KimberlyBarzola is a socialist artist and multilingual organizer from Salem, Massachusetts.
In 2019, Barzola painted a mural paying homage to the hard work of Latin American coffee farmers in Chelsea, MA. [1] [2]
She won a grant from the city of Boston to connect residents to nature and build community through a mural-making project in East Boston, as part of the series, Stories From the Garden. [3] [4]
In 2020, Barzola painted a mural at the Punto Urban Art Museum depicting Tupac Katari and Bartolina Sisa, two indigenous revolutionaries who fought for freedom in 18th-century Peru, where Barzola's family is from. [5] [6]
In 2020, Barzola's piece, Kawsachun Pachamama, was featured in an international Anti-Imperialist Poster Exhibition. [7]
In 2021, Barzola was hired to make art that embodied environmental stewardship and social justice for the Living Landscapes Conference at Boston University. [8]
Her print of Taghreed al-Barawi resisting during protests in Gaza was published in The Palestine Poster Project Archives. [9] [10]
In January 2022, US-based organization The People's Forum published an international collaborative exhibit: Líneas Vitales/Vital Lines, which brought the artwork of Cuban artists and US artists together to protest the United States embargo against Cuba. [11] [12] Barzola's work was featured, incorporating Che Guevara, and drawing inspiration from socialist futures. [11]
Barzola has also collaborated with The People's Forum with art to support Haitian liberation. [13]
In February 2022, Barzola's relief print was published in a Tricontinental interview with Héctor Béjar. [14]
On August 19, 2017, approximately 40,000 people gathered in Boston Common to oppose white supremacists and fascists, [15] presenting themselves as the “Boston Free Speech Coalition". [16] [17] Barzola co-organized the counter-rally and spoke to the crowd about the importance of ending US militarism abroad. [18] [19] [20]
A member of A.N.S.W.E.R., [21] Barzola has spoken at many demonstrations in opposition to military intervention. [22] [23] [24] She has protested and photographed the presence of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Jeffrey Epstein at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in solidarity with MIT Students Against the War. [25] [26] [27]
Barzola often organizes around policies to support undocumented immigrants. [28] [29]
In November 2017, Barzola, an organizer for the T Riders Union, [30] [31] advocated for maintaining the option of cash payments for low-income and immigrant passengers whose immigration status prevents them from using a bank account or credit card. [32] [33] [34]
She co-organized the Justice4Siham campaign to protest ICE's deportation of a single mother and community organizer, Siham Byah. [35] [36] [37]
In November 2015, Barzola was impeached from Boston University student government, [38] along with colleague Marwa Sayed, due to alleged negligence of their duties. [39] Some students opposed the motion, [40] believing Barzola and Sayed were being punished for their support of and involvement in Students for Justice in Palestine. [41]
In June 2022, following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, [42] [43] Barzola and fellow organizers with the Boston Liberation Center, [44] [45] led a crowd of thousands of protestors through the streets of Boston to the Massachusetts State House. [46] [47] Speaking to the crowd, Barzola stated, “We are going back to the roots of this movement by coming to the streets because we know that the only way we even got this right to begin with in 1973 was by mass mobilization." [48] [49]
After Barzola's former high school, Nathaniel Bowditch School, was closed due to "underperformance", she wrote a letter criticizing the lack of funding towards the school, which predominately served students classified as "Hispanic". [50]
Barzola fought alongside the I am Harriet Coalition, in an attempt to save the Harriet Tubman house, which was a community center and one of the last remaining representations of the Black community in the South End. The building was later demolished and the land was sold to developers to create luxury condominiums. [51] [52] [53] [54]
Beginning in late 2002 and continuing after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, large-scale protests against the Iraq War were held in many cities worldwide, often coordinated to occur simultaneously around the world. After the biggest series of demonstrations, on February 15, 2003, New York Times writer Patrick Tyler claimed that they showed that there were two superpowers on the planet: the United States and worldwide public opinion.
The Rhode Island School of Design is a private art and design school in Providence, Rhode Island. The school was founded as a coeducational institution in 1877 by Helen Adelia Rowe Metcalf, who sought to increase the accessibility of design education to women. Today, RISD offers bachelor's and master's degree programs across 19 majors and enrolls approximately 2,000 undergraduate and 500 graduate students. The Rhode Island School of Design Museum—which houses the school's art and design collections—is one of the largest college art museums in the United States.
The Black Cat Tavern is an LGBT historic site located in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. In 1967, it was the site of one of the first demonstrations in the United States protesting police brutality against LGBT people, preceding the Stonewall riots by over two years.
