Even as race continues to be one of the most divisive issues in the country, the celebration of cultural diversity is a dominant theme across the 70th Emmy Award nominations. Performers of color and series produced and written by minorities scored numerous nominations Thursday.

“Atlanta,” “black-ish,” “This Is Us” and “Westworld” are among the series receiving big nods that spotlight minorities in major creative and acting roles.

Hollywood has been rocked in recent years by controversies over the lack of awards recognition for people of color. But the stream of performers, producers and writers of color receiving Emmy nominations indicate that the Television Academy at least is placing a greater premium on honoring projects with diverse cultural perspectives.

One of the series leading the way is “Atlanta,” from Donald Glover. Season 2 of the quirky, groundbreaking show was nominated for comedy series, while Glover received nods for lead actor, directing and writing. (He also received a nomination for guest-hosting “Saturday Night Live”).

The FX series also scored nominations for supporting actor Brian Tyree Henry and supporting actress Zazie Beetz.

Glover made history last year when he became the first African American to win an Emmy for comedy direction.

“Atlanta” will face off in the comedy category against ABC’s “black-ish,” which appears to have replaced ABC’S “Modern Family” as a network Emmy favorite. African American stars Anthony Anderson and Tracee Ellis Ross were recognized in the lead actor and actress category, respectively.

While Anderson and Glover will face off for the second time in in two years in the category, one of Ross’ rivals will be black actress and comic Issa Rae, a first-time nominee for her HBO show, “Insecure.”

NBC’s “This Is Us,” the show about a multicultural family that premiered to huge critical acclaim last year, received its second nomination for drama series. Sterling K. Brown, who won lead actor in a drama series last year for the show, is nominated again; he’ll compete against Jeffrey Wright (“Westworld”). Other nominees in the category include Jason Bateman (“Ozark”), Ed Harris (“Westworld”) and Matthew Rhys (“The Americans”).

Another high profile nominee is Sandra Oh of “Killing Eve,” who is the first Asian actress to be nominated in the lead actress in a drama category.

Antonio Banderas received a nomination for lead actor in a limited series or movie for his portrayal of the iconic artist Pablo Picasso in NatGeo’s “Genius: Picasso.” Regina King, who won two consecutive Emmys for supporting actress in a limited series or movie for ABC’s anthology “American Crime,” has landed again in the category with Netflix’s “Seven Seconds,” in which she plays the anguished mother of a young boy who is killed in a mysterious auto accident.

In the supporting actor in a comedy category, Henry of “Atlanta” will compete against Kenan Thompson (“Saturday Night Live”) and Tony Shalhoub of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”

Other prominent nominees of color include John Legend (lead actor in a limited series or movie for “Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert”), Thandie Newton (supporting actress in a drama for “Westworld”) and Leslie Jones (supporting actress in a comedy for “Saturday Night Live”). Legend’s nomination puts him in the running for the coveted EGOT — he’s already won multiple Grammys, an Oscar (for “Selma”) and a Tony (for “Jitney”).

Learn more at the LA Times

The Association of Art Museum Directors has launched a new paid internship program for minority college students. It’s designed to help bring some much-needed diversity to museum staffs across the country, whose demographics are overwhelmingly white.

“Museums will be able to serve their communities more effectively when their leadership reflects the diversity of those communities,” Christine Anagnos, the AAMD’s executive director, told artnet News.

According to a 2015 study from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the American Alliance of Museums, nonwhite people account for only 28 percent of all American museum employees, and just 16 percent of positions “most closely associated with the intellectual and educational mission,” such as curators, conservators, educators, and leadership.

“Research has consistently shown that fewer than 20 percent of art museum leadership positions are held by people of Asian, Black, Hispanic, Native American, or multiracial backgrounds,” Anagnos said in a statement. “One reason for this disparity is the limitations on access, and another is a limitation on resources. By providing paid summer internships to students who want to explore a career in art museums, we can begin to address these challenges and cultivate the next generation of art museum professionals.”

The program’s pilot year will select 10 students and provide each with a stipend of $6,300 for a 12-week internship. Participants will also work with a mentor who can provide career guidance and be assigned a specific project to work on for the duration of the program. The internships are scheduled to begin in late spring 2019.

Participating students will also have the opportunity to attend two museum conferences, including the AAMD’s fall and winter conference, with expenses covered by the organization.

The initiative is a useful corollary to a grant program launched by the Ford Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation last year, which is providing $3 million to 22 institutions across the US with the goal of filling 30 percent of mid- and senior-level curatorial and management positions at US art museums with staffers from historically under-represented populations by 2025. The AAMD program works at the other end of the pipeline, boosting people at the earliest stage of their careers.

The AAMD has invited its 242 member museums in the US, Canada, and Mexico to apply to be host institutions, with a deadline of September 13. Ten museums will be selected for the pilot year. The initiative is supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

We talked to Anagnos about the necessity of the program, how it will work, and who will benefit from it.

What are the goals of the AAMD’s new internship initiative?

This program creates a pathway for successfully growing the percentage of minorities in the arts over time, by introducing students from a range of underrepresented backgrounds to the types of jobs and skills needed in the field, and thus supporting their education and career planning. Moreover, by connecting them with leaders in the museum field, we will help them develop the professional network that can also be so crucial to a successful career.

Why do paid internships, specifically, help students of minority backgrounds?

It is pretty simple: unpaid internships make the pathway to museum employment less accessible to candidates without the resources to accept unpaid work.

What kind of students will this program be a good fit for, and what kind of projects do you expect interns will work on?

We intentionally did not limit this program to a specific area of the museum. Art museums offer entry points into a host of different departments from finance and development to marketing, education and curatorial. We felt it was important to encourage individuals with experiences and expertise that are not typically associated with museum studies or art history degrees. This may mean that the candidate has a different perspective and view—but in order to be a diverse institution, you need to accept diverse views.

Learn more at artnet

Music has always been political, be it the debate over decency inspired by Elvis Presley’s hip shaking, Woody Guthrie pasting the message “this machine kills fascists” on his guitar or even, long before “Hamilton,” a century-old opera that about Native American life.

Today, amid a tense and divisive political climate, the sound of resistance has as much to do with inclusion as with strict opposition. In art — and in policy — the line between the personal and the political feels increasingly blurred, as made clear by the #MeToo movement and heated discussions over immigration rights, sexual harassment and gender and racial equality.

Some artists are raising a fist while others are looking for empathy, but it’s all in the name of building a community. Here, in this series of stories, The New Sounds of Protest, The Times offers a look how varying artists are making sense of life in 2018.

—Todd Martens, Pop Music Editor

In today's divisive political climate, pop artists are shaping the new sound of protest music

By Mikael Wood

One of the most effective protest songs of 2018 doesn’t mention Donald Trump by name.

It doesn’t push back directly against one of his controversial policies, nor does it question the means by which he was elected president. It doesn’t refer to government at all, really, unless you count an image of Uncle Sam kissing a man.

The song is “Americans,” the final track on Janelle Monáe’s album “Dirty Computer,” and what it does is argue that the promise of this country is still something to get excited about — and still something to fight for.

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Kamasi Washington's ‘Heaven and Earth’ proves jazz's vitality and political power

By August Brown

Saxophonist Kamasi Washington helped pioneer an L.A. scene that freely melds free jazz with hip-hop and Afro-centric spirituality. Jazz has always been radical in its deconstructions of form and forceful assertions of black identity. Washington notes that his new album is political music, even at its most oblique, in the sense that it taps into and tries to understand the primal forces that animate our attitudes and choices.

The current political climate is “a cyclical thing that’s happened before and it will continue to happen until we change our approach,” he said. “I’m looking beyond the problem and looking to the cause.”

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L.A. rapper JPEGMAFIA lashes out at the right and the 'fake-woke' left. Just don't call it 'trolling'

In the pantheon of current Republican government figures that Air Force veteran and hip-hop artist JPEGMAFIA despises (and it’s pretty much all of them), Rudy Giuliani holds a near and dear place in his loathing.

The 28-year-old rapper (born Barrington Hendricks) was raised in New York before decamping to Baltimore and now Los Angeles, and memories of the former mayor’s policies still boil Hendricks’ blood.

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‘I can’t stay completely silent’: Jason Isbell looks inward in examining a ‘White Man’s World’

By Randy Lewis

Singer-songwriter Jason Isbell grew up in Green Hills, Ala., often hearing sentiments coming from his radio extolling the virtues of the good old days, of small-town America, of times that seemed simpler and happier through the rear-view mirror of history.

He took a different tack while writing songs for his acclaimed 2017 album “The Nashville Sound.” Several songs broached topics that are exceptionally touchy for many in country’s predominantly white, rural audience, and even more fearsome for radio programmers who try to avoid controversy at all costs.

The most noteworthy may have been “White Man’s World,” in which Isbell didn’t overtly rail against perceived injustices. Instead, he raised questions about his own life experience, about the privileges he’s enjoyed, where those privileges came from and who paid what price to create them.

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California Sounds: L.A. artists rage and wrestle with politics and policy in the age of Trump

By Randall Roberts

Kendrick Lamar and YG are two of the best known contemporary Los Angeles music artists speaking out on social issues, but they’re part of a string of incendiary songs lobbed the administration’s way.

Other local artists making political music in their own unique ways include Dead Sara, Nik Frietas, Niña Dioz featuring Lido and Ceci Bastida, and Charles Lloyd and the Marvels featuring Lucinda Williams.

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Beyond outrage: Australia's Stella Donnelly mixes the personal and political with humor

By Todd Martens

Tense times call for tense songs, and Stella Donnelly has a few. See “Boys Will Be Boys.”

The single, which introduced the Australian artist to the pop world, goes deep on rape culture with verses that begin by documenting an individual story, in this case one belonging to Donnelly’s friend, and then widen out to encompass victim-blaming and the lifelong effects of trauma.

As one may imagine, it’s an intense listen. “Try playing it,” Donnelly said while in Los Angeles recently.

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To Hurray for the Riff Raff's Alynda Segarra, the personal is political

By Randy Lewis

Given her tumultuous history, Hurray for the Riff Raff’s Alynda Segarra probably couldn’t be an apolitical musician even if she wanted to. Which she admittedly doesn’t.

To the 32-year-old artist, speaking out with her music is as much a part of her DNA as her Puerto Rican heritage and her ingrained affection for New York and New Orleans.

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Review: Before ‘Hamilton,’ 100 years of American music theater and how it’s told the story of who we are

By Mark Swed

“Hamilton” didn’t come out of nowhere. For the last century, American music theater has been struggling with how exactly to represent our national character on stage, and with who we are. It’s a long story.

Consider that a remarkable centennial few are paying attention to is the premiere of the first meaningful American opera to have any real national success: The Metropolitan Opera’s production of Charles Wakefield Cadman’s “Shanewis (or The Robin Woman).” The 1918 opera is about a Native American singer who leaves her reservation in Oklahoma to study voice with a Santa Monica socialite at a “bungalow by the sea” (I’m not making this up).

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Learn more at LA Times

Death, mayhem and promises of “badass demons”: The video-game marketing extravaganza that is the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) has been striking some familiar chords in the run-up to its Tuesday opening.

But even this escapist-celebrating medium, it seems, can’t avoid the realities of life in 2018.

Amid the bombast and teasers for games that are months or years away from release, audiences in pre-show sessions across Los Angeles last weekend previewed a quiet game that aims to meditate on crippling depression and suicidal thoughts. There was also a fast-paced and fervent war game that slows down to illustrate the horrors of battle on families and communities, and the latest installment of a Nazi-battling shoot-’em-up that pits two women leading a resistance against a world of white supremacy.

While the game industry has often been accused of lacking subtlety, today’s world beyond gaming is one increasingly built for bluntness.

At roughly the same time Sunday evening that actor Robert De Niro was denouncing President Trump with an expletive at the Tony Awards, a gaming executive was on stage using the same curse word about Nazis.

When E3 shifted last year from an industry-only gathering to one that sold some 15,000 of 60,000-plus slots to the ticket-buying public, its focus shifted too.

Media-trained spokespeople still will be demonstrating carefully choreographed snippets of games inside the Los Angeles Convention Center, while next door at L.A. Live a series of talks dubbed the E3 Coliseum will illustrate the industry’s pop culture reach as well as more serious aspects of games.

A smattering of the games at E3, whether intentional or not, increasingly reflect our often divisive, confusing and stressful political and social climate.

“Sea of Solitude,” for instance, tackles paralyzing loneliness and depression by putting players in control of a young woman named Kay, who sees herself turning into an unrecognizable monster in her darkest moments. The game from Cornelia Geppert is being developed by Berlin studio Jo-Mei Games and will be published next year by Electronic Arts, a company best known of late for its “Battlefield” and “Star Wars” games.

“It’s everywhere, this topic,” said Geppert. “Four or five years ago, a lot of things came together. Friends were struggling with really major depression, and I had certain incidents in my family and then more famous people started to commit suicide.”

She credits creating the metaphorical game as helping her conquer her own insecurities and exhaustion that resulted from going out in public.

“I talked with one good friend who had major depression and she told me when she was really down she felt like a bad person,” Geppert said. “Of course, if you have this darkness inside — anger and all this stuff — and you imagine it all burst out, how would you imagine it? A monster. This was a natural way to imagine how all the dark feelings and dark things you had in your head turned to the outside.”

It’s one of the many games garnering attention at this year’s E3, including such hotly anticipated blockbuster games as Sony’s sequel to “The Last of Us,” Nintendo’s latest entry in its “Super Smash Bros.” franchise and From Software’s just-announced “Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice,” a darkly mysterious adventure set in 1500s Japan.

Adding a bit of seriousness to E3 isn’t a shift that happened in a vacuum. Independent developers such as Geppert have for years brought more thoughtful experiences to the game world. Yet today, when a war can feel one misguided presidential tweet away from occurring, the post-apocalyptic fantasy of many a major E3 game doesn’t feel so absurd.

Bethesda’s “Wolfenstein: Youngblood,” the upcoming game in a franchise set in an alternate timeline in which the Axis powers prevailed in WWII, fast-forwards to 1980, bringing its Nazi imagery uncomfortably close to present-day hate speech. In turn, “Youngblood” may appear less like a dark twist on a history that never happened and more like a game that exposes beliefs that have inspired acts of horrific violence.

Centering the game on two female protagonists adds to its political power, not only by having women battle a group with expressively regressive views on femininity, but also by ushering in more gender diversity to a medium that has long lacked it — and a community that doesn’t always handle it with grace.

Dice’s “Battlefield 5,” for instance, recently came under attack by some fans online for daring to put a woman combatant on the cover of its WWII game. The company’s creative director Lars Gustavsson over the weekend stressed the need for games to reflect the diversity of their creators and the audience that plays them, and the studio also doubled-down on its mission. New clips of one of “Battlefield’s” single-player vignettes revealed an emphasis on a young, female Norwegian soldier.

Elsewhere, Ubisoft’s sequel to “The Division” shifted its images of near-future terrorist-induced mass hysteria from New York to Washington, D.C. Even the post-nuclear landscapes of the “Fallout” series have been transformed in its newest game to a more recognizable West Virginia. Games whose violence once felt exaggerated now almost seem ripped from the headlines.

When asked if games should address the real world, Mike Nichols, chief marketing officer for Microsoft Studios, said, “Of course, you can have some [games] that are just puzzles and some that are fantasies … but to a lot of us it’s a form of storytelling, one where you can immerse yourself in this world and make choices.”

Large publishers have long emphasized that their games were solely about play — not politics — and no doubt throughout the course of E3 many developers will shy away from questions about real-life concerns.

But the answers are in the games themselves as the line between fact and pixel-based fiction is more blurred than ever.

Learn more at L.A. Times

“City Dreams,” the lovely retrospective devoted to Congolese artist Bodys Isek Kingelez, is currently winning raves at the Museum of Modern Art. But the joys of Kingelez’s work are in the details, so I thought I might focus, here, on just one work: Ville Fantôme (1996), his model of a festive imagined city of shining office towers, colorful pavilions, orderly highways, parks, and rivers. Here it is:

Ville Fantôme was the most ambitious work ever produced by the Kinshasa-based Kingelez (1948-2015), who described himself as “a designer, an architect, a sculptor, engineer, artist.” In the late ’80s, he gained widespread acclaim for his unique style of “extrêmes maquettes,” sculptural imaginings of buildings, at once meticulously conceived and fantastical, visions of a paradisiacal architecture he believed could heal the world. “I’m dreaming cities of peace,” he explained. “I’d like to help the Earth above all.”

The building below, one of many in Ville Fantôme’s dreamy cityscape, gives a sense of the pyrotechnics he could pack into one imagined building: a blue central tower attached to two wings that resemble, well, actual wings, inexplicably scalloped and inexplicably suspended in the air, a mix of modernist folly, space craft, and bat.

