Cultured Magazine June/July/August 2019 by CulturedMag

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Contents

COURTESY GALERIE BUCHHOLZ, BERLIN/COLOGNE/NEW YORK

JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2019

Heji Shin, KW5 (2018)

SPACE INVADER Donna Huanca’s show “OBSIDIAN LADDER” takes over the Marciano Art Foundation with works that dismantle heteronormative ideas of gender and body. BACK TO THE LAND Johannes Vogt Gallery hosts the fifth annual Barn Show in East Hampton, bringing fresh faces, including Dominic Chamber. NOT WHAT IT SEEMS Hadi Fallahpisheh deals with the incongruity of what we see and what is really out there. CULTURE SEEKER Contributing Editor Laura de Gunzburg takes a spin upstate to Dia:Beacon and hits the highlights in Europe. ART COLLECTING FOR THE AUDIOPHILE For YouTube executive Megan Green, the algorithms that shape her life in the music world have little bearing when it comes to the way she acquires art. FREEDOM FIGHTER Musician and artist Abdu Ali is leading the avant-garde on a radical mission that once didn’t seem possible. CULTURED 25 From exhibitions and installations to performances and collaborations, we bring you the most important events in art, design, architecture, fashion and everything in between. A LEG UP For Brazilian-born entrepreneur, art collector and Fendi ambassador Sinesia Karol, art and fashion walk side by side. A MATCH MADE IN MEDIA The entrepreneurs behind MAMAG merge their interests and love to build a business rooted in diversity and freedom. THE CRYSTAL PALACE Baccarat La Maison teams up with Italian design firm Luxury Living Group on a home collection to remember. SOUNDTRACKS TO ECSTASY Esra Soraya Padgett traces the history of porn soundtracks from the birth of cinema through the Pornhub present.

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Contents

The Moroccan-born artist Meriem Bennani delves into the past for her futuristic videos.

CURATOR OF THE CITY Following the opening of his Harold Ancart commission earlier this year, Daniel S. Palmer launches the first-ever large-scale presentation of sculptures by Carmen Herrera on July 11 at City Hall Park. SUZI ANALOGUE COMPOSES FOR LIFE Analogue is a synesthete, feeling and seeing the shape of sound wherever she goes. MANUAL NOT INCLUDED Detroit’s Underground Resistance label is a vector to the past and to the future, with their tech-driven, community-first approach to techno. ON AN ISLAND IN THE FUTURE WITH MERIEM BENNANI The artist resurrects the documentary by introducing an absurdist kind of fiction. THE PAINTER OF POST-MODERN LIFE What happens when the most important name in luxury taps a group of blue-chip talent to create a treasure to last? Alex Israel weighs in on Louis Vuitton’s latest blockbuster. THE GRASS IS GREENER Collector and Moda Operandi co-founder Lauren Santo Domingo shares how her first experience with contemporary art transformed her thinking. THE KEEPERS OF CULTURE Meet the seven visionaries creating space for new names to flourish within the establishment on our annual Young Curators list. OF AGENCY AND ABSTRACTION For his contribution to the Whitney Biennial, sculptor Matthew Angelo Harrison offers a subtly potent take on globalization and the complexities of black American culture. THE STONE CARVER Fin Simonetti’s alabaster sculptures elide past and future, grief and devotion. THE VIRTUOSO From his cello-playing childhood to his years in a hardcore rock trio, Dev Hynes has never been confined by expectations.

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PHOTO BY PHILIP-DANIEL DUCASSE

Contents

Young Paris wears a Boss suit and Gucci strawberry brooch and beaded tiger motif necklace in New York City.

ANONYMOUS WAS A WOMAN Leikeli47 defies categorization. The breakout star refuses to show her face in public or reveal her name—and her privacy is proving a potent strategy for success. SAME AS IT EVER WAS Benin-born super-diva Angélique Kidjo and David Byrne reminisce about mutual friends, their musical histories and their shared love of the late Cuban star Celia Cruz, who is paid homage on Kidjo’s most recent album. THE COLLEGE DROPOUT Heji Shin sees no distinction between her photographs of birthing babies and portraits of Kanye West. ALL ROADS LEAD TO PARIS Born in France to a Congolese family of artists, Young Paris has swiftly ascended the ranks of music and fashion. THE WOMAN WHO SAVED MENSWEAR Fashion designer Emily Adams Bode rethinks the American man one textile at a time. ANOHNI ANEW Since first taking the stage at The Kitchen more than two decades ago, the polymathic performer now known as ANOHNI has revived her early experimental theatrical practice. FIGURES FOR A NEW ERA We visited the studios of seven queer painters, talking with them about what drives their work and their expansive visions for what it can mean for the world at large. DESIGNING FROM THE INSIDE OUT As co-founder of the Zürich-based architectural firm Karamuk Kuo, Jeannette Kuo has overseen the design and re-design of buildings around the world. THE BEAT IS YOURS Coach’s rock star Stuart Vevers has brought his own taste and rhythm to the fashion house’s collaborative history. IT HURTS, SO GOOD Artist Richard Phillips speaks with the bands Boy Harsher, Kristina Esfandiari and SRSQ on what makes them tick. ADULT LIFE TASTE LIKE EGGNOG A poem by artist Diamond Stingily.

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Douglas Friedman

Esra Soraya Padgett

Lakin Starling

Photographer

Writer

Journalist

Douglas Friedman was born and raised in New York City and now divides his time between his hometown, Marfa and Los Angeles. He shoots portraits, interiors and fashion for Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue Italia, Architectural Digest and The New York Times. For this issue of Cultured, he documented Coach creative director Stuart Vevers at the house’s New York City headquarters. “I’ve followed Stuart’s work for years and am such a fan.”

A writer and musician from NYC, Esra Soraya Padgett plays in the band Angels In America, and maintains an experimental solo project, Chicklette. Padgett says of her essay for this issue: “Considering the sonic aspects of sexuality and the history of musical representations for pornography brought insight into thinking about how we understand porn today, and led me to a number of amazing artists whose work has gone mostly unrecognized due to associations with the illicit.”

Lakin Starling sat down with cover star Dev Hynes to muse over the nuance of blackness, home, and the creative science of being an interdisciplinary artist. “I caught Dev at a fruitful time as he was resettling back in NYC after traveling and working on his new album. The creative polymath opened up about his existential journey and the safe and tender space that music has provided him with as a true and understated constant in his life.”

Renell Medrano Photographer Hailing from the Bronx, 26-year-old Renell Medrano, who shot our Dev Hynes cover, is fast becoming a creative force. Medrano’s raw aesthetic earned her the New York Times Lens Blog award before even graduating from Parsons. Her vision has since become her trademark, allowing her to shoot everything from reportage to a-list talent. “Working with Dev was everything I expected. He’s such a calm soul and he understands my vision. He’s an artist who isn’t afraid to push boundaries.” 38 culturedmag.com

KYLE KNODELL (PADGETT), BLAIRE MONROE (STARLING)

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

Philip-Daniel Ducasse

Penny Slinger

Oluwabukola Becky Akinyode

Photographer

Artist

Stylist

Canadian-born, Brooklyn-based photographer and filmmaker Philip-Daniel Ducasse’s work is often informed by his early years in Haiti. He worked with fellow Francophone Young Paris to produce a dynamic series of images that express a fusion of African heritage, fashion and culture. “There was an instant connection between us,” he shares. “I’m able to create my best work when I’m able to connect with my subject.”

Penny Slinger has been exploring the connection between eroticism, mysticism, feminism and art for over 50 years. Here, she offered an exclusive collage to accompany our piece on music in pornography. “As a young artist I incorporated provocative images in my work, and deliberately placed myself in magazines of this genre to show that there was a consciousness at work behind the body being exhibited. Coming back to look at films that were seminal in my experience was inspiring, especially revisiting the women who helped to shift our perception of pornography.”

Oluwabukola Becky Akinyode is a NigerianAmerican freelance stylist, market editor at Out of Order Magazine and creative consultant. “I’ve always admired the style of men like Lee Morgan, Fela Kuti and Miles Davis—musicians who weren’t afraid to take risks, had a strong sense of self and were confident in their looks. Young Paris is of Congolese descent and La Sape culture is very much about being expressive and showing out in an elegant way. I dressed Young Paris in the same manner; paying homage to his heritage and also the great musicians of the past.”

Salome Asega Artist A researcher and artist, Salome Asega is a Ford Foundation fellow and the director of partnerships at POWRPLNT, a digital art collaboratory in Bushwick. She is also speculative design instructor at Parsons. Asega visited Underground Resistance’s Submerge space in Detroit in 2017 and ended up spending a whole afternoon with Cornelius Harris and Mike Banks, tracing the breadcrumbs of their creative paths. “Cornelius generously made sure I left that visit with a whole bag of CDs and photo books. What resonates with me the most in that conversation and the one we have in this issue is how the music is the output, but the intention and the process are the story. UR is more than a label. UR is made up of storytellers and stakeholders who are nurturing networks of people who love this music.” 40 culturedmag.com

SETOR TSIKUDO (DUCASSE), DHIREN DASU (SLINGER), PHILIP-DANIEL DUACASSE (AKINYODE), NAIMA GREEN (ASEGA)

Contributors

Design Authenticity. Meticulous Craftsmanship. Service Excellence.

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Whitney Mallett

Gerrick D. Kennedy

Dean Kissick

Writer, Filmmaker, Educator

Journalist, Critic

Writer

Whitney Mallett covers ANOHNI’s performance and exhibition at The Kitchen. She has published or presented work in a number of publications as well as MoMA PS1 and the Baltimore Museum of Art. “I’ve long been a fan of ANOHNI’s. We met at The Kitchen during her install. I chewed on a donut most of the hour we talked and later in the elevator she kindly wiped the icing off my face. I forgot to tell her I was an extra in one of her music videos. I play a member of an angry mob throwing eels at Susan Cianciolo.”

Gerrick D. Kennedy is the author of Parental Discretion Is Advised, The Rise of N.W.A and the Dawn of Gangsta Rap and the forthcoming Exhale (2021). He writes about arts and culture for the Los Angeles Times. Kennedy interviews Brooklyn chameleon and one of this issue’s cover stars, Leikeli47, to learn about the woman behind the mask. “I’m inspired by her commitment to sing and rap about the safe spaces and communities we as black folks turn to for comfort; that tells us everything we need to know about her—even if she’s still a mystery.”

“I’ve wanted to meet Heji Shin for a while, so I was really pleased to have a reason to,” says Dean Kissick of his first print contribution to Cultured. “I couldn’t see her at the Whitney Biennial opening, or at the after-party at the Jane, but finally found her at the afterafter-party at La Caverna. The following day we went for the interview in Seward Park in Chinatown. We were both pretty hungover so we met towards the end of the day. It was a sunny evening, and we sat on a bench between two children’s playgrounds and talked for hours and watched the world go by. Afterwards I felt much better.”

Richard Phillips Artist For New York-based artist Richard Phillips, music has long been an integral part of his painting practice. He writes about Boy Harsher, SRSQ and Kristina Esfandiari and the groups’ outsize influence on today’s punk scene. “There is a shared sensibility and intelligence among these bands that I wanted to communicate to others as I have done before with artworks and live events,” says the Gagosian artist. Complementing his text are three original pastel drawings, made exclusively for Cultured.

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SANSHO SCOTT (MALLETT), NINA CHUNG (KENNEDY), DECLAN HIGGINS (KISSICK)

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Summer of Music our annual Art Basel trip, but I’m currently sitting at my desk filled with folders, awaiting final sign-offs and feeling harried. Even in the midst of this seasonal chaos, I’m immensely grateful and excited to present our second annual Summer Music Issue. I can feel the joy pulsing through the office. This humming sensation brings me back to a typically rainy spring afternoon in New York just a few weeks ago, when I met the multitalented, solitude-loving musician Dev Hynes, also known as Blood Orange. On set, Hynes emanated a quiet calm and sincerity that felt unique to a pop star of his status. Perhaps this is the spell of his friend and our cover photographer, Renell Medrano, who blew us away with her moving portraits that play with Hynes’s status as a bona fide Renaissance man. On that same day in Los Angeles, photographer Chuck Grant was working her magic with Leikeli47, the visage-obscuring rapper on the rise. Though never seen without a mask, “a desire to reside in an anonymous, mysterious universe doesn’t mean Leikeli47 is incapable of revealing herself,” writes Gerrick D. Kennedy in our second cover story. “Everything one needs to know about Leikeli47 can be found in her music.” Much like Hynes and Leikeli47, who have bent the borders of their respective genres, I’m proud to share our own efforts to create new connections, whether that is commissioning revolutionary artist Penny Slinger to revisit classic skin flicks or touring the femme-fandom of noise music with the help of Richard Phillips’s pastels. What makes these works even more exciting is that they will be distributed internationally for the first time. Cultured is now available in Italy, Singapore, Switzerland, Germany, Sweden and Australia. Once the issue is put to bed, the summer rushes onwards. First, a celebration with Dev Hynes in New York, followed by a dinner for Tony Oursler in East Hampton with Lehmann Maupin; and on the West Coast, a pool party in Los Angeles toasting our collaboration with Prospect NY and Misha Kahn. We round out the summer in Aspen with a Moda Operandi lunch. We hope to see you in the mix and are grateful, as always, for your loyal readership. It keeps our music going.

With Young Paris, right, during our Fashion Issue cover party celebrating Kerby Jean-Raymond of Pyer Moss at Lucien in New York City.

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Musician Dev Hynes photographed by Renell Medrano wearing pieces by Kenneth Nicholson and styled by Shibon Kennedy; hair by Evanie Frausto.

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Rapper Leikeli47 photographed by Chuck Grant in Los Angeles; collage by Beth Hoeckel; styled by Amelian Kashiro Hamilton and assisted by Cat Wilson Jones; photo lighting by Thomas Patton; photo production by Operator.

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Donna Huanca employs sculpture, scent and painting as tools for reclaiming spaces. Her summer show “OBSIDIAN LADDER” takes over the Marciano Art Foundation with works that dismantle heteronormative ideas of gender and body, including live performances painting femme models.

PUERTA DE PARAÍSO HUANQUITA (2019)

“My work is both a response to and an activation of spaces. By virtue of their powerful presence, the models facilitate a transitory process that captures and develops the space. The models become a kind of respiratory system of temporality and deconstruction. They sense and feel the space, leaving it changed. I see the exhibition at the Marciano Foundation as an opportunity for disruption—a means to reclaim a femme space in a former Masonic temple, a space that was literally built by and for powerful men.” —Donna Huanca

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NOT WHAT IT SEEMS Artist Hadi Fallahpisheh deals with the incongruity of the world we see and what’s really out there. The Iranian-born, 2019 Artadia awardee has two upcoming shows at Central Fine in Miami and Tramps in New York. Below, he talks to us about how his latest works function.

Surrender, 2018

“I work primarily with photography, as well as performance and installation to destabilize visions of a stable and singular subject. My photographs are made completely in the dark, in a large darkroom space I have constructed specifically for these large-scale prints. In my work I question the ability of representation to convey truth, and within that I try to observe conditions of displacement, and the gaps between public perception and personal experience.” —Hadi Fallahpisheh

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CULTURE SEEKER

Contributing Editor Laura de Gunzburg takes a spin upstate to Dia:Beacon and hits the highlights in Europe.

Oscar Niemeyer’s auditorium is set on a natural slope on the coast of Amalfi in Ravello, the City of Music. Though a real gem for Ravello, Niemeyer came under scrutiny for never visiting the site or the city.

Lee Ufan’s Relatum (formerly Iron Field), 1969, is a moving installation at Dia:Beacon that recalls his words: “I am interested in the world of phenomenological perception that arises from a relationship of encounter rather than the existence of images or objects.”

V In the gardens of the Villa Cimbrone in Ravello, which dates at least to the 11th century and is named for the rocky outcrop on which it stands, overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. V

I loved discovering the work 800 x 9 x 9, 2018, by Miroslaw Balka at White Cube. The Polish artist often uses minimalistic materials in his practice, such as with this sculpture, designed like a garland.

The Georg Baselitz show in Venice is the first-ever retrospective of a living artist at the Galleria dell’Accademia.

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The Brant Foundation

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Robert Mapplethorpe, Self Portrait, 1980. © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Darkroom Mirror (0X5A1531), 2017. © Paul Mpagi Sepuya; Zanele Muholi, Xana Nyilenda, Newtown, Johannesburg, 2011. © Zanele Muholi; Catherine Opie, Dyke, 1993. © 2019 Catherine Opie; Lyle Ashton Harris, detail from Americas, 1987–88. © Lyle Ashton Harris; Glenn Ligon, detail from Notes on the Margin of the Black Book, 1991–93. © Glenn Ligon, courtesy Glenn Ligon Studio, and all Mapplethorpe images © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used with permission; Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Adebiyi, ca. 1989. © Rotimi Fani-Kayode, courtesy Autograph ABP Funding for Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now is provided by Stein Erik Hagen–The Canica Art Collection, the William Talbott Hillman Foundation, LLWW Foundation, the Leadership Committee, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s Photography Council.

New York City

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ART COLLECTING FOR THE AUDIOPHILE

For YouTube executive Megan Green, the algorithms that shape her life in the music world have little bearing when it comes to the way she acquires art. BY MARQUITA K. HARRIS PORTRAIT BY EMMA CRAFT

LIKE SO MANY AMERICAN TEENAGERS

coming of age in the ’90s, Megan Green was an avid collector of cassette tapes. Her beat-up Sony Walkman was an emblem of her youthful, rebellious spirit, with groups like Hole, The Smashing Pumpkins, and TLC in steady rotation. The songs she blasted through her foamcapped headphones were the beginning of her love affair with music. Now in her mid-30s and at YouTube, Green has become a serious art collector—though she’s still in touch with her teenage self. Upon entering her sunny Upper West Side digs, sharp-eyed guests will immediately spot a familiar gadget hanging near the television: a Walkman. Specifically, it’s interdisciplinary artist Daniel Arsham’s Steel Eroded Walkman (2014) made of volcanic glass. “It means so much to me because I had a Walkman and tapes. I consider myself a true child of the ’90s,” Green says. “I listened to this thing called The Box,” she reflects, recalling the popular television channel that urged viewers to call a 1-900 number to request the video they’d like to see aired next. As for Green’s relationship with art, you could say it was her destiny. “I was always around art. From the time I was little, my parents took me to museums and galleries. They also took me to New York for auctions, so I thought it was a really natural part of life,” says Green, who grew up between Chicago and Boca Raton. Green’s parents, Stanley Green and the late Adrienne Green, were both major collectors and it rubbed off on their only child. “My parents said, ‘We’re going to get you something that you want.’” Green was 15 years old and selected a Jenny Holzer LED Box. The piece now sits in her living room unassumingly, until it flashes when you walk by it. “It annoys everyone,” she says with a laugh. Miniature steel Kara Walker sculptures sit encased in glass, near the window. Shantell Martin’s inky-black lines snake up a small white bottle nearby. Green’s home is cozy and inviting, with every nook offering a little something—blink and you might miss it. Though the art world permeated her life from a young age and Green studied art history as a student, when it came to choosing a career, she opted for her other love: music. “Somebody gave me advice when I was deciding what I wanted to do for my career. He said, ‘You should do music as your career because it’s sort of an everyman, democratic medium.’ Art is a little bit more specific in terms of the audience,” Green recalls. The advice hit and shortly thereafter Green found herself working for Sony Music and then, after business school, for Songza, the free streaming service that offered listeners curated playlists that aligned with their moods and activities. A novel concept at the time, Songza was purchased by Google Play Music in 2014. Thanks to the advent of algorithms, streaming services for music, film, and television take the labor out of choice. But when it comes to collecting art, Green believes there is no code to crack. To be a successful collector, you must do the work. She sees something, she researches it. She hunts, then she gathers. It’s all about the chase. Green is not a love-at-first-sight type of collector. “What I always tell people about art is you have to love it, but there are no shortcuts to that love. If you don’t want to spend the time researching, it is not going to be part of your life,” she says. Despite the differences between how we consume art and music, for Green, “It’s all culture at the end of the day.”

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FREEDOM FIGHTER Musician and artist Abdu Ali is leading the avant-garde on a radical mission that once didn’t seem possible—and they’re doing it all from their hometown of Baltimore. BY SHANEKIA MCINTOSH PORTRAIT BY TOMM ROESCHLEIN

THE STORY OF HUDSON, NEW YORK seems to intrigue everyone who crosses its path. From whaling city to factory town to antique epicenter to a place that puts art and commerce front and center, the story is similar to what is happening in little cities and towns all over the country. But what sets Hudson apart is that it has always been about the opportunities it holds for people—opportunities that are so close in reach. So close that if everything goes well, Hudson, one of the oldest cities in the country, will hopefully elect its first Black mayor this year. In 2018, Tschabalala Self and Mike Mosby (who performs as Fulathela) asked me if I wanted to help curate a night of black performance in Hudson and I immediately said yes. From the beginning, we have been intrigued about ways to connect the community and expand the scope of what can be seen in Hudson. Our event, Free Range, is very much steeped in the ethos of doing-it-for-the-culture and offering space for limitless black expression. Our first gathering, last summer at Half Moon Hudson (a no-brainer, as it is one of the few spaces in Hudson that all of the community feels comfortable in), proved successful with performances by Ms. Boogie, XHOSA, Fulathela and Young Wavy Fox. When we decided to curate another one, it was painfully obvious who the next performer had to be: Abdu Ali. If you have been paying attention to underground poc queer culture, Abdu Ali is not a new name. The Baltimore native, and recipient of the 2019 mayor’s award for artist of the year, has been a fixture on all the scenes, effortlessly embodying the spirit and energy of their community to create something new. A fantastic poet and musician, Ali is also a community activist who not only speaks about caring for your craft and your community, but actually does it. As I watched Ali from the corner of the stage with their band at the most recent Free Range, spreading their message and power as the crowd of strangers under their direction suddenly became friends, everyone falling in line to the beat, it conjured in my mind The Last Poets, Sun Ra, Bad Brains—artists who are simply and unapologetically themselves. Your work intersects with so many different genres that are rooted in Baltimore. How has your experience in the Baltimore music scene impacted your direction? The backbone of my music production centers Baltimore club music, but I’m influenced by a multitude of genres. I’m very into the avant-garde jazz stylings of musicians like Sun Ra and Max Roach, the futurism of Missy Elliott and Kelis, the blues of Erykah Badu and Billie Holiday. All of these artists plus more are the roots of my musical tree. Of course, growing up in Baltimore help shaped my ear. Baltimore club, house, and ballroom music was the score of youth, and I’d hear that everywhere there was a congregation of black youth, from the Paradox to Shake n Bake to block parties. I always want to create music that involves that fire I heard in my city’s sound.

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Tell me something that you would really love people to know about you. I want people to know that I am your sister, brother, cousin, daughter, son, and so on. I am your family and I am you. I believe we need to decentralize “celebrity” and dismantle this distance “famous” people have or most artists have who aren’t even universally known. I don’t like artists who distance themselves from their audience, whether it be personally or through their work. I find that elitist and non-inclusive. I found this most present in the world of electronic/avant-garde music, where a lot of artists get off on intellectualizing their work. I always want to give myself to my audience and let my work be tangible, no matter how intellectualized or abstract or avant-garde it is. I don’t like when people perform realness, either. Like I am that real bitch from the ghettos of Baltimore, who also is on some very deeply theorized shit. People are resonating with artists like Megan Thee Stallion because she seems like a girl you went to high school with. She’s real. I want to be authentically real and one with my audience. Baltimore and Hudson have some striking parallels when it comes to race, class and gentrification. How was your experience performing in Hudson? Is that something you were able to identify in your short time here? I didn’t realize Hudson was even a black city ’til Tschaba schooled me on the history of the town. No tea, no shade, but I gagged because everywhere I went I saw white hipster folk. Baltimore is definitely changing, but I think the city’s gentrification is going to look different than most black cities because our city has been drenched in this narrative of being “dangerous” so that white folk are still hesitant about living in the city. I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing. Tell me a little about something you are working toward. Something you love about your community and something you would like to see happen. I really want to start a concept platform that is a book club and publication. One day I realized that it’s 2019, and we still have no media platforms that are really showcasing an inclusive narrative of black and LGBTQ creatives who exist in the underground that are not famous. As I said before, I am tired of centering “celebrity.” It’s irresponsible, especially for publications. We are missing out on so many emerging artists and stories from our community that deserve the same amount of attention as someone with a lot of social capital. I’m getting bored with the same people being centered over and over again, even those who are black or LBGTQ. Journalists are not into cultivation anymore or raising up not-so-known people. Plus these bitches just don’t care to investigate no more; they want stories to land on their laps or only talk about the people everyone else is talking about. No one is discovered anymore. I don’t know how my fantasy will manifest, but it’s necessary and I am that bitch to do it.

Relatability and community are at the center of Abdu Ali’s sound; they emphasize disrupting notions of celebrity in favor of inclusivity.

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June 29—August 17, 2019

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Daniel Buren, Photo-souvenir: The Garlands, work in situ (third version), 1982-2019, The High Line, New York, NY. Part of En Plein Air. A High Line Commission. On view April 2019 – March 2020. Photo by Timothy Schenck. Courtesy of the High Line.

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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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COLLECTIVEARTDESIGN.COM An installation view of “Al Held and Bram Bogart, Paintings 1959–1966”

Enrollment is now open for the fall edition of the program Collecting Design: History, Collections, Highlights, at the Center for Architecture/AIA under the leadership of design historian and influencer Daniella Ohad. The program, consists of ten sessions, where styles and periods are being illuminated and analyzed by some of the world’s best experts. Through dialogues with dealers, critics, collectors, curators, designers, and writers, Dr. Ohad examines exhibitions, publications, auction records, relevant connoisseurship, major design fairs, the new interior, and the stories behind the scenes. The fall edition begins on October 15th and takes place every Tuesday from 10:30 to 12:30. AIANY.ORG The Palais Stoclet (1905–11)

Helen Frankenthaler, Summer Picture (1959)

The Parrish Art Museum honors Helen Frankenthaler nearly a decade after her death with a close look at her work made between 1950 and 1971. On August 4, “Abstract Climates” opens in Water Mill, New York, featuring paintings that the late artist created during her time in Provincetown, MA. The exhibition includes both small-scale and monumentally-sized paintings that explore landscape and abstraction. PARRISHART.ORG 78 culturedmag.com

THE HELEN FRANKENTHALER FOUNDATION, NEW YORK

If you’ll be in the Hamptons, make sure to stop by Southhampton gallery Jeff Lincoln Art + Design, which presents “Al Held and Bram Bogart, Paintings 1959– 1966” opening July 14. The two painters worked worlds away from each other—Held in New York and Bogart in Brussels— but over the course of the selected six years, both were committed to reducing painting to its most basic essence.

