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DESIGN MIAMI/ PODIUM November 27–December 6, 2020 TIMED ENTRY
Taking a provocative look at the multiple identities of America, curated by Aric Chen.
GALLERIES/ CURIO/ COLLABORATIONS/ SATELLITES/ TALKS/
@DESIGNMIAMI #DESIGNMIAMI DESIGNMIAMI.COM SHOP.DESIGNMIAMI.COM
MOORE BUILDING Miami Design District 191 NE 40th Street Miami, USA
Safety protocols implemented in consultation with the University of Miami Health System.
Rare Five Leaf Chair/ George Nelson & Associates, manufactured by Union Carbide, 1963/ Courtesy of R & Company
May Flower Minguren II/ George Nakashima, 1974/ Courtesy of Moderne Gallery
November 27– December 6, 2020
Taking a provocative look at the multiple identities of America, curated by Aric Chen.
GALLERIES/ CURIO/ COLLABORATIONS/ SATELLITES/ TALKS/
@DESIGNMIAMI #DESIGNMIAMI DESIGNMIAMI.COM SHOP.DESIGNMIAMI.COM
MOORE BUILDING Miami Design District 191 NE 40th Street Miami, USA
Safety protocols implemented in consultation with the University of Miami Health System.
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Contents DEC/JAN/FEB 2021
Genesis Tramaine in her studio photographed by Gillian Laub.
HOMEWARD BOUND Beloved imagemaker Ed Ruscha goes back to his roots. THEY’RE BACK Cultured’s Young Artist hoodie collaborations are back and better than ever. SCREEN GRAB When designing a fashion collection for SS21, virtual communication was at the forefront of Priya Ahluwalia’s mind. SAY IT LIKE YOU MEAN IT Socially-driven artist Andrea Bowers gets her first museum retrospective. LOVE LETTERS Artist Ray Johnson played the US Postal Service like an instrument, bending its manifold channels to his creative whims AN OASIS IN THE SUN We’ve teamed up with R & Company for Cultured’s first ever group exhibition. FULL CIRCLE Grupo Habita’s new hotel in Mexico City navigates layers of history with elegant and inventive design. A LITTLE BIT OF SOUL Hannah Gottlieb-Graham discusses the challenges and possibilities of working with artists in a changing world. CRACKING THE CODE New Orleans-based designer Bradley L. Bowers uses algorithms to merge the high-tech with the handmade.
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Contents
Musician Mark Sabinin in Dior Men photographed by Justin Heron.
A LENS OF INCLUSIVITY The multifaceted Shavone Charles works to make opportunities for Black creatives in tech while making music of her own. 66 THE FUTURE OF CREATIVITY AND CONNECTIVITY Could recent adaptations in the creative fields offer a glimpse of a more inclusive future? 68 SOLACE IN RENDITIONS OF BLACK JOY Ferrari Sheppard returns to painting with his distinctive commingling of figuration and abstraction. 72 STARSTRUCK Beloved internet’s seer Mela Pabón shares her interdisciplinary and totally contemporary approach to the art of the horoscope. 74 LENS ON THE FUTURE Artist Jheyda McGarrell discusses influences, expectations and the future for young artists. 78 THE WAITING GAME On his long-anticipated debut EP, Ashton Travis explores a range of styles. 82 WHAT’S OLD IS NEW An archive, gallery and print shop, a83 uses vintage technology to disseminate and preserve experimental contemporary architecture. 84 VOICES AND VALUE Destinee Ross-Sutton is promoting and empowering artists of the African diaspora. 86 AND THEN THERE WAS WE The most radical thing about Peter Do is not his balking at fashion industry traditions, but his focus on cultivating internal bliss. 88 30 YOUNG ARTISTS FOR A NEW YEAR Our fifth annual Young Artists List presents a critical and, at times, joyful moment of group reflection. 96
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Contents
Alexa Demie photographed by Chuck Grant in vintage Dior Homme sunglasses, Gucci bra.
THIS ELEMENT OF REVOLT Alexa Demie talks about her creativity, friendship and the films that inspire her. SHOW ME THE SIGNS At Blum & Poe in Los Angeles, an exhibition explores the creative and political energies of the Black Lives Matter movement. FOR HOUSTON BY HOUSTON Cary Fagan creates a visual diary with a cast of collaborators drawn from Houston’s creative scene. SURVIVAL STRATEGIES Genesis Tramaine discusses devotional painting, sources of knowledge and finding strength as a Black woman in America. TO BUILD WITH RESPECT For two decades Triptyque has reimagined the relationship between architecture and nature. SENSUAL SEDUCTION LaQuan Smith creates spellbinding silhouettes and dreams of a fashion industry that sells much more than sex. 99 PROBLEMS AND THE BOYFRIEND WITHIN IS NOT ONE Savannah Knoop reviews underground punk icon Brontez Purnell’s new book, 100 Boyfriends. ART BECAME MY LIFE On the eve of opening her own gallery, Nicola Vassell thinks back on a career in art commited to Black persepctives. NORTHERN EXPOSURE Just two hours from New York, younger architects and designers are pouring their souls into the Hudson Valley. DO NOT BE ALARMED For our 2020 Winter commission we asked artist Serban Ionescu to create something worthy of the era.
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Savannah Knoop
Enuma Okoro
Aviva Klein
Savannah Knoop is a New York-based artist and educator working in film, sculpture, writing, and performance. Here, they do a deep dive into the work of multidisciplinary artist Brontez Purnell. After collaborating with Brontez on a screenplay of his novel Since I Laid My Burden Down, Savannah was excited to get a sneak peek at his new book, 100 Boyfriends, saying “Brontez has an unapologetic playfulness, an embracing slutty energy that makes for sheer genius in everything he touches.”
Enuma Okoro is a Nigerian-American writer, global speaker, and arts and cultural curator, whose work focuses on identity, culture, contemporary African art and design, and women’s narratives. She believes that stories spin the world and the visual arts are a powerful form of storytelling that can shift perceptions and transform individuals and communities. Speaking to Destinee RossSutton, she says, “was a beautiful affirmation of how gifted young Black women are stepping in and claiming spaces where more of their voices are needed and long-overdue.”
Aviva Klein is a New York-based visual artist whose work ranges from largescale productions (for clients such as Nike, Google Pixel and Spotify) to intimate portrait sittings. She strives to create space for meaningful and necessary conversations through visual storytelling that is as impactful as it is beautiful. About photographing LaQuan Smith—her first shoot since quarantine—she says: “He is so down to earth and easy to connect with, which made telling his story effortless.
WRITER
WRITER
PHOTOGRAPHER
Chuck Grant PHOTOGRAPHER
Chuck Grant is an Adirondack native based in Los Angeles. A graduate of Parsons School of Design, Grant is a photographer and director specializing in editorial, fashion, music videos and album artwork. Clients include New York Magazine, Vice, The Fader and brands like Tigra Tigra, Topshop and Lanvin. Some of her favorite things include her snake, Limey, her dog, Spooky, orange blossoms and KJazz. For this issue she collaborated closely with Alexa Demie to evoke the histories and myths of old Hollywood.
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PORTRAIT BY MAX ZAMBELLI. PORTRAIT BY MARCO GUIGLIARELLI. PORTRAIT BY ANDREW WILLIAMS. COURTESY OF SUBJECT. GRANT COURTESY OF SUBJECT.
Contributors
Artillery | Fullpage ad | Background image
VIELMETTER LOS ANGELES
Math Bass Desert Veins January 2021 1700 S Santa Fe Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90021 +1 213 623 3280 vielmetter.com
Ming Smith
Drew Zeiba
Stephanie Seidel
Harlem-based, Detroit-born, Ming Smith was the first female member of the Kamoinge collective of black photographers and the first Black woman photographer included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Known for documenting Black life in New York, Smith says, “You have to catch a moment that would never ever return again and do it justice.” In addition to MoMA, her work is in the collections of the Whitney, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, among other institutions.
Drew Zeiba is a New York–based writer of criticism, cultural journalism and fiction. He is also associate editor of PIN–UP. Talking with Bradley L. Bowers for the issue, he says, “was a really exciting way to think about a lot of problems that vex my writing and, I think, most of us today. Often design and art can feel very detached from day-to-day concerns but in some sense it can actually offer insight into broader themes and give us new ways of conceiving bigger problems.”
Stephanie Seidel is curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, where she has mounted exhibitions of Allan McCollum, Carlos Sandoval de Leon, Judy Chicago and Diamond Stingily among others and spearheaded a number of artist monographs. “I deeply enjoyed interviewing Genesis Tramaine for this issue,” she says. “ICA Miami recently acquired a work by the artist, and it’s great to expand on this connection. It was exciting to talk to Genesis about her work one-on-one and learn more about her practice.”
PHOTOGRAPHER
WRITER
WRITER
Cary Fagan PHOTOGRAPHER
Having contributed visuals for Solange’s album When I Get Home (2019) and shot the critically acclaimed album cover of A$AP Rocky’s Testing (2018), Cary Fagan now finds himself on a developmental journey toward new pursuits and challenges. For this issue, he brought together members of Houston’s creative community to make a picture of the city “unified in a moment of uncertainty.”
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PORTRAIT BY BRANDON THOMAS BROWN. PORTRAIT BY WHITNEY MALLETT. PORTRAIT BY GESI SCHILLING. PORTRAIT BY QUYN DUONG.
Contributors
©2020 WATERWORKS IS A REG ISTER ED TRA DEMA RK O F WATERWOR KS I P CO MPANY, LLC
Introducing
Mixed Metals
WAT E R W O R K S . C O M
Anna Cafolla
Laura Pitcher
Maria Mora
Anna Cafolla is Dazed magazine’s digital editor and a Guardian contributor, whose work sits at the intersection of youth culture and the personal as political. For this issue’s cover, on the evening of a recent full moon, she connected with Alexa Demie and Taylor Russell to reflect on art and friendship. She tells us: “It was a joy to moderate a conversation between two women that champion each other so fervently.”
Laura Pitcher is a New Zealand writer, editor and designer based in New York. She is a regular contributor to Vogue, Teen Vogue, i-D, Vice, The Guardian and more. In this issue, she explores how Gen Z is steering the culture industry to be more dynamic and inclusive. “As someone who’s on the cusp of being Gen Z,” she says, “I’m filled with hope by the younger generation and their creativity.”
Maria Mora is a Brooklyn-based writer with a strong interest in art and its complexities. In this issue, she sits down with Mela Pabon, a Puerto Rican astrologist who uses illustration as a communicative tool. As a proud Latina herself, Maria hits on mental health in the Latinx community, Mela’s art journey and more.
WRITER
WRITER
WRITER
Anthony Barboza PHOTOGRAPHER
Over the course of his prolific career, Anthony Barboza has shot iconic movie posters for Spike Lee, album covers for the likes Miles Davis and Roberta Flack, campaigns for international corporations and assignments for almost every major magazine. His celebrated portraits of Black cultural figures evoke the styles and strengths of each subject: “When I do a portrait, I’m doing a photograph of how that person feels to me, how I feel about the person, not how they look.”
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CAFOLLA IMAGE COURTESY OF SUBJECT. PITCHER BY KARL POMPILUS. MORA COURTESY OF SUBJECT. ETTA JAMES WITH ANTHONY BARBOZA
Contributors
Made in L.A.
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OPENING FALL 2020 FREE ADMISSION Mario Ayala Aria Dean Hedi El Kholti Buck Ellison Niloufar Emamifar Christina Forrer Harmony Holiday Patrick Jackson Larry Johnson Kahlil Joseph Ann Greene Kelly Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork Nicola L. Brandon D. Landers SON. (Justen LeRoy) Ligia Lewis Monica Majoli Jill Mulleady Diane Severin Nguyen Alexandra Noel Mathias Poledna Umar Rashid Reynaldo Rivera Katja Seib Ser Serpas Sonya Sombreuil / COME TEES Jeffrey Stuker Beyond Baroque by Sabrina Tarasoff Fulton Leroy Washington (aka MR. WASH) Kandis Williams
a version Presented by:
FULTON LEROY WASHINGTON (AKA “MR. WASH”), POLITICAL TEARS OBAMA, 2008 (DETAIL). OIL ON STRETCHED CANVAS. 24 × 18 IN. (61 × 45.7 CM). COLLECTION OF JOEL LUBIN
FOUNDER | EDITOR-IN-CHIEF SARAH G. HARRELSON Executive Features Editor KAT HERRIMAN Executive Editors ELI DINER, ISABEL FLOWER Managing Editor JESSICA IDARRAGA Art Director KATIE BROWN Architecture and Design Editor ELIZABETH FAZZARE Landscape Editor LILY KWONG Design Editor MIEKE TEN HAVE Podcast Editor SIENNA FEKETE Contributing Creative Director CARLOS A. SUAREZ Contributing Editor MICHAEL REYNOLDS Copy Editor JULIAN CORBETT Architecture Editor ANDREW HEID
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Susan Ainsworth Maria Brito Alex Gartenfeld Nasir Kassamali George Lindemann Franklin Sirmans Sarah Thornton
Sarah Arison Trudy Cejas Laura de Gunzburg Jessica Kantor Dean Kissick Doug Meyer Monica Uszerowicz
PUBLISHER Lori Warriner SENIOR ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES Ladyane Lopez, Rachel Hale SENIOR ACCOUNTANT Judith Cabrera
ITALIAN REPRESENTATIVE Carlo Fiorucci carlo@fiorucci-international.com PARTNER Mike Batt
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SENIOR PHOTO RETOUCHERS Bert Moo-Young To subscribe, visit culturedmag.com For advertising information, please email info@culturedmag.com Follow us on Instagram @cultured_mag Printer Times Printing LLC, Random Lake, WI
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EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Rachel Rubi, Rebecca Aaron
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MELBOURNE
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Letter from the Editor
The Young Artists Issue I AM WRITING THIS LETTER FROM Cultured’s new Los Angeles office. The West Coast wasn’t always in the plan, but this pandemic, as it has for many, presented the magazine with challenges as well as opportunities to explore different paths and act on dreams in a way we haven’t before. I am thrilled to be here and so grateful to friends Jimmy Jacobsen and Dana Garman for helping Cultured find a home amongst like-minded creatives whose collaborative ambitions mirror our own. When it’s safe, we look forward to this space being somewhere we can welcome our community. This issue sees our fifth annual Young Artists portfolio, which, since its inception, has become a critical part of our editorial DNA. For this year’s iteration, we spent countless hours on Zoom calls and sent endless emails identifying a vanguard that felt appropriate to the enormity of the year. The individuals included within kept us inspired with their ingenuity and vision of the future. With the safety restrictions of the pandemic a driving concern, we asked the artists to create their own images this year. Thanks to Apple, some of the artists had the opportunity to use the new iPhone 12 Pro Max; you can see the results among the portraits and on our Instagram, where we will launch a short series of self-recorded studio visits this December. Instagram will also be the best place to catch our behind-the-scenes footage with cover star Alexa Demie. The Euphoria actor and multifaceted creative tapped into her love of the history of cinema, co-directing an homage to Old Hollywood alongside photographer Chuck Grant. The set felt electric and I think it shows. I am thrilled to announce Cultured’s first IRL intervention is in motion. We are popping up with a gallery in collaboration with R & Company this December for Miami Art Week. Our biggest hope for this space is to provide some safe hands-on art-viewing experiences during a time dominated by virtual interactions and screens. Speaking of making time away from screens, I have found reading a solid source of renewal in this draining time. If you, too, have turned to books, please check out Kat Herriman’s new bi-monthly book review column running on our IG, called “On Our Newsstand.” In these unprecedented times, I’m reminded of the importance of taking a second to pause and be thankful. With a challenging winter ahead, I feel grateful for my team’s relentless dedication and tremendous work ethic. Their faith in Cultured is mine.
Sarah G. Harrelson Founder and Editor-in-Chief @sarahgharrelson Follow us | @cultured_mag
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From top left: Sarah Harrelson at the Cultured and Moda Operandi party, Art Basel 2019— what a difference a year makes. On the cover: ALEXA DEMIE Photographed by Chuck Grant in Los Angeles. Styled by Alex Cronan and Kate Foley. Hair by Evanie Frausto. Makeup by Kali Kennedy. Co-Directed by Alexa Demie. Demie weas vintage Azzedine Alaïa pants and bodysuit, La Panthère de Cartier watch. Second cover: vintage Dior Homme sunglasses, Gucci bra. A collection of artists for our fifth annual YOUNG ARTISTS LIST. From left: Doreen Chan; Simphiwe Ndzube; Katie Stout (photo by Balarama Heller); Felix Bernstein and Gabe Rubin; Widline Cadet; Ravi Jackson (photo by Marten Elder); Tyler Mitchell; Francesco Igory Deiana (photo by Alessandro Simonetti); Sonya Sombreuil; Gisela McDaniel; Kelsey Lu (photo by Ib Kamara).
Photo Michel Gibert, for advertising purposes only. Flower arrangement by Thierry FĂŠret.
In celebration of the brand’s 60th anniversary, renowned Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos imagined a line of seating and accessories for Roche Bobois. The Bombom collection presents her interpretation of comfort and interior design: playful, generous and resolutely optimistic.
Bombom, designed by Joana Vasconcelos. Collection of sofas with entirely removable slipcovers, upholstered in different shades of Stretch fabric. Sets of mobile backrests, can be positioned freely on the seats. Tutti Frutti. Rugs, designed by Joana Vasconcelos. Manufactured in Europe.
Open for Inspiration
Visit New York City’s iconic Frank Lloyd Wright building. See Jackson Pollock’s first monumental painting, explore sculpture after Abstract Expressionism, and experience the future of the countryside. Timed tickets at guggenheim.org
Global Partners
152 West 25th Street, 3rd Floor, New York | www.cristinagrajalesinc.com | 212.219.9941 info@cristinagrajalesinc.com | @cristinagrajalesgallery
Homeward Bound
UBS ART COLLECTION ©ED RUSCHA. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND GAGOSIAN
This February, beloved imagemaker Ed Ruscha—known for his bold and witty work in film, painting, photography and printmaking—examines his roots. At Oklahoma Contemporary in Oklahoma City, “Ed Ruscha: OKLA” will trace the connections between his upbringing and his visual language in his first-ever major exhibition in his hometown.
Twentysix Gasoline Stations from Book Covers, 1970.
“I left as a John Steinbeck Okie to pursue a sunset to the far West. I often return to the tunes of a Woody Guthrie poem and love this place the Choctaw Indians call Oklahoma.” —Ed Ruscha 46 culturedmag.com
MARC FISH THE ETHEREAL SERIES
Combining hand-poured resin with his signature bent wood, Marc Fish has created a revolutionary, seamless material that allows light to pass through it at varying values and shades. Reflecting off slices of the paper-thin wood, light is manipulated by the fluctuating spaces between the laminations resulting in a constantly shifting, illuminated surface quality. Marc Fish is represented exclusively through Todd Merrill Studio.
80 Lafayette Street, New York NY // www.toddmerrillstudio.com
They’re Back
Cultured’s Young Artist hoodie collaborations are back, including this one from designer Katie Stout. “I was playing around with marbling flowers,” says Stout, “and they transitioned into women, as they are want to do.” Shop them all on culturedmag.com.
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1 to 4 Bedroom Residences Priced from under $1M to over $6M
ESCAPE TO THE ALINA LIFESTYLE MOVE-IN READY RESIDENCES AVAILABLE EARLY 2021 Sales and Model Gallery | 300 SE Mizner Blvd, Boca Raton, FL 33432 561.403.2785 | alinabocaraton.com ORAL REPRESENTATIONS CANNOT BE RELIED UPON AS CORRECTLY STATING THE REPRESENTATIONS OF THE DEVELOPER. FOR CORRECT REPRESENTATIONS, REFERENCE SHOULD BE MADE TO THE DOCUMENTS REQUIRED BY SECTION 718.503, FLORIDA STATUTES, TO BE FURNISHED BY A DEVELOPER TO A BUYER OR LESSEE. THIS OFFERING IS MADE ONLY BY THE OFFERING DOCUMENTS FOR THE CONDOMINIUM AND NO STATEMENT SHOULD BE RELIED UPON IF NOT MADE IN THE OFFERING DOCUMENTS. THIS IS NOT AN OFFER TO SELL, OR SOLICITATION OF OFFERS TO BUY, THE CONDOMINIUM UNITS IN STATES WHERE SUCH OFFER OR SOLICITATION CANNOT BE MADE. THIS CONDOMINIUM IS BEING DEVELOPED BY ALINA BOCA RATON LLC, A FLORIDA LIMITED LIABILITY COMPANY (“DEVELOPER”). ANY AND ALL STATEMENTS, DISCLOSURES AND/OR REPRESENTATIONS SHALL BE DEEMED MADE BY DEVELOPER AND NOT BY EL AD AND YOU AGREE TO LOOK SOLELY TO DEVELOPER (AND NOT TO EL AD AND/OR ANY OF ITS AFFILIATES) WITH RESPECT TO ANY AND ALL MATTERS RELATING TO THE MARKETING AND/OR DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONDOMINIUM AND WITH RESPECT TO THE SALES OF UNITS IN THE CONDOMINIUM. THE INFORMATION PROVIDED, INCLUDING PRICING, IS SOLELY FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES, AND IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE WITHOUT NOTICE. IMAGE IS ARTIST’S CONCEPTUAL RENDERING. FOR NEW YORK PURCHASERS ONLY, THE CPS-12 APPLICATION FOR THE CONDOMINIUM HAS BEEN FILED WITH THE STATE OF NEW YORK, DEPARTMENT OF LAW (FILE NO. CP18-0136). WARNING: THE CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF REAL ESTATE HAS NOT INSPECTED, EXAMINED, OR QUALIFIED THIS OFFERING. THIS ADVERTISEMENT IS A SOLICITATION FOR THE SALE OF UNITS IN ALINA BOCA RATON: N.J. REG. NO. 19-04-0004. THIS CONDOMINIUM HAS BEEN REGISTERED WITH THE MASSACHUSETTS BOARD OF REGISTRATION OF REAL ESTATE BROKERS AND SALESMEN F-1266-01-01.
Screen Grab
When designing a collection for SS21, virtual communication was at the forefront of Priya Ahluwalia’s mind.
Ahluwalia speaks more in depth on the new collection at culturedmag.com/ priya-ahluwalia-here-and-now
“LIBERATION, THE NAME GIVEN TO THE Ahluwalia SS21 collection, came as a result of the emotions I felt this year, which has been full of protesting for the liberation and freedom of Black people globally. During research for the collection I was looking at different books in my studio on the subjects of protest and ideas about Black beauty. At this particular moment, it’s something I really wanted to celebrate. My thought process was very much as to how the collection could be communicated on a screen, something which was new for me—I’m naturally very tactile and analog as a designer. I wanted it to be really graphic, which is why I worked with Dennis McInnes. A lot of it was us looking at old newspaper articles from Nigeria in the 60s, where we found lots of graphics that we liked. We also noticed that everyone was smartly dressed; there was such as sense of pride that I wanted to include in my work.”
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Breakfast in the Park Virtually at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum FIU Join us for a free lecture with
Jeffrey Gibson Sunday, December 6 | 11am – 12pm
Installation view: Jeffrey Gibson: When Fire Is Applied to Stone It Cracks, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, 2020, Photo: Jonathan Dorado, Courtesy of the artist; Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; Kavi Gupta, Chicago; and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.
For more information, visit frost.fiu.edu/events 10975 SW 17th St., Miami, FL 33199 | 305.348.2890
Say It Like You Mean It
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND VIELMETTER LOS ANGELES. PHOTO: ROBERT WEDEMEYER.
Before activism was trending, artist Andrea Bowers was using the methodology of contemporary art to get the message out there to organize. Her socially-driven practice continues to necessitate all kinds of new collaborations, and in her first major retrospective this winter, coordinated by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Hammer, a set of brave curators takes on the task of laying out this multipronged history in all its tangled glory.
Families Belong Together, 2018.
