Q: Dear Jerry,

I saw that Art Forearm put out a call for pitches for its next issue. I've never pitched to a publication before. Any tips?

Signed,

Mr. Pitch Perfect

Dear Mr. PP,

You’ve come to the right guy. Pull up a chair, put on your safety goggles, and let’s get into it.

One, read the call. Read the submission guidelines. Read them again like they’re instructions for operating a band saw and you’d prefer to keep all your fingers. They wrote them for a reason. Help us help you.

Two, read some Art Forearm. I know, groundbreaking advice. But truly–get a feel for the magazine’s focus and vibe before you come in hot with something that belongs in a biennial wall text.

Read the latest Art Forearm article

Three, experience is critical. I’m begging you–bring something from your forearms, not just your forehead. Instead of putting me to sleep with a “I’m interested in exploring,” try pitching a Technique Cast Study on, say, cold-forging scrap aluminum with improvised tools in a shared studio that definitely wasn’t rated for the kind of impact. Now we’re talking. I’m feeling the sparks!

Read a Technique Case Study

The strongest pitches come from lived experience. Materials you’ve worked with, processes you’ve fought with, studios where you’ve spend some time, and the economic realities that come along with all of that.

Four, be specific. And anchor your pitch in one of the publications forms:

Material Deep Dive - where does this metal actually come from and who paid for that (in every sense)

Technique Case Study - a very particular way of doing something. Ideally learned the hard way.

Toolbox and Practice Notes - useful, grounded, no fluff.

Money Talk - what stuff actually costs. In time, labor, cash, sanity.

There are more kinds of features that just these. Like I said, read the guidelines.

Read a Toolbox feature

If you can’t name what kind of piece you’re writing, I can’t either!

Five, include all the basics. Don’t send the editors digging. Make sure you say:

WHAT you’re writing about

HOW you’re approaching it

WHAT you’re revealing. AKA, why anyone should care.

If I finish reading your pitch and my only thought is “okay…but so what?”

We’re in trouble.

Six, here’s what you’re gonna want to avoid:

Big vague gestures toward “systems”

Theoretical name-dropping with no actual application. C’mon man. Boring.

Pitches that read like you’re interviewing for grad school.

You don’t have to make it seem urgent, global, catastrophic, or dripping in jargon. Art Forearm likes things that are matter-of-fact, situated, artist-centered, infrastructural, and materialist. Just use real talk.

A pitch abbott how you reuse metal offcuts in your studio? Great.

A pitch about extraction economies? I’m interested.

A pitch that floats six feet above my head not really touching anything? I’ll pass, and they will, too.

Also, no reviews, press releases, or dense academic abstraction. It physically pains me to type “dense academic abstraction,” so please don’t make me read about it.

If your pitch could be copy-pasted into a gallery press release, start over, friend.

Seven, be honest about your position. You don’t need to posture your way into authority, I promise. Tell me what you actually know, not what you think you’re supposed to know.

Eight, stay focused. Art Forearm articles are not that long. If you pitch “the history of iron across cultures,” I’m going to choke. Instead trace one supply chain, one workshop, one process, one problem. Zoom in until it’s sharp.

Read a Material Deep Dive

Nine, think about the reader. I’m serious. What can someone learn from your piece? What do they walk away with? Make sure it’s some knowledge, a method, some kind of shift in thinking.

Here’s a super simple pitch template (you’re welcome)

Paragraph 1: what the piece is, what it focuses on, and where it takes place

Paragraph 2: how you’re approaching it, what you’re revealing, and why it matters.

Then, briefly: why you? (not existentially–just the facts), estimated word count, any conflicts (yes, this is in the guidelines, yes, I know you read them.)

Hope this numbered word salad helps.

While the editorial board at Art Forearm might cringe when I say “on behalf of Art Forearm,” I genuinely want to see what you come up with.

And if METAL isn’t your thing, don’t worry. There will be another issue, another material, another chance to get it right. Or at least interesting.

Now go write something I actually want to read.

–Jerry

Do you have a question for Jerry? Ask him for his advice on art materials, fabrication techniques, professional etiquette, lover’s quarrels, vintage cars, applying to grad school, sandwich-making, international travel, or any other areas of life where you could use some advice or good news.

Jen de los Reyes—whose studio profile was published earlier this year—shares personal journal entries that coincide with her work at Garbage Hill Farm and LAND. These day-to-day musings are filled with references to the artist’s inspirations while providing thoughtful reflections on how one cultivates creative practice and place-making in a tumultuous world.

One of the major influences for this piece is Linda Montano’s book Art in Everyday Life. Art and life are inextricably linked, and in this book she shows that intimacy. For each project she shares the description of the work that you would see commonly circulated professionally in the art world, and then next to that she shares a much more personal narrative that explains what situations in her life led her to produce the work. This contribution to Practice Notes will take a similar approach.

I am focusing on two of my most recent projects, Garbage Hill Farm and LAND. I am experimenting with a way of sharing these that not only shows the outward-facing broad overviews but also reveals my perspective on the ground by interspersing daily records from both projects. I didn’t think these notes and personal photos would have a purpose other than to log what I was learning and observing, but now I see each brief reflection as a seed. These entries are about the time and care it takes to grow something. It is about both the unglamorous tending and revealing the work behind the polished description and documentation of a project.

Garbage Hill Farm, a project currently on hiatus, was an artist-led urban farm I founded on a post industrial corridor in Chicago, Illinois, committed to food justice and sovereignty by increasing local food access with a focus on community-sustained agriculture, redistribution of food to neighbors, and donating fresh produce to local food pantries.

The project modeled what is possible on a residential lot in an urban center.

We ran a twelve member CSA and donated fresh produce to local food pantries weekly throughout our growing season, donating between 500–900 pounds of food annually. We used solar energy and practiced organic regenerative farming, closed-loop production, and the elimination of single-use plastics in distribution. The farm encouraged community foraging and self-production through a publicly accessible micro-orchard with thirty-nine fruit and nut trees—enough trees to qualify as an official level-one arboretum. There is a restored prairie for pollinators, a self-harvest mutual aid garden, and a free seed library with over fifty seed varieties that reflect the backgrounds of the gardeners of the neighborhood.

This is usually the point where the public-facing description of the project ends, but I am now going to share a selection of excerpts from my journals interspersed with personal photos that show some of what went into making this work possible.

April 2, 2021

Before I began my “official” workday I cut a circle out of the earth so that later I could plant another pecan tree. In the circle of newly opened ground, chickens unearthed riches. Yesterday a cherry tree was planted, and her partner will go into the ground next to her tonight. I didn’t know until recently that some trees need partners in order to bear fruit. Some are able to fruit alone. A mulberry tree. I planted one yesterday.

These trees are part of my retirement plan. I imagine an old age baking pies with the fruit and nuts they provide. By that point, the five foot tall tree that I planted today could be seventy feet tall.

Trees make me think differently about time, growth, productivity, and partnerships.

May 25, 2021

Today I was asked by Randy, one of the neighborhood kids, what was the first thing I ever planted?

Answer: a stolen red begonia.

When I was about ten or eleven I stole a red begonia from a neighbor’s yard, not just picking the bloom, but digging up the entire plant with my bare hands to transplant into my front yard. My family moved a lot when I was kid. We moved eighteen times in twenty-two years because of housing insecurity, so planting gardens was never an activity that we were able to engage in but clearly something I gravitated toward even then.

September 19, 2021

In the golden hour I saw a pumpkin poking through the squash leaves and thought it was so beautiful.

It is growing in the plot where I planted Asian heritage vegetables in the Three Sisters method. This indigenous method of planting grows corn, squash, and beans together for the ways they feed the soil, providing each plant with what it needs to thrive, as well as for how they support each other physically, with the beans wrapping and climbing up the tall stalks of corn and the squash meandering around the planted mounds offering ground cover and weed suppression. My planting used Japanese Hulless Corn, Chinese Red Noodle Yardlong Beans, and different varieties of Korean pumpkins and Japanese squash.

September 21, 2021

“A good part of agriculture is to adapt one’s work to nature….To live in right relation with his natural conditions is one of the first lessons that a wise farmer or any other wise man learns.”

-Liberty Hyde Baily

My choice to farm in some ways is to adapt to my own nature, my own rhythm. Long before I started growing food I kept farmer’s hours, so this feels right.

Lately I have had many people comment on how much “practical knowledge” I have in relation to my current connection to agriculture and animal husbandry. This feels like an achievement in an academic career where I always espoused theory put into practice and knowledge being out in the world. This feels like a fitting place for me to have landed.

Even nearing the end of September the tomatoes are still going strong, as are many other of the summer crops. I had planned to change over the plots much earlier, but climate change is prolonging the growing season. It is also making it harder to know when to plant certain finicky crops for this region that tend to bolt when the temperature is too warm, like broccoli and some other brassicas.

I am meeting with my climate crisis collective/support group How’s the Weather tonight; I will be sure to report how this has impacted the growing season.

November 24, 2021

I am finding it hard to believe that over a month has passed since my last entry. I have found it challenging to find a rhythm in which this writing and reflection practice is not a struggle. I think I am realizing it is early morning, first sun-sight, that makes the most sense with my days. The term “sun-sight” comes from Buckminster Fuller and is an attempt to correct language that goes against what we know to be true. The sun does not rise and set; we are turning around the sun and there are parts of the day where it is felt and parts it is not. He used the terms “sun-sight” and “sun-clipse” to more accurately describe this.

Much has happened in the past weeks. October 31 marked the last day of the growing season for Garbage Hill Farm, which was celebrated with a holiday market. I look forward to this being an annual tradition. The raised beds have been prepared for winter with cover crops and dressed with compost and coffee chaff. This was year one of re-wilding the front parkway and the prairie grasses and plants have been cut back for the winter to promote new growth in spring.

There has been a lot of reconfiguring of the animal spaces. The goat yard has been moved and their shed prepared for winter, a rooster yard had to be created, and a new hen yard. The compost system that was in place in the back alley and some of the prepared stored compost was stolen, so a new series of compost systems had to be created within the fence line.

There is more I am certain, but those are seeds that didn’t take root. I am trying not to feel as though this lapse in writing was a failing on my part, but instead that there need to be moments where we go fallow in order to restore ourselves and to allow space for realization and emergence.

