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CONTENTS Feb/March 2024
56
AT THE EDGES OF IT ALL Jeffrey Deitch’s latest exhibition in Los Angeles puts 12 local artists in conversation, and at the curatorial forefront.
58
THE DIRECTOR PORTFOLIO Eight filmmakers reflect on a work of art that exposed them to new ways of seeing—and set the tone for a recent project.
74
RAISING A MONUMENT The Noguchi Museum’s latest exhibition is a deep dive into the practice of influential Japanese-American ceramicist Toshiko Takaezu.
76
YES, CHEF Halfway through the Golden Swan’s first year, Chef Doug Brixton sat down with his favorite guest, Helena Christensen, at the West Village hotspot.
78
SEEKING THE SUN For her first West Coast exhibition, the Brazilian painter Marina Perez Simão makes her canvases glow using nothing but oil paint.
80
OBSESSIONS Three writers—Hilton Als, J Wortham, and Nicolaia Rips—hold a treasured cultural artifact up to the light, reflecting on the revelations it has sparked, the nostalgia it conjures, and the deep-seated urges it embodies.
86
IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WAS THE END Ahead of the opening of Last Days at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, star Agathe Rousselle and director Matt Copson took CULTURED behind the curtain.
88
CHRISTINE MESSINEO OFFERS A GUIDE TO HER MOST BELOVED SPOTS IN LA Ahead of Frieze, the director invited CULTURED to accompany her on a whirlwind tour of some of the best art LA has to offer.
92
ONE MAN’S TRASH Designer Max Lamb’s latest collection offers an unsung material a permanent seat at the table.
94
Charles Melton in Los Angeles wearing Saint Laurent. Photography by Emmanuel Sanchez-Monsalve. 38 culturedmag.com
EBGI GOES EAST The longtime Los Angeles gallerist has a history of moving on instinct—and now, she also has a two-story, 5,000-square-foot gallery in Tribeca.
CONTENTS Feb/March 2024
96
A CULT AWARDS CEREMONY LANDS A MAGNANIMOUS NEW HOST At the 39th annual Film Independent Spirit Awards, Aidy Bryant continues a tradition of outlandishness.
98
WORN WISDOM Naiomi Glasses, Ralph Lauren’s inaugural artist-in-residence, presents an ode to her Indigenous community’s patterns and practices in her first collection with the storied brand.
100
THE KOREAN AVANT-GARDE LANDS IN LOS ANGELES For its first West Coast presentation, “Only the Young” looks back at the experimental artists who shaped Korea’s postwar sensibilities.
102
Hannah Motler wears a Prada dress. Photography by Daniel Archer.
CHIC SCAVENGERS Hermès convened a coterie of actors, chefs, athletes, and more in Aspen last December for a weekend of luxury, mystery, and camaraderie.
106
FIND THE CAVE, HOLD THE TORCH Two museum directors remember the nights they spent dreaming up exhibitions over drinks as young curators in New York. RISING PERFUMER’S GAMBIT 108 AMIND GAMES, a line of fragrances inspired
by one of the world’s most popular competitions, makes a case for bringing strategy into the realm of beauty.
110
SOUTHERN GUILD FINDS A HOME ON LOS ANGELES’S COVETED GALLERY STRIP Cape Town’s most prominent gallery opened a Los Angeles outpost in February, making it the first South African outfit to establish a permanent residence in the United States.
112
MEET JAKE BRUSH, THE SCREEN QUEEN OF OUR REALITY TV AGE The 29-year-old artist is the latest in a long line of lowbudget, high-concept queer provocateurs.
116
REBRANDING THE NARRATIVE Designer Carlton DeWoody grew up surrounded by contemporary art. He remains most inspired by the visual language of the quotidian.
38 culturedmag.com 42 culturedmag.com
CONTENTS Feb/March 2024
118
MEET THE ARTISTS WHO TURNED CELINE’S MIAMI OUTPOST INTO A CONTEMPORARY ART DESTINATION Contributions from the likes of Lucy Skaer, Eli Ping, and Simone Fattal have transformed the brand’s Miami Design District boutique.
124
HOLLYWOOD’S NEW ERA The seven talents featured in these pages have reckoned with their fair share of setbacks, crossroads, and epiphanies. They are driven not by an oasis of accolades, but by their visions of what could be.
140
CAN THE BIENNIAL SURVIVE SOCIAL MEDIA? Plagued by online controversy and reckoning with politics that evolve faster than the pace of curation, the Whitney Biennial stands as a testament to the triumphs and tribulations of these art world referendums.
144
FOLLOW THE LIGHT Wing Shya had little image-making experience when he became Wong Kar-Wai’s on-set photographer. Decades later, the Hong Kong native is releasing Solace, his first U.S. monograph.
152
HOW LA SEDUCED MIAMI’S COLLECTING ROYALTY Jason and Michelle Rubell never intended to put down roots in Los Angeles, but a certain Richard Neutra– designed house had other plans. OFF THE PEDESTAL 158 STEPPING A selection of looks, curated from archival
runway pieces and independent designer silhouettes, embrace the power of fashion as sculpture.
172
THE RISE OF FLAT PHOTOGRAPHY One writer situates the practice of South African artist Zanele Muholi within a society slouching towards homogeneity. SALOME ASEGA, THE MEDIUM IS THE 178 FOR MESSENGER
The artist, educator, and director of NEW INC works with raw materials ranging from big data to museum bureaucracy.
182
FISHING FOR COMPLIMENTS For Frank Gehry and Louis Vuitton, it was love at first sight. A decade later, their relationship has only deepened.
Photography from Wing Shya’s ‘Solace,’ published by Session Press. 44 culturedmag.com
JARRETT EARNEST Writer
Jarrett Earnest hates reality television (except For the Love of DILFs, hosted by Stormy Daniels) but loves the hallucinatory video art that Jake Brush makes from such cultural detritus. Earnest profiles the queer provocateur in this issue, delving into his riotous oeuvre. For the past few years, the writer has organized several books and exhibitions charting the wilder shores of queer art history, including “The Young and Evil” and “WHAT A DUMP,” both at David Zwirner in New York. His latest book, Valid Until Sunset, which combines art criticism, travelogue, drag queens, and gay sex, was published last year by MATTE Editions.
HILTON ALS Writer
It’s difficult to narrow down just one topic for prolific writer Hilton Als to expound upon, but in this issue, he focuses his exacting lens on the work of artist Jared Buckhiester. Als, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, is best known for his writing at The New Yorker, as well as books including White Girls. The 2013 essay collection was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and the winner of the Lambda Literary Award. He received a Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2017 and most recently published My Pinup (2022), a hybrid work of memoir and musings on Prince and desire.
YOSHIHIRO MAKINO Photographer
Born and raised in Tokyo, Yoshihiro Makino’s unique architectural surroundings instilled an innate appreciation for design. The Los Angeles–based photographer has since captured a variety of abodes for publications including Architectural Digest, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. For this issue, he visited Jason and Michelle Rubell at their new LA home. “It’s always a pleasure to visit masterpieces by Richard Neutra, especially when the experience is filled with the amazing art collections of great collectors like the Rubells,” says Makino. “Luckily, we caught them right before their departure for Art Basel Miami Beach!”
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JARRETT EARNEST, PHOTOGRAPHY BY JONATHAN GRASSI. IMAGE COURTESY OF JARRETT EARNEST; HILTON ALS, PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALI SMITH. IMAGE COURTESY OF HILTON ALS; YOSHIHIRO MAKINO, IMAGE COURTESY OF YOSHIHIRO MAKINO.
CONTRIBUTORS
MATT COPSON
JESSICA IREDALE
KAREN WONG
Who would you choose to star in a Kurt Cobain–inspired opera outfitted by Balenciaga? Titane’s Agathe Rousselle, of course. In this issue, co-director Matt Copson talks to the French actor about pulling off the existentialist production. “It’s a roller-coaster of tone and one thing bleeds into the next,” says Copson. “It got more and more extreme until we performed it.” Outside of the theater, the British artist plays with light and technology in exhibitions staged with the likes of Clearing, Reena Spaulings Fine Art, and the Fondation Louis Vuitton.
In this issue, New York–based writer Jessica Iredale chronicles Hermès’s retreat to the mountains of Aspen with the proper dose of mystification. “Hermès is a funny brand. Maybe that’s not a word many people associate with it, but it has a quirky sense of humor about itself,” she says. “Asking a bunch of adults to go on a scavenger hunt in the snow on Kevin Costner’s ranch without revealing any details ahead of time is actually very on-brand for them. Obviously, it was fabulous.” Outside of CULTURED, Iredale has written for publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Vogue.
“Spending an afternoon with Salome is a tutorial in soft power,” says writer Karen Wong of her interview with artist Salome Asega. “She radiates diplomacy, empathy, and integrity. She’s juggling balls and connecting dots, all in the name of sustainability for artists who center their work on social impact. She is simply fucking fierce.” Outside of her work as a writer, Wong is an educator and serves on the boards of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, the nonprofit Rhizome, the new music incubator and venue National Sawdust, and the app-builder Kinfolk. At Columbia GSAPP, she teaches a popular seminar called “Ways of Experiencing.”
Artist
JAZMINE HUGHES Writer
Before Charles Melton became the darling of every red carpet, Jazmine Hughes caught the actor in Los Angeles for an interview about his sharp Hollywood ascent. Melton is featured in CULTURED’s portfolio of electrifying Hollywood talents, all of whom sat with Hughes for candid conversations about their work for this issue. “I interviewed all of the stars in the dusk of 2023 and the dawn of the new year, which gave our conversations a reflective, moony sheen,” she recalls. “They were hopeful and curious about the future without disavowing the past, a lesson I think we could all learn from.” The writer and editor won the National Magazine Award for profile-writing last year, and works from Brooklyn, New York, and Oaxaca de Juárez, Mexico.
48 culturedmag.com
Writer
Writer
MATT COPSON, PHOTOGRAPHY BY AIDAN ZAMIRI. IMAGE COURTESY OF MATT COPSON; JESSICA IREDALE, IMAGE COURTESY OF JESSICA IREDALE; JAZMINE HUGHES, PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHRISTOPHER CHANG. IMAGE COURTESY OF JAZMINE HUGHES; KAREN WONG, PHOTOGRAPHY BY DOMINIK TARABANSKI. IMAGE COURTESY OF KAREN WONG.
CONTRIBUTORS
J WORTHAM
DANIELLE JACKSON
DANIEL ARCHER
Between their work as a sound healer, herbalist, art critic, and co-host of the podcast Still Processing, J Wortham somehow still finds time to be a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. They are also currently penning a book about dissociation called Work of Body for Penguin Press. In this issue, the Brooklyn-based writer selected a moment from cinema history that left a lingering impression. “It was extremely hard to choose,” they note. “But I decided to pick from the most recent films I’d seen as a way to narrow the field and keep it contemporary.”
The strengthening of the international art scene has been lauded for bringing artists stateside from abroad, and vice versa. But what effect does this globalizing process have on the work itself? Danielle Jackson attempts to answer that question in this issue. “I loved having the opportunity to write about contemporary artists from South Africa 20 years after I first visited,” she says. “Back then, the country was still emerging from isolation. It’s incredible to see artists like Zanele Muholi on the international stage.” Jackson is the co-founder of the Bronx Documentary Center and teaches at Stanford in New York and New York University.
London-based photographer Daniel Archer imbues each of his images with a dark, ethereal quality. For this issue, he produced a study of garments as structural objects, intended to reshape the human figure. “I wanted to explore the intricate dance between the real and the surreal, where garments become brushstrokes and wearers become living canvases,” he says. Originally from the outskirts of Melbourne, Australia, Archer honed his skills at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and has since worked with clients including Prada, Maison Margiela, Vogue, and the Cut.
Writer
WING SHYA Artist
Wing Shya’s work spans the realms of film, art, design, and fashion. In this issue, he offers CULTURED a first glimpse at the work in his forthcoming Session Press monograph, Solace. The moody, blue- and red-tinged frames capture life in Hong Kong, where Shya runs his award-winning design studio, Shya-La-La Workshop. After working as an on-set photographer for In the Mood for Love director Wong Kar-Wai, Shya moved on to his own ventures, balancing film projects like Hot Summer Days and Love in Space with exhibitions staged in cities from London to Shanghai.
50 culturedmag.com
Writer
Photographer
PHOTOGRAPHY BY NAIMA GREEN. IMAGE COURTESY OF J WORTHAM; DANIELLE JACKSON, PHOTOGRAPHY BY BIANCA FARROW. IMAGE COURTESY OF DANIELLE JACKSON; DANIEL ARCHER, IMAGE COURTESY OF DANIEL ARCHER; WING SHYA, IMAGE COURTESY OF WING SHYA.
CONTRIBUTORS
MR.WASH
FEBRUARY 16–MARCH 30, 2024
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LETTER from the EDITOR
THIS FEBRUARY MARKS THE FIFTH edition of our annual Art + Film issue, but the stakes feel as high as they did the first time. Every year— through deep research, thoughtful casting, and enthusiastic conversations—we strive to express the potential, the promise, of what the new year will bring. For the incredibly talented people featured in these pages, dreams come in all shapes and sizes. Dreams demand risks, and risks reward us. As part of our second major collaboration with Saint Laurent, which also includes our two cover shoots, we curated a portfolio of seven young performers who have dared to take on Hollywood, changing it from the inside out. Our cover stars— Charles Melton and LaKeith Stanfield—have already left their marks on an industry in desperate need of a new North Star. Charles, who could easily have rested on his heartthrob laurels a bit longer, stepped bravely into challenging terrain—opposite Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman, no less—warping
Sarah Harrelson and LaKeith Stanfield in Los Angeles.
conventions of masculinity with a performance that I can’t stop thinking about. LaKeith is, as his award-winning interviewer Jazmine Hughes puts it, “the rare Black man granted ethereality” in a culture that favors clear-cut heroes and villains. In their latest projects, the pair present knotty narratives and new visions of leading men that leave us hopeful about the future of film. This February, many of CULTURED’s own dreams are coming to life. Our VIP CULTURED Club has grown beyond our wildest expectations, and we’re excited to welcome our members to the 13 events we’ll be hosting across the
country this month. We’re launching our first newsstand collaboration with Frieze Los Angeles during the fair, along with a full takeover of Alfred Coffee’s Melrose flagship the following week. As if that weren’t enough, we’re launching our inaugural CULT100 list in April, spotlighting creatives who are tireless in their efforts to challenge and redefine our culture. We’ll see you in New York for the list’s tentpole celebration this spring.’ I hope the stories you find in these pages inspire you to dream big and think bigger.
CHARLES MELTON photographed in Los Angeles wearing Saint Laurent. Photography by Emmanuel Sanchez-Monsalve.
LAKEITH STANFIELD photographed in Los Angeles wearing Saint Laurent. Photography by Emmanuel Sanchez-Monsalve.
Sarah G. Harrelson Founder and Editor-in-Chief @sarahgharrelson | @cultured_mag
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AT THE EDGES OF IT ALL By SOPHIE LEE
GRAPHIC BILLBOARDS, colored pencil sketches, and slabs of concrete punctuated by an artist’s signature all have a place in Jeffrey Deitch’s latest exhibition, “At the Edge of the Sun.” Organized by a tight-knit network of Los Angeles artists, the intimate show upends stale preconceptions about the city’s artistic movements and materials. Unlike other presentations that have endeavored to package a singular Angeleno aesthetic, these curator-artists are writing their own postcards to their home city—in the first-person plural. For Jaime Muñoz, one of the dozen creatives featured, the freeway is the city’s most significant monument. “My focus on the vehicle is rooted in identity and labor,” the Pomona-based painter explains. “I’m fascinated by the ways that commodification reaches into realms as deep as religion in capitalist culture.” Toyotas and larger-than-life gears populate his sun-baked compositions, like icons in a working-class cathedral. The group of artists helming “At the Edge of the Sun” have been in conversation over the past decade, offering their unique visions of the discursive themes that emanate from their hometown’s shared landscape and practices. That history, says rafa esparza, helped make 56 culturedmag.com
Shizu Saldamando, Fonsi with Abolish Shirt, 2021.
for a fluid curatorial experience: “Being part of a group this large and sharing equal responsibility in organizing the exhibition is a huge feat. It takes unwavering commitment to the collective vision to maintain a non-hierarchical mode of working.” For his contribution, the performance and installation artist pulled materials straight from the Los Angeles earth to assemble an adobe mural. The piece explores body modification practices and anthropomorphic images “indigenous to America,” he says. Other works on view include Alfonso Gonzalez Jr.’s extraction of an LA sidewalk corner; Mario Ayala’s installation of a trucker lounge; an airbrushed metal gate from Ozzie Juarez, complete with barbed wire; and oil paint portraits on wood paneling by Shizu Saldamando.
Before the exhibition’s conception, Saldamando had already composed portraits of half of the participating artists, a by-product of their preexisting proximity. “Although my portrait work is celebratory of friends and creative peers, it is also born out of historical, political endurance and survival as the legacy of immigration and political activism,” she notes. Ultimately, the show seeks to close a cultural gap that often emerges between the content creators and contextualizers of the art world. Saldamando sees her comrades as “all traversing this balancing act of having work exist in institutional spaces but still creating and existing in [our] own neighborhoods and being inspired by familial histories and practices.” What these artists, and their show offer, she concludes, is a working study of “existing at the edges of it all.”
Photography by Yubo Dong. Image courtesy of the artist, Charlie James Gallery, and Jeffrey Deitch.
Jeffrey Deitch’s latest exhibition in Los Angeles puts 12 local artists in conversation, and at the curatorial forefront.
Discover a multi-sensory video experience, biomorphic sculptures and photomontages in Ntjam’s first solo U.S. museum exhibition at Fotografiska New York.
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8 FILMMAKERS REFLECT ON A WORK OF ART THAT EXPOSED THEM TO NEW WAYS OF SEEING—AND SET THE TONE FOR A RECENT PROJECT. 58 culturedmag.com
CORD JEFFERSON
ART+FILM
HOLLYWOOD SHUFFLE (Film Still), 1987, Orion Pictures Corporation. Image courtesy of MGM Media Licensing.
Cord Jefferson’s directorial debut and Oscars sensation American Fiction opens on a writer struggling to land his next book deal. His academic prose isn’t “Black” enough for publishers, who expect a certain level of gangster mayhem from African-American authors. The film, based on Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, gleefully follows as its protagonist’s efforts to exact revenge on the literary world spiral out of control. Back in grade school, it was a low-budget ’80s flick directed by Robert Townsend that first taught Jefferson just how cutting—and complex—comedy could be.
“I saw ‘Hollywood Shuffle’ when I was about 9 or 10, right in the window when you’re learning about the founding of America. You’re learning about slavery. You’re learning about the civil rights movement. One of the ways that they teach you about this stuff is through movies, right? The things that you’re witnessing in school are, like, people getting their heads beaten by police officers and blood streaming down their faces, German shepherds being sicced on people, lynchings, and cross burnings. ‘Hollywood Shuffle’ was this revelatory moment for me where I was like, ‘Wow, you can talk about this stuff in a way that allows people to laugh in every scene.’ There are no fanciful camera angles or tricks. It was just the storytelling and the heart that changed my perspective on how movies about Blackness and racism have to look. It’s not always gritty and grimy and dark and depressing and self-serious and intense and violent. These days, there is a real belief that audiences are not smart and that we need to dumb everything down for them. I think that is incredibly inaccurate. People are craving stuff that makes them think a little bit.” culturedmag.com 59
ROBERT EGGERS
ART+FILM
Robert Eggers is best known for creating macabre, otherworldly films like The Witch (2015), and The Lighthouse (2019), set in his native New England. His latest feature, Nosferatu—loosely inspired by Bram Stoker’s Dracula—tackles a distinctly European tale. Ahead of its release in December, Eggers recounts how a little-known German artist named Sascha Schneider helped inspire the look of The Lighthouse.
Sascha Schneider, Hypnosis, 1904.
