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4shreya · 3 months

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Top 5 Reasons to Choose Germany for Your Higher Education

Germany has become a premier destination for international students seeking top-notch higher education. With its rich history, diverse culture, and a commitment to innovation and research, Germany offers an academic experience that is both enriching and globally recognized. Here are the top 5 reasons why you should consider Germany for your higher education.

1. World-Class Education System

Germany is home to some of the world's top universities and institutions. The country’s education system is known for its high standards and rigorous academic environment. Institutions like the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Heidelberg University, and the Technical University of Munich consistently rank among the best in the world. These universities offer a wide range of programs, from undergraduate to doctoral levels, in virtually every field of study.

High Academic Standards

German universities maintain strict academic standards, ensuring that students receive a quality education that is respected globally. The curriculum is designed to challenge students and push them to achieve their full potential. Additionally, many programs incorporate practical training and internships, providing students with real-world experience.

Diverse Range of Programs

Whether you are interested in engineering, medicine, business, or the arts, Germany has a program for you. The country offers a vast array of courses in English, making it accessible for international students. The flexibility and diversity of the programs allow students to tailor their education to their specific interests and career goals.

2. Affordable Education and Living Costs

One of the most significant advantages of studying in Germany is the affordability. Unlike many other popular study destinations, most public universities in Germany do not charge tuition fees for undergraduate and many graduate programs. This policy applies not only to German students but also to international students from around the world.

No Tuition Fees

Public universities in Germany offer education at no cost, or for a very nominal fee, which typically covers administrative costs. This makes high-quality education accessible to a broader range of students, regardless of their financial background.

Reasonable Living Costs

Living in Germany is relatively affordable compared to other Western countries. While cities like Munich and Frankfurt can be expensive, other student-friendly cities like Berlin, Leipzig, and Freiburg offer a more affordable cost of living. Additionally, students benefit from various discounts on transportation, food, and cultural activities.

3. Rich Cultural Experience

Germany offers a vibrant cultural experience that enriches students' lives beyond the classroom. The country is a melting pot of cultures, with a rich history and a lively contemporary arts scene. Students have the opportunity to immerse themselves in this cultural diversity and gain a broader perspective of the world.

Historical and Cultural Heritage

Germany is steeped in history and culture. From medieval castles and historic towns to world-renowned museums and galleries, there is always something to explore. Cities like Berlin, Munich, and Hamburg are cultural hubs, offering a plethora of events, exhibitions, and festivals throughout the year.

Multicultural Environment

Germany is home to a diverse population, with a significant number of international students and expatriates. This multicultural environment fosters an inclusive and welcoming atmosphere, where students from all backgrounds can feel at home and make lifelong connections.

4. Strong Job Prospects and Industry Connections

Germany has a robust economy and is known for its strong job market and industry connections. The country is home to numerous multinational companies and is a leader in various sectors, including engineering, automotive, finance, and technology.

Internship and Job Opportunities

Students in Germany have access to numerous internship and job opportunities. Many universities have strong ties with industry, providing students with the chance to gain valuable work experience while studying. These connections often lead to job offers upon graduation.

Post-Graduation Work Visa

Germany offers favorable post-graduation work visa options. International students can apply for an 18-month residence permit to look for a job after completing their studies. This gives graduates ample time to find employment and start their careers in Germany.

5. High Quality of Life

Germany consistently ranks high in global quality of life indices. The country offers a high standard of living, excellent public services, and a strong focus on work-life balance.

Safe and Welcoming Environment

Germany is known for its safety and high quality of life. The country has low crime rates and is generally considered safe for students. Additionally, German society is known for its tolerance and openness, making it a welcoming place for international students.

Excellent Public Services and Infrastructure

Germany boasts excellent public services and infrastructure. The country has a well-developed public transportation system, making it easy for students to travel within cities and across the country. Healthcare services are of high quality, and students often have access to affordable health insurance plans.

Conclusion

Choosing Germany for your higher education is a decision that offers numerous benefits. From its world-class education system and affordable living costs to its rich cultural experience and strong job prospects, Germany provides an environment where students can thrive academically and personally. Whether you are looking to pursue undergraduate or postgraduate studies, Germany offers a unique and rewarding educational experience that can open doors to a bright future.

By choosing Germany, you are not only investing in a quality education but also in a life-changing experience that will broaden your horizons and prepare you for global opportunities.

#studyingermany #mastersingermany #mbaingermany #msingermany #bachelorisgermany

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gokitetour · 3 months

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The best cities you must visit in Germany

Experience the heart of Europe in vibrant Germany, where medieval castles stand tall against modern skyscrapers. From the historic streets of Berlin to the fairy-tale landscapes of Bavaria, Germany offers a tapestry of culture, art, and innovation. Indulge in world-renowned cuisine, sip on traditional beers, and explore picturesque villages nestled in lush green valleys. Whether you seek history, nature, or nightlife, Germany's blend of old-world charm and contemporary excitement awaits. Discover why Germany captivates travelers with its rich heritage and dynamic spirit.

Here are some of the best cities you must visit:

Berlin:

The capital city is known for its vibrant arts scene, historic sites like the Berlin Wall and Brandenburg Gate, and eclectic neighborhoods such as Kreuzberg and Mitte.

Munich (München):

Famous for Oktoberfest, Munich also boasts stunning architecture like the Nymphenburg Palace, cultural institutions such as the Pinakothek art museums, and a lively atmosphere in Marienplatz.

Hamburg:

Germany's second-largest city is a major port with a rich maritime history. Visit the historic Speicherstadt, enjoy the vibrant nightlife of the Reeperbahn, and take a stroll along the Elbe River.

Cologne (Köln):

Home to the iconic Cologne Cathedral (Kölner Dom), this city on the Rhine River offers a blend of Roman history, medieval architecture, and a buzzing contemporary arts scene.

Frankfurt:

A financial hub with a striking skyline, Frankfurt is also steeped in history. Explore the Römerberg square, visit the Goethe House, and take in the views from the Main Tower.

Dresden:

Known as the "Florence on the Elbe," Dresden is renowned for its Baroque architecture, including the Zwinger Palace and the Frauenkirche, which was painstakingly rebuilt after WWII.

Heidelberg:

Famous for its historic university and romantic setting on the Neckar River, Heidelberg boasts a stunning castle overlooking the old town, which inspired writers like Mark Twain.

Nuremberg (Nürnberg):

Rich in medieval history, Nuremberg offers the Imperial Castle, the historic old town (Altstadt), and significant sites related to WWII and the Nuremberg Trials.

Leipzig:

A city of music and culture, Leipzig was home to Bach and Mendelssohn. Explore the St. Thomas Church, the historic marketplace, and the vibrant cultural scene.

Stuttgart:

Known for its automotive heritage (Mercedes-Benz and Porsche), Stuttgart also offers beautiful parks like the Schlossgarten, cultural venues such as the Staatsgalerie, and the Wilhelma Zoo.

Conclusion

When considering the best cities to visit in Germany, one cannot overlook the vibrant blend of culture, history, and modernity that each city offers. From the fairytale charm of Rothenburg ob der Tauber to the cosmopolitan allure of Berlin, Germany beckons travelers with its rich tapestry of experiences. Whether exploring medieval castles in Heidelberg or indulging in the arts scene of Munich, there's something to captivate every visitor. Planning ahead includes checking Germany visa requirements to ensure a seamless journey. Embrace the essence of Germany's cities and unlock a world of discovery and wonder.

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yesgermany-manish · 8 months

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10 Must-Visit German Cities during Your Study Abroad Journey

Studying abroad is a transformative experience, and Germany offers a plethora of captivating cities that go beyond the conventional tourist destinations. Our guide unveils the top 10 German cities you must consider exploring during your study abroad journey. From historical landmarks to vibrant cultural scenes, Germany has something for every student seeking a blend of education and adventure.

Also Read: overseas education consultants in chennai

Berlin: Where History Meets Modernity

Berlin, the capital city, is a captivating blend of historical significance and contemporary vibrancy. Visit the iconic Brandenburg Gate and immerse yourself in the rich history of the city. Explore the vibrant neighborhoods like Kreuzberg for its artistic flair and the East Side Gallery for remnants of the Berlin Wall's artistic expressions.

Also Read: abroad studies consultancy in coimbatore

Munich: Bavarian Elegance and Cultural Richness

In the heart of Bavaria lies Munich, a city renowned for its cultural heritage and picturesque landscapes. Don't miss the grandeur of the Nymphenburg Palace and the lively atmosphere of the Viktualienmarkt. Munich effortlessly marries tradition and modernity, providing an enriching experience for any student.

Also Read: study abroad consultants in trichy

Heidelberg: A Romantic Haven for Scholars

Heidelberg is a picturesque city nestled along the Neckar River, known for its historic university and stunning castle. The Heidelberg Castle offers breathtaking views of the city, while the charming Old Town invites you to stroll through cobblestone streets filled with quaint cafes and bookshops.

Also Read: germany study abroad consultants

Hamburg: Maritime Charm and Cutting-Edge Culture

As Germany's major port city, Hamburg boasts a unique maritime charm. Explore the iconic Speicherstadt, the largest warehouse district in the world, and experience the vibrant nightlife at the Reeperbahn. Hamburg seamlessly combines its maritime history with a modern and artistic ambiance.

Also Read: Online German Language courses

Cologne: Architectural Marvels and Gothic Splendor

Cologne, situated on the banks of the Rhine River, captivates with its stunning Gothic architecture. The Cologne Cathedral, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is a testament to medieval craftsmanship. The city's lively atmosphere extends to the charming Old Town, offering a perfect blend of history and modernity.

