GeoDesign Landscapes Magazine

SCAD GEODESIGN

01 ISSUE

LANDSCAPES MAGAZINE

COPYRIGHT

This magazine was compiled by the Savannah College of Art and Design GeoDesign Club. Special thanks to Chair Robin Williams and Dean Geoffrey Taylor.

Editor in Chief: Lui Andrade Marinozzi Editorial Assitant: Asia Saltanat Copy Editor: Sam Stone Proof Reader: Andrew White Treasury: Wenya Zhao Submissions Manager: Lindsay Miller Collaborator: Sara Castellano Club Advisor: Alice Guess

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Evy Hondros The Church

Sam Stone

Minka: Japan’s Farmhouses and the People Who Called Them Home

18 Ben Elhav

SEE YOU THERE

19 Daniel Borrero

The Story of the Cross-Bronx Expressway

32 Scarlett Mason Distorted Walk

33 Ben Elhav Lines

35 Bejnarowicz

Twentysix Gas Stations is Not an Art Book

43 Zach Jett

Self Dissolution

45 Natalia Fuentes On Lovers and Mothers

50 Isaiah Zacharia A Tree Assignment

51 Evy Hondros Time Capsule

52 Cristina Mayor

Landscape and Political Identity

62 Ben Elhav Profiled

66 José Vega

Project Espere

69 Lui Andrade Marinozzi

CAT Bus Station: An Exploration on Liminality

71 Jessica Hoofnagle Tree of Joy

84 Ben Elhav

One-Way Glass With No Traustein

90 Scarlett Mason Distorted Walk

91 Isabel Brennan

The Fabric of a Community: Zapatista Art Collectives

101 Alex Holmes Holden Arboretum

102 Bejnarowicz Prairie

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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GEODESIGN

THE CHURCH

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Evy Hondros Acrylic Paint on Canvas 2021

MINKA:

JAPANESE FARMHOUSES AND THE PEOPLE WHO CALL THEM HOME

Sam Stone

1. Pardo, Davina. “In Japan, a Farmhouse Becomes a Journalist’s Elegy.” The New York Times, March 19, 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/19/travel/minka-a-farmhouse-in-japan.html.

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Yoshihiro Takashita, standing beneath crossbeams, each the diameter of a tree, remarks, “I [feel] life, very healthy life, being lead in [this] space.”1 Takashita is a residential architect in Japan, and the beams (fig. 1) are that of an old minka. No one lives in this house, yet the evidence of life is all around—wood smelling of tea, stained by smoke; earthen floors tamped smooth by the walking of feet. Takashita believes there is a power held in these old minka, a belief becoming rarer and rarer. Although generally thought to be ordinary, minka’s significance comes from their adaptation to different settings and the specific needs of Japan’s diverse peoples. Through this adaptation, these farmhouses became symbols of the people, “the peoples houses,” or minka. By reading their subtle differences, we can understand how these adaptations reflect the families who developed them.

Minka refers to many building traditions found across the Japanese archipelago. While frequently referred to as Japanese farmhouses, minka translates literally to “houses of the people.” Until its dissolution in 1868 at the end of the Edo period, the shogunate established a clear division between the elite samurai class and the non-samurai classes. In this feudal system, non-samurai classes were made up of diverse peoples who mostly worked as tradespeople and farmers. The trades and crops of these people would shape the image of their lives and, in turn, the houses in which they found refuge, worked, and cherished their time together.

Despite their long history and the breadth of their variety, minka, particularly examples from the 17th century onward, share a series of similarities.

GEODESIGN

Fig. 1 Example of oversized beam (likely cedar), Kuriyama House, seventeenth century. (Itoh, 1972, 97)

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The most significant and the feature most associated with the prototypical minka is their programmatic layout.2 Most minka are entered via a main workroom called the doma (fig. 2), a large space with an earthen floor. These rooms are used for various purposes, typically that of the family unit’s particular craft.

Additionally, this room is used for the preparation of food via a kamado stove, the size of which varies from minka to minka. The workroom is attached directly to the main living space (fig. 3), referred to by several terms. Though it varies, this living space is typically elevated from the workroom, where a wood floor, covered in either woven mats or configured with tatami, creates a perceived separation. Commonly the two rooms are shared with no dividing walls, though later, minka will create more physical separation.3 While the living space is typically associated with tatami mat flooring, tatami are a relatively new addition to minka given their expense, with most living 2. Kawashima, Chuji. Minka: Traditional Houses of Rural Japan. Translated by Lynne E. Riggs.

Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1989. 64-70.

3. Ibid. 54-63

Fig. 2 View of the Sakano House doma.

Note raised living space in background. (Kawashima, 1989, 54)

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areas opting for simpler woven matting to cover the wooden floor.4 While the workroom is a mixed-use space for the duties of the house, the living area is a mixed-use space for familial practices such as gathering, eating, and sleeping.

4. Itoh, Teiji. Traditional Domestic Architecture of Japan. Translated by Richard L. Gage. New York, NY: Weatherhill, 1972. 112-115

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Fig. 3 View into the living space (hiroma) from the doma, Kitamura House. Note the use of woven matting rather than tatami. (Kawashima, 1989, 155)

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Like tatami, bedrooms would be a later addition as minka become more specialized and minka owners more prosperous. Lastly is the zashiki, a reception space used for worship and the greeting of guests. These three spaces will be supplemented more and more as Japan becomes more prosperous, more industrialized, and as trades become more specialized.5 This general layout unifies minka of all geographic styles. What typically separates the different styles of minka is materiality.

The minka building tradition is defined by the materials available to those who built them. Minka were traditionally built by the community and those who would go on to live in them. This collaborative design places a particular significance on the geographic location of the community in defining minka styles.

For example, Minka in the mountains of the Khūbu region present distinct characteristics from that of minka found to the east in the flatlands of the Kantō region. We see material differences in the construction of the floors and walls, but most obviously and characteristically important, in the roof.6 Minka roofs are one of their defining characteristics. The roof is the strongest denotation of the dwelling demonstrated by their immense size.

It is the roof that provides the strongest sense of shelter from Japan’s climate.7 Whether north or south, rain defines this climate, resulting in a particular focus on roof construction. Traditionally minka roofs are constructed from a frame covered in a basket of tightly thatched kusa or grass. Thatch provides an excellent example of the various construction materials with kusa susuki (miscanthus grass) in the mountains and kusa-yoshi (ditch reed) in the flatlands as examples.8 We also find in more wooded areas shingles of maze-buki, which utilize cedar bark rather than grass. Later as Japan industrialized, we can see the emergence of kawara (ceramic shingles) (fig 4.) as well. The variety shown in roof finish can act as something of an analogue to the greater material 5.

6.

7.

8.

Kawashima. 1989, 64-70 Ibid. 19-23 Itoh. 1972, 55-69 Kawashima, 1989, 17-37

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variability of minka. This variability is demonstrated throughout the minka structure. As a result of the rich terminological history in minka construction, discerning structural differences between minka can become linguistically complicated. However, the shapes of minka roofs provide general categories for discussion. Roofs are divided into gables (kirizuma), hips (yosemune), helmets (kabuto-zukuri), and composite roofs, each with their own history and purposes (fig. 5).9 An example of how geographic styles rely on these structural differences, one that provides a particular glimpse into life in Edo period Japan, is gasshō-zukuri.

While it is only one of the numerous minka traditions, gasshō-zukuri (fig. 6) provides a unique example of minka architecture interfacing with Edo society.

Gasshō-zukuri is, for many, the quintessential minka style, characterized by massive thatched gables, some of which encompass as many as five floors above ground level. Like with all minka adaptations, these gables are a direct result of those who lived in them. The gable of the gasshō-zukuri grew in size with the silk

Fig. 4 Tile roof utilizing later sangawara pan tiles, Hyōgo Pref.(Kawashima, 1989, 37) 9. Ibid.

GEODESIGN

Fig. 5 Distribution graphs indicating the prevalence of different roof shapes and finishes in different geographic areas. (Kawashima, 1989, 24)

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trade in Edo Japan. Given the high demand for silk, silk farmers began to increase their workspaces to accommodate.10 Where a horse farmer may opt to expand the doma to incorporate a stable, silk farms began to increase the height of their minka to provide space for silkworms to produce silk. Additionally, we find increased use of shoji shades which could be slid open or closed to provide air and light to the worms.

As noted by Kawashima, the primary workforce on silk farms was that of women, leading many daughters in silk farming communities to remain home even after marriage. This resulted in much larger families and, thus, much larger minka. Just one example of how minka are a reflection of rural Japanese life.11 There has been the hint of a unifying trend in the description of the minka character. As noted, variety, as much as typical traits, define the minka tradition. This is due to geography and occupation generally; however, minka also act as a living history of those who lived in Japan under the shogunate.

11. Kawashima. 1989, 109-121

Just as seen in gasshō-zukuri, much can be told of an individual family by the construction of their minka, providing insights into the lives of oft forgotten people. Often architecture tells the stories of the affluent and powerful. However, in minka, we are presented the tales of those individuals who remain steadfast, perfecting their crafts and living their ordinary lives. The life of a minka is one tied directly to these families. After their construction, minka continue to evolve with the family unit. Similar to the cycles of domestic life, many components of a minka must be replaced over time. Additional layers of earth are coated to the exterior facade, thatching is reworked, floor mats replaced. What remains of this is the wood frame, bare but full of life. We see this in the existence of sennenya (fig. 7). Sennenya, or “thousand-year house,” is a term used for the oldest of the remaining minka.12 The name originates from the 12. Itoh. 1972, 139

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Fig. 6 Gasshō-zukuri style minka, eighteenth century, Shirakawa Village. Note shoji panels along the facade. (Itoh, 1972, 17)

GEODESIGN

Fig. 7 Hakogi sennenya, fourteenth or fifteenth century, (Itoh, 1972, 18)

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Fig. 7 Hakogi sennenya, fourteenth or fifteenth century, (Itoh, 1972, 18)

Edo Period, referring to homes deemed then to be “ancient” compared to newly constructed houses of the day. None of these examples, then or now, are actually millennia old, however, they are frequently many hundreds of years old.

The Kitamura Residence features a large veranda which spans the length of the house. Verandas are common in minka, ubiquitously so; however, the size and number of openings between the zashiki and hiroma and the veranda suggests a family with many connections in the community.15

13. Kawashima,1989, 152-156 14. Ibid. 64-70 15. Itoh. 1972, 55-69

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Today most standing minka date to the mid to late 19th century, toward the end of the Edo Period when industrialization permitted more permanent materials such as mass-produced ceramic tiling for roofs. Yet, a number of sennenya still exist, dating as far back as the 14th century. An exceptionally well-kept minka of sennenya status is the home of Ippei Kitamura.

The Kitamura Residence (fig. 8), located in the plains of the Kantō region, was built during the 15th century, with a protective poem, common in minka, dated 1687.13 The house acts as a prototypical example of the traditional minka plan, specifically that of a hiroma type (fig. 9). The hiroma plan is also known as a three-room plan. The three rooms are separated into the doma and hiroma (living room), counted here as one room, the zashiki (formal room), and the heya (bedroom).14 These three rooms are separated by wooden doors in the case of the zashiki and shoji in the case of the heya. We find here hints at who Ippei Kitamura likely was. Shoji paper was still a luxury during the 17th century, as well as tatami, located both in the zashiki and the heya. This would indicate the Kitamura were an important family in the community. Yet we also find a very large doma spanning the depth of the house, suggesting a need for ample workspace. Kawashima suggests Ippei Kitamura was an important farmer, citing these characteristics. We find in many farming minka large doma, called daidoka, which could be used for larger-scale work and even as stables in some cases. Beyond the luxurious materials, aspects of the floor plan also suggest the importance of the Kitamura.

GEODESIGN

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Fig. 9 Section and plan of the Kitamura House, demonstrating the hiromanconfiguration.

(Kawashima, 1989, 156)

Fig. 10 View of the Yanohara House. (Kawashima, 1989, 209)

16. Kawashima, 1989, 209-213

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We see this in many minka verandas. Verandas denote both the border between the environment and the home, but also the public and private. Minka close to roads or urban centers will frequently double as shops, exhibiting folding extensions called age-shōgi attached to their verandas to accommodate food stalls for the sale of vegetables and wares.

Continuing into the 18th century, further into the Edo Period, we look to the establishment of a new “middle-class.” With the technological advances of the Edo period, rice farming experienced a massive increase in output and thus revenue for farming communities. It is with this increase in rural wealth we begin to see a blurring of the line between minka and the shoin style homes of the samurai aristocracy. This increase can be seen in the example of the Yanohara family, whose residence shows a far more developed example of minka than that of Ippei Kitamura’s home.

The Yanohara House (fig. 10) is located in the mountainous Chūbu region. While one would be forgiven for not noticing, that house is in the gasshō-zukuri style.16 While we had seen gasshō-zukuri in its most notable form in silk-farming regions, not all examples had the association with silk, nor the immense size.

However, this does not mean the Yanohara House is small, on the contrary. The Yanohara family were likely far wealthier than much of the minka dwelling population at the time of the house’s construction.

Features of the house show similarities between the wealthiest of the working class and the lower ranks of the samurai, most obviously in the floor plan (fig. 11).

The floor plan of the Yanohara’s residence is divided into three sections, one ken organized formal space with tatami floors, and two posts organized areas, the living room, and doma. The inclusion of tatami in the organization of the plan can be likened more to the shoin homes of the samurai, which too use ken, than that of early minka.

GEODESIGN

Fig. 11 Yanohara House floor plan. Note the complexity of the layout compared to that of the Kitamura House (Kawashima, 1989, 211)

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We also see the minimization of the doma, becoming less a living space and more a utility, with much of its floor space dedicated to a stable. Conversely, the formal room, a single zashiki in the case of the Kitamura house, has expanded into a series of rooms taking up half of the plan.17 This formalization alone shows the evolution from the minka of previous centuries. As the Edo period brought new wealth and industrialization created workspaces outside of the home, minka became, in a way, more residential. For the Yanohara family, work likely became less manual and more interpersonal, requiring meeting spaces.

