11: Richard Gear* on Selling Social Justice: Why the Rich Love Antiracism by Jennifer C. Pan

On a snowy Michigan winter day in January 2026, I found myself glued to my iPhone, watching videos of ICE agents in full tactical gear attacking civilians in Minneapolis. I wasn’t alone. Much of the American and global public witnessed what unfolded. It felt like another moment of reckoning: one in a long sequence that has made increasingly clear how the state governs through brute-force policing, ultranationalism, and racialized exclusion. Certain lives—immigrants, people of color, and those who stand in solidarity with them—remain disposable. “Make America Great Again” at the cost of innocent lives: Renée Good and Alex Pretti, who were killed within the span of two weeks. Both Americans.

The feeling was familiar. I looked up from my phone and noticed my neighbor’s faded BLACK LIVES MATTER yard sign in a neighborhood that is nearly all white. It took me back to the summer of 2020, when expressions of solidarity proliferated: donations to bail funds, mutual aid campaigns, and emergency support for strangers online. There was genuine care in many of these gestures, but also a kind of moral urgency untethered from long-term structural change. As attention moved on, the conditions that produced that moment remained largely intact.

In the years since, it has become harder to ignore how parts of the non-profit and philanthropic ecosystem, including some high-profile 501(c)(3) organizations, arts, and cultural institutions, absorbed unprecedented resources with limited accountability or durable impact. What was framed as racial justice often settled into HR policies, branding strategies, and symbolic wins, rather than material redistribution or systemic transformation. In the art world, the language and aesthetics of justice and solidarity endured, even as their political force thinned.

Jennifer C. Pan’s book Selling Social Justice: Why the Rich Love Antiracism offers an unexpected critique of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). It is not the predictable right-wing dismissal of progressive education or the recognition of marginalized people, but a staunchly left critique of how the language and practice of equity and anti-racism in the United States have been commodified. She points out that DEI was not actually born out of the social justice movement. From its inception around the time of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, it has served the ruling class as a professionalized, market-friendly language that ultimately stabilizes an exploitative economic order. In this formulation, racial awareness becomes a consumable moral performance, one that often obscures class inequality rather than confronting it. Representation (of traditionally marginalized community members) expands, while the underlying distribution of power remains unchanged.

This critique resonates strongly within the art world. The post-2020 surge of institutional attention toward BIPOC artists often mirrored corporate diversity strategies: an emphasis on visibility without a corresponding shift in control, resources, or decision-making power. We’ve witnessed many more BIPOC artists exhibiting in major art museums in America. First, that fact on its own should be celebrated. Second, we should review them clearly. Some exhibitions were genuinely thoughtful and rigorous. Others flattened radical content into digestible forms, fitting it neatly within the white cube. Cynics and critics have called out such “Painted Protests” as disingenuous, while philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò describes, through the concept of elite capture, how opportunities increasingly flowed to those within marginalized groups who were already positioned to benefit, without translating into broader structural change.

Pan is neither cynical nor hopeless. I found her book to be charged with a brilliant energy of optimism and a call to action. It is a redirection of political imagination away from symbolic inclusion and toward the construction of an economic order that serves the majority, regardless of race. Justice, she insists, cannot be achieved solely by diversifying who benefits from capitalism.

The racial reckoning of 2020 gave us more diverse museum exhibitions within an increasingly authoritarian state. What we witness in moments like Minneapolis is not an aberration, but a visible expression of fascistic violence against immigrants and marginalized people living what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” For artists, institutions, and communities, the challenge now is not to abandon solidarity, but to rethink it. This means moving beyond attention economies, performative gestures, cancel culture, and activism as personal branding toward forms of creative action that are quieter, less legible, and materially grounded, rooted in sustaining dignified life rather than managing its representation. Artists, regardless of their identities, will be a critical part of making this shift.

