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By Anya Shukla Taylor Wang’s Instagram, @yingshiart, features finely-detailed oil paintings, hyper-realistic digital art, and celebrity-related fanart as I’ve never seen it before. I spent a minute staring at a portrait of Billie Eilish—side-eying the viewer like she couldn’t care less—which manages to capture the pop star’s world-wearying languor. Wang’s best work—and this is oddly specific—gives me the sense that I’m lying on a small town road at two in the morning a la The Notebook. There’s a sense of peaceful isolation about each painting, regardless of whether there are one or multiple subjects in the frame.
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By Anya Shukla Historically, glassblowing has been dominated by European artists. Dan Friday, a member of the Lummi Nation, is working to change that dynamic. Seattle born, Friday went to the local, arts-focused Northwest School. However, according to Friday, “it didn’t really seem pragmatic as a career, to continue in artwork.” After graduating, he decided to go into the automotive industry. Two years later, at twenty, he walked into a glassblowing studio for the first time and saw a potential career path. An art form where an artist uses a blowpipe to inflate molten glass, glassblowing requires a fairly unique skill set. Glassblowers must utilize a mix of industrial and artistic knowledge. Nevertheless, Friday’s background gave him the ability to succeed in the discipline. Friday uses his childhood drawing experience and mechanical knowledge from auto work to create his pieces. But the learning curve has been steep: “Glassmaking is a lot like being a musician,” Friday noted. “Anyone can get up there and sing, but when you’re performing at such a high level, it can take two or three or five years to start to feel like you’re producing something you’re happy with.”
By Anya Shukla Leilani Lewis, a Seattle native, was first exposed to visual arts when her mom was offered a job at the Detroit Institute of Art. “I would go run around the museum, terrorizing the security guards,” she reminisces. Growing up in the ‘90s, Lewis noticed art--particularly hip-hop inspired murals and street art--all around her. But as she grew older, she began listening to lectures by visiting artists, shifting from a passive consumption of art to active participation. Simultaneously, her newfound artistic knowledge, particularly around black history in the arts, began to shape her worldview: “I learned about history; I learned about black history in art. I learned my most critical, foundational identity and historical identity through the arts.” Lewis’s mother is white, and she didn’t have much connection to the black side of her family, so the arts shaped her understanding of her heritage.
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