“THE VISUAL ASPECT OF ANDREA BOWERS’ work is the result of months and years of engagement with activists and causes she admires, where research, conversations and an understanding of the core issues direct her artistic responses. She thinks of her studio as a creative agency that harnesses aesthetics to push forward the concerns of her partners. The MCA and Hammer exhibitions will trace nearly 25 years of that work across a wide range of media and paint a picture of a unique practice and artistic journey.” —Curator Michael Darling
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LET US STAY WITH YOU.
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The Ritz-Carlton, South Beach has returned with refined sophistication but the very same soul. Visit us now to experience reimagined accommodations that embody the vibrant culture and sophisticated ease of its surroundings. In addition, you’ll find a distinguished arts scene, luxury shopping boutiques and inspired world cuisine, all set against the warm sands and picturesque blue waters of the Atlantic. Regardless of your plans, the Ladies and Gentlemen of The Ritz-Carlton, South Beach are excited to welcome you back to the most exotic city in America. www.ritzcarlton.com/southbeach ©2020 The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, L.L.C.
Love Letters
PROMISED GIFT OF THE WILLIAM S. WILSON COLLECTION OF RAY JOHNSON. © RAY JOHNSON ESTATE.
Artist Ray Johnson played the US Postal Service like an instrument, bending its manifold channels to his creative whims. There was something very intimate about his mail art, a romantic poetry of brevity and cartoons. This January, as the USPS awaits its fate, the Art Institute of Chicago delves into the timely archive of the late artist with a retrospective that pays special attention to the vivacious network he erected with the lost art of letter writing.
Ray Johnson’s Rimbaud, 1957–60.
“AT A TIME WHEN ISOLATION IS A survival strategy and the USPS has been on our minds more than ever, the profoundly elusive artist Ray Johnson reemerges with much to offer the current moment. On one hand, Johnson was among the first to perceive the potential of the postal service to function as an artistic medium and even as a broadcast technology; on the other hand, his mail art was incredibly intimate and highly ephemeral. As the founder of the New York Correspondence School, Johnson cultivated a network of correspondents who became a close, personal community, despite being geographically dispersed. Our exhibition, Ray Johnson c/o, unpacks the many ways in which he orchestrated these exchanges and considers how his diverse practices— including collages, books, mailers, performance and questionnaires—might come into clearer focus through the distinct paper trails his collaborators amassed and preserved.” —Caitlin Haskell, Gary C. and Frances Comer Curator, and Jordan Carter, associate curator.
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fernandowongold.com
Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami {
/ Allan McCollum Works Since 1969 Photos: Zachary Balber.
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Reserve Your Free Timed Ticket Online
61 NE 41st St Miami FL 33137 305 901 5272
Stay Connected icamiami.org @icamiami
An Oasis in the Sun
We’ve teamed up with R & Company for Cultured’s first ever group exhibition. Hosted as a satellite to this year’s more intimate iteration of Design Miami, the pop-up show includes artists from Cultured’s pages like Stephanie H. Shih, Wentrcek Zebulon, Andy Harman, Brian Rochefort and Travis Boyer. Opening December 1, the exhibition will run through the holiday season. For more information go to culturedmag.com or check out @cultured_mag’s Instagram stories.
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DECEMBER 1, 2020 — ONGOING
10975 SW 17th St., Miami, FL 33199 | 305.348.2890 | frost.fiu.edu
Now open Fri-Sat, by appointment. Manuel Mendive, Pavo Real, 2000, bronze, 53 ½ x 17 ¾ x 18 ½, donation of Mary Lou and John Dasburg, FIU 2020.3 This exhibition is made possible with support from the Funding Arts Network. Additional support has been generously provided by the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners; the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs and the Florida Council on Arts and Culture; and members of the Frost Art Museum.
Full Circle
Grupo Habita’s new hotel in Mexico City navigates layers of history with elegant and inventive design. BY NICK REMSEN
WHEN ARRIVING AT CÍRCULO MEXICANO —the six-month-old hotel from Grupo Habita, a Mexico City-based hospitality firm known for its design-forward projects—one instantly feels the comforts of an old home. It doesn’t have the lived-in bourgeois messiness of, say, the dwelling in Alfonso Cuarón’s 2018 film Roma. Situated downtown, just behind the famed Zócalo Square, Círculo Mexicano rather exudes a sense of long-attenuated formality, of hurried ghosts where the switchback staircase shows wear in the center of its steps, of the grandeur of old-fashioned entertaining—and a sense of cleverness in the integration of modern architecture in such a nineteenth-century space. The bones of the building once housed the great Mexican photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo, who was born on-site in 1902. The new tendons— the glass, steel, wood and overall Shaker-inspired minimalism—have been added by the Mexican architecture firm Ambrosi Etchegaray. Together, the then and now gel to form one of the most compelling hotel openings of 2020. The feat is especially notable considering how brutal 2020 has been for the travel industry. Both public and private spaces within Círculo Mexicano beg to be explored. For the post-COVID era—whenever we get there—there are common areas with tables and chairs for resting, reading or working outside of one’s room. This actually relates to my one complaint about the hotel: my room had a beautifully designed little table and chair by the renowned Mexican furniture company La Metropolitana, but the setup wasn’t optimal
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for laptop productivity. A long table set in the open corridor on the first floor would offer an ideal alternative, but with the pandemic still looming that means sitting and working with a mask on. (I should note that Círculo Mexicano’s COVID-19 protocols are thorough, with staff wearing both masks and face shields, on-demand housekeeping, temperature checks and more.) Complaints notwithstanding, my balcony faced República de Guatemala, a quiet street over which looms the Catedral Metropolitana, a massive Catholic landmark, built between 1573 and 1813. The Day of the Dead holiday was approaching, and vibrant potted marigolds lined the church’s perimeter. The room’s bed—no headboard—rested on a raised tiled platform with a direct view of the cathedral. These chambers, twentyfive in total, are all about ecclesiastical minimalism. My favorite feature in this suite was a towering, open-air yet enclosed sitting area, with a water fixture for background noise, a few hanging green plants, two wooden chairs (also courtesy of La Metropolitana) and a simple wall candle left with a keepsake matchbox. I read here for hours, a serene hideaway in a time when serenity is hard to find. Even if you don’t book a stay at Círculo Mexicano, the hotel allows visitors to its rooftop. (A downstairs restaurant is in the works, but is not yet open.) The sauna, gym, hot tub and pool are for hotel guests, but a lounge area serves strong drinks and bar food—try the steak tacos. I went up to watch the sunset, and felt the same as I did from the moment I arrived; there’s a special kind of magic to a hotel that immediately feels like home.
PHOTO BY SERGIO LÓPEZ
Círculo Mexicano’s bones are hundreds of years old, but modern touches have been added by the architecture firm Ambrosi Etchegaray.
Photo by Kevin Tedora.
IAN DAVENPORT
Sequence
NOVEMBER 20, 2020– JANUARY 9, 2021, 509 West 27th Street
509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 +1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com
Hannah Gottlieb-Graham and associate Grant Uba in front of Casa Magazines in the West Village of Manhattan.
A Little Bit of Soul Hannah Gottlieb-Graham discusses the challenges and possibilities of working with artists in a changing world. BY MARIA VOGEL PORTRAIT BY LUKE A. WRIGHT
TIRED OF THE TRADITIONAL LARGE-SCALE PR model that treats clients as strictly business and not people, Hannah Gottlieb-Graham set out at the beginning of this year to create a new way of giving voice to those creating meaningful work in the art world. At just 25, Gottlieb-Graham has years of experience working in the realms of editorial, photography, agencies and both the for-profit and non-profit sectors. Compounding her far-reaching experience, Gottlieb-Graham now sits at the helm of ALMA Communications, which she has dubbed “the antithesis of a PR agency.” With an already impressive list of clients, including Antwaun Sargent, Andre D. Wagner, Miles Greenberg, Tyler Mitchell and Bernard Lumpkin, to name a few, GottliebGraham’s mark on the art world is just beginning to take shape.
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MARIA VOGEL: Tell us a little bit about yourself. What is your professional background, and how did you end up in PR? HANNAH GOTTLIEB-GRAHAM: I never imagined that I would be a PR girl. For many years I thought I would dance professionally. I ended up giving that up for various reasons and really fell in love with photography during my college years at Sarah Lawrence and Oxford. At the same time, I was always very interested in writing; both of my parents are writers. I had a pivotal career moment working for Elisabeth Biondi [former Visuals Editor of The New Yorker] when I was 19 or 20. She taught me a lot about how to be a powerful woman in photography and in the art world and was the one to tell me I should go into communications. I spent the next few years bouncing around to different agencies. MV: This year you launched your own firm, ALMA Communications. What was the impetus for creating the company and what is it that you do? HGG: I think it was the culmination of a lot of things. After going through all of my past working experiences and identifying specific skills I had, I decided I wanted to go out and continue developing my career on my own. My last project while working as the head publicist at Aperture, the exhibition The New Black Vanguard, lit something up in me—both as a project and for myself, realizing that I wanted to be my own person and work for myself. Now, I work with a combination of artists, collectors, designers, stores and galleries to secure press, partnerships and publishing deals. While I do a lot of traditional press, mostly for exhibitions, launches or major initiatives for my clients, I also do a ton of behind-the-scenes work, acting as a bad cop for my clients and making sure they are happy with the projects that come their way. MV: What has been one of your most exciting projects this year? HGG: Bernard Lumpkin’s book, Young Gifted and Black. It was the first book project that I signed on to manage after leaving Aperture and has been such a joy. We’ve really created a team around the project. Bernard and Carmine [Boccuzzi, his husband] are such mission-driven collectors, who really practice what they preach, which is honestly such a rare thing. Young Gifted and Black has been an enormous part of their lives. To turn their work into a physical object in the form of an exhibition and book feels so important. It’s also come at a time in art history when projects like this really move the needle forward and keep the conversation going. MV: What is a challenge that you face in the communications field and how have you worked to overcome that challenge? HGG: It’s a challenge to be a young woman running a business. There are societal expectations in place that leave me feeling that because I’m young I need to prove myself on a regular basis. MV: What do you hope to change about the art industry with ALMA? HGG: I try to have a really sensitive approach toward working with my artists and prioritizing their wants and needs. The first conversation I have when I decide to work with somebody is, “What do you want?” Instead of a pitch deck or preconceived strategy, I really try to keep things simple and figure out a way to make what they want come to life. MV: Where do you see ALMA five years from now? HGG: While the future is super important to me, I’m a very present-minded thinker. I never could have imagined what’s happened in the last few months, let alone in the next five years. I launched this business in January, and got three months under my belt before the pandemic. It was absolutely terrifying. There was an interesting moment when protests erupted following George Floyd’s death where I felt a resurgence of energy, both artistically and politically. At that point, a lot of people came to me wanting to work with me, knowing that I’ve been doing the work of engaging with artists of color for a long time. I wasn’t expecting that to happen. Work has picked up since that time, which I couldn’t have predicted would happen either. Who knows what will happen in the next five years?
GENESIS TRAMAINE: SANCTUARY YAYOI KUSAMA: NARCISSUS GARDEN HERNAN BAS
RUBELL MUSEUM 1100 NW 23 ST MIAMI, FL 33127
Genesis Tramaine, Forgive Yourself, 2020
Cracking the Code New Orleans–based designer Bradley L. Bowers uses algorithms to merge the high-tech with the handmade. BY DREW ZEIBA PORTRAIT BY FRANCESCO VASI
BRADLEY L. BOWERS’S PRACTICE IS ever-expanding. It comprises the usual design objects—furnishings, lighting and servingware—but also new media art, scarves and, more recently, commercial interiors. “I’m not interested in trying to put a title on it,” the New Orleans–based designer told me of his all-encompassing approach. “I just like exploring things. I like giving people something else to think about.” One recent project, his “Halo” series of one-off folded paper lamps, resulted from a desire to re-center and escape: “I began looking at lighting after COVID hit and everyone was isolated,” he explained. “Then there were the police brutality deaths, and so just about every Black person on the face of the earth was going through some trauma. I was starting to feel that, I was starting to feel the isolation.” He returned to his studio and picked up paper, folding and bending it. “The first few pieces genuinely were these meditative acts; it was just my attempt to zone out and, in a way, stick my head in the sand, because that was about the only release I could get from all of the madness.” Though wet-molded by hand and constructed using simple clips and adhesive, the Halo lamps are reminiscent of the curves of parametric architecture—such as the buildings of Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid—or, Bowers’s personal favorite, Greg Lynn. While these furrowed and pleated lanterns, each a balancing act of light and shadow, are hand-formed, Bowers’s practice often relies heavily on digital technologies such as 3-D printing and robotic CNC milling. In fact, many of his ideas are generated in collaboration with the computer, beginning as custom scripts or algorithms he writes for architectural software like Rhino and Grasshopper—the same sort of programs that inform the sweeping forms of his architectural inspirations. This tension between the hand-formed and the robotically shaped, or between the computationally generated and the classically sketched,
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is hardly paradoxical. “I jokingly came up with this term ‘technocraft,’” Bowers said of his multiplatform practice. “I think the best ideas are born in this overlap between technological advancement and craftsmanship and our relationship to familiar material. It’s familiar, but also unexpected.” For example, a recent series of silk scarves, the COSMOS collection, paired the classic fabric with computer-generated prints that could only be realistically rendered with digital printing, finished off with delicate handstitching. As Bowers put it: “It’s kind of like a nice little marriage.” In contemporary design, there’s been a kind of inversion of industrialization. 3-D printing and other automated production tools have allowed for the quick and affordable creation of designs that could be one-offs or infinitely repeatable. “I’m trying to think about how to use the computer to bring in that diversity and variability of handmade objects,” reflected Bowers. “Two or three hundred years ago, everything was handmade. Every single chair was different.” Of course, the industrial revolution changed all that. “In a weird way, contemporary technology has allowed us to revisit that kind of artisanship and craft, but bring the computer in on the game.” That said, computational design has also dovetailed and accelerated an ideology of optimization that he worries is misguided. Some design thinking, Bowers suggested, has a faith in finding a mythic ideal form: say, the perfect coffee mug or platter. “[That line of thinking] means all designers, all artists, are endeavoring to discover that one object. And I think that’s ludicrous.” Instead, he looks at his process like a garden—a new feature of his New Orleans life. “I don’t think there’s a person alive who’s trying to grow the one best rosebush, because we know it’s not possible. What we do instead is try to create the conditions so that rose bushes can thrive. That’s how I approach my design process.”
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A Lens of Inclusivity
The multifaceted Shavone Charles works to make opportunities for Black creatives in tech while making music of her own. BY MAXWELL WILLIAMS PORTRAIT BY UNDIE MARKUS
“IN TECH, PARTICULARLY AT THE PLACES I’ve worked, Black creators are the pulse of the entire platform—what we do, what we don’t do, what we say, and how we spend,” Shavone Charles says. Charles sits on the other side of the screen in an LA Kings jersey, effervescent in the morning in her sun-speckled home in Los Angeles. The musician, tech executive, entrepreneur and activist has a warm and engaging countenance—like an old friend you haven’t seen in a while—but she’s talking about the serious subject of being a Black creator in the technology space. Though Black creators are the lifeblood of social media, their employment numbers remain embarrassingly low. “Existing, for a lot of Black people I’ve met in tech, it’s radical, it’s protest, because we’re not normalized in the space,” she says. “So now you’ve seen, you know, more efforts—some performative, some legit—around getting more diverse voices at the table and seats, but from what I’ve seen, just over time, it’s always been an uphill battle.” It’s a battle that Charles has been fighting for years. After leaving her hometown of San Diego—a place that she says prepared her for often being the only Black person in the room—she went to University of California, Merced, where she became the school’s first Google intern, working on the launch of Google+ and Google Play. From there, she landed at Twitter, where she helped launch Blackbirds, a resource network for Twitter’s Black employees, and did vital work growing the official @TwitterMusic account. She then went to Instagram in 2015, where she held the title Head of Global Music and Youth Culture Communications, helping spotlight creators everywhere. Now she’s taken a new gig at VSCO, the photo editing app that blew up a few years ago when the stereotype of Hydro Flask-drinking, sksksksktyping “VSCO girls” became a meme. But, Charles says, VSCO has been making genuine, meaningful contributions and outreaches to Black creators, including in their Micro Gallery platform, where they recently featured “The Hair Appointment”, a photo series by Josef Adamu and Jeremy Rodney-Hall shot in various Brooklyn salons. “I’ve been working on some pretty dope projects,” she says of her new job as Director of Consumer Communications. For instance, “Black Joy Matters”
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showcases curated images of VSCO’s Black users in various states of delight: “I’m so proud,” she says, “of basically mobilizing the whole engineering team around celebrating black happiness.” Showcasing Blackness has been on Charles’s mind for a long time. Her own multidisciplinary agency Magic In Her Melanin, which she started in 2018, is dedicated to boosting Black voices. Part peer-to-peer network for Black creators and part community outreach for underprivileged young potential creators, Magic is Charles’s baby. The plan is to build a safety net for Black creators to get resources and connect with people who can help. “I’m positioning it as a creative collective and community organization, and also a think tank if someone’s working on something and they need help, and they’re asking, ‘How do we think about this through a lens of inclusivity?’” Charles says. If there’s one thing that ties everything she does together, it’s music, which has played a role at each of her jobs and in her own life. As a solo artist, she has recently dropped “4C,” an ode to tightly coiled curly hair, and “Sith,” a twisty lyrical rap named for the dark side in the Star Wars universe. And she’s got more on the way, as she’s building a studio in her house and working with producers like Mars from the Grammy-winning production crew 1500 or Nothin’. “I’m looking for trip hop: more transformational, non-traditional and alternative backpack productions. You know Sophie? Stuff like that. And I’m looking for some dubstep beats,” she says, describing her upcoming EP’s more outré sound. “I have a couple of songs in the vault that I’m excited about. I’m going to trickle them out.” But her end goal is to produce her own music. “All my favorite people that I love—Pharrell, Tyler the Creator, Childish Gambino, PartyNextDoor—they really know their sound,” she says. And it makes sense: Charles has always worked hard to manifest exactly what she wants in the world, and has the vision to pull off everything she sets her mind to. So, becoming her own musical producer? Of course that will happen. “The stuff I want, I know what it sounds like,” she says with a grin. “So yeah, I’m coming for the production.”
Multihypenate musician SHAVONE. at Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles.
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COULD RECENT ADAPTATIONS IN THE CREATIVE FIELDS OFFER
THE FUTURE OF CREATIVITY AND CONNECTIVITY
A GLIMPSE OF A MORE INCLUSIVE FUTURE?
BY LAURA PITCHER
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Musician Ashton Travis getting braided in his of Houston. INhometown THE MIDST OF
GLOBAL LOCKDOWNS, 19-year-old Nairobi-based comedian Elsa Majimbo posted a video saying she “misses no one.” A few months and 1 million Instagram followers later, Majimbo has established herself as one of the most exciting upcoming comedians, having conversations with the likes of Jorja Smith. While social media, from the start, offered the promise that people could reach far beyond their borders, the global health crisis and subsequent closures of cultural institutions and diminishing in-person gatherings have presented new challenges and opportunities to creatives. There’s hope that, under the influence of Gen Z, the cultural industry might be further democratized and steered towards a more inclusive future post-pandemic, the seeds of which we’re already seeing sprout. While Majimbo is a leading figure in a new social-first wave of comedy, she didn’t start out with intentions to shift the industry. “When I started posting my clips I didn’t even know it was comedy,” she explains. “They were just videos that brought out the real me and made me extremely happy. Then in the process of putting out my content I found out that I was apparently funny.” Majimbo enjoys performing for the internet because it allows it to be “just her and her phone.” Although she started posting videos prior to the pandemic, while at a new boarding school where she was struggling to make friends, the comic relief resonated widely during a time when many felt hopeless. “I think people are able to relate to my videos because the things that I talk about are things that we all experience, regardless of our gender, culture, sexual orientation or nationality,” she says. “I think everyone needs to go for what they think is rightfully theirs. In this world you cannot ask to be included or to be given your fair share. Be yourself, be bold, take risks. It may be a little tough but it’s definitely worth it.” Having first established herself as a viral sensation, Majimbo’s future path will look different than those of many comedians starting out, though it will still include the fundamentals of stand-up and acting. Shavone Charles, musician, activist and director of communications and creative partnerships at photography app VSCO, recently spearheaded the VSCO campaign #BlackJoyMatters, an online collection that celebrates Black joy and paints a picture of the Black experience. Charles says that while everyone and everything has been forced to adapt during this time, Gen Z, an already very online generation, have found themselves even more online. “Gen Z are such digital natives already and now many of them have experienced graduating from a mobile device or laptop,” she says. “During my time working at Instagram we were already seeing young people looking to hang out in a community online. Now, we’re seeing even more connectivity in lieu of us being connected in real life.” Charles says this year has been a time for “self-teaching and self-learning,” as offices and workspaces have become almost redundant. “I think a lot of people are realizing that they can do a lot with less,” she says. “Do you need to pay a ton of money for an office space to have quality creative output? No. Do you have to be around people 24/7 to have community? No.” However, she says that while this has sparked innovation and creativity, it has been a particularly hard time for creatives in underpaid and undervalued industries. As museums expand their online presences after pandemic closures, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy, has also taken a comedic approach. Ilde Forgione, one of their social media managers, says they created their TikTok account to try and communicate to a different audience. “The new target we want to focus on are the very young, but without imposing a classic explanation, by speaking their language, with videos focused on the museum’s masterpieces, characterized by a playful and ironic cut, as is the style of TikTok, or, in general, by an emotional approach,” Forgione says. The response, Forgione says, was unexpected. “Young people are the
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“I THINK EVERYONE NEEDS TO GO
FOR WHAT THEY THINK IS RIGHTFULLY THEIRS. IN THIS WORLD YOU CANNOT ASK TO BE INCLUDED OR TO BE GIVEN YOUR FAIR SHARE.
future’s public. This was a serious attempt to open a channel to a very difficult audience to involve: bringing school-age young people as close as possible to letting them discover the beauty of art as something they have the pleasure of discovering for themselves.” The gallery’s communications strategy aims at being open and inclusive, making museums more accessible and understandable. Their final goal is to eventually bring more young people into the museum, something which is working as new visitors have already started tagging videos of themselves in a similar style while visiting. This approach is spanning the cultural sector, as in in the work between next-gen marketing agency PRZM and American Ballet Theatre. Liz Toney, cofounder of PRZM who launched ABT’s TikTok account, explains that the ballet company now refers to their in-person performances as “analog.” “They’re looking at TikTok as part of their toolkit for communication,” she says. “It opens them up in a way where they can actually create a two-way dialogue and interactive connection with their audience.” Larry Milstein, also a co-founder, says no other leading performing arts institution had launched their own TikTok channel but, for a Gen Z consultancy, that platform was a “no-brainer”. Milstein explains that while these strategies may not seem financially lucrative initially, “revenue will flow naturally” to creatives as long as the focus on the “human element” is still connected. “Throwing more technology at things is not the solution, it’s about building authentic identity and finding balance,” he explains. This is something that both Toney and Milstein think Gen Z craves when consuming cultural content, as a creatively-minded generation that can feel “overwhelmed” with noise and information. Finding this balance between expanding and elevating digital experiences while still incorporating human connection is something Jim Louderback, GM of online video tech conference VidCon, hopes to achieve by launching new
sessions crafted for digital delivery. Usually an annual in-person event, VidCon has been hosting hundreds of online sessions throughout the pandemic, something they want to continue to do alongside in-person events post-pandemic. He’s optimistic this will result in a more inclusive media industry at large. “I think the democratization of media in general, whether from a creative perspective or from a viewing perspective, has made it already more diverse,” he explains. “And I think we’re just going to see that continue because now that we are locked down, we’re seeing that telecommuting and teleconnections are becoming just part of the fabric of our lives.” He hopes opportunities will be available for a much broader swath of people and that because, for Gen Z, you don’t have to connect in person to have experiences with friends everywhere, we’re going to see more connectivities across the world. Much of VidCon’s audience is Gen Z or younger, and Louderback says video is just “how this generation communicates.” For this reason, he expects to see more emphasis on shared video experiences in the future. Curator and writer Kimberly Drew hopes this shift towards connection and accessibility continues. She also says it’s no surprise to her that institutions are now finding themselves on channels like TikTok. “I think it should always be a priority because even after this moment your constituents are not just people who are able to come into your institution,” she says. “It’s important to think about all the ways that people of all walks of life, and of all abilities, interact with what you’re creating and have different entry points. That’s what social media is at the end of the day, not just an educational tool but an invitation.” This invitation, it seems, has been both spearheaded and excitedly accepted by the younger generation. While creatives and cultural institutions have been hit hard economically, there is hope that the adaptations we have seen will help move the creative fields away from the historically elitist structures—and toward greater inclusivity.
