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Spring 2024, Vol. 36, No. 1
Malak Mattar, “Last Night in Gaza”
Last night in Gaza is one of latest artworks I finished in Gaza. Painful to have witnessed a fourth major attack in my vacation and anxious to cross the worst border ever. Did you know sunbirds are the national birds of Palestine and you see them anywhere you go?
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"
Victor Manuel Escoto Sánchez is a mixed media artist based in Mexico City. Victor Manuel incorporates a variety of themes in their artwork, including cultural, existential, and transcendental. Their art piece that is featured on the spring 2023 cover of Feminist Formations is an oil painting entitled “Decolonial Feminisms.” As an art restorer, they have worked in the Frida Kahlo Museum, Chapultepec Park, and Templo Mayor—the main temple of the Mexica (or Aztec) people. IG account: @manu.art.x
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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"
Althea Murphy-Price is an active artist and professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She received her B.A. in Fine Art from Spelman College, her Master of Arts in Printmaking and Painting from Purdue University and her Master of Fine Arts from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Utilizing lithography, stenciling methods, photography and 3D printing, her work can be described as representing a broad survey of contemporary printmaking.
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Winter 2021, Vol. 33, No. 3
garima thakur, "it is in our hands together"
garima thakur is an interdisciplinary artist born and raised in New Delhi. With an interest in the multitudinous nature of reality, history, and narrative, she creates works that address assimilation, alienation, and collectivism. She is currently stationed in Portland, OR, and works as an assistant professor in Graphic Design with a focus of Emerging Creative Technologies at Portland State University.
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Summer 2021, Vol. 33, No. 2
Molly Crabapple, "We Won't Stop"
This piece was drawn at the height of the 2020 anti-police brutality uprising,and was inspired by a year of activism amidst the global pandemic. |
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Spring 2021, Vol. 33, No. 1
Part of the Free Our Mamas, Sisters, Queens
When art = freedom. Since 2018, the People’s Paper Co-op (PPC) has collaborated with the Philadelphia Community Bail Fund on their annual Mama's Day Bail Out campaign. Each year the PPC works with a powerful cohort of women in reentry to co-create a poster series and corresponding set of exhibitions, parades, press conferences, and events to raise awareness and funds for the campaign. Their posters, prints, and t-shirt sales have raised over $120,000 to free Black mothers and caregivers. This print, done in collaboration with artist Melanie Cervantes, was printed on handmade paper that PPC Fellows made from their shredded criminal records.
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Winter 2020, Vol. 32, No. 3
Alex, "Wood and Fish"
Alex is an agender artist from Victoria BC. Alex goes by they and he, and makes art revolving around themes of asexuality and feelings of hope, wonder and alienation. You can follow them on X (formerly twitter) @AgentBoss to see what work they are making next. |
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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
Artist statement (based on a personal correspondence letter):
“I don’t think that you can tell people ‘look at this it was done by an inmate in TDCJ who wants to transition from male to female’ and expect them to perceive the meaning of the drawing. Let me take that back, they would get the meaning but not the emotions that I was trying to express out of my darkest moments. For me a drawing can be like a window into the soul or the light at the end of the tunnel. It can also represent a journey, like a blue-print into somebody’s life or like a particular incident.
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"
Part of the series “Red Bean Paste and Apple Pie,” an exploration of Shu-JuWang’s personal story of immigration and travels presented as diptychs, “It’sComplicated” further embeds the narratives and consequences of large-scalecultivations of our staples. The industrial agriculture of wheat and rice haveleft indelible marks on the health of ourselves, our planet, and the many speciesthat share our land.
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
Fariba Salma Alam is a Brooklyn-based visual artist who creates small-scale installations with ceramic tiles, self-portraits and archival photographs. While the visuality of photography within the post-colonial imagination are a departure point for her work, Islamic architecture and Reductive art provide a formal reference point for Alam’s process. An intended effect of Alam’s work is to stimulate reflection on the dynamic interplay of Islamic Art traditions with more personal inquiries of gender and belonging.
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"
Cristy C. Road is a Cuban-American artist, writer, and musician. She published Green’zine from 1997–2004, and since has released three illustrated novels which tackle mental health, sexuality, cultural identity, and punk rock music. She’s been contributing illustrations to music, social justice movements, and publishing for 20 years, and fronted her band The Homewreckers from 2008–2016. She recently released the Next World Tarot, a card deck focused on resilience and resistance, and is the singer/songwriter and guitarist for her band Choked Up. She’s currently living, crying, and making stuff in Brooklyn, NY. |
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Summer 2018, Vol. 30, No. 2
Wura-Natasha Ogunji, "She moved the road"
Wura-Natasha Ogunji is a visual artist and performer. Her works include drawings, videos and public performances. Her hand-stitched drawings, made on architectural trace paper, are inspired by the daily interactions and frequencies that occur in the city of Lagos, from the epic to the intimate. www.wuraogunji.com.
