C r e a t i v i t y , C o m m u n i t y a n d C o n v e r s a t i o n i n t h e He a r t l a n d
ARTISTS
Colin Klimesh & Taylor Carter, OH | R E S T A U R A T E U R Allison Poindexter, TN
PHOTOGR A PHER CHEF
Wing Young Huie, MN | D E S I G N E R Nina Ganci, MO | A R T I S T Lisa Luck, MN
Julia Sullivan, TN | E N T R E P R E N E U R S Patrick Woodyard & Zoe Cleary, TN
We tell the stories of interesting
people doing remarkable things in the middle of America.
L E T T E R F ROM T H E E DI TOR The Mississippi River is my talisman. I wasn’t born near it, but have always been drawn to it. When I was 16, my friend John and I took a road trip to St. Louis. As we set out on our drive, it never occurred to me I could see the 2,300-mile long river at any other place. It was night by the time we turned down the narrow streets of the old waterfront. I found it inconceivably wondrous we could pull our car onto the seemingly ancient cobblestone banks that skim the edges of the city. Steps from the silently rushing current, we opened every door, turned the stereo to 10 and danced on the river’s edge. Today, tracing the course of the Mississippi, I travel north on Highway 61 from St. Louis, the place I now call home. I stop for photos, or sometimes only to see and breathe. A millennia of mounds, villages, ports, art, agriculture and industrial machinery dot the land and shores. At the confluence of the Illinois, Missouri and Mississippi, the waters slow, the energy is vital and the sky is wide. The road trips have never stopped. They nourish my spirit. Farmer, artist, laborer—homestead, flat, harbor and square—I need to see the ways we build cities and live in them, work, worship and create. In “Prism of Shifting Dreams,” Eileen G’sell’s interview with Wing Young Huie on page 22 of this issue, the photographer relates, “What I’m trying to do is understand how things are—not how they should be. And to photograph in a way that invites the viewer to consider what they think.” Wing’s work resonates with us as we continue on our journey documenting the lives and work of artists living and working in the middle of America. There is a common thread that unites the lives of the artists we visit in these pages. Alongside a commitment to virtuosic work, they are making a contribution to building the kind of world they want to live in. Nina Ganci weaves a cloth of love and friendship. Lisa Luck paints portraits of visibility and connection. Zoey Cleary and Patrick Woodyard craft metal and leather into fair wages and new ideas of ethical commerce. Julia Sullivan and Allison Poindexter feed our souls. Wing Young Huie makes photos of our common bonds. Taylor Carter and Colin Klimesh mold color and clay into movies of our memories and visions of alternate futures. Tiana Clark teaches us to see where we have been blind. Thank you for opening these pages to take this journey with us.
Attilio D’Agostino EDITOR-IN- CHIEF
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TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S 14 Artists | Colin Klimesh & Taylor Carter 18 Artist | Lisa Luck 22 Photographer | Wing Young Huie 28 Chef | Julia Sullivan
Restaurateur | Allison Poindexter
36 Fashion | “Woven Together” 46 Designer | Nina Ganci 64 Entrepreneurs | Patrick Woodyard & Zoe Cleary 80 Poem | Tiana Clark
COVER PHOTO
Qun Liu in SKIF, St. Louis, Missouri. RIGHT
Oysters, Henrietta Red, Nashville, Tennessee. B AC K C O V E R
Zanaba in SKIF, St. Louis, Missouri. Photography:
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M AK ING SPACE A conversation with Colin Klimesh and Taylor Car ter of CK TC Ceramics. by KEA WILSON / Photography by ATTILIO D’AGOSTINO
CKTC Ceramics is comprised of just two artists: Cincinnatians Colin Klimesh and Taylor Carter. But everything they make pulses with a sort of wild collaborative energy that feels bigger than what two young Midwesterners should reasonably be able to create in a single cramped studio. Whether they’re sculpting sinuous vases in ‘90s-cartoon pinks or weed pipes elegant enough to be featured in the pages of Vogue, Klimesh and Carter ride the line between humor and high art. Roping in references from their favorite Instagram accounts to the 1980s Memphis design movement shows CKTC has spent time fleshing out their point of view. But they are only getting started. We chatted
with these hungry young artists as they begin to open up to an even wider world of influences. Taylor, you’re almost a decade younger than Colin, and you started as his studio assistant when you were still an undergraduate. What’s it been like moving into a creative partnership?
It’s been pretty smooth, because we both have our strengths. Colin’s really good at the 3-D printing part, which is a big part of our process, and I do a lot of the design stuff—trying to figure out where we could go next, what’s new. Colin helps bring that to life. We do the production together—the cleaning, the casting, the glazing. We play off of each other’s strengths and weaknesses.
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Colin Klimesh: That’s true. I’ll say something like, “We
about all the stuff in the city, and I just realized how connected everything is. I told him, “You should go to this restaurant! And this company does their furniture, but they also have a store. And the store sells this person’s work, and they also made the dishes for that other restaurant …” It goes on and on.
should really make something that does this”—say, something that you can put whiskey in—and then Taylor will say, “But wouldn’t it be funny if that flask was bright pink and ceramic?” My first starting point is always the function, and Taylor says, “Cool, but I’m going to turn that sideways and make it a little bit wonky.”
Tell me about the collaborative studio space you’re
What’s inspiring you lately?
