He will be speaking at NYU in Manhattan with MOVE THE CROWD
about how he turned FAILURE into SUCCESS!
On the evening of the 27th, Move The Crowd will present the next installment in it’s critically acclaimed School Of Hard Knocks Series: Flipping Failure To Success. This networking event will be an intimate Oprah Style Interview with the up and coming star and renowned Cultural Innovator-In-The-Making - Jamar Rogers. This candid in depth interview will be an opportunity to discover actionable, real world insights about failure, success and longevity from the ground up. Jamar Rogers reigns from New Orleans, LA. Growing up, he showed tremendous talent for singing as early as six years of age, but soon fell prey to negative influences and quickly became addicted to drugs. As his life began to spiral out of control; Jamar was declared HIV positive. Completely broken, Jamar somehow found the light in the darkest time of his life and began to turn things around. After six years of being clean from crystal meth, Jamar auditioned for The Voice and “the rest is history,” as they say. Since becoming a finalist on The Voice, Jamar has appeared on popular shows such as The Today Show, Ellen, CNN, E! Entertainment News, MTV News, and many more! This is a $50 event but if you register now, our ADINKRA HOUSE friends get in for FREE! That's right! FREE!!! Details / REGISTER HERE ---> http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=ef14e610d56e90269862cc464&id=f99a0697ed&e=e3abe81dfc WHAT: Move The Crowd School Of Hard Knocks Series presents JAMAR ROGERS Doors open 7:00 p.m. FREE if you register before midnight tonight. $50 if you don't. WHERE: NYU Open House Gallery 528 LaGuardia Place New York, NY 10012
NEW TO JAMAR ROGERS? CHECK THIS! 1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r7muSUrqYI 2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5svx_dYzpA&feature=related NEW TO MOVE THE CROWD? Check THIS! 1) http://www.movethecrowd.me/ 2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W344lPDi6rU --Team GET DOWN
“ACT UP could
easily become your life,” said John Riley at a weekly ACT UP/NY meeting held
earlier this Summer on June 18th, 2012. He was talking about ACT UP when it first started in 1987,
when Americans were angry and scared, watching an incurable disease take the
lives of their friends and family.
“Meetings used to be held in Cooper Union, and up to 400 people would
go,” said Riley, who is one of the early members of ACT UP, and a co-founder of
Health GAP (Health Global Access Project http://www.healthgap.org/)
an organization that works to provide generic AIDS drugs to developing
countries.
Now, ACT UP
meetings are quite different. ACT UP, the AIDS
Coalition To Unleash Power, is a diverse, non-partisan group of individuals
united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis (http://www.actupny.org/).
This year, ACT UP celebrates its 25 birthday. When I went to the June 18th meeting, there were
about 20 people who eventually trickled in, mostly older, original
members. There were maybe five
other people there around my age, all from other organizations like Queerocracy
or VOCAL-NY (Voices Of Community Activists & Leaders). It seemed to me that ACT UP had
fractured and branched out into a dozen new organizations focused on different
aspects of the AIDS fight — housing, health reform, community development, and
global distribution of HIV/AIDS drugs.
Part of what made
ACT UP so powerful in the beginning years was its mass of determined
youth. Demonstrations wracked with
symbolism and anger attracted publicity, and publicity attracted the
government’s attention. Suffering
young people were uniting to demand solutions to the AIDS crisis—they wanted
cheaper healthcare for those with the disease, and since very little was known
about AIDS, ACT UP demanded government money for research. “I was HIV positive in 1981, back when
they were calling the disease GRID — Gay-Related Immune Deficiency,” said Eric
Sawyer, one of the founders of the ACT UP, and a co-founder of Housing Works
and Health GAP.
We now know that HIV does not only
affect Gay men, but in 1987 it did not matter what the disease was called
because thousands of people were dying from a disease that might be curable, if the government would only listen. “Every other
week there were obituaries read out during the general meetings—obituaries of
members who had just died from AIDS,” Riley remembers.
