#unmonumentalwest (Wilshire Blvd)
I was just saying to my friend Shelley Marlow : While on a long walk in my new hood something came over me. All at once I felt the gorgeous insanity of LA, the big wild dirty, the down and out sadness, the fizz and fun and endless sprawl and palm trees and motor oil of everything. It reminded me how NY and Bkyn used to feel in the 80s, especially in the summer when the tar was melting on the roof and the street simultaneously, fire hydrants spewing, people sweating like fountains fanning themselves on front stoops in the heat, and the smell of onions frying, and lots of garbage everywhere. Also dance music. Random fireworks, loud helicopters overhead sometimes, that feeling of engines gunning, a screeching metropolis.
Joy Amina Garnett is an artist and writer who lives in Los Angeles. She is currently working on a family memoir of Egypt. Garnett is the Art Editor of Evergreen Review.
Recent pubs:
“Leaving New York” (short story/creative non-fiction) Evergreen Review Fall/Winter 2020.
“The Lost Narratives of A.Z. Abushady, Poet and Bee Master,” 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. [PDF]
Information about her archive projects can be found at thebeekingdom.art and abushadyarchive.com
Garnett’s work has been exhibited at the FLAG Art Foundation, MoMA-PS1, Whitney Museum, Artists Space, Smack Mellon, White Columns, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (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). Her artwork and writings have appeared in an assortment of publications that include: Rusted Radishes (Beirut, Lebanon); Full Blede (Los Angeles, CA); Virilio and Visual Culture (Edinburgh Univ. Press); Ibraaz (Kamal Lazaar Foundation); Ping Pong (Henry Miller Memorial Library, Big Sur, CA); and The Artists’ and Writers’ Cookbook (powerHouse Books, Brooklyn, NY).
Garnett has been awarded grants by Anonymous Was a Woman, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The Wellcome Trust, and the Chipstone Foundation. Her work is in the permanent collections of the National Academy of Sciences, Altria, and The West Collection (Oaks, PA).
You must be logged in to post a comment.