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In Maryland, female migrant laborers face an uncertain future as sea levels rise – photo essay
by Evelyn Reynolds 15 April 2024, 13:00
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In the evening light, Maribel Malagón stepped outside into a rain storm.It was late October and Malagón, 53, had worked all day picking crab off the eastern shore of Maryland. That night, she and a handful of other seasonal workers walked to a neighbor’s house for an evening of prayer. On the way, Malagón clutched a pendant of St Judas, the patron saint of lost causes, that hung around her neck; she hoped he would hear her prayers for more work.About an hour later, when the women were ready to call it a night, the coastal waters had risen so high that the road leading back to their house was completely submerged.“We didn’t know which way to go. We were afraid that we would fall into the ditches,” Malagón said in Spanish, thinking back on that night two years ago. To make it back home, the women waded through knee-high murky waters. “The island is changing every year.”View image in fullscreenFor more than 20 years, Malagón has been coming to work in crab processing plants on Hoopers Island, one of the many island communities in the Chesapeake Bay.Hoopers Island, a chain of small islands linked by causeways, has been the center of the state’s seafood industry since the early 1900s. Due to its low-lying nature, the region has faced erosion and destructive storms over the years.But rising sea levels are increasing the frequency of flooding, creating uncertainty for the village’s watermen and their families, who have long depended on the seafood industry for their livelihoods. The situation is especially worrying for female migrants such as Malagón, who have limited job prospects back home in Mexico and wonder how long they will be able to work on the island.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreen@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:300;font-style:normal}@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.woff2) 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Twenty-four years ago, when Malagón first arrived on the island, her output was prolific. With the precision of a machine and a sharp tiny knife in hand, she would break off the claws, crack open the shells, remove the legs, and scrape out the white meat into containers in seconds. She estimates picking between 40 and 48lb of crab meat in her eight-hour shift.Now, she says 10 hours could go by, and she’ll only have picked 30lb. She suspects the crab population has decreased in number and size over the years.“The crab was huge in my first years here. Our hands would hurt from how big they were. We produced a lot of pounds, but unfortunately, we were paid $2 a pound back then,” said Malagón, who works for one of the five crab houses that remain.View image in fullscreenAubrey Vincent, the owner of Lindy’s Seafood, a processing plant on the island, said wages have significantly increased for her employees. They make about $16 an hour, compared to four or five years ago when they made $7.52 an hour, she said.Some employers pay workers per pound, so the more abundant the catch and meatier the crabs, the more money the women can send home.“For the past five or six years at least, the work is not 100% consistent every season, and it seems to sometimes vary across workplaces,” said Julia Coburn, director of projects and special initiatives at Centro de los Derechos del Migrante (CDM), an advocacy group that supports workers in the region.“The workers are coming with certain expectations about what they can pick in a season and how much pay they can take home, and that’s changing. It’s having a widespread impact on their families beyond their immediate circumstances.”View image in fullscreenVincent said the unpredictable nature of the work has to do more with shifting environmental conditions and weather than any fluctuations in crab availability. She described an industry at odds with numerous economic conditions.“You’ve got a certain amount of costs [of doing business] that have gone up, just like everybody else’s expenses,” she said.Crab populations fluctuate yearly and have always been difficult to predict. But recent years have raised concerns among the state’s seafood houses, which have relied on the temporary worker program since the 1980s, to stay open.Each winter, when crabs are in semi-hibernation, Maryland and Virginia conduct a survey to estimate the number of blue crabs in the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. In the mid-1990s to the late 2000s, there was a dramatic decline in the blue crab population. Biologists, as well as the federal and state governments, believed that the problem was due to overfishing and poor water quality, causing a decline in habitat and food, which ultimately led to restrictions on the number of crabs caught for commercial sale in 2008.View image in fullscreenThe 2022 survey estimated 227 million crabs, the lowest ever recorded in the survey’s 33-year history. This led to new limits on the number of male and female crabs watermen could harvest. In 2023, the population bounced back to 323 million, a 40% increase; while these figures are encouraging, scientists urge continued vigilance based on low numbers of juvenile crabs.Today, researchers believe overfishing is less likely to be the sole contributing factor, and instead argue that factors related to the climate crisis could be affecting blue crab reproduction and survival.“We’re certainly seeing evidence in the data that reproductive success is declining,” said Tom Miller, a professor of fisheries science at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Sciences who studies blue crab populations.View image in fullscreenThe climate crisis could affect the blue crab population in other ways. With shorter winters, crabs could face a longer fishing period, meaning more of them would be caught, said Miller. However, he added that the impact is unclear and an active area of research. Ocean acidification may also contribute to the shells of blue crabs becoming less strong, making them more susceptible to predators.Conservationists also believe pollution and the recent decline in the Bay’s underwater grasses is probably contributing to low blue crab numbers. Another factor could be the presence of the invasive blue catfish in the Chesapeake Bay.“They’re going to be doubly impacted by not only shorter winters, but the shells will become less strong than they once were. There’s a lot changing in the world for crabs,” said Miller.The 2024 blue crab winter dredge survey results will be released in May.View image in fullscreenDespite the unpredictable and temporary nature of the work, many women in central Mexico vie for these positions when recruiters come to towns, hoping to score work authorization.