Artist Statement Since I was a child I’ve been enthralled with folktales, myths, and literature, and these have been a major source of inspiration in my work. Children’s games, old theater forms like puppetry and opera, traditional British folk ballads, divination, superstitions, the human/animal boundary, and the natural world also come into play in my […]
Cover Art
Paula Scher – World Trade (2010)
Artist Statement For the past twenty years, renowned graphic designer and fine artist Paula Scher has been reinterpreting society’s approach to data and our visual representation of the trafficked environment. Through her large-scale cartographic paintings, she has created a novel way of mapping traditional information while subjectively twisting and confounding it. Intricate, colorful, and obsessively […]
Ana Teresa Fernández – Borrando la Frontera (Erasing the border) (2011)
Artist Biography Ana Teresa Fernández is a visual artist who uses performance as a primary research tool in her multimedia practice. Fernández’s work includes community-based projects, public art, sculpture, performance, video, and larger-than-life oil paintings that critique cultural assumptions and stereotypes about Latina women. Fernandez uses her own experience of having migrated to the US with […]
Ellen Driscoll – The Loophole of Retreat (1990-91)
Artist Statement Based on Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, this piece takes its title from a chapter in her book. The installation invites viewers into the central camera obscura one at a time. In the pitch-dark interior, rocked by slight movement of the cone’s round form, the viewer’s eyes dilate […]
Gabrielle Le Roux, in collaboration with trans activists – Proudly African & Transgender (2008)
Artist Statement Cocreated during the first ever gathering of and for African trans activists in Cape Town, the work is a creative intervention for social justice, to mark the emergence of an African trans movement and honor the people from seven countries who chose to participate. After drawing them from life, I invited each […]
Lorna Simpson – Five Day Forecast (1988)
Artist Statement Feeling a strong need to reexamine and redefine photographic practice for contemporary relevance, I began producing work that engages the conceptual vocabulary of the time. With unidentified figures as a visual point of departure, I use the figure to examine the ways in which gender and culture shape the interactions, relationships and experiences […]
Wangechi Mutu – Eat Cake (2012)
Artist Statement In the video “Eat Cake,” a dance is enacted by another female character, whose place of origin is hard to determine from her dress code and general appearance. She materializes magically in a seat placed centrally in the video, in front of a large, dark cake that she proceeds to squat or genuflect […]
Mickalene Thomas – Sleep: Deux femmes noires (2012)
Artist Statement Emerging from a discourse that combines art historical, political, and pop-cultural references, and through the lens of black and female identity, I aim to blur the distinctions between object and subject, concrete and abstract, real and imaginary. Indeed, the modes through which culture serves to shape perception across social, spatial, and ideological platforms […]
Renée Stout – Erzulie’s Arsenal (2013)
Artist Statement The world seems to be at a crossroads, and in my recent works I address the power structures within our society and how these structures affect our lives and the way we view ourselves and others, right down to the subtlest levels. As human beings, why do we relate to each other the […]
Andi Arnovitz – The Commerce of Infertility (2013)
Artist Statement: The piece was inspired by several events. Two movies, in Canada the movie Starbuck and in the United States the movie Delivery Man, both based on actual stories where sperm banks carelessly used the same sperm over and over, creating a situation where the same man fathered hundreds of children. A Montreal […]