TC: I’ve really missed working in a communal studio
I’m really into neoclassical ceramics, but I feel like a lot of it has been done so many times over. I’m trying to find ways to flip those shapes into a more fun aesthetic. Like color—I love midcentury design and the colors that were popular during that period, the chartreuses and mustards.
lately. Our old studio was okay, but it’s a little dusty and grimy in there, so it’s not a place where I want to hang out, and that doesn’t motivate you to show up every day. I wanted to create a space that we wanted to be in.
starting, OTOT. TC:
This is the kind of opportunity that Cincinnati offers. If you need a space, and you don’t have a lot of cash, you can get something that’s not ideal, but you can make it better. We’ve definitely struggled through a lot of cold winters without heat and with gross bathrooms, and the whole time, we’ve just been putting those vibes out into the universe that we’re looking for something better. After a while, I think Taylor started to think, ‘We have to make that space.’ Once she got that in her mind, we knew we’d be taking a risk, but we needed to do it. CK:
Up until the last five years or so, ceramics, as a medium, has never been able to cycle through and reference ideas. But Instagram—and the way it lets you view the work of young ceramic artists—has changed all of that; we can look inside one another’s studios, check out processes in a way we just couldn’t before, and nod to each other’s work a lot more easily now. I can look at a concrete artist who did something really cool and say, “Wow, how can I arrive at that?” I could gorge myself on material and process forever. That’s exciting to me. CK:
What excites you about being an artist in Cincinnati? TC: Cincinnati is a really good place to be right now. There are a lot of cheap spaces where you can make work and organizations who are encouraging artists to keep up their momentum. When Attilio D’Agostino [ALIVE’s Editor-in-Chief] was here, I was telling him
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It’s been a lot of work, but it feels like things are lining up. Not just in terms of physically moving to this studio, but in terms of moving the business into the next stage. Maybe bringing on some help to do some larger projects, to be more nimble. TC:
Definitely. A lot of exciting things to come.
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GOOD FORTUNE MINNEAPOLIS ARTIST LISA LUCK WANTS TO TAKE YOUR PORTRAIT. by EILEEN G’SELL / Photography by ATTILIO D’AGOSTINO
Lisa Luck is a talker. Not a fast talker or a nervous talker or a talker who talks to take up space, but rather one whose neurological leaps and lands are verbalized at felicitous length. It would be more accurate to say she’s an out-loud ruminator—and that anyone would be lucky to catch an earful. “I’m doing more serious work than I ever have,” starts the Minneapolis visual artist. “Work under-toned with my experience as a woman navigating a world feeling isolated. As a person, I love sharing and connecting with people. I’ve been thinking a lot about how I can do my work and be honest with myself and also support the communities that are precious to me. I do that with my family, with how I treat my partner and peers, but also my work.” Here her voice slows a beat. “I’m trying to learn more about empathy and connecting with people who aren’t exact mirrors of my experience.” In between cogitative spurts like this one, Luck tends to sigh at her sudden gravity. “I can’t believe that was so emotional to me!” she laughs at one point.
Spanning media and methodology—whether fiveminute portraits painted in gouache, hand-painted art toys or “weird hand-drawn textiles in simple unisex shapes” through the fashion collaborative MegoLisaLand with designer Meg Browning—Luck’s creative output comes across as both droll and conscious, irreverent and celebratory. Pastel profiles of pensive children pop from a night-sky canvas; a mermaid angel with heavy brows hovers over a desert; nudes drawn in loopy strokes spread their legs and smile. Think Chagall meets Pipilotti Rist, or Picasso meets Elizabeth Peyton. Visually, her figuration betrays an interest in playfully upending gender norms whenever possible—especially when depicting female sexuality. “I love the new movement of women supporting each other and sharing instead of—to use this gross word—‘trumping’ each other,” Luck says. “I love that that is no longer the thing. I try to show those parts of me through sexual references, but also through portraiture. I feel luxurious that I can mix portraiture with my contemporary artwork.”
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Across the past five years, her practice has evolved from the need to self-express. Now, there’s a call to forge a kind of solidarity through the art of portraiture itself—a genre historically fraught with male renderings of female figures that can read as much as a lens on patriarchy than on the individual women represented. “I’m starting to do body-positive nudes,” Luck shares enthusiastically. “Lately I’ve been doing these types of portraits by request. I recently did a partial nude portrait of a transgender man who had just done top surgery—it was a really vulnerable piece, and I felt honored. I’m comfortable with nudity and bodies, which is ironic, because that’s not how I was brought up. “ Luck grew up in Connecticut and, after earning an MFA in illustration from the Maryland Institute College of Art, moved to the Twin Cities for love about 10 years ago. “I was about to move to San Diego, and I met my husband at the going-away party,” she explains. “The party was at a bar—a Connecticut biker bar, which was kind of magical. After dating long distance, I moved from California to Minneapolis—where he lived—in a couple of months.” Self-described as a “messy, all-over-theplace person,” Luck has implemented a disciplined schedule to sustain her creative life as a working mom. “Both my husband and I made the choice when we decided to have children that we were still going to have our professional lives, which has meant making space to figure out how I am going to do my art in the best way possible. I’m okay with failure, but I really want to succeed at this.” “Failure” is a word that comes up more than once—as a way to gauge the relative success of a new venture, rather than bemoan what doesn’t immediately take off. Planning her future in two-month increments, Luck balances long-term goals with improvisational instincts. “I didn’t used to be okay with failing at things, but now I think about something for a month, and if it’s good to go, I move forward. If it’s not, I throw it away.” At 33, Luck has lived a lot of professional and creative lives. In art school, she nannied for a child on the autism spectrum and eventually worked six years in the field of applied behavioral analysis and early childhood intervention. “I learned all of these basics of human interaction that I had never picked up on innately. I’m a thoughtful person, and I’ve been learning to basically do applied behavioral analysis on myself the last 15 years. Some things about my personality used to come across before as harsh or inappropriate, but I’ve learned to do different things to solve that problem.”
