It’s presented and written by Zayd Ayers Dohrn, a playwright and screenwriter whose parents Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn spent years on the run from the FBI as members of the Weather Underground and allies of the Black Panthers. I also loved Mother Country Radicals, a documentary podcast subtitled “A Family History of the Weather Underground”. Though I’d long ago read her biography, I’d never seen any of her work in person, and seeing her paintings face to face – her acute, unsentimental eye and unwavering commitment to portraiture as a radical art form – was a revelation, as was her luminous portrait of a frail Andy Warhol, painted two years after his shooting by Valerie Solanas and perhaps the greatest work of her long and storied career. My top choice, and really the high point of my cultural year, was Hot Off the Griddle, the monumental Barbican retrospective of the work of the American artist Alice Neel. These ‘reads’, watches’ or ‘listens’ have provoked thought, brought comfort, generated solidarity and inspired learning amongst the History Workshop and History Workshop Journal editors. Reflecting on the past year, History Workshop editors have selected some radical ‘reads’ – broadly defined to include the many forms and mediums through which we have engaged with histories. 2023 has been another year of uncertainty, instability and crisis for so many – a description which has haunted us for the past several years now.
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