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CONTENTS April/May 2021
46 48 THE GLOW UP A new show at the Tate Modern in London sheds light on Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms series and its rise. 50 THE THREAD BARES ALL Faith Ringgold’s monumental retrospective arrives at the Glenstone in Potomac, Maryland, after traveling the world for the past two years. 52 THE CHANGING WORLD This May, artist James Barnor traces his many lives in a new Serpentine retrospective. 56 THE 12-YEAR-OLD JEWELER Harmony Korine’s daughter, Lefty, makes a name for herself with her beaded-jewelry line. 58 THE SUN SPOT Rhude designer Rhuigi Villaseñor won’t judge what you wear, but he is looking closely. 60 COMING OF AGE For a new collection in her Converse collaboration, MELT WITH ME With three solo shows underway, figurative artist Christina Quarles is longing for the return of physical intimacy.
Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown teams up with artist Pauline Wattandom.
62 I SEE YOU With Black Fashion Fair, Antoine Gregory is highlighting
neglected histories and creating a platform for Black designers.
66
THE STUDIO RUNWAY At Beijing’s X Museum, Jeppe Ugelvig and Poppy Dongxue Wu curate a two-part exhibition on where fashion is made and received.
68
THE TRIFECTA Aureta explores Valentino’s Collezione Milano for a special installation at the Rubell Museum.
70 WELCOME TO WYLDLANDS Doug Meyer’s new sculpture series
transports us to utopia during lockdown.
72
COMMUNITY-MADE Souls Grown Deep Foundation partners with ethical fashion brand Paskho to support artists in Gee’s Bend, Alabama.
74 CALIFORNIA COLOR STORY Los Angeles-based designer Kelly Wearstler reveals a Farrow & Ball paint palette inspired by the Golden State.
Phoebe Bridgers cracks a smile in Loewe at Malibu Fig Ranch. Photo by Daria Kobayashi Ritch. Styling by Tess Herbert. 30 culturedmag.com
CONTENTS April/May 2021
80
LET THERE BE LIGHTS These six emerging lighting designers are making some of the most exciting work today.
84 HEALING SPACES A new wave of architects and designers are
transforming hospital, community center and schoolhouse idioms for the better.
88 IDEAL HOMES Interior designer Brandon Fontenot is keeping the American dream alive in Houston, Texas.
90 ANDREA MARIE BREILING MIXES UP A DREAM COCKTAIL
Ahead of her first New York solo show, the artist shares how spray cans helped her break free.
92 HOW TO DRESS WELL Hollywood costume designer Marci
Rodgers tells stories through clothing and during the lockdown wrote a children’s book about love.
96
Ziwe means business in Alexander McQueen. Photo by Farah Al Qasimi. Styling by Becky Akinyode.
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102
HOT DIGGITY DOG Artist Ivy Haldeman is painting weenies for her forthcoming show in New York.
TOWARD AN EVERYDAY FEELING Phoebe Bridgers surprised everyone this Grammy season, including herself, and her quiet sensibilities are being challenged by her success.
112 YOUNG COLLECTORS 2021 Presenting the “2021 Young Collectors” list, highlighting nine new faces and advocates for the arts. 124 THE ART OF DISCOMFORT With an A24-produced Showtime variety show out in May, Ziwe’s multi-pronged universe moves into center stage. 132 DEPICTING AMERICA, ONE ROLE AT A TIME Actors Darrell Britt-Gibson and Max Minghella speak on what’s new, what’s next and what’s important in Hollywood. 140 THE PORTRAIT ARTIST 2020 Hugo Boss Prize winner Deana Lawson prepares for her photography exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York. 146 THE INTROSPECTIVE LENS Dawoud Bey reflects on his past to bring us histories and narratives that shaped his decades-long career.
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CONTENTS April/May 2021
152 158 STYLE AS A FORM OF HOPE Harlem-born entertainer and street-style icon Kerwin Frost beams star-studded fashion history and charity telethons to our screens. 164 SPEAK, MEMORY Seminal Chinese documentarian Wang Bing finds narrative and meaning in the explication of time. 168 THE DANCING TRIPTYCH Hermès’s artistic director Nadège VanheeCybulski talks us through her global collaboration with choreographers Madeline
WHEN LIFE IS GOING REALLY BAD, BUT YOU’RE TRYING TO ACT LIKE IT’S NOT Performer Alex Tatarsky talks to comedian Meg Stalter while spiraling into the void.
Hollander and Gu Jiani.
176 180 HERTOPIA Meet 10 artists presenting female-centered visions of a utopian future or mythic past. 188 THE DREAM LIFE OF BUAZIZI & ELA Mexican creatives Buazizi and Ela combat heteronormativity and violence with music, fashion and boundary-pushing, bodySCRATCHING AT THE ADOBES Shaw Bowman confronts the history and politics of Santa Fe’s architectural charm.
Max Minghella catches golden hour at Casa Perfect in Los Angeles, California. Clothing by Dior Men. Photo by Ryan Pfluger.
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positive eroticism.
CONTRIBUTORS
RAHEL AIMA
BRIDGET FOLEY
EMMANUEL OLUNKWA
Rahel Aima is a Dubai-based arts writer, editor of online publication BXD: The Postwestern Review and associate editor at Momus. She is currently working on a book of essays that focuses on Enya, terroir and where oil meets water in the Arabian Gulf. For this issue, Rahel writes about filmmaker Wang Bing’s time-dilated cinema of obsolescence. An admirer of the Chinese director, she did her research thoroughly. “I was so intimidated to interview Wang Bing,” she admits, “that I spent weeks beforehand watching his films.”
Bridget Foley is a longtime fashion journalist and critic. She reports on issues across the scope of fashion, with a particular emphasis on the role of the designer. For Cultured, she interviewed Hermès Creative Director Nadège VanheeCybulski about Triptych, the house’s compelling online presentation for Fall 2021 that spanned three continents. “In response to pandemic constraints,” Foley says, “Nadège pulled off a masterpiece.”
New York-based artist, filmmaker and writer Emmanuel Olunkwa is a Master’s candidate in the Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices program at Columbia University’s GSAPP, editor for Pioneer Works’s Broadcast and cofounder and editor of November magazine. His work studies surprising connections across youth culture, fashion, urban landscape and social ecology. In conversation with artist Deana Lawson for this issue, he explores “the strictures of photography (representation), the body and authenticity, with the limits and potentials of Blackness as both a material construction and a material to construct.”
DARIA KOBAYASHI RITCH Photographer
Daria Kobayashi Ritch is a fashion and portrait photographer working between Los Angeles and New York. Encouraged creatively from a young age by two artist parents, in 2018 she was named a “new and emerging photographer to watch” by both W Magazine and Photo District News. The following year, her work was exhibited in the “Icons of Style: A Century of Fashion Photography” show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and then acquired for its permanent collection. Daria merges intimacy with the romanticism of fashion and returns to her hometown of Malibu, California, to capture singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers for this issue’s cover story.
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Writer
Artist
PHOTO BY JOSHUA WEIBLEY (AIMA)
Writer
Borea outdoor collection, design Piero Lissoni. www.bebitalia.com
CONTRIBUTORS
VIVIAN CHUI
MYLES PETTENGILL
CASSANDRA GILLIG
Hong Kong-born, Los Angeles-raised Vivian Chui is an independent writer and associate curator of Brooklyn’s Pioneer Works arts and cultural center. Vivian speaks to Dawoud Bey about his life and decades-long explorations in photography, ahead of new solo exhibition “An American Project”, set to open at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York this spring. “I have been a deep admirer of Dawoud’s poetic images for years now,” she says of the interview for this issue, “so having the opportunity to engage with him is a dream come true.”
Raised between the Mount Airy and Germantown neighborhoods of Philadelphia, Myles Pettengill ultimately landed in Los Angeles to pursue his love of photography. His work has appeared in W and Interview magazines and in association with Netflix. About photographing street-style icon Kerwin Frost for this issue, Myles says, “Though he often (and somehow accurately) introduces his guests as ‘the most interesting person in the world,’ I now know for a fact that Kerwin Frost himself deserves a bid for that title.”
Cassandra Gillig is a Kansas City, Missouri-based writer whose endeavors include coordinating the Institute for Whoopi Goldberg Studies at Stray Cat Film Center, making music as Orlando Gillig/ Lesbians for the End of America and co-translating the book Grenade in Mouth: Some Poems of Miyó Vestrini. For this issue’s cover story, she interviewed singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers. “It was a distinguished honor to chat with someone from my My Chemical Romance-huffing peer class who is guiding hip dads, depressive teens and deeply feeling millennial holdovers (such as myself) toward collective self-reflection in pop bliss,” she says of the conversation. “The future’s a little more possible.”
RIKKI BYRD Writer
An educator, writer and current PhD candidate in African American Studies at Northwestern University, Rikki Byrd’s work focuses on the intersection of Black studies, fashion and contemporary art. In this issue, she interviews Black Fashion Fair founder Antoine Gregory and discusses how he is disrupting various facets of fashion—from e-commerce to history—and his vision for a future where Black creatives past and present finally get recognition for their countless contributions to the industry.
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Photographer
Artist
PHOTO BY SHABEZ JAMAL (BYRD)
Writer
WHITNEY
Julie Mehretu, Of Other Planes of There (S.R.), 2018-19. Ink and acrylic on canvas. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. © Julie Mehretu
JULIE MEHRETU
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CONTRIBUTORS
SIMON WU
DAVID BENJAMIN SHERRY GABBY SHACKNAI Photographer
Writer
Simon Wu is a writer and program coordinator for the Racial Imaginary Institute, whose current work is focused on collaborative art production and research. For this issue, Simon covers “The Endless Garment,” a two-part art and fashion exhibition curated by Jeppe Ugelvig and Poppy Dongxue Wu at Beijing’s X Museum. “I really only scratched the surface of the diverse group that Jeppe and Poppy brought together for their show. It’s an exciting feeling when an exhibition gives you so much, yet also makes you wonder: What else is out there?” he says. “I’m excited to be in dialogue with these art/fashion-hybrid projects and see how it all develops.”
David Benjamin Sherry is an artist who recently relocated to Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his partner Shaw Bowman and their dogs Wizard and Magic. His work revolves around interests in environmentalism, queer identity and alternative analog film processes, and he’s best known for his colorful landscapes focused on the American West. For this issue, David photographs his newly adopted hometown to accompany an essay written by Shaw. “One of the many things I love about Santa Fe is that its architecture is in perfect harmony with its natural surroundings, like no other American city I’ve visited,” he muses. “I find it especially gratifying to see a cityscape seemingly carved right out of the landscape.”
Gabby Shacknai is a New York-based journalist who covers a wide range of culture and lifestyle stories, especially as they intersect with political and social issues. For this issue, Gabby profiled both The Handmaid’s Tale lead Max Minghella and actor Darrell Britt-Gibson, a star of recent Best Picture Oscarnominated film Judas and the Black Messiah. Says Gabby of the experience. “Minghella and Britt-Gibson both possess a certain old-world nostalgia for the magic of film, one that, in the time of streaming and never-ending remakes, is often seen as overly romanticized or unrealistic; but after hearing their undying love for the medium and their optimism for its future, I can’t help but feel they might be onto something.”
Writer
BARRY SCHWABSKY Writer
Barry Schwabsky is a New York-based art critic and poet. His recent books include The Observer Effect: On Contemporary Painting and a monograph on the British painter Gillian Carnegie. For this issue, he basks in the beatific light and color of Andrea Marie Breiling’s new paintings, recently exhibited at Broadway gallery in New York. “These paintings made me feel like I was floating,” he says, “so I wasn’t surprised when Andrea told me she wanted the viewer to levitate!”
