Latest news with #WeExist
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Rainbow Road' mural painted for WorldPride in DC
WASHINGTON (DC News Now) — There's a new LGBTQ mural in the District just in time for the start of WorldPride. It's a colorful display on 15th Street NW, but it also adds a safety component for families. Steady brush strokes are slowly turning regular pavement into a rainbow road. 'Everything's coming together,' said Lisa Marie Thalhammer. Thalhammer is the lead artist with a mission to 'just bring joy and color and creativity into the community.' LIST: WorldPride events kicking off this weekend It's part of the WorldPride celebrations just getting underway in D.C., funded by the Capital Pride Alliance. 'This is a really special time for the city, and we really… want to celebrate,' Thalhammer said. 'We don't want to shy away from showing our colors and celebrating who we are and being visible.' More than 100 volunteers are helping to visually separate the space between parked cars and the bike lane. Thalhammer said as far as she knows, it's the longest LGBTQ mural that's ever been created, stretching all the way from O Street NW up to V Street NW. 'So many bikers are saying thank you. Thank you for making this bike lane safer. And I think safety is a really important part of this project,' Thalhammer said. 'It's stunning. Like I walked by and just put a big smile on my face. I like how they've separated here at, like, a stop sign, so there's not as much crisscross,' said Nicholas Field, who was visiting from New York City. The project also features eight LGBTQ artists, including Mx Mundy. 'The piece is called We Exist. Recently, our administration has literally said that non-binary people and people that live outside the binary gender don't exist. And that doesn't mean we just poof and disappear,' Mundy said. 'But also, there is so much joy and celebration in knowing who you are. And that is what I wanted to express in this piece.' The artists wanted to keep the project under wraps until it was almost done for fear the Trump administration would somehow squash the project. Mundy said their piece and the entire project is about bringing joy to others. 'This person walked by the other day and they were like, 'you know, I'm from a small town, and this just makes me so happy,'' Mundy said. 'I said, I want you to look at this piece. I want everyone to look at this piece and know that they are seen and that they are safe.' Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Hill
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hill
‘Rainbow Road' mural painted for WorldPride in DC
WASHINGTON (DC News Now) — There's a new LGBTQ mural in the District just in time for the start of WorldPride. It's a colorful display on 15th Street NW, but it also adds a safety component for families. Steady brush strokes are slowly turning regular pavement into a rainbow road. 'Everything's coming together,' said Lisa Marie Thalhammer. Thalhammer is the lead artist with a mission to 'just bring joy and color and creativity into the community.' It's part of the WorldPride celebrations just getting underway in D.C., funded by the Capital Pride Alliance. 'This is a really special time for the city, and we really… want to celebrate,' Thalhammer said. 'We don't want to shy away from showing our colors and celebrating who we are and being visible.' More than 100 volunteers are helping to visually separate the space between parked cars and the bike lane. Thalhammer said as far as she knows, it's the longest LGBTQ mural that's ever been created, stretching all the way from O Street NW up to V Street NW. 'So many bikers are saying thank you. Thank you for making this bike lane safer. And I think safety is a really important part of this project,' Thalhammer said. 'It's stunning. Like I walked by and just put a big smile on my face. I like how they've separated here at, like, a stop sign, so there's not as much crisscross,' said Nicholas Field, who was visiting from New York City. The project also features eight LGBTQ artists, including Mx Mundy. 'The piece is called We Exist. Recently, our administration has literally said that non-binary people and people that live outside the binary gender don't exist. And that doesn't mean we just poof and disappear,' Mundy said. 'But also, there is so much joy and celebration in knowing who you are. And that is what I wanted to express in this piece.' The artists wanted to keep the project under wraps until it was almost done for fear the Trump administration would somehow squash the project. Mundy said their piece and the entire project is about bringing joy to others. 'This person walked by the other day and they were like, 'you know, I'm from a small town, and this just makes me so happy,'' Mundy said. 'I said, I want you to look at this piece. I want everyone to look at this piece and know that they are seen and that they are safe.'
