Feb/March 2023

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BEYOND BELIEF

CONTENTS Feb/March 2023

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THE TRUTH COMES OUT Laura Poitras’s Oscar-nominated documentary about Nan Goldin illuminates the inner world of the radical photographer and her efforts to take down the Sackler family.

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ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD With his Los Angeles gallery, STARS, Christopher Schwartz surrenders to the enigmatic, and it’s paid off in all kinds of ways.

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LOST AND FOUND During the pandemic, artist and curator Moch Hahn added “designer” to his resume. Ever since, the orders have been rolling in for Cadis, his spirited furniture line that revels in life’s kinks.

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STILL WATERS RUN DEEP Twenty-five years after graduating from Spelman College, Calida Rawles returns to her alma mater to ignite a new generation of artists.

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EMPATHY IN BRONZE In Nifemi Marcus-Bello’s first American presentation, the Nigerian designer ties himself resolutely to his roots.

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THIS TIME TOMORROW Gaetano Pesce, who has hovered at the intersection of experimental architecture and idiosyncratic design for the past six decades, sets his sights on Los Angeles.

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CLOSE-KNIT On the façade of Harlem’s National Black Theatre, textile artist Xenobia Bailey debuts an homage to the decades of community building and artistic reinvention that have made a home on its stage.

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ARTISTS AND ACTORS Through discussions about everything from suburbia to solitude, three pairs uncover the shared references, insights, and vulnerabilities that connect their practices.

Mia Goth at the Palace Theatre in Los Angeles.

Photography by Rachel Fleminger Hudson.

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Spring Summer 2023 Photographed by David Sims

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CONTENTS Feb/March 2023

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HIDDEN TREASURES Bruce Weber, legendary fashion photographer and chronicler of an era, made a discovery in a tiny gallery in Rome that altered the latest chapter of his career.

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THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT History-making actor and producer Marsai Martin speaks to columnist Rachel Cargle about building an empire from the age of five, and enjoying every stop along the way.

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WHEN YOU CAN WATCH ANYTHING ANYWHERE, WHY ARE FILM FESTIVALS STILL SO IMPORTANT? Ever since online streaming’s radical disruption of the entertainment industry, many have forecasted the demise of the indie cinema circuit. But the two worlds have a much more collaborative relationship than one might think.

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SOCIAL NETWORKING Creatively connects emerging talent with the broader creative economy and shines a light on the talented, lesser-known individuals working alongside world-renowned artists.

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LICENSE TO BE VULNERABLE As Mia Goth prepares for the X trilogy’s third and final installment, MaXXXine, she ruminates with her castmate, Kid Cudi, on artistic vulnerability, creative challenges, and evolving her approach.

HOLLYWOOD THEIR OWN 102 MAKING These eight performers—some of whom came

to the craft through years of auditions, others through chance encounters on the street—are doing more than meeting the moment. They’re making it their own.

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TOO WEIRD AND TOO MUCH Jim Shaw eschews minimalism and defies the limits of normalcy. How else could the artist capture the absurdity of Hollywood?

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REFIK ANADOL’S DATABASE OF DREAMS The Turkish digital artist trains his bespoke artificial intelligence models to dream, coaxing his machines to produce mind-melting visual fantasies that appear briefly on a screen before fading away, never to be repeated.

Calida Rawles working on a commission from Spelman College.

Photography by Emmanuelle Pickett.

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CONTENTS Feb/March 2023

132

POCKETS OF OUR OWN UNIVERSE Arthur Jafa and Bradford Young share a visual language—one that articulates disparities, fulfillments, and uncompromising truths through the mechanics of emotional cinematography.

138

YOUNG ARCHITECTS 2023 From Accra to São Paulo, the architects in our third annual selection are shaping the world around us.

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BODY LANGUAGE As we reckon with the intractable issues of our time, a group of choreographers from across the world are hard at work inscribing collective feelings of angst, affirmation, outrage, and jubilation into the body.

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A RENAISSANCE IN FLORENCE The past and the future meet at Gucci ArtLab, a hub for design incubation and environmental action.

Jim Shaw in his Los Angeles studio.

Photography by Brad Torchia.

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ULL AJOHNSON.COM

8823 BEVERLY BLVD OPENING SPRING 2023

CHRISTINA BINKLEY

KOBE WAGSTAFF

CAT DAWSON

Christina Binkley writes about the business of culture with a big dose of fashion and smidgeons of tech, art, and the gambling industry. She co-hosts the podcast Hot Buttons, which explores the ethics and sustainability of fashion on a changing planet, and is editor-at-large of Vogue Business as well as a contributor to WSJ Magazine, and The New Yorker. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Winner Takes All, and shared in a group Pulitzer prize for coverage of 9/11. “Bruce Weber is a legend in photography and in fashion—one of a handful of creative people whose work has helped define the era in which they worked,” Binkley says. “I was curious about why he was so obsessed with a longforgotten Italian photographer Paolo Di Paolo, and his answers revealed more than I anticipated.”

Kobe Wagstaff’s work is rooted in fluidity. The artist is dedicated to photographing the things they want to learn more about—most recently, the societal construction of gender. Their work, defined by its sense of simplicity and harmonious blend of color and composition, has captured subjects for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Elder Statesman, and this magazine. Wagstaff shot two editorials in this issue, a portfolio of eight Hollywood talents “at the beginning of their legacy, coming into the fold of their artistry,” and wunderkind Marsai Martin.

Cat Dawson is an academic, critic, entrepreneur, and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow who writes about the intersection of culture, technology, and aesthetics. They regularly publish scholarship and criticism and have lectured at leading institutions including Smith College, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University. Dawson’s first book, Monumental: Race, Representation, Redress, will be published

by MIT in 2024. For this issue, they surveyed the contemporary film festival landscape. “When Netflix started, the DVDs came in envelopes, signaling a shift,” they say. “But the envelopes were just the first step of a massive change in how we consume content.”

Writer

Photographer

RACHEL CARGLE Writer

Rachel Cargle is an Ohio-born, Brooklyn-based writer and entrepreneur.

She is the founder of multiple organizations, including The Loveland Group, a constellation of social enterprises dedicated to Black and QTBIPOC culture; The Loveland Foundation, which offers free therapy to Black women and gender nonconforming individuals; and Elizabeth’s Bookshop & Writing Centre, a space that amplifies the work of writers who are often excluded from traditional canons. Cargle’s writing has appeared in Atmos Magazine and The Cut, and she is a contributing columnist at CULTURED. Her debut book, A Renaissance of Our Own: A Memoir & Manifesto on Reimagining, will be released this May with Ballantine. “I’m thrilled to be in thought and conversation with such dynamic artists,” she says of the young actor and activist Marsai Martin, whom she profiled in this issue. “The chance to witness humanity through art is a deep honor.”

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Writer / Art Historian

CHRISTINA BINKLEY, PHOTOGRAPHY BY HARPER RUBIN; RACHEL CARGLE, PHOTOGRAPHY BY LELANIE FOSTER

CONTRIBUTORS

FRANCESCO CLEMENTE ANGELUS NOVUS MARCH 2 – APRIL 29, 2023 VITO SCHNABEL GALLERY 43 CLARKSON STREET, NEW YORK

KIMBERLY DREW

EMMA LEIGH MACDONALD

DANIEL ARCHER

Kimberly Drew is a curator (independently and at Pace Gallery), cultural critic, and author with over a decade of experience in the art world. For this issue, she spoke with Calida Rawles about “her ongoing commitment to complicating narratives about Black life through her paintings.”

Emma Leigh MacDonald is a multidisciplinary practitioner. She contributes to W and PIN-UP, and was the founding editor of Le Dépanneur magazine. She has curated exhibitions for the Istanbul Design Biennial, the New Museum, and New Art Dealers Alliance. “Young architecture practice is almost an oxymoron,” notes MacDonald, who interviewed CULTURED’s Young Architects of 2023. “It is so much more common to start your career working in support of someone else’s vision than toward your own. For this reason, I took an expansive approach to what architectural practice means in this feature—and to who and what it can include.”

The London-based photographer Daniel Archer has shot for brands including Prada, Maison Margiela, Saint Laurent, and Adidas. For this issue, he captured a group of cutting-edge performers in motion. “I wanted the choreographers to have freedom of expression, showcasing their individual approaches to their work,” Archer says.

Writer

Writer

RACHEL FLEMINGER HUDSON Photographer

Rachel Fleminger Hudson’s practice spans art direction, set design, and costuming. After graduating from Central Saint Martins in 2022, she won the international Dior Photography and Visual Arts Award for Young Talents and exhibited her work at the LUMA Foundation. This year, she’ll be heading to the Maison Européenne de la Photographie for a solo exhibition. Fleminger Hudson photographed Mia Goth for this issue’s cover at the iconic Palace Theatre in downtown Los Angeles. “It was a privilege to capture Mia’s extraordinary capacity for emotion,” says Fleminger Hudson. “She navigates the full range of human expression without judgment or fear and with joyous sensitivity and curiosity.”

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Photographer

KIMBERLY DREW, PHOTOGRAPHY BY JEZZ CHUNG; EMMA LEIGH MACDONALD, PHOTOGRAPHY BY ROWAN SPENCER; RACHEL FLEMINGER HUDSON, PHOTOGRAPHY BY LUCA WARD

CONTRIBUTORS

LAURA MAY TODD

CARRIE WITTMER

SCHAUN CHAMPION

Laura May Todd is a Milan-based journalist. She regularly contributes to publications including T Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Architectural Digest. Her first book, How To Get Away: Cabins, Cottages, Hideouts and the Design of Retreat, was released in 2021. In this issue, she wrote about her experience touring the Gucci ArtLab in Florence. “I saw how some of the historic brand’s most coveted leather goods are made,” says Todd. “Speaking with the artisans and learning about Gucci’s efforts to preserve their traditions was a total thrill.”

Carrie Wittmer covers film, television, celebrity, and fashion. Her writing has been featured in publications including The Cut, W, GQ, and The New Yorker. She is also a co-author of the 2018 satirical book New Erotica for Feminists. Wittmer interviewed eight rising actors shaping the entertainment industry for this issue. “People on the cusp of fame are vulnerable and transparent, with an intoxicating drive and charisma that’s been bottled up, ready to burst for all the world to see,” says the writer. “This group is creative, bold, and self-assured, which makes me think differently about the future of the film and television industry.”

Internationally exhibited artist, photographer, cultural documentarian, and filmmaker Schaun Champion captures her subjects in quiet moments and natural environments. The artist has photographed the likes of André Holland, Terrence Howard, and Pink Siifu, and her work can be found in scientific journals, galleries, and museums. For this issue, Champion shot the cinematographer Bradford Young in his new Baltimore studio space: “There’s this brilliant energy surrounding Bradford, almost like water: calm, with a whole world just under the surface,” she says. “It’s always a pleasure to have him on the other side of the lens.”

Writer

Writer

EMMANUELLE PICKETT Photographer

Emmanuelle Pickett is a filmmaker and photographer. While studying film and photography at Yale University, her work was featured in Oscar-winning directors Kevin Macdonald and Ridley Scott’s documentary, Life in a Day. After graduating, she landed in the writer’s room of Marvel’s Jessica Jones, where she fortified her passion for creating complex characters. Pickett is preparing for the release of All Souls, her feature directorial debut starring Mikey Madison and American rapper Gerald “G-Eazy” Gillum. “Every time I’m welcomed into an artist’s studio to capture their process, I find myself interested in their rituals and discipline,” she says of photographing Calida Rawles for this issue. “Are they in the studio from nine to five? Are they rocking the same ripped-up paint shirt that they’ve worn for the past 10 years? I see ink-dyed fingers and welding scars. I see piled-up canvases and heaps of scrap metal. I’m reminded of the unrelenting commitment and time required to make art.”

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Photographer

LAURA MAY TODD, PHOTOGRAPHY BY LIAM CUSHING; EMMANUELLE PICKETT, PHOTOGRAPHY BY JIMI JAMES

CONTRIBUTORS

CINE SÃO JOSÉ 35 YEARS OF ESTUDIO CAMPANA FEB 15 - APR 15, 2023

Founder | Editor-in-Chief

SARAH G. HARRELSON

Executive Editor JOSHUA GLASS

Publisher LORI WARRINER

Senior Editor MARA VEITCH

Italian Representative—Design CARLO FIORUCCI

Senior Creative Producer REBECCA AARON

Marketing and Publishing Coordinator HANNAH TACHER

Fashion Directors ALEXANDRA CRONAN, KATE FOLEY Editor-at-Large KAT HERRIMAN

Copy Editor REGAN SOLMO

New York Contributing Arts Editor JACOBA URIST Contributing Art Directors MAFALDA KAHANE, ORIANA REN

Interns ANNIE LYALL SLAUGHTER LYRIC NIV SARAH WETSMAN YAROSLAVA BONDAR

Contributing Columnist RACHEL CARGLE

Prepress/Print Production PETE JACATY

Podcast Editor SIENNA FEKETE

Senior Photo Retoucher BERT MOO-YOUNG

Landscape Editor LILY KWONG Editorial Assistant SOPHIE LEE Contributing Editors ALEX GARTENFELD, FRANKLIN SIRMANS, SARAH ARISON, LAURA DE GUNZBURG, DOUG MEYER, CASEY FREMONT, ALLISON BERG, MICHAEL REYNOLDS, DOMINIQUE CLAYTON

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LETTER from the EDITOR

I BEGAN 2023 with an 8 a.m. email to the CULTURED team suggesting that we ease slowly into 2023 with purpose and intention. Seconds after sending it, an email from Bottega Veneta arrived in my inbox asking if we could collaborate on an event at FOG, San Francisco’s art and design fair, just 10 days later. The answer, somehow, was a resounding yes.

As a publication, CULTURED has never eased slowly into anything—there are never enough hours in the day to cover all of the exciting artists and performers who inspire us, or to host all of the events that reflect our diverse community of partners and collaborators—but those two words, purpose and intention, have guided the publication since its conception. So, it’s only fitting that CULTURED’s first issue of the year is dedicated to an array of talents who are changing the way we think about the world around us, and who are deeply engaged in their practice—be it architecture, film, painting, dance, or poetry.

There’s the method actor Mia Goth, a young visionary who, through her work with some of the most impactful directors of our time, has managed to transform the horror genre for a new generation. She appears on our cover in full Prada, captured by the raw eye of young photographer Rachel Fleminger Hudson at The Palace, the oldest theater in Los Angeles. Mia’s conversation with her close friend and collaborator Kid Cudi reveals an incredible depth of emotion and wisdom, and the images she created with Rachel feel alive—more like film stills than fashion shots.

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

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Sabrina Buell and Sarah Harrelson at CULTURED and Bottega Veneta’s FOG Design+Art event at Buell’s home in San Francisco. Photography by Sydney Jackson.

In addition to Mia and Kid Cudi, this issue is full of cross-disciplinary conversations: the cinematographer Bradford Young tells Arthur Jafa about his next chapter; Laurie Simmons and Molly Ringwald compare notes on transcending their mediums; and Precious Okoyomon and Quintessa Swindell discuss ways of staying grounded.

It also features our annual international Young Architects list, which spotlights 10 boundary-breaking individual practitioners and collaborative studios who are reshaping the built environment. The issue climaxes with an ambitious portfolio of actors who are ushering in a new Hollywood era, created with Saint Laurent.

Thank you for always bearing witness to our work, and for supporting the best and brightest artists of our time.

On the cover: MIA GOTH shot on location at The Palace in Los Angeles, wearing a full look by Prada. Photography

by Rachel Fleminger Hudson.

Styling by Studio&.

Alfred Conteh It Is What It Is On view through March 4, 2023 Kavi Gupta 835 W. Washington Blvd. Floor 1 Chicago, IL 60607 kavigupta.com | 312 432 0708

The Truth Comes Out

BY MARA VEITCH

Nan Goldin, Nan in the bathroom with roommate in Boston. Image courtesy of the artist.

One of the most talked-about films of the year, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed illuminates the inner world of radical photographer Nan Goldin— and her efforts to take down the Sackler family.

NAN GOLDIN has been photographing the members of her chosen family— applying eye makeup in bathrooms, piled on top of one another on rickety kitchen chairs, lost in thought in unmade beds—since her teenage years.

After her repressive middle-class childhood was ripped apart by the suicide of her sister, the photographer left home at 14, ultimately finding her way into New York’s punk underbelly with camera in hand. Goldin’s work— tender, bawdy, raw—commemorates the burgeoning queer subcultures of downtown Manhattan in the 1980s, and the avant-garde characters that

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communed there. The world she reveals is exuberant, certainly. But it’s violent too.

Pulitzer Prize and Academy Award–winning director Laura Poitras’s latest documentary, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, explores both sides of Goldin’s story by fixing its lens on the character behind the camera.

Combining rich archival footage with the photographer’s own blistering accounts of her struggles with grief and addiction, the film—which takes its name from a psychiatrist’s stirring note found in her late sister’s medical records—follows Goldin through the AIDS and opioid crises, both of which left an indelible mark on the artist and her work. Poitras centers the film on P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now)—the advocacy group Goldin founded after her own near-fatal overdose to hold the billionaire Sackler family responsible for their role in the drug epidemic—and on the artist’s efforts to seek retribution by staging elaborate die-ins at museums from the Guggenheim to the Louvre. Goldin succeeded in having the family’s name scrubbed from several illustrious galleries, but her vision for justice stretches still further. “The wrong things are kept secret in society,” she says in the film, “and that destroys people.”

David Lewis Frieze LA February 16-19, 2023 Booth H6

Trey Abdella Todd Gray Lisa Jo Leah Ke Yi Zheng Claire Lehmann Peter Schlesinger 57 Walker Street, New York, NY www.davidlewisgallery.com / info@davidlewisgallery.com

BY KAT HERRIMAN PHOTOGRAPHY BY CLIFFORD PRINCE KING

CHRISTOPHER SCHWARTZ has everything a young gallerist needs to succeed: a singular eye and an instinctive stomach. But it’s not just the Los Angeles–based dealer’s aptitude that makes him extraordinary at his job. Rather, it’s his monastic devotion to the vocation and the thoughtful action that flows from this diligent belief. His eyes are not only sharp but beautiful. His business isn’t just successful, it generates abundance for everyone involved. STARS, Schwartz’s gallery, is a space that helps great artists on the periphery make their way to the center—on their own terms.

It is a place to meet your potential.

“I identify as a viewer first and foremost, because that’s how I learned,” Schwartz says. “Having worked in the art world for over a decade now, I do have likes and dislikes, but on an ideal day, I go into an exhibition and remain really open.” This perspective shapes STARS in all its dimensions and is a byproduct of Schwartz’s own art odyssey—starting with an assistant job at Metro Pictures in New York after landing a cold-call interview. There, he diligently studied the catalogs of everyone from Bas Jan Ader to Louise Lawler while familiarizing himself with the lexicon of curators and critics. Eventually Gagosian poached him; he liked the purr of ambition there and the access to top-tier pieces, but he knew better than to linger in the halls of power. Within a year he moved to Reena Spaulings, rounding out his arts education with a dose of downtown niche. Heartbreak was his graduation gift, and so Schwartz headed to Los Angeles in search of that elusive “work-life balance.” Instead, he found a glut of curatorial opportunities that evolved into STARS in 2021. A nod to its Hollywood Walk of Fame proximity, the gallery’s name also smirks at an industry so enamored of its own image that it forgets to wonder.

A commitment to questioning is a quality Schwartz picked up from Pippa Garner, the LA–based artist and author whose cheeky interpretations of consumer products (cars that drive backwards, chain smoking vacuums, and souped-up children’s high chairs) have enjoyed cult fame and the occasional burst of pop cultural idolatry for over 50 years. “Pippa is a very LA artist, so learning about her personal history was also like learning about Los Angeles’s history,” Schwartz says of his mentor. “Pippa just gave me access to everything. She didn’t really care about any sort of

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STARS founder Christopher Schwartz at his Hollywood gallery alongside a painting by Danny Bredar.

With his Los Angeles gallery, STARS, Christopher Schwartz surrenders to the enigmatic, and it’s paid off in all kinds of ways—from kicking off the careers of young artists like Beaux Mendes and Eric-Paul Riege to launching revivals of established talents like Pippa Garner and Jacci Den Hartog.

art market or gallery system or whatever, and that really helped me eventually understand the role of the gallerist by asking, What can the gallery do for someone like that?” The answer came four years into their friendship, when Garner unearthed a tower of file boxes filled to the brim with years’ worth of jumbled drawings, slides, and photographs. Schwartz set about digitizing the entire trove before he had a permanent space to show it. Now Garner’s oeuvre, in all its exquisite parts, is traveling Europe as a retrospective, with stops at Kunstverein München and Kunsthalle Zürich. The exhibition and its accompanying catalog owe their lives to Schwartz’s herculean preservation and door-opening efforts, which in their thoroughness honor the investments the artist made in her work, decade after decade, when no one was looking.