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Letter from the Editor LAST SPRING, AS WE CLOSED WHAT WE THOUGHT WOULD BE AN ANOMALOUS ISSUE, WE COULDN’T HAVE ENVISIONED THE REALITY OF THE YEAR TO COME. Now we’ve come full circle, having faced down the immense challenges and growing pains required by our new landscape. As the optimistic horizon of summer comes into view, we harbor a cautious hope about what is possible now that we’ve spent a year brainstorming and laying the groundwork as renewed individuals. Hence, we decided to call the issue “The Start of Something New,” as a way to set our intentions towards a more compassionate and mindful way of being. I am committed to this, as is the entire Cultured team. Being able to spotlight people we admire and respect is a great privilege and one we don’t take for granted. Our supporters—Cultured’s readers, subscribers and advertisers—are integral to this mission, and we are grateful for you every day. It perhaps then comes as no surprise that for our covers we chose to highlight two artists who have chosen to balk at the norms of their industries in favor of setting their own pace. Phoebe Bridgers, who was nominated for a Grammy (four to be exact), has cut a path of quiet resistance to pop’s hook-centric narratives by instead doubling down on her own emotionally charged melodies. A talented set of collaborators — photographer Daria Kobayashi Ritch and stylist Tess
Sarah G. Harrelson Founder and Editor-in-Chief @sarahgharrelson Follow us | @cultured_mag
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Herbert— captured the 26-year-old Los Angeles-born singer at my friend’s farm in Malibu (thank you, Rogan Gregory) one chilly Sunday for our 10-page portfolio. Rising from the other coast, Ziwe landed on our radar during quarantine when her IG Live interview series flooded our feed, but shame on us for not tuning in sooner, because the producer is a walking entertainment renaissance (check out her YouTube series right now for proof). Luckily, Hollywood caught up too in the interim, and now Ziwe is set to launch her Showtime variety show in May. I would be remiss not to mention some other highlights in the issue, such as our powerhouse triptych of Black figurative photographers: Dawoud Bey, Deana Lawson and James Barnor, all of whom have institutional shows this spring. There’s also our annual portfolio of young collectors building tomorrow’s great collections. And, last but not least, there’s our package of designers, which includes our favorite new names in lighting as well as the idiosyncratic Kelly Wearstler. The future is uncertain—but creatives everywhere are rising to meet it, and we are hopeful of what their participation in the mainstream may mean for us and for culture at large.
SUBSCRIBER COVER ZIWE: Photographed by Farah Al Qasimi. Styling by Oluwabukola Becky Akinyode. Hair by Latisha Chong. Makeup by Merrell Hollis. Ziwe wears Burberry top and pant, Versace bra, David Yurman bracelets and earrings. Stylist’s own choker. Nails by Kayo.
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From top left: Sarah Harrelson in the Es Devlin’s, Every Wall is a Door exhibit at the Superblue Miami preview. On the cover: PHOEBE BRIDGERS. Photographed by Daria Kobayashi Ritch. Styling by Tess Herbert. Hair by Nikki Providence. Makeup by Sandy Ganzer. Bridgers wears a Loewe dress, Wolford bra and underwear.
Photo by Flavien Carlod and Baptiste Le Quiniou for advertising purposes only. Editions Zulma. TASCHEN. 1Conditions apply, contact store for details. 2Program available on select items, subject to availability.
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With solo shows open at MCA Chicago and X Museum in Beijing, and another forthcoming at South London Gallery, Christina Quarles’s spring has been a busy one. The figurative artist, whose paintings play that delightful Édouard Vuillard game of landscape or limb, face or façade, is longing for the return of physical intimacy.
O Holy Nite, 2021.
“INTIMACY, FOR ME, IS ANY MOMENT we are fully embodied, any moment when we exist beyond the flattened face we present to the world and can exist in the round in all of our complexity and contradiction. Intimacy is love and sex and friendship and family, but intimacy is also sickness and violence and death. This past year we’ve endured an unbearable lack of physical intimacy in order to protect ourselves from an intimacy we physically could not bear. And, as a result, we have found ourselves in an extended flattened state, one of disembodiment and disorientation. Without these punctuations of intimacy, we have begun to lose our frame of reference, leaving us with a strange relationship to time and the world around us.” —Christina Quarles
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The Glow Up
PRESENTED BY THE ARTIST, OTA FINE ARTS AND VICTORIA MIRO 2015, ACCESSIONED 2019 © YAYOI KUSAMA
Tate Modern’s Yayoi Kusama retrospective in 2012 established the social-media rite of passage of capturing oneself within one of the artist’s experiential dioramas for selfierealization and clout. Now, the institution is giving the good people of London access to two of the 92-year-old Japanese phenomenon’s Infinity Mirror Rooms with a new show that sheds special light on the series and its rise.
Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room-Filled with the Brilliance of Life, (2011/2017).
“THE IMMERSIVE AND SPECTACULAR NATURE of her Infinity Mirror Rooms have no doubt made Yayoi Kusama a global phenomenon. Barriers of language and cultural specificity are also conquered through the abstract character of her installations, creating an experience that can be enjoyed by people from all different backgrounds. The fact that Kusama’s work is borne of her very personal experiences with mental health has also been inspiring for many.” —Tate Modern Assistant Curator Katy Wan
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The Thread Bares All
© 2021 FAITH RINGGOLD / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK. COURTESY OF ACA GALLERIES, NEW YORK. COURTESY: GLENSTONE MUSEUM.
Artist Faith Ringgold’s mammoth touring retrospective, which has trotted around the world over the past two years, arrives this spring to awaken the grounds of the Glenstone in Potomac, Maryland. This leg of the marathon will also include 30 previously unseen works, shedding yet more light on one of the most beloved and relevant American artists around.
(from left) Slave Rape #1: Fear Will Make You Weak (1972); Slave Rape #2: Run You Might Get Away, (1972); Slave Rape #3: Fight to Save Your Life (1972).
“AS SOON AS I BEGAN TO MAKE soft sculptures and quilts, my mother and I got together, because she was a fashion designer. She opened a lot of doors, because at this point, I was combining the art with the sewing, and it was working beautifully.” —Faith Ringgold
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The Changing World
COURTESY AUTOGRAPH ABP
James Barnor’s Serpentine retrospective this May will trace the many lives of the Ghanaian photographer, whose editorials and portraits have fronted seminal publications like South Africa’s Drum, which reported on the Apartheid as a Black-led culture and news source. Barnor’s practice, which became his passport to both war fronts and fashion shoots, emanates a generosity of spirit honed over a lifetime on the move. Collected together for the first time, six decades of imagery allow us all to commune with a living legend.
Funflower Rosemarie, Drum cover girl Rosemarie Thompson, London, 1967.
“AS SOON AS I MET A MODEL, I would think of the location, the dress and the interests of the person, you know, connect with them and work very fast and think, where shall I take this person? I like to show where I am. I like to take the model to the most suitable place, and talk to her and see where she lives, get to know her. I love doing that. These little markers I would include, phone booths and so on—they also show me that I’ve been there before.” —James Barnor 52 culturedmag.com
COM M U NI TY A R T CU LT URE
TH ESI LV ERRO O M.C O M H Y D E PARK C H ICAG O
Oolite Arts + Locust Projects 2021 Talks This spring, Talks will be streamed on facebook.com/ locustprojects/live
Next on Talks April 14, 2021
Rujeko Hockley Assistant Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY RSVP at Talks.Miami Photo credit Jody Rogac
RSVP at Talks.Miami For videos of past Talks with curators from around the country, visit Talks.Miami
Upcoming Talks September 22, 2021
Lauren Haynes
Recently appointed Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Senior Curator, Nasher Museum of Art Duke University
October 13, 2021
Dr. Lynne Cooke
Senior Curator, Special Projects in Modern Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
November 17, 2021
Lars Nittve
Founding Director of Tate Modern in London and former Director at M+ museum for visual culture of West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong Top Curators on Contemporary Art
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THE 12-YEAR-OLD JEWELER Harmony Korine’s daughter, Lefty, makes a name for herself with her beaded-jewelry line.
Crafting is making a comeback. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic siloed us in our homes, unique rug art, handmade kitsch and DIY fashion were all on the rise. Now, it’s only gotten more mainstream. Did we mention that one of the most prevalent designers in the field is only 12 years old? ¶ LEFTY KORINE, daughter of film director Harmony Korine and actor Rachel Korine, launched By Lefty at the beginning of August. Since then, her brilliant Instagram, which showcases her pieces being worn on Gen Zers and Gen Xers alike, has grown from a few hundred to many thousands of followers. ¶ Handmade in Miami, the Zoomer Accessories brand offers one-of-a-kind beaded necklaces, bracelets and earrings evoking the exact kind of childlike freedom and playfulness we’re collectively yearning for these days. She also makes pearl strands, nameplate bracelets, chili peppers scattered over 14-karat hoops, and even mask lanyards for keeping track of that always disappearing PPE. Lefty’s style isn’t just authentic; it’s funny, revitalizing and sparkling with youthful charm. By DA N IEL MODLI N Photo b y LU ISA OPA LESK Y 56 culturedmag.com
CHRISTIAN NYAMPETA April 30–June 21
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FROM TOP: Christian Nyampeta, Sometimes It Was Beautiful, 2018; color 2K video, with sound, 37 min.; commissioned by Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm; © Christian Nyampeta, rendering by Lucie Rebeyrol. Sable Elyse Smith, Coloring Book 18, 2018; silkscreen ink, oil stick, oil pastel, and pastel on paper, 60 3/16 x 49 15/16 in. (152.9 x 126.8 cm); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Young Collectors Council, with additional funds contributed by Astrid Hill and Alexandra Economou 2018.82; © Sable Elyse Smith. Hank Willis Thomas, Bleach and Glow, 1975/2008; chromogenic print, image: 30 1/8 x 21 3/16 in. (76.5 x 53.8 cm), frame: 36 13/16 x 28 x 2 in. (93.5 x 71.1 x 5.1 cm), edition 5/5; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee 2011.12; © Hank Willis Thomas
The Sun Spot Rhude designer Rhuigi Villaseñor won’t judge what you wear, but he is looking closely. BY KAT HERRIMAN PORTRAIT BY STEWART SHINING
WHEN FASHION DESIGNER RHUIGI VILLASEÑOR immigrated to Los Angeles at the age of nine, he stood outside its sun-soaked gates wanting to understand the city’s velvet-stanchion-protected secrets. He’d grown up revering LA’s on-screen personality, watching Hollywood classics with his mother as they trotted the globe together following his father’s architecture practice. After his family’s hasty exit from Manila, Villaseñor acclimated to his new adopted hometown through meticulous observation, taking a special interest in what his peers were listening to, wearing, waiting for and dreaming of. His careful, verging on obsessive, eye for people watching fed the foundation for his brand, Rhude, which Villaseñor launched in 2015 to marshal the full forces of an already-established fan base. In the years prior to Rhude, the designer had found a niche dropping brandless (but sought-after) streetwear capsules to the online community he’d honed through extensive research and networking. His brand name, Rhude, gave formal shape to a concept years in the making. Rhude’s first official collection, “Sugar Land,” named for the small Texas town, featured asymmetrically cut tees inscribed with slogans such as “American Spirit” and burned with cigarettes, almost-too-ripped jeans and fatigue-inflected basics in desert tones: a Spaghetti Western brought up to 2010s speed with hints of The Fast and the Furious. Launched alongside a short, docu-inspired film starring a gun-wielding military recruit, Villaseñor’s debut laid the groundwork for a cinematic alternative to LA’s notoriously anticlimactic fashion sense. Yet, at the time, only sites like Hypebeast were tuned in; Vogue Runway would show up later. In 2021, however, Villaseñor is no longer on the outside looking in. According to a GQ profile from January, he is now effectively the main stage of LA fashion scene with advocates in every nook of its star-studded coasts. Seminal emcee, producer and collector Jay-Z is an outspoken devotee, appearing with the designer courtside in pre-COVID paparazzi snaps. I’ve also noticed that artist Arthur Jafa devotedly wears the designer’s first sunglass collaboration with Thierry Lasry: a set of chunky frames that set the eye like a jeweler might a precious stone—perhaps because I covet them too. On a recent phone call, I asked what all this popularity means for Rhude, a brand that was conceived to foil, and even maybe roil, what had existed before. “We are growing up together, the fans and I,” Villaseñor says of his evolution over the eight past seasons. “I’m pushing them to dress in new
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ways and they are doing the same thing for me.” Youth is an acknowledged, central ingredient in Rhude’s bombastic formula. “The work you do before everyone puts you in a box is always the most radical. The work you do before they know you,” the designer states. “The other part is that I can’t be more experienced than I am and I’m trying to enjoy that. Ride that.” The suspension of judgment seems critical to Villaseñor’s practice, because while he is constantly looking, the designer is reluctant to jump to conclusions. Instead, his objective is to understand the underpinnings of identity as expressed through personal style, or the lack thereof. “I never look at someone’s outfit and think, ‘That is bad,’” he says. “As a designer, my job is to understand why they might have chosen to wear something and to see if there is an opportunity to identify a new common denominator that I can take back into my world and then send something out that is better than what they initially chose.” For LA’s purposefully homogeneous sweatpants-clad masses, Rhude has envisioned an entirely new canon of loungewear-to-the-touch pieces with more formal pretensions for the eyeballs. The vibe is always casual but elevates through A-list materialism—a quarantine emphasis for the designer that one can see play out in Rhude’s SS21 collection via sumptuous production details like double-faced cashmere and paradoxically tailored leather basketball shorts. Coverage of Villaseñor’s meteoric rise has stressed the improbability of the designer’s trajectory into the gilded halls of luxury, and yet it seems only fitting that an American immigrant would have a better handle on the US’s cultural touchstones than those already indoctrinated—and no doubt blinded—by the seeming omnipotence of their own narrow experience. “It’s also my job to have my hand on the pulse,” Villaseñor says simply, adding, “You need to know the rules before you break them.” I imagine him as a kind of doctor, nursing LA fashion back to life alongside other candy stripers like Total Luxury Spa, No Sesso, Come Tees and The Elder Statesman. Progress is slow but steady. With his city on the mend, I ask what comes next in the Rhude saga. I threw out the idea of a feature film. Try the Tom Ford door. The designer laughs. (I’m not the first person to ask.) He is already speaking in embargoes, consulting on a project he can’t name. Then, riffing off my idea, he throws out a joke about a Godfather remake starring Jay-Z. Why not?
