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15 Photos That Celebrate The Beauty Of Breastfeeding

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As birth photographers, Monet Moutrie and Jennifer Mason have been taking pictures of mothers breastfeeding their babies for over five years. In honor of World Breastfeeding Week, they launched a breastfeeding photography contest through their birth support website, Birth Becomes Her.


The Denver-based photographers announced the contest on social media and received over 100 submissions over the course of a few days. Online voting was open to the public, who narrowed down the entries to 15 finalists. A panel of judges selected the winners.



Moutrie and Mason decided to hold a breastfeeding photography contest after feeling frustrated by their experiences with other photo competitions.


“Jennifer and I both submitted to a larger photography contest this year, and we were surprised that many of our breastfeeding entries were banned because they wanted the contest to be ‘family friendly,’” Moutrie told The Huffington Post, adding, “And while Facebook and Instagram have made great strides in allowing breastfeeding images on their platforms, many are still reported and removed.”


“Just as some breastfeeding mothers feel that they can’t nurse in public ― photographers who capture nursing mothers often have their images disqualified from contests due to the ‘nature’ of the shot,” Mason noted. “We wanted to create a space for these photographers to embrace the beauty of their images and be able to share them publicly in a space that they can be embraced.”



Though Moutrie is a breastfeeding advocate, she doesn’t limit her photography to nursing images. “I firmly believe that the act of nurturing our children is what matters, and I love documenting other ways of feeding babies,” she said. “Bottle or breast, what matters is that our children feel loved and cared for.”


Ultimately both Mason and Moutrie aim to empower parents with the photography contest. “Jennifer and I hope that these images show women that breastfeeding is worth celebrating,” Moutrie explained, adding, “We hope that these images show women and men that breastfeeding is normal and practiced in many different communities, many different ways.”


Keep scrolling to see the 15 finalists in the breastfeeding image contest. The stunning photos show 15 human mamas and one gorilla.


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Craig Robinson Explains The Value Of Family In Our Current Political Hellscape

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If your understanding of the world has slipped away more and more over the last year, Craig Robinson’s new movie about expat family life is a poignant salvation. It also makes a compelling case for Robinson’s continued work in drama, as an actor famous for comedic roles in “The Office” and “Hot Tub Time Machine.”


At the 2016 Sundance Film Festival in January, Robinson won a Special Jury Award for his part in “Morris From America,” which is currently available on DirecTV and will have a limited theatrical release beginning Aug. 19. In the movie, Robinson plays a widowed father who has relocated his 13-year-old son, Morris, from New York City to Heidelberg, Germany, for a coaching job with a “football” (soccer) team.


The movie is mainly a coming-of-age story for Morris, played by Markees Christmas, but it also has a lot to say about being part of a black minority in an extremely white city. Locals are overtly racist to Morris. Robinson’s character, Curtis, tells his son at one point: “We’re the only two brothers in Heidelberg. We have to stick together.”


In an interview with The Huffington Post, Robinson said the project appealed to him because of its theme of family teamwork through adversity. “Them being there in Germany, it kind of forces them to once again revisit that friendship,” said Robinson. “Because it’s really them two against the world.”


“Especially in this atmosphere, with this election and all this stuff, it’s like, we’re still in this boat together,” Robinson said. “Let’s not rock it.”


Robinson thought screenwriter Chad Hartigan pulled a “smooth move” by writing Morris as a “super fish-out-of-water” character. (Hartigan also won an award at Sundance for the movie.)



The relationship between Curtis and Morris becomes particularly nuanced as Robinson decides he also needs to take on the roles of a traditional mother and best friend for his son. Throughout the movie, Morris struggles with the language barrier and different interests between himself and German locals. The young boy is also an aspiring hip-hop star who eventually develops a crush, but, since the girl only knows Jay Z as Beyoncé’s husband, the relationship can only go so far. 


Robinson explained that he also took the role because of the film’s musical side-plots, such as Morris’ rap efforts and Curtis’ attempts to teach his son about old-school hip-hop. Before becoming an actor, Robinson worked as an elementary-school music teacher ― although he admits he was always “more of a funk guy” than a fan of the rap his character champions in the movie.


Midway through “Morris,” Curtis gives his son an old mixtape of his own rapping as a kid. It ends up being his dad trying to imitate Biggie Smalls, but Morris, not knowing what to expect, plays the awkward tracks in his crush’s bedroom. Since she doesn’t know anything about hip-hop, he’s luckily the only one who realizes it’s bad.


“I’ve rapped for fun in karaoke,” said Robinson. “But for the most part, my rapping skills are non-existent and that was just fun. I was actually reading when I rapped that.” 


As Americans overseas, the cast members went out of their way to bond together in Germany, diving into the local party culture. Robinson explained how they would throw impromptu “fests” with German food and beer in a barn with a DJ. “One of the nights I played piano and we partied all night,” Robinson said, smiling.


Finding your team can serve a bigger purpose than just survival against the odds.





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11 Illustrations That Perfectly Sum Up The Daily Struggles Of Womanhood

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From dealing with summer boob sweat to unfortunate hair days, being a woman comes with its own, specific set of...complications.


But for Romanian-Canadian artist Cassandra Calin, these complications inspire adorable ― and accurate ― depictions of daily life.


In her sketches, she perfectly captures some of the minute, day-to-day stresses so many women are familiar with. 


Below are 11 illustrations that perfectly nail the tiny moments, frustrations and hilarious complications of modern womanhood:


1. The first thing we do when we get home:





2. Why summer is both a beautiful dream and a hellish nightmare:





3. The very real struggles of keeping makeup on:





4. The perils of trying to self-diagnose your illnesses:





5. The moment you hope to God that tagged photo is a good one:





6. The moment you realize you’ll never quite pull off those hairstyles you see on Pinterest:





7. When you miss a spot with the razor:





8. When you go for the ~natural~ look only to be asked if you’re sick or tired, because LOL men have zero idea what no makeup actually looks like:





9. The terror of actually talking on the phone:





10. Everything about our periods:





11. When there’s no filter:





H/T BoredPanda

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Photographer Captures Powerful Image Of Hope After One Family's Loss

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Lifestyle photographer Ashley Maisonet has been taking pictures of pregnant women for about three years, but this emotional maternity session was a first for her.


