mix of 1940s war costumes, seen here, and 1960s Pop around the Princess Catherine of France who at the end marries our Henry V, which did bring peace. So that makes the war worthwhile??? Or could he have married her anyway and no war. He was offered her at the beginning of the war. ( It is a little like the Vietnam War, Kissinger was offered a peace before it started and in the end had exactly what he was offered at the beginning, after so many years)
Odd Play. Here is another opinion.

An Iliad (this isn’t much of a picture but it is all they have on the website, obviously the character was posed before the production) , created by Denis O Hare and Lisa Peterson (who also directed it) was an entirely different matter. It was a tour de force performance by a single actor, Hans Alweis, and he played the entire range of characters ( Hector, Achilles, Ageammenon, Patroklus, Priam, Helen, Paris, Andromache, Astynax the baby son of Andromache and Hector , Zeus, Thetis, Athena) brilliantly, as well as himself (perhaps Homer) and himself again ( a contemporary who sees the meaninglessness of war).

The selections from the Iliad, the parts that were chosen, were perfect to convey the stupidity of war, the needless suffering, the insanity of killing, the arrogance, the egos, the hesitation, the thoughts of avoiding war that were not acted on, all of it was there. The recital of wars from ancient history to the present was staggering, presented in a soft voice that seemed to come out of the actor like a slow drip of blood. It was a similar intention to the slide show at the end of Henry V of art works about war, but had much more impact. The simple recital fit with the poetic homage of the play as a whole.
An  Iliad gave us the full persepctive on what war is about and an extraordinary performance.

But then there is the Srebenica Quilt made by the widows, sisters, daughters of survivors of that terrible massacre. Each square is an homage to a lost loved one. Each one is actually woven, it is not a quilt, it is done in the flat weave kilim style, a heritage of the Ottoman Empire in this area. It is done by a group of brave, activist women who are extraodinary survivors, who are claiming a burial ground for their loved ones, who are reburying them, who are organizing to declare that they are going forward. This is the message of woman. I wish there were a play about that.

From Oppression to Liberation

 “Boycott Israeli Apartheid” the  pro Palestinian protest at Westlake Plaza in downtown Seattle had a huge audience last weekend because it coincided with a “flash”, a coming together of young people. The Boycott, Divestment Sanctions campaign is a long project. It is just beginning. The people of Palestine and pro Palestinian Israelis and other people around the world are urging the world to support this campaign that compares the current situation in Palestine Israel to apartheid in South Africa. The Palestinians are trapped in their cities by endless checkpoints. They are living in open prisons, they cannot get to work, their fields are being stolen by the wall. The campaign is asking people not to buy Israeli products, like Naot shoes, and to advocate for divestment of investments in Israel such as Motorola and Caterpillar. Here is an image with some of the companies that do business in Israel.

Of course the largest factor in the situation is the enormous US support for the Israeli military budgets. We send untold billions there every year. End the Occupation is a project to help us educate the American public and lobby Congressmen on the issues.

Not far away from the pro Palestinian rally, there was an immigrant rights rally, hundreds of people protesting the deportations, proposed horrendous legislation, and advocating for their rights.  They oppose further militarizing the border, and they support legalizing their status. They came here simply to make a living because many people are increasingly unable to do so where they live, often because of our Free Trade policies that are dumping cheap agricultural products in Mexico, putting farmers out of business.

The film festival was sponsored by Tasveer, which has been going for about nine years, an amazing and enterprising operation. It is partnering with Chaya, a group that advocates for and provides services to South Asian women who are victims of domestic violence. Yoni Ki Baat ( Vagina Monologues) was a series of courageous monologues by women who addressed dating, marriage, cultral traditions, sexuality, coming out, childbearing, and female circumcision.

And finally, there was an Indian PowWow, a celebration and example of an extraordinary resurgence of American Indian cultures, traditions, languages, and pride. Far from being obliterating, tribes are asserting their rights and recovering their languages and traditions.

So from oppression to liberation, from the beginning of a resistance, to the results of resistance, from people in the midst of struggle to people healing themselves to people celebrating their liberation.

