She may send screenshots to friends or consult relationship advice creators to make sense of a text such as, miss you, crazy week thou. X. In this tiny message, intimacy, self-focus, social orientation, and certainty might all be inferred. Yet what makes dating a battlefield is that there are two levels of inference happening. The crush converts an internal state into language, and our leading lady converts that language back into an estimate of his internal state. If language contains information about the speaker, audience, situation, and psychological orientation, she may read the message holistically: he misses me, therefore he has feelings. From a psychological perspective, however, the better question is which properties of his language can legitimately function as evidence about his mental and relational state, and which remain inaccessible. Computational psychology allows us to move beyond intuition by turning language into measurable features.

Pennebaker et al. (2003) distinguish several ways of analysing natural language. Human judges can code themes, but this is subjective and difficult to scale. Automated approaches instead quantify features of text. Dictionary-based methods such as Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) assign words to predefined linguistic and psychological categories, including pronouns, emotion, social processes, causal language, insight, and time. This converts language into behavioural data. Yet the psychologically revealing information may not sit in the declaration “I miss you” itself. Pennebaker et al. distinguish linguistic content, what someone says, from linguistic style, how they say it. Compare I miss you but I have work and I don’t know what I want with I miss you. When can we see each other? We should plan something. The emotional content is similar, but the speaker positions the relationship differently.

Women are often accused of obsessing over tiny details in messages or reading too deep, but Pennebaker gives those details some psychological legitimacy. Function words, including pronouns, articles, prepositions, conjunctions and auxiliary verbs, often tell us less about topic than about perspective, reference, self-focus and social orientation. First-person singular pronouns such as I and me can be associated with self-focus, whereas we may indicate interdependence or group identity. Even the difference between “I had a good time” and “we had such a good time” potentially reveals how a speaker positions an experience in relation to another person. Pennebaker et al. review research in which greater we use occurred in more interdependent and satisfied married couples, whereas greater I use characterized more autonomous couples. Yet pronouns are not fixed psychological codes: we can also signal emotional distancing depending on context. Imagine, then, that over dinner a man mentions inviting a woman to Italy, but later texts: “I will go to Italy for the summer. I am not focused on dating at the moment. I have a lot going on.” Her messages instead ask, “Should we go to Italy?” and “When are we seeing each other?” A word-count model could quantify this divergence in I/we language and ask whether they are constructing the imagined future from different social perspectives. It still could not conclude that one person loves more or is more avoidant. First-person plural can indicate group identity but can also sometimes signal emotional distancing. Linguistic markers are therefore probabilistic indicators rather than one-to-one codes for mental states.

This limitation matters because language can provide evidence about a mind without giving direct access to it. A woman interpreting a text is doing something like a psychological model: estimating an unobservable state from an observable signal. Yet neither she nor the model can know whether “I have a lot going on” reflects avoidance, genuine stress, an attempt to soften rejection, or something else. Dictionary methods such as LIWC are especially limited here because they largely treat text as a “bag of words,” ignoring order and much of the surrounding context. Distributional methods such as Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) add another level by using patterns of word co-occurrence across documents: according to the distributional hypothesis, words appearing in similar contexts tend to have similar meanings. Rather than asking only whether someone uses love or we, LSA allows us to ask what semantic neighbourhoods those words repeatedly inhabit. Modern context-sensitive embeddings go further still by allowing the representation of the same word to change according to the sentence in which it appears.

The same methods become especially revealing across time. Seraj, Blackburn and Pennebaker (2021) analysed more than one million Reddit posts from 6,803 users surrounding romantic breakups and found detectable linguistic changes up to three months before the breakup, peaking around the event and returning toward baseline roughly six months later. These included increases in I-words, we-words and cognitive-processing language. Pennebaker’s expressive-writing research similarly found that shifts in pronoun perspective and increasing use of causal and insight language were associated with better outcomes following emotional upheaval. The important point is not that pronouns mechanically create recovery, but that changes in language may register changes in how an experience is cognitively represented. This moves the girls from asking what one “miss you” text reveals about a man’s mind to asking how linguistic patterns change as two people construct, endure and eventually reinterpret the relationship over time.

As a woman who has been in a situationship, I coped by writing a book. My poetry collection can therefore be treated as a small illustrative corpus: not proof of a computational result, but material on which the methods above could be applied. The book moves through three chapters, and the semantic centre changes with it. In Chapter One, desire is organised around ambiguity and the other person as something to decode. In “Aves Azules,” the speaker describes “naively thinking that every feeling has a definitive title” before conceding that something can exist even when “lo que somos no tenga nombre” (Alvarez, 2026). In “Origin Story,” the lover remains embedded in sensation through “the lingering smell of a lover,” while the relationship becomes an environment described as “aridly-avoidant soil.” Chapter One therefore mirrors the original situationship problem: without a stable label, the speaker searches language, sensation, and metaphor for evidence of what the relationship means.

By Chapter Two, the focus shifts from decoding him toward examining what her own mind is doing with him. “Sticky Papers” grants “permission to turn Cupid’s piercing arrow into my pen,” while “Perfidious Albion and a Feathered Serpent” asks, “¿Me gustas o me inspiras?” (Alvarez, 2026). The relationship is becoming not only an emotional event but an object of metacognition and artistic analysis. The book-end pair “Heads” and “Tails” passages deepen that movement by presenting parallel self-descriptions with different semantic emphases: Heads foregrounds “a bad habit for overthinking”, whereas Tails includes “three friends that I text about everything,”. By Chapter Three, the man has not disappeared, but he is no longer the sole organising centre. “Indicator Species” reframes sensitivity itself: “To be this sensitive / is not weakness / it’s ecological,” while the collection ends by acknowledging unrequited love yet returning action to the speaker through “refloreciendo” and “I sigo chambeando and wash it myself” (Alvarez, 2026). An LSA-style analysis could operationalise this chronology by treating poems or chapters as documents and asking how their semantic positions change: from desire, ambiguity, and the lover; to questioning, interpretation, and writing; and finally toward sensitivity, ecology, friendship, creativity, and agency. A complementary LIWC analysis could track pronouns, cognitive-processing terms, social words, and emotion categories across the same chronology.

The situationship began with me attempting to infer a mind from language and ends with the possibility of someone else attempting to infer mine. That circularity, or situationship loop, captures both the power and limit of computational language analysis. Texts can reveal what we attend to, how we position ourselves in relation to others, and how those patterns reorganise over time. Words leave measurable traces of attention, perspective, emotion, and change. They can show us what someone keeps returning to, whether the imagined future is organised around I or we, and how the semantic landscape of an experience shifts over time.

Yet neither a message nor a poem is a transparent transcription of the mind that produced it. Language leaves measurable traces of the mind, not a complete map of it: it cannot tell us exactly what someone thinks or feels, but it can show us how they are attending to, framing, and making sense of their (romantic) experience. No algorithm can take “miss you, crazy week thou. X” and reveal, definitively, what a man feels.

Which is ultimately unfortunate.

But perhaps also the reason we keep writing, and keep dating, despite the unpredictablility of both .

References

Alvarez, A. V. (2026). Panty Spliffs.

Landauer, T. K., & Dumais, S. T. (1997). A solution to Plato’s problem: The latent semantic analysis theory of acquisition, induction, and representation of knowledge. Psychological Review, 104(2), 211–240.

Mihalcea, R., Biester, L., Boyd, R. L., Jin, Z., Perez-Rosas, V., Wilson, S., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2024). How developments in natural language processing help us in understanding human behaviour. Nature Human Behaviour, 8(10), 1877–1889.

Pennebaker, J. W., & King, L. A. (1999). Linguistic styles: Language use as an individual difference. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1296–1312.

Pennebaker, J. W., Mehl, M. R., & Niederhoffer, K. G. (2003). Psychological aspects of natural language use: Our words, our selves. Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 547–577.

Seraj, S., Blackburn, K. G., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2021). Language left behind on social media exposes the emotional and cognitive costs of a romantic breakup. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(7), e2017154118.

Panty Spliffs: a long and thinly rolled joint worn as a high fashion artifact, typically paired with underwear or soft garments. 66% tobacco, 1% lipgloss, 33% flowers.

Dearly beloveds,

Last week I went to a conference and listened to a talk about the stereotype of the mad genius. For centuries we’ve associated artistic expression and creativity with mental illness. But research over the last thirty years points to something narrower: the only cohort of creatives actually more vulnerable to depression and suicide are writers… specifically female writers. It’s called the Sylvia Plath effect. Researchers, looking for why this one group keeps surfacing as the lone mad genius, suspect societal factors. Frankly, artists need to be witnessed, and the truth is we don’t earnestly read women’s semantic work. A painting or a sculpture can be taken in at a glance, through both bottom-up and top-down processing but poetry and storytelling ask you to sit and listen for an undefined length of time. A body can be praised, degraded, judged, sanctified, dismissed, admired, healed, broken, and absorbed without even listening to the words coming from it.

Luckily, I’ve always had eyes on my work. The people I surround myself with encourage me to write and show me that they paid attention to the details I yearn to share. I don’t know who I would be if I didn’t write, if I didn’t share my poem in the second grade that made the high school english literature teacher cry. Writers ask to be seen so they can show you something about yourself.

Panty Spliffs began as poems I started writing and sharing on my Substack in early 2023. I spent 2024 editing my intimate high thoughts with feedback from subscribers and close friends. In May 2025, the first proof of the book came to materiality in Mexico City, through the creative direction, support, and trust of Justin Reyna of OTRO, with art direction and execution by Miranda Orozco of Simple Moo. I performed the poem Aves Azules in the cashmere panties I’d designed and fabricated, smoking a spliff, passing the prototype around the room.

