KELLY AKASHI / J. SMITH-CAMERON / WILLY CHAVARRIA / JUDY CHICAGO / ELLA EMHOFF / HODAKOVA / OTTESSA MOSHFEGH
LESLIE ODOM JR. / NICOLAS PARTY / JACK PIERSON / MICKALENE THOMAS / RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA / EMMA SELIGMAN / SABLE ELYSE SMITH
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RULES TO LIVE BY CULTURED asks six sartorial voices to share their advice for a life well and luxuriously lived.
A WELL-ADORNED HAND
With a string of museum collaborations on the way, Los Angeles–based designer Jess Hannah Révész dives deep into the art historical canon, crafting jewelry with a will to endure.
FOR MICHAEL STEWART, THE BODY IS A LANDSCAPE
The London-based designer’s sculptural fashion label, Standing Ground, built its credo on Irish mysticism, fantasy classics, and an intuitive approach to craft.
78 80 84
PAINTING FOR THE END TIMES
WE ARE IN THE SOUP NOW Rirkrit Tiravanija’s inaugural U.S. survey, “A LOT OF PEOPLE,” will fill MoMA PS1’s halls this October.
KELLY AKASHI’S TIME MACHINE
The Los Angeles–based artist’s galaxyspanning practice will be honored with two West Coast exhibitions this season.
WHITE CUBE HAS FOUND A HOME IN NEW YORK. JUST DON’T CALL IT AN OUTPOST
The British gallery opens its first permanent U.S. branch with an inaugural group show.
88 90 98 104
THE FOREIGN AND THE FAMILIAR
Whether in her art-filled West Village townhouse or in her namesake clothing line, Veronica de Piante weaves together subtle references from her global upbringing to mesmerizing effect.
September 2023
With the newly inaugurated Mickalene Thomas Scholarship at the Yale School of Art, collectors Carmine Boccuzzi and Bernard Lumpkin are offering one lucky student a chance to become the artist’s newest mentee.
The full breadth of Judy Chicago’s work is finally getting the art world’s unmediated attention.
The work of this year’s breakthrough designers—Lu’u Dan, Hodakova, DJ Chappel, and Zoe Gustavia Anna Whalen—captures the feeling of moving through our flawed, topsy-turvy world.
The Italian house’s Fall/Winter 2023 Women’s collection brings a vast archive to life in fresh and colorful ways.
HARI
As the actor prepares for a busy fall, Hari Nef calls up the pop icon Troye Sivan for a conversation about the strength of their friendship and the art of saying less.
Five discipline-spanning artists reflect on their journeys into a new era of their practice.
Julia Belyakova and Isha Senghore wear full looks by GUCCI. Photography by Drew Jarrett.
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The 11 individuals featured in CULTURED ’s inaugural Young Photographers list treat images like diaries, manifestos, recipes, and field studies.
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In the spirit of Tiffany & Co.’s new collection, six New York creatives reflect on the role of chosen family—the people we discover in the wild and keep with us—in making a life, and making work.
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The New York–based designer shows CULTURED the places, and the people, that shaped his Spring/ Summer 2024 collection.
188
Veronica
196
Chanel’s Fine Jewelry Creative Studio Director Patrice Leguéreau translates the ethos of the house’s signature textile into this season’s high jewelry collection.
THE RETURN OF THE MAIL-ORDER MAN
Jack Pierson, the Massachusetts-born artist known for his unflinchingly intimate male portraits, enters fresh territory with a new job title and a photographic challenge.
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A NEW YORK MOVEMENT
Dance Reflections, the nascent festival supported by Van Cleef & Arpels, is bringing a coterie of world-class performers to the city this fall.
Online communities are Günseli Yalcinkaya’s obsession—and her profession. The Londonbased writer, researcher, and cultural critic is the features editor at Dazed and the host of Logged On, a monthly podcast series exploring all things Internet culture. For this issue, Yalcinkaya profiled the designer behind one of London’s buzziest fashion labels. “Standing Ground is futuristic and mystical, unique and alien,” she says. “Its conceptual backbone— unusual silhouettes and craftsmanship—is exactly what makes Michael Stewart one of the most exciting emerging talents out there.”
Myles Loftin knows the power of visibility. The Brooklyn-based artist, storyteller, and creative collaborator is driven by a desire to show up for under- and misrepresented groups, and his work is characterized by its intimacy and a playful sensibility that unites viewer and subject. “It was an honor to photograph Mickalene Thomas for this issue,” he says of his shoot with the artist in celebration of her new namesake scholarship at the Yale School of Art. “She’s incredibly talented and influential. We shot this feature at the home of collectors Bernard Lumpkin and Carmine Boccuzzi, where a piece of Thomas’s work— from her MFA thesis—hangs on the wall.”
Drew Jarrett’s creative philosophy, which embraces the imperfections of analog and takes a unique approach to light, has led to sustained demand for his work in the fashion and fine art spheres. The U.K.-born photographer, now living in upstate New York, has been taking pictures professionally for over 25 years, and his extensive oeuvre has been exhibited in London, New York, and Tokyo. Jarrett has also published three books: 1994, Guinevere, and Jungle Dreams. Jarrett shot one of two cover features for this issue—a bold red color study in partnership with Gucci. “I reference painters, artists, and music and then turn it into my vision. I grab a color, a shape, and textures,” explains the photographer.
“The whole team on this project was brilliant.”
Jack Pierson came to New York via Massachusetts, and works across the mediums of photography, collage, sculptural assemblage, and installation. The artist made a recent move to Lisson Gallery, and will be staging his first show there, titled “Pomegranates,” in New York this fall. For this issue, Pierson contributed a number of photographs that reveal his unique interpretation of the nude form. “I just wanna show what I’ve been up to [and] look at what could be next,” says Pierson of the show. “It’s all about looking. The whole show will be a labyrinth, an exhibition where you wander around in big spaces and little spaces and find the next thing to look at.”
Lynette Nylander lives at the intersection of fashion and youth culture. The writer, editor, and creative consultant is currently the editorial director of Dazed. She has also held senior leadership positions at the likes of Alexander Wang and Pat McGrath Labs, and has consulted for brands including Gucci, Calvin Klein, and Nike. “I shared some tips on how I sartorially approach my day-to-day, which I probably contradict on a daily basis,” the London-born, New York–based creative says of her contribution to this issue. “I’m very much a ‘do as I say, not as I do’ type of gal!”
While growing up in Buenos Aires, Marcos Fecchino discovered his love for image-making. This passion inspired the young producer and creative director to move from Argentina to New York, where he opened his own agency, MF Studio. After more than a decade in the industry, Fecchino has contributed to the likes of Vogue, Vogue Italia, Man about Town, Harper’s Bazaar, and Numéro. Fecchino produced the Hari Nef cover shoot for this issue, which took place on a rainy day on Fire Island.
Susan Yung covers dance, art, literature, and culture for publications including the Brooklyn Rail, Dance Magazine, and Chronogram. After working as the associate editorial director at the Brooklyn Academy of Music for several years, she coedited the book BAM: Next Wave Festival, and was associate editor of BAM: The Complete Works. For this issue, the Hudson Valley–based writer turned her attention to the Van Cleef & Arpels–supported Dance Reflections festival, exploring its impact on the New York dance community. “Delving into the work of these varied artists reminded me of all the wild creativity in dance around the world,” she notes. “I hope that a festival like Dance Reflections signifies the strong return of the arts in New York—on a collaborative, citywide scale.”
“I can point this camera at really anything and turn the moment into something inspiring for others. It’s just a beautiful and powerful thing.” Discover their story.
The Swiss artist—known for his familiar yet unsettling landscapes, portraits, and still lifes—has earned a reputation for challenging the conventions of representational painting. Nicolas Party’s work has been exhibited around the world, most recently with a solo show at Hauser & Wirth New York. His works are primarily created in soft pastel, an idiosyncratic choice of medium in the 21st century that allows for exceptional degrees of intensity and fluidity in his depictions of natural and man-made objects. For this issue, Party offered his own bold interpretation of CULTURED’s signature cover logo, and sat down with writer Katie White for a conversation about his latest exhibition.
New York–based Nic Burdekin and Lucas Lefler are the cofounders of Image, a creative studio specializing in advertising and editorial at the intersection of culture and fashion. For this issue, Burdekin and Lefler directed a feature on the vitality of New York’s creative ecosystems. “We focused this shoot on considered portraits of artists in the city who are cultivating their own communities through their work,” they explain. As a team and individually, the duo have collaborated with brands and publications including Prada, Moncler, and Vogue, and have worked with talent including Bella Hadid and Doja Cat.
Ottessa Moshfegh is a Los Angeles–based fiction writer from New England. Eileen, her first novel, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Death in Her Hands, her second and third novels, were New York Times bestsellers. For this issue, she shared her rules for living a beautiful life. “Giving advice is always a personal reflection of the advice-giver,” she explains, “but I didn’t realize this until I was asked to write down some advice about how to live. That’s what I love about writing: When my thoughts and feelings are externalized into language, I can see myself more clearly.”
Willy Chavarria is a 2021 CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund recipient and 2022 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award winner. The Mexican American designer’s eponymous brand takes inspiration from recurring motifs in Chavarria’s community and the magic that he finds in the streets of New York. In this issue, Chavarria shares a glimpse of his adopted home: “I was so happy to work with my good friend, the incredibly talented photographer Stefan Ruiz, on this special feature,” he says. “I am excited to share these beautiful portraits of the people and places closest to me through Stefan’s unique and visionary lens.”
OTTESSA MOSHFEGH
NICOLAS PARTY, PHOTOGRAPHY BY STEVE BENISTY; LUCAS LEFLER AND NIC BURDEKIN, IMAGE COURTESY OF LUCAS LEFLER AND NIC BURDEKIN; OTTESSA MOSHFEGH, PHOTOGRAPHY BY JAKE BELCHER; WILLY CHAVARRIA, PHOTOGRAPHY BY STEFAN RUIZ.
Founder | Editor-in-Chief
SARAH G. HARRELSON
Executive Editor
MARA VEITCH
Senior Creative Producer
REBECCA AARON
Casting Director
TOM MACKLIN
Associate Editor
ELLA MARTIN-GACHOT
Editorial Assistant
SOPHIE LEE
Copy Editor
EVELINE CHAO
Junior Art Director
HANNAH TACHER
Contributing Fashion Directors
ALEXANDRA CRONAN, KATE FOLEY
Editor-at-Large
KAT HERRIMAN
New York Contributing Arts Editor
JACOBA URIST
Podcast Editor
SIENNA FEKETE
Contributing Editors
JULIA HALPERIN, LILY KWONG, MARTINE SYMS, FRANKLIN
SIRMANS, SARAH ARISON, DOUG MEYER, CASEY FREMONT, MICHAEL REYNOLDS, DOMINIQUE CLAYTON
Chief Revenue Officer
CARL KIESEL
Publisher LORI WARRINER
Italian Representative—Design
CARLO FIORUCCI
Interns
LAINE ALLISON
ISABELLA BARADARAN
CAROLINE BOMBACK
MARIA CLARA COBO
ELIZABETH COHAN
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MARIANA DE JESUS SZENDREY
AMELIA STONE
Prepress/Print Production
PETE JACATY
Senior Photo Retoucher
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ISSN 2638-7611
THE CREATIVE AND CULTURAL FORCES featured in this issue, our first September issue dedicated to the crossover between fashion and art, are technicians and craftspeople at their core. They are motivated by that big, unwieldy ideal we call art—but even as they pursue material and narrative sophistication, they leave space for the plain facts of life in a messy world to seep into the work.
As Coco Romack writes in the introduction to our roundup of breakout designers, the runway, much like the museum, the silver screen, and the still image, “can be a petri dish for larger social reckonings.” Our cover star, Hari Nef, is perhaps one of the best examples of this. A consummate actor, the young icon’s work eschews explicit political critique in favor of political realism, an attitude embraced by the extraordinary photographic duo Torso Solutions. In their first collaboration with CULTURED, the pair captured Hari, their former intern, in all her ethereal complexity.
If Diana Vreeland—whose pearls of wisdom inspired our portfolio of advice for a life well-lived—taught us anything, it’s that more is always more. In that spirit, we are honored to present a second cover for this issue: photographer Drew Jarrett’s sumptuous color study featuring the upand-coming model Isha Senghore clad head-to-toe in Gucci. This cover is embellished with a psychedelic interpretation of our logo, courtesy of Swiss artist Nicolas Party, whose first solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth opens in New York this fall.
During our interview earlier this month, the artist and photographer Jack Pierson shared something deeply touching with me that has become something of a touchstone, or talisman, for the issue: “I still believe in the power of an image, especially a printed image. Part of what makes me work to stay relevant as an
artist is the desire to have my work printed in magazines, because there is always that possibility of somebody ripping out that page and keeping it.” Jack’s words speak to the democratic value of publishing, and to the epiphanic encounters we can only have with printed matter. This is something that the 11 young image-makers featured in our inaugural Young Photographers list know well. While their peers are content with the endless scroll of digital imagery, each of these artists is driven, at all costs, to make tangible things. Rirkrit Tiravanija, Judy Chicago, and Kelly Akashi, three artists profiled in the issue, operate at the edges of material to craft work that seems to disappear, or is barely even there to begin with. In their formidable slate of upcoming exhibitions, we get the sense that the work on view is speaking to us directly, that its physical form is a conduit for a message from artist to viewer.
We hope you like the issue, and maybe even rip out a few pages.
Sarah G. Harrelson Founder and Editor-in-Chief @sarahgharrelsonFollow us | @cultured_mag
There are few fashion critics more infamous than DIANA VREELAND. Before her tenures at Vogue and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the legendary iconoclast launched her consummate advice column,
at Harper’s Bazaar in 1936. It ran for decades until her resignation, serving as a sumptuous call to action that was refreshing in its preposterousness and startling in its particularity. She endorsed gourmandise (“WEAR FRUIT HATS? CURRANTS? CHERRIES?”), fashionable ambidexterity (“TIE BLACK TULLE BOWS ON YOUR WRISTS?”), and baroque excess (“RINSE YOUR BLOND CHILD’S HAIR IN DEAD CHAMPAGNE TO KEEP IT GOLD, AS THEY DO IN FRANCE?”). Vreeland relished in the daily trifles and contradictions that define style, inviting her readers to forsake conformity in favor of spontaneity.
In her honor, CULTURED asked six sartorial voices to share their advice for a life well and luxuriously lived.
This has served me well professionally, personally, and romantically. It helps soothe the wound of not getting a gig you wanted, or when the vintage piece you went back for the next day was gone.
Live in the freaking moment. Marry the hell out of today, and have a flirty relationship with what comes next. Treat the future like a casual fling, and don’t be dictated by it. What you know is that today is right here, right now.
I don’t want anything too glitzy with no chaser. I consider myself a lover of the dichotomy of high and low. Vintage Saint Laurent dress to visit the dosa guy in Washington Square Park—perfect! Monkey Bar, then Drag Race reruns after— ideal! My new one: I dream of de Gournay wallpaper to frame the thrifted photo I got for no money.
Lynette Nylander grew up with a mother who ironed her underwear. “She took immense pride in the way she put herself together,” says the London-born, New York–based fashion critic. “She thought it was important that I understood that as well.” For Nylander, who served as the creative and editorial director-at-large of CR Fashion Book and is currently the editorial director at Dazed, good style lies in its contradictions—a little high, a little low. Something delicate but “a little fucked-up.” And planning an outfit begins with a single piece. “I ask myself, New thing? Old thing? Tailored thing?” Armed with the answer, Nylander ventures into her closet, a former “apartment-engulfing fungus,” which she has since wrestled into a state of organized chaos. “The results can vary, but the beauty is that it all comes back to different parts of myself that I’m really comfortable with,” she says. “In the end, it’s the swag that sets a look off, never the brand name.”
Do this as formally as you can. Bar coaster, the appropriate glass for your drink, and lots of chatter about the day’s comings and goings. This, I am sure, will add years to your life.
There’s nothing sadder than not being able to be in your own company. Meals, vacations, theater shows, cinema trips. Know yourself, goddamnit.
No matter how dazzling they are, you will look like a fool if you’re limping or stumbling. Once, Martha Raddatz had to hide my Manolo Blahniks behind the White House drapes while I padded around the Bidens’ Christmas party in flip-flops!
When I was a child, I hated to go to bed because FOMO. I was an insomniac from 25, when I got burglarized three times in a row, but a doctor figured out the right pill for me. Isn’t modern medicine a miracle?
It is the shiniest, most influential right we have! Don’t let the bad guys win! Vote them out! And make every single one of your friends do it, too.
You may be cursing yourself at first, but I guarantee new adventures broaden your horizons and make you a more interesting person.
If it’s someone you know quite well—say, your landlord or Kieran Culkin— rudeness can be warranted, especially if handled with style and wit. But for goodness’ sake, be kind to the cashier, the lady who lives downstairs, the cabbie. Be polite with colleagues. They won’t catch on that you’re insulting them if you have lovely manners.
AND PREFERABLY A LAP ROBE. Air travel costs a fortune and is bad for the environment, but on top of that they keep you and your dinner frozen.
When J. Smith-Cameron was growing up in South Carolina, prep was the fashion currency in her school’s hallways. Smith-Cameron sported knockoffs from Sears, until she and her best friend discovered the thrift store. The pair dug through piles of clothes to find embroidered shirts and bandannas, channeling hippie aesthetics a few years too late. They didn’t mind being off-trend, because they saw clothes as costumes. “And this was before I was a professional actor!” says Smith-Cameron.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY STEPHANIE DIANIShe’s carried this sense of sartorial play throughout her career, sporting styles as austere as her Succession character’s power suits and as sumptuous as the cobalt Carolina Herrera dress she was captured in for Vogue earlier this year. Off-camera, she’s tapped into old school glamour with nudging from her stylist Cat Pope. “I would never have had the balls to do that without her,” confesses Smith-Cameron. But as her onscreen personas know well, you don’t need balls to make an impact.
