This March/April issue of ART PAPERS celebrates and interrogates island living. It looks across the Gulf of Mexico and over Florida to our neighbors in the Caribbean, where waves made by mass processional city traditions such as Carnival crash upon the region’s ostensible northernmost city--New Orleans--and create a cultural resonance so strong that it connects the American South to a global one. This issue’s contributors consider the physical migration of bodies through geopolitical space (those of the displaced, of the diaspora, and those of separatists), and the digital migration of artifacts through cyberspace, where piracy thrives, at times for the cultural good. Permeating a number of these features is a tension between escapism and a longing for connectivity--one evident, perhaps, in the nomadicism that seems to inhere to art world production and participation today. TABLE OF CONTENTS: The Plastic GyrePam LongobardiWhat is the material marker of the Anthropocene? Artists, scientists, and activists respond; QR codes elaborate. Interview: The Political Aesthetics of CarnivalEric BookhardtCurator Claire Tancons talks with D. Eric Bookhardt in New Orleans, the "northernmost city of the Caribbean." The New World, Application for Turtle IslandJosef StrauAn illustrated, narrative petition for immigrant status replaces formal paperwork in a commission adapted from a solo exhibition at Chicago's Renaissance Society, the artist's first at a US museum. On Informality and NomadismTimothy P.A. CooperTorrent sites and pirated media form the black market archives preserving visual culture in postcolonial Pakistan. Desire is Irrelevant, or Is It?Omar KholeifFrom its curator, a reflexive overture to the Cyprus Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale. Life AltarsIyawó (Kristin Naca)Ekphrastic poetry emerges from a journey via Latino art to Cuba, where the author is initiated into the religion Santería. Hayley Silverman's SOUP: A Play in Two Acts Pablo LariosSongs excerpted from Aimé Césaire's A Tempest accompany a poetic essay accompanying recent works exhibited in artist Hayley Silverman's Unmanned Lander. No Fair Is an IslandBade Stageberg CoxStudies and schematics from the architecture firm behind the Armory Show's evolving occupation of Piers 92 and 94 in Manhattan. New Spaces of Queer SeparatismRisa PuleoRadical communities update—and revindicate—off-the-grid feminist movements of the 1970s. Escape from BerlinCaia HagelNew travel magazines suggest that print is the muse-medium for the post-digital flaneur. Glossary: #TMAIShumon BasarSometimes futurist discourse is just #TMI. Reviews Days of Endless Time Washington, DCErin C. Devine Creating Matter: The Prints of Mildred Thompsonat the Michael C. Carlos Museum, AtlantaDan Weiskopf Greer Lankton: LOVE MEat Participant, Inc., New York Emily Colucci Shahzia Sikander: Parallaxat Linda Pace Foundation, San Antonio, TXRachel Adams Not Ready to Make Nice:The Guerrilla Girls in the Artworld and Beyondat the Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA Lilly Lampe Forecastat Anderson Gallery, Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, Richmond, VA Dinah Ryan Taipei Biennial 2014: The Great Accelerationat the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan Marcus Civin Repurposing the Wunderkammerat the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, Gainesville, FL Galen Olmsted Satin Island + Empire's CrossroadsBook ReviewJerry Cullum