After a year of production, Panty Spliffs is ready to be worn.

A finite, limited run of the fashion artifact will be hot off the press in three weeks. Thank you to those who have been patient, every page is a different material, chosen to match the story it carries. Ars longa, vita brevis went into making this artwork. I invite you to collect one for yourself, or to gift one to someone in your life. What arrives in hand is more than the website can show you.

Collect Panty Spliffs

This fashion artifact is an interactive experience to roll textures in your hands, unfold layers of hallucinations, let words burn sensually.

In a world that rushes us through our feelings, PS presents a microcosm where emotions that linger are a novelty.

At its heart, Panty Spliffs is a meditation on how feelings can be a luxury item.

Preorder Panty Spliffs

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Central to my artistic practice is giving context to my stories by telling them with my body— whether that is through dance, fashion, film or with my fingers on my harp.

Here is a little teaser of a short film we have made from one of the poems featured in the forthcoming book.

Technicolor Swamp is about letting go in liminal spaces—a reversal of baptism. It explores what it means to dissolve human expectations and become part of the decaying natural world. Speak to me in righteous words, and I’ll look at you with rhizomatic feelings. The descent into the swamp becomes an act of surrender, reminding us that intimacy without reward is still valuable. Within the filth of existence, like lichen, a union of fungus and alga, being free is not an act of preservation but of transformation.

#2 If you had hope- reflect, draw, and make a map on what a real alignment to your values would look like in a political candidate and start looking for them now. Creativity is improved when you don’t settle for ideation but actual execution of the project. 

#3 If you posted a sticker, stick it to a commitment in your planner of one community meeting a season that doesn’t include a hobby-centric event. Serotonin is significant in goal setting and motivation, helps with emotional resilience, and encourages more long term thinking than dopamine. 

#4 If you are a woman worried about your body- weaponize it, withhold it, work towards securing birth control in critical states now. This is less of a brain hack and more of a vibe check a la Julia Fox cuz I’m still just a girl in STEM.

#5 If you are concerned about the environment, invest in schools and support teachers’ needs. Educate children do not waste your precious brain energy and mitochondria on boomers.

#6 If you feel attacked or separately embarrassed, DANCE. I will speak to dancing’s effects on mood and neuroplasticity a thousand times, google it and groove it.

#7 If you feel apathetic or checked out, reset your empathy centers. Our ability to modulate our emotions is super supported by the poetic anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Specifically, the ACC addresses how we manage or steer clear of unpleasant emotions. Tips to restore it would be to take breaks, breaths, and baths.

#8 If you feel tricked, work on your theory of mind (ToM). Think about what voting even means and to whom votes are intended for when people and lands are being desecrated. ToM is the ability to recognize and respect different perspectives and reduces the likelihood of dismissing or violating others' values. It is how we get sanctity. You can improve it by reading more fiction and people outside of your own group’s stories.

Because I want a metaphor for being enthralled by the dark

Dreaming so deep a bat might bite

Why me, Nosferatu?

Did I stare too longingly at a gargoyle?

Speak to me in righteous words and I’ll look at you with rhizomatic feelings

What if I told you that I’m not worried how much stone I’d have to claw to get back out

That the notions of names doesn’t even really matter

Instinctively or naively, touched a creature between the horns

Melt my face, make me liminal

Chromatize me in the shadows

I just want more spit

I’ll let go if you row my body down to the technicolor swamp

A place where spiders go and unarmed angels fall

Where cat eyes don’t have to work so hard

Why now, am I nefarious still?

Did I stand too close to his carved eyes?

Speak to me in righteous words and I’ll look at you with rhizomatic feelings

Could you remind me that I’m just bones to be buried in moss

That the root of desire is thicker than blood

A prayer or an entrancement, awakened my iridescent skin

Remember my face, make me as sacred as a beetle

Grime my wings in the marsh

I just want to emerge as clean as lichen

Enough musk to be a smoke signal

Sibylline instant desire

The perfect nose, the right clothes

Rich empire, two possessions

Name and relationships

Noble conqueror, a thousand hearts

Your name and your relationships

Love spelled with vowels borrowed from power

Milked skin that you bottled into oil

So luxurious with emotions

Dissolve a pearl when it pleases me

Armor rusts when you don't take it off

An aleatory chemical composition

The opposite of fire is no fire, not water

Too foreign to understand

Tomb raid to make the next move

Only thing I follow is a zombie dog

Keep your spoils but show me the sand

Is it, Dionysus or Osiris

Am I, Venus or Isis

Since then, you miss me

Close enough, you kiss me

As if never had been a forever

Would you cross to me

But if forever was a never

Could you worship me too

It's not a bite if you know how to whisper to a snake

There are more ways to fall than onto a sword

Pray to the panther at yanaguana and to the river named Guadalupe

Collect bugs that tell the truth

I sit in his chair in our Eden where I don’t mention us

Pretend I’m in the universe where our paths never crossed

You’re irrelevant when his fire fighting years have now taken teeth

I take his annual photograph through the mirror

We get high and speak in flowers

He has to always be here to fill the bird bath

A toast with fizzy water in glass bottles can’t stop the clock

He asks me questions about who's been in my love notes

I don’t answer, why ruin a perfectly good breeze

Won’t waste time explaining knots on a string

Or open up the can of worms of your silent soliloquies

When he’s too old to go for a bike ride in this heat

He goes into the kitchen to cut more slices

He knows what I like, what I’m like when I’m comfortable

42 years younger he might not know how calm I can be

I’ve lost my marbles and let them roll away

The radiation changed the way poems roll off his tongue

We listen to the cicadas shed their shells

The desire to bottle the sound of the sun settling into the day

Preserve the hissing in a jar as evidence that this secret garden is real

Like a molt showing when and where a change occurred in timespace

Lick my fingers, makes me miss you

Deja vu collects on my brow when I see the condensation on my Topo Chico

I remember how in a year you’ll feed me pomegranate from the sweat of your palm

Lick my fingers, makes me think of you less

Get to the rind and savor the sal de gusao

Let that taste of the maguey linger

Ask myself what is it about salted sweetness, about sharing fruit with men

Allostasis is the efficiency at all levels of output rather than a set point goal of homeostasis. It is the process we maintain stability through adjusting internal conditions to meet current and anticipated needs. This protective and adaptive process of allostasis is about regulating the body via the continuous manipulation of internal models to match the external environment across modalities and contexts. Homeostasis aims to keep internal conditions constant which would mean we might, like, die— but luckily allostosis allows us to effectively respond to stressors and environmental changes. You reach homeostasis through allostasis with the latter being the mechanism in predicting your environment through the minimization of prediction errors.

Imagine you see an alluring guy alone at the ice cream parlour and you want to go say hi. Based on previous experiences with cute strangers, your brain predicts the stress or excitement associated with this interaction. Then anticipated sensory changes kick in like your brain will anticipate a potential increase in sweat, a common response to stress, or your digestive system might slow down leaving that butterflies in the stomach feeling. The brain modulates physiological systems like the hormone, metabolic, and immune as well as neuroendocrine and autonomic control. Your brain then initiates adaptive responses such as releasing hormones to make you confident, behavioural cues like unconsciously adjusting your posture to prepare for a social engagement, mental preparation such as rehearsing or preparing what your opening line might be.

You walk over and have a chat and during the conversation your brain is still monitoring the feedback in what he says back to you and your own sensory experiences. If that hard working brain picks up on positive feedback like he smiles at you handsomely then it might quell those nerves to make you more at ease. If he stresses you out more thats your brain ramping up the stress response because it received neutral or negative feedback. Stop imagining, all of that is just allostasis predicting and managing the physiological and behavioural changes associated with the stress and excitement of talking to a cute guy.

Brain anticipation of needs and the preparation to meet needs before they arrive is a part of internal signaling called interoception, or the brain's awareness of physical sensations. The brain makes predictive models of sensory changes that result from allostasis. “Luckily, humans are often unaware of the interoception drama going on inside our bodies” Feldman Barrett said. I penned in my notes cute but **complex** systems.

However, the brain makes us aware of allostatic conditions as affect or low dimensional summaries of internal states that manifest themselves as feelings. Our mood is based within affect, underlying feelings and emotions, that is linked to interoception. Allostasis is less efficient when we are tired or metabolically compromised. For instance, uncertainty is metabolically expensive. I scribed in my notebook margins situationships are exhausting and $$$.

After running resting state connectivity analysis on Macaque brain regions, Feldman Barrett and her team can point out that the Default Mode Network and Salience Network are involved in allostasis (Kleckner 2017 and ongoing/current study Zhang et al.). The Hippocampus and Hypothalamus which have more endocrine structures, are notorious for their function in memory and spatial mapping alongside hormonal regulation. Feldman Barrett’s new results suggest that the hypothalamus’s role within hormone regulation is an allostatic function that is coupled with the hippocampus. Thus, social and spatial mapping spawn from allostatic navigations. The rats that are able to memorize routes to safety are perhaps using their hippocampus to not predict a spatial map but to predict the best way to reach efficiency.

Feldman Barrett is one of the top .1% cited researchers on the brain as an organ and stated that the brain's job is not thinking, feeling, or sensing, but its most important job is regulating a complicated body. Your body is at the core of your mind. Actions and experiences begin as memories that are assembled to be similar to present. That's what predictive coding is and it’s what our brain is doing all the time to make sense of reality. Prediction signals momentary ad hoc categories or possible futures tested constantly against signals from the body’s sensing surfaces. Your experience of the world is your memory of it; every experience is a remembered past, current predictions, and sensory input. Signals become meaningful when in relationship to one another. When you make a mistake your brain learns by encoding failures and bad predictions to sustain itself in this ever changing world. 

