In the tradition of women of color feminist publishing, we incorporated the careful selection of politically engaged artwork to feature on our front covers beginning with Volume 24. More than a cosmetic shift, we seek to pay tribute to the often underappreciated importance of the visual and to introduce you to feminist artists with whom you may not yet be familiar. In this process, we made a commitment to experimenting with color, bringing vibrant covers to our readers with each issue.
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Spring 2025, Vol. 37, No. 1 Mateo Rosales Fertig, "Chicharras" |
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Winter 2024, Vol. 36, No. 3 Ethel-Ruth Tawe, "A Gathering Place"
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Summer 2024, Vol. 36, No. 2 Negar Nahidian, “Echoes of Tranquility” “In water I find calm, love, tranquility, and feel weightless. My friend Ayat and I were talking about people in Gaza, wondering if they stare at the ocean and maybe, for a little while, looking at the beauty of the infinite water they can forget about all the destruction and ugliness that’s behind them. Later I saw videos of a young journalist putting her feet in the water at night and saying exactly that. But of course, that’s only when there are no drones, snipers, and bombs being dropped on them even by the beach. I thought about the fish swimming freely and how every movement is like an elegant dance but still the lines can represent entanglement, a net, or a trap. The fish is moving with the ebb and flow of the water, not yet caught in the net, but it looms. I use art as one tool for activism, to engage in dialogue about Palestinian liberation–Palestinians have shown for decades, and especially in these last several months, that despite the looming nets of oppression and genocide, liberation is possible.” Negar Nahidian is a graphic designer, artist, and calligrapher whose work bridges traditional Persian art with contemporary expressions using digital and traditional mixed media engaging with themes of identity, culture, and social justice. Nahidian has been involved in various exhibitions and projects, contributing to a broader dialogue about the intersection of tradition and innovation in contemporary art. |
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Spring 2024, Vol. 36, No. 1 Malak Mattar, “Last Night in Gaza” Malak Mattar’s work focuses on liberation, decolonization, Palestinian identity, and politics through painting, writing, and illustration. She is also the author of Sitti’s Bird: A Gaza Story, which is the first children’s book from Gaza about war. Her email is malakamattar47@gmail.com and her instagram is @malakmattarart. |
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Winter 2023, Vol. 35, No. 3 Laura Kina, “Over the Rainbow, One More Time” “Over the Rainbow, One More Time” was painted in the wake of surviving breast cancer, coming out, and divorce during the Pandemic and features the artist lying in bed exhausted at golden hour as a beam of sun lights fractures across a toy globe into a darkening bedroom. |
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Summer 2023, Vol. 35, No. 2 Amreen Butt, “Shoaib (8)” This is Shoaib (8) from the series “Say My Name.” The series is dedicated to the young casualties of US drone strikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan that took place during the war on terror. The work displays shredded pieces of paper in varied patterns on a tea-stained surface, the shredded pieces repeat the name and age of a single victim. There is a dichotomy between the appealing beauty of undulating, jewel toned image and the ugly reality of political violence. Ambreen Butt was born in Lahore, Pakistan, and received her BFA in traditional Indian and Persian miniature painting from the National College of Arts in Lahore. She earned her MFA in painting from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 1997. In 1999, she was the first recipient of the James and Audrey Foster Prize given by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston in addition to being an artist-in-residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum that same year. Her work is included in many public and private collections including the Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, NY, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA, the Library of Congress in Washington DC, the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington DC, the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, MA, and the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, MA. |
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Spring 2023, Vol. 35, No. 1 Victor Manuel Escoto Sánchez, "Decolonial Feminisms" |