ALWAYS COMBINE BLACK AND NAVY.
ALWAYS BUY CHEAP LIQUOR.
You’re just going to PISS IT OUT. or Easter
BE WORRIED ABOUT LOOKING LIKE CHRISTMAS
ALWAYS HAVE TRANSITIONAL SUNGLASSES for antisocial situations.
During her time as an art student at Rutgers University, Jamian Juliano-Villani dyed her hair green to avoid Thanksgiving. The New Jersey native knew her parents—a “guido beach boy” and “Carmela Soprano to a tee”—wouldn’t let her come home looking like that. She had giant plugs, too, “which is, like, the worst mistake ever.” Her deviant status didn’t stop her from being captain of the cheerleading team, though, and it is this balance of abrasive disregard for decorum and overachieving work ethic that has made Juliano-Villani an art world magnet. Her personal style penchants—“disgusting Stouffer’s-covered T-shirts” in the studio, “semi-professional fake Prada suits” at O’Flaherty’s, and miniskirts and knee socks when she needs to look like a “halfway decent human”—don’t make her any less noticeable. A fast-fashion apologist, Juliano-Villani loves the thrill of buying tons of things that she can lose immediately. But she’s not allergic to haute couture—her fever dream would be to inspire a Gucci and Mary Quant collab: “I have a whole line in my head, and they gotta pay attention.”
PHOTOGRAPHY BY ZOE CHAIT
NEVER ASK ADVICE FROM LAWYERS OR DOCTORS. They look for problems, not solutions.
ALWAYS SPRAY TAN TWO DAYS BEFORE THE EVENT.
(THINK WINDBREAKER MATERIAL!) or a wool-and-silk blend, in the crispest and most dangerous black you can find. You can ball it up like dirty laundry in your suitcase or closet and shake it out for emergencies and languorous events alike.
Refuse to wear anything but their clothes for several years, enmesh your entire identity with the symbolism and semantics of their runway output, and then abruptly change your mind and move onto something else.
OR SWEATSHIRT. Unless you are friends with the person who made it.
living room, and bedroom as meticulously as you attire yourself. Create the YOU EXTENDED UNIVERSE—insist on personalizing your mentally sprawling domain.
ALWAYS WATCH AT LEAST FOUR MOVIES, READ AT LEAST THREE BOOKS, AND GO TO AT LEAST TWO MUSEUM SHOWS A MONTH.
Your outfits will be better, your accessorizing more attentive, and your weekends more extravagant.
In 10th grade, Rachel Tashjian wrote a short story about a woman going on a blind date. When her protagonist showed up, the guy was wearing Tevas, so she left. The New York–based fashion critic behind the beloved, and exclusive, “Opulent Tips” newsletter describes her latest stylistic era as “luxury bizarro,” citing brands like Loewe, the Row, and Alaïa, which, she says, produce strange and exquisite garments that have “a sense of connoisseurship to them.” Since she joined the Washington Post as a fashion writer in April, though, her vestimentary needs have shifted. She’s been working remotely, and mostly mulls over what to wear on walks with her dog, Ritz. You can find her in an assemblage of loose linens, silks, cottons, and, more often than not, an outré hat, hitting the New York streets with her canine companion.
If you don’t have a dog, invest in a good stuffie and give it a pet name such as Fluffy or Monsieur le Dog or Cutiepie. Just do this. Keep Cutiepie in the bed with you. We all need some companionship and protection while we dream.
If the source is a human being, compliment the person. Say, “Wow. You smell wonderful.”
Also, if the pharmacist at Rite Aid looks beautiful, tell her so, damnit. She deals with sick people all day who don’t give a shit about her, and she looks good. Say, “Wow, you look beautiful.” You’ll feel better immediately.
Put a dark curtain over a window. Anytime you’d like to see yourself, go outside and get some fresh air. Hear the birds and the wind rustling the leaves. Stand before the darkened window and have a look. Your reflection will be far more optimistic when you see that you’re just another creature in the wild.
Under the salt and pepper shakers. In the kitchen cabinet. Taped to the bathroom wall. Most people are dead. You are so lucky to be alive.
Ottessa Moshfegh embraces the edge. The Los Angeles–based writer’s characters swing from stupor to frenzy, riding out breakdowns and breakthroughs with languid flair. Her unique brand of psychological turbulence resonates—Moshfegh’s 2015 debut novel, Eileen, has been adapted into a film, out this December; and her 2018 follow-up, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, was met with rave reviews. At home in Southern California, Moshfegh fills her wardrobe with vintage finds that she rarely wears. Though her standard uniform is baggy jeans, a sweatshirt, and Puma slides, her eye for the idiosyncratic has paid off: Last year, the writer was invited to walk the runway for Maryam Nassir Zadeh at the Fall/ Winter 2022 New York Fashion Week. “It was a terrifying thing, being the conduit for these creations,” she recalls. For Moshfegh, clothes are objects of affection, vessels that embody the thrill of discovery. No surprise, then, that three rooms in her home are dedicated to their storage. “It is my hobby and my obsession,” she says, “And a bit of an addiction.”
PHOTOGRAPHY BY HANNAH TACHER
IF YOU SMELL SOMETHING WONDERFUL, ALWAYS FIND THE SOURCE.
It will make you feel more civilized.
even if it’s just one article a day.
even underneath a hoodie. The key to feeling your best is dressing for yourself, not for others.
When Paris-based stylist Helena Tejedor hires a new assistant, she sends them a list of films to study. Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Millennium Mambo; Darren Stein’s Jawbreaker; Bigas Luna’s Jamón, Jamón… her curriculum is vast in its socio-geographical circumference, but each film taps into and interrogates shades of femininity, from the two-faced teen queen to the ennui-ridden club girl. Women, and what they wear, are as central to Tejedor’s career as they are to her sense of self. This is an obsession that she traces back to the womb. Her Spanish mother would tell Tejedor, “The chicest person is the one who knows how to dress for the occasion.” Naturally, the stylist rebelled during her teen years: The low-rise jean was her act of treason, Posh Spice her patron saint. In the time since, she’s cycled through wardrobes and achievements—fashion director of L’Officiel Hommes by 25, editorials in Vogue Italia a few years later, consultant to Helmut Lang and now Coperni—before landing on her current “effortless” and intellectual ’90s-inspired ethos.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY LÉON PROSTALWAYS MAKE SURE YOUR SPELL ING IS IMPECCABLE, even if it’s a text message. Bad spelling is very unattractive.
NEVER TAKE ADVICE FROM ME. NEVER POST VIDEOS OF CONCERTS ON INSTAGRAM.
The sound is shit and the magic is lost. It’s like taking a picture of the moon.
NEVER WEAR MONOGRAMS;
it’s small-dick energy.
It’s a sign of weakness, and you’ll look stupid.
TODAY, Egyptian pharaoh Hatshepsut is known as “the first great woman of history,” but her legacy was lost to time for centuries: obelisks torn down, temples walled up, and monuments defaced by her male successors. During a collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art last year, Jess Hannah Révész fell into a deep Hatshepsut rabbit hole. “I became completel y obsessed,” she says. The 32-year-old designer—founder of the independent jewelry brand J. Hannah—created a capsule of rings and necklaces for the museum’s gift shops inspired by a cache of carved stone amulets found in the pharaoh’s tomb.
The ongoing partnership with the Met—which allows Révész to trawl the depths of the museum’s permanent collection and consult with its curators—has been a fruitful one for the designer, whose line of modern heirlooms takes many of its cues from art history. She sees her pieces— rings, pendants, and hoops constructed from recycled 14k gold and silver—as keepsakes whose value lies in their ability to endure. “I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel,” she explains. “I’m interested in designs that are timeless for a reason.” This reverence for talismans of the past has sparked a number of collaborations, including one with A24 (Révész is designing her own version of the vintage heart locket worn in Sofia Coppola’s forthcoming biopic Priscilla), and another with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art tied to an upcoming September exhibition.
Soon entering its 10th year, J. Hannah was born cottage industry–style in Révész’s college apartment in San Luis Obispo, California. The designer fell in love with metalsmithing when she fell out of love with school, learning the craft from a former jeweler who taught hobbyists out of her garage. “It was a bunch of older women—who were approaching it in a very chill way—and me,” she
recalls. When she surpassed the skills of her instructor, she moved on to a hybrid of YouTube and local courses. Révész set up a bench in her bedroom and started drawing up very specific Hanukkah wish lists—“flex shafts, pliers, and torch saws.”
It’s been a long time since she’s made jewelry herself. When demand for Révész’s designs outpaced her ability to make pieces with her own two hands, she relocated to a studio in downtown Los Angeles, recruiting a stable of veteran bench jewelers on Hill Street who could meet her sustainability demands at a larger scale. In the eight years since, J. Hannah has evolved to incorporate a line of cruelty-free nail polishes in subtle hues—a logical coda, says Révész, “to complement a well-adorned hand.” As the brand grows, she finds herself confronting the “less sexy” demands of her current role—content planning, payroll, and “emails, emails, emails.” But the polishes offer Révész a rare chance to float in the free-associative “soup” that is inspiration. “Compost,” a fecund green shade, is a luxuriant take on an infamously unappetizing Pantone swatch. “Ghost Ranch” is based on Georgia O’Keeffe’s earthy, arid palette. “Saltillo,” a faded pink, is inspired by the tip of her cat’s nose. “You have to be open to following that thread,” she says, “a flower I see on a walk, a button I see on a shirt that reminds me of a line I read in a book… Sometimes it sparks a good idea, and sometimes simply doesn’t.”
Recently, the designer has directed her energy toward a new creative endeavor: art objects for the home. Officially, the debut collection of J. Hannah lamps— elegant interplays of corrugated glass and metal released last August—represents an exploration of light through the lens of a jewelry designer. “But honestly, it’s simpler than that,” she muses. “I just want to make beautiful things that last.”
With a string of museum collaborations on the horizon, Los Angeles–based jewelry designer Jess Hannah Révész dives deep into the art historical canon, crafting pieces with a will to endure
BY MARA VEITCH
PHOTOGRAPHY BY MADDY ROTMAN
The London-based designer’s sculptural fashion label, Standing Ground, built its credo on Irish mysticism, fantasy classics, and an intuitive approach to craft.
BY GÜNSELI YALCINKAYA PHOTOGRAPHY BY DANIEL ARCHER STYLING BY STUDIO&ALL CLOTHING BY STANDING GROUND.
IRELAND’S STANDING stones and dolmens are the oldest remaining neolithic monuments in the country. For Michael Stewart, the designer behind London-based label Standing Ground, they are portals through time: stoic witnesses to the eons. He recalls taking frequent trips to visit them as a child, enchanted by the centuriesold mysticism buried deep within. “Ireland is a superstitious country, which is a good thing, because the dolmens have been preserved and protected over time,” he muses. “They’re feared in a way, so people don’t dare touch them.”
It’s no secret that Stewart’s connection to these megalithic tombs informs his brand’s name and modus operandi. Speaking from his new studio at the Sarabande Foundation in East London, he explains that the dolmens possess a transcendent quality, which he projects onto his own statuesque garments: deceptively simple creations that borrow from the futurism of sci-fi and fantasy classics, such as Lord of the Rings, to imagine evening wear, custom garments, and body ornaments that feel rooted in neither past, present, nor future.
After graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2017, Stewart established Standing Ground in 2022, before attracting the attention of Lulu Kennedy’s Fashion East incubator program, and making his London Fashion Week debut as part of the Spring/Summer 2023 shows. Remaining loyal to his source material of neolithic artifacts and figures, he freely admits to having done no new research since his master’s degree, and doesn’t use a mood board or sketches. Instead, Stewart takes an intuitive—and manual—approach to draping, sculpting, and craft, developing his own lines and patterns by hand to produce alien silhouettes that flow from and protect the body like topographic armor.
The designer is currently working on his third collection for Spring/Summer 2024, which expands on the dialogue between distant pasts and otherworldly futures. “It’s different to what I would’ve presented last February, which was very beautiful, but not as menacing,” he confesses. “I wanted to take some time to figure out what I was doing, and not pigeonhole myself.” This collection dials back the clock to pre-human times, focusing on primordial and fossilized forms to create uncanny garments that explore the relationship between objects and their surrounding environment. Imagining a world where ancient objects grow and shapeshift across each collection, the designs suggest a speculative place where humankind and nature are mirrors for each other—or, as Stewart puts it: “where the body is a landscape and the landscape is a body.”
“I wanted to take some time to figure out what I was doing, and not pigeonhole myself.”
Makeup by MACHIKO YANO
Hair by MOE MUKAI
Casting by AAMØ CASTING
Model NYAUETH RIAM
Fashion Assistance by FLORENCE THOMPSON
Makeup Assistance by KRISHNA BRANCH-MACKOWIAK
“The end of the world is not new,” says Nicolas Party. “We’ve been creating stories about floods and fires since our very beginnings.” The Swissborn artist is sitting in his Red Hook, Brooklyn, studio, surrounded by a small army of miniature dinosaurs—long-necked Brachiosauruses, by the looks of it—which he’s painted into petitely scaled oil-on-copper compositions. “I’ve been wanting to paint dinosaurs—monsters, really—for a long time,” he continues, with a glimmer of a smile. “Now that they’ve emerged, they’re actually quite small.”
Party is putting the final touches on these paintings for “Swamp,” his first solo exhibition with Hauser & Wirth in New York at the gallery’s 22nd Street location. Known for virtuosic pastel drawings that honor and challenge traditions of still life and portraiture, the artist seems to be grappling with the precarity of human life and our ecological crisis. These sentiments are captured succinctly in Triptych with Dinosaurs, 2023, one of several three-paneled “cabinets” included in the show. An infant, alien in its newness, occupies the composition’s central panel while peaceful-looking dinosaurs flank the child on either side, like a baby Jesus and angels. Party based the central painting on a photograph of his daughter, who turns one this fall. “Having a child makes you see time very differently,” he says. “Suddenly, people ask you if you have a will. I’m 43; fatherhood is happening a little bit later in life… I’ll only have her for so long. Dinosaurs are an iconic symbol of a creature out of time.”
For the artist, the extinct creatures hint at the possibilities of a post-human world. “First,
BY KATIE WHITEthere are these giant lizards, but shit goes down and the dinosaurs disappear. Then these overly smart monkeys emerge,” he muses. “I can’t help but wonder what will dominate when humans disappear.”
Beyond this newly emergent fascination with the Mesozoic Era, Party continues, more familiarly, to engage with art history in other works. After paying homage to 18th-century pastel artist Rosalba Carriera with a recent installation at the Frick Madison, he has turned his attention to Rosa Bonheur, a 19th-century French painter famed in her lifetime for her highly precise portraits of animals. “Swamp” features four of Party’s uncanny androgynous pastel portraits, each juxtaposed with an animal pulled from Bonheur’s oeuvre.
“Rosa has been revisited recently through the lens of ecofeminism,” Party tells me. “That’s not a term that existed in the 19th century. Still, the way she depicted animals, and our relationship with them and nature, feels extremely modern. These kinds of anachronisms are central to this exhibition.”
Two new site-specific murals at the gallery elaborate upon Party’s alluringly luxuriant, yet apocalyptic visions. Extensions of both his “Swamp” and “Red Forest” series, the murals are intended to transport viewers into a churchlike moment of reverie. One, with red, blazing trees, inevitably calls to mind the recent Canadian wildfires. “Forest fires are one of the most visually striking events of our time,” he says. “I want the exhibition to have that kind of transcendent quality, rooted in today, but linked to the past. Frightening, but also beautiful.”
Swiss artist Nicolas Party’s latest works, on view at Hauser & Wirth in New York until late October, imagine epochs before and after mankind.
RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA’S INAUGURAL U.S. SURVEY, “A LOT OF PEOPLE,” WILL FILL MOMA PS1’S HALLS THIS OCTOBER.
THE EXHIBITION EXCAVATES FOUR DECADES’ WORTH OF WORK FROM ONE OF OUR ERA’S MOST CATEGORY-DEFYING ARTISTS, AND SHOWS US HOW MUCH WE OWE TO HIS PERIPATETIC PRACTICE.
BY KAT HERRIMANIts nature is process. It spans hours, sometimes centuries. For example, a meal of rice noodles dressed with tamarind sauce and peanut crumbs—served in February 1990 as one of artist Rirkrit Tiravanija’s early food works, untitled 1990 (pad thai) —was probably extruded through the intestines of participating New Yorkers overnight. But the radicality of the gesture remains deep in the guts of the art world, pervading our cultural biome and the way we see ourselves as artists and viewers. It is into these roiling bowels that curators Ruba Katrib and Yasmil Raymond dared to venture, bringing us “A LOT OF PEOPLE.” The MoMA PS1 show will be the inaugural U.S. survey of an artist who, for four decades, has actively worked against the shelf life of facts, objects, and identity by destabilizing (and simultaneously elucidating) the fungible borders between author and audience, material and idea, biography and lived experience.
