All Is Not Lost

“In this hour, I do not believe that any darkness will endure.”

-JRR Tolkien, The Return of the King

It is all too easy to get caught up in the moment and believe that this is all there is. The world may feel particularly heavy right now, and truly we are living through a time of great strife on many fronts, but what we must always, always carry with us is the knowledge of what has come before. Even in the darkest moments of civilization there has been hope. The sure knowledge that better days lie ahead if we are willing to work for them. The belief that humanity, at its core, is a force for good and that it is us who get to choose the path forward.

Erik Beehn spoke to us in 2020. At the time he was working both on his personal art practice and his print publishing business called Test Site Projects, both of which he runs out of his studio in Las Vegas. Although the pandemic was in full swing when we spoke, he was at work printing projects for an artist’s exhibition as well as working his own new paintings. To learn more about his work at the time, and for links to what he’s up to now, listen to the complete interview.

Kristine Stiles joined the conversation in 2021 from Durham, North Carolina. A Distinguished Professor of Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University, she was at the time navigating online teaching after Duke became one of the first institutions to move to remote learning as the pandemic took hold. For more, listen to the complete interview.