Warm Holiday Greetings, Readers!
Welcome back for Smartermarx Magazine’s Issue Two! This month, we turn our focus to Diversity. We are sincerely grateful for the tremendous response to our debut issue, Community. Your enthusiasm meant a great deal to us, and we are grateful for every message, share, and conversation it sparked. Our goal is to evolve in ways that are informative, collaborative, and genuinely useful to the artists and communities we serve.
Within this issue, we explore ways in which diversity enriches artistic life. At the ÀNI Art Academies, diversity is not a slogan. It is a practice. It is the embracing of differences, the welcoming of new ways of seeing, and the staying open to the unfamiliar. It is an opportunity to learn from each other.
Our main feature, Money Left on the Table: What Modernism Can Teach Contemporary Realists, looks at the productive tension between traditional training and modernist innovation. Rather than framing realism and modernism as incompatible, it asks what contemporary representational artists might gain from studying a movement often viewed as their opposite. This issue also introduces a new recurring series, Coded Voices: A Quiet Revolution in American Life, which explores how LGBTQ+ artists have shaped American visual culture. In my feature, How Color Traveled the World and Transformed Art, we follow the movement of color across continents and see how materials spread through trade and exchange. Ultramarine, cochineal, indigo, and madder moved because people moved, and with each connection the global palette grew richer.
Smartermarx Magazine is shaped by the people who read it. Artists, students, teachers, and art lovers across the ÀNI Academies bring perspectives that keep our mission active and evolving. Diversity is part of how we grow and how we learn together. Thank you for being here for another issue! I hope these pages add a few new colors and ideas to that ongoing conversation.
With excitement and gratitude,
Ava Ash-Waichulis
Editor-in-Chief, Smartermarx Magazine