Every year, London’s Serpentine Galleries invites an architect who has yet to complete a building in England to create a temporary pavilion on the institution’s lawns. The pioneering commission began with Zaha Hadid in 2013. This year, the gallery is offering the space to Japanese architect Junya Ishigami, whose “free space” philosophy seamlessly weaves man-made structures with the natural. The 2019 Serpentine Pavilion opens June 21. SERPENTINEGALLERIES.ORG

Junya Ishigami’s Botanical Garden Art Biotop / Water Garden in Tochigi, Japan culturedmag.com 79

The Museo Salvatore Ferragamo in Florence presents “Sustainable Thinking,” a long-view show celebrating and exploring the brand’s commitment to the use of sustainable materials in fashion. Tracing the brand’s history from its early experimentation with natural and recycled material to the techniques used today, the show, on view through March 2020, addresses pressing issues of environmentalism through the lens of art and fashion. FERRAGAMO.COM

Dora Maar steps into the spotlight with a retrospective of her extensive but largely unknown body of work at the Pompidou, on view through July 29. The Parisian avant-gardist, who died in 1997, built a reputation of mystery so alluring it has nearly eclipsed her significant, Surrealist artistic output. The Pompidou brings together nearly 400 works from more than 80 lenders. CENTREPOMPIDOU.FR

Maria Berrio, The Reckoning of Time (2019)

Kohn Gallery presents “A Cloud’s Roots,” the first exhibition in Los Angeles by New York-based artist María Berrío. Inspired by her youth in the countryside of Bogotá, Colombia, Berrío’s paintings explore the experience of immigrant identity, intercultural connectivity and the beauty that is found in the diversity of cultures and countries through her distinctive use of collaged Japanese rice paper and watercolors. This summer, Berrío also has work on view in New York in the Ford Foundation’s group exhibition “Radical Love”, and is featured in a site-specific commission on the Fort Hamilton Parkway MTA stop in Brooklyn. Her show at Kohn Gallery runs through August 24. KOHNGALLERY.COM 80 culturedmag.com

Dora Maar, Sans titre [Mannequin assise de profil en robe et veste de soirée] (1932–35)

Installation view of “Sustainable Thinking”

PHOTO BY THILO FRANK / STUDIO OLAFUR ELIASSON; © CLAUDIA PEÑA SALINAS. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND EMBAJADA, SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO; COURTESY OF OPERA GALLERY

Olafur Eliasson, Din blinde passager (Your blind passenger) (2010)

On July 11, the Tate Modern will offer an all-sensory experience as the space is transformed by the work of Olafur Eliasson. A longtime friend of the Tate, Eliasson will bring natural phenomena such as rainbows into the gallery space as well as some play with shadows and reflections. The artist’s team has co-curated an all-new menu with the museum which will be available throughout the run of the show. TATE.ORG.UK

Joe Black’s Blink 2 (2016)

Claudia Peña Salinas, Titla (2019)

Timothy Taylor Gallery has invited Danny Baez to curate “Ilaciones,” the not-to-miss summer group exhibition. Baez has organized a presentation of work by nine artists who either hail from or are inspired by Latin America’s rich cultural history and the techniques that have grown alongside it. Translated in English to “threads,” “Ilaciones” exists as a manifestation of the interconnectedness between a community of artists through a common cultural tie. WWW.TIMOTHYTAYLOR.COM

Celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, Art Aspen kicks off on July 25 at the foot of Ajax Mountain. With 30 exhibitors, the fair focuses on modern and contemporary works that are in dialog with the history of art. Taking place over the course of a long weekend, the fair is a perfect destination for a summer getaway among the beauty of the Rockies. ART-ASPEN.COM

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COURTESY OF FRANCESCO ALLEGRETTO

There’s nothing like a slightly traumatizing childhood fable. It feels fitting that Hansel and Gretel, perhaps the most infamous of them all, is being honored by the Fondation Valmont with an exhibition at the Palazzo Bonvicini. “Hansel and Gretel: White Traces in Search of Your Self” opened alongside the Venice Biennale and includes works by Isao, Didier Guillon and Silvano Rubino. FONDATIONVALMONT.COM Silvano Rubino, Bianco nel Bianco (2019)

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PHOTO BY LEE THOMPSON; COURTESY THE ARTIST AND DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY. PHOTO BY TALISMAN BROLIN; © ARIELLE TEPPER COURTESY OF HYPHEN & HALSEY MCKAY GALLERY

Sam Gilliam, PARADE VI (2015), detail

The Chelsea-based FLAG Art Foundation presents a suite of new works by longterm D.C. resident and color master Sam Gilliam. Gilliam’s outsize contributions to contemporary painting are finally being recognized after decades of relatively little attribution, and the show is a welcome opportunity for New Yorkers to deepen their knowledge of the octogenarian artist. The 12 monumentally-sized paintings on handmade paper were all created this year. FLAGARTFOUNDATION.ORG

Susan Tepper’s Untitled (From the Heads Series) (1978–83)

We know you’ve probably done an escape room as some kind of office bonding activity, but have you done one by a contemporary artist whose room acts as a commentary on social dynamics? We think not. The public art non-profit Creative Time invites you for their inaugural open call project with artist Risa Puno. Using puzzles and riddles, Puno sets to task anyone who dares to enter her one-of-a-kind escape room. CREATIVETIME.ORG

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For only a few short weeks in East Hampton, NY, viewers will be able to see Bianca Beck and Susan Tepper at Halsey McKay Gallery. Focusing on the female form and weaving the work of two different generations of women, the show is loaded with material richness and societal angst. Opening July 6, Tepper’s Heads from the late ’70s and early ’80s dance with Beck’s more recent works, which she calls Doubles. HALSEYMCKAY.COM

The New York Botanical Garden celebrates the work of a world-renowned icon with “Brazilian Modern: The Living Art of Roberto Burle Marx.” Burle Marx is largely known for the curving mosaic walkways at Copacabana Beach and his everlasting influence on the modernist art and garden movement. “Brazilian Modern” includes both a horticultural tribute featuring lush gardens as well as a gallery exhibit of the late artist’s paintings. NYBG.ORG

Roberto Burle Marx designed the Gardens of the Ministry of Education and Health in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (1936). culturedmag.com 85

COURTESY OF PARAISO MIAMI BEACH

Formerly known as Miami Swim Week, Paraiso Miami Beach runs July 11–14. Featuring dozens of runway shows, activations and exclusive launches, what was once an industry-only event now opens its doors to the public. Patrons can shop the newest collections from famed swimwear designers, attend panel discussions and mix and mingle at events on Miami Beach and across the bridge at Brickell City Centre. To learn more visit: PARAISOMIAMIBEACH.COM

The ACACIA Resort 2019 collection presented on top of 1111 Lincoln Road designed by Herzog & de Meuron.

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Francis Alÿs in collaboration with Julien Devaux, Felix Blume, Ivan Boccara, Abbas Benheim, Fundaciéon Montenmedio Arte, and children of Tanger and Tarifa, Don’t Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River (Strait of Gibraltar, Morocco-Spain) (still), (2008)

In a partnership between the New Museum in New York and D.C.’s Phillips Collection, “The Warmth of Other Suns: Stories of Global Displacement” is organized by New Museum curators Massimiliano Gioni and Natalie Bell. The show features more than 60 international artists who explore real and imaginary geographies, reconstructing personal and collective tales of migration. In a time where borderlines have become walls, these artists navigate the universality of migration. PHILLIPSCOLLECTION.ORG

If you didn’t already have a reason to visit the Dan Flavin house in Bridgehampton, you now have no excuse not to. The Dia Art Foundation-run program brings a long-term presentation of new work by Jacqueline Humphries to the house. Building upon her blacklight paintings and moving into the sculptural realm, the new body of work illuminates fluorescent cast objects under blacklight. DIAART.ORG

Founded in 1960 in Paris, Roche Bobois took the industry by storm and has remained a world leader in furniture design for over half a century. Separated into two collections, Les Contemporains and Nouveaux Classiques, Roche Bobois handcrafts pieces of the highest creative caliber in interior design. The house has just opened their newest showroom on the Upper East Side boasting more than 5,000 square feet and providing the ultimate home shopping experience. The new showroom features the contemporary line while the original UES location across the street continues with the classic. ROCHE-BOBOIS.COM Jacqueline Humphries, Sign (2019) culturedmag.com 87

Cindy Sherman has her first major UK retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery, opening June 27. Perpetually dancing between truth and fiction, Sherman’s famed Untitled Film Stills are on view, in addition to hundreds of photographs made over the course of her fivedecade-long career. NPG.ORG.UK

Robert Nava, Tigress Snake (2019)

Jeffrey Deitch has invited artist Nina Chanel Abney to curate “Punch” in his LA outpost as an expansion of the 2018 show in New York. Featuring the work of 33 artists, “Punch” looks at contemporary culture through the lens of figuration. Setting the stage to explore the physical and the digital, culture and subculture is a line-up of artists including Tschabalala Self, Jeffrey Cheung, and the curator herself. DEITCH.COM

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Installation view of Katie Stout’s room at “Flutter”

Prepare your hashtags. The interactive exhibition “Flutter” hits LA in full force this summer just steps from LACMA. According to exhibition founder Chris Dowson, the initiative’s purpose “is to bring fine art to everyone.” A sensory journey that takes visitors through various mediums, “Flutter” includes the work of Saya Woolfalk, Katie Stout and NAR, the NYC- based trans producer known largely for his work with Rihanna’s Fenty. FLUTTEREXPERIENCE.COM

PHOTO BY JOHN LINDEN; COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND FLUTTER

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #48 (1979)

COURTESY B&B ITALIA; PHOTO BY SANDRO; COURTESY THE ARTIST AND ESTHER SCHIPPER. PHOTO © JULIA SCHER.

Enacting the role of disruptor long before the term was coined, B&B Italia’s Piero Ambrogio Busnelli changed the world of furniture design and this year celebrates the 50th anniversary of the famed armchair designed by Gaetano Pesce. Officially named Up5 and debuted at the Milan Furniture Fair, the iconic armchair is being re-released this year in some new colors like petrol green, orange red, cardamom, emerald and navy. BEBITALIA.COM

Julia Scher created a dialogue about surveillance states long before the Patriot Act and the Trump era. Her work seems to be evergreen in relevance and in beauty. Ortuzar Projects brings Scher to Lower Manhattan for her first solo show in New York in 15 years. With work that spans the artist’s career, “American Promises” explores surveillance and obedience in a collection of sculpture, video work and exhibitionism. ORTUZARPROJECTS.COM While there may not be après-ski in the summer season, there is always the opportunity for apresart. Anderson Ranch in Aspen opens their summer series on July 3, kicking off six weeks of conversations and events with artists from all over the world. This year’s series, for which Cultured is a media partner, features Nick Cave, pictured here, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Taryn Simon, Paul McCarthy and Beth Rudin DeWoody among many more. ANDERSONRANCH.ORG

Julia Scher, Surveillance Bed (1994)

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A LEG UP For Brazilian-born entrepreneur, art collector and Fendi ambassador Sinesia Karol, art and fashion walk side by side. BY TAYLOR DAFOE PORTRAIT BY MICHAEL BLANCHARD

WHEN FASHION DESIGNER SINESIA KAROL first moved to Boston from Brazil, she noticed something different about the way women dressed in the summer. “People are really conservative here,” she says, laughing. “Especially when it comes to the bum—they like to cover it.” Karol was 20 then and had just left home for college in New England. Growing up on the islands off of Brazil, she was used to a different approach. “There, it 90 culturedmag.com

doesn’t matter your body type; you wear whatever you want. People don’t care.” She had, at that point, long since fallen in love with the classic Brazilian bikini cut: low on the hips, high on the cheeks. But American women preferred a different cut, one that sat higher and covered more of the bottom in fabric. For her, it was emblematic of the tenuous, under confident way many American women feel about swimwear in general. That disconnect was, for her, where the seeds of her swimwear line were first sewn—literally. In 2010, she began working on what would become her signature—swim suits and cover-ups that merged art and fashion, style and comfort. “I wanted to create a line that catered to the type of woman that likes to cover everything, one that also appealed to my Brazilian friends and the European women living in the United States who could never find a bathing suit that fit the way they like,” Karol says with her Portuguese lilt, each word rolling into the next. “I wanted to create a line that allowed women to embrace their bodies, in a positive way. And most of all, I wanted to create something beautiful.” Not surprisingly, it was a tough needle to thread. But after two years of research and collaborations with artists, thread it she did. And people took note. The day the company launched in June of 2012, Bergdorf Goodman acquired her line. Within 24 hours, she had invitations to do fashion and trade shows in Miami, New York, and elsewhere. “Everything I dreamed of accomplishing, I did in two weeks,” she says, as if still in disbelief. The company has changed a lot since then. But so, too, has fashion, says Karol—especially women’s swimwear. Social media has put the trend cycle in another gear, and women—even those conservative northeasterners—are a little bit more willing to put themselves out there than they once were. For Karol, it means more work. Whereas her company used to introduce two new collections a year, it’s now churning out five. On the flip side, she notes, there’s more freedom. “We can be more playful now, try new, fun things,” the designer says. “To be honest, I think it’s changed for the better.” Part of Karol’s success is surely tied to her relatability. “I think she understands the lifestyle of the modern woman—multi-tasking, managing different things at once,” says Nancy Adams, a Bostonbased accountant who has been close friends with—and a dedicated customer of—Karol for more than a decade running. “She’s a mother to four children, like me. I’m always impressed by her ability to switch seamlessly from running around in mom clothes during the day to black tie beautiful for an event that night.” In addition to selling her wares at places like Bergdorf and Saks Fifth Avenue, she now operates brick-and-mortar stores in Boston, Brazil and Greece and is currently working on adding lines for both men and children to her platform, both of which she’s hoping to have out this fall. More and more, Karol has looked to the art world for creative inspiration, a habit that dovetails with her passion for art. When she and her husband bought their house outside of Boston, they decided to leave the walls white and rely only on art for color. They’ve since amassed a collection of more 130 works, including pieces by Andy Warhol, Sol LeWitt, Philip Guston, Dale Chihuly, and Carlos Páez Vilaró. “I look for art that speaks to me and the way I live,” she says, before going on to explain that she doesn’t like the word “collector” because it sounds like a storage operator. “I can’t separate art from fashion; they walk side by side in my mind. I get so much inspiration by looking at and admiring a perfect art piece.”

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CRAFTED WITH 11 GENERATIONS OF FAMILY DISTILLING EXPERTISE. P L E A S E D R I N K R E S P O N S I B LY NOLE T’S

A MATCHH MADE IN MEDIA EDIA

The creative entrepreneurs behind MAMAG merge their interests and love to build a business rooted in diversity and freedom. BY DOMINIQUE CLAYTON PORTRAIT BY MATTHEW MORROCCO

DURING PEAK MIDDAY SUNLIGHT, I drive up into the Hollywood Hills to meet with Sylvia M. Zakhary and Sing J. Lee, the artistic duo behind MAMAG, a creative agency and production company working at the intersection of music, film, art, fashion and technology, with clients like Google Pixel 3, Adidas, and The New York Times—for whom they worked on the mini-series Great Performers. Their enclave is a mix between cozy bed and breakfast, romantic bungalow and production office, with a small crew stationed at edit bays in the living room. After heading up a winding, hobbitlike staircase, we settle into a dreamy sunroom to talk about the good, the bad and the ugly sides of building a relationship and a business. Zakhary founded MAMAG in 2016. When I ask her about the meaning behind the name, she explains, “My nickname growing up was mama ghanoush, like baba ghanoush. As I grew up, I needed to retire that name and I had this idea that the company could carry it.” Lee adds, “There’s hidden meaning—that’s what Sylvia’s about.” Zakhary redirects Lee’s compliment: “That’s what the work is about. Most of our work is a Trojan horse that comes into play in all these spheres of entertainment and music and commercials—worlds where they would normally never allow us to talk about these things. Traditionally and historically, we’re not allowed to have someone like Carrie Mae Weems in a commercially-driven environment and talk the way she talks,” she says, referring to a project they did in partnership with Lyft. In the series, Weems talks with filmmaker Terence Nance about the influences behind their work and their search for authentic black representation in American popular culture. “Normally our brand partners would fight that,” says Zakhary, “but we were fortunate to have her speak her mind. We were in a beautiful position to be able to do that.” This creative freedom was not exactly easy to come by, but Lee and Zakhary have maintained an intentionality in their casting, crew and narratives that sets them apart from other ad companies. “I’m always afraid to call it an ad agency,” Zakhary admits. “That is essentially what it is, but I don’t always believe—and I’m being frank—that I deserve it, because I’m this small Egyptian girl coming into this world that’s really dominated by white men. Essentially every ad agency is owned by or founded by a white man.” While the media landscape continues to grapple with institutional and implicit bias, Zakhary and Lee have a love for their work and each other—

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their love story began on the set of the Migos “Stir Fry” music video—that keeps them in the game for the long haul. Zakhary, who is Egyptian-American, spent her childhood and teen years living across seven different countries, finding her way to New York when she was 18. She hustled her way into a career as an agent and producer using white male pseudonyms to negotiate her own deals. Lee, born in Manchester, England to immigrant parents from Hong Kong, started off as a director and musician and describes his journey into the creative industry as a way for him to understand his identity and feelings, which where complicated growing up “as a person of color who grew up in a 99-percent white town, in an East Asian household with parents who tried to barricade themselves from Western culture and consumerism.” His marginalization fueled his exploration into subcultures like the British punk scene. “The Clash is such an important group to me,” Lee says. “Not just because of their music, but more so because of the way they held themselves. They didn’t see themselves as musicians. They saw themselves as public service announcements with guitars.” Now with MAMAG, Zakhary and Lee work similarly to provide both a service and a message. Their work on projects such as the Dreamweavers artist interview series that Swizz Beatz made in collaboration with UTA Artist Space, their Adidas campaign with Donald Glover, and their forthcoming work with Amazon Music Rap Rotation all offer powerful messages, raising the question of why we haven’t seen this before. Both are excited about the groundbreaking new partnership with Amazon in which they are able to shape the company’s entry into a hip-hop cultural space. Zakhary explains, “It’s so nice to know that brands know we are here for that. We make it easy for them to partner with us and speak authentically about culture, and we make sure they understand how the voices of marginalized people and people of color can help drive brands further. On a business level, we, as people of color, have such huge buying power and companies are starting to recognize that.” In 2018, the duo expanded their brand with the launch of MAMAG Creative Studios, which focuses on bridging the gap between culture and commerce. And beyond marriage and scaling their business, giving back is one of MAMAG’s biggest priorities. As Zakhary says, “Secretly this has always been about creating opportunities for people who wouldn’t otherwise have them.”

Sylvia M. Zakhary and Sing J. Lee in their Hollywood Hills home, which doubles as the production offices for the creative agency MAMAG.

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THE CRYSTAL PALACE

)HJJHYH[ 3H 4HPZVU [LHTZ \W ^P[O 0[HSPHU KLZPNU ÄYT Luxury Living Group on a home collection to remember. BY RACHEL SMALL PORTRAIT BY KYLE KNODELL

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NEARLY THREE YEARS AGO, BACCARAT’S Daniela Riccardi—then recently-appointed as CEO of the iconic French 255-year-old crystal manufacturer—was considering how the brand might approach expanding to include a luxury furniture collection. “We’ve always been a part of big houses, palaces, villas,” she says. “We decorate, but we were missing the furniture to fully bring the DNA of the brand to life within the world of Baccarat.” Coincidentally, Alberto Vignatelli, the then-CEO and founder of the Italian furniture design firm Luxury Living Group, happened to be seeking a new brand with which to partner, having spent the previous three decades launching highly successful collaborations with the likes of Fendi (as Fendi Casa), the Ritz Paris (Ritz Paris Home), and Bentley (Bentley Home), to name a few. It’s disputed who reached out to whom—nonetheless, upon meeting one another, the choice to initiate a partnership was, to be sure, clear as crystal. “When they met, they immediately were thinking this was the right meeting and the right person,” says Raffaella Vignatelli, Alberto’s daughter. Sadly, in late 2017, the elder Vignatelli passed away. As the new CEO, the younger Vignatelli immediately reached out to Riccardi to pick up the conversation. “We sat down together and started from there—thinking about who our potential customers could be and the key words around which to build a collection,” recalls Vignatelli. “At the end of a very long day we decided that ‘timeless’ would be the word to describe this collection.” The result is Baccarat La Maison, which debuted at Luxury Living’s New York showroom in May. The inaugural 42-piece collection comprises several versatile lighting fixtures, many of which nod to Baccarat’s classic chandelier design, as well as furniture sets for dining rooms, bedrooms, and lounge areas. Most of the bulkier items, such as cabinets, sofas, and tables, incorporate Baccarat’s signature material as understated sections of crystal tile inlaid along various edges within the objects. For instance, the Eclat ottoman features two rows stretching across either of its shorter ends just above its base. “You have to balance between the crystals and the pieces so you can see them,” explains Vignatelli. Notably, these strips of crystal double as low-key, LED-powered lighting, which, controlled via remote, can be dimmed, brightened, or changed in hue from acid green to bright pink to neon blue and beyond. Made with the highest quality materials and masterful craftsmanship that have earned Luxury Living its name, there’s no question that any Baccarat La Maison product would add to an opulent home environment. But what of the long term? “The Baccarat chandelier has been offered for more than 100 years and continues to be our best seller,” says Riccardi. “We try to design pieces that you want to have for the rest of this life.” Raffaella Vignatelli is carrying forth her late father’s vision of a Luxury Living Group collaboration with Baccarat. The first joint collection of Baccarat La Maison launched in May, which includes the Phébé chandelier and the Nacre side table designed by Alban Le Henry, among other pieces.

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soundtracks

to ecstasy

The sonics of today’s porn tend to be an afterthought, if they are considered at all. This wasn’t always the case, with scores to some of the 20th century’s most popular erotic ﬁlms ﬁnding mainstream success and pioneering new genres of electronic music. Esra Soraya Padgett traces the history of porn soundtracks from the birth of cinema through the Pornhub present.