“What we make here in a day would take us a week to make back home,” said Elia Ramírez Rangel, a crab-picker from Hidalgo.For women in particular, there is a dearth of job opportunities in their communities in Mexico and abroad in the US. For some, crab-picking is their best chance of finding sustainable work, said Coburn.View image in fullscreen“There is no source of work back home,” a laborer working on the island for 14 years said in Spanish. She spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity for fear of employer retaliation.In 1996, she left Mexico to make a living picking crabs in the Carolinas. She described having to make the arduous decision to leave her two children, aged nine and 11, in the care of her sister and family friends. Over the years, with her earnings and faith in God, she said she was able to afford a house and basic necessities like food and clothing for her children, who are now grown.“It’s been very difficult for me to be far away from them. Even though they’re grown up, I still feel like there’s a void,” she said in Spanish. “When I left them, I didn’t see their achievements, for example, in school. I missed their birthdays.”View image in fullscreenIn 2021, women made up just 12% of H-2B visa recipients to the US. On Hoopers Island, these women often describe coming to the US for work out of necessity. For nine months out of the year, they report leaving their families and children behind for a steady, albeit seasonal, paycheck.Some workers, like Malagón, come to Hoopers Island year after year to work in the local seafood industry, so long as their seasonal work visas are granted. Her father spent decades picking under the hot sun in California’s farmlands as a bracero. At the age of 22, she said poverty and desperation led her to follow in her father’s footsteps; later, she switched to picking crabs, a job her father described to her more suited for women.Over the course of the 20th century, crab-picking in the US became gendered and racialized work. Research shows picking crab meat was work delegated to women based on beliefs that their hands are typically smaller and more nimble. Some scholars argue hiring immigrant workers was a way to pay women less for the work.Crab houses say they have turned to workers from Mexico in recent decades because of a local labor shortage. In order to obtain visas, they need to prove local workers are not able to fulfill those jobs. Before the 1980s it was low-paid work largely carried out by Black women.View image in fullscreenThe journey from central Mexico to Maryland involves an arduous three-day journey by bus. For Malagón, the biggest sacrifice has been the time spent away from her sisters, mother and son.“Leaving was horrible,” said Malagón, who sends money home to her ageing father. Seasons spent laboring abroad have allowed her to transform her family’s once-dilapidated property in the countryside of Guanajuato into a comfortable living space.“The grace of God has given me license to build everything I wanted. I have comforts that I didn’t have before,” Malagón said in Spanish. “We used to sleep on the floor when we were kids, but now, thank God, we have beds. We’ve got a fridge, we’ve got a TV.”View image in fullscreenWith the rising cost of living and less predictable hours, some women report earning less than they once did.Previously, working 10-hour days six days a week could earn them $280 a week, but now, with workers reporting dwindling crab harvests, they sometimes only work three to four days a week and for shorter periods of time. Vincent said women have the opportunity to earn above their hourly rate if they are more productive.View image in fullscreenOther crab-house owners acknowledge that workers may take home less pay depending on the harvest. Jay Newcomb, the former owner of Old Salty’s, a popular crab house and restaurant on the upper island, said his employees make $5 a pound or $17.50 an hour.“That can fluctuate due to the quality of crabs, males versus females, the size of the crabs. Some days it may be better but we have to pay whatever is the highest,” said Newcomb, who downsized his operations in 2021 and sold Old Salty’s to open a smaller restaurant on nearby Taylors Island.The federal average rate is currently $16.42 an hour.View image in fullscreenTo fill their idle hours, many of the women make phone calls home, watch TV together, or look for ways to earn extra income. Currently, workers in Maryland’s seafood industry are exempt from minimum wage and overtime protections under state law.Without public transportation, they often pay or rely on favors from acquaintances to drive them 40 minutes to the nearest city of Cambridge for errands.Over time the repetitive hand motion of picking crab can result in arthritis, back pain, allergies to crab meat, and cuts to their hands from working quickly with the knives used to cut the shells open, according to CDM. Vincent acknowledged that crab picking, like other production jobs, can be physically demanding.View image in fullscreenThe advocacy group also said that women are disincentivized from reporting work-related issues or take sick days because their immigration status is tied to their employer, making them susceptible to labor abuses. Vincent said she provides an anonymous tip line where employees can report issues.Despite the challenges, the women emphasize that they are grateful for the opportunity to work and note that there have been some improvements over time.Today migrant workers have successfully gained more labor protections in part due to laborer testimony and a coalition of groups such as CDM, which have fought for policies that improve working conditions.Some women have begun organizing a Comité de Defensa, where they discuss ongoing issues such as Covid-19 vaccine information, accessing healthcare in this remote region, and how to report work-related injuries. Part of that work also involves disseminating information about their rights with other women on the island and their families, many of whom are also contractors.View image in fullscreenThe view from the cabin where Malagón rents from her employer overlooks the Honga River estuary and distant pine forests. A tree directly outside the house that once provided shade and a place to hang dry clothes was swept away in a storm recently, leaving only a small stump behind.This three-and-a-half-mile stretch of land known as Hoopersville is the middle island of the three that make up Hoopers, dividing the Honga River from the Chesapeake Bay.Surrounded by a lush ecosystem of marshland, wildlife and tall seagrass, the women are also geographically and socially isolated.View image in fullscreenNestled in Dorchester county, a tight-knit community with predominantly conservative values, the women say they turn to their faith in God and seek solace in each other’s company while away from home.