Daily Archives: June 28, 2020

The coronavirus pandemic has not only pressured Americans retirement savings but it has also upended the very timing of retirement for many, accelerating financial decisions and forcing people to understand their options for income and health care.

Among those leaving the workforce between January and April, 60% say they planned to retire rather than return, according to a report by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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Barrons brings retirement planning and advice to you in a weekly wrap-up of our articles about preparing for life after work.

The onset of the Covid-19 crisis led to a wave of earlier than planned retirements, the report said.

Having such a big life event happen sooner than expected requires a quick financial health check-up, including your income and expenses. Here are some tips to help navigate an unexpected retirement or choose whether to return to work.

If youre of the age where you can withdraw funds from a qualified retirement account without penalty, the 4% rule may no longer apply. The rule of thumb, which says an investor can withdraw 4% of the balance in the first year of retirement and adjust that dollar amount for 2% inflation each year during a 30-year retirement, was built for an age when interest rates werent near historic lows and markets not clouded by a pandemic.

Theres no one-size-fits-all strategy for determining retirement savings and spending since factors such as health, risk tolerance, and longevity vary, experts say. But for those hit with unexpected early retirement, a more cautious, 3% withdrawal rate may be prudent, says Maria Bruno, head of U.S. wealth planning research at Vanguard Group.

A 2019 report from the Government Accountability Office said 48% of Americans ages 55 and older dont have any retirement savings or a pension plan. And those who do have retirement savings dont have enoughwith those between 56 and 61 years old having an average of $163,577, according to the Economic Policy Institute. According to AARP, a rule of thumb says youll need 70% to 80% of your pre-retirement income once you retire.

It could be tempting to claim Social Security early, but experts typically suggest holding out as long as possible to maximize benefits. You can tap Social Security starting at 62, but the amount will be 30% less throughout retirement than if you had waited until full retirement agewhich is 67 for those born 1960 or later.

Waiting even longeruntil age 70means your monthly payout would be 24% higher than if you start tapping benefits at full retirement age. For 2020, the Social Security Administration expects to pay a maximum benefit of $3,790 a month for those who delayed benefits until age 70.

For people considering taking Social Security early, I suggest pausing, Bruno says. It may not be the best long-term decision to leave all that extra money on the table.

One way to avoid claiming Social Security before maximum benefits is to retire only partially. Retiring doesnt have to be an all-or-nothing decision. Part-time work or consultancythat can come in handy to bridge any financial gaps, says Jill Hitchcock, senior executive vice president of the U.S. private client group of Fisher Investments.

If you decide to take Social Security before your full retirement benefits kick in, financial advisors say to earn only up to the limit for that year or penalties dont make it worthwhile. In 2020, you can earn $18,240 and still collect Social Security. Earning more than that threshold, however, means you will have $1 withheld from your Social Security for every $2 earned above that limit.

Retiring early may equal the loss of employer-sponsored health insurance, assuming you had such a benefit. You can get an extension of your companys health insurance through the federal Cobra law for typically 18 months. The catch, of course, is that the retiree must pay the entire cost of the health-insurance premium rather than just the portion usually paid as an employee. The cost can be substantial.

A retiree also may find private health insurance, such as under the Affordable Care Acts federal exchanges. That would also be where to look when Cobra lapses and before Medicare eligibility kicks in at 65.

Health care is the big elephant in the room until theyre Medicare eligible, Bruno said. Being on the open market for health insurance prior to Medicare means much more substantial costs.

According to a Mercer-Vanguard research report, the premium cost of a typical bronze or silver plan on the federal exchanges at age 64 is about twice the cost of most Medicare coverage at age 65. For example, a silver plan on the marketplace would cost a 64-year-old $12,800 in premiums and out-of-pocket expenses.

Once 65, Medicare costs may be less but theyll still be hefty. A typical 65-year-old woman, for example, was predicted to have $5,200 in annual health-care expenses in 2018, even with purchasing a Medicare supplement plan and a standard prescription plan, according to the research report from Mercer-Vanguard.

Still, even once someone qualifies for Medicare, many costs arent covered. Supplemental insurance and long-term care policies may be necessary to provide comfort against unexpected medical costs, said Jeffrey Herman, wealth planning strategist at JPMorgan Chase.

Many people are living longer. The end of life and life-expectancy has changed. You have to plan for that, Herman said.

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To Retire or to Return to Work? Thats the Question Many Are Asking Amid the Pandemic. - Barron's

Chesa Boudin speaks at an August Candidates Forum in 2019 in San Francisco

San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin announced that, in an effort to ensure the staff in his office work to promote racial justice, he invited them to join him in taking a racial equity pledge to commit to eradicate inequities in our criminal justice system. District Attorney Boudin and staff members vowed to fight racial injustice by adopting the pledge at the conclusion of an officewide racial justice training.

Boudin also announced the launch of a new Training, Culture, Diversity and Inclusion Division within the office to further these goals and action steps to reduce racial disparities both in the office and in the legal system overall.

There is power in words: Our office is committed to racial justice, said District Attorney Boudin. With this oath, we commit ourselves to using the considerable power we have as prosecutors to promote racial justice and to combatting the racial disparities in our system.

District Attorney Boudin has prioritized combatting racial injustice since his campaign and during his first few months in office. In recent weeks, however, with the killings of numerous Black people at the hands of police and a national reckoning around racial injustice, District Attorney Boudin felt it was important not to just advocate for policies advancing racial equity, but to invite all staff members to personally pledge to use their positions to promote racial justice and holding others accountable.

The pledge reads as follows:

The San Francisco District Attorneys office does not tolerate any form of bias, including on the basis of race, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, status, religion, disability, or age.

I _____ acknowledge that people in these categories have borne the burdens of systemic discrimination manifested in inequitable social, environmental, economic and criminal justice policies, practices, and investments. The legacy of these government actions has caused deep disparities throughout San Franciscos criminal justice system.

I ______promise that I will not tolerate bias, and commit to eradicate inequities, in our criminal justice system; that I will never betray my character, my integrity or the public trust; and that I will always have the courage to hold myself and others accountable for our actions.

In addition to the pledge, the San Francisco District Attorneys Office has committed to additional steps towards combatting racism and racial injustice, including a new division dedicated to diversity and inclusion. District Attorney Boudin recently hired experienced attorney Arcelia Hurtado to spearhead these efforts as the Managing Attorney for the Training, Culture, Diversity and Inclusion Department.

Ms. Hurtado, a graduate of Berkeley Law, is bilingual, bicultural, and deeply committed to serving populations that would not otherwise have access to legal representation. She is the former Executive Director of Equal Rights Advocates, a national womens rights organization, and the former Deputy Director and Immigration Policy Advisor at the National Center for Lesbian Rights, a national civil rights organization dedicated to achieving LGBT equality through litigation, legislation, policy, and public education.

I am grateful to District Attorney Boudin for not only recognizing that prosecutors bear great responsibility to prioritize issues of racial injustice and inequities in various forms but also actively working to address them, said Ms. Hurtado. I am eager to move our office forward towards our collective goals of eliminating racial and other disparities in our legal system and in our workplaces.

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SF District Attorney Adopts Racial Equity Pledge to Combat Racial Injustice in the Criminal Legal System - The Peoples Vanguard of Davis

By Sajid Khan

Yesterday, we got word that Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen withdrew a whistleblower complaint against me over my blog posts where I highlighted the role of prosecutors in perpetuating police violence and dehumanizing black people through their use of the mass incarceration machine and demanded accountability of DAs offices and system wide, sweeping criminal-justice reform.

I am thankful and humbled that so many people and organizations rallied to support me, my free speech freedoms, our collective First Amendment Rights, and this cause to manifest Black Lives Matter and to hold DAs offices to task for their complicity in the belittling of Black lives:

My lawyer Charlie Gerstein and Civil Rights Corp, Raj Jayadev & Silicon Valley De-Bug, Reverend Jethroe Moore and the Silicon Valley Branch of the NAACP, Zahra Billoo and CAIR San Francisco Bay Area, my manager Santa Clara County Alternate Defender David Epps, Scott Hechinger of Zealous, Radley Balko of The Washington Post, Alameda County Public Defender Brendon Woods, San Francisco Public Defender Mano Raju, Jon Rapping and Gideons Promise, my brother Suhail Khan, my Aider & Abettor Podcast Partner, friend and public defender colleague Avi Singh, Oscar Bobrow, Michael Ogul and everyone at The California Public Defenders Association (CPDA), The Pacific Juvenile Defense Center (PJDC), The National Association for Public Defense (NAPD), Farhana Khera and Muslim Advocates, Wajahat Ali, Faisal Ghori

Evan Kuluk, Emi Young, Kaylie Simon, Brandon Li and The Contra Costa County Public Defender Racial Justice & Diversity Committee, Nikhil Ramnaney and the Los Angeles County Public Defender Union

Countless colleagues at the Santa Clara County Public and Alternate Defenders Offices including, but not limited to, Kristin Carter, Will Brotherson, Michelle Vasquez, Tony Flemmer, Barbie Wolfe, Jaime Feder, Mondonna Mostofi, Chris Givens, Krista Henneman, Nisreen Baroudi, Madelyn Rodrigues, Sarah Ruby, Jennifer Redding, Katarina Pena, Ashanti Mitchell, Carlie Ware, Jung Le, Anjali Bhargava, Patrick Hoopes, Brett Hammon, Sung Lee, Brian Matthews, Mahira Siddiqui-Mir, Andres Del Alcazar and Heather Harris

Attorney colleagues Jaime Leanos, Emily Galvin, Iman Boundaoui, Leah Gillis, Cuong Nguyen, Negad Zaky, Janice Lu, Stefan Kennedy, Sabir Ibrahim, Asha Vora, Indrani Balaratnam, Ash Kalra, Somil Trivedi, Madalyn Wasilczuk and Thompson Sharkey, the 650(!) public defenders from across the country who signed a letter supporting me and the dozens of friends and strangers who have sent me messages and checked in on me over the last few weeks.

