photo by Jakub Fulin

A gale force wind always seems to precede dub poet d’bi.young when she enters a room. Her fierce presence and her unstoppable energy are perhaps the most noticeable things about her, but what lingers after the first impression is her overwhelming determination in her mission to spread the word about love, equality and social action.

The first time I met d’bi.young, I had taken a group of students in a college course entitled “Dangerous Acts: Dramatic Literature as a Tool of Social Change” to a production that she had written, performed, and produced with fellow artist Naila Keleta Mae. Both women are Jamaican-Canadians, and their work handled a range of issues including abuse, poverty, racism and social inequity. I had arranged for the artists to have a talk back session after the show with my students, a number of whom were Caribbean – Canadians themselves – and this turned out to be one of the most moving moments I can think of during my teaching career. My students, some of whom were prone to feeling indifferent and powerless in the face of some of the challenges they faced, became animated, engaged and passionate. The performance had managed to reflect back to my students something about their own lives, and this alone was enough for them to elevate their view of who they were and what they could accomplish in their lives. This was, in no small part, thanks to the warmth, the honesty and the strength of the drama, but also of the artists. A pair of students who saw the show that night went on to do their oral presentation on d’bi.young and her work, and they reported feeling that her work touched them in a special way, and made them realize their own power. When an artist manages to bring this passion to the classroom, the effect is tremendous. Since this experience, I have taught d’bi.young’s work in a number of different contexts, and I can say that my students always find that her voice speaks to them in a way that compels not just their intellect, but their hearts.

d’bi.young’s work is fiery. She stares down issues like racism, sexism, homophobia, colonialism, slavery, and the inequities visited upon the world by capitalism, but perhaps her most enduring theme is love. In the video below, d’bi.young elaborates upon her vision of a love that is honest, compassionate, and forgiving.

Amidst the contrasting tones and strikingly honest symbols in Bonner’s sculpture series called Exploring the Perpetrator, Bonner confronts the powerful forces that have threatened her spirit and health.

By exploring domination, as she calls it, Bonner has been able to find ways to survive her abusive past. She has found profound intersections between her own exploitation and that of our society. Like many before her, she has connected the personal with the political. Bonner invites us to not only recognize the perpetrator that controls our own well being, but also those forces that control our system.

Grass by Lorraine Bonner. Click on the image above to see more of her art.

To see more of Bonner’s work, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery and visit the artist’s website.

by Sarah Stafford

Artist Yoram Raanan seeks to revive life and purpose. His characteristic style drips with vibrant colors and processions of people that practically melt into each other and their surroundings. While his work is inspired by the “Jewish people who are happy in being a part of this sort of resurrection,” he attracts a wide-ranging audience – from Toronto to London to Israel, where he lives.

Blessing of the Sun

To see more of Yoram’s work, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery and visit the artist’s website.

I am not sure how to convey the power of this poetry collection.

I can tell you that once I picked up Love Cake, I could not put it down until I finished every poem, even though I sometimes had to read through my tears. Upon finishing, I immediately had to call a femme friend to read her a poem that reminded me of her. Relocating from my couch to my bed, I sank in and re-read the entire collection.

I want to say that the poems tore out my heart. I keep seeing an image of my heart getting pulled out of my chest, but my heart does not remain in the air, naked and exposed. Instead, birds carefully wind orange velvet ribbons around it before they replace it in my chest cavity, prettier and stronger than it was before. These poems demand that I feel everything more intensely–including grief and rage–but in return, they give me back something I didn’t know I was missing: an expansive sense of possibility. The morning after I read this collection, I woke up from my sleep with a feeling of anticipation, remembering that I had been given an unexpectedly precious gift that I will carry deep inside me.

The gift of this poetry collection is nothing less than a roadmap to what liberation can look like for queer people who survive personal and collective trauma. Describing border crossings that she experiences as a queer working class person of color, Leah Laskshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha gives voice to the involuntary incursions on her body: child abuse, colonialism, racism, and war; as well as her voluntary crossings of boundaries: leaving her family of origin, rediscovering her roots in Sri Lanka, and reclaiming her body. She maintains a tension between oppression and healing throughout, in poems that leave no doubt about her power as a survivor, healer, and activist.

