Looking for Lost Cattle.

Some more of Kestrel’s amazing work: I finished off some tack for someone and got some pics with a new set-up for the background. I’ve set the doll up so he looks like he’s looking for lost cattle here. Will send a couple more of this set, of romal reins, braided headstall, pencil bosal (“bosalito”) with mecate and hanger and spade bit. I’m only showing the bosalito and mecate with hanger, here. The  saddle is totally wrong but it’s the only one finished at present.

I think the background works amazingly well, and serves to highlight such beautiful work. Click for full size!

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You can see the hand made sterling silver buckle pretty good in this pic. Also you can see the tassel (the vaqueros call it “la mota”).

You can see the hand made sterling silver buckle pretty good in this pic. Also you can see the tassel (the vaqueros call it “la mota”).

aaaand here you can see all the gear that a vaquero or buckaroo would use. First the young horse is taught to respond to the bosal, then gradually taught to carry the spade bit, while the rider uses first the mecate reins and then gradually starts using the romal reins.

aaaand here you can see all the gear that a vaquero or buckaroo would use. First the young horse is taught to respond to the bosal, then gradually taught to carry the spade bit, while the rider uses first the mecate reins and then gradually starts using the romal reins.

All images © Kestrel, all rights reserved.

Moisés Hernández.

Immersed

© Moisés Hernández.

Mexican designer Moisés Hernández’ dipped his Immersed Birds collection in dye to emulate the plumage of tropical fauna. The wooden birds are based on the form and colouring of toucans, hummingbirds and Mexican quetzals – chosen for their bright, contrasting feathers.Hernández used computer-numerically-controlled (CNC) technology to mill soft, continuous wooden shapes that replicate the structure of the birds’ bodies. Exaggerated tubes form tails, while slender spikes make for beaks.

The designer then developed an experimental painting technique that immersed sections of the wood in coloured water. This allowed Hernández to create overlapping and contrasting layers of colour, and play with transparency – leaving the grain of the wood visible beneath the dye.

“This way, the birds acquire a duality where handmade and machine-made complement each other, resulting in three decorative figures,” said the designer, who has exhibited his work around the world.

Immersed1

© Moisés Hernández.

Via Dezeen. Moisés Hernández’ site is full of wonders, oh, have a visit!

White Minority Rule…

USA-black-and-white

A checklist of how maintaining white minority rule can be achieved.

Well, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, the Trump Administration and the GOP are engaging in a plan that Karl Rove and his billionaire patrons, as well as the GOP have had in the mill for a few decades. What is the plan?

TO CONTINUE WHITE PRIVILEGE AND THE WHITE SUPREMACY HOLD ON ALL BRANCHES OF FEDERAL AND STATE GOVERNMENT BECAUSE THEY ARE AFRAID OF LOSING POWER DUE TO THE ON-GOING SHIFT IN POPULATION TO MORE PEOPLE OF COLOR AND FOREIGN BORN THAN WHITES. THEY WANT TO ESTABLISH AND/OR MAINTAIN WHITE MINORITY RULE IN AMERICA UNDER THE GUISE OF NATIONALISM AND PATIOTISM.

How are they going to do it? As follows:

