CAA awards for Rainer and O’Grady

Two former faculty at the University of California, Irvine, Department of Art will be honored at the upcoming meeting of the College Art Association. Professor Emeritus Yvonne Rainer will receive this year’s “Lifetime Achievement” award for an artist.  Former UCI Assistant Professor Lorraine O’Grady will receive the “Distinguished Feminist Award.”

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As CAA describes the honorees:

“Yvonne Rainer has been instrumental in the movement to merge the visual arts with dance, performance, and filmmaking. As a founder of the Judson Dance Theater (1962) and of the improvisational group Grand Union (1970), Rainer choreographed major dance works for many decades. She has also produced films that have been hailed globally, and her videos have dissolved the barriers between art forms and revealed a new unified vision of the arts. The author of four books and recipient of prestigious fellowships, Rainer was a longtime professor at the University of California, Irvine, where her prodigious talent and innovation has greatly influenced numerous generations of creative people.

“CAA recognizes Lorraine O’Grady for her considerable and important service to the feminist art community, especially in her determined efforts to underscore discrimination and bias through her performance art, photo-based work, writing, teaching, and activism. O’Grady has worked to expand the political content of art, persistently returning to a complicated place that she describes as “where the personal intersects with the historic and cultural.” As part of a small group of women of color in the Women’s Action Coalition, she has used this platform to accentuate the involvement of black women artists in contemporary culture and the perpetual disregard for their contributions. Continue reading “CAA awards for Rainer and O’Grady”

Guns and freedom

The day after this week’s elections, the National Rifle Association got exactly what it wanted: a front-page New York Times story about Colorado results that supposedly send “lawmakers across the country a warning about the political risks of voting for tougher gun laws.”images-1  In These Time writes that the article, and many others like it, “came after the gun lobby mounted successful recall campaigns against two state legislators who, in the wake of mass shootings, voted for universal background checks, limits on the capacity of bullet magazines and restrictions on domestic abusers owning firearms.
“Despite the recalls being anomalously low-turnout affairs, the national media helped the gun lobby deliver a frightening message to politicians: Vote for modest gun control and face political death.
“For all that reductionism, though, there are more nuanced lessons from these elections. First and foremost, with statewide polls showing that most Coloradans support modest gun control and opposed the recall campaigns, the elections prove that in low-turnout situations, a relatively small group of pro-gun voters can still win the day.
“Additionally, with gun extremists issuing threats of violence against pro-gun-control legislators, Colorado Democrats stopped explaining why their gun legislation was so necessary. In light of that, the election results are a reminder that when politicians don’t stay on the message offensive, they quickly find themselves on the electoral defensive. This is especially the case when, as a Pew survey documented, voters who oppose gun control tend to be more motivated single-issue voters than those who support gun control. That intensity gap, of course, is the most significant story of the Colorado elections because it reveals how different people ascribe different meanings to the gun debate.   Continue reading “Guns and freedom”

Kids and gender non-conformity

From the time they are born, we put our boys in blue beanies and our girls in pink ones. So begins a piece in today’s Washington Post: “It’s a societal norm, an expectation even, that you just are what you are born — a boy or a girl.images“From early on, we divide toys and activities by very distinct gender lines, with superheroes and trucks and muck on one side and princesses and dolls and all things frilly on the other.
“Many children land, enthusiastically, on the expected side. Others dabble in both “girl” and “boy” things. But what if your kid, even from an early age, mostly showed interest in doing opposite-gender things? More importantly, what if they wanted to BE the opposite gender — or a less-defined mix of both? And what if they wanted to test those limits in public places, like school?”Would you let them?”It’s not, of course, that pat of a process. Parents don’t just decide to let their kids switch genders. But, whether parents are dragged through the process, or if they decide to work it through more openly, more kids are challenging the boundaries of traditional gender, and going public at younger ages. And they are doing so with the guidance of a growing faction of medical experts who no longer see this as something to be fixed. Last year, the American Psychiatric Association removed “gender identity disorder” from its list of mental health ailments.  Continue reading “Kids and gender non-conformity”

Apple stops using teen labor in China

imgres-2Apple said a Chinese labor agent forged documents on behalf of underage workers as the world’s most-valuable technology company seeks to improve conditions at suppliers making iPhones, iPads and Macs. Bloomberg News reports that

“The electronics company also stopped doing business with a manufacturer that employed 74 people younger than 16 who used the faked papers, according to its annual Supplier Responsibility Report released today. The recruiter was reported to provincial authorities, fined and had its license suspended. ‘Underage labor is a subject no company wants to be associated with, so as a result I don’t believe it gets the attention it deserves, and as a result it doesn’t get fixed like it should,’ Jeff Williams, Cupertino, California-based Apple’s senior vice president of operations, said in an interview. Continue reading “Apple stops using teen labor in China”

American Family Association condemns inaugural speech

Famous for its reactionary takes on many issues, the American Family Association (AFA) issued a condemnation of President Obama’s broad stance on human rights in his Inaugural Address.

In its remarks, the AFA joined other right wing groups like the Family Research council and National Organization for Marriage, who recently have been stepping up their criticisms of White House policy.  The AFA’s Bryan Fischer condemned President Barack Obama’s inaugural address, pointing specifically to it specific references to the LGBT community. As Huffington Post quotes Fischer: “Homosexuals do not have a constitutional right to engage in sodomy.”  The story continues:

“Noting that sodomy was a

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felony for the first 200 years of America’s history, he added, ‘It’s absurd in the extreme, it’s ridiculous, it’s ludicrous for homosexuals to claim that they have some kind of constitutional right to engage in sexually deviant behavior. Continue reading “American Family Association condemns inaugural speech”

On “Practice Range”

The new game “Practice Range” from the National Rifle Association is already generating a lot of controversy – as the current moral panic over gun continues to escalate nationwide.

Rather than getting caught up in emotionalism, let’s remember that any links between simulated violence and actual violence have proven tenuous at best, and that nations

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around the world with plenty of violent entertainment do not share America’s tragic history, which itself becomes exaggerated by self-serving alarmists.

Everyday violence is a big problem and its heavily gendered character rarely gets addressed directly. And guns kill people like nothing else. But the NRA game is little more than a poorly timed and crassly advanced public relations effort. It’s not going to hurt anyone. As CBS reports about the game. Continue reading “On “Practice Range””