Cover Art Concept

T his, Alma Sinai says of her workWitness, chosen for this issue’s cover, “is the first painting I did as an undergraduate student in 2010, while I was studying fine arts at RISD [Rhode Island School of Design]. A lot has changed since then, but also many things have stayed the same.” I correspondedwith Sinai in the last days of September 2022, during the early days of themass protests that shook Iran in the fall—revolts that,most likely,will be remembered as a feminist revolution. These are, suddenly and again, moving and thrilling times for everyonewho cares aboutwomen’s and human rights, timesfilled with hope, admiration, and fear. That is certainly so for an artist like Sinai,who was born and raised in Iran and studied at Tehran University of Art and then moved to the United States in 2010, and these feelings echoed in our email exchange. “The initial drawings of this painting weremade around the time of the greenmovement in 2009, and now that I’m revisiting it, another big movement is happening with women at its center. I wouldn’t directly link all of these together, but I do think that in some way it corresponds to the overall climate of this momentum.” Sinai thinks of herself as an interdisciplinary artist using printmaking, drawings, videos, and installations as her primary media: “The ideas in my works stem from an interpersonal realm, but they speak out to different individuals and communities that undergo abrupt and suspended situations in various scenarios.” The notions of repetition, entanglement, and being trapped in a certain situation while findingwaystodealwith, resolve, andtransformitare leitmotifs inherwork. InWitness we see a series of entangled headless and limbless female figures building a unified entity,which generates new coping, grappling, and determiningmechanisms.Women are always at the center of Sinai’s work, because she feels that she has a better understanding of women than of men, and a more intimate relation to their psychology.