Also Read: Higher Education Consultant

Nuremberg: Medieval Charm and Historical Significance

Nuremberg invites you to step back in time with its well-preserved medieval architecture. The Nuremberg Castle offers panoramic views of the city, while the Nuremberg Trials Memorial provides insight into the city's historical significance. Immerse yourself in the medieval charm of the Old Town.

Stuttgart: Automotive Innovation and Green Spaces

Stuttgart, the birthplace of the automobile, combines cutting-edge technology with serene green spaces. Explore the Mercedes-Benz Museum for a journey through automotive history and relax in the expansive Killesberg Park, offering a retreat from the urban bustle.

In conclusion, Germany's diverse cities cater to every taste, providing a perfect backdrop for an enriching study abroad experience. Each city has its unique charm, seamlessly blending history with modernity, ensuring that your time abroad is not only academically rewarding but also culturally fulfilling.

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videogeist · 9 months

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news#4 2023 NEWS Studio Philipp Geist / VIDEOGEIST Upcoming & Past Projects

http://videogeist.blogspot.com/2023/12/news4-2023-news-studio-philipp-geist.html

Dear Light Art People Partners Friends,

I would like to provide information about my current activities and previous and upcoming projects and work.

From December 29th to January 14th I will be showing my site-specific installation 'Time Drifts Bremen' on the occasion of the 'Lights of the City' light festival in Bremen. The project is part of the Time Drifts series. For the installation, I portrayed people in Bremen and collected terms and words that I will integrate into my picturesque abstract worlds in the installation at Bremen's St. Peter's Cathedral. The installation will be on view daily from 12/29/23 to 01/14/24 from 4:30 p.m. to 10 p.m.

I am currently part of the group exhibition 'Companions' at the Museum of Non-Objective Art in Otterndorf / Cuxhaven. The exhibition is open until March 17, 2024.

I am currently showing in Mexico as part of the Guadalajara International Book Fair and as part of the exhibition 'Artistic Expressions in Contemporary Europe', an immersive digital art experience with works by 40 European artists will be on view until February 24, 2024. I am 'SÄTEET' with the audio/visual work. The MUSA Museo de las Artes at the University of Guadalajara will present “Immersive digital art experiences: a sensory journey into the world of fantasy,” curated by Stefano Fake.

The permanent installation has been on display in the Predigerkirche in Eisenach since October 1st. The walk-in installation on St. Elisabeth can be seen during the museum's opening hours.

In the last few weeks and months I have been able to realize further projects/work and installations.

On Fri September 1st and Saturday September 2nd I showed the installation 'spectrum 2023' at the historic Lahn Bridge in Wetzlar. On the occasion of the anniversary '250 Years of Goethe in Wetzlar' in 2022, I developed a video/light installation. Lukas Taido developed the music specifically for this. Speaker Mathias Kopetzki. On the weekend of September 8th - 10th the group exhibition ' Farbappartat ' took place in the Monopol Berlin. Works by Jan Muche, Oliver Lanz, Elisabeth Sonneck and pictures from Bernd Wolf's estate were shown in the spectacular former factory rooms. There I showed my paintings and painting mappings (combination of projection mapping and painting). My installation GLOWING TIMES (30 YEARS OF THE ZOLLHAUS) took place in Leer at the historic Zollhaus between September 22nd and 30th, 2023. On September 22nd and Saturday, 23rd, my installation 'ZEIT & TIMES' could be seen at the Fehnturm in Herzogenaurach. At the end of September I showed the installation 'Time Drifts Trier' at the historic cathedral on the newly named Human Dignity Square.

On October 9th, on the day of the peaceful revolution, I showed the project 'We - Leipzig' at the New Town Hall on the occasion of the LICHTFEST LEIPZIG 2023. The music and composition was composed by Lukas Taido himself. A Leipzig chamber choir of around 35 members under the direction of Andreas Reuter sang live from the New Town Hall onto the facade on which I had projected.

The film of the installation can now be seen online at

MOVIE ONLINE

Wir Leipzig 09. Oktober 2023 Lcihtfest Leipzig

<<https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/895833458>>

The 11th Hohler Biennale 2023 'LandUNTER' took place in Gera from July 21st to October 13th, 2023. I showed my long-term project Riverine Zones to the cavers in the underground former beer cellars. In November I was represented with the installation 'Digital Romantic' at the Glanzlichter Festival in Fürth. The first Katerbow Leuchtet, which I initiated, also took place in November. To do this, I implemented installations at various locations in Katerbow near Netzeband/Neuruppin.

I'm also working on my painting and analogue images.

All the best and LightsON!

I wish everyone a nice end to the year and a merry Christmas!

Philipp Geist

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feliciagarrivan · 1 year

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LEAH SCHRAGER

About

Leah Schrager is a digital artist and online performer. She is the model, photographer, artist, and marketer in/of her images. Her visual works apply a painterly aesthetic to bodily forms and often draw their material from her conceptual online performance practice. These include @OnaArtist (Instagram 5M), Sarah White (The Naked Therapist), and An American Dream (as herself). With these performances, Schrager situates her work in a contemporary hotbed of female (in)appropriateness, arousal, celebrity, fandom, and commercialism. She seeks to explore female biography and labor in today’s global society.

Schrager has been compared by journalists and critics to such seminal figures as Marina Abramovic, Marcel Duchamp, Laurel Nakadate, Diane Fossey, and Sigmund Freud. She and/or her work has been profiled in 1000′s of media outlets, including Art Forum, Monopol, The Huffington Post, Vice, Viceland, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, CBS News, ABC News, The NY Daily News, and Playboy. She has exhibited with Johannes Vogt Gallery, Castor Gallery, Roman Fine Art, and others; her work has been on view in notable museums such as Fotografiska, Museum of Sex, and the Museum of Visual Art in Leipzig; and her pieces and performances have been purchased by collectors world-wide.

Longer Bio

Schrager grew up in a small NW US town where she found dance and theater. She continued studying dance at the University of Washington and performed in works by Martha Graham, Jose Limon, Zvi Gotheiner, amongst others. In the NW and NYC she danced in downtown and uptown productions, choreographed for theater, and performed in others’ performance art works at On the Boards, NY Live Arts, Henry Art Gallery, and more. Shortly after moving to NYC she started moving into photographyand visual art. She found herself in the unexpected situation of, whilst being the model and instagator of a photoshoot, she did not own the images of her modeling or dance and often could not get ull resolution versions from the photographers. This led to “My Modeling Portfolio” (2011), Schrager’s attempt to own her image as a female model, wherein she took her entire modeling portfolio (shot from 2001-2011) and created “derivative” works that she could “own.”

In 2010 she founded Naked Therapy as Sarah White. In 2011, Naked Therapy unexpectedly went viral and was covered in the NY Daily, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, CBS, NBC, The Huffington Post, and many more news outlets. In 2012 she submitted artwork to the Chelsea West Artists Open Studios as Sarah White – The Naked Therapist. She was at first accepted, but after submitting her profile image, she was blackballed from the festival said that her image was an “ad” and not “art” and that she was a “commercial entity” and not an “artist.” This event opened her eyes to the prejudice in the art world against women who use the provocative (and potentially commercial) body performatively.

She returned to school to get her MFA in Fine Art in 2013. She explored multimedia works using her image as base (“appropriating her own image”), explored conceptual work including “The Google Project,” and co-curated “Body Anxiety” which was featured in Artforum.

In 2015 she started ONA as a celebrity-as-art-practice project, ONA. Her provocative performances, admitted engagement in online sex work, and unique status as an artist with a pro-sex approach puts her work on exciting and contemporary terrain. Current work is viewable under “Visual Work” in the menu above.

Its Just a Phase

Featured

Ona

Projects

Phoems

Becoming a celebrity is a complex process which is given little credit, as New York-based artist Leah Schrager will attest. The processes of building up a cultural empire from scratch is a full time job; there’s no rest for the fame-seeker. Back in 2015, Schrager created her alter-ego Ona as part of her five-year Celebrity Project, which is a “social, aesthetic and emotional journey” through the throngs of fame and fandom. Ona, a shortened term for “online persona”, is now a burgeoning Instagram star with almost 400,000 followers and is a strong advocate for sex, pornography and social media as a mode of self-expression. Created by Schrager as a way of blurring the boundaries that separate art and celebrity, Ona is her attempt at fighting against what she calls the “puritanical” prejudice of the creative world which chastises women for using their body as exploration of gender and eroticism. This ‘DIY celebrity’ unravels the dualistic male-gaze argument and poses the question: why can’t a female be both sexualised and liberated?

Schrager created a musician, an artist and a model through Ona and set herself three main goals to achieve by 2020: get a photograph of her ass on the cover of Rolling Stone, hit one million downloads for her music, and pull in ten million followers on Instagram. The manufacturing of celebrity is something that has become more transparent in a post-Kardashian era as we can now see the building blocks of money, power and notoriety at every turn. When the concept of fame itself was once so deeply entrenched in a feeling of superiority and transcendence, it has almost shrunk to a level that even the ‘everyday’ person can become a household name if they put their all into it. Schrager cleverly refers to personal social media growth as “micro-celebrity creation”, because who feels alive if they’re not getting likes? What sets her apart from other artists, however, is an unashamed desire to live the life of an A-lister. Rather than rip the public to shreds for their obsession with celebrity culture and criticise the mainstream, Schrager is pushing back against “elite” artists who create fake personas to undermine the masses because she’s hoping to become a global star herself.

