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Winnipeg Free Press
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
Subversive curation
'Spill the tea' and 'time is a flat circle' might seem like modern neologisms, but they have deep, long cultural roots as evidenced in a pair of new exhibitions opening today at the Winnipeg Art Gallery-Qaumajuq. Crying Over Spilt Tea, curated by Grace Braniff, assistant curator of art at WAG-Qaumajuq, was inspired by two idioms: 'spill the tea,' a phrase from Black drag culture that refers to the subversive sharing of gossip or the revealing of secrets — a.k.a. piping-hot tea, or 'T,' as in truth — and 'no use crying over spilled milk' which refers to the futility of getting upset over something that can't be changed or undone. A Matter of Time, curated by Nawang Tsomo Kinkar, TD curatorial fellow, explores the concept of spiral time, the idea that time, despite having the tidy grid of the modern calendar imposed on it, is non-linear and cyclical. MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS Curators Nawang Tsomo Kinkar (left) and Grace Braniff at a preview of the two new shows Crying Over Spilt Tea and a matter of time, both of which display works from Winnipeg Art Gallery's vast collection. Both exhibitions draw from the gallery's nearly 30,000-piece permanent collection. 'It is a lot to choose from,' Braniff acknowledges. 'My strategy is to try to narrow in on a very specific idea, and then do a survey of our collection and see what artworks fit in with that idea. And I think tea and gossip, they are very specific, but they're also universal experiences that everyone has a connection to.' When you walk into Crying Over Spilt Tea, you are immediately greeted by a massive wall of bone-china teaware, most of it from the United Kingdom. On the opposite wall is Afternoon Tea (The Gossips), a work by British painter Sir John Everett Millais. The painting shows three cherub-faced little girls (and a pet pug), leaning in close at a tea party, play-acting as grown-up women. But it also functions as a comment on how silly and non-essential gossip was (and is) treated by society — as in, a thing for little girls in bows — because God forbid women share their oral histories. 'Often feminized and racialized people have used gossip as a means to kind of confront authority or to share their own narratives and information outside of what the main conversation is all about,' Braniff says. 'This teaware, the pug — both imported into the United Kingdom from China — I don't think it's a coincidence that they're framed with these girls who are doing this 'frivolous' thing, like gossiping.' MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS Curator Grace Braniff 's new exhibition, Crying Over Spilt Tea, at WAG-Qaumajuq draws from the gallery's huge permanent collection. In addition to the main themes of tea (and its cultural and colonial symbolism), gossip and truths, Braniff also wanted to explore the idea of virality. 'Because when we're talking about idioms, they take on this viral trajectory and through that virality, there's this disconnection, I feel, from their origins. And there, in its representations, we don't see that gesture to its places of origin or the places it was grown in,' Braniff says. She is referring to the now-viral phrase from Black drag culture that gives the exhibition its name and has been heavily co-opted online, but one could make the same argument about tea itself. Like the whisper networks of women before her using gossip to subvert the narrative, Braniff also uses subversion in her curation. On the flip side of the bone-china teaware display is Buffalo Bone China, a 1997 video/found-object installation by Hunkpapa Lakota filmmaker, photographer and performance artist Dana Claxton, whose centrepiece is a heap of smashed bone-china teaware on the floor. 'So, the things we see on the front wall we see back here, broken and crushed up. Dana Claxton was making a commentary on state-sanctioned extermination or eradication of buffalo as a means of control and oppression of Plains Indigenous Peoples,' Braniff says. MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS Curator Grace Braniff gives a tour of a vault at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. During that period in the 19th century, buffalo bones were shipped across the Atlantic to England, where they were made into bone china. Braniff says Claxton is teasing out the complicated history of that material, while also taking apart an item we might see as a simple teacup and exploring its full narrative. Crying Over Spilt Tea also includes numerous pieces of contemporary Inuit art, including Tarralik Duffy's 2023 work Red Rose, a repeating pop-art motif of Red Rose tea boxes, and Annie Pootoogook's circa 2001-02 coloured-pencil drawing The Tea Drinkers, which is also featured outside the gallery on a billboard at the corner of Sherbrook Street and Portage Avenue. For A Matter of Time, Kinkar leaned into the creative challenge of building a show out of a massive permanent collection. 