Where has ACT UP gone? That is a
question Larry Kramer asks in his article in the Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larry-kramer/act-up_b_1382314.html ) called
“Happy Birthday, ACT UP, wherever you are.” Kramer is a founding member of both
ACT UP and GMHC (Gay Men’s Health Crisis), but in his recent article, he
wonders what and where ACT UP is today, and talks about the organization as if
it only exists in the past. According to Kramer, ACT UP was started by “a bunch
of terrified kids,” but it’s thanks to those scared young activists that those
diagnosed with HIV over 25 years ago are still alive and well today.
Today, the fight
against AIDS suffers from apathy because we have medications that can extend
the life of a person with HIV to its natural length. We know how HIV is transmitted, and how to prevent the
spread of HIV. Indeed the United
State has not only made pharmaceutical advances, but also political advances.
This July, Washington DC hosted the International AIDS Conference after
twenty-two years of not allowing people with HIV to enter the country. Today that law is no longer in
existence, but there are still policies in this country that feed
discrimination or prevent those infected with HIV from receiving the highest
level of medical care.
At the Convention
in Washington DC, protesters gathered to object to the current United States
ban on the entry of sex workers and drug users into the country. As these two populations are among the
highest risk groups for contracting AIDS, many protesters felt that to ignore
these populations is discrimination, and it is a human rights violation to
prevent them from receiving necessary medical attention. Those who showed up to the protest were
not explicitly representing ACT UP, but it did not go unmentioned that this
tradition of protest is mainly thanks to the original organizations that set
precedents for how to object and how to draw media attention to an important
issue. According to an article in The Nation (http://www.thenation.com/blog/169029/protest-greets-international-aids-conference-dc ),
protesters chanted “No
sex workers? No drug users? No IAC!” near the place where the conference was
taking place.
As the father of the branch organizations that
demonstrated at the International AIDS Conference, ACT UP—and specifically ACT
UP/NY—was also getting ready for its time in the spotlight. When I attended the general meeting in
early July, ACT UP/NY was planning to join forces with Occupy Wall Street to
campaign for the Robin Hood Tax.
This tax is something a
coalition of forces around the world, including ACT UP/NY, conceived to solve
many issues with one tax on government and big business practices such as
currency and stock exchanges. The
idea of the Robin Hood Tax, or the Financial Transaction Tax, was brought to
OWS where young and angry people began to rally support for the tax that will
raise money for poverty reduction, green energy implementation in developing
countries, and AIDS and healthcare coverage in the United States. OWS started in much the same way as
ACT UP/NY; both were formed by young people who were
frustrated with the government, and both started on Wall Street (the site of
ACT UP’s first New York protest). This must be the sort of thing that Larry Kramer is
looking for. ACT UP is still
fighting and protesting with OWS and other AIDS activism organizations.
At the ACT
UP/NY meeting, plans to protest HIV criminalization during the Gay Pride march
were discussed. “We now have the history of 25 years of activism, and we know
now what to expect,” said Sawyer after the meeting, when I learned a few of ACT
UP’s current goals: decriminalization of HIV and financial propositions like
the Robin Hood Tax. Individual members of ACT UP had their own goals for the
future of AIDS reform, and many have devoted their careers to AIDS activism.
Sawyer, who now works at UNAIDS said “It’s not fair that I can buy thirty years
of life while people in the developing world die within two years of receiving
diagnosis.” Riley, Health GAP co-founder, also stated his goal that generic
AIDS drugs will one day be available to people in developing counties as well
as those with money in developed areas like the United States and Europe.
ACT UP is not gone. The size
and goals of the organization has changed, but as long as people are willing to
fight for the cause, ACT UP will continue to affect change for another 25
years. By sharing goals and ideas with other activism groups today, ACT UP will
be able to share its wisdom and knowledge of how to unite a group of people to
affect social and political change.
We’ve heard it before—a picture is worth a thousand
words. If one can capture an idea
or a feeling completely and powerfully with a simple image, suddenly, a
movement is born. During the
beginning of the AIDS crisis in New York City in the early 80s and 90s, artists
banded together to create art in order to muster a feeling of protest and
camaraderie. The more the public knows
and cares about the deadly reality of AIDS, the greater the numbers of those
marching and demanding a cure.
