‣ The late John T. Biggers, a giant of the Houston art world, painted several large murals across the city he called home for over half a century. Daniel Fuller visited these murals for Burnaway, mining the artist’s singular narratives of Black Southern life:
Not far away at the Blue Triangle Community Center, Biggers painted one of his earliest and most politically charged murals: The Contribution of Negro Women to American Life and Education (1953). The mural stretches twenty-four feet across the back wall of what was then the YWCA serving Black women and girls. It centers Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth—two monumental figures not as distant icons, but as muscular, commanding presences. Tubman leads with a rifle in one hand and a torch in the other, carrying both fire and force—freedom lit and fiercely defended. She’s less Moses than a flesh-and-blood Statue of Liberty. Truth, on the opposite side of the mural, preaches before a crowd gathered on railroad tracks, backed by a church and holding a scroll that demands land, public education, and equal rights for women. This is education as liberation—the written word as a weapon.
What struck me most about this mural is not just its political vision but its attention to labor—bruised feet, calloused hands, figures bent under sacks of cotton and still moving forward. Biggers gives weight to struggle and power to collective action. His Tubman leads not with ethereal grace but with militant steadiness. That alone unsettled some of the YWCA patrons when the mural was unveiled. These women weren’t “pretty,” they said. But they were true.
‣ Gothamist‘s Hannah Firshberg reports that art schools around New York City are getting more applicants than ever, a surprising development amid an increasingly difficult job market. She spoke to educators about why this might be:
Manar Balh, a 25-year-old painting student at Pratt, said more young people are prioritizing their passion for the arts amid deep corporate pessimism.
“A lot of my peers understand that nothing is guaranteed really, no matter what you study, so you should just study the thing that matters the most to you,” Balh said. “AI doesn’t feel like a reason to stop making art. If anything, it’s a reason to keep making and insist on making art.”
While most Gen Zers say the purpose of college is to prepare students for specific careers, about 43% say it’s to prepare students for life in general, according to a 2018 report by the Chronicle of Higher Education. Only a small percentage of graduates go into the arts: During the 2021-22 school year, visual and performing arts degrees composed 4.4%, or just over 90,000, of the 2 million bachelor’s degrees conferred in the U.S., making it the nation’s eight most popular major. Business ranked first, followed by health, social sciences and history.
‣ How did slow motion get so popular in film? A new book tackles the complex answer, and Scott W. Stern reviews it for the New Republic:
Slow motion, Goble argues, is the perfect effect for our imperfect age. It captures “time as we experience it in the modern world: variously uneven, punctuated and accelerated, dragging and expanding, beautiful, traumatic, endless, and commodified.” Since the industrial revolution, some observers have suggested that history seems to be accelerating. (“Time has now become so fluidly rapid,” one German novelist wrote to her friend in 1809. “It is not possible to keep up; between one mail day and the other lies an entire historical epoch.”) But, in Goble’s telling, the speed of events seemed to achieve a new momentum in the late ’60s, when in a matter of months, slo-mo suddenly transformed from a “minor” aesthetic approach present in a handful of commercial films to the dominant, omnipresent special effect of the next half-century.
Today, as history hurtles forward, it’s unsurprising that slow motion retains its popularity. If, as Goble suggests, we might experience “everything” in slow motion if we always thought we were dying, perhaps it’s telling that so many are experiencing everything in a kind of slow motion, a feeling of “stuckness,” a sense that our political moment has become both endless and inescapable.
‣ This Fourth of July, artist Phil Buehler celebrated by unveiling a Brooklyn mural chronicling over 1,500 January 6 rioters pardoned by Trump. The Guardian‘s David Smith spoke to him about the project:
“Artists can have more power than Fox News to turn this around,” Buehler says in a Zoom interview from his Brooklyn studio, reflecting on the struggle for truth in the Trump era. “Boy, would Magaland hate it if culture, music and art [pushed back]. You’ve got to double down the other way and start flooding this zone with art as Trump tries to erase it.”
The Wall of Shame is a 50ft-long, 10ft-tall outdoor mural featuring the pardoned Trump supporters, colour-coded to distinguish their actions: violent rioters appear in red, those who damaged property are shown in blue, and the remaining individuals are depicted in white. The combined effect resembles a Star and Stripes that has imploded.
Buehler spent about 100 hours gathering the rioters’ stories, charges and sentences from research by National Public Radio (NPR) and formatting them to be printed on waterproof vinyl and hung outdoors on a fence. NPR had about a thousand photos of the rioters, so Buehler enlisted a friend to track down a further 500 pictures; only about 10 are now missing.
‣ The Israeli military targeted a transgender ward in an Iranian prison, killing around 100 incarcerated people in the process. John Russell reports on the disturbing attack for LGBTQ Nation:
But as the Washington Post notes, military attacks on prisons raise humanitarian and legal concerns due to the vulnerability of inmates. The Times reports that prisoners, families, and activists in Iran criticized the Israeli attack as showing a disregard for the lives of prisoners as well as the visiting families, lawyers, medical staff, and administrative workers at the prison when the missiles hit around noon during a workday.