'I think my approach has been a little bit more playful and about experimentation and creativity and seeing what is in the collection that hasn't been shown in a long time,' she says Circles and spirals figure prominently in the works on view, but not necessarily in the ways that are obvious; the room also makes use of curved inset walls, so the gallery space doesn't feel as angular. MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS Curatorial fellow Nawang Tsomo Kinkar says circles and spirals have surfaced across different time periods and cultures. The symbol of the spiral has surfaced across different time periods and cultures, Kinkar says. 'We can trace it back to the Neolithic era. It's also been found in rock carvings and Indigenous sites across the Americas. It's been utilized by artists in the later half of the 20th century, specifically in the United States who were involved in movements of abstract art and social art but they're also rooted in other global traditions of mark making,' she says. 'But one thing that I think remains constant, and one thing that the exhibition is trying to build upon, is that the spiral is steeped in deep symbolism.' There are a few entry points onto a matter of time — which is also by design — but if you come into the exhibition from Crying Over Spilt Tea, you'll be met by two juxtaposed works. Wednesdays Columnist Jen Zoratti looks at what's next in arts, life and pop culture. Look up and suspended from the ceiling is Waiting for the Shaman, a 2017 work by Inuvialuk artist Maureen Gruben constructed from polar bear paw bones she has found over the years on beaches. The bones are arranged in concentric circles and encased in clear resin, giving it the appearance that they are encased in sea ice. A space has been left open in the circle for the shaman. MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS Curator Grace Braniff speaks about the new exhibit, Crying Over Spilt Tea, at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. 'She's really drawing here from aspects of traditional gatherings in Inuit communities that revolve around teaching and drumming circles, this aspect of being connected to community and being connected to Inuit ways of being, specifically ancestral time,' Kinkar says. Across from Gruben's work is an 18th-century fresco by Johann Januarius Zick, depicting angels in a spiraling swirl of clouds, a space left open in the centre for the Holy Trinity. It's meant for a church ceiling, but Kinkar has it displayed on a podium as if on an easel. 'I really wanted to have that effect when you come into the space through that entrance, looking up at Maureen Gruben and then being drawn to this circular wall with the gold, and then looking down here and being pulled and drawn to this imagery.' MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS A vault housing some of the Winnipeg Art Gallery's collection Jen ZorattiColumnist Jen Zoratti is a columnist and feature writer working in the Arts & Life department, as well as the author of the weekly newsletter NEXT. A National Newspaper Award finalist for arts and entertainment writing, Jen is a graduate of the Creative Communications program at RRC Polytech and was a music writer before joining the Free Press in 2013. Read more about Jen. Every piece of reporting Jen produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print – part of the Free Press's tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press's history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates. Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
Yahoo
05-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
A 22-year-old college grad with no government experience is now leading an $18 million terror prevention team: ‘Putting the intern in charge'
A 22-year-old college graduate with no previous government leadership experience is now heading up a Department of Homeland Security terror prevention team. Thomas Fulgate, a former Heritage Foundation intern and self-described 'Trumplican,' has been appointed to a leadership role in the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, known as CP3, which works to combat terrorism, school shootings and other hate-driven violence. This includes an $18 million grant program intended to help communities violent extremism. The appointment of the recent University of San Antonio grad has counterterrorism experts and insiders on edge, ProPublica first reported. 'It sounds like putting the intern in charge,' a counterterrorism researcher who has experience working with CP3 told the outlet. 