Raymond Saunders 1934 - 2025

 

Beauty in Darkness, 1993-1999, Collage and mixed media on board, 96 1/2 x 180 inches (245.1 x 457.2 cm)

 

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Fanny Howe 1940 - 2025

 

In the next world I discovered

a hovel where a naked I writes with a nail

There you're as small as zero, a hole in the wall

the mouse goes in

with a whorl of cheese

for the littlest glass-cutter to eat

To paint one's rose means a life in that place

and on the thorny path outside

one cathedral is equal to the sky

 

              from Goodbye Post Office Square 

 

 

Ismail Abu Hatab 1992 - 2025

 

 

Gaza, 2024

 

Birthday boy

Ardeshir Mohassess, The king is always above the people, 1977

Mohassess, The men bent in prayer to God and the government airplanes arrived, 1977

Mohassess, The convict’s execution coincided with the king’s birthday ceremonies, 1978

Mansoureh Alikhani 1966 - 2025

 

Edmund White 1940-2025

 

[Verlaine] moved more and more in an artistic milieu. Every week he attended a salon frequented by the composers Berlioz and Wagner and the painters Édouard Manet and Henri Fantin-Latour and all the Parnassan band, who grew accustomed to Verlaine's habits; when he started drinking absinthe, they made sure to hide the knives. They knew that in a matter of moments he could go from the meekest mildness to the most murderous and ungovernable of rages. One night when he was blind with drink and wanted money from his mother so that he could continue his rout into the dawn hours, he became so angry with her for holding out on him that he attacked with his cane the jars containing Madame Verlaine's miscarriages, smashing the glass and dismembering the tiny rubbery fetuses and scattering them across the floor - and remarking soddenly that they, like him, had been macerating in alcohol long enough. The next morning, Verlaine crawled to his mother's side, begging her forgiveness in a prolonged, tearful scene of penitence. As she would do each time for the rest of her days, she forgave him.

                                                               

                                                                         (Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel, 2008) 

 

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o 1938 - 2025

"It is all due to a parable that came to me as I waited in a lobby of a New York hotel, trying to figure out the meaning of the wonders I had seen in a flight I had made around Africa and all the lands where dwell black folk, in the form of a bird.

"[The Wizard of the Crow] told the story of his travels in time and space in search of the sources of black power and a rather long parable of how humans surrendered control of their own lives to a blind deity with a double barreled name of M&M, or money and market, and how Africa's independence mutated to dependence.

 "Why did Africa let Europe cart away millions of Africa's souls from the continent to the four corners of the world?  How could Europe lord it over a continent ten times its size?  Why does needy Africa continue to let its wealth meet the needs of those outside its borders and then follow behind with hands outstretched for a loan of the very wealth it let go?  How did we arrive at this, that the best leader is the one who knows how to beg for a share of what he has already given away at the price of a broken tool?  Where is the future of Africa?  I cried.

"I saw this: Around the seventeenth century, Europe impregnated some in Africa with its evil.  These pregnancies gave birth to the slave driver of the slave plantation, who mutated into the colonial driver of the colonial plantation, who years later mutated into the neocolonial pilots of the postcolonial plantation.  Is he now mutating into a modern driver and pilot of a global plantation?  But Africa impregnated its own breed, which made our people sing.  Even if you kill our heroes, we women are pregnant with hope of a new lot.  Therefore, don't cry despair at those who sold the heritage; smile also with pride at the achievement of those that struggle to rescue our heritage.

"So I said to myself: Just as today is born of the womb of yesterday, today is pregnant with tomorrow." 

                                                                                     (from Wizard of the Crow, 2006)

Sebastião Salgado 1944 - 2025

At daybreak, Waurá Indians travel by canoe to collect the “waiting net,” Xingu Indigenous Territory, state of Mato Grosso, Brazil, 2005, gelatin silver print, 20 x 24 inches/50.8 x 61 cm, courtesy Sundaram Tagore Gallery