Fidelity to one’s craft is a trait Schwartz shares with his artists. Like a glamorous Hollywood agent, he is on call 24/7 for them, prioritizing their visions even when it empties the kitty in the short-term. Schwartz dipped into the red to frame a suite of paintings by Takako Yamaguchi, a mid-career LA–based painter, whose work is impossible to find today for purchase— even at six figures. Cynthia Hawkins, an improvisionist abstract painter with 30 years of work to show, sold out before her exhibition at STARS even opened. For Eric-Paul Riege (whose 2023 solo show at the Hammer Museum closed in February), Schwartz devised a new model of ownership that enables the artist to sell his soft sculptures to buyers while retaining the right to change them in the future, a key element of his practice. The gallerist’s strategies are never one-size-fits-all. Every decision, though harrowingly specific, serves a larger vision.

This March, STARS turns two. Despite the gallery’s many achievements, Schwartz views himself more as a facilitator of success than its architect— he reserves that pedestal for his artists. “Ultimately the gallery took shape on its own, regardless of what I would want for it or any plans I could have,” he says. “I try to stay out of the way, because that’s usually when things are the most successful.”

Lost and Found

Moch Hahn moved from New York to Nashville, Tennessee to sharpen his carpentry.

Instead he stumbled upon an audience for his autodidactic designs.

During the pandemic, artist and curator Moch Hahn added “designer” to his resume. Ever since, the orders have been rolling in for Cadis, his spirited furniture line that revels in life’s kinks.

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BY KAT HERRIMAN PHOTOGRAPHY BY HUNT FANELLI

MY FRIEND ALIX takes wabi-sabi classes at the YMCA uptown. Alix is the kind of clear-eyed woman who knows how to cultivate beauty. Like attracts like, a lesson that I remember in her kitchen. It is technically a plain Ikea number, but thanks to a miss-match of hand-carved, sculptural cabinet pulls by the artist Moch Hahn, it is unrecognizable as such. Hahn, like Alix, is a lover and caretaker of idiosyncrasy.

I first met Hahn in 2017, when the self-taught artist was making sculptures in Brooklyn and moonlighting as a curator at Maw, an artistrun project space on the Lower East Side. When time ran out on Maw, he hit the road in search of compelling antiques to use for his sculptures or sell for cash. Out there, tripping across the endless country, Hahn decided to extend his New York intermission, moving to Nashville to sharpen his carpentry skills where the raw materials were cheaper. With few obligations and a pandemic lockdown to boot, he quickly built out a studio—a metal shell on a muddy stretch of road littered with pick-up trucks. Once everything was tidy, Hahn began dragging in problems. Sometimes it was a commission for an object he’d never made before. Other times, it was a curious fragment from an estate sale. Over time, this autodidactic practice mutated into an aesthetic language composed of gestures that heal and memorialize the accidental. The difficult process of hand-bending hard woods leaked over from his sculptural practice. Time asserted itself as the most essential tool on his bench.

Hahn’s work echoes with notes of things already trending: Green River Project LLC’s living material palette, Gaetano Pesce’s gloopy shapes, Alma Allen’s essentialism. What makes his contribution to the design landscape unique is not a material gag or a formal signature, but an approach. The artist meets materials where they are, welcoming mistakes into the process and interfering only when necessary. It’s minimalism without closing the door on the Baroque.

By the time Hahn had developed his first signature products—totem-like candelabras, three-legged stools, bent oak sconces—he was already selling out of them on Instagram, where he’d built up a following with his robust catalog of antiques. Then came local pop-ups, where he made the acquaintance of clients like the country singer Chris Stapleton. Increasing demand for Hahn’s designs made it necessary for the artist to distinguish his expanding furniture line from his sculptural practice. He landed on the name Cadis, inspired by the fly commonly used in fishing. Out on the water, caddisflies are tied to the line in order to attract the hunted to the hook. Beauty has its utilities.

Still Waters Run Deep

CALIDA RAWLES logs onto our Zoom call covered in paint. The artist is in go-mode, working fervently on a set of new paintings.

Just over her shoulder is a not-yet-finished canvas featuring one of her signature floating figures. Rawles’s microbraids rock as she walks the camera over to showcase intimate details embedded in the composition. Inside the work’s approximately nine-foot canvas, a Black woman’s head is suspended, somehow both floating and sinking. Her white dress trails through clear, blue waters. “This beautiful, strong woman is pulling energy from something larger than herself,” she explains. The work, titled Thy Name We Praise, was recently commissioned by the Museum of Fine Art at Spelman College, Rawles’s alma mater, and joins other works in the traveling exhibition “Black American Portraits,” co-curated by the museum’s executive director, Liz Andrews, and the Tate Modern’s Britton Family curator-at-large, Christine Y. Kim. The work’s title is borrowed from “The Spelman Hymn.” It wasn’t until a recent conversation with the college’s former museum director, Andrea Barnwell Brownlee, that Rawles began to realize just how deeply the college has informed her work as an artist. “The best thing about my

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Calida Rawles alongside her painting, Thy Name We Praise, 2023, a co-acquisition by the Terra Foundation for American Art and Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, in honor of Mary Schmidt Campbell, Ph.D., the 10th President of Spelman College.

Twenty-five years after graduating from Spelman College, Calida Rawles returns to her alma mater to ignite a new generation of artists.

BY KIMBERLY DREW PHOTOGRAPHY BY EMMANUELLE PICKETT

experience at Spelman was recognizing the diversity of Blackness and the Black female,” she shares, noting that it helped her to better hold and understand her own complexity. In Rawles’s finished painting, the figure’s skin is created from a vast array of flesh tones to enhance its richness. Just before our call ends, the painter holds up her copy of the catalog for “Bearing Witness: Contemporary Works by African American Women Artists,” an exhibition held during her time at Spelman. Each page of the book is adorned with signatures from Black women artists who traveled to Atlanta for the exhibition in 1996. “The experience of these artists coming, seeing the show… I was like, This is what I want to do.” With this latest commission, Rawles has her chance to inspire the same reaction in a new generation of artists.

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Empathy in Bronze In Nifemi Marcus-Bello’s first American presentation, a collection of sculptural benches at Marta in Los Angeles, the Nigerian designer ties himself resolutely to his roots.

BY MARA VEITCH Photography by Erik Benjamins. Image courtesy of Marta, Los Angeles.

EMPATHY IS at the core of Nifemi Marcus-Bello’s practice. The Nigerian designer makes works that enter into quiet communion with their user, highlighting intentionally sourced materials and time-honored rituals of production. The Introvert’s Chair, Marcus-Bello’s contribution to the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, features a high screen of traditionally woven raffia that wraps around the sitter in a protective embrace. His M2 shelves, 2022, are made from African mahogany and a powder-coated frame that maintain their structural integrity primarily by “leaning on one another for support.”

This spring, Marcus-Bello presents his first U.S. exhibition, “Oríkì (Act I): Friction Ridge,” at Marta. Six bronze benches, fabricated by repeatedly thumping their molds to achieve the dented texture of recently repatriated

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Beninese royal sculptures, are arranged in a circle in the Los Angeles design space, set to a recording of the artist’s mother delivering an oríkì (a form of poetic affirmation among West African Yoruba-speakers). For the designer, who got his degree in industrial and product design at the University of Leeds in the U.K., entering this chapter after a career in commercial production poses a new set of challenges. “I am exploring what it means to present this work in a gallery space, to be able to tell the story the right way,” he says, noting his attention to themes of Africanism and modern material colonization. The exhibition, on view through March 4, is the first in a series of design “acts” that will engage with different facets of African identity and craft production—a subject close to MarcusBello’s heart. “This work feels extremely different, a lot more personal.”

This Time Tomorrow

Gaetano Pesce, Nobody’s Perfect chair and blue and pink console table, 2022. Photography by Olga Antipina.

Image courtesy of the artist and The Future Pefect.

Gaetano Pesce, the 83-year-old master designer who has hovered at the intersection of experimental architecture and idiosyncratic design for the past six decades, sets his sights on Los Angeles.

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BY JOSHUA GLASS

THE LAST TIME Gaetano Pesce set foot in Los Angeles, it was to debut a selection of cast-resin objects—spunky vases, flamboyant seating, and two-dimensional reliefs that he termed “industrial skins” for his 2016 exhibition “Molds (Gelati Misti)” at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Pacific Design Center. Much has changed in the nearly seven years since, including the permanent closure of the LA institution’s mausoleum-esque concrete space.

For his own part, the 83-year-old master designer has ascended to new heights in his dynamic practice, which has hovered at the intersection of experimental architecture and idiosyncratic design for the past six decades. Chaotically modern, the Gruppo N artist’s creations aren’t restricted by dimensionality, and find harmony, somehow, between organic materials and new technology. This past year alone, he staged “Nobody’s Perfect” at the Sea World Culture and Arts Center in Shenzhen, China, his debut solo showing in Asia; enclosed the Aspen Art Museum in a 3-D mountainous landscape; and collaborated with the fashion brand Bottega Veneta on a runway design and prismic Art Basel installation, “Come Stai?”

Now Pesce returns to the City of Angels to open “Dear Future,” the designer’s first-ever solo exhibition with a Los Angeles gallery. The six-week show at The Future Perfect’s Arthur S. Heineman–designed Goldwyn House in the Hollywood Hills includes an array of never-before-seen works—including the blue and pink iteration of the “Nobody’s Perfect” chair and console table pictured in these pages—along with rarely exhibited objects on loan from Pesce’s studio archives and cult limited-edition pieces, including a cork rendition of the B&B Italia “UP5_6” armchair that was first shown at Miami Design Week 2021. But despite the exhibition’s career-spanning offering, “Dear Future”—as its name suggests—is not a retrospective.

“It centers on the future, a concept central to my creative practice,” notes Pesce. “It’s only fitting that the exhibition takes place in a metropolis that has become a creative capital of the world—a future-forward city where the arts act as a catalyst for critical conversations happening globally.”

Close-Knit

On the façade of Harlem’s National Black Theatre, textile artist Xenobia Bailey debuts an homage to the decades of community building and artistic reinvention that have made a home on its stage.

BY SOPHIE LEE Xenobia Bailey, Steal Away. Image courtesy of the artist and the National Black Theatre.

IN 1968, DR. BARBARA ANN TEER—the award-winning performer, activist, and core figure in the Black Arts Movement—founded Harlem’s National Black Theatre to celebrate the canon-shaping work of Black American artists.

The space, which would become the country’s first revenue-generating Black art complex and the longest-running Black theater in New York City, was grounded in one principle: that the racial justice issues that plague society can be overcome, according to Dr. Teer, through a combination of “Black liberation, visual art, and placemaking.” This February, the fiber artist Xenobia Bailey will honor the theater’s legacy as a cultural anchor in uptown Manhattan with Steal Away, a temporary mural on its Fifth Avenue façade.

Set against a royal purple backdrop, Bailey’s installation features gilded feathers in commemoration of the Munsee Lenape people (on whose ancestral land the theater sits), spiritual iconography reflective of the theater’s mission, and archival photographs of historic performances—all connected by the artist’s signature crocheted mandalas. Dr. Teer’s formula

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for transcendence is central to Bailey’s artmaking: “I learned the Teer Technique of crystallizing the vision of my story, which is now part of endless legacies, incorporated in the cosmos of the Total Black Experience,” the artist explains.

Bailey has exhibited her large-scale tapestries and signature blooming crocheted hats at institutions including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the New Museum, and the Museum of Arts and Design. Her focus on the legacies of craftsmanship embedded in African American diasporic communities makes her an ideal candidate to adorn the storied theater, which is currently in the process of establishing a set of new housing, retail, and performance spaces. “The artwork is the product of the National Black Theatre’s techniques, created to give value to Black cultural heritage and identities,” Bailey says of Steal Away. “This comes from a specific African American experience—my domestic textiles heritage, and my humble, yet rich, communities.”

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Artists and Actors

The realms of artmaking and performance are kept apart by porous boundaries.

Whether on canvas or in front of the camera, a reverence for ritual pervades both disciplines, as does an eye for what belongs inside—and outside—of a frame. The creatives featured in these pages know one another— some by crossing paths on set; some through mutual admiration of one another’s work; others by meeting, so to speak, “in the same dream.” Through discussions about everything from suburbia to solitude, the six actors and artists uncover the shared references, insights, and vulnerabilities that connect their practices.

Precious Okoyomon x Quintessa Swindell Laurie Simmons x Molly Ringwald Alex Prager x Elizabeth Banks

Encounters with Endlessness Precious Okoyomon, Touching My Lil Tail Till the Sun Notices Me (installation view), 2022. Photography by Yasushi Ichikawa. Image courtesy of the artist, the Okayama Art Summit, and rossogranada.

Both Precious Okoyomon and Quintessa Swindell have refined the art of commingling beauty and darkness. In Okoyomon’s 2022 installation at the Okayama Art Summit, Touching My Lil Tail Till the Sun Notices Me, a giant underwear-clad teddy bear lies in an empty outdoor pool, a tableau at once tender and menacing. Swindell’s recent starring role opposite Sigourney Weaver in last year’s thriller Master Gardener—a quiet film about obsession, romance, and utopic redemption—conjures a vulnerable character shrouded in an air of foreboding. But the artist-chef-poet and the actor have their own ways of grounding themselves. For Okoyomon, it’s their poodle, Gravity. For Swindell, it’s traversing the agave-lined streets of Los Angeles on their vintage motorcycle. With each project, the pair confronts us with buried truths about the world we inhabit, and leaves us craving more.

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Quintessa Swindell: Well, well, well. Hello again. I met you a while ago— well, I say that, but it’s been quite some time.

Precious Okoyomon: Hello!

Swindell: My first question for you is in regards to your culinary practice.

At what point did the gears begin to turn? What was that key moment for you?

Okoyomon: I love to cook. It’s mostly just a time thing now. Making art can be an intense, involved process for me, and it just doesn’t leave a lot of space for cooking the kinds of meals I would like to. It’s unfortunate, because the idea of feeding people is—and has always been—at the center of what I do as an artist. I might have a secret pop-up in Tokyo this spring though, if you can make it.

Swindell: Amazing. I’m curious what allows you to begin again. Is there a particular trigger for you to start crafting, imagining, and testing new work? Can you describe the feeling and how you nurture it?

Okoyomon: These days, it’s mostly space that fuels the work—whatever that means. You visit a place where you’re planning an exhibition, and you’re hit by something. It could be the tenderness of the air, the pulse of the sun through the building’s windows, or the silence of its history that gets inside of you. Then, hopefully, something special comes out of it. I used to spend a lot of time walking around New York speaking into a dictaphone and writing poems from the recordings, which I think is the same kind of process. But back to you. When I was in college, I used to say that it’s hard to care about art when all I care about is people. So, I wanted to ask you a few questions that I’ve adapted from a list by the poet Bhanu Kapil—first, can you describe for me a morning when you woke without fear?

Swindell: Ah yes, good ole Kapil! I think that, given my life experiences, I find it quite difficult to wake up without fear. I experience it quite often, and I greet it like an old friend. Without fear, I don’t think I would know where I’m at or what I’m doing. So, I welcome it. What is your greatest challenge in this period of your life? What do you think is your greatest reward?

Okoyomon: It’s a challenge to stay dangerously optimistic. My greatest joy is being changed by encounters with endlessness. What do you think the consequences of your silence would be?

Swindell: I think the world would still turn. What about you?

Okoyomon: That’s a good way to think of it—the world will always turn, constantly spiral. Have you done anything to prepare for your death?

Swindell: Hmm...I don’t know exactly. But by choosing life every day, viewing death as inevitable, and seeing what’s after it, I prepare. What are essential facets to every work you create?

Okoyomon: I guess I think of myself as a poet. Poetry is about a lot of

things, but great poems always work durationally—maybe that has something to do with why most poems are so short. That interest in time has sort of leaked into my work as an artist, where I am primarily interested in installation. I just want to make worlds, prayers, rituals, and sacrifices…experiences that you move through, and that move through you. Objects sort of bore me.

Swindell: What are you listening to right now? How does it move you?

Okoyomon: So much Alice Coltrane. Do you know the album Illuminations from 1974 that she made with [Carlos] Santana? It’s a miracle, a rapture. It makes my heart feel a kind of freedom, a love that holds me tight with clarity. Now, back to the work. I think acting is a really interesting medium for self-expression—because, in a superficial sense, it’s not about selfexpression at all. How do you find yourself in the roles you take on, and what do you do if you can’t emotionally access the character you’re portraying?

Swindell: I haven’t heard someone say it like that—why do you think acting is not about self-expression?

Okoyomon: Hmm. Well, I wrote and directed a play a couple of years ago—this invocation of the end of the world that I worked on with the curator Claude Adjil at Serpentine Galleries. When we started rehearsing, I realized I had this fear of putting my poems into the bodies of other people. On some level, of course, that’s how writing always functions— but most of the time there’s this amazing unknowable distance between you and the reader. Actually watching actors give their bodies over to my poems sort of scared me. I guess that’s why I ask the question.

Swindell: That’s interesting. Because for every project I do, I need to have a personal connection to the character, the environment, or the obstacle central to their story. I find it impossible to perform things I don’t understand, and I think that has forced me to be really selective with what I choose to do. That understanding has also driven me to start creating the things that I feel no one else is talking about.

Okoyomon: That makes a lot of sense.

Swindell: What’s something you’ve seen recently that has inspired you?

Okoyomon: Theaster Gates’s show at the New Museum. His dedication to craft, to material—by which I mean earth—and the care he puts into the work is a form of God. Swindell: Who do you celebrate and cherish?

Okoyomon: Gravity, my little poodle who holds down my grace. And my mom, who is pretty much an angel.

Swindell: Thoughts on choosing love?

Okoyomon: It’s an everyday act. The consciousness of the world is love—it’s the energy that moves everything. I try to be the best vessel of love that I can be, by searching for the self in others and moving towards it. It’s that kindness.

“I just want to make worlds, prayers, rituals, and sacrifices…experiences that you move through, and that move through you.

Objects sort of bore me. ” —Precious Okoyomon culturedmag.com 69

Photography by Danielle Bartholomew

Ballet, Pig Farming, and Art-Making Through her photographs of uncanny domestic scenes, Laurie Simmons has been holding a mirror to the charms and deceits of bourgeois life since her first show at Artists Space in 1979. Molly Ringwald attained teen stardom after Sixteen Candles, John Hughes’s 1984 homage to the false promises of American adolescence, and has shaped and critiqued mainstream culture through film and writing ever since. Keen arbiters of the American spirit, both grew up immersed in the materialism of suburbia. The pair reunite here to discuss the blessing—and the curse—of embracing a single craft at a tender age and explain why it’s the pendulum, not the Bald Eagle, that best represents American culture.

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Laurie Simmons: We can talk about art and movies, but first we have to talk about your writing. You wrote an extraordinary piece in The New Yorker about shooting King Lear with Jean-Luc Godard. That was riveting.

Molly Ringwald: It means so much to hear you say that. Have you ever seen the film?

Simmons: If I have, it was a long time ago. But I’m definitely going to watch it now. You describe what it was like to work with Godard, this legendary director. Working with him sounded really crazy.

Ringwald: It was, but I’m so glad that I had the foresight to know it would be an interesting experience. So many of the things I’ve done have that quality to them—I somehow know they will be worthwhile down the line.

Do you ever get that feeling?

Simmons: I know exactly what you mean. That’s one thing we have in common, this idea of doing things for the experience of it, or saying to ourselves, Even if I don’t grasp the meaning of this right now, I know it’s important. I always followed those instincts. I ended up doing really exciting things that way, and I also got myself into trouble.

Ringwald: Well of course! The two go hand in hand, don’t they?

Simmons: Right. That shared foresight shows that we both saw our lives as something outside of ourselves, in a way, from an early age. This intuition that an experience will be great for the story of our lives. I’m not sure everybody gets that feeling.

Ringwald: I don’t know any other way to be. I have always been my own North Star. As an artist, how do you know when an idea is worth pursuing?

Simmons: I don’t have a narrative in my work, but the story I tell myself about my work is that I look for moments when the experiences I’ve had in my life come up against something that’s happening at a specific time in our culture. I try to pinpoint that. I want to ask you the same question about your experience in film, but I don’t think it really applies.

Ringwald: Not totally, but I do think there’s a similar process of knowing what the right project is when it comes along. How important has mentorship been to you as an artist?

Simmons: I wanted to find mentors, but ultimately never really did. I always wondered why that was. Really, the closest thing to a mentor for me is my husband [Carroll Dunham], who’s been my partner since I was 27, and is an artist himself. His perspective has grown with and influenced my own. We use each other as sounding boards because we run up against the same problems. Have you had mentors?

