Cultured Magazine - Feb/March 2022

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CONTENTS Feb/March 2022

48 FACE FIRST Painter Marcus Brutus steps out with his debut at Harper’s gallery and opens his studio for a peek at a new work.

50 SPOILERS ONLY With her new commission for Frieze Los Angeles, artist Olivia Erlanger’s dreamworld takes a sharp turn.

52 CONTAIN YOURSELF A cool veneer of effortlessness blesses Torbjørn Rødland’s photography. In Los Angeles, exhibition “Pain in the Shell,” turns expectations inside out.

54 MASTER OF THE COLOR WHEEL, INDOORS AND OUT Paola Lenti is synonymous with visions of chic, comfortable and sustainable furniture.

56

ART BASEL 2021 If you are in need of proof that the roaring 2020s are here, then look no further than last year’s Art Basel Miami Beach.

58 MATERIAL GIRL The Rubell Museum’s 2021 artist-in-residence, Kennedy Yanko, reflects on her experience while turning heads in head-to-toe Valentino.

Actor Odessa Young wears a Gucci dress and shoes with Alexander McQueen earrings and rings in NewYork.

Photographed by Brad Ogbonna.

Styling by Chris Horan.

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Spring Summer 2022 Photographed by David Sims

Miami Design District 110 NE 39th Street loewe.com

CONTENTS Feb/March 2022

68

YOU’LL PAINT US Painter Jenna Gribbon and her muse, musician Mackenzie Scott, discuss the potential dangers of mixing pleasure and business, art and love.

74 80 WE’LL PAINT THE WORLD Since they lost their sight almost a decade ago, Manuel Solano’s paintings have only grown more complicated.

87 BEAUTIFUL DESIGN, WHERE ARE YOU? We pinpoint three cities whose designers and architects are putting them on the tip of the world’s tongue.

101 SPIRIT RISING: A DAY WITH DANIEL LIND-RAMOS Cultured contributing editor Jacoba Urist catches up with the newly minted MacArthur I’LL PAINT ME She named her tits form and content. Nash Glynn paints naked portraits of herself in paradise. But who is she really?

Fellow in his Loíza, Puerto Rico studio.

104

WRITER’S BLOCK AND ITS ANTIDOTES Last fall, Lauren Mayberry, the lead vocalist of CHVRCHES, spoke with artist Devan Shimoyama about creating in a pandemic.

Painter Jenna Gribbon and her partner, musician Mackenzie Scott in Brooklyn. Photographed

by Flora Hanitijo.

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www.akris.com

CONTENTS Feb/March 2022

David Cronenberg wears a Tiger of Sweden jacket. Photographed in Toronto by Luis Mora. Styling by Shira Hershkop.

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THE PROTAGONISTS This portfolio of five young actors proves that being the main character is only a compliment when it comes with more than just a point of view.

144

ENTER THE CRONENBERGS’ WEIRD, WILD WORLD David Cronenberg and his daughter, Caitlin, share more in common than blood: their talent runs deep.

152

YOUNG ARCHITECTS 2022 For our second annual Young Architects List, we’re going global. These 10 practices are designing for what matters today.

164 LOVE LANGUAGE All significant others develop a special

private code between them. Seven writers in relationships open up about their origin stories and shared tongues.

174 THE NEWNESS OF LOUIS VUITTON’S SAVOIR FAIRE The success of Louis Vuitton’s Objets Nomades series embraces the ways its heritage and resources

can be leveraged into new endeavors. A decade after launch, its adventures continue.

184

THE STORY OF REYNALDO RIVERA’S LOS ANGELES The photographer tells curator and editor Lauren Mackler all about the thrilling lives and times of his family and friends.

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BRAD OGBONNA

FLORA HANITIJO

DREW ZEIBA

Brad Ogbonna is a Brooklyn-based photographer and director originally from the Twin Cities, Minnesota. A self-taught artist, his work has been seen in Vogue, GQ, The New York Times and elsewhere; he has worked on campaigns for brands such as Nike, Google and Apple, and is a frequent collaborator of artist Kehinde Wiley. Ogbonna’s work focuses on highlighting underrepresented communities and cultures worldwide. For this issue, he shot actor Odessa Young. “She was game for everything,” he says. “We found a great location in the Bronx—an Art Deco building with a beautiful foyer, triumphant pillars at the courthouse nearby and adjacent to a park. It felt like a great ode to a less-frequented part of New York City.”

Originally from Macau, photographer Flora Hanitijo grew up in Montreal, studied at the Cooper Union in New York City and spent a decade working and living between Paris, London and New York before settling in Brooklyn.

In 2016, Flora published her first photography book, Silence, to critical acclaim and is currently working on another portrait series of Asian women as a way to combat anti-Asian sentiments. For this issue, Hanitijo photographed painter Jenna Gribbon, who she met 20 years ago at a party in downtown New York. “We were all just a bunch of art school kids running wild around NYC, hustling and figuring out who we were,” she says.

“It makes me really happy to be photographing friends who are finally finding success after years of hard work.”

Drew Zeiba writes criticism, cultural journalism and fiction, and is an associate editor of PIN–UP. His work is found in publications including Frieze, Artforum and Metropolis, as well as in the monograph Andy Warhol: Love, Sex, and Desire, Drawings 1950–62.

His solo and collaborative work has been screened and exhibited internationally, most recently in the 13th Shanghai Biennale. In this issue, he profiled four of Cultured’s 2022 Young Architects List. “This kind of survey is always interesting,” he says, “because, in a crystalized way, I get to think about the ways contemporary architecture is always getting explored, pulled apart and redefined.”

Photographer

RACHEL CARGLE Writer

Rachel Cargle is an Akron, Ohio-born, Brooklynbased writer and entrepreneur. She is the founder of The Loveland Foundation, Inc., which offers free therapy to Black women and girls; The Great Unlearn, a self-paced, donationbased learning community, and Elizabeth’s Bookshop & Writing Centre—a space designed to amplify the work of writers who are often excluded from traditional canons. Cargle writes for Atmos Magazine and The Cut, and is Cultured’s newest contributing columnist: her musings on art will soon be found on culturedmag.com and in the magazine. “The chance to witness humanity through art is a deep honor,” she says. “I’m thrilled to share my encounters with today’s dynamic artists here in the pages of Cultured.”

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Photographer

Writer

PHOTO BY MO DAUD (OGBONNA); PHOTO BY EYJA HANITIJO CARSON, 4 YEARS OLD (HANITIJO); PHOTO BY LELANIE FOSTER (CARGLE); PHOTO BY SANGWOO SUH (ZEIBA)

CONTRIBUTORS

CONTRIBUTORS

LAUREN MACKLER

AMANDA LIM

EVAN MOFFITT

Lauren Mackler is a curator and writer based in Los Angeles. In 2010, she founded Public Fiction, a forum for staging exhibitions, performances and programs by contemporary artists and writers, accompanied by a print journal. In 2020, she co-edited a monograph of photographer Reynaldo Rivera’s work for Semiotext(e) and co-curated the Los Angeles biennial, “Made in L.A. 2020.” In this issue, Mackler and artist Rivera recorded a fragment of their ongoing conversation about the latter’s life, work and ideas. “This conversation involved a deep dive into his family archive, as well as into his prolific body of work,” she says. “We dug through stacks of negatives and prints, watched edits of his candid videos, talked for hours on night-walks in Pasadena, and sat in his lush garden in Lincoln Heights.”

Amanda Lim is a Los Angeles-based fashion stylist who founded her own styling and costume design studio in February 2018 and works with dedicated celebrity, editorial and filmmaker clientele in Los Angeles and on location. Her work can be seen in the pages of magazines like People, Schön! and Wonderland. For this issue, she dressed actor Alisha Boe. “Alisha and I have been working together on the red carpet for 3.5 years,” says Lim. “Our Cultured photoshoot was held at my Burbank home, where I live with my human and furry friends, the latter whom you’ll notice darting into frame on occasion in this story.”

Evan Moffitt is a writer and art critic from Los Angeles. He moved to New York to be an editor for Frieze magazine, and now splits his time between Brooklyn and Mexico City, where he contributes to a number of other publications, including Art in America, Artforum, Art Review and PIN–UP. For this issue, Moffitt profiled the work of five designers from Mexico who are working at the interstices of art, architecture, and design. “Drawing from Mexico’s deep past,” he says, “they are forging new and dynamic forms for its future.”

THOMAS WHITESIDE Photographer

Thomas Whiteside is an American photographer best known for his celebrity portraits of stars such as Naomi Campbell, Aretha Franklin and Taylor Swift. His editorial photography has been featured in publications including Vogue, W and Harper’s Bazaar. For this issue, he captured actor Suzanna Son, who is making a Sundance splash this year. “This shoot with Suzanna,” he says, “was a reminder of what I love about photography: the opportunity to reflect an individual’s unique beauty.”

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Stylist

Writer

PHOTO BY KATYA BACHROUCHE (LIM); PHOTO BY REYNALDO RIVERA (MACKLER); PHOTO BY SHAWN MICHAEL JONES (MOFFITT)

Curator

SAM PENN

QUINCI LEGARDYE

YALE BRESLIN

New York City-based actor and photographer Sam Penn is published in Artforum, Interview magazine and Document Journal. Penn’s photography works to capture both the wonder and rawness of humanity. For this issue, she photographed painter Nash Glynn for a feature about her artistic practice.

“Nash is an incredible painter and an even better friend,” Penn says. “Her work looks a lot like her life, gorgeous, and full of wonder and snark and charm. It’s always an honor to take her photo.”

Quinci LeGardye is an entertainment writer and cultural critic based in Los Angeles. She typically covers culture, politics and mental health through a Black feminist lens. Her work, which is centered on her passion for storytelling in its many forms, can be found in Harper’s Bazaar and Elle, among other publications. For this issue, LeGardye profiled actor Saniyya Sidney of films King Richard and The First Lady, writing that “[Sidney]’s work as an actor centers on being a conduit for wisdom, especially with the real-life stories she loves to tell.”

Yale Breslin is a New York-based creative content producer. Breslin was formerly editor-in-chief of INDUSTRIE Magazine and has a keen eye for the interplay of culture and fashion. Breslin is a storyteller, journalist and digital strategist. “I’m originally from Toronto, so when I was asked to profile the relationship between Canadians David and Caitlin Cronenberg, it was probably the easiest ‘YES’ I’ve ever said,” Breslin reveals. “Family dynamics have always been interesting to me, and to hear both father and daughter answer the same set of questions gives a lot of insight into the way their minds function.”

Photographer

EMILY SOTO Photographer

Photographer Emily Soto lives between New York City and Los Angeles and specializes in a variety of film and digital formats. She especially enjoys shooting on different instant film mediums and works often with Fujifilm and Polaroid. Soto is a contributor to Vogue, Allure and Puss Puss, among other publications. For this issue, she captures actor and rising movie star Saniyya Sidney. “I loved working with Saniyya as she’s such a brilliant young talent and had the best energy on set,” says Soto of the experience.

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Writer

Writer

PHOTO BY AUREOLE RIBES (PENN); PHOTO BY ERIK TORSTENSSON (BRESLIN); SELF-PORTRAIT BY QUINCI LEGARDYE; PHOTO BY VIC SOTO (SOTO)

CONTRIBUTORS

Photos by Michel Gibert and Baptiste Le Quiniou, for advertising purposes only. Zulma Editions. 1Conditions apply, contact store for details. 2 Program available on select items, subject to availability.

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Founder | Editor-in-Chief SARAH G. HARRELSON

Creative Director KAT HERRIMAN Senior Architecture and Design Editor ELIZABETH FAZZARE Contributing Art Director KATHERINE JORDAN Assistant Creative Producer REBECCA AARON Senior Copy Editor DEAN KISSICK Podcast Editor SIENNA FEKETE Editorial Assistant MOLLY WILCOX Contributing Editor, NY JACOBA URIST Copy Editor ROB GOYANES Contributing Columnist RACHEL CARGLE Landscape Editor LILY KWONG Contributing Fashion Editor TESS HERBERT

Publisher LORI WARRINER Italian Representative—Fashion RULA AL AMAD Italian Representative—Design CARLO FIORUCCI Marketing Coordinator JUAN GRACIA

Interns BECCA LINCK SOPHIA SMALL SOFIA DAGUANO

Contributing Editors SUSAN AINSWORTH, ALEX GARTENFELD, ANDREW HEID, NASIR KASSAMALI, GEORGE LINDEMANN, FRANKLIN SIRMANS, SARAH ARISON, TRUDY CEJAS, LAURA DE GUNZBURG, DOUG MEYER, CASEY FREMONT, MASHONDA TIFRERE, ALLISON BERG, MICHAEL REYNOLDS Prepress/Print Production PETE JACATY Senior Photo Retoucher BERT MOO-YOUNG

Miami Office 1041 NW 21st Street Miami, Florida Los Angeles Office 2341 Michigan Ave Santa Monica, California Partner MIKE BATT

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ISSN 2638-7611

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WITHOUT YOUR INTERPRETATION

ULYSSES JENKINS FEBRUARY 6–MAY 15, 2022

1 MUSEUM hammer.ucla.edu | @hammer_museum

PORTRAIT OF ULYSSES JENKINS, N.D. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST. PHOTOGRAPHER UNKNOWN.

Letter from the Editor

Sarah Harrelson wears a full Gucci look in a Rogan Gregory chair at Cultured’s Los Angeles office, She is seated in front of a Kerstin Brätsch, who has been chosen for the 2022 Venice Biennial.

Photographed by Brandon Hicks.

Welcome to our first issue of 2022. In this time of plateaued hope, we, as a magazine, feel compelled to get people excited again. While ambitious, this is the goal we hope to meet all year. At any given moment, there are so many innovative, joyous, creative visions being pioneered.

To this end, we decided to try some new things ourselves.

In this issue, we reveal our second annual Young Architects list. It’s a story that has always inspired us to build a better world for all, which is why we decided to go global in our search this year and present you with a group of thinkers who reflect the diversity and uniqueness of our changing Earth. The 10 featured changemakers are designing for the contemporary issues that matter most.

For the first time in our history, we looked to Hollywood for new role models and found five bright, young women bringing grit and poise back to the screen in the year’s most riveting coming of age narratives. This vanguard of actors—Odessa Young, Maude Apatow, Suzanna Son,

Saniyya Sidney and Alisha Boe—reminds us that being a main character is about sparking an internal flame. As we all stare down the barrel at individuality’s radical ends, we are confronted with the truth that being the hero or antihero of the story is not a feat in and of itself—it’s what you do with the script that makes it interesting.

Our protagonist theme coincides with a special time in the magazine’s own story arc. As I write, we are launching our second season of our podcast, Points of View, and three new online-only columns, and preparing for a spring full of events, including celebrating our friends at the much-anticipated Venice Biennale. We are also embarking on our first curated trip with Indagare to Mexico City, which will allow our subscribers to immerse themselves completely in our world. When I began Cultured 10 years ago, these kinds of collaborations were the stuff of fantasy. Now we are owning the plot and running with it.

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

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XXX

THE MAIN CHARACTER ISSUE

On the cover: ODESSA YOUNG: Photographed by Brad Ogbonna. Styling by Chris Horan. Makeup by Genevieve Herr. Hair

by Nakashima Junya. Odessa Young clutches two Hästens pillows and a bag by Grace Ling.

She wears an Alexander McQueen dress and ear cuff.

Tomokazu Matsuyama The Best Part About Us

Kavi Gupta 219 N. Elizabeth St. Floors 1 & 2 Chicago, IL 60607 kavigupta.com Tomokazu Matsuyama, So Happy Alone Abnormal, 2021, Acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 105 x 76 inches

SPRING 2022 APRIL 7—10 THE INTERNATIONAL EXPOSITION OF CONTEMPORARY & MODERN ART

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A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration is co-organized by MMA and BMA with support provided by the Ford Foundation, Henry Luce Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Its presentation in Jackson, Mississippi, is sponsored by the Robert M. Hearin Support Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Lucy and John Shackelford Fund of the Community Foundation for Mississippi, The Selby and Richard McRae Foundation, Trustmark National Bank, Mississippi Arts Commission, Mississippi Humanities Council, Visit Mississippi, Visit Jackson, the Ramey Agency, and H. F. McCarty, Jr. Family Foundation.

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FACE FIRST

This March, self-taught figurative painter Marcus Brutus steps out in a big way with a landmark debut at Harper’s gallery in New York. Before the show opened, the Brooklyn-based artist opened his studio to Cultured for a sneak peek at a new body of work influenced by his recent rabbit hole: high-fidelity speakers.

¶ YOU ARE SELF-TAUGHT. DOES THAT MEAN YOU’VE SPENT A LOT OF TIME LOOKING AT BOOKS? Well, I’ve drawn my entire life and I would just save images, anything I liked. HOW DID THIS BODY OF WORK BEGIN? IS THERE A THEME LEADING THE WAY? I was already working on these images when the Harper’s show came up. Throughout the works, there was a musical or recording theme because I have climbed into high-fidelity recording systems over the pandemic for some reason. I just found ways to put that into the work. SALONS ARE A RECURRING SCENE IN YOUR WORK. WHAT ATTRACTS YOU TO THAT SPACE? It’s just something that’s been a constant in my life. From when I was younger, my dad would take me to the barbershop and then as I got older, it just became a thing where you do it every two weeks; you get a haircut. On Saturdays, the women in my family would always wake up early to go to the hair salon. WHAT’S YOUR RELATIONSHIP TO REALISM? I never want the burden of capturing reality, so I just let it be after a certain point. When I was teaching myself how to paint, I got to a certain point, and I really embraced my limitations. I try to capture something that feels a bit real, but then, obviously, I go against that with the extremes of bright colors. WHEN YOU ARE PAINTING WHAT COMES FIRST? The face.

Po r t rait By QU Y N ĐA K AO 48 culturedmag.com

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SPOILERS ONLY

Artist Olivia Erlanger has always dabbled in the fantastical, but with her new commission for Frieze Los Angeles, her dreamworld takes a sharp turn. The peripateic artist discusses the big twist.

¶ WHAT MAKES A PUBLIC COMMISSION APPETIZING? I’m in art to speak to the masses. I’m interested in democratizing forms and conversations. YOUR VISION OF THE ENVIRONMENT ALWAYS INCLUDES THE GUTS. CAN YOU TELL ME WHAT THE SCULPTURE ACTUALLY IS? A massive, severed serpent tongue. It’s 12 feet long, six-anda-half feet tall. I really have wanted to connect my interest in the infrastructure of a built environment to the horror and mundanity of suburban life within climate chaos. The idea of this horror was really exciting to me because a lot of the work that I’ve been making has a sense of fantasy, but I hadn’t yet twisted to its brother/sister: nightmare. That’s the turn that I’ve been trying to take with this sculpture. ARCHITECTURE SEEMS LIKE AN INESCAPABLE PART OF YOUR DISPOSITION. My brain is geared to creating puzzles, but they’re inverted because I’m making all the pieces and I don’t necessarily know the final image I’m putting together. That’s the art of it, right? I’m intuiting the direction. A LOT OF WHAT YOU’RE DOING IS PLAYING PRETEND WITH REAL LIFE. I think that’s what I was talking about: that very thin line between fantasy and nightmare.

Po r t rait b y H A R RY EEL M A N 50 culturedmag.com

ICA MIAMI/Now on View Hugh Hayden: Boogey Men Free Admission Every Day / Nov 30, 2021 – Apr 17, 2022

Hugh Hayden, Nude, 2021.

Bald cypresss, plywood, and aluminum.

Photo: Zachary Balber.

Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami

61 NE 41ST St Design District 305 901 5272

Reserve Your Free Ticket Online icamiami.org

CONTAIN YOURSELF

A cool veneer of effortlessness blesses Torbjørn Rødland’s photography, yet very rarely are the origins candid. Plotted and performed, sometimes with collaborators, the Los Angeles-based photographer’s compositions push viewers to look past clichés and instead at the strange—and its subtler cousin, the uncanny. At Rødland’s upcoming March show at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles, “Pain in the Shell,” the artist turns the skin of expectation inside out.

¶ THE SHOW’S TITLE REFERS TO GHOST IN THE SHELL, the 1995 CYBERPUNK ANIME FILM, AND THE CONCEPTUAL PROJECT IT INSPIRED, “NO GHOST JUST A SHELL,” BY PHILIPPE PARRENO AND PIERRE HUYGHE. The title is typically introduced late in the process. It helps me in the finishing stages of deciding what to include in a show.

HOW DO YOU KNOW WHICH ONES YOU’LL PRINT? I usually know as soon as I get my film back which images will work for a book or an exhibition. BUT THERE IS SOMETHING HERE ABOUT SHELLS AND GUTS. THE APPLE, FOR INSTANCE. The insides are moving out and the outside is moving in. ONE IMAGE THAT STRUCK ME WAS THE COUPLE IN THE AWOKEN CONSCIENCE, (2019).

HOW DO YOU MEET COUPLES? One of my recurring motifs is a couple with a negotiable or unsettled power balance. For a long time, I would construct these unequal couples, but this photograph resulted from an open call for existing couples. HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT INSTAGRAM? If my images cannot stand out among everybody else’s, I’m doing something wrong.

Po r t rait b y EM M A M A R I E J EN K I NSON 52 culturedmag.com

Tickets at guggenheim.org Global Partners

Gillian Wearing in collaboration with Wieden + Kennedy, Wearing, Gillian (detail), 2018.

Color video, with sound, 5 min. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Council, 2019.67. © Gillian Wearing, courtesy Maureen Paley, London; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles; and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

MASTER OF THE COLOR WHEEL, INDOORS AND OUT Paola Lenti is synonymous with visions of chic, colorful and, most importantly, comfortable outdoor furniture. The Italian entrepreneur made a name for herself and the eponymous brand she runs with her sister, Anna (at the business helm), through their unique approach to design, material research, experimentation and a sustainable ethos. A master colorist, Lenti combines hues to sophisticated effect, allowing customers to thrive as the main characters of their spaces. Sustainability is a key consideration in bringing these forward-thinking designs to life, and the brand has developed their own high-tech, 100 percent recyclable and eco-compatible yarns and textiles to create durable colorfast furniture while minimizing the ecological impact. Responsible sourcing and manufacturing in Italy also lower the carbon footprint. With the very first United States Paola Lenti stores opening in Los Angeles and Miami, the brand has expanded its oeuvre to include architectural elements, indoor product and most recently, Eres, a collection crafted using 100 percent natural materials like bamboo, hemp and linen.

BY SOPHIA SMALL

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WHAT EXPERIENCES LED YOU TO DESIGN? Paola Lenti: Color has always fascinated me, even from a very young age. I was drawn to design well before I even knew what that meant. Early in my career, I worked as a graphic designer for many brands but found that to be a bit limiting. I decided to invent a job that would allow me the freedom to explore and express my ideas fully. I consider 1994 to be the year that Paola Lenti, the company, was born. I started by designing Limoges porcelain and glass objects but I’ve always liked working with all kinds of materials, especially fabrics, and it was with the introduction of the wool felt we use to produce rugs and furnishing accessories that we first gained attention.

WHERE DO YOU FIND INSPIRATION FOR YOUR COLLECTIONS? I can find inspiration in a good book or a work of art, architecture or design from the past.

But it can also bubble up in moments of stillness and tranquility. If you learn how to listen to nature, you can discover an inexhaustible wealth of information.

WHAT DOES SUSTAINABILITY MEAN TO YOU? Our approach to design from our earliest days has incorporated our commitment to a very precise set of ecological ethics that, unfortunately, has now become a real necessity.

We start by fully understanding and respecting the inherent properties of each material, using only those that are 100 percent recyclable or recycled, industrial or natural (never from animal sources though) and then process them without chemical substances harmful to living beings and the environment.

WHAT WAS THE TRANSITION FROM OUTDOOR TO INDOOR FURNITURE LIKE? Having begun our entrepreneurial path with indoor accessories such as rugs, we extended our research and experimentation in the last few years to include products and architectural elements, which, layered together, can create a holistic environment, sensitive to its setting. We have brought the comfort of indoor seating outdoors and the easy informality of outdoor living indoors.

PHOTO BY SERGIO CHIMENTI

This tranquil setting layers architectural elements, seating, rugs, tables and accessories, all by Paola Lenti.

Karolína Kurková and Sarah Harrelson at Five Park and Cultured.

Art Basel 2021

If you are in need of proof that the roaring 2020s are here, then look no further than last year’s Art Basel Miami Beach, which took Collins Avenue by storm with its partyhungry cohort of art and fashion professionals who had whiplash desires to return to normalcy at speed. A historic week of late nights, forever marked by the tragic milestone of Virgil Abloh’s suddenly posthumous runway show, the entire fair unfolded with a renewed sense of purpose as a pilgrimage place for international artists to converge under the sun.

Cultured avoided the chaotic neutral of it all by trying to tip the scale towards good with a series of intimate events including a soulful set with former cover star and musician Moses Sumney, Salvatore Ferragamo and Red Rooster Overtown and many others you can peruse here.

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Blake Gray at ZADIG&VOLTAIRE and Cultured.

Josephine Skriver and Jasmine Tookes at Salvatore Ferragamo, Cultured and Red Rooster.

Venus Williams at Salvatore Ferragamo, Cultured and Red Rooster.

Moses Sumney at Salvatore Ferragamo, Cultured and Red Rooster.

