We’ve had the pleasure of knowing, supporting and working alongside Amelia Bonow, Founder of Shout Your Abortion, for years. We can attest that she is a brilliant force in the abortion movement and her commitment to ensuring that access is available to all is unparalleled. When the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals last week attempted to “reinstate an outdated FDA requirement despite decades of evidence showing it is safely prescribed via telemedicine”, we immediately called Bonow, who is our trusted source for accurate information regarding all things abortion access and reproductive justice.

That’s why, when she says that people will be able to access abortion pills in all 50 states, despite the outcome in the courts, we believe her. Read on for more on how to access abortion pills now and in the future, how to spread awareness in your own backyard, and how to support the work of Shout Your Abortion. Because as they say at SYA, “ABORTION ACCESS IS A COMMUNITY RESPONSIBILITY.”

Last week access to abortion pills in the US was disrupted by a ruling that stated, against FDA regulations I should add, that mifepristone must be dispensed in person. For those who are unfamiliar with what this means and how it impacts access to abortions in the US, how do you explain it?

AB: Last week, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals attempted to reinstate an outdated FDA requirement that mifepristone be dispensed in person, despite decades of evidence showing it is safely prescribed via telemedicine—in fact, mifepristone is a safe drug even when used outside of medical contexts all together. The 5th Circuit’s decision is fucked up in a procedural, death-of-democracy way because it represents the judiciary overriding of the FDA’s supposedly apolitical, scientific authority, and because any claim of safety issues around mifepristone is anti-choice propaganda. This ruling would have disrupted telemedicine abortion in the U.S.—although it is critical to know that telemedicine is only one of many ways that people access abortion pills, and also, that many telemedicine providers are prepared to pivot to a protocol that does not include mifepristone and only uses misoprostol. The misoprostol only protocol is also safe and effective and is used all over the world.

Then, 24 hours after the aforementioned ruling Supreme Court Justice, Samuel Alito, issued a stay on that decision, granting access to mifepristone until the court can review the case. Again, what does this mean and to be direct: can people still access abortion pills in all 50 states as of today?

AB: I am not being hyperbolic or idealistic when I say that people will be able to access abortion pills in all fifty states, regardless of what happens in the courts. There are many paths to obtaining these medications; telemedicine is just one. A significant number of people are already accessing pills through what we call “alternate routes”—this means international organizations, community networks, and websites that sell pills—and those pathways will not be eliminated by any court ruling. The laws will change and the specific channels of access will change, but the abortion access movement will continue to adapt.

This is infuriating bullshit, and I don’t want to downplay that, and if the 5th Circuit’s ruling is allowed to stand, it will cause a somewhat TBD level of chaos and confusion and disruption, and none of that is remotely ok. But any coverage or commentary on this moment that makes it seem like this ruling would be the end of abortion pills by mail is deeply misinfomed or fearmongering or both, and it is not constructive whatsoever.

I realize there is no crystal ball in this scenario, but I do think this is a situation that has long been anticipated. Are you able to share what you think might happen? Or, what could possibly happen and what the repercussions will be for a ban on telemedicine abortion care? And, what could happen if SCOTUS actually honors the decades long precedence of the FDA’s approval of both mifepristone and misoprostol?

AB: I don’t want to speculate in too much detail because nobody knows what these clowns will do, and ultimately, what we need to do to maintain abortion access is the same regardless. But from here, it seems like either the Supreme Court will allow the Fifth Circuit ruling to take effect, which would change the current landscape of telemedicine abortion. Some providers will pivot to perscribing misoprostol only, some will likely stop, and people will continue being able to obtain abortion pills other ways. The other possibility is that SCOTUS upholds the FDA’s authority, and mifepristone continues to be available via telemedicine, and before too long, republicans will try to come for mifepristone in some other way. They will win some of these legal fights and they will lose some, but they will never stop abortion.

Bottom line: we will always adapt. We will never stop having abortions or helping others to do so. And a great way to do this, especially in chaotic moments like this one, is to share accurate information.

AB: You can find info about how to get pills by mail in every U.S. state or territory at PlanCPills.org, and you can find core abortion resources for clinics, pills, funding, and other support at YouAlwaysHaveOptions.com. You can go get abortion pills right this moment, for around $50, just to have on hand. You can get stickers from Plan C and start putting them in bathrooms. And you can donate to Shout Your Abortion’s Give Big Campaign!!! We’ve been saying the same shit for years, and we’ve never been more confident that we are going to win.

There is no other way to say this except for things are really hard right now. Well, there are many ways to say it, and that statement is putting it lightly. Most individuals I know vacillate between over-consumption of content, be it via news outlets or political content creators on social media, and complete and total media blackouts. Rarely do I talk with someone, be it friend, colleague or family member who is able to exist anywhere in-between.

Personally, I have a difficult time NOT consuming information, consistently putting my mouth under the faucet of the fast flow of political content available at arm’s reach at all hours of the day. Not a method that I recommend. The one thing has proven to be the anecdote to my consumption is 1. getting outside and 2. taking action in community. Not revelatory nor revolutionary, but both have become very necessary. Action in community is contagious, it has the power to motivate and inspire. Action in community begets action in community. And well, nature!

With all of this top of mind, I sat down with Leah Greenberg, Co-Executive Director of Indivisible, shortly after the March 28 “No Kings” protest to talk about the overwhelming success of the event, the importance of an activism on-ramp, and how you can take action on Friday, May 1.

My first question is regarding this past “No Kings” protest: It was a historic showing! What are you most proud of? And what are your biggest takeaways?

LG: I am just hugely proud of everyone who threw in, I think some of the really exciting things that we saw was major growth in red and rural and suburban areas. A disproportionate number of our RSVPs and our new events were coming from places that are either battleground or are generally classified as kind of redder areas. Which, I think reflects both the combination of broad popular discontent with Trump and the fact that the people are willing to stand up and push back in public in a way. This is really beating back fear, even in places where Trump might have a lot of support. I think is very exciting.

I was also in the twin cities at the flagship event and it was an extraordinarily moving experience to be there with a community who has endured horrifying violations of their rights, who pushed back with extraordinary courage and grace and nonviolent discipline. Fundamentally, the story of Minnesota is a story of immigrant rights organizers and soccer moms and retirees who collectively came together and beat back the Gestapo. And that is an extraordinary thing, and I’m glad that the environment on the ground was such that they really got a moment to be celebrated for their heroism.

I know this is becoming like an exhausted talking point, but there are people who say that protests don’t work, that these actions are performative or that we’re not seeing traction from these efforts. For me personally, I’ve always seen it as a method of engagement. An avenue to engagement and community, which I think is the only way that really we’re going to make any progress. How do you respond to that thinking?

LG: The challenge that I think we often have with communicating what is happening on the ground is for example, I just had this conversation with a Times reporter. Where we talked and they only come to cover the protest and the organizing when it’s a big flashy moment. And then they’re sort of like, but what will it translate into? And my response is you didn’t cover all the stuff that led to this, and you’re not going to cover all of the stuff that comes from this, and you’re just going to kind of be surprised by that moment of massive pushback.

But the reality is the work was going on before. And that a huge amount of necessary coalition building, organizing recruitment effort went into making the large protests possible. Each of these events is going to act as a catalyst for absorption and recruitment of new people. I think that commonly the way that this gets framed is sort of like, oh, well, you know, 1 day of action won’t accomplish anything. And we are 100% aligned with that. Like there is no one who is involved in the “No Kings” effort who would say, if we have one really big protest, it’s going to fix the problems that we are facing. We see this as a tactic that is part of a broader strategy around fostering mass defiance across this country that fundamentally has to translate into ongoing and supercharged, longtime, ongoing local organizing.

Let’s talk about next steps: say you have your ideal, Indivisible member. They have been to all the protests, they participates in the calls, their involved in their community. What are they next action steps?

LG: So what we, what I would say to somebody who’s already in the work is, do not let moments of activation in your community go to waste. Host a meeting, get people signed up who went to the protest to get them involved, move them into in real life activity as fast as possible. Because, fundamentally, these big activations are important, and also they are a step into deeper and sustained local organizing.

And then for somebody who’s new, it’s the same thing, but your mirror image, right? Go find people in your community who are doing the work and get connected with them and hooked in, because we’ve got to move as much of our work as we can into IRL organizing.

We know they're going to try steal the midterms. Everything that we know about Donald Trump suggests that he does not want to head into an election. He knows he's going to lose, and we know he won’t just let it happen. He's gonna he's gonna pull out every trick in the book. We've got to win by enormous margins and then we've got to collectively push to make sure that the results actually translate to people taking office.

There’s another opportunity to take on May 1st. Is that what I heard? Can you tell me a little bit about that plan.

May Day is going to be an economic show of force. We are asking folks for no business as usual, so no school, no work, no shopping. There will be mobilizations around the country. It is about flexing our power and sending a message to the billionaires who profit off of workers and to the court, and to the would be kings who attempt to rule over us. We're going to be really working with our network on what this means. It's a new tactic for us and we're really excited about that.

I’d like to end on a high note because I know some people are feeling very disheartened and, honestly, apathetic. I think a lot of people are tired of being tired, tired of being sad. But I do subscribe to the notion that joy is an act of resistance. I would love to know what is making you feel most hopeful right now?

LG: First of all, just being part of an extraordinary and growing movement. What we are seeing is that in massive numbers, Americans are rejecting Donald Trump and MAGA ideology and horrors. They are moving towards us. His base is splitting out of discontent. We are building power every day. We are trying new tactics. We are bringing in new people. I’ll just go back to Minnesota, I don’t think that people have processed yet that one of the most extraordinary episodes in nonviolent resistance has taken place in this country in just the last couple of months. You really did see something that is an extraordinary societal mobilization to protect each other and protect their neighbors. I just think that’s incredibly beautiful. We all need to bring the lessons learned in Minnesota, and we also need to bring the same courage, compassion and solidarity to the work that we do going forward.

Thank you, Leah! We encourage you to take part in whatever way you are able in tomorrow’s May Day National Day of Action. Invisible has a fantastic, comprehensive guide for every level of participation on their website. Let us know your plan in the comments!

Part II of The Matriarchy of Martyr Sauce delves into how motherhood “turbocharged” Tariqa’s artistic ambition, her exploration of vulnerability through her exhibition at Seattle Art Museum Venus is Missing, the reality of living, working, and raising a family centered in and surrounded by the arts and much, much more. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Hil: You became a mother in your early twenties with your son, 9, and then with your daughter, Kaelau, shortly after. Looking back at that younger version of yourself, what was it that drew you toward motherhood so early on?

Tariqa: I actually wanted 14 kids. I thought that was the most revolutionary thing I could do, to have 14 kids, get some land, just sit there, nursing baby after baby. And I was serious about it. Until I started working with kids, and I was like, “Nope, I am good on that.” Did I answer your question?

Well, you chose to have children at a young age. You could have decided not to. What made you decide to move forward with that journey?

Tariqa: You don’t know what you’re gonna get. I definitely don’t encourage people to think that young people should have a kid because they’re going to save their life. Fuck that noise.

There’s often this pressure to keep “mother” and “artist” in separate boxes. How has your experience raising children shaped the way you approach your art? Is there a point where those two roles just become one for you?

Tariqa: You know what’s hilarious? Growing up in art circles, I watched men paint the “divine mother,” like she floated in on a cloud, while conveniently skipping the gritty, sweaty labor that actually makes that divinity possible without coming out on the other side looking like a wet cat. I’m allergic to boxes; I break them down and leave them at the curb for recycling. Being an artist swept me up long before kids came along, and having children didn’t tame that thrill—it turbocharged it. Some days, motherhood commandeers the whole bus; other days, it’s just a passenger, waving from the back, smoking a joint. Either way, those stories sneak into the work whether I intend them to or not.

In writing about the impact your mother has had on you, did you find it brought a sense of healing or perhaps a new perspective on your own path as a parent?

Tariqa: Well, to a certain extent, I think it brought about a lot of clarity in spaces that I can see that perhaps she doesn’t. A lot of what I’ve had to reconcile with in my relationship with my mom is that she has her own story to tell, and I have mine. And they don’t necessarily need to line up. I think that’s a part of life when you’re engaging with your younger self, especially.

My mother was raised a certain way by the Silent Generation, and so she raised me based on that. And those boomers, you know. They don’t take no prisoners when it comes to being accountable for anything. For me, the buck stops there, with her. Now I am the matriarch of my family. I am the one my children are going to look to and seek guidance and life lessons from, and it’s my responsibility to hold that space well for them, so they don’t leave with more questions and self-doubt. I don’t want them to feel like they have to hold me in any regard that will diminish their life in any way, because of how they view their mother, you know? There are some woman-to-woman conversations that we’ve had to have, but it’s my responsibility to make sure that I’m holding my own in that space, and that’s what it was like writing about her. And making sure to hold her and all of my family in a high regard was important to me because they’re human. We do the best we can with what we/ve got at the time. I have really wonderfully sweet people and family members who have gone through some really hard, dark shit. So it’s just a weird thing as a mother now with adult children—just the humility of that space where you’re like, I’m not raising them how I was raised. There was this “beyond reproach” kind of position that I’m like, “no.” I’m not on that bullshit.