Very inspiring. People organizing together really do make a difference, they really can change the world. And artists are an integral part of that.  Doing nothing or just talking really does waste that potential. As Arundhati Roy says in one of her brilliant essays in Field Notes on Democracy ” “There is something pitiable about a people that constantly bemoan its leaders. If they’ve let us down, it is only because we’ve allowed them to.”

Kiki Smith 2 and Milton Rogovin

So  I went back to the Henry Art Gallery’s Kiki Smith exhibition “I myself have seen it” for another look. It is a complex exhibition and deserves a lot of looks. First I watched the Art 21 video which was really helpful . She talks about death masks, her grandmother’s, her father’s, her sister’s. She herself is cast, that is terrifying. And she talked about Genevieve the savior of Paris.

So when I saw the series about Genevieve in the exhibition, it was clear what she was doing. The exhibition includes six photographs of parts of the sculpture, a profile face, lips, a hand,  the legs of a wolf ( perhaps signifying the enemy that Genevieve’s prayers staved off from Paris), the wolf’s furry face, four animal feet. Together they create an imaginary narrative, much more than the sculpture in which G calmly steps over a supine animal, but this narrative is another story, a story of fragments of bodies that seem to be frozen, even as they create, collectively, a sense of anxiety. The stasis is perhaps related to Genevieve’s spiritual nature. But there didn’t seem to be any suggestion of the actions that she took to save the people by bringing grain.

Going through the rest of the show starting with a young girl trapped (floating?) in a branch, to odd photographs that seem to evoke fragments of organs, to Mary Magdalene ( we know her story, Christ’s “fallen” woman) , to Lot’s Wife (who turned to a pillar of salt, if you remember), to the Harpies (perched about on mouldings high above us) , to the witches, to the little girls, dead white animals, dead black crows, shredded puppet, worms, and a photograph of just Guanyin’s head on its side (the image is in previous post) which does not suggest her power as a goddess of love and mercy and childbearing. There is only one message for me – violence against women, and especially little girls. The show is presenting frighened girls  and oddly powerless witches. Even fairy tales where little girls succeed, like Alice in Wonderland, seem to be oddly ambibuous – will she succeed in escaping her pursuers??

The question is why doesn’t Kiki Smith say what her real subject is, why is she so unwilling to be an advocate for all the victims she creates in her sculptures?? Why does she make victims from powerful goddesses and biblical women. Why can’t they fight back? Why doesn’t she fight back? My intelligent friend Deborah Lawrence talked me out of saying it is about personal trauma. What do I know, but why is Smith so obsessed with this single subject of death and threats of death and powerlessness.

The contrast to Cindy Sherman comes to mind who works from film, that, like fairy tales, are often about violence against women (in fact the new mythology), but we know they are re-staged with herself as the main actor, and she is opposing violence against women by calling attention to it. 

Kiki adds to the victims in the world without doing anything for them. As far as I am concerned this is not feminism.

In an intriguing revelation, she mentioned that she had worked with Bread and Puppet theater for awhile. But she takes their confrontational approach and empties it of all resistance in making these  prone or frozen or fragmented women and girls.

And what an amazing contrast to the adjacent gallery at the Henry with the photography of Milton Rogovin.

 He has photographed the working class for fifty years. He went to Chile ( the image above is from Chile,) Appalachia, photographing. among others, the families of miners and the miners themselves (particularly resonant at the moment with the horrifying greed propelled, mine accidents in the non unionized mines )and repeatedly to the Lower West Side of New York City. His people are dignfiedand strong. He honors them with his photographs.
He wrote poetry about the subjects of his work.
Here are a few of his comments.
“They are regular people just like the rest of us. We must not abandon them.”
“Everybody should have an opportunity for a better education.”
” All around we saw people with great potential but we knew none of them would realize it under the conditions of our society.”

Here is a man who cares deeply about the human condition and has spent his life recording it and speaking up for what he believes.

Kiki Smith

Plum Blossoms in the Spring Pure Poetry

 

The William Kentridge Moment in New York CIty

I was privileged to be there, during what was referred to as the “William Kentridge moment” in New York City. It combined his major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, “Five Themes”, a lecture at the New York Public Library “Learning from the Absurd” and his groundbreaking  production of “The Nose” at the Metropolitan Opera. William Kentridge directed, made the set designs (with Sabine Theunissen), and staging, (including a nose the size of a human being dancing around and even singing ), proscenium curtain, and banner. Also part of his team was Urs Schonebaum from Munich, who did the lighting, and Catherine Meyburgh from South Africa who did the video compostions.