Jacinto Hernandez and Chet Callahan at Five Park and Cultured.

Awol Erizku at Salvatore Ferragamo, Cultured and Red Rooster.

Rebecca Sorkin, Julia Kalnmals and Laurice Budd at ZADIG&VOLTAIRE and Cultured.

Matthew O’Reilly and Megan Prives at Five Park and Cultured.

Co-hosts Andrew Warren, Gaïa Jacquet-Matisse and Brooks Marks at ZADIG&VOLTAIRE and Cultured.

Chelcie May and Constanza Montalva at ZADIG&VOLTAIRE and Cultured.

Carl Larsson and Waris Ahluwalia at Dr. Barbara Sturm and Cultured at the Rubells’ home.

Ric Whitney and Robert Galstian at Cultured Collector Cocktail with The Cultivist.

Co-hosts Andrew Warren, Gaïa Jacquet-Matisse and Brooks Marks at ZADIG&VOLTAIRE and Cultured.

Carolina AlvarezMathies at Dr. Barbara Sturm and Cultured at the Rubells’ home.

Charlotte McKinney at ZADIG&VOLTAIRE and Cultured.

Paula Sánchez Navarro, Manuel Barrantes, Alejandra Piñera and Emilio Braun at Anónimo Collective, Dupuis and Cultured.

Hugh Hayden at Salvatore Ferragamo, Cultured and Red Rooster.

Rogan Gregory and Isolde Brielmaier at Five Park and Cultured.

Lili Buffett, Diedrick Brackens, Sarah Harrelson, Kennedy Yanko and Casey Fremont at Dr. Barbara Sturm and Cultured at the Rubells’ home.

Austin Mahone at ZADIG&VOLTAIRE and Cultured.

Mark Hernandez, Laura Posbolska, Monica Kalpakian and Katherine Francey Stables at Cultured Collector Cocktail with The Cultivist.

Lily Harriman and Sunda Uzzell at Cultured Collector Cocktail with The Cultivist.

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Material Girl

;OL 9\ILSS 4\ZL\T»Z HY[PZ[ PU YLZPKLUJL 2LUULK` @HURV YLÅLJ[Z VU OLY experience while turning heads in head-to-toe Valentino.

BY REBECCA AARON PORTRAIT BY ANDRÉS OYUELA

IF YOU’RE LUCKY ENOUGH, you may get to walk the quiet halls of an empty Rubell Museum before its opening hours. And if you’re even luckier, you may get to try on Valentino’s The Party Collection with 2021 artist-inresidence Kennedy Yanko—at least for a little while. This past December, Valentino transformed a gallery space in the Miami museum into a walk-in closet that catapulted Valentino’s The Party Collection into fashion history and onto the pages of our Art Basel Miami Beach diaries. The capsule collection, which goes all in for sequins and feathers and reflects the joy of celebrating together again, looked at home in the halls of the landmark institution, as did Yanko, whose solo show swallows up the room with its grand gestures, on view through October 2022. Valentino and Yanko share more than a penchant for drama in common. The artist has successfully threaded the needle as a fashion circuit muse while her work maintains the institutional gravitas that It Girls are usually denied.

Part of this is the ease Yanko has with her passions. If a creative endeavor demands it, she’s not afraid to go big. “It’s because of the consistent practice and dedication I’ve had over the past 17 years that I

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can now really allow myself to be any kind of artist I want to be,” she says.

Her towering painted-metal sculptures demand attention by embracing the scale of their setting. For the Rubell show, Yanko had a large white cube to contend with and she met it with bright unapologetic colors and gold lines. The Valentino installation also on display during Miami Art Week echoed this vivacious appetite.

“Because my practice is founded in pure expression and all my work is based on the way I see and understand the world, the sculptures I make elicit an immediate sense of presence, body, movement, intense action and fluidity—similar to the kind of expression we see on the runway,” she says, like she knows exactly what I’m thinking.

I ask her what she likes most about the city outside of her tailormade residency. She pauses: “My favorite thing about Miami is that you can wear as little clothing as possible and nobody really looks too hard at you, and that’s an incredible experience as a woman.” she admits. “I’m definitely a titties out kinda girl.” Inspired, I’m finding more excuses than ever to party.

Kennedy Yanko with her sculpture, I am that, 2021, at the Rubell Museum Jewelry by L’Enchanteur and full look by Valentino.

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FEBRUARY 17-20, 2022

FELIX FELIX ART FAIR 2022 HOLLYWOOD ROOSEVELT HOTEL, LOS ANGELES, USA

fernandowongold.com

WHEN I’M TOLD THAT SASHA SPIELBERG’S earliest availability to chat with me is between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, I let her publicist know that I can do noon— which still allows me to make a morning class at the gym, while also not entirely ruining the first day of summer’s last hurrah for me. Besides, I’m certain she’s going to cancel the moment she realizes that September 4 falls on a holiday.

In fact, I’m so certain I’ll receive an “I’m so sorry to do this to you” email from her publicist at 11:55 a.m. that, as I dial her number, I’m already rehearsing the voicemail I’m going to leave when Spielberg’s doesn’t answer. Except for that she does. Almost immediately. And she’s refreshed, prepared and expecting my call.

The warmth and sincerity in her voice—and the fact that she answered at all—catches me off guard. Shouldn’t she be spending her summers on the Spielberg yacht? Or doing something else fabulous? Why is she working on a holiday weekend?

It turns out this singer, songwriter, painter and podcast host isn’t just the daughter of a famous Hollywood couple, she’s her own person too.

“I probably practiced my Oscar speech a million times in the mirror when I was growing up,” Spielberg says. “I’m kidding. Ugh, can you imagine?” Of course, the 31-year-old grew up thinking for a time that she wanted to pursue acting, but it was more painting and music that bit her. “My dad always had a video camera with him when I was a kid, so there was part of me that liked performing in front of a camera, but I was also super shy. Really, it was painting with pastels when I was five that was my first artistic passion and then singing shortly after.”

In fact, her bat mitzvah was her coming out party in more ways than one.

“I really, really wanted to belt out ballads like Mariah or Christina, but it was my bat mitzvah, and you can’t really belt out Hebrew, so I did it in a softer voice. No one had heard me sing like that before, and it ignited something,” she says. “Also, I couldn’t sing like Mariah or Christina, so there was that.

But, at the party, someone asked me if I had ever heard Joni Mitchell. I hadn’t, and they later sent me a bunch of her records, which showed me that there were so many different ways you could sing.”

The way she throws out “someone” is endearing, and my mind admittedly wanders as to which guest at this 2003 event told her about Joni Mitchell… Leo? Tom? The other Tom? But she’s so self-conscious about her circumstances that I feel bad prying.

It wasn’t until college at Brown that she really came into her own as an artist. “For the first two semesters, I don’t think I really spoke to anyone, because I was so terrified of sounding dumb, and I felt like there was this pressure to prove myself and show that I got into school on my own merit,” she says. “But I eventually got over that and started making music with friends.”

Last year, Spielberg released her first album under the name Buzzy Lee—a combination of her childhood nickname and an ode to her grandmother/ kindred spirit—with a second one already in the works. She’ll also paint your pet, and for a very reasonable price of $200. (The website is bysashy.com, and the portraits—as well as their captions—are good.)

“I went through a lot of waves during COVID, and at one point, I was just really inspired by dogs’ faces and would get lost in that. Of course, sometimes I’d also get lost in Below Deck Mediterranean, but I ultimately would make it back to the dogs,” she says. What started as a hobby, painting her friends’ pets, is now a legitimate side hustle she devotes most mornings to, creating roughly two works a day.

Additionally, what started out as a way to promote her album has turned into a new creative endeavor. “It was originally just a spoof podcast I did on Twitch, where I speak in an Australian accent and I’m this character who knows nothing about gear but pretends that she does and interviews a bunch of different musicians about it,” she says, adding that she had so much fun doing the first four—guests have included Chrome Sparks, Dev Hynes, Haim and more—that it led to her becoming a Twitch Partner, with more episodes in the works.

But for now, she’s most excited about getting to perform and tour with Haim in April. “I haven’t performed in two years,” she says. “I’m totally nervous, but excited to be back in the groove of things.”

NOT A FLUFF PIECE ABOUT STEVEN SPIELBERG’S DAUGHTER

Surprise: Sasha Spielberg is self-aware, creatively driven and just downright lovely. She sings, she paints, she pods—she’s a triple threat.

BY SAMANTHA BROOKS PORTRAIT BY MOLLY BERMAN

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Sasha Spielberg performs under stage name Buzzy Lee.

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On April 9, the late artist JeanMichel Basquiat’s sisters are out to correct the record with a new, intimate exhibition of unseen work, accompanied by a Pentagramdesigned catalogue filled with tender familial stories about the youth and artistic rise of the brilliant talent. Simultaneously, the launch of an another tome, Crossroads, from Rizzoli, will explore Basquiat’s friendship with the multidisciplinary artist Lee Jaffe and the influence that music had on both their lives.

Shrouded in mystery no more, this is Basquiat as we’ve never known him, but at the same time, as he’s always been.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1982.

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BY ELIZABETH FAZZARE

PORTRAIT: © 1983 VAN DER ZEE

The Truth Is Out There

THOUGH HE ONLY LIVED TO 27 years old, the legacy and work of Jean-Michel Basquiat feels timeless. In the past, his story has often been told through the lens of his connection to Andy Warhol and the who’s who of 1980s celebrity, his origin as a graffiti writer, or the influence his wry, colorful, character-filled paintings, drawings and assemblages have had on contemporary

“His body of work provides so much insight into who he was, what he observed about our culture and history and what he had to say about it.”

creatives, young and old. However, on April 9, a new exhibition, “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure” and its accompanying catalogue are finally telling his true story—through the words and vision of his living sisters, Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux.

Designed by architect Sir David Adjaye on the ground floor of the iconic Starrett-Lehigh Building in New York, this intimate presentation provides familial context to the beloved artist’s origins, his rise to fame and his legendary spot in the art historical canon. Set to a dedicated soundtrack of the music that inspired him, the show will feature over 200 never-before-seen works as well as reproductions of Basquiat’s Great Jones Street studio and the sincedemolished Palladium nightclub’s VIP section for which he made two paintings. But what it truly reveals is a different side of his humanity, seen through the loving eyes of his two younger sisters and their stories of his relationships with his Haitian father Gerard, his Brooklyn-born, Puerto Rican mother Matilde, his stepmother Nora Fitzpatrick, his friends, his acquaintances and his admirers. “Jean-Michel is and has always been fire,” writes Lisane in the catalogue, and her pride in her older brother is tangible. Here, she, Heriveaux and Adjaye speak about why this story finally needed to be told.

ELIZABETH FAZZARE: How long have you been working on this show and why is now the right moment to unveil it?

JEANINE HERIVEAUX: The idea of creating an exhibition from the family’s perspective came about in 2017 but it wasn’t until the summer of 2020 that we actually went ahead with working on it full time. Now is the right moment because his art is always the right moment.

LISANE BASQUIAT: His work is always timely and we want to invite his audience to join us in celebrating his incredible creativity, perspective and contribution to art and culture.

EF: Why was imbuing a sense of personality important to the design of “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure”?

JH: It was important that the exhibition design captured the essence of Jean-Michel and how he lived. The Adjaye team supported that from the first conversation and created a design that will walk the visitor through Basquiat’s journey.

DAVID ADJAYE: Working with the Basquiat

family has been incredible because their ambition is to present another face to the image and incredible legacy of Jean-Michel that’s no longer from an outside perspective. I jumped onto the project immediately after meeting with the family because I understood the curatorial lens was really from the inside—from the family sharing who this trailblazing 20th-century icon was. “King Pleasure” is about revealing the humanity of JeanMichel to shed new light on an artist who is widely known but only partially understood.

EF: How does this show honor Jean-Michel’s legacy, as an artist and a cultural figure, and correct the narrative about him?

JH: The best way that we can honor Jean-Michel’s legacy is to focus on what was most important to him, which was the art and the messages that were conveyed by them.

LB: This show honors Jean-Michel’s legacy by introducing his audience to a broader and more intimate perspective of his life.

DA: The show is also about dismissing some of the mythmaking around Jean-Michel to really illuminate the lesser-known facets of his life and his work. Designed as a narrative experience, “King Pleasure” guide you through the key periods of his life as identified and articulated by his family.

Instead of creating a white box-type experience, the exhibition unfolds as a series of contextual frames using materiality and tonality as thematic indicators that guide visitors through the distinct stages of his life.

EF: What is one thing about Jean-Michel that the history books have got wrong? What’s the real story?

LB: The most precise understanding of who Jean-Michel is and what he thought is accessible through his work. His body of work provides so much insight into who he was, what he observed about our culture and history, and what he had to say about it. The goal of our show is to provide broader context and a more personal lens.

EF: Lisane and Jeanine, if you could describe your brother in one phrase, what would it be?

JH: Famous.

LB: Creative genius.

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Now Presenting: Spaghetti Western Restaurateur Vinny Dotolo and film producer Michael Sherman’s wives describe their husbands’ relationship as “art bros,” but the truth is the two collectors and entrepreneurs have taken it past friends with benefits. Together, Dotolo and Sherman launched a collaborative collection they call Spaghetti Western, a send-up for the uniting of their creative endeavors. Previously a secret project, the duo has decided to take Spaghetti Western public in this first peek interview with Cultured.

PORTRAIT BY CLIFFORD PRINCE KING Vinny Dotolo and Michael Sherman with Deana Lawson’s House of My Deceased Lover (2019) a part of their shared collection, Spaghetti Western.

LET’S START AT THE BEGINNING. MICHAEL SHERMAN: We met at Go Get Em Tiger in Los Angeles. Vinny’s beard was half the size. Then I forget what happened after that.

VINNY DOTOLO: We were drinking coffee regularly. It was around the same time that…

What was that art fair that was down in…?

MS: Oh, yes, the LAXART fair.

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VD: We just started chopping it up about art and artists. Sherm was a little further into collecting than I was and there was something that stood out at the fair and we both started talking about it. That was really the start of us not only becoming friends but just having this constant conversation around art and artists.

WHERE DOES SPAGHETTI WESTERN COME IN?

VD: The Spaghetti Western idea started a couple years ago. It really has just been something that we’ve cultivated together in our heads. This [interview] is a real launchpad for it to turn into something else.

WHY TAKE IT PUBLIC NOW? VD: This is going on our third year of working together and finding artists that we both love

and putting them into Spaghetti Western. Now it’s like, “What do we do with all this beautiful work? How do we make it available for others to see and for people to know that they’re in the Spaghetti Western collection?” We’ve never really talked about it with anybody before.

INCLUDING THE ARTISTS? VD: Yes, including the artists. This [conversation] is a moment where we’re saying, “Hey, look what we’ve built together.” People know about us individually. Now we can hopefully go out there and say to people, “Do you want your artist to be a part of this great and growing collection with two collectors that are passionate about the arts and artists?” We both also contribute to culture at large through the restaurant from my end and through film on Sherm’s end; it gives more meaning and context to the collection.

MS: It’s helpful when you have a friend who loves the same artist as you, and you’re like, “Man, we should help this person get into the museum. They’re so rad. They’re such good people.” Part of the approach to our collection is knowing the people we collect. Maybe not all of them personally, but the majority of the artists that we collect, we’ve met, we know.

They’re wonderful people.

IS THAT A RUBRIC FOR PURCHASES? VD: Interestingly enough, up until this point we’ve acquired things individually because of how we have navigated through the gallery system. It’s just getting a response, starting there, and then building relationships. Sometimes Sherm acquires a work or I acquire a work, and then we say to each other, “Hey, would you want to put this into Spaghetti Western?” I’m hoping that we can now go out and say, “I’m collecting this piece specifically for Spaghetti Western.” We’re both on the board at the Hammer Museum.

Sherm is also on the board at the Balitmore Museum of Art. Given these things, it’s hopefully something that is exciting for young, mid-career and older artists to be a part of.

WHERE DID THE NAME COME FROM? MS: Vinny is Italian and makes pasta. I’m a filmmaker and my favorite genre is westerns. It felt like the right extension of both our practices combining.

ARE THERE THEMES THAT APPEAR IN THE COLLECTION THAT ARE MAYBE NOT WHAT YOU SET OUT WITH? VD: I don’t think we necessarily have a theme.

Ultimately, we’d just like the collection to be about great art.

MS: The real beginning of Spaghetti Western

was actually a Christina Forrer work. Vinny and I had been talking about Christina’s work, and we were both like, “Oh, man. I love it,” and then I had gotten this offered to me and it was expensive; I couldn’t afford it. I was always thinking about how you could make a collection with your best friend that had equal parts. It’s not necessarily shared values but shared ideas about what we love in the art world.

VD: Honestly, sometimes it comes down to just financial ability too. We might get offered something great and sometimes you can’t squeeze it. It just doesn’t work. We’re not made of unlimited funds here.

IT IS POPULAR WISDOM NOT TO MIX MONEY AND FRIENDSHIP. HOW DO YOU GUYS LIKE HACKING THE COLLECTION TOGETHER? VD: It’s really simple. It’s equal. It’s 50/50, and that’s it.

MS: First of all, there’s no greed—we’re trying to build something that we can showcase at some point. It’s about supporting artists and making sure that their work gets seen, whether that’s at somebody else’s museum, a Spaghetti Western place of rest or in some town where there’s not a lot of art to see: not LA, not New York, but somewhere where people need access to art. Our fundamental purpose is pushing the narrative of collecting in a positive way.

SOUNDS LIKE YOU WANT TO SHARE THE JOY YOU HAVE IN GEEKING OUT TOGETHER WITH OTHERS SO THEY CATCH THE BUG TOO. MS: 100 percent.

VD: Exactly. We want this work to be seen by other people. We haven’t been able to put our finger on where that is yet because we’ve been in build-mode to make it something that people would be interested in coming to see. We’re going to be the only ones that put the limitations on it.

MS: I would love to get a cool old schoolhouse in Portugal and turn it into the Spaghetti Western Museum. That would be my dream: to have a place of resting in Europe as well as America.

DO YOU COLLECT SOME PEOPLE IN-DEPTH? MS: Absolutely. Jonathan Lyndon Chase was someone that we collected separately, and then, when we started Spaghetti Western, we talked about certain artists that we’d love to collect deeply. We combined our Lyndon Chases and then we bought three drawings from them recently that we’ve added into Spaghetti. Devin N. Morris is someone that I was introduced to through my friend, curator Essence Harden. I

went to visit Devin and I was blown away. Devin is like an engineer. He really understands how to put a piece of art with different mediums together. I called Vinny and said, “Man, I just had the best studio visit.” Vinny looked at the art and said, “Oh my god, these are amazing.”

I was like, “We should heavily collect Devin. I feel strongly about him as an artist” and then we did.

VD: It’s hard to get multiple works by artists especially now with how big collecting is. I hope that we can continue to support these artists as they grow and their bodies of work grow and evolve.

MS: The tricky part for us is just the pricing moves so fast these days that it’s hard to keep up with. That’s part of collecting. I think that’s the beauty of discovering artists and meeting new faces and new people.

WHERE DO YOU DISCOVER NEW ARTISTS? VD: Personally, art fairs help me see something that maybe I have only seen on the internet, or in JPEGs or on PDFs, etcetera. We learn a lot from group shows, when a gallery that we’ve been following picks up an artist, and from Instagram.

MS: For me, you have to see art in person. It’s also nice to meet somebody before you buy their work. I’m big on energy. I like discovering artists and then doing studio Zooms with them and then buying the work.

DO YOU HAVE ANY TIPS FOR ASPIRING COLLECTORS? MS: I have a couple of friends who wanted to start collecting art during the pandemic. I told them that there are so many amazing artists with work under $5,000 and $2,000. Every collection starts somewhere. You should always buy something that you love and want to hang in your house.

VD: That gut reaction, you got to trust that. It always comes back to prove itself.

EVERYONE IS LA-BOUND FOR FRIEZE AND TO ESCAPE THE NEW YORK WINTER DOLDRUMS, ANY HOT TIPS? MS: We love Matthew Brown, David Kordansky, Night Gallery, François Ghebaly, Sarah Gavlak.

VD: I’m going to add Chris Sharp in there.

Matthew Marks.

MS: Commonwealth and Council. Paul Soto.

Charlie James.

VD: Paul Soto, for sure. Parker Gallery does amazing shows. There is so much to see. The real advice is to make sure you make time for it.

MS: Effort is everything.

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YOU’LL PAINT US With an upcoming exhibition at MassimodeCarlo in London, painter Jenna Gribbon and her muse, musician Mackenzie Scott, AKA Torres, discuss the potential dangers of mixing pleasure and business, art and love.

By Kat Herriman Photography by Flora Hanitijo

“A RELUCTANCE TO BE painted was something I was really trying to get into the work,” Jenna Gribbon tells me. We are sitting on a leafy rooftop in Brooklyn overlooking her skylighted studio where the artist has been focused on portraits big and small of her lover, musician Mackenzie Scott. Gribbon shares that recently her desire to capture reticence has manifested in the form of a favorite prop: the clamp light. In the largest, most lubricious works in the studio bound for a January 2022 solo show with MASSIMODECARLO in London, her girlfriend is depicted blinding herself in an almost cop-like interrogation. In others, Scott turns the bulb on Gribbon, and then on us. Now we are the suspects. This follows on the heels of recent paintings like Comment Section (2021), in which the musician holds up her fingers as a temporary shelter, Kanye in his shutter shades. “Comment sections are crazy and when they’re about you, they’re even crazier,” Gribbon says. “It’s that thing of being seen, your image being consumed and then having to deal with every person’s thoughts about who you are or what you’ve said or what you’ve done.” Scott, who performs as Torres, the indie rock star, makes a rich subject for inquiries into how our images are constructed and distributed with and without our blessings. “I’m always interested in the way that people are seen versus the way that they think they are or the way they want to be,” Gribbon says. “Because my partner is a public figure, it ends up also being about public versus private, how she’s depicted outside of our home versus inside of our home and what those two things look like next to each other.”

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“We’ve only been documenting ourselves in obsessive ways for less than a century.

I’m interested in investigating what the costs are for those that are represented.”

–JENNA GRIBBON Scott shares Gribbon’s fascination with Zen and the art of image maintenance. “We are co-conspirators,” Scott diagnoses a few days later, on a group FaceTime. “When you have a romantic relationship with an artist of any kind, you’re signing up for exhibitionism at the mildest and, at the most extreme, maybe exploitation.”

A reflexive pause. “I would like to think the tail is not wagging the dog. The relationship is what informs our art. There’s probably crosspollution but that’s the most fun thing about the relationship and the work.”

“Uscapes,” Gribbon’s fall 2021 exhibition at Fredericks & Freiser in New York, was composed of a suite of small nudes, mostly of Scott’s ass, paintings which you had to almost get inside of to see clearly. In these works, Gribbon’s culpability is acutely framed, sometimes as a camerawoman taking quiet advantageous

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footage, sometimes as an outright villain pushing the limits of consent. Scott is rarely pictured smiling but rather betrayed in various shades of discomfort, from suspicion to contempt.

The lovers’ rapport isn’t idealized by Gribbon’s brushstrokes, but rather worked through in the medium’s crude terms, arms and thighs carved out with the same winding licks. Big patches of careful color are devoted to knees, which rise like mountains to screen Scott’s expressions.

We are as close as we can get but her calves are

still in the way. The canvas creates our frame, and then Scott’s legs cut it into unequal halves— channeling our sight lines. These are the joint decisions that make them co-conspirators. With her posture, Scott demands a break—a cigarette off-screen. A painting of Scott captured through a slit in the bathroom doorway titled Small Crack (2021), shows her form bent over examining her chin (zits, perhaps?) in a mirror. Her body is not composed for us but instead doubled over in earnest examination. It’s the opposite of Balthus’s Nude Before a Mirror (1955). We are still the voyeur but here Scott, like us, is an accomplice in judgement—picking at her body in the same way the viewer inspects the paintings.

I feel a blush of shame for us all.

In writing about Gribbon’s work, I set out to avoid the generally mawkish conversation around figuration in contemporary paintings—

Previous spread: Musician MacKenzie Scott and artist Jenna Gribbon pose in the latter’s Brooklyn studio surrounded by new paintings of Scott. Here and beyond, more scenes from the studio including, at left, Gribbon’s Lavender scarescape in progess.

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the ones that dawdle on the erotic (which Gribbon seems to initiate in most paintings depicting Scott nude, but ultimately dodges by giving her neon pink nipples), the ones that gawk at frenzied markets and auction highs, the ones that overuse the word “intimacy” while flattening love and painting into LGBTQ thought. I wanted to explore inclusion and agency within the context of romance and art, which use public and private platforms to survive—just like the market and pornography and politics.

Gribbon’s film-world hero, Agnès Varda (to whom she dedicated an entire exhibition in 2021), offered a way in. The last beat of Varda’s cinematic love letter to Los Angeles, Lions Love (…and Lies) (1969), is given to Warhol Factory darling Viva (aka actor Janet Susan Mary Hoffmann). Viva’s wish is to spend her time silently looking into the camera: “I’m so sick of doing monologues, I would like to just breathe for one minute,” she announces.

Rather than ignore the victims of her sharp autofictions, Varda provided an avenue for friends, peers and strangers to air out their grievances. Viva is permitted to be tired of the camera and Varda’s direction.

