ALIVE Magazine Issue 1 2019

A L I V E M AG A Z I N E V 18 . 01

OH IL

CUR ATOR POET

A L IC E

TIANA

G R AY

CLARK

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S T I T E S ARTIST

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ARTIS T S

REBECCA

DA N I E L L E

BLEVINS

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MN

A N D

CHEF

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K E V I N

MC C OY

R E S TAU R AT EU R

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MN

ENTREPRENEUR

CHRISTINA

A R T I S T S A N D C R E AT I V E S I N T H E M I D D L E O F A M E R I C A

NGUYEN

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G R E G

BE NS ON

BIRK

GRUDEM

The lives and work of artists, activists, writers, designers and creative entrepreneurs in the middle of America.

L E T T E R F ROM T H E E DI TOR There is no archeological record of weaponry, armies or a warrior class at Cahokia, a pre-American city whose footprint sits directly across the Mississippi River from modern-day St. Louis. Instead, we’re learning how the Cahokia people built their society on the sharing of knowledge.

A thousand years before Europeans set foot in North America, indigenous people of the Mississippian era built an urban center at the confluence of the Mississippi, Missouri and Illinois rivers. The city’s most notable lasting features are large, earthen, pyramid-like mounds that are now a UNESCO World Heritage site.

The vast art, spiritual and trading center included hand-tool and garment manufacturing, coppersmiths, a market quarter and dense residential neighborhoods. Their sphere of influence stretched from what is now Minnesota in the north, Pennsylvania in the east, Oklahoma in the west, and south down the meandering Mississippi to the Gulf Coast.

Until Philadelphia’s population surpassed 40,000 in the 1780s, Cahokia stood as the largest metropolitan area to have grown up on the continent.

Navigating the waterways of the middle of America, the Cahokia people traveled far and wide, teaching their neighbors how to make objects and grow crops, then inviting them to visit—a pre-Columbian open-source architecture for a peaceful society.

In “Pull No Punches, Waste No Words” on page 20 of this issue, Eileen G’Sell dives into the work and world of St. Louis artists Kevin and Danielle McCoy. We are confronted by their pieces that challenge what we think we know about ourselves and our society. Does their American flag emblazoned with the slogan “Everything Is Alt Right” soothe complicity in solidarity with our righteous anger, or challenge us to investigate our acceptance of and comfort with longstanding historic systems of racial oppression?

Alice Stites travels the middle of America curating works of contemporary art at 21c Museum Hotels with galleries that are free for all and open 24 hours a day. Clay is a spiritual portal that connects us to life and earth through the simultaneously pensive and whimsical mind of artist R ebecca Blevins.

We learn from Greg Benson that a holistic approach to sustainability can be discovered through play. In fact, the two ideas may be inseparable. The work of poet Tiana Clark reveals tenderness.

There are lessons of joy, community and welcome in Christina Nguyen and Birk Grudem’s creative approach to food and hospitality. And what do we learn about love, devotion and judgement when poet Hanif Abdurr aqib’s words suggest we hold up a mirror to ourselves?

Attilio D’Agostino EDITOR-IN- CHIEF

@_attilio

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TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

TENNESSEE

14 Artist | Rebecca Blevins MISSOURI

20 Artists | Danielle & Kevin McCoy MINNESOTA

26 Chef & Restaurateur | Christina Nguyen & Birk Grudem ILLINOIS

32 Poet | Tiana Clark

MIDDLE OF AMERICA

36 Fashion | Hackwith OHIO

46 Curator | Alice Gray Stites MINNESOTA

62 Entrepreneur | Greg Benson OHIO

80 Poem | Hanif Abdurraqib

COVER PHOTO

North Shore of Lake Superior, Minnesota RIGHT

Kevin McCoy in his studio, St. Louis, Missouri B AC K C O V E R

Bree Smith in Four Eyes Ceramics Photography:

Attilio D’Agostino

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TN

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THE SPIR ITUA L POW ER OF THE FUNCTIONA L

A conversation with ar tist Rebecca Blevins.

by JORIE JACOBI / Photography by ATTILIO D’AGOSTINO

Nashville-based ceramicist Rebecca Blevins was working on one of the largest pieces she’s attempted to date, propelling past the threshold of her comfort zone, driven by curiosity. What would happen, she wondered, if she heaved 25 pounds of clay onto a pottery wheel and fashioned it into a massive bowl before firing it?

The resulting creation measured nearly 3 feet high and was intended to serve as the base for an even larger sculptural feat—until it unceremoniously exploded in the kiln.

“I pushed it too fast,” Blevins says, with a rueful laugh. “There are always setbacks in ceramics. Things break and explode. You’re tripping over something or smashing it on accident, and you need to make multiples of whatever you’re working on. I’ve definitely broken more pieces than I’ve completed.”

They who select clay must somehow accept the probability that a high percentage of what they make will fail. Leaning in, and failing forward in a way that’s unfamiliar is the best scenario one can hope for. Applied broadly, the metaphor symbolizes the life of a working artist almost too perfectly: they who live for what has previously been left untreaded.

Which makes it all the more special when examining one of Blevins’ pieces: perfectly smooth, hollowed-out vessels alongside more experimental works, like plates and pots repeatedly patterned with an illustration of a

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girl’s face, outlined in black. Delicate clay chain links are also a motif to which she often returns, frequently incorporating them into bowls and vessels. Deeply regal, they sit on top of carefully made ceramic pedestals, harnessing the spiritual power that may live in a simple utilitarian object.

“It’s hard for me to try and make something that isn’t functional in some way. Even if it’s just a tiny dish you can use to burn incense, or even some of the taller vessels,” she says. “I love the idea of creating something that’s part of a daily ritual. Like a morning cup of coffee. It’s my small way of being part of someone else’s life.”