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As it turns out, such self-awareness has proven an asset to the act of capturing the spirits of others; Luck’s ability to swiftly gain trust among her portrait subjects is no small thing. “I’m the sort of person that people immediately tell their secrets to,” she admits. “In the grocery store, or wherever. I think I have a rigid way of thinking in some ways, so I try to be purposeful by being empathetic.” In an overtly anti-rigid way, her business Daughters and Sons is more than anything a means to market her skills as an artist who dons a shelf full of hats, though portraits remain her bread and butter. Typically completed at pop-up events at area businesses Luck supports, the portraits range in price from $25 to $65. “I use a gouache that usually comes in tubes and is really convenient to travel with,” she explains. “It dries in only three seconds. I set out my easel and paper varieties, and people just sign up. It’s how I sustain my business, but I also love it.” She also does acrylic on panel, typically for portrait commissions. “I’m out of my experimental media phase,” she goes on. “I’ve weeded out what doesn’t work for me. I love gouache on paper and pigmented paper—it sets the vibe immediately. I work with the paper—grounding the painting, putting the pigment on the canvas, setting the tone.” With a new art studio in Northeast Minneapolis, Luck will keep doing portraits but is expanding her purview in an organic manner with each new connection and creative venue. “I want to continue what I’m doing now, but just refine it,” she says. Part of her long-term plan is to tour with pop-ups in cities across the United States, but she’s also keeping busy at her home base—whether putting out a zine with Poliça’s Channy Leaneagh (with whom she earlier collaborated on an “anarcho-kids book” that is both “cute and thoughtful”), or working with Rachel Zaidman on “Pink and Blue for Me and You,” another children’s book due out soon. “One thing about Minneapolis is that there’s a really thriving female artist scene, as well as an emerging trans and non-binary scene. That’s not why I came here, but it’s definitely a happy spot that I’ve been involved in lately.” In a lot of ways, Luck is living the dream—humbly, happily making a living by honoring the faces, bodies and personalities of those both like and unlike her. “I’m proud. I really am,” she responds when asked how it feels to keep at it. “I’m proud of myself—and a lot of other people, too. You have to look at your good qualities, and you have to push forward. That’s what I believe.”
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PR ISM OF SHIFTING DR E A MS Meet Minnesota photographer Wing Young Huie. by EILEEN G’SELL / Photography by ATTILIO D’AGOSTINO
The era of globalization, for better or worse, has fostered a sense that the distinction between exotically foreign and cozily local might amount to a series of clicks on a screen. We, in a sense, know our global neighbors, because we can see them—all the time and everywhere, in stunning HD clarity. But if the past two years have taught the United States anything, it is the extent to which rapid access to the unknown does not necessarily lead to understanding our neighbors, be they continents away or a few alleys over. For three decades plus, Minnesota photographer Wing Young Huie has rejected assumptions that to simply see is to know and understand. Born in Duluth to parents who emigrated from the Guangdong Province of China, Huie has long been invested in questions of identity, ethnicity and the dignity of the human experience, no matter the utter indignities thrown its way. His latest project, “Chinese-ness,” investigates the intersections of Chinese and American cultural expectations. In 2018, Huie was awarded the McK-
night Distinguished Artist Award, the highest prize for an artist in the state of Minnesota—and the first photographer recipient in the award’s esteemed history. We spoke with him in early autumn, a few months before his “Chinese-ness” book was due for release. Congratulations on the recent McKnight award. What does it mean to get this kind of honor from your home state?
It’s a great honor—it’s a little surreal, actually. There are so many artists out there in Minnesota that have done such wonderful work. I’m fortunate that what I do—photography—is a very accessible medium. My work is very public, so I think I get a lot more attention than a lot of other artists. What’s interesting is I’m a self-taught photographer. My degree is in journalism—I trained to be a reporter. I don’t have any formal training. I took an introto-photography class and one-week workshop with
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Garry Winogrand, an iconic news photographer. I was 23 years old, and that’s when I decided to be a photographic artist. Tell me more about your most recent project,
I brought an interpreter—Stephen Zhong—to help with the dialect. He really understood what I was trying to do and became a kind of collaborator and my friend. He said, “You should wear the clothes of a migrant, because your father was a migrant.”
“Chinese-ness.” How did you choose your subjects?
All different kinds of ways—it’s a broad look at identity through the prism that I call “Chinese-ness.” Maybe a third of the book was taken during a recent trip to China. Some of the photographs are from different places around the United States, and the rest in Minnesota. All the people I photographed, I did not know well. Some I knew a little bit, and I met them in all different ways. I meet a lot of people in what I do—a lot of educational workshops and presentations at schools and businesses—thinking about who would give an interesting perspective on “Chinese-ness.” How did you come up with the concept of “I Am You,” a creative methodology—but perhaps also a philosophy?
Going to China for the first time in 2010 made me think, “What if?” What if my family had never left China? What if I had not gone to college? What if I was not the youngest of six and instead had to work 60 hours a week, like my older brothers, at my father’s restaurant? Or what if I had turned out like mother wanted me to turn out—married to a Chinese woman with a bunch of children? I started this process of wearing other people’s clothes and sometimes photographing myself wearing them, calling the series “I Am You.” I had a list. I wanted to photograph Chinese men whose lives I could have had—not just any random Chinese guy. For instance, I am a native, born-and-bred Minnesotan, but I’d never been ice fishing, on a snowmobile, hunting or worn camo. So I wanted to find middle-aged Chinese men who did those things. And finally I met someone who said, “Hey! I know this Chinese doctor who’s this hunter.” I had a great time getting to know him and photographing him—even hunting! Sometimes it took months to meet someone who introduced me to someone else. In China, for instance,
We went to Guangzhou railroad station, which is one of the busiest in China. Millions of immigrants pass through every month, trying to find work in the South, where there are many factories. When we got there, hundreds of migrants were on the steps waiting to go somewhere. We were also with a young reporter from China Daily—he pointed to a guy at the top of the stairs and said, “That guy kinda looks like you.” When we reached the top of the steps, I thought about how strange it would be for this guy [if I approached him]. The absurdity of it overwhelmed me. But he agreed—and he loved the idea of telling the story of being an immigrant for 30 years. He left home at 17—about the same age my father left China to come to America. The experience gave me a better understanding of my father, who I did not know well because he worked so hard. All the questions I never got to ask my parents, who have long passed away, I got to find out through other people’s stories included this book. What it’s like to leave everything you know and go to another place and become an American—or not become an American. I noticed many of the subjects are holding little chalkboards with words in either English or Chinese. The chalkboards seem to be a motif across certain projects—what prompted the idea?
