For over 150 years, photography has played a powerful role in shaping how Indigenous peoples of the Americas are seen and too often misunderstood. Images made about Indigenous communities rather than by them have circulated widely in museums, textbooks and popular culture, reinforcing narratives of disappearance, distance or anthropological extraction. “In Light and Shadow,” the ambitious new book by photographers Brian Adams and Sarah Stacke, directly challenges that legacy, not by rejecting photography’s past but by radically re-centering who controls the archive, who tells the story and who the work is for.

Adams, an Iñupiaq photographer based in Anchorage, and Stacke, a Brooklyn-based photographer, writer and archival researcher, approach photography less as image-making than as long-term relationship-building and storytelling. Their collaboration grew out of “The 400 Years Project,” an expansive initiative marking the anniversary of the Mayflower by foregrounding Indigenous photographers across generations, geographies and the full range of photographic practice — from 19th-century studio portraits to contemporary conceptual work.

In this interview, Adams and Stacke discuss the ethical and logistical choices behind “In Light and Shadow,” the politics of archives and representation and what it means to be storytellers accountable to the people whose lives and histories they photograph.

https://brianadams.photoshelter.com/index

https://sarahstacke.com/

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For more than a decade, conceptual artists Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida have collaborated on sharp, often darkly funny critiques of the art world’s economic and political machinery. One of their earliest projects together, a satirical telethon staged during the Great Recession, planted a seed they later returned to: What would happen if you ran an art fair where every work of art was free? That question eventually evolved into Zero Art Fair, a real, fully functioning event that uses a radically different contract to redistribute both artworks and power within the art market.

Zero Art Fair invites participating artists to place selected works into a five-year “store-to-own” agreement with collectors who take the work home at no cost. During those five years, ownership vests gradually; if a collector later decides to sell the work, the artist receives half of the sale price as well as a 10 percent resale royalty. The result is a system that clears storage, builds new relationships across class lines, and asserts one of the Fair’s core beliefs, namely that price does not equal value. So far, Dalton and Powhida have staged two editions — the first in a barn in the Hudson Valley as part of Upstate Art Weekend, the second this fall at the FLAG Art Foundation in Manhattan — together seeding more than 400 works of contemporary art into new homes.

In this interview, Dalton and Powhida explain how the Fair’s unconventional contract works, why prioritizing access for people who “need help to live with art” reshaped their second New York edition, and what kinds of unexpected relationships and ripple effects have emerged along the way.

https://www.zeroartfair.com/

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For more than two decades, Ariel Fristoe has been at the center of one of the country’s most inventive experiments in how theater can live inside a community. As the artistic director of Atlanta’s Out of Hand Theater, she has shaped an organization known not for occupying traditional stages but for embedding performance inside civic life, partnering with schools, nonprofits, public agencies and neighborhood groups to spark dialogue and move people toward collective action.

Out of Hand’s work is now studied and replicated across the country, in part because it offers an alternative path at a moment when many arts organizations are searching for new models. Instead of focusing on season planning or ticket sales, Ariel and her team design programs that integrate theater with data, storytelling with civic participation and performance with tangible next steps for audiences who want to make change in their communities.

In this interview, Ariel reflects on how this approach emerged, how her own leadership evolved alongside it, and why she believes artists are uniquely equipped to work on the most urgent social issues of our time. She also gives a glimpse into Out of Hand’s next chapter — including a major 2026 national initiative — and shares what she’s learned about building trust, building partnerships and sustaining purpose-driven work over the long haul.

https://www.outofhandtheater.com/

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