This online collection presents digitized images of the AIDS Memorial Quilt panel maker files housed in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. The panel maker files contain more than 150,000 mementos and ephemera submitted by Quilt panel makers to the NAMES Project and the National AIDS Memorial, which memorializes victims of HIV/AIDS. Conceived by Cleve Jones and friends in response to the AIDS epidemic unfolding in San Francisco, California, it was first displayed on the National Mall on October 11, 1987 at the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. The Quilt's impact was immediate and helped transform discussions about HIV/AIDS victims, treatment, prevention, prejudice, and taboos. Since 1987 the Quilt has grown to nearly 50,000 panels memorializing 110,000 individuals - the largest piece of community folk art ever created - and has traveled all over the world.

The Women's Art Library began as an artists' initiative that developed into an arts organization publishing catalogues and books as well as a magazine from the early 1980s to 2002.

When I was a high school student in the mid-1960s, I used to trek up to the West Wing of UCLA’s Powell Library on Sunday nights.  This was the place to see and be seen in the social scene of …

We here at Open Culture heartily endorse the practice of viewing art, whether in a physical museum, in the pages of a book, or online. For some, however, it tends to have one serious shortcoming: all the colors are already filled in.

"A field guide to the memorials, museums, and practices that commemorate white supremacy in the United States nd how to reimagine a more deeply shared cultural infrastructure for the future"--;Monuments, museums, and everyday patriotic practices have made headlines for most of the twenty-first century, yet they are seldom look at together or understood explicitly as tools used by particular people in particular times and places to shape the culture in particular ways. Hass explore the complicated histories of sites of cultural infrastructure: memorials in parks, museums visited by school kids, and routine practices of patriotism. She unearths legacies of white supremacy and traces movements to reevaluate and resist countless sites that have been doing this work, and asks that we look for sites that actually work to tell us who we are, how we came to be, and who belongs in the country. -- adapted from jacket

Honoring Excellence in Journalism and the Arts

"When it comes to Confederate monuments, there is no common ground. Polarizing debates over their meaning have intensified into legislative maneuvering to preserve the statues, legal battles to remove them, and rowdy crowds taking matters into their own hands. These conflicts have raged for well over a century--but they've never been as intense as they are today. In this eye-opening narrative of the efforts to raise, preserve, protest, and remove Confederate monuments, Karen L. Cox depicts what these statues meant to those who erected them and how a movement arose to force a reckoning. She lucidly shows the forces that drove white southerners to construct beacons of white supremacy, as well as the ways that antimonument sentiment, largely stifled during the Jim Crow era, returned with the civil rights movement and gathered momentum in the decades after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Monument defenders responded with gerrymandering and "heritage" laws intended to block efforts to remove these statues, but hard as they worked to preserve the Lost Cause vision of southern history, civil rights activists, Black elected officials, and movements of ordinary people fought harder to take the story back. Timely, accessible, and essential, No Common Ground is the story of the seemingly invincible stone sentinels that are just beginning to fall from their pedestals." -- Publisher's description

As we navigate the balance between hope and uncertainty, we invite you to join Dr. Cornel West & Professor Tricia Rose on The Tight Rope, a weekly program where we welcome listeners and guests as thought collaborators. The Tight Rope is rich in creative, unfiltered dialogue on topics ranging from culture, art, and music to the contours of systemic racism, philosophy, the power of Socratic self-examination, and the possibilities of a peaceful and just world. Our innovative and interactive format will highlight the professors’ combined expertise to encourage critical thinking, self-reflection, and human connection as we navigate The Tight Rope.

Rev Left is a podcast that explores political philosophy, history, science, religion, culture, art, and struggle through a socialist lens. Advancing an analysis and vision for the world rooted in egalitarianism, solidarity, compassion, and human freedom.

New episodes starting November 15th. The Roxane Gay Agenda is the *bad feminist* podcast of your dreams. It’s writer Roxane Gay in conversation with guests who have something necessary to say about the issues that matter most to her–and hopefully to you as well. On the Agenda: feminism, race, writing, art, pop culture, food, and, of course, politics. If you enjoy hearing from people–women, mostly; Black women, usually–who bring unique perspectives to a world in complete and utter chaos, put this show on your own agenda.

Fresh Air from WHYY, the Peabody Award-winning weekday magazine of contemporary arts and issues, is one of public radio's most popular programs. Hosted by Terry Gross, the show features intimate conversations with today's biggest luminaries.