Eva Lou is a Taiwanese-born, American-educated writer who has called Hawaii, New York, Seoul, and Paris home. She has a BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University and an MFA in Writing from Columbia University. Lou’s short stories and poems have been anthologized in America and France. Her first collection of short stories, Rapture/d’extases, was published by Editions Lanore in France in a bilingual edition. Her novel-in-progress, QUIETUDE, is a finalist for the James Jones First Novel Award. She is the founder of Madeleine Editions, an international independent publishing house for children.

The first-ever Columbia Journal Fall Contest is now open for submissions in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and, for the first time, art. Our judges will be Akil Kumarasamy(fiction), Monica Sok (poetry), Emily Bernard (nonfiction), and Helena Anrather (art). The four winners of the Fall Contest will be published online on columbiajournal.org and will receive a cash prize of $250 each. At least three finalists will be selected and announced in each of the four genres in the fall. Submissions open today on Submittable, and the deadline to submit is August 9th. There is a $10 entry fee for each submission. More guidelines can be found here. You can read about our judges below.

Julian Rosefeldt’s thirteen-part film installation, Manifesto, is situated at the approximate midpoint of the Hirshhorn’s Manifesto: Art x Agency exhibition which comprises the entire outer ring of the museum’s second floor, serving to bridge early twentieth-century manifesto-catalyzed art—futurism, surrealism, constructivism, and lyrical abstraction—with political art that speaks more specifically to contemporary concerns. It thus acts as a synecdoche of the attempt by the exhibition—and by manifestos in general—to taxonomize the breadth of history and the diversity of individual expression. The ways in which the installation subverts these tendencies make the two-hour journey one of the most compelling artistic confrontations in my recent experience, both on intellectual and sensory levels.

The Columbia Journal Online Editors are delighted to officially announce that the Columbia Journal Fall Contest is now open for submissions in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and, for the first time, art. Our judges will be Akil Kumarasamy (fiction), Monica Sok (poetry), Emily Bernard (nonfiction), and Helena Anrather (art). The four winners of the Fall Contest will be published online on columbiajournal.org and will receive a cash prize of $250 each. At least three finalists will be selected and announced in each of the four genres in the fall. Submissions open today on Submittable, and the deadline to submit is August 9th. There is a $10 entry fee for each submission. You can read the full contest guidelines below.

Hello and welcome to the new (and possibly improved?) Blurbed. Each month, columns editor Adin Dobkin gives recommendations from his reading list, as well as listening to Columbia Journal editors’ thoughts on reading, writing, or whatever happens to be on their minds.

“Here’s proof that the algorithm is, in fact, fallible,” begins one panel of Melanie Kruvelis’s New York City grief pamphlet, part travel brochure, part how-to guide for the bereaved: “Spotify compiles no playlists for mourning complicated father-daughter relationships. Maybe grief is just too messy for recommendations curated by capitalism. Besides, what would they call that playlist?…‘Estrangement + Chill’?”

tarah douglas describes her work as “conceptually motivated,” which is a way of saying she’s not tied to one medium. Though other projects like studies of jahyne and pillowsforsadboiysz have married photography and textiles, her most recent work, called daysmissingu, is a series of watercolors created over the duration of a period of grief. Often so watery that the pigments bleed together, these paintings are very intentional indices of an ongoing emotional experience, a way, douglas says, to represent her “internal-emotional landscape.” On a recent Saturday morning, we spoke on the phone about her work and about making space: safe spaces, space for grief, and space for responding to the world.

There are many Frida Kahlos inside the Brooklyn Museum’s Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving. There is a diminutive Asian girl with a crown of braids, dressed in a long red skirt and embroidered blouse. There is a tall blond man with fine penciled unibrow, a headband with enormous flowers, red kitten heels. Kahlo stretches across T-shirts of little girls on tiptoes, across bags, phone cases, the red painted lips of gallery-goers and the flowers in their hair.

