In her 2021 essay “A Family Reunion Near the End of the World,” botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer contemplates our kinship with nature and proposes a road map for deepening our care and respect for all living things. “Being a relative,” she writes, “is more than shared blood from a common past. Real kinship arises when […]

Kea Tawana (c. 1935–2016) is known for creating the Ark, an 86-foot-long, three-story ship she built in Newark, New Jersey, starting in 1982, with the intention of making it her home. For decades prior, she had collected salvaged wood, glass shards, and other materials from abandoned buildings in the city’s Central Ward. Incorporating those materials, […]

In 1974, Ruth DeYoung Kohler II founded the Arts/Industry residency in partnership with Kohler Co. Today, the program annually hosts twelve artists who make new works of art in the company’s factory in Kohler, Wisconsin. The artists work in studios located on the factory floor, alongside Kohler Co. associates who offer support and information as […]

A nonbinary artist and first-generation Mexican American raised by undocumented parents, Moisés Salazar Tlatenchi infuses their work with their lived experience.   Salazar’s art frequently addresses the lack of agency and freedom the marginalized face in physical and theoretical spaces, and the trauma and barriers specific to queer and immigrant bodies. They create works using […]

In ancient Persian literature, the adjective ماه طلعت (moon-faced) was used to describe the beauty of an individual, regardless of their gender identity. Today, the word refers to the beauty of women only. A similar shift in gender representation occurred in Persian visual culture—as evidenced in portrait paintings of Iran’s Qajar dynasty (1786–1925)—when Western modernization, […]