Maisonet had the privilege of photographing Bella Maia Anderson, who wanted to celebrate the upcoming birth of her rainbow baby, four years after losing her first child. During the photo shoot, she captured a powerful image of hope in the aftermath of heartbreaking tragedy. 



“I have dreamed of becoming a mother pretty much all my life, and losing my first child, Harlow, was very traumatic event yet healing in many ways,” Anderson told The Huffington Post.


The mom shared her story of loss on her blog, An Angel named Harlow. When Anderson was six months pregnant with Harlow back in 2011, her unborn baby was diagnosed with Potter’s syndrome caused by bilateral renal agenesis ― a condition in which a fetus fails to develop kidneys during gestation.


Babies diagnosed with this condition are typically stillborn or do not survive more than a few hours after birth. After Harlow’s diagnosis, Anderson made the difficult decision to carry her to full term. “Carrying a child knowing she was going to die as soon as she left my womb was the worst experience of my life, yet it has shaped me in so many ways.” she said. “I learned so much about myself, spirituality and gratitude, and it has certainly changed me as a person.”


Harlow was born on January 17, 2012 and passed away shortly after coming into the world. “I got to hold her, kiss her and spend about one hour with her, and I would do it all over again,” she recalled. “There is something majestic about holding a newborn in your arms ― it truly transforms you.”


Over four years later, Anderson gave birth to her second child, Skyler Rose Anderson, on July 29, 2016. When she was three months pregnant with Skyler, the mom learned the term “rainbow baby” after a friend sent her a photo of moms celebrating their babies born after loss.


“I shared the photo with my husband and we both thought, ‘We have to honor OUR rainbow baby.’” Anderson said. That’s when the couple reached out to Maisonet.





Maisonet had never heard of rainbow babies, but was immediately on board when Anderson’s husband James brought out a paint set to decorate her pregnant belly.


“After the paint was on, there was a moment of silence that fell, and I saw Bella look down at her belly with her palms up,” Maisonet recalled. “It was stunning to me. I saw ... and I captured.” 


The photographer was also moved by the image during the editing process.  “I’m sure there were a million thoughts running through Bella’s mind while looking at her belly and empty hands smeared with painted memories of her beautiful baby,” said Maisonet.


“Was she thinking of what could have been? Did she see the paint on her empty hands and think about her baby ― the one who should have occupied those hands?” she speculated. “I couldn’t tell you, but I know thoughts like those were racing through my mind as I captured and later took time to reflection over the image.”


Maisonet shared the emotional image and story with the Facebook page, Birth Without Fear, where it was liked over 33,000 times and shared by nearly 18,000 people. Many Facebook users shared their own rainbow baby stories in the comments section.





The photographer hopes her picture can help others who have experienced loss find joy. “A rainbow signifies a promise that comes after a storm,” she said. “I can only hope that after mourning and after healing, mothers like Bella can find the courage to smile at the life that once was and celebrate it with a tribute that will live on forever.”


Echoing this sentiment, Anderson told HuffPost, “I would like to hug every mother who has lost a child if I could and to tell her I understand her pain.” She added, “We may never fully understand why things like a baby dying happen but we must press on to make our lives, ourselves and our world better.”


The Andersons love the photo, both for the way it represents their story and the way its meaning extends to their community in Orlando, Florida. “The Pulse nightclub attack had just taken place when we took this photo, so rainbow flags were everywhere,” the mom explained. “My husband and I thought, what a beautiful thing if we can take those photos to share our story but also, in a time of such pain and hate in the world, to be a vessel of love, life and most importantly HOPE!”


She added, “After the storm, there’s a rainbow.”


H/T BabyCenter

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So, About That Time Someone Let Us Perform At Carnegie Hall

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There we were: four badass chicks people who can’t sing from the Moulin Rouge The Huffington Post, waiting in the wings at Carnegie Hall. Feather boas draped around our necks, we gawked at the ornate stage that seemed to envelop us as we walked out to begin our number. This was, after all, the very site where Leonard Bernstein conducted the New York Philharmonic, The Beatles performed during their first visit to New York and Meryl Streep single-handedly saved arts education in “Music of the Heart.” These humble HuffPost soul sistas were in awe.


The day before our prestigious debut, we’d rehearsed our “Lady Marmalade” choreography for a grand total of 45 minutes. If we do say so ourselves, we nailed the essence of “voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir,” even if most of our vocals couldn’t rough it on a bad episode of “Say What? Karaoke.” But we pulled it off, only missing a few cues here and there.


Why did this happen, you ask? It was all in the name of the music, specifically that of Florence Foster Jenkins, the New York heiress and socialite who self-financed an opera career, unaware that she couldn’t sing. Jenkins performed at Carnegie Hall in 1944 and is now the subject of a biopic directed by Stephen Frears ("The Queen,” “High Fidelity”) starring Streep ("Music of the Heart,” obviously). The movie opens Aug. 12, and, for some reason (a fun marketing ploy?), Paramount Pictures invited us to follow our dreams on the Carnegie stage, just like Jenkins did.


Watch us below, will you? As Meryl herself would say, “That’s all.”




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These Models Are Completely Redefining Beauty Standards

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Winnie Harlow, Souffrant Ralph, Diandra Forrest, Shaun Ross and Breanne Rice are just a few of the models who are proving that we can, and should, embrace what makes us different.


Harlow, for example, is a model and activist who appeared on “America’s Next Top Model” in 2014. She also has vitiligo, a condition that involves the depigmentation of skin. Harlow has said she was bullied as a child because she looked different than her peers, but she didn’t let that get in the way of her dream of becoming a model. Today, she’s the spokesperson for the Spanish fashion brand Desigual. 



Ross, who has albinism, shared his own experience with bullying on “The Tyra Banks Show.” “When I was in the seventh grade, I used to get antagonized a lot. There was this boy one day, and he starts calling me all these names: ‘powder,’ ‘white bread,’ ‘paper,’” he said.


Since starting his modeling career at the age of 16, Ross has appeared in music videos for artists including Beyoncé and Katy Perry.