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COMING OF AGE
Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown’s ongoing collaboration with Converse, Millie By You, gets a new chapter as the actor incorporates Thai artist Pauline Wattandom into her universe with a coloring-book-ready collection. ¶ WHY WAS IT IMPORTANT TO CREATE A VERSION OF YOUR SHOE SOMEONE COULD COLOR IN? Millie Bobby Brown: I grew up drawing on my sneakers to personalize them and make them my own. That’s what is really cool about Millie By You, too; there are so many variations of sneakers you can customize so it represents you. We approached the graphic in the same way—leaving room for individual creativity! ¶ CONVERSE LIVES IN THE TEEN CANON. WHAT’S IT LIKE TO BECOME A STEWARD OF THAT ICONOGRAPHY? DOES IT RELATE TO YOUR ROLE ON STRANGER THINGS? MBB: I genuinely feel honored to have had the opportunity to partner with Converse. They will forever be classic, but I also appreciate that they are a forward-thinking brand. I don’t know that there is an obvious connection between Converse and Eleven— what I will say is that people often love nostalgia. There is something about both Stranger Things and Converse that gives people that feeling. ¶ WHAT WOULD BE THE DREAM LIFE OF A MBB SHOE? MBB: To step foot in beautiful gardens, to spend time playing with my dogs and to somehow find a way to empower girls from all over the world. That’s possible in a shoe, right? Photo b y CH A R LI E BROW N 60 culturedmag.com
Desert X is a recurring contemporary art exhibition of site-specific works made in response to the California desert. In 2021, an exciting roster of renowned, international artists will explore the histories, realities and possibilities of the Coachella Valley and its communities, creating new dialogues between regional and global desert experiences.
MAR 12 – MAY 16
Presented by With support from Desert X 2021 is funded by its board of directors and an extraordinary group of individuals, foundations and sponsors. Media Partners: artnet, Cultured Magazine, frieze Magazine, Here TV, LocaliQ, part of The Desert Sun, NBC Palm Springs, Open Spaces Magazine and Palm Springs Life Magazine.
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I See You
With Black Fashion Fair, Antoine Gregory is highlighting neglected histories and creating a platform for Black designers. BY R I K K I BY R D
WHEN ASKED ABOUT HIS EARLIEST experiences with fashion, Antoine Gregory recalls the moments he shared with his grandmother, who worked for a furrier in New York City’s Garment District. On the weekends, he would accompany her on visits to thrift stores in the city, near his home on Long Island and in the Hamptons. His grandmother had an eye for fabulous things, and on these shopping trips they would come across luxury designers such as Christian Dior and Yves Saint Laurent. “That was my introduction to fashion,” Gregory tells me. “That was my introduction to luxury. That was my introduction to Black women being stylish.” He talks about his late grandmother with a wide smile, and although we’re speaking via Zoom, I can almost feel the warmth and
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regard he carries for her, and the impact she has had on his career and his commitment to Black people in fashion. Since graduating from the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in 2017, he has blossomed into a multihyphenate, working as a stylist, director and consultant. He’s worked with some of the most coveted contemporary brands, such as Pyer Moss and Telfar, and in September 2020 he launched Black Fashion Fair. It all began with a 2016 Twitter thread, in which he listed Black designers that people should know, and grew into a mission to discover, support and further Black designers. Black Fashion Fair comprises of a first-of-itskind, direct-to-consumer marketplace that sells products by emerging Black fashion
designers such as Theophilio, Nicole Zïzi and Aliétte, plus a stories vertical featuring editorials and films styled by Gregory. Finally, there’s the directory, featuring about 250 Black designers past and present: from Ann Lowe, who designed Jacqueline Kennedy’s 1953 wedding dress, to Anifa Mvuemba, a designer who staged a 3D digital fashion show during the first wave of COVID-19 shelterin-place orders. In 1953, Lowe’s name was omitted from the media coverage of the wedding; in 2020, Mvuemba was featured in Vogue’s September Issue. Gone are the days when the industry continually overlooks Black designers, photographers or stylists with the excuse that they simply don’t know of any. Gregory is making sure that you do.
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In 2016, you posted a thread of Black fashion designers. It was New York Fashion Week and you noticed that there weren’t a lot of Black designers on the schedule. What were the feelings behind you starting the thread? For me it was just how could I use the very small platform I had at the time to bring visibility to Black designers, because I’ve always kind of made it a mission of mine to support Black designers and wear Black designers and to discover them by any means. I went to FIT and I never once learned about a Black designer. And it left a really bad impression on me, where it was like, I’m going into an industry that obviously does not mirror me, that almost doesn’t even see me. How do I exist in this space when even at the educational level we’re not present? Right out of college I got a corporate job and there were no Black people. I even interned at different companies and I would always be the only Black person, even at an interning level. What you’re speaking to as well is how fashion education is shaping the fashion industry. What we actually have to do is break apart this entire system, we have to explode this system to really address how we got to this point. I think fashion, like most industries, is reacting to what’s happening versus being progressive. So, now we see Black people being put into these positions almost just because. No one’s looking for affirmative action in fashion. Obviously, we need diversity, but we also need people in these roles that are qualified and can do the job and are passionate about what they’re doing. We don’t need to just put Black people in roles, so that in two years, you can put another white person in it and no one bats an eye. That doesn’t work. Like you said, we need to fully dismantle the system. So, let’s talk about your vision for how Black Fashion Fair can actually respond, rectify, recover—do a lot of work. You have said, on Twitter, “Black fashion designers are the future of fashion.” I would love to hear you talk about that. I think I’m so inspired by so many of the emerging Black designers like, Anifa [Mvuemba], Mowalola [Ogunlesi] and Kerby [Jean-Raymond], who’ve really ushered in this new generation of Black storytelling through design. So, when I say Black fashion designers are the future, that’s what I mean. Anifa did a 3D show during quarantine; when Prada did a similar thing, she was completely overlooked. She was the first one to do this in this type of environment, and to have her completely erased from that is the point of Black Fashion Fair. I wanted Black Fashion
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Fair to combat that happening to our stories and our people. I think Black Fashion Fair can be an institution like CFDA, like Vogue, like the British Fashion Council, because I’m doing this for the main purpose of documenting and preserving our history as it’s happening. I think that’s the greatest part about it. How many times do you want to reference something that’s so clearly Black but you cannot find where it came from? How many times was I trying to do an editorial, make mood boards, and I wanted to reference Black editorials, but they did not exist? They did not exist in a place that I could find them. So, what I’m trying to do is build that database, so when you want to reference a Black editorial or Black designers, here’s so much of it and you can take whatever you want, and it’s free.
specifically for Black Fashion Fair?” And just like that, he did it. Just to have people like Ahmad Barber and Donté Maurice, who were the first Black photographers to shoot a cover of InStyle, to shoot a cover of Town & Country, to shoot our first fashion story. That’s important because not only am I giving visibility to these photographers, they’re giving it back to me, too. We launched the fashion fair portion, where we sell only Black designers: all that money goes back to Black designers. I think giving people direct access to these designers was super important because you can go into a Bergdorf, you can go into a Saks and you won’t find Black designers. You may find one or two. I put, I think, 21 Black designers together. If I was able to do that, Saks should be able to do that, Nordstrom
Can you talk about the importance of community to you in this project? I would not have been able to do Black Fashion Fair in the way that I did without the community of my peers, without being able to say, “Kerby, I need this collection from you.” I remember calling Jason [Rembert] and I said, “Jason, I’m doing this thing. It’s really important to me. Do you mind designing a product
should be able to do that. So, when you walk into those stores and you don’t see Black designers, it’s a choice that someone made not to carry Black designers because they are clearly available, they have the product, and I sold a lot of it, so I know that people are buying it. It’s necessary work. And, you just answered my next question about the fair side of it. What’s been your selection process for the designers
Two images from the first feature published to Black Fashion Fair featuring garments by Pyer Moss. Both images and portrait of Antoine Gregory on previous page by Ahmad Barber and Donté Maurice of AB+DM.
that you’re choosing for that side of the site? Well, I wanted to choose designers that had really great stories, and not just everyone who had a ton of followers. It was about having a diverse group of Black designers. Nicole Zïzi does streetwear, but it’s recycled. She makes a beautiful denim jacket out of recycled plastics from Honduras and Haiti. She’s a Haitian designer. That is a beautiful story. Jason Rembert’s brand Aliétte is heavily inspired by his mother and grandmother. That’s important to me. Pyer Moss, Fe Noel. Just like these beautiful Black stories that they tell through their clothes, it was super important to me to be able to put them all in one space and give people access. And people can learn about their work? Exactly. So even if you wanted to shop a designer, but you didn’t see a product that you liked, you can still go to the directory, go to their website and purchase from them directly.