  • They will create and carry out a Civil War, if necessary, in order to achieve their aims.
  • They will engage in massive violations of the United States Constitution and Laws to achieve their goals.
  • They will scapegoat certain segments of the population, mainly people of color, immigrants and “liberals”, but also the middle class.
  • They will engage in passing discriminatory and unconstitutional legislation that the populace will accept as long as it is not aimed at their particular segment and when it is eventually aimed at them, they will be too fearful to do anything about it, and no one will be left to defend them.
  • They will engage in policy efforts, law enforcement efforts, military efforts and judicial efforts to reduce the influx on “non-white” immigrants and reduce the present population of non-whites, and this will include efforts to control the growth of non-white populations.
  • They will continue to “militarize” local, state and national law enforcement agencies and use them to protect corporate interests domestically and abroad and they will utilize the “domestic military” for these same purposes.
  • They will privatize public lands and interests in land, such as minerals and fuels, and continue to privatize (Corporate Control) the safe drinking water supply while allowing Corporate interests to pillage the “public trust” without regard to environmental impacts and the impacts to safe drinking water and agricultural water.
  • They will engage administrative policy enforcement through “Executive Orders” and other mechanisms, even if some are ultimately struck down by courts, and will utilize the same to divide the populace into warring segments.
  • They will engage or attack the Judiciary Branch in order to achieve their aims or eventually destroy it.
  • They will depend upon their followers, and those unaffected by initial discriminatory laws and policy, to eventually accept surrender of their Constitutional rights in order to establish white people as the “ruling class”.
  • They will use the catchwords of “nationalism and patriotism” as euphemisms or “code words” for “white rule” and “white supremacy” and will make it clear to poor and uneducated whites and eventually all of the white population, that their aim is to maintain white rule and white privilege, for the good of America.
  • They will attack the Free Press and attempt to silence any “Corporate Owned” media by convincing their followers, and others who eventually understand and accept their aims (either out of self-interest or fear), and will engage in Policy efforts and Congressional efforts to restrict the Free Press and Free Expression that is the lynchpin of the Constitutional Republic.
  • They will incrementally replace the Free Press with media sources that spew only manufactured “alternative” facts or function as the propaganda arm for the achievement of their aims.
  • They will create false facts which their followers will accept as Gospel in order to destroy the Free Press and attack and destroy the credibility of the Judicial and Congressional branches of government, which the GOP will go along with in order to achieve “one-party” domination.

That’s just part of Harold A. Monteau’s checklist and column. I highly recommend clicking over and reading the whole thing. Also recommended: West Wing World: The Amusement Park That Is the White House.

The Colors of Home.

The second journey that Lufthansa #inspiredby HEIMWEH takes us on, “The Colors of Home”, followers Nepalese jewellery designer Arpana Rayamajhi from her adopted city of New York to her native land of Nepal, in search of the meaning of home.

In the film, Lufthansa accompanies Rayamajhi from New York back to her hometown of Kathmandu, where the designer searches for her creative and personal identity. Having experienced a childhood influenced by strong Nepalese women, Rayamajhi finds herself navigating a city that is at once familiar and distant. In between this tension, she must learn to reconnect with her roots, be inspired by different versions of creativity, and experience a new feeling of what it means to be home.

Beginning in Kathmandu, Lufthansa’s voyage transports the viewer through the journey of color, sound and vibrancy of the capital, as well as the city of Pokhara and its regional provinces. Sweeping views of the Himalayas alternate with vast cityscapes, showcasing the vast diversity of both the country and  Rayamajhi’s inner journey.

Via iGNANT.

Fighting for Cultural Survival.

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Everything Anywhere.

A steel blindfold covers the head of a human female figure, yet, unlike Lady Justice, her arms and legs too are bound. Fiber, in an interlocking braid, ties her wrists, wraps her neck and belly, and snakes down to hitch her legs at the ankles. Over her shoulder, however, her hands clutch the means to freedom from her bondage: a soft white blade digs beneath the rope around her neck. Salvation via ceramics.

Artist Cannupa Hanska Luger was born on the Standing Rock Reservation. He is of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, Austrian, and Norwegian heritage. A graduate with honors from The Institute of American Indian Arts, in 2016 he was the recipient of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Artists Fellowship Award for artists who “represent the cultural continuity of Native peoples in contemporary contexts, and are the creative voices of their communities.” His work in sculpture is figurative yet imaginative, assembling a panoply of cultural symbols—feathers, bones, textiles—into signifiers all his own. More mythopoeic than surreal, it frames him as a medium, a psychic intermediary between colonizer and Native, ancient tradition and modern understanding, soft clay and hard ceramics.

Nature.

Nature.

 

The Creators Project has an interview with Cannupa Hanska Luger, you can see and read much more!

http://www.cannupahanska.com/

Pebbles.

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These are depictions of the war in Syria – but they have been delicately composed with stones. They are the work of 52-year-old Syria-based artist and sculptor Nizar Ali Badr, who publishes pictures of his creations on Facebook.

[…]

When the Syrian conflict erupted in 2011, Nizar saw tragedies unfolding – homes destroyed, families displaced, children killed. He began to re-create the things he saw in stone.