As a self-professed fourth-wave feminist, which she refers to as a gendered performer enabled by the internet, Schrager uses online platforms to continue her catalogue of work which has typically used nudity and sex to examine subjectivity. This latest undertaking is an evolution of her previous work as Sarah White – The Naked Therapist, and it’s as revolutionary as it is controversial. Schrager makes no excuses for the male-orientated world of erotica in which she has created for herself: in fact, she embraces it. @OnaArtist started to garner much more cyber attraction when she became more overtly sexualised, which is no surprise, but the artist does not oppose voyeuristic fascination. As a pro-sex, pro-body “self-made model”, Schrager is a supporter of porn and believes that if you want to fuck men and be a sexual object, you should just do it. Here we chat to her about celebrity obsession, Insta-feminism and the restrictive male gaze/female authority dichotomy.

Tell us about The Celebrity Project. How did the premise come about? What are you trying to say by becoming Ona?

Leah Schrager: The idea came to me in the last semester of my MFA program when professors (and some students) kept saying that the images of myself that I was placing in my art were too sexy to be art. But when I looked around, I saw a few things. First, there was plenty of "sexy’ in the art world – it was just women presented by what I call "man hands’ (images by male photographers or works that appropriate the images of models or celebrities). Second, I saw hypocrisy because so many art world people seem to love mainstream (industry-sanctioned) celebrities and they incessantly listened to their music and watched their movies. Finally, I felt there was a kind of puritanical art world prejudice against women using their bodies in a sexy way in their art. So I decided to eschew appropriation, fight the hypocrisy, and subvert puritanism by creating a DIY sexy celebrity as an art practice, or what I recently called in Rhizome “a self-made supermodel”.

Social media, particularly Instagram, has been central to this project. I’m really fascinated with online interaction and the dynamics of fandom. Inevitably, I think anyone trying to grow a social media account is engaged in their own celebrity project, so I view what I’m doing to be a kind of metaphor for the general trend toward a universal adoption of the practice of micro-celebrity creation. It's an evolving question – what does it mean to make a celebrity as an art practice? So far it includes being fully in charge of manufacturing all elements of Ona’s artistry, marketing and imagery, and documenting my experience as a kind of social, aesthetic and emotional adventure.

What has the reaction been by online users? Do they know that you are an artist?

Leah Schrager: I have had great reactions from male fans and have been surprisingly welcomed into the Instagram modelling world. Many of my fans tell me I’m an awesome artist just based on the photos I put on my @OnaArtist IG, which now has over 400,000 followers. I also share my music and videos and sometimes my visual art there as well. Some of my followers know I’m also an ‘artist’ and some don’t – it depends on their interest. All they have to do is look a little deeper, but some don’t care too. But in the end, my IG aesthetic actually isn't mainstream-celebrity or Instagram-standard. I’m quite influenced by Cindy Sherman, and my photos come from hundreds of different locations and my goal is to explore different looks (as opposed to pushing a single image brand).

How did you build up your following from zero to 400K? Was there a moment it began to snowball? When did it start to gain more momentum?

Leah Schrager: I paid close attention to what other Instagram models were doing to learn the ropes and in a year (from April 2015 to April 2016) gained almost that entire 400K! (I recently wrote an essay for Rhizome that describes this process and the world of IG models in depth.) The turning point for me was when I paid for one of my photos to be on @the.buttblog in April 2015. Since I was ‘new in town’ that led to a bunch of my pics being posted on numerous big Instagram collection pages and followers began flowing in. Then I did a lot of SFS (‘spam-for-spam’), which in its most powerful form (for me) is that I post a photo of myself and ask my followers to check out a collection page, and that collection page posts a photo of me and asks their followers to follow me. This is a free/trade exchange, but it takes work to arrange and navigate.

My @OnaArtist Instagram is highly curated to be likable while staying creative and sometimes being racy. I was very engaged with the platform and focused on making novel content. In fact, I like to think I popularised the meta-selfie (photo of the model taking a selfie) and some unique butt-selfie angles.

As part of my celebrity project, I’ve actually recently shifted my focus away from growing my IG, as I realised I faced a ceiling within it (I lack impressive cleavage or an ability to spend lots of money to promote myself) and without it (it still does not substitute for the mainstream covering your music). Recently I’ve been focusing on making music videos for my band and producing my first album, Lullabies for Daddy. I’ve also recently started a new IG page, @OnaMania, which is more like a SFW-celebrity profile and has 4K followers (so it's gained more followers in a month than my @LeahSchrager profile has in two years!)

How have you gone about actually building your celebrity persona – can you tell us more about the photo shoots/clothes/cost etc?

Leah Schrager: I do an eight-to-ten day trip every two months to generate new content. I’m from the country and I love travelling around rural America, so many of my trips are there. Given my content, it’s hard to know I live in NYC! I see my aesthetic (and reality) as the American Dream – working girl moves to the big city and tries to make something happen for herself. And this ties in with my musical style of ‘bedroom rock’ / ‘sexy rock’n’roll’.

The project – and my aesthetic overall – is very populist and DIY. I don't have a background of modelling agency support or socialite it-girl cred. That’s one thing I learned paying close attention to Instagram – a celebrity will gain status by posting pics of an expensive-looking vacation, an agency model by hanging out at the right parties and shooting with the right photographer. But gaining status as an Instagram model happens through showing your body in an appealing way, and they are the DIY models of our time. So I’m trying to make my own route... and we’ll see where it goes.

Are you mocking society’s obsession with “celebrity’?

Leah Schrager: Not at all. I totally get the desire for celebrity and the love of celebrities. Rather, I’m just trying to create a real-world celebrity to try to discover what it takes, to learn about it, to document the experience, to see what it does within my art practice. I will admit, however, that sometimes in my mind I call it The Anti-Celebrity Project, mostly because I’m doing so many things that no one who’s actually become a celebrity would ever do. Like, I have a naked pay site, and I’m all over the place with my image, and I do everything myself. So perhaps a better name for it is The DIY Celebrity Project.

One really interesting thing that I’ve discovered is that mainstream celebrity is largely driven by female fandom. For instance, just take a look at the profiles of the ‘likers’ on @kimkardashian, @beyonce, @lanadelrey, @selenagomez, etc. They are mostly females. But what about male fandom, and what about the females who like to perform for males? They are pretty much not covered in mainstream media, and are relegated to porn. So our current idea of celebrity is really only one side of what celebrity could be if our mainstream media outlets weren’t so obsessed with keeping everything within the narrow confines of what everyone can agree is ‘safe-for-work’.

How do your ideas and concepts tie into feminism and body image?

Leah Schrager: I’m into fourth-wave feminism (the kind of female performance enabled by the internet) and pro-sex feminism (the kind that believes that engaging in ‘porn’ is cool and that sexuality is a positive thing). I’m also pro-all bodies. I don’t believe that any type of body should be censored. But I am also against the idea that the produced presentation of women’s bodies that are thin or fit or ‘pleasing to the male gaze’ are somehow damaging to women overall. If you’re really going to be pro-all bodies, then you need to go all the way and support whatever kind of body wants to show itself, even if some of those bodies are considered by some people to be ‘ideal’.

Are you an advocate of social media for self-expression or are you critical of it?

Leah Schrager: While I am somewhat critical of the puritanism of many of the platforms, I am overall very positive about social media as a force for self-expression. Like anything, it has its pluses and minuses, but what it has enabled in the world is incredible.

In what ways are you interested in blurring the lines between creating a celebrity and actually being a celebrity?

Leah Schrager: In my practice, I’ve found that my personal biography is basically forced into the reading of my art (as often happens with female performative bodies), and I’ve chosen to embrace that. I’ve seen artists fabricate or fake a celebrity, but that’s not interesting to me. Because I’ve almost always been a performer in my work, I feel I actually need to try to be a celebrity in order to create work on and about one. So it's not a case of ‘elite New York artist makes fun of the dreams of the masses’. I actually am not into that vibe at all, as it’s quite the opposite. I’ve always had a real folkloric, humanist take in my work, and so living it (while not always easy) is how I’ve practised my art. From the start of my @OnaArtist Instagram I’ve had some family, friends, and art-world figures be negative, insulting, and/or slut-shaming to my engaging in the Instagram aesthetic.

“Like anything, (social media) has its pluses and minuses, but what it has enabled in the world is incredible” – Leah Schrager

Have you chosen to sexualise your Ona persona? Are you challenging the male gaze or upholding it?

Leah Schrager: Ona is very sexual for several reasons. First, I like sex and I think discussions on and expressions of it should be supported. Second, being sexual has worked for me. It was when I started to push the sexualisation of Ona that I started becoming a bit of an Instagram celebrity. Finally, I’m interested in pushing the envelope when it comes to how sexual a celebrity can be. Of course, I’m very aware that a lot of people look at what I do and discount it because I’m making work that seems to ‘pander’ to the male gaze, which apparently means you can’t be an artist or make art. But in all honesty, I find the discussion around the male gaze to be overly simplistic. If a heterosexual woman presents an image of herself that happens to garner a large number of male likes, it’s assumed by some that she is somehow alienated from her true self, that she has lost agency, that she has objectified herself, is behaving like a puppet. This seems absurd and even cruel to me.

The question of the male gaze is complicated. The idea that there is a ‘world of freedom’ beyond the male gaze that heterosexual women can live in is absurd. We are sexual beings and we behave and perform for our sexual other. Being obsessed with being free from the expectations of the thing you sexually desire seems like a pretty miserable way to live to me. Maybe what you’re doing as a woman feels like you’re just totally free of what men might want you to be doing, but if you’re interested in men then whatever you’re doing is partly geared toward being attractive to them. It’s called sexual selection, and there’s nothing wrong with it.

How is The Celebrity Project an extension of your previous work?

