Arizona’s new immigration law has sparked fervent demonstrations and activist work of all kinds. Many cite the law as a blatant example of racial profiling, scapegoating, and hatred. Yesterday, Arizona federal judge Susan Bolton attempted to affirm the Obama administration’s position against the bill, but failed to meet the demand for an injunction that would have stopped SB1070 all together. Today, SB1070 officially goes into effect, but without many of the provisions that gave the law ‘real teeth‘.

Music artists have joined the ever- growing backlash against Arizona’s new anti-immigration law. The boycotts began two weeks ago, when Rage Against the Machine threw a benefit concert that raised $300,000 for organizations fighting the bill. More and more artists are joining what is being called the Soundstrike, including Kanye West, Cypress Hill, Tenacious D, Massive Attack, Norteno superstars Los Tigres del Norte, salsa-ska band Ozomatli, Nine Inch Nails, Maroon 5, Ben Harper, State Radio, Anti-Flag, and many more. Though some argue that the bands’ efforts will only hurt businesses in Arizona and disappoint fans, the nature of the boycott reflects the anger felt by those fighting against SB1070, a law they see as legalizing racial profiling and fueling an already thriving culture of hatred. In the video below, Zach de la Rocha speaks about the Soundstrike movement:

A number of other activist and artistic efforts have emerged in the fight against SB1070. On July 28th, a group known as Stop the Hate scaled down a construction crane in Phoenix to display a large banner calling for an injunction against the implementation of the law. In a statement released by the group, the activists point to the true nature of the law:

“We say ‘stop hate’ because SB 1070 is not immigration policy. Like the experience of the Irish, Italian, Chinese or others, SB 1070 is simply scapegoating and targeting of the most vulnerable among us in these uncertain times; times that should call us to stand together as a people. Within days of SB 1070 passing, we witnessed vicious hate crimes against Latinos in the Southwest. We know that hateful laws legitimize hateful acts and that tolerating their passage signals a dangerous direction for the country.”

Ernesto Yerena, a 23 year- old activist leader and artist, creates simple posters reminiscent of anti- war and civil rights graphics of the 1960s. Yerena grew up close to the border, and eventually found a way to blend his passion for art with his passionate resistance of the anti- immigration movement. See more of his work here.

Yesterday’s small victory is only the beginning in a long fight that will likely end up in the Supreme Court. As the fight continues, musicians, artists, and other activists will surely continue express their anger with Arizona and it’s leaders. Legislators and citizens are left with the responsibility to demand that this unjust law be stopped.

“The production of a normative human body is a vital means of social control. In an interview with Stefan Szczelkun, artist Alexa Wright explains how her work experiments with the defended boundaries of the human/self, and the affects unleashed by their transgression.”

“…too often the competitive forces of the art market lead artists to use facile shock tactics, which only serve to inoculate us rather than enable us to think. Alexa Wright’s work avoids sensationalism and takes a more serious and useful approach to this material.”

Click here for the full article/interview.

Based on the understanding that race is an ideology performed on a daily basis, this conference will investigate how and why performances of race are manifested or subverted in African American visual culture. The panels include “Race and Museum Practices,” “Race and Abstraction,” and “Performance in/of Contemporary African American Art.” The symposium will begin with keynote speaker Dr. Richard Powell of Duke University, on Wednesday, September 15th at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.  The conference will continue on September 16th between 9:00 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. at the Adele H. Stamp Student Union Building on the University of Maryland College Park campus.

The Sept. 15 Keynote Lecture is FREE for the first 40 people to register, and the Sept. 16 Symposium is FREE with registration.

For more information, click here or call the David C. Driskell Center at 301.314.2615.

Foreign Policy has published Dulce Pinzón’s streotype-busting photograpghs.

I saw a Spiderman costume in a store in November 2001, and that’s when everything came together in my head. Comic-book superheroes have an alter ego, and so do immigrants in the United States. They may be insignificant or even invisible to much of society, but they are heroes in their homelands.

carriage trade
62 Walker Street
New York, NY 10013
212.343.2944

Through July 18:
Mistaken Identity

Dan Graham
Innocence Project
Carol Irving
John Schabel
Karen Yama
The Yes Men

“While the genre of portraiture tends to feature clearly defined subjects, the portrait show Mistaken Identity focuses instead on the uncertainties of facial recognition and how misperception might affect behavior in everyday experience. Linking the concept of belief to what we can “know” about an individual’s face, the exhibition explores identification as a process influenced by the particular circumstances of any given encounter.

Commonly associated with detective stories and courtroom dramas, the need of proof of an individual’s identity also has a utilitarian aspect, as our memories for faces plays a significant role in the most mundane of exchanges. In the somewhat rare case of people with prosopagnosia (face blindness), friends and family are indistinguishable from strangers, so that the “context” of an individual (hair, clothing, the sound of a voice) often provides the only clues to their identity. For an eyewitness or victim of a crime, these same associations can prove misleading, as they may falsely trigger a link to an innocent person who has chance connections to a perpetrator’s appearance.

