Cultured Magazine DEC/JAN/FEB 2019 by CulturedMag

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Contents

PHOTO BY NAIMA GREEN

DEC/JAN/FEB 2019

Filmmaker Terence Nance sits in a Railcar Club Chair by Green River Project LLC.

CULTURED 25 We’ve gathered 25 exhibitions, happenings and moments that have caught our attention. THE FULL PICTURE Twenty-nine years after his death, Robert Mapplethorpe’s legacy continues to evolve. MAGICAL THINKING The Haas Brothers hit a milestone with their first museum solo exhibition at The Bass. PAPER TRAIL The late abstractionist Tomie Ohtake takes New York with a solo show at Galeria Nara Roesler. GOING PUBLIC Elizabeth Margulies launches a new venture with a David Salle installation towering over NoMad. PAINTING AS PERSISTENCE Jamea Richmond-Edwards reflects on her fascination with fashion and painting as a means of channeling hope. A MATTER OF TIME Artist Zoe Buckman and Whitney Biennial curator Rujeko Hockley talk about art in the present. FANTASY LAND Milan-born arist Paola Pivi arrives at The Bass for her solo exhibition with a fictional menagerie in tow. GODDESS OF GOTH Venus X is charting a new model for creative output, starting with her marauding dance party. THE TYRANT FEARS THE POET For Amanda Gorman, the nation’s first Youth Poet Laureate, politics is inseparable from art. THE STILL AMONGST THE CHAOS Austyn Weiner returns home to Miami for a solo show at Bill Brady Gallery. SURFACE AND SYNERGY Pierre-Yves Rochon, who recently oversaw the interior design of Herzog & de Meuron Jade Signature tower, talks with the building’s developer Ana Cristina Defortuna. EYE IN THE SKY Virginia Shore has been using art as a means of cultural diplomacy across the globe for more than two decades.

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A celebration of time Kalpagraphe Chronomètre Manufactured entirely in Switzerland parmigiani.com

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Contents

A detail of sculptor Dani Karavan’s Negev Monument in Be’er Sheva, Israel.

AN APPETITE FOR OBJECTS Cooper Hewitt continues its incursion into the cutting edge with the appointment of curator Alexandra Cunningham Cameron. PLAY, PERSIST Afropunk band Fuck U Pay Us is reimagining the future of language and music, one performance at a time. A BEAUTIFUL MESS When it comes to putting paint on canvas, Eddie Martinez knows how to throw down. BEHIND THE BLOCK Vivian Pfeiffer shares her thoughts on the expanding market and its global consequences. SOFT SPOT Seoul-based designer Sang Hoon Kim returns to Design Miami with Cristina Grajales gallery. A LOVELY DARKNESS Painter Cassi Namoda delves into colonialism and identity with a cinematic lens. GRIT AND GRACE Caleb Teicher brings soft-shoe tapping to the art world stage with a commission for the Guggenheim’s black box. HARLEM ON MY MIND Native New Yorker and curator Legacy Russell brings her brilliance to the Studio Museum. PARADIGM SHIFT A conversation between collector Anne Huntington and artist Brendan Fernandes. CULTURE SEEKER Laura de Gunzburg travels back to the future with a visit to Marfa,Texas, a mecca for postwar Minimalism. OUT OF THIS WORLD Curator Erin Christovale organizes a presentation of Jamilah Sabur’s work at the Hammer Museum. THE SHAPESHIFTING ALCHEMIST Curator Gia Hamilton returns to her community-driven roots. CURATOR OF COMMUNITY Taylor Trabulus is a guiding force of the Lower East Side milieu. GREEN HOUSE As Versace looks back on its 40-year history, the luxury house is securing its eco-friendly place in the future.

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PHOTO BY MATTHEW MORROCCO

Contents

Singer and performer Caroline Vreeland wearing Versace in front of Pascale Marthine Tayou’s Welcome Wall, 2015, at The Bass.

KILL THE CLICHÉ Gallerist Mariane Ibrahim presents contemporary African art in a context that is as layered and complex as the places where it is made. IF YOU BUILD IT Rózsa Farkas has found success for her gallery, Arcadia Missa, by sticking to the values her artists embody. PAINT INTO PLUSH Two decades ago, artists Janis Provisor and Brad Davis found themselves on a mission to create a unique carpet for their home. Today, that project has evolved into Fort Street Studio. 30 UNDER 35 Our third annual Young Artists List takes us into the studios of 30 artists leading by example. BRIGHT LIGHTS Filmmaker Terence Nance charts a new chapter for comedy and art with his HBO debut, Random Acts of Flyness. INTIMATE IMMENSITY Ella Kruglyanskaya’s colorful paintings of women infuse comedic scenes with emotional communication. MATERIAL EXPANSION Torey Thornton and Andrew Blackley discuss non-linear progression, devices of structure and Thornton’s sculptural investigations. THE MONUMENTS MAN Artist Dani Karavan expands the boundaries of human perception and artistic practice. BOTH/AND Rindon Johnson on Leilah Weinraub PUSH TO PLAY Catherine Damman checks in with Alina Tenser before her show at New York’s 17ESSEX. BUILT TO LAST The art collection of Ziel and Helene Feldman has as much energy as the Bjarke Ingels–designed towers they’re developing in West Chelsea. NOTHING CAN BE TOO CRAZY Andrew Heid and fellow architect Anne Holtrop on gesture, material and the realization that the biggest constraints in the field are those set by the architect. FIND THE FOLLY Adam Charlap Hyman and Andre Herrero embrace humor over homogeneity, which is perhaps why the ears and eyes of the art world are on them. LONG LIVE JEANINE JABLONSKI Adrianne Rubenstein pens a valentine to the founder of Portland’s Fourteen30 Contemporary gallery. VENUS RISES We partnered with Prospect NY to present Judy Chicago’s bronze reimagination of the iconic Venus of Willendorf. 74 culturedmag.com

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CALIBER RM 037

RICHARD MILLE BOUTIQUES ASPEN • BAL HARBOUR • BEVERLY HILLS • BUENOS AIRES • LAS VEGAS • MIAMI • NEW YORK • ST. BARTH • TORONTO

AMAH-ROSE ABRAMS Journalist

NAIMA GREEN Artist, educator

AUBREY MAYER Photographer

Abrams is a London-based arts and culture journalist. For this issue, she profiled Rózsa Farkas of gallery Arcadia Missa. “It was a pure pleasure to interview Rózsa,” Abrams says. “She’s smart, funny and she sticks to her guns in a climate where her kind of grit is a rare commodity.”

“Working with Terence was a dream,” Green says of photographing filmmaker and cover star Terence Nance. “Meeting on set felt like running into a friend I hadn’t seen in years. I love the experience that is Random Acts of Flyness.” The Brooklyn-based photographer also shot Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman for this issue.

In addition to being a self-taught photographer, Mayer is a painter and producer of zines and self-published texts. Commissioned to document the young artists included in our third annual 30 Under 35. Mayer, who visited all 30 in their studios, began photographing artists more than a decade ago as an undergrad teaching Elizabeth Peyton how to sail in Orient, New York.

TIONA NEKKIA MCCLODDEN Artist, filmmaker, curator McClodden’s research-based practice explores and critiques issues at the intersections of race, gender and sexuality. Based in North Philadelphia, McClodden is currently the 2018–19 Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism at Bard College. For her first contribution to Cultured, McClodden wrote about painter Cassi Namoda, explaining that she was “interested in Namoda’s sense of time in relation to mid-20th-century African cinema.”

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THOMAS BARNWELL, AUNDRE LARROW, COLLIER SCHORR, TIONA NEKKIA MCCLODDEN

Contributors

SONDRIA Artist

ALIMA JENNINGS Filmmaker, designer, artist, curator, DJ

COCO ROMACK Writer

Sondria, who for this issue covered Afropunk band Fuck U Pay Us, is an author, filmmaker, mother, and member of the art collective #SNATCHPOWER. Her latest collection of fiction “Unthinkable Acts” is out now, and her forthcoming “The Carverians” is set to release at the end of 2018. She is also a freelance social media content provider and has maintained online personas for the band Earth Wind and Fire, and the Pan African Film Festival.

Jennings co-operates and art directs the music label Akashik Records, curates a monthly party and hosts a radio show. “Fuck U Pay Us represents everything I encapsulate in my practice; complete and utter unapologetic black femme queerness,” Jennings says of photographing FUPU. “They are radical, loving, intelligent and everything I strive to be.”

In this issue, Romack profiles Gavin Brown’s downtown gallery director Taylor Trabulus. “Taylor gives cool, emerging creatives a platform by bringing their work into an established gallery,” says Romack. “I was blown away by her exhibitions of Women's History Museum and Jacolby Satterwhite.”

RUJEKO HOCKLEY Curator “It was really special to ‘officially' talk to Zoe,” says Hockley, who took time away from co-curating the upcoming edition of the Whitney Biennial to speak with artist Zoe Buckman for this issue. “We are friends in real life and talk all the time—texts, calls, DMs—but it's amazing to be reminded how professionally accomplished and brilliant your friends are. Zoe is rigorous, spunky and filled with urgency, and it does this body good to be around her.”

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JASON SCHMIDT, ALIMA JENNINGS, GEORGE KOELLE, TYLER JONES

Contributors

ERIN CHRISTOVALE Curator

MARIA BRITO Designer, author, advisor

KATIE BROWN Graphic Designer

Erin Christovale is the assistant curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and a cofounder of the moving-image platform Black Radical Imagination. She spoke with Jamilah Sabur about the artist’s upcoming Hammer show. “I met Jamilah when she was an MFA student and we’ve been friends ever since,” says Christovale.

Brito is a multivalent art world practitioner, whose first book, “Out There,” was the recipient of two USA Best Book Awards in the Art and Design categories. Her profile of Jamea Richmond-Edwards shines an important light on a DC artist. “Jamea is a fresh talent whose work mingles many aspects of great relevancy today: race, culture, fashion, female empowerment and identity.”

As associate art director for Cultured, Brown has been behind the design and layout of every issue for more than a year. “I love the interview between Jamilah Sabur and Erin Christovale in this issue—the Miami connection hits close to home and the portrait of them is gorgeous.”

ANDREW HEID Architect Cultured’s Architecture Editor Andrew Heid is the founding principal of New York–based practice NO ARCHITECTURE. For this issue, Heid spoke with Dutch architect Anne Holtrop about his boundary-pushing work. “As architects, and particularly in schools of architecture, we are only talking to ourselves: meanwhile on the horizon, the world is literally falling apart,” Heid says. “Anne’s work questions architecture and the oil-driven world we’ve built by defining his own internal constraints instead of relying on the conventions of what came before.” 80 culturedmag.com

PALEY FAIRMAN, PETER KOLOFF, SIMONE SUTNICK, MICHAEL WEBBER

Contributors

HANDCR AF T ED A A X JH COLLEC T ION

V I S I T O U R B O U T I Q U E AT AV E N T U R A M A L L

Founder /Editor-in-Chief Sarah G. Harrelson sarah@culturedmag.com Creative Director Carlos A. Suarez Executive Editor Sara Roffino sroffino@culturedmag.com Associate Editor Kat Herriman Editor-at-Large Michael Reynolds Associate Art Director Katie Brown Digital Media Editor Jessica Idarraga Assistant Editor Simone Sutnick Landscape Editor Lily Kwong Design Editor Mieke ten Have New York Contributing Editor Wendy Vogel Architecture Editor Andrew Heid Publisher Gail Feldman gail@whitehausmediagroup.com

Associate Publisher Lori Warriner lori@whitehausmediagroup.com

Marketing Coordinator Carolina Navarro Lins Carolina@culturedmag.com

Italian Representative Carlo Fiorucci carlo@fiorucci-international.com

Copy Editors Anna Bonesteel, Vered Engelhard, Bartolomeo Sala Contributing Editors Susan Ainsworth Sarah Arison Maria Brito Trudy Cejas Laura de Gunzburg Nasir Kassamali John Lin George Lindemann Ted Loos Doug Meyer Fernando Mastrangelo Franklin Sirmans Michelle Rubell Sarah Thornton David Sokol Michael Wolfson Contributing Photographers Zack Garlitos François Dischinger Douglas Friedman Jeremy Liebman Kevin Lu Aubrey Mayer Matthew Morrocco Landon Nordeman Matthew Placek Jason Schmidt Stephen Kent Johnson Warren Elgort

Senior Accountant Judith Cabrera Senior Photo Retouchers Bert Moo-Young, Matt Stevens

Partner Mike Batt

Interns Carolyn Batchelor, Paola Coriat, Callan Malone Prepress/Print Production Pete Jacaty

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With creative director Dennis Freedman at the Guggenheim’s Hugo Boss Prize Dinner.

Clockwise from top left: Filmmaker Terence Nance, photographed by Naima Green, and three artists from our “30 Under 35”—Sam Falls, Martine Syms and Sara Cwynar—photographed by Aubrey Mayer.

As I sit down to write this letter on Election Day, the theme of this issue, which is dedicated to young artists, could not feel more urgent. Our annual "30 Under 35" roundup of young artists is one of our favorite pieces to work on. This year is no exception. We love visiting artists in their studios—or in cafes or on the beach—to talk with them about their practices and what matters most in the world. The 30 artists included this year make work in all kinds of media, from video to painting to poetry. But what ties them together is thinking about sustainability. Whether they are building local communities, challenging norms of art history, engaging in political action or creating more diverse representations, these artists all have an eye to the future. Photographer Aubrey Mayer took on the herculean task of producing and photographing the artists, which inspired three covers: Sam Falls, Martine Syms and Sara Cwynar. Part of Cultured's mission is putting artists in conversation with each other throughout our pages and beyond. In this issue, we are proud to celebrate such thoughtful stars as Terence Nance (also our cover subject), the director of HBO’s hit Random Acts of Flyness and the Space Jam remake, and Harvard student Amanda Gorman, the nation's first Youth Poet Laureate, along with dance darling Caleb Teicher and visual artist Ella Kruglyanskaya, whose work I’ve followed for years. I'm filled with gratitude at the end of this year. We have an amazing team who consistently foster a supportive environment while engaging 24/7 with our community—and continually expanding on our vision. I am thankful for their endless hustle every day. Support artists! Support culture! Subscribe!

Sarah G. Harrelson Founder and Editor-in-Chief @sarahgharrelson

Subscribe today at culturedmag.com 84 culturedmag.com

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THE TWE NTY FIVE We’ve gathered 25 exhibitions, happenings and moments that have caught our attention—and we think they’ll capture yours, too.

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COURTESY OF KURIMANZUTTO; WHAT PIPELINE; © ANNA MARIA MAIOLINO, COURTESY THE ARTIST AND HAUSER & WIRTH, PHOTO BY EVERTON BALLARDIN

Architect and designer Oscar Hagerman’s Sillas de México embody his practice in one functional form: a series of chairs made in collaboration with Mexican artisans. The new pieces, presented by Mexico City-based gallery Kurimanzutto in Design Miami’s Curio platform, are largely based on Hagerman’s 1969 Arrullo chair, a design that was made deliberately accessible for reproduction, subverting its own designer status. KURIMANZUTTO.COM

Scieszka’s The Younger Generation (Open Book with Columbine), 2018

Maiolino’s Untitled, from Filogenéticos (Phylogenetics) series, 2018

Detroit-based Bailey Scieszka, who was featured in our 2018 Young Artists list, makes her debut at Larrie gallery in the Lower East Side this January, showing recent drawings by her clownish alter-ego, the enigmatic Old Put. As in the past, the works draw from her world of Hobby Lobby and American excess. LARRIE.NYC 108 culturedmag.com

Brazilian legend Anna Maria Maiolino gets the full Hauser & Wirth treatment this season with “Errância Poética (Poetic Wanderings).” On view through December 22, her New York blockbuster is a genre-blending survey spanning five decades. HAUSERWIRTH.COM

Kelly’s Charmettes I, 1956

This November, Lévy Gorvy handed over its blue-chip halls to an intergenerational friendship worthy of a museum show with “Calder/ Kelly.” The exhibition centers on Alexander Calder and Ellsworth Kelly, who not only share a palette and a preternatural understanding of form, but also a close, personal dialogue that comes to the fore in the exhibition. Drawing upon the former’s estate and the latter’s studio, the unique show offers a peek into the call and response of art history. LEVYGORVY.COM culturedmag.com 109

COURTESY OF THE RUBELL FAMILY COLLECTION

Self’s Friendly, 2016

Beginning December 3, additions to the Rubell Family Collection made over the last two years are on view as part of “New Acquisitions.” Paintings and sculptures by the likes of Janiva Ellis, Tomm El-Saieh and Tschabalala Self take over the second floor of the Miami foundation, while a concurrent survey of more than 100 works by the late Purvis Young takes over the entirety of the ground floor through June 2019. RFC.MUSEUM

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COURTESY OF CUE ART FOUNDATION; LOUIS VUITTON; RAMIKEN CRUCIBLE

Siegel’s The house your road ends on, 2017

Sable Elyse Smith resists categorization. The young artist first caught our attention with her Queens Museum breakout, “Ordinary Violence.” On January 10, she steps into the role of curator at CUE Art Foundation with a show dedicated to Cal Siegel, whose work delves into the ways colonial architecture preserves the establishment. Smith’s own investigations of America’s prison system can be seen in her solo show at JTT. CUEARTFOUNDATION.ORG

The Diamond Stingily Effect We first met Diamond Stingily when creating our 2017 Young Artists List, and since then the artist’s trajectory has skyrocketed. She’s nabbed the institutional spotlight with work at the ICA Miami and New Museum, and on January 15, she debuts her next show, “Doing the Best I Can,” at the CCA Wattis Institute in San Francisco. See our Young Artists List archive now on culturedmag.com. WATTIS.ORG

Installation view of Stingily’s Elephant Memory at Ramiken Crucible in 2016.

Louis Vuitton gets festive with window displays inspired by the tradition of tree decorating. Vitrines across the globe from Fifth Avenue to Beijing feature palms, cacti, Joshua Trees and evergreens abundantly decorated with culturally diverse holiday ornaments and contemporary icons of Louis Vuitton designs, like the Twist bag and Archlight sneaker. LOUISVUITTON.COM culturedmag.com 111

Installation view of 10 Rooms, 40 Walls, 1059 m2, Comte’s 2017 exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Luzern. 112 culturedmag.com

Swiss artist Claudia Comte returns to New York for her second solo show at Gladstone this January with a suite of new paintings. Washed in abstract patterns of acerbic lemons, pinks and greens, her oil compositions toy with one’s gaze even when on the periphery of a sightline. Like the carved marble and wood sculptures for which she is best known, these wall-based works reverberate with a sense of both joy and urgency. GLADSTONEGALLERY.COM

PHOTO BY YUMI MATSUO; GUNNAR MEIER

“This is something I’ve always dreamed about,” says Claire Distenfeld Olshan of her new avant-garde–inspired snack line, DADA. The owner of New York’s Fivestory boutique and a collector, Distenfeld Olshan’s turn to the culinary arts isn’t really a surprise. She is an aesthete in every sense of the word and her new products leverage her talents in a delectable way: surprising treats with superfood ingredients, such as hot turmeric cabbage petals. DADADAILY.COM

When asked about how he selected his bright pastel colors, the late Franz West answered: “I do that from the gut. You don’t think with your gut, everything is already clear there. There you live as if before making decisions. You select before you have to decide.” One can see West’s instincts play out in his self-titled Tate Modern retrospective, which draws upon the late Austrian artist’s varied mediums to paint a fuller image of his practice. Designed by his friend Sarah Lucas, the show, opening February 20, promises to draw West fans and dilettantes alike closer to the heart of his influential oeuvre. TATE.ORG.UK

West’s Epiphanie an Stühlen, 2011

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Challenging the differentiation between art world art and that which exists outside of institutional validation, David Carrier and Joachim Pissarro’s “Wild Art, Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics: Wild Art Explained” is a compelling investigation into the history and systems of inclusion and exclusion that drive the art world. Their new book traces the history of taste, suggesting that skateboarding videos and graffiti merit the same aesthetic consideration as the so-called fine arts. PSUPRESS.COM

Named after an unaired radio interview with Jackson Pollock from 1950, “The Strangeness Will Wear Off” at David Castillo Gallery looks at the traces of modernism present in contemporary practices: Eamon Ore-Giron’s repeated patterns and shapes, Vaughn Spann’s postminimalist references, Pepe Mar’s Rauschenberg-esque assemblages of fabric, including Red 2, pictured here. The group show, which opens December 3, also includes works by Wendy White, Natalie Frank and Jillian Mayer. DAVIDCASTILLOGALLERY.COM

Vija Celmins’s hyper-real images of starry nights and rippling water are paradoxically enigmatic. On December 15, SFMoMA celebrates the living legend with “Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory,” her first retrospective in 25 years. Composed of her paintings, drawings and 3-D works, the exhibition celebrates the subtleties and rebellion of an art world recluse. SFMOMA.ORG Celmins’s Untitled (Ocean), 1977 114 culturedmag.com

COURTESY OF DAVID CASTILLO GALLERY; ©VIJA CELMINS, PHOTO BY DON ROSS, COURTESY OF SFMOMA

Art on the Loose

COURTESY OF SWISS INSTITUTE, NY; CRISTINA GRAJALES

Multi-hyphenate creator Cally Spooner brings an almost surreal vision to the Swiss Institute for her solo show, which opens December 12. Spooner’s Early Research: Methods are stacks of documents printed with offset text, weighed down by disembodied bronze casts of the artist’s ear, mixed in with 3D-printed resin copies of similar pieces. The presence of a body becomes further dissolved with Self Tracking (the five stages of grief), 2016—along the walls, lines of hand-drawn pencil and “normal range” spray tan pigment create a reduction of a self-portrait, tracing the artist’s career success and stress levels using data collected between 2012–2016. SWISSINSTITUTE.NET

Fairest of Them All Serbian-born jewelry designer Ivana Berendika is staking new ground with her Ruffle Mirror. For her first architectural object—on view in Cristina Grajales’s Design Miami booth—Berendika’s limitededition mirror features feminine fluted shapes cast in luxurious 14-karat gold. Like a distant relative of Brion Gysin’s hypnotic Dream Machine, the Ruffle Mirror is pierced with hundreds of hand-cut openings that allow light to stream through. CRISTINAGRAJALES-INC.COM

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Drink Up

COURTESY OF RELATIONSHIPS

Art-world eateries are no longer exclusive to Gordon Matta Clark or Rirkrit Tiravanija. This fall, Brooklyn birthed two new entities: the coffee shop Relationships NYC and Laika, e-flux’s venture into the bar scene. Relationships is a mecca for those in the midst of holiday shopping, as the cafe is serving up cappuccinos alongside prêt-à-porter treasures from local artists like TD Sidell and Denise Kupferschmidt. Helmed by former Salon 94 director Nina Schwarz and design soothsayer Su Beyazit, the local drip might be our new go-to. Read more on culturedmag.com. RELATIONSHIPSNYC.COM

Relationships founders Nina Schwarz (left) and Su Beyazit 116 culturedmag.com

COURTESY HAND & ROSE; © ANTHONY MCCALL, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND SEAN KELLY, NY, PHOTO BY HANS WILSCHUT

Bouquets are almost dwarfed by the immensity of the white cube, yet they remain a critical staple to the gallery environment. 2017 Young Artists alum Awol Erizku and his partner, Sarah Lineberger, have taken this relationship to the next level with Hand & Rose, their guerilla floral boutique. Available throughout LA, their brightly painted truck is worth tracking down. HANDANDROSE.COM

In February, Sean Kelly Gallery turns the spotlight on avant-garde film artist Anthony McCall—the artist’s first major exhibition at the gallery since joining their roster. McCall, whose work blurs the lines of film, light and space, is a seminal figure in the exploration of the audience’s physical experience with filmwork. The show includes one of the most complex installations in the artist’s oeuvre: You and I, Horizontal (III), a set of 35foot projections of “solid light” across the gallery’s main space.

McCall’s Face to Face, 2013

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Next Up

New year, new fair. This February, California sees the inauguration of Frieze Los Angeles. Helmed by LA native Bettina Korek, the fair will be held in a specially-made structure designed by Kulapat Yantrasast of wHY at the historic Paramount Pictures Studios—a rendition of Frieze tailored to its host city. Starting Valentine’s Day, be sure to look for Cultured’s booth! FRIEZE.COM

A cotton gin from Maplesville, Alabama takes up residency in the Whitney Museum as of December 15th for Kevin Beasley’s solo show, “A View of a Landscape.” Plucked from its home, the gin—a farming tool designed to separate seeds from cotton fiber— grinds on in the gallery as the artist’s intervention sparks a conversation about the history of race and labor, specifically the rise of the slave trade in the U.S. that followed the machine’s invention in 1793. WHITNEY.ORG Beasley’s Rebuilding of the cotton gin motor, 2016 118 culturedmag.com

COURTESY OF PARAMOUNT PICTURES STUDIOS; THE ARTIST AND CASEY KAPLAN, NY, IMAGE COURTESY OF CARLOS VELA-PRADO; PHOTO BY AIDAN ELIAS

This fall’s fashion discovery, Onea Clare, waltzes in at just the right moment with its gauzy, handmade dresses and structured suits, which we first happened upon at Café Forgot. Following in the footsteps of artists like Susan Cianciolo, Onea Clare Engel-Bradley conjures a whimsical realm where history collapses into itself. Read up on the self-taught designer on culturedmag.com. ONEACLARE.COM

PHOTO BY JONAH SIEGEL COURTESY OF TOTAH; THE FIFE ARMS; PHOTO BY FREDRIK NILSEN STUDIO

Rand’s 10, 2005

Following two years of restoration, Scotland’s historic hotel in the Highlands, The Fife Arms, reopens in December. With one foot in the past and one in the present, the century-old hotel’s 46 uniquely decorated rooms pay homage to the many places, people, events and traditions that characterize Braemar. For example, the “Treasure Island”-inspired room is a reference to Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote the novel next to The Fife Arms. The hotel also showcases sitespecific commissions by contemporary artists including Zhang Enli and Guillermo Kuitca. THEFIFEARMS.COM

Painter and beloved professor Archie Rand’s “Misfits” exhibition at TOTAH is a humorous spin on the mystical Judaic notion of the Tzadikim Nistarim—36 secret individuals whose righteousness justifies humanity. The brightly painted portraits depict unassuming, cartoon-like figures highlighting the mystery around the identities of the righteous 36, their roles unknown to themselves and to the world. “Misfits” opens January 18. DAVIDTOTAH.COM

West Coast Minimalist luminary Larry Bell takes over the third floor of Miami’s Institute of Contemporary Arts with a career-spanning survey co-organized by ICA artistic director Alex Gartenfeld, on view through March 2019. “Bell’s approach to making art—which combines matter of fact materials with an industrial fabrication in order to examine changes to perception—is exemplary for generations of artists,” says Gartenfeld. “Larry has been so ahead of his time because of his sensitivity to cultural and social context, not least the Vietnam War and the development of the atomic bomb. His restless creative experimentation, especially with technology, has been greatly underexplored—which is a wonderful opportunity for ICA Miami and our exhibition, ‘Time Machines.’” ICAMIAMI.ORG

Installation view of “Time Machine” at ICA Miami. culturedmag.com 119

the full picture

COURTESY OF THE ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION

'$( $!$') '%#")% ('#) !") '%( )

") ' % &$(!$ '")(&)' & ' ) '$ '! )%""& !%(') #%(&#") % #'$) !$ "&$)%$ "%$) & "&$) #!(')( ')$' () % ('#)& )( ') &(& #% '# ") !"(&# ) !( ! !() '$"!&$" ) % '( &# ') & )%)( & %#()" # ' )( %() #% ") &$ ( ')!$"(!( (!&$ ") %# ') ! () #& )( ') & '#() % '( &# ') & $ %(!&$ )

Calla Lily, 1986

“The Guggenheim’s collection contains important examples from every phase of Mapplethorpe’s career, and so we decided to present a truly comprehensive overview that represents the full scope of his production. We have holdings in depth from several key themes in his practice and we made selections that reflect this depth: from his collages and mixed media constructions to his classicizing images of male and female nudes. His work is perhaps best known for the more explicit depictions of the S&M underground that have been the source of controversy and subject of censorship over the decades. We will be including a selection of that work in the exhibition, but we also wanted to bring attention to the way in which Mapplethorpe treated every subject—from tulips to the male phallus—with an equal degree of breathtaking photographic skill. As he said himself, ‘I’m looking for perfection in form.’” —Lauren Hinkson and Susan Thompson

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James Turrell, VARDA (03), 2017, LED light, etched glass, shallow space, 71 × 53", 180.3 × 134.6 cm

Lightness of Being Art Basel Miami Beach December 6–9, 2018

Peter Alexander Larry Bell Mary Corse Robert Irwin Craig Kauffman John McCracken James Turrell Doug Wheeler Miami Beach Convention Center

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MAGICAL THINKING

COURTESY OF THE HAAS BROTHERS

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Parts of Palm, 2018

“This collection is meant to represent our full range of work from the beginning of our studio until now. The final room holds unseen artworks that are our attempt to incorporate all the things that make our version of art: Humor, humanity, meticulous process and passionate expression all inside a package of laboriously built fantasy objects. Our hope is that our world is as fun for those visiting it as it is for us to live inside of it.” —The Haas Brothers

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Paper Trail

COURTESY OF GALERIA NARA ROESLER

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Installation view of “Tomie Ohtake: At Her Fingertips,” at Galeria Nara Roesler through December 22.

