Pepsi Pulls Insulting To Activists & People Of Conscience Kendall Jenner & The Good Cops Commercial

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Watching the new Pepsi ad featuring Kendall Jenner in an act of pseudo street activism involving protest and then making nice to a row of cops by offering them a can of Pepsi left me stupefied. And I believe that America is way too pc and am never silent in telling people to get a grip. But I simply cannot believe that such a high-level brand as Pepsi was ignorant as to how our young people and all people of conscience would respond, watching the commercial. If you want to understand why #BlackLivesMatter gets their backs up, this marketing travesty just confirms every stereotype about empathy-lacking whites that I can think of.

All over America black men of every age are dying in the streets because they 'looked ominous'; all over America millions of women are watching our rights being stripped away by the Trump administration, all over the world the Trump administration has further restricted funding for contraception and maternal health, all over America undocumented workers are afraid of the dreaded knock at the door that will lead to deportation . . . Pepsi takes this reality that is front and center in the nation's consciousness and they reduce it to Kendall Jenner (who didn't join the Women's March, unlike Gigi Hadid) giving a can of Pepsi to good cops. If only the issues of the mass incarceration of young black men and Ferguson were this simple. 

Thankfully, the brand came to its senses and issued this statement: "Pepsi was trying to project a global message of unity, peace and understanding. Clearly we missed the mark, and we apologize. We did not intend to make light of any serious issue. We are removing the content and halting any further rollout. We also apologize for putting Kendall Jenner in this position." ~ Anne

Melania Trump's First Lady Body Language Is Not Welcoming

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Melania Trump Goes Arms-Crossed Defensive Pose, Putting Strong Barrier Between Her & American People

About those Crossed Arms

Both arms are folded together across the chest as an attempt to put a barrier between the person and someone or something they don't like. . . Crossed-Arms-on-Chest is universal and is decoded with the same defensive or negative meaning almost everywhere. It is commonly seen among strangers in public meetings, in queues or cafeteria lines, elevators or anywhere that people feel uncertain or insecure.

Bottom line with crossed-arms-on-chest main Melania Trump message: she's not coming out and you're not coming in.

When the crossed arms then become the Double-Arm-Grip as Melania Trump is posing, additional reinforcement is achieved in a form of self-hugging. Westside Toastmasters explains that in extended, hostile debates, the arms are easily gripped so tight that one's fingers and knuckles can turn white, with blood circulation being cut off. The pose shows a very negative attitude and definitely a message of "I do not want to be standing here."

Daily News: Samira Wiley In 'The Handmaid's Tale'; Prince Harry Honors Diana on Landmine Free World Day April 4

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Prince Harry Continues Diana's Work On Landmine Free World 2025 Day April 4

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Prince Harry Continues Diana's Work On Landmine Free World 2025 Day April 4

Prince Harry will speak at the Landmine Free World 2025 reception at Kensington Palace to mark International Mine Awareness Day on April 4. Harry is committed to continuing in his mother Princess Diana's footsteps in pursuit of a world free of landmines by 2025, writes Vogue UK.

Diana was photographed walking through a mine field in Angola to raise awareness of the risk of often lethal undiscovered landmines. 

Jenna Lyons Leaves J Crew After 26 Years, Replaced By Somsack Sikhounmuong

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Jenna Lyons, creative director and president of J.Crew, is parting ways with the brand after 26 years. Somsack Sikhounmuong, head of women's design at J. Crew will take the new position. When he returned to J Crew after being head of design for sister brand Madewell, it represented a homecoming for the creative who designed accessories and then apparel for 12 years at J.Crew before his Madewell promotion.

When Sikhounmuong returned to J.Crew from Madewell, the New York Times wondered, “Can a New Designer (Not Jenna Lyons) Fix J.Crew?” Not so far: During fiscal 2016, sales decreased 6 percent to $2 billion, having dropped 7 percent the year before that.

J.Crew has struggled for several seasons with dissatisfied shoppers, and Lyons’s departure is the biggest signal possible that it’s aiming to get back on track.

2017 Whitney Biennial Curators Lew & Lockshave Stand Firm On 'Open Casket' Controversy

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2017 Whitney Biennial Curators Lew & Lockshave Stand Firm On 'Open Casket' Controversy AOC The Wokes

Not in recent memory has a single painting caused such controversy and furor in the contemporary art world as Dana Schutz's 'Open Casket' (2016), part of New York's current Whitney Biennial. The portrait focuses on the disfigured corpse of Emmett Till, murdered in 1955 at age 14 by a Mississippi lynch mob after conflicting stories about whistling -- or 'worse' according to suggestive innuendos in court testimony -- at a white woman. 