When Blevins was just beginning her career in the arts, she began by studying photography and art history at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, not far from the small town in Illinois where she spent much of her childhood. Before that, her family had settled in Elizabethton, Tennessee, which was actually home to one of Blevins’ first exposures to professional artistry: The town hosts an annual spring craft fair and art festival, which she attended growing up. She still often does.

An old soul at heart, in school Blevins was discouraged by the inescapable shift from analog to digital photography, which removed the ritualistic, tactile process of developing film by hand. “I felt like the real practice of actually doing it was taken away,” she says.

“So I naturally drifted towards ceramics, as something that would take up that missing space.”

Blevins graduated with a degree in art history, and her commitment to life as a professional artist in the time since has deepened alongside her partner, Brett Douglas Hunter, who has been a working artist for more than 20 years. “Being with him, there’s no other option apart from being creative

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and supporting yourself with your own work. He’s definitely been the most influential person on me,” says Blevins, as she discusses Hunter’s large, whimsical cement sculptures.

She recalls helping him paint some of the works that appear in a recent collection, made up of mediumto large-scale pieces modeled after animals, folklore and the human figure. At once vibrant and bawdy, one piece even looks like piles of colorful turds with fanciful expressions—which is corroborated by the title of the piece: “Turds.” Without directly mentioning it, Hunter’s pieces seem to say that the contemporary art world, often hyper-academic, could do a lot worse than a few colorful excrements on display.

One of his most provocative sculptures yet is a giant, concrete turquoise-colored chair with an erect penis right in the center, which Blevins also assisted with— and they had a blast doing it. “That’s another reason I’m drawn to work on a larger scale,” says Blevins. “I see how much fun it is for him.” They plan to fill their yard with Hunter’s buoyant, spirited pieces.

In 2017, Blevins posted a photo of herself on social media from the Women’s March in Nashville, during which she held a cardboard sign that read “Fucked with no orgasm again,” all in capital letters. It feels like a linguistic incarnation of one of Hunter’s sculptures. “Women so often don’t expect their own sexual fulfillment, which spills out into other areas of our lives. That’s what that sign is really about,” she says.

It’s reflective of the kind of art and mentality she desires to perpetuate: a celebration of the human spirit, regardless of the traits of the body carrying it.

“More than anything, I try to be around people who are supportive of one another. To me, that’s the most important thing: be supportive, even if you don’t know or understand what they’re going through.”

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PULL NO PUNCHES, WASTE NO WOR DS How St. Louis duo WORK /PL AY humbly channels greatness.

by EILEEN G’SELL / Photography by ATTILIO D’AGOSTINO

“THERE ARE NO TROPHIES FOR RESISTANCE” reads an all-cap tower of stenciled text, “ONLY OPEN REBUKE.” The font is serifed, the words are black and “RESISTANCE” is split into its Webster syllables upon a hanging black banner. Against a white gallery wall of painted brick, the piece neighbors two black-andwhite photographs of Tommie Smith and John Carlos issuing a Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics, one overlaid with the caption “BLACKSKINNED STORMTROOPERS.” A framed Colin Kaepernick jersey glows a lone scarlet from the adjacent wall.

Called “When Stars Align,” the mixed-media installation created by Danielle and Kevin McCoy—of the St. Louis creative duo WORK/PLAY—renders the abstract imperative #Resist vividly tactile, textual and multivalent.

“A lot of our work intends to spark dialogue,” explains Danielle McCoy from her husband’s graduate studio space at Washington University in St. Louis. “If you just walk in and say, ‘That’s cool,’ the work has no feeling. Art is supposed to be up for interpretation.”

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Walking into the studio—part of which doubles as an activity space for their inquisitive 2-year-old daughter—it’s clear that feeling informs everything that WORK/PLAY conceives and designs. “The Mike Brown incident was really hard for us,” Kevin McCoy recounts. “We live in a city that was already racially tense. But then there was this continuous loop of black bodies being brutalized and nobody cared. It was a point of reflection: ‘Why are we making comfortable work? We are not comfortable.’ So we have to pass the buck. We have to make other people uncomfortable to get them to think critically.”

With a practice that values provocation over art-world laurels, WORK/PLAY has been steadily building a reputation for mingling experimental print-making with design, illustration and textile work. However, if making their audience uncomfortable is a conscious goal, the pair couldn’t seem more comfortable with each other—corroborating the 10-plus years of their creative and romantic partnership. The two met in

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a college psychology class at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and—after a chivalrous “pot pie made from scratch,” as he boasts—their paths quickly converged. “He was there for communication and design,” she shares, “and I was there for biology. It was completely different ends of the spectrum.”

“I kind of corrupted her,” her husband jests.

“He did,” his wife deadpans to what seems a running joke. “As we started working together more, I realized that design was my calling. I was more on the conceptual side, and Kevin was more at the forefront.”

From the beginning, WORK/PLAY focused on printmaking, letterpress and silk screening. “Throughout our entire practice, we’ve always tried to incorporate text,” says Danielle McCoy. “That’s one thing we’ve always stayed true to. Even if I know what something is going to say, Kevin is the one who’s going to design it.” As the two toggle throughout the creative process, they balance more commercial projects with research-driven conceptual and curatorial work intended for the gallery and public art space.

Ergo, the WORK/PLAY moniker. “When we’re working or doing design for a client, we’re playing around in our studio, having fun, exploring ideas and materials,” explains Kevin McCoy. “Conversely, when we’re out playing, going to a show, going to exhibitions, hanging out with friends, there’s always stimulation to create new work. We oscillate between the two.”