@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff) 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The narrow bridge connecting the middle to the upper island routinely floods in high tide, leaving the women trapped. Lower Hoopers Island, formerly Applegarth, became uninhabitable due to erosion, and a hurricane washed away the bridge in 1933.Malagón vividly remembers the first time she saw the bay’s waters encroaching on the doorstep of the house in 2006. “When I looked outside, I was terrified,” she said. “We had never seen the tide rise that high. Now we see it as more normal.”Flooding has become routine in recent years, threatening the daily lives and futures of locals and women alike.The Chesapeake Bay has risen by about one foot during the past century, which is nearly double the global average. By 2050, sea levels are projected to rise by as much as two feet. Climate models predict that over half of Dorchester county, the third-largest county in Maryland by land area, could be underwater by the end of the century.View image in fullscreenVincent said she has an emergency management plan for a major flooding event during work hours, where she would evacuate her employees, but says there’s only so much she’s responsible for as an employer.CDM argues there is a pressing need for climate adaptation measures from both governments and employers to safeguard seasonal workers’ wellbeing in the long run.“With roads washing out, the communication lines go down – it just increases all these layers of vulnerability,” said Coburn.“The truth is it’s very beautiful living here – except when the tide rises,” said the laborer who has worked on the island for 14 years. During a recent grocery trip to Walmart, 40 minutes away, she said her housemates were unable to return to the island because the bridge was closed due to flooding.View image in fullscreenLanguage barriers can make it difficult for women to stay informed and they often rely on word of mouth from other workers about the bridge flooding.With every passing season, the grueling nature of the job and looming precarity can take a toll emotionally and physically – some of the women question whether it’s worth coming back.“As long as we’re here, we’re going to make the most of it,” said Clara Ramrez, a worker at GW Hall & Son, one of the crab processing plants on the island. (GW Hall & Son did not respond to requests for comment.)Some owners share a common sentiment.“We just do the best we can with what we’ve got, and ultimately, everybody’s goal is the same: to try and make a living,” said Vincent.View image in fullscreenBack at the house, a group of women started to arrive for the new crab season that started on 1 April.This year more visas have been made available, and Vincent scored 80 visas for her employees through the lottery system. Speaking via WhatsApp from Mexico in early April, Malagón said she was getting ready to make the trip to Maryland via bus. If all goes well, she and the other workers from Lindy’s will arrive by 15 April.Newcomb, the former owner of Old Salty’s, said he won 23 employee visas this season, up from the roughly 18 or 20 he’s gotten in previous years.AE Phillips & Son, another crab house on the island, was unable to obtain visas and will not be operating this season, a major setback for the company and its employees.View image in fullscreenMalagón says she has put her faith in God for a bountiful season, with hopes of returning every year to have enough money to retire. Still, she worries for the future of the industry and the region itself.“If God allows it, my goal is to work for 10 more years. But if there’s no crab, what will we do then?”View image in fullscreen More
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‘It’s our job to change it for the better’: can artists influence the US election?
by Evelyn Reynolds 10 April 2024, 15:48
“I think what we’ve learned is that one man’s hope is another man’s fear,” broadcaster Alex Wagner observed in the final episode of the Showtime channel’s The Circus. “Barack Obama was the embodiment of hope for a lot of people and the embodiment of fear for a sizable portion of this country. And the same is true for Donald Trump. They are twinned emotions and we as a country cannot reconcile that.”Street artist and social activist Shepard Fairey’s Hope poster was a defining image of Obama’s winning 2008 election campaign. Sixteen years on, with another presidential poll looming, it can often feel like fear has the upper hand in American politics. But Fairey is again at work to show that art can make a difference.The 54-year-old is co-chair of Artists For Democracy 2024, a campaign launched this month by the progressive advocacy organisation People for the American Way. It aims to create art that will motivate citizens to vote against the authoritarian Trump and reclaim concepts such as “freedom”, “patriotism” and “the American way”.The lineup of more than 20 artists includes co-chair Carrie Mae Weems along with Beverly McIver, Titus Kaphar, Hank Willis Thomas, Victoria Cassinova, Christine Sun Kim, Alyson Shotz, Amalia Mesa-Baines, Angelica Muro and Cleon Peterson. Together they are setting out to cut through the political noise to surprise, entertain and shock voters out of apathy.Fairey, who has contributed four images stressing the importance of democratic participation, says by phone from Los Angeles: “The amazing thing about art is that it can get to someone’s emotions around empathy, compassion, seeing that the country should work for everyone, not just for the super rich and powerful. Some of these goals with outreach are just to stimulate that moral centre of people.“All humans are capable of making good choices, bad choices, having moments of joy, moments of pain, moments of hope, moments of fear. If we’re following the wrong story, the wrong narrative, making a more compelling alternative narrative can shift the wind back in the other direction, so that’s what I try to do all the time.”View image in fullscreenArtists for Democracy 2024 also includes a Kickstarter campaign to fund the production of billboards in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and an effort that will include peer-to-peer texting, radio PSAs, on-the-ground organisers, targeted digital ads and art activations with potential expansion into more battleground states such as North Carolina and Georgia. Activities include the release of visual prints, custom-made merchandise, radio ads, digital ads, celebrity videos, bus wraps and billboards.People for the American Way was founded in 1980 by the TV producer Norman Lear as an advocacy group aimed at countering the rising power of the evangelical right. One of the pieces included in the campaign is a portrait of Lear – who died last December aged 101 – by Fairey that was inspired by the photographer Peter Yang.The organisation has long engaged artists, from an advert narrated by the actor Gregory Peck urging Americans to reject the nomination of Judge Bork to the supreme court to board members including Seth MacFarlane, Alec Baldwin, Josh Sapan and Kathleen Turner.During the 2020 election it ran an Enough of Trump campaign in swing states featuring billboards, street teams, art installations, digital content, organising and a six-figure crowdfunding campaign. Trump was indeed defeated, only to roar back with a 2024 White House run that is even more radical, extreme and driven by vengeance.Fairey admits: “I never thought that Trump would be viable after January 6. He made many efforts to undermine all the institutions that preserve a functioning democracy while he was president the first time and he failed to completely undo all the safeguards.