I’ve been a documentary photographer for over 30 years. With the University Avenue project, in St. Paul, I started to think that no matter how good a photograph was, it was still only a surface description. So I decided to give people chalkboards and ask them open-ended questions—like, “Who are you? How do you think other people see you, and what don’t they see? What challenges have you faced in life?” I did that for part of “Chinese-ness”—to people in
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China and a few people here. In China, I asked, “What was your dream as a child, and what is your dream now?” At one point I had a group of college students from China visiting my gallery in Minneapolis. I asked, “What is the Chinese dream? The American dream? What is your dream?” The Chinese dream was to be more strong, to rebuild the dynasty, to be a developed country. The American dream was to rule the world! And then the individual dream was to be an artist, a designer, to do what they want to be happy. You have published several photographic monographs. Publishing seems an integral part of your overall practice.
“Chinese-ness” is my seventh book. A lot of my books were projects first. “Lake St, USA,” for instance, was a catalog of the project. “Chinese-ness” was meant to be a book first—it’s more personal. A third of it is text, interviewing a lot of the people in the photographs—their words, their quotes. Some of the people wrote their own stories. It’s wonderful to have a photography book so that the project lives on. As an artist, I do a lot of different things to make a living, and the books help get my work out into the world. Who are some of your influences, in art or outside of it?
I read a lot. A lot of articles inform what I do and give me ideas for projects. As far as specific individuals, it’s more like I take a little bit of this and a little bit of that from different mediums. Sometimes I’m inspired by the people I photograph—like Jarrelle Barton, whom I met when looking for material for “Chinese-ness.” I went to a Chinese New Year celebration at the Mall of America. It was very informal. I saw this man—a young black man—playing a very traditional Chinese instrument. He was surrounded my maybe 20 Chinese people, and they were very interested in what he was playing. After he played a song, they would ask him questions in English, and
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he would reply in Mandarin. You could see the looks on their faces shift from amusement to amazement. As I came to find out, Jarrelle grew up in Cleveland and had suffered trauma as a child. He would go to the public library to check out music CDs. He checked out a Chinese music CD—and heard this instrument, the guzheng, for the first time. It was a cross between a zither and a harp, and he felt a deep connection that he’s never felt since. So he immediately created his replication of the instrument out of a wooden tea tray and tied some guitar strings to it. His grandmother saw how devoted he was to playing it, and she broke down and bought him one. Then he opened it up and all the instructions were in Chinese. So he taught himself Chinese to play this instrument—over the course of the year he taught himself the language and how to play this instrument. Soon he called this guy who’s a master in Prairie Lake, Minnesota, and moved across the country to study with him. Chinese audiences were appreciative. But sometimes they would come up to him and say, “You shouldn’t play this. You’re not Chinese.” But that instrument was a way to survive. This idea of transcending identity and race to be what you want to be, rather than what society says you should be—that is of interest to me. Society reminds him everyday of his blackness, and yet he chooses to play this instrument. What is appropriate and what is appropriation is something he has to face everyday. What I’m trying to do is understand how things are—not how they should be. And to photograph in a way that invites the viewer to consider what they think. For a lot of my life, I’ve been trying to understand how my Chinese-ness collides with my Minnesota-ness and my American-ness. At some point, my Chinese-ness doesn’t define me, and my lack of Chinese-ness doesn’t define me.
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FISH OUT OF WATER Meet the women behind Nashville’s Henrietta Red. by KEA WILSON / Photography by ATTILIO D’AGOSTINO
The best oyster you’ll eat this year is served 400 miles from the nearest coast, in an understated white building in the heart of Nashville’s Germantown neighborhood. There are no seashells on the menu, no mermaids on the walls. Instead, there’s a clean, tiled dining room flooded with natural light, the subtle smell of a wood-burning oven in the next room and a menu that challenges you to think more expansively about everything the flavors of the heartland can be.