It’s such a wild and fully imagined bit of fantasy architecture that you almost miss the strangely indeterminate scale: the divisions of windows in the wings would seem to indicate that it was five stories, max; the grid in the main tower would suggest 16. It is actually not clear how the interior space would fit together, practically. Throughout Kingelez’s cities, consistent scale seems hard to pin down even as it all meshes together into a seamless fabric, giving the whole thing a subtly dream-like air.

Part of what makes Kingelez’s architecture so charming is the contrast between grandiose vision and handmade character. He worked with simple materials: cardboard, knife, glue, and whatever bits and pieces he could come up with for accents. The point, however, was generally not to highlight humble materials—the catalogue reminds us that, in the Congo, cardboard was actually “exotic, expensive, and imported.” Kingelez was always trying for a precious look.

In Ville Fantôme, even when the maquettes are accented with clearly found objects you get the feeling that Kingelez is using them because their forms simply worked with his preferred style of imaginary ornamentation. The repeated pushpin turrets and the scalloped medallion of the bottle cap crowning this tower are a case in point:

Ville Fantôme came at an important time in Kingelez’s career. His big break had come in 1989, when French curator André Magnin included several of his individual works in “Magiciens de la Terre,” a hotly debated, closely watched show at Paris’s Pompidou Center that attempted to open the Western museum world to a global perspective.

This international exposure gave Kingelez an expanded audience and validation of his vision. In its wake, he felt empowered to scale up his ambition, welding individual maquettes together into mini cities, peaking with this, his largest. Given this background, it is no coincidence that Ville Fantôme is a city pointedly international in orientation, an aerotropolis with an airport laid out on a separate island to one side.

The city itself is something like a World’s Fair—or one of the international art biennials where Kingelez’s art became a staple in the ’90s—representing countries from all over. A train station declares itself “Vietnam Station;” a purple man-made lake is designated “Norvege” (Norway); a glittering office tower, sited next to the Town Council (“Conseil de Ville”), is claimed for “Canada”.

A hierarchy exists within this miniature utopia, roughly following the perceived hierarchy of the economic order in 1996. Multiple structures are labeled “USA”—including the city’s most imposing skyscraper.

Kingelez appears to have had an interesting mental relationship to the United States. On one hand, he seems to have imagined it as the land whose taste for architectural spectacle matched his own—the ’80s and ’90s were peak vogue for architectural postmodernism, which resonates with the Congolese artist’s imaginary architecture, where ornament overwhelms function.

But Kingalez also had a truly remarkable belief in the world-historical status of his own vision, and seems also to have seen the US as a kind of personal rival. “He believed that the Americans had plundered all his ideas, all the great American architects had plundered all his ideas,” Magnin relates of one of his meeting with the artist in Kinshasa. “He told me a hundred times, ‘Bloody America, they stole all my ideas!’”

Perhaps this imagined rivalry explains an odd detail of the otherwise harmonious Ville Fantôme: atop the USA tower, there is an American flag—but it flies upside-down, as if Kingelez is declaring that he is both claiming and reversing its power.

On the other hand, the countries of Africa or, indeed, the Congo itself, are not given much prominence in Kingelez’s cosmopolitan vision. No doubt this reflected the reality of the artist’s actual position. “I am like a stranger in Congo, where I have never been recognized,” Kingelez lamented. “It’s mostly foreigners who commission my work.”

But the absence is striking here in that he had commenced his artistic career, in 1980, with a sculptural group, Kinshasa: Cité du 24 Novembre de l’Authenticité Africaine, paying homage to the post-colonial ambitions of his homeland and Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko’s policy of “authenticité” (“authenticity”), meant to tear off the yoke of Western cultural imperialism.

Sixteen years after that work, the Mobutu regime’s grandiose building schemes and promises of renewal had definitively descended into kleptocracy. By 1996, the year Ville Fantôme was made, the country was mired in economic chaos and civil unrest; Mobutu would fall the following year. Kingelez’s vision, it seems, had turned both outwards and inwards.

“There is no police force in this city, to protect the city, there are no soldiers to defend it, no doctors to heal the sick,” he explained of Ville Fantôme. “It’s a peaceful city where everybody is free. It’s a city that breathes nothing but joy, the beauty of life. It’s a melting pot of all the races in the world. Here you live in a paradise, just like heaven.”

It is, in other words, a world removed from any of the problems of his actual present. Indeed, there’s precious little evidence of any real people in his vision. Here as elsewhere, there aren’t even any private residences in Kingelez’s world, let alone slums. There are some cars on the highways—but very few. It all evokes a world of uncluttered freedom, but also a world that is too good for all but a chosen few. (Ville Fantôme, after all, means “Ghost Town.”)

The ground of this city oscillates between earnest markers of infrastructure (roads, rivers, medians, etc.) and festive patterns. It’s not always clear how they fit together or which is which. “[H]e imbued the works with the immediacy of thought—but they don’t have the perfection that thoughts have,” architect and Kingelez admirer David Adjaye writes in the catalogue. “Rather, they reflect distortions in the way the mind deals with images. Mental images are not precise: they are fleeting systems, with only sparks of thought.”

This is a city that would be at once a paradise and completely perplexing to live in. A glittering red and blue tower at one corner of the city is deposited in the middle of what appears to be a park and a lake, even as its neighboring trio of pavilions appear wreathed with inexplicable aerial roads.

This ambiguity of Ville Fantôme as a model city indifferent to the needs of any of its imagined inhabitants is mirrored by an ambiguity of this artwork as a sculpture in actual space: How are you supposed to view it?

Its jewel-box intricacies are fully realized on the level of individual model buildings, but the scale of the work as an ensemble means that you can’t get in to appreciate them. For whom are the details intended? (This dilemma is only partly solved by the MoMA installation device, conceived by artist Carsten Höller, of installing a mirror on the ceiling above it.)

The answer is clear. Kingelez saw his vision as divinely inspired, and even called himself a “small god.” It is the impossible god’s-eye view of Kingelez that makes sense of the city.

As he did often throughout his work, the artist prominently inserted his own name into Ville Fantôme. In this case, the gesture is particularly striking, because “Bodys” is given more or less the same status, atop a building, as the names of any of the nation states that are saluted elsewhere in his city.

This is a vision that insists on being taken seriously as reality even as it refuses to conform to reality. Ego and infrastructure are one. That meshing is what makes a work like Ville Fantôme, and Kingelez’s work in general, feel so pleasantly optimistic. It also lends it, when you really look, a note of wistfulness—the kind of ache that you associate with waking up from a beautiful, impossible dream.

“Bodys Isek Kingelez: City Dreams” is on view at the Museum of Modern Art, through January 1, 2019.

Learn more at artnet

Can an artist help tackle one of the biggest problems facing mankind?

Miami Beach certainly thinks so. One of the most vulnerable cities in the United States to the effects of climate change, the metropolis has launched an innovative artist residency that aims to recruit an artist to help address rising sea levels. For one year, the artist will be embedded with the city as it works to develop a plan to respond to the rising tides.

In Miami Beach, climate change isn’t just a nerve-wracking impending problem—it’s a reality. Sea level rise has tripled over the past decade and the city has resorted to importing sand in order to restore its rapidly eroding coastline. In 2015, Miami Beach committed to investing $500 million to raise roads and install pumps to protect the island and its residents. The city’s Bass Museum has already altered its collecting strategy to focus on more durable objects in lieu of delicate, humidity-sensitive works on paper and photographs.

So why ask an artist to help address this very urgent problem? “I’ve always found it ingenious how artists think about not only physical projects, but also things such as policy decisions and ways to inform the way the public engages and thinks as well,” Miami Beach cultural affairs manager Brandi Reddick told artnet News.

After putting out an open call to artists that drew more than 100 proposals from around the world, the city chose a local resident, Puerto Rican-born, South Florida native Misael Soto, to fill the slot. Over the next twelve months, he will attend meetings with city officials, provide input, and create art that seeks to bring the community into the process of addressing climate change.

“It really seemed tailor-made for me,” said Soto, who just wrapped up his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was particularly intrigued by “the ability to get into the city government on the municipal level and interacting directly as opposed to from afar.”

The new residency is the brainchild of the Art Center of South Florida, which has been offering artist residencies for the past 37 years, in conjunction with the city of Miami Beach. “There really isn’t any other program like this that I know of,” Soto noted.

Art Center president and CEO Dennis Scholl told artnet News that with the help of the Knight Foundation, “we were able to create a residency that would bring an artist to South Beach and embed him or her in city government. In this case, the city liked the idea so much that they were willing to have the artist embedded in the resiliency department of the city of Miami Beach.” Resiliency, he added, is “code word for the things that concern us here… South Beach is ground zero for rising sea levels.”

According to an initial post about the residency, the program offers a $25,000 stipend, housing, and a maximum of $7,500 for production.

Soto isn’t the only artist to embed himself in a municipal government. New York City, for example, offers artist residencies in departments as diverse as the Department of Sanitation and the Department of Probation.

Meanwhile, other institutions have recognized artists’ potential for thinking creatively about climate change. Justin Guariglia, for example, has ridden aboard expeditions with NASA as they track the sinking ice sheets over Greenland. Scientists hope he can help them better visualize the topography of Greenland’s ocean floor.

For his part, Soto is well positioned to join Miami’s fight against the rising tides. He already has experience making art on the city’s shoreline. This past November, he created Flood Relief at Miami’s Museum Park, adjacent to the Pérez Art Museum. The week-long installation employed numerous gas-powered pumps to Sisyphean effect: They created a continuous cycle of water pumping out and then funneling back into Biscayne Bay. Stripped of their original purpose, they “essentially become fountains,” the artist explained.

Soto’s other major projects—installed in Florida and other East Coast locations—include Beach Towel (2011–12) and Picnic Blanket (2012), for which he created giant versions of the titular objects and turned them into sites where guests could play games, eat, and gather. The projects aimed to change the way beach- and park-goers think about the space they occupy, he said.

Soto’s residency began in Miami Beach a few weeks ago with meetings with various stakeholders. The particular projects he will focus on likely won’t be finalized until the fall. “Don’t ask me what he’s going to do, because I don’t know,” Scholl said.

Soto says he is aiming to identify three or four sites across Miami Beach and spend a few months at each site “in a kind of shifting installation that plays with these signifiers of public works improvement.”

Scholl said he would like to see more cities give “artists a seat at the table” to help solve big problems creatively. Though in this case, that table won’t stay in one place—it will be roving around the city for the next year. “This isn’t a residency where you’re locked in a studio with a blank canvas for 12 months,” Scholl said.

Learn more at artnet

On a recent visit to an Indigenous cultural center in Nova Scotia, Canadian politician Bill Casey found himself admiring an intricately embroidered robe. He was surprised to hear from a curator that what he was looking at was not the real thing, but a replica.

Held behind glass at the Millbrook Cultural and Heritage Centre near Truro, Nova Scotia, the stunning 19th-century Mi’kmaq regalia was a convincing facsimile of the original. The real regalia, however, is currently tucked away in a drawer at a museum in Melbourne, Australia.

Millbrook’s Mi’kmaq First Nation have been fighting to reclaim this unique piece of heritage for a decade. Their plight is familiar to many Indigenous communities in Canada and beyond. But now, for the first time, an unprecedented groundswell of support is growing to buttress their efforts.

A Global Shift

The push for restitution in Canada comes at a moment when long-held assumptions about the rightful ownership of cultural heritage are coming under renewed scrutiny worldwide. In Europe, French President Emmanuel Macron has promised to make restitution of French-owned African heritage a priority over the next five years, while Germany recently published guidelines on how to handle its own massive collections of colonial-era artifacts.

But former European colonies like Canada find themselves in a categorically different position. The so-called source communities asking for restitution are not an ocean away, but squarely within their own borders. Meanwhile, some of the contested items are held by foreign countries, creating a diplomatic and bureaucratic obstacle course. Arguably even more painful, other objects are in the collections of Canadian museums—visible but still out of reach for Indigenous communities.

Casey, who is a member of Canada’s federal parliament and represents Millbrook, was deeply affected by his visit to the cultural center. Since then, he has set out to help create a national strategy to help Indigenous peoples get their objects back, both from foreign nations and institutions within Canada’s own borders.

This February, he introduced a bill called the Aboriginal Cultural Property Repatriation Act (also known as Bill C-391) that aims to clear a smoother path for repatriation. The bill was unanimously voted forward through two rounds, most recently on June 7. Now, it will go to a Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage for further study. There is still a long way to go before it becomes law, but it’s off to a promising start. Parliament will debate the bill this autumn.

“From talking with many Indigenous stakeholders, I know that this strategy that would obtain artifacts being held in foreign museums and bring them back to Canada is long overdue,” Casey said after the vote in early June in the House of Commons. “For many Indigenous communities, the ceremonial artifacts that were removed by explorers over the centuries are a keenly missed part of their cultural heritage and identity.”

A Surprise Bill

When news first broke about Bill C-391 earlier this year, it caught several in the museum world off guard. “This bill, C-391, frankly came as a total surprise to us,” said John McAvity, the executive director and CEO of the Canadian Museums Association, which advocates for the museum sector in Canada. “It’s a well-meaning piece of legislation, but not really necessary as Canadian museums have been repatriating artifacts for over 35 years.”

Indeed, museums including Chicago’s Field Museum and the BC Royal Museum in Canada have repatriated objects to Canadian Indigenous communities over the years. But the new bill seeks to establish a national support system to make these requests more feasible for Indigenous communities, in part by providing funding for the transfer and storage of objects.

McAvity says he supports the bill overall and believes it will empower communities to gain access to their own cultural heritage. But he also points out the need for certain amendments. For one, he notes, human remains are not currently included in the list of qualifying objects, even though they are very often a top priority for repatriation.

Where Did the Artifacts Go?

So how, exactly, did Indigenous cultural property end up leaving the hands of its creators and landing in museums?

While some objects may have been legitimately purchased or donated, others are alleged to have been illegitimately confiscated by Canadian officials. From 1885 to 1951, the federal government banned potlach ceremonies—rituals practiced by Indigenous people in the Northwest to mark important events—in an effort to compel Indigenous people to assimilate and restrict their cultural expression. In the case of the notorious Cranmer potlach in 1921, officials arrested 45 potlach participants and swept up many important cultural objects in the process.

Over the years, artifacts from these ceremonies, including ritual clothing and dancing masks, ended up in museums including the Canadian Museum of History in Ottawa and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

“These important cultural objects were taken or stolen under our colonial regime’s disguise of superiority of ‘cultural preservation,'” a spokesman for Canadian Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly told CBC in response to Casey’s legislation.

Despite a growing willingness to address the issue, however, deep divisions about restitution remain, and a number of highly contested requests remain unresolved. The National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh holds the human remains of the last two members of Canada’s Beothuk tribe, APTN News reported last December.

Though the Beothuk slowly died out following European colonization, other local Indigenous community members in the region have been actively trying in vain to reclaim the remains. National Museums Scotland, which now oversees the collection, has said it would only consider a request from Canada’s federal government.

Finally, Canada submitted an “official” request in 2016, but the matter remains unresolved. As of this writing, the remains of Demasdui and her husband, a chief named Nonosabasut, as well as 10 burial items removed from graves, remain stored in the Scottish capital. The Scottish Museums Association has argued against restitution, in part because there are no living Beothuk descendants.

A Long Road

McAvity, the Canadian Museums Association director, remembers when he first heard the word “cultural repatriation.” It was at a Canadian museums conference on the West Coast in the 1970s. “A lone woman from the Haida Nation stood up and talked about repatriation,” he recalled. The room fell silent. “Most of us had never heard the word or concept before. It was a defining moment for me.”

Much has changed since then. The current conversation is part of a much broader discussion in Canada about the federal government’s need to make amends to Indigenous communities.

In 2008, Canada established the landmark Truth and Reconciliation Commission which, in 2015, released 94 calls to action to bring restorative justice to Indigenous peoples. From the 1880s to the end of the 20th century, the Canadian government operated a brutal residential school system that separated Indigenous children from their parents for extended periods and sought to “‘kill the Indian in the child,'” as Canada’s former Prime Minister Stephen Harper put it in an official apology in 2008.

A call to action targeted at museums seeking a national review of current policies and practices to determine their compliance with the United Nations’ 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples; In response, the Canadian Museums Association initiated a 15-member working group this May with key members from its national museums and Indigenous cultural institutions.

“What we’re dealing with is one of the steps in reconciliation of the residential school experience and all of the ways in which heritage and knowledge were denied to Indigenous communities, or how the transmission of culture and traditional knowledge from generation to generation was interrupted. That is really the heart of this whole discussion,” says Sarah Pash, the executive director at Aanischaaukamikw Cree Cultural Institute and a member of the working group who also sits on the Canadian Museums Association’s board.

Over the next three years, the task force will tackle a range of Indigenous art-related issues, including restitution. Casey’s bill is also on the table for consideration.