Your relationship with your husband (musician), Ryan Waters, seems to be built on this beautiful reciprocity of creativity. When you first met, did you feel that shared artistic energy immediately, or did it grow as you started building this life together?

Tariqa: Before we met, we were living our lives on opposite ends of the earth, all the while, unbeknownst to us, having mutual friends who made our world instantaneously smaller. We met as artists: he, a world-renowned musician, and I (nearly twenty years ago), a painter who fancied herself the next great bassist. We both shared a very authentic, activist, grassroots approach to the arts. We understood and faced our own personal challenges within the arts and knew that taking the piss would be the most fun and effective way of sustaining ourselves as two creatives in the business.

In your book, you note that “Martyr Sauce became a rallying cry for those daring to create in a world that often demands conformity.” Your daughter, Kaelau, famously came up with this saying, “Martyr Sauce,” as a play on a phrase your son, 9, often said when he was frustrated, and it was a lightbulb for you and your husband, Ryan, who created the typeface for both Martyr Sauce and MS PAM (Martyr Sauce Pop Art Museum). Can you tell us a little bit more about Martyr Sauce for those who aren’t familiar, and what it means to you and your family?

Tariqa: The irony of the play on words “Martyr” and “Sauce” wasn’t lost on us. Kids say the darnedest things, but the pairing of Martyr Sauce was particularly prolific, courtesy of our then seven-year-old daughter, Kaelau. Martyr Sauce doesn’t just defy conformity; it challenges existing power structures within the arts at large. Occupying multiple prime real estate spots in the heart of downtown Seattle’s arts district, Pioneer Square, and keeping those brick and mortars going for over a decade didn’t just ruffle a few feathers- it flipped the whole damn bird. Behind closed doors, Martyr Sauce was changing the art landscape conversation at large- whether people fucked with it or not. It was a very punk rock existence for a good long while. The book provides more context for the “sauce.”

I love how you and Ryan hold space for your children to explore their own creativity and find their own creative voices, without the pressure to follow in your footsteps. You’ve allowed them to explore who they are. Is there a specific freedom or ‘gift’ that you’ve been able to give your children that you wish you’d had more of when you were growing up?

Tariqa: Yes. Access. The thing about the arts is that it’s so difficult to navigate what the successes look like and what we think a failure looks like, how to make money off of it, what work looks like, what a job looks like, what you make, and how to even be able to separate the stresses that come along with it. People would say, “Do what you love, and you never work a day in your life.” But it’s fucking work, hard work [in the arts]. You ask yourself every day, “What the fuck am I doing?” And “what the fuck is this?”

Tariqa: I got the lesson because this shit is crazy, fucking bananas. And the people that you meet along the way—everybody’s cool until they’re not. So how do you navigate different personalities, other people’s ambitions, and the competition behind it all? Just being close to it. When we were out with Sade. It was the first time that my kids saw a classy portrayal of just really good people, you know, who really value family, and a collective, shared experience. It was really cool. The energy was great, and so the kids, everybody’s kids, were just running around and kind of running the show. It’s important for children to see how accessible art is and how healthy it can be, too. What does a truly healthy arts ecosystem look like? Because there are a lot of unhealthy elements to this that will totally take you out. Sometimes, I was just like, I can’t do this anymore. That’s the arts in general, any genre of the arts, really. It is wrought with some shit, the music industry, the performing arts, it’s all there. I think my children having access gives them more agency to exist however they need to in the world. Just seeing it all, because the arts will give you a little bit of everything. And you know, love and support. That’s the biggest thing.

When you watch your kids lean into their own creative talents now, what’s the one thing that gets you the most excited for their futures?

Tariqa: Oooh. When they diversify, when they change it up. Right now, 9, he’s a DJ hosting on 91.9 WCLK. He’s on the radio every Sunday night, he has his own radio show at Clark University in Atlanta. So he does that, and he’s also working on this huge animation piece, and at the same time, he understands that he’s not gonna just do this one thing. He really does branch out. Same thing with Kaelau. They both can draw their asses off, too.

Kaelau jumps in. She’s a great collaborator and has a really keen eye for photography, film, and graphic arts. She’s super helpful. I’m like, okay, y’all are paying attention. And they don’t really talk about it. I think with kids, especially once they, well, they’re not kids, they’re young adults now. If you don’t tap in, you just don’t know; you have to ask them. Are you cool with this? Even with the work I do, I try to do something that I hope they would actually want to be involved in. When I did Gum Baby, and 9 did all these bluebird animations for me. Or, you know, yeah, Kaelau’s the same, like I can just say, hey, I need help, especially with shooting. I don’t really feel like shooting myself so much anymore. Can you take over the space? And she’s right in it and just knows what she’s talking about. She just grabs the camera.

I am inspired by the way that you and Ryan have intentionally cultivated a creative life for your family. To me, it’s very unique. It sounds like you grew up in a fairly creative environment with all the people in your family, but for a lot of us, that’s not super common. You genuinely like each other and enjoy creating together. It feels like such a rare model where everyone, including the kids, is a true collaborator. How did you two intentionally set out to build a family culture where everyone’s voice carries that much weight?

Tariqa: Oh, we just bring them in. We fold them in for everything. They don’t have a choice, ha, but, you know, they had a choice. It’s funny because from the start, before we even moved to Seattle, they were always in the mix.

When we moved to Seattle, actually, they stayed with my mother-in-law in Atlanta while we looked for a place to live. They were both really into “Harriet the Spy,” so our directive was to find a place that looked like a “Harriet the Spy” house, like in the movies. So that’s how we ended up where we did, because they wanted a quirky, weird, creative, art-like, lofty living space. So, if it wasn’t for them. Martyr Sauce probably wouldn’t exist in a lot of different ways. If they had wanted something more traditional, we probably would have looked for that, but they wanted something far out and weird. So I just remembered that today! I was like, oh shit, y’all are the reasons why!

I keep thinking about the recent Chloé Zhao quote from the Golden Globes—“The most important thing of being an artist is learning to be vulnerable enough to allow ourselves to be seen for who we are, not who we ought to be.” Your SAM exhibit, Venus is Missing, with the light portal, blown-glass ball barrettes, and fabricated pink spaceship, is so playful on the surface, but after reading your book and learning about the backstory of your dog, Venus, it adds a much deeper layer of emotional weight. Now that the show is out in the world, do you feel like you’ve reached that level of vulnerability Zhao talks about, or does it still feel like a mission you’ll always be navigating?

Tariqa: The vulnerability is constant. The work is an outward extension of my self-care- a way to tend the parts of me that grief and loss expose. Seeing people respond genuinely, letting themselves play and soften in front of the pieces, feels like a reciprocal healing: they bring their own inner work into the space and, in doing so, complete the gesture of the work. That said, I don’t think vulnerability is a destination. It’s a practice and a navigation. I’m learning how to hold a generous, hospitable space for others without outsourcing my worth to the room. There are still boundaries to negotiate: how much of myself to reveal, when to protect the private heart that makes the work possible, and how to keep care at the center rather than performance. So yes, constantly vulnerable, constantly learning.

If you could pack a real lunch in your giant rotating Julia lunchbox installation, what would be inside?

Tariqa: What I was always dying to have in my lunchbox, but my mom would never let me have, was a Lunchable. So I’d want two Lunchables, two Capri Suns, and ranch Ruffles potato chips. Oh my god, maybe some peanut M&M’s or something. That’s what I would want because I wasn’t allowed to have any of that shit. What I got wouldn’t keep. It was so disgusting. Whatever survived by the time you got to lunch, it was inedible. Lunchables have staying power.

I mean, as a kid who grew up on Lunchables, I can say, you didn’t miss anything. I see them now, and I’m like, I ate that? What were you feeding me, Mom?

Tariqa: Really? When I tell people who actually ate Lunchables, they’re like, “ Yeah, why?” We got to have Pop-Tarts on occasion; we ate them like they were cheesecake or something. My mom would say, “ Okay, you guys can have a Pop-Tart.” So we would savor every bite, and then I would try to save my last bite, and then watch my sister eat her last bite. It’s like, “See, I still got some.” Terrible foods. I mean, okay, maybe a roast beef and some mashed potatoes, but maybe it’s still a Capri Sun.

Some kind of juice box. Adult juice, kid juice, whatever juice. Yeah.

Tariqa Right, or like a can of rosé.

And if you had a time machine, what would you go back and tell little 6-year-old Tariqa about herself now? What’s the one thing your 6-year-old self would be most impressed by in your life right today?

Tariqa: Oh, my. My 6-year-old self would be most impressed by all of it. I think about that all the time. Knowing where I was at 6 in that little house in Richmond. Oh my god, she would have thought I was lying. I even think about walking around now with different-colored hair, and how conservative it was for me growing up. Just being able to look the way I do is something I never would have imagined for myself. There were all of these restrictions—the way I was supposed to present myself to the world and the way I was supposed to ultimately end up. None of that has happened for me. I would blow my 6-year-old’s mind. You don’t need to be a billionaire. I don’t know why everybody’s aspiring to be a billionaire or what it feels like; it doesn’t have to be this grandiose thing. It’s just something you can never imagine for yourself - how things are going to turn out. But then, when they turn out, who you’ve become and what you had to go through in order to get there and be on the other side of that, and to be able to receive all of that. You couldn’t imagine, as it’s written on paper: you’ll be a mother at 46, and you’ll be married. But you wouldn’t understand all of the inner workings of the magic that presents because it’s such a gift. And I’m really appreciative of it, because it’s so precious. It’s such a precious space that I get to exist in, and I don’t take it for granted. Everything moves, changes, and evolves. Right now, my 6-year-old’s mind would be blown, I hope it stays blown, you know, into my 70s and 80s.

In the exhibition, I had audio of my sister and me when we were little. It’s my 6-year-old self’s voice, and her 3-year-old self that were in that exhibition [Venus is Missing].

Really?! Oh my god, I didn’t even catch that when I was there. It was pretty busy and loud that evening. I didn’t even catch it. Oh man.

Tariqa: I’m still waiting for SAM to return the media from the exhibit so I can put something together with just the audio file attached, because that’s huge. Venus Is Missing was that time. I mean, to put my front yard in there, and then to have Kaelau exchanging in that space. It was unreal. And SAM, the curators, everybody was great, so I just had a really good time getting it all up, even after everything that I’ve already gone through with a lot of these other institutions. Just to have something work out the way it was supposed to. To have it be solely based on what my 6-year-old self needed to see happen. It didn’t need to be any trauma porn or my interpretation of something for the greater good, or some other conversation or be introspective. It was just purely for my 6-year-old self. Back then, it seemed like that was going to be my reality, forever. You know, some people don’t leave their neighborhoods; they spend their whole lifetime there. They never leave their city and spend their whole lives there. That’s in my family. They’re still in the same house that I grew up in. It’s crazy just to see what time and experience can do. Yeah, that book wasn’t enough.

Tariqa Waters’ book, WHO RAISED YOU? A Martyr Sauce Guide to Etiquette is available for purchase in person or online at ARTE NOIR and Seattle Art Museum, and via the Martyr Sauce Website.

On Friday, March 20 over 200 people gathered at Recess Studio to celebrate the opening of Mother Lode: a three day exhibition featuring over 30 artists, five live performances and two in-person healing activations.

Curated and produced by Recess co-founder Elizabeth Rudge, and The Fold’s founder, Amanda Carter Gomes, the works presented spanned mediums, and the artists spanned generations. Participants and attendees were invited to experience the joy, pain, levity, grief, and anger conjured through the prompt Rudge provided as inspiration for this event:

“I have been in deep thought about what it means to have this reproductive system (or have lost it) and the unending responsibility it is to live with it. What it means to keep fighting for body autonomy. To keep fighting for people to research our bodies to understand more the meeting of the mind and its physical form. What it means to be a “mother”. Or our relationships to our “mother”, our feminine ancestral lines. The generations of secrets and shame. And the moments of joy that go hand in hand with the heaviness as well.I would love to create a show into our inner minds and stories in whatever way feels right to tell.”

What happened next exceeded all expectations, people moved outside their comfort zones and created art in forms and through channels they had not worked in before. A writer made a hand-stitched flag; one photographer wrote a poem, another photographer created a layered, life-sized portrait printed on tissue paper; a glass artist and a fiber artists collaborated on a large installation, and more. There were readings of personal stories and poetry, a young sister duo who danced and sang, Kisha Vaughan graced with a performance and then DJ Play Pranks kept us on the dance floor until closing time. We are still riding the high from the night and now inspired to take this show on the road!