Dimitri Shostakovich wrote the opera in 1928 at the age of 22. It was produced in 1930 ( in Leningrad/St. Petersburg). It was not performed in the Soviet Union again until 1974. Shostakovich survived Stalinism, unlike many of his brilliant contemporaries, but he was shattered by it. “The Nose” represents a watershed moment of brilliant experimentation.

At the Metropolitan Opera the music was conducted by world famous Shostakovich expert Valery Gergiev. Its extraordinary music is atonal and non lyrical, as well as filled with satirical references to traditional musical forms like folk music and chorales. But its main characteristic is the incredible use of unpitched percussion. It is based on a Gogol short story of ten pages called The Nose, written in 1836. The nose is a character on its own. The owner of the nose wakes up to discover his nose is gone, he has various adventures ( as the nose dances around the stage in both real time and on the animated film sequences that Kentridge created, borrowing from all sorts of Russian, modernist sources.) The extraordinary singing by Paulo Szot, who played Kovalyov, the mid level bureaucrat who lost his nose when he had a shave ( it fell into the barber’s flour supply and reappeared in his bread the next morning)  and therefore his position in the world, is a Brazilian baritone who sang almost non stop for one and a half hours. He was thrilling. I am now a convert to opera.

Kentridge animated the stage and its surroundings with the Russian avant garde art of Lissitzky, Malevich, with moving red squares, black lines, red circles. The costumes ( by Greta Goiris) drew on Popova’s famed constructivist inspired dresses. The proscenium curtain was a giant collage with all sorts of amusing references, such as a list of the hierarchies of people under the tsar that starts with angels, the tsar, with actors way down the list with slaves, then thieves, pirates, gypsies, Jews/Muslims, animals, plants and finally stones. Then there was the hierarchy in Stalinist Russia, self seekers, loafers, careerists, morally corrupt, cadets menshiviks, democratic centralists, workers opposition, three times contemptible degenerates. Then there is the hierarchy ( not on the curtain, but recited in the lecture) of apartheid South Africa, Whites, Japanese, Chinese, Other Asians, Indian, colored, black. And we know about Mexico and its mind bogglingly complex castata. Which is to say that all hierarchies are futile exercises in arbitrary and meaningless status driven by the desire for power. The Nose, short story, opera, performance all refer to the absurdity of stature and how it is endowed.

Kentridge has also done a performance that related directly to the Opera, “I am not me, The Horse is Not Mine,” which I wrote about when I saw it last year ( search the blog under Kentridge). His theme is the great aspirations and tragic failure of the Russian Revolution and its artists. And yet, the exuberance of his set and the staging of the absurdist play suggests his love of this art as well as its hopes. The performance began with an animation of the silhouette of a marching worker carrying a red flag across the stage. ( We all know about the importance of processions for Kentridge with the layers of meaning from protest to desperation)

Kentridge as a white South African and genre defying artist, working in animated film, drawing, prints, and collage, is deeply political, but he defined it, in a conversation at the New York Public Library, as conveying the political as surprising, as having an “uncertain ending.” His work is laced with the humor of the Cabaret Voltaire defiance of World War I and its absurd performances. He throws us off from any certainty, he plays with the ridiculous, the illogical, the embarrassing , the accidental, the digressive, selecting from various experimental actions what will work in his performances. He has given us “sketches” in a DVD accompanying his book Five Themes that include some of the ideas he didn’t use. He is absolutely in tune with Gogol and Shostakovich themselves, who perpetuated the same kind of disruptions with the novel and music respectively.

