From 1960 to 1971, the FBI's Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), collected files on more than 250 African American writers, artists, politicians, and activists who they perceived as domestic threats. Among the non-consensual participants of this illegal surveillance program were Malcolm X, James Baldwin, and Marion Stokes -- three key figures whose...
Alternatingly celebratory and apocalyptic, moon Over miami -- a collaborative album curated by Archival Feedback, a long-time duo consisting of Emile Milgrim and T. Wheeler Castillo -- subverts the old standard of the same name with a series of remixes and re-imaginings. Written in 1935 by songwriters Joe Burke and...
John Lewis gets stopped in airports. A lot. In John Lewis: Good Trouble, a new documentary by director Dawn Porter, there’s a scene where we follow Lewis through an airport terminal as strangers approach him to call him a hero and an inspiration. His son says, with a rueful laugh,...
Welcome to Cancer season! The Sun is now in the sign ruled by the Moon. This is a time with real spiritual weight, where our ego meets our inner child and the energy of the moment feels positively tidal. Cancer is the soil that feeds our roots, the feathers that...
When filmmaker Matt Wolf (Recorder, Wild Combination) first saw photos of eight scientists dressed in red jumpsuits and standing beside a glass pyramid in the Arizona desert, he assumed they were characters from a sci-fi movie. He soon discovered that between 1991 and 1993, the scientists lived in a gleaming,...
Music preservation efforts go beyond strictly archival functions. They challenge our understanding of certain genres that have been historically associated with just a few major cities. For individual musicians who have never profited from their work finally, preservation groups can also provide some small restitution — or at least shed...
Based upon a true story, Nancy Kelly's Thousand Pieces of Gold is an affecting and slow-building narrative exploring issues of autonomy, captivity and dependence in the economy of the Gold Rush. The film calls attention to the hardships faced by Chinese Americans in the 19th century, such as human trafficking,...
Since the Dot-Com Boom of the 1990s, San Francisco, California, has left its hippie and counterculture roots behind to become the poster child for the affordability crisis. With that has come the slow exodus of its creative class, who, priced out, have been forced to seek cheaper alternatives. At one time...
Photography by Naomi Ishisaka "But those are the most narrow parameters!" balks my well-meaning white friend. We are on our way to On The Boards to see dancer and choreographer Dani Tirrell's latest ensemble piece, Black Bois, and unrelatedly, I have just been articulating my latest dating quandary. As a first-generation Chinese-American...
Some artists are prolific, churning out project after project at a speed that leaves onlookers wondering about their superhuman pace. Some have a much slower process -- painstaking in intricate detail -- and Eric Beltz is one of the latter. A drawing teacher at University of Santa Barbara, Beltz is a...
With her latest series, Material Speculation: ISIS, Iran-born art activist and educator Morehshin Allahyahri has been using 3D modeling and 3D printing to create her own reconstructions of artifacts destroyed by ISIS. A thorough research project involving different archeologists, historians, and museum staff — and with 3D printable files to...
Nonkeen's Frederic Gmeiner and Nils Frahm grew up in a suburb of Hamburg, the German port city famous for the Beatles' pre-fame residency, nestled up near the North Sea. As they were meeting one another in primary school, their future bandmate, Sebastian Singwald, was growing up on the other...