Leah Schrager: Ona carries on the pro-sex and pro-virtual touch message of Sarah White – The Naked Therapist and the pro-self ownership of my visual work. Also, Sarah White was my first foray into mini-celebrity, but since it’s based in therapy, which has an ethic of confidentiality, I didn't feel comfortable using a lot of the material in my art. So the idea is that this project is public from the beginning so any of the material can be used in my art. One of my favourite recent pieces is ‘50 Favourite Comments From Fans’ where I screengrab an Instagram post and highlight my favourite comment and then part of the sale of the work goes to the commenter. This makes the work collaborative, which I like.

What was your motivation in creating Sarah White – The Naked Therapist?

Leah Schrager: I thought it made sense for nakedness to be in therapy, and nakedness related to a lot of the performance art I was studying. So I just tried it and it took off. Overall I’d say that Sarah White started me on a path of social practice art that continues to this day. I fully embrace the mostly male world I perform and make my celebrity art for, and I find my interactions with my fans to be very informative and satisfying. The stark split between the images men look at to be aroused and the images they look at to be aesthetically intrigued seems really backwards to me. I’m interested in bridging these two worlds through my work and seeing what happens when they coalesce.

#research #art research #photography #art photography #art photographer #artist research #female gaze #woman photographer #artist from girl on girl book #articles #women artists #Leah Schrager

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santistebanmoreno · 4 years

Text

BUJNOWSKI, RAFAL

Artista contemporáneo nacido en Polonia en 1974 (46 años).

Untitled , 2003

oil on canvas

35 x 45 cm. (13.8 x 17.7 in.)

Untitled , 1999

oil on canvas

87 x 120 cm. (34.3 x 47.2 in.)

Pope , 2002

oil on canvas

50 x 40 cm. (19.7 x 15.7 in.)

How to paint VHS tape , 2001

oil on canvas

120 x 120 cm. (47.2 x 47.2 in.)

#B #BUJNOWSKI #rafal #Rafal Bujnowski #art #arte contemporáneo #the Cracow Polytechnic #Academy of Fine Arts in Crakow #Ladnie #gallery Otwarta #krakov #Art Award Future of Europe #Museum for Contemporary Art Leipzig #Galeria Raster Warsaw #RENTAL Gallery New York #Jiri Svestka Gallery Prague #centre for contemporary art Prague #National Gallery of Art Warsaw #Academia de Bellas Artes Jan Matejko de Cracovia

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uwmspeccoll · 2 years

Photo

Decorative Sunday Fashion: The Menagerie of the Middle Ages

The Middle Ages are often viewed as the Dark Ages for want of enlightenment and with the Black Death bookending its perilous time. Yet a closer look shows the most novice scholar that the one-thousand-year period from the 5th century to the 15th century is rich with new kingdoms and hybrid cultures.

The Eastern Mediterranean hosted the Roman Empire in its Byzantine lore, while the conquest of the Umayyad Caliphate marched into Northern Africa and Spain, and Western Europe saw the Vikings land on their shores. Civilizations were blended, skilled trades were shared, and manuscripts such as the Divine Comedy abounded.

The Late Middle Ages saw the quick rise and fall of Joan of Arc whose premonitions from the archangel Michael sent her to King Charles VII of France where she became a confidante, military strategist, and gravely feared by the oppressed English rulers. Burned at the stake for heresy and supernatural powers, it was largely a political move to eradicate her power as royal soothsayer.

The ecclesiastical court that judged Joan of Arc may well have been fashioned with mitres just as Roman Catholic leadership was in her modern-era beatification. Original papal tiaras had three tiers representing the authority of sacred orders; silk and linen versions are adorned today and the opulent gold jewels have been shunned and given as symbols to the poor people of the world.

Just as the papal headgear evolved to suit changing sensibilities of society, so too did robewear. The houppelande was worn by both regal men and women of the Middle Ages, and today it is best seen in black on the shoulders of our Supreme Court. The robes were collared in a variety of forms, standing up, V-neck, or perhaps in most recent memory, in the bejeweled style of the dissent collar.

My first fashion plate is titled "Joan of Arc Dress," armor and flames in style. The remaining designs are similarly inspired; perhaps you can trace the muse through each iteration.

Here is a listing of sources from the UWM Special Collections which I have augmented with digital color and outline to emphasize particular details of my inspiration:

1, 10). photogravures by Lynd Ward in a tale of the Middle Ages, The Cloister and the Hearth, published by the Limited Editions Club in 1932.

2). My interpretation and contemporary design of the JOAN OF ARC Dress based on the illustration of Christian dress in the Middle Ages in Adolf Rosenberg's Geschichte des Kostums published by E. Weyhe in 1923.

3). My interpretation and contemporary design of the MITRE Dress based on common dress worn by Hebrew and Christian ecclesiastics, illustrated by Belle Northrup in A Short Description of Historic Fashion published by the Teachers College of Columbia University in 1925.

4, 6). My interpretation and contemporary design of the HOUPPELANDE Dress based on garments of the Middle Age illustrated by Paul Louis de Giafferri in The History of French Masculine Costume published by Foreign Publications in 1927.

5) Byzantine costume plate in the United States Work Projects Administration Museum Extension Project publication, Costumes of the World, 100 Hand Colored Plates from Ancient Egypt to the Gay Nineties, 1940.

7) "Indiano" motifs through the Middle Ages, plate XXXVIII in Gli Stili Nella Forma e nel Colore, Rassegna dell' arte antica e Moderna di Tutti i Paesi, published by Crudo & Co. in 1925.

8) Christian tapestry, plate 57 in Alexander Speltz’s The Coloured Ornament of All Historical Styles, Part I: Antiquity. Leipzig, GE: Baumgärtner, 1915.

9) German expressionist oil painting by Melanie Kent Steinhardt which evokes a common perception of life in the Middle Ages, in The Life and Art of Melanie Kent Steinhardt, published by Rabbit Hill Press in 2002.

View my other posts on historical fashion research in Special Collections.

View more Decorative Sunday posts.

View more Fashion posts.

—Christine Westrich, MFA Graduate Student in Intermedia Arts

#Decorative Sunday #fashion #Middle Ages #Medieval costumes #Christine Westrich #fashion design #costume design #graduate research #decorative arts #fashion plates #The Cloister and the Hearth #Lynd Ward #Geschichte des Kostums #A Short Description of Historic Fashion #The History of French Masculine Costume #Costumes of the World #Gli Stili Nella Forma e nel Colore #The Coloured Ornament of All Historical Styles #The Life and Art of Melanie Kent Steinhardt

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digital-arts-etc · 3 years

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The Face of Johann Sebastian Bach | Culture

Today, we are still not quite sure what composer Johann Sebastian Bach really looked like. A face reconstruction program can help us find out.

👇 📺 👇

youtube

Experts Digitally Reconstruct Bach's Face

Apart from his extensive musical legacy, relatively little is known about Johann Sebastian Bach.

A Scottish anthropologist and art historian have recreated the countenance of one of the world's greatest musicians.

Unlike Mozart and Beethoven, who left scores of personal letters and posed for plenty of portraits, Johann Sebastian Bach, who worked as a cantor in Leipzig for 27 years, was a prolific composer, but didn't leave many clues about his personality.

He only posed for one portrait, by Leipzig painter Elias Gottlob Haussmann, which has been reproduced in countless books.

But can anyone be sure that's really what Bach looked like?

Working with a cast of the composer's skull on loan from the Bach Museum in Eisenach, Scottish anthropologist Caroline Wilkinson has created a 3-D representation of the face of a man who died in 1750 at the age of 65.

Wilkinson, a specialist in her field, had developed a computer program that is capable of extrapolating the measurements taken from the subject's facial bones. She has also used it to identify casualties in the Balkan wars and to reconstruct the face of Pharaoh Ramses II.

"We carried out a laser scan of the skull which allowed us to recreate the musculature and skin of the face on our computer system," she told reporters. "This is really the most complete face that can be built from the available reliable information."

Art makes up for limits of science

Bach's protruding under bite and the slight asymmetry of his face are evident in Wilkinson's image. Yet the technique is not 100 percent accurate. Bones don't reveal how thick the fat layers were on Bach's visage, how deep his wrinkles ran and what color his eyes were.

"There were written contemporary documents that described his eye problems causing swollen eyelids," Wilkinson said.

To fill out the contour, the scientist compared Bach's face with those of similarly looking men from the present time. The rest of the aesthetic details were filled in with the help of art historian Janice Aitken.

She was forced to rely largely on Haussmann's portrait, combining art with science. The painting has been said to bear a canny resemblance to other portraits by Haussmann, reported the daily Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung, which casts some doubt on its accuracy.

Wilkinson's rendering may be as close as science can get to knowing what Bach looked like, but minor details -- signs of age, his expressions, the hue of his skin -- remain shrouded in mystery.

The new model, a wigless version of the great musician, goes on display at the Bach Museum in Eisenach, his birth town, on March 21 -- the day he would have turned 323 years old.

"As far as we can ascertain, this is how Bach would have looked," Wilkinson said.

https://www.dw.com/en/experts-digitally-reconstruct-bachs-face/a-3157170

#Bach #music #Youtube

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bm-contemporary-art · 3 years

Photo

Leipzig, Budd Hopkins, 1961, Brooklyn Museum: Contemporary Art

https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/102050

#contemporaryart #brooklynmuseum #buddhopkins #museumarchive

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passionate-reply · 4 years

Video

youtube

Do you “fucking love” science? Have you ever been blinded by it? Well, it doesn’t really matter, because that goofy little number isn’t really supposed to be on Thomas Dolby’s debut album in the first place. Find out about all the awesome OTHER stuff that’s actually meant to be here, in this new installment of Great Albums! Transcript below the break.

Welcome to Passionate Reply, and welcome to Great Albums! Today, I’ll be talking about a stellar album by one of those artists who have gone down in history as “one hit wonders,” despite producing a deep catalogue that’s often more impressive than that one song they end up known for: it’s The Golden Age of Wireless, the debut LP of Thomas Dolby. Chances are pretty good you’ve heard his big hit, “She Blinded Me With Science,” before...at least, if you’re American.