When Marcel Duchamp asserted, in 1917, that a bicycle wheel or a toilet turned on its head was as much an artwork as a painstakingly crafted painting, he revolutionized art with the readymade and what theorist Thierry de Duve describes as “an attitude.” Decades later, mashing up the open-endedness of John Cage’s performances and the incisiveness of Michael Asher’s institutional interventions, Tiravanija converted attitude into action. In fact, countless people pissed in Tiravanija’s untitled 1996 (tomorrow is another day), a plywood replica of his East Village apartment installed at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne. Visitors also napped, bathed, and made out. My house is your
house. And what we do in it is art. The host didn’t even have to be there to say so.
It is this snout-to-tail embrace of the everyday that has made the Thai artist a canonical figure and an archival nightmare. Tiravanija’s artworks are often like recipes—so open to substitutions and the chef’s whims that they almost always scrape up against the Ship of Theseus paradox. When the work isn’t pillaging the world’s pantries, travel itineraries, and architecture, it tends to cannibalize itself. Take, for example, Tiravanija’s untitled 2017 (super 8), a piece composed of his earlier Super 8 films.
Out of this tangle of dates and materials, Raymond and Katrib have wrestled the artist’s output into coherent form. They had a running start thanks to archivists Jörn Schafaff and Jan Pfeiffer, who, in the late 2000s, created a fiveway categorization in their quest to organize a pile of work 20 years in the making. Each of these typologies—slogans, replicas, immersive installations, portraits, and stages—appears in the PS1 show. But the curators further distilled the practice into what Katrib calls “two, really two and a half, methodologies.” One of these concerns the part of Tiravanija’s practice that might loosely be called object-focused, including the aforementioned slogans, portraits, and replicas. The second methodology unfolds as a literal stage, where a series of participatory performances will take place. As for the halfmethodology: This is untitled 2011 (558 broome st. the future is chrome), the exhibition’s welcome mat, an immersive replica of the original Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, sans the beer. Instead there are ceramic bottles glazed with palladium
luster—a sober, one-for-one replacement therapy that the artist has grown to favor.
Most people familiar with Tiravanija tend to think of him as a relational aesthete and social practitioner, a teacher with a backpack of tricks and treats swinging between responsibilities and studios in New York, Berlin, and Chiang Mai. This exhibition doesn’t refute the wanderlust thread nor the patrimony of his students (he’s a longtime faculty member at Columbia University’s School of Visual Arts). It does add an interpretation that has been missing: Tiravanija the autobiographer, an immigrant and son of a Thai diplomat trying to make sense of his own narrative as both insider and outsider in a rapidly globalizing world. Perhaps its absence up until now can be accounted for in its prescience. Tiravanija’s diaristic yet flexible forms foreshadow the last decade’s fixation with gluing identity politics onto a slippery mass of exceptions—its failure to account for those individuals shuttling between worlds, as well as work that exploits those cracks in order to make new (w)holes. “I think that Rirkrit’s consistency will be what comes across most,” says Katrib of the exhibition. “The work is ultimately very personal.”
Tiravanija echoes this sentiment when I write to him about the upcoming survey. “It has been difficult,” he says. “I don’t think of my work in one context, in one place. The work has always been as much about the people and the place where and when it was made. But the work has directions; it has a spine of awareness and attentions. Perhaps in the end it’s all biographical, without the ego of one.”
Portrait of Rirkrit Tiravanija in 2021
The Los Angeles–based artist uses bronze, earth, hair, and plant matter to craft works that are at once deeply intimate and existentially out-of-reach.
This fall, her galaxy-spanning practice will be honored with two West Coast exhibitions.
BY CATHERINE G. WAGLEY PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRAD TORCHIA
WHEN THE WORLD SHUT DOWN, Kelly Akashi took up stone carving. It was the spring of 2020, and the meditative, outdoor process felt well-suited to an era of isolation. Now, slabs of calcite, sandstone, and marble rest on sawhorses outside her studio, a converted garage in the unincorporated city of Altadena, just northeast of Los Angeles. Inside, there is more evidence of Akashi’s omnivorous appetite for craft traditions, which she uses to make art that manages to be both precise and indeterminate. A floor-to-ceiling shelving unit occupying a full wall of Akashi’s studio holds an array of colorful, pristine glass and bronze objects—snake-like tubes, yawning blossoms, and several expressive replicas of her own hand, a motif in her work.
Many of these pieces will never appear in exhibitions. “I try to be careful not to make any of my studies too precious,” explains Akashi. Some of them end up archived in labeled boxes, a record of the experiments that go on to inform completed artworks. “I always say the best time to make work is when I don’t have a bunch of deadlines,” she notes. “It’s really nice when there’s just no goal.”
In a moment when crushing economic pressures in most international art centers force artists to become results-driven, Akashi’s insistence upon open-endedness feels especially optimistic, as it underscores art’s ability to unfurl less direct, but still potent, modes of meaningmaking. Her circuitous way of working defines “Formations,” the first major exhibition of Akashi’s work, which opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, in September. (It originated at the San José Museum of Art in September 2022 and then traveled to the Frye Art Museum in Seattle.) The show spans the past decade of Akashi’s career and treats her materials—photography, wax, bronze, glass, earth, fossils, medicine, plant matter—as part of a constellation.
In fact, the exhibition feels so coherent that it could be mistaken for a single installation. The golden rope Akashi has used for years drapes over walls, anchoring delicate-looking bronze body parts and glass orbs. Casts of flora bisect slabs of earth, or grow out of dirt mounds on the floor. Human hair extends from glass bowls. “It’s not this linear, dry narrative,” says Akashi. “It’s meandering. But meandering paths create a lot of volume, and loop back on themselves.”
Akashi’s family has deep roots in Los Angeles: Her grandfather ran a business in Little Tokyo, and her father grew up in Boyle Heights before the Japanese American family was forcibly interned during World War II. She grew up around the paintings her mother made in college, though when asked why she became an artist, Akashi often cites a 1996 copy of Spin magazine that featured photographs by Nan Goldin.
“There is an insistence on stories and relationships,” Akashi explained of Goldin’s appeal in a 2022 interview with fellow artist Julien Nguyen, featured in the “Formations” exhibition catalog. This pivotal encounter with contemporary photography led her to study the subject at Otis College of Art and Design, where she graduated in 2006. But, as she told Nguyen, “At some point, I started realizing maybe it was never really about photography.” Like Goldin, Akashi was interested in collecting, archiving, and connection-making; photography was just one way to pursue these urges.
By the time she received an MFA from the University of Southern California in 2014, Akashi had begun working with wax, bronze, and glass. The wax came first—during her first semester of graduate school, when her mother taught her candle making—and led her to make wax replicas of her own hands. A friend who worked at a foundry offered to cast them in bronze free of charge. “It’s a terrible thing he did for me,” she jokes,
“because now I’m hooked.” Glass came next, and over the years, Akashi has taken multiple trips to Pilchuck, an epicenter of the American studio glass movement. She spent the summer of 2022 learning glass-blowing techniques in Murano, Italy, a hub for glassmaking since the 1200s.
For Akashi, these ways of working are all extensions of the same impulse: to explore time and our inability to control it. The sculpture Pincer, 2017, included in “Formations,” consists of a pearl-hued, shell-like basin with small glass balls interrupted by disembodied bronze fingers at the bottom. This work helped Akashi begin to grapple with nonhuman perspectives and inspired her to research fossils. She has always used her own figure—through casts of body parts and materials collected from her life—as a threshold. With Pincer, she started to think about how to “situate the human timeline on these other timelines that are just as valid.”
In 2020, she traveled to Poston, Arizona, to visit the remains of the camp where her father had been interned in the 1940s. She knew that internees planted trees during their time there. “They’re these last witnesses of that time,” she says. “That’s why I wanted to go there initially, to see if there were any trees.” There were, and she made bronze casts of the branches she collected. In “Formations,” these sculptures lie across large pedestals of rammed dirt, intended to make viewers feel like they are immersed in the earth.
Over the past year, Akashi has become increasingly interested in outer space. So when Shamim M. Momin, director of curatorial affairs at the University of Washington’s Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, asked if she wanted to collaborate with any department at the university for an exhibition opening the week after “Formations,” Akashi suggested astronomy. In collaboration with astrophysicist Tom Quinn, she has been working on a simulation that shows the merger of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies, which scientists predict will happen in approximately 4.5 billion years. In the simulation, the galaxies cross each other and then, propelled by gravitational forces, sling back and meld. “It’s so romantic and horrifying at the same time,” she says. “There’s something about getting people to see things that aren’t for us. They’re just things happening in the universe.”
Pooches-41©KáriBjörn
Explore the role our furry (and feathered) friends have played in culture and how they stand in as representations of status, power, loyalty, compassion and companionship through the perspectives of 24 global photographers.
October 20 - 22, 2023
Sung Neung Kyung, Apple, 1976 (detail). Seventeen gelatin silver prints (framed) with marker pen, each 9 7/16 × 7 5/8 in. (24 × 19.3 cm). Daejeon Museum of Art. © Sung Neung Kyung.
Photos: Jang Junho (image zoom)
THE ANNOUNCEMENT that White Cube would open its first New York gallery this year was met with nods, not gasps, by art industry insiders. More surprising was that the London-founded gallery had taken so long to plant a permanent flag across the pond.
“We’ve been talking about New York since I joined 17 years ago,” says Susan May, the gallery’s global artistic director, with a laugh. She points to White Cube’s slow, steady expansion across the U.S. in recent years: the 2018 opening of an office in Manhattan; the launch of off-site exhibitions in Aspen, Colorado that same year; and finally, the 2020 opening of a seasonal gallery in West Palm Beach, Florida.
When asked why Jay Jopling, White Cube’s founder, hadn’t pulled the trigger on a New York home until now, May says it came down to location. “The key thing was really to find the right space,” she says.
The British gallery will open its first permanent U.S. branch this October with an inaugural group show.
BY TAYLOR DAFOEThe wait was worth it. On Oct. 3, the gallery will open inside a former bank building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, a stone’s throw from Central Park and blocks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, and the former Whitney Museum building recently purchased by Sotheby’s. White Cube New York boasts three floors and 8,000 square feet of space, most of which will be dedicated to exhibitions. “There were a lot of locations in consideration,” says Caspar Jopling, White Cube’s director of strategic development and the founder’s nephew. One major challenge: The gallery wanted a site that hadn’t previously housed an art organization. “It’s a tabula rasa,” notes May. “It doesn’t have anybody else’s imprint.”
That a gallery named White Cube would be so picky about space is ironic. Then again, Jopling knows the importance of location more than most. In 1993, the then-upstart dealer scored a five-year, rent-free lease on a space in London’s tony St. James’s neighborhood. What distinguished Jopling’s outfit from other, stuffier spots in the West End was a penchant for of-themoment art and a novel policy on how it would be shown: No artist would ever exhibit more than once. Over the next eight years, White Cube played host to some of the era’s best talents, including Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, and Gavin Turk.
The business has only grown since. Additional London branches opened in 2000, 2006, and 2011. A Hong Kong outpost came in
2012, followed by a Paris gallery in 2019, and one in Seoul earlier this year. (White Cube also operated a São Paulo space from 2012 to 2015.) Along the way, the gallery let go of its “one artist, one show” rule and built a stable of some 60 international artists, including Mona Hatoum, Anselm Kiefer, and Doris Salcedo.
White Cube’s newest arm will open just in time for its 30th anniversary. For Courtney Willis Blair, the gallery’s newly named U.S. senior director, all that history is top of mind. “For me, it’s really about the foundation of White Cube— what White Cube has been and what it continues to be,” she says. “How do we bring that to New York and then add on top of it?”
A former partner and senior director at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Willis Blair developed a reputation for championing young, rigorous artists with strong points of view. Nine months into her new job, she has already put her stamp on White Cube’s roster, helping to recruit the Philadelphia-based interdisciplinary artist Tiona Nekkia McClodden, with whom she worked at her former gallery.
McClodden is one of several artists included in “Chopped & Screwed,” the group show that will inaugurate White Cube’s New York space this fall. Taking its name from the down-tempo, narcotized brand of hip hop popularized in 1990s Houston, the exhibition “looks at how artists are using a methodology of sourcing, distorting, and slowing down as a means to be transgressive, and to really think about the subversion or the dismantling of systems of power and systems of value,” explains Willis Blair. Artists like David Hammons, David Altmejd, and Julie Mehretu—along with others who are not represented by White Cube—will fill out the exhibition.
The show reflects both Willis Blair’s interests and something more: a distinctly American sensibility that is budding under her direction. It also shows the trust that Jopling has in his new home and hire. “This is not an outpost,” says May. “This is a major gallery for us. And it’s a major focus for us in terms of White Cube’s direction.”
“For me, it’s really about the foundation of White Cube— what White Cube has been and what it continues to be.
How do we bring that to New York and then add on top of it?”
—Courtney Willis Blair
October 18–22, 2023/ Paris, France/ @designmiami #designmiami designmiami.com
WHETHER ON THE ART-FILLED WALLS OF HER WEST VILLAGE HOME, OR IN THE FALL COLLECTION OF HER NAMESAKE CLOTHING BRAND, VERONICA DE PIANTE WEAVES TOGETHER SUBTLE REFERENCES FROM HER GLOBAL UPBRINGING TO MESMERIZING EFFECT.
By Ella Martin-Gachot
IN HIS 1750 WORK La Pamela, Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni writes, “The world is a beautiful book, but of little use to him who cannot read it.” Veronica de Piante first encountered the godfather of the modern Italian comedy as a teenager studying for her A-levels in the United Kingdom. Today, the designer of her eponymous ready-to-wear line is sipping tea from a Snoopy mug in her sprawling West Village home, pining for a visit to the Venice of Goldoni’s era.
De Piante is no stranger to a suitcase. Born in Milan to an Argentinian mother and Italian father, the designer moved to Bahrain with her family as a child. Later, a career in media sales brought her to Lebanon, Nigeria, Egypt, and the Dominican Republic. This global fluency has made de Piante a deft translator—though she chooses to work with textiles over text.
The designer founded her brand, which is already carving out a niche in the crowded independent fashion landscape with sumptuous yet modern garments, in 2022—but de Piante traces its roots back to the mid-2010s. In 2013, Roberta Ventura, founder of the Social Enterprise Project in Jordan and a friend of de Piante’s, asked if she’d consider collaborating on a line of beachwear. Ventura’s ethical fashion and homeware line is crafted by artisans based in northwest Jordan’s Jerash camp, home to over 30,000 Palestinian refugees. It was then that the wheels began to turn for de Piante, who was still working in media sales. “I started to think, Well, how would I translate this into something more relevant to me? ” she recalls. “Because I don’t really wear kaftans.”
A move to New York from Switzerland in 2017, for her husband's work, was the catalyst that finally jump-started de Piante’s foray into fashion. With no formal training, she relied instead on instinct and a trove of personal experiences, juxtaposing nostalgic palettes and textures (think heavy knits, dark velvet, and chestnut and mahogany tones) with the minimalist edge of classic menswear. Aside from a poncho that clearly references her Argentinian heritage, the designer’s influences are mostly discreet. A pair of gaucho pants sourced in Buenos Aires, for example, provided inspiration for a shirt cuff with a long row of buttons. These sartorial footnotes are filtered through memories of family and loved ones. “It has to do with personality,” says de Piante. “I’m inspired by the way someone wears something, the way they make it their own.” She worked with SEP Jordan as well as family-run factories in Italy, New York, and Bolivia to craft the pieces. The fruits of this labor are manifested in the brand’s debut collection, launched last fall.
Cecily Brown, Unfurl the Flag, 2013; Pablo Picasso, Nu Assis, de Profil, 1947; Artwork by Fernand Léger
Rita Ackermann, Mama, Masked and Anonymous, 2021.
“IT HAS TO DO WITH PERSONALITY. I’M INSPIRED BY THE WAY SOMEONE WEARS SOMETHING, THE WAY THEY MAKE IT THEIR OWN.”
Creating a sense of home, whether in the form of a garment or a place, is an art that de Piante has perfected over a lifetime in motion. Sitting in the sunlit living room of her West Village townhouse, an 1855 structure originally divided into 12 studio apartments, she recalls her meticulous approach to renovating it—salvaging the structure’s wrought-iron balcony and original tilework, insisting that the windows retain their wavy, hand-crafted look. The resulting interiors feel more Saint-Germain than West Village, filled with design elements and objects that channel a reserved romanticism. De Piante’s art collection speaks the loudest.
In the living room, a Tracey Emin and a Cecily Brown neighbor drawings by de Piante’s three children. “I have to like it,” she insists. “I don’t actually care what it’s worth or who it’s by.” When asked what she likes, specifically, in a collection that includes works by Pablo Picasso, Shirin Neshat, Mirtha Dermisache, and Rita Ackermann, de Piante responds that the work has to
feel alive. She’s also drawn to an irreverent streak that manifests throughout her acquisitions, most of them by woman artists. The works on display complicate classical beauty, and their makers are funambulists who walk a delicate tightrope between nerve and daintiness.
