In Building a Better Monument, nine artists remind us of the work that anti-racist monuments and movements must do: memorialize the fallen, while stoking the righteous anger needed for transformation.
Thea Quiray Tagle
Thea Quiray Tagle, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies and Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She writes and thinks a lot about socially engaged art and site-specific performance; visual cultures of violence and waste; and surviving political and ecological collapse in the Pacific Rim. For more, visit theaquiraytagle.com.
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Seattle Museum Falls Short of “Reimagining” Asian Art as It Promised
Hopefully this renovation is not the endpoint of this institution’s reimagining of what an Asian art museum should be.
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A Team of Curators Designs a System for Indigenous Artists to Thrive In
The term ‘decolonization’ has been used frequently to describe the exhibition yəhaw̓. But you won’t hear its curators call it a decolonial project. So what is it, if not that?
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Who Profits from Waste? A Tale of Two Bay Area Cities
In San Francisco, artists in residence at the city dump are valorized for their work. In West Oakland, homeless people who rely on independent recycling centers are criminalized.
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Stories of War and Survival Unfold in San Francisco’s Presidio
Homeland Security takes over three decommissioned military bunkers, a church, and the former headquarters of the Nike Missile Program by staging paintings, installations, and social practice projects throughout.
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At the Venice Biennale, the Philippine Pavilion Favors Beauty Over Ugly Truths
VENICE — “People say I’m extravagant because I want to be surrounded by beauty. But tell me, who wants to be surrounded by garbage?” infamously asked “Iron Butterfly” Imelda Marcos in the eponymous 2003 documentary Imelda.
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The Intimate Dynamics of a Two-Person, One-Couple Show
SAN FRANCISCO — To be bound, inextricably, to another person throughout time.
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Keith Haring and the Artist as Witness
SAN FRANCISCO — At the end of the 2012 documentary How to Survive a Plague, we see a group of ACT UP protestors march on the nation’s capital with the ashes of their dead, a counterprotest to the exhibition of the AIDS Quilt on the Washington Mall.
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Art in the Grip of Riot Grrrl
SAN FRANCISCO — What would a “Revolution Grrrl Style Now!” look like now, some 20 years after the punk Riot Grrrl movement blasted onto the cultural landscape?