She ended the talk speaking on the limbic system, with limbic actually meaning bridge. On her train of debunking sensationalist science, she deconstructed the notion that the limbic system is this highly-reactive-overly-emotional part of the brain that needs cognitive control. Instead, recent research would suggest that the limbic system is probably a powerful predictive core that is actually doing the control.

Predictive coding is quite poetic in nature. Imagine yourself back at that ice cream parlour with the cutie but now you know thinking is the result from a long process of predictive computations and the relational realism between the self and the environment. You ask him where he is from. You know someone you don’t like from there. This might trigger an immediate emotional response, you might unconsciously adjust your posture becoming more closed off, calming neurotransmitters might be released to counteract the negative emotional signal, your brain might encourage a polite response to maintain social harmony or you might shift focus to other aspects of the conversation. Meanwhile you’re still talking to this guy and your brain is still continuously monitoring both your internal state and external cues from him. Yet, he’s also reading you and taking it in. His heart rate might of increased from perceived negative feedback to your disappointment in his response. Back and forth y’all tweak and respond- assess and predict.

Edited by: Ryan Slaby

The artist collaborates strongly art dealer and curator Antonio Del Valle Lago as well as operates out of her studio. A Cancer born in 1995, she is influenced by the writings of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the storytelling of reggaeton. Nestled between Cézzane and Khalo, Romero’s portraits layered with symbolism emerge within the distinct stylistic vein of contemporary Latinx creators like Maria Fragoso and Nadia Waheed. Rooted in a blend of therapeutic recall, imagining, and honesty; the symbols she uses are also either nostalgic or magical depending on the viewer's orientation to the colonization of Latina America and the subsequent diaspora.

For example in her painting I do not know if it is a memory or un sueño, pero aveces siento el Rio Magdalena en mi cuello Romero paints her cousin as a sort of embodiment of Lilith and Madremonte in a Colombian landscapes that holds objects like coffee barrels, bananas, and machetes. Nestled in the diabolical river that was the site of the banana massacre in 1928, they are floating reminders of her homeland’s infiltration. This river as Romero says in our interview is the “veins and heart to the country, the river that feeds and nourishes the country”. For a full analysis and deep dive into this work please listen to the podcast conversation we had about the piece.

Audio Guide 

Transcript

Art as a Primary Reward

 Avoiding gestalts- the most convincing, or perhaps interesting, argument for me that art is a primary reward, something like food and sex that is necessary to the survival of the species comes from the work of Richard Prum. His hypothesis of aesthetic radiation, or diverse preferences produce diverse species, reimagines human development outside of the historically violent logic of evolutionary scientists. 

Prum studied Manakins, a cohort of beautiful birds with a bunch of sub species that posses ornate tails that produce dancing movements. These Manakins develop these elaborate traits albeit they are maladaptive to evolution at some point the beautiful displays make it harder to fly. Yet the preference for the beauty and dramatic movement is continuously exaggerated across generations. Beauty happens. 

If we reorient and integrate desire into evolutionary theory, this might suggest humans don’t pick traits because it means strongest and healthiest ex: symmetry isn’t a significant indicator of good health (Pound 2014). Rather mate selection can also come from finding aesthetic pleasure produced by the chosen partner which is measured by arousal and valence (Osgood 1974) . I find it very unconvincing that all the skulls of ancestral humans scattered out on the walls of the British Natural History Museum all desired to fuck for the same reasons. The Manakins are a good compliment show that survival can also be driven by the ability to produce aesthetics, sometimes the girlies just like something about their mate.  

The work done by  Daisy Fancourt through super large population studies in the U.K. is a really wonderful series of studies that have examined the role of arts engagement and emotional regulation (avoidance, approach and self-development) as well as perceived self efficacy, esteem, etc. In a longitudinal study on children aged 10-16 and arts engagement through exposure ( think museums or classes) and technique ( actual art making) the results yielded children who had arts training / perceived ability and arts engagement at age 10 had less behavioral problems and higher self efficacy by age 16. Thus we see a reward in learning. Unfortunately and surprisingly socio economic status is a HUGE confounding factor in access however when controlled for this was true regardless of SES. 

Fancourt also did a study during lockdown on 40k British people about using art for emotional regulation strategies of avoidance, rumination, and self development . It showed evidence that using art for emotional regulation is influenced by training- accessing artworks either physically or cognitively. E.g. through exposure and guided rehearsal so that you have semantic structures and other things that teach you about how to use art or how to read art. This perhaps evidence that art could have primary function ( survival) , but may be more secondary ( monetary, cognitive, social) since it requires a meaning making in addition to the object? or still something else? 

side note: in Fancourt’s studies because when controlling for SES + access we see that women and lower SES make more use of art for emotional regulation strategies-

Art as Secondary Reward 

Primary rewards tend to be associated with our amygdala and secondary rewards- things that are learned needs like money and were developed later to accompany complex cognitive processes of decision making and evaluating stimuli are associated with the Orbitofrontal Cortex. Evaluating a stimulus in context means looking at a work of art, looking at its details, deciding if you like it, deciding if it holds any value, etc.

The OFC is a  network, and we are still figuring out how all these parts talk to each other. But what we do know is parts of our olfactory system run through since the OFC is in the prefrontal cortex, it has to do with decision making, sensory perception, evaluative judgment, and reward ergo it is involved in aesthetic perception. 

In findings of investigations on the role of effort, intention, and duplication of an artwork we see the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) lighting up like a Christmas tree only under certain contexts. Kirk did another study in 2009 and showed participants artworks made by artists and others by photoshop. People's OFCs were more activated when looking at art vs photoshop images, showing a mechanism for making a judgment in an *artistic context*.

Likewise when (Huang 2011) people were shown paintings done by Rembrandt or done by trained prodigy showed activation in OFC and increased response at authentic works vs copies. This suggests again that the OFC is a mechanism for turning on evaluative judgments in an artistic context. These studies highlight a structural description of why there might be cognitive evidence of aesthetic evaluation happening in a new brain region associated with secondary rewards. 

Furthermore, in a study conducted on architecture students vs regular grad students (Kirk 2009) participants were shown images of black and white pictures of faces and buildings. When hooked up to and fMRI we see similar brain activity when all participants look at faces however when architecture students looked at buildings, we saw way more activity in the OFC. This shows us expertise is wrapped up in this conversation of an aesthetic judgement and that there is something happening in this part of the brain that is heightened through trained experience and discernment.

In one of my favourite studies on aesthetic chills (our autonomic nervous system response to a highly moving stimuli), Salimpoor 2011 had participants submit their favourite song on iTunes. They used the other participants favourite songs as a control, then hooked up participants to PETs (inject people with radioactive substance to track dopamine), FMRI (to see blood flow movement aka indicating brain activity), other psychophysiology measures ( heart rate skin etc, and then behavioural reports (participants confirm how they FELT during the trials). When people listened to their jam or other reported highly moving songs, essentially what we see is dopamine freaking flood into the right nucleus accumbens (NAcc)  ( included in the OFC). I think we all know that feeling of euphoria accompanying the beat hitting . This study also showed anticipation in the right caudate and the actual experience happening in the NAcc.

Studies done on lesions or people who have had strokes or other brain damage can tell us not just the brain area of activity but how that activity might play out. A study done by participants with right hemisphere lesions were shown a Jackson Pollock and Kahlo’s Two Fridas showed that damage to the right hemisphere gave different perceptions of abstractness, accuracy, and stroke quality – these evaluative aspects are a mixture of formal-perceptual and content-conceptual qualities of an artwork. For example, formal perceptual would be what are the hue colours of Pollock’s lines and what are their complexity, content conceptual would be what is the symbolism of the two seated figures or how realistic is the painting. This is a roundabout way to say that preferences and aesthetic evaluations are not linked to one region.

Thus, the data indicates in my mind at least, although art is a need it really is kind of something else. During an IAEA 2024 symposium with Marcus Nadal, Helmut Leder and Anjan Chatterjee, they opened up the idea whether or not art is purely limited to humans. While there is evidence of animals admiring sunsets and other beauty things, Chatterjee put forth this notion that humans’ behavioural niche is our ability of language. Is art perhaps an extension of this adaptive trait? As Alva Noë would say, art is a strange tool and perhaps it’s all in the eye of the beholder and it’s a combination of all the above.

Also the days of knowing you are packed with the potential of any weathered feeling, and that feels real

The way our words shine on each other sometimes feels like that the golden hour is the same shade of our conversations

Therefore it seems okay to go from spooky to jolly because I get a feast of you

So I let you carve me up just to feel your light inside of me

In the same way the earth grows quiet during this time so does my need to be adored by anyone but your topaz eyes

Maybe because pomegranates are my favourite fruit, they make me work for access, I look forward to the fruits of darkness from your brooding mood, picking out each seed of truth in your glow-in-the-dark venom

On that note, why was the most delectable tea chrysanthemum assigned to the penultimate month, similarly to how I wanna make you hot and feel it in my throat 

It’s also impossible to deny that 11 feels like magic or some sort of star stuff aligned 

But really no matter if the tree is lush or bare I know it's true name and yearn to hold its branches just like the cycles of the man who under the Beaver moon I whisper I love you like November to.