“But he has more people who will be complicit with his malfeasance this time and so, if he’s elected, it will be a lot more destructive. I actually really care about democracy and care that people will have a say in all of the things that government does that affect their lives, so it’s pretty fucking important.”Warning of Trump’s dictatorial tendencies, he continues: “I’m not someone who is prone to hysteria but this is an existential threat for a lot of the things that Americans have taken for granted and the success of this country has been built upon.”But the notion of artists diving into politics might set off alarm bells. The perception that Hillary Clinton was palling around with Hollywood stars in 2016 fed an “us v them” narrative, dividing America between coastal elites and Trump-loving “deplorables” in the heartland. Could artistic interventions be seen as patronising, preachy and counterproductive?Fairey insists that that some issues cut across partisan lines. “The idea that your freedom to vote might be limited can appeal to some people who normally don’t like liberal ‘woke’ talking points.“I grew up in South Carolina which always votes for Republicans and yet I had and still have tons of progressive friends. Sometimes the outreach in those places makes people who might feel apathetic or like they don’t have allies feel a little bit more courageous. I don’t think it’s a wasted effort at all.”There is another challenge this time. Opinion polls show that Biden’s staunch support for Israel as it wages war in Gaza is alienating young people, progressives and Arab Americans. More than 100,000 Michigan voters in the Democrats’ presidential primary election cast “uncommitted” ballots in a massive protest against the president.View image in fullscreenFairey understands the concerns but makes a case for pragmatism. “I do think that’s a problem but what I would say to any of those people is, regardless of how you feel about Joe Biden, if you can understand that your idealism has to be married to the pragmatic side of having a functional democracy, your next round of opportunity to place someone you like more than Joe Biden in the White House or any other political office is going to depend on democracy working.“So don’t be shortsighted. Consider that, whatever you don’t like about Joe Biden, Trump will be much worse. Anybody who’s young who has listened to Trump talk about Israel should know that Israel is going to get more unconditional support from Donald Trump. If you care about a ceasefire and human rights in Gaza, Trump will not be the person to perform better on that.”Fairey will vote for Biden, albeit not with the same enthusiasm that he felt for Obama. “I’m an idealist but I also understand that there is never going to be someone who’s running a perfect party, a perfect president or perfect Congress. This is where I get very frustrated with people who decide that it just doesn’t make any sense to participate at all if they don’t get precisely what they want, because all they do is ensure that they’re going to get even less of what they want.”McIver is another veteran of the Enough of Trump initiative four years ago. This time she has produced Black Beauty II, an image of a woman patterned with flowers beneath the word “VOTE” – in which the “T” is stylised as a woman’s fallopian tubes and uterus.The 61-year-old year old was “horrified” when the rightwing supreme court ended the constitutional right to abortion. “As a woman, I’m past the age where I would ever have an abortion but I still think it’s extremely important that all women fight for women’s rights,” she says by phone from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.McIver, who is African American, is clear-eyed about what a second Trump presidency would mean. “To even fathom that could happen makes me incredibly uncomfortable and very worried for humanity at large. I just think that we have to beat them. We have to get out there and vote.“I’m gonna take people to the polls, I’m gonna make phone calls, whatever it takes to get people out to vote is extremely important because I can’t imagine that the humanity of the world has gone that low that it would be acceptable for Trump to be president again. That’s a hopeless thought.”View image in fullscreenMcIver is convinced that art can make a difference and rejects the charge of liberal elitism. “That’s funny as a Black woman who grew up in the projects in Greensboro, North Carolina, whose family was raised on welfare, who wasn’t expected to amount to anything and art saved me, if you will.”Living with “roaches and rats” in the projects, she recalls watching Lear’s sitcom Good Times, about a family living in a public housing project in inner-city Chicago. “They were in the projects and the character JJ was an artist and he made paintings –that gave me hope about what my future could be, so the last thing I think about myself is an elitist. My family tells me I’m not all the time.“I’ll definitely own being a humanitarian and wanting good for everyone – guilty of that for sure. ‘We can’t trust the artist because they are elitist. Their work sells for X dollars.’ All that’s about fear, which is how Trump is running this campaign and has run it in the past. We just gotta realise that, before fear, we’re all human.”For Peterson, the political wake-up call came in 2017. A brawl erupted outside the Turkish ambassador’s residence in Washington when President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s diplomatic escort beat up protesters, leaving nine people injured and two under arrest.“I thought, well, this is strange, this is something different with all this divisive language and hatred and everything going on in the public dialogue, getting people riled up with fear,” the 50-year-old says from Los Angeles. “It looked very similar to stuff I’d seen in history and that’s when I started getting scared.”Peterson, too, regards Trump as a fundamental threat to democracy. “He’s trying to destroy institutions and we’re becoming like a culture of grift. I’ve found within myself that I can be all right with a certain amount of grift in the world but, when it become all-encompassing, I just can’t deal with it any more.“In terms of what’s going on, you can’t take this stuff seriously. This guy’s selling Bibles and NFTs – it’s just gotten crazy. We’re listening to super-technical arguments in the courts that that are just meant to be disruptive. Nothing is productive any more. It’s just a battle of fake ideas all day long.”Peterson has faith in the power of the artist to effect change. “I see it as our job – not just visual artists but writers, musicians, painters – to tell some form of truth in the world and also express some form of ideals and also have some kind of vision reminding people of the past and also a hopeful image of the future.“People feel disengaged and alienated, like they’re powerless nowadays, and maybe our role as artists is to say look, you guys actually do have some power here. In a world like where we can become overwhelmed with crisis, it’s our job to change it for the better if we want a better life.” More
