Spot 1: FIRE ECOLOGY
FIRE ECOLOGY
Fire Ecology is a three-year, multi-part project that spans public programs, publishing, and archival initiatives. It adopts the metaphor of Fire Ecology—the practice of maintain ecosystem health by using controlled fires to burn old growth, thereby fertilizing the soil, and clearing space for new growth to thrive.
50 Years of ART PAPERS
ATLANTA ART ECOSYSTEMS
A Letter to Our Readers
We are launching a three-year strategic plan designed to celebrate the legacy of Art Papers, to mobilize the organization’s resources in service to the cultural community, and to thoughtfully arrive at meaningful and controlled conclusion of operations in 2026, at 50 years.
Spot 2: NEW ONLINE
Alex Tatarsky: Power|Play
Frequencies
We Say What Black This Is
Spot 3: TRADE WINDS

Gray Harbor
What such water goods reveal—only to persons close enough to smell the clinging dregs of seaweed or willing to caress the faux-leather handbag tucked into a cellophane sleeve—are the sentient negotiations of supple conquest.
Stubborn Materialism: Stoppages, Blocks, and Piles
Liv Bugge: The Consequence of Touching Oil
“What is the consequence of touching oil—of coming to know it in an embodied sense? What gets destabilized when oil slips out of the category of the inhuman, even momentarily? To make an image with the body requires revaluation of the discursive function of touch. I propose that Bugge’s document of people touching oil and becoming aware of its aliveness, its animateness, awakens those people to the violent relationship humans have not only with oil, but also with the world beings that humans broadly consider inanimate.”
Logistics Make the World
Synchronizing the world of commerce means attempting to overcome time and space. A study of logistics with a photo essay on UPS by Dustin Chambers.
Spot 4: THE RULE OF LAW

An Eye for An Eye — Bambitchell’s Bugs and Beasts Before the Law
Bugs and Beasts works to remind viewers that such stories aren’t simply dusty curiosities from the footnotes of history books, but practices that fundamentally shaped how we came to understand the intersections between performance, punishment, and the social and legal limits of personhood.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan
“Echo Profiles,” “ear witnesses,” and audio forensics inform the practice of an artist and “private eye” working at the intersection of sound and politics.
Larping Adulthood: Freeville to Midlands
All My …/All My— Designing Motherhood and the Labyrinth of Reproductive Health
The breathtaking range of topics in Designing Motherhood—choices of whether to conceive children or take a pregnancy to term, infant mortality, sterilization abuse, thalidomide, cesarean birth curtains, masculine birth, baby formula, the faja (a wrap for binding a postpartum abdomen), gender reveals, the Del Em Device, car seats, carers and carrying, the tie-waist skirt, the breast pump, and so on—reveals the immense, intricate knowledge necessary to understand reproductive health, and to advocate for conditions that promote wellbeing.
Spot 5: Discourse on Queerness

Queer Intimacy: A Conversation with Diedrick Brackens
The implications of emerging fully black and fully queer into the art world, and of creating images wherein men touch.
I Like It Hot: Red, White & Royal Blue
Erotics of the Image
Why would it be important, right now, to defend such ambiguity and indeterminacy? Why might I counterpose, to an agenda straightforward, “in your face” lesbian representation, an alternate erotics of surrogacy and displacement? There is no question that we are in a period of intense commodification of identity, with an attendant demand for extremely reductive and normalizing approaches to image-making.
autosexuality
Shehab Awad takes up the term autosexuality (n.) and offers a parable of self-discovery and acceptance.
Spot 6: Creating Liminal Space

Itziar Barrio: Stella!—working on, and through You Weren’t Familiar but You Weren’t Afraid
You Weren’t Familiar but You Weren’t Afraid was filmed in multiple cities and makes overt narrative references to three films: A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), La estrategia del caracol (The Strategy of the Snail) (1993) and Accattone (1961).
Interview with Carrie Mae Weems
Frequencies
Amanda Grae Platner: It’s Still Not Me, It’s You
In It’s Still Not Me, It’s You at Atlanta’s Echo Contemporary Art, Platner’s self-portraits and installations invite the viewer into her world. She coaxes empathy through a variety of strategies, some that are playful and interactive, others that involve showing pain.
Spot 7: OUR OWN BACK YARD

The Perpetual Almost
Bump and Grind / Search and Destroy
Kelly Taylor Mitchell: Masking Practice
Krista Clark — After Barkley
Even Clark’s techniques appear to be sly allusions that further enmesh her suite of references. In many of her works on paper, such as Play 1, Verse 1, the artist has created a subtle layering of paper through cutting and ripping—terms also used to label maneuvers in basketball.