The collection will see new walls soon. De Piante and her family are leaving Manhattan for London in the coming months. Though New York never quite felt like home, it will forever be the city that brought her brand to life, and where she learned that Veronica de Piante had been dubbed “the new name to know” by Net-a-Porter. The retailer will release the line’s key pieces in September, along with a new collection later this fall. “Of course, it’s incredibly flattering,” she says, smiling. “It gives me a lot of encouragement. But it almost feels like they’re talking about someone else. I set out to make beautiful clothes … I just want to keep it authentic. Maybe that means I’ll lose a few retailers, or have three boutiques instead of 10,” she muses. “But they will make sense to me.”
for many promising talents, but the experience can often feel more like a dry run of the competitive art-world gauntlet than a safe haven for self-discovery and creative evolution. This year, three Yale alumni—attorney Carmine Boccuzzi, arts patron Bernard Lumpkin, and artist Mickalene Thomas—have committed to fostering the latter experience at their alma mater. Boccuzzi and Lumpkin first encountered Thomas as collectors of her work, which was later featured in the traveling exhibition “Young, Gifted and Black: The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art.” It wasn’t long before the trio recognized their shared dedication to nurturing the careers of emerging artists— especially those who are often overlooked by prevailing art world institutions. This July, Boccuzzi, Lumpkin, and Thomas established the Mickalene Thomas Scholarship at the Yale School of Art. The monetary award, a culmination of their shared vision, also offers one student per year the opportunity to benefit from Thomas’s guidance and mentorship. The announcement of the artist’s eponymous scholarship is tied to this month’s opening of “Mickalene Thomas / Portrait of an Unlikely Space,” an exhibition co-curated by Thomas at the university’s art gallery. The show, which runs through the end of the year, juxtaposes pre-emancipation-era portraits of Black Americans with works by contemporary artists. To mark the occasion, the trio reunited for a conversation about building a legacy that honors the past as much as the future.
BERNARD LUMPKIN: Mickalene, you and I are part of an amazing community of artists, curators, educators, writers, patrons, and collectors who champion artists of African descent. We share a mission to elevate these voices in the contemporary art world, each using our own platforms and strengths. You have used your success to provide opportunities for others, which
resonates with me as a patron and collector. I aim to use the visibility I have—through my support of institutions like the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the Yale School of Art—to inspire others to extend their support beyond merely acquiring work.
CARMINE BOCCUZZI: Bernard has shown me what can happen when you act as an art patron, support younger artists, and learn about how the world of today is tied into past historical moments and people. It’s enriching to be around people who care about art and art history, like when we went to see Mickalene speak at MoMA about the Matisse painting The Red Studio [1911]. You have both helped me think about building community and being in dialogue with other collectors.
MICKALENE THOMAS: It begins with likeminded people wanting to address a void. As Toni Morrison says, if you don’t have that place, create it yourself. Making space is vital to my practice, because creating art simply isn’t enough. I want to see others in my community grow, too. I never felt comfortable being the only one at the table. I want dialogue with peers—like Derrick Adams, Wangechi Mutu, Kehinde Wiley, and Clifford Owens—who also navigate these spaces and support one another. When I reached a point of influencing institutions, I realized I could use my platform to educate artists about community. No one wants to stand alone.
This instinct to make space is something we share. I first encountered you both through the Studio Museum in Harlem, and I was inspired by your efforts. Your support was never ostentatious—it was stealthy and genuine. You were always welcoming a diverse range of artists to your homes and championing our work, regardless of our career stage.
LUMPKIN: For you, art is not just a practice—it’s a way of advocating for change. You’ve engaged institutions like Yale to accomplish your wider vision of what an artist can do: this idea of the artist as citizen, advocate, activist. You’ve set an amazing example for a new generation of artists.
When Yale approached us, we were already supporting the School of Art program through scholarships and service on its task force. I had advised Yale on another project that Mickalene did there, a mural in one of the new residential colleges in honor of Pauli Murray.
With the newly
at the Yale School of Art, collectors Carmine Boccuzzi and Bernard Lumpkin are offering one lucky student a chance to become the artist’s newest mentee.
BOCCUZZI: The mural that Mickalene did at Pauli Murray College was so meaningful to me, because Bernard and I met as students at Yale. Murray got her higher law degree at Yale Law School, and I went to Yale Law School, too. Seeing what Mickalene did, which is so gorgeous and stunning, was a revelatory moment.
THOMAS: It’s interesting how life comes full circle. I had discovered Pauli Murray prior to being invited to create this mural, because I was researching African American women activists who were dealing with gender equality. She seemed like this nonbinary force, an activist and scholar who worked through the Civil Rights Movement. The fact that she became the first African American person to have a college in her name at an Ivy League school seemed like a great opportunity to celebrate her. She was a shapeshifter far ahead of her time—she was even an Episcopal priest. I consider her a distant mentor, influencing how I envision my own legacy.
LUMPKIN: That’s also reflected in the exhibition you’re curating at the Yale University Art Gallery this fall: “Mickalene Thomas / Portrait of an Unlikely Space.” Yale knew of our special relationship with you. The opportunity to join forces and support emerging artists, the university’s art program, and the mission of elevating artists of African descent felt unmissable to us. I hope it sets an example for other patrons and collectors to impact future generations of artists by supporting their education.
THOMAS: There are many things I imagined accomplishing in my life, but a scholarship was not on my list. When I received the phone call, I was speechless. It’s beyond the idea of a legacy. It validates my thoughts, actions, and beliefs. I know the struggles I had in school, so I hope other patrons follow your lead, because students need space to create without stress and compromise. The scholarship is a concentrated engagement with one student over their tenure at Yale. I’ve extended my mentor services to the recipient while they’re in school, and after school through my platform Pratt>FORWARD [a program at the Pratt School of Art]. The scholarship recipient will always have a home in me, and can rely on my team as advocates. Artists often find themselves in conflict because they lack this type of support to guide them.
LUMPKIN: What did mentorship look like for you as a young artist?
THOMAS: My mentor was Rahimah Lateef. She was a collector, friend, and supporter who introduced me to Carrie Mae Weems’s work. This became instrumental and transformative in my practice. Rahimah was also my first patron. When she needed to sell some work, she gave it to my
gallery, Lehmann Maupin. Bernard and Carmine ended up with this painting, Mary J. Me [2002], showing the serendipitous connections in my life.
LUMPKIN: We’re in a moment with increased visibility for Black artists—there’s more support and infrastructure. Yet we’re aware that we’re building for the next generation without knowing whether the world will be as receptive. Regardless, we will always be creating space and opportunities. While I often lead the conversation, Carmine’s partnership is integral. The best things happen with teamwork, and Carmine, your support and advocacy is invaluable.
THOMAS: You both have carved out space in monumental ways that enable artists like me to continue to achieve what we set out to do. Octavia Butler’s words come to mind: “All that you touch / You Change. / All that you Change / Changes you. / The only lasting truth / Is Change.” I know that the person who receives this scholarship will be incredible. They’ll take this opportunity and
run with it, knowing they have a support system behind them. Meanwhile, Kymberly Pinder [dean of the Yale School of Art] is working towards making the MFA program free for all students. This will offer an unparalleled chance for students to focus on creativity, and the theoretical and conceptual process of becoming an artist.
LUMPKIN: That’s absolutely true. Being at the Yale School of Art presents unique challenges and pressures from the commercial side of the art world. The goal of the scholarship—and the support provided by the Yale School of Art task force—is to extend the security and community of the school, allowing artists to continue creating work without the immediate pressures of the commercial art world. Mickalene understands these dynamics and can help students navigate the transition while preserving their artistic purpose. It’s crucial that this mentorship comes from someone who has experienced both the academic world and the demands of the professional art world.
The full breadth of Judy Chicago’s work is finally getting the art world’s unmediated attention.
Her largest survey to date, a choral recontextualization of her six-decadelong career, opens at the New Museum in October.
BY ELLA MARTIN-GACHOT“THAT WAS one of the great euphemisms of all time,” says Judy Chicago across the screen, her hand punctuating every word. The 84-year-old artist is recalling a statement made by de Young Museum director Thomas Campbell on the occasion of her first retrospective in 2021. During “a press conference or something,” he declared that she “had been marginalized for decades.” This mammoth understatement, as Chicago sees it, resurfaced as the artist began preparations for her largest survey to date, “Herstory,” with the New Museum’s Edlis Neeson artistic director, Massimiliano Gioni. She had been “marginalized,” she realized, because she was working in an entirely different lane. “Museums have been trying to figure out how to add women and artists of color around the edges,” she tells me, “but there is an unknown alternative paradigm which has to do with women’s history. That’s the paradigm I’ve been working out of.”
When the Illinois-born artist began her career in 1960s Los Angeles, Frida Kahlo was “known as Diego Rivera’s wife who also paints,” and Chicago’s gallery sold a 24-foot cloud painting by Georgia O’Keeffe for a paltry $35,000. Chicago took the social construction and implications of gender as the starting point for a six-decadelong practice that would evolve into a universe of systemic interrogations—from the experience of birth, to the abyss of the Holocaust, to the urgency of environmental collapse. “Sclerotic” is one word to describe the ways that art world institutions— and their overwhelmingly male representatives— received the artist’s “interventions.” Chicago insists
that it wasn’t until the Museum of Contemporary Art’s 2012 “Ends of the Earth” exhibition that her smoke works were included in the land art canon. The archival images that document the “Atmospheres” series, 1968–74, testify to their creator’s unrelenting knack for making a scene.
“As tough as it was, I had 50 years of making art without ever thinking about the market, which is inconceivable now,” says the artist. The 2020s have indeed presented Chicago with a dizzying succession of recognitions: an autobiography; a collaboration with Dior; a partnership with Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova; a book, Judy Chicago-isms, out this November; and 10 exhibitions throughout 2023— including “Herstory.” A nesting doll of a show, it will touch on the artist’s forays into mediums as distinct as stained glass, needlework, and drawing. One of its most enlightening layers is an exhibition within the exhibition—a compendium of works from over 80 artists that, like her canonical 1974–79 work The Dinner Party, puts women in dialogue with each other.
As she prepares to reveal “Herstory” to the world this fall, Chicago is hard at work on another major exhibition at London’s Serpentine Galleries, opening next summer. When asked how she’s maintained her momentum through periods of erasure and hypervisibility alike, she reasons, “There’s an expression in Jewish culture about choosing life. It’s a decision you make every day. You wake up, and you look at the headlines. You think, Oh my god, I just want to get back in bed and cover my head. But you have to say, No, I choose life in the face of darkness.”
The runway is often a petri dish for larger social reckonings around the body and identity. Last year, the upheaval of Roe v. Wade and a slew of anti-trans bills resurfaced ongoing questions about bodily autonomy, just as America’s racial history was negotiated on a global stage following the protests of 2020. Designers, much like the rest of us, are contending with these forces in deeply personal ways. Despair is certainly a logical response, but in the work of this year’s breakthrough talents—Lu’u Dan, Hodakova, DJ Chappel, and Zoe Gustavia Anna Whalen—there’s a lot of hope, too. Hailing from the U.S. and abroad, these designers offer up visions of ourselves that are fiercer, and freer, than those we are most often handed. Some contend with the industry’s culture of frenzied consumption by sourcing secondhand materials or opting for a more meditative pace. Others reckon with their own relationships to gender, nationality, and race, presenting critical yet undeniably joyful work. All four capture the feeling of moving through our flawed and topsy-turvy world.
By COCO ROMACKA RECENT FOURTH of July getaway inspired the 24-year-old designer DJ Chappel to create a run of garments decorated with the stars and stripes of the American flag. “My friends and I went to Massachusetts, someplace very pro-America, and we were just being, I guess you would say, campy,” he recalls. “Wearing red, white, and blue, shooting BB guns, and being really American.” Chappel has plans to unveil the pieces this fall as part of his latest collection, which includes a number of never-beforeseen archival works. Though this is the first time he’s explicitly experimented with a flag motif since he began designing in 2018, Chappel’s clothing has always reflected his own uniquely American perspective: an embrace of Black queerness infused with his New York upbringing and finished with an irreverent, surrealist twist. Think double-brimmed trucker hats, prairie skirts constructed out of layers of plaid boxers, and handbags woven from opalescent hair bobbles. It’s a little Vetements, a little Hood By Air. Canal Street souvenirs by way of Salvador Dalí.
Largely self-taught as a tailor, Chappel begins each piece with a character in mind—a holdover from his time as a student at the Point Park University dance conservatory in Pittsburgh, where he worked in the campus costume shop. (Duality Junkie, as his ready-to-wear brand was previously known, is based on one such character.) Chappel’s designs are beloved by rising R&B starlets like Liv.e and keiyaA. They have also become the foundation for a more holistic creative practice. Chappel is a creative director, a stylist, a filmmaker, and above all, a collaborator. For a commission by the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, on view this September, Chappel and his partner, the photographer Ryan Cardoso, set out to conjure the energy that buzzes in the street when an event concludes.
“At the end of a party or a gallery opening, there’s that scene where everybody’s gathered outside,” explains Chappel. The pair will install a banner in the space emblazoned with photographs of clothing from RISD’s collection, styled on a crew of intimidatingly cool-looking characters—all of whom are played by Chappel himself.
“My friends and I went to Massachusetts, someplace very pro-America, and we were just being, I guess you would say, campy.”
ELLEN HODAKOVA LARSSON grew up on a horse farm near Strängnäs, Sweden, about an hour west of Stockholm, where she currently lives. Larsson’s father was in the military and often called abroad, but always returned home full of ideas for new projects. Her mother, a seamstress specializing in fur repair, was resourceful. “We had a tablecloth that she made a dress out of,” remembers Larsson. “My parents rarely bought anything new for me and my brother. It was about creating what we needed.” The 31-year-old seems to have inherited that ingenuity—in fact, it’s a hallmark of Hodakova, the sustainable brand she founded in 2021 after graduating from the Swedish School of Textiles the year prior. Larsson deconstructs and reclaims secondhand garments and vintage accessories, often salvaging past-season pieces and scraps from much larger companies like Gucci. These material constraints yield reinterpretations of wardrobe staples—like soft, tailored suiting, or leather handbags made from woven belts—that are playful and sculptural.
For her Fall/Winter 2023 show in Paris, Larsson fashioned paneled pencil skirts from leather belts, a prickly ankle-length gown from sewing needles, and cap-sleeved dresses from nylon windbreakers courtesy of the Swedish sportswear company Houdini. In an effort to create versatile and seasonless garments, she eschews bright colors in favor of a restrained, neutral palette. The most literal translation of her commitment to timelessness and versatility can be found in her Fall/Winter 2022 collection, for which she presented a series of slinky skirts and halter tops made of ticking antique watches. “The challenge,” she says, “is to use timelessness to create a new kind of timelessness.”
“We had a tablecloth that [my mom] made a dress out of. My parents rarely bought anything new for me and my brother. It was about creating what we needed.”
Hung La had been operating Kwaidan Editions, the luxury womenswear label he cofounded in London with his wife, Léa Dickely, for four years when 2020 hit like a hammer. A Black man named George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis. Asian Americans were targeted in a slew of violent hate crimes spurred by the xenophobic rhetoric on newscasts and social media, and the Covid pandemic was at its peak. “All of these issues about identity started to creep up,” recalls La. After training at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and working for nearly a decade at Balenciaga and Celine, the 45-year-old designer responded to the moment in the only way he knew how: through clothing. Lu’u Dan was born in 2022, a menswear line that embodied the vision of Asian masculinity that La, who grew up in a Vietnamese enclave nestled in an otherwise white suburb of Washington, DC, longed to see: cool and rebellious, richly complex yet utterly bad. A boy you just don’t fuck with.
The name of the brand says it all. Vietnamese for “pomegranate bullet,” a loose colloquialism meaning “dangerous man,” Lu’u Dan’s clothing is stitched together from villainous archetypes and real-life subcultures. La’s Autumn/Winter 2023 collection was inspired by bōsōzoku motorcycle gangs, while his Spring/ Summer 2024 collection, presented in Paris this summer, took cues from Japanese workwear with paint-splattered coats, khaki vests, and a voluminous riff on tobi pants (the baggy trousers worn by construction workers). “It’s about your working-class dude who doesn’t aspire to be more,” explains La. That laissez-faire attitude—which, like so much in fashion, is carefully cultivated and sold—has resonated with many of those shaping today’s youth culture, including the pop star Billie Eilish, who garnered buzz when she wore the brand’s vibrant logo windbreaker to a Met Gala after-party in May. “The way I look at it, the more authentic I am with my community, the more outsiders will want to participate,” says La. “That’s the beauty of subculture. When there’s authenticity and truth, people will want to be a part of it.”
“That’s the beauty of subculture. When there’s authenticity and truth, people will want to be a part of it.”
A MAZE OF DIRT piled atop a linen blanket. The woody scent of frankincense wafting in the air. That’s what visitors encountered when they stepped inside St. Mark’s Church one afternoon last February for Zoe Gustavia Anna Whalen’s New York Fashion Week debut. The 28-year-old artistdesigner instructed the models wearing her gauzy bias-cut gowns, dramatically boned panniers, and pillowy embroidered jackets to make their way through the winding labyrinth in a steady, unhurried procession. “I wanted the focus to be less on the runway than on this sense of community, slowness, and meditation,” explains Whalen. Guests were given paper bags so that they could take home a handful of soil after the show. Infused with the room’s energy, it doubled as a spell to carry into the world.
This mystical presentation is a reflection of Whalen’s upbringing outside Boston, where she practiced a form of Earth-centered spirituality and attended supportive women’s circles with her mother. After arriving in New York, she studied fashion design at Parsons and cut her teeth at some of the city’s buzziest brands, including Eckhaus Latta and Interior. Her vision for the future of garment-making is largely informed by the past, taking cues from preindustrial wearables like medieval chain mail and hip-shaping Victorian undergarments. Her pieces, which she produces with the help of an in-house team, are constructed from deadstock fabric and other delicate discarded materials that she sources by scouring thrift shops and antique fairs. Working this way allows Whalen to cut down on waste, an imperative given the industry’s outsized role in climate change. It also adds to the singularity of each design. “There’s such a bounty of these beautiful, embroidered tablecloths and crocheted coasters,” she says. “Using these secondhand textiles can contribute to the ineffable magic of an object.”
Photography
by
ZOE CHAIT
“I wanted the focus to be less on the runway than on this sense of community, slowness, and meditation.”
