Cultured Magazine April/May 2019 by CulturedMag

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Left “Pratone” lounge chair designed by Pietro Derossi, Giorgio Ceretti and Riccardo Rosso, Italy, 1966. This example produced by Gufram in 1986. Right “Bocca” sofa designed by Studio65, Italy, 1970. This example produced by Gufram in 1973.

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Contents

PHOTO BY MICAIAH CARTER

APRIL / MAY 2019

Designer Kerby Jean-Raymond, second from left, with models in pieces from the Pyer Moss SS19 collection.

MIND GAMES AND LAND MINES Part film, part installation, part performance, Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin’s Whether Line is now on view 58 at the Fondazione Prada. TELL ME SOMETHING GOOD Vaquera refashions the Wizard of Oz for MoMA PS1 like they do their larger-than-life runway shows. 60 JOIE DE VIVRE Alex Katz is a living legend. On April 27, the lifelong New Yorker’s solo show opens at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise. 62 CULTURE SEEKER Laura de Gunzburg takes a winter sojourn to Europe, stopping by the season’s must-see events and checking in with artists. 64 HEAVENLY BODY Precious Okoyomon’s writing breathes tenderness with a visceral energy, directly addressing the reader, herself, the universe. 66 OPEN SEASON The Shed is creating a space for New York’s young and as yet unknown artists to shape the conversation. 68 CULTURED 25 From exhibitions and installations to performances and collaborations, we bring you the most important events in art, design, 83 architecture, fashion and everything in between. HISTORIAN OF THE FUTURE Sculptor Bea Fremderman prepares for her first-ever solo museum show, opening May 9 at Atlanta Contemporary. 100 LISTENING CAMPAIGN ASH NYC is changing the hotel game by foregoing aesthetic consistency and embracing what makes a community unique. 102 FLOWER POWER Batsheva Hay’s maximalist florals and ruffles are unapologetically feminine—and fabulous. 104 ALL IN THE MIX Laure Hériard Dubreuil turns her attention to a new line for the home, after launching The Webster a decade ago. 106 42 culturedmag.com

BERGDORF GOODMAN . ISTANBUL . MIAMI

PHOTO BY CHUCK GRANT

Contents

c, the musician formerly known as Grimes, at Villa de Leon.

MONIQUE PÉAN: TIME TRAVELER Péan’s jewelry designs are sophisticated talismans of the universe and its history. ON NATURE IN ARCHITECTURE Andrew Heid spoke with Jean Nouvel in advance of the opening of the National Museum of Qatar. CULTURAL EXCHANGE Alára combines the best of African design, a David Adjaye-designed building and culinary offerings in the heart of Lagos. THE UNCANNY INFLUENCER Lil Miquela is an Instagram celebrity, but she isn’t all what she seems. THE YOUNG COLLECTORS This year’s list of young collectors share a dedication to thinking of art as part of the larger context of their lives. THE POWERFUL PERSISTENCE OF FAITH RINGGOLD Diana McClure looks back at the legend’s past and what is to come as she prepares for a solo exhibition at London’s Serpentine Galleries opening in June. THE NEW WORK WARDROBE Italian-born photographer Alessandro Simonetti is bringing utilitarian durability and aesthetics to his U.P.W.W. line. A KITCHEN FOR CREATIVES Redefining the notion of renovation, Henrybuilt’s Scott Hudson takes a wholly artistic approach to spaces. THE ARTIST FORMERLY KNOWN AS GRIMES The singer now known as c opens up about fame, climate change and the forthcoming album that sums it all up: Miss Anthropocene. THE POTENT VISION OF KERBY JEAN-RAYMOND The man behind Pyer Moss is putting politics on the runway and rewriting history. BLACK RENAISSACE AFOOT Simone Leigh has long put the black female experience at the center of her work. This spring, she takes over the Guggenheim’s iconic rotunda. FUCK THE FOURTH WALL For the past decade, MacArthur “Genius” Wu Tsang has been prodding the problems of representation and developing new languages for open-ended identities.

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Contents

Simone Leigh’s in-progress Brick House sculpture, which is now installed on the High Line.

BOB MEETS WORLD Ian Cheng’s latest creation brings viewers screen-to-screen with artificial intelligence and its attendant uncanny realities. FEELING BLESS(ED) The neo-Dada spirit of BLESS stretches through fashion and art with wit and charm. DESIRE AND THE UNDERWORLD Charline von Heyl’s paintings treat structure like a game, which is to say, they keep us playing. BOUNCE Harold Ancart takes Kat Herriman through his studio and mind as he prepares for a Public Art Fund commission and Frieze New York. A MATCH MADE IN HEAVEN Emily Segal and Martti Kalliala’s consultancy Nemesis collects market intel and transforms it into art. MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE Walter Hood’s Oakland-based Hood Design Studio brings together ideas around landscape, art and urbanism. SARAH FAUX PAINTS NAKED SENSATIONS With her solo booth at Frieze New York, the artist elucidates her relationship to Matisse’s reconstructed bodies offering viewers subtle aids to deciphering her paintings. FASHION IN SPACE Thanks to a cohort of leading architectf, tashion houses are reinventing the concept of stores, treating them not as repositories of inventory but instead as gallery environments that convey the essence of a brand in nuanced ways. FIRST IMPRESSIONS For the latest Cultured Commission, Sarah Faux created a series of four bodily topographies—each a monoprint.

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Designer Kerby Jean-Raymond with model Lameka Fox wearing pieces from the Pyer Moss SS19 collection photographed by Micaiah Carter; makeup by Alana Wright assisted by Fatimot Isadare. Photo assistants: Atarah Atkinson and Rahim Fortune; hair by Nigella Miller; special thanks to Magic Flying Carpets of the Berber Kingdom of Morocco, Brother Vellies, Reebok, IMG Models and Shio Studios.

FEN D I C A SA .CO M

MICAIAH CARTER

CHLOE MALLE

Photographer

Writer

SABLE ELYSE SMITH Artist

Micaiah Carter blends contemporary youth culture, fine art, and street style with the certainty that the act of representation can be a force for change. For this issue’s cover story he documented Pyer Moss and founder Kerby Jean-Raymond. “I loved working on this shoot and collaborating with so many amazing talents, especially Kerby. It was a special shoot that had a lot of eccentric energy!”

“I’ve been Insta-stalking ASH NYC’s hotels since they opened the Dean in Providence and am dying to stay at Hotel Peter and Paul in New Orleans,” says Vogue contributing editor Chloe Malle, of the subject of her piece on page 102. “I practically salivate whenever I look at photos of those tent-flapped curtains and Gustavian antiques swaddled in checked linen—a maximalist fever dream!”

Sable Elyse Smith is an artist, writer, and educator working in video, sculpture, photography and text. Her work deals with the carceral, the personal, the political, and the quotidian. She checks in with Kerby Jean-Raymond on page 168, calling him a “bad motherfucker.” “It was nice to sit down with Kerby and feel a familiarity. No posturing, no performance. Just real. You gotta love that. If I was sold before I’m totally in now!”

CHUCK GRANT Photographer Chuck Grant is an Adirondack native based in Los Angeles. A graduate of Parsons School of Design, Grant is a photographer and director specializing in editorial, fashion, music video and album artwork. Clients include New York Magazine, Vice, Fader, Playboy, Complex, Rolling Stone, Texte zur Kunst, and brands like Tigra Tigra, Topshop and Lanvin. Some of her favorite things include her snake Limey, her dog Spooky, orange blossoms and KJazz. “What a dream it was to collaborate with one of my favorite musicians, c, in our glorified Steampunk Rococo world. Big love to Cultured for letting us play so freely on your pages.” 48 culturedmag.com

RYAN LOPEZ (CARTER), EMILY WEISS (MALLE), KYLE DOROSZ (SMITH)

Contributors

AR T ISAN HANDCR AF T ED JE WELRY V I S I T O U R B O U T I Q U E AT AV E N T U R A M A L L

KHALILA DOUZE

Precious Okoyomon

MOSHA LUNDSTRÖM HALBERT

Writer

Poet

Journalist

Khalila Douze is an LA-based writer as well as an intuitive healer. For this issue, she profiled the artist formerly known as Grimes. “I appreciate how much of an open book she was while simultaneously being very careful, considerate and thoughtful about what she had to say. It was a refreshing balance of vulnerability and intention— qualities in artists I find most powerful.”

Precious Okoyomon is a portal weaver. Her work was included in the 13th Baltic Triennial, and in a current solo show at the Luma Westbau. Okoyomon has performed at The Kitchen, New York, and The Serpentine Galleries, London. Her first book of poetry, Ajebota (2016), was published by Bottlecap Press, and her second book But Did U Die? is forthcoming from Wonder Press in 2019. “idk today I felt really good like the sun might never stop singing.”

Based in Miami and LA, Mosha Lundström Halbert writes for Vogue.com and BoF in addition to being a co-founder of Therma Kota. On page 104, she profiles Batsheva Hay, maker of the twisted prairie dresses populating Instagram and the closets of fashion’s intelligentsia. “It’s always revealing to interview creatives in their private quarters. Batsheva’s NYC space is surrounded by a happy clash of samples, art, Judaica and kids’ toys. ”

PAUL MPAGI SEPUYA Artist Paul Mpagi Sepuya is an LA-based artist working in photography. His most recent solo exhibition, “The Conditions,” is on view now at Team Gallery in New York. Upcoming exhibitions include a survey of work at The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, a project for the Whitney Biennial 2019, and group exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, Guggenheim Museum and Contemporary Art Museum Houston. He visited groundbreaking artist Wu Tsang in their studio, producing portraits of the artist for our profile on page 186.

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ARIEL LEBEAU (DOUZE), SAMUEL PENN (OKOYOMON) MARK SOMMERFELD (LUNDSTRÖM HALBERT), SELF-PORTRAIT (SEPUYA)

Contributors

DAVID WISEMAN

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David Wiseman, Branch Chandelier, 2019, bronze, 60 x 130 x 94 inches, 152.4 x 330.2 x 238.8 cm. Courtesy of Wiseman Studio.

NONA FAUSTINE

BARRY SCHWABSKY

JENNA SAUERS

Artist

Poet and Critic

Writer

“It was with pure joy and amazement that I photographed the legendary Faith Ringgold,”says Nona Faustine. “She has long been a heroine of mine. I will long cherish the pearls of wisdom and hospitality she afforded me one cold Saturday in January.” Faustine’s work has been published in Artforum, the New York Times, and the New Yorker, and have been exhibited around the world.

Barry Schwabsky is an art critic for The Nation, coeditor of international reviews for Artforum, author of the forthcoming book The Observer Effect: On Contemporary Painting (2019), and still manages to sleep late in the mornings. Schwabsky visits painter Sarah Faux for this issue to unpack her practice. “The first time I went to Faux’s studio, all I could see at first was the abstraction—until, noticing that I was missing the point, she gently pointed out that all the paintings included figurative imagery, however loose or fragmented.”

Jenna Sauers is a New Yorkbased writer originally from New Zealand. Her journalism and essays have appeared in GQ, Bookforum, and the Guardian, among others. For this piece about Lil Miquela, she thought a lot about the supposed truth of photography, the ways identity is constructed in the digital world—and streetwear.

ZOË BLEU Stylist Zoë Bleu is an actress, designer, artist, poet and stylist. Aside from running clothing collective Nautae alongside Arielle Chiara and Darius Khonsary, Bleu’s other recent projects include the role of Vampire Queen in the 2017 remake of Mother, May I Sleep With Danger? For this issue, Bleu brings her postinternet reimagination of Edwardian romance to the table as the stylist for our cover shoot with c, the artist formerly known as Grimes.

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SELF-PORTRAIT (FAUSTINE), © M/M (PARIS) (SCHWABSKY), ALAN DEL RIO ORTIZ (SAUERS)

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Founder /Editor-in-Chief Sarah G. Harrelson sarah@culturedmag.com Creative Director Carlos A. Suarez Executive Editor Sara Rofﬁno VURIÀQR#FXOWXUHGPDJ FRP Features Editor Kat Herriman Senior Editor Monica Uszerowicz Contributing Editor Michael Reynolds Associate Art Director Katie Brown Digital Editor Jessica Idarraga Assistant Editor Simone Sutnick Contributing Art Director Ariela Gittlen Landscape Editor Lily Kwong Design Editor Mieke ten Have Architecture Editor Andrew Heid

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Contributing Editors Susan Ainsworth Sarah Arison Maria Brito Trudy Cejas Laura de Gunzburg Jessica Kantor Nasir Kassamali John Lin George Lindemann Ted Loos Doug Meyer Michelle Rubell Franklin Sirmans David Sokol Sarah Thornton Michael Wolfson

Contributing Photographers Brendan Burdzinski Micaiah Carter Sara Deraedt Chuck Grant Nona Faustine Naima Green Kyle Knodell Gabby Laurent Isabel Magowan Paul Mpagi Sepuya Senior Accountant Judith Cabrera

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Interns Callan Malone, Carenina Sasha Sanchez Senior Photo Retouchers Bert Moo-Young, Matt Stevens

Where Fashion and Art are Inseparable WE NEVER WANT TO TAKE a typical approach to covering fashion and art, and their obvious and often discussed relationship. For our Fashion Issue, we instead focus on the people paving their own paths: artists like our cover stars c (aka Grimes), who has the ability to constantly forge new identities and concepts, and fashion designer Kerby Jean-Raymond, who in this story, written by artist Sable Elyse Smith, says he hopes to “present black people in a fashionable light, in a natural light...showing what the black condition looks like without the angst of racism...to take all of this and show people what we can be.” It’s especially important to us to showcase those who have created space for themselves and, in turn, helped establish a platform for others. We’re also thrilled to have a star-studded collection of interviews with some of the most brilliant artists in today’s contemporary landscape: Faith Ringgold, Ian Cheng, Simone Leigh, Harold Ancart, Wu Tsang and Sarah Faux, to name a few. Additionally, this is the first issue in which we’ve ever published an original poem; we’re proud to present a piece by Precious Okoyomon, who finds poetry in everything. We also take a look at Monique Péan’s jewelry pieces—which are more akin to wearable artworks and have a devoted following of collectors from around the globe. Beyond the print issue, we are reinforcing our digital presence. We’ve taken the same approach to our online content as we have to our print: meaningful conversations with artists about their processes and their influences. Our goal is to share the most engaging stories with our readers in a way that makes an impact and continues the momentum we are building in our voice. As a magazine dedicated to covering the arts and all its reaches, each season we are thrilled to be at the forefront of the conversations and happenings in those spheres. This spring you can find us at Frieze New York; we will also be celebrating our second annual Young Collectors profiles—in which we interview seven individuals who are driven by the conversations their collections generate—with a toast at The Webster with founder and friend Laure Hériard Dubreuil. The coming season is all about growth, and we are feeling incredibly grateful this spring. We are proud of how far we have come and I am personally thankful to all the people who helped us get here. Our allwomen editorial and sales teams inspire me daily. This journey has taught me so much—and there’s so much more to learn.

The team behind our cover shoot in Pacific Palisades. From left, makeup artist Anthony H. Nguyen, hairstylist Chanel Croker, me, c, photographer Chuck Grant and stylist Zoë Bleu at Villa de Leon.

Musician c photographed by Chuck Grant, styled by Zoë Bleu wearing rings by Darius Khonsary; hair by Chanel Croker; makeup by Anthony H. Nguyen; produced by Kathleen Heffernan.

Sarah G. Harrelson Founder and Editor-in-Chief @sarahgharrelson Follow us | @cultured_mag

Subscribe today at culturedmag.com 56 culturedmag.com

Photo Michel Gibert: for advertising purposes only. 1Conditions apply, contact store for details. 2Program available on select items, subject to availability.

French Art de Vivre

Caractère. Corner composition, designed by Sacha Lakic. Spoutnik. Armchair, designed by Sacha Lakic. Coin. Cocktail table, end table and occasional table, designed by Dmitry Kozinenko. Noise. Console, designed by Cristián Mohaded. Kuma. Rug, designed by Simona Scollica. Manufactured in Europe.

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MIND GAMES AND LAND MINES

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Production still from Whether Line Photo Fitch | Trecartin Studio

“In a lot of ways I feel like there’s a trilogy here, and this movie we’ve been working on sets up the development of the land and of these tensions around the idea of property and borders. Not just in relation to the land, but also as they relate to personality, ways of being, and ideology. In the movie, the characters often talk about ideologies as if they are row crops. Like they have seasons and ideas get harvested, or crops fail, like ideas fail. ‘It was too wet this year for that idea.’ I almost feel like it is the platform for something more narrative. I feel like this movie is almost antinarrative, in a strange way. There’s a lot of talk about preserving things, using language that has to do with pickling or fermenting. Like a village gets pickled and becomes a culture preserve. So, things are often getting stuck, and storytelling is something to be avoided in the developing setting, but in a way that’s kind of the premise for something larger that would definitely engage storytelling.” —Ryan Trecartin

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TELL ME SOMETHING GOOD VAQUERA GARMENTS ARE BOTH SURREAL

Looks from Vaquera’s Spring/Summer 2019 collection.

Fashion collective Vaquera brings the Wizard of Oz to MoMA PS1 in the larger-than-life style of their runway shows. BY ERIN LELAND PORTRAIT BY ALEXANDER J. ROTONDO

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and instructive, naive and knowingly-naive. Innocence, the kind of wide-eyed quality found in fairy-tales, is a key note. Models teeter under the heft of oversized chef’s hats, blown-out graduation gowns and chainmail constructed from gym-class whistles. There is a Beetlejuice stripe. There is a cropped, lamé cape competing with a quarterback’s shoulder pad. A dark, ghoulish charcoal ringing the models’ eyes recurs as a Vaquera signature. There is the suggestion of eternal adolescence. Cuts vary between being skimpy and oversized. The clothing either swallows, or skims, the body. And accessories appear larger than life, as if having undergone an overnight growth spurt from gulping an enchanted bean. Fiction is the muse. Scanning the online Vaquera boutique, one can buy a bedazzled crucifix and tie-on devil horns just as easily as a shirt, positioning Vaquera as the ideal brand to approach a performative retelling of the musical Wicked, and hence the literary fable The Wonderful Wizard of Oz they are presenting at MoMA PS1 in April. The three designers, Clare Sully, Bryn Taubensee and Patric DiCaprio, in collaboration with Leah Victoria Hennessy and an ensemble of artists, are preparing garment production and scripting for Ding Dong the Witch is Dead, in which the allegorical world collides with Vaquera’s spectral pubescent costuming. Essential to the aesthetic is Vaquera’s origin story. In 2013, designer Patric DiCaprio ordered a sewing machine on a whim and learned to sew through online tutorials. Beginning the fashion label with one blind eye, the designers taught themselves to tailor, to hem and alter, and to materially cultivate coming-of-age. Since then, the designers have expanded from crafting ephemeral fashion held together by a bare thread to a fashion line in full production, made to last. And since 2017, Vogue has covered their runway shows. Garments generate a literary narrative all their own. A harlequin trouser meets a rococo hat meets a flamenco sleeve meets a ballet legging. And this, all playfully staged upon the carpeted stairway of a Chinese restaurant, composes Vaquera’s 2016 lookbook. Clicking through past seasons online, in the midst of what might be performance art or what might be a runway show, a model gathers the hem of his skirt in a high school gymnasium. Another model approaches, the hair underneath a headband becoming more and more disheveled, the band of ribbon as if slackened and retied several times a day. Loosely tied in a looped knot on a hooded sweatshirt, the next model wears a bow for closure around the neck. Down the line enters a flat way of wearing a bow, securing an Amish collar. Sharp bows, round bows, detachable bows and attached bows. Bows to the side, bows underneath, bows every which-way, nothing else but a bow. More bows all of the time.

Introducing Foro.

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Sunset (2019)

JOIE DE VIVRE Alex Katz is a living legend. At 91 years old, the iconic artist is still moving full steam ahead, producing new works year after year. On April 27, the New Yorker’s solo show opens at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise. Katz captures a landcape in motion in a new series of paintings—scenes of light sifting through tree branches, rendered with thick, impactful brushstrokes, at once brooding and lively. In the spirit of the vitality his work evokes, the artist says of the exhibition, “I’m lucky to be alive.”

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CULTURE SEEKER

Contributing Editor Laura de Gunzburg takes a winter sojourn to Europe, stopping by the season’s must-see events and checking in with artists.

Doug Aitken’s reflective ranch-style house installation Mirage Gstaad set amongst the pristine mountains.

I was first shown the work of Grant Levy-Lucero by Lawrence Van Hagen, who was curating a group show in the fall that included a few of his pieces. What really grasped me was the familiarity of the vases, all representing goods that we had around the house growing up.

V While in Maastricht, I visited the studio of designer Valentin Loellmann. We were introduced a few months back by a mutual friend in London, and I fell in love with his work after seeing a few of his pieces at the Blue Mountain School as well as additional images from a book his brother, photographer Jonas Loellmann, put together.

This was my first time attending The European Fine Art Fair in Maastricht and it blew my mind. The production of the fair is next level. I’ve never seen flowers like that and the art was incredible, from antiquities, old masters, design, and jewelry to modern art. I was particularly taken by the sculpture Sleeping Hermaphrodite by Barry X Ball, a contemporary artist I didn’t know before.

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The Alexander Calder exhibition at the Musée Picasso in Paris was conceived by Calder’s and Picasso’s grandsons.

It’s more than a showroom. It’s a feast for the senses.

The Sub-Zero, Wolf, and Cove Showroom is now open in Miami. From cooking demos to appliance test-drives, you’re invited to taste, touch, and see the potential for your kitchen in a dynamic space free of sales pressure but full of inspiration.

Miami • 3711 NE 2nd Avenue, Suite 200, Miami, FL 33137 • 786-431-3907 • subzero-wolf.com/miami

HEAVENLY BODY Artist and poet Precious Okoyomon’s writing breathes tenderness with a visceral energy, directly addressing the reader, herself, the universe. Often structured like rhythmic text messages, Okoyomon’s poems are pulsing bodies. PORTRAIT BY SAMUEL PENN

Angel i cannot fuck you tonight

Something slipped between language Or did it stop time Retreat Attempts timelessness Show me the wound Raw and bloodless You excrete god likeness

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Al HELD + BRAM BOGART

Reductive Abstraction Paintings 1959-1966

July 14 - Sept 28, 2019

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heard of The Shed. Open since April 5, the massive new addition to New York’s cultural landscape has almost met a fundraising goal of more than half-a-billion dollars. The multi-disciplinary arts center has pride of place in Hudson Yards, the biggest real estate development in US history by value (so says developer Stephen Ross, whose Related Companies is behind it), on the far west side of Manhattan. Its adjustable structure—which moves to cover or uncover a plaza—was designed by the Diller Scofidio + Renfro studio as lead architect and the Rockwell Group as collaborating architect, and it will keep Instagrammers busy for years. The Shed has sizeable ambitions, as evidenced by its opening programming: A concert series conceived and curated by filmmaker Steve McQueen, a concert by legendary musician Björk, plus an immersive live performance with painter Gerhard Richter alongside music by Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt. Later in the year, look for a kung-fu musical directed by Chen Shi-Zheng and an exhibition of works by conceptual artist Agnes Denes. Arts institutions have been fully embracing multi-disciplinary programming for a while now, a trend that continues with the diverse lineup for this year’s edition of the Whitney Biennial, but generally such presentations have required retrofitting performance into institutions originally designed to hold visual arts. Rarely has there been a purposebuilt venue for everything at once. “We’re not siloed into one artistic practice,” says The Shed’s director, Alex Poots, who has spent the last couple of years ramping up for the big opening.

For at least one of the artists, daàPò reo, the commission was a major validation. “I’ve jumped over so many hurdles,” says reo, who hails from Lagos, Nigeria, and is now based in Bushwick. “It’s important for someone like me. I feel blessed.” In one of his previous works, ALCOHOLOTOPIA (A GEOPOLITICAL DREAM UNDER THE INFLUENCE), reo riffed on the dream of African unity by creating a flag from fabric scraps that looks like a crazy-quilt version of the American flag. He’s taking his ambitious textile-based installation to a new level for The Shed. In KUYE’N KEGBE KEGBE, POSSESSION OF STOLEN GODS, he says he’ll “connect the dots between the masquerade traditions of secret societies in West Africa with the origins of the Ku Klux Klan’s regalia and folklore.” The title includes the Yoruba phrase “he revels in bad company.” Reo wants to look at the “grotesque” tradition, in all senses of the word, and how it can have “two very different meanings.” To highlight that, for his “Open Call” piece he’ll project video of traditional African dancing onto the white portions of KKK uniforms. To reo, the interplay between the two is a “conversation that needs to be had.” The discourse within “Open Call” will be at its most multifaceted in the show-within-a-show curated by artists Phoebe d’Heurle and Maryam Hoseini. Just as The Shed is upending our expectations about what a big, expensive new art center can be, the two intend to blur lines about museums in a presentation that’s “all about doubling,” explains Hoseini. “We’re artists taking on curation, and doubling is resonant for us.”