In the process the couple has accumulated an impressive roster of clients across discipline and region, including Vitaminwater, Red Bull, the Contemporary Art Museum, The Luminary and Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis. “Some people say to us, ‘Every time we turn around, your name is in the credits,’” Kevin McCoy relates. “But make no mistake, we paid our dues: A lot of ‘Nos,’ a lot of pressure, a lot of headaches, a lot of hard work.

We earned our clientele.”

Low on flash and big on fortitude, WORK/PLAY has made a living—and a vocation—off of an ethos one part industry and one part humility. “We’ve stayed under the radar for a reason,” says Kevin McCoy, shifting seamlessly to address his daughter’s

request for a napkin. “We put our heads down, got work done and thought, ‘This turned out great. What’s the next project?’”

On view in the studio is a piece from a series of framed brown paper bags they’ve emblazoned with the question “Am I accepted now?” Confronting “colorism in the black community,” the series literally sends up the “brown paper bag test” as a source of discrimination among 20th-century African-American sororities and fraternities. As Danielle McCoy elucidates, “When Kevin letter-pressed the words on the bag, some of them got darker, some of them got lighter. Someone might look at the bag and think, ‘Am I accepted now? I guess I’m light enough, so I can be accepted.’ We can provide space for people to have these conversations. To talk about personal experiences young and old.”

“To see people actually come in and physically do the test is really amazing,” adds Kevin McCoy. On the opposite wall, the likeness of a dollar bill is defaced with images of slave labor. Created in collaboration with printmaking students from a local community college, the piece calls attention to both our first president’s identity as a slave owner and the degree to which such degradation formed the crux of our nation’s economy. “We don’t pull punches,” Kevin McCoy asserts. “History doesn’t pull punches. When you find out all the ills and disparities in our society, it’s a bitter pill to swallow. The United States got its infrastructure on the backs of enslaved people, monetarily speaking. So we juxtaposed scenery from the days of slavery to the iconography on the dollar bill.

In the United States, we have always been told, ‘Pull yourself up by your bootstraps,’ but plenty of people here didn’t do that.”

For WORK/PLAY, professional and creative progress is less self-propelled than indebted to their shared faith in something greater. “A lot of what we do comes from our own spirituality,” Danielle McCoy emphasizes. “We don’t really take a lot of credit for the work that we make, because it comes from a higher source.” Similarly, the two see their future in St. Louis as guided by bigger forces. In this light, “When Stars Align” applies not only to the cosmic intersections of righteous activism but also to their attitude toward life in general. “When the time comes that we feel led to leave, we will do that,” she continues. “But not before we make a positive mark on this city.”

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H AI H AI The couple behind an ar tful, emerging restaurant group in Minneapolis.

by JORIE JACOBI / Photography by ATTILIO D’AGOSTINO

The rise of food trucks had begun, and, on a whim, Twin Cities native Christina Nguyen and husband Birk Grudem decided to abandon two successful careers and start one together. He’d been working as a screen printer and t-shirt designer and bartender, while Nguyen put her business degree to use running a boutique that sold locally designed clothing, when they decided it was time for a major shift. What resulted were 12- to 16-hour days churning out flavorful Latin-inspired cuisine that would catch the city’s attention and near-immediate recognition, a foreshadowing of the acclaim that would land Nguyen on the list of James Beard Award semifinalists for Best Chef: Midwest in 2018.

They served arepas—a classic South American dish of cornmeal cakes filled with meat and cheese and hard to come by elsewhere in the area. The food truck Hola Arepa quickly formed a fan base, which supported a brick-and-mortar location in Minneapolis’ Kingfield neighborhood. The young restaurateurs then opened a second eatery, Hai Hai, in northeast Minneapolis. Just as at Hola Arepa, Nguyen assumed the role of head chef, while Grudem handled all front-of-house matters. The move brought fast, hard-won success in an industry with daunting turnover and failure rates.

their hometown, which encouraged them to open Hai Hai. How did you make your way into the restaurant industry?

I didn’t get my start in a traditional way. I went to school for business, but cooking is a passion I’ve always had.

Before my husband and I got married, we were working on separate endeavors and felt like we really needed to shake it up. We thought it would be fun to have our own food truck. I don’t know why we thought that [laughs]; It’s so much work—but it’s not the same as spending $500,000 on a restaurant build-out.

That was Hola Arepa, which had a very slim menu of things I’d tried when I traveled abroad.

We had five different kinds of arepas with a few different sides. Then during the off-season, and depending on how cold the winter was, Birk and I would spend three or four months traveling to South America and Southeast Asia, exploring and trying new food. We continued to run the food truck for catering and special events for a few years after opening our first restaurant, and then we opened Hai Hai. The whole process has been very intuitive.

Your parents immigrated to the U.S. from Vietnam.

What have they shared with you about that process

Hai Hai’s Vietnamese focus pays homage to Nguyen’s family and heritage, as her parents were both born and raised in Vietnam. During her travels there with Grudem, they discovered unique dishes that weren’t being served in

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and their life there?

They actually lived in Saigon and fled from the war in 1975. They told me a bit about it when I was a kid. As time went by, I gathered more information and started

asking deeper questions. It’s a painful memory, so it’s not something they often share about. Before coming here, they’d never even seen snow before. A cool day where they lived in Vietnam would be 90 degrees.

But really, they were just happy to start a new life that wasn’t under communism.

I’ve been to Vietnam four times, and my parents didn’t want to come back with me for the first three times. It was really important for me to see where they’re from, but they hadn’t returned since they fled. I would ask them to come with me, and every time they would say something along the lines of, “It didn’t go so great the last time we were there—we’ll pass.” They did finally give in and go back to Vietnam after all, in January, and they loved it.

How have your travels to Vietnam and Southeast Asia inspired the menu at Hai Hai?

