Jess Martinaitis

Self Determination Theory is the idea that your happiness is related to:

Autonomy: the feeling that you have control over your day, and that your actions are important.

Competence: the feeling that you are good at what you do.

Relatedness: the feeling of connection to other people.

For almost 20 years, I have considered myself a student of "negrophilia". This means that I spend much of my time scrutinising how white and black people relate to each other, trying especially to understand their attraction to each other.

art can change the way we think about culture and ourselves. My interest is in artists who understand and rewrite history, who think about themselves within the narrative of the larger world of art, but who have created new places for us to see and understand.

The black American writer Richard Wright once wrote that black and white Americans were engaged in a war over the nature of reality.

Their moves are at once personal and driven by a desire to connect; and if these artists do not expect to feel wholly at home anywhere in the world, neither do they assume America is the only, or the best, place to exercise their collaborative gifts.

"Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)" - Walt Whitman

The task, impossible at times, is to dialectically hold two uncomfortable truths: that people who have been exposed to indoctrinating narratives most of their lives are not at fault for that, and that they are simultaneously responsible – assuming exposure to free information and accessibility – for examining the validity of those narratives. To... See more

In 1975, Muhammad Ali gave a lecture at Harvard University. After his lecture, a student got up and said to him, "Give us a poem." And Mohammed Ali said, "Me, we."