GUCCI’S ENDURING LEGACY IS GROUNDED IN CONSTANT REVITALIZATION. THE ITALIAN HOUSE’S FALL/WINTER 2023 WOMEN’S COLLECTION IS AN HOMAGE TO THE ECOSYSTEM OF DESIGNERS AND ARTISANS WHO HAVE POOLED THEIR KNOWLEDGE OVER THE BRAND’S FIRST CENTURY. A BOLD PRESENTATION OF HERITAGE CODES FILTERED THROUGH THE PRISM OF SHARED MEMORY, THE COLLECTION BRINGS ITS HISTORY TO LIFE IN NEW, COLORFUL WAYS.
All clothing Gucci Women’s Fall-Winter 2023.
STYLING ASSISTANT INDIA REED
MAKE UP BY
KUMA FOR BOBBI BROWN HAIR BY HIKARU USING
KÉRASTASE PARIS FOR FRANK REPS
MODELS
ISHA SENGHORE XUE HUIZI
JULIA BELYAKOVA
Hari Nef wears a turtleneck, panties, tights, and shoes by Miu Miu, and Estate Earrings by Kentshire, NYC.
Zoom, Hari Nef and Troye Sivan are in different worlds—Nef bronzed and brighteyed from a month-long retreat to Fire Island, and Sivan perched by the radiator, cranked full blast, in his Melbourne home. The pair became friends amid the political tumult of 2016, when they attended a string of protests together. At the time, Nef had just landed her breakout television role, and Sivan, a newcomer to New York, was fresh off his first international tour. The pair, both devotees of the fashion world, have held onto each other ever since, regardless of time zones and tours. As Sivan prepares for the release of his third album, Something to Give Each Other, next month, and Nef prepares for a busy fall, the pair connect to reflect on the strength of their friendship, the eras—personal and stylistic—that they’ve seen each other through, and the art of saying less.
TROYE SIVAN: We’ve known each other forever. It’s been cool to see you through all these different phases of life.
HARI NEF: When we met, we were experimenting with our work. I learned a lot from watching you onstage and seeing you contend with all those eyes on you, and on your personal life and identity. I was like, “He just wears [it all] like a T-shirt and jeans.”
SIVAN: One thing I notice when I look back at photos of us from that time is how differently we used to express ourselves through fashion. I use the word “fashion” loosely because I used to wear the ugliest clothes. How has your sense of style evolved over the years, and how much effort does it take to look so effortless?
NEF: Let me reveal my secrets to you! I’ve always been attracted to fashion as something that speaks before I do. Something I’ve been telling myself this year is, Say less. Fashion, if you are specific and intentional with it, allows you to say less. In preschool, I was obsessed with this pink dress in the dress-up chest—I needed that pink dress. I don’t know where that fab feeling comes from—it feels like a girl thing, a gay thing.
SIVAN: Self-censorship got in the way for me as a kid, regardless of how good that feeling felt. That sense of exploration came to me much later in life, and it’s still something I feel more comfortable doing in a work context than an everyday context. Did you always have that gusto?
NEF: The same thing that keeps me captivated by fashion keeps me captivated by cinema and live performance. It’s not about the clothes—it’s about the person in the clothes. Not her name, or where she’s from, or what she looks like, but the way she moves in them, talks in them; the way they change her posture. I remember feeling this acutely from when I walked my first runway show for Hood By Air a decade ago. Sometimes, other people see you in ways that are more expansive than the way you see yourself, which can be scary. Have you ever felt clocked in that way and been inspired?
SIVAN: Yes, when I was making the “Bloom” music video. Jacob Bixenman was creative directing me, unofficially, and he saw something in me that excited but also completely terrified me. I was surprised by how self-conscious I became when I put on my first look for that project. There are a few makeup products that push me to a point where I feel like another person, or that reveal a facet of myself that I was unaware of previously. I put on mascara and lipstick, and all of a sudden, she’s present. In that moment, I felt terrified of myself, like I was 12 years old again. The second we started rolling, I felt better than I ever have in my life. It was because all these incredible people—Jacob, Bardia [Zeinali, director], James Kaliardos [makeup artist]—saw something in me that I was deathly afraid of.
NEF: First time in drag, courtesy of James Kaliardos. It could get a lot shabbier than that, girl.
SIVAN: That’s true. You’re an endless source of references for me. Are there any specific influences that you keep returning to?
“EVERYTHING ELSE COULD BE TAKEN AWAY, BUT AS LONG AS I HAVE MY PEOPLE, I CAN LIVE. IT SOUNDS SILLY TO SAY OUT LOUD, BUT I’M EMBRACING THE CRINGE.” —HARI NEF
“I ARRIVED IN NEW YORK AND JUST SNUCK INTO SHOWS. FOR THEM TO GET DRUNK SO I COULD ASK THEM IF THEY
I WOULD SPOT PEOPLE I THOUGHT WERE COOL AND WAIT NEEDED AN INTERN. IT WAS FAIRLY EFFECTIVE.” —HARI NEF
NEF: When I’m getting into the goop with my friends, I start speaking strictly in references and memes—like ancient, crunchy YouTube. It helps me express things I don’t necessarily have the words for, but sometimes I hide behind it. I think a lot of people in our generation don’t feel comfortable speaking in our own voice, or expressing our own ideas.
SIVAN: I completely agree. What about when it comes to fashion? Do you actively seek out references and inspiration for what you wear?
NEF: At this point, I’ve been in fashion longer than I was out of it. But the core of my fashion knowledge comes from being far outside of it as a suburban high schooler on the Internet at the dawn of Style.com and fashion LiveJournals, which then bled into Tumblr. I watched Alexander McQueen’s Spring/Summer 2010 Plato’s Atlantis, the first fashion show ever to be live-streamed—which was also where Lady Gaga debuted “Bad Romance.” That was insane. Remember the armadillo shoes? That moment is what gave me the delusion that I could just show up to fashion week, which I did. I arrived in New York and just snuck into shows. I would spot people I thought were cool and wait for them to get drunk so I could ask them if they needed an intern. It was fairly effective. You never really get away from your first love in life. What’s your healing-the-inner-child frolic of the moment?
SIVAN: It’s dance. I have a pretty singular way of moving; everyone does. Mine is particularly noodly. My parents might be upset at me saying this, but in our house, it was always: “Troye can sing, and Tide can dance.” Interestingly, Tide— my brother—is a great singer, and I’ve recently moved past my insecurity about dancing. I had a lot of internalized homophobia; I used to be scared that people would think I was gay if I danced. The “Rush” music video was my first time doing choreography. Now it’s something I’m excited to do for the rest of my life, even if I’m shit.
NEF: You’re not shit! You devoured that choreo. I don’t want to kiss up, but “Rush” is a Fire Island sensation. That video was played no fewer than nine times in our house. It comes up algorithmically after any random gay YouTube playlist. It’s giving geo-location, like, These girls are on Fire Island? Let me give them something they can really take a bite out of, babe
SIVAN: Oh my god, the highest compliment of all. Over the years, I’ve noticed how close you keep your friends. I’m wondering, what’s the through-line among all of your incredible people?
NEF: That’s a really good question to ask me right now, because I’ve just spent a month in friend summer camp. For me, ensuring the longevity of my friendships is this dance between—it sounds basic and corny, but it’s true— unconditional affirmation, support, love, and positivity; and truth, accountability, and transparent conversation. It’s this idea of love as work. When you put in that work with someone, you earn the right to say things—not to hurt or chastise them, but to help them grow—and vice versa. I’m figuring out how to be a mother and sister to my friends, as well as a companion. That’s part of what it means to build meaningful connections—in our community specifically. The rule book we were raised with, regardless of good intentions, wasn’t written for us.
SIVAN: That’s absolutely true. It’s on us to figure out a new way to do it. NEF: That has become the most important thing in the world to me. Everything else could be taken away, but as long as I have my people, I can live. It sounds silly to say out loud, but I’m embracing the cringe.
“THERE ARE A FEW MAKEUP PRODUCTS THAT PUSH ME TO A POINT WHERE I FEEL LIKE ANOTHER PERSON, OR THAT REVEAL A FACET OF MYSELF THAT I WAS UNAWARE OF PREVIOUSLY. I PUT ON MASCARA AND LIPSTICK, AND ALL OF A SUDDEN, SHE’S PRESENT.” —TROYE SIVAN
POST BY HELEN STUDIOS
A lifetime could be spent chasing the elusive milestones of a creative career:
a Broadway marquee, a prime time television role, a solo exhibition.
Less time is dedicated to the murky follow-up question: What comes next?
After the accolades, a fresh challenge emerges: accessing new depths.
Theater actor LESLIE ODOM JR. floated in sensory deprivation tanks and went to therapy. Actor EMMA LAIRD dug deeper into the intricacies of her craft with her acting coach, while artist SABLE ELYSE SMITH probed the political underbelly of American leisure culture.
Television star YVONNE ORJI untangled her relationship with religion in the pages of a memoir, and filmmaker EMMA SELIGMAN revisited the romantic isolation of adolescence.
Here, these FIVE ARTISTS reflect on their journeys into the unkown.
By John Ortved Creative Direction by Studio&The wall in Leslie Odom Jr.’s Los Angeles kitchen is populated with countless faces, portraits picked up from his travels around the world with Nicolette Robinson, his wife of 11 years. He points to one dark-haired woman on a bright yellow background. “We got this at a little restaurant in…” He can’t remember where. He shuts his eyes tightly, thinking hard. “Ischia!” Nicolette chimes in from the next room. He opens his eyes, a smile the size of the Mediterranean broadening his handsome face. “Thank you,” he says, sincerely.
The last eight years have included many journeys for Odom, beginning with the show-stealing role of Aaron Burr in Hamilton that catapulted him to Broadway, and then to international stardom (earning him both a Tony and a Grammy along the way). After leaving the cast in 2016, he made his way to film and TV roles, including his portrayal of Sam Cooke in Regina King’s One Night in Miami, for which he received an Academy Award nomination. He wrote an autobiography, Failing Up, about finding success through taking risks, and recorded a number of albums, including 2019’s Mr.
On Sept. 7, he will return to Broadway for a revival of Ossie Davis’s Purlie Victorious: A NonConfederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch, a project he’s been working toward since leaving Hamilton. “It was a piece of writing that held even more of a challenge than the one I had just done,” he says. “People were asking me, ‘What do you want to do next?’ The list is really short, because there are not a whole lot of roles written for Black actors that are as complex and dynamic and human as Aaron Burr was.” Purlie Victorious, a play about a preacher returning to his small Georgia town to save a community church in the Jim Crow South, was at the top of that list, but a global pandemic had other ideas.
Six years later, the play will run at the legendary Music Box Theatre, a dream for the self-described “Broadway nerd” (“You think about a Broadway house, that is it,” he says). He’s savoring the moment, especially after the literal darkness Covid brought to the Great White Way. “In returning, there’s a sense of gratitude,” he says. “It meant reckoning with mourning, asking
yourself tough questions. Most people that I know are human fucking beings, and the pandemic made them more vulnerable. We’re not taking anything for granted.”
These are not emotions Odom strictly explores under the house lights. He’s been on a personal odyssey as well. He went to therapy. He and his wife went to couples therapy. He’s been trying sensory deprivation “float labs.” He’s reading voraciously, including Clint Smith’s How the Word Is Passed Purlie Victorious marks not just the renewal of a play, but of Odom himself. “I don’t want somebody to sing about me: ‘You’ll never be satisfied,’” he says, referencing a line in Hamilton that encapsulates the destructive ambition of the play’s namesake protagonist. “There are still things that I am doing and want to do. But on some level, I’m very satisfied with how lucky I am,” he says. “We pushed through, and Purlie Victorious has come together in a way that’s better. I just thank Providence for this opportunity.”
“People were asking me, ‘What do you want to do next?’ The list is really short, because there are not a whole lot of roles written for Black actors that are as complex and dynamic and human as Aaron Burr was.”
Emma Laird is not a horse girl. Yes, she rode horses growing up in Chesterfield—“It’s the Pittsburgh of England”—and adventured in the Peak District National Park near her father’s home. “But I didn’t own a horse,” she says. Riding and camping were distractions from the everyday rigors of education, until a model scout discovered the 17-year-old at a music festival, taking her to London and away from all that. She is not interested in talking about the modeling thing, which dominated her life for eight years.
She wants to talk about acting, which she studied in New York before being cast as Iris—a hypnotic, silver-tongued sex worker on Paramount+’s Mayor of Kingstown —in 2021. This September, she’ll step onto the big screen alongside Kenneth Branagh, Tina Fey, and Michelle Yeoh in A Haunting in Venice, Branagh’s version of the Agatha Christie classic, Hallowe’en Party Laird was never married to a single dramaturgical method, and is instead utterly dedicated to her acting coach, James Monarski. “He’s the reason why I’m still acting, or why I have a job in the first place. I send him a scene, and he spots something that gives me a completely different lens. He’s almost like my therapist. I call him up and we cry together.”
She has mentors on her side of the camera, too: actors like Sarah Paulson and Elizabeth Reaser, to whom Laird confessed her fears about her “late” arrival in an industry famously obsessed with youth. “They gave me the biggest pep talk,” she says. They told her that her fears were rational, but that her skills would see her through. “I am talented and also keen to keep learning and get better. That will keep me employed more than how I look.”
Where would she like that talent to take her next? “Honestly, I want to play a bad guy,” says Laird. She points to performances like Gary Oldman in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds. She wants something challenging, something riskier, something, for lack of a better word, mature. “I feel like I’ve grown out of playing an 18-year-old girl, despite how I look onscreen. I’ve evolved as an actor,” she says. “You have to put yourself out there and physically transform—I want something that tests me, where I have to make bold choices. I want to do really fucking weird stuff.”
“You have to put yourself out there and physically transform— I want something that tests me, where I have to make bold choices. I want to do really fucking weird stuff.”
Sable Elyse Smith makes work to entice you, and her intentions are anything but innocent. “I am interested in visual seduction,” she says, “but I’m more interested in what happens once the viewer gets there, which is intense and sometimes uncomfortable. It’s not about the visual pleasure anymore, it’s up to the audience.”
After appearances in group exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the New Museum, on the High Line, and in many other enviable institutions, her practice—which includes sculpture, photography, and new works from her “Coloring Book” series—will be on display in her first solo show with Regen Projects, “FAIR GROUNDS,” in Los Angeles this September.
A sculpture on view in the show is reminiscent of one she built for the 2022 Whitney Biennial: an imposing, jet-black ferris wheel that is at once fun, monolithic, and menacing. “It was a reference to the carnival or the traveling fair,” says Smith, who explores the enticement conjured by amusements, and “all the things that are permissible in that space because it’s labeled entertainment.” Her work asks viewers to contemplate the links between violence and power that permeate our world, through a vocabulary that at first seems not only harmless, but enjoyable. “Language can be the first domino in a certain kind of violence being perpetuated,” she says. It’s an invitation to take the ride—the price of the ticket comes later.
Smith played with similar themes during her 2018–19 residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and in her solo show at the Queens Museum in 2017, where she used coloring books, friendly neon lighting, and other materials to delve into the prison-industrial complex. “Violence has always been a subject,” she says. “I’m trying to point at it in ways that are not immediately obvious.”
The show at Regen Projects will be a homecoming for Smith, who grew up in Southern California: Inglewood, Pasadena, Studio City, all over. She received her BA in 2011 from Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, before heading to London, where she had her first real encounters with contemporary art at the Tate Modern. “I first got introduced to Kara Walker,” she says. “I think that was my art education.” Smith later did an MFA at Parsons in New York, of which she says, “I got the piece of paper.” Since 2020, she’s taught in the visual arts program at Columbia University, where she finds her students are often more concerned with “this idea of celebrity and visibility” than the slipperier questions with which her own work wrestles.
Today, Smith has more room to navigate those questions outside the parameters of a solo show. Recently, after 12 years in New York (spent mostly in Harlem), she moved to New Jersey. “It’s just more space, a different quality of life,” she says, as she examines ever larger ideas. “Things that happen are interwoven in different ways that we’re not always privy to. I’m really interested in pulling out and addressing that kind of networked life,” she says. “I started to see these things … And more people need to see them.”
“Violence has always been a subject. I’m trying to point at it in ways that are not immediately obvious.”
None of the usual suspects—bullies, a funny parent, an absent parent, a dead parent, late blooming, poverty—brought Yvonne Orji to comedy. It was Jesus. Born in Nigeria and raised in Maryland, Orji was studying for her master’s in public health at George Washington University when she entered a pageant that featured a terrifying talent portion. “I’m a child of immigrants. We don’t have talent. Our talents are to make straight A’s,” she says. “I was like, ‘God, they said that I could call on you and you would answer. So I’m calling. What you got?’ I heard the voice of the Holy Spirit say, ‘Do comedy.’ I was like, ‘Stop it.’ And the Holy Spirit said, ‘You’re either gonna learn to trust me or you’re not.’”
To make a long biblical parable short, Orji killed, and kept killing on the DC and then national circuit until Hollywood took note. In 2016, she was cast as Issa Rae’s best friend in HBO’s Insecure, for which she received an Emmy nomination in 2020. Since then, she has appeared in films and TV shows including Velma and The Blackening, and inked a two-year deal with Sony. This fall, she’ll test her dramatic chops in Netflix’s tentatively titled series Stronger, for which she also serves as an executive producer.
“It’s always so interesting when people are like, ‘I don’t know if you can do drama.’ I’m dramatic by nature. Most comedy is birthed from deep trauma. It doesn’t quite go the other way. You don’t find a lot of dramatic people who can do stand-up.”
