Olivetti in your pocket? Edigio Bonfante, Poster, 1953. Lithograph mounted on canvas.

A warm first welcome, please, this morning to our fantastic new crew of columnists, who will be rolling out their maiden posts in coming days. I’m very excited to see what they will do:

Interdisciplinary artist Christine Wong Yap recently relocated to New York from Oakland. Her installations, sculptures, multiples, and works on paper explore optimism and pessimism, and major themes and touchstones are language, light and dark, and psychology.

Glen Helfand is an independent writer, critic, curator, and educator. His writing appears regularly in Artforum and at Artforum.com, and he’s contributed to the San Francisco Bay Guardian, ArtInfo.com, and many other periodicals and exhibition catalogues.

Norma Cole is a poet, painter, and translator. Her most recent books of poetry include Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988–2008 (City Lights), Collective Memory (Granary Books), Do the Monkey (Zasterle), Spinoza in Her Youth (Omnidawn), and Natural Light (Libellum). Born in Toronto, Canada, Norma has lived in San Francisco since 1977.

Archivist, writer, lecturer, and filmmaker Rick Prelinger founded Prelinger Archives in 1982 in New York. With Megan Shaw Prelinger, he cofounded an appropriation-friendly research library in 2002, currently open to the public in San Francisco. Rick is a longtime advocate of increased public access to archives and cultural material, and he frequently writes and lectures in this field.

Raised in Tehran, Iran, and living and working in San Francisco, visual artist Taraneh Hemami explores themes of displacement, preservation, and representation through her collective and curatorial projects. Examining images as propagated for power and political gain, her handcrafted replications of historical archives commemorate events, people, and places, and comment on the tools of manipulation and persuasion used across nations and histories.

Expect to continue to hear, too, from Iain Boal, Meg Shiffler, Scott Hewicker, and Chris Cobb, our winter crew, and of course Brecht Andersch, Brandon Brown, and many of our other columnist-alumni who continue to post on an occasional basis.

Welcome, everyone! Forward! Thank you!

Suzanne