New York-based artist and political activist Norm Magnusson applies a personal approach to national issues in a series of paintings entitled “America’s Seven Deadly Sins,” and an ongoing collection of provocative road signs entitled “The I-75 project.” He uses his background in economics, extensive research, shrewd marketing sense, and playful sense of humor to spark dialogue about what’s going on in our country.

#7 of America's Deadly Sins: U.S. National Arrogance. Painting by Norm Magnusson. Click on the picture above to see more art.

To see more of Magnusson’s work, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery and visit the artist’s website.

Artist Carl Gopal’s interests are expansive, but he is by no means a dilettante. He is gifted with an ability to analyze current events in the context of the “big picture” without getting overwhelmed, weaving together schools of thought as diverse as popular culture and politics, spirituality and quantum physics. He is afraid that amid the exhilaration of rapid scientific advancement, we are losing the sense of humble awe at the universe that spurred our curiosity in the first place.

And Starring Benjamin Netanyahu as Norman Maine

To see more of Gopal’s work, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery and visit the artist’s website.

by Paul Buhle

We are now exactly a year since Harvey Pekar’s passing (born in 1939, he passed away on July 12, 2010). The traditional religious ceremonies and Hebrew phrases would have been nothing to him, but perhaps it is time to think more about his life and accomplishments.

I am in the unusual position of being one of Harvey’s last collaborators, the only one who is a historian, or for that matter anything besides an artist, or Harvey’s widow Joyce Brabner. And, of course, the only Yiddishist.

British actress Helen Mirren observed, at the San Diego ComiCon of 2010, that the comics he had created in his own American Splendor series (always drawn by artists in collaboration: Harvey did not draw) and carried on in a series of books had proven what comics could do and thereby went far to create and validate a genuinely new art form.

One can quibble in many ways with the “new,” because comic art blossomed in the daily papers more than a century ago, and for that matter, comic books, that lowly and despised genre, reached by the middle 1940s more readers than any other periodical in the US. Harvey himself despised superhero comics, the one genre that hit biggest during the Second World War, and has hit biggest again in adaptation to film. Harvey’s ideas went elsewhere, not only to his own blue collar life in the Veterans Administration where he worked for thirty some years, but also to Russian literature, jazz, and even history. That is, to my end of things.

The Zohar, like many other Jewish mystical texts, is veiled in a shroud of secrecy. Part of its power resides in its illusion of exclusivity, its silent challenge to the novice who dares to break open its pages. Artist Michael Hafftka animates stories from the Zohar in the context of his personal life, inviting all of us to search for an element of the sacred within.

Book of Concealment 16: " The Ancient One to the Short-Tempered One - separated and cleaving, not really separate..."

To see more of Michael Hafftka’s work, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery and visit the artist’s website.

In conservative Jewish tradition, there is an aura of spiritual elitism surrounding the Zohar; access to the Kabbalah is limited to those over the age of thirty-five, settled down, and married. Hafftka rejects these regulations. “I think those rules are nonsense, they were instituted specifically for control,” he says. “There’s nothing that I’ve read in the Zohar that shouldn’t be read by anybody and everybody.”

For Hafftka, the poetic Zohar inspired a much stronger emotional connection to Judaism than prayer, services, and the requirements of religious ritual. He believes that the poetry of the Zohar has the potential to reinvigorate a more fluid side of Judaism that might have greater appeal for young, questioning Jews like me. It also offers fodder for artistic creativity. I agree that the Zohar has a special resonance for my generation. In a 2010 survey by LifeWay Research, 72 percent of young adults aged 18-24 characterized themselves as less religious than their parents, yet more spiritual. The Zohar, Hebrew for “splendor” or “radiance,” explores the relationship between the “universal energy” and man. The fierce self-examination and personal growth it inspires is relevant to both Jews and non-Jews, theists and secularists.

This second installment of my Tikkun Daily series on “Spoken Word, Video, and Performance Art to Change the World” features multidisciplinary artist Norman Nawrocki of Montreal, Quebec. Nawrocki’s art is about community, it’s about activism, and he doesn’t shy away from taking a critical look at some of today’s most politically charged issues. Like all of the artists featured here, Nawrocki sees art as a means for social change, and he lives this not only in his role as artist, but as an instructor as well, helping to form the next generation of artist/provocateurs.

