#lydia-velez-gonzalez

#lydia-velez-gonzalez

Bronx politics has changed dramatically over the past 20 years. Since 2006, only Carl Heastie, Jeff Dinowitz, and maybe Jose M. Serrano remain elected. The demographic shift is evident, with areas like Throggs Neck and Morris Park now represented by Latino women, reflecting a growing Latino population, particularly Dominicans.

Abraham Vazquez has this lusty, powerful, aching voice. This song is about loss, and you feel it with every inch of intensity that he's performing.

It makes me feel proud, simply because of the specific time we're in right now. It definitely takes a lot of courage for kids my age to represent their culture. Anthony Benitez, an 18-year-old violin student born in the United States to Mexican immigrants, expressed how the academy provides a meaningful outlet for cultural expression amid punitive immigration enforcement affecting Latino and immigrant families across the country.

Founded in 2014 as a tongue-in-cheek alternative to the esteemed Whitney Biennial, the Every Woman Biennial has evolved into an intergenerational showcase that mixes emerging talent with established feminist art stars while maintaining the scrappy, activist energy that inspired it in the first place.

The Center for Literary Arts presents acclaimed author Venita Blackburn, Compton-born creative writing professor and founder of Live, Write, an organization offering free creative writing workshops.

There is a scene in "Morgenkreis | Morning Circle" (2025), a 16-mm film by Berlin-based Palestinian artist Basma al-Sharif, that unfolds at the threshold of a daycare center. A young boy clings to his father, his fists locked into the fabric of his coat, his arms wrapped tightly around him. The father gently tries to pry himself free while a daycare worker crouches nearby, attempting to distract the child and coax him inside. It is an ordinary moment, one that anyone who has ever been a child - or cared for one - recognizes instantly, as well as the gut-wrenching feeling it provokes.

What began as a passion for collecting became a responsibility. She not only believes in the artistic genius of women, but she wants society in general to hold men and women artists in equal esteem-and to place the same monetary value on their work.

Going out and demonstrating is really important. But if you don't feel comfortable demonstrating, you can volunteer for organizations, you can donate to organizations, you can sign petitions, you can call your senator. There's no excuse not to be involved on some level.

We were supposed to be Frieze's special guests. And we feel like we're being censored, racially profiled and discriminated against. Having worked with the fair for five years, she says she will not continue beyond this weekend.

The only thing most people know about epiphytes, if they know about them at all, is that they're rootless. That's not quite true - they develop highly specialized root systems adapted to wherever they land. In Epiphytic Elucidations at Patel Brown Gallery, Calgary-based artist Marigold Santos takes this fact as more than a metaphor. The exhibition uses epiphytes - plants that grow on other plants without harming them - as a framework for the expansive ways diasporas form through material labor.

the artist's newest body of work responds to an urgent question precipitated by the catastrophic events of the past year: What does one do when the world collapses? The works attempt to make sense of her experience of the fire and its enduring aftermath, while continuing her exploration of the poetics of loss, displacement, and migration. Kahraman views these works as an offering, a libation, to a burning world.

In her manifesto, Borderlands/La Frontera, Anzaldúa presents what she calls a new mestiza consciousness, which advocates for ambiguity and moves "toward a more whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes." Groundbreaking when it was published in 1987, this theory pushed queer, feminist, and cultural scholars to consider how identity is both fluid and informed by several overlapping factors. It also helped to lay the groundwork for branches of study like ecofeminism,

Artist Ayelet Gal-On does not just paint; she builds, layering oil, acrylic and plaster on canvas. Gal-On's signature subjects for "Taken by the Wind, Swept by the Light," her upcoming solo exhibition at Gallery 9 in Los Altos, are white dresses that appear to hang on a line, defying the stillness of the canvas. "I love the process of playing with color," says the artist.

In the language of climate, water is dialectical: It is overabundance and scarcity; needed as well as dreaded. Psychologically, it can represent the unconscious, the maternal, the prelapsarian. Artist Deborah Jack disrupts any viewer's impulse to find recreational soothing in the ocean's tidal landscape, as she openly critiques the legitimacy of cartography, empire, and ecological adaptation. Jack's six-channel video installation "a sea desalts, creeping in the collapse... in the expanse...a rhizome looks for reason... whispers an elegy instead"

Last summer, I did face painting at a block party in my Brooklyn neighborhood. In the sweltering August humidity, I rendered pink butterflies and Spiderman webs on tiny, sticky faces; unsurprisingly, my designs didn't last very long in the bouncy castle. Except for the glitter. For weeks, I found it in my hair, on my cats, in my sink, and in random corners of the house, migrating to and fro like dandelion fuzz.