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The Lover or the Fighter by Ian E. Toledo It happened during either my sophomore or junior year as an illustration major. I was still struggling to overcome my middle school rep as both shyest and quietest student and was taking a course called Sequential Illustration. The course was taught by a professor who I’ll call Mr. V, an elderly man that’d had a modestly successful career as an illustrator and was pretty well known and respected in some circles. One day Mr. V. gave us an assignment to do a series of comic pages on whatever subject we wanted. Despite the fact that I adored comics, nothing immediately came to mind. So when he came around to check my sketches I looked up at him helplessly, hoping that he would share one of his idea generating methods he had acquired from his career as a successful illustrator. Mr. V’s sage advice was, “Why don’t you draw something about food? Why don’t you draw egg foo young?” Then he looked at me and proceeded to laugh in my face. I was shocked that someone in such a position would say that to me or anyone. A flood of Weltschmerz...

Visual Art

Bayete Ross Smith: An Interview with the Artist

Apogee Journal

02 Feb 2015

Bayete Ross Smith is a Harlem-based multi-media artist who explores constructions of identity and representations of African-American culture with his practice. Apogee Visual Arts Editor Legacy Russell spoke with Bayete on the occasion of his work being featured as the cover image in Apogee’s fourth issue. Legacy Russell [LR]: Tell me about your background. Where did you begin your relationship with photography? Bayete Ross Smith [BRS]: I began photographing in high school. I took a black and white photography class and I just fell in love with the concept of re-creating and archiving my view of the world. It’s a typical beginning for many photographers prior to the digital SLR, I suppose. I continued photographing as a hobby throughout high school and into college. I never really thought of it as a career. Then when I was entering my junior year of college, when I was studying business administration, I realized becoming a corporate executive would be a miserable life for me, so I switched my area of study to photography and began studying photojournalism. I got my start as a newspaper photographer for the Knight Ridder Newspaper Corporation. I worked at the Tallahassee Democrat, the Philadelphia Inquirer, which...

Fiction

Sam, by Alexandra Watson

Apogee Journal

23 Jan 2015

Sam by Alexandra Watson He grows exhausted of her: the way she squeezes toothpaste from the top instead of rolling up the bottom, how she references literature in their fights to remind him of her education, the slight click in her jaw when she chews, the rusty taste of her mouth. Before they were minor things, now they are all she is. They’d met in the teacher break room at the high school where he’d subbed for years; she’d taken a spot in the English department a little under a year ago. He didn’t get called in today, so he sits watching the Twilight Zone marathon and drinking ice cold beer, occasionally lighting the same joint he rolled right after she left that morning. She gets home early that afternoon and finds him in the kitchen, sliding the last empty beer bottle into the twelve-pack box. She looks weary in a way he recognizes; a tiredness from too much noise and too much fighting, not enough windows and not enough textbooks. When she sees him, she grabs the back of his neck to pull him towards her mouth. He recoils, as if the kiss has sent a static...