“For years, restitution was a no-no word in the museum language,” says McAvity. “This is changing fast, and it is about time for this new reality.”

A New Conversation Emerges

In recent years, Canadian museums have been working increasingly closely with Indigenous communities. But Pash says institutions must be careful to let Indigenous people take the lead on restitution-related matters, particularly in cases where their elders have specialized knowledge that can help retrace objects’ lost ownership histories.

Advocates argue that one of the most important parts of the bill is the proposed financial support that would enable communities to establish storage facilities or cultural institutions to house their own artifacts. McAvity notes that in that past, some communities have opted not to pursue restitution simply because they were unable to safely preserve the objects.

Still, others worry that increased funding could turn the current stream of repatriation requests into a flood. If the bill were to pass, would Canada’s museums end up empty? No, says McAvity. On the contrary, the law would likely result in the creation of more museums—ones run by Indigenous communities who have expertise in their own histories.

“Our treasures are family,” the artist and educator Lou-ann Ika’wega Neel, who has recently been appointed a repatriation specialist at the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, tells artnet News. “To know that our family is being stored away in museum cases or in basements or attics in far away lands has always been heartbreaking.” (The Royal Museum, for one, owns several objects that were confiscated from potlach ceremonies in the early 20th century.)

In her new role, Neel has developed an intriguing idea. She suggests that Indigenous Nations artists create replicas of cultural objects for Canadian museums as the originals are returned to their respective communities.

“These replicas could remain with museums along with much more information, so they can continue to serve as educational tools for people of all cultures,” Neel says. “[Visitors] will know that we are not a dead or dying culture. We are still here.”

In recent months, the Australian ambassador to Canada, Natasha Smith, has reached out to Casey, the Canadian politician, about the contested Mi’kmaq regalia that inspired his new bill. The Millbrook cultural center is now in active discussions with Australia and the First Nations museum there where it is being currently stored; The goal is to establish a plan to repatriate the robe as soon as possible.

“This is not a country-to-country negotiation, it is a First Nation-to-First Nation negotiation, and they are 15,000 km apart,” says Casey. “When the Ambassador contacted me, she pointed out, ‘How could we ask other countries to repatriate, if we’re not prepared to also do the same?’ I was floored. Already, this has had an impact.”

Learn more at artnet

Banksy may be visiting the City of Lights, but he didn’t come for romance. Aiming at France’s refugee crisis, the anonymous British street artist appears to have targeted Paris with at least three murals and several of his signature rats in various locations. It is the first time the artist has hit the French capital with his brand of social and political commentary.

Appropriately enough, the first of the new works was discovered by Parisians on World Refugee Day, June 20, near the Porte de la Chapelle metro station in the North of Paris, where the city’s refugee reception center “La Bulle” (The Bubble) was once situated. The center provided housing for between 2,000 and 3,000 refugees until French president Emmanuel Macron closed it last year. The migrants living there were bussed to temporary shelters elsewhere, but many are now reportedly sleeping on the streets of Paris. In the past three years, nearly 40 makeshift refugee camps in the capital have been razed to the ground by French authorities.

Similar to his 2008 work Go Flock Yourself, Banksy’s new mural shows a young girl spray-painting a flowery pink wallpaper pattern over a swastika on the street, beautifying the dismal area next to her sleeping bag and teddy bear. The work could be interpreted as a comment on anti-immigrant policies and the rise of the far right, as well as a reference to the very real situation of young migrants living on the streets.

Another mural purportedly by the artist takes aim at the French establishment. Found in the city center, it depicts a besuited businessman offering a bone to a hungry-looking three-legged dog, the front leg of which appears to have been recently cut off. The man is concealing a handsaw behind his back, which he presumably used to saw off the dog’s leg, before distracting the animal with a bone.

A third work elsewhere in the city references Jacques-Louis David’s Napolean Crossing the Alps. Instead of Bonaparte, however, Banksy’s rider looks almost comical: A red cape blows back over the rider, covering their face, suggesting perhaps that the country’s leadership is blind. The red cape might also reference the country’s so-called “Burka Ban,” which was introduced by the French government in 2010. The law prohibited the covering of the face in public, including with religious garments such as the full burka or niqabs worn by some female Muslims.

One commentator on Instagram placed the two works side by side, writing: “The blind leading the country!”

Banksy also stenciled his signature rats in different places around the city. The artist’s rats were influenced by the Parisian street artist Blek Le Rat and are widely interpreted to be stand-ins for the ordinary working class people of the world. The rats interact with the local environment, such as building façades and graffiti. Some reference the pivotal May 1968 period of civil unrest that began with student protests and eventually ended up grinding the country’s economy to a halt.

In one piece discovered on the Left Bank of the Seine near the Sorbonne University, a rat sits beneath the words “May 1968.” The number eight is turned on its side, perhaps signaling the decline of the city’s revolutionary spirit. The number also resembles Disney-esque mouse ears, as the rat below sports Minnie Mouse’s polka-dot bow. (Disneyland Paris is one of the city’s biggest employers.) In another work, a rat sits astride a champagne cork as it rockets into the atmosphere, and elsewhere a rat appears to be plotting to blow up a billboard.

Banksy, who usually claims his works on his website, has not yet confirmed that the new Paris works were indeed painted by him, and none of the works are signed. artnet News has reached out to the artist’s handling and authentication company Pest Control but had not received a response by press time.

It wouldn’t be the first time the artist has taken on issues related to the treatment of refugees. In 2015, he took his paint to the port city of Calais, the home of the notorious “Jungle” refugee camp that has since been razed by authorities. There the artist pained a mural reminding authorities that the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs came from a family of Syrian migrants. In another Calais mural, he referenced The Raft of the Medusa by the French Romantic painter Théodore Géricault, alluding to the fate of the hundreds of thousands of migrants attempting to cross the English Channel to reach the United Kingdom. More recently, in 2017, the artist created an anti-Brexit mural on the British side of the Channel at Dover.

Learn more at artnet

WASHINGTON — Melania Trump visited immigrant children in a Texas border town on Thursday, and by the time the first lady left, she had made headlines for another reason.

As the temperature climbed to 80 degrees at Joint Base Andrews near Washington, Mrs. Trump boarded her plane wearing an olive green coat that read, in white capital letters, “I really don’t care. Do U?”

For the second time since her husband took office — and the second time on a trip to Texas — Mrs. Trump had made an unusual choice. It was a move reminiscent of her decision last year to wear stilettos to a hurricane relief zone.

One common reaction to the jacket was bafflement: What was she thinking? No, really, what was she thinking? Mrs. Trump is a former model with a keen understanding of her own image. She never makes an accidental fashion choice. Right?

When asked about the choice — apparently a $39 jacket from the fast-fashion brand Zara — her office quickly responded.

“It’s a jacket,” Mrs. Trump’s communications director, Stephanie Grisham, said Thursday in a statement to reporters. “There was no hidden message. After today’s important visit to Texas, I hope this isn’t what the media is going to choose to focus on.”

During Mrs. Trump’s 75-minute visit to the Upbring New Hope Children’s Shelter in McAllen, Tex., she met with dozens of children as well as the people who are educating them and supervising their care. She asked officials questions about children’s well-being. She told the children to value friendship over all else.

“Good luck,” the first lady told them. The children applauded her as she left.

It was a striking re-emergence for Mrs. Trump, who underwent a procedure in May to treat a benign kidney condition and spent several weeks out of the public eye. Her trip on Thursday was a headfirst dive into the roiling debate over the Trump administration’s hard-line approach to immigration hours after her husband declared “we’ll send them the hell back” at a campaign rally.

She is the first member of the Trump family to visit the border with Mexico since a national debate broke out over the administration’s separation policy. The outcry led the president to reverse course under political pressure and sign an executive order on Wednesday to end the policy. More than 2,300 children have been separated from their parents so far, and thousands of families are likely to remain fractured.

“I’m here to learn about your facility,” Mrs. Trump told a group of officials at the center. She added that she wanted to offer “help to these children to reunite with their families as quickly as possible.”

The first lady interacted with dozens of the center’s 55 children, visiting three classrooms, according to a small group of reporters who accompanied her on the trip.

Mrs. Trump, who recently started Be Best, a platform centered around the betterment of children’s lives, asked her aides to organize the trip after seeing photographs and video of separated families, and hearing audio of children crying in the centers, Ms. Grisham said.

“She’s seen the images,” Ms. Grisham told reporters. “She’s heard the recordings. She was on top of the situation before any of that came out. She was concerned about it.”

Mrs. Trump, who traveled to Texas with Alex Azar, the health and human services secretary, was also scheduled to visit the Ursula Border Patrol Processing Center, which had became a particular subject of scrutiny this week after a government video emerged showing families sitting in cages clutching mylar blankets. But her visit had to be cut short because of bad weather.

A senior administration official, who insisted on anonymity, told reporters on the first lady’s plane that only six of the New Hope facility’s 55 children had been separated from their parents, and the rest arrived as unaccompanied minors. At the facility, officials told the first lady that the separated children could speak to their parents twice a week.

Mrs. Trump also asked about the condition of the children when they arrived: “So when the children come here, what kind of stage, you know, physical and the mental stage” are they in when “they come here?”

She was told by an official that children often arrive distraught, but soon settle in.

“It’s a process, yes,” Mrs. Trump replied. “But I’ve heard they’re very happy. They love to study. They love to go school.”

In recent days, according to her office, Mrs. Trump was upset by news reports about families being separated at the border and helped persuade President Trump to take action to stop it. Amid the din of voices who tried to persuade him to change his mind — including members of Congress and his oldest daughter — the first lady’s concern seemed to stand out.

“My wife feels very strongly about it,” Mr. Trump said as he signed an executive order on Wednesday to stop the separations. But Mr. Trump, who faced a growing outcry from the public and from Republicans and Democrats in Congress, did not say whether her urging had swayed his decision.

In any case, Mrs. Trump had planned the trip before the president signed the order: “I don’t know what she knew” about the timing, Ms. Grisham said. “She knew what she wanted to do, and she told us.”

Learn more at NY Times

In 1962, two men from East Berlin attempted a daring escape to the West. Peter Fechter and Helmut Kulbeik were young — all of 18. On Aug. 17, the pair slipped away from their construction jobs during their lunch break and made their way to the border, hiding in an old factory near the Checkpoint Charlie crossing of the Berlin Wall, which had been erected only the year before.

Around 2 p.m., they slipped out an open window into the barbed wire-filled no man’s land alongside the wall. They then made a run for it. Kulbeik managed to scramble over the wall, then still a crude barrier not much taller than a man.

Fechter did not.

An East German guard shot him before he could make the climb. His body fell to the East, but was visible in the West, from the windows of buildings close to the wall. He cried for help, but no guards or medics came. In full view of the world, he bled to death. On the Western side of the wall, a crowd of hundreds gathered and chanted “murderers” at the East German guards. The security zone in which he died became known as the “death strip.”

After Fechter’s killing, it seemed beyond the realm of imagination that the Berlin Wall could ever come down. Yet, less than three decades later, it did: In November 1989, after a member of the East German Politburo announced that restrictions on travel would be lifted, East Germans flooded the border, and joined by West Berliners on the other side, tore the wall apart with whatever tools they could find. Within months, this seemingly intractable political barrier had crumbled. By the following year, Germany was one again.

The wall and its physical and political aftermath are at the heart of one of the most captivating pavilions at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, on view through Nov. 25. In keeping with the biennale’s “Freespace” theme, “Unbuilding Walls,” as Germany’s exhibition is titled, charts the ways in which architects and urbanists have sought to weave back together East and West since 1989 — both physically and psychologically.

Step into the German pavilion and you are greeted by a grim black wall bisecting the room before you. Walk farther into the space, however, and the wall appears to fragment. The long, black barrier, it turns out, isn’t solid. It is a series of unconnected vertical slabs, laid out at different depths, that provide a passing illusion of fortitude. It could not be more sculptural.

It also could not be a more propitious time for this show.

This year, Feb. 5 marked the day that the wall had been gone as long as it had been up — 10,316 days. The wall, as the curators note in a related essay, “represented not only the division of a city and the division of an entire country” but also became a symbol of “state repression, forcible separation, autocratic despotism and the inhuman potential of political ideology.”

Moreover, the deconstruction of the Berlin Wall and its attendant Cold War legacies highlights the construction of walls elsewhere — such as the “big, fat, beautiful wall” President Trump wants for the U.S.-Mexico border — and points to a future in which those walls may be no more.

Architect Lars Krückeberg is a founder of the Berlin-based design studio Graftand served as a curator of the exhibition. He says that growing up in Germany — in the West — the wall seemed like it would always be a part of the landscape.

“If you had asked me in Germany, even half a year before it did, will that wall come down?” he says. “I would have have said, ‘No. It can’t come down.’ And a lot of people would have said that.”

Today, tourists flood sites such as Checkpoint Charlie, the wall’s most recognizable crossing point, to have their pictures taken with actors in military costume.

Walls that go up, one day come down.

Krückeberg organized the exhibition with his fellow Graft founders Wolfram Putz and Thomas Willemeit, in collaboration with Marianne Birthler, a human rights advocate who served on a commission that investigated the crimes of the Stasi, the East German secret police.

“There have been many stories in exhibitions about the wall,” Krückeberg says of the impetus for the show. “But there have been no exhibitions that look at the space around it — a space that could be very deep.”

Together, the curators have put together a dense but fascinating show — with an essential (and blessedly well-written) catalog that looks at the urban and rural sites occupied by the Berlin Wall before, during and after its existence.

As part of this, they recount riveting bits of the Berlin Wall’s urban history.

The wall, for example, cut indiscriminately across existing rail lines, but subterranean rails were left untouched. This meant that West Berlin underground lines regularly crossed into Eastern territory as part of their daily routes. To observe the political boundaries, however, Western trains didn’t stop in on the Eastern side, resulting in a number of ghost stations. Except for one: Friedrichstrasse, which served as an official border crossing, and which was dubbed the “Palace of Tears,” since it’s where easterners said goodbye to friends and family heading back to the West.

There is the long history of Potsdamer Platz, a busy intersection of traffic and trams — once home to Europe’s first traffic lights — that was bombed to rubble during World War II and was later unsympathetically divided by the wall. And there was the Gothic Revival church from the 19th century that was blown up in 1985 because it had the misfortune of being in the middle of the death strip. (At this spot now stands the Chapel of Reconciliation, designed by Sassenroth & Reitermann, that is built on the foundations of the earlier church.)

“Unbuilding Walls” reviews the myriad architecture and urbanism projects that have arisen as a reaction to the Berlin Wall — such as the Band des Bundes, a strip of federal buildings designed by German architects Axel Schultes and Charlotte Frank that seem to strap together East and West like the buckle of a belt. The show also reviews the parks and monuments that incorporate elements of the wall as a nod to historical memory and the many that do not — such as an apartment complex by Italian postmodernist Aldo Rossi. His ebullient Schützenstrasse Quarter complex, built on the site of the former death strip, completely overwrites the area’s deadly history.

Most significantly, “Unbuilding Walls” looks at the ways in which the country has attempted to weave itself back together socially and culturally since the end of the Cold War.

This reunification has not been an equal proposition. In her catalog essay, Birthler notes the disparities faced by those in the former East Germany, who on average earn less and wield far less power socially and politically. “Two of the 13 ministers of the German government in 2017 came from the East,” she notes. “Only three of the 60 state secretaries originate from the East. Of the 190 board seats of stock companies, just three are occupied by East Germans.”

This has led to a lopsided cultural representation as well.

In a separate essay, cultural journalist Michael Pilz notes that the West doesn’t always show much regard for the East’s architectural history. Socialist Modernist buildings have been demolished or ill-preserved — such as the Ahornblatt, the so-called maple-leaf restaurant from the 1970s known for its swooping five-point canopy. It was torn down to make way for a hotel and shopping mall. Other key sites have been reborn as luxury car dealerships or tourist viewing platforms — generally with little acknowledgement of what they once signified.

“Buildings are not just aesthetic compositions or profitable investments,” writes Pilz. They are “monuments.” And “those who tear them down erase entire biographies.”

Nearly three decades after it came down, the Berlin Wall still casts a long shadow.

“Some people thought, ‘Let’s just heal the city. Let’s erase traces of the wall and it’ll be fine,’” Krückeberg says. “If you say that, you are lying to yourself.

“You can’t just divide things. If you do, you’re cutting through tissue — and you damage and you hurt and you scar. We know that from Berlin.”

What makes the exhibition relevant beyond the German context is the ways in which it connects with other political scenarios.

“Unbuilding Walls” features video testimonials gathered by the architects at border walls around the world — North and South Korea, Israel and Palestine, the U.S. and Mexico. In these testimonials, residents of those nations reflect on what border walls mean and how they have affected their lives. It’s a piece that ties in nicely with a project by Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, on view at the U.S. pavilion nearby, that makes a case for viewing the U.S.-Mexico border not as a dividing line but as a holistic ecological region.

