WELCOME TO THE ISSUE ABOUT THE ISSUE THAT WON’T GO AWAY

By Susan Leibovitz Steinman

EARTH AMBULANCE CEREMONY, Helene Aylon, 1982.

INTRODUCTION

Artists have the ability to manifest images that give face and voice to consequences of both action and inaction that affect us all.  Such is the continuing debate over use and abuse of atomic power/energy (safe and sustainable vs. dangerous and polluting).  It is an issue that will never go away, bound to last as long as the waste it creates.  Time and again, we forget the real costs until awakened by disasters like Three Mile Island 1979, Chernobyl 1986, and Fukushima March 2011.

ISSUE 5 brings voices from Japan, Chernobyl, New Mexico, and US areas threatened by aging nuclear plants in Florida, California and Washington.

The essays reveal personal journeys, political actions, and transformative artworks and performances involving non-artist communities.  It is an ambitious issue that we and the writers have been working on for more than a year.  It is rich in experience, insights, and hope.  And so, we dedicate ISSUE 5 to the future.

ATOMIC LEGACY ARTISTS

Feature Artist HELÉNE AYLON created her Earth Ambulance in 1982.  For ten+ years she drove the Ambulance across the United States to Strategic Air Command bases, gathering people to collectively “rescue earth”—from the United Nations Plaza, to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Writing about post-Fukushima Japan, writer/publisher HIROKO SHIMIZU brings a sampler of anti-nuclear activist artists, followed by a long interview with charismatic philosopher-artist ICHI IKEDA.  Ikeda works with small rural communities creating large visions of clean water and collective action.

German artist INSA WINKLER traveled to Chernobyl with an activist artists’ collective who work with the “forgotten” people living there.  She brings back the stories of people still living there, and the projects they worked on.

Working in New York and New Mexico, artist EVE ANDREE LARAMEE creates complex installations and videos about radioactive damage to people and land by resident nuclear industries.

Long time anti-nuclear activist artist BEVERLY NAIDUS’ experiences are deeply personal and close to heart. Having suffered from serious environmental illnesses in the past, her work confronts the nuclear industry as a tool for healing and power.

ANN T. ROSENTHAL has been combining anti-nuclear activism and art since 1982.  She shares her “atomic pilgrimage” from Guam to Japan to New Mexico to Washington’s Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

Raised a “downwinder” (living near a reactor), Southern California political artist LAURA LYNCH charts a history of nuclear industry over seven decades and its negative environmental impact. In her ART OF PROTEST she calls on humans to regain “consciousness” to face the real costs of nuclear power.

COMMENTARIES

  • ON MY MIND:  Art critic and EcoArt South Florida founder MARY JO AAGERSTOUN asks Can Anti-Nuke Activist Art Be A Form Of EcoArt? while critiquing Florida’s arsenal of aging failing nuclear plant dangers.
  • JAMES LERAGER presents a photographer’s atomic legacy portfolio
  • CECILE PINEDA shares part of her recent book Devil’s Tango.
  • JL MALBROOK reports on a feminist conference at the The New School for Design in NYC on April 5, 2012.

FUTURE ISSUES

We welcome PROPOSALS and ESSAYS from people year round.  What’s wanted:  critical writing on individual artist projects, collaborations with communities, surveys of a particular aspect of the field, reviews of artists/exhibits/books, and creative works. Email submissions to weadartists@gmail.com.

ISSUE #6 WILL BE PUBLISHED IN SPRING 2013.