art

It’s not often that income tax audits make big news, but the mammoth of an audit that’s been thrown Venus DeMars andLynette Reini-Gambell, a married couple and a relatively successful musician and poet respectively, has been getting some local press in their home state of Minnesota. This MinnPost article features an interview with the couple in which they discuss the details of the situation, but in short: the Minnesota Revenue Department is claiming that the couple’s respective artistic careers are not profitable enough to qualify them as “professional” artists and is demanding around $100,000 in back taxes for work-related tax deductions the couple has claimed over the years. 

As long as I can remember, my mother had long nails. For that matter, my grandmothers and aunts did too. It was a sign of maturity, like big earrings and high heels. But it was practically a cultural practice, since most of my friends at school and their mothers kept their nails unpainted and shortened to the fingertip. And until recently, I was still the only one of my roommates whose nail polishes didn’t fit in one box.

But suddenly, nail art is the new “it” thing.

Art tells us a lot about game worlds—and art largely tells us that these game worlds contain highly sexualized women present for the heterosexual consumption of men.

Chicago-based artist Sandie Yi is the virtuoso behind Crip Couture, an avant-garde wearable art project for disabled people seeking to redefine constricting standards of beauty, agency and “normalcy.”

Yi transforms traditional, uninspired prosthetics and orthotics into tailor-made creations for clients, taking into account the individual’s needs, desires and state of mind. The point is not to manufacture conventional, “corrective” physical aids that blend in with the status quo; instead these innovative pieces capitalize on the diverse beauty found in disabled bodies, highlighting difference and redefining not only fashion but disability itself.

Renowned visual artist and educator Riva Lehrer has teamed up with brilliant cartoonist and graphic memoirist, Alison Bechdel in the new short film, “The Paper Mirror: Drawing Alison Bechdel.”

Happening now is the first ever Design Week Portland, which celebrates design as one of our city’s most promising cultural and economic resources through a series of talks, exhibits, films, and open studios all across town.

I'll admit, I kind of fudged when I said this would be a three-part series about zine artists I love. Honestly, I could probably do a fifty part series on zine artists I love, then publish it as a memoir called Can I Be You? But I'm not doing that, and instead, I'm going to take a few minutes to tell you about something really important. A couple of weeks ago, you might have stopped by the Portland Zine Symposium (or any zine fest anywhere) and thought to yourself "Wow, there are a lot of white people here, where are all the zinesters of color?" Or at least, that's what I was thinking. I scoured the entire space looking for people of color only to find one table all alone, in the back of the warehouse. One amazing table, to be sure,, but I still left wishing for something more. I'd imagine Daniela Capistrano had some similar thoughts when she founded the People of Color Zine Project in 2010 in order to make zines by folks of color accessible, available, and distributable for all, because really, these things can be incredibly hard to find in such white dominated DIY, activist, and artist communities.

As summer stretches its legs in the Pacific Northwest, Nikki McClure's calendar is helping me count down the months. The cut paper artist seems to be everywhere now: on bookshelves, greeting cards, and fabulous retrospectives in museums opening this fall. McClure is known for her dramatic etchings of everyday life, resistance, and celebration. As Cinders Gallery puts it, “Armed with an X-acto knife, she cuts out her images from a single sheet of paper and creates a bold language that translates the complex poetry of motherhood, nature, and activism into a simple and endearing picture.” She’s been doing it for over a decade, and despite age, fame, and maybe a little fortune, seems to be as true to her roots as before. And that's what's so inspiring: a continuous evolution of radical art-making that doesn’t sell out after life changes like having families or getting older.

Cristy C. Road, a Miami-raised, Brooklyn-based, Cuban-American illustrator, writer, and of course, total dreamboat, is no stranger to DIY, punk, queer, zine, and activist communities all over the place, and certainly no stranger to the pages of Bitch magazine. You might recognize her work from covers of books such as We Don’t Need Another Wave and The Revolution Starts at Home, or maybe you’ve caught her on tour with Sister Spit The Next Generation when they rolled through your town, or perhaps you’ve flipped through an issue or two of Green Zine, or you stole your ex's copy of Bad Habits, or you saw her band play in someone's basement, or maybe you've never heard of her at all, but basically, she’s a big deal, not to mention a badass. This is what happened when I sat down for a chat with her on a sunny Friday morning, pajamas on, and breakfast in hand. Cristy shared her feelings about everything from her art, to astrology, to racial dynamics in radical communities, to cats and brunch. It's all here for you to read, so let's get started!

Many feminists have praised praised Georgia O'Keeffe for her use of "female iconography" in her art (a.k.a. her vagtastic flower paintings). But O'Keeffe always denied this association as a conscious choice and instead claimed her art revealed the sensuality of nature... which to me sounds like pretty much the same thing. At any rate, O'Keeffe has been celebrated as one of the most influential American modernist artists and definitely deserves a place in Feministory, regardless of her feelings about her flowers' anatomical lookalikes.