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The restaurant is Henrietta Red, and the coowners behind it—general manager Allison Poindexter and chef Julia Sullivan—are challenging preconceptions in all kinds of ways. As women restaurateurs in a still male-dominated industry delivering seafood-focused food in urban Tennessee, there’s no doubting their boldness. But what’s more remarkable about Poindexter and Sullivan—as well as about Henrietta Red itself—is how they marry that sense of daring-
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ness with grace, delivering a dining experience that is all the more startling for its confident simplicity. That Henrietta Red’s story started in New York City makes the Nashville staple even more of a feat. Poindexter was running the cooking school at an event space and café in Chelsea; Sullivan was her boss, fresh off stints at Per Se and Pinewood Social. “One of the things we did all of the time after work was go to oyster bars,” Poindexter remembers. “We were young and on a budget, and they always had discounted oysters and cheap bubbles. We bonded over our love of that style of food.” That sense of eating as a bonding experience is crucial to the restaurant they built together, too. Sullivan’s created a dynamic menu focused around small plates and raw-bar staples that jigsaw-puzzle together into something astounding, no matter which combination you choose. “Truthfully, the traditional kind of menu format is not even the way I like to eat when I eat out,” Sullivan admits. “I don’t usually order a dish where protein is the focus of the meal. I prefer everything to be pieced together, where the whole menu—if we order eight random dishes and share them, they’ll all come together beautifully.” Beautifully but not necessarily neatly. Henrietta Red encourages guests to eat with their hands, if not outright play with their food; oysters are slurped, as are the elevated, toothpick-skewered Jell-O shots that have earned the restaurant’s bar as many raves as its food menu. “There’s a kind of convivial nature to the experience here,” Poindexter says. “We don’t want to take ourselves too seriously.” Yet for a relaxed middle-price-point restaurant that aims to make guests feel welcomed enough to become regulars, Henrietta Red has the fine-dining crowd excited, too. Sullivan was named one of Food and Wine Magazine’s Best New Chefs in 2018; the restaurant made the list of finalists for Bon Appétit’s Best New
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Restaurants, as well as being named a semi-finalist for the James Beard Award in the same category. That’s no doubt because of Sullivan’s extraordinary flavors. She’s always attuned to seasonal, hyper-local produce—she’s a Nashville native, as were her grandparents before her, Henrietta and Red Sullivan; the restaurant is named for them. But her flavors extend past the Tennessee border, including expertly sourced ingredients from all three of the nation’s coasts. It’s thrilling to listen to her detail how her Seattle oysters are planted on ropes when they’re still microscopic—“like seeds,” she says—before being harvested and shipped to her kitchen door. But a noted portion of Henrietta Red’s success is due to Poindexter, too, and the fresh outsider’s perspective she brings to their corner of Germantown. She grew up outside of Washington, D.C., and her first trip to the Music City didn’t leave a good impression—an old friend brought her to a college football game straight off the plane. “It was a little overwhelming,” she admits. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m a fish out of water here.’ But I did come visit again, and you know, you realize that most of the time, the South moves at a little bit of a slower pace.” Sullivan’s shared Chicken Liver Mousse is a dish that encapsulates that sense of warm southern slowness, as well as Henrietta Red’s sense of dynamism and surprise. It’s one of the few items on the menu that centers on a protein that doesn’t come from the sea. “I’m not a meat fanatic, but I’m a chicken-liver fanatic,” Sullivan says. “This one has duck fat and cream and brandy, and it’s extremely rich and nicely balanced, but it’s smooth and creamy and kind of luxurious. We put it into a bowl and cover it with a layer of galette that we change every two months. Right now, it’s Concord grape, but we’ve had melon, we’ve had apple, we’ve had cantaloupe, we’ve had mushroom … the liver never changes, but the galette on top does.” Two things in balance, complementing one another even as they’re ever changing: it might remind you of the women behind Henrietta Red.
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Chicken Liver Mousse Yield: 1.5 quarts
Ingredients
Method
500g chicken livers
1.
Preheat oven to 300F.
240g duck fat
2.
In a Vitamix, blend the livers, fats, yolks and seasonings. Pour the cognac and cream into the mixture and blend again.
3.
Strain through a fine-mesh strainer and fill clean, eight-ounce bowls halfway full. Wrap each bowl individually with plastic wrap and place in a baking pan. Pour boiling water into the baking pan until the water reaches about a centimeter below the rims of the bowls.
4.
Carefully place the pan in the oven and bake until the internal temperature of the mousse reaches 150F, about one hour.
5.
Remove pan from the oven, and remove bowls from the pan. Cool at room temperature, then refrigerate.
6.
The next day, cover the tops of the mousse with a small amount of duck fat and chill.
7.
Serve with jam and toasted bread.
160g butter, melted and cooled 50g egg yolks (approx. 3 large) 18g kosher salt 5g pink salt 2g ground black pepper 30g cognac (alcohol burned off) 250g heav y cream additional duck fat as needed, for sealing
Mousse, lower right
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WOVEN TOGETHER A COLL ABOR ATION WITH SKIF IN ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI Photography by ATTILIO D’AGOSTINO
Caitlin Ward, Jarah Warren, Qun Liu, Dhoruba Shakur, DJ Kennedy and Zanaba MODELS:
ST YLISTS: Trudy Fogarty-Hayden and Michael Drummond
SKIF INTERNATIONAL
LONEWOLF COLLECTIVE
@skifintl
@lonewolfcollective
MICHAEL DRUMMOND
@xes4eyes Q LIU
@qliu.fashion
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Skif Hat, Dresses, Pant and Bag
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Skif Top, Pant and Bag + Lonewolf Collective Earrings, Br acelets and Rings
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THIS PAGE: Q Liu Beret and Shirt + Skif Cape OPPOSITE: Skif Shirt with appliquĂŠ illustr ations by Robe and Pant + Lonewolf Collective Earrings
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THE UNCONTA INABLE NINA GA NCI A CONVERSATION WITH DESIGNER AND OWNER OF SKIF INTERNATIONAL. by KEA WILSON / Photography by ATTILIO D’AGOSTINO
“I shouldn’t even use that ‘f’ word,” Nina Ganci says. “To me, it’s kind of redundant, and it doesn’t really say much of anything. The word is overused.” The “f” word Nina Ganci’s talking about is fashion. As designer and owner of St. Louis’ SKIF International, she has made a career at the cutting edge of style. Ganci has built a brand anchored in extraordinary knitwear. But what’s catapulted SKIF into the closets of Hollywood stars like Lily Tomlin isn’t about Ganci’s keen eye for color, texture and drape. Or, at least, that’s what she insists. “It’s not about my concept on what clothing should look like,” she says. “It’s more about what is important for something to do on a human figure, a body.” Or to put it another way: for SKIF, the design process isn’t really complete until another designer enters the room. And that designer is you.
