Articles
Poems
The Mountain If a man should ask to meet me at the summit of a mountain to discuss the great questions of life, I would have to turn him down. Talking Woman A woman with a coarse voice can be very sexy, especially if she only says the most negative things. Table In...
COMICS Artists in Hell
Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokno Dominating Minds with Art
We catch up with Nadezdha Tolokonnikova by phone while she’s in LA recording. “Pussy Riot is a movement and we have different creative initiatives,” she says. One of them involves the group getting more seriously into music leading to an album slated for sometime in...
Engaging a New Normal: LA Artists on Vulnerability and Resistance Interviews with Kim Abeles, gloria galvez, Ara Oshagan, and more
In ever-mounting reports on the interlocked pandemics of COVID-19 and structural oppression, two words cyclically resound: “vulnerable” and “resist.” While the virus causes us to consider our own immune system’s vulnerability or resistance to it, it also creates or...
The Democracy Project: 2020 An online group exhibition curated by Lawrence Gipe and Antoine Girard.
"The Democracy Project: 2020" manifests the great, besieged "project of Democracy" as an online exhibition for Artillery's September/October issue, featuring recent work by a diverse selection of the West Coast's most compelling artists. Whether approaching the theme...
Graffiti Highway Crude and Sophisticated; Now Gone Forever
On April 8th of this year, Fox News reported that Pennsylvania’s famed Graffiti Highway was being completely covered with truckloads of dirt. The one-mile stretch of Route 61 was abandoned in 1993 after an underground fire in the nearby abandoned mining town of...
The Pros and Cons of Erasing History Damned If We Don't
I’ve been thinking about the concept of damnatio memoriae recently. Translated as “condemnation of memory,” the term refers to a practice associated with ancient rulers who called for the erasure of their predecessors from the historical record; their likeness removed...
The City as Canvas Democracy in the Art World Means Inclusion of Graffiti
For this democratized issue of Artillery, I’ve decided to focus on the most democratic medium of art: graffiti. Graffiti is as diverse as any medium but, generally, it is the painting of text or images onto surfaces in public spaces. The operative word in that...
Frederick Douglass’ Stunning Portrait Leaving His Image Behind
Among the amateur photographers of our time are some rare daguerreotype buffs who still practice this 19th-century form of portraiture, which creates a unique image on a photosensitized metal plate. Back in the 1990s, two such buffs were shrewd enough to realize that...
Kimberly Morris Give Me Some Art With Hair
Kimberly Morris creates work that is intensely visceral. She makes art about subjects intrinsically rooted in American culture, yet entirely personal. As an interdisciplinary artist, she has worked with a wide range of mediums over the years, including painting,...
Ari Salka: On Bodies (Be)held Trans Rights are Under Siege; This Artist Resists
Ari Salka is a trans, non-binary artist based in LA. Their ecstatic paintings and drawings—primarily self-portraits of their body—move in a liminal fantasy space brimming with queer angels and ghosts; a buoyant space where their present and former selves, can meet:...
Ramekon O’Arwisters Fabric and Ceramics Fits His World
Growing up as a queer Black child in the Jim Crow era South, Ramekon O’Arwisters and his family had many barriers to overcome. His grandmother, recognizing that the young boy was “a bit of a hot mess,” one day called him over and invited him to work with her on her...
Forrest Kirk “It Doesn’t Always Have to be Didactic”
“Art is on the frontlines of social change, challenging people’s core beliefs,” says artist Forrest Kirk, “and this is where I live in my work.” An exhibition of nine new paintings exploring the raised fist motif in his richly textured, chromatically charged...
Photographers of Democracy: Part 1 Mark Peterson and David Butow
“Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something the nation must be doing.” – Archibald MacLeish Few contemporary American photographers have covered the endless living, breathing spectacle of democracy with more dedication and...
Joey Forsyte Our Vote is our Power
Joey Forsyte knows that “The only cure for grief is action.” Her beloved mother died shortly before Hilary Clinton lost the election for president. Overwhelmed by grief and loss, Forsyte was transformed into “a different person,” a person who—like her holocaust...
Kehinde Wiley Celebrates Black Identity Integrity 101
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the word “integrity” as a “firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values, and the quality or state of being complete and undivided.” Integrity is not a learned value, and is not culturally determined, but...
Berlin’s Bundestag What Does it Mean for a Building to be ‘To the People?’
After German reunification the remains of the famously incinerated Reichstag were first Norman Fosterized, then draped by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and finally repurposed as the Bundestag—the lower legislative body of German government roughly equivalent to the U.S....
COMICS Christo and His Bag
POEMS "The Swan Motel" By Alan Yuch; "Say You Love Me" By John Tottenham
The Swan Motel By Alan Yuch The hot nights, the swelter, even the walls would sweat. Sweet Marcy in the same cotton dress, patterned with red, white and blue balloons. The windowless room, matching walls, the air-flooded neon. This room was meant for sleeping,...
SHELTER-IN-PLACE: Remarks on Shit Brown
Why does brown always get the short end of the stick? If it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down. It’s not fair – earthy, practical, pragmatic brown is so much more than the leavings of a last meal. Brown is the color of the earth, your Sunday school...