“One day, they will become the earth.” Yoshihiro Takashita points to a pile of timbers, wet with snow (fig.12). “Like many things, there’s always end of life, and they are just about to finish it.”18 As an architect, Takashita renovates minka, disassembling them and rebuilding them all over Japan. However, true minka are becoming rarer and rarer.

17. Kawashima, 1989, 209-213 18. Pardo, Davina. “In Japan, a Farmhouse Becomes a Journalist’s Elegy.” The New York Times, March 19, 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/19/travel/minka-a-farmhouse-in-japan.html.

Takashita sees minka as living things, each with their own story, each with their own end. As minka continue to be put to rest, it is essential to ask them for their stories. Far too often, the stories spoken in dying tongues, carved in fading stone, held in earthen walls, are left to disappear without so much as an acknowledgment. The people of rural Japan, whose work powered and inspired much of what we understand as Japanese today, deserve their stories told. It is in minka, their diversity, and their rich history that we can listen.

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Fig.12 Yoshihiro Takashita stands next to old minka crossbeams and posts. (Pardo, 2015)

GEODESIGN

Bibliography

17

Engel, Heino. Measure and Construction of the Japanese House.

Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 2006.

Itoh, Teiji. Traditional Domestic Architecture of Japan. Translated

by Richard L. Gage. New York, NY: Weatherhill, 1972.

Kawashima, Chuji. Minka: Traditional Houses of Rural Japan.

Translated by Lynne E. Riggs. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1989.

Morse, Edward S. Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings. Rutland, VT: Charles E Tuttle, 1990.

Pardo, Davina. “In Japan, a Farmhouse Becomes a Journalist’s Elegy.” The New York Times, March 19, 2015. https://www. nytimes.com/2015/03/19/travel/minka-a-farmhouse-in japan. html.

Parent, Mary Neighbour. “Terminology of Japanese Architecture & Art History.” JAANUS. Dr. Mary Neighbour Parent, 2001. http://www.aisf.or.jp/%7Ejaanus/.

Ueda, Atsushi, and Gunter Nitschke. The Inner Harmony of the Japanese House Atsushi Ueda. With an Introduction by Gunter Nitschke. Translated by Stephen Suloway. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2005.

UNESCO World Heritage Centre. “Historic Villages of Shirakawa-Go and Gokayama.” UNESCO World Heritage Centre. https://whc. unesco.org/en/list/734/.

SEE YOU THERE

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Ben Elhav Digital Collage 2017

THE STORY OF THE CROSS-BRONX EXPRESSWAY: AUTOMOBILITY, REVOLT, & MEMORY

GEODESIGN

Daniel J Borrero

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The highway revolts that took place in American cities in the mid-to-late 20th-century are well-known instances of successful community activism, yet some of the failed demonstrations that took place earlier in the century have received far less critical attention.

One of these was the unsuccessful revolt against Robert Moses’ Cross-Bronx Expressway (the CBE) by Lillian Edelstein and Bronx residents from 1952 to 1954. The story of this revolt, though, extends far beyond those few years, from planning ideals established in the first years of the century, to lasting effects today.

In this paper, I contend that the construction of the CBE in the 1950s represented the lack of power many New Yorkers faced in an age of forceful bureaucracy and devotion to the automobile. I also argue that the failure of the CBE revolt, predicated on class lines, was due to its precariously early place in the timeline of highway revolts; it therefore gave later protests, specifically the Lower Manhattan Expressway (LOMEX) protest led by Jane Jacobs, a cautionary tale from which to learn.

Urban planners in the early-to-mid 20th century wielded enormous power through their influence over the routing of highway developments. Part of what granted them this influence was 20th century fascination with automobility, which led to a preoccupation throughout the country with building for the car. According to Rose and Mohl, the number of Americans with registered vehicles increased from about 78,000 in 1905 to 458,500 in 1910, making the United States “the leading car culture in the world.”78 This number ballooned to over 40 million by the early 1950s.79 The driving forces behind this impetus were “American technology, governmental 78. Mark H. Rose and Raymond A. Mohl, Interstate: Highway Politics and Policy since 1939 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2012), 2.

79. Department of Transportation, “State Motor Vehicle Registrations, By Years, 1900 – 1995” (PDF, April 1997), https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/summary95/mv200.pdf.

80. Rose and Mohl, 3.

81. Rose and Mohl, 6-7 82. Rose and Mohl, 7.

83. Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 5-20.

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structures, and basic values.”80 The automobile represented the future and the success of the American way of life. This went together with the idea that highway construction would improve cities both economically and aesthetically. This continued through the 1940s, when trenched highways such as the Davison Avenue Limited Traffic Way in Detroit were described as exemplar. There was a consensus across the nation that the “construction of a coordinated road network… would enhance neighborhood integrity, upgrade downtown property values, and make men and their families wealthier and better behaved too.”81 By framing their work in this way, planners amassed power for themselves by convincing the American people and government that their work was essential for the maintenance of the country’s beauty, international image, and morality.

This granted planners the ability to take a topdown approach to their work, granting them free reign with their designs. The leading planning organization that took this tabula rasa approach in the 1920s and 1930s was the Committee on the Regional Plan of New York. This committee “proposed broad programs for decentralizing and coordinating the location of manufacturing and commercial establishments and housing, in part by a more sophisticated alignment of highway coordinates” (emphasis added).82 Indeed, highways became an essential aspect of every feasible urban redevelopment plan.

Perhaps the most infamous of planners to exercise this ideological power was Robert Moses. Known as New York’s “master builder,” Moses held a position in New York City government for over three decades, from 1934 to 1968, and for much of this period, no public improvement project was initiated without his approval.

Though he at one point held twelve different official roles simultaneously, Moses was never elected to any of his positions, he was merely appointed to or created public authorities that gave him an unprecedented level of autonomy.83 Moses enforced the power that he garnered

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for himself through legislation coupled with a quest for human improvement. He had a “grand vision of society’s [improved] future” that would, however, “significantly [affect] the private lives of a great many individuals while disregarding those people’s own plans and dreams.”84 Accordingly, over time Moses formed “an increasingly totalitarian regime in miniature.”85 He was able to feed off “a demand for quick and determined government action” instead of a headachingly slow democratic procedure.86 In order to avert problems concerning the legality of his plans, Moses became fluent in crafting legislation that was vague enough to grant him extra authority. One popular example that Caro brings to light is Moses’ use of the word “appropriation” in legislation that would make him the President of a new Long Island State Park Commission in 1924. While many legislators took this to mean that they would act on their own in allocating funds, Moses specifically defined “appropriation” according to an obscure 1884 bill. This bill said that “appropriation” lent the presidents of state commissions the ability to seize private property as they so pleased.87 Moses thereby secretly granted himself a nearly unheard-of political power, which he used to his advantage at the CBE. Before the construction of the CBE, Moses did face some backlash for several of his proposed projects. In 1929, the Northern State Parkway was moved a few miles south after a fight by wealthy landowners.88 In 1939, Moses proposal for a Brooklyn-Battery Bridge faced backlash from a few fronts: the American Institute of Architects;89 the United States Department of War;90 and President Roosevelt and the First 83. Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 5-20.

84. Cal and Ikeda, 255.

85. Cal and Ikeda, 256.

86. F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), 150.

87. Caro, 174 88. “Route Change Ends L.I. Parkway Fight,” The New York Times (New York, NY), December 20, 1929, 1.

89. “Architects Wary on Battery Span; Institute Warns Against Haste, Fearing Marring of Famous View,” The New York Times, March 18, 1939, https://www.nytimes.com/1939/03/18/archives/architects-wary-on-battery-span-institute-warns-against-haste.html.

90. “Army Bars Plans for Battery Span; Revision is Ready; Finds Present Proposal for Bridge to Brooklyn would Bring Navigation Perils but way is Left Open; Mayor and Moses are Confident Modified Program will Meet Objections,” The New York Times, May 19, 1939, https://www.nytimes. com/1939/05/19/archives/army-bars-plans-for-battery-span-revision-is-ready-finds-present.html.

Regardless of this consideration, the neighborhoods that the CBE would slash through had no say in how the

91. Caro, The Power Broker, 670-677.

92. “Castle Clinton,” National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, accessed February 28, 2021, https://www.nps.gov/cacl/index.htm.

93. Robert A.M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin, and Thomas Mellins, New York 1930: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Two World Wars (New York: Rizzoli, 1987), 145.

94. Caratzas, 10.

95. Caratzas, 11.

96. Caratzas, 12-13.

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Lady.91 Finally, in 1941, multiple advocacy groups including the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society, the New-York Historical Society, and the Municipal Art Society worked together to stop Moses’ efforts to demolish Castle Clinton, a historic fortification on the southern tip of Manhattan.92 While each of these cases proved successful, they did not immediately cause Moses to suffer a large loss of momentum or power; Moses seemed happy to pivot to simple alternatives.

In the wake of these challenges, the CBE, which was first proposed in 1929, was unveiled to the public in 1945. The expressway was originally part of the groundbreaking “Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs,” which has been called “the first fully comprehensive regional plan ever undertaken for an American city.”93 New York’s regional plan was designed based on “three diagrammatic presentation[s] of various types of highway systems;” ultimately, the regional plan was modeled based on the Metropolitan Loop, with a series of expressways encircling the city at an average distance of about 12 miles from City Hall.94 The CBE represented a large northern section of this loop.

From the beginning, this east-west expressway could be seen “relentless[ly] slashing” across the Bronx. In 1941, now with Moses at the helm, its exact location was shifted a few blocks north to provide a connection with the George Washington Bridge.95 Moses presented the plans for the expressway to the public in 1945 in a “conversational [and] good-humored” article, touting its traffic easing benefits and describing it in patriotic language, in which he provided two renderings and ensured the public that it would not lack “aesthetic appeal.”96

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Regardless of this consideration, the neighborhoods that the CBE would slash through had no say in how the expressway was to be designed or constructed. For example, the CBE was built below grade. While this was intended to provide some relief for the communities, as the negative effects of elevated expressways. noise, lack of sunlight at street level, and the separation of communities were by this point understood, building below ground level in New York City represented a major engineering challenge.97 The process “[required] intensive and prolonged blasting, with frightening instability that caused sliding and slipping of the rocks” that could potentially damage water mains, sewage pipes, gas mains, electrical lines, and subway tunnels.98 The physical labor that it took to complete each of the three separate sections of the expressway itself seems an expression of Moses’ obsession with autocratic power. All of this in addition to the already hard task of relocating the thousands of residents that lived in the expressway’s path.

It was Section 2 of the CBE that presented Moses with the most difficulties, as he began to feel pressure from residents whose homes were in danger of being destroyed. After receiving a letter of eviction in December 1952, the neighborhoods of Tremont, East Tremont, and Bronx Park South banded together to oppose the plan and suggest a new route that would be less destructive to residential homes. The response to this revolt laid bare the power imbalances that existed: legislation, money, and modern ideology endangered neighborhood endurance. In response to the backlash, Moses threatened to resign as City Construction Coordinator if the CBE could not move forward “free of borough politics,” and he warned the Bronx Borough President James J. Lyons that other boroughs would instead get the money being funneled into the Bronx if he did not support Moses’ efforts.99 Moses was essentially using the power he had garnered much needed money in front of Lyons to sway him to his 97. Caratzas, 14.

98. Caratzas, 27.

99. Caratzas, 31.

100. Caratzas, 31.

101. David Kelsey, “The Forgotten Heroine,” Forward, August 18, 2006, https://forward.com/culture/1052/the-forgotten-heroine/.

102. Eric Avila, The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 59.

103. “Bronx Residents Lose Road Fight; Expressway Route Affirmed as Estimate Board Votes to Buy Mid-Section Land,” The New York Times, December 3, 1954, https://www.nytimes.com/1954/12/03/archives/bronx-residents-lose-road-fight-expressway-route-affirmed-as.html 104. Caratzas, “Cross-Bronx, Trans-Manhattan,” 33.

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side and deride community backlash. It worked. The next month, Moses had Lyons’ support, and Lillian Edelstein, who was leading the East Tremont residents, accused him of double-crossing them.100 East Tremont, which in the 1950s was a mostly working-class Jewish neighborhood, used specific tactics to fight the CBE that later would be used more strategically in successful revolts. Edelstein, who often worked alone, made three big moves to fight the expressway: she created the East Tremont Neighborhood Association (ETNA), had the Bronx County Chapter of the New York State Society of Professional Engineers study a new route, and in April of 1953, was able to organize buses to bring about three-hundred housewives to City Hall to pack a Board of Estimate hearing concerning the demolition of their homes.101 They brought with them homemade signs that read “Heartbreak Highway” as well as maps of the proposed alternate route.102 While Edelstein was able to delay the land acquisition for the middle section of the expressway for some time, the Board of Estimate ultimately approved the purchase in December 1954, giving this early highway revolt its final blow.103 The failure of the Bronx communities to stop the CBE stands in stark contrast to the successes mentioned earlier. As Caratzas reveals, these earlier battles differed qualitatively from the Bronx revolt because they had money and the city’s elites on their sides.104 Though grounded in the same effort to protect neighborhoods from the destructive force of a highway being jammed through, the Bronx communities lacked the economic, class, and high-profile characteristics that allowed the other battles to more effectively leverage their own power against Moses and the forceful bureaucracy that he had built up. Ultimately, because these communities were marginalized, they lacked broad public sympathy.

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The CBE revolt also failed because of its precarious place in the timeline of highway revolts. It was an early case of working-class people attempting to subvert the power norms of mid-20th century New York government, which was a tall task. In addition, the residents of the Bronx communities did not have “the conceptual tools, the vocabulary… and the flair for publicity and mass mobilization” that could allow them to build broader coalitions and exert more pressure on Moses and the bureaucracy from multiple angles.105 Interestingly, later, more famous highway revolts, such as those in San Francisco against the Embarcadero Freeway,106 would take the lessons learned from the CBE revolt to build these tools into their protest efforts. Finally, the CBE revolt occurred before the long-lasting effects of large, trenched expressways on neighborhoods were completely understood. Later revolts would benefit from more detailed studies that documented these negative effects and the more vehement critiques of expressway plans by professionals in powerful positions.