Ringwald: I have, but not as much as I would have liked. It’s also something that I’ve actively started to seek in later years. I realized I could benefit from the guidance of other writers as well—my husband [Panio Gianopoulos], who’s a writer, is also a sort of mentor for me.

Simmons: I think that largely solitary experience comes from having the conviction from a tender age of who and what you are. Most people come much later in life to their callings—my husband decided he would be an artist in his 20s. When Lena [Dunham, Simmons’s daughter] was little, she wanted to be a ballerina and a pig farmer when she grew up. Those are the kinds of children’s expectations that I think are more common— they want to be astronauts. I knew what I would be in life from the time I was six. On my first day of school, I introduced myself to my first grade class as an artist. I don’t know where I got that from.

Ringwald: When I was three, I told my grandmother I wanted to be an entertainer. That’s a word I probably only knew because of my father, who was an entertainer.

Simmons: That’s definitely not a three-year-old word.

Ringwald: It’s not! My grandmother told me it couldn’t happen.

Simmons: At that time girls wanted to be teachers, nurses. I knew instinctively that I would be an artist during a period when most families were not supportive of those goals, so I really did not grow up with other kids who had the same motivations as me.

Ringwald: I think I only saw acting as a possibility because of my own parents. My father was a jazz musician and my mother was a stay-athome mom, so a life of performance to me felt doable.

Simmons: Absolutely. Your daughter Mathilda [Gianopoulos] just started her acting career, right?

Ringwald: She did. She’s 19 now, and I very adamantly did not want her to be a child actor. That was a big bone of contention in our family for a long time. I wanted her to develop other creative outlets. I told her, “Even though acting is what feels most exciting to you right now, you need to have other means of expressing yourself along the way.” Life is long, and I do not want her to be waiting for that next role in order to feel fulfilled.

Simmons: I felt the exact same way as you. Because we started so young, it feels important to us now to develop relationships with other mediums—for you writing and translation, for me film. It’s a way of making sure we made the right choices all those years ago, and telling ourselves we didn’t miss out on anything. What was it like to see your daughter enter the film world?

Ringwald: It was a very big moment. All of a sudden, she was in a casting office, reading lines with Anne Hathaway [for the film The Idea of You]. Before that she’d never done anything more than a self-taped audition at home with me.

Simmons: Did you visit her while she was shooting?

Ringwald: She was on location for a month and a half in Georgia. I couldn’t be on set because of Covid, but we talked every day, and she would say things to me like, “Mom, I’m so awkward, I don’t know how to do this and that.” I’d tell her, “Mathilda, that is your power. I didn’t raise you to be a Hollywood kid. You’re your own person.”

Simmons: This goes back to your writing, and your pursuit of creative expression outside the craft of acting. I loved your novel When It Happens to You, and I can’t wait for the next one— Ringwald: Neither can my agent.

Simmons: And recently you did an incredible translation of My Cousin Maria Schneider, the book about the great French actress. It was so powerful and so moving. There are moments in the book, particularly regarding her interactions with men, that show us how far our society has come. Her experience was unfortunately quite common at that time, and it was treated in a sort of blasé way for so long. When we look back, the normalization of that treatment is just horrific.

Ringwald: So much has changed. That’s not to say that there aren’t still challenges that women face in the entertainment world, but now there is so much more freedom to present yourself on your own terms. Lena, for example, is so daring and sexual and provocative, and she embodies that identity all on her own.

Simmons: But she’s had plenty of experiences with men in Hollywood that just make me, as a mother, want to punch someone in the nose.

After periods of great progress, there always seems to be backlash. We still have so far to go.

Ringwald: You’re right. I can’t remember who it was that said it, but the symbol of America shouldn’t be an eagle. It should be a pendulum.

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Alex Prager, Mary Suspended Between Heaven and Earth, 2022. Image courtesy of Alex Prager Studio and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London.

Wanting, Love, and Loss Los Angeles native Alex Prager reveals Hollywood’s visual excesses and distorted beauty standards through her own photographic lens. She first collaborated with Elizabeth Banks when the artist featured the actor, who has a gift for blending raw emotion and visual playfulness, in her 2013 film installation Face in the Crowd, an eerily charged meditation on our uniquely isolating time in which the ominous lurks just beneath the surface of the quotidian. Here, the pair discuss the art of reading faces, and the solitary and communal aspects of their crafts.

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Elizabeth Banks: You work with costume designers, set designers, hair and makeup, and lighting—tools we think of as more associated with film. What inspired you to bring all of these elements into your work?

Alex Prager: I grew up in Hollywood, and I started acting when I was eight years old, in an episode of Tales from the Crypt. I got to see the magic of special effects—a two-headed monster brought to life with animatronics, an empty soundstage transformed into a whole snowglobe of a world. It showed me from a young age what was possible, and that creative families form through film. I later found photography and contemporary art, a world very much outside of the LA I grew up in. It wasn’t until several years later that I found my way back to moving pictures.

Banks: People think of the photographer as solitary, out in the world with their camera. But your projects always bring together a “creative family,” as you say. Can you talk a bit about collaboration?

Prager: Collaboration is something that happens anyway—I’ve always felt that a project is not complete until the viewer interprets and digests it for themselves—but the process of collaborating while making something is vital. Having everyone’s life experiences bouncing around helps a project come alive in a way that it couldn’t otherwise.

Banks: I’m curious—the faces that you photograph are always so varied and interesting. What do you look for when you’re casting?

Prager: I look for faces that have stories written all over them. There are trends in beauty that are fascinating to look at after they’ve passed. I’m interested in the details: freckles, moles, and scars; whether they choose to hide them or not. Art is only important if it actually reflects who we are and how we connect with each other.

Banks: What makes a great image to you?

Prager: Run is my latest piece. I made it during the recent years of chaos we’ve collectively experienced. I find that a great work of art always poses a question, never an answer—answers lie with every viewer. I think the same is true for movies. How are movies different from contemporary art to you?

Banks: My relationship to art is very private. When I visit a gallery or museum, it’s for myself. I’m not there trying to have a shared experience; I’m only communing with whatever I’m taking in. That’s what I look for in art—an initial, intimate response that something can grow from. But as a filmmaker, I’m trying to entertain. I love that in movies you have the setup and the payoff; there is a journey, but you’re not left with tons of questions. At the end of Jaws, you’re not like, What was that about? With film and television, I want to create a communal experience.

I want to make something that moves like a virus moves through a room, infecting everybody.

Prager: I’ve never heard it put that way.

Banks: There’s a great responsibility in creating culture, whatever it is. And at a mass scale, the intention behind every choice becomes even more important. There’s a little more pressure in it for me as an artist—I can’t just dismiss that, you know?

Prager: How do you deal with that responsibility?

Banks: It’s about trying to make something lasting, a legacy that reflects me and what I care about. Do you have a process? Has it changed over the years?

Prager: In the beginning, I would take a long moment of peace before going into the next project. It would be a process of stepping away, and there was this coy flirtation with the next project until I couldn’t hold it in anymore. But now I’m onto the next project before I’m halfway through the first one. So my process is just getting through each day. It doesn’t sound very romantic, but I’m madly in love with what I do.

That’s the biggest thing I struggle with: there’s always something that I must make next.

Banks: People tell me, “You’re so busy, do you ever take a nap?” I’ve actually never taken a nap in my life. We create our creative lives. I mean, we’ve woken up every day since we were 20 years old and said, “What is the hustle today? What’s going to move me forward?” When you actually find success, it opens up more choices. The best advice that I’ve ever received is the power of saying “no.” Now, I have to be so passionate about a project that I’m willing to leave my kids to do it.

That’s a high bar. The thing about making art is it impacts your psychology and emotional life. I play roles and suddenly I dress like my character, and my whole wardrobe feels like a costume. So, I have to be really careful. That’s also, frankly, why I tend to make joyful films, because that energy reenters my life.

Prager: Is that one of your ways of being responsible?

Banks: For sure. I think it’s also a thing that men don’t deal with nearly as much.

Prager: I was going to say that. It’s totally normal for a man to leave town for work. For me, there’s a low level of guilt almost every time I’m away for longer than a few days, because I’m addicted to my son. I always thought that as long as I could afford a nanny, I could keep working as much as before. But the second I had a kid, I wanted to be around him all the time.

Banks: I appreciate the way you say that. I’ve let go of a lot of the guilt—partly because my kids are at school most of the day, and partly because I realize that taking them with me is selfish. They’re like, “We have lives. We have friends and basketball practice.” In the end, they’re basically over me. How do you maintain your sense of originality?

Prager: I’ve always believed that the more I listen to my gut, the louder it gets. But I also have to make sure that I’m educating myself on what came before me and what is happening now. Something happened recently with Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu. There’s a scene at the end of Run where everyone’s “asleep” on the ground. Iñárritu’s film Bardo has almost the exact same shot. Bardo hadn’t been released yet and Run was still in post-production when I discovered this, and I immediately emailed him saying, “I haven’t seen the movie yet, but we made the same picture.” He wrote back and said, “We met in the same dream.” I think artists do this a lot—we make pictures that reflect our desire to understand life in a larger way, and sometimes we end up making the same one.

Banks: When I saw Run, I thought of war movies—a general looking across the battlefield at the destruction and death, asking himself, What’s my place in this? Why am I a survivor? So, you and Iñárritu both ripped off old war movies.

Prager: And war movies rip off real life. I love when you hear an artist say that they came up with an idea completely by themselves, without being inspired by anything they ever saw.

Banks: I like that we’re blatantly laughing at any artist who says that out loud. I mean, there are only, like, nine stories you can possibly tell, and the Greeks wrote most of them down. Every story we tell is about wanting, love, and loss.

Prager: Exactly. Recent years have felt so chaotic, manic, and intangible. There’s a Joseph Campbell quote that I came across while making Run that really resonated with me, “Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world.” Making a film at this moment felt cathartic. It was a great reminder that one thing can affect everybody. We’re all in this. Nobody is alone.

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Hidden Treasures

BY CHRISTINA BINKLEY

Image courtesy of ©Archivio Fotografico Paolo Di Paolo.

Bruce Weber, legendary fashion photographer and chronicler of a bygone era, made a discovery in a gallery in Rome that altered the latest chapter of his career.

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, a well-known magazine editor invited Bruce Weber to do a shoot on a private French Polynesian island. “You will be there for two days,” the photographer and filmmaker was informed before being issued the edict: “And no topless women.”

For Weber, now 76, the proposal marked the end of an epoch—the 1980s and ‘90s were largely defined by the photographer’s black and white photographs of lithe, half-clad youths for fashion magazines and clients like Calvin Klein and Abercrombie & Fitch. He recalls the days when week-long shoots came stocked with acupuncturists, massage therapists, and acting coaches. It was “like summer camp,” he says, his six cockatiels cackling in the background. “To know that I couldn’t do that anymore, and that I was only going to be there for two days,” Weber says, “I couldn’t.”

So he recognized a fellow traveler when he encountered a black and white photo shot by Paolo Di Paolo in a tiny gallery in Rome in 2016. Weber had never heard of the Italian photojournalist—almost nobody had—but he was drawn to the emotive street scenes and unposed celebrity portraits that Di Paolo shot during the ‘50s and ‘60s as Italy emerged from fascism. The photos captured candid moments of the elite and the everyday: an elderly man in a rowboat gazing longingly at a bikini-clad girl in a neighboring skiff, a sultry Sophia Loren applying her eyeliner while a curious young boy looks on. The images leave the viewer aching for the next frame.

The owner of the gallery told Weber that Di Paolo quit photography when star-chasing magazines began pressing him for paparazzi shots and gossip about his fancy friends.

Sensing that his moment had come to an end, he left Rome for a small farming town, stowing thousands of negatives in his cellar to be discovered decades later by his daughter, Silvia. “Here’s a man who gave up photography,” says Weber.

He promptly became obsessed. Treasure of His Youth, Weber’s documentary film about Di Paolo, reflects on his life in postwar Italy; shooting for magazines; befriending the tragic actor Pier Paolo Pasolini, who could not live with his own homosexuality; and the glamorous actor Anna Magnani, who lived as she pleased. There’s a twist at the end.

Back home in Miami with his partner Nan Bush, the cockatiels, five golden retrievers, and two cats, Weber is focused on securing international distribution for the film. He wants Di Paolo to be recognized as “a national treasure of Italy, just as Cecil Beaton is for England and Henri Cartier-Bresson is for France.” Weber’s own presence is barely seen on screen, but his commitment to memorializing Di Paolo’s work reveals itself nonetheless. Late in the film, a quote from the American photographer Nan Goldin appears: “I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I have lost.”

This sentiment rings true for Weber, who has resolved to never stop shooting. “A lot of people aren’t here anymore,” he says. “I look back at my pictures and I say, ‘My God.’ Like River Phoenix. I just adored River and loved photographing him. I went to his house, got to know the rest of his family and his mom,” Weber reflects. “And that’s gone.”

The Butterfly Effect History-making actor and producer Marsai Martin speaks to columnist Rachel Cargle—whose upcoming memoir and manifesto A Renaissance of Our Own will be released this spring—about building an empire from the age of five, and enjoying every stop along the way.

BY RACHEL CARGLE PHOTOGRAPHY BY KOBE WAGSTAFF STYLING BY STUDIO&

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT awards commemorate the kind of milestones that Marsai Martin is breezing through. In 2019, the Black-ish actor made history as the youngest executive producer on a major Hollywood production with the film Little, and was featured on the celebrated TIME100 Next list. At just 18 years old, she has been awarded a total of 11 NAACP Image Awards and nominated for two Screen Actors Guild Awards. Last November, Fantasy Football—a film she not only starred in but also produced—was released on Netflix. But Martin is not simply knocking down barriers for her own fulfillment—she is building a legacy to inspire young women around the world.

Martin joined me on a very dreary afternoon in New York over Zoom from what appeared to be a much more vibrant locale. Her face was fresh— an unexpected vessel for the clear and considered sophistication that pours from her—and her spirit light. It must have been this same prodigious energy that inspired Michelle Obama to tap Martin to work on the Obama Foundation’s Get Her There, an initiative that ensures adolescent girls have access to education. The former First Lady asked the young actor to produce and co-direct the campaign’s launch video, and Martin delivered, taking the project as an opportunity to braid together her burgeoning craft and her desire to enact change.

“For her to trust me and to be able to co-direct it as well was amazing,” Martin tells me. The video is a gorgeous montage of young girls filmed in their various home countries. Each repeats the prompt “Dear 25-year-old me, I hope you are…” before relaying her dreams and aspirations: becoming a tattoo artist, saving lives as a cardiologist, making movies, or being the best optician in Uganda.

“I wanted to make sure we heard stories from girls all around the world—to show that we all want the same thing, and that’s to have the chance to strive for what we love and the dreams that we can accomplish,” says Martin. “Every day we walk down the street passing strangers or meeting new people, and each of us is uniquely the same. I wanted everybody’s stories to feel relatable and impactful at the same time.”

Such is a recurring theme throughout Martin’s work, from her role as the erudite but unfiltered Diane Johnson on Black-ish to her performance as the competitive Callie Coleman in Fantasy Football: an insistence not just on seeing but celebrating the complexities of girlhood. Nowhere, though, is that drive more prevalent than in Saturdays, her most recent project for Disney Channel. The forthcoming show centers on Paris, a young Black girl played

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by Danielle Jalade, and the eclectic ecosystem that is her local roller-skating rink. Martin, who is producing the show, explains to me that it is a nostalgic nod to the era of Disney that she and her cousins grew up loving—series like That’s So Raven and The Suite Life of Zack & Cody—but with an added layer.

Paris navigates the social scene and indulges her passion for skating all while managing her sickle cell disease, an aspect of the real world Martin felt was missing in young adult entertainment. “Even though it’s a story about family and the beauty of friendship and community, there are different layers to it,” she says. “We wanted to highlight that having a sickness isn’t gonna bring you down. It doesn’t stop you from living your best life and doing what you love, especially as a young girl.”

Saturdays sees Martin move from where we all met her—in front of the camera, charming audiences—to a role behind the scenes, a shift that requires new skills from the young creative. “It has allowed me to use my voice in a new way,” she says. “It feels good to see your vision come to life in a space that you’re not in.” The process wasn’t always easy, though—Martin often struggled with the challenges of production. “You’re not only pleasing your own needs, but also making sure Disney and the cast and crew get what they want. It’s how I imagine it feels to be a new mom: you’re learning your way through it while trying to take care of this thing, making sure it grows up, and then you just let it go. You let it live, you let it dream, and you let people see what you’ve created.”

Throughout our conversation, I can’t help but see a connection between the message of the Get Her There campaign and the actor’s own success after being seen, supported, and celebrated. What is it that “got you here?” I ask. Martin got her start at five years old while posing for family portraits at a mall kiosk. The photographer, impressed by how well she took direction, offered her parents a discount if they promised to enroll her in acting classes. “You would be truly shocked at how the smallest decisions might make a difference,” Martin says. “How far each one could take you. That’s what I’ve learned from considering all the what-ifs.”

When I ask Martin what advice she’d give her own future self, she squirms in her chair through the computer screen. “Oh no, girl, this is tough.

I really don’t allow myself to think that far ahead,” she exhales. Martin thinks for a moment, before offering: “I hope you’re happy and that your family is healthy. I hope your shows and films have impacted people and helped them open up about their own stories, hopefully creating little chain reactions around the world.”

Makeup by JOANNA SIMKIN at THE WALL GROUP using NARS Hair by RACHEL LEE at MA+ GROUP Location REDCAR PROPERTIES LTD

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Ever since online streaming’s radical disruption of the entertainment industry, many have forecasted the demise of the indie cinema circuit.

But nearly two decades later, the two worlds have a much more collaborative relationship than one might think.

BY CAT DAWSON PHOTOGRAPHY BY DIANA NAGIRNYAK

AWARDS SEASON COMMENCES with the Sundance Film Festival and the Berlinale, the first of a flurry of major film festivals that take place throughout the year. While the oldest have Nationalist roots—Venice’s was founded by Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Party in 1932, and Berlin’s was initially funded by the U.S. military—annual presentations like these have historically skewed progressive: pushing cinema forward by showcasing new voices and amplifying projects that might not otherwise find an audience.

They are also crucial to the entertainment ecosystem. Festivals are accompanied by energetic markets, at which films and series—especially those made by independent producers who are responsible for the vitality of the medium—are acquired for distribution. But since content streaming platforms (SVODs to those in the business, “streamers” to the rest of us) disrupted this ecosystem 15 years ago, industry doomers have been bracing for the demise of the studio system and the independent film festival. Of course, streamers have fundamentally changed the film and TV industry, transforming how content is licensed and consumed. But the impact of streaming—first on distribution, then later on development and production— is actually far more nuanced than many might think.

Streamers have enabled substantial expansion in the number of opportunities available to early-career filmmakers and, according to the Berlinale’s artistic director Carlo Chatrian, have also resulted in far larger production budgets. Cara Cusumano, the Tribeca Film Festival’s festival director and VP of programming echoes this sentiment, noting that streamers “put more pressure on festivals” to identify new talent. But they’ve also augmented the criteria for the films that make their way onto festival slates. Streaming has transformed how we discover films, replacing more traditional forms of browsing with algorithms that assess behavioral data to put content in front of viewers that they’ll readily consume. Chatrian and Cusumano both add that the emphasis streaming companies place on funding projects that they anticipate will have broad audience appeal has discouraged experimentation in form and narrative. This means that the Netflix catalog that viewers encounter today, which is full of direct-tostreaming projects, is less diverse than it might have been in the past. Still, original narratives are what keep the medium relevant, and identifying them

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is the central struggle of streamers and studios alike—a challenge that is becoming more pronounced as streaming platforms flood the market and as social media and gaming compete for audiences’ time and attention.

Original stories do, however, consistently find their first key audience at film festivals. But what, precisely, counts as original stories is both difficult to pinpoint and the subject of ongoing debate. Chatrian cites Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans as an example of the power of anachronism—of using older techniques and narratives that, perhaps paradoxically, feel fresh, an innovative strategy that has also proven successful in other industries (take Kehinde Wiley’s citations of the Old Masters, or Alessandro Michele’s nostalgic designs for Gucci). The hunt for original material has also compelled festival programmers to reach beyond cinema’s conventions by offering “immersive” or extended reality (XR) sections; but a survey of such programming, which differs at every festival, suggests that XR content has yet to effectively intersect with film and TV or to connect with audiences in lasting ways.