Birk and I tried so many things there that we could never get in Minneapolis, where many of the local restaurants were barely scratching the surface of each type of cuisine. I’ve always found it interesting to serve people something they haven’t tried—that’s why we originally started the arepa business. At the time, most people here hadn’t tried cuisine like that. There is also a strong Vietnamese population here in the Twin Cities, so we knew there would be an audience that would fully appreciate what we wanted to do.

Your parents must be really proud of you.

Ha! They’re as proud as Asian parents can be. For a while, I think there was a sense of, “Why can’t you get a real job?” But now that the restaurants are successful, I think they’re proud.

There’s something safe about taking the corporate route, which was where my business degree could have led. Defying that certainly comes with some fear.

But the restaurants have been successful, thankfully, and we’ve just kept growing.

How do you and your husband manage both a marriage and business?

I don’t think it’s something everyone should or can do.

After spending long hours in a small, cramped space like a food truck, it really builds your relationship.

My husband is my favorite person. We try hard not to hang onto arguments. You have to shake things off, especially in the restaurant industry. If one of us worked on the restaurant and one of us had another job, we’d never see each other. But we get to be creative and work on it together.

What was your inspiration for the beef larb recipe you shared with us?

Larb is a delicious, classic Thai meat salad, and this is our simplified version that is easy to cook at home.

It’s a dish that hits all the notes of fresh, tart, umami, herbaceous and spicy—all the things we love at Hai Hai. There’s also a bit of crunch and nuttiness from the toasted rice powder that really takes this dish to the next level. When served with beautiful seasonal crudité, it’s a great dish that’s protein-packed but also really light and refreshing.

Tell me about a few items on the menu and how you chose them.

In the spirit of our goal to bring people food they probably haven’t tried before, one of my favorites on the menu is the banana blossom salad, which is very popular in Vietnam. Banana blossoms have an amazing flavor and texture. And because most people aren’t familiar with dishes like that, most restaurants won’t put them on their menu, because they don’t think they’ll sell. But I like to push the envelope.

There’s also an amazing dish from the northern capital of Vietnam—Hanoi—called Cha Ca La Vong. It’s made from pan-fried fish that’s been coated in turmeric, cooked with dill and scallions, topped with fresh herbs and served over rice noodles. It comes with nuoc cham and a pineapple-shrimp paste sauce—which sounds terrifying, but it’s absolutely delicious. That’s another interesting, eclectic dish you probably won’t find on the menu at Vietnamese restaurants here. A lot of these ingredients are also hard to source, so we definitely pride ourselves on finding those hard-to-get ingredients, even though it’s a lot of extra work.

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Beef Larb Yield: 2 large servings or 4 appetizer-size servings

Ingredients

Instructions

1/4 cup sweet/sticky rice (dry), or 1 tbsp toasted rice powder

1.

Whisk larb dressing ingredients until sugar is dissolved. Set aside.

1 lb cooked ground beef, r aw

2.

Toast dry sweet rice in a pan on medium heat until amber or golden brown in color.

Stir and toss, so sides are evenly colored.

Do not burn. Pulse in a spice grinder until it is a coarse powder, or grind with mortar and pestle (skip this whole step if you are buying premade toasted rice powder—though making it is much more delicious).

3.

Cook ground beef in oil over medium heat without browning too much. Stir to break up large chunks. When cooked completely, let it cool in the pan for a couple of minutes, then transfer to a mixing bowl.

4.

Mix warm ground beef with dressing, lemongrass, shallots, Thai chilis and 2/3 of each of the herbs, torn into small pieces.

5.

Put the larb on a plate or in a bowl. Sprinkle some toasted rice powder on top and garnish with remaining torn herbs. Enjoy larb warm by scooping it up with sliced cucumber, cabbage wedges, other raw veggies and/or shrimp chips.

1 tbsp oil 3 tbsp lemongr ass, minced 2 small shallots, thinly sliced rings 1-2 red Thai chilis, thinly sliced rings 6 basil leaves 6 cilantro sprigs, leaves and thin stems from upper half only 6 mint leaves r aw cucu m ber sl ice s, gr e en c a bb age w e d g e s, r a dish sl ic e s or o t h e r r aw vegetables (for serving) shrimp chips (optional) Larb Dressing: 3 tbsp Thai fish sauce 3 tbsp lime juice (freshly squeezed) 1.5 tbsp white sugar

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I’LL E AT YOU TO LIVE A conversation with poet Tiana Clark.

by KEA WILSON / Photography by ATTILIO D’AGOSTINO

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Midway through poet Tiana Clark’s first full-length collection, “I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood,” the ghost of Nina Simone beckons the poet over and whispers something urgent in her ear: “Listen, little girl:/For every pain/there is a longer song.”

It’s a strange message—half warning, half balm. And it’s one that echoes continuously between the pages of Clark’s book. While her poems often trace the contours of painful spaces—of being a black woman in a deeply racist America; of being a girl in the backseat of a car with a boy you aren’t quite sure of—Clark also has astonishing ways of urging the reader to be still and to listen for the longer song. What you’ll hear if you do is often shockingly joyful, always faceted and cutting as a diamond.

Raised in Nashville and now teaching at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville’s innovative new creativewriting MFA program, Clark’s work is rooted deeply in the soil and to heartland landscapes where even the trees themselves can morph into reminders of the blood we’ve shed as a nation—and where, hopefully, extraordinary voices like Tiana Clark’s will only echo louder.

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Your poems often make use of the first-person point of view, and they draw on elements of your personal experience. Why do you feel drawn to the lyric “I”?

