The Politics of Portraiture: The Prison Creative Arts Project
Twelve portraits by ten artists: Rafael DeJesus, Theodora Moss, Gilbert Poole, RoShuan Smith, Raymond Gray, Nino Tanzini, Bryan Picken, Moses Whitepig, Johnnie Trice, and Anonymous Artist.
Outsider Artist, Outside Time
Who gets to be considered an outsider artist, or an artist at all? Alison Stine on John B. McLemore (the unlikely star of the blockbuster podcast S-Town), the politics of art and access, her own artistic practices, and more.
The Cabinet of Ordinary Affairs: Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer and Cheryl Wassenaar
Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer and Cheryl Wassenaar take us into The Cabinet of Ordinary Affairs, an art exhibit inspired by a poetry manuscript by Schlaifer, in which they explore the bureaucracy of the mind through imagined interior government officials and cabinets.
If They Come For Us: Fatimah Asghar and Shyama Golden
Fatimah Asghar and Shyama Golden discuss how Shyama created cover art for Fatimah’s debut collection of poetry, If They Come For Us, and more. Including glimpses of Shyama’s drafting process and three other pieces of art.
Two Visual Essays: American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
After Terrance Hayes completed American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, he found he had some remaining fragments and lines that yet “begged … for shape.” From them he has been making drawings.
The Goodbye Door
Lesley Jenike encounters a painting with an intriguing title—The Goodbye Door by Joan Mitchell—at around the same time that she learns about the discovery of remains of infants and small children near a Catholic Church-run home for mothers and babies born out of wedlock in Tuam, Ireland. In this essay, Jenike meditates on Mitchell, Tuam, her own life, internalized misogyny, resistance, synesthesia, narrative, love, and more.
Somewhere on the Road to Nowhere: Double Negative
Merridawn Duckler takes us beyond “No” and “No” into Double Negative, Michael Heizer’s monumental piece of land art stationed in Nevada.
The Colossal: Iris van Herpen and Girls Write the Museum
“For me, each dress functions the way a poem does: ‘A poem should not mean / But be.'” Emily Mohn-Slate on “Girls Write the Museum,” the art of Iris van Herpen’s couture, poetry, and the feeling that the world could be colossal.
Four Paintings by Margarita Gokun
Four haunting and alluring paintings by Margarita Gokun, a writer, novelist, and painter, and an editor’s note.
Takuji Hamanaka
Talking with artist and printmaker Takuji Hamanaka about his hybrid woodcut and collage works: radical displacements from his training in traditional Japanese woodblock printmaking.
Chrome Green
Nature is not betrayed by the artists included in Chrome Green at Chicago’s Heaven Gallery.
Breaking the System: An Interview with Kristan Kennedy
Kristan Kennedy talks with us about making paintings that may be more at home draped on a chair than hung on a wall, being an artist in Portland, Oregon, and how Miley Cyrus makes great road trip music.
Take This Quiz
Kristan Kennedy, Rebekka Moran, Adam Forrester, Kreh Mellick, and Jason Polan respond to our sensibility quiz composed from questions stolen from contemporary poems.
Exquisite Syntropy
“Honestly, I’m happy my duties end at unlocking doors and making sure nobody headbutts the Motherwell.” Photographer Bucky Miller talks with us about his day-job as a guard at a museum, collaboration, installation, and making the photographic sequence.
Narwhals, Salt and Fractals
Using photography as a point of departure, Christine Nguyen cuts, layers, draws, sprays and crystallizes, making both objects and works on paper that revel in a sense of discovery.