Despite the success these models have earned, Forrest, who also has albinism, said she is still ridiculed because of her looks, even within the modeling industry.  


“We’re looked at as something that’s maybe extraterrestrial, you know, an odd beauty, not just a regular beauty, whatever that is,” she said in a UN albinism awareness campaign. 


Harlow wants to help people embrace themselves. 


“I want to help you be able to see the beauty in every other person, you know, that has a disability, mark, a scar,” she said. “How can I show you the beauty in differences?”


This video was produced by Katrina Norvell and Brittany Berkowitz and edited by Alfred Marroquin.

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Photographer Chronicles The New African Diaspora In Vibrant Portraits

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Atong Atem was 6 years old when her family left her native South Sudan, migrating through Ethiopia to a refugee camp in Kenya. Soon after, they migrated to Australia. As such, from a young age, Atem identified herself as an outsider, caught somewhere between past and present, her current setting and the place she calls home. 


Every young person grows up plagued with questions about who they are, where they belong and who it is they want to become. The already knotty journey to construct your identity becomes additionally complicated when issues of race, gender, sexuality and colonial history come into play, incorporating complex narratives into an already tangled sense of self. 


Now an art student based in Melbourne, Atem is still viscerally aware of the way a single person can occupy many times, places and cultures at once. In her photography series “Third Culture Kids,” Atem crafts staged and stylized portraits of other such individuals, Australia’s second-generation African youth, exploring the ways race, colonialism and history play into one’s constructed sense of self. 



“Third Culture Kid” is a term used to describe a child who grew up in a culture different than their parents’. For Atem, the word alludes to the mystifying reality of being a living contradiction, albeit a very well-dressed one. “Being a Third Culture Kid means recognizing there’s a space that exists between the culture we’re from and the culture we’re living in,” she explained in an interview with i-D.


“I feel not South Sudanese enough, or not Australian enough. I have to accept that I’ll never be both: those ideas are completely fabricated from outside of myself. For a lot of people who realize they exist in that in-between space, it’s kind of upsetting because you’re neither this nor that. But being a third culture kid can be whatever you want,” she said.


For her portraits, Atem took hints from groundbreaking West African studio portraitists like Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta. Between 1940 and 1960, Keïta took now-iconic black-and-white portraits of Malian citizens and families, mixing and matching elements of Western and African visual culture to yield vibrant modern portraits that represented the true complexity of African identity at that precise and precarious moment. 



Sidibé emerged in the 1960s as Mali’s only traveling documentary photographer, snapping smartly dressed youths letting loose at parties and nightclubs. He also opened up a studio, which he draped in colorful African fabrics, and supplied extra accessories for subjects looking to add some extra pizzazz. “He really changed the way Westerners look at Africa,” gallerist Jack Shainman told The New York Times. “He captured the newfound freedom after colonialism — that time, and that moment.”


The residue of colonialism still looms large over the culture of Africa and the African diaspora. This is another subject Atem is interested in researching and exploring. There are countless elements now associated with African culture that were first introduced by European colonizers, from wax print fabrics to studio portraiture itself. Eventually, these elements became part of the fabric of the African experience, their origins often muffled or forgotten. 


Like Sidibé and Keïta, Atem incorporates elements of Australian and African culture into her photographs. Brilliant fabrics and traditional West African dresses radiate alongside hip sunglasses, ripped denim, and the occasional fedora. Her vibrant photographs depict a generation for whom identity cannot be expressed in a place of origin or a single phrase. Rather, the self is multiplied and ever-changing, limitless in its lack of borders and laws. 


“I think it is really political and a huge act for people of color to claim their identity in loud and obvious ways,” Atem said. “I think that’s really cool and important.”


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How Does A 20-Something Virgin Go About 'Losing' Her V-Card?

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It’s generally taken as a given that young men want to shed their V-cards as soon as humanly possible. Entire movies have been dedicated to the male allergy to remaining a virgin past a certain age.


For young women, the mainstream narrative of pursuing sex is more complicated. Why would a heterosexual girl need to go on a quest to lose her virginity, when all she needs to do is flash a wink at any red-blooded man at a bar, on the street, or in the cereal aisle at ShopRite and find herself in a stranger’s apartment in a state of deshabille in minutes? For women, the cherry-popping arc typically revolves around not a madcap search for a sexual partner, but around a tender deflowering at the hands of a great love, often after a prolonged should I/shouldn’t I internal struggle.


All the same, women can and do arrive into full-fledged adulthood without ever having gone “all the way,” even if they never made a conscious choice to avoid losing their virginity. Getting a guy you’d be willing to be alone with to have sex with you isn’t always as simple for women as straight men tend to assume. And these days, being a 20-something woman without any sexual experience (unless you date within a faith-based community that emphasizes premarital celibacy or something) can feel like a catch-22 ― all you want is to get that first time over with, but not many dudes want the pressure of being your first.


Such is the dilemma of Julia, a 26-year-old former competitive swimmer from Texas, now living an aimless yuppie life in a miserable office job and a miserable apartment near Washington, D.C. She traces back through a decade of hearing about her friends’ first times, always anticipating hers will be soon, but high school and college slip away in a flurry of swim meets and not-right moments. After moving out east in hopes of shaking up her social life, she realizes that all she’s done is make herself totally isolated, a single lonely girl living in a grim apartment complex too far from the city.


Men do not seem to be stumbling over themselves to meet her, woo her, or even just have a fun one-nighter with her, and the longer she goes on as a virgin, the less likely it seems that any guy will be interested in the task of ending her lifelong dry spell.


Sick of treading water, she quits her job and, suddenly unable to move home because her parents have rented out their house while they take a relationship-building sabbatical in Costa Rica, Julia winds up spending the summer in North Carolina with her quirky aunt, Vivienne. A new setting, a new terrible office job, a new opportunity to meet eligible men ― but more important, she learns that her aunt is herself a virgin, and Julia becomes fascinated by a possible case study and/or cautionary tale standing right next to her. How did Aunt Vivienne never have sex, even once? What happened? How can Julia make sure it doesn’t happen to her?