“My films start with the atmosphere. [For ‘The Lighthouse,’] I pictured the aspect ratio; the high-contrast black-and-white; the dusty, musty environment; pipe smoke; facial hair; and sweaters. This should have drawn me to Andrew Wyeth’s rotten clapboards and lighthouses, not a European Symbolist. Ironically, ‘Hypnosis’ [1904, by Sascha Schneider] is something else. I think I came across [the etching] on Tumblr; certainly some sort of banal online discovery. It was my brother, Max Eggers, who suggested we do a riff on the engraving. When Robert Pattinson’s character loses his mind, he has this vision of Willem Dafoe naked, light coming from his eyes, gripping his shoulder, with Pattinson on his knees in awe and fear before him. The victim in ‘Hypnosis’ seems hypnotized, unaware of his condition. Pattinson is all too aware of the horror he is experiencing.” 60 culturedmag.com
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TINA SATTER
ART+FILM
In 2017, playwright Tina Satter discovered the transcript of an FBI interrogation. The transcript became the backbone for Reality—Satter’s first film, out last spring—which charts the true story of NSA whistleblower Reality Winner. The thriller mines the inherent absurdity of a yoga- and gun-loving 25-year-old translator’s prolonged encounter with two bumbling FBI agents, without veering from the simmering tension that undergirds it. Here, Satter reveals an artistic inspiration that illustrates the ominous, unresolved emotions at the heart of the film.
Piero della Francesca, Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angels, 1460–70. Image courtesy of the Clark Art Institute.
“I first encountered ʻVirgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angelsʼ [1460–70] in 2017 when I was watching all these YouTube video lectures on the Renaissance. This painting has a haunting, fascinating quality to it. It feels like so much more is going on—like thereʼs an iceberg underneath each of them. All the figures have feelings behind their faces, and that was going to be the lingua franca of so much of the emotional trajectory of ʻReality,ʼ that just-under-the-skin thing—for Sydney [Sweeney’s role as] Reality, but also for the FBI investigators. They’re not in a neutral room at a police station or FBI office. I’ve always imagined that in real life the agents were like, ‘Oh my God, we’re actually in this girl’s house right now.’” 62 culturedmag.com
RAVEN JACKSON
ART+FILM
All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, poet and filmmaker Raven Jackson’s feature debut, slaloms its way through five decades of its protagonist Mackenzie’s life in just under two hours. Shot in rural Mississippi, where Jackson’s mother and grandmother grew up, the film revels in the emotional topography of its landscape. Here, Jackson singles out Carlos Reygadas’s 2007 film about a Chihuahuan Mennonite community and speaks to how it shaped the spirit and sounds of All Dirt Roads.
Carlos Reygadas, Silent Light (Film Still), 2007. Image courtesy of Palisades Tartan.
“I was a graduate assistant in a sound class at New York University, and the professor played the opening scene of ‘Silent Light.’ I remember getting the film afterward, watching it, and really resonating with it. It’s about trusting the [emotional] weight sound carries, to the point that I don’t need anything explained to me … I knew I didn’t want a lot of dialogue in ‘All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt’—I wanted to use other means to communicate the emotionality of the characters. How do we communicate through silence? What are we hearing in that silence? After a hospital scene with Mack and Josie, we cut to a shot of water, and you ‘hear’ the water. It reminds me of a scene in ‘Silent Light’ where you see kids playing in a stream. It’s slow, patient. Then it cuts to a little girl in the grass looking up at the sky, and you hear the wind rustling through the trees. It fills you with reverence—not only for sound but for nature too.” 64 culturedmag.com
February 24 - April 4
ASTRID KROGH ARABESQUE
6819 Melrose Ave, Los Angeles CA 90038 | hostlerburrows.com
REINALDO MARCUS GREEN
ART+FILM
Director Reinaldo Marcus Green understands that real people can be the key to unlocking a good story. Following his 2021 Oscar-winning biopic King Richard, which recounts the life of Venus and Serena Williams’s unrelenting father, the New York–born director took on yet another biopic—Bob Marley: One Love—about the king of reggae. Below, the filmmaker shares the painting that shaped the way he thinks about telling Black men’s stories.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Defacement, 1983. © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York.
“When we open our film in 1976, Bob Marley is sitting between two warring factions. He wasn’t a perfect man—nobody is. But everything that he sang was from a place of pain. He channeled that pain into something incredibly beautiful, like a gift to the world. One piece of art that keeps recurring in my work is Jean-Michel Basquiat’s ‘Defacement’ [1983]. Inherent in the work’s title is that shadowy black figure, and the feeling that it’s any of us. It’s a community of people in-between these two policemen. There’s not a day that I don’t wake up and think about that as a Black man in America. I think my kids can look at ‘Defacement’ and understand it. They’re like, ‘Oh, there’s a guy in the middle, and then there’s two authoritative figures that want to bring him down.’ It’s complex, which makes it simple. That’s the beauty of art.” 66 culturedmag.com
Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s FEB 11–MAY 12
Los Angeles | hammer.ucla.edu
SUNG NEUNG KYUNG, APPLE, 1976 (DETAIL). 17 GELATIN SILVER PRINTS, MARKER, PEN, 6 × 4 IN. (15.2 × 10.2 CM.) EACH. DAEJEON MUSEUM OF ART. © SEUNG NEUNG KYUNG. PHOTO: JANG JUNHO
NUMA PERRIER
ART+FILM
Numa Perrier filmed her first feature, Jezebel—a semi-autobiographical look at a 19-year-old girl entering the world of sex work and camming—in the building where she grew up. Ahead of her latest project, a biopic of the contemporary Black country music duo the War and Treaty, Perrier discusses the artist installation that gave her license to mine her life in her art.
Louise Bourgeois, THE WOVEN CHILD, 2002. Photography by Christopher Burke. Image courtesy of the Easton Foundation and VAGA at Artists Rights Society.
“I started my career in photography but quickly became frustrated. I wanted to go deeper. The first artist I stumbled across who really impacted me was Louise Bourgeois. I saw her presentation called ʻThe Woven Child,ʼ a collection of works in installation form. It felt like she was permitting me to trespass into the recesses of her childhood, to glimpse some of the moments that made her. Maybe she was trying to stitch herself together through all these different little tapestries. I had dreams of wanting to share pieces of my childhood with people, and feeling like the only way I could possibly do it is if I were able to recreate it exactly. Her work gave me permission to be completely personal. You just have to keep scraping for the truth, for the entry point. In ʻJezebel,ʼ I was able to recreate the weekly rental apartment that I lived in with my sister as a young adult. In ʻThe War and Treaty,ʼ Iʼm gonna be scraping for all of that again. Can I open the door so that someone can enter and feel like theyʼre in my shoes, like theyʼre walking in my world?” 68 culturedmag.com
MOLLY MANNING WALKER
ART+FILM
British holiday culture has provided generations of filmmakers with cinematic fodder, from Joanna Hogg’s Tuscan-tinged feature debut Unrelated to The Inbetweeners’s musty mancation. The Greek party town of Malia played host to the latter’s debauchery, and resurfaces once more in How to Have Sex, Molly Manning Walker’s chilling debut feature, which sees its protagonist Tara confront the penumbra of sexual violence. Here, Walker points to a viral image by British photographer Joel Goodman, which helped her sketch the film’s sinister decadence.
New Year’s Eve on Wells Street in Manchester, 2015. Photography by Joel Goodman. Image courtesy of the artist.
“We were in Malia prepping for six weeks. I would sit out on the strip and watch drunk people. A lot of ‘How to Have Sex’ stems from that and also from going back into old photo albums. I went on lots of those holidays as a teenager. I’ve got a photo of a group of us frying cigarettes because they got wet, that type of thing. This photograph by Joel Goodman sums up British drinking culture in an interesting way. There’s so much going on, like the girls eating chips in the background, or the guy who’s still drinking even though he’s trashed. Those little details are the things that keep you intrigued. Who’s looking at who? There’s one scene where Tara walks alone down the strip. We used Goodman’s photograph as a reference to block the scene’s composition and the chaos behind her. There’s something beautifully normal about it.” 70 culturedmag.com
LULU WANG
ART+FILM
Five years ago, Lulu Wang’s sophomore feature, The Farewell, made waves at Sundance. The autobiographical film is a portrait of a family that oscillates between falling apart and holding it together following the announcement of its matriarch’s terminal cancer. This winter, the director released Expats, a limited series that unspools the lives and losses of a group of affluent foreigners living in Hong Kong. Here, Wang points to a work by Singaporean photographer Nguan, which hangs in her Los Angeles home and offered her companionship during both projects.
Nguan, Untitled, from the series “Singapore,” 2012. Image courtesy of the artist.
“I was introduced to Nguan’s work by a friend. I’ve never been to Singapore, yet through his eyes, I felt nostalgia for the place. My first time on an airplane was leaving Beijing in 1989 with my mother. This plane ride represented a one-way trip, from which I would never return. There’s a sense of longing to escape, to leave, in this image. But it’s hopeful, too. I think about the people on that plane, what they’re leaving behind, as much as I think about the kids who are watching from below. ‘Expats’ is about people in the diaspora. It’s about changes: political changes, personal changes, tragedies. There’s this ebb and flow of how much we want to be in control. I believe that no matter the cards we are dealt, there are still small choices you can make minute to minute, day to day.” 72 culturedmag.com
María Magdalena Campos-Pons
Feb 15 – Jun 9, 2023
María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold is organized by the Brooklyn Museum and the J. Paul Getty Museum. The exhibition is curated by Carmen Hermo, Associate Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum, and Mazie Harris, Assistant Curator, Department of Photographs, J. Paul Getty Museum, with Jenée-Daria Strand, former Curatorial Associate, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum.
nasher.duke.edu
At the Nasher Museum, this exhibition is made possible by the Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Family Fund for Exhibitions; the J. Horst and Ruth Mary Meyer Fund; the Prakash and Anjali Melwani Fund; the Derek and Christen Wilson Fund for the Nasher Museum of Art; the Frank Edward Hanscom Endowment; and the Marilyn M. Arthur Fund
María Magdalena Campos-Pons (born Matanzas, Cuba, 1959). The Calling, 2003. Diptych of Polaroid Polacolor Pro photographs, framed: approx. 24 × 44 in. (61 × 111.8 cm) overall. Collection of Jonathan and Barbara Lee. © María Magdalena Campos-Pons. (Photo: courtesy of the artist)
RAISING A MONUMENT The Noguchi Museum’s latest exhibition is a deep dive into the practice of influential Japanese-American ceramicist Toshiko Takaezu. By JULIA HALPERIN
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making pots, cooking, and growing vegetables,” the Japanese-American artist Toshiko Takaezu liked to say. At her New Jersey home and studio, visitors might spot a pumpkin or a bowl of cherry tomatoes nestled among rows of ceramic orbs. Takaezu, who died in 2011, embodied the postwar ideal of merging art and life. Born in Hawaii to Okinawan immigrants, she was most closely associated with ceramic sculptures known as “closed forms”: painterly, glazed vessels with a puckered top resembling a nipple. They range from the size of a cantaloupe to taller than a person. On March 20, the first nationally touring exhibition of Takaezu’s work in two decades is opening at the Noguchi Museum in New York— fitting for a moment when the traditional hierarchy between art and craft is being dismissed as antiquated and patriarchal. Through 200 works, including rarely seen weavings and paintings, “Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within” brings forward the radical nature of her oeuvre and her rich contribution to the history of abstraction. The show’s curators pay special attention to the role of sound and touch in Takaezu’s work. One fateful day, a piece of clay fell into a pot while she was trimming its rim; it created a distinctive sound as it rolled around during the firing process. Takaezu was delighted. After that, she created several closed forms with a rattle hidden inside, activated only when the vessel was handled. At the Noguchi Museum, co-curator and composer Leilehua Lanzilotti has developed a concert program inspired by Takaezu’s exploration of sound. The artist, who was friends with Isamu Noguchi, Lenore Tawney, and other genredefying 20th-century creators, was also an influential teacher at Princeton University and at her home studio, where she hosted dozens of apprentices and worked around the clock. The retrospective aims to capture Takaezu’s influence holistically—as a teacher, experimenter, craftsperson, and avant-garde artist. “Over the course of six hard-working decades,” co-curator Glenn Adamson writes in an accompanying monograph, “she raised a monument and sent it out to the world in pieces.”
Photography by Charles Okamura. Image courtesy of Honolulu-Star Advertiser and the Noguchi Museum. © Family of Toshiko Takaezu
Toshiko Takaezu at her exhibition, “Toshiko Takaezu: Potter Weaver,” Contemporary ArtCenter of Hawaii, 1967.
“I SEE NO DIFFERENCE between
A’DRIANE NIEVES self-evident truths
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February 27 – April 6, 2024
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my day off, is going to a food truck in Queens, some hidden gem. I’ll go out of my way for that. New York is one of those places where you can indulge in whatever you’re craving at whatever time, and that’s basically what I do—whether it’s my favorite taco truck or lamb over rice.
Photography by Henry Hargreaves
YES, CHEF
Helena Christensen might have been the Golden Swan’s first regular, but the iconic model and photographer didn’t meet its culinary mastermind, Chef Doug Brixton, until he stopped by her table to shave black truffles months after the West Village hotspotʼs opening. Halfway through the Golden Swan’s first year, Brixton sat down with his favorite guest to give her a sense of the man behind the mise en place. HELENA CHRISTENSEN: I was born a food lover. From the second I came into this world I could not get enough, and it has stayed with me my whole life. Did you grow up in the kitchen? DOUG BRIXTON: My mom used to cook a lot, and I watched a lot of cooking shows on PBS, like Julia Child and Jacques Pépin. I would take those recipes and mimic them for her. CHRISTENSEN: How old were you? BRIXTON: About 6. I liked the energy of cooking—there are so many components and things to look out for. That really intrigued me. Growing
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up in California, you’re exposed to so many flavors from different communities … I always tell my cooks that, when you’re working on a classic dish, it’s important to keep its integrity, its story. That is truly the backbone of a dish. CHRISTENSEN: You start most days at the market. How do you finish your day? Are you hungry after leaving the kitchen? BRIXTON: The team used to go for a run on Saturday nights to finish the week off strong and bond. Everybody was invited: front- and back-ofhouse. My pleasure after work, especially before
CHRISTENSEN: Kitchens have gotten a negative rep for being toxic environments. I think it has a lot to do with the TV shows we’ve watched over the years, where chefs scream and treat their employees in a damaging way. I could never watch those shows because it made no sense to me why it would be like that. Cooking is such a beautiful experience that you have together—there’s magic in it. BRIXTON: I’ve moved away from the yelling, crazy intense negative vibe. I felt like it was my duty—and the duty of my colleagues—to think of how we’re shaping the next generation of chefs. A lot of people who come into my kitchen have to adapt to that kind of environment. You anticipate, given how the food comes out, that it will be an intense kitchen. But for me, a quiet and composed kitchen means focus—people are focused on their craft and themselves. CHRISTENSEN: You worked with Daniel Boulud—that must have been a big learning experience. BRIXTON: Working in an empire like that, there’s a lot of pressure. It takes you out of your comfort zone. There are so many things going on at the same time, so your creativity really needs to shine. I’m grateful I did it. CHRISTENSEN: I can’t imagine what kind of brain chefs must have—you need both an immense overview and so much concentration. I love cooking, but [doing it] for lots of people gets me very stressed out. What’s an ingredient that you can’t live without? BRIXTON: Easy—salt. If you have a high-quality ingredient, you don’t need to do anything other than season it with a little bit of salt. CHRISTENSEN: I always travel with sea salt. If I go on holiday, I always bring some with me … Is there a film or TV show about a chef that you relate to? BRIXTON: The movie Chef [with Jon Favreau]. The pressure, the teamwork, family, finding balance—all those things are in there. I like the moment where he’s cooking at his house after the review. He’s making this restaurant-style dinner; he’s just in his element, really focusing on his passion and loving what he’s doing. I can relate to that.
SEEKING
THE SUN
For her first West Coast exhibition, the Brazilian painter Marina Perez Simão wanted to make her canvases glow using nothing but oil paint. By JULIA HALPERIN Photography by WILLIAM JESS LAIRD
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MARINA PEREZ SIMÃO’S paintings look like how diving into a body of water feels. Luscious color envelops every corner of the canvas, brushstrokes swirl around the surface like a current, and edges bite with cold while the center warms up. Since the market for ultra-contemporary artists went gangbusters four years ago, the 44-year-old’s transporting abstractions have become sought-after prizes—perhaps because the kinds of people who can afford them fantasize about experiencing the quiet yet profound connection to the elements that her work embodies. After growing up between the green hills of Minas Gerais and the urban sprawl of Rio de Janeiro, Simão studied art in Paris before returning home to Brazil. Lately, her work has grown considerably in both scale and ambition. After she completed an 11-meter-long fresco in São Paulo for Mendes Wood DM’s 10thanniversary group show, the artist “felt the
need to expand” her oil paintings. Two of her largest landscapes to date—both more than 12 feet wide—form the backbone of her first West Coast solo show, “Solanaceae,” which runs through March 2 at Pace Los Angeles. The exhibition takes its name from the scientific word for the nightshade plant family. The term’s murky etymology has a special kinship with Simão’s work: It either stems from the Latin verb solari, meaning “to soothe,” or from the fact that certain solanaceous flowers resemble the shape of the sun. Ambiguity, nature’s capacity to heal, the connection between the earth and the heavens—it’s all there, both in the title and the 15 canvases created by the artist over the past year. “For these works, I was trying to trap light inside the paintings, between the layers or juxtapositions of colors,” Simão says. “Ultimately, movement and light are the guiding principles behind everything else.”
OBSESSIONS
Three writers select a treasured cultural artifact and hold it up to the light, reflecting on the revelations it has sparked, the nostalgia it conjures, and the deep-seated urges it articulates.
Image courtesy of Hilton Als.
HILTON ALS “I’M NOT QUITE SURE if it’s an obsession—I reserve that honorific for more personal matters—but I have a sculpture by the brilliant Jared Buckhiester that I wouldn’t part with for the world. It makes me think about so much: not only form, but history and the queer mind, too. The piece is about a foot high; not terribly big, but big enough. It shows a figure—a male figure—riding backward on a horse. The horse is bucking; you can see its goofy teeth. There is no danger here: The male figure is bending backward to accommodate the action of the horse, both man and beast are having fun. 80 culturedmag.com
In Hilton Als’s home, one object—a free-wheeling sculpture of a Mexican revolutionary by artist Jared Buckhiester—never ceases to please. In this figure’s joyful gruffness, the Pulitzer Prize– winning writer and critic finds a new model of masculinity.
Sometimes, when I’m just sitting around, I look at this wonderful object and laugh. It’s like a still from a particularly surreal and amusing silent movie. Though the piece is based on Pancho Villa—a key figure and general in the Mexican Revolution (1910–20)—it is not a monument. Jared has made him a living figure, sombrero in the air. I first saw the 46-year-old artist’s work many years ago, when I hired him to help me with a project. His eye and sensibility remain important to my understanding of art, particularly in a marketplace that’s defined at
present less by surprise than by the acquisition of comforting narratives about someone else’s oppression. Buckhiester’s power is his imagination, and it’s a beautiful, refreshingly reckless one. Always at the center of his work is some kind of reference to queerness in all senses of the word; his cowboys and military guys are given a garment, or a gesture, that calls attention to standard ‘manly’ attire and affect while breaking free of it. His work makes me rethink the hang-ups that go into so-called masculinity—the joy to be found in turning all that on its head.”
DALLAS APRIL ART 4 – 7 2024 FAIR sixteenth edition
OBSESSIONS
Photography by Ciera Dunbar. Image courtesy of J Wortham.
J WORTHAM “2023 HAD ME DESPERATE for more expansive emotional landscapes that weren’t afraid to explore messy portrayals of love and codependency without being toxic or destructive. For a mirror that reflected my own peri-pandemic ambivalence about life and all its compartments. I found that in Past Lives, Celine Song’s minefield of a movie about two childhood friends reuniting as adults, pressing up against the edges of their connection to each other. In the movie’s final moments, we watch Nora (Greta Lee) embrace Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) before putting
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The Virginia-born writer met their emotional match in filmmaker Celine Song’s minor-key sensation, Past Lives. Released last June, the film plumbs the murky depths of adulthood with an eye toward the ends we leave loose, and the ones we come home to.
him into a cab back to their native Seoul. Nora watches the car pull away, then walks the length of an excruciatingly long city block, wading backward from longing into reality. As she falls into the arms of her husband, Arthur (John Magaro), she lets out an anguished sob that feels like it’s been bottled up for the previous 100 minutes. That sound has worn a groove in my brain, a texture that I worry like a small rock. Her grief is the score of uncertainty, the ambivalence of adulthood, the terror of having to live with all of our choices, including the ones made for us.
