Art

Bridging the gap between commercial and fine art photography is a challenging task, but military brat and domestic TCK Annie Leibovitz does it with ease.

France and Italy have been known to be influential in the art world for centuries — the former birthing avante-garde and works by Rodin, Monet and others, and the latter blessing us with pieces, such as the Mona Lisa and the David sculpture. American art didn’t gain traction or credibility until the late 1930s with the rise of the Abstract Expressionist movement.

Although it’s up to you to decide if superhero movies are “not cinema,” there is certainly something to be said about their rapid integration into popular culture. With up to 17 films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) until the […]

Born in Havana, Cuba in November 1948, Ana Mendieta was a well-known performance artist throughout the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. At age 12, she and her sister were forced to flee Cuba after her father joined an anti-Castro counter-revolutionary force, and the two siblings spent their first few weeks in the United States at a refugee camp in Florida until they were sent to an orphanage in Dubuque, Iowa — a location with a culture very different from the life Ana knew back in Cuba. She wouldn’t reunite with her mother and brother for five years and her father for another 18.

Persepolis is a autobiographical graphic novel written and illustrated by Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian-French cartoonist. It tells the tale of Marji, a young girl living in Tehran just before the 1979 Iranian Revolution. This accounts her life before, during, and after the Iranian Revolution, where she lives through threats to her wellbeing and xenophobia.

Monstress is an epic fantasy graphic novel written by Marjorie Liu telling the tale of Maika Halfwolf, a teenage girl sharing a psychic link to a power monster who occasionally emerges from the stub of her severed left arm. Inspired by early 20th century Asia, Monstress is set in a matriarchal world split into factions, where war for power and greed set the stage for our heroine to avenge her fallen mother.

Despite the racist undertones in “West Side Story”, the messages about life in foreign places still stand true.

Representation in photography is about the inclusion/exclusion of certain stories and the reasoning behind it. But the conversation shouldn’t end there.