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Manual for Freedom, Research & Creativity

What We Believe
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  • “In a world where we obsessively document our own lives, most of us don’t pay nearly enough attention to what we owe one another. It’s about recognizing that human civilization began when we realized that we could do more together… Today, certain algorithms pull you toward the things you already know, believe, or like, and they push away everything else… Push back. It shouldn’t be this way. But in 2019 opening your eyes and seeing things in a new way can be a revolutionary act.”

    – Tim Cook, Apple CEO, Tulane University, May 18th 2019

  • Life Exists: Theaster Gates’ Black Image Corporation

    Theaster Gates' “The Black Image Corporation” presents photographs from the holdings of Chicago’s Johnson Publishing Company, a sprawling archive that shaped “the aesthetic and cultural languages of contemporary African American identity.” Gates approached the project as a celebration and activation of the black image in Milan through photographs of women photographed by Moneta Sleet Jr. and Isaac Sutton – of black entrepreneurship and legacy-making. “Life exists” in the Johnson archive, he says, just as it exists and should be honored in other places of black creativity.More

  • FRIDA ESCOBEDO: The Era of the Starchitect is Over

    Rising Mexican architect Frida Escobedo is relentlessly inquisitive, eschewing stylistic constants in favour of an overriding preoccupation with shifting dynamics. Personal curiosity is the driving force behind her practice, which makes he an outlier in a profession dominated by extroverted personalities keen on making bold assertions. "I think it really is a generational shift," Escobedo says. "The idea of the starchitect making grand gestures with huge commissions is over."More

  • The novelist, essayist, and social critic James Baldwin has been dead for more than 30 years, but he is still a Jeremiah: a mournful prophet whose warnings about the health of the world appear to have gone unheeded. His 1963 book The Fire Next Time has reemerged as a discomforting guide for those bewildered by the global ascendance of the populist right, by the persistence of wealth disparity in the world’s most developed countries, by the deportations, by attacks on the free press, by police killings. Those seeking reassurance in the present through the belief that things “used to be worse” will find little comfort in his words. But perhaps they will find direction in his things . . . READ MORE ➡️

  • “I live a hope despite my knowing better”: James Baldwin in Conversation With Fritz J. Raddatz (1978)

    Born in Berlin in 1931, editor and writer Fritz J. Raddatz relied on food delivered by African American GIs after the death of his parents. To Baldwin he was an “anti-Nazi German who has the scars to prove it.” Debating his return to the USA after 25 years, Baldwin explores the political climate in America at the end of the 1970s in a conversation at home in Saint-Paul-de-Vence.More

  • House as Archive: James Baldwin’s Provençal Home

    For her new book, Magdalena J. Zaborowska visited the house Baldwin occupied from 1971 to 1987 “to expand his biography and explore the politics and poetics of blackness, queerness, and domesticity”. Here, she narrates her early journeys to Baldwin’s home and proposes a salve for its recent loss: a virtual presentation of Baldwin’s home and effects.More

  • Where are the real investments? Theaster Gates on James Baldwin

    The Chicago-based artist talks to Victoria Camblin about materializing the past, the house as museum, and preserving black legacies. Social and artistic engagement, Gates suggests, may allow the contents and spirit of Baldwin’s home, and others like it, to settle in lived experience.More

  • 💥🏛 ARCHITECTURE’S LOST HEROINE 🏛💥

    Madelon Vriesendorp, painter, sculptor, and OMA co-founder, welcomes the Guardian’s Nell Card (plus daughter Betsy) into her London home, a playground “perfect for five-year-olds.” The multi-hyphenate artist has been sidelined and uncredited throughout her career, though a 2018 Ada Louise Huxtable Prize-win suggests she is finally getting her due.

    📲 READ MORE @ the GUARDIAN.

  • Opening Friday (April 12) at David Zwirner, London, William Eggleston 2¼ showcases square-format photography from California and the American South in the 1970s – saturated figurative statements that exist somewhere between portraiture and landscape. More info: www.davidzwirner.com/exhibitions/