Until then, please enjoy snaps from the event….and if you live in a location that would benefit from a Mother Lode visit, please let us know in the comments. You can also check out a video of the event on Instagram.

Thank you to the artists, those who joined us for the opening party, and the roughly 400 people who made it to Mother Lode over the 3 day exhibition. Thanks also to our friends at Alaffia for the GOOD soaps and SYA for the resource materials. And thank you to Parlour Wines for popping up with beverage offerings. If Mother Lode confirmed anything it’s that we will save us.

“When the oncologist mentioned genetic testing and how it would benefit our family, we had to explain that I wasn't her biological daughter. The room absorbed this information and moved on. There is no biological record of the two of us in each other. Nothing in my body that is technically hers.”

Share The Fold Mag

interviewed phenomenal multi-hyphenate, artist, curator, gallerist, teacher, activist, and mother, Tariqa Waters. This is the first of an extensive two-part series with the icon.

At twenty-four, Tariqa Waters packed her bags and jetted off to Sicily to pursue art with two toddlers in tow—a bold move for many, but Tariqa has never been afraid to take a leap of faith and see where the chips land. This same creative determination and punk ethos led her family to move from Atlanta to Seattle in 2012 to build a life in the historic Pioneer Square neighborhood.

Together, the family created Martyr Sauce, a pocket-sized art gallery located in the foyer and stairwell of their first apartment, becoming one of the most unique art spaces in the city. As their creative ideas and connections grew, the gallery relocated to a much larger underground space, becoming a multi-use cultural hub featuring art, music, a beauty supply store, and more. In 2020, its street-level companion, MS PAM (Martyr Sauce Pop Art Museum), allowed visitors to experience Tariqa’s large-scale installations along with vibrant local art and her beloved pop culture collections, and she even launched a performance talk show, “Thank You, MS PAM.”

In the midst of her recent solo exhibition at Seattle Art Museum, Venus is Missing, and a move back to Atlanta, Tariqa released her first book, WHO RAISED YOU? A Martyr Sauce Guide to Etiquette. The book not only covers the last decade of her paintings, sculptures, installations, and public works but also integrates elements of memoir, including her philosophy on life and art and the people who have helped shape her. There’s even a bonus mini tongue-in-cheek etiquette guide written specifically for museums and art institutions. *wink wink

Adding author to her list of accomplishments, which includes artist, curator, gallerist, teacher, activist, and, of course, mother, Tariqa has taken ‘doing the most’ to a whole new level. Along the way, she has continued to cultivate a creative, arts-filled life with her husband and their two children. Together, they have uplifted music, fashion, and the work of dozens of contemporary visual artists.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

First of all, congratulations on publishing your first book! That is such a major undertaking. It’s hard for me to express how much I loved Who Raised You? A Martyr Sauce Guide to Etiquette. I was truly overcome with pride for you – you made this beautiful thing you put out into the world that honors not only your personal story but also your family’s.

Tariqa Waters: It was. Well, thank you for all your sweet words, and thank you for reading the book.

Before I get into my questions about the “Martyr Sauce Family Band,” as you call yourselves, I want to go back a bit to pre-husband-and-kids Tariqa.

You talk about poring over your mother’s photo albums as a child and how it shaped your perspective. You had a lot of big personalities in your family. Growing up, did you find that these figures nurtured your creative voice, or was art a way of carving out an identity separate from them?

Tariqa: It’s wild. My sister and I often talk about it. We adore our family; they were a huge part of our childhood, but family was just as much an active part of our childhood as it was passive. It was a nothing burger. It almost canceled itself out in that way because it [creativity] was so accessible. My grandmother had all of my uncle’s paintings hung around the house. We were super impressed. He could paint circles around hyper-realistic portraits, paintings of friends or encounters, all from memory. He didn’t need a photograph. This was at the height of the 80s—we didn’t have cable, and we had only limited times to watch television. So once they thought we were in front of the TV long enough, it was, “Okay, you need to find something else to do, either go outside or draw.” So we would always try to copy how good our uncle was. I didn’t mention him in the book. I should have, but you know, pages, trees, tariffs.

My other uncle, Lorenzo, was also an accomplished artist, especially in the Richmond art scene. He was a landscape artist. He loved nature. He loved to hike, and he would go to the James River and different trails in the Blue Ridge mountains, and just take his canvas and paints. He also learned Taekwondo and Karate at a really early age as a form of self-defense because of my crazy ass grandfather. He grew up in the Creighton Court projects, and it was a different time then. If someone was picking on you, you had to fight the king of the bullies, like the main leader. So my uncle, he could fight, but he wanted skills. He became a martial artist and later a ballet dancer with the Richmond Ballet.

Then, my mother’s youngest sister, Marcia, the baby, she just went into the arts. She studied art in Atlanta. That’s where she met my Uncle Daniel [Minter], who’s also an accomplished artist. She was the Creative Director for Essence Magazine and then for LL Bean. Now she and Daniel run their own incubator arts center in Portland, Maine. Uncle Daniel paints and does Capoeira martial arts as well.

So you’re saying it was pretty much just kind of a natural part of your life from the jump. You already had all these creative people in your life.

Tariqa: Yeah…

You are a natural observer and storyteller. In the process of telling your story for this book, did you discover new facets of your narrative that visual art alone couldn’t capture? How do these two mediums, writing and visual art, play off each other for you? Have you had an inclination toward writing in the past, or was this your first time sitting down to tell your story through words versus visual art?

Tariqa: My visual art practice allows me to play. A sanctioned escapism I give myself permission to indulge in. It’s liken to drifting off into a blissful daydream amid chaos. It invites viewers in, offers a space to linger, but it doesn’t always let me name the small, precise decisions and histories that shaped a piece without flattening the enjoyment of their experience. No matter how large or immersive the installation, viewers still take away only a portion of the story. Storytelling and scale are a strange pairing: sometimes a picture book needs no words. Sometimes an image insists on context.

Writing demands the same time and care as making, and I’m constantly choosing between deadlines and studio hours. For Venus is Missing, I knew I was opening into a layered sequence of events that stretch into the present. No fucking way I was going to stand in the installation and unpack all that history and pain for museum visitors. The book felt necessary- the pictures plus words give a broader context and a sliver of the artist’s humanity. “It’s not about hair, after all!” They’d say...after reading it.

From Richmond and Maryland, Florida, to Italy, Atlanta, and Seattle, your life has been one of migration. Is there a specific moment or story from one of these locations—perhaps one that didn’t make it into your book—that served as the definitive “turning point” for your calling as an artist?

Tariqa: Sicily shaped it. There’s no bones about it. It was the first time I started making money as an artist. I was painting because I couldn’t afford a television. My next-door neighbor gave me one of those old black-and-white TVs with the radio attached. Like, thank you. So I started painting just to kind of see what I could do on my own. I would show my folks what I was doing when I went home, and my uncles in particular were so encouraging, even though they were terrible paintings. Looking back on them, I’m like, “No.”

I highly doubt that.

Tariqa: They were so sweet. If they had said anything discouraging in the slightest, I never would have pursued it. If they were like, “Umm, Tariqa, I don’t think you should be a painter...” But they didn’t. It was, “This is so cool, I can’t believe you’re doing this, keep going.”

In Sicily, I just had Kaelau. I started painting in oils. I needed slower drying times. Moving around, I had so many boxes, so I was making these removable children’s remurals [in Sicily]. Then people would come over and be like, “Can you do that for my kid?” So it changed to doing proper murals. I was painting constantly. I was also teaching at the equivalent of a Boys and Girls Club there. I was doing a lot of work, and having shows. It was just really cool to navigate those spaces on my own and then get the encouragement. Being in Italy on my own, not going there to pursue my career as an artist, but just doing it, having it well received, and finding a little bit of financial support—not enough to stay—because I tried my damndest to stay.

I don’t think I would want to leave Sicily, either.

Tariqa: Oh my god, I was so close to becoming a go-go dancer. I didn’t care. But that’s what made it easier for me to go. When I came back to the States, I felt like an immigrant in the way that you just hit the ground running. What do I need to do? Who do I need to talk to? That kind of propelled it in DC. And then when Ryan and I met, it helped in Atlanta. When I met Ryan, he had already been doing it on his own his entire life, as a musician. It took all of the “This is the way you’re supposed to do it” away. It was like, “No, you want to do it? Do it, and we’ll just figure it out.”

But yes, it was Sicily. Especially having young kids, and I mean, they were babies.

I think I screwed up my timeline! I don’t think I initially realized you had the kids with you there. So before that, while attending an HBCU, there were rumors that you were a CIA operative. It wasn’t long after that you left school and eventually lived in Sicily for four years.

Tariqa: I always said, when I had to write this book, I was like, oh my god. That was all true. I wish it were not. It was so funny. They literally thought I was [a CIA operative].

I was like laughing my ass off reading that, but also I’m sure that was just so disheartening. I can’t imagine going into this environment where you think, “ Oh, I’m going to be completely surrounded by my peers,” and then you are still misunderstood by them.

Tariqa: Not for the last time either. I’ve had people say that about me in Seattle, too. And that’s why I put it in the book. It’s only because of how I carry myself. [They thought], “this girl ain’t real.”

How old were you when you had Kaelau [daughter] and 9 [son]? 9 is the oldest, right?

Tariqa: I just turned 21 when I found I was pregnant. So, I was 21 when he was born, and 24 when I had Kaelau.

What made you decide to pick Sicily of all the places you could have gone?

Tariqa: I always say that’s another lifetime. It could be a biopic. Yeah, being young, being 24 is what got me over there (to Sicily). Big all the way at 24. If I had a 24 in front of me right now—that’s a baby, you know?

Oh yeah, I mean, how old is 9? He’s almost 24 now, right?

Tariqa: Yeah, 9 is almost there; he’s 23. And then Kaelau’s 21. She’s about to be 22, and I treat them like, absolutely not. We were pushed out of the house at 18, and you had to figure it the fuck out. So I was always scaring my family. I gave them high blood pressure all the time. Yeah, it’s a problem.

You and I are both members of the “latchkey kid” generation - we had this unique, unsupervised relationship with pop culture and branding during our coming of age years. You’ve mastered the art of using everyday objects as narrative devices, revealing deeper meanings behind them. How does that specific era of media and independence continue to inform the visual language of your work today?

Tariqa: It’s funny because it was really fun to pull these things off at that time. 2014 and 2015 were when I really started, with 100% Kannekalon. I am a consumer. I hate to say it. I do love all those things. I love shopping. I love vintage. I love toys. I mean, that was one of the reasons I married Ryan, because he still kept all his toys. I was like, “ You can do that?”

I don’t know any time in my life where some shit had hit the fan or, you know, it’s the agony of having to put one foot in front of the other, the toll that that takes, but then there’s always these things that are around, that just take the edge off. Back in the day, you had to dig into your old toy box to try to find that one thing that you hadn’t seen in a long time to show it off. Like, “Did you have one of these?”

That’s where it came from, with Seattle in particular, because I really enjoyed meeting people constantly on a First Thursday or at an opening. The spaces we had had all this history to them. And then, combining that historical architecture with another vibrant, era-specific object that is just in a space of play. Back then, you either had it or you didn’t, and you didn’t have to be rich or poor. It didn’t have anything to do with class. It was just this ubiquitous object that, if you were around, especially in the 80s, every season those toys marked a certain era, even marked your age and what you were into.

They mark a time in my personal life, but also, politically and socially, what was happening in the country at the time. How my thoughts were evolving and changing, what my mom was going through at the time as a single mother, having to raise these two girls on her own. It was important for her, too. We only had Christmas. We would be overloaded with as much as she could get us to occupy and distract us for the year. Itwas just like, “Okay, you’re going to be set for the year. Don’t ask me for shit, because you get it today, and that’s it.” She would take on two or three jobs just to make sure that we were in abundance come Christmas day, which was just wild to me.

I try to avoid conversations centering race, particularly in Seattle. It’s too forward and off-putting- like, geez, buy me a drink first. It’s presumptuous for someone with no real connection to, or cultural literacy about, another person to think they can encapsulate the nuanced totality of what a value is and why it exists the way it does. I’d like to discuss certain aspects of myself and my lived experiences- on a timeline that feels comfortable to me.

What I’ve found is that arts spaces reductively want to play succubus, extracting particular traumas from the grander complexities of my Blackness- of our humanity. Let me tell my story in all of its vastness. And guess what: to some degree, you’re already part of it. How is it expressed in the work? How does it resonate with you? All I ask is that you be up to speed before you ring my phone.

With this rocket ship for the Seattle Art Museum [from Venus is Missing], I was trying to move away from some of the previous branding. I didn’t want to get a cease-and-desist. I wanted something where I could move through time and have it as that nod to when we were all thinking that by 2020, by the 2000s, you would be flying or there’d be some advancement with technology where these reductive conversations that we tend to keep having wouldn’t really hold any weight or water now. Why don’t we have a new set of issues to talk about? Why are we still talking about these same things? Especially in thinking about the next generation, that was kind of the pull.

