The third issue of SKEW, an art and dialogue magazine by Los Angeles-based artist collective LevelGround will be released on November 7, 2021.
This year’s magazine features the curatorial theme Black Abundance and features artists across the Black Diaspora.
The front and back covers of SKEW 03//Black Abundance features striking photographs captured by South African photographer Jesse Navarre Vos and creatively directed by Nigerian artist Bubu Ogisi.
This piece examines lost historical stories and applies them to garments, environments, and fibres as a form of silent protest to post and neo-colonialism. This work focuses on decolonizing the mind thoroughly by questioning and engaging a variety of thoughts in relation to classism, religion, gender, traditions, symbols and scripts, tribes and magic as well as questioning inferiority in blackness.
Bubu Ogisi is the creator of IAMISIGO, contemporary wearable art and home textiles brand based between Lagos, Nairobi, and Accra, and co-founder of the art collective hFACTOR.
Their work primarily focuses on how fashion and textile can keep history alive and build a better future by preserving techniques and expression. In her artistic practices, Bubu emphasizes the importance of collaboration: “It is important to continuously and consistently work with local artisans within and around Africa by merging different ideas from different but yet very similar cultures to expose the world to the unlining artisanal secrets in Africa.”
Through collaboration across different cultures, creatives create awareness around Africa’s significant and unique contributions to the global fabric of culture and art.
What is unique about SKEW 03//Black Abundance is that all revenue derived from magazine sales is shared equally among the contributing artists and the editorial team in an effort to create a sustainable creative ecosystem for Black artists to be supported in their creative practices.
This is an exciting example of a way that the creative economy can sustain itself. For Bubu, creativity is the path of liberation: “I guess the only way a free world would ever exist is from an immensely creative community, a community that isn’t for competition but for co-existential unison through creativity.”
Editor-in-Chief Nneka Jackson describes the issue as “a celebration of the expansiveness of Black life: the
emotionality, the textures, the pleasure and all of the stickiness, all of the colors in between. We continue to live
abundantly, accessing happiness and healing in and around dire circumstances. This year’s SKEW celebrates all of
the ways we continue to learn how to access the multitudes within ourselves and step into an intentional life that’s true and liberated.”
This year’s issue also features an accompanying digital hub with additional multimedia artworks from Black artists as well as a Syllabus with curated media including podcasts, books, and film to complement and deepen the SKEW 03//Black Abundance world.
