All posts tagged: Studio

Return of the Puffin 

Return of the Puffin 

October 21, 2024 , , , ,

By JAMES K. BOYCE

Photos by TIANNE STROMBECK

puffin spreading its wings
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. 

Return of the Puffin 
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Against This Earth, We Knock

Against This Earth, We Knock

September 30, 2024 , ,

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

Against This Earth, We Knock
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USA Portraits

USA Portraits

November 6, 2023 , , ,

Artwork and introduction by NARSISO MARTINEZ

A portrait of a man painted on a spinach boxTender 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.

USA Portraits
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Learning from Las Vegas (Air) Strip

Learning from Las Vegas (Air) Strip

December 15, 2022 ,

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.

*

Palm trees and an airplane in the sky.

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.

Learning from Las Vegas (Air) Strip
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Staring Through a Slit

Staring Through a Slit

July 20, 2021

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.

Artwork of a face

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.

Staring Through a Slit
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The Solidarity Book Project

The Solidarity Book Project

March 30, 2021

By SONYA CLARK 

Sonya clark

The Solidarity Book Project was envisioned by Professor of Art and Art History Sonya Clark, as one way for Amherst College, in its Bicentennial year, to recommit to a more equitable future by pushing against legacies of settler colonialism and anti-Black racism.

The Solidarity Book Project
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