Artist Care with Hima Batavia

In this third episode, I take a walk with Samar Hejazi, whose embroidery and textile practice is a process of making and unmaking, weaving, and unweaving as she puts together and pulls apart traditional threads as an exploration of change and transformation, and everything from her identity as a Palestinian-Canadian artist to her mentality and worldview.Samar is both clear and inquisitive in how they make sense of and navigate their relationships to land, friendship, universal guidance, and artistic practice and leads us to understand how to draw boundaries, hold space, and create rituals to protect that which matters to us. Here is the episode for the seventh issue, Conversations with the Past, available to read at https://newest.co/

In this second episode of Artist Care, host Hima Batavia takes a walk with Queen Kukoyi, whose Afrofuturist practice weaves threads and mediums together to connect the ancestral, spiritual, scientific and psychological into new frames of being and seeing. Ritual is foundational to their work, bringing in the Earth as a collaborator in the creative process. They are refreshingly honest about their lived experiences, balancing the humor with the real, leading us to understand how they must care for themselves to create what they create. This interview is part of our sixth issue, Imaginarium, available to read at https://newest.co/