We roll deep.

I am deeply disappointed, hurt and sad that Mr. Rosen and members of his office read my editorial words calling for District Attorneys offices to be held to task by the public for their role in perpetuating police violence and dehumanizing black lives as a call for violent protest or for protests that could result in violence against members of this union.

The rush to that place of fear belittles and diminishes my years of meaningfully living and contributing in this community, my 12 years as devoted, ethical, respectful advocate for the people I serve, and my decade of efforts to contribute to the democracy of this county, state and country through the expression of free speech and engagement in dialogue. I find it deeply troubling that, despite my track record of non-violent work and expression, that Mr. Rosen and members of his office assumed either that I was calling for violence or that people that read my work and that I associate with would be incited to violence.

Im thankful that Mr. Rosen withdrew his unreasonable, misplaced, baseless whistleblower complaint so that I can, with peace of mind, continue to zealously work as a public defender serving Santa Clara County and honoring the people Ive been entrusted to represent as I have for 12 years.

But I and we must not be satisfied.

We will not be satisfied until Mr. Rosen apologizes for his use of ugly rhetoric against me and the communities I represent everyday through my skin color, beard and name.

Rosen publicly and repeatedly stated that I, through my written word, threatened his staff, endangered public servants and that I did so aiming to incite anger and destruction toward (the DAs office). He essentially called me a terrorist.

Zahra Billoo of CAIR said it best: at a time when Islamophobia is increasing, accusing Mr. Khan of inciting violence has far-reaching implications. It is not lost on us that Mr. Khan is a man of color, a Muslim, and someone who routinely works to protect members of marginalized communities from targeting by local police and prosecution by your office. Your rush to judgment demonstrates an implicit bias, borrowing from false portrayals of members of our communities as suspect, terrorist, and violent.

On this point, Reverend Jethroe Moore of the NAACP also responded to Mr. Rosen, Your response to his comments reflects a culture filled with negative portrayals of ideas about African Americans, and in this case Muslim Americans as violent, as dangerous, as terrorist, as less than human.

Mr. Rosens inflammatory, incendiary, personal accusations against me are unacceptable and he must apologize.

But ultimately, were not satisfied because this isnt and was never about me.

This is about tearing down and revolutionizing systems rooted in slavery, lynchings and subjugation of black people, constructs that perpetuate police violence and that pervasively belittle and devalue black lives. This is about holding DAs offices like Rosens to task for their continued practices and policies of mass incarceration that result in the systemic policing, caging, decimation and dehumanization of black lives and communities.

Se we will not be satisfied until Mr. Rosen and DAs across the Bay Area, State and Country adopt real, meaningful, tangible reforms to ensure that the value of black lives are no longer cheapened and to remedy the hideously disproportionate number of black lives languishing in our jails and prisons and impacted by our mass incarceration monster.

As Raj Jayadev of Silicon Valley De-Bug and I wrote in an editorial published by the San Jose Mercury News on June 16, Mr. Rosen can start by saying Black Lives Matter.

He can require that all prosecutors attend jail and prison tours so they witness the machine of mass incarceration in operation and the countless black people and people of color that are caged within it.

Rosen wrote, People who are not a danger to our community should never be held behind bars because they cant afford bail. Instead, he can demand that People who are not a danger to our community should never be held behind bars. His office can stop asking for money bail in any case. His office can respect the presumption of innocence and not detain people pretrial absent an imminent, violent threat to public safety.

He can stop the prosecution of kids, historically mostly black and brown boys, as adults and stop sending them to adult prisons for adult prison terms.

He can stop the use of the death penalty and stop seeking mandatory life without the possibility of parole (LWOP) sentences, punishments that define peoples lives, disproportionately black and brown men, by their worst moments and ignore their prospects for rehabilitation.

He can ensure that people are not disproportionately punished and imprisoned by stopping the prosecution of 3 strikes law status enhancements and by not locking people up for technical, non-criminal probation violations.

He can combat racially motivated policing of minority communities by ending racist gang enhancements and the racist policing tactics that these prosecutions live on.

He can join the national and statewide movements to shrink the footprint of prisons by not fighting the next wave of laws that de-carcerate rather than resisting reforms as he and his office have done with SB 1437 (amended felony murder rule) and SB 1391 (ended prosecution of 14 and 15 year old kids as adults).

He can commit to not using illegally secured evidence in prosecutions and hold police officers accountable who collect evidence unconstitutionally.

He can commit to prosecute police officers who unlawfully kill civilians and bring to justice all police officers who use excessive force and unreasonably beat, assault, mace, baton, maim our community members. Alternatively, he can assign independent prosecutors with charging authority to prosecute crimes committed by police officers.

He can stop shielding police officers from liability by ending the routine practice of prosecuting victims of police violence, racial profiling, and harassment with frivolous crimes.

He can recognize the toxic influence that police unions have in protecting police from accountability and reject any campaign support from them.

Until and unless Mr. Rosen and DAs across the Bay Area, California and this country adopt these reforms, well continue to speak our truths to them, hold their seats of power to task and ultimately root them out of office at the ballot box and vote to replace them.

Were not satisfied. The movement to manifest Black Lives Matter marches on.

Sajid Khan is a Deputy Public Defender in the Alternate Defenders Office in Santa Clara

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Guest Commentary: We're Not Satisfied the Movement to Manifest Black Lives Matter Marches On. - The Peoples Vanguard of Davis

By Anna Gorski

SOMMERVILLE, MA Structural Racism, and how it impacts health, public safety, education, jobs, housing and other aspects of society, was the focus of panel discussion here featuring Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley and District Attorney Rachael Rollins.

The panel is part of a series of upcoming related events hosted by the City of Sommerville on racism and policing, as well as a series of ongoing small group listening sessions with Mayor Joseph Curtatone of Sommerville.

The moderator noted that while structural racism has moved to the forefront of national conversation, for many African Americans structural or systemic racism has always been front and center as a topic in their lives.

Because of George Floyd, America has been awakened and for the first time in American history a mayor in Somerville declared racism a public health emergency.

Congresswoman Presley has a long history of political activism and is the first women of color elected to congress from Massachusetts and first African American woman elected to the Boston City Council. She had fought for equality during her time on the Boston city council, but now that this conversation is nationwide, the focus has shifted.

I didnt begin this work when I was elected; I was born into this work. Pressley recounts, adding that full liberation and emancipation is work from cradle to grave.

Pressley defines structural racism as hate hurt and harm legislated and codified by law, so pervasive and systemic that you cannot escape it

Systemic racism in America, she said, is seen in unequal education, healthcare, housing, and especially in the criminal legal system. Disproportionate hate, hurt, and harm that Black people face is precise, as seen in the GI bill, Jim Crow laws, the war on drugs, and redlining.

Pressley calls this moment a tipping point or a reckoning. She describes how the movement is centuries old, but the moment we are living in right now is new and full of young people that can implement real change.

We need to be actively anti-racist to dismantle structural racism, and to legislate healing and justice in the same way that we legislate the hurt and harm was put on our communities she said.

Pressley is a staunch opponent of qualified immunity and introduced the End Qualified Immunity Act in June 2020 with representative Justin Amash. She argues that although real justice will never be achieved for these families whose loved ones are gone, society still needs to hold people accountable.

While officers resigning or getting fired for their failures is respectable, it does not constitute justice, she said, adding that protections offered by the supreme court and codified case after case, families do not see justice, contribution or

Pressley uses the examples of lawyers and doctors who have consequences for their malpractice, and recourse for their negligence; something police officers completely evade for most of the time.

Rachael Rollins is the first female district attorney in Massachusetts history and has been fighting for criminal justice reform and a more equitable system for people color her entire career.

Rollins argues for economic justice, stating that canceling student debt would be a huge step in the right direction.

Black students borrow more and are the average Black student has 30 thousand dollars of debt because Black families have been denied the opportunity to build generational wealth compared to their white counterparts.

