Required Reading
This week: women’s strike in Argentina, graffiti dialogues in Brooklyn, UK museums hold human remains from former colonies, mini Tudor paintings, mapping The Met, and more.
Zahra Hankir took to the streets of Crown Heights to observe the dialogue playing out on lampposts and electrical boxes between pro-Palestine messages, often simple statements of fact, and the responses they elicit. For Acacia, she writes:
(One sticker on Nostrand, which illustrates some of these tensions, depicts a keffiyeh‑patterned fence and asks, What if you were in Gaza? What if they were your kids? Someone has added or Israel after Gaza and scrawled onto it: This is antisemitic bc it dehumanizes Jews. Everyone matters. The original poster writes back: Babe, I’m literally Jewish and I put this up xoxo.)
The rawness of the pro‑Palestine graffiti, Judy notes, underscores its authenticity: “It’s someone who felt a conviction and was looking for something that they could do, and they grabbed a can of spray paint and went out and started writing.”
By comparison, soon after October 7, Kidnapped posters of Israeli hostages appeared across New York. Their orderly type and coordinated rollout, complete with downloadable templates and instructions and a WhatsApp group, stood in stark contrast to the scrappy, anonymous pro-Palestinian signs, Judy tells me. One installation even reached Art Basel in Miami, where the flyers were transformed into ten-foot “milk cartons.”
Tudor enthusiasts unite — art historian Elizabeth Goldring writes for Smithsonian Magazine about her research on mini portrait tokens, almost like proto-valentines, by painter Nicholas Hilliard:
Because of their size, miniatures had the great virtue of being portable. Thus, in an era long before the invention of photography—much less the instantly communicable imagery of the cellphone—miniatures helped create intimacy across great distances. Unsurprisingly, husbands and wives, fiancés and fiancées, and illicit lovers (as Elizabeth and Leicester were rumored to be) frequently traded such portraits. The exchange of miniatures also formed an integral part of diplomatic negotiations, especially those relating to royal and noble marriages. Miniatures commissioned by and for those of high rank were often encased in elaborate pieces of jewelry so they could be worn.
The Guardian recently found that UK museums hold over 260,000 human remains, likely belonging to victims of colonial violence. David Batty reports:
Lord Paul Boateng said the findings exposed UK museums and universities as “imperial charnel houses where the bones of Indigenous peoples torn from Britain’s empire in the past, with little or no regard to the spiritual sensibilities of its people, continue to be retained to this day in circumstances that beggar belief”.
Bell Ribeiro-Addy, MP and chair of the all-party parliamentary group for Afrikan reparations, said it was barbaric that looted human remains were warehoused in boxes, with many museums not knowing who they belonged to.
The Department of Justice quietly released some of the missing Epstein files naming Donald Trump, including reports of sexual abuse. Read James Hill and Peter Charalambous report for ABC News with care:
According to the FBI 302 reports released Thursday, the FBI interviewed the woman four times between July and October 2019. During each of the interviews with the woman, whose identity is redacted, she made allegations of abuse against Epstein.
In her second interview with federal investigators, she claimed that Epstein once took her to either New York or New Jersey where he introduced to Trump when she was between the ages of 13 and 15 years old. According to the report, she claimed Trump abused her during that trip.
Activist Mahmoud Khalil, who was kidnapped by ICE last year from his Columbia University housing, pens a powerful letter in the Guardian to Leqaa Kordia, the last pro-Palestine protester from the school who remains in detention:
Between us, we carry the entire geography of Palestinian dispossession: the holy city they claim was never ours, Tiberias stolen and emptied of its people, the camps built to warehouse us, Ramallah where you grew up under occupation, Gaza where your mother lived and where you watched more than 100 of your family members be slaughtered, and the exile that has followed Palestinians across every ocean and border for 77 years.
We carry not only the dust of those memories but their mark on everything we are. Foreign powers promised our grandparents they could return. Then they were told to stop waiting. Then they were told to forget. We have done none of these things. We remember. We insist. We speak.
If Misty Copeland dragged me, I’d simply have to change my name and go off the grid. LA Times's Alexandra Del Rosario reports on the legendary ballerina's response to Timothée Chalamet's now-infamous comments about opera and ballet:
Copeland, who took her final bow at ABT after 25 years in the fall, said that “there’s a reason” ballet and opera have managed to last for centuries and said artists have a responsibility to make their art form more accessible and help people understand its relevance in “our culture.” Chalamet, born and raised in New York amid its rich fine arts scene, was also around ballet growing up: Both his mother and his sister, “Sex Lives of College Girls” star Pauline Chalamet, trained at the prestigious School of American Ballet, a pipeline to the renowned New York City Ballet.
Copeland said Chalamet “wouldn’t be an actor and have the opportunities he has as a movie star if it weren’t for opera and ballet and their relevance in that medium.”
In Manhattan's Chinatown, chain-store boba shops are opening up and pushing local businesses out:
Ramadan Mubarak! Rida Ali brings us into the history of the crescent moon and star symbol of Islam:
@freespiritrida If you’ve ever wondered why the crescent moon is on so much Islamic iconography, here’s an explainer! #history #ramadan #muslim #politics #explainer ♬ original sound - Freespiritrida
The New Yorker published a shoddy, disrespectul illustration for its profile of Wunmi Mosaku, who absolutely gleamed as Annie in Sinners. Artist DeAnn Wiley stepped in to offer an alternative:
My new love language is a museum map tailored to my personality:
@artbylgo Loving this particular hobby rn @The Met #artmuseum #nyc #metropolitanmuseumofart #museumtok #arthobby ♬ Amy (from "Little Women" Soundtrack) - Alexandre Desplat