The two Biennial creators  Christopher Lew and Mia Lockshave also become the target of criticism, and Artnet New's editor-in-chief Andrew Goldstein spoke to Lew about the controversy.

Celebrating Two New Malawi-Born Daughters, Madonna Releases 'Her-Story' A 12-Minute Film For International Women's Day

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Celebrating Two New Malawi-Born Daughters, Madonna Releases 'Her-Story' A 12-Minute Film For International Women's Day

Madonna said her daughters will keep their birth names of Esther and Stella to preserve their identity as Malawians, and a Malawian nanny will travel with the children to the United States to ease their transition, according to the ruling. Her son David Banda and daughter Mercy James are now 11.

Judge Mwale noted that the pop star has raised $7.5 million for her latest project in Malawi, the construction of a pediatric surgery ward at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre. The ward is scheduled to open early next year

Hillary Clinton Returns In Fighting Form Imploring Us To: RESIST, INSIST, PERSIST, ENLIST!

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Hillary Clinton speaking in at the Professional Business Women of California’s annual conference in San Francisco, 3/28/17. Vogue photo courtesy of AP

“Obviously, the outcome of the election wasn’t the one I hoped for, worked for, but I will never stop speaking out,” Clinton said on Tuesday night at the Professional Business Women of California’s annual conference in San Francisco. “I am thrilled to be out of the woods, in the company of so many inspiring women.”

Clinton delivered a four-word mantra to the crowd which was focused on women and diversity in the workplace: RESIST, INSIST, PERSIST, ENLIST! Almost five months after the election, Clinton is not only back, but blazing writes Michelle Ruiz for Vogue.  

I'm fighting for a fairer, big-hearted, inclusive America. And the unfinished business of the 21st century can't wait any longer . . . Now is the time to demand the progress we want to see . . . and I'll be right there with you every step of the way."

Clinton criticized Trump for having the fewest number of women in top jobs "in a generation", with four women out of 23 positions. She called out White House press secretary Sean Spicer who told American Urban Radio Networks House correspondent April Ryan "Please, stop shaking your head" during Tuesday's press briefing.  "Too many women have had a lifetime of practice taking this kind of indignity in stride," Clinton said.

Hillary also had choice words regarding Bill O'Reilly's recent comment about Rep. Maxine Waters's (D-Calif) hair. 

The Fox New host called it a "James Brown wig," an insult that some interpreted as racist and sexist. Since Trump's election, Waters has repeatedly blasted the president's rhetoric and agenda.

"One of our own California congressmen Maxine Waters was taunted with a racist joke about her hair," Clinton said on Tuesday. "Too many women, especially women of color, have had a lifetime of practice taking precisely these kinds of indignities in stride."

"But why should we have to?" she said. "And any woman who thinks this couldn’t be directed at her is living in a dream world."

Clinton called on Silicon Valley to improve diversity and inclusion, particularly by introducing paid parental leave policies. 

“These are not buzzwords to throw around or boxes to check,” Clinton said. “A crucial part of solving these problems is recognizing that, important as it is, corporate feminism is no substitute for inclusive concrete solutions that improve life for women everywhere.”

In Ruiz' words: "She's back, and here's hoping she is as nasty a woman as ever!"

Fearless Girl's Standoff With Wall Street's Charging Bull Will Continue Thru February 2018

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The standoff between 'Fearless Girl' and Wall Street's Charging Bull will continue for another year. With large numbers of New Yorkers seeking a permanent home for 'Fearless Girl', New York Mayor de Blasio's office gave her a lease through February 2018.

“In her short time here, the Fearless Girl has fueled powerful conversations about women in leadership and inspired so many,” de Blasio said in a statement. “Now, she’ll be asserting herself and affirming her strength even after her temporary permit expires — a fitting path for a girl who refuses to quit.”

Follow the Story

London Artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's Brings Vibrant Paintings Of Black Experience To New York's New Museum

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'To Douse the Devil for a Ducat', 2015, oil on canvasCourtesy of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, and Corvi-Mora, London

Vogue.com profiles London artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, whose work will be shown from May 3-2017 thru September 9-2017 at New York's New Museum. The museum's artistic director, Massimiliano Gioni, who featured her work in his 2013 Venice Biennale, says that her work has a particular urgency. 

 “In a moment of racial tension like the one America has been living through, Lynette’s characters take on a completely different weight and presence,” he says. “It’s hard not to feel implicated as a viewer—I can’t help thinking that her imagined characters are engaging with me.”