“I didn’t have a camera to record any of my work,” he said, in a phone interview from Latakia, Syria. “As soon as I finished, I looked at it for some time and then destroyed it to make a new one.”

His stone art became a way to express his emotions and the worries that kept him awake at night, and to share those feelings with the world.

[…]

In the past, Nizar glued the stones on to cards, but now glue is too expensive. Nearly as soon as he has created a piece of art he dismantles it and begins piecing together a new image.

“I take photos of the artwork. This is the only way to preserve them and make sure people will see them,” he said.

[…]

Nizar has created more than 25,000 scenes from daily life in Syria since 2011, he said. He doesn’t sell any of his pieces; he never intended to make a living out of it.

“I am a human before anything else. The conflict has caused me a lot of pain and I sometimes can’t sleep at night,” he said.

“My only consolation is the work I do and therefore I don’t see it as a source of revenue. It is pure passion for stone art. I want to communicate human emotions that people everywhere in the world share, such as love, hope, and sadness.”

[…]

“When I saw all these families being forced to leave their homes, I felt pain. Why should anyone be forced to leave their home?”

Through his art, he tries to showcase the sacrifices people make and the risks they take to escape war and persecution, he said.

Many of his images depict families and children. He attempts to convey the suffering of the most vulnerable and the burden of being on the move.

Nizar Ali Badr’s works are searing in their poignancy, go and have a look at them all. Share them. Remind everyone you know that war is not desirable. It’s a reminder we Americans need right now.

See and read more here.

This Is Our Land.

Water Protectors Leave Oceti Sakowin Reluctantly.

‘Absolutely False’: No Contact From Trump Administration, Archambault Says.

marty-two-bulls-cartoon-dapl-020717
NODAPL; The Last Stand © Marty Two Bulls.
 
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No DAPL; Beware the Early Thaw © Marty Two Bulls.

Marriage Equality Reduces Teen Suicides.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Seth Wenig.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Seth Wenig.

A new study reveals something remarkable: marriage equality cuts down on teen suicide. This shows just how much social justice issues matter, and that they can be, all too often, a matter of life or death. LGB teens are prone to suicide, given that they often find themselves with no support system, no safety net, and see a bleak future in which they can all too easily envision never being accepted, and never having the same human rights as other people.

A new study found some stunning results: After same-sex marriage became legal on a state level, the rate at which young people attempted suicide in that state dropped significantly.

Published this week in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, the new study used data from the hundreds of thousands of students who participated in the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) between 1999 and 2015. Researchers from Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University, and Boston Children’s Hospital looked at 32 different states that legalized same-sex marriage in that span of time and found a consistent drop in teen suicide attempts in each state after marriage equality arrived.

Overall, the suicide rate attempt among all high school students dropped 7 percent in the year after marriage equality arrived in a state. For students who identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual or who were still questioning their orientation — a group whom the suicide attempt rate is much higher — the drop-off in suicide attempts was 14 percent after the arrival of marriage equality.

Because the effect was specific to each state as it legalized marriage equality, it cannot be dismissed as mere correlation. In fact, during the same span of time, suicide rates in the country were actually increasing across almost all age groups.

[…]

Regardless, the study offers a profound addition to the wealth of research already documenting the impact of what psychologists call “minority stress.” For example, a study published earlier this month in Australia found that LGB people who had strong social support and affirmation had normative rates of depression and anxiety, while only those who experienced rejection or had past experiences of trauma experienced higher rates. Several other studies in the U.S. have found that simply living in more conservative communities can have a negative impact.

Republicans, who so often tout themselves as being so very “pro-life”, but could not care less about the lives or health of women, and support the death penalty, are also staunchly against marriage equality. The fact that equality helps to maintain life is one which will, no doubt, not sway them in the least. For all their claims of pro-lifery, they don’t seem to be the least bit concerned with LGBT people dying. It’s rather difficult to not get the feeling they are cheering behind closed doors, so I imagine this news will be met with a renewed determination to kill marriage equality. Seeing as the Trump Regime is all set to rescind the Obama administration’s guidance protecting transgender students, which is little more than a license to harass and bully transgender kids, I’m sure an uptick in violence against transgender people and suicides will be seen. This is not a good. This is evil, absolutely evil, repulsive behaviour that any decent person should be ashamed of, and be willing to fight against, tooth and nail. Once again, the rethuglicans prove they are people who are pro-death, and they will go to any length to ostracize those they deem subhuman, and hope they will be driven to death, one way or another.