BE YOURSELF, BE BOLD, TAKE RISKS. IT MAY BE
A LITTLE TOUGH BUT IT’S DEFINITELY WORTH IT.”
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Ferrari Sheppard Finds Solace in Renditions of Black Joy
The rising star returns to painting with his distinctive commingling of figuration and abstraction.
BY FOLASADE OLOGUNDUDU PORTRAIT BY DEVIN L’AMOREAUX
“MY WORK IS GENERALLY VERY HOPEFUL. I’m thinking about life post all this bullshit, post all the oppression,” Ferrari Sheppard declares, envisioning a world where Black people are free from the violent history of slavery. If the titles of James Baldwin’s 1963 book The Fire Next Time and Tupac Shakur’s iconic “Holler If Ya Hear Me” record of 1993 birthed a creative brainchild, it would be Sheppard. On the heels of a decade-long hiatus from art making, Sheppard has returned more poignant than ever and with an eternal optimism illuminating from within. The artist’s first solo show, “Heroines of Innocence,” presented at Wilding Cran Gallery in Los Angeles, sold out before it even opened. Over ten years ago, when he was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Sheppard became inspired by Renaissance-era master storytellers of hyperrealism. In time, his evocative style took shape, bearing fruit in large figurative abstract paintings. But life immediately after college would see Sheppard take a different path. A stint in journalism, interviewing the likes of Erykah Badu, M.I.A. and Little Dragon for his own publication— the now-defunct Stop Being Famous—led to the formation of alternative Hip Hop group Dec 99th with Mos Def, while Sheppard was living in Africa. For years, Sheppard traveled the continent, calling Tanzania, Ethiopia and parts of South Africa home. Encumbered by homeland security upon reentry to the US in 2016, he was again, as in childhood, confronted with the realities of being a Black person in America. “When I came back, I was detained for six or seven hours. They wanted to know why I’d been living in Africa,” he reflects. “It was like ‘welcome back, get your hands up against the wall.’” Born in New York and raised in Chicago in the 1990s, Sheppard lived through the urban decay prevalent in inner cities where racist criminal policies resulted in the over-policing of Black men and the deterioration of Black neighborhoods. “The police would literally pull me and my friends over so many times that I thought our existence was wrong,” he recalls. From the effects of the War on Drugs of the ’70s to the 1994 Crime Bill—which ignited the flame of mass incarceration that still results in one in three Black men in America entering the prison system in their lifetime—Sheppard witnessed the criminal justice system wreak havoc on his community. “Low level crack dealers were getting draconian sentences under the mandatory minimum sentencing laws. One gram of crack rock would get you the same amount of time as 100 grams of powder cocaine. It was used as a reason to completely erase parts of my generation.” Facing the trauma of Black life in America, how does one wrestle with the seemingly endless stream of violence and terror that white America continues to inflict on Black citizens? “Pain is easy for me, because I’ve
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experienced it, and I think every human being has experienced pain; but, to be able to articulate beauty, that is rare, and it’s so necessary in this world,” Sheppard reveals. The illustrious and eponymous series debuted in “Heronies of Innocence” transports viewers to a new world that is both far from reality yet instantly nostalgic. Filled with joy, Black children play with carefree exuberance, mothers clutch their babies lovingly and women find indulgent moments of healing solitude in quiet repose. A sense of purity fills Sheppard’s canvases, made more magnificent through a radical new imagination of Black life. Rendered in acrylic and charcoal elaborated with 24-karat gold leaf, figures come alive under muted tones entwined with livelier hues. With a window cracked open ever so slightly, Sheppard offers a glimpse into a universe of his own making, summoning a well of emotion with intense clarity. How does Sheppard see us? “I started to envision a world where Black people had never been enslaved.”
“Pain is easy for me, because I’ve experienced it, and I think every human being has experienced pain; but, to be able to articulate beauty, that is rare, and it’s so necessary in this world.”
Ferrari Sheppard sketches next to a herd of ostriches. No one’s head is in the sand.
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MOST OF THE HOROSCOPES FLOATING AROUND the internet carry a similar tone—a generic platitude with a splash of hope. But not Mela Pabón’s. The Puerto Rican artist serves your horoscope as if she has always been your best friend. Using original illustration as a communicative tool, Pabón carries out her monthly predictions by treating the process itself as a form of therapy, making each message as personal and authentic as possible. “Getting into astrology was a tribute to friendship,” the Scorpio illustrator and writer says. “It’s forced me to be more attentive to my own.” With a sweet cosign from fellow Puerto Ricans Ricky Martin and Bad Bunny, Mela has us hooked with her relatable readings and quirky visual interpretations. We spoke with the San Juan native about her love for the art form and how she creates a safe space in the Latinx community. MARIA MORA: At what age did you start drawing and what do you love most about it? MELA PABÓN: Since I was a child, I’ve always practiced drawing, but I never saw it as something I could do for a living. I leaned
MP: Here in Puerto Rico, we have an interesting relationship with identity because though we’re part of the United States, we’re also not. We have our own identity and, at times, that can create certain pressures to conform. For example, we have to nullify our language in favor of a more neutral Spanish so that everyone understands us. That’s something that I wasn’t willing to do. I would rather have someone refer to a Puerto Rican glossary if they don’t understand a word, instead of changing how I speak. I write the way I do as if I’m talking to a friend. MM: How have you been dealing with quarantine? MP: It’s been a roller coaster. Sometimes I’m productive. Sometimes I’m not. It’s also given me the time to pause a bit and think about what I’m doing and how I should proceed. Besides horoscopes, I like comedy; I like to write and I want to do other types of content. It gets me excited about next year, when I am hoping things will get better. MM: Since your work involves a lot of emotional effort, how do you make sure you take the time to recharge?
STARSTRUCK
Mela Pabón isn’t your personal astrologist—she’s your friend. One of the internet’s most beloved seers shares her interdisciplinary and totally contemporary approach to the art of the horoscope. BY MARIA MORA PHOTOGRAPHY BY SUPAKID
more towards writing and that’s what I studied. My interest in writing led to doing stand-up comedy. I began to think about if there was a way to unite the two. My horoscope illustrations are a super useful way to do that because they include drawing, writing and humor. That’s where I found the middle ground. MM: What drew you to astrology? MP: Overall, I believe that Latinx culture is significantly influenced by astrology. We grew up watching Walter Mercado and reading horoscopes in the newspaper. I always considered this a tradition, despite our culture’s strong ties to Christianity. Astrology was something we turned to, despite our relatives praying. When I started writing horoscopes, I had the chance to play around with humor. Astrology is a practice that is respected by our culture and with that respect there is also room for satire. I use each horoscope as a channel to relay a positive message. I learned to read the transits well and to know a little more about the signs, the planets, the houses, the cards, etc. MM: What drew me to your art is that it feels like it’s my homegirl speaking to me. Tell us a bit about that rhetorical approach and how it’s tied to the authenticity of your work.
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MP: I take my breaks. I recently went to Vieques, an island offshore Puerto Rico, for some R & R. Also, I pay attention to my body and my health. For those who are working remotely, the line between home and work sometimes does not exist. It’s like going to work for 24 hours. Taking time for yourself is vital. Also, make sure you have boundaries. MM: The topic of mental health in the Latinx community can be taboo. However, our communities suffer because it’s not discussed. How do you go about normalizing having these conversations through your art? MP: I realized that many people resort to astrology and lean on it as if it were therapy. It was interesting to observe that the messages I was receiving from people were pretty serious. Some people were questioning a lot of things about themselves and asking me to help them with critical decisions. I know that therapy is not accessible to everyone; still, I always make it a point to note that I am not a mental health professional. However, I like to produce content that helps people view things differently while still seeing themselves reflected.
“I believe that Latinx culture is significantly influenced by astrology. We grew up watching Walter Mercado and reading horoscopes in the newspaper. I always considered this a tradition, despite our culture’s strong ties to Christianity.”
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Collecting Design: The Legends Part 2
Mathias Bengtsson, Growth Table Walnut, 2014, Solid walnut; photo: Martin Scott Jupp. © Galerie Maria Wettergren; Josef Hoffmann, Hanging Lamp Model M 997, Prototype Made for the Palais Stoclet, 1908; Necklace and Rings, by Ettore Sottsass, courtesy Didier Ltd.; Bouroullec brothers, ’Sofa’ © Paul Tahon / R&E Bouroullec - Courtesy Galerie Kreo; Fabio De Sanctis and Ugo Sterpini, Officina Undici, Cielo, Mare, Terra Buffet, 1964, walnut, metal, and two Fiat doors of the 600 prima series, from the collection of Dennis Freedman.
Collecting modern and contemporary design has become one of the most dynamic, influential, and inspiring territories in the international marketplace. For the first time, the program will be virtual, accessible to anyone across the globe. In celebration of this occasion, Dr. Daniella Ohad will explore several major areas of the collectible design world: with Didier Haspeslagh of Didier Ltd on Art Jewelry by Architects and Artists; with Yves Macaux on Wiener Werkstätte; with Didier Krzentowski of Galerie Kreo on Contemporary Design; with Loic Le Gaillard of Carpenters Workshop Gallery on Contemporary Design; with Jacques Barsac on Charlotte Perriand; with Mathias Bengtsson on Digital Design; with Dennis Freedman on Italian Radical Design; with Simon Andrews on the market of 20th-century Design; with Simon de-Pury on Taste and Influence. NEW CONTENT FULL PROGRAM – TEN SESSIONS FEBRUARY 9, 16, 23 MARCH 2, 9, 16, 23 APRIL 6, 13, 20 $500 FOR THE PROGRAM TUESDAY AFTERNOONS 3:30-5:00 PM EST TO REGISTER EMAIL: MFICHTNER@AIANY.ORG AIANY.ORG/COLLECTINGDESIGN2021
DIDIER HASPESLAGH
DIDIER KRZENTOWSKI
LOÏC LE GAILLARD
YVES MACAUX
DANIELLA OHAD
MATHIAS BENGTSSON
JACQUES BARSAC
SIMON ANDREWS
SIMON DE PURY
DENNIS FREEDMAN
Pérez Art Museum Pérez ArtMiami Museum Miami
NovemberNovember 7, 2020—Summer 2021 7, 2020—Summer 2021 Zanele Muholi. Faniswa, Seapoint, Cape Town, 2018. Wallpaper. 137 8/10 inches. © Zanele Muholi. Zanele Muholi. Faniswa, Cape Town,New 2018. Wallpaper. 137 8/10 inches. © Zanele Muholi. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg, and Seapoint, Yancey Richardson, York Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg, and Yancey Richardson, New York
pamm.org
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PHOTOGRAPHY BY JHEYDA MCGARRELL culturedmag.com 79
Musician Ashton Travis getting braided in his hometown of Houston.
YOUTH CULTURE HAS BEEN AN increasingly significant influence on art, music, fashion and politics. As a reluctant millennial myself, I’m often in dialogue with the generations before and after me on the recurring themes of independence, influence and power. I caught up with Los Angeles–based photographer Jheyda McGarrell to discuss her journey as a young artist and a few important lessons artists of any age should learn. In the first moments of our conversation, we laughed about our shared love of Larry Clark’s Kids, a raw coming-of-age story with moments that mirrored my own formative years and served as inspiration for MGarrell’s decision to become a visual storyteller. As a recent graduate of NYU, McGarrell isn’t too far removed from the trials and tribulations of navigating young adult life in a big city and she’s still figuring it out, joking, “My story isn’t that long, because I’m still kinda young.” McGarrell’s mix of humility and bravado not only demonstrates her awareness of the time and space she occupies but also shows where she would like to go. The first seeds of McGarrell’s photography were planted after receiving a small point and shoot camera from her father, an accountant. With camera in hand, McGarrell honed her technique with landscape photos during a family trip to Guyana, her father’s home country. In her middle school years, McGarrell upgraded to a Nikon DSLR. “We went to the pawn shop and picked it out together,” she shares. “And then from there, I started taking little photo shoots down at the railroad tracks with all my friends
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Multimedia artist and photographer Rakeem Cunningham. Right: Filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist Alima Lee. Previous spread: Photographer Jheyda McGarrell with fellow photographers Cunningham and Clifford Prince King.
and then I started carrying my camera around all the time.” A child of two immigrants—an Afro-Carribean father and a Mexican mother—McGarrell recalls that “they wanted me to be a lawyer and I was in this program for Black people growing up called College Bound”. McGarrell was certainly college bound but had a different plan. She admits, “I lied to my dad for about a year and said I was in the business program.” With the cat out of the bag, McGarrell lost financial support from her parents, so she relied on her scholarship funds and college meal plan to pursue her arts studies. Thankfully McGarrell’s art network opened up new editorial and curatorial opportunities. Through the Art Hoe Collective, a creative platform for artists of color, she met peers and collaborators like Sage Adams. Balancing school and creative endeavors wasn’t nearly as complicated as navigating the media landscape and fighting for representation and inclusion. McGarrell reflects, “I feel like we moved past the space of having to just fight for pure representation and more into a space of having to fight for less exploitation.” Exploitation certainly continues to present challenges for Black artists who might get pigeonholed into a particular aesthetic. she adds, “Sometimes I think that the only way currently for Black artists to become successful is if they present a fetishized view of Blackness.” Also essential to McGarrell’s practice is the need to amplify and clarify nuance in culture. The specificity of lived experiences, especially for a multiracial
and multicultural artist, lends itself to a wide range of creative expression. McGarrell considers the path to true representation and inclusion is to move past stereotypes, and expresses her concern: “I feel like right now we are centering Blackness, but in a way that excludes different portions of Blackness.” McGarrell attempts to bridge these gaps in her work, which sometimes means having to say no or do things on her own terms. And while some of the “kids” are hitting the ground running, booking gigs left and right, McGarrell is more intentional about her approach to longevity. “I went to NYU for photography and imaging,” she points out, “and now I’m getting my masters at CalArts for studio art with the focus on photography.” Taking the time to learn from professors, artists, and mentors like EJ Hill has helped McGarrell form new intentions around her work and community. Looking at how other friends like Tyler Mitchell, Micaiah Carter and Munachi Osegbu have cashed in on newly opened doors and calls for representation, McGarrell and other young Black artists struggle to be seen, booked and busy which leaves little room for error. McGarrell admits, “I think a lot of people, even me, expect that they are just gonna pop off, but being a Black woman in this industry and being someone who doesn’t have the same type of process as people—it’s hard, and sometimes I don’t really like taking photos anymore.” McGarrell hasn’t given up her arts practice; instead she’s spending time working alongside artists and organizers to build the Black Image Center, which aims to open new channels and resources for other artists to learn and grow. “There are artists older than me who have been grinding for so long and still don’t have any studio space,” she shares, adding, “I just wanted to create something that isn’t about me and will have longevity and give other people the opportunity to have an entry point.” McGarrell points out, “I got to go to NYU and learn about photos, and a lot of people who live in South Central aren’t going to get the opportunity to go somewhere and move to a whole different city, running around with a full scholarship. Here we can create something for people that have been working for so long, or for kids that want to get into it to finally have a chance, and that is so important to me.” McGarrell’s new investment into community arts building comes at the perfect time, as the world continues to navigate the pandemic and calls for racial equity after the murders of Black people like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor shocked the world into action. The fundraiser for the Black Image Center is still ongoing, and McGarrell considers what’s next for her and other artist—especially after the increased interest in Black artists and businesses wanes. McGarrell thinks about presumed allies, considering, “We have your attention for us dying. But what about your attention for us living? What about your attention for us creating? What about your attention for us expressing ourselves?” These are serious concerns, and McGarrell adds that those answers are “more important than what I’m doing next.” She adds, “I don’t know if anyone will let me shoot a campaign ever again. During this whole coronavirus, I haven’t worked a single time except for a couple of online shows, but I’m not really concerned.” Instead McGarrell wants to build a community resource where Black artists can continue to work, document their own stories and have access to materials and support. While young artists continue to dominate social media and “break the internet,” McGarrell hopes instead to get off platforms like Instagram, which, as she puts it, “can be so toxic and crazy, where everyone stays calling each other out for no reason.” With this level of commitment and awareness, McGarrell will surely continue to thrive. She shares that despite everything, “I just want to make art and have longevity.” And I have no doubt she will.
“I think everyone needs to go for what they think is rightfully theirs. In this world you cannot ask to be included or to be given your fair share. Be yourself, be bold, take risks. It may be a little tough but it’s definitely worth it.”
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The Waiting Game
Ashton Travis’s long-anticipated debut EP heralds the arrival of a versatile talent.
BY GRANT RINDNER PHOTOGRAPHY BY TROY MONTES
THIRTY-YEAR-OLD SINGER ASHTON TRAVIS envisioned a 2020 filled with supporting tour dates, a few festival runs and the release of his introductory project. Through no fault of his own, the first two goals quickly became out of the question, but, with the release of his debut EP, PHOENIX MODE, Travis has thrown his hat into the ring as a charismatic young vocalist and songwriter who can keep a flow atop slippery trap beats and croon with or without an autotune assist. “Anybody who knew me before knows that I’ve been holding music and sitting on my hands anxiously waiting for my voice to be heard,” Travis says over Zoom in late September. A Houston native, Travis speaks about his hometown with warmth and fondness; he’s also worked closely with local luminary and Travis Scott’s righthand man, Chase B. That said, Travis is hardly a southern traditionalist when he gets on the mic. He balances a diverse array of sounds ranging from glitzy tropical pop (“Robbery”) to guitar-heavy late-night R&B (“Bad4Me”) to cloudy trap (“Death Row”). By themselves, some of the songs are almost too clean, gliding along with slick synths and melodies that seem tailor-made for Spotify playlist placements. But, when taken in context, each track on PHOENIX MODE showcases a slightly different skill. It’s an effective sample platter, which is something few artists can successfully pull off early in their careers. The EP surveys Travis’s love life. On the catchy standout “Robbery,” he likens a draining relationship to a stickup, with a few personal details sprinkled in to reward the active listener. One such moment comes at the very outset of PHOENIX MODE, as Travis kicks off “INFINITY” by singing the names of the highways (SH-288 and IH-610) where a dangerous car crash could’ve cost him his life. “I didn’t write anything down for this record. It was really whatever came to my mind, from the melody to the words,” he says. “A lot of the time, when I’m sitting in the booth trying to come up with something to say, all I have is the present moment to think about, or I’ll look at a text message and think about some shit that I’m really going through.” Travis, who has been signed to Def Jam since 2018, has certainly taken his time making an opening statement. He says that some of the songs on PHOENIX MODE were made two years ago, and a few of the beats go back even farther than that. As you would expect for someone who has spent so long waiting to be heard, Travis has plenty more to get off his chest now that more ears are tuned in. “I haven’t talked about what makes me cry or what makes me super excited and super passionate about getting out of bed,” he says, the glint in his eyes detectable even through the computer screen. “I haven’t talked about what scares me, I haven’t talked about my family at all. I haven’t said one name of any of my friends in any of my music. There’s so much left to talk about.”
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For his upcoming debut studio album, Travis says he’s focused on coming up with a cohesive narrative that not only tells his own story, but supports Black people in this pivotal moment, without being sanctimonious. He says he’s specifically looking to work with women in the R&B space to create collaborations that run deeper than simply a hook sent over email or a tacked-on verse. “As a Black man, every day that I wake up and walk this earth, I’m fighting for my life. Every time I get on a track, it’s me trying to put on for me and my people,” he says. “I don’t want to make political music, that’s not the point, but I want to make music to uplift Black women and uplift my people and inspire these young Black kids to know that they can make it with whatever they put their mind to.” Ashton Travis has waited longer than many artists do to release his first true project, and with the pandemic grinding music to a halt, he’s had to wait a little longer still. But, all the while, he’s been steadily gathering his thoughts, and when the stars finally align, it’s clear he has the talent and motivation to capitalize.
“I don’t want to make political music, that’s not the point, but I want to make music to uplift Black women and uplift my people and inspire these young Black kids to know that they can make it with whatever they put their mind to.”
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What’s Old Is New
An archive, gallery and print shop, a83 uses vintage technology to disseminate and preserve experimental contemporary architecture. BY ELIZABETH FAZZARE PORTRAIT BY VINCENT TULLO
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AT A83, A NEW GALLERY IN NEW YORK’S SoHo, the Risograph machine
a83 owners Phillip Denny, Owen Nichols and Clara Sym at work.
is often whirring. It seems a strange sound in the year 2020, but for gallery founders Phillip Denny, Owen Nichols and Clara Syme, this 1980s Japanese technology remains essential. The trio took over the Manhattan real estate this past winter to create a trifold space for architecture: part print shop, part gallery and part archive, it is dedicated to showing experimental designs and does so via the Riso. Architects send their work digitally to a83, and the team uses the machine—a cross between a mimeograph and a screen printer—to reproduce it on paper, making high-quality prints for installations in the gallery and to send a kind of version of the exhibition through the mail. “We’re producing conditions in which experimental, unprofitable work can be supported in equitable and sustainable ways,” explains architecture writer Denny, noting that the projects they highlight are often conceptual, made to advance discourse in the profession rather than be built physically. When a83 opened its inaugural show, “Working Remotely,” this past July, as the New York pandemic curve had flattened and was beginning to trend downward, this process served its purpose well for social distancing. The open-call exhibit saw works by up-andcomers like New Affiliates, Young Projects and Somewhere Studio hung next to designs by more established practices like RUR Architecture. Appointments were made for in-person visits for some, and the United States Postal Service did its part delivering the show to others. Now, records of all of those projects enter a83’s archive, headed by artist and architect Nichols, who has a personal connection to the project and gallery space. The origin of a83’s physical abode runs in Nichols’s family. From 1978 to 1992, it was home to his father’s print shop, John Nichols Printmakers and Publishers, where he amassed an archive of work by now well-known designers like Steven Holl, Frank Gehry, Michael Graves and Elizabeth Diller. “At first, the shop worked with prominent artists but quickly shifted over to the architecture world and began making fine art-quality print editions,” says the younger Nichols, explaining that the prints were used for both “paper projects and competition entries.” The a83 archive now encompasses these contents, and the trio plans to continue in the footsteps of the space’s earlier occupants—with a twenty-first-century twist. “We have a gallery that is mostly not selling work for commercial purposes, but instead creating experimental installations for architects and designers and serving as a printmaking workshop for people to produce editions,” he says. In its threepronged organization, a83 supports exhibition-making by selling editions of the archive material printed on the Riso. “But we’d also like to open up the printmaking workshop to people to use and have educational workshops, and to open the archive for researchers.” Team a83 is hoping that by providing the infrastructure to print high-quality editions of architectural designs, they can also catalyze a contemporary market for it. The next show, planned for spring 2021, is a survey of architectural printmaking since 1980 that will draw heavily from the former John Nichols Printmakers and Publishers archive material as well as newly sourced archival documents from star figures like Rem Koolhaas and Madelon Vriesendorp. Future shows may not rely so heavily on the beloved Risograph, however. As the team delves into their archive, they have found that a lot of the work is mixed-media or multidimensional, unable to be reproduced via printing. The mailed packets for “Working Remotely” was a solution “very specific to the kind of pandemic condition,” explains architect Syme, who takes the lead on translating designs to exhibitions. “It might not be something that we would do otherwise.” The goal, she maintains, is to show as much of this experimental work as possible, whatever the medium. As she sums it up: “We’re providing a platform for other voices within architecture.”