-------

That was the last entry I wrote for Garbage Hill Farm before I made the move to Ithaca, New York, in July 2022. I made the choice to take a job at Cornell University with the understanding that the context there would allow me to continue my work in an expanded way. It was at Cornell where I met my partner and collaborator for LAND.

LAND is a site of research, cultivation, and care that I established with artist Oscar Rene Cornejo in 2023. Our project combines histories of artists’ engagement with land-based practices and techniques with environmental regeneration and conservation to cultivate sustainable futures.

Situated adjacent to Cayuga Lake on 4.2 acres on the urban fringe, the project site has a pond, old-growth pines, stands of black walnut trees, and open tall grass meadows, all home to wildlife. This landscape will be the grounds for outdoor art and ecology labs, studios, regenerative forestry, and a zone for community-driven agriculture. LAND is not a school, conservancy, or community garden. While sharing some relationship to these forms, the content is rooted in philosophies of covivencia: shared living, kinship, and considering social architecture to build relationships between people, their environment, and contemporary art practice.

The next time I returned to the practice of keeping a journal of what I was working on was in 2025, two years into my work on LAND.

June 2, 2025

I am writing this down in the notebook that I started in the first year I began planting at Garbage Hill Farm in Chicago. I thought this would be a record of my daily reflections and notes about the garden, but these planting plans and musings are often interrupted by notes jotted down in class on student work, ideas for essays, and the first draft of a commencement speech I gave that year.

I intended to have a daily writing practice inspired by Derek Jarman’s journals written at Prospect Cottage and Thoureau’s diary entries that kept track of his observations of the flora of Western Mass, but this fell by the wayside as the demands of my life and work found ways to make setting aside the time to write in this way feel nearly impossible. It is now over four years later that I am opening up this notebook with the hope of starting this practice again in earnest with a resolve that if I can find the time to respond to the barrage of relentless work emails, I can make time to write about the land I am tending.

I recently finished reading Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time, which reminded me of my own writing on gardening that I had forsaken. The book weaves and traces a cultural history of gardens alongside diary entries chronicling her personal restoration of a garden by landscape architect Mark Rumary, who designed the garden of the home she recently acquired. This was a parallel I could relate to in my own life, though the garden I had inherited at the home I recently moved into was not created by a trained gardener of note.

Like Laing, the grounds I am restoring were similarly neglected. I began to learn about the gardener here before me through my observations, as well as what I began to glean from the people in my neighborhood. I learned from Gale across the way that her name was Jean and that at one time she had a beautiful flower garden. With time, care, and attention, this began to reveal itself as I cleared brush and debris from the property. It became evident she had a love of purple flowers. For the first time this spring I saw the Allium bulbs she planted reemerge, beautiful tall fireworks of flowers marking her domain. Purple bearded irises also made themselves known, as did some native Marsh Blazing Star. I almost mistook the bright red blooms of California Poppies for the many brightly colored marker flags dotting the grounds attempting to protect all the new plantings we put in this spring.

Our planting plan was ambitious this season. We put over 500 plants in the ground, mostly trees and shrubs. While planting a young Eastern White Pine on the southwest corner of the lot I met Dave, who lives on the adjacent street. He told me that the now majestic pines I see around me that are easily over 100 feet tall were planted just 30 years ago. A true testament to their fast growing nature. I can’t wait to see what everything we put in the ground this year will look like 30 years from now. I hope this entry marks a new beginning. A new seed. A new chapter.

June 21, 2025

I think part of the reason I have been so conflicted about writing these entries is in part because I am an artist. As an artist I don’t personally have enough of an ego to believe anyone in the future would have interest in these.

Today I read The Resilient Homestead, a permaculture guide to setting up a whole systems ecological approach to home agriculture. The author, Ben Falke, spoke to the importance of keeping a farmstead journal so that one could return to it and reference what was happening on the land in past years, since our memories are fallible and markers of time can easily slip away. Tonight there was a moment that made me realize why I should be more vigilant about recording my daily environmental observations.

After returning home from Salt Point the land was a glittering sequined blanket of lightning bugs. I had never seen such a beautiful sight and hadn’t experienced it out here before. I told Oscar I just read an article about how our generation will be the last to experience fireflies.

One in three North American firefly species are at risk of extinction, with some species already being officially listed as “critically endangered.” There is no way I can capture what I saw here or how moving it was. I walked to the pond in the darkness in hopes I could see this doubled.

June 24, 2025

Heat advisory still in effect. It is impacting everything.

We had to go to the vet because it was aggravating Mei Mei’s heart condition. On the way home we stopped at the farm at the end of the road. We picked up some Queen of the Prairies. I usually gravitate toward tall feathery plants like these. Not sure where we will plant them yet. Fireflies were out again tonight.

October 11, 2025

Another large gap in entries. I hope this will be the last time that happens. Much to update in terms of fall plantings and shifts on the grounds, but that might be for the next entry. The political climate is reaching a boiling point, and I am finding it hard to focus on anything else. I am so glad to hear how Chicago residents are mobilizing to resist ICE and protect their neighbors. Some Chicago restaurants are refusing to serve ICE agents and closing operations when they fear their employees are at risk. Community members are showing up every morning at schools to protect children from being disappeared by ICE.

My aging mother is refusing to move to the United States from Canada so I can care for her in old age. She would rather live in a nursing home than live under a fascist regime. She already witnessed a corrupt dictatorship in the Philippines; she knows the patterns well.

Oscar is particularly affected by the news; his own family fled civil war in El Salvador, and he sees the signs that this country is on the precipice of a similar future. It almost feels unthinkable to be working on planting trees at this moment, but I am reminded of what poet W. S. Merwin wrote, “on the last day of this world I want to plant a tree.”

I will keep going.

Jen de los Reyes is an artist, educator, writer, and community arts organizer. With roots in the Riot Grrrl and DIY music scene, her practice incorporates pedagogical, ecological, and organizational methodologies. She founded and directed Open Engagement, an international conference on socially engaged art that was active from 2007–19. She worked within Portland State University from 2008–14 to establish the Art and Social Practice MFA program with a curriculum focused on place, engagement, and dialogue. Following that, Reyes was the Associate Director of the School of Art & Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she taught in the departments of Art and Museum and Exhibition Studies.

Her collaborative work and practice have been situated at institutions including the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Queens Museum, the Oakland Museum of California, MCA Chicago, and the Portland Museum of Art. She is the author of several books, most recently Defiantly Optimistic: Turning Up in a World on Fire. She divides her time between Chicago, where she founded Garbage Hill Farm, and Ithaca, NY.

Tether is a video essay that began as a simple experiment: a camera lifted into the air over the Wendover Salt Flats by a weather balloon, tethered to the ground by a string. The video essay situates this footage within the history of Wendover, where the bombsight for the atomic bomb was developed during World War II, and examines how framing operates in both military and artistic contexts. At its core, Tether challenges the idea of a “god’s-eye view” as neutral or objective, asking what is lost when a place is understood from above without maintaining a connection to the ground it surveys.

I’ve been thinking about the Bonneville flats…and speed.

The fastest time recorded on the flats was in 2020, with the Speed Demon Streamliner, but if jet engines are included, the record reaches back to Craig Breedlove, in 1965, in this car, The Spirit of America, 600mph, racing across the flats.

In Wendover, this jet fuel desire for speed is the strange stepson of the Air Force presence. Both use the supposed emptiness of the desert as a playground of the machine.

The Wendover Historic Airfield Museum says it was for American glory. But when I look at the faces of the smiling pilots in the archival photos, I read something more like escape. Not in a nationalistic sense, but a personal hunger—

a desire to shed an earthbound weight.

The salt flats offer a certain kind of frame. A space where ground is brighter than sky, so our orientation is flipped.

In search of a point of reference, it has been described as an alien landscape or a white gallery wall, turned flat; in either form, we are out of context.

Drawing targets, the white surface was used in the nuclear project to develop the Norden bombsight—a viewing device deemed top secret, with bombardiers sworn to defend the device with their lives.

The bombsight was a certain kind of frame. A device engineered to make the shifting world below appear fixed—still—calibrated to draw a single accurate line from air to target below.

The tool anticipated error in every environmental variable—wind, gravity, the curvature of the earth—each one calculated so it could be controlled.

But in its development, a glitch surfaced: even with the calculations correct, the bombs landed hundreds of feet off their mark. The error lived in the final seconds in the bombardier’s body: the small lean into the viewer, the subtle shift as the man took a breath.

At high velocity, true precision would require a kind of self erasure—where the bombardier’s pulse slowed, breath subdued—until he moved as an extension of the device itself.

It’s a seductive fantasy, that with the body erased, and environment controlled, an objective view could be reached—a perfect image from above.

I am reminded of Yves Klein’s leap—where his fall was transformed into flight. The image was a trick, made by combining multiple exposures to hold Klein in the air, arms outstretched, street steady beneath him.

The camera offers here the same promise as the bombsight—that with the right frame, that with the right frame, the world can be made orderly, weightless, perfected.

What was in Klein’s need for the void? Was it hubris or curiosity? Either way, a certain delusion is required.

Standing a quarter mile from the bunkers used to load the atomic tests, I think of Virilio’s Politics of Speed—when you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck.

Here in the museum, in the archival photos, the pilots are still standing next to their ships with wild smiles on their faces. I feel an odd sort of camaraderie with them, and seeing myself in them is unsettling.

I know they were working towards violence and a destructive end, but also they must have loved the sky, the acceleration, and the act of living together at the edge of things.

I have always wanted to have a frank conversation with my cousin Kyle, who is an Air Force pilot.

I would ask him now: What is it that you love about flying? What is the worst thing you have done for that love?

Anika Todd (b. 1992, Boston, MA) is an artist and educator whose work investigates Western principles of property that authorize human control of earth and sky. Todd earned a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, and currently teaches sculpture at the Sam Fox School of Art and Design in MO. They have created site-specific outdoor works for Sweet Pass Sculpture Park, TX (2024) and NONstndrd, MO (2025), and have presented solo exhibitions at Erin Cluley Projects, TX (2024); Lydian Stater, NY (2023); and Flux Factory, NY (2021). Todd has participated in residencies nationally and internationally, including the NARS Foundation (2020) and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2019). They received an Austin Cultural Arts Council Award in 2019 and were a finalist for the NYFA Architecture/Environmental Structures/Design Award in 2022.

Q: Dear Jerry,

How do you caulk a wall? And what’s your preferred brand of caulk for a job like this?

Signed,

Seeking Something Sticky

Dear SSS,

You want to talk caulk, do ya?