The case of imposters provides yet another example of a loss of identity through context, but here the subject willingly foregoes recognition in favor of subterfuge. When exposed, the temporary forfeiture of an identity is often met with a great deal of hostility. Those fooled by the deception are now faced with the uncertainty of their convictions. This need for authentication in connection with facial identification runs deep, as it underlines the survival mechanisms that guide our perceptions of whom and what we can trust.

Approaching portraiture as a means to explore the complex relationship between perception and circumstance, the work in the exhibition Mistaken Identity presents a range of possibilities concerning the construction of belief in the process of fixing an individual’s identity.”

The Innocence Project is affiliated with Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University

[Text from gallery website.]

A thoughtful and fascinating  social photography project by French-U.S. photographer Justine Graham and Colombian visual artist Ruby Rumié is on view until August 8th at the  Museum of Visual Arts (MAVI) in Santiago, Chile.

“We were both interested in the issue of domestic employment in the Latin American context, and over time we created this platform to show the points that these women have in common as they share the domestic environment in a hierarchical work relationship,” said Graham, who like Rumié has lived many years in Chile.

Inter Press Service article here.

Download PDF of the catalogue here.  The show is slated for exhibition in Washington in July 2011.

The D.C. based organization Men Can Stop Rape has come up with an interesting and simple way to engage teenage boys- free pizza. Kedrick Griffin, the Senior Director of Programs, leads the year long programs, gently titled “Men of Strength” or MOST Club. The activist organization keeps things intentionally vague in the beginning, so as not to scare off the teens with their true intentions: to challenge the patriarchal structure the boys have grown up in. The weekly club meetings begin with, of course, pizza and soda, followed by a “check-in”- a time for the teens to reflect on what is going on in their lives. Griffin uses this open dialogue to segue into heavier topics, like understanding rape culture and respecting women. The idea is to slowly change the perspectives of these young men, in hopes that gender relations in D.C. schools will begin to shift.

More here.

For more on male feminism and men’s work against sexual violence, check out the work of Jackson Katz.

Baltimore’s Contemporary Museum is presenting a major, multi-venue survey of work by Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry, called Bearing Witness.  Through July 31st.

A husband and wife collaborative, artists McCallum and Tarry have produced an incredible body of work that possesses a potent combination of seductive, exquisitely crafted images and incisive content. Their art challenges audiences to reflect deeply on teen homelessness, gun violence in inner cities, homicide, the legacy of the civil rights movement and their own circumstance as an interracial couple. These works take the form of large-scale public projects, interactive sculpture, painting, photography, and video. Over the course of their careers, they have produced powerful civic-based projects with lasting impact in the communities they engage. This exhibition reveals their substantial contribution to the history and representation of race relations and the enduring influence that their community-based practice has had over the years.

We Make Money Not Art has an excellent review of Lucy Orta’s new book about Roma people in Europe.

The Roma are present throughout Europe and to some extent in the Americas.  Historically, like Jews, they have been routinely subjected to ethnic hatred and persecution.  Fiercely independent, they refuse a single homeland, preferring to be dispersed and nomadic.  Their cultural traditions are passed orally in a rich array of dialects and through distinctive music and social rituals.  Their language is based on Sanskrit, so traces their origins to India– it appears likely they were escapees from slavery in Afghanistan in 1001.

Treatment of Roma populations has been improving in countries wishing to join the European Union, which demands a high standard of human rights in its members, especially new ones where Roma populations are large.  Many Roma have assimilated into the cultures of their host countries and come to prominence in various fields

At Culture Unplugged watch Skutka: Book of Records, a film documenting the largest settlement of Roma in Macedonia. Isabel Fonseca’s Bury Me Standing and Jan Yoors’ The Gypsies are good background books, but because books have not been part of Roma heritage, there is relatively little Roma literature in print.  PEN brought out The Roads of the Roma, an anthology or poetry and prose, which contains works by a one of the greatest Roma poets, a woman named Papusza, much of whose writings were unfortunately lost.   The Pariah Syndrome by Ian Hancock is a scholarly study of Gypsy slavery and persecution.  The University of Hertfordshire Press has also been regularly publishing books on Romani Studies.

The Roma’s most notable cultural contribution are musical and several films online delve into their ethnomusicology.  Latcho Drom traces Romani culture from India to Spain.  Crossing the Bridge is contemporary documentary about music in Istanbul at the nexus of Europe and Asia. Another relevant film is Adela Peeva’s, Whose is This Song? (preview only), which explores how the same melody is shared, albeit with different meanings, across diverse cultural communities in Turkey and the Balkans.