In one of the videos, a man named José Efraín from Tijuana is asked how long he thinks the U.S. border wall may ultimately last.

“I can’t be sure,” he responds. “As you see in Berlin, where they took down that wall — here, we can do the same thing, and we could just not have a border.”

The hardened U.S.-Mexico border may seem like a permanent part of life in North America. But Krückeberg says making those assumptions can be foolhardy.

“That’s the lesson of the Berlin Wall. Each wall is temporary. There is a time it will come down.”

Learn more at L.A. Times

New York City today announced She Built NYC, a new initiative to commission a public monument or artwork on city property with a focus on women’s history. The program—which was inaugurated by the Mayor’s Office and the Department of Cultural Affairs—follows recommendations from the Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers, a commission initiated “to expand the stories, histories, and narratives represented on public property in New York.” As a press release for She Built NYC stated, “These representations have historically failed to reflect the multiplicity of people that have contributed to the city throughout history.” With a goal to correct for the past, the Department of Cultural Affairs has committed up to $10 million for new monuments and works.

Anyone can nominate women or historical events for consideration at the website for Women.nyc; the deadline for suggestions is August 1. After reviewing the nominations, an advisory panel will consult with the Department of Cultural Affairs on the subject of a monument and an artist to create it, to be announced in January.

The new initiative follows increasing protest among New Yorkers over representational imbalance within public works. As noted in a 2017 Gothamist report on the subject, “In Central Park, the most-visited urban park in the country, there are 23 historical male statues, but the sole female representations are either fictional characters, like Alice and Mother Goose, or nameless props, like nymphs and angels.”

Earlier this year, a statue dedicated in 1894 in Harlem was removed in the wake of protests over its subject: J. Marion Sims, a doctor whose work drew in part on experiments on enslaved black women.

Learn more at ARTNEWS

When the Electronic Entertainment Expo took over downtown Los Angeles last week, there was talk of new technologies as well as hints of a “next generation” of consoles. Yet the most striking moment during the weeklong celebration of gaming was something far more simple: a kiss.

An unexpectedly intimate and warmly optimistic scene — one complete with honest and awkward dialogue — launched Sony's presentation of "The Last of Us Part 2." The scene of a kiss between two women made the argument that good ol’ fashioned storytelling still tops slick gameplay and larger-than-life digital effects

At E3, "The Last of Us Part 2" was an outlier, and not just because it emphasized teen romance — and, to be sure, lots of intense violence. "The Last of Us Part 2" stands out as a single-player game in an increasingly multiplayer world. Big-budget games today are going communal. And with Epic Games recently unveiling that more than 125 million people have played “Fortnite,” who can blame them?

A longstanding single-player franchise such as “Fallout” announced its upcoming “Fallout 76” would be a multiplayer experience. BioWare, known best for single-player narratives such as “Dragon Age” and “Mass Affect,” is embracing social with its upcoming shooter “Anthem.” Treyarch stated that its newest “Call of Duty” title would go without a single-player campaign.

Other games, such as Rare’s pirate adventure “Sea of Thieves” for Xbox One, is geared toward social play, to the point that its single-player experience is barely playable. Ubisoft’s own upcoming pirate title, “Skull and Bones,” is also going the multiplayer route, and last year, Electronic Arts shuttered a “Star Wars” title from celebrated game storyteller Amy Hennig of “Uncharted” fame to “pivot” away from “a story-based, linear adventure game.”

Which leads to this question: What’s the future for the introverted player, the one who doesn’t want to game with strangers and whose friends don’t have the latest consoles? Are those of us who want to dig in with a game in the solitary way we devour a book or binge watch a series slowly being phased out?

“That conversation is scary,” said Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann, currently overseeing production of “The Last of Us Part 2. “It’s scary because those are my favorite kinds of games, and if there’s fewer people making those games? That’s one of the reasons I joined the industry.”

The kiss in “The Last of Us Part 2” was effective because it felt directed — that is, it was carefully written and staged by artists who want players to discover a rather specific story. Such is a key benefit of the single-player experience. Co-writer of the game Halley Gross said “The Last of Us Part 2” provided her an opportunity to go deep on the lasting effects of trauma, especially as it pertains to a young woman.

“It is this hostile environment; it is this place where there are no rules,” she said. “When you have to fight for your life everyday, and you can’t go to therapy and you can’t get help, how do you deal with that and how does that corrupt you? Or save you?”

There are benefits to the single-player games beyond just thoughtful character development and a heavy narrative focus. Combat and action can feel more personally choreographed in ways that fit the story. In “The Last of Us Part 2,” fight scenes feel claustrophobic.

In FromSoftware’s “Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice,” set in a fantastical take on feudal Japan, the studio’s marketing manager, Yasuhiro Kitao, said via a translator that adding options for another player would essentially mean having to create more generic enemies that could be scaled to multiple skill-sets at once.

In a game such as “Fortnite,” chaos and humor rule. The wild anything-goes matches result in a vastly unpredictable game where spontaneity and competition matter significantly more than story. That’s expected, as the game must be designed to support the whims of dozens of strangers.

Multiplayer inherently changes the tone of a game, one that can give it more of a sport-like feel.

“Speaking personally, and ensuring I’ll never work again, I’m a single-player story guy,” said veteran developer Warren Spector (“Epic Mickey,” “Deus Ex”). “I think interactive storytelling is really fascinating. Virtual socializing is less interesting to me than establishing a connection with a game. For me, games are a dialogue between the developer and the player, and not necessarily 16 players out there in the world.”

What’s changing, however, is the quest by developers to bring narrative-rich experiences into the multiplayer universe. A franchise such as “Destiny” is designed essentially to last forever, creating an immersive universe rather than a beginning-middle-end. This solves one inherent problem of a single-player game: People purchase it once and then stop spending money.

BioWare’s sci-fi space gunner “Anthem” looks to go after a similar market, as it’s emphasizing cooperative gameplay in a setting in which missions could be added over a number of years. In theory, this allows developers to create multiple revenue streams for a single game, either via micro-transitions, subscriptions or world-building expansion packs.

The challenges: making the narrative feel more guided and controlled than so-called environmental storytelling usually allows and trying to ensure that everyone plays along nicely. Though my time with the game at E3 was limited, I was often using my jetpack to soar among the forest-like planet in the opposite (read: wrong) direction of everyone else on my team.

BioWare’s general manager, Casey Hudson, tried to assuage my concern, saying that the game would be friendly. “Anthem,” he said, will encourage mentor-mentee relationships.

“Anyone can play with any level, and when you’re a higher level, there are bonuses for playing with people who are at a lower level and helping them out,” he said. “It’s a mentor system, including helping people through the first levels of the game.”

When the topic of single-player games entering endangered species status comes up, most every developer — including the industry’s own trade body, the Electronic Software Assn. — says a variation of the same thing: Look at Bethesda. The studio last year launched a slightly tongue-in-cheek campaign dubbed “Save Player 1,” noting that while gaming is “often about social interaction,” sometimes one needs some personal space.

Yet Bethesda this year took the single-player-focused “Fallout” series and turned it into a multiplayer experience with the upcoming “Fallout 76.”

“The stuff we’ve traditionally done, it’s good to say, ‘You’re the hero, the world is here for you and we’ve designed it all around maximizing your personal experience. We’re the dungeon master. Trust us,’” said Bethesda executive and “Fallout” architect Todd Howard, who added that even in traditionally single-player games, the studio has been thinking of ways to facilitate more interaction among friends, even if it’s as simple as sharing a photo.

Yet in “Fallout 76,” every human in the game will be controlled by another human. Traditionally, in the game’s violent post-apocalyptic world, even the non-player-controlled characters are regularly despicable. Won’t turning their digital brains over to humans simply create a more inhospitable, anarchic experience?

Howard said Bethesda is thinking hard about preventing strangers from ruining someone’s game in “Fallout 76.” Don’t, he said, expect to see my digital character just randomly shot in the head by some unseen foe.

“That’s very hard for them to do,” he said. “They offer you a challenge. It’s like if someone walks up to you into a bar and slaps you. ‘Do you want to fight?’ You can be like, ‘That’s kind of annoying. I’m just going to walk away.’ That’s the vibe we want.

“We want to incentive it,” Howard continued. “Imagine the guy slaps you, and then someone walks up to you and says, ‘I’ll give you $1,000 if you fight that guy.’ The game incentives you to fight. It’s the same way we would design an entertaining encounter, but [we’re having] the game design give the player those tools to design those entertaining encounters themselves.”

Right.

But what if I still trust, say, Howard to give me the best experience rather than strangers I encounter in a virtual world? For example, after the reaction to “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” I shudder at what any “Star Wars” fan would do if given Lucasfilm’s tools.

If I long ago decided “World of Warcraft” wasn’t my style of gaming, shouldn’t today’s multiplayer obsession frighten me? When it comes to big budget mainstream games, that answer remains unclear. “This is not some flag that says, ‘This is the future of everything,’” said Howard, trying to reassure me.

But even Spector, that self-described “single-player story guy,” said multiplayer offers some irresistible problems designers have yet to solve, and I should expect plenty in the years ahead to give it their best shot.

“I’ve spent my entire career trying to re-create the feeling I got when I played ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ with my friends, where there was six of us telling stories with each other,” he said. “It’s a really interesting problem. How do you take an electronic game and let six players tell a story to each other? From an intellectual standpoint, I find that really interesting. I find that kind of cooperative storytelling a really interesting challenge, and I’d like to tackle that someday.

“I’m a single-player story guy not so much because I’m a single-player guy,” he added, “but because I’m a story guy.”

And for now, I want my stories dictated by storytellers and not my niece and nephew who just got a new game console.

Learn more at L.A. Times

In the 1980s, when the art world was struggling to distill the pain and loss of the AIDS epidemic, Ann Philbin, a young curator with an avant-garde eye and an activist’s edge, walked into a New York gallery and came upon a simple and searing work: A white, scoured sink by sculptor Robert Gober.

“It took my breath away,” said Philbin, who watched many friends die of a disease that swept through the East Village and inspired gay artists like Gober to respond. “I thought, ‘Oh, my God, I have no idea what it means, but for me that sink had all the beauty and pathos of what we were living through in that moment, and what we were living through was horrifying.’”

That reckoning spoke not only to Philbin’s aesthetic but to a provocative instinct that art should define its era, challenge its politics and resonate with a truth that can startle and illuminate. Her 19 years as director of the UCLA Hammer Museum have personified that credo, turning the institution into one of nation’s most enticing and risk-taking ventures, exhibiting not only contemporary and conceptual art, but holding hundreds of programs a year on topics including racism, civil disobedience, feminism, clean energy and talking sex with Dita Von Teese.

“When I came here,” said Philbin, who left the Drawing Center in New York to move to the Hammer, “L.A. was considered not at all an interesting city for art. But in these two decades, it has become the red hot center, arguably in the world. Artists are moving here from Berlin, South America, a lot from Europe. The environment here is not about making money, it’s about making art.”

Trim and mercurial, Philbin, who once clashed with billionaire Eli Broad over funding and turned away potential board members who didn’t share her progressive inclinations, runs on self-assurance and charm. She looks right at you, as if perhaps you’re a painting or video installation to be politely scrutinized, and then, if all goes well, conspired with. She is at ease in the penthouses of donors and the cluttered studio apartments of unknown artists, looking for that revelatory find that will celebrate Los Angeles’ ascension.

The Hammer’s current ‘Made in L.A. 2018’ biennial exhibition features 33 artists from ethnicities that reflect the city’s diversity. It is a signature show that, like many at the institution, highlights new and under-recognized local artists. Throughout her career, Philbin, who started out as a painter, has focused on artists ahead of boards of directors, donors, collectors, the public and other complicated whims and egos that are at once a distraction and necessity for an institution to thrive.

“I started with artists and it took a long time for people to notice anything was happening here,” said Philbin, whose operating budget has jumped from $5 million to $25 million since 1999. “But it gave us credibility with the artists. Only in the last six years has the general public finally noticed. We’re still building our audience. Sometimes I say more people in Berlin know who we are than in Westwood.”

Andrea Bowers, whose work is often politically charged, praised the Hammer last year for hanging her 50-foot mural depicting banks, including one of the museum’s donors (Wells Fargo), that were funding the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline, which runs through the Standing Rock Native American reservation. “Annie has amazing courage to do projects that other institutions might not do,” said Bowers. “The reason LA has evolved into one of the major art cities in the world has a lot to do with her tenure.”

But Philbin fears that the city’s allure for artists — many of whom studied at local schools -- is now threatened by rising rents and creeping gentrification, factors that in other cities, notably New York and San Francisco, pushed artists away. The pressure is likely to intensify as Southern California becomes attractive to the tech industry, a shift that could recast the region’s character and culture.

“Real estate prices are something that’s now talked about all the time. You can feel it changing. It’s a big concern for artists,” said Philbin. She added that in San Francisco, the tech industry was estranged from the local art scene. “They were in their own little bubble,” she said of tech companies. “You can’t old hold it (development) back. You can’t stop it. But you can do it differently. I hope they understand what it means to be a citizen. If so, we have the potential to alter this landscape in the most exciting way.”

Philbin is fierce about the duties of citizenship and the cachet of brand, turning a university museum into a world-class institution, one that has received two recent donations totaling $50 million to underpin a $180-million campaign for renovations, endowment, exhibitions and gallery expansion. “We’re going for big game,” she said. “Our exhibition partners are MOMA, the MET, the Tate, the Whitney.”

That sense of prowess and singularity — the museum’s affiliation with the university is not readily apparent on its website — has at times agitated some at UCLA, though Philbin says, “it’s not an issue today.”

The Hammer’s autonomy grew out of legal disputes and financial maneuverings in the 1990s when UCLA took over what was then the Armand Hammer Museum, founded by the CEO of Occidental Petroleum to house his art collection. Brett Steele, dean of UCLA’s School of the Arts and Architecture and a member of the Hammer board, said there is no tension between the Hammer and the university, adding that the museum’s degree of independence “is something we talk about.”

Philbin followed the “strength of her convictions in building this museum into what it has become,” said board chairwoman Marcy Carsey, a television producer who donated $20 million last year to the Hammer. “Sometimes she stood up to very powerful people and put her job on the line.”

One of those times came shortly after Philbin arrived at the Hammer and learned that then-board member Eli Broad wanted to divert millions of dollars from the sale of a museum-owned scientific drawing by Leonardo da Vinci to start what became the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Center at UCLA. Philbin helped block Broad’s attempt, a telling move against one of the city’s most powerful arts patrons.

That early encounter appears not to have damaged their relationship. When asked about the matter, Philbin said, “Eli and I had a disagreement in the past, but we’re friends now.” Broad, who can be temperamental when his plans are challenged, called Philbin “a determined, smart leader who has shown remarkable vision,” adding, “Los Angeles is fortunate to have her.”

On a recent morning, Philbin, a photographer in tow, walked through the annual Kids’ Art Museum Project (K.A.M.P.) fundraiser in the Hammer courtyard. Children painted, weaved, drew and built Legos alongside artists including skateboarder Chad Muska and architect Kulapat Yantrasast. The event raised about $200,000 and provided a glimpse of the celebrity (Bill Hader and Jimmy Kimmel read children’s stories), wealth (Chanel and diamonds) and talent (painter Rosson Crow oversaw the collage table) that fuels the LA art scene.

Philbin did tricks with a magician who held a deck of Tiffany & Co. playing cards. The metaphor, though happenstance, was evident: Philbin has navigated the delicate and at times ego-fueled intersection between wealth and art for years, most visibly at the annual museum’s Gala, with a guest list that ranges from Sarah Jessica Parker to architect Frank Gehry. The event raised $2.4 million last year.

To the consternation of some artists and curators, she has invited celebrities to have a hand in exhibitions. Steve Martin, an intrepid collector, curated a show by Canadian artist Lawren Harris. Will Ferrell and Joel McHale starred in a short video to explain the works in the “Stories of Almost Everyone,” a recent exhibition about how we interpret art objects. Philbin thought Ferrell and McHale would add an everyman sense of humor to a show that featured folded socks and piled letters and was inscrutable to many. The video had more than 850,000 views on YouTube and Facebook.

“This was a little controversial because the curators said, ‘You’re making fun of the art.’ And I said, ‘No, I’m not. I’m trying to find a way where people can find comfort with their discomfort about this work,” said Philbin, adding that one artist refused to be in the video. “One of the works of art was a pillow that had only been slept on by acrobats. I’m sorry, but if we cannot make fun of ourselves. If we cannot make fun of that then we’re just….”

