Wisteria Magazine is a non-profit organization that publishes print magazines focusing on social justice. With many of its contributors and founders based in Charlotte, NC, Wisteria Magazine has a substantial local following! Katarina Sparling, a senior here at Myers Park, is the chief creative officer of the organization.
Wisteria’s mission is evident in its origin. Katarina says it was founded by Morgan Lee around the summer of 2020, during the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, “because there was a lot of demand to get involved in social justice work, but safely, because it was in the middle of the pandemic… doing a magazine online and through social media was a really accessible way for people to get involved.” Katarina was one of the first members of the Wisteria Magazine team, joining the founding team alongside Morgan and others that summer. She started out with the social media team which she eventually took over and ran for over a year, before assuming her current role of chief creative officer. Katarina sums up Wisteria Magazine’s goal as to bring “awareness to these underrepresented issues and underrepresented stories through art and writing.”
Initially, Wisteria Magazine focused heavily on current events and operated as a news source. Katarina says, however, that “realistically we could never be the first people to get that information, we’d never be the first to post it, and we’d never have the same depth of explanation that, like, CNN could have.” Plus, when schools went back in session, members found they did not have enough time to commit to Wisteria Magazine as it was set up then since it demanded essentially being online all the time.
Wisteria went on a brief hiatus and came back rebranded. “So we rebranded it to be a little more focused on our mission, which is storytelling and art and sharing the stories of marginalized communities through art in the print magazine, and a little less on the idea of trying to communicate current events through Instagram. And when we made that change, Marmalade was kind of at the center of it,” Katarina says. Marmalade is a mini-magazine, the first one that Wisteria Magazine released post-rebranding. With the tagline, “made from bitter orange, yet makes a sweet spread”, the magazine takes its theme seriously. Inspired by many Wisteria members leaving for college, the magazine is centered around “this idea of leaving behind youth, and the transition from summer to fall”, as Katarina puts it. Its also “a lot more focused on short form poetry and art. Our past issues had been more focused on articles and longer form interviews, which has its own value, it was just not what we wanted to be doing anymore to that extent.” Not to mention, Marmalade is a lot physically smaller than the previously released issues, being roughly half the size of those. This smaller package continues to move Wisteria’s image away from that of a news source and more toward its mission of personalized art and storytelling. Dive into artistic nostalgia with your own copy of Marmalade, which can be purchased for $10.00 on the Wisteria Magazine website, www.wisteriamagazine.org.
Wisteria Magazine is currently producing a new issue called the Love Zine, which they’re aiming to release around early-mid February. They’re also planning on dropping shirts to go along with it, a fundraising technique that they used prior to releasing Marmalade. They sell around 25 shirts, which are thrifted and dyed with non-toxic, solarfast dye from a small business to keep the practice as sustainable as possible.
If you’re looking for an outlet to learn about social justice issues, look no further than Wisteria Magazine—and support a few creative Myers Park students in the process!