Check these out!

A few articles and videos worth checking out!


CinderFella - a twist on the heteronormative Disney stories

Shadeism from ammabia productions on Vimeo.

This documentary short is an introduction to the issue of shadeism, the discrimination that exists between the lighter-skinned and darker-skinned members of the same community. This documentary short looks specifically at how it affects young womyn within the African, Caribbean, and South Asian diasporas. Through the eyes and words of 5 young womyn and 1 little girl - all females of colour - the film takes us into the thoughts and experiences of each. Overall, 'Shadeism' explores where shadeism comes from, how it directly affects us as womyn of colour, and ultimately, begins to explore how we can move forward through dialogue and discussion. Worth a watch!

Sexism, Racism, and Swimming: Article about the "controversy" over Ye Shiwen's world record gold medal swim, which basically amounts to the Western world being racist against the Chinese.

Jessica Colotl: Eye Of The Storm. Jessica Colotl is an undocumented immigrant who was brought to America as a child – and who now faces deportation. Reporter Ryan Schill and artist Greg Scott bring to life the story that has become a flash point for America's immigration debate. Really great comic.

A story of a Muslim lesbian couple. Family can surprise you sometimes.

Remnants of Anti-Chinese Violence. This New York Times photo gallery highlights the work of Seattle photojournalist Tim Greyhavens, whose new online project, No Place for Your Kind, visits and photographs the sites of anti-Chinese incidents and vicious racial violence in the American West that occurred over a century ago. The photos are mundane, but the history behind them are not.

But We're Not Muslim! Article on the Sikh murders and stereotyping. When minorities feel they have to distinguish themselves from the "bad" minorities, what are we actually telling people? It's just perpetuating the stereotypes.

Why Art? Community Art Project Video

Ever wondered what the point of doing art was, what benefits there are to participating in the arts, or how you might get involved? You've come to watch the right video!

I've been involved in a year long community arts project with the Centre of Multicultural Youth. The artist in residency project started off as focused on the very broad topics of building relationships between young people of color and art organizations, developing best practice models for art organizations, and ways to encourage families and young people to participate in art. Over a series of brainstorming sessions and discussions, we spoke a lot about of the role of art, identity and labeling, addressing social issues with art, skills developed during the process of art, challenges art practioners and organizations face, and more. Eventually, we narrowed down our focus to getting families and young people involved in the arts through examining why art is important. We interviewed a bunch of people over Nov 2011-Jan 2012 (including me!!) and came up with the short documentary video below. I'll shut up now and let you watch the video because it is AWESOME and speaks for itself.


The long term intention is to build on this short video and develop a feature length documentary on the many issues touched upon in this video. But for now, the goal is to get the word out to as many people as we can about this video. We're planning on distributing it to as many families and young people as we can. But they won't be our only target audience - it's important for city councils, community organizers, youth workers, and funding bodies to watch this video too. If you can forward it to your networks and get them to watch it, it will really help!

Guerrilla Girls: Conscience of the Art World

I went to a lecture tonight by two of the founding members of the Guerrilla Girls. Best decision I made in a while, I must say. The lecture was AWESOME, very enlightening and humorous. I remember the first poster I saw of them was of a nude female statue with a gorilla mask on and the caption, "Do women have be naked to be in US museums? Only 3% of artists in the Met Museum are female, but 83% of the nudes are female". Apparently they did a resurveying of the Met a few months ago and now the statistics read, 4% female artists and 74% nude female statues. So CLEARLY, there's a lot of work to be done still about the representation of female artists and artists of color.

Guerrilla Girls 2007 Shanghai poster
The two Guerrilla Girls spoke a lot about the lack of museum ethics (trustees paying their way to show their private collections, fixed art auctions, tokenism), the evolving set of issues they've addressed over the years (from complete lack of female artists in exhibition to token multicultural or female artists to the bad money issues to other social justice issues), politics, and many a museum protest. Who knew museum directors make so much money?? The black market for art is 5th behind drugs, sex, guns, and human trafficking. I mean, I kinda knew that art was lucrative, but not THAT lucrative. It's funny how the museums have now started to invite the Guerrilla Girls to exhibit their work and they've taken the opportunity to make some criticial pieces of tough love against the system. But it does get the message out.

The take home message at the end (and directives for future aspiring Guerrilla Girls):

1. Complain, complain, complain. Every person who stands up to demand more female and minority presence in museums and other institution makes a difference.
2. Be anonymous. There's a lot of power in the mask - it takes the focus off the personality and on the issue.
3. Don't be afraid to make liberal use of the F word - FEMINISM.
4. Do one thing at a time and if it doesn't work, try something else. There are a lot of social justice issues out there and trying to battle them all at once is pretty overwhelming. Just take it one step at a time and don't give up.
5. Be funny! A little humor goes a long way in getting awareness about social justice issues.
6. Tough love to the system! Don't be afraid to speak your mind about it.

