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The Art of Revolution: Spoken Word, Video, and Performance Art to Change the World – Jen Capraru and ISOKO (Rwanda)

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Speaking to Jennifer Herszman Capraru in Toronto, Canada, it is impossible not to be warmed by her passion for the work she does and the people it brings her close to. Born in Montréal, Québec, Capraru is the daughter of a mother who was a child survivor of the Holocaust, and a Romanian father, both of whom emphasized the importance of human rights and provided Capraru with the gift of creativity that she exercises with such love and intelligence today. As an adult, Capraru received an MA in Theatre Studies from York University and also trained as a director in Germany; it has been through the medium of theatre and directing that she has always seen the opportunity to create a whole world – a world where real change could transpire. In her role as Artistic Director of the award-winning Theatre Asylum in Toronto, Capraru premieres thought-provoking plays by and about women and humanist issues. In 2006, Capraru was asked to be 2nd Script Supervisor on the Canadian feature film Shake Hands with the Devil about the experiences of Lieutenant General Roméo Dallaire during his tenure as UN Force Commander during the Rwandan Genocide of 1994.

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Imagining a Different Future: Family Accountability in Eliaichi Kimaro’s A Lot Like You

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When I saw Eliaichi Kimaro’s moving and complex documentary A Lot Like You at the Seattle International Film Festival in June 2011, one of my first responses to this film was to recognize it as a model for a personal and family accountability process. Having just finished reviewing The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities for Bitch magazine, I was interested in seeing more concrete examples of community accountability, which the authors define as “any strategy to address violence, abuse or harm that creates safety, justice, reparations, and healing without relying on police, prisons, childhood protective services, or any other state systems.” A Lot Like You brings to life the complicated, messy, beautiful, and liberatory process of addressing harm and seeking healing within a family context. I sought out Eliaichi, a Seattle filmmaker and activist, for an interview and was excited to learn that she also sees her film as capturing the beginning of a family accountability process. The film was originally titled Worlds Apart, and its change to A Lot Like You reflects the journey that Eliaichi embarked upon while creating this documentary about her relationship to her father’s side of the family – the Chagga tribe in Tanzania, who live on the slopes of Mt.

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A Visible Island in the Invisible Sea

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I have just come home from an island. It is small and magical, and set 12 nautical miles out into the Atlantic, and I have been returning there in the summers since I was a teenager. I have been drunk on its landscape since I first set foot there, seasick and naive, and trailed behind my parents through the cathedral woods and stumbled onto a marsh awash in wild iris that I followed to the shore. I was hooked then. I was in sway to the place.

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A Star is Born: Metaphorical Portraits of America

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Artist Carl Gopal’s interests are expansive, but he is by no means a dilettante. He is gifted with an ability to analyze current events in the context of the “big picture” without getting overwhelmed, weaving together schools of thought as diverse as popular culture and politics, spirituality and quantum physics. He is afraid that amid the exhilaration of rapid scientific advancement, we are losing the sense of humble awe at the universe that spurred our curiosity in the first place. To see more of Gopal’s work, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery and visit the artist’s website. Gopal is also afraid that much of America has forgotten a dazzling Hollywood narrative that may have subconsciously shaped our approach to politics on the international stage.

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Yortsayt for Harvey Pekar

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by Paul Buhle
We are now exactly a year since Harvey Pekar’s passing (born in 1939, he passed away on July 12, 2010). The traditional religious ceremonies and Hebrew phrases would have been nothing to him, but perhaps it is time to think more about his life and accomplishments. I am in the unusual position of being one of Harvey’s last collaborators, the only one who is a historian, or for that matter anything besides an artist, or Harvey’s widow Joyce Brabner. And, of course, the only Yiddishist. British actress Helen Mirren observed, at the San Diego ComiCon of 2010, that the comics he had created in his own American Splendor series (always drawn by artists in collaboration: Harvey did not draw) and carried on in a series of books had proven what comics could do and thereby went far to create and validate a genuinely new art form.

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Teetering on the Edge of Creation: Painting the Zohar

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The Zohar, like many other Jewish mystical texts, is veiled in a shroud of secrecy. Part of its power resides in its illusion of exclusivity, its silent challenge to the novice who dares to break open its pages. Artist Michael Hafftka animates stories from the Zohar in the context of his personal life, inviting all of us to search for an element of the sacred within. To see more of Michael Hafftka’s work, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery and visit the artist’s website. In conservative Jewish tradition, there is an aura of spiritual elitism surrounding the Zohar; access to the Kabbalah is limited to those over the age of thirty-five, settled down, and married.

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The Art of Revolution: Norman Nawrocki's Spoken Word

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This second installment of my Tikkun Daily series on “Spoken Word, Video, and Performance Art to Change the World” features multidisciplinary artist Norman Nawrocki of Montreal, Quebec. Nawrocki’s art is about community, it’s about activism, and he doesn’t shy away from taking a critical look at some of today’s most politically charged issues. Like all of the artists featured here, Nawrocki sees art as a means for social change, and he lives this not only in his role as artist, but as an instructor as well, helping to form the next generation of artist/provocateurs. Incorporating many genres into his work Nawrocki is an author, veteran spoken word artist, violinist, actor, educator, and sex advocate with an international reputation. He has several books of short fiction and poetry (in English, French & Italian), over 50 music albums (solo & with his different bands), and has written several theater musicals and cabarets.

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A Young Woman’s Lifesaving Artistic Vision

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It turns out that Art Spiegelman’s factually-based graphic novel, Maus, was not the first use of a comic book format relating to the Holocaust. Life? or Theatre? A Play with Music by Charlotte Salomon, a German-Jewish refugee who perished in Auschwitz at the age of 25, consisted of a remarkable series of 1300 vividly colorful frames (known technically as “gouaches”). These were based on her life and that of her family, and completed in the year prior to her being arrested by the Gestapo in the south of France in September 1943.

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Assembling Stories: The Rubble Art of Dominique Moody

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by Paul Von Blum
Dominique Moody is a visual griot, an artistic storyteller whose imaginative use of found objects and rubble from the streets of Los Angeles and elsewhere has propelled her into the front ranks of contemporary African American artists in the early years of the twenty-first century. Moody, whose major visual disability makes her legally blind, transforms trash into treasure by assembling the remains from architecture, tree branches, bottles, discarded shoes, and other everyday items into some of the most engaging artworks in the contemporary era. Her three-dimensional pieces explore her personal and family history that reflects her nomadic history from her birth in Germany in a military family through her odyssey of living at more than forty addresses in various locations throughout her fifty-four years. Her works are simultaneously individual and social and make her the heir of some of the most influential African American artists of recent times. Moody herself is the first to acknowledge the profound influences of her distinguished visual predecessors.

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Secret Weapon Against Fascism: Ourselves

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Happy International Workers Day, everyone! All over the world, on grand and small scales, people are celebrating the majority in every society: workers and would-be workers. Every day, in my work as a teacher, I see that the belief in fairness continues to flourish among the majority, the baristas and servers, the nurse’s aides and clerks, the dishwashers and groundskeepers. It’s a complex situation, of course. Workers can be hard on one another, proud of their endurance under extreme conditions.