From the nearly abstracted patterns featuring dozens of Black faces in the meticulous work of Sharon Kerry-Harlan to portraits inspired by real events like Donna Chambers’ celebration of President Barack Obama’s inauguration, Masters of the Stitch: Threaded Stories at Claire Oliver Gallery spotlights remarkable narratives in fabric.

The exhibition draws from the collection of Carolyn Mazloomi, founder of the Women of Color Quilters Network, whose strategy over the better part of the last four decades has been to highlight the craft as an artistic expression beyond what the gallery describes as “folk curiosity.” Works simultaneously function “as fine art, historical archive, and cultural testimony, asserting once and for all that Black quiltmaking deserves a central place in the American art canon,” says a statement.

The 12 artists included in the show reference a range of perspectives and stories, from childhood memories to the COVID-19 pandemic to civil rights actions like the Freedom Train. “Black American quilts occupy a singular position in the history of American art: they are simultaneously an intimate domestic practice and a form of public witness,” the gallery says. “For generations, these textiles carried stories that could not always be spoken aloud of family, faith, resistance, grief, and joy.”

Masters of the Stitch: Threaded Stories continues through August 8 in Harlem. You might also enjoy Stephen Towns’ quilted paintings celebrating midcentury leisure in the South and Bisa Butler’s vibrant stitched portraits.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article ‘Masters of the Stitch: Threaded Stories’ Spotlights Narrative Quilts by Black Americans appeared first on Colossal.

Wireless jamming attacks are on the rise. Rice University researchers have shown how self-curving radio beams can make a jammer appear to be somewhere it isn't, potentially undermining some anti-jamming defenses. Jamming relies on flooding a wireless receiver with noise that denies service. Some modern receivers identify and block jamming attempts using direction-of-arrival (DoA) estimation technology that pinpoints the jammer's direction and directs an array null that blocks signals emanating in the jammer’s direction. Were a jammer to transmit a self-curving beam, however, it could fool DoA-based anti-jamming defenses by appearing to come from somewhere else entirely, and that's exactly what the Rice researchers demonstrated. Rice electrical and computer engineering professor Edward Knightly and doctoral student Caroline Spindel presented a paper [PDF] last month in which they demonstrated a curving-beam jamming attack that caused "catastrophic bit-error-rate degradation" while also "fool[ing] the receiver's DoA estimator," preventing conventional DoA-based defenses from stopping the interference. Knightly and Spindel have done prior research developing wireless technology that could bend beams around objects to increase signal strength - particularly useful for short-range millimeter wave signals - and found that the same technology could be used to deploy jammers that are far harder to locate. Spindel gave the perfect analogy in a recent Rice press release about the research for understanding how curved beams confuse DoA estimators by considering a soccer ball kick to the head. “Imagine being hit on the right side of your head by a soccer ball - you would naturally look to the right,” Spindel said. “If the ball actually curved through the air, like a David Beckham free kick, then it was kicked from somewhere else entirely.” Were Sir David to keep moving and kicking curveballs at your head you’d probably spot him eventually, but it might take a minute, and a few more smacks, to stop him. A signal jammer at radio-wave distances will probably be far harder to spot, and it won’t even have to move: Knightly and Spindel were able to create the illusion that the jammer was mobile by modulating the beam parameters from a stationary position, making it even more difficult to locate the jamming signal and negating the point of blindly searching for the best spot to point an array null. Conventional recovery methods used to block jamming completely failed in laboratory tests, Spindel said. “This is the first demonstration of a jammer that cannot be reliably localized and the first time self-curving wireless beams have been used as an attack,” Knightly added. The pair sees their research not just as a way to point out a serious threat to wireless signals - GPS jamming of aircraft is on the rise, for example - but also something that can inform the direction of future wireless technologies as we move toward the 6G era. Until then, however, there’s the potential for even more devastating jamming attacks to come. ®

Foodguessr Guess the nation a food is from in a game styled after Geoguessr.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Microsoft's Build developer conference kicked off today, and as with almost everything the company has done in the last few years, Microsoft's opening keynote focused overwhelmingly on AI and other closely related technologies. [...] On the hardware front, we didn't get any updates for existing Surface devices (not counting yesterday's Surface Laptop Ultra announcement), but we did get something new: the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box is "a compact developer PC" built around Nvidia's new RTX Spark chip with up to 128GB of built-in memory. The Dev Box looks a little like a cartoon anvil or piano fell onto an Xbox Series X and flattened it. Its aluminum casing was designed "to double as a heatsink," and its preloaded version of Windows 11 Pro will include a "purposeful" set of developer-centric default settings and preinstalled tools.

