Tariku Shiferaw: It’s a love thang, it’s a joy thang

By Charles Moore

MAY 2021 | ArtSeen

Tariku Shiferaw’s It’s a love thang, it’s a joy thang embodies Black joy—but not in the sense that people might think. In his latest exhibition, the artist pays homage to quotidian pleasures: those often referenced in the jazz era, a time when the greats sang about their daily lives.

Randa Jarrar’s Love Is an Ex-Country

By Yvonne C. Garrett

FEB 2021 | Books

In Jarrar’s new book (a memoir), Trump’s rise to power is an undercurrent as, in over more than 200 pages, across decades, time zones, and borders, Jarrar explores what it is to live as an American who is also Palestinian, a woman, and a woman of a certain size who also self-defines as queer. We can all learn a lot from Jarrar: about racism, privilege, oppression, fat-phobia, sexual violence, and the way this country (and others) treats women.

J. Nicole Jones’s Low Country: A Southern Memoir

By Yvonne C. Garrett

APRIL 2021 | Books

In her debut, a memoir, Jones catalogues family violence as a part of her remembering; violence becomes a framework and connecting thread for the 13 vignettes that explore her own, her family’s, and her hometown, Myrtle Beach’s troubled and collective past.

The Jerk Comes Full Circle: Reflections on Developing, Dramaturging, and Directing Fake Friends’ Cinematic and Theatrical Feat

By Rory Pelsue, Cat Rodríguez, and Ariel Sibert

DEC 20-JAN 21 | Theater

In October, as theaters remained dark for a seventh consecutive month and the content-starved internet feasted on memes to ready itself for the long, dry winter, a new performance-media company emerged from the sweat non-profit theaters drowned in while trying to stay afloat: Fake Friends was born, and so was a hybrid art form.