ORIGINAL ARTWORK BY PENNY SLINGER EXCLUSIVELY FOR CULTURED

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The idea of a soundtrack

to pornography seems woefully out of place in the Pornhub era. This is because, as consumers, our relation to pornography is shaped by today’s marketplace of porn, a “free market” if ever there was one, where the influx of pornographic images is so rapid, and the access so unlimited, that the notion of settling on a single film long enough to absorb its musicality is practically irrelevant. We are not strolling through a department store with the aim of finding the perfect commodity. Instead, the object of pornographic consumption is the very action of perusal. We are window shoppers in perpetuum. It’s true, this perusal is not without its sonics: a car alarm ringing faintly behind the moans of two unknown performers; a dog barking from the apartment complex courtyard; a football game muffled in the background, outside the camera’s angle, but not out of earshot. These sounds tell us the sex is real: they bring authenticity to the genre of “amateur” pornography. But what were the sounds of pornography before amateur won the day? When porn was “adult cinema” and the product was one most consumers spent more than 30 seconds viewing, how was ecstasy imagined in and through its musical accompaniment? Though erotic films have been part and parcel of the cinematic industry from its inception (even Eadweard Muybridge’s 1880s test footage featured men and women in the nude), the sounds of erotic films were stifled by the totalizing Hays Code—the set of industry guidelines that censored motion pictures from 1930–68. As mainstream movies developed from the silent era into the early days of Hollywood film, pornographic works were so heavily censored that they remained silent throughout this period. In the 1960s, however, the Hays Code fell out of use, and with the emergence of the sexual revolution, pornography crept into wider public view. Adult movie houses opened, and the experience of the cinema required sound: a group of men silently watching intercourse couldn’t sell—films needed dialogue, and most importantly a score. In 1968, the year the Hays Code was officially rescinded, a few films aroused particular attention in the way of musicality. Sweden: Heaven and Hell, with music by Piero Umiliani, and the Inga series, scored by Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson of ABBA, are both striking examples of mainstream musical success. Before founding ABBA, Andersson and Ulvaeus released two of the songs they had written for the Inga films: “Inga Theme” and “She’s My Kind of Girl.” But despite the lascivious imagery with which these songs were paired, the lyrics are more reminiscent of what ABBA would become. Ulvaeus and Andersson sing: “And when we go for a walk in the park/ Then she holds me and squeezes my hand/ We’ll go on walking for hours and talking/ About all the things that we plan.” What emerged from Sweden: Heaven and Hell was an even more striking cultural juxtaposition: from a Scandinavian fantasy of a lesbian nightclub, Umiliani composed the kitschy and kid-friendly, “Mah Nà Mah Nà,” later made famous by The Muppet Show. As pornography entered into the mainstream, these soundtracks demonstrated the possibilities of cross-over success for the composers of adult film. The films presaged what was to follow, as the 1970s ushered in the Golden Age of Porn. As the adult industry found new commercial success, increases in production value meant a new attention to musical scores. The most famous films of this era all have notable soundtracks. The crew for Behind the Green Door (1972) included a full music and sound department, with a soundtrack composed by Daniel Le Blanc. The film contains almost no dialogue—Marilyn Chambers, the star, has zero lines—and the directors, strip club financiers the Mitchell Brothers, are said to have intentionally put the soundtrack high in the mix. This was a commercial tactic: rather than stir up the crowds with the sounds of sex, the Mitchells thought the soft piano, acoustic guitar, and psychedelic electronics emanating from the theater would intrigue passers-by into seeing a film they might otherwise shy away from. The soundtrack to Deep Throat (1972) also found mainstream appeal; inaugurating what would be called “porno funk”—where the sounds of lounge

met so perfectly with the sleaze of smut that it seemed that funk couldn’t be heard any other way. But the artists behind Deep Throat’s tunes would remain unknown because the film and all its paraphernalia (including the original musical recordings) were seized by the FBI on claims of obscenity. Anonymous and yet infamous, the artists behind Deep Throat set the stage for years to come; porno funk—the genre invoked by the onomatopoetic “boom chicka wow wow”—would become a staple in porno films of the 1970s. A standout in this genre is the soundtrack to the 1974 film Lialeh—often cited as the first African-American porn film—about an aspirational soul singer moonlighting as a stripper to support herself. The soundtrack is composed by funk legend Bernard “Pretty” Purdie (a session drummer for The Beatles), who is featured singing the title track in the opening scene, leading the band in Lialeh’s club. But the creative innovations of Golden Age era soundtracks did not end with “porno funk.” The endless demand for pornography created an unceasing site for musical experimentation, ranging from the avant-garde to early disco and synthpop. Electronic music pioneers of this era often composed porno scores to support themselves. Most notably, Klaus Schulze composed the soundtrack to Lasse Braun’s Body Love as his seventh fulllength album in 1977; and Patrick Cowley, a lesser-known composer, wrote the scores to several early gay porn films including School Daze (1980), Muscle Up (1980) and Afternooners (1982). Cowley constructed the scores with a mix of analog synthesizers and his own self-made instruments, and though he is credited as a major influence for bands like New Order and the Pet Shop Boys, his early death to AIDS in 1982 cut short his creative output, making the porn soundtracks a significant portion of his oeuvre. Pornography’s entanglement in musical development was not exclusive to the Euro-American context either. In Japan, “pink” film starlets, including Ike Reiko, Tani Naomi, Kuwabara Yukiko and Taguchi Kumi created their own musical genre, “Iroke Kayǀkyoku” (often called “pink blues”) mixing the styles of Enka, the songstress-led sentimental ballads that became popular in post-war Japan, with uncensored erotics: lusty breaths, shrieks of pleasure, and sensual whispered lyrics. Not all soundtracks of this era were original, however: many porn soundtracks simply stole music from elsewhere, knowing that the piracy would likely go unrecognized. Her Name was Lisa (1979), features a note-for-note reproduction of Kraftwerk’s “The Robots.” The scores of Ennio Morricone were sampled and borrowed from again and again. Sometimes the borrowing would inspire new music of merit: Nico Fidenco’s score to Black Emanuelle (1975), an Italian sexploitation film shot in Kenya, is as much derivative of Morricone as it is worthy of contemporary listeners. In lieu of sonic paraphrasing, many films simply used music without a copyright—including classical music often humorously juxtaposed with the film’s sordid content. The Opening of Misty Beethoven (1976), an X-rated retelling of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion deemed the “crown jewel” of the Golden Age of porn, includes just such a musical borrowing: the William Tell Overture plays over an opening shot of Misty attending the ballet. But the idea that porn of this time could “steal” from another industry is in stark contrast to what would become porn’s future; these were the days when pornography did the pirating, perhaps karmically portending both the era of VHS bootlegs as well as the age of internet piracy to which the big-budget productions of the 1970s would eventually surrender. It’s difficult to imagine musical scores to pornography ever returning to what they were at this time. Yet the conversation between sonics and porn did not end with the Golden Age, nor is it entirely quieted now. Perhaps music is what we need to release us from the acts of pornographic perusal we are locked in today. If so, it would be worth asking: to what sounds of ecstasy might we hover over longer? How could pleasure be composed to reverberate in us today?

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CURATOR OF THE CITY Daniel S. Palmer is making his mark on the metropolis. Following the opening of OPZ /HYVSK (UJHY[ JVTTPZZPVU LHYSPLY [OPZ `LHY OL SH\UJOLZ [OL ÄYZ[ L]LY SHYNL ZJHSL presentation of sculptures by Carmen Herrera at City Hall Park on July 11.

PHOTO BY NICHOLAS KNIGHT, COURTESY OF PUBLIC ART FUND, NY

BY MONICA USZEROWICZ

Public Art Fund Associate Curator, Daniel S. Palmer in front of his recent curatorial project, Harold Ancart: Subliminal Standard.

WHEN DANIEL S. PALMER WAS A KID, his grandmother kept a book of the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art on her credenza. “I would pore through it for hours,” he says, “totally mesmerized and captivated. Even though my parents were not in the art world, they understood that learning more about art could be good cultural enrichment. I found and discovered myself in art, thinking about it, talking about it.” He went on to study art history, focusing on American art made in New York during the Great Depression and following the Holocaust. “I love that many artists believed so firmly in the power of their art to create genuine social change,” he says. Now the Associate Curator at New York’s Public Art Fund—he joined the staff in 2016, after working as the Leon Levy Assistant Curator at the Jewish Museum—Palmer has maintained his childhood sense of excitement with every collaboration. He describes Harold Ancart’s recentlyopened Subliminal Standard at Cadman Plaza Park as “rewarding”; his next

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big project, Carmen Herrera’s Estructuras Monumentales, opens July 11 at City Hall Park and “is so special, and deeply meaningful to me.” (Herrera will be 104 at the time of the opening.) “Artists hold such an important role in society. They are our thought leaders, dreamers, critics. To have the honor of stewarding their vision and getting to share that with people is a duty I take really seriously.” Sharing with people is what Palmer likes best about working with Public Art Fund—it’s “the inclusiveness I had been searching for,” he explains. “The best resources for me to learn from are always the people of the city—I love sitting in the sites where I’ve curated an exhibition and watching how they use the space, respond to the work. My approach has never been that of the curator who selects from art fairs and puts together an exhibition as a kind of auteur. What interests me is the artists themselves—the dialogue they’re developing, and imagining how that will connect back to audiences and society as a whole.”

SARAH LUCAS AU NATUREL JUN 9–SEP 1, 2019

1 MUSEUM Los Angeles | hammer.ucla.edu | @hammer_museum SARAH LUCAS: AU NATUREL IS ORGANIZED BY THE NEW MUSEUM, NEW YORK. SARAH LUCAS, BUNNY GETS SNOOKERED #9, 1997. TAN TIGHTS, YELLOW STOCKINGS, OFFICE CHAIR, CLAMP, KAPOK AND WIRE, 41 × 18 7∕8 × 26 IN. (104 × 48 × 66 CM). COLLECTION OF STEPHEN AND YANA PEEL, LONDON. © SARAH LUCAS. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND SADIE COLES HQ, LONDON

Free Admission

SUZI ANALOGUE COMPOSES FOR LIFE

The producer, composer, and songwriter is a synesthete, feeling and seeing the shape of sound wherever she goes. It’s the sounds of people and stories, of energy and feeling, that shape her own. Here, she discusses \[PSPaPUN KHUJL T\ZPJ [V ÄUK joy, the black and brown roots of techno, and her collaborative new album, ZONEZ V.4: Love Me Louder. BY MONICA USZEROWICZ 104 culturedmag.com

A FEW HOURS BEFORE I SPOKE TO

the producer and composer Suzi Analogue, she was putting makeup on and, in her haste, nearly dropped a brush on the floor. But she’s too quick for that. “I wasn’t even looking at the makeup brush, but I caught it in my hand because I could hear where it was going,” she tells me. Analogue’s particular neurological faculties have been referred to as synesthesia, but even she can’t fully explain it. “I see forms, forms of mass, inside words. The words become something else. When I listen to any kind of sound, I can see the waveform. I can see where it’s coming from.” She can see where it’s going, too. The founder of Never Normal Records is a beatmaker, songwriter, singer; in a still-male-dominated scene, she’s an independent polymath, often providing platforms for other musicians of color while writing work that’s fiercely her own—much of it made with, as her name reveals, analog gear. She’s a true cognoscente: once a kid who obsessively read the liner notes of albums she loved, and who today constructs beats like they’re puzzles, as if she’s intuiting a series of equations. Born in Baltimore, Analogue was primarily raised in Virginia by her mother. While in college in Philadelphia, she moved and worked with other musicians, eventually emerging publicly as part of the Klipmode collective (with Knxwledge, Devonwho, and Mndsgn); by graduation, she’d already toured globally. She later became a cultural diplomat for the USA in Uganda (part of the hiphop music initiative Next Level), teaching production to beat-makers in Kampala. She’s collaborated with the likes of TOKiMONSTA and DJ Earl, toured with Princess Nokia, Bonobo, and Sylvan Esso, and soundtracked runway shows and Adult Swim spots. Analogue is everywhere, infusing everything she does with her own particular charge. But in ZONEZ V.4: Love Me Louder, her latest release, Analogue is very much in Miami, where she’s lived for the last several years. She’s described the ZONEZ series as “mood boards,” energetic, beat-driven scores for emotional landscapes, accompanied by kaleidoscopic visuals. The album is filled with mantras—on “2DEEP,” featuring Junglepussy, the rapper and actress says, over Analogue’s production, “I’m too deep/rock a life jacket”; the videos were produced by femme artists in Miami, and pay homage to everything from the work of Carrie Mae Weems (“BREAKTHRU,” featuring Oyinda, directed by Kristabel) to skateboarding culture (“LOUDR,” directed by Dana Lauren Goldstein) and the ritual of hair care (“2DEEP,” directed by Helen Peña of (F)empower, the Miami-based art and activist collective). Coming up, Never Normal is launching NNECESSARY, a radio residency for emerging artists, on

radio platform Half Moon BK; Analogue is also getting her own residency, as ZONEZ Radio, on RinseFM. In June, she performs at The Kitchen as part of the venue’s ASSEMBLY activation. Preparing to hit the road yet again, Analogue caught us up on her history, her future, and finally defining herself as a composer. MONICA USZEROWICZ: Tell me about your name, its reference points. SUZI ANALOGUE: My name is derived from Bobby Digital, an alter ego of the RZA. His project, the RZA as Bobby Digital, inspired me as a teen entering my punk rebel phase. As a kid, I was obsessed with producers— reading the track listings and seeing who wrote the songs I was listening to on my cassettes. But as I evolved into my creativity, the name Suzi became a dual name for my birth identity as Maya—both names have four letters, so it’s reflective. And Suzi is this all-Americangirl’s name. I feel like my story is very American, but it’s indigenous and African-American—untold stories. Suzi’s not even a persona; it’s just another extension of me. The name Analogue conveys a sense of time, a sense of an aesthetic. It’s a nod to formats of music, like cassette and vinyl. The word “analogous,” too, speaks to my duality. The way I create operates in a format of understanding analogous entities. It’s always a comparison: The two Zs in ZONEZ reflect each other; there’s the word “one” in the middle, so there’s a oneness. MU: This reminds me of your synesthesia. SA: I don’t even know how to categorize it. My synesthesia’s not just auditory. I see forms, forms of mass, inside words. The words become something else. When I listen to any kind of sound, I can see the waveform. I can see where it’s coming from. This has helped me—living in different cities, traveling by myself, being a woman. And I have a somewhat photographic memory, so I remember the forms of mass. When I used to take notes in class, I’d use different colors; when I took the test, I could go back in my mind to where it was on the page and find the answer. But I never thought I had synesthesia then. I never thought about how, when I was in a house full of people, I could tell who was coming up the steps. I can identify bass, the bass lines of different music, from other rooms. Everything hits my memory very differently with sounds and words. MU: It’s like a superpower, or a gift. SA: Well, I feel like a synthesizer. Like a vibration, an energy form. It’s not just sound that I’m processing: it’s the sound of the times, the sound of the people. It’s the sound of what’s happening around me. ZONEZ is an outlet for me to express how I’m navigating the world as a creative, as an entrepreneur, as a black woman, as an activist.

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I was being so stimulated and I didn’t really know how to channel it as an artist. I had to give myself time to process. MU: With ZONEZ, a lot of the tracks feel almost meditative, deliberately repetitive. SA: Totally. Being so stimulated all the time—I hear the directions of sounds and everything—there’s still a calmness. When Junglepussy says, “I’m too deep/rock a life jacket,” it’s kind of a warning: you might drown in the depths of how connected I am. Junglepussy is very deep; she has so many layers as a person, as an artist. But it’s also a permission to embrace your depth. In these times we’re going through, people always say, “It’s not that deep,” but things are very deep. We’re all interconnected. On ZONEZ, many of the MCs are expressing some of their deepest truths, their stances on how they survive. Sometimes you need to hear that from other people. MU: One thing you’ve mentioned is that some of your music has an upward tempo because you’ve experienced loss, and it’s a way of working through it—if you don’t mind talking about that. SA: Yes, I like to share my stories if it can help somebody who feels isolated. And these days, with so many struggles, and so much oppression and marginalization of groups of people, many of them experiencing loss in their communities—I know they can identify with the message. I feel happy to share how I’m getting through these things. I experienced back-to-back loss of nearly everyone who raised me, in a period of five years. My first loss was my grandmother, then my mother, then my grandfather; then I lost my father—that was when I had just moved to Miami. I lost my mother a couple years after I graduated college—not really a great time to lose the most important cheerleader of your life. At the time, I was making some down-to-mid-tempo, some soul, some bedroom beat vibes. I had a crew, but it was disbanding; I had romantic relationships that were going sour. I had built up so much of what I wanted my life to be, but at the same time, it felt like I was losing things left and right. I didn’t know what to hold onto. But I remembered dance music: growing up listening to it, making dance routines with my friends. I started to fixate on those tempos. Dance music called me back. It kept me alive—I really felt like not being here anymore. I was ready. I was like, “I don’t know what could be worse.” But the music started taking my hand; I went back to making my own music. Now it’s become such a part of me, and it makes me so happy. The energy I want to give is that you can push through anything if you give yourself time and space to free yourself to the beats. Free yourself through the rhythm. MU: You were telling me your mom was one of your biggest supporters. SA: My mom was a spirited person. I remember she told me, as she was getting sick, “It’s okay. I’m gonna find my happiness and I’m gonna dance.” It came out of nowhere, and it was so trippy that she said that. She was so upbeat, smiling through everything, the cheerleader on her high school and college teams—that’s the presence she had in my life. Making this up-tempo music, I feel like I’m honoring her spirit. I feel like if she could be right beside me, dancing at these festivals and shows, she would say, “Yes, this is what I want. For you to be happy. I want you to be celebrating.” I remember when I was writing songs as a teen, I would play them for her. She was a poet herself, the editor of her college literary journal. She would ask me, “What is this song about? Who are you speaking to?” She would help me consider my writing,

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even in my experiments. I know she had a vision for how I should interact in the world. I think she would be happy that I’m making people dance, trying to inspire people to feel happiness. MU: Like what you’re doing with ZONEZ and its messages. SA: ZONEZ V. 4 is a message to the people. It has many different vibes, but what I’m aiming to do is connect the worlds of electronic music and hip-hop music, to the point where it becomes one form, one zone. I will argue that hip-hop music is electronic music. I’m like an ethno-music activist, because I want more justice and ownership for the innovative moments in music history that black and brown people paved the way for commercial music to become. Techno, house, hip-hop—all of it was created by black and brown people. These are tenets of Never Normal. Everyone in our collective knows this; we are powered by this. All of this was riot, protest music, for people who were oppressed and marginalized. I’m allowing other voices from the diaspora to connect—everyone vocally involved with ZONEZ is part of the African diaspora. We have artists who are Cuban, Jamaican, Dominican, African-American, Southern; there are coastal vibes. And for seven of the tracks, there are visual guides that people can watch and catch a mood, all filmed and directed by femme creatives in Miami. That was important to me. I’ve been blessed to be in the creative community here, and I wanted to share that space. Miami femme creatives have something unique to share, meaningfully, with the world. There’s almost a renaissance period happening. MU: There is a Renaissance happening in Miami, completely. SA: It’s also been important for me to have visuals directed from the femme gaze, versus other male visual narrators—who I’ve worked with before. But this time, it’s about us. I even have a nod to Carrie Mae Weems. I just really believe in artists like that: giving them their flowers while they can still smell them. So many visuals that artists put out these days are flexes, like, “Look at me perform this idea of something I want you to perceive.” ZONEZ is very much, “This is a woman in her own world, owning every space that she goes into.” I think back to when I was a little girl, watching Lil’ Kim and Missy Elliott and all these femmes, just doing them. I’m trying to make something for the little girl I was then, because I can imagine that if she saw some of these visuals, she’d say, “What does she do? Can I be like that when I grow up? I can be interesting; I can be diverse.” Giving visual permission to femmes’ experiences, experiencing diversity in oneself, not feeling like you have to fit any one mold— that’s what the visual narratives are all about. It’s about inspiring. I’m fixated on inspiration. It’s not just something I want to do for the people—it’s something I need to do for myself. Because, again, I’ve had so much loss that inspiration is a very healing thing. MU: You’re truly a composer—do you consider yourself one? SA: I have just started to consider myself a composer. As a black woman, no one ever told me I could be one. What I’m doing now is recontextualizing my art with what being a composer means. When you’re a young girl, people will say, “You’re a singer.” Yes, that’s a skill I have. I can DJ; that’s a skill I have, too. But what I am is a composer, producer, and songwriter. Composing not just music, but moments we can live to and remember when things get hard or sad. I compose for life. That’s really what I want to do, in how ever many forms it can take shape. Hair by Rabiah Ahmad at House of Kiyomi; nails by Gina at Nail Gawd Studios. Necklace: Jenn Wong

“The energy I want to give is that you can push through anything if you give yourself time and space to free yourself to the beats. Free yourself through the rhythm.”

SUZI ANALOGUE

PHOTO BY PHOTOPHUNK

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MANUAL NOT INCLUDED Detroit’s Underground Resistance label is a vector to the past and to the future, with their [LJO KYP]LU JVTT\UP[` ÄYZ[ HWWYVHJO [V [LJOUV BY SALOME ASEGA

ABOUT 15 MINUTES INTO MY CONVERSATION with Cornelius Harris, label manager of Underground Resistance (UR), we’re talking about alien abductions, singularity, and how the fear of superintelligent machines is really channeling something much deeper—a guilt and fear of machines doing unto humans what humans have done unto each other. As Octavia Butler, William Gibson, and many other speculative world builders have expressed, the threats found in science fiction re-present our current social and political anxieties in new garb. And here is where Underground Resistance enters, offering us fractal futures and electronic visions as a means of coursecorrecting the cyclical loop of history. Formed in the late 1980s in Detroit, UR is a label and crew initiated by Jeff Mills, “Mad” Mike Banks, and Robert Hood, and has welcomed a powerhouse roster of affiliated artists over the course of its 30 years, including Drexciya, James Stinson, Blake Baxter, Nomadico and many more. Yes, they are important figures in early techno music, but UR also nurtures a comprehensive electronic music landscape that includes a range of styles from house to hi-tek jazz. When you ask members of UR how the sound came to be, they’ll most likely start by telling you the story of how a slew of sequencers, samplers, and other electronic audio gear became affordable by way of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM)’s tax against electronic music in the mid-‘80s. Musicians who could afford this equipment at original cost, and who were finding it difficult to get gigs, would sell their gear at discounted rates or pledge them to pawn shops. This opened the door for a younger, more black audience to scoop up these toys and start playing. Underground Resistance’s Interstellar Fugitives at the TodaysArt Festival.

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“TECHNO IS A MUSIC BASED IN EXPERIMENTATION. IT IS MUSIC FOR THE FUTURE OF THE HUMAN RACE. WITHOUT THIS NO PEACE, NO LOVE, NO VISION.” —TKTKTK

As journalist David McNamee wrote in The Guardian in 2008, sampling “was the working-class black answer to punk.” Techno developed by way of people experimenting with equipment that was not meant for them. And without the restrictions of an established electronic music industry, these artists found freedom of expression. No one was going to tell them what they could or could not do with their samplers and sequencers. There was no manual. Detroit’s techno musicians in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s were testing how far they could go with the sound. In writer Mike Rubin’s “Cosmic Cars” piece in Victory Journal, Mike Banks tells Rubin: “Motown is affiliated with cruising; UR is associated with horsepower.” The first time I heard Underground Resistance felt like a confrontation. I was at a party at a Brooklyn venue that was closing soon, another cyclicality, and a DJ put on “Riot,” the title track off Riot EP (1991). The invocation of the siren and the “Now is the time” vocal alarm set up a sense of urgency, both artistically and politically for me. The four-track EP was ablaze with radicality and fierce rigor. It was the soundtrack I needed to make my rage generative. But when I express this fierceness to Harris, he asks if he can make two points. “We’re always going to be seen as radical if we ask for something,” he starts off. “If you’re used to having a full pie to yourself, giving a small slice to someone else feels like you’re giving up something. Share some of that! You’re going to have less and that’s ok. If people stopped to think about it, a lot of radical ideas wouldn’t be really radical. It’s just common sense.” We both laugh at this.

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He continues with point two: “The minute you have an opinion, you’re militant. I understand that’s how things are put out there. UR is hard music from a hard city... I think a lot of it is about being able to tell your story, whatever it might be, and to have control over your own narrative.” These points are critical to how I read the work of UR. They’ve maintained unapologetic creative control in their storytelling, while also remaining accountable to their community. You see this sprinkled into the Underground Resistance Manifesto: “Techno is a music based in experimentation. It is music for the future of the human race. Without this music there will be no peace, no love, no vision.” When I think about the legacy of UR and Detroit techno, I am reminded that this music has traveled the world and back again and serves as one of many indicators of Detroit’s capacity for cultural and technological innovation. When we talk about digital equity in Detroit, UR offers an important lens as champions for tech inclusion. Their Submerge space, just down the street from the Motown Museum, is part techno history museum, part record shop, and part community space. They offer studio support and resources for emerging artists in the city. And as they move around the world, they are powerfully loud advocates for keeping audio gear accessible. To them, keeping costs low ensures more people are

PHOTO BY DARRYELL RANDLE

MUSIC THERE WILL BE

Underground Resistance members Milton “DJ Skurge” Baldwin and Mad Mike.

at the table to experiment and push music forward. Harris tells me synth engineer Tatsuya Takahashi once thanked Mike Banks for showing him the impact and social responsibility manufacturers have in releasing affordable gear, with the Korg Volca surfacing as an example of a step in the right direction. This kind of DIY for-us-by-us approach to digital equity can be seen throughout Detroit. The Detroit Community Technology Project (DCTP), a sponsored initiative of Allied Media Projects, has built six community-owned wireless mesh networks across the city since 2009 through their Digital Stewards program. DCTP’s work not only grants access to broadband to lowincome residents, it gives people intimate exposure to how the technology runs and renders a replicable blueprint for ownership. Where Detroit ranks high in percentage of households without internet access, DCTP and the

larger Detroit Digital Justice Coalition is propelling change through their online curriculums, zines, and campaigns. This work has strong ripple effects and has made DCTP an important model in community technology. After Hurricane Sandy, New America’s Open Technology Institute helped bring DCTP’s curriculum to Red Hook Initiative in New York, where young residents built a mesh network and produced a podcast series. I am not surprised to learn that DCTP’s director, Diana Nucera, has a musical alter ego named Mother Cyborg who makes healing electronic dance music. The jellied connection between healing, futurity, localism, and tech experimentation is felt in both the values of DCTP and UR. I ask Harris what he thinks this next generation will do with techno and he says, “We opened the door for them, but then they went off and did something wild on their own that we’re now learning from. And that’s fun.”

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The Moroccan-born artist resurrects the documentary by introducing an HIZ\YKPZ[ RPUK VM ÄJ[PVU BY ERIN LELAND

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A behind-the-scenes photbooth snap taken by Meriem Bennani from the Party on the CAPS shoot in 2018.

