WELCOME

In this third issue, we’re still crossing into unknown editorial territory.  Producing an entirely new magazine is exciting and obsessive.  We hope to stay flexible, though, and open to feedback (send ideas, essay and theme proposals), but we’re dedicated to WEAD’s basic ground (aka golden) rules.  Nothing’s perfect, but each issue aims to be stimulating and worthy of note, inclusive and diverse, leave room for the poetic and personal, and work towards and for a saner, more connected global community.  It’s good to have goals.

 

 

 

 

I. BORDER CROSSINGS

This title emerged organically as a common denominator.  Much more than a travel journal, these essays explore the artists’ richer experiences working in foreign cultures on collective projects, not always in their full control.  As artists, they see borders literally and figuratively.  Beyond the literal, their borders are personal, poetic, ephemeral, intuitive, and mark life changes.

 

II. FEATURED ARTIST

 

 

Each issue honors a pioneering artist who, in turn, writes a commentary.  Border Crossings Featured Artist is conceptual Chicano artist and cultural activist AMELIA MESA BAINS. An internationally respected cross-disciplinary artist best known for altar-installations, she is a scholar, educator, and innovator in the documentation and interpretation of Chicano traditions in Mexican-American art. Through scholarly articles and lectures on Chicano art, she continues to enhance public understanding of multi-culturalism and its concurrent major cultural and demographic shifts in the United States and the world.

 

III. THE BORDER ESSAYS

 

Interviewed by Mexican journalist JOYCE JANVIER, Mazatlan mixed media artist ELINA CHAUVET travels out of her comfort zone to produce Red Shoes, a sorrowful creative protest on the continuously growing number of disappeared and murdered women in border towns.

For 20+ years American conceptual artists TIM COLLINS and REIKO GOTO have produced solo and collaborative ecoart projects. Several years ago they moved to England to teach and study, but the real border their art crosses is psychological.  Listening and speaking, they upend arbitrary barriers between humans and nature.

Three+ years ago Swedish curator VERONICA WINMAN traveled to Colombia and stayed to work, producing several projects bearing on women’s economic and human rights.  In Nashira, a utopian rural farm community for displaced women and children, she designed a central space for residents to work with visiting artists, like ecoartists Lauren Elder (Oakland CA) and Andi Sutton (Boston). The three views create a more fully realized portrait of place.

 

 

Born in China, Philadelphia artist LILY YEH has been lauded widely for her remarkable inner city project Village of Art and Humanities (1986-2004).  Here freelance writer David Kupfer asks Yeh to talk about her work after 2004 when she took her “community art village” concept international, working on projects in Beijing and Rwanda.

Emergent TAIWANESE GREEN ART is covered in three articles. First, U.S. ecoartist, curator and festival organizer JANE ALLEN INGRAM, working there since 2004, writes about her discoveries and the projects she initiated.  Next, American curator PATRICIA WATTS (see Reviews) analyzes the U.S. traveling Taiwanese green art exhibit curated by Ingram in 2010.  Coming Fall 2011, one of Taiwan’s leading artists MALI WU and her students share their researched compilation of indigenous Taiwanese ecoart.

A member of The Beauty of Water Project, American ecoartist LIZA BEHRENDT traveled to Kerala India where she collaborated with villagers to create a beautiful floating series of artworks.

Beauty is a sidebar to the intent of Portland artist ELIZABETH STANEK’s The Dispersal Project.  Her poetic project is a personal meditation on dispersing memories, akin to the dispersal of endangered native seeds that she nurtures in a seed bank.  Taking a botanical model she writes how her personal moves from Berkeley to Portland to remote acreage along the Columbia River mimics the seed movements she studies.

 

IV. FUTURE ISSUES

 

FALL 2011—OPEN THEME.  Submit proposals by July 15.
SPRING 2012—EXPLORING THE GLOBAL ATOMIC LEGACY