Global Conversation: 2nd Round

In the midst of total shutdown, Issahary draws attention to how visiting family, friends and neighbors changed during the lockdown.

Issahary depicts an elderly woman living alone in this pastel on brown paper drawing.

Bruno Alencastro creates visual narratives, by telling stories such as Felipe Martini and Rafaela di Giorgio, a couple who had to cancel their wedding plans due to COVID-19 and faced the reflection of the outside world from inside their home in São Paulo, Brazil.

Setting out to disrupt, artist Jiang Feng captures the unexamined truth of everyday discrimination that many racial-ethnic minorities experience in the U.S.

Syrian artist, Oroubah Dieb takes collage and painting to represent women in exile and their emotional baggage. This is the invisible baggage of migration, a bag of human rubbish that stinks of survivors trauma, colonial privilege and children who want to return home.

Artist Charmaine Maw works in glass and its translucent, fragile and ever changing quality. With "Cloud Burst" Maw stops time with it's beauty and challenges us to respond to global warming. A reflection through a 3D sculpture that is never the same, constantly changing when viewed from different angles such as the changes in the environment which are causing global warming.

Artist, pro free diver and ecologist Aia Mar is devoted to the elements and biodiversity. She photographs Air, Earth, Fire & Water creating abstract images that become the canvas for surreal landscapes with endangered animals.

Aia Mar's 'Global Warming' series links directly to warming temperatures, particularly for the butterfly, who's life is an epic journey of transformation with the rhythms of nature, and a sensitivity to the climatic whims of shifting seasons. The fire depicted is necessitated by global warming, a conspicuously unnatural change in climate fueled by the heat of human activity.

Most butterflies possess an unusually heightened sensitivity to overly warm environments and if we cannot mitigate this issue our beautiful, flying friends will not exist, like the iconic western monarch butterfly's population which crashed to the tune of 99.9 percent. (National Geographic)

The whole world seems to be using social networking sites, but just how much time are we spending on the likes of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and what activities are we sacrificing in order to fulfill our appetite for online interaction?

What real life activities are we prepared to sacrifice to spend increasing amounts of time on social networking sites?

Social media is taking over our lives and we are not thinking about the lack of actions spent on mitigating the greatest threats to humanity.

In honoring Malcolm X's Sacrifice to the World we remember the unrelenting realism and understanding of a man who believed adamantly in the rights of not only his people, but people the world over. Garry Grant joins 'Global Conversation' with a focus on this and his abstraction. His work is inspired by the materials he employs and the use of color and texture. This tone of Grant’s work conveys a sense of rhythm; the form of expressive movement and most importantly remembrance, in this case Malcom X who sacrificed his life for what he believed in, for the people.

Female Genital Mutilation: how can we lessen misunderstandings of this sensitive subject?

Artist Aljohara Jeje invokes the book of words, for beyond words immediate denotations, there are connotative powers. For people with vaginas, orgasms commonly come from the clitoris. The removal of the clitoris, infibulation, is still practiced in various parts of the world.

The use of the pearls in the hands of a woman, correlate to pearls of wisdom. Pearls are as pure and innocent as the silenced, pure and innocent young women who undergo genital mutilation. Their clitoris, their pearl, is snatched and this triptych locks us in between two worlds, one mirroring the other and of babies to come.

Female genital mutilation (FGM) involves the partial or total removal of external female genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons.

The practice has no health benefits for girls and women.

FGM can cause severe bleeding and problems urinating, and later cysts, infections, as well as complications in childbirth and increased risk of newborn deaths.

More than 200 million girls and women alive today have been cut in 30 countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia where FGM is concentrated.

FGM is mostly carried out on young girls between infancy and age 15.

FGM is a violation of the human rights of girls and women.

Places such as the Caribbean, predominantly attract many tourists and first generation Salvadoran-American artist Reyna Delcid feels there is a desperate need to discuss the etiquette that should come with visiting and speaking on behalf of places that often do not have the platform to speak for themselves.

Take the small island of Islote, understanding how the people of Islote feel and the effects of pity and attention for their native innocence against giving the people recognition.

Delcid touches on an extremely important message with her photography series and that is how can we speak on behalf of people who are often misrepresented when there's media bias, no cooperation or a bridge of intercultural communication.

Speaking to people according to their level of understanding and NOT surreptitiously snapping photos of locals without their permission.

It starts with a conversation.