The French director’s diary mingled so frequently with her plotlines that the collateral emotional damage became a structural concern of the work, just as it is in Gribbon’s.

Varda’s solution was to implicate herself in the hardships of being candid—by placing herself never too far from the frame even when she was technically invisible. Gribbon’s images of her lover and other select subjects function in the same charmingly self-sabotaging way, aligning the artist with memoirists like Varda but also Chris Kraus, Hannah Wilke, Nan Goldin, Diamond Stingily, Alice Neel.

I’m mad at Neel lately. (I carry my admiration for historic figures out like little affairs.) Neel’s recent Metropolitan Museum of Art retrospective, ironically titled “People Come First,” made the painter’s resentfulness of others so unbearably two-dimensional that I haven’t been able to enjoy the paintings ever since. What I like about Gribbon’s work, which deals in the same familiarity, is how it spreads any loathing, self- or otherwise, equally over

viewer, maker and subject. I am at once curious and guilty. Try not feeling like a perv observing one of her canvases too close in a public space.

But what exactly is the comeuppance for turning your relationships into art? Gribbon says she finds herself needing to set internal reminders to turn off painter’s brain and “live in the moment” and that the trepidation in Scott’s painted eyes is real. She also acknowledges that her son, who occasionally appears in the work, flinches whenever the iPhone, her preferred camera, comes out. The caveat is that he enjoys seeing himself once the paint dries. I suggest that perhaps this is because he can sense the love demonstrated in the labor, the same labor photography obscures in its haste. Gribbon nods, but then tempers it with her motivations. She says painting is precisely the space to engage our impulse to resist and that in some way it is the reflexive recoil that she feels compelled to document. “We assume people want to be seen but is that true?” Gribbon asks. “We’ve only been documenting, composing ourselves in obsessive ways for less than a century. I’m

interested in investigating that assumption and what the costs are for those who are represented.”

A surprising upshot of their relationship’s entanglement with Gribbon’s work is that the paintings occasionally provide a counterintuitive privacy. Scott is such an idiosyncratic fixture of the work that the art world sometimes addresses her in the shorthand of plusones. “Some people don’t even know I’m a musician. I’m just Jenna’s girlfriend,” Scott laughs. “Jenna is a star and I love that it gives me this place to burrow and get to watch for once. I’m such an exhibitionist because of what I do but with Jenna, she’s on display just as much as her subjects are because she has such a strong point of view.” Gribbon’s take is so invested in how all readings and facets of a figure could potentially occupy the same canvas that every new perspective it touches is subsumed into its own logic. Your world becomes a part of hers but it’s an exchange of information, not a surrender. “Painting is a way of understanding an image down to its minutiae,” Gribbon says. “It’s a way to have a relationship to every inch.”

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I’LL PAINT ME She named her tits form and content.

Nash Glynn paints naked portraits of herself in paradise.

But who is she really?

Where does the subject end and the artist begin?

By Simon Wu Photography by Sam Penn

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THE FIGURE IS GLYNN, and she is painting when I arrive. Her apartment is warm and clean. There is goopy, colorful art on her walls, but she says it’s all her partner’s. “It used to be bare here when I lived alone,” she tells me. “I need the blankness to work. But it’s nice to have stuff around.” Next to her easel is her laptop, an iPhone tripod and a bottle of water.

Untitled is in some ways a signature painting of Glynn’s: a self-portrait of a naked figure in an ethereal, natural setting. In a bigger version, like Self-Portrait with One Foot Forward and One Hand Reaching Out (2020) the figure steps into a colorful, idyll nature scene with tufted, violet clouds and green-yellow fall foliage. She is barefoot, a giant goddess—the trees come up to her ankles. She neither springs forward nor sinks into the foreground, floating on the surface. She beckons you into her world. These natural scenes often have ruptures, if you look closely. The little circle at the bottom left of Sunset (2021) is like a little glitch in her matrix. While these landscapes may appear to be placeless, like stock images, they are usually based on a picture of a place she has been. “I was feeling sad in Vermont,” Glynn tells me of the circumstances that led to the picture in the background of Self-Portrait with One Foot. Life, heartbreak, betrayal and friendshipseem to press themselves just beyond the frame of her Eden, lying in wait like shared secrets.

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Nash Glynn’s Self Portrait with One Foot Forward and One Hand Reaching Out, 2021. Previous spread: Glynn in the studio with an in-progress work.

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“I wasn’t planning on going to grad school. I also wasn’t planning on transitioning.

Glynn learned to paint at her father’s set construction company in Miami, Florida. Her brothers would get sent to do construction and she would get sent with “the one other woman and the gays” to the scenic department, where she painted sets for plays, theaters and amusement parks. Eventually she joined

I thought about putting grad school on hold because I wanted to hide. But then I needed to paint again.”

an arts-focused Miami public school, primarily to continue art, but also because she learned she wouldn’t have to take gym, and the thought of being in a boy’s locker room terrified her.

During her undergrad studies at School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, she stopped painting, before picking it back up in grad school at Columbia. Even now, Glynn feels a primordial draw to painting describing it as a “survival mechanism.” “I wasn’t planning on going to grad school. I also wasn’t planning on transitioning. I thought about putting grad school on hold because I wanted to hide. But then I needed to paint again.”

At yoga two weeks later, we lie next to each other in shavasana and talk about how hot the guy behind us is. We also talk about the conflicted burden of representation, the types of visibility that institutions ask of marginalized people. She wonders out loud if she can ever just be “a painter,” or if she’ll always have to be a “trans painter.” Selfportraits have been a way for her to take charge of her own image. But sometimes she can be interested in more fundamental things—like time and space, she tells me, or more formal concerns: “How little does it take to signal an inside and an outside?” In her recent works at Vielmetter in Los Angeles she’s testing these waters. The show consists of two paintings, Interior #1 and Interior #2 (both works 2021), which depict the front and the back of a self-portrait, displayed on two sides of a column in the center of the gallery.

Here, the wall became a sort of minimalist sculpture, an extension of her interest in the

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binaries that construct architecture, painting, but also heterosexism.

In a spare, wistful painting like If You Were A Cup (2021), the canvas is white and the only object is a wine glass with pink and blue flowers. A soft, blue line connotes something like a table, floor, or a wall. This economy imbues her surfaces with a certain mystery. Like, who is she??? Glynn has been doing self-portraits since an early age, and they’ve become a way for her to celebrate her visibility. But these still lifes are also very intentional. The juxtaposition between

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still lifes and self-portraits in her oeuvre imbues each genre with the aura of the other—is the flower Glynn? Is Glynn a flower in a landscape? In this light, paintings like Before (2020)—a knife with an apple—and After (2020)—a knife and a sliced apple— take on metaphorical resonances. Are these about surgery? Are we extrapolating from her identity in a way that oversteps? It could also just be the passage of time, as expressed through painting. Ultimately it’s both. “I named my tits form and content,” she tells me, succinctly wrapping up her

philosophy, “because you can’t tell the difference.”

In the next few months, she’s preparing for a big solo show at Vielmetter set to open next fall 2023. She’s not exactly sure what’s next, but she knows that she wants to work more intuitively, to not have so much of a framework all the time. After yoga, she drives me in her tiny car and we go to an opening downtown together. This fall feels like winter. “I just want to play more,” she tells me, and we step into the crowd to look for our friends.

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WE’LL PAINT THE WORLD Since they lost their sight almost a decade ago, Manuel Solano’s paintings have only grown more complicated, more delicate, more beautifully detailed.

By Henry Dexter Photography by Volker Conradus

FACETED LIKE GEMSTONES, waves move geometrically over the surface of a swimming pool in two paintings in Manuel Solano’s 2021 exhibition “Heliplaza” at Pivô in São Paulo. Solano borrowed the title of the show from the name of a shopping mall in Ciudad Satélite, the suburb of Mexico City where they grew up. After losing their sight in 2014 due to HIV-related complications, the 34-year-old painter has been forced to work only with the images that they remember from their experience of the visual world; frequently they reconstruct vivid and striking pictures from pop culture and their childhood. Solano tells me that before they became blind they prided themself in their ability to paint “transparent or reflective objects,” which “is all about understanding exactly where there is light and where there is dark and how light is bending through space.” Solano has been told that their natatorial landscapes remind people of David Hockney’s classic 1964 painting A Bigger Splash, a comparison they politely decline. In their opinion, “Hockney did not do the work. The water in his painting does not look like water; it’s symbolized there because there’s the color blue but that’s

“There’s always a point where I have to give up.

Any feedback becomes huge in my imagination and I can’t let it run on forever.” it.” And Solano is right, if you return to the painting, you’ll find that the plume of gushing chlorination meant to indicate the submersion of a body into the swimming pool just sits flatly on a smooth uniform field of blue.

The process of painterly mimesis has as much to do with observational acuity as it does with the careful and precise gesture of one’s hand. Part of what’s so striking about Solano’s work is seeing an artist rely so fully on the former of the two skills, to dissect and take apart images—Solano gets inside of the mechanics of each material’s appearance to reverse-engineer an optical encounter with it for the viewer. In another painting from 2020, an interior scene of an invented Art Deco building, Solano deals with a window of

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translucent bricks of glass much the same way as they do the undulating ripples in the pretend fountain. And in an earlier work from a series called Pose, based on images from the world of Michael Jackson, one finds the killer whale from the film Free Willy, used in the music video for Jackson’s song “Will

You Be There,” glistening with his dorsal fin tragically collapsed as theatrical lights beam off his rubbery skin and scatter into the orca’s tank water. Nostalgia, glamorous and melancholy as ever, is as much the method of Solano’s paintings as it is their subject. Their paintings of images taken from pop culture are so remarkable because they are able to articulate not just the image itself but the feeling of seeing the image for the first time, or perhaps the feeling of an image that you have played back for yourself in your head a million times. Well-worn, the picture warbles in all the wrong places and we can imagine what it must have been like to encounter, to be pierced by, some of these pop culture icons.

In order to achieve the naturalism they

Scenes from Solano’s studio in Berlin.

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“[Making images is the way] I know how to communicate myself to the world.”

demand of their pictures, Solano now works with a team of three studio assistants in Berlin where they has lived for the past two years. The rest of the team, Solano’s longtime studio manager and former boyfriend, works remotely from Mexico City helping create maps of each picture using tactile markers that guide Solano’s hands over the surface of the painting as they apply acrylic with their fingertips. Sometimes when they have to work alone, Solano uses a phone app called Be My Eyes that connects blind people with sighted people who describe back to Solano what they see them doing as they paint. Solano says, “There’s always a point where I have to

give up. Any feedback becomes huge in my imagination and I can’t let it run on forever.”

In the four years since they were included in Songs for Sabotage, the 2018 New Museum Triennial, their work has exploded in popularity, earning them institutional solo and group exhibitions at the ICA Miami, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and, most recently, at the Kunsthalle Lissabon in Portugal. The new success has afforded Solano, whose paintings are often praised for their unique emotional intensity and earnestness, an all but forgotten luxury in the market driven world of contemporary art discourse; the time and space required to work on longer

term projects that encompass both painting and sculpture and explore their identity through references to the movies and music that shaped it.

In the years since Solano went blind, their paintings have only become more formally complicated, delicate and detailed; when telling me this they stumble for a moment before posing it back as a question to themself.

They ask why they remain so committed to representation, when they could far more easily make paintings that look another way. “I think basically I’m feeling very lonely,” they say, and making images is the way “I know how to communicate myself to the world.”

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bfa.com

Beautiful Design, Where Are You? This season, we’re traveling around the world’s most exciting design hubs—Lagos, Tbilisi and Mexico City—to meet the designers changing their local scenes. How do their unique approaches reflect the great cities they live, work and dream in? Join our journey for beautiful design.

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Carlos H. Matos and Lucas Cantu of Tezontle.

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XXX

Mexico City, Mexico Mexico City’s coolest makers take the area’s rich history and reimagine it anew.

Gloria Cortina, Alexander Díaz Andersson, Paola Jose, Lucas Cantú and Carlos H. Matos, and Liliana Ovalle turn the past into the future.

BY EVAN MOFFITT

Alexander Díaz Andersson BORN AND RAISED IN Falsterbo, Sweden, Alexander Díaz Andersson was drawn to the minimalism of Scandinavian designers like Alvar Aalto at a young age.

He was also obsessed with the Italian architect and designer Carlo Scarpa, whose furniture and architecture form a perfect synthesis. After studying industrial design at the Istituto Europeo di Design in Spain, he followed his mother’s travels and relocated to Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, where he observed the rich local tradition of woodworking firsthand.

In 2009, Andersson founded ATRA, an architecture and design studio that he describes as “an amalgamation of Scandinavian minimalism with Mexican maximalist/Brutalist design.” Uniquely,

the firm’s many architectural projects are inspired by their furniture, rather than the other way around: each space is built around fine details that are considered in relationship to the body. ATRA’s first architectural commission was for the hejal of the Birkat Itzjak Synagogue in Mexico City, the altar-like cabinet where the holy Torah scrolls are stored. The project was fitting for Andersson, whose design philosophy prizes a sense of permanence, asking how to make an object that will decay gracefully and gain character over time. Each piece of ATRA furniture is built to last, reflecting a belief, Andersson says, in the twin values of “sustainability and durability.” The Fjaril Table, for instance, pairs a sheet of

marble, cleaved gently in two, with black steel tripod legs that curve gracefully like an Alexander Calder sculpture. ATRA’s Air Sofa, meanwhile, is a black leather couch stripped down to its most basic elements: with most of the back and sides cut away, it provides the sitter only with what’s needed to support their body.

“I always start with a silhouette,” he says. This is clear from his many chairs, which come in every imaginable material, from sensuously curved walnut to wicker, leather and steel. He is currently developing a new seven-piece furniture collection—“a more hedonistic, materialheavy line with soft upholstery”—and will open a permanent studio in New York by summer.

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Tezontle

IN 2015, LUCAS CANTÚ AND Carlos H. Matos had just begun working together when they visited Las Pozas, the fantastical estate of British surrealist poet Edward James in the jungles of San Luis Potosí. Cast concrete follies in spiraling forms, built between 1949 and 1984, rise several stories above the thick forest canopy. The artists felt a deep connection with the place that, like their own joint practice as Tezontle, was deeply rooted in the modern history of Mexico while also envisioning the distant future. Tezontle is a reddish volcanic rock common in early colonial and pre-Hispanic architecture, and one of the materials Cantú and Matos have used in their sculptural work, which flirts with interior design and architecture in equal measure. In 2017, following a residency at the Neutra VDL House in Los Angeles, the pair installed a frieze of abstracted Mesoamerican motifs, carved in onyx, along the floor-to-ceiling windows of the iconic modernist home. They scaled up their work for the 2019 Havana Biennial, installing a prefab concrete pavilion right on the city’s famed Malecón esplanade.

Accessible by a narrow staircase, the structure resembled a towering, futuristic sandcastle or a crown, and seemed to take notes from Edward James’s follies. For the past few years, Tezontle has also taught an experimental concrete workshop at Las Pozas, showing locals and interested travelers the infinite potential of the abundant material, which is common in major buildings across Mexico. Concrete slowly decays over time, an obsolescence that Tezontle welcomes like James’s ruin, their works aren’t always designed to be permanent.

For a recent show at LIGA gallery in Mexico City, they constructed an environment for a fictional character comprised of sculptures in concrete, plaster, fabric and metal, which abstractly resembles the interior of a home. “By creating an ephemeral space,” they write, “the installation also explores themes of temporality in architecture, calling into question the very notion of permanence and property.”

WHEN GLORIA CORTINA WAS growing up in the tony Mexico City neighborhood of Lomas de Chapultepec, she exhibited an early flair for interior design, dramatically redecorating her bedroom three times. She went on to study architecture at the Parsons School of Design in New York and apprenticed with architect Ricardo Legorreta, designing refined interiors for global hotels. It wasn’t until a fateful meeting in 2013, however, that she even considered designing furniture.

That was when the Colombia - born, New York-based gallerist Cristina Grajales, on the hunt for new talent from Latin America, suggested that Cortina try her hand at collectible design. Cortina had made just one object for herself at that point: a coffee table of three jagged, interlocking pieces of hand-hammered brass, in homage to Mexican modernist Mathias Goeritz. The table, which soon after became the first piece Cortina ever sold, would set a precedent for her practice, now one of the most prominent in Mexico: each exquisitely crafted, limited-edition

Gloria Cortina

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work filters Mexican cultural references through a highly refined process of abstraction. 2013’s Feather Wall, for instance, is a screen of stylized quills rendered in bronze with a dark, silvery patina, some inlaid with obsidian and pink quartz. The feather is a sacred element of Indigenous dress throughout North America, and the Aztecs used obsidian to make ritual daggers and black mirrors.

Cortina has used obsidian in many of her works, such as Eye of God (2016), an end table formed by eight pyramids—a key Mesoamerican architectural form—inverted as if seen from above and below.

The Bullet cabinet (2016), meanwhile, seems to reference the contemporary Mexican landscape: triangular plates of polished bronze, set in panels of black lacquer, radiate from a round, hollow casing.

It’s a beautiful and violent detail that Cortina says represents the sudden impact of creative inspiration.

“My work is sculptural, but it has to be functional, and it has to have a lot of meaning,” she says. Her new collection, made during the pandemic, will feature Origin: a round, white onyx table with a key leg made from melted bronze sheets, cast in sand and welded together with silver. Its form resembles a dial because, Cortina says, it’s important to remember that “we can always reset the clock.”

TEZONTZLE, GLORIA CORTINA AND ALEXANDER DÍAZ ANDERSSON: COURTESY OF THE DESIGNERS. PAOLA JOSE: MARÍA JABER. LILIANA OVALLE: MAX CREASY

IN THE LEAFY, SUBURBAN DISTRICT of Colonia Narvarte, Mexico City, Paola Jose’s father was known simply as “Doctor Yacaman.” Neighbors thought “Jose” was his second last name. The same happened to her grandfather, a general practitioner who immigrated to Mexico from Syria in the late 1930s.

Shortly after Jose’s father passed away in 2019, the lighting designer received an invitation to contribute work to the inaugural edition of the Mexico Design Fair.

The resulting Yacaman collection, which pays homage to the two men, draws from the antique surgical lamps she remembers seeing on childhood visits to the family medical practice, where she loved playing with their swiveling robotic arms. On one of her lamps, a bulb set within a shallow silver dish is attached by a leather strap to a cone of Mexican volcanic rock called recinto. An elegant chandelier, meanwhile, catches falling light in a cascade of golden dishes and projects them upward onto the ceiling, bathing the room in a faint, warm glow. Jose prefers dim light, which may explain why she called her studio SOMBRA, meaning “shadow.” The name also references the 1933 book

by Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, in which the Japanese novelist scorns the bright electric lights then in vogue in Kyoto and celebrates the somber spaces of traditional Japanese architecture. Jose’s design for cocktail bar Salón Rosetta, atop the eponymous Roma restaurant, uses dimmable Murano glass luminaires to create a sense of intimacy. Meanwhile, the hanging lamps she devised for boutique hotel Monte Uzulu on the Oaxacan coast drape lightbulbs in a local straw called popotillo so they cast shadows that recall ocean waves. “Darkness is like silence,” she says. “It’s become a luxury. We don’t need that much light, but we need to reconnect with darkness.”

Paola Jose

Liliana Ovalle

MEXICO CITY SITS ON THE SOFT, marshy bed of Lake Texcoco, a high mountain lake drained by the Spanish in their quest to build upon the floating Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán. That’s why the metropolis is so vulnerable to earthquakes, and why whenever it rains—as it does during the humid summer months—sinkholes often form in the streets. These deadly geological pits inspired Liliana Ovalle’s signature Sinkhole Vessels, which she produced in collaboration with Colectivo 1050°, and which are now part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York.

Handcrafted, fire-blackened clay vessels, too uneven to stand up on their own, sit within boxy wooden scaffolding, combining the form of a vase with that of an end table.

In her design practice, Ovalle often introduces an element of instability to simple forms.

Take, for instance, her Crash Bench (2006), which seems to buckle under the impact of a meteor. Or Table Stripping (2008), a desk of smooth, white-lacquered corian that disappears in sections to reveal an endoskeleton of oak. In 2006, while studying at the Royal College of Art in London, where she is currently based, Ovalle began her Mugroso (“Mucky”) series of chairs and sofas padded unevenly with bundles of mismatched fabrics tied together with rough cord. This calculated appearance of improvisation isn’t true of all Ovalle’s works, however: for her key work Fragment of a Staircase (2003), which is in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and won her the first Designer of the Year award at the 2021 Mexico Design Fair, Ovalle turned to the simple experience of sitting down on a step for a moment’s rest. For the past couple years, the designer has explored more sculptural forms, creating objects in cast concrete for the series En Concreto, inspired by Mexico’s Brutalist architecture. culturedmag.com 91

Tbilisi, Georgia Curator and scholar Anna Kats takes us to the Caucasus for a tour of five of Tbilisi’s best architecture and design practices: Gypsandconcrete, Material Editors, Rooms, Wunderwerk, and Multiverse. It’s time to learn about the new Georgian architecture.

BY ANNA KATS

Rooms I DON’T MEAN TO BE crass but Nata Janberidze and Keti Toloraia, co-founders of Rooms Studio and the doyennes of contemporary design in Tbilisi, have impeccable taste. Since establishing their practice in 2007, the duo has consistently reimagined Georgian design vernacular, presenting it to international audiences in a modernist-inflected dialect. They’ve shown with Rossana Orlandi in Milan and The Future Perfect in New York—indeed, Rooms were the first among the present coterie of Tbilisi-based talents to put Georgian design on the global map.

Nearly every young designer I talked to in the capital cites them as a source of inspiration.

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“We work with almost all the same artisans that we’ve worked with for years,” explains Janberidze. “We really have a partnership.” Most of Rooms’s pieces are custom fabricated in Georgia, a commitment to local production that is part and parcel of their insistence on collectivity as a driving agent of their design work.

The studio’s largest United States exhibition to date, “Distant Symphony,” opened at Emma Scully Gallery on New York’s Upper East Side last October to widespread acclaim. Among the pieces shown were the results of Rooms’s search for a way forward from the forced isolation of the pandemic: to refocus on collaborative

and collective work. The main gallery space featured highlights of Rooms’s recent design output: a wax chair, redolent of Georgian church candles, designed in collaboration with artist Shotiko Aptsiauri; a wooden chair that evokes the geometry of medieval Georgian thrones from Rooms’s Wild Minimalism collection and a sculptural room divider with rope stitches by artist Salome Chigilashvili. The antechamber displayed trinkets and personal effects chosen by the designers for their emotive qualities, a curatorial maneuver intended to underscore the same logic present in Rooms’s choice of name—they’re interested in interiority, both spatial and personal.

Nata Janberidze and Keti Toloraia of Rooms.

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Wunderwerk

GIGI SHUKAKIDZE, FOUNDER OF Tbilisibased research and design studio Wunderwerk, is at the multi-tasking, multi-hyphenate vanguard of contemporary Georgian architecture. Not only does he helm the design, research and publishing operations at Wunderwerk, he’s also a co-founder and co-curator of the Tbilisi Architecture Biennial (whose third edition debuts fall 2022) and a studio professor amongst the architecture faculty at the Visual Art, Architecture and Design School of Tbilisi’s prestigious Free University. He sees all of these interrelated avenues of architectural engagement as “shelters” that serve to mediate the impact of Tbilisi’s real estate boom on his practice, with its ensuing financial pressure to produce apolitical, generic work for developers. During a studio visit this past summer, Shukakidze summed the situation up with characteristically wry humor: “I want to not do evil shit.”

Established in 2013, Wunderwerk serves as a kind of umbrella organization for Shukakidze’s lines of inquiry—many of which seek to re-evaluate the significance of Tbilisi’s Soviet-era architectural patrimony. The studio’s design projects exist on the boundary between private property, a kind of national obsession in the post-socialist milieu, and public space, a legacy of Georgia’s Soviet era. Take, for example, the Bagebi housing complex on Tbilisi’s outskirts: a rectilinear block that references the geometries of adjacent Soviet-era mass housing projects and was nominated for a 2022 EU Mies Award.

The Tbilisi Architecture Biennial, co-founded by Tinatin Gurgenidze, Oto Nemsadze and Natia Kalandarishvili, is an outlet for the speculative, research-driven projects that emerge from the same preoccupations. The first edition, staged in 2018 and titled “Buildings Are Not Enough,” revolved around the question of contemporary solutions for the Soviet-era housing estates that ring the Tbilisi outskirts. Building on an all-online second edition staged during the pandemic, the 2022 iteration is in the works. Between practice, teaching, research and exhibition-making, Shukakidze proves that alternatives to the expected norms exist if you design them for yourself.

MARIAM GVAZAVA, WHO CO-FOUNDED Tbilisi-based architecture firm Material Editors with Ana Grigolia in 2019, will have you know that she was born to be an architect. It’s not so much that her grandfather, a practicing architect, or her mother, an architecture and architectural history professor, expected her to enter the career—she’s simply always loved it. Grigolia, who spent much of her childhood observing the studio practice of a sculptor uncle, also decided well before puberty to pursue creative work. The partners—both under 30, remarkably young by the field’s standards— approach their myriad building-design projects at Material Editors with an aesthetic rigor and knowing sensitivity to context that bespeak how long they’ve been preparing to produce architecture on their own terms.