The same faith that placed Orji in comedy’s path also placed her on bookshelves in 2021 with Bamboozled by Jesus, her hilarious autobiographical tome of advice. “It was an excavating experience for me, because you have to be vulnerable. Writing a book is shedding all the layers.” Acting doesn’t have the same impact. “The difference is somebody already wrote those words. You just have to embody them,” she says, nodding to the collaborative aspects of film and television. “A good script, a good director, and a good actor: It’s like the Holy Grail.”
While scripts and screens big and small are opening up to Orji, her faith, and her stand-up, remain her anchor. “I said to Chris Rock, ‘Comedy feels like a gateway drug. You get in with comedy and then you can boost up your acting career.’ He was like, ‘Comedy’s not a gateway drug. It’s heroin!’ I knew what he was saying. All you ever need is one mic,” she says. “Your audience is there.”
“A good script, a good director, and a good actor: It’s like the Holy Grail.”
Yvonne Orji wears a coat, sweater, belt, and shoes by Givenchy.
Produced by Iza El Nems
Makeup by Mical Klip Hair by Kiyonori Sudo
Fashion Assistance by Tallula Bell Madden and Sheneque Clarke
“There were no restrictions in my house,” says Emma Seligman. She’s sitting at a quiet corner table at Union Square Cafe in a tiger-print campcollar shirt, adjusting her shaggy symphony of hair—a beautiful, contained explosion, not unlike the young director’s award-winning 2020 debut, Shiva Baby. Starring comedian Rachel Sennott, it’s the simmering, sardonic tale of a recently graduated sugar baby who must confront her client, his wife, her overbearing family, an ex-girlfriend, and seemingly all of life’s choices, at one eventful shiva. Seligman’s lack of boundaries is more than evident in the Toronto-born filmmaker’s sophomore feature, Bottoms, released in August. This time it’s a high school romp cowritten by, and again starring, Sennott. She’s paired with Ayo Edibiri, whose now-infamous “Yes, Chef” delivery on The Bear has earned her legions of fans. Bottoms tells the story of two unpopular gay girls scheming to lose their virginities to cheerleaders by—wait for it—starting a fight club.
“I really wanted to make a stupid comedy for queer girls, and Rachel really wanted to make a stupid comedy for horny girls and have them actually be sexual and flawed,” she says. Seligman’s own high school years were typical. “Angsty but fun. I was super involved with drama classes,” she says. “But you know, like every teenage girl, also super emotionally insecure.” There were no cheerleaders or fight clubs at her large public school, but there was agita over boys, and sex, which was echoed in the movies she consumed. Her references were late-’90s and early-aughts teen comedies like American Pie and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, which prompted Bottoms’s violent overtones.
“I wanted to take on the genres that I wish I could have seen myself in as a kid—these movies where boys fight to get the girl.” For Seligman and Sennott, it’s girls fighting to get the girl. The pair
wrote Bottoms around the same time that Shiva Baby came to fruition, shortly after they graduated from New York University (they continued to use the school’s facilities until their IDs stopped working). They always write together, in the same room or over Zoom. “It’s so much fun. It’s the opposite of writing alone, which is literally torture,” she says.
When it came time to actually shoot Bottoms, Seligman met with a pleasant surprise: scenes that left room for improvisation. “With Rachel and Ayo together, it got to a point where I was getting a little spoiled,” she says. (Actors need restrictions, we think, but it turns out that maybe they don’t?) The film also has plenty of action, and big boffo scenes; the opposite of the frenzied, single-cam intimacy of Shiva Baby. “There was a lot more thinking about symmetry, and lines, and order, and angles, and how that sort of language shifts in a power hero story,” she says.
In Seligman’s own hero story, the high-flying ingénue is potentially looking at a well-deserved rest. “I made my first movies back-to-back, with a Covid year living in my parents’ house in-between,” she says. Today, she’s living in Bushwick, exploring adult New York, and traveling. “I’m very excited to be living and making friends and being a human being. I feel grateful to relax and get ahold of myself.” And, importantly for any budding artist, “Not just rush.” What could be more freeing?
“I wanted to take on the genres that I wish I could have seen myself in as a kid— these movies where boys fight to get the girl.”
In Close to the Knives, David Wojnarowicz’s “memoir of disintegration,” he writes, “To me, photographs are like words … History is made and preserved by and for particular classes of people. A camera in some hands can preserve an alternate history.” The late writer and artist never called himself a photographer, yet he left us with some of the past century’s most devastating images: A pack of buffalo suspended in their fall off a cliff. A selfportrait with his lips sewn shut. A series of his twin flame, photographer Peter Hujar, minutes after he had died of AIDSrelated pneumonia. Defibrillators of images, photos that don’t shut up. This fall, Wojnarowicz would have turned 69. In his abbreviated life, he turned boxes (and closets) inside out, channeled anger at a callous, delinquent government into community, and, perhaps most importantly, urgently advocated for love and empathy. In what continues to feel like a disintegrating world, his pictures remind us that a camera can be a tool to resist complacency, rewire humanity, and redefine everyday beauty. In preparing this inaugural Young Photographers list, CULTURED searched for image-makers who take Wojnarowicz’s legacy and run with it, carving out new approaches, formats, and audiences in the porous world of photography. The 11 individuals featured in the following pages, represented in a series of self-portraits, treat images like diaries, manifestos, recipes, and field studies. They dispatch from nightclubs, restaurant kitchens, crowded beaches, and rural outposts. And they argue for everyone’s chance to be seen.
the way I am? What don’t I know about myself? ”
This inquiry is at the heart of Nagaoka’s photography practice today, although it wasn’t at first. After studying photography at the Rhode Island School of Design, Nagaoka moved to Portland, taking on documentary work for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Time magazine. Photojournalism remains an outlet, but it didn’t prove fulfilling. “I found myself wanting to reflect something a bit odder about the world and myself,” they recall. Like any journey of self-discovery, there were plenty of enlightening dead ends—a few years spent documenting Paraguay’s Japanese communities allowed Nagaoka to reconnect with a facet of their culture, but raised ethical questions around subjecthood and exploitation that were at odds with their introspective sensibility. An exploration of cis masculinity unearthed the photographer’s own buried preconceptions, but fell to the side when the artist developed a more nuanced understanding of their own gender. Eventually, they settled on a practice of visual autofiction.
For Nagaoka, this process offers the possibility of self-actualization in real time. Through the photographer’s carefully orchestrated and sensual domestic scenes, subjects drop their guard, allowing the plurality of their identities (Asian, Latino, cis, trans, fem, masc) to curl around each other without fighting for dominance. “There’s this pressure to express yourself fully when you’re out in public. But so much daydreaming and growth happens when we’re alone with ourselves.” The images are powerful, quiet, and thrumming with desire—not sexual desire, but “the desire to be whole.”
Home is a delicate concept for Ricardo Nagaoka. “I’m Japanese, and I look Asian, but culturally I’m more Latino. My parents were born and raised in Paraguay, and I lived there until we moved to Toronto,” they say. “A lot of how I function as an artist stems from this upbringing.” From their current perch in an airy
studio in Portland, Oregon, Nagaoka appreciates the layered complexities of this multivalent upbringing. But it led to a number of delayed revelations around their own sexuality and gender fluidity that only surfaced when the photographer entered their 20s. “That was when I stopped avoiding these questions, Why am I
This is a difficult perspective to articulate visually, especially in a culture with a strong appetite for identity markers. “People think my work is about Asian masculinity or queerness, but it doesn’t stand for any one community. Everyone’s their own contradiction, and I want to make work that lives within that.”
When Nagaoka considers the future, it’s with anticipation. “I’ve learned how expansive personhood is. How do I use that freedom?” says the artist. A full-time move to Los Angeles is on the horizon, along with a more deliberate foray into the gallery world. But above all, Nagaoka reserves the right not to know. “There are days where I’m like, Are people going to understand what I’m trying to say? In those moments of weakness, I always return to this process,” they explain, “of becoming a whole person.”
“People think my work is about Asian masculinity or queerness, but it doesn’t stand for any one community. Everyone’s their own contradiction, and I want to make work that lives within that.”
began taking self-portraits. Much like the self-timed Android shoots of his tween years, the result was revelatory for Hinton. “Those photos showed me what I know best about myself,” he recalls, “that I’ve always been able to create with the bare minimum, because it’s all I’ve ever had.”
From the time he was in third grade until he graduated from high school, Deon Hinton moved homes every year. His family—based in Fayetteville, Arkansas—would find a new apartment, and start over. “We used these rent-to-own services, but we never were able to own,” he explains. One material possession that did survive these moves was “a massive shoebox.” Inside were photos of Hinton and his mother, tangible anchors of their moments together, accumulated over the years. “No matter what situation we were in,” he says, “we always had those photos.”
Hinton first turned the camera (of his Android smartphone) on himself when he was in middle school. “Being young and Black in the South, I was supposed to be tough, but I resonated with absolutely none of that,” he remembers. “I was very soft, I was bullied a lot.” To occupy his time, Hinton would prop his phone on a pile of clothes, taking picture after picture in his bedroom. “I literally thought I was eating the girls up. These photos were me building a life.”
A friend gave her old Nikon D3100 to Hinton in seventh grade. “It was the most powerful tool I’ve ever held,” he says. The camera gave him confidence—he began shooting football players, teaching them how to pose. The images marked the beginning, for Hinton, of carving out a place for himself as a gay, economically disadvantaged kid in a conservative town “that held all kinds of misconceptions of what it means to be queer, and what it means to be an artist.”
At 19, Hinton left Fayetteville for New York, which he describes as “the only place [he’s] ever homesick for,” and graduated with a degree in marketing from Berkeley College right as the pandemic hit the city. The ensuing standstill brought Hinton’s childhood pastime back into his life. Using only the materials he had—a camera, a tripod, and himself—he
Though Hinton has continued to mine himself as a muse in the years following that epiphany, he has increasingly turned his lens— and his stirringly gentle eye—onto others, shooting for brands including Chanel, Calvin Klein, and Aesop. But despite the growing demand for his work, Hinton still carves out time for personal projects, declarations of love that honor his past. Last year, while visiting family in Fayetteville, he photographed his forever muse—his brother Amarion, then 11 years old— wearing a homemade cardboard hat in an Arkansas field. “I looked down at the camera and thought, I’m looking at the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” Hinton remembers. “My brother, so carefree, so bright. I know he felt seen in a way that I only dreamed of when I was his age. He’s going to be able to hold onto those photos for the rest of his life.”
“I’ve always been able to create with the bare minimum, because it’s all I’ve ever had.”
“I grew up in a mix of graffiti and first-generation New Yorkers,” says Maxwell Vice. The artist, who was raised along the Bushwick-Ridgewood border, knows the city’s topography in their bones. They’re one of its self-appointed, boots-on-the-ground historians—mourning and honoring the rituals of its longstanding communities through a practice that includes photography, DJing, performance, modeling, and writing. “Some people see it as ‘the ghetto,’ but my neighborhood holds so much cultural wealth,” they say. This environment instilled a reverence for the glory of grime and high-octane excess in Vice, who often shoots against a backdrop of rusty subway pillars, rickety scaffolding, and gumsmeared pavement. “Minimalism is so European and simple,” they say, reclining on the bed in their Bushwick apartment. “I value dirt.”
Vice is more than a documentarian of the city that raised them. A denizen of Brooklyn’s underground club scene, Vice organizes queer BIPOC events, fundraises for vulnerable members of their community, posts open casting calls on Instagram, and draws attention to hypocrisy in the industry circles that have become their adopted home. “I’ve developed a reputation online as a bit of a fashion villain, if you will,” they say with a
shrug. “People love New York, but no one likes to support the New Yorker. People love queerness, but no one wants to book the queer person.”
This bold, outsider exuberance has caught the attention of designers like Raul Lopez, Willy Chavarria, Shayne Oliver, and Telfar Clemens, who have entrusted the young polymath to iterate on their creative visions as a photographer and muse. “The best queer brown designers in the world have taken me under their wing,” says Vice. “They call me their niece.” This support has bolstered the photographer, who has since shot for publications including Vogue, Interview, and Office. But above all, it has given them a platform to share with communities whose stories might otherwise be lost. “I’m creating this
archive of images that feels true, but also offers hope. I’m Dominican, Puerto Rican, and Chinese, but I don’t have any photos from the homeland. I’m nonbinary, but there’s so little documentation of queer and trans bodies from our perspective.”
More and more, fashion editorials and campaigns are paying the bills, but Vice resists the prospect of being confined to a single medium. “I’m making more money from it, but it’s not more of who I am. Until the day I die, I am focused on artistic expression and my people,” they say, one hand absentmindedly grazing the dense mesh of Polaroids on the wall behind them. “Even if I start whittling chairs, they’re gonna be chairs inspired by Black, brown, and trans beauty.”
“Until the day I die, I am focused on artistic expression and my people.”
“I started taking pictures when it became clear to me that time moves really fast,” says Bella Newman. The Vietnamese American photographer came to this metaphysical realization at 13. Those are rough years. “I started getting all awkward and limby, and I was sad that I wasn’t a kid anymore,” she says. “I preferred feeling more like a creature than a gender item.”
Newman is still a kind of creature. An ethereal veneer—infused with the folklore she absorbed growing up near a rural Amish enclave of central Pennsylvania—blankets her world, making her feel like an outsider in this one. “So many of the everyday things people do are creepy to me,” she says. “Photography allows me to create a crossover between reality and the universe that I live in.” Newman has managed to preserve her eye for the eerie and magical—her “fairy bubble”—where others might allow it to atrophy with age. She recalls, as a child, dressing in white and drifting around the playground, convincing other children that she was a ghost (she notes, matter of factly, that the area she grew up in was haunted). As a teenager, Newman won a photography contest that she didn’t enter (“I still don’t know how that happened”) and her work landed in Teen Vogue as a result, jumpstarting her career. As we speak over Zoom, she leans against the wall, her long hair somehow animate, wrapping itself around the knob of her bedroom door.
This reverence for the dark, charmed recesses of childhood has become the throughline in the Brooklyn-based photographer’s work. In her images, the fantastical crashlands into the quotidian: Rabbits rustle around in ballgowns and Little BoPeep lookalikes strike raunchy poses on chintzy motel sheets. “That was the best thing I ever did for myself,” she says of her days haunting the playground, “because I learned how to convince people of something. My work is a reminder that the fantasy is real.” Many photographers approach imagemaking as a way of revealing certain truths about society, but for Newman, it’s a dance between bodies. “I don’t like to intellectualize what I see as very visual and feeling-based work,” she continues. “Really, it’s about play.”
The Teen Vogue feature that launched Newman’s career quickly blossomed into a series of Vogue photojournalism projects before she’d even finished high school, including one
focused on the Amish and Mennonite cultures she grew up around. These insular communities serve as a stylistic North Star for the photographer, who has since graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts with a degree in filmmaking; collaborated with brands like Burberry, Balenciaga, and Marc Jacobs; and walked for Miu Miu. “The Amish are incredible—they wear their homemade clothes with Oakley sunglasses and New Balance sneakers,” she says. “More people should be like that.”
From her older, wiser perch in Brooklyn, Newman recognizes that time moves a bit slower than her adolescent self feared. “When I was younger, I wanted to be in fashion so badly,” she recalls. “But I’m ready to return to the source.” For Newman, the source is America: “this weird marketing technique of a place, and the people that buy it—or don’t.”
“Photography allows me to create a crossover between reality and the universe that I live in.”
24—New York
Of all the places Sam Youkilis has shot during his 10 years as a photographer, it is his hometown of New York that challenges him the most.
This wasn’t always the case. When he was a teenager living in Tribeca, his grandparents gave him a film camera, and, inspired by the images of erstwhile New Yorkers Harmony Korine and Larry Clark, Youkilis began documenting the quotidian exploits of his peers. “I wanted to suspend these moments in time, to memorialize them,” he remembers. “I didn’t want things to change.” But by the time he arrived at Bard College to study the medium in earnest, a yen for the unknown had emerged. Instead of settling into the bucolic cocoon of his upstate campus, Youkilis worked a bartending job to save enough money for a car. Armed with the keys, the photographer would drive as far as he could in any direction to forage for inspiration.
The urge for movement didn’t subside postgrad. Youkilis, who turns 30 this month, lived out of a suitcase for the better part of his early 20s, picking up a string of photography assignments along the way. Two summers ago, he left Mexico—where he had been living for a year and still keeps a set of clean clothes—and decamped to Umbria, where his “not Italian whatsoever” parents met in the ’80s and still own land.
Youkilis’s moving images—in the form of 10–15 second iPhone videos— navigate the social topography of his adopted country effortlessly: dapper elders ambling through open markets, lovers engaged in hyperpublic displays of affection, oiled beach bodies luxuriating in the sand.
This ever-expanding constellation of vignettes, both ubiquitous and instantly recognizable, has earned Youkilis half a million followers on Instagram and collaborations with Italian bellwethers like Versace, Pucci, and Palazzo Grassi. In spite of this warm local welcome, the photographer cannot sit still.
“I’m traveling about three weeks out of a month for commercial work,” he admits, listing recent campaigns for Jacquemus, Belmond, and Zara. When we speak, Youkilis is in Marseille, where he’s putting the finishing touches on his debut monograph,
Somewhere. Out this November, the book indexes six years of cameraphone videos over 500 pages. The project would be a Herculean task for anyone, but it’s especially challenging for Youkilis, who is resistant to annotating his work. Rather than framing it for consumption, he wants it to take on a life of its own—if an image is destined to be repurposed by someone else, so be it. Youkilis is, to cite Hito Steyerl, in defense of the poor image. “For it to be disseminated, reproduced, changed in quality, have filters go over it,” says Youkilis, “is actually such a beautiful thing.”