His animated films, including the story of Soho Ekstein, the greedy capitalist, and Felix Teitelbaum the neurotic lover, along with Mrs. Eckstein are about greed and love (love as a type of greed). His technique of animating drawings by sequential erasers is poignent and deeply moving. Ubu and the Truth Commission, with Ubu referring back to another Dada character, the impossibly self important  despot Ubu from the Alfred Jarry play, is another performance that uses puppets, as he did last year in “The Return of Ulysses.” “Ubu Tells the Truth” a film from 1997 has some shockingly violent sequences, including a person being chopped up and exploded three times.
From the Soho and Felix group, here is a line of starving workers and nearby the greedy capitalist stuffs his face from Kentridge’s first film, Johannesburg, the Second Greatest City after Paris, 1989. One vivid image in this film was the capitalist using a coffee press, and the press goes right down into the deep underground and sets off charges that explode into the veins of a mine.

The Nose opera, the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, the lecture, all together comprise the astonishing work of one of the most extraordinary artists working today. He draws on not only Russian avant-garde art of the 1920s and Dada, but also on German Expressionism, that great style of political protest art in Germany.

Living in post apartheid South Africa and having lived tin South Africa all his life, he is acutely aware of the absurdity of contrived hierarchies that make some people superior to other people. He is undermining those certainties of who is important and who is not, and Gogol’s short story and Shostakovich’s opera with their wandering nose looking for status, removing it from its owner, and giving it to another person of “higher rank”, etc, is a perfect ( he would say literal) example of the absurdity of who is powerful and who is not. That is the most subversive political statement I can imagine.

Of course, I am myself very opinionated about politics, and I feel that opinions and taking a stand for what I believe in is important. So why does Kentridge appeal to me so much? Because I can feel that underlying the wonderful humor, the absurdities, there is a man who cares very, very deeply about humanity. His work “the Black Box,” addressing the ravaging of Africa by whites in the nineteenth century, is filled with pathos. The arbitrary slaughter of rhinocerous shown with vintage footage, connects directly to our continuing random slaughter of the planet for sport and greed.

But Kentridge also believes that humor, of which he makes such use in many of his works, can encompass the experience of the many, while tragedy only the experience of the individual. So he relies on humor, our collective laughter, and our recognition of our shared humanity as we laugh, to get ideas across.

In The Nose performance, and the related section of MOMA exhibition, Bukharin, that most deeply intellectual of the early Russian Revolutionary idealists, speaks up for humanity, may also speak for Kentridge, even as the words are those of a man who is laughed at, and, ultimately, condemned.
There is a lot more to say, but I will stop there for now. Kentridge will be the Conclusion of my book on Art and Politics Now so buy the book next summer when it comes out for more analysis.

Kentridge at the New York Public Library.

PS And the contrast could not have been starker with the shallow and failed works in the 2010 Whitney Biennial. I hope those artists attend Kentridge’s exhibition.

International Women’s Day March in Seattle

On Saturday March 6 we had an amazing march. We walked for over two hours and went to a recruiting station, the King County Jail, the ICE Immigration Center and Seattle Human Services, with a rally/ speaker in front of each place. We ended at Occidental Square where the Duwamish were there in spirit. We had all ages, all ethnicities, all issues, all political positions joining together. Radical Women were well represented. Also Amnesty International, as well as National Organization of Women, and Pinay, Gabriela, CARA, photographs below and more information. It was exhiliarating and inspiring.

Pinay Filipina group. Gabriela was also represented, a mass solidarity group that is politically leftist and really activist.
They led us in chants.
This child is left behind after his parents were deported. He is an American citizen so he got to stay here all by himself. He looks like he is about four years old.

These are Iranian women offering us information for supporting the women of Iran

This is Margo Heights speaking in front of the Jail and across the street from ICE ( Immigration Detention Center). 1 our of every 3 women on the planet who are in jail is locked up in the United States.
Most women are imprisoned for economic crivmes. The majority of women convicted for violent crimes were defending themselves or their children against abuse. In the U.S. a woman is raped every six minutes.

These are people listening to the speaker from Real Change about homelessness in front of the Seattle Human Services.

These are women from CARA, Communities Against Rape and Abuse

This is a general photograph of us taking over downtown.

Seattle Labor Chorus

Raging Grannies

The Duwamish watching over us in this space that used to belong to them, although they didn’t make the totem pole and totem poles are not a Duwamish art form, at least it is a reference to the Indigenous people who lived in Seattle.
No explanation needed

A young feminist ready to play songs for us.