Open season Behind the half-a-billion dollars in fundraising and the over-the-top building, The Shed is creating a space for New York’s young and as yet unknown artists to shape the conversation. BY TED LOOS PORTRAIT BY OLUWASEYE OLUSA The other point of difference for The Shed is that, alongside the massive names like Richter and Björk, the center is committed to discovering new talent—even artists who have never had a big show and aren’t yet represented by a gallery. “We’re as interested in very established artists as we are in early-career people who are just starting out, and the two complement each other,” says Poots. He adds, “I haven’t been to an arts center that does both.” The exhibition “Open Call,” opening May 30 and continuing through the summer and into the 2020 season, features 52 emerging artists and collectives based in New York City. All participants were commissioned to create new work, and all received a stipend between $7,000 and $15,000. The multidisciplinary artist Kiyan Williams, for instance, will use dirt donated by the city’s parks department to create a site-specific wall work addressing gentrification and diaspora. The Shed convened six different panels of outside experts to find the talent for “Open Call.” According to Tamara McCaw, the chief civic program officer, “We’re always thinking about what it means to be a civic institution, and located on city-owned land”—in other words, The Shed has taken on the responsibility of representing all of New York. Senior curator Emma Enderby points out that the exhibition will be a noteworthy complement to the concurrent Biennial, with its moreestablished artists like Nicole Eisenman and Brendan Fernandes. “Our approach is completely grassroots,” she adds, noting that they did everything from post on LinkedIn to contact the Asian American Arts Alliance to tap into unheralded talent. 68 culturedmag.com

Their show will feature six to seven creators, including themselves, the late Surrealist legend Dorothea Tanning and the multimedia artist A.L. Steiner, but it will be enclosed with transparent walls, keeping it separate but also connected to the rest of “Open Call.” The inspiration for the presentation is the work of 19th-century artist Suzanne Valadon (1865–1938), who was also a model for Degas and Matisse. You’ve seen her before: She’s the smiling female dancer in Renoir’s famous Dance at Bougival, in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. After her days as an Impressionist muse, she embarked on a 40-year painting career, and was also the mother of the painter Maurice Utrillo. “We were inspired by one reclining nude in particular,” says d’Heurle of a Valadon canvas at the Met, where only a small percentage of the art on display is by women. “She shifted the expectations for a woman, and it got us thinking about the representation of women’s bodies.” Examinations of voyeurism and the male gaze are front and center here. D’Heurle adds, “As a painter who was once a model, she made a huge leap.” D’Heurle has primarily worked with photography, and Hoseini with painting. The two met at Bard in 2014 and have been happily collaborating for three years. If their “Open Call” exhibition illustrates anything, it’s that The Shed is being set up to reflect a new kind of prismatic discourse that doesn’t rely on the same old traditions. “We feel like as artists, we’re always in discussion about everything we see around us,” says Hoseini. “And this show reflects that.”

Nigerian-born daàPò reo is one of 52 artists included in The Shed’s “Open Call” exhibition— his project explores the connection between West African culture and Ku Klux Klan folklore using textiles as a symbolic vehicle.

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For over 30 years, ICFF has built a solid reputation as North America’s platform for international design. Over 900 exhibitors from across the globe will present to more than 38,000 industry professionals looking to be inspired and find what’s best and what’s next in luxury interior design. Register to attend for no cost at icff.com/register using promo code: CULTURED

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I C F F. C O M

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VAN GOGH, PICASSO, DEGAS, MATISSE, MONET

EUROPEAN MASTERWORKS

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ON VIEW: APRIL 6– JULY 14 | 1280 PEACH TREE STREET, N.E.| H I GH .ORG | MEMBERS ALWAYS FREE! European Masterworks: The Phillips Collection is organized by The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

EXHIBITION SERIES SPONSORS

PREMIER EXHIBITION SERIES SUPPORTERS

BENEFACTOR EXHIBITION SERIES SUPPORTER

AMBASSADOR EXHIBITION SUPPORTERS

The Antinori Foundation Sarah and Jim Kennedy Louise Sams and Jerome Grilhot

Anne Cox Chambers Foundation

Tom and Susan Wardell Rod Westmoreland

CONTRIBUTING EXHIBITION SERIES SUPPORTERS The Ron and Lisa Brill Family Charitable Trust, Lucinda W. Bunnen, Corporate Environments, Marcia and John Donnell, W. Daniel Ebersole and Sarah Eby-Ebersole, Peggy Foreman, Robin and Hilton Howell, Mr. and Mrs. Baxter Jones, and Margot and Danny McCaul

GENEROUS SUPPORT IS ALSO PROVIDED BY Alfred and Adele Davis Exhibition Endowment Fund, Anne Cox Chambers Exhibition Fund, Barbara Stewart Exhibition Fund, Marjorie and Carter Crittenden, Dorothy Smith Hopkins Exhibition Endowment Fund, Eleanor McDonald Storza Exhibition Endowment Fund, The Fay and Barrett Howell Exhibition Fund, Forward Arts Foundation Exhibition Endowment Fund, Helen S. Lanier Endowment Fund, Isobel Anne Fraser–Nancy Fraser Parker Exhibition Endowment Fund, John H. and Wilhelmina D. Harland Exhibition Endowment Fund, Katherine Murphy Riley Special Exhibition Endowment Fund, Margaretta Taylor Exhibition Fund, Massey Charitable Trust, RJR Nabisco Exhibition Endowment Fund, and Dr. Diane L. Wisebram. IMAGES: Vincent van Gogh, The Road Menders, 1889, oil on canvas. Pablo Picasso, Reclining Figure, 1934, gift of the Carey Walker Foundation, 1994. © 2019 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Edgar Degas, Dancers at the Barre, ca. 1900. Henri Matisse, Studio, Quai Saint-Michel, 1916. © 2019 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Claude Monet, The Road to Vétheuil (detail), 1879. All works The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.

From exhibitions and installations to performances and collaborations, we bring you the

most important events in art, design, architecture, fashion and everything in between.

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What are the building blocks of identity? Are they aesthetically driven? Artists have always toyed with how character is built and manipulated in the creation and distribution of images. Advisor and curator Lisa Cooley taps into this lineage with “Last Night I Wore a Costume,” a group show on view at LX Gallery through May 29 that brings together contemporary voices like Martin Wong, Susan Cianciolo and Paul Mpagi Sepuya to explore how these questions are being posited in the identity politics zeitgeist. LXARTSNYC.COM Sara Cwynar’s Tracy (Wrestlers) (2017) 84 culturedmag.com

PHOTO BY FRANK OUDEMAN ©/OTTO; COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND FOXY PRODUCTION

A Birkin for you! A Birkin for me! The residents of New York’s Meatpacking District will now be able to purchase their very own Birkin just steps away from home. The newest Hermès boutique opens April 5 on Manhattan’s west side with windows adorned with the work of a now-household name in Hermès, Ruby Wescoat. The artist talks to us about her project and her relationship with the iconic brand on CULTUREDMAG.COM/RUBY-WESCOAT.

PHOTO BY HUNTER CANNING

Forget “Don’t touch the art!” This spring, Leonardo Drew invites you to walk on the art with his monumental commission for Madison Square Park, City in the Grass. Starting June 3, the interactive, 100-footlong cityscape will envelop the park in vibrant colors, reverberating the energy of the city around it. Drew used varied materials to draw on both urban and domestic motifs for his most ambitious project to date. MADISONSQUAREPARK.ORG Leonardo Drew at work on City in the Grass, commissioned by Madison Square Park Conservancy. culturedmag.com 85

Geta Bràtescu-inspired looks for the Akris Spring 2019 collection.

Akris designer Albert Kriemler first encountered the work of late Romanian artist Geta BrŅtescu at Documenta in 2017 and kept seeing it, as if in a dream, until he made her acquaintance through Hauser & Wirth. Their conversation led to his Spring 2019 collection, which is now an homage to the artist who passed in September of last year. Framed in Kriemler’s fluid, feminine silhouettes, BrŅtescu’s wild abstractions take on a new life as they take to the streets this season. AKRIS.COM

Irma Blank’s Radical Writings, Exercitium (1989)

In her first solo exhibition in the US since 1979, German-born conceptualist Irma Blank will show work from three integral moments of her life. Featuring pieces from Eigenschriften (1968–73), Radical Writings (1983–95) and Avant-testo (begun in the late 1990s), viewers at Luxembourg and Dayan’s New York gallery will see the scope of Blank’s prolific career. Blank’s exploration of human connection through written language both legible and otherwise will be a sight to see—and if you’ve got the propensity for nonsensical language, a fun read as well. LUXEMBOURGDAYAN.COM 86 culturedmag.com

PHOTO BY MARIO SORRENTI. COURTESY TKTKTKTKTKKTKTKTKTKT THE ARTIST; COURTESY OF LUXEMBOURG & DAYAN

Dallas Contemporary hosts a solo show for a name that is synonymous with Kate Moss and the fashion world: Mario Sorrenti. Sorrenti’s “Kate” exhibition opens April 13 and centers on his images of the model, including some that led to their famous Calvin Klein Obsession campaign in the ’90s as well as an unreleased video. The show will feature 58 of the photographer’s images. DALLASCONTEMPORARY.ORG

The late Austrian painter Kiki Kogelnik transcended Modernism and American Pop art to create a unique, forward-looking oeuvre that addressed new technologies and feminism. Incorporating a variety of materials, irony and humor, her paintings and sculptural works typically take the human body as their point of departure, presenting it as variously ebullient, stylized, interchangeable or fragmentary. An exhibition of her work opens at Mitchell-Innes & Nash on May 23. MIANDN.COM

THE FOUNDATION OF KIKI KOGELNIK. COURTESY OF THE FOUNDATION TKTKKTKTKTKTKKT OF KIKI KOGELNIK AND MITCHELL-INNES & NASH, NEW YORK; © HARALD GOTTSCHALK

Kiki Kogelnik’s City (1979)

Nicolas Lobo’s Hydrogel beauty mask drawings (Working title) (2019)

Miami-based artist Nicolas Lobo has a proclivity for cultivating conversation through art that deals with socio-political and economic issues. On May 10 at MoCA Detroit, Lobo will present Wellness Center in the late Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead. Featuring “sauna tents” connected to steam generators, Lobo will take on the issue of water rights and “privileges” in the state where its fraughtness has made it a universal issue. Lobo’s show will combine elements of superficial and natural beauty as displayed in his use of face masks and palm fronds. MOCADETROIT.ORG

Living room in the Templeton Crocker penthouse designed by Jean-Michel Frank, 1930

There is little room in architecture for those homeschooled, doit-yourself individuals, but some genius always breaks through, as is the case with Jean-Michel Frank, whose self-taught background enabled him to envision sumptuous interiors that his contemporaries couldn’t even imagine at the turn of the 20th century. This spring, Frank’s legacy is presented by Assouline in one of their famous tomes. Luxuriating over his archive, the monograph teases out Frank’s connections to art and fashion including his collaboration with Alberto Giacometti and his interiors for Elsa Schiaparelli. ASSOULINE.COM culturedmag.com 87

Lorna Simpson’s Untitled (2018)

Virgil Abloh’s You’re Obviously in the Wrong Place, (2015/2019)

At 81, Bogotá-based artist Beatriz González celebrates her first large-scale U.S. retrospective at Pérez Art Museum Miami. Opening April 19, the show features González’s six-decade career, largely unknown to American audiences. From her oil-on-canvas paintings to three-dimensional recycled furniture, González is one of the few remaining “radical women” who came up in the 20th-century Latin American art scene. Addressing “la violencia” and investigating Colombian middle-class taste as well as the popular desire for and consumption of well-known European artworks, González’s output ranges immensely. PAMM.ORG

Artist and recent J. Paul Getty Medal recipient Lorna Simpson returns to New York for “Darkening,” an exhibition at Hauser & Wirth opening April 25. The show promises a new body of work that continues her multi-media investigations into representation, identity and race. HAUSERWIRTH.COM

Beatriz González’s Encajera Almanaque Pielroja (Lacemaker Pielroja Almanac) (1964) 88 culturedmag.comm

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST; COLLECTION OF THE ARTIST, COURTESY OF CASAS RIEGNER GALLERY, BOGOTÁ; COURTESY THE ARTIST AND HAUSER & WIRTH; PHOTO BY JAMES WANG

Few artists have crossed genre lines quite like Virgil Abloh has in the last few years. The polymath’s creative endeavors include his line Off-White, DJ gigs around the world and Louis Vuitton menswear. On June 10, Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art opens “Figures of Speech,” a show which features a collection of pieces straight off the runway, videos of his most iconic shows, and works of industrial and graphic design that are intrinsic to Abloh’s identity. MCACHICAGO.ORG

THE ARTIST AND JTT, THE ARTIST AND GREENE NAFTALI, NEW YORK

Doreen Garner photographed by Jason Schmidt, at right, a detail of Not Yet Titled, (2019)

In case you’re feeling particularly holy in this age of “God is a Woman,” JTT will open on Easter, April 21, to present Doreen Garner’s “She is Risen.” Garner is known for fusing painting, sculpture and performance to explore the ways in which history, power and violence affect the body via beauty and medicine. The show’s central piece is an American flag made of stitched brown silicone encased in a large plexiglass vitrine and hanging from the ceiling. The show continues Garner’s investigations into the history of pain in America—specifically the history of medical experimentation on black women. JTTNYC.COM

William Leavitt’s Ruins, CPU and Shadows (2019)

LA Conceptualist William Leavitt returns for his third show at Greene Naftali with a series of new paintings. Opening May 3, the exhibition includes Ruins, CPU and Shadows, pictured here. “This painting is from a group of new works called Robots and Ruins, which evolved from a movie script I was writing,” Leavitt says. “The script itself was the result of repeatedly seeing a modern house in my neighborhood that was under construction but never finished or occupied. As a consequence of this neglect over a period of seven or eight years, the structure acquired the appearance of a modernist ruin. I transferred this context to a desert setting where city dwellers on a retreat come upon the ruined house and its robotic occupant, as well as electrical devices such as banks of CPUs, transformers and resistors all situated in the landscape.” GREENENAFTALIGALLERY.COM

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Todd Gray’s Three Women (2) (2018)

In 2012, Alice Könitz founded the experimental exhibition space, Los Angeles Museum of Art, as a “platform for an organic institution that lives through participation.” Now, Könitz presents Display System #7 at LA’s Commonwealth and Council, with artists including Carmen Argote, Beatriz Cortez and Jen Smith showing works in a modular wooden space. COMMONWEALTHANDCOUNCIL.COM Alice Könitz’s Display System #7 (LAMOA #7) (2018) 90 culturedmag.com

Creative Director Gherardo Felloni

Roger Vivier’s designs have been called the “Fabergé of footwear” and creative director Gherardo Felloni has certainly followed in the late artist’s, you guessed it, footsteps. The Spring/Summer collection is a cinematic homage to Paris, an ode to women in all their diversity and beauty. ROGERVIVIER.COM

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND DAVID LEWIS, NEW YORK, COMMONWEALTH AND COUNCIL, ROGER VIVIER

Working at the intersection of performance, sculpture and photography, Todd Gray has spent his career creating works that cross genres and break boundaries. On April 30, his show “Cartesian Gris Gris” opens at David Lewis Gallery. Featuring photographic wall collages filled with photos spanning decades, Gray’s solo show includes work both old and new. DAVIDLEWISGALLERY.COM

IMAGE BY HOLY SHOT PHOTOGRAPHY

Sheila Hicks’s Escalade Beyond Chromatic Lands (2016–17)

In a reconfiguration of her 2017 Venice Biennale installation for the Arsenale, Escalade Beyond Chromatic Lands, Sheila Hicks— who straddles craft, design and art—presents “Campo Abierto (Open Field)” at The Bass in Miami Beach. Featuring her signature two- and three-dimensional textile works, the show is comprised of pieces from throughout her five-decade-long career exploring the formal, social and environmental aspects of landscape in intensely vibrant hues and textures. THEBASS.ORG

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The Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial takes on critical issues surrounding the environment and climate change this year when it opens on May 10 at both Cooper Hewitt and the Cube Museum in the Netherlands. Featuring more than 60 international artists, gigantic site-specific installations will dominate the spaces, including a lowtech bamboo theater in rural Songyang County. The pieces will be far reaching, literally, and innovative by nature. COOPERHEWITT.ORG

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COURTESY OF THE DESIGNER; PHOTO BY WANG ZILING ©DNA_DESIGN AND ARCHITECTURE

Bamboo Theatre, 2015–ongoing, designed by Xu Tiantian, DnA Design and Architecture culturedmag.com 93

Charles Ray’s Mountain Lion Attacking a Dog (2018)

Gloria Cortina’s N&S Cabinet, in steel with brass feather inlays

In a time when parody may be the only way to stomach current events, Anna Wintour has hit the nail on the head with this year’s Met Gala theme: Notes on Camp. Inspired by Susan Sontag’s seminal essay of the same title, the event and exhibit examines irony and humor, pastiche and theatricality, as well as artifice and exaggeration in fashion. We can only hope Gaga pulls out some of her old tricks for the May 6 fête. METMUSEUM.ORG

A Fall/Winter 1989 dress by Franco Moschino for House of Moschino

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Long-time collector and philanthropist Stephanie Ingrassia inaugurates Cristina Grajales Gallery’s first guest-curated exhibition, “Encounters.” The show blends design and visual art using the gallery’s permanent collection as well as newer pieces. Ingrassia says of the curation, “some artists in the show are very well known, some are not. It is all about the mix for me.” “Encounters” opens April 25. CRISTINAGRAJALESINC.COM

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST; COURTESY OF THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, © JOHNNY DUFORT

Charles Ray has left himself decidedly outside of the limelight for much of his career. Despite these efforts, however, the celebrated artist has found himself yet again in the brightest of them all, Los Angeles. “Two Ghosts” opens at both of Matthew Marks’s LA locations on April 23. Including a range of Ray’s work from a six-ton sculpture carved from a single block of Virginia Granite to Clothespile, a portrait of his own closet, a combination of sculptures and paper works ensures Ray won’t be able to hide from the spotlight much longer. MATTHEWMARKS.COM

Who doesn’t love a little melodrama in the great outdoors? Josh Smith, who joined the David Zwirner roster in 2017, has his first show with the gallery at their West 19th Street location through June 15. “Emo Jungle” includes a range of new paintings—Smith’s investigations of scale, color, and compositional resolution will be fully on display as he experiments with placing his work in new contexts. DAVIDZWIRNER.COM

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND DAVID ZWIRNER; COURTESY THE ARTIST AND MENDES WOOD DM, SÃO PAULO; ©LOUIS VUITTON

Josh Smith’s JSP19118 (2019)

Staples edition by Louis Vuitton Fall/Winter 2019 Pre-collection

A staple is a twisted piece of metal that holds two elements together. It is also a white tee, a denim jacket, a khaki colored trench. Louis Vuitton and Virgil Abloh present Staples: a stand alone pre-Fall collection that coordinates the essential wardrobe pieces, both garments and accessories, necessary in a man’s closet. Abloh will amplify cuts, techniques, and fabrications to create the absolute staples in men’s fashion. LOUISVUITTON.COM An installation view of Paulo Nazareth’s Old Hope (2017)

Opening May 16, one of Brazil’s most compelling artists makes his U.S. solo debut at the ICA Miami. Paulo Nazareth works across mediums, using performance and sculpture to explore and critique the colonial experience both in his home country and the Americas. Nazareth will present an alternative history of the Latin Americas through his own eyes and those of other indigenous bodies. ICAMIAMI.ORG culturedmag.com 95

David Lewis

Barbara Bloom Thornton Dial Lucy Dodd Alex Mackin Dolan Mary Beth Edelson Todd Gray Gillian Jagger Jeffrey Joyal Dawn Kasper Hans-Christian Lotz Israel Lund Megan Marrin Charles Mayton Sean Paul Greg Parma Smith

Todd Gray Cartesian Gris Gris David Lewis, New York April 30 - June 16, 2019 Frieze New York Charles Mayton May 1 - 5, 2019 Todd Gray Whitney Biennial Whitney Museum of American Art, New York May 17 - September 22, 2019

88 Eldridge Street, Fifth Floor New York, NY 10002 +1 212 966 7990 www.davidlewisgallery.com info@davidlewisgallery.com

Urs Fischer

The Brant Foundation Art Study Center 941 North Street Greenwich, CT 06831 203.869.0611 www.brantfoundation.org May–October 2019

Photograph taken at Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein

Participating Galleries # 303 Gallery 47 Canal A A Gentil Carioca Miguel Abreu Acquavella Air de Paris Juana de Aizpuru Helga de Alvear Andréhn-Schiptjenko Applicat-Prazan The Approach Art : Concept Alfonso Artiaco B von Bartha Guido W. Baudach elba benítez Bergamin & Gomide Berinson Bernier/Eliades Fondation Beyeler Daniel Blau Blum & Poe Marianne Boesky Tanya Bonakdar Bortolami Isabella Bortolozzi BQ Gavin Brown Buchholz Buchmann C Cabinet Campoli Presti Canada Gisela Capitain carlier gebauer Carzaniga Casas Riegner Pedro Cera Cheim & Read Chemould Prescott Road Mehdi Chouakri Sadie Coles HQ Contemporary Fine Arts Continua Paula Cooper Pilar Corrias Chantal Crousel

D Thomas Dane Massimo De Carlo dépendance Di Donna E Ecart Eigen + Art F Konrad Fischer Foksal Fortes D‘Aloia & Gabriel Fraenkel Peter Freeman Stephen Friedman Frith Street G Gagosian Galerie 1900-2000 Galleria dello Scudo gb agency Annet Gelink Gladstone Gmurzynska Elvira González Goodman Gallery Marian Goodman Bärbel Grässlin Alexander Gray Richard Gray Howard Greenberg Greene Naftali greengrassi Karsten Greve Cristina Guerra H Michael Haas Hauser & Wirth Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert Herald St Max Hetzler Hollybush Gardens Hopkins Edwynn Houk Xavier Hufkens I Invernizzi Taka Ishii J Bernard Jacobson Alison Jacques Martin Janda Catriona Jeffries Annely Juda

K Kadel Willborn Casey Kaplan Karma International kaufmann repetto Sean Kelly Kerlin Anton Kern Kewenig Kicken Peter Kilchmann König Galerie David Kordansky KOW Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler Andrew Kreps Krinzinger Nicolas Krupp Kukje / Tina Kim kurimanzutto L Lahumière Landau Simon Lee Lehmann Maupin Tanya Leighton Lelong Lévy Gorvy Gisèle Linder Lisson Long March Luhring Augustine Luxembourg & Dayan M Jörg Maass Kate MacGarry Magazzino Mai 36 Gió Marconi Matthew Marks Marlborough Mayor Fergus McCaffrey Greta Meert Anthony Meier Urs Meile Mendes Wood DM kamel mennour Metro Pictures Meyer Riegger Massimo Minini Victoria Miro Mitchell-Innes & Nash

June 13 – 16, 2019

Mnuchin Modern Art The Modern Institute Jan Mot mother‘s tankstation Vera Munro N nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder Nagel Draxler Richard Nagy Edward Tyler Nahem Helly Nahmad Neu neugerriemschneider Franco Noero David Nolan Nordenhake Georg Nothelfer Nathalie Obadia O OMR P P.P.O.W Pace Pace/MacGill Maureen Paley Alice Pauli Peres Projects Perrotin Petzel Francesca Pia Plan B Gregor Podnar Eva Presenhuber ProjecteSD R Almine Rech Reena Spaulings Regen Projects Rodeo Thaddaeus Ropac S Salon 94 Esther Schipper Rüdiger Schöttle Thomas Schulte Natalie Seroussi Sfeir-Semler Jack Shainman ShanghART Sies + Höke Sikkema Jenkins Skarstedt

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Historian of the Future Audrey Wollen visits Bea Fremderman in her Queens studio as the sculptor prepares MVY OLY ÄYZ[ L]LY ZVSV T\ZL\T ZOV^ VWLUPUN 4H` H[ ([SHU[H *VU[LTWVYHY` PORTRAIT BY ALISTAIR MATTHEWS

HOW DO YOU PREPARE FOR AN apocalypse that has already happened? We tend to think of the emotional effects of our eco-crisis in the future tense. Whether we are doomsday preppers, distressed activists, paralyzed consumers, or a frenzied mix of the above, we imagine ourselves looking out towards a dark horizon, a gathering storm. Is it possible that what we are afraid of is also a kind of memory? How do we keep track of our shared timelines, especially when the range of human experience under capitalism is so violently different? In the thick of this time-warp of globalized crisis, Bea Fremderman, the Moldova-born artist, makes her delicate, handy sculptures: “I think of them as relics of the future,” she offers, ruefully. Sand dollars, shells, and old motherboards sit in parallel stacks in her Queens studio. Fremderman points out a series of weapons: a bludgeon made from wood and a brick-like Blackberry, nails emerging from a rubber band ball. A man’s shoe with a hole punched in the sole hangs on the wall. “That’s a birdhouse,” she says, a small gesture of solidarity between human and animal use. An extra-long branch leans against the corner; severed samples of different tree specimens from around New York are soldered together with precise rings of metal, like Frankenstein’s tree. A lot of her work isn’t here in the room with us because it decomposes in the gallery: her jeans and hoodies overtaken by living chia plants, for example, or her brick wall laid with soil and seeds. Radishes bloom, and the wall crumbles. Fremderman’s approach to her materials seems archaeological, but without a hierarchy of value: a chunky zebra print flip phone from the early 2000s receives the same care as glimmering discs of mother of pearl. She’s making earrings and buttons for the fashion line Gauntlett Cheng, mollusks welded shut. Shells were used as the first money, she tells me, the beginning of natural objects transmogrified into symbolic entities of human value. These shells becoming new commodity items (fashion accessories, artworks) evoke a history of exchange, and complicate how we think of our stuff and the world’s stuff. A shell is kind of coin, a shard of plastic is a kind of stone, a landfill is a kind of mountain. “At the core of my work is this issue of new nature— what things are left behind, what will outlive us, how we’ve changed the landscape,” she explains. Here, there is no difference between the natural and the man-made, but rather an awareness of what can decompose and what can’t. “We used to create things out of rock that would break down, and turn into sand, which comes together and becomes rock again,” she continues, “but now we have things that don’t break down.” And yet, this glitch, as it were, in the cycle of nature isn’t presented as the end of the line. Fremderman’s sculptures propose a new ouroboros, one where technology can fossilize into a third term, a new mode of survival. This scene of apocalypse whispers a utopian promise. “With my work, it’s not doomsday. It’s about starting over, dealing with what we have, and trying to make anew with what we know.” Fremderman in her studio wielding one of her weapon-like sculptures.