– Richard*, February 2026

Richard Gear* is an art historian in training based in Michigan. He is preparing for doctoral study in art history, with an intended focus on contemporary art, technology and the built environment. His research interests center on post-2001 artistic practices, particularly questions of authorship, institutional frameworks, and the circulation of images within global and technologically mediated contexts. Gear’s academic work engages interdisciplinary methodologies drawn from critical theory, cultural studies, and science and technology studies (STS). He is especially interested in how contemporary artists respond to shifting technological, political, and social conditions, and how these responses challenge and reshape established art historical narratives. His current research explores socially engaged practices in contemporary art, with attention to how meaning is produced through audience participation, pedagogy, and collaborative models of production.

He has received training in studio art alongside coursework in modern and contemporary art history, and has sustained engagement with global biennales and nonprofit art organizations. He splits time between Michigan and New York, his research and writing are often shaped by long winters, extended time in libraries, and the rhythms of a college town organized around walking, reading, and watching the weather change. His scholarly interests are further informed by a commitment to social justice and the role of art in public and civic life.

*Pseudonym. 

10: Cara marie young on the Kwanzaa kinara and the endurance of creativity

I find this question (what is the role of art in making a better world possible?) interesting since art making has always played a huge role in documenting the world as we know it to be—a vivid multimedia response to our social conditions. It’s a new year and a new chance to capture this experience each day. On the Kwanzaa Kinara, Creativity or Kuumba is a red candle. It’s a recollection of the blood, sweat, and tears that fuel the creative endeavors that helped Black communities survive and continue to create new things in the midst of every political climate. It’s a reminder that creative organizing has power and that what we make has potential to shift perspectives and break oppressive systems that seek to silence the voices our ancestors gave us—voices that will forever speak louder on the conditions of their existence. It’s also a reminder for peace, and to create a space for one another to exist. As an educator, linguist, and interdisciplinary artist, I see the work that I create as an echo of my brief existence in the analogy between the world that I live in and the world that we creatively seek to build. I think it’s important to remember that the art we create will always live beyond us.

Vita brevis, ars longa / Life is short, Art is long – Hippocrates

– Cara, January 2026

Image of the artist’s homemade Kinara from 2021. The middle candle, representing unity (Umoja) is the first one lit. The red candles are symbolic of blood and of collective suffering endured, while the green are reminiscent of the earth, the growth, and moments of bounty.

Cara Marie Young is an artist from Atlanta, Georgia based in Detroit, Michigan. Her current interdisciplinary painting practice is an evolving response to the human experience, concerned with issues of race in the American landscape and the reality of life in her own skin. The artist seeks to engage with the community around her, recently exhibiting work at the 101st Michigan House of Representatives in 2022 and 2023, at Olayami Dabls Mbad African Bead Museum and at The Feminist Art Museum in 2020. She was an exhibiting artist and speaker in the Race Forward Facing Race Conference in Fall 2016 at the Hilton Atlanta and a Dean’s Diversity Fellow at Wayne State University from 2019-21. The artist recently exhibited artwork at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American history from July-December of 2023 and at the Wright’s 2025 60th anniversary gala. The artist continually seeks to engage with new opportunities in the future. You can find her work on her website.

09: Lyla Catellier on Designing Infrastructure for Change: Celine Semaan, Slow Factory and Everything is Political

My creative practice requires me to constantly survey the field. What cultural conversations are emerging? Who is creating for their community? What do we need? My life’s work has emerged and evolved along with social media. I see these platforms as an opportunity to create connections and share knowledge as an egalitarian network. We can critique the use of social media, with all of its corporate surveillance and artificial intelligence, but not in a 30-second review. Informative infographics have been a staple of human connection (co-education and activism) for all of recorded time; now, stapling the poster to the proverbial lightpole occurs on social media, and Slow Factory is typesetting the revolution. Celine Semaan, co-founder of Slow Factory and its publication Everything is Political, is an artist and activist based in New York with roots in the Levant. Since 2012, she has been explaining issues of social and climate justice in modern, graphically stunning, shareable posts with a platform that has gathered nearly a million followers and untold shares. I consider this work a critical entrypoint for young or recently awakened people who feel the twinge of injustice but do not know exactly where to start. Take, for example, a collaborative post with the New Economy Coalition from February of 2025 that explains Fascism vs Solidarity with 10,000 likes—in seven slides, it defines not only Fascism, but how it shows up in American life, and what are the strategies we have to fight it. This post cites sources; draws attention to an important, people-powered organization with affiliations all over the United States that anyone can get involved with; and most importantly, never shames the novice for not yet understanding the nuances of the issue. It’s beautiful, it's informative, and it contains a call to action for further investigation—in short, art that makes a better world possible.