The daughter of an artist and a lawyer who worked in President John F. Kennedy’s administration, Philbin gets along well with her board (“their job is to support us, not lead us”) and is freer to explore her tastes than directors at many other institutions. It would be hard to imagine the leadership turmoil at MOCA — director Philippe Vergne’s contract will not be renewed next year – plaguing the Hammer. This has allowed her to concentrate on exhibitions like “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985”, a recent acclaimed show that featured artists who fought racism, misogyny and political oppression.

“Our public programs are unabashedly progressive in their viewpoints,” said Philbin, who is married to Cynthia Wornham, a senior vice president at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. “I have a couple of Republicans on my board, but they’re good Republicans [she laughed], and they probably mostly agree with the point of view we’re putting out there. Many other museums couldn’t get away with that. There are people on their boards who are very partisan. Democrats and Republicans and people who are very wealthy who have very strong points of view about immigration and this and that.”

Philbin received a master’s degree in museum studies/arts administration from New York University. She remembers the days of Reaganomics, AIDS memorials in Greenwich Village, and when Cindy Sherman worked was a receptionist at Artists Space. And though she is now building a vibrant art scene that reflects Los Angeles, like many in her world, she wants the recognition of New York’s cultural media and established order. The art world may be shifting west, but the perception remains that much of its influence is in the east.

She is in some ways is reminiscent of Deborah Borda, who left her post as head of the New York Philharmonic and took over the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2000. Borda put aside East Coast conventions and, along with conductor Gustavo Dudamel, built one of the most innovative orchestras in the world. So much so that the struggling New York Philharmonic lured her back last year to infuse it with her marketing skills and adventurousness.

“I’m still a New Yorker at heart,” said Philbin. “But risk and experimentation are much more embraced in L.A.”

On a May afternoon, Philbin, dressed in ivory-colored pants and a jacket, walked amid pieces being installed for the “Made in L.A. 2018” show, which encompasses topics ranging from climate change to social justice that reflect our unsettled times. They include works by Luchita Hurtado, a 97-year-old Venezuelan-born painter whose images turn the body into landscapes, and Charles Long, a slight man in a black T-shirt who stood next to a sculpture that could be viewed as either the base of a cut-down tree or a severed penis.

“This is the room where patriarchy ends,” Long said with a laugh.

“I like it,” Philbin said.

The unexpected, a place where imagination finds spark and voice, a style all its own, that’s what she saw in Gober’s sink during the AIDS crisis. And it defined her many-years quest to meet Lee Bontecou, a sculptor popular in the 1960s who retreated from the public eye to make art in a barn deep in Pennsylvania. Philbin was determined to bring Bontecou’s new works to the Hammer.

“I had been writing Lee for 10 years. She never responded,” said Philbin. Her break came when Elizabeth Smith, a curator at MOCA, made contact with Bontecou. “So we made this pilgrimage to Pennsylvania. I literally fainted. When she opened the barn doors, I had to sit down and put my head between my legs. The work was phenomenal, and she was doing it in total isolation. It was like it was being seen for the first time. The show opened at Hammer in 2003 and went on to MOMA.”

She paused while recounting the story, lingering over the memory of that sublime instant when barn doors swung toward the light.

Learn more at L.A. Times

My son Langston came into the house visibly angry. His jaw was clenched, and his eyes were red and narrowed. “What’s wrong?” I quickly asked. “I was just trying to park and get to work,” he said.

Last summer, Langston was an intern for a progressive organization in New Jersey. They had been lobbying at the capitol in Trenton that day. He left home hoping they could make a difference. But as he attempted to park at the statehouse, a police officer stopped him and roughly told him to park elsewhere. As Langston searched for a different spot, another officer stopped him, drilled him with questions and told him to find somewhere else to park. He stood still in the kitchen, not really looking at me as he spoke. And then, “I got stopped again, Dad. Again! And the cop asked me, ‘Who is your P.O.?’ And I said, ‘What’s a P.O.?’ and the cop yelled, ‘Parole officer!’ I was in a suit, Dad! A suit!” A single tear fell down his face.

This was the latest in a string of incidents. As father and son, we’d had “the talk.” Not the one about sex that all parents have. The one about being black in America. He had told me of his encounters with the police before. I longed to protect him. But here he was in front of me again, 21 years of age, full of rage. I felt helpless as a father. I shouted, “F-ck!” and poured us a stiff drink. I didn’t know what else to do.

I am sure I am not alone. Black fathers throughout this country struggle to raise their sons in a world where they seemingly have bull’s-eyes on their backs. We work hard at striking the delicate balance between unconditional love and providing the discipline our sons and daughters will need to survive in America. We watch them as they take their first steps. Teach them how to ride their bicycles without training wheels. We attend their basketball games. Tend to their scratches and bruises. Argue and fight with them when they become teenagers. Worry about their choices and their futures.

We do so while much of the country–well, much of white America–believes we are absent from our children’s lives. The stereotype of the absent black father has masqueraded as common sense, even if the data suggest otherwise. Josh Levs’ 2015 book, All In, showed that the majority of black men do live with their children. A 2013 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report found that black fathers are more likely than their white and Hispanic counterparts to bathe, read to, talk with and review homework with their children on a daily basis. Of course, there are black men who have turned their backs on their children. But they are no different than other men who have done the same.

Dame Drummer, 40
Damon, 10

Oakland, Calif.

I know that I have a special boy. But my reality as a father is, one day, this 10-year-old could not come home—at the hands of foolishness or hatred or misunderstanding. And if I can give him anything, I would just say, “Take your life one day at a time, man. Don’t let this world suck you into it with the illusions of happiness and the illusions of self-worth. Be your own man. Make your own mind. Have your own decisions. And above all, don’t be afraid of anything.”

The persistence of the stereotype, however, sheds light on the context within which we must raise our children–especially our sons. They will grow up, and we must raise them in a world that has a host of assumptions about who they are and what they are capable of. I remember my own father, a hard man who weathered brutal Mississippi summers to deliver mail, telling me, “I am not here to be your friend. I have to prepare you for the world out there, and it ain’t a friendly place.” As if raising children isn’t hard enough, we have to do so with the added burden of preparing them for a racist world. That fact alone often interrupts intimacies. It can make private, black spaces hard and sometimes appear unloving.

We comfort our sons when their hearts are broken. Encourage them after a crushing defeat. Criticize their lack of effort. Prod them to do better in school. We urge them to dream big–but with the refrain that, if they are going to achieve their dreams, they will have to be twice as good and work twice as hard as everyone else. And there it is: even in the most intimate moments, black fathers have to remind their children that this world is not organized in their favor.

Ruddy Roye’s photographs offer a glimpse into those interrupted intimacies. With these images, “we see the disparate range of the relationships between fathers and sons,” Roye told me. Throughout, we see fathers pulling their sons close: their arms draped around them, the boys snuggled tight, trying to approximate a space of safety.

But these images are haunted by the reality of what lies beyond the reach of our arms. My son came home angry and in tears. Thank God he came home. Think about the blank stare of Trayvon Martin’s dad or the rage in the eyes of Michael Brown Sr., or listen to the unimaginable grief of Alton Sterling’s son as he wept for his late father. Black fathers are here. Roye’s photographs bear witness to that fact. We are trying desperately to raise our children, to shower them with love, to allow them to dream big–and to keep them alive. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

Interviews have been edited and condensed.

Fredrico Don Broom, 41
Vincent, 7, in lap
Diego, 12

Catonsville, Md.

I teach my sons that when life gets hard, never give up. There was a time when I was going to lose it all. It was on Father’s Day. I work as an engineer, in my father’s footsteps. I got a call from my job: to come in, stabilize the boiler room. Before I could leave, one of the stabilizer tanks exploded. I got cracked across the head. I was out for 2½ years. I sold everything I had just to keep a roof over our heads. To keep things afloat, I started my own business. It’s always good to show a physical example of strength, determination and the willingness to never give up.

Remi Bereola, 38
Kaden, 4

Oakland, Calif.

Every day, we talk about how our day was and about being a leader and a good listener and a good helper. His school is African-centered and teaches the greatness of precolonial kings and kingdoms, rather than him learning about slavery as if that were our first entry point into history. My father is Nigerian, so we make sure that’s a part of his understanding of who he is-that when he enters in the room, he has that greatness that he carries within him.

Shaykh Abdur Rashied, 70
Malcolm Matthews, 20

Chicago

I realized at an early age that he was a very spiritual guy. But he had his own mind. He would have to learn just from observing me. We used to bowl, and people said, “I didn’t know Muslims had fun?” He was taking all this in—how people responded to us, respected us. Also, my wife was a [gang] violence interrupter, so he and his siblings knew what was happening in the community and were aware of certain things not to be involved in. He saw the distinction between right and wrong.

Kamau Preston, 39
Dayne, 12

New York City

I cannot protect my son. I cannot protect my daughter. When a black teen does something, [it’s] “We’re gonna teach him a lesson.” And when a white teen does something, it’s “Oh, he’s a kid. It’s a phase.” The first time I spoke to him about this, he was about 10. And his response to me was, “Dad, I’m half-white.” And I was like, “I get that. But in everybody else’s world, you’re not. They think you’re black.” He’s having a hard time having to compute that.

Victor P. Mason, 62
Christopher Mason, 35

Jackson, Miss.

I’m sheriff of Hinds County. When I became an officer in law enforcement in the early ’80s, I knew how the environment was here, so I didn’t want my son to be a victim. I wanted him to be a vessel. I was very protective of [my sons], but I let them get their knees skinned. I would take him to the funeral home. I would let him see bodies in the back that were shot up because guys were trying to commit crimes, and let him know this was just one-way; there are consequences.

Jesse Starr III, 50
Jesse Starr IV, 28

Jackson, Miss.

To raise a black man in this society, I was fortunate enough to be able to be raised around a father that was in the workforce, and he was a teacher. So I saw a work ethic early. And then I have a bloodline of just hustlers and entrepreneurs, so that just gave me the work ethic to know that you’ve got to have your own business. So my son picked that up. You’d make two dollars, you turn it into four. All black men in America and beyond need to have their own business.

James Gaither, 48
Elijah, 5, in lap
Jasir, 8

Gwynn Oak, Md.

Unfortunately about a year, year-and-a-half ago, I had a talk with my then-, what, six-year-old about police. And that police are supposed to be good people. Unfortunately, as human beings, all of them aren’t good people. So when you deal with them, you have to be somewhat more docile. Because I want you to come home safe. Because I don’t want you to be the next news clip of a young kid shot playing with something that looked like something that they thought was a gun. Because the cop was scared, racist, confused or whatever. Because he said you were combative, you didn’t listen or whatever reason that came up. And that’s a fear that I felt like I never should have had to have. And that’s always been around.

Vincent Wade Jenkins, 58
Vincent Wade Knight, 26

Jackson, Miss.

I won’t say nothing to him that ain’t going to be beneficial for him. I don’t just say any kind of sh-t to him. I say some sh-t that I know he needs, you know what I’m saying? And whether he listens or not, fine. But I come to find out, he listens to everything I say.

Anthony Hamblin, 48
Amear, 5

Louisville, Ky.

He’s very observant about things. He will see something and say, “Hey Daddy, can I do that?” I explained to him, “Just because you see an adult do it, doesn’t make it right.” I just hope that I can prepare him, because it’s a mean world. He wants to know my phone number, so we go over my phone number every day, just in case he might need to call me. That’s something that we’re working on. And his name. We gotta get his name right, and his letters. We really haven’t had a rough talk about his identity. We haven’t got on that yet.

Learn more at TIME

Institutions have begun preserving the art created by people on both sides of the Irish abortion debate, which led to the historic referendum on May 25 and the landslide vote to repeal the country’s abortion ban.

Brenda Malone, a curator at the National Museum of Ireland, was quick to use social media to appeal to people to preserve banners in particular. Malone tells artnet News that on her wish list is a knitted one with the words “Repeal the 8th” on top of a red heart, which became one of the defining and contentious images of the campaign.

This particular repeal banner was inspired by a mural by the street artist Maser on Dublin’s Project Arts Centre wall, which went viral when the center was forced to paint over it, not once but twice. The second cover-up led to a protest in the street and on social media. Only this time the center cleverly subverted the ban by leaving a tiny part of the edge of the love heart visible. Alongside the concealed work a pointed slogan was added saying: “You can paint over a mural but you can’t paint over an issue.”

First created by Maser in 2016 at the start of the campaign to allow abortion, it was painted over after Dublin Council objected to it on the grounds that it needed planning permission as it was a “political advertisement.” Cian O’Brien, the artistic director of the Project Arts Centre, says: “We discovered that during the course of the referendum there was a planning loophole.” So, the mural went up again only for the center to receive another letter, this time from the Charity Regulator, saying the work violated its charitable purpose. “Art is not a charitable purpose,” O’Brien discovered. “They applied a very strict reading of the law.”

“I’m leaving the shadow of it there for the moment,” he says, partly because the center is currently showing Jesse Jones’s Tremble Tremble, a feminist take on women’s oppression, by the male-dominated judiciary in particular. Jones’s installation, which is on show through July 18, made its debut in Ireland’s pavilion at last year’s Venice Biennale. “Legally, to be honest, I don’t think we have to paint over it.” The center is also selling limited-edition prints of the mural fragment.

Brenda Malone says that she was “impressed but not surprised” at the level of creativity stirred up by the abortion referendum debate. “There were some really imaginative, quirky, witty, and strong banners on the streets that I’m trying to get hold of for the collection.”

Malone’s full remit is curator of Ireland’s military history, transport, flags and banners. “I’ve kind of sidelined World War I at the moment,” she admits, to make sure the banners on the “no” and the “yes” sides of the debate to relax the country’s hard-line abortion laws are collected and preserved. “There is a real community acknowledgement that this was an important moment in Ireland’s history that needs to be recorded by the national institutions,” she says. “I haven’t seen this before,” she says, adding that the last time the public felt so strongly about the need to record their stories was after the Easter Rising of 1916 and War of Independence.

Learn more at Artnet

It’s an understatement to say that a lot can change in 100 years. A century ago, Europe was just limping out of World War I, and the anarchic seeds of Modernism were spreading throughout a traumatized world. A century from today is hard to envision.But that hasn’t stopped some artists from trying. In 2014, the Scottish artist Katie Peterson launched the Future Library, which commissions one writer each year to contribute a text that will remain unpublished until 2114. The writings will be printed on paper supplied by lumber from a forest she planted four years ago just outside Oslo.

More recently, LOUIS XIII Cognac partnered with pop star Pharrell Williams to write a song that would be released in 100 years. The musician and sometimes-curator created a solitary recording printed on water-soluble clay and stored in a state-of-the-art safe that is only destructible when submerged in water. The idea? Unless mankind reverses the depredations of climate change, the recording, titled “100 Years, The Song We’ll Only Hear If We Care,” might be destroyed before it is ever heard.

The future may be bright, it may be dire, but it remains to be shaped by ideas yet unthought. In the spirit of looking forward to the uncertain world 100 years hence, we asked a broad range of artists, from Michelle Grabner to Doug Aitken to Nick Cave, to predict what the world—and art—will look like in a century.

Carla Gannis

To imagine art in 100 years, I’ve taken a cue from Marge Piercy’s 1976 speculative fiction novel Woman on the Edge of Time (and yes, perhaps I’m hedging my bets too). Piercy’s protagonist Connie travels to two future 2137s, one where the environment has stabilized, racial and sexual equality have been achieved, and technology is “organically” interwoven into all life on the planet. The other future is far bleaker. Human dignity, clean air, and autonomous thought are commodities only available to the mega-mega-mega-rich. So here goes:

Scenario 02

Humans and machines live in harmony in the year 2118. After decades of living underground due to the bio hazardous fall out of the GR8 W@R of 2089, the machines have recently stabilized the environment and humans have emerged from their subterranean bunkers, bursting with creative verve. Plein-Air VRainting is all the rage. Every human is an interdataplinary artist now, since machines have proven to operate the government and economy more efficiently. Most refer to the Earth as the Art World now, and robots are keenly invested in universal art care for all humans; buying, trading, and selling art via a DNA blockchain system. Interestingly, a radical group of bio-genetically “dehanced” individuals, calling themselves les Fauves deux points zéro, have begun to garner attention. Painting on cave walls, with berries, roots and leaves, they produce strange images of space aliens and unidentified flying objects.

Doug Aitken

I think art is moving in a direction where it will become increasingly de-material. Art in 100 years will be about complete connectivity and dialogue with the viewer with less and less of the detached formalism we see in art now. Art will take us to the edge of the horizon and question what is beyond. Art will seamlessly live both in the fast-flowing river of images and information and in the slow moving desire for true and unrepeatable personal experience.

We are only beginning to understand how technology is changing the human experience… we are scratching the surface. Creating images is perhaps an existential way of our society reminding us we are actually here on earth, and actually exist in living flesh and blood. It seems at times like life is the film… and we are all in it together, while at the same time each of us is directing our own live version.

