Pop-Magazine: Issue in a Box
In late 2020, Pop-Up Magazine delivered “Issue in a Box”, a specially packaged collection of products and writings that conveyed the personal stories and histories of each participating artist as we continued to be in COVID-19 lockdown.
Pop-Up Magazine, a creative studio famed for it’s live storytelling events in New York and California, approached me in fall 2020 to participate in a unique project — their “Issue in a Box”. With the entire world in lockdown, this ingenious way of delivering on their storytelling mandate was appealing to me and I was commissioned to work with issue sponsor, Instacart, on the design of the included seed packet (which can be planted in a simple home planter to sprout wildflowers) to be included in the box.
My collage, “Okra”, pays homage to the vegetable that anchors Barbados’s national dish, Cou-Cou, and is the vegetable of my home city at the time, Tulsa. “Okra” is featured on the front of the seed packet, while on the back my love of okra is encapsulated in short biography of my history with the vegetable.
Barbados’s Cou-cou requires patience and okra, as does America’s Gumbo. Because I love the mild grassiness of okra, I love these dishes for their subtle complexity. Much like collages, Cou-Cou and Gumbo are an inventive blend of the humbly familiar and the wildly imaginative that coalesce into a harmonious whole.
Issue in a Box was launched in November 2020 and was heralded as “delightful humanity” by Vulture magazine. Artists included Ada Limon, Samin Nosrat, Hrishikesh Hirway, and Karen Russell, among others.
Learn more about Issue in a Box here.