'We're entering very dangerous territory,' another longtime counterterrorism official said. Officials spoke out about the appointment as spring saw a number of high-profile, violent incidents, including the recent attack in Boulder, Colorado, the fatal shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C., and a car bombing outside a California fertility center. Fulgate took over from Army veteran Bill Braniff, who resigned in March after the Trump administration cut 20 percent of his staff. Braniff has more than 20 years' experience in national security. 'If I cannot advance the prevention mission from inside of the government for now, I will do what I can outside of government,' he wrote in a LinkedIn post announcing his resignation. 'CP3 is the inheritor of the primary and founding mission of DHS - to prevent terrorism,' he added. Braniff's achievements in the post included funneling nearly $90 million since 2020 toward helping communities tackle extremist violence. Replacing Braniff with Fulgate is 'an insult,' a source told ProPublica. Braniff helped with the move 'toward evidence-based approaches to terrorism prevention' in a field still dealing with post-9/11 work that was predisposed to stigmatizing Muslims, the source added. 'They really started to shift the conversation and shift the public thinking. It was starting to get to the root of the problem,' they said. 'Now that's all gone.' Before taking up the new leadership responsibilities, Fulgate was hired as a 'special assistant' in an immigration office at the Department of Homeland Security. The department told ProPublica that Fulgate was 'temporarily given additional leadership responsibilities' in CP3 'due to his success.' Staffers he works with, however, have likened meeting with him to 'career conseling' while expressing shock at how little he appears to know about the role, the outlet reported. The Independent has contacted the Department of Homeland Security for further comment. According to Fulgate's LinkedIn profile, he worked as a gardener briefly in 2020 before embarking on fellowships and internships, including at the conservative Heritage Foundation. He worked on the Trump campaign last year where he attended the Republican National Convention. He also served as secretary general of a Model United Nations club. He also shared photos in recent months at the White House. In one post, he gushed about taking 'the first major leap' of his career. The criticism of the 22-year-old follows similar outrage over Elon Musk's hiring of teenagers in the Department of Government Efficiency. Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old Northeastern University drop-out, was part of a group of young DOGE engineers who were given access to critical computer systems as part of the Trump administration's efforts to gut the federal government. President Donald Trump stood by the group after widespread criticism earlier this year. 'I'm very proud of the job that this group of young people, generally young people, but very smart people, they're doing,' Trump said.
RTÉ News
24-04-2025
- Science
- RTÉ News
Volunteers wanted for annual survey of Irish rivers
The Rivers Trust is urging people from all over the island of Ireland to take part in their annual river survey. The Big River Watch Survey takes place from Friday 25 April to Thursday 1 May. Over that week, the trust is asking people to observe a local river, lough of stream and record their findings on their free app. The app will prompt the user to answer questions about what they can see and observe. No special knowledge is required. Speaking to RTÉ's Morning Ireland, Joanna Braniff, all-Ireland advocacy and communications manager of The Rivers Trust, said that the survey should take no longer than 15 minutes to complete. "There are loads of data gaps in river and waterbody knowledge throughout Ireland," Ms Braniff said. "We want to get a broader picture of our rivers," she added. Unlike in Britain, where there is live monitoring on many freshwater bodies, this is not the case in Ireland. The biodiversity crisis, as well as increased blue-green algae blooms and pollution incidents, means that the need for data on freshwater bodies is increasing, Ms Braniff has said. "There is a gap in the story right now and we're asking the public to step-up," Ms Braniff said. People can complete as many surveys as they like in the app in as many places along the same freshwater body or a different body. "You never step in the same river twice," Ms Braniff said. "A small pollution incident could only be visible for 15 minutes, so there is no upper limit on how many times even the one area could be surveyed." This is the third year the Big River Watch Survey is running in Ireland. The Rivers Trust is hoping for 250 data points to come from Ireland in this year's survey. Last year, there were around 200 from the island of Ireland and around 3,000 from Britain. The Big River Watch app can be downloaded on both Android and iOS. The app itself is always live so people can submit data to it year-round and all the data gathered from the survey is publicly available for anyone to use.
