“What greater sorrow than being forced to leave behind my native earth?” -Euripides

We live in a world full of displacement. As you sit and read these words, 70 million people are forcibly driven from their homes only to establish ghost lives in another place, a makeshift community, a shadow of their former existence. Each day we wake and feel the security of our place in the world is a day when others wake and know nothing more clearly than that they are far from home unlikely to ever return. This lack of permanence speaks to the wider human condition, the buried knowledge that everything we have, we know, we are can and will one day be lost.

Patrick Dougher lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. At present, he is actively working in his studio. His current project uses collage and paint and he has a solo exhibition coming up in the approaching weeks. Much of the work for this show he hasn’t seen in some time which he says feels like reuniting with old friends. The exhibition, titled God Body, will be on view at Contemporary African Diasporan Arts in Brooklyn. To hear more about this and about Dougher’s other work, listen to the complete interview.

Jamie Martinez is at work on a series based on the poetry and glyphs of Mayans. Titled I am One With the Jaguar, Martinez’s work plays with Mayan glyphs to create paintings and clay pieces. The pieces are based on stories from the Mayan culture and focus largely on transitions, like crossing over from one world into another. To hear more about this work and the stories that inspire it, listen to the complete interview.