– Lyla, December 2025

Lyla Catellier is the Curator of Public Programs at Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, where they develop programming that deepens engagement with and understanding of Contemporary art, especially through experimental interdisciplinary performance. They also organize community-based programming as the Chair of the Arts and Culture Committee for the People of Palmer Park, a non-profit working together with the city of Detroit to celebrate the renaissance of the city's most spectacular public park. Throughout their 20 years in cultural organizations and educational institutions, they have specialized in public engagement, creating opportunities for conversation and working with artists to develop their practices. They have previously worked for Columbia University in the City of New York’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, the Chicago Architecture Center, and Elastic Arts Foundation. They received their Master of Arts in Arts Administration and Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012 and hold a Bachelor of Arts in Art History with minors in Art Education and Fine Arts, focusing on sculpture from the University of West Florida in 2009.

08: ASHLEY COOK ON After the Future by Franco “Bifo” Berardi

Thinkers write texts about the activities of complex ecosystems to better understand why things are the way they are, which other thinkers then consume, discuss and respond to as part of an ever growing network of wonder, investigation and discovery. These pieces of writing often function as a reflection of their time, influenced by some kind of collective sentiment, but more than providing answers to questions, they offer a space to explore how deeply intertwined things can become. 

In 2009, After the Future by Italian Marxist philosopher, theorist and activist Franco “Bifo” Berardi was published by AK Press, a worker-run, collectively managed anarchist publishing and distribution house. It is a book that comprises twenty-eight texts written over the course of a decade that incrementally unpack the future as a utopian concept that contemporary societies have lost the ability to envision. Berardi addresses the psychological stress experienced by organic bodies when they are required to adapt to the acceleration of a hyper-connected infosphere and wide scale neoliberal deregulation. Tracing specific political, economic, environmental and social events that have occurred since the emergence of Italian Futurism in 1909, Berardi’s argument is abundant with references to figures, systems and movements of the last century that have caused feelings of hope to fade into despair. 

Though seemingly macabre, this piece of writing offers reassurance that feelings of apathy, exhaustion and depression are cognitive and physical symptoms shared by a majority of individuals trying to survive in the 21st century. But about halfway through the book, Berardi begins to weave in some potential solutions to this dystopic Gordian Knot, ending with the Manifesto of Post-Futurism, a proclamation of withdrawal from competition into a life of rest, love and pleasure, unapologetically.

– Ashley, December 2025

Ashley Cook is a Detroit-based artist and writer who was born on December 23, 1986. She earned her BFA from College for Creative Studies in 2009, and her MFA from Haute École d'Art et de Design in Geneva, Switzerland in 2017. She is the founder and lead editor of the Detroit-based arts and culture publication, Runner Magazine, and has written texts for Holiday (Paris, France), Dwell Magazine (San Francisco), Morning Calm (Seoul, South Korea), and Detroit Art Review (Detroit, Michigan, USA) among others.

07: AndREW Wright on Heavy Heavy by Young Fathers

Sometimes joy spontaneously appears where it is not expected—where it should not be—disturbing the standard flow of (the sometimes unbearable) normalcy, eliciting an unplanned—if not inappropriate—response which even defies context. For example, when Israel released Palestinian hostages in early 2025, celebrations among Palestinians were so bothersome to authorities that Israel had to ban them welcoming the prisoners home. Among the horrors being committed in Gaza, joy—albeit briefly—existed in Palestine. When joy starts to break through the cracks, an illegitimate regularity is no longer able to hold our experience. At its most primordial, this is what art evokes and, in this way, art becomes choiceless: the decision to react, to dance, to create seems forced.