Music: “She Blinded Me With Science”

Like I said, if you’re American, you’ve heard this one before. If anything, it’s oversaturated! But if you’re from elsewhere in the world, you might not know it. Growing up in the US, I went through the whole gauntlet of alleged “one hit wonders” of 80s synth-pop, and a great many of them turned out to be British artists who had perfectly respectable careers in their native UK: Gary Numan, Soft Cell, and OMD, for example. Thomas Dolby is also British, but he’s apparently more famous here than he is across the pond--which is still not that famous.

He really ought to be, though, because The Golden Age of Wireless is a true masterpiece. Or, at least it WAS, in its original form. It’s actually a tough album to talk about, insofar as it’s hard to pin down what exactly constitutes “The Golden Age of Wireless.” It’s had quite a few different pressings, and a variety of different track listings. And the original version of it does NOT include “She Blinded Me With Science.” While I’d never argue that it’s a bad song, since it is insanely fun, and catchy to the point of being irresistible, it really does not belong on this album. I’m sure it helped them move copies of it, but its inclusion kind of ruins the vibe, to be honest. Its in-your-face and flamboyant hooks make it feel like a very unwarranted intrusion on an otherwise fairly serious and contemplative LP, which seems to have been intended as a fairly tight and thoughtful concept album.

Aside from that glaring issue, there are a few other tracks that have appeared on later versions of the album that weren’t there from the start, namely, the two tracks from Dolby’s first ever-release, a double A-side of “Urges” and “Leipzig,” as well as “One of Our Submarines,” the B-side of some versions of “She Blinded Me With Science.” All of these tracks are excellent, and mesh with the thematic and sonic character of the album quite well. “One of Our Submarines” in particular is often considered one of the best tracks of Dolby’s career--melancholy, claustrophobic, and stinging in its poignant sense of tragedy. It captures the misery and futility of modern war, as well as the sunset of the British Empire after the Second World War...and there’s a sample of a dolphin, too. It’s easily the track that I most wish had been included from the very start.

Music: “One of Our Submarines”

But now that that’s over with, I’d like to drill down and talk about how the album operates in its original form, as the artist intended. Like I said earlier, The Golden Age of Wireless is best understood as a concept album, and I think of it in a similar league as classics like the Buggles’ The Age of Plastic, OMD’s Dazzle Ships, or even Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love. The original track listing opens with “Flying North,” a stellar introduction to one of the most prominent themes of the album: freedom!

Music: “Flying North”

“Flying North” is an exultant anthem of self-determination, and one clearly mediated by “metal birds”--aeroplanes, that is. It’s a celebration of the independence allowed by technology, and a rather winsome one, in which this almost macho image of a heroic pilot takes center stage. The final track of the album, “Cloudburst At Shingle Street,” is a bit more esoteric, but seems to be aiming for a pretty similar idea overall, and I’d argue that the two of them form thematic “bookends.”

Music: “Cloudburst At Shingle Street”

“Cloudburst At Shingle Street” leads us through the technological evolution of mankind, from swinging from trees to paving concrete beaches--but the spacey synth warbles beneath those lines give them an ominous bent. The assertion that we might be heading into a cloudburst “mindless,” “naked,” or “blindly” is unnervingly cynical, but, we’re told, “there’s no escaping it.” Despite all of these signs that our better judgment should be resisting the temptation of this miraculous cloudburst...this triumphant, rising coda, with its powerful choir encouraging us onwards, seems to muddle the whole thing. The untethered, free-roaming nature of modern life isn’t always this sexy and exuberant, though--consider the track “Weightless,” as a counterpoint.

Music: “Weightless”

“Weightless” certainly seems to be about modern transients of some sort--in this case, traveling by car--but never lionizes them or makes them too terribly enviable. Instead, the focus is on the image of the draining fuel tank: the constant emptiness and craving for meaning, validation, and genuine love. No matter the allure of this very American, Route 66-like setting, the gas stations, cinemas, and decadent diner meals along the way are never any real substitute for an emotionally authentic life. That setting is, of course, a wistfully backward-looking Midcentury one. Nostalgia and childhood naivete are also among the album’s major themes, and are expressed the most clearly on “Europa and the Pirate Twins.”

Music: “Europa and the Pirate Twins”

Narratively, “Europa and the Pirate Twins” is a bittersweet story of childhood playmates who never quite re-unite, despite promising to be together again someday. The really interesting wrinkle is the fact that the narrator’s beloved Europa has become a famous celebrity as an adult, and the narrator is essentially a fan of her despite their real-world relationship. It’s an uncanny, confused parasocial relationship dynamic that feels extremely contemporary, despite the fact that it’s ultimately more of a commentary on the rise of teenager-oriented marketing during the Midcentury than anything else. The strange, often unhealthy relationships between young people and mass media, particularly radio, are another one of the major sources of tension on The Golden Age of Wireless. “Europa and the Pirate Twins” is also one of the more interesting tracks, instrumentally, featuring a prominent harmonica part, performed by Andy Partridge of XTC. Given how much the album strives to be about the future and past simultaneously, steeped in nostalgia and utopian visions alike, it makes sense to hear Dolby blend elements of traditional folk or popular music with forward-thinking synth-pop sensibilities. Listen also for a flute on “Windpower,” and a substantial amount of guitar on “Commercial Breakup,” a song that proves Dolby certainly can rock, if he feels like it.

Music: “Commercial Breakup”

The cover art for The Golden Age of Wireless isn’t exactly the most iconic, but I’ve always thought it was very beautiful. You’ve got this very eye-catching, lurid, pulp magazine style illustration of Dolby as a diligent, yet glamourous engineer, radiating with the complementary colour palette of orange and blue, the perfect picture of retro cool. But it’s framed and inset, to give us a conscious sense of observing something that’s coming to us from another time, an artifact preserved. That patina and sense of the antique is amplified by this dull-coloured background, which actually shows a marble sculpture gallery in a museum, though that’s tough to make out unless you have it right in front of you. The numerous shades of irony operating here are another thing that make the album feel strikingly contemporary.

I’m also a huge fan of the album’s title. “Wireless,” if you weren’t aware, is an old-fashioned term for radio. Radio itself is a strong theme on the album, most obviously on the track “Radio Silence,” but the use of the term “wireless” isn’t just another piece of retro nostalgia--I think it’s also evocative of that sense of free-flying, untethered independence I talked about earlier. The first half, i.e., “golden age,” is perhaps even more important. “Golden age” is an extremely loaded term that brings a number of rich associations to the table. “Golden ages” are simultaneously longed for, but not fully believed in. They’re bygone eras that usually felt like nothing special to the people who actually lived through them, despite their greatness being palpable to anyone reflecting on them in hindsight. In every golden age, there’s a poetic tragedy.

I think that even if someone did buy this record just to get their hands on “She Blinded Me With Science,” they’d probably be at least a little bit disappointed in what they got. The album does have some decent pop singles, chiefly “Radio Silence” and “Europa and the Pirate Twins,” but they’re still humming with nostalgia and unease, and not without some substantial experimental DNA.

Music: “Radio Silence”

While they cut the single weirdest track on the album, “The Wreck of the Fairchild,” they still retained some fairly ambitious tracks, such as “Windpower”--clearly an ode to Kraftwerk’s “Radioactivity.” It’s hard to be angry with an electronic musician for trying to rip off Kraftwerk, since they all do it one way or another, and in this case it invites a natural comparison between two great concept albums focused on the theme of radio.

Music: “Windpower”

Overall, though, The Golden Age of Wireless is still a reasonably accessible album on the whole. Possibly not what you expected, and certainly, a work that’s more sentimental and affecting than good for the dance floor, but as far as poignant, ballady, diesel-punk odes to the tragic techno-optimism of the Midcentury go, I’d say it’s not all that hard to get into! Dolby does have a pop core, as an artist, that he’s quite capable of selling to us if he chooses to. For proof of that point, look no further than the single “Hyperactive!” which he followed this up with a few years later:

Music: “Hyperactive!”

When discussing an ostensible one-hit wonder, there’s a distinct temptation to resort to “they deserved better” style rhetoric. On one hand, yes, I do think more people should hear Thomas Dolby’s music, and that it has a lot to say to us. I’m all about obscure music finding new life and being appreciated. That said, in the case of Dolby, I think he basically got what he wanted, in the end. He’s always been more keenly interested in music’s many behind-the-scenes roles than he has in chasing pop stardom himself--he’s produced music, and scored a number of films and video games over the decades. It feels kind of wrong to tell someone who’s successful at one thing that they “deserve” to be successful at something different, just because we may want to hear him do it, or because we esteem one skillset more highly than the other. Ultimately, The Golden Age of Wireless is a Great Album on its own terms, whether Dolby ever decides to grace us with another synth-pop release under his own name again--which he did in 2011, with A Map of the Floating City. But it’s his decision, as an artist, and the fact that he can choose to or not is a luxury that allows him integrity. I think that’s the way it ought to be.

My overall top track on this album has got to be “Airwaves,” a song in which the narrator dies, tragically and suddenly, in an automobile accident. It’s not the sexy, “Warm Leatherette” sort of car accident, but rather a dismally realistic one, that shows quite frankly how undignified death can be. Sometimes, we aren’t so much doomed heroes as we are frightened, sickly children, defeated by our own fickle bodies. The last thought our narrator gets is “I itch all over, let me sleep”; their honour perishes just moments before they do. Meanwhile, the radio is a constant presence throughout, and serves as both something to anchor the scene in the droll and quotidian, as well as ultimately becoming something transcendent. The promise of “airwaves” is not only the human interconnectedness made possible by technology, but also a hint at the ultimate destiny of human souls, a kind of ethereal afterlife in the sky. The meandering lulls of the verses contrast sharply with the song’s eerily soaring refrain, which enhances that feeling that those “airwaves” occupy some sort of higher plane. On that surprisingly heavy note, that’s all I’ve got for today, so thanks for listening!