Nevertheless, it’s indie filmmakers whose relentless innovations in narrative and form ensure the continued relevance of Sundance, the Berlinale, and other major festivals on the circuit. For creatives like Christine Vachon, whose production company Killer Films has been developing raw, cutting-edge projects since it debuted the generation-defining Kids in 1995, festivals remain a crucial avenue for alternative films to enter the critical discourse. She insists that there is no formula for cinematic success—“you know it when you see it.” The fact that many streamers now offer access to award-winning projects from specific festivals—Netflix has individual channels for Cannes and the Toronto International Film Festival—signals that independent storytelling and the festivals that champion it will continue reaching for originality, even as the financial and data-driven structures of SVODs might appear to discourage it.

This landscape of heterogeneous incentive structures is an early indication of impending tectonic shifts in the industry, but unlike the apocalyptic projections of many, it’s likely to be one in which the role of film festivals and their symbiotic relationships with indie producers is more important than ever.

The historic Zoo Palast theater in Berlin has been hosting Berlinale premieres since the 1950s.

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“We make it easy for creatives to show off their work, collaborate, and get discovered all in one place.”

Social Networking Creatively connects emerging talent with the broader creative economy. Now, the discovery platform co-founded by Stacey Bendet is collaborating with this magazine to shine a light on the talented, lesser-known individuals working alongside world-renowned artists.

BY LISA KWON

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the intersection of fashion and pop culture, Bendet was wary of how difficult it was to identify Black and Brown artists and creative producers by relying on existing networking platforms. At the same time, she wanted to do her part in supporting newcomers, which is often the hardest stage of finding stability in any creative field. She cites Creatively’s partnership with the Council of Fashion Designers of America as an early milestone for the company. Together, the two entities built the IMPACT talent directory to help brands connect with and hire Black and Brown creatives for full-time, freelance, and internship roles.

Three years in, Bendet and Indriolo are invested in the continued education and growth of Creatively Stacey Bendet in collaboration with the artist Mokshini.

Photography by Rony Alwin.

STACEY BENDET met Aziza-Abdullah Nicole last March at the private members-only club Zero Bond in New York. The alice + olivia founder previously stumbled upon the Brooklyn-based artist’s portfolio of hand-crafted jewelry while browsing Creatively.

After meeting at an event for the networking platform, she loved her work so much that she invited the artist to sell her pieces in six alice + olivia stores across the U.S. “That’s the power of Creatively,” Bendet says of the startup she co-founded in 2020. “As a brand, I can access and discover innovative talent while also giving new career opportunities.”

The platform offers a tool for artists and workers in creative fields to secure jobs, meet peers, and apply for projects with top-name brands that are equally eager to find fresh, emerging visionaries. Co-helmed

by Joe Indriolo, founder of product design hub Studio, Creatively puts untapped talents—especially those of diverse racial, ethnic, or underrepresented backgrounds—in the sightlines of prominent companies.

It couldn’t have arrived at a more timely moment.

With Instagram in decline, Creatively fills a void of artistic discovery. Over the last few years, many creatives have relied on the Meta-owned social service to publicize their latest works and accomplishments, but now find that their posts are buried in the noise of algorithm-driven recommendations and prioritized over by Reels. And forget LinkedIn—the professional social networking platform has proven cumbersome for job seekers who rely on visual mediums to demonstrate their range. With its text-heavy posts and corporate lexicon, it is often the last stop for entry-level professionals. Creatively bucks these social media networking trends. “If you’re a creative or are looking to hire creatives, you’ll notice other platforms aren’t purposefully built to service our community,” says Indriolo. “We make it easy for them to show off their work, collaborate, and get discovered all in one place.”

With the unrelenting segmentation of digital tools in our daily lives—Pinterest for moodboards, TikTok for promotion—Creatively enables job seekers to update their professional goings-on with a seamless in-app experience. A candidate can update their portfolio with their latest projects, follow and message colleagues, and search for open positions, all without leaving the platform. The job board is robust, too; currently, Creatively boasts listings from esteemed companies including the NBA, Tommy Hilfiger, Sunday Riley, and Nickelodeon Animation Studio.

For Bendet, the platform exists to highlight diverse, qualified talent. After over 20 years as a powerful voice at

members. The company extends ongoing invitations to industry leaders and artists to teach Creatively Classes, a monthly virtual education series that demystifies topics ranging from NFTs and the metaverse to navigating an interview and building a portfolio.

And what’s on the horizon in 2023? “There’s a lot we’re excited about,” says Indriolo. He mentions expanding the CreativelyMade grant program and improving tools for talent discovery, including an upcoming “premium search” product for avid users to increase their visibility.

“We will continue our commitment to providing our creative community with the inspiration, skills,

and mentoring they need to advance their careers,” says Bendet. In 2020, Creatively announced a yearly “Class Of” initiative to spotlight rising talent from nearly 30 different academic partners such as Pratt Institute, Parsons School of Design, and Yale School of Architecture. Reflecting on the program, Bendet is particularly proud of the work of Cornelia Borgerhoff, a Creatively member named to Pratt’s inaugural cohort.

The Brooklyn-based fashion designer was hired by Coach as a design apprentice, and has recently been promoted to an assistant designer for the fashion brand’s men’s ready-to-wear department.

The search for fresh talent continues this spring as Creatively prepares to come to life beyond the Internet. In partnership with CULTURED, the company will launch its inaugural digital and experiential event, CreativelyCultured, honoring over 100 talented creatives discovered on the platform. The honorees will be selected by artists across a broad spectrum of mediums, such as musician Alicia Keys, photographer Jamel Shabazz, interior designer David Netto, multi-disciplinary artist Awol Erizku, and filmmaker Gillian Laub.

“I love that Creatively and CULTURED are coming together to amplify the power of creative collaboration,” says Keys. “I may be known as a solo artist, but my art has been a success because of teamwork, inspiration, and the talented creatives around me.”

Selected to participate because of their communal ethos, the artists’ honoree picks reflect Creatively’s commitment to bridging generations in artist communities. “My creative process is rooted in collaboration, whether it be with the subject or the team behind a shoot, creating memorable moments for all involved,” explains Shabazz. In fact, collaboration is what award winning author Jason Reynolds, who is also on the CreativelyCultured selection panel, calls the “corner-stone” of his work. “Whether it be with my editor, an artist, or the world itself, I am always in creative discourse in an effort to tell a story that stretches beyond my solitary office chair,” he continues.

The future looks bright for Creatively and its members. Just three years ago, Bendet and Indriolo made the fateful decision to launch their platform ahead of schedule in order to support entry-level job seekers hunting for work at the height of the pandemic.

The company has earned a reputation for bringing life and warmth back into the professional realm for artists of all stripes—and it’s entering 2023 with a full head of steam.

DALLAS ART FAIR APRIL 20 - 23, 2023 FOR MORE INFO w w w. d a l l a s a rt f a i r. c o m

hammer.ucla.edu

Study for ‘Hidden Squares,’ 1961. Ink on graph paper. 12 ½ × 8 ½ in. (31.8 × 21.6 cm).

Collection of the artist. © Bridget Riley

H IG H M U SEU M OF A RT ATLA N TA | TH R OU G H A P R I L 9 | H I GH . O RG Monir Farmanfarmaian: A Mirror Garden is the first posthumous exhibition at an American museum for Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian (1922–2019), one of Iran’s most celebrated and revered visual artists, known internationally for her geometric mirror sculptures that combine the mathematical order and beauty of ancient Persian architectural motifs with the forms and patterns of hard-edged, postwar abstraction.

This exhibition is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.

PRE MIE R E XHIB ITIO N SE RIE S SPO NSO R

PRE MIE R E XHIB ITION SE RIE S SUPPO RTE RS ACT Foundation, Inc. Sarah and Jim Kennedy Louise Sams and Jerome Grilhot

BENEFACTOR EXHIBITION SERIES SUPPORTERS Robin and Hilton Howell

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Untitled (Muqarnas) (detail), 2012, mirror, reverse-glass painting, and plaster on wood, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from the Farideh & Al Azadi Foundation, 2019.174. © Estate of Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian.

APRIL 13—16 NAVY PIER THE INTERNATIONAL EXPOSITION OF CONTEMPORARY & MODERN ART

expochicago.com Presenting Sponsor

MARCH 4 – MAY 7, 2023 COACHELLA VALLEY, CA Desert X is funded by its board of directors and an international group of individual donors, foundations and sponsors.

desertx.org

Media Partners: artnet, frieze Magazine, Cultured Magazine, Here Media, Palm Springs Life Magazine, Take on Art, Terremoto and Visit Greater Palm Springs.

@_desertx

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License To Be Vulnerable Making Hollywood Their Own Too Weird and Too Much Refik Anadol’s Database of Dreams Pockets of Our Own Universe Young Architects 2023 Body Language A Renaissance in Florence

License by

Kid Cudi

to be Styling by Studio&

No two Mia Goth films are alike—unless you count the X trilogy, a cerebral twist on slasher cinema hatched by horror auteur Ti West and A24 films— and even that is irrevocably radical. Following collaborations with the likes of Lars von Trier, Luca Guadagnino, and Claire Denis, the discerning actor fronts dual roles in the series’ titular film, and co-wrote its prequel, Pearl, both of which debuted this past year. As Goth prepares for X’s third and final installment, MaXXXine, she ruminates on artistic vulnerability, creative challenges, and evolving her craft with her castmate, Scott Mescudi aka the multidisciplinary performing artist Kid Cudi.

Photography by Rachel Fleminger Hudson

Mia Goth wears all clothing and accessories by Prada

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“You have to be so vulnerable for anything of merit to be created.”

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Kid Cudi: Ti West is one of the most brilliant writer-directors around.

What’s it like collaborating with him?

Mia Goth: It has honestly been one of the most creative and fulfilling experiences of my life. Pearl was my first time writing a real script, and he let me in on the entire process of making a movie, from conception to post-production. He would ask me certain questions such as, “What are some scenes as an actor that you’ve always dreamt of filming?” Or, “What’s the character that you’ve always longed to play?” I loved being more than just an actor. I loved being able to nurture and navigate all that it takes to eventually get to set. That’s something that Ti gave me, and I’m very grateful.

Cudi: What’s your idea of collaboration?

Goth: Collaboration to me means working together, assembling a space where we can safely fail. That will happen. A lot. You have to be so vulnerable for anything of merit to be created. What I pursue in collaboration, though, has changed as I have grown. I used to look to my directors as parental figures, seeking their guidance and approval.

Now I am starting to come into myself more. I am finding my voice. I will advocate for my character and what feels authentic to her. With Ti, I was able to create a character—Pearl—who spoke to my strengths as both a woman and as an actor. Being involved from the conception certainly helped that, and it’s something that I want to continue doing.

Cudi: That’s really dope that you want to do more. I know you’re going to kill it.

Goth: Oh, thank you. Having that level of involvement in a project is just so empowering. Being an actor is constantly waiting for other people to validate you, and that can be very uncomfortable. There are so many other roles that I want to explore and characters that I would love to play. To be able to have a say in their existence would be a dream come true, really.

Cudi: What is your favorite aspect of performing?

Goth: Losing myself. Great actors make the craft appear deceptively simple. It’s one of the hardest things in the world: to speak the words on the page truthfully, wholly vulnerable, and naked. But when you can momentarily touch that ever-elusive realm...the feeling is glorious.

Cudi: What was your first acting gig?

Goth: It was the character P in Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac. I got the part three weeks after I graduated from high school. At that point, I would

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have done anything, but it just so happened that the first thing I booked was for Lars von Trier—one of the most important directors of our lifetime—and with the best caliber of actors. It felt unreal. The movie became my north star, and ever since I’ve been searching for projects that are as close to it in some way or another as possible. Now whenever I’m unsure about something, I look back to that time and remember how fulfilled I felt. Sometimes you can only really appreciate how special or consequential a moment is in retrospect, but that was one of the rare times in my life that I was fully aware, in real time, of the impact it had on me.

Cudi: I had that same feeling with X, you know.

Goth: Did you?

Cudi: Yeah. Every day I was just…happy. This feeling like, Oh my God, I’m gonna do something people will fucking see and love. That doesn’t happen all the time. It’s very rare to do a movie and be so sure that it’s going to do well.

Goth: You’re so great in it. You’re so talented, and I hope you continue to make films for as long as you want, truly. There’s something very natural about how you perform, about how you just make the characters your own.

Cudi: That means so much coming from you, thank you. I mean, come on, your performance was incredible— Goth: No, Scott, just take the compliment! You don’t have to turn it back around to me.

Cudi: Okay! You’ve taken on such intense roles throughout your career.

Is it difficult for you personally to switch them on and off?

Goth: The characters that I have portrayed tend to live in the extreme.

They either exist in worlds that are so heightened and removed from my day-to-day that letting go once we wrap is pretty straightforward, or it’s the total opposite. Sometimes I’ll understand and relate to my character so much, on such an intimate level, that a part of her will always stay with me.

I have a somewhat healthy sense of self, which helps. Looking back, I can

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“Great actors make the craft appear deceptively simple. It’s one of the hardest things in the world: to speak the words on the page truthfully, wholly vulnerable, and naked. But when you can momentarily touch that ever-elusive realm... the feeling is glorious.”

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see that the women I have played have shaped my life. They’ve all had a profound impact on me.

Cudi: What would be a dream role for you?

Goth: I would love to play a character in a different language. I speak Portuguese and my Spanish is pretty good. I grew up watching Pedro Almodóvar— Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is probably my favorite movie of his. It doesn’t feel like something entirely out of the realm of possibility, and would be an exciting challenge.

Cudi: Do challenges like that inspire you? Do they ever get you down?

Goth: I work on things that challenge me. That keeps me vigilant. It ensures I work hard and forces me to go the extra mile. I turn down a lot of work because I get offers for things I have already explored. Patience is a virtue. I have built a life for myself that is beautiful and that fills me up. It’s helped me a lot in maintaining my discretion when picking my projects.

Sometimes you read a script and there are lines that speak to you. Other times you just know that your character—or you, yourself—is never going to be able to say them in a way that feels honest. Some people are so disconnected from what needs to happen for lines to ring true or have any substantial meaning.

Cudi: Yeah, I get the same feelings too.

Goth: And being on stage… I can’t even imagine.

Cudi: I’m kind of reaching that peak. I’m about to be 40 in a couple of years, and I don’t know how many more years of running around onstage and touring the world I have in me. But acting is different; I think I can do it for a long, long time. There’s no real age cap for that. Do you see yourself acting well into old age?

Goth: Acting is the only thing that I do, the only thing that I know. It’s a marathon for me. I’m not in a sprint or race of any sort. There is a lot of thought that goes into the choices that I make as an actor and into the films that I decide to do. I’m not rushing to get to the next set after I wrap one up. It’s important to be able to go back into your personal life, fill up your well with as many varied experiences as possible, and then return to set, which is a sacred place to release and reveal.

You know, it’s a miracle to me each time I’m cast in something that I wanted to be in—and every time I wrap a movie, I’m certain I’m never going to work again. I also prepare for my movies in a similar way, so that

each one feels like it might be my last. That energy makes me work harder and be more present when I’m on set with other actors. As stressful as it can be to feel it, I hope to never lose that idea that I might not work again.

Cudi: Your performance in Pearl is on the shortlists for all the awards.

How does that feel?

Goth: It’s surreal. People come up to me and they tell me that Pearl is one of their favorite movies. They’ve really connected to her, and I’ve never experienced anything like that—that kind of reception, that embrace of a project that I’ve done. This is all very new to me, but I love it.

Cudi: After MaXXXine, when the X trilogy is over, what are you gonna miss the most about playing Pearl, both old and young?

Goth: I love how manic she is. There’s some imbalance within her that allows her to go from zero to 100 in a moment, and it’s so fun to play with that. It’s so freeing. In the real world, there’s something so quintessentially British about me. I’m always saying things like, “Would you mind if I did this?” Or, “Would it be alright if I blah blah blah blah?” I second-guess myself a lot more in my day-to-day life. But as Pearl—and being on set and with the crew that we had—I just felt so in control and free and really quite powerful in my craft. I’ll miss having that level of connection to a character of mine. Now that I’ve had the taste for it, I can’t go back.

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Makeup by NINA PARK Hair by ADIR ABERGEL Nails by RACHEL JOSEPH Set Design by KELLY INFIEL Produced by BLOCK

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PRODUCTIONS Lighting Direction

by JORDIE TURNER Casting by JILL DEMLING Fashion Assistance

by TOM GRIMSDELL, MOLLY NOVACK, and TALLULA BELL

MADDEN Tailoring by TRISH DECEMBER Photography Assistance by JORDIE TURNER, David Winthrop, and TYLER WERGES Hair Assistance by

PILAR BERMUDES Set Assistance

by DYLAN LYNCH and WINSTON Location PALACE THEATRE

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MAKING HOLLY HOLL Y WOOD THEIR OWN

By Carrie Wittmer Photography by Kobe Wagstaff Styling by Studio&

The laws of fame are mercurial. Today, streaming platforms and social media feeds have cracked the once-elusive realm of stardom wide open, trading mystique for exposure and longevity for instant gratification. This sea change presents a host of new opportunities for emerging performers—while making it all the more challenging to stand out. On a rainy winter day in East Los Angeles, CULTURED shot eight of the industry’s most promising young actors on the eve of career-making projects, from indie features to blockbuster franchises. These eight performers— some of whom came to the craft through years of auditions, others through chance encounters on the street—are doing more than meeting the moment. They’re making it their own.

All clothing and accessories by Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello

“It’s not to say that I don’t want to return to the stage, because I really do hope to at some point. It’ll just have to be right story, right time, and right place.”

THE FIRST TIME Myha’la Herrold read the script for Industry, she thought, This is so damn good. Even if she didn’t get cast in the HBO series about the lives of bankers at a top London investment firm, she’d already vowed to watch it. Thankfully, the now 26-year-old actor ended up landing the role of Harper Stern, the competitive, fearless, and arrogant (deservedly so) young woman from New York trying to make it in the, well, industry. It was the first Black role Herrold ever read that surprised her.

“She didn’t do anything I thought she would do,” the actor recalls. “She doesn’t fit into any of the archetypes. She is breaking down any stereotype that you thought a Black character should fall under. That is how you do representation.” The San Jose native knew she wanted to perform from the age of six, and spent her entire life preparing on stage. After studying at Carnegie Mellon and moving to New York in 2018, she started to get more attention for film and TV. Herrold, who appeared in the A24 horror-comedy and social satire Bodies Bodies Bodies last year alongside Rachel Sennott, Amandla Stenberg, Pete Davidson, and Lee Pace, can still recall the critiques from college: her performances were “not big enough for the back of the house to see, feel, or hear.” But the camera, which is upclose and catches everything, calls for a more subdued and focused presence. “It feels more real to me,” she says. It was a realization that came to Herrold immediately after stepping onto the Industry set—but it was not an ultimatum: “It’s not to say that I don’t want to return to the stage, because I really do hope to at some point. It’ll just be have to be right story, right time, and right place.”

MYHA’LA HERROLD

The star of HBO’s splashy, London-set finance drama Industry originally planned for a life in the theater, but quickly discovered that her subtle, realist performance style was best captured by the camera’s all-seeing eye.

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“The concept of getting into this industry always felt so foreign.”

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DANNY RAMIREZ had to lie to get his big blockbuster break. When the 30-year-old actor auditioned for the role of Lieutenant Mickey “Fanboy” Garcia in the box office smash Top Gun: Maverick, he confirmed he was comfortable with flying. But that was far from the truth: simply traveling from a shoot in Iowa to the film’s casting in Los Angeles filled the young actor with anxiety. He got the part, but the good news came with a kicker: he would have to literally learn how to pilot a plane.

Ramirez eventually overcame the phobia, thanks to an even greater fear of pissing off Tom Cruise, hours of flight training, and a stressful surprise trip piloted by costar Glen Powell. (Ramirez recognized the actor from Scream Queens but had no idea he would be flying the plane until they took off.) Before spreading his wings, Ramirez fell into acting thanks to a sprained ankle. Unable to practice with his college soccer team, he was asked to be an extra on the set of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which happened to be shooting nearby. “The concept of getting into this industry always felt so foreign,” he remembers. “It never felt feasible from the films that I would watch as a kid. They always felt like something that other people did.” From the sidelines, Ramirez was enamored of the film’s lead, the thenunknown Riz Ahmed. The next day, he bought a “ridiculous” collection of acting books before enrolling in New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. For Ramirez, who has had TV appearances in The Affair, Orange Is the New Black, and On My Block, the skies are fast becoming a constant presence in his work life. Up next, he’s preparing to reprise the role of Captain America’s winged sidekick, Falcon, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Ramirez’s character, whose real name is Joaquin Torres, made his debut in the 2021 series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and will return in Captain America: New World Order alongside Anthony Mackie and Harrison Ford in 2024.

DANNY RAMIREZ

The Top Gun: Maverick star used to fear flying.

