Anthrow Circus

Sitting in Beauty: How Choral Music Made Me Less Lonely

WORDS & IMAGES BY CALLIE RADKE STEVENS

Behind the steeple of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, clouds gathered and boiled, preparing for a storm or a show or something wild, surely. I zipped my coat all the way up as my husband and I picked our way down the narrow street.

I was determined to see at least a little bit of the city before we had to drive an hour south to where I was doing grad school research. This was Dublin, after all. We were there, and we had limited time. We had to see it. My husband, on the other hand, was tired and cranky and being exasperating. I was also tired and cranky, but I was going to have a good time. I was going to see the city. He was being annoying.

Young Afghan Dreams: Three Sisters Share Their Artwork—and Future Hopes

DOCUMENTARY & PHOTO BY W.H.
INTRODUCTORY TEXT BY HEATHER M. SURLS

“The flower that blooms in adversity is the most rare and beautiful of all.” This quote from Disney’s animated film “Mulan” aptly describes Maryam, Khadija, and Fatima Kawsary, teenage Afghan sisters living outside of their home country and still cultivating their passion for art.

Channeling Hemingway One Autumn Night

CREATIVE PROJECT CURATED BY KAMI L. RICE

One fall night last year, we created a project for ourselves. The American students were studying abroad in Paris, and I was a mentor in their program. Two artists and three writers, we assigned ourselves homework. We’d spend an evening all together at one of Ernest Hemingway’s famous haunts. The writers had to choose someone, or someones, from among the clientele as their inspiration for a short story. The artists’ drawings would be similarly inspired by someone who was there that night. We’d package the works together and discover what we’d jointly created

Interacting With Art: A Catalog of Tourists in Italy

STORY BY JC JOHNSON

While it wasn’t officially an Anthrow Circus travel tour, the fact that our editor, Kami Rice, and I, Anthrow Circus’s creative director, were in Italy together made it nearly so. Fitting well with Anthrow Circus’s love of investing in burgeoning writers and photographers and artists, we embarked on a photography study tour as mentors to a group of my just-graduated high school students. Given their new status as legal “adults,” the goal was to give them access to sites, history, and art while also giving them a taste of responsibility as they explored and interacted with famous Italy.

But as our group tour of Italy continued, it became clearer to me that we were those tourists. We may have thought we were special, and in some ways, we were. But simultaneously, we were also them. We weren’t always the same type of tourist, in that we played different tourist roles, but still, at some point, we were those tourists.

My Camera’s Souvenirs From Our Italian Tour

STORY AND PHOTOS BY VIVIAN MORROW

Time is so powerful, especially in Italy.

Here I was, on a street corner in Milan, in 2022. I was surrounded by buildings that predated me, a culture that predated them, and above me, a piece of sky that predated us all.

Yalda: An Afghan Winter Story

MIXED-MEDIA VIDEO BY “TILL WE HAVE FACES
INTRODUCTORY TEXT BY HEATHER M. SURLS

Setara, a 17-year-old from Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, remembers falling asleep at her grandmother’s house as a girl. Grandma Gul, or Grandma Flower, would sit beside her with a cup of chai and rock-sugar candies and tell her stories. One of these was the story of Yalda, a traditional Afghan tale about a village girl who meets a feared “witch” on the longest night of the year.

In Monet’s Room, Quietly

STORY BY HAILEY SMALL

I turn the corner and am jolted by fluid splashes of color, original blues, greens, and oranges, not their recreated versions. Then I hear myself sigh, easing from the city into this quiet space.

When Monet designed the Water Lilies galleries in Le Musée de l’Orangerie, he specified that they should be experienced in silence. Viewers should whisper, step softly. It’s a space set apart—a cathedral built in reverence for the absence of sound.

David Wej: From Car Boot in Lagos to London’s High Street

STORY BY AKINTUNDE BABATUNDE
PHOTOS BY TUNDE ALABI-HUNDEYIN II

Preceding its grand opening in June, menswear brand David Wej was in the news across Nigeria and the United Kingdom in February this year for agreeing to a deal to open its debut UK standalone store in central London, despite the current uncertainty hitting retailers.

On Looking at Rothko

TEXT BY JANE POTTHAST

When I see a Rothko painting, the feeling is akin to that moment between waking and sleep when one is delayed—happily—in an absence of category. A purity of breath and stillness without effort. A cessation of being. But to be transported to these realms by his art, I must see the original painting in person. Otherwise the image has no effect.

And this is the enduring strength of Rothko in the age of the smartphone.

View From a Pandemic: Observed in Nashville, No. 5

TEXT AND PHOTOS BY DAWN MAJORS, BILL STEBER, JOON POWELL, AND JOHN PARTIPILO

Illustrating their divergent perspectives and practices, four photographers from Nashville, Tennessee, USA, each with a solid foundation in newspapers, have prepared a pandemic-era exhibit that is slated to be presented in 2021 at the Scarritt Bennett Center and at Vanderbilt University, both in Nashville. In the months leading up to the exhibit we’re featuring their work in an ongoing Anthrow Circus series, a project that is as much a study of photographic styles as a record of the pandemic.