Tabitha Soren talks about Truth-out.org/Ferguson, part of a project entitled Surface Tension—as she describes it, “a wordless evocation of the way care fights distance in our everyday lives.” With an 8x10 camera, Soren shoots photographs of fingerprints on technological devices, placing in sharp focus what we normally try to look past on our screens.

In 1999 Soren left a career in television reporting to start another as an artist. Her work explores the surface of photographs to get at what is going on underneath. Her books include Surface Tension, Fantasy Life, and Trace.

Lava Thomas discusses Ms. Jimmie L. Lowe, a life-size drawing based on a police photograph that is one of a dozen in the artist’s series of portraits honoring Black women who played a leadership role in the 1955–56 Montgomery Bus Boycott and were indicted under Alabama’s anti-boycott laws.

Thomas’s multimedia practice interrogates issues around race, gender, representation, and memorialization, with an emphasis on portraiture that visualizes Black women’s empowerment and activism.