Fiona Apple - "Hot Knife"

If I'm butter...love this.

Everybody Street - A Street Photography Documentary Trailer

No le digas a nadie (Don't Tell Anyone)

 "In the shadows of an abusive past and a precarious future, undocumented immigrant activist Angy Rivera tells her extraordinary journey from poverty in rural Colombia to the front page of the New York Times." 

An important story and cause.  Donate at Seed and Spark to make this documentary happen.

NPR: How The Death Of A 12-Year-Old Changed The City Of Dallas

Twelve-year-old Santos Rodriguez was shot and killed by a police officer in Dallas on July 24, 1973.

 

Like a Lunatic

Hikari Shimoda

Let me first say I love these paintings! It makes me reconsider how I bring the portrait/color/feeling into my own work.  Hikari Shimoda is a Japanese artist, obviously influenced by Mangaand Lisa Frank-like stickers but there is a heavier emotional tension to them.

"Impacted by the catastrophic earthquake in Japan in 2011, Hikari painted a series of children who have magical features as a result of the power plant explosion from the earthquake. 'The work mainly takes up the problem which people live in modern society faces with a child motif, create a original world view mixing innocently cutie and painfully eerie based on the way of expression peculiar to Japan'."Juxtapoz

Don't let it get you

Theaster Gates

awesome.

We're sorry

David Hammon - "Hood"

David Hammon's "Hood," (directly above) came to mind the second I heard the verdict that Zimmerman was found not guilty is his case involving Trayvon Martin.   This piece was made in 1993 and is still so relative 20 years later. Fucking heart breaking- and so enraging.

Fruitvale Station

Malala Yousafzai

 

Malala Yousafzai spent her 16th birthday demanding compulsory education for young people worldwide.

 In a speech Friday at the UN in New York, the Pakistani schoolgirl who was shot in the head in October 2012 for speaking out about her right to education, talked about how she represents some 57 million children around the world are not going to school.

"We realize the importance of our voice when we are silenced." 

Robin Rhode

“The source of inspiration is something which is not even a consciousness. It’s intuitive.” -Robin Rhode

Cosby Show favorite

BaaaAAAABAAAAaaaaay

Educate, Agitate, Organize

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry Documentary

I don't know why it took me so long to see this movie because I love Ai Weiwei's work- But I saw this movie last night and was completely inspired.  It really brings forward what an artist is capable of doing and their responsibility within society.  beautiful.

The Underground Newsstand

cool idea.

pairs

Hiro Kurata

Wardell Milan

Whitfield Lovell

Whitfield Lovell, a 2007 MacArthur Fellowship winner, is internationally renowned for his thought-provoking images of anonymous African Americans from the 19th and 20th centuries. Using old black and white photographs taken in the early and mid-twentieth century, and more recently, imagery from contemporary sources, the Bronx born and raised artist pays tribute to his ancestors by spiriting them into the present. HunterMuseum

Romare Bearden

Romare Bearden was originally from Charlotte, North Carolina.  Grew up during the heart of the Harlem Renesance and graduated from NYU.  He was surrounded by the New York city jazz scene and was lucky enough to call Duke Ellington one of his first patrons. He began his collage works in the 1960s after working mostly in the realm of abstract painting.

 "Born into a middle-class, educated family, he chose subjects for many of his paintings and collages that represent a life of agrarian toil. An early trauma came in 1914, when the artist was 3. Walking one day a few blocks from his family’s grocery store, Bearden, who was light-skinned, with curly blond hair, was nearly snatched by a white mob from his darker-skinned father. Shortly after that, the family migrated north to Harlem, and Bearden’s South became, as he put it, “a homeland of my imagination.” One essay in the catalog argues that over the next 45 years, Bearden in his art “returned to family scenes that he could not possibly remember.”NYT

 NPR's Neda Ulaby reporteded on The National Gallery of Art's retrospective of Bearden's work in 2003.  It was The Gallery's first major retrospective of an African-American artist.