"Her resignation from the presidency isn’t even enough, however, so the “Gay is gay” messages continue; racists want to see her out of work completely, and for those on the fence about the trumped up antisemitic and plagiarism, saying she’s a lesbian is a tried and true tactic to turn the tide against her."

Not only is John Edwin Mason an articulate voice on the history of photography, he is also an authority on African history. In this essay, he writes about how one man, Henry Martin, understood the power of photography and “used (it) to challenge the white gaze, striving to control how he was seen whenever he could”.

Programs like this are important to improving our understanding of intersectionality and how to help those most at risk in our society.

"...with a new administration in City Hall and a new policy proposal in Illinois that could expand food programs via Medicaid, there has never been a better time to improve access to food in our city.

At the core of this work should be the growing movement known as food is medicine."

Wonderful insight from Nick Cave in his reply to a letter he received:

I understand your conflicted feelings about losing a daughter and gaining a son, but I can also feel your awareness that the soul remains consistent and unchanging and that love, real parental love, runs eternal and unconditional through that soul.

 “Are there more people from underrepresented backgrounds in the organisation but as you go up the ladder, it gets less so? Do people from minority ethnic backgrounds or [who have] disabilities get promoted? Is there a clear path to promotions? Are there support [systems] and mentorships [available]? If the answer is no, that’s an indication that an employer is falsely inflating the diversity at their company.”

"...executive director and curator Danyelle Means's focus on Indigenous art might have alienated donors. Means, who is a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation, organised the centre's well-received 2022 exhibition, Determined: A Contemporary Survey of Native and Indigenous Artists.

“Not many people will voice ‘I don’t like this because it’s turning brown-er or younger’, but that’s absolutely what happened,” Chalay told Hyperallergic. “We had people who started criticising us and saying, ‘Your director is Indigenous and you’re doing an Indigenous show, are you just going to be an Indigenous arts org? Because that’s not what I want to give to.'" "

I've been posting regularly on this blog for about a year and a half now. It started out as a way to keep interesting news, articles and essays about diversity, equity and inclusion while taking my Certificate in DEI at UBC.

I've now completed my certificate but I am going to continue on with this blog. Instead of posting weekly about art, education, human resources and other general interest topics and quotes, I will be posting less regularly. I am still interested in thoughts and ideas on art but I will be mixing in more political points of view.

This is in response to what I am seeing around me and the increasing urgency to save lives by raising awareness and moving people to action.

"As historian and curator Maurice Berger has said, “Ms. Smith’s subjects are often suspended between visibility and invisibility: faces turned away, or are blurred or shrouded in shadow, mist or darkness, a potent metaphor of the struggle for African-American visibility in a culture in which black men and women were disparaged, erased or ignored.”3 In this way, Smith gives shape to the quotidian idiosyncrasies of Black life."

"I think the whole global phenomenon is a byproduct of just individual hard work, of people trying to survive. I think, if you look behind most Chinese restaurants—not the commercial ones, but the Mom-and-Pop family restaurants—it’s basically a story about immigration, diaspora, survival, and probably hardship and discrimination."

"Integrating Islamic art and architectural styles with corporate branding, the artist examines globalization’s impact on intersecting identities of the diaspora. The artist’s perceptions of social environments and the interplay of capitalist demands have become a place of critique in her complex wall paintings and ceramics. Utilizing traditional tile, she “draws connections between the ways colonization seeps into Indigenous ways of life, both jarringly obvious and woefully mundane,” in her own words."

"Hutchinson, who has worked as a sports scientist and biomechanist with swimmers and cyclists for more than a decade, says she was aware that gender-diverse individuals are more likely to quit sports than others. So she started looking into what creating a “truly safe space” entails."

"She documented the fact of us. I wasn’t aware at the time that I was studying composition, depth of field, mood, and intimacy when looking at her pictures. Only now is it clear to me that those books provided an early visual literacy for the extraordinary in ordinary Black life."

"In collaboration with Indigenous communities and language experts, we have developed technologies that contribute to revitalization of Indigenous languages.

Collaborative projects have generated new speech- and text-based resources for Indigenous language students, educators, translators, transcribers and other language professionals, and have helped increase the accessibility of audio and video recordings."

"Considered the founder of the Woodlands School of Art, which drew on traditional Native cosmology, and dubbed “the Picasso of the North” by Marc Chagall, Morrisseau made work that spoke to the cultural and political tensions between Indigenous and settler traditions. But it also celebrated fluidity, both cultural and sexual. (Morrisseau was bisexual and painted many erotic images.) The artist’s later work embraced contemporary idioms, paving the way for painters such as Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, who merged Indigenous cosmology with Surrealism."

"The church is also aware that the contents of these documents were manipulated for political purposes by competing colonial powers in order to justify immoral acts against Indigenous peoples that were carried out, at times, without opposition from ecclesiastical authorities. It is only just to recognize these errors, acknowledge the terrible effects of the assimilation policies and the pain experienced by Indigenous peoples, and ask for pardon."

"So we came to the idea of the relationship of Europe to Africa with war, and the most interesting for me was the First World War. It was a war between France and Britain against Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but it was also – and this was much less appreciated – a war between those European countries as to who would get to own which countries in Africa."

“If you can’t be curious across divides in a polarized world,” she says, “you can’t see the world at all.”