Now, the sky’s the limit for the young actor, who never thought a career in Hollywood was possible.

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JACK DYLAN GRAZER

After making a name for himself in some of Hollywood’s biggest franchises, the 19-year-old actor—who returns to the DC universe this spring in Shazam!

Fury of the Gods—is excited to evolve his oeuvre.

“As I grow up, I’m less surface-level about my identity. I’m trying to delve into the complexities of who I am.”

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“I DON’T WANT TO do easy work anymore,” Jack Dylan Grazer says in a rapid, selfassured way that has an air of selfdeprecation. “I want to be challenged. I want to make things more complex.”

Although he grew up in Los Angeles in an entertainment family—his father is an actor and his uncle is the Oscar-winning producer Brian Grazer—he says the craft came to him organically. He remembers elementary school as a period in which he was “getting in trouble a lot.” By order of his mom, Grazer took on a variety of activities and sports to improve his behavior, but nothing stuck until he found musical theater at The Adderley School. Acting “saved my life in every way, shape, and form,” recalls the young actor, who now funds a bi-annual scholarship for students of his alma mater.

Ironically, it was his mother who was hard to sway. After much convincing, though, she relented—rearranging her life to drive her son to auditions. “She sacrificed everything,” the actor says. “She gave up on her job so that she could support my dream, and now here I am, living it. It wouldn’t be possible without Mom.” After a few small roles in film and television, Grazer got his big break at age 13 as Eddie Kaspbrak in the 2017 box office smash horror film It, quickly establishing himself as one of Hollywood’s most reliable fast-talking nerds. In 2019, he co-starred in the DC universe film Shazam! as Freddy, the best friend-slash-sidekick to Asher Angel’s Billy, a role that Grazer plans to return to in the film’s sequel this March. (Adam Brody, patron saint of fast-talking nerds, appears as Freddy’s superhero alter ego, opposite Zachary Levi as Billy’s.) “Freddy and I are the most similar out of any character I’ve ever played,” Grazer says. But as the actor matures, he says he’s ready to evolve his craft and explore different psyches. In addition to the franchise films, he’s worked with Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino in the 2020 series We Are Who We Are, and this year, he will appear in the Chuck Klosterman adaptation Downtown Owl from directors Lily Rabe and Hamish Linklater. “As I grow up, I’m less surfacelevel about my identity,” Grazer says. “I’m trying to delve into the complexities of who I am. I want to have more intentionality and be less passive—it’s something that I apply to my characters now, but also to myself.”

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QUINTESSA SWINDELL

The actor is the first out, non-binary actor to play a lead superhero in the DC universe. But rather than waiting for the next round of roles they’ve been dreaming of their whole life, they’re ready to create them themself.

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QUINTESSA SWINDELL wants what they call “uninhibited freedom”—the kind that has historically been reserved for cisgender white men. Swindell, the first out, nonbinary actor to play a lead superhero in the DC Extended Universe, starred as Cyclone in 2022’s Black Adam, opposite Dwayne Johnson and Pierce Brosnan. “It was the first experience I had working with a massive production that was so eager to challenge how people view a particular character,” they say. The contagiously cool and confident 25-year-old grew up in Virginia Beach, Virginia, with their father, who first introduced them to the method performances by actors Philip Seymour Hoffman and Daniel Day-Lewis that later shaped their craft. “It was the idea of taking up space that really compelled me—not being too shy and not giving everything you have,” they say. “Not holding anything back for a role.” After years of fine-tuning their practice, Swindell began their Hollywood career in 2019 with a regular role in the Netflix series Trinkets, which ran for two seasons.

The same year, they appeared in an episode of Euphoria as Anna, who had a steamy encounter with Hunter Schafer’s Jules.

Last year proved a defining time for Swindell: along with Black Adam, they appeared opposite Sigourney Weaver and Joel Edgerton in Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener. As a gender nonconforming Black person who presents femme, Swindell struggles to find roles that truly represent themself. “Not every non-binary person should be androgynous, have a shaved head, or be semi-on testosterone,” they say. “I now understand that no one else is going to create the thing that I want to see the most. I’m going to have to do that myself. That has reinvigorated my love of film and a necessity to look at movies from all different types of eras, cultures, and languages. I want to make stories that allow space for someone like me.”

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“Life is abusrd. It can be quirky.

It can be strange. It can be funny. It can be sad.”

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FELIX MALLARD remembers the exact moment he discovered the enduring emotional power of performance. The Australian actor began his career in his early teens, as a model. With no prior experience, he booked his first acting gig on the long-running Aussie soap Neighbours, a launchpad for many other successful actors, including Russell Crowe and Margot Robbie. Mallard played the 14-year-old Ben Kirk, whose father died when Ben was a toddler. Now 24, the actor viscerally remembers struggling with his debut role at the time; he didn’t understand how his character could be so sad about something that had happened so long ago.

The show’s director gave him a bit of advice that stuck: grief can be experienced at any time—it was Mallard’s job to communicate that. Ever since, the actor has gravitated toward stories about mental health, and to layered characters who will make people feel seen. On Ginny & Georgia—one of Netflix’s most popular series to date—he plays the “very Jordan Catalano” bad boy Marcus. The actor was drawn to the series’ unique tone and overall message. “Life is absurd, and that’s what I really love about Ginny & Georgia,” he explains. “It can be quirky. It can be strange. It can be funny.

It can be sad.” Mallard connects deeply with Marcus because of their shared experiences: As young men, they’re pressured not to be vulnerable, not to be emotional. “There’s a real sense of showing things aren’t nec-essarily as they seem on the surface,” says the actor, who, in addition to starring in the second season of the show, will play Davis Pickett—a wellheeled, brooding youth plagued by family tragedy—in director Hannah Marks’s adaptation of John Green’s Turtles All the Way Down, which co-stars Isabela Merced and Succession’s J. Smith-Cameron.

FELIX MALLARD

The model-turned–TV heartthrob learned how to connect with himself the first time he landed on a film set. Now, he’s more committed than ever to performances that make people feel seen.

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“Somehow, acting is the intersection of the things I am interested in.”

HAVANA ROSE LIU

From fashion darling to promising actor, Havana Rose Liu is inspired by the authenticity of life. Good thing she said yes to a chance happening on the street.

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HAVANA ROSE LIU’S origin story echoes those of Old Hollywood, when stars were chosen merely for the way they existed, their radiance catching the eye of the right person in the right place at the right time.

Today, the 25-year-old says that she was “dragged” into the spotlight. After years of rejecting overtures from photographers on the streets of her native New York out of fear of being trapped in a stranger’s basement, she finally gave in and started modeling. “I was street cast by the same casting director probably three or four times. Finally the last time, I was like, ‘Okay, I will see what comes of this.’” What came was a slew of commercials, short films, and eventually, features. “My inspiration for performance comes from life more than anything else,” the New York University graduate muses. “I was all over the map before. Somehow, acting is the intersection of the things I am interested in.” After a number of supporting roles in projects including Netflix’s The Chair, Mayday, and The Sky Is Everywhere, Liu starred in her first feature film last year, the A24 thriller No Exit, as Darby Thorne, a recovering drug addict who stumbles upon a kidnapping at a rest stop during a blizzard. Liu learned she had been chosen for the role while she had Covid, and immediately felt skeptical.

Really? was her first reaction. This year, the actor will appear in the highly anticipated queer comedy Bottoms directed by Emma Seligman that also stars Rachel Sennott and The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri. “It’s everything I crave out of a rich, punchy comedy,” says Liu, who herself identifies as queer. “I didn’t even know how much I craved that until I read the script.”

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“Being in your body allows you to move out of your mind.”

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DANCE INFORMS Katerina Tannenbaum’s acting as well as her daily life. “There’s such an awareness that comes with it,” explains the 29-year-old Portland native, who originally moved to New York to attend dance school before pivoting to theater.

“If you can clock the muscle connecting your left toe to your shin, then you can probably tell when someone is a little off in the room.” It’s a skill that’s served her well. For several seasons of Better Call Saul, Tannenbaum played Amber, the methaddicted girlfriend of Nacho, a career criminal with a big heart. Determined to avoid falling into a caricature, she ate a carton of ice cream during her audition tape—something just clicked. Outside of the six-season AMC series, Tannenbaum’s resumé includes several supporting roles in critical darlings, including the short-lived but beloved series Sweetbitter as well as the teen comedy Betty. In 2021, Tannenbaum got her big break when she joined the cast of HBO’s Sex and the City revival series And Just Like That… as Carrie Bradshaw’s neighbor, Lisette. She was offered the role by creator Michael Patrick King, with whom she had worked on the Netflix series AJ and the Queen. A majority of Tannenbaum’s scenes are opposite Sarah Jessica Parker, from whom the young actor learned a lot. “She has an ability to be really direct about what she needs, which is really hard to do in this industry: be direct, but also kind,” Tannenbaum says of her costar. As she’s currently filming the second season of And Just Like That…, the actor can’t say too much about what’s to come, except that the looks are “fab.” It’s not the only project her lips are sealed about— she’s also in the midst of writing her first feature film. “Dance has given me a great amount of focus and discipline and groundedness,” she notes. “Being in your body allows you to move out of your mind.”

KATERINA TANNENBAUM As an actor, Katerina Tannenbaum has an advantage: the lifelong dancer’s connection to her body makes her more attuned her surroundings—a quality that radiates from the screen with every role she portrays.

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KELSEY ASBILLE

KELSEY ASBILLE is both a lead in one of the most popular television shows of the moment and a self-appointed super senior.

She plays Monica Dutton on the American neo-Western Yellowstone, a Native American teacher who marries into a violent and dysfunctional family and lives a life of relentless distress. “She can’t catch a break,” the 31-year-old actor reflects.

Between shooting the Paramount Network hit and projects like the comedy-crime anthology Fargo, Asbille, who lives in Brooklyn, has been studying human relations, race, and ethnic studies at Columbia University since she was 17.

“How long has it been? Thirteen, 14 years later, I’m the old gal in class.” Despite starting her career in her teens, Asbille does not consider herself to have been a child actor. When she was 13, she landed a role as a “local nerd” on the WB teen soap One Tree Hill, which shot in Wilmington, North Carolina—just a few hours’ drive from her home in Columbia, South Carolina. “It was a fluke,” she remembers. “They had to tell me to stop smiling because I was so excited to be there.” Before the opportunity came along, Asbille thought that “being an actor just didn’t seem real.” But almost two decades later, her performances feel realer than ever. “I care so much about my characters,” she says, particularly when it comes to Monica in Yellowstone, a show she’s been in since its debut in 2018. The actor is committed not only to continued learning, but also to findimg a truthful headspace for emotionally intense performances, integrating her character’s emotional life into her own. Monica’s trauma—which spans explosions, brain injuries, and child loss—helped Asbille bond with her own parent. Ahead of filming its last season, she road-tripped from Brooklyn to the show’s Montana set with her mother. “She was there for all of those really traumatic scenes,” the actor remembers. “It allowed her to share experiences with me that we hadn’t talked about before. It was a really powerful time, a moving experience.”

Over a decade into her career, the 31-year-old actor is still studying. As a “perma” Ivy League undergrad, she’s also a regular on Yellowstone, one of the streaming era’s most-watched shows.

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“How long has it been? Thirteen, 14 years later, I’m the old gal in class.”

Makeup by SARA TAGALOA Hair by TIAGO GOYA Nails by BLUE ARIOS Grooming for

Danny Ramirez by COLLEEN DOMINIQUE for EXCLUSIVE ARTISTS using CALDERA + LAB and ORIBE

Photography Assistance by MAYA GUICE Fashion Assistance by TALLULA BELL MADDEN, MOLLY NOVACK, and TOM GRIMSDELL

Makeup Assistance by HANNAH JACLYN Hair Assistance by SADAF AZIMI

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TOO WEIRD AND Jim Shaw eschews minimalism and defies the limits of normalcy. How else could the artist, whose debut Gagosian Beverly Hills show reanimates the mythological in popular entertainment, capture the absurdity of Hollywood?

BY ROSE COURTEAU PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRAD TORCHIA

TOO MUCH

The artist Jim Shaw’s

STUDIO SITS IN A WHITE stucco building on North Figueroa Street in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Highland Park, sandwiched between a jiu-jitsu academy and a small art gallery, across from a cluster of bungalows. I wonder if I’m in the right place when I arrive there this past winter, just as a red Kia slows to a stop and parks in front. Out climbs Shaw. Wearing a pronounced stoop, paint-stained khakis, and a teal Members Only jacket, he ushers me inside the three-room studio and clears a seat for me on a beige vinyl-upholstered bench that reminds me of a 1970s Ford pickup truck my father used to drive. Soon, his studio manager appears, followed a few minutes later by Sarah Watson, director of Gagosian Beverly Hills, where Shaw’s exhibition “Thinking the Unthinkable” is currently on display. She’s brought pastries, and as she unboxes them, she tells me she often drives right past Shaw’s studio and has to double back.

Such disorientation is similar to the not unpleasant feeling of talking with the artist himself. Like his adopted city of LA, Shaw’s mind is sprawling: regardless of what he’s talking about, his voice maintains a consistent, almost reportorial register, like a stripmall advertising diverse businesses with identical signage. (At one point, he manages to invoke chicken houses, magic mushrooms, and the Iran-Contra affair in scarcely more than a minute.) Upon greeting me, Shaw confesses that he’s discombobulated, having just traveled from Connecticut, where he and his wife, fellow artist Marnie Weber, recently bought a second home to be closer to their daughter in Brooklyn. They’ve owned their LA home, not far from Shaw’s studio, for 30 years.

Though he’s lived here most of his life, Shaw seems ambivalent about the city. He observes that, like New York, LA has grown almost prohibitively expensive for artists. “You have to have a fairly high income to not put most of it into the cost of living and taxes,” he says, noting that his middle-class childhood in the 1950s involved far more “privation compared to today.” After graduating with an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in the 1970s, Shaw discovered that “the art world basically didn’t function economically” for him and his fellow graduates (including his friend the late Mike Kelley, with whom he co-founded the experimental noise band Destroy All Monsters). At that time, Shaw assumed he couldn’t cut it as a professional artist. “I thought I was too weird for the art world,” he remembers. For several years, he worked in the visual effects industry, lending his skills to such diverse cultural outputs as Barbra Streisand music videos (“She was the most picky perfectionist ever,” Shaw says of the singer, “more so than myself”), The Abyss, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4, and the musical science fiction-cumromantic comedy Earth Girls Are Easy.

He didn’t quit his day job until the success of his epic series “My Mirage,” 1986-91, comprised of nearly 170 paintings, drawings,

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silkscreens, photographs, films, and sculptures that follow Billy, a fictional middle-class white man, through adolescent angst, psychedelic hallucinations, pagan occultism, and evangelical conversion during the 1960s and ‘70s. Formally channeling comic strips, posters, and religious propaganda, the series functions both as a Boomer bildungsroman and an associative chronicle of the eras’ anxieties and visual influences. It also draws upon Shaw’s own feelings of alienation, if only obliquely.

Growing up in a small town in Michigan with “three sisters and a mother, and a father [who] was a workaholic,” Shaw felt he was “not male enough to fit into boy society,” he recalls. “I found going to school disturbing and sad.” He uses similar language to imagine how his mother, a medical transcriber, must have experienced midcentury America. “I’m sure it was a very weird and depressing time to be a woman.”

Shaw’s practicality—and his propensity for charting the vicissitudes of the art economy—might seem surprising given the surrealist nature of his art, but it is part of what makes his prolific output so varied and interesting. “Shaw shows us that art is work,” wrote the artist and critic Matthew Weinstein in a review of “The End is Here,” Shaw’s 2015 massive retrospective at the New Museum in New York. “He does not apply cooling filters over his sweaty industriousness… While many artists are saying, ‘Here is the thing,’ Shaw is saying, ‘Here are a lot of things.’ This attitude towards art produces a generously heterogenous realm of conceptual play that is both hilarious and melancholy. It accesses a rich range of experience; it utilizes and exercises our potential to think on many levels simultaneously.”

“Thinking the Unthinkable” further demonstrates the truth of this observation. It’s the artist’s first show with Gagosian since leaving Metro Pictures gallery, which represented him from the 1990s until it shuttered in 2021, and it’s a reminder that although he eschews seriality, he embraces his fixations. Chief among those fixations is Hollywood, which he depicts with anthropological trippiness. In Going for the One, 2022, a Myra Breckinridge–era Raquel Welch, clad in an American flag monokini, extends four arms in the manner of Kali, the Hindu goddess of creation and destruction, while standing atop the headquarters of 20th Century Fox. A naked young man faces her, his back to the viewer, while Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra, flanked by Mark Antony and Julius Caesar, slinks in the background among vertiginous skyscrapers that look like pyramids.

Keep looking, and you might realize that Caesar is also the evil emperor from Star Wars—who in turn bears an uncanny resemblance to today’s Rupert Murdoch—while the naked man echoes the album cover of Yes’s best-selling 1977 record from which the work takes its title. Made using silk screen, acrylic, and airbrush (to an “almost too perfect” effect, says Shaw), the artwork feels both ironic in its iconography and earnest in its meditation on gender and power. What myths continue to stir us?

Jim Shaw in his Highland Park studio in Los Angeles.

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What personal relationship do we have with the desires of a collective consciousness?

That painting, along with the others on display—including four titled The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 2022, inspired by the strange history of LSD in America and featuring a hallucinating Cary Grant— bristle with detail. “Sometimes I might include too much,” says Shaw.

(He counts the 15th century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch and the satirical ‘50s comic book series MAD Magazine among his maximalist influences.) But the referential intricacy of his own creations reveal a

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Marie Kondo-level of discipline in comparison to his penchant for collecting—as documented by “Thrift Store Paintings,” an early-‘90s accumulated series of approximately 100 amateur paintings that Shaw gathered from secondhand sources, and “The Hidden World,” his cache of nearly 1,000 ephemera from American-made religions and societies like the Church of Scientology, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the Church of Latter-day Saints. Eventually, such collections require offloading. “I don’t want to leave my wife and daughter to sift through all my stuff,” says Shaw. In the last few years, he sold “Thrift Store Paintings” to a collector

“I’m always interested in narrative.

I’m not interested in necessarily all things being apparent.

I want there to be things to be uncovered.”

in Belgium and “The Hidden World” to the University of Michigan’s Broad Museum— though Oism, an elaborate fictional cult he invented in the 1990s, continues to inspire his work and arguably serves as the most synthesizing outlet for his fascination with religion and nostalgia.

Because of his obsessiveness, Shaw suspects that he has Asperger Syndrome. He cites clinical psychologist Louis Sass’s book Madness and Modernism, which identified the sensibilities of schizophrenia in many great works of modern art. He thinks a similar analysis could be made of someone like himself; one’s most creatively generative qualities can feel unwieldy. “Look at me,” he says. “Look at the art I do. It’s pretty clear that there’s something wrong with me.”

Alongside “Thinking the Unthinkable,” Shaw has been developing an even larger project that also takes Hollywood as its subject. In 2020, German-American investor and philanthropist Nicolas Berggruen asked for the artist’s help in decorating a GeorgianRevival mansion near Beverly Hills. Designed

by Gordon Kaufmann in the 1930s, it was occupied for decades by socialite and art collector Edith Mayer Goetz and her husband William, the prominent movie producer. Berggruen “wanted to restore the house with a twist,” he tells me, and commissioned Shaw, along with a number of other artists, “to give it some magic.”

Shaw’s answer to Berggruen’s prompt sits in his studio, awaiting installation in the house’s library—formerly a dining room. For inspiration, he looked to the room’s history as a den of Hollywood power and to its original architecture, including its baffle—a demi-wall once used to

conceal a set of servants’ passages to the kitchen that reminds Shaw of a uterus. Other touchstones include old Warner Bros. cartoons, vintage book covers, philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s thoughts on the evolution of literacy, and a poster Shaw cherished as a child that portrayed a land of make-believe. Against a large theater backdrop made of muslin, Shaw incorporates his many references in a mural landscape that takes as its conceit The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan’s 1678 Puritan allegory that follows a man through a dreamlike journey from his hometown to the “Celestial City” of redemption. The result is a literary metaverse where books are characters, their covers tentacled with little arms and legs, and their titles fodder for wordplay: Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake struggle across a bog of sin (per Bunyan’s parable), while Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents lies in the Valley of Humiliation, and Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking scrambles up Lucre Hill. A pair of e-readers roast marshmallows over a flame tindered by copies of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, sending a column of smoke into the sky that morphs into a fallopian-like antler that floats above the scene. The panorama will eventually wrap around the baffle as the room’s centerpiece.