“I wanted to suspend these moments in time, to memorialize them.”
30—Todi, Italy
Among the Spring Breakers–esque photonovelas and live concert souvenirs that populate Alejandro Hernandez’s Instagram, another protagonist emerges: his 4-year-old daughter, Jupiter. There she is, dressed as Pikachu, Batgirl, or Yoda; riding horses, shopping in Hello Kitty land, or picnicking in front of the Austin, Texas, skyline. Like her father, Jupiter has her own camera (a Polaroid) and often accompanies Hernandez on his photographic excursions. “I want to show her that you can do whatever you want,” he explains of the duo’s preferred bonding activity. “This is all coming out of nowhere. I created this space myself.”
Much of the self-taught photographer’s success stems from the Instagram account he made for himself a few years ago under the moniker 512c0wb0y. His pseudonym— which he already had tattooed across his stomach—is a mash-up of the Austin area code and the Western aesthetic he’s reclaiming, Tejano-style. Hernandez, who still works full-time at the Austin Parks Foundation, isn’t precious about making sure his work gets seen—“I DM artists. I DM venues.” The photographer stakes out the South by Southwest music festival annually, refining his concert photography skills and building a portfolio that includes Thundercat and PinkPantheress. In 2022, Hernandez’s diligent outreach finally came back to him when Pussy Riot’s team sent him a DM. “It was the
27—Austin
first time someone out-of-state reached out to book me,” he remembers.
The journey began when Hernandez was at Texas State University studying sociology and business management. A friend gifted him an old camera and after fiddling with it for a while, he decided to put it to work, setting up backdrops at local events and shooting portraits for tips. Collaborations began to trickle in with local fashion brands and companies. Then, the photographer says, “I started having my own ideas.”
A lightbulb moment occurred in 2021. He was listening to “Punk Planet” by Enjoy, the solo project of the Garden’s Wyatt Shears. “I was like, Why don’t I just take my punky friends and shoot around Austin? They look insane—black leather, big boots, barely
any clothes on.” Hernandez’s signature aesthetic came together when he opened his aperture and turned the flash on. “We were just pulling up to places and shooting until we were yelled at and had to leave.”
While his process features an inherent, authority figure–enforced time limit, Hernandez foments the plans for his electric scenes over long periods, plucking references from ’90s movies like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, psychobilly bands like the Cramps, rappers like Mike Jones, and the corrido music his father listens to. For a recent shoot, inspired by Scarface and the Cramps’s “Bikini Girls with Machine Guns,” the photographer took a few prop guns and two bikini- and fishnet-clad friends from high school onto Lake Travis. A friend loaned him a boat and kept watch for cops who might mistake the guns as real.
In that moment, like in many of his shoots, Hernandez felt like a kid again. “I’m linking up with my friends, they look ridiculous,” he says. “We dress up, and it feels freeing. We worked a 9-to-5 today, and now we’re on a boat playing with a fake gun. There’s no questions asked.”
“I’m linking up with my friends, they look ridiculous. We dress up, and it feels freeing. We worked a 9-to-5 today, and now we’re on a boat playing with a fake gun.”
“I’ve always been in search of that defining moment where I feel really connected to someone,” says Sam Penn. “Whether that is a lover, a friend, or even myself. It’s an obsessive practice.” The New York–based photographer’s reverence for everyday interactions is exemplified in Some Girls, her first print publication, released earlier this year. Put simply, the zine is an homage to moments themselves: fleeting ones and weighty ones alike, in the diaristic vein of artists like Nan Goldin. Penn captures her close circle of friends—including actor Hari Nef and writer Thora Siemsen—at the beach, lazing in the tub, or smoking in the car; the barrier so fluid that each muse appears to be staring through the camera and directly into Penn’s eyes. She readily acknowledges this effect: “The only real directive I ever give is, ‘Look at me.’”
Being an expert in her subjects allows the photographer to access the in-between—the elusive, unposed alchemy of affection and ease that saturates her work. “I know when they’re going to turn away. I know when they’re going to exhale. I know when they’re going to open their eyes,” she says, “and I just want to freeze that moment.”
Penn’s predisposition for the personal can be traced back to her earliest interactions with the medium. A shelf in her childhood home in Philadelphia was dedicated to photo albums that her mother filled with snapshots of Penn and her sisters marking every conceivable childhood milestone. Penn inherited this urge for constant documentation, regularly photographing her younger siblings on disposable Kodak cameras and eventually picking up her first DSLR at age 12.
Last summer, Penn’s images of her New York community left the confines of the group chat for gallery walls. “It’s Personal,” a buzzed-about group show at OCDChinatown, put the photographer’s work in conversation with that of her friends Nash Glynn and Ser Serpas. The press release for the exhibition was penned by writer hannah baer, another member of their
intimate circle, and prompts a question that’s an apt thesis for Penn’s oeuvre thus far: “[W]ho gets to look at women and girls?”
One portrait included in “It’s Personal” features her confidante, Sarah Nicole Prickett, lying nude on a bedspread, cigarette in hand, staring straight down Penn’s lens with a placid—even haughty—expression on her face. The image challenges any viewer to meet that gaze, a
dynamic that the photographer is invested in exploring. “Something changes when a person knows they’re being photographed,” she says. “I’m interested in that reaction. Sometimes it feels nice. Sometimes it feels violent to the moment, or disruptive—or like a confrontation.”
“ The only real directive I ever give is, ‘Look at me.’”
A few months ago, Rebekah Campbell found herself in a New Jersey beach town with Margaret Qualley. As the photographer recounts the story, she makes a point of not disclosing the location. “I like the idea of it being a secret space,” she says. “Only we know what happened and where.” The images, shot for ES Magazine, show the actor at play, traipsing across a cloudy beach and smearing mud on a Prada dress. “We found a mound of dirt in this weird park,” says Campbell, “and I was like, ‘Margaret, go lay in that.’”
Campbell came to New York by way of Oklahoma and the Savannah College of Art and Design. She would flee Georgia every summer for internships in the city, and bolted north as soon as she graduated. Her father, a shutterbug himself, gifted the budding photographer her first camera, which she experimented with as a teenager before refining her skills at school. She spent her post-college years unlearning some of the rigid norms of the medium—“I don’t know if you can really teach taste,” she muses. A decade and a half later, her instinctive approach has led to collaborations with Calvin Klein, Marc Jacobs, Vogue, and i-D.
Before Campbell steps on a set, she has an idea—rendered in quick sketches—of the images she wants to make. “A little stick figure girl on a tree branch,” for example. Recently, these drawings have morphed into a storyboard for a short film. “I’ve been having a lot of dreams with screens in them,” she says. “I’m holding a camera, or taking a video.” Campbell sees this as a sign, and she’s happy to let the story reveal itself to her in small, subconscious doses.
In her waking hours, the photographer struggles with the social implications of her medium. “It’s like you’re taking something from someone,” she says, citing Susan Sontag’s seminal 1977 book On Photography, in which the writer likens the camera to a gun. Campbell resists this theory by prioritizing obfuscation and mystery, giving her subjects, often young women, an aura of unknowability. She does this by situating them in untraceable locations—uniform white walls, lush greenery, waters with no shoreline
in sight—where they feel protected and free. “I like to make moments that don’t feel contrived … I love that trust, even if it’s just a quick thing,” she says. Often, she protects her most cherished work by keeping it off of Instagram. “I don’t want people screenshotting it. I don’t want pervy men saving it,” she says. “These weird, intimate moments are too precious to me.”
“I like to make moments that don’t feel contrived ... I love that trust, even if it’s just a quick thing.”
Angalis Field was sure of two things when he graduated from Columbia University’s Barnard College with an English degree in 2016. First, he wanted to transition. Second, he could not spend the rest of his life writing alone at a desk. A third realization dawned on the young creative in the following months: He wouldn’t be fully satisfied if he limited himself to photography, either.
By then, he was already known for his bittersweet documentation of bodies, often queer ones, in states of leisure. The photographer cut his teeth as a casting intern for Ryan McGinley while building out a portfolio of bedroom and beach portraits of the city’s beau monde. Two years out of undergrad, he added a few more laurels—a solo show at Baby Company (Company Gallery’s defunct
experimental satellite), and editorials for the likes of the New York Times and i-D —to his CV. But he was restless, and needed another medium to expand his vision.
“This might sound bad, but I knew that I wouldn’t be intellectually challenged enough if I committed only to photography for the rest of my life,” he admits over the phone. “It’s only a sliver of me, and very much connected to my childhood.” The medium entered Field’s life during his adolescence. His grandmother, a hobby photographer, was his first teacher: She would pass down her cameras whenever she upgraded, and whisk Field away from his Portlandia-esque Oregon childhood—“I grew up with a Volvo, listening to John Denver and Cat Stevens, and going to farmers’ markets”—for picturesque getaways to Arizona and the Virgin Islands.
These adventures molded Field’s understanding of image-making as an escape more than an occupation, an act of distinct and contained temporality. Today, cordoning off the practice from the rest of his life is as much a necessity as a ritual. “Otherwise, I find it too overwhelming,” he explains. “Once you introduce a camera, you enter a world in which everything has to be framed. That makes it incredibly hard to move through daily life.”
Field didn’t completely abandon photography after this postgrad epiphany—instead, he opted for a craft that promised a confluence of his visual and literary loves: directing. He began an MFA in film at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2019, and plans to graduate next May. The program brought Field back to Oregon, where he shot The Dalles, his first short, centered on an 18-year-old trans boy who stumbles on a cruising site along the Columbia River. The film, which premiered at Sundance in January, grew from Field’s longtime practice of documenting Oregonian life, the results of which will be compiled in an upcoming publication. The book is an ode to “these faces that are really specific to Oregon, people we haven’t seen before.”
Directing films has helped Field renegotiate his attitude towards photography. A film has a confined temporality of its own, from the buildup and climax to the denouement, and this expansive perspective has soothed Field’s anxiety around fitting life’s moments into the static frame of a photograph. The beauty, he realized, is in the logistics: “It’s everything from: Where are we getting coffee in the morning? What are we listening to on our drive to the coast? All of these things [that make] people feel taken care of, and safe enough to have an experience together,” he muses. “The photos, in some ways, are incidental.”
“Once you introduce a camera, you enter a world in which everything has to be framed. That makes it incredibly hard to move through daily life.”
Lucia Bell-Epstein first put her camera skills to the test in one of society’s more volatile environments: the restaurant kitchen. She had just graduated from McGill University with a degree in art history, Islamic studies, and communications. A law school application was in the works. “One day, I was like, I can’t go into a corporate job or academia,” she recalls. “I needed to do something with my hands.”
Food, and the processes around it, has always mattered to Bell-Epstein, who grew up on the Bowery as the child of artists. (Her father is photographer Mitch Epstein, and her mother is writer and editor Susan Bell.) The illustrious stretch of Manhattan is known for its restaurant supply stores, and their attendant cacophony—“stainless steel everywhere, fridges pulled out of trucks, shouting”—was the soundtrack to her neighborhood walks.
A babysitting gig won the thenmiddle-schooler her first back-of-house position. Ned Baldwin, chef of the East Village bistro Prune at the time, saw the “weird snacks” Bell-Epstein concocted for his kids and asked her if she’d come into the kitchen to help with brunch prep. “It was an awakening,” she remembers.
Bell-Epstein, armed with a 35mm camera, made her way back into the kitchen post-college to train as a line cook under Jay Wolman at Brooklyn’s LaLou. She brought it along to help her visualize plating, but soon realized she wanted “to shoot all the shit that you don’t want to see—a spill on the floor or someone’s hands cutting something.” She kept her camera on standby, tucked into a jacket pocket or behind stacks of plates. “There were definitely moments where it was like, ‘You should put it down. This is not the time to be shooting a beautiful radicchio pickled-cherry salad,’” she says. “But it made me make stronger images because I had to be like, I only have so much time.”
Bell-Epstein left the culinary world to pursue photography full-time in 2021: working under photography duo Gentl and Hyers; creating editorial campaigns for New York–based fashion line Colbo; exhibiting alongside Zora Sicher, Gray Sorrenti, and Turiya Adkins in a Gasp-organized group show; and shooting cookbooks with buzzy restaurateurs Nicholas Morgenstern and Ellie Bouhadana (both out next spring).
Nevertheless, the kitchen-insider status she earned at LaLou has proven invaluable in shaping her practice, which she likens to method acting. First
comes a period of exploration, when she interviews clients (among them New York Chinatown antiques dealer Christopher Cawley, and the people behind Los Angeles’s Canyon Coffee and Brooklyn’s Public Records). Then she draws preparatory sketches, mining films, paintings, and ephemera for inspiration. Next comes immersion: She shadows a subject for a week, learning their personal choreography and
building a sense of trust. By the time the camera comes out, Bell-Epstein is an expert.
This fluency helps the photographer capture micro moments—a sigh, a wilted vegetable in a walk-in, a jacket ballooning from a gust of wind. She cites Bruce Nauman and Chantal Akerman as influences— gestural poets who deal in truth, ritual, and broken beauty. But Bell-Epstein is wary of the trap of aestheticization. “Beauty is a hornet’s nest,” she asserts. “I want my photos to be vehicles for collaboration, trust, and risk-taking. And I want the process to keep me attuned and honest.”
“Beauty is a hornet’s nest. I want my photos to be vehicles for collaboration, trust, and risk-taking. And I want the process to keep me attuned and honest.”
In some ways, every image Jester Bulnes makes is a self-portrait, although the photographer appears in almost none of them. Instead, they enlist friends and online mutuals as their models, promising a free drink or lunch in exchange for a day’s worth of poses. These subjects are styled in clothing from Bulnes’s own closet, a treasure chest filled with fishnets and repurposed denim; and the result is a delicate composition that seesaws between exposure and superimposition. A saturated, atmospheric vision of queer Latinx Los Angeles, the images function as both document and diary.
Anyone who wants to see more than the carefully curated selection of images that the photographer posts online will have to invest in a copy of their 2023 debut monograph, DENTRO, which has been championed in publications including Office, Dazed, and Document Journal. Unlike many of their peers, who spend their days awash in an endless digital scroll, the rising University of California, Los Angeles senior is committed to the permanence of print. In an era of everyone’s-a-photographer ubiquity, a physical image demands attention—and contributes to a meaningful, enduring archive for a community on the margins.
The Mexican and Salvadoran artist grew up in Downey, a largely immigrant suburb on the outskirts of Los Angeles where, they recall, “There were probably like three kids that were gay.” For Bulnes, who is shy and didn’t speak Spanish, connection was hard to come by. “Racially, there was this sort of outcasting, and then there was the added layer that I’m queer,” they explain.
At the heart of DENTRO is an emphasis on collaboration, and an urge to show a community at its most truthful. Each image is an act of communion and a mutual process of self-discovery. “I’m less interested in someone who is conventionally beautiful,” says Bulnes. “To me, that’s just not as interesting. I want the weirdness. I want what feels most authentic. I think about myself; I’m not like the hottest person in the world, but I’ve got a little quirk to me.”
With their final year of college looming, the fine art major is puzzling through the questions that arise when academic frameworks meet real-world social politics—like the fear that being a minoritized photographer will impose a taxonomy on their work that will be difficult to escape, or that the subjects they so carefully spotlight might be reduced to a series of identity markers. “This idea of the muse is really interesting,” they say, mentally flipping through their Rolodex of friends and models. “I tend to document more fem bodies. Granted, I’m someone who identifies as nonbinary—but I do sometimes catch myself. Am I objectifying these people? It’s this push and pull. In some ways, I would love for an audience to view me as this thing…” They pause, thinking. “But then, is that all I become?”
“I want the weirdness. I want what feels most authentic. I think about myself; I’m not like the hottest person in the world, but I’ve got a little quirk to me.”
In New York, a metropolis known for its high highs and low lows, true kinship can be a particularly rare and electric find.
Still more elusive is a creative kismet—the alignment of community and calling—that makes life feel its fullest. These bonds are at the heart of Tiffany & Co.’s recent collection, TIFFANY LOCK . Inspired by the jaws of a padlock, a house motif since the 1880s, the constellation of sloping, modern pieces pays homage to the connections that bind us, irrevocably, to one another. In the spirit of this new classic, six creatives reflect on the role of chosen family—the people we discover in the wild and keep with us—in making a life, and making work, in New York.
Tiffany
New York-based model and knitwear designer Ella Emhoff cemented herself as one of New York Fashion Week’s quirkiest players last February with a presentation showcasing her rabbit ear balaclavas and colorblock pullovers. Even as she pivots into the fine arts, the recent Parsons grad remains a devotee of the fashion scene, stitching Gucci hair clips, Sandy Liang slippers, and Puppets and Puppets handbags onto stretched canvases. This fall, she’ll be sitting fashion week out, opting instead to bring her craft to the masses in the form of a knitting club that will be open to the public. “Knitting is fun, I want everyone to do it,” she says with a laugh. “And I’ll force it down your throat until you do.”
My community has been forming since the moment I moved to New York. I grab people along the way. Everyone has something that they love—business, architecture, whatever—and I get so much value from that. I use my friends as models for my knitwear; I use them as inspiration, as references. Talking to the people I love always feeds into my work, which has a lot to do with nostalgia, and my own stories from childhood. Last season, I invited everyone to my New York Fashion Week pop-up presentation. It was the first time ever I’d seen them together in one space. All of my people! It was an experience I’ll never forget. It felt very New York, and like a pivotal moment in my life. I thought, Wow, I really do have such a good support system in this city. It made me feel blessed to live here.”