Collins argues that structural racism is in all aspects of our life, yet black culture is the most culturally appropriated in America.

Collins list of 15, which includes 15 types of non-violent crimes that should not be prosecuted, is something she has been adamant about implementing.

Because of coronavirus, police all over the country have been interacting with communities and interacting with low level crime at lower rates.

COVID 19 proved my list of 15 works says Collins.

Black and Brown communities have disproportionate interactions with the police, and are prosecuted and arrested for crimes at much higher rates than normal.

For George Floyd, his counterfeit check was a misdemeanor, but Floyd was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death all in the time span of 8 minutes.

If police stopped interacting with poor Black communities for low level non-serious crimes, Floyd would still be alive Collins says.

We need policies where police are not deployed when people are under the influence or having a mental health crisis or engaged in behavior that is a societal failure, not a job for police who we are asking to do too much, she said.

Collins seemingly radical ideas are finally being taken seriously as the COVID crises proves that her list of 15 is not so crazy.

In comparison to the awakening of America, Black people have been awake for 401 years. It is no question that the American criminal justice system is broken, and the police force itself was built to be punitive and oppressive, she said.

Pressley argues for a radical reimagining of our system and of our country, where police officers are not forced to bear the responsibility of social workers in schools and addiction specialists by administering Narcan.

There is a role for first responders in our society, but not every part of society, Presley states, arguing for law changes and budget changes first and foremost.

This moment in America has to be a continuation for the movement. No more thoughts and prayers, but action.

Mayor Curatone says that as a white progressive human being and politician, his job is to be a listener and set the table for conversation.

George Floyd is a symptom of a bigger problem, he said, about the centuries long oppression of Black and Brown people in the United States.

Curatone concedes, We all need to own the work.

The panel also included the voices of Mayor Yvonne Spicer from Framingham, MA, Councilman Will Mbah, and Student Leader Floreisha Bastein.

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Rep. Pressley and DA Rollins Discuss 'Structural Racism' in the US - The Peoples Vanguard of Davis

Milton Glaser, the pioneering graphic designer behind the I Heart NY logo, has died.

Glaser, who had a career spanning more than six decades, died in Manhattan on Friday, June 26, the day of his 91st birthday.

His wife, Shirley Glaser, told The New York Times, that the cause of his death was a stroke and renal failure.

The influential designer who created the DC Comics logo as well as the image of Bob Dylans silhouette with tousled psychedelic-hued hair has worked on a number of periodicals, posters, restaurant menus and books. He even co-founded New York magazine in 1968 with editor Clay Felker.

Around our office, of course, he will forever be one of the small team of men and women that, in the late sixties, yanked New York out of the newspaper morgue and turned it into a great American magazine, the magazines obituary of the designer reads.

Glaser also was the only graphic designer to receive the National Medal of Arts, which was awarded to him by President Barrack Obama in 2010.

At a time when European designers, especially in Switzerland, were defining the terms of vanguard design, Milton Glaser helped launch an alternative ethos rooted in American pop culture and counterculture, Ellen Lupton, senior curator of contemporary design at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum told The Washington Post. His more personal, narrative and permissive design philosophy itself became a worldwide phenomenon.

But the design he is perhaps best known for is the I Heart NY logo, which elegantly summarises Glasers sentiments about his native city.

The New York State Department of Commerce launched an advertising campaign in 1977 that aimed to boost the morale of New Yorkers and attract tourists to the city, which at the time was verging on bankruptcy. Glaser was tasked with creating a logo for the marketing campaign to go along with the states new slogan: I love New York.

Glaser conceived the original design during a taxi ride, replacing the word love with a heart drawn with a red crayon. The original drawing is now displayed in the Museum of Modern Art.

In a 2008 interview with The New York Times, Glaser said he never expected the logo to be as far-reaching and iconic as it had become.

It is one of those peculiarities of your own life where you dont know the consequences of your own actions. Who in the world would have thought that this silly little bit of ephemera would become one of the most pervasive images of the 20th century?

Updated: June 27, 2020 05:03 PM

Excerpt from:

Milton Glaser, designer behind the I Heart NY logo, has died aged 91 - The National

ByElizabeth Evitts Dickinson

Martha Jones is a legal and cultural historian whose work examines how Black Americans have shaped the story of U.S. democracy. A professor of history and the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor at Johns Hopkins University, her research and writing around voting rights and citizenship help to illuminate not only the germinal ideas of American democracy but also the struggles and achievements of the disenfranchised. In February, the Hub spoke with Jones about this year's centennial of the 19th Amendment and her forthcoming book, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, a story that spans seven generations of Black political activism.

Today, as Black Lives Matter protests continue around the country in the immediate wake of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, we caught up with Jones in her home in downtown Baltimore to talk about the history of Black activism and politics, and the kinds of honest conversations that individuals and institutions need to have about racism in order to seed what comes next.

I want to open with a seemingly simple question, but I mean it as more than perfunctory. How are you doing today?

Oh gosh. Honestly, I'm tired. These have been two very demanding weeks. But I just taught an online class for the Zinn Education Project where there were nearly 200 people present online live to talk about the history of citizenship and voting rights and racism, and I found that very moving. Sometimes teaching is the opportunity to reconnect with your purpose and to be inspired, and so today I'm also feeling inspired.

This week, many of the top 10 books on the New York Times Nonfiction Bestseller list are about racism and the Black experience. Is it your sense that there's a growing desire from some to educate themselves and learn about what has brought us to this moment?

Yes, it reflects an interest in history, but I think we're seeing books that are aimed at self-examination and introspection as well, like Ibram X. Kendi's How To Be an Antiracist. Many of these best-selling books reflect the lived experience and the testimony of Black Americans in our very recent past. I would take the buying of books, and hopefully the reading of those books, as a commitment on the part of some Americans and even others beyond the United States to understand better the moment that we're in and their place in it. What people will do based on what they learn and read I cannot say.

Some are suggesting that it's not enough to read and observe, that it's time to act. Are you sensing that as well?

I certainly hope you're right. There's a whole history we could tell of the ways in which white Americans have been passive, if not indifferent, witnesses to the long history of racism in the United States. That's a very heavy legacy to lift off one's shoulders, let's put it that way. We know a great deal about white people's indifference and callousness. The women I write about [in Vanguard], so many of them will eventually tell of how they were not only accostedhow they were assaulted and violently removed from a theater or a railroad car or a bus. The companion story is that many, many white Americans witnessed and watched and by their inaction countenanced that violence. I think that helps us appreciate the distance between Black and white women, even today. I think one of the questions now is what in this context could it mean to become an ally.

You spoke in February about your new book Vanguard, and part of the story that your book tells is how Black women linked ballot access not just to the right to vote but to the human rights of all. You highlight the breadth of vision that women like Ida B. Wells, Carrie W. Clifford, and Mary Church Terrell had.

As I started to read through the commentary, the speeches, the writings of Black women, particularly those at the end of the 19th and the start of the 20th century, there were words they used that at first surprised me. Words like dignity and humanity. I began to learn that those words were reflecting a set of principles, values, and objectives, that Black women in particular embraced and worked toward as political thinkers and as activists. There was more at stake than the vote. Voting rights, in their view, were one part of a range of approaches that were intended to, yes, earn equality but also to earn dignity and to be in a position to work for the interests of humanity. It was ambitious, and Black women led pointedly with a critique of how both racism and sexism too often perverted and distorted and otherwise degraded American political culture.

I call them the vanguard because they really were the ones to set forth a set of principles and a set of objectives for the nation long before most Americans would catch up to them in the 21st century. They maintain that position and endure many decades during which their point of view is rejected. Today we might concede that those are our best ideals.

Are you seeing lessons from this vanguard of women that could help inform the grassroots protests happening across the country right now?

I think yes. On the one hand, Vanguard is the story of women who felt and believed that there was an urgency to the project of American democracy and there was an urgency around getting it right. I don't write about political philosophers. I don't write about dilettantes. I write about women whose own selves and whose communities were on the front lines of slavery, of apartheid or what we refer to as Jim Crow, who were on the front lines of racial violence. They would understand very clearly the urgency of our own moment.

Black women have known all too well the capacity of the state both to enact violence upon them and to turn away and fail to punish the perpetrators of that violence. Black women activists consistently demanded that they be free of violence, and from the specter and threat of violence in their daily lives. I tell the stories of women who knew firsthand the scourge of violence that was unprovoked and unchecked. Today, as we mourn and grieve and rage at the deaths of Black Americans like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the women I write about would recognize both that sadness and that outrage because the ever-present threat of violence also constrained their lives. Political history teaches us that Black women in public and Black women in politics risked encounters with a robust and vile brand of racism that questioned their very womanhood.

In these protests, there was initially a silence around Breonna Taylor's story. Scholar and activist Andrea Ritchie was quoted in The New York Times as saying that by focusing on Taylor as well as George Floyd, "we're not trying to compete with Floyd's story, we're trying to complete the story." What do you think Ritchie means by "completing the story"?

