“Our changed world provides a new momentum for this issue: creativity as a saving force, that energy from which innovative ideas are born, that spirit that makes it possible to thrive in our present circumstances and bring a new future into being,” writes guest editor Teka Selman. “Art, southern or otherwise, is a pathway to connection within ourselves and with others. In this new reality, art is as essential for survival as it ever was.”
“My family reaches out of these photographs, pushing through time to remind me of the challenges they faced—of flood, pandemic, racial violence, and debt—the same challenges we face today.”
“Vision requires relinquishing control enough to find meaning in chaos, allowing what dreams may come and believing in them.”
The clay knows the hand. The land knows the feet. The souls know the land.
“In a purposeful inversion of the news headlines from the time, my work foregrounds individuals who fought for civil rights and who were victims of retaliatory violence.”
“The quinceañera is smiling, framed in the center, a standard sort of portrait for the occasion, but she is pointedly out-of-context.”
“What does it mean to be (categorically) ‘undesirable’?”
“By gilding her passport, Page renders its emblematic privileges into an explicit ‘golden ticket.’”
“We ride the waves of supply and demand on the banks of the Mississippi, furs and cypress, cotton and cane, oil and gas, corn and grain, coal and aluminum, commodities bought and sold, always en route, pushed up and down river.”
“That these ancient mounds have stood firm despite millennia of extreme weather, erosion, and, occasionally, looters’ dynamite is a testament to the builders’ skill.”
“A drawing is sometimes confirmation to me that the shenanigans needed for a complex work are justified, a visual consideration of a much bigger action.”
“We’re just people, we have layered experiences. We should be able just to be, it’s not always about some performance of experience.”
“They have come to this afternoon prepared to immortalize an intimacy.”
“who are these new trees. look how they glisten against an unshackled firmament . . . ”