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In A Time of Panthers: Jeffery Henson Scales photographs Black history
by Evelyn Reynolds 24 December 2022, 06:00
In A Time of Panthers: Jeffery Henson Scales photographs Black history An absorbing pictorial history of a key component of the Black Power movement shows its relevance has not receded todayJeffrey Henson Scales is a New York Times photo editor. His latest book is most compelling in how it helps place the relentless quest for equal treatment in easily understood context. Beyond beauty or mere appealing images, In a Time of Panthers is a highly valuable work.Sisters of the revolution: the women of the Black Panther partyRead moreCharacterizing the Black Panther movement as “the vanguard of the African American civil rights struggle”, Henson Scales shows how it emerged. The movement became “focused on police violence and community needs in over-policed and under-served communities of color”. To Henson Scales, “So much in all of our lives would continue to change in ways unforeseen to me … so many of the issues that motivated us during these inspired years of activism in America remain unresolved.”For sure, the scourge of urban crime is still hotly debated. The writer Adam Gopnik once remarked that so long as you promise to keep them safe, even in Manhattan, the white middle-class is “pretty much content to look away when the rights of others are being violated”.This, according to a Bronx politician who spoke on condition of anonymity, “is why New York state’s recently hard-won amelioration of bad police policy is threatened now”. Jeff Mays, a Times reporter who lives in Harlem, concurred. He observed the irony of how closely the new Democratic mayor, Eric Adams, echoed the Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin, a Trump supporter. Repeatedly, as hard as he could, Zeldin hit Governor Kathy Hochul with the upsurge in crime attendant to the Covid pandemic. Though making their other differences clear, Mays said of Adams and Zeldin: “Certainly their rhetoric has been very similar on things like bail reform.”Changing discriminatory bail laws, an historic accomplishment meant to equalize justice, was hardly easy. In reaction to Black Lives Matter activists, responding to a rash of police murders, progressive leaders sought to finally fix one of the many issues raised by the Panthers.“Even with it taking until now to address, there’s pushback,” said the Bronx official. . “Some seem eager to retreat to where we were. Man that’s a pitiful shame! And, without a shred of evidence, Adams connecting crime to the bail law – that was just short of a Willie Horton ad. And for Democrats, in the most enlightened place there is, New York, it was just as destructive too.”To Henson Scales, crime is complicated.“It requires nuanced thinking,” he maintains. Yes, today’s increase of violent crime is still “only” producing a few hundred annual homicides, versus a few thousand in the smaller city of 1990. “But with many, many more guns, with magazines capable of cutting down hundreds of victims in seconds, sometimes I do feel as unsafe as I did in the 1990s.”He cautions: “It’s imperative not to overreact and at all cost to avoid unintended consequences, like the mass incarceration that accompanied the Rockefeller drug laws [of 1973]. Black preachers and politicians, thousands of African Americans, favored and voted for such laws. But look where they led.”How did Henson Scales come to produce his book, which morphed into an exhibition associated with Art Basel, on display in Miami’s Black Overtown neighborhood, across from the Red Rooster Restaurant?“Well,” he said, “Four years ago, not long after my mother’s death, my family was preparing our house for sale. It’s a cool place, big enough to have a ballroom and a darkroom too. In one spot they discovered this stash of 40 rolls of film. They reasoned it was mine. And it was. I was so glad they were not lost.“This stuff dated from the late-1960s. I was around 14, a high-school freshman. My dad was a hobbyist photographer and my mother was a painter. Even before I turned 11, when dad gave me a Leica camera, both patiently instructed me. That earliest footage of mine contained a mixed bag of images. There were people and places I hoped to remember. I photographed protest and riots in my home city of Berkeley, California. Sly and the Family Stone and other acts that appeared at the Fillmore, across the bay in San Francisco, were represented too. And then among it all, was this cache of 15 sleeves with negatives showing various aspects of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. The two of us, we grew up together.”Oakland and Berkeley, Haight-Ashbury, the Castro, LA, the summer of love, women’s liberation, Vietnam, uprisings in urban ghettos.“They were,” recalls Scales, “all of a piece. But the Panthers were the coolest people.”He seems caught up in the dynamic of art utilized in the service of action and change, taking note of great style.