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is synchronized with a virtual platform. But the immediate surroundings MERIEM BENNANI LIKES TO FILM IN the open streets of are decades old—the same regional pharmacy, the neighbor’s house, the Morocco, allowing life to enter into the frame. The public is as much a movie pizzeria that sells fries. A collusion of time periods suggests that bodies are set as the contained, constructed environments that Bennani alternately held hostage in past geographies while minds are disconnected in a futurestages. Based in New York since 2012, she was born in Rabat in 1988. seeking preoccupation. One character says, “I am the only person on this “Morocco is sensual and highly corporeal. It is a sexual place,” Bennani says. island who can sing the way they used to back in Morocco.” Physicality runs alongside the presence of religion, alongside a matriarchal “How did you learn?” asks another. culture that blossoms indoors. Bennani could make endless work about this “I learned from my parents. My father, my mother. They were musicians.” tension, she tells me, “without ever reaching the answer to it, reaching the On the terrace of the Whitney Museum in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, end of it.” In Rabat, men tend to congregate outside in groups. Women less three sculptures with inset video screens and one flatscreen monitor sit so. Instead, gatherings of women form inside the home. Music populates like celestial totems. Within Bennani’s larger installation MISSION TEENS: familial domestic space and, in turn, the domestic becomes the locus for a French School in Morocco is an interactive video installation, with two pushnumber of ecstatic dance scenes throughout Bennani’s videos. button activated screens that alternate playback. Through the past four The presence of song mirrors the experience of the city. Bennani’s years, all of Bennani’s installations have included sculptural elements that cast members, who are also frequently her family members, live beyond act as screens. There are discs, cylinders, rectangles. The duplication of the body in an awareness of the virtual realm. Participants in the videos the video image among simultaneous projections and surfaces is most are given role-play prompts. For example: “Pretend you are on an island acutely present in Bennani’s 2017 installation of Siham and Hafida at The in the future.” Bennani exaggerates their physicality through 3D slapstick Kitchen. The piece tells the story animations of enlarged eyes, faces of an elder, Hafida, who watches swathed in golden dust, and a a young woman, Siham, become swirling, spiraling, stretched digital a star. At the center of the effect filter that pulls at the fabric intergenerational struggle is also of a dress. The digital world tugs an examination of the construction at the characters, intercepting the of femininity. Hafida’s lessons real world and hinting at a life inlearned as a young Aita singer between the past and the future, were stricter, more demanding, the tangible and intangible, the and harder earned. Throughout, cyber and the concrete. Bennani animates Siham’s songs Before Bennani began working with cartoon butterflies in flight, in video, she drew—and she emerging from mouths and touching still does. Animation spirits her down. Intimate annotations documentary aesthetic. Take, radiate across stacked screens, for example, the video The Fly reminiscent of a sports stadium (2016), in which the final vignette where one misses the details of is narrated by a buzzing bug. The the action, while simultaneously insect circles Morocco from above Video still from MISSION TEENS: French School in Morocco (2019) absorbing every move. before landing on the camera lens. In MISSION TEENS: French Inserting humor into a corporate School in Morocco, Bennani’s most strategy, Bennani built the animation of this fly using a similar texture applied autobiographical work to date, she is a symbolic parent to a group of high by Samsung in 3D animation programs to their company designs. Rihanna’s school students. The documentary-slash-reality television piece brings into “Kiss It Better” squeaks through the fly’s vocal chord while it alights from view a group of students in a post-colonial French high school in Morocco. covered markets and observes the city as an omnipotent illustration. The kids are popular, the opposite of bookish types. They like the idea Bennani’s videos travel through towns, visiting their occupants and finding of becoming stars and know little of Moroccan history. Since in her past an oral history of rumors upheld through twice-removed acquaintances. In videos, Bennani has been surrounded by her elders while looking in, for the Party on CAPS (2018), shown in the Biennial of the Moving Image in Geneva first time, Bennani “feels the responsibility of being an elder herself” and in 2018, the setting is in the far future, technologically speaking, on an glances backwards at the implications of her own education in a classist, imaginary island called CAPS. Illegal immigrants have landed on this island elitist school system. In MISSION TEENS: French School in Morocco, colonial through intercepted teleportation travel en route to the United States. A possession and cultural tension are refracted through a multiplication video guide, in the form of an animated alligator from a cereal box, tells of screens, through Bennani’s relationship to the teenagers on camera, us “violent interception is the reality that unites all communities...it’s a through her relationship to herself through these students, and through the place where the idea of having a body itself is never taken for granted.” ability to take comic relief from her position as interviewer in the guise of Here, humans access internet screens through eyesight command. Wishful a donkey. projections manifest in mid-air through online search portals, as the brain

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Installation view of Meriem Bennani’s Neighborhood Goggles (2019) 115 culturedmag.com 145

THE PAINTER OF LIFE What happens when the most important name in luxury taps a group of blue-chip talent to create a treasure to last? Alex Israel weighs in on Louis Vuitton’s latest blockbuster. BY CAIT MUNRO

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ALEX ISRAEL IS A BRAND. Unlike some visual artists, he’s never been shy about admitting this. And this fact makes the 37-year-old Los Angeles native the perfect collaborator for Louis Vuitton, a brand that, after 165 years, continues to find new ways to make its iconic luxury logo branding feel cool and cutting edge. But while most collaborators in the past have opted to transform Louis Vuitton’s monogram, Israel lends himself instead to the Capucines, a sleek

Installation view of Israel’s As It Lays 2 (2019) at Greene Naftali

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and relatively inconspicuous handbag that takes its name from Paris’s Rue de Capucines, where the first Louis Vuitton shop was located. Israel’s Capucines can best be described as one of his signature Wave paintings come to life, rendered in three-dimensional leather and rainbow sherbet hues. It also bears a delightfully avant-garde twist: a pair of leather “waves” jut out from the bag’s otherwise simple shape. “While I never had a specific consumer in mind while designing it, I do hope to encounter it one day out in the world, on the street or in an airport,” Israel says. “I’d probably go up to the person carrying it and just say ‘cool bag.’” It’s not Israel’s first time working with Louis Vuitton. He created a unisex fragrance for the brand this year, in which he tried to capture the scent of his hometown, a frequent source of inspiration in his work. But the bag, which became available June 1, is poised to make Israel a household name—at least among the high fashion crowd. In lending his work to the brand, Israel joins a canon that includes Yayoi Kusama, Richard Prince, Jeff Koons, and Takashi Murakami. “I remember how much those projects shifted my perception of the brand, and of the potential for fashion’s relationship to art,” Israel says of Murakami and fashion designer Stephen Sprouse’s collections in particular. “Registering those shifts in real time was quite powerful.” Israel has a longtime fascination with the concept of the readymade, especially as it relates to fashion. Last year, he launched Infrathin, a Duchamp-inspired clothing line

“I’ll always be prone to working with brands that have meaning and resonance for me.”

—ALEX ISRAEL

Israel was one of six contemporary artists tapped by Louis Vuitton this year to reimagine the iconic Capucines bag.

that will debut new pieces this fall. In many ways, this collaboration feels like an extension of that, as well as of his greater artistic practice—since the bags essentially take on the form of Israel’s paintings, it’s easy to think of them as portable artworks. “‘Infrathin’ is a word Duchamp coined to refer to the imperceptible difference between two identical things, namely when one is art and the other isn’t—i.e. the aura of art,” Israel explains. “In any art-fashion collaboration, there’s inevitably going to be a little bit of that question of the Infrathin—is it art or not? I think that question is good to ask, and I’m comfortable not always having a definitive answer.” The massive Rimowa suitcase sculpture he created on LA’s La Cienega Boulevard last year—plus the much smaller, airplane-friendly versions available for purchase—seem to fall into this category as well. As for further brand collaborations, Israel says he’s open-minded. “I’ll always be prone to working with brands that have meaning and resonance for me.”

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THE GRASS IS GREENER

Collector and Moda Operandi co-founder Lauren Santo Domingo ZOHYLZ OV^ OLY ÄYZ[ L_WLYPLUJL ^P[O JVU[LTWVYHY` HY[ [YHUZMVYTLK OLY [OPURPUN BY JENNA SAUERS PORTRAIT BY WILLIAM JESS LAIRD

“A LOT OF PEOPLE USE ‘SELF-TAUGHT’ as a derogatory statement, which I think is so crazy,” says Lauren Santo Domingo, the co-founder of online luxury retailer Moda Operandi, and owner—with her husband, Colombian heir Andres Santo Domingo—of an art collection of envy-inducing breadth and beauty. “I taught myself business, I taught myself to be a mother, I taught myself about fashion,” says Santo Domingo. “I never understood how that’s supposed to be a put-down. Maybe it’s my New England spirit, but being called self-taught is the ultimate compliment. It’s grit and independence.” Santo Domingo was raised in Greenwich, Connecticut, the daughter of a businessman (her father was the US C.E.O. of Perrier, and built brands including Poland Spring) and a stay-at-home mother who later in life became an amateur artist. Although her career has been in fashion—before cofounding Moda Operandi in 2010, she was an associate market editor at American Vogue, and a vice president of communications for Carolina Herrera—Santo Domingo and her husband have long had an interest in art. Andres is on the board of the New York City arts venue The Shed, and Lauren is a regular at art fairs and auction previews. Longtime friend of the couple Hugo Nathan, of the art advisory firm Beaumont Nathan, says Santo Domingo has a “natural feel for things of the highest quality.” “First of all, her taste is eclectic,” says Nathan, who has occasionally acted in a professional capacity for the couple. “She is interested in drawings, paintings, sculpture, design, furniture; she likes contemporary things, she sometimes gravitates to Old Masters and antiquities. She is incredibly decisive and knows what she likes, and I have to say, she is one of those people who naturally has a very good eye.” Though her collection is of a different scale, he compares her eye to that of the late Yves Saint Laurent. “She mixes things by younger artists with things by incredibly famous older artists, with things that look like they belong in a museum, but when they’re in her home, they feel just right,” he says. “I also appreciate technical ability, maybe because I have none,” she says, wryly. “I can’t draw, I can’t paint, I can’t sculpt, I can’t sew. If I visit a contemporary artist in their studio and see sketches on their table— someone like Dan Colen, for example; I know that he is an incredibly talented draftsman—that’s something I value. It’s the same thing with a dress. There are designers who are great at draping, but they don’t have any sense of construction of a garment. And I can see that. I think I have that same requirement, or sensitivity, when it comes to an artist. There has to be something behind it.”

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Santo Domingo counts younger artists like Colen, Nate Lowman, Damian Loeb, and Olympia Scarry among those she considers friends, as well as more established New York figures like Jeff Koons, Tom Sachs, and Richard Prince—“they’re friends with everybody,” she laughs. Though Santo Domingo did not study art history in college, she’s learned about art from her immersion in it: museums, fairs, “and asking a lot of questions.” One early cultural experience that left a deep impression was visiting Venice for the first time, at around age 12, and arriving at Saint Mark’s Square. “It was the ’80s. I remember I had my Walkman, I had Guns N’ Roses on, I had my Invicta backpack, and I felt really cool. And I’m from one of the older towns in the US, but there’s nothing still standing in Greenwich that dates back past maybe the 1750s. In Venice, I was jarred. It was awesome, in the true definition of the word.” It was an experience that was formative for how she looks at and approaches art. “I think that’s the moment that I’ve been chasing,” she says. “That feeling I had in Venice for the first time. Wanting to see something new, wanting to be amazed, wanting to experience something. I keep looking for that experience of seeing something for the first time, and really being moved.” The Santo Domingo family travels to Italy every summer and is involved with Save Venice, which works to fund restoration and preservation of the city’s artistic and architectural treasures. Santo Domingo has organized the charity’s annual fundraiser ball for the last five years and often takes her children to visit restoration projects funded through the organization, and to the Biennale when it’s happening. “I look at everything,” she says. And when her eye catches sight of something that isn’t right for her, but she feels might just work perfectly for someone else, she often gets so excited that she sends the find along. “I do like to place objects with other people,” she says. “There was this amazing Matisse fireplace mantel from the Rockefeller apartment—I sent it to everyone I knew who was in the middle of construction.” She sounds a little sad when she says she doesn’t know where it ended up. “Whether it’s a Viennese hand-painted crystal tumbler, or an incredible Helen Frankenthaler canvas, I just really like beautiful things,” says Santo Domingo. As a collector, she feels there’s a spectrum between appreciation and ownership, and she falls somewhere in the middle. “Some things I feel like I really want to own, to collect, and some things I simply want to gaze at, and move on to the next thrill,” she says. “I accumulate things that I think will add value to my life, and that I will appreciate for the rest of my life. But I can also appreciate without ownership.”

Lauren Santo Domingo with a family of François-Xavier Lalanne sheep in Marina Moscone pants, shirt and bustier with Marni necklace and bracelet.

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SUMMER ƒ 2019

23RD ANNUAL RECOGNITION DINNER Honoring Nick Cave, Sarah Arison and Doug Casebeer Tickets: 970/924-5067

39TH ANNUAL ART AUCTION & COMMUNITY PICNIC Live and silent auctions include 200+ works

SUMMER SERIES FEATURED ARTISTS & CONVERSATIONS PRESENTING SPONSOR, TOBY DEVAN LEWIS Premier Sponsor, With Sarah Arison, Sanford Biggers, Doug Casebeer, Nick Cave, Beth Rudin DeWoody, Kate Fowle, Elliot Hundley, Paul McCarthy, Maynard Monrow, Anne Pasternak, Lari Pittman and Taryn Simon

CRITICAL DIALOG With Elizabeth Ferrill, Rubens Ghenov, Alex Israel, Bettina Korek Helen Molesworth, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Gary Simmons

join us all year long Visiting Artists, Artists-in-Residence, Scholarships, Visiting Critics, Lunchtime Auctionettes, Exhibitions, Artist Lectures, ArtWorks Store and Dining at the Ranch Café

The Keepers Long before exhibition openings, biennial announcements and ce le bratory dinners, a group of pe ople visit studios, conduct re search, talk with artists and scholars and f igure out ways to pre sent art for audience s both spe cif ic and broad. Their vision and labor shape s the shows we se e; their collaborations with artists he lp pre sent new ways to think. Working in the art world tends to re quire some polymathic magic: an ability to move through a multitude of contexts and se ttings, simultane ously promoting it all. The e tymolog y of the word “curator,” though, is far more focuse d. In me dieval Europe, the curatus was a prie st devote d to the care of souls. Today, curators are re quire d to care, too—for the artists, for the public, for the storie s they’re communicating. For Culture d ’s fourth annual se le ction of young curators, we

pre sent

seven

visionarie s

de stabilizing

the

traditional

mode ls and creating space for new name s to f lourish within the e stablishment. We be lieve the se curators are galvanizing social change —a kind of care for the soul of the world.

of Culture BY MONICA USZEROWICZ

Don’t miss our Young Curators playlist, a set of tracks selected by the curators for motivation and inspiration on c u lt u re d ma g.c om. 124 culturedmag.com

COREY SIPKIN PHOTOGRAPHY

Brown with the painting Yesterday (1987) by Carmen Herrera at the opening of “She Persists: A Century of Women Artists in New York.”

JESSICA BELL BROWN

Independent Curator

“I always knew I wanted to work with artists in some way or form—to engage the myriad of perspectives they bring into the fold,” says Jessica Bell Brown. “Museum spaces affirmed that for me. They always felt like a church, a space for reflection and immense possibility.” During an undergraduate painting course, she gained “a deeper sense of the complexity and courage required to conceive an idea,” recognizing a natural link between making art and presenting and contextualizing it. The art historian, writer, and independent curator has worked in programming at Creative Time and the Brooklyn Academy of Music; she is also a co-founder of Black Art Incubator. After the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts “took a chance on a video art show” she co-curated with filmmaker Terence Nance, Brown kept going, in love with the agility of curating outside of institutions. “You’re still working with teams of people, but the intellectual and entrepreneurial aspects of organizing shows demands more of a symbiosis.” Last February, she curated “She Persists: A Century of Women Artists in New

York,” a project led by New York Mayoral First Lady Chirlane McCray, at Gracie Mansion. Currently a doctoral candidate at Princeton, Brown’s project is focused on painting in the post-Civil Rights decade, specifically the work of Sam Gilliam and Joe Overstreet. She recalls how Overstreet’s practice “evolved into radical expressions of black liberation and formal experimentation. I’m attracted to stories that alter our sense of security in the narrative of art history.” Brown is now working on “Demoiselles,” an exhibition slated for 2020, “featuring painters… presenting the body in tropes of caricature or exaggeration,” and another project “on the history of black American participation in the culture of opera,” opening this fall. “Curator means caretaker,” she adds, “and it’s our duty to safeguard the work’s integrity. We must also communicate those ideas, never taking for granted all the possibilities in how audiences can connect to them. It’s a delicate balance between precision and openness, but artists will always light the path for us to follow.”

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NATALIE BELL

Natalie Bell has long been fascinated with art’s prismatic qualities: the ways it transcends its material to foster dialogue, how one work can offer multiple narratives. Bell’s curatorial practice is wide-ranging: she collaborates with colleagues on massive group shows—like “Here and Elsewhere” (2014) and “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon” (2017)—but also devotes special attention to solo exhibitions. “I care about work that tells stories not widely known or widely accepted,” she says. “A lot of shows I do end up thinking across various disciplines outside of art—engaging social, political, and economic histories, or crossing into science, anthropology or philosophy.” Bell studied philosophy for both her BA and MA, intrigued by the philosophy of art, which, she says, “seeks to resolve the question of ‘what is art’—which I eventually realized artists get to decide, not philosophers!” (She used to make art, too, including “weird sound art compositions” from audio recorded in the subway.) It’s the New Museum’s “history of progressive, risk-taking programming” that made it a perfect fit. Initially an intern in the curatorial department, she was soon working with the museum’s artistic director, Massimiliano Gioni, on projects outside of the museum, which evolved into a position as an assistant curator at the 2013 Venice Biennale (Gioni curated the international pavilion). Becoming part of the New Museum’s curatorial staff has provided Bell with a constant opportunity to stretch and challenge her early questions about what art is—and what it can be. This June, she’s opening “Lubaina Himid: Work from Underneath,” the artist’s first US solo museum show, at the New Museum; and “The Warmth of Other Suns” at the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. Curated by Bell and Gioni, it is a “major group exhibition looking at representations of migration in art.” “It’s amazing,” says Bell, “to work in a place that fosters pioneering and experimental ideas about art and what art can teach us. I care a lot about scholarship and the quality of ideas, but I appreciate art as a realm that can play freely between disciplines and bend the rules that remain rigid in academia.”

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PHOTO BY JEFF HENRIKSON

Associate Curator, New Museum

“I care about work that tells stories not widely known or widely accepted.”

PHOTO BY MIRANDA BARNES

“If I were to believe the stereotypes, there are a lot of strikes against me—but I won’t embrace that or allow it to stop me from putting things in the world that I think will inspire people who might not have hope.”

LARRY OSSEI-MENSAH

Susanne Feld Hilberry Senior Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit / Co-Founder of ARTNOIR For Larry Ossei-Mensah, his work is part of what he calls “a cycle of giving.” Currently curating three shows at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, including American Artist’s first solo museum exhibition, and “Crossing Night,” OsseiMensah’s second show at MOCAD (co-curated with Josh Ginsburg), his practice embodies a spirit of real connectivity. Ossei-Mensah is not simply giving emerging artists a platform for their voices—he’s dedicated to imagining spaces in the art world for everyone, even those outside of it. “As you get older, you realize it’s all about the tribe you build,” he says. “In my community, some people don’t know what I’m doing in the art world. How do we bring them into these conversations? That’s how I learned. That’s how, I think, other people can learn.” Raised in the Bronx—he still lives between there and Detroit—Ossei-Mensah’s multifaceted curiosity was supported early. His parents, who emigrated from Ghana, encouraged his extensive pursuits. He interned for record labels, studied hospitality and marketing, wrote about art and worked full-time at Viacom. After the passing of his father, Ossei-Mensah “wanted to leave a mark while I had the opportunity to,” he explains. “I realized there weren’t enough platforms for emerging artists of color, so I started putting on shows.” “My introduction to this world is not through an institution, but through community organizations,” he continues. Given his mentorships from artists like Kehinde Wiley, Mickalene Thomas and Derrick Adams, Ossei-Mensah is eager to provide the same support for others. “There aren’t many male curators of color in my role at an institution. If I were to believe the stereotypes, there are a lot of strikes against me—but I won’t embrace that. I’m not going to allow it to stop me from putting things in the world that I think will inspire people who might not have hope. How do I create space for artists, for other curators? How can we be in dialogue with each other? And people who want to be part of this community, too: how do we give them the tools to be successful?”

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“Humanity is very complex. It comes with anger, chaos, sorrow, regret, guilt—and happiness, excitement, curiosity. The ability to experience and share it with other people is exciting. Art provides this feeling constantly.”

XIAOYU WENG

The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Associate Curator of Chinese Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Before joining the Guggenheim, Xiaoyu Weng’s curatorial practice was extensive—spanning roles (she was the founding director of the Kadist Art Foundation’s Asia Programs in Paris and San Francisco), projects (including 2016’s “Soft Crash” at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo) and institutions (such as the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts at CCA). But her earliest exhibitions were in her father’s art studio in Shanghai. As a child, Weng would place “cutouts from the newspaper, art clippings or candy wrappers on the wall, creating a bit of a narrative,” she says. Her parents and friends of her father’s, artists like him, offered commentary. “Spending time with artists, listening to how they look at the world, made a very strong impact on me.” She still loves working directly with artists; for Weng, art is alive. Human. It’s a slow, patient process. “I don’t see art objects as static,” she explains. “You work with artists and understand where they’re coming from. Once it’s put into the world, that relationship evolves into different meanings. Art has to actively participate in our everyday reality, with social and political issues. But it doesn’t just reduce things into black and white or right and wrong—it poetically, introspectively intervenes with reality. It isn’t productive, in terms of producing something that achieves

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a result, or in an economic sense. We might not immediately solve social problems, but the process would shape people’s thinking; perhaps they will change their behavior. You can’t be impatient about that.” Weng is curating the upcoming 5th Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art—the theme is immortality—where questions about time and humanity will arise. “Some technological innovators think the singularity, that leads the human to become immortal, would be the ultimate goal,” she says. “I wanted to propose a counter position: What about the value of mortality, or the cultural meaning of death? What does that contribute to our understanding of who we are?” Humanity itself ignites Weng’s practice: “Humanity is very complex. It comes with anger, chaos, sorrow, regret, guilt—and happiness, excitement, curiosity. The ability to experience and share it with other people is exciting. Art provides this feeling constantly.” Art also offers a platform to shift hegemonic power structures—however slowly. “I wanted to encourage women working in the field, especially Asian women, to stand up and voice their opinions,” she says. “I consider myself a bit of a fighter, who challenges the system and advocates for the groups of people being silenced and suppressed. I want to give positive energy to whoever is working hard and wants to change the world. We can do this together.”

PHOTO BY ZHAOYIN WANG

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“The way in which a person perceives another culture is extremely suggestive, and becomes a way of confronting one’s self, one’s own assumptions and at times ignorance.” SHANAY JHAVERI

Assistant Curator of South Asian Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Although Shanay Jhaveri is the first person to fill this newly created position at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “I never imagined a career in the arts, let alone working at a major institution like The Met,” he says. Growing up in Mumbai, “in a household where the arts were part of its daily rhythms and routines”—Jhaveri’s parents are art lovers and collectors—sensitized him, he says, “to various mediums and modes of creative expression, from classical music to painting and sculpture.” When he joined the museum in April 2016, Jhaveri considered how he might introduce relatively new work to the museum’s historic collections. One solution, he explains, “is teasing out some of the connections between the modern and contemporary works that we’re either acquiring or exhibiting.” “We Come in Peace,” Huma Bhabha’s Roof Garden Commission, which Jhaveri curated last year, drew inspiration “from classical and pre-modern works from across the museum’s collection.” Now, he’s looking forward to “Phenomenal Nature: Mrinalini Mukherjee,” the first international retrospective of the late sculptor, which runs through September. Jhaveri’s examination of the relationship between the West and India—as it’s manifested in visual art—reveals how “cross-cultural dialogues can be fraught, but also revelatory,” he explains. “The way in which a person perceives another culture is extremely suggestive, and becomes a way of confronting one’s self, one’s own assumptions and at times ignorance.” But Jhaveri’s professional interests are expansive, “beyond South Asian modern and contemporary art, and being partly in the West facilitates and encourages those pursuits.” He loves film (“there was a weekly ritual at home where I was taken to a local video library and could pick a film to watch over the weekend,” he says), and continues to write about it—he edited and wrote the introduction for America: Films from Elsewhere, a new book with an upcoming accompanying program at Lincoln Center. He still travels between New York and Mumbai, maintaining his relationship with the South Asian art community. “It has been a great joy to see the field grow—many positions and historical assumptions have been challenged and reconsidered.”

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DIYA VIJ

“I believe that my place in the art world is about using a historic practice to move the needle towards justice.”

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Diya Vij has long been aware of a deep connection between art and politics: “Growing up in a very white community in Connecticut, raised by a family from India who had a global perspective—there was a political bent to the way I saw the world. Photography gave me permission to dive deeper.” After studying photography and politics at Bard, she became a Curatorial Fellow at the Queens Museum, where, says Vij, “I realized art organizations could be instrumental in positively impacting communities, communities of color particularly.” Her first few months at the High Line have been a listening tour to explore “what community engagement programs look like with long-term neighbors; what it means to present public art in an industrial, reused space in a place of great history and constant transformation.” Vij has been considerate of such factors for the entirety of her career, most notably while developing the Public Artists in Residence program at the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, where she was the head of their Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity initiative. “I believe that my place in the art world is about understanding socially-engaged art and using a historic practice to move the needle towards justice. We put a lot of pressure on artists to solve our problems, but we don’t resource them to do it. Fundamentally changing that narrative comes from understanding what equity and justice look like in an organization.” In June, the High Line presents Claudia Rankine’s “We Are Here”—a series of text-based sound installations written by Rankine with Helga Davis and LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, with sound by Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste—and “HOW MANY OF US WILL BE THRIVING FOR STONEWALL 100? A Public Forum on Queer Wellbeing for Stonewall 50,” led by the collective What Would an HIV Doula Do? “There are more people of color, queer people, disabled, trans, and marginalized folks working in this field, and we’ve been able to elevate the conversation—so I hope the tide is turning toward long-term, sustainable change,” Vij says. “To have these conversations with fellow cultural workers and artists is beautiful and healing.”

PHOTO BY LIZ LIGON

Associate Curator of Public Programs, High Line

PHOTO BYERIK ADRIAN SANTIAGO

“What I do is a contribution to something bigger than myself.”

DIANA NAWI

Independent Curator/Co-Curator of Prospect.5 New Orleans, with Naima J. Keith Although Diana Nawi is an independent curator these days, she still thinks of her work as part of larger institutional conversations. “I often say I serve two people—the artists and the audience,” she says. “That’s what orients me, this multiplicity: Who are you putting this up for? And: how do we support artists intellectually, professionally, economically? What I do is a contribution to something bigger than myself.” The California-born Nawi attended UCLA for fine arts, minoring in art history and Chicana/o Studies; with the support of her professor, Monique van Genderen, she curated her classmates’ work for her senior show. Nawi went on to stints at LAXART, where she met Naima J. Keith (“we’ve known each other since we were wee babes”), MASS MoCA, MCA Chicago, the Abu Dhabi Project of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, and Pérez Art Museum Miami, in addition to various other projects. “I got into curating because I realized I prefer talking about art to making it. That’s one of exhibitions’ major functions: a space for dialogue.”

In addition to Prospect.5, Nawi is excited about her upcoming exhibition at Shanghai’s Long Museum, “Mark Bradford: Los Angeles,” and her current show with Michael Rakowitz at REDCAT, “Dispute Between the Tamarisk and the Date Palm”—like Nawi, Rakowitz is of Iraqi-Jewish descent, and interested in how a region’s story connects to larger narratives. “I am attuned to context more than anything,” she says. She’s presently co-developing Prospect.5, considering New Orleans’s relationship to US and world history. “Our orientation point for this Triennial is the question of history, how this moment feels ‘anomalous’ yet precedented. How do you think about the specificity of a region within a global context? How do you square those things?” To answer her hypothetical queries herself: “New Orleans, the city itself—we think of it as a mandate. Prospect is city-wide; it’s interesting to connect each artist to the place, each exhibition to the city. We have to learn from New Orleans and engage with its perspective. You dig in—you try to learn from where you are.”