Gvazava and Grigolia had met prior but became better acquainted four years ago when they worked as architects at Multiverse Architecture (MUA), discovering immediate simpatico on matters of taste and design process. Gvazava moved to Spain shortly thereafter to

Material Editors

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pursue yet more architecture training, assuming she’d take up her post again at MUA upon returning to Georgia with a master’s degree. Her eventual homecoming, however, triggered so many inquiries from friends and acquaintances about commissions that she called Grigolia to collaborate. They weathered the pandemic building a portfolio of apartment interiors; more recently, Material Editors’s operation has scaled up.

Current design projects include a chain of Tbilisi gelato shops and a vineyard complex in the village of Armazi.

“We’re not using brick; we’re not using ornament,” Gvazava explains of the vineyard. In their search for a contemporary material language that eschews the traditional typology, they settled on a concrete structure with geometric light wells to direct circulation.

Finding new work has at times been easier than convincing some clients and contractors that they’re able to do it. “One potential client told us that because we’re ‘girls’—not even women—he wasn’t going to hire us to design his house,” says Grigolia, “but he’d call us to do the interiors.” Their refusal to accept belittling attitudes is paying off: “When we start talking about construction details and show we know how to build, it’s the best feeling,” says Gvazava. “When they realize what’s going on, they have this minute of silence.”

Mariam Gvazava and Ana Grigolia of Material Editors.

LADO

LOMITASHVILI—DESIGNER, interior

architect and artist—represents a new generation of multihyphenates who work across disciplines with much the same ease that they navigate between the Georgian and Western-European creative contexts. Lomitashvili established Tbilisi-based Studio Gypsandconcrete in 2020, and leads its practices in furniture, exhibition design and sculpture. Yet the 27-year-old polymath is far less interested in categories as such than he is in reconfiguring them. “If I’m making a chair,” he asks, “why can’t I say it’s an art piece?”

When we talk, Lomitashvili is installing his work for the Georgian capital’s new Oxygen Biennial. Titled “Nostalgia with a Dose of Cynicism and Detachment,” the installation is a polycarbonate enclosure—a kind of intimate waiting room—with steel-frame chairs upholstered in a fabric print of nude bodies with genitals blurred. Somewhere between scenography and furniture design, it brings pornography to bear on the biennial’s “lost bodies” theme.

Lomitashvili refined this impulse toward hybridity at the Design Academy Eindhoven, entering the prestigious Contextual Design master’s program in 2019. Having studied architecture as an undergraduate at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts and run a one-man exhibition-design practice since 2018, Lomitashvili was eager to expand his material palette, fabrication capacities and geographic purview. In the Netherlands, he studied aluminum casting and glassblowing before returning to Georgia a devotee of the Dutch and Belgian design sensibilities—functionalism and efficiency of materials in the former, wit and emphasis on adaptive reuse over new construction in the latter.

Studio Gypsandconcrete developed out of this experience; Lomitashvili construes it as an altogether different operation than his personal practice. The studio is currently designing permanent displays for the Pirosmani Museum, commercial interiors around Tbilisi and a monument in Kazakhstan.

Lado Lomitashvili X

ROOMS: ADRIANNA GLAVIANO. WUNDERWERK: GURAM KAPANADZE. MATERIAL EDITORS, LADO LOMITASHVILI AND MULTIVERSE ARCHITECTURE: COURTESY OF THE DESIGNERS

Multiverse Architecture

MULTIVERSE CO-FOUNDERS GOGIKO SAKVARELIDZE AND DEVI KITUASHVILI—

who call their Tbilisi-based practice MUA in shorthand—are among the elder statesmen of contemporary architecture in Georgia. For over a decade, their myriad collaborations have produced some of the most noteworthy buildings in post-Soviet Georgia: these include Fabrika, a wildly popular hostel and creative hub that plays host to many of Tbilisi’s youth subcultures, as well as the Lazika Town Hall on the country’s Black Sea coast, a commanding work of municipal architecture that first put the practice on the contemporary map when it opened in 2012.

The Lazika project, designed and built while Sakvarelidze and Kituashvili were two of three partners at Architects of Invention, emerged from the intense politicization of contemporary architecture under the regime of Georgia’s former president, who set about commissioning formally commanding new buildings and infrastructure to promote the image of a future-oriented, cosmopolitan country. The Town Hall fit that bill with attenuated pilotis—as much a Corbusian gesture as a reference to regional vernacular architecture—that hold up civil service offices spread across geometric volumes.

When Sakvarelidze and Kituashvili set out on their own to establish MUA, they focused their architectural efforts upon the Georgian capital. Fabrika, completed in 2017, has been their most expansive project to date, catalyzing Tbilisi’s historic Marjanishvili neighborhood by creating a center for skate kids, artists and creatives to work and play in a former Soviet-era sewing factory. Their adaptive reuse scheme includes a hostel, eateries, a pottery studio, co-working space and a record shop clustered around a courtyard where any constellation of the city’s young and hip can be found. It’s a synthesis of old and new and, as such, a microcosm of Georgian architecture itself.

Devi Kituashvili and Gogiko Sakvarelidze of Multiverse Architecture.

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PHOTO BY OLADAYO ODUNARO

Lagos, Nigeria While Lagos’s spectacular creativity in art, fashion and music has received a spotlight on the international stage, its design scene has been largely overlooked.

Mark our words, it’s next to rise. Meet Tobi Oreoluwa, Lani Adeoye, Tosin Oshinowo, Nifemi Marcus-Bello and Papa Omotayo: five talents not to be missed.

BY ELIZABETH FAZZARE

Tobi Oreoluwa NIGERIA’S RICH CULTURE and history informs the work of architect and designer Tobi Oreoluwa and his Lagos-based studio Alaga. It’s a way to disseminate West African stories to an international audience and to spread awareness at home. “Our projects explore culture, language, ethics, history and meaning,” explains Oreoluwa, often inspired to create by contemporary socioeconomic issues. Alaga’s line of Danfo armchairs upholstered in black-striped, yellow fabric was prompted by the Nigerian government’s announcement that the ubiquitous commuter buses of the same name would be phased

out—despite being the nation’s largest form of public transportation.

Another series has cushions covered in traditional fabrics like the indigo-dyed adire, prompting conversation on the heritage process and helping ensure its continuation. Recently, the designer shares, a client learned about the traditional Òsùká headwrap—the fabric that is placed on the head as a buffer between loads carried in this manner— via its inspiration found in a piece of his furniture.

“The Nigerian culture is very rich, but we have discovered that with the influx of modernism with the younger generation,

if we are not deliberate a great part of this richness will be lost in transit to modernization,” says Oreoluwa, born and raised in Lagos. “Hence, we have made it our calling to ensure that these stories are kept alive in our products and work.” As a multidisciplinary studio working solely in Nigeria, Alaga is adept at contextual innovation and uses its ability to tackle existing problems in the nation. Currently in the pipeline: several projects previously halted by the pandemic are back on, including a library for Yoruba culture, as well as a new exhibition themed around “Nigerian Minimalism” in interiors.

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POST-GRADUATION FROM THE University of Leeds, and while working as a remote consultant for MASS Design Group in Kigali, industrial designer Nifemi Marcus-Bello returned to his homeland of Nigeria to start his own practice. Once he did, he found that manufacturing contemporary furniture and products under his new moniker nmbello Studio was much harder than it was for his peers still in the United Kingdom— but this was exactly what he expected. It’s not for a lack of ideas or technical knowledge, he says, but rather a deficit in policy and set systems. Thus, the designer did his own research, visiting hundreds of factories in Nigeria and a few in Accra to record their abilities— and interests—in taking on contemporary, cutting-edge design projects. He’s planning to share the data on an open-source platform so other young talents can more easily make African design on the continent.

Nifemi Marcus-Bello

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nmbello Studio focuses on open-minded, contextual design that is intrinsically tied to Lagos. “I am extremely inspired by the day-to-day anonymously designed products that I interact with and make my city tick,” explains the founding principal of his work, which both innovates on current, informal designs and incorporates traditional crafts. His Lagos studio is serene, but dotted with prototypes, first editions and ideas in exploration: the SELAH Lamp 1.0, a twoin-one stool and floor lamp that is made of a single piece of sheet metal; The Introvert’s Chair, which shelters its sitter in a woven cocoon, and a recent inspiration: the ubiquitous miniaturized magazine stands that street vendors carry while selling wares in Lagos traffic. This year, in addition to a new line of limited-edition furniture that will investigate new forms, materials and means of production, MarcusBello is kicking off a formal research project in March: Africa – A Designer’s Utopia analyzes the connections between urban planning and Indigenous contemporary design solutions using readymade or kit-of-parts materials.

ADEOYE: PHOTO COURTESY OF STUDIO LANI; MARCUS-BELLO: PHOTO BY JAIYEOLA ODUYOYE

Lani Adeoye

“WHEN DESIGNING HERE ONE has to be quite adaptive and be willing to explore multiple solutions; it’s a very iterative and immersive process,” explains furniture and lighting designer Lani Adeoye of the Lagos scene where she established her practice, Studio Lani, in 2015 after returning home from graduate studies at Parsons School of Design in New York. Adeoye’s designs toe the line with sculpture and are rooted in a contemporary hybrid relationship with traditional West African crafts like weaving, metalworking and woodworking. Her recent pieces include hand-carved Igbako sconces, whose form and Yoruba name references the eponymous utensil; metal Ite pendant lamps shaped like loose birds’ nests, and woven leatherand-fiber Talking Stools, a reinvention of common household floor mats as three-dimensional seating. Rendered in warm, natural colors and materials, they are distinctly Nigerian, and are all handmade in the nation as well.

Lagos, according to the designer who grew up between Nigeria and Canada, enjoys a population of talented artisans and craftspeople, but finding a manufacturer willing to work on projects—her projects—that expand the use of their materials in unusual ways requires a lot of searching for the right partner, conversation and collaboration. Once found, the results are not only local, but community centric and sustainable as well. “It reinforces that design is a tool that adds value, preserves heritage and can be used to positively engage with communities that are maybe on the fringes,” explains Adeoye, who is interested in finding symbiosis between things seemingly disparate.

OMOTAYO: PHOTO BY A WHITESPACE CREATIVE AGENCY; OSHINOWO: PHOTO BY SPARK CREATIVE

ASK PAPA OMOTAYO ABOUT HIS current concerns for Lagos’s built environment and he’ll tell you about the trees. Despite the scorching sun present most days of the year, there is a campaign to remove the trees that have been maturing on street corners for decades. The heart of public outdoor life in the city, their shade means that passersby can stop for a chat and a streetside snack, but they also encourage people to congregate, something not all officials want.

It’s an occurrence that could be easily overlooked, but to the detail-oriented architect, designer, filmmaker and writer, it’s a key to a larger conversation about urban conditions in contemporary Nigeria, which is the broad focus of his multidisciplinary studio, MOE+ Art Architecture. “So much of urban design and architecture in Nigeria ignores context, environmentally and in material use. We need to move away from the linear design process and look at it as a way to facilitate the real needs of the population, allow it to feel participatory, adaptable, inventive and, most importantly, localized,” argues the talent who finds design solutions in art, architecture and research.

Currently, housing for the nation’s exponentially growing population (Lagos is now the most populous city on the African continent) is occupying his mind, as is Material Lab, a space to research and repurpose local, raw, sustainable and reusable waste materials for consumer industries, ideated in partnership with fellow young Nigerian firm ADD.apt. This year, MOE+ Art Architecture will complete the new Guest Artists Space Ecological Green Farm in Iknishe, Ijebu, an artist residency founded by British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare. And the firm is currently working with Adjaye Associates on the future Edo Museum of West African Arts pavilion in Benin City.

Overall, Omotayo wants designers to get real about Africa. Good design isn’t a fancy image, he argues: “We need to create real spaces that enhance the quality of human life—not 3D visual renderings of fantasy cities.”

Papa Omotayo

Tosin Oshinowo

“MY PRACTICE IS VERY MUCH a celebration of where I come from, while also a nod to the foundational figures of global architecture and design,” says Tosin Oshinowo, founding principal of Lagos-based architecture firm cmDesign Atelier and furniture company Ilé Ilà. In her commercial and residential projects, the Nigerian architect is in the business of creating serenity, with a contextual and material African twist. Her Lagos beach house designs use natural palettes and have all-white facades of sandcrete and cement that strategically frame Atlantic coastline views. Her workplace interiors are homey and textured—offices you might actually want to return to. In this contemporary Afro-minimalist style, her Lagos roots, Yoruba culture and global design training operate in harmony.

Oshinowo considers her work more of a “lifestyle than a job,” she reveals, and thus, just like the mother, MBA student and sole proprietor, it is full of heart and inherently socially conscious. Currently, she is spending a lot of time on a jobsite in northern Nigeria, working with the United Nations Development Programme to build a new village for a community displaced by Boko Haram; residents will move in this year. In her Ilé Ilà design studio, plans have been drawn for a new chair prototype and current models will be released with limited edition fashion collaborations in 2022. All her furniture pieces are handmade to order in Lagos.

“I aim to champion Africa and Nigeria in my work across the board; we are so often overlooked in the global dialogue on architecture and design, and yet so many incredibly rich design histories exist here,” she explains of her multidisciplinary approach, which allows her to design at any scale. “That balance of being from here but looking to a future where these African influences are the norm in architecture locally, and eventually globally, is a real central passion that drives my work.”

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Cultured contributing editor Jacoba Urist catches up with the newly minted MacArthur Fellow in his Loíza, Puerto Rico studio.

Spirit Rising: A Day With Daniel Lind-Ramos

PORTRAIT BY GILMARI CRUZ LUGO

Daniel Lind-Ramos in his childhood home in Loíza, Puerto Rico.

IT’S A CRYSTALLINE DECEMBER afternoon in Loíza, a town on the northeastern coast of Puerto Rico, distinct for its African heritage, traditional vejigante masks and a week of bomba drumming in the streets with the annual Festival of Saint James. Loíza traces its roots to members of the Yoruba tribe who were brought to the island enslaved, and retains the largest Black population in the commonwealth. I am here to visit the studio of artist Daniel Lind-Ramos, an art world favorite since the 2019 Whitney Biennial, whose visual language melds natural and manmade objects to recall centuries of AfroCaribbean identity. Likely his best-known sculpture, the dichotomous Maria-Maria (2019) made of coconuts and blue FEMA tarp conjures both the Virgin Mary and the over 3,000 people killed in the widespread devastation of Hurricane Maria. But now Lind-Ramos is poised for broad household acclaim with a 2021 MacArthur Fellowship, a bellwether for contemporary artists on the precipice of next-level stardom.

We meet at his empty childhood house—a classic Puerto Rican midcentury with terracotta tile floors and concrete latticework—where he stages culinary, performance and musical happenings for Loíza and surrounding communities. He describes plans for a permanent sculpture garden out back, and points, as we walk through the neighborhood, to enduring damage from Hurricane Maria, as well as to relatives’ homes, alongside that of the artisan Castor Ayala, whose mask-making inspired him as a little boy. Loíza feeds Lind-Ramos’s soul and his practice. Evoking the island’s resilience, his altar-like assemblages comprise materials Lind-Ramos collects from the area—fishing nets, cooking pots, electronics, plastic rope, duct tape, boats—while other works cut a ghostly, lyrical presence that shine light on Puerto Rico’s disparities. Together, they compose the legacy of an artist who’s spent a lifetime capturing the spirit of a place and a people.

Large-scale sculptures reside in various stages

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INSTALLATION PHOTO BY GREG KESSLER. COURTESY OF THE RANCH.

“This sculpture is made from objects that have to do with sanitation and care, inspired by La Loca, the carnival personality of the madwoman, always cleaning. I was trying to filter my emotions, looking for a character that makes us laugh as a matter of therapy.”

Installation View of Daniel Lind-Ramos’ “SUSTENANCE” at The Ranch, 2021.

of completion around the studio. Lind-Ramos has draped white blankets over large swaths of the floor to cover everyday items and machinery, a tactic, he explains, so visitors can focus on the art. “I would like to make seven in this Covid series,” Lind-Ramos says, showing me a striking, kinetic, vaguely amorphic figure that incorporates mops, brooms, an outdoor hose, and a bucket. The series originates from sketches he made during the early days of lockdown. While installing his first New York solo exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery in Chelsea, LindRamos found himself stranded in East Harlem. “I became afraid because everyone was talking about front-liners exposing themselves to the virus, and my two daughters are nurses at the Veterans Hospital in Puerto Rico,” he explains. “I became obsessed with cleanliness and buying supplies like Clorox. This sculpture is made from objects that have to do with sanitation and care, inspired by La Loca, the carnival personality of the madwoman, always cleaning. I was trying to filter my emotions, looking for a character that makes us laugh as a matter of therapy.”

I ask Lind-Ramos about hearing the MacArthur news: does it place pressure on an artist, particularly for one who has—despite numerous solo exhibitions and critical praise—studiously avoided the spotlight? “I feel more calm and have more peace of mind,” he says of the award.

“When I received the call, I had just retired from the University of Puerto Rico. I was standing in the parking lot thinking about how I was going to produce these pieces, because they are so large and I have to spend money on tools to make them—and then ring.” At first, he thought the blocked number was a friend joking with him and didn’t believe the caller was indeed from the MacArthur Foundation. “I don’t feel pressure because I live here,” adds Lind-Ramos. “If I were in San Juan, things would be different because you are constantly finding yourself in the conversation.” He pauses, gesturing to his surroundings: “The rhythm of this life is the one that I want.”

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Last fall, Lauren Mayberry, the lead vocalist of CHVRCHES, spoke with artist Devan Shimoyama about creating in a WHUKLTPJ [LJOUVSVN`»Z PUÅ\LUJL VU experiencing art and drawing inspiration from literature, poetry, music and more.

PORTRAIT BY JOHN LUSIS PRODUCED BY WILLIAM J. SIMMONS

In a previous life, Lauren Mayberry was a journalist, which often involves a driving need to talk to people you admire, and in this life and in all prior lives, she is and was a fan. She loves a number of artists in all disciplines, and is never afraid to signal-boost them and direct her followers to their work. That generosity brings visibility and builds community. Her Instagram has become an homage to a number of artists: Barbara Kruger, David Lynch, Nam June Paik.

When I asked her if she might like to interview a visual artist, Devan Shimoyama was top of our minds, because he too, as evinced by this interview, is a fan of a variety of creatives in a variety of media. His work is both a celebration and an inquiry. It tells a different kind of history, a different kind of truth about the world we are already in. And above all it does not shy away from beauty or a love of beauty. Devan and Lauren, it seems to me, constantly work through what it means to love, which is a form of fandom, and from love emerges every question we could ever ask.

LAUREN MAYBERRY: Thank you so much for making time to chat. You’re in Pittsburgh for lockdown?

DEVAN SHIMOYAMA: Yeah. I’ve been here for seven years. I came right after grad school.

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LM: Have you been able to work much during these last six months?

DS: When the pandemic really hit, at least in terms of when quarantine started cracking down in March, I immediately lost access to my studio that I had previously. I’ve made some work at home. I started making some drawings, about four of them. They are a pretty big undertaking, for me at least, just because my drawings tend to be pretty large in scale, so I’ve been making those at home with just colored pencil, and it has been really tedious. So, it ate up a lot of my time which has been really nice, but production in the studio has totally halted otherwise.

LM: I’ve been talking to a lot of friends about music venues and what’s been happening there.

I imagine it’s pretty similar for galleries, in terms of being shut down…

DS: Yeah, you know what’s funny: I was just talking to a student, one of the grad students at Carnegie Mellon, where I teach, and she is doing a lot of experimental music. Nightlife is totally just not a thing. So, she’s having to do these really tiny gatherings, with maybe like five people in a really huge room to do a performance. And, you know with galleries, a lot of it has moved online in some capacity but, they’ve been opening back up to limited numbers of people in

actual physical spaces for some things. So, most of the stuff that I’ve shown since quarantine has started has been in person. I’ve only done maybe one or two things online and usually everything has an online version of the thing in real space, at least. But the art fairs are all online.

LM: Interesting. I did wonder, because I follow you on Instagram, what is your relationship to the online aspect of promoting art? For the time and the emotion and the energy you put into work, to then have it be like a little square on the internet must be very strange.

DS: Yeah. It is, but things have been going in that direction to some extent since Instagram came out. That’s how most people experience my work, just through social media, unless they get a chance to see it in person, if they are in a major city or wherever my work happens to be. Most people following me probably haven’t even seen it in person and it’s such a strange thing to think about. Actually, just last month in September, I did this project with Lovecraft Country on HBO. They had this VR experience that incorporated three artists’ work in the space. You go through this really crazy thing called Sanctum, and it’s this guided tour in a virtual-reality alternate dimension. You get to experience the work on this grand scale and animated through VR. That was a unique thing that I hadn’t considered, experiencing work in a kind of virtual space.

LM: It is really interesting that you say that because I guess I’ve been trying to find the positives of the absolute bottom falling out of both of our industries and I’m like, well, maybe it will push people to think about how they can actually help people who don’t have the means or aren’t geographically in the places where they can access things. How they can open things up through technology in a way that’s… positive?

Maybe that will be helpful?

DS: Yeah, and I’m noticing a lot of different platforms coming out that are online where people are reimagining how work can exist in a way that’s accessible to people more broadly. I think that people are starting to think about how technology can be used in this way, but at the end of the day, something’s still lost without

COURTESY OF DEVAN SHIMOYAMA AND KAVI GUPTA

Writer’s Block and Its Antidotes

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“A lot of things [OH[ PUÅ\LUJL my own ways of thinking or \UKLYZ[HUKPUN of myself or actually experiencing something in real time. You know, experiencing music live and being there with that type of energy is so vastly different than just listening to it on your own or going into another type of space with a limited number of people in it. It just changes everything.

LM: What I love whenever I am looking at your work is how you take ideas of masculinity or sexuality or race or class and put those things in such an interesting context. Are those things that you’re consciously drawn to when you’re creating?

DS: Yeah! It’s interesting. I have two studios. In my other studio I’m currently working on these two paintings that are just for me. I’m making this work, thinking about myself when I was like 12 or 13 or something. I’ve created this fictional R&B girl group, pop girl group.

LM: I saw your [fake cover art] and I was like I want this band to be real! I need this! [Laughing] DS: I have three of them that are made now and two of them are going to be shown pretty soon in a group show. Their name is Diamond and there’s originally four girls in the group. I have a whole narrative, now there’s only three.

LM: Well, it happens.

DS: [Laughs] There’s always one. That work for me is very much thinking about the past, looking at music, looking at who I’ve idolized and loved and adored and my affinity for women in music and it’s like just such a fun project to work on.

I’m looking at mythology or I’m looking at just people in my life or in my day-to-day and I’m just so fortunate to make work in so many different ways and think through so many different types of ideas and have people still be excited to look at it and to think about it. I’m thinking about, largely, femme or female-presenting people that are of significance in my life or that I’ve sort of idolized or looked to. And that’s in all of my work, not just that music work. When I was growing up, I grew

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up in a Baptist Christian church and there were women with big hats and the feathers and big custom jewelry. I also look to drag queens. I’ve become close to a lot of performers. They are sort of mirroring or mimicking femininity from powerful female musicians or idols. But yeah, I think a lot about how the material choices that I’m making are so influenced by my own affinity for women and how they’ve been the people who have kept me safe when I was growing up in school or made me feel at home or welcomed and loved and cared for and make some of the smartest, most effective leaders. I think that a lot of my choices are reflective of that.

LM: Do you kind of visualize what it is you are going to create before you begin, or do you figure it out as you’re going?

DS: I’m pretty good at responding to dreams. I also collect images a lot. I take screenshots all the time or I’ll take photos on the go and I’ll just have an archive of a ton of different things. Sometimes,

\UKLYZ[HUKPUN politics come [OYV\NO \UJVU]LU[PVUHS means.”

something will really click where I’ll see the entire image and I’ll have to make the painting.

That’s a moment of urgency that happens, where something falls into place and I can see it in my mind. I’ll often sketch it really quickly, either on my phone or something with like a cheap little app that I can paint with on my phone. Or I’ll write down exactly the vision that I had and I’ll make it. Obviously, things change in the studio because I’m responding to colors and materials and everything else but a lot of times I do see the painting in my head first and then I’ll just jump into it and try to make the thing. It’s funny that you say

that, because I always think about music or even poetry. Poetry creates this activated thing that’s different but it really transports me in a different way than painting does, in this really exciting way.

It takes me into this other type of space where it’s all sensory and feeling and I love that so much. I think that’s so powerful and amazing. Like I listen to “Clearest Blue” all the time, by the way.

LM: Oh my god you’re probably like “I gotta get it done quickly!”

DS: It just like really gets me in the zone. I just really love things like that.

LM: I’ve genuinely become more conscious of this as we’ve gotten older, but if I’m ever stuck or like in a block or something, I feel like experiencing art really helps get things moving. I was reading this essay that Nick Cave wrote, and he said that he feels that so much of his time when he’s creating is spent taking in other people’s creativity; ten percent of the time I feel like that’s me topping up my cup and learning things. I feel like I’m spending so much time watching films or looking at art or reading and it gets my motor running!