I ask Shaw if he’s ever undergone psychoanalysis, given the associative nature of such pieces. He hasn’t, though his book Dreams, 1995, which collected years’ worth of pencil renditions of his dreams, remains one of his best-known works. It also cemented Shaw’s interest in puns, which extend beyond the mural in the Berggruen library installation in the form of wooden book figurines. Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, for example, spouts a plywood cutout of a sobbing Johnnie Ray, a closeted singer famous in the 1950s for songs with tearful themes, while Dorothy Kilgallen, the television actress and newspaper columnist rumored to be Ray’s girlfriend, emerges from her book Murder One, a collection of true crime stories published after her mysterious death in 1965. (Shaw, admitting to an interest in what some would call conspiracy theories, tells me that Kilgallen died right before she could “break the JFK assassination wide open.”) A pair of coffee tables look like sunny-side up eggs, a nod to the room’s fertility motif and to the Goetzs’s friend Frank Sinatra, the model for a character in Swooner Crooner, a 1944 Porky Pig wartime propaganda cartoon in which a heartthrob rooster sings to hens and affects their egg production.

Taken together, the room’s assembled works contain “a lot of occluded negativity,” says Shaw, and inevitably influenced “Thinking the Unthinkable.” One of the exhibition’s sculptures, a throne that maps Charles Manson’s peers and influences in the style of a Kabbalistic tree of life, was originally made for the library, but ultimately deemed too sinister for the space. “I’m always interested in narrative. I’m not necessarily interested in all things being apparent. I want there to be things to be uncovered.”

If the Berggruen collection had a name, what might it be? Maybe “Pilgrim’s Progress,” Shaw supposes—though “Gutenberg Galaxy,” taken from McLuhan’s 1962 book of the same name, or “Book Revue,” the title of a 1946 Daffy Duck cartoon, would also do.

He admits that the entire commission from Berggruen—whose concurrent plans to build a “secular monastery” in the Santa Monica Mountains are currently awaiting approval by local authorities—is itself rather surreal. But so is Hollywood. So is growing up and growing old, something Shaw is bracing for. He doesn’t know if he’ll ever fully extract himself from LA. “I never planned for the future,” he says. “I always just worked to earn enough money to get through the present.”

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REFIK ANADOL’S

The Turkish digital artist trains his bespoke artificial intelligence models to dream. After educating them on datasets containing hundreds of thousands of images from our collective memory— scenes of nature, urban spaces, scans of human bodies—he “paints,” coaxing his machines to produce mind-melting visual fantasies that appear briefly on a screen before fading away, never to be repeated.

DATABASE OF DREAMS

BY DEAN KISSICK PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRAD TORCHIA

Installation view of Refik Anadol,“Unsupervised,” The Museum of Modern Art, New York, November 19, 2022 – March 5, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and ©2022 The Museum of Modern Art.

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Installation view of Refik Anadol, “Unsupervised,” The Museum of Modern Art, New York, November 19, 2022 – March 5, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and ©2022 The Museum of Modern Art.

In the lobby of MoMA for the past few months, a huge LED SCREEN HAS BEAMED an abstract CGI animation that morphs from blossoming clouds to splashing fountains of paint to lurid fungal blooms to pale, Surrealist pencil-like drawings. The audience sits and watches or mills around it. A little girl films the screen, holding up her phone and following its movements, swaying from side to side as though entranced.

This is “Unsupervised,” 2022, an exhibition by Turkish artist Refik Anadol that makes a serious attempt to answer the question, What would a machine dream about after seeing the collection of the Museum of Modern Art? Near the wall text that details the work’s concept, two young women explain artificial intelligence (A.I.) to a small kid in a Naruto hoodie: You don’t build an A.I., you train one.

“Like a computer?” he asks. “Kind of,” they respond, “but it learns.”

Here, at the entrance of one of the greatest modern art museums in the world, it feels like we’ve reached the boundary of a new and strange territory. Time and space are being manipulated and represented in radically different ways, with 200 years of art history reimagined as a series of infinite-duration simulations on a 24-square-foot display.

There has been a great deal of concern over the development of A.I. in the past year, particularly surrounding text-to-image A.I. diffusion models such as DALL-E and Midjourney. The ability to appreciate—and also make—art is one of the qualities that makes us unique among living beings. If software learns to create images—perhaps even art—what does that mean for artists? For humanity? The discourse around A.I. and art is very negative, when it’s written about at all. This incredible new technology is treated as an existential threat to our livelihoods, our intellectual property, and our spirit. Anadol, however, is focused on a different side of the story: he shows how artists can collaborate with A.I. harmoniously, and how similar advanced technologies might help art to move in unexpected directions, hopefully toward progress. He arrived at MoMA at the perfect moment.

Anadol was born in 1985 in Istanbul, the Turkish city that bridges Europe and Asia both geographically and culturally. “That was a really very powerful starting point in life,” he recalls, “when I think about the desire to connect the physical and virtual. It is a very similar feeling I think to connecting the West and East.” He grew up in a family of teachers in which, he says, “being a nerd is something that happens.” At eight years old he got

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his first computer, and throughout his youth he enjoyed playing and was fascinated by strategy games, and in particular StarCraft.

To make A.I. art in an ethical manner, Anadol believes it’s important that artists claim responsibility for the A.I. models they employ.

Rather than off-the-shelf diffusion models, he uses bespoke GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks), a different sort of A.I. entirely. A GAN learns by putting two neural networks in competition with each other in whatever specific task they’re performing. Furthermore, rather than using a dataset of other people’s personal work—as is the case with some of the popular diffusion models—Anadol’s GANs are trained on vast datasets of what he calls “collective memories.” Things that he hopes “belong to humanity, like nature, space, culture, and cities. I try to look at the whole of nature as an input.” In 2020, for his exhibition “Quantum Memories” at the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia, he used 200 million photos of Earth —its landscapes, oceans, and atmosphere—as a dataset. In 2019, for “Machine Hallucination: NYC,” he used 113 million images of New York City, and for Sense of Space, at 2021’s Venice Biennale of Architecture, he used approximately 70 terabytes of MRI brain scans to build an immersive installation exploring the human mind.

Anadol is able to find great beauty in mathematics. It can often seem as if algorithms make today’s world smaller, but he finds ways of using them to make it feel larger, to create dazzling, immersive environments and spectacular outdoor projections. Over the years, he and his studio team of data scientists, researchers, designers, architects, and composers have trained more than 100 A.I. models on over 3 billion images. There is a famous Jorge Luis Borges story from 1946, On Rigor in Science, set in a world in which cartography develops into such a precise science that a map of the empire was the same size as the empire itself, and was laid on top of it, covering it. Eventually it fell into disrepair, although tattered fragments of the map coult still be found, as Borges writes, sheltering the occasional beast or beggar. Anadol’s art practice, likewise, could be understood as a series of Borgesian software installations made from all the world’s memories and data, writing and coding a form of optimistic science fiction that takes our universe as its subject matter.

Now, for “Unsupervised,” he trained his GANs on 138,151 images of works from the MoMA collection. Having shown at institutions including the Centre Pompidou, Pinakothek der Moderne, and Walt Disney Concert Hall; participated in successful auctions with Sotheby’s and Christie’s; and joined the artist roster at Berlin’s König Galerie, Anadol has done more than almost anyone to transform data visualization into high art—for this project however, the data he visualized was art.

The project was born from an online exhibition on the NFT art

“People are mostly trying to mimic reality, but in my mind, it’s much more inspiring to make A.I. have a fantasy than to recreate reality.”

platform Feral File in 2021. To begin, Anadol and his team downloaded the museum’s public collection of images and metadata from the hosting platform GitHub. Next, they used open-source software to build a complex map of the archive in a multi-dimensional digital space. They trained their GAN on the map and, months of learning later, had their supercomputer rendering a continuous dream-flow of surreal visions inspired by the history of modern art in real time; they’d stopped the training relatively early, in fact, because Anadol wanted the visuals to remain abstract, and not resemble other artworks or develop into recognizable forms. “People are mostly trying to mimic reality,” he says, “but in my mind, it’s much more inspiring to make A.I. have a fantasy than to recreate reality.”

These are the supercomputer’s phosphene-like impressions of modern art. They are forms that might have existed in the archive, but don’t. By connecting many different visions across three centuries, the A.I. imagines paths not taken in art history, and paths that still might be taken in the future, giving them speculative forms and colors.

When he was invited to exhibit the project at MoMA the following year, Anadol decided to add yet more layers of data and remake “Unsupervised” as a site-specific installation. Eventually the surrounding environment (light levels, noise, the movement of the audience and staff through the lobby, the weather outside in the sculpture garden) crept into the machine’s dataset, affecting what it showed.

As such, “Unsupervised” is made up of three separate but intimately connected works—MoMA, Generative Study I, Fluid Dreams—drawn by GANs and rendered by bespoke software, appearing on the lobby screen one after another. The first, MoMA, sets the foundation upon which the following two works iterate. Hallucinatory traces of unrealized artworks, the A.I.’s visual interpretation of the MoMA archive, appear on the screen for a moment and fade away, never to be repeated. The second, Generative Study I, sketches new patterns on top of these A.I. hallucinations, connecting them with intricate gossamer webs. The third, Fluid Dreams, a signature form of Anadol’s, reimagines these interconnected visions as splashing effervescent surf, made up of around 100 million digital particles.

Fluid Dreams is so complex, in fact, that it has to be rendered in advance— even Anadol’s specially crafted supercomputer cannot produce the visualization in real time. “This is my brush,” the artist says. “I’m not proud of my skills with drawing. I’m not proud of my skills using pen and paper, but I’m pretty confident that I can draw anything in my mind with a computer.”

Anadol has had a couple of great revelations in his career so far. The first came in 2009, during his studies at Istanbul’s Bilgi University, where he transformed the façade of Santralistanbul into a digital canvas. That’s when he came up with the idea of embedding media art into architecture using light as a material and data as a pigment. It’s also when he coined the term “data painting,” the idea that data can be given form, made visible, and be transmuted into bright, colorful pigments. “When I found that data is not just numbers—that data is a form of a memory—my mind was blown away,” he explains. “Since then I’ve felt like data can take any form, like a painting or a sculpture. It’s an infinite imagination because it’s not stuck in the reality of life. It doesn’t need to follow the rules of Newtonian physics; it goes beyond what we can do.”

It was in California, where he moved to get an MFA in the Department of Design Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles, that Anadol had the second of his great revelations. In 2016 he became an artist in residence at Google’s Artists and Machine Intelligence program.

“Data is an infinite imagination because it’s not stuck in the reality of life. It doesn’t need to follow the rules of Newtonian physics; it goes beyond what we can do.”

Around that time, Google was developing its DeepDream A.I. (which runs on a convolutional neural network). He saw how A.I. algorithms might lead to new methods of image-making and completely new aesthetics.

He realized that if a machine could learn, it could remember—and so it could dream, it could hallucinate. That’s when he coined the terms “A.I. data painting” and “A.I. data sculpture” to describe how data could be shaped and pigmented in collaboration with A.I. From there, he began his ongoing series of “Machine Hallucinations” works, of which “Unsupervised” is one, and set about training A.I.s to conjure visualizations based on different datasets. Now, his dream is to open a door to altered perception, revealing the world in a totally new way.

Asked whether he’s ever used psychedelics himself—real-world psychedelics, not psychedelic software—he replies, “I’m practicing. A couple of months ago I returned from Brazil—from the Yawanawá people in the Amazon—where I’ve been closely experimenting with plant medicines,” he says. “I don’t believe ‘Machine Hallucinations’ as a name can happen without understanding what ‘hallucination’ means… And psychedelics are a practice people see so much positivity around. I believe in ancient wisdom and I think they’re bringing that.” He has also been fantasizing, he says, about collecting the largest rainforest biome dataset in the world in collaboration with the Yawanawá and using it to grow an immersive, artificial-reality rainforest.

What sets Anadol apart from most artists today is his great optimism regarding technology—how it can change art, and how it can change us. “I don’t know any other plan than this. This is probably the only logical way to invent the language of humanity, by using the collective memories of humanity, collective dreams and collective consciousness.”

The “Machine Hallucinations” offer a new interpretation of the automatic writing practices used by artists of the 20th century Surrealist and Fluxus movements. While Anadol’s avant-garde predecessors relied on chance or accident, or found techniques for unconscious mark-making to achieve the effect of automatism, he uses algorithms whose outputs he can never quite predict. “I don’t believe the simple output of a machine can be art,” he says with excitement as we breeze past the end of our allotted interview time. “For me, the art is happening after the machine has given us an output.” While so many worry about A.I. replacing human artists, Anadol shows potential avenues for collaboration with it that only broaden the possibilities of self-expression and creative potential.

“Interacting with an A.I. model is very much an artistic endeavor,” he concludes. “I’m the conductor at the end.”

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POCKETS OF OUR OWN UNIVERSE

Photography by Schaun Champion

Photography by Arthur Jafa. Image courtesy of the artist.

Arthur Jafa and Bradford Young share a visual language—one that articulates disparities, fulfillments, and uncompromising truths through the mechanics of emotional cinematography.

Jafa coined what he refers to as “Black visual intonation”—exemplified through his work on Julie Dash’s seminal Daughters of the Dust in 1991 and Spike Lee’s Crooklyn in 1994—before carrying over his filmmaking practice into the art world. Since his 2000 presentation at the Whitney Biennial, Jafa has oscillated between the two realms, attempting with each project to grapple with and complicate the assumptions about Blackness that permeate social structures. It’s a trajectory that Young—who earned Sundance cinematography awards for Pariah, Mother of George, and Ain’t Them Bodies Saints before collaborating with Ava DuVernay on Selma and Denis Villeneuve on Arrival—can imagine himself following, as the Kentucky-born cinematographer ponders whether his next chapter will take place on or off a film set. After all, motion imaging is just one element of interest for both purists—one that binds them to their tight-knit communities and encourages them to expand into other pursuits.

Bradford Young: There’s a real intentional framework to obey in the film industry— certain rules to be engaged with the story in a way that… I’m still trying to figure out.

As cinematographers, our relationship to time is much like that of artists; it’s a contemplative, accumulative practice.

Making films—specifically the films I make with Black artists, like Selma—you have to play the “uplift” game with a certain amount of time given. That doesn’t allow you to think about the past in a new way, and it doesn’t allow you to think about the future. I think about time as a slow assassin. It’s a marronage that cannot exist in standard industry contexts, because time is their weapon—it’s the thing that they deprive you of in order to keep you in line. When art is made out of that context, it’s more human.

Arthur Jafa: One early, profound experience that framed my whole relationship to cinematography was working with Charles [Burnett] on My Brother’s Wedding. It was a chaotic shoot—I mean, a classic Black indie film experience. I came out to Los Angeles to be a PA, or at best a second or third camera assistant. There was so much crew turnover the first few weeks—people having affairs, affairs collapsing, classic shit—until it was just the two of us in the camera department. I’ll never forget it being just me and Charles on a location pre-lighting. Charles shot like a painter. He’d stand next to the camera, walk over with one light bulb, screw it in, then walk back to look at it. It had nothing to do with moving big lights around, gaffers, or any of that kind of stuff. Six years later, on the set of Daughters of the Dust, it was very much the same. We had a very small crew, and shot with a lot of available light. Later, people would say, “Oh, it’s just available light,” as if you just pointed the camera and shot, which always irritated me.

If it were that simple, we’d see a lot more films that looked as good as Daughters. But we don’t. The “available light” thing became, How do you work given minimal means? Then I went to Crooklyn, which was great in many ways, but I never really figured out how to transpose that way of working onto the context. It wasn’t the slowness that I missed (we worked together on Daughters), but the freedom to contemplate and operate free of constraint. Constraint on a movie set is manifested in terms of time. I remember when I saw the films [The Model and The Model: Oshun and the Dream] you and Kahlil [Joseph] did with— Young: Seu Jorge?

Jafa: Exactly. It was incredible. Even now, they are some of the most amazing things I’ve seen. I remember asking, “Well, what did you do?” And you were like, “Man, we had no lights. It was just me moving things around.” Whatever that state of grace—if you want to call it a state of grace—is, it’s always harder with a lot of people around.

Young: Yeah.

Jafa: It requires people you’ve worked with before: people you have some continuity with—their personalities, their preferred way of being spoken to, their sense of speed, and how they manage temporal constraints. All of these…pressures. It’s like having a saxophone. It has a fixed set of mechanical actions. Not to reduce people to instruments, but we are all instruments within a production. How do you wield an instrument? How does the director wield you as a cinematographer? It matters how people look at you, how they talk to you, how they declare things, or sometimes just ask, “Well, what do you think we should do?” Even when you allow the other person to initiate an exchange, you still want a context that reinforces Black sociality, but the “classic production mode” didn’t evolve in response to what Black sociality is or should look like—it doesn’t reflect that. So when you’re inside of it, you’re constantly trying to create these pocket universes.

Even if it’s just between you and one other person, you’re trying to create a momentary asylum where you can confer with one another in a moment of grace that disregards the alien, ill-fitting constraints of the protocols. It’s always there, but you want to create your own gravitational field inside of it.

So, you work with the same people again and again and again if you can.

That’s one of the things I saw with Malik [Hassan Sayeed] over the years, because he has such a tight crew of brothers and sisters. You can be working on a job for Chanel with Malik, and it’ll be mostly Black folks. I remember when we were working on Formation with Beyoncé. You would think, Beyoncé? Super Black. You know what I mean? But she was like, “I’ve never been on a set like this before.” Malik and I just looked at each other, and said, “It’s always like this.” We never felt like it had to be a Black project to have a Black crew. Ain’t nobody doing a list of who’s white and who ain’t on their crew. It’s about working with the people you know.

Young: And the people you love.

Jafa: I feel like you and I…we’re X-Men but there ain’t no Mr. X—Xavier or Malcolm—you know what I mean? Ain’t no school for us, no asylum, so we’re fumbling around in the dark looking for each other. There are things that come up specifically around just being a Black person in this industry.

You want to be a samurai sword, but they’re fucking dicing hotdogs with you. You want to be used to your fullest capacity, and it’s just so hard to find that, man. Like, look at me. I’m at peace with myself, but this is not the arc I imagined—it’s not. I’m 60, and I’m still looking toward my first feature film. But I am happy with where I am. I used to look back and think I could have achieved a lot more as a cinematographer, which is an art form I love and respect. [John] Coltrane in Miles [Davis’s] Kind of Blue did not say, “I didn’t write the music” or “It’s not my band, so whatever.” Coltrane [who played saxophone on the album] did ‘Trane. My thing is like, I never got to… well, it depends on who you talk to. Some people say, “You got your Coltrane moment.” But it’s weird, no matter how interesting or respected a moment is, you want to have 10 of them before moving on to be bandleader. And even then, we know from the history of jazz, people go back and forth.

Young: I remember a few years ago I went to visit Greig Fraser on the set of Rogue One in London. They were doing these massive reshoots with hundreds of people…it was big! The first thing I did was try to understand where the light was coming, you know, I was in my cinematographer’s head. Then I wanted to see how Greig survives in that kind of machine.

This is a guy I really respect. He works at a high level of art but also knows how to command personnel—gather and command human resources in a way that’s special. Instantly I thought, This guy’s gonna be shooting movies up into his 70s. He’s gonna be up on these sets till he’s an older person. It was the first time that I was able to realize that I wasn’t that person. I’m not going to be on set when I’m that age—I don’t

Photography by Schaun Champion

“IF YOU DON’T RESPECT THAT CAMERA— IF YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND WHAT THAT THING IS DOING IN CORRESPONDENCE WITH THIS SOCIAL STRUCTURE, THIS CULTURE, THIS VILLAGE-BUILDING— THEN IT AIN’T FILMMAKING.” —BRADFORD YOUNG culturedmag.com 135

Photography by Melinda Nugent. Image courtesy of the artist and Arthur Jafa.

“I DON’T WANT TO LEAN INTO THE IDEA THAT BLACK PEOPLE SOMEHOW OPERATE BEST WHEN THERE’S A LACK OF MATERIAL OR RESOURCES. THERE’S A FINE LINE BETWEEN MAKING SOMETHING OUT OF NOTHING AND SAYING THAT WE’RE AT OUR BEST WHEN OPERATING WITH DEFICITS.

WE KNOW THAT’S NOT TRUE BECAUSE OF JAZZ, IF NOTHING ELSE.” —ARTHUR JAFA

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want to. I have other interests, you know. Cinematography is an axe, and there’s a big ol’ tree. I don’t know what the tree is, but we are all chipping away at it. There’s something else that I know I need to be doing. I’m pretty certain I’ll still be accessing time-based motion picture practices, but within a space in which I can do other things. This is not in reaction to anything—other than that maybe time and space have expired for me in all the best ways. Maybe what’s next is a hybridized version.

