Are you Target Audience? Find out in Philly. Stay tuned for details on the next official AMerican MEdia Output appearance.
together we hope
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcwPoFPdeVM]The polling lines were LONG in STL, I waited over 4 hrs to vote! But it was well worth it, I have never been more proud to be an american and to take part in such an important moment in history.The night of the elections, Carianne and I initiated our project together we hope with the help of our friend Becky Potts. We passed out red tyvek tags and asked people to write down their hopes for the future. We tried to encourage them to go beyond "I hope Obama wins" or I hope McCain wins".People wrote things ranging from "I hope I get good grades" to "I hope that we end the war in Iraq and do not go to war win Iran."Check out this website we created where you can submit your hopes online. We will make a tag for each hope submitted...
caminante no hay camino
There is one specific image that I have never been able to remove from my mind: an image of a Guatemalan solider pointing a gun at the belly of a young pregnant woman. Ironically, I have no recollection as to the source of that specific image. Part of me wonders if that image even existed, or if it was a confabulation of my youth, created in response to the countless stories of political massacre in Guatemala that my father described to me on a regular basis.The Power of ImageRecently I attended a symposium on Architecture, Art and the Experience of Blackness, where I was greatly moved by the words of Hamza Walker, who serves as the Director of Education and Associate Curator for the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago.In an effort to outline “blackness” or the “black experience”, Walker alluded to the profound impact of the publication of the casket-side Emmett Till photos in JET magazine.The Till incident began with the brutal beating and murder of an 11yr old boy, whose only crime was whistling at a white woman. In a surprisingly high profile trial the two men accused were almost immediately acquitted by an all white jury. The boy’s grieving mother insisted on an open casket funeral so that the world could see what had happened to her beloved son.Walker said, that the media transmission of these transgressions confirmed the collective understanding shared by African Americans that this treatment was the reality of the judicial system. If they were to ever “compromise the integrity of a white woman” what happened to Till would happen to them.Is exposure to explicit images of human brutality the proper way to insure that these incidents do not repeat themselves?How many times have we seen the same iconographic holocaust pictures?But do we know who is in these images and what is taking place?Has seeing the same images a million times done anything the stop the Iraq war or prevent genocide in Darfur?Perhaps the issue comes down to the dissemination of information to young people. Without providing a proper context for the interpretation and dialogue surrounding these explicit images, the depicted incidents become far removed from our lives, and we become numb to their reality.Why a Coloring Book?Coloring Books, emerged in the United States a part of the movement towards the “democratization of education”. They are commonly utilized in popular education models as, accessible teaching tools for often illiterate audiences.This coloring book provides the platform for the introduction and the critical re-evaluation of social movements the context in which they occurred, and the individuals who have preserved and made a major impacts upon the world.
video reel
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3li_mT--f-A&hl=en]
The JAP©
from the series acciones plásticas
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBjBN0ftcP0]click here for Kol Ra'ash Gadol's critque on Jewschool about this piece.
When Maya Escobar uses this stereotype she may be either mocking it or indulging it - or both - that’s one of the dangers of comedy. She clearly thinks that she’s mocking it, and attempting to provide a conversation starter (Okay, Maya, so here I am starting a conversation: Kol hakavod!) But even in her attempts to mock the stereotypes that have been projected onto her (and let’s be clear the chach and the sexy latina aren’t any better!), I have to wonder about those who are watching the comedy, and whether it helps them reject - or accept- those experiences in which they met a person onto whom they themselves projected such a label. “After all, how can she “nail the JAP” if there’s no JAP to be nailed, if the JAP happens to simply be a person whom one dislikes upon meeting, but no more likely a Jew than a Lutheran? In order for it to confirm that glorious feeling, one has to have a little sense that there is something about being Jewish and female that attaches to that kind of behavior, n’est ce pas?
she offers the following linksan exerpt from Dr. Evelyn Torton Beck’s essay "From ‘Kike to Jap’:How misogyny, anti-semitism, and racism construct the Jewish American Princess."bibliography of the analysis of the JAP stereotype www.lilith.org/landmark_articles/jap.pdf