DS: I listen to music all the time in the studio but I rotate between music and audiobooks, sometimes interviews. Audiobooks get me through a lot of things. I listen to a lot of sci-fi or epic fantasy novels. Those things really help me. They just have a different type of feeling and pacing. It depends on what I am doing, I think, in the studio. What’s nice about music is that I don’t have to always be paying attention so much, whereas with audiobooks, I kind of need to focus. Like right now I’m listening to Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, but I can’t listen to that all the time in the studio because I really do pay attention to it.

LM: When it’s Toni, you have to focus! That makes the Lovecraft Country connection make a lot of sense too, cause that’s so vivid and visual but so sci-fi, creepy. I watched the first episode and I was like “Oh my god, I did not see that coming at all,” but I love it so much. And the colors, the design of it. When I was a kid, I wanted to be the person who makes the houses that people live in on TV. I don’t know what my child brain was talking about.

Now I know I’m just not artistic in that way at all. I’ll just be like “Does this go? Does this look nice?” I don’t know. I feel like the thing I always come back to is different kinds of storytelling.

Whenever I look at your work, I’m like, they are such important stories that you’re telling, whether it seems like it’s about you or other people. Are you conscious of trying to tell a story?

DS: Yes and no. I do think a lot about narratives.

My introduction into a lot of images paired with texts was from fairy tales when I was growing up. I’m thinking of a panel that accompanies a

INSTALLATION VIEWS OF MIGHTY MIGHTY (THE BARBERSHOP PROJECT PRESENTED BY CULTURALDC), THEARC, WASHINGTON, DC, 2019. COURTESY OF DEVAN SHIMOYAMA AND KAVI GUPTA. PHOTOGRAPHY BY RYAN MAXWELL

Gabi, 2019

much more didactic text perhaps, that tells a story. My work alludes to a story or it is born out of a reference from a pre-existing narrative or something that I’ve read. I love Greek mythology.

I love Caribbean folklore. I think that there are a lot of inventive stories in the Bible that are really fascinating. They come out of the Fertile Crescent and stem from different territories of religious studies and art that are so incredibly fascinating in terms of why we tell the stories that we tell. I am more so interested in providing an image that might allow the viewer to then take it and run with it and create their own narrative, if that makes sense, for them. I love that.

LM: I’ve noticed that in a lot of pieces, there are people carrying books or reading books. You must take a lot of inspiration from literature and writing and purposely put those in the work as well.

DS: Yeah, I’ve become really close friends with a poet, Rickey Laurentiis, who is just a really incredible thinker. They worked with me for my first museum exhibition, and they wrote an essay in my catalogue for “Cry, Baby” at the Warhol Museum.

They also organized some really incredible programming, particularly “The Black Ecstatic,” which was an evening of poetry. The energy was so specific in that and there was a potency to it that was different than just passively reading on your own. I was like, people should be reading more! I really do think the way in which people understand and construct their own identities or understandings of the world come through reading and art and those intersections of the ways in which people reinterpret or reimagine or re-tell stories and explain things through visual or auditory or written ways of working. I want to create this suggested reading in a lot of ways. A lot of things that influence my own ways of thinking or understanding of myself or understanding politics come through unconventional means. I’m not just reading dry theoretical texts. I’m really interested in how poetry, prose, sci-fi, biobehavioral health texts, etc. can really be informative in understanding myself or oneself. That’s where that body of work came out of.

LM: I think that’s so interesting because I was

looking at it being like, “Oh, I haven’t read that!” or “Oh, I’ve read that!” and then going through it.

That’s like the visual art version of when I would read interviews with Radiohead when I was a teenager and they would talk about Kraftwerk and I would be like “What is a Kraftwerk?” and I would go look it up. I feel like that’s so fun, as someone who is taking in someone else’s creativity to figure out how they got to where they got to and what inspired that person to create this thing which then inspired you. I like that domino effect of things. I appreciate those Easter eggs.

Anyway, I feel hopeful or maybe you’re just catching me on an upbeat day, but part of me is like I hope that when the world starts to move at a more regular pace that there’s more gratitude for this kind of stuff. The things I find the most comforting and good for my fucking mental health have been other people’s art, what they are making. It’s essential that humans make art and I feel like most people, hopefully, come to that same conclusion during this time. Maybe when we go back in the world, it will be better?

DS: Hopefully. Yeah, I think so. I was also going to ask you, have you been able to be productive?

LM: In the end, we ended up being productive.

We were maybe three weeks into recording and making the new album when all the lockdowns went into place. We were like, “Oh we’ll be home for a few weeks and then we’ll figure it out.” A very fucking naive understanding of what was going to happen. I feel like when it was springtime, I thought, “I got all this time, I’m not on tour, I’ll make five albums!” Then, it just wasn’t… I think just the sheer weight and horror of everything that was happening made it really difficult to actually make anything. It would just come in such waves. After that, we set a schedule and we’ve finished the album. It was so, so weird to make an album basically over Zoom. We were able to come back together for the mixing but we were all recording everything separately and then sending it in. It was nice in a way because I was like, even though I see those guys all the time when we’re touring, it’s never like meeting up every day, consciously, to create something.

It’s just getting in a van and going somewhere, to do something. There’s not that same kind of purpose to it. I think it’s made everybody a lot more appreciative of each other and appreciative of the safe haven that creativity is.

DS: That sounds like The Postal Service and when they made that album.

LM: Everybody was like “Woah, what an insane thing they’ve done, they made an album separately by sending it through email.”

DS: Now look, here we are!

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2 . 1 8.2022 The Protangonists Enter the Cronenbergs’ Weird, Wild World Love Language Young Architects 2022 The Newness of Louis Vuitton’s Savoir Faire The Story of Reynaldo Rivera’s Los Angeles culturedmag.com 109

Momentum is not a force summoned but a balance accrued—an accumulation of small actions taken that become something grander than their parts—as the actors included in this portfolio know firsthand.

All of them are stepping into their biggest roles to date in 2022.

They’ve been putting in the work, taking on projects that inspire them and investing in their own off-screen creative endeavors. Their ongoing efforts have reached a fever pitch.

The PROTA 110 culturedmag.com

Odessa Young Maude Apatow Saniyya Sidney Suzanna Son Alisha Boe

GONISTS culturedmag.com 111

Odessa Young Takes Control of the Situation

In her new film Mothering Sunday, Odessa Young plays a maid working for a wealthy English family between the wars during a time of great change. These past couple years, she’s also wondered herself about the purpose of acting, and whether the art form is in peril.

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Odessa Young wears a Loewe tracksuit with Alexander McQueen ring.

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Odessa Young pulls out a Marlboro and lights it inside her Williamsburg apartment. “I kind of want my apartment to feel like a salon,” she says. “We’re having people over tonight. I love hosting.”

MAKEUP BY GENEVIEVE HERR; HAIR BY NAKASHIMA JUNYA .

STYLING ASSISTANTS: TAYLOR WOODS AND DELANEY WILLIAMS. Young clutches Hästens pillows and two bags

by Alexander McQueen (top) and Grace Ling (bottom). She wears a Alexander McQueen dress, boots and ear cuffs with her own jewelry (worn throughout).

During our call she moves upstairs to get away from the sounds of her boyfriend cooking, preparing for guests. “My acting teacher recently said to me that I host so many parties, because I’m so afraid of not being invited to things. Like to just take control of the situation. That’s probably true.”

To make one’s own way, to host instead of worrying about not being invited, to carve out a space that is one’s own, are desires that have appeared in a few of the roles Young has played in her nascent acting career. Whether this is a sign of insecurity or self-assurance, or a little of both, Young tells me this with candor and a self-deprecating charm. In Mothering Sunday— which also stars Colin Firth, Olivia Colman and Josh O’Connor—the 23-year-old Australian actress plays Jane Fairchild, a writer who works as a maid for a wealthy family in post-WWI, preWWII England. Jane in her adolescence navigates intimacy, loss, the pursuit of an artistic practice, the struggle to emerge from her working-class situation. Young tells me, “Eva [Husson, the film’s director] was very, very hell-bent on embracing the ugliness of insecurity and the struggle to ride through it.”

The film is an update to the Upstairs, Downstairs (1971) narrative; instead of only getting snippets of what goes on downstairs, Mothering Sunday follows Jane and her internal life closely. Flashing between her early 20s and her mid 40s, Jane tells the story of her youth, reflecting on the period of her life as a servant and her discreet love affair with a friend of the family who employed her. Young, who plays Jane at both ages, is growing into more mature leading roles in her career, and recently starred opposite Elisabeth Moss in Josephine Decker’s romantic melodrama Shirley.

When I ask her about playing the same

character at two different ages she says, “I think it was the subtle differences in the way that it was written, the way Jane holds herself or the way that she speaks. She found the ability to speak as opposed to just be seen and not heard for most of her life. Her internal narrative or internal struggles are made external in the kind of older version of Jane once she’s actually found herself, found agency.”

The gap between the two iterations of Jane mirrors the paradigmatic shift happening more broadly in the film’s atmosphere. The affair with the boy took place during a period, flanked by the wars. It was the great pause of the service era, money was running out, everyone’s sons had died.

Young studied up on this particular part of the century by reading diaries and journals written by maids. She says, “Jane is in fact their only maid because they have to let everyone go because there’s kind of nothing to do. Everything’s lost and everyone’s just floating around trying to do what they once did.”

The film’s setting was timely as it was shot during the tail end of lockdown, when the pursuit of normality, to return to what we once did, was at its height. “It makes you feel crazy,” Young says with a hint of exasperation, “when you see that the structure of the way things are done is so blatantly disintegrating but everybody’s pretending that it isn’t.” After being sent auditions and scripts in the early days of the pandemic and questioning the purpose of these projects that weren’t going to be

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Young wears a Gucci dress and heels with Alexander McQueen jewelry.

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“THE AMOUNT OF STUFF THAT’S BEING MADE IS REALLY DANGEROUS FOR THE FUTURE OF FILM.”

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industry has forced her to question the meaning of her work and has driven her to pursue projects that interest her, those she wants to see out in the world. She’s currently at work on a dramatization of the 2004 true crime docuseries The Staircase in which she plays the adopted daughter of Michael Peterson, the suspected murderer. Young tells me, “It’s interesting playing a person who is quite documented. It’s like the first time I’ve ever had to choose between imitation and representation of a real person.” The miniseries is creator Antonio Campos’s passion project. “I’m not just going to do jobs just because I love acting. There’s a reason why I love movies and it’s because they have the power to make people ambitious or hopeful about the direction of the world even if they show the opposite of that.” It’s as if Young searches for this same drive in the filmmakers she chooses to work with, whose projects are guided by a commitment to good work rather than pressure from platforms to churn out a product. She’s come to terms with the fact that this might mean making sacrifices.

“I’m fine with never being comfortable if that’s what it means.”

Young wears a Chanel cape with Grace Ling bra and pants and below, she wears a Grace Ling blazer and pants with Alexander McQueen earrings.

made, Young says she almost quit acting knowing she wanted to figure out what she was going to do if not act. In a year that put everyone’s creative pursuits into question, and had a lot of people questioning the validity and sustainability of their artistic lives, she says she felt estranged from the world of acting.

At the same time Young says she benefited from this opportunity for reflection, questioning the existing structures of the film industry. “I think that the amount of stuff that’s being made is really dangerous for the future of film,” she says. Since streaming platforms have become even more powerful, with more money to produce incredible amounts of content to supply the demand, the almost compulsive production makes the work suffer: “They’re trying to make as much for as little as possible... 90% of what I’m reading is super nihilistic either in its message or in its conception and that doesn’t interest me.” The aforementioned desire to host her own party, to be in control of her own situation, seems obvious then, practically necessary.

Young says the experience in a changing

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Maude Apatow Has a Revolution

Euphoria’s good girl, Lexi, blossomed from wallflower into leading lady this season.

She was just walking in actor Maude Apatow’s footsteps.

By KAT HERRIMAN Photography by ELIAS TAHAN Styling by SAVANNAH WHITE

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Maude Apatow wears a Louis Vuitton look.

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MAKEUP BY MELISSA HERNANDEZ; HAIR BY JENNY CHO. Apatow wears a Nina Ricci jacket and top.

Right: Apatow wears a Valentino dress.

Maude Apatow was on Jimmy Fallon last night

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—an interview she describes as “the scariest experience ever but fun.” It’s all part of a new chapter that has taken hold for Apatow ever since Euphoria’s second season dropped in January and fans fell for her character, Lexi Howard’s outof-the-gate romance with the show’s beloved drug dealer Fezco (played by Angus Cloud). “People are posting little meme things on Twitter,” she says, the giddy shock still in her breath. “How do I even describe this one?” Then she does: a chihuahua chomping a pillow with a four-toothed grin. “It’s something about us being cute.”

Despite Apatow’s best efforts, I don’t know if I believe her when she claims she fumbles over her words, echoing my own apology: I do better

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Apatow wears an Issey Miyake bodysuit and Chanel necklace. Left: Apatow wears an Issey Miyake bodysuit and skirt with Christian Louboutin shoes.

in person. Because even on the phone, she sets herself apart—as someone in command enough to pause and think rather than fill the air with talk. On-screen, she appears in full possession of Lexi and all her coming-of-age complications.

Apatow embodies the salutatorian’s pillow-biting relationship to power as a reticent main character.

One of the strongest parts of the performance is the way she is able to capture the simultaneous highs and lows of the teenage emotional vernacular and the alternating viciousness and compassion it inspires. All winter we’ve watched Lexi prepare for an autobiographical school play with anticipation while her friends spiral on their own in the dark. Is it a vengeful malice that keeps Lexi from telling them that she’s about to make their private lives other people’s entertainment?

Or is it the fear of what might happen when she tells them how she really feels? “I don’t think it’s necessarily coming from a mean place, but also at the same time, what makes it interesting is it’s a little mean,” Apatow says, pathologizing further. “[Lexi] is super insecure and shy, but she also is super aggressive. She does have so many thoughts about things, but she’s so sad that she can’t express it. When the play comes and she’s fully in charge, she has no choice, all of that comes out.”

As Lexi, Apatow captures the truth of being at once ecstatically manic backstage with theater pals while at the same time nursing a gutwrenching heartbreak for who might not show up to see your big finale—and how those feelings reinforce each other in real time. Apatow credits the success of that scene with the real-life thrills she was getting from acting in front of a live audience to shoot the sequence. “It was easy to play that excitement because it was real,” she says.

Being on stage lights up Apatow like we’ve never seen her before. Lexi stumbles on her

anxiety. Apatow thrives on it. During the Fallon interview, she crackles louder than her sequin dress. So I wasn’t surprised when she revealed that Lexi’s bossy backstage persona is loosely based on real life, or that, in fact, all of the little parts of Lexi are loosely Apatow. Euphoria creator Sam Levinson may have tried Apatow out over the course of several weeks, but as he confessed later in an interview, Lexi was literally made for her. He was writing it while directing his thriller Assassination Nation, in which Apatow also appears. Her performance clearly stuck with him.

“He really is excited about writing things that we’ll like. That’s one of the best things about Sam,” says Apatow. “He gets excited to tell us about what our characters are up to and I love

that. He is also open to collaboration. He wants it to be the best it can be.”

This season, Rue, her historic best friend in the show, describes Lexi as an observer. In Euphoria’s reality television moment (ambiguously screened in Lexi’s head), the aspiring director describes herself as a sidekick. Yet watching this season one gets the sense that Lexi is a superhero who has not discovered her powers yet.

Apatow meanwhile is adjusting well to hers.

Of the finale, she says: “[Lexi] knows she’s been through a lot and she figures out a way to channel all of that into something productive. I’m proud of her for figuring that out and not letting these things take her down.”

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Saniyya Sidney Is Ready For the Spotlight In the middle of her breakout year playing two public figures, Venus Williams and Sasha Obama, Saniyya Sidney talks about learning from world-famous actors and becoming a role model for young Black women.

By QUINCI LEGARDYE Photography by EMILY SOTO Styling by CHRIS HORAN

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Saniyya Sidney wears a full Gucci look.

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At the age of 15, Saniyya Sidney has already met most of her idols.

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Though most people are just getting to know her after her breakout role as Venus Williams in the biopic King Richard, the young phenom has already acted alongside Hollywood royalty. She speaks of them fondly, gushing over Mr. Will’s transformation into the Williams sisters’ father, or mentioning the “young women” conversations she had with Miss Viola after reuniting with her on the set of the upcoming drama The First Lady.

The show is Sidney’s second time working with the Oscar winner, and her second time playing a public figure in so many years, Sasha Obama to Davis’s Michelle.

One of the most talented young actresses working today, Sidney is a force. In King Richard, she completely embodies Venus Williams, balancing the tennis star’s immense talent and quiet confidence while also showing her as a 14-year-old girl. In one of the film’s closing scenes, after Williams loses her second professional match, she shows the vulnerability that sports fans don’t get to see, no matter how many times they watch the match tape.

Sidney shows just how much it took to become Venus the person, not just the superstar.

In addition to providing breakout roles for Sidney, King Richard and The First Lady will likely go down in history as master classes for Black public figures telling their own stories. The Williams sisters, who executive produced their biopic, also brought on their sisters Lyndrea and Isha Price to discuss their childhoods with the film’s actors.

Davis had regular phone calls with the former First Lady throughout the show’s production. (Sidney did not get the chance to speak with Obama but says, “She knows of us, so that’s enough for me.”) Now Sidney, who’s interested in producing herself down the road, has several examples of seeing Black people have a hand in telling their own stories, which is unfortunately still a rarity in Hollywood.

The young star has learned so much from working with the highest echelon of actors, the type that you can identify with a first name: Denzel.

Viola. Will. She considers them mentors and sort of parents, giving life lessons that she humbly accepts, maybe without realizing that one day, as she stays on her stellar trajectory, she’ll be a household name too. Saniyya.

“I do kind of get like, what? That’s crazy. Mr. Will, Miss Viola, they’re giving me advice? I love everything about all three of them, and they’ve been doing this for as long as I can remember. So I definitely listen when I’m supposed to.”

That respect and urge to listen to her elders extends to her family too, even more than the acting legends she works with. So much of her drive and even her hobbies come from lessons learned growing up. Listening to her mom and grandma’s radio influenced her old school music taste, Smokey Robinson and Ella Fitzgerald and “anything

MAKEUP BY DANA DELANEY; HAIR BY MICHAEL DAVID WARREN. Sidney wears a Saint Laurent playsuit and at left, a full Balenciaga look.

nineties.” Her love of baking comes from being introduced by her grandma to the Food Network at age 8 (though now her favorite cooking show is Netflix’s Nailed It!). In essence Sidney is an old soul, soaking up wisdom.

“A lot of people growing up used to tell me, like, ‘Girl you’ve been here before.’ I think it’s just, knowledge is key. I learn a lot from my mom. She inspires me more than anyone. So I just listen to what she has to say and my grandma and that’ll get me far.”

You could say her work as an actor centers on being a conduit for wisdom, especially with the

real-life stories she loves to tell. It’s one of the many things she does wonderfully in King Richard, passing down the lessons of Venus Williams, who internalized the lessons of her father and became a role model leading the representation of Black girls in tennis. When asked how she feels about now being a role model for young Black girls interested in acting, Sidney lights up, saying it makes her feel “overjoyed and empowered.”

“It just makes my heart sing when young girls come up to me and my other peers and say, ‘Wow, you made me wanna go out there and start gymnastics again or ‘pick up piano,’ stuff like that.

It’s motivation.”

Despite everything she’s accomplished, Sidney’s quick to remind you that she’s still a kid, who loves playing with her dog and spending time with her family. She’s a little Black girl who believes deeply in the power of little Black girls, who are capable of anything. Like Venus and Serena, and Kerry Washington and Viola Davis, she carries along the quiet grace of women who know that the only person in this world that they have to prove their greatness to is themselves. Like Venus Williams after that first pro tournament, Saniyya Sidney has a long way to go.

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Suzanna Son Plays Rocket Girl

Suzanna Son’s entire life changed just a week after she moved to Los Angeles to chase after her dreams. It all began with a trip to the cinema.

Now Sean Baker’s porn fable Red Rocket has made her an overnight star.

By MARIAH KREUTTER Photography by THOMAS WHITESIDE Styling by AMANDA LIM

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Suzanna Son wears Faith Connexion top and Alabama Blonde denim.

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MAKEUP BY MÉLANIE INGLESSIS; HAIR BY BRIDGET BRAGER. STYLE ASSISTANT: KITO GARCIA. Son wears a Wolford bodysuit and TSeat ear cuff.

Suzanna Son has a look.

It’s what first caught Sean Baker’s eye when the indie auteur spotted her outside a Los Angeles movie theater, barely a week since she’d arrived in the city.

The story is the type that could become a legend, depending on where things go from here: he approached her after the Gus Van Sant showing, said he liked her look, and asked if she was an actor. Two years later, he cast her as Strawberry, a precocious Texas teenager drawn to the possibilities of porn stardom, in December’s Red Rocket. Doe-eyed and frecklefaced, it’s not hard to see why Baker picked her out of the crowd.

Son also has a voice. It’s ethereal, light but textured, soaring high and thin on top notes and surprisingly rich on low ones. You can hear the influence of Regina Spektor, an artist Son admires, in her cover of NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye” in the film. In one of the Red Rocket’s most memorable scenes, she sings naked while seated at a keyboard in her bright pink bedroom, while Mikey Saber (played by Simon Rex), the 40-something washed-up porn star she’s fallen in with, watches from her bed.

Son might be a newcomer, just like her character, but that doesn’t mean they have much in common. “She’s more fearless than I am and she’s certainly more calculated. Maybe I should

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learn from her,” she said. Watching the film, I was captivated by how well Son portrayed Strawberry’s own layered performance: she has a poised, enigmatic quality that sits over the ingenue role like imperfect armor. It’s the kind of sure-I’myoung-but-I-know-what-I’m-doing swagger that’s both magnetic and heartbreakingly naive onscreen.

Son’s own teenaged bedroom was blue. “I remember it was a huge argument with my mom because she read somewhere that if a teenager has blue walls, they’ll, like, get depressed,” she told me. “And finally I got the blue walls and I was fine.” Trying to picture a wall color that might

result in depression, I asked if it was a dark blue.

“It was a beautiful light blue. She was tripping,” Son laughs.

As a child, Son was an instinctive performer, or as she puts it, “annoying.” “I just wouldn’t stop talking. I tried to be funny all the time. But as a kid, you just aren’t funny. You’re annoying.

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“I’M NOT THE BEST DANCER, I’M MORE OF A MOVER.”

Son wears a Musier Paris top. Stylist’s sweater.

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Son wears a Marco Bologna turtleneck. Right: Son wears an Ashton Michael top and Alabama Blonde pants.

You’ve got to refine that,” she said. When she first started acting in musicals, she would get good roles because she could sing. “But I really couldn’t act, I would just get so embarrassed and I couldn’t commit to anything,” she said.

She studied at Cornish College of the Arts for a while, switching from music to musical theater, and spent a few months studying dance in New Zealand before dropping out to pursue acting in LA. “I’m not the best dancer, I’m more of a mover, but I think it helps,” she said.

That background seems to have come in handy playing Strawberry, the kind of demanding, vulnerable, physical role that has launched many a young actress. There’s lots of sex and lots of nudity, but Son always felt comfortable

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working with Baker and Rex, the latter of whom Son says she would have been lost without.

“A lot of Strawberry’s character came from my physicality,” she tells me. “I would put on those cowboy boots, and my voice would get higher with that accent… I made her just have more energy.

She’s, like, up on her toes. Whereas I’m 26, I’m kind of melty,” she says. Those cowboy boots, like a lot of Strawberry’s wardrobe, were Son’s own and have now gone missing. “They’re my clothes and they didn’t give them back!” she exclaims when I ask about the costuming. Luckily, she’s since been able to acquire a replacement pair of cowboy boots, and agreed that there was some solace in knowing that the originals are now a small part of film history.

Ever since Red Rocket premiered, Son has been busy. Her performance has been enthusiastically received: she was nominated for a Gotham Award for Best Breakthrough Performer and an Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Actress. Auditions are coming through like never before. Son is currently filming an HBO series, The Idol, with The Weeknd and Lily-Rose Depp. And after that, who knows? She’d love to have a “chameleon-like” career, maybe do more music, but for now she’s just happy to be working.

The awards buzz is “exciting and nervewracking,” she says, “like I’m in a competition I never entered. But no, it’s fun. And it’s fun just to be talked about with all those other cool people. So I’m trying to appreciate it.”

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Alisha Boe Embraces Her Rising Sign Millions of followers fell for Alisha Boe as Jessica Davis in the binge-worthy high school drama, 13 Reasons Why, and now the Norwegian-Somali actor is taking her career to the next level landing a major role in Jesse Eisenberg’s anticipated directorial debut, When You Finish Saving the World.

By NAJMA SHARIF Photography by MOLLY MALATON Styled by AMANDA LIM

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Alisha Boe wears a Gucci suit with David Yurman jewelry.

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MAKEUP BY TASHA REIKO BROWN; HAIR BY SHERIDAN WARD. STYLE ASSISTANTS: KITO GARCIA AND KARLA GARCIA. Boe wears a Saint Laurent blazer, gloves and jewelry.