The southern Bronx neighborhoods that surround the CBE have shown clear evidence of these effects since the mid-20th century. John McNamara grew up in the neighborhood in the 1950s and watched as the construction of the expressway ripped through the borough and displaced more than fifteen hundred families. In 2001, when he was 88 years old, he told the New York Times that the CBE “…was a catastrophe for the people up here.”107 Indeed, the expressway’s construction gouged a trench through the working-class Jewish community, thereby triggering a “rapid decline… [that transformed] a densely populated residential district into a notorious urban wasteland…”108 Fueling this rapid decline in neighborhood character and safety was a sharp decrease in real estate values.

105. Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air, 326.

106. Raymond A. Mohl, “Stop the Road: Freeway Revolts in American Cities,” Journal of Urban History 30, no. 5 (2004): 675.

107. Matt Sedensky, “Neighborhood Report: Bronx Up Close; Decades Later, Doing the Cross Bronx Expressway Right,” The New York Times, October 7, 2001, https://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/07/nyregion/neighborhood-report-bronx-up-close-decades-later-doing-cross-bronx-expressway.html.

108. Evelyn Gonzalez, The Bronx (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 116.

109. Avila, The Folklore of the Freeway, 154.

110. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Modern Library, 1961), 266 111. Themis Chronopoulos, “The Rebuilding of the South Bronx after the Fiscal Crisis,” Journal of Urban History 43, no. 6 (2017): 932-933.

112. Steve Alpert and Lexcie Lu, “The Cross Bronx Expressway” (PDF, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2003), http://www.mit.edu/~uic/igert-cdrom/cross-bronx/xbronx.x005.pdf.

113. James Nevius, “Jane Jacobs, Robert Moses, and the Battle Over LOMEX,” Curbed, May 4, 2016, https://archive.curbed.com/2016/5/4/11505214/jane-jacobs-robert-moses-lomex 114. Nevius, https://archive.curbed.com/2016/5/4/11505214/jane-jacobs-robert-moses-lomex.

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Jane Jacobs highlighted how this could occur through the creation of “border vacuums,” areas that, because they are cut off from the rest of the city, become dead urban space that discourage and impede pedestrian circulation and economic activity.109 Jacobs singled out the Bronx in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, stating that, presumably because of the CBE, local businesses were deprived of pedestrian traffic, thus limiting their revenue, leading to vacancies.110 When businesses fail and leave behind empty spaces that cannot be filled, Jacob’s “eyes on the street” and “sidewalk ballet” philosophies fail to materialize.

This likely led to the spikes in violent crimes that the Bronx would experience in the 1970s.111 In addition to the $101 million the expressway itself cost, a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2003 estimated that the total social cost of deforming neighborhoods was $7.9 million per year.112 In the wake of the revolt against the CBE, later revolts found their footing. This is especially true in the case of the LOMEX revolt led by Jacobs. LOMEX was planned as a ten-lane superhighway that would connect Long Island to New Jersey, in the process cutting up the neighborhoods of Little Italy and SoHo in southern Manhattan.113 LOMEX had, like the CBE, originated in the 1929 Regional Plan; Moses officially proposed it in 1941, but construction lingered.114 Jacobs became the main figurehead of opposition in 1962. Like Lillian Edelstein, the coalition that Jacobs was leading was not made up of wealthy communities, nor did they have the backing of big-name individuals. Both Edelstein and Jacobs were instead at the forefront of working-class communities, and housewives made up a large portion of the opposition. Jacobs differed from Edelstein, however, because she was able to take advantage of LOMEX’s later

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position in the timeline of highway revolts; she could draw on the negative effects that occurred in the Bronx because of the CBE, could work to fill in some of the knowledge gaps the Bronx residents had faced, and could call upon the now broader opposition to highway development. In 1952, prior to the LOMEX battle, Jacobs had gained notoriety when she joined Shirley Hayes’ campaign to save Washington Square Park from a fourlane roadway that would cut through the park. Unlike the residents in the Bronx, Hayes and Jacobs formed two coalitions named specifically in relation to their efforts to fight the roadway, which gained more overall participation: Save the Square and Committee to Save West Village.115 Language become a powerful tool for revolt legitimacy and swaying power.

Jacobs took the lessons she learned in the West Village and from the CBE with her to the LOMEX battle.

She quickly pulled together a Joint Committee to Stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway when quiet construction began in 1962. In addition, the LOMEX battle came just one year after Jacobs published Death and Life. Jacobs says that “Massive single uses in cities… form borders, and borders usually make destructive neighbors.”116 This, she notes, includes expressways, and the CBE, as mentioned earlier, was one of the main images she had in mind. Indeed, at the same time, others around the country had echoed Jacobs critiques of building for cars. U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who would later write the Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture, published an influential article in The Reporter in which he “criticized urban interstates for their lack of comprehensive planning and potentially damaging impact on urban life and metropolitan structure.”117 The CBE’s characterization as a cement barrier and concrete river was the epitome of this damage. This knowledge helped fuel Jacobs’ revolt and the ones that would follow throughout the 1960s and 1970s. One last new method that Jacobs employed was historic preservation.

115. Nevius, https://archive.curbed.com/2016/5/4/11505214/jane-jacobs-robert-moses-lomex.

116. Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 336.

117. Rose and Mohl, Interstate: Highway Politics and Policy since 1939, 114.

118. Nevius, “Jane Jacobs, Robert Moses, and the Battle Over LOMEX,” https://archive.curbed. com/2016/5/4/11505214/jane-jacobs-robert-moses-lomex.

119. Michael Caratzas, “Cross-Bronx: The Urban Expressway as Cultural Landscape,” in Cultural Landscapes: Balancing Nature and Heritage in Preservation Practice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 64-69.

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She called upon the stature of the Haughwout Building, a cast-iron marvel that was home to the nation’s first commercial elevator, in addition to cultural buildings in Little Italy.118 While whether or not any of the Bronx communities contained historic buildings worthy of preservation or might one day have become historic districts thanks to a vibrancy of culture is beyond the scope of this essay, it is noteworthy that the CBE revolt was never framed in this way. This was, again, a product of the revolt’s lack of conceptual tools that could have helped Edelstein and others get the path of the expressway moved. Jacobs learned from this missing piece of firepower and used it to her advantage.

The Cross Bronx Expressway is the archetypal cautionary tale of the devastation a powerful, topdown bureaucracy can cause to disenfranchised neighborhoods. Yet coalitions that lost their battles must be remembered and critically examined in addition to those that succeeded. If not for Edelstein’s efforts in the Bronx, Jacobs herself might not have been as successful. If we can give these lesser-known stories the same kinds of investigation we give those that already figure prominently, we may be able to reexamine how to honor their contributions today. This is already happening with Lilian Edelstein and the CBE. Some authors have expressed interest in reinterpreting the CBE as a cultural landscape. They suggest that it would be beneficial for the Bronx if a marker could be erected to commemorate East Tremont’s battle, specifically Edelstein’s efforts.119 How, though, could the representation of a Jewish-led highway revolt aid the present communities of color? Communal memory is an important way to deal with injustices communities have faced; an acknowledgment of past failures can pave the way for new, positive interventions for current residents.

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For example, the State Department of Transportation has completed a study into ways to undo some of the CBE’s damage.120 Small proposals include adding pathways for pedestrian and bicyclists. The boldest proposition aims to cap the expressway with parkland.121 Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health completed a study in 2017 which showed that by capping just 2.4-miles of the 6-mile length of the CBE, nearly 230,000 Bronx residents would have two months added to their life expectancy.122 These changes are not unprecedented. In Dallas Texas, the trenched Woodall Rogers Freeway was capped in 2012, creating the popular 5.2-acre Klyde Warren Park on top of it.123 In 1990, 74-year-old Geraldine Jones saw changes coming to East Tremont, with new, affordable housing bringing the neighborhood back from the brink of extinction it faced in the 1970s. Maria Olan, a young, homeless mother, was able to provide for her daughter by getting help from a local non-profit to move into one of these apartments.124 For these women, East Tremont’s leader, Edelstein, could offer them a stronger sense of place through her commemoration. For them and so many other current residents, the interventions highlighted here offer hope of transforming the Cross Bronx Expressway from a “concrete barrier” into a verdant, cultural landscape that connects the borough instead of dividing it.

120. Matt Sedensky, “Neighborhood Report: Bronx Up Close; Decades Later, Doing the Cross Bronx Expressway Right,” The New York Times, October 7, 2001, https://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/07/nyregion/neighborhood-report-bronx-up-close-decades-later-doing-cross-bronx-expressway.html.

121. “It’s Time to Cap the Cross Bronx & Create More Parks & Housing,” Welcom2TheBronx, January 30, 2020, https://www.welcome2thebronx.com/2020/01/30/its-time-to-cap-the-cross-bronx-createmore-parks-housing/.

122. Sooyoung Kim et. al., “Cost-Effectiveness of Capping Freeways for Usse as Parks: The New York Cross-Bronx Expressway Case Study,” American Journal of Public Health 108, no. 3 (2018): 382-383.

123. “About the Park,” Klyde Warren Park, accessed March 8, 2021, https://www.klydewarrenpark. org/about-the-park/index.html.

124. Sara Rimer, “An Old Area Surges With New Urgency,” The New York Times, August 7, 1990, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1990/08/07/141990.html?pageNumber=21.

Bibliography “About the Park.” Klyde Warren Park. Accessed March 8, 2021. https://www. klydewarrenpark.org/about-the-park/index.html.

Alpert Steve and Lexcie Lu. “The Cross Bronx Expressway.” PDF, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2003. http://www.mit.edu/~uic/ igert-cdrom/cross-bronx/xbronx.x005.pdf.

“Architects Wary on Battery Span; Institute Warns Against Haste, Fearing Marring of Famous View.” The New York Times. March 18, 1939. https://www.nytimes.com/1939/03/18/archives/architects-wary-onbattery-span-institute-warns-against-haste.html.

“Army Bars Plans for Battery Span; Revision is Ready; Finds Present Proposal for Bridge to Brooklyn would Bring Navigation Perils but way is Left Open; Mayor and Moses are Confident Modified Program will Meet Objections.” The New York Times. May 19, 1939. https://www. nytimes.com/1939/05/19/archives/army-bars-plans-for-battery-spanrevision-is-ready-finds-present.html.

Avila, Eric. The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

Berman, Marshall. All that is Solid Melts into Air. New York: Penguin, 1982.

“Bronx Residents Lose Road Fight; Expressway Route Affirmed as Estimate Board Votes to Buy Mid-Section Land.” The New York Times. December 3, 1954. https://www.nytimes.com/1954/12/03/archives/bronx-residentslose-road-fight-expressway-route-affirmed-as.html.

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Caratzas, Michael. “Cross-Bronx: The Urban Expressway as Cultural Landscape.” In Cultural Landscapes: Balancing Nature and Heritage in Preservation Practice, edited by Richard Longstreth, 55-72.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

Caratzas, Michael. “Cross-Bronx, Trans-Manhattan: Preserving a Significant Urban Expressway and its Megastructure.” Master’s thesis, Columbia University, 2002.

Caro, Robert A. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.

New York: Vintage Books, 1975.

Chronopoulos, Themis. “The Rebuilding of the South Bronx after the Fiscal Crisis.” Journal of Urban History 43, no. 6 (2017): 932-959.

Department of Transportation. “State Motor Vehicle Registrations,

By Years, 1900 – 1995.” PDF, April 1997, https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ ohim/ summary95/mv200.pdf.

Gonzalez, Evelyn. The Bronx. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.

Hayek, F.A. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944.

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“Castle Clinton.” National Park Service. U.S. Department of the Interior.

Accessed February 28, 2021. https://www.nps.gov/cacl/index.htm.

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“It’s Time to Cap the Cross Bronx & Create More Parks & Housing.”

Welcom2TheBronx. January 30, 2020. https://www.welcome2thebronx. com/2020/01/30/its-time-to-cap-the-cross-bronx-create-more-parkshousing/.

Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Modern Library, 1961.

Kelsey, David. “The Forgotten Heroine.” Forward. August 18, 2006. https:// forward.com/culture/1052/the-forgotten-heroine/.

Mohl, Raymond A. “Stop the Road: Freeway Revolts in American Cities.”

Journal of Urban History 30, no. 5 (2004): 674-706.

Nevius, James. “Jane Jacobs, Robert Moses, and the Battle Over LOMEX.” Curbed. May 4, 2016. https://archive.curbed.com/2016/5/4/11505214/ jane-jacobs-robert-moses-lomex.

Rose, Mark H. and Raymond A. Mohl. Interstate: Highway Politics and Policy since 1939. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2012.

“Route Change Ends L.I. Parkway Fight.” The New York Times (New York, NY), December 20, 1929.

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Sedensky, Matt. “Neighborhood Report: Bronx Up Close; Decades Later, Doing the Cross Bronx Expressway Right.” The New York Times. October 7, 2001. https://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/07/nyregion/neighborhoodreport-bronx-up-close-decades-later-doing-cross-bronx-expressway. html.

Stern, Robert A.M., Gregory Gilmartin, and Thomas Mellins. New York 1930: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Two World Wars. New York: Rizzoli, 1987.

A DISTORTED WALK

Scarlett Mason Collage 2022

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LINES

Borders have created distinct national identities that are both beneficial to unity, and divisive as they rampage their way across the world and inspire the rise of a new right wing. We think in terms of borders, as if giving or taking one mile can change character or identity. Ultimately, they are often meaningless, and many boundaries are indistinguishable. With this photography series, I hope to ease these divides by showing that geography cares little for the designs of mankind.

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Visually, I show the alienation caused by these lines and urge the viewer to consider humanity as one entity rather than one fractured into a million pieces. I have used close up satellite photography of border-points unmarked by any noticeable features, some of which are well established and accepted, while others are the sites of contentious debates and conflict. These photographs were then printed at a large size.

Using multiple volunteers in the creation of each photo, I invited them to pull at different sides of the print until the they would tear entirely arbitrarily, then scanned the results. This process of pressure and random determination of reality is done to echo the formation of these borders.

Increasingly, we think from a factional mentality even in Canada, a society that, like many others, is supposedly built on a foregoing of differences. The rise of antisemitism has caused me to feel more and more boxed into one identity, and increasingly skeptical of the forces that attempt to define me. With this I dig to the roots of this internal division by examining external ones.

