An art project examines the objects police mistook for guns, plus sexual misconduct and racial reckonings at key cultural institutions.
that is both marvelously poetic and brutally visceral. It starts with the opening sentence: “America always meant for our murders to go viral. They used to put lynchings on postcards.”“This Is Not a Gun,” edited by Cara Levine, reflects on police shootings.
I’ve been thinking about Floyd a lot recently because of the anniversary — but also because of a small publication that came across my desk a few months ago and which I dip into regularly., then snowballed into a compelling series of collaborations between artists and activists that now have been recorded in book form.magazine in 2016, which featured 23 objects that had been mistaken for guns by police in shootings of unarmed civilians over a period of 15 years.
In response, Levine set out to sculpt the objects out of wood. “Often my work comes from a problem that I can’t reconcile, that I’m working over in my head, like, how do I understand this?” she