Aorta is published by a collective of working artists in the San Francisco Bay Area. We welcome the addition of creative, committed, and inspired folks that are also interested in organizing, antagonizing, accessorizing, theorizing, visualizing, and scrutinizing. If you’d like to join our ranks, get in touch!
Issue No. 4 contributors and rebel rousers:
Francesca Austin Ochoa is a Salvadoran American writer and ideologue with an appetite for the absurd. She is collecting feminist and queer media from love letters, to pornography to cyber-anarcha-punk and beyond.
Vivian Crockett is a Brazilian-born, mixed-race queer art lover & art dreamer. She works at a modern art museum by day, waiting for the art revolution and the chance to work in a worker-owned art museum cooperative. She loves all forms of visual and non-visual art & culture, and channels her obsession with imagery and political and queer theory into activism with HAVOQ (www.sfprideatwork.og), rhapsodizing, daily ranting and collaging.
Chrystal Powell is spun from bright colors, obsessive thought patterns, paper, metal, and scabbed knees. She likes to play with tactile things and spends lots of time thinking about the figurative spaces where sharp edges and soft corners meet. Mostly she can be found thinking about or actually in the process of, making art, writing, grant writing and/or organizing arts related events.
Paulina Nowicka lives in the world made up almost entirely of paper and glue. Book maker, self-described media activist, sensitive soul with a penchant for deconstructing, cutting up and re-making; she designs, organizes things and occasionally flips out about the lack of hours in a day.
Sheley Monahan is a painter, sculptor, and all around creative mastermind who likes drinking beer in public and looking at pretty things.
Lex Non Scripta is a cut-paper artist, found object lover, poster maker, illustrator, and organizer. Often portrayed with a dash of irony and a smattering of sarcasm, Lex’s creative focus is heavily informed by social justice/practice/responsibility, transgressive politics, and self sufficiency in/critical investigation of the queer diaspora.
Magenta organizes art-making parties and a workshop on art as propaganda. She is a member of the socialist feminist think tank Radical Women, and has been affectionately dubbed The Interdimensional Unicorn. She designs psychedelic clothes as Technicolor Nudibranch, makes experimental vocal music (pretty much constantly), and is probably made of rainbows. She was once told she is a swirling, omni-gravitational, omni-radiant vortex of true magic. She generally tries to leverage this to be a Muse for creativity and more sustainable ways of living.
Elly Sarabipour is a transplant from Chicago. Elly has become the order maker and stress reducer by keeping our books balanced and stopping us from using the collective bank card on coffee and art supplies! Along with her passion for balance sheets and her mad profit and loss analysis skills she is an active volunteer in the Bay Area.
Imogen Binnie is a bookstore lifer who writes a zine called The Fact That It’s Funny Doesn’t Make It A Joke, although she does it in print runs small enough to count on your fingers, so good luck finding one.
Hannah Mae Blair is a sculptor, writer, bike dancer, musician, radical bannermaker, and enthusiastic dilettante in San Francisco, CA.
Amy Gilgan is a librarian. Her passion for preserving the history of underrepresented groups is reflected in her previous work with the UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Library and the GLBT Historical Society.