Arts in the News: A Very Overdue Library Book, The Beauty of Traffic Lights, Access to Ballet and Banned Books
Controversy over Books in Virginia Schools
Earlier in December, public schools in a Virginia school district temporarily removed two classics from their bookshelves after complaints from a parent. She reported that her biracial son had difficulty reading passages in the books, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, that contained racial slurs. In the wake of that controversy, a new one has arisen: Virginia regulators are drafting rules that would require schools to alert parents to potentially objectionable material in the books given to students. In practice, this would entail Virginia schools sending parents a list of all teaching materials containing “sexually explicit” content at the start of every year. Parents could then choose to opt out of certain book choices, and their children would be given replacement texts. The State Board of Education is set to make decisions on these matters in the next month. Certainly many are hoping that any new rules the Board enacts will not prevent students from being exposed to culturally iconic literature.
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Beauty in Traffic Lights
For many, traffic lights represent one of the more frustrating aspects of daily life. Photographer Lucas Zimmerman saw something different when he took long exposures of red, yellow, and green lights on streets near Weimar in central Germany–he saw beauty (see above). The 23-year-old from Bauhaus University actually took the photographs a couple years ago, but garnered international attention this week when someone posted one of them to Reddit. Zimmerman says he was just “lucky to be at the right place at the right time” to capture the hauntingly hazy scenes. His photographs have certainly made people look twice and see beauty in something so ordinary and mechanical.
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A Very, Very Overdue Library Book Returned
One hundred and twenty years after it was checked out by her grandfather, Alice Gillett finally returned a copy of Dr. William B. Carpenter’s The Microscope and its Revelations to the library of Hereford Cathedral School in England. Gillett reportedly noticed a message inside the cover of the book saying it had been borrowed from her grandfather’s school, and decided to return it to the current headmaster. The school told The Guardian that they do not usually penalize students for late books, and decided not to charge Gillett or her family a late fee–even though it took twelve decades to return! “We don’t want to put [our students] off borrowing books,” a spokesperson for the school explained. Gillett’s grandfather, Professor Arthur Boycott, went on to become a distinguished pathologist and naturalist, and his photo hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. Perhaps his later success was in part due to the knowledge he gained from reading Carpenter’s book!
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Ballet in One of Nairobi’s Biggest Slums
Photographer Fredrik Lerneryd has spent the last year and a half documenting inspiring young ballet dancers in the Kibera neighborhood of Nairobi–one of the largest urban slums in all of Africa. The young dancers are part of a program run by UK-based charity “Anno’s Africa,” which aims to provide alternative arts education to over 800 children in Kenya. The classes are taught by Mike Wamaya, a dancer who used to work throughout Europe, and focus on both physical and mental well-being for the students, building their confidence as they transition to adulthood. Lerneryd’s photos focus less on the balletic craft and more on the young students practicing it. The students gather with their teacher in classrooms where the chairs and desks have been moved aside. Some of the older students have become skilled enough to train once a week at an upper-class ballet school. Lerneryd’s photos provide a glimpse into the world of these wonderful students finding confidence and joy in the world of ballet.