The fall part is that you won’t love me until you're in the November of your life

Women like me deserve more than men who wait till they get to the finish line of December to choose whatever is around

I don't want to be a what if memory that resurfaces like the coming of every January

Because courageous women with heavy hearts don’t find men of their same season since being strong enough to hold them is a daunting task in February 

Successful men have been told they don’t have to harvest with us instead there’s always a younger flower that will come to blossom for you to March over 

I cry April showers since it doesn’t matter if I check the boxes, nothing I can do will make you grow but instead you make me your token May- be

Only because it was easier to have a June where you don’t have to work and who wants to anyways when there is a July of splashing legs around

I could imagine the idea of loving me might feel like biting into August gold, but rewarding things shouldn't be so easy

I didn't do anything wrong nor dangerous, I just am incapable of shrinking myself seeing that if every year of my life was a day I’m already at 31 and can no longer fit into September

Lucky for me the veil will be thin in October and I’ll be able to make peace with death and let my devotion to you wither on the vine, thus I won't have to feel that I love you like November anymore, even if I already do.

Her creations contain multitudes that activate many sensory arousals that excite everyone differently even if we all recognize that thing. Clara has a background in womenswear and her practice was born out of an interest in packaging, interior design, and product design. She also smashes it as the resident artist at the V&A’s the Shed, Design Gallery where she holds an open studio and workshops where visitors can watch her tinker. Her process naturally lends itself to working with children and visitor learning experiences as it fosters tactile play by using the assemblage and reassemblage of everyday objects to stimulate divergent thinking. Divergent thinking is fluency- the ability to develop a large number of ideas, flexibility- the ability to come up with ideas in multiple categories, originality- the ability to produce unusual or unique ideas, and elaboration- the ability to adapt abstract ideas into realistic solutions. 

Divergent thinking is a marker of creativity and to measure it us psychologists of Art sometimes use the Alternative Use Task, a test that asks you to think of as many uses as possible for a simple object like a box or piece of rope. While I know if my friend indulged me in an AU task she would excel, she is not just highly creative and devilishly stylish; there is something spectacular about the way she operates. Her Hong Kong born grit and knowledge of multi-meaning intersections and palimpsest-esque spaces is seen in how she uses innovative technologies to reimagine pre-existing materials. 

Because Clara’s practice wears so many accessories, I was excited to hear her talk more about her work at the Business of Creativity Panel during London Fashion Week hosted by Highsnobiety with @fashionroadman Odunayo Oyo as the moderator.  While wearing Scar Kennedy and Emily Lamb, Chu introduced herself and her artistic impulse to animate mundane objects. When asked when she could pinpoint her moment of success, with composed earnesty she responded that it's not just looking at end sale prices, but is at the level at which you are able to involve the community. What is so real about this is that her work is largely based on the reusing of kitchenware materials. The kitchen is where we make the things that congregate us to share. From their past lives to future outfits, Clara’s works are inclusive. Her practice is inclusive in the way she shares her process and expertise. There is a cheeky character to her work that abolishes highbrow and lowbrow binaries. 

In the days following the panel, I had a timely studio visit with another artist whose modus operandi could also be said to be reimagining no longer deemed utilitarian objects- albeit with a completely different praxis and material outcome.  Also UK based, James Lomax’s repertoire of objects include found goods that were born to be containers and barriers. He’ll take concrete casts of luxury boxes that are packed with political implications or create scarred prints of chain link fences that create a line between abstraction and knowing-hood as your eyes try to climb them. I am particularly drawn to the ratio between the texture created by the chain links and the cropped place they occupy in the composition. His artworks in general are infused with a graceful intuition and theoretical reasoning. 

Prior to a studio tour, I might not have known to call his Untitled (System XII) 2023 that I saw at Minor Attractions at Borough Yards during Frieze week a painting. However, once I sat down with the artist wearing  a formerly-blue-now-faded-into-a-desert-purple button down I began to understand that his process and ultimate presentation goals are rooted in the lexicon of painting over sculpture. Found cardboard with both repetitive and miscellaneous markings etched into its fibrous skin goes through a series of casting transformations. Litter of price tag stickers and footprints of usage is picked up as texture but relayed as concrete color gradients in the end project. Ultimately, the object’s embodiment is the collapse of its facade’s shadows onto its structural essence.

Perhaps they are fossils, perhaps they are relics, their intention is to be read as an image on a wall, not a floor. I caught James in a stage where he is working with the amenability of glass fiber reinforced concrete to see how agreeable the substance will be at a more thinner, petal-like existence. While walking around the blue resin trays, Lomax mentions Agnes Martin and I wished I had named it sooner. The concrete paintings do hold a chalky serenity connection and an aura of meditative stamping that makes me think about conjuring and cloning.  

If I applaud Chu for a divergent thinking approach, it might be meaningful to consider in recognizing Lomax’s success in traversing public projects as creative convergent thinking. Grants are keen on solution based scaffolding. Convergent thinking isn't just multiple choice and standardized tests, but when looking for creative solutions it can be measured through things like The Remote Association Task, where three words have to be linked together by a common fourth word. It’s about chains and connections, a solution-based reasoning within the context of known information.  Instead of being a golden word, the artist finds an object, usually a grungy one, to group together the known information about a space. 

James’s site specific project’s titles are revealing of an interest in economics and a palpable political awareness. For example in the Markets shift like sand 2021, a project about the effects of the privatization of markets on cultural capital, the sand-iron casted drain covers overlaid with trash such as a t-shirt is mounted on a plinth constructed by the carpenters of  Canary Wharf where the work resided. He was also aware at the time that the site’s Billingsgate Market would be relocated. The drain is quite poetic when you think about cultural landscapes sliding off like trash run off on the sidewalk during a hard rain. 

In Markets shift like sand V 2023 the theme was reiterated but this time in Chester in the Tudor styled shopping centers where he had 17th century tarpaulin installed in windows. The hanging of the repurposed material was an act of remembering, this formerly tarp-like canvas would have been used to protect cargo goods while on their boat voyage from the sea to Chester Port to where they then deboard to go on sale in  those very buildings. He is activating spaces that are losing their mojo to the current capital machine.

Chu and Lomax bring up what is left behind from unchecked consumption and they both approach their practice with an interest in accessibility. Where Chu’s ethos is more heavily rooted in upcycling to show possibilities and James’s in recontextualizing to indicate commonalties, they both have inspired me to meditate on what is considered trash and who decides disposal. Art that uses what is already there, as Chu and Lomax suggest, would then appear to be some sort of solution to talk about squandered materials.

If we were settled by the beach in France, I’d collect you seashells and leave them on your pillow like a tooth fairy. 

If we walked in a Brutalist city, I’d capture all the angles I think you’d like and print them alongside a poem.

If we spent time in Italy, I’d collect knowledge from the locals and present you selections of only the best cheeses. 

If we had a mi casa es tu casa situation, I’d give la señorita on la esquina pesos to pick you up something useful like a pencil sharpener or una canasta for your socks. 

If we shared a roaming range with colourful birds, I’d go feather hunting to collect you a bouquet of plumage tied together at the quill. 

If we slept under the stars in the Outback, I’d knit sweet nothings into the handkerchief you use to wipe the sweat off your brow. 

If we locked eyes and our pupils aligned, I’d draw your favourite celestial body next to mine on the back of a book you’ve been wanting to read.

If we held hands for a year, I’d keep a journal of pressed flowers from all the changing seasons and wrap it up in a red bow for you.

If we got wrinkles and you took up swimming in the mornings, I’d tuck in words-of-the-day and a seldom pastry into your duffle bag.

If we were neighbours in a big city, I’d watercolour you cards on rainy days and slip them into your letterbox.

If we bicycled on an island in the fresh waters and lagoons, I’d collect crocodile teeth to make you a necklace. 

If we met anytime anywhere, for you I’d always be generous because I don't know how else to show you my world.

In sum, art experiences that really stood out to survey takers in California, Texas, New York, Berlin, Mexico City, and London were Hilma af Klint at the Tate, Day Jobs at the Blanton curated by Veronica Roberts, Isa Gensken 75/75 at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Groundswell: Women Of Land Art the Nasher Sculpture Center, and the Philip Guston retrospectives at the Tate and the Smithsonian.

Exhibitions that were nominated more than once were Larissa de Jesús Negrón La Canción Verde at Anna Zorina Gallery, Wangechi Mutu Intertwined at the New Museum, Bony Ramirez Tropic Apex at Jeffrey Deitch, Martin Wong Malicious Mischief at the Camden Arts Center. Artists and galleries that were nominated for more than one project or exhibition were Carrie Mae Weems, Isaac Julien, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Martha’s, Hauser & Wirth, David Zwirner, Arusha Gallery, the Tamayo, the Blanton, the Tate.

Thank you to all of our participants, we will be conducting this survey again next year so start your lists. We are excited for 2024.

Sasha Gordon’s work at Stephen Friedman Gallery was a highlight to see in real life in her solo exhibition The Flesh Disappears, But Continues to Ache. I spent a lot of time investigating Hannah Black’s work “There is at least one spot in every dream at which it is unplumbable (plum pit qi, hyoid bone,)” at Arcadia Missa with a friend of mine from uni.  In June, I did the art school thesis rounds and was really into Antonia Caicedo’s Slade MFA body of work (who I previously met at a mutual friend’s birthday party) as well as Lily Hargreaves’ undergraduate paintings at my alma mater Goldsmiths. I collected a collaboration between clothing designer Rhi Dancey and artist Ida Lissner.

I will forever cherish hearing Marina Abramovic speak at her book release at the Southbank Center in conjunction with her retrospective The Artist is Present at the Royal Academy of the Arts. My favorite things I saw during and surrounding Frieze were obviously Philip Guston at the Tate, Julia Hazel Thomas’s soap perfume bottles at Minor Attractions, Klara Kristalova’s smiling face at the Gagosian booth, and Liu Ye’s perfect painting in her solo at David Zwirner. My favorite exhibition of the year would be my last gallery outing of 2023, Groundswell: Women of Land Art at Dallas's Nasher Sculpture Center. Even if I disagree with the inclusion of Anish Kapoor and some of the other boys, the Ana Mendieta and Lida Albqueruqe works on display spoke louder to me than any complaint could. 

