BY HOLLY WREN SPAULDING
Since meeting her seven years ago, I’ve admired painter Amanda Acker’s ability to tell a story through a single image, as well as her sensitive use of color, which has the effect of teaching me how to see the vibrancy in my own surroundings.
BY JONATHON GEELS
In recent decades, as churches have fallen into disrepair, their previously significant impact on community development has waned. While they certainly still serve as both social and spiritual centers, they do not dominate the landscape as they once did. The grid of city streets has reduced their hierarchical impact, and often, the Central Business District supports many buildings of much greater scale. Even the megachurches, with their thousands of members and sprawling complexes and campuses, are often sited away from urban centers, isolated on large swaths of land in suburbia.
By Marina Gross-Hoy
The Detroit Institute of Arts is a gem. It has one of the largest art collections in the United States, with objects spanning from ancient Mesopotamia to contemporary America.
The reason for my visit on a blustery March afternoon was to test Lumin, the museum’s brand new augmented reality mobile experience.
Interview by Linda Swan. Photos by Bradley Leach.
A conversation with Weléla Mar Kindred is a dance of kindness, openness, fierce intellect, and subtle movement. It was an honor for me to spend an hour getting to know such a rare soul. Weléla was born in Southern California but identifies strongly as a member of the Muskogee (Creek) Nation as well as of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
Photos by Bradley Leach and Intro by Jonathan Randall Grant
Dancer, writer, and director Weléla Mar Kindred radiates peace and warmth. Her presence is like a hug. I met her in Paris a few years ago, and my life has been all the sweeter because of our meeting.
By Holly Wren Spaulding
Despite my inexperience, what I made is beautiful to me, in part because it accomplished something I’ve strived for in my poems for a while: radical simplicity, quiet, and room for the reader to think about a single image or idea at a time. I also enjoyed engaging with the visual elements of these spare essences of language, seeing them as art objects as much as I see them as poems.
By Capucine Fachot
Lomography emailed me with a few of my favorite words: monochrome, purple, film. I was to test one of the two films they had received from Vienna. I chose to hike, and bring the light of the island onto my violet emulsion. Near Istanbul, the escape and I refused to make purple human.
It is opportunity that drives me. Because we deserve healthier, more vibrant places to live in, living out the vision to overcome obstacles and understand opportunity is a journey worth taking.
I felt overwhelmed by how much there was to see, and I didn’t know how to structure my visit. I wanted to see everything, and simultaneously, I longed to take my time with the artworks. Then, as I was meandering through the Greek and Roman statuary, all of a sudden I came to a halt…
Join contributor, Roshanda Cummings, as she explores what personal style and unchained expression look like for women in the Afrofuture movement.
