Keith Haring in 1989: “Unfinished Painting”. Haring died few months after and this is his last painting. This is supposed to be a self-portrait. Haring knew he wouldn’t have enough time to finish it. This is one of the saddest but certainly the most powerful thing I’ve ever seen.
to clarify: this is a finished self portrait. haring did know that he would be unable to continue to work; this “unfinished” painting refers to that self-consciously as a visualization of how the aids crisis and government neglect robbed him of his life and future career.
i feel like this distinction is important? there are many artists who died due to hiv/aids and left unfinished work, but haring made this specifically to comment on his impending death. i feel like stating that it’s actually unfinished takes away some of his agency as an artist/activist/pwa and the political power of the work.
when i woke up this morning, my first thought was ‘no one visits my grave anymore’ and i was really sad for a few minutes so i lay on my bed with my eyes shut and then all of a sudden i opened my eyes and was like ‘wait i don’t have a grave what the ****’
are you okay
Am I Ever?
how did you reblog this with the old format and bleep my fuck
Because treating people fairly often means treating them differently.
This is something that I teach my students during the first week of school and they understand it. Eight year olds can understand this and all it costs is a box of band-aids.
I have each students pretend they got hurt and need a band-aid. Children love band-aids. I ask the first one where they are hurt. If he says his finger, I put the band-aid on his finger. Then I ask the second one where they are hurt. No matter what that child says, I put the band-aid on their finger exactly like the first child. I keep doing that through the whole class. No matter where they say their pretend injury is, I do the same thing I did with the first one.
After they all have band-aids in the same spot, I ask if that actually helped any of them other than the first child. I say, “Well, I helped all of you the same! You all have one band-aid!” And they’ll try to get me to understand that they were hurt somewhere else. I act like I’m just now understanding it. Then I explain, “There might be moments this year where some of you get different things because you need them differently, just like you needed a band-aid in a different spot.”
If at any time any of my students ask why one student has a different assignment, or gets taken out of the class for a subject, or gets another teacher to come in and help them throughout the year, I remind my students of the band-aids they got at the start of the school year and they stop complaining. That’s why eight year olds can understand equity.
I remember reading somewhere once “we should be speaking of equity instead of equality” and that is a principle that applies here me thinks
honey-bun-diaries 