In addition to the art I experienced in real life, there was a plethora of content I FEEL like I saw vis-à-vis the digital sphere. Emma Steinkraus: Princess Botticelli at 1969 Gallery and Bony Ramirez’s Deitch NYC solo were the best things I saw on the internet in 2023. I would have liked to see the candy painted cozy coupes in real life from Daniel Antelo: Best of Time at Good Mother Gallery. From people I know, Chicago based Jacqueline Surdell had a wonderful installation based solo exhibition entitled Adoration Garden at Alabama’s AEIVA that I peeped on her page as well as Superposition founder Storm Ascher continued to excel in her projects with a Miami curatorial debut exhibition entitled Bounce that looked super baddie via instagram. Having previously collaborated with the gallery, I root for Ricky Morales and Mer Williams of Martha’s and was excited to see them land a booth in EXPO Chicago and sell out the booth in NADA Miami by midday for their first year in the fair.  

In general, both Ricky and Kevin Ivester of Ivester Contemporary continued to exhibit stellar exhibitions in Austin this year- the latter’s solo show of Diego Mireles Duran caught my eye. My top artist from Texas, Jose Villalobos, continued to redefine Norteño machismo culture in 2023 with their work featured in group and solo exhibitions in The Cheech, Big Medium, and the Rubin Center.  Mexico City based OMR crushed it with their collaboration this year with Sebastian Silva, particularly the film Rotting in the Sun that made it to my friend at A24’s annual best films of the year. Also in Mexico City, I wish I could have gotten a closer look at ceramicist Alejandro Garcia Contreras' vessels in his Karen Huber exhibition and additionally sculptor Sula Bermúdez-Silverman’s objects in any of their shows from this year including the Armoury. Lastly, it would have been rad to catch the Imperfect Game curated by Antonio Del Valle- Lago at the Spring Break Art Show featuring Saul Acevedo as well as Amy Bravo’s autumn solo exhibition with Swivel Gallery- both presentations looked absolutely insane.

While that's my take, Ava Ganza is a publication that requires reader participation to conduct mini experiments and surveys in order to yield theory rooted in something real. Thus in order to accurately create a list of the best art experiences of 2023 we needed to poll the people. Ergo, I dmed and texted artists, gallerists, collectors, and creatives asking for their top art experiences of the year and 36 got back to me within the day. Below is the list, in no particular order of the Best Exhibitions of 2023 according to the people from my circuit.  

The People’s Nominees for Best of Art of 2023

Nadia Lee Cohen Hello My Name Is at Jeffery Deitch. Alex Katz Gathering at Guggenheim. Math Bass Roses are Red at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. Dreaming of Home curated by Gemma Rolls-Bently at Leslie Lohman Museum. Barkley L. Hendricks Portraits at the Frick. Spring Break Art Show, NYC. Rufino Tamayo Variaciones Museo Tamayo / Zona Maco, Mexico City. NADA Art Fair, NYC. Miguel Calderon Materia Estética Disponible at Museo Tamayo. Njideka Akunyili Crosby Coming Back to See Through, Again David Zwirner. Hilary Harkness Prisoners From the Front P-P-O-W Gallery. Meleko Mokgosi Spaces of Subjection: PARTS 1 TO 5 Jack Shainman Gallery.

-Xavier Schipani, Artist, Austin

Judy Chicago at New Museum and seeing the Olympia at the met was fucking wild!

-Jacqueline Surdell, Artist, Chicago

Fictions of Emancipation at the MET. Tell Me What You Remember at the Barnes Collection. Africa Fashion at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (traveling). Black American Portraits at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art (traveling). Going Dark at the Guggenheim.

-Heather Nickels, Ph.D Student and Independent Curator, NYC

John Waters retrospective at the Academy Museum in LA and then the current Abraham Angel show here at the Dallas Museum of Art. 

-Adrian Zuñiga, Gallerist VSF, Dallas

Megan thee Stallion at LA pride deserves to be in a museum. Hugh Hayden at Lisson Gallery in Los Angeles. It’s incredible, he basically designed it as a bathroom and you had to open each door which revealed the work… you could pee in one of the urinals. It was hot. Paul Pfeiffer at MOCA. Tatsumi Hijikata the Last Butoh at Nonaka Hill. Sylvie Fleury at Sprüth Magers.

-Reid Calvert, Photographer, Los Angeles 

Jawn Diego Reyes, ALGO (+), Public Works Gallery in Manhattan. This distinctive exhibit delved into the fascinating contrast between the anonymity of graffiti culture and the clear transparency of NFT art on the blockchain. Reyes prompted visitors to reflect on essential questions regarding the value and authenticity of art when ownership is uncertain. Uniquely, 'ALGO(+)' was presented across three different spaces - online, inside the gallery, and on the streets of New York.

-Dev Moore, Creative Director Felt Zine, NYC

The Kiefer exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey was WOW. 

-Andrea Wild Botero, Artist and Designer of Pickled Pulp, London

Day Jobs at the Blanton Museum curated by Veronica Roberts. Robert Motherwell Retrospective at the Fort Worth Modern. Fuertes Y Firmes: José Villalobos at Big Medium. Wet Hot Texas Summer at Martha’s Contemporary. Invasive Species at ICOSA. Unbreakable: Feminist Visions from the Gilberto Cárdenas and Dolores Garcia Collection at Blanton Museum curated by Claudia Zapata. Richard Avedon’s WEST at Amon Carter Museum of American Art. Amy Cutler Past, Present, Progress at Ruby City. Liu Ye Naive and Sentimental Painting at David Zwirner London. Philip Guston at the Tate. 

-Michael Carnes, Artist and Registrar the Blanton, Austin

I would say Emma Webster at Deitch, LA, Lily Stockman at Massimo de Carlo,  London and of course my own at Carl Kostyal lol.

-Scout Zabinski, Artist, Los Angeles

The Dominique Fung exhibition in London was fantastic and great to see a cohesive display of sculpture and painting in one space where you could see direct translations between the two. She is an insane painter and I appreciate her approach to create this idea of the universe as something you can imagine that is so much bigger than this world.

Julianknxx at Curve gallery at the Barbican. Incredibly immersive experience, I appreciate this constant link to nature and the African Diaspora, it caught my attention; I sat there for quite a while.

Mollie E. Barnes curator of P.D.A Public Displays of Affection at Yusto/Giner Gallery Madrid. It's a good time to bring in connections and displays of care all together and people's needs and desires. This exhibition shows the ways people can find a connection not just in each other but in the world around us- this is something that will become a more explored topic as we try to combat an increasingly isolated society. 

-Precious Opara, Artist and Model, London

Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue at the Getty. To see Carrie's "The Kitchen Table Series" in person was truly moving. I had only seen them on a small screen, so to see her photographs in large format allowed you to experience and feel the emotions of the scenes and subjects. Weems hoped her portraits would give a voice to women, questioning how we can begin to alter these domestic spaces traditionally seen as the woman's domain. What does the kitchen table mean to you? This series also showed her the possibilities of things you can create through subtle changes in scenery. 

Sula Bermúdez-Silverman: Ichthyocentaur at Matthew Brown Gallery. What can I even say?! Sula's work is a perfect combination of so many things I love- natural objects, sculpture, translucence, fantasy, and legend. My favorites were her mini frames, each one creating a tiny universe I wanted to explore- from the praying mantises that made my nature girl heart do little flips, to the different items filling the epoxy resin frames (chewed gum, maize, lemon peel turmeric and more), and the haunting images in some, the mind could create so many stories to accompany each work. I loved the element of imagination and exploration that Sula's work made me feel in relatively small works of art. 

Day Jobs at the Blanton Museum of Art. I have been attending exhibitions at the Blanton for many years and never have I loved a show as much as this one. In this society, money has to be made, and many times that means taking on jobs that do not exactly align with your hopes and dreams. Day Jobs did a fantastic job highlighting this struggle to create while also having to work to survive and how these jobs influence the work that is made. Featuring pieces from artists who held jobs in museums, the service industry, caregiving, fashion, and more, your eyes are opened up to a fact that we all know but so often forget: talented artists are everywhere, finding inspiration in the mundane, working day to day to bring their passions to life. I am so thankful to all of those who continue to push through the exhausting limitations our society creates and don't stop creating. 

- Mer Williams, Gallerist Martha’s, Austin

Tim Walker at the Getty. Women Defining Women at LACMA. Ed Munch at Musée d’Orsay. Sankai Juku butoh performances and Dada Masilo’s The Sacrifice, both at the Joyce Theatre. 

-Sanam Mechkat, Collector, NYC

Carrie Mae Weems, Reflections for Now at the Barbican and Johny Pitts touring exhibition Home is Not a Place. Both resonated with me on a personal level in regards to my own practice. I also saw Weems give a lecture about her work and practice; she is phenomenal, very inspiring. 

-Ryan Adrian Prince, Photographer, London

Wolfgang Tillmans, Fold Me, at David Zwirner 

-Saul Acevedo, Artist, New York

Rights of Passage, Gagosian. Garry Simmons, Hauser & Wirth. Jennifer Packer, Corvi Mora. Chris Offili,  Victoria Miro. Isaac Julien, Tate Britain. Eric Gyamfi, Autograph. Daryl Daley, Now Gallery. Remi Ajani, Sid Motion. Akinola Davies Junior, Harlesden High Street. Emmanuel Awuni, Copperfield. Brianna Rose Park & Leyla Faye,  Lindon & Co. 

