After 15 years focusing almost exclusively on digital publishing projects, I'm back in the print world: my first issue as editor of the Carleton College Voice is out. Designed by Nancy Eato, it includes a cover story by Olivia Fantini on Hmong author and librettist Kao Kalia Yang (with commissioned photography by the amazing Pao Houa Her), Sara Harrison's piece asking how prepared we are for the next pandemic (with commissioned art by Piotr Szyhalski/Labor Camp), Andrew Faught's profile of Oppenheimer biographer Kai Bird, an 8-page rollout on overcrowding in our national parks by Laura Theobald, my first editor’s note, and more (including... beavers). Get your hands on a copy if you can, or read it online at carleton.edu/voice.
Piotr Szyhalski in the Walker cinema, March 1, 2022.
Insights 2022: Piotr Szyhalski on his Labor Camp's COVID-19 Reports
Artist and educator Piotr Szyhalski took the stage on March 1 to launch the return of Insights, an annual design lecture series put on by AIGA Minnesota and the Walker Art Center. Fitting his theme—his artistic practice and his yearlong COVID-19 Reports project—he spoke from the Walker’s empty cinema to online-only audiences. He began, as his daily drawing project did, listing off current statistics related to COVID: those killed by the pandemic since it began, those killed the previous day, etc. “So this is the context for today,” he said, and then, choking up, there in that empty auditorium, he looked at another dark context: the brutal war in Ukraine. “I am really feeling the weight of history today,” he said, putting the Ukrainian flag on the screen (as far as I can tell, his words mark the first public acknowledgement of the war by this contemporary art center). An artist with rare heart, vision, and technical skill, he went on to dig into that history, from how his upbringing in Poland helped shape his aesthetic and views on free speech, propaganda, and politics to the newer histories, years and months and days old, of corruption and disinformation around this deadly pandemic. Piotr was kind enough to mention my April 2020 article on his COVID project, “NO HOLDS BARRED! A Look at Piotr Szyhalski's Daily COVID-19 Reports,” which at the time—only a month into the project—helped him think about the series as a continuous project instead of just a series of daily reflections (you can watch it here).
And to quote Piotr, “Slava Ukraini!”
COVID-19 Reports Profile Linked by New York Times
“[T]he works are meticulous but piercing, like a carefully released primal scream.” Running down the week’s “5 Art Accounts to Follow on Instagram Now,” the New York Times’s Jillian Steinhauer links to my Walker Reader profile of Minneapolis-based artist Piotr Szyhalski’s COVID-19 Reports, a series of daily artworks responding to the power and politics surrounding the pandemic. The project, created under Szyhalski’s Labor Camp moniker, began on March 24; I featured it it on the Walker magazine on April 27.