Public art, graffiti, and activist art emerged as rallying
points during the terrifying decades of the beginning of HIV/AIDS. It seemed that the only way to be heard
was to force images into a person’s everyday life: to paint subway walls with
protest symbols, and paste Xeroxed posters on sidewalks.
According to Will Travers, founder and executive
director of the cultural and political resistance website lokashakti.org (http://www.lokashakti.org/), art is a logical way to unite people, and to
spread a message. “It seems
like using art as a medium for protest is particularly effective because it's
accessible to so many different kinds of people. Street art even more so.
Just looking at something forces you to have a reaction,” said Travers. Travers’ organization promotes social
awareness by posting information about protest rallies and social justice
issues that are happening now, around the world, along with a separate blog
about protest art http://www.protestart.org/ . It’s like social networking for
activism, the goal being to be ‘in the know’ and prepared to join a cause as
quickly as Google maps on can load the directions to the start of a march or
location of a demonstration.
However,
in the early 80s and 90s, there was no Internet to spread the word about
protests or local activism. At a
time when HIV/AIDS activism desperately needed unity, artists struggled to
connect their art with the public. It was not as simple as creating a Twitter account and
getting a large number of followers; getting the word out required a unique
persistence.
Keith
Haring was among the artists who changed the way art was distributed and digested. For those just getting up on Haring, he was a young, gay
artist in the time of ACT UP and Paradise Garage — which was a warehouse that
hosted DJ dance parties primarily for the gay community. He is known for his bold figures — the
‘radiant baby,’ the dog, and the UFO — and for his prevalence in street art.
According to the Keith Haring Foundation website, in
an interview with Rolling Stone in 1989 (http://www.haring.com/archives/interviews/index.html), Haring talked about his experience creating
chalk drawings in subways. “It was
this chalk-white fragile thing in the middle of all this power and tension and
violence,” said Haring. “The subway pictures became a media thing, and the
images started going out into the rest of the world via magazines and
television.”
Keith Haring: 1978–1982 at Brooklyn Museum
A picture of one of the chalk drawings Haring did
with his artist friend Jean-Michel Basquiat, another pioneer of symbolic
graffiti in the 80s and 90s, was recently featured among pieces at the Keith
Haring exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum.
I had a chance to check out this
amazing exhibition, which was the first large-scale
exhibition to explore his early career.By drawing where he was not
allowed, and forcing the public to confront whatever was put in front of them,
Haring and other activist artists made the public aware of important issues.
Haring also clipped headlines from newspapers,
arranged them in ridiculous ways, and then posted them on the streets. “The
idea was that people would be stopped in their tracks, not knowing whether it
was real or not… so they had to confront it and somehow deal with it,” said
Haring in the Rolling Stone interview.
Here’s a picture that I took of those newspaper
clippings, again at the Brooklyn Museum:
Keith Haring: 1978–1982 at Brooklyn Museum
But Haring
did not just do street art. He used his talent to promote other artist friends,
and raise awareness about issues important to him.
Haring
made this painting in 1988 to promote safe sex. The image is bold and explicit, depicting two men jerking
each other off, but as is the general
idea of protest art and graffiti: get in touch with your audience by bringing
the art to the people, even if the images are alarming.
Other artists continue this legacy today when
approaching current political and social issues. Molly Crabapple is one such contemporary artist (http://mollycrabapple.com/). She
makes protest art for Occupy Wall Street, among other artistic endeavors. “I don’t really believe in putting
things in boxes, I think things should be pervasive everywhere,” said
Crabapple. She went on to talk
about the importance of creating a visual language—repeated and powerful
symbols that come to represent a movement. This was the same for Haring, as Julia Gruen, executive
director of the Keith Haring Foundation, stated to me as we traded emails. “He
developed a visual language and alphabet based in part on semiotics, influenced
by comics and graffiti, and synthesized those disparate influences into a
vocabulary at once unique and yet somehow readable as part of a collective
unconscious.” The Keith Haring
Foundation — a foundation Haring created— was establised to ensure that his philanthropy would continue, and
that his images would be used for appropriate causes.Gruen served as Haring’s own assistant from 1984 until his
death from AIDS in 1990.