-Hamed Maiye, Artist, London

Honor, an Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra Starring Lili Taylor, Moody Center for the Arts.Kelly Akashi: Infinite Body, at Tanya Bonakdar, NY. Day Jobs at  the Blanton. Remedios Varo at AIC. Groundswell: Women of Land Art at Nasher. Laura Lit: Others, at Northern-Southern, Austin. Moveables at ICA Philadelphia. Marie Laurencin: Sapphic Paris, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia 

-Claire Howard, Curator the Blanton, Austin

Bony Ramirez, Tropical Apex, at Jeffrey Deitch. Larissa De Jesus Negrón, La Cancion Verde,  at Anna Zorina Gallery. Erin Milez, Round and Around We Go, at Monya Rowe Gallery. Cindy Bernhard, Holy Smokes, at Monya Rowe Gallery. Sole Perspectives curated by Easy Otabor in collaboration with Nike 

-Pedro Troncoso, Artist, NYC

Gray Wielebinski solo exhibition at the ICA was the best for meeeeee. Daniel Wang and Lindsey Lascaux at Martha’s vid. Just Friends at McLennon Pen & Co. Isa Genzken at Neue Nationalgalerie. Aby Warburg exhibit at the gallery Uffizi

-Grace Saparpani, PhD candidate and Icon, Berlin/Austin 

VLM’s (Virginia L. Montgomery) exhibition at Women and Their Work was probably my favorite of the year. Aryel René Jackson at the Contemporary. Brittany Ham and Justin Korver at grayDUCK was great. 

-Kevin Ivester, Gallerist Ivester Contemporary, Austin

In Mexico, Ragnar’s show at the Tamayo. In Berlin, the Isa Gensken- to see those works in that building (Neue Nationalgalerie) was an amazing experience. I also think the Latin American show at MoMA (in which I participated) was very important.

-Mario García Torres, Artist, Mexico City

Daniel Lind- Ramos, El Virgo Griot- Una Historia de todos nosotros, MOMA PSA. Daniel Tyree Gaitor-Lomack, EyeNeedAWitness, Jac Forbes Contemporary. Lauren Halsey, The Roof Garden Commission, the MET. Stephanie Temma Hier, Roadside Picnic, Bradley Ertaskiran. Thomas Barger, Wholesome, Salon 94

-Antonio Del Valle- Lago, Independent Curator, NYC

I think my favorite exhibitions I visited this year was the Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined exhibition at the New Museum and the Alma Allen: Nunca Solo exhibition at Museo Anahuacalli ☺️

-Lizette Hernández, Artist, Los Angeles 

Desert Flood at LagoAlgo with Claudia Comte, Gabriel Rico and SUPERFLEX. Phillip Guston at the Tate modern. Per Kirkerby at the Tamayo. Alicja Kwade works at MAZ

-Jacob Flood, Gallerist OMR, Mexico City

Groundswell group show at the Nasher Sculpture Center. Kamala Ibrahim Ishag at Serpentine. Hilma AF Klint in the Tate Modern. Molly Martin paintings at Arusha Gallery. Georg Wilson at Berntson Bhattacharjee. Larissa De Jesús Negrón La Cancion Verde at Anna Zorina.

-Ava (it me), Art Historian and Scientist, London

Day Jobs, curated by Veronica Roberts at the Blanton was really dope-  all about the day jobs artists kept before and during their careers, destigmatizing having to work for extra income when you’re a full time artist. 

Jonny Negron Chateau Shatto and Chase Hall at Kordansky Frieze Los Angeles booths stand up in person and a lot of them were about fishermen so I related. Earnie Barnes “ Sugar Shack” on loan from the collector at the Blanton was the result of a major auction of the artist's works which I saw a bunch of at Frieze… and they should be in museums. 

Rina Sawayama crushed it at ACL. Julia Mairuri with 12.26 at Dallas Art Fair, I love her work and bought one. There was a Stanley Whitney painting at Basel (Miami) that I freakin loved. I was extremely proud of our Erick Medel exhibition in collaboration with Alan Garcia of ATX barrio; our Conner O’Leary show was probably my fav.

-Ricky Morales, Director and Founder Martha’s, Austin

The best show I saw was at the Tate. It’s a canonical exhibition, Magdalena Abakanowicz

-Kahlil Robert Irving, Artist, NYC

Not much really gripped me this year but there's a show up at Lawndale Art center in Houston curated by Tierney L. Malone

-Ricky Sallay Zoker (YATTA), Musician and Performance artist, nyc

Visitando sitios arqueológicos.

-Charly Garcia Noriega, Artist, Mexico 

In Austin, two installs at The Contemporary Austin (one at each of their locations) — Manik Raj Nakra’s mural “The Man Who Fell To Earth” and CELESTE’s takeover at Laguna Gloria. In NYC, Sonic Sphere at The Shed, Judy Chicago’s retrospective at The New Museum. As well as, Guerilla Girls exhibits for Format Festival at The Momentary and Crystal Bridges and Yvette Mayorga’s What A Time to Be at The Momentary.

- Jane Claire Hervey, Creative Director and Founder Future Front Texas, Austin

Private Pleasures - Shmorevaz, Paris. Unbound - Julia Stoschek Foundation, Berlin

-Dan Adeyemi, Musician, Marseille

Philip Guston at Tate and Hilma as well 😘 (she did that kissy face because we went together) . Felt Cute Might Delete Later at Arusha Gallery. Mimi Lauter and Marguerite Humeau at White cube. Martin Wong and also Forrest Bess (both solos) at Camden arts Centre. Lawrence Abu Hamdan, 45th Parallel at Talbot Rice in Edinburgh. Henry Curchod at Mamoth. The last supper in Milan lol.

-Olivia Sterling, Artist, London

The Hilma af Klint at Tate Modern!! Felix Gonzalez-Torres at Zwirner and Delcy Morelos at DIA.

-Michael Jiang, Collector, NYC 

Martin Wong, Camden Arts Centre- amazing paintings that transported me to a grimey 80s New York with undercurrents of psychedelia and a heart wrenching sadness.

Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian Tate Modern - A beautiful exhibition that explored themes of our connection with nature. A highlight was seeing the final room of Klint’s work and being uplifted and moved by these joyous large symbolic flower forms.

Philip Guston, Tate Modern - heaven seeing these paintings in real life and a longer overview of his career. I loved seeing the transformation from abstracted to these ridiculous big cartoon hooded figures. His unique way of grappling with the horrors he was being confronted with at the time and his own role as an artist.

-Stella Murphy, Artist, London 

Kehinde Wiley at Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Wangechi Mutu at New Museum. Bony Ramirez at Jeffrey Deitch. Shakira's performance at the VMAs. Shaina Mccoy at A Hug from the Art World. Paola de la Calle at SOMA. Eddie Salinas curated a show at Soho in LA called Heaven is a Basement. Javier Ramirez at Sow and Tailor. Golden Worlds at MFAH. Juan Pablo Echeverri at James Fuentes changed my life. Braden Hollis at 56 Henry.

- Rossana Romero, Artist, NYC

There was a great exhibition on one of our artists Rosemarie Trockel at MMK in Frankfurt which was delicious and one of the most anticipated museum shows this year.

-Carolyn Seiler, Gallerist Sprueth Magers, London

Kurt Lightner I Hauled Harper’s Chelsea. Shirin Neshat The Fury Gladstone Gallery. Marilyn Minter  LGDR. Rear View LGDR. Karewith Casas, Hunter MFA Graduation. Bárbara Sánchez Kane New Lexicons for Embodiment kurimanzutto New York. Pipilotti Rist, Prickling Goosebumps and a Humming Horizon Hauser & Wirth. Derek Fordjour Score Petzel Gallery 

-Aida Valdez, Gallerist Harper’s and Mad54, NYC

I would say that the Philip Guston show at the Smithsonian was a fantastically tight survey of his progression from Abstraction to incorporating the cartoon as cultural commentary. With any painting, photo documentation is an insufficient mode of conveyance, but is even more so with a Guston because the illustrative approach to art making already has a tendency to visually and psychologically flatten the pictorial space, but Guston utilizes his abstract and physical approach to defy that flattening, giving the painting both physical and narrative heft, that one should see in person informing each other. 

The Isaac Julien exhibit at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford CT, “I am Seen, Therefore I Am.”  More specifically, I am talking of his video installation about Frederick Douglas, “Lessons of the Hour.” This multi-screen installation incorporates a cinematic approach regarding the Mise en scene, using actors and costume to portray Douglas and various characters of the time, but this is no narrative movie. I think one could more accurately describe it as a selectively edited documentation of a performance piece.

The caretakers of Robert Smithson’s Amarillo Ramp are willing to accommodate you if you want to see it. Again, pictures will not do justice to the experience, but when you walk the elevated spiral, against the open landscape of west Texas, there is a “charge” that occurs, which I always love when art does and am always chasing, that reminds you or your smallness and connectedness in the universe.  I was skeptical that something like that would happen and perhaps it only did because I was visiting it during a solar eclipse, but this is now one of my favorite art experiences

-David Alcantar, Artist, San Antonio

click here to view the 2023 Best Exhibitions by Type of exhibition with hyperlinks to the show

Whales used to be wolves you know? That’s why they travel in packs. It would take them centuries to learn their navigation songs. The bulbs on their brains would grow in unison with the oceanic howls, a slow but steady restructuring of mind and breath. Twas the lack of pressure from land that would allow their tails to become grand in the space of the vast ocean. Predator to protector, nevertheless the sea mammal’s pelvic bone used to flap its blubbery fluke is the remnant of a prehistoric dog’s hairy hind leg.