Scott Moe is a Canadian politician serving as the 15th and current premier of Saskatchewan since February 2, 2018. He is a member of the Legislative Assembly of Saskatchewan for the riding of Rosthern-Shellbrook, first elected in 2011. He served in the Saskatchewan Party cabinet from 2014 to 2017 under the premiership of Brad Wall, twice as minister of environment and also as minister of advanced education. In January 2018 he was chosen to succeed Wall as leader of the Saskatchewan Party. He led the party to a fourth consecutive majority mandate in the 2020 provincial election.
Frieda Garcia is a longtime activist and community organizer in the South End and Roxbury areas of Boston, Massachusetts. She served as Executive Director of the United South End Settlement for 20 years and was one of the founding members of La Alianza Hispana.
The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) is a communist party in the United States. PSL was established in 2004, when its members split from the Workers World Party. The group believes that a socialist revolution is necessary to overthrow capitalism and establish socialism. The organization works toward this end by organizing and participating in local protests, running candidates in elections, and political education favoring a revolutionary socialist vanguard party.
Hashtag activism refers to the use of Twitter's hashtags for Internet activism. The hashtag has become one of the many ways that social media contributes to civic engagement and social movements. The use of the hashtag on social media provides users with an opportunity to share information and opinions about social issues in a way that others (followers) can interact and engage as part of a larger conversation with the potential to create change. The hashtag itself consists of a word or phrase that is connected to a social or political issue, and fosters a place where discourse can occur. Social media provides an important platform for historically marginalized populations. Through the use of hashtags these groups are able to communicate, mobilize, and advocate for issues less visible to the mainstream.
Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) is an international grassroots network of animal rights activists founded in 2013 in the San Francisco Bay Area. DxE uses disruptive protests and non-violent direct action tactics, such as open rescue of animals from factory farms. Their intent is to build a movement that can eventually shift culture and change social and political institutions. DxE activists work to "put an end to the commodity status of animals."
The Oromo conflict is a protracted conflict between the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) and the Ethiopian government. The Oromo Liberation Front formed to fight the Ethiopian Empire to liberate the Oromo people and establish an independent state of Oromia. The conflict began in 1973, when Oromo nationalists established the OLF and its armed wing, the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA). These groups formed in response to prejudice against the Oromo people during the Haile Selassie and Derg era, when their language was banned from public administration, courts, church and schools, and the stereotype of Oromo people as a hindrance to expanding Ethiopian national identity.
School Strike for Climate, also known variously as Fridays for Future (FFF), Youth for Climate, Climate Strike or Youth Strike for Climate, is an international movement of school students who skip Friday classes to participate in demonstrations to demand action from political leaders to prevent climate change and for the fossil fuel industry to transition to renewable energy.
Abortion in Illinois is legal. Laws about abortion dated to the early 1800s in Illinois; the first criminal penalties related to abortion were imposed in 1827, and abortion itself became illegal in 1867. As hospitals set up barriers in the 1950s, the number of therapeutic abortions declined. Following Roe v. Wade in 1973, Illinois passed a number of restrictions on abortion, many of which have subsequently been repealed. Illinois updated its existing abortion laws in June 2019. The state has seen a decline in the number of abortion clinics over the years, going from 58 in 1982 to 47 in 1992 to 24 in 2014.
Abortion in Colorado is legal at all stages of pregnancy. It is one of seven states without any term restrictions as to when a pregnancy can be terminated.
Abortion in Montana is legal. The number of abortion clinics in Montana has fluctuated over the years, with twenty in 1982, twelve in 1992, eight providers of which seven were clinics in 2011, and five clinics in 2014. There were four clinics from 2015 to February 2018 when All Families Healthcare clinic in Whitefish reopened. There were 1,690 legal abortions in 2014, and 1,611 in 2015.
Abortion in Florida is currently legal up until the 15th week of gestation, whilst an embryonic heartbeat ban that restricts abortion after the 6th week of pregnancy is set to take effect on May 1, 2024. Both pieces of legislation were signed by Governor Ron DeSantis.
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Derecka Purnell is an American lawyer, writer, and organizer. She is best known for her 2021 memoir Becoming Abolitionists, which received positive reviews from Boston Review, PEN America, Kirkus, The Guardian, and others.
A "Black Lives Matter" street mural was painted in Capitol Hill, Seattle, in the U.S. state of Washington in June 2020. Maintained by the Seattle Department of Transportation, the artwork has survived longer than many Black Lives Matter street murals across the United States.
A series of ongoing protests supporting abortion rights and anti-abortion counter-protests began in the United States on May 2, 2022, following the leak of a draft majority opinion for the U.S. Supreme Court case Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which stated that the Constitution of the United States does not confer any Reproductive rights, thus overturning Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court officially overturned Roe and Casey in Dobbs, resulting in further protests outside of the U.S. Supreme Court building and across the country, eventually to major cities across the world both in favor of and against the decision.
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