Losing It approaches this story with an honesty and nuance that can often be lacking in depictions of female sexuality. Julia feels sexually frustrated; once, with her aunt out of town, she says, “I masturbated for three straight hours… It was like an itchy toxin entered my brain, and everything, even the walls, seemed to be vibrating with a sex ache.” She’s not trapped by excessively romantic, “Twilight”-eque visions of her first time, but she also finds her primal urges are thwarted by her own fickle tastes and uncertainty. She goes on online dates and dates with casual acquaintances, initially eager to get to the hooking up, but finally unable to ignore an itch of discomfort with the individual men. When it comes to the guys she feels unequivocally lustful toward, unending external complications spring up.


Rathbone has a crisply compelling prose style and an honesty about female sexuality, but Losing It nonetheless doesn’t read as a raw, unfettered take on a 20-something coming of age. The plot often relies on simple contrivances and awkward scenarios that would seem equally at home in a sitcom script, but not punched up by bright lights, hilarious actors and a laugh track. Each of these things individually could certainly happen ― having to move in with a distant aunt temporarily, trying to set your perennially single aunt up on a surprise date, being caught hooking up with a college student at a funeral ― but taken together, and laid out in such glossy, neat order, the plot beats can feel rote.


For a light read, a little rote-ness in plot may not be such a bad thing; plenty of genre fiction, like romance and mystery, mixes it up while staying within familiar narrative progressions and tropes. When it comes to a beach read, Losing It is excellent, but it won’t throw too many curveballs. Except, maybe, its very premise ― after all, every narrative that adds dimension to our cultural conception of women’s sexuality has to make us think a little.


The Bottom Line:


A light, pleasant book that looks honestly at the question: What is it like to be a woman in her 20s who desperately wants to get laid, but can’t?


What other reviewers think:


San Francisco Chronicle: “Losing It deftly charts the shifting temperatures of awkward social situations, and the reader gets to wince along with its characters.”


The Rumpus: “Losing It is a terrific and funny meditation on the deep pockets of discontent in life, growing up, and seizing the right opportunities for connection when you can.”


Who wrote it?


Emma Rathbone writes for outlets including The New Yorker and The New York Times. Her first novel, The Patterns of Paper Monsters, was published in 2010.


Who will read it?


Readers looking for some fun, breezy summer fiction, and who enjoy books about the interior lives and relationships of young women.


Opening lines:


“I sat at my desk and stared at a calendar with a bunch of dancing tamales on it and played with a little piece of paper and thought about the fact that I was twenty-six and still a virgin. There was that, and then there was the fact that I couldn’t stop thinking about it.”


Notable passage:


“I couldn’t get the summer to work. I couldn’t crank it right. There were dark, split, bloated days where I simmered with frustration. One afternoon I stared at a lady at a craft store when I was picking up some paints for Viv on the way home from work. She had jiggly arms and was wearing a stupid wooden necklace and I hated her for the pliant way she was nodding at the clerk. For being so middle-aged and obsolete and accommodating.


I went on another Internet date.”


 


Losing It


by Emma Rathbone


Riverhead, $26.00


Published July 19, 2016


The Bottom Line is a weekly review combining plot description and analysis with fun tidbits about the book.

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Delta Airlines Is Showing 'Carol' With Same-Sex Kissing Edited Out

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If you recently watched the movie “Carol,” a 1950s love story about two women played by Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, aboard a Delta Airlines flight, you may be unaware that the two characters kiss.


That’s because those moments were edited out.


Comedian Cameron Esposito tweeted about the odd omission on Wednesday. She noted that it was reasonable to edit sex scenes out of an in-flight movie, but without even a kiss, Carol “is a movie about staring.”










Delta Airlines told Entertainment Weekly that the reason the kissing was left out is because the studio only supplied them with two versions of the movie — one edited and one unedited. The unedited version included nudity and so would not be appropriate for Delta in-flight movies, they said. The edited version that cut the nudity also happened to cut the kissing.


“If we were worried about kissing we wouldn’t be showing the film in the first place, but because there are scenes with more than a few seconds of nudity, we opted for the edited version instead of the theatrical version,” read a statement sent to EW.


If that’s the case, then the studio, The Weinstein Company, is the one that ultimately made the call that same-sex kissing was worth editing out. The Weinstein Company did not immediately return a request for comment from The Huffington Post.


“Carol” screenwriter Phyllis Nagy tweeted that American Airlines and United Airlines opted to show the original, unedited versions.






Seriously, even the official trailer for “Carol” has kissing. Watch for yourself: 




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In 'Stranger Things' And 'Little Men,' The Kids Are All Right

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This summer, the best entertainment comes from an unlikely source: teen boys.


Two remarkable new releases ― the debut season of Netflix’s “Stranger Things” and the movie “Little Men” ― make heroes of adolescent males who are wiser and more daring than their age implies. Amid a dearth of quality blockbusters and the doldrums of summer television, “Stranger Things” and “Little Men” are out of place. They are subtle and affectionate, with charming young characters whose optimism defies the stubborn adults around them. The respective creatives responsible for “Stranger Things” and “Little Men” channel the agony and ecstasy of youth, deftly showcasing the limitlessness of childhood. If only these fussy parents would stop getting in the way ― if only they dared to dream. And if only more of our summer fare had been this lovely. (Minor spoilers ahead.)


By now, you’ve probably heard a thing or two about “Stranger Things.” The Spielbergian genre hybrid, created by twins Ross and Matt Duffer, premiered to glowing reviews last month and lit up the online water cooler. The imaginative 12-year-old Dungeons & Dragons obsessives at the show’s center will stop at nothing to retrieve their friend, Will, from the mysterious Upside Down underworld. Horrid monster, alternate dimensions and skeptical townsfolk be damned. 



“Little Men,” the latest from “Love Is Strange” director Ira Sachs, is a different beast. Its monster is not a brisk humanoid with a tulip-shaped head ― it is merely the changing tides of life, the unavoidable forces that shift the course of our relationships and our surroundings. When artistic 13-year-old Jake (Theo Taplitz) moves to Brooklyn with his parents (Greg Kinnear and Jennifer Ehle), he bonds with Tony (Michael Barbieri), an aspiring actor hoping to get into the same performing arts high school that Al Pacino and Nicki Minaj attended. Jake’s late grandfather was a dear friend of Tony’s mother, Leonor (Paulina Garcia). He was also the landlord who oversaw the unprofitable dress boutique she maintains. Jake’s grandfather avoided raising the rent on Leonor’s store, even as real-estate costs in gentrified Brooklyn soared. When Jake’s parents demand Leonor pay five times her current rate, the notion of compromise ― evident to their offspring ― barely registers among the adults.