First problem: you didn’t tell me what kind of job you’re doing. But I’m gonna assume you’re trying to seal the gap between a wall and trim–baseboard, window, door, something like that. You probably want to clean it up, make it tight, make it look like you knew what you were doing all along.

Okay, so first up: what is caulking? Caulk is a sauce we lay down to seal and adhere. Not all caulking is an adhesive and not all adhesives are caulking, though there are a few that can be used for both applications.

Real ones know the job title used to be called a mastic man. Now we just call ‘em a “caulker.” Yes a “caulker” is a profession, and–who knows–by the end of this letter you might be running off to join the goop troop.

First: The Gun

Don’t waste your time and money with the cheapest beer-can-sheet-metal-caulk-gun you can pick up. Spend the extra bucks on a decent gun this allows for:

- fewer tears

- cleaner lines

- smoother trigger (no Hercules hand strength needed)

- a release latch that actually works (so it doesn’t dribble in your hands like a busted ketchup bottle)

What You Need: Jerry’s Setup

Get your act together before you start:

- Caulk (see my picks below)

- A decent caulking gun

- Utility knife (to cut the tip)

- 2” blue painters tape

- Striking solution:

Silicone caulk - use denatured or isopropyl alcohol

Latex caulk - soapy water works fine

- Spray bottle (for striking solution)

- Rag (you will need it)

Optional but smart:

- Paper towels

- Trash bag

Hot Tips: Before You Get Started

- Cold caulk doesn’t move good. Think: me getting out of bed on a January morning. Not easy. So keep your caulk somewhere warm.

- Don’t stab the tube like an animal. Some caulks don’t have an inner seal. You’ll just look stupid trying to poke through it.

- Prep work makes the dream work. If you’re trying to pull clean lines, prep is 99% of it.

How To Caulk a Wall: Step-by-Step

1. Clean the area. Dust, debris, old gunk–get it out of there.

2. Tape your lines. Run blue tape on both sides of the joint to give you some clean edges.

3. Cut the tip. Just the tip! You can always go bigger, but you can’t go back.

4. Load the gun and run the bead. Move at a consistent pace with steady pressure. Don’t start and stop like you’re learning how to drive stick shift.

5. Mist the bead. Lightly spray your striking solution over the caulk line. This will keep it from dragging when you smooth it.

6. Strike the joint. Run your finger along the bead, one clean pass, steady pressure. Excess caulk goes onto the tape (that’s what it’s there for) and you’ll get a big blob on your finger (wipe it on your rag).

7. Peel the tape. Do this right away, while the caulk is wet. That feels good, right?

8. Now walk away. Don’t touch it! Don’t try to just “fix one little thing.” That’s how you’re going to ruin it.

Advanced: For the Goop Enthusiasts

If you start doing this a lot, you might want to invest in a chub gun. Let me tell you, it’s kind of satisfying to walk into a supply place asking for a “chub gun and a case of sausage” and instead of being asked to leave they ask you “what color sausage?”

Caulking and adhesives are packed like Jimmy Dean breakfast sausage. This packaging is cheaper long-term and leads to less trash. The chub gun handle rotates so you’re not having to do some kind of interpretive dance around corners.

“Do Your Best and Caulk the Rest”

…is not the philosophy I live by. It sounds nice, but in my (and my ex-wife’s) experience, you can’t usually cover up your shortcomings so easily. Caulk doesn’t fix bad work, but it can provide a nice transition between surfaces. When done properly, it disappears. It can even become a focal point if you want–like icing on a cake.

And now…

Jerry’s Top 3 Sauces of 2026

1. White Lightning (DAP Alex Plus) - Cheap, easy cleanup, comes in all sorts of colors, great for interior, everyday use.

2. 100% Silicone - For when you need a real seal. Wet areas, slick surfaces. The only way to go.

3. NP1 Master Seal - This is a brand name polyurethane-based adhesive that sticks to dang near everything. And it remains flexible once cured. More adhesive than caulk, but it can be used to seal an edge.

If you’re still scared to find yourself in the aisle at Ace staring at 47 tubes having an existential breakdown: comment “SPREADSHEET” and I’ll think about sharing my handy dandy cheat sheet for caulk to cure your analysis paralysis.

Leave a comment

Good luck gettin goopy.

–Jerry

Do you have a question for Jerry? Ask him for his advice on art materials, fabrication techniques, professional etiquette, lover’s quarrels, vintage cars, applying to grad school, sandwich-making, international travel, or any other areas of life where you could use some advice or good news.

If you have an exhibition, project, publication, or opportunity you’d like us to know about and share with our readers, send submissions for future installments to artforearm@gmail.com with the subject OPEN ARMS.

Opportunities

Call for pitches for Art Forearm’s next issue!
Fall/Winter Issue: METAL

For this issue, we’re interested in metal as both substance and condition: structural, sonic, economic, symbolic. We welcome proposals that engage metal in processes such as fabrication, welding, casting, gilding, plating, engraving, printmaking, and silverpoint. We’re equally interested in writing that approaches metal through broader cultural or conceptual lenses—music and subculture, extraction and labor, infrastructure, corrosion and patina, prosthetics and implants, weaponry and defense, or currency and value.

We encourage pitches that move between disciplines, linking studio practice to industry, history, technology, or lived experience. We are drawn to specificity, material knowledge, and writing that emerges from direct engagement.

We welcome pitches from visual and performing artists, writers, cultural workers, researchers, organizers, fabricators, conservators, craftspeople, and others whose expertise is embedded in real-world practice.

Deadline for pitches: July 1
Draft deadline (if accepted): August
Publication window: September–January

SUBMIT YOUR PITCH

Questions? Send to artforearm@gmail.com

Exhibitions

The Half-life of a Sign at at Nine 9 Monroe St, New York, New York—This solo exhibition by painter James Warren centers an investigation of figure and ground—the shifting threshold between human-made structures and the landscapes they inhabit. You’ll see finished works that feature the molding paste ground he demonstrated in this issue’s Toolbox feature. Through May 6, 2026.

Line at tête-à-tête-à-tê, 2539 N Kedzie, Suite 5E, Chicago, IL—This singular new exhibition space envisioned by artist, curator, and writer Shannon Stratton is structured around intimacy, closeness, quietude, and slow-looking. The inaugural exhibition is curated by Molly Zuckerman-Hartung and features work by Cameron Martin and Susanne Doremus in conversation with poet Jennifer Moxley, whose book The Line acts as the resonator for the exhibition. Guests are invited to spend time—two at a time—with each other and the art in a tête-à-tête chair by artist Julia Klein selected by curator-of-chair, Kelly Kaczynski. Open Saturdays 12-5 or by appointment.

Echolalia at National Gallery of Iceland—an expansive solo exhibition by visionary musician Björk opens at the end of May, but tickets are on sale now for the coinciding rave she is hosting in Iceland during the total eclipse of the sun on August 12. General Admission tickets are approximately 160 USD. Exhibition through September, tickets on sale now.

In Minor Keys at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in Venice, Italy – opens on May 9. The Art Biennale is one of the world's largest and arguably the most important contemporary visual art exhibitions in the world. Over 75,000 square feet of the city is dedicated to artists in the collective exhibition spaces as well as in the national pavilions. The U.S. pavilion’s status remained in question after the call for proposals introduced new language that submissions should highlight “works of art that reflect and promote American values,” and the first proposal by artist Robert Lazzarini and curator John Ravenal fell through. Late in the fall of 2025, the US State Department announced that Alma Allen—an artist who lives in Mexico—will represent the United States curated by Jeffrey Uslip— who disappeared from public roles after his previous post at CAM St. Louis ended because he organized an exhibition that included racist images. Curious choices, indeed. Through November 2026.

Projects

Olamina Folk School for Land, Memory & Craft in Tuskegee, AL—a new educational project and arts center in the tradition of the Danish folk high schools, the Black Arts Movement community art schools, and the 1964 Freedom Summer Schools is raising funds for Phase 1 of their project. Your donations will help build a place where people across the global majority can come and work with their bodies, their minds, and their spirits to develop skills and community on the land. Donate here.

Sunrise May Day forest-planting parade in Champaign-Urbana, IL—Be a part of the newest iteration of artist Deke Weaver’s life-long project, The Unreliable Bestiary. Having previously explored the Monkey, Elephant, Wolf, Bear, Tiger, and Cetacean, Weaver’s focus for this chapter is the Forest. Meet at the Japan House parking lot at 5:30am on Friday, May 1 (rain date: Sat, May 2) for mask-making and parade together to a forest plot where 2800 plants and trees will be put in the ground.

Cactus Club in Milwaukee, WI - this artist-run, queer-owned, multi-disciplinary arts and performance space has created an arts education nonprofit organization with 501(c)3 status called Cactus+, opening access to grants and funding sources that have funded an artist-designed accessible entrance ramp and programming like intergenerational line dancing, a family-friendly block party, papermaking workshops, all-ages DJ classes, a book club, a seed library, queer karaoke, Narcan trainings, and more.

Subvert - a streaming music platform owned and controlled by its community. Invest now to become a founding member, be a co-owner, and get a zine. 100 USD for users, free for musicians and labels.

Do you have an exhibition, project, publication, or opportunity you’d like us to know about and share with our readers?

Send submissions for future installments to artforearm@gmail.com with the subject OPEN ARMS or comment below.

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Michelle Wilson describes why the technique of courtroom sketching emerged in her artistic practice in the past year—first as an attempt to hold masked ICE agents accountable but ultimately as a method of documenting the breakdown of our court system. She recounts her time as a voluntary court observer in the San Francisco Immigration Court, sharing insights and reflections gained from this witnessing.

In the summer of 2025, as the Trump Administration was ramping up their deportation activities, I began serving as a Court Observer in the San Francisco Immigration Courts. My official mission was to be on the ground to witness any dismissals and to call the Bay Area Rapid Response Network to assure that attorneys could intercede in their possible deportations. Unlike other Court Observers, though, I had a secret mission: to draw the immigration courts. More precisely, I was going to try and draw ICE officers without their masks.

I’d like to say that when I arrived that first day I was cool and confident, walking in as if I belonged there. Instead I was a nervous, flustered wreck, and I wasn’t even on trial. I was uncertain how I was even going to make these drawings, because I knew that I needed to protect the identities of the asylum seekers in court.

