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It is usually late at night when Michael C. Gibson creates his works of art. He works with purpose and exactness in a world of shimmering grays, as he says, to “push the limits of realism in the graphite medium” as well as to seek to “capture that which we cannot see: thoughts, feelings, emotions, the soul and spirit.” When the two meet, as in this visual document of Black lives, lost lives, resistance, and ancestors, what emerges is immediate, devastating, and demanding.

One morning this autumn my brother woke to ash falling from the sky outside his window in Montana. He leapt out of bed, worried that his apartment building was on fire. It wasn’t. But the eerie haze and the woodsy scent that clung to it made the forest fires raging miles away feel disconcertingly close. Thousands of people were not so fortunate, as flames roared through vast regions of the American West, sometimes devouring entire towns.

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.