Despite disparate settings and genres, “Little Men” and “Stranger Things” grapple with the same idea: Where adults’ imaginations are limiting, children’s are endless. If only parents, the supposed guideposts for all that is proper, could channel their kids’ wherewithal, things might not be so contentious. In the worlds of “Stranger Things” and “Little Men,” maturity replaces ingenuity, and problems become harder to solve because adults can’t blaze through their own rigidity and/or cluelessness. 



Of course, Jake’s parents in “Little Men” are fair to ask Leonor to pay more in rent, even if the rift upsets the kids. Had she haggled for a smaller increase, maybe a resolution would be possible. Instead, Leonor doles out insults and disregard, using her relationship with Jake’s grandfather as ammo for why she should be exempt from economic change. Her unwillingness to brainstorm an alternative ultimately gets her evicted. And Jake’s dad won’t entertain any appeals about what his own father would have wanted him to do. Only Jake proposes a solution. Whether or not it’s realistic, at least it’s a starting point. The children are the future.


“Stranger Things” divides most of its adults into two camps. There’s Will’s instinctual mother, Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder), and there’s everyone else. Desperate to find her son, Joyce will talk to blinking Christmas lights and take an ax to her walls if it means saving Will from the Upside Down. Will’s trio of friends, aided by the E.T.-like Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), has no doubt their pal is alive, and each of the show’s eight episodes finds them concocting ever more creative ways to reach him. As for Karen (Cara Buono), Mike’s poised mother? She thinks Joyce is losing it, yet she has no idea a girl is living in her basement and a boy is sneaking into her daughter’s window. Police Chief Hopper (David Harbour) comes around, but he, too, first treats Joyce like a distressed lunatic. And yes, of course it’s hard to believe that a monster is roaming through town, sucking preteens into some abyss. But the kids in this Indiana suburb use their fascination with fiction as a way to believe that anything can become a reality. Adulthood has stripped the grown-ups of their ability to imagine the fantastical ― or at least, like the “Little Men” parents, the faculties to find creative solutions to the ideas with which they are presented.



As summer crawls to a close, I am happy to let these wily kids reign supreme. Since most are underdogs who’ve banded together against their peers, seeing them come into their own in the face of conflict is a victory unto itself. By the time they leave high school, their intellect and dexterity will give them an edge. But while they endure the social pecking order of adolescence, their unbreakable loyalty saves the day, or at least has the potential to. The odds they’re up against become more astonishing and contentious, but they never stop supporting one another’s ideas.


The themes of both “Stranger Things” and “Little Men” revolve around solidarity. Jake and Tony display it by not speaking to their parents until the rent dispute is resolved, and it shines through in Will’s friends’ willingness to chance whatever peril might bring him home. Where most adults are stubborn spoilsports, these kids are low-key heroes, and 2016’s popular culture is more inspiring with them in it. 


“Stranger Things” is now streaming on Netflix. “Little Men” is now in select theaters.

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Drop Everything And Watch Blocks Of Sand Being Cut Into Slices

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• • • • • • #satisfying #kineticsand #sand #aesthetic #satisfyingvideos #slime #beautiful #cool

A video posted by Satisfying sand videos (@sand.isfying) on




What do you get when you combine kinetic sand, a minimalist pastel background, and the strange magic of the internet? 


The instagram account sand.isfying. In 70 videos (and counting), an anonymous human presses, cuts and otherwise manipulates tan and fuchsia shapes of sand in a perfectly unadorned setting. The videos clearly hit a nerve — the account currently has more than 35,000 subscribers, and each post is peppered with comments ranging from “I’ve found my sexuality” to “I could watch this for hours” to requests for different ways to slice the sand with pizza cutters or scissors. 



Scissors

A video posted by Satisfying sand videos (@sand.isfying) on




The videos take on the same qualities as other calligraphy or paint-mixing videos covered on HuffPost Arts in the past: Soft sounds accompany visuals that are interesting to the eye without being too fast-moving or jarring. That sensation you may experience is simply ASMR, or a tingly feeling that relaxes you while exposed to certain auditory or visual stimuli. You could say it’s the best thing since sliced sand.


Accounts like sand.isfying are a reminder that the internet is vast and constantly surprising. Plus, it just looks really cool.



I got a new form it looks cool

A video posted by Satisfying sand videos (@sand.isfying) on





triangles • • • • • • #satisfying #kineticsand #sand #aesthetic #satisfyingvideos #slime #beautiful #cool

A video posted by Satisfying sand videos (@sand.isfying) on





Apple cutter again

A video posted by Satisfying sand videos (@sand.isfying) on




h/t Reddit

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For 50 Years, This Feminist Ceramicist Has Told Stories With Clay

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When Coille Hooven was young, she looked forward to a certain nighttime ritual. Every night, while tucking her in, Hooven’s father would lull her to sleep with a bedtime story of his own creation. She was in awe of her father’s ability to weave fairytales and myths out of thin air. 


Today, Hooven is a formidable storyteller in her own right. Yet instead of telling tales with words, she sculpts them with clay. For over 50 years, Hooven has molded stories of mermaids, snakes and other hybrid beasts ― fantastical tales with feminist undercurrents.



Delicate and mighty, Hooven’s sculptures resemble household objects that, when no one is looking, sprout mythical critters from their every crack and corner. Aprons, shoes, pillows and mugs become temporary shelters for long-limbed lions and triangular ghosts, forming skeletons of feminist fairy tales the viewer must piece together for herself. 


“I liken my work to dream interpretation,” the artist wrote in an artist statement from 1985. “It is both literal and symbolic, intended to invoke a feeling that lingers. The shoe is a shoe, but it is also an animal, a vehicle, and a stage for the play within.”