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VOICES
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VALUE At her new gallery, Destinee Ross-Sutton is promoting and empowering artists of the African diaspora. BY ENUMA OKORO PORTRAIT BY KHARI TURNER
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WHEN DESTINEE ROSS-SUTTON WAS six years old, her teacher placed large canvases against the brownstone walls at her Harlem school, and invited her and the other children to have a go at mimicking the work of artist Jackson Pollock. “That was the kind of education I had at the O’Gorman Garden,” she told me recently during a phone interview. “It was a Montessori program, and within my first days of school, I was immediately exposed to another way of seeing the world than what I was used to in my tightknit and sheltered Harlem community.” She remembers how excited she was, even at that age, about what she was learning. “We had rooms full of books with pages and pages of paintings, and people were suddenly asking me, ‘What do you think?’ That wasn’t something I got asked often as a six-year-old.” Now, at 25, she’s building a name for herself as an independent curator, art advocate and advisor to institutions and private clients. She focuses on contemporary art from artists of the African diaspora, and in the past year she’s curated two exhibitions, most notably a virtual exhibition last July, called “Say it Loud, (I’m Black and I’m Proud),” in partnership with Christie’s auction house. The show featured forty works by twenty-two international artists of African descent, with 100% of proceeds going directly to the artists. Ross-Sutton began her career volunteering at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art in Brooklyn during college. She started making curatorial suggestions for fundraising auctions and discovered that her voice mattered, was heard and proved necessary in curatorial spaces. It was a short leap from there to becoming an advocate for artists. “I want the artists I work with to know that their work has value and they are in more of a position of power than they realize.” She doesn’t want to see any more artists’ markets suddenly thrown into chaos because a buyer flipped their work for a huge profit: “Artists should be surrounded by people who genuinely care about building their career, rather than taking advantage of them.” Ross-Sutton firmly believes that a percentage of the profit from any work resold should go to the artist. To that end, she drafted an agreement for buyers that she says is essentially “a litmus test to see if people want this to be a point of sale for future profit or to have the work in their homes, and in their families, and to respect the artist and their career.” Now Ross-Sutton is taking her own next steps in her art career. On October 31 she will launch Ross-Sutton Gallery, joining the digital platform Vortic as the first Black-owned gallery in its extended reality space. Her inaugural exhibition is called “Black Voices: Friend of My Mind,” and will exist both online and at 155 Wooster Street, New York, the former SoHo space of renowned fellow female gallerist Paula Cooper. “It’s going to be a nomadic international gallery,” Ross-Sutton explains, and Friend of My Mind will be the first in a series of Black Voices exhibitions. She’s excited to continue to find ways to honor the talent of the artists she works with, while also making art more accessible to the mainstream: “I want young Black girls to see what I do, and not only imagine it for themselves, but even exceed me, if this is a career they would be interested in.”
Curator Destinee Ross-Sutton picking out works for an upcoming exhibition at painter Khari Turner’s studio.
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BY KAT HERRIMAN PHOTOGRAPHY BY ANTHONY BARBOZA
WE AND THEN THERE WAS
LVMH FAVORITE PETER DO HAS MADE HEADLINES FOR FLOUTING FASHION INDUSTRY TRADITIONS, BUT THE MOST RADICAL THING ABOUT THE EPONYMOUS UP-AND-COMING ATELIER IS NOT WHAT IT DOESN’T DO, BUT RATHER ITS FOCUS ON CULTIVATING INTERNAL BLISS. 88 culturedmag.com
From left to right: Front row: Bebe Bolortoli, So Hyun An, Peter Do (dog: Uni), Yiru Wang, Jessica Wu. Middle row: An Nguyen, Utkarsh Shukla, Lydia Sukato, Pablo Correa. Back row: Cooper Robar, Kellen Kauffman, Vincent Ho.
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2015 SAW THE DAWN OF A NEW fashion era, one in which humor reigned, no matter the cost. Appointed to positions of power almost in tandem, this movement’s two charters, Demna Gvasalia of Balenciaga (formerly Vetements) and Alessandro Michele of Gucci, rang in a time in which irony replaced earnestness. For Michele, it was through the stained-glass prism of nostalgia that he revived a cultural yen for antiquated signifiers of wealth, letting the estate sale walk the runway. He wanted us to clown the costume box, but not actually; he wanted us to buy it new again. Gvasalia produced a similar effect, but by recycling garments not of the upper class, but instead the lower middle. This might have made sense at Vetements, a small, independent concept brand, but took on a different tone at Balenciaga, as the luxury house became the context for his downmarket-turned-upscale gags. I would argue that these two forms of satire paved the way for the appointment of Virgil Abloh to Louis Vuitton and the Sterling Ruby x Raf Simons era of Calvin Klein. The more brash, ruthless and over the top, the better. Gvasalia and Michele inadverntendly launched a revelatory assault against the self-seriousness that had rolled like a fog over the industry in the rebuild of the economic crash. Now, five years later, the pendulum is beginning to swing again, riding the coattails of designers like Bottega Veneta’s Daniel Lee, whose garments are lauded for their wearability, fit and materials, rather than for interpolating the rhinestoned contours of the absurd. Peter Do, the founder of the eponymously named fashion collective, sits somewhere between these two extremes, picking up the problems left behind by both schools and proposing garments as a scientist might: by offering a fully formed thesis after exhausting every avenue of doubt. “I still don’t know what we mean when we say fashion with a capital F,” Do confesses by video call. “As a team, we are creating garments that solve the questions we see.” We see? I learn quickly that everything at Peter Do invokes the royal we, which at first terrifies me, and not only because I recently binged a podcast on WeWork founder Adam Neumann’s rise and fall. The mother in my head: “If something sounds too good to be true it is.” Yet, after our Zoom and coordinating the multi-person shoot to accompany this article, during a pandemic, with photographer Anthony Barboza, I am relieved to put aside some of my cynicism. It seems that, indeed, kindness is a founding design principle at the atelier
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that functions as far more than a marketing one-liner. This might be the New York–based studio’s most important contribution to the current landscape, especially in the ways that it manifests structurally. Do doesn’t stick to the traditional schedule nor its distribution methods, instead pursuing a made-to-order tailoring model where silhouettes and fabrics are recycled as a way to create continuity rather than short-lived seasonal surprises. “My experiences working at another, bigger house was that something was missing at the studio— there was a disconnect,” Do tells me. “When I started Peter Do with my closest friends, we had the goal of creating a space where we would be safe, creative and happy. The reason we are not eager to grow as some other brands is so that we can hang onto that energy as much as possible.” The paradox of resisting growth in the context of a capitalist marketplace does not scare Do, but rather empowers him to put the needs of the studio first. What does that look like? For now: an
Industry City studio with large windows along one wall and a big room studded with cutting tables, stacks of fabric bolts and racks of clothes. The scene has a familial feel and everyone tends to eat lunch together. Tasks and positions are fluid and there is no articulated hierarchy between coworkers. This formation enables the Do team to be nimble, a characteristic that came in handy when COVID-19 struck. “We decided to delay the collection by three to four months—we didn’t want to rush to finish something just to put it out there,” he tells me. “We want to be proud of everything we put out into the world. Patience is an essential ingredient to thoughtful design.” And then, he utters a phrase I’ve never heard emerge from the mouth of an LVMH-nominated up-and-comer: “I don’t mind waiting.” Letting things marinate is a go-to recipe for the Do team and one that has continued to pay off. Take, for example, their wildly successful shoe line. A two-year development period brought about an overnight must-have. “We were getting orders from all over the place from
both men and women, which is when we decided to offer the boots in a larger range of styles,” Do recounts. “We don’t blindly obey our clients’ every email, but we are always listening. To be honest, the popularity took us by surprise.” While customer feedback has informed evolutions at Do, each formal collection comes to fruition through a list of questions. In the past, these starting points have ranged from the sensible to the spiritual: How do I keep the rain at bay? What do I need to feel comfortable somewhere strange? What should I wear on the first day of work? Do’s fabric answers often split the baby. Functionality is the only other rubric. This has translated into a domination of wrinkle-free fabrics and 9-5 proof designs. Combing through three years of press clippings since their inception, I discover that Do’s garments —hand-crafted suits, jackets, turtlenecks, crisp shirts—have been described as “substantial,” “practical,”
“beautifully constructed,” “clever” and “sleek.” “I like to wear an outfit all day,” Do smiles. The pandemic shifted the head of their Spring Summer 2021 collection and turned towards an uncertain future. Not able to take their annual pilgrimages to galleries and museums or even discuss the matter in person, the Do team took on the paralyzingly large task of imagining what someone might want to be wearing six months from now. “For me, the Spring Summer collection has always been a moment to focus on daywear,” Do says. “The everyday has always been more exciting to me. With the pandemic, examining comfort became a big part of that conversation.” Vogue’s Nicole Phelps voiced her approval for the results in August, writing that Do’s M.O. was effective for “a world in flux,” and that “those T-shirt gowns are a seductive proposition.” I couldn’t agree more. The philosophy at Do is its most astonishing
offering and, in a way, the care put into the design process becomes a natural egress of that thought. While, on the outside, the garments bear the materiality and silhouettes of more conservative designers like Lee and his mentor, Phoebe Philo, the clothes in hand possess a joyful magnanimity that is subtle but unmistakable. It is a form of quiet resistance that I find refreshingly radical for an ambitious luxury brand. “I think because we design and fabricate most here at the studio, the clothes have a human touch,” Do says. “There is vulnerability in the things we pursue. We don’t use hitting numbers as milestones. We have different metrics for success. We want clothes that can be enjoyed over and over again.” This is the part where Do seems to rejoin Michele and Gvasalia. There is joy and laughter at Peter Do. It’s just not focused on the slapstick high of the punchline.
Here: Leslie Jean-Bart captures the Do team styling one of their own on a cutting table. Left: Anthony Barboza and Jean-Bart talk behind the scenes. Head to Culturemag.com/ peter-do for more images.
“THERE IS VULNERABILITY IN THE THINGS WE PURSUE. WE DON’T USE HITTING NUMBERS AS MILESTONES. WE HAVE DIFFERENT METRICS FOR SUCCESS. WE WANT CLOTHES THAT CAN BE ENJOYED OVER AND OVER AGAIN.” - PETER DO culturedmag.com 91
Introducing Points of View, a Cultured Magazine podcast. Points of View brings you intimate interviews with creative leaders reflecting on their personal journeys and their visions for the future. Join the conversation; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
VSF
CLARENCE HOLBROOK CARTER VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 812 N HIGHLAND AVE LOS ANGELES JANUARY 16 - FEBRUARY 20 INFO@VSF.LA WWW.VSF.LA
1 2 .02 .2020
30 Young Artists for a New Year This Element of Revolt Show Me the Signs For Houston By Houston Survival Strategies To Build With Respect Sensual Seduction 99 Problems and the Boyfriend Within is Not One Art Became My Life Northern Exposure Do Not Be Alarmed
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G N YOU S T S I ART FOR A N EWAR YE
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ON THE TAIL END OF ONE OF THE MOST TRYING YEARS IN RECENT MEMORY, WE ARE LEFT WITH MANY QUESTIONS: Questions about the rapid devolution of the past twelve months and questions about the future. Though these queries themselves are not firsts, they come in the wake of shifts none of us expected—some we feared, and others we had hoped for. Embarking on our fifth annual Young Artists List offered a critical and, at times, joyful moment of group reflection on both the historical moment and this project’s history. Like countless other endeavors during COVID, putting this list together without physical contact seemed a Herculean task, yet, because of this, it is all the more rewarding to share our portfolio with you. As always, the artists included are individuals we perceive to be at the forefront of a number of intersecting conversations that engage media, criticism, concept and representation. Speaking with them by phone and Zoom, we found ourselves becoming further tangled up in their narratives, obsessions, hopes and fears. They were not daunted by the complication of the moment; rather, they rose to meet it.
BY KIARA CRISTINA VENTURA, K AYLEE WARREN, K AT HERRIMAN, ISABEL FLOWER AND WALLACE LUDEL.
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Self-portrait, courtesy of artist
WIDLINE CADET @WIDLINE_
WIDLINE CADET’S PHOTOGRAPHS, many of which picture Black women, compose their own visual poetry. The secret language they speak whispers in the symbolic devices of iconography, repetition, pattern and palette. Some of Cadet’s subjects, often caught mid-gesture, are suspended in the uncanny apprehension of imminent action. In one photograph from her ongoing series, Seremoni Disparisyon (Ritual [Dis]Appearance), two women in matching red gingham dresses bend in unison before a waxed gingham tablecloth, hung as a backdrop against a bright green lawn. The opaque sky suggests that it is night, while a beaming frontal light source indicates the camera’s flash; the resulting scene, as is often true of Cadet’s photographs, is immediately perplexing, loaded with surreal allusion. For this body of work in particular, Cadet manipulates her images, using layers and mirroring to express literally the intersectionality and complexity of diasporic experience. Cadet was born in Haiti and, in 2002, immigrated to New York City, where she still lives. An early aspiration was to become an animator—she was intrigued by the otherworldly visuals of the mangas she was reading at the time—but her drawing practice eventually gave way to other forms of creative and personal exploration, most importantly photography. But Cadet’s work seems to dissect the photograph as a mode of recording space, time or personhood, welcoming instead a murkier set of truths in which photographic images are as compositional as a sketch or painting. This same set of possibilities, or confines, can be applied to the construction of identity, particularly to the spillage produced by colonialism, migration and the discrepancies between memory and history—all topics that weigh heavily on Cadet’s considerations of what it means to be Haitian in the United States. “My work is for me, first and foremost,” Cadet says. “But it’s also for others. I know I feel a lot of joy when I make something and others see themselves or their experiences reflected in it. I’m talking about other Black womxn in particular, Black immigrants from the Caribbean and beyond and Black people in general, who exist at the intersections of so many identities.”
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NAUDLINE PIERRE @CLUVIE
NAUDLINE PIERRE’S ETHEREAL paintings
Photo by Widline Cadet
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pull from both religious narratives and the artist’s personal history, creating a space that the gospel might refer to as in the world, but not of the world. “I grew up in a Christian Protestant religion that heavily emphasized prophecy and the end of the world. I absorbed lots of visuals of beasts and fire, but also many references to otherworldly beings and a future new world,” says Pierre. The artist worked with this lexicon of imagery—a stew of heavy beasts that mark the end times and divine figures that signal lightness—and brought it all down to an intimate, personal level that makes the sublime imagery feel at home among us. “All of this filters into creating an alter-ego who lives in an alternate universe filled with fantastical beings and quite a lot of fire.” Pierre’s paintings—which are primarily figurative and in a style all her own—less illustrate singular moments so much as they create sweepings atmospheres that feel both accessible and transcendent. Her compositions recall Renaissance tableaus in which figures from earthly realms comingled with the preternatural. The work also engages problems of authorship within art history, probing questions as to what it means to be a young Black woman painting into subjects long dominated by white European men. “Lately, my religious texts include anything by Toni Morrison and Octavia Butler,” she says. “At this moment, I find myself going back to Sula and Song of Solomon by Morrison, and Butler’s Parable series. Both of these authors’ works quench my soul in indescribable ways.” She’s currently wrapping up a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem and preparing for a three-person exhibition at MoMA PS1. “I’m interested in expanding the alternate realities I’ve created in my work,” she adds, “and I’m most excited about fantasy, escape and world-building.”
“I GO THROUGH PERIODS WHERE I make work in a specific way—these can last months, or even years,” Francesco Igory Deiana tells me over Zoom. “I’m known, for example, for my large-scale graphite drawings, which I’ve been doing for the last five years, but on my table right now are wood panels that I am working on with paint.” The Brooklyn-based artist’s multimedia practice involves such a wide range of materials and techniques that a trip to his studio might be “confusing,” he admits, laughing, as there’s so much to take in. “To me, being an artist means not having any boundaries or limitations within my creativity,” he explains with an enthusiasm that radiates through the screen. “It means having infinite sources of inspiration. It means being allowed to jump into the unknown.” Born in Milan, Deiana moved to the US in search of this very creative freedom, spending stints first in San Francisco and then Los Angeles before settling in New York. In SF, he worked at the studio of an established artist, traveling the world in accordance with their exhibition schedule and learning more about a life of artmaking than he ever could have in school. With that said, his astonishing technical versatility is mostly self-taught; transitions between different materials and compositional methods trace an organic trajectory of personal discovery in which each step is a consequence of whatever realization came before. A through line in his practice, however, is an attempt to use analog materials to visualize digital imagery, and many of his works—psychedelic in their expression of form and depth but most often rendered in grayscale—function like optical allusions in the ambiguity of their referents and media. Though he feels strongly that these compositions are best experienced in person, Deiana is grateful that, due to “80% of everything else” he was doing being cancelled or postponed in the wake of COVID, he now has “the possibility to focus completely on my work. It somehow made my purpose a little more pure.”
Photo by Alessandro Simonetti
FRANCESCO IGORY DEIANA @FRANCESCOIGORYDEIANA
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CHASE HALL @HALLCHASE
CHASE HALL’S PRACTICE IS situated in a long tradition of autodidacts. Hall, who didn’t attend college, taught himself to paint ten years ago by sneaking into the facilities at Parsons while his girlfriend was a student there. Even now, his pictures retain a feeling that they were reverse engineered, perhaps improvised, out of necessity and sheer will. Hall’s kinship with the group of artists often and inappropriately dubbed “outsiders”—among them William Hawkins, Bill Traylor, Thornton Dial and Purvis Young—goes beyond that they were all self-trained; Hall also engages deeply with their towering contributions to the history of figuration, situating their stylistic inventions as a jumping off point from which his own paintings explode into being. Unlike many figurative painters, Hall—perhaps because of his robust photography practice—is actually able to realize the task of portraiture, in that his pictures seem to communicate the emotional innards of the people they depict. In the past year of heartbreaking historical rupture, some of these pictures have proved unfortunately vatic; Black Birderers Association (2020) and Running From Yesterday’s Acquittal (2019) uncannily presage Central Park birder Christian Cooper’s racist encounter with Amy Cooper and the brutal lynching of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery while he was jogging on a public road in Glynn County, Georgia—a phenomenon whose supernatural bizarreness gestures at how deep and long these histories of violence run, and how the trauma they produce is passed between generations. In Hall’s flourishing visual world, images of fisherman, divers, horse jockeys and jazz men are structured against stretches of stark, raw cotton canvas, a strategy he uses to engage with the crop’s foundational role in the history of race. In his sculptures, cotton appears in other forms; in Fishing with Dad (2018), two cast cement figures, one smaller than the other, sit on a stack of blue police barricades, devotionally clutching dried sprigs of the plant, the white clots of fiber dangling like lures on outstretched fishing poles. When we speak, the artist, who otherwise lives in New York, has just begun a residency at Mass MoCA, where he plans to create work for his upcoming exhibition at CLEARING gallery in Brooklyn this spring.
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Photo by Emma Marie Jenkinson
Self-portrait, courtesy of artist
“THE TENOR OF OUR CURRENT time has become the perfect climate for being rebellious,” Danica Barboza tells me over email. The ungovernable energy has even led the artist to start a band, which she describes as “a mangled version of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.” Side projects aside, it’s been a busy year; in January, the artist took over Berlin’s Schinkel Pavillon with her solo exhibition, “Advanced Pair Bonding,” an absolutely riotous installation (which Rindon Johnson recounted for our spring issue) and before that she was one of four artists featured in the inaugural exhibition at Artists Space’s new location. The focal point of the Berlin show was a pool of jet-black water from which the rest of the exhibition stemmed, comprising a kaleidoscopic range of materials such as a massive, sunken digital clock, a lifesized nude figure and other scattershot forms that toed the line of sculpture and detritus. “It was quite an exhilarating stretch to be on three different time zones at once, preparing for both exhibitions, and overseeing technical fabrication and construction abroad,” says Barboza. The installation also served as an ode to David Bowie, who the artist has referred to as her “muse” and whose fluidity in all things— gender, genre, identity—has inspired her own quest for, as she puts it, an “artisticallyactualized personal mythology.” Like Bowie, who
DANICA BARBOZA @DANICABARBOZA
birthed Ziggy Stardust, Barboza has also sought an alter ego: her doppelganger is Amalphia, “an over-the-top sexualized exhibitionist” who the artist first began performing as during her time at Cooper Union and has recently begun channeling once again. “Returning to Amalphia as a persona seems to be a perfect match for me,” she shares, recounting how this resurgent persona itself is indicative of her larger body of
work. “One of the things I find myself grateful for in discussing my artwork is the fact that all of my projects are interconnected—everything exists like the hub of a wheel, its center and its spokes radiating outwards,” she says, noting, “I’m looking forward to doing more with Amalphia as a character persona—it feels a lot like privately conferring with a close friend to take over the world.”
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FIELDS HARRINGTON @INTERNAL_FIELD
THE INTERSECTION OF POETRY and science is at the heart of artist fields harrington’s work, a practice that began to fortify after he began levitating. His hair, that is. The interdisciplinary artist was receiving his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania when he became fascinated by acoustic levitation, a science in which sound is used to levitate objects and liquids. In a graduate performance, harrington read from conceptual writers Fred Moten and Hito Steyerl, as well as inventor Dr. Asier Marzo, as he applied an S-Curl relaxer to a strand of his hair. “I used to use S-Curl a lot in high school, until I saw myself with really long, straight hair and said, ‘Why is my hair straight?’ I was thinking about this moment of realization—that I was doing something to my body that looked very different from what I felt my body should look like.” This performance demonstrates harrington’s arrival at poetic forms through sciences such as physics. “Experimentation has happened on the Back body for a very long time, the bodies of Black women more specifically,” says harrington. “I’m thinking through
levitation and sound as a way of providing some relief through that.” The Brooklyn-based artist furthered this exploration as a 2019–20 participant in the Whitney’s Independent Study Program, where he collaborated on Conjuncture, a book for which he penned an essay that questions John Hutchinson’s 1840 invention of the spirometer, a medical device with the function to measure lung capacity that was historically racialized and weaponized to injure life insurance qualification for Black individuals. The work signals that by melding appropriated literature, Western science and racist ideologies with artistic performance, harrington is engaging with the old league of experimenters, inventing a new artistic mode of inquiry for what it means to be human. Before he started levitating, harrington spent most of his formative years in Texas, where a black and white photography class at community college set him down the path to art. “I started off making images and then slowly tried to work with sculptural elements and videos from found footage,” he explains.
Photo by Sasha Cwalino
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DOREEN CHAN
@DOREEN_CHANWINGYAN
DOREEN CHAN SUFFERED FROM
Self-portrait, courtesy of artist
imposter syndrome for longer than you might expect, given her rocket-fueled trajectory in the Hong Kong art scene. Since her prominent solo exhibition at Lianzhou Foto Festival in 2013, Chan’s career has continued to snowball past her wildest expectations, she tells me over FaceTime. “I never thought I was an artist. I just thought I was a girl who liked to take pictures and keep memories and notes,” Chan says. “When I got started, I couldn’t see what I was doing, I was too close—I didn’t know so much of artmaking was just daily life.” Having finally come to terms with her success, including several well-reviewed institutional solo shows, Chan believes it is her responsibility to use her cultural and ecological footprint as an installation artist to help as many people as possible. This meant moving to Chicago to seek a master’s degree in education. “As an artist, I have to ask myself what value I am bringing,” Chan says. “Art has always been an avenue for expression, but also a method to heal myself and refresh the way I look at the intimate relationships in my life. I want my work to do that for others as well.” A romantic in the vein of Bunny Rogers and Nan Goldin, Chan often cuts open her private life to make room for others to discuss the things that are taboo. For example, “Hard Cream,” her show with Para Site curator Qu Chang at HB Station in Guangzhou, retraced the wounds of a past relationship, while “How to Close a Window” at Charbon Art Space delved into her father’s sudden passing. For the foreseeable future, Chan will be at work on a five-year project that came to her in December of 2019, during the first Hong Kong uprising. The premise is a social network through which people from all over can find other individuals experiencing the same dreams at night. “I’m not a data scientist, but I love the idea of helping people find their dream soulmates,” Chan says. “There is so much in the world showing us we are alone. I want to create an alternative image.”
