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The evening after protests in Turin, Italy, Tempio Industriale—artist Valerio Perino—gathers tear gas canisters from the city streets. He creates artwork from urban refuse, from items that symbolize the environments that contain, discard, or deploy them. He reflects to viewers a materialism of the Western world: the detritus of buildings, the symbols of policing. From metal scraps found on city streets and in abandoned factories Tempio Industriale brings together fraught symbols to draw attention to humanity.

Beaches and scrap piles on his home island of Bali provide Martinus Sumbaji with the materials he needs to make weathered wood “faith boxes” like this portrait of Christ in his Passion. The Indonesian Roman Catholic artist knows from commercial work in animation and digital vector design that imagery with sacred content needs to be accessible to the larger non-Christian culture in which he lives. He uses symbols like the cross, the lamb, and the grape cluster, universally recognized as religious emblems in our age of globalization.

Lanecia Rouse Tinsley, a multidisciplinary artist in Houston, Texas, is director for justice and the arts at projectCURATE and cofounder of the ImagiNoir Group, a think tank of Black activists, creatives, and educators. Rouse Tinsley’s materials—photography, paint, cloth and canvas, ground stone, minerals, paper—play a role not only in the construction of a given piece but in unifying construction with approach, content with context. She is deeply interested in the materiality of her media, and each element speaks—making her work extrasensory for those who engage it.