It’s not just about me having product to sell you, because, again, the designers are getting majority of the profits. Because of COVID and because of the climate that we’re in right now, a lot of brands are shifting to direct-to-consumer models. Historically, because Black designers have been left out of retail, they have always sold direct-to-consumer. So, here the industry is playing catch-up to something Black people have always been forced to do. Because of your interest in fashion history, what’re some of your favorite memories? André Leon Talley, I think he’s brilliant. I remember being in class, like, “Oh, I want to talk about André Leon Talley,” and no one knew what I was talking about. Everybody knew like Rachel Zoe. I think Pyer Moss’s spring 2020 show at Kings Theatre—that was a show that I immediately had a reaction to. It was beautiful to just see Black music and Black people and a
Black choir. Reading Robin Givhan’s book about the Battle of Versailles. Christopher John Rogers, his last show [Fall 2020] was beautiful, brilliant. What’s next for you and what’s next for Black Fashion Fair? We’re working on our next fashion story, which will be an editorial and a short film. As Black Fashion Fair continues to advocate for greater access and visibility, these stories will document and preserve Black fashion and style. We’ll also be launching a designer capsule collection to highlight the designer’s story. Our first capsule is with designer Edvin Thompson of Theophilio. Our next Fashion Fair will take place this fall. I want to do an exhibit. I’m really excited about that. I’ve been having an idea to do this very specific exhibit for a long time, so I’m just hoping to find funding and grants and figuring that whole process out because it’s very difficult—I’ve put all of my savings into this project.
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THE STUDIO RUNWAY
At Beijing’s X Museum, Jeppe Ugelvig and Poppy Dongxue Wu curate the first part of their two-part exhibition “Endless Garment,” which brings together a group of artists, photographers, labels and fashion designers from Asia and its diaspora to question where fashion is made and where it is received. Here are a few of our favorite participants. BY SIMON WU
NZTT Sewing Co-op “SEWING IS AN OUTLET,” explains NZTT Sewing Co-op in a recent Instagram post. “You can give it a lot of meaning, or it can be meaningless. When sewing, the memory fragments will pop out of your mind. We break free from complicated situations, talk to each other during the sewing process, and broaden each other’s experiences.” Guangzhou-based NZTT hosts weekly open sewing days where local friends, mothers and children are invited to use the machines, watch movies, hang out and chat. A sampling of their recent sewing experiments include: adorable fluffy poufs called “companion dolls,” lacy umbrellas with ribbons and streamers and green fluffy penises, capes with cartoon faces and picnic blankets with pillows and smiles. This playful, handcrafted quality carries over to their posters, which merge this sensibility with something more digital, stitching together colorful gradients, stuffed teddy bears, cartoon stickers and bubbly letters. NZTT wouldn’t intentionally call their practice anything so wooden as “art” or “relational aesthetics,” but seem to be motivated rather by community and connection. In their “intimate forums,” they bring together mothers and families and children to shoot music videos, demos for songs, and DJ sets, with event titles like “Guide for Girls And Boys’ Families Transforming,” “Housewives Also Need Social Status,” “Why Learn to Be a Scum” and “Girls’ Guide to Transforming.” For their engagement at the X Museum, they have extended this social project by staging a collective sewing exercise focused on exploring alternative family structures. “There are many types of intimate relationships,” they write on their callout for the event. “When does the boundary of the relationship appear? When will it disappear? Do I need to have a border?” In the project, they write, draw, and sew keywords on to a big cloth, cut those sections out, discuss them and exchange them with the other members, and sew them into a big book. 66 culturedmag.com
Carl Jan Cruz “Function over form” is for Carl Jan Cruz the core sensibility of Filipino design. “You have to think about whether a jacket suits the climate, before thinking about the different ways it could be worn; whether a trenchcoat is light enough to wear in the heat, before you think about obliterating the seams.” For this London College of Fashion graduate and alumnus of Phoebe Philo-era Céline, practicality, rooted in a particular climate and place, is the seed of creativity. He develops all of his clothing, from fabrics to final pieces, in his Manila atelier. For his most recent collection, he created clothes based on pambahay, or Filipino home clothes. Cruz has said that the brand began as a visual autobiography, drawing from a range of references he encountered growing up between Manila and London. For example, a striped shirt called “Bowlo in Pique” might have been inspired by a simple striped T-shirt that he grew up wearing on his own in the tropics: pique fabric is common in the Philippines for its lightweight breathability. Or it might recall a memory of wearing a striped shirt with a jumper and a pair of jeans in the UK. In his collections, he often likes to blend and mess ideas of the “tropical” and “high fashion.” While CJC’s ambitions are more commercial than others in the exhibition, collaboration and experimentation are still integral elements of the brand. Indeed, a section on his website called “collaborators” lists friends and artists he often works with, and another section called “CJC cinema” presents his garments in collaborative fashion films. For the Fall 2019 collection, for example, he worked with director Simon Te, who made a series of films inspired by the games they used to play as children, like luksong tinik, jolen, and tumbang preso. In the film for his Fall 2020 collection, again shot with Te, models laze around in a room covered in brown paper. They wear oversized denim tunics with asymmetrical cuts and exposed seams, and sheer Chinese-collar shirts and sandals, recalling both piles of fashion refuse as well as local street fashion.
Baby Reni To be “jetlegged,” Irene Ha, the artist behind the project Baby Reni, says, is to have just arrived in one place, but to have your mind elsewhere. It’s a phrase she uses to describe a sense of rootlessness from her experience as a Vietnamese person growing up in the Netherlands, and also the name of her precocious undergraduate thesis at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. Like many of the participants in “Endless Garment,” Ha is a fashion designer who finds freedom in the economies and languages of art (others, like CFGNY, are artists who find solace in the casualness of fashion economies; the grass is always greener). Jetlegged (2020) is an installation of clothing elements like shark-fin pants and long stretchy dresses and leotards in surfer colors: lime green and aquamarine and egg yellow. Glittery stickers with phrases like “Cute Shit Only” and “Felt Cute Might Drop Some Scarves Later” decorate the metal armature. Ha calls the clothing in Jetlegged “an archive” inspired by her grandmother’s bright, “almost RGB-colored” dresses, which she made to explore the relationship between this heritage and her life online. A self-described “bedroom brand,” Baby Reni uses collaboration and connection as a way to explore her questions about identity. Selling things on the website is an opportunity to have a conversation, a long text thread. An amazing towel on her website recreates a chain-text from her Notes app with the title “I want to be a community artist.” A section titled “community” on her website serves as an archive of every screenshot, IG story, text message and Snapchat of the clothes that her buyers and friends wear. Her clothes often recreate the texture of the Internet quite literally, in the form of a distorted image or a Note or a screenshot, which are printed directly onto clothing. Her models end up looking like walking personifications of that rippling, ever-changing surface. Another connotation of the phrase “jetlegged” is its similarity to the word “bootleg,” an operation that Ha explores in her production methods. Baby Reni is most known for the merch that she sells, her scarves and hats, which are drawn from fabrics from designers in Hong Kong, but produced in the Netherlands. With this, she questions why fast fashion produced the other way around (designed in the West, produced in the East) seems to have less value. Through bootlegging, she seeks to find authenticity. This sort of placelessness, or inversion, is also characteristic of many of the other practices in the show, which seek to interrogate the relationship between the means of production and the sites those products are made to “mean” or represent. culturedmag.com 67
THE TRIFECTA
Aureta explores Valentino’s Collezione Milano for a special installation at the Rubell Museum.
In a world of influencer overload Aureta Thomollari’s authentic content stands out as the real deal. The Albanian-born brand consultant grew up in Washington, D.C. and spent her youth visiting the many Smithsonian museums that line the National Mall. It was during those formative years that she discovered her love of art. Today, Aureta shares her passion for culture with over half a million followers on Instagram. IRL she’s every bit as lovely and beautiful as on social media—if not more so—with an undeniable charm and grace. At the Valentino Collezione Milano installation at Miami’s Rubell Museum, she explored how creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli is reigniting the iconic fashion house. ¶ Her own art collection features dozens of contemporary and late career artists who inspire her daily, from Nina Chanel Abney to Ray Howlett. When choosing new works, Aureta trusts her instincts. “You should buy something you truly love that speaks to you,” she advises. Reflecting on womanhood and femininity, she recognizes the importance of being kind and confident, and staying true to yourself. “I think people, especially women, think that the more powerful you want to become, the more tough you have to be, but I don’t think that’s the truth,” she Aureta stands inside Valentino’s says. “Kindness and gratitude installation at the Rubell Museum take you far.” By FOL A SA DE OLOGU N DU DU Photo b y PA BLO COSTA NZO 68 culturedmag.com
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WELCOME TO WYLDLANDS
What does utopia look like during lockdown? Doug Meyer’s new sculpture series transports us to a series of isolation bunkers in his imaginary recreation park “Wyldlands.” BY CLAIRE VOON SELF-PORTRAIT BY DOUG MEYER
DOUG MEYER SPENT MUCH OF 2020 thinking about the distant future. Last spring, cooped up in his apartment in Chelsea, he began producing a series of sculptures that tells the surreal story of an America that could be. At the time, New York City was entering a total lockdown. Meyer, navigating a new normal of solitude, gradually constructed his own community in miniature, creating scaled-down buildings with fanciful anatomies enhanced by jazzy color palettes. He called them “isolation bunkers.” “I was kind of lost, in a way, and I just started making one of these bunkers and speculating what would be happening in five, 10, 15 years,” Meyer says. “I didn’t really know what it was going to lead to. But it grew as the pandemic grew.” Using a mishmash of materials such as plexiglass, plaster, Lucite, and honeycomb board, he eventually dreamt up and realized 15 bunkers. They have distinct, beguiling architectures, from a bird-shaped shelter to a cool-hued Seussian structure on stilts with a fun-house interior of mirrors and crystals. Currently on view at Daniel Cooney Fine Art, the sculptures invite close observation: Visitors can peer through tiny windows and take in the otherworldly interiors, some of which are occupied by human figures. Much like Zillow surfing, cottagecore and Bridgerton, the futuristic bunkers feed a common desire for escapism that has grown over our year of collective isolation. It takes little time to get lost in Meyer’s world. The series, titled “Wyldlands,” is more than a collection of sculptures; it encompasses an elaborate narrative of speculative fiction. Meyer, collaborating with his husband, has authored a future in which these bunkers exist: The year is 2037, and society continues to suffer from another global pandemic, this one more transmissible, more deadly and more divisive. In the United States, several states have seceded to form “the WestAmerica Confederation,” a place with universal healthcare, its own robust economy, and strict border controls. It is essentially, for better or for worse, a liberal bubble—a massive pod for the like-minded. Within this confederation lies Wyldlands, a recreational park that has colonized the Sonoran Desert and provides isolation bunkers as sites of amusement. Meyer’s story, chronicled in the exhibition catalog in seven brisk
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chapters, describes it as a playground built in light of the “ongoing consumer confinement and boredom of much of the American population.” Run by a private-equity firm, Wyldlands is a place for elites to indulge without bounds; it offers access to a vineyard, a perfumery, a unique film festival and, of course, those fabulous bunkers. Unapologetically extravagant, Meyer’s sculptures reflect and revel in this unfiltered pleasure. Only at Wyldlands might someone find a building shaped like a plump, two-faced goldfish, its hollow belly framing a circular picture window—perfect for looking out and looking in. Despite all this visual folly, the concept of a utopian oasis in a dystopian world is, for Meyer, not far-fetched. “When you start looking at the reality, I think this is a story that could happen,” he says. “The way this world and this country is going, I’m ready to move to WestAmerica. For me, it’s kind of a hopeful thing.” Having the option to escape is, of course, a privilege. While “Wyldlands” represents one ideal commune, it also raises critical questions: For whom is this pleasure site built, and who has the resources to access it? As we, in 2021, cautiously anticipate less isolated futures, Meyer’s quixotic visions prompt us to consider building new worlds that are equitable as well as euphoric.
