Ian Bunn | Political & Popular Culture Arts

John Axelrod the 66 year old retired attorney and collector of so-called “Loisaida” art [Latino pronunciation of Lower East Side) artist of 1980s] has been profiled by Judith Gura in an article published on Blouin Artinfo titled ‘Collecting Is a Disease”: Nonstop Art Acquirer John Axelrod Can’t Stop Hunting’. Gura states “Visitors entering John Axelrod’s spacious town house apartment in Boston’s Back Bay are met by Myrna Loy, an affable Australian terrier, and an eruption of graffiti art by the likes of Dondi, Crash, and Lady Pink invading an environment of pristine walls, neoclassical moldings, and American modern furniture. Axelrod is passionate about graffiti art, but it is not his first collection; it follows a half-dozen others, all comprehensive. He is not simply an obsessive collector—he’s a serial one. Over a span of four decades he has assembled groundbreaking collections of American prints, European Art Deco objects, American modern decorative arts from 1920 to 1950, Memphis furnishings, African-American painting, and Latin American art. Each collection was accompanied by painstaking research, and each was divested as Axelrod moved on to another category with renewed enthusiasm for the thrill of the chase. “Collecting is a disease,” he explains. “I’m just another sufferer.” He doesn’t look like he’s suffering. A former lawyer and businessman, Axelrod has clearly enjoyed his art pursuits. More important, the outcome of this process has been substantial: All but one of his collections have gone to museums, where they have stimulated additional donations and acquisitions. …Axelrod admits to enjoying the endorsement of museums. “It’s the bottom line,” he says. “Nothing validates what you’ve done like having a museum take it.” Summing up his accomplishments, Axelrod adds, “I think I’ve helped the museums move into areas they might not have gone into, or not with the same depth. That’s my legacy. You made a change: That’s what I’d like as my epitaph.”

Inspired by Judith Gura, Blouin Artinfo ow.ly/jBe1R Image source Vimeo ow.ly/jBe0Q

Khaled A. Beydoun the American Attorney and author has published an article on Aljazeera titled ‘The business of remaking Arab-American identity’ in which he provides an overview of racial categorization within the USA. Beydoun states “Since its inception, the United States government has had a fixation with race. The judiciary was the government’s arbiter of making and molding racial designations, and subsequently, classifying new immigrant communities into the fluidly shifting and arbitrary American racial taxonomy. Racial categories were shaped, and reshaped, according to shifting demographics. Initially, three primary categories, White, Black, and the catch-all “Mongoloid” group were created to distinguish between Americans, and segregate the latter groups from full-fledged citizenship. These categories were incessantly morphed, by American courts, and new titles such as “Caucasian” and “Hispanic”, for instance, were introduced. …The first major wave of Arab-Americans, who arrived in America circa the turn of the 20th century, was largely Christian natives of the Ottoman-colonised Levant. Religion, and the physical appearance of this wave, facilitated racial passing, and American courts ruled that (this pioneering) influx of Arabs were “part of the white race”. …Arab-Americans would ultimately be racialised differently, creating a divided landscape where American courts facilitated the early wave’s pursuit of whiteness and white privilege, and established jurisprudential baselines that denied the subsequent wave of largely Muslim, “ethnic” Arabs that same path. Caucasian was a legal term imposed on Arabs-Americans, while whiteness as an on-the-ground status was only enjoyed by those Arabs the courts – and the court of public opinion – deemed worthy of inclusion.”

Inspired by Aljazeera ow.ly/cbFmF image source America.gov ow.ly/cbF2T