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Ben Elhav Collage 2017

TWENTYSIX GAS STATIONS IS NOT AN ART BOOK

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Bejnarowicz

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Ed Rucha is an artist associated with the Contemporary and Pop Art scenes of the 1960s. Based in LA, he took (and continues to take, as he’s still creating artwork) inspiration from everyday living within the city. This essay will conduct a visual analysis of Ed Ruscha’s Twentysix Gas Stations, 1963, specifically STANDARD, WILLIAMS, ARIZONA and its counterpart to the spread, MOBIL, WILLIAMS, ARIZONA, and focus on how he deconstructs what is and isn’t art by photographing specifically banal subject matter.

Twenty-six67 Gas Stations is a small book comprised of 26 black and white photographs of gas stations. These gas stations mark Ruscha’s welltraveled path between Los Angeles to Oklahoma City, his childhood home. The book measures 17.9 x 14 x .5 cm when closed and is 48 pages in total. The title appears on the cover and down the spine in a redorange widely-spaced font called Stymie Bold68 against a white background. Ed Ruscha’s name does not appear on the outside of the book. Inside, there is a title page, a page with copyright information, and a dedication to Patty Callahan. There is little ready information about Patty Callahan’s connection to Ed Ruscha, save for the two being pictured together at the opening reception to the Duchamp Retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum in 196369 and Callahan being credited as the photographer for a photo of Ruscha in front of an old billboard reading “Welcome 24 HR.”70 Ruscha plays around with image as well as caption placement. Throughout the book, there are three singular images which span 67. “Edward Ruscha ‘Twentysix Gasoline Stations’ 1963.” Tate. Accessed January 31, 2022. https://www.tate.org.uk/about-us/projects/transforming-artist-books/summaries/edward-ruscha-twentysix-gasoline-stations-1963.

68. Koivu, Anniina. “Ed Ruscha on Paper.” Kvadrat Interwoven. Accessed January 31, 2022. http:// kvadratinterwoven.com/ed-ruscha-on-paper#:~:text=The%20typographic%20cover%20of%20his,Thirtyfour%20Parking%20Lots%20(1967).

69. Wasser, Julian. “Julian Wasser: Ed Ruscha and Patty Callahan at the Opening Reception, Duchamp Retrospective, Pasadena Art Museum (1963): Available for Sale.” Artsy. Accessed January 31, 2022. https://www.artsy.net/artwork/julian-wasser-ed-ruscha-and-patty-callahan-at-the-opening-reception-duchamp-retrospective-pasadena-art-museum.

70. Calderón, Trina. “Ed Ruscha.” HUMANITY Magazine, April 9, 2018. https://mag.citizensofhumanity.com/blog/2015/12/10/ed-ruscha/.

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across both pages, three times where there is an image on both the left and right pages of a spread, and one occasion where there are two images within a singular page. While most of the photos were taken during daylight hours, night scenes are incorporated three times. vMOBIL, WILLIAMS, ARIZONA and STANDARD, WILLIAMS, ARIZONA are the seventh and eighth images to appear in Twentysix Gas Stations. They are one of the three times photos appear on the left and right pages of a spread.

This essay will discuss both as a spread, but will first provide a detailed visual description of STANDARD, WILLIAMS, ARIZONA. STANDARD, WILLIAMS, ARIZONA can be split visually into thirds. The top and bottom thirds are reserved for the monotonous light gray of the sky and pavement. On the ground, there are several cracks in the pavement that lead the eye back in towards the gas station. The gas station itself is a small, long, white building that sits across the middle of the page. As the eye travels from left to right across the gas station’s white canopy to the small cube of a building, also white, with large windows covering the two sides that are visible to the viewer. “STANDARD” is written out across the side of the canopy in simple, capitalized white lettering against a black rectangle backing. Under the canopy, there appears to be two sets of gas pumps in shadow. Through the open space below the canopy and beyond the gas station, several simple white buildings can be seen. The side of one of these buildings, possibly a house, is mostly unobstructed. It displays a dark roof, windows, and shrubbery. The other buildings are less visible, but provide situational context, giving the impression of a small town. To the left, at the highest point of interest within the image, is a “CHEVRON” sign. The high contrast of this sign stands out against the midtone of the sky. Below it to the right, but attached to the same signpost, is a sign advertising “HERTZ RENT A CAR.” The text here is dark and barely legible. To the far right of the image, parked in front of the gas station’s wide windows, is a gray car- possibly a 1960s Chevy.

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The car’s backside is cut off as it reaches the image’s border. Above the car but behind the gas station is a tree with a dark silhouette. In the far distance, a dark hill covered in trees slopes down from the righthand side, disappearing behind the station’s canopy.

There are no people to be seen.

Initially, Ruscha printed 400 copies of Twentysix Gas Stations and numbered each of them, later he realized that made his books a limited-edition item so in his next two rounds of printing, he left them unnumbered- assuring that each book was as plain and unremarkable as the next. In an interview, he states, “‘I am not trying to create a precious limited edition book, but a mass-produced product of the highest order. . . . It is almost worth the money to have the thrill of seeing 400 exactly identical books stacked in front of you.’”71 The stack of books, not the contents itself became the art for him. This way of thinking ties Ruscha’s work to Conceptual Art and the prioritization of ideas over objects. Twentysix Gas Stations has no value as a singular book. It was cheaply made, massproduced, and its contents were of that which no one cherished. His subject matter was banal. In fact, every banal aspect of Twentysix Gas Stations was an integral part to the experience Ruscha was aiming to create.

It was for this reason he was so specific about how the book was laid out. Each photograph and its caption could be considered a puzzle piece, and the picture that this puzzle formed is an interactive experience.

In Ed Ruscha, Pop Art, and Spectatorship in 1960s Los Angeles, Ken D. Allan describes these photos as, “Not simply documentary images, they explicitly demonstrate the physical interface between the user’s body and Ruscha’s small-scale, pocket-size books [...] The book, itself, has a diverse ability to give you photographs, and also give you the act of editing them in your own mind as you move through the pages.’”72 Ruscha knew, even when he was first taking the photos, that they would be used in a tiny handheld book.

71. Allan, Ken D. “Ed Ruscha, Pop Art, and Spectatorship in 1960s Los Angeles.” The Art Bulletin 92, no. 3 (2010): 231. http://www.jstor.org/stable/29546123.

72. Allan, Ken D. “Ed Ruscha, Pop Art, and Spectatorship in 1960s Los Angeles.” 242.

73. Allan, Ken D. “Ed Ruscha, Pop Art, and Spectatorship in 1960s Los Angeles.” 244.

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Each photo was deliberately chosen to be on the page.

When arranging them, Ruscha had to consider how the viewer’s hands would fall on the book- what aspects would be covered up by fingers, what would be revealed as a page is turned. Ruscha gave the power of creation to whoever picked up his book, the viewer has complete control over their viewing experience down to the order they turn the pages.

In an analysis of Some Los Angeles Apartments, a similarly-styled book by Ruscha published in 1965, Allan discusses the importance of the spreads which feature two photographs. Allan states, “In a neatly symmetrical arrangement of facing pages, the two wide, horizontal images are placed close to the gutter (the inside margin of each page adjacent to the binding) so that the sides of the buildings recede from the point of view of the photograph and disappear into the book.”73 This line of thought can be translated to Twentysix Gas Stations. In the layout featuring MOBIL, WILLIAMS, ARIZONA and STANDARD, WILLIAMS, ARIZONA the two photographs almost merge into one. As the physical borders disappear into the gutter, so does the symbolic border between time and space. The gray sky and pavement from each photo blend seamlessly into each other, the pavement even lines up at one point to create a near-perfectly aligned right angle. The path that the eye traces as it looks over the pronounced hills in the background of MOBIL, WILLIAMS, ARIZONA continues and trails over the relaxed hill of STANDARD, WILLIAMS, ARIZONA as it carries the line off of the page. The dark trees on the outside edge of both photos almost frame the “new image” when viewed as a whole.

If one were to look at these pages with squinted eyes, it’d be difficult to see them as separate entities.

Through this, Ruscha combines two different places and moments in time into a space which is larger but ultimately unchanged. No matter how it exists, the scene is still of an unremarkable gas station in the middle of nowhere.

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In his essay “Something Else” Kevin Hatch discusses, “the psychological distance between snapshot and time exposure. Each station appears as a discontinuous time exposure, empty of human actors and exhibiting a meditative, even morbid, stillness. Yet the banal subject of the shots is the very thing most likely to fall out of memory.”74 A photograph captures a moment in time but, as Hutch describes, that moment has lost context within Twentysix Gas Stations. There are no people, the landscape is not beautiful, and the overall quality is low. Without these points of connection, the viewer is forced to rely on memory to form a personal connection. To strengthen this replication of memory, the photos presented are all shot from eye level, enforcing the idea that the viewer is there.75 The camera technically captured a specific moment, but the photograph has lost context- becoming a placeholder for what the viewer wishes to project onto it.

Ruscha’s work confused and upset a lot of people who felt entitled to something else. Due to the interactive nature of Twentysix Gas Stations, it was bound to be disliked by those who either misunderstood or rebuked it as art.76 Despite the varying feelings towards the book, everyone who encountered Twentysix Gas Stations experienced a strong reaction. This pushand-pull reaction caught the eye of, “critic and then Artforum editor Phillip Leider, who compared them in a 1963 review to Marcel Duchamp’s readymades.Leider argued that the appearance of Ruscha’s Twenty six Gasoline Stations may be annoying or irritating in its rejection of the traditions of art photography and artists’ books, but the reader still feels ‘compelled to resolve the questions it raises.’”77 Twentysix Gas Stations is confusing, thought-provoking, and lowbudget. It presents itself as a traditional “art book” (commonly understood as a book that contains and displays art) rather than an art book in the sense 74. Hatch, Kevin. “‘Something Else’: Ed Ruscha’s Photographic Books.” October 111 (2005): 107– 26. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3397675.

75. Whiting, Cécile. “The Sublime and the Banal in Postwar Photography of the American West.”

American Art 27, no. 2 (2013): 44–67. https://doi.org/10.1086/673109.

76. Allan, Ken D. “Ed Ruscha, Pop Art, and Spectatorship in 1960s Los Angeles.” 231-249 77. Allan, Ken D. “Ed Ruscha, Pop Art, and Spectatorship in 1960s Los Angeles.” 242-243.

that it itself as a conceptual object is art. Whether or not the viewer is enjoying the process, in picking up the book they are becoming part of Twentysix Gas Stations.

Ed Ruscha’s deconstruction of what is or isn’t and through his photographing of banal subject matter opened up discussion within the Contemporary Art scene of the early 1960s. His little book about a generally disliked liminal space was something that anyone could make, people were upset by the thought that art could be so “easy.” This “art can be easy” (meaning low-budget, low skill, and accessible) and subversive mindset bled into subsequent art movements such as Punk and No Wave.

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Bibliography

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Allan, Ken D. “Ed Ruscha, Pop Art, and Spectatorship in 1960s Los Angeles.” The Art Bulletin 92, no. 3 (2010): 231–49. http://www.jstor. org/stable/29546123.

Calderón, Trina. “Ed Ruscha.” HUMANITY Magazine, April 9, 2018. https://mag. citizensofhumanity.com/blog/2015/12/10/ed-ruscha/.

“Edward Ruscha ‘Twentysix Gasoline Stations’ 1963.” Tate. Accessed January 31, 2022. https://www.tate.org.uk/about-us/projects/transformingartist-books/summaries/edward-ruscha-twentysix-gasoline- stations-1963.

Hatch, Kevin. “‘Something Else’: Ed Ruscha’s Photographic Books.” October 111 (2005): 107–26. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3397675.

Koivu, Anniina. “Ed Ruscha on Paper.” Kvadrat Interwoven. Accessed January 31, 2022. http://kvadratinterwoven.com/ed-ruscha-onpaper#:~:text=The%20typographic%20cover%20of%20his,Thirtyfour%20 Parking%20Lots%20(1967).

Wasser, Julian. “Julian Wasser: Ed Ruscha and Patty Callahan at the Opening Reception, Duchamp Retrospective, Pasadena Art Museum (1963): Available for Sale.” Artsy. Accessed January 31, 2022. https://www.artsy.net/artwork/julian-wasser-ed-ruscha-and-pattycallahan-at-the-opening-reception-duchamp-retrospective-pasadenaart-museum.

Whiting, Cécile. “The Sublime and the Banal in Postwar Photography of the American West.” American Art 27, no. 2 (2013): 44–67. https:// doi.org/10.1086/673109.

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SELF DISSOLUTION SERIES

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Zach Jett Photography 2020

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Zach Jett Photography 2020

ON LOVERS AND MOTHERS EL FUCKING BETRAYAL: CHAPTER DOS

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Natalia Fuentes

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I still find it difficult to fathom that Mami’s diagnosis was the result of a series of casualties and coincidences that, in hindsight, I’m tempted to label as the games of destiny itself. It was a golden Sunday afternoon when my parents, my siblings, and I traveled back to Bogotá after a boring weekend in Cachipay, that ghastly town that was once picturesque, and that Mami called home in her childhood.

From an early age, I realized that I experience validation from strangers at a religious level.

Growing up in Colombia meant my field trips were weeklong excursions into mystical deserts and slippery jungles instead of the average visit to the local museum or zoo. Once a schoolyear, I slept in flearidden beds and squatted over smelly latrines without uttering a single word of discontent, all because I was surrounded by the judgmental glare of distant classmates whose names I now forget. I desperately care about what people think of me, but that group rarely contains anyone I care for in return.

It was in one of these school outings that I met El Primero. As the sole heir of one of Colombia’s richest families, my first serious boyfriend always made sure to wear at least one piece of imported clothing.

He had an adventurous spirit, he wasn’t feigning for attention like I was, but even in the hottest, most humid of weathers, El Primero always managed to keep the amber curls atop his head neatly combed and perfumed. I once asked if his PJs were also bought at Prada. He responded with an ironic cackle.

“Duermo desnudo. ¿No es obvio?”

He slept naked. Duh. Supposedly to keep his skin young. Though in my eyes it always seemed like that baby-powdered, Armani-smelling, milky flesh of his needed a scar or a scab or a bead of sweat or

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something to prove he also existed in the physical realm.