There is something in Young Fathers’ 2023 album Heavy Heavy that defies domestication. First thing of note is the band’s refusal to be inscribed into any specific genre, which makes every next track an unexpected turn down some different path with only the trust and familiarity of the band itself. Similar to bands like Algiers and Mourning [A] BLKstr, Young Fathers are not afraid to move into new territory only after a few bars. Secondly, Heavy Heavy welcomes the listener into an immediate joyful site—some displaced coordinates where one feels a part of something larger. 

The album establishes its tempo in tracks like “Drums” and “Sink Or Swim,” which is especially felt in its absence. Even with lessened urgency, it is difficult to not move during “Rice” and “I Saw.” A much needed reprieve hits in the middle of the album, but only so one can let their body rest while the mind races on. “Tell Somebody” and “Geronimo” are songs of anxiety, a hopelessness taken hold, but with an assurance that it’s not felt alone. A turn into “Shoot Me Down” betrays that we never left dangerous ground, but “Ululation” and “Holy Moly” remind us of why we ever dared tread into such territory. Finally, “Be Your Lady” literally thumps us back into life leaving us in the cold, open real. What choice do we really have?

– Andy, November 2025

Andrew Wright is a Detroit-based journalist, writer, and comedian. He is a frequent contributor to Detroit’s Metro Times and People’s World. His work has also been published in Against The Current and Iskra Book’s journal Peace, Land, & Bread. He has also been a frequent panelist at regional MLA conferences presenting on topics of film, politics, and mental health. In 2025, Andrew was a resident at Château d'Orquevaux Artists & Writers Residency as a Denis Diderot grant recipient.

06: Ian Matchett on Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village by William H. Hinton

The whole people became politicized, became conscious, became active, and finally did indeed become capable of transforming their world, and, in that process, of still further transforming themselves.

When times are difficult we often look to the past for inspiration. Too often, however, these accounts share only the big moments and do little to inform us about the day-to-day action and work of changing the world. We learn that impossible feats were attempted, and at times even accomplished, but we rarely get a sense of what it looks like when people take history into their hands.

Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village is a history that explores one of those massive feats: Land Reform in 1940’s China. William Hinton was teaching English at a local school when communist forces defeated the nationalists who had upheld the centuries old landlord system. He sought to document the communist led process of land reform by joining in the lives and labor of the local town of Longbow. However, instead of giving us an appraisal of party policy, or the debate around Mao’s leadership, Hinton shares the specific process that this single 1,000-person village undertook in order to first break the landlord system, and then slowly redistribute land and labor. It is a narrative of struggle, but at the profoundly human level. The party cadre are flawed people, just like the villagers they are working alongside. The reader sees the process of trying to host public meetings, holding community accountable, motivating, reprimanding, weighing solutions and problems—in short, the work of transforming an ideal into a lived reality.

It was not Mao who made land reform in this small town, it was the relationship between cadre and the people: through debate, argument, revenge, failure, collaboration and struggle. They succeeded not because they were perfect people, but because they committed to a way of relating to each other and a common goal. Through this process they changed both themselves and their world. Here change becomes not a personal journey to enlightenment, but a radical, collective, dialectical process. 

In 2025, confronted as we are with contradiction and uncertainty, narratives like this offer us a window into our own potential. We are reminded of the ways that working people have already changed the world so many times and stood up to so many challenges. Is it so hard to imagine we can do so again?  

Every revolution creates new words. The Chinese Revolution created a whole new vocabulary. A most important word in this vocabulary was fanshen. Literally, it means “to turn the body,” or “to turn over.” To China's hundreds of millions of landless and land-poor peasants it meant to stand up, to throw off the landlord yoke, to gain land, stock, implements, and houses. But it meant much more than this. …It meant to enter a new world. That is why this book is called Fanshen. It is the story of how the peasants of Long Bow Village built a new world.

– Ian, October 2025

Ian Matchett is a queer socialist midwestern painter based in Detroit, Michigan since 2014. He attended University of Michigan and received degrees in Political Science and Studio Art. His work is primarily focused on the humanity and drives of political organizers and working people. It explores what motivates someone to join a cause, and see themselves in collective history; and how understandings of leadership, memory, and perception can shape that engagement. His work draws inspiration from the social realist tradition and his experiences as a community organizer. He is currently the Director of Swords into Plowshares Gallery, and an Adjunct Professor at the College for Creative Studies.