“What this exhibition shows

is how Tomie Ohtake developed an approach to abstract painting that could bypass the apparent dilemma between reason and intuition that was staged between informalism and the Concrete and Neoconcrete movements in Brazil. She would abruptly rip or cut magazine pages in order to develop small painting studies that were faithfully followed. That way she could condense gesture in the early stages of composition and work methodically afterwards.” —Paulo Miyada, Chief Curator, Instituto Tomie Ohtake

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Photograph taken at The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, FIU, Miami

Participating Galleries Galleries # 303 Gallery 47 Canal A A Gentil Carioca Miguel Abreu Acquavella Altman Siegel Applicat-Prazan Alfonso Artiaco B Guido W. Baudach elba benítez Ruth Benzacar Bergamin & Gomide Berggruen Fondation Beyeler Blum & Poe Boers-Li Marianne Boesky Tanya Bonakdar Bortolami Gavin Brown Buchholz Bureau C Campoli Presti Canada Cardi Casa Triângulo David Castillo Cheim & Read James Cohan Sadie Coles HQ Continua Paula Cooper Corbett vs. Dempsey Pilar Corrias Chantal Crousel D DAN DC Moore Massimo De Carlo Di Donna E Andrew Edlin frank elbaz Essex Street

F Konrad Fischer Foksal Fortes D‘Aloia & Gabriel Peter Freeman Stephen Friedman G Gagosian Galerie 1900-2000 Gladstone Gmurzynska Elvira González Goodman Gallery Marian Goodman Bärbel Grässlin Richard Gray Garth Greenan Howard Greenberg Greene Naftali Karsten Greve Cristina Guerra Kavi Gupta H Hammer Hauser & Wirth Herald St Max Hetzler Hirschl & Adler Rhona Hoffman Edwynn Houk Xavier Hufkens I Ingleby J Alison Jacques rodolphe janssen Annely Juda K Kalfayan Casey Kaplan Kasmin kaufmann repetto Kayne Griffin Corcoran Sean Kelly Kerlin Anton Kern Kewenig Peter Kilchmann Kohn König Galerie

David Kordansky Andrew Kreps Krinzinger Kukje / Tina Kim kurimanzutto L Labor Landau Simon Lee Lehmann Maupin Tanya Leighton Lelong Lévy Gorvy Lisson Luhring Augustine M Magazzino Mai 36 Jorge Mara - La Ruche Matthew Marks Marlborough Mary-Anne Martin Philip Martin Barbara Mathes Mazzoleni Fergus McCaffrey Miles McEnery Greta Meert Anthony Meier Urs Meile Menconi + Schoelkopf Mendes Wood DM kamel mennour Metro Pictures Meyer Riegger Victoria Miro Mitchell-Innes & Nash Mnuchin Stuart Shave/Modern Art The Modern Institute mor charpentier N nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder Nagel Draxler Edward Tyler Nahem Helly Nahmad Francis M. Naumann Leandro Navarro neugerriemschneider Franco Noero David Nolan Nordenhake

O Nathalie Obadia OMR P P.P.O.W Pace Pace/MacGill Parra & Romero Franklin Parrasch Peres Projects Perrotin Petzel Plan B Gregor Podnar Eva Presenhuber Proyectos Monclova R Ratio 3 Almine Rech Regen Projects Nara Roesler Thaddaeus Ropac Michael Rosenfeld Lia Rumma S Salon 94 SCAI The Bathhouse Esther Schipper Thomas Schulte Marc Selwyn Sfeir-Semler Jack Shainman Sicardi Ayers Bacino Sies + Höke Sikkema Jenkins Jessica Silverman Simões de Assis Skarstedt SKE Fredric Snitzer Sperone Westwater Sprüth Magers Nils Stærk Standard (Oslo) Stevenson Luisa Strina T Templon Thomas Barbara Thumm Tilton Tokyo Gallery + BTAP Tornabuoni Travesía Cuatro

V Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois Van de Weghe Van Doren Waxter Vedovi Vermelho Susanne Vielmetter W Waddington Custot Nicolai Wallner Washburn Wentrup Michael Werner White Cube Jocelyn Wolff Z Zeno X David Zwirner Nova Arredondo \ Arozarena blank projects Carlos/Ishikawa Silvia Cintra + Box 4 Clearing dépendance Selma Feriani Gaga Christophe Gaillard Grimm Hanart TZ Instituto de visión JTT Levy Delval David Lewis Josh Lilley Linn Lühn Maisterravalbuena Morán Morán Nanzuka Lorcan O‘Neill Prometeogallery di Ida Pisani Revolver Roberts Projects Tyler Rollins Anita Schwartz Société Take Ninagawa Tiwani

Positions Antenna Space Maria Bernheim Bodega Callicoon Chapter NY Commonwealth and Council Thierry Goldberg Isla Flotante Madragoa Parque Jérôme Poggi SIM This Is No Fantasy + dianne tanzer Upstream Edition Alan Cristea Crown Point Gemini G.E.L. Carolina Nitsch Pace Prints Paragon Polígrafa Susan Sheehan STPI Two Palms ULAE Survey Sabrina Amrani Peter Blum Ceysson & Bénétière Tibor de Nagy Anat Ebgi espaivisor Eric Firestone Hackett Mill Haines Hales Jaqueline Martins Paci Richard Saltoun Louis Stern Venus Over Manhattan Walden

ANTHONY McCALL SPLIT SECOND

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GOING PUBLIC

BY HEATHER CORCORAN PORTRAIT BY NOMI ELLENSON

Since launching her company earlier this year Elizabeth Margulies is well on her way to carrying on her family’s tradition of making art accessible to the public.

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Do you remember the last time art surprised you? Now think about how it made you feel. That experience is precisely what Elizabeth Margulies is after: the wonder of discovering something unexpected. Since launching her company at the start of the year, the 31-year-old art advisor has unveiled her largest project yet: a public installation at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 28th Street in Manhattan. There, massive reproductions of David Salle’s paintings Swamp Music and Solar System (both 2013) soar over the intersection, printed onto the scaffolding netting surrounding the McKim, Mead & White bank building under redevelopment and integrated into the fabric of the city. “You rarely see art like that,” Margulies says. “It’s the most beautiful scaffolding in the world.” The images reach some 70 feet high and beneath them, two giant exhibition labels identify the works. It’s a nod to museum conventions, but for viewers, it’s a completely different experience, since, as Salle explains, “one encounters the paintings serendipitously, walking down the street. They’re just there—part of the urban landscape.” The project is the result of six months of careful planning, and a hint of what’s to come on the site. Behind the scrim, renovation is underway on the first-ever property from Flâneur Hospitality, a new hotel brand set to debut in 2019, for which Margulies is currently building an art collection. With its focus on creating a cultural moment, the Flâneur project represents a new wave of semi-public spaces where art is as essential as impactful interior design and high-end amenities—a growing venue for art Margulies is especially suited to tap. “More and more developers are realizing that art creates cultural capital and sophistication,” says Margulies, who in previous roles worked with artists like Michael Craig-Martin and Kenny Scharf on public art projects and brand collaborations, and licensed reproductions of works by Jasper Johns and Frank Stella to appear on the television show Billions. Though Margulies is hesitant to name names, the forthcoming Flâneur programming will be a physical reflection of her curatorial approach, with art everywhere from the lobby and restaurant to guest rooms. She imagines work by blue-chip names hanging next to sitespecific commissions from emerging and overlooked voices: “a very diverse group of artists, different ethnicities, different races, different genders, people from all over the world,” she says. “I want everything to have a unique story and idea behind it. It’s this element of discovery, finding and learning new things. It’s more than meets the eye—you have to look closer.” Though she’s only just branching out on her own as a consultant, the move seems natural for someone who has been advising friends on purchases for as long as she can remember. After all, her father is Martin Margulies, the Miami real estate developer and ARTnews “Top 200” collector, and she grew up surrounded by one of the world’s preeminent private collections. “There was really no plan B” when it came to choosing art as a career, says the younger Margulies, who studied design at SVA before earning her master’s degree at Sotheby’s and doing a stint on a shortlived art-world reality show that she prefers to leave in the past. But the move that most clearly presaged her career was actually her father’s, who, two decades ago, opened the Margulies Collection at the Warehouse to the public in Miami’s Wynwood Arts District. “It was the first real example I saw of someone sharing their art with the world,” she says. And as Margulies develops her own approach for bringing art to the public realm, this idea has become something of her mission statement: “Art should be about inclusion, not exclusion.”

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What do you do when

you are trained as a painter and your main medium is oil, but as a mother of three you have to work from home for many years without a proper ventilation system? For Jamea Richmond-Edwards, the solution came through resourcefulness and ingenuity. As an answer to one of her dilemmas, the sculptural quality of the faces in her work is rendered by a simple ballpoint pen. “Ink provided a similar permanence to oil. It isn’t fluid, but I love the rawness of it.” If one looks up close at any of these portraits, the word “rawness” doesn’t come to mind—the faces made by Richmond-Edwards look as if they were 3-D and their eyes gaze back at their spectator with defiance and determination. A second inventive solution gave birth to the collages that form the bodies of her subjects. Combinations of layered paper in hundreds of different patterns and colors are glued onto her canvases, whose backgrounds are made of glitter, acrylic and spray paint. Richmond-Edwards pays homage to her upbringing on the West Side of Detroit during a time characterized by a lavish dress-up culture turned up to the nth degree seen through the style of hip-hop figures like Biggie Smalls, Ice Berg and Puff Daddy. She confesses that she was a fan of Coogi sweaters, the Australian brand whose kaleidoscopic knits inspired by intricate aboriginal art were popularized by rappers of the ’90s. “The collages represented a reappearance of an interest and fascination I have with fashion. This flamboyancy is inspired by my mother and the women in my family.” In Detroit, people used fashion as escapism, as a way of expressing oneself and of asserting power through clothes. Their garments were sometimes the real thing; sometimes they were knock-offs. There is a nod here to the “boostin’” culture (a practice of buying fake clothes and accessories and selling them at hair salons or in boosters’ homes), which

was common in Detroit 20 years ago and is what made fashion icon and stylist Dapper Dan both an infamous character in ’90s Harlem and a darling of high-end brands today. The women represented in many of her paintings are self-portraits with altered features: they have their hair styled in cornrows and their expressions are solemn and intense. “I look younger than my age,” says the 36-year-old artist, “and I want to be taken seriously. I don’t like the dismissiveness that comes when people think I am a child. My women are resilient and stoic. Since colonial times, the history of black people in this country has been filled with adversity and we’ve always found ways to overcome it.” Now a resident of Washington D.C., Richmond-Edwards explains that when she left Detroit 18 years ago to pursue her BFA at Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi, and then her MFA at Howard University she realized how extravagant the style of her hometown could be, and as consequence, has toned down her own (even though when we met she was wearing leopard print jeans, snakeskin flats and a white lace blouse complete with a thick gold chain necklace). Richmond-Edwards is having quite a year. Following her sold-out solo show at Kravets Wehby Gallery in New York this past April, she has several works at the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, on view as part of their “New Acquisitions” exhibition. Richmond-Edwards now has a studio outside her home and is devoting her time exclusively to her practice. Before we part ways, she tells me “what these pieces symbolize is that there is always hope.” And there isn’t a better moment to seize the positive outlook offered by the colorful promise of a better tomorrow that is woven into the multicultural narratives of her work.

PAINTING AS PERSISTENCE

BY MARIA BRITO

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COURTESY KRAVETS WEHBY GALLERY

Jamea Richmond-Edwards’s Archetype of a 5 Star, 2018

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A MATTER OF TIME

Rujeko Hockley: Zoe, how are you? What are you working on at the moment? Zoe Buckman: Hi Ru! At the moment I’m working on new embroidered text pieces. I’ve been collecting vintage tea towels and creating these banner-like works. The texts I’m using are snippets of things I’ve said, written, heard or read in the past year pertaining to sexual violence, bleeding or BDSM. This work is part of a new series in which I’m using the same fabrics to create clusters of boxing gloves. It’s very much coming out of a time of reflection and introspection for me around my own experiences with violence as well as the experiences of those around me. Ru, tell me about curating the Biennial! Is there anything that has come out of all this hard work you’ve been doing that you didn’t foresee and expect? What have some of the challenges and highlights been? RH: Your new work sounds amazing, Zoe! Definitely timely—though I kind of hate how that descriptor is used for any work that engages the contemporary, especially on sociopolitical terms. It’s never not been “timely” to address much of what you consider in your work, and this is true of most political art—our issues as a society are not new. In any case, I’m looking forward to seeing where the work goes. As always, I appreciate your voice and perspective! We need it. As far as the Biennial goes, it’s kind of hard to talk about with any clarity because it’s ongoing! There have been many incredible highlights, chief among them the same as is true of almost every exhibition I’ve ever worked on: spending time with artists, talking about their work, and then thinking together about how best to present it. It’s an immense privilege and one I hold very dear—the best part of my job and the best part of my biennial year! The depth of attention and generosity of spirit that artists bring to bear is always both humbling and arresting. The challenges are mundane and to be expected—being on the road and away from home a lot is hard; juggling multiple projects on similar timelines is hard; having to make difficult, sometimes impossible choices is hard; and—surprise!— being pregnant while doing all of the above is hard! But, none of it is impossible and I’m never doing it alone, which makes a huge difference. I’m very lucky to have an incredibly smart, kind and generous collaborator on this project—Jane Panetta. We work really hard and we have fun and that’s as it should be. Something I’ve thought a lot about in this process is what our historical moment requires, both on the macro and micro scales. So, what does the world need/ask of us, but also what do our communities—and thinking especially of artists here—need/ask of us? How would you answer those questions, Zoe? ZB: Ah Ru... I’m so proud of you. The sensitive, compassionate way you receive

and respond to work is an artist’s dream (believe!), and on top of that you bring such vast knowledge and a brave way of drawing new parallels. I’m so glad you’re here doing what you’re doing—thank you. And on top of that, you’re growing a human. As we speak. It’s amazing! Getting to your question... it’s a big one, and my feelings change daily on the matter. I think we need to make space for the new, and for that we need freedom. We need to fully accept that the systems and judgments and ways of being that we’ve accepted and even taken part in, are broken and not serving us as a whole. But for real change to take place we have to shed the old, and that could mean the comfortable and familiar. And so it’s not going to be easy, and it’s going to incremental. What do you think? RH: Thanks so much for the votes of confidence! It means the world. As we know, real life is hard and things are sometimes fraught—complete with moments of doubt, burnout, failure and disillusion (no matter what Instagram might have us believe!), so it’s encouraging to hear. Especially from someone like you, Zoe, who is the epitome of #momgoals for me, especially in terms of your relationship with your child and balancing parenting, work and your own needs—tryna get like you in 2019 and beyond! I think you’re absolutely right re: what’s required for real (and lasting) change. Lately, I have been thinking in really concrete terms, especially in relation to compensation and security—maybe because the big picture is so overwhelming and insecure and frankly scary right now. So for example, among other things artists need affordable studio space and to be paid for their work (because they have families and expenses just like everyone else and “exposure” is not a thing). Art professionals need to be paid decently and to not have there be this assumption that we do our work out of altruism (or that we are independently wealthy and so salary doesn’t matter). Women need equal pay, and the work of all women (including in their own or others’ homes) needs to be valued equally. These aren’t small or easy things to fix necessarily, but they are tangible—like we can change them in our own lives for and with the people we work with. ZB: Precisely! “Exposure” is not income. I can’t tell you how many lessons I’ve learned to that effect since starting out. The lack of support and decent pay for most art professionals (particularly women) is bewildering to me, Ru. I think we’re going to have to start refusing to do things for free and let that start a new model for the next generation of female artists and curators. Basically: let’s hold hands and jump. It’s time. RH: What else is there to say? It’s time.

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Curator Rujeko Hockley and artist Zoe Buckman are friends in and beyond the art world. culturedmag.com 137

Thank you!

$8,731,600 was raised on September 21, 2018 during Art for One Drop, a contemporary art auction held at Phillips Auction House in New York City. The One Drop Foundation wishes to dedicate the record-breaking success of this event to the generosity of the artists, the entire team at Phillips Auction House, the galleries, partners and collectors. This result is just the beginning; all the proceeds will fund One Drop’s life-changing projects in Latin America, providing sustainable access to safe water to more than 200,000 people in dire need.

Together, we turn art into water.

Participating Artists Rita Ackermann David Altmejd Ai Weiwei Cory Arcangel Nairy Baghramian Hernan Bas Walead Beshty Carol Bove Ed Clark Olafur Eliasson Tracey Emin Charles Gaines Jennifer Guidi Andreas Gursky David Hammons Camille Henrot Damien Hirst Jenny Holzer Thomas Houseago Gary Hume Anne Imhof Rashid Johnson Wyatt Kahn Anish Kapoor Ellsworth Kelly

Barbara Kruger Louise Lawler Tony Lewis Glenn Ligon Nate Lowman Sarah Lucas Mark Manders Paul McCarthy Vik Muniz Catherine Opie Gabriel Orozco Angel Otero Jean-Michel Othoniel Nicolas Party Adam Pendleton Giuseppe Penone Rob Pruitt Ugo Rondinone Sterling Ruby Gary Simmons Lorna Simpson Josh Smith Do Ho Suh Kara Walker Christopher Wool

Galleries Galerie Buchholz David Zwirner Galerie Eva Presenhuber Gladstone Gallery Hauser & Wirth kamel mennour Kurimanzutto Lehmann Maupin Lisson Gallery Luhring Augustine Marian Goodman Gallery Massimo De Carlo Matthew Marks Gallery

Metro Pictures Pace Gallery Paula Cooper Gallery Perrotin Regen Projects Sadie Coles HQ Sikkema Jenkins & Co. Tanya Bonakdar Gallery Tilton Gallery Victoria Miro White Cube Xavier Hufens

Organization Committee Kimberly ChangMathieu Miety Heiden Philipp Kaiser

Pippa Cohen Sarah Watson Scott Nussbaum

Media Partner

The after-party was imagined by Variety Worldwide and made possible by

FANTASY LAND

“It’s been a very long day,” Paola Pivi exhales as we grab an outdoor table at a wellappointed café in Miami's Design District. Though the nomadic artist hasn't lived in her native Milan for some time, she effortlessly retains a Milanese sensibility. Dressed in a jacket and skirt by Maurizio Pecoraro and metallic Jimmy Choos, her warm eyes framed by large Thierry Lasry glasses, Pivi explains that she has spent the afternoon installing one of her iconic feathered bears in the Margulies Warehouse; the seasoned collector had purchased the piece some months back. Since July, Pivi has been renting a flat along Collins Avenue in preparation for her solo show, “Art with a view,” at The Bass. The culmination of her efforts is a whimsical explosion of color, texture and movement featuring her most iconic works alongside newly debuted pieces. “I do every show like it's the last show of my life,” says Pivi, whose practice rarely settles on any one medium or theme, but instead ushers the viewer through Pivi's furtive imagination. Born to a family of doctors and engineers, Pivi's upbringing was quite rigid—and a propensity for order and discipline is visible in her work. Her deft precision is evident in everything from her meticulous research to her technical prowess and she often takes months, even years, to complete her work. Untitled (pearls) (beautiful day) (2015), for example, features more than 370,000 real pearls, painstakingly hand-stitched together in a gradient of beige and delicate blush. Lies (2018), a poignant work conceived in 2013 and realized over years for her show at The Bass, flashes roughly 40,000 images of quotidian life on 92 television screens. A series of blatant falsehoods are repeated on an endless loop by a deadpan voice, enveloping the viewer in a nightmarish cycle of fake news. Pivi's oeuvre defies categorization. It is instead driven by the artist's own internal musings. For Pivi, nothing is outside the realm of possibility: “When I have a vision, it's something that I just need to do.”

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Paola Pivi’s show at The Bass includes a group of her famously feathered bears, an installation of 80 mattresses and a video of goldfish taking flight on an airplane.

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BY JASMIN HERNANDEZ PORTRAIT BY DICKO CHAN

“I’m not looking at other pop stars when I think about my ideas or what I believe in or what set I’m going to play. I’m creating my own world,” Venus X proclaims on a Friday afternoon in early October. The founder of the roving, iconic New York underground dance party GHE20G0TH1K, which has brought queer, black and brown folks to soul search on the dancefloor under innovative DJs for nearly a decade, the 32-year-old is a cultural connector. The diversity of blackness, beyond rap music, is celebrated full-on at GHE20G0TH1K. “We have a lot of systematically programmed ways of assuming people will be, so there were always these questions about who could be goth. Are Latinos allowed to be goth? Are black people allowed to be goth? Are they inherently goth because of their trajectory as oppressed, marginalized, people?” Venus X conceived of the GHE20G0TH1K universe in 2009 with early collaborator and Hood By Air cofounder Shayne Oliver, breathing life into New York’s bland, corporate and fading nightlife scene of the 2010s. With Latinx roots, Venus X was born Jazmin Venus Soto in Washington Heights to a Dominican mother and an Ecuadorian father. Nightlife was in her career DNA early on. She worked at the 40/40 Club before a friend offered her a monthly night at a Brooklyn bar which quickly metamorphosized into GHE20G0TH1K. The musical genesis of the party initially consisted of goth, punk and dark hip-hop and now includes juke, dembow and house.

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GHE20G0TH1K’s extended family of DJs, like Physical Therapy, Kingdom, Total Freedom and Mike Q, played a myriad of sonic sensations for audiences, complemented by Venus X’s chopping of Aaliyah, Siouxie Sioux, ballroom beats and reggaeton. Then the celebrities—like Alexander Wang, Diplo, and M.I.A. (Venus X opened for M.I.A.’s Matangi 2013–14 tour)—started to come, and other stars appropriated the party’s aesthetic. GHE20G0TH1K turns 10 in 2019 and has already garnered Venus X global visibility, yet she still navigates shrewdly and independently with recent projects, including spinning for Dior and Versace, curating the 2017–18 lineup for MoMA PS1’s Warm Up festival and designing a Nike Air Max sneaker. “When we started, there wasn’t really the intention to be musicians and have fame. We were creating a community where we made sense to one another. We didn’t want to become mainstream, but we wanted our ideas to become mainstream, our craziness. Even though we’re not super famous, it’s obvious we’ve had an impact and people know we exist.” “GHE20G0TH1K created and owned its own sound,” says fashion designer Telfar Clemens, a contributor to the party’s ecosystem. “In the early days of GHE20G0TH1K Venus X, Shayne Oliver and Daniel Fisher had a special way of mixing music of all genres to create a new sound that attracted a new atmosphere in New York club culture. GHE20G0TH1K influenced popular music, high

fashion and lifestyle specific to New York City.” Other pillars in the GHE20G0TH1K cosmos include the Planet X boutique, which is still going strong after two pop-up locations in Bushwick and Chinatown. “I learned a lot about retail and having a brick-and-mortar location,” Venus X shares. “Now that we’re constantly evolving and the location of the store is meant to be transient, that’s kind of like how I am.” More pop-ups, a website and a new location are in the works. Venus X established GHE20G0TH1K Records in 2016, releasing LSDXOXO’s Fuck Marry Kill, but is taking a pause to reconsider its approach because, as Venus X explains, “There’s infrastructure you have to build in order to do that the right way. For me, as a young woman of color, there is really no mentor or guidebook that I can refer to.” As we conclude our conversation, Venus X has a packed weekend ahead. In a few hours she’ll be spinning at Schimanski in Williamsburg, alongside core peers like Asmara and Byrell the Great. Two days later, she’s the headline DJ on the main stage at the inaugural Hypefest, Hypebeast’s festival of ideas, music and culture. “We’re almost going to be 10 years old, this is our ninth year. We have to organize. It’s all within reach. I think natural evolution is better than forced evolution.” With Venus X at the helm, GHE20G0TH1K’s creative rebellion has kept the grit of New York intact in the midst of the faux Instagram reality we’re steeped in.

MAKEUP BY MICHAELA BOSCH; HAIR BY SUSY

Venus X wears a Poche Hat. The DJ and cultural connector is bringing her dance party to the next level, with a pop-up boutique and a record label in the works. culturedmag.com 143

THE TYRANT FEARS THE POET

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On the first Friday of October, Amanda Gorman stood at the podium at Tercentenary Theatre in Harvard Yard for the inauguration of University president Lawrence S. Bacow, the school’s 29th president in its almost 400-year existence. Gorman, a Harvard junior and America’s first Youth Poet Laureate, had been asked to deliver a poem for the occasion, but if she were feeling the weight of history on her tiny shoulders, you never would have known it. She titled her dynamic Hamilton-esque riff on Bacow— who is the son of immigrants—and the role of Harvard in the world “Making Mountains As We Run.” When the mind is free When we take another look We see that the books are open The silence of a blank page broken By truth being shared, written, spoken… Gorman was referring to the Harvard coat of arms—a shield bearing three open books which spell out the word Veritas—but she was also speaking directly to her personal experience as a poet and a messenger of difficult truths about race, gender and discrimination. Gorman is charming, disarming and barely over five feet tall, depending on how she chooses to style her hair. It is not a stretch to imagine her speaking at her own inauguration some day—January 20, 2037 to be precise. She recently declared her intention to run for POTUS in an interview in the New York Times and is already working on hashtags for the social media campaign. Gorman grew up in Los Angeles and was raised by a single mother, who is a writer and a public school English teacher. As one of a set of twins born prematurely (her sister Gabrielle is a filmmaker), Gorman experienced developmental issues, most notably an auditory processing disorder that manifests itself in a speech impediment that she contends with to this day. Rs in particular are the bane of her existence. She had to learn to speak English, she says, as if it were a foreign language and was often mistaken for a transplant from another country. The feeling of being an alien permeated her childhood. For the self-described “plain weird” kid who sat by herself in a corner of the playground writing her own dictionary while the other kids did normal kid stuff, words were everything. The first fully formed poem she wrote was an exploration of her own loneliness. “I was an extremely sad third grader,” she recalls. “Very cute, but very sad. The interesting thing about it was that I knew I was sad

and depressed. The way I dealt with it was to write.” When Gorman describes the path that brought her to being named the country’s first Youth Poet Laureate she does so in the third person, as if speaking about a made-up character whose destiny she has only begun to shape. “I’ll give you the SparkNotes version, chapters one through eight,” she tells me, speaking from her dorm room in Leverett House. “You have this young black girl who is really passionate about language and stories, and around late middle school or early high school she makes a decision to transfer from songwriting to poetry because she can’t really sing.” Singing ability aside, Gorman has found her voice—as a poet, as an activist and as an unapologetic young black woman living in the era of movements like #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo and Parkland-inspired #NeverAgain. Earlier this year she took the stage alongside Hamilton vets Mandy Gonzalez and Christopher Jackson to perform at a fundraising event for Amigos de Jesús, an orphanage in Honduras. (Her original poem, which she composed in both English and Spanish, received a standing ovation.) When she is not poet-ing, as she likes to put it, she is Amanda-ing, meaning: registering people to vote through the Harvard Votes Challenge, giving young people a platform to speak about the future of America through a partnership with the activist design lab Amplifier, studying for a degree in sociology and writing opinion pieces for the New York Times newsletter The Edit (her topics have ranged from how to cook for yourself in college to the Kavanaugh hearings and their effect on consent on school campuses). Oh, and then there is that impending presidential campaign. “I need an auto response on my email that says, ‘I’m studying. I’m in school. Catch up with you later,’” Gorman says with a laugh, but only half-joking. “Amanda gives me hope for the future,” a writer I know who has worked with her told me. But while Gorman seems to embrace her role as a voice of a generation, she stops short when it comes to letting her generation bear that burden alone. “I don’t know what it is that makes the little kinky hairs on the back of my head stand up, but I think it’s the idea that we’re saviors of some sort,” she says. “The language around ‘you’re going to save us’ is different from saying ‘we’re going to save ourselves collectively.’ The pronoun adds a lot of pressure. I think we’re going to save our country together.” She laughs, ever the poet, zeroing on a metaphor. “I’m happy the older generation is sitting back and letting us take the wheel. But while I’m driving the car, maybe you can help people cross the street.”

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At only 20 years old, Amanda Gorman is an accomplished writer, poet and activist set on running for president in 2036. culturedmag.com 145

March 29 – 31, 2019 Photograph taken at Asia Society Hong Kong Center

AI WEIWEI ZODIAC On View Through January 5, 2019

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THE STILL AMONGST THE CHAOS

PORTRAIT BY ASHLEY NOELLE

Birth. Intercourse. Pettibon. Nipples. Guston. Repetition. These are just a few of the things Austyn Weiner cites as influences, though she identifies photography as the root of her work. Her approach embodies a paradox of flux and fixation—engaging in focused explorations of motifs like serial lines and drooping flowers, yet ever ready to depart onto the next means of expression. Weiner’s works for her Miami show, opening December 4, are an entanglement of chaos, evolution and the present—another shift in the way she seeks to represent the world she sees. You have lived in Miami, New York and Los Angeles. In what ways is your work influenced by the different places you’ve called home? The idea of home is preserved within me. I knew from the get-go that in order to feel comfortable with who I was and what I was doing I needed those familiar characteristics of home to exist within myself—me as the vessel. I am my home, and my work is only a translation of that. This year my travels brought me East; from the hillsides of India to the steps of Varanasi and into the refugee camps of Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. These external experiences, as well as the internal, are ever present in this body of work. What is the origin of the flower motif? The flower that recurs in my works is a representation of the iconographic and often ironic ideals of the female gender. They were inspired by sitting in a garden, drawing in rural France. You work in several different mediums. How do they interact with each other and what medium do you find yourself most drawn to? The various mediums I use coexist in a way that is similar to a type of mating ritual. They dance, they interact, they attract and they repel one another. At the base of that process, however, is my unwavering connection to my photography. I believe that unconsciously, much of my understanding of composition, order, and color stem from there. As a native Miamian, what is it like coming back for Art Basel? I am just happy to be home and contributing to the place that raised me. How have you seen the artistic and cultural landscape of the city change in your time spent here and away? The biggest change I seem to notice is that the transient nature of Miami itself has in the past made it difficult for concrete culture to build. That is no longer the case with small businesses opening, museums staking their ground and, most importantly, the formation and growth of artist communities. I think Miami is becoming the multicultural epicenter of the United States, always shifting and changing with ample diversity and a unique foundation to build upon. What was the inspiration for the works in your show at Bill Brady Gallery? I was thinking about evolution. The journey from ape to woman. Animal instinct. Shapes mimic that narrative. Only these figures are present. They are not evolving

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Austyn Weiner in her LA studio with Post Apocalyptic Midsummer’s Night Dream, 2018.

nor regressing, but standing still amongst the chaos. These works are about what it means to be a woman at war, both internally and externally, in the 21st century. Where do these works fall in the evolutionary line of your practice? Nothing is linear. Up and down and around we go. I’d say it is absolute mayhem, and sometimes I do it to myself. It is the thrill and the chase of creating new challenges and giving myself no choice but to find my way out of them. Being lost is equally as important in my practice as being found. This work is about that. It is about the explosion and implosion of the present, my present. These figures presented in the form of canvas—we have a long history. This is just the first time they are coming to life. They are old friends, with personality and presence reaching far beyond my hand. Are there any moments or occurrences you can identify as signaling a shift in your approach to your work figuratively, conceptually, in choice of medium? Whenever I move spaces physically, both an external and internal shift occurs. Oftentimes I consciously throw myself into those shifts in order to propel myself forward—to see things differently. There are also literal moments beyond my control; the entering and exiting of figures in my life, the unexpected and the unplanned. I am empathic and I can be impressionable. I take it all in, the good and the bad, and that makes for an interesting ride. But there is no other way for me. My work bursts out in between the cracks of these shifts. I have grown to appreciate and love that about myself rather than fight it. What kind of experience do you want people to have with your work? Something I struggle with is that exact notion: the idea of control. In the age of social media, we try and try to retain absolute control of how people see us. Everything is about affirmation or rejection, when really we are the ones judging the most. Of course as artists we hope our initial intent in making the work comes through, but I try my very best to let go of that. I don’t want to be involved in that experience at all. I want to be honest first and foremost, and if nothing else, I hope that comes through.

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

SURFACE AND SYNERGY ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

Miami’s skyline expands outwards and upwards every year, accumulating block after block of impressive luxury buildings, each striving to stand out in the city’s growing urban landscape. While the eye immediately goes to the exteriors, crafted by architectural icons like Zaha Hadid and Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, the interiors of these spaces are just as preciously curated and developed to create a harmonious synergy between the outside and the inside. Interior designer Pierre-Yves Rochon is widely recognized for his ability to do so—from the Waldorf Astoria in Beverly Hills to the Ritz Carlton in Tianjin, China. Ana Cristina Defortuna, vice president of the Miami-based real estate organization, Fortune International Group, sat with Rochon to get down to the details of his practice—namely the interior of Jade Signature, FIG’s Herzog & de Meuron–designed residential building in Brickell. Ana Cristina Defortuna: How long did the process take from start to finish? Pierre-Yves Rochon: I believe the project lasted about four years—but when you love something, you don’t count! ACD: How did the building’s setting on the beach influence your design decisions? PYR: It’s clear that the star here is the ocean—the architecture highlights transparency and views, and the white helps translate the brightness of the beach and the ocean. The harmony of colors based on blues and whites or greens, beiges and whites are like a mirror reflecting the ocean and the beach, with lush gardens surrounding the building. ACD: A vast majority of your recent work is more traditional and embraces that look. How did you adjust yourself to the very modern and dynamic city of Miami for this project? PYR: Everyone seems to forget that at the beginning of my career, I did more contemporary projects. It was later, after I became interested in all types of styles, that I became involved with more traditional projects. However, creativity is independent of style. Regarding Jade Signature and the Herzog & de Meuron team, I have always dreamed of working with great

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architects. At the beginning of my career, I was able to work with the late and great Brazilian architect, Oscar Niemeyer. In this project, I felt his influence and the spirit of South America and Miami with the white chosen for this building—it felt like the signature component. ACD: You’ve designed more than 200 spaces and never do the same thing. How do you keep it fresh in terms of where you look for your inspiration and references? PYR: This has been the DNA of PYR ever since I started the company. We always want to do different projects. That’s the real creativity. To sustain this is a great challenge, because it is a permanent state of questioning yourself. Being in fashion or trendy does not interest me. Being yourself is more important than being fashionable. ACD: Herzog & de Meuron’s architectural design for Jade Signature is strong and beautiful. How were you able to create a seamless connection from the outside to the inside so that when residents arrive, it feels like home? PYR: From day one, I liked very much the architecture of Herzog & de Meuron. I had to be humble and respectful and understand how to complement the building with the interior experience. This starts with the building’s architectural “ribbon” to which we added curved interior forms as an extension of the exterior. Respect for simple materials, such as terrazzo, also helps translate the exterior design language. ACD: How was your experience working on the Jade Signature project with Fortune International Group? PYR: For a project to succeed, the interior designer needs a good client. With you and your husband, Edgardo, this was the case; without you, the project would not even exist. It takes courage to choose a new architectural form, completely different from the traditional architecture of Miami and all the glass towers. When you chose PYR for the interiors, I knew the challenge would then be to create a soft residential interior that respected the exterior. The collaboration was wonderful because of the confidence and respect for each member of the team. With that, we could only succeed.

