A participant marches during the Tokyo Rainbow Pride parade, celebrating advances in LGBTQ+ rights and calling for marriage equality, in Tokyo, Japan on April 21, 2024. (Photo by Issei Kato/Reuters)

Latin dancing featured on the opening day of the 98th Blackpool Dance Festival in the Empress Ballroom in the city’s Winter Gardens on May 28, 2024. (Photo by James Glossop/ The Times & Sunday Times)

French photographer Bettina Rheims poses next to her work, two days before the opening of her exhibition “Pourquoi m'as-tu abandonnée ?” (Why did you abandon me?) at the Museum of Photography Charles Negre, in Nice on June 13, 2024. (Photo by Valery Hache/AFP Photo)

A woman swings on a swing in Venao beach in Pedasi, Panama, Saturday, July 13, 2024. (Photo by Matias Delacroix/AP Photo)

A cricket is seen posing on an advertising billboard during the Concacaf Nations League group stage football match between Costa Rica and Guadeloupe at the National Stadium in San Jose on September 5, 2024. (Photo by Ezequiel Becerra/AFP Photo)

A woman travels on a train stopping at a subway station visited by foreign reporters in central Pyongyang, North Korea on April 14, 2017. (Photo by Damir Sagolj/Reuters)

Iraqi soldiers from 9th Armoured Division give drops of water to a dehydrated child rescued earlier by soldiers at the frontline, during the ongoing fighting between Iraqi forces and Islamic State militants near the Old City in western Mosul, Iraq June 13, 2017. (Photo by Erik De Castro/Reuters)

Los Angeles native Mike Stilkey has always been attracted to painting and drawing not only on vintage paper, record covers and book pages, but on the books themselves. Using a mix of ink, colored pencil, paint and lacquer, Stilkey depicts a melancholic and at times a whimsical cast of characters inhabiting ambiguous spaces and narratives of fantasy and fairy tales. A lingering sense of loss and longing hints at emotional depth and draws the viewer into their introspective thrall with a mixture of capricious poetry, wit, and mystery. (Photo by Mike Stilkey)