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RAVI JACKSON @RSJLOL
“TO CALL YOURSELF AN ARTIST IS loaded,” Ravi Jackson tells me, thinking out loud over the phone from Los Angeles. “For a lot of people, it’s about romance.” For Jackson, however, his practice is perhaps a more private, intellectual pursuit. “I’m able to talk about the things I’m interested in with people who are also interested in the same things, or who see things the same way. That’s fulfilling. The day-to-day is what it really means.” Jackson’s days involve hours in the studio, where he spends most of his time looking, particularly at the images he collects as a way to parse through the ever-shifting constellation of things on his mind. As for most artists, the majority of what he makes will only be experienced by his immediate social circle; the most rewarding part of making paintings and sculptures, however, is not necessarily the result, but rather the experience of processing a difficult idea, “of putting the thread together.” Jackon’s elegant, quietly provocative canvases merge quaint, even decorative palettes with phallic symbols and protrusions, found imagery, text and ephemera; one grouping of works sampled early Black Panther Party leader Eldridge Cleaver’s seminal 1968 memoir-cum-essay-collection Soul on Ice, while another collaged photographs of country music icon Toby Keith. Both figures serve as avatars for interrogating various manifestations of hypermasculinity, as well as the messy encounters of gender, race and class within pop culture—a set of considerations Jackson’s work has always responded to. Though he received his MFA from UCLA, Jackson didn’t study art as an undergrad and tells me that his relationship to creative practice—as well as his appreciation of the fundamental connectedness between the different iterations and profound multiplicity of cultural expression on the margins—came instead through music. “As an artist, you hope your work gets across to people. That it’s complicated. That it provokes,” he explains. “But I don’t like it when people can summarize work as being about one thing in particular.” In an age when truncated attention spans beget dangerous oversimplification, Jackson’s work makes a case for an art that need not be easy to explain.
“As an artist, you hope your work gets across to people. That it’s complicated. That it provokes.”
Photo by Marten Elder
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Self-portrait, courtesy of artist
“I DON’T LIKE STATISTICS,” 25-year-old artist Gisela McDaniel offers from her Detroit studio. McDaniel makes opulent oil paintings rendered in thick color that already glow like gems before she ornaments them with women’s jewelry that she collects in thrift stores and recycling centers. Contemplating the fruits from her hauls, she continues, grimly, “but when I think about statistics, and I look at the jewelry that’s sitting in my studio—and I have tables of it—I think a lot of the jewelry was probably worn by survivors of sexual violence.” Based in her own experience of healing from sexual trauma, McDaniel’s work is motivated by a deep drive to honor and witness the stories of other survivors, and in doing so to facilitate their healing too. McDaniel’s paintings have always been made in close contact with her subjects, who she calls her collaborators. The women, who are often indigenous or of color, work with McDaniel to determine how they will be represented. McDaniel also conducts interviews with each woman, the audio recordings of which are put onto USB drives that travel with the paintings wherever they go so that the image is never severed from the story it came out of, and the people in them are never just seen, but always heard, too. Sometimes, the jewelry in the paintings belongs to the women themselves and, recently, past subjects have started coming back to give McDaniel material to incorporate into another person’s painting, a gesture she
GISELA McDANIEL @GISELAMCDANIEL
sees as “an act of solidarity.” Often, these women, who McDaniel has met independently of each other, get to encounter one another in the space of her practice. McDaniel is no stranger to the power of community in the face of a world hostile to one’s own existence. She cites her experience growing up as an indigenous person in the
primarily white college town of Oberlin, Ohio, where her mother was a professor of race and ethnicity, as formative in that regard. With a solo exhibition at Pilar Corrias just behind her—the artist’s first with the London gallery— McDaniel is focusing back on her network and plans to host her next show in the intimate space of her studio.
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BENJAMIN ASAM KELLOGG
@BENJAMIN_KELLOGG
THERE WAS A TIME WHEN Benjamin
Photo by Elise Raven
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Asam Kellogg considered penning a codex that would map out all the meanings and references embedded in his symbol-laden installations and sculptures, but the New York-based artist soon nixed the idea, deciding instead that those narratives should only be available to those curious enough to seek them. “If you paid attention, you would know my recipe,” he reassures me. In the crystal ball of Kellogg’s work, I do see recurring stories appear, but I also have the sensation of getting lost in his chemtrails, which tangle back in on themselves like infinity signs. Maybe that’s what I like about them. Kellogg seems to take special pleasure in this kind of mental circumambulation, which seeks to complicate the relationship between the built world we occupy and the beliefs upon which it is animated. His most recent solo show, “House of Hours” at Murmurs in Los Angeles this past February, took on a maze-like quality that reminded me of fantastical video games with their pixelated towers and keys. Composed of a set of follies and wall-bound tapestries connected by Alice in Wonderland-worthy checkered pathways, the exhibition bore down on the exponential meanings that pour out from the elemental tautology of night and day, and how those symbols are then instrumentalized by power. The paradoxical but fundamental pillars of Kellogg’s lexicon are architecture and the occult, which he quickly proves are more interrelated than they may seem. “What I like about buildings is that they automatically take on human sensation, even without any anthropomorphic qualities,” Kellogg says. “Buildings are symbols as a whole. They are able to both encapsulate and represent many beliefs at once.” Like mystical dogmas, the artist envisions our man-made landscape as a dimension riddled with clues about our lives and the forces that govern us. Kellogg often goes searching for new narratives by archi-trespassing all over the cities he visits; he likes ruins, follies and burnt out churches, and not yet finished skyscraper roofs—all places to discover beastly paw prints to track into the mist.
Self-portrait, courtesy of artist
JONATHAN LYNDON CHASE’S paintings are propelled by the same extraordinary force that stirs typhoons out of still air. In the 31-year-old’s ecstatic compositions, bodies dissolve into desire; they bruise and bloom, don cowboy hats, Nikes and sometimes gold chains. It’s difficult to say anything definitive about the scenes Chase chooses to depict because the artist’s appetite for our world is so unlimited; but regardless of what corner of life they turn their brush on—be it a bathtub, a football game, maybe a motorcycle— the content immediately takes on biblical proportion. Besides that, everything seems to be fair game, though one generalization does emerge, however hazily: in the pictures that comprise the artist’s prolific output, there is not a single moment of hate. Chase was born and raised in Philadelphia, where they completed both their undergrad and master’s degrees and still live today. They tell me their work is ardently in and about Philadelphia and the people who populate it, but affectionately refer to New York as their “second home.” When we speak, Chase has just returned from that second home after installing a new exhibition of paintings, sculpture and a sound installation at Company Gallery. The exhibition, “Wind Rider,” picks up the meteorological motif Chase first explored in “Quiet Storm,” their first exhibition with the gallery in 2018; simultaneously more ambitious and restrained, “Wind Rider” shows Chase at their most mature and masterful to date. Chase’s paintings mostly depict the male body, but in the artist’s life “the ladies take centerfold.” Raised primarily by women, Chase says they get their “creativeness from mom,”
JONATHAN LYNDON CHASE @JONATHANLYNDONCHASE
who, in teaching a young Chase about the meditative capacity of cleaning, inspired their first institutional solo show, “Big Wash,” which opened at Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop Museum at the end of November. The exhibition is a paean to the laundromat, where the quiet intimacy of domestic life and the rich intensity
of the urban landscape converge to magical effect. For the show, Chase has collaborated with the institution’s screen-printing workshop to enable their already boundless paintings to spill out onto clothes and soft sculptures. As restless as it is confident, Chase’s practice promises greatness.
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KELSEY LU @IAMKELSEYLU
“DID Y’ALL SEE THAT?” Kelsey Lu, the 29-year-old singer-songwriter and cellist, was in a “dark windowless box,” or, more technically, their first practice studio in Bushwick, NY, when, wide-eyed, they asked the others in the room if they had just seen that. And by “that” they meant a kindling moment in their musical journey that involved GarageBand and a loop pedal. “I started layering the cello over itself and creating harmonies and polyphonic melodies while singing over them. I was looking up and around, smiling, feeling like I just discovered a new planet, when really I was just discovering myself. There ain’t nothin like that feeling.” This feeling Lu describes is akin to what one can experience listening to their music: empyrean vocals echoing through electro-classical compositions and soulful rhythms, interlacing together to produce that goosebumps-sensation brought on by something sacred. In 2016, Lu released their debut EP, Church, leading to collaborations with artists such as Dev Hynes, Lady Gaga, Solange and, most recently, fashion designer Jil Sander. In 2019, Lu released their equally gentle and entrancing debut album, Blood. “Music can time travel, it can possess your soul, it causes riots, it fuels revolutions,” says Lu. “[Music] transcends memory diseases, if even for a fleeting moment; it crosses language barriers. It can be heard without being seen, it can be felt without being heard.” It is clear from their phosphorescent yet earthy presence that Lu wears the colors of the cosmos, a rippling motif throughout their work. Earlier this year, the North Carolina-born singer completed an artist residency in the Cayman Islands, where they created HYDROHARMONIA—a three-part sound bath series scored to the rise and fall of the sun. “Nature holds universes of music and mysticism within itself,” says Lu. “And my connection to that is something I hold sacred.” Photo by Ib Kamara 216 culturedmag.com 110
“For me, constructing a transitional situation is about synergetic relationships between human and non-human agents. I look at how meaning is constructed and circulated through materials and images, often moving fluidly between fiction and reality.”
WORKING THROUGH SCULPTURE and installation, Dora Budor is often in dialogue with the architectural spaces and contexts in which her work is exhibited, weaving spliced and reworked narratives that tend to evoke a disjointed, almost sci-fi cinematic experience. “I am more susceptible to relationships created than to the objects themselves, which means engaging given contexts, structures and conditions,” Budor writes. “I don’t per se believe in a static envelope of art but perceive it as something homeorhetic that exists in constant flux and needs to be negotiated. Therefore, the way I make exhibitions is through systems, which become affected by temporal and experiential conditions.” Her immersive projects excavate history and infrastructure while incorporating surrounding variables such as sound pollution, meteorological changes, visitors’ movements or urban development. “For me, constructing a transitional situation is about synergetic relationships between human and non-human agents. I look at how meaning is constructed and circulated through materials and images, often moving fluidly between fiction and reality,” she says. “Different ideas of ecosystems are brought together: both biological and image worlds, environmental concerns and intraactions between micro and macro scales.” The result is a complex body of artistic actions that redefine the spatial characteristics of the exhibition site and its surroundings, highlighting layers and forces that are otherwise not clearly visible. For her 2019 series Origin, exhibited at the Istanbul Biennial that year, Budor created kinetic environmental chambers—sealed vitrines in which dusts and pigments were animated by air gusts activated by noises from
Self-portrait, courtesy of artist
DORA BUDOR @DORABUDOR
the nearby construction of a parking complex. This symbiotic dynamism is indicative of Budor’s practice; her 2019 solo exhibition “I am Gong” at Kunsthalle Basel included a 14-channel soundscape hidden behind the walls, ceilings and floors of the museum, which was modulated constantly according to the noises from the
renovation of the adjacent concert hall, turning the whole building into an instrument. The New York–based artist is currently preparing for two solo exhibitions: her largest to date at Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria in 2022 (preceded by a six-month residency at Callie’s in Berlin) and another at Progetto in Puglia, Italy.
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IF YOU HAVE PICKED UP A MAGAZINE
Self Portrait, courtesy of artist
TYLER MITCHELL @TYLERSPHOTOS
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in the past five years, you have likely seen one of Tyler Mitchell’s images. The artist, who also makes films, has steadily risen as a photographer of a generation, with work that confronts a visual canon of Black people depicted in despair and anguish, challenging it with images wherein Black people are buoyant, suspended in unblushing bliss. His photographs have been commissioned by fashion houses, discussed in lectures at prestigious institutions such as Harvard University and accompany his title as the first Black photographer to shoot a cover of American Vogue. Tyler Mitchell is also twenty-five years old. Naturally, we spoke about jumbo slides and trampolines in the middle of lakes, idyllic snapshots of leisure from Mitchell’s summers growing up in Atlanta. “I grew up near a lake,” he explains. “It wasn’t fancy, more like a pond, but I remember fishing with my dad.” Mitchell was in the middle of recalling this nostalgic portrait when a knock on the door interrupted—a delivery person dropping off a vase of flowers sent to his Brooklyn apartment. This serendipity of tangible romance is befitting of the prolific photographer, whose work serves as “an invite into visualizing Black folks at play, enjoying romantic scenes, whether that’s at a picnic or hula hooping.” It’s utopic visions like these that shaped his celebrated 2019 exhibition-turn-monograph I Can Make You Feel Good. Mitchell’s practice uses the image as a vehicle to explore possibility, a curiosity he will be exercising further as a recent signee with Jack Shainman Gallery in New York. “With Jack, it’s such a genuine relationship,” says Mitchell. “For twenty plus years, [Jack] has been exhibiting rigorous [work by] Black artists who are exploring all kinds of concepts related to our identities.” Joining an esteemed roster of gallery-mates such as Hank Willis Thomas and Carrie Mae Weems, among many others, Mitchell is in good company as he anticipates his first solo exhibition with the gallery in Fall 2021.
SONYA SOMBREUIL @COMETEES
“So many brands in this epoch have to rely on partnerships with fake, corporate brands. I have a vision of being autonomous. I want to be able to totally control my message and link it to an activist project.” “I DON’T WANT MY PLANET TO GET
Self-portrait, courtesy of artist
abducted from another galaxy.” Painter and clothing designer Sonya Sombreuil understands the importance of “staying in your own orbit,” which is apparent in COME TEES, her streetwear line that blends painterly sensibilities and punk aesthetics with the earthy, country vibes retained from her childhood growing up in Santa Cruz, California. “So many brands in this epoch have to rely on partnerships with fake, corporate brands,” says Sombreuil. “I have a vision of being autonomous. I want to be able to totally control my message and link it to an activist project.” Preserving an authentic voice is at the core of a line that originated as a “pet project” but catapulted into a successful business, bolstered by the clout garnered from Rage Against The Machine T-shirts designed for Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign and through streetwear royals such as Kanye West and Rihanna sporting pieces from the brand. Before this rise in notoriety, however, Sombreuil was once four years old, painting at an all-ages after-school art class. Being from a small town of “mostly hippies and bigot-surfer parents,” the artist describes the class as a subculture of its own. At age 18, Sombreuil moved to western Massachusetts, where she started designing merch for local punk bands and, later, for herself and friends. “I wanted it to be a little bit sexually suggestive, a little bit sweet, a little bit stupid,” says Sombreuil on the name COME TEES. “I’ve always really loved the word ‘come.’ It’s an invitation and a command. It’s a little opening, which is a visual motif of mine.” Language and chance encounters serve as primary sites of discovery for the artist. “Streetwear, especially with the way it works with language, can be genius and utterly ignorant.” Sombreuil pauses to describe a time she stumbled across an old poetry book in a charity shop titled Cookie Aura that inspired a T-shirt of the same name. “COME TEES is my version of that. It’s stupid and mystical.”
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Self-portrait, courtesy of artist
SIMPHIWE NDZUBE @SIMPHIWE_NDZUBE
IN 2015, SIMPHIWE NDZUBE graduated from Michaelis School of Fine Art in South Africa into an art world that he understood to be newly consumed by a long-overdue discussion about race and representation. “As important as that conversation” was, he says he “personally felt very constricted” by the sudden expectation that artists of color “say something about Blackness
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and subjugation.” Ndzube, who is as tenacious as he is independent, puts it simply: “I always prefer to have a conversation of my own.” Ndzube’s work is like a kaleidoscope in which harsh reality enmeshes with hallucination and worlds weave in and out of each other, fantastic color exploding at their intersections. At once flamboyant and mystical, his practice
is populated by evanescent figures that sprawl out in his paintings and strut through his exhibitions as sculptures. Sometimes these buoyant bodies are caught diving between the two realms—an appendage sprouts beyond the picture plane and into a pant leg, or maybe a wig replaces a face. Using primarily secondhand clothes and found objects, Ndzube’s chimeric assemblages have a material humility that underscores the magic they emanate. These objects also play key roles in grand narratives that the artist constructs. Inspired by mythology, Ndzube metabolizes experiences of migration, exploitation and precarity through fictive worlds like that of the “mine moon,” a far off celestial body plagued by colonizers, the invented history of which structured his most recent show with Nicodim Gallery in Los Angeles, “In the Order of Elephants After the Rain.” Like that of a psychedelic Hieronymus Bosch, his work is inlaid with visual symbols that repeat across exhibitions and often appear as both objects and images. Perhaps the most striking of these is the umbrella, but there are also birds, traffic cones, sand, rafts and dinghies. When I sheepishly admit to Ndzube that, even after much deliberation, the iconographic order in his work remains impenetrable to me, he replies excitedly and with a laugh, “it’s impenetrable to me too!” It’s rare to find an artist so driven by the ongoing mystery of the things they make and this energy is what makes his work so immediately pleasurable. With a number of international solo exhibitions on the horizon, Ndzube will no doubt be creating for years to come.
TEXAS ISAIAH “When I dove a little bit deeper into historical archives of photographs, I saw there were a lot of people missing from these narratives. Especially Black and brown people and trans and gender-expansive people. I wanted not only to challenge myself but to expand my perspective on who is being photographed and who is not.”
Self-portrait, courtesy of artist
@KINGTEXAS
“IT’S IMPORTANT TO NOTE HOW much we prevailed within this capitalist system. How much we prevailed within colonialism, anti-Blackness, homophobia, transphobia, all of it… I wish we didn’t have to but here we are. This year has served so many lessons,” Texas Isaiah reflects. “Personally, I have been inspired to trust myself more as a human being and as an artist.” Texas Isaiah approaches the canon of photography, which often misrepresents and erases, with so much power, tenderness and care. Hands in the air, feeling wind between fingertips. Figures are held by grass, trees and large green leaves. Eyes closed and palms sitting comfortably on the body. Eyes filled with pride, making direct contact with the camera lens. In his portraits, we see Black and brown people, and trans and gender-expansive individuals, experiencing a spectrum of emotions and environments. Whether he is photographing celebrities, activists or loved ones, Texas Isaiah allows sitters to meditate on the moment, as they are being photographed. There’s a sense of serene silence in his images, coupled with moments of exploration and affirmation. As a visual storyteller, Texas Isaiah investigates the relationship between people and physical spaces. “This interest emerged between 2012 and 2013, when a significant number of people I knew passed away,” he says. “When I dove a little bit deeper into historical archives of photographs, I saw there were a lot of people missing from these narratives. Especially Black and brown people and trans and gender-expansive people. I wanted not only to challenge myself but to expand my perspective on who is being photographed and who is not.” Texas Isaiah responds to history by centering narratives that come from the margins. When asked why he makes images, he replies, “it’s an ancestral calling.”
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Self-portrait, courtesy of artist
MANDY HARRIS WILLIAMS @IDEALBLACKFEMALE
BACK IN MIDDLE SCHOOL, MANDY Harris Williams’s AIM screen name was “thegreatamanda.” At as young as 12 years old, she was asking questions like, “What does my body have to do with the things that I’m saying and feeling?” and “How are people hearing and seeing me, or taking me as lovable or not?” Highlighting how she navigated being perceived online, she notes, “The internet played a role in how I understood love or my deservingness of love as connected to or disconnected from the apparition of my body.” Now known under the social media handle @idealblackfemale, Williams is leading a movement and hashtag, #BrownUpYourFeed, which pushes images
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of brown and especially dark-skinned, kinkyhaired people like her to the forefront. Yet her online presence is more than just a profile: “My Instagram is a performance of a theme. For me, it’s a political-performative gesture space.” As a performer, critic and conceptual artist, Williams’s ultimate medium is her voice, which can be seen and heard in her essays, textbased work, video art and music. She began her career as a classroom teacher, which provided a sense of urgency around education. Her work goes deep and makes us question at what capacity the images we see are serving Black and brown communities. “We are in a moment of packaged image liberation. There are so
many images right now meant to sell liberation and sexiness, or the mystic of liberation. But do they? What I focus on is the power of beholding and making images. That’s where we find the locus of control,” she describes. Truth-telling can be a difficult job. With regard to the upcoming year, Williams informs me that “I’m at capacity with telling the truth.” But we can still expect exciting new ways to connect with her work. “I’m preparing for a large solo show in 2022. I’m creating music and writing a musical that communicates difficult truths set to sensual groves. And I’m looking forward to writing, finishing and selling my book for #BrownUpYourFeed.”
JUAN ANTONIO OLIVARES
@ANGST143
Photo by William Jess Laird
MULTIDISCIPLINARY
ARTIST
Juan Antonio Olivares creates work that doesn’t simply ask to be viewed, but also draws viewers in closer to experience a reflection of themselves. Pulling from a wide range of mediums, from video and sound sculpture to performance and drawing, Olivares’s practice seeks to remind us how, as individuals, we are much more connected to one another than we are separated. Olivares aims to begin every work from a place of vulnerability. “So much of our lives are willingly put on display at this point,” says the New York-based artist. “That can mean a turn inwards.” This inward turn is demonstrated in Moléculas, his 2017 3-D animated film, exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2018, wherein a broken teddy bear narrates the story of the artist’s move to New York and a painful family loss. Olivares sensitively marries the autobiographical with the fictional, extending this fusion to the surreal in his 2019 exhibition “Naufragios,” which contained a 24-piece sound installation composed of seashells emitting overlapping audio of sounds such as Stephen Hawking speaking on the potential of extraterrestrial life and the mesmerizing croons of Nina Simone. Accompanying the installation is a collection of hyper-realistic graphite drawings of sperm and egg cells, reminiscent of textbook scientific illustrations. “I have been drawing from Scanning Electron Microscopic images because these are the most accurate depictions of objects invisible to the naked eye,” says Olivares. “These scans visualize things that are somewhat commonplace in completely unfamiliar detail.” This paradox of the seemingly strange producing a sense of familiarity is encompassed in Olivares’s precise yet visionary practice. Currently, Olivares is in the process of making two new animations while anticipating two upcoming solo shows, at Galerie Maria Bernheim in Zurich and ChertLüdde in Berlin, both planned for 2021.
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MARIO AYALA @LOSTBROS
“Back when my family and I lived in LA, my dad would come home late from work with these pen drawings on the back of his delivery receipts, or on loose sketch-pad paper. He’d give them to me once he walked through the door. I think it was the first time I can remember realizing what a drawing was.”
MARIO AYALA USES AIRBRUSH to execute his surrealistic paintings in a mode that invokes the culture of the artist’s native Los Angeles, exploding the iconography and stylistic tendencies outwards into a world uniquely his own. The airbrush signifies something “between being seductive and utilitarian,” the artist explains, noting that it reminds him of the cars and swap meets that occupy his memories of when he was much younger. His choices of imagery feel both randomized and highly curated, as figures and forms meld into one another amid narrative strategies that offer dexterity and humor, but never lack for sincerity. “I think humor has always been an effective way of communicating and that has always interested me,” he says. His lexicon points to a fluency between worlds, as references to Southern Californian Chicano culture—aesthetic elements that recall lowriders, handmade grieving items and storefront signage, for example—seamlessly blend into and butt up against pop culture iconography, creating a fruitful space of tension.
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Self-portrait, courtesy of artist
“It’s important for me to have access points in the work to allow a range of people to feel engaged. I’m interested in creating a dialogue and sometimes using familiar imagery can allow that to happen.” Growing up, Ayala’s first encounters with art came from his father. “Back when my family and I lived in LA, my dad would come home late from work with these pen drawings on the back of his delivery receipts, or on loose sketch-pad paper,” says the artist. “He’d give them to me once he
walked through the door. I think it was the first time I can remember realizing what a drawing was.” This notion that image-making could encapsulate anything, that it is an opportunity not relegated to anyone and an outlet to let the whole world in, proved a catalyst for the supremely complex canvases Ayala makes today. In the near future, Ayala’s work will be featured in the Hammer Museum’s “Made in LA” biennial, a two-person exhibition at Ever Gold Projects and a group show with Jeffrey Deitch slated to open in February.