Reuters
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Reuters
He was inspired by exiled Russian artists. Then he became one
LONDON, May 14 (Reuters) - Russian film maker Roma Liberov had long been fascinated by writers who fled the country after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. He never imagined that he would one day become an exile himself. In the midst of the COVID pandemic in January 2021, Liberov left Russia because of a powerful conviction that its people had become "hostages of the state" and that a long-simmering conflict with Ukraine would erupt into full-scale war. Thirteen months later, his fears became reality when Russia invaded its neighbour. In 2023, he was designated as a "foreign agent", making it very risky to return. Yet even now, Liberov said he suffers doubts, and wonders if he should have stayed. Despite throwing himself into projects in his new adopted home, Britain, he worries that by choosing to leave, he cut himself off from the mainstream of Russian culture. Had he remained in Moscow - even in a climate where people risk jail for speaking out against President Vladimir Putin or criticising the war - his voice would have been "incomparably louder", he told Reuters. "It's always louder when you're in the same cage, when you experience the same difficulties, when you are with your country and with your people, with all its grief and joy. And now ... for those who stayed in Russia, I'm a betrayer, I'm an alien, I'm someone who left." Artists who move abroad are "condemned to be forgotten in our home country... We need to declare that we exist," he said. "We Exist!" is the title Liberov gave to a 2023 "film concert", opens new tab he produced that features Russian musicians now spread across the world from Montenegro to Argentina. It is also the name of the cultural foundation, opens new tab he runs from London, which aims to promote arts throughout the Russian diaspora. POEMS OF EXILE When Russia was convulsed by revolution and civil war more than a century ago, an estimated two million people fled abroad including artists, musicians and poets. Some, like Vladimir Nabokov, author of "Lolita", became famous in the West, while others lived in near-obscurity, haunted by the desire to return home but able to do so only in their imaginations. Liberov is equally fascinated by those who made the opposite choice and remained in Russia despite the danger of persecution, such as the poet Anna Akhmatova. Akhmatova wrote dozens of poems reproaching her former lover Boris Anrep for leaving her, and Russia, behind - foreshadowing what Liberov calls the "terrible conversation" taking place today between those who stayed behind and those who left. She endured surveillance by the NKVD secret police, expulsion from the Writers' Union and her son's arrest, while other writers and artists including her friend Osip Mandelstam perished in Josef Stalin's camps. Several Akhmatova poems are included in Keys to Home, opens new tab, an album compiled by Liberov in what he calls his farewell to Russia. It features music by artists still inside the country, though Liberov said seeking partners there was a tough process during which he discovered "things I'd prefer not to know". "People were selfish, scared. People lied, people were false. People avoided (me), people did not respond," he said. But he declines to engage in personal recriminations. "If we're going to blame those who stayed and they're going to blame those who left, it leads to nowhere, just to further separation." JAILED ARTISTS From exile, Liberov, 44, has tracked the repression of fellow artists with horror. In a high-profile 2024 case, a playwright and a director, Svetlana Petriychuk and Zhenya Berkovich, were sentenced to six years each in prison for "justifying terrorism" in a play about Russian women who married Islamic State fighters. Inspired by a defiant speech that Berkovich delivered to the court in verse, Liberov created a widely viewed YouTubevideo in which her words were turned into rap-style lyrics, accompanied by drawings made inside the courtroom. Last July Russian pianist Pavel Kushnir, 39, died in a Siberian prison where he had launched a hunger strike while awaiting trial on charges of inciting terrorism, after posting anti-war material online. Thanks to Liberov's efforts, a recording of Kushnir playing Sergei Rachmaninov's preludes has been restored and released on Spotify and Apple Music, and a scholarship was established to support young pianists from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus who want to study in Europe. Concerts, opens new tab dedicated to Kushnir are taking place this month in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Tel Aviv and Berlin. Liberov is pessimistic about what lies ahead. Russia squandered the opportunity to reinvent itself as a free country after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, he said. "And so the question now is: will we... ever have this chance again? I pray for that, but I doubt it. If we have this chance I would love so very much to go back home and to work there."