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OF AGENCY AND ABSTRACTION For his contribution to the Whitney Biennial, sculptor Matthew Angelo Harrison VќLYZ H Z\I[S` WV[LU[ [HRL on globalization and the JVTWSL_P[PLZ VM ISHJR (TLYPJHU culture. The Detroit-based artist is now going global himself, with ^VYR VU ]PL^ PU 7HYPZ SH[LY [OPZ year and a solo show at the Kunsthalle Basel in 2020. BY COCO ROMACK PORTRAIT BY TYLER JONES

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Installation view of Harrison’s 2018 exhibition at Jessica Silverman Gallery, “Prototype of Dark Silhouettes.”

ON A RECENT AFTERNOON, THE DETROIT-BASED SCULPTOR Matthew Angelo Harrison acts as a guide through the 2019 Whitney Biennial, pointing out his favorite pieces. He is one of 75 artists included in the untitled survey, and at 29, joins three-quarters of the roster aged under 40, making this iteration the museum’s youngest to date. Among his top picks are Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s assemblage of ritualistic tools carved from a tree she cut, accompanied by a video documenting their production; a blackand-white photograph by Elle Pérez centering a couple in embrace, one of whose chest is wrapped in plastic and bears the markings of needle play (body piercing performed for the pleasure of the sensation); and a pair of

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fragmented still-life portraits by Paul Mpagi Sepuya created in collaboration with the writer Ariel Goldberg. Illuminating the walls of a room on the museum’s fifth floor, Sepuya’s photographs—for which he employs mirrors, tripods, and the presence of the camera itself to interrogate the relationship between artist, tool, and composition—surround and complement Harrison’s own hybrid creations. For his contribution, Harrison presents six new sculptures in his Dark Silhouettes series. Each features an artifact submerged in resin, then precisely cut by a CNC router into rectangular totems of varying sizes and imprinted with mechanical forms marking the

“I’ve reassembled the story of these things and embedded them within my own narrative as a black person who’s been completely removed from his ancestry.” — MATTHEW ANGELO HARRISON

caress of the machine. Four Dogon spears and two wooden idols from West Africa—some bona fide antiques and others mass produced for sale in the West—appear obscured within, as if frozen in ice, an effect intentionally achieved by Harrison to communicate an idea he calls “abstract ancestry.” They sit atop sleek metal pedestals fashioned after mid-century Belgian designs, alluding to the country’s history of colonization in Africa. “In order to relate and assimilate into where black Americans are culturally, they’ve had to reappropriate African imagery to create their own idea of what homeland is,” he says. Approaching his craft like a techno producer (a symptom of his Michigan upbringing), Harrison notes that the provenance of the objects, like a sample within a track, is less important than the finished product. Once these objects reach his hands, they’ve lost their cosmic energy. “I’ve reassembled the story of these things and embedded them within my own narrative as a black person who’s been completely removed from his ancestry.” At the center of the room one piece stands out. Titled Worker Fragment Gleam (2019), it consists of a floating severed BMW headlight at first glance and appears like a specimen in a bell jar. Harrison, a former Ford employee, notes that the car was assembled in

a Detroit factory: “You think of this as a European car when, in fact, it’s driven here, assembled here, and consumed here,” he says. When viewed together, the installation operates as a powerful visual metaphor for the loss and reassembling of culture as a result of globalization, and the exchange between production and human life. With a subdued palette of browns and grays, the statement feels tempered, even matter-of-fact. “All these pass-throughs that happen because of globalization leave a trace. It takes something away from the identity of each thing,” he says. “Once the anger’s gone, how do we actually adapt to these seismic shifts in culture and make them, not necessarily right, but functional in a way that is helpful for everyone to understand history? It’s a rehab process.” Though some critics of this year’s Biennial argue that the exhibition lacks the radical fire with which it has become synonymous over the course of its 79year history, many of the artists have successfully carved out space for subtle work, art that seethes rather than shouts. With a potent but heady allusion for the complexities of contemporary black American culture, forever altered by the tides of colonialism and globalization, Harrison makes the case for agency over outrage.

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THE STONE CARVER

Fin Simonetti’s alabaster sculptures elide past and future, grief and devotion. Following her critically-acclaimed show at Company Gallery, the young artist shares her thoughts on male pain, devotion and death. BY AUDREY WOLLEN PORTRAIT BY WALTER WLODARCZYK

IT IS HARD TO BELIEVE A STONE could be such a color, the color of the sky. It seems almost impossible that something buried so deep could know how the clouds smear across cold mornings. A mineral composite of every winter dawn. In her recent show, “Pledge,” at Company Gallery, Fin Simonetti’s sculptures, hand-carved from Spanish alabaster, are this celestial, haunting blue: this impossible color. The sense of quiet that trails after such an evocative material seems, at first, in contrast with her subject matter: masculinity, or more specifically, she says, “male pain.” Later, she says, “male absence,” but she doesn’t need to explain how those things equal, overlap, obscure and determine each other. By the door, way up high, a video shows a montage of close zooms on male weight lifters, just as their faces contort at the peak of their incredible power. It looks like they’re crying. It looks like they’re falling apart. Each small sculpture is perched tenuously on a metal railing that cuts through the gallery. I’m reminded of bleak skateparks, and minimalist sculpture: two arenas of culture almost entirely dominated by men. The heavy black line connects the delicate pieces into a single work: the viewer follows the trail, almost “like each object is a still in a film,” she says. A fire extinguisher, cartoonish candles, a flaccid penis, “a lock that’s sort of soft,” ear plugs, and a dog that isn’t there, only disembodied paws, a lonely tail. Simonetti says she tried to “convey the broken body, with the least amount of information possible,” and it’s clear that the negative space is just as much a part of an artwork as the fragile effigies themselves. According to Lacan, the phallus only exists in the form of a lack. The sculptures act almost as pressure points in an acute emptiness, dense sites of meaning and labor that produce the same vibrational twang as an acupuncture needle. Here, the repetitive, familiar image is both made weighty, left in the rubble of antiquity, and softened, encased with raw stone that looks like wet rot on the side of fruit. Simonetti began to carve stone when her father, who was also a stone cutter, died in 2017. She taught herself. It is a strange audacity of grief that sometimes moves us into a project so ambitious it is “almost devotional,” as she puts it. Each sculpture takes months, using mostly “old-school hand tools,” like a hammer and chisel. The tenderness of the objects combined with the extreme physical feat of their making mirrors the questions proposed by the work, and the breadth of its compassion. On the walls, sun-bleached blue barber shop posters are wall-papered behind soldered chain link, the gaps filled with stained glass. We peep through the empty holes to see a crowd of men, heads bent, looking away. Again, the materials carry a quietness. Offhandedly, Simonetti comments, “I think these reference memorials too, in a way, as a lower octave theme. I’m processing my dad’s death… but there’s also so many other things to mourn.”

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Installation view of Fin Simonetti’s “Pledge” at Company Gallery earlier this year.

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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 Felix Bernstein and Gabe Rubin Greg Parma Smith

Thornton Dial, Interior Decoration (Scratching and Wrapping) (detail), 1999, Steel mesh, wire, nails, enamel, cloth, spray paint, and oil on canvas 48 x 48 x 3 1/2 inches21.9 x 121.9 x 8.9 cm

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

06.22 . 19 The Virtuoso Anonymous Was a Woman Same As It Ever Was The College Dropout All Roads Lead to Paris The Woman Who Saved Menswear Anohni Anew Figures For a New Era Designing From the Inside Out The Beat is Yours It Hurts, So Good culturedmag.com 143

THE

VIRTU From his cello-playing childhood to his years in a hardcore rock trio, Dev Hynes has UL]LY ILLU JVUÄULK I` L_WLJ[H[PVUZ ;OL PU[YVZWLJ[P]L HY[PZ[ YLSLHZLZ OPZ UL^LZ[ HSI\T PU 1\UL OPZ Z\S[Y` ]VJHSZ ILS`PUN [OL ^LPNO[ VM [OL ISHJR HUNZ[ OL PZ L_WSVYPUN BY LAKIN STARLING PHOTOGRAPHY RENELL MEDRANO STYLED BY SHIBON KENNEDY

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DEV HYNES IS TRYING TO GET GROUNDED. On a warm and dewy April afternoon, the musician also known as Blood Orange is seated in the corner of a health food store café. It’s one of the only nooks in New York City where he can get things done in peace. For the past few months, he’d been finding solace in places across the globe including Jamaica, Tokyo, London, Florence and Los Angeles. In a post-Brexit world, it’s felt important for Hynes to spend more time in Europe to reconnect with the founding pieces of his identity and sensibilities. Places yield their own

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lessons and energy, providing backdrops to his constant flow of creativity and self-understanding. Outside the café’s window, horns and sirens blare through lower Manhattan, but Hynes is unruffled. With a disarming smile flashing a jewel-studded tooth, he says, “I’m pretty much here now.” And now that he’s back in New York, he’s working on something, or many things—feeding new ideas while coming down off the momentum of Blood Orange’s 2018 opus Negro Swan. The album was celebrated as an

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“I TRUST PEOPLE.

IF THERE’S SOMEONE ELSE IN THE ROOM, I WANT TO HEAR WHAT THEY’RE THINKING.” 148 culturedmag.com

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intentionally hopeful portrait of what he calls “black depression,” textured with the voices of cultural beacons like Puff Daddy and Janet Mock. On the cover, a photograph of Kai The Black Angel embodies the heavenly, yet burdensome life that Hynes and so many others who share his sensibility traverse. Looking back, he describes Negro Swan as a “zoomed in” take on his identity that’s pushed him to see his pain and continue to make his truest art. But it took him some time and a bit of collaboration to get there. Composing beautiful sounds comes naturally to Hynes. He’s delicate, a quality that allows him to tap into a distinct sound and special kind of emotional honesty, resulting in songwriting credits for artists like Solange, Haim and Mariah Carey. “I don’t know if it’s naive but I feel that everyone is the constant at the thing that they do, so I feel like it’s impossible for me to be involved in something and have it not sound like me,” he says. With Blood Orange albums Cupid Deluxe (2013), Freetown Sound (2016), and Negro Swan, he’s at the helm while employing a brilliant roster of co-creators to elevate and enrich the art. Ironically, as a master of solitude, Hynes is always open to working with others who often turn out as friends, if they weren’t already. “If I’m around you it means I like your taste or sensibility. You’re more than welcome to try,” he says. “I know when I’m working on stuff and I have people around, they’re surprised that I’m open to it.” Born Devonté Hynes as the youngest of three children, the Essex,

England native spent a lot of time on his own. A non-conformist deemed a misfit in a town full of social and racial repression, Hynes dealt with years of violence and bullying. “I remember when I first went to my school, people were insanely confused by me. I was this cello-playing kid, painting my nails and wearing makeup, and playing drums and in metal bands and I was the best on the football [soccer] team,” he recalls. Early on, Hynes learned to respond to isolation by crafting the safe and freeing realms he built for himself. In addition to his interests in reading, writing, film and playing sports, he always played music, albeit very passively. Growing up, he preferred to make it in his bedroom—lo-fi and intimate. Not much has changed in that sense and it wasn’t until he turned 18, joined the short-lived London hardcore rock trio Test Icicles, and moved to New York to figure it all out that he saw music as crucial to his self-preservation and survival. “Now, I’m confident that music was the root of all of it,” he says. “I listened to music non-stop. I made music non-stop.” As an orchestra kid, Hynes has always viewed his practice with an integrative lens. He’s inspired by seeing his peers transform an idea or the direction of a track. “I trust people,” he explains. “I can do my ideas any day. I’m by myself 24/7. If there’s someone else in the room, I want to hear what they’re thinking,” he says. Not honoring that possibility could mean a song doesn’t reach its potential, and for Hynes, making sure that it does

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is paramount. “I have real faith in my ability to start and end things,” he says. “The middle is where you can take flight.” He calls on a circuit of ultra-bright artists like Onyx Collective drummer Austin Williamson, Adam Bainbridge, also known as Kindness, and vocalists like Zuri Marley, Eva Tolkin, and Ian Isiah. Working with the same people keeps things familiar to Hynes, a chemistry he values. In production mode, the artist likens himself to a director, describing his focus on carrying out the big picture. It isn’t always clear exactly which role Hynes takes in regards to his music, but that’s partly because he balances so many. “In everything I’ve created, whether it’s packaging, putting the album together, stage design, footage—I’ve rendered it. I do all of those things, but I’m fully aware that it’s in service to the music. I see myself as a musician because that’s the thread. Those other things wouldn’t exist without music,” he says. For someone who admittedly does everything, Hynes doesn’t move from a place of ego; it’s more about “getting the point across.” With a highly active mind, his stream of ideas is steady. Usually, he has the concept for a new project while finishing the current one, which, he admits, can be overwhelming. There’s never a moment of stillness. By the end of Negro Swan, Hynes had already envisioned his fifth album, which is out in late June. It features appearances from his “usual” crew along with others and an under-the-radar rapper named Benny Revival, about whom Hynes is thrilled. He casually blurts out the secret news in the midst of our chat, laughing at his outlandish level of creative execution and productivity. He knew the length, the vibe, and mission of the intro and closing tracks before retreating to his quasi-utopia in LA to go full steam. Making an album cracks open a new emotional dimension for Hynes, getting him closer to a sense of openness and the core of his existential quandaries. For the new album, he’s leaving hope in the dust and plunging into the pits of black angst that he first mentioned on Negro Swan. “That was the first time I looked at it and the new one is like living in the guts,” he says. Hynes is all for revisiting a method in order to get his ideas across. With so many pieces constantly in-progress, he finds stability in his familiar orbit of artists and emotions. “A lot of people constantly try to out-do themselves. They innovate and try things and go against something. I don’t think like that at all,” he says. “I’ve never had that thing. That need to one-up something or I did something once so I can’t do it again. I reuse chord strips or chord progressions, instruments, or people. I’m just trying to do in that moment what works or what is of service to the idea. That’s how you create a world.”

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“I HAVE REAL FAITH IN MY ABILITY TO START AND END THINGS. THE MIDDLE IS WHERE YOU CAN TAKE FLIGHT.” Hair by Evanie Frausto, clothes by Kenneth Nicholson and shoes by Brother Vellies.

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ANONYMOUS WAS Leikeli47 defies categorization. The breakout star refuses to show her face in public or reveal her name—and her privacy is proving a potent strategy for success.

A WOMAN BY GERRICK D. KENNEDY PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHUCK GRANT S T Y L E D B Y A M E L I A N K A S H I R O H A M I LT O N

O R I G I N A L C O L L A G E B Y B E T H H O E C K E L E X C L U S I V E LY F O R C U LT U R E D

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“Being black, we gotta learn how to wear a mask early,”

Since her debut mixtape a decade ago, Leikeli47 has maintained an aura of mystery by concealing her visage and identity, putting the focus on her music instead.

Leikeli47 says, her bubbly demeanor growing serious for the first time in conversation. She’s explaining the idea behind last year’s Acrylic—her brilliant sophomore album that dotted several best-of lists and elevated her profile tremendously—but Leikeli47 could have very well been defining her intention as an artist. Leikeli47 is never seen in public without a mask, a literal one, her face cloaked in a knitted balaclava or a bandana with ragged torn holes in whatever style she’s feeling that day—black and studded with crystals, cobalt blue, red, blush, bright orange and so forth. It’s the armor she uses to put distance between herself and the prying curiosity inherent to celebrity, and she’s fiercely committed to keeping her life private, to the point where her identity and visage still remain a mystery nearly a decade after her arrival as a wildly adventurous, genre-hopping performer. It’s all for the sake of making her craft the sole focus. “I wanted to lead with my sound and my voice and the way to do that, I thought, is to remove myself. I don’t have an ego, nor do I care about being this crazy, big public figure. And I’m not gonna lie, I do love my privacy,” she says over the phone hours before a red-eye flight to Stockholm, where she’ll launch her first European tour. “I know the mask can be seen as provocative or exciting but you’re getting all of me in the music, and the mask has afforded me a way to do that.” An enigmatic approach to art is nothing new, but it’s certainly a rarity in the 21st-century music ecosystem. This is a time when fandom is almost wholly built on unfettered access to every facet of an artist’s life. From their every meal, to where they vacation, their families and friends and, yeah, who they are fucking—the age of social media has given us real-time consumption of artists’ lives and often stands as a critical tool for agendasetting and promotion. Considering that Leikeli47 largely orbits in hip-hop, a genre that wants its women hypersexualized and entirely devoted to the male gaze, her decision to perform under a mask becomes an act of rebellion in itself. “We’ve been telling her to get on Instagram since it came out and she’s like, ‘I don’t believe in that. It’ll take away from the magic,’” says Harold Lilly, her cousin and frequent collaborator. “It’s a different age, but she doesn’t believe in it. She once told me, ‘Paul Simon wouldn’t have been able to make Graceland if he had been on Instagram. Michael Jackson couldn’t have done Off the Wall or Thriller if he had been on Facebook.’ The girl is a rock star, but she’s in control of her narrative.”

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“I just wanted to have fun. I just wanted to be black. I wanted to be bold, spirited, colorful, dope and ill. I wanted to be like a superhero and that’s what this is for me.” ³0)-/)0-Ăą

A desire to reside in an anonymous, mysterious universe doesn’t, however, mean Leikeli47 is incapable of revealing herself. Acrylic continues a trilogy of releases dubbed the “beauty series” that began with her 2017 debut Wash & Set and ends with Shape Up—which is currently being recorded—that slowly lifts the veil on the performer that once proclaimed herself “notorious in Brooklyn, just like Biggie.” Empowerment, self-care and love of self and of community are a through line in the series inspired by the sacred spaces where black folks have found joy and solace. “A lot of times our masks are hidden in our barber shops and our nail salons. That’s why those places are safe havens for us,” she says. “Being a black girl, this is the culture I came up around… and I wanted to speak to us.” Acrylic is a valentine to community and the black women who find sanctuary in nail salons, where getting tips glossed or bejeweled is a therapeutic ritual. Conceptualized as a hood fairytale, Leikeli47 vividly portrays the communities and people she deeply reveres through a specifically black lens on the album. She raps and sings about the auntie who sells candy from a windowpane; the homegirl hoping to get away from the no-shit man that’s overstayed his welcome in her bed; the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station where Leikeli47 giddily whispered “I love you” to a boy underneath flickering lights. She pays tribute to New York’s ballroom scene, where black queer folks have sought refuge and community for nearly a century, and the sanctified experience of historically black college campuses. “When you smell acrylic, you know where you are and you’re in our neighborhood. You don’t smell acrylic walking down Rodeo Drive, you just don’t. There’s a different culture here—a different tone, different air, a different community,” she says. “I just wanted to tell the story from my community about the bold black women that I’ve seen growing up and that I’ve admired. Acrylic was about telling powerful stories, speaking on black love and painting a picture of where we come from and the things

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I’ve seen in my life—it wasn’t always bad, but it wasn’t always great either, and I wanted to squeeze the beauty out of that.” Everything one needs to know about Leikeli47 can be found in her music. Even though she’s not one to disclose many specifics in conversation, she doesn’t make it hard to piece together who the woman beneath the mask is if you listen close enough. A line on “In My Eyes” —a tender, gospel-rooted song off Acrylic—sees her at her frankest: “Father, forgive me for I do not know it all, but the life you chose for me had me livin’ off the wall… sometimes on the floors, singin’ through the halls.” She grew up in Bed-Stuy, by way of Virginia, bouncing from different housing projects or wherever she could stay with a relative. She didn’t have her parents around and only goes so far to directly say her upbringing was rough. Introverted and deeply shy, she attached herself to music and became a self-taught student. Her inspirations are varied (Stevie Wonder, Twinkie Clark, N.E.R.D., Red Hot Chili Peppers and Jay-Z are heroes), and that comes through in the music that cuts across trap, house, bounce, R&B, pop, soul, gospel and dancehall. She sings and raps, just don’t call her either (she abhors being categorized). “I never wanted to do anything else and I’ve never not done it,” she says when I ask her to tell me where her musical ambitions started. Although she’s been dropping music for the better part of a decade, Leikeli47 has been at full speed since a banger she made for Jay-Z but kept for herself—2015’s “Fuck the Summer Up”—topped an inaugural eponymous Tidal playlist curated by the mogul. Acrylic was about showing her growth as an artist, producer—and a storyteller—a goal that feels more than accomplished given the breakout she’s in the midst of. “I just wanted to have fun. I just wanted to be black. I wanted to be bold, spirited, colorful, dope and ill. I wanted to be like a superhero and that’s what this is for me,” she says. “I still have a lot more work to do, but it’s been a cool experience to see my own growth and to see things happening right before my eyes.”

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SAME AS IT EVER WAS

PHOTOGRAPHY BY SEAN DONNOLA

Benin-born super-diva Angélique Kidjo and David Byrne, whose SLNLUKHY` JHYLLY RPJRLK Vќ with his role as lead singer of the Talking Heads, have been friends for more than two decades, going to each other’s shows and even playing together a few [PTLZ 2PKQV ÄYZ[ OLHYK [OL Talking Heads just a few months after she moved to Paris in the 1980s, but didn’t realize it was her friend’s voice that had stuck with her until a few years ago. That spark ignited her decision to remake the iconic album, Remain in Light—itself partly inspired by the African music Byrne was just discovering when he wrote it. The two met with Cultured’s executive editor, :HYH 9VѝUV, PU )`YUL»Z :VOV VѝJL reminiscing about mutual friends, their musical histories and their shared love of the late Cuban star Celia Cruz, who is paid homage on Kidjo’s most recent album.

Sara Rofﬁno: Where are all these records from? David Byrne: These are all original Celia Cruz records. Until she relocated to New York they were difficult to find. Some of these records are Cuban recordings that they would re-release in New York with no license. They were kind of like bootlegs because after the Cuban Revolution there was no communication, but people had the Cuban recordings here so they would just put them back out. This one was made in Mexico. SR: Angélique, you saw Celia perform when you were growing up in Benin and you’ve talked about what she meant to you as a person, but I’m wondering if you can talk about hearing the music and what that meant for you. Angélique Kidjo: Salsa is huge in Africa; there is no party without salsa. If you want people to stay at your party you better play salsa, otherwise they leave. Growing up, all the African salsa bands, any bands that came, were all men—you never saw any girls in those bands. So I thought, if you want to play salsa you have to be a guy. And then here comes Celia. I told my girlfriends at school that there was a woman who sings salsa coming. They looked at me and said, “You’re still dreaming. There are no girls singing.” So we made a bet. If she was a backup singer, I had to do their homework for six months, but if she was the center they had to do my homework for six months. [Laughter.] And of course when the show started, Johnny Pacheco was playing with the guys and then suddenly she burst on the stage, Azucar, and I’m like woah—start counting man, six months of homework. [Laughter.] DB: African college entry scandal. [Laughter.] AK: Exactly. I hate homework, especially math. That’s how I met Celia the first time. I wasn’t close to her, but she was like a comet that passed by. Benin is very conservative. Still today, people are very conservative and it’s very hard to get them to dance. But when Celia came in, everyone was dancing. And I was like, that is what I want to do, I want to make everybody dance. Everybody is going to dance when they come to my show. SR: And what has made her an idol to you, David? DB: I heard in her voice a kind of sadness, but also a kind of ecstasy. I heard both together and I didn’t know that was possible. I became a fan and bought all the— AK: Bootlegs. [Laughter.] DB: I got all the records. [Laughter.] She used to play in clubs around town, sometimes doing big concerts and sometimes just in small clubs. We did a show together at SOBs once, and in those days there would be rock clubs, discos and a salsa club all on the same street. You could go from CBGBs on Bowery to the Village Gate, which had a salsa night every week, and you could go further and there was a disco. SR: Your point about the simultaneous sadness and ecstasy relates to something I’ve been thinking about in relation to both of your work. In both of your music there’s an overall consistency of pushing for the joy and the optimism. What has sustained that and what does that mean to you as artists? AK: If there is no optimism, there is no art. Even the darkest art has to have light in it. Otherwise, why live? Why breathe? Living is experiencing both and it’s the way you balance both that gives you an artistry that can touch people. Even when you’re going to the darkness, people will find light in that darkness. For me, art allows us to do both and even more than that. Sometimes we don’t even know we are carrying something and then it comes out. And when it comes out like that I don’t question it, I just put it out there as it is. It’s simple and complicated at the same time. It’s very difficult to talk about these kinds of feelings. When you are writing music, it’s not intellectual. The intellectual part is in the words you are writing, but the feelings you are trying to convey is something you can’t put into words. It’s difficult for me to explain. I don’t know if David can, but I can’t. Try, go ahead. [Laughter.] DB: Okay, okay. A lot of what Angélique said. It’s definitely a kind of therapy and for some of us, anyway, I don’t know if we could survive without music, without the feeling that music gives. Going along with what I was saying before, sometimes I notice with salsa music that the lyrics are sad or melancholic, but the music, the rhythm, is the life that’s coming up and supporting that and telling you, “No, don’t give up.” But the lyrics are very sad. And there’s the combination. The music is giving you hope but the lyrics and sometimes the melody are telling you of the sadness of life, because a lot of life is sad. But it’s both. It brings it together.

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Kidjo and Byrne in Byrne’s SoHo office space.