In Alisha Boe’s 2022 Sundance Film Festival debut, When You Finish Saving the World, (also Jesse Eisenberg’s directorial debut), the actor plays Lila, a fervent social justice activist and poet.

Lila has an intense relationship with Ziggy (played by Finn Wolfhard)—a character with so little self-awareness that it’s hard to look away.

Similar to Boe, Lila cares deeply about the world’s injustices and wants to do more than play the activist role: she wants to make real change.

Born in Oslo to a Norwegian mother and Somali father, Boe has immense love and pride for both of her heritages, and it struck me to see her playing an activist and a poet—a common trope associated with young Somali women online. This one, though, says the actor, felt different. “I loved Lila’s tenacity and this strange, weird relationship dynamic that she has with Ziggy,” says Boe of the role. “Jesse, the director, was really interested in my background as a Somali woman and in my costume: I actually got to wear this necklace that’s an old Somali coin.

So, it was very much integrated with my character and her identity.”

Boe was only 10 years old when she moved from Norway to Los Angeles and had to come of age in a place where no one looked like her or shared her background. As a result, “there is a great deal of distance and a great deal of disconnect on both sides of my Norwegian culture and Somali culture,” she admits. “And as an adult, I have to try harder to really reconnect with my heritage, which is also strangely beautiful. I’m very lucky to know exactly what my roots are.”

Open and honest, Boe feels like talking to a long-lost sister. We spoke right before she

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attended a sound bath, an experience she describes as “very LA.” Mindfulness, though in vogue, feeds her creative practice, one that also doesn’t exist without her binging Netflix content or taking long baths. “I feel most creative when I’m on set or when I’m at rest and calm and surrounded by nature. When my brain is clear, I’m able to explore my imagination. Those beautiful creative thoughts can come through,” she explains. “I’m sure as a writer, you can relate. It’s so spontaneous and then you just get this urge like, ‘I need to do this right now and I need to put this on paper.’”

Boe’s breakout came after playing Jessica Davis on 13 Reasons Why, a popular cheerleader that becomes a strong advocate for feminism after experiencing sexual assault. In When You Finish Saving the World, she is in her element again, capturing the nuances of complicated people who are passionate about complicated issues. 13 Reasons Why may have thrust the actor into fame, but her artistic practice thrives

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because she is a sensitive Pisces with a keen understanding about her position in the industry and in the world. “The most important thing is other people and the memories and experiences you create with them,” she says. “When you leave this weird place called Earth, you want to know that you’ve been there for people who have made an impact on others and remember what it felt like to be loved and to love.”

When I ask what books have shaped Boe’s thinking, in true Piscean fashion she didn’t want to disappoint a writer: she cites the likes of James Baldwin, Ottessa Moshfegh and Sally Rooney while giving an honorable mention to Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, which she read as a teenager. Her tastes align with the coolest and smartest girls on the internet, and she helps shape its latest obsessions, as well. Last April, she participated in a photoshoot with Palestinian/ Jordanian-Australian artist Sarah Bahbah about attachment theory.

Aside from embracing our attachment styles, Boe doesn’t hold back on what the industry can do to promote true diversity, saying she wishes to see “actual diversity rather than just performative diversity.” Taking on projects that she feels supports this effort, she wants others to follow suit. “We are giving everyone a seat at the table,” she explains, “not using it as tokenism, but actually putting people of color or just minorities in general in positions of power.”

We may not have answers about how to save the world, but when I ask Boe about how to show up for one another, she is succinct: “It’s about lifting each other up and really focusing on community,” says the actor. “I mean, at the end of the day, it’s all about interpersonal relationships, and it’s why we’re here on this Earth.”

Boe wears a Miu Miu skirt suit and heels with Acchitto Jewelry rings and a Paula Mendoza ear cuff.

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ENTER THE &521(1%(5*6· WEIRD, WILD WORLD

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With cult classics like The Fly and The Dead Zone having secured him as a champion of the body horror genre, even in parody and pop FXOWXUH³-XVWLQ 5RLODQG DQG 'DQ +DUPRQ·V DQLPDWHG VHULHV Rick and Morty invents Cronenberg World as an Earth dimension populated with humans gone terribly mutated after a failed science H[SHULPHQW³DFWRU GLUHFWRU DQG ÀOPPDNHU 'DYLG &URQHQEHUJ LV D ERQD ÀGH OHJHQG +LV GDXJKWHU &DLWOLQ LV IRUJLQJ KHU RZQ SDWK LQ WKDW IDPLO\ OHJDF\ LQ ÀOP VFUHHQZULWLQJ DQG RQ WKH QH[W IURQWLHU GLJLWDO DUW 7DOHQW UXQV GHHS LQ WKH &URQHQEHUJ FODQ

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Some argue that your creative vision is heavily LQVSLUHG E\ WKRVH ZLWK ZKRP \RX VXUURXQG \RXUVHOI David and Caitlin Cronenberg, Canadian creative royalty, approach their mediums with the same amount of dedication and precision, yet infuse them ZLWK GLIIHUHQW SHUVSHFWLYHV 'DYLG WKH \HDU ROG ÀOP VFUHHQZULWHU GLUHFWRU DQG VRPHWLPHV DFWRU LV a pioneer of the body horror genre, one that deeply explores the transformation of the physical and SV\FKRORJLFDO +DYLQJ JURZQ XS H[SRVHG ÀUVWKDQG WR KHU IDWKHU·V RHXYUH \HDU ROG &DLWOLQ³RU &DLW as David refers to her—took her creative endeavors LQ KHU RZQ GLUHFWLRQ 6KH LV UHFRJQL]HG IRU KHU QDUUDWLYH GULYHQ HGLWRULDOV ÀOPPDNLQJ DQG KHU UHFHQW GLYH LQWR WKH ZRUOG RI 1)7V ,QVSLUHG E\ WKH Proust questionnaire—with our own spin—father and daughter answer the same set of questions, establishing that creativity can be shared through EORRGOLQHV

CAITLIN CRONENBERG

Caitlin Cronenberg wears a Smythe suit with Chanel earrings and hugs David Cronenberg who wears a BOSS jacket and pants. Previous spread: Caitlin wears a L’Agence blazer, Acne Studios T-shirt, Cartier bracelet and Mejuri and Biko rings.

David wears a Tiger of Sweden jacket.

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HOW HAS YOUR APPROACH TO YOUR CRAFT CHANGED AND EVOLVED OVER THE LAST TWO YEARS? In the last two years, I’ve had a second child and had to completely pivot the way everything is done because of the pandemic. It’s been a very interesting time. Really the way I work is constantly changing as I am constantly trying to challenge myself to do new things, take on new kinds of projects and evolve as an artist and person. When I started I was a photographer, now I am also a business owner, wife, mother, filmmaker, author, screenwriter, fine artist, and crypto enthusiast. Ever since I was a child I have always had my hand in a lot of different pots.

Every day I am doing more and more things and learning more and more things and it is exhilarating and exhausting all at once.

WHAT EXCITES YOU ABOUT HAVING YOUR FATHER AS A SOUNDING BOARD? To be perfectly honest I don’t really use him as a sounding board too often. We both have so much going on that we don’t usually stop to run things by each other. Though we do like to give each other updates on our various projects.

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WHAT’S THE BIGGEST CREATIVE LESSON YOU’VE TAKEN FROM YOUR FATHER AND APPLIED TO YOUR ARTISTIC EXPRESSION? The greatest lesson has been to love what you do. Put all of yourself into your work and do not compromise your creative vision because other people think you should. He has always been his own biggest supporter and you need to do that for yourself when you are in this industry. You will have champions but you need to have your own back. Also, to respect everyone along every step of the process, because everyone is important.

And don’t be afraid to let your weird show.

WHAT’S THE MOST FULFILLING THING ABOUT YOUR CRAFT? I’m fulfilled because I’m never bored. I can learn and create a new thing every single day doing what I do. I also love working and collaborating with people who are amazing artists and minds.

Working hard makes me who I am. I’m addicted to it. I love creating new things and love that I can never be finished learning and creating.

WHAT EXCITES YOU? WHAT TERRIFIES YOU? It is exhilarating to create something new and share it with the world. It is also the most terrifying thing to share new work with the world because you are constantly exposing your most vulnerable self.

HOW DOES YOUR FATHER PUSH YOU FORWARD? By giving me space.

WHEN IT COMES TO YOU SHOWING YOUR FATHER YOUR LATEST WORK OR PROJECT, HOW DO YOU FEEL IN THE MOMENTS BEFORE THE REVEAL? I think you might overestimate my showmanship here [laughs]. I take a lot of pride in my work and I don’t usually feel any sort of nervousness when I share it with anyone I’m close to. I’m sure that when I have the first cut of my feature film done I will be a bit nervous to show him, but that will be true of anyone! With my photography I feel very confident in my own eye and I don’t usually doubt myself. With filmmaking I guess I’ll find out how much input I want from outside sources!

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DAVID CRONENBERG HOW HAS YOUR APPROACH TO YOUR CRAFT CHANGED AND EVOLVED OVER THE LAST TWO YEARS? I wasn’t sure how I would react to directing a movie again after close to eight years away from moviemaking, but I have to say that, despite advances in digital technology and remote working and the awkwardness imposed by our strict on-set Covid protocols while shooting my new movie, Crimes of the Future, it felt the same as always to me. The art and craft of filmmaking has not changed for me.

WHAT EXCITES YOU ABOUT HAVING YOUR DAUGHTER AS A SOUNDING BOARD? Although I have been working with computers since Cait was born in 1984, her approach to computing, especially in terms of photography and the visual arts in general, is much more natural and current than mine. And of course, she is a very socially connected young woman and I am not. (I’m not on any social media—I don’t want to be that accessible; I’ve always had

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Previous spread: David wears a Tiger of Sweden jacket.

reclusive tendencies.) I have a good idea of what my contemporaries might think of any new film or video projects I might be involved with, but Cait has her finger on the pulse of a younger audience that I would otherwise only be guessing about.

And of course, she is also a member of that audience herself. I depend on her to let me know what’s really going on!

WHAT’S THE MOST FULFILLING THING ABOUT YOUR CRAFT? Creating a living, pulsing creature that didn’t exist before. It’s the next best thing to having a kid.

WHAT EXCITES YOU? WHAT TERRIFIES YOU? Everything excites me.

Existence is overwhelmingly exciting and astounding in every detail. Nothing terrifies me.

HOW DOES YOUR DAUGHTER PUSH YOU FORWARD? She seems to think I’m still a viable creative force. Despite my occasional doubts on that score, I can’t bear to disappoint her.

WHEN IT COMES TO YOU SHOWING YOUR DAUGHTER YOUR LATEST WORK OR PROJECT, HOW DO YOU FEEL IN THE MOMENTS BEFORE THE REVEAL? It’s never quite that dramatic. And I don’t assume that she’ll want to see everything that I create.

There’s a sensitivity there that partly comes from our shared history, partly from her personal taste. I let her come to me with her reactions, and if there are no reactions, that’s fine too.

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Y O U N G

A R C H I T E C T S

2 0 2 2

For our second annual Young Architects List, we’re going global.

These 10 practices are at the forefront of the forward-thinking field

and designing for what matters today: context, climate and inclusivity.

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By Elizabeth Fazzare and Drew Zeiba

LOT OFFICE FOR A RCHITECTU R E PAU L MOK FR EDER ICK TA NG A RCHITECTU R E ATELIER M ASOMI ASSOCI ATES A RCHITECTU R E MICH A EL K CHEN A RCHITECTU R E JEROME BY RON SOPHIE DR IES A RCHITECT DEPA RTA MENTO DEL DISTR ITO EMERGENT V ER NACU LA R A RCHITECTU R E culturedmag.com 153

Leonidas Trampoukis and Eleni Petaloti.

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PHOTO BY BRYAN W. FERRY

LOT OFFICE FOR A RCHITECTU R E

Splitting their time between Athens and Brooklyn, Eleni Petaloti and Leonidas Trampoukis’s architecture and design studio is also split in two: LOT Architecture, for buildings, and Objects of Common Interest for, as the name suggests, objects.

But as Trampoukis explains, “It’s all integrated.”

They launched their architecture practice in 2012, and the design spinoff came three or four years later. In 2021 alone, Objects of Common Interest had solo exhibitions at Queens’s Noguchi Museum and the Design Museum Brussels and today, Trampoukis says, “We draw inspiration from both scales, blending them into hybrids. Sometimes a building looks like an object or an object has the organization of a building.” One example: a 2019 student micro-apartment project in Thessaloniki, Greece is an arrangement of black cubic geometries on a street of “conservative ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s architecture.” Trampoukis explains that though the idea was to place an “object in the urban context,” the 24-unit structure was not meant to be “a spaceship that landed and has nothing to do with the context.” Rather it subtly draws inspirations from nearby typologies and historic collective housing projects, but abstracts them.

“Sometimes we call it creating cohesiveness through contrast.”

Their 2016 installation in New York’s Flatiron Plaza also blended architecture and object, creating public space from sculptural, lighted white arches dangling with hammocks. “It kind of sparked this interest between scales,” Trampoukis says. “We weren’t called to do a space for gathering, we were called to do a public art piece. But we selected something that’s actually usable by the people and brings people together in this informal but surprising way.”

The firm’s projects have ranged widely: their first built structure was a beach club in Mykonos, and they’ve done everything from private residences to larger-scale commissions.

However the process is always much the same.

“We work intuitively a lot, meaning we start with sketching and discussing. Often we envision or we build a project in our minds just by discussing with Eleni or with our team.”

What unifies the various creations however is not a signature style, but rather a standpoint.

“We want to keep that almost naive clarity that a concept sketch has all the way from the beginning to the end,” says Trampoukis. “It’s basically taking an idea and abstracting and simplifying it to the absolute essence that you can almost describe it with a single sentence.” DZ

COURTESY OF PAUL MOK

PAU L MOK

Hong Kong–born, New York– based architect and artist Paul Mok’s practice is one of happy accidents.

Mok’s sculptural designs might have a certain sense of incompleteness— or perhaps its opposite, of ruin: jagged fragments, exposed rebar, floating industrial light switches, drains to nowhere. Following his undergraduate studies in Hong Kong, he explains, “Like most designers I had a day job and had my own freelance work at night.” Because of that, Mok found himself often at work zones after midnight, exploring “half-deconstructed, half-constructed sites, completely dark with debris everywhere.”

That in-betweenness is an enduring fascination for Mok. “It might be a subconscious opposition to all the strict geometries I have to deal with as an architect. We spend so much time making two little details join perfectly. When I do my own thing, I kind of just don’t want them to join perfectly.”

When he moved to New York, not surprisingly he was working in more cramped quarters.

“I couldn’t make big things. I started making a bunch of these clay gestures. There’s no purpose, but then I gradually started using them in sculptural installations.” The installations have been made for brands, shops, and pop-ups such as WORM and The Canvas, frequently in collaboration with his girlfriend, jewelry designer Amanda Maldonado-Perez, and also formed the basis of his solo exhibition at Gallery Gaia.

A commitment to play guides Mok’s practice.

“I got very interested in this notion of ‘playing’ from developmental psychology,” he explains.

“In architecture training, you always have a clear goal, a clear function, a clear purpose before you even do anything. And back then I was like, What if I just start doing something without a clear purpose?” At first this began with drawings— random gestures that would reveal form as they added up. Since then, he’s taken the playful approach to texts, ceramics, sculpture and installations.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising then that Mok’s big architecture commission—completed along with his former classmate Qiu Jiayu—was a primary school. Located on a wetland in Zhejiang, China, “Our idea was that we would shrink the classroom sizes and then use the remaining floor area to generate pockets of spaces between classrooms or outside the classrooms and have a circulation system that connects the whole school.” DZ

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PHOTO BY GIEVES ANDERSON

Whether for artists, acupuncture studios or recent upstate arrivals, New York architect Frederick Tang knows many architectural idioms.

“We often talk about language and vernacular in our projects,” he explains.

“All of our projects have geometry, some play on shape and curves, but also all of our projects have some kind of play with language and detailing that’s unique to that specific project.”

When Tang started his studio in 2015, he began it in conversation with art. “One of the first calls we got was from [artist] Adam Pendleton. It wasn’t even a conventional architecture project, it was the installation that we just completed at MoMA.” That MoMA coproduction for Pendleton’s solo show has now evolved into a number of projects—from the “very technical” workshops to more gallery-esque spaces—with Pendleton. “I think it’s the best version of a collaboration where there’s a really great sense of trust between the two of us.”

An “intimate relationship” is no less present for Tang with his residential clients. “Many of our clients tell us that they have dreams about us,” he says of working on people’s homes. Perhaps that is why the studio’s approach often becomes so expansive. He notes that they rarely set out doing interior design with an interior architecture project, rather, Tang says, “Once we establish a good relationship with the client, they end up trusting us and it starts with a little thing like, ‘Well, what are we gonna do with this?’ and we take a stab at it and it’s surprising to them. We end up just doing all the furniture and interior design.

And sometimes even art purchasing, because the client really trusts the vision.” This total approach has increasingly become intentional, such as for a Cobble Hill restaurant for which the firm is designing everything from the architecture to the decor to the menus. “That’s a great example of a commercial project where we can create not just the physical space, but also the environment that the brand occupies.” DZ

Architect Frederick Tang and Barbara Reyes, director of design for interiors and branding.

FR EDER ICK TA NG A RCHITECTU R E

ROLEX/STEPHANE RODRIGEZ DELAVEGA

Mariam Kamara is among the handful of female sole practitioners in Niger’s architecture scene, and of those, one of a very few making work that she feels is truly local. “There are architects I admire doing it in other parts of the world: Balkrishna Doshi in India or Francis Kéré in Germany,” she says. “But I couldn’t move to India or Germany; I have a family.” It’s why after matriculating University of Washington’s Master of Architecture program, she felt compelled to move herself and her kin back to her home country to begin her own studio, Atelier Masomi, in capital city Niamey in 2014.

Kamara’s practice is “a journey in discovery,” she says, and strikes a balance between traditional knowledge Niger’s artisan collaborators provide and the architect’s own Western education.

Working in a place where the daily temperature is often 110°F, building for sustainable climate control is crucial. Kamara uses contextually driven passive cooling techniques like rammed earth construction and uses materials that absorb and store heat like concrete and glass minimally, architectural ideas that Western architects are just beginning to rediscover as the effects of climate change rage on across the globe. Beginning construction soon, the Niamey Cultural Center in Niamey by Atelier Masomi takes its shape from the traditional architecture of the Hausa and Songhai people while a recently completed Hikma Community Complex in Dandaji uses abode techniques in addition to brickwork to provide additional structural strength.

Of course, not every solution is right for every place.

That is Kamara’s point. In a post-colonial country, it applies to style as well: her firm’s aim is design of and for its place, not of and for its colonizer’s aesthetic history. “In the 21st century, and after the Industrial Revolution, what we’ve done is embark on this quest for sameness, for standardization, for glorifying an international style that is somehow supposed to be good for everyone. And I think it’s a bit unfortunate,” she says.

ATELIER M ASOMI However, this attitude seems to be changing.

Aterlier Masomi is growing rapidly—the 12-person team anticipates becoming 20 by the end of the year—and has several projects on the horizon in Niger, Ghana, Liberia, Senegal, the United States and the United Arab Emirates. All these new clients are coming to Kamara specifically for her commitment to local design aesthetic through research. And she has been tapped by the Harvard Graduate School of Design to give a lecture on the topic this March.

Ever the realist, time will tell if the trend sticks, Kamara says, but she is hopeful it will.

The alternative is a painful reminder of a past shaped, against will, by someone from afar. “I find this notion that somehow good ideas have to come from elsewhere incredibly dehumanizing,” she sums, “because we all have value. It’s just a matter of tapping into it.” EF

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Martina Salvaneschi and Nicolò Galeazzi.

ASSOCI ATES A RCHITECTU R E blocks of contemporary architecture.

Establishing a design studio in a regional city may seem like an additional challenge for a young firm with global projects, but Galeazzi is quick to point out that Associates Architecture is following in the footsteps of one of its role models: architect Peter Zumthor’s practice is based in his small Swiss hometown. While it may not have global name recognition, Brescia has been chosen as the 2023 Italian Capital of Culture. This year, Associates Architecture is designing a celebratory pavilion in addition to residential projects across Italy, a concept artist residence for an English chef and his partner and a biotic farm. EF

COURTESY OF ASSOCIATES ARCHITECTURE

Architects Nicolò Galeazzi and Martina Salvaneschi begin our conversation with a disclaimer. “We’re partners in life and in work but no longer in love,” says Salvaneschi. In fact, though, their Brescia, Italy-based firm Associates Architecture began as the meet cute of every architecture nerd’s dreams.

At the 2016 Venice Bienniale of Architecture, the South African talent Salvaneschi—then a teaching assistant at the University in Venice— and the Italian architect Galeazzi—then working for Pritzker Prize-winner Álvaro Siza—were introduced by a mutual friend at the Portuguese pavilion by Siza in the Giudecca. Over Campari spritzes and hours of conversation, they did fall in love and decided to open a studio together in Galeazzi’s hometown the following year to complete a commission for the Chapel of Silence in Botticino, Italy, a material exploration of the city’s local marble. Three years later, Galeazzi and Salvaneschi’s intimate relationship ended; however, their architectural partnership is as strong as ever.

From the exterior, Associates Architecture’s designs are defined by restraint. Materials are pushed to new limits as massive volumes and appear like abstract landmarks sited in a landscape.

Inside, one is always greeted by elements of surprise: a double-height space, an incredible picture window or an unexpected lightwell.

The duo recently completed their first Mexico project—a two-story house and gallery in San Miguel de Allende for a product designer couple who loves to put on at-home shows of their work for industry peers. Its concrete façade is punctured by 52.5-foot-tall windows that pull sunlight from the home’s internal courtyard deep into the living and gallery space. With the opening of a large, hinged wall panel, its colorful cityscape is visually connected to the interior.

The project was begun in Associates Architecture’s typical manner: with a research process into its immediate context that is almost archeological. “We investigate all the anonymous local vernacular architecture and building methods,” explains Salvaneschi, as well as “traditional materials, cultural elements of society, the memory of people,” continues Galeazzi. It leads to structures that are as much of the place as they are explorations of the building

PHOTO BY MAX BURKHALTER

MICH A EL K CHEN A RCHITECTU R E

“There’s something local and discrete and tangible about architecture, but it touches so many things that are regional or planetary,” reflects architect Michael K Chen of MKCA. There are the buildings, of course, but also supply chains for materials, labor flows in construction, long-term social environmental impacts of built projects.

This awareness pervades Chen’s projects— which range from residential interiors to hardcore

research on cellular data infrastructure to architectural community aid.

As Chen’s thinking “toggles between scales,” so too does MKCA’s approach shift between modes of production. At the outset of his practice, he explains, “We were very much interested in thinking about how digital design methodologies would more directly impact ideas about craft— the presence of the hand as a kind of absence of the hand, the presence of workmanship decoupled from the ultra-rarefied way that craft has historically been understood.” In one groundup residential project, for example, the team designed a bronze railing parametrically, however they realized the best way to realize it would be to twist it by hand, even if the “geometry was impossible to draw and had to be programmed.”

Likewise, materials in Chen’s projects range from 3D-printed polymers and laser-sintered nylon to local timber—local because “when we’re able to work with smaller actors in the supply chain, there’s more control over better stewardship of materials, and also making sure that there’s not exploitation in the supply chain.”

Design for Chen is not just at the scale of built projects—such as micro-apartments, homes with conservation-garden skins, or community health centers—but also worksite signage that alerts workers of things like wage theft or trafficking and provides information on how to report it.

“They’re really primitive instruments, but we think that they’re kind of sophisticated, or at least they foreground a value system that we hold and so do our clients.” Similarly, the firm’s use of digital tools has gone from additive manufacturing and computational design to using software’s abilities to collaborate with craftspeople, designers and manufacturers—”letting go” of some control.

At the outset of the pandemic, Chen joined forces with a few other studios to form Design Advocates, offering pro-bono work to a variety of community members. The organization has swelled, becoming a full-fledged nonprofit comprising 250 firms and having worked on projects including reopening plans for New York City schools, furniture strategies for a houseless services provider, and solutions for dozens of restaurants—”not only for outdoor dining,” Chen is quick to note.

Instead of (friendly) competition for projects, Design Advocates has created “a really incredible way for us to share resources with each other and to also work on projects where everyone’s bringing something to the table, everyone checks their ego at the door, and we just work together.” DZ

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Though he is a multidisciplinary designer, all Jerome Byron’s work is permeated by an architectural spirit.

It’s just in his training. The Los Angelesbased talent has a Master in Architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design and has previously worked at firms like Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Now, in addition to running his own independent practice, he has co-founded design studio BC with fellow creative Lindsey Chan, focusing on architecture, art direction and interior design for commercial and residential spaces.

“In my architectural career, I noticed that a very top-down approach to a project was typical.

I never quite vibed with that,” says the designer, who instead thinks of his work as a way to tell a story. “I’m more of someone who is responsive to the client and their needs, especially if they are creatives. I see projects more as collaborative visions.” Byron’s first built project as a sole practitioner is a backyard guesthouse, completed for a creative family in Los Angeles last year.

Made entirely of wood, it evokes a treehouse one might find while wandering the forest, as Byron notes he often did while growing up between New York and Ohio.

