This morning I tied plastic-covered strips of paper to each of the signs in “Beyond the Chief,” an installation by Edgar Heap of Birds on the campus of the University of Illinois, in Urbana. The strips read: On May 17, 2009, the artist Edgar Heap of Birds was quoted in The News-Gazette: “[This is] really […]
Reimagining Ourselves
The signs in Edgar Heap of Birds’ installation were vandalized for a fourth time on May 10, 2009. Someone wrote on one sign and two other signs were bent further. I was reading Patricia J. Williams the other day: Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race (1997). She’s a lawyer and theorist who attended […]
Beyond the Chief by Edgar Heap of Birds
We are privileged to have an installation by Hock E Aye Vi/Edgar Heap of Birds on the campus of the University of Illinois. I wrote about being a docent with the work in the previous post. But I wanted to reflect a little more on this powerful work. The backwards writing (FIGHTING ILLINI), which refers […]
The Hole
A couple of friends, Damian Duffy and John Jennings, just published a new book, The Hole. Straight from the website of Front 40 Press: “The Hole: Consumer Culture is a science fiction horror story about the buying and selling of race in America, the simultaneous worship and degradation of African Americans in popular culture, and […]