AK: That’s one of the things I learned when I was a young girl, listening and asking questions to the traditional musicians in my village. My nickname was When Why How, because I couldn’t make sense of things. As an artist you have to bring both to the table, then you let people decide what they want to do with it. It’s not your job as an artist to lecture people or to make people feel guilty. You have to leave it out there, because it’s part of life. Both have to work hand in hand. If we don’t have music to support the sadness, we can’t live. We can’t just make the music as sad as the world; then you’re asking people to commit suicide because it’s so dark nobody can get out of it. One day one of my uncles sat me down and said to me, if you have a sad story to tell and you want people to listen to you, if you start making them cry they’ll shut down and won’t listen anymore because you’re bringing them to a place where they don’t want to question that sadness within them. But if you bring it in a way that they can listen to it and be empowered at the same time, you win them over. That’s what it is for me. Sometimes people tell me my lyrics are very obscure. That’s the point, so you pay attention to the lyrics. SR: I love the Kerry James Marshall cover of Remain in Light— AK: He was really interested in that idea. I went to visit Kerry James in

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Chicago last February and as we were walking to his studio, I saw on the wall some cartoons, and I was like, “What is that?” And he said, “I’m working on an animated project that is called Rythm Mastr, which is about the problem of modernity and tradition, how they are both always at the center of everything we do.” We spent like five hours talking about that. It was intense conversation. Then he suddenly paused and asked me why I was doing a remake of Remain in Light. He talked about how that album and my music are like two different worlds. He said, “That album transformed my life as a teenager. That’s one of the albums that made me pause and question my art. And there’s darkness in it.” I said, “There’s no darkness in it; there’s an anxiety and I like that anxiety because it was written during the Reagan era, and that anxiety was real and we still have this anxiety today.” And he looked at me and said, “What do you want from me?” And I said, “I don’t know, you tell me, you’re the artist.” He put the album on again and as he was listening I got cold, so I stood up with my hat and coat on and he said, “Right there, hold it. We’re going to do the cover with black light. Come back tomorrow with the same coat, the same necklace and the same earrings.” So I went back the next day and he did the first picture to give me an idea. He said, “There’s so much light in Remain in Light that we have to make a

visual that tells the story of the light.” And I’m like, what the fuck is he talking about? But I came back two days later and he took the picture and said, “You have to be the dealer of light.” SR: David, you have a long history of making visual art. Can you talk about how you see the relationship of visual art to the music? DB: Well, like Angélique said, sometimes you can help tell the story with visual things in a way you can’t with words. People can understand either musically or visually and they sometimes don’t know why they understand something. They’re getting it emotionally and symbolically through associations, which in some ways are undervalued. People think most communication is with words, but it’s just as much with sound and image and dance, how we move and how we look. All these kinds of things are just as much as how we communicate. I think sometimes it can be a problem with these devices, because we communicate by text and emails and social media and we miss all those other levels. AK: Visual art is really important. Since I started my career, it has been very important for me. I’m not good at visual art, but I have ideas in my head and when I am writing music, when I get to the second or third song, I start seeing colors and the color is consistent until I finish the album. What that color is going to turn out to be, I don’t know, but I make sure that color is part of the album and when I started working on Remain in Light, that dark light was there all the time. I couldn’t say it, but I was thinking about a dark light with light in it. I had heard “Once in a Lifetime” in 1983 when I arrived in Paris. In Benin, I didn’t have any music because of the communist regime. From 1972 to 1983 there was no music at all and the world passed me by without me hearing anything new, so when I arrived in Paris I was like a music junkie. Anything new, I was chomping on it. And when I heard “Once in a Lifetime” on a cassette at a friend’s house, there was a guy telling me, “This is rock and roll, this isn’t African music,” and I was like, “I’m sorry, but this is African music.” I was so homesick; it was just three months after I arrived. And that song allowed me to make the link between coming to a different culture and staying here, because I felt like if I can find this kind of music here, there is more for me to discover. I never linked that song to David. David came to my show at SOBs in 1992 and I didn’t know that album, but I knew every album after that. I was singing the chorus one day and my husband said, “That is David Byrne, the Talking Heads,” and I said, “What, what, what? David Byrne sings that song?” He put the Spotify on and I said, “Play the whole album,” and he said, “All the words are absurd,” and I said, “This is not absurd. If you know African proverbs, this is not absurd; this is as clear as anything my grandmother

would tell me.” It would take two days to understand what she was talking about. Right before I started working on Remain in Light I did the album Eve, and I met many different women who sang endless songs to me and I couldn’t use all of them and as soon as I finished I said to my husband, “I want to put call and response with the voices of those women and the Talking Heads. I need that.” It became clear that every song on that album has a message that is completely different from your perspective as an American. As an African, it was a no-brainer that those proverbs had to be a part of the song. That’s how I did all the songs. It’s all the things about how we perceive people before we even think about what the person has to bring to the table. SR: David, growing up you always had an interest in music from all over the world. Was there a definitive moment when African music moved you or when you first heard Angélique, or when there was something in it that brought something out in you, when you knew you had to bring that into your own practice? DB: It would have been the late ’70s when I started buying some African records, some Fela records and South African records. There wasn’t much you could get here and the things that did make it, you had no idea what it was. You didn’t know if it was dance music or griot music. SR: Where would you find these records? DB: There was a very big record store in Times Square, and they had a section called International— AK: Thank god it wasn’t called World Music. I hate that. [Laughter.] DB: It was called International and each region got little sections, so I would go up there and get some records and starting asking people and finding out more, and then Celia and all the salsa musicians were playing all around. So I guess by sometime in the ’80s I started going to see all these groups in clubs all around town and buying all these records. And I realized pretty early that you have a record like this [Celia] and you realize, this is an African record. AK: [Laughs.] It is not! DB: In all the songs, all the orishas are all the same and she’s singing in Yoruba. She’s not singing in Spanish and I realized that it is all connected. SR: Do you remember how it became a part of what you were doing? DB: I didn’t have any idea that I could incorporate this music into what I was doing, but I just listened to it all the time. AK: When you listen to music you are not immune to what it is. I grew up with so many different kinds of music that the music I started making at the beginning was South African music, and that was the music I listened to growing up. People always used to tell me, especially in Benin, that I was a white girl because I listened to rock and roll and rock and roll was white music. But you can’t say stuff

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like that. I was in that constant fight with people in Benin saying, “This is what you should listen to as an African.” But I said, “You don’t tell me what I have to listen to. All music is welcome in my house.” My father never said, “Don’t listen to this.” He would bring albums and we would listen. We listened to the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, all of those things. I can’t say if the music I make is only African music or not. It’s rooted in the drums, the drumming of my country, but one thing I learned from the traditional musicians in Benin is that music is ever evolving. As long as we are evolving, music is evolving. What we did 10 years ago is different than what we do now, because we are different, so you can’t go back and do the same thing. People ask me about cultural appropriation and I say, “You have to stop this.” If there’s no controversy, people find one. Cultural appropriation doesn’t exist, because culture belongs to all of us. As long as you recognize where your source of inspiration comes from, it’s cultural expansion. People want me to say it’s cultural appropriation, but I won’t say that, because I write my music influenced by so much other music. So you say it’s cultural appropriation, whatever makes you happy, but I don’t want to discuss that because it’s not a point for me. DB: For me, the way I felt myself being influenced at first was through signing. I wasn’t going to be able to sing like Celia but I heard something coming from deep inside in the vocals in these artists—Celia and other salsa artists. I heard it in the Brazilian artists I love, and I started to realize that I can bring some of that quality into my own singing with my own words and my own music, but I can bring a different vocal quality to what I do. And that can became part of what I do. I didn’t sound like I was trying to sing bossa novas or salsas or anything like this. And then of course, after a while, I wanted to work with the musicians that I heard on these records, and they were around New York so I said, let’s do something together. And the same with Brazilian musicians. SR: How do you know when a collaboration is the right thing to do? Is there a guiding ethos? DB: I’m willing to try lots of things. It doesn’t always work. AK: Sometimes the chemistry isn’t there and music is all about chemistry, and sometimes you have an idea that’s completely absurd and it doesn’t

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work. That doesn’t mean that if you do something different with the same person it won’t work. It’s so complicated to explain why this works versus that, because if it was that easy, we wouldn’t be writing music anymore. Anything that we human beings put our hands on we destroy, and that’s what’s good about inspiration—you can’t guess what’s going to happen, it just happens. For me as an artist, collaboration is always about opening the door and learning something from somebody I want to work with. It’s basic chemistry between the voice and the instruments that has to work. And if that chemistry isn’t there and you put it out, you won’t be happy, because if you can’t feel it, how do you want the public to feel it? It’s like what David describes: he never tried to be Celia Cruz or anybody else, but what he has to bring is his. What touches him is the way he can deliver it. That’s what music does to you. You don’t even know it’s embedded in you until you allow yourself to let it shine. Collaboration is the same thing. SR: What’s something you’ve learned from David? AK: What I’ve learned from David is his ability to not be afraid of any challenge as an artist. For an artist, when you start getting afraid, when you start telling yourself, “Oh no, I can’t do that,” then it’s not the right business for you, because every time it’s a challenge. He’s always doing something new. It’s David and his voice is always going to be the same, but the way he imagines his stuff and brings it, nobody could expect it until he comes out. SR: What about something you’ve learned from Angélique, David? DB: There are musical things; I think the first record I heard was Logozo and a lot of it was done in Miami I think with Joe Galdo, and I loved it. Angélique and Joe were bringing electronics to African music and African beats and I had never heard it done that way. The grooves didn’t sound like electronic grooves, it was real African grooves, but you could hear the sounds were very electronic and I thought wow, this is taking this to another level. This is taking this music and making it very contemporary and I loved that and I thought I can learn from that. And of course, it’s probably obvious to people now that I love Celia Cruz and I heard Angélique and I thought, hey, here’s someone else with this similar energy, similar voice.

The two friends with a pile of Byrne’s original Celia Cruz records.

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THE COLLEGE DROPOUT Heji Shin sees no distinction between her photographs of birthing babies and portraits of Kanye West, making people uncomfortable in the best ways possible.

BY DEAN KISSICK

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ALL IMAGES COURTESY GALERIE BUCHHOLZ, BERLIN/COLOGNE/NEW YORK

Heji Shin’s Kanye and North in Uganda (2018)

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KW6 (2018) 168 culturedmag.com

FOR THIS YEAR’S WHITNEY BIENNIAL, HEJI SHIN

wanted to exhibit her portraits of Kanye. The curators who had invited her, however, were more keen on her Babies series. Eventually they agreed to include both: Shin’s photographs of babies emerging gloopy, bloody purple and screaming from their mothers are prominently displayed on the fifth floor, while her pictures of Kanye are hidden away in the basement, which isn’t even listed as one of the Biennial’s floors, between the coat check and the bathrooms. The basement, she notes, is traditionally considered a space of psychological repression. But then the whole show seemed to her to have been curated with a lot of anxiety about inadvertently offending anybody. Shin’s Kanye pictures had already come under a lot of criticism following their debut at Kunsthalle Zürich last year, presumably because of the rapper’s scattershot tweeting and friendship with Trump. They’re lush and intimate but also fairly straightforward portraits of one of the most photographed men alive. If Shin had been commissioned to take them for a magazine, nobody would have minded, and there wouldn’t have been any uproar. So why do images like these become politicized when they are on the wall of a museum? Is it because she’s chosen to take them of her own volition? Because today’s art world can sometimes be less tolerant than the culture at large? Because of a belief (which she doesn’t personally subscribe to) in art’s great power to seduce and so potentially corrupt a society? Where does the difference lie between studio photography and artistic provocation? Born in Seoul to Korean parents, Shin grew up in Hamburg, later began and then quit a photography program there (like Kanye, she’s a college dropout), moved to Berlin, and found a job taking low-key portraits for a German economics magazine in the 2000s. Art came later, around the same time she moved to New York eight years ago, and fashion later still, only a few years ago. Like Wolfgang Tillmans and Juergen Teller before her, she’s a photographer from Germany working around the intersection of art and fashion. However, while those guys like to mix everything up, Shin makes a clear distinction between the kinds of photographs she takes for different contexts, and sometimes plays with that distinction to create an effect—as with her exhibitions of no-frills Kanye pictures. Likewise, while most of her fashion work is reasonably conventional, she’ll take a more conceptual approach when she wants to: most notoriously with her Eckhaus Latta Spring 2017 advertising campaign featuring pixelated images of young couples having real sex. Shin relishes the challenge of organizing improbable shoots. “I’m interested in projects that I don’t find very possible,” she says. “Then you see how far you can get. With Kanye, I never thought that he would ever reply to me. With photographing the mothers, I didn’t think it was possible.” She likes to take risks with her subject matter and approach as well. To be an artist, she tells me, you have to have some meanness, some aggression. You can’t worry about pleasing others or doing what’s right—that is the opposite of what an artist should do. “You should actually do what people think is wrong. That’s what I’ve always thought. That’s what I like. I’ve never thought of trying to do what other people think art is.” Her approach may have landed her Kanyes by the toilets, but she actually finds this more amusing than frustrating. It’s important to keep a sense of humor about everything. “I think I’m never very completely sincere. Or I never go into something in a purely serious way,” says Shin. “There always has to be something to smile a little bit about, or laugh about.” Her pictures of childbirth, which I find rather uplifting and beautiful are, for her, somewhat grotesque, and violent, and also kind of “funny, how these babies don’t look like human beings.” Everything she does is done with levity, and a willingness to laugh at the world, even at its most miraculous moments, because life is not a tragedy, but a farce.

“You should actually do what people think is wrong. That’s what I’ve always thought. That’s what I like. I’ve never thought of trying to do what other people think art is.”

—HEJI SHIN

KW9 (2018); opposite, KW2 (2018)

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Dancer. Rapper. Model. Born in France to a Congolese family of artists, Young Paris has swiftly ascended the ranks of music and fashion, signing with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation, which released his latest album, Blood Diamond, in May. The young phenom sits down with Franklin Sirmans, director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, to talk about childhood memories, African traditions, and the importance of heroes. PHOTOGRAPHY BY PHILIP-DANIEL DUCASSE STYLED BY OLUWABUKOLA BECKY AKINYODE 172 culturedmag.com

PARIS

ALL ROADS

LEAD

Young Paris wears a shirt and dressing gown by Gucci and jewelry from L’enchanteur, Tiffany & Co. and John Hardy.

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Young Paris poses in an Abasi Rosborough jacket, Victor Li joggers, a watch and bangles by Tiffany & Co., John Hardy rings and Christian Louboutin sandals.

Franklin Sirmans: So you have a big event coming up, right? Young Paris: The album. FS: Your next album is coming out. YP: Yeah. FS: It seems like you’ve been making an album a year, which is pretty impressive. There are certain things I think are important after listening to your music for a while now, and then listening to just a little snippet of Blood Diamond, it’s different! Where’s your head at? YP: I wanted to get into more of my poetic side, and a little bit more of the artistry of my songwriting. I feel like what I’ve been doing a lot the last several years has been creating more of a vibe, introducing this contemporary African sound and I think people are getting it now, so it felt like it was time to tell my story a little bit more. I’ve been doing the long route. I’ve been out here a long time. FS: I know! It’s impressive. YP: I’ve been able to survive by having my foot in so many different industries. Blood Diamond is looking at African kids, like myself, who come from conflict areas, and make it to America. The idea of a diamond, when you conceptualize it as a human, is like the African dream. We’re from the mud of areas of conflict, and we’re taken out and cut up and polished, and then we’re seen in a whole different light, to be displayed to the world as something beautiful. FS: Absolutely. YP: Blood Diamond introduces that conversation. My family is from the Congo and I’m talking about the way people live in Africa and then my journey here, and what it feels like to be an African who can sit front-row at a fashion show and be respected in these rooms. FS: You reference very specifically the idea of introducing yourself through Afrobeat and through the music and the image. You reference war within the song. There are some tough lyrics about people trying to grow up. It’s amazing to see that kind of a pivot. YP: The African story has not really been told in hip-hop; it’s hard to tell that story in American hip-hop. It’s hard to tell the first-generation African story. Now there are whole new generations who are making families here who have African bloodlines. A lot of us relate to knowing that we came from these countries and there’s a certain type of hustle that comes with that, a certain type of respect for bringing your traditional culture to a contemporary world. FS: Absolutely. You come from a pretty artistic background. Where did the desire for you to be a creative come from? YP: My whole life. My father co-founded the National Ballet of the Congo.

The real Blood Diamond context is the story of my father, who came from a village in Congo. And when he created the National Ballet, he went to all these villages and said, we can create a performance and theater about what the country is doing, about the government and the police. At the time there was no media, no press; it was all about plays in the streets. My mother is also a dancer and we eventually moved to Paris, but I was raised in Congo where at times dinner was a struggle. It wasn’t a dangerous environment, but very traditional. Walking home at 2 AM when there’s no light, eating with your hands, eating the chickens that are in the yard, washing clothing by hand in the buckets. It’s completely natural. If you go to Africa today you have extremes. You have very wealthy Africans, and then over the bridge it’s a whole different world. FS: So, growing up you saw art and how it fits into people’s lives, but what was the first form of creativity for you? You didn’t really go into dance. YP: Well I did, actually. I watched my parents and was brought up in dance studios. It was a big influence. I started to dance, and when I say ballet is tradition, it’s really African dance. The boys in the family would play the drums and the girls would dance. I started as a drummer when I was around five years old. I was already keyed to these traditional African rhythms, and then we were living in the States and my parents would do these summer workshops. We would help with the choreography, and I started to do my own choreography. FS: Okay. YP: I started to sing and rap and when I was around 18 I started to really get into music. And then it was a good four years of figuring out what I wanted my sound to be, what my subject matter was, and how to start telling my story. My father was also a renowned painter; growing up with an artistic family, I was always involved with art in a household with 10 siblings where we were all dancing and painting—it was very colorful. FS: I’m wondering where your sense of image comes from. YP: I give a lot of credit to my father. He taught us to be proud of who we are, where we’re from, and before he passed he really drilled that into our consciousness. He was a very honorable man, someone we all looked up to. When I was a little older, we moved to Hudson, New York where there are lots of galleries, so I was a 15-year-old African kid going to art openings. FS: Amazing. YP: I would help with putting the shows together and the curators would explain things to me, like, this a Basquiat, this is a Dali. I was the only black kid. Being in those spaces and watching a show go up from A to Z and then come down, I just wanted to learn about why people create and I found my artistry through it all. FS: How would you describe your image? YP: I try to contemporize the African man. I try to celebrate the traditions, but keep it contemporary. I’ll wear Gucci, but have my paint on, or complement it with African garb. Whatever it is, it has to complement tradition. FS: The face-paint is a lot. YP: Yeah, so the maquillage I use is a tradition. Specifically, we use it when someone dies or when a child is born as a way to renew energy. Energy never dies, it’s reused. When my father died, it was really hard for me. He

“AMERICA IS BUILT ON HEROES, WHETHER IT’S A PUBLIC FIGURE, A BRAND, A BUSINESS. IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN CULTURE WE NEED MORE HEROES.” —YOUNG PARIS

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was my hero and I needed to find a way to keep his energy with me. He had given me this maquillage when I was young and after he died, I just kept wearing it. Everybody was like, why you keep wearing your maquillage? I felt like he was with me. I did it so much, I decided to perform with it, and I started to do photos with it. It just became my image. He died in 2012. FS: I’m sorry, brother. YP: It was my way of grieving and holding onto a tradition. This has been done with a lot of different African traditions. In many ways it’s created a whole new identity for a lot of Africans or people who want to celebrate Africa. You see Beyoncé wearing it, you see a lot of superstars finding their way to kind of touch on Africanism. FS: Absolutely. It’s a way of making something representative of that space, too. You posted a beautiful quote on your Instagram from Chinua Achebe: “A man who pays respect for the greats paves the way for his own greatness.” You said that in relation to meeting up with Dapper Dan. YP: The young generation has to pay respects. The more the older and the younger generations communicate, the more we learn from each other. FS: Definitely. Does “Juicy,” the single that came out a couple of months ago, fit into the Blood Diamond conversation or is it more closely related to the past? YP: “Juicy” is the attitude of my sides. I got that Congolese confidence. I’ll do anything. And “Juicy” is a way of saying like, man, every day we finesse. We ain’t out here playing with nobody. This is New York City, I’m black in America. How do you think I’m making this happen? “Juicy” is a way of talking about abundance, it’s fun. FS: Who did you do the video with? YP: A guy named AbFad from Atlanta. He’s a Sierra Leonean artist and he also directs. FS: The video is crazy. YP: I wanted to add in an element of artistry to make it a little bit more exquisite, with all the snakes and lizards and the girls looking like some African Game of Thrones shit. FS: Do you feel like that was part of what you were talking about in terms of establishing this presence within African music as a bridge to a global conversation? YP: The African Vogue album was about Africans basically creating what the idea of vogue is. It’s kind of us taking back the conversation. In one way, vogue is dance, an expression. It’s also the highest form of fashion. The album is a way of saying Africa is vogue. We are that. We make that. And then Afrobeats was about igniting the conversation of this contemporary sound coming out of Africa and playing the different avenues of it, doing the melodic forms, showing what upbeat feels like, telling this story from the raw. Now, Blood Diamond is the time to tell the story. Last night at Ozwald Boateng’s event, I was thinking about how it goes back to the concept of heroes. We need heroes. America is built on heroes, whether it’s a public figure, a brand, a business. In contemporary African culture we need more heroes. For guys like Virgil Abloh, it’s a big responsibility because there are a whole lot of

people with your skin color that have high expectations. FS: For real. YP: You know he posted this thing the other day from his studio in Milan with the Off-White team, and obviously it’s in Italy so most of the team is white. But I was like, where are all the black people? We only really have Virgil. FS: In that space, yeah. YP: You know, when Kanye was trying to do it, he didn’t have the empathy. It’s an empathetic job to be a hero. You gotta care about the people. The musicians have mastered it, black music has mastered it. We know how to tell that story, look at the fashion world, look at the art world, look at Hank Willis Thomas. How do we create that narrative? FS: We’re getting there, you know. Hank is a good one. The one thing I miss about New York is that it’s hard to find the other voices and there are so many of us in New York. You’re part of a much wider context and group of people here. YP: Yeah, that why I’m very keen to activate different spaces and encounter different groups of people. It’s not just about the music for me. It’s the conversation. As the pages turn, god kind of guides me. When I was nowhere, this girl, who I loved to death, was like, your image is incredible. I think you could do anything in fashion you want. And I was like, the fuck? [Laughter.] And she was like, I do PR. I didn’t even know what PR was. At first I couldn’t afford even the low rate she was charging me. I was scraping my bank account. She gave me the lowest rate of all her clients and that’s what I’m talking about when I say Blood Diamond. It’s someone seeing the glass and being like, that is some shit down there. If I polish that shit— FS: It’ll shine. YP: And it’s not about race or whoever. It could have been a black woman. It could have been anyone. FS: It’s about someone acknowledging. YP: It’s about someone acknowledging something that I had that I couldn’t see myself, and giving me the battery to think about doing a campaign or an editorial. FS: It’s true. YP: Having these experiences, knowing what it’s like to be completely in doubt and insecure. To be ashamed of being an African. All of this goes into the journey. FS: It’s interesting—the contrasts you had in your foundational moments are what allowed you to see the world. YP: Yeah, growing up around white people and Africans, and living in Congo and Paris and then in New York and going to these electronic parties and nightclubs. FS: I love it. YP: I’m completely comfortable in all those spaces. If you follow my Instagram, you don’t know what the next post is gonna be. You might see me standing next to the goddamned president, like, oh shit. Or you might see me with some kid in the hood. I celebrate everyone. That’s what art is. It’s about understanding that everyone has a story.

“I TRY TO CONTEMPORIZE THE AFRICAN MAN. I TRY TO CELEBRATE THE TRADITIONS, BUT KEEP IT CONTEMPORARY. I’LL WEAR GUCCI, BUT HAVE MY PAINT ON, OR COMPLEMENT IT WITH AFRICAN GARB.” —YOUNG PARIS

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Young Paris wears a Boss suit, Gucci strawberry brooch and beaded tiger motif necklace.

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THE WOMAN WHO SAVED MENSWEAR

Fashion designer Emily Adams Bode rethinks the American man one textile at a time. BY KAT HERRIMAN PHOTOGRAPHY BY CAROLINE TOMPKINS

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SEVERAL OIL DRUMS, A PRECARIOUS ARRAY of hats, potted plants, iced coffee, stacks of crocheted lace and geometric quilts, a drum set of corduroy-topped stools and a choir of sewing machines: this is the inanimate orchestra of Emily Adam Bode’s Chinatown studio. On first glance, the visual cacophony deafens the senses, strummed forward by the graceful yet restricted motions of fashion production—folding, cutting, pinning, stitching, packing. And so the first word on my tongue is that of silencing judgment: “hoarder,” it says. But my instincts are wrong. My eyes adjust to the saturation. This is not an arbitrary assemblage of compulsion; it is the juice behind Bode’s synonymous menswear line and the lens of her life. Bode and I find common ground, namely the 26th Street Flea Market (first introduced to me by the late, great design enigma, Jim Walrod) and the Brimfield Antique Show (the US’s oldest mega flea). When I still lived in Massachusetts, I remember my mother driving us to Brimfield’s tented fields, but they all blur together in the car trip of nostalgia. I was a passenger. Bode is a driver. Her biannual pilgrimages are just that—a communion with a group of friends she’s been staying with and shopping beside for almost a decade. Together, they’ve amassed treasure, their eyes and desire evolving with each discovery. “When I go to Brimfield or India, there are certain things

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that I’m looking for, of course, but the joy of those places is discovery. There are things I’ve learned to look for. Over time, I’ve seen so many fairs that I’m now able to see the pieces that are not like the others.” Originally a time for ad hoc discovery, her more recent fiberseeking trips necessitate more than browsing. She has quotas to fill now: yards upon yards of vintage textiles, most of which she will upcycle through her clothes. The need for lists is a kind of growing pain, one that signals the ways Bode has changed in its short but sweet history. First launched in 2016, Bode began as a couture studio producing pieces one by one in a way that resembled an artist’s output, but in 2018, things shifted. Bode debuted her first Vogue.com certified presentation and in doing so became the first female designer to show at New York Men’s Week. Lauded for her ingenious use of thrifted materials and rejiggering of the American fashion vernacular, the designer picked up her first major retailers and the CFDA Fashion Fund award. More accolades followed. This year, the fashion council doubled down on their praise by nominating Bode for their Emerging Designer of the Year award. Forbes also gave a nod, adding her to their prestigious 30 Under 30 list. In June, she stages her first runway show as perhaps the most anticipated new member of Paris’s Men’s Fashion Week.

