Ann-Derrick Gaillot

Jackie Venson got a priceless piece of career advice when she was 13 years old: “My dad told me that I had to start singing if I wanted to make any money in this business.” Speaking by phone from her home in Austin, as her miniature dachshund Jack plays nearby, she explains her dad’s reasoning. “Bands that have singers make more money; they get more gigs,” she says. “If you’re a singer and you play an instrument also, you’re making the money of two players now. You save that money, you pay yo...

A week before our interview, the Chicago-based artist Dreamer Isioma read a book that introduced them to the idea of quantum immortality. “I’m writing a video based on this concept,” they say. “Basically, the theory is that you consciously cannot imagine yourself dead. Therefore, you will always be alive in some form of dimension or universe.”
The book is the latest bit of astrophysical literature to inspire the musician, whose work flits from bedroom pop to indie rock to chillwave with aband...

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Akeema-Zane
Akeema-Zane is an artist and researcher who centers experimental approaches and practices in literature, sound/music, cinema and performance.
Artist and researcher Akeema-Zane discusses keeping track of your working history, being okay...

By Ann-Derrick Gaillot
At the time of his assassination in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was in the process of organizing a demonstration in Washington, D.C. uniting thousands of struggling Americans, of all races and ethnicities, in the fight for economic justice. Called the Poor People’s Campaign and March on Washington, it threatened to upend the interests of the United States’s wealthy, ruling class to further the causes of expanding access to education and jobs and ensuring all Americans...

When the members of KC Tenants show up together in their yellow shirts, they come boldly proclaiming their demands on their backs: “What we want is safe, accessible, and truly affordable homes.”

76 years after Clara Peoples founded Oregon’s celebration marking slaves’ emancipation, Janelle Jack ensures the festivities continue
This story was updated June 17 to add that a new law now makes Juneteenth a federal holiday.
Clara Peoples was working at the Kaiser shipyards in 1945 when she ushered in her first celebration of Juneteenth in Portland.
Having recently moved from Muskogee, Oklahoma, Peoples was part of a wave of African Americans who relocated to the Pacific Northwest from the ...

The athlete, who won the U.S. Open while wearing masks with the names of Black victims of police violence, talks to street papers about her heritage and using her platform for good
It’s no small feat to become one of the best athletes in the world by age 23. And yet tennis champion Naomi Osaka has accomplished just that and quickly learned how to wield the sizable platform that comes with it.
As of this interview, she had won three Grand Slams and was preparing for the Australian Open. On Sat...

Kehlani is behind the wheel, driving through the streets of Boyle Heights when I call them one Monday afternoon. I’m looking up at the 26-year-old singer over video chat, phone cradled somewhere between their car’s stereo and gearshift, as they head to pick up their two-year-old daughter from her father’s house. They’re describing a livestream concert of their second studio album, It Was Good Until It Wasn’t, that was broadcast this May, marking a year since the album’s release and just weeks...

Valerie June thought she had her third album, The Moon And Stars: Prescriptions For Dreamers, completed and ready for release in 2020. But like so many plans, the Covid-19 pandemic delayed it, giving space for the Memphis-born, New York-based roots rocker, along with producer Jack Splash, to develop the album’s final, meditative moments.
Speaking via Zoom from her Brooklyn apartment, June is at the ready when asked to define the central figure on Moon and Stars: A dreamer. “A dreamer is someo...

26.01.21
Forever, Ya Girl was one of the defining albums of 2020, but the work is just beginning. And KeiyaA is more than ready.
The Abalone shell KeiyaA holds up to her laptop camera still shimmers though it’s dusted with ash. That sooty residue is a testament to how often she uses the ashtray when she needs to get her mind right. “I usually always have some sort of resin or incense burning,” she says during our afternoon call this past autumn. “Palo Santo, frankincense and sandalwood; those...

Tattoo artist Jalen Frizzell discusses the importance of setting boundaries, centering Black people in her practice, what she learned about herself by starting her own business, leaving space for play, and remembering to prioritize mental health.
How do you get in the zone to draw versus to tattoo someone?
Right now I am really trying to draw less for tattoos. Tattooing requires a certain amount of refinement. To get myself in the drawing zone, I’ve been trying to do a daily practice of just ...

Ana Benaroya is an artist from New Jersey. From a queer perspective, she explores notions of power and desire by exaggerating and distorting the human body, playing with its form and its relationship to other bodies. She draws from the languages of comics, caricature, and pop culture and is influenced by images of bodybuilders, cartoons, gig-posters, and artists such as Tom of Finland, Robert Colescott, the Chicago Imagists as well as children’s artwork.
Visual artist Ana Benaroya on shifting...

“Compton—and Los Angeles as a whole—was chock-full of great lyricists with something viable to say,” Marcus Moore writes about rapper Kendrick Lamar’s hometown, “so what made Kendrick the one to rise above it all?” It’s a question at the heart of his new book, The Butterfly Effect: How Kendrick Lamar Ignited the Soul of Black America, out in October, and one Moore uses to guide readers through wider discussions of artistic achievement and what it means to be the voice of a generation.
As a cu...

An interview with Congresswoman Ilhan Omar for the International Network of Street Newspapers.

The day before my phone interview with Jodie Turner-Smith, the actor had a copy of her English birth certificate overnighted to her in Topanga, California. “I’m a Virgo, Scorpio rising, Libra moon,” she says excitedly, noting, however, her current astrological chart’s basis on her mother’s best guess of her birth time. The rising star is home on a rare break from work, fresh off of shooting a film with Colin Farrell in New York City. But like many millennials, she needs to know the exact time...