Besides, Before, Beyond Beauty
By Issue 102
I’m tired of beauty. Or rather, I’m tired of hearing the word “beauty” overused and misapplied.
Read MoreLife After Thirty | Death, Change, and Time: Lia Chavez
By Interview Issue 100
I’m still learning to embrace the boundlessness of art and the trajectory that this implies.
Read MoreRitual Images
By Essay Issue 88
Ritual Images The Autobiographs of Ira Lippke IN 1918, a German priest named Martin Gusinde traveled to the islands of Tierra del Fuego off the southern tip of South America. Commissioned by Chile’s Museum of Ethnology and Anthropology to study the region’s indigenous tribes, Gusinde made four expeditions over a period of six years to…
Read MoreGrief Daybook: Evans’ Gulf of Mexico
By Poetry Issue 54
There are panels of sky as good as forgotten, Evans’ gelatin folds of Florida circa 1934. The line of sky is dark at first where the gulf hits it, then comes to me like a halo around the palm tree with its neck bent, its spray of branches leaning out of frame as if to…
Read MoreBeing Shown the Way
By Book Review Issue 54
Bible Road: Signs of Faith in the American Landscape by Sam Fentress (David and Charles, 2007) I GREW UP outside Portage, Ohio, on an acre with corn fields on three sides and the county highway on the fourth. On our disused barn was a painted advertisement: CHEW MAIL POUCH TOBACCO TREAT YOURSELF TO THE BEST. The enduring letters…
Read MoreCandy and Copenhagen: Encountering the Art of Jonathan Castellino
By Essay Issue 86
The role or purpose of art in our lives is to serve as a reminder. We have a sense that the world of perception is illusive and created. Through the acceptance of the gifts of beauty we feel that we are able to draw back the veil cast over our senses, if only briefly, and…
Read MoreWeb Exclusive: A Conversation with Kathy T. Hettinga
By Interview Issue 66
Kathy Hettinga has received many awards and honors for her artwork, including an Indiana Arts Fellowship, a Research Fellowship at The Institute of Sacred Music, Worship, and the Arts at Yale University, and the very first Scholar Chair from Messiah University. Her work is in the permanent collections of UCLA, the Armand Hammer Museum, the…
Read MorePixelated Glories: The Graphic Excursions of Kathy T. Hettinga
By Essay Issue 66
DESIGN IS ubiquitous. Design in its graphic manifestations is, well, frankly overwhelming. Streams of printed ephemera constantly assault us, from cherished journals, to the slumping pile of unread newspapers shoved behind an easy chair in the corner, to the blur of billboards, fliers, bulletins, and posters cluttering our horizon. The democracy of digital invention compounds…
Read MoreWilliam Eggleston
By Poetry Issue 70
To me it seems that the pictures reproduced here are about the photographer’s home, about his place, in both important meanings of that word. —John Szarkowski, Introduction to William Eggleston’s Guide I’m sure I’m wrong about him, but it’s always seemed like slumming to me, those _____lovely color photographs—quickly seen shots of broken grave monuments…
Read MoreA Celebration of Transient Beauty: The Photographic Art of Paul Kenny
By Essay Issue 73
I suppose if the main challenge I set myself is to make increasingly beautiful work, the simpler the image the better, the more ideas the better, so the other variable is to make those images out of more and more insignificant material: a splash of dried seawater, a rusting can bottom, a handful of sand,…
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