PHOTO BY BRETT HUFFZEIGER

Established in 1979, Pierre-Yves Rochon’s design firm, PYR, focuses primarily on luxury hotels and residential buildings. Ana Cristina Defortuna has been following Rochon’s work since they met in Paris in the early 2000s.

*Cigar & Spirits Magazine February 2018 Issue

**June 2018 Issue

CRAFTED WITH OVER 325 YEARS O F N O L E T FA M I LY E X P E R I E N C E D I S C OV E R M O R E AT N O L E T S G I N .C O M

EYE IN THE SKY

“Virginia is the kind of curator who is always there for you,” says artist Jenny Holzer. “Once, I was waiting alone in line at the White House, feeling nervous, and there she was—calm, kind, much fresher than the gold brocade.” Virginia Shore, the former deputy director and chief curator of Art in Embassies and now an independent advisor, commissioned 13 artists, including Holzer, to make work for the new high-security American Embassy in London. Holzer’s pieces consist of quotes inscribed in stone on the embassy’s walls, such as Queen Elizabeth II’s adage that “the waging of peace is the hardest form of leadership.” Empowering living artists to manifest monumental works is one of Shore’s fortes. She and Mark Bradford started discussing his epic 32-panel painting for the atrium of the Embassy more than four years ago. Titled We the People, the multicolored work includes the entire text of the US Constitution. “Virginia is cool, but tenacious,” says Bradford. “She fights a good fight with the government.” The seismic shifts to American foreign policy over the past two years have altered the meaning of the work. “But we don’t march backwards,” declares Bradford. “I tell myself that every day.” Having worked with some 6,000 artists and hung more than 10,000 works in 200 embassies and consulates, Shore has probably overseen more acquisitions, loans and major commissions than any other curator in America. When Shore joined Art in Embassies (which is overseen by the US State Department) some 20 years ago, the ambassadors had final say over the art in their realm. One wanted her to execute a “family fun and farming” theme. Another was keen to install photos of his wife in 50 different Gone with the Wind–style ball gowns. Luckily, in 2005, the State Department gave curators the responsibility to conceive and execute art acquisitions. “We expected battles around what was culturally important,” explains Shore, who has a BA in Political Science and an MA in Art History. “So, we’d do a lot of research to find the relevant messages for the region.” In Madagascar, deforestation is an issue, so the embassy hosted an exhibition of photography focused on the environment. In Islamabad, the embassy displays many works by female artists to help open up a discussion about women’s issues. “The art is political, but not so much that it would be inappropriate,” explains Shore. “It represents American culture and values, not the shifting politics of the day.” One of Shore’s innovations was the inclusion of art from the host country. “Before the art was all about raising the American flag,” she explains. “Now it’s more like extending an olive branch and transforming

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these buildings into more inviting environments.” In this capacity, for example, Brazilian artist Vik Muniz created a 90-foot-long mosaic, depicting both Brazilian and American forests, at the American embassy in Brasilia. Despite the rewarding sense of purpose, Shore recently left the State Department. She resisted the exodus after the 2016 presidential election to complete her work on new embassies in London, Kabul, Moscow, Islamabad and Jakarta. “I’ve worked through the politics of four White House administrations,” she says. “I stayed as long as I could bear. I’m still keen to curate art in ways that open people’s eyes to political issues, particularly the environment, race and gender.” As a freelance curator and art advisor, Shore is already making an impact. She envisioned and executed 25 art projects as part of the Washington, DC arts festival “By the People.” Dubbed an empathy or democracy fest, the first edition this past summer was a local affair—albeit with the involvement of globally recognized artists like Nick Cave, Imran Qureshi and Jenny Sabin. “Next year,” says Shore, “we hope to spread the word so it becomes a destination event with national and international pull.” Shore is also consulting for Laurene Powell Jobs’s Emerson Collective, working on outreach for Carne y Arena, a complex virtual reality installation created by Alejandro Iñárritu, the director of such films as The Revenant and Birdman. The work, which adopts the perspective of immigrants trying to cross the Mexican border, was the first VR project to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival. Kathryn Hall, the former Ambassador to Austria, who, with her husband, owns Hall winery in Rutherford and St. Helena, CA, is another client. When the Halls met Shore almost 20 years ago, they were collecting wellestablished names such as Agnes Martin and Gerhard Richter. “Virginia opened our eyes to a broader spectrum,” says Hall. “I love the idea that we can include lesser-known or even unknown artists. It gives the collection more depth. It makes it less about us and our friends, and more about supporting the broader art community.” Connecting people through art is one of Shore’s missions. Living in the DC suburb of Kalorama, two blocks from Barack and Michelle Obama and one block away from Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, Shore is ever cognizant of the need to “wage peace,” as Elizabeth II puts it. Indeed, Shore believes deeply in cultural diplomacy. “It is an honor,” she says, “and also exciting and meaningful, to deploy the soft power of art to initiate conversations in all sorts of places.”

Virginia Shore was instrumental in bringing Rachel Whiteread’s work to the US Embassy in London. Opposite: Untitled (Domestic), 2002, from Whiteread’s survey show at the National Gallery of Art in DC. culturedmag.com 153

Less than a month after being

AN APPETITE FOR OBJECTS

appointed curator of contemporary design at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Alexandra Cunningham Cameron greets me at her office, having just returned from a quick tour of the Guggenheim a few blocks down Fifth Avenue. Donning a pleated sweatshirt, loose denim pants and a pair of lustrous boots, the Miami-born design expert has the unmistakable aura of a tastemaker and the schedule of a multitasker. Her eyes sparkle when she mentions recent trips to Cognac and the London Design Biennale, where Cooper Hewitt won the Emotional States Medal. “We associate with design and objects at levels we don’t even notice, as opposed to visual art which programs us to have a particular experience,” she says. “Design is an equalizer with its familiarity and function, and contributing to its appreciation at a time when design can save the world feels especially powerful.” As Cooper Hewitt’s inaugural Edward and Helen Hintz Secretarial Scholar, Cunningham Cameron takes up a new position at the country’s only museum devoted exclusively to historic and contemporary design. Upon taking up the role, Cunningham Cameron’s first task was to begin familiarizing herself with Cooper Hewitt’s collection of more than 200,000 objects in order to grasp the foundations of the institution, which reopened its doors in late 2014 with a grand renovation project at its historic Andrew Carnegie Mansion. This new chapter introduced the museum to a younger crowd, thanks to an edgy exhibition program and emphasis on social engagement strategies that merge design and technology. “There is a nuance in making accessibility effective at a design museum and, here, we find access points for many types of visitors,” says Cunningham Cameron. She emphasizes the importance of the language used for communication in our data-driven age, noting with excitement that the museum’s dominant demographic is between 18 and 34 years old. In Miami, Cunningham Cameron was the curatorial advisor on commissions with Urs Fischer, Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec and Philippe Malouin in the Design District, introducing some of the most visible public design projects to the city, where she also served as the creative director of the Design Miami fairs. “The majority of my background is in developing temporary exhibitions in addition to public works for active use,” the 37-year-old explains. “In my current role, I have become more conscious of immediate responses, but also the importance of preserving the present for the future. We can experience the present by looking at a molten glass pot from the 4th century or one made yesterday in a Brooklyn studio.” Walking through Marguerita Mergentime’s mesmerizing tablecloths in the museum’s ongoing exhibition about table arrangement, the curator describes her interest in delving into design experiences from the Americas after spending years in Western Europe and Asia. Revealing a bit about the museum’s next triennial—which opens in May with a focus on nature—she asks, “How do we present people with extremely complex projects and ideas, including a few created in laboratories?” There is a weight to representing the nation’s design museum, and Cunningham Cameron is ready for the job. “There are vernaculars for understanding design in each American city, and I’d like to tap into all those inclinations in this institution,” she says.

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Recently appointed as curator of contemporary design at Cooper Hewitt, Alexandra Cunningham Cameron brings a global perspective to the national museum.

Artist Markus Haase’s monumental 12-foot handcrafted dining table features a sculpted American black walnut top resting on a hand-cast bronze tripod, supported by a carved limestone base. Each unique chair is individually sculpted and then cast in mirror polished bronze in the artist’s New York City studio. The custom chandelier is composed of five, hand-sculpted, bleached ash “branches” embedded with handcarved white onyx encasing dimmable LED lights.

80 Lafayette Street, New York NY 10013 // 212-673-0531

Cynthia Talmadge : 1076 Madison November 2 - December 23, 2018

56 Henry

www.56henry.nyc Exhibition Design by Charlap Hyman and Herrero

Art. Design. Now. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale November 2018, New York Carmen Herrera Blanco y verde, 1966 © Carmen Herrera

Visit us at phillips.com

Enquiries contemporary@phillips.com

SOME FRAME ART. WE FRAME A PICTURE PERFECT LA STORY. 297 re-imagined rooms. Four distinct culinary adventures from Chef José Andrés. Two sparkling rooftop pools. One unforgettable stay. This is SLS Hotel, a Luxury Collection Hotel, Beverly Hills.

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B A L H A R B O U R S H O P S / S H O P S AT M ER R I C K PA R K / TO W N C EN T ER AT B O C A R ATO N / T H E G A R D EN S M A L L / WAT ER S I D E S H O P S

UNFOLD

PLAY, PERSIST BY SONDRIA PORTRAIT BY ALIMA JENNINGS

The day before the band Fuck U Pay Us left for the summer leg of their Reparations Tour 2018, its guitarist and cofounder Uhuru Moor dropped the Black Magic School Bus, aka the Snatch Bus—a retired, yellow, short school bus—off at my house. I met Uhuru in 2014 when their Afrofuturistic art collective #SNATCHPOWER was doing its first burlesque show. “An artist collective that consists of anyone who loves and respects or is Black, indigenous, femme queer or trans people of color and collectively wants the cis white heterosexual capitalist patriarchy to crumble,” #SNATCHPOWER is now an international reality with chapters in Bangkok and Japan. I joined the collective then, and years later, we bought the Snatch Bus. They were dropping it off at my house because the Black punk band was leaving for Sweden the next day, then on to New York to play Afropunk the following week, and then they were off to Chicago. Once we got the bus settled in at my place in Bloomington, California, we—Uhuru, their godson Wolverine and I— hopped in my ’93 Toyota Camry and drove the 50 or so miles to Los Angeles for the final pre-tour FUPU rehearsal—where I would conduct this interview. We met at the house of Tianna Nicole (FUPU’s drummer) where we were greeted with smiles and hugs and refreshments and all of the cozy and warm things Tianna brings to every experience I get to share with her. Tianna had made these delicious Mediterranean burgers, and as Wolverine and Uhuru and I enjoyed the food, other band mates, Jasmine Nyende and Ayotunde Osareme—the band’s lead vocalist and bassist, respectively—joined us at the outdoor dining table to feast, discuss band business and coo over Wolverine. Amidst this cool and easy mixture of food and love and children—a rare space in which to catch FUPU for an interview—we talked about their responsibilities in the band, what they would do with a utopia of their creation and the problems with filtering Black art through the English language. “If you died today, and someone had to replace you in the band, what’s the main thing they need to know?” I start off lightly. Jasmine responds that you have to check your ego to rock a mile in her shoes. “Because being afraid of not being what the patriarchy tells you you need to be is what’s gonna make you feel nervous on stage.” The singer, who also models, may be an expert on

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challenging patriarchal norms and ignoring the need to be attractive. The only way you can tangle with the daring, often-topless electric guitarist Uhuru is by staying attuned to the spirit realm. “Listen to your ancestors and transcend all other things on the earth to make sure the music stays at its highest. That comes out in the spirit of the guitar. You can’t just be playing notes. You gotta be more free-spirited than that.” Ayotunde says you can’t be too married to structure if you want a chance at the FUPU bottom. You have to “be open to things changing. And stay present.” If you desire to drum for your due, FUPU’s rhythmic OG Tianna says, “Listen to everybody, find your vibe, communicate and learn what works between you and the rest of the band.” But what if this punk quartet was not playing for reparations anymore? What if the Fuck U Pay Us demand was met? What would they play then? Would they even exist? “Of course we would exist!” Uhuru laughs. “We always exist. Eternally. We have funk music, we have blues songs, we make punk, we make rap songs and pop—we just make music. Like Nina Simone talks about: Freedom is freedom from the need to be free. That’s a next-level sound too.” “There are a lot of indigenous societies that have been able to preserve their culture for thousands of years,” Ayotunde adds. “So I would like us to write more songs about the fact that we don’t want any interference with these cultures.” FUPU would also make “more songs that imagine black futures,” if it were up to Tianna. Having to use your oppressor’s tongue to voice your lament against him is not without its challenges, and FUPU is working its way through that. “English always feels like it is dumbing down what my spirit is really trying to say,” Uhuru expresses. “I’m communicating with the spiritual realm and translating to the material realm in the white man’s tongue. It’s very complex for me.” “We were singing ‘Nappy Black Pussy,’” Jasmine starts, “And someone was like ‘But what if I got good hair down there?’ And I’m like, ‘Nappy hair is good hair.’ That shows how important FUPU is. We’re saying, ‘Idolize this shit! Our naps are God-given.’”

Los Angeles–based Fuck U Pay Us is a radical punk band that grew out of the Afrofuturistic art collective #SNATCHPOWER. culturedmag.com 161

Brooklyn-based painter Eddie Martinez’s winding path has landed him at the epicenter of contemporary abstraction. 162 culturedmag.com

A BEAUTIFUL MESS

BY TED LOOS PORTRAIT BY CHARLIE RUBIN

With abstract artists, it’s hard to talk about why one painter is more interesting than the next without getting deep in the weeds. Suffice it to say that some blobs and bloops are arranged in a way that energize and engage the mind more powerfully than others. Eddie Martinez makes good blobs. He’s been the subject of chatter from the lips of collectors and curators for a while now, garnering a solo show at the Drawing Center that ended last February, as well as well-received presentations at art fairs and galleries. Now he has an exhibition on view at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, “Eddie Martinez: White Outs,” through February 17. Imagine that some drippy, exuberant works were painted, but then large portions of them were covered with Liquid Paper, and you get the idea. Without a doubt, Martinez’s work evokes mid-20thcentury abstraction, but it also recalls street art, and it’s not too surprising to learn that he did some graffiti back in the day. “People always say Guston, de Kooning, Basquiat,” says Martinez, 41, seated on an electric green couch in his Bushwick studio. “I don’t know how to respond anymore.” He said that if stuck in an elevator with someone’s mother, he would describe his style as “messy explosions of Picassos.” Like a lot of painters, he considers drawing to be the foundation of his work. “Drawing is a constant,” he says. “I’m surprised I’m not drawing right now. That’s what I do to unpack life as it’s happening.” Figurative elements drift in and out of his compositions—more so lately, he says—especially heads. Martinez draws for its own sake, but it does help

inform the rest of his practice. As he puts it, “I don’t make a drawing for a painting. But at the same time, I make a drawing and then say, ‘I want this to be a silkscreen.’” He also uses palette knives, brushes, crayons and spray cans—he’s truly omnivorous when it comes to getting paint onto canvas. His work in sculpture exhibits the same quality, with found objects enlivening the mix. “I like when you can have a super transparent thing next to a highly impasto shape,” Martinez says of his paintings. “That also kind of gives you an idea of the history, even though you won’t necessarily know when each one was done.” His own history has a couple of twists and turns. His grandfather was Puerto Rican, but “I’m embarrassed because I have a Latino last name and don’t speak Spanish,” he says, laughing. He spent his earliest years in Brooklyn, but grew up all over the country, in states that include Florida, Massachusetts, Texas and California. He did one year of art school at the Art Institute of Boston, but he found he couldn’t finish. He needed structure in his life, but “it just wasn’t going to happen,” he admits now. “It was only about 10 years ago that I stopped feeling bad about that. “In the end, it all worked out.” Martinez’s distinctive color sense—primary tones that are interrupted and shaped by black and white and some in-between hues—also follows his gut, and so far, so good. “It’s completely instinctual,” he says. “I don’t know color theory, and I’m not concerned if I’m doing it right or if I’m doing it wrong. It’s just the way I do it.”

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ammann-gallery.com | office@ammann-gallery.com | t +49 221 932 88 03

PIVI CURRY BROTHERS PAOLA PIVI Art with a view Oct 13, 2018 - Mar 10, 2019 AARON CURRY Tune Yer Head Oct 13, 2018 - Apr 21, 2019 THE HAAS BROTHERS Ferngully Dec 5, 2018 - Apr 21, 2019

THE BASS MUSEUM OF ART 2100 Collins Avenue Miami Beach, FL 33139 www.thebass.org @TheBassMoA HOURS Wednesday to Sunday 10 AM - 5 PM Closed Monday & Tuesday

Paola Pivi: Art with a view is generously sponsored by PHILLIPS. Additional support for the exhibition is provided by PERROTIN and Massimo De Carlo, Milan, London, Hong Kong. Production support provided by Davide Quadrio for Arthub, Shanghai/Hong Kong. The exhibition is supported in part by the Diane W. Camber Exhibition Fund. Aaron Curry: Tune Yer Head is generously sponsored by Chloé. Additional support for this exhibition is made possible by Michael Werner Gallery, New York and London, and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles. The Haas Brothers: Ferngully is sponsored in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, Art Works, the Arison Arts Foundation and Funding Arts Network. All exhibitions are presented with the support of the City of Miami Beach, Cultural Affairs Program and Cultural Arts Council, the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners, the Miami-Dade County Tourist Development Council, and sponsored in part by the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs, and the Florida Council on Arts and Culture.

photography | Matteo Imbriani

Audrey, sofa | Chanel, coffee table | Cookies, coffee table | Lou, pouf

Flagship Store 19NE 39th Street | Miami, FL 33137 786-534-7274 miamishowroom@gallottiradice.com

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BEHIND THE BLOCK

In the early 1990s, Vivian Pfeiffer interviewed to be a specialist at Christie’s. In the years leading up to her meeting with the house, she’d been working in finance and, save for a few mental footnotes on the Surrealists, she knew almost nothing of the art world. “I thought, ‘I’ll just open the hood and see how this works,’” Pfeiffer recalls. “But there must be something about auction houses because once you’re in, you’re completely hooked.” Back then, the Latin American department was the third-largest at Christie’s behind Impressionist and Jewelry. Contemporary art, says Pfeiffer, fell way behind the others. “In the early ’90s, Contemporary was a struggling department. It was only in the late ’90s that it began to rise through the ranks. And, well, everybody knows what happened next,” she says, referring to the unprecedented international demand for contemporary and 20th-century art. In the early 2000s, geometric abstractions from Latin America found their way to the United States, with exhibitions taking place at blue-chip galleries and institutions across the country. Pfeiffer played a major role in the placement of many such works from places like Cuba, Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela. And over the next two decades, she worked diligently to acquire new, important works from Latin America and beyond, rewriting the rulebook for what defines a contemporary collection. Since joining Phillips two years ago as Head of Business Development and Deputy Chairman, Americas, she’s launched regional offices in Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, Palm Beach, Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro, and overseen world auction records for both Carmen Herrera and Hélio Oiticica. Earlier this year, she helped incorporate Latin American Art into the Contemporary Art department, a reflection of and response to new trends in global collecting. “In the 1990s, collectors were very much guided by a sense of regionalism,” says Pfeiffer. “Today, that’s changed.” Over the last two decades Pfeiffer has built relationships with collectors throughout Latin America and Miami (where she has lived, at least semiannually, since 1996). She has also been instrumental in bringing entire collections of design and other contemporary works to auction, including collections of Wendell Castle, a seminal early 1980s work by Anselm Kiefer, a record-breaking work on paper by Peter Doig, and a major work by KAWS which hit the block November 15. For Pfeiffer, the process of acquiring art is its own kind of art form, requiring patience, care and a working knowledge of an artist’s performance at fairs, biennials and

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exhibitions. “Most often,” she says, “it involves guiding and educating people for many years.” Take an artist like Laura Owens, who has had seven works sold at Phillips in the last two years. “A few years back, I noticed a handful of people collecting Owens,” says Pfeiffer, “so when her solo show opened at the Whitney last year, I knew it was the right time.” It isn’t, however, always so straightforward. Pfeiffer mentions the recent groundbreaking “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985” exhibition that started at the Hammer Museum before traveling to the Brooklyn Museum and explains that due to lack of international gallery representation, there are many artists whose work she cannot bring to auction so easily. “That’s a whole altar of women whose works I’d love to see come to auction sooner rather than later, but we’re going to have to wait for many of them to gain gallery representation overseas.” Part of what drives Pfeiffer’s interest in bringing such artists to the block is a desire to provide a platform for those who have not been given their due place in history—artists like Marta Minujín, whom Pfeiffer describes as a “badass,” despite decades of being known more for her eccentricities than her artwork; and the mother of Brazilian modernism, Tarsila do Amaral. “I would like to do with Tarsila what’s been done with Frida Kahlo,” says Pfeiffer, “because for me, Tarsila do Amaral is just as much a cult figure.” Pfeiffer has long used her platform to promote social causes, both from within and outside the auction houses. Since the early 1990s, she has helped stage exhibitions benefiting AIDS relief, global poverty and clean water. “We did everything for that sale ourselves,” she recalls of her first AIDS benefit auction in 1993. “We typed up the catalogue, we hung the works, and all without really any money.” Today, Pfeiffer serves as a board member for several museums and nonprofit organizations, including the Miami-based Locust Projects. For this year’s edition of Art Basel Miami Beach, Pfeiffer is planning special events and programming around Contemporary and Latin American Art, though details were still under wraps at print time. As for the auction house, Pfeiffer hopes to keep expanding clientele in Latin America and strengthening its presence in Los Angeles, the Pacific Northwest and throughout the Americas. “We might be one of the smaller houses,” says Pfeiffer, noting that in 2017 Phillips’s overall earnings increased by 25 percent. “But we are actually becoming the new story of the auction world—the story of growth, of impact.”

COURTESY OF PHILLIPS

Vivian Pfeiffer with Carmen Herrera’s Untitled (Orange and Black), 1956, which set a world record for the artist at Phillips in 2016.

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SOFT SPOT

BY MAX LAKIN

In furniture design, foam is typically only considered the end of the story, mostly used in packaging, ignored and unloved. It is a bit player—a necessary nuisance cut into planks to buffer, formed into precision-cut cradles, or poured on as so many peanuts filling negative space to ensure safe transit and then discarded. This is why Sang Hoon Kim’s recent designs, made entirely of foam, feel like such a revelation. Kim’s collection of seating, slab tables, sloping Swiss cheese bookcases and gelatinous-looking ottomans are made from a flexible foam, chemically treated so it becomes yielding and exceptionally dense. Some of these pieces—like geometric sectionals tinted in neat color blocking that recall hard-edge abstract paintings—are more well-behaved than others, such

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as the oblong chaises that look like they tried to knock over a Janovic. They all share a drippy, rough-hewn surface texture, making them look like something accreted in a cavern’s damp darkness over eons, or hurtled many light years to reach us (Kim refers to the bulbous ottomans, which come in a ghostly white or a tourmaline black, as “meteorites”). Eight of Kim’s foam pieces are on view with Cristina Grajales Gallery at Design Miami/ in December, the first time they’ll be presented in the US. Grajales, whose gallery is based in New York, was so enchanted with Kim’s work that she agreed to show it, nearly sight unseen, soon after he emailed her a proposal over the summer. She will meet Kim, who is based in Seoul, for the first time in December.

COURTESY OF CRISTINA GRAJALES GALLERY

Sang Hoon Kim’s Sofa Set, 2018

“They have this incredibly beautiful, organic shape—elegant and ingenious, but also very grounded and humble,” Grajales says. “Basically, they’re like paintings, and he’s using foam as a canvas. I find him incredibly refreshing and very daring to work with this funny material.” The foam designs are materially different from anything Kim has done before. Born in Seoul, he had success, after graduating from the Cranbrook Academy of Art nearly a decade ago, with his signature undulating wood screens. “I do not need to do drilling, cutting, finishing,” he explains of the foam pieces, “I use electric scales, mixers and formulations to make furniture. It’s basically made out of chemical reactions, so I can control the properties. It’s like modeling with clay.”

The pieces feel new, but for Kim, they have been gestating for years. His family has operated a foam factory in South Korea for three generations, and his exploration of the material’s possibilities is rooted in a childhood fascination. The collection is the result of three years of research in flexible foam, a material which already has a wide application, appearing in medical-grade artificial skin, but also artificial leather, and now legion memory foam mattresses. “I was really taken with the fact that he saw something as mundane as foam and wanted to do something so creative with this material,” Grajales offers. “It’s a beautiful story: how many times do you hear when you have your family involved in a business that you want to run away from it? And in his case he did the opposite: he ran into it, but with a very different approach.”

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

Art Basel Miami Beach Nova, Booth N11 Barbara Bloom Megan Marrin Greg Parma Smith December 6-9, 2018

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

Image: Greg Parma Smith, Relief Painting (Creatures), 2018, Oil on canvas, 28 x 22 inches, 71.1 x 55.9 cm

Cosima von Bonin, What if it Barks 1, 2018

Cosima von Bonin, What if it Barks 9, 2018

42nd Street

NE 42nd Street

23 NE 41 Street NE 41st Street

NE 1st Ave

N. Miami Ave

Art Basel Miami Beach 2018 Tuesday, Dec. 4th through Saturday, Dec. 8th 9AM - 4:30PM Admission Free.

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Cassi Namoda—here with Bar Texas and The Three Marias, 2016—explores lusotropicality, a term used to describe Portuguese colonialism in her paintings. 178 culturedmag.com

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BY TIONA NEKKIA MCCLODDEN PORTRAIT BY BRANDON STANCIELL

A LOVELY DARKNESS

“In Francophone Africa we had Négritude, started by Léopold Senghor, and then the way that traveled throughout the Diaspora and informed many other literary movements and Black identity movements. We don’t know so much about the Portuguese African movement, called lusotropicality. In Mozambique a lot of culture was lost through the war, through colonialism, but what stayed was a sort of literary identity. I’m filling in for those who didn’t take the paint. Or didn’t take the other forms.” –Cassi Namoda

Cassi Namoda was born in Maputo, Mozambique. She grew up traveling the world and now splits her time between Los Angeles and East Hampton. Lusotropicalism, which Namoda has been exploring in her work, is a double-edged sword of sorts. The idea was first suggested by Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre in the early 20th century to describe the distinctive character of Portuguese imperialism, specifically within the African diaspora, and proposes that the Portuguese were better colonizers than other European nations. Questioning whether or not colonialism can be better or worse is a daring task to take up within the form of painting. Namoda—who has abstracted the term to make it “more of a style or sort of contemporary consciousness”—does not disappoint. I’m not entirely surprised when she tells me she started out studying film alongside her interest in literature, and that over time she moved into painting. Namoda’s work recalls a film you think you may have seen, still frames pulled directly from the middle of a scene. With strong narrative compositions, figures with gazes that break the

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fourth wall enveloped in a haunting darkness, her paintings are refreshingly not painted from existing images. They present as a sort of simulacrum of her memory, travels and African films she saw growing up across the African continent. I’m thinking about the African experience and then the Black experience through the lens of filmmaking... But then the narrative shows up in the paint. I’m thinking about the history of painting and who took agency over that.

Namoda was deep in preparation for her fall exhibition with Nina Johnson Gallery in Miami when we first met this past summer. She was painting in rigorous studio sessions, wearing elegantly tailored vintage dresses fit for a lead in the most classic of romantic African cinema. Her paintings are considerate of the peripheries of angst, longing, passion and love. The presence of a time before and what is yet to come sits within her work. Characters are often gazing at you, away from you, implicating you within their narrative constructions.

I’m thinking about the drama. I’m thinking about the acting and what that meant for the beginning of when Black figures were showing up in film and reaching to the world. I thought they were so classic and so beautiful. Sometimes you can’t get that with a sitter in front of you.

The agency Namoda takes within her work, regarding her relationship to her investigation of the residues of lusotropicalism, supports and furthers the retention of her cultural heritage and puts it back in its place—deeply embodied and not able to be taken away unless you are of it. Her paintings create a withholding of a subjectively retention and an inherited copyright of lived experience. Namoda’s upcoming exhibition is titled “The Day a Monkey’s Destined to Die All Trees Become Slippery”—which she says means there’s no escaping one’s fate. It opens in mid-2019 at Ghebaly Gallery in LA.

