In each publication, Critical Conversations invites two commissioning editors to connect writers and artists into dialogue, catalyzing conversations that unfold contemporary art practices. For our inaugural all-digital publication, we invited Oregon-based editor, Amelia Rina and an at-large editor, Lumi Tan, based in New York to take up this role. Working independently, they sought to understand the currents shaping artmaking in Oregon, where artists are dispersed across both densely populated areas and rural geographies. Cultural workers across these communities are navigating inequalities endemic to a high cost of living marked by unequal access to housing, healthcare and economic opportunity while also contending with environmental pressures and persistent structural inequities. Despite this, Oregon continues to proliferate localized ecologies of creative independence and socially oriented practices that spill beyond institutions and market, articulating forms of collectivity within networks of creation and dissemination.

The editors individually chose the themes of Revolution and Transmission to consider how artists are living through this period of overlapping crises, and perhaps what it means to be in time and yet out of time and at a distance to the impact of emergencies unfolding across the world. Here as well as elsewhere, artists and their surrounding communities play a vital role in translating complex political, social, emotional, and ecological realities into forms we can recognize and feel. Their practices articulate distinct systems of embodied knowledge that center and locate us within the material reality of our bodies, even as we face abstractions that distance us from shared facts and unequal access to basic rights and necessities.

This collection of texts was generated in Fall 2025, at a moment when the United States appeared, at least on the surface, less directly entangled in global warfare and somewhat insulated from the immediate physical and ecological devastation wrought by the U.S. military-industrial complex. Yet the present moment — or rather, the forces that bear us forward, sometimes against our will, like lightning transmuting sand into glass — makes the urgency of revolution and transmission only more apparent. These are modes of rupture, and rupture, as these texts insist, is not merely destructive: it is the condition of possibility for new forms of collectivity, for futures seeded through the shared labor of imagining otherwise.

Critical Conversations Editorial Board

Meagan Atiyeh
Tannaz Farsi
Shawna Lipton
Ralph Pugay