Bunker Review is a web magazine that publishes essays and other visual content discussing art and life in our always-expanding community. We are looking to feature a myriad of voices as we explore art from different perspectives. How do our life experiences affect the ways we make and interpret artworks? What are the potential impacts and limits of art beyond the gallery walls? Can contemporary art contribute differently to society in the future? What might a better future look like? With the Bunker Review, we aim to explore these questions by looking both at finished artworks, and the journeys artists take to make them. Over the last six months, the unprecedented conditions under which artists have lived and worked have made this approach more timely than ever. Though for many of us times are harder than they have ever been, amidst the chaos appeared glimpses of hope for our future, particularly within the art community. From the proliferation of mutual aid networks, to the sale of work to fund just causes, to a renewed call for a public commitment to racial equity, grassroots movements emerged largely at the hands of creative youth. On a smaller scale, artists have applied the same creativity to adapt to new constraints: organizing online art exhibitions, networking with peers through social media, and turning to new modes of expression. To highlight these innovations and the overlaps in social and artistic change, Bunker Review has established a new essay series, the Hand-Off. With this series, our goal is to provide a new platform for emerging Black artists, and to document the groundbreaking ways they’ve adapted and grown since the pandemic began. As a whole, we hope the series will provide new insights into this confusing moment, the concerns of people living in it, and their hopes for the future. Rather than accepting submissions, each contributor will be asked to select a piece to be published after their own, and work with us to edit their successor’s piece for publication. In this format, the Hand-Off will double as an ever-expanding, creative network of young, like-minded, Black artists, centered around novel approaches to art making in the COVID age. The first of these is by series instigator, Harrison Smith with his essay, Monadology. This series is developed by Harrison K. Smith and co-published by Jessie Rommelt
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