Namoda’s Ritual Bathers, 2018

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“When I was 10, I saw tap

dance on TV and decided it was cool and that I’d like to try it,” says Caleb Teicher, now 25, a dance wunderkind, known for his fresh tap choreography and his subversive take on standards like the Lindy Hop. After his 2011 Bessie Award for outstanding individual performance, Teicher’s rise has been streaked with career milestones and a sense of inevitable momentum. In November, he performed in a concert with indie icon Regina Spektor, his second collaboration with National Symphony Orchestra artistic advisor Ben Folds, at the Kennedy Center. In January, Teicher presents More Forever, consisting of three performances on a stage layered in sand, in collaboration with composer-pianist Conrad Tao that’s part of the Guggenheim’s Works & Process series at their Frank Lloyd Wrightdesigned black box theater. More Forever affords Teicher a unique artistic opportunity. “I usually make things in the studio and then premiere them for an audience,” he explains. In this case, however, there have been three inprogress showings, enabling the incorporation of feedback throughout the process. Teicher describes sand dancing as a tap subgenre: instead of metal shoes on a wood floor, leather soles sweep across

is a Teicher signature. An artist born for the stage, Teicher electrifies even the modest rehearsal space, his euphoria evident as he slides and stomps across the venue. Of his childhood, he recalls: “At one point, I remember saying I wanted to be in politics because I loved watching The West Wing so much.” Fortunately, Teicher heeded the call of dance as his métier—and the dream of making it in New York City. He has the type of resumé that can make creative success seem all too easy. In reality, his meteoric rise reflects both the intrinsic dedication and luminous talent of an expressive master. Graduating high school after his junior year, he lucked into a life-changing entree to the dance world—as seems to happen when prodigious talent and copious risk-taking coalesce—with acclaimed tap dancer Michelle Dorrance during his first year in Manhattan in 2010. Five years later, Dorrance would go on to receive a MacArthur. “I didn’t have a job. I was kind of floating,” recalls Teicher. “And it just exploded. I won the Bessie at 17, and it’s something you are supposed to win decades down the line.” Established more than three decades ago, the Guggenheim’s Works & Process is the first performing arts commission series set in a museum, and it includes dance, theater, music and opera. Its

GRIT AND GRACE a surface of fine sand. “It’s less explored for the reason that sand is sort of troublesome,” he says. “People don’t want it in their theaters or near their instruments.” Usually, sand dancing is confined to a “little 4-by-4-foot square and enough room for one person to stand still and tap dance.” By contrast, the sandbox built for the Guggenheim’s stage is 20 by 20 feet, and “More Forever” features seven dancers (including Teicher) exploring Tao’s forward, contemporary score. “There’s piano and electronics,” he explains. “Conrad is having a moment as well.” Teicher and I met after one of his rehearsals at the American Tap Dance Foundation in the West Village, a home base of sorts, where he spends nearly every day expanding his vernacular. On this afternoon, Caleb Teicher & Company—his collaborative troupe since 2015—is honing its Fall for Dance commission for the New York City Center. The piece blends sounds from beatboxer Chris Celiz and the traditional language of tap with a fresh touch of jazz freestyle to create the egalitarian practice that

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hallmark is the theater’s physical intimacy, which allows unique intellectual insight into a performer’s artistic process. “Works & Process started in order to see and meet artists,” says the program’s producer Caroline Cronson. “The theater is very clean and small and almost round, so you can have a performance and a moderated discussion. It is more than just performance. It is also explanatory.” Works & Process is indeed a league of its own. It is where, in 2016, choreographer Ryan McNamara performed the site-specific Battleground, which he has described as a kind of sci-fi cosplay house-musicballet-battle—“in some ways both the weirdest and most traditional piece he’s ever made.” Due to his explosive success, the Guggenheim presented an encore set of Battleground performances last winter. But Works & Process artists are more than revolutionary in their respective fields; they must also be eloquent. “Both Caleb and Conrad are deeply articulate. We need to have performers who can explain what they are doing and why they are doing it, educating the audience,” says Cronson.

P O R T R A I T B Y FA R R A H C H A M S E D D I N E

Dance prodigy Caleb Teicher won a Bessie Award at just 17 years old. At the age of 25, he is redefining the field.

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HARLEM ON MY MIND

BY JASMIN HERNANDEZ PORTRAIT BY LIA CLAY

On Labor Day, as revelers en route to the West Indian Day Parade pass me by in vibrant costumes, I walk down a sunny block in BedfordStuyvesant to Legacy Russell’s lovely Brooklyn brownstone. Russell is a writer, curator and the founding theorist behind Glitch Feminism, a cultural manifesto and movement which aims to utilize the digital as a means of resisting dominion over the corporeal. And as of September, Russell has brought her brilliance to the Studio Museum in Harlem as its new associate curator of exhibitions. Settling in to talk, I listen to Russell intently, as she sits across from me in a leopard jumpsuit, bare-faced and nuzzling her eight-month-old pup. She speaks assuredly about the esteemed Studio Museum: “There is a really important history of criticality and a care that space has set, in terms of setting a really high bar for what the future of the art world can look like.” Russell’s career is tied to her New York upbringing. Born and bred in the East Village, raised by her late photographer father (a native Harlemite) and gerontologist mother (an East Village resident still living there in her 70s), Russell calls them “the most primary creative influences.” Being an East Village kid, art destinations like Performance Space 122, Theatre for the New City and St. Mark’s Church-In-The-Bowery were everyday experiences. And that early immersion in art firmly shaped Russell’s future interests in gender, performance, digital feminism and empowering bodies of color on the internet. “Where punk and drag intersect is where I became more curious,” Russell says. “Within those two histories there are a lot of exciting contributions to a larger dialogue of queer and body culture. That space allowed me as a young femmeidentifying person to explore versions of what that could mean.” Russell returned to New York at the end of 2017 after a five-year sojourn in London, where she earned a graduate degree at Goldsmiths and subsequently worked for Artsy while nurturing her curatorial platform NO ANGEL. For “Wandering/Wilding: Blackness on the Internet,” an exhibition that took place at the IMT Gallery in collaboration with the ICA London in 2016, Russell presented artists niv acosta, Hannah Black, Evan Ifekoya, Devin Kenny and Fannie Sosa. “‘Wandering/Wilding’ set up a dialogue between the notion of the

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flâneur, the wanderer and the racist newspaper headline about Black youth ‘wilding’ in the streets (famously bolstered by Donald Trump to lambast the Central Park 5, who were wrongfully convicted),” explains Kenny. “Legacy is creatively, socially and politically engaged. She’s really a force to be reckoned with.” Russell has spoken all over the globe about Glitch Feminism, using a digital manifesto that brings together myriad references including an archival video of RuPaul on The Geraldo Rivera Show stating “we are all born naked and the rest is drag”; Frank Ocean’s “Pink + White”; and a quote from James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room.” Together, the clips affirm Russell’s stance that the body is a social construct that can detach itself to embrace a new reality: Glitch Feminism can be an erratum, a necessary correction. Russell’s pioneering ideas are encapsulated in her forthcoming book, simply titled “Glitch Feminism,” which is presented for universal appeal in a zine format with straightforward language. Russell points out, “I wanted it to be something that didn’t get too wrapped up in academia. The idea of a zine was inspiring to me because it can be easily disseminated, can easily be carried with you, and isn’t too expensive.” Will Glitch Feminism come into play at the Studio Museum? To that, Russell responds, “I’m less concerned about bringing this ethos into that institution and more interested in what it can mean as it’s tied to the mission of the museum. The idea of creating space for artists of African descent is really urgent. That’s where the intersection comes into play.” Thelma Golden, the museum’s director and chief curator, offers, “Our mission at the Studio Museum is about thinking deeply about issues of culture and society while looking closely at the visual world, about enabling artists’ creativity while seeking to energize the public. Legacy has an extraordinary record of achievements in all those areas. We couldn’t be more excited to welcome her.” Russell is a former downtown kid, who is Brooklyn-based, and will now be creating culture in Harlem. Her New York cultivated roots have prepared her for this role.

Legacy Russell has been cultivating her curatorial vision since her childhood in the East Village, where punk and drag culture were part of her everyday life. culturedmag.com 187

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N E W YO R K | MEXICO CIT Y

Anne Huntington surrounded by works that she owns and loves: on the table, a Daniel Arsham clock and a pink hourglass by Zoe Buckman; above, a photograph by Alex Prager of a woman and flying pigeons. A mask by Brendan Fernandes hangs to to the right of the door; beneath it, a layered-glass collage (on plinth) by Dustin Yellin.

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PARADIGM SHIFT

On the surface, Anne Huntington and Brendan Fernandes may look to have the classic collector/artist relationship. But in reality what they share is based on friendship, collaboration and a loyalty that defies definition. Over the years, they have supported each other in myriad ways: Brendan has donated original works to philanthropic causes Anne is involved with, while Anne has continued to collect Brendan’s art and incorporate his work in shows she curates. They have also collaborated on a number of projects at institutional levels, including the upcoming Young Collectors Council benefit at the Guggenheim in April 2019. The two reminisce on their friendship in the art world and beyond. Brendan Fernandes: I met Anne along the Grand Canal during the 2009 Venice Biennale. Her magnetism was contagious and we became fast friends. Anne Huntington: We had no clue that 10 years later we’d have countless professional and personal experiences together. We’ve guided each other towards the next great adventure and truly made our dreams come true. BF: Years back, Anne acquired the first edition of a series I created while at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency on Captiva Island. Little did she know at the time, but this acquisition helped pay my rent. AH: When Brendan returned from the residency program, we scheduled a catch-up that included a studio visit. This must have been 2013. When he shared the works with me, they were so special and strong. They were the first prints made on Rauschenberg’s presses since his passing. The works showed conceptual rigor and ideas while connecting to Rauschenberg in creation and thought. I believe these prints highlight an important moment in Brendan’s career and I’m honored to have them in my collection. As a collector, I’m looking for these moments over an artist’s career, all the while continuing to support the artist through the years. Every performance and exhibition of Brendan’s highlights the breadth and depth of his practice—the latest being at the DePaul Art Museum, which I viewed during the 2018 EXPO Chicago. This exhibition connected dance, sculpture, photographs, works on paper and masks. The masks are a defining element in Brendan’s works that symbolize a significant relationship and meaning. The neon masks continue to be elements in shows, including one at the Brooklyn Museum in 2015. I also had the honor to co-curate a neon into the 2017 Spring/Break Art Show. Now I am proud to have two masks, one neon and one mirrored, in my collection. BF: Anne and I champion each other, we look out for each other. Regardless of the gaps in between our visits, there is an immediate sense of warmth and love when we are together. Anyone who knows Anne knows she wears many hats with ease and grace, yet she always makes time to be present, kind and authentic. When Anne says something, you listen. And when Anne says something’s going to happen, well, it always does. BF: Our friendship is based on the notion of collaboration, and in the past decade we have supported each other in all areas of life. AH: We’ve rung in the New Year many times, traveled together, visited several artist studios, discussed art and culture, all while helping each other dance through this thing called life. BF: Our roles complement each other and create exclusive ways of being and mutual ways of supporting and generating. AH: We collected each other, which means we have each other in our everyday lives.

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PHOTO © PHILIP PATTON, 2016

Brendan Fernandes’s recent work crosses the boundaries of art, dance and performance, treating the body as an object and a tool.

“Our friendship is based on the notion of collaboration, and in the past decade we have supported each other in all areas of life.” –Brendan Fernandes culturedmag.com 193

CULTURE SEEKER

ALL IMAGES COURTESY LAURA DE GUNZBURG

Robert Irwin’s Dawn to Dusk installation at the Chinati Foundation, which took 16 years to complete. It is also the only permanent, freestanding structure conceived and designed by Irwin as a total work.

A 7AM filter of Donald Judd’s 100 untitled works in mill aluminum at the Artillery Shed.

"I chose the town of Marfa (pop. 2,466) because it was the bestlooking and most practical, and rented a small house... Three months later, a friend, I, and my son, who was soon to eat his fourth birthday cake lost with his elders in Baja, drove a truck full of art to Texas and unloaded it into the house and garage." – Donald Judd

One of six of Dan Flavin's colored fluorescent light works from the early 1980s.

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Downtown Marfa’s Ice Plant, where the Chinati Foundation houses two stainless steel floor works by Judd.

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I’ve always seen as a threshold, a place where the inside and outside merge. Last year my research on the St. Johns River led me to spend time in the Lake Wales Ridge area of Florida, examining the topography. There I began to see the rhombus in the ridge form that defines this region of the peninsula. Escarpment feels like the origin. It’s a metaphorical genesis, finding genesis in science; it’s a word that feels quite active. Escarpment is a steep slope. EC: You also incorporate into your work a feature of the Caribbean Sea known as the Rossby whistle, in which a sound is produced every 120 days that can only be detected in space! How did you discover this phenomenon, and how does it function within your oeuvre? JS: I first encountered the Rossby whistle in 2016 by way of research I was looking at from Colombian climate scientist Camilo Mora, whose work is outlining the alarming effects of climate departure, especially in the tropics. The Rossby whistle is inaudible to the human ear, but can be heard from space in the form of wave oscillations of the earth’s gravity field. I featured a recording of the whistle that was pitched up several octaves so it could be heard by human ears in a 2016 performance called My Queen before you go tell my horse, and made an installation related to it recently in Berlin, a piece called Mnemonic for the Caribbean Sea. Within the installation I incorporate the Rossby phenomenon through choreography; a sequence of movements I perform is inspired by it. I additionally feature the clarinet in the score I’m composing, and oceanographer Joseph Lacasce at the University of Oslo describes the Rossby basin modes as “like acoustic waves in a clarinet.” EC: Tell me more about your love affair with Saturn. JS: I was always enamored with the immensity of the universe, and definitely as a kid Saturn’s rings left a mark on me, always fascinated me. But now I’m impressed by the idea of relating my own body to its features. You know, always thinking about different states of matter and being able to shift and feel all of them, become them. Moon Tendon was my love letter to Saturn’s moons. We would have a better chance of living on one of its moons, since Saturn has no surface— in order to live on it, we’d have to be gas. It could fit 764 Earths and it’s lighter than water, so this massive being could float on water if there was a body of water big enough. Just a forever wow!

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND NINA JOHNSON GALLERY

EC: You were born in Saint Andrew Parish, Jamaica, and moved to Miami at the age of four. How do both spaces inform your work and, more importantly, your understanding of identity and diaspora? JS: My being is always straddling multiple worlds, and I have agency to speak unconditionally about truth, landscape, language, time and the body— themes that form the basis of my work. I think a lot about the poetics of reciprocity and relation, in which an individual’s identity is not complete without the other’s. Growing up in Miami as a Black immigrant and living undocumented for two decades certainly influenced my worldview. The notion of sovereignty is incomplete without solidarity—I am not free until all of my brothers and sisters are free. EC: I first had the pleasure of seeing your work at your thesis show at UC San Diego, where you received your MFA. You were showing a trilogy of short experimental video works: Playing Possum (2012), Moon Tendon (2015) and Medical Gaze (2013). I was blown away by your filmic approach. Who are some of your cinematic influences? JS: Thank you. Works by Samuel Beckett that I encountered in undergrad are a big influence on my filmic space. What Where (1983), Quad (1981) and Come and Go (1966) are my favorites. I can’t really describe it fully here, but the work just always felt familiar—the way language is fractured, the psychological vacancy, something that reminds me of island psychology. A Man Escaped (1956) by Robert Bresson and The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) by Víctor Erice are two films I go back to a lot. EC: For your Hammer project opening in January, “Un Chemin Escarpé,” your main reference point is the geologic term “escarpment.” How does this term fold into your work? JS: My examination of the word “escarpment” grew out of a desire to connect and organize relations I began to see in my recent works, most explicitly in a 40-minute piece I choreographed and directed for stage called Beneath the rivers, there are no borders (2018). These recent works feature the rhombus shape, and my usage of this shape originates from memory. The rhombus was a prominent feature in the architecture of my mother’s childhood home in Jamaica—one was above the entryway. Growing up, my mother would share memories of bats, lizards and other creatures entering the house through that rhombus, as it functioned like a vent. It’s a form that

Curator Erin Christovale, right, and artist Jamilah Sabur, are working together on Sabur’s Hammer Museum show, on view January 19–May 5. Opposite: Jamilah Sabur’s Origin and etymology of escarpment, 2018, neon and transformers, 100 x 52 inches.

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PHOTO BY JONATHAN TRAVIESA

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THE SHAPESHIFTING ALCHEMIST

“We have to examine our current institutions,” says New Orleansborn and based curator, Gia Hamilton. “We also have the pressure to build new models.” Hamilton may have spent the past decade building a name for herself as a curator, but make no mistake, she is a social alchemist. During the course of her career, she’s successfully fused her talents as a community organizer and grassroots activist with her work as a curator and it’s the combination of these experiences that continuously informs her work. “I'm a shapeshifter for liberation,” she says. After five years as a director of the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, Hamilton stepped down from her role at the organization. As for the what’s next? She’s a free agent again. In November, Hamilton accepted a consulting director role at the New Orleans African American Museum and she couldn’t be more thrilled. “African-American history is everyone's history, and this is an opportunity to really create an engagement strategy that asks young people, ‘What is a museum to you? What would you want to see in a museum?’" Prior to serving as the director of the Joan Mitchell Center, Hamilton created and led the organization’s artist residency program, situated on the city’s historic Bayou Road. From the property’s design to the actual program, Hamilton poured her heart into the sprawling 7th Ward complex, building it into a holistic, nature-friendly gathering space that prides itself on innovation and transformation. Cognizant of the strained, icy relationship large institutions tend to have with the locals, Hamilton approached her new director role as an organizer: for 18 months she canvassed the center’s neighborhood, introducing herself and occasionally other staff members. “Gia empowers you with a warm and comprehensive welcome not only to the residency but to the city, specifically the neighborhood, as well,” says artist and former 2017 resident, Stacy Lynn Waddell. Hamilton also encouraged

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residents under her tutelage to familiarize themselves with the city. “She made certain that we met and interacted with cultural leaders of New Orleans and the surrounding community. Her mantra of “building community” resonated throughout every aspect of the residency and helped make for a wonderful live/work experience,” Waddell continues. This type of engagement is a tactic Hamilton no doubt perfected after she founded the creative incubator, Gris Gris Lab in 2009. After spending 15 years working in New York, Hamilton moved back to her native city, which was still in recovery mode four years after Hurricane Katrina, and launched the residency program. “We housed creatives,” she explains of GGL. “The goal was for them to produce interesting projects in the city over the course of time. They could really engage and get to know New Orleans, and that we would help produce those projects.” Hamilton also tapped into her love of plants—residents of the program were also part of a foraging festival. “We had a small micro-farm where we grew medicinal herbs and microgreens and sold them. I think a lot of people, especially now, don't necessarily know about my food-based work, but I used to farm,” she says. This is where her signature radical curation comes into play. In a world replete with white-glove care, she’s unafraid to get her hands dirty. Sure, there may be a white glove or two, but for the most part, Hamilton applies her grassroots nature to her practice. It’s work she refers to as “Social Magic.” “What we believe is that these four pillars, arts and culture, healing, food, and sort of radicalized education, would give people the opportunity to basically engage in Social Magic,” she says. “In order to really have a clear vision, you have to let go of certain things. You have to have a paradigm shift. Part of this whole methodology is about how do we collectively let go of the things that aren't working so that we can make space for the things that might work.”

Gia Hamilton at the New Orleans Museum of Art and Sculpture Garden culturedmag.com 209

CURATOR OF COMMUNITY

New York’s downtown

art scene, with its burgeoning galleries and anything-goes attitude, is an incubator for the city’s creative hivemind, and of the curators mounting exhibitions in the gritty gaits below Chelsea, none have as sharp an eye for what’s cool and upand-coming as Taylor Trabulus. As associate director for Gavin Brown’s Enterprise and director of the gallery’s Lower East Side satellite, the 30-year-old East Village transplant represents artists of historical heft, like performance art pioneer Joan Jonas, and also stages shows with lesser-known makers mined from Brooklyn’s underground. True to the experimental ethos set forth by Gavin Brown when he founded his eponymous London space in the 1990s, exhibitions by Trabulus frequently exist at the intersection of art, fashion and music, leaving visitors excitedly uncertain whether they’re inside a gallery, club, boutique, or some sinister combination thereunder. “The artists I’m drawn toward always offer different sets of reality,” explains Trabulus. Like Jacolby Satterwhite, whose critically beloved solo exhibition “Blessed Avenue”— which comprised a ceiling-high video installation that transported viewers

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into a dystopian dreamscape of machine-tethered, leather-clad bodies voguing to the remixed beat of Satterwhite’s late mother’s acapella vocals—was produced by Trabulus; and Women’s History Museum, the conceptual fashion collective whose anachronistic, deconstructed garments and sculptures had their first major showcase at Gavin Brown Enterprise’s Grand Street outpost. And DJ and digital artist Juliana Huxtable; educator and performance artist Annie Sprinkle, the first porn star to bridge the world of art; poet and sculptor Ser Serpas; and photographer Elle Pérez, whose work deals with coded queer desire, who were brought in by Trabulus, working in collaboration with editor and dominatrix Reba Maybury, for “Putting Out,” a group show making the case that we’re all sexually repressed. “You’re either being taken out of your everyday, the

banality of your everyday world, or you’re being made to question it or look at it in a different way, to find the beauty in the subtleties,” says Trabulus, noting that this suspension of reality becomes especially crucial in moments of social and political turmoil. “There’s insanity in the world right now,” she adds. “It’s just fabulous to walk into something and be transformed.” Hailing from Los Angeles, Trabulus moved to New York in 2010 after graduating from Bard College. Following a stint at the Whitney Museum, she found a mentor in dealer Nicole Klagsbrun. “She was one of the first people to show these West Coast artists like Bruce Conner and Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel and Wallace Berman, who are all artists I really love.” When Klagsbrun shuttered her space, Trabulus, then just 24, became Director of Martos Gallery. Three years later, at 27, she was brought on by Gavin Brown, and eventually began to oversee programming at their downtown space. “I love that someone can have an idea that seems so radical and abstract on paper, and then help them from start to finish,” she says. “From the idea to the production to the exhibition.” This winter, that

includes a collaboration with colleague Tom Brewer for an exhibition with Alex Bag, an artist known for her low-tech, deadpan video monologues. Art scene mainstays will recognize Trabulus flitting between openings in a pair of off-white, tabitoed Margiela boots, arms speckled with tattoos from her husband, painter and tattoo artist Will Sheldon, and often touting a nearly hairless, pint-sized Chinese crested dog named Misty, who has her own Instagram account. She can also be caught typing away below the gallery’s window, where she’s happy to sit and discuss the current show. (On a recent day, it’s a display of photos and a video by renowned photojournalist Danny Lyon.) “I’m a Gemini,” she says, laughing, and she identifies with the sign’s proclivity for socializing. “I love working down here because the office is in the gallery, so I get to talk to people all day long.” For Trabulus, fostering a community around the space is one of the most important aspects of her role, and by bringing in buzzy outside artists, she’s extended its reach to new audiences. As for Trabulus’s contribution to the art world at large? She ponders, then quips, “I don’t know…A sense of humor.”

Trabulus and her dog, Misty, take a picnic in Tompkins Square Park, 2018.

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Education as the Practice of Freedom Curated by Jasmine Wahi Featuring works by 20 YoungArts alumni. Free and open to the public. YoungArts Campus 2100 Biscayne Boulevard Miami

YoungArts at PULSE Contemporary Art Fair Featuring works by 15 YoungArts alumni. 601 Collins Avenue Booth S-224 | Miami Beach Visit youngarts.org for more information.

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Sustainability is sexy—and the house of Versace is here to prove it. In November the Italian luxury brand unveiled its opulent new boutique in Bal Harbour. The minimalist space is every bit as chic as one would expect: The ceiling is a gleaming network of brass beams suspended above a white-tiled floor hand assembled by Italian artisans. What really shines, though, is its environmental pedigree. The store was conceived by Curiosity, the Tokyo-based firm of designer Gwenael Nicolas, who has also created interiors for Dolce & Gabbana, Louis Vuitton and Fendi. Rated LEED Gold by the US Green Building Council, it was built using environmentally responsible methods and materials, including recomposed marble and Forest Stewardship Council–certified wood, and features energy-efficient lighting and climate control. “Versace is a brand that never ceases to surprise,” says Nicolas. “Its intense curiosity for the new keeps the collections contemporary and innovative. The new store concept follows that path.” Indeed, the Bal Harbour boutique reflects Versace artistic director Donatella Versace’s farsighted push for sustainable luxury. In December 2017 she debuted the company’s ecofriendly store design concept at its London flagship on Sloane Street; the Miami location is the second to receive a green upgrade, with more slated to follow. “I love this new concept that embraces a sustainable future for the people and for the environment,” she says. “I believe in constant evolution, and I think this project perfectly embraces the heritage of the brand with innovative spatial design for Versace’s vision for the future.”

GREEN HOUSE

As one of fashion’s most recognizable and influential figures, Donatella Versace could comfortably rest on her laurels. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the house, which she has successfully helmed since the death of its founder, her brother Gianni Versace, in 1997. To celebrate the 40-year milestone, she dedicated the label’s spring 2018 runway show to Gianni’s genius, reprising his most iconic looks. The show and subsequent ad campaign featured many of the legendary models who have represented the brand over the years, including Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford and Christy Turlington Burns. But this fond look back has not kept her from implementing a series of bold steps forward. In September the company announced its acquisition by Michael Kors Holdings, which will now be called Capri Holdings, for $2.12 billion. The move allows Versace to grow significantly, particularly in its accessories and footwear segments. (Bag and shoe collectors, take note!) Donatella has extended her focus on sustainability to the clothes, as well, reexamining Versace’s supply chain and creating a code of conduct among her suppliers. This past spring, supermodel Gisele Bündchen attended the Met Gala in a Versace organic silk gown, ecologically dyed a radiant gold and embroidered with crystals made from recycled glass bottles—an object lesson in what Donatella believes the industry can and should achieve. She’s also renounced fur beginning with the 2019 collections. “Everyone looks to Versace for what a sexy modern woman should be,” says musician and Versace ambassador Caroline Vreeland, great-granddaughter of revered Vogue editor Diana Vreeland. “Now that this woman is being responsible about the quality of the clothes she wears, it simply reconfirms that the Versace woman is the woman I want to be.” It’s clear that Donatella shares her clients’ environmental and ethical concerns and intends for Versace not only to remain relevant in our changing world but to take the lead in shaping it for the better. “There’s no bigger luxury than our future,” she says.

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Vreeland, the great-granddaughter of fashion icon Diana Vreeland, channels fashion, art and sustainability in a white denim jacket, pencil skirt and printed wedge sandals from Versace’s Resort 2019 collection at Karen Rifas’s exhibition at The Bass. culturedmag.com 217

The work of late Malian photographer Malick Sidibé was a first for Somali-French gallerist Mariane Ibrahim. Until then, all of the African art she had seen in museums had been put in a kind of anthropological display, she says, as if European curators were looking at the continent with a “telescope and white gloves.” Sidibé, however, had captured something she hadn’t seen in a museum before: an intimate portrait of a living Africa, where the streets and nightlife of postindependence Bamako in the 1960s and ’70s were electrified by the city’s youth culture. “You’re used to seeing some sort of traditional craft from Africa labeled anonymous and not recognizing yourself in it,” Ibrahim recounts over the phone, but Sidibé’s work had sparked what she describes as “an instant connection.” He got her thinking. “Surely,” she told herself, “there must be more connectors.” In 2012, she founded Mariane Ibrahim gallery in Seattle as a home for artists like him. (She and her husband had moved to Seattle in 2010 thanks to his job at Boeing, trading their Sarkozy-era “French fatigue” for the optimism of Obama; today, they split their time between Seattle and New York.) Her global roster of artists carry on Sidibé’s legacy, framing Africa and its diaspora as a part of the contemporary world and not as a colonial fantasy. “My artists are not exotic products,” Ibrahim says. “What we talk about is what people of our generation talk about.” They touch on issues from sexual identity to abstraction, climate change to social justice. On view at the gallery through December 22 are canvases dipped and blackened in oil by South African artist Alexandra Karakashian. Meanwhile, at the New Orleans Museum of Art, her artist Lina Iris Viktor, whose gold-based paintings with traditional African patterns evoke Klimt’s gilded canvases, has her first solo institutional exhibition through January 6.

KILL THE CLICHE For the last three consecutive Armory Shows, Ibrahim has presented solo booths of emerging African female artists—Viktor, Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze and Zohra Opoku—arguably the least represented demographic of the art world. Not only did she sell out her booths, in 2017 she took the fair’s inaugural “Presents” Booth Prize. “You have to go where decisions are made,” she says, stressing the number of museum board members who buy work at these fairs, and how few black women are currently represented in museums. As one of the very few black female gallerists showing on an international level (having booths at Mexico City’s Zona Maco, Art Dubai, Photo London and EXPO Chicago as well as the Armory Show this year alone), Ibrahim is acutely aware of the skewed perceptions that the art world levies not only at her artists, but at her as well. She’s reminded each time a potential collector assumes that she and her artists are all from the same country, or that rather than the gallerist, she must be the model in a painting or a photograph. Ibrahim calls the experience isolating. But “not in a dramatic or self-pitying way,” she assures, because she also feels “extremely privileged” to have this platform. “Mariane brings everything you’d want in a dealer to the table—she has an incredible eye, she’s personable, she’s fashionable,” says American artist Ayana V. Jackson, whose photographic performances deconstruct the tropes that have historically framed the black female body. “But the added benefit is that she takes our careers personally.” At the heart of Mariane Ibrahim gallery is a subtle activism that corrects a longstanding imbalance: For the entirety of art history, scores of artists like hers were ignored. On their behalf, she’d rather not wait patiently for change, she says. “I try to make as much noise as possible.”

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Marianne Ibrahim’s Seattle gallery expands the conversation and the audience around artists from Africa. culturedmag.com 219

In 2011, London was preparing to host the 2012 Olympic Games and rents around the city soared as many attempted to cash in. This was right after the UK’s Conservative government announced austerity measures that dramatically cut public funding for the arts, causing a generation of young people hoping to work in the field to rethink their future plans. It was also around this time that Rózsa Farkas graduated from Central Saint Martins with a bachelor’s degree in fine art. But rather than start working on her practice, Farkas opened a project space in her longtime neighborhood of Peckham, South London. This was the first iteration of Arcadia Missa. The global financial crisis, followed by the seismic jolt of austerity, instilled an anti-capitalist mentality in a generation that watched the cost of living drive their friends and family out of London. Questions about gentrification, wealth disparity, power structures and feminism became urgent and daily topics of conversation, and Arcadia Missa opened its doors to host such talks, turning the gallery into a forum. As we sit on the fire escape of the West End building where Farkas now runs Arcadia Missa as a commercial gallery, she muses on the journey that has taken her to this point. “It was a reaction to austerity,” Farkas explains. “I was left with a desire to do something different.” Through Arcadia Missa, Farkas has facilitated the general disquiet of her peers amidst the erosion of public services. She has provided a platform to artists of color, queer artists and artists without formal training. And since its inception, the space has both exhibited and published work by artists dealing with gender, LGBTQ rights and identity politics. “The collective voice you can harness through a publication—which generally doesn’t come across in a gallery program or press release—is a great thing,” says Farkas. As artists exhibiting in the nonprofit project space began to gain traction and were approached by London galleries, they turned to Farkas, encouraging her to develop a method to represent them commercially. Then, a few months after being given a free project booth at START Art Fair in London, Farkas gained the confidence to turn Arcadia Missa into a commercial operation in late 2014. “How these artists were carrying out their practices became a form of institutional critique,” she says. “It was not only what the work was about, but it was also about having a physical space to show work that has been validated by peers rather than by an institution.” Take, for example, Amalia Ulman, who gained a significant following through her Instagram series Excellences & Perfections, for which she went blonde and faked a breast augmentation in a satirization of the social media trend of

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women posting highly stylized pictures of themselves to project a narrative of wealth and success. Ulman’s Excellences & Perfections was ahead of its time when it was made in 2014 and is now seen as a contemporary masterpiece. Since then Ulman has steadily built on that success and has had shows around the globe, including one last spring at the KWM Art Center in Beijing. And Farkas, who has worked with Ulman since the start of her career—the two overlapped at Central Saint Martins—has successfully shepherded her through the difficult journey from hyped art star to globally recognized artist. Farkas also works with academic and dominatrix Reba Maybury, and Hamishi Farah, who responded to Dana Schutz’s scandalous Emmett Till painting by painting a portrait of Schutz’s son. Artists and collaborators Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings’s multidisciplinary practice tackles gentrification—in particular, their video archive work UK Gay Bar Directory, which documents the closure of gay bars in London. The two were drawn to Farkas because they felt that she represented their values. “We wanted our professional practice to be in line with what we are making art about,” they explain. “Farkas took an interest in pursuing a method of working through which our practice could develop, rather than just getting us in the market and inflating the value of our work.”