Similar to the work that the Keith Haring
Foundation continues to do to support AIDS research and other worthy causes,
the west coast based Alliance Health Project also supports AIDS research by
holding a big art auction in San Francisco every year called Art For AIDS (http://artforaids.org/ ). According
to dk haas, artist and organizer of the event, Art For AIDS “was started by
some artists who were either themselves infected or knew of other people who
were affected by the disease.” The
Alliance Health Project was among the first in the country to offer anonymous
testing for HIV, and continues to offer health support for the LGBTQ community.
It’s just another way art connects to activism. Whether its raising funds for research,
or getting the word out by way of an image, art is essential to unity and
progress. “I’ve been saying for a long time that contemporary art was very not
engaged with the outside world, and I think that with political people of the
last few years, not being engaged, and just sticking with your galleries has
become a cop out,” said Molly Crabapple.
Here’s an image to leave you with, done by Haring
in collaboration with ACT UP. It’s
an image of the pink triangle, which has visual significance outside of the
AIDS crisis; the pink triangle was used by Nazis in World War II to identify
homosexuals, and then again used by ACT UP as a protest against the negative
stigma of AIDS. Here it is
superimposed by images of the “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” and
ACT UP’s motto: “Silence = Death.” His art is telling us that if we don’t talk about being gay,
safe sex, and finding a cure, the consequence will be tragic.
Silence = Death, 1989, Copyright Keith Haring Foundation
Having completed its run at Brooklyn Museum, Haring’s
‘radiant babies’ and more will travel to Santiago, Chile (8/20 - 9/29); Udine,
Italy (9/2 – 2/15/13); and Paris, France (4/19 – 8/18/2013).Keith Haring is also included an
upcoming group show at New York’s New Museum entitled “Come Closer: Art Around the Bowery, 1969–1989”
(9/19 – 1/6/2013).New Museum 212-219-1222.
The heat is
on! You know what that means – Summer Concert Tours! On June 26th,
I got a chance to check out Glassnote Entertainment Group’s Childish
Gambino (aka Donald Glover) in New York.
At his shows, while Childish Gambino tears through underground viral
hits “Heartbeat” and “Outside” from his new album, “Camp,” representatives from
Lifebeat hand out condoms and encouraging Childish Gambino fans to get tested
for HIV/AIDS. As it turns
out, Lifebeat is partnering with Childish Gambino and other major concert tours
this year as well, including Coldplay, Madonna and Wiz Khalifa, to raise
awareness around HIV and help stop the spread.
Lifebeat,
which has been around longer than I’ve been alive, is an amazing organization
that brings AIDS awareness and money for AIDS research to music lovers and
concert-goers.
Through benefit
concerts and tours, Lifebeat, according to their website, is “the music
industry’s response to the HIV/AIDS crisis.”
In New
York, Lifebeat hosts benefit concerts or other benefit events almost every year
when a portion of the ticket money is donated to AIDS research. The first
benefit concert took place in 1992 and female rap trio Salt-N-Pepa performed,
along with the iconic band Pet Shop Boys. Besides raising money and
awareness, these first bands demonstrated the power of music by performing
songs about the crisis. Salt-N-Pepa performed their seminal safe sex song
“Let’s Talk about AIDS”, a play on their “Let’s Talk About Sex”, in which they
warned their audience about the ways a person can get HIV, and how to be smart
about it. Watching the video now, you might be momentarily distracted by
the colorful windbreakers and mom jeans (but remember, it was the 90’s and
everyone dressed like that). Once you’ve gotten over the strange outfits,
you’ll hear the lyrics that were intended to open people’s minds. First,
you’ll learn that AIDS “is not a black, white, or gay disease,” and “the
earlier, the sooner detected, the better off.”
The artists in Salt-N-Pepa are hip-hop pioneers, and at the time, they were at the
top of their game. The founders of Lifebeat knew how much influence a band like that can have on
its fans. When Salt-N-Pepa told their audience to “protect yourself or don’t have
sex anymore,” people listened because the message was coming from a source that
they admired. To our generation of youth today, this type of rap may seem
a bit outdated but it’s essential to understand that in 1992 this openness
about AIDS transmission was pretty unprecedented.