In a traditional palette of whites and blues, Hooven explores issues of gender inequality, domestic spaces, work and motherhood, allowing each to change shape as they bubble up from the subconscious and into clay. Tackling the most pressing tensions of womanhood in a complex language of symbols and signs all her own, Hooven weaves lighthearted mythologies with dark undertones that will crawl into your psyche and find a quiet place to rest. 


A retrospective spanning Hooven’s work will be on view this fall at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design (MAD). It’s called, quite fittingly, “Tell It By Heart.”



Hooven was born in New York City to two creative parents. Her mother was a poet, her father an architect and designer who, among other accomplishments, created the logo for the United Nations. From the age of 2 years old, Hooven had little doubt she wanted to follow in her parents’ footsteps and become an artist. Around the same time she had this epiphany, however, her family picked up and left New York for Virginia. 


Growing up, Hooven was constantly possessed by the call to create. “I was always doing artsy things,” she explained in an interview with The Huffington Post. “I was just artsy. It was how I lived my life.” Her father’s office was a mecca of art supplies in bright and tempting colors, all of which Hooven took advantage of constantly, with her parents’ approval. “I couldn’t get rid of it. I needed to make the things I wanted to make.” 


In the early 1960s, Hooven received her BFA from the University of Illinois. There she discovered that, despite her love for all creative modes, it was clay she wanted to devote her life’s work to. “I tried metal, I tried weaving, I tried sculpture,” Hooven said. “When I tried clay I never went back.”



When I asked why, Hooven described how the medium opened itself up to her, exposed in all its formless susceptibility, it felt like magic. “It was easy for me to work with clay,” the artist said. “Shaping balls of clay, throwing them on the potter’s wheel, catching them the moment they’re dry, but still damp enough. I just loved it ― the process was a flowing rhythm between the medium and my mind.”


Before long, Hooven’s work branched in two distinct directions. There was the pottery, the everyday objects she’d sell to pay the bills, and there was the fine art, the delicate sculptures that brought bedtime stories to life in extraordinary, soft detail. Yet regardless of the particular piece, whether it would be categorized as “high” or “low” art, the clay always delivered. 


“No matter if I am making fantastical shoes or coffee cups, the feel of the clay is alive,” Hooven said. “I have to partner with the clay. What a fortunate calling it is to have this lifelong affair with clay!”



Perhaps for this reason, Hooven was unfazed by the criticism she received for working in a medium often designated as “craft” instead of “art.” She recalled a specific instance in which an individual advised her to give up her pottery practice for fear it would diminish her ability to be taken seriously as a “real” artist. “I had no tension because I was doing what I wanted to do,” she remembered. “I was in it too much to be able to not like it.”


After graduating from University of Illinois, Hooven took a position in the ceramics department at the Maryland Institute of the College of Art in Baltimore, eventually rising to the position of chairperson. Under her guidance, the ceramics department grew from a single wheel to a thriving ecosystem of clay.



In Baltimore, Hooven spent much of her time teaching and starting a family, all the while dreaming of moving to California, where the ceramics world felt the most experimental, the most free. Eventually, Hooven packed up and moved with her two children to Berkeley, California. She set up a studio in her home and supported herself by selling work at studio sales and craft fairs. 


Hooven’s children grew up, much like she did, surrounded by art. “It was the only norm,” Hooven’s daughter Molly told HuffPost. “My mom was an artist my whole life, so was my dad. We grew up around studios and art sales. Having no money was also normal. I never realized my family didn’t go to normal 9-to-5 jobs. It was never like that.”


While her mother’s career as an artist never struck Molly as exceptional, Hooven herself did. “She’s a super strong person and a very independent mother,” said Molly. “I admire her because she’s always done what she loved. She was always going after what she believed in, so I ended up doing the same thing. I went to art school as well, and she always supported me.” 



In 1962, Hooven submitted a piece to the Museum of Arts and Design for their “Young Americans” exhibition. The piece was accepted and displayed when Hooven was only 23 years old, at the beginning of her career. This fall, she will return to the MAD for a retrospective honoring her lifetime contributions to the field of ceramics. 


I feel so blessed,” Hooven said of the show. “I never thought this was going to happen.” The exhibition spans 50 years of Hooven’s work, from a time when both ceramics and feminist art were not terms you’d likely encounter in art world conversations, to a moment when both are at the forefront of artistic discourse. Today, Hooven’s influence is everywhere, from Nicki Green’s queer takes on traditional china to Kaye Blegvad’s sweet and surreal creations. 


For Hooven, the trajectory of her life feels almost as dreamlike as the stories she dozed off to before bed, or the legends that manifest themselves in her clay creations. “We came together, clay and me,” she said in disbelief. “It’s what I always wanted to do.”


“Coille Hooven: Tell It By Heart” is on view from Sept. 22, 2016, to Feb. 5, 2017, at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in New York.


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Street Artist's Epic Ode To The Olympics Might Break World Record For Largest Mural

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Athletes aren’t the only ones breaking records at this year’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Street artist Eduardo Kobra is gunning for a world record by creating what could be the largest mural conceived by a single person. 


Kobra transformed a 190-meter-long wall in the city’s Boulevard Olímpico into a vibrant and massive mural that spans an area of nearly 3,000 square meters. The giant artwork bests the current Guinness World Record holder ― Ernesto Espiridion Rios Rocha, whose street art opus in Mexico measured in at 1,678 square meters in 2009 ― by a hefty margin.




The majestic artwork is Kobra’s take on the five Olympic rings, depicting five faces from the world’s five continents represented in the games. Each face, enlarged to extreme proportions, is rendered in Kobra’s signature style, in which bright, geometric patchwork is mapped atop realistic facial features.


Called “Ethnicities,” the piece highlights the importance of diversity and the beauty of coming together as world citizens, both unique and united. “We’re living through a very confusing time with a lot of conflict,” Kobra explained in an interview featured on Rio 2016. “I wanted to show that everyone is united, we are all connected.”


The whopping undertaking required 100 gallons of white paint, 1,500 liters of colored paint and more than 3,500 cans of spray paint to transform the run-down wall into a colorful quilt of paint. Kobra collaborated with four artists for two months, working 12 hours a day to complete the project. 