She releases it all into the body of her partner, a man who is implicated in her sadness, but not responsible for it. Nora’s anguish over her feelings of alienation is the tether that keeps the slow-moving movie taut, and its release is as cathartic as it is confusing. Song doesn’t give us the long processing conversation that is sure to happen that night. The film refuses simplicity, choosing the murky gradients of love, fear, longing, belonging, and unknowing. Nora’s husband helps her into their home tenderly, holding it all with her, for her.”
APRIL 11–14
THE INTERNATIONAL EXPOSITION OF CONTEMPORARY & MODERN ART CHICAGO
NAVY PIER
OBSESSIONS
Image courtesy of Nicolaia Rips.
NICOLAIA RIPS “MY PARENTS PURCHASED a used Marx Brothers box set at the Chelsea Flea Market back when it was a parking garage. I watched the VHS tapes repeatedly, teething eagerly on the smallest details—expressions, words, scents, habits—in the greedy way children consume things. Groucho Marx was the first man I ever fell in love with. He died August 19, 1977 and I, Nicolaia Rips, was born August 19, 1998. Obsession is the gulf between adoration and ownership, where the self boils. It is all-consuming and bewildering. From the age of 5, my
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You don’t choose your first love, it chooses you. As a child, writer Nicolaia Rips fell for the mustachioed, cigar-smoking punchinello Groucho Marx. At the age of 26, she’s still recovering.
personality was so tethered to Groucho’s that my room became a shrine: no Barbies, but there was a statue of him with a cigar pinched insolently between his teeth, a poster for Duck Soup in Spanish, assorted biographies, letters he had written, and several sets of You Bet Your Life that I watched until I couldn’t breathe. I was 11 when we visited California. I insisted on a pilgrimage to Groucho Marx’s former home and was devastated to find that it was being demoed by its new owners. I forced my mom to take a photo of me in front of the wreckage
anyway. In it, I’m standing tear-soaked next to his mailbox, a wrecking ball swinging behind me. The Marx Brothers cut the world to childsize. In their universe, you can wriggle out of most horrors with a quip, a song, or an eyebrow waggle. Of course, as we get bigger, so do our problems. When I feel bogged down by mine, I watch A Night at the Opera and remind myself that I’ve fallen into the trap: I’ve taken myself seriously again—but there’s always the chance to laugh at life’s wrecking balls, even through tears.”
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IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WAS THE END
THE FIRST ACT OF Last Days, an
opera composed by Oliver Leith and codirected by Matt Copson and Anna Morrissey, is punctuated by a turntable playing the production’s only aria. Pop darling Caroline Polachek lends her voice to the piece, which concludes with the words, “Non voglio che finisca mai”—I don’t ever want it to end. Endings are at the center of the opera, an adaptation of Gus Van Sant’s 2005 film of the same name, which takes Kurt Cobain’s demise as its loose blueprint. Onstage, Blake—the protagonist who mirrors the Nirvana frontman—is incarnated by Agathe Rousselle, the breakout star of 2021’s Titane. After a sold-out run at London’s Royal Opera House in 2022, the opera had its U.S. premiere at the Los Angeles Philharmonic earlier this month. Ahead of the opening, Rousselle and Copson, who is also a visual artist, took CULTURED behind the curtain.
CULTURED: How did you two meet? MATT COPSON: I had seen Agathe’s performance in Titane and was wowed by it. I believed that she could do anything. It approximated the desired condition of theater, where we do not know in which direction this is going, as opposed to a filmed performance, which can often feel like a stilted, stylized thing. I was amazed by the transformative power of the whole thing. That was exactly the tone I was looking for with Blake—somebody who exists in this slippery area between reclusive animal and something that’s going to pounce. So I reached out to Agathe and was like, “Have you ever heard of this film Last Days?” Agathe answered, “I’m obsessed with Last Days.” AGATHE ROUSSELLE: When Last Days came out, I was 17. I went to see it maybe three times. I asked for the original soundtrack for Christmas, and I listened to the CD until it broke, basically. As a teenager, Nirvana helped me live, like many other teenagers. In the first conversation with Matt, I understood that it was going to be a very collaborative way of working, which I’m all about.
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“Celebrity in general is hard to deal with, and it’s even harder when you’re not built for that, when your dream was not to be famous. That’s a new dream people have now: They don’t want to be talented, they want to be famous.” —Agathe Rousselle
Images courtesy of the Royal Opera House, London.
COPSON: The wonderful thing about opera is we had six weeks of rehearsal together. We live in an age where the desire is for the content mill to pummel things out. Certain things can be made fast and in a fantastic way with a strong attitude. But we didn’t go into anything flippantly here. I sent Agathe a list of things that I’d been reading, all the existentialist texts on suicide—you’ve got to delve into that stuff. We didn’t get into the literal blocking of scenes until way down the line, because it was far more important to figure out who our version of Blake was. There was a perfect level of enthusiastic amateurness, which is very good—especially for something like opera which is understood, culturally at least, to be a dead form. CULTURED: You were making a work about death in a dead form. Did you think about the metanarrative within the opera itself?
COPSON: For me, that’s one of the keys to unlocking it. I hate biopics as a form. I have a moral problem with most of them—to summarize someone’s existence within extremely conventional terms seems like quite a vulgar thing to do. But I love it when things like Last Days exist, things that play with an idea of reality and truth to get to that third position of art—neither trying to depict the very thing, nor trying to access this more archetypal understanding. Opera deals with melodrama, and we’re dealing with someone’s suicide here, so we’re not a million miles away from Greek theater or some of these classics. On the other hand, the reason there are still kids walking around wearing Nirvana T-shirts is because that symbol represents the last hurrah of the alternative within the mainstream. [Kurt Cobain] existed at a time when there was a monoculture, when there was a singular way in which culture was consumed.
Matt Copson (left) and the cast (right) of Last Days in rehearsals for the opera.
We live in a totally decentralized world now, and we’ve almost given up on the idea of provocation to any degree. We had somebody who was extremely famous but was essentially saying “fuck you” the whole time. He kind of loved the “fuck you” and the fame in equal measure. CULTURED: Agathe, how did you prepare yourself to channel someone who has become an archetype? ROUSSELLE: I never thought about Blake as a symbol. I don’t think he wanted to die; he just didn’t want to be here anymore. As an actor, I cannot channel a concept, but I can channel the human experience. Fortunately with Kurt Cobain, we have so much material to try to attain that. There are journals, interviews, [recorded] performances. And Blake’s experience in the film is very human. The banality of it is insane. We’ve all been through an “I don’t want to see anyone, and I want to stay in my fucking cave for the next week and not talk to anyone” phase. He’s a rock star—that’s the extreme of it. Celebrity in general is hard to deal with, and it’s even harder when you’re not built for that, when your dream was not to be famous. That’s a new dream people have now: They don’t want to be talented, they want to be famous. CULTURED: The costumes in Last Days are all Balenciaga. Agathe, for most of the opera you wear an enormous green coat. How did that shape Blake’s physical language? ROUSSELLE: If you play a pregnant woman in the film and they give you a fake prosthetic belly, it changes your whole way of walking, sitting, everything. You feel how vulnerable a pregnant woman is feeling. It was the same with that coat because it is very heavy and very hot, so it’s the best place to hide. You’re hiding, but very conscious that everyone sees you because it’s neon green. COPSON: I wanted to work with fashion. I liked the idea that people were wearing ripped jeans, but those ripped jeans cost a lot of money. I felt like I could deal with the postmodern nihilism of that position within a narrative interestingly. For Blake, I had no interest in recreating a look of Cobain’s or something from the film. I liked how [Balenciaga] clothes are exaggerated, which is perfect for the stage. I was always thinking about how in LA, you’re in the supermarket and a celebrity is there, supposedly undercover, but wearing fucking pink fuzz. There’s an emotional truth that you don’t want the limelight, but it’s the only thing you know.
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traveling to an art fair can feel like visiting a Starbucks. Inside the recycled air of a convention center, wandering from booth to booth, and looking at the same two dozen artists, you could be anywhere in the world. Good fairs, however, are different. They serve as invitations to discover not only new artists and galleries, but also the host city itself. This year, Frieze Los Angeles (Feb. 29–March 3) will invite elements of its sprawling hometown’s spirit into its outpost at the Santa Monica Airport. Christine Messineo, Frieze’s director of Americas, also hopes visitors will venture beyond the tent to explore the quirkier and more intimate corners of LA’s cultural landscape. Ahead of the fair, Messineo invited CULTURED to accompany her on a whirlwind tour of some of the best art LA has to offer—often in unlikely places.
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Photography by RAMSEY ALDERSON
Christine Messineo and Brooke Kanter at LACMA.
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J o a n Br o w n, "Ce n t e r Ob e l is k," a t Be v e r l y H i l l s P u b l i c Li b r a r y “I love the public library. My son is 4 and we’re constantly looking for activities, so my relationship to the library has changed, but remains steadfast and strong. He treats the stacks as mazes, dashes up the steps, rides the elevator endlessly, but he also adores stories. These places stewarded by our cities are essential to the ecosystem. In my many trips to the Beverly Hills branch, I encountered Center Obelisk [1986], the Joan Brown pillar made later in her life after years of portraiture. It’s tucked in an alcove of arches at the entrance, surrounded by green sprouting palms.”
Joan Brown, Center Obelisk, 1986.
R y a n F l o r e s's S t u d i o “I met up with Casey Fremont—executive director of Art Production Fund and curator of this year’s public sculpture at Frieze Los Angeles—in Glendale at ceramicist Ryan Flores’s studio. We spent hours studying his vast array of finishes and glazes—the unpredictable nature of the layered colors and the discoveries along the way. Flores is the recipient of a new on-site commission by Maestro Dobel Tequila at this year’s Frieze Los Angeles, part of a partnership launched last year. Debuting four hand-built plinths over five feet tall, the artist will display colorful sculptures referencing Gaudí’s Sagrada Família in Barcelona through forms reminiscent of fruits, flowers, and vegetables from the southwestern United States and Mexico. We also spent time with a collection of small ceramic cups that Flores is making for 100 lucky fair guests (with the added bonus of a tequila respite).”
L AC MA “LACMA was the first museum I visited in Los Angeles after graduating from college. I was working as a stylist’s assistant, driving a car packed full of garment bags and shoeboxes, schlepping between parking garages and shoots. The museum was a reprieve, a reminder that art remained close. That trove is growing—multiple cranes now dot the landscape, signaling the evolving legacy of the museum. Brooke Kanter, head of VIP, Americas for Frieze, and I were fortunate to get a sneak peek at the action from the third-floor offices across Wilshire Boulevard.” 90 culturedmag.com
Teak Ramos’s “What’s Wrong With Beauty?” in Los Angeles.
Oz z i e J u a r e z a n d
T l a l o c S t u d i os
Ga y l o r d Ap a r t m e n t s
“Ozzie Juarez has heart. His generosity of spirit extends to the constellation of close friends, colleagues, and neighbors he invites to work out of his warehouse space. (When I last visited Tlaloc, the studio collective he opened in 2021, he had just rescued a cat.) The studio houses photographers, painters, an archive of punk rock ephemera and zines, traditional sign painters, and graffiti artists, who come together to share techniques, critiques, and mentorship. It’s inspirational and motivating and deserves attention. Ozzie was in the midst of completing a new body of work that will be shown at Charlie James Gallery during Frieze Los Angeles.”
“Los Angeles has a unique history of garage and home galleries. Some are temporary summer affairs, others move into the commercial realm, but these small operations and the exhibitions they produce often inform the larger conversation. Gaylord Apartments, a gallery founded by Ramsey Alderson, Joseph Geagan, Veronica Gelbaum, and John Tuite (one of whom was holed up painting during my visit for his upcoming show at LOMEX) is just this kind of spot. I visited as Teak Ramos was installing her first LA show in the space. Her intricately constructed wooden canvases line the space, referencing Diane Simpson and Susan Cianciolo. I want one.”
Tony Delap, The Big Wave, 1989.
To n y De l a p, "Th e Bi g W a v e," o n Wi l s hi r e Bl v d “I ended my tour with another public sculpture hidden in plain sight, The Big Wave [1989] by Tony Delap, which stretches over Wilshire Boulevard at the point where the city of Santa Monica meets Los Angeles. A bridge arching above the street embodies something you might not realize, which is that you are entering the final stretch of urbanity before hitting the ocean. I think the work represents the artistic legacy of Santa Monica, which for decades hosted prominent West Coast artists including Lita Albuquerque, Tony Berlant, Richard Diebenkorn, and Sam Francis. We’re embracing this cultural legacy of public sculpture in the programming of the next Frieze Los Angeles. This year, in collaboration with Art Production Fund and the city of Santa Monica, significant work by Cynthia Talmadge and Matt Johnson will remain on view beyond the fair calendar.”
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ONE MAN’S TRASH Designer Max Lamb’s latest collection offers an unsung material a permanent seat at the table. By MARA VEITCH
Photography by Tom Jamieson. Direction by Joseph Doran Fitzbrien. Image courtesy of Gallery Fumi.
“AMAZON BOXES, those are really the worst,” declares Max Lamb. The British furniture designer is on speakerphone, decrying the demerits of cardboard varietals, the contents of his car jangling as he traverses the rutted roads near his home and studio in Harrow on the Hill, outside of London. The designer is in the final stages of preparing “Box 2,” his latest furniture collection made entirely of the ubiquitous and overlooked material. The show, an extension of his recent exhibition at London’s Gallery Fumi last October, also marks the designer’s West Coast debut. This month, the stools, chairs, and coffee tables he’s been working on— some of which bear cryptic markings from their past lives—are on view at Sized Studio in Los Angeles.
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Lamb’s design philosophy stems from his reverence for constraints. For his 2017 collection “Boulders,” he wore soft depressions into rough blocks of granite, mimicking the eons-long erosive effect of water on stone. “Box 2” may be focused on a more contemporary phenomenon, our castaway culture, but the subtlety of Lamb̓s interventions and the purity of their results
“THE IDEA IS THAT THEY GROW OLD GRACEFULLY. THEY MATURE, THEY WRINKLE, MAYBE THEY GET A BIT GRUMPY, BUT THEY’RE STILL FUNCTIONAL. I’M DESCRIBING MYSELF HERE.”
are similar. “The main principle here is to get rid of waste,” he says of his latest pieces, which, he emphasizes, are completely functional. “All of the material from a single box remains part of the piece.” Using nothing but scraps of cardboard (detritus from his own home as well as his neighbors’), the occasional screw, and a simple flour-and-water paste that he proudly claims “you could lick off your hands,” Lamb creates quiet testaments to trash—something from nothing. Will these objects, tattooed with barcodes and mailman chicken scratch, stand the test of time? It may be too early to tell. “The idea is that they grow old gracefully. They mature, they wrinkle, maybe they get a bit grumpy, but they're still functional,” says the designer, laughing. “I’m describing myself here.”
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EBGI GOES EAST
The Los Angeles gallerist Anat Ebgi once said she would not expand to New York in order to keep up with the Joneses. But Ebgi has a history of moving on instinct—and now, she also has a two-story, 5,000-square-foot gallery in Tribeca.
IN FEBRUARY 2023, Anat Ebgi penned an op-ed for Artnet News about her enduring commitment to Los Angeles—where her eponymous, 12-year-old gallery has earned a loyal following among the denizens of a growing art scene—at a time when many of her peers were eyeing expansions to the East Coast or abroad. “For me,” she wrote, “it’s still all about LA.” Fast-forward to November, and the Miami native had news: She was opening a gallery in New York. “Honestly, it kind of took me by surprise,” says Greg Ito, a dyed-in-the-wool LA artist who has worked with Ebgi since 2019. “The way that Anat operates … it can seem very on-a-whim. But I’m also that kind of person. If there’s an opportunity or you get a whisper, you just go for it.” In Ebgi’s case, the whisper came from a prospective client in Manhattan real estate who offered to show her some properties while she was in town for Frieze New York last spring. Suddenly—enticingly—the prospect of a bicoastal operation was right in front of her. “He planted the seed in my head. From there, everything just fell into place like puzzle pieces,” Ebgi says with enthusiasm. It’s not the only time the 45-year-old dealer—whose disposition is as warm and sunny as her adopted home city—lets her enthusiasm for the next chapter peek through. As Moira Sims, whom Ebgi hired from Simone Subal Gallery to di94 culturedmag.com
rect the New York branch, says, “Anat just has so much energy!” That word—energy—is one she and her new employer use often. In a reversal of the typical dynamic, the two-story, 5,000-square-foot building on the eastern edge of Tribeca boasts a bigger footprint than either of Ebgi’s LA galleries. But the dealer has no intention of shifting the base of her operation east. New York, she says, represents “an investment in the artists, an investment in the program.” That commitment showed through in “The First Taste,” the Tribeca outpost’s inaugural exhibition, which opened on Jan. 19. The show included work from every artist on the dealer’s intergenerational, 31-name roster—a group that’s heavy on painters and Angelenos. Many, like Alec Egan, Jessica Taylor Bellamy, and Joshua Petker, straddle both categories. Up next is an ambitious solo presentation from Ito, who, after the initial whiplash of the New York news, decided he was all in. “I want to support Anat as much as she wants to support me,” he says. It is a precarious time for a gallery like Ebgi’s to set up shop in downtown Manhattan. The area has recently seen a wave of experimental dealers—Foxy Production, JTT, Queer Thoughts—shutter amid a broader economic downturn. The trend has left many wringing their hands over fears that the increasingly top-
heavy art market is finally squeezing mid-sized galleries out. But Ebgi is no stranger to making big moves in tough times. She moved to New York for college on Aug. 29, 2001—less than two weeks before 9/11. After getting her master’s at Bard College, she relocated to LA in search of a museum job at the height of the financial crisis in 2008. When that job proved difficult to find, she opened her first LA gallery, the Company, on a shoestring instead. “I had to do something to pay my student loans,” she explains. Twelve years later, in the middle of the pandemic lockdowns, her eponymous venture expanded with two more LA spaces. (Anat Ebgi closed the oldest of its three LA galleries shortly after signing the Tribeca lease last September.) With this track record, you could say that Ebgi’s timing is either chronically unlucky, or, shockingly charmed, as she’s managed to endure at every turn. While it is certainly hard to argue with the dealer’s many achievements, it’s also fair to wonder how many times she can play that game and continue to come out on top. To this, Ebgi points out, “Shit’s always bad!” The success of the New York project, she continues, will never hinge on macroeconomic tides. “I’m doing this with eyes wide open,” she says. “The only way New York fails is if I don’t put the energy into it.”
Photography by Matthew Kroening. Artwork featured by Joshua Petker. Image courtesy of Anat Ebgi.
By TAYLOR DAFOE
Stephanie Syjuco, Total Transparency Filter (Portrait of N), 2017. Inkjet print, 40 × 30 in. (101.6 × 76.2 cm). Courtesy the artist; RYAN LEE Gallery, New York; Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco; and Silverlens, Manila. © Stephanie Syjuco. Photo: Courtesy the artist; RYAN LEE Gallery, New York; Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco; and Silverlens, Manila
October 20, 2023–April 7, 2024 Tickets at guggenheim.org
A CULT AWARDS CEREMONY LANDS A MAGNANIMOUS NEW HOST At the 39th annual Film Independent Spirit Awards, Aidy Bryant aims to continue a tradition of outlandishness. By JAYNE O’DWYER Photography by Alexa Viscius. Image courtesy of Aidy Bryant.