KATIE STOUT @UMMMSMILE
KATIE STOUT’S SCULPTURE and
Photo by Balarama Heller
design objects are ebulliently their own. The domestic is subverted into the celebratory—ceramic lamps are comprised of women standing atop one another, shelflike objects have fantastical, biomorphic qualities and all of it is at once utilitarian and decidedly, joyously decorative. Think Les Lalanne meets Niki de Saint Phalle meets Antoni Gaudí. “The categories of art and design have come to have little meaning to me,” the artist says. “It’s like, if you say a word over and over, you can’t even tell how it differs from any other arbitrary sound.” No material is off limits for Stout, and her exhibition at Nina Johnson this year, titled “Sour Tasting Liquid,” saw mosaic, porcelain, clay and wicker come together in a singular body of work. “I’m materially agnostic,” she says. “Generally, it starts with drawings. If it’s ceramic, I usually start without a drawing but sometimes I’ll do vague sketches just as a visual anchor, so I don’t veer totally off track. But veering off track is important; my solution has been to work on multiple projects at once—I’ll usually have a commission going alongside a piece I just want to do and flop back and forth adding coils to each.” With a rocky year almost behind us, there’s much left to be excited about in the New York–based artist’s immediate future. “I’m working on a show for R & Company and Venus Over Manhattan. I’m also very much looking forward to a show I’m curating for the Shaker Museum,” she says, adding, “and a big kiln—I’m very excited about that. The idea of investing in my studio has been terrifying. With so much that is wretched in the world, I have to make way more of an effort to act in optimism these days. But making stuff makes me feel good. I hope it makes others feel the same way.”
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SHARIF FARRAG @SHARIF5
IT CAME AS NO SURPRISE TO find out that Sharif Farrag’s favorite pieces of media growing up were Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, Rugrats, Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland and Beetlejuice. We see vases covered in mouths with elongated teeth, suns with whimsical smiles and sunken
eyes and figures sitting on a vessel’s rim as spiky worms swarm around them. Farrag’s sculptures make our childhood nightmare of household objects growing legs and eyes and walking the hallways in the middle of the night come alive. But the artist is not only thinking of play; he is
also considering the art historical significance of the vessel across the globe. “I realized, whether in my heritage—being Egyptian and Syrian—or everyone’s heritage, there is always something in vessel form. I take on the vessel as a way to express myself and also not be within the context of Western painting. I’m working with color and form. I still like to think I’m making paintings on vessels,” he explains. Filled with dynamic movement and vivid color, his whimsical sculptures disrupt how we think of traditional household objects. As pots, cups and other functional vessels have traditionally been used for rituals across cultures and throughout history, it’s also logical that Farrag engages with his sense of spirituality when in the studio. “Making work is spiritual for me, especially since I work with natural materials. It’s all minerals and heat,” he reflects. “Something that always got me excited about clay was this idea and story in the Quran that people were made of clay and the devil was made of fire, that there was a weird separation between them and that the devil had jealousy towards humans. This medium I’m working with is how they mix. It’s the fire. It’s the battle.” Farrag proves that sculpture can offer more than objects made for viewing in an art world context; a sculpture can also be an object made for function and storytelling that takes our imaginations outside of our realities.
“I realized, whether in my heritage—being Egyptian and Syrian—or everyone’s heritage, there is always something in vessel form. I take on the vessel as a way to express myself and also not be within the context of Western painting.”
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GROWING UP IN MIAMI, FRANK Traynor felt different. “The
Photo by Auggie Traynor (age 8)
FRANK TRAYNOR @FRANKTRAYNOR
other kids didn’t want to do the goofy things I did,” he remembers. When I met Traynor in 2015, the artist wasn’t only getting kids to clown around, but adults, too, like me. Yes, I crawled on hands and knees into the sweat lodge he built in New York’s Signal Gallery and tripped out to a mud bath he christened in the Rockaways. Always interactive and collaborative to the point of authorial collapse, I came to understand his artworks as actions, and perhaps the next node on a chain that could include Rirkrit Tiravanija’s untitled (free) (1992/1995/2007/2011-); Carol Goodden, Tina Girouard and Gordon Matta-Clark’s FOOD (1971-74) and Simone Leigh’s Free People’s Medical Clinic (2014). This was around the time that Traynor began No School, an artwork that, over the past few years, took on institutional proportions at an existing nonprofit space called 2727 California Street in Berkeley. “I was supposed to be the first artist in residence,” he tells me, but after months of friendly extensions, Traynor transitioned into being an employee and running his afterschool concept as a primary part of their program. The premise was simple: working together, artists and students would dig into creative processes and concepts, reviving them from the inside out. Terrazzo served as the first subject, with Fictus Interfaith helping the class pave a new entryway. “If you are able to change part of a building or a space, then the distinction between art and your life disappears,” Traynor says. While not integral to the premise of No School, Traynor’s favorite projects are always architectural in nature. He likes helping students turn a door into a giant wood print block and weld new gates for the building inspired by the innards of flowers. “My dream is to have a building that is altered slowly, piece by piece,” he shares. “People want to feel connected to the communal spaces they occupy.” As architecture tries to rebrand itself after starchitecture’s failure and museums rethink reactionary acquisitions, perhaps Traynor’s vision for hands-on education in which the teacher is also the student isn’t a bad place to start. “Maybe that’s why it’s an artwork,” he says, “because I’m always learning.”
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EDDIE RODOLFO APARICIO @EDDIERODOLFOAPARICIO
EDDIE
RODOLFO
APARICIO’S
work points to the profound oneness of all things, and the deep loss that reverberates when such fundamental truths are disregarded. In a recent series, the artist paints trees in the outer neighborhoods of his native Los Angeles with layers of rubber until the material is thick enough to peel off, at which point it functions almost like a tapestry, having absorbed both the natural and manmade textures of the tree. “A good place to start thinking about the work is the interaction between human mark making and the textures that nature makes, and the ways in which these are connected,” he says. The rubber takes weeks to become structurally integral and Aparicio is there daily, painting layer after layer for hours on end. “The rubber absorbs car exhaust, staples, graffiti and carvings in the tree. I’m interested in the ways in which human carvings happen to the tree, but over time the trunk heals itself and abstracts the marks, and they become hieroglyphics between human marks and the tree’s own growth,” he adds. “Capturing the surface of these trees is a way of preserving these documents of space in communities where the history of ficus trees—which are all over LA—so closely mirrors the history of Central American and Mexican immigration from the mid-20th century till now,” says Aparicio. “LA planted over 10,000 ficus trees within a short period of time in the 1950s and ’60s. These trees grow tall very quickly and have wide canopies that provide shade and allow cars to pass underneath. They grow so quickly because they have large buttressing roots. These roots break out of the ground and now LA is notorious for its broken sidewalks, so the city is cutting the ficus trees down or replacing them. This idea of utilizing a species for all of these positive benefits but not supplying it with an infrastructure that is appropriate for its growth, and therefore calling for its removal and expulsion, became a stand-in for contemporary immigration and periods of the 20th century in which the US’s involvement in Mexico and Central America perpetuated all of these inhospitable situations,” he explains. Among other projects, Aparicio’s solo exhibition at Los Angeles’s Commonwealth and Council closed in October, he will be included in El Museo del Barrio’s forthcoming “La Trienal” and he’s also working on a commission for Los Angeles State Historic Park.
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Photo by Evan Davis
Self-portrait, courtesy of artist
LUCY BULL @LUCYBULLLL
IN 2012, LUCY BULL found Los Angeles and stayed. On the phone, the painter confesses she still misses fall on the East Coast, where she grew up. Right after graduating from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she decided the sunshine did something for her brain. Those Rorschach moments of hot clarity remain visible on the skins of Bull’s optically charged paintings, which drag the viewer into a cinematic trance. In the past, some have likened Bull’s canvases to songs, in the way that they produce durational experiences as the eye is drawn over the kinetic optics of the 2-D surface. Music is a recurring inspiration for Bull, but it’s the automatic brushwork of the
Surrealists and their filmmaking peers that have loomed large in her thinking recently, in addition to her forever muse: Hollywood and the weird mythologies that spin outwards from it. Her cinephilia bleeds not only into her relationship with her chosen hometown, but also into her compositions, which purposefully drag out time to allow fantasy the head start it needs to catch the tail of the truth. “Time is everything,” Bull says bluntly. “I’ve always been jealous of filmmakers, who expect no one will leave the theater. When I’m painting, I’m always thinking about creating the same kind of psychic space that a movie does because I think it’s better when you are invited to feel your way through an experience. It’s through
indulging our unconscious that we find reality.” In addition to the space she makes in her paintings, Bull is known for her exhibition program, which she’s been running out of her apartment since 2017. The program is perfunctorily titled, “From the Desk of Lucy Bull,” as most of the works are exhibited on a dedicated plank in her home, but the truth is that the shows tend to spill over. There have been neighbor-rousing performances, shoulder-to-shoulder parties and rowdy meals. Like LA, Bull radiates with a generosity that attracts wild energy to her sublime abstractions, some of which were on view this fall in the South of France, thanks to a High Art gallery pop-up.
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DEVIN B. JOHNSON’S SCULPTURES and textural paintings carry spirits and energies through space. The abstract figures are fragmented and intertwining with the environment. There are brushstrokes revealing a variety of speeds. Bricks, drips and splatters meet hints of floral pattern. “I’m a daydreamer. I’m a Pisces. I’m emotional, sensitive and intuitive,” he describes. Johnson moved to New York City from Woodland Hills, California in 2017 to pursue his MFA at Pratt Institute. He became inspired by the liveliness of the city—its graffiti, ripped posters and urban marks. This pushed his journey toward exploring “memory of place.” The layers of paint tell stories of different times and moments; if Johnson’s work was rendered in music, it would definitely be a jazz song filled with abstract sounds, riffs and spontaneity. To no surprise, I discover that his father was a piano player and his Nana was a singer. Johnson sources his figures from photos of loved ones “that pull strings of nostalgia.” In that, he memorializes people and their essence. At the same time, he sources from different streams of consciousness for each piece. “When I’m approaching the surface of the canvas, I’m thinking about tactility and memory. I’m thinking about how different iterations of paint over time can also make an image that is almost in between this bridge of ambiguity. It’s a realization of figuration and abstraction. Abstraction for me is guided by intangibility—I think about Blackness in a way that is intangible to define,” he notes. Grabbing from the past, his own instincts and the totally abstract, Johnson solves his own puzzle. “I’m putting together these fragments to make something that’s whole.” As for 2021, Johnson has much in store. He is currently finishing pieces for major institutions in his hometown. He’ll have work in Art Basel Hong Kong in March and Frieze New York in May, a two-person show in Bucharest, also in May, and a solo exhibition with Nicodim Gallery in Los Angeles in September.
Photo by Freddie L. Rankin II
DEVIN B. JOHNSON @DEVINBJOHNSON
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ALINA PEREZ “You don’t have to regurgitate what happened to you on a piece of paper. What if you could draw a memory that you wish you had.”
“SOMETIMES I FEEL SAD OR weird and I
Photo by Danielle De Jesus
realize I haven’t been in the studio. It’s like feeling dehydrated then realizing you haven’t had any water,” Alina Perez tells me over the phone. It was 2018, at Deli Gallery in New York, when I first encountered the artist’s extraordinary drawings, which appear painterly from a distance or through the screen but are in fact rendered in transfixing detail with charcoal and pastel. In one that I remember clearly, a shirtless man with a tank top tan and Adidas basketball shorts sits on a chair, one foot lifted as he paints his toes with clear Revlon nail enamel. All this time, I’ve wondered if Perez has a photographic memory; when I finally get to ask, the Miami native confirms, “All my memories are images in my mind, but now I’m using them to create my own. Can the images I make be as important, as real?” Perez’s considerations tend to deal with the way our perception of the past affects how we respond to the world. “I used to describe my work as being about identity, family and how who I am today comes out of my experiences when I was really young—a lot about how life experiences inform intimacy,” she recalls. But, for the last two years, in which time Perez has also started her MFA, the artist has begun asserting a different kind of narrative authority that pushes past dutiful renditions of the past. “Sometimes you can feel like you have to make a certain thing,” she explains. “But, actually, you don’t have to regurgitate what happened to you on a piece of paper. What if you could draw a memory that you wish you had?” Newer compositions express this sense of possibility quite literally—with looser shapes, fluid lines and more speculative subject matter— and Perez is ever-curious about the variation in interpretations of her work, as viewers project their own experiences, fears and hopes, which often diverge from her own. “At one time, I thought my work was for people like me. Now I’m realizing I want everyone to see it. I think anyone can understand something in their own way.”
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CAROLYN LAZARD @CAR01YN1AZARD
“SYNC,” Carolyn Lazard’s Essex Street gallery debut in September, corresponded to manufacturers’ recommendations. If shown in the volumes of the kinds of institutional spaces where Lazard’s work often appears (Palais de Tokyo, Walker Art Center and the ICA Philadelphia, to name a few), their numbers would multiply according to square footage because it is, in fact, HEPA filter purified breeze blowing from the choir of haloed machine mouths that constitutes Privatization (2020). A new vision of the mundane, Privatization offers at once a moment of toxin respite and a blistering critique in the form of a premonition of urban miasma—infinitely worsened by climate catastrophe and a police force discharging warfare-grade chemicals against its people—becoming an impossible barrier to life. “The work started out as a gesture of goodwill,” Lazard reassures me. Though care for the viewer’s well-being permeates Lazard’s work, it doesn’t take away the edge of its appraisal. Lazard’s contributions as a writer, filmmaker and artist have knocked on the doors of institutions and individuals alike, to demand a fundamental overhaul of vision as it relates to our bodies and the demands we put upon them. Introducing the writings and work of crip artists to the public is central to this realignment. For “SYNC,” Lazard obtained permission to republish late writer and disability community advocate Tameka Blackwell’s And the Sun Still Shines because of the way the short story transforms the mundane into narrative complexity. “What we are told to register as an event in our lives is culturally and socially constructed, and some of the feelings and ideas behind the show deal with challenging this,” Lazard says. “Instead of hiding the temporality of the domestic, maybe we should have it be primary, and embrace the slowness of convalescence.” Questions surrounding America’s extreme discomfort with rest lay at the heart of the show, which transformed the white cube into a disjointed living room consisting of La-Z-Boys posing like figurative sculptures and a fleet of sinks moonlighting as televisions. Those indoctrinated in Lazard’s work might have expected video from the Philadelphiabased artist and, in a way, these metal and ceramic readymade basins filled that role, if only as screens for projection.
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COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND ESSEX STREET/MAXWELL GRAHAM GALLERY.
THE TALLY OF AIR PURIFIERS THAT pocked
Carolyn Working, 2020.
“What we are told to register as an event in our lives is culturally and socially constructed, and some of the feelings and ideas behind the show deal with challenging this.”
FELIX BERNSTEIN AND GABE RUBIN @JACKEYHORNER
“WE’RE TRYING TO WORK against the flatness of video as a medium and embed it in sculpture in new ways,” Gabe Rubin says of an installation he and Felix Bernstein have been tinkering with. It’s the latest project in their multidisciplinary practice, which has unfolded, Rubin says, like an “endless slumber party” over the past decade. “It’s a conceptual struggle too, against the flattening of everything in life,” Bernstein is quick to add. This kind of exchange is the norm for the pair. Their first gallery exhibition, mounted at David Lewis in 2018, was titled Folie à Deux, a term for a psychiatric disorder in which psychosis and delusion are shared between two patients. The show hingesd on a 45-minute single-channel video in which Bernstein and Rubin
synthesize the Marquis de Sade and Cruella de Vil to explore the queer coding of villains, narcissism and hysteria. A series of smart sculptures fashioned out of the video’s props hover off the gallery walls like theatrical slotes, the most proficient of which features Rubin’s dalmatian costume reclining on a seesaw. Invoking both Lacan’s notion of the seesaw of desire and the once-iconic piece of playground equipment’s recent disappearance from parks everywhere due to safety concerns, Bernstein and Rubin gesture to the dangers of fantasy, even as they court and cultivate it. In a show the following year titled “The Vomitorium,” presented at The Kitchen in New York and the Luma Westbau in Zurich, the pair moved
to allegory, creating—through the transhistorical figure of the cupid—a multi-channel installation that was unmoored from narrative while also all about it. Bernstein and Rubin have known of each other since they were high schoolers in New York but forged their friendship while undergrads at Bard College. This year they will both be twentyeight, but their work still aspires to the unfettered energy of adolescence. Rubin tells me, with a strange combination of glee and rigor, that for the same upcoming video that sets its sights on combating flatness, the two will play a coterie of childhood characters including Miss Frizzle and Frog and Toad, in the hopes of not just talking about allegory, but creating it. They take silliness very seriously.
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HALEIGH NICKERSON @HALEIGHNICKERSON
“Identifying as an artist means exploring and questioning the world around me, but also taking things apart and reassembling them in different ways.”
IN ONE OF HALEIGH NICKERSON’S most recent sculptures, from her installation Through the Fire: 1, bubblegum pink plastic curlers encase a mannequin’s head like a helmet, or perhaps a crown; each is adorned with a nameplate framed by two, kissing doves. In the place of a name, the pendants read “Rzlient,” an alternate spelling of “resilient.” Narrated in her words as “a deconstruction of many different tools” and “a play on armor,” this resplendent sculpture, which I have been unable to forget since seeing it for the first time in an Instagram post earlier this year, merges several of the concerns that interact and overlap in Nickerson’s layered, multidisciplinary oeuvre—the rituals of material culture and adornment, the construction of identity, iconicity and the exuberance of strength. “Identifying as an artist means exploring and questioning the world around me, but also taking things apart and reassembling them in different ways,” she tells me on the phone from Los Angeles. Originally from the Bay Area, Nickerson moved to LA to work in film. In the studio, her process consists of constant, active research: reading, looking at and compiling ephemera. She’s currently in the process of expanding a series of personae and costumes that re-imagine warrior archetypes using sartorial materials, objects and media that relate to Black identity. One of these—a spikeencrusted black cape with a stack of bamboo hoops for a breastplate—was donned by Nickerson for a photographic self-portrait titled Searching for Self As Hero, on view in the group show “Celebrate Longevity” at Superposition Gallery’s Hamptons outpost this past summer. “I’m always thinking about the Black female body in relation to time and space—in whatever way that manifests through form or media—whether through costumes, objects or any other configuration, reconstructing spaces and worlds,” Nickerson explains with intense clarity. “This array of fragmented parts comes together like an orchestra or a band—like a film set. Blackness is uncontainable. Identity is multilayered, transformative and ever shifting. That’s what I’m working through. It’s a retracing of memory, an accumulation of time, a piecing together of new moments and mythologies that reference the past and the future.”
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Self-portrait, courtesy of artist
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This Element of Revolt
Alexa Demie talks to Taylor Russell about creativity, friendship and the films that inspire her. Photography by CHUCK GRANT Moderated by Anna Cafolla Styled by Alexandra Cronan and Kate Foley Co-Directed by Alexa Demie
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It’s a blue moon, a rare lunar event that’s said to bring release and healing, so Alexa Demie informs me over Zoom.
Hair by Evanie Frausto. Make-up by Kali Kennedy. Nails by Natalie Minerva. Here and previous spread: Demie wears vintage Azzedine Alaïa pants and bodysuit; La Panthère de Cartier watch, 18k yellow gold, tsavorites, black lacquer, diamonds; La Panthère de Cartier rings.
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Demie, in her home in Los Angeles, has been meditating through the morning to capture the moment of astrological energy. On the call, along with her close friend and peer Taylor Russell, she tells me of the moments of calm she has allowed herself to ruminate in, even with forthcoming creative projects nudging at the parameters of lockdown. Demie is best known for her effervescent performance as acerbic cheerleader Maddy Perez in HBO’s Euphoria. She navigates a tumultuous, toxic relationship storyline with depth and compassion, punctuated by cutting one-liners and knife sharp eyeliner flicks. In lockdown the last few months Demie’s been watching Agnes Varda and Fellini movies, while waiting for some of her most personal projects to come to fruition. Euphoria’s second season should start production again in the new year, and Demie is producing and starring in her first feature film, about her mother Rose Mendez, a Mexican transplant growing up in glittering eighties Hollywood. Soon, too, she’ll release her debut music. With or without the
celestial event, Demie is steering an exciting path as a multihypenate. Russell, who is continuing to film sci-fi TV series Lost in Space in Vancouver when we all speak, bears witness to the journey as a close friend, ally and spiritual sister. The women met on the set of Trey Edward Shults’ devastating 2019 film Waves; originally, they had no scenes together, but after spa trips and card readings and supportive late-night musings following gruelling days on set, they passionately made their case for shared screen time. A brief scene where their characters share a tube of lip gloss, before major tragedy strikes, became one of the movie’s most tender moments. Since then, the pair barely go a day without speaking. Russell joined Demie in LA lockdown earlier in the summer, both later absconding to a spiritual retreat at California’s Mount Shasta. They tell me they shared dreams and bonded more over shared childhood traumas, the golden age of cinema’s unbridled starlets like Maria Felix and surrealist art.
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Demie wears vintage Jean Paul Gaultier robe courtesy of Resurrection Vintage; Sir The Label white body; La Panthère De Cartier Watch (As Before). Right: Demie wears La Perla silk pajamas; Roger Vivier mules.
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ANNA CAFOLLA: Tell us about your relationship. ALEXA DEMIE: When quarantine started, we were having six-hour FaceTime calls. It felt like it was our church. We’d get into everything—the human, the existential. It’s mostly really positive. My whole life, I’ve always just wanted a girlfriend that I can share everything with. I was always disappointed in my friendships with women growing up. I’ve been able to find a friend within the industry that is female with Taylor. It felt like our angels were pushing us to meet at the right time. TAYLOR RUSSELL: She feels like a sister to me. Our conversations are very reflective. I am her biggest supporter and fan! Alexa has this force of life that is unmatched to anybody. She has taught me to stand up for myself and what I’m worth. We met two years ago, and I’ve seen a huge growth, but I also feel like this is an interesting time for us to speak; it feels like Alexa is going back to her roots in many ways, and discovering who she is, her joy.
ALEXA DEMIE: Could I get this recording so I can play it every morning?! I feel like I’m in the best space right now. A lot has changed. This year, I’ve had a lot of time to sit with myself. I feel that I’ve hidden a lot of who I am. I’m shy, and people don’t know that. I’ve also hidden a lot of personal work, and I’m ready to unleash it. I’ve had a mask on, especially with the public. I was scared about being goofy or talking about the things I believe in. I’m ready to not hide anything anymore and be my full self. I have the movie with my mom and that’s getting really close. It’s set in eighties Hollywood and I play her. I have some films and work in the animation space, and I have a really special project with Petra Collins coming out. And Taylor and I have something in development. I was joking last night, “Why did God make me so multifaceted?” Because there’s just so much I want to do! I’m very precious with my music. I wrote a song in 2012 that I never put out, but it’s always been at the back of my head. I’ve made new songs and I’ve written new things, but I can’t fully move forward
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until this one is out. I played it for Taylor and she started crying. She encouraged me to finish the video, because I shot half of the video in 2017. And so we shot the other half, which she directed while she was here. I’ve been speaking to my healer about it, and she told me that my body was tricking me—it wasn’t letting me move forward until I released this. I make so many things and then I just hold on to them. I’ll hopefully have my full music project out next year. If no one likes it, Taylor likes it and it’s for Taylor. So, I’m fine with that! ANNA CAFOLLA: Euphoria was put on hold amid the coronavirus. How has it been anticipating your return to such a significant project? ALEXA DEMIE: We film and edit pretty quickly, so there is a possibility that it’s out next year. We were literally about to begin production, and the next day everything was shut down. The two Christmas specials are done though. It’s
interesting being away from that character for so long. It’s a lot of work, with long hours, and my body is not used to that anymore. I miss it though. Sam [Levinson] rewrites all the time, because he just has so many ideas, so I have no idea what to expect. TAYLOR RUSSELL: We have talked a lot about old Hollywood relationships, like that of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands. Gloria, A Woman Under the Influence, other films that they collaborated on that have deeply inspired us. When we notice relationships like these in current times we will often say, “that must be her Cassavetes…” and share a moment of awe. We share a yearning for a collaboration that goes deep and comes from a place of oneness. What do you look for in creative partners, and how do you know when you’ve found it? ALEXA DEMIE: I actually started to recognize that recently.
