A few photographs from the marvellous @alice_a2studio to go with @bigmikeg151 ‘s homage to her and her contributions to hip hop. Gonzales understands how Alice Arnold’s photographs show New York’s life as social texture and not as an urban spectacle.
Gonzales’ amazing piece is available now in print and online at Asterixjournal.com
Michael A. Gonzales traces the stories of the people, the music, the culture and the lives in New York as witnessed in Alice Arnold’s photographs in this piece- his homage to Alice and her contributions to hip hop.
How do we process emotions, feelings and intensities that exist outside the realm of nomenclature we assign for them? Kristina Kay Robinson maps out that road for those of us who want to see beyond who we are and what we think we are capable of holding!
“This Woman’s Work: A Listening Session” is a zine sitting at the top of Critical Minded’s Mother’s Day reading list.
The anthology excavates the hidden labor of the women of hip hop and reggaeton with in-depth interviews, reporting, music and cultural criticism, poetry, and personal essays. Each written piece traces the impact of these sonic legacies and how they were sustained by collective cultural work involving a network of journalists, photographers, publicists, songwriters, stylists, dancers and more.
In conversation with her co-editor for the zine, Carina del Valle Schorske, Danielle Amir Jackson illuminates the feeling at the center of woman’s work, and at the core of the independent publication:
“This project is about kitchen table conversations between aunties and sister friends; talking-tos about no-account men and the ones worth loving; secret codes and information passed between those in the know; intimacy inside the circle where rituals are set to music.”
Critical Minded is proud to support the writers and editors who brought “This Woman’s Work: A Listening Session” to life over the last several years. Get yours in print at the #linkinbio, or read it in full online at @asterixjournal ⭐️
#criticalminded #mothersday #criticism #zinemakers
In this piece, Jessica Lynne moves through Missy Elliots samples, collaborations, early records to trace a practise that is as much about making space for others and letting their voice shine as it is about finding, refining and staging her own. Lynne’s piece understands Missy Elliot as the quiet infrastructure beneath the sound of contemporary music.
In Carina del Valle Schorske’s intimate conversation with Sheila Maldonado, she reflects on “the ways she knows” to stay with the craft: “ All over this country for sure. I meet people who feel displaced and not right with how things are, for whom doubt is belief, who make their own particular ways. Those are the ways I know,” she says. Read the full interview on Aster(ix)’s latest issue. Available now in print and online at Aster(ix)journal.com.
In his poem, “GIRLHOOD, OR, SO WHAT IF DIAMOND IS A STRIPPER NAME,” Joseph Earl Thomas explores the duality of seeing and being seen. He tugs gently at the multi-coloured thread that is memory, identity and history.
“Showtime’s Here” insists that dance history is lived, practiced, and taught in real time.
Shamira’s piece makes visible the women and their labour that translated the culture into a medium accessible to the public and open to mainstream attention.
“Self Portrait as Aretha’s Gold Purse”, understands glamour as labour and strategy.
This beautiful poem does not play modest or request for permission to be seen. It enters already assured.
This issue is not organized around star power or mastery, but around relation. Edited by Carina del
Valle Schorske and Danielle Amir Jackson, This Woman’s Work brings together writing that
understands music as something made collectively, and often unevenly across lines of gender, race,
class, and labor.
@alice_a2studio ‘s visual work extends this inquiry, offering photographs that function as archive rather
than ornament: evidence of presence, intimacy, and persistence.
This Woman’s Work: A Listening Session, is an issue shaped by attention rather than spectacle. It
resists the urge to summarize, celebrate, or resolve. Instead, it listens closely to the women whose
labor has sustained sound, scene, and culture while remaining structurally backgrounded.
Across criticism, poetry, interviews, and archival material, this issue traces music as a collective
practice: something learned at kitchen tables, on dance floors, in churches, studios, magazines, and
friendships. It asks what becomes visible when we take women’s work seriously not as supplement
or support, but as method.
Alice Arnold’s cover art and photographs are not illustrative but archival. They hold memory,
lineage, and labor in view, echoing the issue’s central concern: how women’s work circulates
through images, sound, and history even when it is not foregrounded as authorship.
This issue listens for what has always been there.
Out now.
