Cover image: quilt art by Karen Maple featuring solitary incarcerated figures behind bars
Posing in Prison: Family Photographs, Emotional Labor, and Carceral Intimacy

The photographs they send are studio portraits taken by incarcerated photographers whose job in prison is to take pictures. Allen poses in these photographs sometimes with props, always in uniform. The backdrops are designed and painted by incarcerated people. They break up the uniformity and repetition of the prison attire and staged poses. There are also photographs from our visits to see Allen. In most of these, he stands in the center and we huddle around, hugging him as tightly as we can.

Sabelo Mlangeni (South African, born 1980), Umkhuleko Wabagulayo, Mama Khoza, Mfundisi Mathebula, KwaNyandeni, 2007. Hand-printed silver gelatin print. Courtesy of the artist and blank projects, Cape Town. © Sabelo Mlangeni.
Imvuselelo Brochure

Look through the brochure for artist Sabelo Mlangeni's Cantor Arts exhibit Imvuselelo, which ran from September 27, 2023 to January 21, 2024. A full reproduction of the text within the brochure follows the images.

Watercolor: green, lush landscape against a blue and yellow sky
Constellations of Hope

Gandhi reflects on “Southern constellations,” her method for bringing together three southern spaces—South Korea, South Vietnam, and the US South—and examining how the “South” operates as a political concept vis-à-vis an imagined “North.”

The electric chair mentioned in the title of the piece. Slightly to the left of the frame, with green hues across the entire frame. Slight bar coming down from the top.
On Andy Warhol's Electric Chair

In June 2003, the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh mounted an exhibition of Warhol's iconic Electric Chair print series—ten large-scale prints along with several smaller prints and paintings—as a catalyst to generate discourse on the issue of capital punishment. The project, Andy Warhol's Electric Chairs: Reflecting on Capital Punishment in America, which came two years after the execution of Timothy McVeigh and shortly after the decision by Illinois Governor George Ryan to commute all death sentences in that state, raised significant questions about the social utility and morality of the death penalty.

A triptych: the left photo is of two mangoes hanging from a tree. The middle is of two brown men. One is wearing an African mask, and the other kisses his throat. The image on the right is of three men, overlaid with a photo of grass.
Queering the Archive: Brown Bodies in Ecstasy: Visual Assemblages, and the Pleasures of Transgressive Erotics

Jordache A. Ellapen reflects on his photographic project, Queering the Archive: Brown Bodies in Ecstasy, which blends photographs from his family archive with contemporary portraits shot in a studio. The work examines the intersections of race, sexuality, and eroticism as they relate to the in/visibility of black and brown queer bodies and subjectivities in South Africa.