And yet, there was something tender about El Primero. Something that intoxicated me, something worth heartbreak, and betrayal, and pain. It is hard to point out what. Maybe it was the rush of watching old money flow through his silky pockets like sand.

Maybe it was his willingness to accept me, the smartmouthed daughter of two middle-class doctors, into his extravagant world. Or maybe it was something invisible.

Something neither of us understood. The promise of mutual discovery, of sex, of intimacy. The adult idea of sharing something sacred at an age when we still had curfews, and pimples, and homework.

I met El Primero at one of those school outings and seduced him with my ability to hide discomfort, but my family is forced to tolerate the real me: the capricious Juliana who will make a scandal at the first inconvenience. Middle children are usually described as independent and ambitious creatures whose childhoods are sprinkled with neglect. But I’m the only girl my parents had, which means I hover between states of prideful autonomy and shameless neediness. I’m the spoiled mujercita, la niña de la casa, and there’s nothing a bratty teen loathes more than spending sweaty weekends in archaic family homes.

The house in Cachipay was built in the forties and has been crumbling ever since. After winning the land in a cockfight at one of his patient’s backyards, my grandfather took concrete and tile into his own bony hands to erect a white mansion to overlook the impoverished hellhole that birthed him. What my grandfather cannot seem to understand - even nowadays when his eyes, ears, and joints are turning against him - is he cannot do everything on his own. This is painfully evidenced by the crooked walls and leaking roofs of his ambitious creation. Mami loved it. As the only daughter of the only physician in town, she was raised in privileged poverty – a little better off than her peers, yet poor enough to desire something better.

I’ve always regarded her youth with a mix of pity and

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fascination. No matter how bad it got for Mami, she always managed to maintain a hopeful smile. She was infinitely kind to her complicated family, and even after my father introduced her to the addictive sophistication of success – the yearly medical conferences in Europe, the nights out drinking wine – Mami always returned to her humble beginnings with a heart full of gratitude.

I, on the other hand, spent the weekend in Cachipay scowling at my phone. El Primero was spending the weekend in one of his five beach houses and I missed him like an army wife in the forties. It was hot. Moisture hung in the air like a bad joke. I had no signal, no patience, and no intention to spend the scorching hours with my family, whose laughter I could hear in the living room as my grandparents told dirty jokes. After spending all Friday and Saturday fighting with my phone so it would let me talk to my boyfriend, the news that we were driving back to Bogotá earlier than expected came like a gift from heaven.

I slid off my chanclas and into my new Converse, making sure the whole time my bare feet didn’t touch the dreaded dusty floors, before tossing my backpack into the back of Papi’s Mazda. I threw the trunk shut, my eyes still stuck to my phone, and got in the car while my grandparents kissed my family goodbye. I didn’t even wave from the backseat as Papi sped into the highway. Colombian roads are serpentine labyrinths of deadly cliffs and curves that lure their victims with beautiful landscapes and robust greenery. Each mile is a dizzying zigzag of ups and downs with dozens of wooden crosses that bloom from the earth to honor those lost in their travels. It was in one of these hellish curves that Mami’s life was changed forever.

She sat next to Papi, as always, his hand sitting atop hers as she helped him drive stick. I always enjoyed witnessing the rituals they shared as a couple. Mami hated peas, so my father always made sure to pick them out of her rice before serving it. She reciprocated by dying his grey hairs every month, something she confessed to me after I asked why Papi never seemed

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to age. Don Martínez, like me, is ashamed of being a little vain. Ever since Mami’s death though, he has let his head turn white in what I suspect is a subconscious announcement of defeat.

Bats cried in the golden gleam of the afternoon as Papi expertly swung the car’s wheel left and right. My big brother, Toto, who inherited my mom’s blind adoration for the countryside, watched blurred trees pass by as his golden locks rippled in the wind. Mateo, the youngest, slept on my lap, his heavy headphones blaring sad music. It was beautiful. So much so, that I began to forget my anger and disgust for the wasted weekend.

Mami’s forgiving eyes and glowing skin completed this transformation as she turned to me and asked: “¿Te gusta Cachipay?”

“Si,” I responded, confident. I did like Cachipay.

Not a lie, simply a new truth. And as Mami and I smiled at each other with deep compassion and mutual understanding, Don Martinez made a left turn so sharp that the trunk burst open and all our bags were lost to the closest precipice.

Papi has a generational tendency to paranoia, especially when it comes to Mami’s safety. Ve con tu mamá, his iconic phrase. Go with your mother. Where? It doesn’t matter. It could’ve been a public restroom, the supermarket, the front door whenever the bell rang.

To protect her from what? Other men, perhaps. A piano falling from the skies… I don’t know. Death. While the fifties raised Colombian men to be domestically inept, the eighties turned them into frightened beings who see Reapers in every corner.

“Ve con tu mamá,” he barked at my older brother, though Mami had hopped out of the car already and was trying to save whatever she could. I never got a Ve con tu mamá. It was an honor reserved to men. And even though it was my fault she was out there, even though I should’ve checked the trunk was properly closed after stuffing it with my bag, Toto slid off his seat obediently and performed his duties as Mami’s faithful guard.

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The rest happened in a matter of seconds: Mami collected all she could find, Toto reached above his curly head to grab the trunk’s door, he got distracted by the corpse of a baby bird who he supposed was pushed from its nest by its mother, he wondered what parent would have the nerve to kill its own offspring, and just as Mami was putting my bag back in the trunk, Toto hurled the door shut and nearly guillotined her right index finger.

Mami didn’t scream, she merely gasped. More from surprise than pain, but I heard her. Toto lost his voice from apologizing. It’s almost as if he knew what was going to happen next. As if he knew that Mami would go to the hospital that same afternoon in Bogotá to get her finger checked. As if he knew that, once there, she would agree to get more than one X-ray, por si las moscas, just in case, because she hadn’t gotten a full-body check-up in a year. As if he knew her finger was just fine, intact, but instead, a little dot, a coin-sized splotch of mutated, carcinogenic cells sneakily awaited to be found in her right lung as she stepped under the X-ray machine and had her thorax photographed.

First love rams into you like a speeding car and all you’re left with are broken limbs, bleeding wounds, and an oozing desire to have it happen all over again. The realization that a parent is mortal is similar. Nothing tells you to expect it. The possibility that my feverish longing for El Primero led in one way or another to Mami’s diagnosis haunts me to this day as if her illness and my hectic love life were bound by invisible links that shivered with every cough, every lying boyfriend, every prescription, and every broken heart. I’ve always had a hard time distinguishing between lovers and mothers, separating my discovery of one from the pain of the other.

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Isaiah Zacharia Digital Collage 2022

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“Existing sometimes a gut feeling in your stomach, Weight of the crumbling twisted world, Too much sadness but just being, Striving for his peace, his beauty design, Love in the breeze, in each one of us staring back-“

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Evy Hondros Acrylic Paint on Canvas 2021

LANDSCAPE AND POLITICAL IDENTITY Cristina Mayor

13. Tom L. Martinson, Interrelationships Between Landscape Art and Geography in Latin America, 347.

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The 20th century can be organized through the lens of violent conflict, so much so it has shaped the perspective of many national identities today. Mexico and Cuba had both endured radical political shifts within the 20th century that have now become applicable to the respective identities of their people. This shift of ideology deeply rooted in the modernization of Cuba and Mexico can be explored in the conquest and personification of their landscape. The landscape of a nation allows for inspiration to stem from their natural environment, encapsulating the reality of conflict. Discussing works from Johann Mortiz Rugendas, Mexican artist Diego Rivera, and Cuban artist Ana Mendieta. The personification of landscape, as well as the decisive manipulation in scenery, expresses the importance in the social, political, and national symbolism. Methods of symbolism and iconography allow artists to gain perspective and inspiration in times of great change.

Landscapes have served many purposes, in regards to their function within a nation. The late 19th century set a new sense of change that would ultimately influence the mindset and outlook of thinkers in the 20th century. Tom L. Martinson, associate of Ball State University, discusses the “artistic feeling in geography,” and takes note of how the Latin American landscape and depictions of such natural wonders had shaped the identity and outward perspective of Latin America.13 Martinson discusses how the use of landscapes was crucial in 19th century charting of the Latin continent, where artists like Johann Mortiz Ruguendas were implemented. Ruguendas was a native of Bavaria, trained in Europe, and at the age of nineteen was intrigued to work across the globe medicating his life to becoming a draftsman of the Latin American

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landscape, drafting details of the land from Mexico to Chile.14 Through Ruguendas experience and talent, many geographers were able to capture both a pictorial and emotional understanding of Latin America.

Ruguendas had produced thousands of sketches and works during his time in Latin America. In understanding the perspectives of 19th century explorers is to emphasize the potential and physical spirit associated with Latin America. As Martinson states in his article, “ This spirit is reflected in Rugenas’ art, which is, above all, literal, dramatic, and optimistic, portraying a new vigor of Latin America stimulated by the vision of a potentially brilliant future.”15 As seen in Nevado de Colina Seen from the Zapotlán Hill (Fig. 1) by Ruguendas depicts the idealized future and fantastical elements of the Latin American image.

The composition depends on a symmetrical balance that appeases the eye, which reads as a possible message on the overall landscape being filled with incredible feats. The people depicted in this piece have barely any detail, diminishing their impact.

Ruguenda deliberately draws the viewer’s attention to the grandeur shown in the background. The scenery showcases two volcanic peaks that seem to be a plateau of divinity. The clouds surrounding the peaks seem whimsical, an idealistic image of a natural reaction.

As well as, the choice of color palette the using pastel, feminine hues of pink and peach drawing one’s gaze to the halo highlighting the horizon line.This aspect of interpreting the landscape helps to frame future visionaries and functions as the base in which to build popular ideology that many can identify with. Knowing the initial history and conquest of the land lies a promising ideology established in the environment around them.

In the early twentieth century the Mexican Revolution had ushered in an age of reinvention, as the 14. Tom L. Martinson, Interrelationships Between Landscape Art and Geography in Latin America, 350.

15. Tom L. Martinson, Interrelationships Between Landscape Art and Geography in Latin America, 354.

16. Buchenau, Jürgen. The Mexican Revolution, 1910–1946,” n.p.

17. Juan B. Rojo. The Meaning of the Mexican Revolution, 28.

18. Buchenau, Jürgen. The Mexican Revolution, 1910–1946,” n.p.

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revolution brought about the search for a new national identity. The Revolution lasted from 1910-1917 and saw not much resolve, or at least in parts that would truly remain uncorrupted. The Mexican Revolution saw the end of Spanish dictatorship in Mexico and the establishment of a constitutional republic.16 Though the constitution was drafted at the end of the Revolution in 1917, it saw a lack of solid mandate as time would pass.

Juan B. Rojo was the Counsellor of the State Department of Mexico in 1917. Rojo wrote an essay, The Meaning of the Mexican Revolution, where he describes Mexico as its potential functions politically and physically,” Mexico is a great field for endeavors and capital, and fortunes have been made overnight.

Therin lay the red flag of danger.”17 Rojo’s statement acknowledges the Industrial boom occurring in all of the Americas as Rojo also summarizes the division of Mexican lands that were made without the benefit of the people prior to the Revolution. As outlined in the Oxford Research Article The Mexican Revolution, 1910-1946, “Article 27 proclaims land and the subsoil the patrimony of the nation, for use by foreigners only upon application…,” applying such policy over the land dedicates the natural potential and inspiration associated to the landscape with the people of Mexico.18 Due to the surmounting losses of the Revolution, Industrial boom, and overall promising vision provided by the landscape, many artistic visionaries saw the tools and potential to mold a new national image.

Arguably one of the most renown Mexican artists, Diego Rivera, felt a deep obligation to advocate for the appreciation of Mexican history, his heritage, and the future of Mexico. Rivera was part of the Mexican Muralists Movement where the institutionalized facets of art were questioned and public spaces became the artists center stage, intended to allow unbarred access to anyone ( no matter their status or identity) to

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experience the ideas these artists sought for in their country. Diego Rivera was a known Communist and saw the future of Mexico in the working people, developing the country under the will of everyday citizens. Rivera would capture the fascination and imagination of many people across America working with the Rockefeller’s, Museum of Modern Art in New York, multiple Universities and a collection of notable institutions.

Even with his fame, Rivera had always stuck to his passions and reflected his views and ideology in his work. As Rivera remarks in his essay The Revolutionary Spirit in Modern Art, “…The man who is truly a thinker, or the painter who is truly an artist, cannot, at a given historical moment, take any but a position in accordance with the revolutionary development of his own time,” this quote aligns with the inescapable involvement of creative thinkers and artisans to react as the world around them is the bases of their work.19 Rivera continues in The Revolutionary Spirit in Modern Art to speak on the importance the proletariat have on the functions of art and beauty in regards to inspirations of the Russian Revolution and political functions of art in general. In Rivera’s mural “The Liberated Earth with Natural Force Controlled by Man” (Fig.2) a tether between the proletariat of Mexico and landscape is depicted as a relationship that draws strength, power, and notability to the future of Mexico.

“The Liberated Earth with Natural Forces Controlled by Man” (Fig.2) was commissioned for the Mexican School of Agriculture where they had converted a church as a place of inspiration for the students of the school. The image in Fig. 2 includes sections of the nave and altar, though the altar will be the focus of our discussion. Within the altar a large, nude woman is seen as a main focal point in the composition, taking up a large aspect of the space. She appears to be resting within the ground, deliberately filling a void. The position of the woman, including her raised arm, is meant to mimic the literal shape of Mexico.

19. Diego Rivera. The Revolutionary Spirit in Modern Art, 422.

20. J. Halcro Ferguson. The Cuban Revolution and Latin America, 288.

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The woman is personifying the potential and new beginning of Mexico as seen through the lens of revolutionaries, she is “The Liberated Earth.”

As her protruded belly suggests, she is pregnant.

Her pregnancy, along with the sprout held in her outreached hand, suggests the bountiful nature in the rebirth of a nation. At the bottom of the altar a man and his family is depicted in the nude looking upon the elements of an agricultural landscape. Within the landscape Riviera included other personified figures of the land that were inspired by Mexican mythology.