“The whole presentation with the leather jackets, the berets. They were very cool. You had the hippies … and then you had the Black Panthers … and it was very powerful … The movement was feeling like we could change society. We could have an effect. It was a very exciting place to be. It was dangerous because of police violence against the Panthers … As a teenager that’s all very exciting because you’re not that concerned with safety like you are as you get older.”In discussion, Henson Scales squarely addressed this short-lived Black empowerment movement’s flaws, its misogyny, homophobia, infighting and FBI infiltration. By contrast, his book is more a testament to the group’s strides in overcoming such drawbacks. In pursuit of recognition, handsome Huey P Newton, the Panther’s minister of defense and co-founder, stressed the value of alliances among all oppressed outcasts:.css-rj2jmf{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#866D50;}Whatever your personal opinions and your insecurities about homosexuality and the various liberation movements among homosexuals and women (and I speak of the homosexuals and women as oppressed groups), we should try to unite with them in a revolutionary fashion. I say ‘whatever your insecurities are’ because as we very well know, sometimes our first instinct is to want to hit a homosexual in the mouth, and want a woman to be quiet. We want to hit a homosexual in the mouth because we are afraid that we might be homosexual; and we want to hit the women or shut her up because we are afraid that she might castrate us, or take the nuts that we might not have to start with.”Coming to boast a membership of more than 10,000, 50% of whom were women, the Panther party shone a spotlight on police and political corruption, brutality and injustice, a story also related in a film by an early Panthers member, Henson Scales’s Harlem neighbor Stanley Nelson.The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution debuted in 2015. It elaborates on the party’s wide-ranging social programs. They established community support systems including food and clothing banks, clinics, transport for families of inmates, legal seminars. In the 70s the Panther’s Free Breakfast for Children, nationwide, fed thousands. All this was achieved amid near-constant surveillance by police and J Edgar Hoover of the FBI, who demonized the BPP as “the greatest internal threat to national security”.The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution review – blistering account of a misunderstood movementRead moreRather than giving a daily rundown of all they did and didn’t do, Henson Scales’ portrayals show these revolutionaries as part of the pantheon of Black valor.When Viola Davis’s recent film The Woman King appeared, many critics were astonished. Projected to gross around $12m in its opening week, it grossed $19.05m. Worldwide, the “history-based” epic has earned nearly $100m. A similarly misunderstood historical fantasy, the astutely named, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, has earned more than three times that.As history, both are unashamedly inventive and melodramatic – much like Shakespeare. The “African-inspired” costuming and architecture is highly inauthentic. Heavy reliance on spectacle is akin to Braveheart or Gladiator. Resoundingly praised performances notwithstanding, some have wondered aloud about the appeal of such movies to Black people.If African American motivations and culture seem inscrutable to many, they ought not. Only now are we both able and fully prepared to embrace our heritage.In a Time of Panthers is an arresting look at some mighty heroes from the recent past. We revere them along with never-enslaved Blacks and those held in captivity. We celebrate our ancestors and adhere to Neo-Africanism. Whether such sources are accurately drawn or totally fabricated, the inspiration we take is legitimate. This is today’s aesthetic and intellectual answer to white supremacy’s neo-classical domination: a realization that we too are the heirs of greatness.
In a Time of Panthers: Early Photographs by Jeffrey Henson Scales is published in the US by SPQR Editions
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‘My gut-felt, heartbreaking decision’ – Tracey Emin on her ‘A-Z of abortion’ blanket
by Evelyn Reynolds 7 November 2022, 07:00
‘My gut-felt, heartbreaking decision’ – Tracey Emin on her ‘A-Z of abortion’ blanketThe artist made The Last of the Gold to help women considering a termination. With the issue dominating tomorrow’s US midterms, the work seems more potent than ever “I felt pretty vulnerable. I was so broke, homeless, in debt … I had worked so hard at my education and coming from my background … I knew I wanted to be an artist and I knew that if I had a baby on my own, I felt that I had zero chance of that happening. It seemed ironic that now after all my education and fighting … that I was going to end up being a single mother … And I just thought, I can’t bring a baby into the world with all this …”These are the words of Tracey Emin reflecting on her two abortions from the early 1990s. They highlight the reality endured by so many women around the world. Emin has been making highly political work for decades. Through painting, textiles, films and more, she unveils the rawness and truths of life. Abortion is an issue she has constantly explored, yet its importance in her work has too often been dismissed.TopicsArt and designThe great women’s art bulletinTracey EminAbortionUS politicsWomenfeaturesReuse this content More
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‘I want a president who has been gaybashed’: America’s underground anthem
by Evelyn Reynolds 26 September 2022, 07:00
‘I want a president who has been gaybashed’: America’s underground anthem Zoe Leonard wanted a leader who had been on welfare, lost a lover to Aids, and much more. Sadly her plea, penned in 1992 and later displayed beneath New York’s High Line, is just as relevant today‘I want a dyke for president,” reads the opening of Zoe Leonard’s I Want a President. “I want a person with aids for president and I want a fag for vice-president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn’t have a choice about getting leukemia.”Originally intended to be published as “a statement” in an underground LGBT magazine, I Want a President was written in the run-up to the 1992 US presidential race. This took place at the height of the Aids epidemic, a medical issue turned political crisis that was, in the previous decade, catastrophically silenced by Ronald Reagan. President from 1981 to 89, Reagan failed to acknowledge Aids until thousands had died. The queer community was in turmoil, in the grip of a disease that took the lives of so many, and stigmatised even more.TopicsArtThe great women’s art bulletinUS politicsLGBTQ+ rightsfeaturesReuse this content More
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‘It was opportunistic in the best sense’: how the US constitution inspired an exhibition
by Evelyn Reynolds 18 July 2022, 05:16