The lyric “I” has always felt like the strongest mask for me to put on. I actually struggled with literature and essays in high school until I found it. I had this amazing creative-writing teacher who showed us contemporary poetry, and it was the weird new format that wasn’t essay, wasn’t music, but it kind of combined both worlds. And I could write about my life, but I could use these craft methods to shape the page, and the “I” was this handlebar I could grip and ride out my imagination.

their activism. A lot of people were pissed when Beyoncé put out her “Formation” album. They were like, “Where’s ‘Bootylicious’ Beyoncé?” When she started talking about police brutality—her lying on top of that police car in Louisiana, drowning—that was a major confrontation.

I relate to that struggle. But it’s also a struggle I feel a lot of freedom in, because I know there are a lot of foremothers before me that have traversed this landscape of having to express your freedom by smashing the personal and the political together.

A lot of your reviewers refer to your voice as unflinching,

I used to write very autobiographically. I actually didn’t know that poets lied until my mid-20s. I thought, “Oh, we’re allowed to lie? Let’s get this party started.”

especially when you deal with themes of racism, violence, misogyny and their intersections. But that word doesn’t feel quite right; There’s a tenderness and complexity in your work that seems to want to make space for flinching, and

It really was an awakening—especially when I learned that “I” can contain both personal and imagined experiences to create this collage.

A lot of my work is plucked from my life, but some of it is more of a psychological fear that’s made real on the page.

When you have PTSD, your body doesn’t know the difference between what’s real and what’s imagined. When your heart rate is raised—when your blood pressure is rising—your body doesn’t know what is and isn’t happening to you. So why not write from that space?

Your work is personal, but it’s also constantly reaching outward. Many of your poems put you in conversation with other writers like Phillis Wheatley, and even figures from

for doubt, and for joy.

I think what you’re pointing to is that a lot of reviewers are lazy, and the language we use around black women’s writing, specifically, is lazy. You see a lot of words like fierce and powerful, and this idea that black writing is confrontational.

To me, what you’re saying is that white people are projecting their own discomfort on black people’s work, because it often stands as a mirror to their own sense of guilt.

I did a reading once, and a white lady came up to me afterwards and said, “I love your anger; Thank you for your anger!” And I said, “Thank you, but that poem is actually full of joy for me. I don’t feel anger when I read it.” And she was like, “No, you were angry!” She kept telling me how I was feeling. She wouldn’t believe me.

pop culture. There’s a pretty stunning poem inspired by Rihanna’s video for “Bitch Better Have My Money.”

Terrance Hayes has a line: “I’ll eat you to live: that’s poetry.”

I’ve always thought of poetry as a means of subsistence, as a way of responding to the right now—I mean, really, I’m writing these poems to survive, to live my own life. For me, poetry’s always been a means of survival.

I think that’s part of why pop culture is so important, and why black female pop artists inspire me. Because especially for black female artists, there’s a different responsibility we have to the world today, and to our politics. Thinking about Beyoncé, or Nina Simone—both of those women aligned their music with

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To me, I take a lot of joy in expressing the type of power that I don’t often feel in my own life. The world makes me feel small, but I feel large and brave and courageous in my work.

Even when I’m talking about violence, I hope there’s a sense of care in what I do; at least, I’m trying to care for myself, and other black women.

That’s a type of joy, to exclaim myself a large way on the page.

That mercy, that tenderness, that type of care and devotion to loving yourself—it sometimes gets missed.

An extended version of this piece appears on alivemag.com.

HANDMADE TALE In collaboration with Hack with Design House, Nisolo and Four Eyes Ceramic s Photography by ATTILIO D’AGOSTINO

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LEFT: Four Eyes Cer amics Earrings BELOW: Hackwith Design House Easy Kimono in Ivory + Button-Up Skirt + Four Eyes Cer amics Earrings + Elayna Sneaker in Neutr al. Molly Svoboda clay vases OPPOSITE: Four Eyes Cer amics Earrings

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OPPOSITE: Hackwith Design House Button-Up Jacket Top + Four Eyes Cer amics Earrings THIS PAGE: Hackwith Design House Easy Kimono in Ivory + Button-Up Skirt + Four Eyes Cer amics Earrings + Elayna Sneaker in Neutr al Cer amics Earrings PROPS: Boda Clay, YellowTree Clay, Future Ancestor

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OH

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C U R ATO R

R EDEFINING R ESPITE THE CHIEF CURATOR OF 21C MUSEUM HOTELS, ALICE GRAY STITES.

by KEA WILSON / Photography by ATTILIO D’AGOSTINO

To get the full experience of a groundbreaking American contemporary art museum, you’d need to book seven domestic flights or fuel up the car for a 2,000-mile road trip. Your journey would take you on a winding loop across the heartland Midwest and the South Rim, past cornfields and bison ranches, nowhere near any kind of coast. There’d be stops in the expected creative powerhouses like Nashville, a few in emerging visual-arts hubs like Oklahoma City and Durham, as well as one surprising detour to an Arkansas town with a population under 50,000 that’s better known for its Walmart headquarters. Each time you parked

the car or cabbed it out of the airport terminal, your destination would be the same: another wing of the sprawling, multi-state museum known as 21c. And each time, when you arrived at the museum’s front desk, they’d welcome you and ask if you’d like to spend the night.

If the word “museum” brings to mind a single Greekpillared downtown building where security guards quietly usher you out at 5 p.m., it’s OK if you need a moment to catch up. Because in many ways, 21c Museum Hotels are shaking up the notion of what a

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contemporary art institution can do—and along the way, they also just so happen to be revolutionizing the hospitality industry, too.

Before it opened its first location in Louisville, Kentucky, in 2006, 21c wasn’t necessarily meant to be a hotel at all. “The idea started with the desire to create a very accessible museum dedicated to contemporary art that would not charge people admission prices or be dependent upon memberships,” chief curator and museum director Alice Gray Stites says. “Our founders, [philanthropists and art collectors] Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson, had been collecting contemporary work for many years and sharing it with people in their hometown [of Louisville], and they wanted to share it with the public. They’re also passionate about preservation and urban revitalization, and they wanted to do something about their downtown. It appeared that one thing Louisville needed was more hotel rooms, and, well, that’s how 21c Museum Hotels was founded.”