The groundwork for my decision to serve in this capacity came shortly after the first No Kings March on June 14, 2025. That day, as I marched across Oakland with over 10,000 others, asylum seekers across the Bay Area received a notification on their CBP app to report to the formerly secret ICE Center located on Tahoma Street in San Francisco. Fearing the alternatives to not appearing, many immigrants showed up. However, no ICE officers were on site. I wondered if it was an attempt to divert people from the march.

Fortunately, many lawyers, including several from the San Francisco chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, turned up to assist asylum seekers with filling out the correct paperwork to demonstrate that they had complied with orders. To not show up, or to have no proof of showing up, could be grounds for deportation.

Deanna Mouton—then the vice president of the San Francisco chapter of the National Lawyers Guild and one of the people on site that day on Tahoma Street—expressed to me their frustration about ICE agents wearing masks during raids. Together, we began to brainstorm ways we could unmask them.

It occurred to me that one place masks are prohibited is the courtroom, where photography and video are also banned. As someone fairly skilled with a pencil and paper, I wondered if I could show up, draw, and possibly capture a likeness.

Dee connected me with one of the training sessions for Court Observers offered by the National Lawyers Guild, and soon thereafter I began my official stint as an undercover courtroom artist.

I quickly learned, though, that ICE agents are actually prohibited from entering courthouses, at least in San Francisco. But I’ve stayed to draw despite this. I believe these drawings bring greater visibility to the plight of immigrants and more transparency to the processes of asylum and immigration. In order to protect the identities of the vulnerable, I render the immigrants in question as silhouettes. However, I simultaneously aim to capture their body language, or some indication of their identities so as to not erase them completely. I am forced to render quickly—court sessions are fast, so most drawings must be completed within fifteen minutes.

Dee assured me I could legally render the defendants as long as I drew them from behind and didn’t show their faces. Even so, I came to use silhouettes. This is in part because of logistics—sometimes I am not able to sit directly behind the asylum seeker, and when I do, it is difficult to capture the rest of the courtroom and the experience they are having.

On a more conceptual level, silhouettes leave an openness that a viewer can fill in—the person in that drawing could be any person. I hope this enables people to see themselves in these stories and, thus, increase a sense of empathy.

In addition to witnessing the stories of asylum seekers, my drawings have inadvertently become evidence of the breakdown of the San Francisco Immigration Court. Since September of 2025, all but seven of the judges on the court have been fired by the Trump administration for having “too high” of an asylum-granting rate. In January, three more judges retired. In March 2026, two more judges were transferred to other districts, leaving only two judges on the San Francisco court. There are plans to permanently close the court in January of 2027.

This destruction of the system from within is adding uncertainty and confusion to the process of gaining legal citizenship, and my works are documenting in real time how this is affecting a vulnerable population of people. The courts are overwhelmed and communications are going awry. Fewer judges also means fewer clerks to file paperwork.

I was recently in court when an asylum seeker was FTA (“failure to appear”), which is typically grounds for immediate deportation. Fortunately, when looking over their paperwork, the judge realized that some numbers in the address were transposed, and their court summons was likely sent to the incorrect address. In this instance, the judge extended their case and sent another summons, this time to the correct address. Unfortunately there are other times where asylum seekers were deported in spite of doing everything else “right” simply due to clerical errors made by the courts.

When I first started going to court, I hoped to remain anonymous. However, I was outed to the court early on by Judge Swink, one of the judges who has since been fired. Identifying me and my drawing was not out of animosity; rather, she seemed pleased that someone was paying attention.

To paraphrase the artist Anne Covell from her book Palpable Mass: amid periods of history such as ours, the use of chaos as a political tool to distract people from important issues causes people to be overwhelmed and become disengaged. This becomes a new normal, and the opportunity to dehumanize others, such as immigrants, becomes inevitable. Thus, during times like these, sustained attention is an act of resistance.

These drawings are my act of sustained attention as visual testimonies made on the ground of the struggles immigrants face today. More than anything, I know it is necessary for these drawings to be seen. As of now, I have almost fifty, although some are less complete than others. I’m uncertain of the archive or repository in which they may finally reside.

The experience of immigration court is a disturbing mix of monotony and anxiety; I am still determining how it has affected me. More importantly, the people who are affected most continue to live in fear of incarceration, of deportation, of being separated from their families. These drawings carry a part of their stories and experiences, and invite others to turn their focus and attention to the plight of immigrants during this regime.

Michelle Wilson is an interdisciplinary thinker, whose work involves papermaking, printmaking, book arts, installation, and social practice. She has exhibited her work both internationally and in the United States, including participation in biennials such as Philadelphia’s Philagrafika 2010 and the 2006 Second International Biennial for the Artist’s Book in Alexandria, Egypt. Her practice includes frequent collaborations with other artists; This includes her ongoing collaboration with Anne Beck as the Rhinoceros Project.

She is a past hand-papermaking advisor to Signa-Haiti, a non-governmental organization developing a sustainable and bio-dynamic economy in Haiti. Wilson currently teaches at San Jose State University and Stanford University, as well as workshops throughout the Bay Area and beyond. Wilson’s imprint is Rocinante Press. A former longtime resident of Philadelphia, Wilson now lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.

For the Spring/Summer 2026 Issue: GROUND, Art Forearm Editor-in-Chief Jennifer Seas is in conversation with Chris Taylor, Director of Land Arts of the American West at Texas Tech University.

Land Arts of the American West is a transdisciplinary field program dedicated to expanding awareness of the intersection of human construction and the evolving nature of our planet. The program leverages immersive field experience in the desert southwest as a primary pedagogic agent to support research that opens horizons of perception, probes depths of inquiry and advances understanding of human actions shaping environments. Land Arts attracts architects, artists, historians, and writers from across the university and beyond to a “semester abroad in our own backyard” that travels 6,000 miles overland while camping for two months to experience major land art monuments—Double Negative, Spiral Jetty, Sun Tunnels, The Lightning Field—while also visiting sites to expand understanding of what land art might be, such as pre-contact archeology, military-industrial infrastructure, and sites of contemporary wilderness and waste. Throughout the travels, and on-campus, participants make work in response to their experience, which is exhibited at the Museum of Texas Tech University to conclude the field season.

Chris Taylor: Check, check, radio, check…

Jennifer Seas: We’re on! Thanks for sitting down to get into some Money Talk today, Chris.

CT: Happy to sit down with you and get into this. Money introduces interesting questions. It might be productive—and you’ll decide whether any of this is productive—to talk about resources in an expanded sense. A big part is less about money than energy—and the way energy is cultivated and shared is, I would say, a bigger reason why we’re still going as a program.

JS: I think that’s important to include, because if you don’t consider those things or have some resources there, it doesn’t matter how much money you have, it’s not going to be successful.

It’s hard to imagine convincing a university to invest in a program like Land Arts of the American West in the risk-averse climate that we’re in today. So I’m curious what strategies you used to initiate the program, and how you might approach it if you were doing that today.

CT: This is a super necessary and relevant question. You’re right that the climate that we all live in is very different institutionally, culturally, socially. And so there’s a lot of potential reflection points in the question

As much as I think we all know that we live in a risk-averse moment, it’s also astounding that we’re averse to these immediate—and I would say—relatively ephemeral risks. Meanwhile, these epic, life-ending planetary risks are just kind of blowing past without much traction.

Maybe that’s because of the currency of finding traction? We can get traction on trying to limit liability in a more immediate way, but the liability of humanity on the planet is harder to get one’s mind around.

To me, that conversation is a question to flip around and say, how can any school not do something that seeks greater transformation? It becomes foolish to not put people together and in the world in ways that make what really matters the most as evident as possible. That it’s risky to create educational environments where people can coast through and think nothing happens.

And I guess I should also say that I have a pretty different tolerance for risk than most people. What may seem really risky to some people may not seem risky to me relative to the field program, because it’s grown over time and over the years of seeing what happens when people are in certain settings.

I’m encouraged by the fact that there are now more field programs in existence within universities and outside of universities. Maybe I just know more about them because I’ve been doing this longer, yet when we started, there was no immediate example of what we were trying to do.

The Rural Studio had come into visibility from Alabama, and that was somewhat of a model within architecture and immersive education that was culturally and socially motivated. Other examples tended to be farther afield. Outward Bound exists as much more about personal values than disciplinary education. And then there were touchstones like the Foxfire manuals and the back-to-the-land movement of the 60s and 70s.

So there were examples, but not within universities where you could say, “if they can do it, we can do it.” We didn’t have that.

It was more folding together archaeology, ancient history, contemporary art, architecture and cultural production. Similar to what Lucy Lippard did in Overlay, yet bringing it into a studio context. The gesture of the idea was fairly simple. It wasn’t some epic epiphany—it was just, “this makes sense.”

The key answer to what strategies we used to initiate the program: the person I developed the program with, Bill Gilbert, met Patrick Lannan, and the Lannan Foundation gave some initial support through the University of New Mexico.

Because there was some seed money, decisions could move forward. Showing up with money makes people take meetings. That got the ball rolling at New Mexico, and also in Austin where I was at the time.

So that’s a recommendation: if you’re trying to do something out of the mold within higher education, figure out a way to bring money to the table before approaching the institution. Make it a fully-fledged plan.

JS: Make it easy for them.

CT: Yes. And the other key piece is that the program runs on a really small budget. We get a lot out of every dollar, which keeps us close to the ground. That’s pedagogically important—not just roughing it, but being in direct contact with weather and the elements.

And not needing expensive infrastructure makes it possible. Well, we do have a special truck now—a dream made real with a visionary gift from Owl Call Radio—yet that may be another story.

There’s also a critique: we’ve undervalued ourselves to get this done, which is also too often the history of running anything.

JS: Artist-run projects tend to suffer from this, yes.

CT: You don’t pay yourself because you believe in the mission, but then later it’s hard to dig out and be taken financially serious later.

JS: Are there ways that you check yourself around that now?

CT: Mmm...Yes and no. I mean, I think probably more no than yes just because I’m willing to just do the thing and not be like, well, I’m not doing that unless I’m getting compensated in some way.

JS: Also you’re doing operations, but you are also responsible for development and curriculum, and everything else.

CT: Yeah. Yeah. We do have a fairly robust list of field guests compared to participants. There’s always more field guests than there are participants, and some of those guests are supported and funded to join us while others are people that find their way to us. And we invite them to dinner, we take care of people that find us, but we’re not able to pay everybody. I’m a big fan of W.A.G.E. and what it stands for, so there’s moments when I wonder, should we check ourselves on this?