05: megan major on The Wall by Marlen haushofer

I wouldn’t say my relationship with reading is fraught, but it isn’t as consistent as I'd like it to be. The same could be said about my relationship with writing. Both nourish me; both expand my thoughts, widen my perspectives, and help me live outside of myself. So, why then, am I so determined to put them off? Why insist on dwelling in darkness, haunted by ghosts long due to be expelled? Maybe my relationships with reading and writing are fraught after all.  

With today’s mounting anxieties, it’s easy to get trapped in hopelessness and helplessness. It’s tempting to disengage but the more we try to ignore our problems, the more they return in unmanageable ways. I constantly have to remind myself that immersing ourselves in the art of others, as well as in our own, is a way to nurture spirituality and imagine how life might be lived better. That practice gives me hope for the future, even when the present feels so fucking bleak.  

I keep returning to Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall, a book I read earlier this year. I didn’t even give it 5 stars, yet over time, it’s proved its lasting impact on me.  Written in the 1960’s, the novel follows a woman who wakes up one morning to find herself cut off from the outside world by an invisible wall. Everything on the other side of the wall appears frozen in time and she must find ways to survive in her new isolated reality. She becomes the caretaker of several animals, lives off the land, and keeps a journal without the expectation that anyone will ever read it.  

Her story is a reminder that survival is not purely physical but spiritual as well. Even in isolation, meaning can be made through care, attention, and imagination. Unlike her, we can lean on community and don’t have to move forward alone.  

I don’t know if art can change the world, but I use it as a tool to help improve my own

– Megan, October 2025

Megan Major is a Detroit-based artist and co-organizer of the Detroit Art Book Fair, an annual event that brings together independent publishers and artists to share their work with the public. Working primarily with photography and the artist book, her practice reflects on memory, transformation, and the quiet tensions between preservation and decay. While most of her books are photo-based, A Book of Images incorporates her own writing, extending her exploration of how the visual and the verbal can coexist as parallel forms of memory.

Through the Detroit Art Book Fair, Megan helps cultivate space for artists and small presses. She is dedicated to expanding access to independent publishing and creative exchange. Her recent contribution to Nox Library’s 30-Second Review series reflects her belief in art as a means of endurance and imagination, a way to nurture connection even in times of fragmentation.

04: Art Historian Samantha Noël on In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe

In light of the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement after the death of George Floyd, one book that brings me solace as I think about the inexplicable prevalence of premature Black death and the enduring resolve of Black life is Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. This heartfelt yet powerful text offers a close look at the “wake” in all of its iterations as it has manifested in the lives of Black people in the Americas across time and space. For Sharpe, to be in the wake is to continuously be aware of slavery’s unfolding presence in the lives of Black people, beginning not only with the trans-Atlantic slave trade but also staying awake to keep watch with the dead during wakes, and, more importantly, developing particular kinds of enduring consciousness (as in being woke) as forms of resistance.

Sharpe’s enquiry into this study begins on a personal level as she discusses the loss of loved ones in her family, but then connects them to the loss of other Black lives that succumb to the afterlives of slavery -- or the term systemic racism that is widely used in popular culture these days. These afterlives of slavery consist of everything from incarceration, limited access to healthcare and education, to the crises of black maternal health and inequities in living wages. Throughout the book, Sharpe examines visual, literary and quotidian representations of Black life that exalt the primacy of being in the wake which ultimately reminds us of the enduring spirit of Black life.

– Samantha Noël

Samantha A. Noël is an Associate Professor of Art History at Wayne State University. She received her B.A. in Fine Art from Brooklyn College, C.U.N.Y., and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from Duke University. Her research interests revolve around the history of art, visual culture and performance of the Black Diaspora. She has published on black modern and contemporary art and performance in journals such as Small Axe, Third Text and Art Journal. Noël’s current book, Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism (Duke University Press, forthcoming 2021), examines black modernism in the early twentieth century, particularly how tropicality functioned as a unifying element in African Diasporic art and performance.