Nalgona 10 by Chris Wolston (edition of 8)
COMMUNITY MADE
BY JACOBA URIST
THE CONFLUENCE OF COVID AND the murder of George Floyd by the police upended everything last summer. “I started seeing food lines in America like I had never seen them before, and hearing how many kids were going hungry,” recalls fashion industry veteran Patrick Robinson, who, after creative directorships at Perry Ellis and Paco Rabanne and four years as Gap’s lead designer, founded the activewear line Paskho in 2013 with a core ethical mission. “I built an e-commerce business around a responsible conversation about the environment, but after George Floyd something broke in me, being a Black man,” he tells me over Zoom from his home in Hudson, New York. “Something just exploded in my life and my career. Seeing all these people who were unemployed, I felt just talking about the environment was like talking out of both sides of my mouth.” Sustainability and social equity, he explains, are two sides of the same coin. By July, Robinson had forged Community-Made, a new way of making garments on demand that reduces waste and the carbon footprint of factories and retail stores, while helping to address historic disparities and barriers to access. His model—which evokes an earlier time of home artisanry—gathers seamstresses, technicians, and tailors from underserved communities into localized production pods, and pays them a fair living wage, whether in New York City—Paskho’s first hub spans studios and apartments from the Theater District to the Bronx—the Rust Belt, or the rural South. This spring, Souls Grown Deep—a nonprofit whose mission is to bring Black artists of the South into the canon of American art history—made a $600,000 impact investment in Paskho for the next Community-Made pod in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, home to quiltmakers who’ve been transforming recycled remnants into eye-popping geometric and minimalist artworks for generations. This financing is but one of Souls Grown Deep’s ongoing efforts to celebrate and support the area’s artists. Originally named for a slaveholder, Joseph Gee, whose plantation inhabited a bend in the Alabama River, the isolated hamlet still has many unpaved roads and lacks a post office. “It has no guarantee of
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modern plumbing or electricity. People grow their own food and have to make a 45-minute trip to the grocery store,” says Souls Grown Deep president Maxwell Anderson. “And yet, for over a 100 years, they’ve been making incredible objects that were utilitarian at first, for putting on beds and keeping kids warm, but are now hanging on the walls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.” While the average annual income in Gee’s Bend stagnates around $12,000, Community-Made lets skilled makers self-manage their schedules and output, receiving up to three times the local minimum wage. “Patrick is looking to quilters not simply as workers,” says Anderson, “but also as people who can add creative ideas to his own thinking about clothing design, and about the tradition of African American cultural heritage.” In fact, Paskho’s partnership with Souls Grown Deep during the pandemic seems all the more kismet: “I always thought of Gee’s Bend as these mystical, made-up people because their work is so powerful,” Robinson says, recounting his initial phone call about the project with Anderson last summer. “I said, ‘Max, I’m not playing.’ The Gee’s Bend book is actually on my coffee table. It’s been one of the books I looked at through Covid, because it relaxes me to see such beautiful craftsmanship and art.”
PATRICK ROBINSON, FOUNDER OF PASKHO, WEARING COMMUNITY-MADE™ CLOTHING. IMAGE COURTESY OF PASKHO.
Souls Grown Deep Foundation partners with ethical fashion brand Paskho in Gee’s Bend, Alabama—home of unsung artists for over a century
PHOTO CREDIT: LATHEM GORDON
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California
Color Story
Designer Kelly Wearstler on location at her forthcoming hotel project, the Downtown L.A. Proper, where the walls are painted in faded terracotta from her new palette for Farrow & Ball. She wears a Marine Serre set, Nour Hammour dress and jacket, Natia X Lako earrings, 1017 ALYX 9SM boots, an Ariana Boussard-Reifel ring, Sterling King helmet rings and vintage bracelets and necklaces.
By Elizabeth Fazzare Photography by Joyce Park Los Angeles-based designer Kelly Wearstler reveals a Farrow & Ball paint palette inspired by the urban and natural beauty of the Golden State.
“CALIFORNIA IS SUCH A FORCE,” says designer Kelly Wearstler—and its creatives certainly are, too. In March, the Los Angelesbased talent, whose style is defined by a love for color, pattern, natural materials and textures, became the first outside designer to create a new palette of paint colors for Farrow & Ball in its 75 years of business. The unique partnership should perhaps come as no surprise: Wearstler notes that she has been using paints by the Dorset, England-based company in her projects for more than two decades. With this collection, however, what she did bestow on the brand’s highly sustainable, highly curated range of hues is a large dose of California cool. Wearstler’s California Collection presents eight colors inspired directly by the Golden State’s urban and natural landscapes. “I thought it would be a great starting point,” says the designer, who often takes visual cues from the heritage architecture and environment in the Southern California setting where she lives. “I looked at terracotta pots, the Pacific Ocean and the salt on its beaches. I gathered driftwood and palm fronds,” she explains of the design process for the paints. In the end, the reference materials proved fruitful: the palette includes neutrals like salt—“like the beautiful white chalking on the sands of Malibu”—tar and sand that complement bolder peers like the zesty citrona or faded terracotta. “In design, color is so powerful because
it’s all part of a story,” explains Wearstler, who originally hails from South Carolina, but whose name has since become synonymous with West Coast contemporary decorating. After founding her interior-design firm in California in the 1990s, her rise to fame was prompted by the design of several boutique hotels developed by her partner Brad Korzen, high-end homes and projects for celebrities like Gwen Stefani and Cameron Diaz. Her look is layered and textured, and yes, full of color. “Just like clothing, color says something about individual style. We let the client dictate. It really tells the story of the person or the brand and it evokes emotion,” she says. If anyone knows style, it’s Wearstler, who is recognized, too, for her bold yet relaxed fashion sense. In the same way that the designer achieves a lived-in, carefree mix in her outfits, documented daily on her well-curated Instagram page alongside her products, partnerships and in-progress work, she achieves a layered and laid-back look for clients at home and for visitors at hospitality spaces she’s designed. Think Tony Duquette-inspired with a touch of Old Hollywood, a dose of beach vibes and a collector’s eye for both vintage and contemporary furniture. Though she tends toward a bold statement— painted monochrome rooms including door jambs, moldings and baseboards are a favorite — divine design is really in the details for Wearstler: in the materials, accessories and the juxtaposition of pieces against one another.
Since the pandemic began, with many more people now working and spending more time in their homes, she has seen tastes tend towards her own: bright, vibrant and colorful. “Design is cyclical, especially with social media, because it dictates what the trends are,” she notes. “There has been a lot of neutrality in design in the past three years. Now, people really want color. They want a different environment; they really want to have each room tell a story.” At current projects like the Proper Hotels in Santa Monica and Downtown LA, color certainly plays a role. In the latter, set to open on June 1st in a fully renovated 1920s Renaissance Revival building that formerly was a private club for celebrity members like filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille, four suites are painted in shades from Wearstler’s new Farrow & Ball collection, and faded terracotta is used throughout as a neutral. Don’t consider a sunbaked light orange a neutral tone? When clients feel color-shy, the designer knows just the trick: she heads to their closet and together they pull out the colors the client wears most. “There is such a correlation between fashion and interior design. Even with metal color, clients that wear a lot of gold tend to like bronzes and so on,” she explains. In general, she believes the bright embrace is here to stay. As vaccines roll out and the pandemic seems to have reached its final peak in the United States, “I think there is so much optimism right now,” says Wearstler. “Color plays into that.”
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Wearstler wears a Born To Roam hat and Jacquemus blazer. Make up by Maria Vargas Hair by Leland Ferrell Styled by Monica Rose Style assistant Katie Peare
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Collecting Design: The Legends Part 2
Mathias Bengtsson, Growth Table Walnut, 2014, Solid walnut; photo: Martin Scott Jupp. © Galerie Maria Wettergren; Josef Hoffmann, Hanging Lamp Model M 997, Prototype Made for the Palais Stoclet, 1908; Necklace and Rings, by Ettore Sottsass, courtesy Didier Ltd.; Bouroullec brothers, ’Sofa’ © Paul Tahon / R&E Bouroullec - Courtesy Galerie Kreo; Fabio De Sanctis and Ugo Sterpini, Officina Undici, Cielo, Mare, Terra Buffet, 1964, walnut, metal, and two Fiat doors of the 600 prima series, from the collection of Dennis Freedman.
Collecting modern and contemporary design has become one of the most dynamic, influential, and inspiring territories in the international marketplace. For the first time, the program will be virtual, accessible to anyone across the globe. In celebration of this occasion, Dr. Daniella Ohad will explore several major areas of the collectible design world: with Didier Haspeslagh of Didier Ltd on Art Jewelry by Architects and Artists; with Yves Macaux on Wiener Werkstätte; with Didier Krzentowski of Galerie Kreo on Contemporary Design; with Loic Le Gaillard of Carpenters Workshop Gallery on Contemporary Design; with Jacques Barsac on Charlotte Perriand; with Mathias Bengtsson on Digital Design; with Dennis Freedman on Italian Radical Design; with Simon Andrews on the market of 20th-century Design; with Simon de-Pury on Taste and Influence. NEW CONTENT FULL PROGRAM – TEN SESSIONS FEBRUARY 9, 16, 23 MARCH 2, 9, 16, 23 APRIL 6, 13, 20 $500 FOR THE PROGRAM TUESDAY AFTERNOONS 3:30-5:00 PM EST TO REGISTER EMAIL: MFICHTNER@AIANY.ORG AIANY.ORG/COLLECTINGDESIGN2021
DIDIER HASPESLAGH
DIDIER KRZENTOWSKI
LOÏC LE GAILLARD
YVES MACAUX
DANIELLA OHAD
MATHIAS BENGTSSON
JACQUES BARSAC
SIMON ANDREWS
SIMON DE PURY
DENNIS FREEDMAN
Let There Elisa Uberti BY REBECCA AARON
Elisa Uberti is a French designer whose forte is mixing lights with ceramics. Her signature lamps are sculptures first and functional lighting pieces second. Uberti’s practice focuses on the entire form of a piece, whether that be one of her ceramic lamps or one of the never-before-seen chairs she plans on firing soon. A cardinal inspiration for Uberti is 20th-century sculptor André Borderie and his designs of the fifties and sixties. She shapes her vision while keeping the organic architecture of the seventies in mind as well. These influences are on full display with her household lighting fixtures that are meant to feel like small illuminating dwellings in their own right. These “small protective houses” are made of white, red and black chamotte, cooked at different temperatures depending on Uberti’s desired color. They not only intimately brighten rooms, but highlight the distinctly organic and soft nature of ceramic. Uberti began sculpting when she was expecting her second child. Being on the brink of motherhood unmistakably informed the rounder and more “heartwarming” shapes reflected in her pieces. This was just the initial flame that ignited Uberti’s passion for rounded edges in organic architecture, exploring the idea of comfort in a round universe, similar to the “womb of the mother.” Currently, her lamps are exhibited at the Galerie Philia in Walker Tower in New York City and she has an exclusive lamp in preparation for Collectible in Brussels in May. She is also gearing up for a solo show at the end of the year in Antwerp in the am designs gallery. While Uberti has become renowned for her organic, contemporary lighting fixtures, designs with new shapes and new household furnishings are ready to bake.
