On the Cover:
Betye Saar, The Alpha & Omega, 2013–16. Detail of mixed-media installation. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer, Courtesy the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.
Executive Director’s Letter:
The artists in this issue combine personal, cultural, and historical materials to create powerful, evocative statements that resonate far beyond the confines of the art world. From Betye Saar’s assemblages of highly charged images and materials to Xu Zhen’s edgy, technologically inflected mash-ups of cultural icons, María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s evocations of displaced Afro-Cuban traditions and practices, Naomi Wanjiku Gakunga’s investigations of processes and materials rooted in experience and social dynamics, Françoise Grossen’s labor-intensive metaphorical objects, and Sonya Clark’s politically charged interweavings of hair, textiles, and combs, these works fuse concept and craftsmanship in challenging ways.
-Johannah Hutchison, ISC Executive Director