That’s a humble way of describing the seemingly accidental origins of what became a thoroughly radical ambition. When they first envisioned 21c, Brown and Wilson didn’t just find a convenient way to address downtown blight while also bringing a little color and style to their hometown. They created a space that brings cutting-edge international art into the very heart of America’s “second-tier” cities—which, as insiders know, are often home to world-class art scenes just waiting to be discovered—and in doing so, shining the kind of spotlight that can elevate an entire region, both economically and artistically. That these spaces are also luxury hotels whose guests’ room fees fully support the museum’s operations—well, all that’s just the icing on the cake.

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All 21c galleries are free, available to every member of the public regardless of whether they’re holding a room key, and open 24 hours a day. (Yes, you can wander in off the streets of Cincinnati at two in the morning and marvel at a Serkan Özkaya video installation if you’d like). The galleries have also grown from occupying about 9,000 square feet in a single location—Louisville—into a dynamic, constantly evolving museum that spans seven states and 80,000 square feet of gallery space exhibiting art from the founders’ 3,000-piece collection, along with loans from artists, galleries and other museums. That makes 21c the largest and only museum in North America dedicated solely to collecting and displaying work created after the turn of the millennium.

And they’re not done expanding yet: A Des Moines, Iowa, location is opening in 2021, and the company’s recent acquisition by global hotel conglomerate AccorHotels has set journalists buzzing about possible locations in Miami, Chicago, New Orleans and even overseas. “We haven’t talked about any locations beyond North America yet, but stay tuned,” Stites teases.

So what makes 21c a single, unified museum across a vast space, rather than a diffuse network of micromuseums that happen to share a name and an attached-hotel concept? Or consider the opposite concern: How deeply can each 21c location possibly engage with its local arts community when the overarching institution has tentacles in over half a dozen communities and counting?

For Stites, the paradox of running a national museum that reaches across hundreds of miles isn’t a problem—it’s the point, and in many ways, it’s the business’ greatest strength. “When you come to any

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21c, it really does feel like you’re walking into a much larger museum space,” she says. “It’s usually quite active and full of people from the community. For example, last night in Louisville, there was a group of local classical musicians who had composed new pieces in response to the exhibition here. It was just a regular Sunday night, and there were probably 60 people, many of them hotel guests, enjoying that and mingling with the locals. Everyone knows that they can come in and wander around. It makes for a wonderfully welcoming hospitality experience.

There’s always something going on; it feels lively.”

21c is finding innovative ways to become that kind of gathering place and to walk the high-wire between local and global, intimate and expansive. In a recent multi-media exhibition, “Labor & Materials,” Stites explored how the realities of work have morphed in the age of automation and depersonalized global commerce, sometimes with brutal consequences for workers’ lives—and it was not incidental that the show debuted at the Oklahoma City location, where 21c occupies a former Model T Ford assembly plant. One show at 21c Cincinnati, on the other hand, focuses on how one of the city’s local artists views the larger world: They’re currently exhibiting the work of photographer Peiter Griga, who documented several cross-country trips that were inspired by geo-tagged Twitter messages from strangers, each of which “evoke the process of being forgotten.”

The resulting dispatches create a visual narrative of national melancholy that feels eerily intimate, despite the work’s anonymous, far-flung inspirations.

Each 21c location is outfitted with a local chef-driven restaurant, and Stites and the 21c founders are careful to commission site-specific installations that engage the surrounding culture every bit as deeply as the hotel’s more traditional white-box spaces. She’s particularly excited about the work recently commissioned for Proof on Main, the restaurant at the flagship Louisville location, from the Los Angeles-

based art duo known as Fallen Fruit (David Allen Burns and Austin Young). By using the hotel arm of 21c Louisville as an ersatz residency over the course of months’ worth of visits to the city, the artists were able to gradually learn and then retell the history of Louisville through a dense multi-media array that doesn’t shy away from the less-pristine aspects of the region’s history.

“Each room explores a different theme about the history of the city and the region. One dining room features images of Native Americans, bison and the Kentucky landscape, while another covers the history of food production and distribution in this part of the world,” Stites says. “You have excerpts from diaries that are in the archives at the University of Louisville, excerpts from political cartoons, articles about runaway slaves, about the big flood of 1937—anything that affected the production of food and labor that went into farming and food in this part of the world.

We feel that it was successful, because the rituals of everyday life, and particularly of sharing a meal, is maybe the ideal setting in which to examine who we are, who we want to be, and what’s happening in the world. That’s what art allows us to do.”

Stites is so articulate and persuasive that you’d almost forget that she’s still talking about decorating a restaurant dining room. After all, the kind of art you usually see in a hotel bar doesn’t prompt any kind of rigorous examination of the foundations of modern society; if anything, it’s precision-engineered to be ignored as you eat your clam chowder and go on your way. In a mainstream hospitality industry that’s better known for adorning their rooms with Thomas Kinkade landscapes and infinitely reproducible abstract prints that lull guests into a sense of comforting sameness, 21c’s approach doesn’t just feel unusual—it feels pioneering.

Stites, though, is careful to make it clear that her museum’s intention is not to shock, but to encourage

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travelers and locals alike to be more engaged with the complexities of their surroundings and more thoughtful about the spaces they occupy, even if they’re only visiting for a day. “We think of the art that we share as thought provoking, certainly, but not intentionally provocative,” she says. “There are going to be exhibitions that address what’s going on in the world today—and of course, we live in complicated times.”