IF YOU BUILD IT

BY AMAH-ROSE ABRAMS PORTRAIT BY ALICE NEALE

Rózsa Farkas started Arcadia Missa as a project space in the height of the financial crisis. The gallery has since established itself as a commercial space, but Farkas’s progressive ideology has remained the focal point of her work. culturedmag.com 221

ICA MIAMI Free Admission Every Day! Nov Dec 2018 Judy Chicago: A Reckoning Open Dec 4 /

/ Larry Bell: Time Machines Open Nov 1 Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami

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Breakfast in the Park

Celebrate Art Basel Miami Beach at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum FIU

Elizabeth Turk

Presented in partnership with West Kendall Baptist Hospital

Sunday, December 9 | 9:30am - noon Complimentary outdoor breakfast Lecture with renowned artist Elizabeth Turk Guided tours of the Sculpture Park at FIU For more information visit frost.fiu.edu.

Elizabeth Turk, Home [detail], 2015, Marble and Northern California redwood, 36 x 67 x 120 inches, Image courtesy of the artist and Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York, Photo © Eric Stoner

Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum FIU 10975 SW 17th St., Miami, FL 33199 w: frost.fiu.edu | t: 305.348.2890

PAINT INTO PLUSH

BY CAIT MUNRO PORTRAIT BY JONATHAN LEIJONHUFVUD

The word “carpet” may not conjure up the image of something at the forefront of artistic design, technology and luxury, but those made by Fort Street Studio sit at exactly that intersection. For more than two decades, artist couple Janis Provisor and Brad Davis have been deftly translating paint to plush, with results that prove a work of art need not hang on a wall or sit atop a table. The pair’s latest undertaking is Progetto Passione, a limited run of eight intricate, expressive designs, launched this summer in collaboration with Sotheby’s. Fort Street maintains outposts in Hong Kong, New York and London and Provisor and Davis are fond of traveling to far-flung locales, where they create abstract paintings that then become carpets. These latest designs were loosely inspired by the environs of Roccantica, Italy. “The atmosphere made us want to push our design sensibility a little bit further,” recalls Davis. “We sat there in Italy in this big studio and we would talk about ideas,” Provisor adds. “We just sat with each other and worked and subtracted and added.” With Fort Street’s signature watercolor gradients plus the interwoven metallic accents, individual rugs can take up to six months for weavers to fabricate. In a brochure for the collection, each weaver is thanked personally. “We did this because we felt they did a heroic job,” Provisor explains. While Fort Street doesn’t typically work in a collection-based format, Provisor and Davis say they felt the pull to create a group of carpets that were in dialogue with one another. This way of working also allowed them to maintain

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a rare sense of artistic authority; though most of their carpets allow for customization by buyers, these do not. “We didn’t want to feel that we were compromising in any way—in terms of color or how it fits into a room. We knew the people that would buy these would have an interest in art,” says Provisor. If Fort Street’s practice is atypical for the worlds of both art and décor, that’s because doing the unexpected is par for the course for both Provisor and Davis, who both maintain successful solo practices outside of Fort Street. While the project changed directions in the early ’90s, out of New York and into China, much to the dismay of their contemporaries, they still consider themselves New York artists. It was while traveling in China during that time that they decided to get a custom carpet made for their loft in New York. When they were told their design was far too complex to fabricate, they suddenly found themselves on a mission to do so anyway. It took about two and half years for them to figure out how to “weave a watercolor,” as Davis puts it. “The problem was to come up with a pattern that weavers could read. And the real breakthrough was realizing that a knot was a pixel.” These days, when their aesthetic is mimicked by many, Fort Street is still making breakthroughs. For example, Progetto Passione’s dreamy metallic flatware areas were created with wire typically reserved for computers and telephones, a choice that echoes the crucial role that technology has played in Davis and Provisor’s modernization of an ancient craft.

Janis Provisor and Brad Davis work closely with weavers, translating their watercolor visions into intricate carpets. culturedmag.com 227

Congratulations to the 2018 winners!

Miami’s Visual Arts Awards

The Michael Richards Award Winner: Edouard Duval-Carrié

Creator Award Winners

Teacher Travel Grants

Kevin Arrow Jenna Balfe Marcus Blake Joe Cardona Leo Castaneda Thom Wheeler Castillo Lou Anne Colodny Franky Cruz Woosler Delisfort Cara Despain April Dobbins Bo Droga Raymond Elman Asif Farooq Guadalupe Figueras Julie Fliegenspan Dara Friedman Gonzalo Fuenmayor Rosa Naday Garmendia

Juana Meneses Susan Feliciano Lourdes Fuller Justin Long Mirena Suarez

GeoVanna Gonzalez Adler Guerrier Nicolas Lobo Pepe Mar Jillian Mayer Ricardo Mor Michelle Lisa Polissaint Johanne Rahaman Alina Rodriguez Silvia Ros Lydia Rubio Onajide Shabaka Stuart Sheldon Troy Simmons Ayesha Singh Symone Titania Fereshteh Toosi Juana Valdes Tom Virgin

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[ Image ] Edouard Duval-Carrié by Betty Rosado.

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Radical abstraction: Two artists, one century apart

Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future is supported by LLWW Foundation, the Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, The Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation, the Robert Lehman Foundation, and The American-Scandinavian Foundation. This exhibition is organized with the cooperation of the Hilma af Klint Foundation, Stockholm. R. H. Quaytman: + x, Chapter 34 is supported in part by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s International Director’s Council. The Leadership Committee for these exhibitions, chaired by Maire Ehrnrooth and Carl Gustaf Ehrnrooth, Trustee, is gratefully acknowledged for its support, with special thanks to Fotene Demoulas and Tom Coté; Rafaela and Kaj Forsblom; Helena and Per Skarstedt; Johannes Falk; Miguel Abreu Gallery; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York; Katherine Farley and Jerry I. Speyer; Barbara Gladstone; Gilberto and Rosa Sandretto; and Candace King Weir. Hilma af Klint, Group IV, The Ten Largest, No. 3, Youth (Grupp IV, De tio största, nr 3, Ynglingaåldern), 1907, from Untitled Series (detail). Tempera on paper, mounted on canvas, 321 × 240 cm. The Hilma af Klint Foundation. Photo: Albin Dahlström, Moderna Museet, Stockholm; R. H. Quaytman, + x, Chapter 34, 2018 (detail). Distemper and acrylic gesso on wood, 94.1 × 94.1 cm. Collection of the artist. © 2018 R. H. Quaytman

Claudia Wieser Forum

January 10 - March 9, 2019

Untitled, 2018

Adrian Piper Concepts and Intuitions 1965–2016 OCTOBER 7, 2018–JANUARY 6, 2019 ORGANIZED BY THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

ADRIAN PIPER, EVERYTHING #2.8, 2003. PHOTOCOPIED PHOTOGRAPH ON GRAPH PAPER, SANDED WITH SANDPAPER, OVERPRINTED WITH INKJET TEXT. 8½ × 11 IN (21.6 × 27.9 CM). PRIVATE COLLECTION. © ADRIAN PIPER RESEARCH ARCHIVE FOUNDATION BERLIN

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Free Admission

Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum FIU

October 13, 2018 — January 13, 2019

Fermín Ceballos, Isolation [detail], 2007, Photographs documenting performance, 12 x 15 inches, Courtesy of the artist

Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum FIU 10975 SW 17th St., Miami, FL 33199 w: frost.fiu.edu | t: 305.348.2890

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Airline Armchair/ KEM Weber, ca. 1935/ Courtesy of Peter

I R RS E E V G BE A ON R C A R P E N T E R S W O K S H O P G A L L E R Y/ C G S N A / E M E R A S T U D I O A P A R T M E N T- G A L L E R Y/ E TA G E P R O J E C T S / F R I E D V I E R Q U U D I D I E R LT D / A C R G RA G A N / I U G G A E S L K E C I E R R T A P A I E I R E E L P A J G / T C P PHILI I THE FUTURE PERFE ON / M E G EG U N G A LL E R I A A N TO N E LL A V I LL A N OVA / G A LL E RY A LL / H O ST L E R BU R R OWS/ JAS I I T TO AR / S L S BRE J O H N K E I T H R U S S E LL / K AS M I N / L A F FA N O U R – G A L E R I E D OWN T E L M / N OW Y IL RE ER E G A L L E R Y/ O R N A M E N T U M / P I E R N R E D L O M / O N R E D O M O L D A C R E M ER GA E D M I E R Y S M C H O A R U A S G H G A L L E R Y/ S R & C O M P A N Y/ S A L O N 9 4 D E S I G N / N DD IG SOUTHERN GUILD/ THOMAS FRITSCH – RTRIUM/ TO S A E #D DESIGNMIAMI.COM @DESIGNMIAMI

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Janiva Ellis, Thrill Issues, 2017 Courtesy of 47 Canal

11.30.18 30 Young Artists to Know Right Now Bright Lights Ahead Intimate Immensity Material Expansion The Monuments Man Both/And Push to Play Built to Last Nothing Can Be Too Crazy Find the Folly Long Live Jeanine Jablonski

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YOUNG ARTISTS TO KNOW RIGHT NOW 242 culturedmag.com

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AARON FOWLER “THESE OBJECTS BECOME manifestations,” Aaron Fowler says of his work. His assemblage paintings speak unconventional combinations into being, allowing for the intertwining of personal and collective histories. Latent ideas that have not yet found material form emerge from Fowler’s juxtapositions and create a forum for expanding and enriching our individual stories. Central to this questioning of narrative is Fowler’s interest in art history, as evinced by his engagement with the legacy of history painting. His work becomes a tool for questioning the establishment of histories altogether, for he shows that any established narrative is inherently an assemblage of paradoxical and competing elements. It follows that a central component of Fowler’s work is a generous

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relationship with the audience, which encourages a sustained reflection into questions of identity—how the collage of life itself is built, maintained and deconstructed. “We as people have so much knowledge and so many different perspectives,” he says. “There is so much to learn and so much to relate to. I always gravitate toward worlds that are not my own history, so I can learn something new. I am constantly trying to put worlds together. You have to make it relatable.” In Fowler’s painted assemblages, there is always something that grabs our attention, what Roland Barthes called the punctum. For Barthes, and perhaps for Fowler, the punctum is a site that is forever only yours, even as it offers the language necessary to connect empathetically with others. @aaron_fowler88

BROOK HSU

“In art, I feel that a spiritual side is missing in conversation. I don’t hesitate to say that it’s there. I don’t think it should be explained. It shouldn’t be dogmatic.” —Brook Hsu

“I APPRECIATE THE word artist more than I do painter.” In tandem with expanding her artistic identity, Hsu looks to dilate viewers’ perspectives by employing mythic and spiritual symbolism wavering between abstraction and figuration. Her work is a profusion of oil painting, texts, sculpture and carpet pieces that present contemporary narratives of love, pain, humor and connectedness. “I hope that my use of symbolism provides a freedom for the viewer to be able to think and feel deeply, to ask the big questions… to keep asking the obvious, why is the sky blue?, to have space to grieve, to laugh and feel joy.” Hsu’s ability to connect disparate themes in order to summon deeper thought may come from traversing vastly different cultural and topographical landscapes. She grew up in Stillwater, Oklahoma, and attended the Kansas City Art Institute

and Yale University. There was a stint in Los Angeles before returning to New York. “Panic Angel,” her 2017 exhibition at Brooklyn’s Deli Gallery was a meditation on her mother’s battle with breast cancer and a breakthrough show. The partner text, “Take Away,” introduced the pain of cancer through the allegory of the Greek god Pan and referenced everything from Rimbaud to Roy Orbison. Hsu’s solo show last summer at Detroit’s Bahamas Biennale gallery strung together disparate themes requiring viewers to interpret complex emotions and her first institutional show, a four-person presentation at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, is on view through January 27, 2019. “It’s difficult to feel our humanity right now, but we really need to feel it now more than ever,” Hsu says. “Art’s greatest power is in its ability to inspire change in us.” @broooooooooooooook

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DIEDRICK BRACKENS

WHILE MANY ARTISTS and critics have rejected allegory and narrative, Diedrick Brackens uses those exact strategies in order to meld questions of identity and history. His materials are the starting point for this relationship: “Cotton is the primary material because it is a very easy material to manipulate, it takes color beautifully and its historical significance in the U.S. relative to enslavement, violence and subjugation has had lasting effects on black bodies,” he says. I think of the process of handweaving cotton as a small way to pay tribute to those who came before me and worked with the material under very different circumstances.” Each of Brackens’ works is thereby a literal piecing together of histories that remain present today, collapsing time upon itself within layers of fabric. Like histor y itself, his work is always a composite creation— an assemblage of sor ts. “The figurative images are constructed in a manner much like collage. I build an image by photographing models, sourcing images found on the internet and social media, scanning family photos, et cetera. Once the images are decided I make a composite drawing, which is then used to create a weaving.” The narratives Brackens employs, therefore, are not seamless, but rather selfconscious constructions that carr y the debris of histor y and desire with them in each step. We thus understand narrativity to be something in process— filtered through lived experience and never unilateral. @deedsweaves

“I think of the process of handweaving cotton as a small way to pay tribute to those who came before me and worked with the material under very different circumstances.” —Diedrick Brackens 246 culturedmag.com

CHEYENNE JULIEN

CHEYENNE JULIEN’S PORTRAITS present figures with exaggerated, dreamlike features who are often forced to grapple with the prejudices inflicted on black and brown individuals. Their eyes resemble liquid pools, frozen in terror or sedate contemplation, yet there are also expressions of love and playfulness. Julien does not paint from reference, but finds context probing past experiences in order to understand more about her own life. “My work is based on personal narratives. Race is something that is inherent in all of my painting, but some works represent it more overtly than others. I think there is power in clarity, and I also think there’s power in nuance,” Julien says. Two particularly striking paintings appeared this year in her two-person show at Chapter New York. Morning Cigarette shows a control over color that the artist is newly demonstrating. In the work, a red-hued woman sits smoking, head in hand, resolved to the challenges of the day. The vacant space created by her black silhouette contrasts with a beautiful purple, leaving the viewer feeling depleted but absorbed in the morning meditation. Night Session reveals a figure on her back, depicted in black tones and frozen while a distinctly white male hand-paints a white stripe over her body. “Whenever I make something in monochrome it feels necessary, black and white says what the image is.” For Julien, color is still decorative but beginning to play a larger role. It’s works like these that led Julien to be a recipient of the 2018 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant. A honor not lost on her as she recounts growing up in the Bronx and the capacity art has to change lives. “I think about the power of art education when I think about art’s power, and its potential to heal a community.” @cheyennejulien

“Race is inherent in all of my painting, but some works represent it more overtly than others. I think there is power in clarity, and I also think there’s power in nuance.” —Cheyenne Julien culturedmag.com 247

GAUNTLETT CHENG “WE DIDN’T SIT down one day and say ‘let’s start a label’” Esther Gauntlett says, perched on a ruby red couch next to her co-designer Jenny Cheng in the Canal Street pop-up showroom the two had earlier this fall. This is the duo behind fashion label Gauntlett Cheng, a chaotically joyous clothing line building its reputation for cheekily cut knitwear, thoughtful collaborations with artists and body-affirming, interspecies designs (they’ve had dog looks on the runway). Their clothes reflect the bursting energy of two women with the gumption to flout their proscriptive paths; Esther went to law school in her native Australia, while Jenny studied biology in the States. This most recent season, GC offered a collection about summer and the beach and the slightly skewed way of dressing that comes with it. “It’s about being half naked and those half outfits that we pull together after the beach,” says Esther. “But also the feeling of comfort that can come in those moments with your body,” Jenny adds. The simple conceit dives deep into body-positivity, which is usually shallowly, or falsely, employed by the fashion world. This especially came across in the show-stopping ocean blue dress covered in a grainy sand material worn by Georgia Pratt, with an elastic fabric, a custom made jacquard designed in-house, gracefully

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spiraling down the curves of the model’s body. The collection highlights new priorities of young designers working today, where tactile experimentation can exist alongside a more relatable experience of living in a body. Gauntlett and Cheng met as interns for pioneering label Eckhaus Latta, where they first experienced the intoxicating ecosystem of a burgeoning underground fashion label. “After working quite intensely with Mike [Eckhaus] and Zoe [Latta], we felt all this momentum,” Esther says, “‘What do you mean this season is over?’ It was this feeling that we had to keep going, we wanted to keep making clothes.” This lead to the workflow that still rings true—day jobs balanced with making clothes, an all too familiar narrative that seeps into the sincerity of the design and its presentation. For example, a few seasons ago, GC did a collection about mixing 9-to-5 attire with nightlife, where suit jackets were matched with itsy- bitsy bikini tops. The show occurred on a docked boat called Harbour Lights in the East River, conjuring the hot mess vibe of a booze cruise. “The clothes say where we are at in our lives. Balance is still a narrative we are dealing with,” Jenny says. @gauntlettcheng

CHRISTINA QUARLES CHRISTINA QUARLES WORKS with paint in order to deconstruct its assumptions and weighty historical lineage: “I find the baggage that comes along with painting—the unspoken but highly regulated historical context that structures the legibility, taste and value of a painting—to be a useful medium to unpack identity and what it is to live in a body. Socio-historical ideals that are Western, heteronormative, patriarchal and white supremacist remain the status quo in part by operating under the radar of being natural and given.” Quarles thereby upends the presumptions of the status quo by critically inhabiting art historical space. Though her work certainly has a deconstructive aspect, there is also an investment in the corporeal nature of beauty and enjoyment—something

affirmative and earnest rather than critical or ironic. She says, “I embrace beauty in order to make paintings that are a refuge for those of us who experience ambiguity on a daily basis—but I also employ beauty in order to captivate and hopefully unlock the potential for ambiguity within those who have never had cause to question their own identity position.” The generosity of bringing in those who do not identify as queer, non-white or female, is perhaps the core of Quarles’ expansive work—its resonances are as varied as the resonances of identity itself. The beauty she employs becomes a subversive beauty, an opportunity to multiply the representational possibilities available to artists and viewers alike. @cequarles

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HAYLEY MARTELL VERY easily convinced me to take the ferry to Rockaway and spend six hours with her. The Ohio-born artist wore all white, and told me she once wore a uniform of a white tee-shirt and painter’s pants for six months. A stranger on line for the ferry asked if she wore the color to make a statement. She does. “For me wearing white has always been a signifier of an attempt toward a greater internal shift. The palette became a visual reminder for myself to remember kindness and to strive for a peaceful equilibrium,” Martell explains. “Right now, it’s serving as a practice in acceptance: I am enjoying the challenge of letting go of perfectionism and judgement as my clothing gains an assortment of stains from years of being worn.” We arrive and walk toward the beach. It’s an unseasonably warm fall day, so we jump in the ocean. While drying on the sand, Martell tells me she believes artists are born, but that otherwise, the label is tricky. I agree with her, since she seems like one of those born ones. It’s evident in the small gestures of her daily existence. For example, if you compliment her on her jewelry, one of her own silver “wearables” as she calls them, she’ll probably yank it off her ear and give it to you. Martell collaboratively designs clothing and crafts sculpture culled during “treasure hunts,” recontextualizing the often discarded materials. She makes videos that function like soothing meditations, with elements of nature flickering onand-off the screen like tabs of a computer. Martell’s practice fits within a lineage of female conceptual artists like Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Rosemar y Mayer—both of whom invest in rituals of care, honoring emotional labor and documenting the surreality of being in a body. “I make work to process my experience and inner emotional landscape,” explains Martell. This includes overcoming trauma and acknowledging the human experience in its joy and banality. “I think life is sort of like theater—not many people pay attention, and it’s my job to direct people’s attention” she says. @skymall98

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HAYLEY MARTELL

“For me, wearing white has always been a signifier of an attempt toward a greater internal shift. The palette became a visual reminder for myself to remember kindness and strive for a peaceful equilibrium.” —Hayley Martell

EVA LEWITT

EVA LEWITT WORKS with soft materials such as plastic, latex, rubber and polyurethane foam to create hanging sculpture and wall pieces, the materiality of which dissects space and plays with notions of depth and mass. LeWitt studied painting at Bard College before finding sculpture at the ver y end of her studies. In the decade since graduating, a continued patience and prolificacy have emerged in her practice, situating her in a lineage of sculptors working with soft material such as Eva Hesse and Maren Hassinger. A key element of this lineage is how the work gains significance through manual labor and the ability to work by hand. “Soft materials are the ones I want to touch and I want to play with; they are physically more impressionable than stone, wood, metal. They are also less subject to a prescribed technique, which has freed me up to be inventive, impulsive,” says LeWitt. In 2018, the oppor tunity to do a large-scale installation at Oslo’s galler y VI, VII led LeWitt to begin working differently. She exper tly incorporated color into different material elements to imbue the interconnected sculptures with visual energy. “Colors were chosen to radiate heat, to generate energy and vibration,” she explains. LeWitt recently worked with curator Kelly Taxter on an installation for the lobby of the Jewish Museum which is on view through March 2019. While her work continues to grow, LeWitt is adamant that there will be no return to painting, or a divergence into other mediums for that matter. “When it comes to visual ar ts, I am purely a sculptor.” @evalewitt

“Soft materials are the ones I want to touch and I want to play with; they are physically more impressionable than stone, wood, metal. They are also less subject to a prescribed technique, which has freed me up to be inventive, impulsive.” —Eva LeWitt. culturedmag.com 251

JASPER SPICERO

“Parts of my sculpture have been really cared for; other parts look like they’ve had no attention paid to them. I think that’s what makes the work compelling, the disparity between the two.” —Jasper Spicero

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“SINCE I WAS a kid, I’ve been making stuff,” Jasper Spicero explains as we share a bench in Washington Square Park. “All of my work is an extension from then.” This certainly makes sense in the landscape of the South Dakota-born artist’s imaginative art practice, which pushes mediums like sculpture and film into a world of his own making. As we watch what is presumably the NYU’s Star Wars Club practice elaborate choreography with plastic lightsabers, Spicero tells me about a childhood that shaped his aesthetic world. Born in the small town of Yankton, South Dakota, Spicero spent an impressionable amount of time traversing the west, living between Tennessee and Kansas, and later Washington. “I spent a lot of time as a passenger in a car driving cross country. I really liked, and identified with the feeling of being in the passenger seat, how it is both soothing and emotionally loaded.” This reverie uncannily applies to Spicero’s work as we become accomplices on a long dreamy trip through the artist’s sensibility with the melancholy soundtracks that often ting in background of his films, like in his recent short The Glady Day, as well as his sculpture, comprised of banal objects whiplashing between tenderness and neglect—all in the muted palette of an overcast sky. Spicero’s process begins with deep dives in digital realms, be it the off-beaten path of the internet, or his beloved video games, as a foundational framework. “I’m always trying to find my way through the internet, looking especially for unusual things that I didn’t even know I was looking for, but when I find them, it feels like they were made for me to find.” For example, bell choirs. Most recently, Spicero stumbled on a man named Jerome Simone, who created a system of vibrations with old cell phones and custom made phones, so that the blind can participate in a bell choir. The choir features in Spicero’s forthcoming film, Centinel, showing at the Swiss Institute this winter. “It’s really gratifying to have an idea or a vision, and create space for others to contribute, which then manifests in an artwork or a film. That’s the space where I feel the most inspiration lately.” @babybluexiv

ILANA HARRIS-BABOU ILANA HARRIS-BABOU INVITES me to tag along to the grand opening of Restoration Hardware in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District on a research expedition of sorts. This past winter, the Brooklyn-born performance and video artist mounted a gleefully sardonic parody of the luxury furniture store called “Reparation Hardware,” at Larrie gallery. Using modes like the word play found in the title, “Reparations” dealt with the design world’s obsession with taking what’s old and making it new again. “It’s this idea that you can curate the world, and bring difference in,” Harris-Babou says, “and that it is controlled by the taste-making, omnitiate eye of the furniture, which grounds itself as modern, centered and white.” This comes to light in a video piece where HarrisBabou seductively caresses repurposed wood in an artfully crumbled New England barn. “I like to use humor and familiar forms as a trojan horse to get heavier material into people’s line of sight,” says the artist. Harris-Babou’s practice mines the bizarre and at times problematic cultural touchstones that we collectively consume, from wellness products to foodie culture. This includes assuming the persona of a celebrity chef in her recent video piece, Cooking with the Erotic, where the artist and her co-chef

(her mother) take turns quoting Audre Lorde’s 1978 text, “Uses of the Erotic” between seductively smattering acr ylic paint on artisanal bread. “Not everything I look at is from a completely critical stance,” she says. “It also comes from a space of love. Cooking shows are something I love, and see myself in. We are all so embedded within visual culture that we’re all also implicated by it too.” Putting the chef’s hat aside, Harris-Babou shares that she’s been thinking through a new character that can straddle more abstract concepts, like the feeling of belonging or being “at home,” especially as it relates to this country’s narratives of aspiration. “I was thinking about a tourist character, who moves between being at leisure, and being alienated—being of the space, but also seeing what can we remove or keep.” The artist references a conversation between Audre Lorde and James Baldwin in Essence magazine, and how Lorde knew that the “American dream” was never really hers, as it is more of a nightmare. “I know I don’t fit into the cohesive narrative, so that gives me ability to see the strangeness too. Thinking through the American dream is a longer-term project.” @ilanahbhb

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MARTINE SYMS MARTINE SYMS IS perhaps best known for her interventions into new media that have profoundly changed the nature of the arthistorical landscape. What is equally important is Syms’ role as a researcher and writer, as someone who brings the past, with all its complexities and paradoxes, into the present. Her Incense Sweaters & Ice, from 2017, for instance, is a simultaneously epic and intimate story that explores the contemporary resonances of the Great Migration. Syms takes this historical framework and adds complex layers of desire that show the impossibility of any unidirectional interpretation of the past. Syms says of the film, “In this case, I was curious about the relationship between cinema, Black women and movement. History bleeds out of everything.” In insisting on the multiple resonances of the past, Syms necessitates an expanded understanding of identity: “I’m often asked, required or demanded to take on multiple positions in life. These are the conditions, and given that, what do you do? How do you live? This is one of my animating questions.” These demands we might make of the art object itself—to speak to us plainly, to give up its meaning unequivocally to us. However, as Syms has explored throughout her work, art owes us no easy answers. Art and artists deserve to be as multifaceted as history itself, to ebb and flow without a predictable trajectory.

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HUGH HAYDEN

HUGH

HAYDEN’S

ARTISTIC

trajectory is a slow burn that continues to evolve. An architect by training, the Dallas native continued designing stores for Starbucks while pursuing an MFA in sculpture at Columbia, years into his career. It was risky for Hayden, whose lifelong artistic impulses manifested in a variety of ways, like his “culinary installations,” which remained in the periphery until recently. “A couple of years ago, I didn’t know I would ever show my work, but I believe in what I’m doing, so this moment is full of feeling for me,” Hayden says. Freshly graduated from his MFA, Hayden had a fall solo show, “Border States,” at Lisson Gallery, where the sculptor is represented in New York and London, along with Clearing in Brussels. We met at the show on a fall Saturday and were greeted by a swarm of people—a mix of friends, curious strangers drawn from the street and ar t world types. Hayden gave an impromptu talk around the sole sculpture in the last room, a dark wood baby crib. Precious and simple from a distance, the interior of the crib reveals what Hayden calls a “terrible constellation” of whittled white thorns, their shape evoking sharp teeth. “I didn’t realize how mouth-like it would turn out,” he says to the bewitched group circling the sculpture. In “Border States,” the crib is joined by other works that reference American tropes, including a picket fence and dining room table—all with the same aggressively protruding thorns. Fabricated with wood sourced from the Texas and Mexico border, Hayden critiques an America that is putting up walls on the border, becoming a countr y of increasing divide. The show expands the material gravity put forth in Hayden’s first New York solo show at White Columns earlier this year, with his haunting use of naked Christmas trees found along Park Avenue. Searching for a wood that could convey more personal significance for the Lisson show, the artist found a species of tree called Texas Ebony. “It feels like a play on my own identity,” Hayden says. @huthhayden

“I understand my progression from using hair, to feathers, to bark, to branches—it all builds on my interest in transformation and the idea of ‘camouflage.’” —Hugh Hayden culturedmag.com 255

KAYODE OJO

AMERICAN ARTIST

AFTER FOUR SOLO SHOWS in 2018 that took him to three different

AMERICAN ARTIST meets me at a diner that serves bad BLTs on white bread,

countries, Kayode Ojo is looking forward to a break. “I’m waiting to exhale,” he laughs over a recent call. Ojo’s sumptuous sculptures have the tendency to induce just that affect. Working with mirror, glass and readymade materials such as chandeliers, ladies’ evening gowns, sheet music stands and acrylic beaded door curtains, Ojo creates assemblages with a human presence that are poetic in their resonance. “I use preexisting objects because they have a meaning to me or a certain cultural connotation, in order to start a conversation with the viewer,” Ojo says. The power of the readymade is just that, but Ojo retains an object’s meaning through his clever placement of material as with No. 5 The Film (Blue Velvet) from 2018, which includes Topwholesalejewel Bridal Long 5 Strands Silver Crystal Earrings that imbue the work with the feeling that it might pick up and saunter right out of the gallery. Ojo began working with sculpture in 2012 and elements from his earliest pieces remain today; exhibitions at SVA, where he studied, included sculpture with stacked mirror and glass. Another through line is his preoccupation with the image, likely founded in Ojo’s training in photography, his primary focus at SVA. “Some of my sculptures take their form from images I’ve seen,” Ojo says. “And the process of making them involves photography in order to record the many possible arrangements and poses.” His photographs were recently shown alongside his sculpture in “Closer” at Sweetwater gallery in Berlin in September and in “Equilibrium,” which is on view at Martos gallery in New York through December 22. With a distinctive voice in two different mediums, it’s likely Ojo won’t be taking a break any time soon. @kayodeojo

while heartbreak anthems drone from the jukebox. Diners are one of those American signifiers that are so distinctly bizarre, yet blindly accepted. American Artist is interested in this particular type of credulity. Born and raised outside of Los Angeles, the interdisciplinary artist uses sculpture, writing, and digital space to question how power works in daily lives, often in ways that are hidden in convenience, or posed as neutral. The artist’s first solo show, “Black Gooey Universe” staged earlier this year at HOUSING Gallery in Bed-Stuy, probed a new digital beyond. It was predicated on Graphical User Interface or “GUI,” as it’s often abbreviated to (“gooey,” phonetically), which refers to the negative space we see when we look at a computer. In the show, American considered a historical moment in the 1970s when that screen shifted from black to white, deeming white as the new neutral tone within the screen space. “What if black screen continued to exist as a realm outside of the white screen interface? American asks. “What technologies would emerge?” So far, American largely imagines this space through sculpture, defying the “sleek look” of technology that often masks our ability to critique it. The artist’s name itself contains the tension of an exclusionary history, but is also a trap door to a new space of possibly, where American can give the slip (try searching the name on Google) while expanding a previously narrow definition of who an artist is. This begins quite literally with their moniker, a name the artist legally assumed in 2013. “I think the general archetype of an ‘American artist’ is someone like Jackson Pollock, a white male AbEx painter. So for me, changing my name was about asserting myself as a black artist who uses digital media.” @ivorytower_headass

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worked steadily since her “Rose Gold” exhibition and next year has two solo museum shows: one at The Aldrich Contemporar y Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut and one at the Milwaukee Art Museum which is traveling from the Minneapolis Institute of Ar t. She is also working on her first public artwork, a permanent billboard in a new subway station in Toronto. Ultimately, Cwynar’s practice is an investigation into image-making as it relates to how we navigate our daily lives. “It seems like the failure of speaking to convey any truth or to accomplish anything is at the forefront of our culture right now,” she says. A chilling observation, especially considering that society is also still struggling to accept the falsehood of the image, as streamed to us daily by companies like Apple. @cwynars

SARA CWYNAR

SARA CWYNAR INVESTIGATES themes that lay the groundwork for capitalist societies—obsolescence, consumption, technology and labor— interrogating them all “through the lens of color.” A technically skilled photographer and designer, her images often include collage, appropriation and a kaleidoscopic take on the image, where pictures are rephotographed and assembled in abundant layering. There is urgency and depth in Cwynar’s imagery, especially in video form. Information is often relayered quickly and repeatedly in her works. A video from her 2017 exhibition at New York’s Foxy Production compares Apple’s rose gold iPhone to other objects and images in which color was used as a selling point, including mid-century Melamine tableware, concluding that even something advertised at opulent can become kitsch over time. Cwynar has

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RAQUE FORD RAQUE FORD’S ABSTRACT YET personal work often straddles the line between painting and sculpture, with elements of performance dancing along the periphery. Whether observing her artwork as painterly sculptures or paintings with sculptural elements, her 2- and 3D pieces engage viewers deeply, exploring narratives of female identity through constant juxtaposition: hard vs. soft, masculine vs. feminine, color vs. black and white. A better conjunction than “vs.” may be “and.” In Ford’s welded steel chains—which hint at violence as much as they do fine jewelry—and bright brushy palettes moving seductively across lasercut acrylic surfaces, we are privy to the gamut of human emotion. “I think I struggle with balancing the desire to be uninhibited and being way too selfconscious. You can see that in my work,” Ford says.