The cactus is just a rose given time and space to become life in the desert. Thorns would travel from the West Indies across the Western Hemisphere and over 18,000 years that little flower would become a statue stronger than sand. A blossom that danced across half the world to learn how to find the deepest drop of water. Cacti self soothe, provide shelter, they are gutted open and burnt on. She dons a coat of spines that protects herself from all the elements but those who open her with care. And if nopales cure everything, is that because their genesis of a rose has the meaning of love?

Knowledge is a ripple, we must all do our evolving part to carry on its flow. I met a curious man who lowered a cactus into the ocean. He hooked it to a device that simultaneously recorded sounds of the underwater world alongside amplifying the vibrations of the plant’s own genetic melody. Life probed the little green needled terrestrial, first came the small fish then the bigger fish until porpoise and lastly whales. Like a whole entire chain of conversation from smallest to biggest, expanding like a web of wisdom. A shared language neither you nor I have access to.

But what would one say to the whale and desert rose? Here I am, human, swinging on ropes of neural connections from tree to tree in my brain. I don’t know if I descended from the oxygen producing microbes that once heated Paleoproterozoic earth into mass extinction. But I know that there are more bacteria in my stomach than stars in the sky. At one point as an organism I was equipped with the instincts to sniff chemical substances and decide either approach or avoid. Yet now I am built to smell parts per trillion so deciphering is not so easy when I can detect the lingering smell of a lover after they have filled me with their germs.

Being a person is to be covered with filth, to have an appetite that has an insatiable drive for pleasure and patterns. Consistently linked to everything I come in contact with, I too feel marked all the time almost as if life is a consistent process of adapting to one's environment. Somewhere between scenting the world out and developing a more sophisticated software I was given a cortex that I carry like a crown. It commands that even in all my slimy glory I am hard wired for feeling. Thousands of ancestors for me to be born a romantic rotting machine.

Could he hear over the whale tail I wore on my hips that I held my breath to unabashedly sing a song that says here I am in the dark? It was more than just a moan, but a mellifluous admission. I wasn’t always like this, able to swim deep and survive. That it was me who chewed off my own arm to escape a land-locked fate. In its place I grew a fist-shaped heart that points like a compass so that I can propel through the icy uncharted and somehow always find the surface. Dive in every time knowing that I might not see the evolution of the risk, yet wanting more space to be held for me so that I might be more than just a wet bitch.

In that rose garden in the morning in that big city on that little island. The buds gather a certain dew that cools my skin like walking through that cactus mine in the sunset in that small town in that big state. The place where a dance of four steps forward two steps back began. A succulent disposition that tried something new- being brave enough to touch aridly-avoidant soil. Consistently both spurned and desired for the same medicine I provide, yet still I stand tall with conviction. Might my inclination to pirouette no matter where I am, my rhizomatic feelings that poke, and my written words that petal be taken seriously if they were the traces of an origin story ?

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Deep in the park Chia took off into the forest and I was afraid. I wasn't afraid of her getting lost, it was barely noon and it was a glorious temperature out so time, water, and heat wasn’t an issue. I know these lands, these trees, these bird sounds, and these snake dens. I wasn’t afraid of the land, her charcoal body slinking further through the trees until all directions were dissolved. I was afraid that calling her name loudly or her off the trail gallop would get us in trouble with the park’s new rules: ALL DOGS ON LEASH. I’ve been coming to Eisenhower Park all my life just like all the other parks and rivers that fall in a 100 mile radius from San Antonio and I didnt know of this rule until today. I grew up on the outer loop on 1604 and Blanco when the only thing around was the Luby’s. On my walk I spoke with a mom and son who moved here in 2016 and said the new rules that dogs must be leashed came sometime during the tail end of the pandemic and that Luby’s has become some other chain. I sighed, deeply disturbed, I loved the LuAnn platter and bright country stars of back then. Dogs from Texas are supposed to run wild, smell the trees, walk a bit off the paths, that's just what they do. The anger and fear that filled me as I fetched mi alebrije in a web of green trees and silver decaying branches echoed how I was feeling the week earlier in NYC.

During my two week stint in NYC, I went to dinner at Chez Ma Tante with my friend- a daughter of Iranian parents, my other friend- born in Shanghai and grew up in Rockford, IL and her friend- a Jewish man who grew up in Dallas. I organized the dinner at the Brooklyn-based-gem-of-a-restaurant because it was founded by a man I thought was so sexy in my undergrad. I was curious to see how his appeal smelled now that I had grown up. People, places, and things always seem to change, but since he was at his other more swanky restaurant that night my idea of him is still frozen. Luckily it ended up that way, not just for my idolised memory’s sake, but he might have come out of the kitchen whilst I was crying into a plate of corn and cod.  

These people are poisoning my home. They used to teach us in school that the limestone filtration of the aquifer is sacred, that the water where we used to hunt crayfish belonged to the Tonkawas, Karankawa, and Coahulitecan peoples and we are merely the stewards, that the blue bonnets cannot be picked, that you always leave your campsite better than you found it. 

Somehow our little diverse group got into the conversation of gentrification. The anthropologist’s younger sister has just moved into east Austin, the historically black neighbourhood with an HBCU that has become overrun with millennials and gen-Zers whose familial situations help sustain their lifestyles. I shrugged with skepticism and asked if she's part of the problem. By my definition, she's not as she is a student at Dell Medical School and those that serve the community they move to (doctors, teachers, firefighters, etc) are not the gentrifying problem we are witnessing. Austin, which flows into San Antonio, has been taken over by tech bros, Californians whose dollar goes a lot further in Texas, and New Yorkers who idealize the country life but just merely glamp and drink overpriced Whiskey. These people are literally killing the spirit of our home- with the excess movement, displacement of people ( particularly Black families in all major cities of Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin), and the escalating inescapable cost of living crisis that all came with their arrival. This geographical rearrangement that's been slowly happening probably since the Dazed and Confused debut and that has turned turbo speed since Musk’s residence- has caused a lack of grounded awareness and community belonging that has been leveraged by the Republican Party to further fuel greed and power. It often feels that we are left defenseless against this oppressive regime of religious fanatics and openly problematic politicians. 

Texas is beautiful, we are diverse, and we have resources. Those in power want to create a poor uneducated working class in Texas to fuel the labor force as they are trying to get one last big drop of oil checks before it rains hellfire. This greed has driven bad policy and EPA regulation peel backs. In 2019 they began building a pipeline through the precious aquifer, something I’m not sure a real Texan would ever have considered 20 years ago. Construction happened despite huge opposition, the whole ordeal is still illegible to a policy novice like me. Best I can do to explain what happened is to quote @atmos ’s review of the Killers of the Flower Moon “Fracking executives, fossil fuel lobbyists, and supreme court justices may not lay awake at night plotting to destroy the planet, but there's a persuasive thoughtlessness and intentional disengagement from the reality of their actions that girls the fire. At their core they chose to sacrifice the lives of others, and sell their futures to the highest bidder... A people, a culture, a landscape are being wiped out and it's not one grisly act, but the death by a thousand small betrayals.” 

So do you think I am a gentrifier? She lives in a new apartment complex on the water in Williamsburg and works in banking. Because Iran, my home, isn’t a place I can go back to. She’s not and reminds me sometimes community rooting means walking the elderly woman in the neighbourhood to her meditation class. I search for the words to describe my frustration for the particular brand of people I am referring to and the real estate private equity businessman of the bunch introduced me to the term NIMBY. “Not in my backyard” is the modern liberal’s chronic problem. I’m so over America’s individualism and this culture of young people who justify their small betrayals as if they are more deserving, needing. I am hurt by people that can eclipse their own actions because they have theoretical morals. 

On paper NIMBYs embrace worthy causes but not at the expense of having their life disrupted or fun questioned. It's the people who go to Hawaii even though the locals don't want us to, it's the people who think in this particular situation we need to call the police, it's the people who complain about having your dog off a leash in a forest, it's the people who are to afraid to post anything but Ceasefire, it’s the people who do post but do so while sipping on overpriced purchased lattes but then don't donate, it's the people who talk about community but also gossip about their friends, it’s the people who ask for discounts on their friend’s art,  it's the people who say they are self-made but have a family system of support, it's the people who think being vegan is a moral superiority, it’s the people who have never stepped foot into their local grocer, it's the people who think buying an electric vehicle is doing your part, it's the people who don't want their property values changes or filled with “the wrong type of people”, it's the people who come to our watering holes and drink our resources but don't advocate for protection of said resources, it's the people that sometimes might be you and might be me. 

We were nearing the end of a four hour meal with no resolution on what exactly is the profile of a gentrifier in sight so we decided for the three of us ( one couldn’t make it) to reconvene at Delcy Morelos installation. The exhibition at Dia Chelsea consists of two installations—Cielo terrenal (Earthly Heaven, 2023) and El abrazo (The Embrace, 2023), the latter giving the exhibition its title. While the former exhibition was quite beautiful and loaded with importance as it references Hurricane Sandy, cultivated farmland, and ceramics produced with an ancestral open-fire technique, it's the latter installation that touched me.

A shrine to and of peat, El Abrazo speaks in rituals and memories. I absolutely love when the art is touchable, viewers are encouraged to interact with Morelos’s piece through movement and caressing as Morelos comments in the exhibition text that to touch the earth is to be touched by her.  The giant temple on display as an artwork in a concrete room is constructed from earth materials such as soil, clay, coir, cinnamon, copaiba, clove, and I overheard the gallery attendant tell the visitor there was purportedly also the infusion of the chemical that gives the coming rain its scent. More than an installation, this artwork is a site of ecological knowledge and an intimate encounter where hierarchies of the senses are disrupted, suspended, and most importantly held in a space. We three engaged with the work which felt like an act of reciprocity. This is what I want, this is what I crave. 

