Category: issues

If you want to avoid crashing and burning because of overconfidence, find a group of women classmates, and start collaborating. When it comes to studying biology, it’s not so much the frog you are dissecting as who you are dissecting it with.

The Museum of Ice Cream. The Museum of Feelings. The Candy Museum. And, inevitably, the Museum of Selfies. Mitchell Kuga argues that these often-corporate-sponsored projects (the Museum of Feelings was an advertisement for Glade air freshener) could change Americans’ idea of museums – and not for the better.

“Created in the 1960s [on the western edge of Greenwich Village], Westbeth brought together icons such as Diane Arbus, Robert De Niro Sr. and Benny Andrews. Merce Cunningham headquartered his dance company in a cavernous space in the building in 1971. Once verified as a working artist – meaning a person derived a significant portion of his or her income from the production and sale of their work – residents were admitted by disciplinary committees ranging from music and performance to visual arts and writing. Rent was determined by income. But what was meant to be a short-term solution for looking to build their careers quickly became a stronghold for artists as the city’s real estate prices rose” – and many of those early residents have never left.

America’s geography continues to be reshaped by a polarized pattern of socioeconomic sorting. This process is driven by a selective population shift of the most affluent, the best-educated, and the young to expensive coastal metros like the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Seattle, and the New York–Boston–Washington corridor, with the less affluent and less educated flowing into cheaper Sunbelt metros, and the even less advantaged trapped in Rust Belt areas.

Scientists studying the site have been able to present some remarkable theories. For one, we haven’t found any direct evidence of a king. The city’s extensive mural paintings contain no obvious images of royalty, and, to date, no one has found signs of a royal burial under the city’s pyramids. Archaeologists David Carballo at Boston University and Linda Manzanilla at the National Autonomous University of Mexico suggest that this is because Teotihuacán’s government may have been closer to a democracy than a dictatorship: It likely involved shared power, and the people may have had more say in selecting their ruler than in many ancient societies.

“Twitter illustrated the enduring obsession with the latter last week when the ‘We need a Disney princess who’ meme – which ranged from earnest (‘We need a Disney princess who’s vegan and fights for animal liberation’) to bizarre (‘We need a Disney princess who is literally Shia LaBeouf on PCP’) – reached a flashpoint after a regional Planned Parenthood center’s account tweeted, then deleted, ‘We need a Disney princess who’s had an abortion.’ The outrage from the anti-choice right that followed was understandable enough. But what accounts for the internet’s chronic royal fever?”

“The Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation” – co-founded by rap mogul Russell Simmons – “has helped pay for art and dance classes for thousands of children and opened galleries giving young artists of color, such as Kehinde Wiley, who would later paint the official portrait of Barack Obama, a place to showcase their work. … [And] the Kevin Spacey Foundation mentored and trained young performers.” The latter has closed up shop, and the former may have to pull out of New York. In the past year, “organizations have rapidly distanced and denounced their now-unsavory benefactors, in an effort to keep the rest of their donors from fleeing.”

“We are half of America. Don’t we deserve a museum?”, said Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), who has written legislation to establish a women’s history museum at the Smithsonian. (She claims to have 250 co-sponsors.) But Smithsonian Secretary David J. Skorton, who has just announced the launch of an institution-wide Women’s History Initiative, says, “We’re not in a position to initiate any new museums in the near future.”

“Our staffs increasingly reflect the communities in which we operate.  But our Boards do not.  Larger, euro-centric mainstay arts organization boards are largely composed of an elite group.  Even in those cases where Boards have succeeded in recruiting people of color, more women and LGBTQ people, those individuals tend to be more highly educated, wealthier, and successful – from the privileged class.  And that’s not surprising.  Many organizations depend on their Boards to both contribute and to fund raise, and those with wealth and networks of people of wealth, are far more likely to be able to both contribute and successfully fundraise.”