Right, right.

Tariqa: It’s a great story because it’s not just my story. I get to hear other people’s experiences about the work that I make, and I don’t have to talk about myself. So people could come in [to the exhibit], and they’ll remember something. They’ll share something with me about their own personal lives. I’m grateful that the pieces I’ve selected so far have been drawing on really good memory banks for folks. Even the ball barrette, if you’re a Black woman artist, if you do anything around hair, now we’re having a hair conversation. But in the 80s, we all wore ball barrettes. They were terrible. Everybody said, “We pulled them out. By the end of the day, they were hanging at the end.” I hated those things. I wanted to try to take away some of the narratives when I’m doing things. And then you step into these institutions, and they always want to bring it back serious. I’m like, can’t we just have fun?!

I’ve always admired how you weave playfulness into your work. It feels like you’re doing more than just making art—you are actively protecting and healing your inner child. You’ve mentioned that as kids, we often retreat into our imagination, and you believe adults need that same space. When you’re dreaming up these large-scale pieces, does it feel like you’re creating the safety and joy that your inner child needed back then?

Tariqa: It’s a bit of both. I remember the first time that I went into a children’s museum as a kid. It blew my mind! We could all play, and everybody is friends. I didn’t know these kids. They didn’t know me. We’ll never see each other again, but right now, we’re in the grocery store, now we’re in a subway. We’re doing these weird things. The interactive part of it was just so cool. And when I painted, the scale became a huge deal. I wanted it to tower over adults. I want to touch on the inner child part of us, where you can’t compete with the scale, and you feel like a kid again. It takes your breath away—that thing shouldn’t be that big!

That said, I take everything I do really seriously, and it does have a lot of serious undertones. But my art is a way for me to play. We have all of these underlying things; we’re multifaceted and very dynamic, and we have stories to tell. But sometimes you don’t feel like you should be pulling in and accessing those spaces in order for the work to have meaning. It helped having the book come out at the same time as the exhibit, because I did not want to talk about why Venus was missing [the inspiration for the exhibit at SAM]. I wanted to lean into my 6-year-old self’s imagination. How do you thread that needle, where you come out on the other ed and you’re not defined by these horrific, dark, shadowy parts of your past? You’ve made something beautiful out of it or something fun where you’re still digging in other people’s memory banks, but they don’t feel like they’re drowning in your own personal experience; they’re part of it too in some hopeful way, in a way where your imagination is like, “let’s go out and play.” We don’t have toys. We don’t have any bikes. We don’t have any balls out here, but we still gotta play outside. That superpower we had when we were kids is still there. I use art to my advantage now. It’s tough to make a living now with that. But that’s what I’ve been trying to fight for, and it’s really hard because people want to be so serious. So you feel like Pee Wee [Herman].

Tune in for Part II of Who Made You? The Matriarchy of Martyr Sauce, next Wednesday, March 25th, exclusively on The Fold Mag.

Until then, you can grab your copy of Tariqa’s book, WHO RAISED YOU? A Martyr Sauce Guide to Etiquette in person or online at ARTE NOIR and Seattle Art Museum, or via the Martyr Sauce Website.

Hilary Northcraft is a writer, photographer and creative collaborator who has spent her career working in the arts, culture and music industries of the PNW . Find her on Substack at .

There are things I need to believe. I am working on a list.

I need to believe that my mothers are immortal. I need to believe that the body can heal itself, that love is a cellular event, and that somewhere in the universe there is a magic that protects the people we cannot afford to lose. I need to believe that “live, laugh, love” is one of the most profound statements of our lifetimes. In September, I texted a friend that I was one unprecedented event away from getting it tattooed on my body. In December, an oncologist pulled up a CT scan and showed us what pancreatic cancer looks like when it’s already made other plans. White spots scattered across my mother’s lungs like a constellation. The same stars my daughter falls asleep under every night, projected onto her ceiling by a small plastic astronaut standing watch in the dark.

My mother, Leesha, has always believed in the impossible. This is one of the things I love most about her, and one of the things that is currently making me want to lie down on the cold floor of a CVS and never get up.

When I was six, she spent months visualizing us winning the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes. Not hoping. Manifesting. Affirming. She said it with the certainty of someone who had already decided to take the lump sum. I believed her completely, the way children believe in things that adults have stopped allowing themselves to want. I had a whole picture of it: the balloons, Ed McMahon at our door, the van pulling up to our house in North Seattle with a check large enough to change everything. I’m not sure I ever fully recovered from the slow understanding that followed, the world containing less magic than I’d been promised, and less mercy. I think about that feeling now when she insists, with some irritation at any implication otherwise, that she is perfectly fine. That all will be well.

This is a woman who left a marriage, moved to Seattle, came out, and rode a motorcycle through the steep hills of the city before she met my other mother, Mimi, while they were both driving electric trolleys. They fell in love in uniform. Leesha decided she wanted to restore a vintage Danish coffee roaster. Then, open espresso carts. A coffeehouse. A roastery. Mimi conspired happily alongside her. There was always something else to build, always something they didn’t want to miss. They looked at the very particular problem of how to bring a child into the world without a husband or a template or a legal framework that recognized their family as real, and decided that was fine. They would figure it out. They always figured it out.

These are women who have always moved through the world like the balloons are coming.

In the waiting room at Swedish Hospital, I held Leesha’s hand the way she has always held me, which is the way you hold someone you made from scratch, even when you didn’t, technically, make them from scratch.

She held me in a similar waiting room when I was just a few weeks old. My mothers had brought me in for a checkup, and while Mimi stepped away to the restroom, Leesha sat with me as I began to stir. A woman nearby struck up a conversation. How old? How was the birth? Leesha answered the way she always does, direct and without apology. They chatted until Mimi came back, took me from Leesha, and began to nurse me. The woman got up and walked away without a word.

People used to tell us we looked alike. You can believe anything if you want to badly enough. Leesha and I don’t share biology. We share something else, something I don’t have a clean word for, that lives in the body anyway, that shows up in waiting rooms and hospital corridors and in the particular way she still calls me Drewji when she thinks I’m scared, which I am. I always am.

Everyone always wanted to know who my real mother was. I never had a satisfying answer, not because it was difficult, not because it was a competition, but because it was the wrong question entirely.

The self-help guru Louise Hay believed you could heal your body with your mind. A sore throat meant you felt silenced. Cancer meant unresolved resentment. The cure was affirmations, self-love, the persistent insistence that you deserved to be well. In the mid-80s, she became a controversial figure in the AIDS crisis, running support groups for men who were dying, teaching them that if they loved themselves enough, their bodies might relent.

Fuck Louise Hay. I mean this sincerely. I have Crohn’s disease and autoimmune arthritis, conditions I likely inherited from somewhere in my father Ron’s biological family, none of whom he ever knew. He was adopted, showed up imperfectly for me until he died of AIDS in 1997, and left before I could ask him much about his body and what it carried. I did not think my way into inflammation. I did not fail to love myself into a flare. The idea that the body is a report card for the mind is a particularly cruel kind of magic, the kind that finds the pleading desire in people, the prayer just underneath the surface of the desperate and the grieving, and charges admission.

And yet. When I watch my mother visualize and affirm and insist, I recognize something in it that I can’t quite bring myself to dismiss entirely. It is the same thing that drove two women to carry a baby food jar of sperm across the West Seattle Bridge, trying to make a baby the only way they knew how, and believe, with complete conviction, that it would work. That the world would make room for what they needed.

It did. It does. It has to.

When my daughter Frida was born, Leesha held her and kept saying, “I have to remind myself she’s not you.” Frida is almost eight now. She was a late walker, scooting everywhere on her butt until she was nearly two, perfectly capable of chatting with us in full sentences the whole time. When she finally took her first steps, she looked at me and announced, matter-of-factly, “I decide to walk.”

She goes to sleep every night under a sky full of stars.

Fetal cells cross into the mother’s body during pregnancy and stay there, sometimes for the rest of her life. The mother’s cells do the same in reverse. They persist. They migrate to sites of injury. They remember.

Leesha and I don’t have this. We never will. When the oncologist mentioned genetic testing and how it would benefit our family, we had to explain that I wasn’t her biological daughter. The room absorbed this information and moved on. There is no biological record of the two of us in each other. Nothing in my body that is technically hers.

Everyone always wanted to know who my real mother was. I never had an answer because it was the wrong question entirely. The right question is what crosses over. What persists without permission. What migrates toward injury because it has no other option.

I think about a woman getting up and walking away from something she didn’t have a word for. I think about a small plastic astronaut standing watch in the dark, throwing stars onto the ceiling so my daughter can fall asleep believing the night is full of beautiful things.

There are things I need to believe. I am still working on the list.

Drew Zandonella-Stannard is a writer, editor and mother living in Seattle with her family (including mothers Leesha and Mimi). You can follow her on Substack at .

In what feels like an endless cycle of so-called “unprecedented” times, parenting has become a constant negotiation—with the news, with work (if you have it), with the relentless details of everyday life, all unfolding at once. How do you hold it all while raising children? And what happens when the national headlines are no longer abstract, when they arrive at your doorstep?

What unfolded in Minnesota over the past weeks has been soul-breaking. Images and footage of ICE raids—families torn apart, children taken, communities living in fear—have gripped so many with outrage and disbelief. At the same time, the response on the ground has revealed something else: neighbors showing up for one another, mutual aid networks mobilizing overnight, people refusing to turn away. In that tension between fear and solidarity, there is a fragile but real glimmer of hope.

While the headlines may have moved on, the impacts of ICE on Minneapolis still linger, uniquely so for children. We heard from a family parenting a teenager and a six-year-old as they navigate this moment in Minnesota—about what daily life looks like right now, how they are talking to their children, and how those of us watching from elsewhere can show up in meaningful ways.

First, how are you feeling today?

Carrie: Overwhelmed.

Jade: Overwhelmed. Paranoid. Exhausted.

How would you describe what it’s like to be a parent in Minnesota right now in one sentence?

C: Constantly worrying about keeping all children safe.

J: Instinctual, real, and complex.

How has your life changed over the past few weeks?

J: We run a small urban farm, and this time of year is typically busy with preparation and planning, but we struggle to get any actual work done.

C: Instead of working, we have been focusing on ensuring people who are sheltering in place are fed and safe. This includes collecting donations from our community, helping with food distributions, driving food to families, and peacefully observing.

What gives you the most fear, and is there anything that gives you hope?

C: Our current fears are huge, but they all surround the fear of this being our new normal. As for hope, the people of our city bring us hope. Within a week, the city came together to help one another in every way possible. We keep ourselves safe, and we keep each other going.

J: I mean, what’s happening is already the realization of some of our greatest fears. Men in full tactical gear indiscriminately grabbing people of color off the streets and from their homes and disappearing them, into what is essentially a prison work camp system, is a living nightmare. It’s not a rare occurrence to happen upon a car in the middle of the street that is both empty and idling. No one around. It’s a scene that will make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. In the same breath, however, I would say the community’s reaction has been incredibly powerful and heartwarming. Days of war and nights of love.

What conversations are you having with your kids right now?

C: We have a 6-year-old and a 15-year-old, so the conversations have been very different with them. The same day Renée Good was murdered, ICE agents detained a teacher and an observer after setting off tear gas at our 15-year-old’s school. This happened soon after dismissal, so many students and teachers were there. This event kind of set the tone for our conversation with our son. We have been talking to him about ways to stay safe and making sure he knows the temperature of MPLS right now. Teens do dumb shit because they are teens and learning, but when our city is on high alert, it is less safe to be a teen. (not explaining this well)

J: I would say that with our teen we are trying to stress the importance of safety and good decision-making. I think this particular discussion brings up the question of being self-aware enough to know when to avoid a situation and when to stand up and do what is right.

C: As for our 6-year-old, she knows some of what is happening, but we don’t want her to live in fear. She asks about her friends with brown skin and if they will be taken by ICE police (that’s what she calls ICE).

J: It’s hard to tell with the 6-year-old how much stress she is picking up from us and the city at large. We talk to her about the basics surrounding all of this. We keep it simple. We lie and tell her that her friends of color will be okay. We tell her that what the government is doing is morally wrong and heinous. But she doesn’t quite get it. She is too young to understand why any of this would be happening.

Have you been able to find moments of joy?

C: Not sure if we have felt joy, but we have felt hope. Seeing our community come together gives so many of us in Minneapolis joy.

J: I agree. I’m not sure about “joy,” but there are definitely heartwarming moments almost every day. Lots of extremes.

What is the best way for people in other states to support your community?

CSA Membership (explain the Sponsor at large membership)

Ways to Give — The Sanneh Foundation - EMPOWER. IMPROVE. UNITE.