Mother's Day

Happy Mother's Day! We often think of Mother's Day as a holiday of those Hallmark cards with the perfect blond mother with her perfect children giving her breakfast in bed and dear husband with flowers and chocolate. But really, there is so much more to motherhood than that. So here's to all the strong women out there, the single mothers, the women of color, the disabled, the queer, the incarcernated, the poor, the stay-at-home carers, the professionals, and everyone in between. Keep fighting the good fight. Today is the radical envisioning of what can happen when you put women in the center of action. Make sure to check out the Strong Families Initiative, read the stories from all the complexities of motherhood, from nursing to sexuality to working to race and immigration, and show some appreciation for the women in your life today!

Mother's Day card from the Strong Families Initiative

Style = Substance

I came across a great little article yesterday. There are so many stories on the women who didn't fit into the same old depressive stereotypes of minorities in the US, but we always hear about their hardships and the pain, never their ability to just be normal women. Here is a short article celebrating just those women, defying the time and age while looking real slick (poofy hair and everything).

Excerpt:

Here’s what I wish I knew back when I was in high school and so proud of myself for being the exceptionally compassionate, caring person I believed myself to be: focusing only on the pain and degradation of any oppressed group of people does another kind of damage to those individuals. It turns them into stereotypes of pain and damage and ignores everything else about them, including whether they’re funny, or stupid, or weird, or brilliant, or irreverent, or stylish, or creative, or boring, or selfish, or anything else that people are capable of being. It takes away their complexity and vastness and reduces people to one-dimensional figures. So yes, this is a post about style, but more than that, it’s a post about not denying these girls the dignity of their multitudes.

Never underestimate the power of small acts. Even something as trivial as hairspray can be a radical act.

Tram Community Art Project

This is a bit of a different post from the norm - I wanted to share the results from my community art project that just finished up.

Last month I finished up a community art project with Melbourne's Centre of Multicultural Youth (CMY) and Yarra Trams. It was my first community art project and I loved it! The task was to come up with art designs on the themes of diversity and multiculturalism for two tram stops along the Route 96 line on the corner of Elgin and Nicholson Street in Carlton. Yarra Trams wanted to install artwork in hopes to preventing graffiti on the tram stops and to promote a positive image of youth. A team of 4 young people, including myself, and CMY's artist in residence, Reeham Hakem, started working on the project in September 2011, with lots of discussions and brainstorms on what multiculturalism and diversity meant, how it can be represented via art, and what messages we wanted to send.







Our brainstorming sessions

We came up with two different concepts. The first was a text based design that answered the statement: "I am more than ___ ". Each one of us is more than what others might perceive us to be. No one is simply a face, and no one can be taken for face value or stereotyped under one word. We decided to go around Carlton to ask people to complete the statement "I am more than" and the various 'answers' would make up a word cloud for the design on the tram stop.



Text based design tram: Before

The collection of the words was great fun and we got to talk with a variety of people, from university students to shop owners to maintenance workers to schoolchildren, which sampled the diversity of the Carlton community. One kind restaurant owner even treated us to a pizza lunch!



The text design

The second design was based on the idea that we all have different paths and backgrounds, but come together to form a larger diverse community. We used abstract shapes to represent this and the final design was done in aerosol spray. The panels were stenciled before they were installed onto the tram stop and then we spent a week doing touch up work on the tram stop itself. It was pretty miserable weather during that week, complete with rain and wind, and every 15 minutes, there'd be a tram running by. But we got it done in time.



Aerosol tram: Before



Stenciling the panels



Installing the artwork

The artwork was officially launched in February 2012 after 6 months hard work. I had a lot of fun with the team, both in the discussions we had and in the art making. And the idea of transforming a public space into an unexpected art exhibition is awesome.



Text design tram stop





Aerosol tram stop





Thanks, Route 96 team! You guys have really inspired me to continue doing community art projects! =)

Translations of sustainable living brochures

I just found something really cool - Environment Victoria in conjunction with their Sustainability for Diverse Communities Resource Hub has provided translations of various sustainable living brochures. They're all available here. The translations were done by different organizations so the topics vary from climate change to water to chemicals to gardening and food. I think it's a great idea to have this information for different communities in different languages, especially considering how multicultural and diverse communities can be. Hopefully once people get access to this information, they can act on it.