News |

Marginalized by media

A queen is defined eight ways by Merriam-Webster—among them the wife of a king, a fertile female bee, a goddess or a thing personified as female and having supremacy in a specified realm. All include a female identifier except for this one: “the most privileged piece of each color in a set of chessmen having the power to move in any direction across any number of unoccupied squares.” Privilege. Color. Power. Space. Whoever said life is a game of chess couldn’t be more accurate.

These four words are ever present in civil rights movement conversations. At the forefront of these conversations are activists fighting to claim space and redefine the country’s race relations. Within our generation of revolutionaries are four Chicago artists of color who are raising up marginalized identities in a media-driven world that gravely lacks representations of black, brown and queer-identifying individuals. A director, a professor, a printmaker, a playwright—they are Chicago’s movers and shakers.