Bal Harbour

illustrators have solved similar problems in the past. Editors and writ- ers, on the other hand, sometimes want an image to very literally evoke the concept of the article, which can be visually dull. On top of that, I have to keep the readership in mind. That's tricky. If you just listen to what the public wants, you're not doing any thing to advance the art form, but if you're not listening to what the public wants, you're not engaging with them. Magazine and newspaper illustrations are a form of public art, which is what drew me to them in the first place. I think it's incredible that artists can have their work circulated to so many di•er- ent people. You can pick a newspaper o• the street!" Zsigmond—AZ to her friends—is a calm but passionate advocate for illustration, with a singular skill. Having lots of ideas about images is one thing, but finding an illustrator who can make something that makes sense within a four- or five-hour deadline is another thing entirely. This is a power she developed working for the New York Times, as an art director for both the Sunday Review section and the Editorial/Op-Ed pages. Some of the work she did relied on full-color illustrations, which sometimes were animated, such as Shira Ovide's pandemic newsletter. But many of them were classic newsprint—black and white, and small. Zsigmond is from San Francisco, and studied art history and philos- ophy at Stanford, working with professor David Hills, who Zsigmond describes as a scholar "who does a lot of thinking about visual and ver- bal metaphor and aesthetics." She did a thesis on René Magritte, but also kept a binder full of illustrations from the Times' Op-Ed page. "I was interested in the way that I saw metaphorical images func- tioning in our contemporary space rather than just in art installed in a museum," Zsigmond told me. Following Stanford, she moved to New York to study graphic design at Parsons but didn't choose to finish her degree. Why? She got a job —in the Op-Ed department of the New York Times, in 2010. She dove right in. " You would get a piece from the editors at maybe 11 a .m. and you would have to have sketches in by maybe 2 p.m.," Zsig mond told me. " You need to f ile the f ina l version by 5 or 6 p.m. That was daily. You never had longer than six hours." Beyond the time crunch, other challenges pre- sented tiny victories—and some not so tiny. "The Times thinks of itself as a 'family paper,' so graphic representations of sexuality can be tough, but I did manage to get some boobs in," Zsigmond said, in reference to a 2015 piece in the Sunday Review section. "The illustration accompanied a piece on locker rooms and toxic masculinity, and combined the nude torso of a statue with the legs of a soccer player. The editors ran it!" She has more than a few hours to commission illustrations for the New Yorker, though, and one of her favorites is from the November 1, 2021 issue accompanying a piece by Elizabeth Kolbert on the decline of insects worldwide. The illustration, by Armando Veve, is a ghostly blue-and-white depic- tion of what seems to be a praying mantis and some moths and caterpillars suspended above a swamp. The figures are there and not there; even a casual reader would under- stand the insects are imperiled. "Conceptually, I think it's elegant. A cyanot y pe —rendered with pencil—to represent the g radual disap- pearance of insects on earth. Expertly done, I thought." Zsigmond's own work as a fine artist is an extension of the problem she solves during the day. How can we use symbols to say more than one thing at the same time? Zsigmond was recently included in an exhibi- tion entitled " In Plain Sight", on the history of seeing and perception through objects, presented at the Wellcome Collection in London. Her ar t work is called Mati Armour, "a sculptural garment " that uses 400 small copper rectangles, each embossed with a di•erently stylized eye and then strung together to create a wearable metal tapestry that looks like a cleric's robe. The copper plates are based on the Greek votive o•erings called tamata, "metal plaques that are used in the Orthodox church for healing and prayer," Zsigmond said. The eyes are versions of the "evil eye" (mati in Greek ) practice that is common to Greece and Turkey and other cultures. An evil eye, often hung by the door, wards o• other truly evil eyes, and in Zsigmond's armor, also fends o• the patho- gens that cause influenza, Covid-19, HIV, and other diseases. Zsigmond's armor demonstrates brilliantly how small images can suggest entire stories while still retaining some mystery. For another installation, in Athens, Greece, Zsigmond created tamata to represent emotional states like anxiety and fear. "The state of feeling extremely anxious or going down a thought whirlpool—how do you represent them in a symbol?" Zsigmond said. "Tamata address states of the body, but could I make something that addressed internal emotional experiences, also in an image?" That's the gig. One of Zsigmond's favorite illustrations is this one by Armando Veve, which appeared in the November 1, 2021, issue of the New Yorker. "M AGA ZI N E A N D N EWSPA PER ILLUSTRATIONS A RE A FORM OF PU BLIC A RTW HICH IS W H AT DREW ME TO THEM I N THE FIRST PL ACE . I THI N K IT'S I NCREDIBLE TH AT A RTISTS CA N H AV E THEIR WORK CIRCU L ATED TO SO M A N Y DIFFERENT PEOPLE ." —ALEX ANDR A ZSIGMOND BAL HARBOUR 133

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