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Winter 2022, Vol. 34, No. 3 Lorenzo Triburgo, "For Tre" For Policing Gender, Triburgo worked with the queer, grassroots prison abolition organization Black & Pink and became pen pals with over 30 LGBTQ incarcerated individuals with whom the artist wrote on a monthly basis for over two years. Triburgo did not want to reinforce associations between queerness and criminality by producing visuals of queers behind bars (even though they had gained access to do so). Instead, they photographed backdrops created for their pen pals, and absence became the subject. Alongside each exhibition of Policing Gender, Triburgo creates programming to cultivate community around prison abolition including workshops, pen pal writing and storytelling events. Lorenzo Triburgo is a full-time instructor at Oregon State University’s College of Liberal Arts online campus who teaches critical theory, photography, and gender studies with a focus on expanding liberatory learning practices in online environments. Through performance, photography, video, and audio, Lorenzo Triburgo, often with their partner and collaborator Sarah Van Dyck, elevates trans*queer subjectivity and abolitionist politics. Triburgo has exhibited and lectured in major cities in Europe, Asia and the United States and is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago, IL) and Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR). Their writing and artworks have been featured in such publications as Art Journal, GUP, and The Transgender Studies Reader 2 (Routledge). Most recently, their article, co-authored with Van Dyck, “Representational Refusal and the Embodiment of Gender Abolition,” was published in the spring 2022 issue of GLQ (Duke University Press). |
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Summer 2022, Vol. 34, No. 2 Gina Athena Ulysse, "Ola Thunder"
What if our point of departure in encounters with difference stemmed not from domination, but an impulse of radical vulnerability? What would we turn to if we did not cling to power? Would we recognize and comprehend that difference as an opening? Expansive. Limitless. Extremities. Revelation. A space to meditatively confront and embrace our socially limited imagination? Would we become more aware of our sensibilities … feel a multitude of sentiments, feel that, as Toni Cade Bambara asserts, "the revolution begins with the self … in the self". Deference. Humility. Surrender. Grace. Can these sentiments be reflected? What reflects them? "Ola Thunder" was a central piece in An Equitable Human Assertion, a site-specific installation-performance rasanblaj (a gathering) of ideas, things, people and spirits exhibited in Australia at the Biennale of Sydney in 2020. Variations of the primary materials in this work are found all over the world. The Kwi, made from the kalbas or calabash tree (Crescentia Cujete), are the simple, sacred and profane holder of rasanblaj. These gourds are known for their multifunctionality and significations, routinely used as containers for eating and storage, carvings, musical instruments, and as sacred objects. In this rasanblaj, the Kwi are and have become living things—primordial beings possessing aesthetics in their myriad forms, patina, textures, and vibrations. Reflected in the Kwi and other materials of this piece (cowries, kindling, threads, ochre, etc.) is the ancestral imperative in Afro-diasporic traditions and found referents in the long history of Indigenous Australian artistic expression. This work is an assertion of shared attachment to the land, and comparability in experiences of self-determination in the persistent shadow of colonialism, displacement, and fracture. My aim is a movement toward wholeness and a quest for beauty in nature, despite our human tendency to denigrate the earth and each other. With their inherent force, the Kwi create space inviting possibilities for new encounters, however ephemeral. |
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Spring 2022, Vol. 34, No. 1 Althea Murphy-Price, "Black Bird Girl" |
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Winter 2021, Vol. 33, No. 3 garima thakur, "it is in our hands together" |
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Summer 2021, Vol. 33, No. 2 Molly Crabapple, "We Won't Stop" |
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Spring 2021, Vol. 33, No. 1 Part of the Free Our Mamas, Sisters, Queens |
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Winter 2020, Vol. 32, No. 3 Alex, "Wood and Fish" |
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Summer 2020, Vol. 32, No. 2 Naeemeh Naeemaei, "The Moon Falls a Thousand Times" |
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Spring 2020, Vol. 32, No. 1 Inker One of the questions [I received] is how and why the use of books, hormones, money, kink etc in my art . . . I can tell you this, when I work on a drawing for somebody and I know things about the person I use those things. In this particular case books represent the help that you and every other person in Inside Books offer to people like me and the benefits of learning and searching for knowledge. Hormones and money represent tools to accomplish something in this or in some of the drawings I was thinking about the journey of transition I was thinking about transsexuals and transgender kink and drugs—things that are part of some of these people. This I know by my own experience. As for the LOOK of my models, that is what I consider extremely beautiful, erotic and alluring.” |
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Winter 2019, Vol. 31, No. 3 Molly Costello, "Homoluminous" |