Previous spread: Designer Emily Bode, Allistair François, Nico Geyer and Mantas Daugvardas in Bode’s Chinatown studio. All models wearing Bode head to toe. Here: Francois and Daugvardas wear pieces from Bode’s Fall 2019 collection, all of which were assembled in New York. culturedmag.com 181

Daugvardas sprawls out in Bode’s corduroy suit which features hand-painted drawings inspired by gallerist Todd Alden’s childhood.

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The roaring attention seems to bemuse Bode, whose voice is affected with a hushed humility and intense purpose. When I bring up her success, she reverts back to her own goals. “[Bode] felt like a project. It was something for me to test if I was a designer,” she says. “Through the process so far, I’ve learned that if I wasn’t making clothes this way, I wouldn’t know how.” I marvel in the evidence, her small team working in close quarters with their supplies. It is the best kind of layer cake. During my first visit, Bode is glowing in the fat minutes before research spurs into action. Tracing the connectivity between oral and visual history is intrinsic to Bode’s ethos and the way each season emerges. Her collections find their home in a concept or a muse that often refuses the circumambient logic of streamlined mass production and market briefs. Leisurely lunch conversations with friends, voracious reading and visual research kicks off what is an entirely hands-on process of digestion and creation. Her soon-available Fall 2019 collection sprang out of her relatively new friendship with Todd Alden of Alden Projects, a Lower East Side bulwark for music and art ephemera. “I’ve definitely never thought of myself as fashionable and I don’t think Emily picked me for my aesthetics,” Alden admits, laughing. “I think her interest came from what we share. We are both collectors and when we spoke, that was her primary interest—what it was about these things that made me want to save them and share them with other people.” The resulting garments decamp from any literal interpretation of Alden or his printed-matter-driven gallery. There are corduroy pants tattooed with Picasso plates, bottle cap-adorned PVC raincoats and striped patchwork suits. Bode says the ideas for each sprang out of phone calls and lunches discussing how his childhood fascination blossomed into a career. “Storytelling is an organic part of making clothes. In the case of Todd, I think I found someone that had the same impulse or narrative, but maybe a different way of how it was expressed. As someone intensely interested in collecting, I feel like it’s important to seek out those moments of introspection.” With so many milestones already under her belt, the kneejerk is to ask what’s next. Her 40-plus retailers are hounding her to launch womenswear, as are some of her private clients. “I wish I could just switch on a desire to do womenswear, but it’s not that simple. I started Bode with a concept in mind. I wanted to create clothes that made room for a different kind of man, or maybe just a new kind of story. I liked the idea that feminine crafts could be my tool, that crocheting and quilting would pave my entryway into the vocabulary of masculinity,” Bode says. “So when people ask me to make womenswear, I have to tell them I would if I had an idea of how to go about it.” For now, the brand remains singularly minded, giving a second life to the canons embedded in our textiles. Like the abridged Italian folktales of Italo Calvino, there is a collapse of collective truth and fiction in the garments. The quilted jackets with their sunny pastels feel both heavy and light. The nostalgia is painful and warm, like a sunburn.

“Storytelling is an organic part of making clothes. In the case of Todd, I think I found someone that had the same impulse or narrative, but TH`IL H KPќLYLU[ way of how it was expressed. As someone intensely interested in collecting, I feel like it’s important to seek out those moments of introspection.” — E M I LY A D A M S B O D E culturedmag.com 183

ANOHNI :PUJL ÄYZ[ [HRPUN [OL Z[HNL H[ ;OL 2P[JOLU TVYL [OHU [^V KLJHKLZ HNV HZ [OL SLHK ZPUNLY VM (U[VU` HUK [OL 1VOUZVUZ [OL WVS`TH[OPJ WLYMVYTLY UV^ RUV^U HZ ANOHNI OHZ YL]P]LK OLY LHYS` L_WLYPTLU[HS [OLH[YPJHS WYHJ[PJL BY WHITNEY MALLETT

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ANOHNI self-portrait (2019) culturedmag.com 185

In April, ANOHNI took over the stage at The Kitchen with SHE WHO SAW BEAUTIFUL THINGS, a performance featuring friends Laurie Anderson, Kembra Pfahler and Lorraine O’Grady, pictured here and at right.

“VISUAL RE PRE SE NTATION IS MORE CEREBRAL... Somehow hearing and sound, it’s in the gut,” explains British-born ANOHNI, whose music, whether electronic pop or baroque ballads, is indelibly driven by her haunting voice. “You can sing an authentic expression of pain in almost any language and people will feel it. I learned that by touring all over the world singing my songs,” she says, comparing her vocals to “trip wires” for how they trigger an automatic involuntary response in listeners. But there’s a frustrating dimension to how this affective power has played out. Audiences “were interested in the noise itself because not many people are allowed to make that noise, but they weren’t interested in who I was

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or the details of my life,” she laments. “They were just projecting their own experience onto the noise I was making.” Now ANOHNI is ready to foreground who she is even at the risk of alienating fans. “If it means 10 people want to see me transparently and might share some part of my point of view, ‘come on down.’” This spring at New York’s long-standing interdisciplinary art space The Kitchen, ANOHNI gave of herself unapologetically with the mixed media exhibition “LOVE” and a four-night run of experimental theater piece SHE WHO SAW BEAUTIFUL THINGS (starring Laurie Anderson, Kembra Pfahler,

“The theme of my work is, what’s really happening? Who am I? Where did I come from?” —ANOHNI and Lorraine O’Grady, among others). The artist’s history, community, and animist ideologies were on full display, and for many it was a first introduction to who ANOHNI is beyond her soul-wrenching vibrato. “Everyone heard about me when I was 35 and won the Mercury Prize,” she says about winning the award in 2005 for the Antony and the Johnsons album I Am a Bird Now. But a decade and a half and another three studio albums and an EP later (the most recent works she released as ANOHNI), few know that, before her musical breakthrough, the artist had been furiously creating absurdist goth theater starring drag queens and punk ladies of the night. Every Monday from 1992 to 1995, ANOHNI’s Blacklips Performance Cult took the stage at the Pyramid Club in the East Village, where RuPaul and Lady Bunny got their starts a decade before. While ANOHNI began as the Blacklips playwright, eventually authorship became more collective, yet the mood stayed calamitous. “We were in the worst part of AIDS,” she remembers. “The aura was hanging in the air.” Continuing to work in experimental performance, ANOHNI founded a new group in 1995 with Johanna Constantine, who’d also been a part of the Blacklips, and a more recent friend Julia Yasuda, an intersex activist and mathematics professor who’d relocated to New York from Tokyo. They called themselves the Johnsons, a tribute to street activist and first Stonewall brick thrower Marsha P. Johnson, who’d passed away a few years prior. The three friends maintained a close creative partnership until Yasuda’s suicide last July. “It was really tough for me because she was one of my very best friends and the center of all my work for 25 years,” explains ANOHNI, who conceived of both the exhibition and performance at the Kitchen around Yasuda’s life and memory. In conjunction with the exhibition, ANOHNI and the Kitchen also re-issued a book of photographs by Julia Yasuda’s late wife Erika Yasuda. ANOHNI never met Erika, who died in 1986, but she was the love of her best friend’s young life, so she got to know her through Julia’s stories as well as a book of photos Julia

had published in memoriam. “That book was very precious, like a holy grail in our relationship,” says ANOHNI. “Julia only had two copies and she gave one to me and one to Johanna.” When republishing the book, ANOHNI found more photos by Erika and also added in transparent pages that layer her own drawings over Erika’s images. Explaining the intervention, she says, “It’s about the passage of time and the changes that happen.” ANOHNI once asked Julia Yasuda what she’d want to be reincarnated as. “She had a very beautiful idea. She said she wanted to reincarnate as one of these beautiful fluffy fancy cats she’d taken care of when she was with her wife Erika,” says ANOHNI. “I’d never heard of reincarnating to inhabit the form of another creature you’d already lived parallel to. The revelation for me was that you could reincarnate in another direction, like a backward stitch. I always thought time had to pour forwards and I’d be forced to be born again as one of those factory farm chickens.” Ideas of non-linear time and ricocheting experiences of trauma inform both SHE WHO SAW BEAUTIFUL THINGS and “LOVE.” The latter, a mix of painting, drawing, sculpture, photo, and video, is full of portals and palimpsests, histories that circle back on themselves as well as ecstatic revelations in anticipation of extinction. For ANOHNI, remembering holds both personal and political weight. Her own memories of the AIDS crisis inflect how she understands the present disaster of environmental collapse while intergenerational memories of ancestral living offer alternatives to capitalism’s acceleration and obsolescence. “The theme of my work is, what’s really happening? Who am I? Where did I come from?” says ANOHNI, explaining that she poses these questions as a challenge, as much to herself as to us, the audience. And after seeing her in the exhibition’s visual impressions, it became clear, as her singular voice, distinguished by its guttural yet controlled quiver of anguish, came from offstage, ringing through the Kitchen’s theater during the play’s first act, I was hearing her again and also anew.

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FIGURES FOR A NEW ERA ;OL X\LLY WHPU[LYZ [HRPUN [OL Z[HNL VM JVU[LTWVYHY` HY[ NYL^ \W PU H ]LY` KPќLYLU[ ^VYSK than their predecessors. A generation removed from the AIDS crisis, these artists came of HNL ^P[O YLSH[P]L MYLLKVT HUK ZLJ\YP[` 5V^ [OL` HYL LTIYHJPUN [OL JHUVU SVVRPUN MHY IHJR PU[V [OL OPZ[VY` VM ÄN\YH[P]L WHPU[PUN HUK THRPUN P[ [OLPY VÛ >L ]PZP[LK [OL Z[\KPVZ VM ZL]LU VM [OLZL HY[PZ[Z [HSRPUN ^P[O [OLT HIV\[ ÔH[ KYP]LZ [OLPY ^VYR HUK [OLPY L_WHUZP]L ]PZPVUZ MVY ÔH[ P[ JHU TLHU MVY [OL ^VYSK BY HARRISON TENZER

FIFTY YEARS AGO, JASPER JOHNS, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol were hailed as artistic geniuses. They were also classified as sharing the same major mental disorder: homosexuality was regarded as an illness by the American Psychiatric Association until 1974. The state violently policed homosexual activity by raiding gay bars and monitoring any suspiciously pro-homosexual material sent through the postal system. Today, on the 50th Anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, which ignited the international LGBTQ+ Liberation Movement and overthrew the draconian political and medical systems of control, overt expressions of queer identity in art have become more commonplace. Within this freedom of expression, a generation of American artists, growing up in the wake of the AIDS epidemic and enjoying more political freedom—relatively speaking—than their predecessors, are turning to the traditional realm of figurative painting to explore queer intimacy. From antiquity through the 19th century, the majority of bodies represented in paintings have been either of the ruling class or idealized forms representative of those who could afford to commission artworks. Here, we look to seven queer artists who utilize the aesthetic tool box of the European canon—which until recently would have excluded most of them due to their race or sex (closeted white male painters have traditionally enjoyed more artistic visibility)— to depict themselves and their loved ones, asserting the value of their experience through the form of figurative painting.

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Just as this is the first generation to choose what aspects of the dominant social order, such as marriage and child-rearing, they want in their lives, so too are they choosing only what suits their needs from the art historical establishment. Unlike the artists active during the AIDS crisis like David Wojnarowicz, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Marlene McCarty, and others, who were pushed to the margins of society, this generation of queer artists do not take overt political action or mourn the rampant loss of loved ones in their works. While all incorporate the figure, they do not quote the sculpted white male bodies of Paul Cadmus, Jared French or other painters that focused on idealized male nudes in the decades before Stonewall. Rather, many of the precedents for this generation are male stalwarts of the European canon—Thomas Gainsborough, Diego Velazquez, Édouard Manet, Édouard Vuillard and others. These artists use a queer lens to deconstruct not only notions of sexuality enshrined in the canon and in today’s society, but also assumptions surrounding gender expression and identity, class and race, all of which are grafted onto the physical body. As certain individuals of the queer community—most notably, white gay men— enjoy greater acceptance in America, many other cohorts of this broad network still face demeaning and dangerous assumptions from the mainstream. Taken together, the works of these artists display a diverse and complex vision of queerness today, advocating for an expanded and inclusive visibility.

D O RO N L A N G B ERG The figures in Doron Langberg’s Louis, Tristan and Sarah are all in unisex clothing, obscuring the gender identity of the two without facial hair. The relationship between the figures is not clear. There is warmth and love, the exact terms of which are not defined. The 2017 painting contains enough details to suggest the figures are at ease in a safe space but remains open enough to allow for multiple readings of their relationships. The structure of the painted space is just as open—the sofa is a cloud bleeding into the figures, made even more opaque in contrast to the carpet, where the empty bowl reads more like an absence than an object with weight. “Once you try to pinpoint exactly what makes the painting queer, it dissolves,” Langberg explains of his approach. “I love the idea that the form itself, the lens, is queer. It’s not that this brushstroke is gay and this one is not, but that the slippage is echoed in the way the paintings are made.” The very openness and antipathy to fixed narratives displayed in the paintings are also hallmarks of the artist’s life. “What conventions am I questioning and what am I accepting? It’s the same with constructing a painting. These paintings echo the way I see my life right now. Some aspects are finely honed, and the rest is very open.” Langberg’s subjects span everything from portraits of friends and family to images of sex, though, he notes, many collectors shy away from the erotic paintings. “In art, depictions of straight desire can be about war, peace, God, anything you want,” he says. “But when a gay person does this, the work is immediately reduced to being only about sex.” While straight male desire can be used as a symbolic device, as in Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, or as a formal device for constructing abstract compositions as per Willem de Kooning and Pablo Picasso, the erotic images constructed from the gay male gaze can only be pornographic to straight eyes—a historical trend Langberg is specifically interested in challenging. “I want my experiences as someone from a more marginalized viewpoint to stand in for more than one thing. I want what I depict to be a nexus for the viewer’s experience as well, regardless of where they are coming from.” Doron Langberg, Louis, Tristan and Sarah (2017) culturedmag.com 189

Planes of cyan, magenta and yellow float within an infinite white void, intersecting to create boldly-hued figures, architecture and spaces of pure abstraction. Two embracing figures repeat in different forms, hovering somewhere between reflection, shadow and the material. Zoe Walsh’s 2018 painting loop, pull, bleed, reveals no narrative. “It alludes to the painting process, camera movements and Photoshop layering effects,” Walsh explains. “I was thinking about the different forms of movement in each medium.” “Pleasure is sacred to my work. It started with my interest in film spectatorship and a desire to create a space for a trans identification rooted in visual pleasure,” says Walsh of their interest in creating an aesthetic of trans-subjectivity untethered to the strictures of the gender binary. Taking cues from the ways in which Warhol used silk screen techniques to deconstruct glamour and celebrity, Walsh turns to highly constructed images of gender and sexuality, namely photographs of actors on the set of the 1984 gay porn Ramcharger. The erotic depictions of gay cowboys in the desert are processed through Sketchup and Photoshop, eventually appearing as genderless figures in the paintings. “These levels of transformation from the source material help me find ways to talk about a particular subjectivity that is about watching from a distance, imagining something that is not actually there.” By removing the hyper-masculine signifiers of the photographs, Walsh reverses the societal mechanisms of gendering. While the genderless figures appear to exist outside of societal restraints, the images do not escape the specificity of their source material. There is no amount of reconfiguration that can fully erase the gender structures that serve as the architecture of the painting. “I want to talk about that space that is shifting and expanding, while also having some specificity based in queer source material. The works stop short at articulating a fixed subjectivity.”

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PHOTO BY ISABEL OSGOOD-ROACH

WALSH

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PHOTO BY JORDAN WEITZMAN

CU DAHY ANTH O NY Anthony Cudahy sourced the central image for his 2018 painting Everard (stage) from news footage of a 1977 fire that devastated the Everard Baths, a crucial meeting space for the New York queer community for much of the 20th century. “Nine people died in the fire, so in the top row are nine stand-in/spectators/angels. They are meant to point to this event being on a continuum, just as the stage aspect does,” he explains. The bathhouse was “a dangerous place to be in physically, but was a safe space socially. The windows were boarded up to add a layer of privacy and thus safety, so when the fire happened, people couldn’t get out.” The three men on the stage—the physical embodiment of a support structure—serve as both the fundamental narrative of the

painting and a symbol of the importance of queer safety networks, a theme Cudahy relates to sentinel theory, which claims that specific individuals in a species have evolved to remain awake in the evening hours to protect those who are sleeping. “People who are drawn to that act of trying to preserve a history that’s been covered up act like sentinels,” he says. “The past becomes a place that is not closed off.” By re-contextualizing past images to address the present, the artist speaks to the continuum of queer experience across generations. “I really like the word ‘tender’ because it has the romantic side to it and also the pain of something like a bruise,” he says, reflecting on the ways in which establishing intimacy requires the potentially dangerous act of exposing the innermost aspects of identity.

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SAL M AN TOO R Salman Toor’s The Bar on East 13th pays homage to Manet’s 1882 A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, which depicts a stoic female bartender gazing directly at the viewer, the reflection of an obscured male patron in the mirror behind her the specter of the male gaze. Unlike the barmaid who is resigned to her objectification (some believe her to be a prostitute), the genderqueer bartender in Toor’s 2019 painting seems emboldened, demurely eyeing the attractive stranger in the mirror. Directly contrasting the rigid gender and sexual roles presented in Manet’s work, Toor’s painting presents queer people freely engaging in erotic and platonic reverie. Born in Pakistan, Toor’s first visit to the National Gallery in London shook open a new world for him. “I was a Muslim outsider, so I had no idea what these Christian stories were, but because they were so gorgeous, I wanted to know everything about them—and I wanted to find a way to show my personal stories and the stories of my community like that.” Toor’s figures often quote the flamboyant dress of these painted figures—mainly brown queer men—in a fusion of contemporary and Orientalist garb, recasting the xenophobic fantasy that European artists applied to depictions of his home and culture. As with the original Manet painting, Toor’s work foregrounds the view of the bartender through the mirror behind the bar. The perspectives of the subject and the viewer are unified through the mirror’s reflection, foregrounding the artist’s interest in double consciousness, the way in which minorities see themselves reflected through the gaze of dominant society. As a brown man living in a time of heightened xenophobia, the artist notes the suspicion with which some white Americans view him. Conversely, in Pakistan, the topic of the artist’s sexuality is never openly discussed in the art press. However, Toor finds levity in the code switching that is required to negotiate his identity. This quality of play and gliding between cultures animates Toor’s vibrant canvases. 192 culturedmag.com

Salman Toor, The Bar on East 13th (2019)

“I was a Muslim outsider, so I had no idea what these Christian stories were, but because they were so gorgeous, I wanted to know everything about them— HUK 0 ^HU[LK [V ÄUK H ^H` [V ZOV^ T` WLYZVUHS Z[VYPLZ and the stories of my community like that.” -SALMAN TOOR

Jenna Gribbon, Pollyanna Wrestlers (2018)

J EN NA GRI BBO N Jenna Gribbon approaches the canon like a bull in a china shop, with her interest in the painterly and physical architecture of classic Eurocentric aesthetics immediately visible in Pollyanna Wrestlers (2018). In the painting, she places two female wrestlers in an antiquarian room, the traditional domain of women in repose. Painted to recall the 1960 Disney film Pollyanna, the room becomes a psychological space in which the artist revisits her own early encounters with cultural signifiers. Gribbon’s female wrestlers—often based on her girlfriend or close friends—figure prominently in her practice. “These came from thinking about the trope of wrestlers, which are usually men. It seemed interesting to flip it and have them be female. There is also a tongue-in-cheek aspect, since they are playful and not actual wrestlers. It’s also erotic. There’s something funny about it. There’s something playful and maybe violent.” The complexities of

Gribbon’s positioning of women is a direct rebuttal to the staid figures crafted for the male gaze by art historical heroes like Gainsborough and Jean-Antoine Watteau. “I was trying to find a new way to love those problematic paintings,” Gribbon offers. “There’s the issue of loving paintings of women, but then the problematic history of paintings of women.” Part of Gribbon’s reclaiming of female beauty comes from her use of camp, an aesthetic strategy with deep roots in queer history. Delineated in Susan Sontag’s notorious 1964 “Notes on Camp,” the camp sensibility humorously blends elements of high and low culture to create an open aesthetic of exaggerated performance. Sontag noted that in the pre-Stonewall gay male community, this sensibility was the dominant social currency. Queer artists as diverse as Warhol, John Waters and RuPaul have defined practices around camp. “Camp takes risks and sometimes it falls on its face,” Gribbon says. culturedmag.com 193 149

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JO NATHAN

CHASE LYN DO N

In Men on Wet Bed (2018), Jonathan Lyndon Chase completely dissolves the distinction between two lovers’ bodies, depicting the figures as a gyrating vortex of erotic energy, riffing off Futurist and Cubist techniques to show various perspectives of the subject in motion. The field of the bed mirrors the ecstasy of the figures, as the room blooms into fields of fiery color, evoking the ways in which Francis Bacon’s figures morph within abstracted realms. The painting depicts a fulfilling sexual encounter between queer black men, a necessary representation of a marginalized community, which Chase explores in the majority of his oeuvre. Interested in issues around bodies, pleasure and ideas of masculinity, Chase has developed a specific pictorial device, termed an “eight,” to address the unified male body. “There are infinity circles

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and loops that focus on pleasure points like the anus. The prostate is an interior world of pleasure that most people are denying themselves.” In Men on Wet Bed, the eights appear as mouths, nipples and anuses, swirling together in an erotic dance, a direct contrast to the ultimate male symbol of the phallus. While the phallus has become a symbol of differentiation between the sexes through dominance, “eights” seek to unify the sexes and unburden men from their phallocentric ideas of masculinity. Chase’s works affirm the ability of the viewer to evolve and overcome the limiting structures of society. “I am trying to put out work that can be meditative, reflective and healing in many ways. I’m interested in Buddhism and self-mastery—thinking of how we can get closer to ourselves.”

CELESTE

D U PUYSPEN CER and awareness about what other people are feeling. That is empathy.” Holding the traumas of her queerness in one hand, Dupuy-Spencer simultaneously considers the privilege of her whiteness. “I keep my finger on the problem of whiteness, but also have a compassion for the people I grew up with. There is a huge fear around facing the history of our whiteness and the position that it gives us now, which is only possible if it holds other people back.” But rather than focus on the criticisms, Dupuy-Spencer sees painting as a space for potential reconciliation. “There needs to be a way to commune with those that are other than you,” she offers. “Painting is an act of healing. I believe that it’s possible to have done this hard work and the healing that comes to me also comes to the viewer.”

PHOTO BY EM ROONEY

The title of Celeste Dupuy-Spencer’s It’s a Sports Bar But it Used to be a Gay Bar instantly identifies the queer figures at the lower edge of the work as the original inhabitants of a place now repurposed for a straight clientele. The gay ghosts and sports fans are thoroughly enjoying themselves in the same space, but in different ways—the former intently locking eyes, the latter cheering at screens. Dupuy-Spencer’s 2016 painting of intimately-engaged queer couples foregrounds the development of empathy that occurs in queer individuals as a result of coming to terms with their inherent difference from established heteronormative narratives. “Confronting shame and trauma, knowing we are never going to fit in, queer people pick up a hypervigilance

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DESIGNING FROM As co-founder of the Zürich-based HYJOP[LJ[\YHS ÄYT 2HYHT\R 2\V Jeannette Kuo has overseen the design and re-design of buildings around [OL ^VYSK YHUNPUN MYVT RPUKLYNHY[LUZ to houses to T\ZL\TZ /LYL ZOL [HSRZ ^P[O HYJOP[LJ[ and Cultured’s architecture editor Andrew Heid about [OL PULќHIPSP[` VM ZWHJL [OL KPќLYLUJL between practicing in Switzerland and the United States and [YHUZMVYTPUN SPTP[Z PU[V VWWVY[\UP[PLZ

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COURTESY LAURIAN GHINITOIU

The interior of the Sports Sciences Institute at the University of Lausanne, designed by Karamuk Kuo.

THE INSIDE OUT

Andrew Heid: How did you start your practice? Jeannette Kuo: We started with a lot of optimism and naiveté. I think that’s probably the only way you can start a practice with all the anxieties that would otherwise be behind it. It was around when the financial crisis began in the U.S. At the time, we were already starting to do a lot of work and competitions on our own, mainly in Europe. We realized that most of the things we were interested in and were possible for us were there, specifically in Switzerland, and it made sense at that point to relocate. We didn’t officially start our office until a year later, in 2010. We gave ourselves a five-year plan to see if we would be able to get work that would sustain us and we were quite lucky in winning one of the first competitions we entered; with that project, we officially started our office. Which project was that? That’s the kindergarten in Aadorf, which is a four-unit kindergarten with an assembly space, which was not so common in Switzerland at the time. They were much more used to smaller kindergarten units operating independently.

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This was one of the first ones where there were four or five that were brought under one roof, which demanded a collective identity for the school, what they could share and what it meant for the spaces within the building. Were you also teaching at the time? No, I made the conscious decision when we moved here to focus on the office. I had been teaching for quite some time at University of California, Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; I was frustrated with the fact that the usual trajectory of a design architect in the U.S. is through academia, and that eventually at some point or another, maybe when you turn 50, you might actually realize your first significant project. I was also wary of facing students before I had anything significant under my belt. That became one of the main reasons why we decided to focus on a practice before we would return to teaching. It was always our intention to have a practice that engaged with academia and through which we would experiment with the constructive process, so the work and the teaching is very much linked.