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THE PARTNERS OF ASH NYC DON’T

have a long-term plan and they like it that way. They have a lot of short-term plans, of course, including expanding their growing hotel group to Baltimore and bolstering their newly opened Los Angeles staging office, but when asked about the real estate and design company’s long-term plans, the three partners— Ari Heckman, CEO; Jonathan Minkoff, CFO; and Will Cooper, CCO— demur. “I get asked that question all the time,” says Heckman, “and I’m really averse to defining it, because who knows!” The other two bob their heads in agreement. They are sitting in the office Cooper and Heckman share in their Williamsburg headquarters on Roebling Street. In a few months they will move their expanding team (currently 38) to an office double the size in Greenpoint. The three young partners talk so eagerly about their 11-yearold business that they constantly interrupt one other before politely apologizing and encouraging the interrupted to finish his thought. Behind them, six-foot-tall mood boards are propped against the walls of the office, highlighting design elements that run throughout their projects: color (red, yellow, blue, green are the recurring hues) and attention to detail, such as the custom houndstooth being created for the upholstery at the as-yet-unnamed Baltimore hotel, a 1912 Beaux-arts building that was once housing for wealthy bachelors. There are also the inspiration images for their line of utilitarian—but perfectly crafted—furniture, what Cooper calls a “basics” collection: round stools and side tables influenced by Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, Walter Gropius and Pierre Jeanneret. It can be hard to keep track of all the different arms of the ASH NYC octopus. “As we grew and evolved over the years, all these things existed under the ASH umbrella, and that means different things to different people,” explains Heckman of his resistance to self-identify too rigidly. ASH NYC began in 2008 as a real estate investment and staging company, but when a hotel property came on the market in Providence in 2012, the two arms of the business came together and a new focus took shape. In addition to the hotels, staging and real estate investment, there is the furniture line and a handful of private design clients—but the appeal of being their own clients with the hotels is hard to resist. “So much of our success in the hotel business has been from not knowing what we were doing,” admits Heckman, “and being unbound by the rules that apply to the people who come from the corporate hotel

world.” Cooper agrees, “Sometimes it feels like we’re playing hotel or playing office.” Currently there are three hotels in the ASH NYC repertoire: Providence’s The Dean, a landmarked one-time strip club and brothel, The Siren, a Renaissance Revival building in downtown Detroit and the recently opened Hotel Peter and Paul in a former church and rectory in the Marigny district of New Orleans. Baltimore will be next, and then who knows—they are looking all over the United States, the criteria for potential locations being cities with an interesting cultural, culinary and architectural heritage: “Places that had an undercurrent of really cool things happening but didn’t have the hospitality to match it,” summarizes Heckman. It was important to them that the hotels act as local hubs as well as traveler destinations. Their dining establishments now all boast James Beard Award-winning chefs, an accolade given while the chefs were working at ASH NYC hotels. They’ve listened to the local communities and responded to what was wanted in the neighborhood: a barbershop in Detroit, an ice cream parlor in New Orleans. “In the teens and ’20s, hotels had telegraph machines and that’s why people went to hotels on a daily basis,” says Heckman. “What’s the modern equivalent of that?” Unlike peers such as Kit Kemp or Roman and Williams, you do not immediately recognize an ASH NYC hotel as soon as you stroll into the lobby. “Our design is very site-specific,” says Heckman, “every project has a unique vision; it’s not the same style that you can recognize.” Indeed, in New Orleans “there was this ecclesiastical component of being in a church,” explains Cooper, who handles all creative and design for the company. He looked at Russian and Greek icons and Renaissance religious paintings for inspiration for the rich hues of the four signature colors that run through their projects. The result is an almost Rococo use of color, fabrics (three sizes of Swiss-made gingham are a theme throughout the property) and trompe l’oeil details, like the simulated Sicilian flower marble bar and the Jean Michel Frank-inspired painted molding on the bureaus and armoires. Meanwhile, Baltimore will be more Art Deco, with the influence of men’s haberdashery dictating the fabrics. “Our design process is different than most bigger firms,” explains Cooper, “it’s constantly evolving.” For example, Cooper and Heckman spent the previous three days in Baltimore and, after a visit to the Baltimore Railroad Museum, Cooper’s concept for the hotel lobby pivoted. “That’s a good example of how you see something and it will take you off on a tangent, so stay tuned!” says Cooper, laughing. We will.

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ASH founding partners Ari Heckman, Jonathan Minkoff and Will Cooper with Jenna Goldman of Detroit’s Siren Hotel.

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FLOWER

Batsheva Hay»Z TH_PTHSPZ[ ÅVYHSZ HUK Y\ўLZ HYL \UHWVSVNL[PJHSS` MLTPUPUL·HUK MHI\SV\Z BY M O S H A LU N D S T RÖ M H A LB E R T P O R T R A I T BY A L E X E I H AY

THE FIRST THINGS DESIGNER

Batsheva Hay sees each morning are her enigmatic dresses. Samples ensconce her bedroom, crowding her Upper West Side home with mischievous abandon. But these hot-button frocks have earned their squatter status. After all, since Hay began her namesake label three years ago during maternity leave, they’ve wound up on everyone from Celine Dion to Aidy Bryant, as well as at MatchesFashion.com, Ten Over Six and Galeries Lafayette. And while her business is still in infancy, the mother of two has made peace with this chaotic cohabitation. “It’s a cozy mess of a shoe box apartment stuffed with dresses and kids toys,” she says over tea at her ad hoc dining room table/ desk. “One thing inspires the other. At this point, the dresses are swallowing us up.” On the surface, the high-necked, pouffy and frilled creations in question may appear absurdly prim, as if ripped out of an ’80s Tatler spread on a young Diana, Princess of Wales—whose early looks are a touchpoint. But her strongest influences are less regal, more real life. “I was raised around an irreverent experience with textiles and patterns,” says Hay, a fan of chintz floral and lamé, on her upbringing in a rambling home in Queens, New York. “My mother always loved antique clothing.” Her grandmother also left her mark. “She was this elegant intellectual Jewish lady who was always in a lace collar and a weird floral pattern. She seemed so tasteful.” The notion of taste is something that Hay, a former lawyer, likes to cross-examine in her work. Personal growing pains during the ’90s, when her idol Laura Ashley was eschewed for logo streetwear, proved ultimately formative. “I appreciated wearing feminine floral stuff, but then I’d go to school and it was really not cool,” she says. “I was struggling with

trying to fit in, so I was always ambivalently trying to wear whatever everyone else was wearing, like Tommy Hilfiger. But then I would find such relief at home in the quirky way everything was there.” In more recent years, her husband (fashion photographer Alexei Hay) converted to orthodox Judaism, which proved impactful. “We would go to his rabbi’s house for dinner. I had to dress very specifically and be much more covered,” Hay says. “This was a whole different world. There’s a lot of strange beauty that people don’t see. I was always trying to look for things to wear that were appropriate,” she explains. “So I would search vintage stores and found longer hemlines and the Calico fabrics my mother loved. Soon enough, I had my own versions made.” Her husband encouraged this transgressive send-up of conservative codes, as did friends and bemused passersby. “Little House on the Prairie, Hasidic and Amish women—I mashed it all together and that became the look.” Artist Cindy Sherman’s portrait parodies are another inspiration, says Hay. “They’re hyperbolic and dramatic exaggerations.” Today, Hay has also found a happy home for these instinctual references. Last year, she held a presentation at Square Diner, an old school fries and milkshake spot, with beehived models wearing dresses so audaciously dated they felt fresh. For her Fall ’19 collection, she staged a pop-up workshop, with an original casting including Christina Ricci and Veronica Webb. The soundtrack came courtesy of the hum of Singer sewing machines and spoken word Hole lyrics, orchestrated by Courtney Love. Like most things Batsheva does, it seemed too offbeat to work, but therein lies her appeal. “I always like to take things a bit further. I don’t want to perfectly fit into the box.”

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Batsheva Hay in one of her own designs.

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Laure Hériard Dubreuil YLKLÄULK [OL T\S[P IYHUK TVKLS ^OLU ZOL SH\UJOLK ;OL >LIZ[LY H KLJHKL HNV 5V^ ^P[O ZOVWZ HJYVZZ [OL JV\U[Y` ZOL [\YUZ OLY H[[LU[PVU [V H UL^ SPUL MVY [OL OVTL BY MIEKE TEN HAVE PORTRAIT BY CAMILO RIOS

“EVERY PIECE HAS ITS OWN IDENTITY and mixing them all together makes my own identity,” says Laure Hériard Dubreuil of the maxim that underpins her approach at The Webster, the multi-brand, multi-city fashion retailer she founded in Miami in 2009. Known for her trend-setting cultivation of nascent talent and electric élan for mixing pattern, texture, and vivid color, Hériard Dubreuil is now applying her irreverent eye to a home line, launching this spring. The move is a natural extension of the style arbiter’s vision for The Webster. “I designed the stores as my home and people were always asking to buy the decor pieces; I had to embrace the category,” says Hériard Dubreuil. It isn’t her first foray into homeware. In 2017, she collaborated with design gallerist Melanie Courbet on a line of lush, hand-painted Lobmeyr glasses depicting tropical flora and fauna for the launch of the New York Webster. That experience lingered with her, and at the suggestion of her friend Pierre Hardy, she met Stéphane Parmentier, a designer who applies his gestural eye to both interiors and furniture design. “It was like love at first sight. Pierre was right: Stéphane and I share so much and an interesting dialogue formed around our past experiences,” remembers Hériard Dubreuil, who worked at Balenciaga under Nicolas Ghesquière and then at YSL under Stefano Pilati. Parmentier similarly had a background in fashion before transitioning into interiors, and also has a strong understanding of the retail landscape. The two began comparing reference points and felt there was a sense of trepidation in the American market to contrast design styles with confidence. “Instead of doing full looks, I mix things together—from table settings to furniture. I think this mix is the strong added value for our friends, family and audience.” The Webster Home collection spans eras, genres, and styles; some of Hériard Dubreuil’s favorite pieces are those of master glassblower Laurence Brabant. “There is poetry in her work. It is subtle and romantic, but deceptively strong and dishwasher safe. She doesn’t make museum pieces, but her works are unique and beautiful and can be used in everyday life,” she says. Other highlights include battery-charged lamps in gold or black, which she envisions living just as easily on an al fresco dinner table in Miami or the Hamptons, or on an office desk. There are items by design icons, too, like the line of trays Hériard Dubreuil commissioned Gaetano Pesce, with whom she has worked before, to create for the collection. “Special pieces by him are part of the DNA of The Webster,” she says. For Hériard Dubreuil, it is about weaving one’s own narrative through a collection of objects and furniture that resonates. “I love having pieces in my home that remind me of a trip or a happy memory, or stimulate me visually or intellectually. That’s what we’re trying to reproduce.”

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FERNANDO WONG GLOBAL REACH | TIMELESS DESIGN FERNANDOWONGOLD.COM

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EVEN IN THE ART WORLD WHERE

people take colors and compositions seriously, most still regard jewelry as little more than bling. Few assume that their earrings or necklaces are conceptual, ethical or meaningful beyond the personal associations they may carry as family heirlooms or amulets of romantic exchange. Not so for collectors of jewelry by Monique Péan, a designer who chronicles the history of our environment through her use of atypical materials such as woolly mammoth tooth, dinosaur bone and extraterrestrial steel from meteorites older than Earth. “Monique uses sacred geometries that register within our deep memory,” explains David Adjaye, the British architect, who has acquired more Péan pieces for his wife than he cares to reveal. “Monique’s pieces adorn, but they also create a spatial composition around your body, drawing it into the work’s architecture and its epic sense of time.” Péan’s fascination with grand temporalities comes, in part, from her early exposure to death—that of her only sibling, who died in a car accident at the age of 16. “Natural materials transport you through time. They stimulate the mind and comfort the soul,” says Péan, who rhymes off key dates in geological history with a passion that reveals her continued wonder. “The earth is 4.5 billion years old. The oldest diamond is 3.2 billion years and the youngest about 900 million. Dinosaur bone is but 150 million years old,” she says. Most of Péan’s dinosaur bones are

artisans of Mayan descent sculpt black and gray Guatemalan jade, which comes to the surface through tectonic activity. And the Rapa Nui people on Easter Island, whose tribe has dwindled to around 5,000 people, carve the cosmic obsidian, a naturally occurring volcanic glass that’s found there. “I could never in several long lifetimes develop the broad range of refined skills needed to make my work,” says Péan. Indeed, dinosaur bones and many fossils are not just rarer than most diamonds, they are more difficult to cut because they can crack and crumble. Péan also likes to travel with glaciologists, marine biologists, geologists, anthropologists and art historians to learn more about the changing climates, cultures, art and architecture of different regions. A fan of earthworks by the likes of Walter De Maria and Nancy Holt, Péan sits on the women’s council of Dia Art Foundation, an invitation-only group that explores women’s place in art history. “Land art is quintessential to Dia,” says Jessica Morgan, director of the contemporary arts organization with locations in Beacon and Soho, New York, and the American West. “Monique shares our ethos. It’s about the journey to the work, the experience of visiting, the landscape and geological formation as well as the art. That kind of unfolding encounter is also true of Monique’s work.” While traveling, Péan sketches with a Japanese graphite pencil in her Moleskin notebook and takes many photos, noting everything from the geometry of nature to the living conditions of the local communities.

Monique Péan: Time Traveler Using materials like dinosaur bones and meteorites, Péan’s jewelry designs are sophisticated talismans of the universe and its history. BY SARAH THORNTON PORTRAIT BY NATHAN PERKEL sourced from the Colorado Plateau, where herbivores from the late Jurassic period met watery accidents that agatized their remains. “Monique creates works that look both ancient or ancestral and very modern,” says Ivy Ross, a jewelry connoisseur who is also the head of design at Google Hardware. “Her pendants are surprising one-of-a-kind arrangements in which she uses gems, fossils, meteorites and metals as if they were paint.” Exploring the diversity of our planet’s people and landscapes is also an important theme in Péan’s work. Indeed, travel is in her DNA. Her Haitianborn father was a senior economist at the World Bank, then a consultant at the United Nations Development Program. “My father said, you have the rest of your life to see the United States, so I am going to show you the world,” says Péan, who visited 20 countries as child, most memorably Egypt, Israel, Turkey and Bulgaria. “I also went to an international school in Washington, D.C., where everyone was from a different country, so I grew up with a global perspective.” Péan’s mother, a painter of impressionistic landscapes and portraits in oil, is Jewish of Russian and Polish extraction. Petite and almond-eyed, Péan relishes the fact that, as she puts it, “People often assume I’m the same ethnicity as them and embrace me.” The artisans with whom Péan works come from all over the world. The carving is often done close to the source by indigenous peoples, who have been working with the material for centuries and understand it intimately. For example, native Inupiaq Alaskans do the preliminary carving of fossilized walrus ivory, which is between 10,000 and 150,000 years old, while master

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The ethics and sustainability of materials are a significant concern to Péan. She uses either repurposed antique diamonds, with no new mining involved, or acquires her gems from environmentally responsible mines with strict labor and safety guidelines. She uses only recycled gold and platinum so as not to participate in the toxicity of mining, which not only wastes vast amounts of water in areas that need it, but releases mercury and cyanide into the air and local groundwater. Indeed, Péan is a founding supporter of charity:water, a non-profit that seeks to bring clean drinking water and basic sanitation to people in the developing world. Given Péan’s practice, it is not surprising that many of her clients hark from the art world. They are the crowd who value cultural connotations and may even consider their bodies as platforms of communication. “If you want a life that is filled with authenticity and meaning,” explains art consultant Sabrina Buell, “then you want the art you live with and the jewelry you wear to reflect that. Monique approaches her work like an artist, with a deep way of thinking that you don’t typically find in the decorative arts.” Experts in the design world endorse Péan from a slightly different point of view. “The importance of a piece of jewelry corresponds to the value assigned by the wearer,” says Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, curator of contemporary design at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. “When the wearer so deeply identifies with a piece that they don’t want to remove it, a special synergy has happened between design and life. Péan’s work often has that effect.”

“

Monique uses sacred geometries that register within our deep memory. —David djaye A

”

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Architect Jean Nouvel has brought the geometry of the desert to his design for the National Museum of Qatar, which was 10 years in the making before opening to the public last month. Cultured’s Architecture Editor Andrew Heid spoke with Nouvel in advance of the opening about the building, its relationship to its environment and the role of architecture in society.

ON NATURE

PHOTOGRAPHY BY IWAN BAAN

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Andrew Heid: Can you describe the desert rose crystal and how this organic system or structural principle created the forms behind the National Museum of Qatar? Jean Nouvel: The sun rose is the structural principle, which is a section of ground and a random system with different angles. You can insert the system into any program. It is a production system. It’s a typology like the sand rose. AH: How does it work with this project? JN: What’s interesting is all the systems here, and the section of the desert rose, and the generation of the space through crystallization. After I have a program, I have to imagine my museum inside the crystallization so I play with the unpredictability—and I like to be unpredictable. With the desert rose crystals, I have the excuse to do what I want. I can build something very low, too low, too high, too oblique—exactly what I want. It’s music. It’s rhythmic architecture. It’s exactly like Le Corbusier at La Tourette, with all the random rhythms of the little glass windows. AH: How did you control these forms if they are randomly generated? JN: I reset the system of the intersection and I decided very rapidly to have a geometrical shape. I wanted to keep the plan. I wanted to keep the forms very sharp, blade-like and thin at the end. And I accentuated the thinness, because I kept the little void in the joints to create the system of the lighting against the day. At the end, it’s a vocabulary; once you have the proportion, you research that with a model and sketches with the computer so you can be sure to build with the right proportions. AH: How many iterations of the geometry did you have to go through? JN: We had to research abnormal situations and find the too long,

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too broken forms, like the kaleidoscope gallery or a gallery that is too low, like in a cave. So we have this vocabulary of forms together, but we also modify this vocabulary. We are adaptive, but the general principles are like this; you have to imagine which formal sequence you have the desire to find. AH: I’m really curious about this organic or fractal quality of the desert rose crystal you’ve used, and how it embodies an interconnected, self-organizing idea of the natural world. I’m also curious about how your thought process of nature has changed over the years. JN: It is a reinterpretation of rules from the natural world. If you take rules from the natural world and put them in a space as a system, people will agree and understand quickly that the system is random. They might agree that it’s something harmonious, but at the same time there is a tension. AH: In contrast to these fractal, self-organizing rules imitated from the natural order of the desert rose crystal, is there a sense of order and disorder in the structure that has changed from your earlier projects—like at the Cartier Foundation, where you were using transparency to bring in nature, the organic and the fractal? JN: The Cartier Foundation does not have a continuity with the Haussmann Boulevard, so I created a fence that is 16 meters high to keep the continuity of the boulevard and to create an inclusion with the three planes of glass. If you are on the boulevard you might think it’s a building, but then you look at the top and see it’s not a roof. The miracle of the Cartier Foundation is that the reflection of the object is on the object, so on the tree you have the reflection of the tree. On the clouds, you have the reflection of the clouds. AH: Who are some of the people that have influenced you? JN: For me, it’s Claude Parent and Paul Virilio. AH: How did they influence you? JN: A lot. In their support. In the 1960s, before ’68, the School of Beaux-Arts was really bad, but I found Claude Parent and Paul Virilio, and I learned everything with them. Paul Virilio was a brilliant philosopher and thinker about the reality of the world and Claude Parent was also someone with a very sharp sense of the tension of the shape. AH: One could say that you developed an emancipatory project of architecture, a new architecture that could be generated from Claude Parent. When do you feel that you discovered these formal techniques, which allowed you to develop your own voice for this new architecture? JN: Architecture is a reification of an instant of culture. But it is always the way to answer to the desires of many people. Architecture is a sentimental act. If you only put your brain into it and not your heart, it lacks something. You have to research to find the right balance of pleasure, like a game with light and the reflections and the sensitivity of the nature of the caves. But there has to be a jubilation as well. And things must exist from the social point of view. The real problem in France, as well as outside of France, is that the people who develop social housing don’t care about the social point of view. They have no empathy and there is a real confusion between urban planning and architecture. Urban planning does not exist, urbanism does not exist; it’s related to architecture but on another scale. Today, every building development in France makes the building like an object designed by an artist, but they have no contact with the other buildings. To

The National Museum of Qatar, located on the Doha waterfront, is inspired by the geometry of desert rose crystals.

“ARCHITECTURE IS A REIFICATION OF AN INSTANT OF CULTURE”

recreate human architecture you need to change this model. AH: Do you think we need more poetics in architecture today? JN: Architecture today is not poetic. Why? Because people don’t care. The real question is between architecture and construction. When I was a young architect, my hope was that the field of architecture would get larger and larger, but it’s the opposite. Now the field of construction is larger and architecture is reduced because people just want to build as soon as possible, they want to repeat the same plan, to earn fees very quickly. With computers, you change three perimeters and it’s finished. It is very cynical. AH: And what do you think the antidote to that is? JN: The architect has to fight against that. He has a social role in the world and he has to defend that.

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ALÁRA, FOUNDED BY FASHION POWERHOUSE

Reni Folawiyo, is a stunning concept store in the Nigerian capital of Lagos. Attracting visitors from around the world, the store’s egalitarian approach to luxury objects is hitting high notes across the globe. The brand, which is due to launch online in the next year, stocks fashion, art and design from all over Africa alongside Western luxury brands such as Valentino and Christian Louboutin. “It’s about beautifully made, bright, colorful, expressive things that have a story behind them. It’s about art, clothing, and design that’s unique and beautiful. It’s African but contemporary,” says Folawiyo. Folawiyo broke ground on Alára in 2014, setting the stage for Nigeria’s first concept store and the continent’s second, following Cape Town’s Merchants on Long. “I decided it would be interesting to have the best stuff from all over the world along with the very best from Africa all in the same space to get people from outside Africa to see what was possible, but also to get people in Africa to understand the value of what they had,” Folawiyo explains. “It was a bit of an education on both sides.” Situated in the heart of the city’s vibrant Victoria Island district, the striking red glass and metal Alára building was designed by Sir David Adjaye OBE, the British-Ghanaian architect responsible for such iconic buildings as The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. and The Nobel Peace Center in Oslo. Adjaye sees the project as setting the standard for the contemporary African luxury scene. “Reni Folawiyo is a pioneer whose determination and vision have created a contemporary visual language for African luxury. Architecturally, the concept of the Alára store is a celebration of design talent—an architectural promenade through the different parts of the program,” Adjaye says. “Socially, Reni Folawiyo has carved a way to promote emerging talent while establishing a creative hub and an essential new destination for Lagos.” Folawiyo practiced as a lawyer for 10 years before launching the store. “I used to spend a lot of time with artists and designers and I had a lot of friends that were doing creative things and I enjoyed spending time with them,” Folawiyo explains of her motivation in starting Alára. Eventually, she found the confidence to make a career change, driven in part by the lack of parity between objects made in African countries and those made in the Western world. “I got the impression that although people were making these things, they didn’t feel as though what they were making was good enough to be on a certain level,” Folawiyo explains. “A lot of what people were doing hadn’t been properly celebrated and there were these very beautiful, very well-crafted African items that people didn’t know about.” The original plan for Alára was to build a space for creative businesses adjacent to the store—an idea that is still in the works. Folawiyo and her team also added a fine dining restaurant, Nok and, following its success, the less formal Nok Garden restaurant; after that took off too, they began offering catering and event services. This adaptability helped the business thrive while remaining true to the heart of Alára—the passion for fine, beautiful objects and those who make them. “The store is about celebration and beauty, about selfdetermination and self-expression,” Folawiyo says. In that vein, last year Folawiyo launched the Emerge Alára Awards to support young African talent, with Faith Oluwajimi of Bloke—an upcoming menswear label with an artisanal, quirky aesthetic that has already been featured in Vogue Italia—taking home the inaugural honor. “The Emerge Award has been a very great platform for me as a designer because it will allow me to grow as a creative and also as a luxury brand,” Oluwajimi says of the award. “It is a brand that continually explores the possibilities for the creation of knitted garments, which appeals to a community of people who are spiritually conscious art lovers,” Oluwajimi adds. “We are unconventional yet with an African identity.”