On Demie, Chanel jacket and bra. The treasure on the bed? Roger Vivier tiara; Bibi Van Der Velden Mammoth Galaxy ring; Chanel chain bracelet; Panthère De Cartier Necklace, 18k yellow gold, tsavorite garnets, onyx, black lacquer, diamonds; La Panthère De Cartier ring, medium Model, 18k yellow gold, emeralds, onyx, diamonds; Panthère De Cartier ring, 18k yellow gold, emeralds, onyx, diamonds; vintage earrings and crystal necklace (stylist’s own); Chanel chain belt. Left: La Perla bra; Mugler blouse; Miu Miu Lace leggings; Chanel sandals; La Panthère De Cartier watch.
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world. Honestly, what if all of the indie films that we’ve made or we love were the big budget films? What if those were what were promoted and seen? I keep wishing for this modern renaissance to happen in film. I don’t think every new film needs to address every single little thing that’s happening right now in such a specific way. I think it’s important to use our voices when it’s genuine. Getting political for the sake of it can be false, bad and corny. Growing up, what attracted me to film and music was the escape. My childhood was not sun and rainbows. I come from trauma, and escaping it was watching these stunning films that took you to another world. I’d like to see anything that’s from the heart —creative, new, pure, fantastical. Then we can root things in reality in more creative ways. There are filmmakers that really excite me, but most are not getting the push that big studios would bring. I am so inspired by the work of filmmakers like Trey [Edward Shults], who did Waves, Celine Sciamma, the Safdies, Alma Harel, Alejandro Landes, Paolo Sorrentino, Houda Benyamina, Bong Joon-Ho. TAYLOR RUSSELL: I’m so impatient to see what you have coming up. I just want to consume it now! ALEXA DEMIE: I hate how long it takes to develop a film. Me and you just need to do the financing ourselves. And, I think, we are both about pulling the ladder down for others to climb up. I don’t want to just stunt on Instagram, I want to be a part of something that makes moves, so I’m very passionate about children and honoring their creativity. Honestly, I have designed a whole school that I want to build one day to really nurture creative spirits. Immigration rights are also important to me. My mom and her family are all from Mexico. It has been hard with COVID, with everything happening at the border, but I’m lucky to be connecting with people to make changes in future. TAYLOR RUSSELL: I think it’s only right we discuss art and the place that it holds in your life! We started talking about collecting art this spring and have slowly started collections. For my birthday, you commissioned a painting of me by a friend and artist, Ben Evans. It’s one of the most special gifts I’ve ever received. What type of art are you drawn to right now, and what is a dream piece that you would love to acquire? ALEXA DEMIE: It has to be Leonor Fini and Leonora Carrington. I have Ben Evans on my wall behind me. There’s also Zoé Blue M who I recently commissioned a piece from. The art I gravitate towards sits between reality and fantasy, and she captures that. I love finding new artists who are going to be massive and being able to have a relationship with them now—it feels so special. TAYLOR RUSSELL: We are going to have houses with the exact same art on the walls! Leonor is an artist that you introduced me to. She has a quote about leading a different life that the one imagined for her: “I understood from a very early time that I would have to revolt, in order to make that life. Now, I am convinced that in any creativity, there exists this element of revolt”. How do you relate to that statement? ALEXA DEMIE: I relate to that on the highest of levels. I’ve revolted my entire life, from a super toxic family environment. Running away from home as a teenager was a major revolt. I had to figure out where I was going to live and sleep, but I needed to do that to become who I am now. To stay was to be stifled. It bleeds into every single piece of work, whether people have seen it yet or not. Everything from my music to acting, writing and how I carry myself in the world is all because of that. I’m so attracted to [Leonor’s] work. I live in the surreal, it compounds the world I’ve built and made real for myself.
PRODUCED BY KATHLEEN HEFFERNAN. HAIR ASSISTING BY SAMANTHA LEPRE. PROP STYLING BY MICHAEL WANENMACHER. LIGHTING BY GAL HARPAZ. DIGITAL TECHNICALS BY SEAN KIEL. VIDEOGRAPHY BY HUNTER RAY BARKER. SPECIAL THANKS TO CLAYTON JOHNSON. SHOPPING INFO: LA PANTHÈRE DE CARTIER COLLECTION PIECES AVAILABLE AT CARTIER BOUTIQUES NATIONWIDE. FOR MORE INFORMATION PLEASE VISIT CARTIER.COM OR CONTACT 1-800-CARTIER.
I can feel really connected with the creator of my show. I’ve experienced collaborative relationships that are more intimate and personal recently— they’re beautiful because you don’t have to say much, you just both get it. It’s like working recently with Petra. She already knows what I’m thinking. I trust everything that she’s doing, which is really difficult for me because I’m a control freak. I like to control the vision, but I’ve put my complete trust into her and feel happy and safe. Shooting the cover with Chuck [Grant] was so fluid. She was open to every single idea. I think it’s beautiful that I’m finding more women to do that with. ANNA CAFOLLA: What is it about the energy of female creators that you appreciate? ALEXA DEMIE: I think with women, we may experience trauma and pain in different ways, but it all boils down to one inner feeling within us and we all can relate. We have empathy. It goes further than just family or relationship trauma too. We, as women, come from a lineage of being abused and taken advantage of. Taylor and I always talk about a world before the one we are currently in, where it was a matriarchy instead of a patriarchy. How a society like that isn’t as far away as it seems and how there is infinite possibilities in the depth of femininity. When you get to find a woman to create with, when we’re open with our traumas and not taking it out on each other, that’s the most pure form of creation. Even though we’re here as individuals, we’re not. With Chuck on this shoot, we were able to bring to life some of my biggest fantasies. We both love old Hollywood and the mystery of it. We got to explore something exciting, the birth of the movie star in this age. TAYLOR RUSSELL: I can count on you to have countless stunning references for starlets throughout time. I think about these women and that I wish I saw their faces more regularly. Marpessa Dawn, María Félix, Sara Montiel. Do you remember the first figure that you fantasized about? What about them made you envision a world you could inhabit? ALEXA DEMIE: María Félix, who was a Mexican actress. She was so beautiful and strong. She could play the stunning princess, and then she would be riding a horse in a cowboy hat and button-down, playing tough. Her strength was so inspiring. I would watch Sophia Loren, Elizabeth Taylor and Lauren Bacall. I found them interesting at first because they’re stunning, that’s their public perception, then you read their stories. These women wrote their own scripts, had a say in their work. I got obsessed with researching them. TAYLOR RUSSELL: I find it so exciting to discover women of color. Of course, we love Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn and Katharine Hepburn. We dream about them, but we can never insert ourselves into those stories. We talk all the time about doing biopics. Who would you love to play in a biopic? ALEXA DEMIE: It would have to be María Félix. They really hounded her to do films in Hollywood, and she refused. She only did Spanish-speaking. She didn’t feel like Hollywood was authentic. Hollywood has used foreign films as their inspiration for as long as we can all remember, and they need to pay their respects. There’s a story that she took two baby crocodiles to a jeweler, and said, “I want a necklace that looks either exactly like them or is made out of them.” That became the famous Cartier piece. The only two people to ever wear it were María Félix and Monica Bellucci. I’m next! I’m seriously looking into making this movie happen. TAYLOR RUSSELL: What kind of films do you think the world needs right now? ALEXA DEMIE: We can stop remakes. There’s enough new ideas in the
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TEAR HERE
AT BLUM & POE IN LOS ANGELES, an exhibition explores the creative and political energies of the Black Lives Matter movement, with a brilliantly chaotic display of protest signs from more than 100 artists. Placards by the likes of David Hockney, Rashid Johnson and Marilyn Minter hang beside those of lesser-known and emerging artists, not to mention contributions from a few familiar names not often seen on art gallery checklists—Cardi B, Usher, Billie Eilish. All proceeds support the African American Policy Forum’s #SayHerName campaign, which aids the families of Black women and girls killed by police, and works to make their stories known. P H OTO G R A P H Y BY T R OT T E R
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BENSON WILLIAMS @KNGWLLMS
“‘Look how they treat us’ is a powerful statement from a poem by Saul Williams, which spotlights not just the idea of threatened black lives but specifically the abusive treatment of black people within our society. A lot of energy focused behind the BLM Movement has to do with our struggle, and I felt it was important to shine a light on the counterparts: the wrongdoings and wrongdoers, and not the ones done wrong.” culturedmag.com 143
AUSTYN WEINER
@AUSTYN
“Coming off of the isolating experience of being quarantined for months, and the horrendous events that were to follow with the murdering of George Floyd and so many other lives, I believe the most genuine expression and emotion that has taken place over this period of time were in those protests and on these signs.� 144 culturedmag.com
FORREST KIRK
@FORRESTKIRK
“I love that 100% of the proceeds are going to help the AAPF, which is an innovative think tank that connects academics, activists and policymakers to promote efforts to dismantle structural inequality. With such a bold and dynamic mission for the AAPF, I immediately felt compelled to participate. Now more than ever I feel like organizations like the AAPF need our help, so this was the least I could do.”
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APRIL BEY
@APRILBEY
“BREONNA / BRIANNA is a portrait of my friend Brianna. Brianna and I, like many of my other friends, have had the morbid discussion about seeing ourselves and loved ones in other Black people when they’re flashed across our phone screens as victims of American violence. We can see our fathers and mothers being held down. They have our noses, cheeks, lips and eyes. I want my practice and my art to reflect real Black women who look like me and the other Black people in my life to humanize what’s at stake here. Show Me the Signs is a visual army for what we all look like as we demolish the system that continues to turn its back on Black people.” 146 culturedmag.com
KARA JOSLYN
@KARAVAGGIO
IAN PATRICK CATO
“The fantastic thing about this project is that it brings artists together across geographies and hierarchies to make demands for change. Each gesture is amplified by the one next to it, and the one next to that, and so on. It creates a context in which you hear the volume rising as you walk across the gallery. The individual pieces begin to culminate into a unified and desirable story. America may be a wealthy country, but we are certainly impoverished when it comes to love, empathy and justice. Rise above, we’re gonna rise above!”
@IAN.PC
“Showing alongside some of my greatest creative influences that I’ve looked up to for years and seeing them use their voice for such change is incredibly activating for me and a lot of people around the planet. I think that in the future this show will be seen as a vital placeholder in history for the societal transformation that we are demanding right now.” culturedmag.com 147
FOR
HOUSTON Houston’s reputation as an art city is nothing new. The Menil Collection alone garners international eyeballs for the Texan outpost, but what about the next generation? Photographer Cary Fagan has spent twenty years of his life in the southern metropolis with the requisite stints in New York and Los Angeles for comparison, but it’s in his Texan home town that he feels the most potential for creative life to flourish. One of the obstacles to Houston’s evolution, as Fagan sees it now, is the unspoken competitive edge that can be felt amongst talented peers in a deep pool where opportunities run short. His solution for the issue is simple: collaboration, which is why when we asked Fagan to create a visual diary for our youth issue he turned the chance loose—inviting local creative directors, photographers, musicians, artists and models to participate in a guerilla style shoot set around the city’s ankles. The result was two blissful days in which everyone had the chance to shine the light back and forth between each other. The blaze of their collective triumph is captured here and in more detail at @IamDiorHouston where you can find behind the scenes and making of footage. BY
HOUSTON
GROUP PORTRAIT BY CAMERON REED.
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Musician Mark Sabinin and Zulu, shot by Cary Fagan.
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Top row: Model Mike Onipede. Onipede with Sabinin. Both by Kareem. Bottom row:: Photographer Christean Kareem and Grace captured by Fagan.
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Fagan and designer Joshua Grace captured by Christean Kareem. culturedmag.com 153
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Onipede with musician and film writer Tobacco Ryan; Sabinin and Grace. Both images by Justin Heron.
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Fagan and designer Josh Allen captured by Christean Kareem. The Houston skyline by Fagan.
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S U R V I V A L
Genesis Tramaine discusses devotional painting,
By Stephanie Seidel
sources of
knowledge, and finding strength as a Black woman in America.
Photography By Gillian Laub
S T R A T E G Y
STEPHANIE SEIDEL: You paint large-scale portraits of deconstructed faces. Who is portrayed in these works? GENESIS TRAMAINE: The portraits are biblical saints. I am a devotional painter and I think it’s important to give a face to the saints, who have names but don’t have a real persona in the Bible. The images of saints that we know and that are projected at us are all white with blond hair—and we all know that that is not true. I think it’s a part of my journey to bridge these gaps. Often what propels me to get in the studio and gives me the energy is the Word. STS: Do you mean scripture, the word of the Bible? GT: Yes, that’ll get me going. I’ll read something that strikes me. Then I do the research on the word, Bible phrase, story or a specific character. I have to know who their parents and their family are. Then these “characters” come to life. I’m such a Bible nerd. STS: What do you feel the medium of painting offers you in particular? GT: I’m going to be honest with you: I can just close my eyes and I don’t have to be in charge of what the work is going to look like. I don’t have to worry about any mistakes. I can just let God be God. It’s the one moment of the day where I can completely let go. One of the greatest gifts that God has given me as a painter is that I get to be alone as often as I choose because solitude is an expected part of the painting process. As women we don’t get these spaces. We are not trusted with “alone spaces.” And as Black women, we are often not afforded those spaces. STS: One of your recent works is titled Black Woman University (2020). The title really stuck with me. Could you talk more about it and how it relates to the broader framework of your practice? GT: I painted Black Woman University during the height of the lockdown. I am convinced that the only thing that kept me present during that time was my belief in God as well as all the knowledge that the
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© GENESIS TRAMAINE, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND ALMINE RECH, PHOTO BY: MELISSA CASTRO DUARTE
Opposite page: Parable of Nana and Prodigal Son at Almine Rech. This page: Saint Jabez, all works 2020.
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“FOR ME, THE WORKS ARE THE BEST WAY—OTHER THAN BEING ON MY KNEES IN SOLITUDE—TO CONNECT TO MY HIGHER SELF AND THE GREATER GOD THAT IS WITHIN ME. A FRESH PIECE OF CANVAS IS LIKE A WATERING HOLE. IT’S A SAFE SPACE. THAT’S WHAT THE PORTAL IS FOR ME.”
women gave me who have raised me. I am who I am as a Black woman in America because of the grace of God and because of these women. There are specific survival strategies that got me through this year – the things my Nana told me and the things I watched my mom do. All of that is encouraging and that’s the energy I took into that work. It was my way of honoring and kneeling before the presence of a Black woman in spirit. STS: You’ve described your paintings as “portals.” I’m curious as to what kind of seeing or visibility you want to facilitate in your works. What are they entry points for? GT: For me, the works are the best way—other than being on my knees in solitude—to connect to my higher self and the greater God that is within me. A fresh piece of canvas is like a watering hole. It’s a safe space. That’s what the portal is for me. I don’t necessarily know where the angels take me, but I know I’m safe. There are things that I’ve learned to pay attention to, to connect to the portal in the physical space of the studio. I pray over this space, I pray for the spirit of the Holy Ghost and then I receive the gospel: that is what is reflected in the paintings. Usually it looks like a portrait from afar. But up close, if you really study the details of work, you’ll notice a separate story. You’ll notice the gospel in the work. I think it’s important to be honest about the fact that I am a vessel, creating a portal for someone else to find a greater sensory space of spirituality for themselves. I want people to feel invited in to the highest point of who they are spiritually. And I think that art can do that.
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For two decades Triptyque has reimagined the relationship between architecture and nature. BY KATHERINE MCGRATH
The co-working, co-living AMATA building in São Paulo, Brazil is set to be completed this year.
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FOR BRAZILIAN-FRENCH ARCHITECTURE firm Triptyque, biophilic design and sustainability has never been a trend. With a deep respect for the natural environment and an eye towards futuristic materials and building practices, the firm has undertaken projects reflecting their ecological sensibilities since they first launched in Sao Paulo in 2000. Led by principals Greg Bousquet, Carolina Bueno, Guillaume Sibaud and Olivier Raffaelli, Triptyque opened an office in Paris in 2008 and has produced an impressive body of work in both Brazil and France that transcends the two distinct cultures, reimagining the relationship between architecture and nature by introducing the plant as a building material. “I think that architects have an enormous responsibility to consider the problems of the planet and to look out for the environment, to consider how they can do without this or that,” says Bousquet. “To build with respect.”
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The group’s name, French for triptych, was an intentionally poetic choice, meant to capture their design sensibility and philosophical approach. “I don’t remember the exact origin story, but it explains us,” says Bousquet. “We thought it was transversal and explained architecture as it crosses art, music, theatre, paintings… There were a lot of triptyques there, and we felt it really marked our spirit.” They appreciated the imagery of the name: something divided into three parts, where each tranche worked together to make a better whole. Not to mention it also gave nod to three places of importance to the founders, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Paris. As students at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris around the turn of the millennium, the quartet absorbed the influence of experimental groups and practices. Archigram, in particular, was a favorite: a British neofuturistic architectural collective whose work in the 1960s and 70s envisioned a
built environment made of high-tech materials through hypothetical designs. Celebrated Brazilian architects Oscar Niemeyer and Paulo Mendes da Rocha have also been major influences on Triptyque—Niemeyer in particular for understanding the architect’s responsibility to look out for the environment. Growing up around nature in Brazil (of the four founders only Bueno was raised in France) informed the group’s understanding of how to link public and private space through vegetation, which is at the root of their practice. “The amount of greenwashing in architecture is concerning,” says Bousquet. “We try to educate with our architecture, and orient a new way of building and thinking. It’s not just about the visible things, but about the techniques that allow for the most energy conservation and well-being.” Triptyque’s approach is as instructional as it is functional: they use their projects to set an example for their peers in architecture and design, to show that not only can a biophilic approach be kinder to the environment and conserve resources, but it affects the greater community: “It has such a good impact on the people to have buildings full of vegetation and flowers that attract butterflies and smell lovely. Without the plants, the buildings would have no soul.” One of the firm’s most celebrated projects is Harmonia, a mixed-use building with a collection of shops
and artist studios. Located in a vibrant neighborhood on the west side of Sao Paulo, Harmonia is designed to breathe, sweat, age and regenerate itself like a living body, with an exterior vegetal layer growing from the porous, organic concrete that functions as the skin. By way of its remarkable hydraulic system that covers the exterior of the building like veins, Harmonia can irrigate itself and encourage plant growth automatically, collecting and treating rainwater and runoff soil water. The result is a living building that challenges the concept of a “finished” or “manufactured” structure—an architectural marvel that continues to evolve over time. And soon to be completed is AMATA, a thirteenstory multi-purpose structure in Sao Paulo made entirely from reforested Brazilian timber, lauded for its structural capabilities, acoustics, thermal retention and resistance to fire. The project, which creates a cleaner chain of production and replaces nonrenewable resources with natural raw materials will absorb carbon dioxide from the environment while hopefully increasing the desirability of material like reforested Brazilian timber. Looking back on twenty years of Triptyque, Bousquet affirms, “I’m proud that we’ve remained rooted in our integrity and that we’ve succeeded even a little bit in changing the perception of how and what architecture should be in such a steadfast community.”
“I think that architects have an enormous responsibility to consider the problems of the planet and to look out for the environment, to consider how they can do without this or that, to build with respect.” For the INPI headquarters in Courbevoie, France, a verdant garden courtyard forms the ecological heart of this biophilic and net positive energy building.
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SENSUAL SEDUCTION
Designer LaQuan Smith’s spellbinding silhouettes are certain to turn heads, but the native New Yorker dreams of a future for the fashion industry that sells much more than sex. BY DARNELL-JAMAL LISBY
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PHOTOGR APHY BY AVIVA KLEIN
THE MEANING OF THE WORD SEDUCTIVE has evolved over time, its negative connotations changing into a sense of joyous liberation. The incredible artistry of LaQuan Smith builds on a history of fashion that reimagines seduction and sensuality in ways that empower those who wear or view his designs. Looking to his predecessors for inspiration, he says, “I’m obsessed with old school designers. Gianni Versace and Azzedine Alaïa and so many others who shaped what sexuality looks like in fashion and the womenswear market.” In the same way, the silhouettes that define Smith’s brand—from the catsuit, high-slit dresses and bodysuit to a myriad of bodycon designs—highlight the dynamism of his vision for a way of life free from inhibitions. Smith originally wanted to be a cartoonist. But whenever he rummaged through his mother’s bags of old clothes, before they were sent to Goodwill, he would find lace blouses and leather pencil skirts and began to develop his appreciation for design, quality and craftsmanship. Being raised in the church among elegantly dressed women, including his mother and grandmother, laid the foundation for his desire to empower women through design. Smith’s story contains multiple parallels with those of creative giants across fashion, like Patrick Kelly and André Leon Talley, who were formed by Black experiences and who have transformed the current generation of the industry.
Smith’s upbringing in Queens, New York, and the flamboyant personalities of the city’s diverse music scene of his youth formed the building blocks of his aesthetic. The legendary deep-V Versace dress that J.Lo wore to the 2000 Grammy Awards cemented his aspirations to become a designer. “I remember when my grandmother was helping me learn how to sew a pattern. I shouted at her, pointing at J.Lo on the TV screen—‘No grandma! That’s the stuff I want to make.’” Although often sought out by women entertainers, particulalry those who celebrate sensuality as a form of power—J.Lo herself, Yung Miami and Beyoncé for her 2018 On the Run II Tour—his designs are intended to encourage women of all walks of life to feel unapologetically sexy. Of the iconic ensemble he produced for Beyoncé, Smith says, “How big of a statement it was to open with a Black designer among really high-end brands is a statement within itself. I felt like I achieved something where I made her feel so damn sexy that that was how the rest of the tour was going to feel.” Tom Ford’s ability to establish a luxurious staple aesthetic is but one blueprint among Smith’s repertoires: “It’s rich, it’s luxe, it’s sexy, it’s sophisticated. As a young creative, it’s imperative to learn and study the people that came before you.” At the start of his career, Smith faced various naysayers, who judged his brand through unimaginative eyes, claiming his
LaQuan Smith pulls out samples around the studio. The tactile experience of the garment is important to the designer.
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“I remember when my grandmother was helping me learn how to sew a pattern; I shouted at her, pointing at J.Lo on the TV screen—‘No grandma! That’s the stuff I want to make.’”
Smith in the studio with Jacqueline Cooper and Joy Massingil.
clothes were too vulgar, questioning the quality. Nevertheless, his consistency and confidence in creating his identity brought him undeniable acclaim. “Slow and steady wins the race. I want this to be a household name someday,” he explains. Astute at comprehending his audience’s preferences, he enjoys reinterpreting the core elements that gave him his initial push, adding to his recipe season by season. Retailers have praised his ability to curate separates that wearers could amenably style across categories, and this industry approval will be unequivocally supported by his Spring 2021 line, forthcoming for Saks Fifth Avenue. From his use of python and leather to his integration of jewel tones, Smith especially appreciates when customers mix and match his garments, and leaves styling to the discretion of the wearer. Additionally, the designer is experimenting with diversifying his product output in his efforts to continue to broaden his consumer base. “When I did these interesting partnerships (with Asos, for example), it was a great exercise to build up my own categories, like handbags, shoes and fragrances. These are the things I’m preparing myself for in the event that even if ‘she’ can’t purchase a $1500 dress, she can walk away with a $150 t-shirt, or pick up a skirt at $395.” “One thing I learned is that it doesn’t matter what size you are, what color you are, how much you weigh, how much you make—there’s something in the collection for every woman,” he says. As we continue to track his rise, Smith’s ingenuity represents a continuous historical through line, from predecessors like Gianni Versace and Thierry Mugler, in ways generations before could never have fathomed, especially when paired with his purposeful attitude toward uplifting the diversity of women’s bodies. Smith’s vision to honor sensuality in all its forms signifies how today’s young designers are rightfully dismantling rigid conventions—both in the fashion industry and in society at large—in favor of a future in which everyone can be whoever they want to be and embrace their inner power for change.
