Dear Readers,

 

It is with great pleasure that I announce the December 2015 issue of The Art Section. Thanks to our writers, this issue is a vehicle for the armchair traveler; each one takes us on a different kind of journey to another place and time.

 

Anna Leung writes about the American artist Joseph Cornell (1903–1972), an artist I have revered since my childhood visits to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The exhibition of his work at the Royal Academy in London was aptly titled Wanderlust. Cornell never left New York City, but his collages and boxes allow for metaphysical travel that is both nostalgic and poetic. He lived his entire life on a street called Utopia Parkway in Queens; those like myself who have traveled on this street understand the beauty and irony of this visionary artist’s making work from things he collected and found while living on a street with that name. I appreciate Anna for writing about Cornell both for those who know his work and will revisit it through her essay as well as for those discovering his magic for the first time. (If you would like to know about another aspect of Cornell's work, his films, please have a look at Robert Stalker's essay "Screen Memories: The Cinema of Joseph Cornell," which we published in 2009.)

 

David Schuster takes us on a passage to Cuba, a journey he made in 2006. We are delighted to present the ten poems of his Cuba Libre series, accompanied by his reading of them. David’s reading and intonation bring color and presence to the poems. Please click on the link beside the poems to hear him. We originally published three of these poems in the early years of TAS, along with others of David’s art-themed poems, and I find this collection even more significant at this moment when Cuba is opening up to visitors from the US.

 

I invited Andrew Alexander to create an online exhibition. Andrew curated an assemblage of music videos accompanied by curatorial annotations that takes us on a visual and aural trip in his piece titled “Would You Kindly Look The Other Way?” The accompanying texts take us through Andrew’s thought process around the emotive transcendence of listening to and watching these works. This is TAS’s first curatorial project, and I hope we can publish many more.

 

Wishing all our readers and contributors the best for the Holiday season. I hope the journey takes us to Art, Beauty and Peace.

 

All my best,

 

Deanna

 

Deanna Sirlin

Editor-in- Chief

The Art Section

www.deannasirlin.com