IT MAY COME as a surprise that Aidy Bryant views her upcoming gig as a rare challenge. Though the Saturday Night Live alum has a wealth of performances—at various degrees of preparedness—under her belt, the prospect of hosting the 39th annual Film Independent Spirit Awards, which takes place Feb. 25, feels like a different beast. “I don’t come from stand-up,” she says. “I come from a sketch, improv, and writing background. I get to come at this like, I don’t know how to do what they do. I can only do what I do.” Bryant’s accomplishments—like her four Emmy nominations, including one for her role in the Hulu comedy Shrill—would inflate most egos. Instead, her deliberately informal and frank approach to her craft makes her a perfect candidate to host the most free-spirited awards show of the season. After all, Bryant has prepared for worse: “This is going to be a room of quiet, smiling people. I used to perform
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in venues where the audience was actively hostile—drunk and mad.” Known for its laidback tenor and enduring sense of humor (for years, the ceremony has taken place in a tented Santa Monica parking lot mere days before the Oscars), the Independent Spirit Awards has
“THIS IS GOING TO BE A ROOM OF QUIET, SMILING PEOPLE. I USED TO PERFORM IN VENUES WHERE THE AUDIENCE WAS ACTIVELY HOSTILE— DRUNK AND MAD.”
lauded cult classics such as After Hours, Fargo, and Dirty Dancing, ushering in the careers of diamond-in-the-rough talents like Paul Dano and Aaron Eckhart in its Best Debut Performance category. As host, Bryant adds her name to a cadre of certified Hollywood luminaries—her predecessors include John Waters, Samuel L. Jackson, and Aubrey Plaza. Nevertheless, Bryant insists that the focus remain on the evening’s nominees. “Ultimately, it’s not about me. It’s actually about all these people who have worked hard to put these projects together—the people who actually made these films,” says Bryant. After a year marked by historic WGA and SAGAFTRA strikes, a ceremony that celebrates the industry’s upstart soul and seat-of-thepants ethos feels all the sweeter. “It’s [about] the special little things that people made in a scrappy way,” Bryant concludes. “I like scrappiness.”
CARLYE PACKER LOS ANGELES DOROTHY HOOD
THE HUNTRESS
Curated by Paul Schimmel
02.24.24 - 03.23.24
CLAIRE CHAMBLESS
ROLE PLAY
03.30.24 - 04.27.24
WWW.CARLYEPACKER.XYZ OFFICE@CARLYEPACKER.XYZ
Naiomi Glasses, Ralph Lauren’s inaugural artist-in-residence, presents an ode to her Indigenous community’s patterns and practices in her first collection with the storied brand. With two more drops slated for 2024, the young designer has a long and exciting road ahead. NAIOMI GLASSES is not a screamer. “I’m usually so reserved,” she says across the screen. “If I’m in a group setting, I’m probably the one who’s listening.” On a fateful October afternoon in 2021, however, the seventhgeneration Diné weaver shrieked with joy. Ralph Lauren had asked her to be the 56-yearold company’s inaugural artist-in-residence. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, of course, yes!’” she remembers. “At the same time, you kind of think to yourself, How is this happening?” Fast-forward two years and that disbelief has transformed into 32 garments and accessories, the first of three limited-edition capsules designed by Glasses in collaboration with the brand she grew up wearing. The collection landed in stores last December, accompanied by a campaign that the textile artist began envisioning on her very first day on the job. “I told everyone at Ralph Lauren, ‘I want everything to be Indigenous. I want people to see the beauty
of Indigenous peoples in front of the camera, and to know that we have talents bringing to life such a beautiful campaign behind the scenes too,’” the 26-year-old recalls, referencing the inaugural campaign. From the photography—by Ryan RedCorn, a screenwriter for Reservation Dogs, and Daryn Sells, who lives 15 miles up the road from Glasses in Navajo Nation—to the music used in the campaign’s Instagram Reels—courtesy of Albuquerque-based indie outfit Side Montero—the campaign is a testament to Glasses’s desire to lift her creative community up alongside her, and her laser-sharp attention to detail. That intentionality threads its way throughout the collection, and Glasses sees a story behind every decision. She advocated for concha buttons to adorn the capsule’s blouses, an homage to the Diné people’s long silversmithing tradition. (The first concha buttons were
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hammered from silver dollars.) She made sure the wool wrap, her riff on a wearing blanket, was made with undyed fibers, a glimpse of what this classic garment looked like before it became a staple in trading posts across the United States—and definitely before Ralph Lauren. Because the storied brand is, in Glasses’s words, “what represents American fashion,” and was inspired by Indigenous iconography for some of its most enduring designs, the collaboration could have been as strained as it was significant. But the artist sees her family in the team she collaborated with, and vice versa. She references a few Ralph Lauren garments she wore endlessly while growing up, like a striped pink dress and a bright turquoise polo. “All those pieces were in my wardrobe,” she says. “I always saw them, so I was like, ‘Yeah, of course, if I were to ever work in fashion, I would go back to something that reminds me of family.’”
Naiomi Glasses and her family by Ryan Redcorn for Ralph Lauren. Image courtesy of Ralph Lauren.
WORN WISDOM
E U R O P E A N H E A R T, C A L I F O R N I A S O U L Discover the best of both worlds
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Lee Kun-Yong, Logic of Hand, 1975/2018. Image courtesy of the artist and Hammer Museum.
Park Hyunki, Untitled (TV Stone Tower), 1982. Image courtesy of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and Hammer Museum.
For its first West Coast presentation, “Only the Young” looks back at the experimental artists who shaped Korea’s postwar sensibilities.
“RECENTLY, K-culture seems to be attracting global attention,” observes 81-yearBy SOPHIE LEE old artist Lee Kun-Yong. “After the Korean War, everyone was trying to make a living—pursuing South Korea’s viral K-pop acts and TV the Korean War. Among Lee’s featured works is art was done by the good-for-nothings of society. dramas are quickly turning the nation’s culture Logic of Hand, the artist’s 1975 photo series that It’s striking to see how things have changed.” into a leading global export, aided by the chronicles a sequence of expressive gestures. The avant-garde Korean artist himself laid government’s hefty investments in the arts. “At the time, relationships were determined by the groundwork for that sea change in the 1960s Less than 50 years ago, things were different. a hierarchy of power,” he says. “I attempted to and ’70s—along with peers like Ha Chong-Hyun, In 1975, Lee recalls being apprehended by his interpret [that system] and communicate through Jung Kangja, and Kim Kulim, who represented country’s national security agency and trampled the body as a primal medium.” the nucleus of South Korea’s experimental art by combat boots. “It was a movement. Their entries into the period of military dictatorship. It pantheon of creative exploration are the is a miracle that we survived as focus of “Only the Young: Experimental Jung Kangja, Kiss Me, artists through such times,” he Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s,” which 1967/2001. Installation view at the Guggenheim’s says. “People may wonder what landed at Los Angeles’s Hammer “Only the Young,” 2023. it is about Korean culture that Museum in early February following suddenly appeals to the global stops in Seoul and New York. population,” Lee continues. The unprecedented exhibition “Perhaps, those who have features nearly 80 paintings, pursued art through tumultuous photographs, and installations that times in Korean modern history chronicle and react to the country’s can offer some clues.” steep climb to modernization following 100 culturedmag.com
Jung Kangja, Kiss Me, 1967/2001. Installation view at the Guggenheim’s “Only the Young,” 2023. Photography by Ariel Ione Williams. Image courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Hammer Museum.
THE KOREAN AVANT-GARDE LANDS IN LOS ANGELES
CHIC SCAVENGERS
Hermès convened a coterie of actors, chefs, athletes, and more in Aspen last December for a weekend of luxury, mystery, and camaraderie. By JESSICA IREDALE
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Left and right: Photography by Vincent Tullo. All images courtesy of Hermès.
“IT’S A HOUSE WHERE CREATION IS VERY FREE. THERE IS NO OBLIGATION.”
—VÉRONIQUE NICHANIAN
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ry field in Ermenonville, France, where everyone was issued mosquito repellent and asked to get in touch with their inner berry. “It’s not very conventional,” says Nichanian. “It’s a house where creation is very free. There is no obligation.” A few years ago, the theme was “Lightness.” “It didn’t mean doing light things, it was more about a state of mind,” says de Beaufort. “Nobody’s telling you this year is going to be brown or square or whatever.” But back to Aspen. Back to the ranch, literally—and Kevin Costner’s, specifically. Everyone boarded sprinter vans at 10:45 a.m. and disembarked at the actor’s Dunbar Ranch, a 160acre spread just outside Aspen that had been rechristened Hermès Winter Camp for the next 10 hours. At base camp, seven glamping tents circled a series of fire pits. Group members were divided into seven teams, based on the color of the Hermès Winter Camp patch on their hat, to embark on a scavenger hunt comprising seven stations around the property. Seven was the magic number: emblematic of the seven seas, seven deadly sins, seven days of the week, and seven hills of Rome. The teams had to complete seven tasks, to learn seven lessons, to find one seven-letter word. With each station came a riddle (“When I find myself at my highest peak, it’s through craftsmanship that I speak.” Would that be custom Hermès skis?) and a challenge loosely revolving around one of the Hermès men’s metiers—Goineau’s silks, Nichanian’s ready-to-wear, or de Beaufort’s Atelier Horizons, which can deck out your Bugatti in Hermès interiors or fashion a
custom Hermès jukebox for your chalet. Nichanian’s team, the first to figure out the seven-letter word—creatif, French for “creative”—were declared the winners. Their prize? “They all got Birkins,” deadpanned another team leader. “Just kidding!” The experience was the prize. The scavenger hunt was broken up by an alfresco lunch of fondue and duck confit. Dinner was a barbecue cooked by the legendary Argentine chef Francis Mallmann and his team, who were flown in to make the best empanadas, steak, and salt-baked salmon of your life. After dinner, the celebrated musician Helado Negro performed and a gentle snow began to fall from the Colorado skies. The scene was so picturesque, one had to wonder if Hermès had somehow arranged the snowfall. “I was wondering that myself,” said Robert Chavez, executive chairman of Hermès Americas, “but I don’t think so.” So what does Hermès get out of an event like this? Of course, there are media impressions, social and otherwise, when attendees like Olympic snowboarder Chloe Kim, chef Alison Roman, and cultural commentator Evan Ross Katz post from the trip. “Have you been abducted by luxury?” one of Katz’s followers wrote. There is the potential to coax top clients further into Hermès’s calf-leather and cashmere embrace. By the end of the trip, the client who questioned the rationale behind Hermès Winter Camp had thoroughly imbibed the orange Kool-Aid. What is Hermès looking to gain by staging these annual luxury abductions? Vibes. As Chavez said before the games began, “There’s no hard work. It’s all about fun and camaraderie.”
Clockwise: Chloe Kim by BFA; Photography by Will Matsuda; Photography by Vincent Tullo; Daniela Soto-Innes and Gus Kenworthy by BFA; Photography by Bruno Staub; Marcos Fecchino by BFA; Photography by Vincent Tullo.
“WHAT DOES HERMÈS get out of this?” That question was posed by one of the brand’s most valued clients as he sat through an eightcourse dinner in Aspen early last December. He was, in a word, confused. Who could blame him? He, along with 50 other guests, who included actors, artists, chefs, influencers, athletes, and fellow clients, had been invited by the brand to attend a two-day jaunt in the luxurious mountain town. They were expected at the five-star Hotel Jerome, with instructions to dress warmly, and scant other details on the trip’s itinerary. Not even Hermès’s triumvirate of creative directors—Véronique Nichanian, Christophe Goineau, and Axel de Beaufort, who flew in from Paris to partake in the adventure billed as a discovery of the men’s universe—knew what to expect. “It’s a scavenger hunt,” Nichanian said. “We’re participating, but we don’t know what’s going on.” After more than 30 years at the helm of the Hermès men’s collection, Nichanian is used to these kinds of surprises. She joined the company a year after Jean-Louis Dumas, Hermès’s former chairman and artistic director (and father of current artistic director Pierre-Alexis Dumas) dreamed up the brand’s annual “theme” in 1987. In 2023, it was “Astonishment,” unveiled before a bunch of journalists, clients, and friends in the form of a herd of white horses in the Camargue‚ a vast wetland in southern France. The theme for 2019 was “Hermès Dreams,” for which the house brought 150 people to the Arctic Circle in Norway. For 2016’s “Nature at Full Gallop,” mystery buses drove passengers to a strawber-
FIND THE CAVE, HOLD THE TORCH Trevor Schoonmaker and Franklin Sirmans remember the nights they spent dreaming up exhibitions over drinks as young curators in New York—a practice they still cherish in their current positions at Duke University’s Nasher Museum and Miami’s Pérez Art Museum. By COLONY LITTLE MUSIC AND SPORTS are two unifying cultural forces that play a significant role in how we identify ourselves, tap into emotional memories, and relate to others. Museum leaders Trevor Schoonmaker and Franklin Sirmans blazed parallel paths while forging a strong friendship based on their love of the two pastimes. As directors of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and the Pérez Art Museum Miami, respectively, the soccer enthusiasts arrived at their current positions after vibrant careers in independent curation, writing, and institutional work. Their professional worlds first collided in early-aughts New York, during a curatorial boom that gave way to a more inclusive art historical canon. By 2006, they were cocurating “The Beautiful Game: Contemporary Art and Fútbol” at Roebling Hall in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood. In the years since, the pair has cultivated a connection grounded in their shared passions: Up next, they’ll team up to present “Spirit in the Land,” curated by Schoonmaker and opening at PAMM in March. Here, they discuss their long-standing friendship, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, hip hop, and the World Cup. Trevor, you moved to New York in 1998. When did you meet Franklin? 106 culturedmag.com
TREVOR SCHOONMAKER: Definitely by the time I curated “The Magic City” in 2000 [at Brent Sikkema]. We got to know one another a lot better during “Freestyle” with Thelma Golden. FRANKLIN SIRMANS: The beautiful thing is that we didn’t meet at an opening. It was probably at a bar or a club. SCHOONMAKER: Chances are high. After every opening at the Studio Museum in Harlem, a group would gather at the Lenox Lounge. SIRMANS: There was a confluence of things that were happening at the same time. “Freestyle” opened in 2001 at Studio, then “One Planet Under a Groove: Hip-Hop and Contemporary Art” at the [Bronx Museum of the Arts] at the end of 2001, and “Black President: the Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti” at the New Museum in 2003. Christian Haye opened the Project, a commercial space that invited many artists including Bili Bidjocka, Sanford Biggers, Odili Donald Odita, and Julie Mehretu. There was a real sense of collective effort. SCHOONMAKER: Those were important times. Wangechi Mutu was also a key figure within that community. Franklin named a lot of great people who we were close with, and it was such a different world then. Physically being together to build community and strong bonds
was critical. A lot of our ideas certainly came together in a bar, a restaurant, or a club. You are both strong stewards of artists’ legacies. Franklin, I read an essay you wrote about museum director and curator Walter Hopps where you describe curators as “cultural architects.” How do you balance these elements of your work? SIRMANS: When you’re in positions that are so artist-centered, you’re not objective. You’re committed to helping them present the work. With Hopps, it was, “Find the cave, hold the torch.” That kind of artist-driven relationship in terms of the curatorial sphere was paramount for me. SCHOONMAKER: The trust you build [with an artist] over time allows you access to work that others don’t have. With someone like Barkley [L. Hendricks], there’s still work coming to the fore that is tucked away in his home. Franklin’s early shows like “One Planet Under a Groove” introduced me to artists like William Cordova
“THE BEAUTIFUL THING IS THAT WE DIDN’T MEET AT AN OPENING. IT WAS PROBABLY AT A BAR OR A CLUB.” —FRANKLIN SIRMANS
(RIGHT) Trevor Schoonmaker with Radcliffe Bailey’s Vessel, 2017. Photography by Cornell Watson. Image courtesy of the Nasher Museum. (LEFT) Franklin Sirmans by standing within the exhibition, Marcela Cantuária: The South American Dream at the Pérez Art Museum Miami.
and others I worked with really closely over the years. His own relationships have influenced some of mine. You both left NYC in the mid 2000s. How important was it for you to create new curatorial paths by foregrounding your personal interests in your work? SIRMANS: The curatorial landscape began to open up in the ’90s, and I think a lot of that was because of independent curators. The curators we admired in the ’90s didn’t work in New York institutions—or American institutions for that matter. They were all making it happen from a very different viewpoint. It’s about connecting places, and then being able to connect people. SCHOONMAKER: You have to carve out an identity as an independent curator, because you don’t have the identity of the institution. Your identity is that you excel at working with living artists, you excel at pushing the canon, you excel at bringing popular culture into your group shows, and supporting Black artists and artists of the diaspora. Music, without question, draws a much larger audience—the possibilities open up extensively. Franklin was curating “One Planet” [when] I was curating “Black President,” and at that time people questioned the validity of
“YOU HAVE TO CARVE OUT AN IDENTITY AS AN INDEPENDENT CURATOR, BECAUSE YOU DON’T HAVE THE IDENTITY OF THE INSTITUTION. YOUR IDENTITY IS THAT YOU EXCEL AT WORKING WITH LIVING ARTISTS, YOU EXCEL AT PUSHING THE CANON.” — TREVOR SCHOONMAKER
the enterprise. “Why would you bring music into a visual arts realm?” It has inspired the two of us so much in our personal lives, so it’s obviously in our work. How do you maintain your professional relationship? SCHOONMAKER: We’re frequently drawn to the same events where we support one another. We text pretty often—art or soccer or something that makes us think of each other. We’ve had the luxury of meeting in Venice a couple of times. Once, we actually planned our family vacations to overlap. SIRMANS: The love of fútbol is always there. We’ll send each other an image of something that can relate to a potential exhibition
in 2026. The Venice meet-up was priceless, and also having daughters and seeing them in those pivotal moments; seeing them evolve and change is amazing. To share that with somebody you care about is really special. Does this mean we can expect to see something from you two in 2026? SIRMANS: The World Cup! One part of “The Beautiful Game” that fits into the curatorial apparatus is a humanist streak. Where do people meet? Where are the bridges? Venice is a bridge—it was meant to be that way since 1895—and the World Cup is meant to be a bridge no matter how commodified it gets. It is meant to be this place to celebrate. SCHOONMAKER: It speaks to the broader issues that Franklin’s getting at—humanism and internationalism. The World Cup was there before it was intellectualized in the academy and in galleries, before everybody was throwing around the term “globalism.” Those are arenas where people don’t necessarily know each other’s affiliation. They may identify with a specific team or a certain artist, but it brings people together more than it separates them. Franklin, as a friend and colleague, is someone I can have these art world and intellectual conversations with. That’s one of the unifying elements in our work.
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A RISING PERFUMER’S GAMBIT MIND GAMES, a line of fragrances inspired by one of the world’s most popular competitions, makes a convincing case for bringing strategy into the realm of beauty. By HENRY DEXTER
WHEN TESTED, some opponents make bold displays of power. Others sit quietly, formulating their French Defense. MIND GAMES, a young fragrance outfit inspired by the age-old game of chess, has a scent fit for every player. The company’s first offering, the Artisan collection, debuted in 2022 under the guidance of The Fragrance Group founder and CEO Alex Shalbaf, with creative direction from his wife Mariana Shalbaf. Notes of coffee, leather, vanilla, and orange activate the genderless group of fragrances, which sit in sleek vessels
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topped with elegant riffs on classic chess pieces. Each product in MIND GAMES’s repertoire is designed to be wholly singular, embodying the diverse personalities that step up to a chess board. They are crafted in partnership with the master perfumers of Symrise, a German fragrance house that, like MIND GAMES, champions its sustainable ingredient sourcing and investment in green technology. The Soulmate collection, the line’s second drop, made its debut late last year and comprises 10 pawns. These pieces, unlike others
on the board, derive strength from their collective numbers. As such, MIND GAMES has outfitted each bottle with a uniform coat of armor. “We drew inspiration from the profound connection that exists between two souls,” said Shalbaf in a statement. “We wanted to translate this connection that almost transcends the physical world and delves into the realm of the ethereal.” The new fragrances emit touches of plum, grapefruit, clean cotton, and lavender. Layering scents—like Sissa and Ruy Lopez, or The For-
Photography by Now Open Creative. Image courtesy of MIND GAMES.
ward and Queening—is encouraged, although each fragrance shines on its own. The collection is accompanied by the release of the brand’s first set of candles, a 10-piece assortment designed to be artfully arranged on an accompanying chess board. The centerpiece was forged in a glossy metal, numbered to allow the candles to be paired with their C3 or A4 positions. Only a month after the Soulmate collection’s arrival, MIND GAMES celebrated its first anniversary at New York’s Guggenheim Muse-
“WE WANTED TO TRANSLATE THIS CONNECTION THAT ALMOST TRANSCENDS THE PHYSICAL WORLD AND DELVES INTO THE REALM OF THE ETHEREAL.” —ALEX SHALBAF
um. Guests including Honey Balenciaga, Lexi Wood, and Yvesmark Chery gathered for chess matches using the brand’s glass bottles and took in a performance by South African sensation Tyla. After three launches in their first year, the young brand could easily take a moment to come up for air. But the masters at MIND GAMES are not inclined to sit on their laurels. The team is already drawing up the first drop of 2024, positioning themselves for many moves to come.