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THE UNCANNY INFLUENCER Lil Miquela is an Instagram celebrity who meticulously documents her life in Los Angeles, championing progressive politics and luxury fashion. The only catch is that she’s more cyborg than California girl. BY JENNA SAUERS

MIQUELA SOUSA IS 19 AND HAS

deep brown eyes, freckles, and a button nose. She has blunt bangs and often wears her hair in Princess Leia buns. She’s active on Instagram, where she posts about learning Mandarin, learning to drive, and her Brazilian heritage; sometimes, she just posts a selfie with a caption like, “Found my light.” Her skin is smooth—porelessly smooth. Smoother than FaceTune. And that hair; something about it doesn’t lay and fall quite like real hair. It’s as if gravity is working slightly differently around Miquela’s head. Look into her eyes, and you’ll notice something else: Miquela is not a person, but a CGI character. She’s an avatar, a digitally rendered image. And, with 1.5 million Instagram followers to whom she promotes brands like Opening Ceremony and Prada, she may be our first and biggest virtual influencer. Miquela’s Instagram is, at its best, almost uncanny in its ability to portray the tastes and ways of being of a 19-year-old Angeleno in 2019. Her tone is earnest, politically engaged, and self-aware. She’s pro-Black Lives Matter, trans rights and DACA. Both her image and the narrative told through her posts are crafted to elicit an is-she-or-isn’t-she speculation on the part of her audience. When I was writing this piece, it seemed as if everyone wanted to talk about Miquela and her reality. Did she fall into the uncanny valley? To what extent she was algorithmic? Were her captions generated by artificial intelligence? Brud, the digital media start-up that created Miquela’s character and runs her Instagram, is tight-lipped and often gives fantastical answers to the press, no doubt to feed Miquela’s mystique. To start with, instead of calling itself something as prosaic as a branding company, or a digital effects workshop, Brud has called itself a “technology start-up specializing in artificial intelligence and robotics,” a claim that has been repeated, uncritically, in venues ranging from Architectural Digest (which featured

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co-founder Sara DeCou’s Los Angeles loft) to, more worryingly, CNN. (According to public records, Brud holds no patents in AI, robotics, or related fields. One person on staff, according to the company’s LinkedIn, holds the job title “lead robotics developer.”) Brud has made many other fantastical claims: DeCou’s company bio once stated that she’d been President Obama’s “special advisor on the ethics of AI development.” Her co-founder, Trevor McFedries—a former music producer and DJ who has worked with artists including BANKS and Katy Perry—once claimed to have authored a Bill of Rights for AIs. Last year, Brud raised a reported $6 million in venture capital funding from firms including Sequoia Capital. The company has spent the last two years building Miquela’s Instagram following, always projecting a certain opacity about how exactly the images are produced. On Instagram, Miquela refers to herself and to the two other Brud characters as “robots,” and pretends they have a sentient, threedimensional existence. “Just a robot sitting on the curb in skinny jeans and wedges,” she writes. And though it would seem implausible on its face that somewhere in Los Angeles there exists a walking, talking, autonomously Instagramming robot whom nobody has ever photographed on the street—or that the IP behind such an advanced creation would not be patented—some people seem at least willing to entertain the idea, or to suspend their disbelief. How, then, to conceptualize Miquela? The artist Ian Cheng compares Miquela to blockchain, another technology that emphasizes “an agnostic attitude toward agency: it may be a human, a bot, or an organization on the other end of a transaction.” Cheng thinks it’s “exciting” that artificial characters are achieving “person-level status in the eyes of public, even if within a narrow range of expressivity.” He continues, “That’s a weird and interesting future, and Lil Miquela is a useful primer for a general public who would not otherwise care about these ideas but may have to one day very soon.” When designer Elizabeth Hilfiger noticed Miquela on Instagram and heard she was a fan, Hilfiger, thinking she was a real person, sent her free clothes. Fictional stories of human-computer interactions hold a deep appeal, from the malevolent AI in 2001: A Space Odyssey to the operating system Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with in Her and the ultimate filmic exploration of the vanishing line between human and cyborg, Blade Runner. I expect the appeal of these narratives will only grow in a world that increasingly abounds with real-life examples of such interactions. We now pose our customer-service questions to chatbots, and we allow ourselves to be subtly rerouted so the algorithms behind Waze and Google Maps can A/B test every decision branch of our commutes. We may have heard that in Japan, a voice-programmed hologram named Hatsune Miku regularly performs at music festivals; she even opened for Lady Gaga. Miquela has a Soundcloud page, too, and has released a series of singles. Miquela always looks the part of a young, cool influencer. She wears perfectly styled streetwear, and her clothes have a reality, an unmistakable drape and weight and texture, that immediately jumps out at a viewer, especially in contrast to her CGI skin and features. Images of Miquela are produced using proprietary technology Brud has developed, which explains why Miquela’s clothing always hangs with such dimensionality, and why the light, shadows, and picture depth look so real: the images are composites. Perhaps Miquela is best understood, then, as a kind of augmented reality. A digital flicker in a real image, an optional overlay to the real world. Her poses and attitudes read as authentic, but occasionally her navigation of her character’s story and relationships can seem off.

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The way her feuds with Brud’s other “robots” play out — the genre is melodrama, and the plot points have included love triangles and staged “hacks” of each other’s accounts—often seem tone-deaf, because they don’t conform to the much more subtle ways rivals typically interact with each other on social media. In our visual culture, there has over the last decade or so been a turn towards a kind of flatness that is a function of the platforms we use. In 2016, the writer Kyle Chayka noted that, thanks to the globalization of design aesthetics via tech companies like Airbnb, we can travel the world without ever leaving the same minimalist, reclaimed-woodand-Edison-bulb bubble that Chayka termed “AirSpace.” Miquela’s medium of choice is of course Instagram, which has made its own contributions to the banalization of visual culture. Its algorithms reward high-engagement but boring images. My feed abounds with selfies, sunsets, flat lays of manicured nails and coffee table books, and food

The artist Ian Cheng compares Miquela to blockchain, another technology that emphasizes “an agnostic attitude toward agency: it may be a human, a bot, or an organization on the other end of a transaction.”

shot from above. Instagram influencers all have the same eyebrows. In this environment, Miquela not only blends into the feed, she embodies its values. Given she is a brand herself, all Miquela’s posts about Black Lives Matter and civil rights are statements designed to position her in line with a certain image, no different than claiming identity through adjacency to any other reference. But in a space like Instagram, Miquela is, and can only be, fake in the ways that all of us are fake. The writer Rob Horning wrote of Miquela’s politics that she “permit[s] a fantasy where social justice can be encoded, can simply appear within the frame like a form of augmented reality, superimposed over historical forms of struggle, which are made to fade into the background, even as they continue to intensify.” Miquela is less a robot than she is a cartoon—a character in a kind of graphic novel unfolding across the square panels of Instagram. These days, we are not unused to animated characters in our media; every other blockbuster seems to revolve around members of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Animated characters anchor tent poles and sell merchandise without triggering undue anxiety in their audiences over whether they are “real.” I suspect that what makes Miquela seem different is the fact that she lives on Instagram, which, like photography more broadly, is widely—but wrongly, of course—supposed to be a documentary medium. But as we grow more accustomed to unreal characters in our social feeds, as they already are in our films and video games, her strangeness will diminish. I suspect that, sooner rather than later, fascination in exactly how “virtual” Miquela is will die down, as skeptical voices continue to debunk Brud’s more extraordinary claims about robots and AI. There are already fans who fact-check Miquela’s “public appearances”—for instance, by taking note of the perspectives from which her runway photos and videos are taken, and making comparisons with other photos of the same events. When the fiction of Miquela as a sentient robot finally becomes unsustainable, what will sustain interest in her? What’s left will be her story. If the story Brud creates for her is a real enough fiction, people will keep following and double-tapping. If it tips into soap opera, or seems inauthentic to the medium or the character, they won’t. Miquela’s face is finely wrought, and those eyes, though clearly inhuman, don’t make me recoil—but it’s her story that may yet fall into the uncanny valley.

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The Glass House 70th Anniversary Summer Party Saturday, 8 June 2019 12 noon to 4pm New Canaan CT theglasshouse.org

E R E ON AN H W SHI ES FA COM RM. BE T FO AR

c ani g r ia, o , the m ohe ence b f ix o epend ashion s and m f p g d arin rtsy in erdale flip flo hat d h a nd a aud than ure t d t i W ry a rt L more e cult ve an . o u F x i n lu ater out uniqu creat ur ow n b e a r a G e is s. It ’s to be all yo fashio n e u sc suit es yo a style y.org / m i g sw oura with sunn enc vative flair at o inn your d Fin

The Young Collectors Art collections are as varied as the individuals that curate them—in content, origin and motivation. For our second annual selection of young collectors, we focus on a diverse group that shares a common thread: the nurturing of conversations that tie art to the larger context of the world. BY JACOBA URIST 130 culturedmag.com

PHOTO COURTESY OF M WOODS MUSEUM

Michael Xufu Huang Home base: Beijing and New York Profession: Co-founder, M WOODS Museum, Beijing You started collecting as a teenager; how did this happen? I think everyone is a collector from a young age: some with toys, some with stamps. I was a well-behaved kid and I was always entrepreneurial, so I saved money to buy a piece of art that I liked, a lithograph by Helen Frankenthaler, while the first unique piece I acquired was from a young Chinese painter Bodu Yang. He’d just signed with Mine Project, the coolest new gallery in Hong Kong. I think my taste matured very fast. How did you co-found a museum at such a young age? I was fortunate to be approached by my co-founders when I was still in college at the University of Pennsylvania. We have the shared goal of building the most exciting and experimental museum in Beijing. Kids in the West are taken to museums starting at a young age, and we want kids in China to have the same experience too, so that the cultural identity in China will be filled with more talents in the future. What are some of the differences between collecting in China and in the United States? The main difference is the amount of opportunity artists have in the US. In China, there are not as many museums or galleries, so when I collect young artists, they don’t have the fancy resumes like artists in the West do. Chinese artists are just as good, so I consider it my job to help the new generation of Chinese artists break into the international scene. What are some of your favorite pieces in your private collection? I think the ones that really help define it are James Turrell, Amalia Ulman—who was the start of my interest in postinternet art and an artist whose participation I sponsored in the Berlin Biennial—and Austin Lee, who I have watched grow to be one of the most popular painters right now.

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“I am perennially inspired by the marriage of fashion and art.” 132 culturedmag.com

Home base: Brooklyn Heights Passion Project: The Instagram handle #CarlasCamo, where fashion meets art Institutional Affiliations: Brooklyn Museum and Greenwood Cemetery, board member Tell us about the first work you acquired. Does it still hold a special place in your psyche? The first “real” art I acquired was a large collage of NYC scenes and landmarks painted in watercolor by Ruben Toledo, who had been commissioned by Louis Vuitton to paint New York City vignettes for an upcoming Louis Vuitton notebook. Toledo used some of the original watercolors and arranged them in roughly their correct geographical locations to create a pseudo-map of Manhattan, which was displayed outside Fred’s for the launch of his wife Isabel’s eponymous line at Barney’s in 2007. Today, it has a prominent place in my living room, next to a portrait of Ruben and Isabel Toledo by Maira Kalman. I am perennially inspired by the marriage of fashion and art, and the Toledos truly embody that. How do you describe the overall aesthetic or ethos of your collection? I was born and raised in Brooklyn and primarily collect contemporary artwork by Brooklyn-based or New York Citybased artists, although I am attracted to a broad range of mediums and styles. New York artists in our home include: Fred Tomaselli, Rebecca Moses, Liz Collins, Ray Charles White and Katherine Bradford. That said, many of the works in my collection tend to incorporate collage elements too. A prime example: the beautifully patterned Japanese paper piece by Maria Berrio, which hangs in our bedroom, so I get to look at it when I first wake up and right before I go to sleep. Another piece that I consider an anchor is a 2008 portrait by Mickalene Thomas. I am obsessed with her use of collage and rhinestones, paint and pattern. Have you ever selected artists specifically for your brownstone? We commissioned Timothy Curtis to paint a mural in our elevator. It looks fabulous, but now we can never move because he painted it directly on the elevator walls, which aren’t removable. We also bought one of Patrick Jacobs’s portals and, during a recent renovation, had it installed properly in the wall. Now, there’s a small hole in the wall, and when you peer into it, you see a valley of dandelions and grass—it’s magical.

LIZZY SULLIVAN

Carla Shen

LANE CODER; FREMONT WEARS CATHERINE QUINN

Casey Fremont Home base: Dumbo Profession: Executive Director, Art Production Fund Institutional Afﬁliations: Times Square Arts Midnight Moment, selection committee Is there one piece in your collection that stands out as particularly meaningful or signiﬁcant to you? It’s nearly impossible to select just one individual artwork that inspires me. They all really do. We are so lucky to have close relationships with artists and personal connections to almost all of the art in our house, some of which are wedding gifts or gifts from artists with whom I’ve worked closely on projects. What are some of your favorites in your home today? Each time I move, I generally hang different art in different rooms. But there are a few staples. The James Nares blue brush stroke is one of my favorites. It’s bold and serene at the same time. I also love Deborah Kass’s OY/YO sculpture that sits on the reflective credenza below it; the Marilyn Minter hanging in the kitchen; the Sanford Biggers over our bed.

And the one work displayed in literally every apartment I’ve ever lived in is a black and white charcoal drawing of a spider monkey by my godfather Bill Copley. Curtis Kulig is a friend; our family cherishes his work. My kids are almost five and seven and have a giant Love Me Smiley between their beds, and an awesome abstract target piece that he did for them. Kenny Scharf also created the most amazing birth date works for each of my children when they were born. Your Dumbo loft is so visually inspiring. Any tips for optimizing art in the design process? We completely renovated the apartment. It was dark and felt quite different initially. It was paramount that we brighten everything. We painted the entire apartment with Benjamin Moore “super white” because—as Deborah Kass and I have discussed and agree—whites are all very different and it’s crucial to choose the right one. We exposed brick that was in perfect condition, hidden behind drywall; perfect as it was, we decided to paint it white too, which adds texture without darkening or dating the space.

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Home base: Greenwich Village and Palo Alto Profession: Stanford Business School student; previously Director of Arts at Kickstarter Institutional Afﬁliations: Brooklyn Museum, Creative Time, Studio Museum in Harlem When did you get bitten by the collecting bug, as it were? I grew up making art in Chicago in a family that was very supportive of my interests. But I realized pretty quickly that I was not an awesome artist, so I instead looked for opportunities to be close to those who are. I think that for me especially—as someone who tried to make art as a young person—I appreciate the craft and how difficult artmaking can be. Collecting was actually a second chapter to my involvement with museums. Is there a recent addition you’re particularly inspired by? I’m really excited about the most recent piece that I added by EJ Hill, whose durational performance was recently part of the Hammer’s “Made in L.A.” biennial. I got my artwork in early September. Company Gallery in New York had a solo show of his last fall, and I actually sort of tripped on a picture of it online. I was heading to New York the next day and got off the plane and went straight to the gallery to see his work. Instagram has increasingly become a really helpful tool. I’m doing two years here at Stanford Business School, so I can often feel disconnected from what’s happening in New York. Do you have any guiding principles or “rules” as you collect? As I do with all the artists I collect—Jennifer Packer, Jordan Casteel, Rashaad Newsome, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Hank Willis Thomas, Derrick Adams—I believe in the message of the works and I want to be part of the artists’ careers and stories going forward. I guess it’s obvious, but many of the works in my collection are by contemporary artists of color.

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CHRIS WAGGONER

Victoria Rogers

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Matthew Chevallard Home base: Miami Profession: President and Creative Director, Del Toro Tell me about the ﬁrst piece of art you ever collected. I’ve always been into studying history and sociology. In high school, I was really focused on different cultural elements of the ’60s and reading all the literature around that period, particularly revolutionary bands. Through that, I developed a love for the Grateful Dead and started collecting the handbills that they used to issue and these trippy, cool, wild posters. I bought three or four semi-large ones. What works in your collection are you particularly excited about right now? Arte Povera is far and beyond my favorite genre, and it’s probably the concentration of my collection. Arte Povera can be a loose term, but artists in my home include Michelangelo Pistoletto, Enrico Castellani, and Alighiero Boetti. I have a Mimmo Rotella—all of these post-war Italian artists, who were based out of Torino, where I was born. The Pistoletto is a brushed aluminum, so it looks like a mirror with a screen print over it, not fully sculptural, but with a little bit of dimensionality. What is the vision of The Ofﬁce, your new gallery space in Miami? My business partner, Daniel Berkowitz, and I work with a variety of artists: Matt McCormick, Jason Seife, Michael Vasquez and Corey Damon Black. There are a lot of Miami-based and relatively emerging artists who we are excited about. I collect a lot of the artists we are working with, promoting and introducing them to my friends. From there, we are building a greater vision.

“Arte Povera is far and beyond my favorite genre, and it’s probably the concentration of my collection.”

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“Art needs to live and breathe.” Emma Hall Home base: Westport, Connecticut Profession: The Hall Art Foundation How does being part of such a serious art collecting family inﬂuence your perspective? I actually started collecting art with the work of my childhood best friend Lyman Richardson. Some of my favorite pieces are works that I grabbed from his studio or sketchbook and have had framed. This was before my parents began collecting in earnest. I guess the desire to surround myself in art runs deep in my blood. Any common themes in your personal collection? My parents gave me a wonderful Warhol work on paper as a 21st birthday gift. I feel as though I can trace the aesthetic of that artwork through many of the pieces I’ve collected since. There is a common thread of strong line work in much of the artwork in my home: Holly Coulis, David Shrigley, Chiharu Shiota, Barry Le Va, Abby Leigh, Dan Gluibizzi and Alison Hall. I also have a great affinity for painting. Ridley Howard, Oliver Clegg, David Humphrey, Peter Dreher, and Walter Robinson are some of the artists we have hanging. Up until we moved to Connecticut last year, our collecting was really limited by size, things we could fit in our West Village apartment. Everything had a gem-like quality—small treasures. Now, we have housesized walls to fill and we’re able to think larger, so the possibilities are exciting. I’m eager for big canvases, though with a three-year old, I’m a tad apprehensive just yet of putting anything in harm’s way. How is collecting for your home different than purchasing for a museum or planning an exhibition? There is a dynamic quality to art in a home. I find when you can experience artwork throughout the day, in different lighting and moods, your connection with the work deepens. I think it’s extremely important for art to be accessible to the public. It’s tragic for work not to be seen. However, I don’t like when museums take on near-religious status and the art within them feels like entombed relics. Art needs to live and breathe.

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JOSUE CASTRO

RF Jeffries Home base: San Diego Profession: Finance Institutional Afﬁliations: Triple Canopy, International Friends of SOMA Council, Mexico Can you describe your collecting philosophy? I have certain parameters to help guide my acquisition process and tie into my giving mission. To start, I focus on time-based works, sculptures and installations with a concentration on those artists identifying as female, persons of color, and LGBQTI. Whenever I can, I try to collect in depth so that I have a solid representation of an artist’s practice and help support an artist’s growth over a longer time frame. I am fortunate enough to have several works, for example, by Puppies Puppies, Tschabalala Self, and Terence Koh, to name a few. Does selecting art to live with differ emotionally from falling in love with work in a museum? I don’t see a difference between work in an institution you love and bringing that work home to a private space. That said, I feel that private collectors have a duty to help public institutions via loans and gifts so that some of this art is accessed by the public at large. I’ve been collecting for 13 years now and I’m very fortunate that I’ve centered my home around my art— and forgo traditional trappings like furniture—in order to live with my sculpture and install work. What’s your tactic for managing the fairs? Art fairs for me are a very hectic experience and now I only go to ones closer to home—LA and Mexico City—to see friends I don’t get to visit often, since I don’t like to travel for art, as I prefer to use those funds to buy art or support an arts institution. I like to buy primarily from representing galleries, as I feel this is an act of support for both the artist and the galleries who support them. This slow-cooked approach allows me to think about each work so that my collection is cohesive and on-mission.

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Faith Ringgold at her home in Englewood, New Jersey, wearing a garment of her own design.

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The Powerful Persistence of Faith Ringgold The Harlem-born artist, activist and author has made work that is both searingly political and intimately personal. Diana McClure looks back at the legend’s past and what is to come as she prepares for a solo exhibition at London’s Serpentine Galleries opening in June. PORTRAIT BY NONA FAUSTINE

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The American Collection #11: Listen to the Trees (1997)

WITH ITS POTENT DEPICTIONS OF RACIAL

violence and African American empowerment now more palatable to the mainstream, the explicit political content in Faith Ringgold’s early work is increasingly de rigueur. For some, its visceral message seems to match the complex feelings of rage, discomfort and empowered self-representation wafting throughout the zeitgeist, alongside discussions on gender equality, structural racism, white privilege, economic disenfranchisement and so on—conversations Ringgold was having with a group of black intellectuals and activists in the 1960s, continuing a lineage of thinkers from Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass to Harriet Tubman and Marcus Garvey, among others. Yet, Ringgold’s interests have taken her elsewhere in 2019. “I spoke about what I had to say at the time I had to say it,” are about the only words she wants to share regarding those early years. Those works are being considered anew within the art world. When I met her for this interview, her Black Light Series #10: Flag for the Moon: Die Nigger

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(1969) was in its last days as part of an installation where it was paired with Jasper Johns’s Flag on an Orange Field II (1958). On view at the recently opened Glenstone museum, in Potomac, Maryland, both paintings riff on the American flag—however in vastly different tones. Ringgold addresses the vicious political climate of the 1960s by inserting the phrase “Die Nigger” within the stripes of her flag. In regard to Johns’s more spare representation, she says, “To me, that wasn’t enough. I mean, what do you say about the flag? Why is it just a flag? But that’s the way artists were in those days. They didn’t want to say anything. I guess they figured they would say the wrong thing. Somebody wouldn’t agree or this or that. I didn’t have that impression. I wanted to say what I thought, how I felt.” In the 1960s Ringgold’s politically charged “super-realist” oil paintings were ignored. Now, she is preparing for a solo show organized by HansUlrich Obrist at London’s Serpentine Galleries opening on June 6; the release of a BBC documentary on Ringgold’s life and work will coincide with

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I was immediately struck not just by her radical painting and publishing career, which spans over 50 years, but also by her active involvement within the Civil Rights and Feminist Movements in New York. Now in her eighties, Faith is widely considered to be one of the most ZPNUPÄJHU[ HY[PZ[Z VM OLY NLULYH[PVU —Hans-Ulrich Obrist

