Art

Asad Badat, the artist behind the cover of the Summer 2015 issue, says he’s always seen himself as “a passionate observer who has romantic eyes for beauty.” Recently, though, he’s departed from this observatory position.

Helen Zughaib came to her longtime home in Washington, D.C., by way of many other nations. Born in Beirut, Lebanon, she also lived in Iraq, Kuwait, Greece and France, before coming to the United…

When Meredith Stern (whose artwork is also featured on the front cover) chooses where to live, she embraces the “act locally, think globally” ethos. That’s why, once she put down roots in Providence, Rhode Island, the printmaker and collage artist began naturally forming collaborations with fellow artists for social justice.

For more than 30 years, David Bacon has been writing about and photographing people who are displaced by poverty in Mexico and choose to cross into the United States in search of a better life.

Catholic and Hindu leaders—two religions that normally appreciate religious statues and images—have decried “Barbie: The Plastic Religion,” a new exhibit by Argentinian artists Pool Paolini and…

This issue’s cover artist, Rommy Torrico, is the graphics and new media director for the Collier County Neighborhood Stories Project (CCNSP), based in southwest Florida.

Commenting to Fox News, Staten Island Representative Michael Grimm has called the work a “deplorable piece,” one that is as “offensive” to Christians as ‘Innocence of Muslims’ is to “the Islamic world.” Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the comparison has provided opportunity to emphasize the supposed moral high ground that Christians occupy over Muslims when it comes to material deemed offensive or blasphemous. Tony Perkins, president of the Family Council, told Fox News that the two incidents shore up “the contrast between Islam and Christianity.” “You don’t have to plead with Christians not to riot and burn and storm buildings simply because they are offended,” Perkins said. “That’s the difference. That’s why Christianity moves nations forward and Islam moves nation backwards.”

The reclusive filmmaker understood that the truth of history, like myth, can only be approached as a sensual experience.

What might it mean for a synagogue, a church, a mosque, or a temple, to set up a video screen in its sanctuary and play these images of death from September 11—and then turn around and respond to them? What reinvented rituals might result from a ritualized, contextualized reception of these images? Such communal framing gets us beyond the questions of morbid voyeurism because it eliminates the one-way dimension and places images within a social setting. It further allows us to reflect and come to terms with dying, thereby stirring the potential for a good death.

Kinkade challenged the high-brow haughtiness of the art world, grew rich in the process, and seemed to fumble around, rock-star like, with drinking and bad behavior. Liberals scoffed at the hypocrisy of yet another social-religious conservative who can’t live up to a decent set of moral standards, while his mass-produced images were hugely loved, especially by evangelical Christians who felt that here, finally, was an artist for them. He called himself the “Painter of Light” and then trademarked the phrase. He includes a Christian fish (icthus) above his signature—but he’s also alleged to have urinated on a Winnie the Pooh figure at Disneyland, among other socially unacceptable activities.