Feast and Famine

Market Emma Wilcox 2007 silver green print

This semester our class went to a field trip to the Rutgers Paul Robeson Galleries at Express in Newark, New Jersey. The exhibit they have is called “Feast & Famine”. “Feast & Famine” explores food as a social, political and bodily experience. The exhibit shows the viewer the relationship between food, death, and sex. It also expresses its likeness as a medium for artistic freedom. The artists draw attention to the impact that food production has on the world as a whole. While I was exploring the gallery I was in search for some art projects that could relate to my final project for this class which is the legalization of marijuana and the effects it has on prison reform. As I was desperately searching the gallery for something that related to my topic I noticed a couple pieces that caught my attention. The first piece that caught my attention was actually two pieces that to me signified the same message or idea. This idea was the supermarket, and how foods and goods are bought and sold. I related this to my project because now people can go to supermarkets just like the ones that are depicted in the pictures and buy marijuana just like any other product. The pieces name is Market by Emma Wilcox made in 2007 out of silver green print. Another piece that caught my attention with the same exact idea is a piece that was actually hanging on the wall right beside the first piece that I chose. Its name is Saturday Morning made by Gladys Barker Grauer in 1981 out of wax resist.

Saturday Morning
Gladys Barker Grauer
1981
Wax Resist

The last piece that caught my attention was a collection of photographs of people that are all suffering from different illnesses whether it be mental or physical.This project stuck out to me because Marijuana has been used since the beginning of time as a source of medicine and a healing remedy. Doctors are just recently starting to admit that marijuana and the compounds in it ( THC/CBD) are actually curing sick people of certain symptoms. Doctors are just now getting the courage to start experimenting with the compounds in marijuana, and it has turned out to work for the best so far. Using medical marijuana can cure depression, anxiety, anorexia, Epilepsy, Alzheimer's disease, glaucoma, muscle spasms, pain, appetite loss, Chrons disease, and so much more. "The greatest amount of evidence for the therapeutic effects of cannabis relate to its ability to reduce chronic pain, nausea and vomiting due to Chemotherapy and spasticity [tight or stiff muscles] from MS," Bonn-Miller says.

               

Post 3

An artist that truly inspired me was Amal Kassir: Story-telling activist and Spoken word poet. Amal was born and raised in Denver, Colorado to a German-Iowan Mother and Syrian Father. Two seemingly opposing worlds combined to grant Amal her lived experience. She spent years on her grandmother’s farm in Syria and enjoyed the sweetness of fresh parsley and ripe lemons. Her grandmother taught them the secret recipes that stay highlighted on their restaurant’s dinner menu.  

This was long before any war or conflict arose in Syria. Amal enjoyed the company of her cousins, aunts, and uncles through each visit. Thirty-one of whom were tragically killed due to airstrikes, chemical attacks, explosions, and sheer chaos. The landscape which she knew all too well, flattened by the piling rubble of broken buildings. Trapped underneath were cousins that Amal spent the summers with. She watched from a distance, on screens, and video messages – as the number of casualties and murders grew bigger.

At home, in Denver, Amal designed her own undergraduate degree called ‘Community Programming in Social Psychology’. She argues that nothing can change without the solidarity of community; An idea that led her into the open-ended territory of social justice activism. A world where public opinion has the power to change public policy. Nationwide, Amal organizes vigils, demonstrations, and fundraisers for victims, refugees, and under-served populations. She uses her voice to speak up for those who had been silenced due to language barriers or lack of representation.

Her fiery spoken word poetry and story-telling activism is the result of her lived experience. Her sadness and frustration seeps through every single word. The urgency to act now boldly echoes in her voice. But she never walks away without giving you a sense of her name. Her name, Amal, which means “Hope” in Arabic. The hope that we will live to see a better world : one that doesn’t hate people seeking asylum, discriminate over race, religion or gender – or look the other way when seeing police brutality in the streets.  As citizens of the globally connected world, we need to be armed with information more than ever. It’s at our fingertips.

Amal is a major proponent in education and building individual agency in particularly under-served and vulnerable populations. She hopes to take part in the global effort for literacy in war-struck areas and refugee camps through writing. She is an international spoken word poet, having performed in 10 countries and over 100 cities. She has conducted workshops, given lectures, and recited her poetry in venues ranging from youth prisons, to orphanages to refugee camps to universities to churches to community spaces for the public.

Amal’s work connects to my own project because we are both trying to make people more informed about certain topics and issues through poetry and spoken word. We both connect experiences from our own lives and use poetry to tell our stories. We both would like to see a better world with less hate, and through Dispeling My Single Story, I’m trying to educate people in hopes to creating a more loving and informed world.

Works Cited

“Amal Kassir.” Book A Muslim, https://bookamuslim.com/amal-kassir/.

Final

From the beginning when our final project was introduced, I knew I wanted to make a connection with the topic of this final project. I am a female that belongs to a family of immigrants. My parents immigrated from Ecuador for the purpose of having a better life. The theme of my final project is female migrants living in US society. Just alone in the united states, women are discriminated in many ways. Either being the cause of our gender, race, appearance and even immigration status. My focus is for my audience to understand how female immigrants dealt with discrimination and manage to become success or/and has become a great leader as well as getting their message out. Migrant women face double discrimination, as women and migrants. 

There are many activists that are females as well as being Hispanic and these women left a great impact on what they believe in. Dolores Huerta was born in New Mexico from Mexican parents, making her Mexican American. Huerta began her career in activism in the 1950s, where she was an organizer for farmworkers’ rights. Later on, she seeks to influence the law regarding the support of Spanish speakers and undocumented people. Going back to the issue where not many women don’t get consider in office because women don’t have enough power or control to be in the political world. Well, Huerta spent two years advocating to increase, she wanted that more Latina would be able to represent the country. To get her message out, she created a project by the Feminist Majority. The Feminist Majority is a foundation that works on “social and political and economic equality for women”. In her journey as an activist, she has been arrested twenty-two times for non-violent protest even being that she been under these circumcise she still would be recognized and awarded for her work in human rights. “She’ll also officially became the first Latina to be portrayed in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery last summer.” (Emily Prado).  

One of my favorite activists is the first Hispanic and Latina justice, Sonia Sotomayor. The Nuyorican, who was raised in the housing project in the Bronx. Sotomayor's life story screams out the American dream, at a young age she knew her calling and it was to become a judge. Sotomayor made it her duty to protect “minorities, women’s health, and pushing for criminal justice reformation.” (E.Prado). Sonia Sotomayor is a big role model in the Hispanic community. We can say that she made it, protecting people that were in the same situation as she was growing up.  

                                  

https://youtu.be/Ao-1x1lJGdY