Oh Happy Day!

The genocide which began in 2003 in Darfur, a southern region of the Sudan, has, to date, resulted in the death of over 450,000 people, the displacement of over a million, and the rape and psychological terror of countless more. Yet, hope that it may soon end is on the horizon! Today, the president of the Sudan Omar Al-Bashir and the the leaders of the most powerful rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement, have signed a ceasefire. Only time will tell what ultimately happens, but it's a step in the right direction.


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/24/world/africa/24briefs-sudanbrf.html?ref=world

The Anti-Invictus

The recently-released film Invictus tells the story of how Nelson Mandela was able to use a sporting event, the 1995 Rugby World Cup, to help heal deep racial fissures in South African society and move the country further towards reconciliation.

As Foreign Policy's latest photo essay makes abundantly clear, however, sport does not always play such a commendatory role in promoting human rights. In their essay, journalists Kayvan Farzaneh and Andrew Swift show how young children are being used to do hard labor in preparation for the 2010 Commonwealth Games in New Delhi, and how New Delhi's homeless shelters and slums are being destroyed in preparation for the games. In many cases the destruction of shelters and slums is causing this already vulnerable segment of the population to freeze to death. A wide range of human rights issues are in balance here, including these children's right to education (Article 25 of the UDHR), their parents' right to an adequate standard of living (Article 26), and most fundamentally, the right of everyone to some kind of shelter - so that no one has to freeze to death.

Check out the photo essay, entitled "Bricks for Bread and Milk," here: http://tinyurl.com/ylgagho

Express Your Rights starts TODAY!

Sessions today start at 4 PM in the Pendleton Room of the Michigan Union. Sessions today include:

4PM-5PM: Carol Jacobsen: Women's Criminalization, Clemency, and Human Rights

5PM-6PM: Nick Tobier: Human Centered Design and How Collective Creativity Enables Change

6PM-7PM: Danielle Abrams: Burritos and Bulldykes: Performance Activity in the Gay Ghetto of the Mission District in San Francisco

7:30PM-8:30PM (Ballroom, Michigan League): Emmanuel Jal: WAR CHILD: A Story of Survival

Look forward to seeing you all today!

Carol Jacobsen

"Carol Jacobsen is an award-winning social documentary artist whose works in video and photography address issues of women's criminalization and censorship. Her art has been exhibited and screened at venues worldwide, including New York's Lincoln Center, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Centre de Cultural Contemporanea in Barcelona, the Kunstforum in Bonn, the Brussels International Film Festival, Rome's Temple Gallery, the Photography Biennial of Wanganui, New Zealand, Human Rights Watch of Beijing, and by many grassroots organizations.

Jacobson has received awards and grants from organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts, the Paul Robeson Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Center for New Television, the Women in Film Foundation, Art Matters, Prostitutes of New York, and No More Nice Girls. Her published articles on art, feminism and politics have appeared in Art in America, Exposure, New York Law Review, Social Text, Lower East Side Journal, and other publications. Her work is represented by Denise Bibro Fine Art in Manhattan.

Carol Jacobsen is the 2005-06 Human Rights Fellow at the University of Michigan. In addition to her teaching responsibilities in art and women's studies at the University of Michigan, Jacobsen serves as Director of the Michigan Women's Clemency Project. In that capacity, she advocates for the human rights of women prisoners and seeks freedom for women wrongly incarcerated. Her projects have been sponsored by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, COYOTE, Women's Prison Association of New York, the American Civil Liberties Association, and other non-profit organizations."

Check out her "phototext essay" about women in prison: http://vv.arts.ucla.edu/terminals/jacobsen/jacobsen.html


Source: http://art-design.umich.edu/people/detail/carol_jacobsen

Nick Tobier

Nick Tobier answers the question "why do you make art?" Part of the Why Series now airing on Michigan Television and the Michigan Channel in between regular programming.

Danielle Abrams

"Danielle Abrams is an interdisciplinary artist who works in performance and video. She is a monologist, a talk-show host, a ballroom dance teacher, and a stand-up comedian of yesteryear. She channels a multiracial cast of family members, and incites participatory extravaganzas. Abrams performs at art galleries, museums, theaters, and performance spaces. Her characters also wax poetic from park benches, barbeque "butch burgers", and lead Conga lines through a Borscht-Belt mirage. Family and social histories are the material Abrams kneads to create real-time work about people, neighborhoods, and eras. Recalling a post-World's Fair Flushing; a Coney Island heyday; Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn; and a 1950's Harlem, Abrams utilizes the tropes of personae to inquire about social relationships and cultures. She challenges our reliance upon origin and biography through embodying characters of multi-gendered and cross-cultural kin. In Abrams' performances, she reveals the frolic, toxicity, poignancy, and revolutionary potential that is created at the intersection of diverse communities."

Source: http://www.danielleabrams.com/



"In Early Bird, Dew Drop Lady (performed by Danielle Abrams) converses with a community of seniors about Passover, Florida, and her lineage which is not only Jewish, but Black too. Less an Early Bird and more like a Canary in a Coal Mine, Dew Drop Lady surveys the toxic beliefs that lie latent in the minds of a homogeneous community."

Michael Simons and Paul Shoebridge

This is what they look like:







"Michael Simons and Paul Shoebridge are award-winning creative directors, most notable for Adbusters magazine.
They have conceptualized magazines, books, television spots, and produced major international advocacy campaigns, including TV Turnoff, Buy Nothing Day, and the 'Blackspot Sneaker'.
They are co-authors, along with Mia Kirshner and J.B Mackinnon, on the book I Live Here (Pantheon, 2008):
"A visually stunning narrative in which the lives of refugees and displaced people become at once personal and global. It is a raw and intimate journey to crises in four corners of the world: war in Chechnya, ethnic cleansing in Burma, globalization in Mexico, and AIDS in Malawi."
They were creative collaborators, with Adbusters founder Kalle Lasn, on the book Design Anarchy (2006).
Co-founders of the I Live Here Foundation:
"Dedicated to telling the stories of silenced and unheard people through a series of books and other media projects about our world. We establish creative writing programs in areas where we work, building an artistic dialogue between strangers."
Illustration and art direction, including the 2008 season graphics, Ars Nova Theatre, "New York's premier hub for emerging artists and new work" and cover design for the Village Voice.
They have won international and national awards for magazine design, as well as a Webby award. Their work has been featured in more than 40 international publications, on CNN and MTV, as well as in documentaries for networks such as BBC, PBS and Dutch National Television and in numerous visual exhibitions.
They have spoken internationally on issues of politics, art and design."

Source: http://www.thegoggles.org/index.php?/about/#