SKEW 02 // Fall 2020
Editorial Team
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Karine Fleurima, Curator
Karine Fleurima (she/her) is a sound healer, musician and multimedia performance artist working in the Afro-futurist feminist tradition. Drawn to themes of displacement, otherness, and interconnection infused with spirituality, she excels at bringing people together through the connective power of immersive and meditative performance art.
Leslie Foster, Curator
Leslie Foster (he/him) is an experimental filmmaker who strives to create work that is beautiful and uncomfortable. Drawing inspiration from artists like Terence Nance, Jenn Nkiru, Adrian Piper, and Theaster Gates, among others, his dazzling films imagine worlds where Black and queer people find community, wholeness, and revolution.
Lola Rose Eros, Curator
Lola Rose Eros (he/she/they) is the artistic pseudonym of Lauren Couch, a multifaceted full-time artist whose work combines visual art with dance, fashion and self-portrait. Drawing inspiration from his Black and queer artistic forebears and peers, from Prince and Grace Jones to Angelica Ross and Def Sound, among so many others—Lola brings a dazzling vision of bold, fantastical color and Black, trans majesty to her curatorial lens.
Turay Pastel, Curator
Mixing tracks under their DJ name pastelShade, interdisciplinary artist Turay Pastel (they/he) has made the work of cultivating healing and wholeness amidst trauma and conflict into a way of life. Always keen to shout out the Black and Queer artists and DJs who inspire them—from Taisha Paggett to Maya Margarita, also known as DJ br0nz3_g0dd3ss—pastelShade centers Blackness in everything they create.
Nikki Pressley, Designer
Inspired by artists like Forest Young, Jennifer Packer and Noah Davis, Nikki (she/her) brings more than 15 years of experience as a visual artist and designer to this year’s magazine. After splitting her time between New York and Los Angeles for several years, she’s recently moved back to the South, the region where she grew up. With a body of work spanning several years, locations, mediums and interests, Nikki offers up a reminder to us that, “like everything else, my art evolves.”
SKEW 02 // Fall 2020
Contributing Artists
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Adrian White
Grappling with its false allure of truth, I document the African diaspora in an effort to connect with my ancestors. Photography is a malleable medium, shaping the world through lens and bias. History is manipulated, reconfigured to fit an agenda. The systematic extermination experienced across the diaspora has been erased from history and silenced in classrooms. I remember, I connect—so that we can begin to heal. I document the present. I remember the past. I imagine a utopian future. By connecting with my ancestors, I learn about myself.
Aja Saint Claire Seabron
Creation in its rawest form comes from a state which at times can be seen as uncomfortable but sensational. I work with colors and pours of acrylic to express a wide range of emotions. To me, colors are the emotional discomfort, the background noise that most people don't pay much attention to. What is applied over those colors are the sensations—touch, life, things growing and evolving. My purpose through art is to offer others the experience of finding comfort through discomfort.
Anthony Bartlett
Grey Light is an intuitive reflection on the muted impressions of light lost beneath the extremes of our environments. It employs still life, landscape and architectural mediums as abstract pedestals for the projection of black attitudes, agency, and refinement.
Brandon Rachal
My work as a Teaching Artist explores using applied drama for community building and restorative justice. This piece is dedicated to my younger self and others seeking healing from toxic masculinity.
Cat Jones
Cat Jones is an artist based in Los Angeles working with fabrics, photography, digital mediums, & audio/visual mediums to express his connection to life, the unknown, & his past. His projects seek to uplift the voice from within, and to encourage others to share their truth in ways that are therapeutic & healing.
Photo by Texas Isaiah
Charlene Modeste
"The Green Widow" is a defiant and loving reminder that we, as co-creators of our existence, are empowered to sprout new ideas and blaze a trail to our collective healing by reconnecting to the earth and each other.
C.S.R. Calloway
Being a queer Black man today means constantly facing and reconciling my rage, my shame, and my mortality. With this piece, I wanted to utilize a concept I haven’t taken time to embrace: a legacy.
Cherise Morris
Cherise Morris is a poet, ritualist and spiritual worker born and raised in rural Virginia and based in Detroit, MI. Her work merges experimentation with creative and spiritual practices to open loving, audacious and transformative spaces that invite us to explore, imagine and continue the infinite work of our individual and collective healing journeys and new-world building.
Chidebe Chinedu
Every work I create is a reflection of my thoughts and experience. I commence my drawings from a formalized position and go on to construct narratives that work to engage the viewer in expansive introspection.