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COURTESY OF ELISA UBERTI.
Sculptor Elisa Uberti in her studio at Ateliers Jouret, an industrial outpost home to more than 40 artists and craftspeople in Roubaix, France.
Be Lights This creative class of six emerging lighting designers is making some of the most exciting work today.
Bennet Schlesinger in his LA studio with lamps from his new series.
Bennet Schlesinger
COURTESY OF BENNET SCHLESINGER.
BY ELIZABETH FAZZARE
“What I love about ceramics is that the most loud experience of working with clay is having your hands in the mud,” explains Los Angeles-based artist Bennet Schlesinger of his practice, which toes the line between sculpture and industrial design. “It’s earth, air and light and not pushing too hard on what’s naturally taking place.” After he got his start three years ago in artworks made of mixed media, metal and stone, the natural simplicity of ceramics and the ability to make a beautiful object that functions turned the art maker into a lighting designer. Now, using just bamboo, paper and ceramic, Schlesinger has released a new series of table lamps whose forms marry the old and new of his artistic experiments. Emitting an expressively framed soft glow and grounded by an organic base, these light sculptures don’t distinguish between the two object categories. For Schlesinger, the mix is his sweet spot. “I have a lot of years of experience making artwork so that’s my voice and my love and it shows through in the production of these works,” he explains. “They’re very sculptural but the fact that they have an inherent use is the main drive for me to make them.” Using a slab-building technique and a glazing method that emulates patina, the ceramic elements can take the artist three to four months to complete. The layered paper shades are often framed one way and end up another: embracing “mistakes or failures” is something the artist enjoys; it’s all process, he says, and leads to new discoveries. At the moment, he is focused on expanding his repertoire to pendants, chandeliers and floor lamps. As always, function is on his mind when experimenting, something that reinforces his joy in the craft of making. After all, he says, using clay is “a real childlike experience. It’s just play.”
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Andy Harman Andy Harman is in fact not a lighting designer; he is a set designer, sculptor and photographer who happens to work with lights. Harman takes the role that lighting and lights play in conventional photography and flips it on its head. Lights are usually offset and used to set a photograph’s environment; Harman, on the other hand, has them in frame, on set, as part of the photograph’s environment. Light fixtures of all shapes and sizes are found scattered on set when Harman is at the helm, but they are not the only objects Harman experiments with. He rediscovers everyday objects we take for granted such as rubber bands and 3M hooks. These banal objects, as he calls them, are the focus of some of his sculptures seen in galleries or in his studio. Harman told me he loves a cliché: when there is no light bulb going off for him, he will literally take one and add it to his project at hand to spark inspiration. His work was most recently displayed at R & Company’s pop-up gallery in Miami, where his Twist Tie lights blurred the barrier between art and home furnishings. Currently, Harman is experimenting with casting his own life-size rubber bands. He plans on incorporating LED lights into them and hopes to create an “ethereal, yet lumpy, and ugly sculptural” display. After having worked in the film and photograph industry for so long, Harman has mastered the art of trusting his own instincts, no matter how bizarre they may be.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY VINCENT DILIO
BY REBECCA AARON
Brooklyn-based designer Andy Harman in the studio with his velvet Cheetos sculptures.
Trueing
Designers Aiden Bowman (left) and Josh Metersky of Trueing.
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“Like a goldfish, the work grew to fit the size of the studio we had,” says Josh Metersky of Trueing, the lighting-design practice he started with his partner Aiden Bowman five years ago in the bedroom of their Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn apartment. Now based in a new Long Island City, Queens, workshop since September, their hip, slick chandeliers, floor and table lamps, sconces and pendants are imbued with a sense of fun, yet built from a highly engineered, scientific base. Above all, they reveal a celebration of the full possibilities of glass. “There is an engineered, highly edited quality to the pieces that we make,” explains Bowman, and it’s certainly a byproduct of its makers’ backgrounds. He is an architect alumnus of Bjarke Ingels Group, while mechanical engineer Metersky worked with New York lighting expert Bec Brittain. Glass appeals to the creative pair for its qualities that lend themselves to lighting, but, also, for its challenges and array of possibilities. Though “glass presents the largest, most complex engineering problems to solve,” says Bowman, experimentation and precision is the space where they thrive, with an appreciation for tradition but a penchant for the modern: scientific glass, dichroic glass and the like. Their Cerine collection uses hand-bent tubes linked as a chain to levitate dome pendants while a recent collaboration with whimsical Japanese glass artist Baku Takahashi sees his hand-sculpted polychromatic glass bits extending from the borosilicate arms of one of Trueing’s Elma chandeliers. This year, with a few new collections in the works, the duo is currently exploring new materials other than glass, like plaster and stone, and extending its design language. “We’re working on making the glass a bit more natural, to soften the curves so they feel more organic,” says Metersky of the exciting expansion of their practice. “Glass is full of possibilities.”
PHOTOGRAPHY BY MICHELLE HUYNH..
BY ELIZABETH FAZZARE
Sam Harvey
PHOTOGRAPHY BY ANDREW DENARO. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.
BY ELIZABETH FAZZARE
Artist Sam Harvey in his studio near Aspen, Colorado.
Last year, at his home and studio just a few miles into the countryside surrounding Aspen, Colorado, artist Sam Harvey first read the 1947 children’s book Goodnight Moon. Its poetic words by Margaret Wise Brown prompted his entrance into the practice of making lights. Harvey has worked with clay since he attended high school at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts and found his passion for ceramics while in college, under the mentorship of a fellow ceramist, the late Betty Woodman. Now, in addition to being a practicing artist, he runs Harvey Preston Gallery in Aspen to support the work of like-minded friends in the ceramics world. Harvey’s own work is considered and intimate; it displays the hand (and fingerprints, for that matter) of its maker, hewn from the artist’s pinching and coiling method. Translated to lighting, this produces sculptural, textural volumes, not unlike the vases and dimensional objets d’art he’s known for. For the “Goodnight House” show on through May 27th at Fort Makers gallery in New York, Harvey has designed five ceramic lamps inspired by the gourd-like table light found in Goodnight Moon’s illustrations by Clement Hurd. “I love the metaphor of light,” says Harvey of his first venture into lighting design. “How do you structure something that contains what makes things visible? I’m just fascinated with making housing for light or a platform to illuminate.” Although the exhibition pieces were a highly specific commission, they prompted a new area of fascination in the artist; more lighting designs are in the works, he assures us. Experimentation is just in his nature. “The thing about being an artist that I really love is the flexibility,” he explains. “The word ‘artist’ gives me room to do whatever the hell I want.”
Léa Mestres
COURTESY OF LÉA MESTRES.
BY REBECCA AARON
Léa Mestres’s work began in lighting not because of a light’s functionality but because she found herself obsessed with the various geometries lamps can have. Lighting and lamps are less the subject of Mestres’s work and more so the canvas on which she works. Lamps are her ideal canvas as they are objects that integrate themselves really into any space. Her workflow flourishes in an environment full of distractions rather than one that is distraction-free. Movies are on and music is blasting when Mestres sits down to sketch. This rather unconventional approach ensures that her instincts take the wheel and that inhibitions are pushed to the wayside. At the core of Mestres’s signature Surrealist sculptures is foam, an easily shapable material to work freely with. For Mestres, foam is a liberating medium that perfectly parallels her workflow. The foam bases are covered in her trademark mixture that she is constantly asked about, but vows never to reveal; she did let me know this proprietary concrete-plaster blend contains fiber and sand to achieve her signature texture. Mestres’s latest exhibition “I’m a living room” was on display at Galerie Scène Ouverte in Paris, and in May you’ll be able to find her work at Collectible in Brussels. For fun, Mestres and four other artists founded the “The Pottery Yacht Club”, which is set to have a freestyle ceramics exhibition this year as well. Right now Mestres is straying from the soft nature of foam and sculpting stools out of solid marble, which we hope to see on display very soon.
Lighting designer and sculptor Léa Mestres at POUSH, her Paris-based studio.
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A new wave of designers and architects are rethinking hospitals, community centers and schoolhouses, and how they can heal us. Here’s how The Black School, A+A+A and Studio Elsewhere are building cities that comfort and care.
IN THE MIDDLE AGES, hospitals provided shelter for pilgrims and the poor, and soon evolved into medical treatment centers for the military. Today, the United States has more than 6,000 hospitals to care for the sick and injured. There are 18 million healthcare workers, and women represent almost 80% of the workforce. Caring for society is a daunting enterprise. Architecture and design play a fundamental role in the success of a hospital. The nonprofit MASS Design Group leads a movement rethinking these spaces as community-centric structures with healing built into their core. Now, a younger generation of designers is focusing on underserved groups and how to design spaces that are beneficial for mental health and wellbeing. Studio Elsewhere, A+A+A, and The Black School are alumni of NEW INC, the New Museum’s cultural incubator located in New York City. The community embraces technology as a creative medium that is expansive, pliable, and can be tuned to bring innovation first to those who usually get it last. Stephanie Pereira, NEW INC’s director, surmises, “We have seen an increasing number of our creative studios using design-justice principles to focus on health and wellness. The members are taking an iterative approach, where through small gestures they are designing intersectional spaces for healing.” These urban acupuncture interventions—a Recharge Room, a Community Sanctuary, and a Black Schoolhouse—mend the stress fractures in our urban systems and reengineer them for a kinder and safer world.
HEALING SPACES BY KAREN WONG PORTRAITS BY LAILA ANNMARIE STEVENS
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THE TRIPLE AS ARE THREE women who
A+A+A
ANDREA CHINEY, ARIANNA DEANE and ASHELY KUO
cofounded a design practice that centers and values process. While the pandemic caused havoc amongst their peers as projects were canceled, A+A+A was in demand. In the fall of 2020, in partnership with Youth Design Center (YDC), they created Healing Sanctuaries for Brooklyn’s Brownsville Community Justice Center (BCJC), a group that invests in local youth and the neighborhood’s built environment. A+A+A conducted five weeks of design workshops with 10 YDC members who are part of the innovation hub and youth design agency. Co-founder Andrea Chiney explains, “We were hired to teach them how to design spaces, but in truth, they were ultimately the ones who taught us about self-healing, to design what are now Healing Sanctuaries.” During the design development phase, a thesis emerged: healing is both communal and individual. The architects and teens built a two-pronged strategy: a Community Sanctuary and Headspaces. The former is a greenhouse that contains items of furniture that double as healing devices. A table offers supplies for expressing one’s feelings through writing, drawing and storytelling; cubby shelves are a stage for objects of release such as crystals, stress balls and incense; and the pitched roof protects a laundry line of notes and memories. The whole structure functions as a collective archive of shared experiences. The mobile units dubbed Headspaces are ingenious inventions that mimic VR sans goggles. You pop your head into three different stations that contain mini immersive environments. One features a biophilic design in the form of a secret garden consisting of plants, sound and light. Another is an inverted fishbowl using dichroic panels, creating a seascape of refractions and sounds. The third is a minimalist cocoon that sheathes you with music, guided meditations and breathing exercises. Turning inward or outward, each person finds their own journey of reflection. In September 2020, the Healing Sanctuaries’ first stop was Osborn Plaza in the heart of Brownsville, and they will tour the neighborhood throughout 2021.