Incorporating many genres into his work Nawrocki is an author, veteran spoken word artist, violinist, actor, educator, and sex advocate with an international reputation. He has several books of short fiction and poetry (in English, French & Italian), over 50 music albums (solo & with his different bands), and has written several theater musicals and cabarets. He tours the world performing music, poetry, anti-sexist, queer positive ‘sex’ comedy shows, and giving Creative Resistance workshops and lectures about how to use the arts for radical social change. He teaches part-time at Concordia University.

Listen to his poignant piece “Why Am I an Anarchist?” here.

Here’s how Nawrocki describes his work:

Self-portrait of the artist at work

It turns out that Art Spiegelman’s factually-based graphic novel, Maus, was not the first use of a comic book format relating to the Holocaust. Life? or Theatre? A Play with Music by Charlotte Salomon, a German-Jewish refugee who perished in Auschwitz at the age of 25, consisted of a remarkable series of 1300 vividly colorful frames (known technically as “gouches”). These were based on her life and that of her family, and completed in the year prior to her being arrested by the Gestapo in the south of France in September 1943.

These generally include text (mostly in German, some in French), either as explanatory captions or embedded within the paintings themselves. Salomon advances her tale as well through suggesting that it be staged as an opera, indicating lyrics and tunes. This conceit is perhaps inspired by her step-mother, who was in fact an opera singer, Paula Lindberg (née Paula Levy, a secular Jew, like Charlotte and her physician father, Albert).

Salomon’s work features two love stories, probably unrequited and perhaps fictionalized. One is the Charlotte character’s infatuation with Paula Lindberg’s voice coach, and the other is this same man’s (imagined?) longing for Ms. Lindberg.

What adds poignancy is that her art was a personal triumph over clinical depression, which apparently plagued the women on her mother’s side of the family. Her mother committed suicide during Charlotte’s early childhood

by Paul Von Blum

Dominique Moody is a visual griot, an artistic storyteller whose imaginative use of found objects and rubble from the streets of Los Angeles and elsewhere has propelled her into the front ranks of contemporary African American artists in the early years of the twenty-first century. Moody, whose major visual disability makes her legally blind, transforms trash into treasure by assembling the remains from architecture, tree branches, bottles, discarded shoes, and other everyday items into some of the most engaging artworks in the contemporary era. Her three-dimensional pieces explore her personal and family history that reflects her nomadic history from her birth in Germany in a military family through her odyssey of living at more than forty addresses in various locations throughout her fifty-four years.

Telling Stories of the Family Tree. Click on the photo above to see more art by Dominique Moody.

Her works are simultaneously individual and social and make her the heir of some of the most influential African American artists of recent times.

Moody herself is the first to acknowledge the profound influences of her distinguished visual predecessors. Los Angeles is the site of the Watts Towers, perhaps the most famous example of folk art in the world. Simon Rodia’s majestic towers were constructed from steel pipes and rods, wrapped with wire mesh, and decorated with such found objects as bottles, scrap metal, sea shells, broken glass, pottery fragments, and bits of ceramic tile. Known to millions of Southern Californians and countless visitors, the Watts Towers are the quintessential example of turning trash into treasure. But fewer people, including scholars and professional art historians, are fully aware of how Rodia’s monumental achievement helped catalyze an artistic renaissance that has stunning implications for African American and other neglected creative communities well into the twenty-first century.

Some of today’s most interesting, socially engaged, controversial, and occasionally even blasphemous artists are working in the mediums of spoken word, video and performance art. I’m excited to be joining Tikkun Daily as a blogger on the multi-media arts beat. All of the artists I plan to present here are working out of the belief that through their work they have the capacity — even the obligation — to ask the questions that light the spark of change. Whether they are examining issues of social justice, feminism/gender politics, the environment versus consumerism, Israel/Palestine or any other of today’s most complex problems, these artists are trailblazing their way to the cutting edge of both politics and artistic representation.

The first artist featured here is Lisa Vinebaum of Montréal, Québec.

Self-portrait as a Christian fundamentalist cheerleader. From the series "Patriot Acts" (2006-2010). Photo by Ivan Coleman

Doves fly over the Israeli Separation Wall in a graffiti art piece near the military checkpoint in Qalandia.