Breonna Taylor's death reminds us that the scourge of police violence is not always the enactment of a forceful, masculine confrontation. Women, too, are the targets of police violence, and sometimes fatal police violence. That is one aspect of completing the story, as Andrea Ritchie has put it.

I would reach further to say that a reckoning with sexual violence is also necessary if we are to complete the story. State terror comes in many forms including the taking of lives, and it is manifested in the lived experience and in the lives of survivors of sexual violence.

Historically, African American women have played an indispensable part in putting sexual violence on the table as a woman's issue through their own testimony, be it enslaved women like Harriet Jacobs in the 19th century and up through Tarana Burke's #MeToo movement today. Black women testify to the fact of sexual violence and the terror that guarding oneself against sexual violence imposes.

What are you thinking and feeling as you watch the Black Lives Matter protests unfold?

I live in Baltimore City and, thus far, the day that was the most moving for me was the Tuesday of our primary election. There was a lot of unevenness in Baltimore City when it came to people getting mail-in ballots, and so those few polling places that had been planned for were much more heavily visited than anyone anticipated. We saw people, our neighbors and community members, at the polls. That same day, Baltimoreans were in the streets. For that moment, there didn't appear to be a contradiction between a politics of the polls and a politics of protest. That resonates with me as reflecting the rich complexity of the African American political tradition. It is varied and it is diverse.

Casting a ballot and supporting a demonstration are consistent parts of a whole. These scenes are especially poignant during a pandemic in which Black Americans are documented as both contracting and suffering the fatal consequences of COVID-19 in disproportionate numbers. Black Baltimoreans, in particular, took their lives in their hands, whether they were standing in crowded polling lines for long periods, entering crowded polling places, or protesting in the streets. American democracy demands nothing less of Black Americans than that they put their bodies on the line to hold this nation to its ideals, and to hold it accountable. It's quite a remarkable moment.

It's interesting because Baltimore hasn't been getting as much national media attention because our protests have been largely peaceful. The more violent scenes are the ones that make the news.

Martha Jones

Professor of History

I have read commentary on the absence of national news organizations in Baltimore in these weeks. There's a perception that there might not be a story here. Of course, there is an extraordinarily important story here, and it's being told to a certain degree by our local news media, but it's not being folded into a national narrative. Someone more expert than me will, I hope, eventually explain why we haven't had the kind of ramped- up clashes between demonstrators and police here.

It's also striking how journalists have been compelled to abandon any modicum of neutrality in this, as we have watched live as mainstream journalists are openly targeted by police in cities like Minneapolis and Washington. There is a line that's been crossed in these scenes of the open targeting of mainstream journalists. That seems nearly unprecedented and eerily mirrors the tactics adopted by authoritarian and fascist regimes.

The last time we spoke was for an article I wrote about the role of Twitter in academia and the power and purpose of hashtags. One thing trending recently on Twitter was the #BlackintheIvory hashtag, which you have contributed to on your feed. People are revealing what it means to be Black within largely white institutions. Do you have thoughts on what it looks like to start to move the needle within academia?

In my spaces in academia, including my department at Hopkins and my professional organizations, I need to hear more than "thoughts and prayers." I'd like us to tell the story, I would like to hear told out loud more precisely how we got here. We must own, understand and own, how our institutionstheir leadership and their culture produced the unjust and deeply disappointing state of affairs that we face today, whether it's the underrepresentation of Black faculty, or unabated incidents of microaggression.

I'm a historian, and I think the past matters. I'm also a storyteller, and I do think it's important that we tell a fuller story about our institutions, one that acknowledges, admits, and explains through research and data how structurally and culturally racism and discrimination have persisted, despite the efforts that have taken us from civil rights to diversity. The cost of this failing is plain, both in the hashtag confessions of Black faculty and students, such as #BlackintheIvory. It is also in the statistics and the demographics of our institutions. It is past time to take stock and explain that. I do not encourage immediately moving to: Here's what we're going to do. Before we determine what we must do, we must examine what we've done, or not done. It is time for some truth-telling about how our institutions and our nation have ensured racism's persistence.

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The persistence of racism in America: What comes next? - The Hub at Johns Hopkins

JUNE 27, 2020

IN THE THICK of World War II, scrambling again to keep the lights on at his chronically underfunded School of Design in Chicago, Bauhaus master Lszl Moholy-Nagy shot a series of 16mm Kodachrome films documenting the schools wartime activities. Known today as Design Workshops (1944), the films traveled with Moholy, artist-cum-administrator, as he pitched the school to potential investors. Since we cant afford to advertise, he quipped to his wife Sibyl, I have to be the advertisement. The films surveyed the range of the students experimental work across media: textiles, drawing, painting, and furniture design; photograms and kinetic assemblages; and various DIY exercises in sculpting with light, using what Moholy called light modulators. Design Workshops offered a primer in the interdisciplinary sensory training Moholy dubbed the new education in his midcentury treatise Vision in Motion, written largely in 1944 and published posthumously in 1947.

[N]o democracy can exist, Moholy explained, without the most careful education of its citizens. For him, this urgent pedagogical agenda was imperiled by specialization, the corporate mass media, and the saturation of market values that threatened to swap homo politicus with homo oeconomicus. Narrow vocational training stunted humanitys innate biological capacities for creativity. Liberal education, a corrective to specialization, was too technophobic precisely when students needed multimedia training to restore their sensory potential. Like Vision in Motion, Design Workshops expressed a midcentury arts and humanities mission in crisis.

As ad campaigns for Moholys program, the films articulate the lofty pedagogical ideals transplanted from Moholys tenure at the Bauhaus (192328), strategically transformed to meet the needs of his new, exilic nation at war, and they prototype postwar applications of novel synthetic materials (plywood, plastic) in the process. In one sequence, for example, the Hungarian artist and designer Gyrgy Kepes, head of the schools Light and Color Workshop, wraps a fashion model in thin silver wire, as colored gels bathe her in hues of blue and red. Kepess shoot frames the model next to another vanguard product a plywood chair. Its bright red removable upholstery, we learn, is woven in part by Saran, a new substance engineered by Dow Chemical. A slick bit of product placement, the sequence also promotes a vision of the humanities that insists on its usefulness for industry on its imperative to train students capacities in various media or what Moholy would extol as their integrated senses, hand, and brain.

A startling later scene surveys the work of Schools new Principles of Camouflage course taught by Kepes in 1942 under the auspices of the Office of Civilian Defense. The sequence immediately follows another dedicated to kinetic assemblages, and Moholys own Papmac (1943), a Plexiglas painting. Moholys editing underscores the compatibility between the schools formalist experimentation with light, color, and new materials and the highly functional illusion taught in the camouflage courses.

In close-up, a hand holding a red crayon traces a pattern in translucent paper above a reconnaissance photo to mask it from bombardment. The now-mobilized hands trained to conceal potential aerial targets during war are the same ones equipped to build the novel stuff of the postwar good life. Such flexible, interdisciplinary training at the School of Design, Moholy explained in Vision in Motion, aimed to produce a new kind of specialist capable of seeing, feeling, and thinking in relationship and not as a series of isolated phenomena.

Kepes, for his part, described camouflage as an ideal site of interdisciplinary activity and collaboration, requiring the combined knowledge of people with a great variety of training architects, engineers, painters, sculptors, graphic artists.

The wartime operations of the School of Design and their relevance for understanding two key figures of the Bauhaus diaspora are taken up in two excellent recent studies of Moholy and his protg and collaborator Kepes, Joyce Tsais Lzsl Moholy-Nagy: Painting after Photography and John R. Blakingers Gyorgy Kepes: Undreaming the Bauhaus. These books coincide with centennial celebrations of the Bauhaus around the globe, and follow a blockbuster retrospective of Moholy, Future Present, the artists first in the United States in 50 years, and a new documentary feature on the School of Design, The New Bauhaus, which premiered at the Chicago International Film Festival last fall.

Scholarship on the Bauhauss American incarnations has noted how the idealistic core of founder Walter Gropiuss vision a transdisciplinary union of art and technology in the collective activity of building (bau) was pragmatically institutionalized in the United States following the German schools shuttering by the Nazis in 1933. By institutionalization, scholars have often meant aesthetic and political cooptation or betrayal, with Moholys Chicago period (19371946) framed as Research and Development for postwar corporate America, and Kepess tenure at MIT (19461974) cast as a tale of military-industrial complicity. According to this reading, Moholy and Kepess once-radical new vision is incapacitated by the postwar liberal consensus, and ensnared in the militarization of the US research university and the Cold Wars organizational complex. In this vein, Tsai concludes with Moholys Chicago program, and the myriad ways in which artistic, philosophical, and pedagogical enterprises were compromised; tools, strategies, and technologies deployed as instruments antithetical to the utopian spirit in which they were once invented. Blakingers story begins where Tsais ends, exploring Kepess camouflage aesthetics as a wartime interdiscipline and a metaphor for the tactical concealment of the designers formerly radical politics in the Cold War, when the artist was reborn as a technocrat.