It’s this “honest expression of materiality and shape” that Byron sees as a consistent thread through all his projects, a concept that can be “scaled up or down as needed.”

A scaled down version was recently on view at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in New York, where the architectural designer showed a new series of steel furniture pieces—benches, a dining table and a console—whose clean lines and proportions were recognizably the work of a draftsman. And another will soon be on view at Small Matter, Solange’s concept shop, whose forthcoming gallery space will feature new furniture by Byron.

“Where the architect brain kicks in is in trying to find a balance between geometry and proportions” in a project, the architectural designer explains. “It’s a lot about composition, but in three dimensions.” In Chan, Byron found a likeminded partner to continue to stretch his creative muscles. Their Lincoln Heightsbased firm has so far completed a skate shop for Babylon LA last spring and a hair salon for Bleach London last summer, and designed a site-

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PHOTO BY SAM MCGUIRE

JEROME BY RON

specific work for the Marta and Erik Benjaminscurated group exhibition, “Built In” at the Neutra VDL House last fall. While the duo is keeping a tight lid on news about current projects, they are lending part of their studio space over as a gallery. Their first show, “Eden,” on view through February 20, features hand-tufted rugs by Londonbased designer, Tom Atton Moore, and marks his inaugural exhibition in the United States. EF

PHOTO BY STEPHAN JUILLIARD

“Nowadays you study either furniture or industrial design or interior design or architecture, but to me it is all the same topic,” says architect and designer Sophie Dries. Her perspective, she admits, is a decidedly modern one—in the historical sense of the word—and influenced by her education: first at the Paris Malaquais Architecture School and then at the Master Department of Furniture and Interior Design at the Aalto University of Helsinki. In Finland, she says, “I realized that furniture design was connected to architecture. There are no boundaries.”

While the rest of the design world plays catch-up, Dries has been forging her own path in Paris and Milan through her eponymous studio, Sophie Dries Architect, which she began in 2014 at age 28. Known for residential interiors that master the art of the mix wholeheartedly, where custom furniture stands alongside collectible design and vintage pieces harmoniously, and commercial spaces whose interior architecture is always imbued with a sense of discovery, the talent’s practice is also tied up in something less obvious at first: symbolism. She compares designing someone’s home to painting a portrait of them: it captures their being and daily needs, but the style is the artist’s own. Similarly, the façade of a building, she believes, should say something about the function it houses. Design is a metaphor for living.

In particular, Dries’s designs are contextual yet surprising; they revel in the contrasts in the all-natural material palette in which she works. Inside classic Parisian Haussmannian apartments, she explores craft, contemporary design and vintage pieces from the 1980s and ’90s. She has worked with glass artisans in Venice and papier-mâché experts in Italy to bring new life to old spaces.

Recently, she finished an apartment design for a creative couple with a growing art collection and a shoe shop with undulating wood walls and handwrought fixtures, both in Paris. Currently, Dries is branching out into the scent world with a new candle line, designing three penthouse apartments in Pari and working on her first ground-up architecture project: a home for her parents in southern France.

The pandemic has led her to appreciate life’s little mysteries, starting with those rooms in the house that have seemingly no purpose, but end

SOPHIE DR IES A RCHITECT up being the ones in which you spend the most time reading, daydreaming and hanging around.

Her explanation is, again, poetically inspired.

“In architecture it is important to create nonfunctional space because otherwise you have just squares connected by corridors,” she says. “In cities we have squares with fountains. Fountains have no function aside from existing to be stared at, but when you see one you love it.” EF

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DEPA RTA MENTO DEL DISTR ITO

PHOTO BY ADRIANA HAMUI

In Cambridge, Massachusetts, an international design partnership was born. In 2013, Mexico City-raised Francisco Quiñones was studying architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. New Jerseyraised Nathan Friedman was doing the same a few miles away at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The two budding architects met, collaborated on a few projects and in 2017 decided to formalize their kindred spirit as Departamento del Distrito, a Mexico City-based design and research studio whose goal is to “strengthen and illuminate the ties that have existed for a very long time between Mexico and the United States but are not currently being explored or represented,” explains Friedman.

The studio achieves this through material research and socioeconomic explorations relating to the border between the two countries.

Currently occupying their minds: the 19th-century evolution of this border and its material history.

“It’s very important to position ourselves as a new face and identity for these sorts of cross-cultural relationships and to have those conversations occur in a substantial way,” Friedman says.

At the Graham Foundation in Chicago for the city’s 2021 Architecture Biennial, the designers showed “Miracles, Now,” a research projectturned-installation that focuses on Mexico City’s abandoned and disused modernist buildings, many of which were built during the Milagro Mexicano, the period of economic growth between 1954 and 1970. They also recently completed a contextual home in the northern Mexico state of San Luis Potosí, a design that builds upon the existing home and stone ruins on the site. Now, Friedman and Quiñones are working on five public projects—a cultural center, fire station, public market, sports center and urban agora—in the Mexico City municipality of Tultitlán in collaboration with Oficina de Resiliencia Urbana and Taller Architects, and their first built U.S. project, a house where the firm began: Massachusetts.

Both founders are also architecture teachers—Friedman at Rice University in Houston and Quiñones at Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. Departamento del Distrito’s two additional team members are Quiñones’s former students and currently settling into a new office space in the center of the Mexican capital. The city itself is a daily source of inspiration, says Friedman. “There is a sort of energy around and support of young designers in Mexico City that feels special right now.” EF

Francisco Quiñones and Nathan Friedman.

COURTESY OF EVA STUDIO

A backpacking trip was the original impetus for the establishment of Haiti- and London-based firm Emergent Vernacular Architecture, also known as EVA Studio.

In 2010, architect Andrea Panizzo traveled throughout South America to work with local organizations and became fascinated by the types of projects being built in developing nations.

After the devastating 7.0 magnitude earthquake hit Haiti that year, he joined nonprofit Architects Without Borders to help rebuild the country. Six months went by and Panizzo decided to stay.

“I didn’t become an architect by default,” he clarifies, though he did receive his 2005 Master’s degree from Politecnico di Milano in the discipline, “and I find it really interesting to work on the design of urban public spaces.” After a few years working with a local contractor on projects in rural areas, he cofounded EVA Studio with Simone Pagani in 2015 with a mantra to create beautiful, community-based public spaces for populations that need them most. The studio’s design process begins with local engagement and engineering consultations. Because they are often working in informal settlements prone to repeat natural disasters, the architects dedicate 80 to 90 percent of a project’s budget to infrastructure costs to ensure that what will be built does much more than just beautify.

“In the context of neighborhoods, socialization is also a resiliency,” says Panizzo. “It builds a sense of ownership and pride, which is important, especially after catastrophe.” In the Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Martissant, EVA Studio recently completed a redesign of a park with programming for a large range of ages, while its Chaarani stairs in Tripoli, funded by UN-Habitat, refurbished aging stairs and created new, landscaped public spaces using local materials in the historic hillside city that is vulnerable to flooding.

Establishing a design firm in Haiti certainly has its difficulties, Panizzo admits. Its governmental powers have long been supported by local gangs whose warfare is acted out in the nation’s streets.

The assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July 2021 meant that those groups were no longer under supervision. Projects can be stalled as a result. But, despite the challenges in every context where they design, the mission feels important enough to continue.

EMERGENT V ER NACU LA R A RCHITECTU R E In March, the studio is completing its first project in London, Colindale Park in the northwest of the city, and will soon begin construction on another. In partnership with the United Nations, the architects are designing some mango processing plants in Haiti that will help improve the livelihood of rural residents. And a new contract has just been inked to rebuild community centers across areas in Haiti affected by the 2021 earthquake. Meanwhile, in the research arm of the firm, Panizzo and his colleagues are exploring how to better the lives of refugees who choose to live in camps in the Middle East. It’s all interconnected, says the architect: “Public space is always political.” EF

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All significant others develop a special, often private code between them. Here, seven writers in three relationships open up about their origin stories, communication issues, and shared tongues.

By Rob Goyanes Photography by Leigh Ledare

Love Langua

Carmen Maria Machado, Val Howlett and Marne Litfin

ge

A Triangular Structure

THE THREE OF THEM LIVE in a tall, old Victorian home. It is all staircases, piles of books. Carmen Maria Machado’s first short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties—an inventory of the monstrous that includes fabulist Law & Order fanfiction and a ribbon cloaking an unspeakable secret—developed a broad cult following. Carmen is known around the house as “big tall vampire lady.”

Even though Carmen is 5’ 8”, she towers over her wife Val Howlett, and their partner, Marne Litfin. Val, whose primary craft is the coming-of-age tale, is working on a YA novel about teenage lesbian suffragettes set in 1913 Philadelphia. A prober of anxieties with a standup comedy practice, Marne writes more straightforwardly realist short stories and nonfiction essays. The home has other occupants too. There’s an ancient beagle named Rosie. And Carmen often finds herself uttering, “Oh, that’s clearly a ghost.”

Carmen and Val met in 2011. They were both dating the same person, the one who provoked In the Dream House, Carmen’s experimental, nightmarish memoir about queer abuse. The book catalogues the many manifestations a home can take: container of mental sickness, machine for evil, but also hallowed, familial space for healing, adventure and joy. “After the breakup Val and I got in touch with each other mostly as a postmortem,” Carmen says. They married in 2017, and kept an open relationship. culturedmag.com 165

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One day in 2019, Marne was on Tinder and came across Carmen. They didn’t know that Carmen was a well-known author, but still, they say, “I’ve never swiped on anyone so fast in my life.”

When Covid hit, Marne was marooned on Long Island, living with “their very dear and very sweet but very heterosexual aunt and uncle.” Carmen, usually averse to talking on the phone, was convinced by Marne to read The Haunting of Hill House to them. Carmen and Val agreed to have Marne come and live with them.

At first Marne felt they were “just the girlfriend who sleeps downstairs.”

But things changed one day at the dog park. After Val was out of earshot, Carmen turned to Marne and blurted, “Val wants to know if you wanna have a threesome.” Within days, Carmen upgraded from a queen to king size bed.

The throuple is a highly productive factory for giggles and layered analysis, prone to periods of plaintive reflection. Their pet names for each other include sugary terms common to many relationships—honey, sweetie, baaby—but their cache is a true cornucopia of plosives: Pecan, Pineapple, Pickle, Peach Pit. Val, who wears lemon-print pajamas, is known as Lemonboy. Carmen calls Val Peanut, and Marne Bean.

Rosie, the dog, aka Robot, Rosamuffin, Rosina Bambina, Our Beautiful Daughter and Lumpy Space Princess, sits in the center of their linguistic Venn diagram. They have a voice for her, which Marne refuses to do during our interview, but describes it as a “very low Eeyore voice that’s also at the same time very demanding.” The three of them speak as her and through her, building fables around the beagle. Carmen says that she and Rosie are “vying for the same throne and trying to depose each other constantly. She sends assassins for me and I send assassins for her.”

I ask how they’d describe each other as characters. “Val is very gentle and thoughtful,” Carmen says. “Marne is dry and mean, but in a good way. And I’m loud and mean.” (Needfully so: Carmen is currently fighting against a campaign to ban In Clockwise from standing: writers Carmen Maria the Dream House from Texas’s school libraries.) Marne says that Machado, Val Howlett Val is quietly observant, but gifted at chit-chat: “I would love to and Marne Litfin in their make a doll with a pull-string that says some of the things that Philadelphia home, December 2021.

Val has said.”

The three of them help each other at every stage of the writing process. “Carmen makes me think about how to elevate my language all the time, because her language is so rich in every sentence,” Val says. Of Marne’s writing, Val describes an “incredible sense of pacing, and their ends always pop. Always.”

Carmen says Val is “insanely good at dialogue, which is something that I always struggle with, and so that has been very instructive for me.” Normally averse to research, Carmen was also inspired by Val to include a lot of history and investigation in the book she’s currently working on, a short story collection called A BRIEF AND FEARFUL STAR. Despite, or perhaps because of their trade, writers are often at a loss for words. Carmen describes difficulty communicating when she feels low: “I tend to kind of just shut down emotionally, and I just wanna keep it private, and I think much to Marne and Val’s chagrin. Marne will be like, ‘You need to share one single feeling with me, like any feeling that you’re having.’” The three of them laugh long and heartily at this.

Whether about the vagaries of human behavior or an hour-long discussion about gardenias, the triumvirate always has much to discuss. “It’s just really nice to not build your whole life around one single person,” Val says. “Everything from like, the division of labor to how we have conflict to sharing joyful things.

I just really love our lives.”

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Toronto-based writers Brad Phillips and Cristine Brache in their bed, December 2021.

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Brad Phillips and Cristine Brache

The Word Epithalamium Means a Poem Written for a Bride “EVERYTHING I SAY IS OFF THE RECORD.” Brad Phillips likes a good joke. Him and his wife, Cristine Brache, met on Instagram in 2014 while Cristine was living in China. “I was posting T-shirts of mistranslated English,” she says, “and my account was mostly just that, and through our mutual love of language, we found each other’s accounts.”

Their first words to each other were “sup.”

Besides being writers, both of them are successful visual artists—Brad’s a painter, and Cristine makes sculpture and video. While Cristine started writing in the fifth grade, Brad didn’t write until 2013, after he got out of rehab. Which is strange, considering that his grandmother pushed him to read Dostoevsky and Tolstoy before he was even in high school.

Cristine: “There’s a picture of him as a child holding Crime and Punishment.”

Brad: [laughing] “No there’s not.”

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Brad Phillips and Cristine Brache

Cristine’s poems have the mystery of a found confessional, the elegance of perfectly shaped stains. Her 2018 book, titled Poems, included new poems and some written when she was a teenager. They have titles like “WASSUP MORTALS” and “YOU CAN’T WEAR CHANEL TO YOUR OWN SYSTEMATIC HUMILIATION.” Her and her husband’s writing styles are similar, in that the reader can’t sniff out real from not. Brad’s Essays and Fictions, dedicated to Cristine, is a dark, self-flagellating riot: “My inner child is not something I want to nurture and care for, it is something I want to leave in a basket on the steps of a convent.” His texts are often about addiction and sexual tendencies more likely to be found in the DSM or on the outer edges of Craigslist.

Besides the dark humor, there is a tenderness to both their writing that is erotic, honest, and unafraid of hot shame. With each other, they are adoring and nurturing. Cristine has a strong Miami accent and vocabulary—a Spanish inflection, and she calls things “crunchy”—and Brad’s East-Coast Canadianness trickles out at times. I ask what words they’ve stolen from each other.

“Brad has definitely gotten me to say assclown, dog shit, dipshit, asshat, chowderhead,” Cristine says. (Apparently it’s a very East-Coast Canadian thing to call someone an asshat or assclown). Brad calls things “bobo” because of Cristine, a Miami-ism meaning janky. When I ask how Brad would characterize the patterns of Cristine’s speech, he says “Take it easy Noam Chomsky” then playfully chides, “Ask some easier questions bro.”

So I ask what words are in circulation between them. Cristine says that Brad incorporates a bunch of atypical words. Like, instead of saying “I have to take a shower,” he’ll say, “I have to go do my ablutions.” Brad’s bank of pet names for Cristine is similarly expansive and evolving. Brad

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calls Cristine mi cielo, mis ojos, mi vida. “There were a couple years where I called Cristine ‘coach’ a lot,” Brad says. “Because she was teaching me yoga.”

For a long time Brad avoided using the word “babe” because it made him think of Elaine’s boyfriend David Puddy on Seinfeld. “I always thought ‘babe’ was kinda like a jock thing or something,” he says.

Cristine: “We started saying ‘babe’ as a joke and then now we say it seriously.”

Brad: “I’m trying to switch to ‘baby’ though.”

I ask what Cristine calls Brad, and she mentions a single endearment, used earlier in the day: angel cakes. “She uses only as many words as are necessary,” Brad says. “She’s an economical speaker. Sort of like her poems.”

Cristine and Brad got married in 2016. Instead of writing their vows, they used the standard ones about for better and worse, which Cristine found “pretty tight.” She sees marriage as the best way to get as close as you can to somebody, like the two lines of an asymptote; a brave act for many reasons, including the fact that “it’s a bitch to get divorced.”

“I actually like that we’re legally bound together,” Brad comments. “I’m not sure exactly why. I just like feeling accountable.”

I ask what they’d like to be better at communication-wise. Brad says, “I can always learn to communicate in a way that’s more effective for our relationship and also that can be more a help to Cristine, in helping her manage this experience of being alive, which is often quite painful for her and for myself.” A plainspoken, bittersweet piece of advice, which all of us should heed.

“Maybe what’s interesting is that even though we’re both writers, maybe we’re not different from any other couple,” Brad suggests. He then looks at Cristine. “Isn’t that right, babe?”

Roxane Gay and Debbie Millman

“I actually like that we’re legally bound together.

I’m not sure exactly why.

I just like feeling accountable.”

-Brad Phillips

Some Secrets Won’t Be Shared A BESTSELLING, DIARISTIC RECORD OF sexual violence, fatness, and the back and forth of trauma and freedom from it, Roxane Gay’s Hunger was released in 2017. One of its many readers was Debbie Millman. Debbie, author of six books about design, including her newest, Why Design Matters: Conversations With the World’s Most Creative People, sent an email to Roxane asking if she wanted to appear on her long-running podcast. Roxane declined.

“At that time I was extraordinarily interviewed-out,” Roxane says. “After that she wrote me another email in which she explained her connection to Hunger and how much she loved the book, and it was extremely flattering and beautiful and I… ” “Ignored it. She ignored it,” Debbie finishes with a smirk.

“I didn’t ignore it, but I just sort of, you know, didn’t really, yeah.”

Later, Debbie did an event with author Ashley C. Ford, who mentioned that Roxane was her mentor. Debbie inquired as to Roxane’s relationship status. At the time Roxane was in an open relationship, so Ashley told Debbie to shoot her shot. Debbie emailed Roxane again, this time asking her out on a date. To which Roxane responded, “Sure.”

Debbie, left to unpack the monosyllabic response, was very nervous.

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They agreed to meet after a reading and book-signing for Hunger, and Debbie decided to make the romantic gesture of being the last person in line. But people kept showing up, and Debbie had to keep telling them to go ahead of her, a scenario fit for a romcom.

Roxane recalls, “I was signing books and the line was going on and on and so with each person that would come up in the line I would think, ‘Huh, is this her?’ I would sort of rate my attraction. Some people were like, Ehhh.

And most people were like, Oh god, I hope not. And then she showed up and she looked amazing. And I was like, Yes, I can work with this.”

Not knowing this first impression, Debbie’s heart was pounding all the way to dinner. It took a moment of klutziness to put her at ease. Debbie says, “We went to the restaurant and then she spilled a glass of water on me, which made me very happy.”

When I ask about what pet names they use, Debbie hesitates, and they agree that they don’t want to share. “Well it’s like an intimate name, you know?” Debbie says. “It reflects, I think, our familiarity with each other and our deep intimacy. I feel like [pet names] are very sacred.” They do divulge, however, that they call their dog Fluffinator, and that Debbie’s unfinished song for him is currently at three verses.

Though private about the sacred, they open up about the profane.

Debbie doesn’t curse much, but Roxane does—the usual litany of fucks and shits and goddamnits. But also, “She says ‘Christ on a cracker,’ which is so Manhattanites and writers weird,” Debbie notes.

Roxane Gay and Debbie On their respective rhythms and manners of Millman with their pets, speech, Roxane says “Debbie is a quintessential December 2021.

New Yorker. She has lived there—until she met me— her entire life. [The couple lives between New York and Los Angeles.] So she talks very quickly, she is very direct, there’s a nice staccato to the way she talks. And when she’s talking to you it feels like she’s boring into your soul.”

“Roxane is very shy,” Debbie says. “She doesn’t like to share her feelings. I often have to ask several times to get a response that’s honest.

She has a gorgeous caramel vocal tone. I love her voice. And she is the smartest person I’ve ever met.”

Debbie is always asking Roxane what she thinks of things: “It could be world politics, it could be thread count, it could be the Grammy nominations, it could be what Seth Rogen is up to,” Debbie says.

On the subject of marriage and the words that formalize such a bond, Roxane says that they’d originally planned on writing their own vows for a ceremony with their friends—but Covid put a temporary halt on these plans.

So they used the traditional vows when they eloped. Though these words are stock, cliché even, Debbie was still rocked: “I was just like, projectile crying.”

Roxane sees these words as far more significant than mere bureaucratic jargon. “It’s not just a piece of paper, and I also think that as queer women, we recognize what it means to be able to enter into this contract with one another, and how hard-fought that right was.”

Another legal term has deeper value than meets the eye. Though they won’t dish on their nicknames for each other, Debbie reveals one endearment.

“Roxane is the only person that is allowed to call me by my legal full name.

Everybody else calls me Debbie. My grandmother used to call me Deborah and I never really liked that name. But now I do because of Roxane.”

“[Marriage] is not just a piece of paper, and I also think that as queer women, we recognize what it means to be able to enter into this contract with one another, and how hard-fought that right was.”

- Roxane Gay

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THE NEWNESS OF LOUIS VUITTON’S SAVOIR FAIRE

THE SUCCESS OF LOUIS VUITTON’S OBJETS NOMADES SERIES IS PRIMARILY THANKS TO THE WAYS ITS HERITAGE AND RESOURCES &$1 %( /(9(ƫ$*(' ,172 1(: (1'($9256 $ '(&$'( $)7(Ƣ /$81&+ ,76 $'9(1785(6 &217,18(

BY BANA BISSAT

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© LOUIS VUITTON / GRÉGOIRE VIEILLE

The testament to this? A design world without Louis Vuitton’s Objets Nomades seems hardly conceivable, in the same way a world without Flos, Cassina, Kartell, Artemide and Vitra would be. This despite the fact that it’s only been a decade since the first collection of 16 travel-inspired furniture and objects premiered in 2012 to celebrate the House’s sense of adventure.

That’s not to imply that the Objets Nomades series is divorced from Louis Vuitton’s heritage.

If anything, its success is primarily thanks to how the brand calculatedly leveraged existing resources into new endeavors. When designers, architects and artists are invited to ideate an Objet, they most certainly don’t design in a vacuum; the brand’s artisans are involved through and through, safeguarding the craft across techniques in leathercraft and beyond. They produce the items in-house, ensuring that the Louis Vuitton savoir faire is meticulously, painstakingly articulated into fully functional items in the same way as it would for any other ready-to-wear piece of clothing, like, say, in the lining, the embossing or the weaving and braiding of leathers. “It’s a great workshop in which any designer could play for a long time,” Dutch furniture designer Maarten Baas says. Design duo Fernando and Humberto Campana agree: “We were impressed with the archive of materials as well as the artisans’ ability to detect distinct colors in the leather and to assemble various pieces in slightly different shades to achieve the effect of a specific color.” Savoir faire, as Louis Vuitton defines it, isn’t just about technique but access to resources as well. The raw material sourcing is a significant perk of its own; in their exhilarating experimentation, Louis Vuitton invited designers get their hands on the house’s legendary materials, including its caramel-hued Nomade leather and its waterproof Monogram canvas. They also get coveted access to state-of-the-art technology in innovative, experimental fabrics.

The debuts of these Objets are consistently a

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© LOUIS VUITTON / GRÉGOIRE VIEILLE

ONLY FOR LOUIS VUITTON &$1 1(:1(66 %( 3$ƫ$'2;,&$//< 6<121<0286 :,7+ +(5,7$*(

From left: Louis Vuitton Objets Nomades Cocoon by the Campana Brothers at Château de Fontainebleau; Surf On the Beach board and Louis Vuitton Horizon Light Up Speaker.

Previous spread: Louis Vuitton Monogram Kite; Louis Vuitton Babyfoot Monogram Foosball table and Poker Case and Louis Vuitton Objets Nomades Diamond armchair by Marcel Wanders studio.

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ALL PORTRAITS: © LOUIS VUITTON / PHILIPPE LACOMBE

highlight of the most prominent design happenings across Milan, Hong Kong and Miami. Five new items were unveiled at Louis Vuitton’s women’s store in the Miami Design District during Design Miami 2021, including pieces by Raw-Edges, Frank Chou, Marcel Wanders, the Campana Brothers and Studio Louis Vuitton. They were displayed across an environment with clusters and imaginary plants by designer Patricia Urquiola—a mesmerizing desert landscape that set the stage for a total of 40 pieces. Urquiola’s layering nudges a memory of dunes somewhere even warmer than Miami. These launches are all retrospectives of some sort, considering that the Objets—some of which occasionally relaunch in updated iterations—continue to travel from show to store over the years in a growing, permanent collection that is exempt from any seasonality. “I actually first started a conversation with the brand in 2010 with the idea of a collection that went back to the brand’s roots of when luxury travel began.

I loved this idea; the concept of traveling and the memory of the iconic Louis Vuitton travel trunk,” Urquiola says. The Spanish designer has been involved since the start with her 2012 Swing Chair, a hanging seat produced in hand-knitted mesh and finished with a fringed hem shaped to resemble the quatrefoils of its Monogram. Meanwhile—400 feet away from Urquiola’s environment, also in the Miami Design District—a massive façade baptized the house’s second standalone men’s store in November 2021 to coincide with the Spring/ Summer 2022 menswear show. It’s an all-white, latticelike, aluminum structure inspired by Marcel Wanders’s 2017 Objets Nomades Diamond Screen (a partition that reinterprets the Monogram motif into 60 modules of leather held together by brass clips and propped on a marble base). The new façade cheekily nods to MiMo, or Miami modernist architecture, in its stylized cladding.