What’s something about parenting here that might surprise people who don’t live in Minnesota?

C: Not sure if this is surprising, but being a parent right now in Minneapolis is so confusing. We are working hard to help each other, yet we have less time for our children.

J: This may be too negative, and it may not be a surprise, but both children are struggling at this time.

Join Recess Studio and The Fold at the opening party for: Mother Lode

Featuring over 30 multi-medium artists presenting works ranging from visual arts to dance to music to poetry. The opening reception and weekend events are free but spacing is limited. View the invitation for additional details and to confirm attendance.

ABOUT MOTHER LODE:

Mother Lode means “a very large amount of something valuable”.

Exploring what it means to have this reproductive system (or have lost it) and the unending responsibility it is to live with it. What it means to keep fighting for body autonomy. To keep fighting for people to research our bodies to understand more the meeting of the mind and its physical form. What it means to be a “mother”, or our relationships to our “mother”. What it’s like to be a caregiver, an aunty, a steward of the earth or a connector in a community, and the connection to our feminine ancestral lines. The generations of secrets and shame, and the moments of joy that go hand in hand with that heaviness. Mother Lode is a show that explores our inner minds and stories. We hope to see our Seattle + Tacoma community there!

In case you have not heard, Bad Bunny gave an unforgettable 13-minute concert on Sunday, and there was football played before and after 😉. The record-breaking halftime show was a loving ode to Puerto Rico and Latino culture. The production was rich in imagery and symbolism, some easy for Latinx audiences to catch, some completely unknown to many, with Easter eggs throughout. Whether you were familiar or not, it was a powerful performance at a tumultuous and heartbreaking time for our community.

When Benito looked directly at the camera and said, “Vales más de lo que piensas” - “You’re worth more than you think,” it was a reminder to value ourselves in spite of constant messaging and actions denying Latinos basic dignity and humanity. In an endless news cycle of heartbreak and state sanctioned violence, Benito gave us a brief escape into pure joy, filled with history and a celebration of our culture and ancestors. This is a very incomplete guide, and we’ll update it as we discover more.

References you may have missed:

Sugarcane field: Where colonization, exploitation, slavery, and rebellion meet in Puerto Rico’s history.

Bad Bunny’s jersey: Showed his mother’s surname Ocasio and the number 64 as a tribute to his late uncle, who was born in 1964 and moved to the U.S. mainland at age 17.

Villa’s Tacos: A beloved Los Angeles taco shop.

Celimar Rivera Cosme: Signed the performance in Puerto Rican Sign Language.

Gentlemen playing dominoes: A social game popular in Caribbean Latin American countries.

Ricky Martin: Puerto Rican performer who was popular in Spanish-speaking countries for much of his life, who achieved stardom on mainland USA once he sang in English, and was a part of the “Latin Explosion” of the 1990s.

Electric Poles: Puerto Rico’s power grid is privatized, mismanaged, and costly to residents, leading to frequent power outages and blackouts that can last for long periods, notably the blackouts that plagued the island following Hurricane Maria.

Toñita: Owner of the lauded Toñita’s, a Puerto Rican social club in Brooklyn, operating for over 50 years in spite of gentrification.

Couple getting married: Really got married! They invited Benito to their wedding and he in turn invited them to get married at the show.

124.4: Yards traveled by Benito during the show.

Lincoln Fox: The little boy Benito handed the Grammy to, symbolizing a young version of himself, mistakenly identified on the internet as Liam Ramos, the five-year-old boy who was abducted by ICE in Minnesota.

Coco frio, piraguas: PR staple street treats.

Reggaeton mashup honoring pioneers of the genre: Tego Calderón’s “Pa’ Que Retocen,” Don Omar’s “Dale Don Dale,” Daddy Yankee’s “Gasolina,”** (also heard was a faint echo of the beginning of the song “Quimbara””)

**A Millennial National Anthem.

Madelyn Nuñez: Mexican-American nail artist (PS, typing this with fresh hot pink french manicure powder gels).

Mariachi Divas de Cindy Shea: All-female mariachi.

Benito waking the little boy sleeping across three chairs: The most Latino moment of the show, a core memory of every Latinx child staying late at parties with their parents.

La Casita: Model of a traditional Puerto Rican home; it was also the centerpiece of his residency concerts. Also like his residency, this performance featured celebrities on the porch of the pink house: Collaborators Karol G 🇨🇴 and Cardi B, Pedro Pascal, Jessica Alba, Young Miko, Ronald Acuña Jr, David Grutman, and, for some reason Alix Earle.

The Puerto Rican flag featuring a lighter blue: Symbolizes the Puerto Rican independence movement. The flag featuring the darker blue has been the flag since 1952, when Puerto Rico became a US colony, er, commonwealth.

*Under the Gag Law (1948–1957) it was illegal to fly the Puerto Rican flag.

Crying and yelling you may have heard: From everyone who screamed through tears when their country of origin or heritage was shouted out at the end of the performance by Benito as he held a football that read “Together, We Are America.”

Honorable mention: Lady Gaga’s fit by Luar, the Dominican American–helmed fashion brand.

We see you 👀♥️: the guy-on-guy perreo.

Some translations:

Las mujeres en el mundo entero, perreando sin miedo: To all of the women around the world, dance/grind/twerk without fear. *Said during “Yo Perreo Sola,” which “is dedicated to those who desire to dance alone, and safely, at the club.”

Mientras uno está vivo, uno debe amar lo más que pueda: While we’re alive, we should love as much as we can.

Baila sin miedo, ama sin miedo: Dance without fear, love without fear.

We’ve never considered ourselves “joiners” nor are we often this late to the party, but as you can see we have moved to Substack. This is where we will be publishing new content, at least for now. We appreciate your following along in whatever capacity you are able to comfortably engage. A paid subscription will give you access to the years of our archived content in addition to all future posts, and event presale discounts and and first option for free event registration. Thank you for supporting The Fold!

While we are taking the next couple weeks to redecorate the halls of The Fold, we thought it a good idea to remind you of the type of content you can come to expect from this space. While some areas of focus have evolved, just like us, many are the same, but now a little bolder - again, just like us.

As you peruse this small round up of previous pieces on The Fold, we would love to know what you think is missing. Share a few topics, individuals or events you think belong in this space in the comments. We know this is an audience of brilliant and activated individuals, and we know you have lots of thoughts - we are listening!



POLITICS & ACTIVISM

Why I Ran For Local Office: It’s Personal

A Day In The Life Of Local Politician Kirsten Harris-Talley

Social Justice & Climate Action: A Conversation With Ashley Engle On Why You Cannot Separate The Two and How You Can Help Combat Them Both

ARTS & CULTURE

20 Hispanic Artists You Should Follow Right Now

Tight Connections

Three Artists On The Expansion of Work, Creativity and Caregiving In A Pandemic

PROFILES

“Grief Is For People”, Sloane Crosley’s latest book, is an intimate depiction of the complicated, intricate grief that accompanies suicide and the loss of a best friend

The Woman Behind: Jessica Yellin, Author Of Savage News And The Voice Of #NewsNotNoise

RELATIONSHIPS

I’M GLAD YOU ASKED:Is It Just Me?

Money and The Art of Receiving

PERSONAL STYLE

Personal Style: Meet Jewelry Designer, Irene Wood

Kate Lindello, Founder of Noihsaf Bazaar, is a Matchmaker for your Resale Wares

Single Women and Their Spaces: Erin Little



PARENTHOOD

“To be honest, I’ve never pictured myself with kids”: On The Choice To Not Have Children

Raising Kids Who Are Actively Anti-Racist: Tabitha St. Bernard-Jacobs and Adam St. Bernard Jacobs Are Teaching Us How

I last profiled Seattle singer-songwriter, Shelby Earl, five years ago. Collectively our lives have changed so much since that spring day in 2019, but few more so than Shelby's. Since our last conversation Shelby has welcomed a child, moved into a new home, and experienced breathtaking losses in an intensely short period of time. Cumulative grief, as we've learned, is the definition of losing 5 family members in a very short amount of time, including her husband and her stepdad of 35 years.

In full transparency, Shelby is a dear friend. Unlike many of the interviews shared on this platform, I am not merely basing my questions on research and my familiarity of the person's work. I have been a witness to the gut wrenching and unfathomable loss she has experienced in the past two years. I have also witnessed her tremendous courage, vulnerability and strength, all of which will be on display as Shelby returns to the stage for the first time in 2 years this Friday, May 24 with "Songs For Singing III" at The Triple Door in Seattle. 

I spoke with Shelby about her upcoming show, what her creative process through and beside grief looks like, being a sole parent and the two factors that greatly influenced her decision to play publicly again. Her answers mirrored how I (and many others) see Shelby and her talents: honest, generous and beautiful. 

You have a show on Friday, May 24 at The Triple Door: "Songs for Singing III". Can you share the story behind this series of concerts?

Yes! This is a special show for me, for several reasons. I generally record and play shows with a full band, but some years ago my friend (and the producer of my album, Swift Arrows) Damien Jurado, said "You know what I want? I want to hear your songs totally stripped down, performed with just your voice and a piano. Can you please play a show like that?" I thought that was kind of him, and such a great compliment. And I loved his idea, but the vision sort of grew from there and I thought "we've got to also add strings!" Thankfully, my amazingly talented bandmate, Billy Brush (keys), and my composer pal Andrew Joslyn, both caught the vision and have since helped to create this ever-evolving set of piano/string arrangements of my tunes. This will be our 3rd time doing the show, with 5 new arrangements added this time, and we expect it to be another magical night.

It's your first live performance in some time, how are you feeling? What are you most looking forward to and what have you missed most about being on stage?

It will be my first time on stage in nearly two years, but I’m feeling good. Don’t get me wrong, I was RUSTY going into this. But Billy and I started practicing months ago and I’ve been working hard to dust off the pipes. The unfortunate part about the time I’ve taken away from performing is that I feel like I had just (finally) gotten good, like really confident and strong as a performer, before the wheels came off the bus and I had to take a hiatus. But in practicing for this show I have felt some of that strength return and it’s been really healing. Not to mention the natural endorphins one gets from singing! You force breath into your body when you sing and it is transformative, no matter how crappy you might feel going into it. I have missed that about singing regularly. It’s like medicine! There is also an emotional exchange that happens with an audience that I find deeply nourishing and meaningful. I’ve missed that dynamic as well, and I look forward to experiencing it again next week.

It will be my first time on stage in nearly two years, but I’m feeling good. 

I know you will be accompanied by some fantastic people - who is joining you? And, will you be playing any new material?

I will be joined onstage by my super talented bandmate Billy Brush (on piano) and the Passenger String Quartet (plus a couple of surprise appearances to-be-revealed at the show!). Unfortunately, this time the quartet will be missing their fearless leader, Andrew Joslyn. Andrew and his wife are expecting their first baby, and they are due on show day! Thankfully, he has still been able to be involved leading up to the show, and he’s composed 5 beautiful new string arrangements for songs we’ve added to the setlist. Some are brand new; some are from the archives. Billy actually showed up to our first rehearsal with a list of older tunes of mine that he wanted to explore, and it’s been fun (and in some cases really powerful) to revisit those songs.

There’s also a very special being opening the show; the magical Julia Massey of Seattle band Warren Dunes. She and I haven’t known each other for long, but she’s one of the people from the Seattle music community who unexpectedly showed up (on my literal doorstep) with active, loving care when my life took a tragic turn last year. She is a real gem of a human and performer, and it feels good and right to share this bill with her.

As someone who is lucky enough to be in your close orbit, I know that the past few years have been laced with tremendous loss and grief. How has your lived experience shaped your music? How did you know now was the time to share your art publicly?

Yes. It’s been a life-altering few years. My family has lost 5 beloved members in a very short amount of time, including my husband and my stepdad of 35 years. We are still reeling, and still very much in process with our grief. And I have been writing a bit lately, but I’m not going to introduce that material at this show. It’s too much. It’s too heavy. I don’t want to do that to an audience. And frankly, I don’t want to do that to myself! (heh)

Going into this, I wasn’t looking to play out any time soon. In fact, I wondered if I could even care about doing it again at all. Priorities change a lot when people close to you die. But a couple things happened. First, I met with a medium, and my husband came through 100% in the session. It was a wild hour and a half full of super evidential information that the medium in no way could’ve known (from the internet or elsewhere). But what was most compelling about it was how she nailed his personality. At one point in the conversation, she laughed and said, “he’s just said ‘when is she going to get back to work?’” I nearly fell off my chair. If you knew my husband well, you knew his work ethic, and you knew how much he believed in me and my music. He could not tolerate inaction. And he would get frustrated if he felt I was squandering my talents. It really felt like him telling me it was time to get going again.

I’m a pretty buoyant person, but I’m coming to terms with the fact that grief is my new sidekick in all things. That doesn’t mean I’m blue all the time, I’m not. But the reality is that no matter how strong and positive I intend to be on stage, my husband’s chair will still be empty, and no one in the room is going to be able to forget that, least of all me.