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Brontez Purnell sits in his study/studio/altar room in his home in Oakland, CA on October, 19, 2020. He’s holding a broom that he keeps there. In his words, “My family is just really superstitious and witchy and they said if you sleep with a broom in the room ghosts won’t bother you because ghosts are really nosy, hence why they haunt people. But ghosts will be too busy counting the bristles on the broom to disturb your sleep.”
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99 PROBLEMS AND THE Savannah Knoop, a winner of Cultured’s first writers grant, with Parker Pens, reviews underground punk icon Brontez Purnell’s new book, 100 Boyfriends.
PORTRAITS BY STEPHANIE LISTER
BOYFRIEND WITHIN IS NOT ONE
IN BRONTEZ PURNELL’S PROLIFIC AND VARIED ways of working, single moments act as dream holes into the entirety of a personal cosmos. For the past year, I have been working with a group of amazing teenagers through the Dia Art Foundation and New York City’s Department of Youth & Community Development program. Under the rubric of thinking about and making art, the program supports young people in realizing their capabilities to act creatively within and upon the world. When I was thinking of who could visit as a guest artist, to shake up the group, Brontez was the first person who came to mind. Before he arrives, we do a highly-curated online crawl; avoiding anything explicitly sexual while still attempting the full tour of his oeuvre, I lead them through music videos for his punk band, a trailer from his dance documentary, excerpts from his writing and a scene from the screenplay Brontez and I are adapting from his 2017 novel, Since I Laid My Burden Down. In cruising Brontez’s impressive CV, I want to impart to the group the only sure thing I know about being an artist: nobody lets you be one—you make yourself into one. “He founded his own dance company!” I tell the teens. “He’s published at least three books but started by making his own zine! He’s toured with his bands all over the world!” They seem excited but confused. I hear myself saying, “He’s not a plate spinner. How could one person make all of these kinds of work?” We untangle this question further: what is this artist obsessed with? We start with the Super 8-shot music video he made in 2010 for the song “Keeps on Falling Down,” performed by his band, The Younger
Lovers. On screen, a group of queers and punks gather in a cluster to do a series of dance moves along a sidewalk in Oakland, California. Each move is pre-announced on a white piece of paper that is slid in front of the camera: Squash the Bug, Sick Twist. The video feels like an invitation to the viewer: do you want to dance, too? I do. Once I’m at home, alone, I put the music video on again and start to dance casually—three beat moves on a four count. I play it only, say, about 100 more times—I follow along, tracing the movements and feeling the names of each one in my body, relishing that pause that floats in between each repetition. Our first workshop is in the basement of the Judson Memorial Church, around the week of Valentine’s Day. He arrives with his cousin, to provide live saxophone accompaniment, and a lover, responsible for manning the projector and tech. He begins with an exercise called “Entrances and Exits” and asks us each to brainstorm three declarations to propel us through space. “Entrances and Exits” presents an existential challenge: can’t the two always be exchanged, depending on where you are, and how you are thinking about it? But before any of us have the time to pause and overthink, we are off, walking in and out of the three doors of the room, punctuating each boundary with one of our prepared lines. First we move at our own paces, trying out different tones of phrases like, “Why, Why, Why, Why?,” “My Whip!,” “Not today, Satan!” and “Happy New Year!” We rev and slow, adjusting the statements as we move. The music Brontez’s cousin is playing and the squeak and swish of our sneakers on the Formica tiling blend with our mantras
Left: Cal Hoodie, Self Portrait with Text Intervention, 2019. Right: Unregistered Voter, Self Portrait with Text Intervention, 2019.
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and the result is beautiful, chaotic noise—it’s impossible to feel selfconscious, there is just too much sensorial action going on. Eventually, we collectively ramp up into fever pitch, moving faster, bumping into one another, screaming and laughing as we enter and exit, saying things with the fervor of maniacs. By the time we stop to do a twenty-minute Sylvia Plath writing exercise, we are all sweaty and completely over whatever awkwardness we were feeling before we started. Each of these moments opens up new moments, shows us what is possible, shows us how we are alive, huzzah! Here’s another dance move, with a title card that could read “Daddy.” In Brontez’s upcoming book 100 Boyfriends (out Valentine’s Day, 2021), a young boy named Mickey watches as his Daddy, pronounced Diedee, goes through the beauty rituals for attracting a new step-mother, starching a crease in his jeans so sharp “you could fuckin’ cut ya self on ‘em” before leaving for the bar. Waiting for his father to get home, the signature smells of pork cracklings, alcohol and cheap cologne lingering, Mickey practices his Flashdance and Janet Jackson routines, wondering whether drinking water from a bottle and living in a loft are the keys to a successful, high-femme life: “Is this a thing?” This particular Daddy admixture of absence and presence shows up in Since I Laid My Burden Down, too; the narrator, DeShawn, swims in the smell of pickled pig’s feet, cologne and liquor, this time while cleaning up the Harlem apartment in which his father died alone. Brontez has coined this retracing throughout his work as “the Art of the Recyclable.” Many of his stories appear and reappear in different iterations with a detail exchanged, one part drawn out or frosted over in order to get to the next part of the narrative this time. This is where his writing feels profoundly based in conversational storytelling, usually passed on, much like dance, from one body to another, but this time it’s committed to paper. Life is often sort of like this, but we don’t always record all of our iterations. We retell the stories of our lives from different angles, often depending on our mood and who we are talking to. Sometimes the distinguishing note is that of creamy fried skin and, at other times, that of a vinegary pungency. In the circle that Brontez has cast around his work, the queered term “Daddy” stands in for, connects up with and blows the fuses of notions of legacy, lineage and inheritance. Daddies of all kinds abound. Daddies who make you feel seen and daddies who don’t, daddies who pay you and daddies who disappoint you, daddies who donate their DNA on, in and around your body. Legacy can be growing up in a Baptist church, then becoming a performance artist. Legacy can be inherited from your creative elders, as exemplified in Brontez’s documentary about San Francisco dancer Ed Mock. In “Free Jazz,” a work spanning 2010-2012, legacy feels like an interactive, involutional space. Through structured improvisation, Brontez creates a map of his own body’s learning—Haitian, African, Anna Halprin and the Isadorables—moves that were passed through generations of bodies that meld and bake with the choreographies of his particular consciousness of the everyday, offered as his own recording for the next to pick up and shift. Legacy can also be passed on from one family member to another. An assortment of coats and guns in a deceased father’s tool shed in Alabama, much desired but only half-collected, after a decision to never set foot outside of California again. Legacy can be an inherited sense of fatigue from your grandmother, externalized as a man in a pink suit skulking around your family’s house in order to take advantage of the young girls in your family, but dealt with abstractly, like weather that you can’t really change but can definitely make a point in avoiding. Legacy can also be the rude fact that your father insists that a werewolf can always come and get you at any minute, even if you are holding your
daddy’s hand. Perhaps legacy can even be likened to an STD; you and a bunch of your friends all fucked the same neighborhood guy and all have the same burning sensation in your pee hole to prove it. Legacy consists of all of the discrete moments that are usually never recorded, that often blur together—in the public restroom or in the bathhouse waiting with a towel on your head—that can potentially be reconstructed through fiction, like some sort of psychedelic captain’s log of the seasons of one’s life, but adding up to what exactly? This is the question that 100 Boyfriends asks. Starting with the epigraph, “Fuck All Y’all,” the book proceeds from that slap to a readerly seduction, sharing with abandon the narrators’ most intimate loves, hates, disappointments and excitements. If 100 Boyfriends reads at first glance as a procession of hangovers and unruly lovers, its structure is, in fact, a provocation. There are few narrative possibilities afforded to queer Black men “out there” and, in this way, the book thwarts those cliches head on, simultaneously throwing the reader into a quickie frisson while letting them dangle in the actual uncertainty and exhaustion of these moments. The narration slips between characters like a baton being passed in a relay race. Not between any and every character under the sun, mind you— these stories are told specifically from inside the consciousness of a Black man or child sitting in and between different intimacies with other men, or lack thereof, Brontez counters. Here are all the old scenes that somehow feel different this time, or all the new interactions that feel like the same old shit. 100 Boyfriends acknowledges that every moment spent fucking a stranger is discrete, is its own mysterious chapter, full of projection, and does not necessarily lead you to knowing yourself or someone else better. It gathers and disperses moments like the lungs of a body panting shallow breaths. Which is really all the form you need. The refusal to cohere with linear narratives across all of Brontez’s work is paired with an equal insistence on cracking jokes. If it’s all the
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BRONTEZ BUILDS IN THE STRUCTURAL SPIRIT OF PUNK AND QUEERNESS; THESE ARE MOMENTS TYPICALLY NOT IN SERVICE OF A HYPER-PRODUCTIVE TRAJECTORY OF SUCCESSFUL LIVING AND THAT DO NOT INHERENTLY BUILD TOWARDS GETTING “WIFED UP” AND LIVING A MORE “NORMATIVE” LIFE.
same old shit, why not make it more entertaining, both for yourself and for whoever happens to read it? Brontez’s Instagram contains some of the most trenchant punchlines, such as one of his posts from this past summer, which reads: “Child please, I was born canceled.” He ponders, in conversation, “At the end of my revolution, there will be all kinds of reformed criminals. It’s not going to be a room full of people who all have squeaky clean reputations. That sounds like a living form of hell.” In another post, a video of Brontez, he appears in underpants and a collar, being led around a kitchen on hands and knees by a lover. He makes direct eye contact and wags his tail as the voice off-camera tells him he is a good “boy.” Below, his caption reads, “BLACK LIVES MATTER” and “BLACK KINK MATTERS.” Is it not true, dear reader? As a self-declared intimacy hound (which is just another way of saying you have slutty energy), I might be projecting when I say that a large part of Brontez’s practice strikes me as operating in a similar fashion; being a slut is a mode—rather than “Why?” you ask, “Why not?” Ever reaching for your own limits, you cast your net wide and wait to see who or what might come your way. Often enough, this mode in turn casts you, slut protagonist, into a process of disassociated, omniscient narration. You watch yourself as the action comes sidling up to you; you are your own personal object moving through the world— what might happen next? Brontez builds in the structural spirit of punk and queerness; these are moments typically not in service of a hyperproductive trajectory of successful living and that do not inherently build towards getting “wifed up” and living a more “normative” life. Instead, these moments unfurl with the rhythm of being alive and they
insist only on themselves. And, as much as the narrator says that he might want to be a wife, replete with a watermelon farm, every time he comes close, he feels fatally bored and opts instead only to give himself over completely to johns and already-married (or -heartbroken, or -self-destructive) men. Not choosing but being chosen is key, however; in the politics of being a slut, choosing your own entrances and exits is essential. Take the watermelon farm alone, wear nothing but an apron and keep on keeping on. Meanwhile, it’s important to mention that being an intimacy hound never excludes the astonishing impact of loving and being loved by other humans. The rest of the year’s workshops happen, as most organized group action these days, on Zoom (or ZOM, as we like to call it). Brontez does three more, using some of the same writing and movement exercises that had blown his mind as a young person. Presaging each prompt with his statement on pedagogy—that he hates authority, so they should basically do what they want—he still loves watching the same synapses click for others. The teens, who, not big on names, affectionately christen him “that guy,” totally get Brontez’s whole thing. They repeat, over and over, “I really like that guy!”....“Just the whole way that he blew his nose and had us do those exercises, like, you could tell that he didn’t care if you liked him or not”....“He felt free!” We wonder about that as a group. How can someone feel free to others? In his last workshop, Auntie Brontez signs off with sincerely piercing eye contact (hard to do on Zoom) and says, “I love each and every one of you. Do not hesitate to be in touch!”
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Just two hours from New York, younger architects and designers are pouring their souls into the Hudson Valley. In a silver lining of COVID-19, quarantine-era exodus from the city has provided newfound visibility and opportunity to these up-and-comers.
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VOUTSA SNOW HAS BEGUN TO INTERMITTENTLY coat the leaf piles and dormant fields of the Hudson Valley—a milieu that makes you want to reach for one of the tangibly yummy, visually outrageous cashmere blankets and pillows that wallpaper-and-fabric house Voutsa released earlier this fall with Saved New York. Covered in hand-rendered lips, snakes, billowy polkadotted curtains and Grecian urns, Snuggies these are not. The collaboration is a reminder that home is a place where you can be fully, unself-consciously yourself. The heart and brains behind Voutsa, George Venson, says Voutsa x Saved NY might not have happened without a 500-acre farm in Claverack, New York. In 2018, Voutsa had just opened its first showroom, and Venson needed to step away from the scrum of New York to clear up any confusion between the brand and his own name. Over two years of farming, hiking and contemplation at the rental property, Venson also ridded his psyche of big-city hustle. In that first year, he was almost powerless to churning out new patterns; after a year of rural quiet, so came ideas like the aforementioned collaboration. With new visions come new plans. Venson is now in the process of moving from Claverack to Los Angeles, where a recent vacancy has allowed Voutsa to double its showroom space. Once there, Venson will continue launching collaborative collections while developing deeper relationships with Voutsa’s California-based designers. With gratitude to the Hudson Valley for reigniting his unapologetic spirit, he plans to venture into film projects, as well.
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JENNIFER L. SALVEMINI FOR ALL OF THIS YEAR’S FOCUS ON sourdough starters and fantastic work-from-home setups, the pandemic hasn’t exactly stripped “homemaking” of its single-income-household, misogynist associations. Through her Shokan, New York–based interiors practice, Jennifer Salvemini is embracing the word with utmost deliberateness and reclaiming it for a new era. Salvemini’s journey as an entrepreneur began in summer 2016, when she launched a consulting business after more than a decade in hospitality and fashion management. While unsure of her exact service offering at the time, she believed in “happy homemaking for happy life” as an ethos as well as a motto. Shortly thereafter, a newly minted homeowner in Troy, New York tapped Salvemini to oversee the conservation and modernization of an impressive brownstone in the Collar City, and she continues threading the needle between that client’s contemporary art collection and penchant for Japanese culture with the historical integrity of the Victorian-era building. COVID-19 finds Salvemini operating on two fronts. She is burnishing her interior design bona fides with a multisensory listening room destined for the next Kingston Design Connection designer showhouse. Simultaneously, she is gradually opening a lifestyle destination called Hinterland. Located on the grounds of her home and studio, Hinterland will peddle in design, tea and more locally conjured treasures, and the campus is already hosting events and Airbnb rentals. Once fully manifested, Hinterland will illustrate Salvemini’s definition of homemaking—not some falsely nostalgic daydream, she says, but rather creating safe and beautiful places for restoring one’s spirit.
MICHAEL ROBBINS THE PLATE-GLASS WINDOWS FACING THE Michael Robbins showroom in Germantown, New York, are regularly covered in finger and nose prints. These most minor acts of vandalism are certainly a symptom of our new era of appointment-only shop visits. They also evidence the spell that Robbins has cast over his fans since 2011. That year, Robbins had just finished building a custom adobe house in Santa Fe and packed his things for the Hudson Valley to dedicate himself solely to furniture making. Robbins’s predilection for open spaces and cosmopolitan energy is reflected in his personal furniture vocabulary as much as his changes of address. The pieces have the same genuine simplicity and honesty as work by Robbins’s Hudson Valley predecessors, which include the prestigious Sawkille Co. and Atlas Industries, as well as the provocative proportions and playful spirit of American studio furniture. His latest two series, New and Beebe, have cemented Robbins’s place on the Hudson Valley map. The designer has dialed up the frisson between large and itty-bitty gestures in these case goods, and he has framed the compositions in plump, huggable curves. No wonder hands are stuck to the storefront. Further evidence that Robbins is on the right track? A 2021 move to a former garment factory, where manufacturing will spread across two floors and greater experimentation with concepts, materials, finishes and techniques will take place. And because we almost always return to our roots, he will be breaking ground on a new home in Germantown.
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S3 ARCHITECTURE IN RECENT YEARS, FORWARD-LOOKING DEVELOPMENTS have popped up in the Hudson Valley, some of which are owned by their architects themselves. Drew Lang of Manhattan-based Lang Architecture has sold out his Hudson Woods collection of houses in Kerhonksen and Mapos and is just wrapping up renovation of the Newburgh Wireworks. This coterie welcomed S3 Architecture into its fold in 2017, when the New York firm purchased Rhinebeck’s Brooklyn Heights Farm for redevelopment into single-family homes. S3 collaborated with the Dutchess Land Conservancy to masterplan more than 200 acres for open-space protection. It then designed a small series of residences in response to specific siting (say, a vista that deserves a perch-like building) and land characteristics (a patch of cattails is transformed into vertical cladding). While Brooklyn Heights Farm nears selling out, it bears noting that the project has inspired Aston Martin as well as homebuyers to come calling. The legendary auto maker reached out to S3 in 2019 to design the first house in its Automotive Galleries and Lairs service on 55 acres in nearby Milan, New York. In turn, S3 has made a nature-inspired design whose many signatures include a panelized roof plane, which swoops down toward the entry drive to form a futuristic porte-cochère. Besides sinking financial equity into Brooklyn Heights Farm, S3 has taken an even more personal stake in the Hudson Valley. Christopher Dierig and Doug Maxwell, partners in S3 and in life, recently completed a small, yet boldly cantilevered cottage for themselves in the Rhinebeck area, and they are opening a studio space in the namesake village shortly.
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WORKSTEAD YOU MAY BE WONDERING WHY A story dedicated to emerging creative voices in the Hudson Valley would include this Brooklyn and Hudson, New York–based powerhouse. Stefanie Brechbuehler and Robert Highsmith founded Workstead in 2009, and the married couple’s dear friend and fellow principal Ryan Mahoney joined them a year later. Since almost day one, it has been the focus of fiercely positive attention and increasingly prestigious residential and hospitality gigs. Now, look more closely at Workstead’s lighting studio. While Workstead has consistently designed one-of-a-kind luminaires for its spatial commissions, in 2019 the firm opened its Hudson location as a showroom and studio for lighting. Highsmith took its helm to create sconces, pendants, chandeliers and freestanding lamps conceived directly for an e-commerce platform. The subsequent product releases have been quick and steady, while feeling like a natural extension of a more deeply rooted Workstead vision. For the firm’s recent Shaded collection with Schumacher, Highsmith wrapped the elemental shapes of his Archetype luminaires in three timeless Schumacher patterns. The pairing lends a touchable, seductive quality to lighting and, when coupled with Schumacher-clad walls (something that Brechbuehler and Highsmith just tried in their own dining room), vertical surface and light source meld almost indistinguishably into a single plane—a radically modernist proposition. Like its interiors and buildings, Workstead’s burgeoning lighting collection both reveres and remixes historic heritage. It is also a reminder that Workstead is still very much the Young Turk shaking up preconceptions.
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KRISTINA DOUSHARM ARCHITECTURE (KDA) BASED IN RED HOOK, NEW YORK since 2014, Kristina Dousharm is already an unofficial mayor of her adopted hometown. The Pratt Institute–trained architect will just about scuttle KDA’s queue of bigger-budgeted commissions to serve a planning board or assist a neighbor with a pressing design need. Her unflagging receptiveness to local projects is motivated by the belief that we all deserve expertise and highquality design. Dousharm’s civic understanding of the architectural profession would deserve kudos on its own, but this service also has substance. In the recently completed Hilltop Residence, also located in Red Hook, KDA reconciled the architectural vernacular of the Hudson Valley with ambitions of 21stcentury living; an appropriately modest exterior belies interior and landscape designs that are both exhilaratingly spacious and highly choreographed. Across the Hudson River, KDA used crisp detailing and syncopated openings to reinterpret the traditional gable form for the Quarry Ridge Residence in Saugerties, while the studio’s cabin housing for Salt Hotels engages in a stylish dialogue with the industrial-era ruins of the Hutton Brickyards on the Kingston waterfront. Dousharm is crystallizing a self-concept in which KDA preserves the Hudson Valley without freezing it in time.
ANA CLAUDIA INTERIOR DESIGN AS THIS ISSUE WENT TO PRESS, interior designer Ana Claudia Schultz and her husband Aaron Smyle were putting the finishing touches on the Beck gallery in Rhinebeck. Dedicated to the design and artisanship of the Hudson Valley, the space could very well accelerate Rhinebeck’s transformation from genteel tourism spot into a maker’s hub. This wouldn’t be the first time in her career that Schultz has gone big. Shortly after launching into business, she pivoted from jewelry to interiors. Just months after she and Smyle moved into a dream Brooklyn apartment, a weekend trip to arts destination Beacon, New York, inspired Schultz to start over in the mid-Hudson Valley. And now comes the Beck. In her daily design practice, Schultz also opts for boldness. She punctuates clean-lined interiors with attentiongetting artwork, blocks of color, and drifts of pattern with ease. In the Hudson Valley, that approach seems best suited to the midcentury homes that were once filled by IBM executives. Schultz took on one such residence at the beginning of her tenure in greater Rhinebeck (it is, in fact, the home she shares with Smyle), and that delightful reinvention of 1950s-era domesticity is both an emblem of Schultz’s point of view and a siren call to new clients.
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THANK YOU TO OUR 2020 DLN PARTNERS WHO DEMONSTRATED INCREDIBLE SUPPORT TO THE DLN AND ITS MEMBERS THROUGHOUT THE YEAR. PLATINUM PARTNERS Benjamin Moore, Herman Miller Retail, Loro Piana Interiors, Luxury Division of Pella, Taconic Builders, Waterworks PREMIER PARTNERS Chubb, Holland & Sherry, KOHLER, Kravet, Merida, Perennials and Sutherland OFFICIAL PARTNERS Alfonso Marina, ALT for Living, Arteriors, Artistic Tile, Bulley & Andrews, Cambria, Carini Carpets, CEDIA, Chairish, Clarence House, Cosentino, Decorators Supply, Fireclay Tile, Hindman Auctions, Hine Builders, Hyde Park Mouldings, Jamb, JANUS et Cie, Justin Van Breda London, Lance Woven Leather, Lanserring, Lutron, Marmi Natural Stone, McKinnon and Harris, Metrica, New York Design Center, Phillip Jeffries, Pierre Frey, Remains Lighting, Retorra, Rock Ridge Construction Management, RoseHyll Studio, Rosemary Hallgarten, SA Baxter, Soane Britain, St. Charles New York, The Rug Company, Vaughan MEDIA PARTNERS Architectural Digest, Business of Home, California Home + Design, CTC&G, Cultured, Elle Decor, Galerie, HC&G, House & Garden, House Beautiful, Luxe Interiors + Design, Mansion Global, NYC&G, Robb Report, The World of Interiors, Town & Country, Veranda, WSJ. Magazine FOR MORE INFORMATION DESIGNLEADERSHIPNETWORK.ORG
3+4 DEC 2020
THE VIRTUAL SUMMIT THE VIRTUAL SUMMIT
Do Not Be Alarmed
PHOTO BY JOHN WATTS
For our 2020 Winter commission we asked artist Serban Ionescu to create something worthy of the era. His answer is ICES, an acronym standing for In Case of Emergency Sculptures (2020). He writes of the series: “ICES are hand held works meant to rest on tables, sit on shelves, be enjoyed as is, unless they turn out to be handy, deploying blades of various shapes, a fork, a bottle opener, a ruler, a saw and other indescribable parts.” Creating with a hypothetical emergency in mind, Ionescu echoes today’s uncertainty while simultaneously enchanting his sculptures with dormant utility.
Beverly (Green), Eliot (Blue) , 2020
ALL UNIQUE EDITIONS, IONESCU’S ICES SERIES FOR CULTURED IS AVAILABLE NOW ON 1STDIB.COM/CULTUREDMAG 192 culturedmag.com