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IN THE LAST WEEK OF February 2021, Joseph Cuillier III, Shani Peters and their four-year-old daughter left Harlem for New Orleans to start the next chapter of The Black School. Over the past five years, they have modeled what an experimental art school could look like for young people. Their school teaches a mixture of radical Black politics married with civic engagement, workshops and meditation, and students are taught art-making to instigate social change. On a personal level, Cuillier says, “Based on our work, you can assume that we believe it to be deeply detrimental for a Black child’s well-being and psyche to grow up in an environment where their Blackness isn’t affirmed and uplifted. We’re excited to see what it does for our daughter and for us to be culturally, socially, politically and economically immersed in a Black city.” It took six months to raise $300,000; not an extravagant number, but a hard-earned one that brought all their communities together, from major foundations to teachers and students who participated in their curriculum. The magnetic pull is exhilarating—if they can buy land, construct a building, and equip it for a low-cost budget, it could be a replicable political action spawning dozens of independent schools for BIPOC students across the United States. Cuillier and Peters are assessing locations in the 7th Ward, a historic neighborhood which was home to many educated people of color in the pre-Civil War years. At the turn of the 20th century, the area was a center for jazz greats, and in 1917, McDonogh 35, the first four-year high school for African American students in New Orleans, was erected. They have enlisted a group of architects— Bryan C. Lee Jr., Whawn Allen and Lo-TEK—to design a new kind of schoolhouse. This hybrid model of school, community center and house posits a more intimate understanding of what Black youths need—an intimate space that caters to their ambitions and envelopes them in the creative process.
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JOSEPH CUILLIER III and SHANI PETERS The Black School
LAST SPRING, AS NEW York
Studio Elsewhere
MIRELLE PHILLIPS
City hospitals valiantly dealt with the surge of COVID-19 patients, Phillips pivoted from researching immersive environments with a top neuroscientist to implementing, almost overnight, Recharge Rooms for Mount Sinai Health System’s frontline healthcare workers with Dr. David Putrino. Leveraging her prior career in video-game design and his work in sports, they converted a disused lab into a “bio-experiential” room combining nature-themed visuals, music and sound, light and scent to relieve stress and anxiety. “We tend to segment out creative technology, art and physical design, but I’m much more interested in the leveraging of all three; more specifically, how we can use their intersection to integrate awe, compassion, opportunities for human connectedness and sumptuous design for the senses,” Phillips explains. Their project’s effectiveness was immediate and surprising. An independent study found that participants reduced their stress level by 60% after a 15-minute experience. Surveyed nurses and doctors described the Recharge Rooms as restorative and nurturing. One Recharge Room has now become a fully-funded initiative, Frontline Strong Relief, providing support for the hospital’s entire network. A year later, Phillips has returned to Studio Elsewhere’s original project led by deep brain stimulation pioneer Dr. Helen Mayberg. Specializing in new treatments for mental illness, Mayberg is partnering with Phillips’s team to record, measure and quantify the data on physical responses to major depression and recovery in the newly designed Q-Lab at Mount Sinai West. Inspired by Japanese tea houses, the slatted blond-wood environment is serene and understated. A patient enters and is met by a large projection that simulates a living, breathing landscape. As the subject interacts with the video wall, they discover two floating orbs are tracking their hands. Moving them slow, fast, back and forth allows for a naturalistic exploration of the generative game world. By studying the body’s choreography, a team of scientists, AI experts and creative technologists hope to break new ground in the field of neuropsychiatric disorders.
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IDEAL HOMES
Interior designer Brandon Fontenot is keeping the American Dream alive in Houston, Texas. BY GABRIELA ULLOA PORTRAIT BY MAX BURKHALTER
“GROWING UP, I REALLY THOUGHT I was going to be an architect,” says 28-year-old decorator Brandon Fontenot, of his notso-far-fetched childhood fantasies. Knowing this, it now comes as no surprise that the Houston-based interior designer turns to architecture first. “It usually dictates what goes in the house,” he says. “I like to allow the architecture to lead the design.” Born and raised in rural Louisiana, he credits his nature-filled upbringing as well as his admiration for fashion for his love of the trade. “By looking at clothes, I started looking at designers’ homes,” Fontenot recalls. “I just became mesmerized by what Jacques Grange did in Paris for Yves Saint Laurent. Looking at fashion sparked my love for design.” After making what he calls a “natural move” from his small hometown to bustling Houston, the rising star, who at the time was working for a larger design firm, set his sights on something more. “I was craving a more intimate expression of my work,” he comments of his decision to leave the safety net of an established company. With one client on his roster, Fontenot took a leap of faith that would change the course of his career immensely. But only when he founded his eponymous design practice in 2015 did he truly find his edge. “What I do here is so different from a lot of other designers,” he says of his tendency to reach for earthy materials and neutral color
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palettes, in a city dripping with grandiosity and over-the-top décor. Furthermore, the nurturing environment Houston has to offer has kept Fontenot craving more: “It really is the American Dream here. There’s tons of opportunity and the longer I stay the more indebted I feel. I’ve cornered myself a little market.” Although his appreciation for his adopted city runs deep, most if not all of his current projects are outside of Houston. Thanks to his loyal clientele and countrywide fanfare, he has his hands full with projects lining the East Coast. From an 1850s farmhouse in Connecticut to the garden level of a Brooklyn brownstone, he’s staying busy and branching out. “Because my portfolio is so neutral, I often get pigeonholed,” Fontenot reflects. “But this time, the clients [in Connecticut] want a lot of color, and I don’t live with color well so this will be a nice push for me.” In Brooklyn, he gets to experiment with something not many New Yorkers have: space. “It’s 4,000 square feet of just outdoor space,” he says. There’s another challenge on his horizon too: creating a playful and vibrant space for a client’s college-bound daughter in a jaw-dropping Boston brownstone outfitted with opulent moldings, plaster ceiling medallions and “over-the-top” chandeliers; it appears he’ll soon be mastering the art of combining youthful cool with history.
Top: Chair by Pierre Jeanneret, custom sofa and coffee table designs by Brandon Fontenot, 1940s Scandinavian chair from M.Naeve. Above: Photographs by Uta Barth, bookcase designed by Brandon Fontenot, Kaare Klint dining chairs.
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Andrea Marie Breiling Mixes Up a Dream Cocktail
Ahead of her first solo show in New York, Andrea Marie Breiling shares her love of driving across the city’s bridges, and how spray cans have helped her break free.
Higher Ground (2021) and I Wanna Surround You Like a Fire (2021).
BY B A R RY S C H WA B S K Y
LOS ANGELES-BASED PAINTER Andrea Marie Breiling has been pushing her work along at incredible velocity lately. The works I first noticed on Instagram a couple of years ago were gutsy, densely packed abstractions redolent of Willem de Kooning, Per Kirkeby and Joan Mitchell. By last year that had changed. I was seeing works that were faster and leaner—more optical, less material. But that didn’t prepare me for what I saw when I visited the studio in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where, in the wake of her show last fall with Night Gallery in Los Angeles, she was making the work for her solo debut in New York, “Eyes to the Wind” at Broadway Gallery: big, tumultuous blasts of ecstatic color and hazy line done solely with spray paint, but no, nothing like graffiti—closer, as she says to J. M. W. Turner. How, I wondered, had she moved so fast? BARRY SCHWABSKY: Let’s start with the basics. Rilke writes: “Beauty is just the beginning of a terror we can barely endure: we admire it because it calmly refuses to crush us.” What do you think, true or false? ANDREA BREILING: It’s true. There is something about longing that happens when one witnesses anything profoundly sublime or beautiful. Music does this so well. It conjures a feeling that we once had, and perhaps simultaneously have never had, but long for. Which feels like terror, but yes, a terror we long for and can endure and continue to endure because I believe it’s true that it is not crushing. It ignites us to continue seeking after something.
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Time and time again with my painting this happens and maybe that’s why many like myself know we can and will do it until we die, because of that endless terror. Georgia O’Keeffe said she’s terrified every time she comes to the canvas. It is the same for me, but it’s exhilarating in a way that not even the most potent hallucinogens can muster up. A dive into the unknown and hopefully a dive into the sublime. The sense of longing for me is what makes the dark days have light and hope. In this work for me particularly, I felt a shift in my zone or vortex of making, having just come out of making a body of work during the beginning
and daunting stages of COVID, and then through the Black Lives Matter protests, the work held a different sentiment. In this body of work I returned to myself for the first time in forever. Looking and longing for something better. For something mysterious and not yet known to me. I wanted to make work that was uplifting. Looking for miracles and a longing for something beyond my imagination. When I finished one of the first works of this show here in my Brooklyn studio, I remember feeling overwhelmed by not understanding what I had done and yet feeling alive in the beauty of it. Something I’m not quite sure I had ever done before. It felt like a spiritual rebound and a return to God. BS: The way you made these, without brushes, it feels like you breathed the colors onto the canvas. Like you made them by exhaling. And then, especially with the big scale of them, the way they seem to surround you like an atmosphere, it almost feels as if I breathe them in, in turn, rather than see them. I think about how one of Jackson Pollock’s last paintings is called Scent. There’s a beautiful aspect of abstraction, how color and form and space, unanchored to a definite image, can sort of seep into you, corporeally. AB: In my first solo show at Night Gallery, the work was bold and colorful. It was made with brushes and the gesture was essential. What was problematic for me was that the audience seemed to get too caught up in the apparent art-historical references, particularly in abstract
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.
expressionists, like with Pollock as you mention. I found it unsatisfying, and it left me wishing that experiencing my paintings was more emotionally consuming, rather than a painting show about painting itself. I felt an overwhelming desire to dive deeper into exploring mediums and how I had been using my energy to create my work. How could I make work that sucked people in and lifted them to a higher state? A spiritual place itself and not a place of painting for painting. A fullbodied experience, poetic moments, a levitation. As after all, the experience for me making them myself was like that. Making paintings is always a transcendental experience. I decided to pull back, to travel and play with materials and figure out how to accomplish this. I was looking at artists like Morris Louis. I began figuring out how to stain the canvas. I was in Mexico City and Upstate New York and made many attempts at discovering a way to approach the canvas without the brush. It wasn’t until I got home to LA and someone had returned an old box of spray paint that I was like, oh maybe this could be the key. I began playing with it and soon realized I could use my energy to create things I couldn’t before. I could create an atmosphere I was looking and longing for. Maybe creating an atmosphere wasn’t my initial intention with spray paint, it was more about Greenbergian “paint and surface”—how to handle surface without a brush and still be able to tap into my strengths as a painter. Self-telling, physical, aggressive, improvisational, automatic and still allowing room for a certain amount of control. It wasn’t however, ’til I got to Brooklyn in Autumn 2020 that I really dropped everything— other materials, acrylic, Flashe, oil, etc.—and began just making the work with spray. With this monumental shift it really felt that everything began to open up for me. My studio suddenly stopped being a place of material investigation and became an adult play world, full of night after night of just letting myself get lost in the color and choreography of paint and the canvas. I was finally in many ways seeing paint do things I never knew it actually could. The work was almost painting itself— one of the most satisfying experiences I have had as a painter. The way I was able to create atmosphere suddenly had me thinking more about Turner and less about de Kooning. Something I subconsciously needed had been unlocked. I was fascinated by what I could do with a spray can. I had a massive palette and a huge variety of spray tips, and mark-making was now taking me on its own path of discovery, it seemed and felt. Shifts in my choreography allowed the rhythm of my
energy to be in charge of the work. I was able to keep what was important for me in a brush, but with greater speed and control. It felt like a dream cocktail, for lack of better words, and I knew I was onto something. I finally felt the work becoming more of a psychedelic experience, wrapping up the viewer like a drug; a full-body experience,
“I think my work is about an orchestrated time to dance, to evolve, to transcend all of this energy in a very serious un-cyclical and non-lackadaisical way.”