‘It was opportunistic in the best sense’: how the US constitution inspired an exhibitionAfter a frenzied auction, a rare first printing of the US constitution was lent to a museum in Arkansas where it’s led to an exhibition on democracy They were eight tense minutes that Austen Barron Bailly will not forget in a hurry.The scene: Sotheby’s auction room in New York. The bidders: Ken Griffin, a billionaire hedge fund manager, versus a group of 17,000 cryptocurrency enthusiasts from around the world. The prize: a rare first printing of the US constitution.‘Many people don’t know this’: the artist shining a light on nuclear testingRead more“It was a nail biter because it was so clearly between these two bidders on the phone,” recalls Bailly, who witnessed the auction last November. “The back and forth and back and forth, and thinking about what it would mean for the US constitution to be owned by a private individual or by this crypto collective, was a pretty interesting, anticipatory eight minutes. Auction is its own form of theatre.”Griffin, an art collector and founder of Chicago-based hedge fund Citadel, prevailed with a bid of $43.2m, a record price for a document or book sold at auction. Sotheby’s immediately announced that he would lend the constitution to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, for public display.The museum, which was founded by Walmart heiress Alice Walton, has about 4,000 works in its collection and is free to the public, made the constitution the centerpiece of an exhibition, We the People: The Radical Notion of Democracy, which opened earlier this month and runs until 2 January.Bailly, who is the museum’s chief curator, says: “The origins of this exhibition were very spontaneous. There was no intention to do an exhibition on the US constitution.“It was truly a response to the moment of the idea that this rare version of an original official edition was to have a new owner and there could be an opportunity to pair the document with works of art in a region of the country that has not seen that before. It was opportunistic in the best sense.”The show could be said to bridge the gap between history and art, between the dead white men of Mount Rushmore and the vibrant community of artists who critiqued America’s imperfect union since the beginning. The rare print of the constitution – one of just 11 known in the world, the museum says – is placed in dialogue with works that shine a different light on the nation’s founding.Among the highlights, organised by Native American art curator Polly Nordstrand, are historical paintings such as John Lee Douglas Mathies’s depiction of Seneca leader Red Jacket and John Trumbull’s portrait of Alexander Hamilton.Original prints of other founding documents, including the declaration of independence, articles of confederation and proposed bill of rights and emancipation proclamation, are juxtaposed with works by artists such as Shelley Niro, Roger Shimomura, Luis C Garza and Jacob Lawrence.Bailly explains: “That gathering of founding documents is truly unprecedented and then we have the opportunity through our collection and special loans to put those words, principles and foundations in conversation with the visual iconography of democracy, portraits of Native leaders, portraits of founding fathers, 20th century works of artists who are documenting and interpreting histories or imagining new futures.“It’s a diverse array of style, media, approach and perspectives and that’s really exciting. People can come to this show and see for themselves these fundamentals, both artistic and political.”The show – complemented by educational and public programming including panels, workshops, student tours and teacher resources – arrives at a moment when history, like seemingly everything else in America, seems to divide more than it unites.The New York Times’s 1619 Project reexamined the legacy of slavery, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton cast actors of colour as the founding fathers and the police murder of George Floyd prompted the removal of numerous Confederate statues.There has been a predictable rightwing backlash. Go to the website of the 1776 Project political action committee (PAC) and you are greeted with an invitation to “Report a School Promoting Critical Race Theory.” The PAC claims it is “promoting patriotism and pride in American history” as opposed to Marxist social engineering.Bailly says: “We don’t shy away from the complicated history and we seek to be very direct in providing fact and truth and those multiple perspectives. We have important works by artists of all backgrounds in the exhibition. We look, too, at the ways in which the cycles of American history and the struggles to form that more perfect union are a persistent part of our nature as a nation.“To me, one of the truest signs of patriotism is to care so much about your country, its principles, its documents, its fundamentals that you’re willing to criticize them to make sure that they work. There are always different ways to tell a story. What’s important is that there can be different biases or emphases within a story, but trying to strike some sort of balance is very critical for us.”Even the founding documents themselves, while sacred to many, are hardly beyond reproach. The declaration of independence’s resounding phrase, “all men are created equal”, does not mention women. The constitution’s “three-fifths clause” allowed enslaved people to be counted as three-fifths of free citizens.The chief curator adds: “What we find extraordinary is the recognition from the moment of the writing of the constitution that it was an imperfect document. We as a nation and artists and even founders of the constitution themselves embrace or acknowledge and work through those imperfections – thus the amendments, thus the bill of rights, thus the constant search for equality and justice.“These documents are the pillars and the cornerstones, flaws and all, of what guides us and we can constantly return to them. It’s those principles and the ostensible protection from the abuses of power that we the people have a responsibility to uphold, defend and fight for when they are not not upheld.”Surely one of the most important aspects of such an exhibition is its location. Donald Trump beat Joe Biden by more than 27 percentage points in Arkansas in the 2020 presidential election. Trump’s former White House spokeswoman, Sarah Sanders, is poised to become the state’s governor.Arkansas is bordered by red states Missouri, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma. And in Bentonville, where Walmart was born and has its headquarters, a Confederate monument stood for more than a century until its removal in 2020. All in all, it does not seem the most fertile ground for a museum show interrogating the heroic version of the American story.But Bailly comments: “What we want to do is present contextually the conditions for the creation of these documents: the people, the places. We want to create a human-centric approach so that anybody coming in, no matter what his or her views are, will find some point of connection and may find connections that they haven’t thought about before.“We don’t dare to try to indoctrinate or direct or say, ‘You need to think like this.’ But we want to provide historical and artistic evidence that can allow people to inform their own thinking and ideas and perspectives. If they change, they change, if they don’t, they don’t. But we want to create that space for discovery, creativity, engagement.”
We the People: The Radical Notion of Democracy is now on view at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, until 2 January.
