Clarity Haynes is a painter based in New York City. Her work centers on the torso as a site for portraiture, queer feminist altars, and the processes of crowning and childbirth. Recent solo exhibitions include “Portals” at New Discretions, New York (2024), “Collective Transmission” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut (2021), and “Altar-ed Bodies” at Denny Dimin Gallery, New York, copresented with New Discretions (2020). Her new monograph, Portals (New Discretions, 2024), is available from Distributed Art Publishers.
It blows my mind that this work was painted nearly a century ago. I love the way the blood looks almost orange as it soaks into the white bedsheet. The mother’s soft pubic hair; the way the infant Kahlo’s head, with those unmistakable eyebrows, dangles outside the birth canal—this is a multilayered self-portrait of the artist. She is both parent and child, creator and creation.
Despite being constantly shadow-banned and censored by Meta, this account has hundreds of thousands of followers. You can really look at birth here, via photos and videos, in all its primal, visceral glory.
This color is pink fire. Its brightness is the kind you usually only see with acrylics. I like to glaze it over layers of orange, red, purple, and other pinks.
Carlo was my mentor, my art father. He’s best known as a mail artist, but his paintings were what made the biggest impression on me. He created portraits from live subjects—often nudes—with a queer sensibility. He wasn’t always comfortable being an out gay man. And he was frequently censored in his lifetime. I wish his incredible work were more widely recognized.
The third issue of this new Canadian art journal examines the problem of censorship through the lenses of various cultural and intellectual frameworks as established by scholar Sara Ahmed, political theorist Achille Mbembe, and curator Legacy Russell, among others. It addresses multiple aspects of censorship, including the recent canceling of Palestinian artists’ exhibitions; the repression of women in Iran; technological biases prioritizing whiteness; and social media censorship—in particular, of LGBTQIA+ and feminist artists. Contributor Chimera Mohammadi writes about how Hollywood’s Hays Code fostered conditions in which historical queerness was equated with evil, and how today’s social media gestapo aims to do something frighteningly similar. In another essay, Taylor Neal writes, “We must not stop sharing, even if we are eternally shadow-banned, because even when it feels hopeless, someone will stumble on your page and feel seen by your art.”
The history of painting is full of smug, chiding works created by men that portray young women as subjects for moralizing “lessons” on the follies of vanity and fading beauty. (See Hans Baldung’s The Three Phases of Life and Death, ca. 1509–10, for example.) Invariably, such mocking images reveal the creators’ fears regarding their own senescence, obsolescence, and demise. But I’ve noticed works by feminist artists in which the figure of the old woman, or crone, is employed as a kind of antidote to this misogyny. I’m thinking specifically of Jo Spence’s photographic self-portrait Jo Spence, 1990; Chitra Ganesh’s photo triptych Hidden, 2007; and Narcissister’s 2018 documentary/performance about her relationship with her mother, Organ Player. These mask-wearing tricksters seem to say, We know the score. The crone has been here in us, all along. WE ARE THE WISE ONES. WE ARE FUCKING POWERFUL.
Two books published this year, Kate Manne’s Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia (Crown), and Omotara James’s poetry collection Song of My Softening (Alice James Books), gloriously affirm fatness as a central kind of body, one that is not an aberration. As Manne states, “Fatness is ample and fluid and luscious and irrepressible.” And to quote James, “Keep your thin spectacle, / your airy hula hoop / Fat of the forgotten republic / I lift you out of the shade.”
Lately, I’ve been enjoying wearing controversy on my body. I’ve been doing this with a number of T-shirts from my collection, one of which reads BITCH BITCH BITCH BITCH BITCH BITCHand is festooned with pink hearts (this one you can order from bitchmusic.com, the website of queer feminist musician Bitch); another, by Pippa Garner, says BURN GALLERIES NOT CALORIES; and one, origins unknown, comes emblazoned with the statement I GOT THIS BODY FROM JUNKFOOD.
I love balloons. They are joyful, sensual, and colorful. Whether at a car dealership or someone’s birthday party in a park, the sight of them always gives me a jolt of delight.
Naps are a portal to the unconscious and to dreams, which is where creativity comes from. Do not fear rest! It holds the key to magic, and to art.