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Ford was the recipient of a 2017 Tiffany Foundation Grant and is a visiting professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. On the horizon is an ar tist book with her writing and plans to make a large acr ylic dance floor piece similar to her Karafun (2017) and Karafun 2 (2018) installations that see a combination of vivid acr ylic sur faces patchworked across the floor, punctured by narrative etchings. The pieces are reminiscent of Adrian Piper’s mesmerizing Funk Lessons (1983), asserting the dynamism and personality black culture has contributed to American music and dance. As sculptures, they are “unself-conscious yet intuitive,” seemingly delicate yet able to withstand the weight of the audience—just like the artist. @punkraque

MISHA KAHN IN THE MANNER OF SOME Surrealists, Misha Kahn considers how objects think, feel and interact with the viewer. Central to this process is Kahn’s consideration of how art objects reflect human aspirations—our desire to be seen, understood and valued. He says, “If an object already looks melted, a little lumpy, a bit dowdy—maybe it’s more like you. So many objects demand us to be careful around them, or to build a better (simpler, more chic, more affluent) life and home in order to deser ve them. I think mine are slightly confused interlopers just hoping to find a bit of love.” Art histor y tends to demand so much from works of art, but Kahn’s work considers a complication of that role, in which artworks and humans relay their respective insecurities to each other.

As a result of this mindset, Kahn’s work becomes an unexpected source of empathy and connectivity. He says, “I always feel like functionality gives objects a Trojan horse quality—we’ve been really well brainwashed to think that anything functional is meaningless, non-narrative, at best zany but superficial. This means that these objects are welcomed into people’s homes without the idea that they might contain more.” Kahn’s objects infiltrate space: they smuggle in emotionality where it might be unexpected or unwelcome. This has been a central strategy of the avant-garde—to use art as an anthropomorphized entity with the capacity to shift vision and feeling in places normally considered banal. @mishakahn

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MARYAM HOSEINI

SER SERPAS

MARYAM HOSEINI’S INTEREST in “our incompleteness as a condition of

SER SERPAS’S ASSEMBLAGES are akin to music—personal and lyrical

being” has led the painter to create the fragmented figures that populate her surreal, flatly-rendered futurescapes. Hoseini paints her female forms nude and gathered in groups with legs and arms akimbo or detached entirely. These ruins of “body, of spirit, of society” are presented in architectural environments that reference the landscape of her native Iran. Through the act of painting, Hoseini builds on the splintered architecture and social structures of the Middle East, subverting present systems to create new spaces of inclusion. Hoseini’s 2017 solo show “Of Strangers and Parrots” at Rachel Uffner gallery saw the addition of abstract site-specific wall paintings, which flowed into her modestly-sized wood panel works and acted as bodily support columns for the smaller pieces. In addition to being among the group of artists inaugurating The Shed in spring of 2019, Hoseini’s delicate acrylic and ink paintings were shown last summer as part of “Body Armor”at MoMA PS1. Included in these works was her use of familiar symbols representing past cultures—clay urns, palm fronds, ancient baths and contrasting lines reminiscent of Egyptian headdresses. “I’m constantly archiving imagery,” Hoseini says. “I’m interested in learning about the past to address the future.” @maryhoseini

interventions into space that exceed articulation. “I treat every session in the studio like a music video. The install is more important to me than any piece individually. I hope that comes across. They’re fragments of my own narcissism, I guess. Like, I was dancing when I balanced this thing on this thing and listening to Radium, can’t you tell? I danced by myself in this gallery at 3 AM and drank.” To dance with an object is to give it agency, to recognize its power to fill us with hope or dread, to project upon it our fears and wishes. And to find balance in that dance is to ask things to exist as they may not normally in the everyday world—to ask the outside world to reflect our inner harmony or turmoil. A central part of this process is love, which is as critical and historical as any conceptual argument. Serpas says, “I’m 100% nostalgia. They’re just not my things—the stuff I’m nostalgic about—It’s like I’m watching a movie about, whatever it is I should care about. I just watched Cold Mountain. It is great.” Our attachments are always shifting and unpredictable, and perhaps this is what Serpas hopes to call to mind. Something we desire becomes refuse and vice versa, or maybe we desire it because it is debased. @ser_sera

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MONICA HERNANDEZ

MONICA HERNANDEZ’S flowing, flowering figures are spread large across the canvas, unadorned, unabashed, and usually representative of the artist or women she knows. Hernandez found her voice long before graduating from Hunter College with a BFA last year. Her confidence in her own image is as sanguine as her sunset-hued oil-oncanvas “scenes” depicting brown men and women eating, praying, bathing and sleeping. “I love becoming a part of this history of painting, in my own way,” says Hernandez. “I would like my art to be honest, transparent, in whatever it is trying to say or do. I want it to be vulnerable and open.” Hernandez is from the Dominican Republic and moved to New York with her family when she was six years old. In a world where the view of the female figure is changing daily, she is a keen adapter. Her not-always-so-popular Instagram account now has more than 70,000 followers. “I’m treating Instagram like its own art piece. Challenging how we represent ourselves,” she says. As with her painting, the power of the female gaze is refreshing and everpresent in the images she posts—of her art, friends, and mainly, herself. 2019 should be a breakout year for Hernandez. Free of expectations and restrictions brought on by school and full-time employment—as well as the structure and support they provide—Hernandez does not hesitate when asked about the future. “I feel like I’m becoming more confident in my voice and what I have to share. I’m more open to experimenting.” @monicagreatgal

“Good art feels like some sort of triumph, it makes you feel like there is a purpose behind our existence. For a second or two you suspend your cynicism, and you find yourself loved, represented, understood.” —Monica Hernandez

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WILL SHELDON THE WORK OF tattooer, illustrator and painter Will Sheldon does nothing

a Haitian childhood, a Miami upbringing, a Palestinian-Haitian father, an Israeli mother, his grandfather’s Vodou-jazz big band, and Saieh, an intergenerational family gallery in Port-au-Prince that has been running since the 1950s. Yet his paintings evade the Haitian narrative tradition in favor of a twisted take on modernism. “My identity has always been confusing for me, and it definitely comes out in the way I make work,” El-Saieh says from his studio in Miami’s Little Haiti district. “I find abstraction is a place that isn’t necessarily about resisting the things that make me who I am, but a space where there’s ambiguity.” El-Saieh’s practice extends beyond painting and he instigates the spread of Haitian art to wider audiences. “I’m still really involved with my family’s galler y and working with the artists there that influence my work,” he says. Also a par tner in the ar tist-run space Central Fine in Miami, the ar tist translates his deep relationships with Haitian ar tists into the galler y’s programming. Last spring, El-Saieh organized a show of Myrlande Constant, a female artist whose practice is intertwined with the Vodou community of Haiti. She crafts color ful, sequined flags traditionally used as “power points for both identification and transformation” in sacred rituals. This past summer, Constant’s flags flew at Brooklyn’s Pioneer Works, in a show featuring many of the artists El-Saieh works with between Central Fine and Saieh. This year was a big one for El-Saieh, with the painter’s first museum solo show at ICA Miami and his inclusion in the New Museum Triennial. Since shipping off the works that appeared in the Triennial, El-Saieh has been preparing for a solo show this winter at Central Fine. “I have this idea of leaving empty space for once,” he says, a departure from the artist’s usually densely populated canvases. @tommelsaieh

less than transpor t viewers to another realm—one of cacophonous psychedelia, a joyful pastel nightmare. “The way I think about my practice is all these elements floating around in the same world,” Sheldon explains. “The elements you see in my tattoos can translate to a college, or a painting or an illustration for a book.” Sheldon is known to take relatable and accessible tropes like blood, flowers or body par ts and filter them through his campy, unprecious lens: bones hung with cascades of loopy ribbon, sinister drippy eyes loaded with glamorous makeup and hardware that would more likely be on a purse than a machine. “When I think of a good tattoo or good imager y in general, I think of these simple things you learn in kindergar ten, or what you find beautiful or interesting at that age,” he says from his East Village studio. The combination of Sheldon’s deeply collaborative nature and experimental attitude has affected his aesthetic in whimsically surprising ways. “I really enjoy working with others,” he says. “You learn so much by putting ideas together and creating something completely unexpected.” Previous collaborations include working with Raffaella Hanley, the visionary behind the Lou Dallas clothing line, where Sheldon’s designs have become part of runway looks. The artist also frequently works with Reba Maybury, illustrating the writer and dominatrix’s novella “Dining with Humpty Dumpty.” The two staged a show together in London last summer for which Sheldon crafted huge wallpaper-like canvases portraying the hybrid creatures that are often miniature in his tattoos. This wallpaper highlights a tension that propels Sheldon’s practice. “I think my art and my tattoo practice is fluid in some ways,” Sheldon explains, “but there’s something inherently different about putting something on a canvas and putting something on a body. There’s a distinction there for me that I’m always working through.” @willsheldon

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TOMM EL-SAIEH BY GESI SCHILLING

TOMM EL-SAIEH ABSTRACT PAINTER TOMM EL-SAIEH over flows with identity markers—

TRISHA BAGA TRISHA BAGA’S WORK in video and installation is a sustained inquiry into the possibility of disrupting art history—with the body, lived experience and identity. To be an artist is to both absorb that which has come before and to reject its claim to authenticity. As Baga says, “I think of how problematic it feels to build upon existing languages, forms and pre-established referent/meaning relationships as though they have any authority. As a person of my background and identity and experience, I find this isolating and uninspiring. Authority should always be resisted, even if it’s just for fun.” History becomes a site of play, where master narratives have no power and instead become fodder for transformation and translation.

What results is a space in Baga’s work in which normative systems of signification fail, in which no one is owed a “right” answer about meaning or significance: “Answers, in art making, are like graves. Did you know that grave marking was the origin of land-owning and real estate among our species? My psychiatrist told me that. I haven’t looked into whether or not it’s true.” There is a sense that so much space—artistically and politically—these days is taken up by a desire to know an indisputable answer, without nuance or debate. Baga conversely insists on a debate, on the complication of discourse within the messiness of human subjectivity. @trishabag

“It’s really hard for me, in my work, to let any element mean just one thing, or have only one aspect of it involved in a narrative.” —Trisha Baga culturedmag.com 263

SAM FALLS SAM FALLS’ WORK occupies a rare space between photography, painting, sculpture and documentary. Central to his thinking is his experience of and relationship to the viewer. “I want to un-mediate the relationship between myself and the work so that the work relates to the viewer more intimately,” he says. “I try really hard to have the work relate directly to the viewer, and be not so much about the artist or the artifice.” Though he has worked in endlessly varied media, Falls is perhaps best known for his painting-photographs (photograms of sorts) using natural phenomena. In a recent installation for the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, for example, Falls visited every national forest in California and littered large canvases with flora endemic to the area. After layering randomly chosen dry

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pigments on top of the composition, Falls then left the hodgepodge overnight, allowing the evening’s condensation to wet the colors and bleed onto the canvas, creating silhouettes not unlike those found in early photograms. The viewer is thus left with indices of an environment that feels at once immediate and impossibly removed. Falls says, “The process comes out of a desire to work with a form that is available to every viewer. With photography, especially abstract photography, there is so much manipulation—in the darkroom, and lately with inkjet printers. By using the sun, the rain and plants, there is universal subject matter that ever yone can relate to, which allows deeper dialogues about art for people who want it.” @samfalls

JORDAN KASEY JORDAN KASEY’S COLORFULLY vivid, gigantically-scaled oil paintings are of the earth, quite literally. Sitting in middle of the floor of Kasey’s Bushwick studio gives the distinct feeling of being in a canyon of the painter’s own creation, as her work surrounds us on all sides, easily careening to the reaches of the ceiling. It’s fitting that the Chicago-raised artist’s breakthrough came not via portraits of people, per se. “Going way back, I was just painting rocks, rock formations and landscapes that would take the place of a figure as a portrait,” the painter says. These days, Kasey’s canvases have expanded in subject matter, incorporating figures, or “blob people” as the artist jokingly calls them. “I like the paintings to look how they feel, rather than be anatomically correct people,” she says. That emotional weight of Kasey’s work is palpable, like in Hot Day, 2017, where an anonymous figure wilts on a dock overlooking the water, their generous body possessed by light. It plays into Kasey’s desire to

activate her canvases by timeless and universal elements as simple as water meeting the sky. “I mean, we’re all drawn to the horizon,” Kasey says. “It’s this magical blue line. I’m interested in the idea of ‘here’s our reality,’ and then ‘here’s the big blue churning mystery.’ I think my work is a lot about that line, even if there’s not overt water or beach present.” Kasey is in the final throes of preparing for a solo show with her gallery, Nicelle Beauchene, this winter, which the artist describes as taking a greater emphasis on architectural elements. Rocks have resurfaced again too, with Kasey showing charcoal drawings at Beauchene’s apartment project space simultaneously with the painting show. “I’ve been doing these drawings of ancient sculptures car ved out of stone, which I started doing just for fun. Charcoal is really relaxing after pulling all this,” the artists arms gesture wildly around the studio, “out of my head.” @jordankaseyjordankasey

“I like the paintings to look more like how they feel, more so than be an anatomically correct people. So if I want the person to feel monumental and stone-like, to feel architectural and unmovable, that’s more important for me than having realistic proportions or anatomy. If hands or feet have a believable gesture to them, you can get away with a lot elsewhere in the figure.” —Jordan Kasey culturedmag.com 265

ELLE PÉREZ THIS PAST YEAR slammed open the door of Elle Pérez’s raw and intimate visual world. “It’s a very intense experience to put out an image of someone, and have it be responded to with very little context around it,” Pérez says in their home studio in Bushwick. “I try to be very careful about what and who goes into the work, especially with how images interface in the world right now.” Over the course of a few months in 2018, the Bronx-born photographer mounted two solo shows: The first, “In Bloom” at 47 Canal, landed as a dizzyingly stark suite of photographs that invited a layered understanding of intimacy, bodily experiences, and transformation. In one photo, a bloody hand is positioned in front of an abyss of par ted legs. In another, a binder (Pérez’s own) hangs on a shower rod, held in strategic compositional suspense between a golden hued cur tain and shampoo bottle. In Wyley, (2017/2018) a red banana whips across the face of Pérez’s friend, shrouding their identity. Perhaps it was the intoxicating open-endedness of “In Bloom” that drew curator Klaus Biesenbach to offer the photographer

their first museum solo show at MoMA PS1 a few shor t months later. “Diablo” expanded the tightly edited “In Bloom,” especially with a recreated version of Pérez’s studio wall. The bulletin-board structure offered a precious window into the photographer’s references, like photos of friends, archival magazine clippings and xeroxed book passages with poetic underlinings. The “in-progress” nature of the wall lent itself to the idea that Pérez’s practice is not a cipher, but a constant state of reckoning. This state of becoming is especially present in recent portraiture featured across both shows. In Warm Curve (2018), a top surger y scar of Pérez’s collaborator and partner Ian, acts an entry point into the work, but not as a final destination. “When it comes to the identity of the person, what if it all that weight could exist in the composition?” Pérez says, “What if it could liberate the people in the photographs from having to claim anything? Photographs can do that.” @elleperex

“I’ve been thinking a lot about ethical portraiture and how there’s this consumption problem. OK, sure, you are consuming something with images, but can we also acknowledge a desire to be consumed? And that there are different levels of being fed by images?” —Elle Pérez 266 culturedmag.com

AMALIA ULMAN

“When I first pointed out the disingenuity of people’s behavior on social media, I was trying to talk about something larger than just supermodels editing their waist to look smaller on Instagram, or girls in general making themselves prettier. I was talking about the the look of legitimacy that certain platforms have (newspapers, books, libraries, universities) which the internet emulated. It seemed dangerous.” —Amalia Ulman

“I DON’T LIKE for art to become art objects, ornaments. Instead, I like to look at ideas under a different light completely, all the time,” Amalia Ulman reveals. “I’m a perpetual student with no goal of becoming a teacher.” Ulman is a pioneer in the ephemeral world of internet art as it functions across social networking platforms. Fundamentally, she is a thought-provoking multidisciplinary performance artist who examines the way people interact with each other. One of Ulman’s greatest strengths is taking the social temperature of Western culture and investigating how contemporary power structures influence the general public online, often by infiltrating the very top of said structures. A single work of Ulman’s can span years on social media and translate into essays, lectures, installations, publications and video, to name a few mediums she works in. In her online per formance Privilege (2015–16), she utilized tropes from silent cinema to create a comedic caricature of herself.

Inspired by the political climate of the time, the project situates Ulman’s character in cis white male-dominant office culture in order to critique our understanding of power and austerity in ever ything from media to fashion marketing. Following the authenticity-bending Excellences & Perfections (2014), Privilege is Ulman’s final scripted work using Instagram as a platform—a publication documenting the per formance launched in November in China. However, Ulman is still interested in engaging in long-term projects. “I’m excited to be working on my first feature film, both as an actress for another director in one project and as a director, screenwriter and actress in another,” says Ulman, “and I’m planning to start writing a novella that has been in my mind since 2013.” @amaliaulman

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WE OFTEN SPEAK of space—who owns it, who takes up too much of it, how to celebrate it, and how to divest it of subjugation and imbalances of power. Lauren Halsey has always intervened in these questions in her examination of architecture, history, and Black culture in Los Angeles. She says: “I’ve always questioned who’s designing the architecture I live in, as well as the architectures that define a neighborhood. I can’t separate architecture from other oppressive forces that have the ability to reinforce stereotypes, deplete the morale of a place and instigate violence.” Halsey interrupts those forces by creating monuments to Black creativity that are always in flux and announce their connection to the community from which their energy is drawn— or in Halsey’s words, remixed. Central to Halsey’s spatial interventions is a capacious investment in social documentary: “I’m interested in accumulating living archives of downtown South Central LA that include, but aren’t limited to, local heroes, signage, logos, mix CDs, celebrations, menus, incense and oils, party flyers, gang tags, figurines, superhero groups, tattoos, hairstyles, bus routes, city blocks and local businesses.” Halsey’s work is therefore an always-mobile assemblage of banal and extraordinary elements of community life that coalesce into an undeniable presence. It is no wonder that Halsey named an important project at MOCA’s Grand Avenue location “we still here, there.” Her work implies duration and fragility simultaneously, which creates a space for the endless combination and recombination of cultural narratives. @summaeverythang

CHLOE WISE CHLOE WISE’S PAINTINGS engage with the idea of constructed identity by questioning the social systems that dictate how we consume images of women. Her plush portraits—paintings growing in seriousness, both technically and thematically—call into question the power the male gaze continues to hold in contemporar y imager y while simultaneously parodying the status quo heteronormative dominance presents. “The people I portray, whether they are women or non-binary, are in control of their own representation, as opposed to the way the female figure has been depicted throughout history,” says Wise. Wise works in an array of media, including painting, sculpture, works on paper, installation and video—but portraiture remains a constant. Currently, she is preparing a new series for her second solo show with Almine Rech

Galler y in London opening in April. The exhibition is a subtle examination of the reversal of painter and painted, connecting male narcissism to the fragility inherent to the ver y idea of masculinity. Dismantling contemporary power dynamics is something that Wise has always taken on in her work, with different amounts of urgency. Whether attempting to destabilize the patriarchy through the female gaze or poking fun at ultra-consumerism by placing a designer fashion logo on a piece of bread, beneath it all there is an adept humor that never fails to show up. “I paint what and who I want, in a manner that feels natural, and it just so happens that my politics and sentiments come through. That is the nature of expression.” @chloewise_

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BRIGHT

LIGHTS AHEAD BY MONICA USZEROWICZ

PHOTOGRAPHY BY NAIMA GREEN

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When I was young and difficult, someone told me that the neurological network that processes humor and the one that processes distress are close to each other in the brain—an imprecise electric crossroad. As pseudoscientific as that statement felt, it was useful: my response to admonishment—loud laughter and internal shame—was biologically permissible. In the first episode of Terence Nance’s acclaimed HBO late-night variety show Random Acts of Flyness—confirmed in August for a second season—there’s a segment called “Everybody Dies!” directed by Nuotama Frances Bodomo. It’s a dystopian children’s program in which Ripa the (Grim) Reaper despairingly ushers black children to their deaths. She grows despondent, screams for help. The episode screened in August at Art Africa, a gallery in Overtown, Miami; it was the second time I’d seen it that week, and when Ripa appeared, a woman in the audience guffawed—indefatigable, tear-soaked laughter. Every implied murder, every pained reference to the disproportionate deaths of black children: hysterics. “I’m sorry,” she said, gasping. “It’s so funny.” I tell Nance about it later. “I understood ‘Everybody Dies!’ to be one step in a process of grief,” he says. His tone is low but bright, and his pacing calm an unaffected luminosity, even if he’s tired. (He has just completed a photoshoot; I imagine this is his third interview of the week.) “Sometimes, after you’re angry, you’re in a state of despair. That can turn into absurdity, then delirium. Ripa then goes in reverse: despair, anger, resignation. That’s a linear experience, but those emotional tonalities are always happening at the same time. They’re going on in me, whether or not I’m expressing that when the police shoot a kid for having a toy gun, your immediate response might be to laugh. Within these emotions is the absurdity of it all: laughter that validates despair, and the desire to change things.” Random Acts of Flyness isn’t linear either, but a collaborative project with directors and artists like Bodomo, Jamund Washington, Naima Ramos-Chapman, Shaka King and others, all friends of Nance—many of whom he’s met through his practice, through art-making, through each other. “It’s a committed, emotionally vulnerable and highly skilled team of artists,” he says, and he values “the energy of other people’s experiences—that’s what makes the show fractal and interconnected to a diverse set of experiences.” Nance cares about his friends, is nourished and charged by them. Even if writing necessitates a kind of solitude, he seems a workaholic only to the extent that his work involves his people. “It’s hard to have any joy about a piece of work as it’s in process, sometimes,” he admits. His voice peaks here, gratitude audible. “The main way to get to the joyfulness is letting go of the expectations or desires you have about what it’s going to be. That’s usually possible when you have the right people around you, who are going to constantly question whatever expectations you have for it.”

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THANK YOU TO AARON AUJLA AND BEN BLOOMSTEIN WHO LENT US THEIR PATIENCE, AND TO CAROLINA VOGT WHO CARRIED MORE THAN AN ARMFUL OF BODE TREASURES TO SET.

The director and actor Terence Nance sits in a Railcar Loveseat, 2018, by Green River Project LLC; he wears Bode’s Striped Country Cloth jumpsuit, similar styles available through bodenewyork.com. Previous spread: Bode’s Washed Indigo Country Cloth Shirt and Green River Project LLC’s Railcar Club Chair.

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ROG WALKER/HBO STUDIOS

Ramos-Chapman, a director, writer and editor—and Nance’s partner— has made major contributions to the show, as has the entire team. Her short film, And Nothing Happened (2016), finds thematic resonance in “Nuncaland,” a musical she directed for episode two where masculinity is a kind of accidental poison—the way it festers, the burden borne only by women. Nance, she says, was essential to the piece. “He has supported my past work and knows I’m interested in discussing these themes: alienation, power and privilege, sexualized violence.” She echoes his assertion that the show has a rippling texture, buzzing with the energy of many hands. “There was a natural inclination to dismantle the idea that Terence’s ideas were more important,” she tells me. “Everyone is a visionary or makes work on their own terms—the different, complicated ways of how we process the world make for a layered, textured thing.” In 2013, when Nance met the sculptor and performance artist Doreen Garner, he told her, rather immediately, “Your voice would sound good as a cartoon voice-over,” she recalls. She plays Nance’s co-host on episode one’s “Sexual Proclivities of the Black Community” and, incidentally, does voiceovers throughout the season, including one in an animation about Michelle

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Obama as god. Garner sounds like a calm sea, slow and a little undulating, and her voice would lend itself well to any colloquy of divinity. “Terence is super open-minded,” she adds, “and open to collaboration, allowing other people to put their own special spin on things.” In the season finale, artist Diamond Stingily plays Nina Rodriguez, who “uploads her brain because she wants to work even if her body isn’t physically there,” she tells me. “It wasn’t hard to play Nina because I’ve been in that position. A lot of people cannot stop working regardless of their circumstances. The world doesn’t stop for anyone.” Random Acts of Flyness pulls from the experiential well, then peregrinates between short films, animations, interviews and musicals, interjected with error messages or sudden ballads in every interstice; it’s poetry, quick and emphatic, about the dense, barbarous landscape of American life. It was disquieting to watch the first episode of Random Acts of Flyness again, devoid this time of surprise. I already knew its abstraction was encoding something concrete—that a segment of Nance floating in the clouds, high above a group of angry cops, was poignant and funny because I wished Tamir Rice, the black 12-year-old killed by police for holding a fake

ROG WALKER/HBO STUDIOS

A still from “The Cookout,” a segment on Episode 104 of HBO’s Random Acts of Flyness featuring Terence Nance. Opposite: A still from “MLK had a dream,” from Episode 105 of Random Acts of Flyness.

gun, had real wings. Performers break character and question themselves; special guests discuss their loves and miseries, and the monologues are transformed into spacious performances, sometimes cartoons. The show is repeatedly described as “surreal,” but that’s inaccurate. Maybe “hyper-real” is better. Maybe it’s not kaleidoscopic but microscopic, life sharpened, still filled with abject pain and a bit more beautiful. “The Afrosurreal Manifesto says that surrealism, as expressed by black people, is a way of describing our identity naturalistically,” Nance explains. “It’s not an attempt to be weird, abstract, obtuse. That’s not necessarily just a black thing, either. Everyone has a physical experience of their body and a metaphysical experience of being non-embodied, whether they meditate or go to church to get to it.” Nance grew up in Dallas, Texas, the son of an actress and a musician/photographer. As a child, he “knew but didn’t know” about the art forms with which his parents engaged, intuiting their processes unconsciously. His 2012 film An Oversimplification of Her Beauty is as much a collaged gyroscope between fiction and reality as Random Acts of Flyness, the real-life her in question—actress and friend Namik Minter—contributing to its story like a duet. It’s regularly cited as a stylistic predecessor to the

show. But Random Acts of Flyness was in the works as early as 2006. At the time Nance called it Random, but the idea, he says, was nearly “exactly the same as it is now.” When Nance was commissioned by Time Warner’s storytelling incubator, 150, Random was his “most fully developed episodic idea.” Encouraged by 150’s Tamir Muhammad, Nance’s pilot was picked up by HBO. “I do think it’s important to have a community of people with whom you have a way of being that feels settled, mutually sustainable,” he adds. “That’ll find its way into the work.” Nance will soon direct Space Jam 2, produced by Ryan Coogler and starring LeBron James, which he describes as “a unique opportunity to create a totally new aesthetic that defines our present.” (Of course.) Like all folks perpetually, wildly in motion, Nance is often beset by worry, which he quiets with meditation. What else? “I try to rest, read, write. I try to not be alone, to have hyper-presence, to engage as consistently as I can with my family and the people I love. I think those are the most important things.” Our call was about 30 minutes long, spliced with static, the sounds of traffic, children, music. There was a few-second delay, stretching the conversation into an echo. Still, I heard Nance, his voice bright as a vesper.

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INTIMATE IMMENSITY

BY EMILY WELLS PORTRAIT BY BRANDON STANCIELL

Ella Kruglyanskaya paints women with agency. The scenes depicted—the creative process, social interactions between women, poses evocative of a glamorous sexuality— gesture towards the fraughtness of being a woman in the world, with bodies as sites for an unfolding drama. Yet, even as Kruglyanskaya’s colorful, voluptuous women are acted upon, they are also

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actors of the narrative in each of her paintings— their emotional responses are honored as the subject matter. Each painting feels both intimate and immense.Born in Latvia, Kruglyanskaya immigrated to Philadelphia at 17 and attended an arts high school before studying painting at Cooper Union where she earned her B.F.A. and then went on to Yale for her M.F.A. She moved to

Los Angeles earlier this year, and finds that the city offers the necessary space for creativity. “It feels almost like a fantasy space where you can project onto,” she says, “it’s a place where imagination can happen.” It is partially Kruglyanskaya’s sense of imagination that allows her to paint sexualized and performative women without adding to their

The subjects of Ella Kruglyanskaya’s paintings are products of her imagination rather than drawn from reference.

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Painter in Red, Exhausted, 2017

Great Expectations, 2017

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The distinction is significant. Kruglyanskaya’s paintings are “cartoonish,” but the aesthetic seems to have been chosen deliberately to honor the content. What better way to demonstrate the potent physicality of women’s existence and the almost caricature-like dramas that accompany living in a female body?

misrepresentation. “I draw from imagination,” she explains over breakfast at Kitchen Mouse, a health-centric spot near her Highland Park studio. “I don’t use any other sources when drawing the women. If you draw from your head, you eliminate a lot and end up with something like a mental note to self, since drawing is so much like handwriting. I can get ideas out without stopping myself.” At her studio, Kruglyanskaya introduces me to the works in progress for her next show at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York City this upcoming January of 2019. To the side of each painting is the drawing on which it is based. The transition from the sketches to her characteristic big, bold strokes is seamless, and I am especially taken by several paintings of a pouty, circular woman in various states of creative frustration, clutching paint brushes and art supplies. This protagonist (she prefers the term over subjects or characters), is called “Art Wench”—“my own crisis represented,” Kruglyanskaya says. A greater crisis of womanhood and the encumberment of attempting to portray it are also themes in the work. In a particularly arresting painting-in-progress, a protagonist set against a

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bubblegum pink background holds up an object to obstruct her face. Two menacing hands in the frame appear to reach toward the woman’s body as if they are going to grab her from below and her side. The piece makes me laugh, but nervously so. Kruglyanskaya’s work masterfully blends humor and emotional communicability, explaining that, to her, vanity is essentially a reminder of death (“all of it will have been in vain”), and that somehow, there is a great deal of humor to be found in memento mori. Adjacent to Kruglyanskaya’s paintings of women are the beginnings of a new series of stilllife paintings of objects. Childlike in their imaginative qualities, three nutcrackers sit next to ceramic dolls and a horse-drawn carriage toy. The paintings also include other depictions such as pages from a book of photographs of objects, elements that also appear in her paintings of women. While Kruglyanskaya’s paintings are often called “cartoonish,” she insists that they are anti style. “The difference between style and the way that a certain thing looks,” she explains, “is that a style implies that you chose something because

it’s a choice of taste, and you decided that is good, and you’re going to repeat it over and over. I’m not interested in that. All the elements of my paintings happen to look they way they do not because I like that look, necessarily, but because of some other reason. There’s some other logic that goes on.” The distinction is significant. Kruglyanskaya’s paintings are “cartoonish,” but the aesthetic seems to have been chosen deliberately to honor the content. What better way to demonstrate the potent physicality of women’s existence and the almost caricature-like dramas that accompany living in a female body? There seems no greater manner to acknowledge the agency of protagonists that refuse to be reduced by outside influences. As I make my way to exit the studio, we discuss Elena Ferrante, a writer we mutually admire, who was established as a point of connection before our interview. “I guess in some ways,” she says, “we are similar in that we’re depicting this narrow, lived point of view that feels incredibly true.” Kruglyanskaya’s specificity yields expansive results and creates a rare space of selfpossession for female protagonists in light of anything else that might invade their frame.