It seems clear, though, that Stites thinks that vigorous engagement with stimulating experiences is exactly what the modern traveler craves, and it’s her role as museum curator to provide that. And her responsibility doesn’t end at the gallery walls. An overnight 21c guest will find themselves literally transported from the street-level museum into a micro-exhibit in the hotel elevator—these are usually reserved for a single emerging local artist, often from a local master of fine-arts program—followed by a true luxury hospitality experience that integrates the fine-art concept into a space of true respite. An original print adorns each room, as well as what Stites describes as “a whole world of art behind your screen”: Each television is even pre-set to the museum’s bespoke Art Channel, which spotlights video-based works from current and past exhibitions at 21c galleries, as well as interviews with the artists whose work is on display. Exciting personal touches like this are just one advantage of having a museum that can also comfortably house exhibiting artists for a deluxe weekend away in exchange for a quick conversation about their latest inspirations.

Of course, not every traveler would consider watching video art in bed the ultimate in vacation relaxation. “But it depends on how you define respite, right?” Stites says. “It’s a subjective experience. Many people find it refreshing and renewing to be able to get a glass of wine or a beer and walk around the galleries, spend time in the video lounge at 10 or 12 o’clock. I think people find having free access to the art at all hours to be a really unique experience. It helps you feel transformed, to get a new perspective on life.” What more can the best travel experiences—and the best art—do for us?

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MN

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ENTREPRENEUR

GOOD COMPA N Y Duluth furniture designer Greg Benson on saving the planet, one recycled chair at a time.

by KEA WILSON / Photography by ATTILIO D’AGOSTINO

What does it really mean to be an environmentally friendly maker? Don’t ask Greg Benson, CEO of Minnesota’s Loll Designs. He’s sworn off the term.

“I stopped using it a long time ago,” Benson says.

“Everybody used to say ‘green,’ and people don’t say that so much anymore. Now it’s ‘environmentally conscious.’ But we want to be even more specific than that. Because when you say ‘environmentally friendly,’ or ‘environmentally conscious,’ what does that even mean?”

It’s a strange thing to hear from a guy who owns a company that makes artfully designed outdoor

furniture out of recycled milk jugs. It’s even stranger if you consider that this same guy is also the co-owner of two other ‘green’ design businesses—Epicurean and Intectural, also based in Duluth—all of which are quietly becoming eco-industry mainstays. But Benson’s opposition to the buzzwords of his trade isn’t just for show—and it definitely doesn’t mean that he isn’t serious about reforming a manufacturing landscape that too often makes the planet pay the price for good design. It’s just that he believes you can have a little fun while you’re working to build a brand that takes environmental friendliness to a whole new level. And you might even be able to lollygag around a bit while you’re doing it.

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If that sounds paradoxical, get comfortable with that feeling. Because at every turn, the story of Loll Designs challenges the narrative that the only way to save the world is to buckle down and deny yourself the things you enjoy—and the narrative that the only way to grow a business is to grow up and get serious.

You’d think Benson would have started the journey that lead him to Loll in a furniture-design masters program, or maybe in a particularly environmentally minded MBA. But his path actually began in the woods of central Minnesota—and he took a major detour through the skate park business along the way.

“I don’t know if I really thought about design too much as a kid,” Benson says. “I didn’t know anybody who was really into it. I was more into being outside, playing in the woods, catching turtles, stuff like that.”

That early propensity for play paid off in an unexpected way. Benson befriended classmates and neighbors Scott and Brennan Olson, who founded an iconic company whose name would become synonymous with their product: Rollerblade Inc. Benson stayed in touch as life took him out of their shared hometown of Bloomington, Minnesota, to a literature degree in Duluth. After college, Rollerblade offered him a full-time job.

“I didn’t identify as a rollerblader,” Benson says.

“That’s not what I did. I was a rock climber; I would backpack, I would go canoeing. I rode my bike a lot.

I was really more of an outdoor person, and I still am. I did not identify with skate culture. I didn’t listen to the music they listened to; I didn’t look at their magazines.”

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But Benson took the offer anyway, and Rollerblade took him to southern California, where he dove into sales and marketing for the company. Decades later, Benson still has a bit of a SoCal lilt to his voice.

“Eventually I ended up doing events for them around the country,” Benson says. We did 30 cities a year— we even held an event outside the Super Bowl. We would set up ramps, and all these rollerbladers and skateboarders would show up to skate on them. And they always said the same thing: “We want skate ramps in our town.”

Skater or no, Benson saw an opportunity. If the modular, portable skate ramps they used at Rollerblade events could be replicated for a more-permanent use at a price cities could afford, he could give those kids the ramps they wanted, no matter where they lived.

Working with his brother Dave and fellow Minnesotan Tony Ciardelli, they founded TrueRide in 1997, just prior to the birth of the X Games had brought skating fully into the American mainstream. Fast forward 10 years, and the three had built more than 450 skate parks across the country.

Benson insists his TrueRide days never converted him to the church of skating—nor did he really see himself as a designer during those years, despite making hundreds of sculptural, custom-designed creations that functioned as skatable land art. “It’s just never been my thing,” Benson admits. “What we saw was an opportunity to build a company building skate ramps, and we did that.”

But if you know anything about skate culture, you know it’s defined by a kind of punk-rock, DIY ethos

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that doesn’t ask permission to make cool stuff. There’s something of that spirit in Benson’s work—and no more so than in the story of how he created Loll, the company that would become his best-known legacy. On what he insists was a random day, he was driving around Duluth and noticed that just about every front yard had an Adirondack chair or two in it, standing at the ready for a summer barbecue or a bonfire. “I just personally liked Adirondack chairs,” Benson says. “I just thought, ‘Why not make one?’”