” the exhibition; and her work is on tour in the blockbuster exhibition, “Soul of A Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963–1983,” currently on view at the Broad Museum in Los Angeles. “I was immediately struck not just by her radical painting and publishing career, which spans over 50 years, but also by her active involvement within the Civil Rights and Feminist Movements in New York,” says Obrist of his first meeting with Ringgold. “Now in her eighties, Faith is widely considered to be one of the most significant artists of her generation, a great inspiration to younger artists, including Grace Wales Bonner and Lynette Yiadom Boakye, both of whom have exhibited at the Serpentine Galleries.” Part of Ringgold’s consistent output can be attributed to her nearly 25-year relationship with Dorian Bergen of ACA Galleries. “I looked around and realized I needed to dedicate one staff member to take care of Faith,” says Bergen. “That was back in 1995. We realized we are cut from the same cloth. The same work ethic. She’s up by 6 or 7, arms ready to work. I’m the same. We’re worker bees.” One of Bergen’s first ideas was the organization of a traveling exhibition that showcased the breadth and depth of Ringgold’s oeuvre. The show has been on the road since 1996, breaking attendance records, and presented at nearly 50 institutions so far. Ringgold’s jubilant spirit, robust laugh, and healthy sense of entitlement seem to illuminate her choice to live in a present moment defined by her own interests—a joie de vivre nurtured during her Harlem childhood, an extraordinary period of African American creative and intellectual output. Although she was not taught about African or African American art in school, she was surrounded by it, with figures like Langston Hughes, Aaron Douglas and Billie Holiday in the ether. “All those guys were living around us in Harlem. Isn’t that something? You walk down the street and you run into them. I knew them, but I didn’t know about them. I didn’t know they were as great as they were. And I don’t think they knew either, because they didn’t allow a whole lot of excitement,” she says. Ringgold has worked in 16 different mediums—ranging from prints, drawings, and story quilts (painted canvas framed with fabric) to works on

paper, soft sculpture, illustration and more—continually and thoroughly engaging race and racism, womanhood and feminism, and a lifelong love of storytelling, exemplified by more than a dozen children’s books she has published. Her iconic work on race riots in the US, American People Series #20: Die (1967), influenced by Picasso’s Guernica, was acquired by MoMA in 2016. Discussions are underway with the Brooklyn Museum on an extended loan of For the Women’s House (1971), an 8-by-8-foot oil painting installed in the women’s prison at Rikers Island in the early ’70s. The work foreshadowed advances for women in the workplace and was vandalized when the prison was converted to an all-male facility. Begun in the 1980s—after making her Tibetan tanka-inspired works in the 1970s—Ringgold’s infamous story quilts offered an outlet to tell her own autobiography through a combination of painting and text that she still employs as an artistic strategy. Ringgold’s series California Dah, among her abstract output, is installed prominently in her living room. Made in the ’80s while she was living beachside and teaching at the University of California at San Diego, California Dah is a large-scale five-part series of paintings with raffia fringe acting as a frame. The work was a response to her mother’s passing. “I wanted to see what it looks like where she was. What is that like? Where is she and what is she seeing? I came up with these shapes. The colors and the shapes. What colors do you see? What shapes do you see?” The works suggest Ringgold could have had a parallel life as an abstract painter. Now, as the second decade of the 21st century comes to a close, what is most on Ringgold’s mind is aging. In fact, it anchors the working title of her next body of work, “Aging-aling-aling.” “I want to get into aging because it’s the one stage in your life that doesn’t stop. Once you reach aging, that’s it. You go on aging, aging. Aging-aling-aling.” She continues, “People are aging into living longer and longer. And I’m fascinated with the possibilities of what that can be and what it could look like. That’s what I’m concentrating on right now, because I’ve noticed that images of old people have a certain look.” Ringgold’s loft-style studio, on the second floor of her ranch house in a

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wooded area of New Jersey, looks like the comfortable abode of an artist well-acquainted with her own craft, quirks and necessities. A vast array of seating, art materials, pieces from her archive and works in progress fill the space. A sense of ease fills the air, the perfect ambience to allow her ideas to unfurl. “I have to get it in my head and feel it, see it—so that I can paint it,” she says. An unlikely character in her investigations into aging is none other than Donald Trump. She laughs, chuckles, and shakes her head when she 148 culturedmag.com

says, “He’s amazing. He’s absolutely amazing.” She means as a humorous muse. A yellow plastic file folder holds pages of downloaded images of the commander-in-chief. Written on the cover: “Trump the Chump.” In Bergen’s estimation, Ringgold does not like or dislike him. “She doesn’t want to demonize him. She wants to understand him, so she’s working it out.” Sketches on 8-by-10-inch white paper depict Trump’s head in a variety of profiles and frontal views in either one of two styles: colored drawings that feature vibrant yellow hair and a respectfully humanized

American People Series #20: Die (1967)

rendition of his face, or black line drawings that seem to reflect the deeper cerebral negotiations going on in Ringgold’s mind. The black-and-whites are striking and call to mind the work of Francis Bacon. They are both simple and complex, showing faces that all feature just one large eye situated above the bridge of Trump’s nose. “I think I’d like to include him in my ‘Aging-aling’. Because he’s definitely aging-aling. I don’t know why he’s so crazy. See this here? This is hair that has been taken off different parts of his body. Maybe it’s taken

off the back, wherever it’s plentiful. It has a permanent bend to it. In other words, he can’t get that to lay down so he just made it into a hairdo.” Bergen is in the midst of planning “The Wise Get Wild” party as a bit of inspiration for Ringgold. The fête, taking place this spring, will bring together elders who are active poets and chess players and have romantic partners and lots of friends. Look for Ringgold’s take on the golden years in an exhibition in 2020. In the meantime, visit her app, Quiltuduko, her digital response to aging—a visual art-making adaptation of Sudoku. culturedmag.com 149

The new WORK Wardrobe With his roots in punk culture, Italian-born photographer Alessandro Simonetti is bringing utilitarian durability and aesthetics to his U.P.W.W. line. BY ISABEL FLOWER PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRENDAN BURDZINSKI

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Designer Alessandro Simonetti and Cleo, the dog, find their place in Alphabet City. Simonetti wears U.P.W.W.’s reversible bomber from FW18, an Umbro sweatshirt, Ben Davis pants, and custom boots from Premiata. Cleo rocks the Utility-Pro collar.

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PHOTOGRAPHER

ALESSANDRO

Simonetti grew up in the late 1970s between Rome and a small town in northeastern Italy. He started taking pictures the same year he started writing graffiti. Naturally, he turned his lens on the activities and communities he was immersed in—skateboarding, punk, painting—each key to cataclysmic DIY innovations that eventually became, and continue to define, global youth culture. In the decades that followed, Simonetti and his peers bore witness to the transmutation of these once self-sustaining niches into a corporate-sponsored and heavily mediatized mainstream. During this time, he made books, put on shows, and worked with fashion brands. His first commercial shoot was for the ’90s Italian streetwear brand Broke, followed by the likes of workwear giant Carhartt, NY-native skate company 5BORO and Zoo York. But Simonetti never thought of fashion as a vehicle for his work. It seemed more likely that his work was a vehicle for fashion, as advertising and marketing quickly learned to commandeer both the content and visual characteristics of subcultural creative movements and documentarystyle photography. On an early winter morning Simonetti and I met for tea in the East Village and he told me about how, to his own surprise, he came to be the creative director of his own fashion label. In 2017, Vanni Lenci, a designer and friend of Simonetti, happened upon the New York Garment

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Skateboarder Shawn Powers showcases the other side of U.P.W.W.’s reversible bomber.

District showroom of Utility Pro: a clothing company that, since 1995, has produced high visibility workwear for air traffic controllers, traffic enforcement agents, and construction workers. Inspired and intrigued, Simonetti and Lenci initiated a collaborative extension of Utility Pro, called it U.P.W.W. (Utility Pro Work Wear), and started making clothes. This was possible with the help of U.P.P.W.’s general manager, Jon Joory, the “third leg” of the U.P.W.W. creative triangle. “His family created Utility Pro in order to serve worksites and security departments all over U.S. and is part of a long tradition of workwear production.” Together, they launched their first ready-towear collection by the end of that year. U.P.W.W.’s neon jackets and pants, constructed with weather-proof fabrics and emblazoned with reflective stripes, can be found at Barneys, TOKEN, VFILES, and a selection of boutiques in Europe and Asia. The “Reversible Faux-Fur & Tech-Canvas Bomber Jacket” from this winter retails at $440. At one point in our conversation, Simonetti observed that “we are living at a time when there’s not much secret sauce in how to make a brand.” I agreed. He explained that the most interesting part of creating U.P.P.W. has been working directly with its parent company, researching and observing the similarities and

discrepancies in each’s strategies and objectives. “Utility Pro has been really supportive both with logistics and as a source of infinite inspiration. We are continuing their story.” And this foray into fashion is certainly a new chapter for Utility Pro. Prior to this partnership, their clothing was never for, or marketed to, anything or anyone outside the aforementioned professions. Rather than “streetwear” as we know it, this is “wear” literally made for the “street”—for workers who are outside and therefore must be protected from the elements and easily discernible to moving vehicles. Exactingly functional vests, bombers, and coveralls have barely changed in over two decades and feature maximally durable, insulated materials, strategically-placed pockets, and 3M™ Scotchlite™ taped across the chest and shoulders to ensure the human torso is clearly defined. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) requires that all workers on any kind of construction or traffic site wear reflective clothing at all times, thus producing a demand grounded not in hype or illusory value but in practical and legal necessity. U.P.W.W. emerged at a time when fashion versions of bluecollar uniforms were popping up on runways, such as the immensely popular Vetements x DHL T-shirts from fall 2015 that retailed at approximately $250. A second iteration will be released this spring for more than double the initial sticker price. However selfaware, a fashion garment based on a worker’s uniform inevitably comments on and often exacerbates the material conditions of labor and class. Of course, fashion (and all creative practices) gleans inspiration from disparate sources, but this corrosion of meaning particularly plagues any mode of creative production for which value depends on manufacturing scarcity. While it would have been perfectly possible to snap some pictures in the Utility Pro showroom and slap them on a mood board without any further contact, that isn’t how Simonetti works. In this way, U.P.W.W. acts less like a fashion brand than a relationship—an active, ongoing exercise in contextual collisions and the tensions they produce. Indeed, these are the cultural frictions Simonetti has traversed his whole career: art versus fashion, counter versus corporate. In the same way that photographers like Simonetti have aimed to document and broadcast subcultures without compromising their essence, removing their contexts, or distorting their histories, U.P.W.W. pushes us to ask how fashion might interact with its source material in a way that is beneficial to both.

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A Kitchen For Creatives If the kitchen is the canvas, Henrybuilt is Scott Hudson‘s brush. 9LKLÄUPUN [OL UV[PVU VM YLUV]H[PVU /\KZVU [HRLZ H ^OVSS` HY[PZ[PJ HWWYVHJO [V JVUJLW[\HSPaPUN J\Z[VT ZWHJLZ BY CAIT MUNRO PORTRAIT BY DANIEL BERNAUER

A GOOD KITCHEN IS THE CENTERPIECE

of a home. It’s the best place to be during a party; a room with an inexplicable gravitational pull. And yet, many kitchens are boring, or worse, inefficient. Those in the know—like blue-chip artists and developers of luxury buildings like the Wardman Tower in D.C.—know that if you want a kitchen that merges form and function, you go to Henrybuilt. The company, which is based in Seattle and has showrooms in New York and Mill Valley, CA and is opening soon in Los Angeles, also handles full-scale remodels and builds furniture, but it’s their customized kitchen “system” that they’re best known for. It all began in 2001, when founder Scott Hudson, a one-time fine arts major who later worked under Bill Gates at Corbis before going on to design interactive programming for children, was remodeling his old farmhouse outside of Seattle. The kitchen needed an overhaul, and when he set about finding someone to change it, what he found was an industry oriented around individual parts constructed by individual people, with nothing to ensure cohesion. “Nobody actually comes and says, ‘Hey, I’m going to give you the whole experience,’” he says. For Henrybuilt, the whole experience means intelligent details, like drawers with high-performance acrylic dividers that snap in and out, allowing for easy reconfiguration. On a larger scale, it means applying precision and creativity like what they did for a film director’s home in Mexico City. The house was made largely out of concrete, which meant

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Henrybuilt needed to design and build their product to be integrated into the house—very precisely—long before concrete was ever poured. Later, when the client wanted a way to display his large wine collection out in the open, Henrybuilt developed a custom wine rack by turning an architectural wall into a functional surface—a precursor to what has become a distinctive feature of the Henrybuilt system, Opencase. While Henrybuilt products and installations tend toward a cool minimalism, Hudson has been steering the company away from becoming too focused on style, which he thinks can be a trap. “Sometimes we talk about Beck, how he’ll make one album that’s kind of country, and one that’s kind of tech. They still sound like him, but the style is different,” he explains. “It’s a function, I think, of getting good enough to know what’s down underneath.” It’s this kind of thinking that has made Henrybuilt the go-to designer for the creative class—including the 50 or so visual artists who have brought Henrybuilt into their homes. Henrybuilt’s clients may be the style set, but Hudson wants everyone to experience the pleasure of living with their work. When company staff travel to the Mill Valley showroom, they stay in a 900-square-foot Henrybuilt-furnished house. “It’s constantly occupied by someone who is traveling for work, and they get to live with and experience the product. That has changed the company in a pretty significant way,” he says. “It’s about connecting all of the dots.”

Scott Hudson sitting next to the Henrybuilt Portal, one of his own designs.

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FORT MASON FESTIVAL PAVILION SAN FRANCISCO • JUNE 5, 2019

Contemporary artworks & creative experiences

Tickets & bidding info at headlands.org/auction

04.20.19 The Artist Formerly Known as Grimes The Potent Vision of Kerby Jean-Raymond Black Renaissance Afoot Fuck the Fourth Wall Bob Meets World Bounce Feeling Bless(ed) Desire and the Underworld A Match Made in Heaven More than Meets the Eye Sarah Faux Paints Naked Sensations Fashion in Space

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the artist formerly kn as grimes The singer now known as c opens up about fame, climate change and the forthcoming album that sums it all up: Miss Anthropocene.

BY KHALILA DOUZE PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHUCK GRANT STYLED BY ZOË BLEU HAIR BY CHANEL CROKER MAKE-UP BY ANTHONY H. NGUYEN PRODUCED BY KATHLEEN HEFFERNAN AND JORDAN VERNES 160 culturedmag.com

own

c is remarkably self-aware. “I’ll try not to say anything scandalous from this moment forward,” the musician formerly known as both Claire Boucher and Grimes promises as a waiter brings us menus at a Los Angeles Buca di Beppo. These days she goes by “c,” the symbol for the speed of light and the name she legally adopted last year because Claire has been “plaguing” her. “Though she turned 31 this year, c could pass for a teenager. She arrives to our pasta lunch on the hunt for an Arrabbiata—a bite of which she later kindly offers to share—in dark sweatpants, a white tee shirt with a Russian transliteration printed in red across the chest, and streaks of amethyst in the long strands of her unkempt hair. After we order, she makes a point to ensure that the waiter has taken my order correctly—a welcome, perceptive consideration. Following a morning of dealing with “press drama,” she plans to head to a League of Legends session at a friend’s house later.

In 2018, c was the subject of a bizarre tabloid-esque spectacle that began when she appeared on the Met Gala red carpet with boyfriend and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and peaked several months later with a personal and professional falling-out from which c is still reeling. Her relationship with Musk, which managed to survive the media fallout, shocked fans, many arguing that she’d sold out on her morals by getting cozy with the eccentric tech billionaire who’s been both deified and vilified for his futuristic exploits (he is currently dealing with a securities fraud case in which c was subpoenaed to testify). “There’s just been these major betrayals,” c says, reflecting on what she’s called one of the most traumatic years of her life and explaining why she’s sworn to collaborate only with friends moving forward. The public shaming, as she deems it, has been more than just a lesson on who to trust. It’s also been a dissociative challenge: “You just have

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If you can make people mad without actually hurting anyone, that’s probably a good thing.

”

c takes to the stairs of Villa de Leon in Pacific Palisades, California.

to totally untether your personality from your public persona. I’m like, I don’t want to use that name anymore. I don’t want to use that face anymore. Because it now stands for something that I don’t agree with.” c says she has a difficult time recollecting anything from last fall. “The one thing I’ll say is just don’t believe everything you read. Just because people wrote about it does not mean it’s fucking true.” Fans of the Vancouver-born art pop musician would know that while celebrity scandal is new territory for c, she’s had her share of extreme experiences. There was the houseboat incident in which she left her home in Montreal for an ill-timed and short-lived jaunt down the Mississippi River. There’s also her retelling of the making of Visions, the album that propelled her into the indie pop canon, which she produced and recorded during a weeks-long, sleepless, self-imposed isolation. Part of c’s appeal has always been her fist-in-the-air approach to life, an attitude she says is partially rooted in her early initiation into crust punk culture. When she moved to LA four years ago, around the time she released an expansive, polyphonic fourth album, Art Angels, things changed. “I didn’t realize how much everyone else was not like that. I think over the last few years, moving to a big city, I’ve just been socialized a bit more. I was a little bit feral,” she giggles. c can be self-deprecating, which registers as a defense mechanism honed through years of audaciousness and discomfort in the public eye. “The last album was a piece of crap,” she says. “I feel like people really misread it and it feels like a stain on my life.” She resists the notion that she tried to make a pop record, and considers it more of a genre exercise in which she demonstrated her range as a producer. “I just wish I could make music in a vacuum,” she claims, before retorting, “it’s good to make people mad actually, I retract my statement. If you can make people mad without actually hurting anyone, that’s probably a good thing.” Her new album, Miss Anthropocene, is, according to c, an amalgamation of three albums she recorded over the past three years, and is still in flux. Based on a neologism commonly used in scientific circles, “misanthropocene” refers to both the misanthrope’s loathing of humanity and the Anthropocene era in which our planet is dominated by human activity. “It’s anthropomorphizing climate change,” c explains, touching on her fascination with the way ancient Greeks used gods to personify existentially threatening concepts. “It’s sort of about this demon of the end of the world, this character that’s like the Voldemort of climate change. She’s relishing the end of the world, and it’s an album about how great fucking climate change is.” Talking with her, it’s easy to reason that the project of c has long been a dissociative, identity-navigating mechanism. Her music has always combined the conceptual and the vulnerably personal. “If everyone sees me as a villain, how do I make the best villain ever?” she asks, elaborating on the record and drawing a parallel between its character and her own experiences. “She is a musician for sure, but she comes at music in such an abstract way, which really inspires me,”

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says HANA, a close friend and long-time collaborator who’s featured on c’s latest single, “We Appreciate Power.” “She just makes me question the [music rules] that I would normally go with.” A preview of three new songs finds c excavating her emotions while constructing a sonic environment for her dark supervillain. Ominous guitar feedback meets sharp, whale call-sounding synths to form the underbelly of a standout called “So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth.” c says the song, whose mystifying lyrics ride an angelic vocal melody, is about how love can be like a poison. “Specifically how when a dude comes inside you, you become in their thrall—how it’s an attack on your feminist freedom,” she illustrates. It’s a song that communicates best how much she’s changed over the last year; notably, in the context of her romantic relationship. “It’s sad how love can be this beautiful thing, but then love is the thing that’s fucking up my career,” she confesses. “The biggest change for me this year is losing my hardcore masculinity. I used to just be free—free of all this bullshit that it seemed like all the other girls were going through, and now I feel like I’m not.” She also sent a pared down early mix of a love song she made just a couple days before we meet called “Shall I Compare Thee.” It’s lo-fi, airy, and refreshing in its simplicity. A narrative complement to “We Appreciate Power” arrives in “My Name is Dark,” which c says is about all the people she knows who didn’t vote in the US presidential election. Sonically, it renders as soul-sucking apathy, with warped guitar strums, looping echoes, and a chamber of distorted voices that sound like they’re drowning or getting sucked into a black hole. For every extreme c experiment or reaction, there is a softer c that reels her in or revises her provocations. Though she’s fascinated by our current moment’s existential dooms, she also expresses an earnest optimism for the future: “Gen Z is probably going to be the first reasonable generation,” she says. Halfway through our conversation, she effusively apologizes for any earlier negativity. “A lot of my bullshit has really affected a lot of people in a way that I will never recover from because I feel so fucking bad about it,” she says about her harsh social media responses to critical fans. “I’ve been feeling the increasing incongruence of the interpretation of me versus the reality of me, and rubbing up against that more and more until it hit sort of a breaking point this year, where people just got mad,” she admits. “It’s just interesting to learn about different ways the world works. I was a fucking idiot. The reality of the situation is there is no reality. Everybody thinks there’s an objective truth. The thing is that everybody’s right and everybody’s wrong,” she concedes. The way c can so quickly turn her conviction off and on is admirable and like watching micro ego deaths happen in real time. Her humility radiates. As we finish our meal, she draws a sensible connection between her growth and her gaming habits: “I’m kind of exiting that vibe [of only playing the hardest games like Bloodborne and Dark Souls because I’m so hard]. I’m trying to learn softness and joy.”

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The Potent Vision of Kerby Jean-Raymond The man behind Pyer Moss is putting politics on the runway and rewriting history while using his platform to celebrate the people and culture he loves. BY SABLE ELYSE SMITH PHOTOGRAPHY BY MICAIAH CARTER

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Designer Kerby Jean-Raymond, second from left, with models in pieces from the Pyer Moss SS19 collection, which featured a collaboration with artist Derrick Adams.

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CERTAIN INFORMATION IN THIS ARTICLE IS FOR THE YOUNG BLACK CREATIVES WHO ARE OUT THERE ASPIRING TO EXIST, ASPIRING TO CREATE SOMETHING BEYOND THE CONFINES OF WHAT SOMEONE, OUTSIDE OF YOU, WOULD ATTEMPT TO “ALLOW,” “CONTROL” OR WHATEVER ELSE. SOME OF THIS ARTICLE IS ONLY FOR YOU, AND I WISH IT COULD BE LONGER.

THERE IS A DON’T GIVE A FUCK ATTITUDE that ownership, a certain type of agency, freedom, affords you. It’s like a deep exhale of wetcrisp air to see it slipped on like a glove sometimes. Here, the dgaf attitude is of course not the sum of the dictionary definitions of those words. The attitude is a Teflon, or in the case of Kerby Jean-Raymond, winner of the 2018 CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund award, it’s a printed silk button-down with what feels like gouache or watercolor washes of blues and greens animating black family and banality and being, all courtesy of artist Derrick Adams. The paintings from Adams’s Family Portrait series were the muse for Pyer Moss’s second collection in the “American, Also” trilogy, aptly titled Family. I describe what the painting looks like, what it feels like, especially as it drapes in fabric across a body hued with the same warmth as those pictures suggest, to get to its poetry, its luscious liquidity. Sometimes that Teflon also shows up in a black cropped leather jacket with cowboy-style stitching and a matching black leather pant—a black power suit of sorts. These are my imaginings. But what I’m describing are not just articles of clothing from Pyer Moss’s collections; they are more like breathing documents. Small histories, treasures of black life, fantastical imaginings breathed into cracks like expanding balloons meant to linger. Meant to put pressure on those hard-cracking foundations. Meant to be soft, bright and flamboyant. Meant to be elastic. Meant to expand and constrict. Meant to wrap themselves around the body like that rubber around breath, around an exhale. The brand Pyer Moss started in a day—January 28, 2013, to be exact. To be fair, of course, we know nothing was made in a day, but an image of Rihanna wearing a camouflaged leather jacket by Kerby went viral on that day, so Kerby had to come up with a name for his brand, create a website and develop an Instagram page all in one breath. And fashion can be a whirlwind—another norm from which Pyer Moss is seceding. His website is matter-of-fact, and maybe it’s only because I’ve just come off an interview with Kerby that I read it in his voice: “Pyer Moss is sold limitedly and in no particular schedule…” even though a schedule is a defining logic in fashion. The schedule or calendar is fashion’s economic engine, lest we forget. It is the benchmark by which investors look toward projections, matrices and bottom lines, “has the money flipped?” Kerby bought his company back from investors in 2017, using almost half of the money from a then newlypenned Reebok deal—and that makes all the difference. His money is clearly where his mouth is. What is most striking is that Kerby’s motivation is not necessarily just fashion. Like any other artist, Kerby has something to say, and so an image, a bead, a silhouette all become conducts for the utterance. His vision is transmitted by a choir, a model, a talking head interview, a historic free black geography around which one may oscillate in constellation—sometimes to a soundtrack somewhere between operatic fervor and trap. One might navigate to Pyer Moss’s website looking for a tee-shirt but leave having met: Angela Rye, Attorney and Political Advocate; Valencia D. Clay, Baltimore Public Schools Educator; Dr. Nadia Lopez, Principal of Mott Hall Bridges Academy; Randy Savvy, Rider, Leader of the COMPTON COWBOYS (shout-out to Cali); Orlando “Chilly” Mayorga, Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation Community Center; Ameena Matthews, Violence Reconciliation Activist & Imam of Al Haqqani Mosque; Kisha “KB” Bowles, Rodeo Rider, Cowgirls of Color; Paris “Tree” Brown, of Good Kids Mad City and more.