There is a deliberate contrast between the volcano god and water deity, showing tension between the feminine and masculine components needed to insight change. The volcano god is handing the man a rod of fire symbolizing enlightenment and a new age; in correlation, the son is seen playing with wire and producing sparks which idealizes future generations that will continue an enlightened path. Rivera uses the landscape in this piece to provide a certain reassurance that is specifically geared toward Mexican idealism, the landscape is what gives the work its specificity and historical context.

The Mexican Revolution set a radical tone for the beginning of the 20th century, the Cuban Revolution would see a new wave of representation and revolution that would reflect the progression of ideas throughout the 20th century.

Cuba found its independence from Spain at the turn of the 20th century, afterward the island found itself in constant flux from republic to dictatorship.

The Cuban Revolution taking place mid-century is what affected the island’s global impact and relationship to modernity. The Revolution spanned from 1953 to 1959, where the dictator Batista was overthrown by Fidel Castro’s socialist regime.20 The revolution brought unstable change in the social and economic atmosphere of the island as foreign relations with the U.S. and and Soviet Union would dramatically change.

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The idea of reform tied to a socialist agenda had spread rapidly through Latin countries in the 20th century, as associate of the Oxford University Press J. Halcro Fergusson states,” All over Latin America people’s imagination was stirred in a way that it had not been stirred since the days of the original revolution against Spaniards,” he continues to describe the use of radio and television that had made revolutionary ideals to take hold.21 Because of the importance of Cuba’s social development the island became synonymous with that of revolutionary thinkers, though the oncoming of foreign forces influencing the island had spawned the need in some to reinvent the Cuban image.

Ana Mendieta was a Cuban artist born during the Revolution, and fled as a child to the U.S. Mendieta’s best known works were part of her Silueta series, an example “Tree of Life” is shown in Fig. 3. As she describes in her speech at The New Museum of Contemporary Art,” To know oneself is to know the world, and it is also paradoxically a form of exile from the world,” this statement reveals a distance between the artist that she herself feels. Mendieta’s statement reflects the constant need to cultivate an identity within the environment we find ourselves in, as revolutionary conflicts require constant change.22 Mendieta also reflects in her speech the relationship between man and nature,” To establish its empire over nature, it has been necessary for man to dominate over men, and to treat part of humanity like objects.”

Nature doesn’t understand the concept of property and divisions, Mendieta touches upon the aspect of representation of nature that is influenced by our innate human instinct to protect and associate our territory with ourselves. Mendieta’s piece “Tree of Life” (Fig. 3) reflects the semipermanent aspect of the human identity, as well as, the need for natural intervention.

21. J. Halcro Ferguson. The Cuban Revolution and Latin America, 289.

22. Ana Mendieta. Art and Politics, 1065.

23. Ana Mendieta. Art and Politics, 1065.

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Mendieta covers herself in mud, grass, and other natural resources blending into the side of a large tree. Her stance is statuesque and unmoving, like the tree, though her facial expression is neutral her hands are placed in submission. This piece reflects the effects of revolution and how displacement from the land is personified in that absence. As the piece is set in the woods, there is a literal cycling of death, decay and growth taking place. This natural cycle is reflective of how the destruction of ideas and rebirth of others the land will always remain and with that its relationship to the people.

The 20th century was a time of change in Latin American countries as they explored the meaning of their respective national identities. Analyzing the general imagery associated with Latin America in Ruguenda’s work, as well as, the political and ideological histories of Mexico and Cuba had shown the crucial importance of landscape as a national symbol. The 20th century had also seen an emphasis on distributing work, focus on industry, and commodification of revolutionary ideals. Such tumultuous times require a fresh perspective on a uniquely familiar subject. The respect of one’s home brings a maternal presence that is comforting yet harsh. Though, looking upon the natural landscape as it exists, it is the unique backdrop to life that is ever changing but always present.

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Fig.1. Johann Mortiz Ruguendas , Nevado de Colina Seen from the Zapotlán Hill, 1831-34. Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. http://www.smb.museum/ smb/home/index.php?lang=de.

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Fig.2. Diego Rivera, The Liberated earth with Natural Forces Controlled

By Man, 1926-27. Universidad Autonoma de Chapingo. https://0-libraryartstor-org.library.scad.edu/asset/ ASCHALKWIJKIG _ 10313991911.

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Fig.3. Ana Mendieta. Tree of Life, 1976. Photographs. https://0-library-artstor-org. library.scad.edu/asset/LARRY _ QUALLS _ 10311709653.

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Bibliography Buchenau, Jürgen. “The Mexican Revolution, 1910–1946.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. 3 Sep. 2015; Accessed 25 May. 2020. https://oxfordre.com/latinamericanhistory/view/10.1093/ acrefore/9780199366439.001.0001/acrefore-9780199366439-e-21.

J. Halcro Ferguson. “The Cuban Revolution and Latin America.”

International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944)37, no. 3 (1961): 285-92. Accessed May 25, 2020. doi:10.2307/2610923.

Martinson, Tom L. “Interrelationships Between Landscape Art and Geography in Latin America: First Response to a Challenge.” Proceedings of the Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers 8 (1981): 347-56.

Accessed April 27, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/25764957.

Mendieta , Ana. “Art and Politics.” Art in Theory, 1900-2000, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Robin Hood , 2003, pp. 1064–1069.

Rivera, Diego. “‘The Revolutionary Spirit in Modern Art.’” Art in Theory, 1900-2000, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Robin Hood, 2003, pp. 421–424.

Rojo, Juan B. “The Meaning of the Mexican Revolution.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 69 (1917): 27-29.

Accessed May 25, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/3804616.

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Siqueiros , David. “Towards a Transformation of the Plastic Arts .” Art in Theory, 1900-2000, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood , Robin Hood , 2003, pp.429–431.

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Ben Elhav Digital Artwork 2018

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Ben Elhav Digital Artwork 2018

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Ben Elhav Digital Artwork 2018

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Ben Elhav Digital Artwork 2018

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Project Espere is an alternative to destructive architecture in wild areas. The name comes from the Old French word for sphere, something I found appropriate as the site is located in the Thousand Islands, adjacent to the French Side of Canada. The project is an answer to the site topography and aims to redefine the limits of what we consider architecture. There are almost no buildings that use a suspension system as structure despite its efficiency in difficult terrains. Project Espere aims to define how true suspending buildings may look like if we use this technology in combination with sustainable methods of construction.

The building is composed by a series of spheres that hang in the air using silk cables, and are covered with a waterproof textile. Because architecture is about the experience, I attempted to mimic a feeling of floating by devising a system of ziplines for circulation. In this building, people will feel as if they are floating in comfort.

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José Vega Conceptual Architecture 2019

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José Vega Conceptual Architecture 2019

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José Vega Conceptual Architecture 2019

SAVANNAH CAT BUS STATION: AN EXPLORATION OF LIMINALITY

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Lui Andrade Marinozzi

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In Percy Blysshe Shelley’s poem, “Ozymandias”, a traveler finds the cyclopean remains of a monument to the king Ozymandias buried in the sand. Inscribed on the statue’s pedestal are the words, “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”, yet all that is left of the king are his amputated legs and the sneering expression of his face, half sunken in the ground.1 In the face of time, all that remains of kings are the foundations of their monuments and the inscriptions of their empires. The liminal encounter of the traveler was when, for a brief moment, they could see the imaginary cartography of a lost landscape. Where there was once an empire lies an expanse of sand, all that remains of our societal structures are architectural foundations and words. The liminal experience of space, one where we find ourselves in a state of transition from one realm to the next, is characterized by this very paradox: where the real and the unreal coexist.

Carpeted office back rooms with suspended ceilings, surprise attic spaces in horror movies, LED-illuminated airport terminals, and abandoned Chuck-E-Cheese animatronic rooms all share a state of liminality.

These are the spaces where, as Rem Koolhaas wrote in his “Junkspace” manifesto, we experience the ghostly residues of modernity, ruins of an empire which has not yet fallen.2 In these spaces we are reduced to passengers, customers, and patients pertaining to no particular nation nor time.

In cyberspace, Dreamcore, Weirdcore, Backrooms, Uncanny, and Liminal are tags commonly found in the corners of the internet which are dedicated to the documentation of aesthetics. Observers are intrigued and disturbed by images such as an apparently exterior courtyard covered by a roof instead of the sky, a cubicle flooded with muddy black water, or a deserted 1. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias,” ( the Examiner, London, 1881).

2. Rem Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” (October 100, 2002), 175-190.

3. Marc Augé, “From Places to Non-Places,” in Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, (London;New York: Verso, 1995), 77.

4. Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space, (London; Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2014).

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shopping playground haunted by ghostly children. These photographs are edited to follow a muted color scheme or distorted with grainy effects and photographic anomalies. The liminal spaces of the internet incite the gaze of discomfort, where the viewer projects their anxieties onto a generic, corporate space wherein anything can happen. Video game companies have capitalized on this phenomenon, selling games where one can explore the “back rooms” of an office building where supernatural beings roam, lurking behind column grids and fire extinguishers.

Although liminal spaces online tend to have an otherworldly quality, liminal spaces are mundane, found in our urban city blocks, rural towns, and highways. Liminal landscapes include programmatically transient spaces such as airports, bus stations, or highways, copy-pasted corporate environments, decaying or overgrown spaces, and the interstitial residue space which line our cityscapes. As theorized by Marc Augé in his 1995 book, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity liminal space, “cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity,” as it is a no man’s land, between two existences.3 The thesis of the chapter entitled “From Places to Non-Places” is that supermodernity, through neoliberal city planning and globalization, has homogenized space and stripped communities of place-making culture, imposing a modular landscape, with replicas of replicas and simulacra. Focusing on the Special Economic Zone, the golf course, and the suburban model of development, Keller Easterling writes, in her book Extrastatecraft, that these spaces are agents of flexible market capitalism: where topography, climate, and cultural nuance are irrelevant against the infrastructures of power.4 The operating mode of our world, which Easterling describes as “Extrastatecraft” is viral and unbounded by national borders to achieve its agenda.

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“Extrastatecraft” is the fiber optic cable, the skyscraper, and the credit card number. In this wild form of global urbanism is where Marc Augé’s “non-place” is born. Augé’s anthropological space refers to places, “ formed by individual identities, through complicities of language, local references, the unformulated rules of living know-how; non-place creates the shared identity of passengers, customers or Sunday drivers.”5 In these spaces, we are guided by signage which instructs us how to behave: no smoking, restrooms designated for either men and women, cautions about watching your step. According to Augé, the world of supermodernity is one where people are in a constant state of flux, navigating the frontiers of nowhere at the end of no time.6 In Savannah, Georgia, a city with a characteristic historical identity, planners have attempted to hide liminal environments. Although the city of Savannah has worked hard to maintain its atmosphere saturated with ghost legends, civic traditions such as St.Patrick’s day, and timely signifiers such as kerosene lanterns, liminality creeps in the corners of tourist, commercial, and transit spaces. This strip of city is designed for the commuter, as John Brinckerhoff Jackson identifies in his book, Landscape in Sight: Looking at America, naming the zone a “Stranger’s Path”.7 The Stranger’s Path is an assembly line: it ushers travelers into the blur of a neon city, feeds hungry bellies, distracts fatigued minds, satiates the desires of lonely hearts. The bus stop, airport, and parking lot are some of the first places visitors encounter, the portal to the real, where after crossing the threshold, one may enter the realm of city life, where people and places exist. The arrival terminal or bus station lobby denies the passage of time, freezing the passerby in a corridor of nothingness. While hotels and commercial establishments around Savannah’s historic district have attempted to mask their corporate non-placehood by ad5. Augé, 101.

6. Kirby, Leiland/Caretaker, Everywhere at the End of Time, (History Always Favors the Winners, 2016), album.

7. John Brinckerhoff Jackson and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, “Stranger’s Path,” in Landscape in Sight: Looking at America. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) 21.

8. Robert Zemeckis, Forrest Gump, (United States: Paramount Pictures, 1994).

9. “History,” Chatham Area Transit (CAT), n.d, accessed January 29, 2022, https://www.catchacat.org/about-cat/history/.

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-opting Southern vernacular elements such as fanned porches and even indoor blinds, the Oglethorpe bus station, underfunded and hidden away from the tourist’s gaze, has not sustained any illusions of place. Serving the commuter workforce of minorities and immigrants to the city of Savannah, the Chatham Area Transit bus station presents a case study in liminality and public transportation, alienating workers both spatially and psychologically.

The most memorable moment in the film Forrest Gump is the bus stop scene, where Forrest sits in Chippewa square and famously says, “My mom always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.”8 Countless tourists visit Chippewa Square in search of that bench, and to their misery, find nothing. Not only is there no bench to be found in Chippewa Square but there has also never been a bus stop there. Once in Savannah’s history, squares were multifunctional common spaces but now historic and tourism committees steadily sanitize the squares, both white-washing them and sterilizing them of Savannah’s working class. In an effort to minimize the sight of bus-goers in the Historic District, planning committees in Savannah have been displacing stops further and further from the touristic spots since the dislocation of the Broughton Street Bus Station to the outskirts of Oglethorpe Road, at the delta of the Atlantic Coastal Highway.

According to Chatham County Transit Authority (CAT), public transportation in Savannah begins with the creation of “Savannah-Skidaway and Seaboard Railway Company” in 1869 which connected the greater Savannah Coastal area through intercity streetcars. The streetcars service surrounding towns of Thunderbolt, Isle of Hope, White Bluff, and Skidaway Island.9 The Savannah Transit Authority (STA) was created in 1961, providing subsidized bus transportation in the face of declining passenger rates due to the rise of the automobile.

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Throughout the 1980s, Savannah’s bus system scraped by as public funding and passengers declined even further. In the 1990s, bus transport in Savannah saved itself through cost regulation and reduction of operation costs. As bus traffic expanded, CAT undertook the relocation of Savannah’s main bus station from Broughton Street to Oglethorpe Road in 1995. The goals of the new station, according to CAT’s statements, was to provide a “climate-controlled passenger waiting area and other passen­ ger amenities could reduce bus traffic along Broughton Street and enhance service delivery for the entire community.”10 The result of this movement was the construction of the Joe Murray Rivers Jr. Intermodal Transit Center, completed in 2013. Partly a historical renovation of a midcentury Greyhound bus terminal and partly contemporary steel canopy construction, the CAT bus station was built to house fourteen buses with four separate bays for Greyhound buses. Today, the bus station operates sixteen Savannah routes and passengers from cross country and state buses.