The second factor in deciding to play has been Billy Brush’s presence and influence. He sent me a note last year, just a gentle nudge, saying that whenever I was in the space to do some music again, he’d love to be involved. Since then, he’s been so encouraging and diligent in showing up and playing songs with me, but he’s also been very sensitive and hasn’t pushed. Thank God for him getting me moving! Because from our very first rehearsal I could immediately feel that music was what was going to lift me from my fog (even though I also cried through most of the songs the first few times we practiced). Ultimately, I reached out to the Triple Door to see about doing this show there again. We scheduled it waaaaay out in the future to give ourselves loads of time to prepare, so it’s wild to think it’s almost here!

Lastly, this “Songs for Singing” format was my husband’s favorite show of mine. He was so proud on these nights. In many ways this feels like the sweetest, most honoring way to step back into my musical life.

What has surprised you about preparing for this show at this moment?

Well, if there’s anything I’ve realized in preparing for this show, it’s that no matter how light and fun I’m hoping to make the night for the audience, my grief will still accompany me. I’m a pretty buoyant person, but I’m coming to terms with the fact that grief is my new sidekick in all things. That doesn’t mean I’m blue all the time, I’m not. But the reality is that no matter how strong and positive I intend to be on stage, my husband’s chair will still be empty, and no one in the room is going to be able to forget that, least of all me. Plus, singing makes you go deep into your body; it unearths things you were attempting to hide away. Because of that, it is entirely possible that my grief will poke its head up at some point in the night. It’s almost like my audience and I just have to get through this first one together. My sense is that the night will be like a big, group hug. And I’m choosing to just let the experience be whatever it needs to be. That’s the truth about performing anyway, you can really only show up with the self you have to offer in that moment.

I will say though, we’ve cultivated beauty in this set of music, and that is cultivating a lot of joy in me. So, I hope that is also felt and received by the audience.

I would be remiss if I did not bring up motherhood, as I know it is a big part of your life and identity. You are a sole parent, which I mention because it is decidedly different from being a single parent on many levels (not saying that either are easy in any way, shape or form), especially when it comes to time and energy. How did you find the space, literally and emotionally, to make this event happen?

Truth speak, I was ONLY able to prepare for this show – physically and emotionally – because I don’t have a full-time job right now. I was laid off last year when my company was going under, and the time and space has turned out to be a great gift. I like to think my husband somehow orchestrated it from the beyond because he knew I needed time to find my feet. I will also tell you that all preparation for this show has happened on weekdays between 9am and 5pm when my kiddo was at preschool. 😊

I will say though, we’ve cultivated beauty in this set of music, and that is cultivating a lot of joy in me. So, I hope that is also felt and received by the audience.

Finally, how do you see your music evolving in the future? And, how has that vision changed and/or stayed the same?

I’m only going to partially answer this one, because it is entirely to-be-revealed. I feel very open-fisted about music, about how/where it will fit into my life, and what kinds of things I might make from here on out. But songs keep arriving. So as long as that is happening, I’m going to assume there’s work to be done.

In the meantime, I’m going to force myself out of my little hidey hole and go sing some songs in a big, beautiful, love-bomb of a room. Then, we’ll go from there. 

*SEATTLE! Shelby has graciously gifted 2 tickets to her show this Friday, May 24 to The Fold community. Enter here to win! 

Please stop by, meet Kate, have an event-inspired cocktail (or mocktail) and peruse the racks. 

See you there, Seattle! 

It's a Monday morning and I have, through luck and circumstance, scheduled a call with New York Times best-selling author and editor, Sloane Crosley. A writer whose books of personal essays (I Was Told There’d Be Cake, How Did You Get This Number and Look Alive Out There) I have long loved. As someone who has read almost exclusively memoirs by women for the past 10 years, when I first heard that Crosley was writing a book on grief, I was somewhat confused. "Grief? Is it a self-help book?" I asked my friend when they told me about Grief Is For People, which is officially able for purchase today.

A self-help book in the traditional sense it is not (though it does pay homage to the stages of grief developed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross), but a journey around, beside and through grief, it is. Grief Is For People is also an intimate look at the relationship between Crosley and her best friend and former colleague, Russell, who died by suicide exactly a month after her apartment was burglarized (robbing her of a collection of inherited family jewelry, possessions she stored in a cabinet that is also connected to Russell) and roughly 7 months before the onset of the pandemic. This, she later learns, is called "cumulative grief or grief overload". 

Grief Is For People takes you on Crosley's circuitous search for answers for the accumulated losses and depicts her trying to better understand the unfathomable through a mosaic of hilarious, stinging and heartbreaking anecdotes. She pays tribute to a person so monumental in her life, so essential to her experience in the city she calls home that you too will miss Russell by the book's end, even as you wonder if we can ever truly know those with who we feel the closest.

I spoke with Crosley about various types of grief and the ways we fail (not for a lack of trying) to navigate it in this country, her fully realized love for her friend and the struggles that come with loving and grieving complex people who die in complex ways. She was, not to my surprise but to my delight, warm, smart and hilarious. I point this out because if you are in Seattle this week you too can experience her wit and humor in person at Town Hall where she will be in conversation about the book with friend, Ben Gibbard of Death Cab For Cutie and The Postal Service. This interview has been edited and condensed.

ACG: My first question is how are you doing? This is a lot for someone who's navigated and will continue to navigate grief, but now you are doing it publicly. And, as someone who didn't know Russell personally, I cried at the end of your book because now I miss him too.

SC: Well, there's a separation between the book and my memories of him and feelings about him. Before the first interview or the first galley went out, I trained myself to remember what one always has to remember no matter what book one publishes, which is you are not the book. If you get amazing reviews of your book, whether it's a novel or children's book, or if you get terrible reviews of the book, your part is done. It doesn't really belong to you anymore. That's true of every book. You have to remember that you are not the book, you have a life outside of it as well.

The additional layer for me is to remember that Russell is not the book. As delightful as it is to get notes and feedback from our mutual friends saying that I have brought back their friend for them, it's not him. I know is sounds self aggrandizing, but, that's the contents of the notes that I've been getting. I also have my own separate memories of him that are not necessarily in the book. My own photographs, my own place that I keep him. This is what is actually enabling me to having an easier time with this process. The truth is, in the book, I describe him as a pathologically social person. And in some weird way, as hokey as it sounds, as readers discover this book, it's bringing him more people. So when you say to me that you miss him too, I think you've now entered a room where you are at this sort of mythical party with Russell.

There is information about what to do when there is loss of a spouse, loss of a child or loss of a parent. In the book, I lament that there is no guidebook to loss of a friendship, which is the one relationship that we all have in our lives.

ACG: I love that way of looking at that connection between readers and Russell. When thinking about the process of grief, I do feel in US we are particularly poor at it. Grief becomes something that we compartmentalize and attempt to surmount, versus something we allow ourselves to experience it and learn to live alongside.

SC:Oh yes, I agree. I also think we do this one thing that really sticks out to me. In the book I talk about how with suicide in particular there is not a lot of information on how to grieve a friend. There is information about what to do when there is loss of a spouse, loss of a child or loss of a parent. In the book, I lament that there is no guidebook to loss of a friendship, which is the one relationship that we all have in our lives. Not everyone has both parents, not everyone has children, or siblings, but we all have our friends. 

ACG: I might be projecting here, but I have witnessed dear friends who have also experienced tragedy and are navigating their grief when in social settings. And, it's often in those settings that people come and want to share their personal stories of grief. I see this as both as a way to connect and to acknowledge the pain, which I of course understand. Oddly, I notice myself feeling protective of my friends because I know they are carrying their own grief, and I wonder if they feel they have to now carry the grief of others. Do you find this happens despite having clear boundaries around yourself, Russell and the book?

SC: Yes, but you really don't have a choice in the matter. I don't necessarily want to become the queen of death, especially after writing three books of humor essays. But, in a weird way, readers connecting with me and sharing their stories does follow the same math, just with a different conclusion. By that I mean, when people have come up to me in the past after a reading and shared their own stories, for example: someone who had an experience getting fired from a job or volunteering somewhere or getting broken up with or being suckered into being a bridesmaid, these were funny stories they were sharing that they felt were mirrored by my books. In both instances I had the megaphone for so long. In their minds, I've gotten to tell my story. Now, it's their turn. I realize that they just want to close the loop. They just want to get their chance to speak. That's part of the wonderful thing about touring and part of the wonderful thing about meeting readers in person, honestly.

With Grief Is For People I'm starting to receive stories about suicide or grief or death. The thing that's interesting about it is that there's something about the book that seems to have extended beyond people who have been left behind by suicide. It's people who have been through a divorce, a breakup, whose grandparents have died. People who are having difficulty getting over or through the pandemic. It's all painful. I think that any sort of grief is like a bat signal that's calling people forward. And, I don't mind hearing their stories at all. I don't think it's actually that draining for me. I feel like this is a plot of an X-Men movie.

I think the thing is to find the balance. I actually do want to be there for people as a human being walking the earth and hearing these stories. It's dangerous, as we all know, given the state of the world to become numb to human suffering, even on a minor level at a bookstore.

ACG: I wonder, too, if people are comfortable being vulnerable with you because you've been so vulnerable with them - so you opened the door.

SC: What's funny about it is that I don't think of my writing as confessional. I just think that there are these instances from life that I use as bullet points to make sort of a larger point. It's really more narrative nonfiction, not necessarily confessing for the sake of confessing. I am not saying, "oh I danced at a bar, fell down and then I went to the hospital and I got stitches and that's how I learned not to drink."

ACG: You talk in the book, and I feel this is a common thing among people I know who have experienced tragic loss like yourself, about the what-ifs.

SC: Well, I only went out so far and then had to let myself off the hook in terms of thinking: is there something I could have said to him? Are there things that I could have noticed, people I could have called? Drugs I could have illegally sent in the mail? Or, is there something I could have done? Because I don't think so.

As I say in the book, I don't really have the ego to think I could have stopped a perfectly cogent 52 year old man from taking his own life. The thing that I can find the beauty in is that I sometimes wonder what if he had experienced a whole different life? If he had a whole different set of friends, and made all different choices? And maybe if I had been there, maybe this wouldn't have happened? This is probably the Ray Bradburyish analogy of it, but what if we've stepped on the butterfly and it's life had taken a different path? Then, maybe this wouldn't have happened. Though, that's also true for all of us, not just those who commit suicide. 

ACG: As you point out in the book and perhaps as we have all experienced in the past few years, there are various types of grief. We have witnessed the expected to the unfathomable, and the grief around both and all that's in between is vast and different.

SC: There's a James Baldwin quote, Russell was actually a huge James Baldwin fan. It's the one that says “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” What I want to do with the book is give people a type of permission to grieve in a way that's best for them. Obviously the stages of grief are the rough structure of the book, but two of the sections are mixed up. The last part is not acceptance, it's afterward. It's afterward because I accept that I am now a combination of those two facts.

Grief Is For People is officially available for purchase today, February 27. 

SEATTLE: Join Sloane Crosley in conversation with Ben Gibbard this Friday, March 1, 2024 at 7:30 PM  - buy your ticket now on the Town Hall website.

It is a rare alchemy when, as an artist, you become close with another artist whose work acts as a north star for your own. This profound experience of seeing and being seen is unmatched by any other bond I have encountered. Painter Melissa Messer, an artistic firestarter and compass in my own life and work, and painter Ian Kurtis Crist, her brilliant partner in crime for their upcoming show, know this singular type of relationship well. It is the primal human need–-to see and be seen, to know and be known–-that informs the vital core of their multi-event exhibition. Merry Go Round of Pleasure and Understanding opens February 3, 2024 at Seattle's Koplin Del Rio.

Messer and Crist are figurative painters whose work talks. Seeing their paintings is akin to being at a party caught in the tractor beam of a magnetic gaze from across the room. Radically this show’s raison d’etre is not the paintings, however deftly each work pulls off its individual hat trick. It’s about your reaction to the paintings. Yours, mine, the person’s next to you. It’s an awakening–-a remembering that 93% of communication is nonverbal, though words, which are only cups into which meaning is poured after all, are certainly also a part of the show.

Radically this show’s raison d’etre is not the paintings, however deftly each work pulls off its individual hat trick. It’s about your reaction to the paintings. Yours, mine, the person’s next to you. It’s an awakening–-a remembering that 93% of communication is nonverbal, though words, which are only cups into which meaning is poured after all, are certainly also a part of the show.

Merry Go Round of Pleasure and Understanding will present the viewer with Crist’s larger than life inquiries into psychological drama, rendered in viscerally textural strokes of intentional color on massive substrates. It will present the viewer with the weight and vibrancy of Messer’s deeply moving sculptural embodiments of form so astoundingly color theorized as to make Glaser and Albers blush. It will present the viewer with a film night, an artist’s salon discussion, figure drawing. It’s part surrealist, part discussion-as-performance, all inquiry, all possibility, all vulnerability as power. It is a massive gift to Seattle’s art community and those who are art community-curious. Reaction as work. Reaction as communion.