In a Bond Street basement, Dashwood Books acts like a life raft, keeping New York’s photography community inspired and afloat. At its helm is Miwa Susuda. Following a degree in curatorial studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology and stints at institutions like the Asia Society, Christie’s, and the Brooklyn Museum, the Tokyo native carved out a niche as Dashwood’s manager and the founder of Session Press. This fall, Susuda is hard at work on two monographs, out in November, that spotlight the work of Daidō Moriyama and Wing Shya.
The ‘My Favorite Dashwood Friends of the Day’ concept started when Covid happened. We had just reopened the store, and people came in and supported Dashwood Books even though they had lost their jobs. I was so touched by that. Newspapers were saying that New York was ‘over’ because the rent was too expensive, and that everything would become virtual. But people were yearning for a real community, and I thought we needed the store more than ever. Emotions are three-dimensional. They require body language, a tone of voice, and eye contact. Dashwood’s importance in the art community shows that big data and generalistic approaches sometimes forget the smaller voices that matter so much in society. In Shinto, we have the philosophy of naka-ima. It means that you should focus on what you see in front of you, kind of like the Western idea of the ‘power of now.’ David Strettell, the founder of Dashwood, and I believe in New York. We believe that we are not done yet.”
The Texas native left high school as a teenager and moved to New York after being scouted on Instagram. Half a decade later, the model has amassed an encyclopedia of cover stories, editorial campaigns, and catwalk moments—all while somehow carving out time to paint. In her work, McMillan captures her friends, and herself, against backdrops of urban and domestic ennui. Her gift for blending the mundane and the hallucinatory has landed the artist a solo show at Paris’s Laurence Esnol Gallery, opening this October.
Growing up in Austin I had this narrative about myself that I didn’t make sense to people. I thought that was something that was going to last forever, until I got to New York. I was like, There are people in the world that make sense to me. At first I was lonely here, but not in a bad way. I went to the movies a lot, I wandered the city, I would go to random restaurants, order the cheapest thing on the menu, and sit there for 500 hours because I didn’t have a lot of money. Now, all my closest friends are a 15-minute walk from me, and we all live next to Fort Greene, my favorite park. We have a group chat, and all we have to do is text, ‘Park?’ Within 30 minutes, we’re there together. The kind of people I gravitate towards have to operate with a level of delusion because it can be so harsh living in New York. There’s a sweet spot between authenticity and delusion.”
“Where food goes, so go its people,” reads the Ghetto Gastro mission statement. The collective’s three founders—Jon Gray, Lester Walker, and Pierre Serrao—are dedicated to taking the culinary legacy of the Bronx nationwide. Gray and Walker met as children, and fell in with Serrao when they became neighbors in Long Island City. That sense of serendipity has guided the brand through its countless ambitious undertakings. For the trio, the goal is to give the borough that raised them its flowers, and food is the tool of choice.
JON GRAY: All of us at Ghetto Gastro like a lot of the same things, but there’s enough diversity of thought to create interesting dynamics. We challenge each other. I love that I’m on this journey with my brothers—we’re growing together and sharing these experiences that aren’t normal for people who come from where we come from. The Bronx is a big source of inspiration for us—it’s an incredible feeling to share our work with people who know our story and have the same reference points. It’s special when you get on the elevator in your building and somebody who knew you as a kid asks how your grandmother is.”
LESTER WALKER: “When I think of the Bronx, I think of three colors. Green, because we’re the borough with the most nature in the city. Black, for the color of our skin. And red, because we’re always striving to reach that bullseye. Because we grew up in New York, we have so much to offer—the ways we talk, the ways we remix and innovate. We say that we want to be the lords of the kitchen cupboard. And now we are— we’re on the shelves at Target. Our packaged products are feeding not only the Bronx, not only New York, but the nation. That fact is pretty remarkable.”
PIERRE SERRAO: “Family are the people that you choose to keep around you. We’ve been together for so long and through so much as a unit. We’ve definitely created that bond. That includes our close tribe, the people who help and motivate us on a daily basis. When it comes to building the future, we’re always like, ‘What’s next?’ We don’t take time to sit down and relish our accomplishments in the moment. We’re too busy thinking about how to take this shit to the top. As long as we keep on the trajectory that we’re on, the future looks bright. It’s always forward, never backwards.”
“I’m much more inspired by people than environments,” says Willy Chavarria. The Fresno-born designer has built his eponymous brand on this sentiment—an homage to Chicano masculinity and tenderness, with the silhouettes he grew up around amped up to their own billowing, sculptural conclusions. Chavarria designs clothes to make the people in his life feel regal.
BY MARA VEITCH PHOTOGRAPHY BY STEFAN RUIZThe designer, 56, and his team work out of a sun-filled warehouse in Greenpoint. Models-turned-advisors, muses-turned-friends, and friends-turned-designers mill around, hanging out or helping out, exemplifying the familial atmosphere that makes Willy Chavarria one of the fashion industry’s rare birds.
It’s hectic in the studio—and not just because New York Fashion Week is around the corner. Chavarria is busy with something new: “I’m looking for a way to overcome the current standard so that I can offer lower prices for people who can’t afford the expensive things, and expensive things for people who do have that luxury,” he says. It all comes back, once again, to the people.
Pricing experiments aside, little about the brand’s ethos has changed in the eight years since its founding. Chavarria’s eye for trendproof elegance has won him a number of the industry’s highest accolades and was featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2021 exhibition “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion.” But it’s his community, in all its complexity, that remains his raison d’être. In the midst of preparing his new collection, the designer and his brood took a moment to show CULTURED Willy Chavarria’s New York haunts.
“This is my studio. I used to have a little box in Manhattan, but when the rent skyrocketed to like $12,000 a month, we packed up and moved to Brooklyn. Now we do everything out of this place— photography, castings. I find it very important to surround myself with people who inspire me and to create a warm, loving culture here. The palo santo is always burning, and it’s kind of hippie, but we do white sage blessings during stressful times, or when bad energy comes through. It’s fashion after all; it’s not always a walk in the park.
Not everyone I work with has the best style—I find that people who are super into that aren’t always as creative. But all of the people I work with know what it’s like to have suffered, what it’s like to have been on the shit end of the stick. The hardship we’ve been through adds to the camaraderie. We find beauty and joy outside of fashion, and that gives more depth to what we do, makes it a little more interesting. We’re also very supportive of one another. Today, I was like, ‘Holy fuck, are we gonna get these clothes made in time for the runway show?’ But everyone has faith, and Connor, our design intern, saw me stressing and brought me a sandwich. We’ll get it done.”
“This park is right near my studio. It’s called American Playground, which I love. I come here when I need to sit and take a little breather. Parks are places of escapism. People go there to play—on the swing set, on the basketball or the handball court. Honestly, I don’t really play much myself. I don’t play an instrument or any sports, so it’s interesting for me to see other people just messing around. Being reminded of that freedom is comforting.
Chachi, the man in this photo, is a very dear friend. He skates a lot in this park; it’s his release. We met when he came in for a casting, and he never left. He just hung around the studio after, sitting quietly and watching everything. Eventually, he became a part of the team simply by being himself. Chachi helps out, he walks in the shows—he’s just part of the crew. I would definitely say that he’s become my muse because he embodies my vision of the brand. He has been around the block a few times and he has a very hard side to him, but he’s extremely tender and loving and has an enormous heart.”
“There’s so little inspiration in the fashion world now, but there’s so much inspiration on the streets. I freak out every time I leave my apartment because people are so fucking amazing—the way they look and walk. It’s never-ending. I do a lot of street casting, and I love being able to see that somebody’s had a history; I find that really attractive. It’s easy to proclaim stylishness, it’s harder to show substance. I like wrinkles, and I like crooked teeth; I like the flaws that make us real.
This man is Jess Cuevas. He’s my art director and dear friend. He has the most beautiful heart, and he’s the funniest person I’ve ever met. He was laughing hysterically between every shot. We are so attached to each other creatively that we work together on almost every project. Also, both of us love trash, and we love recycling. I mean, look at this dumpster! The colors are amazing, the typography is incredible, and it’s weathered down in this insane way. This alone holds more inspiration than any runway show I’ve ever seen.”
“I enjoy a moment by the water. It’s easy in this city to get caught up in daily operations—it’s so tough to get through the chaos of the day that you can kind of forget that there’s a sky. I like to step back and remember that things are so much bigger than the minutiae. It’s nice to see Manhattan from a distance—the Williamsburg Bridge, downtown in the background, the projects on the other side. It’s therapeutic, very therapeutic.
This is Ricky. Ricky is fucking crazy—he saw this fence and immediately climbed it. He is such a free spirit and so confident, like the Mexican Marky Mark. His trust in himself and his commitment to protecting culture as a filmmaker is something I very much respect. It’s important to have people like that in my life when I’m creating. Seeing my clothes on anybody is amazing to me, but when I see them on people I admire, it makes me so happy.”
TWEED PÉTALE NECKLACE
18K pink gold, diamonds, pink sapphires
It was in the windswept hills of the Scottish Highlands, where she traveled during a The mottled textile, comforting yet elegant, would become the calling card of her eponymous maison. Fringed, laced, and glowing as if from within,
tryst with the Duke of Westminster, that Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel first became enamored with tweed. This season, PATRICE LEGUÉREAU translates the ethos of the fabric into CHANEL’s latest High Jewelry collection. each piece recalls a moment lost to time.
TWEED FRANGÉ EARRINGS
18K white gold, diamonds, onyx
TWEED
Jack Pierson, the Massachusetts-born artist known for his unflinchingly intimate male portraits, is entering fresh territory with a new job title and his first show with Lisson Gallery.
“I’m trying to make this old, gay antique shop. They used to exist by the dozen when I first came to New York,” says Jack Pierson. “It was just a guy with some junk in a store that he’d open when he felt like it. I want that to exist again.” The artist—who has followed his polychrome persuasions into the realms of video, drawing, and sculptural assemblage over the last three decades— made a name for himself in the ’80s as a student of the diary-as-documentary movement loosely known as the Boston School of photography. Pierson’s vision of a bygone New York is the inspiration for his new Lower East Side gallery, Elliott Templeton Fine Arts, named after a character in an 1844 William Somerset Maugham novel. The space, which opens its doors this fall, will showcase pieces from the photographer’s personal collection, alongside works by artists he admires. Beyond adding gallerist to his CV this season, Pierson is taking on another new challenge with “Pomegranates,” his first show since joining Lisson Gallery in 2022. The works on view are an attempt to evoke the same intimacy, typically captured au naturel in his unflinchingly homoerotic portraiture practice, under the sparest conditions possible: shooting black-and-white in-studio. Of this momentous occasion, the soft-spoken artist has little to add. “I feel like I’ve succeeded,” he says. “We’ll see if everybody else thinks so.”
“This show is me trying something else at a stage when I feel like I can do whatever I want. It comes out of this longterm passion I’ve had for male physique photography. This has been a practice throughout history, whether under the guise of academic reference or pleasure. I’m interested in the photographers that did that as a cottage industry and sold it through the mail.”
“I love photography for being like low-budget cinema. That’s part of what I’m doing here: leaving a trace of a life well-lived, a life with people, and a life with life. I want to get that message across in a way that makes people appreciate their own lives.”
“I still believe in the power of an image, especially a printed image. Part of what makes me work to stay relevant as an artist is the desire to have my work printed in magazines, because there’s always the possibility of somebody ripping out that page and keeping it.”
“I’m figuring out whether it’s possible to create an intimate photograph in a studio context. Of course, the greats like Irving Penn and Richard Avedon do that. I wanted to see for myself. Can I take a picture that is intimate in the way I’m known for—with a mise en scène, on a textured bedspread in a motel room... Can I do that in an empty white space?”
All images courtesy of the artists.
Dance Reflections, the nascent is bringing a coterie of world-class
Over the last century, dance has diversified its stylistic vocabulary and global reach. The art form’s traditions and descendants—ballet, modern, street, folk, and circus—are flourishing, and innovations in movement have seeped into an impressive array of genres. Breakthroughs in technology have catalyzed a revolution in how artists communicate, and the ways in which the audience absorbs their message. From formal and kinetic to immersive performance art—untethered by the proscenium if desired—anything can now go… anywhere.
Dance Reflections, a festival inaugurated in London last year and supported by Van Cleef & Arpels, lands this fall in New York—one of the dance world’s most fertile laboratories. The festival’s program, which runs from October 19th to December 14th, will take over seven prime performance venues across the city, hosting a group of artistic visionaries and celebrating its theater network. The lineup comprises a cross section of international choreographers—from revered icons to young artists—who, in the words of Van Cleef & Arpels Director of Dance and Culture Program Serge Laurent, “have in common the ability to invent languages, forms.” Juxtaposing new works with seminal ones, such as those by legends like Lucinda Childs, is crucial to Laurent: “History and context contribute to the evolution of choreographic art. It is important to underline this.” The citywide celebration is a harbinger of the dance community’s enduring vitality and promising future, and a testament to the form’s possibilities. To mark the start of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels Festival six participating artists reflect on their work and inspirations.
festival supported by Van Cleef & Arpels, performers to the city this fall.
In “takemehome,” Dimitri Chamblas’s collaboration with artrock star Kim Gordon at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, a glowing zeppelin hovers over the space. Nontraditional spaces and unexpected collaborations are hallmarks of the choreographer’s wide-ranging practice: In addition to performing in live works and films, he has set pieces in sites as varied as the California State Prison in Lancaster, the Geffen Contemporary at MoCA, and the streets of Los Angeles. For Dance Reflections, he blends the personal feeling of his past collaborations with Gordon and the spectacle of his grander pieces.
Describe yourself in one sentence.
What sounds do you hear every day that put you in a good mood?
Describe an aspect of your work that is challenging you right now.
What’s a place that inspires you to make work?
Name an unexpected work of art that has influenced your practice.
Judson Church movement in 1960s New York, creating provocative work with found objects and everyday gestures. “Dance,” 1979, Childs’s first collaboration with Philip Glass, is accompanied by a Sol LeWitt film, and will be performed by the Lyon Opera Ballet at New York City Center as part of Dance Reflections. Childs’s work is also represented by “Tempo Vicino,” performed by (LA) HORDE and the Ballet National de Marseille at New York University’s Skirball Center, and by a work in “Dancing with Glass: The Piano Etudes,” alongside one of the composer’s most renowned interpreters, Maki Namekawa, at the Joyce Theater.
Describe yourself in one sentence. What sounds do you hear every day that put you in a good mood?
Describe an aspect of your work that is challenging you right now.
Name an unexpected work of art that has influenced your practice.
In “Bombyx Mori,” three dancers manipulate black silk cloaks to create mesmerizing sculptural shapes and trompe l’œil tableaux. The Polish-born Ola Maciejewska drew inspiration for the piece from a decade spent studying the modern dance trailblazer Loïe Fuller’s 1890s “serpentine” dance. Fuller experimented with the body’s expressive potential when combined with the versatility of fabric, as well as the theatrical elements of lighting and sound. Maciejewska braids these archival strands together with her own choreography, creating a unique genre at once historically reverent and thoroughly modern. Maciej Sado, Leah Marojevic, and Jean Lesca will perform the piece at the French Institute as part of Dance Reflections.
Describe yourself in one sentence.
What sounds do you hear every day that put you in a good mood?
Describe an aspect of your work that is challenging you right now.
Name an unexpected work of art that has influenced your practice.
What’s a place that inspires you to make work?
Dancers defy gravity in Rachid Ouramdane’s “Corps Extrêmes”— climbing, dangling, nearly flying—in an attempt to hit the sweet fulcrum point between rising and falling. The work, which will be performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music during the festival, features a huge climbing wall upstage and a high-wire above. Eight acrobats, a climber, and a tightrope walker share personal stories alongside a score by Jean-Baptiste Julien. The French-Algerian choreographer creates works that trace narratives of police brutality, genocide, war crimes, and more. Ouramdane draws on heightened sensations to shape his varied oeuvre—the body or psyche under duress, at its most extreme.
Describe yourself in one sentence.
What sounds do you hear every day that put you in a good mood?
Describe an aspect of your work that is challenging you right now.
Name an unexpected work of art that has influenced your practice.
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Born in Kigali, Rwanda, in 1982, Dorothée Munyaneza and her family relocated to London after the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi minority. She began her career as a musician, performing on the soundtrack to “Hotel Rwanda” in 2004, before expanding into movement. Haunted by the memories of her childhood, Munyaneza harnesses a potent blend of dance, poetry, and music to explore her own history. In “Mailles,” at New York Live Arts, she invites Ife Day, Yinka Esi Graves, Asmaa Jama, and Nido Uwera to the stage. The artists will impart their narratives through spoken word, song, and dance.
Describe yourself in one sentence.
What sounds do you hear every day that put you in a good mood?
Describe an aspect of your work that is challenging you right now.
Name an unexpected work of art that has influenced your practice.
What’s a place that inspires you to make work?
Gisèle Vienne’s “L’Étang (The Pond)” is an adaptation of a Robert Walser story about a boy who fakes suicide in order to test his mother’s love for him. It stars acclaimed French actor Adèle Haenel and longtime member of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Julie Shanahan. The Franco-Austrian director and choreographer weaves her distinct areas of study—dance, drama, visual art, philosophy, and puppetry—in her work, which has been presented in performance venues and festivals throughout the world, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Ruhrtriennale, along with art institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art and Centre Pompidou.
Describe yourself in one sentence.
What sounds do you hear every day that put you in a good mood?
Describe an aspect of your work that is challenging you right now.
Name an unexpected work of art that has influenced your practice.
