{"id":1358,"date":"2024-08-21T00:22:36","date_gmt":"2024-08-21T00:22:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/goeggit.com\/?p=1358"},"modified":"2024-09-18T11:46:27","modified_gmt":"2024-09-18T11:46:27","slug":"embraced-by-wildflowers-black-figures-emerge-defiantly-resilient-in-yashua-kloss-collaged-portraits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/goeggit.com\/index.php\/2024\/08\/21\/embraced-by-wildflowers-black-figures-emerge-defiantly-resilient-in-yashua-kloss-collaged-portraits\/","title":{"rendered":"Embraced by Wildflowers, Black Figures Emerge Defiantly Resilient in Yashua Klos\u2019s Collaged Portraits"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Early in the morning of July 23, 1967, police raided an after-hours, unlicensed bar known colloquially as a “blind pig”\u2014a speakeasy\u2014on the Near West Side of Detroit. Law enforcement expected only a few customers inside, but to their surprise, more than 80 people were in attendance for a party celebrating GIs returning from the Vietnam War. The police decided to arrest everyone, and by the time they were through, a sizable and angry crowd had gathered outside to witness the raid.<\/p>\n
A doorman named William Walter Scott III, whose father ran the blind pig, later detailed in a memoir that by throwing a bottle at a police officer, he incited what came next: the most violent riot<\/a> in the country since 1863. The clash emerged as the bloodiest of a series of more than 150 race riots that erupted in cities around the nation during the long, hot summer of 1967<\/a>. Spurred by racial segregation, recent police reforms and policing inequity, an economic crisis, inadequate housing projects, a practice known as redlining<\/a>\u2014financial services discriminatorily withheld from neighborhoods with significant populations of racial and ethnic minorities\u2014and many other factors, tensions finally erupted.<\/p>\n Yashua Klos<\/a>\u2019s family in Detroit was profoundly impacted by the strain and chaos of the riots. Raised in Chicago and now based in the Bronx, the artist (previously<\/a>) is researching the history of riots for Black justice in the U.S., from Newark to Los Angeles. “In New York, during the uprisings around George Floyd’s murder, I saw a lot of media blaming riot violence on the same vulnerable populations being killed by law enforcement,” he tells Colossal. “I’m also thinking about how Black populations rebuild and carry on afterward\u2014how the wildflowers keep sprawling after the smoke dies down.”<\/p>\n