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‘Adults are banning books, but they’re not asking our opinions’: meet the teens of the Banned Book Club
by Evelyn Reynolds 7 February 2022, 07:00
Conservatives are pushing to ban books from school libraries. At a time of crisis, a group of Pennsylvania teenagers are fighting backby More
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Profusely Illustrated review: Edward Sorel and all the golden ages of New York magazines
by Evelyn Reynolds 15 January 2022, 06:00
Profusely Illustrated review: Edward Sorel and all the golden ages of New York magazines A memoir by a man who has drawn caricatures for the greatest editors is a treasure trove of the American mid-century modernAt 92, Edward Sorel is the grand old man of New York magazines. For 60 years, his blistering caricatures have lit up the pages of Harper’s, the Atlantic, Esquire, Time, Rolling Stone and the Nation. He is especially revered for his work in Clay Felker’s New York in the late 60s and for work in the New Yorker under Tina Brown and David Remnick.A life in cartoons: Edward SorelRead moreHe has also worked for slightly less august titles, like Penthouse, Screw and Ramparts.He is one of the foundational New Yorkers. Like Leonard Bernstein or E B White, Sorel absorbs the rhythms of the rambunctious city, using them to create an exaggerated, beguiling mirror of all he has experienced.A very abbreviated list of his memories includes the Great Depression, Hitler and Mussolini, the Red Scare, Joe McCarthy, Lee Harvey Oswald, both Bushes, Clinton, Obama and Trump.His memoir begins with a political frame. Like the unreconstructed lefty he is – he voted for Ralph Nader twice – he announces that he will show how the crimes of the previous 12 presidents made possible the catastrophe of Donald Trump.He gives the CIA and the military industrial complex all the shame they deserve for an unending parade of coups and wars – from Iran, Guatemala and Chile to Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. But he promises “these exposés will be brief”, so “it will only hurt for a few minutes”. On that he keeps his word.What gives Profusely Illustrated its charm and its power – besides 177 spectacular illustrations – are Sorel’s tales of New York, beginning with a childhood spent in a fifth-floor walk-up in the Bronx with a father he despised and a mother he adored.Sorel spares no one, especially his “stupid, insensitive, grouchy, mean-spirited, fault-finding, racist” father, who he dreamed of pushing in front of a subway train when he was only eight or nine.“When I grew older, I realized how wrong that would have been,” Sorel writes.“The motorman would have seen me.”The first riddle that tortured him was why his amazing mother married his revolting father. She explained that a few months after her arrival in New York from Romania, at 16, she started work in a factory that made women’s hats. When one of the hat blockers noticed on her first day that she hadn’t left for lunch, he loaned her the nickel she needed. Later, the same blocker told her he would kill himself if she didn’t marry him. So that was that.During a prolonged childhood illness that confined him to his bed, Ed started making drawings on cardboard that came back with shirts from a Chinese laundry. When he went back to school, the drawings were admired by his teacher at PS90, who told his mother young Ed had talent. She enrolled him in a Saturday art class at the other end of the city, the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and then another at the Little Red School House, at the bottom of Manhattan.At Little Red, thanks to the generosity of one Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, all the students were given a wooden box containing oil paints, brushes, turpentine and an enamel palette.It was Ed’s “to keep so I could paint at home” – and it changed his life.He gained admission to the highly competitive High School of Music and Art, and then to tuition-free art school at Cooper Union. But his teachers did nothing but delay his success: the fashion for abstraction was so intense, he wasn’t allowed to do the realistic work he loved.The Bronx boy who had been Eddie Schwartz was transformed after he discovered Julien Sorel, hero of Stendhal’s novel The Red and the Black. Julien was “a sensitive young peasant who hated his father, was appalled by the corruption of the clergy in 19th-century France, and was catnip to every woman he encountered”.Five years later, Eddie changed his name to Sorel.With Seymour Chast he founded Push Pin Studios, which after Milton Glaser joined, became the hottest design studio in New York. Sorel didn’t last long but when Glaser founded New York magazine with Felker a few years later, Sorel got the perfect outlet for his increasingly powerful caricatures.His book’s pleasures include interactions with all the most important magazine editors of the second half of the last century, including George Lois, art director of Esquire in its heyday under Harold Hayes.Gay Talese had written what would become a very famous profile, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold. The crooner had refused to pose for the cover, after Lois told him he wanted a close up with a cigarette in his mouth and a gaggle of sycophants eagerly trying to light it.Lois asked Sorel for an illustration. It was an assignment that would give him “more visibility than I had ever had before”. He panicked and his first effort was a failure. But with only one night left, his “adrenalin somehow made my hand turn out a terrific drawing of Frank Sinatra”. It launched Sorel’s career. The original now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.Gay Talese: ‘Most journalists are voyeurs. Of course they are’Read moreThe Village Voice, New York’s original counterculture newspaper, gave him a weekly spot. Sorel inked a memorable portrait of the New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal as a tank shooting a too-liberal columnist, Sydney Schanberg, after Schanberg was fired for attacking the news department from the op-ed page.Tina Brown chose Sorel to do her first New Yorker cover. When Woody Allen and Mia Farrow split up, Sorel imagined a Woody & Mia Analysts Convention.If you’re looking for a bird’s eye view of the glory days of magazine journalism, illustrated with drawings guaranteed to make you nostalgic for great battles of years gone by, Profusely Illustrated is perfect. When you’re done, you’ll be ready to rewatch Mad Men all over again.
Profusely Illustrated is published in the US by Knopf
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Profusely Illustrated review: Edward Sorel and all the golden ages of New York magazines

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