Zora Celebrates
In ZORA. More on Medium.
“The first time I picked up that camera, I thought, ‘Oh, okay. This is my tool. This is it.’” — Carrie Mae Weems
Carrie Mae Weems is widely considered to be one of the most influential contemporary artists of recent history. While she is best known for her photography, Weems also works in text, fabric, audio, digital images, and installation video. She’s a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship (or “Genius Grant”), the first Black woman to have a retrospective at the Guggenheim and has even been cited as an influence for Beyonce’s “Lemonade” visuals.
Weem’s work primarily features Black subjects…
Mariame Kaba is an organizer and educator whose work focuses on restorative justice, advocating for youth, ending violence, and dismantling the prison industrial complex (PIC). She has long been vocal in the movement to abolish police and prisons, a movement that gained notoriety in 2020 after the death of George Floyd at the hands of police officers and the subsequent protests.
“As a society, we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm,” she wrote…
“It is not that I dwell on the past. But the past shapes the way we are in the present and the way we will become what we are destined to become.” from “Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America”
Mamie Till-Mobley (November 23, 1921–January 6, 2003) was an American educator and activist and the mother of Emmett Till, who was lynched in Mississippi at the age of 14 for allegedly flirting with a White woman. For his funeral in Chicago, Mamie Till Mobley insisted that her son’s casket be left open because, in her…