Yahoo
07-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump gutted key research programs studying violence. Experts say it will come at a heavy cost
Since Donald Trump took office in January, several federal programs and research institutions aimed at preventing gun violence, sexual violence, domestic terrorist attacks and violent hate crimes have been shuttered or downsized. These cuts, advocates say, will disrupt – or even end – critical research and will ultimately lead to an increase in violence of all forms. 'It's simple: we will see more school and workplace violence, more hate-fueled violence and terrorism and our political leadership will see more assassination attempts. This is the government putting itself at risk. There is no rung of society that is immune to violence like this,' said William Braniff, former director of the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3) at the Department of Homeland Security, about the increase in violence threats against government officials and judges. Through CP3, Braniff and his staff had been working with local law enforcement, schools and nonprofits to prevent threats and attacks aimed at specific groups and locations. But on 3 March, 20% of Braniff's staff was terminated during a round of 'department of government efficiency' (Doge) cuts, and he resigned alongside them. After a judge's order, the staff members were reinstated but are currently on administrative leave. In addition to DHS, violence prevention efforts were slashed as a result of cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 'There's going to be a huge impact on [our ability to make] communities safer from violence in schools at home and on the streets,' said James Mercy, former director of the CDC's division of violence prevention. 'I think it's a real step back. This undermining of science reflects a belief that science can't help us understand and solve these problems.' Mercy spent 41 years at the CDC, and in the 1980s was one of just a handful of researchers there investigating the ways violence impacts public health. Since then, he's helped build the division into one of the nation's leading hubs of data and analysis on child abuse, sexual and domestic violence, and firearm injuries. On Tuesday, about 2,400 people were laid off at the CDC. Mercy said this included the majority of the division's staff. Mercy, who left his role in 2023, says that throughout his tenure at the CDC, his work has generally had bipartisan support. While he's seen funding and staffing cuts before, they've been 'nowhere near' the level they are now, he said. Before this round of cuts, he says the group had started to evaluate which strategies work best to curtail gun violence – but this work is now in jeopardy. 'Our overall goal was to support communities in preventing violence. That work will slow,' Mercy said. The cuts to the CDC's violence prevention team come amid tens of thousands of layoffs across US health agencies and follow the removal of a HHS webpage that frames gun violence as a public health crisis. On Wednesday, attorneys general and officials from 23 states announced a lawsuit against the Trump administration over the downsizing of public health agencies. The lawsuit, filed in a Rhode Island district court, argues that the $11bn in cuts 'immediately triggered chaos for state and local health jurisdictions'. At DHS, Braniff said CP3 had been working to widen the department's concept of terror to include 'grievance based' violence, which are usually pre-meditated acts based on personal resentments like being fired from a job, and being rejected by peers or a romantic partner. Related: US government cuts imperil life-saving gun violence research. As doctors, we fear for the future | Jessica Beard and Elinore Kaufman Braniff was also working with local law enforcement to understand what drives people to make threats of and commit mass shootings and other terror so that they can find ways to intervene before anyone is harmed. 'We looked at it through the lens of violence prevention and saw there were strategies we could tailor to this kind of violence,' said Braniff, who has since moved to a new role with the Polarization and Extremism Research & Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University in Washington DC. 'We got more traction in that last 12 months than anyone could anticipate from law enforcement agencies who said, 'someone is finally bringing us help.'' Another program that has been canceled is Terrorism and Targeted Violence (T2V), which receives funding from DHS and maintains a database of domestic terror attacks and the types of weapons used in them. This move is being appealed by the University of Maryland, where T2V is housed. 'Our goal was to try to prevent violence and terrorism and treat it like any other sort of phenomenon that science was interested in,' said Gary LaFree, the co-principal investigator on the project. On 17 March, LaFree was notified via email that T2V was cancelled and that he and his staff of about six part-time workers would be laid off. Before they were cut, LaFree and his staff had collected data on terrorism and targeted violent crimes in 2023 and 2024. They found that more than 1,800 such events have occurred in the US, killing more than 400 people and injuring 700 more. Without this type of research, he says, the federal government's policies and counterterrorism efforts will be based on anecdotes and conjecture instead of up-to-date data. 'How can you come up with a policy on anything without data?' he said. 'You're just making it up otherwise. You've just got people's hunches and guesses.' Another DHS project that assembled school leadership, campus safety experts and parents of children killed in school shootings to develop recommendations on the ways schools respond to and prevent shootings has also been taken offline. The federal school safety clearinghouse external advisory board was announced by DHS last July and the board met once in October. Days after Trump's inauguration, DHS told the group that the clearinghouse was being disbanded. Members were invited to reapply for their positions – but it's unclear if the effort will ever restart, two members told the Guardian. DHS did not respond to the Guardian's questions about whether the clearinghouse would resume and why T2V and CP3 ended. 'It felt like a gut punch and has been tough to watch because I know how much work has gone into creating some of these agencies,' said Michael Bennett, the superintendent at Greenville Central school district in New York. In 2004, when Bennett was a high school teacher, he was shot by a 16-year-old student. In the years since, Bennett has worked with survivors and school leaders to restore their communities after shootings, including several people involved with the clearinghouse. Federal cooperation is essential to this work, he says. School officials get an understanding of nationwide data and trends, and agencies such as DHS get input from people who've been injured and lost their children on how to respond to attacks. 'We were beginning to make inroads to show why it's important to work arm in arm and point to data. And we've lost some of that,' Bennett said. 'We'll continue to beat the drum, but tracking it is hard enough and it will be even harder to do it across state lines.'
