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Subjects: Art

Art

What a Fellowship

Jimmy Wright’s Down Home

by Jimmy Wright, John Corbett

Jimmy Wright’s many collectors and enthusiasts quite reasonably think of him as a New York painter. Wright (b. 1944) has lived and worked in New York City since 1974, and since the early ’90s he has been celebrated for his incisive self-portraits and his luscious paintings and pastels of sunflowers. The New York Times described Wright’s sunflowers »

Art

Center the Landscape

Celestine in Conversation

by Allison Janae Hamilton, Michelle Lanier

Folklorist Michelle Lanier spoke with artist Allison Janae Hamilton about her new body of work Celestine, recently on view at Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York, and connections to home and the Black South. This conversation has been edited and condensed for publication. Michelle Lanier: I’m thinking about this concept of newness. And I was »

Art

What Is It Worth?

by Libby O'Bryan

“In general, local, artisanal, values-based makers are in constant struggle to validate their craft. Textiles, especially, are up against large global labor markets that have trained consumers to buy more disposable goods for less money.” After a career as a textile buyer and production manager in New York City’s Garment District and after seeing so »

Art

It’s My House and I Lived Here

by Kevin Brisco Jr.

On the cover and throughout the issue, we’re pleased to present selections from Kevin Brisco Jr.’s series It’s My House and I Lived Here, which premiered at albertz benda gallery in Los Angeles, October 4–November 23, 2024. THE HOME EPITOMIZES our most basic ideas of security and comfort. It is a container for life’s most intimate moments »

Art

Kevin Brisco Jr.: Holding Our Echoes

by Aaron Levi Garvey

Kevin Brisco Jr. is the cover artist for the forthcoming Home issue (Fall 2024). Brisco’s exhibition It’s My House and I Lived Here is on view at albertz benda Los Angeles, October 4–November 22, 2024. The home, your home, our home, their home, the space which allows many of us to be our true selves »

Art

In the Swamp

Abolition. Imagination. Play.

by Kai Lumumba Barrow, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, Alexis Pauline Gumbs

“There are so many different ways that people constructed home in places that one would not desire for home.” On my most recent outing with the Black feminist abolitionist revolutionary artist (and dear mentor of mine) kai lumumba barrow, we went looking for Spanish moss for one of her world-unmaking installations. When she pulled up »

Art

Dawoud Bey’s Meditations on History and Vision

by Grace Elizabeth Hale

Dawoud Bey’s Untitled (The Light on the Trail) could be anywhere that is warm and wet enough to produce this tangle of plant life. But stay still in front of this photograph and really look.  Somehow all of the wild growth frames an opening. And inside that rough circle, the light spirals clockwise toward the »

Snapshot

Snapshot: Fear of a Black (Southern) Planet

Kara Walker's "Night Conjure"

by Kameelah L. Martin

“The Black woman is tossing an ambiguous object into a presumed hole in the ground, arguably to effect the desired outcome of her conjure spell. Indeed, both the woman and Walker are turning a hoodoo trick for the viewer.” Kara Walker is renowned for art that invokes the American South as an intrinsic site of »

Art

Drawing All Over Again

Remembering Patrick Dean

by Robert Newsome

When artist Patrick Dean died in May of 2021, he left behind an impossibly large collection of work: sketchbooks, paintings, loose pieces of paper, cardboard, newsprint, a couple of sculptures, and several other things he’d drawn or painted on, usually whatever was closest to him when an idea hit—and those ideas hit frequently. I was »

Art

“Necessary Contemplation”

by Lauren Frances Adams, Jason Patterson

In early 2022, we visited each other’s studios in Baltimore and Chestertown, Maryland, to discuss the influences of historical memory, ancestry, and artists’ roles navigating time and place within white supremacy. Our first collaboration, in 2020, was the exhibition Rights and Wrongs: Citizenship, Belonging, and the Vote, hosted by the Peale Museum at the Carroll »

Art

Records of Light

by Grace Elizabeth Hale

This essay is part of our Shutter art and photography series. “Called to the Camera: Black American Studio Photographers” is on view at the New Orleans Museum of Art, September 16, 2022–January 8, 2023, and “The Photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard” at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, October 1, 2022–January 15, 2023. Because we can make »

Memoir

Alabama

Embroidery: Threads and Stories from Alabama Chanin and the School of Making (Excerpt)

by Natalie Chanin

Natalie Chanin is the founder and head designer of Alabama Chanin, the 21-year-old company focused on sustainable design based in Florence, Alabama. Chanin’s latest book, Embroidery: Threads and Stories from Alabama Chanin and The School of Making (Abrams, October 2022) mixes lessons in sewing, design, and embroidery with her personal story and the evolution of »