Happy Monday, Everyone! This week’s featured artist is Amy Sherald. I was fascinated researching Ms Sherald and her body of work.
Amy Sherald (born 1973) is an American painter based in Baltimore, Maryland. Her work started out autobiographical in nature, but has taken on a social context ever since she moved to Baltimore.She is best known for her portrait paintings that address social justice, as well as her choice of subjects, which are drawn from outside of the art historical narrative. Through her work, she takes a closer look at the way people construct and perform their identities in response to political, social, and cultural expectations. Sherald is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery.
Early life and education
Amy Sherald was born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1973. As a child, she was never surrounded by art because it was never an interest for her family. Her mother only supported art as a summer program and never as a career, until she won the National Gallery Portrait Competition. She studied at the Clark Atlanta University, where she earned her Bachelor of the Arts degree in painting in 1997. After that, she became an apprentice to Dr. Arturo Lindsay, who was an art history professor at Spelman College.In 1997, she was also a part of the Spelman College International Artist-in-Residence program in Portobelo, Panama. She attended the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2004, where she earned her M.F.A. in painting. After gaining her M.F.A, she lived and studied with painter Odd Nerdrum in Larvik, Norway. In 2008 she attained an artist residency assistantship at the Tong Xion Art Center in Beijing, China.[
Career
Sherald’s work focuses on issues of race and identity in the American South. Her experience of being one of very few black students to attend a private school often influences her work. At the beginning of her career, she started out by installing and curating shows in the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo and the 1999 South American Biennale in Lima, Peru. Recently, her work was acquired by the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the Smithsonian Museum of African American Art.She also has helped to organize and install international exhibitions in Central and South America.
In October 2017 it was announced that Sherald and Kehinde Wiley had been chosen to paint official portraits of Michelle Obama and Barack Obama to be held in the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.
Pete’s gonna be at the Blacksonian!!
Oh, to have tickets that day…lucky people.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BanKz5oFPVb/
this is who they are.
https://twitter.com/MikeElk/status/922443811401367553
Rauner looks to Washington for the power to change pension benefits
by Kim Geiger Chicago Tribune
Stymied by a Democrat-controlled General Assembly and still in a contract dispute with the largest state employee union, Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner is looking to Washington for help advancing his agenda to weaken the influence of organized labor in Illinois.
He’s lobbying Congress to give states like Illinois the power to change public employee pension benefits, which he argues are overly generous because of a “corrupt bargain” between politicians and union negotiators. And the governor is hoping to get legal victories over unions at the U.S. Supreme Court, where the recent appointment of a new conservative justice could tilt decisions in his favor.
ADVERTISING
The focus on D.C. allows the first-term governor to show supporters he has a plan for delivering on the promises he made as a candidate despite losing a two-year budget battle with Democrats over the summer. And it comes as Rauner prepares for a re-election campaign in which he needs to win back his conservative base after his approval of controversial abortion and immigration legislation left many of them angry.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-met-bruce-rauner-washington-20171020-story.html
Thread
https://twitter.com/renato_mariotti/status/921914377690845186
Renato MariottiVerified account @renato_mariotti
2/ Illinois @GovRauner is trying to get Congress to pass a law that would take away the Illinois Constitutional right to keep your pension.
3/ Due to the supremacy clause of the constitution, Congress and Trump
could try to undo a state constitutional right without an amendment.
4/ Can you imagine working your whole life for a pension you thought was guaranteed and then have it reduced after retirement?
5/ That shouldn’t be lawful. If we don’t stop this, what rights could they take away next? /end
https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/921734068475179008
https://twitter.com/JoyAnnReid/status/922290630801395712
uh huh
uh huh
https://twitter.com/BruceBartlett/status/922097065102110720
https://twitter.com/Johngcole/status/922640332810084352
Iowa’s new voting restrictions deepen our democratic crisisEllen Kurz and Brad Anderson, Iowa View contributors
Published 12:40 p.m. CT Oct. 20, 2017 |
Every news cycle seems to bring more of the same — chaos, anger and deep division. Our television screens and our social media elevate the most extreme voices and nowhere do we hear a
civil debate on important issues like education, jobs, climate change, taxes and the choices facing our state and our country today.