Suppose I believe that if you’re going to join us and talk about your work, we should be compensating you. Just feeding you isn’t quite the same as writing a check, but it would be a lot for us to work in a zone where we are paying everybody the same— would be nice to have that kind of purse!

Generally, it’s a good balance, and people are coming to us because they care deeply about what we are doing and want to connect and have something to offer. They want to be in dialogue with the participants. Seeing that map out over time is fruitful.

The strength of the community, and how the community has supported itself, both in an operational sense and in the community of alumni is way bigger than the program itself or any individual that happens to be driving anything.

That’s super heartening and encouraging, and that’s a testament of us doing something relevant—if it wasn’t giving something to people, they would walk away. We tend to get more people walking towards us than walking away from us.

This is not a thing for everybody, and that’s totally fine. I’ve often said this is an experience that everyone can benefit from, but not everyone’s in a position to in a given moment. It takes commitment and sacrifice, and it’s a challenge.

When we started this, it wasn’t about asking: is this an acceptable load? If I was waiting around to make sure that I had enough support, so this would be more like a standard teaching load, it never would have happened.

I would welcome such a structure, yet because of the circumstance of the institution and where I am, that it hasn’t happened. I’m okay with that, but I’m well aware that it means that I’m wearing the development hat and shopping for the food, the logistics hat, and the seminar leader, critic, all of it. It’s taxing.

I feel like I’m both pointing out all of the problems and then making excuses for all of them at every turn, yet I think this arrangement speaks to the interconnectedness of the totality of the program in that there isn’t separation between things.

JS: This is the challenge of scaling things, which is such a popular talking point now—everything needs to be scaled, but then everything becomes fragmented, and the person who’s doing this thing over here doesn’t fully understand this thing over there. Everyone wants growth, but there is sometimes something important about recognizing when something is exactly what it needs to be.

CT: I guess I’m at least a little bit self-aware enough to know that just mapping what we’re doing right now onto a future is unsustainable, unrealistic. And even to put that onto somebody—like, here, to a colleague right now, here, have the keys, good luck. Call me if you need anything—that’s dangerous and foolish.

It’s giving somebody a burden I was willing to build for myself.

JS: I appreciate what you’re saying—you reminded me of a conversation I had yesterday when you were talking about different vantage points of risk.

Our institutions are really clear about short-term risks, but not about long-term risks. I was thinking about how people in leadership positions are often thinking on the timescale of their career, not the timescale of humanity.

So I appreciate that you’re thinking about sustainability across different timescales—your career, but also beyond that.

CT: Yeah. I think there are examples of places where unique things have happened and continued. Samuel Mockbee died suddenly and too young, and Rural Studio continued. He was able to help with the transition before he passed, and the person who took over has made it their own. It’s lived on within the spirit of its source, yet expanded.

That’s totally fine. It’s a question of the transference of desire and motivation.

This has become a rear-view mirror conversation, but there haven’t been many “most difficult” things, because at every turn it’s been, that’s a ton of work, and I’m excited about doing it.

Like, figuring out how to do a broadcast from Spiral Jetty—we’ve never done that before, okay, let’s figure it out.

JS: You’re invigorated by that kind of problem solving, so it’s hard to imagine it as non-sustainable when it seems like that’s what feeds you.

Then I’m curious—what worked better than you expected?

CT: The first thing that comes to mind is the community.

Over the years, each group has different energies—sometimes harmonious, sometimes fractious—but what’s been way better than expected is the strength of the community.

It exists at different scales and levels of engagement. People come back after years, and it’s as if they never left. They connect with the current group and reflect on how meaningful participation still is for them.

That’s powerful.

JS: Yeah, it’s very cool.

Are there strategies or structures you recommend for artists or educators who want to build alternative or field-based teaching models, especially thinking about funding and labor?

CT: The biggest thing is just to do it. The world needs more of these things.

I recently met Piero Golia who runs the Mountain School in LA—an alternative school that’s been going for over 20 years. It was the same story: willed into being.

JS: I think that’s important for people to hear, especially what you said about not getting caught up in legacy. It’s okay if it doesn’t last forever. It just needs to be what it is now.

CT: Exactly. There’s that Greil Marcus book Lipstick Traces, about how something ephemeral can create seismic cultural shifts.

Something can burn bright and short and still matter deeply.

That makes more sense to me than incrementalism—trying to plan everything or ensure long-term perpetuity before starting. That can become insurmountable.

Right now, with institutional risk aversion, it’s increasingly difficult to do anything. Especially in the arts and humanities, where you’re asking for inventive thinking, but the systems limit you to predefined options.

We’ve shifted from deep engagement—like reading a book—to quick snapshots of information. Everyone has access to the same data. What matters now is what you do with it.

Our path forward is through human imagination.

Even with AI, I place confidence in human eccentricity—let machines handle the mundane tasks so we can focus on wonder and insight. That’s why we need more educational and cultural spaces that expand perception rather than narrow it.

JS: How do you think about value in a program like this, when outcomes aren’t easily measured or monetized?

CT: The value is in people and the connections they build, and what that enables.

Think about Barry Lopez—his writing isn’t just about what he saw, it’s about opening ways of seeing. Creating tools of perception. The real value is helping people see more possibilities—more ways to live, work, and connect.

Monetizing that is secondary.

We make too many life decisions based on assumptions about money. But if we’re thinking about building culture or making humanity more humane, leading with the checkbook is part of the problem. We’re too eager to balance budgets before feeding, and educating, people.

My hope is that people develop the ability to construct their own perception of the world and act on it—not just move passively through predefined systems.

JS: And connect with other builders.

CT: Exactly. That’s what needs more support.

There’s also this issue of large-scale art projects—people critique them by saying the money could have been used better elsewhere. That’s a false choice.

The problem isn’t that one project got funded—it’s that we don’t fund more projects by more people. We don’t need to tear down the one thing that got built. We need to ask how to support more. There’s plenty of money in the world—it’s just not allocated toward cultural production in meaningful ways. The question isn’t just about money—it’s about what we define as value and wealth.

Barry Lopez writes about how early Europeans only valued what they could extract and take from the Americas. That definition of value led to enormous harm. We don’t have to use that definition today.

So the real question is: what do we value?

The Land Arts program offers other ways of measuring value—of a person, a work, a place. That’s where it becomes meaningful.

JS: I think that’s a great place to end. There are a lot of good thoughts here, so thank you.

CT: I’m excited about what you’re doing. I think it’s important to talk about money openly instead of pretending it doesn’t matter or assuming people just emerge from wealth.

JS: Yeah, we have to talk about it!

Chris Taylor was born in Germany, raised in waters of Southwest Florida, lives in arid American Southwest. An architect, educator, and director of Land Arts of the American West at Texas Tech University, Taylor is deeply committed to the intersection of human construction and the evolving nature of the planet. The Terminal Lake Exploration Platform, created with support from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, continues to facilitate visual and performative research within under-examined basins and internal aquatic fringes. Taylor studied architecture at the University of Florida and the Graduate School of Design at Harvard.

This guide will outline the application and effects of a molding paste ground intended for use with oil or acrylic paint, which creates an extremely smooth, thick, and non-absorbent surface.

Ground is the layer in a painting between the supports (canvas, wood, or paper) and the paint. It can be prepared to have different characteristics—smooth or textured, thin or thick, absorbent or non-absorbent, white or colored—depending on what kind of effects you want to achieve.

This guide will outline the application and effects of a molding paste ground, which creates a surface similar to mylar or another polypropylene material. A molding paste ground is extremely smooth and relatively non-absorbent; without much “tooth,” paint glides across the surface very easily. This makes it easy to create very thin layers or washes of color when the paint is mixed with enough medium or extender—oils and acrylics can take on some of the visual effects of watercolor. It also makes working with translucencies and overlapping layers of color rewarding. Lastly, the way paint sits on top of the ground makes it easy to create texture with the brush. Especially with oils that remain workable for hours, as paint is pushed across the surface, evidence of the thickness or length of the bristols is visible.

*A note of clarification on size (sealant) vs. ground: Painting material terms can often be confusing, and they are sometimes used interchangeably or inconsistently by manufacturers. A size is a glue used to seal the canvas or wood panel before doing any ground preparation. Sizing a surface protects the support, ensuring that the paint or even the ground doesn’t seep into the fibers of the canvas or wood, helping to preserve the painting over time. While the molding paste ground is generally applied thick enough to effectively seal the support, I would still recommend applying a pH neutral PVA (polyvinyl acetate) size to create the most archival surface.

The molding paste we’re using for this project is a water-based product made by GOLDEN that has a thick consistency and forms a flexible, semi-opaque film when it dries. It is often mixed directly with acrylic paints for textured impasto techniques. However, when applied in layers directly to a support and wet-sanded, it creates a uniquely smooth, glass-like ground that allows oils and acrylics to glide like watercolor. The ground we are preparing is intended for use with oil or acrylic paint.

Required Materials/Tools:

• GOLDEN Molding Paste

• large palette knife

• small palette knife

• wet/dry sandpaper (150–320 grit)

• spray bottle

• stretched canvas or wood panel

• paper towel

• PVA size

• wide brush

Optional:

• white gesso

• sealable mixing container

• sanding block

• masking tape

Step 1: Choosing a Support

Since this ground is thick and requires the buildup of multiple layers of molding paste, it works best on a more structural support—wood panel or canvas work better than paper. Additionally, having a flat and rigid surface, while not necessary, makes the application process easier. For example, canvas stretched over the panel will be easier to work with than canvas stretched on a strainer. Having something to push against is helpful for achieving the unique flatness and smoothness that is possible with this material.

Step 2: Tinting the Ground (Optional)

Once you have your support ready, you can decide if you would like to tint your molding paste ground. If you want your ground to be white, mix equal parts white acrylic gesso with molding paste in a large sealable container. This step is optional, as molding paste on its own has a light-grey semi-translucent color that looks almost like frosted glass. This color can be nice for creating muted tones, while a white ground makes translucent oils look more luminous.

Step 3: Application

Using the large palette knife, loosely spread molding paste onto the canvas/panel so there is enough to cover the surface. (It’s better to put too much than too little, as the extra will be scraped off in the spreading process and can be reused). Use one hand to hold the handle of the large palette knife and place the four fingers of your other hand on top of the blade.