Full stories at Think Progress: one, two.

Confronting the Lasting Legacy of Colonialism.

Installation view, PARADISE COVE 1.0, 2015.

Installation view, PARADISE COVE 1.0, 2015.

At its best, Hawai’i’s art community reflects a multi-ethnic heritage as well as a critical desire to confront the legacy of colonialism that plays out in the present day against the people, land, and natural resources of the islands. For many long-time Hawai’i artists, there is an acceptance of a place where the market is not a priority. This is important work, hard work, work that must be done in the face of personal and economic sacrifice and the growing lack of institutional support, despite near-constant development and a booming tourist economy.

At its worst, Hawai’i’s art community is dated and alienating: full of the racist undertones and an underlying bitterness stemming from a lack of opportunities. Artists here can be unapologetically territorial. “Watufaka!” Given the whitewashed colonial injustices committed against Hawai’ians and throughout the Pacific, does it really come as a surprise? Meanwhile, artists trying to make a living face tremendous pressure to conform to touristic expectations and often end up sacrificing their vision to produce uninspired tropical seascapes or “designed by committee” public commissions for the state. Neither promotes meaningful engagement. Some artists go for broke and move to “the mainland,” never to be seen or heard from again. Some move home to surf or start a career, when they are jaded and tired, in their 40s. The rest just stop.

The whole essay, part of 50 States of Art, is at The Creators Project, and excellent reading. There’s more to see, too!

Crispus Attucks: A Shared Narrative.

Getty images - Simon and Schuster.

Getty images – Simon and Schuster.

Gyasi Ross has an excellent article up about Crispus Attucks, and the shared narrative between Black people and Indigenous people.

Since white colonization of this continent, Black and Native lives have always been valued less than other people.  The story of Crispus Attucks was an early illustration of how there seems to always be a reason why black and Native people get killed that somehow exonerates the authorities of guilt when they harm us.  “Self-defense.”  But, perhaps most importantly, the story of Crispus Attucks is about combined Native and black lineages that resisted, suffered, but through that resistance caused a revolution.

The year was 1770 and the scene was the Massachusetts Colony.  Boston was hot with anger and resentment toward England. 150 years after Pilgrims originally occupied the homelands of the Wampanoag people, the descendants of those Pilgrims felt like they were losing control of the land they called “home.” At that time slavery was legal in the Massachusetts Colony—white colonists enslaved Natives and blacks alike in Massachusetts.  For example, in 1638 during the so-called “Pequot Wars,” white colonists enslaved a group of Pequot women and children. However, most of the men and boys, deemed too dangerous to keep in the colony. Therefore white colonists transported them to the West Indies on the ship Desire and exchanged them for African slaves.

[…]

Crispus Attucks was both Indigenous and black and a product of the slave trade. He was brilliant in the survival skills that is common and necessary amongst both Indigenous people and black people since the brutal regime of white supremacy came to power on Turtle Island.  His mother’s name was Nancy Attucks, a Wampanoag Native who came from the island of Nantucket. The word “attuck” in the Natick language means deer. His father was born in Africa. His name was Prince Yonger and he was brought to America as a slave.

Attucks was himself born a slave. But he was not afraid to actively seek his own (or others’) liberation. For example he escaped from his slave master and was the focus of an advertisement in a 1750 edition of the Boston Gazette in which a white landowner offered to pay 10 pounds for the return of a young runaway slave.

“Ran away from his Master, William Brown of Framingham, on the 30th of Sept. last, a Molatto Fellow, about 27 Year of age, named Crispas, 6 Feet two Inches high, short curl’d Hair…,”

Attucks was not going back though—he never did.  He spent the next two decades on trading ships and whaling vessels.

[…]

The story of Crispus Attucks is powerful. Native and black people have been facing the same tribulations and common enemies for a very long time.  For most of the time since white people have been on this continent, black folk and Native folk have had no choice but to work together and have.  If we look at statistics today—from expulsion/suspension from schools, to the blacks and Natives going to prison, to getting killed by law enforcement—not a lot has changed.  We still share very common narratives and need each other.