Courtney Alexander
Dust II Onyx merges divination with my multimedia artist practice to explore the archetypes within tarot while imagining an ancient civilization that carries all of our histories within it—a world beyond this dimension, yet intrinsically connected to our own.
Craig Cutright
Much of my work explores the Black experience in some capacity, often through portraiture. This piece continues that discovery as it relates to futurism, making use of materials that lend to this theme in both purpose and aesthetics.
Dannywolfchild
As an artist I am essentially interested in creating art that calls out to the participation of the audience to the same extent as my involvement in it. Different mediums allow me to express different ideas.
Def Sound
“Here" is a poem about processing the process of processing presently. Def Sound is a genre-fluid huem_n resource who is using their work to subversively shift the Black narrative back to an Afro Presentist perspective with a buffet of healthy experimental raps and poems that feed both the mind and spirit. Def synthesizes Hip Hop, poetry and his Afro Latino roots into music as a healing mechanism while weaving together a tapestry of triumph, levity, ancestry and power.
Photo by Jenny Desrosiers
Dustin Thierry
Healing is the essence of my work, next to representation. And in some ways, these two go hand in hand. When you see yourself represented, you can find connection and possibly, community. And it is my belief that within having or finding a community lies healing.
FOREMOST
FOREMOST is interested in exploring themes of limitless Black imagination and Black resilience. He hopes to create a new world not solely as an escape from racial disparity but to build a future rooted in freedom and love.
Gemynii
This piece is a tribute to size-inclusive photographer Rochelle Brock and to other dark-skinned, fat Black femmes out here that deserve to seen as art too.
Photo by Kennedi Carter
Jordiana
My piece, GIANT ROCK, is a prayer connected to the indigenous land of the Paiute and to all displaced Indigenous people of the African diaspora who are searching for a place to call home.
Kanika Gordon
Kanika Gordon is a digital media artist with a focus on telling compelling stories through a futurist lens. Mixing video with futuristic soundscapes, she creates worlds that nearly resemble our own and explore what the future could look like.
Khadija Jahmila
Cutting and splicing salvaged paper sources, I create surrealist collages—each one a self-preservation. The creation asserts place and space for Black, immigrant, queer women to live in and journey towards self and communal wholeness.
Kyle Cornish
Kyle is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores Black identity and queer community. In We Are Spores, they imagine a novel human ecosystem where death and decay give way to growth and liberation.
LA Fotografa
My work showcases and celebrates BIPOC lifestyles and fashion. In order to promote authentication and positivity, I work with an inclusive client and never retouch my pictures.
ggggrimes
ggggrimes is a Black Queer digital artist from the Bronx, now based in Philly. Their work portrays QTPoC living happy, beautiful, and sexy lives.
GWS
“Black Trans Love” is a self-portrait of BEYONDEEP (my love, Kei X. Griot and I) and represents my dream of living in peace, abundance, and safety. All the media I create promotes empowerment and love.
jamie renee williams
I like the oscillation between rising from the earth and falling back down into it because part of me knows life is very much this thrusting up, falling down, and rising again. In so many ways, these writings are musings about pain, resilience, and the power of collective love.
Photo by Kort Havens
Jazmin Jones
Jazmin Jones is a Brooklyn-based, Bay Area raised visual storyteller and thot leader with BUFU: By Us For Us. Her aim is to build platforms for more vibrant and nuanced representation of the marginalized communities she’s a part of. Working across visual mediums, her projects often echo personal experiences as a queer, Black femme waging intimacy in the post-internet era.
Laiza Graciela Fuhrmann
Through my art, I primarily aim to display a glorification of unconventional female forms, typically using oil paints and clay. During the start of the pandemic, I experimented a bit with watercolor and line work to study life, form, and meditation.
Natasha Eziquiel-Shriro
Transformation of reality and a higher consciousness are possible when we let go of fearing what is shrouded in mystery, darkness, or shadow.
@LauraNicoleHaldane
Using the pronouns they/them/we, L Is a Chicago-based Trans-disciplinary artist primarily focused on conceptual ideas around personal healing, community healing and social movements. With a background in physics and robotics, they merge technology and art mediums to reexamine how socioeconomics plays a role in access to contemporary art. Demystifying these socially accepted barriers, their art practice provides audiences with multiple entry and access points via public and web-based broadcasts, entertainment and beyond.
LeahAnn "Lafemmebear" Mitchell
I am an independent musician who identifies as a Black trans woman. I provide professional sound engineering, mixing, and music production services to clients of all caliber, offering high-quality production services and live entertainment in order to bring awareness to and amplify the daily realities, trials, and joys of the Black queer community.