Then, starting in one of the top corners, after cleaning the knife, push down and drag the blade to the bottom of the canvas/panel. The idea is not to scrape but to flatten and push the paste so it spreads across the surface as flat as possible. You will want to keep the blade level, with only the slightest angling up of the edge closest to you. After the first stroke, move left or right across the support, slightly overlapping your previous stroke, until the entire surface has been covered.

I find that I can achieve the best coverage if I do this once, then flip the support 180 degrees and do the same things all along the opposite edge. If there are big ridges left between the strokes, then push with less pressure.

Molding paste dries relatively quickly, so it’s important to start immediately after applying the paste to the surface. You will be able to go over your strokes if you’re not satisfied on the first pass, but after a couple attempts it gets tacky and won’t spread smoothly. It is okay if there are ridges or gaps left at the end of your first layer—these can be sanded away or filled later.

Depending on the thickness, it takes about 4–8 hours for a layer to dry before the next one can be applied. (Note: if the surface feels dry to the touch but is still cold, then the paste hasn’t dried all the way through.) Apply at least three layers or until the weave of the canvas is no longer visible. Any holes or divots that are left in the surface can be easily filled using a small palette knife once the last layer has dried completely.

A note about the edges: after multiple layers, you will notice that the ground builds up and hangs over the edge of the surface creating a sculptural border around the side of the support.

This is one of my personal favorite characteristics of the molding paste ground; however, if you find it distracting, it can be removed with an X-acto blade by trimming it perpendicular to the surface.

Step 4: Wet Sanding

In this last step we will take advantage of the molding paste’s ability to be finished with an extremely smooth surface. Wet sanding is great for finishing in general—it prevents clogging in the sandpaper and reduces inhalation hazards by trapping dust in the water—but it works particularly well with this water-based material.

First, using the spray bottle, coat the surface with a thin layer of water. This will reactivate the ground. Starting with your 320 grit sandpaper, wrap it around a sanding block (or other flat object like a 2x4 cutoff) and begin working the surface with circular motions. The water will mix with the sanded molding paste creating a white slurry that helps the sanding block glide along the surface.

All the small particles that would otherwise be dispersed into the air are instead trapped in the slurry and pushed across the surface, filling in the small holes left from the application process. Wait for the surface to dry and then repeat this process with a lower grit sandpaper until you have achieved your desired level of smoothness.

Now the molding paste ground is complete, and you can begin the process of painting.

James Warren (b. 1999) lives and works in New York. He received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2022 and has exhibited in New York, Brooklyn, and Providence, RI. In 2025, he was a participant in the Land Arts of the American West program at Texas Tech University, researching and making in the American Southwest. Working primarily with painting, drawing, and photography, his work is concerned with dialectical landscapes—where natural forces and human intervention intersect. He is interested in the possibility of image-making as something which can not only depict the built environment, but also influence, construct, and become a part of it.

Q: Dear Jerry,

How do I get out of my head, stop reading books, and actually do shit?

Signed,

All Gas, No Go

Dear AGNG,

First off—this is the first time in recorded history someone’s asking how to stop reading books. Usually I’m out here begging people to crack one open that isn’t a take out menu or the back of a motor oil bottle. But listen, if you’re gonna stop reading books, at least give yourself the treat of reading Art Forearm once a week so you don’t get the literary withdrawals.

Here’s what I think: you don’t have a reading problem. You got a parking brake problem. Reading’s a beautiful thing. It keeps the engine running nice and smooth. But if you never drop it into drive, you’re just burning fuel out here. Sure, things sound productive, they probably smell productive, too. But you ain’t going nowhere.

You’re asking me why you’re idling. Because moving means you might stall, man. But let me tell you something…everything stalls. Everything breaks or fails eventually. I’m not being pessimistic, I’m just reading you the warranty.

I’ve seen cars come in looking like the quarter pound patty in an I-95-pile-up-burger. And my guy Alonzo—absolute magician, we call him the Dent & Ding Master—he’ll tap, pull, drop a few f-bombs, step back, try again. But he gets it back to beautiful every time, and you’d never guess it was a salvage title.

You know what Alonzo doesn’t do? Sit there reading manuals all day. My guy gets in and gets his hands dirty. And yeah, sometimes he makes it a lot worse before it gets better. That’s process, that’s practice.

Here’s what nobody likes: practice and failure are a package deal. You don’t get one without the other. Like grinding gears learning to drive a manual transmission. For anyone who remembers those.

Lot a people walking around like failure’s optional. Give it time. Your knees are gonna go just like your neighbor’s catalytic converter did, and you’re gonna be buying the cheaters next to the candy bars like the rest of us. System failure is undefeated.

You can do one of two things, my friend. You can be afraid of failing and bury your nose in a book or you can get interested in it. Only one of those things gets things built right.

You want actionable steps? Good news! It’s not really as mysterious as you’re making it out to be.

Step 1: Put the book down.

Not forever, just for now. You’re not reading for knowledge anymore, you’re reading for permission. And I’ll tell you right now—permission’s a lousy boss. If there’s anything I’ve learned working with codes departments, it’s that you’re always better off doing your own thing and hoping for forgiveness later.

Step 2: Do nothing.

Yeah, you read that right. Sit there. Stare at a wall or a ceiling fan or a sunset or the back bar at a place where no one asks you what you do. Let your thoughts rev a little. Let them get loud enough to bother you. I call this the pause.

You know how many hours I’ve spent staring at an Iron Duke before picking up a wrench? Embarrassing amount. But if you skip that part, you’ll end up taking the engine apart twice. Thinking isn’t in the way of doing, it’s the compressed airline to your impact wrench.

Step 3: Pay attention to the most annoying questions.

You’re not waiting for a good idea, you need to listen for the most persistent one. Don’t worry, it’ll come up once you stop drowning it out with other people’s words.

Step 4: Make something that’s not good.

You don’t drive your car onto jack stands, you have to jack the car first and then get the stands underneath it. So lower the bar on your expectations, and you can jack them up as you go.

There’s a secret ain’t nobody writing books about: you can’t make good shit without making bad shit first. It’s physically, spiritually, and mechanically impossible. So get in there! Make a mess. Strip a bolt. Then start over.

And when you get stuck again—and don’t worry, you will—pick the book back up if you want. Just don’t confuse reading a map with driving on the highway.

Now go do some shit!

–Jerry

Here’s the short version:

Trust yourself enough to learn from your own failures instead of outsourcing the experience.

Do you have a question for Jerry? Ask him for his advice on art materials, fabrication techniques, professional etiquette, lover’s quarrels, vintage cars, applying to grad school, sandwich-making, international travel, or any other areas of life where you could use some advice or good news.

Inspired in part by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Jen de los Reyes writes on forgoing a traditional studio space in order to commit resources to the three zones that hold her practice: community organizing, place-based work, and the kitchen.

It feels appropriate for me to set up my Studio Profile with an exchange between two artists who have had deep and lasting impacts on my work as an artist and educator—Tim Rollins and Felix Gonzalez-Torres:

TR: This is something that I’ve always wanted to ask you: why have you deliberately, obstinately decided for some reason not to have a studio?

FGT: Do you really want to ask me that?

TR: Yeah, because it’s very curious to me. It’s almost like making art on the dining-room table as a hobby. This is an amazing limitation. You don’t have the trappings of a studio: assistants, visitors, and all that. Issues of space and light are gone since your work is so sensitive to place and context. How do you determine the pieces? You say you don’t do drawings but I know you must do drawings, you must have some idea of what the piece is going to look like, so how do you begin?

FGT: I really don’t plan pieces using drawings. First of all, I usually dislike drawings by sculptors, they’re just so academic and expected. I don’t follow that prescribed mode. I do make drawings and photographs but they have their own specific function. They are not sketches of the sculptures, these are drawings that represent a parallel set of ideas. The reason why I don’t have a studio... I think that I’m very neurotic. Actually I guess I am neurotic. So having a studio would paralyze me completely. Just the idea that I would have a place where I had to go to work and make “something” scares the shit out of me. The studio is a scary stage set.

While I don’t see the studio as a “scary stage set,” like Torres I can and in some ways do identify as a kitchen table artist. I have only kept an official designated studio at three points in my career, and always because they have been institutionally provided to me and not something I sought out for myself. When I have received this kind of institutional support, I have often used the studio space in unorthodox ways that provide other forms of support for my practice—space for community meetings, or an extended classroom. One of the reasons I wouldn’t seek out a dedicated studio on my own is that the kind of work I engage in doesn’t necessitate it; it would also be an economic burden to carry, and those financial resources could be better allocated.

Triangulating the zones that make up my “studio” would encompass the following aspects of my practice: organizing and administration, land-based approaches, and the kitchen (not just the table!). I have done, and continue to do, a lot of work that involves communicating with many other artists. Open Engagement, one of the most notable aspects of my practice, entailed communicating with hundreds of artists over the course of years. For a more recent project I am working on with The National Audubon Society, I invited 389 contemporary artists to each interpret a bird on the list of their groundbreaking climate report “Survival by Degrees: 389 Bird Species on the Brink.” All of this means a lot of time sitting and doing admin.

The next zone of my studio is place-based work, most recently LAND. LAND is a site of research, cultivation, care, and conservation that I established with artist Oscar Rene Cornejo. The project combines histories of artists’ engagement with land-based practices and techniques with environmental regeneration and conservation to cultivate sustainable futures. Currently this means spending a lot of time outdoors working on plantings and conservation on site. LAND is also an extension of my classroom.

And now we get to the kitchen. By this I don’t mean that food is an aspect of my practice, though I do love cooking and if I were to make a career change, this would be the path for me. My current studio provided to me through my teaching appointment is equipped mostly with basic kitchen supplies—pots, hot plates, funnels, strainers, coffee filters, all of which I have been using to make inks and dyes from natural materials.

For a recent collaboration with Oscar for the earth dwell/ers school in Los Angeles, I wrote a birding field guide for the Sepulveda Basin Wildlife Reserve, and he made an artwork depicting the bushtit. The painting was created using natural inks and pigments I ethically foraged and processed. Many of same materials that are part of the ecosystems that support these birds also provided the materials to create these inks:

• Green ink was made from buckthorn berries.

• Browns are black walnut ink.

• Black was created from charcoal ash from fallen branches.

• Vibrant pink is from pokeberry.

• Grays are from wild cherry ink.