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This to me is profound, and a simplicity not to be taken for granted. Conscious of the reach a brand has, how one decides to use their platform is telling. Kerby is adamant about not confusing the definitions of activism in relationship to him or his brand. So, the beauty here is the people he decides to feature, the people offered a moment to speak and share their concerns, dreams or experiences. And in addition, you get to look at some fly shit. You get to see them wearing some fly shit. And by now we all know the power of an image. The power of a picture of someone who looks like you, tucked into a buttery leather or shawled in faux finery, skin tones lit properly—and then, an unexpected discovery. They are superheroes, they are celebrities—just not in the way we’ve been conditioned to define either of those positions. I’m sure Kerby would attribute this thinking to someone in his life he calls Dean Mimi, “who was woke before woke,” he tells me, “old-school woke like Public Enemy.” Kerby attended Hofstra University, and the summer prior to enrolling in his first year he participated in a six-week program called New Opportunities at Hofstra, which was run by Dean Mimi. The purpose was to even the playing field, so to speak, for all the “smart kids of color.” “In six weeks, you had to catch up to all the shit your public high school didn’t teach you,” he recalls. “Mimi added her own curriculum to it, so she added topics like African studies, and every night we had to watch Eyes on the Prize… Ms. Mimi taught me how to be black, or rather how to be black and proud.” You can tell this has informed so much for Kerby. Of course, in the beginning it was a struggle. He didn’t want anyone to know he was black. He didn’t want to be photographed, didn’t want the interviewers to harp on his blackness because there was a connotation there. The brand would be labeled “streetwear” or “urban” just because of what he looked like. It’s not something he or anyone is able to escape much, but fast-forward and it’s something he’s leaned into hard. He’s found a way to exist, a way to imbue the conversation with beauty and transcend the lazy trappings of stereotype. It seems he has found an artistic freedom, and I’m sure Ms. Mimi’s voice comes flooding to the surface from time to time. The work he’s trying to do right now “is to present black people in a fashionable light, in a natural light… showing what the black condition looks like without the angst of racism, without the history of slavery, without the interference of the molestation of imperialism, all these different things and how they relate to the present day… to take all of this and show people what can be, and to encourage others to come in and to further infiltrate it as much as [he has] but even further.” Kerby says, “If there’s a brand that steps in and does it better than me I might not need to do it anymore, and then I can just move on. Maybe I switch to doing pottery or something. It’s a social experiment for now.” The dialogue and the intersections between art and fashion are not new—fashion is always finding its way into the museum space. According to the New York Times, the Pyer Moss presentation at last February’s New York Fashion Week was “one of the most anticipated on the schedule,” and what did Kerby do? He opted out. Not an easy decision to make, especially with the momentum around the brand. Yet he did it anyway. You see, it is the risks the brand takes that give it just a little more tooth than others; that make me reconsider the boundaries and rules thrusted upon them by the industry; that make the frame dissolve a little more. It’s that dgaf that makes it so delicious. Pyer Moss is a love letter and Kerby Jean-Raymond a bad motherfucker!

...showing what the black condition looks like

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without the angst of racism, without the history of slavery, without the interference of the molestation of imperialism, all these different things and how they relate to the present day…

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Cast: Kerby Jean-Raymond, Elizabeth Ayodele, Darron Clarke, Lameka Fox, Anarcius Jean. Photo assistants: Atarah Atkinson and Rahim Fortune. Hair: Nigella Miller with thanks to Indique Hair Pure Texture hairspray, EDEN BodyWorks, Babytress, Curls, Got2b, Sebastian professional, T3 micro, Andis Clippers, Sheila Stotts, Ricky’s. Makeup: Alana Wright assisted by Fatimot Isadare. Special thanks to Magic Flying Carpets of the Berber Kingdom of Morocco, Brother Vellies, Reebok, IMG Models and Shio Studios.

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BLACK RENAISSANCE AFOOT

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Simone Leigh has long put the black female experience at the center of her work. This spring, she takes over the Guggenheim’s iconic rotunda. BY ELIZABETH KARP-EVANS PHOTOGRAPHY BY KYLE KNODELL

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“

I’m standing on the shoulders of many that got me to this place… they also modeled how you can hold the door open for others. That’s part of my job now. —Simone Leigh

” IN OCTOBER OF LAST YEAR, SIMONE LEIGH was named the recipient of the 2018 Hugo Boss Prize. The news was a welcome conclusion to a year that in many ways saw culture in decline. From the Trump administration’s continued threats to defund the National Endowment for the Arts to the end of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s choose-what-you-pay admission for all (reminiscent of the financial fiasco at Cooper Union that ended free tuition in 2013, even after the city’s recent announcement that a fraction of the Met’s revenue will go to smaller cultural nonprofits), it has become increasingly normal to feel neglected by those institutions whose role it is to serve. Leigh’s win wasn’t an antidote to this, but rather a confirmation of the multiple narratives that always run through history. Born in 1967 in Chicago, Leigh is the first black artist to win the Hugo Boss Prize and is only the second black female artist to be shortlisted behind Lorna Simpson. The achievement capped off a decade of successes for Leigh, whose rise is as much a story of an artist who has elevated the medium of sculpture as it is of someone who has acknowledged and uplifted the black female experience in contemporary art. “My recent successes have brought a kind of seriousness that I didn’t expect. Part and parcel with success is responsibility,” Leigh writes to me over email. She is busy preparing for her exhibition “Loophole of Retreat,” which opens at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation on April 19. “I had numerous mentors, for example Peggy Cooper Cafritz and Bisi Silva, and I’ve had role models, like Thelma Golden. I’m standing on the shoulders of many that got me to this place… they also modeled how you can hold the door open for others. That’s part of my job now.”

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Many of the new works Simone Leigh is presenting at the Guggenheim include bronze and raffia—two materials the artist has often employed in her investigations into sculpture and architecture.

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Leigh on site at Stratton Sculpture Studios, the Philadelphia foundry where she is producing new works.

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An in-process look at Brick House, Leigh’s monumental bust for the High Line.

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The Hugo Boss Prize, which was established in 1996, is awarded every other year to an individual contemporary artist or group working in any medium. Along with $100,000, recipients are awarded a solo show at the Guggenheim. “Loophole of Retreat” takes its title from a chapter in Harriet Jacobs’s (1813–97) 1861 memoir Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The chapter describes how Jacobs hid from her abusive owner for seven years in a small garret above her grandmother’s house in the antebellum South. “If you consider the state of black women to be de facto some form of incarceration, the point of view of ‘Loophole of Retreat’ is one of the best examples of a quality of blackness. Maybe you could call it make-a-way-out-of no-way-ism.” Leigh is explaining what initially drew her to Jacobs’s text. “The exhibition is not related to the life of Harriet Jacobs. I’m interested in describing epistemologies or ontologies of black women and femmes.” In a 2018 interview for her book Fired Up! Ready to Go!, Leigh’s late mentor, the great patron, educator, and collector Peggy Cooper Cafritz, defined this act of survivalism as cultural mentality: “It was an expected trajectory that every generation should be better than the next, that we should be better than the last.” Leigh is part of this history, and her work fits into a microcosm of this ethos. Her shows have grown in scale and sophistication— along with the monumental 16-foot-tall sculpture Brick House that unveils this April on the High Line, “Loophole of Retreat” may be her most ambitious institutional show to date. A new series of sculptures constitute the main body of work and include familiar elements like bronze busts and voluminous raffia skirts. With raffia, a fiber that comes from palms native to tropical regions of Africa, Leigh is continuing her investigation into architecture, specifically the hierarchy placed on formed material in Western culture. “I’m trying to write a grammar, to show parts of the full vocabulary of my work in sculpture,” says Leigh. Two video works, an updated version of Untitled (M*A*S*H), originally commissioned for the Berlin Biennale in 2018, and a new work will debut during the run of the show, as well as a sound piece made in collaboration with Philadelphian musician and experimental poet Moor Mother. Leigh will also collaborate with the scholars Saidiya Hartman and Tina Campt in the form of a conference that gathers black women thinkers and artists together to celebrate the

intellectual contributions of women of color to society. While not a sociopolitical act of art making like her Free People’s Medical Clinic (2014) and The Waiting Room (2016)—Leigh told me that she “will not create social practice works anymore, at least not anymore public-facing works,” as too much of it was “out of [her] control”— the conference supports a related idea Leigh stated in her 2013 text “Everyone Wants to be Subaltern.” Referencing the indexical artwork University of Local Knowledge (2000–ongoing) by Suzanne Lacy, which reveals “the bodies of information stored in the daily lives of residents” of a British council estate, Leigh wrote of her excitement at finding “viable antidotes to colonial anthropology.” While not as literal as Lacy’s community index, seeing Leigh’s work in institutional settings, and the formality attributed to her decidedly African forms and material, does offer a long-desired alternative to the colonial narrative. It is also thrilling to imagine her works alongside the Guggenheim’s Brâncusi collection, another sculptor whose Romanian heritage meant his influence was not wholly from the Western canon. “I would hope that I have been able to gaze even more inwardly as I explore my subalternity. The more specific I get the more people I reach. And I’m so proud of my heritage,” says Leigh. The growing recognition of artists who are women and women of color within institutions is in large part due to Leigh and her contemporaries’ direct and multifaceted engagement of race—their subalternity—in the post-black era, first supported by women like Cafritz, Silva, and Golden. “We have a black renaissance afoot when it comes to art and scholarship in multiple fields. We are making the change,” Leigh signs off. Leigh’s unfaltering dedication to place black femininity at the center of her narrative has allowed a younger generation to not only bear witness to these lives but acknowledge and accept them as part of the fiber of contemporary art. Her work has taken us closer to the universality with which we view the white experience. This acceptance of the black female body is at the heart of what is so important about Leigh’s win. It has sparked further understanding of the complexity of an artist’s identity, and therefore our own. Nearly 30 years ago, the first museum show my parents took me to was of Dale Chihuly at the Portland Art Museum. How different the world would have appeared if it had been Simone Leigh.

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FUCK THE FOURTH WALL

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For the past decade, MacArthur “Genius” Wu Tsang has been prodding the problems of representation and developing new languages for open-ended identities. BY ASHTON COOPER PHOTOGRAPHY BY PAUL MPAGI SEPUYA

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IN HER 2008 VIDEO THE SHAPE

of a Right Statement, Wu Tsang stages a one-to-one vocal performance of blogger and autism rights activist Amanda Baggs’s 2007 viral video In My Language. Speaking in the staccato tone of the computerized voice that Baggs uses, Tsang intones: “It is only when I type something in your language that you refer to me as having communication. … there are people being tortured, people dying because they are considered non-persons because their kind of thought is so unusual as to not be considered thought at all. Only when the many shapes of personhood are recognized will justice and human rights be possible.” Tsang’s “full-body quotation” of Baggs speaks to several major issues at the heart of her practice. Foremost is her endeavor to communicate the impossibility of communication, the ways we can never fully understand other people. Simultaneously, Tsang makes space for marginalized narratives through playing with modes of language that allow for openended understandings of others. Whether communicating through dance, poetry, translation, or other methods of storytelling, Tsang evades using language or images as agents of fixity, creating forms of connection that can accommodate queerness as a continual process of becoming. In the decade since The Shape of a Right Statement, Tsang has continued to address these themes as her practice has gained wider institutional recognition. In the past year alone, she was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Grant, nominated for the Hugo Boss Prize, and received a United States Artists fellowship. Tsang’s career success has positioned her in such a way that she now speaks about marginality from the institutional center. She is conscious of the ways that her position is all too easily framed as representative of an increased visibility of queer artists of color. Tsang aims to pivot the conversation away from visibility, toward legibility and communicability. “My practice is very social,” Tsang says. “I’ve always felt that making things is about communicating with people. I like to make films and especially documentary as a genre because it immediately brings up the problem of representation. Representation presupposes a subject, it presupposes individuality in this way that I like to try to challenge. Cinema can allow me to do that because it’s sort of magical. You can mess with time, you can mess with what it means to be a character or what it means to have interiority or a story.” Tsang first gained widespread recognition for her film Wildness, which premiered at MoMA in 2012—the same year she was in the Whitney Biennial and the New Museum Triennial simultaneously. The film came out of Tsang’s experience co-hosting a weekly party of the same name at a queer, Latinx and immigrant bar in Los Angeles called the Silver Platter, and mixes fiction and reality, telling the story of the bar through its owner, loyal patrons, and through the imagined voice of the bar itself. The methods Tsang developed in Wildness remain enduring qualities of her work. In subsequent films, she continues to be fascinated by translating real-life experience into fantasy

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and making work out of a collaborative process. Tsang’s community is a major part of her practice and she often creates work in collaboration with poet and scholar Fred Moten and her partner, performance artist boychild, among others. “I love to collaborate with musicians and performers,” Tsang explains. “I’m always looking for ways to translate my experience of someone live into a cinematic language. My practice is very collaborative and really about trying to create the circumstances for things to be possible and then let life unfold.” Outside of her collaborators, Tsang’s work is best contextualized alongside other multi-hyphenate artists born in the 1980s, including Korakrit Arunanondchai, Zackary Drucker, and Mariah Garnett, whose works also deal with the impossibility of language, recovering queer histories, and the disruption of a teleological understanding of time with cyclical strategies. “For me, the most important aspect of her work is that she has found a very radical and intriguing way of creating documentary film,” says GropiusBau director Stephanie Rosenthal, who is curating a large-scale survey exhibition of Tsang’s work at the Berlin museum, opening this September. Rosenthal continues, “Her work is so crucial because she draws cinematic parallels between the moving image, performance, and the experience of migration. Via the camera, dance choreography becomes a narrative language. Our show at the Gropius-Bau will follow this development from early works like DAMELO TODO to the most recent work.” When we talked, Tsang was finishing up a new film that debuted as part of the Sharjah Biennial in March. She had just returned from filming in Athens and on the storied island of Lesbos, which currently houses thousands of asylum seekers from the Middle East. Tsang describes the film as a “magical realist documentary” that centers on two women: one a photojournalist documenting the refugee crisis and the other a refugee. “The story is told from two different perspectives of two young women whose lives intertwined on this island,” Tsang explains. “This particular film is a two-channel film, there are two projections and two stories and I’m telling them simultaneously. I’ve become quite interested in what is possible when there’s this dual narrative or when using multiple imagery at the same time.” Like her recent video Duilian, which was filmed in China, Tsang’s new film contains dialogue in multiple languages. In fact, the new film contains no English at all. By including characters that entirely speak in Greek or Arabic, Tsang continues her career-long commitment to creating sites in which we can think through the imperfection of communication, but the importance of connection. “The feeling of communication is very elusive,” she says. “In being seen by another, there’s always an incompleteness to that understanding because you can’t know what someone else is experiencing and I think that’s why I often find myself in situations where I’m working in multiple languages. I like that gap, that potential of what gets missed when you try to communicate with others.”

Previous spread: Model Study (0X5A3281). Here: Model Study (0X5A3256), both 2019.

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BOB MEETS WORLD Ian Cheng’s latest creation, on view at the Venice Biennale this year, brings viewers ZJYLLU [V ZJYLLU ^P[O HY[PÄJPHS PU[LSSPNLUJL and its attendant uncanny realities.

BY RAHEL AIMA PORTRAIT BY NATALIA MANTINI

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COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND GLADSTONE GALLERY, NEW YORK AND BRUSSELS.

WHEN I SAT DOWN WITH ARTIST Ian Cheng, I was drinking a Diet Coke. We met in a third-floor office in New York’s Gladstone Gallery, where his solo exhibition, “BOB,” was recently on view. We were there to talk about the show’s eponymous star, a three-eyed algorithmic snake writhing across 18 screens in the ground floor gallery below, and the suite of instructional drawings, including a stunning thangka, that accompanied it, which became a sort of inspirational talisman for the artist. But somehow we kept returning to that bottle of soda. I’d been trying to cut out Coke, see. To change my habits and understand my motivations, in order to figure out and achieve my long-term goals, or something like it. I even started bullet journaling. Instead, I should have turned to Cheng, who had been spending his days reading philosophy and child psychology. His gentle pedagogical style unfurled additively, dissecting a concept down to its elements and then repeatedly returning to refine it. The Coke became “the gray cap, the clearness, the dark liquid, the red stripe,” and a recurring prop to explain the workings of his creation, from machine learning through to the Jungian “congress of demons” and “angels” that inform its every action.

“Maybe I’m into religion now,” Cheng smiled. Sitting with him in that white room high above his creations felt a lot like watching someone play a game on god mode. Fittingly, BOB is short for “bag of beliefs.” It’s an artificial lifeform sheathed in a fiery vermillion skin and covered in nubby beige bits that suggest a halfheartedly peeled piece of turmeric. It lives and dies in a spare, blushcolored environment whose curvature and single arched window suggest some kind of Rapunzel-like incarceration. Mostly, it just thrashes around, occasionally getting electrocuted or blown up, and dying. But more than anything, BOB is alive, replete with a personality. BOB’s squirmy undulations are closer to those inflatable men outside car dealerships, but it gambols like a puppy chasing a ball. It even seems to throw tantrums, pouting and stamping its many legs when it doesn’t get its way. An ambient, granulated score—Cheng worked with sound designer Jeremy Yang—creates a real sense of atmosphere, as well as a visceral sense of BOB’s body as it collides with other objects. Cheng is no stranger to worldbuilding, and even worked at George Lucas’s special effects studio for a time before he considered making art. “I love that he made every planet its own biome with its own culture, with its own people

Ian Cheng with the computers powering his inaugural Gladstone show. 192 culturedmag.com

with their own, you know, pots and pans and weapons and foods,” he says admiringly of the Star Wars universe. Cheng is known for creating emotionally robust animal avatars too. An older work, the otherworldly Emissaries trilogy from 2015–17, which will be on view in the Giardini at the Venice Biennale this summer, featured a Shiba Inu as protagonist (Cheng himself has a Corgi). It is also projected onto the wall of a former hospital and historic house at the Sharjah Biennial through the summer. When I saw it there, it was plaintively beautiful, but the dusty desert air conspired with the historic town to make it feel like a missive from the past instead of the future. With BOB, Cheng wanted to create an entirely different kind of interaction with the viewer, where the creature becomes like “a c-list Twitter celebrity or a Real Housewife or one of those YouTube stars, someone who has agency and personality and a life of their own when the cameras go off, but comes alive in relation to us, as viewers.” I think of the AI (aeai) stars of the Hindi soapis in Ian McDonald’s sci-fi novel River of Gods, a concept that seemed so far off when the book was published in 2004, but which BOB makes a reality. An earlier, “much stupider” iteration of BOB was shown at London’s Serpentine Galleries last spring, but that creature wasn’t able to do much more than recognize things and perhaps make inferences (green cap, same liquid, and red stripe? Probably also Diet Coke). Cheng realized that just as humans need a motivational framework—perhaps even desire it on a deep, primal level—so too does BOB. “The really exciting thing about BOB was to explore how its mind could be constructed in a motivated way,” he enthused, later adding, “I learned a lot about myself and a lot about human behavior by trying to actually make BOB. I never considered how much of intelligence is really simply about what you’re motivated by in the very near or far future.” BOB 1.0 was a snake too: Cheng chose the serpentine form because he’s “not trying to replicate human level intelligence. I mean, we are so far from that day. I can see the pathway to it, but we’re extremely far from that.” He adds that understanding the cognitive architecture of animals allow us to understand our own baser, primal instincts. As such, the Gladstone BOB is motivated by a number of limbic motivators which he calls demons. “You know, fight or flight, hunger, sleep, the need to explore. Each demon is governed by a little story or script. The eater demon, it’s motivated to find food and opportunities for food, simple as that.” Continuing the soda metaphor, he adds, “So when BOB now looks at the Diet Coke, BOB says, ‘Oh, that’s a tool for my eater demon to fill its story.’” An empty bottle, meanwhile, would be registered not as empty but as “irrelevant,” while one filled with snakes wouldn’t be understood as dangerous so much as an obstacle impeding snacktime. Everything BOB encounters is perceived as either a tool, an obstacle or irrelevant.

“I learned a lot about myself and a lot about human behavior by trying to actually make BOB. I never considered how much of intelligence is really simply about what you’re motivated by in the very near or far future.”

Of course, there might equally be another demon that, like those soccer enthusiast bovines, just wants to play with the object and kick it around a bit. This is how BOB learns, Pavlov-like, through interacting with its environment and the steady stream of objects dropping from the sky. Rocks, mushrooms, shrubs and starfish; pale green SpinyFruit, mysterious BlackOrbs and gemlike purple LuckStones, and the ominous ProximityBomb. All of these objects are available via the downloadable BOB Shrine app, where users can make “offerings” which manifest as the aforementioned angels. These “angels” compete with the demons to direct BOB’s behaviors, but the magnitude of their influence depends on trust. For example, if I repeatedly assure BOB that bombs are delicious like Diet Coke and it repeatedly gets blown up, it will stop trusting my shrine. Initially this congress of demons was unweighted—”when we opened the show, we gave him a fresh brain”—but over time, it builds up an understanding of the world around it. Importantly, it retains this knowledge when it is reborn, but his works’ generative nature means that anything can, and does, happen. For example, one of the Emissaries simulations pits a group of meerkat-like characters against a mutational plant. When it becomes a threat, they reliably attack it. But when the work was on view the Carnegie Museum of Art, Cheng relates an instance where the plant hadn’t mutated much, so the meerkats turned on one of their own instead, killing it off. To an outside viewer it must have looked like a “Lord of the Flies” reenactment, but as its creator-parent, the situation was even more jarring for Cheng. As we talk, I’ve been mentally creating a Twitter bio for Cheng: Artist, Child Psychologist, Philosopher, Brain Surgeon, Dad. I later see that his real bio is “entropy wrangler” which feels fitting because what the casual viewer might not notice is that the offerings, just like discarded leaves or mushrooms after the rain, not only decompose with time, but do so according to their modelled internal temperatures and wetness factors. Because—how can you create life without planning for death too?

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Linda wearing N°49 Alternarrative pillowdo and N°46 TheLindaSwanson Motherdaughter jumper, rue Portefoin Paris

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FEELING BLESS(ED)

The neo-Dada spirit of BLESS stretches through fashion and art with wit and charm. BY JEPPE UGELVIG PHOTOGRAPHY BY SARA DERAEDT

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The current relationship between art

and fashion is so fraught with quickly spun branding tactics and corporate merchandising deals that it’s sometimes hard to have much faith in the strength of their hybridity. It’s also what makes the encounter with the strange, idiosyncratic and far-spanning oeuvre of the design collective BLESS so joyful and alluring—a reminder that when done right, art/fashion collaborations have the capacity to subvert our understanding of both. BLESS’s design universe is as deep as it is durational, and is surrounded by an impenetrable elusiveness that feels increasingly rare in today’s pumped-up, hyper-visual fashion economy. A fashion line, an art practice, a design laboratory, a furniture brand and a concept store with an in-house hairdresser: BLESS is all this and more, and even after years of studying their work, I continue to get surprised and confused with what may best be described as their many different “fashion activities.” Part of BLESS’s perceived alterity is not only their continental European origins, but their roots in the fashion world of the 1990s, which in both social values and style represented a very different mode of fashion production from today. The duo was born in 1993 when Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag, two design graduates from Austria and Germany respectively, met at the fashion talent award Concours International des Jeunes Créateurs de la Mode, a predecessor to today’s LVMH Prize. They launched BLESS two years later with a cryptic poster campaign in the streets of Vienna and Berlin, simply titled “Debut,” comprised of ambiguous fashion images promoting an unknown fashion object—followed by their first official product, a limitededition series of wigs made out of recycled fur, sourced from Heiss’s family business. Famously, the project came to the attention of Martin Margiela, the doyen of European fashion avant-garde of the time, who promptly dressed the models of his much-lauded Fall 1997 show in the fuzzy line of accessories. Assuming residence in Paris and Berlin—where the two designers, now in their late 40s, have remained ever since, running their collaborative practice mainly over Skype—BLESS joined a young and emerging fashion scene developing between Paris and New York, characterized by experimentation, community and an active cross-pollination with art. Between editorial spaces such as Bernadette Corporation’s Made in USA and Olivier Zahm’s Purple, as well as American peers such as Susan Cianciolo (who remains a close friend of the duo today), BLESS pursued the making of its own clandestine mythology through experimental and subversive communication and production tactics, with a nod to Margiela, with whom they share a

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relentless evasion of identity (the couple are never photographed, and enjoy remaining out of the industry spotlight as much as possible). The surreal yet profoundly functional quality of “Furwig” (“Fits every style! Cut & try!” was the cheeky slogan of the collection) came to define the basic ethos of the collective’s output. Through garments, accessories, furniture and a plethora of other design goods, BLESS have developed an extraordinary set of strategies for expanding the notion of design through processes of deconstruction, recycling and repurposing, always with a pragmatism in mind: Knee-length “bootsocks” made in leather and denim; a hairbrush made from human hair; make-up postcards with built-in eyeshadow; “Cable Jewellery” enriching your ugly electrical cables with pearls, crystals and lace and fur trimmings; a collection of “shopping support” garments to aid the wearer in carrying unprecedented amounts of purchased goods; a fur hammock, transferring the convenience of the lounge object into a wintery and less exotic context. Always marked by progressive numbers and released in a limited edition between 20 and 2,000, the duo’s bi-annual “collections” have little concern for consistent fashion retail potential in mind, yet their objects somehow seem to fit perfectly into what most people would call everyday life. Their rigorous emphasis on re-utilization and reassembling, with at times nonsensical outcomes, evokes a kind of neoDada spirit, as well as a kind of design idealism through materials. But by no means is BLESS all joke: underwriting the entire brand aesthetic is a deep appreciation of and raw experimentation with manual techniques such as knitting, embroidery and crochet work, a language that has re-appeared in the present through much younger labels and practices, like Eckhaus Latta and Women’s History Museum. Over time, BLESS has become a stable brand for a certain kind of design-oriented consumer; sophisticated, tonguein-cheek and intellectual—just like the products themselves. While having maintained a relatively stable (if subtle) relationship with the art world through solo and group exhibitions since the start of their collaboration (including those at institutions such as MoMu in Antwerp, Belgium, the Vitra Design Museum Gallery in Rhein, Germany and the Art Institute of Chicago), BLESS’s relationship with the mainstream fashion world has—as opposed to most of the peers of their generation—remained spontaneous, analytical and, most importantly, independent. In retrospect, their manifold and playful projects crystallize as not only formally inventive but prophetic of a fashion industry to come: a customizable shoe collection, a

N°26 Cable jewellery.