I talked with Messer and Crist through computer screens from my apartment in New York. I want you to know that the resultant conversation was so electric it produced an interview over 10,000 words long. The edit is below. Stick your finger deep into the socket, then mark your calendar. 

In every overt way possible, this show is not just about the form and medium of painting. It's about reacting to painting. I have my own ideas as to why there's never been a more interesting, dynamic, or urgent time to call people's attention to the shape, form, and content of their own reactions to all art, but to paintings in particular. I would love to hear about what your eureka moments were, realizing that reacting had to be the theme for this show.

Melissa: One idea that we both come back to is having a relationship with the viewer through the work and that phenomenon of being understood that goes both ways–making yourself understood through a work and feeling understood by a work. One eureka moment was us milling through these ideas and both saying, almost simultaneously, “that's more important to me than painting.” Jenny Saville describes it as “the shock of recognition.”

Ian: We took a break from show prep and walked to get coffee. We were having this discussion of “more than my interest and love and curiosity for painting…” is this experience of creating a sense of understanding. Of building a relationship to an artwork. One end of what Melissa is talking about is somebody having the potential to feel understood by an artwork. I don't know if an artist can actually direct that for someone else. That's more about one’s personal relationships and experiences projected onto the work. I would diminish their experience if I were to force any interpretation beyond the imagery I create.

Melissa: We talk a lot about the alienating practice of artist statements.

Oh boy.

Melissa: And how we really don't want to explain the work. Not because we're being cagey, but because it's urgent that you get in front of the work and are challenged by it. That you have a somatic reaction to the work, and that you cultivate a practice or a muscle, whatever, of trusting that. And works we might see in some swanky setting that have to be bolstered by an artist statement, that doesn’t do it for me.

Me neither. I love y’all talking about artist statements because…say you're in a museum or gallery and you need that artist statement, you need that explanation as a way in, you don't have that somatic response. It never hits. If you have to explain what you're doing in order for anything to come across, have you reached your objective? No, you haven't. Words can bolster. Cornelia Parker is a great example, right? Because her work hits you in the gut. But then when you read the accompanying text next to any of her pieces, you get context and it makes it even more of a gut punch.

Melissa: The best an artist statement can do is contextualize.

Joan: Yes. Hard agree.

Ian: Yes, totally.

All right. Speaking of reactive context, how do you feel the consumption of art on social media has influenced the way people react to paintings? Do you feel like it's changed the way you react to paintings? Is scrolling past someone's work the same as walking past it in a gallery or museum? How do people's reactions to your work on social media impact you emotionally or otherwise?

Melissa: Using it for discovery? Messaging your art crushes, making friends, finding out about shows, telling folks to come hang out with you at your upcoming show? Hell yeah.

Ian: Yeah, what a gift for approachability. But, what’s most important to me, is building a meaning-making experience. When you're taking in work through social media, the context in which you are forced to experience the work is “how many followers, how many subscribers, how many likes”. The truth is, I'm not interested in engaging with art in that way. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, per se. But what Melissa and I talk a lot about is the way social media reinforces this black and white binary of “is it tight or is it not tight”?

Melissa: “Tight or not tight” is a shorthand for describing our groupthink. Are you influenced to like something more because it has a lot of likes? I guess if it's your predilection to go through a museum and think “I like that. I don't like that. I like that”--that is what we're doing on social media. But to walk on and not be in that binary, to say “man, that mother holding that child, or the way the light hits the still life, or the visceral quality of the contour on that figure is doing something to me, hitting me behind the chest in a way…” that is not what Instagram or social media fosters. It's a sales tool. It always has been, but now more than ever it's a thing of business. I gotta say that participating in Instagram, you have to understand you're engaging in sex work. You're posting thirst traps, selfies, and your art you want to look as slick and titillating in that way as possible. So then it becomes, is this hot or not? It’s not a place to be challenged or curious.

In therapy recently, I had the damning realization that I've lived a lot of my life like a bat, having a dim view of self without the reflection via sonar off of others. I think that as painters, the practice can either be very much like this or the opposite of this. We benefit from feedback. We don't want our work to exist in a vacuum. We often oscillate between knowing and not knowing if it's any good until someone validates it for us with an insightful or positive reaction. What do you think the key dangers are of this very human thing? How do you fight against having your own reactions to others' reactions fuck you up?

Ian: This ties to the title of our show. The idea of Merry Go Round of Pleasure and Understanding is childlike. This endless cycle of pleasure and understanding, I think of as the human psychological base. When you dumb it all down, we all just want to feel good and be understood. I think that speaks to the nature of building relationships with people, with stuff, with ourselves.

Melissa: So, we're seeking pleasure and understanding, but often the pursuit of them is a tailspin. We want to share our work with the world — art making is so isolating — but that can be treacherous especially if it isn’t finished. We were having an open studio and somebody came in and said, “When is your show, ‘Hedonic Treadmill’?” I was like, “Wait, what?” Turns out it's this idea that your set-point well-being is not altered by having good or bad experiences because your chemistry wants to return to a set point very quickly. The only thing that can really improve your set-point, make you happier, is being okay with your set-point. Very Zen come west.

The point of this, going back to the tight or not tight quality of social media or when people see the work before it’s ready, is that you cannot let the hedonic treadmill – good reactions or bad, whether the work connects or not – interfere with your art making because it will pull you away from your vision and yourself.

Ian: I'm far too likely to feel misunderstood if somebody views my work before it can defend itself. For Melissa and I, another eureka moment was coming to this shared conclusion that the work must scratch the itch. It has to meet the purpose of our own personal vision, which is the most challenging thing to accomplish. Once met, I think positive feedback is validating, but not lasting. Lasting success is when I've “said” what I wanted to “say”. Then honestly, the negative feedback does not feel dangerous to me at all. I feel like: job done.

Both of your work is so alive and so vibrant that one would have to be dead inside not to react to it. What's the first painting that both of you remember having a strong reaction to in your formative years? What was that reaction?

Ian: The first artists that I really can remember maniacally devouring through books... When I was 14 or 15, I had stolen a book of Gustave Doré’s completed works, and an Egon Schiele completed works from a Barnes and Noble. It's funny for me to think about that now. I still like Gustave Doré's work. I don't think Schiele has followed me much into my adulthood. But when I look back, I see how especially indicative those two artists are of the body of work that I'm making now.

Melissa: I was at the MoMA, a pre-teen, I saw Matisse's La Danse. I still return to the color relationships in La Danse. In all of Matisse's work, that is the main impact you confront before you enter the scene. That impact gets in front of your intellectualizing. That slight pause to me is everything in art. If something can put you back on your heels just enough that you are aware of yourself entering a painting and then looking at it. Then you can experience the figures. I studied design and then trained in classical art. After that, I was trying to use these tools for expression and always having to ask myself, “What do I actually like and what do I actually respond to?” This is what we're talking about – cultivating what you actually like, not getting in front of a Rembrandt and saying, “Well, that's good” because the greater culture tells you it's good. Who cares if it's good? What's it doing to you? I had to really cultivate that and find my voice again.

“What do I actually like and what do I actually respond to?” This is what we're talking about – cultivating what you actually like, not getting in front of a Rembrandt and saying, “Well, that's good” because the greater culture tells you it's good. Who cares if it's good? What's it doing to you?

I also return to a painting that you and I have bonded over, Joan: Frantisek Kupka's The Yellow Scale. That's a 19th century realist who is playing with color in such an aggressive way. So dramatic. It's yellow on yellow on yellow, and yet the form is all articulated. The mid-tones are visceral green. And the face is red. And yet everything locks together and you're convinced of the reality of everything. But there's something about the narrative and emotive quality that's evoked just with the color. It's a portrait of a dude sitting in a chair. How many of those exist in the 19th century! But this one in particular really shook me by the shoulders when I was a kid. It's in Houston, where Joan and I were both born. And also in Houston is the Rothko Chapel. This is the other thing–I haven't cared about Rothko my whole life but in the past year or two, I’ve been going back and thinking about this idea of the pause, the idea of a resonant or visceral reaction that can be engaged in before you start to intellectualize a painting. I'm thinking: oh, that's awesome–this immersive juxtaposing of color relationships—and that is what Rothko’s Color Fields are.

Joan: Yes. I was just in Houston and just went to the Rothko Chapel.

Ian: Man, tell me. How was it?

Melissa: Go on. Tight or not tight?

It's always been my church–if I have one, it is that. When I was a teen, I would go and sit in front of the paintings and just cry and be comforted by them. I would go to the Sculpture Garden at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and walk around the Giacomettis and be like, “It's me”. Seeing these works again felt like a lineage, getting to touch base with the same emotional reaction that I have always had. Back to Rothko: you're talking about Color Field as a device. You're also talking about scale.

Ian: Yeah, it’s the immersive experience. I have this friend who is a Butoh and Vipassana meditation teacher. She asks her students, “What is the feeling like in your arm?” And they’d respond, “Warm? I don't know.” She would then guide them through intense physical activities and ask again how they feel. “Oh, now there's all this tingling, and a burning, there's sweat.” There was much more awareness. Just as when there’s more bodily awareness when you’ve run 3 miles, after viewing a Rothko, you can’t help but be aware of how massively evocative the work is.

There's nothing intellectual to pick apart at all. You could write about it intellectually all day, but that is very different from when you show up to the experience of “I have never been in a place where I have not seen anything outside of yellow. What is this?” And then begins the unpacking of “why do I feel this way” and “why did the artist do this?”

It's almost a forced presence. It's voluntary of course, but it ups the chances that somebody will be present and immersed enough to actually react in a way that is not surface. Both of your works do that using so many different approaches, whether it's color, size or form. You’re both figurative painters, which just automatically hits close to the bone because it's the language of bodies. In Ian's case, also objects used or worn by bodies. What attracted each of you to focusing on the body as a storytelling modality, as something that can potentially prompt more engagement, more of a reaction.

Melissa: I'll just loop it back to seeing La Danse and, after entering the color of the painting, having an experience of empathy with the dancing figures. Figures can describe things that aren't explicit because there's infinite nuance in the human condition and seeing a scene of figures and how they're relating to each other can really cut right to the quick of it.

Ian: Yeah, humans are just the most interesting thing to me. I feel like painting humans easily lays the groundwork for the mind’s mechanism to begin spinning up narrative.

Joan: I want to loop back around and discuss the process of you reacting to each other’s reactions and work while making this show.

Ian: Well, it's funny. There has been zero conceptual collaboration with the paintings. We are both painting figures in very different ways, but we both, separately, have this focus of interest. I really trust Mel, and I really feel like Mel understands my vision, which is a very rare experience to have. It's evolved even in the last couple of months where I want Mel's critique. I want Mel to come over and look at my works early on and tell me what she thinks about them and see how that spins in the wash.

Melissa: We do a good amount of talking in preparation for this show that’s like the conversation that we're having right now with you–that's the collaboration.

Ian: Really, it's an emotional collaboration.

Melissa: Yes, and the work falls out of it because we're just trying to come correct to each other and connect, get these ideas that are crucial to us on the table, get it straight, be understood by each other and understand ourselves.

Ian: It's empowered my creativity.

Melissa: Same. Sometimes I notice Ian will start to deal with color or something in a way that I've been approaching it. I really love Ian's very direct approach to contour and drawing. I don't use a lot of contour, I just use shapes. There is something riveting that draws you in about Ian's very direct approach that I've started to apply as well. That's technical, but thematically I started doing more multi-figure stuff too. Everything that we're getting straight about our lives, art, painting. That's really the collaboration.

I love it. I can’t wait for everyone to see your work in a space together. Because when that happens, the conversation between how one body of work seems to react to the other body of work and how, as a viewer, you have the reaction to one artist's work, you have the reaction to the other artist's work, and then you have a third reaction, which is to the conversation that you see the work having together. I think that's going to be so exciting for people to experience– and in this show, there’s room for these processes to take place. It's not a show that’s like a busy party.

Melissa: We hope so. Ian's work is effing big.

Ian: There is also the conversation between the viewers; the potential for opinions to be shared and debated. The projection of others’ personal lives, opinions, and experiences onto the work is the reflection of contemporary social culture. That is the point. I feel responsible for explaining my personal life, opinions, and experiences with imagery. I don’t want to tell anyone else what their experience should be in reaction to that.

Melissa: And that really underlines the importance of reacting to contemporary art. You are part of the context. Art history is great, but it's a head thing. People can feel like they don't know much about art. But it's good enough to get in front of some contemporary art that's standing on the shoulders of history and huge conversations. It's enough to bring your contemporary experience to contemporary painting and let that be your entry point. But people are intimidated by the typical presentation. The point of it all should be connection and access for anybody.

