Bread and Puppet’s cheap art manifesto (above) has hung on my wall for nearly a decade. “Why Cheap Art?” it asks. “Art is like good bread! Art is like green trees!” Wakes up sleepers, fights war and stupidity, sings halleluja. All good things, sorely needed, true then as it is now: cheap art is a constant companion there to cradle me between the rock of overwrought wall text and the hard place of ai slop deli menus.
studio: I’ve recently become intrigued by the concept of “summering,” the seasonal ritual undertaken by the wealthy where they spend the warmer months on an extended vacation, usually somewhere like an island or a lake or a country in western Europe. I first heard the term at the big age of 26 (not coming from a family that “summers,” apparently) when I was working as a teaching assistant at an upper-middle-class elementary school in Austin, Texas, and some of the students were discussing their upcoming trips. What interests me most about this seasonal migration is the freedom of movement it implies. Whenever June rolls around, you can just be somewhere else, provided you have the resources.
For most of us, summer 2026 brought the now usual gifts: fires, floods, food you can’t eat. You’d never know it, though, looking through the online presences of recent LAC grads and reality TV influencers. They have their somewhere else. Freedom of movement granted by various levels of privilege is one determinant of a community’s resilience to environmental change. “Summering,” then, can be viewed through the lens of the ever-widening gulf between socioeconomic classes as one example of how climate disaster disproportionately affects poor people.
As the Earth’s summers get longer, hotter, and more chaotic due to climate change, I wonder where the rich will set up their temporary retreats. Maybe they’ll now be gone from April to November; maybe they’ll gobble up the new coastlines that appear with fluctuating sea levels. Maybe that’s why they’re so hell-bent on getting to Mars.
