Featuring body outlaws, endangered cultures, and anti-colonial belief systems, THE NEXT WORLD TAROT envisions a world where justice relies on respect and revolutionary love.
The Fool’s Journey is about smashing systematic oppression, owning their truths, being accountable to the people and places that support them, and taking back a connection to their body that may have been lost through trauma or societal brainwashing.
The NEXT WORLD TAROT is a visual spectacle of both the battle cry and the re-connection between outcasts and their criminalized identities.
This set includes 78 Tarot Cards and an accompanying Tarot Reader (Written and Illustrated by Cristy C. Road).
ISBN: 978-1-945509-29-2
Diamond: OCT181893
SRP: $50.00
Direct: Silver Sprocket mail-order
Cristy C. Road’s lavish, bilingual NEXT WORLD TAROT (Silver Sprocket, $50) envisions the future — “a world based on radical redefinitions of love and social justice.” It’s of the moment, keyed to transformative rage and care. Nominally, it is a tarot deck — Road has made smaller, portable versions — but a beautifully produced art book is the ideal format for her prodigious artistic talent. The Spanish and English text, although often evocative in its details (the nine of swords “smokes capri menthols under a chrome umbrella to blow in the face of despair”), feels beside the point next to Road’s sumptuous, full-color portraits of mostly Black and brown characters, differently abled, old and young, often gender nonbinary (descriptions alternately refer to “she,” “he” or “they”).
Road gives bodies that have been historically devalued central space as the movers of forces and fortunes. Her characters are meticulously visually articulated, with detailed hairstyles, outfits, tattoos, and often situated in fantastical landscapes; they pose cross-legged on cars and in gardens, create music, read books, gaze out windows, ride horses, clutch purses and torches and knives. The king of cups’ throne is her wheelchair, on which is balanced a mug of tea. “Next World Tarot” testifies to the need to imagine the future and the political power that comes from that imagining.
An ethos of social justice suffuses Cristy C. Road’s Next World Tarot deck with inspired and honest images of protest and progress. Refreshing in its representation and modern in its aesthetic, Road’s deck speaks directly to a new generation inhabiting a new reality—one that cries out for a different kind of interpretation.
Inspired by her friends and acquaintances, the deck features images of gay couples, people in wheelchairs, women in hijabs, minorities, the poor and seniors, set against a dystopian landscape.
Cristy C. Road, a Miami-raised, Brooklyn-based, Cuban-American illustrator, writer, and of course, total dreamboat, is no stranger to DIY, punk, queer, zine, and activist communities all over the place.
Cristy C. Road’s “Next World Tarot” Boldly Defines a New Generation of Saints
Cuban-American and raised in a traditional Catholic family, the preteen Road has a number of identity issues: she does not fit into her cultural mold, she finds salvation in punk rock, and she has a conflicted gender identity.