The article “Aids-the Grim Reaper Of Rock”, published in
the Chicago Tribune in February 1992, focused on the death of Queen lead singer
Freddie Mercury. It claimed that many people in the music industry were
HIV positive, but did not talk about it for fear of discrimination. Bob Caviano, founder of Lifebeat, was one of these
music industry people struggling with AIDS, and he was not about to let his own
struggles go unsung. He wrote in a 1992 Billboard Magazine article,
“Music People With AIDS Need Help,” that it was time that music makers stood up
to get the word out. And slowly,
they did.
“Rent,” the rock opera/musical about a group of friends
living with HIV/AIDS and in various premiered in 1994, and all at once,
Broadway was involved in the music frenzy surrounding AIDS. The trend that Caviano and Lifebeat started—to connect
with the high-risk (young) population through popular music—has just begun to
catch on in Africa, where AIDS is devastating whole communities. The Tanzanian government started a
program in 2004 called “Ishi” which means “live”
in Swahili that produced a rap music video about safe sex, condoms, and
abstinence. The Democratic Republic of the Congo followed suit in 2011
when popular artists got together to rap and sing about how to protect yourself
from contracting HIV.
With the
recent disclosure of rap collective OFWGKTA’s sole singer Frank Ocean (an
admitted bi-sexual), the conversations have just begun about sexual identity in
hip-hop. In response to Frank Ocean’s disclosure, TMZ solicited a
response from VH1’s “Love and Hip Hop Atlanta” star and rapper Lil Scrappy who
stated he was glad Frank Ocean came out because, according to Scrappy, “gay is
a doorway to AIDS.” This is simply
not true. Although certain
segments of the population are higher in the number of HIV infections, the
gender that you are attracted to does not determine whether or not you will
contract HIV. HIV/AIDS is a
disease that lives in your blood and transmitted by bodily fluids; being gay,
bisexual, or straight does not change your vulnerability to the disease.
We now know this from thirty years of research and studies.
The TMZ host went on to talk about the
closeted nature of the hip-hop world, saying that artists feared being shunned
if they came out. Lil Scrappy did
say that he was glad that Frank Ocean came out, but his reasons for encouraging openness about sexual orientation were just
wrong. Disclosing sexual orientation
does not magically protect a person from getting or transmitting AIDS any more
than being closeted. Nor does it
mean that someone will automatically contract HIV. Because rap artists are so influential, we need them to start
talking about AIDS in a more educated way. Artists, along with fans, need more HIV education. The fact remains that we need to start
talking about AIDS in the music world in general. HIV education must take place at all levels, even in the music industry, lest it continue to suffer in silence. This silence, to impressionable fans, could mean the difference between life and death. Twenty-years later, it might be time for a mainstream, chart-topping artist to make another anthem.
This year
marks the 20th anniversary of Lifebeat’s beginning, and still today
the organization goes on tour with famous artists, and brings awareness to
communities that are at high risk of having unprotected sex; young people in
New York City. Though Bob Caviano died of AIDS in September of 1992, his
organization remains strong. Today, Lifebeat also supports a program
called “Hearts & Voices” that brings music and performers to people living
in AIDS facilities in the New York area. “Hearts & Voices,” brings
joy and humanity to these communities, spreading the message that we haven’t
forgotten, and we’re still here.
Lifebeat has an impressive history of working
with famous and successful performers, including artists who participate in
benefit concerts, and also artists who invite Lifebeat to go on tour with them,
spreading the word about protecting yourself across the nation. In the
past, Lifebeat performances have included Mary J. Blige, Pink, The Dave Mathews
Band, Wu Tang Clan, The Beastie Boys, Blink 182, Alicia Keys, Destiny’s Child,
Elton John, Idina Menzel, Maroon 5, Phoenix, Plain White T’s, Ke$ha, Busta
Rhymes, and Joe Jonas among many others. It’s pretty cool to be behind
the same cause as all of these artists. We’re definitely not alone.
To cop some tickets for Wiz Khalifa (with Mac Miller), Madonna,
and Coldplay, head over to www.ticketmaster.com
before they’re all gone!
For more information on Lifebeat and its
various programs, including “Hearts and Voices”, head over to www.lifebeat.org.
