Letter from the Editor – Issue 22

Issue 22

Sep 25

When I was a teenager, my family took a trip to Barcelona. I had a small digital point-and-shoot and spent the trip taking photos. My dad, a lifelong lover of photography, noticed. At the airport on our way home, he gave me a copy of Ralph Gibson’s Refractions. That gift was an opening onto a future I didn’t know existed.

I am about to become a father, and so I’ve been thinking a lot about that moment in the airport twenty years ago. Gibson made photographs never knowing that a kid from Buffalo would discover the infinitude of a life inside them. That is the grace of influence; it is a gift freely given. My father saw something in me and opened that door. So much of my life as an artist, teacher, editor, curator, etc., has been trying to live up to that, saying to anyone who shows an interest in anything at all, hey, have you looked at this? Have you read that? You might find a life for yourself inside of it.

I cannot repay that gift from my dad, or the gift of influence from any great artist; I can only try to reproduce it: make something with enough attention that it might open a door for someone I will never meet, and help create a world in which other people can do the same.

We inherit artworks, institutions, ideas, failures, and ways of seeing; we have more power than we think to decide what to make of them. I want to help make the conditions from which an art history I cannot foresee might emerge. At eighty, I hope artists who passed through BICA and the pages of Cornelia are building things for people I will never know, and I hope somebody encounters one of my works with the same sense of recognition I have always felt looking at one of Ralph Gibson’s books. Art history is not just what survives from the past; it is a gift of possibility passed freely into the future.

In this issue we’ve got Lucas Cook sharing a Medina-native’s perspective on the inaugural Medina Triennial; Namah working through Sara Cwynar’s Baby Blue Benzo Beta at MOCA Toronto; Luke Urbain on Andrea Alvarez’s massive Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way at the Buffalo AKG; Maya Burns reflecting on Jacob Lepp’s Butterfly Kisses at Bonny Poon; and Francesco Agnellini on Frank Chang’s recent exhibition at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center.

There are going to be some changes coming up at Cornelia. Editing a magazine was a task I fell into by accident, and while it’s been a pleasure, I’m excited to announce that Emily Mangione—who has been writing for and copy editing the magazine since its very first issue—will be stepping into a guest editor role for issue 23. It’s one of a few ways we’re thinking about to bring new voices into Cornelia. Pitches are due October 18th. Not long after we hope to be welcoming a healthy, glistening, new being into the world.

Can’t wait for you to meet her. I hope you show her something good.

Nando Alvarez-Perez

Editor-in-Chief