Mural "Todos somos um" - Povo Chukchi - Wall "We are all One " Chukchi People #somostodosum

A photo posted by Eduardo Kobra (@kobrastreetart) on




It seems likely that Kobra’s enlisting of assistants could disqualify him from winning the Guinness World Record, which specifies that artists must work alone. (The record for largest outdoor mural by more than one artist is currently 16,554 square meters.) However, as any art lover knows, the power of art cannot be quantified with records, prizes or gold medals.


At least not since someone took home the Olympic gold for painting in 1912.


Thank you, Kobra, for making this year’s Olympic Games a little bit brighter. Hopefully the imagery will outlast the summer season, as will its powerful message. As the artist said: “We’ve all got the same origins so we have to get along, not only during the Olympic Games but always. We should always stand for world peace.”



Mural "Todos somos um" em andamento no Rio de Janeiro ! work in progress in Rio de Janeiro

A photo posted by Eduardo Kobra (@kobrastreetart) on




See more of the street art Rio has to offer here.



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65 Baby Name Ideas For Parents-To-Be Who Love '30 Rock'

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NBC’s ”30 Rock” has been off the air for three years now, but its legacy endures in the pop culture zeitgeist. In fact, new fans are finding the show on Netflix, and many Liz Lemon-isms have real staying power in contemporary vernacular.


As fans of the show settle down and have children, there’s another way to keep the “30 Rock” legacy alive: baby names. We took a look at the show’s characters ― from the protagonists to the many notable guest stars ― and made a list of ideas.


Without further ado, here are 65 name ideas from the world of Liz Lemon.


Girls


Liz


Lemon


Jenna


Cerie


Kathy


Kaylie


Avery


Hazel


Sue


Angie


Colleen


Phoebe


Greta


Maria


Gretchen


Bianca


Celeste


Elisa


Nancy


Margaret


Janet


Virginia


Verna


Diana


Sylvia


Bev


Lynn


Eliza


 


Boys


Jack


Tracy


Kenneth


Pete


Toofer


Frank


James


Jonathon


Josh


Grizz


Walter


J.D.


Dennis


Criss


Floyd


Drew


Wesley


Carol


Mike


Anders


Paul


Danny


Don


Devon


Hank


Subhas


Howard


Donny


Jeffrey


Gavin


Gray


Milton


Dick


Leo


Lenny


Shawn


Terry

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Hey, Nerds, The New York Public Library Just Put 300,000 Books On An App For You

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Getting lost in the vast stacks of the iconic New York Public Library, picking out a book that strikes your fancy, cuddling up with your new adventure and feeling your heart skip a beat as you flip to the first page ― there’s an app for that! 


The New York Public Library just released an app called SimplyE, bringing 300,000 titles from the mecca of letters to your phone, if you have a library card.


If you do, you can simply head to the app to check your desired book’s availability and download it for free, right to your phone. (Added bonus: Books in the public domain are available for permanent download.) 


There are a limited amount of licenses for each book, so if you have your eye on a popular choice, you may have to wait until it’s back “in stock” to read it. But you can always reserve a book and download it when it’s available. You just might want to act fast — buzzy new release The Girls by Emma Cline already has 822 people in the hold line. 


You can download the app now for iOS and Android. Get reading, you big, beautiful nerd, you. If you’re outside the NYC area, search to see whether your local library has a similar system. 






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Meryl Streep Opens Up About The Queer People Who Changed Her Life

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Meryl Streep credits both a gay man and a transgender person with leaving an indelible mark on her record-breaking Hollywood career.  


The Oscar-winning actress, 67, recalled those early artistic influences in a wide-ranging interview with The Advocate on Aug. 5 to promote her new movie, “Florence Foster Jenkins,” which hits theaters Aug. 12. 


“My piano teacher and his lover lived in a little house in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, and I would go once a week to have my piano lesson,” she told The Advocate. Their house, she said, was both “magical” and “an entry into exotica.”


Although the couple “were not acknowledged, and not free to be themselves” in public, Streep said her mother inadvertently stressed the importance of acceptance early on. 


“My mother, who was born in 1915, never said — ‘the boys,’ she called them — she never said ‘the boys are gay,’ or that there was anything that she disapproved of,” she said. “But it was just that this is a different life, and… they were living under the cover of the love of the people who loved them.”


The star also opened up about her childhood music teacher, who previously presented as male and later came out as transgender. 


“It was very, very unusual,” she said. 


“Florence Foster Jenkins” is loosely based on the life of an early 20th century socialite who is often considered one of the worst singers to have ever lived, but nonetheless fulfilled her dream of selling out New York’s Carnegie Hall. (Watch the trailer for the film below) 


Jenkins’s accompanist, Cosmé McMoon, is portrayed as a closeted gay man in the film. In the interview, Streep said she believed Cosmé’s respect for Jenkins despite her less-than-stellar vocal talents would’ve been mutual.


“The art world has always embraced people of every kind and every manner of expression,” she said. “I think Florence is someone who embraced that world so thoroughly; I can’t imagine that she would have disapproved of Cosmé or in any way not loved him as much as she did.” 




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Traveling Portrait Gallery Will Capture The Faces Of Navajo Nation

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Bumper stickers, company logos, paid-for banners on buses ― like nearly every other surface in our public spaces today, vehicular exteriors are just another canvas for corporate advertisements and glib sloganeering.


But they can also be a canvas for meaningful art, the kind that exists as part of the community rather than tucked away in museums and galleries.


With Santa Fe, New Mexico, gallery Axle Art’s mobile showroom, Axle Contemporary, artists and co-founders Matthew Chase-Daniel and Jerry Wellman are doing just that. For their project “E Pluribus Unum,” currently operating around Navajo Nation, the pair use the traveling van as a photography studio as well as a gallery to display portraits taken during the project. 



The process is simple: The pair tours the area in a converted service van. Any and all community members are welcome to enter the portrait studio to have a black-and-white photo taken; they’re asked to bring one object with personal significance to hold during the portrait session. “These objects reflect culture and personality in the place and time where the portraits are made,” the artists explained in an email to The Huffington Post. But there’s also a practical side: “We have also noticed that the objects distract the people sitting for their portraits, and because of this we get more genuine expressions from them and less forced smiles.”


