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In June of 2018, artist Gina Adams took the stage at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. She talked nervously about being selected as summer artist-in-residence for the department of studio art, then greeted the audience in Anishinaabemowin, and talked about her Ojibwe grandfather. The following year, the Emily Carr University of Art & Design in Vancouver posted five positions, and Adams was hired for one of them. She was described as “a contemporary Indigenous hybrid artist of Ojibwa Anishinaabe and Lakota descent.” In March of 2021, however, a Twitter account called NoMoreRedFace posted a tweet that read: “Would you FAKE a residential school survivor backstory to sell $35,000 quilts and land a tenure track professorship in Aboriginal art?” The tweet then named Gina Adams, saying that “research suggests” she did just that.
How China’s imperial palace, the Forbidden City, became a public museum
When Zhu Di, the third emperor of the Ming dynasty, ordered a grand palace built in Beijing in 1406, he probably didn’t envision vast crowds of commoners lining up to enter every weekend. The palace, which became known as the Forbidden City, was the exclusive residence of 28 emperors from the Ming and Qing dynasties. It became a museum in 1925, and the story of how it got there is filled with intrigue and disaster — at one point, administrators decided to make an inventory of all the priceless artifacts in the palace’s collection, but many couldn’t be found. Hearing the news, many of the eunuchs who used to be employed in the city panicked, since they often smuggled treasures from the palace and sold them to antique dealers in the city. In order to cover their tracks, they set the palace on fire.
Continue reading “An investigation into the rise of what some call “Pretendians””