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SOUTHERN GUILD FINDS A HOME ON LOS ANGELES’S MOST COVETED GALLERY STRIP
Portrait of Zizipho Poswa, 2023. Photography by Peyton Fulford.
The gallery, helmed by Trevyn and Julian McGowan, is the first South African outfit to establish a permanent residence in the United States. By JANELLE ZARA
A FLIGHT BETWEEN Los Angeles and Cape Town can take between 20 and 30 hours. Having just opened an LA outpost of Southern Guild, Trevyn and Julian McGowan plan to make the commute four to five times a year. “I quite enjoy flying,” says Trevyn, but the 10-hour time difference has proven strenuous. In LA, she logs onto meetings with her Cape Town team at 10 p.m. “The night feels very wrapped in the workday.” Southern Guild opened the doors to its Melrose Hill location in February, becoming the first South African gallery to land a permanent space in the United States. Their program, composed primarily of African contemporary art and design—Oluseye’s found object 110 culturedmag.com
All images courtesy of the artists and Southern Guild. Mashilo image also courtesy of Hayden Phipps.
sculptures, for example, or Porky Hefer’s floraand fauna-shaped seating—finds its new home in a refurbished 5,000-square-foot building on Western Avenue, a newly minted gallery row whose tenants include David Zwirner, Morán Morán, and Sargent’s Daughters. For Trevyn, “It feels like the most exciting, dynamic place in the city to be right now.” The move, she adds, was a natural next step in the 16-year-old gallery’s trajectory. Known for the expressive, textural richness of its presentations, Southern Guild had become a longtime anchor of Design Miami, and, as its emphasis on painting and photography grew, a more recent participant in art fairs including Expo Chicago and the Armory Show. Given the high U.S. concentration of their market, Trevyn continues, “We wanted to be able to interact with our audience on a year-round basis.” Put simply, “Doing the fairs wasn’t cutting it anymore.” The story of Southern Guild begins in London, where Johannesburg-born Trevyn met her partner, Julian, a theater and opera designer on the West End. The pair returned to South Africa in 2008, launching Southern Guild in
“WE WANTED TO BE ABLE TO INTERACT WITH OUR AUDIENCE ON A YEAR-ROUND BASIS. DOING THE FAIRS WASN’T CUTTING IT ANYMORE.” —TREVYN MCGOWAN
“W W BA CU
–T
Manyaku Mashilo, Passage to Prayer, 2023. Photography by Katinka Bester.
response to the increasing global resonance of narratives coming out of the African continent. Keen to bring together unlikely collaborators, the McGowans sought out makers with unique approaches to ceramics, metalwork, and weaving, and who embedded their own personal and political narratives into their practice. (In recent years, exhibitions with artists including Andile Dyalvane and Zizipho Poswa have served as turning points in the gallery’s program). “There was a very strong sense of experimentation, of pushing a category that didn’t exist yet,” says Trevyn of a time when African designers had little visibility on the international stage. Then came tremendous milestones: Southern Guild’s establishment on Cape Town’s V&A waterfront; its inclusion in the inaugural 2016 London Design Biennale, representing South Africa; and the acquisition of its artists’ works by international institutions like the Philadelphia Museum of Art, LACMA, and the Met. In addition to their own tirelessness, the McGowans credit their rise in visibility to South African contemporary art museums
like Zeitz MOCAA and the Norval Foundation. “We were a little more isolated before, [but] the opening of both of those institutions has increased focus on South Africa and Africa in general.” In Los Angeles, Southern Guild opened with two inaugural exhibitions. The first, “Mother Tongues,” was a group show featuring gallery artists including Dyalvane and Hefer, activist photographer Zanele Muholi, mixed media painter Manyaku Mashilo, and many others. The second was a solo presentation of Poswa’s technically ambitious ceramic and bronze sculptures, created during a recent summer-long ceramics residency at California State University in Long Beach. Trevyn looks forward to more opportunities like these—for artists based in both Africa and North America to travel between the two places, expanding their respective practices through cultural dialogue. “How do we evolve and grow through interacting with the landscape?” she asks. “This is what we’re about, as a gallery and as a group of artists.”
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MEET JAKE BRUSH, THE SCREEN QUEEN OF OUR REALITY TV AGE The 29-year-old artist is the latest in a long line of low-budget, high-concept queer provocateurs. By JARRETT EARNEST
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Jake Brush, This Unremarkable Life (Film Still), 2023–24. Image courtesy of the artist.
Top: Jake Brush, The Multiple Murders of Lady Gilgo (Film Still), 2021. Image courtesy of the artist. Bottom: Jake Brush, Petpourri (Installation Shot), 2023. Photography by Adam Reich. Image courtesy of the artist and the Shed.
HER BLONDE WIG crests high, arching from a side part and cascading onto the breast of a floral jacket buttoned over a matching miniskirt. Her temples are pulled back using face-lifting tape to create a dramatic, arched brow, and her face is washed out by a spotlight, a pink halo glowing around this televisual angel. “Do you readily admit that you have way too many images? That you are drowning? That you are unmanageable? That you are a representation of something unmanageable?” She stands, immobilized in digital space as the monologue loops around her, delivered in the tone of a slightly mechanical motivational speaker. “It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that you can’t care for these images. Or tend to their needs. Because there are just too many of them. Do you literally see these images as your children? Because no one sees you as their mother. You know these images have got to go.” 114 culturedmag.com
“THERE IS SOMETHING SO HONEST ABOUT THESE SUPER EXPLOITATIVE SITUATIONS. I GET THAT DESPERATION. I GET NOT KNOWING BETTER. I GET REACHING FOR SOMETHING TO FIX EVERYTHING ELSE.” —JAKE BRUSH
This demented diva is Long Island’s finest: 29-year-old Jake Brush, who has been terrorizing New York’s underground art scene for the past few years with his loosely connected constellation of video works, art objects, installations, and performances. This latest vision of high-glam mall drag comes courtesy of This Unremarkable Life, 2023–24. Blending the early social media mania of Ryan Trecartin with the animated phantasmagoria of Jacolby Satterwhite, Brush is the newest incarnation of low-budget, high-concept queer provocation—a lineage that reaches back to Jack Smith and Charles Ludlam. Which is to say that Jake Brush revels in trash, the foundation of our collective psyche. He burnishes it and transforms it into incisive works that will make you laugh until you cry. Or throw up. Or both. Brush’s videos and performances hijack the syntax of television competitions and Instagram
Top: Jake Brush, Petpourri (Film Still), 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and the Shed. Bottom: Jake Brush, The Multiple Murders of Lady Gilgo (Film Still), 2021. Image courtesy of the artist.
confessionals—controlled forums in which people enact dramatized versions of themselves in highly artificial contexts. He lives for, and on, the Internet: Reddit message boards, long-running campy TV series like Survivor, and B-level horror films like Killer Klowns from Outer Space are longtime sources of inspiration. Rendered with maximum camp, Brush dramatizes a kaleidoscopic self that is becoming increasingly prevalent in our culture—fractured, derivative, and desperate for engagement. Brush’s acid-tinged comedy is also a decoy to explore something darker: the ways people betray themselves and their loved ones for the briefest glimpses of attention. “There is something so honest about these super exploitative situations,” Brush says. “I get that desperation. I get not knowing better. I get reaching for something to fix everything else.” Brush’s characters are not mouthpieces for public virtue or his own
private feelings, but expressions of the collective hallucination that each of us is special. Last year, Brush debuted Petpourri, 2023, an installation inspired by a pet store in his Long Island hometown, as one of the Shed’s 2023 Open Call commissions. In the work, which went on view earlier this month at Brooklyn’s International Objects, a character in the midst of a nervous breakdown (played by Brush, disguised by a pair of bulbous and testicular prosthetic cheeks) fantasizes about the cessation of pet shop samsara: “I want to strap a Drano bomb to my chest where the main ingredient prevents all the animals ever from existing—not from pain or death or disfigurement but like, just gone. It ends this cycle, you know, of being picked up, put down, put into boxes, collecting dust on the floor, fed, overfed the wrong things, not fed enough…”
This self-referential mythology can be traced back through Brush’s early video works, like The Multiple Murders of Lady Gilgo, presented by the artist in 2021 at Duplex art space in Chinatown. It focuses on the “Hot Dog Hooker,” an early-2000s media sensation who, Brush posits, drowned out coverage of a string of real-life murders by the Gilgo Beach serial killer. “People ask me how many interesting people there are in Long Island. My answer is—a lot,” he says. “My challenge to that question is to say that my art is also about my family. About the gossip of the family, the drama of the family. That extends into the character of this particular place where we live. But it goes beyond that, into reality television, too, and media—all the things we talk about.” Which is to say it’s about all of us, an unflattering reflection that should make us scream, cry, and throw up.
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Designer CARLTON DEWOODY grew up surrounded by contemporary art. He remains most inspired by the visual language of the quotidian.
REBRANDING THE NARRATIVE By Sophie Lee Photography by Brad Torchia
AS A CHILD, Carlton DeWoody would sit at restaurants and stare at the Sweet ’N Low packets in the center of the table. While many kids idly stacked the ubiquitous pastel paper packets while waiting for food to arrive, DeWoody, even as a child, was thinking like a designer. He wondered, Where did their bubblegum color scheme come from? At antique fairs with his family, he found himself asking similar questions about design and construction while examining decorative door knobs and watches. The search for these “mini miracles,” he recalls, made him feel like “Indiana Jones looking for the Holy Grail.” Now 42, DeWoody channels that passion for craftsmanship into his work as co-founder and creative director of Reunion Goods & Services, an interior design and brand studio in Los Angeles. His passion for aesthetics may be genetic: His father is artist Jason DeWoody and his mother is collector and patron Beth Rudin DeWoody. But while his parents focused their attention on contemporary painting and sculpture, DeWoody has always been drawn to the objects and experiences that make up the fabric of daily life. His Los Angeles home is filled to the brim 116 culturedmag.com
with mementos from various projects—a pennant he designed for UNICEF is nestled among other small wonders, like the polished geode that sits on his desk. Marie Kondo’s decluttering method doesn’t work for him, he admits. Quite the opposite: “Everything in here brings me joy.” His natural keepsakes in particular offer perspective during the creative process. “Mother Nature is the best designer there is,” he says. “It takes a little bit of the pressure off.” Back when he was in college studying poetry and philosophy, DeWoody started redesigning the business cards of family friends with new typefaces, graphics, and logos. Only after his “business card business” began building momentum did he realize that he had in effect been offering complete brand overhauls for the paltry price of a three-by-two-inch piece of cardstock. In 2008, the first project by what would become Reunion, which DeWoody co-founded with Eric Adolfsen and Laura Flam, was to set up the Wooly bar in New York’s Woolworth Building. The invitation-only space, owned by Adolfsen, received a lush makeover that looked “a little bit haunted, a little bit sexy,” DeWoody says. Then came the Wildwood Snowmass hotel
in Colorado, where the trio conceived everything from the retro ski lodge interiors to the custom plaid of the workers’ uniforms. Since then, the studio has added two architect partners and a full staff to the team, and have designed and branded more than 20 hotels and restaurants across the country. DeWoody is now focusing on a handful of solo projects and working on a litany of collaborations, like a forthcoming wristwatch for Rowing Blazers. His focus is wide-ranging: “A very important part of my life right now is doing work for nonprofits—using this talent and narrative storytelling and experiential design for good causes, to help them communicate or reach new audiences,” DeWoody notes. He has worked with UNICEF for the past 11 years, and helped develop the name and logo for West Coast art biennial Desert X. Narrative-building, says the designer, is what unites his sprawling oeuvre. “I’m always looking for those Buddhist moments to lose your ego … collaborating with other people that open your eyes and realizing that other people’s ideas can make yours stronger,” he says. “I love those growth moments, of humility and nonattachment.”
“MOTHER NATURE IS THE BEST DESIGNER THERE IS. IT TAKES A LITTLE BIT OF THE PRESSURE OFF.” culturedmag.com 117
MEET THE
ARTISTS WHO TURNED CELINE’S NEW MIAMI OUTPOST INTO
A CONTEMPORARY
ART DESTINATION BY KATIE WHITE
CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE LIKES OF LUCY SKAER, ELI PING, AND SIMONE FATTAL HAVE TRANSFORMED THE BRAND’S MIAMI DESIGN DISTRICT BOUTIQUE AND REAFFIRMED THE HOUSE’S COMMITMENT TO ARTISTIC EXPRESSION. 118 culturedmag.com
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Celine’s Miami Design District boutique. All imagery courtesy of Celine.
If Hedi Slimane, creative director of Celine, had lived in another era (perhaps a century or two ago), he might have been known as a great patron of the arts. Art history’s greatest benefactors—from the Medicis to Peggy Guggenheim— have heralded new ways of seeing and celebrating beauty. The same might be said of Slimane, who, since joining Celine in 2018, has consistently deepened the French house’s engagement with the contemporary art world. The brand’s artist collaborations have ranged from Bauhaus-inspired skateboards featuring artwork by Swiss artist David Weiss, to its 2022 Cosmic Cruiser collection created in collaboration with 14 artists. This synergy reaches one of its most vibrant expressions in Celine’s new 4,000-square-foot store in Miami’s Design District. Works by leading contemporary artists—including Simone Fattal, Elaine Cameron-Weir, Davina Semo, Antonia Kuo, Maia Ruth Lee, Eli Ping, Marcelo Silveira, Lucy Skaer, and SoiL Thornton—unfurl across two marble-bedecked floors, in seamless harmony with the house’s own designs. To mark the store’s reopening, Fattal, Ping, and Skaer reflect on their contributions to the space and Celine’s emphasis on artworks that embrace materiality, craft, and embodied meaning.
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SIMONE FATTAL Philosophy, painting, collage, and sculpture are but a few avenues of expression Syria-born artist Simone Fattal has explored over a life and career that has wound its way from Beirut to Paris to Sausalito, California. In Miami, Celine has given a place of prominence to Fattal’s State of the Sky, 7, 2013, a dynamic abstract painting. The artist created the work, part of a larger series, as a means of visualizing and abstracting the celestial bodies of the moon, stars, and planets. Black forms stretch across a pure white background, rendered in gestural bursts with a cosmic intensity. For Fattal, the idea for the series sprang from a moment of intense inspiration. “It came over me in an extremely urgent way, very quickly. Sometimes I would paint two works a day,” she recalls. For the artist, painting is a reflection of her relationship to the world around her, while sculpture offers a means of mining more abstract and philosophical veins. When it comes to her work’s inclusion in Celine’s Miami space, Fattal is more than enthusiastic: “I adore Celine,” she says. “I love the elegance—their bags are extremely well conceived for the working woman.” Currently, the artist is preparing for several upcoming exhibitions, as well as a monograph of her work, to be released by D.A.P. this month.
“I ADORE CELINE. I LOVE THE ELEGANCE— THEIR BAGS ARE EXTREMELY WELL CONCEIVED FOR THE WORKING WOMAN.” Simone Fattal, State of the Sky, 7, 2013.
Eli Ping, Moult, 2022.
ELI PING
Eli Ping believes in the sanctity of materials. The Brooklyn-based, Chicago-born artist brings an almost monastic rigor to his minimalist works, which slowly emerge from an intensive process of working and reworking materials over months. “The work is the result of an open-ended exploration of material and process,” he explains. “I start with the overall sense of what I want to bring into existence and the materials that I might use, but I find my way by feeling around in the dark over long periods.” In the past, Ping has described his process as rooted in the Tao, a pillar of Chinese philosophy. Ping’s work Moult, 2022, offers a moment of evocative beauty in Celine’s Miami store: A twist of cast iron is formed into a flame-like shape. Ping has alchemized cast iron into a state of near-liquid fluidity, the material looking more like wet and twisted drapery—reminiscent of a Greek marble statue—than an industrial material. “I tend to use one material at a time,” Ping notes of his focused process of experimentation. “In the end, I want it … to have the appearance of being made all at once.” He acknowledges certain affinities between Celine’s clean aesthetic and the purity that defines his own practice. “Celine works in minimalist silhouettes and with a simplicity of colors, which is consistent with my work’s essence.”
LUCY SKAER
“CELINE WORKS IN MINIMALIST SILHOUETTES AND WITH A SIMPLICITY OF COLORS, WHICH IS CONSISTENT WITH MY WORK’S ESSENCE.”
In a home and studio in the Outer Hebrides, a remote island chain off the coast of Scotland, Lucy Skaer creates sculptures, drawings, and installations that conjure archaic histories and heritages hewn from the primeval materials of wood, stone, and bronze. The English-born artist’s practice involves exhaustive historical research into the architecture, agriculture, and societal frameworks of past civilizations, the remnants of which still haunt our contemporary world. She then sets to work fabricating her sculptures, which often resemble ancient ceremonial objects or vestments. Celine’s Miami collection features Skaer’s Fog on Fire, 2020, a lustrous and tactile bronze work that depicts overlapping imaginary animal pelts. The piece was originally commissioned for an installation at the Bloomberg Space in London, which as Skaer discovered in her research, rests above a Roman temple devoted to the god Mithras, an obscure mythological figure whose cult reveled in all manner of hedonism. Skaer’s sculpture, with its implied relationship to both hunting and garment-making, was a testament to the storied history of the venue. “That part of London also includes Tanner’s Row and vestiges of trades that are no longer there,” says Skaer. “I came to the idea of using animal pelts as a recognizable commodity, tactile and possessing the qualities of a particular animal.” Skaer sees the Miami outpost as a fitting environment for her work. “I’m interested in how we formulate languages, and the boundaries that exist between humans and animals, including fashion,” she notes.
“I’M INTERESTED IN HOW WE FORMULATE LANGUAGES, AND THE BOUNDARIES THAT EXIST BETWEEN HUMANS AND ANIMALS, INCLUDING FASHION.” Lucy Skaer, Fog on Fire, 2020.
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Hollywood’s New Era Can the Biennial Survive Social Media? Follow the Light How LA Seduced Miami’s Collecting Royalty Stepping off the Pedestal The Rise of Flat Photography For Salome Asega, the Medium Is the Messenger Fishing for Compliments
The entertainment industry is a kind of mirage— tantalizing from afar, but fickle enough to leave most hopefuls wandering the desert. The best way for an aspiring performer to navigate this precarious terrain is to hold tightly to a dream—of transcending circumstances, challenging flawed systems, or making work that stands the test of time. The seven talents featured in these pages have reckoned with their fair share of setbacks, crossroads, and epiphanies. They are driven not by an oasis of accolades, but by their visions of what could be.
HOLLYWOOD’S NEW ERA By Jazmine Hughes Styling by Yashua Simmons Photography by Emmanuel Sanchez-Monsalve All clothing and accessories by Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello
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My interviews with the seven actors in this portfolio had one thing in common: Each eventually turned to the subject of dreams. It makes sense—we spoke during the sleepy in-between of late December and early January, when time loses its edges, rest takes root, and revelations bubble to the surface. For some of these performers, dreams are a means to transcend undesirable circumstances, whether personal or systemic. L A K EITH STA NFIELD spent his adolescence feeling hemmed in by a small town, and his ability to channel the unexpected—now a pillar of his acting style—was his best launchpad for an exit. SA SH A C A LLE , who spent most of her life scraping by financially, brought me to tears when she mentioned that supporting her family felt just as fulfilling as landing a major role. CELESTE O’ CONNOR , meanwhile, sees cinema as a site of collective dreaming—an “exercise of imagination” to conjure a better, fuller future. For others, dreams are a wild garden that requires careful tending. AUSTIN A BR A MS has grappled with the extremes of a fickle industry by excising (most) expectations from his craft, resolute on staying in the present. As a child traveling through countries and cultures, CHARLES MELTON dreamt of becoming an astronaut, a fantasy he traded in for one that allows him to revel in the human experience. YA R A SH A HIDI , who has been acting since she was 6, is seizing the opportunity to set more quotidian goals that restore a sense of balance to her life. After developing closer relationships with film characters than real people as a child, H A DLEY ROBINSON felt she had to become one herself. Regardless of the motivations that fuel them, each of these performers has accomplished something rare: the feat of not just breaking into the entertainment industry, but playing a part in shaping it. They are embodying roles that no one like them has ever played, using their influence to direct attention to pressing social causes, and collaborating with modern-day legends—like Meryl Streep, Jenifer Lewis, Brad Pitt, Julianne Moore, and George Clooney—so that, one day, they might carry the torch. Taken together, their stories offer insights into an industry in flux, where who gets to make work is just as relevant as what the work is about. This new vanguard views their craft as a means not only to entertain, but to educate—not just to realize their own dreams, but to get audiences to dream bigger, too.