These powerful paintings of black women and men -- all of them fictional -- are increasingly influential in contemporary culture. Yiadom-Boakye was shortlisted for the 2013 Turner Prize and comes to New York after solo exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery in London, the Haus der Kunst in Munich, and the Kunsthalle in Basel.

The artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, photographed in her London studio, paints fast, timeless portraits in oils. Her solo show at the New Museum in New York opens this May.Photographed by Anton Corbijn, Vogue, April 2017

One wonders if Lynette Yiadom-Boakye can offer insights into the current intellectual chaos whirling around Dana Schutz' 'Open Casket' painting of Emmett Till, part of the Whitney Bienniale

Can A White Cube Museum & Conference Center In Lusanga Redress Economic Inequality In The Democratic Republic Of Congo?

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A RENDERING OF THE WHITE CUBE IN LUSANGA (IMAGE: © OMA)

Can A White Cube Museum & Conference Center In Lusanga Redress Economic Inequality In The Democratic Republic Of Congo?

With the establishment of LIRCAEI, the iconic modernist White Cube will be recontextualized in the setting that has historically underwritten its development. In economic terms, plantations have funded not just the building of most European and American infrastructure and industries, but also that of museums and universities. On an ideological level, the violence and brutality unfolding on one side—the plantation zones—has informed and haunted the civility, taste and aesthetics championed at the other: the White Cubes. By colliding these two opposite poles of global value chains with each other, LIRCAEI aims to overcome both the monoculture of the plantation system—that exhausts people and the environment and the sterility of the White Cube—a free haven for critique, love, and singularity, that, more often than not, reaffirms class divides.

A RENDERING OF THE WHITE CUBE IN LUSANGA (IMAGE: © OMA)

DC's Republic Restoratives Releases Rodham Rye In Honor Of Hillary Clinton

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Distillery and craft cocktail bar Republic Restoratives founders Pia Carusone and Rachel Gardner planned and renovated their warehouse space in DC's Ivy City for over two years, making it home to a bar, retail store, a tasting room and their bourbon distillery. Carusone and Gardner can lay claim to the first women-owned distillery in Washington, DC. 

“You can’t make a true bourbon unless you’re an American producer,” Carusone said. “Americans have been perfecting it for generations, and it’s protected from international competition. It goes back to international trade law that protects specialties of certain nations.”

The two-story, 24,000 square foot warehouse located at 1369 New York Ave. NE is in an area that is quickly-emerging as the food and liquor manufacturing hub of DC. 

“I want people to feel excited, interested and connected in the same way we feel connected to the neighborhood,” Carusone said. “This whole area is developing very fast.”

Home to Rodham Rye

The owners of Republic Restoratives, spent months concocting a spirit worthy of celebrating their next president’s inauguration. Their creative juices imagined a drink that would be the talk of Washington. And then the roof fell in, and it seemed that Rodham Rye sort of made no sense. This week, after “a period of self-described mourning,” Gardner and Carusone have decided to move forward with the whiskey anyway. Their boozy homage to Hillary Clinton went on sale in a limited batch of 4,652 bottles that could go pretty fast, though the company is already teasing, “You never know, there could be a comeback.”

Hillary Clinton has been known to "throw back" the occasional whiskey, writes The Washingtonian. Priced at $79, 5 percent of each sale goes to support pro-choice Democratic women running for political office with the help of Emily's List. 

Carusone, who used to be congresswoman Gabby Giffords’s chief of staff, says Rodham Rye is really a celebration of women in general, which is why they’re releasing it in March, during Women’s History Month. “It’s a tribute to women in history, and a tribute to women in our everyday lives,” she tells Washingtonian. And there are plenty of symbolic eye winks. It’s a blend of one- and three-and-a-half-year Tennessee ryes, teeing up this description on the bottle: “A selection of whiskies that are stronger together than apart.” Additionally, Carusone points out, rye is the “hardiest, sturdiest, most resilient” grain of them all, and it just so happens that they sweetened the whiskey with maple syrup from Clinton’s state of New York. 

Rodham Rye launched on March 25 with a “community conversation” at the Ivy City distillery entitled “How to Support Women in the Age of Trump.” After a panel discussion, Republic Restoratives lead tours of their facility, offered samples and cocktails, while female-owned vendors provided food.

Fake Letter Requesting Removal Of Dana Schutz' 'Open Casket' Emmett Till Painting Dials Up Protest Temperature

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The controversy around artist Dana Schutz' controversial painting 'Open Casket' and the horrific death of Emmett Till continues at the Whitney Biennial. This shocking image above appeared in Google Images and is from former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos' website. 