Music: “Airwaves”

#music #album review #album reviews #thomas dolby #one hit wonder #one hit wonders

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your-dietician · 3 years

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Celebrities with a history of protest

New Post has been published on https://tattlepress.com/celebrities/celebrities-with-a-history-of-protest/

Celebrities with a history of protest

Chris Compendio, provided by

June 30, 2021Updated: June 30, 2021 6:07 a.m.

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Celebrities with a history of protest

Despite calls for actors, athletes, musicians, and other celebrities to eschew activism to focus on entertainment, there is a long-standing precedent for famous people to leverage their platforms to enact change.

From Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier establishing themselves as leaders during the civil rights movement to Leonardo DiCaprio and Jane Fonda among many stars pushing for environmental protections and justice, hundreds if not thousands of celebrities in the last century have pushed the needle on a wide variety of causes. Today’s celebrities commonly use their mantles to protest animal cruelty, police brutality, government surveillance, military action, environmental injustice, and civil rights among dozens of other causes.

Stacker has highlighted 50 celebrities from the last 75 years with a history of protest. Our list includes actors, athletes, and musicians. Several of the contemporary stars made headlines in 2020 for their efforts in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, appearing at numerous protests in the wake of the killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and many others. Others were instrumental in successful efforts to shut down the Keystone XL pipeline.

Keep reading to find out what causes some of your favorite celebrities are fighting for.

You may also like: 50 best space movies of all time

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Jane Fonda

Actor Jane Fonda has been known for her activism throughout her decades-spanning career. She was arrested in 1970 for protesting the Vietnam War. Despite continued action against the conflict, Fonda avoided further arrests until 2019, when she was arrested five times while protesting fossil fuels and calling for environmental action.

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Muhammad Ali

Legendary boxing champion Muhammad Ali became an outspoken figure against the Vietnam War, refusing to join the U.S. Army. Declaring himself a conscientious objector, in part due to his religious beliefs, Ali was arrested and stripped of his titles. Ali became a countercultural figure for civil rights and pacifism, and his conviction for draft evasion was eventually overturned by the Supreme Court.

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Mark Ruffalo

“Avengers” star Mark Ruffalo is one of the highest-profile activists against fracking, participating in multiple protests against oil companies. Ruffalo also produced and starred in a 2019 anti-fracking film called “Dark Waters” and co-founded The Solutions Project, an organization providing funding for climate justice projects in the U.S. and Puerto Rico. While fracking has been a central issue for Ruffalo for decades, the actor also protested against former President Donald Trump’s policies during his term, and was one of the few celebrities to call for justice for Palestine in 2021.

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Alicia Keys

As a musician, Alicia Keys has added musical flair to her activism. Keys spoke at various demonstrations protesting Trump administration immigration policies, the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, and police brutality, and contributed several protest songs speaking to some of these issues, notably “Perfect Way to Die.”

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George Clooney

As one of the most prolific celebrities in Hollywood, George Clooney has used his star power time and again to bolster his humanitarian efforts. Clooney had long been vocal about finding a resolution to the War in Darfur, interfacing with world leaders and the United Nations as well as taking part in a number of documentaries spreading awareness about the conflict. In 2012, Clooney was arrested along with his father during a protest at the Sudanese Embassy in Washington D.C. In 2020, Clooney and his wife Amal donated $500,000 to the Equal Justice Initiative following the murder of George Floyd.

You may also like: Best Picture Winner From the Year You were Born

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Rosario Dawson

Actor Rosario Dawson is a well-documented activist, primarily demonstrating in support of the Democratic Party. In 2004, Dawson was arrested during the Republican National Convention while protesting against President George W. Bush. She also protested in Washington D.C. in 2016 while attending a rally and spoke out against the role of money in politics. Dawson founded the non-profit organization Voto Latino, which works to motivate young Hispanic and Latino Americans to register to vote. Her political activism led her to a fundraiser for Ben Jealous, a 2018 gubernatorial candidate for Maryland, where she met her current partner, Sen. Cory Booker.

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Marlon Brando

Oscar-winning actor Marlon Brando was influential not only for his roles in films like “The Godfather” and “On the Waterfront,” but also for his political idealism and activism. Brando participated in the movement for civil rights in the 1960s and favored a boycott toward South Africa for its apartheid policies. In support of Indigenous people in the Americas, Brando refused to accept his Best Actor trophy at the 1973 Academy Awards and sent Native American actor Sacheen Littlefeather to speak on his behalf.

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Eartha Kitt

Active in a number of social causes, actor Eartha Kitt advocated for and supported underprivileged children in Los Angeles. Kitt also protested against the Vietnam War, and as with many politically active celebrities at the time, she was surveilled by the CIA. Her most public and vocal criticism of the war came during a White House luncheon that President Lyndon Johnson attended.

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Christopher Reeve

Former “Superman” Christopher Reeve had a well-documented history of human rights and environmental activism dating back to at least the mid-’70s. He was very involved with America’s Watch, Amnesty International, The Environmental Air Force, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Save the Children. He flew to Santiago, Chile, in 1987 in support of 77 actors whom the Pinochet regime threatened to execute. Thrown from a horse and paralyzed in 1995, Christopher Reeve spent the rest of his life and career advocating for stem cell research and the treatment of neurological disorders. He creating the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation to fund research and improve the quality of life for patients, testified in support of federal funding for stem cell research before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies, and successfully helped get the budget for that National Institute of Health doubled over the course of five years.

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John Lennon and Yoko Ono

The power couple of former Beatle John Lennon and musician and artist Yoko Ono primarily focused on promoting peace with their works of art, with “Imagine” and “Give Peace a Chance” being some of the more famous songs from the duo. The Nixon administration attempted to deport Lennon from the United States over the musician’s outspoken leftist politics. Following Lennon’s murder in 1980, Ono has continued with her peace activism and art through today; she had a massive retrospective exhibit called “Peace is Power” in 2019 at the Leipzig Museum of Fine Arts in Germany.

You may also like: 100 best Westerns of all time

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Woody Harrelson

Actor Woody Harrelson has made many of his sociopolitical views known to the public, including his support for marijuana legalization and environmental protection. At a 1996 protest, Harrelson and several other protesters scaled the Golden Gate Bridge to hang up a sign criticizing Maxxam Inc. CEO Charles Hurwitz. The outspoken activist and vegan narrated the 2020 documentary “Kiss the Ground,” which centers on promoting regenerative agriculture as a method for mitigating ecologically damaging farming practices from fossil-fuel use to factory farming.

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Elliot Page

After coming out at the Human Rights Campaign’s Time to Thrive conference in 2014, actor Elliot Page became a public advocate for LGBTQ+ rights. In an anti-Donald Trump protest after the president’s inauguration, a video of Page debating a homophobic preacher went viral online. After coming out as transgender in December of 2020, Page has become an outspoken advocate and activist for trans issues.

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Leonardo DiCaprio

Being one of the most famous actors in film today benefited Leonardo DiCaprio’s environmental activism. For the bulk of his career, DiCaprio has been active in efforts for preservation and combating climate change. His activism led to him conferring with national leaders, donating millions of dollars to environmental causes, attending marches, and speaking out about climate change in his acceptance speech for Best Actor at the 88th Academy Awards. He formed the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation in 1998 (now part of Earth Alliance), which forms partnerships with organizations, experts, and activists to foster biodiversity and mitigate climate change.

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Janelle Monae

In support of the Black Lives Matter movement, musical artist Janelle Monae wrote and performed a protest song called “Hell You Talmbout,” which invoked the names of several Black Americans who were victims of police violence and racially motivated crimes. Monae also marched in Black Lives Matter protests.

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James Cromwell

Actor James Cromwell, who became a vegan while shooting the film “Babe,” began his activism during the civil rights movement and Vietnam War. He was arrested in 1971 for civil disobedience at the famed May Day anti-war protests in Washington D.C. His half-century-plus of activism has run the gamut from environmental issues, peace efforts, animal rights, and equality. He has participated in Black Lives Matter protests back to at least 2017, served as a spokesperson for PETA, was arrested during a protest against a dog laboratory in 2019.

You may also like: Best and worst Leonardo DiCaprio movies

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Shailene Woodley

“Divergent” and “The Fault in Our Stars” actor Shailene Woodley is an avid activist for environmental issues and is active in a number of progressive organizations. While protesting against the Dakota Access Pipeline, Woodley was arrested and charged with criminal trespassing.

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Mos Def

Rapper and actor Yasiin Bey, also known as Mos Def, has been outspoken about police brutality and violence against Black Americans. He held an impromptu concert outside the MTV Video Music Awards in 2006, performing a protest song called “Katrina Clap” that criticized the Bush administration’s response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Despite having a permit, Mos Def was arrested for the performance.

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Adèle Haenel

French actor Adèle Haenel (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”) has been active in France’s #MeToo movement. Having had her own experiences with abuse and harassment in the film industry, Haenel in 2020 protested Roman Polanski’s win at the César Awards by walking out of the ceremony with several others.

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America Ferrera

The daughter of Honduran immigrants, actor America Ferrera has spent most of her career encouraging and mobilizing Latin Americans to be politically active. Ferrera spoke several times at Democratic national conventions as well as at the 2017 Women’s March. She has also served as a prominent voice in the Keep Families Together movement against family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border and served as an artist ambassador for the global organization Save the Children.

