Enter the New York art scene of the 1970s and ’80s with fresh eyes. Award-winning author and curator, Omar Kholeif, weaves us through the many worlds of Sonia Balassanian, an Iranian American artist of Armenian descent who came to renown with her political art in the 1980s and early ’90s. In these pages, the author delves into poetry and Lyrical Abstraction, as well as collage and portraiture developed in response to the American hostage crisis in Iran. Travel from the exhibition halls of MoMA, New York, to the monasteries of rural Armenia.

The way we see the world has changed drastically since NASA released the “blue marble” image of the earth taken by Apollo 17 in 1972. No longer a placid slow-moving orb, the world is now perceived as a hothouse of activity and hyper-connectivity that cannot keep up with its inhabitants.