Elections are the great equalizer, where no one vote or voice is more important than the other and everyone’s vote is counted, whether you have 100,000 Twitter followers, or you don’t own a computer. It is a true Iowan value and tradition to engage in our democracy by the simple yet critical actof voting. At a time when the country is experiencing such turmoil we need the participation of more citizens, not less.
It is not an overstatement to say the future of our democracy depends on the state of the democratic process, or, simply put, ensuring everybody can vote and that their votes are counted.
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists/iowa-view/2017/10/20/voter-id-law-iowa-deepens-democratic-crisis/784615001/
lips pursed
https://twitter.com/yashar/status/922562714345467905
https://twitter.com/BabyAnimalGifs/status/921345686674788353
Eric Holder will be on MSNBC this hour. on Rachel Maddow
SMH
USING OUR KIDS FOR PHOTO OPS!
SMH. She will use her position to combat childhood bullying? I suppose she thinks that doesn’t include Donald who is presumably an adult.
Trump Supporters Are Being Set Up to Dismiss His Ties to Russia
by Nancy LeTourneau
October 23, 2017
If you avoid right wing media, you might not be aware of the story that has them all galvanized right now, a remake of the old one about how the Russians bribed the Clintons to sell off 20 percent of America’s uranium. It’s the lie Peter Schweitzer tried to sell in his book, Clinton Cash, which has been repeatedly fact-checked since he and Bannon conned the New York Times into buying it in 2015.
The reason this whole nonsense has been resurrected is because a reporter named John Solomon has been writing about it at The Hill almost daily for the last week. To understand what’s up, it is helpful to know a little bit about his background. From 1987 until 2006 Solomon worked as a reporter for the Associated Press. Here is how Josh Marshall summarized his reputation among fellow journalists.
His position at The Hill started this past summer.
There are a couple of stories prior to this one that Solomon is known for. Back in 2006, while working for AP, he attempted to smear Harry Reid by suggesting he had ties to Jack Abramhoff. In doing so, he wrote about contacts between the two but failed to mention that the former majority leader voted against the bills Abramhoff was pushing.
After his arrival at The Hill, Solomon was able to weaponize a story about how James Comey’s memos documenting his conversations with Trump contained classified information. That one made the rounds among right wing news sites. To demonstrate how that story was completely debunked, even Fox News issued a retraction. Even so, Solomon maintains a consistent presence on that network.
Look at this whining.
“White Working Class Populism & Conservatism Are Incompatible”:
Are we entering the end times for the NFL?
Professional basketball offers the NFL a blueprint for success: embrace the black culture of the majority of your players
BY DAVID DENNIS, JR.
The National Football League, the American sport that comes closest to resembling a religion, has its end times in sight: the year 2021. “The likelihood,” NFL Players Association executive director DeMaurice Smith said in August, “of either a strike, or a lockout is in ’21 a virtual certainty.”
Doomsdays. Humanity has always been obsessed with them.
Every religious text has mention of the end times. In just the past 30 years, we’ve survived Halley’s comet, Y2K, the end of the Mayan calendar and the rapture that was supposed to happen in September. But nothing lasts forever. The NFL has survived lockouts and strikes before and has seemed like Teflon for the past decade with sky-high broadcast ratings, massive revenues and an annual American holiday called Super Bowl Sunday. But the league has serious competition for American pastime status from the National Basketball Association.
This may seem far-fetched now, while the NFL’s television ratings lead the NBA’s by a wide margin (although numbers were down last season, and some wonder whether television ratings, in a streaming world, matter as much as they used to). And the NBA doesn’t have anything close to dominating a whole day in America like the Super Bowl. But the NBA, which is as popular as ever in this social media era, continues to embrace an important fact about American culture: Black culture and black people determine cool. Cool resists linear structures. If the NFL wants to maintain its dominance, it needs to embrace black culture or get left behind. Just like baseball.