These books return us to the question of the midcentury fate of the Bauhauss utopian ideals, but they also recover in the Bauhauslers work a timely species of vanguard, technophilic humanism. Pragmatic upon arrival in the United States, because forged in interwar economic and political upheaval, crisis was its medium. Long before anxious arts and humanities programs, pressed to make the case for their own relevance, pitched a curricular move from STEM (science, technology, mathematics, engineering) to STEAM by integrating the arts, these designers explored an interdisciplinary pedagogy that sought to unite technological sophistication with humane values, and mulitimedia experimentation with the expression of foundational human capacities.

As Blakinger shows, this humanism became entangled in the growth and transformation of American higher education at midcentury: Kepes moved from Chicago to MIT, an archetypal Cold War university, precisely when that institution, influenced by a postwar vogue for general education, sought to install the humanities into the heart of its engineering curriculum. Both designers thought hard about the humanities role in the production of creative and flexible democratic citizens precisely the kind featured in Design Workshops. And both stumped for humane, interdisciplinary knowledge production what Kepes called interfeeling and interseeing as a means of managing the democratic citizen and the institution in a time of crisis. As Moholy and Kepes remade themselves at midcentury as canny arts administrators, their overlapping media programs and media theory offer a prehistory of our ongoing, crisis-based humanities.

The hands featured in close-ups throughout Design Workshops extend a privileged motif in Moholys work and artistic self-fashioning. As Tsai acknowledges, the human hand recurred as a ghostly presence in many of his photograms in the 1920s, signaling Moholys allegiance to new, modern ways of making and seeing abetted by the technical media of photography and film. In the aesthetic tradition before World War I, she writes, the painterly hand of the artist left its traces in sensuous, expressive brushwork. Traveling in various and overlapping avant-garde networks Expressionism, Dada, Constructivism the Moholy of the 1920s, scarred by his experience in World War I, would leave that hand behind, and with it, an entirely outmoded conception of painting within the emulative tradition. In place of painting as sign of artistic autonomy, contemplative subjectivity, or individual genius, Moholy reconceptualized painting as part of a multimedia arsenal.

The martial metaphor is apt. Tsai underscores the decisive influence of Moholys wartime experience as an artillery reconnaissance officer in the Austro-Hungarian military. He enlisted in 1915 and served until his thumb was shattered by a bullet in 1917. The aesthetic of machinic exactitude and transparency in his famous Constructions in Enamel paintings the primary subject of Tsais excellent second chapter was shaped not just by Constructivist idioms but effective recons premium on transmissible numerical and cartographical data. War, Moholy realized, was a training ground for modern, technologically enhanced forms of perception. It demanded prosthetically enhanced vision with optical tools (aerial photography, field glasses, binoculars, periscopes, clinometers), as well as telegraphy and telephony. Survival in battle required workers and soldiers to internalize new habits of seeing and being that allowed them to perform under a constant state of duress.

By grounding Moholys later celebration of a technologically mediated New Vision in war, Tsai excavates the humanism underpinning the artists media theory and pedagogy. In his early essay Production-Reproduction (1922), Moholy clarified that freeing art from mimesis across a range of media of technological reproduction required not subjection to the dictates of machines, but rather the presence and activity of the human hand. This experimental interjection of human agency was practiced in cameraless photographs, or by making music through precise incisions into photographic discs. Like his contemporary (and admirer) Walter Benjamin, who called for a revolutionary collective that has its organs in the new technology, Moholy aspired to cultivate what Tsai calls relationships between man and technology that would contribute to the development of the whole, biological human being. His theory of media, Tsai argues, begins with the assumption that technologies have no inherent value. Their ends are contingent, capable of radical redefinition.

Inspired by trends in German experimental psychology, the kinaesthetic epistemology underlying Moholys teaching at the Bauhaus posed a challenge to educational models that enshrined inwardness and self-cultivation as self-discipline. Moholys students were impressionable, subject to external sensation and elementary experiences. His classroom was a lab requiring the development (Ausbildung) of the human sensorium through technological training and media experimentation. As Tsai notes, this notion of human development exists in tension in Moholys work. It connotes both a traditional project of Bildung, the aesthetic education of man, and a more radical, scientific understanding of the development of organs in response to stimuli that Moholy gleaned from contemporary biocentric discourses and psychotechnics, an emerging science of worker attention. The former depends on the survival and cultivation of the expressive humanist subject; the latter perhaps most apparent in Moholys 1925 treatise Painting, Photography, Film on its elimination in favor of a picture of human being as improvable biological entity.

Tsai works chronologically through case studies that variously illuminate the changing terms of Moholys utopian humanism and its abiding relationship to technology and pedagogical technique. Her fine discussion of Constructions in Enamel, first exhibited in 1924 at Berlins Sturm Gallery shortly after Moholy began teaching at the Weimar Bauhaus, clarifies the economic terms of those paintings productive potential. Here, Tsai places Moholys painterly technique in dialogue with the urgent financial realities of the school that shaped its curriculum. Gropius hired Moholy because of his Constructivist bona fides an economization of form clearly on display in this series of paintings, manufactured by machine at a Weimar enamel factory. The technique dovetailed with Gropiuss own desire to shift the school from a craft (Handwerk) emphasis to an embrace of modern technology. This meant reforming the workshop system and bringing it into a productive relationship with industry in a way that Moholy would later be asked to duplicate in Chicago.

In the 1920s, Moholys contemporaneous practice of varnishing paintings to mimic the look of polished plastic, by effacing the hand, echoed the ethos of industrial production at the school. Declining state support led the school to actively pursue private partnerships, and eventually precipitated the Bauhauss relocation to Dessau in 1925, where Gropius anticipated better relations with industrial firms. In the context of hyperinflation in Germany and an unfavorable political climate, Gropius proclaimed that the Bauhaus is not just a school, but rather, a productive apparatus, and insisted that the workshops generate revenue streams.

Moholy designed a catalog promoting the modernity of the schools workshops in 1923, relegating the fine arts (free art) to the books final section. He also demanded that every workshop answer the question of its contemporary relevance, and voiced his belief that the painting and sculpture workshops were preoccupied with matters on their way to extinction. Ultimately, those partnerships with industry failed to materialize until the late 1920s, and the schools limited capacity for serial production condemned the workshops productivity to the cottage production of luxury goods the dream of egalitarian design betrayed by a bespoke modernism.

In other words, when Moholy resigned from the Bauhaus in 1928, he was no stranger to a crisis-based humanities curriculum, which, under the conditions of capitalism, demanded it justify itself and prove its relevance. All education systems, he would later write, are the results of an economic structure. By 1929, with the publication of From Material to Architecture, Moholy began to express a new investment in industrial materials based on the specificity of effects generated and not in the design of a feasible future product. Tsai argues that Moholys commitment to materiality as a field of autonomous experimentation with special pedagogical uses pushed him to abandon painting for a time, and to continue his pedagogical legacy in the 1930s through other media: book publications, photography exhibitions, set design, and experimentation with light itself as a medium. Tsai casts Moholys most famous kinetic light machine, Light Prop for an Electric Stage, as the culmination of a decades work in harnessing technology to restore to wholeness a humanitas stunted by modernitys fragmentation of the senses. And she convincingly reads the work and Moholys changing relationship to it as a sign of his growing ambivalence toward technology in the 1930s.

When Moholy returned to painting in 1930, he often attempted to reproduce in the medium quasi-kinetic effects inspired by Light Prop, but with minimal material and technical requirements. Light Prop, Tsai reminds us, was a notoriously glitchy, often inoperable machine, and a conservators nightmare, prone to breakdown. Whats more, with the rise of National Socialism, Moholys dream of the revolutionary transformation of the masses by using the correct technology to produce the proper stimulus was perverted in various forms of fascist techno-spectacle. All the more reason to rethink the scale of his technological ambitions.

For example, when, in 1936, Moholy selected his painting Z VII as a representative work in the Czech avant-garde journal Telehor, a work reproduced in color on the journals cover, he explained his return to painting as the realization of the constraints placed by industrial capitalism on sovereign access to the means of artistic production. Tsai brilliantly reads Telehor as an intermedial space. In its spiral-bound pages (novel at the time), a painting like Z VII advances color photography and its photomechanical reproduction, imitating not just Light Props kineticism, what Moholy called paintings capacity for spatial kinetics, but also its obdurate materiality. As a damaged, torn work, repaired by Moholy, Z VII announces the return of the human hand, and the laboriousness of manual work at every turn.

