Studio | The Common

Return of the Puffin

October 21, 2024 Essays, Issue 28, Issue 28 Art, Issue 28 Essays, Studio

On July 4, 1981, something caught Evie Weinstein’s eye as she was washing dishes in a tidal pool on Eastern Egg Rock, a treeless island off the Maine coast. An Atlantic puffin, a football-sized seabird, emerged from the pea-soup fog with something dangling from its beak. Evie dropped the dishpan, grabbed the binoculars slung around her neck, and saw that the puffin had a beak-load of fingerling fish. She had been waiting for this moment and knew at once what it meant: the bird was bringing food for a chick—a puffling, as they are called in children’s books—the first to hatch on the island in a century, and the first seabird hatched anywhere as the result of a conscious human effort to restore them to a place from which they had been exterminated.

Against This Earth, We Knock

September 30, 2024 China Portfolio, Poetry, Studio

This piece is part of a special portfolio about youth and contemporary culture in China. Read more from the portfolio here.

By JINJIN XU

I try to feel this is home ¹

I don’t think

I am a foreigner ²
I was not supposed to be living ³

Exploring the Intersection: Coptic Motifs and Social Realism in Eritrean Art

April 22, 2024 Issue 27, Issue 27 Art, Studio

By MICHAEL ADONAI

Waidel (2008), acrylic on canvas (20.5 x 90.5 cm)

Lightning Talk on I-90

April 10, 2024 Essays, Studio

By ALI SHAPIRO

Lightning Talk on I-90 by Ali Shapiro

Ali Shapiro’s work has appeared in Gertrude, Popula, PrairieSchooner, The Offing, The Rumpus, and Electric Literature, among others. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan, and now teaches writing at the Stamps School of Art & Design. Read more at www.ali-shapiro.com.

USA Portraits

November 6, 2023 Farmworker, Issue 26, Issue 26 Art, Studio

Artwork and introduction by NARSISO MARTINEZ

Tender Leaves (2021). Ink, charcoal, and gold leaf on cardboard produce box (52.50 x 62.50 in). Photo by Yubo Dong.

Introduction

Through my art, I intend to highlight the difficult reality faced by American farmworkers, a workforce essential to American life consisting of men and women almost wholly of insecure immigration status. This status makes them vulnerable to predatory practices from agribusiness. I am a former farmworker myself; after immigrating to the United States from a small community outside of Oaxaca, Mexico, I worked nine seasons in the fields of Eastern Washington state to pay for my undergraduate and graduate degrees.

I seek to honor farmworkers and reveal the difficult working conditions they face. Their portraits and scenes from the fields are executed on found produce boxes. When I nest images of farmworkers amidst the colorful brand names and illustrations of agricultural corporations, I hope to help the viewer make a connection, or a disconnection rather, and start creating consciousness about the people that farm their food.

Contemporary Art Platform: Selections from Kuwait

May 8, 2023 Issue 25, Issue 25 Art, Kuwait, Studio

Courtesy of the CONTEMPORARY ART PLATFORM (CAP)

GHADAH ALKANDARI, UNTIL (2017),
ACRYLIC ON CANVAS (180 X 240 CM)

Learning from Las Vegas (Air) Strip

December 15, 2022 Essays, Studio

By ZOE VALERY

This woman in the airport is neither catching a plane nor meeting one. (…)
Why is this woman in this airport? Why is she going nowhere, where has she been?
—Joan Didion, “Why I Write” (1976)

In the margins of the Strip, planes shimmer in and out of Las Vegas. I photographed this periphery, populated by plane watchers. Why they watch and why I write seem to be connected by a tenuous link that became clearer as the afternoon transpired.

Sundown marks the time and the place for a discreet show among Las Vegas locals. At the golden hour, vehicles on Sunset Road veer toward McCarran International Airport and park in front of the runway. While the casino-jammed stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard known as the Strip blinks itself awake in the background, the airstrip stages a steady stream of landings and take-offs. Every day, new and seasoned plane watchers come here to view the aircrafts rolling between the sky and the Vegas skyline.

The Hindiyeh Museum of Art: Selections from Palestine

May 2, 2022 Issue 23, Issue 23 Art, Studio

Courtesy of the Hindiyeh Museum of Art

Laila Shawa
Untitled (1965)
Oil on Canvas (70 x 50 cm)

Past and Future on Rapa Nui

October 25, 2021 Essays, Issue 22, Issue 22 Essays, Studio

By JULIA COOKE

The morning was clear and the colors vivid: yellow brush, white ocean froth against cobalt sky. In front of me, dense gray volcanic stone appeared to consume the light. I stood in salty mist before an altar on the north coast of Rapa Nui, Easter Island. A single toppled moai lay in violent chunks on the ground. At 9:00 a.m. the sun still hovered tight at the horizon. Rapa Nui, which is part of Chile 2,300 miles away, is kept closer to mainland time than by geographical rights it should be. The sun rises gray and sticky at 8:30 in the morning, and sets late, too. This is not the only disorienting thing about Rapa Nui, but rather the most objective example.

Staring Through a Slit

July 20, 2021 Studio

Text and images by ALAA TAWALBEH

After drawing the collection of dark faces in charcoal, Alaa was provoked to give them a story, so he used the same charcoal sticks to form words. The words were written after the drawings, so the faces can still have different stories. These drawings and more from the same collection will be displayed in Alaa’s second solo exhibition, forthcoming in September 2021 in Amman, alongside works in watercolor.

At Rukban refugee camp, your only source of entertainment is sitting on the cold floor and staring at a slit in your tent. It flaps open with each gust of wind and cold drops of rain land on your face, just like the broken window in your old house.

The raindrops are black. They say it is the soot from a faraway city. Some say it’s from your city, Aleppo. Maybe some of it has come from the building you once lived in.