In art, as we move forward, I think the viewer’s role will change and be less passive. There will be new forms of artworks that are living and continuously changing and artworks that will be more experiential. We will not see art as something that passively hangs on a wall.

Art will be a seamless part of our lives, not a decoration in our lives.

Because the media revolution of the internet serves economic and not cultural ends, as the sociologist Jürgen Habermas continues to remind us, it is likely that the literal object and subject of art will be subsumed into an evolving economy of digital networks. Whatever form art takes, we will not encounter it for long, as our attention will certainly be evermore commercialized.

Elmgreen & Dragset

In 100 years, our current global economic system will most likely have been exchanged with other formats of wealth distribution following the collapse of capitalism, and an art market as we know it today will no longer exist. However, that doesn’t mean that free and individual artistic expressions will have vanished, but that both artists’ practices and art institutions might have undergone radical changes in relation to their cultural functions within society. When it comes to the mediation of art, new generations will certainly have learned to filter the overload of information in more selective ways and will therefore have also become more immune to media-hyped cultural tendencies and mass hysteria.

Old-school media, such as painting or sculpture, have often been declared “dead”, only to show their renewed strength and relevance less than a decade later. With an increased digitization of our everyday realities, the need for artistic materiality will become even more urgent in order to remind ourselves that we are physical beings.

Ebony G. Patterson

Hopefully art will reflect more truth. It will be more inclusive and reflect the truth of ALL of US and OUR HISTORIES.

Justin Brice Guariglia

Art that rises to the great ecological challenges of today will be crucial for our survival as a species. In a recent issue of the journal NATURE, scientists showed that there is a 96 percent chance of a whopping 5 degrees Celsius of temperature rise by the year 2100. That kind of rise in the earth’s temperature is catastrophic for virtually all life on earth, making climate change the moral imperative of our time. Artists have not only the unique ability, but I would argue the responsibility, to give us new languages and tools to be able to better understand the world around us, which can help us solve these great existential problems. This puts tremendous pressure on artists to help society reimagine the future. I believe art as a social practice, where artists are invested in the great problems of today, will thrive in the immediate and long term future.

At the same time, AI will leave many people jobless. Forced to accept life in all it’s meaninglessness, art for art sake will flourish as a way humans will fill the “void of time” machines create.

Jacolby Satterwhite

Architecture and Design probably will prevail as a fine art because of the urgency to survive Climate Change …. that is, if we are still here.

Luke DuBois

Learn more at artnet

In half a decade, the number of U.S. adults who are reading poetry has nearly doubled.

That's according to the results of a new survey by the National Endowment for the Arts, which announced Thursday that "as a share of the total U.S. adult population, this poetry readership is the highest on record over a 15-year period."

The Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, a collaboration between the NEA and the Census Bureau, found that 11.7 percent of the U.S. adult population in 2017 — or about 28 million people — had read poetry in the last year. Which admittedly may not seem like much on the surface — until it's compared with the 6.7 percent found during the last survey period, in 2012.

To find a comparable interest in poetry, you have to reach back to 2002, when the number of adults reading poetry narrowly cleared the 12 percent threshold.

The survey showed sharp increases in readership across the board — but especially among women, minorities and adults with only some college education.

"These increases definitely reflect what we've been witnessing over in our corner of the office," NEA's director of literature, Amy Stolls, said in revealing the results.

"I suspect social media has had an influence, as well as other robust outreach activities and efforts," she added, referring to many of the agency's programs and fellowships to boost readers and writers.

Whatever the reason may be, the bottom line spells positive things for poets and their readers, who have been fairly starved for this kind of good news of late. As Quartz notes, prior to 2017, "the portion of the total population reading poetry had been in steady decline since 1992."

And there's more to come: The NEA promised to unveil full results from the survey "over the next several months."

Learn more at NPR

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have truly created a monster.

A team of researchers who specialize in the darker side of artificial intelligence made news again this week for their latest creation: “Norman,” a machine-learning bot that “sees death in whatever image it looks at,” its creators told HuffPost.

Pinar Yanardag, Manuel Cebrian and Iyad Rahwan wanted to prove that an artificial intelligence algorithm would be influenced by the kind of content fed to it. So they made Norman, named for “Psycho” character Norman Bates, and had it read image captions from a Reddit forum that features disturbing footage of people dying. (We don’t need to promote it here.)

“Due to ethical and technical concerns and the graphic content of the videos, we only utilized captions of the images, rather than using the actual images that contain the death of real people.” the scientists said in an email.

The team then showed Norman randomly generated inkblots and compared the way it captioned the images to the captions created by a standard AI. For instance, where a standard AI sees, “A black and white photo of a small bird,” Norman sees, “Man gets pulled into dough machine.”

Here are some of the inkblots shown to Norman and the eerie results.

When asked why they would create such a thing, the MIT researchers erupted in chilling laughter as lightning struck in the distance.

That didn’t happen of course, but they did give a valid reason for this project.

“The data you use to teach a machine learning algorithm can significantly influence its behavior,” the researchers said. “So when we talk about AI algorithms being biased or unfair, the culprit is often not the algorithm itself, but the biased data that was fed to it.”

The same MIT lab previously created other creepy bots, including Shelley, which helps write horror stories, and the Nightmare Machine, which generates scary imagery.

In the future, when Norman and his kin do take over, we hope they will remember this article ― and its author ― with fondness.

Learn more at HuffPost

The UCLA Hammer Museum’s much-anticipated biennial survey of new art produced in the city has just opened its fourth iteration. “Made in L.A. 2018” is the best one yet.

Part of the reason comes from simple, dramatic contrast. Since the show’s last outing in 2016, American society has been plunged into a period of destructive nastiness and malice. Art is inherently its opposite.

Artists have been responding. These 33 — up from 26 last time — were chosen with a keen attention to the resonance of their work within our socially disturbed time. Rather than art with partisan political agendas, Hammer curators Anne Ellegood and Erin Christovale have chosen smart work that, for the most part, feels acutely attuned to our beleaguered moment.

Emblematic is the big mural that wraps the stairwell at the museum’s front entry. At first look, you might not notice how.

In a palette of breezy pastels and tertiary hues, Eamon Ore-Giron painted hard-edge, geometric shapes that seem to fuse landscape elements represented as natural, industrial and schematic. In one lovely mural passage, a precision sequence of disks that evokes factory mass-production within a diagrammatic modern setting also conjures the phases of the moon.

Muralism has a long and venerable history in Los Angeles, home to landmark examples from the 1930s by David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco. (The latter’s fiery “Prometheus” at Pomona College, an explosive burst of Expressionist fervor, is the first modern fresco in the United States.) Mexican muralism banished tasteful public decorum for blunt social agitation, essential to its Great Depression era.

Ore-Giron’s impressive mural interrupts that venerable tradition, responding to its public purpose and commitment in a novel way. The sleek formal rhythms of the Hammer mural are neither monolithic nor combative. Instead, they look to South America and Concrete art, with its cross-fertilization of imported European and indigenous modernisms. The forms draw on diverse pictorial legacies — say, a Uruguayan abstractionist like Joaquín Torres-Garcia and a Swiss one like Max Bill or a Russian like El Lissitzky.

Apparent influences also include commercial graphic design, the flat and patterned color of Peruvian painter (and occasional muralist) Josué Sánchez Cerron and the aural syncopation of folk and popular music. Right now, in the face of America’s reactionary narrow-mindedness, the work’s insistent cross-cultural heterogeneity feels joyfully subversive.

One response to a divisive power that clamors for building walls is to refuse by orchestrating artistic border crossings. The refined comeliness of Ore-Giron’s painting is one seductive method.

Narrative is another. Daniel Joseph Martinez traveled the length of the old Berlin Wall, which once kept Soviet-dominated East Germans from emigrating to democratic West Germany. He photographed himself at 80 spots holding aloft processional banners adorned with the face of Ulrike Meinhof, the Red Army Faction militant, shown at different stages of life — schoolgirl, ingénue, slain terrorist.

Martinez’s large-scale photographs are printed in luxurious silvery grays, nodding toward Gerhard Richter’s great 1988 painting cycle on the brutal Baader-Meinhof gang, as the RAF was also known. The Berlin Wall is long gone, but the indelible memory of the cruelty and persecution that it represented and enforced inevitably invokes the Trump administration’s incessant mantra of building a border wall between Mexico and the United States.

Martinez, who is Mexican American, has fashioned a Meinhof processional placard that recalls Catholic saint-banners, which derive from the military standards once carried into battle. Rather than triumphant, these photographs seem to propose that cruel division only serves to create martyrs.

Ore-Giron’s abstract painting and Martinez’s representational photographs occupy very different points on the show’s broad spectrum, but both refer back to the alarming social context to which the 2018 biennial is attuned. The only political position staked out is for commitment to deep cultural awareness — to acknowledging that artists are citizens too.

As always, the biennial emphasizes emerging and established but often lesser-known artists. These 33 range in age from 29 to 97 — the youngest (textile artist Diedrick Brackens) born in the immediate aftermath of the Reagan Revolution’s rightward jolt, the oldest (painter Luchita Hurtado) in the wake of the blistering brutalities of the First World War. Just five were born in Los Angeles, while eight are foreign-born. Urbanism’s vigorous cosmopolitanism stands front and center.

Video installations are prominent (there are nine), partly reflecting the easy accessibility now of inexpensive digital equipment. Subjects and formats could not be more diverse.

Among the strongest are Gelare Khoshgozaran’s quasi-documentary rumination on the strange, pseudo-Middle East towns erected in the California desert as test sites for U.S. military maneuvers; Neha Choksi’s achingly poetic, four-channel lamentation for the ongoing, perhaps irreversible degradation of Mother Earth (and a yearning to escape it); and, a wicked satire of self-improvement rituals for women who, in Freud’s foolish but pervasive misconception, are inherently lacking, by the team of Jade Gordon and Megan Whitmarsh.

Among the elegiac “Found Fragments” of lost life in James Benning’s installation is a ravishing, wall-projected video image of a sun-dappled forest, shot after a devastating recent wildfire. The landscape image, almost completely still, becomes a nearly abstract meditation on life-cycles and the mutability of fearsome tragedy and exquisite beauty.

Dance is seamlessly integrated into a line of six wall-mounted flat-screen video monitors by choreographer Flora Wiegmann. A virtual mural of shifting viewpoints, it exploits camera-work as bodily movement matching that of the depicted dancers. The two-dimensional screens compose a visual field corresponding to the amorphous white space through which the dancers move. All that is solid melts into an aesthetic sensation of pixilation.

Including Ore-Giron, half a dozen compelling painters are here. The complex, hands-on demands of painting perhaps stand as an indicator of a continuing reaction to today’s gauzy, enveloping digital ether.

John Houck began as a photographer, but now he is composing abstractions in which camerawork and painting masquerade as one another. The illusions in two-dimensional imagery are contradicted by flat surfaces that he’s folded, spindled and otherwise mutilated.

Similarly, several of Linda Stark’s textured relief paintings fuse female body parts and floral motifs within a physically mottled surface that looks like synthetic skin. A witty self-portrait focuses just above watery eyes onto her forehead, its “third eye” a picture of her cat inside a pink aura. No iconic pussy hat is shown, but as an image of wisdom implanted squarely in the forehead of a deity, the marvelously eccentric picture is a delight.

Seven lovely Surrealist landscape paintings from the 1970s by Hurtado seem informed by outer-space exploration. A circle of cloud-filled sky surrounded by voluptuous brown hills inverts the famous Apollo 17 photograph of Earth as a “big blue marble” floating through space. Here, it’s a void in the Earth that becomes an erotically suggestive spatial atmosphere.

A charming grunge imbues Celeste Dupuy-Spencer’s clotted pictures — a toppled Confederate statue crumpled like a corpse; a crude man anxiously reading a love letter; smokers indulging their simple, deadly pleasure while idling in a car parked in a trash-filled alley; and, a tightly clustered crowd drowning in a turbulent sea, unable to grasp a nearby lifeline, its arabesque almost decoratively baroque. The quirky paintings, touchingly civilized, are a gentle but firm avowal of humanity during extraordinarily trying times.

Finally, Christina Quarles paints trompe l’oeil paintings onto flower-bedecked “wallpaper” that she has also made, interrupting domestic space with knockout images of nude women entwined with their own and each other’s bodies, pushing against physical norms. Barely out of art school, she hasn’t shown much in L.A., so Quarles ranks as perhaps the biennial’s most exciting discovery.

Also impressive is Lauren Halsey’s “The Crenshaw District Hieroglyph Project (Prototype Architecture),” an imposing square room built of faux-marble walls cobbled together from ordinary gypsum, cardboard and off-white acrylic paint. In this white cube, humility equals grandeur.

As with Halsey’s current fine installation downtown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, which spins off the Classical motif of Plato’s Cave, this piece also looks to an ancient source — the Egyptian form of a cenotaph, or empty tomb. The list etched into interior walls includes Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland and Philando Castile, plus dozens of unfamiliar names. A war memorial for 90 bodies buried elsewhere, the monument gathers shades.

At the other end of the spectrum, grim humor marks Charles Long’s installation, titled “paradigm lost,” which mixes sculpture and painting. Clusters of tree stumps appear both petrified and phallic. They are cleverly infused with sly visual references to a Surrealist and Expressionist pantheon of male artists — Munch’s face screams, Dali’s watches droop, Brancusi’s torso is another stump, Giacometti’s lopsided chariot would only run in circles. Within Long’s ruined art-forest, nature and culture pass into history.

It’s a sobering sight, until an odd and pleasant realization arises: One-third of the artists in the splendid “Made in L.A. 2018” are men, two-thirds are women. Not so long ago, a ratio of women far outnumbering men in a survey exhibition would have been a topic of stunned and enthusiastic comment.

Now it’s just a number. Women have long outnumbered men in the artist ranks, but institutions have been a drag on reality. Progress has finally been made! A quiet revolution has happened, with its own profound resonance amid today’s social strife.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

‘Made in L.A. 2018’

Where: UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood

When: Through Sept. 2; closed Mondays

Information: (310) 443-7000, www.hammer.ucla.edu

Learn more at L.A. Times

In a maker space with hand tools and power tools neatly sorted and hanging on the walls, opposite a row of work tables covered in sawdust and dreams, Devon Walls tells me about growing up right here, in Chester, Pennsylvania.

“I come from an artist family,” says Walls. “I grew up with our living room being our theater, our stage, the place where we painted and built stuff, block parties where kids had to make the games, painting, building, and sculpting. Art was just a part of it, part of everything.”

Tiny Chester, population around 34,000, is technically the oldest city in Pennsylvania, established by Swedish colonizers on Lenape land in 1644. William Penn himself, namesake founder of Pennsylvania, wouldn’t arrive in the area until 1682, shortly afterward establishing the city of Philadelphia, a few miles upstream on the Delaware River.

Chester would peak in the 1950s, when the city served as a hub for shipbuilding and car manufacturing, home to some 66,000 residents. Then, as now, Chester was between 75 and 80 percent black. While still small in the 1950s, it was enough to support a thriving arts community, led by William Dandridge, who was called “the Father of Arts and Culture in the City of Chester,” upon his passing in 2014. To Walls, Dandridge was Uncle Bill.

“My uncle’s vision was to create a cultural arts corridor, right here,” says Walls. “He was an activist as well. He once got arrested right here on this block during the civil rights era, fighting for equality. The stuff that he wanted to get finished, he had other fights he had to fight first.”

Slowly, and under the radar — much like the city that he still calls home — Walls has spent the last decade or so bringing that vision to life on a stretch of Chester’s Avenue of the States, a once mostly vacant corridor, save for a few discount retail and drug stores (the kind that sold drugs that were 20 years old, Walls says).

Walls has methodically acquired ownership interests in a growing number of properties along the corridor, including the MJ Freed Performing Arts Theater, which has an attached dance studio, an art gallery, a coffee shop, and the maker space. And he’s been recruiting local entrepreneurs to fill storefronts in other buildings with tenants who reflect not only his uncle’s vision, but the vision of a group of contemporary Chester artists who have stuck it out over years, remaining steadfast in their commitment to the city and to working with each other as an informal collective.

“We don’t always agree right away on how to do things,” says Walls. “Some folks want to put in hookah lounges, but we’re not playing that. It’s a fight we’re willing to fight because having kids do workshops here, the last thing we want is kids looking across the street and people are smoking pipes. It kinda contradicts the healthy lifestyle we’re also trying to promote.”

The careful curation of business partners goes beyond whom the group has invited onto the corridor. With Walls at the helm, the group has also carefully selected the investors from whom they have accepted capital.

“Our thing, my thing will forever be local ownership,” Walls says. “So when you start putting too much out there and you get too many people in it, the ownership leaves from being local, from the artists. I wanted to make sure we kept local ownership at the forefront of what was going on.”

