Articles
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...
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...
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 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 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:...
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...
“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...
“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 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...
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...
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....
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...
The uprisings and protests over the death of George Floyd erupted in Los Angeles not unlike its legendary wildfires. The flare-ups were largely spontaneous and unpredictable, some small and contained, others massive and out-of-control. Yet all were fueled with an...
Set on a six-acre site overlooking downtown Montgomery and, most significantly, the Alabama State Capitol, The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened in April 2018, is dedicated to the over 4,400 known victims of racial terrorism who were murdered by...
A good white American friend can be hard to find, so I appreciate and cherish mine. It’s June 2020, a month that will probably go down in history as one of the most pivotal, enraging, disgusting, hypocritical, amazing months in American history. And one by one, these...
Los Angeles–based photographer Brandy Eve Allen has responded uniquely to the isolation of the COVID social distancing period with a new series of portraits, shot from the street, of isolators in their homes. The subjects of the photos, who Allen found on Nextdoor...
Lynn Hershman Leeson has always been an artist simultaneously ahead of her time and very much a product of the present moment. From her revolutionary Breathing Machines in the early 1960s—the first sculpture works which incorporated sound—to her most recent video...
When I talk with Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, his smiling face lights up the video conference window as he speaks of joy. He hopes to bring joy to the subjects of his portraits, and to those that view them. Picking up the range of tonality in Blackness, his portraits...
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