Approaching the bus station, there is no threshold to ponder one’s arrival. There is barely a sidewalk to cross the intersection, where the noise and speed of cars overwhelm the senses. A passenger named Keishawn sitting on the curb in front of the terminal gate wishes there was a place to eat. He says travelers are not able to walk too far to find a meal because they are scared to miss their bus. Inspecting the buildings surrounding the bus station, one will find mostly hotels, construction sites, and a Family Dollar a few blocks away. “We need small businesses,” says Judy Peecher, another passenger. Judy stands by the front doors of the lobby with her suitcases and complains that she needs a cup of coffee “to figure out what to do.” This sense of disorientation is not merely caused by an unfamiliar location but manufactured by the threatening urbanism that denies people the spaces they deserve.

10. Ibid.,

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The cars, the lack of a crosswalk, the walls of inaccessible hotels makes the bus station and its surrounding neighborhood a non-place according to Augé.

Judy describes her feeling of discomfort, when she was scorned for smoking in a nonsmoking area, “It was just harsh,” she sighs. The tense nature of the non place, breeds hostility between interactions, a performatic customer-employee identity, where both feel mistreated.

Through the main doors of the lobby, one finds the ticket booth and the interior waiting area. A generic terrazzo floored space with mass-produced perforated metal seats, drop acoustical ceiling, and large exposed vents for climate control. People form lines at the booths or lounge on the seats with their mountain of luggage beside them. Here, time barely passes under the constant illumination and controlled temperature.

The air is stale and the atmosphere is dreary. Beyond the lobby lies the external bus waiting space. The floating steel cloak of the terminal lacerates the sky, but barely keeps in the leaks of rain from the previous night as seen in Fig. 1. The external bus waiting area is a long corridor of pure structure, cameras, monitors, white tube lights and electric wires (Fig. 2). At night, the bus station looks like it could be floating in space, as the city lights are nowhere to be seen beyond the fluorescent light of the canopy and the red blinkers of the bus.

A passenger who identified himself as “Traveling Man” points to the monitors that have been covered by a sign and exclaims, “I’m glad everyone’s coming together in this place but where is the money? The monitors don’t work!” (Fig, 3). He points to an elderly man in a wheelchair who sits in front of us, and laments, “People like him can’t wait inside the bus station. They don’t know where to catch the bus because the monitors don’t tell him where to go. COVID makes it unsafe for people like him.” When I ask about the neighborhood, Traveling Man looks at the construction cranes behind us and reflects about Yamacraw Village, “It’s not changing because of violence or drugs, it’s where the police go get their arrests. This is not

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something I’m saying, it’s something I know.” The bus station, at the intersection of gentrifying forces, according to author Joe Grengs, has abandoned its social goals. Where Congress once advocated for transit as a means for wealth redistribution, the dominance of the automobile economy has rendered these efforts ineffective. Now, rather than achieving equity, transit policy has aimed mostly to relieve congestion.11 With a transit system revolving around the interests of the suburban commuter and the highway developer, the needs of minority and working class people are neglected, depriving groups of political and social visibility.12 The spatial pattern concentrates poverty in the inner city and administers public transportation to dislocate workers where they are needed, servicing commercial districts in centralized locations. The construction of the bus station appears to be a mere corollary. An afterthought in the rings of Haussman, the rush hour of a 9-5 city, an exchange of people and products. In Savannah, a historically significant city with rising rent values and an evolving landscape, the flux of tourists, workers, and students sustain the city.

For this reason, Savannah itself may be considered liminal, in state of transience (graduating students, migrant workers) and permanence (old money, historical preservation). Savannah is a city of solid-void.

While the bus station, the office space, and the big box store, are essential components in the choreography of a city, they are sickly nodes, decaying in front of us from lack of incentive and maintenance.

Liminal space does not require elaborate façadism or cosmetic surgery. In our parting words, Judy told me, “The bus station doesn’t need to be pretty. It gets the job done even if it’s cold.” As our economy dissolves into virtual space, the residual liminal spaces in our cities are as the statue of Ozymandias in the sand: ruins of a dying empire.

11. Joe Grengs, “The Abandoned Social Goals of Public Transit in the Neoliberal City of the USA,” City 9, (2005): 52, https://doi.org/10.1080/13604810500050161.

12. Grengs, 62

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Fig. 1 The steel beam canopy makes up the bus terminal of the CAT Bus Station. It is a butterfly roof with a height of roughly 12 feet at center.

Fig. 2 The roof collects water at the central convergence point, where puddles form underneath.

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Fig. 3 The green film on the monitors covers their state of disrepair.

Construction work can be seen in the background, making the bus station even more of a non-place.

Bibliography Augé, Marc. “From Places to Non-Places.” In Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London ; New York: Verso, 1995.

Easterling, Keller. Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space.

London;Brooklyn, NY;: Verso, 2014.

Grengs, Joe. “The Abandoned Social Goals of Public Transit in the Neoliberal City of the USA.” City 9 (2005): 51–66. https://doi. org/10.1080/13604810500050161.

“History | Chatham Area Transit (CAT).” n.d. Accessed January 29, 2022. https://www.catchacat.org/about-cat/history/.

Jackson, John Brinckerhoff and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz. “Stranger’s Path.”

In Landscape in Sight: Looking at America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.

Kirby, Leiland/Caretaker. Everywhere at the End of Time. History Always Favors the Winners, 2016, album.

Koolhaas, Rem. “junkspace.” October 100: 175-190, (2002). doi:10.1162/016228702320218457.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe.”Ozymandias.” The Examiner, London, 1881.

Zemeckis, Robert. 1994. Forrest Gump. United States: Paramount Pictures.

Zizek, Slavoj. “ARCHITECTURAL PARALLAX: SPANDRELS AND OTHER PHENOMENA OF CLASS STRUGGLE” How to Read Lacan | SLAVOJ ZIZEK. n.d. Accessed February 4, 2022. https://www.lacan.com/essays/?page _ id=218.

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TREE OF JOY

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Jessica Hoofnagle Paint Maker and Paper 2022

SHE’S SITTING BY THE WINDOW

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Jessica Hoofnagle Paint Maker and Paper 2022

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SAFE HAVEN

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Jessica Hoofnagle Paint Maker and Paper 2022

FIGHT! RESIST!

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Jessica Hoofnagle Paint Maker and Paper 2022

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I WANT WIND

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Jessica Hoofnagle Paint Maker and Paper 2022

ONE-WAY GLASS WITH NO TRAUSTEIN Ben Elhav Every time I commit pen to paper, what becomes clear to you is obscured to me, and more detail disappears with each divulgence. By the time you’ve finished reading this, you will know who I was and who I am, and I will be more lost than ever before. Yet, in hopes that you will tell me who I am, I will tell you again.

Let’s get lost together.

“JEW” I was a nice Jewish boy who grew up in Jewish Toronto.

I was a nice Jewish boy who grew up in Jewish Toronto and moved.

My memory of that day is like the weather most days in London, meaning it is shrouded in a perpetual fog.

I was sitting at a bustling table in the dining hall of my orderly primary school. There were dozens of us, color-coordinated in our white uniforms and smart blue caps, settling in for the lunch hour. We sat facing one another on benches in neat rows, and between every few students was a large jug of water with a metallic tang to it that was refreshing nonetheless. On the rare afternoons when there was nobody to talk to, I like to imagine that my younger self was enraptured with those large, geometric vessels, and the way they scattered light across the tabletop.

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Like other nice Jewish boys, I went to Synagogue on the high holidays, attended Hebrew school, kept kosher, and secretly wanted to light the candles. On Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement for sin, I remember praying my heart out in Synagogue for God to forgive me after I kicked that awful boy David in my kindergarten class.

I didn’t mean it, though he certainly deserved it. My best friends were other nice Jewish boys, and there was no difference between us yet.

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On that day, however, there was much to talk about and eager conversationalists all around me. One of the older boys, let’s call him Jack, was seated across the table from me, but you could probably hear him from a mile away. The topic was a popular one - the winter holidays - and for once, there was no endless conversation of some resort in Dubai that my parents would strangely refuse as the destination for our next trip whenever I would ask.

Here Jack turned to me and said, “What are you doing for Christmas?”

I felt sort of scared but very excited. replying, “Well actually, I don’t celebrate Christmas.”

Suddenly, Jack’s face turned red. He stared at me incredulous as if I had told him I had no soul.

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“What?” he gawked at me.

“I’m Jewish” I continued, eager to share something about an identity that few seemed to know the first thing about.

“That’s stupid.”

“YID” I was a nice Jewish boy who grew up in Toronto, moved, and came back So, not everyone was Jewish. I still had my bubble of nice Jewish boys, and when we were together, it was almost a community. Being Jewish, even at that age I had an opinion on almost everything under the sun, and I would share all these thoughts and arguments with my best friend and greatest rival, Zechariah Friedman In many ways, Friedman, as we all called him, was my polar opposite. I was grouchy and brooding, and he was, well, naive.

Friedman was unabashedly Jewish, yet I could never understand how. The contents of his state-of-the-art victorian home included a massive coffee table book on Jewish Nobel laureates, stacks of repulsive kosher pizzas refrigerated in thin plastic bags, and a number of Adam Sandler movies, which Friedman told me he kept not because they were good, but because one has to “support the tribe”. When we walked to school together every morning, the crisp crunch of leaves under our early-winter boots echoed our constant dialog.

All of these things were considered Jewish, and I had no connection to any one of them. What was wrong with me?

“YEHUDI” I was a Jewish boy who grew up in Toronto, moved, came back, and realized I was Israeli.

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Sometimes, we talked about how I thought I was a different kind of Jew, though neither of us knew what “different” meant. I could understand more of what was being said at Synagogue services than anyone in attendance, but I didn’t know any of the EasternEuropean melodies that accompanied the words. I didn’t understand a word of Yiddish, a bizarre tongue filled with words like “meshugenah” and “schluffer” and “schlepper” which sounded to me like Dr. Seuss had mutilated the Hebrew language. At the same time, Friedman and I had just returned from Camp Israel, a Jewish camp in Northern Ontario, where I stood out as one tan body amidst a sea of a thousand palefleshed and awkward middle-schoolers assaulted by the hot August sun. Presumably, because it was a “Jewish” camp, everything had to be labeled in a mispronounced and misspelled Hebrew, which I took great delight in pointing out to anyone who would listen. My cynicism festered. They had taken the secret dialect I spoke only with my closest family, a language of our love, and distorted it beyond recognition.

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There’s something almost nostalgic about the drive to my uncle’s house, though few precious memories exist to justify this reverence. It feels like coming home from the last leg of a long road trip in a state of exhaustion and ecstasy; seeing the day etched onto the faces of everyone around you, knowing they feel it too. As we fly across the surface of the ghostly Ayalon highway at night, those moments when I can see my uncle’s worn features clearly are fleeting, even though I am close enough to touch him. Between glimpses, I see serious lines and deep shadows, but there are suggestions of a long-gone levity that refuses to die.

I can see the fortified bunkers that whip past us in the windows, masquerading as benign highway exits. I can see the manicured line of trees and fences that separates me from what I can’t see. Then suddenly, I realize that I don’t know what I’m looking at.

“I don’t understand,” I say, turning to my uncle. “That sign on our left read “Exit to Palestine”, but just a few minutes ago I could have sworn there was an ‘Exit to Palestine’ on our right.”

He winces, answering my question before it has even formed. “Yes...” he pauses, pretending to concentrate on the highway.

“So... if there’s an exit on our left and an exit on our right” I continue, “... are we in Palestine?”

Uri trips over five different answers, then finally says, “No, it’s complicated... this road is in Israel-” “But we are in Palestine?” “...Yes.” Silence falls, dark as the tunnel we have just entered,

but more revealing. Uri is no ideologue, so when he finally speaks up, I listen carefully.

“What do you think?” He says, looking almost amused.

“Of this? I think... I think it sucks.”

Surely I’ve gone too far. I try to cover my tracks.

“Like... I get that they have to do it for security reasons and everything though-” “It’s an apartheid state.” He declares bitterly, unapologetic. I turn toward him with a mixture of shock and awe.

“And... what do you think?”

“About that? Well, it sucks, but what can I do? I was born on the side that has it better. Why give it up? I could protest all I want - and I did! - but nothing is going to change.”

I was a Jewish boy who grew up in Toronto, moved, came back, and realized I was a liberal Israeli.

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My mother told me that her mother was descended from diamond merchants, who worked with precious stones from the comforts of a mansion in old Baghdad. In those days, my mother tells me, they were rich enough to afford servants, and when she shows me the drawer in her night table where she keeps the fraction of jewelry they took with them as they left, I begin to understand their wealth.

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Shoam had a voice like gravel crackling feverishly under the wheels of a car that came from a deep, guttural place in the throat and bellowed out like fire.

I can hear it echo around when I try to recall her, and on her face I see the proud genesis of our family line, refusing to be assimilated even after years in the largely Ashkenazi society.

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The journey of discovery ends here, as I am unable to reach further back, the past sealed to me like the dark recesses of my mother’s drawer. Few records exist of Shoam’s family and other Iraqi Jews, and a permanent mark of “Israeli” bars me from visiting any of the countries from where my family originated. It is unlikely that I will ever see the splendid mansion in Baghdad, if it even exists anymore, and I will certainly never visit the now-ruined streets of Syria’s Aleppo, where my grandfather once played as a boy.

I was a Jewish boy who grew up in Toronto, moved, came back, and realized I was a liberal Israeli with an Arab background.

Each time I tell this story, in its many bits and pieces and with all its innumerable tangents, I continue to approach the perfect sentence that describes who I was and who I am.

I desperately want to understand myself in the terms of a thousand labels. I am content to be one in a group of others with the same identity. Yet, when I account for every label and identity, allowing them all to define me despite their contradictions and inaccuracies, I am alone. Perhaps I have discovered what to identify as, but there is no one to identify with.

A DISTORTED WALK

Scarlett Mason Collage 2022

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THE FABRIC OF A COMMUNITY: ZAPATISTA ART COLLECTIVES

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“Liberation, the key struggle of the Zapatistas has an additional element for Zapatista women.”

