Candor Arts
Chicago, IL | USA
Candor Arts is a resource for the design and production of artist books. We publish books about learning and healing. As an evolving experiment, we attempt to develop ethical support for authors, collaborators, and partners within a hyper-capitalist society. We work from the stance that capitalism is unsustainable—that it will forever encourage a prioritization of money and profit over the wellness of anyone, with great inequity on the bases of race, class, gender, ability, or any mode in which a group of people can be othered. We attempt to build a support system that works to reverse that disproportion.
Organized by acclaimed writer, photographer, and critic Teju Cole, the exhibition Go Down Moses presents a reinterpretation of the Museum of Contemporary Photography’s permanent collection that can be understood as a visual tone poem. Exploring elemental themes of movement, chaos, freedom, and hope, Cole uses the photographic archive to interweave the past and present, suggesting an aesthetic approach to understanding both human suffering and compassion.
This original publication accompanying the exhibition features reproductions of key images, as well as an interview with Cole and MoCP Chief Curator and Deputy Director Karen Irvine about his curatorial process.
Krista Franklin – Under the Knife
Part memoir, part treatise, part collage and experiment, Krista Franklin’s Under the Knife is an excavation; a dig at the sites of the construction and demolition of the poet/artist’s selves.
Franklin plays fast and loose with fact at the crossroads of the history of her maternal line and her own in a ruptured conversation about inheritance and the generational traumas that blossom in the body. Under the Knife hiccups, cross-fades and stops midsentence as Franklin cuts through the illusion of memory, the pathologies of history, and the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.
sashiko is a collection of writing by the late emi kuriyama, who passed away at the age of 24 in 2016. emi was a prolific writer whose vibrant curiosity led her to produce an expansive body of work that insisted on play and careful collaborations as ways to live. sashiko consists of the late writer’s unfinished novella, a compilation of absurd, dark, and magical vignettes loosely based on her lived reality. Also included is emi’s Cal Arts Creative Writing MFA thesis proposal, addressed to Douglas Kearney, explaining the intentions with her novella. Throughout sashiko, movement principles such as swimming, running, and ghosting help readers understand the connection and conundrum of exile, fugitivity, and belonging. emi’s tender and peculiar voice is felt in personal emails addressed to artists Jennifer Moon, Laub, and Christine Wertheim, each of whom guided her towards cosmological expansion and love, and in whom she found hope.
sashiko is organized by emi’s friend and collaborator, artist iris yirei hu, who wrote the foreword to this book.
Honey Pot Performance – Ma(s)king Her: Black Feminist Futures
Ma(s)king Her is a dance theater work addressing the absence of women of color in speculative fiction as empowered future beings and journeywomen. Aligned with AfroSurrealism and Black feminist thought, this modern folktale emphasizing the urgency of creating alternative worlds and economies of value and need, particularly for women of color in a world that often subjugates their collective presence to silence and/or invisibility.