Abu keeps rabbits on the roof of his family’s home. There are five of them and they’re brown, white and black. He tosses them a handful of yesterday’s pita and they scamper underfoot, nibbling on the edges of the bread.

“You see the fat one?” he points, “She’s the mother. The first one I owned.”

Downstairs, Abu lives with his wife and his newborn daughter. They stay on the third floor; his father and mother live on the second and his two brothers live on the first floor. Abu also has two sisters who live in Jerusalem.

It’s early in the morning, but the sun is bright. I shade my eyes with my hand to look into the light. Abu wants to show me the view from the roof. Ramallah, he explains, is behind us.

“And you see that building?” Abu says, stretching his arm out and pointing to the west. The building that he’s pointing to looks like it’s on the same block, but it isn’t. It’s in another city. “That’s my sister’s house. That’s Jerusalem.”

He takes me by the arm, to the edge of the roof. “And right there is the Israeli wall,” he points down.

by Peter Gimpel

Concerning Art and Religion, No. 9, by Junko Chodos. To see more, click on the picture above.

Are there “sacred values” capable of dissolving the borders between art and religion?

That question pulsed at the heart of the recent Art and Religion Symposium organized by the Foundation for Centripetal Art and co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Religion and the Center for Jewish Studies at UCLA.

Rafael Chodos, the foundation’s director, opened the symposium with a riddle:

A group of people gather in a certain place, where they all focus on the same thing. Some of them are moved. All of them feel that their experience is important. They are all quiet and many of them seem to be looking inward. After the gathering has dispersed, one or two of them come back to that place alone and weep. Where did this gathering take place? In a theatre, a concert hall, an art gallery or museum, or in a place of worship?

by Melissa Shiff

Excitement is rising in Montreal over matzo as an art construction team prepares for Passover like never before: stocking up on three thousand pieces of matzo, they are set to build a multimedia installation that lets visitors journey out of Egypt and crush oppression.

Matzo Mitzaryim Tunnel. Click on the picture above to see more photos from the art exhibit.

“The Medium is the Matzo” project functions like a three-dimensional Haggadah and brings some of the religious holiday’s central themes into the context of contemporary social action. After viewing the installation at the Bronfman Center at New York University, media scholar Douglas Rushkoff wrote, “It’s a provocative and playful exploration of the real values underlying Pesach, transmitted to its audience through a series of experiential installations that hit all the senses.”

Visitors to the installation depart from Egypt by following a path through a Ten Plagues space and a Matzo Mitzrayim Tunnel to the Passover Projections part of the installation. Through the wonders of video technology, visitors become actors as they are inserted in real time into Cecil B. DeMille’s iconic film The Ten Commandments at the very point where the runaway slaves are crossing the Red Sea. In this way the installation invites them to obey the injunction to “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt.” After the visitors leave Egypt, they enter the liberation spaces of the installation: at the Miriam Bar, they quench their thirst with a fresh glass of water (or a cup of white wine) and in the Elijah Lounge they recline in a sea of four hundred pillows which all have the words “Crush Oppression” silkscreened on top of an image of a piece of Matzo. At the end of the installation (and online at japshopper.com), these pillows are sold to raise money for an organization that fights hunger.

When I first picked up Floodlines on assignment to write a review for Bitch magazine, I thought I knew something about what went down in New Orleans after Katrina, but after reading this firsthand account of surviving the storm, I realized I didn’t know much at all. It reminded me of the first time I read a leftist account of the history of Zionism. Only then did I realize how much the US mainstream media had framed my perception of Palestine by focusing on individual acts of violence by Palestinians taken out of context from the larger frame of Israeli state violence.

Similarly, while reading Floodlines, I was forced to confront how my understanding of New Orleans has been shaped by mainstream media reports that focused obsessively on individual acts of violence while ignoring the large-scale state violence imposed on mostly poor communities of color. I was moved by how Flaherty, a white journalist and organizer based in New Orleans, manages to tell a story that encompasses both the staggering injustice of structural racism and the inspiring grassroots activism of New Orleanians.