Subcomandante Marcos57 On January 1st, 1994, the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) declared war on the Mexican national government, and thus began the world’s first postmodern war.58 This declaration came in response to the continued dispossession of indigenous people in the globalizing world, specifically the actions taken against Indigenous farmers by the Mexican government to enforce the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The Indigenous communities of the area have suffered land dispossession and economic strife by Mexican statehood and capitalism, constructions that function to fragment and exploit indigenous resources.

One indigenous resource threatened by these pressures is the intimate communities themselves, within which communal kinship is defined. To protect these communities, the EZLN announced their indigenous autonomy from the oppressive system of the Mexican state. The ongoing war has largely been understood as a war of commerce, production, resource, and ideology rather than one of outright battle. The insurgents of the EZLN seek to fight dominant ideologies both within Mexico and the international world, often by using protest and art. For this paper, the focus will be on the commercial textile art created by usually female collectives. These Zapatista art collectives function to fight for indigenous autonomy by creating politically subversive textile art that visually represent and disperse the EZLN’s goals internationally, all whilst emboldening the community ties the EZLN defends.

57. “Zapatista Women,” St. Lawrence University, http://zapataproject.org/content/zapatista-women.

58. Léger, Marc James and David Thomas, eds. Zapantera Negra: An Artistic Encounter Between Black Panthers and Zapatistas (NY: Common Notions, 2017), 1.

59. Soneile Hymn, “Indigenous Feminism in Southern Mexico,” The International Journal of Illich Studies 2, no. 1 (2011): 22.

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The author of this paper recognizes that the oeuvre of Zapatista women art collectives is continuously expansive and changing. It would be impossible to write a comprehensive reflection of Zapatista art while the movement is still ongoing.

This paper will instead explore a small number of Zapatista art objects that are exemplary of the paper’s arguments. The limitation of textiles, while providing only a narrow window into Zapatista women’s lives, will enable the reader to personally interact with each work. Altogether, they will provide a representation of the larger movement of Zapatista textile production and the shared ideas that function to build Indigenous communities.

In analyzing political indigenous art created by female Zapatista art collectives, this paper recognizes the many intersecting identities and ideas that visually permeates within the textile art.

While subversive to the Mexican national government, the art also challenges constructions of gender, politics, and history by actors of indigenous activism that navigate a post-colonial world while healing intergenerational trauma that has been perpetuated in the 500+ years since contact. Indigenous feminism, a feminism that centers and focuses on specifically Indigenous communities’ gender rights, is a struggle “based in a blend of their unique ethnic, class, and gender identities,”59 most of which are unrealized and uninterrogated by mainstream feminism. The arts created by the collectives serves to distribute indigenous feminism by visually centering feminist icons on art created to circulate the globe. Art specialized in recapitulating and distributing the Zapatista cause, a cause that includes female liberation.

In 1968, Mexico experienced a massive cultural shift as a result of the genocide committed by the state in Tlatelolco. While not the first crime committed

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international support in the total disillusionment of the neoliberal system. The images and art that is created is distributed throughout the world. “Zapatista images also circulate around the world and are part of an imaginary of utopia, which can be found in references from different countries.”62 While the author of this quote specifically noted it in reference to iconography and images in the traditional Mexican muralist style found throughout Zapatista communities, Zapatista textile art is created to function as a representation of the same ideas. Additionally, textiles can be transported and sported anywhere around the world, garnering both international attention and appeal. Using analysis as a tool, it is clear that Zapatista artists function to depict and disperse political ideas through the incorporation of recognizable indigenous symbols and techniques that splice together to create a political declaration.

Specific icons, symbols, words, stories, and people are inserted into textile images to call for the overthrow of government officials, the disillusionment of land ownership, altogether indigenous community solidarity, and a number of other shared Zapatista ideologies. Solnit, a researcher who spent time in Zapatista communities, recognizes one of the many symbols to be the now infamous Zapatista caracol (snail or spiral shell). In 2003, the Zapatistas publicly renamed their existing autonomous communities caracoles (plural).63 The specific reason was vocalized by one of the leaders, Subcomandante Marco. “The wise ones of olden times say that the hearts of men and women are in the shape of a caracol.”64 The wise ones Marcos referred to are the ancient Maya people, directly connecting the caracol to traditional Maya ecology as a means of persuasion, strength, and validation. Since the 2003 renaming, the imagery of a spiral shell or specifically a snail has 62. Giovana Christ, “A Brief History of the Zapatista Murals,” SP—Arte 365, June 2, 2020, https://www.sp-arte.com/en/editorial/a-brief-history-of-the-zapatista-murals/.

63. Rebecca Solnit, “Revolution of the Snails: Encounters with the Zapatistas,” TomDispatch.

Jan. 15, 2008, https://tomdispatch.com/rebecca-solnit-journey-into-the-heart-of-an-insurgency/ 64. Subcomandante Marcos, Zapatista Stories (Gardners Books, Dec. 31, 2001) as cited in Solnit, “Revolution.”

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become the visual representation of the Zapatista people, representing their hearts, their communities, and the slow but steady movement of progress all connected to indigenous teachings. This is represented in figure 2, which is an embroidered representation of a snail wearing the iconic pasamontaña and bandana that symbolizes Zapatista insurgents. The snail crawls across the wild ground through grasses and bugs from left to right, toward the future. High above the Zapatista caracol on undyed fabric are red embroidered letters that read “el caracol de resistencia” or “the snail of resistance”. The snail icon serves to imply a multitude of meanings to community members and members of the public. To the community, the snail represents the slow but undeterminable progress of revolution.

A physical representation of the Zapatista people and actions literally carrying on their backs the hearts of their communities into a new world. This is an idea created and reiterated by repetitive and replicative textiles also visible in figure 3. Figure 3, a handembroidered bolsa (purse) is adorned with a snail moving in the same forward direction across an implied ground. The small purse was created to be shared and reiterated, simple and cheap enough to incentivize casual buyers. The only specifically Zapatista icons are the words “caracol il en Obentik” and EZLN on the back. This text is pseudo-Spanish, noticeably changing the common spelling of Oventik to Obentik, thus marking the bolsa’s language as closer as a verbal reinterpretation rather than visual. Unlike the other textiles, this one privatizes the connection of the work to the EZLN, making the icons visible only to the wearer unless turned. While not visibly political, this textile still serves to share the Zapatista ideology by sharing the caracol icon on the global stage. The audience of these textiles, as international supporters, encourage the textiles to include icons that heavily resonate with the indigenous people of Mexico but also function to be meaningful throughout the world. This functions in seeking to garner international support in the total disillusionment of

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the neoliberal system. And while a casual buyer may not entirely realize the implication of the icon, the snail is recognized as specifically indigenous and specifically Zapatista.

All of textiles have been noted as created by “Zapatista women,” this simple language connotes several key facts. Firstly, there is often a noticeable lack of accreditation to individuals beyond the identification as Zapatista. This is not a mistake by the workshops that serve to digitize and sell the art, but instead, a tactic that both reflects and enforces communal ties. The tactic firstly serves the individuals involved in the collective by helping to protect their identities from being easily discernible.

The Zapatista movement functions largely in anonymity, allowing them to shed their individual selves in favor of the strength found in a community identity. A famous Zapatista saying is “we cover our faces so that you can see us,” remarking on the collectivist nature of the Zapatista insurgency and their visibility in the international world only as a collective.65 Art collectives have a long history in indigenous Mexico. Alfred M. Tozzer, a Mayanist in 1941 notes that Maya women, ancient and (then) contemporary, engage in groups to fulfill highly demanding artistic projects as a means to finish jobs and socialize. “[Women] have the habit of helping each other in weaving or spinning… and on these occasions, they always have their witty speeches in joking and telling good stories and occasionally a little gossip.”66 This gossip serves to connect inner community members that share secrets and seek one another’s help. This is no different in the contemporary Zapatista communities, who, enabled within their communities, practice these collectives to both make art and socialize in a safe space.

65. Laura Gottesdiener, “My Glimpse Into the Zapatista Movement, Two Decades Later,” Jan. 23, 2014, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/01/zapatista-movement-two-decades-later-anniversary-indigenous-uprising/.

66. Alfred M. Tozzer, “Landa’s Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán: A Translation”, Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology 18 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941) as cited in Marvin Cohodas, “Multiplicity and Discourse in Maya Gender Relations”, in Lowell S. Gustafson and Amelia M. Trevelyan, Ancient Maya Gender Identity and Relation, (Bergin & Garvey, Connecticut: 2002), 22.

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Within these female-only, art-focused collectives, women have the power to dominate not only the art and direction of the textiles but of the conversation.

These conversations, built up by politically engaged women in rural communities, presumably touch on topics such as political and personal issues while the women share the labor of creating and decorating textiles.

These conversations serve to build steadfast personal ties between women and between families. As a result, it can be assumed that these ties then serve to better connect the entire community behind shared political identities and personal ties. The collectives that create the art, therefore, builds the very communities that the Zapatista movement seeks to protect. It is within these spaces that not only art but the very indigenous communities the Zapatistas fight so diligently for are fostered. It is within these art caracoles that female kinship and bonds are forged by hours of artistic sharing.

Zapatista’s textile art serves to politically function for the EZLN as both a visual representation of indigenous autonomy and instigator of community togetherness. Ideologically informed decisions are made by active female agents within the Zapatista movement, ranging from material to technique to content. All of which serves to invoke anti-neoliberal indigenous feminist ideas on a global scale while also serving their communities. Indigenous women, always and especially in Chiapas, are often considered to be the protectors of heritage with the close connection to traditional practices. This is exemplified within the closely knitted, heavily political, and intimately connected collectives of the Zapatista movement.

66. Alfred M. Tozzer, “Landa’s Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán: A Translation”, Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology 18 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941) as cited in Marvin Cohodas, “Multiplicity and Discourse in Maya Gender Relations”, in Lowell S. Gustafson and Amelia M. Trevelyan, Ancient Maya Gender Identity and Relation, (Bergin & Garvey, Connecticut: 2002), 22.

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Figure 1. Embroidered Blouse/Huipil, handmade embroidered huipil created by a group of Zapatista women reading “cuando una mujer abanza no hay ombre que retroce.” Schools for Chiapas.

Figure 2. Embroidered Textile, hand-made embroidered textil reading “el caracol de resistencia.” As exampled by Solnit in “Revolution of the Snails.”

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Figure 3. Pouch/Bolsa – Embroidered with Zapatista Woman, hand-made embroidered purse created by a group of Zapatista women reading “cararol il en obentik.” Schools for Chiapas.

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Bibliography Mora, Mariana. “Decolonizing Politics: Zapatista Indigenous Autonomy in an Era of Neoliberal Governance and Low Intensity Warfare,” PhD diss., University of Texas, Austin, December 2008. University of Texas Libraries, https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/ handle/2152/18194.

Greeley, Robin Adele. “The Space of Appearance: Performativity and Aesthetics in the Politicization of Mexico’s Public Sphere.” In Sabotage Art: Politics and Iconoclasm in Contemporary Latin America, edited by Sophie Halart and Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra, 188-213. London and New York: I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2016.

Greenfield, Patricia Marks. Weaving Generations Together: Evolving Creativity in the Maya of Chiapas. Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press, 2004.

Gustafson, Lowell S. and Amelia M. Trevelyan, ed. Ancient Maya Gender Identity and Relations. Westport, Connecticut and London: Bergin & Garvey, 2002.

Hamnett, Brian. A Concise History of Mexico. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

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Hymn, Soneile. “Indigenous Feminism in Southern Mexico.” The International Journal of Illich Studies 2, no. 1 (2011): 21-34.

Medina, Cuauhtémoc. “A Ghost Wanders About Mexico: Tlatelolo 1968-2008.”

Archivo Artea, February 2008.

Mentinis, Mihalis. Zapatistas: The Chiapas Revolt and What It Means for Radical Politics, Pluto Press, 2006 Morris, Jr., Walter F. “The Marketing of Maya Textiles in Highland Chiapas, Mexico.” In Textile Traditions of Mesoamerican and the Andes, edited by Margot Blum Schevill, Janet Catherine Berlo, and Edward B. Dwyer, 403-433. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.

O’Donnell, Katherine. Weaving Transnational Solidarity: From the Catskills to Chiapas and Beyond. Leiden: BRILL, 2010. Órgano Informativo del EZLN México. “Declaración de la Selva Lacandona - Hoy Decimos ¡Basta!” El Despertador Mexicano. December 1, 1993.

Reel 2 Folder 16. University of California, Mandeville Special Collections Library.

Pellarolo, Sirena. “Zapatista Women: Revolutionary Process Within a Revolution.” Autonomy: Chiapas-California / In Motion Magazine.

March 13, 2006. https://inmotionmagazine.com/auto/sp _ zw.html.

Sholette, Gregory. Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism. London: Pluto Press, 2017.

Solnit, Rebecca. “Revolution of the Snails: Encounters with the Zapatistas.” TomDispatch. January 15, 2008, https://tomdispatch.com/ rebecca-solnit-journey-into-the-heart-of-an-insurgency/.

Treece, Madison. “Zapatista Embroidery as Speech Act in Zapantera Negra.”

SEQUITUR 4, no. 1 (December 2017). https://www.bu.edu/ sequitur/2017/12/01/treece-zapatista/.

The textile practices of the Chiapas area (and indeed all the Americas) are deeply tied to ancestry, tradition, and meaning. Creating these textiles, in part, keep artists and viewers alike connected to these indigenous traditions. Textiles have long been overlooked by nonindigenous communities. As a result, indigenous communities have long been able to speak a language through textile that is unknowable to the globalized world, a subversive code that is distinguishable only to inner community members. By coming together to create textile art as a part of a collective (often female), artists togetherness serves to embolden new and preexisting community bonds.

“Fourteen years later, it is a qualified success: many landless campesino families in Zapatista-controlled Chiapas now have land; many who were subjugated now govern themselves; many who were crushed now have a sense of agency and power. Five areas in Chiapas have existed outside the reach of the Mexican government, under their own radically different rules, since that revolution… What shifted most was their language, which metamorphosed into something unprecedented — a revolutionary poetry full of brilliant analysis as well as of metaphor, imagery, and humor, the fruit of extraordinary imaginations”

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