Tsai observes a similar return to painting as a way of pioneering technological media in Moholys Space Modulators, now through painting on plastic (Rhodoid and Plexiglas). Moholy would make thermoplastic vulnerable to manual shaping by heating it at home, in his kitchens oven, an act that Tsai reads as a sign of Moholys newly domesticated technological ambitions. Terms like domestication and modulation, Tsai productively suggests, speak to the rescaling of Moholys revolutionary aims in the United States. To modulate is not to create from a tabula rasa, but to change the properties of something that already exists. No longer waiting for capitalism to change, Moholy poached the time and experimental materials of his patrons: [I]n these works, he could reign sovereign over domains where capitalism, or for that matter, fascism, saw no use.

Tsai asks us to understand Moholys Chicago period as refracted through the experience of exile, and a sense of the precariousness of that existence. Moholys Vision in Motion, written during the artists treatment for leukemia, offers the best, late articulation of this damaged and humane pragmatism what Moholy called the transformation of Utopia into action. Marked by a trust in technocratic expertise, as Tsai calls it, reflecting the wartime prestige of planning, Moholy lays out a brief for a kind of radical, postwar institutionalism, assigning an importance, even a responsibility, to institutions for coordinating the work of experts in a variety of domains. Vision in Motion begins and ends with a call for a parliament of social design, an international cultural working assembly made up of outstanding scientists, sociologists, artists, writers, musicians, technicians who, by exchanging knowledge, restore the basic unity of all human experiences.

In effect, Moholy proposes upscaling to the level of national and global knowledge work the kind of integrative, humanistic group activity taught at the School of Design, on display in Design Workshops, and promoted in Moholys pedagogical theory. What Moholy hails in Vision in Motion as vanguard, democratic education is an incipient technique of postwar well-being: [A] new methodology for approaching problems; a social mechanism of production and creative education.

It was Gyrgy Kepes, Moholys collaborator at the School of Design, who eventually realized Moholys interdisciplinary vision in undreaming the Bauhaus and actualizing its ideals. Blakingers groundbreaking study frames Kepess career as a protracted agon with the power of postwar institutions, especially MIT, as its research mission became entangled with the military-industrial complex. Marshall McLuhan, Blakinger suggests, likely had Kepes in mind when he observed, in Understanding Media, that the postwar artist tends now to move from the ivory tower to the control tower, serving to manage the rapid growth of techno-scientific change.

Kepess tenure at MIT (194674) coincided with what recent scholarship has described as designs expanded sphere of influence in the postwar period. The professions purview widened from the making of things to the production of postwar citizens. Having proved themselves capable problem-solvers during the war, designers like Kepes and his friends Charles and Ray Eames, increasingly participated in the training of future knowledge workers for life in a postindustrial society defined by information abundance. Midcentury designers placed faith in the power of communication between and across tidy disciplinary boundaries as a salve for information overload, the threat of technoscience, and the fragmentation of knowledge.

For Blakinger, Kepess career at MIT reflects a sustained commitment to a utopianism based on the promise of communication between disciplines. This interdisciplinary practice across science and the arts matured in the 1950s and 60s through Kepess exposure to the transdisciplinary idioms of systems theory, cybernetics, and information theory. But it began in earnest with Kepess wartime camouflage aesthetics at the School of Design. After Pearl Harbor, Kepess quest for a holistic language of vision was instrumentalized through his Principles of Camouflage courses, which sought to translate the methods and methodologies for making art with the strategies and tactics for making war. Trained at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, in the summer of 1942, Kepes was one of 73 civilian instructors who, after graduating, returned to their home institutions to help the government establish a network of Regional Camouflage Schools.

At the School of Design, Kepess camouflage course was a hit. It helped Moholy solve an enrollment problem, and he leveraged its success in grant applications as he tirelessly sought additional funds from potential benefactors. An object lesson in a mobilized humanities and morale-building interdisciplinarity, Kepess camouflage pedagogy also allows Blakinger to assess Kepess own survival strategy the strategic concealment of his leftist political commitments. (Like Moholy, Gropius, and other leftist Bauhauslers, Kepes was a person of interest for the FBI.) Blakingers archival digging reveals that Kepes was considerably more ambivalent about this pedagogical opportunism than Moholy, which led to their falling out, and Kepess departure from the school. In fact, Kepes later explained that he thought the camouflage course had no justification [] nor was it appropriate to have such a course in the context of the declared and believed goals of the school.

Throughout, Blakinger challenges Kepess reputation as a kind of Moholy manqu, a tragic epigone of the master. Kepess career teaching the new interdiscipline of what he termed visual design at MIT was defined by a similarly ambivalent position vis--vis postwar technocracy in the United States. As Blakinger sees it, Kepes was neither entirely complicit with, nor fully co-opted by the ideology of the institution that employed him and gave him access to vast technical resources. Rather, he worked as a subtle operator within MITs network of experts, many of whom were involved in weapons and defense research.

Inspired in part by Moholys call in Vision in Motion for a parliament of social design, Kepes announced in 1965, in the interdisciplinary journal Daedalus, his own scheme for a working community of young artists and designers located in an academic institution with a strong scientific tradition. This was realized with the launching of MITs Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) in 1967 a kind of think-tank to foster collaborations between artists-in-residence and MIT scientists, labs, and technologies. Art, Kepes insisted, is not merely a humanistic ornament to the education of scientists and engineers. It has its own frontier of discovery. With CAVS, Kepes aimed less to create art works, necessarily, than to explore a what Blakinger calls a poetics of interdisciplinary based in new idioms of collaboration and communication.

As Blakinger shows, Kepes began to forge this poetics of knowledge at MIT first with his landmark 1951 exhibition The New Landscape, later reframed as a boundary-crossing book of visual design The New Landscape in Art and Science (1956); and then in his ambitious Vision + Value book series (196572), a feat of encyclopedic knowledge production that grew from a series of interdisciplinary seminars and collaborations Kepes hosted at MIT. Blakingers account of these projects as feats of vanguard, Cold War knowledge work is meticulous, compelling, and often surprising. Against a standard reading of Kepess New Landscape made up mostly of technical images produced in MIT research labs as a way of lending a humanistic veneer to MITs visual culture, naturalizing the military-industrial complex, Blakinger explores the subtly subversive ways Kepes transvalued technoscientific images. Kepess pedagogy of visual design involved the curation and assembly of images in unusual constellations. He invited his readers eye to make creative connections across heterogeneous fields, and to engage in a dialectical, subjective act of pattern seeing that, at times, bordered on the irrational.

Ministering to the crisis in communication between fields and disciplines, the Vision + Value series turned knowledge itself into an aesthetic object. Assembling far-flung contributors across the arts and sciences, Kepess curation also cannily transferred legitimacy between fields. While his anthologies opportunistically turned cover design into a graphic art of name-checking, they also aspired to be a true universitas. The book series modeled the kind of reparative, centripetal systems-thinking Kepes hoped would hold together a world that felt as if it was falling apart, spinning too fast, expanding every outward.

The stunning layout and lavish illustrations of Blakingers lovely book are designed to facilitate precisely those acts of readerly imagination and visual creativity that Kepes wished for in his own experiments with the book as medium. In one especially eye-popping chapter, Blakinger both describes and partially reconstructs Kepess unfinished Light Book, a sweeping historical study of light as a creative medium with an ever-expanding scale. For Kepes, the project was an allegorical reckoning with the Janus-faced power of light as an index of technoscientific destruction and humane, romantic, therapeutic value. Resurrecting this unrealized project on the page, and doing visual thinking, Undreaming the Bauhaus is a self-reflexive work of visual design both a thing of beauty and a smart performance of visual technique.

Like Moholy, Kepes understood technology expansively, not simply as material apparatus, but as human technique, or what Daniel Bell called intellectual technology in his contemporaneous study The Reforming of General Education (1966). As Blakinger notes, Bell used the term to refer to methods employed in military R-and-D: game theory, simulation, cybernetics, operations research. And he positions Kepess interdisciplinary poetics at CAVS as a kind of anxious double for the scientific idioms practiced in the two MIT labs most directly implicated in defense and weapons research during the Vietnam War: the Instrumentation Lab and the Lincoln Lab, both of whose personnel Kepes collaborated with on various projects.

On March 4, 1969, MIT student and faculty protestors held a campus-wide research stoppage to protest the institutions involvement in Vietnam. War is interdisciplinarity, the neighboring historian Howard Zinn quipped. He didnt need to remind Kepes (or Moholy). The protests, which led MITs president to charge a special panel to investigate the problem of military research on campus, directly implicated CAVS, and Kepes himself, when he appeared on a controversial panel titled The Human Purpose, exploring how MIT and its alums served humanity through science and technology.

The same year, Kepes attempted to organize the US section for the 10th So Paulo Biennial, only to scrap the exhibition after a number of the participating artists (most famously, Robert Smithson) withdrew in protest of the repressive policies of Brazils military dictatorship, later revealed to be covertly supported by the Johnson administration in a bid to contain the spread of communism in Latin America. By the fall of 1969, Kepes and CAVS artists like Otto Piene and Ted Kraynick were targeted by a Situationist-affiliated, Boston-based student activist group as the advanced guard of the cybernetic welfare state. They named names: And to you, Gyorgy Kepes, whose dream it was to gather this scum, fuck you.