We still need to work together.

Click on over to Indian Country Media Network for the full article.

Arctic Hysteria.

A still from Arke’s 1996 video Arctic Hysteria shows the artist naked and crawling across a photograph of Nuugaarsuk Point in Greenland. Photo courtesy of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Acquired with funding from Anker Fonden 
Poul Buchard/Brøndum & Co.

A still from Arke’s 1996 video Arctic Hysteria shows the artist naked and crawling across a photograph of Nuugaarsuk Point in Greenland. Photo courtesy of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Acquired with funding from Anker Fonden 
Poul Buchard/Brøndum & Co.

Most people have never heard of Pia Arke, which is a shame, because she was an artist who took on one huge subject: the colonial takeover of indigenous peoples by those who termed themselves “explorers” and “discoverers”. There’s a great deal of horror inherent in any indigenous peoples experiences with colonialism. Unsurprisingly, indigenous women got the worst of it.

In the spring of 1995, Danish-Greenlandic artist Pia Arke was digging through the archives of New York City’s Explorers Club. She was searching for maps, ethnographic images, and scientific miscellany that she could repurpose into collages that confront Greenland’s colonial past. Arke knew early 20th-century adventurers often, by turns, demeaned and romanticized her Inuit ancestors. Even so, one photo from American explorer Robert E. Peary’s collection shocked her: a native woman, topless and screaming, restrained by two fur-clad and seemingly untroubled white men. A curator told Arke the woman could have been suffering from a madness called Arctic hysteria.

More than 20 years later, Arke’s mesmerizing film Arctic Hysteria, which she created the year after she found that dark photo, was looping endlessly in an alcove at Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Situated in a small town along the Baltic Sea about 50 kilometers north of Copenhagen, the Louisiana Museum enjoys the kind of international acclaim that makes it a dream exhibit space for most artists. Arke’s work was part of last year’s star-studded exhibit Illumination, which featured such luminaries as Ai Weiwei, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, and Gerhard Richter. The flashiest Arke piece on display was Legende I-V, a series of five collages of Greenlandic maps and sepia-toned family snapshots layered with imported commodities such as rice, sugar, and coffee. Legende I-V is physically imposing—it dominated an entire gallery wall—and hauntingly beautiful. The foodstuffs function both symbolically and texturally, the photographs evoke the warmth of kinship, and the cartographic lines of Greenland, stamped with place names referencing colonial explorers (Peary Land, Humboldt Glacier, and Kane Bassin, for example), loom insistently over everyone.

Arke’s Arctic Hysteria is equally magnetic. The performance, which lasts six minutes, is silent and consists almost entirely of one scene: Arke crawling naked across a giant black-and-white photo of Nuugaarsuk Point, a spit of land at the terminus of a C-shaped bay. The artist lived there, outside the small town of Narsaq, Greenland, with her parents and siblings in the late 1960s. In the video, Arke strokes the artificial landscape, rolls across it, and sniffs it like an animal. Then she methodically rips the entire thing to shreds, gathers the curled shards of paper, and lets them fall across her shoulders and thighs. The intimacy of the performance and the title’s historical allusion are classic Arke.

[…]

Historical context points to alternative interpretations. Inuit women labored at the very bottom of the social hierarchy on Peary’s expeditions and in his camps, expected to sew, fish, carry wood, and submit to the Americans’ sexual desires. Peary, for example, fathered two sons with his Inuit laundress, Ahlikasingwah. His navigator, Robert Bartlett, viewed one woman’s hysteria as simple protest, or “pure cussedness.” Accounts described women who seemed intent on escape or dissent leaping over the ship’s railings or shouting for a knife. Expedition member Donald MacMillan recounted finding a woman named Inawaho naked and screaming, presumably unaware of her surroundings and out of her mind. But as soon as MacMillan pulled out his camera, Inawaho hurled huge chunks of ice at him and later begged him to destroy the photos. Were these women, in fact, crazy? Or were they reacting perfectly rationally—even bravely—to their circumstances?

You can read and see more here.