Susan Meiselas’s 1978 image of woman fleeing fighting between the Nicaraguan military and Sandinesta rebels around the town of Esteli.

Matthews points out other differences: “Women sometimes think of better ways to capture a story. We look behind the action and have different priorities, such as the human interest. Twenty years ago, there were rarely any images of the women who were left behind in conflict zones. Now, because of women photographers, you see images of refugee camps all the time - taken by men as well as women.” Edelstein adds that “women are prepared to look at the emotional undergrowth of the situations we’re in.”

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The 239 army helmets that are strewn across the fourth floor gallery of the Figge Art Museum are all made of rice.

In a corner floor of the gallery, a bed of rice serves as a makeshift film screen, where images of a Vietnamese orphanage are projected. An entire wall also has a film from Vietnam projected onto it.

“For Such a Time as This: Remembering Vietnam” is artist Adrienne Noelle Werge’s tribute to the land where she was born, then adopted as an infant in 1972 and brought to South Bend, Ind.

Its opening Thursday night left people entering and leaving the gallery with a solemn sense of reverence.

“If they’re able to go in and have a moment of peace, this is what I want,” said Werge, who still lives in South Bend.
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In the past year, at least thirty-eight writers and journalists have been killed around the world — many clearly in the pursuit of their professions, others in unclear circumstances. In Mexico there have been eight such deaths, five in Iraq and in Pakistan and multiple deaths also in countries such as Somalia, Guatemala, the Philippines, Thailand and Russia.

PEN Canada joins 145 PEN centres around the world every November 15 — The Day of the Imprisoned Writer — to acknowledge the plight of individual writers imprisoned for speaking out and to condemn the unconscionable suppression by many governments worldwide of the human right to freedom of expression.

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San Francisco’s Broadway tunnel is a busy thoroughfare in the midst of the city. Its walls are thick with grime and patched with remnants of spray-painted graffiti tags. The talented English reverse graffiti artist Paul “Moose” Curtis, a pioneer of the art form, recently chose this tunnel as a tableau for a mural depicting plants indigenous to California which was sponsored by Green Works, a plant-based line of cleaning products. Moose, who has been cleaning the streets of the UK and beyond for the past ten years, uses detergent and a wire brush, the tools of many a cleaner, to work his magic.Reverse graffiti is form of street art that involves carving into the dirt and dust that surrounds us. Artists subtract from a surface in order to create a negative image within the positive, often quite dark layer of grime. They use methods as simple as dragging their finger across a dirty car window or as elaborate as carving elaborate stencils, which they then mount on a surface and spray with a high pressure water hose, to impress a finely wrought illustration or message. Reverse graffiti is a form of activist art, in that the work often draws attention not only to a particular image etched into a surface, but also the extent to which these surfaces - and our cities - are caked with pollution.

Moose told Richard Morgan of the New York Times Magazine that he preferred the “less sinister” terms “clean tagging” or “grime writing” to “reverse graffiti”. He explains:

“It’s refacing,” he says, “not defacing. Just restoring a surface to its original state. It’s very temporary. It glows and it twinkles, and then it fades away.”To pay for industrial scrubbers, he has sold some of his reverse graffiti as advertising. But mostly he sticks to his own art. Critics, like the City Council in Leeds, have accused him of breaking the law, but for what? Cleaning without a permit? “Once you do this,” he says, “you make people confront whether or not they like people cleaning walls or if they really have a problem with personal expression.”

Alexandre Orion is another prominent reverse graffiti artist-environmental activist.

According to Environmental Graffiti’s Linda McCormick,

A few years ago he adorned a transport tunnel in Sao Paolo with a mural consisting of a series of skulls to remind drivers of the detrimental impact their emissions have on the planet. The Brazilian authorities were incensed but couldn’t actually charge him with anything so they instead cleaned the tunnel. At first they cleaned only the parts Alexandre had cleared but after the artist switched to the opposite wall they had to clean that too. In the end, the authorities decided to wash every tunnel in the city.

Link to Original: Reverse Graffiti: Activist Art Extraordinaire (Huffington Post)

LONDON — Miriam Makeba, a South African singer whose voice stirred hopes of freedom among millions in her own country though her music was formally banned by the apartheid authorities she struggled against, died overnight after performing at a concert in Italy on Sunday. She was 76.

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Jackie Reem Salloum, a film director and activist, has been one of the key players in the movement to increase global interest in Palestinian art.Born to Palestinian and Syrian parents in Dearborn, Michigan, her artwork was influenced by her experiences as a young woman in the Arab Diaspora.

During her late teens, she studied at the renowned Steinhardt art school at New York University, where she learned to reinterpret traditional American cultural symbols like gum ball machines to include references to revolutionary figures like Musa Kazim Pasha al-Husseini, a mayor of Jerusalem who was ousted in the 1920s for his opposition to British pro-Jewish policies.

In 2005, Salloum presented Planet of the Arabs, a nine-minute film about how Arabs are portrayed in the media, at the Sundance Film Festival.

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I think by now, most of us realize who is for the war in Iraq, and who is against it. But for those who do not, here is a visual clue. This dazzling (and somewhat bizzare) anti-war mural was spotted in Berkeley, California. Stenciled on the bottom of the wall is a collection of American skylines, from New York to San Fransico.

Photo via New River Head on Flickr.

Link to original (and more images): Stunning John McCain Sarah Palin Anti-War Mural in Berkeley (jetcomx.com)

They fettered his mouth with chains,
And tied his hands to the rock of the dead.
They said: You’re a murderer.
They took his food, his clothes and his banners,
And threw him into the well of the dead.
They said: You’re a thief.
They threw him out of every port,
And took away his young beloved.
And then they said: You’re a refugee.

With poems from the 1960s such as this, Mahmoud Darwish, who has died in a Texas hospital aged 67 of complications following open-heart surgery, did as much as anyone to forge a Palestinian national consciousness, and especially after the six-day war of June 1967. His poems have been taught in schools throughout the Arab world and set to music; some of his lines have become part of the fabric of modern Arabic culture.

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The frustrations of young Guineans have boiled over into mass riots and military mutinies and this has been reflected by a new generation of musicians, breaking a long tradition of singers praising national leaders.

“When injustice becomes law, to revolt becomes one’s duty,” says Guinean rapper Phaduba Keita.

Most rap stars may not quote French philosophers, but for this 27-year-old, the words of Albert Camus ring true.

“I don’t think there’s anywhere in the world with more corruption than Guinea,” he says.

“Today Conakry the capital is the darkest capital in the world - a capital without electricity, water or infrastructure,” says Keita.

On his album A Quand L’Aubaine? (When Will The Windfall Come?) the Guinean rap star asks when things will improve for people in and outside the country.

“It is not just to the political leaders here but also to the powers in the West, because the future of Africa is in the hands of these two groups. It’s the intellectuals who hold the power.”

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 As the inventor of the escopetarra– rifles transformed into guitars–Cesar Lopez breathes life into instruments of death. In response to the violence that has plagued his home in Bogota, Colombia, Lopez has discovered a way to channelthis violence into “art, where creation triumphs over destruction.” He has received wide acclaim for this, as well as his involvement with The Battalion of Immediate Artistic Action — a kind of emergency first-response unit of musicians and activists who take to the streets every time there is some kind of guerilla attack in Bogota to assuage the victims of political violence with soothing music.

You can visit his website to find out more: http://www.cesarlopez.org/