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From top: N°42 Jewelled eating iron silver; N°14 Shopping supports carriage grey. Right: N°14 Shopping supports lafayette bag with fur and leather.

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collection consististing entirely of collaborations with big brands, a traveling exhibition and store (Hello Nike! Hello Vetements! Hello every pop-up store in the world!). Working through a period when fashion underwent a radical transformation and acceleration, from sub-cultural art to ubiquitous and global forms of popular culture, BLESS’s archive of projects marks a history of design innovations that would eventually be adopted by the corporate fashion world in the pursuit for ever-greater profit. BLESS, meanwhile, are always moving swiftly forward, shifting into (and out of) the fields of visual merchandising, wallpaper design and furniture production, such as with their 60th collection, “Lobby Conquerors,” which premiered at the Chicago Architecture Biennial in 2017. To me, the most fascinating and admirable aspect of BLESS’s ongoing interrogation of fashion as a place of radical epistemological imagination is their recurring critique of fashion’s systems of production, communication and exchange. Instead of working “against the system,” the duo employs the industry’s strategies of seduction, hype and innovation in order to put those very strategies into question. BLESS N° 46, for example, was

born out of the two designers’ struggle to keep up with the unreasonable speed of fashion production after both had given birth; so instead of a new collection, they decided to reach out to their network of friends and clients, accepting requests for any new products they might need. From key chains and grocery shopping bags to ponchos and baby sweaters, the collection took form as a kind of on-demand fashion, a brilliant strategy for survival, but also a stark foresight of today’s fashion world. Brilliantly, however, when the season ended, the duo decided to keep the service open, allowing for new additions—including prominent ones by Colette, Slam Jam and Bjarne Melgaard—while still categorizing them under the 2012 collection. By continuously adding products to a by-gone season, BLESS collapses fashion’s own frenzied production logic onto itself, putting the entire industry into question not with any hard-line antagonism, but through playful subversion. Proposing re-thinking and re-directing fashion practice and business as a form of critique, the blessed duo functions, as they themselves have described their business, as “a visionary substitute to make the near future worth living for.”

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Desire and the Underworld Charline von Heyl’s paintings treat structure like a game, which is to say, they keep us playing. BY GABY COLLINS-FERNANDEZ

WITHIN MOMENTS OF ARRIVING AT “Snake Eyes,” Charline von Heyl’s retrospective at the Hirshhorn, a guard asked me if I knew the secret to Melencolia (2008), a painting divided into numbered squares, many of which are blocked by a large, orb-ish mass. Every row and column had to add up to 34, he said. “Do you want to know the numbers that you can’t see?” he asked me. “I’ve been looking at it for a while, so I figured it out.” He told me and I immediately forgot. I wanted to ask the guard what those numbers meant for him, literally hidden and yet illuminated: if they helped to pass the time, if he imagined away the globe in the center of the painting in order to place each numeral in its logically required square, which seemed to me a madness. Of course, madness is Melencolia’s gray moon, the primordial and almost Chagall-ish vortex hearkening back to Dürer’s etching of the same name and the bad luck of black bile. An artist wants to conjure the spirit and finds that they have tools only to measure that desire. It turns out that my feelings are structured a lot like von Heyl’s paintings. The distances they articulate between images, icons, and forms help me understand emotional distance and the contours of moods. I see their hard and soft irregularities, the gazes they articulate through attitude, their declarative weirdness, their absolutely clear diversions, and I recognize these as features of my interior world. Feelings announce themselves to

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me and then scurry away, leaving the imprint of outlines that I know well— exhilaration, coyness, rage, confusion—and they loiter ineffably, layering in clouds that have at best tenuous, tangential relationships to the scenes playing out in the world before my eyes. Compare this to the frontal line comprising bowling pins and a longnecked bottle that dominates the compositions of Dunesday (2016) and Plato’s Pharmacy (2015), which hang adjacent in the exhibition. I recognize these based on their outlines and the variations of color and texture that hint at glass and the markings of pins. The objects are foregrounded and asserted as subjects, given that privileged “aboutness” in the paintings, and then set aside, almost, as I wonder what to do with them and what they have to do with their environment. My eye moves around them and beyond at the rest of the paintings’ surfaces, seeing a passage that resembles a green curtain among smoke and arrows, another an inverted, striped shadow-wave. No matter, the pins and bottle continue to inform my looking, a reminder to take aim at something. They announce themselves in my brain whenever my eye passes them over, like an alarm whose buzzing repositions me in time and my to-do list: don’t get lost in gesture; remember that a painting can be something until it isn’t anymore, at the edge of an outline; time to try to make sense of it all. There are other instances where recognizable forms emerge from

Melencolia (2008)

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proximity and von Heyl’s wit. Take Killersmile (2011), whose eponymous gesture rearranges stripes that look like wallpaper or tepid modernism, pulling an emoticon-like smirk from a slash (albeit with astute nods; I saw Daniel Buren, Charlotte Perkins Gilman via The Yellow Wallpaper, and the language of advertising). Or Carlotta (2013), where one eye and a mouth are able to make a woman’s face immediately recognizable. This signifying allows some snakey, painted-over marks to suggest hair, or a brain; half an oval of dots becomes half of the face in shadow; and some striated pinks and browns start to make folds under a chin. It does not fall into portrait or character—it is more like a mirage, preying on the human urge to find faces everywhere. Part of the drama is the brash presumption of this eye and mouth to reconfigure otherwise unrelated painted elements into their own pictorial agendas. Since I saw this painting at Petzel in 2013, this face has become my personal image of Charline von Heyl. In a recent interview with Jason Farago, she says, “It’s called Carlotta because, as a child, I always thought Carlotta was the coolest name on earth. It’s my fetish object of a name, projected into the painting.” To wit: Carlotta is my fetish object of Charline von Heyl, projected into this essay. It is not irrelevant to my fetish that “Charline” and “Carlotta” are such close names, both variants on “Charles,” subjected to slightly different filters. I could squint and misrecognize the two, visually and etymologically, which cements the terms of my devotion and is validated by her propensity to pun in titles and imagery. Von Heyl plays as adeptly with manipulating experiences of genre and format as she does with forms and surfaces. The conditions of making meaning are, on every level, up for debate. Looking at the tubular shape in the center of Slow Tramp (2012), you might think of a vase, the sense of still life reinforced by stripes resembling wallpaper. Then, eyes drifting along its top edge, the painting shifts to a landscape with a wet, violet-gray sky and a winding black path. Neither of these experiences is denied by the painting. I see them as two-dimensional manifestations of a more complicated object, sides of a lenticular print that shifts with me when I move. As in a lenticular, I understand that whatever happens to be visible is purposefully incomplete. The image is completed in the mind. In Slow Tramp, this variability becomes content, as a relief from subject matter or a return to it. In their incessant articulation and erasure of things and moves we recognize, von Heyl’s paintings let us relinquish the false binaries that litter our thinking of representation, of which none is more repeated or insidious than its implied opposition to abstraction. Rather, the works suggest that the two describe different parts of the same process. Abstraction, as insinuated by its etymology, drags what is nameable away from its usual surfaces. Representations confront us with our distance from the things we think we already know precisely by reminding us of them. This is also like a lenticular. During my two-day visit to D.C. I saw “Snake Eyes” twice, with a visit to the National Gallery in between. They were not dissimilar experiences, but then, I was looking for connections. Wandering the halls of European painting in an unfamiliar museum, I was attentive to things I already knew: painters, genres, penitent Marys, sliced fruits. Wandering the rooms of “Snake Eyes” is comparable. I collected the appearance of various widths of marks, a particular acidic yellow, the presence and placement of a head, squiggly grids, straight-edged grids, large obstructions, etc.—as I tried to find the meaning in their repetition, the clues they might give me about the exhibition as a whole. Von Heyl’s references are prodigious and generous,

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offering viewers ways of entering the work on their own terms. They also replicate the experience of seeing this language of symbols, colors, paint handling, and materiality as a code, a language spoken by and between paintings, interpreted but not spoken by people. Talking about painting can feel like pushing rocks from a mouthshaped hole, like the one in Igitur (2008), a work I recognized on sight from reproductions in magazines and on the internet. It wasn’t the same at all: the red was immediately brighter and more spatially rebellious, the lavender background less atmospheric, moodier. I had for years thought of it as an abstract symbol, perhaps related to a stylized letter in an illuminated manuscript, but in its presence, I was certain the crimson shapes were lips glowing from the exertion of producing inscrutable, possibly meaningless lumps which nonetheless continuously tumbled out. In an interview in the show’s catalog, von Heyl says that paintings “are these weird looking-holes, time tunnels so to speak.” It’s true; I always look at paintings in my present, and a painting I am looking at always pre-exists my present, so there is a kind of time warp at work. Usually, we think of this as looking back, which is technically true. However, paintings (and, one can say, art objects in general), also represent the specific present of their making, both indexically, in having been made at a specific time, and metaphorically, in the sense that they are made in relation to their time. In this sense, looking at art produces an amalgamated present through a slip of tenses: the work was made in a present tense which, though having passed, is simultaneous with a present tense of its experience. In looking at any painting, five minutes or 500 years old, these two presents commingle. This way of thinking about viewership makes the idea of aspiring to total newness less important than being able to communicate being of one’s time, a high order. It’s an audacious gambit on the part of a painter, to convince a person to try to talk with an inanimate object. Sometimes von Heyl’s paintings have the quality of a time tunnel laid bare on a surface, as in The Language of the Underworld (2017). The title reads like a wry take on the Death of Painting, which von Heyl has survived at least twice between Düsseldorf, where she began her career, and New York, where she moved and has had a studio since the mid-’90s. Just as wryly, with a nod to David Maurer’s linguistic study of crime circles, it suggests that being a painter requires the ability to code-switch between the underworld languages that are the parlance of painting and the genteel world of the living. The Language of the Underworld suggests a jigsaw puzzle, with a repeated, disembodied head looking out over piles of forms and cryptic, largely illegible notes. Among the ones I could decipher, three read: “[W—] the Posthumous,” “Rome [upon?] Rome,” and “Handsome Little Shadows!” Making paintings is always building Rome over Rome, the new and the old casting jumbled shadows impossible to untangle; moving forward inevitably because time does. These knotted shades are everywhere in von Heyl’s work, too sprawling to enumerate, built in as part of the paintings’ surfaces and their underlying communicative structure. Even the head in The Language of the Underworld looks translated via Dubuffet and Picasso, certainly gangsters themselves, equal parts classical ruin and cipher of subjectivity. The paintings whisper as seductively and obscurely with the chatty forms of dead paintings as with us, the living, in front of them, and, in doing so, bring us all to the same plane, as though von Heyl has taken it upon herself to mediate the conversation, false idols, miscommunications and all. Show us how, Carlotta.

Carlotta (2013)

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BouN Harold Ancart takes Kat Herriman through his studio and mind as he prepares for a Public Art Fund commission and Frieze New York.

I DON’T THINK I EVER NOTICED the handball courts of New York—or just rarely and only then through trees and fences on my way home from work. What eventually drew my attention wasn’t their canvaslike geometries and the graffiti they inevitably attract, nor the city’s slapdash beige band-aid responses, but instead the smack of the ball— making its sonorous boomerang from hand to wall and back again. But that was before. Now, I can’t stop seeing their accidental abstractions. They are everywhere. And maybe it’s a curse because they are so humble and complete that they sneak up on you. When I tell Harold Ancart this, the artist recommends The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal (2001), Matt McCormick’s short, tongue-in-cheek documentary narrated by Miranda July, which does in fact provide a momentary prophylaxis. “Graffiti removal has become one of the more intriguing and important art movements of the early 21st century with roots in Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and Russian Constructivism,” July rattles as inadvertent compositions flash in and out of view. “What makes graffiti removal particularly intriguing is that the artists creating it are unconscious of their artistic achievements.” Ancart certainly doesn’t miss the merits of the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation’s painters, nor their illegal counterparts. In fact, he is creating a kind of homage to both parties this April in the form of a mammoth handball court sculpture, backed by the Public Art Fund for Brooklyn’s Cadman Plaza. When discussing the installation’s details, commissioning curator Daniel S. Palmer connects the work to an earlier installation the Public Art Fund erected on Cadman Plaza: David Hammons’s Higher Goals (1986). “Like Hammons’s basketball nets, Harold’s sculpture won’t be about the sport of handball but perhaps more about a court as a flexible monument, a space for others to be in dialogue,” he explains.

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“Of course, I hope that people play, but I also hope they host impromptu concerts, take photographs and picnic.” Ancart concurs, and even goes as far as to say he’d be happy if someone pissed on it. Vandalism in all its forms is almost proof of concept. “The handball court is something invisible, a ghost in this city,” Ancart says. “It’s something where if you don’t want to see it you will never see it, but it’s everywhere. The court is an extension of the playground, so it is by its definition abstract. What makes it useful to me is that it is already framed: two abstract canvases put together to become something functional.” Like the city laborers who wet-roll over hard-won tags with only coverage in mind, Ancart plans to wash his commission in his idiosyncratic psychedelics as if the multiple-ton sculpture was just another stretcher. In preparation, this February, the Belgian transplant was testing concretefriendly colors amidst a sea of wooden maquettes-turned-sculptures, the first of which he made more than two years ago. Ancart’s practice revolves around these exercises of seemingly endless repetition. They help the painter get “out of his head” and into the impulses of his hand. This is a man who brings watercolors in his carry-on to pass the time between New York and Tokyo. “Painting has hardly anything to do with control in that it only becomes interesting when you almost forget you are doing anything at all,” he says. “There are the things in life you do that define you: he is a writer, he is a painter, he is a lawyer, but those titles hardly say anything about you. What makes you unique is not that you are a lawyer but the way you love or the way you pick your nose or the way you walk. When you forget, you are natural. You have to have that when you paint. I guess if everyone was following the movement of their own arm, everyone would end up being a very good painter, but, people, they like to blend with the rest.”

nce

Untitled (2019)

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As if in opposition, Ancart’s own handiwork is identifiable on sight. His paintings hypostatize his en plein air expeditions into the subconscious as obsessive, bold, increasingly overlapping strokes of oil sticks. The final compositions bear the physicality of their making and conjure forms that sometimes appear like objects from our environment. Often they appear as in the fractal vision of an acid trip—first like towers, then fire, then crystals, then desert plants and mountains. The ambiguity encourages the eye to make its own travels. I remember Ancart’s 2018 exhibition at Clearing where great swaths of flames lapped at you in one room and in another you stared down depths of a tiny blackened swimming pool. There were lonely icebergs in ruby red seas and crystal canyons in between. The opening night, populated by a beer-warmed crowd, could’ve passed for an apocalypse-viewing party. This

Untitled (2017)

friction of content ignited the paintings and sculptures, giving them a roaring sense of life. It was a real fire and not only because it looked like one. The paradox of intention insufflates all of Ancart’s work, a hypocrisy he gleefully cops to: “You know when we were talking about how having intentions and vanity obstructs the work? Well, I lied. It is impossible not to have any intentions because having the intention of not having an intention is a trap. When you paint, there are always things you expect to happen and an equivalency of things you don’t expect to happen at all. Maybe a lot of people focus on what they can control and forget about what they cannot control but I say, let’s do the opposite. What you can control you’ve already earned. Why would you pursue that direction when you can pursue a trail that you don’t know?” Ancart’s philosophy seems to ground itself in his own improbable, left-turn trajectory. During our studio visit, he recalls spending his early years escaping into his drawings so as to avoid “trouble” and flunking as a consequence. He quips that his short, delayed jaunt into undergraduate

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political science (“two weeks maximum”) came out of the same now-what urgency that returned him to art and eventually to school at Belgium’s École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuel de la Cambre. “When they said, ‘Mr. Ancart, we believe in what you are doing and capable of,’ that was one of the first times I felt like I was headed in a right direction,” he says. “It gave me confidence.” The high faded with graduation. The self-proclaimed draftsman balked at a professional landscape dominated by post-conceptual peers and the European collectors who love them. “Brussels was empty,” the artist says, before smiling. “New York was open.” It was in his adopted U.S. homeland that Ancart first met Olivier Babin, a fellow European defector. Introduced at an opening at New York’s 303 Gallery opening, the two artists formed an instant bond that they parlayed into both a lifelong friendship and the formation of Clearing gallery. “He was ready to do everything it takes to become an artist,” Babin says of the first year of their friendship. He describes Ancart as almost like his mirror, but different. “I saw in Harold something I was not sure I saw in myself.” In 2011, Clearing opened its first show: “Badlands,” a pairing of Ancart and Jacob Kassay. That night Babin became Ancart’s first dealer (a title he now shares with David Zwirner). “Harold taught me how to have the right attitude in life, how to walk my own line,” Babin continues. “Without Harold, there would be no Clearing and still to this day I’m not sure I completely understand how it all happened.” To people who know them, the bond between Babin and Ancart is, at the same time, readily transparent and infused with mystery. I find myself similarly perplexed when trying to encapsulate their relationship’s impact on Ancart’s work, but a decade later, I am able to admire the threads of their first shows together and the way they reveal the artist’s first bites of the U.S. landscape. In each, one finds a moment of digestion. In each, Ancart subsumes yet another passage of local vernacular, assimilating it into his aesthetic tautology, gaining strength with each mouthful. A seminal cross-country trip in 2014 (lovingly distilled into a pair of artist books: Driving Is Awesome and There Is No There) is the closest thing to a road map Ancart offers. Traveling with his friend Colin Morvan across the green belly of the U.S. midlands and the alien terrains of the Southwest, the artist tricked his ride into an easel and their lackadaisical route into a well. “To paint in the trunk of a car is special because the situation forces you to give absolutely no fucks at all, and that is great,” he writes in the short essayistic prelude to Driving Is Awesome. “This attitude allows you to navigate more freely, and to dare doing things that you otherwise could not. Giving zero fucks keeps you away from vanity. The back of the car keeps you away from vanity; so does the cold.” Contending with weather does not appeal to most painters, but for Ancart the environment is not a condition to be overcome but rather

BOTH IMAGES BY JSP ART PHOTOGRAPHY; COURTESY THE ARTIST, CLEARNING AND DAVID ZWIRNER

something to be deployed as a bulwark against the maniacal splashes of the ego. Whether erecting concrete staircases in the bustling heart of a Jaipur palace or capturing a red-eye sky from the air, Ancart seeks to employ the elemental materials around him in service of the sublime. And the most precious ingredient in this palette may be Ancart’s voracious desire to see better. Or in his words, “I always break things down to what I need.” Untitled (2018) His latest body of paintings exemplify this kind of critical looking. On his work bench sits a leaf pile of watercolor matchsticks he made on a recent trip, which serve as the foundational fodder for Ancart’s two-person booth with David Zwirner at Frieze New York in May. Paired with Christopher Williams’s exacting photographs, Ancart will unveil what first appears to be a large-scale painted portrait series. “Matches are the thing you see but do not look at,” he says. “They look like people but they also clearly look like the rest of the paintings. I like to go around the question because there are a million ways to paint a match and maybe you can find one way, and then you find millions of variations within that choice.” Like his handball courts, mountains and icebergs, the matches insist on mobility even if only by their associations with hotels, restaurants and cigarettes. Ancart’s recent show at David Kordansky, “The Grand Flâneur,” sticks in my brain. The twee wandering paradigm doesn’t quite suit Ancart in my own estimation, but it gets at the lackadaisical mode from which he at first appears to drink it all in. In “Death to the Flâneur,” Josephine Livingstone and Lovia Gyarkye’s 2017 New Republic article, the authors make the argument that Charles Baudelaire’s historical character is a myth, and that what remains for contemporary peripatetic souls is best described as cosmopolitanism. They argue that the cosmopolitanism, while still haunted by “its own theoretical problems (its upper-middle-class aesthetic, its exclusion of forced migrants),” represents an agent that does not passively ingest its surroundings but instead actively seeks new experiences and the marks they leave. This ambition is in Ancart’s work. He is anything but casual in his observations and he’s certainly not in the business of reporting on them. Ancart isn’t a seeker of intention or realism or stories. When I look into the flared eyes of his matches and the rutilant horizons of his handball maquettes, I see randomness and intention in love, biting each other’s necks. I’m sure they’ll make it up to each other this April when paint hits the pavement. I’ll walk by but I won’t stop.

“

There are the things in life you do [OH[ KLÄUL `V\! OL PZ H ^YP[LY OL PZ H WHPU[LY OL PZ H SH^`LY I\[ [OVZL [P[SLZ OHYKS` ZH` HU`[OPUN HIV\[ `V\ >OH[ makes you unique is not that you are H SH^`LY I\[ [OL ^H` `V\ SV]L VY [OL ^H` `V\ WPJR `V\Y UVZL VY [OL ^H` `V\ ^HSR >OLU `V\ MVYNL[ `V\ HYL UH[\YHS @V\ OH]L [V OH]L [OH[ ^OLU `V\ WHPU[ 0 N\LZZ PM L]LY`VUL ^HZ MVSSV^PUN [OL TV]LTLU[ VM [OLPY V^U HYT L]LY`VUL ^V\SK LUK \W ILPUN H ]LY` NVVK WHPU[LY I\[ WLVWSL [OL` SPRL [V ISLUK ^P[O [OL YLZ[ —Harold Ancart

”

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A Match Made in Heaven Named after the Greek goddess of divine retribution, Emily Segal and Martti Kalliala’s consultancy Nemesis collects market intel and transforms it into art. BY FIONA ALISON DUNCAN

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meeting with Nemesis, a new think tank and consultancy with nodes in New York, Berlin, and Helsinki, its two founders, Emily Segal and Martti Kalliala, informed me of an enterprise similar to their own. Also founded by a man and a woman, this UK-based “duo that does strategy,” they told me, “is funnily enough named Rival.” Though the members of Rival are in fact friends with Nemesis, “it’s kind of unclear to us,” Segal said, “if we actually do similar work, or if it just seems like we do similar work.” Having spent the last hour asking rudimentary questions about what Nemesis does, it made perfect sense to me that this Rival business seemed similarly opaque from an outside perspective. Opacity is endemic to their business. A think tank suggests a hard exterior, unbreachable, potentially lethal (what’s inside is that valuable). The term “strategy” also has a military etymology; it’s Greek-cum-French for the “art of the general.” Kalliala, for instance, likens strategy work he’s done to being “higher up in a value chain” of a building process (his background is in architecture), “or a decision-making process, working in phase zero or minus one.” As for consulting, he describes it as, “giving biased advice.” When I asked what his biases were, he replied, “That’s a good question,” then paused for a while before answering. I met Kalliala, who is from Finland, in his home in Berlin, which doubles, or will, as Nemesis’s office. It was 5pm in Berlin, 9am in Los Angeles, where Kalliala’s New York-born partner, Segal, had been based for a few weeks. When she joined us on Skype, Kalliala picked up his laptop and waved it around the top floor of his highrise place to show her the progress on their office. A lilac and apricot sunset surrounded us; he and I had already been up there for 20 minutes. Right before Segal rang, Kalliala was elaborating on his biases. “I think,” Kalliala eventually suggested, “the biases have to do with this like, truly multidisciplinary knowledge.” Both he and Segal are what he called “career queer.” Trained in architecture, Kalliala previously worked for OMA, the Rotterdam firm founded by Rem Koolhaas. He also writes and has an ongoing electronic music project called Amnesia Scanner. Segal is best known for cofounding K-HOLE, a collective that made ambiguous trend reports as an art gesture between 2011 and 2016. She’s also worked as the Creative Director of the website Genius, and for 2x4, a global design consultancy that services clients such as Chanel, Starbucks, Nike, Google, and the

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Guggenheim Museum. Segal’s first novel, Mercury Retrograde, is being shopped around by an agent right now. “The Venn diagram that Emily and I ended up building across competencies and domains—” Kalliala claimed as their bias. But, he was quick to add, “I wouldn’t want to articulate it in a higher resolution than that.” Once on the line, Segal asked for an update on our interview so far. She laughed when we relayed Kalliala’s definition of consulting. “I tend to say it’s answering directed questions,” she said quite articulately—when Segal speaks, she shows the authority of a God, or a Goddess, perhaps Nemesis, the Greek goddess of divine retribution and her company’s namesake. “We give structured advice around certain questions that are usually strategic or creative in nature to help our clients reach certain goals around audiences or expression or other business targets.” Among Nemesis’s impressive client list are Rimowa, an LVMH-owned suitcase company; Virgil Abloh, the creative director of Louis Vuitton and Off-White; and Full Node, a Berlin-based blockchain company. In less than two years, they’ve made “a really weird manifesto” for True Religion Brand Jeans; become the Creative Directors of Buffy, a new New Yorkbased comforter company; done culture research for MTV; and they were working, when I visited with them, on a secret commission from Art Basel. When appropriate, Kalliala and Segal intend to package knowledge cultivated through their client work for a wider public. “Whatever we can share, if valuable,” Kalliala told me, “we want to release independently.” So far, this second activation of their practice doesn’t function to demystify their work, but rather adds the glamor of art to it. Last year, inspired in part by luxury research they accomplished with Rimowa and Virgil Abloh, Nemesis erected an installation at the Guggenheim Bilbao. Titled HEAVEN (LUXURY = DEATH), this Tower of Babel-like structure, made of 1,200 rolls of branded adhesive tape, came with an audio work—written by Nemesis and sung by the angelic Colin Self—that figured luxury as, “the absence of all desire,” and so death-like, or heavenly. “For us,” Segal said, “heaven is an environment of 100% design and 0% chaos.” Heaven is but one of many real and imaginary architectural spaces that Kalliala and Segal have been writing about. A luxury boardroom, a Burning Man playa, and a sensory deprivation chamber are others. These visions, informed by Nemesis’s first year of intel generation, will be published in their first, forthcoming book, SPACE.