Benson, of course, is being modest about how ambitious even that single chair was. After all, he likely couldn’t have followed the Adirondack lark to such a beautiful conclusion if he hadn’t already built a Duluth manufacturing center for TrueRide that was fully tricked out with computerized cutters and the latest digital design tools. Not to mention Benson’s other lightning-bolt moment: that he could build his chair out of plastic scraps from the ramps themselves.

“They’d literally just go to a landfill, and some of these chunks and pieces were pretty big,” Benson says. “We knew these outdoor chairs needed a lot of maintenance; even if you did that, they still didn’t last all that long. We’d already dealt with [those kinds of durability and weatherization challenges] on the skate ramps and found materials that we knew worked—and because we weren’t skaters, we weren’t just stuck in, ‘How can we use these materials in the skate industry?’ I don’t know. It was just like, ‘Why not make a chair?’”

“Why not?” moments like these don’t always lead to an internationally recognized company that employs 70 people and has spawned buzzy articles in The Atlantic magazine about the potential of small manufacturers to revitalize post-industrial towns like Duluth. Nor do “Why not?” moments cultivate empires like the three green businesses Benson and his partners refer to collectively as Good Sheets. In

addition to Loll, there’s also kitchen utensil maker Epicurean—which uses scraps from building new skate ramps to make products like cutting boards— and Intectural, which sells eco-conscious materials for commercial architectural and design projects.

And happy accidents definitely don’t produce products that look as gorgeous as everything that the three brands make. Just look at Loll’s Rapson Cave Chair, a futuristic lounger that’s adapted for the outdoors but stays true to the original furniture drawings of midcentury architect Ralph Rapson.

Benson’s holistic, practical approach to design and the company’s instinct for an ultra-modern aesthetic have been integral to their success. That’s why he’s worked so hard to collaborate with brands like Design Within Reach, as well as superstar architects like Duluth’s David Salmela, who designed Lussi Chair, a rectilinear stunner that, according to Loll’s website, “expands our collective consciousness of what a modern patio chair ought to be.” He also works with top industrial designers like Chicago’s Studio Murmur and sculptor/industrial designers like Los Angeles’ Brendan Ravenhill.

“It’s almost always the aesthetics in the design,” Benson says. “You look at a chair, and you either like how it looks, or you don’t; that’s why you buy it, or you choose something else. But when you get past that, you might say, ‘Where is it made? What is it made of?’”

That’s where the milk jugs come in.

As Loll grew, Benson and his business partners began to wonder whether there might be an even more environmentally conscious way to make an outdoor chair. It wasn’t just that the three had started to drift away from TrueRide—they sold the business in 2007—and started to wonder what they’d do when

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those post-industrial skate park scraps dried up. They’d also realized that they could have a bigger impact if they pivoted to post-consumer plastics. And maybe their designs could have a bigger impact, too.

“What a lot of people don’t realize is that all post-industrial plastic is black,” Benson says. “Milk jugs, on the other hand, are great, because there’s no pigment. You can add whatever colors you want. And when you’re done with them, they can be recycled again.”

Nowadays, a single Loll chair keeps over 400 milk jugs out of the landfill. Multiply that number by the company’s annual sales numbers, and Benson estimates that “well over 100 million jugs” have been repurposed as stylish seating and tables that most of us would never realize began their lives as containers for skim and 2%.

If you’re buying a No. 9 Rocker for the look, you might not realize just how far Loll goes to shrink their environmental footprint. If you decide to refurnish your patio, Loll invites you to send your patio chair back to them to be recycled into something new. You might not even notice that every item in your Loll package is recyclable or reusable. Even the screwdriver is made of their own plastic and designed to be used beyond the initial chair assembly. Dig even deeper, and you’ll learn that Loll is fully designed, manufactured and sold domestically—a rare feat in a furniture industry that’s often reliant on underpaid international workers and constant, fuel-intensive shipping.

But talk to Benson, and he won’t brag about this radically holistic approach to eco-consciousness. For him, outsourcing to China or swathing his green products in pounds of non-recyclable packaging were simply never options in the first place. In his eyes, the real challenge has to do with taking planet-friendly practices mainstream—and to do that, he needs to sell consumers on a lifestyle that puts more people out in nature, enjoying a bit of good company in a stylish chair.

“Loll got its name from the word ‘lollygagger,’” Benson says. “But we’ve sort of redefined the term: A lollygagger is someone who wants to play hard and work hard but relax hard, too—ideally in the outdoors.”

It’s a funny sentiment, coming from a guy from a place as cold as Duluth. But spark up a campfire and pull up a Loll chair, and you might find yourself enjoying a starry winter night anyway.

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W ITH BOX ES PILED AT THE FOOT OF THE STAIRS, I GO TO SEE LOGAN

By Hanif Abdurraqib

I will not spoil the ending, though what is there to spoil but to say there was a casket in the place you would imagine a casket to be. depending on how you define burial, the ending is unspectacular. my pal died not when pill bottle rolled hollow from his unfurling palm. It was sometime after that, when I told his old girlfriend I have maybe been in love with you the whole time.

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He is the author of “The Crown Ain’t Worth Much” (Button Poetry/Exploding Pinecone Press, 2016), nominated for a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and “They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us” (Two Dollar Radio, 2017), named a best book of 2017 by NPR, Pitchfork, Oprah Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, Slate, Esquire, GQ and Publisher’s Weekly. He is a Callaloo Creative Writing Fellow, a poetry editor at Muzzle Magazine, and a member of the poetry collective Echo Hotel with poet/essayist Eve Ewing. Abdurraqib has multiple forthcoming books including a book on A Tribe Called Quest titled “Go Ahead in the Rain” (University of Texas Press, February 2019), the new collection of poems “A Fortune for Your Disaster” (Tin House, 2019) and a history of black performance in the United States titled “They Don’t Dance No Mo’” (Random House, 2020).

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