There is something quietly radical about Anika Toro’s Finding Joy — a mixed media art book that asks a deceptively simple question: what happens when you strip away everything but the essential? In a cultural moment when so much feels overwhelming, chaotic, and beyond our control, this book arrives as both a creative manifesto and a small act of resistance.
Toro’s process is as elegant as it is inventive. Working with nine copies of the same source book, she approaches each page through erasure — redacting all but a selection of words left exactly where they appear in the original text, allowing new poems, thoughts, and narratives to surface from the existing language without a single word being added or moved. The text becomes a found object, and what remains carries an almost uncanny resonance.
But Finding Joy is also a stunning mixed media art book. Toro layers her erasures with analog collage, painting, photography, and embroidery, creating spreads of extraordinary visual range. A cosmic, glitter-drenched double-page collage pulls vintage engravings of wizards and angels into a swirling galaxy, with a lone figure gazing upward from atop a globe — dreamlike and delightfully unhinged. Elsewhere, a blackout poem about Grace Kelly sits opposite a mixed media portrait of the actress at a camera, her black-and-white image transposed into an otherworldly painted forest. The tonal leaps are part of the work’s charm: a spread of jack-in-the-box figures bursting from their boxes is pure gleeful chaos.
The erasure poems themselves reward close reading. Words bubble and float across painted surfaces, connected by sinuous lines that guide the eye like a river moving through landscape. One spread traces a quiet meditation on friendship: “friends / cherish / time / sitting / in the rain,” the words drifting across a field of hot pink above a vintage photograph of two people sheltering under an umbrella. Another floats across a golden interior scene — a woman seated at a window, the words “The window opened / and swept the dust out / imagination” hovering like thoughts half-formed.
What makes Finding Joy particularly vital right now is its underlying philosophy: that creativity is an act of reclamation. In taking something already written — already fixed — and finding within it something new and luminous, Toro models a kind of hope that doesn’t look away from difficulty but transforms it. The book is, as Toro herself puts it, a testament to the delight in making. It is also, whether intentionally or not, a gentle reminder that meaning is never entirely lost — only waiting to be uncovered.
For readers, artists, and anyone in need of a creative spark, Finding Joy is a singular and generous book. Highly recommended.
Anika Toro is a mixed media artist with a background in photography and collage. Her current work fuses narrative, serendipity, and playful experimentation into art that transforms familiar texts and images into unexpected expressions of creativity. Her innovative projects have found homes in hotels and private spaces around the world, while her award-winning photography has been seen in magazines, on record covers, and in exhibitions throughout the United States.
In her debut book, Finding Joy, Anika offers an intimate look at her creative journey—a path of wonder, discovery, and those unexpected twists that make art so fun and magical. When not in her studio, Anika finds inspiration in music, nature, tarot, and time with her family. She lives in Tennessee with her husband, teenage daughter, and their much-loved cat.
SUMMARY:
Discover the magic of serendipity and artistic exploration in “Finding Joy”! This mixed media art book takes selections from nine different copies of the same book, showcasing Anika’s transformative and playful approach to the original text.
Each page spread uses hand-selected text, left unaltered from its original position. Through a process of erasure and blackout, Anika redacts everything except a newly found message, thought, idea, or poem, without adding any new text. Analog collages, paint, photography, embroidery, and more celebrate unique narratives, exploring creativity, spontaneity, and the profound moments that emerge from reimagining existing ideas.
Above all, Anika believes that creating should be fun! She hopes this book is a testament to the delight in making and that in exploring this book, you too find a bit of inspiration on your own path to joy.
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