Last Friday, January 11, Idle No More London staged a UK solidarity action in London’s British Museum. Standing in solidarity with the Idle No More movement, which originated last November with the First Nations, Metis, and Inuit communities in Canada, members of Idle No More London chose the museum that is widely believed to be the largest repository of colonial artifacts in the world as the site for their protest action.
January 14, 2013
Posted inOpinion
Imagining the Payphones of the Future
I suspect everyone who’s wandered around New York — or any major city, really — has had the experience of walking past a payphone and wondering about its fate. Public phones often strike me as the ultimate objects in transition, relics from a pre-digital age dotting the cityscape. It may be a coincidental sign of the times that the vendor contracts for New York City’s more than 11,000 (!) payphones will expire next year.
Posted inArt
Looking at Colonial Africa in Black and White
CINCINNATI — Meet Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes, who may be one of the last people to create a black-and-white movie. In order to make his art-house drama Tabu the way he wanted, Gomes searched and found one of the remaining labs in Europe capable of processing black and white 35mm film stock, right before it closed for good.
Posted inArt
The Vandals Are No Longer Too Hot To Handle at MoMA
Last week, I witnessed an art event I thought would possibly never occur: the Museum of Modern Art made a serious step forward in recognizing the cultural importance of graffiti writing and hip hop at their fascinating panel discussion, “Writers and Writers: Narrative on the Page and in the Street.”
Posted inNews
A New Open Source Manual for Raspberry Pi, A Kid-friendly Programmable PC
LOS ANGELES — Raspberry Pi, an award-winning open hardware board meant to teach computer science, is one of those educational gateways that could serve as a bridge for learners. Which is why I was excited to learn about the new Raspberry Pi Education Manual, put out by Computing at School. Available on a Creative Commons License as a free PDF, the manual walks through the ins and outs of Raspberry Pi.
Posted inArt
Mickalene Thomas and the Seduction of Beauty
Mickalene Thomas’s current exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum is a visual marvel. Bright colors, shimmering rhinestones, chaotic patterns, and bold-faced women abound. And not separately, mind you — Thomas has a proclivity for mashing up up into exquisitely rendered wholes that take the cut-and-paste aesthetic to a nearly explosive endpoint. If there’s one thing her work doesn’t lack, it’s energy.
