An ode to a vanished New York by Evergreen’s Art Editor. Joy Garnett, you make me wish that I’d lived through your New York with you, living for “the odd moment, the expressive gesture.” Always interwoven with a lost city are the lost people, the lovers, the neighbors, the artists, the diners, the cars. And when you conclude that you are not sad at all to leave New York, what New York has become, you stab me in the heart.

— Jee Leong Koh on Joy Garnett’s short essay Leaving New York, Evergreen Review Fall/Winter 2020

Recent writing:

The Lost Narratives of A.Z. Abushady, Poet and Bee Master, [PDF] Cultural Entanglement in the Pre-Independence Arab World: Arts, Thought, and Literature, edited by Anthony Gorman and Sarah Irving (I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury, Dec. 2020)

The sea takes up residence in all parts of the city, Rusted Radishes, Issue 8, 2019

Archival projects:

thebeekingdom.art & abushadyarchive.com

Bio:

Joy Amina Garnett is an artist and writer from New York. She recently moved to Los Angeles where she’s writing a family memoir of Egypt. Her writings have appeared in Rusted Radishes (Beirut, Lebanon); Full Blede (Los Angeles, CA); Stat®rec/Statement of Record (New York & Berlin); Virilio and Visual Culture (Edinburgh University Press); Ibraaz (Kamal Lazaar Foundation); Ping-Pong (Henry Miller Memorial Library, Big Sur, CA); and The Artists’ and Writers’ Cookbook (powerHouse Books, Brooklyn, NY). Her work has been exhibited at the FLAG Art Foundation, MoMA-PS1, Whitney Museum, Artists Space, Smack Mellon, White Columns, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (all in NY), the Milwaukee Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Craft Portland (OR), Boston University Art Gallery, National Academy of Sciences (Washington, DC), and the Witte Zaal (Ghent, Belgium). She is the art director of Evergreen Review.  Garnett has received grants from Anonymous Was a Woman, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The Wellcome Trust (London, UK), and the Chipstone Foundation (Milwaukee, WI). Her work is in the permanent collections of the National Academy of Sciences, Altria, and The West Collection (Oaks, PA).