Yahoo
18-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
They worked to prevent violence and terrorism at the agency created after 9/11. Then they got fired
WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal program designed to prevent targeted violence and terrorism in the United States has lost 20% of its staff after layoffs hit its probationary staffers. The Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships was a redefined version of programs created after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as a way to identify people who could pose new terrorism threats or carry out violence and prevent tragedies by getting them help. It has a mission enlisting parents, coaches, teachers and ministers to head off trouble before it starts by training them to look for signs of trouble in advance. That job became far more difficult after eight members of the center's staff were fired in early March as part of the Trump administration's efforts to trim the government by getting rid of probationary staffers. According to a Department of Homeland Security employee and a center employee who was fired, the staffers were rehired late Monday but were then put on administrative leave, following two March 13 court decisions ordering the Republican administration to rehire fired probationary staffers. The administration vowed to fight the decisions. The staffers spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concerns they might be targeted for retribution. The center's director confirmed the terminations in a statement to The Associated Press. William Braniff said that with his appointment to the director's job ending soon, he decided the best thing he could do for the staffers and for the center was to 'resign alongside of them, as some agencies and departments have rehired people in mission critical offices once they were made aware of the implications of those terminations.' Braniff said there is a huge demand for the assistance provided by the center, called CP3 for short. 'CP3 is the inheritor of the primary and founding mission of DHS — to prevent terrorism,' he said, adding that the center's approach "is as effective for preventing school shootings as it is for terrorism prevention.' In a post on LinkedIn before he resigned, Braniff said grant applications last year increased 82% and 27 states were lined up to work with the center to create plans to address targeted violence and prevent terrorism; 16 states already had plans in place or were creating them. The employees terminated included former social workers, mental health professionals and state public health officials. Before the layoffs there had been more than 40 staff members at the center, with most based in Washington, D.C. In a statement, Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said President Donald Trump is leading an effort to make 'sweeping cuts and reforms' across the federal government to get rid of ' egregious waste and incompetence.' She said leaders at the department 'identified non-mission-critical personnel in probationary status' and added: 'DHS remains focused on supporting law enforcement and public safety through funding, training, increased public awareness, and partnerships.' Tom Warrick, a former counterterrorism official at Homeland Security who's now at the Atlantic Council, said the center, launched in 2021 under the Biden administration, was intended to develop projects that try to identify people before they turn violent, regardless of ideology or motivation, and steer them toward help through community health programs. Warrick said that the center has been doing 'pioneering' work and that the payoff is 'enormous' in terms of shootings and attacks averted. 'What they really need to do is to expand it, not cut it back,' he said. The grants provide funding to state, local, tribal and territorial governments, nonprofits and education institutions to help them establish or grow their own programs to address targeted violence and terrorism. The center replaced the Trump-era Office for Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention, which itself replaced an Obama-era program called Countering Violent Extremism. Earlier iterations of the program were criticized for unfairly targeting Muslim and minority communities, and critics said it was difficult to measure results. Some of those concerns still remain, said Spencer Reynolds, senior counsel to the Brennan Center's Liberty and National Security Program. He said the Brennan Center has long had concerns about the program's civil liberties protections. Even with the emphasis on bringing in public health providers, he said, there's still too much of an emphasis on law enforcement. Last year, the center announced $18 million in grant funding to 35 recipients. Those grants included $700,000 to the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office in Florida as it worked to 'increase community awareness of the signs that someone may be on a pathway to violence.' Another $344,982 went to the Southwest Texas Fusion Center to help it expand its behavioral threat assessment and management team to cover more counties in southwest Texas, where it works to help schools reduce violence.