Although I'm confident that Delcy Morelos’ piece has a lot more layers and poetic history to what I could access in my visit, this article is a testament to the effect of experiencing good art. You ruminate on it, you relate to it, you think about it in all different contexts. After seeing her earthwork paired with that dinner convo, I began to realize I grew up in a land that is already a shrine so now that it is being desecrated what might a temple of my Texas look like? Morelos uses Peatlands, fermenting organic matter that are effective at trapping carbon. Could I do the same or how might I gather resources of my earth in a way that might fight climate change ? I’m not sure right now but I think this is where I’m headed. 

While I can’t bottle the rivers, my shrine could take clay from the riverbeds from the Pecos to the Guadalupe, I could also have dried algae mats from the declining watering holes, the bones would be cavernous spiralling Cypress tree roots, ribs of Cedar sneezy leaves, bursts of color patches quilted from wildflowers and Thistle, an Agave heart, veins of Red Yucca, a crown of feathers fallen from blue jays and cardinals, the claw of an owl whose spirit would need to bless the summoning of all the various parts, lost teeth of the coyotes that cackle in the night, windows lined with pecans, purple poop from muskrats that eat the wildberries, barbed mesquite to protect the parts that are tender, and so much grass. 

A monarch butterfly circles my head bringing me back to this temporal reality, I need to return my stepmom’s car and get Chia some water, I think to myself did she run off to lead me to a forest where I thought about my ancestors that have roamed this land before there were paths?  I walked to the fountain and pressed the spout for the dog-height basin and bees spilled into the water pool. I cup my bare hand and fish them out letting their fuzz graze my skin before they fly off. Some people might squirm at the thought of touching bees, I don’t, but today I got chills because perhaps today, particularly on this very day when the veil is thin to touch the earth, is to be touched by an ancestor.

I asked Pedro, who I call Dro, to join me to go see Larissa De Jesús Negrón’s solo show at Anna Zorina Gallery. I thought it was a good fit as he has exhibited with her before and been in another show curated by her partner- the independent art curator from Puerto Rico with his finger on the pulse Antonio Del Valle- Lago. En route Dro asked me about my leg warmers. I told him how my mom always tells me to shave my legs and at times will screenshot photos of me on social media, zoom them in to my flaws, and proceed to tell me to do my nails, shave my body, or brush my hair. I’m still learning how to sit with my mom’s consistent criticism and judgment, so I was taken aback when the first work Larissa began our gallery tour with was the portrait of her mother judging her hairy legs.

In Entiendo Porque No Entiendes, you can almost smell the mother’s disgust and criticism with her daughter’s prickly body. I decided I’m going to take a page from Larissa’s approach in that she can’t change her mother, she has to accept how she was conditioned to be. In the corner of this mother-daughter interaction an image of the artist as a little girl in coletas eating cereal disintegrates. I thought back to being a little girl with dark curly hair who still isn't allowed to wear their hair down in my blonde mother’s kitchen. For my own healing, I kinda needed this work to show me that maybe my mom’s judgment of me and fear of my contamination of her pristine perspective isn’t wholly because she’s just White and I’m also Latina but across all cultures mothers stare into their daughter’s beauty standards. 

Staring across the room is Larissa’s grandmother who I kept calling la jefa. De Jesús Negrón did a beautiful job of capturing the strength of her grandmother who helped lead a community church along with the artist’s abuelo- who also was a creative and military man. Dios le bendiga shows a pious business woman whose shoulders are strong, reliable, but still exude an undeniable femininity. In the background we see a poinsettia- a plant primarily associated with Christmas time. This Van Gough inspired work along with the other two paintings on the same wall all allude to Christmas or as in Puerto Rico they call it Nochebuena. To latinos, we all celebrate on Christmas Eve- which also happens to be Larissa’s grandfather’s birthday. We spoke about how in Puerto Rico they celebrate in festivities called Parrandas and I explained La Posada tradition of Mexico.  In the works Noche Buena, my personal favorite of the exhibition, and Parranda!, an undeniably perfect painting,  the artist draws inspiration from botanical illustrations by Agustin Stahl. I absolutely loved these flower elements which were quite different from the iconography I saw used in Larissa's solo show at Guts Gallery in March which was dominated by water elements. 

I would have loved the opportunity to collect one of these works if my budget was there. While it’ll be awhile before I make back my savings after spending so much to pursue a higher education and a new life in London, experiencing art shouldn’t be all about buying and selling. Being able to walk through an exhibition with an artist is truly one of the most pleasurable important experiences one can have. Engagement in the story and understanding the moving parts is what us art historians / scientists / models live for. I am so grateful for Larissa’s time and being able to understand more intimately her family history, her perspective, and ultimately what ties her work together. I love how she included a sculpture of her grandfather’s light changing invention that is also referenced in Cobacha, reminding us all creativity isn't limited to producing a painting but is found in all outlets of living. 

Two artworks that really spoke to me as a girl from a big city but small town in Texas were Hablando de ti and No Puedo Dormir Sola. The former references the toxic gossip culture of small towns and how destructive chisme can be. Integrity and kindness are perhaps the two qualities that I look for most in friends and the people I connect with. I think sometimes the artworld can be insidious in that way with layers of cool and who’s who, that is all just based off of telephone of stories shared behind peoples’ backs. It was refreshing to see an artist of Larissa’s caliber to call it out. Curatorially arranged next to the portrait of shark-toothed-pot-stirrers is No Puedo Dormir Sola. This fantastic piece is actually a story of the artist’s aunt about a nightmare she had of a monster turning off the light and an indigenous man on a horse. Her tía, a little girl in bed, with scissors like the cross of a bible under her pillow to ward off evil spirits is wrapped in a star spangled banner blanket. 

We talked about the situation in PR and America’s mistreatment of the island. I often feel Texas is also abused by the United States. If you know me, you know I consider myself Texan and reject American. Most of America takes Texas's resources, calls us racist and uneducated when really we are living in a repressive regime that wants us to be the second worst educated state so there will be plenty of workers to provide for the rest of the country. We’re left to freeze during violent weather storms and often ignored when we plead for help to resist these right wingers who seek to frack our beauty and control women’s bodies. Most people forget the lone star state is the second most diverse and has the most Black people. The left also often forgets to advocate for PR.

This solo exhibition at Anna Zorina Gallery features 18 works of mixed media. I have so much respect for the ambition Larissa has to present such a wide range of materials and to execute each with finesse and confidence. Dro and I spent time complimenting the silky smooth La Más Bella, a large-scale work detailing the notable victory of Marisol Malaret as the first Caribbean Miss Universe. Technically speaking the ability to work on linen and still maintain so much light without over saturation is quite the feat. The compact mirrors somehow mimic the mouth to which we all were copying while gawking.

We finished our tour looking at the work Mi Canción Verde, which features the little froggy that the exhibition La Canción Verde derives its title. In this children’s book one of the tiny Coqui people who resemble tree frogs, leaves his home in the green sugar fields of Puerto Rico and travels to New York to witness the vast and ranging colors of the world. Just like Larissa, a NYC resident for 8 years, this exhibition is a testament to all the Puerto Rican artist has absorbed and so kindly shares with her viewers. 

Feeling Too Much

When it seems like your wants and needs are too intense for interpersonal relationships

• Dance it out in your bedroom or go for a run

• Draw/ paint a self portrait

• Read anything by Sandra Cisneros and Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi

• Get dressed fabulous and make the route to coffee your runway

• Smell lavender, drink ashwagandha

• Gua-sha your face as your say nice things to yourself in the mirror

• Accept not everyone has a hand strong enough to hold you 

• Find a new saint, goddess, or historical figure to relate to and research

Feeling Inadequate 

When you feel not good enough and affirmations do not work

• Have a piece of dark chocolate

• Text a friend who questions your reality to untangle esteem from abilities

• Give others compliments (consider writing everything you wish someone would say to you into a letter and leave it in the park for someone else to find) 

• Go outside, take your shoes off, put your feet on a tree

• Make yourself into a video game character, what would your superpower be? What weapon would you have? What journey would you be found on? What trials would you encounter and what rewards?

• Herbs for serotonin (confidence neurochemical) St.Johns Worst, Ginseng, Holy Basil

• Read Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Undrowned or anything about biology/ nature 

• Hug yourself and say “ I am here”

Feeling Heartbroken

When your chest is burning with broken glass

• Sit with it- don’t take drugs, don't drink, don't numb yourself

• Scream into a pillow and sing out loud

• Berrinche (have a temper tantrum: lay down on your back and hit your fists and stomp your feet into the floor shake out that pain like a child)

• Buy yourself rose ( rosehip, rosemary) tea and drink lemon water

• Tell all of your close friends, be held don’t force positivity

• Make saffron rice and eat fruit and yogurt

• Write the letter, send it if you must

• Take a mini vacation

Feeling Humiliated

When you feel shame or do not want to be seen or want to escape from the world

• Watch reality television

• Put on your grandma/grandpa’s sweater

• Read Virginia Woolf, Ada Limón, Maggie Nelson, Pablo Neruda, Tracy Smith, or Fred Moten

• Go flower picking or swimming (wash it away)

• Listen to Hannah Montana Nobody’s Perfect and anything by Drake

• Lemon balm, willow, or agrimony tea; burn pine 

• Sweat it out with your inner child and teenage angst 

• Do a full skin care routine