I fully agree. And this show is an invitation to have the beginner's mind, which is the pathway to vulnerability. You can't truly react to anything unless you're making yourself vulnerable enough to ingest and metabolize it.

Melissa: Come to our paintings with yourself, that's what's crucial. The beginner's mind is an access point. The next step is to try to access yourself in front of the paintings, which I've tried to access myself to make.

There is also the conversation between the viewers; the potential for opinions to be shared and debated. The projection of others’ personal lives, opinions, and experiences onto the work is the reflection of contemporary social culture. That is the point

And in the mix too are the events–the film night, the figure drawing, the conversation–that are part of this exhibition. Having these dimensions to the show is so brilliant because it’s exactly what the concept asks for. I want to hear more about the figure drawing event. To me, giving people–whether you're five years old or a pro–the mind-to-heart-to-hand-to-pencil opportunity to draw a figure and then react to it is such a brilliant way to foster conversation.

Melissa: Thanks. We wanted to create as many excuses as possible to get people in front of painting. When Katelyn Norris, the director of Koplin Del Rio, did a studio visit with each of us. She just “got” the work— separately and together. She said to us, “You need to put on the show that you would want. You guys need to do it your way.” That was her direction.

Ian: We've been to a lot of openings that were fun parties with a lot of people and not much emphasis around connection to the art. It was important to us to establish how we can move away from throwing a party in which the art is tertiary to a social dynamic.

Melissa: So, the Figure Drawing night isn't just a drawing session. I collaborate with my friend and model Ruth a lot. We’ll design the poses that she takes in a sequence – poses A, B, and C– that I might take from art history, a shape I saw a building make, geometry. Ruth will move slowly through that sequence, and we’ll stop in these moments that don't come explicitly. They come in nuance. It will be about giving participants that experience and involving everyone in where we stop and what we end up drawing.

So there's a film night. I’ve got to know what you’re playing. I don't know you as well yet, Ian, but I know Mel is a cinephile with taste that I implicitly trust.

Ian: I don't think I'm on the Mel level. I don't think anybody's on the Mel level.

Joan: Nobody's on the Mel level.

Melissa: Ha! No, no. We are huge fans of this incredible local theater just down the way. Their programming and curation can't be beat. We asked them if we could do a film night with them. We asked Tommy, the owner of the cinema and an incredible film expert, if he would view the show–

Ian: He's a connoisseur.

Melissa: –And he’s omnivorous. We asked him to view our show and then pair a film with his reaction to the show. This could be a left-field situation, and I hope it is.

Ian: We're screening a short film that my friend Patrick Troll is making to document the show, and then Tommy will get up and give his pitch–why he is pairing the film he’s choosing with the show. Whatever his reaction is, is welcome. And we won’t know what the movie is beforehand.

Oh, I love this. Can you talk a little bit about the roundtable, the unorthodox artist conversation?

Ian: We want people to have this conversation. We want to emphasize that anyone’s experience 100% contributes to the meaning the work takes on. Without us defining or explaining our work, it’s the viewer’s opinions that define our work as relevant or meaningful outside of our studios.

Melissa: We're calling it “On Reacting to Painting” and we’re calling it a salon to open it up. We don't want it to be an artist's talk. We're not going picture by picture and explaining the thought.

Ian: I'm curious to see if anybody will earnestly express what they think or feel about the work too. I want to lift that up as important.

Absolutely. It's beautiful collective intimacy. To open up that conversation to a group of people gives them the permission to claim the agency of their own vision.

Merry Go Round of Pleasure and Understanding exhibits February 3 to March 2, 2024 at Koplin Del Rio gallery in Seattle, WA. More information about the show and events is available here. Do not miss it. 

We are now a little more than a week into 2024. It's been a slow re-entry, one that as I took my trendy polar plunge on New Year's Day I was not anticipating. Flus, infections, general post-holiday malaise, but also the general feeling of exhaustion. Exhaustion for all of the things that are draining my hope but feel out of my control to repair. Exhaustion at the thought another election year, exhaustion at the idea of having it to do "it" (diet, exercise, sleep, therapy, parenting...the list goes on) differently. 

I was listening to my new favorite podcast (late to the party), particularly the "Wellness for Slackers" episode, where Lori Leibovich, Editor of Well at The New York Times discusses the Times wellness focus on increasing energy. A notion that I as type this from my dining room table on a grayer-than-usual day in Seattle, I know I need to hear and practice. A few of these suggestions bear repeating, in addition to a piece of insightful wisdom from a friend of The Fold, especially for this forty-something woman slowly walking (errr, crawling) into a new year.

Plan something that you can look forward to: I had a colleague who once said she would sprinkle her PTO strategically throughout the year to give herself a reason to plan an event or outing. She would space it so she always had something to look forward to once or twice a quarter. This can also be as simple as committing to a single event like the concert tickets you were considering, (there are also individual and communal benefits of seeing live music), or signing up for a class that intrigues and challenges you.

Move your body for at least 3 minutes each day: I am a runner, yogi, and very novice skier. I am not great at any of these activities (my skiing prowess is borderline comical) but I have been dedicated to moving my body in some way, shape, or form for years. What I did not realize is that doing so for a mere handful of minutes has proven mood and energy benefits. I am not giving up my longer practices anytime soon, but knowing that just jumping up and down for three minutes is helpful gets me moving on even the aforementioned grayest of days.

Release the vampires: Recently a friend of mine met up with an old pal for coffee, someone that she had not seen since since pre-pandemic times. My friend is now a single parent with a tight schedule and a finite amount of energy to expend toward anything that does not directly relate to the raising of her toddler. I checked in with her after the meet-up and asked how it felt to see this person again, someone with whom she was quite close to at one point in her life.

"Is it weird if I say that by the end I was exhausted?"

"Not at all," I replied.

She then went on to say that she left feeling drained and foggy. The pal, while well meaning, had dominated the conversation and unloaded all of her trauma from the past few years in the first hour of their conversation. The term "energy vampire" has been used to describe such interactions and relationship dynamics. And while some people might feel compelled to address this with said friend, I think that all depends on the status of the relationship. And I think ultimately we know the difference.

Embrace the "AS IS" self: A week ago my friend and artist, Jennifer Ament, shared a post on social media decrying the need to constantly improve and evolve, and I took notice.

"But here’s the thing, what if we are just ‘OK’ as we are now? It’s not that we shouldn’t evolve, have goals, or do some of these things above, but we should want them to come from a place of excitement, not pressure. My hope for the future is to settle into being ok ‘AS IS’ right now. I need to wear one of those stickers that businesses put on damaged goods that say ‘AS IS’ on my forehead when I am out and about. Maybe we can convince the world we are ‘GOOD ENOUGH,’ damage and all."

I am a believer in simplifying my life and how I spend my energy when circumstances get tricky. Perhaps this is one of the gifts of aging? Knowing that when the going gets sluggish, my focus gets smaller and I find it easier to release the things that no longer serve me. 

Yes, we know, it takes a little more time and some additional planning but a customized gift can be a perfect option for those hard-to-shop-for-already-seemingly-have-everything types. Today we are sharing some of our favorites, which can all can still be delivered in time for Christmas! 

For all the beautiful people in your life: customized sweatshirt from Mylle  - must order by midnight, December 14. (Also  available in the above version, for the non-committal types). 

For those who are always losing their purse (ahem, present company included): Monogramed Grande Fanny from Clare V.  

A sweet and tiny sentimental reminder: Tiniest key charm from Catbird

Finally a gift card for a intuitive or healing service for all those needing some insight for their new year (join the club?!): a Stellar Guidance with Stephanie Gailing, a bundle of goodies from our neighborhood natural-beauty go to or a True Tarot session with Kat! 

As a person who delights in visuals, the setting of a table brings just as much joy as picking out what I am going to wear. The holidays provide an outlet to be just the right amount of outlandish. Since having my daughter, we started the tradition of hosting Christmas dinner at our house. The setting changes slightly year to year depending on what I have acquired or how many guests will join, but a few key elements have remained the same. In a way, it’s a recipe consisting of some core ingredients that leave a lot of room to adjust and dabble. After all, one must leave space for spontaneous creativity!

One of my recent table explorations was with a tub of white Crayola dry clay. A leftover from one of our daughters craft projects. Upon her next moment of boredom I quickly assigned her the task of making me a clay display for these tiny Japanese rice candles I didn’t have a stand for. Her piece came out better than I could have imagined and it’s something I plan to do again this year.

A few things that we have done every year is having our “tablecloth” be large sheets of brown Kraft paper. Initially, this was more out of necessity for the mounds of broken crab legs to be tossed aside, but now it’s just standard practice. We scatter dried orange slices and shelled pistachios around the paper and use linen napkins that we have collected over the years (my favorite being these and these).

We have collected our serving ware through years of thrifting and small shops. My favorite finds are brightly colored Dansk pots and wooden bowls our friend John made. I recently splurged on these absurdly beautiful, giant salad tongs. They make me so happy every time I pull them from the drawer.

Noihsaf home has consistently provided treasures for hosting. I highly recommend this shop for your wining and dining needs. The seller has made it her sport to have your dining room guest ready.

My last recommendation is inspired by the first Christmas dinner we ever hosted. After finishing our meal we learned about the death of George Michael. We happened to have Last Christmas on record and played it on repeat as we danced around the living room. It has become a yearly tribute that even gets our grandparents bopping around the house.

So, dear reader, let these tales of our table inspire your own brand of clever. Included is a recipe card, a mere launching pad for your visual escapades. May your table be a stage for creativity, a symphony of style, and a catalyst for your own holiday memories.

Happy Holidays,

xx

Kate

Seasonal changes are a glorious gift. They are the universe saying, “You don’t have to wait until the New Year. You can press the reset button now.” The fall reset button is my favorite. It may be because it seems to happen overnight, whereas the other seasons slowly blend together, eventually belly flopping into an apparent environment.

Yes, fall marks the start of new routines (kids back in school!) and schedules, but the most enjoyable part of this reset comes in the form of clothing choices. Autumn brings down the sweaters from the top shelf and has you pull out the wool coat you forgot you bought at the end of last season's sale. NYC fashion week starts to take over your feed, and you start to see voids in your closet that need to be filled. This season has me wanting to invest in something I probably haven't worn since I was a toddler: corduroy.

Many brands sent corduroy down the runway and into their lookbooks this year, and a few looks really caught my eye. Most notably, the beloved American designer Rachel Comey, who drop-kicked the idea that corduroy should stay synonymous with your English lit professor. Her cheetah print supply shirt and oversized dress would like to have a word with you after class.

Agolde has taken the reins (again) and is approaching these new styles with a classic trouser. So far, the reviews are looking like a safe place to start.

Vintage corduroy is abundant and provides a lot that these new wears don’t: that soft, broken-in cotton feel that has you looking and feeling like Annie Hall.

Want to dig deeper into the world of corduroy? May I suggest the episode “The Corduroy Appreciation Club” on my favorite podcast, Articles of Interest? You’re in for a treat.

Kate’s Corduroy pics:

Rachel Comey Supply Shirt and Agathon dress

AGOLDE Harper Corduroy Straight Leg

Secondhand and Vintage:

No.6 Marlon Jumpsuit

Kordal Studio Halley Trouser

Laura Ashley Corduroy Suede Chore Jacket

Kate Lindello is the founder of Noihsaf Bazaar. An online resale marketplace focused on Independent Designers. Noihsaf (fashion backwards) Bazaar has been featured in Vogue, The New York Times, and Business of Fashion. Kate lives and plays in Duluth, Minnesota. 

We all know you don't have to look far (or even really look at all) to access all the Cyber Monday sales your hearts desire. With that in mind, and in an effort to support our local economy and creative friends in our community on this Makers Monday, we asked our pals at fruitsuper to create a list of locally made gift ideas they love.

"Our shop now carries over 160 independent artists, designers, and makers! We pride ourselves on shelves full of beautiful, handcrafted wares that can't be found anywhere else."

Some items are exclusive to their shop and have limited quantities, all are made here in fruitsuper's (and The Fold's!) hometown of Seattle, and each one will delight the design-savvy individuals on your list. 

For the person in your life that needs to know how truly awesome they are: Exclusive, limited edition prints by Teresa Grasseschi

For the winter and all-things-charming lover: Exclusive, limited edition Winter Characters from artist Brian Beck

For your the forever snacky friend:Exclusive, almost too cute for words, handcrafted magnet sets from Sam Dodie studio

For the friend that's always sending you astrology memes: Oracle Decks from Stephanie Gailing

For the friend who is building a culinary library: An approachable and delicious addition from Andrea Pons, Mamacita Cookbook 

For the friend that always insists on hosting:Hand painted and handcrafted bowls from Ceremony

For the friend that isn't afraid of color:Exclusive Tissue Box Cover from Anna Learns Things