Hello everyone! Small update to the Reckoning staff roster here: we now have an art director (me 
). I did minor in Visual Art way back when, and led PR for a bunch of student clubs before kicking off my current career because the team needed an artsier person, so I’m excited to dip back into this side of the house for Reckoning.
As part of our move to codify this position, and as we update our publication to center environmental justice without a secondary per-issue theme, we’ve also updated our art guidelines a bit. Fundamentally, we are a publication of environmental justice and, with our updated definition, want to see that reflected in our published art. To this end, we’re now asking prospective artists to submit an artist statement along with your work in our Moksha submissions portal, looking specifically for how you connect your work to environmental justice, whether it’s there on the page or behind the scenes as part of your process. We’ll also look at works that benefit from more explanation alongside the piece, although abstract will continue to be a harder sell.
Aside from aesthetic appeal, the two things I’m really hoping to see in our art submissions are a sense of narrative and strong technique, with an eye to how you use the medium and composition to successfully deliver said narrative. To be clear, this isn’t a call to only submit things that depict a clear sequence of events or a requirement to always explain your work, it’s a call to submit work that draws the viewer into thinking more about what they are looking at, how those elements got there and where they might go next.
For instance, one of our latest featured artworks, Camouflage, features a dodo bird on a rock, ship in the distance. The artist’s statement encourages us to apply our own interpretation, encouraged by the well-known story of the dodo’s extinction as an effect of colonialism—both in the physical act of the arriving sailors, and the attitude that resources exist to be exploited regardless of need or local contribution to the ecosystem.
Contrast that with this image. While it’s 4 chinstrap penguins around an old whaling post—relic from an era of mass overexploitation—and therefore has a connection to environmentalism, there’s no expression of environmental justice specifically.
But, as always, when in doubt, err on the side of submitting to us 
