Cover Art

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.

	Spring 2015, Vol. 27, No. 3 Beck Levy, "22nd & I" Beck Levy describes “22nd & I” as a letterpress print using polymer plates and a reduction woodcut. Its subject is a small house at the intersection of 22nd and I Street NW in Washington, DC, in the heart of George Washington University’s campus. This little house is the Women’s Studies department. It is surrounded by towering buildings, a Whole Foods, and newly built dorms, on a block in a state of perpetual construction, in a university in a state of rapacious expansion. The block itself neighbors powerful institutions—the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the White House. The scale and style of the house are out of tune with its bland, expensive surroundings. The department it contains is out of tune with its pro-austerity, neoliberal, institutional neighbors. The house looks and feels precarious. It looks and feels uneasy, uncanny. Yet it is also a refuge and a source of strength for many students and workers in a school that has come to epitomize the corporate university. It is part of yet also in opposition to.
	Spring 2015, Vol. 27, No. 1 Sama Alshaibi, "Abu Ammar: 4 years Later" Multi-media artist Sama Alshaibi (b. Iraq, 1973) has a longstanding history of negotiating spaces of conflict in her artwork: the aftermath of war/exile, the power dynamics between the nation and its citizenry, and the interaction between humans competing for resources/power. Alshaibi’s artworks have been widely exhibited and screened internationally including 13 international solo exhibitions, the 55th Venice Biennial, 2014 FotoFest International Biennial (Houston) and Honolulu Biennial 2014 (Hawaii), and featured in prominent institutions such as MoMA (NYC), Institut Du Monde Arabe (Paris) and The Arab American National Museum (Michigan).
	Winter 2014, Vol. 26, No. 3 Valerie Galloway, "Florid" Galloway’s "Florid" fills our Winter cover with the gorgeous excess of pink and green flowery hair evocative of 1960s pop. Born in France and now living in Tucson, where she received her BFA in photography, Galloway’s influences include film noire and avant-garde photography. A follower of the “handmade movement,” she works with a combination of found objects (illustrated pages from vintage dictionaries and maps, hand-cut mirrors, jars, recycled frames) and her own photography and paintings. She has a BFA in photography from the University of Arizona, although drawing and painting were her first loves. She is influenced by old family photos, French New Wave cinema, and old American TV shows from the 1960s and 70s.
	Summer 2014, Vol. 26, No. 2 Wangechi Mutu, "Family Tree" Wangechi Mutu is a Kenyan-born artist currently residing in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is a visceral response to personal and social critiques of gender, culture, and mass media imagery. Exploring the female body as a site of engagement and provocation, her figures are lurking hybrids that possess an abject yet alluring beauty. The artist’s signature aesthetic samples from a multitude of image sources such as medical diagrams, glossy magazines, anthropology and botany texts, pornographic materials and traditional African arts, travel postcards, and mechanical and hunting publications. Combined with tactile materials like glitter, fake pearls, and synthetic hair, Mutu’s fleshy images occupy environments that are embedded with a physical and conceptual depth, resulting in a distinct form of mythmaking.
	Spring 2014, Vol. 26, No. 1 Brooke Lober, “New Magic,” featuring "Disaster" by The Collective Tarot This cover features a beautiful photomontage created by Brooke Lober. Lober studied photography and printmaking as an undergraduate in Studio Arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and now teaches feminist studies at the University of Arizona, where she is a PhD candidate in Gender and Women’s Studies. For the last decade, Brooke has experienced the magic of parenting and the transformative journey of motherhood—thanks to her daughter Satya, who is featured in Brooke’s cover art for this issue. An artist, activist, teacher and scholar, Brooke is currently researching US-based Jewish feminist histories while writing her dissertation on the interplay of gender, sexuality, and race in legacies of Jewish opposition to Zionism.
	Winter 2013, Vol. 25, No. 3: Including a dossier, "Inhabitations: A Feminist Formations dossier on Robyn Wiegman's Object Lessons" Favianna Rodriguez, “Spellbound III” This cover features a beautiful monotype by Favianna Rodriguez. Rodriguez is a self-described “artist, agitator, and techie working for social change.” Her colorful, edgy political art has become a staple of (im)migrant rights activism in particular, and anti-racist, anti-capitalist feminism in general. The daughter of Peruvian immigrants, Rodriguez is based in Oakland, California, where she is involved in a number of activist/artist projects, including the immigrant rights magazine CultureStrike, and ongoing collaborations with artist-activists Melanie Cervantes and Jesus Barraza of Dignidad Rebelde.
	Summer 2013, Vol. 25, No. 2: Special Issue: "Feminists Interrogate States of Emergency," guest edited by Jill Bystydzienski, Jennifer Suchland, and Rebecca Wanzo John Jennings, “Formations” This stunning cover image was produced specifically for this issue. John Jennings’s research and teaching focus on the analysis, explication, and disruption of African American stereotypes in popular visual media. His research is concerned with the topics of representation and authenticity, visual culture, visual literacy, social justice, and design pedagogy. He is an accomplished designer, curator, illustrator, cartoonist, and award-winning graphic novelist. His work overlaps into various disciplines including American Studies, African American Studies, Design History, Media Studies, Sociology, Women and Gender Studies, and Literature.
	Winter 2013, Vol. 25, No. 1 Nana Osei-Kofi, “American Girls: Breaking Free” This cover features one image from photo essay by the journal’s Book Review Editor, an associate professor and director of the social justice studies certificate program in the School of Education at Iowa State University. "American Girls: Breaking Free" is a series of photographs created in an effort to intervene in the ways in which the American Girl Collection, as a powerful manifestation of capitalist consumer culture for young girls, normalizes and promotes oppressive constructions of gender, race, class, sexuality, and national identity. The issue contains six photos from Osei-Kofi's project.
	Winter 2012, Vol. 24, No. 3 Rio Yañez, “Ghetto Frida” This cover is the stunning, irreverent work of a Chicano artist and curator born and raised in the San Francisco Mission District. Yañez is the son of the renowned Chicana/o artists Yolanda Lopez and Rene Yañez, and his art is driven and enlivened by a politicized Chicano engagement with the popular culture of his childhood. “Ghetto Frida” propels Frida Kahlo squarely into the present-day Mission District and vibrantly transforms her into a toughchola, complete with tear-drop tattoo. And that is not all. “Ghetto Frida” is part of a larger series with the same title that includes brilliant interviews between Yañez (in the voice of “El Rio”) and the persona Ghetto Frida.
	Summer 2012, Vol. 24, No. 2 Edouard Duval Carrié, “Le Monde Actuel Ou Erzulie Interceptée” Carrié is a Haitian-born artist now based in Miami. Carrié’s work has been influenced by the memorializing practices of Haitian artists, who bring together the past and present to achieve a visual synthesis of the aesthetic, religious, and historic. Duval Carrié’s painting is an invitation to consider the interwoven gendered, racialized, and religious dimensions of U.S. bordering practices and to reflect on how contemporary passages are part of much longer histories of traversals and crossings in many forms.
	Spring 2012, Vol. 24, No. 1 Jesse Aguirre’s “Lady Waiting for Cortez” Much of Aguirre’s art speaks to his complex trajectory, from child migrant worker, to student of elite universities, to engaged visual artist.