This is a follow-up of sorts to the Windows Dev Kit 2023, also known as "Project Volterra." This Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3-powered PC was essentially the system board from a Surface Pro tablet stuffed into a plastic box, and it was introduced alongside Arm-native versions of several Microsoft developer tools. It helped to set the stage for the Arm-based flagship Surface devices that launched the next year, which benefitted from a better and faster x86-to-Arm code translation technology called Prism and a greater number of Arm-native third-party apps that didn't need to be translated in the first place. Microsoft didn't announce pricing or specific specs for the RTX Spark Dev Box, but you can probably expect it to cost quite a bit more than the $600 that Project Volterra did. Hopefully, Microsoft can keep the price at least somewhat lower than the $4,699 asking price for Nvidia's similarly specced DGX Spark box.

On the software side, several developer-centric changes are coming to Windows 11, particularly for users of the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Microsoft is introducing a Windows-native version of the coreutils command line tools, so that commands or scripts made for Linux work within Windows and the other way around; the ability to run WSL inside of containers, said to be arriving in "the coming months"; and something called Windows Developer Configurations that uses the WinGet tool to quickly set up "a distraction-free dev environment with VS Code, GitHub Copilot, WSL, PowerShell 7 and developer-optimized settings with one command on any Windows 11 device." Microsoft also introduced Microsoft Execution Containers (MXC), as "enterprise-grade sandboxed environments" that let AI agents like OpenClaw operate on Windows without getting unrestricted access to the whole system. In theory, MXC could let organizations enforce agent-specific limits, such as blocking access to personal accounts, separating work and personal data, or requiring permission before deleting files.

The MXC GitHub repo also notes support for "multiple containment backends," meaning the same sandboxing concept could apply beyond AI agents to other plugins, tools, and workloads.

Further reading: Microsoft Unveils Scout, an Autonomous AI Agent Built On OpenClaw

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

on the water photography has added a photo to the pool:

stan.jernigan has added a photo to the pool:

I took this photo on an overcast day of this “Memorial” with my iPhone 17 Pro Max while visiting and walking around Miyajima Island, Japan. I don’t know who it’s dedicated to, but I love the symmetry of the inscribed stones, the rock wall, and the beautiful tree…

stan.jernigan has added a photo to the pool:

I took this photo on an overcast day at “Miyajima Island Beach" with my iPhone 17 Pro Max while visiting Miyajima Island, Japan. I love the beach’s curvature, its cleanliness, and the homes in the background. The beach leads to the iconic Torii Gate and to the Itsukushima Shrine…

BertvB posted a photo:

A detailed close-up of a Common Crow butterfly (Euploea core) resting gracefully on a vibrant green leaf, captured today in the butterfly garden at Wildlands in Emmen

Photography has always been more than images. It’s memory, documentation, storytelling, resistance, joy – humanity. For years, Black women photographers have shaped visual culture while remaining underrepresented in many of the spaces where creative careers are built. In 2020, Black Women Photographers (BWP), founded by Polly Irungu, launched with a mission to create visibility, opportunity, and community for Black women and non-binary photographers around the world.

What began as a directory quickly grew into something larger: a global network offering grants, mentorship, education, and pathways toward sustainable creative careers. Since partnering with Black Women Photographers, Flickr has been proud to support that work through funding opportunities, visibility initiatives, community spaces, and artist spotlights.

Supporting Photographers through Grants

One of the most meaningful parts of the Flickr and Black Women Photographers partnership has been the continued expansion of grant opportunities designed to support photographers in advancing their work.

