Dyani Kennedy, Visual Arts Editor

When it comes to the visual arts, there’s often little means of defining them to simply a distilled and concise nutshell. Visual Arts can run the gamut from photography, to hand-drawn traditional art, to digital masterpieces built for the social media age—and this year’s publication has no shortage of diversity on that front. If photography is one’s interest, even that subset has a variety of means and methods of defining art, from a simple black and white image of cows being so clear and crisp it’s just nice to look at in the form of Ryan Mellinger’s “Idle Cows,” to the collection of simple images of life and nature turned to thoughtful art pieces by Long Nguyen, to even the space of cartooning and anime style traditional artwork with Abishek Makhal’s anime-based sketch. But most of all, one cannot ignore the thought and soul into these pieces. Art is best defined, in my eyes, as the soul of its creator given visual shape and form. Their intentions, hearts, and minds are embodied in the art they create, and thusly, I believe these intentions, and all these artists strove to portray, are conveyed beautifully in this year’s issue of From the Fallout Shelter.