Although I find the use of absolute words like “never” and “all” in what is supposed to be critical writing to be lazy and stale, I can safely say I will never publish anything about my community/ies at UCLA.

In Urgent Publishing After the Artist’s Book: Making Public in Movements Towards Liberation, the author recognizes a clear distinction from an “artist book” and radical publications stating that for radical publications “design [is] not the end goal.” The author goes on to state:

“subsuming radical practices into dominant structures perpetrates more harm than it reduces. Non-profits, museums, cultural corporations, style magazines, chic developers, and governmental arts councils are all complicit (to varying degrees) in the exploitation of transgressive art for capital accumulation.”

The example of the publication by the black panther party is a prime example of an “alternative publishing ecosystem,” one for the community that has been cultivated for the liberation of black people through education. This fundamental value is what made the Black Panther party. You cannot institutionalize these things and call it for the people. That would be exploitation of a community. To use their rhetoric that oppressed you to try to crawl your way out. It is a form of assimilation that they want from the people that they have colonized. This reminds me of an issue Chican@ artist have. They have the tendency of co-opting Mexican culture and identities as “Chicano iconography” to then have their work displayed in an institutional gallery. I would call this appropriation.

In 1845, Karl Marx declared: “philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it. " This is the key to social practice art.