So far, the select few investors that have made it past Walls’ gatekeeping happen to all be small private foundations, all three so far with strong ties to the Philadelphia region. Their investments — equity or loans, not grants — have helped Walls and the artists secure and begin to make improvements to some of the properties, including the MJ Freed theater as well as a formerly blighted 40,000 square-foot warehouse that will soon be renovated into studios, offices and convening space for 20 Chester artists.

“There’s been [other investors] that I turned down, I cursed out, I kicked out the door. It’s been a lot of people,” says Walls. “I like the group that we’ve worked with so far. They made me feel comfortable enough … We’re like family.”

STEPPING INTO A VACUUM

For decades, foundations have used loans and other types of investments for charitable purposes. The Ford Foundation was the first to take this approach, making the first of what it called “program-related investments” in 1968. The following year, the Tax Reform Act of 1969 included a tweak to the U.S. Tax Code that recognized program-related investments as part of the five percent of a foundation’s asset value that each private foundation must disburse every year for charitable purposes in order to remain tax-exempt.

Large, well-endowed foundations would eventually follow suit with program-related investments, including the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Kresge Foundation, among others. (The Ford and Kresge Foundations provide grant funding to Next City.)

From their very beginning at the Ford Foundation in 1968, program-related investments from foundations have helped finance affordable housing, small business lending for women- and minority-owned businesses, conservation or parks development, and other purposes under the various and shifting program areas of large foundations. For decades, only larger foundations could afford the lawyers, accountants and other professionals required to properly assess the financial soundness (not to mention potential impact) of potential program-related investments. Because of those constraints, by 2003, only 134 out of 66,000-plus foundations made any program-related investments in that year.

But something intriguing has happened in the foundation world. As the broader U.S. financial system has become more and more concentrated over time, foundations have become less concentrated, at least at the aggregate level of analysis. In 2003, more than 66,000 foundations existed in the U.S. holding nearly $477 billion in assets; in 2014, the most recent year available from The Foundation Center, more than 86,000 foundations held $865 billion in assets. By contrast, the U.S. had more than 14,000 banks in the mid-1980s; only around 5,000 banks are still in business today.

As Next City has previously reported, the smaller foundations are now getting into program-related investing. These are the kinds of small foundations that have historically been focused on grantmaking for after-school school programs, museums, higher education, medical research, or human services like food pantries or domestic violence survivor counseling. Smaller foundations are getting into the lending and investing game, especially when it comes to place-based investments, like Chester’s arts corridor revitalization.

The story of Devon Walls and Chester’s artist-led revitalization illustrates how smaller foundations, both new and old, might be ideally positioned to step into the vacuum left behind by a financial system that has become ever more distant from people and places like Chester’s artist community. They might even be able to build a new bridge between the two.

BECOMING THE WING MAN

Chuck Lacy is president of the Barred Rock Fund, a small private foundation he co-founded in 2001, along with Judy Wicks and Ben Cohen (of Ben & Jerry’s fame — Lacy was formerly chief operating officer of the ice cream company under Cohen). Wicks, founder of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, is a local Philly-area icon, as the founder of White Dog Café, the restaurant that birthed the modern day local foods movement. Instead of making grants, Barred Rock Fund uses program-related investing to operate more like a venture capital fund, making investments in ventures intended to create jobs and opportunity in historically under-invested places.

In 2015, flush with cash after Lacy sold off some previous assets, Barred Rock Fund was looking to make its next investment. “Judy and I were out exploring and looking for something to do in the Philadelphia area,” Lacy says.

They cast a wide net, Lacy says. In the fall of 2015, Wicks and Lacy made a stop at Widener University, in Chester, where Walls was doing an artist residency, supported by the Pennsylvania Humanities Council. “We went to the Small Business Administration program at Widener, to see if they had any ideas, and when we showed up we discovered we were expected to give a talk,” says Lacy. “Devon was there, and he invited us to come downtown.”

Downtown they went, to the Avenue of the States corridor, where Walls had already spent years quietly setting up lease-to-purchase agreements with longtime property owners along the street. He’d been funding the agreements mostly out of his own earnings from selling artwork, doing set design and construction all over the country, and the small amount of overhead available from grants received to do arts programming and creative placemaking work like Chester Made — also funded by the Pennsylvania Humanities Council.

On that first trip to the Avenue of the States, Lacy noticed a poster on the MJ Freed Theater for a children’s Halloween party the following Saturday.

“I went back, without telling Devon I was coming,” says Lacy. “It was supposed to start at six o’clock. I got there at 5:30 and it seemed like nothing was going on. At six o’clock, the grate came up, and all of a sudden families started showing up and kids started going in. I went in and there was all this theater smoke, kids painting pumpkins, and Devon and his friends put on a children’s play. It was just fantastic. That’s when I got hooked. I wanted to see if it was for real, and it was.”

Walls and Barred Rock Fund created a new business partnership, New Day Chester Inc., to later buy the theater building and other buildings, including the future artists’ warehouse. They intentionally set up Walls as the two-thirds majority owner of the venture.

“The way I see it is, our involvement has brought things along quicker, but what happened was going to happen anyway,” Lacy says. “What we bring is a little bit of the resources and connections that would be commonplace in a wealthier community.”

A typical venture capital fund expects to push startup companies to grow fast and eventually “go public,” selling shares on the stock market and earning the fund ten times or a hundred times back what it invested. The Barred Rock Fund has worked out a different venture capital model.

“I’m really a wingman here,” says Lacy, who typically travels down from his Vermont base to spend one or two days a week in Chester. “My goal is to create the conditions under which Devon and other people from Chester can buy us out.”

The approach and the philosophy are what finally won over Walls. “This was a change, it was a conversation with Chuck and others about a faster way to get it done,” he says. “Sometimes doing it the slow way like I do, it still costs you in the long run. Having someone that was willing to loan that money to get stuff done at a faster pace, it was inviting and I opened up to the idea.”

New Day Chester, Inc., is Barred Rock Fund’s eighth investment. Out of the others, Lacy says there are two with whom the fund has been invested for 15 years and counting, and the founders of those ventures have been gradually buying out Barred Rock Fund’s ownership shares in their companies.

After Barred Rock Fund’s initial investment in New Day Chester, the Untours Foundation, based in nearby Media, Pa., and the Barra Foundation, based in Wayne, Pa., have also invested or made loans to the new business partnership.

“I’ve never had a credit card. Taking on loans like that was scary to me,” says Walls. “Even when I talked to other people from the community, it’s scary. We’re talking about a community where most people don’t have stuff, so when you start talking about taking out a $250,000 loan to build something, and you’re now indebted for that, it was different.”

It was different, too, for the Barra Foundation, founded in 1963. The $250,000 loan to build out the 40,000 square-foot warehouse was the foundation’s first program-related investment.

A FAMILY JOURNEY BEGINS

“We started this journey as an organization in 2015,” says Kristina “Tina” Wahl, president of the Barra Foundation, with a full-time staff of three, herself included.

At the time, Wahl had participated in the Mission Investors Exchange, which, in addition to providing research on the subject, functions as a sort of support group for people and institutions with a lot of money and an interest in investing it intentionally to address social issues. The idea to do so came up at the next board meeting of the Barra Foundation.

“We’re dealing with very seasoned investment professionals on our board’s investment committee,” explains Wahl. “It takes time to socialize this idea, learn about it, understand it, and make sure it’s in line with your goals and your mission.”

The foundation held its following fall board meeting at the offices of Reinvestment Fund, a federally certified community development financial institution with a three-decade track record of making investments for community development purposes like affordable housing and job creation around Greater Philadelphia and all over the United States. At the Barra Foundation board meeting, staff members of Reinvestment Fund gave presentations about their work and lessons learned.

“Having the board hear directly from experts in the field, rather than translating through us, was a really important step,” says Wahl.

The foundation went on to start talking about program-related investments with current and previous grantees. The Barra Foundation had previously supported arts programming under Walls’ leadership, under the Boundaries & Bridgesprogram. Many of the activities of that program took place right on Avenue of the States, in the spaces Walls and his fellow artists were quietly acquiring and building. When Barra came around talking about making some program-related investments, New Day Chester and its artist warehouse project provided the perfect opportunity.

“Devon owning two-thirds of the company was important for us,” says Wahl. “For us, that was a creative opportunity that was in line with our thinking around innovation, to model that behavior for other investors, even beyond foundations.”

The foundation said yes to the New Day Chester loan in September 2016. Wahl hopes that, in addition to building out the warehouse space and turning it into a source of revenue for New Day Chester, the loan will also help the entity establish a track record of timely payments over the five-year term of the loan, positioning them eventually to access conventional financing if they so choose.

Walls has bigger plans ahead, including rehabbing the vacant, out-of-repair apartments above many of the storefronts along the Avenue of the States corridor, to provide affordable housing for artists and others from Chester.

“I think our vision is bigger than the capital that we had, says Walls. “We are in a community where banks don’t want to loan money, insurance companies didn’t even want to insure the properties, a redlined community where most of the wealth that was here moved out to the suburbs … I don’t think $250,000 would do it all, but I think it would get us to the point where we can gain more capital to do more, so definitely.”

The city is starting to pop up on the radar. DTLR, a national urban sneaker powerhouse, took over an existing sneaker store anchoring a corner location along the Avenue of the States corridor. Around the corner from the corridor, a new hotel is under construction — the owner of which Walls says came up to introduce himself and say thanks for the work he was doing to revitalize the area.

“Having that kind of attention and to see that other people are popping up businesses because of what you’re doing, it says a lot,” says Walls. “And it wouldn’t have been possible if we didn’t have those partnerships with the Judys and Chucks and Tinas.”

At the same time, more attention on Chester means even more than just the weight of history on Walls’ broad shoulders.

“I can’t make a lot of mistakes when we’re building something like this,” says Walls. “We’ve got one shot at it. We’ve got one shot and twenty developers waiting on the sidelines who might say well they tried but now let’s just go in there and snatch up everything.”

Learn more at Next City

Clearly, some members of BTS were more interested in the puppies than others.

In a fifth-floor meeting room at the sleek InterContinental hotel in downtown Los Angeles, the seven young men who make up this South Korean boy band — RM, Suga, J-Hope, Jimin, V, Jin and Jungkook, each as handsome and stylishly dressed as the next — were gathered on a recent afternoon to shoot a video for Buzzfeed’s meant-to-go-viral “plays with puppies” series, in which an entertainer answers questions submitted by fans as he or she … well, you can put it together.

RM, the group’s unofficial frontman, knelt eagerly to scoop up one of the fuzzy creatures, while J-Hope showed his excitement by singing the chorus from Justin Bieber’s “Baby,” albeit with a key lyrical adjustment: “Puppy, puppy, puppy / Oh!”

Yet Suga, glued to his phone during a break near the end of a long day of interviews, appeared less smitten — at least until Buzzfeed’s cameras started rolling. Then he put down the phone and cranked up the enthusiasm required of an international pop group determined to break America.

Fortunately for Suga and his bandmates, work like this is paying off.

This week BTS’ latest album, “Love Yourself: Tear,” entered the Billboard 200 chart at No. 1 — a first for an act from the busy K-pop scene brought to the attention of many American listeners when Psy’s song “Gangnam Style” took off on YouTube in 2012.

The group’s elaborately choreographed performance on this month’s Billboard Music Awards (where BTS won the prize for top social artist for the second year in a row) was among the show’s most discussed moments online.

And tickets for the outfit’s fall tour — scheduled to stop for four sold-out concerts in September at Staples Center — are going for more than $1,000 each on the secondary market.

Indeed, BTS has gotten so popular in the U.S. that journalists at the InterContinental were asked not to reveal their whereabouts on social media for fear that word might spread and lead fans to descend on the hotel.

What’s remarkable about this crossover success is that it hasn’t come at a creative price; there’s no feeling of compromise to the vivid “Love Yourself: Tear,” BTS’ sixth full-length release since emerging in 2013 from the highly industrialized K-pop scene based in Seoul.

Sung mostly in Korean, the album emphasizes the precise and adventurous production that K-pop listeners expect as it jumps from swinging R&B to surging club music to rowdy hip-hop to the dramatic rap-rock balladry of the disc’s first single, “Fake Love,” which as a non-English-language tune just followed “Despacito” into the upper reaches of the Hot 100.

Curious fans — and with BTS, there’s really no other kind — will discover in “Love Yourself’s” liner notes that the group sought help from Stateside hitmakers such as Ali Tamposi, who’s written for Bieber and Cardi B, and the superstar DJ Steve Aoki.

But as with “Despacito,” the embrace of the music in this country seems to say more about a broadening of American taste than it does about BTS’ willingness to dilute its message (even as the group doggedly courts an audience here).

Seated around a large table after the puppies had been taken away, the members were quick to acknowledge the influence that American boy bands like the Backstreet Boys had on BTS’ catchy songs about romance and heartbreak.

Now, though, they see themselves as “re-exporting” their distinct sound, as RM put it through an interpreter, “to the rest of the world where we had initially drawn much of our inspiration.”

Asked if they ever felt pressured to sing in English, Suga said he’d tried it on a recent solo mixtape and found that it made a “better conduit” for certain “emotions or sensibilities.”

Yet RM, who switches in conversation between Korean and English, said he suspects that most BTS fans “won’t like that much if we sing in other languages.” Korean lyrics, he added, are a core feature of the group’s music, which its ultra-devoted fans have in turn “made as part of their identity.”

You get a sense from sitting in a room with BTS — not to mention its dozen or so handlers — of how carefully the band manages that connection with its base. As the members spoke with me, several people with cameras roved around us, apparently documenting the interview for potential content to serve up later; another woman seemed to be transcribing everything the group said, perhaps in case somebody said something worth tweeting to BTS’ 15 million followers.

That digital engagement is necessary, of course, for an act that so far hasn’t scored much U.S. radio play. But it’s also in keeping with a super-strategic K-pop scene that overall can make the American music business look haphazard.

When I asked whether the knowledge that BTS would be playing to a bigger audience this time had affected the design of the new album, the members nodded in seeming recognition of the idea that “Love Yourself: Tear” would introduce many listeners to the band.

Still, “we want to show ourselves in increments,” Jungkook said through the interpreter. “There are a lot of things that we want to show people, and if you try to show everything about us in a single album, it’s a burden for us — and it’s a lot for people to handle and accept.”

RM said he wanted the album to reflect “the current condition of us — how we feel right now — because, you know, things have really changed from 2013.”

Does that seem like an eternity ago?

Everyone answered yes at the same time, though Jin said he hadn’t forgotten anything from the band’s early days, when they lived together in one house — “one room, basically” — and ate the same food every day “because we didn’t have any money back then.”

Things are definitely better now, they all agreed, even if more and more of their days are filled with encounters with people who want a piece of BTS.

The endless promotion can be tiring, RM admitted. “But I think the fact that we are making our fans happy removes a lot of that fatigue for us.”

The fans “made all this possible,” he went on. “When we forget that, it all ends.”

Learn more at L.A. Times

WHITE BALLET SLIPPERS SYMBOLIZE CHILDHOOD FOR MELA SOFTIC. She grew up during the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s. Her memories of youth are those of war.

“Dancing was something that helped me survive [the] war,” said Softic, who was 8 years old when the war broke out in Bosnia and Herzegovina in April 1992. The Bosnian war was one of several conflicts in the 1990s that shook the region during the breakup of Yugoslavia.

During the siege, the Bosnian Serb army encircled the city, targeting civilians, and for years citizens of Sarajevo lived in fear. Thousands of children were killed and many more were robbed of a normal childhood.

Many children, like Softic, spent their formative years in a state of fear and deprivation, dreaming of chocolate, fresh fruit, and other luxuries stolen by the circumstances, often cowering in cellars during shelling.

The generation raised in the Bosnia war were forced to grow up prematurely. But this was not an anomaly. Today, this is a reality for children in conflict zones all over the world, and those who survive the violence often suffer from health and psychological problems long after the conflict ends.

Children of conflict

ACCORDING TO UNICEF, ONE IN NINE CHILDREN LIVE IN CONFLICT ZONES. Those under the age of five are twice as likely to die from preventable diseases.

“No one thinks about what it is like to be a child during war [and] what it is like to grow up during war,” Softic said.

In Sarajevo, a 29-year-old author is shedding new light on the world of children in conflict with a unique project.

Jasminko Halilovic, who made Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2018, was just 4 years old when the war broke out. In an effort to create a memorial of his own experience, and those of other children affected by the siege, he decided to start collecting testimonies.

The War Childhood Museum (WCM) in Sarajevo opened in January 2017. It was initially dedicated to telling the stories of children during the war in Bosnia. It is now in the process of expanding to tell the stories of children affected by war around the world, including those from more recent conflicts in Syria and Ukraine.

