Movers and Shakers: The 40 Most Exciting Soulful Artists of 2003

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Janet Sternburg
A New Lens
Best known as the editor of The Writer on Her Work (rev. ed, 2000), a pioneering two-volume anthology of essays by women writers, and author of a memoir, Phantom Limb (2002), Janet Sternburg was on holiday from her writing in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, when the rich visual texture of her surroundings startled her into photography. She bought a disposable camera in a tourist shop and began taking pictures of the Mexican cityscape.
Sternburg?s simple, direct approach to becoming a photographer worked. The photos, which she then blew up to gallery size, are remarkably complex. Often shooting through windows, she manages to show what?s reflected in the glass on top of what?s behind it, and the images have a dreamy abstraction, becoming, as she puts it, ?pictures of what happens when one suspends conventional seeing.? ?A Writer?s Need to See,? an article by Janet Sternburg, in Art Journal (Spring 2002) ?JOSEPH HART

Phoebe Gloeckner
Portrait of the artist as a young cartoonist
Medical illustrator Phoebe Gloeckner started drawing comics in her mid-teens, about the time she discovered cartoonist R. Crumb and began an affair with her mother?s boyfriend. In underground publications like Wimmin?s Comix and Weirdo she told unflinching stories of her troubled life bouncing back and forth between a chaotic home and the streets of San Francisco?s seedy Tenderloin district. A Child?s Life and Other Stories (Frog Ltd., 1998) reprints her work from this era.
Gloeckner?s new book, The Diary of a Teenage Girl,(North Atlantic/Frog, 2002), a novel about teen life set in the mid-1970s, continues her semi-autobiography in an innovative blend of regular print, comics episodes, and spot illustrations. What?s unusual and wonderful about Gloeckner?s work is its unflinching engagement with messy truths. ?If I censor myself, I feel sick,? she?s said. The Diary of a Teenage Girl is shockingly?and refreshingly?frank, strongly conveying what it?s like to be a sexual girl in a confusing world.
www.ravenblond.com/pgloeckner ?CHRIS DODGE

Mickey Lemle
Cinema?s soul man
With subjects that range from the life of the Dalai Lama to the fate of planet Earth, Mickey Lemle?s 30-year career making feature films, television series, and documentary specials has been a spiritual journey in and of itself. And his credentials as a former U.S. Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal and current director of the Tibet Fund only reinforce the degree to which his personal passions infuse his work.
Lemle?s most recent film, Ram Dass: Fierce Grace is a gentle and generous addition to his oeuvre. Going beyond the former Richard Alpert?s LSD proselytizing in the 1960s and the success that greeted his trippy meditation guide, Be Here Now, Lemle pieces together a surprisingly earthbound portrait of the American guru. (When he recalls the 1997 stroke that nearly killed him, Ram Dass tells the camera: ?Here I am, Mr. Spiritual, and in my own head I didn?t orient toward the spirit.?) Lemle?s humanistic approach celebrates such contradictions and allows for an unpretentious and often humorous grace. www.lemlepictures.com
?ELIZABETH LARSEN

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