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Joaquin Phoenix

When winning multiple awards for his lead role in the film “Joker,” Joaquin Phoenix used the awards stage to promote diversity in the film industry and awareness of animal cruelty. His 2020 speech at the Oscars specifically condemned the dairy industry for its treatment of cows. Phoenix was arrested in 2020 while protesting the climate crisis along with Jane Fonda and Martin Sheen.

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Emily Ratajkowski

Model Emily Ratajkowski has used her platform to advocate for feminism, sexual expression, and a positive body image. She has designed dresses with partial proceeds supporting Planned Parenthood, and leveraged her Instagram profile to speak out against an Alabama state law that banned abortion. Upon the nomination and eventual confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, Ratajkowski and others were arrested at a protest in Washington D.C.

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Ted Danson

Star of “Cheers” and “The Good Place,” Ted Danson has been an outspoken voice for environmental issues, particularly those concerning the world’s oceans. Danson in late 2019 participated in one of Fonda’s many protests demanding action on climate change and arrested alongside her.

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Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee

Along with being legendary performers on stage and screen, married couple Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee were also both prominent activists in the civil rights movement. Organizing a number of marches, the two were also friends with Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse Jackson, and Malcolm X, with Davis delivering eulogies for King and Malcolm X.

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Humphrey Bogart

During a period in which politicians such as Joseph McCarthy were leading a fight against communism in America, several individuals and figures in the film industry were targeted and blacklisted for their suspected political alignments. Classic Hollywood actor Humphrey Bogart organized the Committee for the First Amendment and protested the House Un-American Activities Committee.

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Sammy Davis Jr.

The multi-talented Sammy Davis Jr. was also politically active, supporting the election campaigns of John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, although he later became close with Richard Nixon—a friendship he eventually regretted. Regardless, Davis remained active in the civil rights movement, especially after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and criticized Nixon for his shortcomings on civil rights.

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Cate Blanchett

Australian actor Cate Blanchett has been outspoken up about the role of women in the film industry. Blanchett is also a longtime ambassador for the Australian Conservation Foundation. She has also advocated for the rights and protection of refugees.

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Danny Glover

Since his time as a student, “Lethal Weapon” star Danny Glover has been an activist fighting for civil rights and worker unions. Politically, Glover has endorsed progressive candidates running for president of the United States. Glover was arrested in 2010 in Maryland during a protest for better working wages and conditions outside French food corporation Sodexo. In May of 2021, Glover spoke at a rally against anti-Asian bias in New York City.

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Emma Watson

Hermione Granger herself, actor Emma Watson, was appointed as a U.N. Women Goodwill Ambassador in 2014. Watson has used her worldwide fame to speak out about women’s issues and human rights and declared her support for transgender people after transphobic comments from “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling. In 2021, Watson was one of 400 signatories in a letter demanding the UK government include women in decision-making roles at the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference.

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Martin Sheen

Martin Sheen may be famous for his acting, but he has stated that activism is “what [he does] to stay alive.” A humanitarian and social activist, Sheen has been arrested more than 65 times for protesting. Sheen primarily participates in anti-war, pro-worker, and environmental protests.

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Hayden Panettiere

“Heroes” star Hayden Panettiere was 18 when she was involved in a confrontation in Japan in which she and several others attempted to prevent dolphin hunting by paddling out on the water and blocking fishermen. A warrant for her arrest was issued and she and the other participants left the country. Panettiere has since been protesting for liberal causes and animal rights.

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Bill Nye

Being a celebrity science advocate famous for his children’s educational television show “Bill Nye the Science Guy,” Bill Nye has used his status to promote climate change activism. Against perceived anti-science rhetoric from conservatives, Nye participated and spoke in the 2017 March for Science and continues to advocate for science on cable news appearances. He launched a successful Netflix series in 2017 aptly titled “Bill Nye Saves the World.”

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Joan Baez

Much of the music by Joan Baez is rooted in activism, counterculture, and protest. Baez has been politically active for several decades since the beginning of the civil rights movement and has written and performed songs for marches and protests, among her most famous being her cover of “We Shall Overcome.”

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Steve-O

Steve-O has never shied away from controversy, including making waves with a pro-environmental stunt. The daredevil in 2015 climbed a 100-foot crane and held up a sign that said “SeaWorld Sucks,” while also holding an inflatable Shamu balloon and shooting fireworks. He was, unsurprisingly, arrested.

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Daryl Hannah

Actor Daryl Hannah, known to audiences for her roles in “Casino” and “Kill Bill,” has been an environmentalist for most of her life and has been arrested multiple times at protests. One such instance had her protesting the development of farmland and handcuffing herself to a tree.

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Bruce Springsteen

Rock and folk musician Bruce Springsteen has been one of the more prolific musical activists in recent history and has consistently spoken out for gay rights, same-sex marriage, and transgender rights. Springsteen was an outspoken critic of Donald Trump, especially in regard to the coronavirus pandemic response.

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Jamie Lee Curtis

Actor Jamie Lee Curtis has fought for numerous humanitarian causes and engaged in extensive philanthropy. For gay marriage rights, Curtis acted in a play by Dustin Lance Black called “8” that reenacted the trial that overturned the same-sex marriage ban, appearing alongside Brad Pitt and Martin Sheen. In 2020, she came out in support of professional athletes who boycotted games and league events in response to the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

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John Boyega

One of the main stars of the contemporary “Star Wars” trilogy, British actor John Boyega received attention for his passionate speech and participation in Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd. Stating “I don’t know if I’m going to have a career after this” while speaking to other protesters with a megaphone, Boyega’s co-stars and collaborators came out in support of his activism.

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Halsey

As a young bisexual musical artist, Halsey has spoken for a number of issues that affect young women and LGBTQ+ people. She has advocated for mental health and suicide prevention awareness, transgender rights, and support for sexual assault victims. During the 2020 protests for Black Lives Matter, Halsey marched alongside protesters and came to the aid of injured demonstrators.

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Sean Penn

Oscar-winning actor Sean Penn hasn’t shied away from controversy over his political views and affiliations. He widely criticized former President George W. Bush, during whose term Penn provided aid to Hurricane Katrina victims, supported same-sex marriage, and protested against the Iraq War. Penn has also been involved internationally, defending Hugo Chavez and marching alongside Egyptian protesters in 2011.

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Laura Dern

Actor Laura Dern has had her hands in several social causes, including gender pay disparity, Down syndrome awareness, women’s rights, the environment, and immigrants’ rights. With the latter two issues, Dern has been involved in organizations and protests for those causes in the past few years, particularly Families Belong Together.

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Amy Schumer

After a fatal shooting during a screening of her film “Trainwreck,” comedian and actor Amy Schumer joined her father’s cousin, Sen. Chuck Schumer, in advocating for gun control reform in the United States. Alongside Emily Ratajkowski, Schumer was arrested in 2018 during a protest against the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. She came out in full support of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020.

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Susan Sarandon

Primarily fighting for progressive and leftist causes, actor Susan Sarandon is also known for being a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. A demonstration in 1999 over the police killing of an African immigrant in New York City led to the arrests of Sarandon and 218 other protesters. She was a firm supporter of the farmers’ protests in India in early 2021.

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Miley Cyrus

Though the public image and perception of Miley Cyrus has changed through the years, the singer has made her support for social causes quite clear in the past decade. Cyrus has participated in benefit concerts and contributed charity singles. Her biggest contribution to date is her founding of the Happy Hippie Foundation, which supports LGBTQ+ rights, homeless youths, and other vulnerable populations.

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Liza Minnelli

Broadway and Hollywood star Liza Minnelli is also a well-known philanthropist and has expressed her support for multiple causes, including LGBTQ+ rights. Minnelli was heavily invested in the AIDS crisis and incited Elizabeth Taylor’s own activism in raising awareness and funds for AIDS research.

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Charlize Theron

Hailing from South Africa, actor Charlize Theron has been involved in movements and organizations meant to support African youth in the fight against AIDS. Theron has also marched in several pro-choice and women’s rights marches, including the 2017 Women’s March.

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Lucy Lawless

In addition to her famed role as the titular character on “Xena: Warrior Princess,” Lucy Lawless is also a climate ambassador for Greenpeace. In 2012, Lawless and five other activists boarded an Arctic oil-drilling ship in protest and were subsequently arrested. Even still, Lawless continues to protest with the organization against climate change and oil drilling.

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Olivia Wilde

Actor and director Olivia Wilde was a vocal supporter of Barack Obama during his presidential run and terms, as well as serving as an advocate for Planned Parenthood and Time’s Up. As a feminist, Wilde has also participated in multiple Women’s Marches. In response to the Charlottesville white supremacist marches in 2017, Wilde, alongside other celebrities such as Mark Ruffalo, protested outside of Trump Tower.

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Cynthia Nixon

“Sex and the City” star Cynthia Nixon has long been an advocate for public education. She was arrested in 2002 while protesting outside of City Hall in New York City to demand better funding for schools. As a Bernie Sanders-supporting progressive, Nixon ran against Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic gubernatorial primaries in New York in 2018 but lost by 30 points. She spoke at a June 2021 rally in Albany, New York, where people advocated for single-payer health care.

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Madonna

Superstar Madonna has spent decades-long advocating for LGBTQ+ rights and HIV/AIDS awareness. For her work and advocacy, Madonna was awarded the Advocate for Change award at the 30th annual GLAAD Media Awards. In June 2020, Madonna was also seen protesting for Black Lives Matter, even with an injury that left her in crutches.

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Cher

Cher has contributed to numerous causes throughout the decades, including but not limited to AIDS relief, veterans care, the Flint water crisis, and COVID-19 relief. In response to the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, Cher participated in a number of anti-Trump rallies, including one right after election night in 2016 that included Madonna and Mark Ruffalo.

