[image description: A bas relief portrait on copper of a black woman with piercing dark eyes between thick lashes. Her expression is intense, if not actually confrontational. Her the silhouette of her hair is an almost perfect circle until it reaches her neck, whereupon it falls into the Vee shape of her collar like the bottom of a heart. The curved copper lines to either side of her face descend such that they seem to join her squared-off collar. Text reads, “255, ZONA, SMALL GOD OF ART DECO.”]
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She is angles and she is elegance; she is truly international, and now, more than a hundred years after her birth, she is timeless. It takes a miracle for an architectural style to become timeless, but she’s managed it, and now she’s not going anywhere. Streamline Moderne? What’s that? Did that style of architecture inspire a god? No? Then get out with your belief that she’s anything other than effortlessly modern and without peer.
She doesn’t need peers. She only needs a stage, a moment in the limelight, the sweeping arch of her design and the elegance of her angles. Her sister embraced the lushness of the natural world in all its twists and tangles; she loves the mathematical, the long, graceful line and the perfection of the curve. She needs nothing more.
Art deco will never die. Zona will see to it.
Lee Moyer 