RECENT CONTENT:
Visualizing Precarity and Security: Mona Hatoum’s Drowning Sorrows and Guadalupe Maravilla’s Walk on Water
Precarity is an overwhelming and persistent condition of unpredictability, instability, and insecurity, especially as related to employment, housing, health care, and migration status. While spread unevenly, it is a hallmark of our contemporary world.
Amalia Mesa-Bains and the Archive: An Interview with the Artist
The following is an interview between editorial board member Madison Treeceand celebrated Chicana artist Amalia Mesa-Bains. Treece has worked as Mesa-Bains’s archivist since 2017. For this issue on “document/ary,” Treece asked Mesa-Bains about the function of the archive as document, its contributions to Chicanx art history, and its more personal implications. The interview took place on March 9, 2021, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I’m New Here: Black and Indigenous Media Ecologies: Curatorial Statement
Exploring themes of race and shared ecologies across the Americas, the born-digital photography exhibition I’m New Here: Black and Indigenous Media Ecologies presents a hemispheric vision of African diasporic and Native life in the United States, Caribbean, and Latin America.
Mission and Vision
Refract is an online journal founded and operated by graduate students and dedicated to conversations about visual culture, non-canonical methodologies, and divergent histories. We publish early-career and established scholars, students, and artists, in the genres of the academic essay, critical review, creative work, and experimental artist statement/essay. We are interested in work that employs visuality as a lens to engage geographies and histories that diverge from U.S. political and academic empire, and uses the tools and methods of visual studies and artistic practice in pursuit of equity and justice. We encourage submissions from multiple academic fields, expansive considerations of artistic practice/s, and multiple ways of knowing. We seek pieces that theorize, dream, and imagine as intervention, as well as pieces that challenge the author’s, artist’s, and editorial board’s intellectual commitments as they reflect on the visual as a site of encounter, entanglement, and social change.
As an open access digital journal, we believe that constantly working toward universally designed and accessible spaces disrupts concentrations of power, broadens the range of voices legible to academia, and expands the terrain of visual studies discourse. Our peer review process is characterized by rigor, care, and cultivation of an author’s and artist’s strengths and style. We work closely with our contributors to develop pieces that meet the field’s standards of excellence and foreground individual interventions and voices.
Refract is an open access journal that allows readers to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of its articles and to use them for any other lawful purpose.
Refract is housed in the History of Art and Visual Culture Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz and run by a multidisciplinary group of graduate students. The journal receives funding and resources from the Art Division at UCSC and has an institutional relationship with the University of California’s eScholarship publishing platform.
Refract 