Jafa: Early on, I had visions of making at least 20 films. Like, full-on stories and narratives. I’m 60 now, so my timeframe and what I’m trying to accomplish has definitely shifted. As you get older, you find yourself just getting closer to the actual essence of what you want to do. I just want a film that feels like listening to a Miles Davis record, right? That’s the simplest, least complicated way to say it. But how many films can you say that about? A handful, to me. At best you’ll see a moment. I think of Jeanne Moreau walking the streets at night in Paris [in Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows] with Miles Davis playing on the soundtrack. It’s still a sublime moment. I want to make a movie that can do that the entire time, not for just an instant. The thing is though, a film has to be a proposition. A film—particularly a Black film—is powerful because of the propositional nature of it, not because it fully realizes something to the Nth degree. Daughters is like that; it’s a proposition. I’ve accepted that I’ve gotta be propositional for many of the things that I want to do in my life. They’re gonna have aspects in them that are going to be largely implied, like in music.

Young: That’s what filmmaking is. In terms of division of labor and talent, we bring all these people together to help us manifest this greater vision or hope or, as you said, proposition. I’m very clear on what that feeling is for the cinematographer when a community or a group of people come together to experience the amalgamation of this thing we call a movie. I remember going to see A Most Violent Year at AFI Fest. J.C. [Chandor, the writer/ director] asked me to come see it, and I said, “I’m gonna come for five minutes.” I ended up staying for the whole film, sitting in the corner because I didn’t want anyone to see me. It was one of those rare times where I, the cinematographer, experienced euphoria in the life of a film. I had not seen the mix at the time, not heard the mix, nor seen how well the color grade had married with the re-edits and the re-cuts and the sound design and all the things that J.C. did so well. I’m not sure if I have ever felt the same ascending feeling on set, and I have a lot of questions about why that is because that’s something I yearn for. As you said, when I’m on set I’m in my instrument mode. It’s when I’m actually with my tools, where I’m with the things and the people that allow me to obviously, clearly, and respectfully enable the director to see their vision—and all the data points and memories or spirits in my body that let me translate it.

Jafa: I don’t want to lean into the idea that Black people somehow operate best when there’s a lack of material or resources. There’s a fine line between making something out of nothing and saying that we’re at our best when operating with deficits. We know that’s not true because of jazz, if nothing else. A person can have all the technical skills, the mastery, the resources, everything they need, and still operate in a state of emergency like it’s life or death. The point, finally, is ascension.

Young: If you’re doing something for eight years or 20 years straight, you’re just gonna be good at it. That can happen in a vacuum, but it’s also part of the cosmos, part of the universe, part of pedagogy, and a very intentional learning space that extends beyond the classroom and into the world.

That’s where people are; that’s what people are connecting to, whether they’re part of that chain of transmission or not.

Jafa: Continuity.

Young: It’s also about a certain continuity of working and a certain continuity of structure where Mother of George, Daughters of the Dust, and Belly [with cinematography by Sayeed] happen repeatedly, not once every 20 years. That is detrimental to all of our dreams and aspirations of what film can be for Black people. When you are not practicing on a consistent level, then you cannot get better and you cannot develop whatever it is you want. When you want that thing, you got to be willing to deal with all of the things that we bring to the table that are disruptive.

Jafa: People want the heat, but they don’t want the fire. That’s been my experience.

Young: In the dynamic of being individuals within a collective, we have to be in our feelings but ultimately not in our feelings. We have to be accepting but we also have to shed tears. That is what’s great and challenging about collaboration, community-building, nation-building. As imagemakers, the most beautiful part is we have to midwife all of that into existence. We cinematographers have to midwife film images and ultimately films into existence. That is our spiritual and professional mandate. The concept of perspective is embodied in the lens, you know. Perspective is like the Holy Grail of art. For all of it, perspective is key. The camera itself and persistence of vision is what makes it cinema. You can talk about sociology and structures and who’s got power and who doesn’t, but if you don’t respect that camera—if you don’t understand what that thing is doing in correspondence with this social structure, this culture, this villagebuilding—then it ain’t filmmaking. I’m not putting you in the bag of cinematography, you’re clearly more than that—though you are that—but it is our responsibility to that beautiful synergy between the director’s vision and what’s on screen. It’s also our duty to teach folks.

Jafa: You create manifestations. You got to be a student of the form.

You’ve got to deal with the instrument. I remember feeling like I’d figured out my path when I met Haile [Gerima], Alonzo [Crawford], and Abiyi [Ford] at Howard University. They offered me an assertion, a truly radical proposition: “We need a Black cinema.” So I asked them, “Well, what is that?” “Not Hollywood,” they said. And I said, “Cool…but tell me what it is, not just what it isn’t.” I realized I had to go back to the fundamentals of cinema.

Young: All of those questions don’t matter unless we go back and dribble.

As Black filmmakers, we want a lot out of the medium, but we’re not creating time signatures. Honestly, we just end up doing white people shit.

It goes back to the rigor, man. You got to put in the work. You have to think about it. You got to talk about it—and talking about it means you got to be in community; it means you got to be with the people you love.

Jafa: That’s why I keep coming back to the term “propositional.” There’s a kingdom in the future that exists for us where our kids can pick up a camera and just be as free as ‘Trane, Jimi [Hendrix] and Billie [Holiday]. But in this time and space we are in now, we’re passing shit to the future. We do the best we can, and occasionally we see the shit totally manifest itself.

Basically, we’re just with rocks in our hands trying to generate a spark. But a spark is everything. It’s the sun, a lightning strike, a forest fire; it’s home.

That’s why, when you say “practice,” I know what you mean. Or in my case, I feel like I’ve figured out, or at least evolved, strategies—through Photoshop or picture books or whatever—to stay in the question. How do I stay engaged with the question? The rigor? To continually say, How do I best formulate my thinking and then, when given the opportunity, implement it? I don’t just talk about it, but enter the space of making in a state of emergency. You know what I mean?

Young: To emerge.

Jafa: To emerge.

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INTERVAL PROJECTS MAIO COOKING SECTIONS LADI’SASHA JONES LIMBO ACCRA JEREMY SCHIPPER MINJAE KIM ESTUDIO FLUME AGENCY—AGENCY MATTAFORMA

BY EMMA LEIGH MACDONALD

FROM ACCRA TO SÃO PAULO, THE ARCHITECTS IN OUR THIRD ANNUAL SELECTION ARE SHAPING THE WORLD AROUND US.

BY TRANSLATING PERSONAL MISSIONS AND CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH INTO BREATHTAKING EXPERIMENTAL FORMS, THESE CONCEPT-DRIVEN DESIGNERS AND COLLABORATIVE STUDIOS ARE TRANSCENDING THE BOUNDARIES OF ARCHITECTURAL PRACTICE.

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All images courtesy of Interval Projects.

INTERVAL PROJECTS

“YOU CAN ONLY SHIFT the profession by being unprofessional,” laughs Marlisa Wise. Indeed, Interval Projects, the practice she co-founded with Benedict Clouette, is advancing the field of architecture. The pair have designed residences, health clinics, and offices since 2016, but it’s Interval Projects’s long-term work with activist and advocacy groups, and its aptitude for publicfacing design proposals, that distinguishes its approach.

The pair also boast a design ethos that challenges traditional approaches to architectural problem-solving.

The duo has been involved in a number of adaptive reuse projects focused on creating access to vacant public land. The first is Dutch Kills Loop, a landscape above an abandoned rail line in Long Island City, Queens.

Wise and Clouette were hired by a public coalition to design a proposal for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and their designs gave the organization the political leverage it needed to reclaim the abandoned land for public recreation. The project, currently under construction, is one of the studio’s first large-scale and long-term communityfocused initiatives.

Interval Projects is also transforming a Superfund site in Butte, Montana. After the EPA’s initial proposal to cap the site—formerly part of a copper mining operation in need of a decades-long cleanup—in a layer of concrete, Wise and Clouette were hired by the Restore Our Creek Coalition—a network of businesses, non-profits, artists, gardeners, and other community members—to draft a proposal that offered access to the land. (The community was so eager for their input that their project fee was covered by a local nun.) Instead of capping the site in concrete, Interval Projects’s plan removed mining waste from the creek, treated the water, and restored the space for public use.

In both cases, Wise and Clouette’s designs were eventually handed over to another architect, engineer, and builder to take over, due to the particularities of publicly funded constructions. But this collaborative cadence is just part of the process for the Interval Projects co-founders. “I like to use the analogy of a beach ball,” Clouette offers.

“The ball has certain physical parameters that are built into its design, but once you throw it into a crowd, the social situation that unfolds isn’t in your control.”

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Photography by José Hevia. Image courtesy of MAIO.

ANNA PUI G JANER , M AR IA CHAR NECO, ALFR ED O LÉRIDA, AND GUILLERMO LÓPEZ founded Barcelonabased studio MAIO in 2012 as a platform for discussion and collaboration. It was also a response to the ongoing housing crisis they saw in the Spanish city. The four architects had observed the over-construction of homes designed around the ideal of the nuclear family that directly contradicted what they knew of the city’s population and its needs. For this reason, López says, MAIO is devoted to designing “flexible typologies that can adapt through time and go beyond a specific and static family type.” The studio works in a way that, as Puigjaner puts it, “embeds time into their systems.”

For 110 Rooms—what could be considered their breakout project—the founders set out to create housing that would appeal to more than one demographic group, and that could adapt and change over time. “The building is composed of rooms that are similar in size, so that any domestic program can take place anywhere,” Puigjaner says of the project, which was completed in Barcelona in 2016. The rooms can be rearranged and reshaped, creating differently sized apartments as occupants’ needs shift.

“The idea is that in one hundred years, it can continue to evolve.” This same flexible and adaptable thinking has since inspired a new social housing project just outside of Barcelona, in Sant Feliu de Llobregat, which MAIO finished this February. The project borrows much of its form from the geometrically striking 110 Rooms, and also includes small gardens for each unit. As Puigjaner asserts, sticking with a proven typology makes a huge impact when working within a government-subsidized budget. “You can work toward efficiency in both the design and its afterlife,” she explains of the building, which is being designed with transversal ventilation to “reduce heating and cooling costs once residents move in.” It also includes a semiexterior room in each unit for the same purposes.

Next year, MAIO will finish a very different project: a private house with an interior containing both living quarters and a garden, complete with flooring made of soil. “Plants can root anywhere,” asserts Puigjaner, who notes that the soil floors will make the home “feel both indoor and outdoor at the same time.” Further expanding its scope, the team is also collaborating with DOGMA and Tatiana Bilbao to build a Cistercian monastery in Brandenburg, Germany, from scratch.

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“The idea is that in one hundred years, it can continue to evolve...

You can work toward efficiency in both the design and its afterlife.”

—Anna Puigjaner

COOKING SECTIONS

high tide, when the table is submerged. After receiving the 2019 Future Generation Art Prize and expanding their “CLIMAVORE” research to other coastal areas such as Los Angeles and Istanbul, Cooking Sections was invited to exhibit at the Tate Britain in 2020. For Salmon: A Red Herring, their site-specific installation that used sound, light, and sculpture to explore salmon as both a color and a fish, Fernández Pascual and Schwabe insisted the museum replace the farmed fish on their café menus with foods that regenerate the planet’s ecosystems rather than deplete them. Two years later, more than 20 additional museums in the U.K. have joined the initiative, accepting the responsibility of “becoming ‘CLIMAVORE.’” Along the way, the pair collected discarded shells from the institutions’ restaurants, cleaning and crushing them to create a resin-less solid material that acts as an alternative to cement, which is known to be one of the most pollutive materials used in architecture and engineering. Projects like this, which transform existing resources into sustainable solutions, position the duo as a boundary-pushing force in and outside the field of architecture.

Photography by Beth Evans/WOI. Image courtesy of Cooking Sections.

FOR DANIEL FERNÁNDE Z PA SCUAL AND ALON SCHWABE, food is a powerful lens for exploring how spaces are constructed and controlled. The pair, who met as students at the Center for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths in London, co-founded Cooking Sections, a spatial practice that moves across architecture, design, art, performance, and ecology. Though the studio produces a range of installations, exhibitions, performances, and built works, the pair have shared a singular commitment since their very first project: “Food has always been a tool for us to address ecological and environmental questions,” says Schwabe.

After a series of installations inspired by their architectural practice—including OfficeUS at the 2014 Venice Biennale of Architecture and What Is Above Is What Is Below in Palermo, Italy—their vision landed the duo in Skye, Scotland, in 2017 to launch “CLIMAVORE,” one of Cooking Sections’s longest-running and most expansive initiatives. The project started as an oyster table, created in collaboration with local residents, politicians, and researchers, where visitors could dine at low tide—and where oysters and other bivalves could do the same at

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Top: Ladi’Sasha Jones, Black Interior Spatial Thought Design Workshop, The Shed, 2021. Photography by Ahad Subzwari. Image courtesy of The Shed as part of Open Call.

Bottom: Ladi’Sasha Jones, Black Interior Sculptural System (Module I, Two-forms), 2021. Image courtesy of Ladi’Sasha Jones.

LADI’SASHA JONES

THE DICHOTOMY OF WORK AND PLAY is an omnipresent subject in the design world, but for Ladi’Sasha Jones, play serves as both an architectural research method and a direct focus of her work. The architectural designer, theorist, and writer frequently incorporates influences from Black art, literature, theory, and cultural production into her architectural framework, using these references and histories to inform a new kind of spatial thinking. After cutting her teeth at the IdeasCity program at the New Museum and The Laundromat Project in Brooklyn, Jones recently began Princeton University’s Ph.D. program in Architecture to formally expand her practice.

Jones’s dissertation research has thus far focused on expanding the canon of architectural history and the structures included within it. A few years ago, she came across archival materials collected from “card clubs”— entertainment locales at the turn of the 20th century that were built by and for Black Americans— at the Avery Research Center in Charleston, South Carolina. “It was a time when people were thinking about a new landscape,” she says, “a new relationship to the land, public and private space, and what it meant to be free in early Reconstruction.” The survey of self-built cultural spaces is “shrouded in fragility,” as she puts it—in part because of the limited documentation that remains.

This isn’t the first time “play as a critical discourse” has grounded the architect’s work, though, and her contribution to The Shed’s 2021 Open Call—entitled simply “Black Interior Space”—is an apt example. For the New York art space’s exhibition, Jones created a toy module that participants could arrange into unique forms and structures.

Made out of maple wood and fabricated in geometric forms, the objects laid the groundwork for workshops at both The Shed’s Hudson Yards space and in Jones’s native Harlem.

With her modules as a basis for discussion, the questions that emerged ranged from the foundational (How can transportation between the Bronx and Harlem be improved?) to the inventive (What new spaces for play and leisure are possible in our society?).

In her 2019 essay A Grammar for Black Interior Art, Jones, who is currently working on the third iteration of her toy modules, writes, “World-making is a conditional practice of the Black interior.” Indeed, she is constantly bringing a myriad of disciplines into the architectural world—and expanding the scope of possibility.

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Limbo Accra, Adjiringanor Activation (exhibition view), 2018.

Photography by Emil Grip, Anthony Badu, and Ofoe Amegavie.

Image courtesy of Limbo Accra.

LIMBO ACCRA

IT’S A TROPE that architects are always looking up: at the built environments that surround us, or at the yet-to-befilled space above our heads. For the co-founder of architectural design studio and cultural platform Limbo Accra, Dominique Petit-Frère, it’s the unfinished buildings that catch her attention.

While completing her master’s degree in international development at Lund University in Sweden, Petit-Frère, who is Haitian- Ghanaian, was struck by the difference between what she was learning in school and the ways that Ghanaians were pushing for development in their home country. This resourceful approach stuck with the 29-yearold designer, and was part of her impetus for founding Limbo alongside artist, educator, and activist Emil Grip.

Through a series of exhibitions set in Accra’s unfinished construction sites, the architect asked herself, How can we express ideas within traditional architecture in a way that feels more accessible and tangible than imagining the finished entity? She realized that, as she now puts it, “At the end of the day, it’s all about world-building.” The studio’s first exhibition in November 2018 invited artists to respond to a single-family home site in East Legon. It had been left unfinished for 25 years, prompting each participant to question the realities of development in

the city and create a vibrant space out of one hitherto left empty.

Last year, Petit-Frère completed Limbo’s first built project in Accra, the city’s Freedom Skate Park, which was a collaboration between Surf Ghana Collective, a surf and skate nonprofit; Wonders Around the World; SAF Ghana; and Space Accra. “It was a beautiful transition, as we were operating within incomplete spaces to amplify the need for public space in Accra,” the architect says. “It was a perfect evolution into more traditional architecture. We’re building public space for us, and for generations to come.”

In the coming months, the studio will have the opportunity to interpret other cities through a “Limbo” lens at the 2023 Sharjah Architecture Triennial and the Something Curated Palm Heights residency. Through a grant from Denmark’s Obel Foundation, the studio will also extend its world-building practice to the World Wide Web, scanning incomplete structures across Ghana to create a digital data-base and space of engagement. For Petit-Frère, Limbo Accra shines a light on the reality of incomplete spaces in West Africa, yes—but it’s also poised to seize opportunities in cities across the world.

Much of the studio’s resonance lies in this intention, at once local and universal.

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All images courtesy of Jeremy Schipper.

FOR JEREMY SCHIPPER, 30, a designer from Toronto who now juggles projects between New York and Northern California, architecture is a social practice—between collaborators and clients, and across design disciplines.

“I’m thinking about design in a way that doesn’t just privilege architecture, but uses it to bring other kinds of design to a project,” he explains. “Textiles, ceramics, and plants are not just objects that come and go, but rather are elements integral to the space. I consider the spaces that I design to be naked until those pieces are included.”

This holistic approach has long informed Schipper’s work. In 2019, while working at Morocco-based Studio KO, he was accepted to a residency at Salmon Creek Farm. The Mendocino, California, commune was founded in 1971, and has been stewarded by the artist Fritz Haeg since 2014 as a queer-friendly nonprofit and long-term art project. After his two weeks at the farm expired, Schipper extended his stay so many times that he eventually became a permanent partner of the project. To this day, he collaborates on cabin designs for Salmon Creek Farm, and his overarching environmental approach to architecture references the construction, renovation, and gardening projects he first conceived while on the property.

After starting his own practice in January 2021, the architect has expanded his domain, taking on projects from Hawaii to Ontario, Canada. Currently, Schipper is working with Haeg and the architect, landscape artist, and floral designer Krystal Chang on a family home in Los Angeles that embodies the “inbetweenness” in which he thrives: a site quite literally “at the intersection of mountains, California wilderness, and the insane sprawl that is Los Angeles,” he says. “The home will be an inter-generational project that redefines what it means for a family to share a home—it’s a queer couple with a young kid. They often host friends, and are going to have additional family members come to live with them, too.” The project offers an intriguing resolution to questions the architect has long grappled with: What is it about an environment—like Salmon Creek Farm, for example—that people are so drawn to? And how can that feeling be translated beyond aesthetics and outside of its unique landscape? Such are the through-lines of the architect’s practice. Though Schipper often finds himself building domestic spaces, his homes are not defined by any one aesthetic, location, or discipline—they’re designed to invite the outside world in.

“The premise of my work now is heavy on my physical involvement— and how to balance that is always tricky. When I have the chance to scale up, I’ll have to figure out how to get those effects without feeling like I should touch everything. That’s the big unknown.”

Photography by Sean Davidson. Image courtesy of Minjae Kim.

MINJAE KIM

HAVING JUST RETURNED FROM MIAMI, w here he staged his winter show “IYKYK (If You’re Korean You Know)” at Nina Johnson Gallery, Minjae Kim is off to Los Angeles for a commission that arose from another of his exhibitions, at Marta gallery in 2021. In spite of his hectic schedule, Kim still invites me over for tea. It’s a testament to his one-to-one approach—he designs for the individual’s experience above all else, resulting in the creation of intimate objects and furniture.

Kim, who grew up in Seoul, Korea, and studied at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, explains: “I have a specific preference for creating total environments.” Before founding his own practice in 2020, he worked at the interior design firm Studio Giancarlo Valle. It was a formative period that taught him to consider all the elements of a space so that a sense of one-to-one balance could be felt by all of its inhabitants. It’s how Kim approaches not only his studio practice, but also his own home: constrained spaces and environments in which “objects can be in harmony.”

But he isn’t always designing spaces. After a year of gallery shows and exhibitions of his artwork—which ranges from fiberglass vases to wooden chairs carved by hand and lacquered—33-year-old Kim is keeping the door open to cross-disciplinary undertakings. He is in talks with agencies and partners about a plethora of projects, including “a jewelry box” that would scale up his work from furniture and design objects to entire interiors. He’s also working on a collection of headboards with Atelier LK, as well as a possible collaboration with his mother—the artist MyoungAe Lee, with whom he shared a show in 2022 at Matter Projects. But as Kim continues to grow his practice, his personal methods will no doubt evolve. “The premise of my work now is heavy on my physical involvement—and how to balance that is always tricky,” he admits. “When I have the chance to scale up, I’ll have to figure out how to get those effects without feeling like I should touch everything. That’s the big unknown.”