03: Asmaa Walton and the Black Art Library on Children’s Books

My name is Asmaa Walton and I’m the founder of the Black Art Library. I recently created a list of all the children’s books I have been collecting for the library so I could share it with teachers, parents, and really anyone who was interested. Children’s books have been some of my favorite to collect because I’m drawn to the illustrations!

All of the books are about Black artists or were created by Black artists. Every book I added to the list was wonderful but I will give some short reviews on a few of them!

Bronzeville Boys and Girls
By Gwendolyn Brooks and illustrated by Faith Ringgold
Ages 7-10

This book is honestly great for not only kids but kids at heart! I loved reading it so much. It is a collection of poems that tells the stories of different boys and girls in Bronzeville. This illustrations are by Faith Ringgold and they are fantastic.


Jacob Lawrence: In the City
By Susan Goldman Rubin
Ages 2-4

This one is a board book for younger children and it is one of the only board books I’ve come across about a Black artist so I think it’s very special. Jacob Lawrence’s paintings illustrate a bustling city for the young readers.


American Struggle: Teens Respond to Jacob Lawrence
Edited by Chul R. Kim

This is one that I didn’t put on the list because it’s one of the few YA books that I have. In this book multiple teens share their perspectives on the timeless work of Jacob Lawrence. This is a really unique book to me but it is not often that we’re able to hear from teens about how art speaks to them.

Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat
Ages 6-9
By Javaka Steptoe

The illustrations in this book are so beautiful. It takes us through a young Jean-Michel’s journey to becoming an artist and we’re introduce to members of his family and the roles they played in introducing him to art. It’s a great story.

– Asmaa Walton

View the Black Art Library’s list of Children’s books here.

Donate to the Black Art Library here!

02: Navigating an endless stream of things to learn from and of

I began the year reading Lydia Davis's shorts, then Merve Emre's Once and Future Feminist. By March I was only panic-reading the news. Then I tried to digest the pandemic by reading Paul Preciado's "Learning From the Virus,” but also digging back to Virginia Woolf's "On Being Ill," and other seminal texts on illness, ailments, and culture. 

At the time George Floyd was murdered, I was in Chicago with my partner, probably reading about a bored celebrity in their mansion or watching Breaking Bad. The world changed overnight. Perhaps because everyone was tired of being either inside or essential; perhaps because Black and Brown people were disproportionately affected by the pandemic; perhaps because of all of the other events that had transpired in the past 400 years, it felt like a time for action. 

Shortly after the protests began there was a flood of organized documents, reading lists, and spreadsheets. The endless bounty of knowledge omitted from American pedagogy could fill, well, a library. There are so many things on my reading list now: books I'm upset I wasn't given in my youth, books I'm ashamed I didn't know about. And to be clear, my reading list isn't exclusively about race. There is so much to learn about the world, but the lens through which I intake these things is always going to be through what I have learned in the American school system—a system predicated on race. 

I'm trying to read, listen, and act in equal measures in order to interrogate my own spheres of references and knowledge. Because it's been so hard to sit down to read a book, I am starting with the 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones and the NYT. I am a maximalist, and this project has it all: podcasts, long-form journalism, extensive criticism, poetry, compact phone-legibility, and more. It's such a robust bank of information about the insidious genesis of contemporary racist structures and systems. At once poetic and disruptive, it provides deep learning for thirsty allies. It's hard to review a compendium of works in medias res, but I can safely guess that there is no conclusion to the 1619 Project at this time. What happens next? I think we're trying to answer that right now.  

I've definitely gone past 30 seconds. 4.5/5 stars—half a point deducted because it is not a book and this is a book review column. But, anything Ted Cruz decries as propaganda is probably going to be excellent.

–Tizziana Baldenebro

Tizziana Baldenebro is a Ford Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD). Her practice emphasizes critical research and documentation, privileging historically undervalued and underrepresented artists and designers. Tizziana received a Masters of Architecture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. 

01: Isabella Achenbach On The Artist As Curator (An Anthology) edited by Elena Filipovic

From Pressed Coffee 02