Ganci has been turning the fashion world inside out since SKIF was founded in 1994. That’s shortly after she had the realization that the clothes available to buy in her native St. Louis weren’t cutting it. “I absolutely had to make my own clothes, because I didn’t want to wear anything that was in the store,” she says. “I knew that clothing had to change. And it has changed a lot since then—all for the better. I love that everybody has his or her own look, and it’s so easily accessible and everybody’s jumping in. It’s not like, ‘Too much is too much’; it’s like, ‘More is better.’” The notion that individual style is not just desirable but an actual, urgent necessity for modern life feels essential to SKIF’s identity as a brand. The name “SKIF” itself is an acronym for “Sweaters Knitted for Freedom,” and the SKIF website is peppered with quotes that bring to mind what inspired the designs (“… the privilege of making a difference, of introducing an element of unpredictability into the order of things. It is this, I believe, that makes
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us free.” –Alessandro Benetton). The photographed models don’t stand statuesque in their poses; they are photographed in motion, crouching and snarling and leaping and arching backwards across armchairs. Sometimes a little white dog wanders into the shot. And then there are the clothes themselves. Handpainted blouses in airy fabrics that seem to float across the body like mist over water. Touchable knits with Rorschach-blotch patterns that make you curious to decode the personality of the wearer. Crushed velvet, blue camouflage, African wax prints, a riot of colors and patterns that Ganci pairs together in thrilling ways. No garment is cinched in. No fabric is too stiff. There’s nothing that restricts the way the wearer can live and move. You’re even encouraged to wear pieces upside down, backwards, to transform a sweater into a shrug by flipping the head hole behind you if that’s the mood you’re in. “I don’t want to have to be altered to fit into an outfit,” Ganci says. “I want the outfit to fit me … That’s why we say at SKIF that you’re the sweater designer: because it’s your body that makes it look a certain way.” While Ganci started out making clothes for herself, she’s evolved into a designer who’s far more inspired by other bodies, other personalities and, to some extent, other worlds. It’s not surprising that her original ambition was not to design just clothes but whole environments—she says she switched to fashion from the interior-design program at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York simply because she “couldn’t draft”—or that she still brings such a broad-minded, open sensibility to her garments. After graduating from FIT, she journeyed to Japan, Italy and France, working in the industry and meeting as many inspiring people as she could, before settling back in St. Louis and founding SKIF. Like her clothing itself, Ganci says her leap to becoming a business owner wouldn’t have been possible without a lot of collaboration. “When I first started, everybody at SKIF was from another country except for me,” Ganci says. “[Their help] really made it pos-
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sible for me to have a company. It was mostly young women coming to St. Louis to learn English, from all over South America and Russia and Bosnia and Vietnam, and then there was a girl from Paris, a girl from Argentina … there were all kinds of people from all over the world.” While most of the SKIF team is a bit more local these days, she’s kept the “International” part of the name in homage to their beginnings. (And her own: Ganci’s parents are both from Italy.) When you walk into the virtually unmarked building nestled in St. Louis’ The Hill neighborhood and are introduced to SKIF’s expansive headquarters, you can feel a sense of cultural and creative exchange permeating the room. The boutique sales floor and the production studio flow into each other; a glorious bohemian mess of garment racks and overflowing sample boxes on one side of the room, heaps of Technicolor fabric and thrumming knitting machines on the other. The walls are covered with visual art made by Ganci’s friends, the fitting rooms hung with signed posters from creatives she’s outfitted (Cibo Matto’s effusive thank-you note from 1999 is particularly eye-catching). Ganci is particularly proud of the fact that SKIF devotes some of its space to incubating other designers. In a corner of the store they call Launch, Michael Drummond of “Project Runway” fame, among others, displays his work. Drummond also has a studio at SKIF, and he and many of the designers often collaborate with Ganci. “Birds of a feather flock together,” Ganci laughs. “We just kind of naturally are drawn to one another and appreciate each other’s work, and we see how we can symbiotically work with one another.” Ganci’s flock isn’t contained within the four walls of SKIF’s studio, either. She cites local restaurant owners as a particular inspiration—she even travelled to Morocco with a group of them recently, which resulted in a partnership with a Moroccan shoemaker who will be the first non-U.S.-based maker to contribute to her line. Other muses include local artist friends and her
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models (not all of them professionals; St. Louisans might be surprised to see waiters from local favorite Milque Toast decked out in the menswear line). And that’s not even to mention the inspiration she finds among the multi-disciplinary performers involved in the Artica outdoor art festival, which has gained a reputation as St. Louis’ answer to Burning Man. Ganci is a co-director. “I’m just very fortunately surrounded by very groovy people who do all kinds of things, from building giant statues that they burn, to dancers, to performers and clowns and things,” she says. But Ganci’s deeply personal approach to design isn’t always an easy sell in the capital-f Fashion world, which is sometimes slow to recognize that a particular voice is setting next year’s trend rather than committing today’s faux pas. Even her customers sometimes take a minute to catch on. “Sometimes I’ll just make the garment because I’ll see it will look amazing on a particular person, and it’ll end up in the collection because we all love it when we see it finished,” Ganci says. “But then we take it to market, and we don’t get a really warm response. And we all think, ‘What’s wrong with everybody? Why don’t they love this?’” Ganci’s response? The market will come around. “Often, a year later, those looks are, like, the numberone seller,” she laughs. “So it’s about timing; it’s about commitment to a style or a look and, sometimes, being patient to see what people say about it in time.” And if the market is still slow to respond, SKIF adapts—or not. “Sometimes, there are ideas we’ll have, and I won’t care what people say,” Nina says. “I just want to have it in the line just to look at it, because it makes everything else look good. For example, African fabric: My customers don’t seem to think that’s a cool idea, but I really don’t care. I want to see that color and vibrancy mix in my collection.” That tension—between what the customer wants
and what the maker wants to create, between the realities of keeping a business viable and following the uncontainable pull of your own inspiration—is very real for a business like SKIF. But when asked about the difficulties of keeping a global business successful while still making daring, one-of-kind garments, Ganci, again, turns the question inside out. “It’s easy,” she says. “If you want an item that doesn’t have any personality and could be made by anyone, go to one of the chain stores and buy it for a whole lot less. Since I can’t afford to make a garment for a low price point, I have to offer unique hand touches that other methods of making clothes can’t even imagine doing. I don’t look at numbers. I look at garments.” The idea that creating unique, hand-touched work is not just an asset to a business but a necessity to survive both creatively and professionally—that’s rare in an industry that’s obsessed with volume and margins. Makers like Ganci may be slowly changing culture—and the future of fashion might be more interesting for it. When asked what she sees for the future of SKIF itself, Ganci has a fascinating answer. She remembers the final evening of the Artica festival, when the crowd gathered around a huge wooden sculpture called “Our Lady of Artica,” a womanly shape with enormous wings reaching into the dark. And then they set the sculpture on fire and watched her burn together. “And I just thought, ‘That is where the word fashion could come into use,’” Ganci says. “The effigy was so glorious and just huge, and when she was on fire, the people all just kind of faded into the ground layer. I thought, if everybody had on wings—or hats that were three feet tall—I thought … that’s where the experiment of fashion needs to blow up and become real, become useful. This fitting in, and being gray, and wearing things that make me look like everyone else, so that they don’t think I’m not like everyone else, has got to come to an end.”
