Toby Millman is a printmaker, photographer, sound collector, and occasionally a cartoonist and filmmaker. She currently lives in Hamtramck but she is semi-originally from Miami and arrived in the American Midwest via Western Massachusetts, Brooklyn and Vermont with a back-and-forths to Palestine in between. She filled up her passport three years ago and inaugurated her new one with an updated version of the coveted and yet hated rubber stamp, which marked her most recent entry into Palestine this past summer. During that time, she lived at the A.M. Qattan Foundation as an artist-in-residence, but more accurately, she talked to total strangers, photographed, and collected paper and cardboard from the sidewalks, dumpsters and car windshields of Ramallah.

The work featured in this issue of Critical Moment originates from photographs of homes and businesses taken on both sides of the Hamtramck/Detroit border and incorporates found paper from around the neighborhood. They are part of a larger series of ongoing works that aim to explore the striking similarities between the communities of Detroit and occupied Palestine, the two anxiety-inducing yet loved locales that the artist has somehow found herself straddling.

The pieces featured in this issue are part of the larger project entitled Home(land).  This collection will chronicle the tragic, humorous and often politically-charged moments which bear witness to thriving cultures that, due to a common history of exile, expulsion and economic inequities, spans across countries and continents. It will bridge drawing, photography, printmaking, book arts and narrative and center on the concept of home.