The museum collects personal objects and oral testimonies in order to tell the story of wartime childhood. Softic’s pair of white ballet slippers is one of 4,000 items donated to the museum by Bosnians. The collection features a bulletproof vest, a half-finished letter, and pieces of a destroyed playground, among other sentimental artifacts.

Although the WCM has only been in operation for a year, the museum is part of a larger project started by Halilovic. He contacted hundreds of people who were young during the Bosnian war and asked them to answer the question, “What was a war childhood for you?” via text message, in 160 characters or less.

He collected more than 1,000 responses, which he compiled in the book “War Childhood: Sarajevo 1992–1995.” The book’s success inspired him to found the museum.

“This museum, a least for me, is a fourth [quarter] of my life. It is the most important thing I ever worked on, and it will remain the most important thing I’ve done in my life,” said Halilovic.

Global memory

THE WCM HAS COLLABORATED WITH OVER 300 INDIVIDUALS to collect stories and mementos from the war in Bosnia. Each object tells a unique story about the children affected by violence.

The museum plans to continue to collect the stories of those affected by the conflict, “We will continue collecting objects from those who were in Sarajevo during the armed conflict, however, we are collecting objects and stories from people from all around the country, no matter where in BiH they were,” said Almedina Lozic, the collection and content manager.

The museum has a great significance to those who have contributed, but the intimacy of the experience is not lost on others.

Sharing experiences

ALTHOUGH BOSNIAN CHILDREN ARE CURRENTLY THE CENTRAL FOCUS OF THE MUSEUM IN SARAJEVO, Lozic says that “with time we will include more and more objects and stories from other countries.” Each new exhibition is set to feature a few personal objects and stories collected from children in different areas of armed conflict. In April, the exhibit will rotate the items on display and include one item from a Syrian child refugee in Lebanon.

Four organizations, Basmeh & Zeitooneh, Sadalsuud Foundation, From Syria with Love, and Sawa Foundation, have partnered with the WCM, and together they will launch a traveling exhibition this year containing around 40 objects and stories. The exhibition will start in Sarajevo and travel across Europe, ending in Beirut, where the children and their families will get a chance to see their items and stories on display. The museum has already collected 80 objects.

We hope that our exhibition … will contribute to understanding of what these refugees went through.

One donated item is a drawing of an aircraft. A boy drew it when he left Syria at age 2. Although he does not remember drawing it, his family does, and often reminds him of his reasons for drawing it. He wanted to use the aircraft to fly over Syria and see what the country looks like.

“We hope that our exhibition, when we tour it around European cities and countries … will contribute to understanding of what these refugees went through, what brings them there, why they are there, and how the mutual trust can be established based on understanding their experiences,” said Halilovic.

The WCM staff plans to use the same model for an exhibition on children affected by conflict in the Ukraine. This will exhibition will start in 2019.

The WCM aims to use the new exhibitions to build on its growing international recognition. On December 5, 2017, the museum was awarded the prestigious 2018 Council of Europe Museum Prize by the Culture Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE).

“Sometimes it’s difficult to use all the opportunities that we have because we have many invitations for exhibitions for different collaborations but we need to pick priorities,” said Halilovic.

Students from the George Washington Museum Studies Department have been hired for the summer to work on a temporary exhibition, by the WCM in Washington D.C., dedicated to children across the world who lived through conflict or experienced it secondhand.

THE WCM IS ALSO ESTABLISHING A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION IN THE UNITED STATES to manage the educational projects and the exhibition in the United States.

Alexandra Hartley, education materials developer at the WCM and a history teacher from the United States, has introduced a curriculum entitled “War Childhood” for primary school children in the school district where she teaches in Ithaca, New York. She uses material from the WCM, “The Diary of Anne Frank,” and “Zlata’s Diary” – the account of the so-called “Anne Frank of Bosnia.”

Through education, Halilovic hopes to raise awareness regarding issues that stem from childhood interrupted by conflict. In addition, the museum managers plan to develop curricula to educate students of all ages.

Although the war in Bosnia ended in 1995, conflict continues to disrupt and dominate the course of children’s lives around the globe. For Softic, the WCM project has a compelling message for the world.

“The collection in this museum is from Bosnia, but the museum does not only focus on Bosnia. It is focused on war childhood anywhere in the world,” she says. “The point of this museum is to just stop wars. See what you are doing to your kids. Just stop all wars.”

Learn more at GOOD

“Empathy is the new black,” someone said to me recently, referring to the trend in recent years to blame many of humanity’s most pressing problems on the depletion of empathy in today’s tech-mediated culture.

The phenomenon has reached the art world, too, perhaps most notably in the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s decision to open the world’s first Center for Empathy and the Visual Arts with a $750,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

It makes sense given that empathy is an idea that first got its start in the study of art. Nineteenth-century theorists described empathy as the way our body mirrors movements in the external world. When the aesthetic philosopher Theodor Lipps watched a dance performance, he said he felt his body “striving and performing” with the dancers. Even with static works of art, observers “move in and with the forms” in such a way that triggers “muscular empathy,” wrote the German philosopher Robert Vischer,

More recent studies have shown that works of art with implied gestures, such as Lucio Fontana‘s slashed canvases, increased activity in viewers’ motor and premotor cortices. “This ability to have the movements and experiences of the artists projected into our minds and bodies triggers an empathic response in the observer,” write the co-authors of a new paper in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, which looks at how our empathic responses to art are evolving in the age of artificial intelligence.

The study, “Putting the art in artificial: Aesthetic responses to computer-generated art,” asks whether viewers consider art, once considered a uniquely human activity, to be more or less valuable when it’s made by machines.

Previous research has found that observers tend to value the intentions of the artist more than a work’s subjective appearance. The qualities in a work most likely to be assessed are its uniqueness and whether it involved a high degree of physical contact with the artist. In keeping with these findings, the new study concluded that art generated by computers was ranked lower in aesthetic value than work made by people.

But there’s also a surprising twist. Viewers tend to elevate machine-made art when that machine is a robot, particularly an anthropomorphic robot, suggesting that humanoid embodiment may be the key to embracing a human-like mind.

For the study, the researchers borrowed artist Patrick Tresset’s robotic installation 5 Robots Named Paul, which he showed at the BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels in 2015. The machines consist of webcams that take photos of sitters while a planar arm draws with a Biro pen. Human-like figures are mounted to desks, reminiscent of students in a figure-drawing class, and enact life-like movements. They seem to look at the sitter and scan their face as the arm follows along, though in reality, they are purely decorative: The drawing results from a single photo taken at the start of the session.

The researchers tested three different conditions: Some participants were in the room as the robots drew, others were only shown the drawings and told that robots had created them, and others saw the drawings but received no information about how they were made. The participants were then asked to fill out a questionnaire about the drawings.

The results found that those participants who saw the robot artists at work had more positive appraisals of the drawings. They appreciated them more than the drawings that were only said to be done by robots and more than those made by unknown artists.

“This is the first study to demonstrate [that] the anthropomorphism of an agent impacts positively on aesthetic appraisal,” the authors write. “[I]ncreasing the anthropomorphic qualities of robotic and computational art will increase societal engagement and likely decrease hostility toward future manifestations of artistic AI.” Translation: Making a computer look more human will make people more receptive to its art.

Paradoxically then, when it comes to the art of artificial intelligence, it may be the body that matters more than the brain.

Learn more at Artnews

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and celebrities, artists, athletes, and activists are coming together in L.A. for a major event in support of the cause.

Launching with a rally on May 19, the 10-day We Rise event has some pretty A-list collaborators involved, and they’ll be working with activists and health and wellness providers on a series of panel conversations, frank discussions, film screenings, and opportunities to participate in activities and art. From the ground up, We Rise has been constructed to be an inclusive and safe place. Backed by the County of Los Angeles and state mental health authorities, it’s intended to create a more positive conversation around mental health.

“This May, in honor of this important national month of awareness around mental health, we are demanding more from our government and from each other,” said Yosi Sergant, one of the event organizers and owner of the social justice-oriented marketing firm TaskForce. “At We Rise, we will be coming together as a community of artists, activists, and community members to create a healthier and more just society.”

The base of operations for We Rise is an art space in Chinatown, which will be outfitted with original work by over 100 different artists, including Chelsea Wong, Guillermo Bert, and Shepard Fairey.

Inside, there will be daily talks and events that tackle various issues under the mental health umbrella. Expert-guided sessions cover everything from acknowledging and de-stigmatizing mental health concerns, the community impacts of mass incarceration, displacement, and suicide, and even combating online trolls and bullies.

Sunday’s Mind, Body, and Sports Field Day on the outside stage brings out most of the participating athletes, like Kobe Bryant, Jay Ajayi, gymnast Shawn Johnson, and even recent Olympic-medal-winning bobsledder Aja Evans, for a day of family-friendly games and play, and there are free yoga classes for adults and children.

Young people are a special focus throughout We Rise, but particularly at the Teen Town Hall, which provides a space to openly discuss well being and identity. And in “Survival Guide to Adulting,” a workshop that even some of us post-teens might do well to attend, speakers will offer strategies for coping with stress, responsibility, relationships, and social media-induced FOMO.

Creativity and fun are forms of mental health self-care too, so they’ve built in sessions for guided art-making, dance parties, poetry readings, and musical performances, which are open to all. Performers at the opening rally include Ty Dolla $ign, YG, Vic Mensa, and Common, and the Jabbawockeez dance troupe will lead a class on May 27.

WE RISE runs May 19 to 28, with a full schedule of events available online. All events are located at 1726 N. Spring Street and are free to attend.

Learn more at Los Angeles Magazine

The arts contribute more than you might expect to the US economy, says a new joint report from the US Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis and the National Endowment for the Arts. The arts generate $763.6 billion per year, or 4.2 percent of the GDP, according to the study, which presents statistics gathered between 1998 and 2015.

The US also exported $20 billion more in art than it imported, providing a positive trade balance. All told, the 4.9 million people employed in America’s creative industries earned $372 billion in total compensation for 2015.

“The robust data present in the [report] show through hard evidence how and where arts and culture contribute value to the economies of communities throughout the nation,” said NEA Chairman Jane Chu in a statement. “The data confirm that the arts play a meaningful role in our daily lives, including through the jobs we have, the products we purchase, and the experiences we share.”

Adjusted for inflation, economic activity related to arts and culture increased 4.9 percent nationwide in 2015, and 2.6 percent on average between 2012 and 2015. Meanwhile, 45 states and the District of Columbia saw growth in the arts and cultural industries in 2015.

Here are a few more compelling facts highlighted in the report:

Washington and Utah have the country’s fastest-growing arts economies. Between 2012 and 2015, they both averaged above seven percent in their annual growth rates.

Arts industries add four times as much money to the country’s economy than agriculture, and $200 billion more than transportation or warehousing.

When it comes to building new arts facilities, Georgia is ahead of the curve, with a 37.1 percent average increase in cultural construction between 2012 and 2015.

Bolstered by the Smithsonian and other federal museums and monuments, arts and culture make up 8.4 percent ($10.2 billion) of the GDP of Washington, DC—more than any individual state.

Among the states, the arts account for the largest share of Washington’s economy: 7.9 percent, or $35.6 billion. On the strength of film and television production, California’s art economy brings in the most money among the states, with $174.6 billion, for an even seven percent overall.

New York ranks second in both categories, with the arts bringing in $114.1 billion, or 7.8 percent of its economy. The state’s 462,584 arts workers earned a collective $46.7 billion in 2015.

Delaware relies the least on the arts, which make up just 1.3 percent of the state’s economy, or $900 million.

Museums added $5.3 billion to the US economy in 2015, while fine arts schools generated $3.4 billion. Independent artists, writers, and performers contributed $22 billion.

Fine arts education services are on the rise, with a 2.4 percent increase in 2015, following 5.1 percent growth the previous year.

Americans spent $1 billion more than projected on tickets for performing arts events in 2015, or $31.6 billion overall.

Learn more at artnet news

In order to talk about social issues such as racism, sexism, homophobia, or the lack of free speech in Cuba, one must find creative ways of doing so, or risk the chance of being labeled as counterrevolutionary. However, there are some artists who are willing to take this risk, such as creating a virtual museum dedicated to Cuba’s relationship with dissidence or directing plays that address civil rights. Conversely, there are some filmmakers who are simply working to preserve Cuba’s diverse racial history and oral tradition, while also paving the way for future filmmakers and storytellers.

Meet four Cuban artists who are working to showcase different narratives within Cuba’s history:

Adonis Milán, 24, is the theater director for Perséfone Theater in which he uses the stage to navigate the themes of womanhood, death, and physical and psychological maladies. Despite being censored and detained by Cuban officials for his involvement in the promotion of a more democratic Cuba, Milán uses the theater to navigate certain truths that are often silenced in Cuba.

Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, 30, visual artist and Yanelys Núñez Leyva, 28, journalist and art historian, are currently working together on a project titled, “The Museum of Cuban Dissidence,” which showcases exhibits and projects by other artist-activists both on the island and who have been exiled. The Museum finds its base virtually, allowing those around the world to participate and take note of Cuba’s long-standing history of political dissidents. Additionally, the pair are working with others on the island to create creative discourse on topics such as women’s and LGBTQ rights.

Gloria Roland Casamayor, 64, is a filmmaker and documentarian. She is also the second Afro-Cuban woman to work with the Institute of Cuban Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC). Her work tends to focus on memories, acknowledging Cuba’s Black history and Cuba’s relationship with other countries in the Caribbean, often preserving stories that are usually shared through the oral tradition.

Learn more at Pulitzer Center

I’m sitting at New York University (NYU), in a Brooklyn Tandon School of Engineering building with wires sprawling across my body while I stare at a 98-inch TV screen. Glasses with inward-facing cameras are tracking my pupils; plaster wrapped around my finger is measuring my perspiration; cheek pads are monitoring whether or not I’m smiling; another device looks at my heart-rate; and an electroencephalogram (EEG) headset—a contraption with wet squidgy nodes on the end of prongs, similar to a head massager—monitors my brain activity. All while my face is being filmed.

The researchers want to quantifiably measure my response and stress levels to two slightly different virtual environments. On the screen I am looking at a basic scene created in Google SketchUp. Mock-ups of an existing NYU building are identical minus a couple of minor differences: one has wider windows and lighter wall colors. Within the two environments I have to navigate my way up a set of stairs onto a mezzanine level, open a door, switch on a thermostat, and return.

Hardly thrilling (that’s the point), but Semiha Ergan, an assistant professor at NYU, is keen to see if the architectural theory behind such rudimentary design aspects is true and can quantitatively measure how much of a difference there is. Though the researchers couldn’t disclose the architecture firms actively interested in this research, I was told that a few well-known “three-letter” firms were keeping a close eye on things.

As you might have guessed, Ergan’s hypothesis was right. In the supposedly less stressful environment that had wider windows, I perspired less, my heart-rate was lower, and my facial expressions along with the EEG monitoring also indicated lower stress levels. The ramifications of this research pertain not only to virtual reality (VR) but augmented reality (AR) services, in which computer-generated visuals are superimposed on a tech user's view of the real world.

Learn more at CityLab

CityLab tests your grasp of our virtual currency-filled future.

Last week, Wired reported that the infrastructure security firm Radifirm had identified the world’s first known “crypto-jacking” of an industrial control system: A hacker had evaded security scanners to install malware on a European water utility company’s network. For months, the malware had been running quietly in the background, allowing the hacker to harvest the digital currency Monero.

Using small amounts of otherwise wasted processing power isn’t fundamentally destructive, but “it still wears on and degrades processors over time,” writes Wired’s Lily Hay Newman. When a hacker crypto-jacks a cellphone, that’s inconvenient for an individual. But when the processor they’re degrading runs a water system or power grid, that might be catastrophic.

Radifirm caught the breach well before a problem arose, but attacks like this might increase in frequency. Demand for cryptocurrency continues to grow, and values, while volatile, are high.

So, how worried should we be about this? Here’s a (really) quick primer on what exactly we’re talking about. As financial advisers are happy to tell you, cryptocurrency is, essentially, nothingness: an entire financial system based on what people are willing to pay for pretend digital “coins.” And blockchain (the underlying technology that supports bitcoin, and many other cryptocurrencies) is very nearly the most boring thing in the world: a decentralized, online database that’s ostensibly safer and less corruptible than others.

Nevertheless, both terms have recently been applied to almost every conceivable product, industry, or human endeavor in an effort to attract funders, grab media attention, or just jazz them up. If you slap “The Blockchain” on your news startup, maybe you can resuscitate local news. Post all your content on the new blockchain-secured website Po.et and it’ll never be taken down by a disgruntled publisher-billionaire. Affix “crypto” on municipal bonds and suddenly everyone wants to support affordable housing. What’s next, a Japanese pop band dressed up as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Ripple called “Virtual Currency Girls”? (Oh, word, they exist. Their first single is called “The Moon, Virtual Currencies, and Me.” It’s … sort of good!)

Read more at Citylab