Jen de los Reyes is an artist, educator, writer, and community arts organizer. With roots in the Riot Grrrl and DIY music scene, her practice incorporates pedagogical, ecological, and organizational methodologies. She founded and directed Open Engagement, an international conference on socially engaged art that was active from 2007–19. She worked within Portland State University from 2008–14 to establish the Art and Social Practice MFA program with a curriculum focused on place, engagement, and dialogue. Following that, Reyes was the Associate Director of the School of Art & Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she taught in the departments of Art and Museum and Exhibition Studies.

Her collaborative work and practice have been situated at institutions including the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Queens Museum, the Oakland Museum of California, MCA Chicago, and the Portland Museum of Art.

She speaks widely and has presented at the Brooklyn Museum, Bronx Museum, UCSB, UMass, NYU, Textile Museum of Canada, Museum of Contemporary Craft, Concordia University, Carnegie Mellon University, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Milwaukee Art Museum, UC Berkeley, Alfred University, The Power Plant, and Project Row Houses amongst many others.

She is the author of several books, most recently Defiantly Optimistic: Turning Up in a World on Fire. She divides her time between Chicago, where she founded Garbage Hill Farm, and Ithaca, NY.

If you have an exhibition, project, publication, or opportunity you’d like us to know about and share with our readers, send submissions for future installments to artforearm@gmail.com with the subject OPEN ARMS.

Exhibitions

In Her Place at the Frist Museum in Nashville, TN—a robust exhibition highlighting the prominent position and community-building of women artists in Music City. Through April 26, 2026.

Land Arts of the American West 2025 at the Museum of Texas Tech in Lubbock, TX—this exhibition culminates a months-long transdisciplinary field program, presenting works by some of the AF current issue’s contributors and featuring a one-of-a-kind Art Forearm wall sculpture to commemorate the birth of this publication. Through April 19, 2026.

Monuments co-organized and co-presented by MOCA and The Brick in Los Angeles, CA—a groundbreaking and celebrated exhibition featuring a selection of decommissioned monuments with contemporary artworks borrowed and newly commissioned. Through May 3, 2026.

Whitney Biennial 2026 at the Whitney in NYC, NY—mixed reviews are pouring in and weary eyes make attempts to focus on the recent opening of the longest-running survey of contemporary art in the United States. 👀 Through August.

Projects

Dissonant Works in St. Louis, MO—a volunteer-run nonprofit arts organization in south city dedicated to cultivating a vibrant, experiential space where artists and musicians stretch the boundaries of creativity and share their work in an intimate setting.

Jarvis Square Pottery in Chicago, IL—a lovely and intimate space on the far north side where positive creative energies of many kinds intermingle and live musicians play on the regular.

Rock n Roll Video Show by the Ex-Bombers—a 90s-style public access video/variety show curated and hosted by a bluesy, psychedelic garage rock duo with cabaret style.

You can find it:

• in Portland, OR on Open Signal

  • Channel 22: Saturday, 03-14-2026 at 8:00 pm

  • Channel 22: Monday, 03-16-2026 at 8:30 pm

  • Channel 23: Friday, 03-20-2026 at 7:30 pm

• in Dartmouth, MA on DCTV Channel 95: Fridays and Saturdays at 5:00 pm

• in Altoona, PA on Channel 14: Fridays at 12:00 pm

• in Charleston, IL on WEIU: 4th Saturday of the month at 9:00 pm

It’s also shown in the following locations at irregular times so check your local access station:

Chicago, IL; Philadelphia, PA; Dayton, OH; San Francisco, CA; Urbana, IL; Springfield, IL; Chapel Hill/Durham, NC; Williamsburg, VA; St. Charles, MO; Bourne, MA; Murfreesboro, TN; New Haven, CT; Ocean Shores, WA; Petaluma, CA; Boothbay Harbor, ME; Kokomo, IN; Easthampton, MA; Mountain View, CA; Oradell, NJ; Ipswich, MA; Springfield, VT; Plymouth, NH; Westwood, MA; Nashua, NH; Norfolk, MA; Brookline, MA; Trempealeau, WI; Concord, MA; Salem, MA; and Fargo, ND.

Publications

Ancestor Bulletin by Jana Harper—a limited-edition publication of Ancestor Bulletin 1-39, a project documenting the artist’s research and creative practice about and with the Mackinac (Island) Band of Chippewa and Ottawa Indians, is available in a black and white limited edition book and a risographed special edition. To inquire about purchasing the book and/or to receive an occasional (free) bulletin in the mail, send your name and address to ancestorbulletin@gmail.com.

Dog Custody by Miles Matis-Uzzo—In the pages of their debut chapbook published by Bottlecap Press, Matis-Uzzo says, “my dog is also a wolf: submissive and unruly, obedient and howling.” Each poem taps into a feral frequency that goes for the jugular, channeling the raw emotional experiences that inhabit intimacy, love, and loss.

The Road Southwest Contemporary’s Spring-Summer Issue drops on March 20. Preorder using the coupon code SWCROAD15 to get 15% off your preorder or become a member to receive all future print issues.

Wednesday, The Second Coming—a lavishly illustrated biennial compendium of hitherto unpublished musings, spirited exchanges, provocative declarations, and carefully vetted accounts pertaining to the current milieu leavened with a modicum of fun for the welcome restoration of cheerful nonconformists and free-thinking aficionados enamored of Dark Culture.

Opportunities

The 2027 Creative Capital Open Call —awards individual artists in the visual arts, performing arts, film, and literature unrestricted project grants of up to $50,000 to create new work. Deadline Thursday, April 2, 2026 at 3PM ET.

Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR)—the first residency in the United States exclusively for artists identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, non-binary, intersex, two-spirit or queer. Deadline 11:59PM on April 1, 2026.

Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art—awards $10,000 to early career artists to produce major works of performance art in New York City. Deadline April 1, 2026.

The Studios at MASS MoCA—awards residencies between 2-4 weeks to visual artists and writers in all disciplines. Deadline May 1, 2026.

Do you have an exhibition, project, publication, or opportunity you’d like us to know about and share with our readers?

Send submissions for future installments to artforearm@gmail.com with the subject OPEN ARMS.

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Skylar Perez explores how color appears in soil, how those colors are classified in soil science, and how different approaches to color classification reflect different values about art, design, material, and place.

Soil is often introduced as the backdrop of human setting—a neutral ground beneath architecture, agriculture, and art. But soil is not neutral. It is one of the most chromatically expressive materials on Earth, carrying within its hues a record of geological formation, biological activity, chemical exchange, and human activity. To encounter soil closely is to encounter color not as surface but as process.

Across landscapes, soil expresses itself in deep reds, muted yellows, ashen grays, blues tinged with logged water, and blacks dense with organic life. Rather than aesthetic happenstance, these colors act as signals. They tell of oxygen and iron, of saturation and drought, of decomposition and genealogic geology. Soil color is the visible trace of invisible human and nonhuman labor, a slow choreography between rock, water, air, microbes, plants, and time.

In this sense, the soil behaves like a fantastically ever-changing microcosm. It is alive without being animated, expressive without intention, and composed without design. Its colors are not applied pigments. They emerge from conditions endured and processes sustained over long durations.

Why Soil Is the Color It Is

The chromatic logic of soil begins underground through pedogenesis, which is the gradual formation of soil from parent material under the influence of climate, organisms, topography, and time. As rock weathers, minerals are released and reorganized, interacting with water, oxygen, organic matter, and living organisms. Color emerges as one of the most immediate expressions of these interactions.

Iron plays a central role. In well-drained environments, iron oxidizes in the presence of oxygen, producing reds and yellows that stain the soil much like rust stains steel. In wetter or poorly drained conditions, where oxygen is limited, iron is reduced rather than oxidized, resulting in grays, greens, and bluish hues. Organic matter darkens soil as plant residues decompose and carbon accumulates near the surface, supporting dense microbial communities. Calcium carbonate and soluble salts lighten soils, producing pale whites and chalky tones common in arid and semi-arid regions.

These chromatic variations can be seen most clearly across soil strata and sections—the vertical layers that develop as soils form. A darkened surface horizon rich in organic matter gives way to underlying mineral layers shaped by leaching, accumulation, and chemical alteration. Reds and browns intensify where iron oxides collect in stable subsoils, while pale or mottled layers reveal fluctuating water tables and seasonal saturation. Soil color becomes a vertical archive, recording the movement of water, minerals, and energy through the ground.

Color in soil is therefore relational. It depends on moisture, temperature, parent material, vegetation, and disturbance. It shifts across depth and time, recording cycles of wet and dry, growth and decay, stability and disruption. Soil color is not fixed. It is contingent, always responding to its environment.

To see soil color is to read a story of place.

Color, Classification, and Soil Taxonomy

In soil science, color is not solely descriptive. It is diagnostic. Alongside texture and structure, soil color plays a central role in how soils are identified, classified, and mapped. Subtle shifts in hue, value, or chroma can indicate drainage conditions, oxidation states, organic matter content, or the presence of specific minerals.

A gray soil matrix interrupted by rust-colored inclusions signals periodic saturation and fluctuating oxygen levels. A uniformly red profile suggests long-term oxidation and stable drainage. Darkened surface layers point to sustained biological activity and carbon accumulation. These chromatic cues inform how soils function, how they store water and nutrients, and how they support plant and microbial life.

Soil taxonomy organizes soils according to how they form and behave rather than how they appear alone. Climate, organisms, texture, parent material, and time shape distinct soil profiles that are grouped into orders, suborders, and series. Color becomes a shorthand for these processes, compressing long environmental histories into legible visual form. Unlike industrial material classification, soil taxonomy accepts ambiguity. Boundaries blur across landscapes. Transitions are gradual. Classification, in this context, is not about eliminating complexity; it is about developing a shared language for describing the life of soil.

Earth Pigments and the Origins of Soil Mediums

Long before color systems were standardized, soil itself served as one of humanity’s earliest pigments. Ochres, umbers, siennas, and clays were gathered directly from the ground, ground into powders, and mixed with binders to create paint. These pigments carried the specificity of place. Their hues varied with geology and organic residues, embedding landscape directly into medium.

Pictographs, murals, and early architectural surfaces were cladded and colored through material locality rather than abstraction. Earth pigments were gathered, processed, and applied within the same landscapes that produced them. Their hues shifted with moisture, light, and age, registering environmental conditions over time. The instability of the material is not a flaw but a condition of its vitality, binding color to place and process rather than fixing it to surface alone. Visual cues of material weathering call for care and repair, allowing vernacular color and matter to remain in dialogue with place.