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Stacker highlights 50 celebrities with a history of protest from the 1960s to today.

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Chris Compendio

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artenvena · 5 years

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Rafal Bujnowski

1974, Polonia Estudios: Arquitectura en Cracow Polytechnic, Arte en Academy of Fine Arts en Crakow. Exposiciones: Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig. National Gallery of Art Polonia, Premios: Art Award Future of Europe Rafal Bujnowski organiza sus pinturas en grandes y pequeñas series para las que se inspira de su entorno inmediato. Sus motivos son simplificados y puestos contra fondos neutros, en los que analiza el medio de la pintura y se enfrenta a la tradición, oponiéndose al principio de la originalidad con la producción en serie y reduciendo el concepto de mímesis a lo absurdo al hacer réplicas de objetos de nuestra realidad.

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curationstationdc · 5 years

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Woodcuts in suburbia: melancholy, nostalgia, and resistance

I associate woodcuts with a particular aesthetic: they loom from their perch on the bookshelf in the den, next to a collection of Hans Christian Andersen tales, whose worn buckram binding is effusing that sapid antique book aroma which pairs so well with coffee and cake. In the corner of the room, above a worn black leather chair designated for tv-watching and reading, a pathos dangles from its pot, fed by gentle streams of light emanating from the canopy of shade sheltering the backyard garden. On weekends and special occasions, the clinking of cake forks against china is punctuated only by an occasional “delicious!” — direct and accurate. This orchestration produces a distinctly Germanic affect, and one that I associate with the elderly; the particular family room I’m recalling belonged to my next-door neighbors growing up, former members of the Danish anti-Nazi resistance who had emigrated in the early 1960s. While I can’t be sure there was any deeper meaning behind their affinity for the humble woodcut, I do recall the medium’s prominence in their home. For me, something as benign as a flock of geese is represented with a degree of melancholy in these prints' impenetrable black shadows — an inevitability in this generation’s Weltanschauung, that everything beautiful carries with it a degree of pain, a nostalgia for the idea of a more civil world.

These beloved octogenarians were my first choice of role models, and I insisted on seeing them almost every day for the first 8 or 9 years of my life. They were old-school Democrats (or at least, that’s how their values system translated into American) in a largely Republican suburb of a mid-sized Upper Midwestern city. I can still place myself their 1950′s minimal traditional home: running my hands along their walnut furniture with polished nickel handles, greeted by a different antique clock in every room, tick-tocking at various registers, my slippered feet shuffling along a dull, greenish-blue carpet so typical of that era. Nothing in that home was remotely as paired down as today’s sanitized mid-century throwback, and the old neighborhood still retained a smidgen of character unlike contemporary expressions of manifest destiny. Lovingly tended beds of roses, pansies, and bleeding hearts flourished under the shade of maples, walnuts, and red oak.

A young family admires their new home. Between 1950 and 1970, America’s suburban population nearly doubled to 74 million Camerique Archive / Archive Photos / Getty Images

For my neighbors, woodcuts seemed to be a culturally relevant way of displaying eerie alternative landscapes: a flock of geese, a school of fish, a sunset laden with a certain degree of subconsciously expressed Weltschmerz. For me, these woodcuts were inextricably linked to their stories of brazen defiance in the face of terror, which they seldom shared, always with a degree of pain and even embarrassment. Their democratic ideals to which they so proudly clung were the real source of their identity; it was from them that I learned it was OK to be gay, that everyone deserved a home and access to healthcare, that one lives like a society like a neighbor rather than just an individual. But it wasn’t until years after their deaths that I detected any degree of paradox in their suburban American existence, was able to chuckle at their nostalgia for the old country as expressed in their grocery cart (tubs of frozen Coolwhip to be served generously with home-baked apple cake, slices of summer sausage or cucumbers served on squares of cocktail rye, a far cry from the bakeries and delicatessens of northern Europe.)

A woman and a boy visiting a man in hospital. Woodcut by Käthe Kollwitz, 1929. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY

While I may associate woodcuts with the interior design choices of an immigrant family in the middle of the last century, its origins predate my concept of history. Woodcutting is thought to be the earliest print technique, originating in 9th-century China, arriving in Europe sometime in the 14th century. Woodcut has been a staple medium for prominent Northern European artists like Dürer since the 16th century. To produce a print, artists carve their image into a block of wood, along the grain, removing the parts that will not carry ink. The surface is then rolled over with a brayer and the image transferred to a sheet of paper through a press. The result in works like Käthe Kollwitz’s Selbstbildness von vorn (1922-1923), pictured above, is nothing short of haunting — well-suited to the violently introspective tone of German Expressionism. If you’re curious about the process, here’s a short demonstration:

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Phil Sanders, Director of the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, demonstrates the pressure + ink relief process

Woodcutting became a popular tool of activists in the 1910′s, when thinkers like Ernst Barlach were beginning to use reductionist, anti-naturalist figures to express their dejection at the rise of an alien world. In the case of Barlach, his art was often placed alongside politically charged writing in order to provoke emotional reactions to the realities of uprootedness, inequality, and disaffection in industrialized, urban Europe. It is Barlach’s rather proletariat answer to the questions of modernity, inspired in part by a kind of political realism emerging in Russia, that inspired German artist Käthe Kollwitz to take up the humble woodcut.

Ernst Barlach, from an East German stamp, 1970. Would he have been pleased with his legacy?

I remember receiving a story on the couch in my neighbors’ den — I was about 10 or 11 — regarding the final days of the war: a fellow member of the resistance had suggested replacing the Dannebrog with the flag of the Danish Communist Party, the DKP, an idea that had shaken my neighbor to his core. For him, resistance had been an act of preservation, a defense of the right to be distinctly Danish, and all that it entailed, in an increasingly international world. How the inability to return to a Denmark before the crimes of Nazism must have felt, I can only attempt to imagine. To this day, I am astounded by my neighbors’ apparent lack of burnout in light of what they sacrificed, their resilience in living out their ideals and inherited melancholia with me under an umbrella on the patio. It seemed that, for them, past and present far outweighed considerations for the future.

My copy of Korsbæk Tidende (Korsbæk Official Journal), an educational accompaniment to the popular Danish 1970′s and 1980′s tv-series “Matador” about a fictionalized Danish town between 1929 and 1947. I inherited this collection of real newspaper clips that informed events on the show from my neighbor — I assume he loved the show.

To an extent, I have inherited their idealism, an obsession with a bleak past used to check the present, an index of unwavering values to be accessed at any time. It is only through a sense of history that I’m able to make sense of the communicative power of images today, how calculated distortions of reality made ubiquitous through mass production can make us more empathetic, braver in the face of a not-so-distant future. It's a future that cannot be understood with the tools we have been given, that will almost upend our perceptions and unsettle us, a future that demands our bravery. More than ever my beloved neighbors ever could have fathomed, the possibility that our sacrifices will be bastardized in the name of another cause is unparalleled in the digital age. And even more than they experienced, we have the incredible opportunity, and challenge, to transplant our ideologies across ecosystems, upending heir original contexts.

Simultaneous calls for universalism and individual freedom, the appeals of difference and homogeneity, the cogent argument of moral relativism against the call for a shared global narrative will, no doubt, continue to shake us in an era of unprecedented displacement and global climate change. Among other things, these challenges call for an art that, like the pervasive woodcut, infiltrates our purviews, and is attuned to the affect of contemporary life. It should carry with is a melancholic nostalgia, demand our empathy, blemish our idealized beauty.

If I limit myself to woodcuts, I'm reminded of the works of William Kentridge, Beatriz Milhazes, Leonard Baskin, Alison Saar, Irving Amen, Tony Bevan, Katsutoshi Yuasa, Assadour Bezdikian, Elizabeth Catlett, Lou Barlow, Leon Gilmour — I'm sure I'm missing countless others.

Retrospective Exhibitions on Käthe Kollwitz

Käthe Kollwitz, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1992; Käthe Kollwitz: In Celebration of the 125th Anniversary of the Artist’s Birth, Galerie St. Etienne, New York City, 1992; Berner Kunstmuseum, Bern, Switzerland, 1946; Retrospective in honor of her 50th birthday at Paul Cassirer galleries, Berlin, 1917

Selected Bibliographies on Käthe Kollwitz

Knesebeck, Alexandra von dem. Käthe Kollwitz: Werkverzeichnis der Graphik. Band I & II. Bern: Kornfeld, 2002.

Prelinger, Elizabeth, ed. Käthe Kollwitz. Exh. cat. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1992.

Rix, Brenda D., and Jay A. Clarke. Käthe Kollwitz: The Art of Compassion. Exh. cat. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2003.

Selected Bibliographies on Ernst Barlach

Laur, Elisabeth. Ernst Barlach: Sämtliche Werke, Werkverzeichnis I. Die Druckgraphik. Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 2001.

Paret, Peter. An Artist Against the Third Reich: Ernst Barlach, 1933–38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Selected Bibliographies on Ernst Ludwig Kirnchner

Dube, Annemarie, and Wolf-Dieter Dube. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Das graphische Werk. 2 vols. Munich: Prestel, 1980.

Gercken, Günther, and Magdalena M. Moeller. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Farbige Druckgraphik. Exh. cat. Berlin: Brücke-Museum, 2008.

Krämer, Felix, ed. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Retrospective. Exh. cat. Frankfurt: Städel Museum, 2010.

Lloyd, Jill, and Magdalena M. Moeller, eds. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, 1880–1938. Exh. cat. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2003.

Wye, Deborah. Kirchner and the Berlin Street. Exh. cat. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2008.

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