The cover for the New Yorker’s new fiction issue is illustrated by Loveis Wise.
THE LATEST EDITION of The New Yorker features a black mother and child on the cover. The image by Loveis Wise illustrates the magazine’s new Fiction Issue, a double issue dated June 4 and June 11. Wise, who graduated from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia less than a month ago, is making her New Yorker debut. The young artist is also making history. The 93-year-old magazine is not in the habit of hiring African American women to illustrate its renowned covers. Wise is only the second to be tapped for the assignment.
This year, the annual Fiction Issue includes a profile of critically acclaimed novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and assembles stories about “parenting, childhood, and the ties that bind both.” In response to the theme, Wise envisioned a maternal image placing her subject in a thriving, natural environment. Titled “Nurture,” the illustration depicts a mother kneeling as she waters lush plantings. She wears a printed scarf tied around her natural hair and holds her baby secured in a baby sling.
WISE GREW UP IN WASHINGTON, D.C., where she regularly visited the Smithsonian with her father. She fell in love with art wandering the galleries of the museums. She inherited her unique moniker from her great-grandmother, whose first name was also “Loveis” and she credits her grandmother with the nod to nature that is ever present in her work for clients such as the Poetry Foundation, Refinery 29, and BuzzFeed, in addition to The New Yorker.
“My grandmother was also into gardening; it brought her a lot of peace. She wanted to share that with us. She had a little garden in her back yard, and we’d help her on weekends. It was a way for us to bond, and also a way for us to connect with our environment, the community we grew up in. I wanted to draw from that nostalgia a little,” Wise told Mouly in a conversation about the magazine cover.
In school, Wise explored a range of mediums, from gouache and oil paintings to graphite and woodcuts before realizing illustration was her calling.
I love this cover! I was sad when I pulled the address label off and it took some green color with it. This lovely piece of art is more than an illustration and one that I would really like to frame. I eagerly opened up to the contents page to see what it was named. Nurture! That is perfect.