Over the years, these grants have increased in size and reach:

• 2022 Grant:$1,200
• 2023 Grant: $2,500
• 2025 Grant: $5,000
• 2026 Grant: Announcing soon! 

The numbers going up year over year is intentional. This is a long-term commitment, not a one-time initiative.

Celebrating the photographers behind the work

Every grant cycle has highlighted photographers exploring deeply personal and universal themes through their images. Themes have centered around identity, change, belonging, memory, environment, and the spaces we occupy physically and emotionally. 

Recipient of the 2022 Inaugural Flickr x Black Women Photographers grant –
Naomi St Juste with Two Become One

Grant support: $1,200 grant fund, Flickr Pro and SmugMug membership, plus memberships for ten additional recipients. 

Naomi St Juste, a self-taught photographer based in Birmingham, United Kingdom, became the first recipient of the Flickr, SmugMug, and Black Women Photographers grant for her image Two Become One. Created around the theme “The Intimacy of: Change,” her work explored transformation through the lens of marriage, family, and new beginnings. Her first camera was a Sony A5000 but her earliest memories of photography are of taking disposable cameras on school trips and to other special events.

Her work set the tone for future grant cycles by demonstrating how deeply personal stories can resonate across communities.  

Recipient of the 2023 Flickr x Black Women Photographers Grant –
Genesis Falls with Children at Play

Grant support: $2,500 fund, two-year Flickr Pro membership, one-year SmugMug Pro membership, plus memberships for ten additional recipients. 

Chicago-based photographer Genesis Falls received the 2023 grant, which expanded support to $2,500, marking continued growth in Flickr and BWP’s investment in Black women photographers. Genesis is a contemporary portrait photographer whose work often uses black-and-white film to capture emotion, intimacy, and fleeting moments of connection.

Her winning image was recognized for the way light moved through water and the emotional atmosphere created within the frame perfectly capturing the theme, “Light in Motion”. Beyond becoming a grant recipient, Genesis later returned as a grant judge and collaborator, helping shape future Flickr x BWP initiatives.

Recipient of the 2025 Flickr x Black Women Photographers Grant –
Eleonore Menga with Living Our Space  

Grant support: $5,000 grant, two-year Flickr Pro membership, one-year SmugMug Pro membership, plus memberships for ten additional recipients. 

Eleonore Menga received the partnership’s largest grant to date: $5,000, awarded through the theme “The Spaces We Occupy.” Her winning image, Living Our Space, used double exposure techniques inspired by photographer Carrie Mae Weems to explore family, joy, identity, and the environments that shape us. 

Originally from Switzerland and now based in Montreal, Eleonore is a portrait and documentary photographer whose work is deeply rooted in identity, emotion, and connection. Drawing from her Congolese and Haitian heritage, she captures the beauty and resilience of Afrodescendant and diasporic stories, often through these intimate moments at home with family.

Beyond funding: creating spaces for visibility

The best partnerships don’t stop at the announcement. Over the years, Flickr and Black Women Photographers have collaborated through artist features, curated galleries, community discussions, and opportunities that put Black women photographers in front of new audiences. BWP is doing incredible work and we’re proud to be part of it.

Get Involved

The Black Women Photographers Flickr group continues to serve as a space for members to share work, discover new artists, and connect with a broader creative community.

Whether you’re looking for inspiration, conversation, or photographers to follow, the group showcases an incredible range of perspectives and visual storytelling.

Explore the Black Women Photographers group on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/groups/blackwomenphotographers/

Learn more about Black Women Photographers

Black Women Photographers is a global community supporting thousands of photographers through programming, grants, education, and networking opportunities.

To learn more about membership, opportunities, and upcoming initiatives, visit blackwomenphotographers.com.

Looking ahead

The future of photography is shaped by who has access to resources, community, and visibility.

We’re grateful to continue supporting Black Women Photographers and the artists shaping visual culture through their work. We look forward to celebrating more photographers, creating more opportunities, and sharing more of what’s to come. Keep an eye out for our Flickr x Black Women Photographers 2026 grant announcement coming this summer!