E
very good story starts with a decisive action. For actor LaKeith Stanfield, 32, it was a Google search. As a teenager living in the sleepy valley town of Victorville, California, he sought out any opportunity to get himself in front of a camera. “I was playing the law of averages, really,” he says. One day, Stanfield completed an online application for the infamous early-aughts John Casablancas Modeling and Career Center. Seventeen years later, the Oscar-nominated actor is one of the mall kiosk chain’s greatest success stories. If the Black-surrealist-horror-comedy genre were to designate a patron saint, it might be Stanfield. He had a scene-stealing turn as a tortured neighbor in Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017), starred as a call center employee who finds success only when he adopts a “white” voice in Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018), and added a dose of surreality as a starry-eyed stoner in Donald Glover’s television series Atlanta (2016–22). Stanfield’s mind hums at a frequency that sets him apart, allowing for uniquely free-associative thought and excellent comedic timing. He is also the rare Black man granted ethereality in Hollywood stories, embodying characters marked by their mystical wisdom and idiosyncratic respons-
“WHAT IS FUNNY IS WHAT IS TRUE.”
es to the world. Has there ever been a more persuasive, concise, and tender piece of advice than the one Stanfield’s character whispers to the only other Black person at an all-white garden party: his electric, terror-stricken, “Get out”? Earlier this year, Stanfield starred in The Book of Clarence as a lowly debtor in the New Testament era. When Clarence notices how much business this Jesus guy seems to be drumming up, he casts himself as a competing messiah to get in on the action. “It’s a challenging role—or roles,” the actor tells me. (Stanfield plays both the titular character and his twin, Thomas.) Stanfield is wiry and restless, shifting his phone several times during our call to find the best lighting in his verdant Los Angeles backyard. “I was challenged in a way that feels good to move through, but it was also something that feels impactful and meaningful to me and my people,” he says. It is this dedication to capturing the spikiness of a life that makes Stanfield stand out: his desire to revel in the multitude of Black masculinities, disentangle childhood traumas from adult transgressions, and chronicle rags-to-riches stories. It’s no surprise that next, he plans to try his hand at directing and producing these kinds of knotty narratives. Despite the gravity of this undertaking, Stanfield remains a devotee of the absurd and offbeat. Playing peek-a-boo, he says, has been one of his greatest sources of inspiration recently. (Stanfield has three children, but declined to share with whom exactly he plays peek-a-boo.) “Being caught off-guard can be quite funny—I don’t think that has changed since I was little,” he says. “That’s what made Atlanta so funny— it was an opportunity to juxtapose these things that just seemed absurd, but there was something in there that rang true. What is funny is what is true.”
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STANFIELD
S
asha Calle doesn’t back down. After the 28-year-old actor was rejected from New York’s prestigious American Dramatic and Musical Academy as a teenager, she called the admissions office multiple times to argue her case. “I was like, ‘Listen, I don’t come from much. I don’t have opportunities,’” she recalls. “You guys are a college, you help people grow. You have to allow me to grow.” The Colombian-American performer didn’t take acting too seriously before auditioning for the program (she had seen herself more as a singer), but the process lit a fire inside her. “I had this dream in my body that needed to be completed,” she tells me from her home in Los Angeles, her Great Dane, Dragon, leaving a loving trail of slobber across her arm. Calle’s campaign paid off. After talking her way into another audition at ADMA, she performed a monologue about a singer desperate to escape home and live a bigger life. The role resonated with the actor, who was also motivated by a desire for a future she couldn’t quite pic-
“I’VE ALWAYS FELT LIKE THIS GUIDING LIGHT HAS BEEN DIRECTING ME. I JUST HAVE TO KEEP GOING.”
ture. Money was scarce during Calle’s childhood, and her mother, who raised the actor and her younger brother alone, shuttled the family from one relative’s house to another across Florida, Massachusetts, and her native Colombia. “From an early age, I was like, ‘I will be a performer.’ People were like, ‘Are you crazy?’” she remembers. The raw angst and desire Calle brought to her audition was sourced from a deep place. She got in. After graduation and a Daytime Emmy– nominated turn as Lola Rosales on the soap opera The Young and the Restless, Calle was cast as Supergirl in the DC Comics film The Flash. Calle’s personal hardships coalesced to make her a force onscreen, giving her deep emotional range and an unquenchable urge to create. When she auditioned for The Flash, she understood the character innately. “She’s the new kid, out of place and misunderstood,” Calle says of Supergirl. “I remember having a moment where I was like, ‘Wow, thanks to my life and what I’ve been through, I’m able to play this character.’” This year, Calle will appear in the eagerly awaited drama On Swift Horses alongside Daisy Edgar-Jones and Jacob Elordi. The film follows a couple struggling to rebuild their life after the Korean War. It’s a far cry from her humble beginnings, but Calle doesn’t have any vertigo about the experience. “I’ve always felt like this guiding light has been directing me,” she explains. “I just have to keep going.”
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F “IN THE PAST, I’VE FALLEN INTO THE TRAP OF, ‘I NEED TO SUFFER FOR MY ART.’”
or his role as a man married to his childhood sexual abuser in the taut Todd Haynes drama May December, Charles Melton did a lot of therapy. The 33-year-old actor didn’t just go for himself, but as his character Joe, too. “My preparation is very technical,” he says, likening the process to how, as a former Division 1 football player at Kansas State University, he would prepare for game days. It tracks, then, that the brilliance of Melton’s first big-screen lead performance—in which he holds his own opposite Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman—dwells in the physical. Joe carries himself as if he’s being dragged through his own life, hunched and uncertain. “Joe puts everything before himself,” says Melton over the noise of a bustling hotel room. (He mouths a big “Sorry!” when our conversation is interrupted by the arrival of room service.) “There is a relaxation in Joe’s body, though we see it as repression, this awkwardness of not taking up space.” Therapy also helped Melton unlearn the idea that creativity is pain. “You don’t have to suffer for your character. It’s a job,” he says. “It’s a gratifying job—I wouldn’t want to do anything else—but in the past, I’ve fallen into the trap of, ‘I need to suffer for my art.’” Now, Melton seeks empathy for his characters in the same place where he finds it for him-
self. “Character work is similar to personal therapy—understanding why you are the way you are, why you tick the way you do,” he muses. It helps that Melton is naturally introspective, a self-described dreamer who has never pruned his ambitions to fit his situation. An army brat, Melton and his family moved constantly—to South Korea (where his mother was born), Alaska, Germany, and Texas, among others—affording him plenty of time in cars and airplanes to conjure visions of a glimmering future. Though he spent his teen years focused on football, a switch flipped when he reached college: After hearing a commercial for a talent showcase on a Great Plains radio station, he dropped out of Kansas State and moved to Los Angeles in 2012. Five years later, he landed his first major role, as high school football captain Reggie Mantle on the CW’s moody teen drama, Riverdale. Though Melton wears the teen-heartthrob label well—he has a face made to be pinned to the inside of a locker door—he has, through his performance in May December, joined the elusive ranks of era-defining actors. This sharp rise would be daunting to most, but Melton is unruffled. After all, he’s a graduate of one of the most prestigious acting schools there is: 23 days on a film set with Todd Haynes. “Todd encouraged me every step of the way, to lean into my instincts and trust them,” says Melton. (Haynes has said that he nearly discounted Melton for reasons of handsomeness—but the actor’s arresting audition performance piqued his interest.) “When you have someone like Todd—this legend in cinema—supporting you, you feel like you can do anything.”
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YARA
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M “A YEAR-ROUND TV SCHEDULE IS A LOT TO MAINTAIN. IT’S BEEN TOP OF MIND TO RETURN TO THE THINGS THAT GIVE ME JOY.”
ost 23-year-olds wouldn’t point to work-life balance as their greatest accomplishment of 2023. Then again, Yara Shahidi isn’t most 23-year-olds. In the past three years, Shahidi has starred in two ABC sitcoms (Black-ish and Grown-ish), launched a production company (7th Sun, which she runs with her mother, Keri), graduated from Harvard (her thesis, on Black political thought, was titled “I Am a Man: The Emancipation of Humanness from Western Hegemony Through the Lens of Sylvia Wynter”), and executive-produced and starred in the dramedy Sitting in Bars with Cake. It makes sense that she might be striving for a sense of balance. As impressive as the “work” half of the equation may be, Shahidi is equally proud of the “life” half: In her rare downtime, the Minneapolis-born actor practices karate (she, perhaps unsurprisingly, has a black belt), paints watercolors, and crochets. “A year-round TV schedule is a lot to maintain,” she says. “It’s been top of mind to return to the things that give me joy.”
Shahidi didn’t grow up a student of the entertainment industry—she did not watch more than an hour of TV per week until she was actually on TV. This year, she’ll wrap up her role as Zoey Johnson—the Denise Huxtable of our time—on Grown-ish. (She carried the character, which she has inhabited for a decade, over from Black-ish.) The jump from original to spinoff—which she not only starred in but also produced—was fulfilling. She credits Kenya Barris, the creator of both shows, with trusting her to make weighty decisions. “What I take most pride in is that when people come to visit the set they see that it’s a palpably positive space to be—a place where people enjoy working,” she says. Shahidi has also established herself as one of the more politically conscious actors of her generation, unafraid to use her platform to educate audiences about voter registration, income inequality, and women’s rights. “I know it’ll sound clichéd, but I have to give credit to my family,” she says. “The conversations I’m having publicly are a reflection of the conversations that we have privately.” Shahidi continues to grow as an activist thanks to some influential mentors, including Sherrilyn Ifill, the former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and Dr. Cornel West. “When you run into people who can maintain a deep sense of optimism, not because they’re ignorant or unaware, but because they believe in our capacity to do and be better,” she says, “there’s something really moving about that.”
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ustin Abrams was 9 years old when he landed his first major role. He played Chip, the bedraggled young teacup, in a community theater production of Beauty and the Beast in his native Sarasota, Florida. (On Abrams’s off nights, the role was played by Owen Teague, who later appeared in It and the Paramount+ series The Stand). “I wanted to be an actor really badly, for reasons I can’t even remember,” Abrams says. His other fantasy was to play professional basketball, an aspiration that was quashed when the actor “didn’t grow.”
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Abrams stayed in theater for years, appearing in local but lofty productions: Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo. The transition to film, he admits, was difficult. “I didn’t really know what I was doing, and it was fucking hard,” he tells me with the weary candor of a stranger recounting war stories at a bar. When Abrams was 13, he landed a key role in the Cuba Gooding Jr.–fronted thriller Ticking Clock. Then he didn’t get another part for two years. Rejection is tough on anyone, but it was hell for a teenager. “I was like, Am I not good enough? Why isn’t this happening for me?” he recalls asking himself. Despite securing what many might view as the role of a lifetime in the forthcoming thriller Wolfs—in which he stars opposite George Clooney and Brad Pitt—Abrams still cannot shake the feeling that his place in the industry is precarious. Nevertheless, the 27-year-old is not too humble to acknowledge that his life may take a turn once the film (the plot and release date of which have been kept tightly under wraps) is out in the world. In preparation for that moment, Abrams solicited plenty of career advice from his veteran costars. “[Brad] told me a career can be as simple as doing things that I dig, and hoping that other people do, too,” Abrams recalls. These words of wisdom dovetailed nicely with the actor’s own “easy come, easy go” philosophy. “A couple of years ago, I decided that I was just gonna be the best actor, collaborator, and creative that I could,” he says with a shrug. “If that means just doing Shakespeare in a Sarasota basement, then that’s what it’s going to be.”
“A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, I DECIDED THAT I WAS JUST GONNA BE THE BEST ACTOR I COULD. IF THAT MEANS JUST DOING SHAKESPEARE IN A SARASOTA BASEMENT, THEN THAT’S WHAT IT’S GOING TO BE.”
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henever Hadley Robinson films a scene, she hears music. “I have synesthesia, so colors, shapes, sound—there’s a lot of overlap,” the actor explains. While filming last year’s George Clooney– directed underdog drama The Boys in the Boat, she conjured up her own micro-scores. For the moment when her character, Joyce, kisses her love interest for the first time, Robinson heard three ascending notes, as soft as an eyelash falling onto a cheek. The 28-year-old felt as if her heart was emitting a specific emotional frequency in that moment. Synesthesia allowed her to manifest it. When we spoke, Robinson apologized continuously for the darkness of her apartment. Winter had finally arrived in New York: That day, the temperature fell to 6 degrees Fahrenheit. Having been raised across the road from a sheep farm in frosty Middlebury, Vermont, the actor finds the cold comforting. Growing up, her family constantly cozied up to watch movies— classics, lots of black-and-white. One year, the Robinsons watched Roman Holiday every week. “I feel closer to people in movies than people in my own life,” the actor confesses. “The stakes, the height of people’s expression, the sensitivity and feelings—it’s more like how I live.”
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When Robinson was 9, her family moved to England, where she fell in love with Shakespeare after watching a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Stratford-upon-Avon. During high school, she bounced between Vermont, Switzerland, and Michigan, attending three schools in four years. “Moving around at that age triggered this thing in my brain,” she says. “I’m constantly novelty-seeking.” After two years at the prestigious Interlochen Arts Academy, Robinson made her way to the hallowed halls of the Juilliard School in New York. She landed small but coveted parts in films like Greta Gerwig’s Little Women and Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things before snagging a major role as Jeanie Buss in the HBO series Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty. One of Robinson’s New Year’s resolutions is to prioritize connection. “In the past decade, I’ve met 5 to 15 people every year who have left an indelible mark on me,” she says. She is hellbent on meeting more of them: She’s enrolled in philosophy, chess, and painting classes, and is making music with producer and fellow Juilliard grad Jack MG. All of these pursuits reflect the actor’s mission statement: to make work that changes people, even for a moment.
“I FEEL CLOSER TO PEOPLE IN MOVIES THAN PEOPLE IN MY OWN LIFE. THE STAKES, THE HEIGHT OF PEOPLE’S EXPRESSION, THE SENSITIVITY AND FEELINGS—IT’S MORE LIKE HOW I LIVE.”
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eleste O’Connor attributes many of their best qualities—determination, curiosity, minimal patience for bullshit—to a single source: “I’m African,” the actor says with a laugh. This year, the 25-year-old will appear alongside famous names in two blockbuster films. First, they’ll carry the torch of the iconic Ghostbusters franchise in its latest iteration, Frozen Empire, alongside Bill Murray. Next, they’ll enter the Marvel Cinematic Universe in Madame Web, opposite Dakota Johnson and Sydney Sweeney. O’Connor was born in Kenya to a Burundian mother and an American father. “Burundians have such a culture of community, and they’re straight-up fighters,” the actor says from the patio of their Los Angeles home. “Coming from that lineage of anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, it’s in me to go after what I want.” When their family moved to Maryland, an adolescent O’Connor petitioned their parents to let them
audition for talent representation, even shaking down family members to cover a showcase admission fee. They were hellbent on becoming a singer, but fate had other plans: “I ended up getting all of these callbacks from casting directors, but none from the music people,” O’Connor recalls. They took the hint, and signed with an acting agent. Before long, this burgeoning career threatened to distract from the education they had always envisioned for themselves. During their senior year of high school, O’Connor was forced to choose between a major audition and starting their freshman year at Johns Hopkins University on time. Looking back, they consider the decision to stay in school one of the most impactful of their career: “It forced me to define what my values were from a pretty young age.” (The following year, they landed their breakout role in Tayarisha Poe’s lauded Black-girl bildungsroman Selah and the Spades—and still managed to graduate in 2021.) Chief among those values? Navigating the industry with an anti-capitalist ethic. “I wish more artists would talk about how it feels to commodify their creativity, because it doesn’t always feel good,” they say. Though their career has not been without challenges, the actor sees their craft as a powerful medium for imagining new realities—both personal and collective. “I would love to make a film that can show an alternative system for Black people: alternatives to capitalism, alternatives to imperialism,” O’Connor asserts. “Film is an amazing tool not just for replicating the systems we see in day-to-day life, but also for expanding people’s ideas of what is possible.”
LaKeith Stanfield grooming by Autumn Moultrie Charles Melton grooming by Candice Birns Yara Shahidi makeup by Keita Moore, hair by Kendall Dorsey, and nails by Tracy Clemens Austin Abrams grooming by Heather Weppler for Exclusive Artists Management
Hair by Hikaru Makeup by Vittorio Masecchia Set design by Romain Goudinoux Tailoring by Carlos Ordoñez Videography by Larry Armstrong Kizzee Digital technology by Victor Prieto
Photography assistance by Alizabeth Bean and Cody Rogers Styling assistance by Andrew McFarland, Laura Cheron Haquette, and Arianna Thode Art assistance by Cam Lindfors
CAN THE BIENNIAL SURVIVE SOCIAL MEDIA? The first Whitney Biennial was the equivalent of a middle finger to the art establishment. It was 1932, two years after the Whitney Museum’s founding, and the show’s curators broke with tradition by allowing artists to select their own work. Ninety-two years later, it has gone from representing defiant table-rattling to a seal of institutional approval from one of America’s most influential museums. The Whitney Biennial is one of more than 250 biennials, triennials, and quinquennials that have sprung up around the world in cities ranging from Milan to Montevideo. These sprawling group shows symbolize the globalization of the art world and the belief that culture can spur tourism and economic activity. They also serve as a critical third space, outside the gallery and the museum exhibition, to explore ambitious, challenging art and ideas.
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PLAGUED BY ONLINE CONTROVERSY AND RECKONING WITH POLITICS THAT EVOLVE FASTER THAN THE PACE OF CURATION, THE WHITNEY BIENNIAL STANDS AS A TESTAMENT TO THE TRIUMPHS AND TRIBULATIONS OF THESE ART WORLD REFERENDUMS.
Throughout its history, the Whitney Biennial has been a barometer for what is new and noteworthy in American art. Perhaps that’s why, more than almost any other biennial, it has been the subject of bitter criticism and roiling controversy. American critics, artists, and viewers feel a sense of ownership over it—it’s their story, their cultural history written in real time. This year’s edition, titled “Even Better Than the Real Thing” and opening March 20, is organized by longtime Whitney curator Chrissie Iles and first-time biennial curator Meg Onli. Iles is the only person to have tackled the show three times (she also organized the 2004 and 2006 editions). Onli most recently served as director of the Underground Museum in Los Angeles. Well before they joined forces to put together the biennial, the duo had begun talking on the phone on Fridays, covering everything from big-picture curatorial philoso-
BY JULIA HALPERIN phy to how best to install new media art. Together, they built an intergenerational and multidisciplinary exhibition featuring 69 artists and two collectives. The lineup includes trailblazers like Mary Kelly and Suzanne Jackson as well as up-and-coming and mid-career talents such as Jes Fan, Ligia Lewis, and Ser Serpas. To consider the role of the Whitney Biennial in the broader cultural ecosystem, and to explore what biennials of all kinds have done to and for art, CULTURED assembled a roundtable of experts. Ben Davis is the national art critic for Artnet News and the author of the 2023 book Art in the After-Culture. He has been reviewing biennials for two decades. Tuan Andrew Nguyen, an artist known for creating transportive, deeply researched video art, has participated in more than 10 biennials, including the Whitney’s, in the past six years alone. They spoke with Iles and Onli in January.