COURTESY KARAMUK KUO

Conscious of the space surrounding their project sites, Karamuk Kuo seek the harmony between a building and its environment. Here, an apartment project in Cham, Switzerland has a triangular form to maximize the interior space while navigating the unusual shape of the land on which it sits. Opposite, the compact structure of the International Sports Sciences Institute building at the University of Lausanne minimizes the structure’s footprint on the landscape to preserve outdoor space.

COURTESY LAURIAN GHINITOIU

So when were you were teaching at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH)? I was never teaching at the ETH Zürich. I was teaching at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, which is the equivalent of the ETH in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. Ünal [Karamuk, co-founder of Karamuk Kuo] was the one teaching at the ETH. In fact, that’s kind of how we were “funded” while we were starting our office here. Your book, A-Typical Plan: Projects and Essays on Identity, Flexibility and Atmosphere in the Office Building, is a really astounding book. You wrote it when you were teaching at EPFL? Yes. It was fantastic for me to be able to go back to academia after having had some time to focus on the practice and working on projects. When I went back to teach at the EPFL, it was after a hiatus of about three years or so. I went into it with a hunger and obsession to explore the new ideas that I was exposed to in building but didn’t have time to research in practice. The book was my outlet. But it was also that going back to teaching after having built

our first project put a new perspective on the way I would actually want to teach. Part of the work that is published in A-Typical Plan was my critique of my own education and my way of thinking prior to that. You studied at Berkeley and Harvard, is that correct? Yes, I did my undergrad at UC Berkeley and my masters at Harvard after having worked for a few years in between. What is the critique in A-Typical Plan of your education through your teaching at EPFL? I don’t devalue my education in any way because in part, it made me who I am. I appreciate very much having had that as a basis, but it was a very cerebral education. It was very much about a theoretical and conceptual investigation, which tends to distance itself from the actual experience of architectural space and the architectural artifact. It’s either from a top down or outside-in strategy, as if you’re looking at this building purely as an object and the space is a result of the form and mass. The image of the object, its formal exuberance, is more important than the experience that comes

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as a result of what was designed. Even when we were thinking about things constructively—say, towards the early 2000s, when people were looking at digital fabrication and how to approach constructive technologies in a different way—we were looking at systems and effects. We were looking at things from a conceptual distance or as ornament, and never quite from the point of view of the person who is really occupying that space. So my obsession became exploring how we can bring that back. How do we design from the inside out and find a holistic way of integrating all the aspects that we were supposed to confront with an architectural design but from a much more visual point of view? I think from my own education, there was always a distrust of things that you could not explain with words—and space is one of them. To a certain degree it is ineffable. It’s not something you can really pin-point in terms of what strikes you as the experience. But everybody knows when they go into an amazing space that it is amazing. In some ways we were trying to find a way to deal with that and to grapple with what that meant for the design process. That actually leads us exactly to my next question. A-Typical Plan has addressed a lot of these issues, which could be called the project behind the project, or as I like to call it, the intractable problems of the discipline or the questions and problems of the discipline. But perhaps you can elaborate more speciﬁcally on what you have addressed in the book and in your practice now as the project behind the project? We’ve been trying to pare things down to their essence, to the most basic and fundamental elements, in order to find new possibilities. Architecture for us is a backdrop for everyday life; it is a vehicle through which we experience collective life. When it’s successful, it should offer pluralities rather than limitations. We realized that in order for that to be expanded upon, almost as an infrastructural space, we have to get down to the essential or bare minimum and to understand the relationship between the basic elements of a building and the space we inhabit. We wanted to turn the architectural question around a little bit and approach it from the other side. Rather than start with form, why not start with space? Part of that is reacting to some things we’ve been seeing before starting our practice, which was right after that period of exuberance in the early 2000s, with all the crazy formal projects in Dubai and China that were heavy on resources and symbolism but weak in experience. Except for the initial “wow” effect, there was nothing in those projects that allowed for a sustained everyday experience. High-resolution architecture versus low-resolution architecture? Yes, and in our case we had to start in a very different context. These days we are very conscious of the consumption of resources and how architecture contributes to that. On top of that, the Swiss have a very particular way of approaching things with a long-standing culture of construction that, in some ways, can be quite dogmatic. We had to respond to that context and to the fact that most of our works are for public institutional clients. That put us in a slightly different position than people who get private commissions, because we didn’t have that flexibility of endless budgets and open-ended timelines. Public institutional projects always have tight time and budget constraints, which meant that we had to deal with reality front and center; that kind of became the driving force behind our work. Many of them have been about finding the opportunities within the constraints and finding loopholes for architectural invention—essentially being resourceful in order to gain design freedom. We question the given architectural brief to introduce spaces that were not asked for, but which completely transform the daily workings of the building. Like the atrium in the Sports Sciences Institute or the central hall in the Weiden School. But most of all, we try to integrate spatial thinking into our process and find ways for communicating space to others. As a result, our buildings are best experienced in person. There are a lot of iconic buildings by architects that we admire and that look spectacular in magazine

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spreads but turn out to be disappointing in person, and we’re very bothered by that. I think the spatiality of the projects and the dynamism of the real experience they offer has to be richer than in still images. What architects have most inﬂuenced your work? If you asked this question to Ünal you would get a slightly different response, but I was very much obsessed with people like Pier Luigi Nervi, Jørn Utzon, Auguste Perret—people that basically were blurring the boundaries between the role of an architect and engineer and whose work was simultaneously spatial and structural. There are also a lot of people who have appeared more recently that have been quite influential as well. While I was working on the second book, Space of Production, I was blown away by the work of Rudolf Schwarz, who is probably lesser known in the U.S. but did amazing work in post-war Germany, a time when austerity pushed rationalism to a very productive spatial investigation—a lot of his churches seem quite industrial from the outside but are extremely spatially rich. This is similar in some ways to Jørn Utzon’s later works. His work is very rational to a certain degree but also completely irrational, which makes for a combination of something quite unexpected. For example, in the Bagsværd church just outside of Copenhagen: you might drive right past it because it looks like an anonymous industrial building from the outside, and then you go in and there’s this really fantastic light and geometrically expressive structure. What differentiates your work from other contemporary practices, in general and more speciﬁcally in Switzerland? A lot of architects are obsessed about the control over their work. We know that once we hand over the keys, the building belongs to others with lives and actions we cannot predict. That demands a very different approach to design. We see architecture as a spatial infrastructure that lives on beyond us. And often the catalysts of our ideas are the structure or services of a building that others would treat as problems to solve at the end, but that for us would mean a purer and more coherent conception of space. Our work also emerges from what seems to be quite ordinary conditions, and often appears very rational and maybe even restrained on first glance. But it always tries to bring something that shifts expectations. As for your question about how we are different from others in Switzerland, we are maybe more optimistic or irreverent than the typical Swiss office. We talk about our work and are interested in the discourse around it. In the American context the discourse is a lot stronger because of the lack of possibility to practice, and in Switzerland it’s sort of the opposite. There’s so much work that nobody is talking about anything. We’re very conscious about the fact that architecture is more than just building. It is a material discipline, but it’s also about constructing knowledge. We are contributing to that not only through the work that we do on a physical level but also on an intellectual level. Where do you see yourself going next in terms of your intellectual or architectural project and its trajectory? Our hopes are that we will be able to broaden our context of operation and therefore be confronted with other questions and cultures. So far most of our work has been in Switzerland, which is a huge privilege, but also in some ways a very comfortable bubble because there is an appreciation for design here that takes the quality of construction to very high levels. But, we’re very curious and fascinated by the challenges of operating in other cultural and constructive contexts and how that might allow us to grow in our thinking and working. We’re also always trying to broaden the types of work we take on as opposed to focusing on a certain typology. Sometimes we say no to certain opportunities because they are too similar to ones we’ve already had—and it’s important to challenge ourselves. Having the distance to question when we start on a new typology or a new context, and to see the basis of things as potentially different, is an advantage. In that sense, we’re trying to question the types of projects we take on.

COURTESY MAARS VISUALISATION AND KARAMUK KUO; KARAMUK KUO

“WE’RE VERY CONSCIOUS ABOUT THE FACT THAT ARCHITECTURE IS MORE THAN JUST BUILDING. IT IS A MATERIAL DISCIPLINE, BUT IT’S ALSO ABOUT CONSTRUCTING KNOWLEDGE.” —JE ANNE T TE KUO

Above: For the Thurgauerstrasse Primary School, Karamuk Kuo created clusters of rooms that open up to terraces, designed with the school’s growth and expansion in mind. Left: A model of a commission for a series of minimalist affordable homes on a sloping hill in Zollikon, Switzerland.

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THE BEAT IS YOURS Coach’s rock star Stuart Vevers has brought his own taste and rhythm to the fashion house’s collaborative history. BY MAX LAKIN PORTRAIT BY DOUGLAS FRIEDMAN

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WHEN COACH STAGED ITS PRE-FALL 2019 runway show in Shanghai last December—a Times Square circa 1975 fantasia dropped into the hangarlike space of the West Bund Art & Design fair—it got a local assist. China has become one of the American heritage brand’s biggest markets, so for their first fashion show there, Coach creative director Stuart Vevers was wary of blowing into town, cowboy-style, all American bluster and cultural exceptionalism. Instead, he recruited a group of Shanghai-based artists: painter Zhu Jingyi, sculptor Sui Jianguo, street artist Guang Yu, and music collective Yeti Out, to interpret one of Coach’s newer and more playful brand codes—Rexy, a shapeshifting and high-performing tyrannosaurus. Rexy has been previously imagined as bag charms and a 12-foot Billie Achilleos sculpture made from approximately 400 Coach bags installed in the New York flagship. In Shanghai, she (everyone at Coach will correct you on this point) appeared as calligraphic ink drawings and graffiti prints on backpacks and belt bags. It was a canny expression of fashion’s fellowship with visual art—light and fizzy, but grounded in an understanding of regional pride and place. Fashion and art have been lucrative bedfellows since around the turn of the millennium, when Marc Jacobs fused Stephen Sprouse’s 204 culturedmag.com

punky graphic scrawl onto Louis Vuitton handbags. In the intervening years, runways have run wild with artist collaborations and limitededition capsule collections. Since Vevers was installed as creative director in 2013, he’s imbued Coach with his interest in visual art, less from an aggressive marketing position than as a source of unexpected joy, revitalizing the leather goods maker into a bona fide ready-to-wear behemoth along the way. Unlike other houses, though, who have leaned on high-wattage collaborations with blue-chip artists like KAWS, Takashi Murakami,

Coach Women and Men’s Fall 2019 collection inspired by California’s scenic coastal road.

“IT’S ALL ABOUT FINDING SOMETHING THAT INSPIRES ME AND MAKING A CONNECTION, TRYING TO GIVE PEOPLE AS MUCH FREEDOM AS POSSIBLE TO DO WHAT THEY LOVE.” —STUART VEVERS

and Andy Warhol, Coach has aligned itself with quieter names in the art world, plucking far-flung talents and colliding them with the household perennials. Vevers’s choices in co-signs reflect his own eclectic taste—everything from Keith Haring to Peanuts—with a genuine sense of wonder and pleasure throughout. Vevers simply likes what he likes. Vevers, who worked under Jacobs at Vuitton early in his career, took that example and made it his own. “Marc is really who I learned that from,” Vevers says from his 10th-floor office in Hudson Yards, a wall of windows overlooking the still undeveloped rail yards, a five-foot-tall inflatable Rexy standing sentinel in the corner. “I always found it really inspiring.” Vevers’s first collection for Coach was inspired by Joel Sternfeld’s large-format color photograph book American Prospects. At the runway show, a Sternfeld photograph of a suburban street made up the backdrop; the collection’s campaign made use of a 2000 Sternfeld image of an untamed High Line. For Spring 2015, he translated Gary Baseman’s creatures—cute, menacing, and pure id—to knit intarsia sweaters and gauzy sheath dresses. Vevers isn’t satisfied with having an artist’s work phoned in. He delights in the exchange. “With Gary, we had one of his images on the board for a kind of feeling, an attitude, and as we started to develop ideas around the collection, it was obvious that we were missing the true hand of the artist,” Vevers says. “It was at that point I realized we actually needed to connect with this person and create some real artwork together, and that’s what happened.” Vevers brought Baseman to New York from Los Angeles and gave him an office at Coach while they were developing the collection.

A similar story shaped last fall. Vevers, taken with “the idea of color” and perusing his home library, came across a book of Kaffe Fassett’s decorative art. “I immediately felt like I needed to speak to this person,” Vevers recalls. Their first conversation led to a full-fledged collaboration, with Vevers transmuting Fassett’s kaleidoscopic florals into swinging chiffon and needlepoint dresses suffused with a moody palette. “It often starts that way, with inspiration, and then it becomes more tangible.” For Vevers, if a collaboration lands, it’s a credit to the process. “At times people can think there’s a strategy behind a lot of these things,” he says. “It’s all about finding something that inspires me and making a connection, trying to give people as much freedom as possible to do what they love.” To wit: the Shanghai pieces looked believably, almost premeditatively cohesive, but each artist received their prompt and were then allowed to go at it, only coming together at the show. “It was a cool moment,” Vevers acknowledges, smiling. Vevers collects, but not in the bloodless, market-driven way that has become a New York pastime. “Most of the things I have around my home are from people I’ve worked with, or often because I was already a fan,” he explains. “I’ve got one of Andy Warhol’s little shoe sketches. A photograph by Nigel Shafran, whom I’ve worked with previously. Julie Verhoeven—a lot of Julie Verhoeven; she actually taught me illustration at college. I don’t think you can get a better illustration teacher than Julie Verhoeven. I have an incredible Kaffe Fassett quilt, Charles Schulz’s illustrations. A lot of it is the things I’ve ended up working with, but I work with them because I already love them. It’s always something that’s personal.” culturedmag.com 205

IT HURTS, SO GOOD

In 2018 Boy Harsher, Kristina Esfandiari, and SRSQ released new records from Massachusetts, California, and Texas, respectively. And though these three bands stake out the outward limits of American geography, they more often than not share the same bills. This collective history and their complementary aesthetics have made them great friends—and a force to be reckoned with. The blunt end of this powerful coalition extends from the root. All three bands are helmed by powerful female vocalists and songwriters who address sharply relevant subjects of loss, intimacy, identity, Eros, and transcendence while engaging in a productive \ZL VM ULNH[P]P[`·H KLÄHU[ transgression against the now universal compulsion towards sameness and positivity. Richard Phillips speaks to all three about what makes them tick.

ORIGINAL ARTWORK BY RICHARD PHILLIPS EXCLUSIVELY FOR CULTURED 206 culturedmag.com

Boy Harsher by Richard Phillips

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BOY HARSHER Jae Matthews and Augustus Muller began as Teen Dreamz after the two musicians met in 2013 while living in the heat that is Savannah, Georgia. But it wasn’t until “Pain,” a single from their 2014 EP Lesser Man, that the band broke out with Soft Science Records, capturing an audience wide enough to keep the fantasy afloat. “Pain”’s dark minimal electronic dance beats and menacing lyrics spread around the world all the way to Berghain, the notoriously ruthless Berlin nightclub, where Matthews and Muller were famously denied entry while their song could be heard from within. A year later they would not only be let in but sell out the space in its entirety. After Lesser Man, a steady rollout of material coalesced towards the release of 2018’s Careful. The album title speaks to their past but also their present. “The title comes from our own struggling to understand the word, especially when years ago we were working together in this chaotic relationship,” Matthews explains. “When we broke up, there was no more band and no more music. There was no Boy Harsher.” In the spirit of this moment, Matthews tattooed “Careful” on her back. “We weren’t speaking to each other then, so we really didn’t even have a plan for our set,” she continues. “We didn’t know what to do and went our own separate ways. So it became, ‘I’m careful,’ as in careful with my heart.” Eventually, scars healed enough for the two to overcome differences and pour it back into their music. According to Muller, the development of Boy Harsher’s minimal electronic sound came from a necessary distillation. “In college we had no money,” Muller smiles. “I had just sold most

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of my stuff just to buy this cheap synthesizer, so it was just not a philosophical or existential choice. Now when we talk about getting more instruments, I often feel like we have enough to explore already. You definitely get lost when you have too many options.” The same doesn’t apply to their inspiration, which runs wild, with anchors in both art and music. Conceptually the performances of Joan Jonas and Vito Acconci have been important to the equation as well as more contemporary peers like FlucT’s Monica Mirabile and Sigrid Lauren. “I remember watching Vertical Roll, the Joan Jonas piece, where she’s slamming a sledgehammer and thinking this is far more interesting than analog visual art,” Mueller says. “I think what we miss out on with performance now is that absolute devotion to the craft. What I truly appreciate with Monica and Sigrid is that they embrace their fear and act with no inhibition.” Muller and Matthews were so taken with FlucT they invited them to perform during two shows: a dive bar followed by an airplane hangar. “I was curious whether they were going to feel strange, but there was no change in their plan or what they needed to do,” Matthews recounts. “They had a very strong disposition that didn’t flinch as the scale and crowds shifted.” Comradery and collaborative energy are an important part of the Boy Harsher recipe. “The sense of community is one thing that really makes this process work for me,” Matthew confesses. “If it was lonely or filled with too much drama or fighting, I don’t think I’d want to do it. But because it’s so familial it replaces a lot of things that I personally don’t have in my life.”

SRSQ Not since Elizabeth Fraser first toured America with her band Cocteau Twins in the early 1980s has there been a voice so emotive, nuanced and soaring as Kennedy Ashlyn’s of SRSQ (pronounced “seer skew”). Previously the vocalist and keyboardist of the duo Them Are Us Too with Cash Askew (who tragically died in the Oakland Ghost Ship fire), Ashlyn released Unreality in 2018 as SRSQ. The deeply personal album found its narrative in the memory of Cash and Ghost Ship and evokes a surreal world where each song creates a “non-space”—or perhaps more accurately, a place for unreality to live. Intertwined with staggering loss, this constructive confusion charts a path to move through trauma by creating a transcendent, if melancholic, environment with her voice and carefully sequenced synthesizers. Ashlyn’s work on SRSQ began concurrently with Them Are Us Too. “The reason I make music isn’t just to sing. It’s the whole package. I didn’t want to be pigeonholed as having to work with songwriters. I’ve always been a songwriter. With Them Are Us Too I would bring a song to Cash and then Cash would come in with the guitar and contribute on the musical arrangements. Towards the end, it became more collaborative. After Cash died, I had this huge anxiety that people would not have faith that I would

be able to carry the music by myself, so I was very specific about not letting any collaborators in for a long time.” Uncannily, a collaboration did occur in her subconscious around the song “Mixed Tides.” Ashlyn explains: “I woke up from a really intense dream about Cash and I feel like it was the last dream when she really visited me. I had dreams about her, but this really felt different. I just woke up in tears because it was the first time I was happy since Ghost Ship.” This was in June 2017. The artist ran to the studio, writing “Mixed Tides” in six hours. Ashlyn’s vocals on Unreality clearly demonstrate her ability to articulate the power and subtlety of her expression as a trained and devoted singer. Growing up in Davis, California, she pursued lots of different versions of vocal training. She was in choir, studied jazz and opera as well as musical theater. “I feel like I have a lot of control over my instrument more than any other skill and can therefore approach things that are challenging for me in a thoughtful way. I still also practice a lot,” she says. “Vocal training gave me the confidence not to hesitate.” This quality is especially evident during her live performances. From the crowd’s perspective, she appears to be living the song rather than performing it. “The hardest thing is that I want to maintain the intensity and the authenticity of the heart of the song while I’m performing. I’ve found new ways to trigger those emotions so that it isn’t fully performative and I’m actually experiencing it in that moment,” Ashlyn says of her stage presence. “I’m not trying to trick myself as much these days.” Unreality and the related video, “Permission” (2018), both grapple with tragedy and the characters associated with it. “I love all these women in history, like Edie Sedgwick and Marilyn Monroe, and that their tragic flaws are an archetype. With Marilyn Monroe, the world demands full access. As soon as there’s any depth or vacancy, it’s shut off. That’s what the song “Martyr” is all about. It’s not about the content of the song. It’s about the performing of the song. It’s like I’m slitting my wrists on the stage and at the end [of the night] there’s nothing to do but a shot at the bar … like what else am I supposed to do?” As a result, there’s an interesting dichotomy that exists in the music itself. There’s an interior grief that’s expressed in such an effective way that people can identify with it and, for as much pain and sorrow as she packs in, there is also relief and freedom. “There is a cathartic effect,” Ashlyn says. Part of the performance’s intensity comes from the pressures of identity. “I think so much about my gender performance,” she says. “My physical projection is like armor. I’ve heard high feminine people saying my makeup is my armor. One of the things Cash’s girlfriend and I did two days after Ghost Ship was go to Sephora to try on makeup, as though there was something about taking control over your representation that does this ‘fake-it-until-you-make-it’ thing. You’re showing you have your shit together and that you’re strong.” For Ashlyn, it became a way of re-taking possession of herself. Ultimately for Ashlyn, Unreality was an event followed by a reaction but “god forbid I have to go through something like that again.” Thinking towards the future of SRSQ, Ashlyn talks about having songs trapped in her head. “I think there are themes that are a bit grander. Them Are Us Too’s Remain album was about love and coming of age, but also starting to deal with depression and mental illness. I’m still growing up in a lot of ways and moving away from existential crisis and towards a peace of mind and what it means to be alive.”

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KRISTINA ESFANDIARI

Fast-forward to the Brooklyn club Elsewhere, where Kristina Esfandiari was invited to appear before Boy Harsher for their Careful release. The club was packed from front to back for what was to be a true celebration of new dark electronic music. The entity that Esfandiari appeared as that evening was NGHTCRWLR, a rap and R&B-inspired dark industrial solo project, which she aggressively performed amidst the crowd while her vocals emerged from the rolling syncopation of ominous beats exploding on the dance floor. Earlier in 2018 she released the double EP Lover Boy/Dog Days under the band name Miserable along with the single, “I Wanna Be Adored” (a cover of the classic Stone Roses shoegaze anthem), recorded with her original band King Woman. “I can’t remember why I chose to do it,” Esfandiari says. “I ended up in Sacramento, which is my hometown, with my friend Pat Mills who records all my stuff. I was doing a show out there with my band and I was like, we should do this cover. And we just recorded it and didn’t think much about it. And then we put it online. It was the first cover I’ve done and people still message me every day about it.” It’s precisely this combination of charismatic delivery, casual disregard for results, and a passion for originality in the studio that bonds Esfandiari to her friends as well as her fans. With “I Wanna Be Adored,” Esfandiari claims her inward vulnerability and transforms it into a commanding declaration of who she is and what she insists on. The takeover of the song in subject, content, and delivery is consistent with her belief in music as a primal release and a way to transcend the present. NGHTCRWLR, for example, is a project Esfandiari describes as “a force that presented itself to me, having to do with past life regression.” She continues, “It’s not a hybrid of styles but a form in itself.” On the contrary, her performances within Miserable have a softer energy—what she describes as an “evolving angsty feeling that’s inside me that never got to express itself.” A single lyric like “candy-coated oppression” from the title track “Lover Boy”

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connects directly to the gaslighting she has experienced in relationships, alongside the depression that comes with the loss of identity and self-worth. Written on a trip back to New York, the song carries a message of strident refusal. “On the flight I just had chills up and down my body and I just kept hearing the words: ‘Lover Boy,’” Esfandiari says. “I wrote it down and underlined it. I had all four songs in my head and could hear the arrangements. It’s how it works for me, I usually hear the sound and write the album around the title.” The visitation of music and lyrics directly into Esfandiari’s consciousness follows a pattern that began with the genesis of her doom-metal project, King Woman, and had further autobiographical connotations: “King Woman changed my life. People have different ideas of spirituality and for me King Woman is very spiritual. The story that connects King Woman is that I kept hearing ‘King Woman’ in my head on tour. We were playing a place in Santa Cruz called the Witch House, which was a very small room. During the set, I had a personal experience where I blacked out and woke up on the floor screaming, having an out-of-body experience, and I felt the entity called King Woman entering my body. As I came out of it, I was baptized. I used to feel weak and insecure and after this my energy just shifted. It was powerful, like an ancient force that propelled me forward.” As in the case of Boy Harsher, Esfandiari’s musician and artist communities are important ingredients to her success. Her best friend, Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, introduced her to Nick Cave, whose music had always been a major force in her pantheon of artists and whose mere presence was “lifechanging.” But it was an early experience with Alanis Morissette’s 1995 Jagged Little Pill that really broke things open. “I used to listen to that record on a PlayStation because I wasn’t allowed to listen to it at home. I would stay at my older sister’s house and blast it. I didn’t understand the lyrics. I think it must have built up this kind of energy.”

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SIDE TABLE BY GEORGE NAKASHIMA, 1981; PHOTO BY MICHAEL J. JONIEC, COURTESY OF MODERNE GALLERY PRINT/MUSIC STAND BY GEORGE NAKASHIMA, 1981; PHOTO BY MICHAEL J. JONIEC, COURTESY OF MODERNE GALLERY

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ADULT LIFE TASTE LIKE EGGNOG A POEM BY DIAMOND STINGILY

I don’t know what to say the majority of times when I am asked to present myself in a light I never asked to be in so I am quiet. I overheard adult conversations about vacuum cleaners, ceiling fans, orthopedic shoes and the importance of high-rise cotton underwear over homemade kombucha at a friend’s birthday party. I thought they were still in their mid 20s until I saw the cake read 32. My friends and I agree rich people don’t tip well but they love small talk and being entertained. Then we get to go on our 30 minutes to an hour lunch breaks. I cleaned my bedroom and brought home a man on a weekday. The next morning he told me he liked the cryptic messages I left myself on my walls. I told him they were positive affirmations. The birds outside my bedroom window sang to each other and we listened until it was time for him to go. We said goodbye through a handshake, a fist pound then a hug. The IRS reminds me not to forget about 2015, 2016 or 2017 as my feet get flatter. I’ll need surgery for that issue one of these days but today I have to remember 2015 when it didn’t hurt as much. We went to the farmer’s market and got a list of fruits and foods. We ate our treats in the cemetery like Victorian times and pretended not to have cell phones.

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