Photos by TIANNE STROMBECK
Return of the Puffin
October 21, 2024
Essays, Issue 28, Issue 28 Art, Issue 28 Essays, Studio
All posts tagged: Studio
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
Lightning Talk on I-90
By ALI SHAPIRO
Lightning Talk on I-90 by Ali Shapiro
Ali Shapiro’s work has appeared in Gertrude, Popula, PrairieS
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
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
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.
Selections from Morocco
April 26, 2021
Issue 21, Issue 21 Art, Studio
Courtesy of the Hindiyeh Museum of Art
MOHAMMAD AL QASEMI, UNTITLED
SILKSCREEN ON PAPEAR (60 x 80 cm)
The Solidarity Book Project
March 30, 2021
Studio
By 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.