What was your first experience ever visiting a biennial? BEN DAVIS: It was 2003, and I was living in Madrid and studying at the European Graduate School. As part of that program, we went to the Venice Biennale. It was the relational aesthetics biennial curated [in part] by Rirkrit Tiravanija. I remember two things: One, there was a heat wave that year and everyone was soaking through their clothes. Two, it was massive—an endless feeling of worlds within worlds. I remember the intellectual excitement of feeling like I didn’t know exactly what I was looking at. Tuan, you said the first biennial you were aware of was the 1993 Whitney Biennial. That has become known as the “identity politics” biennial, and it is now considered one of the most influential shows of the 20th century. TUAN ANDREW NGUYEN: I went to the University of California, Irvine. I was pretty determined to double major in biology and art, just so I could expand my application to medical school. One of my art professors was Daniel Joseph Martinez, who created the pins in the biennial that said, “I can’t imagine ever wanting to be white.” We were given essays to read about the ’93 Whitney by another professor. It was mind-blowing. It gave me an understanding of the urgency of political art. CHRISSIE ILES: My first job was at the Venice Biennale as an assistant in the British Pavilion. So I lived in Venice for four months and started out seeing it from the inside. I also came to New York for the opening of the ’93 Whitney Biennial. It was my second visit to America, and it was transformative in ways I didn’t understand at the time. It was a very specific, critical conversation, and very American. Meg, this is the first biennial you’ve curated. In preparation, you’ve read every single Whitney Biennial catalog and interviewed many previous curators. What was the best advice you got? MEG ONLI: Thelma Golden, who organized the ’93 biennial, said, “Don’t read the press.” Adrienne Edwards, who did the 2012 biennial, said to think carefully about what Chrissie and I want to say at this exact moment. Henriette Huldisch, who curated 2008, said, “Everyone’s going to hate it, so just enjoy the process.” That really scared me. I describe the Whitney Biennial as curating on a speeding train. There is such a short period of time to make this show, and it has more attention on it than any show I’ve ever worked on. DAVIS: It’s interesting that the ’93 biennial is
Photography by MICAH SCHMIDT
“PART OF WHY BIENNIALS GET SUCH A ROUGH GO FROM THE CRITICS IS BECAUSE THEY HAVE COME TO BE DEFINED AS NOT JUST A SHOW, BUT A REFERENDUM ON WHO IS IN AND WHO IS OUT— A REFERENDUM ON THE MOMENT.” —BEN DAVIS
such a touchstone for people, because it was completely panned, yet it’s the one everybody remembers as a landmark. Part of why biennials get such a rough go from critics is because they have come to be defined as not just a show, but a referendum on who is in and who is out—a referendum on the moment. It becomes everybody with an opinion about the moment’s opportunity to air what they really think. ILES: That is strictly a New York view, since most culture is made in the Global South. So in terms of who’s in and who’s out, I think it’s very interesting to go to the São Paulo Biennial, to Documenta. It’s important to not get sucked into what you’re describing, because who is that conversation for? ONLI: What you’re talking about feels very market-driven. Inevitably, all of us are part of an art market, but it’s not at the forefront of my mind when working on the biennial. We wanted to get away from this discovery model. I was trying to turn away from that impulse of, What’s the new hot thing? Biennials are some of the only places where you can synthesize a group of ideas together fully. We found artists were returning to ideas of the psyche, psychoanalysis, and the body. At first, we were surprised, but given the past year and a half—in which politics have been limit-
ing people’s bodily autonomy, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and the limitations on trans people being able to medically transition—maybe it’s not so surprising. The majority of artists in our show are people of color, and there’s a long history of what it means to be looked at, to be consumed, to be put on display. Chrissie, you said at one point, “What is America but a psychodrama? What is America but a fiction?” The relationship between biennials and the art market is interesting. Ben, you once looked at all the artists who had participated in biennials over the previous five years and found that there was almost no overlap with the mainstream art market. If you ask people who cover the market what they think of the artists most frequently shown in biennials, they’ll say, “I’ve never heard of them.” ILES: I don’t agree that there’s a biennial track and an art market track. I think a lot of galleries are extremely knowledgeable about art, including art that’s not for sale. And they often take more risks than museums do. ONLI: If we look back to the ’32 annual, the earliest iteration of the Whitney Biennial, you could just go and buy the work. Until the ’90s, multiple artists would be in back-to-back biennials— and that would show how robust their markets
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were, how collectible their work was. So there is this longer trajectory. It’s not as if you’re in the biennial and suddenly you are a famous artist. But there are substantial changes—you’re able to get a teaching position. Your prices change. NGUYEN: People have told me that I am not a gallery artist, that I am more of a biennial artist. For a very long time, I didn’t care about the market. It wasn’t until much later in my career that I realized that I depended upon the market to survive. And part of surviving was gaining the proper visibility: getting the art out there at certain biennials to have potential gallerists and collectors see it. That was especially important to me at the beginning of my career because I’m based out of Ho Chi Minh City, not New York, LA, London, or Paris. DAVIS: The age of the biennial is also the age of the art fair. They grew in tandem as effects of globalization. I looked at the numbers, and I do feel there is more of a bifurcation over time between the biennial world and the market world. Curators just aren’t including Adrian Ghenie, for example—someone who is minting money and has incredible support from collectors. Do people undervalue these biennials as an alternative channel of symbolic value, cultural value, intellectual value? I feel like people have a split view: Biennials are these jet-setting events and they are exhibitions that hold space for art that isn’t necessarily represented in the big galleries. ILES: One of the things you’re talking about is the difference between taste and ideas. Those can be very different. But 90 percent of the people who see the biennial are not “the art world.” They are the general public. And in America, where there is very little cultural education in high school, museums are how people learn about culture. Conversations about biennials radically swing from talking about ideas to talking about logistics. So when an artist like Tuan is creating an ambitious film for a biennial, he has to create it and he has to figure out how to finance it. That represents a departure from the job of what we’d call a “market artist.” NGUYEN: There’s a lot of pressure to represent your best work when you’re in a biennial. I work mostly in moving image, so the cost of production is quite high. Many times, I have to raise a significant amount of money to produce the idea that was presented to the curators. And oftentimes I might only have a year, a year and a half if I’m lucky. I feel like 75 percent of the work is finding the funding and then physically getting the work there. Crating and shipping is a different headache.
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“I DESCRIBE THE WHITNEY BIENNIAL AS CURATING ON A SPEEDING TRAIN.” —MEG ONLI
ONLI: There’s more new work than we anticipated in this biennial. Once we told the artists who else was in the show, they often would want to adjust their work because they saw themselves in dialogue with others. ILES: The thing about artists is, say you choose a piece for the biennial. Then the artist says, “I want to change the color of the carpet, I want to re-edit the film, I want to do this or that.” So although you think you’ve chosen this piece, you’re not just taking something and installing it. You’re working with the artist. ONLI: Our average studio visit was three hours. Our longest was 12. We didn’t want to feel as if we were shopping. DAVIS: Did the artist with the 12-hour visit get into the biennial? ONLI: Yes. It’s an incredibly good sign if you want to talk to someone for 12 hours. Meg, you said you didn’t want to work with any artists in this show with whom you’d worked before. This is also the first time you’ve worked with non-Black artists as a curator. What has the process been like? ONLI: All my shows have been around Blackness, so I’ve never worked with an artist who wasn’t specifically dealing with Black studies and Black cultural production. I have also been
“IT’S REALLY IMPORTANT TO MAKE A SHOW THAT HAS A HAPTIC QUALITY TO IT—THAT MAKES YOU WANT TO LEAVE YOUR COMPUTER AND ACTUALLY EXPERIENCE THESE THINGS.” –CHRISSIE ILES very focused on video. When I saw Jordan Carter [a curator at the Dia Art Foundation], he was like, “Oh, it’s going to be the video biennial, right?” I said, “Well, Chrissie and I are really drawn to painting and sculpture right now.” Okay, there’s still a lot of video. But we wanted to think about what it meant to take you into an environment. We have two lighting designers working with artists on this show. We talk a lot about the choreography that occurs in building any exhibition. How do you draw someone close? How do you move someone back? How do we convince people to look longer than three seconds? NGUYEN: I left art school with this idea that no one’s going to watch video art, especially at a biennial. But most of my videos are longer than 30 minutes, sometimes more than 60 minutes. I’ve taken it upon myself to see if I can captivate audiences. It might be a practice in self-defeat. It takes a lot of space to create these black boxes for projections, and a lot of people don’t even walk through the curtains to watch.
Photography by BRYAN DERBALLA
I’ve talked to a lot of curators, and they have the same experience Chrissie mentioned, where the artworks are changing until the moment the biennial opens. So you can’t really anticipate what the work will be—you’re actually curating practices together and putting practices into dialogue. I wonder, are biennials just really about the artist list? ILES: For me, biennials are about ideas, not the artist list. What does an artist list mean? You see a name, and you think, Oh, I know that work. Well, do you? They might be switching from painting to sculpture, for all you know. Looking at a list beforehand, you can’t anticipate the feeling of all those works being brought together. And afterward, you can’t explain what it felt like when no one had heard of some of the artists on that list. It feels more exploratory, experimental, and radical than it looks in retrospect. In a way, that’s the magic of the biennial. Social media has defined the narrative emerging from biennials, and Whitney Biennials in particular, in recent years. Tuan, you were in the 2017 biennial, which is best known for the controversy surrounding Dana Schutz’s Open Casket, 2016. What was it like to be in a biennial that was part of an Internet firestorm? NGUYEN: I have mixed feelings about it. The conversations and some of the writing that came out of the Dana Schutz situation were worthy of our time and attention. I still haven’t really processed it, to tell you the truth. Part of me just put it to the back of my mind. I did follow the twists and turns from Vietnam. And there were conversations had about other works in the show, they just didn’t take center stage. It seems like biennials have been riddled with controversy of late—and maybe even earlier. DAVIS: The Guerrilla Girls were doing agitprop about the Whitney Biennial in the ’80s. But I do think social media has changed everything. The vast majority of people are now experiencing these shows through digital mediation, and the Internet inherently selects for controversy. The truth is, the media is disintegrating at the same time, more and more desperately catering to the present. There’s less time for reflection. It creates the perfect storm where you get the one signifier that defines these events. I actually thought the last Whitney Biennial was really good, but it had this real feeling of withdrawal. There were vast amounts of time-based work, you really had to sit there, and there was a theme of opacity. I read it as a curatorial reckoning with that reality. The 2017 biennial was also the first one after Trump’s election. I remember the vivid
Photography by HARRY VU
feeling that it had been planned mostly before the election with an expectation of landing in a different environment. People were processing the vulnerability, shock, and urgency of that moment and treating the show as a referendum on that. ONLI: I don’t want to get too into the Dana Schutz painting itself, but I will say that the history of American media has been very comfortable disseminating images of mutilated Black bodies. That’s a fact. And there’s a way in which art media and media in general participated in disseminating those images. That’s not to say that I didn’t think the Dana Schutz painting and having those conversations wasn’t important, but I do want to flag that we are not outside of our own influences. We’re not outside of the media landscape that is America. That image played with something that already circulates in a really complicated way. I can’t say I’m surprised that it ended up having this huge impact. DAVIS: I asked people at the end of 2019 to select individual artworks that defined the previous decade. The only one everyone agreed on was Open Casket. ILES: Which is interesting, because the painting in the same show of Philando Castile by Henry Taylor, who’s a Black artist talking about Black death, didn’t get that recognition. That’s problematic to me. DAVIS: Okay, I have a question. At the end of the press preview, when they’re asking me to leave, I’m always like, “I haven’t seen every-
thing. I haven’t seen all the video.” Is your ideal spectator someone who sees it all? ILES: I don’t think so. Curiosity—actually putting the phone down and being with the work— is much more important than seeing everything. Of course, if you see everything, you’ll understand it better. But we have tried to make a show that doesn’t feel overwhelming or exhausting. It’s really important to make a show that has a haptic quality to it—that makes you want to leave your computer and actually experience these things. ONLI: I am a chronically ill person. I’m not a person who necessarily wants to visit for a really long time and see everything. I might catch a quarter of the show and come back. I might feel like sitting with one video. I want to encourage people to pick their own pace. Ben, I heard you saw all the videos in the last biennial. How many sittings did you do to get that done? DAVIS: It was two full days. That was me feeling like other people were going to write reviews without having seen the whole show, and I challenged myself not to do that. But that’s a luxury—a lot of writers are very pressed for time, and they’re going to pick a few things and read a few labels and make some generalizations. I see it as a challenge of the form. You get hit with this barrage of stuff all at once. I imagine as an artist, there must be a little bit of competition, right? With other artists in the show? NGUYEN: That’s a whole other roundtable, Ben.
“I’VE TAKEN IT UPON MYSELF TO SEE IF I CAN CAPTIVATE AUDIENCES. IT MIGHT BE A PRACTICE IN SELF-DEFEAT.” —TUAN ANDREW NGUYEN
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FOLLOW
WING SHYA HAD LITTLE IMAGE-MAKING EXPERIENCE WHEN HE BECAME
WONG KAR-WAI’S ON-SET PHOTOGRAPHER. DECADES LATER, THE HONG KONG NATIVE IS RELEASING
SOLACE,
HIS FIRST U.S. MONOGRAPH AND AN HOMAGE TO THE DIRECTOR WHO SHAPED HIS CAREER.
THE LIGHT BY MARA VEITCH
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All photography from Wing Shya̓s Solace, published by Session Press.
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“I NEVER CHOSE MY CAREER,” SAYS WING SHYA. “IT CAME TO ME.”
After graduating with a degree in graphic design, the Hong Kong native found himself, camera in hand, on a film set with Wong Kar-Wai. Shya had no real photography experience— he’d been summoned by a friend to document the production of a low-budget film that Wong was producing. “It was a dream. He was my idol, but I didn’t know what I was doing,” Shya recalls decades later. “I just put [the camera] on automatic.” Whatever he did worked: When the movie wrapped, the legendary filmmaker invited Shya to Buenos Aires to shoot stills for 1997’s Happy Together, the tumultuous drama that won Wong a Best Director award at Cannes. Things flowed from there: Shya, who also worked with Wong on In the Mood for Love, became a frequent collaborator and confidante, earning rare access to the enigmatic auteur’s inner world. The experience was like a second education: “At first, I copied Wong. I stole his movie style, his lighting, and transferred it to stills,” Shya says. This May, images from the photographer’s archive, an exclusive selection of which are reproduced here, will be released by Session Press. Solace, Shya’s first U.S. monograph, unearths private moments plucked from delirious, days-long shoots, each as charged and color-soaked as Wong’s films themselves. Despite their decades-long collaboration, the pair’s connection remains largely unspoken. “I still don’t know if Wong loves the work,” says Shya, laughing. “He’s always pushed me—made me question myself. This was how he taught me.”
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“IT WAS A DREAM. HE WAS MY IDOL, BUT I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT I WAS DOING.”
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“WONG KAR-WAI ALWAYS PUSHED ME— MADE ME QUESTION MYSELF. THIS WAS HOW HE TAUGHT ME.”
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Jason and Michelle Rubell never intended to put down roots in Los Angeles...
How LA Seduced Miami’s Collecting Royalty but a certain Richard Neutra–designed house had other plans. By JONATH A N GR IFFIN Photography by YOSHIHIRO M A K INO Styling by AUSTIN W HIT T LE Interior Design by MONICA FRIED 152 culturedmag.com
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The first night Jason and Michelle Rubell spent in their new Los Angeles home, they slept on a mattress on the floor, under sheets gifted by their realtor. It was April 2022, and they had closed earlier that day on the sleek, single-story property, designed by Richard Neutra for the choreographer Eugene Loring in 1958. “In the morning,” recalls Michelle, “we woke up and both said, ‘It is a privilege to be in this house.’” “It’s beyond a house,” Jason chimes in. “It’s kind of like living inside of a sculpture. It has an attitude. It has a personality.” The couple, who often eagerly complete each other’s sentences, exude a childlike wonder at the bounteous gifts that life has bestowed on them. Since he was a teenager, Jason has worked closely with his parents—trailblazing Miami collectors Don and Mera Rubell—to grow the family collection and establish the Rubell Family Museum, alongside his work as vice president of Rubell Hotels. While Michelle also hails from a prominent Miami family, it was only after her marriage to Jason, in 1999, that she became immersed in the world of contemporary art. Strange as it is to admit, Michelle says that the property was an impulse buy. The pair had not planned to purchase a house in LA, but after visiting the west-facing Nichols Canyon home one evening at sunset, they fell in love. “It was crazy!” she says. “We said to each other, ‘If we can do this, it would be magical.’” “It’s so simple, yet so thought-out,” Jason says of the home’s classic “boxcar” design. Neutra is known for architectural minimalism that celebrates the abundant light, landscape views, and vegetation of Southern California. One side of the building consists almost entirely of sliding glass doors, which open onto the pool and landscaped gardens beyond. “It’s amazing,” Jason adds. “Neutra took these small spaces and made them so grand.” The property ultimately comprises the
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Trulee Hall, Cat Eyes, 2022. Dibbet Stool by De Jong & Co.
“IN THE MORNING, WE WOKE UP AND BOTH SAID, ‘IT IS A PRIVILEGE TO BE IN THIS HOUSE.’” –M IC H E L L E RU BE L L
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Joel Mesler, Untitled (To Life), 2023.
“IT’S BEYOND A HOUSE. IT’S KIND OF LIKE LIVING INSIDE OF A SCULPTURE. IT HAS AN ATTITUDE. IT HAS A PERSONALITY.” —JA S ON RU BE L L 156 culturedmag.com
work of three architects. In the 1980s, its owner commissioned Culver City–based Steven Ehrlich to design a double-height guesthouse on the grounds, one of Ehrlich’s first projects. More recently, the firm Escher GuneWardena—which specializes in historical renovations—designed a master bedroom addition to the 1958 house based on Neutra’s archival plans. The Rubells have long-cherished connections to Los Angeles, even if they still call Miami home. Jason was born there, the couple was married there, and their son Samuel now attends college in the city. At the Rubell Museum in Miami, an exhibition recently opened titled “Singular Views: Los Angeles,” which brings together 16 LA-based artists with diverse perspectives on their city. Many, like Diana Yesenia Alvarado, Nehemiah Cisneros, or Savannah Claudia Levin, are emerging talents, while others, such as Thomas Houseago, are seasoned figures in the Rubells’ collection. In fact, a young Houseago was featured in “Red Eye,” an early but important exhibition of LA art mounted by the Rubells in 2006, establishing the family’s commitment to the city. Michelle and Jason now count the sculptor as a “dear friend.” He is one of many artists,
dealers, and curators they turn to for guidance in navigating LA’s fast-evolving art scene. They use their Nichols Canyon home to display some of the work they have acquired from local artists, such as the striking painting by Trulee Hall of a blue-skinned woman cradling a tiger. On the whole, it is a minimalist hang—especially, says Jason, compared with their artfilled Miami base. “LA has always felt like a real hotbed—all the great art schools, the tradition, the different generations that are mixing and blending,” he reasons. “The creative class drives the city. It’s very energizing.” As the often-challenging work in “Singular Views” demonstrates, however, LA has its complexities and contradictions. “It’s a gritty town. It’s a tough town, it has edge,” Jason says. “It’s not just palm trees and beaches.” I ask the couple what they learn from artists: What compels them to spend hours navigating LA’s backstreets and freeways, traipsing from galleries to studios, museums to dinners? “Art is an amazing way to open your eyes to other people’s points of view,” Jason responds without hesitation. “In times like this, art is so vital. It’s one of the few mediums we can use to communicate with each other in a meaningful way.”
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Stepping off the Pedestal PHOTOGRAPHY BY
DANIEL ARCHER
Fashion has always been a manipulation of form— a means to obfuscate, warp, tighten, or liberate. From a riff on a Degas dancer to a geometric silhouette reminiscent of a Brancusi, these looks, curated from a range of archival runway pieces and independent designer silhouettes, embrace the power of fashion as sculpture. ST YLING BY 158 culturedmag.com
STUDIO&
Hannah Motler wears a dress by Hodakova, bustle by Renaissance Renaissance, and tights by Ioannes.
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Hannah wears a top by Schiaparelli, headpiece by Ali, and tights by Wolford.
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Hannah wears a dress by Alaïa and hat by Noel Stewart.
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Hannah wears a dress, bra, and underwear by Bottega Veneta; tights by Falke; shoes by Marc Jacobs; and gloves by Paula Rowan.
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Hannah wears a vintage dress by Comme des Garçons sourced from 20 Age Archive, headpiece by Ali, bodysuit and tights by Wolford, and shoes by Prada.
Hannah wears a dress by Melitta Baumeister, tights by Tabio, and shoes by the Row.
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Hannah wears a vintage top by Comme des Garçons sourced from Aralda Vintage, shorts by Maison Margiela, socks by Comme Si, shoes by the Row, and a headpiece by Noel Stewart.
