Dear Readers,
I want to start out by saying, Thank you. Today we celebrate 3 years as a platform for emerging artists. All of us at Venison have enjoyed the community, the conversations, and the art that we’ve had the pleasure to engage with you here. So thank you for being part of this! Thank you to everyone reading our magazine for the first time today, and thank you to those of you who keep coming back! We’ve been able to celebrate a steady and exciting growth in our readership with every issue, so thank you for sharing us with your friends, family and community!
Now, I want to address the speciality of this issue. In the days following the presidential election. Our Venison team sat down to discuss how we could help shape the political and artistic resistance. Many of the issues social and economical, that came up during the election hit close to home. Venison is lead by a team of racially, sexually, and religiously diverse individuals. Every week we come together to create this magazine, a passion project for each and every one of us. The unity and solidarity that we felt towards and amongst each other was something we wanted to extend outwards. We felt like we needed to reach out across our country and give artists working in a wide range of politically steeped work the platform to have their voices intermingle.
We spent the following month searching for a collection of contemporary emerging artists who not only spoke about an issue we saw arise during the election, but spoke about it in a poignant, unique, and exciting way. Be it a quiet voice, or a loud one, it’s important to listen to each individual and take a moment to understand their perspective, their fears, their hopes, their pessimism or optimism and their vision for the future.
In this issue you will hear from people we sourced from “8 Regions” of the United States. It was very hard to pick one artist for such large sections of land and while in no way does that person represent their whole area, we wanted to make an effort to diversify the coastal conversations and include artists from the inner workings of America. We also selected artist who all spoke about different issues and whose work spoke on a multitude of issues that came up during the election; from LGBT rights, american ideas of masculinity, Islamic culture, feminism, rural culture, environmentalism, american cultural idealism, advertisement and the media, deterioration of an idealized time, immigration, socio-economics, identity politics, native american representation, political comics, and the act of protest.
We are so proud to present this amazing selection of artist to you and we hope you enjoy hearing their voices, just as much as we did. Thank you and happy reading!
Sincerely,
Editor-in-Chief, Amber Imrie-Situnayake
Lead Editor, Nazish Chunara
Lead Columnist, Danielle Schlunegger