In these moments of crisis, as his interdisciplinary mission was attacked as inescapably complicit with the institutional power of the warfare state, Kepes kept faith in communication, for him, the only response to dissensus and political contestation. Sympathetic to this optimism, Blakinger bucks a scholarly tendency to read the work of Kepes and CAVS as a sign of the arts and humanities compensatory role within an institution driven by sponsored, technoscientific R-and-D.

In fact, Kepes heard these critiques directly from his colleagues. Inaugural CAVS fellow Jack Burnham, whose book Beyond Modern Sculpture (1968) had helped recuperate Moholys reputation for a younger generation of artists, collaborated with Kepes on various unrealized proposals for a civic-scale, environmental art inspired by ecological principles of homeostatic self-regulation and a vogue for responsive environments. For Burnham, Kepess proposals for a technologized environmental art his plan for a massive light tower in the center of Boston Harbor, for example were hopelessly impractical. He began to suspect that the Centers real job, finally, was producing lavishly illustrated catalogues and anthologies that would impress foundations. In 2004, he would dismiss Kepess nave fetishism as part of a Bauhaus romanticization of technology.

One sign of the strength of these two remarkable books is that they make critiques like Burnhams seem unfair, or, at the very least, insensitive to the web of historical forces, institutional pressures, and power structures within which Moholy and Kepes charted an expansive vision of a humane art practice. Their resilient vision, forged in crisis, should compel our attention today, as the arts and humanities booming in the postwar, but suffering a steady decline of market share in college degrees since 200506 brace for a new landscape of higher education in the wake of COVID-19. The pandemic has been branded as a kind of war, and universities have been keen to communicate the various ways their creativity, ingenuity, and intellectual technology can be mobilized to meet the challenge of the moment. At my home institution, our librarys MakerSpace has ramped up production of plastic face shields; our public broadcasting station features pandemic-related programming; faculty engineers have built DIY ventilator prototypes; and medical school researchers are developing new testing methods.

When the School of Design went to war, Moholys and Kepess handy students prototyped plywood springs to compensate for metal shortages; they designed parachute clothing, new kinds of barbed wire, and shock-proof helmets. And their teachers offered cutting-edge classes on industrial camouflage and Visual Propaganda in Wartime. On the other side of that episode of total mobilization was the zenith of the humanities postwar prestige and support in the United States: the GI bill, a period of enormous investment in higher education at both federal and state levels, and with it, an expanded middle class and the democratization of access to knowledge. Our present crisis is unlikely to yield the same results, since our problem is not the entrenched power of educational institutions, but rather their active dismantling by powerful constituencies hostile to academic values, eager to restrict liberal arts education as the preserve of the elite. That basically anti-democratic animus, the Bauhauslers knew well. It has a long history, and it compromises the agency of those seeking to rebuild and transform our institutions from within.

Justus Nieland is professor and chair of the Department of English at Michigan State University, and teaches in the Film Studies Program. He is the author of Happiness by Design: Modernism and Media in the Eames Era (University of Minnesota Press, 2020).

Excerpt from:

Bauhaus STEAMpunks and a Crisis-Based Humanities - lareviewofbooks

The Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities (SSANU), which is a strong member of Joint Action Committee (JAC) of the non-teaching staff of Nigerian universities, has given a 14-day ultimatum to the Federal Government over the issues of shoddy implementation of the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS), non-implementation of 2009 Agreement and non-payment of the arrears of its earned allowances.

The association, at the weekend, during its western zone online zoom meeting held at the University of Ibadan and presided by the national vice president and chairman, western zone, Comrade Alfred Ilesanmi Jimoh, noted that it was disheartening government and IPPIS have succeeded in making SSANU and indeed the leadership of JAC of the non-teaching staff of Nigerian University look stupid for supporting the deployment of IPPIS platform in the university by the way the non-teaching staff has been treated so far.

He added that IPPIS has constituted itself into another government, deciding what to pay or what not to pay them.

Com. Jimoh said: In fact, the platform which has been in operation since 2014, is still fraught with so many anomalies and inconsistencies that one begins to wonder if the agency has actually improved on its operations as often being claimed.

The high point of the legion of problems brought upon us include ridiculous amputation of our salaries as a result of illegal and unilateral removal of some negotiated Earned Allowances of our members, tax deduction, enforcement of alien deductions without our consent, non-payment of third party deductions including cooperative deductions and union dues to mention but a few.

It is disheartening to note that Government and IPPIS have succeeded in making SSANU and indeed the leadership of JAC of the non-teaching staff of Nigerian University looks stupid for supporting the deployment of IPPIS platform in the University by the way we have been treated so far. IPPIS has constituted itself into another government, deciding what to pay us and/or what not to pay us.

The association, however, resolved that: IPPIS must correct all these observed anomalies before the end of the lockdown, to guarantee industrial peace in the university and our continued support for the payment platform.

Our Earned Allowances which are products of agreements freely entered into in 2009, still remain largely unpaid and unimplemented, despite the fact that this has been a major subject matter in our strikes ever since. The latest twist is for the government to be treating the Non-Teaching staff as inconsequential when it comes to the issue of payment and implementation of our Earn Allowance focusing always on our Teaching counterpart. (We say this without any prejudice to our teaching colleagues).

We hereby resolve that government should positively address all issues raised by the SSANU in its letter of the ultimatum and put in place all the COVID-19 containment protocols before recalling students to the campus, as any reopening of the Universities at this point, without addressing the pre-existing industrial grievances in the system, would amount to an exercise in futility.

Com. Jimoh, hinted that for genuine and lasting industrial peace to be ensured in the countrys universities and inter universities centers, the government must urgently look into all these complaints with a view to promptly addressing them.

Government must pay all the arrears of our Earned Allowances and implement them for a monthly payment to avoid a mother of all strike by the non-teaching staff unions of universities, he warned.

The western zone vice president of the association expressed sadness over the poor state of the Nigeria universities, which he said, was poor infrastructure occasioned by years of poor funding cum systemic corruption, to incessant strike actions which more often than not, has become a relay baton between the staff unions in the university.

All these have cumulatively resulted in flattening the graph of the educational growth in Nigeria and the subsequent downing of the graph to the point that Nigerian graduates are considered half baked, un-employable, and incapable of admission for higher degrees outside the country, he posited.

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IPPIS: SSANU gives FG 14-day ultimatum to address crises or embark on indefinite strike - Vanguard

On one hand, Phase III of Minnesotas Stay Safe Plan, which took effect June 10, is good for arts organizations. They are now officially allowed to reopen, with limited capacity and certain other restrictions and expectations.

On the other, were seeing a lot of layoffs, some tied to the fact that the PPP (Payroll Protection Program) funds organizations received as part of the CARE Act are running out.

At the Minneapolis Institute of Art, PPP funds paid staff through Friday, June 19. Seventeen employees took a voluntary separation package effective Saturday, June 20, and 22 were laid off on Monday. Mia plans to reopen July 16.

Last week, the Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS) announced plans to reopen Split Rock Lighthouse and Jeffers Petroglyphs on July 15. It is bringing 64 employees back to work, extending furloughs for 139 and laying off 176, primarily staff who work at MNHS historic sites and museums that remain closed. MNHS has 26 historic sites and museums around Minnesota. The History Center, Mill City Museum, Hill House, Ramsey House, Historic Fort Snelling and others remain closed.

The Walker Art Center is the latest on this mixed-bag list, and its safe but also sad to say it probably wont be the last. With its reopening set for July 16, it announced Tuesday that it will lay off 33 people as of July 1. All are whats called visitor-facing staff. Fifteen work in the Walker Shop and Visitor Services, and 18 are part-time gallery assistants. A PPP loan will pay them through June 30.

Experts are predicting another huge wave of layoffs as PPP money runs out nationwide. Business Insider columnist Dan Alpert explains: [The] regulations surrounding the PPP essentially forced employers to initially rush out 75% of the loan amounts they received to put their entire pre-crisis body of workers back on payroll for eight weeks, in order to qualify for loan forgiveness. While that requirement was relaxed two weeks ago the vast majority of that cash will be out the door to employees by the end of June as originally required.

Starting July 16, the Walker will offer reduced hours, programs and operations. The organization is projecting a $5.7 million drop in revenue, or 26 percent of last years operating budget. Along with laying off staff, it will freeze all salaries, reduce its 403b pension contribution by 1 percent. Executive Director Mary Ceruti will take a 20 percent pay cut and other senior leadership will take 10 percent pay cuts.

When the Twin Cities Jazz Festival had to cancel its Winter Jazz Festival, originally set for March 29, Executive Director Steve Heckler and his board rescheduled it for Oct. 18, which seemed reasonable at the time. Because surely COVID wouldnt still be a problem in seven months?