He juxtaposes first-hand stories of communities helping each other survive the storm with the mainstream media’s racist depictions of their struggles. For instance, while the media portrayed African American men in New Orleans mainly as criminals, Flaherty describes how, in the wake of abandonment by official rescuers, groups of working class African American men travelled through neighborhoods, rescuing people and delivering supplies in the first days after the storm. Meanwhile, African Americans who needed help were treated like criminals: the National Guard placed many of them in militarized evacuee camps and eventually forced them to leave the state.

Flaherty explains how such inequity continued throughout the so-called recovery efforts. Money did not go to the people and local community organizations who needed it. Instead, it flowed to corporations who profited from rebuilding contracts, security firms who made money from criminalizing the victims of the storm, and large-scale corporate charities with high overhead costs. As Flaherty describes, “living in New Orleans in the first years after Katrina, it was as if the sky were filled with money. I imagined it thirty feet up in the air, clearly visible, but out of reach” (121).

by Rebecca Foust and Lorna Stevens

It was in San Rafael, in a tiny subterranean artist studio with walls of thickly plastered brick that I made my acquaintance with New Zealand’s huia bird, meeting it in my friend Lorna’s intricate twig sculptures and an altered artist’s book whose pages had been painstakingly excised, erased, and inked with images of haunting delicacy. I learned how the bills of males and females (his squat cudgel for shredding bark, her curved needle for finding insects) had evolved so as to make them mutually dependent mates-for-life. I also learned that the huia had recently become utterly, unalterably extinct, so that not only would I never see it with my own eyes, but neither would my children, nor my children’s children, nor their children and so on and on down the long, bitter corridors of never.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. declared that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” In this struggle for justice, Massachusetts-based artist Pamela Chatterton-Purdy sees godliness made manifest. Godliness is reflected in the actions of individuals who protect the weak from the strong, who maintain innocence in an evil world, or who fight for the dignity of being a human being. The arc is bent through the struggle and sacrifice of innumerable individuals, only some of whom will be named in a place of honor in the pages of history. Chatterton-Purdy has devoted the last seven years to a project called “Icons of the Civil Rights Movement … Connecting the Dots,” that venerates these heroes — both the known and unknown.

MLK - I Have a Dream

To see more of Pamela Chatterton-Purdy’s work, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery and visit the artist’s website.

Why and at what point do certain short-term memories survive as long-term memories? Are the ones that stick with us and fade into the recesses of our minds significantly more important than the ones that dissipate, or does the brain randomly latch onto specific moments for no apparent reason? And if we lose our ability to retain short-term memories do we, as a result, lose ourselves? These are a few of the questions that Marcie Paper’s art investigates.

For the past eight years Paper has been working on a series of paintings that illustrate the details of her daily life as she experiences them. The purpose of this project? To visually represent short-term memory.

Untitled #115

To see more of Marcie Paper’s work, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery and visit the artist’s website.

Paper taps into her short-term memory each morning when she arrives at her art studio in Brooklyn. First she compiles a list of words and phrases that communicate her most recent memories and present emotions; then she constructs abstract symbols to represent these emotions and transfers them onto the canvas. Staying on the same canvas and, day after day, layering it with these representative symbols enables Paper to chronicle a specific period of time.

by Akile Kabir

Al Kahf

To see more of Davi Barker’s work, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery and the artist’s website.

The clarity of composition and richness of color in Davi Barker’s work were what struck me first. Then, as I began to reflect on his art, I noticed the serenity of his paintings, which juxtapose Islamic calligraphy and sites with beautiful, surreal panoramas. The paintings featured in Barker’s exhibit on Tikkun Daily are products of his experimentation with a combination of digital and fine art mediums. The scenes of nature or Islamic architecture may appear to be realistic landscapes or still lifes, but they also have a supernatural quality. Take for instance, the onion-shaped domes that dramatically emerge against cloudy skies, or the pristine smoothness of sand dunes, warmly bathed in sunlight. Each painting possesses a quality of light, even in darker settings, whether it is reflected on the surface of the water in Al Kahf or through the ominous clouds and birds encircling the Kaaba. In fact, the subjects featured in these paintings, such as the Kaaba on a bed of glass, are first arranged from digital photographs on the computer after which Barker produces the images in paint, thereby creating these fantastical compositions.