The portrait is printed immediately in the studio, and one copy goes to the subject. Another is wheat-pasted to the side of the van, and a third will eventually be displayed in a traditional gallery setting when the project is over. Participants are also given “E Pluribus Unum” as a writing prompt, and their musings are included in the book compilation of each “E Pluribus Unum” project.



The first iteration of “E Pluribus Unum” was developed in 2012 for SITE Santa Fe. “We wanted to find [...] to draw community members into the refined confines of SITE Santa Fe, and to make a lasting document of people in a particular place and time,” Chase-Daniel and Wellman told HuffPost. Since then, they’ve also brought the project to Albuquerque.


Axle Contemporary was invited to bring “E Pluribus Unum” to Dinétah by the Navajo Nation Museum, and Chase-Daniel and Wellman told HuffPost, “it was a natural fit.” By creating a new installment every two years, the artists hope to chart a visual map of contemporary New Mexico as a whole.


“The project title, ‘E Pluribus Unum,’ means from many, one,” Chase-Daniel and Wellman said. “We find it a powerful notion [...] referring to the value of maintaining individuality while honoring the group. This is not the ‘melting pot’ of assimilation, but rather a notion of strength of diverse communities.” 


By capturing the individual faces that make up New Mexico, and the various communities ― like Navajo Nation (a semi-autonomous territory that also stretches into Arizona and Utah) ― that possess their own distinct cultures, the project reflects the full reality of the people back at themselves. 


“We wanted to find a way of showing images of the community to itself,” the artists explained to HuffPost. No matter how long we live in a community, we can never be reminded too much of who we really are, in our commonalities and in our differences.



For more, check out the project’s Kickstarter page.

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'The Great Gilly Hopkins,' One Of Your Childhood Faves, Is Finally A Movie

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It’s a wonder it took The Great Gilly Hopkins this long to hit the big screen. The 1978 novel won the National Book Award and became a classic of children’s literature, though the story was never made into a movie. On Oct. 7 (in theaters and on VOD), that will change.


The Huffington Post and its parent company, AOL, have a joint exclusive trailer for the new movie, which stars Sophie Nélisse (”The Book Thief”) as the titular orphan who finally finds a proper mother figure in the loving Maime Trotter (Kathy Bates). Is your childhood heart ready?





Read more:


All The Book Adaptations You’re Going To Want To See In 2016 




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Give Your Lady Parts The Love They Deserve With This NSFW Coloring Book

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U.K. based illustrator Beki Reilly has put a whole new spin on the concept of “adult” coloring books by creating an exciting new project on Kickstarter: Colour Up Next Tuesday: A Feminist Coloring Book, cheekily abbreviated to C.U.N.T.


With C.U.N.T., women can “Colour those cunts. Finesse those flaps. And master that minge.” What fun!



According to its Kickstarter page, the project “invites you to reclaim every twat, snatch, and gash with colour to make them beautiful.”


Reilly chose 15 “utterly cringeworthy words” that have historically been used to demean women’s body parts and to demean people in general.Words like “pussy” and “cunt,” for example, are not only used to describe women’s vaginas, they are used just as often as emasculating, vicious insults


But with Reilly’s coloring book ― and the intricate patterns around the “cringeworthy” words ― women are free to reclaim those words and make them entirely beautiful.


“I think there’s something very interesting in taking ugly, negative things ― in this case words for your vagina ― and making them beautiful. By physically coloring-in words like ‘gash’ which is so derogatory and humiliating, you can completely change how that word is seen,” she told The Huffington Post.




As an outspoken feminist, Reilly was inspired her to create a coloring book centered around women’s empowerment.


“Colouring is a form of therapy, so perhaps there could be therapy in what you colour ― not just the act of colouring itself,” she said. “So yeah, I went for vaginas.” 



Reilly plans to have the coloring books delivered by November ― get yours here

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Powerful Spoken Word Performance Commemorates The Tragic Deaths Of Black Men

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“I’m deeply aware of the stress that’s put on our community,” artist Carrie Mae Weems states in the video above. “The stress that’s put on black women, the stress that’s put on black men.”


“It’s not a play,” she adds. “It’s really this battle.”


The “it” in Weems’ sentence refers to one of her recent performances, titled “Grace Notes: Reflections for Now.” The work is a combination of music, spoken word and dance that pays tribute to the young black men who’ve lost their lives over the past few years.


The performance follows the story of a woman compared to Antigone who is grappling with the duty of burying her dead brothers in the face of individuals who seek to deny their deaths. The work is meant to shine a light on escalating racial tensions in America, and, more specifically, the role of grace in the pursuit of democracy.



In the clip above, a narrator, the well-known poet Aja Monet, recites the following words, underscoring the parallel between “Grace Notes” and contemporary events in America:



“I saw him running. I saw him stop. I saw him turn with raised hands. I heard a shot. I saw him fall. Rejecting my own knowledge, I deceived myself, refusing to believe that this was possible. How do you measure a life?”



The video comes to us courtesy of ART21,a nonprofit specializing in digital media about contemporary visual art. ART21 released the video on the two-year anniversary of Michael Brown’s death. Brown died after he was shot by a police in Ferguson, Missouri, on Aug. 9, 2014.


Originally performed in June 2016, “Grace Notes” was commissioned by the Spoleto Festival USA to honor the nine churchgoers who were killed one year earlier at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, located just three blocks from the College of Charleston’s Sottile Theatre ― where “Grace Notes” was performed. Weems will host another performance of the work at the Yale Repertory Theatre in September 2016 as part of its “No Boundaries” series.



Weems, the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and famous for her self-portraits and social documentary on view at institutions like the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art, hopes that “Grace Notes” viewers will not only focus on the tragedy that has taken hold of black men in America, but also on the human ability to maintain a sense of dignity and generosity in times of crisis.


“If our audience can leave with the sense of question,” Weems expresses in the video, “that they have really engaged with something deep for themselves, and that they know that it’s serious but there is still some glimmer, and that they can wake up the next day and think about that ― then I’m alright.”


Episode #238 of ART21 is dedicated to Weem’s work “Grace Notes: Reflections for Now.” Learn more about the artist here.


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