Then it had to cancel the 22nd Annual Twin Cities Jazz Festival, the big one, scheduled for June 25-27. This weekend. Tonight, tomorrow and Saturday, in case anyone wants to take a moment and think about how glorious it would have been to hear Jazz Master Kenny Barron play on the Mears Park stage. At the time, Heckler called the festival postponed and said, Wed also like to have some kind of live show in September, if its allowed and if its safe.

Nix to both. TCJF wont present any live shows until 2021.

But you can still have a jazzy weekend. Jazz Central Studios began in 2010 as a rehearsal and recording space for Twin Cities jazz musicians and evolved into a performance space, much needed especially after the Artists Quarter in St. Paul closed at the end of 2013. Starting Friday, June 26, and continuing through Sunday, it will host an online festival of live jazz, available for streaming on its Facebook page and YouTube channel.

Streamfest will feature 30 hours of music, with a new performance every hour on the hour. Musicians will include Chris Bates, Sarah M. Greer, Steve Kenny, Graydon Peterson, Solomon Parham, Dean Granros, Charlie Lincoln, Will Kjeer, Ted Godbout, Nathan Hanson, Jordan Anderson, L.A. Buckner and many more. Performances will take place at Jazz Central, with protocols in place to keep the musicians safe.

Calendar (scroll down)

Facebook page

Fridays YouTube channel link

Saturdays YouTube channel link

Sundays YouTube channel link

Donations will support the Musicians Relief Fund and the Twin Cities Black American Musicians Project.

Tonight (Thursday, June 25) at 7 p.m.: Jazz Fest Live presents Debbie Duncan. Though the Twin Cities Jazz Fest wont present any live shows until 2021, its weekly Jazz Fest Live streams will continue. Sign up here to save your spot for the Twin Cities First Lady of Song. Free, but donations are appreciated.

Friday, June 26, at noon CST: #KnightLive: Walking the talk: Social impact of the arts. The Knight Foundation is holding several series of online conversations about the future of our communities and democracy. Watch and listen in as Knights Director for Arts Priya Sircar talks with poet, writer and lyricist Aja Monet and Americans for the Arts VP Clay Lord about how the arts and individual artists are shaping society and addressing systemic issues. The webinar is free. Register here.

Saturday and Sunday, June 27 and 28: Live Streaming at the Vanguard: Joe Martin Quartet featuring Mark Turner, Kevin Hays and Nasheet Waits. Weve seen two of the Village Vanguards streaming shows, the first with the Billy Hart Quartet (Ethan Iverson on piano) and the second with Vijay Iyer. Were going back for more. Not all live streams are equal, but so far these have been exceptional: crisp and clear, latency-free (as long as you dont listen through Bluetooth), with close-up but nonintrusive camera work. Its weird not hearing applause, but wonderful knowing that what youre hearing (and seeing) is live and in the moment. Its weird not being in an actual crowd, but wonderful to be in the worlds most famous jazz club. If you can Airplay/cast/mirror to a smart TV with decent sound, you might forget youre streaming. Saturday at 6 p.m. CST, Sunday at 1 p.m. CST. Tickets are $7. Coming up July 4 and 5: Joe Lovano Trio Fascination.

Starts Sunday, June 28, at 11 a.m. from MSP Film Society: Free 24-hour streaming of Women in Blue. Director Dierdre Fishels film about the inner workings of the Minneapolis Police Department, especially the lives of women officers, starts out as if its going to be a profile of former Police Chief Jane Harteau, then takes a sudden turn after Justine Damond is killed by a police officer. But its still a fascinating look at the department and what its like to work there if youre a woman. On Monday, June 29, at 7 p.m., Craig Laurence Rice will moderate a conversation with the director, Minneapolis City Council member Alondra Cano, civil rights attorney and activist Nekima Levy Armstrong, and former Minneapolis City Council member Ralph Remington. FMI and tickets/registration.

National Theatre Live

Gwendoline Christie, left, in Midsummer Nights Dream.

Now on PBS Voices: Prideland. PBS Voices is a new documentary-focused YouTube channel by PBS Digital Studios. Prideland isnt Queer Eye (nothing is) but its awfully good. In this six-episode short-form series, host and actor Dylln Burnside (Pose) travels across the American South, meeting people, hearing their stories, and bringing viewers into the Souths various LGBTQ+ communities to show how LGBTQ+ Americans are finding ways to live authentically. Also on PBS (check local listings), the PBS website and the PBS Video App. Heres the trailer.

Now on the Martha Graham Dance Companys YouTube channel: Martha Matinees: Immediate Tragedy. Martha Graham Dance Company would have been at Northrop on Saturday, April 4. Inspired by Grahams lost solo from 1937, Immediate Tragedy is a new digital creation by 22 artists collaborating from locations across the U.S. and Europe.

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More layoffs, this time at the Walker; Jazz Central Studios to host 'Streamfest' - MinnPost

On the recent UN Day of Multilateralism and Peace, President Higgins spoke of the global community's need "to forge a new approach in its relationship with Africa". He urged Ireland "to give a lead in addressing unfair and imbalanced trade terms" while working with African countries "for the achievement of a sustainable connection between economy, society and ecology".

r Clare O'Grady Walshe, in her remarkable book, has contributed significantly to our understanding of this connection. Let's hope the title doesn't put people off. Seed sovereignty? What's that? The academic-speak phrase may puzzle some (as it did me), though the concept has been among the main enablers of mankind's development for 10,000 years or so.

You know seed sovereignty when you see it; 27 years ago, on my two-wheeled way from Nairobi to Cape Town, I came across many examples in regions as yet free of globalisation. When invited to spend the night in a village, my farmer hosts usually walked me around their fields and explained (if an English-speaker could be found) how they managed to grow such a variety of food crops on so little land.

Now I wish I had kept more detailed notes; at the time I was too uninformed to fully understand the ingenuity on display. What looked like untidy, overcrowded patches of land in fact demonstrated the practical value of seed sovereignty. Which plant should go there because it attracts a fly whose eggs, if laid on that plant, would be damaging - though this next-door plant benefits from a deep-burrowing worm during too-dry seasons - whereas this other plant must always go under these bushes because it benefits from their decomposing leaves.

Remote and often illiterate communities guard the accumulated knowledge and adaptability of countless centuries. In 1998, while trekking through Laos, I stayed in a mountainous area where more than 30 varieties of rice were grown; one family might grow five or six varieties depending on the soil, the gradients, the prevailing wind, the accessibility of shade or water.

Dr O'Grady Walshe, a research associate at DCU's School of Law and Government, points out that before the 1960s Green Revolution, funded by private foundations like Ford and Rockefeller, the Philippines grew over 3,000 varieties of rice. A generation later, only two remained on 98 per cent of the total land area.

This book demanded years of hard work; this is not the sort of research you do for fun. The author's main fields of study, Kenya and Ethiopia, presented very different though equally complex challenges. Regional and national politics, overt or covert, tested her negotiating skills.

Legal conundrums, international and trans-national, had to be sorted out. Commercial sensitivities had to be allowed for in an area where numerous snares awaited the unwary.

And over all brooded the increasing threat to seed sovereignty. Rarely does a work of rigorous scholarship include detective story attributes but here, as the plots unfold, one feels tension rising while villains flit to and fro in the shadows - until at last they are exposed, quietly but relentlessly.

Wars have always disrupted agriculture, and in our own day, as Dr O'Grady Walshe notes, the accompanying massive migrations often replace homelands with wastelands. In Iraq 600,000 farmers 'lost their seed stewardship' when a new Seed Patent law was introduced in 2004 for the benefit of the leading occupying power. According to US State Department documents, Order 81 enabled "privatisation to promote economic diversity" while making it illegal for Iraqi farmers to re-use the seeds of new varieties registered under the imposed law. In Afghanistan, in 2006, a similar law was introduced.

Here a word of warning: the unholy alliance between philanthro-capitalists and corporate seed-breeders has speeded the corruption of plain English. One sympathises with the author as she struggles through an acronym-impeded ocean to identify how various approaches to globalisation may be applied to seed sovereignty.

In 1976 Ethiopia established what became Africa's biggest national gene-bank. Until 2015 it defended its territory from 'improving' interventions while encouraging other African countries to do likewise; the US Department of Agriculture identified Ethiopia as "the vanguard of the anti-GM movement".

But the aforementioned alliance is all the time expanding. In the Addis Standard (April 23, 2020) Dr Teshome Hunduma commented sadly on his government's 2018 approval of Bt-cotton (a genetically modified variety) - among other destructive intrusions.

He recorded that by June 2019, Ethiopia had saved 86,599 samples of the seeds of over 100 plant species.

Covid-19 soon exposed the reckless impracticality of just-in-time transcontinental production lines, whether of car parts or carrots.

In a March 31 RTE Brainstorm essay, Clare O'Grady Walshe outlined how "seed sovereignty for food security could transform globalisation". Her book strongly suggests that this cheering prospect is not as unrealistic as it may seem.

Sunday Indo Living

Read more from the original source:

Sowing the seeds of hope: how the sovereignty of what we plant can transform fate of nations - Independent.ie