A lot has changed for Louis Fratino in the past year, and his autobiographical paintings are a case in point. In Come Softly to Me, the twenty-five-year-old artist’s second solo show in New York and first at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., Fratino’s work has absorbed the City, where he settled after a Fulbright Research Fellowship in Berlin. In “Me,” we see the Chrysler building reflected in his pupils; in “The Williamsburg Bridge,” we see him walking alone along the waterfront, the horizon on fire. Cocteau- and Matisse-inspired male odalisques lounge nude beside open windows, and same-sex couples embrace on dance floors, club-lit as if inside an ultramarine and cadmium-red kaleidoscope.

On the night of January 17th, the Brooklyn Museum coupled a tour of Do Ho Suh’s installation The Perfect Home II with a literary salon on Go Home!, a collection of works by Asian American writers on the impossibility of “going home.” Suh’s translucent fabric apartment, hand-stitched with chalk pink manatee blue, and faint jade nylon, glowed beneath the dome ceiling of the museum. The installation is a hauntingly precise 1:1 replica of his former home on 348 West 22nd St. Suh, one of South Korea’s most famous contemporary artists, is internationally renowned for these immersive, life-size installations of fabric houses. One: Do Ho Suh is his second major exhibition in the East Coast, following Almost Home at the Smithsonian American Art Museum last summer.

The world is rapt with chaos. Ascendant reactionary movements across the globe, largely motivated by overt racism and xenophobia, have disrupted the convenient narrative of uninterrupted social progress, melding the frustrations of a weakening, shrinking, and resentful middle class into anger and fear.

It begins in the dark: a phone vibrates, and a woman lying in bed answers it. “Pronto,” she says. “Mama’s missing,” the voice of a man on the other end says in Neapolitan dialect.

On Monday, October 22, I spoke with artists Katie Giritlian and Esteban Jefferson about their collaboration and here,. The work will be released as the second issue of prompt:, a new publication from Mira Dayal and Nicole Kaack that asks two artists who have never worked together to produce a publication presented as a draft for further research. and here, takes the form of an email thread between Giritlian and Jefferson dating from July 2 to August 23, 2018. It launches today, Friday, October 26, at the CUE Art Foundation in Manhattan.

Friends and Strangers, Katherine Bradford’s current show at Canada, opens with a large yellow diptych depicting a group of six male-coded figures facing the viewer. The painting hangs alone in the gallery’s entryway and at first the standing men strike me as menacing — their postures signal an approach, as if they’re in formation — but the painting’s title, “Waiting Room,” suggests that these figures aren’t necessarily in league. Maybe, instead, they’re some of the “strangers” that the exhibition’s title refers to, aligned here in their shared non-task of waiting but otherwise standing as solitary subjects.

Because of my interest in the movie, I went to photography where passion and love brought a different picture of life for me. Cinema is motion pictures and is continuous. Photography is also a unique collection of discrete elements.

What do we do for our own sake? Binge watch all of Westworld in a single weekend, eat an entire box of mac and cheese in one sitting, major in nonfiction? Few of us can say that we are truly productive in these actions. Sure Netflix may be comforting and relaxing, but how good is it for us actually?

Solace is so desperately sought out by youth, but finding tranquility often poses as a challenge. I find the bathroom to be an unusual but common place to collect yourself.

Originally I was strongly inspired by Luca Maria Piccolo’s series of ‘M.U.D Centro Danza’s’ series and then half way through the photo shoot I unintentionally took it into a different direction. There were many poly boards set up as props. Ideally Sarah (dancer) and I were working with how her body movements would compliment the shapes we could make with the boards without being restrictive on her freedom to dance.

A collection of mixed media prints utilizing beadwork and collage, this interweaving of Gray’s Anatomy by Dr. Henry Gray and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen is a new narrative. Pride and Prejudice is the tale of the cultivation and beginning of romance awash in hope and ending on a note of future promise. Gray’s Anatomy focuses not on this emotional establishment of ties but instead scientific facts and it unveils the mystery behind the creation of the human body and its functions. Through the editing of these texts by means of removal, blocking, and highlighting of words this new work delves within and is instead a study of deterioration. The deterioration of a relationship, deterioration of a text, a deterioration of the image.

I depict life as I see it and people as they are. I don’t try to contrive what isn’t, but simply reveal and preserve what is. Photographs of coupling, youth, sexuality, class, & addiction form the locus of my work.