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Spring 2018, Vol. 30, No. 1
Sins Invalid and Micah Bazant
Micah Bazant created this piece in collaboration with Patricia Berne, the Co-Founder and Director of Sins Invalid. Sins Invalid is a performance project that incubates and celebrates artists with disabilities, centralizing artists of color and queer and gender-variant artists. A version of this image was originally created to promote the 2016 Sins Invalid performance, Birthing, Dying, Becoming Crip Wisdom. Learn more about Sins Invalid at sinsinvalid.org, and see more of Bazant’s art at micahbazant.com.
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"
Living Deep Time Calendar Year 000001 is a medium for noticing and appreciating wildly diverse speeds, scales, rhythms and durations of time swirling around you, within you, and as you. It can be used for inspiration, to create relief, wonder, and livable time in the Anthropocene. When you practice Living Deep Time Calendar Year 000001, you connect to the many, and often strange, time beings beyond yourself. The 46 card set was produced in an edition of 200 by smudge studio in 002016. |
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Summer 2017, Vol. 29, No. 2
Megan Spencer, "Greenhouses"
Megan is an artist, scholar, and houseplant enthusiast based in Portland, OR. She enjoys reading, writing, and theorizing about black feminist literature and racialized notions of gender and queerness in relation to transatlantic slavery. She is interested in the geographic implications of anti-black racism and enslavement, and especially the ways that black women’s relationships with land offer possibilities to disrupt ways of being that are rooted in colonial violence. She explores these ideas in poetry, academic writing, and visual art.
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Spring 2017, Vol. 29, No. 1
Cover art of March 1970 issue of Gidra: the News Magazine of the Asian American Community
Line drawing of North Vietnamese fighter and baby.
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"
Gina Osterloh’s interdisciplinary practice brings together photography, drawing, film, and performance to explore the resonances between the physical form and its representational imprint, trace, or stand-in. Recent photographs serve as records of the artist’s body traversing portrait photo backdrop paper. Osterloh’s photographs lay bare the perpetual juxtaposition between the artist’s hand and the mechanical precision of the camera. Repetition, mimesis, and seriality serve as important drives in the artist’s photographic oeuvre.
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Summer 2016, Vol. 28, No. 2
Pearl C. Hsiung, "Helens"
Pearl C. Hsiung is a Los Angeles-based artist. Her painting, drawing, and videoworks explore states of physical, psychical, and metaphysical metamorphosis.Often these transformations play out in anthropomorphizing landscapes vergingon portraiture, where the geological and biological collide and collapse,raising questions about the nature of nature. Hsiung’s video works bring theseideas out into an order of social space, beyond the pictorial plane, to furtherinvestigate the mediation of social life, nature, and constructed images in anendlessly transforming universe.
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Spring 2016, Vol. 28, No. 1
Fredy,“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. 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.
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Summer 2015, Vol. 27, No. 2
Narcissister, "Narcissister is You"
Narcissister works at the intersection of performance, dance, art, and activism. Integrating prior experience as a professional dancer and commercial artist with a long-standing art practice in a range of media including photography, video, and experimental music, she has presented work at The New Museum, PS 1, The Kitchen, Abrons Art Center and many nightclubs, galleries, and alternative spaces. Narcissister was a re-performer of “Luminosity” in “The Artist is Present” at MoMA. She has also presented work internationally at the Music Biennale Zagreb, Chicks on Speed’s Girl Monster Festival, Festival of Women Ljubljana at Copenhagen’s first live art festival, and the Camp/Anti- Camp festival in Berlin, among others. Her videos have been included in exhibitions and festivals worldwide, including recently on MocaTV. Her video “The Self-Gratifier” won “Best Use of a Sex Toy” at the 2008 Good Vibrations Film Festival; “Vaseline” won the main prize in 2013. Interested in troubling the divide between popular entertainment and experimental art, Narcissister appeared on America’s Got Talent in 2011. In 2013, she was in FORE at The Studio Museum and had her first solo gallery exhibition “Narcissister is You” at envoy enterprises. She was nominated for a Bessie Award for her evening-length piece “Organ Player” which debuted at Abrons Art Center in 2013. Narcissister is a recipient of a 2015 Creative Capital Award.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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”
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.
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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 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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