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“Our projects always have the goal to improve the conditions of the communities we are working within— the learning process before construction is the most important phase.”

— Noelia Monteiro

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Photography by Maíra Acayaba.

Image courtesy of Estudio Flume.

ESTUDIO FLUME

ESTUDIO FLUME’S PORTFOLIO may be limited to Brazilian landscapes thus far, but when the studio expands beyond its roots, the field of architecture—and the world at large—will be better for it. Founded by Noelia Monteiro and Christian Teshirogi in 2015—with the addition of Marina Lickel in 2019—the studio is based in São Paulo, but regularly takes on social and environmental projects in remote areas across the country. “We work across different biomes,” explains Monteiro. “Each one is an opportunity to learn about the areas’ different geography, weather conditions, and activities. Our projects always have the goal to improve the conditions of the communities we are working within—the learning process before construction is the most important phase.”

But Estudio Flume’s holistic practice reaches still further, providing its clients and their communities with tools and frameworks in addition to built spaces. In 2022, Estudio Flume completed construction on a new building in Sumauma village in the Vitória do Mearim district of northern Brazil that now serves as a place of work for about 40 local women, who grow and break babassu coconuts that are then transformed into oil and flour. Built using portable machinery that will remain permanently at the site, and with bricks made of dirt from its grounds, the new building—which features large spaces open to the outdoors and an elegantly pitched roof—offers shade, ventilation, and light, enabling the babassu coconut-breakers to preserve their historical way of working. It also minimizes travel needs: the closest city, São Luís, is about a four-hour drive from the remote locale, and variation in water levels in the region makes river transport necessary at certain times of the year, when roads are often flooded. Altogether, these factors will allow for a possible expansion of the project in the future—one led by the community itself.

Other recent initiatives include a beekeeper’s workshop in Canaã dos Carajás, a fisherman’s kiosk on Jaguanum Island, and an ongoing agroforestry project in Apuí. The latter—located in an area that the studio describes as “one of the most deforested regions in the Amazon”—is a prototype that explores the possibility of planting in deforested soil, a response to the devastation in the region that largely resulted from former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s time in office. The studio’s research is still underway, but Apuí’s inhabitants are already learning how to introduce new economic and ecological approaches, such as rainwater management, to their landcare practices.

Agency—Agency, “Is it morning for you yet?” (exhibition view), 2022. Photography by Sean Eaton. Image courtesy of Agency—Agency and the Carnegie Museum of Art.

AGENCY —AGENCY

TEI CARPENTER grew up around art and design—her mother is the architect Toshiko Mori and her father is the artist and designer James Carpenter. But her practice didn’t formally begin until 2014, when she was tasked with designing the headquarters for the nonprofit organization Big Brothers Big Sisters. Since then, A gency — A gency’s founding architect has been recognized as one of the most innovative and inventive young practitioners in her native New York, and her overflowing slate of projects is proof.

As Carpenter balances teaching, her practice, and exhibition work—including this year’s 58th Carnegie International art show—she is always considering how a built work relates to larger systems and the public. “I love to find ways to get out of the office,” laughs Carpenter, who won the 2021 Architecture League Prize for Young Architects. First up this month is “Architecture Now: New York, New Publics,” an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that will feature a series of Agency—Agency designs entitled “New Public Hydrant.”

These interventions, originally designed and fabricated over the summer of 2018, are one component of a project developed in collaboration with Brooklyn-based designer Chris Woebken, and are made up of playful, inventive plumbing concepts that interrupt the city’s water infrastructure to turn fire hydrants into public water fountains. In Carpenter’s words, the works pose a question: “How do we think about infrastructure in a way that makes it more social, as well as more accessible?”

The exhibition includes prototype translations of concepts by youth participants from a workshop Carpenter led last year in Brownsville, Brooklyn, alongside prompts from the architects themselves.

Across the world, in Xinyang, China, Agency—Agency will complete a “book house” (a Chinese typology similar to a library, but with more social and cultural importance) later this spring that will function as a community center.

Carpenter describes the trees that frame the structure as the “façade” of the building—a distinct choice to design around the existing landscape that is mirrored by the experiential effect of looking through the foliage from inside the space. In this project, as in every Agency—Agency endeavor, Carpenter’s interventions consider the most minute of details in designs that address macro systems and large-scale infrastructures.

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MATTAFORMA

“M OS T T Y PI C AL AN D D EFAULT PR O CE SSE S a r e damaging and quite polluting when you’re working in the built environment,” begins Lindsey Wikstrom, who cofounded Mattaforma with Jean Suh in 2021. They launched their New York practice with the desire to provide more sustainable community-minded outcomes than were currently available in the architecture field, with each of their projects pushing the bounds of material research and design. Wikstrom and Suh’s daily focus is to find partners who share that vision, and to keep up the pace of their technological and environmental research. As such, Mattaforma is not only constantly evolving based on new design and material innovations—it’s also pushing its clients to adopt those priorities.

One example of this ethos in action is Mattaforma’s biofarm and hospitality project located near Sedona, Arizona. Currently in its research and design phase, the work imagines a place where guests immerse themselves in the desert landscape while consuming produce grown on-site. “The client and the consultant team really understood the importance of where the food comes from,” says Wikstrom of the developing concept, “but they hadn’t yet extended that to the built components of the project.” Suh adds that by including the circular principles of biodynamic farming in their designs, Mattaforma formulated an approach in which the structure emerges from the earth “just like the edible landscape.”

At home in New York, the duo is designing The Nursery for Public Records, which is set to open later this year.

They have envisioned an addition to the sustainably minded cultural space, which already includes a music venue, bar, listening rooms, and a restaurant in a historic building in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Their brief asked them to build an enclosure to shelter the plants in the open garden space during winter months (and for human use when not occupied by greenery) using three shipping containers already on site. “Our jumping-off point was thinking about how we could use the steel from the shipping containers to absorb and hold heat inside a roof system, thinking about them as we would a Trombe wall,” Wikstrom says, describing a technique to passively absorb and store energy from sunlight.

This elemental approach is typical of Mattaforma: consistently executing complex visions with whatever materials are at hand. Another project currently under construction in Park City, Utah, will embed artist residencies into a mountainside landscape. Their vertical design uses a minimal footprint to reduce concrete volume, according to the design duo, creating a miniature tower in the forest. This environmentally conscious thinking extends into their educational work, like Wikstrom’s discussion series for the newly launched Emilio Ambasz Institute at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a department focused on the intersection of architecture and ecology. Entitled “Material Worlds,” it serves as an outlet to bring Mattaforma’s work to the broader public, and to help bolster the studio’s expansive practice.

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Image courtesy of Mattaforma.

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Body As we reckon with the intractable issues of our time, a group of choreographers from across the world—some classically trained, others who cut their teeth in the circus arts—are hard at work inscribing collective feelings of angst, affirmation, outrage, and jubilation onto the body. By translating issues of gender, race, power, and our collective humanity into an arched spine or a flutter of the hand, the six choreographers spotlighted here offer a powerful statement on the state of our culture.

By Sophie Lee Photography by Daniel Archer Styling by Studio&

All skincare by Dr. Barbara Sturm

Language

Yoann Bourgeois wears a tank top by Re/Done, pants and suspenders by Acne Studios, and shoes by Loewe.

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Eleanor Perry wears a dress by Melitta Baumeister, bustle by Costume Studio, and shoes by Melitta Baumeister.

Eleanor wears a dress by Melitta Baumeister, bustle by Costume Studio, and shoes by Melitta Baumeister. Daniel Hay-Gordon wears a coat by Simone Rocha, gilet by Carhartt, pants by Stefan Cooke, and shoes by Loewe.

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“Choreography for me is just structured improvisation, a portal to transcendence.”

—Ivan Michael Blackstock

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Ivan Michael Blackstock wears a suit and harness by Alexander McQueen, top vintage Issey Miyake courtesy of West Archive, and sunglasses by Celine by Hedi Slimane.

IVAN MICHAEL BLACKSTOCK Big names swirl around Ivan Michael Blackstock— he collaborated with Beyoncé on her 2020 visual album Black is King, and with Nike in 2019. But the choreographer’s multi-disciplinary practice is entirely his own. Last spring, Blackstock, 36, put his singular style on display with TRAPLORD—an alchemy of spoken word, dance, and musical per formance that explored stereot ypes surrounding Black masculinity—at 180 Studios in London. He is also the founder of Crxss Platfxrm, an organization celebrating and supporting the best of the U.K.’s street culture performers and artists.

“Choreography for me is just structured improvisation, a portal to transcendence. Dance is my spirituality—it’s the thing that holds me together. Music has always been the starting point. It’s the thing that makes me vibrate. If we look at cultures from around the world, it’s what dictates the movement. It’s very shamanic. If we listen closely enough, we can hear the music inside of ourselves, from our heartbeat to our breath. Music is all around us, and the more we listen and open our ears, the more we can hear a multitude of sounds and select how to interpret that. The best way to be a communicator of the body is to listen first, then respond.”

YOANN BOURGEOIS Yoann Bourgeois trained in the circus arts, and it shows. The artistic director, choreographer, and set designer explores notions of weightlessness, achieving gravity-defying feats that bend the laws of physics. His choreography has been brought to life by the likes of Harry Styles, Coldplay, and Selena Gomez, to name a few.

“Contemporary dance has gradually become so diversified that it would certainly escape even a seasoned panoramic gaze. It is perhaps less of a single landscape and more like multiple worlds. As in many other areas, the advent of digital and social medias has been a phenomenal upheaval. These networks have become real, new scenes that have allowed the recognition of an incredible diversity of styles, individuals, and contexts. Choreography clarifies notions of rhythms, body shapes, and movements. It reminds me of objective rules of space and time; to write a body language. It is a framework for sensation.

It is a tool for transmitting information. With choreography, I count time and trace space.”

VIDYA PATEL For Birmingham-based Vidya Patel, movement is about death and rebirth. As the founder of South Asian Dance Artists U.K. and a Young Associate Choreographer of the acclaimed dance organization Sadler’s Wells, she has studied Indian

classical dance since childhood, and was a finalist in the South Asian category of the BBC Young Dancer competition in 2015. Patel, 27, has spent the years since interrogating the historical influences that shaped her Indian classical training—refining and expanding her practice beyond the genre, but never forgetting her roots.

“The landscape of dance is always evolving, always shifting. It’s like cycles: the new becomes old, the old becomes new, things die and then they’re born. Everything is constantly copying and imitating, with the desire of being original. I still do believe colonialism is present. It’s embedded within systems that many are now working towards understanding. It’s not about dismantling tradition, but getting rid of ideologies that were built on colonial structures. Even in Indian classical dance, there’s a huge effect from the British. My very being in the U.K. is through colonization and displacements and the migration of my family. I choreograph to make something in my mind tangible—to understand it further, to explore the possibilities of my imagination, and to ask how human emotion can be translated. I create and move to help understand myself and how I belong in the world.”

JOHN-WILLIAM WATSON John-William Watson, 24, is no stranger to the surreal. The self-described “dance theater maker” merges existential themes with the granular intimacy of human connection. They are also a Young Associate Choreographer at Sadler’s Wells, a Northern Connection Artist of 2021/22, and the co-founder of Another Collective, a Belgium-based dance theater group.

“Choreography means world-building for me. It means storytelling. It means creating a universe, establishing its rules and boundaries, and then messing with the parameters. My practice is rooted heavily in surrealism and the absurd. We’re constantly met with things that don’t make sense, decisions that people make, events that occur around us, déjà vu, and creepy coincidences. Ultimately, I think there’s something truly silly but also very profound in mundane situations and everyday encounters. My work sits on the borderline of the most bland, ordinary scenarios and the big ole questions that keep us up at night, like trying to imagine what’s beyond the universe’s current point of expansion, whilst waiting for your dog to nip one off in the park. My work attempts to bring elements of the human condition and consciousness to light—things we all share.”

ELEANOR PERRY Eleanor Perry, 35, is the co-founder of Thick & Tight alongside Daniel Hay-Gordon, and has

collaborated with creatives including Gary Clarke, Lea Anderson, and Julie Cunningham. She’s worked as a movement director, lighting designer, and costume designer. As a dancer, she has performed everywhere from the Centre Pompidou to the Hollywood Bowl, and has taught at companies, including Trinity Laban, Gary Clarke Company, and Impermanence Dance Theatre.

“A friend once asked me what my choreographic method is, and I half-jokingly replied ‘precision and angst.’ It can take so much concentration and thought, but at the same time there’s a lightness about it. After all, you are just making up a dance. I love that it can feel trifling, frivolous, difficult, and a matter of life and death all at the same time—total inconsequence and total drama! I always feel a pull between things that seem to be in opposition but aren’t really, like seriousness and flippancy, control and freedom, constancy and change, individual and universal, clarity and ambiguity. I want to reframe what artistic ‘excellence’ means and celebrate differences, highlight that they don’t need to separate us. They can reveal—in a much lovelier way—what is shared more than a stage full of people who are all supposed to look the same and be perfect in the same way.”

DANIEL HAY-GORDON Filmmaker and choreographer Daniel Hay-Gordon, 34, has performed across Europe and the United States. In 2012, he and Eleanor Perry established the U.K. dance theater company Thick & Tight.

He’s worked with heavyweight institutions including The Royal Ballet—which tapped Thick & Tight to curate programming for its Family Sunday and Late events—Staatsoper Berlin, and The Royal Opera House.

“Finding invention, storytelling, musicality, humor, rapture, and expression through the form of movement is thrilling to me. Some days I can be on a roll, and movement streams fluently.

On other days it can be really challenging; I can create a passage for a few hours, then look back at it and feel a bit nauseated! Dance doesn’t happen by chance or because of some kind of unearthly genius; you have to work really hard at it. Historically, it has been an industry where abuse is permissible; most dancers are young and have been trained within a suppressive culture. However, a new generation is seeking to rebalance the hierarchy, to speak out when they have grievances, and to work towards an environment of collective responsibility. Earlier in my career I was often told that the way I moved was too feminine. My queerness was something undesirable. Thankfully, times have changed, and authentic ways of moving are desired and celebrated.”

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Makeup by ANNA PAYN Hair by ELIOT McQUEEN Nails by CHRISTIE HUSEYIN Set Design by SAM PIDGEN

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Produced by THE CURATED DOP MAX MONTGOMERY Digi Op NINA CLOSE Lighting Direction by ROSS ZILLWOOD

Fashion Assistance by TOM GRIMSDELL and TAMSIN MICHAEL Makeup Assistance by

TAMSIN BILINGALL Set Assistance by KAUSH ODEDRA and HALEIMAH DARWISH Location DROP STUDIOS

Left: John-William Watson wears a suit by Mark Chapman, top vintage Issey Miyake courtesy of West Archive, shoes by Stefan Cooke, and socks by Falke.

Right: Vidya Patel wears a full look by Bottega Veneta.

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A Renaissance in Florence

BY LAURA MAY TODD

The past and the future meet at Gucci ArtLab, a hub for design incubation and environmental action.

Gucci ArtLab, a sprawling campus devoted to prototyping, sustainability, and artisan education in Scandicci, Florence.

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Gucci ArtLab employs over 950 workers, dedicated to innovating the heritage brand.

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Gucci ArtLab is more than just a place to refine and road test new designs—it’s a dedicated think-tank and research lab devoted to the brand’s sustainability efforts.

TRAVELING ALONG THE MOTORWAY from the ornate epicenter of Florence to its industrial peripheries feels like zipping through the fabric of centuries.

Renaissance-era palazzos slowly give way to rows of squat 1960s apartment buildings, and later to low-slung warehouses and gray-faced factory complexes. The irony of this nondescript sprawl is that a good portion of Italy’s high-end leather accessories are developed and produced here. What began centuries ago as a Tuscan artisan leather tradition has evolved into a booming industry, largely fostered by the high concentration of luxury brands that call this Florence suburb home. But while most hide their operations behind anonymous concrete walls, one stands out: Gucci ArtLab, a sprawling campus devoted to prototyping, sustainability, and artisan education.

The 37,000-square-meter space is a stark departure from Gucci’s former factory and workshop, the stately Palazzo Settimanni in Florence’s Oltrarno neighborhood that dates back to the 15th century. The brand was founded by Guccio Gucci, a native Florentine who immigrated to London in 1897 to work as a porter at the Savoy, one of the most luxurious hotels of the era. Day in and day out, Gucci ferried well-to-do tourists and fin de siècle stars through the hotel’s lavish halls, studying their refined trappings: polished steamer trunks, drumlike hat boxes, and soft leather suitcases, all monogrammed with their owners’ initials. He brought those memories home to Florence when he returned in 1902, and then to life 19 years later, when he founded the house of Gucci out of a small storefront on Via della Vigna Nuova. There, he sold the same kinds of sumptuous luggage and travel accoutrements he had coveted during his early years in London, expertly constructed by the master craftsmen of his hometown. Over a century later, the brand continues to employ the artisans of Tuscany—but its methods of

production have evolved with the times, largely thanks to the innovation of the Gucci ArtLab, which launched in 2018.

In front of the vast, two-story complex, visitors are greeted by bright, whimsical murals by artists such as Angelica Hicks and Ignasi Monreal.

The building’s exterior is awash with vibrant illustrations, but its interiors are pristine. Wide glass windows punctuate the whitewashed hallways, framing busy workshops where teams of artisans stitch together bag and footwear prototypes, and tidy laboratories full of chemists and engineers test the coming season’s collection before approving it for production. In one lab, a glossy robotic arm jostles a mannequin—clad in Gucci tweed and wearing two of the brand’s signature crossbodies—as if it were a marionette doll. The jerking movements mimic the effects of several months of wear, revealing how daily life would shape and stress the leather, seams, and hardware.

Gucci ArtLab is more than just a place to refine and road test new designs—it’s a dedicated think-tank and research lab devoted to the brand’s sustainability efforts. In 2021, Gucci reduced its total environmental footprint by 49 percent, a cut that Antonella Centra, Gucci’s executive vice president, general counsel, corporate affairs, and sustainability, credits in part to sustainable solutions and initiatives developed at ArtLab, including Gucci-Up, which reintroduces scrap leather and fabric into the production cycle; and the development of Demetra, the house’s own eco-friendly, animal-free material. “Though we are a leather brand at heart—Guccio Gucci opened our first store in Florence in 1921—it’s important for us to offer alternatives to those consumers who are looking for animal-free options,” says Centra. Derived from wood pulp, Demetra undergoes a chrome-free tanning process similar to genuine leather, resulting in a soft

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Ryan Gosling stars in the campaign for Gucci’s Savoy collection.

All images courtesy of Gucci

While Gucci ArtLab’s purpose is to innovate and push the company forward, it’s clear that the guiding principle behind the project is a return to tradition, cultivating an environment reminiscent of the one that nurtured the brand’s signature aesthetic a century ago. and supple material the brand has been using to construct sneakers, luggage, and lifestyle products.

Though Gucci has made significant progress in meeting its sustainability goals, Centra makes it clear that new ideas are perpetually incubated and hatched at the ArtLab. “We are constantly researching new ways to make our production process and supply chain more sustainable,” she says. “In this chapter of our journey, we are very much focused on regenerative agriculture.” The sustainability team has launched an experimental effort to grow cotton in Puglia, and is planning an initiative to return silk farming to Italy’s southern province of Calabria, all with the hope of restoring the production of raw materials to Italian soil.

While Gucci ArtLab exists to innovate and push the company forward, the guiding principle behind the project is a return to tradition, cultivating an environment reminiscent of the one that first nurtured the brand’s signature aesthetic a century ago. Take, for example, L’École de l’Amour, the ArtLab’s training program for would-be artisans to learn the fundamentals of craftsmanship traditions, and for seasoned employees to refine their skills.

“In recent years, there has been a declining interest from young people to become artisans,” explains Centra. “Our goal with the school is to show how the profession has evolved with technology, and to create a new generation of trained craftspeople who can work with us at Gucci ArtLab and in our workshops.” With a focus on tradition in mind, the brand decided this past year to launch a contemporary iteration of one of Guccio Gucci’s original designs, the Valigeria line of travelware, which the house’s visionary founder sold in his Via della Vigna Nuova shop in the 1920s and ‘30s.

Thanks to the work of Gucci ArtLab, the collection—composed of trolleys, trunks, suitcases, hat boxes, and beauty kits—is designed and fabricated to minimize impact on the environment while maintaining the same heritageinspired style that continues to set Gucci apart. It is named the Savoy collection—after the place where it all began.

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