The debated work is based on a photograph from the funeral of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black American who was murdered in Mississippi for flirting with a white woman. 

Schutz shared her perspective about the painting with ArtNet News, saying:

You’ve said in the Times that you approached the painting as a mother, and as a way to explore a mother’s pain. Would there have been no way to address the subject without, as your critics would have it, appropriating black experience?

It was the feeling of understanding and sharing the pain, the horror. I could never, ever know her experience, but I know what it is to love your child. I don’t know if there would be a way to address the subject without some way of approaching it on a personal level.

Could you have foreseen that you were stepping on a third rail by treating this explosive subject? If so, what made it necessary to paint Emmett Till specifically?
Yes, for many reasons. The anger surrounding this painting is real and I understand that. It’s a problematic painting and I knew that getting into it. I do think that it is better to try to engage something extremely uncomfortable, maybe impossible, and fail, than to not respond at all.

Will the reaction to the painting change anything about your practice in the future?
I’m sure it has to.

On Thursday morning several new outlets including Artsy, Frieze, and Out Magazine published parts or all of an open letter alleged to have been written by the artist Dana Schutz, requesting that the painting be removed from the exhibition. Shortly after, the letter addressed to Whitney Biennial 2017 co-curators Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks was declared to be a fake by  Stephen Soba, the Whitney Museum’s director of communications.

Queer artist Parker Bright has maintained a vigil in front of the painting, blocking its view. Bright met with Lew and Locks to express his views, and he was assured that Schutz would not sell the painting or profit from it in any way, writes Out.

Artist Hannah Black sent a letter earlier in the week to the curators, requesting that the painting be moved and destroyed. AOC will revisit this story after digesting a number of essays and thoughtful pieces about the controversy.

Read AOC's original story, including the full text of Black's letter to the Whitney and new details around Emmett Till's death: Dana Schutz' Painting Of Emmett Till Creates Controversy At Whitney Biennial 2017 AOC The Wokes

Brie Larson Set To Play 'Victoria Woodhull' In Amazon Film On First US Woman Presidential Candidate

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Actor Brie Larson will play Victoria Woodhull,who ran for the US presidency in 1872, nearly 50 years before American women could even vote. The women's rights suffragist was also a published author, creating the radical publication 'Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly' in 1870 with her sister. The duo also started the first woman-run stock brokerage company.

Woodhull ran for president under the banner of the Equal Rights Party—formerly the People’s Party—which supported equal rights for women and women’s suffrage. The party nominated her in May 1872 in New York City for the uphill battle against incumbent Republican Ulysses S. Grant and Democrat Horace Greeley. Woodhull selected as her running mate Frederick Douglass, former escaped slave-turned-abolitionist writer and speaker, writes Politico.

The only problem with the vice-presidential nomination is that "Douglass never appeared at the party’s nominating convention, never agreed to run with Woodhull, never participated in the campaign and actually gave stump speeches for Grant."

Amazon has bought the package, with Ben Kopit writing the script for the Woodhull story. Larson also will produce with Whalerock Industries’ Lloyd Braun and Andrew Mittman, and Anne Woodward will executive produce, writes Hollywood Reporter.

Bee Shaffer, Daughter of Anna Wintour, Engaged To Francesco Carrozzini, Son Of Franca Sozzani

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Wedding bells are in Anna Wintour's future with the announcement of the engagement of her daughter Bee Shaffer to Francesco Carrozzini, son of late Vogue Italy editor-in-chief and dear friend of Anna Wintour -- Franca Sozzani. 

The couple has been dating for an extended period of time but went public when Shaffer attended a screening of Carrozzini's documentary about his mother, "Franca: Chaos & Creation." 

Shaffer works as a segment producer at Late Night with Seth Meyers, while Carrozzini is a film director and photographer who has directed music videos for Beyoncé, A$AP Rocky and Nicki Minaj and worked on advertisements with a number of fashion brands including Roberto Cavalli, Ermenegildo Zegna and Salvatore Ferragamo.

The only child of the legendary Sozzani, Carrozzini lost his mother in late December following a year-long illness. Wintour wrote a moving tribute to her dear friend, that included:

“After she became ill, I began visiting her at her home in Milan,” Wintour wrote. “Her mind and spirit were undiminished as we discussed every topic under the sun, from the fall of Matteo Renzi, to her amazing work with women in Ghana, to our children’s miraculous love affair.”