Pandemic Postcard

Social Intervention (2020)

How to digest the news in a pandemic?
Cut it up + revise
(more postcards coming soon!)

Make your own!
– Buy pre-stamped postcards – #SaveUSPS
– Cut out words + pictures from your local newspaper
– Use artist medium to decoupage newsprint to the postcard.
– After postcard dries, leave it under a heavy book to flatten
– Listen to the postcard to know who it should go to
– Address + drop it in the mail
– Repeat

Please also see Gaza Ghetto, #MAGA, Forbidden Words

Gaza Ghetto

Public Intervention (2014 – present)

There should be a word for it.

Earlier this summer I was sitting in a Berlin cafe with two other Jewish women. We each had a story about the moment when it happened. For me it was taking a language class and meeting a young man from Gaza. For the woman from Frankfurt it was while living in Jerusalem. A gear click-turns and the hazy fantasy of Israel is gone, replaced by something harsh and clear and true.

Question: 
Am I living in alignment with my own values?

Gaza Ghetto was originally created in 2014 as a response to Israel’s Operation Protective Edge. I wrote the name and age of each person killed in Gaza on my arm, photographed it and posted the image to social media. Israel killed roughly 2200 people that summer, most of them civilians, 548 were children. Since that time hundreds more Palestinians have been killed. The Gaza Ghetto project continues.

Please stay informed. Resources include: Jewish Voice for Peace, Electronic Intifada, B’Tselem

Please also see Chalk, Voices of 9.11.

Forbidden Words

Forbidden Words: USA 2017

Public Intervention (2017)

The Trump administration is prohibiting officials at the nation’s top public health agency from using a list of seven words or phrases — including “fetus” and “transgender” — in official documents being prepared for next year’s budget.
–Washington Post 15 December 2017

Thank you Esme Farb, Tyler Kim, Clara Palavesin, Saudia Young. Al. Bruce + Ethel dearly missed.

Please also see #maga, Gaza Ghetto

#maga

Public Intervention (2016 – 2017)

52 cards (a full deck) created between the 2016 Electoral College vote and the 2017 Inauguration of the 45th President of the United States.

Please also see Bruce, Forbidden Words, Gaza Ghetto, Chalk.

1863 scarred back of Gordon who escaped slavery.
1890 Massacre at Wounded Knee.
1968 My Lai massacre, Vietnam.
1882 Chinese Exclusion Act
1921 Blair Mountain. Striking miners bombed from planes.
1954 US supported coup against democratically elected president of Guatemala leads to widespread massacres.
1942-6 Japanese internment camps
1916 Lynching of Jesse Washington. Postcard quote: This is the barbeque we had last night.
2009 abortion protestor at clinic of Dr. George Tiller who was shot, fire bombed + ultimately murdered.
1980 Man w an Uzi kills 2 men + injures many others shouting I'll kill them all - the gays - they ruin everything.
1914 Ludlow Massacre. State national guard + company goons attack tent village of striking miners. Among many others, 11 children asphyxiated + burned to death
September 11, 1973 CIA supported coup of democratically elected President Allende of Chile.
"More African American adults are under correctional control today... than were enslaved in 1850" Michelle Alexander (read The New Jim Crow)
2003 Smiling American faces at Abu Ghraib
1938 Father Coughlin, with up to 30 million weekly listeners: When we get through with the Jews in America, they will think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing.
1932-72 Tuskegee syphilis experiment on African American men + their families.
1993 Jerry Falwell says: AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals.
2014 Young man kills 6 and says: My war on women...I am the true victim in all this.
1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire takes the lives of 146 young garment workers, most of them immigrant women and girls. Owner says: I had a right to protect my property.
Roy Cohn. Prodigious use of red + lavender scare tactics. Known for his role in Rosenberg trial, working w McCarthy + representing Trump. Disbarred.
1955 Emmett Till, 14 years old. One of his murderers: I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. As long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers are gonna stay in their place.
1891 largest mass lynching in US history. 11 Italian men in New Orleans. Call to violence states:...the descendants of bandits and assassins...are to us a pest without mitigation.
1988 Couple shot 8 times while camping. Shooter claimed he was outraged by seeing them have sex when he followed + spied on them. Rebecca Wight perished.
1957 Little Rock, National Guard block African American students from integrating high school
1830 Andrew Jackson signs the Indian Removal Act: What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive republic...
1956-? What do Viola Liuzzo, Charlie Chaplin + Martin Luther King jr. have in common?? COINTELPRO !!
1991 Footprints on the locked door where workers tried to escape the Hamlet chicken processing plant fire. 25 perished.
1995 Timothy McVeigh kills 168 people by blowing up a federal building w a daycare center in Oklahoma City. He says: I strongly believe in a god given right to self defense.
1860 Pemberton Mill collapse + fire kills 145 due to shoddy building materials and over crowded heavy equipment.
2016 Khalid Jabara murdered after calling 911 twice that day about neighbor who was out on bail for having run over Jabara's mother. Murderer says: Fuck you Arabs... I want to kill you all
1963 Four little girls killed by a bomb set off at their church by the KKK
1969 visionary Black Panther Fred Hampton assassinated by Chicago police
2014 Eric Garner says:I can't breathe 11 times before he is killed by the NYPD. Who is in jail? The guy who filmed the violence.
1939 MS St Louis set sail from Germany with 908 Jewish refugees. Turned away from Cuba, US and Canada most were returned to Europe + perished
1970 just 11 days after Kent State, police fire on protesting Jackson State students killing two
1855 Protestant nativist Know Nothing (American) Party members riot against Irish + German immigrants on election day. 22 killed
1917 1300 striking mine workers + supporters kidnapped + deported in Brisbee, AZ
1954 Yes there was an Operation Wetback. Papers? No papers? Didn't matter. 1.5 million deported to Mexico.
Terrorism. 3 women murdered every day by a current or former male partner in the US. Photo by Donna Ferrato
1919 Elaine Massacre one of the deadliest racial conflicts in US history.
1968 Nixon + Kissinger sabotage Paris peace talks to win the election. Thousands die as a result.
Legal forced sterilization as recently as 2010 of people deemed undesirable because of mental or physical disability, poverty or race.
1972 Buffalo Creek disaster 132,000,000 gallons of mining waste water floods, killing 125 + displacing over 4000.
1968-2011 ~1.4 million people killed by guns in the US. Rebecca Solnit based on the work of TM Luhrmann: ...when schizophrenics hear voices in India, they're more likely to be told to clean the house, while Americans are more likely to be told to become violent. Culture.
1950 - ? What do Paul Robeson, Daniel Ellsberg + Chelsea Manning all have in common? The McCarran Act of course!
1926 KKK march on Washington. At its peak the Ku Klux Klan had over 4 million members
2015 Dylann Roof murders 9 people in a Charleston Church and claims: we have no skinheads no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.
1965 Selma. Beaten to unconsciousness for marching for the right to vote. Thank you John Lewis. Thank you Amelia Bonyon Robinson
2002 “Please don't. I have a family” last words of 17 year old Gwen Araujo. At trial the defense claim gay/trans panic on behalf of her murderers.
2010 Prior to the ACA (Obamacare), the US had the most expensive, least effective medical care of Western industrialized nations with an estimated 45,000 people dying each year from lack of healthcare. Medical bills are the leading cause of personal bankruptcy.
1945 US drops atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killing between 129,000 and 206,000 people.
2017 the black hole of neediness becomes president.