Let’s be clear: The 2017 NBA Finals between the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers was the league’s most watched Finals since Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls played the Utah Jazz in 1998. But the average 20.4 million viewers who tuned into each game is equal to the average viewership for a single Sunday Night Football game in 2016. And the NFL is still an unmitigated cash cow, with a net worth of more than $13 billion, dwarfing the NBA’s $6 billion figure. The average NFL franchise is worth $2.5 billion. Worth of the average NBA franchise: $1.36 billion, a 3.5-fold increase over the past five years. Over at Major League Baseball, the average team is worth $1.54 billion, but 50 percent of viewers are 55 or older, up from 41 percent in 2010. And in its defense, the MLB can still captivate the country when it has historic World Series matchups like last year’s battle between Cinderellas in the Chicago Cubs and Cleveland Indians. And they almost doubled back with a monster championship series between the Yankees and Dodgers if the former hadn’t lost to the Houston Astros. ESPN data shows the average age of baseball viewers at 53. The average age is 47 for the NFL, and it’s rising. The average age is 37 for the NBA, and it seems to be staying there. Baseball’s television ratings continue to trend downward.
Howard Bryant, ESPN senior writer and author of Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston, summarizes the NFL’s stance in relation to the NBA and MLB: “Post-ABA merger,” he says, “basketball has done by far the best job of adapting to the people who play the sport, baseball the worst. The NFL has been in between, leaning towards a bad job.”
Meet the Trumpkins
A crop of Republicans are betting that a Trump-style mix of crassness and white grievance will bring them victory in 2018.
by Saahil Desai
Family values.
Trump forgets Tiffany in list of his children https://t.co/BMf2DbHLqU
— David Frum (@davidfrum) October 23, 2017
Why it matters if Trump pays his aides’ legal bills
10/23/17 10:12 AM
By Steve Benen
………………………………………………………
Axios’ original report on this used the words “pledge” and “promise” to describe the president’s intention to defray the costs of his aides’ legal representation.
I’m highlighting the specific verbs because Trump’s credibility in this area is something of a joke. This is, after all, a president who’s been caught lying about contributions to veterans’ charities. Sure, he may say he’s prepared to use his own money to help cover the legal costs of his team, but what Trump says and what Trump does often have little to do with one another.
But just for the sake of conversation, let’s say the “plan” is legitimate. Let’s assume that Trump will follow through on this vow, grab his checkbook, and start writing checks to his staffers’ law firms. That brings us back to Walter Shaub’s concerns.
Given the circumstances, this need not be seen as a story about magnanimity. In the Russia scandal, the sitting president is in legal jeopardy – there’s every reason to believe he’s under investigation for obstruction of justice, for example – and those around him are, at a minimum, potential witnesses who may be able to shed light on Trump’s alleged wrongdoing.
And that’s where the trouble kicks in. What happens if officials in the West Wing have information to share that may be damaging to the president, who also happens to be paying for these officials’ legal counsel?
In other words, we don’t know if Trump is prepared to start writing personal checks to help his team because he wants to help them or if he wants to help himself. It’s not hard to imagine the president thinking that he can perhaps buy his aides’ silence by opening his wallet and discouraging them from “flipping.”
THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 10/21/17
Trump interviews with U.S. attorney candidates raise eyebrows
Rachel Maddow reports on Donald Trump meeting with candidates for U.S. attorney positions in the districts that would have jurisdiction over Trump’s affairs, which isn’t illegal but is unusually enough to draw concerned attention.
THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 10/21/17
Trump screening of U.S. attorney candidates unheard-of
Barbara McQuade, former U.S. attorney, talks with Rachel Maddow about the rarity of presidents meeting with candidates for U.S. attorney positions and why Donald Trump doing so is of particular concern.
THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 10/20/17
Expert sees risk of corruption in Trump foreign government deals
Sarah Chayes, author of “Thieves of State,” talks with Rachel Maddow about the structure of corruption in some developing nations and why she sees a risk of that kind of corruption spreading to the United States under Donald Trump
THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 10/21/17
Trump flouting norms risks venal turn in US
Sarah Chayes, author of “Thieves of State,” talks with Rachel Maddow about why Donald Trump’s business with corrupt foreign governments risks spreading corruption to the United States
THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 10/21/17
Search for answers on U.S. soldier deaths in Niger intensifies
Rachel Maddow looks at circumstances and U.S. interests in and around Niger and the increasing demand for answers about the how four American soldiers were killed there.
THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 10/21/17
Trump Chief of staff John Kelly lied in attack on Rep. Wilson
Rachel Maddow reports the latest developments in the mess Donald Trump has made politicizing military next-of-kin notifications with the fact that Trump chief of staff John Kelly’s attack on Rep. Frederica Wilson in his defense of Trump was completely false.
THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 10/21/17
Weak response leaves Puerto Rico backsliding one month post-storm
Rachel Maddow reports on the updated death toll, the rate of infection, and the reverse in progress restoring electricity to Puerto Rico as the inadequate response to Hurricane Maria is turning a natural disaster into a public health catastrophe.
THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 10/20/17
US refugee office denying girl access to abortion
Rachel Maddow reports on an anti-abortion extremist appointed by Donald Trump to lead the Office of Refugee Resettlement trying to force a teenage girl refugee to give birth by denying her access to medical care, including abortion services.
THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 10/21/17
Greater need but less help for Puerto Rico
Rachel Maddow compares the amount of help the Houston area received after Hurricane Harvey and the progress made in recovering from that storm to the comparatively meager response Puerto Rico and the corresponding slow progress there.
Trump keeps rejecting plans to pay for his proposed tax cuts
10/23/17 09:21 AM
By Steve Benen
Republicans remain eager to pass a massive tax plan, which still doesn’t actually exist. That said, GOP lawmakers continue to consider some provocative ideas to help offset the costs of the package they have in mind.
The New York Times reported the other day, for example, that Republicans are “considering a plan to sharply reduce the amount of income American workers can save in tax-deferred retirement accounts.” According to the lobbyists who are working with GOP lawmakers – Democrats have been excluded from the process – Republicans have weighed capping “the annual amount workers can set aside to as low as $2,400 for 401(k) accounts,” far less than the $18,000 a year most Americans can put in their 401k without paying taxes upfront.
This would only cover about a tenth of the cost of the GOP tax plan, but it’s a start. Or, it might have been a start if Donald Trump hadn’t just rejected the idea in his latest morning tweet. The Washington Post reported:
Bernie’s Bots: How Fake Twitter Accounts Manipulate Public Perception
31%.
The percentage above represents a wide range of interpretations, depending on the context. If one were to receive a 31% on his or her exam, the reaction to this number would be an obvious disappointment. If one were to receive a 31% tip as a server, then he or she would most likely be elated. That same percentage also elicits a wide range of emotions in the sporting world as well. A professional basketball player who shoots 31% is most likely not happy with his performance while a professional baseball player who gets a hit 31% of the time is most like quite proud of the work he is doing. The point of these comparisons is that a certain numerical percentage can tell us a lot about a person based on how he or she performs, but, more importantly, how he or she chooses to respond to that percentage moving forward.
Senator Bernie Sanders is currently at 31%.