The rise of synthetic pigments and standardized color systems marked a turning point. Color became increasingly detached from material origin, reproducible across distance, and separated from the geological and ecological processes that once shaped it. What was gained in consistency was often lost in relational understanding, specifically the ability for material and color to communicate place, history, and knowledge of ground.

Disturbed and Contaminated Earth

Not all soil colors emerge from natural processes alone. Industrial disturbance introduces new chromatics into the ground. Heavy metals, petroleum residues, mining tailings, and chemical spills stain soils in radical ways. Iridescent sheens, acidic yellows, metallic blues, and unnaturally dark horizons appear as symptoms of altered chemistry.

In contaminated soils, color often reflects chemical processes that bind to and accumulate pollutants, clays, and organic matter. These anomalies complicate classification, challenging systems developed for relatively stable environments. These colors function as warnings as much as records. Soil becomes both an archive and a witness, recording histories of extraction, neglect, and toxicity.

The Munsell Soil Color System

To communicate soil’s variability with precision, soil scientists rely on the Munsell Soil Color Chart, a system that translates earth’s chromatic complexity into a shared visual language. Developed by artist, theorist, and educator Albert H. Munsell in the early twentieth century, the system organizes color through three perceptual attributes: hue, value, and chroma.

Hue situates soil within a color family, expressed through a combination of numbers and letters that describe its position along a perceptual spectrum. In the notation 10YR, for example, the letters indicate a hue between yellow and red, while the number specifies its exact location along that range. Value describes lightness or darkness, measured on a scale from light to dark, while chroma expresses intensity or saturation. In a designation such as 10YR 4/3, the number before the slash indicates value and the number after indicates chroma. These components allow soil color to be communicated with specificity while still acknowledging variation. A soil isn’t just red or brown. It is described relationally, as a temporal position within a system that reflects both perception and historic ground.

Within soil surveys and classification frameworks, Munsell notation functions as a bridge between observation and categorization. Soil color is assessed directly in the field, often under shifting light, changing moisture, and imperfect conditions. This situates Munsell not as an abstract system but as a tool embedded in embodied practice. It depends on judgment, experience, and calibration between observers.

The brilliance of the Munsell system lies in its acceptance of imperfection. It does not promise absolute consistency. Rather, it offers comparability, recognizing that soil is never constant. It is a system designed for kneeling in dirt, for consideration, and for seeing. Munsell acknowledges soil as a living material rather than a standardized product.

Munsell, Pantone, and the Politics of Color

As of 2007 both the Munsell and Pantone systems are owned by X-Rite, a corporation specializing in color measurement, calibration, and digital color management. This convergence places tools developed from very different epistemologies under a shared technological and commercial infrastructure. Soil color charts and corporate brand palettes now coexist within systems designed to translate color into data, screens, and devices. The contrast between color systems becomes quite philosophical when you get into the dirt of it.

When Pantone emerged from the needs of industrial production, printing, and global branding, its colors were fixed, named, and proprietary. A Pantone color is designed to appear identical regardless of location, material, or environment. Authority here lies in standardization and control. Color becomes a code.

Soil resists this logic. No two soils are identical. Even within a single field, color shifts subtly across meters and depths. Moisture alone can transform appearance, darkening values and muting chroma within minutes. Attempting to Pantone-match soil is absurd. Soil cannot be owned chromatically. It cannot be stabilized without erasing the conditions that produced its color.

Soil resists full capture. Light shifts it. Moisture alters it. Touch transforms it. No scanner can account for the smell of wet earth or the granularity of a rubbed horizon. The Munsell system acknowledges this resistance. Pantone, by design, minimizes it.

Where Pantone names and fixes, Munsell describes and relates. One supports mass production. The other supports ecological literacy. Their coexistence exposes a tension between the possible uses of color: as a method to enforce an idealized world versus a metric used to describe the world as it actually is.

Why Soil Color Matters

To pay attention to soil color is not only an act of care toward the land but also an inquiry into how knowledge itself is structured. The systems used to describe color shape what is seen, what is ignored, and what is valued. In this sense, soil color becomes a site where epistemologies collide.

Munsell’s color system emerged from observation and inquiry. Developed by an artist and chemist rather than a corporation, it was grounded in perception, variability, and relational understanding. Its adoption in soil science reflects this orientation. Color is read situationally, informed by moisture, light, and context. Judgment, disagreement, and calibration are not failures of the system. They are essential to it.

Pantone represents a different value structure. As a proprietary corporate system, it is driven by standardization, reproducibility, and control. Colors are fixed, named, and owned. Difference is minimized. Authority is centralized. This logic works well for industrial production and global branding. It works poorly for living materials.

Soil resists being reduced to a fixed reference. Its color changes with water, touch, and time. It records processes rather than surfaces. In doing so, it exposes the limits of systems designed to enforce sameness. Soil demands forms of knowledge that remain responsive, provisional, and grounded in material reality.

Soil color matters because it reminds us that the ground beneath us is not passive matter but an active archive of life, labor, and disturbance. In choosing systems that describe rather than dominate, that observe rather than extract, we begin to align design and science with the intelligence already present in the earth.

Skylar Perez is a Mexican-American artist, researcher, and designer, whose work explores the intersection of microbiology, living systems, land use, and biodesign. Rooted in the semi-arid landscapes of the Llano Estacado, his practice investigates how soil and microbes can reframe the future of humanity through architecture and ecology, revealing the ground as both an archive and a living participant in shaping the earth. Currently pursuing his Ph.D. at Texas Tech University, Perez teaches and researches within the realms of biodesign, architecture, and plant–soil science. His work advances a vision of design as a regenerative system, where the built environment operates in dialogue with the biological and geological processes that sustain life on Earth. Designing against desertification.

Ground level is where it all starts. The ground is a surface to build on, and ultimately the substance to which all things return. It is both a literal material (soil, gesso, clay, land) and a conceptual one (foundation, orientation, position, truth). The inaugural issue of this magazine is focused on ground because Art Forearm is itself trying to find its footing, and because I’ve been circling this idea—materially and philosophically—for a little while now.

For years I’ve been involuntarily preoccupied with the idea of grounding and its related concepts: land, place, and site. Maybe it began with working at a botanical garden. Then moving cities and trying to find my place in a new community. After that… habit, maybe? Or just the lovely persistence of curiosity? These themes have surfaced again and again in my projects around site-specificity and land art. So last year I decided to lean into the pull and embarked on a months-long investigation of human intervention in the land—I gave myself the space to dig in, so to speak. It was during this time that the idea for Art Forearm arrived, so it seems right to begin now with ground.

In this era of capitalist imperialism, it is impossible—and irresponsible—not to acknowledge the colonial power dynamics embedded in land. Language and writing play a central role in this. Stories are how power claims territory. Narratives establish ownership, belonging, and authority. As Palestinian-American literary critic Edward Said wrote: “Stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world; they also become the method colonized people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history.”

Nation itself, he reminds us, is merely a narration. Writing has been used as a tool of Western domination, but embodiment offers other ways of knowing and remembering that have often been suppressed. The body and the voice can be methods of inscription. Knowledge can be written through movement, rhythm, and ritual as well as through text. It is important to pay attention to who(se body) is speaking. And so this magazine will ask: Where are we writing from? And whose bodies are speaking when we do?

These questions prompt me to think about the evolution of social media—from written language to orality, from pithy status updates on Facebook to daily vlogs on TikTok—and what that shift might signify in a larger cultural sense. So many of us in the US lament that it seems like no one reads anymore. I wonder: if we were to frame this with less cynicism, could we sense a collective desire to break free from the constraints of written language? And if we’re reading less, could it mean we are becoming better listeners?

At Art Forearm, we care deeply about writing, but not only from people who identify as “writers.” You’ll see visual artists, musicians, fabricators, and cultural workers engaging language in ways that alternate between deeply poetic and very matter-of-fact. We want to make space for people to explore their relationship to words in the same way they explore their relationship to other materials. Which is to say: honestly, experimentally, and—this is important—sometimes imperfectly.

This first issue will roll out over the coming months, with posts delivered weekly. Posts will range from practical advice to conceptual reflection, each from a different contributor. You’ll find an essay that considers alien abduction from the edge of Michael Heizer’s Double Negative; a studio profile of a land-based, pedagogical practice; a technical tutorial on how to lay down ground for a uniquely smooth painting surface; and so much more.

Every post is free to read, and if you subscribe, they will arrive directly in your inbox. If you choose to become a paid subscriber, you’ll be helping us work toward paying contributors fairly based on standards established by Working Artists for the Greater Economy.

In a moment when public space feels increasingly unmoored in groundlessness, I’m interested in creating space that is grounded in collective effort. This issue is for and by people who spend their lives making things while reckoning with the contradictions of being human within staggeringly inhumane systems.

I’m glad you’re here with us.

Jennifer Seas
Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Art Forearm

02.28.2026 | Letter from the Editor by Jennifer Seas

03.05.2026 | The Chromatics of Ground: Soil Color and the Earth Archive by Skylar Perez

03.12.2026 | Open Arms

03.19.2026 | Studio Profile by Jen de los Reyes

03.26.2026 | Dear Jerry

04.02.2026 | Molding Paste Painting Ground by James Warren

04.09.2026 | Money Talk with Chris Taylor

04.16.2026 | Legal Grounds: Serving as an Observer in the San Francisco Immigration Court by Michelle Wilson

04.23.2026 | Open Arms

04.30.2026 | Dear Jerry

05.07.2026 | Tether by Anika Todd

05.14.2026 | Practice Notes by Jen de los Reyes

05.21.2026 | Dear Jerry

05.28.2026 | Announcement!

06.04.2026 | Technique Case Study by Maria Patricia Tinajero

06.11.2026| Open Arms

06.18.2026 | Dear Jerry

06.25.2026 | Materials Watch by Nicole Rene Woodard

07.02.2026 | Global Lens by Jennifer Seas

07.09.2026 | Materials Watch by Process / Process

07.16.2026 | Critical Essay by Miles Matis-Uzzo

07.23.2026 | Dear Jerry

07.30.2026 | Next Issue Preview

Each issue (2x/year) investigates the material, ecological, and social infrastructures that shape art-making today, foregrounding accessibility and sustainability.

Volume I: Issue 1: Ground will be released here beginning in Spring 2026.

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