Deaf rappers who lay down rhymes in sign languages are changing what it means for music to be heard by Katelyn Best, West Virginia University This story was originally published on The Conversation. Rapper Beautiful The Artist performs in the music video for the dip hop song ‘DEAFinitely Lit.’ In April 2023, DJ Supalee hosted Supafest Reunion 2023 to celebrate entertainers and promoters within the U.S. Deaf community. The event included performances by R&B artist and rapper Sho’Roc, female rapper Beautiful The Artist, the group Sunshine 2.0, DJs Key-Yo and Hear No Evil, as well as ASL pe ..read more

“Art hurts. Art urges voyages—and it is easier to stay at home, the nice beer ready.” – Gwendolyn Brooks, ‘Chicago’s Picasso,’ 1967 This issue of OTH Bookshelf comprises some 200 academic open access titles in the areas of art and art history, focusing on books that would be of most interest and value to HSS scholars and students.  The OTH list includes the book’s author or editor names, title and title remainder, year of publication, publisher, and open access format (PDF, EPUB, MOBI, etc.) Subject headings in the list are taken from WorldCat records or Library of Congress records, if ..read more

by Nigel Fletcher-Jones, PhD Canterbury, in the eastern corner of England, was a city of saints. Eighteen archbishops were canonised before the Reformation and the remains of many other holy men and women were collected from elsewhere and deposited in its monasteries and churches. Yet of its most famous saint, Thomas Becket (archbishop 1162-1170), no trace remains—unless one believes the claims of the nearby parish church at Chilham to secretly contain his relics. Nonetheless, many tens of thousands of people still visit Canterbury cathedral each year, as they have since shortly after Becket’s ..read more

In this edition of Industry News, an interview with the president of the Mellon Foundation, a Nobel Laureate’s novel becomes a puppet play, a surprising philanthropic fundraiser, improving your museum’s presence on YouTube, a new open access monograph collaboration is up and running, the inaugural Art Mumbai will have a unique locale, and a stunning exhibition of African photography at the Tate Modern.   Artistic Exchange is a Living Experience Elizabeth Alexander, poet and president of the Mellon Foundation, discusses creativity as an agent for change, artistic collaboration, and holdin ..read more

Solo exhibitions that are also career retrospectives really call for a space sufficient to show {off) the artist’s complete body of work. Howardena Pindell: A Renewed Language sprawls magnificently over seven rooms and two corridors at IMMA (the Irish Museum of Modern Art). The largest presentation of her work in Europe to date, it had its origins in Howardena Pindell: A New Language, organized by the Fruitmarket, Edinburgh in 2021. Howardena Pindell: A Renewed Language includes some new work in which one sees echoes of the artist’s concerns from the 1970s and 1980s. American artist Howardena ..read more

In this round-up of stories you may have missed: there’s no place like home for a priceless piece of movie memorabilia stuck in legal limbo; an Ivy League student using stop-animation to tell the story of what happened after hours in the library one night; UCLA’s Pioneers of Queer Cinema series is going on tour; what insiders think about African cinema at Cannes and other festivals; a new documentary about an organization that changed Toronto queer history; very rare movies to be featured in a Library of Congress inaugural festival this June; how curator amassed a huge pan-African film archiv ..read more

by Kevin Eamon Muehleman Background South Africa was the first country in the world to prohibit discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, which was included in both the 1993 Interim Constitution and the 1996 Constitution. Section 9 of the Constitution, known as the Equality Clause, explicitly provides South African citizens with constitutional protection from discrimination on the basis of their sexual orientation, stating that: “The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital statu ..read more

In this month’s Industry News, women authors are outperforming the men at long last, a Seven Sisters College appoints its first Black women President, a profile of drag as an expanding cultural force, a major survey of what Covid-19 taught librarians, and Women’s History Month at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.   Women Authors in the Lead In the 1960s women were the authors of just 18% of books published. By 2020, a new study has shown, that figure is more than 50%, for the first time in history. And it seems that the increasing number of female ..read more

by Megan Smith In honor of Black and Women’s History Month, OTH is highlighting Ali Duncan and Urban Sanctuary Wellness Studio to illustrate the creative genius and legacy of Black women across the U.S. Urban Sanctuary is a Black women-owned and led wellness studio in the historically Black neighborhood of Five Points in Denver, Colorado that used to be known as the ‘Harlem of the West.’ The studio is housed in a 120-year building and in 1915, the sons of the great abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, Louis, and Fredrick Douglass Jr., ran the Douglass Undertaking Company through the building. Ali ..read more

by Craig M. Klugman Craig M. Klugman, Ph.D. is Vincent de Paul Professor of Bioethics & Health Humanities at DePaul University in Chicago.  Medicine has a race problem.  Many people have heard of the health disparities that affect people of color in the United States: They are less likely to have a primary care physician (KFF), less likely to have health insurance coverage (Branch and Conway), and suffer from higher rates of illness and death (Hill et al.). Fewer people know that this problem also manifests in health care workers. First, there are fewer health care professionals ..read more