An Interview With Artist Theo Beatty
Theo Beatty is a 30 year old, openly gay, Hopi artist living and working in Phoenix, Arizona. His work, often dealing with themes surrounding identity, community and the soul, offers a powerfully unique voice that honors and intimately explores the heritage and cultural landscape Beatty was raised by.
Dearfield, Colorado: A Ghost of the Black American West
Dearfield, Colorado is a ghost on the western plains. What remains of the once thriving agrarian community rests in bleak disrepair alongside state highway 34 in a dry, wind whipped and deeply red Weld County. All but three buildings — once a gas station, a diner and the founder’s home — have succumbed to the pressures of time and neglect, scarcely echoing the promise this land possessed in 1910 when Oliver Toussaint (O.T.) Jackson, inspired by Booker T. Washington’s “Up from Slavery”, first purchased 320 acres and began to lay the foundations for what would become Colorado’s most successful Black settlement.
We Need More Than a Shutdown to Heal the Environment
In the first weeks of global Covid-19 shutdowns stories of the natural world recovering from the rampant effects of industrialization began surfacing across social media. Often misleading tales of dolphins returning to the Venetian Canals, freely roaming elephants and lowered metropolitan carbon emissions suggested that the environment, given this unprecedented reduction in human activity, had…
1200 Years of Reistance: Five Lesser Taught Black Led Slave Revolts
Last week was the 155th celebration of Juneteenth, the commemoration of a federal announcement made in Galveston, Texas on June 19th 1865 that all slaves in the state were officially free — two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was made. Liberty has always come late. Delaware and Kentucky, slaveholding border states during…
Deepening Discourse: Terrance Hayes- “American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassins”
Poetry, as it stands in modern society, is undervalued. It’s relevance has been eroded from all sides, diminished by the accessible and self indulgent nature of the medium while at once coming across as psychically and intellectually overwhelming due to the attention and consideration a good poem requires of the reader. Few other artistic mediums…
The Trump Campaign’s “Trump Army”
In early March, Donald Trump’s re-election campaign unveiled a new yet unsurprisingly familiar tactic in their quest to secure votes in upcoming November elections — the Army for Trump. The introduction and initial call to join the “Trump Army” came amidst rising domestic concerns surrounding Covid-19, and while Donald Trump’s taste for militarism has been…
The Great White Myth Part 1: The Abstraction of a Simple Truth
Oftentimes, when attempting to convince our white colleagues, families or peers of the horror of a particular racial injustice, we ask them to put a loved one in the victim’s place. We ask of them the impossible task of placing their white child in a park with a toy gun or walking home with Skittles…
Deepening Discourse: Frantz Fanon-“The Wretched of the Earth”
Frantz Omar Fanon was born on the French occupied Caribbean island of Martinique in 1925. After a tour in World War II as a member of the Free French Forces exposed Fanon to the depths of European anti-black racism he began studies in psychopathology and medicine, developing the strong existential analysis on anti black racism…
On American Riot
The legacy of riot has a unique and influential place in American discourse. This nation was steeled in its language from its very conception, yet the racially and culturally pigmented dialects of that language have been translated quite differently.
A Brief Introduction to the Web Editions
The name of this project is a bit of a misnomer. To suggest a one, true alchemy, or worse, that I possessed any knowledge of it, would be a misgiving. The word itself is a complex and murky synthesis of meanings and language, transmuted through Egyptian, Coptic, Greek, Arabic and Latin to arrive at it’s…