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Summer 2019, Vol. 31, No. 2 Shu-Ju Wang, "It’s Complicated" Shu-Ju Wang is a painter and book artist whose work focuses on the profoundor catastrophic transformations of our lives. Using multiple voices and pointsof view, she addresses issues of immigration, health/aging/dementia, and theenvironment. Her work is in collections regionally and nationally, includingBrooklyn Museum, Yale University, and Multnomah County Central Libraryand other public spaces in Oregon. |
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Spring 2019, Vol. 31, No. 1 Fariba Salma Alam Artist statement: As this issue of Feminist Formations centers on the movement of critical feminist scholars (especially women of color feminists) within, across, and out of academic institutions, I created a work that would visually highlight the notion of opposition, resistance, movement, and various levels, matrices, and veneers. On one side of the frame, I place a black and white image of a woman in silhouette to connote a shared experience of feeling marginalized, invisible, or forced, all predicaments that can lead to the various types of academic “migrations.” On the other side of the frame, I use pictures of buildings and exteriors in color to connote institutional strongholds. I contain this collage in white broken geometric lines to reference dominant frameworks and structural constraints. |
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Winter 2018, Vol. 30, No. 3 from NEXT WORLD TAROT by Cristy C. Road, "Justice" |
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Summer 2018, Vol. 30, No. 2 Wura-Natasha Ogunji, "She moved the road" |
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Spring 2018, Vol. 30, No. 1 Sins Invalid and Micah Bazant Visual description of the image: At the top of the image are two Black disabled people smiling towards each other. One is wearing a crown of leaves and the other is wearing a crown of crystals. Both are drooling. At the bottom of the poster are five people sitting with their arm raised in the air looking upwards. Most are people of color, some are wheelchair users, and some are gender nonconforming. One is wearing a tutu. The drool is raining on them and they are welcoming it. The background is an intergalactic celestial blue color. |
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Winter 2017, Vol. 29, No. 3 the times of kintsugi, "Living Deep Time Calendar Year 000001" |
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Summer 2017, Vol. 29, No. 2 Megan Spencer, "Greenhouses" |
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Spring 2017, Vol. 29, No. 1Cover art of March 1970 issue of Gidra: the News Magazine of the Asian American Community Caption: “We will fight and fight from this generation to the next” |
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Winter 2016, Vol. 28, No. 3 Gina Osterloh, "All of Our Edges" |
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Summer 2016, Vol. 28, No. 2Pearl C. Hsiung, "Helens" |
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Spring 2016, Vol. 28, No. 1Fredy,“El Barco (The Boat)” This drawing is part of Arte de Lágrimas (art of tears), a traveling exhibit of drawings made by Central American refugee children and youth crossing the Texas–Mexico border. These drawings were made after the children had just been released from the McAllen, Texas, detention center. Fredy is 5 years old from Guatemala. In this picture he drew the boat he and his mother rode in crossing the Usumacinta River (Guatemala-Mexico Border). For more information, contact Reverend Dr. Gregory L. Cuellar, director of the Refugee Artwork Project in Austin, Texas, at GCuellar@austinseminary.edu. |
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Winter 2015, Vol. 27, No. 3Beck Levy, "22nd & I" |
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Summer 2015, Vol. 27, No. 2 Narcissister, "Narcissister is You" |
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Spring 2015, Vol. 27, No. 1Sama Alshaibi, "Abu Ammar: 4 years Later" |
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Winter 2014, Vol. 26, No. 3Valerie Galloway, "Florid" |
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Summer 2014, Vol. 26, No. 2Wangechi Mutu, "Family Tree" |
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Spring 2014, Vol. 26, No. 1Brooke Lober, “New Magic,” featuring "Disaster" by The Collective Tarot |
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Winter 2013, Vol. 25, No. 3: Including a dossier, "Inhabitations: A Feminist Formations dossier on Robyn Wiegman's Object Lessons"Favianna Rodriguez, “Spellbound III” |
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Summer 2013, Vol. 25, No. 2: Special Issue: "Feminists Interrogate States of Emergency," guest edited by Jill Bystydzienski, Jennifer Suchland, and Rebecca WanzoJohn Jennings, “Formations” |
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Winter 2013, Vol. 25, No. 1Nana Osei-Kofi, “American Girls: Breaking Free” |
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Winter 2012, Vol. 24, No. 3Rio Yañez, “Ghetto Frida” |
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Summer 2012, Vol. 24, No. 2Edouard Duval Carrié, “Le Monde Actuel Ou Erzulie Interceptée” |
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Spring 2012, Vol. 24, No. 1Jesse Aguirre’s “Lady Waiting for Cortez” |