These instances of Urquiola and Wanders’s Miami designs aren’t exactly “Objets,” but create scenescapes to house pieces that are. But the designers’ curatorial involvement attests that the Objets Nomades collection has certainly grown beyond the experimental series it was when it first premiered—initially driven by many prototypes— into an empire of its own where that first invite from Louis Vuitton blossoms into actualized, multidisciplinary creations year in and year out.

Here, we look at the designers and studios behind the newest Objets Nomades launched during Design Miami 2021.

MARCEL WANDERS “It is so rewarding to see others who believe that craft still matters,” Marcel Wanders says. His studio’s involvement with Objets Nomades this past year goes beyond the Louis Vuitton Miami men’s store façade. The 40-person Dutch design practice first joined the world of Objets Nomades in 2015 with its Chaise Longue, wherein three independent modules in high-tech carbon fiber interlock like a puzzle. Its 2021 piece, Petal Chair, pays homage to Louis Vuitton’s iconic Monogram flower. Its creamor coral-colored, petal-shaped cushions are covered in handstitched calf leather and supported by legs of cast aluminum. The cherry on top? The LV initials embroidered on the central petal.

PHOTO BY BRAD DICKSON

Petal Chairs by Marcel Wanders studio and a Merengue pouffe by the Campana Brothers in the Louis Vuitton Miami Design District women’s store environment designed by Patricia Urquiola.

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Cosmic Table with Dolls chairs by Raw-Edges in the Louis Vuitton Miami Design District women’s store.

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RAW-EDGES

PHOTO BY BRAD DICKSON

Yael Mer and Shay Alkalay—or Raw-Edges—play with form to “bring out the kid in all of us,” they say. Their Concertina Chair made noise when it first premiered and instantly became one of the most iconic launches under the Objets Nomades series; it’s one of the few items without the Monogram that somehow still effortlessly manages to announce its linkage to Louis Vuitton, likely thanks to the Nomade leather that wraps each of the chair’s six accordion-like petals. “The products are quite complex in their geometry, so we had to consider both form and function very carefully,” they say. Their latest Objet is their fourth so far: Cosmic Table features a carbon-fiber base covered with calfskin and is topped with a beveled glass disc—an organic structure brought to fruition with the house’s cutting-edge techniques.

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CAMPANA BROTHERS The Brazilian design duo’s name sings like a legendary band: The Beatles, the Ramones, the Campana Brothers. Their creative, colorful energy laughs off the notion of gravity. With mind-boggling forms and colors like theirs, it’s no surprise that Fernando and Humberto Campana’s works feature in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper Hewitt in New York.

The Campana Brothers dove into Objets Nomades from day one and have so far designed five items, each available in multiple variants. They debuted Merengue at Design Miami 2021, a pouffe that, as the name suggests, is inspired by meringue.

Their iconic Cocoon swing chair was relaunched in a new leopard variation based on the Louis Vuitton Pre-Fall 2021 Wild at Heart collection. The brothers were seemingly omnipresent this past year—an animation inspired by their sculptural object, Aguacate Multicolore, also lit up Louis Vuitton’s women’s store façade in Miami.

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Signature Armchair by Frank Chou and a Merengue pouffe by the Campana Brothers in the Louis Vuitton Miami Design District women’s store.

PHOTO BY BRAD DICKSON

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CHOU In 2021, Beijing-based designer Frank Chou joined the growing roster of Objets Nomades designers, instantly making a grand entrance with his armchair and sofa designs. The collaboration seemingly went without a hitch, and Chou didn’t need to sacrifice his vision at any point. “Louis Vuitton really encourages designers to keep their own spirit and character,” he says. “We figured out how to combine our DNA with the brand as the project developed.” The Signature Armchair and Sofa were inspired by the terraced fields in Yunnan, China and the Antelope Canyon in Arizona, and signal the very first time the Objets Nomades series sees an item designed specifically for the outdoors. “In bringing value to the concept, we found more possibilities with an outdoor piece,” Chou explains. Ready for the wear of everyday, the seating set is equipped with Louis Vuitton’s waterproof canvas and Brio rope yarn fabric by the Italian textile company Paola Lenti.

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THE STORY OF

R E Y NA LD O R I V E R A’ S LOS ANGELES

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THE PHOTOGRAPHER’S INTIMATE IMAGES OF LATINA TRANS WOMEN, DRAG ARTISTS AND CLUB KIDS IN THE 1980s AND 1990s WERE RECENTLY THE SUBJECT OF A SEMIOTEXT(E) MONOGRAPH, Provisional Notes for a Disappeared City, AND WERE ALSO INCLUDED IN THE “Made in L.A. 2020” BIENNIAL. HERE HE TELLS CURATOR AND EDITOR LAUREN MACKLER ALL ABOUT THE THRILLING LIVES AND TIMES OF HIS FAMILY AND FRIENDS.

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CH A R I SM ATIC , HON E ST A N D U N F I LT E R ED, Reynaldo Rivera connects ideas across eras, referencing local histories, silent movies, Mexican divas, writers and politicians. His father fervent in his desire to have un hijo de la patria, Rivera was born in Mexicali, Mexico. He grew up traveling itinerantly up and down the coast among various towns in Mexico and California. He initially used photography as a tool for stilling time, his early photos focusing indiscriminately on his surroundings, but he became more intentional as he grew older, perfecting his craft. He took pictures of places he went and the wide range of people who surrounded him: first the cleaners in the pensioner hotel where he lived with his father; then his family; street vendors and street corners, and, later, fake fashion shoots for LA Weekly, candid interactions between friends, music shows, house parties and on stage and backstage in queer clubs where trans women and drag entertainers performed.

These images comprise intimate moments of preparation and dazzling outbursts of glamour in public. They’re a gathering of evidence he leverages later in this conversation to litigate his photographs: the way they function as fact and fiction alike, as proof and product of his cohort’s imprint on the city of LA and an antidote to the distinctly American amnesia that keeps decentering the Latina/o narrative.

His body of work from the 1980s and 1990s, rarely seen until recently, is full of moments that would otherwise be committed to memory— fleeting light and figures that level recognizable names such as Sonic Youth, Los Elegantes and Jean Baudrillard with fresh and lesser-known (yet no less glamourous) faces. In his dark, cinematic images, Rivera focuses on “how his subjects want to be seen,” to quote Chris Kraus, or the slippage between self-perception and appearance that happens between a face and a mirror—or a shutter. He specializes in simultaneously capturing both their interiority and their outer shell through his skill for mining intimacy from his subjects and refracting it onto the surrounding context.

Rivera recently produced a monograph published by the beloved literary, philosophy and art press Semiotext(e)—co-edited by Hedi El Kholti (and myself)—and he was showcased in the recent Los

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Angeles biennial “Made in L.A. 2020” (curated by Myriam Ben Salah, Ikechúkwú Onyewuenyi and me) at the Hammer Museum and The Huntington.

In his book, Rivera’s friend, the aforementioned Kraus, delivers a searingly precise account of his unruly early life—likely the result of many conversations—that traces the roads that led him to now live in a towering Victorian house in Lincoln Heights where a pristine record player, cared for with tenderness, spills obscure Russian vocalists, Lucha Reyes or Nina Hagen onto the sidewalk shared with a bustling body shop. We recorded this conversation in two bursts in September 2021.

This text moves from old traditions to Rivera’s newest work, which is still in progress, and nods to the people and scenes that have shaped him.

It also highlights his fierce distaste for the powers that enforce the ephemeral nature of a scene that was not only deeply influential on him but also one he views as foundational to the LA we live in today.

These works were never driven by an archival impulse (neither the preservation of his own work nor a particularly documentary-like mindset).

They hold contradictions and poetic fallacies, an intimate and instinctive excavation of a city and the people who fill it.

LAUREN MACKLER: So, over the past few years we have spent a lot of time together, we’ve had a lot of conversations about your work, and we wanted to start this one with the relationship between oral traditions and photography.

REYNALDO RIVERA: The language of imagery.

MACKLER: Also, the role gossip plays in this kind of storytelling: the hearsay, the aggrandizement of self-perception…

RIVERA: Great art is gossip.

MACKLER: Ha, yes.

RIVERA: Okay, I’ll act like it’s fresh: As a child in my village, I would sit around and listen to all the old farts talk in the kitchen at the big events, the Christmases, the birthdays, the deaths. They would sit around and talk about all the big feats of the town, and it was their way of remembering these things. They were passing this info to the younger folk.

MACKLER: An expanded family history.

RIVERA: It’s like verbal imagery. I used to love hearing all the stories of the great-greatgrandfather that got conned by los Cristeros or my great-grandmother whogot raped by… what was his fucking name? Leon Pena. Maybe Leon made her suck his dick. They would get graphic sometimes.

This is during the Mexican Revolution, like 1910.

She lost all her lands, etcetera… People who don’t have other tools relied on this kind of oral remembrance. When I got older, when I discovered photography, I did the same thing through my images. It was image gossip. It was a way of leaving the stories of people that come and go. This is what my family or these older folk would do in my village.

They would tell these stories of people that came and went. It kept them alive. Each family seems to have the designated receptacle of info, and later I became that person by default because no one else was interested and I did this with photography.

Even though having a camera was never intended for someone like me; it was such a foreign idea for someone like myself that grew up in poverty or as a migrant worker. The first photos I took I just did to preserve these moments for myself. As I got older, I started choosing the people I wanted to include in my narrative.

MACKLER: While it wasn’t your intent, your images are often read as documentary, and they function that way too, but you refer to them as fictions. Oral histories also have that relationship between fact and fiction because they rely on self-presentation and memory, namely the way memory fictionalizes fact—and vice versa.

RIVERA: It’s storytelling, and you want to make the story captivating to keep the younger people interested. In a way that’s what the elder people did when I was a child, they told the story with their own flair. Also you want to make it interesting enough for someone else to retain this memory and retell the story because that’s how those things work. Like how Mexico had corridos—music that was created to tell stories as a way of passing information throughout a country—I describe my stuff as a visual corrido because I’ve documented people that in most cases are not documented, and events that go unnoticed, because usually in the West—the non-oral-tradition folk—they always just want to capture the big events. I’m a sucker for the ones that go unnoticed.

When I read about the twenties, the thirties, I always wanted to know what regular folk did.

Because you always read about the movie stars, or that guy that crossed the Atlantic, or whatever, yet you never really get a feel for what things were really like.

MACKLER: Also it matters that it’s through your lens.

RIVERA: Everything goes through someone’s lens.

Like all those performers in my work, to me, they

CLOCKWISE STARTING IN TOP LEFT: “MY DAD WORKING AS A TEENAGER IN THE 1930S. A STRIP OF PHOTOS OF MY MAMA FROM THE 1950S.” THREE GUYS ON THE BEACH: “THE GUY ON THE LEFT IS MY DAD, THE ONE THAT HAS HIS HANDS TOGETHER, WITH TWO FRIENDS. THEY USED TO DO DIVES IN CANCUN IN THE

MERCEDES RIVERA FROM THE 1930S.” TWO WOMEN STANDING: “MY GRANDMOTHER (LEFT) WITH A FRIEND IN MEXICO CITY IN THE 1930S.” FADED GROUP PHOTO: “MY DAD AGAIN AS A TEENAGER WITH THE TRAIN STATION MASONRY CREW.” LARGER OVAL: “MY AUNT CONSUELA IN THE 1940S—ACCORDING TO HER HAIR.”

HAT AROUND 1991. BLACK AND WHITE POLAROID: “MY COUSIN TRISHA, ARELLANO.” COLOR POLAROID: “MY MAMA AND HER FRIEND WITH A HAT FROM THE 1950S IN STOCKTON, CALIFORNIA.” “MY GRANDMOTHER’S SCREEN ACTORS GUILD CARD FROM WHEN SHE THOUGHT SHE’D BE FAMOUS. SMALL OVAL: “MY AUNT

1940S. “THE RIPPED IMAGE: “MY GRANDMOTHER DIVORCED HER HUSBAND AND TOOK HIM OUT OF THE PHOTO.” THE COLOR PHOTOGRAPH: “AN IMAGE OF ME AND MY TWO SISTERS IN MACARTHUR PARK FROM 1989.” THE SMALL BLACK AND WHITE PHOTO: “A FAMILY PHOTO TAKEN IN EL MONTE.” THE ARTIST WEARING A

“WHEN I READ ABOUT THE TWENTIES, THE THIRTIES, I ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW WHAT REGULAR FOLK DID.”

Performer, Le Bar (1995).

Angela Romero and her mother, 2018.

Previous spread: Family photos from the artist. More detailed captions in gutter.

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“THESE ARE ALL THE CHARACTERS IN MY STORY. STARS IN MY MOVIE.” Patron, La Plaza (1994); Gaby, Reynaldo and Angela, La Plaza (1993).

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were like Garbo and Dietrich and these other gals that I fell in love with as a child watching movies.

When I started documenting the performers at Mugy’s and La Plaza, to me they were larger than life. I wanted to document them in this way to give them that. And that’s why I wanted the pictures at the Hammer to be that big, because I wanted people to have to stand back to see the whole image and it’s like, “Don’t get close, bitches”—they are stars. What I find rewarding now is to be able to see these performers at LACMA and all these other museums that have bought the work. Now all these gals are going to be seen. Unfortunately, in their own time, they were throwaways. They were the people that no one gave a fuck about, that someone would throw over a bridge in a suitcase.

Unfortunately, that’s how so many trans folk end up now, it’s still part of our current history. Through my lens, and not just my mental one, I’ve immortalized these girls.

MACKLER: Today, we were in conversation with an institution that is considering the acquisition of your archive. It was striking to realize that all the information pertaining to these images [currently negatives in plastic sleeves and stacks of prints]— dates, names, places—lives in your mind, that’s all in your brain—nobody else can really caption them.

Some other people may be able to corroborate the information, but you’re a kind of “keeper.”

RIVERA: It’s my story. I am the orator—is that the word?

MACKLER: Yes. RIVERA: These are all the characters in my story.

Stars in my movie. The same way that these older folk in my village chose the people they remembered. They decided who was worthy of being remembered through what they felt was valuable to the family.

People remember things for a reason, and everyone chooses. We are constantly curating our life. I’ve done this through photography.

By the time I shot all these performers, it was a conscious decision to document them for posterity because, by this point, I was seeing things differently. It was no longer just saving shit for myself. And there was a reason I shot all this video alongside the pictures, because I was thinking, someone is going to wonder what this looked like moving, and I thought so many of these things are so fucking amazing that it made me want to also document it that way.

MACKLER: I’m glad you brought them up. Your videos are so captivating. Handheld and often shot through mirrors (like the pictures), they straddle the line between the spontaneous and the choreographed. In the cut you screened at the Hammer as part of “Made in L.A. 2020,” you show seemingly casual nights out, days browsing

the flea markets, windy car rides shot from the passenger seat, house parties and then multiple takes of a single scene in a bar bathroom. That last shot plants a seed that everything here is a little rehearsed or staged. There’s also this moment where you interview someone in the bathroom through a mirror. You are in the frame, asking him about sex, teasing out his story, edging his desire. You interviewed a lot of people in the videos in this unique way, kind of egging them on. What are you coaxing?

RIVERA: Again, I’m curating. I wanted something.

In most cases, people see you differently than you see yourself. Obviously, to me, a lot of these performers are larger than life, and so I wanted to pull that out of them because these folks only sell themselves in that limelight while they were on stage.

MACKLER: And that’s really fleeting. There’s more.

RIVERA: Yes. MACKLER: In a public conversation you did for Artforum last year, I remember someone asking you about glamour, and you suggested that behind the glamour, there was a lot of violence.

Sometimes, in person, when you recount the stories of some of these performers, you reference tragedy and horror, but the viewer might not see that in the pictures.

RIVERA: The reason I don’t dwell on those things in the pictures is because I don’t want another tragic story about these people. I would rather concentrate on their output, that what they were doing was amazing, and that they deserve to be seen or remembered for other things than their tragedy. They had full lives.

And the thing about the glamour is that glamour is violent. Well, it’s just because glamour is a façade, but what does it take to get that façade, to get that steely look? All these girls went through a lot of shit to get to where they were, to get that look. It didn’t come easily. Their bodies cost them a lot and, in some cases, it cost them their lives.

MACKLER: There’s an element of artifice throughout your whole body of work, even when the images are—contradictorily—somewhat candid. Even in the house party scenes you draw a performance out of your subjects.

RIVERA: The photos look the way they look because, again, in that case, it was really knowing the right moment to take the image. There were 50 crappy photos for one amazing photo. You’re waiting for that moment. That comes from just doing what you do for years, just knowing what looks good in that little square. It’s like learning to view the world through a specific thing. I noticed that people, that photographers and cinema people view the world through their medium.

MACKLER: Just constantly framing.

RIVERA: Yes, I think we do. It’s just something that happens naturally after years of doing this shit and because it’s not as easy as people think to get something on film the way you see it in your mind.

Most people take a photo and go like, “This is not the way I saw this image.” It’s not easy to actually get what you wanted.

MACKLER: For me, being in front of your lens for the first time was really pivotal in understanding your work. The way you banter. Of course, everyone’s different, so it’s probably a little different with each subject.

RIVERA: Right. You have to play a different tune to every person.

MACKLER: My experience was that you really don’t fawn over people.

RIVERA: No. MACKLER: You’re much more like, “Stop doing that.” You shut down a thing to get another thing.

What are you shutting down?

RIVERA: That either works or it doesn’t. People that are very sensitive tend to get crushed. I have a big thing about honesty. Because at the end of the day, I want to get a good photo because I want to make you the best I can, make you whatever I think looks good.

MACKLER: Are you trying to make people look good?

RIVERA: Yes, of course. That is the bane of my existence. To me, a big nose is amazing, but everyone has their weird things about their face.

They hate their nose or they hate their eyebrows, their eyes. Usually everyone is always waiting for the right moment when they lose enough weight, and that moment never comes. You’re always seeing yourself through that fucking weird prism of your brain, which is always telling you you’re not good enough or you’re not whatever enough. That’s been my experience with most sitters.

MACKLER: Actually, it relates to how the mirror is such a big player in your work. You’re often shooting people looking at themselves or looking at their reflection.

RIVERA: Mirrors are the ways people want to see themselves, and I’m all about their fantasy, not their reality. Actually, there’s this one image of this one guy who usually didn’t do shows—one of the girls had not shown up so they slapped this dude in a dress and a fucking wig. It was really awkward.

MACKLER: I remember that one.

RIVERA: I love that image of him looking in the mirror because I almost feel like the reflection that’s looking back at him is so different from the person he believes himself to be. He’s so unsure of himself looking in this mirror. That’s one of the images that I like the most, but it’s probably because I know the backstory. He had never done

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this before. You could see it in his body language in this tacky dress, in this totally bad wig. It looks like it’s backwards. Oh, my God. I really love it.

MACKLER: One time when I asked you about the mirror in your compositions and your reflection in it, you explained that it is also a portrait of you.

RIVERA: Is that what I said?

MACKLER: As much a portrait of you as it is a portrait of others.

RIVERA: Right. Oh, yes. A lot of times I wanted to be part of the photo. Well, there were times that I’m in the image because when you’re looking at it, you’re not just seeing it through my eyes. It feels inclusive. It’s not like Arbus’s images where you feel excluded immediately.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed that her photos really feel exclusive. There’s this hand that is not letting you get close to the sitter. I think that comes from her. She was not close to anybody. She made normal people look freaky. I think because through her lens, she viewed the world as a fucking alien experience. She couldn’t get close to anything. I’m not this way.

The reason I bring her up is because when I was younger, people used to make these connections to her all the time. I could never figure that shit out, because I felt that the only similarity was the subject matter. I always felt that the feel of our work was so different. Everyone that has talked about seeing my work always has said that they feel like they’re there. I think it’s because I was there. When I took the photo, I wasn’t just there with my camera. I was part of what was happening, which in a way makes you feel included.

I didn’t make people that ordinarily society would have deemed as freaky look unfreaky. I usually made them look good. I’m still doing that, except now, I do it much more singularly. My old photos are very busy, there’s a ton of stuff going on everywhere, which was what I was about at that time. Now I’m about individual things. Portraiture.

MACKLER: Who are you shooting now?

RIVERA: I realized I am mostly shooting transplants, people who are new to this city. The portraits are as much about them as they are about the city around them as it changes.

MACKLER: You tend to shoot people who are close to you—sometimes newly close, sometimes long-time and trusted. We should talk about family too.

RIVERA: Right. One thing that gay folk, in general, have to experience early on is the making of our own families. Luckily, I was close to my immediate family, but I was as close to them maybe as some of these other friends that I’ve collected that became like family throughout the years. The recent book in a way is a family album in this whole tradition of preserving the people that matter to you. You are everyone you’ve ever met. You’re a

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receptacle. If you really are honest with yourself and look deep, you’ll see how every mannerism, every fucking thing that is you, you learned from someone else or from an exterior influence. This is the kind of shit you think about when you’re old.

You start connecting dots.

MACKLER: I think it says something about you too, that you let yourself be imprinted.

RIVERA: We all do though. I just think some of us are more honest than others.

MACKLER: I also think your images, your aesthetic, seem to live across time and eras. Through the notion you mentioned earlier about people being “mosaic-ed” inside of you—but also the images you’ve spent time contemplating: family pictures, your neighborhood’s history, silent films and the Golden Age of cinema, album covers…

RIVERA: The more you’re exposed to shit, the more your brain has to borrow from, and it makes for a much more interesting image. We all borrow from everything. People you’re around for a long time, have you ever found yourself mimicking shit they do? You start becoming very similar and then that stuff stays with you when they disappear and it becomes part of who you are. It happens so subtly.

I was telling the curator from the Getty earlier how little documentation we have—by we, I mean Latinos. It’s where I feel the importance of this work really is now, that I’m leaving a body of work there for other people to remember that we’re part of these things, because that’s what connects people from different times and makes you feel like you belong in a place. Documenting the mundane shit makes you feel like you were here.

In the US, we are constantly being moved from places. Look at Echo Park: look at how quickly we were erased from this fucking neighborhood. I’m not putting the blame on anyone. I’m just saying that this has happened to us repeatedly and this is why we tend to not have a sense of ownership.

If you wanted to know about Latinos who lived in Echo Park, go fucking look for anything. It wasn’t out there, and I really feel that the book we made and this work is a testament that we were here.

[In the book] we say, “This is Echo Park,” “This is Silver Lake,” and I did that on purpose to let other people know we were part of that neighborhood and part of what was going on, and we were as much trendsetters as we were following trends. We have always been part of this American experience, and we always seem to be put in the footnotes.

MACKLER: Do you feel like that is changing now?

Your work is becoming a reference.

RIVERA: What is happening now is all of a sudden all these white folks seem to be so interested in giving us our own table, but again they are missing the mark, we don’t want our own table, that’s never what I meant. I wanted to be included in

the discussion because we are doing all these things that are a part of what they are doing, what we are all doing. We have always been a part of the history of this fucking city. I wanted to let people know we never went anywhere.

I did a workshop with young kids in the nineties in Echo Park, and one of the things at the end I had asked them was to write a little something about their neighborhood, and all the kids wrote, “This used to be a Jewish neighborhood,” “This used to be an Italian neighborhood,” this used to be every other ethnic group’s neighborhood. Not one said, “This has always been a Latino neighborhood,” yet the one thing Los Angeles has always been is a Latino city, because we were here before nearly everyone. Then this one kid wrote, “Art is something white people do,” and it’s so funny because I felt like this kid in that one sentence said what we all always felt.

Just the fact that I picked up that fucking camera and did something with it is monumental because I grew up believing that that’s something we don’t do.

MACKLER: There was no road map and it felt so improbable.

RIVERA: There was no background in art. No education. Everything told me not to do it. That’s the magical part of all this—I did it anyway.

MACKLER: I’m going to ask you one last question, about light as it relates to your newest work. When you shoot, you adamantly only use “natural light.” What qualifies as natural light in this city for you?

RIVERA: Every city has its own light and its own feel. And it’s the person that is from the city that feels the change. I have really felt this change in how the city looks.

MACKLER: It’s particularly related to lighting?

RIVERA: Yes, well, the lighting part is related to all the suburbanites moving into the city who have brought with them that need for safety and security—shit that we didn’t grow up with and didn’t expect from the city. We wanted the freedom the city gave us and the anonymity that the city gave us in its darkness. The night in Los Angeles was magical, you felt this darkness, this penumbra, this in-between world, the shadows spoke. I think that’s why this was the capital of film noir, why it began here. And I really believe that by adding all this safety, all this excess light… you know everything is so well lit now.

They just added two extra lights in the alley where I am shooting now. In a way, I am documenting the end of that space because every time I go back there, there is more and more light.

MACKLER: “Well-lit” as in over-lit.

RIVERA: Yes, safety-lit. They got rid of all the shadows.

“I DIDN’T MAKE PEOPLE THAT ORDINARILY SOCIETY WOULD HAVE DEEMED AS FREAKY LOOK UNFREAKY. I USUALLY MADE THEM LOOK GOOD.” Performer, Le Bar and Paquita, Le Bar (both 1997).

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