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PATR ICK WOODYA R D A ND
ZOE CLE A RY Nisolo shoemakers are challenging labor prac tices and traditional design in Nashville. by KEA WILSON / Photography by ATTILIO D’AGOSTINO
If you’re one kind of customer, you’ll look at a pair of Nisolo shoes and see minimal lines over a stacked leather heel, a silhouette that’s simple enough to take you from work to an outdoor music festival on a crisp night in Nashville. If you’re another kind of customer, you’ll focus on the stitching details around the tongue, wondering about the artisan shoemaker in Peru who, not long ago, held a piece of waxed suede in their hands and turned it into something beautiful. You may wince a little and wonder if that artist was paid what they’re worth.
Nisolo—the Spanish translation of “never alone”—is a radically ethical slow-fashion company that moves just a beat quicker than its peers. And to a growing number of American consumers who are tired of compromising their conscience every time they buy a great pair of shoes, it’s a breath of fresh air. The unique shoe company is the brainchild of cofounders Patrick Woodyard and Zoe Cleary, whose vision for Nisolo is as thoughtful and singular as their designs. But that doesn’t mean that their path to building their brand was clear every step of the way.
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The story starts in Trujillo, Peru, where Woodyard lived after spending a few years neck-deep in undergraduate global economics and business classes at Ole Miss. As a student, he’d discovered two passions that aren’t always known for being compatible: entrepreneurship and ending intergenerational poverty. Summers in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and East Africa had shown him how easily families could be trapped in cycles of labor exploitation; meanwhile, his business textbooks were teaching him economic principles that he knew could just as easily be used to exploit workers. “After I graduated, the plan was always to go to business school,” Woodyard says. “But I knew I wanted to first take some time off and work in a Spanish-speaking country, in a similar field to where I’d worked before. So I moved to Peru, and I got a job with a microfinance organization.” That microfinance job brought him to the home of a woman named Doris, who was working to support a family largely on the income from a convenience store she ran out of her living room. “One day I was working with her, helping to balance her books, and all of a sudden, there was all this noise going on in the back of her house,” Woodyard remembers. “She let me know that her husband was a shoemaker, and he was working back there. So I went back and met her husband, Willan, and I was just blown away by the shoes he was making. They looked like handmade leather dress shoes from Italy, and this was in a very humble home on the outskirts of the city.” The only thing more astonishing to Woodyard than Willan’s talent was the scale of the family’s troubles. “They really were operating in pretty unsafe working
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conditions and only making pennies,” Woodyard says. “They struggled to provide for their four sons.” The microfinance firm could assist the family in the short term, but he began to wonder whether there might be a more lasting way to help Doris and Willan—and create a business that had the potential to show the rest of the fashion industry that perpetuating poverty in places like Peru wasn’t simply the price we pay for style. Meanwhile on another continent, Cleary was having a reckoning of her own. Fresh off a master’s degree in fashion merchandising at LIM College, she’d dove headfirst into New York City’s design world, working for fashion companies valued in the billions. But she also found herself in the midst of conversations that troubled her. “I struggled sitting in on meetings and hearing the discussions about needing to negotiate shaving pennies off of already very low landed costs from our factories in Vietnam and China,” Cleary says. “I started questioning some of the practices that were very normal in fashion companies.” Cleary hadn’t entered the fashion world to participate in the mistreatment of strangers an ocean away. She’d fallen in love with design, in part, because she’d seen firsthand at a young age how fashion could transform lives for the better, even at the lowest reaches of the supply chain. “After college, my best friend and I started a swimsuit company working with small-scale seamstresses in Mexico,” she says. “It gave me my first glimpse at empowerment through job creation; I watched our head seamstress build her family a new kitchen in their home from the money she earned making our swimsuits.” After some soul-searching, Cleary decided to take the
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leap out of the high-dollar design world and into the universe of ethical fashion. And that was right around the time a close friend introduced her to a college classmate who was working in microfinance in Peru. He had a crazy idea: to start his own shoe company.
“You can have high-quality products and also compete from a price-point perspective, but at the same time really treat people and the planet in the same way that you treat your end consumer,” Woodyard says. “And it’s not that expensive for us to do that.”
That college friend, of course, was Patrick—and after selling off her furniture in New York, Cleary got on a plane to Trujillo, Peru, in June of 2011. Fast forward to today, and she and Patrick lead a Nashville-headquartered business that’s doubled almost every year since its inception and currently employs roughly 400 people from Peru to Kenya to Mexico, all while building a brand that’s quickly becoming synonymous with classic shoes and accessories that work with virtually any item in your closet.
“I’m excited about the day when a company doesn’t have to be one or the other—where fashion brands are innately ethically minded—where this can be an assumption because it is the norm,” Cleary adds. “Those people who go deeper into our brand can, and they become our best brand champions.”
