Mumia Abu-Jamal, Writing on the Wall. Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal, Edited by Johanna Fernández, Foreword by Cornel West, Open Media series, City Lights Books, City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco, CA, 2015

When a Butterfly Makes a Fist: The New Migrants' Rights Art

With the Brooklyn Museum's acquisition of a rare cache of work from the Black Arts Movement and the Tang Museum's career survey of edgy activist Sister Corita Kent, activist art from the '60s is entering museums--showing that the postwar-art canon has come a long way, sort of.

Meanwhile, a new generation fighting for migrants' rights is creating an iconography of protest for today, with the Monarch Butterfly emerging as a recurring symbol. See some in Migration is Beautiful, a video recently posted on rapper Pharrell Williams’ i am OTHER YouTube channel; see others on the website of No Papers No Fear, which received a creative outpouring when it put out a call for butterfly images asserting the rights of undocumented immigrants. My favorite is Cesar Maxit's Migrant, where the creature's trademark whorls turn into footprints and fists. Read more.