Exit with Blue Stripes, 2017

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MATERIAL

EXPANSION

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I believe the first time I saw Torey Thornton’s work was in 2015 in a group exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Since then, we have interacted with one another in a spectrum of group settings: a baseball game, a holiday party, various openings, a wedding, a bachelor party. We’ve also had a number of daytime meals out with one another. We text and email. I’ve never been to his studio, though I have seen exhibitions of his work. I know that for others who occupy similar positions as mine (not the artists, but the writers, dealers, curators, researchers of the world) it can be irksome to meet with an artist over breakfast instead of their studio. However, I’ve come to think of the studio as a site like any other. If we understand studio practices and the practices of exhibitions as architectural projects—rooms through which people navigate, these navigations effected by objects—then for me, right now, being seated at table in a restaurant is just as good a setting as any to talk. In other words, the here-and-now can occur in any place—the future as a site of hope and apprehension and the past as a site of memory are narrative projects, anyway.

So, of course I was pleased to be asked by Thornton to talk with him in advance of his January 2019 exhibition at Essex Street gallery. I think that in the exchange below we set a good foundation for the forthcoming exhibition: by exchange I mean that of the interpersonal, but also a laying out of how disparate parts operate with and alongside one another—how objects might correspond with one another in, say, a solo exhibition. Thornton is represented in major public collections, and earlier this fall his work was included in “The Vitalist Economy of Painting” curated by Isabelle Graw at Galerie Neu in Berlin. Thornton’s painting was hung between works by Ellen Cantor and Albert Oehlen. What draws me to Thornton and his work is common between himself, Cantor and Oehlen: an unapologetic and disruptive opposition to the status quo, and a practice that explores the extremities of narration and abstraction. In the conversation below we touch upon these themes and spend some time opening up the field in which his coming exhibition will be situated. — Andrew Blackley

Andrew Blackley: I recently spent some time uptown looking at exhibitions and two bodies of work struck me. The first was Jack Whitten’s “Black Monolith” paintings which are composed of tesserae that he made by curing pigmented acrylic in refuse (bottle caps, plastic packaging) repurposed as molds. Once cured, he would cut, break or otherwise shape each tessera as he saw fit before arranging them together as and on the painting. The other body of work I saw was a group of six or seven collages by Jean Dubuffet made in the 1950s— each work features dozens of butterfly wings which serve as the primary compositional material of the works. These two bodies of work were similar in that they were physical arrangements of what appear to be common materials, but as much as they shared some ethos of combination, collage and accumulation, the materials they used were nearly opposite from each other: Whitten’s materials were plastic, static, constant, while Dubuffet’s were fragile, particular and iridescent—and already existing with a design and decoration in and of themselves. One material was fully formed, and the other—Whitten’s— well, he formed the material fully. What do you see as your building blocks—or, to use different language, your alphabet, your foundation, your arch stones? I am recalling the two works that you showed at the Whitney last year—Painting and What Is Sexuality, Is The Scale Infinite Similar To A Line (both 2017)—there’s a lot to talk about with those works and their materials.

Torey Thornton: For each piece I approach it differently in terms of material focus, and of course there are different approaches for the paintings versus the sculptures but, in either case, I’m always considering what the content and form of the piece should be and then that dictates materially how I choose to compete with the medium that I’m working in, sculpture or painting etc., or how to highlight the realm. There are works that attempt to undo the stereotypes surrounding the medium and there are those which heighten the medium, or have other agendas outside of the medium itself. The content may focus on subjects that are more worldly or not as rooted in an art criticism discourse or direct analysis of the space in which the piece is made. These two works you mention are both paintings, and in many ways they are both about pushing the definition of painting and lifting up the definition to look behind it. In the case of Painting, I considered the round saw blade as a surface just like a paper, panel or canvas, and I wanted to work with materials that softened or competed with the steel so I chose to work with the found painted rocks, seeing them as similar to collage. With the mattress I used to make What Is Sexuality, Is The Scale Infinite Similar To A Line, it’s more complicated in terms of discussing its origins and various meanings, but materially I knew that having a surface that was a canvas would inevitably talk about painting along with the actual painting that I applied to its surface. The additional binding materials and plastic forms on top were about boosting the concepts in my mind but also still seeing the

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1. Untitled, 2018. Cellular photograph 2. Untitled, 2018. Cellular photograph 3. Untitled Political Aliens (Top Fifty U.S. Babies 2018 Gender Mashed To Make My New), 2018. Acrylic paint, sharpie and graphite on cardboard. 129.5 x 95.5 inches (framed). 4. Voyeur’s Chameleon (The Rest), 2017-2018. Color photo prints, mirror finished stainless steel and polished aluminum frame. 129.5 x 95.5 inches (framed) 5. Untitled, 2018. Cellular photograph. 6. Untitled, 2018. Cellular photograph. 7. Untitled, 2018. Cellular photograph. 8. Untitled, 2018. Cellular photograph. 9. Untitled, 2018. Cellular photograph. 10. Untitled, 2018. Cellular photograph.

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materials as applied collage. A shallow hard painting and a thick soft one, in many ways. I have rules, though. None of the sculptures use paint by me, or at all really, and all the paintings have paint involved. This is just a way for me to allow my brain to settle and navigate the work, otherwise things get too open-ended and free in ways that don’t suit my work. AB: We still talk about painting and sculpture as if they’re totally distinct, like two parallel lines and lineages that never touch. Maybe it would be more useful for us to think about painting and sculpture as intersecting and overlapping, like x and y axes. What’s going on in the studio and in your head when you’re working towards a new exhibition? Besides what is going on in the studio, what does it mean for you to sequence works and to sequence exhibitions? I have a feeling that you take the time between each occurrence, be it a work or an exhibition, as important—that’s what creates intervals, rhythm, cadence, etc. TT: There’s a certain pacing and trajectory that I have attempted to develop and follow inside my mind. How do I create the most space for myself to work in freely while still keeping strong pressure on the concerns I have within art-making? Generally, once I’m showing work, I’ve already thought about the work and shows that will need to follow in order to create the right context and conversation for the things shown, before and after, that existing show or piece. I don’t really work serially in the same way that many artists do, so sometimes it makes it difficult to determine which works should go where and why, but this also keeps me stimulated. I like to have something to push against. I guess the works are like words and the shows sentences, so the overall practice is a statement or a paragraph. It takes years to have the statements speak clearly but most people would rather fast-forward or tell you what your statements are versus waiting for you to finish speaking. I’ve realized that instead of moving in a straight line I move more up and down, sideways and backwards in order to pull in the necessary information to support whatever I’m working on at the time. My practice isn’t one long narrative, it’s more related to several streams of thought overlapping and interacting at once, how the brain generally works. I think the main focus is to not move too far ahead of myself when making work for a show and to make sure that I’m thinking things through and putting enough glue in the cracks if you will, versus hopping over statements (works) and moving onto the ideas that speak the loudest to me. Sometimes I have to slow down and really dig inside of a space and struggle or play within it, to get to the other side. I like to think that also in every step forward I dip backwards some and borrow from my past, but I never want to stifle myself or feel imprisoned, so I have to do what the work tells me to versus imagining what the viewer or world is ready for and/or thinks makes sense for me and my work. There are definitely particular pieces and shows that I save for the right time or moment. Sometimes there’s a show in my mind that’s three shows away from the current one because I need to present a body of work or ideas before certain work can be digested more comfortably. Abrasive bombardment can be nice and important at times, but I want people to be able to read and look without causing unnecessary confusion or shock: There’s a time and place for everything. This show at Essex Street in January will in many ways be the most proper presentation of my sculpture to date. It will definitely be a particular introduction to my vocabulary and material sensibility within sculpture, and there are also some overarching concepts that will be present, without speaking too explicitly about the show, too soon. AB: I’m drawn to what you’re saying about the word/sentence/paragraph structure. In as much as these are containers of accumulation, they’re also active devices of structure: paragraphs organize sentences, sentences organize words. (The poet Ron Silliman writes, “The paragraph organizes the sentences; The paragraph is a unit of quantity, not logic or argument; Sentence length is a unit of measure.”) These forms can also serve as the site for disorganization. Will you talk about the titles of your works? They’re within the grasp of recognition but they are also elusive and are off-kilter, out-of-sync. They differ and they defer, for example: I against I, Surgically Removed Organs Left In I Against I, Creative Asphyxia, Intellectual Asphyxia, Romantic Asphyxia Painting and Am Not, You Want, (Analog

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Digi) (both 2017). It seems that you’re utilizing the moment where narrative shifts in scale or direction as the production site for meaning. If that’s true, or could be true, I think it could say a lot about how one might successfully navigate your exhibitions, which I suppose are also not serial, but simultaneously emerge from precedent and disabuse us of a loyalty to linear sequence. TT: I used to have a difficult time determining titles because I wasn’t interested in flat fake poetic ethereal titles that could just be attached to anything that exists, and I wasn’t interested in blank giveaways, like “Large Brown Pit” in reference to a work of a hole dug into the earth. I always want my titles to be a work in themselves but to also give indicators or clues to the way my mind works in relation to constructing each piece, or otherwise. When the titles are read, eventually I hope people recognize shifts in my voice and attitude. I believe that a type of mystery is generally more interesting in artworks. Titling in some ways has become harder for me as the work has grown more conceptually rigorous and complicated. I would like viewers to take their time with each work and exhibition by comparing and contrasting language, form and image, sequence. All of these characteristics influence speed, which also relates to something I call “the work’s rewatch value.” Similar to a movie, each work has a certain number of times it can be seen before it is empty or uninteresting. When thinking of certain artists, I often obsessively dig and try to find common threads or quiet reveals in the work or exhibitions. This could be repetition through language or reference to other works in the past, formally, conceptually or linguistically. I hope that someone would take the time to investigate these threads and clues in my work, as well. Societal systems and technological advancement have halted a type of mental porousness or digestion of information. Things slide through and over our heads much faster, and in some ways I feel that this helps move me to loop back and reference works from my past and evolve or anchor their language or progression through a different context. AB: Are you suggesting that the “rewatch value” of a work is a value that depletes through experience? I’m interested in agreeing with you, not because I think that works and their meaning and value are not accumulative, but I do think that some works become entirely recognizable. I’m interested, and I think you are too, in the unrecognizable, or something that teeters on the brink of recognition. That’s what makes reference and reception so rewarding: both tools rely on difference and the “new,” thereby prompting the viewer, and I suppose the maker, to construct new frames and boundaries. Speaking of boundaries and frames, how might one lay out a sculpture exhibition? Would the relation of the pieces to the whole resemble more a celestial constellation or an archipelago? TT: I think some work just isn’t as interested in holding the viewer for longer periods of time. Maybe it just wants you to say “wow” and understand it relatively quickly. In other situations, work is possibly too simple or doesn’t leave much room for question, or no room to come back to it at another time and realize new dimensions that it possesses. Inevitably though, as with anything, the more you see something the more desensitized you become to that thing or situation. If you watch The Skin I Live In (2011) by Pedro Almodóvar as many times as I have, you will be less surprised and maybe won’t feel sick or angry towards the end of the movie. All exhibitions are different for me. Aside from the materials or mediums shifting, there are always subjects or concepts that I’m playing with, building on or pushing against that dictate the work that I make for each show. For some years I felt that I was making painting shows predominantly as an introduction of my hand, vocabulary and environment to the viewer: this is what my paintings can look like and how my mind works. Now that I’ve begun to present more sculpture in full, in some ways the current shows will inevitably be a new introduction within this space of working. What is sculpture and what is material. How do I see sculpture materials and the meaning surrounding them? What are my forms or concerns and interest and so on? Although, for the Essex Street show, there will be some common threads between the works, beyond my hand of course, creating an ecosystem of sorts.

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PHOTO COURTESY OF MICHA PERI

A detail of Dani Karavan’s Negev Monument (1963–68) in Be’er Sheva, Israel. culturedmag.com 291

IN MY VIEW, IT IS THE SITE THAT IS LOOKING FOR THE ARTIST AND NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND. –DANI KARAVAN

With a background in sculpture and painting, what led you in the direction of creating site-specific art? I began studying painting when I was 13 years old and wanted to become a painter. In my youth I was part of political movements involved with human rights and peace. During the cease-fire of the War of Independence (1948) I was among the founders of a kibbutz on what was then the border with Jordan. As a member of the kibbutz I became interested in doing art for the general public rather than for private people. During this period, I started to think about painting murals as public art. I then decided to travel to Florence and study fresco. I was very much influenced by 13th- and 14th-century art in Italy, especially in Tuscany. When I returned to Israel, I understood that I would not be able to do fresco paintings due to the widespread use of cement in modern construction. I wanted to find a way to combine the techniques of murals with the materials used in contemporary architecture. Therefore, I began working in concrete and created large-scale bas-reliefs for public buildings. At the same time, I was also designing stage sets for the Cameri Theater in Israel and various dance companies, including the Martha Graham Dance Company in New York. Following my experience with the site-specific bas-reliefs and with set design, I was invited to create site-specific sculptures, which best suited their environment. I was lucky to get commissions in Israel and, following those, in different countries all over the world. Your father was the chief landscape designer for Tel Aviv from the 1940s through the 1960s. How did that influence your approach to your practice? I began to understand how much I was influenced by my father, Avraham Karavan, only when I turned from painting to sculpture. My father grew up in Manchester and I think he was very inspired by the English gardens. He always wanted to recreate nature—gardens as nature. I understand now that I am following his footsteps: When I approach a site, I often develop the project in a very similar way to his way of creating gardens. What do you believe the role of the artist is in urban life? Artists working in an urban environment have to take people into consideration. They need to always keep in mind that the space they are creating has to include people, to make a connection with them. In my sitespecific works people are an integral part of the work. My works could not exist without people. I want them to experience the work and feel like it is embracing them. At the same time, I never try to impose the way people should interact with my work. The work itself inspires people and leads them to explore the different forms and spaces. The fact that children engage with my works is not because I designed it for that purpose, but because my works give them a sense of freedom to use them in any way they would like to, without aggression, without violence—in a peaceful way. Regarding your materials, you list natural elements first like sunlight, water and wind before manmade materials like concrete or steel. Why? When I create an environment, I use materials such as trees, vegetation, flowers, etc. in a similar manner to that of a landscape architect. However, I use them as materials of art. Instead of their botanical use, I use them as a form, color and structure. In my view, it is the site that is looking for the artist and not the other way around. Natural elements and memory create art. Artists should take what nature is proposing them and integrate it into their works.

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They have to listen. In all my projects, the site is guiding me. In the White Square in Tel Aviv, for instance, the olive tree, as an organic form, counterpoints the geometric elements. It was artistically necessary to integrate this tree in the work. I wanted to incorporate the surroundings, the park, so that the square will be connected with nature around it. Some say that since I work with harmonious materials my works symbolize peace. But this is not my approach. I don’t use white concrete or water or trees in order to “describe” peace. An olive tree can be used as a symbolic element, but also as a simple artistic material. In fact, any object can be used as artistic material. You can use sand, you can use a tree. The site also dictates the materials. This is why it is important for me to write natural elements before manmade materials. Your first site-specific environmental sculpture, the Negev Monument (Be’er Sheva, Israel 1963–68), became a landmark in Land Art. How are these human events you are memorializing connected to the natural world? First of all, I am not an artist who creates memorials. I create homages. In 1962, my friend Micha Perry asked me to design a monument to commemorate those who fought in the Palmach Negev Brigade in 1948. Many of my friends had fought with the brigade. Nahum Sarig, the Negev Brigade’s commander, told me that it was formed before the War of Independence in order to protect the settlements in the Negev and safeguard the water pipeline which was a real lifeline for their residents. Uzi Narkiss, a commander of the Negev Brigade’s Seventh Battalion, suggested I build a lookout so that visitors could climb up and physically experience the landscape. Nature was indubitably inherent to this project! I observed the surrounding hills leading down to the valley, examined the views of the rolling landscape, and studied all the folds of the ground, the rocks and the bushes. All those elements became materials of my art. I had to integrate the landscape of the desert, its particularities, in order to tell the story of this brigade. My father helped me to plant acacia trees, indigenous to the Negev desert. As water was scarce, he knew which trees should be used. He always kept in mind the water. The line of water I created as part of the monument is not only a symbol of life, but also a tribute to the Palmach Brigade who had the mission of insuring the water supply to the kibbutzim in the desert. At the time, I didn’t know what I was doing, I had no theories. I did what I felt. I created a sculpture that directs the flow of visitors to it and requires them to use all their senses. This constitutes the experience—an environment composed of natural materials and memories. You create in so many different mediums. Is there a common message driving your work? My creative process and its language are defined through a unique and specific relation to the place itself; through a dialogue with the site, with the natural and built environment that surrounds it; through the use of specific materials, wind, sun, water, tree and earth; and through a dialogue with those who commissioned the work. This is how the story is created. I would never go against nature, against the landscape. What I am creating is specifically an opening to a panorama, to a view inseparable from a place. It is crucial to integrate the details of the surrounding landscape into the work. That is why in the Axe Majeur, a site-specific 3-kilometer-long axe I created for the new city

I ALWAYS CARRY A MESSAGE OF PEACE, MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING AND FREEDOM THROUGH THE STORY OF THOSE I PAY TRIBUTE TO, SO THAT THEY WILL BE REMEMBERED IN THE FUTURE.

PHOTO COURTESY OF MICHA PERI

–DANI KARAVAN

The interior of the Negev Monument plays with shadow and light as integral parts of the structure.

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MY CREATIVE PROCESS AND ITS LANGUAGE ARE DEFINED THROUGH A UNIQUE AND SPECIFIC RELATION TO THE PLACE ITSELF. –DANI KARAVAN

of Cergy-Pontoise near Paris, I invite people to climb up a 36-meter-high tower where they can contemplate the beautiful view of the surroundings. In the Negev Monument, my objective was to trap the light and sun, like ancient cultures did in the pyramids. I wanted to hear flowing water, to write on water. When the wind rose and offered its breath into the pipes, it was like flutes— its music could resonate like the melancholic sounds of a Bedouin flute. In 2016, you requested that your historic Knesset sculpture be taken down in protest, in response to Israel’s Culture Minister launching a new funding criteria that penalized artists who refused to perform in the occupied West Bank. You asked, “What is this if not a dictatorship?” As authoritarian leaders rise across the globe, what do you feel your responsibility is as an artist today? I was born and raised in Israel, where I have always been part of left-wing political movements. When I did this wall for the Knesset, it was an homage to the first declaration of independence of the Israeli state, which was genuinely a text promoting respect for human rights. As the current political ideology in Israel is far from this text, I decided I wanted to remove my work from the Knesset so that it will not be related to what I have always been fighting against. I am very concerned and very worried about the politics around the world. The worst part is that I don’t see how it would change positively. I have always believed in rights for everyone. The French motto “liberté, égalité et fraternité”—liberty, equality and brotherhood—really resonates in me. Indeed, I feel very close to it. Unfortunately, it seems like this is a right we are losing day by day. I believe that artists today have the responsibility to promote the fact that we all have the right to express our beliefs and in the same time we should not impose them on others. We have to listen to each other. Freedom of speech is essential. Evelyn Beatrice Hall wrote about Voltaire’s way of thinking: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” In the Jewish tradition, we are taught to love our neighbors as ourselves. This is what I feel is important to pass on. Memorials can be the most challenging and fraught commissions an artist can take on. With multiple narratives and agendas surrounding historical events and figures, how do you orient yourself as an artist to a project? When I am commissioned for a site-specific project related to historical events, I always study the different versions of the story by consulting experts, reading articles and all kind of information which allows me to have a clear view on the situation. Then I take from it the most convincing and encouraging message to bring hope to my project. I try to avoid political messages as much as possible so that my work is not related to nationalistic ideas. My project is about men and mankind first. I always carry a message of peace, mutual understanding and freedom through the story of those I pay tribute to, so that they will be remembered in the future. Nowadays there is less and less respect between people. Less and less people care for others’ lives. Furthermore, in the current political situation around the world—with far-right political parties speaking in their own voice and governments that wish to change the history— it is even more important for me to convey the courage and the story of those who lived through the worst. I make sure the message is clear, that the history is not altered and I prevent any ambiguity. That is where natural elements play an important part in my work. You cannot misinterpret an olive tree, the sound

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of the waves breaking or rays of sunlight reflecting on water. The best result is when nature itself can tell the story. For example in my homage to Walter Benjamin in Portbou I was looking for the right way to represent the turbulent life of this important Jewish philosopher. When I saw the whirlpool the waves made in the sea, it was clear for me that this was the essence of my project. The whole project is then directed towards this whirlpool. What are your values as you approach these sensitive projects, and do you have a different approach when an event includes death? Most of my works are commissions that involve tragic events. Therefore I have to deal with death but also with life, as they are closely linked to one another. Obviously, I have great respect for these people who were killed and I want to honor them in my work. However, it is crucial for me not to treat them as heroes. Indeed, I want to avoid creating feelings of holiness or religious explanations of any kind towards them. It is more important for me to point to their admirable humanistic values, just like Walter Benjamin in my work Passages or the Sinti and Roma in the memorial in Berlin. I always try to create spaces that celebrate life rather than death. Even places of memorial can give a feeling of the importance of life. You recently opened some major exhibitions. Tell us about them. How do you approach showing your work differently in a gallery context? My exhibition in Paris at Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger is called “Adama,” which means “earth” in Hebrew. It also has in it the word “Adam,” which in Hebrew not only relates to the first man but to all human beings, and the word “dam,” which means blood—the fluid of life. The Jeanne Bucher Jaeger gallery has been my home since I arrived in France in 1980 to work on the Axe Majeur. In the exhibition, I will show a model of the Axe Majeur that is more than eight meters long, as well the earth sculptures and bas-reliefs I created in 2015 as a comeback to work exclusively with natural material. It is a reference to the houses and villages which are made from earth. I came back to the traditional building techniques of my ancestors who lived 2,000 years ago in the country where I was born. On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of my monument the Way of Human Rights in Nuremberg, which was in October, I received the Nuremberg honorary citizenship and I opened an exhibition at Kreis Galerie there. It was an opportunity to present a model, films and installations related to this very important work of mine. Following this work was the initiation of the Nuremberg Human Rights Prize, awarded every two years to freedom and equality fighters who risk their lives but are still anonymous. Later that month I opened a third exhibition, this time in Italy, in the Museo Nazionale dell’Ebraismo Italiano e della Shoah in Ferrara. This exhibition introduces to the public the site-specific project I have been wanting to create in Ferrara: Il Giardino che non c’è (“The Non-Existent Garden”) as an homage to Giorgio Bassani’s book “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis” (“Il giardino dei FinziContini”). Indeed, this garden does not exist in reality, although I have seen tourists looking for it. Some of my main works are also on display there, such as Passages in Portbou, the Way of Human Rights in Nuremberg, the Sinti and Roma memorial—all linked to memory and human rights. What is your hope for humanity now? I hope people will be more tolerant of others and to each other. I hope for more education all around the world. I hope that in most countries, art will have a key role in people’s daily lives.

PHOTO COURTESY OF STUDIO DANI KARAVAN

An aerial view of the Neveg Monument, which was built to commemorate the fallen members of the Palmach Negev Brigade during the Arab-Israeli War in 1948. culturedmag.com 295

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As an artist and writer I have spent a great deal of my short career wondering: How do I tell the stories of black spaces, of queer spaces, of spaces so often culled by the very systems which seek to oppress us? As I work under the table, on the table, on art works, precariously, from quick gig to quick gig, I wonder: What does it mean to work now? What forms of labor are acceptable to our society today? What does the body at work look like? Los Angeles-born, New York-based artist and film director Leilah Weinraub has spent a number of years asking these questions, furthering lines of inquiry about bodies, money, blackness, control and power. Weinraub made her name as co-founder and CEO of Hood by Air (HBA), a New York fashion collective known for their hyper luxurious, ingenious ready-to-wear. Founded in 2006, HBA picked up speed in 2013 as Weinraub and cofounder Shayne Oliver began laying the groundwork for what would become a completely different type of fashion brand—one whose aesthetic engaged directly with young, black, city-based clothing trends of the late ’90s and early aughts while simultaneously thrusting those notes into a futuristic vat of minimal, dark fantasy. Driving everything that HBA produced was an imperative to create something that felt completely new. As CEO, Weinraub was responsible for all aspects of HBA’s visual identity, save for the clothing itself, which was left in Oliver’s capable hands. Weinraub’s role was one of strategy and persistence. It was about pushing boundaries while being consistent. In the early teens, there was no other black woman in fashion in a position like Weinraub, and using the term CEO places her unquestionably within the traditional role of a chief executive—a position of power. In practice, however, a CEO for an endeavor like HBA is far more than just the highest-ranking managerial position at the company. HBA is a collective, a hybrid, an imperatively new type of brand, so titles like CEO are both meaningful and meaningless. It is a position of both/and—a position I find

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incredibly inspiring. To be a black person in the US means one must be able to hold many things at once: One must know that the structures currently in power are not the structures that will liberate us, and concurrently one must also acknowledge that to be able to change a structure one must first understand and participate in all of its parts. For HBA, to do that so elegantly and seamlessly was and is, for lack of a better phrase, a big deal. “Black culture is used as a tool to increase the value of luxury products,” Weinraub explains to me on a recent phone call. As such, HBA’s interest in luxury is not pedestrian: It is a form of reclamation. HBA is the manifestation of a serious conversation between black artists and designers about the construction of desire through what is perceived as black. It suggests that what is packaged by other brands as blackness for the sake of being “cool” is actually a form of non-consensual posturing. Pointing to this posturing while simultaneously shaping a unique brand is a tricky business and, consequently, HBA’s working ethos and structure evolved into something very different from most fashion brands, with the media and design houses residing under the same roof so every part of the brand touches the other parts. By theoretically acknowledging the absurdity, layered tropes and canonical failures present in fashion, HBA pushed the industry forward in a nuanced and exciting way, leaving accolades and copycats in their wake. In April of 2017, Weinraub and Oliver announced that they would put HBA on hold while they each pursued their own projects. For Weinraub this meant re-focusing on filmmaking and a month later, a short cut of SHAKEDOWN—a documentary film focused on a black lesbian strip club in LA and the community that surrounded it—was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. The film borrows its title from the club and is edited from more than

400 hours of interview footage with various members of the scene taken in the early aughts, when Weinraub was the club’s resident videographer. With a moving and introspective score by Tim Dewit (of Gang Gang Dance), each of SHAKEDOWN’s 22 chapters could be its own short film existing somewhat like a stanza in an epic poem. SHAKEDOWN moves between footage from the club and interviews with Weinraub’s main subjects: creator and MC, Ronnie-Ron; “mother” and legend within the community, Mahogany; star performer, Egypt; and the “Queen,” Jazmine. Weinraub’s subjects explain their roles at the club while candidly and simultaneously raising questions about labor, working, and money as well as questions about bodies and desire. While portraying many different registers of black female identity in a dream-like haze, SHAKEDOWN explores the arrival of particular cultural markers, including ways of acting and being that have been co-opted and monetized by people other than their creators. It puts forth a genesis for certain ways of moving and seeing while simultaneously creating a portrait of a particular time and place. The chapters build towards an exciting ending, which (to spoil it only theoretically) turns the movie back inward on itself, as Weinraub uses a simple declaration about the film to address the audience through the voice of Egypt. This brings into focus the one-to-one scale that Weinraub so adeptly constructs through the illusory visual interlacing of the film. SHAKEDOWN addresses the viewer as they are there watching—as we are there watching. Running at a slim 70 or so minutes, the film’s meaning morphs with its viewers. It means a very particular thing for me, a black american queer trans person to see this film, a part of my history, told this way in 2018. It is not a didactic experience. Weinraub has created a film that also happens to be a documentary, not a proposal for an educational encounter that happens to use moving image. It is woven and focused and in those two movements it gives space for Weinraub’s main subjects to tell

the story of the party, SHAKEDOWN, and to tell their own stories about participating in the party. By releasing SHAKEDOWN—which premiered in its entirety in February 2018 at the Berlinale and has since been showing at art galleries, museums and film festivals—Weinraub suggests a covenant of a particular type of trust with her audience. What happens at night is usually a private experience, so giving her viewers a small taste of what was happening at SHAKEDOWN is an incredibly generous offering. In that generosity, Weinraub insists that we as viewers realize that the film is activated by our viewing: we cannot see the film without realizing that we are also seeing ourselves seeing the film. This is a radical, subversive act which, done at the scale Weinraub intends, is revolutionary. I am, in short, very grateful to Weinraub for her careful caring of this moment in black queer history. Weinraub‘s oeuvre, as both artist and executive, speaks directly to questions of power and visibility and asks specifically: How do we share without giving away? She proposes ways of seeing and remembering that are not so much detail-oriented as agency-oriented. She is interested in visually telling a story not from the inside or the outside but from the truly precarious place which we actually occupy when telling a story or hearing one—somewhere between knowing, participating, fictionalizing and misunderstanding. In a way, the roles that Weinraub inhabits are forms of becoming something as a means to forcibly tear it apart. (She is guiding us to an infinite series of possible pathways, not one particular trail.) To learn about someone or something without asserting ownership over that person or thing requires a constant reorienting and the ability to remember that it is physically impossible to fully step outside of ourselves. Weinraub insists on new forms of being and becoming, and with her steady hand we are all very lucky to be along for the ride.

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PUSH TO PLAY

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Sculptor Alina Tenser in her Maspeth studio where she is preparing for her January show at 17ESSEX.