An Israeli Defense Forces spokesperson claimed the prison was used for “intelligence operations against the State of Israel, including counterespionage” and that the attack was “carried out in a precise manner to mitigate harm to civilians imprisoned within the prison to the greatest extent possible.”
However, the Post reports that a visitation area for families of prisoners and a medical center were among the locations damaged in the strike. According to the Post’s analysis, at least four civilians who did not work at Evin were among those killed, including two children.
Contrary to Israel’s reported rhetoric about liberation, one Iranian dissident who was imprisoned at Evin described the chaotic aftermath of the attack as “a slow death.”
‣ Yesterday, Harvard unceremoniously removed the websites of its DEI centers and announced a nebulous “Office for Academic Culture and Community” in their place. Undergraduate reporters Samuel A. Church and Cam N. Srivastava have the scoop for the Harvard Crimson:
The changes within the FAS and the College continue Harvard’s adoption of a new administrative vocabulary: one that eschews mentions of race, gender, or equity while emphasizing words like “community,” “diverse viewpoints,” and “growth.”
The College’s new Office of Culture and Community page features a “University Commitment Statement” — not previously published on any Harvard website — that emphasizes integrity, respect, and the pursuit of excellence. The statement encourages students to “cultivate bonds and bridges” and learn from peers with different backgrounds, but it does not include the word “diversity” or any reference to protected categories.
The office also states at the top of the page that “Harvard College remains committed to cultivating a community where all of its members can thrive” and ensuring that students feel welcome.
‣ For CBC News, Candace Maracle reports on a series of workshops geared toward educating Haudenosaunee kids about menstruation and traditional pain remedies:
Prompted by a need for increased health support and education in her community as well as her own personal struggles with her moon time, Sateiokwen Bucktooth started Snipe Clan Botanicals in 2018 and is sharing her knowledge by providing workshops.
Bucktooth is a traditional ecological knowledge teacher from Akwesasne Mohawk Territory, on the Ontario-Quebec-New York state border.
“I had a really rough moon time every month,” she said.
“It was pretty uncomfortable and it affected my quality of life so I started really delving into what types of plants I can use to help support my reproductive health.”
She said raspberry leaf, stinging nettle, chamomile, hibiscus and yarrow are her go-to herbs to help to ease menstrual symptoms.
In addition to education, engaging youth through activities like botanical scavenger hunts, Bucktooth said her workshops normalize talking about reproductive health so these types of conversations can become more common.
‣ The New York Times published an incendiary story about Zohran Mamdani’s 2009 Columbia application, using the school’s data breach to their advantage and collaborating with a racist blogger in the process. Defector‘s Samer Kalaf explains they just didn’t want to get scooped:
After publication, the Times article was amended to add the following to the description of Lasker, without including his name: “He provided the data under condition of anonymity, although his identity has been made public elsewhere. He is an academic who opposes affirmative action and writes often about I.Q. and race.” That’s one way to put it. Here’s a sample of what he wrote in June about the Columbia hack: “Consider the Ivies. If we admitted just the most qualified students, it is impossible for them to admit as many Black students as they have.” After the piece was published, Lasker tweeted about how betting markets on the mayoral election hadn’t changed, as if it would’ve meant anything. The Times got worked by a Substack guy who was also a Polymarket guy.
So the article was embarrassingly written and excessively deferential toward its questionable source. Why run it right before the Fourth of July? As Max Tani of Semafor reported this past weekend, the Times didn’t want to get beaten to the punch by their competition, which in this case was the conservative agitator and bigot Christopher Rufo.
‣ And in a deliciously snarky move, a new website lampoons the NYT‘s coverage of Mamdani with headlines you can generate yourself. My favorite so far: “Zohran Mamdani Does Not Own A Car. But He Drives Us Nuts.”
‣ In some joyful news, which lord knows we need, humpback whales are apparently using bubbles to communicate with us humans! Sarah Mohamed writes for KQED:
While humpbacks commonly use bubble nets to trap prey and bubble trails during mating, these bubble rings seemed to occur only during relaxed, voluntary encounters with humans — not while hunting or competing for mates.
“We did not see aggression, and the whales were approaching boats where people were present, and they were engaging in what we call kind of relaxed or slow movements,” said Josephine Hubbard, postdoctoral researcher at UC Davis and co-author on the paper. “Often this was combined with a kind of slowly rolling around in the water … and then they produce a bubble ring right next to the boat with humans on it.”
To better understand whether humans influenced the behavior, the team reviewed hundreds of hours of drone footage from other whale studies. They found no examples of these bubble “smoke” rings when humans weren’t present.
‣ Actor Ilana Glazer and NYC Council Member Chi Ossé on the uphill battle of being an artist in the city (peep the shout-out to Hyperallergic‘s reporting!):
‣ The quince of my dreams:
Required Reading is published every Thursday afternoon, and it is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.