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For the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum’s renovation project, Hood Design Studio created a sculpture garden that harmonized the architecture of the building with the museum’s original landscape. Pictured here is Gustav and Ulla Kraitz’s installation Apples (2005).

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than Meets the Walter Hood’s Oakland-based Hood Design Studio brings together ideas around landscape, art and urbanism to create public spaces that place community engagement at their center. His re-examination of history allows for buried truths to emerge: the narratives hidden in every constructed environment—and the communities that made them. Cultured’s Landscape Editor Lily Kwong sits down with Hood to discuss the role of storytelling in his work and the importance of palimpsests.

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Lily Kwong: You’ve been called a community-whisperer. What is your view on the role of public engagement in architecture? What does communityled design look like to you? Walter Hood: There has to be some kind of public engagement. For my studio, it’s never been about having a mandate to make sure you’ve dotted i’s and crossed t’s. As a person working and educating in architecture, landscape architecture and art, the things I make are for people, so there has to be a relationship between people who are engaged in the setting that I’m creating work for. The best way I can have that conversation with them is through some kind of engagement, which takes many different forms. It depends on what conversation I’m having and that differs from place to place. Engagement is real when it’s not about putting Post-its on the wall. It’s not about “kumbaya” moments or arriving at the least common denominator. It’s not about someone winning or losing. It’s about a conversation, for me to know and understand the people and the place in which I’m working. How does your heritage and personal story impact your design approach? What is the importance of storytelling in your work? Your visualization of the Brooks map at the International African American Museum in Charleston, your “Double Consciousness” installation—which addresses the complicated history of former president Woodrow Wilson—and your proposal for the Boston memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King all come to mind. It’s everything! When I was learning my discipline, my identity had very little place in that. I got out of school and began working, and still my identity had no place in the discipline in which I was working. It wasn’t until grad school, where I worked with a few people at UC Berkeley, that I gained the courage to begin to say: I’m an African-American. I’ve got a different way of thinking of things. Everything—history, storytelling—that had been quiet in me was kind of awakened, and allowed me to think about my identity. I started to believe I was a storyteller; I understood why I began telling stories. I’m from North Carolina and was raised by my grandmother. I found that the things I have to say were literally a part of that storytelling imagination. That’s completely different from a narrative, because not everything is truth—but it’s a way of getting people to hear and see something that you can see, something that they’re unable to. It’s led me to think in a totally different way than how I work and make things. I think one of the tropes—or one of the places where one can get caught up—is when one takes that identity and becomes so hermetic within that view that the outside starts to define you. Whether I’m working at the Broad Museum or in the Rosa Parks neighborhood in Detroit, they’re the same thing to me, to a certain degree. Both projects are about making landscape and telling a story about the place. It freaks some people out sometimes.

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How has Oakland’s landscape, both ecologically and culturally, inﬂuenced your work? One thing that differs between the East and West Coasts is that the West Coast is about prospect, and the East Coast is about refuge. On the East Coast, you’re in it, always. You really gotta get out to have a view. Here, I get a view every day. I’m standing at my window right now in West Oakland and

Hood focuses on public projects as a way to engage the dialogue between spaces

and the bodies that occupy them.

I can see the Oakland hills, the Claremont Hotel, the bay. Even though people in this neighborhood are in a marginal spot, there are always ways out visually. I think that is really important for people. I wanted to live in Oakland, particularly West Oakland, because I wanted to be around people who look like me. I want to see and experience the diversity of the East Bay—racially and economically. With the decline in black populations in major urban areas, how does your studio address gentriﬁcation through design? We live in a capitalist society and at this point in time we don’t have a federal housing program. We don’t have an infrastructure that helps a lot of neighborhoods. One of the things we try to do through the work and telling particular stories is to create palimpsest—so when change occurs, there’s something left from the previous culture and a way of finding your way back home. That memory is important! In my neighborhood, there are beautiful Victorian houses, but they aren’t valued. They’re actually devalued for the market. We try to bring value to places, so that the people who are in them see that value and won’t give it up easily. Sometimes it’s just simple acts, like making a street cleaner or painting a building brighter colors. We also believe that landscapes are not empty, but full. There is always something there. The Hill Greenprint project in Pittsburgh argued that the neighborhood was not shrinking, it’s just more landscape and less people at this moment. And maybe we shouldn’t try to fill it up again. Again, it’s about value. When things are devalued, it’s easy to remove people. Signs saying “we buy houses cash” devalue a place. You never see these signs in valued neighborhoods.

You have said contemporary architecture and urban design have failed to incorporate African and Afro-descended aesthetics—and AfricanAmerican populations at that. What has been your experience as a black designer in this ﬁeld where your point of view is underrepresented? It’s a sticky problem. I don’t really believe that there isn’t African-American architecture. This country is a melting pot and African-Americans have contributed to possibly all styles of architecture. Think of the White House, which was built by enslaved labor. Enslaved labor built the University of Virginia (UVA). The idea that there has to be clear Africanism or symbolic representations to be authentic devalues our contributions to design. Again, it’s about the palimpsest—the physical reminders in places that can tell the truth and give value to those voices. Our work at UVA and the Village of Nauck in Arlington, Virginia says we were here! We were present! Through stripping down the history and giving a new story to these places, I think we can empower ourselves and empower architects to say, “Yes, the contribution is not pastiche, it’s not an Afrocentric idea. It’s that we’re truly architects, truly landscape architects. Just through the ingenuity of agriculture, we’re landscape architects; through the ingenuity of building, we are architects.” It’s the kind of thing we’ve overlooked, and it’s so easy to chase the separate things instead of taking the credit and saying, “Wow, my ancestors have been part of this amazing diaspora of making things.” African-American culture is something completely different, and those are the patterns and practices that I have greater knowledge of. How does someone from the outside incorporate those patterns and practices to maybe push at those normative things? I want to design a space where you can put 20 black people in that space and no one is threatened by them. Most places you can’t do that, but I know 20 black people want to be together on the corner hanging out. That is a pattern in practice. Another example might be the sense of familiar housing where you have grandmother, cousin, everyone living together. Those used to be the patterns that we valued, and if we don’t validate them, someone else will come do that—like co-housing. That is a validation of a familiar pattern that gets undervalued when people think about it in relation to immigrants and people of color. We have to be the ones to pull those things out and give them value. It’s really hard to tell the truth about these things. Sometimes the truth manifests these values in a very powerful way. How do you get to the truth? It’s difficult. I was recently at a new project site and there were what I would call ‘design liberals’ who believe that a landscape project, a bike trail, can make this marginal neighborhood better. But on the other side of the coin are all the stereotypical beliefs we hold for neighborhoods of color. Fear is central. One falsehood is that if you plant trees, crime will be an issue because people can hide. If you’re afraid to come into a space now, no wonder people would be afraid of planting trees. Fear is already there. You have to speak truth to fear. You have to deal with the reaction and the people who don’t want to deal with the truth. It’s so easy for a designer to go along with the client, but actually we have to be surrogate advocates for the community. You have chosen to work almost exclusively in the public realm—no expensive condo buildings, no corporate complexes—focused almost entirely on urban environments. Why? It’s the last democratic space. Our parks, streets and plazas are the last place people can be seen. It’s the last free space there is and it is becoming more and more privatized. And that’s where I find the most diversity of people and the most diversity of social and cultural patterns and practices. I want my work and our work to affect as many people as possible. You received a Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013 in studio arts. How do you understand the connection

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Hood Design Studio’s re-conceptualization of the exterior of the Cooper Hewitt in New York.

between ﬁne art and urbanism? When I was at the School of the Art Institute, there was a lot of time and conversation looking back to the Bauhaus and other early-20th-century manifestos on how design, art and everything else is integrated. I had the opportunity then to look back at my studio practice over the 10 years prior to that and really critique it and see that the fine art was in the work from the beginning. When I started my practice, I was looking at Russian Constructivism as a means of breaking out of post-colonial design—looking at abstract work, El Lissitzky’s Proun, and other non-objective pieces of art as a means to make landscapes. My early projects, like Lafayette Square and Splash Park, are abstract expressions of me, rather than highly figurative landscapes. That was the beginning of being able to go back and find connections. There are ways in which you can exploit art for spatial purposes. We’re talking to the community about curating events versus just allowing things to happen—these are two different ways of thinking about art and artists. We need the most investment in neighborhoods of color. They end up getting the least investment, and you end up with the usual tropes: community gardens and murals. You want to invest the most in these places. The art should be amazing. How has your role as a professor at Berkeley impacted your work? What does the future of landscape architecture look like? The beautiful thing about teaching is that the students are always the same age. They keep you young and fresh. They are a litmus test for society. You can see the cultural shifts if you’re attuned to them. I teach design studio every year and we engage with issues of the moment, even though they’re embedded in a much more structured pedagogy that deals with what you need to learn first, second and third year. The thing I’m seeing with the students now is a greater agency. It’s less the simple fact of making environments—there’s greater agency in trying to shape other facets of life, whether it’s food, sea level rise, migration. In last year’s thesis show, people were addressing everything from migration at the European scale to ecological hazards to food resources to housing. The students today tend to be much more engaged with what’s happening in the world and wanting their education to help solve those things. When you have such a wide range of expertise and interests, why landscape? I began my studio with landscape architecture as a focus, and more and more today the work is in the public art context. Public art is a context where there is a gathering of opportunities and you can be a little freer with representation and subject than with some of the more architectural/urban projects. The art projects are more personal, which allows for a greater storytelling to emerge.

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With her solo booth at Frieze New York, the Brooklyn-based artist elucidates her relationship to Matisse’s reconstructed bodies, VќLYPUN ]PL^LYZ Z\I[SL HPKZ [V KLJPWOLYPUN OLY WHPU[PUNZ BY BARRY SCHWABSKY PORTRAIT BY ISABEL MAGOWAN

NAKED SENSAT SARAH FAUX PAINTS

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IONS

Heavy Bloom (2019)

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WHAT IS THE PROCESS OF PAINTING but a long and never-fully-resolved lovers’ quarrel between touch and vision, hand and eye? That blissful moment when our not entirely congruent senses find a momentary reconciliation looks like the ultimate subject of most of Sarah Faux’s paintings. Since graduating from Yale’s MFA program in 2015, Faux—whose family name is pronounced “fox,” not “foe,” by the way—has found considerable acclaim, with one-person shows in Brussels and Shanghai as well as a couple of them in New York. And while her subject matter has remained consistent, her technique seems to be getting both more refined and more forceful by the day. Stopping by Faux’s Crown Heights studio as she was preparing for her solo booth at Frieze New York with Capsule Shanghai, I found myself surrounded by half a dozen medium-sized paintings in progress or recently finished, as well as a few smaller ones and parts of a couple of her “cut-outs.” These are collaged canvas wall works that, she explains, reflect a lineage that goes back to Matisse’s reconstructed bodies. At Frieze New York, she intends to use them as works in themselves as well as backdrops on which to hang paintings—something she hasn’t done before. She also showed me a sheaf of monotypes recently made at the Lower East Side Printshop. As with many of Faux’s paintings so far, the new ones are situated in a curious state of ambiguity between abstraction and representation, not unlike the work of some of the midcareer painters who’ve clearly inspired her, such as Amy Sillman and Charline von Heyl. The first time I went to Faux’s studio, all I could see at first was the abstraction—until, noticing that I was missing the point, she gently pointed out that all the paintings included

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figurative imagery, however loose or fragmented: here a hand, there a foot; here a nipple, there a behind; here a head, there a mons pubis… I was mortified, but she seemed tickled at being able to sneak in her corporeal references so subtly that her paintings could be enjoyed as just strikingly composed—that is, appealingly awkward—abstractions, even by mistake. Now, hyperconscious of my former obliviousness, I tend to see the images in Faux’s paintings first. But when I then go on to describe the works by way of what they represent, which is hard to avoid, I somehow feel that I am doing them a disservice—that I am misdescribing as much as describing. Consider one of those I saw in the studio, in which the bottom of the canvas is occupied by part of an outlined male head—closed eyes with delicate lashes, nose, a bit of beard—while most of the rest of the rectangle is occupied by a hand that, under a spray of lovely cursive squiggles, floats in with considerable spatial ambiguity from the left—though where its wrist should be, aren’t those a couple of fingers, presumably of some completely other hand? I had to wonder: Is this a painting of one person, or two, or three? Differences dissipate as self or selves fragment. I’m inclined to believe that closed-eyed man must be dreaming those hands. But it makes me think that I might be dreaming too. When I see those eyes at the bottom of the painting, below the nose that is in turn below the chin, it’s as if my own head’s been turned upside down—a voluptuous vertigo. There’s an effect that was noticed long ago by William James in his Principles of Psychology (1890): “when we look at a landscape with our head upside down” or “lie on the floor and look up at the mouth of a person talking behind us”—like turning a painting upside down—what we see becomes estranged, and “we feel more freshly the value of the mere tints and shadings”; whatever we look at, even a human face, “we get it as a naked sensation and not as part of a familiar object perceived.” Something like that happens in this painting. No wonder it’s titled Tinges (2019). Faux’s paintings are seriously sexy, not because they show bits of naked people, but because they do so in order to get at what James called naked sensation. She makes us intimate with color and facture. In Tinges, which I suspect has learned some of its fluency and immediacy from the monotypes, we make contact with a scarlet opacity and a cream translucency, with blue lines bent like iron wire and nameless gray stains that seem to linger under the surface of the canvas like blushes or bruises; our eyes seem to feel their way through layers of appearance, more like hands. Dry or wet, delicate or crude, smooth or sharp, there are as many kinds of touch in how paint rubs up against itself or sinks into or floats atop the canvas as there might be between any lovers, and they’re all in the painting.

Sarah Faux’s Float Tank (2019) set against a group of cut-out canvas collage parts in the studio. Opposite: Faux with an in-progress cut-out collage that will debut at Frieze New York this May. culturedmag.com 221

FASHION IN At a time when clothes can be bought with the click of a mouse and hand-delivered within hours, the idea of building new stores might seem retrograde— an unnecessary hassle for the consumer and an added cost for the brand. But thanks to a cohort of leading architects, fashion houses are reinventing the concept of stores, treating them not as repositories of inventory but instead as gallery environments that convey the essence of a brand in nuanced ways. BY JOHN GENDALL

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PHOTO BY ANNABEL ELSTON

SPACE Acne’s concrete, minimalist Seoul flagship designed by Sophie Hicks.

SOPHIE

HICKS

“We don’t actually need shops anymore,” says Sophie Hicks of her work designing highly-acclaimed retail environments around the world. The London-based architect is responsible for the spaces of an impressive range of blue-chip clients, including Paul Smith, Yohji Yamamoto, Acne Studios and Chloé, but with luxury brands seeking out her architectural imprimatur, she has taken a measured approach to these commissions. “It’s so much more convenient to look for clothes online and have them delivered to your house,” she says, explaining why she creates destinations that are more about conveying the essence of a brand than offering endless racks of inventory. In her work with Acne Studios, for example, Hicks wanted to create the impression of Sweden, where the brand and its founder, Jonny Johansson, are based—but she needed to construct that in Manhattan’s West Village, and in the Cheongdam district of Seoul.

“I didn’t really know Sweden at all before I started with Acne Studios,” she admits. In order to familiarize herself, she spent several weeks in the Scandinavian nation walking through neighborhoods, visiting museums, going to restaurants and shops and, perhaps most importantly, spending time with Johansson. In Seoul, she designed a new building from the ground up, with its concrete structure referencing what she calls the “groundedness of the Swedes.” The inside, meanwhile, replicates the light qualities— “very cool, very even”—of the distinctive Swedish landscape. Sun filters through the translucent panels of the façade, while supplemental light is concealed behind a polycarbonate ceiling, making a cool, even distribution of light throughout the day—“very much like Swedish light.” Hicks, who early in her career was an editor at Vogue, sees value in new stores, but, as she cautions, “the environment of the store is so important. It has to be something customers can’t get online.”

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PHOTO BY DAVID ALLEE

A lounge at 45 Grand, Nike’s invite-only gym, designed by Rafael de Cárdenas, in New York.

RAFAEL

CÁRDENAS

For Rafael de Cárdenas, the founder of Architecture at Large, retail design is in the midst of a moment of great opportunity—and as the architect behind a string of successful stores, including a Kenzo flagship in Seoul and a series of boutiques for Baccarat, New York Citybased de Cárdenas is certainly an authority on the topic. In addition to his retail projects, he has worked extensively in what he calls “a kind of ancillary space to retail”—including conceptualizing a gym popup for Nike, a temporary exhibition for Cartier, and, most recently, the New York headquarters of Glossier. Before starting his firm, de Cárdenas spent three years as a menswear designer at Calvin Klein. And his interest isn’t just professional: “I’m a big shopper,” he says. “People say that brick-and-mortar is over,” he adds. “That’s just not true.” In his opinion, the role that architecture plays in retail has changed,

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but it is as integral as ever. “Physical stores,” he says, “may not be the main point of sale, but they are important places for storytelling.” De Cárdenas cites Ralph Lauren as an early leader of using stores to create a narrative around a brand. “You walk into a Ralph Lauren store, and there’s a table with cable-knit sweaters, but also old tennis racquets and a pair of skis,” he says. “There’s a story you can participate in.” Now that storytelling happens less with displays of historical artifacts and more via interactions of architecture and technology—as exemplified in de Cárdenas’s designs for Baccarat, which included videos telling the history of the brand and offering a glimpse at the making of Baccarat crystal—“It can’t be too didactic,” he cautions, “but it should allow the customer to participate in the brand in an authentic way.” And, he explains, today’s retail spaces need to be designed in sync with a brand’s online footprint. “The online presence has to work in concert with the physical presence,” de Cárdenas says. “They don’t have to look the same, but they need to have a performative relationship.”

PHOTO BY SANTI CALECA. COURTESY OF JUN AOKI & ASSOCIATES; PHOTO BY DAN BIBB

JUN

Giuseppe Zampieri’s iconic Valentino flagship on Fifth Avenue.

GIUSEPPE

ZAMPIERI

David Chipperfield Architects is known for the restraint and timelessness of its work, so it might seem a paradox that it has become a leading voice in fashion, where expressiveness and constant change are de rigueur. Yet the firm has done just that, creating retail environments which have an enduring presence. Directed by David Chipperfield’s Milan-based partner, Giuseppe Zampieri, the firm’s retail work includes spaces for Valentino, Brioni and Bally, along with a Montreal store for SSENSE—the first brick-and-mortar commitment for the e-commerce company. To avoid the flash-in-the-pan cycles of retail, the firm draws a conceptual distinction between architecture and display, providing the timeless architecture for which David Chipperfield is so well known, but then equipping it with a display system that can be readily modified based on changing retail needs. As Zampieri explains, “the ability to adapt is a fundamental element that needs to be seriously considered right from the initial stages of the concept development.” For the New York Valentino flagship, Zampieri created an architectural environment using marble, terrazzo and a palladiana staircase that

links the shop’s three floors. Amidst this fixed environment of hard surfaces and heavy materials, a system of lighter-weight displays gives the space wide-ranging flexibility. And in Paris, for Brioni’s flagship, he designed an interior environment using travertine—a stone associated with Rome, where Brioni was founded—with a lightweight metal mesh and slender floor-to-ceiling posts that serve as versatile display systems. The growth of online commerce has amplified the tension between change and permanence by accelerating the frequency of flux. Online commerce, Zampieri explains, has led “physical stores toward something new, less static and symbolic, and more dynamic.” Brick-and-mortar outlets continue to support sales, but they are also now used for “various other types of promotion and communication, grouping and socialization,” he explains. The Montreal SSENSE shop is emblematic of this shift, functioning “not as a conventional shop, but rather as a cultural, social and retail venue” with an enclosed rooftop café and doubleheight spaces offering the flexibility to hold events and performances.

AOKI

When it comes to retail design, the establishment of a visual connection between the store and the sidewalk has always been a top priority. Throughout most of the 20th century, this meant one thing: elaborate window displays set into otherwise nondescript building façades. But as competition for storefront attention intensifies, advances in engineering and building systems have allowed architects to move beyond the mere window display, transforming entire façades into a branded surface. An early forerunner of this approach is Japanese architect Jun Aoki, who, since the late ’90s, has been creating retail environments for brands around the world, including Louis Vuitton, with which he has a long-running and acclaimed collaboration. In 2004, for Louis Vuitton’s New York flagship on Fifth Avenue, Aoki peeled away the building’s 1930s façade, replacing it with layers of glass laminated with the brand’s distinctive checkered pattern. The result is an 11-story window display. Aoki recognizes the changes that have moved the retail market since his work in the early 2000s—“media, pop-up stores, and the acceleration of online shopping”—and notes that in the midst of these changes the “physical stores are all the more important to emphasize a brand’s coherent identity.” “A façade is always an interface between a building and the surrounding city,” Aoki explains, acknowledging that exteriors need to communicate a brand without devolving into a billboard. “The façade not only expresses the brand’s identity, but it also plays a role in the city.” The exterior of Jun Aoki and Associate’s Louis Vuitton flagship in New York.

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Collecting and Living with Danish Modern:

Crafting a Modern Lifestyle

During the mid-century years, Danish Modern found its way into millions of homes across the globe, moving the public’s taste away from IV\QY]M[ IVL \W_IZL[ I UWZM UWLMZV QV\MZQWZ <PM N]ZVQ\]ZM LM[QOV[ _MZM XMZKMQ^ML I[ \PM ]T\QUI\M KWUJQVI\QWV WN Å VM KZIN\[UIV[PQX [QUXTQKQ\a and functional, ‘good,’ democratic design – eventually becoming the leading blockbuster of the design world. In the 70s, together with the entire mid-century design culture, the allure of Danish Modern began to fade, but it has made a remarkable comeback since the beginning of the 21st century. Today, Danish Modern is desired by collectors, studied by scholars, used by architects in curated and chic interiors, and presented at art fairs and museums all over the world. This evening, join us in a celebration of Danish Modern and learn more about its current identity.

Dr. Daniella Ohad Design historian

Peter Kjelgaard

James Zemaitis

Head of Modern Design at Bruun Rasmussen Auctioneers

Curator and Director of Museum Relations, R & Company

Date: Tuesday, May 14, 6:00 - 8:00 pm (doors open at 5:30 pm) Location: Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Pl., NYC Price: Free for AIA members and students; $10 for the general public Register: aiany.org/danishmodern

Vance Trimble Designer and Collector

COME BE INSPIRED TOUR NEW WORLD CENTER

T H E F R A N K G E H RY- D E S I G N E D C A M P U S

NWS.EDU/TOURS 500 1 7 T H S T. M I AM I B E AC H , F L

NWS.EDU - 305.673.3331

FIRST IMPRESSIONS +HUJPUN PU [OL ZWHJL IL[^LLU HIZ[YHJ[PVU HUK ÄN\YH[PVU Sarah Faux treats IVKPLZ HZ SHUKZJHWLZ -VY [OL SH[LZ[ *\S[\YLK *VTTPZZPVU [OL WHPU[LY JYLH[LK H ZLYPLZ VM MV\Y IVKPS` [VWVNYHWOPLZ·LHJO H TVUV[`WL

Sarah Faux’s Untitled (2019) monotype printed on Rives BFK paper and custom framed is available for $2,000. Additional prints from the series available on 1stDibs.

“The bodies in my monotypes are seen from above, looking down from a first-person point of view. In this close proximity, your vision migrates and shifts focus, like a female orgasm waxing and waning at will. I called the series ‘Feel Flows,’ and I think of these prints as an open-ended braiding together of hands, boobs and hairy chests that resist and dissolve into each other. While each print is unique, it also leaves a ghost image on its Plexiglas plate, traces of its first run through the printing press. So I get to rework and reprint every body again, letting it hover gently over its own shadow.” —Sarah Faux #CULTUREDCOMMISSION 228 culturedmag.com

Available on 1stdibs.com/dealers/cultured-commissions

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