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Hannah wears pants by Y/Project and shoes by Aeyde.
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Hannah wears a coat by Balenciaga, bodysuit and tights by Commando, socks by Marc Jacobs, shoes by the Row, and a hat by Noel Stewart.
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Hannah wears a vintage top by Comme des Garçons sourced from Aralda Vintage and a headpiece by Noel Stewart.
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Hannah wears a vintage dress by Junya Watanabe sourced from Aralda Vintage, tights by Wolford, socks by Comme Si, and shoes by Prada.
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Left and right: Hannah wears a top by Y/ Project, vintage skirt by Yohji Yamamoto sourced from Aralda Vintage, socks by Wolford, and shoes by Marc Jacobs.
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MODELING by HANNAH MOTLER
CASTING by AAMØ CASTING
MAKEUP by CELIA BURTON
LIGHTING DIRECTION by ROSS ZILLWOOD
HAIR by ALI PIRZADEH
PRODUCTION COORDINATION by KATIE HOLMES
NAILS by TRISH LOMAX
PRODUCTION RUNNING by ELLIE STEEL
SET DESIGN by THOMAS BIRD
PHOTOGRAPHY ASSISTANCE by ROB PALMER
EXECUTIVE PRODUCTION by GIORGIO TSINTOUKIDIS
and ARTHUR FINCH
FASHION ASSISTANCE by TALLULA BELL MADDEN and FLO THOMPSON SET ASSISTANCE by ELLIOTT BATTEN, MITCHELL FRANK FENN, and TOBY SAUNDERS MAKEUP ASSISTANCE by EMILY ENGELMAN HAIR ASSISTANCE by TOMMY STAYTON and AMINATA KAMARA
THE RISE OF FLAT PHOTOGRAPHY GLOBALIZATION AND ITS FAVORITE APPARATUS, THE INTERNET, HAVE CHANGED THE WAY WE SEE OURSELVES AND EACH OTHER.
BUT HOW HAS THE WEST’S ONLINE DISCOURSE MOLDED THE EXPECTATIONS— AND OUTPUT— OF VISUAL ARTISTS FROM THE GLOBAL SOUTH?
ONE WRITER SITUATES THE PRACTICE OF SOUTH AFRICAN ARTIST ZANELE MUHOLI WITHIN A SOCIETY SLOUCHING TOWARDS HOMOGENEITY.
BY DANIELLE JACKSON
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Image courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson.
Zanele Muholi, Liza I, from the series “Being,” 2009.
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IN 2003, WHEN I VISITED JOHANNESBURG as a graduate student in a course on the history and culture of South Africa, I heard a joke directed at African Americans by local comedian Judy Jake. “This is not your homeland,” she said, tired of Black Americans making ancestral pilgrimages to the new democracy. “You meant to go way over there.” She waved toward the western part of the continent, some 4,000 miles away. The message of that trip was clear: South Africa had its own history, its own dynamics that could not be readily framed within the Black American experience. The township was not the ghetto, a braai was not a fish fry. In 1990,
the legendary South African lawyer Albie Sachs warned that a reductionist view of the country’s culture could stifle artistic creation. “Our movement has developed a style of its own, a way of doing things and of expressing itself … And what a rich mix it is,” he said. “African tradition, church tradition, Gandhian tradition, revolutionary socialist tradition, liberal tradition, all the languages and ways and styles of the many communities in our country.” South African perspectives, I learned, were distinct and particular, and demanded respect on their own terms.
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Image courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson.
Zanele Muholi, Katlego Mashiloane and Nosipho Lavuta, Ext. 2, Lakeside, Johannesburg, 2007.
Imagine my surprise, some 20 years later, to find that one of the preeminent South African artists of their generation, Zanele Muholi, is also perhaps one of the first photographers of what the late economist Theodore Levitt deemed “a flat earth,” a phase of globalization ushered by new technologies, homogenizing culture along the way. The threats of a flat society have been predicted, with slightly different intonations, since at least 2005, when observers from Andrew Keen to Lawrence Lessig debated the impact of networked technologies. Unlike “post-Internet art,” which emerged around the same time, what I call flat photography is not about the Internet, but reflects, visually, the logics of visibility, publicity, and digestibility that developed online throughout the 2000s. Flat photography—of which Muholi’s work is a prime example—is often born from the
Zanele Muholi, Qhawe, Umbumbulu, KwaZulu-Natal, 2020.
MUHOLI’S WORK CAME TO REFLECT TWO INTERRELATED DIGITAL TRENDS:
THE FLATNESS
OF ACTIVIST SPEECH
Image courtesy of the artist and Southern Guild.
AND THE GLORIFICATION OF THE INDIVIDUAL.
global connections of Web 2.0, but speaks to a Western audience. It is vaguely democratic, rich in easy-to-parse symbolism, and fluent in the trends and language of digital culture. Coinciding with the 30th anniversary of the end of apartheid, Muholi’s first major exhibition on the West Coast, “Zanele Muholi: Eye Me,” is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through Aug. 11; another major survey opens in June at the Tate Modern in London. To understand Muholi’s career, and the rise of flat photography in general, one must understand social media in its infancy. Facebook, and its promise of global community, arrived in
2004 at the end of a roughly 10-year period of influential group exhibitions organized to warm international audiences to African contemporary art. Muholi embraced social media early, posting pictures to Facebook and Tumblr, uploading videos to YouTube, and starting their own long-running digital publication, Inkanyiso. The network social media afforded the Durban native had once been unimaginable. Muholi was born in 1972, four years before television was introduced to South Africa, reversing a state-sanctioned strategy to isolate the nation from the rest of the world. Until the end of apartheid in 1994, South African artists often worked
in anonymity or in exile, censored by their governments and subject to cultural boycotts. In 2012, when Muholi returned from a film screening in South Korea to find they had been robbed of five years’ worth of work, the news quickly reached an international public and the artist garnered support from around the world. Born to a domestic worker and a tradesman who died when they were an infant, Muholi was raised by relatives on the coast before moving to Johannesburg. There, they held a series of jobs: as a hairdresser and in a corporate communications firm. They began photographing the LGBTQIA+ community for the website
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CAN A WORK OF ART SHAPED BY WESTERN OBSESSIONS
EVER BE
TRULY DECOLONIAL? Behind the Mask before attending the Market Photo Workshop in 2003. In an early series, “Only Half the Picture,” Muholi, who had documented hate crimes across the country as a lesbian rights advocate, dispelled the idea that queer identity was a Western import. Another project, “Being,” depicted the intimate lives of queer couples. In 2010, South Africa’s minister of arts and culture condemned Muholi’s work as “immoral,” spurring national debate. While completing an MFA at Ryerson University in Toronto, Muholi rose to international acclaim with “Faces and Phases,” an ongoing series of black-and-white portraits of young Black LTBQI South Africans. The subject of countless exhibitions and prizes, including Glamour mag-
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azine’s “Campaigner of the Year,” the body of work burnished the artist’s reputation as a “visual activist.” The photos, often exhibited in large grids, catalog members of Muholi’s community in a bid for social recognition. Muholi’s work has gained renown amid a growing respect for practices of “participatory” or “socially engaged” photography made with the sitter’s collaboration. (Muholi eschews the term “subject,” which implies an imbalance of power between artist and sitter.) In “Faces and Phases,” Muholi’s approach—vertical black-and-white portraits, eyes staring directly into the camera with a crinkle of recognition— echoed the work of community and visual literacy projects, from the earnest portraits of
veteran educator Wendy Ewald to the paste-up murals of French celebrity street artist JR. As social media evolved into the monolith it is today, Muholi’s work, in which the participant is invited to control their presentation, became resonant with another emerging practice: image management. Their practice reflected an intensifying veneration of personal expression found everywhere from advertising to human rights and was exhibited during a shifting discourse in photography from “the body” (practical, vulnerable) to “the self” (creative, heroic). As personalization and accommodation were shaping discourses of “visibility” on the Internet, the virtue of “seeing one’s self” in an image took on a new, reductionist dimension. Muholi’s culturally specific at-
Image courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson.
Zanele Muholi, Hate Crimes Survivor I, from the series “Only Half the Picture,” 2004.
tempts to create an archive of Black, queer life in South Africa, where homosexuality is enshrined in the constitution but men perform “corrective rapes,” were increasingly flattened into the generic and therapizing language of American-style identity politics. Muholi’s work came to reflect two interrelated digital trends: the flatness of activist speech and the glorification of the individual. In 2014, Muholi began a series of self-portraits to, as they wrote at the time, “reclaim my blackness,” a phrase frequently invoked by Black Twitter. In “Somnyama Ngonyama (or Hail, the Dark Lioness),” the resulting series of more than 200 self-portraits, Muholi dons a set of easily recognizable symbols: Afro-picks, a miner’s goggles, and crucially, a series of items worn as crowns. The portraits are striking, borrowing from the history of fashion photography, but mistake ico-
nicity with social justice. A new series of largescale sculptures—including a giant clitoris and the artist’s likeness as a Madonna, offering benediction—lands somewhere between agitprop and a hashtag. Twenty years ago, a number of exhibitions, essays, and conferences sought to understand the meaning of globalization to the African artist, and convey Africa’s influence on the West. Today, it may be salient to consider the impact of the West’s online discourse on African artists, especially when it sets the terms of engagement in international art markets. The culturally flat world can be seen in the work of sculptor Mary Sibande, who uses toy soldiers and Western comic book heroes, or the self-portraits of Samuel Fosso and Omar Victor Diop, who have depicted themselves as Martin Luther King Jr. and Trayvon Martin, respectively. Can a work of
art shaped by Western obsessions ever be truly decolonial? In 2018, to commemorate 25 years of democracy in South Africa, Muholi initiated a self-funded, multimillion-rand project, inviting 25 students to make portraits of the artist— one painting for each year of freedom—for an exhibition that traveled across the globe. I’ll let those engaged in South African politics interpret the symbolic dimensions of such a tribute. To me, it illustrates how, in flat photography, the wider the world expands, the narrower the scope of vision becomes. It calls to mind a perverse reading of the phrase, “Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu,” which evokes our shared humanity and translates from Zulu to, “I am, because you are.” Recently, Muholi posted the expression to social media, thanking their followers. I think, in the end, the artist has got it right.
Zanele Muholi, Ncinda, 2023.
[FLAT PHOTOGRAPHY] IS VAGUELY DEMOCRATIC, RICH IN
Image courtesy of the artist, Hayden Phipps, and Southern Guild.
EASY-TO-PARSE SYMBOLISM,
AND FLUENT IN THE TRENDS AND LANGUAGE OF DIGITAL CULTURE.
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FOR SALOME ASEGA, THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSENGER By KAREN WONG
THE ARTIST, EDUCATOR, AND DIRECTOR OF NEW INC WORKS WITH RAW MATERIALS RANGING FROM BIG DATA TO MUSEUM BUREAUCRACY. SHE’S MAKING THE WORLD WEIRDER AND MORE EXPANSIVE IN THE PROCESS.
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Salome Asega pictured with her artworks, the film Possession and a 3D-printed prototype of RATs, 2022. Portrait by Laila Annmarie Stevens
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SALOME ASEGA GREW UP SURROUNDED BY SPECTACLE.
Her after-school rituals included accompanying her dad to his job as a floor manager at the Las Vegas MGM Grand Garden Arena. She’d survey the venue’s transformation into a concert stage for Janet Jackson or a freestyle racetrack for Monster Jam, the annual event where monster trucks perform extreme tricks. She was also a regular at the Caesars Palace OmniMax, a spherical theater billed as a “sensational sight and sound adventure.” (One might consider it a predecessor of the Sphere, Las Vegas’s new, $2.3 billion entertainment venue.) “Las Vegas has always been an early adopter and champion for experimenting with new forms of audience engagement,” says Asega. The same could be said of the artist herself. Asega is part of a league of innovative Black creatives who have carved out robust practices as activist artists. What began decades ago with initiatives like Rick Lowe’s Project Row Houses in Houston and Theaster Gates’s cluster of refurbished buildings for art and education on Chicago’s South Side has multiplied over the past 10 years to encompass Mark Bradford’s Art + Practice in South Los Angeles, Wangechi Mutu’s Africa’s Out! nonprofit supporting new African narratives, and Titus Kaphar’s NXTHVN cultural accelerator in New Haven, among many others. These leaders have leveraged their commercial success to build spaces elevating the work of marginalized artists. At 34, Asega is still in the early stages of her art career. In classic millennial fashion, she has mashed up her creative passions with her love for arts administration to forge a path that pays homage to Lowe’s pursuit of “social sculpture”—art made with and for the community. After graduating from New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study with a focus on social practice, Asega attended Parsons
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for an MFA in design and technology, where she soon pivoted to community organizing and art. She landed residencies and fellowships at organizations including the Laundromat Project, Eyebeam, the New Museum’s incubator NEW INC, and the Ford Foundation, while also teaching courses at Parsons. “The classroom is an active place to work through complex, layered challenges without restraint or external pressure,” says Asega. “There’s some level of safety to try things out, fail, try again, and come back. Output isn’t as important as process to me because it’s in developing a process that we can refine and iterate on, asking better questions.” As her former teaching partner and collaborator American Artist puts it, “Salome has the phenomenal ability to make everyone feel seen, to draw out their unique gifts and make them shine. She can hold space for the hard conversations within her community and is ready to pop a bottle when it’s time to celebrate.” At NEW INC in 2016, Asega joined POWRPLNT, a space for young people to embrace digital arts. At the Ford Foundation, she honed her skills in supporting artists working at the intersection of radical storytelling, social justice, and new technology. Coming full circle, Asega became NEW INC’s director in 2021 and now helms a cultural incubator centered on professional development and technical assistance. With her handpicked team of six, she leads a primarily BIPOC and female creative community pursuing weird, wonderful, and impactful projects and businesses. In record time, she has raised millions of dollars, curated programming with diverse partners ranging from EY (Ernst & Young) to the Onassis Foundation, and reimagined NEW INC’s annual Demo Day into a full-fledged festival celebrating members’ ideas put into practice. According to artist Sable Elyse Smith, Asega’s secret sauce is her “egoless enthusiasm for working with creatives that matter and bringing people in a room together to dream.” For Asega, dreaming and imagining are critical to countering the white male fantasies of Silicon Valley that dominate the public’s perception of progress and innovation. Iyapo Repository, an ongoing project Asega created with artist Ayodamola Okunseinde, illustrates the power
“IMAGINE A WORLD WHERE NEW TECHNOLOGY BECOMES AN ACCESS POINT TO OUR HISTORIES AND TRADITIONS BEFORE THEY ARE COMPLETELY LOST— WHERE DESIGN FOSTERS CONVERSATION AND PROVOKES US TO SPECULATE ON THE FUTURE WE WANT. THIS IS THE WORLDBUILDING OF SALOME’S MAKING.”
—NONTSIKELELO MUTITI
Salome Asega's monster truck RATs at the 2022 Nuit Blanche Festival in Toronto.
of collective imagination: Participants engage in a card game to catalyze cultural and technological artifacts, and their ideas are memorialized in manuscripts, with elements rapidly prototyped through computer-aided drawings. Some of the drawings are developed into products. Iyapo Repository is an Afrofuturist treasure trove and living museum that concretizes Black futures and makes technology accessible and digestible to a hungry community. “Imagine a world where new technology becomes an access point to our histories and traditions before they are completely lost—where design fosters conversation and provokes us to speculate on the future we want,” says artist and educator
Nontsikelelo Mutiti. “This is the world-building of Salome’s making.” Asega’s latest work, RATs, 2022, is a funny and seething critique of “Risk Assessment Tools,” which aid decision-makers on welfare eligibility, medical benefits, and housing services. The work explores the impact of biased data generated by A.I. through interviews with researchers and artists. The fruits of this labor are embodied in a fabricated monster truck with tires taller than Asega herself, and a tail stretching 23 feet. This sinister spectacle, which has been shown in Toronto and at the Munch Triennale in Oslo, explores the duplicitous nature of technology—something destructive and invasive.
Lowe has famously said that Project Row Houses, which is both an art project and an affordable housing development, was partially inspired by a student he met on a studio visit, who challenged him, “If you’re an artist and your job is to create, then why can’t you create solutions?” Solutions are where Asega’s art begins. Her alchemy is to merge artist, educator, and museum administrator into a single avatar that can navigate both physical and digital spaces. With an uncommon social dexterity, she takes the institution as her artistic medium and sculpts it into a new form, centered on a multiplicity of narratives that challenge the status quo.
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FISHING FOR COMPLIMENTS FOR FRANK GEHRY AND LOUIS VUITTON, IT WAS LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT. A DECADE LATER, THEIR RELATIONSHIP HAS ONLY DEEPENED. By KAT HERRIMAN
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Photography by Mario Kroes. All images courtesy of Louis Vuitton.
Frank Gehry’s collaboration with Louis Vuitton has always been extremely personal. The Pritzker Prize–winning starchitect’s first handbag debuted at the same time as the Fondation Louis Vuitton, the sprawling museum he designed for the fashion house. Only a decade later, its sail-like peaks floating above the Bois de Boulogne have become synonymous with the storied brand and its commitment to the arts.
Fondation Louis Vuitton sketch by Frank Gehry.
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Photography by Yvonne Tnt.
Like his museum, Gehry’s first handbags were a runaway success commercially and creatively. It turns out the architect relished the process of working alongside the Louis Vuitton atelier as much as his daughter-in-law, independent designer Joyce Shin Gehry, who helped him distill his musings into potential designs. “The process is collaborative and iterative and not always linear,” the architect explains. “We try things, we bump into things, we see what works and what doesn’t.” In his latest collaboration with Louis Vuitton, which debuted in December, Gehry returned to the successful formula of his first, bringing in Joyce to help him prepare the initial sketches. “Joyce is very talented and has a great eye,” he says. “As we always do, we made a lot of options—playing with different themes and shapes.” Although most of those experiments never made it to the atelier, Gehry sees them as an important part of the process. “It’s not so much about making sure that the original
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vision is translated. Rather, it’s about working with the team as the project develops to create the object of desire together,” he says. Desire was certainly generated late last year at Art Basel Miami Beach, where Louis Vuitton and Gehry strategically set up shop at the mouth of the art fair’s entrance. Innocent passersby never stood a chance. I was nearly drowning in envy before I ever saw a piece of art, thanks to Gehry and company. Who among us is strong enough to stroll by a bag with a crocodile for a handle? Or a reflective minaudière that looks as if it’s been warped with Photoshop? Only a monster, or someone utterly immune to beauty. For those of us who did linger among those ephemeral shelves and pedestals, there were rewards to be had. The collection was practically a basket of Easter eggs—nods to highlights from Gehry’s celebrated career. Some were easy to spot. Take, for example, the “Bear With Us” clutch, a functionalized (and miniaturized) version of Gehry’s 2014 sculpture of the same name. Others were more subtle, like a mini Capucine festooned with large, translucent
“THE PROCESS IS COLLABORATIVE AND ITERATIVE AND NOT ALWAYS LINEAR. WE TRY THINGS, WE BUMP INTO THINGS, WE SEE WHAT WORKS AND WHAT DOESN’T.” —FR ANK GEHRY
Photography by Piotr Stokłosa. Photography by Piotr Stokłosa.
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Photography by Philippe Lacombe.
Left and right: Photography by Yvonne Tnt.
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Photography by Philippe Lacombe.
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“IT’S NOT SO MUCH ABOUT MAKING SURE THAT THE ORIGINAL VISION IS TRANSLATED. RATHER, IT’S ABOUT WORKING WITH THE TEAM AS THE PROJECT DEVELOPS TO CREATE THE OBJECT OF DESIRE TOGETHER.”
Photography by Piotr Stokłosa.
—FR ANK GEHRY
blossoms resembling the colliding leaves of the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s roof. Fish appear multiple times—a nod to both Gehry’s well-known series of large-scale paper lanterns and his Venice Beach era. Brimming with inside jokes and references, Gehry’s capsule collection reflects the depth and expansiveness of his history with Louis Vuitton. It showcases that this collaboration is not a one-line publicity stunt, but an important relationship that has become an essential cipher for reading the oeuvre of the house and architect alike. “What Louis Vuitton brings to the table is a deep respect for artists,” Gehry asserts. “They were able to produce things that were beyond my wildest dreams.”
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