Many of their customers don’t realize the depth of the Nisolo story. That’s because after its first few years, the Nisolo team had an uncomfortable realization: that they were putting the story of their process over their product, and it was hurting their sales. “If you went to our homepage, you’d see pictures of the shoemakers below every product, a bit of a story of how each shoe was made,” Woodyard remembers. “Obviously, I think that’s great, but ultimately, we began to recognize that when you market yourself that way, there’s a customer that starts to question the integrity of the product itself; your shoes start to feel more like a giveback product than a product that’s great intrinsically.” It was a painful revelation for a CEO who came to fashion through microfinance. But Woodyard recognized that Nisolo could keep ethical production central to their mission only if they succeeded in a competitive marketplace—and if they wanted to achieve their larger vision of influencing other fashion brands, they needed to make not just the best slow-fashion shoes out there, but your favorite pair of oxfords or chukka boots, period.
So what would you see if you went deeper into Nisolo’s process? You’d see that the shoemaker Woodyard met in that back room in Trujillo, Willan, is now a factory supervisor. You’d see workers who have seen an average 120 percent pay increase since coming to work for Nisolo, according to Woodyard—143 percent for women—launching not just workers but whole families into better lives. He’s particularly proud of the fact that 100 percent of the children of workers in Nisolo-owned factories are currently enrolled in school, in countries where many children are forced to abandon their education to enter the workforce. He’s even seen Nisolo’s earliest employees, like Willan, send their children on to university. And he reports that 100 percent of those college students are the first in their families ever to attend. “What we’re focused on is, ‘How do we break this cycle of poverty?’” Woodyard says. “We know that most workers in the fashion industry don’t earn a living wage, that 1 out of every 6 people works in the fashion industry in the entire world. We know that the fashion industry is one of the most polluting industries. I look at that, and I don’t just see brokenness—I see the potential for change.” But Cleary and Woodyard realized that change wouldn’t be achieved simply by raising wages. “I saw
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this firsthand about a year after starting Nisolo, when I visited the home of one of Nisolo’s founding shoemakers in Trujillo and learned about a loan that he had recently acquired from a loan shark,” Cleary remembers. “Not only had he acquired this high-interest-rate loan, but he had spent it all on a home remodeling that he could not afford—he was only 50 percent through the building of his house, and now he could not pay the monthly payments on the loan and didn’t have a completed home to live in.” It was dark echo of what Cleary had seen that seamstress in Mexico achieve during her bathing-suit-designing days. So the team resolved to be better. They started offering financial-education classes to their workers and began asking a deeper set of questions about their needs beyond a fair wage alone. “Our programming has evolved to also offer trainings on healthy eating; how to utilize the company-sponsored health care plan; physical fitness; how to reduce stress; free technical trainings; weekly English classes; and discounts with partner university programs to encourage professional development and ongoing educational opportunities,” Cleary says. They pursued similar programs when the company outgrew their Peruvian factory; Woodyard says they learned even more from the ethical manufacturing facilities they partner with in Mexico and Kenya. It’s a refreshingly holistic response in a slow-fashion industry that’s sometimes surprisingly slow to evolve their initial goals. “I do think there’s been a hard push in the industry towards more sustainability. We’re not speaking some bizarre language anymore,” Woodyard says. He credits that evolution in large part to consumers, who have become more aware of how powerful their choice of where to spend their money can be. “People are starting to realize it’s cool to be a good person, I guess,” he laughs. Or maybe they’ve simply realized that you can have your cake and eat it, too. With responsible brands like Nisolo making covetable shoes at accessible prices, the decision to support fair labor and environmental practices is easier than it’s been in human history. And it will get even easier as Nisolo continues to innovate and push their design sensibilities just as hard as they’re pushing for better supply-chain practices. Cleary, who recently began splitting her time between Nashville and Ojai, California, says she “can feel the exposure to the beauty of untouched nature [in my new home] inspiring my design work. The colors in particular are so perfect in their subtle, raw and becoming way … I also feel a pull toward functionality and authenticity—waxed suedes and rubber soles that hold up to weather and are comfortable to travel in while still looking good.” In 20 years, we might live in a world where every owner is like Woodyard and Cleary, and every shoemaker like Willan is on a path out of poverty, because of—not despite—their employers. Until then, we know where we’ll be buying our next pair of perfect leather boots.
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Virtue Signaling, Wisconsin
by TIANA CLARK
You couldn’t know this loneliness… – N ATA L I E E I L B E R T
My first night in Madison cool, less sticky. The street
the air was different— was quiet, weirdly stagnant.
Our house, a pale yellow. I straddled the felt ice chip between both lakes
isthmus, like frozen lace.
I’m hyper visible now, so seen, so everywhere, then suddenly nowhere—so much so, I became Muzak to my own face. Now I’m being followed inside a grocery store. Down each aisle, then back again. Now I’m being stalked inside a restaurant. I switch seats. of this town scorch
But it does not matter. I feel it all: the eyeballs the back of my neck, skin already darker there.
I want to pluck these manicured lawns
all the signs that read:
I see stapled across Black Lives Matter.
I don’t believe you. There is a sign you buy because you want so badly to believe in what it has to say, and then there is a sign you buy because you want others to believe you are brave. A sign can’t save I watch
my life? as you watch me
as my white students watch me I watch me than when I first moved here. my doctor said. for the bitter winter to end. person to pass me. Most days I wait and we hold the gaze. simply
Most days Most days
You will not spare me. I watch
watch me, smaller now Lost a quarter of an inch I wait I wait for another black
Most days for another black person
they never come. to save me
We do not smile or lie. A simple nod saves my life.
Tiana Clark is the author of “I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood” (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), her first full-length poetry collection, which won the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. She is also the author of “Equilibrium” (Bull City Press, 2016). Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from The New Yorker, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review and elsewhere. “Virtue Signaling, Wisconsin” is reprinted with permission from The Los Angeles Review.
VOLUME 17 ISSUE 4
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