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Floating and disembodied,

two hands grope at an object at once familiar and unplaceable. The plush torus at the center of the video’s frame seems too small to be a cushion for sitting, and perhaps too strange to be household decor. Grasping the object from two sides, the hands knead the fabric covering, pushing alternating segments of citrine and dull fuchsia inward, toward the central orifice around which everything puckers. The colors shift and pulsate; the viewer is drawn in. Much of the artist Alina Tenser’s work is like this: an object is manipulated, the eye is deceived. How does the world avail itself to us? Relevant is the psychologist James J. Gibson’s theory of affordances, which addresses the ways an object’s form can suggest to a user how to interact or function with it. Knobs ask to be turned, handles ask to be grasped, switches asked to be flipped. The design of the objects populating our environment is a subtle choreography: whether we are aware of it or not, forms tell us what to do, governing our movements. As in Kismet Tutorial, 2016, Tenser’s sculptural objects belie their capacities, or are wryly diverted from normative use. In videos, abetted by chroma key (or “green screen”) technology, objects and body parts sometimes float or move unexpectedly. At once animate and wily, they slip the noose of expectation. Often, the visual pleasure of Tenser’s work is found in its canny reversals: inside becomes outside, volume becomes surface, or void becomes protrusion. In the pleasantly overgrown backyard of her studio in Maspeth, Queens, Tenser is preparing for Marble on Marble, her upcoming solo show at New York’s 17ESSEX gallery, which opens January 11. She uses hand tools to incise shallow lines in marble tiles purchased from a big-box home improvement store. Into these grooves she then pours sallow-colored rubber and lets it set. Like yellow lines separating drivers headed in opposite directions, the bands of ochre disrupt and demarcate the mottled grey planes; as perceived by the bottoms of the artist’s feet during performances, the tacky rubber surface feels distinct from that of wintry stone. In a performance, Tenser occupies a miniature stage comprised of four tiles. While rotating them with her feet, she turns an aluminum spool in her hand. The movement is intimate, and appears as if unconscious—like the anxious fidgeting with a cap or straw at the table. Lengths of acrylic string are unwound, set free from the spool; they are then threaded into hardware store D-rings that sprout from the artist’s costume. As she sews and tangles herself, gravity does its work, creating an unexpected symphony: marble beads clack against one another or against the marble tiles. Another series of marble tablets conjure hand-held gaming devices, slightly oversized. Some are mounted on the walls, some lean between wall and shelf, others lay flat atop tables. They too bear linear incisions, as well as jutting aluminum fins. Scattered among these parallel and perpendicular lines are small marbles of different colors or little melon-scooped pockets that suggest a marble’s absence. Looking at them, one tries to discern their logic, only to be flustered. The conflicts between a thing’s form and the possibilities for its function—or dysfunction—are central to Tenser’s artmaking, which turns on the erotics of our prehensile condition. I am invited in. I place the soft pad of my fingertip in the concave impression—what can I say, I couldn’t resist. A video still from Tenser’s Kismet Tutorial, 2016. 308 culturedmag.com

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BUILT TO LAST

BY TED LOOS PORTRAIT BY MATTHEW MORROCCO

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The Feldmans in their Upper East Side apartment, accompanied by Richard, Maurizio Cattelan’s taxidermied bunny. culturedmag.com 311

Collectors who intensely specialize are rewarded in many ways—in-depth knowledge of fields and artists, special access to works— but being expansive in your tastes has advantages, too. For proof, just visit with Ziel and Helene Feldman, the real estate developers who have filled their Upper East Side and Hamptons homes with a wide array of works, from monumental sculpture to colorful paintings and beguilingly textured ceramics. In their Manhattan triplex, some of the maker names are famous indeed, like sculpture legend John Chamberlain and painter George Condo, while others are up-and-comers. The Feldmans have Dogon ceremonial masks among their African art treasures, as well Maurizio Cattelan’s tiny taxidermied bunny with strange eyes, whose name is Richard (1996). Works with a strong intellectual underpinning dominate. The Feldmans don’t work with an art advisor and they have just a few rules. “There’s nothing purely decorative,” says Ziel of the roughly 100-piece collection, spread among their homes and offices. He points to a pair of figures by Sanford Biggers, BAM (Seated Warrior) (2017), that address police brutality using the language of African sculpture. If there’s a theme, it’s a fine-edged balance between big-picture boldness and meticulous craft. The Feldmans—who put their initials into the company they founded, HFZ Capital Group—are definitely a partnership when it comes to art. “There’s an attention to detail that’s part of our DNA,” says Helene. “I present ideas, and Ziel has a great eye, so he pushes me to make it cooler, make it better. So we really collaborate.” Even if you don’t snare an invitation to their homes, you can already see the scope of their vision if you’re walking, biking or running down the West Side of Manhattan. The Feldmans commissioned award-winning architect Bjarke Ingels to design their two-tower, mixed-use development in West Chelsea, known as The XI. The towers appear to be listing dramatically or dancing with each other—or both—already making them the talk of the town, even though the project isn’t scheduled to be completed until next year (“God willing,” says Ziel.) Already open is what the Feldmans call The XI Visionaries Gallery, on Little West 12th Street, a sales gallery for the project that has already opened and features Es Devlin’s Series XI (2018), which consists of Egg, as well as two other-site specific installations in response to Ingels’ architecture and philosophy for The XI. Egg is a model of the neighborhood washed over by a simulation of changing daylight, with a mirror above to double the effect on the tiny streets and buildings. “You see that the city

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is made up of communities, and nothing happens in a vacuum, including this project,” says Helene. New York is in their blood: Ziel is from Queens; Helene, who used to work as a sex crime prosecutor, from Brooklyn. “We got married in 1987,” recalls Ziel. “During our honeymoon in the south of France, we bought our first piece: a painting of a red horse by some unknown French artist.” Helene adds, “We loved buying things, and at the time, young emerging artists were what we could afford. And we still have those pieces.” In the last few years, their collecting has ramped up. For their Hamptons estate, they commissioned Ugo Rondinone to build an outdoor sculpture, which turned out to be a monumental stack of bluestone boulders which takes a human form; inside is a dazzling figure by Thomas Houseago. “In the Hamptons, I think part of the challenge was that our house is made of glass and surrounded by nature, and we didn’t want to compete with that,” says Helene. “So every piece was selected so that it fits in and it actually enhances. We have a rule: If it doesn’t enhance, it’s not coming in the door.” They have a sense of humor, too: Tracey Emin’s painting There Is No Warmth (2016) hangs in their bedroom in the city. (The building, called The Marquand, is an HFZ project, naturally.) Intense patterns and rough textures reappear in the works in both homes, as in the strikingly layered ceramic pieces by Adam Silverman that enliven their city kitchen. There’s a sense that the Feldmans may wish they were the ones deciding on every angle, slash and bump of the very tactile works. “We’re frustrated artists,” says Ziel, though Helene is slightly less frustrated. “I’ve been taking a welding class,” she says, jokingly noting the bonus factor of Flashdance sex appeal. But she adds, “I want to learn to weld, because there’s something so strong and healthy about steel.” Having just visited Anselm Kiefer’s 200-acre industrial art utopia in southern France, as well as the castle in Germany where Georg Baselitz lived and worked for years that now hosts the Hall Art Foundation, the Feldmans have a reverence for artists who have devoted their whole lives to their crafts. They’re happy to have collecting as their main arts activity— that, and producing new architecture. HFZ has been part of more than $10 billion in real estate deals over its 25-year history, with The XI as the most ambitious project yet. When Helene suggests that maybe Ziel would take up watercoloring, he shrugs it off. “I have terrible handwriting,” he says. “That’s why I’m building buildings.”

COURTESY OF THE XI AND THE ARTIST

Es Devlin’s Egg, 2018, shows a partial map of Manhattan, mirrored and cradled in an oval form.

PHOTO BY NIKOLAS KOENIG

A special commission by Ugo Rondinone for the Feldman home in the Hamptons.

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Anne Holtrop’s project Temporary Museum (Lake) lasted just six weeks and took its form from a drawing. culturedmag.com 315

Andrew Heid: One thing that has always drawn me to your work is that it doesn’t really feel very Dutch. Anne Holtrop: No. I am often introduced like that. When Christian Kerez introduced me at a lecture in Zürich, he said, “This is the Dutch architect who doesn’t make Dutch work.” I think now that I don't live in the Netherlands anymore and have a bit of a distance, there are definitely some things that are you could say are from a very Dutch culture, but you have to look a little broader. That’s the idea—to reinvent things. If you take Theo van Doesburg and Gerrit Rietveld as architects, or Mondrian as a painter, or I even think Rem Koolhaas fits in this relation really well, I think there is a will to kind of rethink something completely—to not be bound by any convention or history. I think that is a very Dutch thing in a way—we have a very strong history of that. I think in that sense, I fit in as a Dutch architect, but my work isn’t confined to any architectural tradition. The message is a bit different, and also has to do with the fact that I worked for quite some time with an artist as an assistant. Heid: Which artist is that? Holtrop: Krijn de Koning. He was a student of Daniel Buren and Pontus Hultén at their Paris school. He makes large in situ sculptures like Buren, and needed some help from an architect. After graduating, I became his assistant and worked for him for five years. For me there were always strong ways to become an artist and I discussed this with him—he told me something that is very much bound to being an artist is that no one is asking for your work. That really helped me define my own work without the necessity of a commission. There is nothing that needs to precede for me to able to do something. When I started doing the Trail House it was actually the very first of my own projects. Heid: How did you initiate the Trail House? Holtrop: I received an encouragement prize from the Prince Bernhard Culture Fund for basically a promise. I had not made anything yet, and the director of a museum asked me to make a work for a group exhibition that she was organizing at the Museum De Paviljoens in Almere, which does not exist anymore. It was a contemporary art institute. She said, “I have this vacant land behind the museum—why don't you propose a work for this land?” which was a really nice question, because there was basically nothing given and I really had to turn my head around the problem. No one asked me for anything specific. There were two things that I really was sure about, eventually. One was that I really wanted to make something very clearly understood as architecture, so I had this idea of a house and a one-to-one mockup of a house. The other thing was that I did not want to have any preconceived plan. I came up with the idea of mapping the trails in that land and using them to form the architecture of how the house sits.

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Heid: So it’s a collage of the existing trails on the site? Holtrop: Yes, yes. There was all this vast, vacant land upon which appeared trails made by people using that land, completely non-designed and nonplanned paths, like these little bike curves going around the bushes. Eventually I used a fragment of these forms to build the Trail House exactly on these paths. You would walk down and then through the house, and at the end you would continue on the path. I really wanted the scale to be oneto-one to have the direct experience, not a representation, and to really understand the possibility of architecture. I thought the house might be too crazy because it would be so slim that there would be this feeling of needing space. And then when it was built, I realized that actually it was pretty feasible to have it as a house, and it was possible to live in it. It made me aware of the fact that nothing can be too crazy. That is a good awareness because in a way I think you are always the biggest constraint on your work. With architecture it is not the constraint of the client or the constraint of the budget, it’s the constraints that architects come up with. What you think is possible to make and to do is built within yourself. After I did that project, in hindsight, that is what I understood. Heid: It is constraint of imagination. Holtrop: Yes. You can really experiment on a high level and do strong experimentation and be able to discover new possibilities for architecture. Heid: The Trail House is an incredible project to me because it comes out of nowhere and it has this lineage of perhaps Japanese architecture—this kind of very minimal line between inside and outside, using the exterior form as a way to differentiate basically one room into, let’s say, five different rooms. It’s quite shocking as a project, and to have built it as a one-to-one mockup installation is really incredible. I’m curious, who were the architects or architectures that have influenced you most as either a student or while working as an artist assistant? Holtrop: I am 40 years old now. When I was studying, the main influencers were still Koolhaas and Herzog & de Meuron on an international level. The Japanese had not appeared yet, they were just after. I think on one hand there was a very conceptual approach to architecture, but this was also a realistic approach in a way. I think Koolhaas’s contribution was to step out of a completely conceptual approach yet make it alive in the reality of architecture. And I think that Herzog & de Meuron was really using this idea about mixed reality and also a very strong idea of photography—a relationship with art. These were quite influential. And then in my teaching, one of my tutors was Herman Hertzberger and Reinier de Graaf who led AMO of OMA. Heid: Yes, I used to work with Reinier and Rem too. Holtrop: Reinier had a secret project aside from OMA and I worked for a year

PHOTOS BY ANNE HOLTROP

PHOTO BY BAS PRINCEN

The National Pavilion of the Kingdom of Bahrain, built for the 2015 World Expo in Milan.

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Bahrain. It’s this idea that the cast of the landscape makes the form of the elements so there is no drawing that precedes it. It is the act of making that is the form. Heid: Like Robert Smithson’s entropy experiments. Holtrop: Yes, in a way it is strongly related to the site. And the idea that through the material, its gestures and the gestures you attribute by ways of making, you can form and can construct an architecture. That’s what I have been teaching at the Academy in Mendrisio for two years as a guest professor, and I will continue that at the ETH Zurich. Heid: It's so fascinating because I see this relationship between the gesture in the drawing and the gesture as one-to-one to reality. It comes close to a new kind of organicism that I see in other people’s work that I respect. I was curious if you could explain how you were drawn to this organicism, or if there is a better term that you use to describe these kinds of works. Holtrop: That is a tricky term, because it could also mean something that is only natural forms or something. For me it does not necessarily have to be a free form, if you understand what I mean. I’m interested in working within constraints. As a maker, you constrain yourself with things. To appropriate a drawing is also a constraint—it can only be this drawing and I cannot change it. There are things that appear in my architecture that are not completely logical, if you think only about the architecture. You have these strange corners, spaces, parts of the house that are so slim you can squeeze yourself through it and that’s it. That character in the architecture has a certain kind of autonomy or independence. Working with constraint in the materiality is, in a way, the same thing, only the outcome is maybe less formal—let’s say in the sense of spatiality, but also in the way in which the space is constructed and the material it is constructed. It gives a strong character to the experience and your embodiment of that space. I think that is the interest for me. Heid: There is still a long history of 20th century modernist architecture being homogenized into a skeletal structural frame or an orthogonal structural frame, and that the antipode is that modernism has always been trying to reintroduce figuration. And I think within the last 20 to 30 years that reintroduction of figuration has been primarily the obsession with digital fabrication and computation. It’s very refreshing to see someone doing that, and I think some of the Japanese and Swiss architects have done that through structure, materiality and form, but in a way that is actually completely analog. Holtrop: Yes it is, and I find that also in modernist art, which I think is also a strong influence. I think for Jean Arp, he could trace the leaves that he would find in the forest, but he could also use a more artificial technique to tear papers apart and rearrange them in a way that maybe reminds you of the organicness of nature, but does not have anything that it relates to. There is no direct representation of it, no direct relation in that sense. That is why I say the organic part is a little bit tricky. It is highly artificial, and it is analog for sure, but I think that is what it disconnects with. It does not want to take a seashell as the form for a plan of architecture. Heid: But it is a translation of the principles of nature into the constraints of our geological world that we build with concrete, steel, glass, et cetera; almost using it as a readymade in some sense. Holtrop: I find the Rorschach inkblot tests really nice. There was an American psychologist John E. Exner, who, in the ’60s, said that the whole test was

PHOTO BY ANNE HOLTROP

for him to do this research project. This was good experience because I was a late bloomer in the sense that this did not really appear yet in my work, this interest did not resonate in my work until much later—it really came when I built the Trail House in 2009, and then it became clear for me. Like if you have to learn a language, you only take in and in and in before you are able to say something. For me, it took a long time to take in things before I was able to say something that felt genuine. In architecture school if I had made something and it reminded me of something, a project of Herzog & de Meuron, for instance, because that was an influence—that frustrated me a lot. It came late, but it also became clear. Heid: This interest in materiality, I didn’t realize it came from the influence of Herzog & de Meuron, which is interesting because I feel like their work has actually moved away from materiality with the conquest of scale for their projects. In the Trail House, how did the materiality play out in terms of influencing the form of the gesture? Holtrop: At the time not at all because there was hardly a budget to build this, so I had to be very practical about it. At that moment it was already Japanese architects and I didn’t want it to be that airy, this kind of complete openness, I really wanted to feel the enclosure of the space. “A window is just a hole in the wall,” kind of feeling. A clearly defined boundary between inside and outside. I also wanted these walls to be very slim because if I made the walls thick, the house would feel bulky. That was why it was made out of wood— so that it would be very easy to build. There was no aim in the materiality other than that it should not be too in the way, it should feel natural. There was a famous exhibition of natural history and Herzog & de Meuron made a big publication about it. That exhibition was tables full of materials, tests, research. Models of buildings and mock-ups. At that moment they were designing the Beijing National Stadium, and at the time there were very strong material questions. But for me, A gypsum cast the first work that material really played an version of Holtrop’s essential role in was Batara in 2012, the A Tower, 2009. project in which I did these huge black sandcasts in the sands—the landscapes formed the sandcasts. Heid: And this was the Museum Fort Vechten? Holtrop: No. I always distinguish between two strands in my work. The first strand starts from drawing: Trail House, the Temporary Museum and A Tower were are all in a way formed by drawing, tracing, automatic drawings, ink blots like Rorschach—all of this, where the drawing doesn’t have any logic to architecture yet, but I have something specific in front of me that I can research as a possibility for the architecture. How can I use it as a plan for the building, which parts to use, what is the size of this work in relationship to the architecture, et cetera. But when I started building the museum in 2012 and the construction began, I realized I was fascinated by casting this concrete, the craftsmanship and the specialization that are related to it. It was a big eye-opener. I hired a consultant on my behalf; he was a concrete expert in the Netherlands and he was building fair-faced concrete buildings for about 40 years. He had an incredible amount of know-how. I am also trained as an engineer, but to do something for real is completely different. In 2012 I also made Batara. There are the models but there is also a pavilion rendition of it, and now we are making a full size five-story building in

Holtrop’s forms often take inspiration from the Barbar Temple in Bahrain and photographer Bas Princen’s documentation of the site.

based on misperception and the only factual answer that you can give to the question of “what do you see” is to say that you see an inkblot, and all other things become a projection. Of course, this is what the test was about. I think that it is interesting to make the distinction of how we look at things, how we see relationships and how we understand things—it is very much based on our cultural education, the ways in which we receive things, the time in which we live, et cetera. It makes us understand something, but it’s not at all the truth in the thing itself. Heid: In your two lines of work, between the material gestures, the drawing and the gestures, how does the Maison Margiela project fit? Holtrop: In Margiela I mixed these things. They needed to have a form, and sometimes the form does not come from the way of processing and applying a material—you need a boundary that can be appropriated. For Margiela I used all kinds of cut papers. We just cut paper into rectangular shapes that were all incomplete; they were never 100 percent complete rectangles. The very strong, unique thing that I only made for Margiela are these textile casts. Think walls or columns for architecture—they have a very architectural presence. They are made in gypsum, and they are cast in a textile formwork. This textile formwork is not rigid of course, so when you are pouring the gypsum the form sets by external boundaries. So, we would set it against part of an existing bowl or against the corner or a piece of furniture or whatever.

Heid: And it gets that pillowing effect, which is quite beautiful. Holtrop: Yes, because it builds out where it has freedom to, and gets tight where we put the external constraints that push into this body. I really like that they feel like bodies or body parts in a way, and that they pivot on us. Heid: It reminds me of Frei Otto’s form-finding techniques. Holtrop: Yes. They are making forms appear and that I like to work with, this kind of leverage of pillow-like shapes that we will always use because we will build the stores for Margiela worldwide. We can constantly cast new forms for new locations using the constraints of the different spaces we find, or the spatiality that we want to create with it, et cetera. Heid: Where do you see yourself going next, besides going back to Bahrain shortly? Holtrop: I think I have around 15 projects in Bahrain at the moment that are all under construction, or about to go under construction. There is an enormous amount of building coming up. I need to build now to understand what works and what does not work. And the second thing— I started teaching material research with my students, but also am proposing it as independent research with other departments at the university to define material a bit more strongly in scientific terms, in technological terms, in craftsmanship terms—the manmade aids that we are living in, the common denominators in the world.

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FIND THE FOLLY

PORTRAIT BY GABBY LAURENT

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“You should’ve seen Adam and Andre’s dorm rooms. They were in a league of their own,” artist Cynthia Talmadge laughs as we stare at picture rail treatments for her November show at 56 Henry. The swatches of green silk, chains and cords were left for consideration by the exhibition’s designers, friends and the subject of the hour, Adam Charlap Hyman and Andrew Herrero. “Andre’s room was all black and white. I don’t think there actually was a snake, but I always imagine there was.” When I ask the bicoastal business partners about Talmadge’s anecdote later by phone, they take a trip down memory lane to a time when two Rhode Island School of Design students, an artist and architect student respectively, connected over a shared flair for the dramatic, which Charlap Hyman and Herrero both claim has mellowed with age. “I was totally taken with your complete vision!” Charlap Hyman says of his first encounter with Herrero’s extreme idyll. He is currently in their New York studio, while Herrero phones in from a Los Angeles highway. “At the time our dorms were another world, a film set on which to project the moment.” In fact, the partners’ first real collaboration was a series of photographs of Charlap Hyman’s apartment, which he fashioned after Nicolas “Niki” de Gunzburg’s apartment. Imagine a small but grand room ticked with family portraits, the batons of former wealth. “I didn’t have the portraits per se, but there were crucifixes, bows and a tented bed,” Charlap Hyman says, describing his former quarters and hours of glue-gunning pleats. “It had the feeling of Proust’s deathbed.” Herrero, a dexterous photographer, collaborated with Charlap Hyman to document it all. The friends gathered a series of different cameras, including Polaroids and four-by-eights. “We wanted to capture how it would look through time,” Herrero explains. Almost as if in solidarity, the ceiling collapsed two weeks later, leaving them with only the images of a bygone reality. “And then we got that too,” the architect deadpans. “We always pull on history, but we are never trying to preserve it or be reverential. If we are comfortable with something, we tend to stray away from it. Ultimately it’s dealing with the discomfort that allows us to expand our own aesthetic and vision.” In this vein one can enter the heart of Charlap Hyman and Herrero’s practice, which runs on an empathetic ear and a wealth of research. Each project, each client, is treated as a script with its own sense of space and time. An encyclopedic, obsessive mood-boarding process congeals into a set of watercolors, renderings and other modeling methods, which are then presented and, pending approval, made real. “Over the course of months, we really get to know our clients,” Herrero explains. “We want to be involved in every aspect of the space,” Charlap Hyman chimes in. “The best kind of project would be one in which we’ve designed the building, the landscape, new furniture, found the antiques, commissioned artists to do the fabrics or the work on the walls.” Nina Johnson can attest to the duo’s perspicacity when parsing a long-term vision. On the recommendation of Cooper Hewitt’s Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, the Miami-based gallerist hired the principals to turn a four-building compound in Little Haiti into a gallery with international reach. “One of the things that I think is really great about working with both of them is that Andre has a more calculated, logical, architectural view of things and Adam is more whimsical, historical and romantic,” Johnson says. “The balance of this works really well— particularly for an art gallery. They know how to design a contemporary space without making it feel completely cold and void of character.” Conceived from day one as a multi-stepped procedure, the compound’s latest addition, two remaining buildings, will be unveiled during Art Basel Miami Beach with a trio of new exhibitions, including a show curated by Charlap Hyman. “I couldn’t think of a more appropriate person to activate the space,” Johnson says of the show, which will include her artists Ann Craven and Katie Stout as well as work by Nicola L. and Anne Libby. Johnson is not the duo’s only art client. The firm launched with a commercial

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commission by Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn followed shortly thereafter by a call from Tina Kim. Katie Stout remembers assisting Charlap Hyman in these early days— fluffing pillows to make the space a little more polished. “They have an attention to detail I had never seen before at that scale,” Stout says of their process. “I’ve always found the sheer amount of research that goes into each project so impressive. It’s truly insane.” At the moment Stout was at work on a wicker cabinet with a lamp coming out of each side like horns—a custom piece for a private home. Artist commissions come second nature to the RISD graduates. They gravitate towards peers like Stout, Misha Kahn and Sophie Stone, whose baroque and wild aesthetic organically weaves in and out of Charlap Hyman and Herrero’s world. And the circle keeps growing. A year or so ago, Talmadge put them in touch with Aaron Aujla and Ben Bloomstein of Green River Project LLC, an introduction that has already yielded a series of custom bamboo lounge chairs adapted from the designers’ second collection. “Ben and I felt like it was much more of a studio visit than an office meeting. That got our guard down right away because the art world just feels more comfortable,” Aujla says of their first encounter. One of the firm’s recurring and perhaps less expected collaborators is Pilar Almon, an artist and Charlap Hyman’s mother. For a fabric and wallpaper capsule for Schumacher last year the firm enlisted Almon’s hand, not unlike the way Andy Warhol used Julia Warhola’s handwriting in his work. “Adam is a very good art director because he’s not precious about it being his idea,” Almon says. “I think in the end they are both attracted to complexity, the projects that are not so straightforward, which is what makes them great collaborators and artists.” Their repertoire—despite relative freshman status (they made Forbes’s 30 under 30 last year)—includes ground-up homes, opera sets and exhibition designs as well as more prêt-à-porter fare—furniture, textiles and objets d’arts. This winter, Charlap Hyman and Herrero are tackling two fittingly cinematic commissions. The first, “Blow Up,” is a Felix Burrichter-curated show at Friedman Benda gallery named for Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1968 cult classic based on a short story by Julio Cortazar. Almost like the story’s photographer and unreliable narrator, the partners are responsible for framing the entire exhibition. Their plan is to create a life-sized doll house in which the other artists’ work, also dollhouse-inspired, can sit comfortably. Once their epic model is in place, Charlap Hyman and Herrero will be onto the next sally, an opera in Amsterdam composed by a friend, with costumes by Talmadge. Charlap Hyman and Herrero tell me there are 24 comparably invested projects currently in motion. The pressure seems to fuel the fire because they are thriving and growing, with Charlap Hyman’s brother Alex leading the business as the college friends concentrate on expanding the reach of their irreverence. “The most luxurious space you can have relays something about you. It speaks to what you’ve done, what you like, what you dream about. It is a place that is beautiful and serious and sad,” Charlap Hyman says. “In speaking to our clients it would seem people are less interested in a complete and neat little package that they have to fit themselves into. Maybe we’ve seen enough nicely done hotels. I think people are ready for something more complex and personal.” As far as their own aesthetic, the target is constantly in motion as their research continues to accumulate and serendipitously veer. The dorm years are gone, but the core tenets of those first projects, a lens-like view of a world and the love of the hand, remain. This is perhaps why they continue to submit watercolors alongside their 3D renderings of projects. A return to time gone by, these time-consuming drawings offer a small frame through which to see the bigger picture, the fantasy. “A part of the process we really appreciate is this moment when a person knows that something isn’t real but is willing to engage with it anyways,” Herrero says. “Being willing to have faith in something because it delights you is definitely a part of our regular design practice.” For our issue, the duo took their dream world to a new level creating a set of follies, 18th-century garden pavilions, with their favorite directors in mind.

Tent: Dario Argento

Argento’s tent consists of a faux-painted red marble cube, seamless as if cut from a single impossibly large red marble deposit. An enormous swath of white fabric is draped over the cube and parts perfectly around a portal in the marble. Two gas lamps planted in the terrace flank the hidden structure. Inside, a contemplative idyll anchored with a 1972 pine bed by Mario Ceroli, a friend of Argento’s and the ex-husband of his second wife, covered in an antique Persian carpet; a painting from Cynthia Talmadge’s Frank E. Campbell series; a silicon asparagus spear sculpture by Hannah Levy; a task lamp by Richard Sapper for Artemide; and an Art Nouveau vase by Ernest Bussière containing an arrangement of sunflowers.

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Grotto: Adam Curtis

A seemingly haphazard mound of debris and gravel is punctured by cast concrete windows and doors as well as a chimney and satellite dish. This humble grotto conceals a bunker-like space within. The interior features a lush landscape mural in grisaille, painted by Charlap Hyman and his mother Pilar Almon; her painting of a single eye adorns the wall as well; a chair, ottoman, and standing lamp made from upholstery foam by Jessi Reaves is complemented by a 1929 side table by Pierre Chareau and a collection of antique Afghan rugs; in the windows, Curtis has placed a brass Empire candlestick and a sculpture by Danh Vō; conch shells found near the grotto have been purposed as bookends.

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Island Pavilion: Michael Haneke

A severe and gleaming façade of smooth stucco is pierced by a series of French doors. The staircase descends into the generally still water so that the folly can be accessed by boat. A 1988 mirrored sofa and chair suite by Robert and Trix Haussmann holds court in front of a pair of orange silk-clad folding screen, on which hang 17th-century landscape paintings from the School of Poussin; two standing lamps by BBPR for Kartell flank the room; and an oval still life by Jan van Os hangs in the corner.

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Garden Pavilion: Agnès Varda

A pale brick rectangular structure, set in unkept grass, has a façade that features staggered ledges for plantings and large round windows. A roof deck is accessible from inside. A suite of Orientalist Victorian furniture upholstered in Persian rugs is strewn about a large blue silk rug spanning the interior; an 18th-century grotto pedestal is topped by a Regency oil lamp and a papier-mâché round table inlaid with mother of pearl designs can be pulled up to the chairs when needed; a rotating French étagère holds Varda’s books; the room is enlivened by a potted palm in her vase by Ruby Neri and a 1969 standing eye lamp by Nicola L.

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Lookout: Lina Wertmüller

An organically shaped structure of concrete and stucco presides over a rocky incline. The roof is planted with vines that cascade down through strategically placed openings, and the deck is similarly configured to allow several trees through. Wertmüller keeps a small potted herb garden for cooking and relaxes in her yellow tubular metal Locus Solus armchair set by Gae Aulenti. From inside, the landscape is seen through irregularly shaped windows and diaphanous curtains made with antique lace fragments by Bode; a large pillow by Sophie Stone rests on the terra cotta floor near a Brionvega television and a Bonacina bamboo armchair; an 18th-century daybed has been updated with ceramic finials by Katie Stout, who also made the ashtray for Wertmüller; a cast metal stool by Misha Kahn from his balloon series and a Paavo Tynell wicker lamp dot the space.

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LONG LIVE JEANINE JABLONSKI

Jeanine Jablonski and I started talking several years ago at art fairs. At the time, her Portland-based gallery Fourteen30 Contemporary was the only participant in NADA from the Pacific Northwest, and she had given shows in 2013 to two of my favorite, but not super-well-known yet New York artists, Gina Beavers and Monique Mouton, both in 2013. Based on these attributes I was able to piece together that she was both cool and original. From afar, her program appeared to be avant-garde but homey, a recipe after my own heart. As with many experiences in the art world, what I admired first from a distance would anticipate a friendship, and later an avenue for collaboration. In 2015, Jablonski invited me to curate a show for her gallery, resulting in “Maraschino,” which featured Alex Chaves, Nolan Simon, Annelie McKenzie and Josh Mannis. Then, in early 2017, just after Trump was elected, I returned for a solo exhibition of my own work: “The Parting of the Green Sea.” On both occasions I was just about ready to take a nose dive out of New York City and thankfully, through the kindness of Jablonski, I was met with a safe place to land. From the outset, Jablonski has encouraged artists and curators to use Fourteen30 Contemporary as a space for experimentation and works-inprogress: a blend of art school, slumber party and critique. A recent exhibition with Seattle-based artist Wynne Greenwood featured a new film that

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Greenwood was fully in the process of editing throughout and after the show. To my knowledge, this is not a result of procrastination but rather a repositioning, suggested by Jablonski, of how the gallery might aid in the making of the artwork. The underlying theme is: You can do whatever you want here. A substantial show might be made of a single work, or three; it could be an endpoint or a beginning. Moreover, Portland is a resource with infinite possibilities, both as a destination and a state of mind. On the tourism front, you’ve got organic food, small brand shopping, ceramics, the Gamblin factory, Bullseye Glass and some of the most wonderful art schools in the country. Add to that the Lumber Room, a private museum founded by collector Sarah Miller Meigs, where Jablonski acts as managing director and where Mira Dancy recently debuted a new series of site-specific works. Need I say more? People who use their role in the creative field as a springboard for others have my highest respect. As someone who works as an artist and gallery director myself, I admire Jeanine for forging a path, both creating a beautiful community and acting as its ambassador. It is pretty fun to know you. I hope we will get at least another 10 years of your tasteful, practical, stimulating and resourceful home-away-from-home. I look forward to staying there again. Also, how cute would it be if you added this page to the completely covered “refrigerator of gratitude”?

Jeanine Jablonski’s Fourteen30 Contemporary breaks from the standard gallery cycle of exhibitions. Instead, she combines practice, critique and community in her Portland space. culturedmag.com 329

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