Loren Adeyinka
Everyblackoneofus is in pursuit of peace at this time. Although our positionalities may differ, they create a common bond through our need for mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual restoration.
Lysz Flo
Poetry allows me to research and fully exist without apologies and sincerity. There is no place to hide within my words. I hope someone feels found, while seeing myself simultaneously through words.
Mandy Harris Williams
Mandy Harris Williams is an artist from New York City, currently living in Los Angeles. Their work seeks to get everybody the love they deserve, through creative, informational, and deconstructive gestures that span multiple mediums including video, writing and text work, performance, sound, and music.
Matt Weathers
Matt is an artist, farmer, and organizer lookin’ for portals. They encourage you to pursue portals into different realities and open some yourself.
Mia Vasquez
Mia is a Dominican, New York-based queer artist, pronouns are she/her. Her recent work BOUSCULANT is a photo documentary on emotional labor, capitalism & the Black body in the African hair braiding community. In her social documentary work, themes of immigration, identity, and liberation are often explored. She exerts intention in her body of work, using photography as a medium to raise consciousness through visual storytelling.
Michael Riley
My passion for art began when I was young and is greatly influenced by the culture where I was raised. As I continue to develop my skills, I hope to share more of my talent with the world.
Minelli Eustacio-Costa
Minelli Eustacio-Costa (she/her) is a 200hr- and Accessible Yoga-certified instructor. She guides accessible and feel-good yoga classes to feel at home in your body, often combining yoga sessions with the grounding properties of plant medicine. Her classes center non-judgment, ease, and healing through rest and traditional yoga practices.
Nicky Chue
Nicky Chue is a queer BPOC filmmaker from Berlin based in London, who spends a lot of their time creating narrative playlists & sitting in nature identifying bees.
Nneka Jackson
BLACK GIRL ON THE INTERNET is a dedication to all of the Black femmes who exist on and navigate the internet, a space in which we were never imagined and that would prefer to swallow us up.
paris "cyan" cian
I am interested in worlds, known and unknown; conversation with lineage; and story/re-tellings, transcribed within the body, transmuted in daily living. I investigate through varying notions of positive obsession, revolving in re-memory, making pleasure in embodied practices. I give myself to live(ing) ritual, an evolving development of process in Black, queer, feminist environmental methodologies that explore play as critical research.
Sabaa Zareena
Seeing Love is a brief exploration of relational breakdowns and the cyclical nature of those breakdowns. The experimental short screened as an accompanying piece within the 2019 RAW Winter showcase at SAFEhouse Arts in San Francisco.
Shelby Swann (Blackkswann)
This piece, similar to my overall body of work, speaks to Black communities and our ability to come together during times of tragedy and celebration. The little girl in this image is taking window scraps that were blown out of her home to a dumpster as a result of the Baltimore gas explosion that occurred in August of this year.
Shontel Horne
“No Rest in the West” is a reflection on the relationship we have with autonomy and perceived freedoms during a time of civil and social unrest.
Shori Sims
Shori Sims is an artist and maker currently living and working in Pittsburgh, PA. In her work, Shori investigates Black girlhood, the power of the look, and the feminine body as a sight of racialization.
T.C. Lightsy
Deep Roots Thick Stem is one of several works from my Dandelion Series (2020). Using oil paint and a little bit of gold leaf, my intention was to illustrate the power and strength of the Black woman.
Tiffany Hudgins
“Let Me Be Ugly” is a poem I wrote about needing space to feel imperfect and how therapeutic it is to accept rejection. I am not for everybody, and that’s okay.
Treva Ellison
I am interested in space and power, listening, receiving, and archives. My art practice and piece, ALLUVIAL, explores the black art of spatial production.
Tre'vell Anderson
Tre’vell Anderson is an award-winning journalist, social curator, and world changer who always comes to slay! Named to The Root’s 2020 list of the 100 most influential African Americans, the former Director of Culture and Entertainment at Out magazine has dedicated their career to centering those in the margins, grey spaces, and at the intersections of life through a pop culture lens.
Ursalee
The late.night.muse bridges elements and experiences across space and time with the alchemy of words.
Uzo Omenihu
I am a living being. I now know that my life is an expression of my purpose on this planet. Joy is our birthright. Creation can only come from love, so let’s live to create.
Whitney Stanley
I like to document Black contact zones and how our expressions of emotions are affected by the context.