Mia Saine provided original artwork for the cover of the August City Guide issue, featuring a scene of Memphis in 2020 — masked up, speaking up, and carrying out.
Each summer, Memphis produces our annual City Guide. Doubling as our August issue, the City Guide, we say, shows you “who’s who and what’s what in the Bluff City.” This is the issue where you’ll find our Who’s Who listings — short descriptions of the city’s movers and shakers — and it’s also where you can explore the places and things that make Memphis vibrant. Exploring this city never gets old in part because it is forever changing. We won’t need to remind you that 2020 has been a strange and difficult year. Our society is in the midst of a reckoning, an awakening (we hope and pray) about race and racism. The Covid-19 pandemic continues to ravage nearly every aspect of our lives, as we grieve for those lost, salute the medical heroes who care for the sick, and reinvent what schooling and working will look like in the months ahead. And the economy has been brought to its knees, affecting nearly all of us.
Mia Saine celebrates the diversity of people, highlighting their unique narratives and triumphs with simplified, light-hearted illustrations.
But there are still ample opportunities for hope, for joy. Congregating looks different now, but togetherness continues to bring strength, whether it’s togetherness in support of a common cause or empathy in the face of troubles. We wanted the cover of the August issue to reflect these times, from the systemic change that has become central to our conversations to the masks and carry-out bags that show the summer of 2020 in all its, well, 2020-ness.
We’ve produced many City Guide issues featuring city glamour shots on the cover, technicolor and watercolor sunsets, Memphis showing off for the camera. This year, we wanted more personality, more specificity, a clearer window into the city beneath and behind those glorious sunsets. We asked local illustrator and designer Mia Saine to dream of a cover view that felt both right and right now, and Saine — an exuberant artist with a quickly recognizable style — delivered. Saine’s generous spirit, suffusing all her work, fit this task perfectly. We love what she created.
We will release City Guide content here in the days to come; subscribers’ print copies are en route to mailboxes. We hope reading this issue is as rewarding as creating it has been.
