Events

Black Stone Burns

Join us for a conversation with Olga Sokal and David Kelley on Black Stone Burns (Fw:Books, 2025).

Black Stone Burns weaves together the complex stories of the people and communities whose lives have been irrevocably shaped and molded by the global mining industry. Made over four years across three continents and five countries, the project starts from intimate family stories and pictures from Olga Sokal’s hometown of Belchatow in Poland. Her journey then moves across the Atlantic to the lost American dreams of Appalachian coal mining towns in the USA, where images of dioramas are coupled with the stark reality of rampant extractivist capitalism. The visual strategies behind the continued promotion of coal are investigated through an analysis of the UK’s history with the black stone, as archival advertisements are juxtaposed with the current commercials that greenwash the country’s fraught history with coal and poverty. Finally, Sokal’s exploration concludes with the vast coal mines of China and the environmental degradation caused by such large-scale extraction.

Then there must be a hell, where the spirits dance and sing

October 4 - December 12, 2025

In Mike Brodie’s Failing, there is a photograph of a young woman sound asleep on a pink blanket. Skip ahead in the book and we see her now awake, holding a cigarette on a makeshift bed in the back of a van. A little further up, she’s shooting up through her foot next to a Lisa Frank book, and on the next page there’s just her pregnant stomach under a tank top that says “baby.” Across the vein on her right arm is the letter X, which stands for X marks the spot.

This young woman is Mia Justice Smith, an artist in her own right whose photographs of hitchhiker life exude the romance and ethos of absolute freedom.

In 2021, she hopped her first train and soon after met Mike Brodie. Reflecting on that first ride, Mia wrote in 2022: “I don’t know if I had ever experience a feeling like that, you know? All I knew was that me strung out, was definitely not the move anymore, and I had found a purpose.”

That freedom was tragically cut short. Three years ago, Mia lost her life to an overdose. She was 23 years old.

In honor of Mia and her vision, we collaborated with photographers Bill Daniel and Ian Ritter to print a selection of her work that will be on view through December 12. We’ve additionally compiled a collection of Polaroids, prints and ephemera from across her life.

Last year, LatoPaper published a zine of her work titled Slack, vol. 3. There’s a long, wandering passage by Mia about addiction, faith, and life on the road.

She says: Most people you see on trains, they’re all performing you know? And we all perform, it’s human nature, but like, a performance ends, and that’s why you see all those people talking about they regret their face tattoos, and the need to grow up and get a job now you’re almost 40, it’s like…they say that shit…because they were performing, and that’s cool like, live that phase know what I’m sayin? But this will never end for me, I will probably just look even more crazy in 30 years.

Please consider donating to Shatterproof, an organization actively fighting addiction.