He is at 31% in terms of the number of actual human beings that follow his Twiter account of the more than 8 million who claim to do so, this according to a routine Twitter audit of the senator’s verified account. That means that 69%, or roughly 4.9 million of Sanders’ followers are not living, breathing human beings. In fact, you can tell that they are bots simply by going to Sanders’ Twitter profile where the overwhelming majority of his recent followers have not Tweeted a single time since joining this month. In addition, several are following anywhere from 40 to 180 people but do not have any followers themselves, a key characteristic of being a Twitter bot. Of the people these bots follow, there tends to be a pattern in that they will follow a handful of politicians, a handful of news organizations, and a handful of celebrities. Hardly ever do they follow an Average Joe because they want to be able to maximize their retweets to the largest audiences possible.
Donald Trump’s ‘blind spot on Russia’ isn’t going away
10/23/17 08:41 AM
By Steve Benen
After Congress approved new economic sanctions against Russia, Donald Trump grudgingly signed the bill into law, but not before blaming lawmakers – including members of his own party – for undermining the U.S. relationship with the Putin government.
But the story took a strange turn recently when the public learned that the sanctions still haven’t been implemented, despite the deadline included in the law. On “Meet the Press” yesterday, NBC’s Chuck Todd sought an explanation from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a proponent of the sanctions.
Really? You still can’t figure it out? It’s just a total mystery as to why this president might have a “blind spot” when it comes to the foreign adversary that launched an espionage operation that help put Donald Trump in power?
Is it really that difficult to wager a guess?
MEDIA ALERT:
Former Attorney General Eric Holder will be on the Rachel Maddow show TONIGHT.
9 pm EST, MSNBC
Look at this hellish monster, y’all. He’s calling a grieving widow a lie. I hate him so much.
https://twitter.com/GMA/status/922427384808091648
https://twitter.com/GMA/status/922440944200376321
Come sit by me, SG2.
Myeshia Johnson, widow of Sgt. La David Johnson: “I don’t know how he got killed, where he got killed or anything.” pic.twitter.com/mdF2feLcUd
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) October 23, 2017
Myeshia Johnson, widow of Sgt. La David Johnson: “Whatever Ms. Wilson said was not fabricated. What she said was 100% correct.” pic.twitter.com/sS5zmkDwAF
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) October 23, 2017
Q: You were upset when you got off the phone?
Myeshia Johnson: “Oh very. Very upset and hurt. Very It made me cry even worse.” pic.twitter.com/4LkNyulGgk
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) October 23, 2017
Sgt. La David Johnson’s widow: “[Trump] couldn’t remember my husband’s name… That’s what hurt me the most.” pic.twitter.com/ta7QRDNRr7
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) October 23, 2017
$74 million to build homes for hurricane victims awarded to a company that claims it has 5 employees, uses a residential home address as HQ https://t.co/rUU5A7J1Kd
— Adam Khan (@Khanoisseur) October 23, 2017
NEWS – @OFA enters partnership with Holder redistricting group @DemRedistrict, Obama to announce it himself shortly https://t.co/34H4ctzVpk
— Edward-Isaac Dovere (@IsaacDovere) October 23, 2017
AM JOY 10/22/17
Trump judge nominee Thomas Farr defended voter ID law
Donald Trump’s federal judge nominee Thomas Farr defended the defeated, controversial North Carolina voter ID law, but Ari Berman of The Nation tells Joy Reid he may soon hear similar cases if confirmed.
AM JOY 10/22/17
Obama and Bush appear to address Trump rhetoric
Former presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush seemed to critique Donald Trump and the impact of his presidency in recent speeches. Joy Reid and her panel discuss.
https://twitter.com/GMA/status/922425645312782336
Thanks for this. I just came to post this.
The week that was
https://mobile.twitter.com/pbump/status/921726982617829378
More on the devastation to Medicare by this budget
https://mobile.twitter.com/kathieallenmd/status/922255090941079552
Please call your Congressman and Senators about the GOP budget, which takes an axe to Medicare and Medicaid.
Good Morning, Everyone 😐😐😐
Good Morning, Rikyrah & 3 Chics Family.
Re-entry from a retreat is going to be slow. Have a great day