beautiful and emotional and sublime, and no longer a conversation about painting. BS: Your reference to Turner makes immediate sense—the sense of light and space. But it also makes me think of something else: Turner’s work represented a turning point in technology and how it was affecting perception: “steam and speed,” to quote from the title of one of his most famous paintings. It’s self-evident that we are living through a technological turning point too. I’m thinking now about how I first got to see your paintings on Instagram. Those paintings were more geometrically constructed than the ones you made in Brooklyn, and I guess they used more different ways of applying paint—not only the spray can, as you say. But still, I think you were already moving away from the more evident tactility of the paintings you’d done just before that. Do you think this new, less tactile aesthetic is linked to how we see things more on screens now, so that our field of vision is less linked to identifying things that might come to hand? Or is that a whimsical connection of mine? AB: A vision of things to come—that definition of Turner’s painting is almost the exact feeling I had
making this work. But more crazy is that only after I made Lucy in the Sky, one of the first works in this show, did it become apparent to me that the bridges of New York were influencing the work. I drove across the country from my car-centric city of Los Angeles to the opposite: the subway/ walking-centric streets of New York. Regardless I was determined to have my car with me in this city as well. Being alone in my car with music and a private space is essential to my existence. It’s healing; it’s spiritual. But, I didn’t realize that it would also be so visually exhilarating; from the Kosciuszko Bridge to just being totally immersed in the city itself. The feeling of things to come was the rise that would come over me every time I drove over any bridge. The rise of something better, a shift, a miracle. The atmosphere in New York was not only so different, but like Turner, I was having my own visceral experience with light and speed and just even with the changing lights of the bridge and the city itself. As for whimsy, I would say my actual state of making when I am in the zone is actually very serious. I get in very late, no heat, the windows open for ventilation while it’s snowing. I’m smoking, I’m chain-smoking and then there is loud music, loud and electronic, sometimes almost new age. An upbeat rhythm really sets a tone. An overwhelming amount of chaos comes crashing in on me, things feel heavy and it’s time to use those sensations. Sadness, fear, happiness, heartache, bliss. I’m energized, color starts to take over and bring me satisfaction in ways that transcend pretty much any feeling. They all get laid out into this thing in front of me. Flattened out. Everything becomes one. Color feeds new life into an echo or a longing. And the bridges, the speed of the light that New York has, the intensity, all of that. The intensity is a challenge to me in a wondrous way. So I think my work is about an orchestrated time to dance, to evolve, to transcend all of this energy in a very serious un-cyclical and nonlackadaisical way. The moment I step away from the studio is actually when I become whimsical. People say they love having me around because I am always laughing. I think this is in part because most of the time I’m actually in a constant state of agony. Agony to get to a place, the carved-out space of release that is in my studio. The place I feel most myself, most at peace—the peace that only transformation can provide. A meditation in non-thinking, just breathing and pushing color around. The moments I’m not thinking are actually when the work is the best, and I actually am at one with myself and my autonomy.
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How to Dress Well Hollywood costume director Marci Rodgers tells stories through clothing. During the lockdown, she also wrote a children’s book about love. BY KILLIAN WRIGHT-JACKSON
Rodgers works on a costume for Rebecca Hall’s directorial debut film, Passing.
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“MY JOURNEY INTO COSTUME DESIGN was divine,” says Marci Rodgers. “People always ask if I planned it, but truthfully I didn’t even know it was a profession. I’ve always been attracted to learning, to history, to the little details that most people don’t have time for. Everything has stemmed from pure curiosity.” It’s a Monday afternoon in early March, and we’re tucked inside West Hollywood’s 1 Hotel. Dressed in an oversized hoodie that reads “Soul Was Designed By Us” and a pair of lush sweats, Rodgers has the look of a cool curator. Her fingers are bedizened in silver rings and beneath a fitted snapback black-frame glasses cover her eyes. On anyone else the look might’ve seemed studied or forced; on Rodger’s the styling looks effortless. This easy, lived-in feel for dress reflects her ability to elevate the mundane. In Spike Lee’s Oscar-winning BlacKkKlansman she twined suede and shearling coats into forms of armor. In the TV series She’s Gotta Have It she highlighted the humanity of the Black female form, showcasing characters in streams of silk nightgowns, lace negligees and coveted sneakers. For Wu-Tang: An American Saga, Rodgers unveiled the legacy of Black bohemia, reimagining the constraints of the early nineties while distilling the origins of our present nostalgia. “I like to ask for music when I start creating,” she says. “That’s a tactic I learned in a set-design course. When I did season one of She’s Gotta Have It, I asked Mr. Lee what type of music Nola Darling listened to. That informs the dress. When you fast forward to a project like Wu-Tang, the music was already there, but that was only a small guide for me because I’m not from New York. So a lot of the work is research. It’s a lot of pictures, a lot of periodicals and books, a lot of conversations. I tend to pull from visual artists of the time to develop a color palette. Sometimes there’s an impression that you’re just shopping, but it’s far more collaborative.” Though she’s hesitant to call herself a historian, Rodgers sifts through time like a trained archivist. For Netflix’s upcoming Passing, an adaptation of Nella Larsen’s classic novel, she unspools the severity of glamour and the mandates of the Black aristocracy in 1920s Harlem. The biggest challenge was to find clothing that resonated in black and white. “When Rebecca said everything would be in black and white, it reminded me of a project I had to do at the University of Maryland,” Rodgers says. “We had to emulate a series of Christian Lacroix’s drawings and I was the only person in the class who rendered them in black and white. I remember feeling annoyed that I wasn’t able to paint in color. But that’s why I feel like so much of my journey has been destined. With Passing the film is shot in black and white, but all the clothing is color. I had to shift my eyes to black and white. Certain things that are pretty in color are hideous in black and white. I kept laughing during the process and felt humbled because God seemed to have been using my old teacher to prepare me for that world.” Her other forthcoming projects include No Sudden Move, a crime thriller set in Detroit during the 1950s directed by Steven Soderbergh, as well as a short film from Rémy Martin: spanning six decades, the project is a series of vignettes showcasing the contributions of Black culture to the storied brand. Rodgers work isn’t only limited to costumes. During the global standstill she went back to her “nest” and “stayed in her childhood bedroom for a year.” During that time she wrote a children’s book called MaJaRa’s Dream, a project inspired by her past and conversations surrounding love: “The trade-off of me not having my own space was being around unconditional love. There’s a lot of pain in the world and love is important. It was during the George Floyd protests, and everyone kept saying 2020 sucked, and I kept wondering who is speaking to the youth. People tend to forget that words are scripture. Life and death lies in the tongue, and I wanted to create something that could uplift.”
All great artists have a perspective. Now we have a podcast to share them. Listen to Points of View with Sienna Fekete on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Manuel Mathieu Negroland: A Landscape of Desires Kavi Gupta 219 N. Elizabeth St. Chicago, IL 60607 kavigupta.com Manuel Mathieu, detail of The Prophetess 2, 2020, acrylic, chalk, charcoal, and tape, 110 x 90 inches
Hot Diggity Haldeman Ivy Haldeman’s painting hot dogs for her forthcoming show in New York. BY KAREN ROBINOVITZ PHOTO BY JOE MCSHEA
AS A COLLECTOR, I HAVE ALWAYS had a thing for art that involves hot dogs. I’m sure Freud would have something to say about it, but I just find it funny. From Lichtenstein to Oldenburg to Wurm to Blalock. I stopped dead in my tracks the first time I came across a supersized Ivy Haldeman hot dog. It was at the Downs & Ross booth at an art fair nearly five years ago. There she was, luxuriating on a supple bun. Sinuous eyelashes worthy of envy. Perfectly pointed ballerina toes. High heel shoes on the floor. She was chic. She was luminous, a bit like stained glass. She was sold. Ivy Haldeman has since emerged as one of the most coveted painters with works in the permanent collections of both the ICA Miami and the Dallas Museum of Art. The 35-year-old New York-based artist is gearing up for her May show at Downs & Ross, working nonstop in her temporary workspace, the 11 x 31’ hallway of a TriBeCa studio, surrounded by large hot dog friends. “A painting is compelling company,” she says, adding that she wants people to develop their own conversations and desires with her work, “making a painting is really a live and let live situation.” The hot dogs came to her years ago in Buenos Aires. She stumbled upon a hand-painted deli ad of a stiletto-clad hot dog on the side of a building. She sketched it and came across it years later in a pile of memories. Thus began her statement on form and identity, developing a practice that she describes as “the clearest expression of my soul. It gets it right in all its details.” The artist is inspired by Kitagawa Utamaro’s print series, Twelve Hours in Yoshiwara, depicting 18th-century Japanese courtesans, and notes that her favorite image is of a woman who has woken up in the dark and is holding a candle to sleepily find her slippers. “There is something in this keen attention to the quotidian that is essential. These women are always being seen; they are always working.”
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That is the essence of her figures, be it the hot dogs, or the iconic headless, hip-cocked pastel suits that effortlessly grace other canvases, like a mix of a Robert Palmer video and Working Girl. Technically, her work is a culmination of eight layers of titanium white paint at the base. “Titanium dioxide is a storied pigment,” she explains. “They put it in candy to make it opaque; they put it in sunscreen to block or reflect the sun.” Over the titanium comes transparent color upon transparent color. The light reflects off the titanium, giving the work a delicious brightness. “I want the work to feel open, like a window or a screen,” she says. Haldeman began painting as an undergrad at Cooper Union (her mother is an artist, so it runs in her blood). She began taking her practice seriously after a chance encounter with Joyce Pensato at a laundromat, the Bean & Clean. Pensato sat her down and gave her some advice. “Joyce told me that if I was going to be an artist, I couldn’t put anything before my studio. It had to be the first priority,” recalls Haldeman. After college, she remained in New York and worked for Annie Leibovitz. “She showed me the value of time and unyielding discernment,” says Haldeman, who also credits her time nannying after school for reminding her to stay playful. “Ivy focuses specific attention towards inherited poses and postures as foundational to immaterial assertions of aspiration, gender, availability and professionalism,” says her New York gallerist Tara Downs, who is giving Haldeman her second solo show at Downs & Ross (François Ghebaly represents Ivy Haldeman on the West Coast). She continues, “Her landmark hot dog paintings advance a new language for portraiture, one of impossible, fragmentary, or absent bodies both irreducible to the determinations of race and gender and critical for speculating new imaginaries through and beyond them.” When asked what she will work on next, the artist. She laughed and would only say this: “Rumblings from other continents.”
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ARTWORK ON FOLLOWING SPREAD: FULL FIGURE, RECLINING, FINGERS TOUCH SHOULDER, EYES CLOSED”, 2020. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND DOWNS & ROSS. PHOTO BY DANIEL TERNA.
Made in L.A.
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Visit hammer.ucla.edu and huntington.org for details about programs and artist projects presented off-site and online.
a version Presented by:
FULTON LEROY WASHINGTON (AKA “MR. WASH”), POLITICAL TEARS OBAMA, 2008 (DETAIL). OIL ON STRETCHED CANVAS. 24 × 18 IN. (61 × 45.7 CM). COLLECTION OF JOEL LUBIN
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Toward an Everyday Feeling Young Collectors 2021 The Art of Discomfort Depicting America, One Role at a Time The Portrait Artist The Introspective Lens When Life Is Going Really Bad, But You’re Trying to Act Like It’s Not Style as a Form of Hope Speak, Memory The Dancing Triptych Scratching at the Adobes Hertopia The Dream Life of Buazizi & Ela
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BY C A S S A N DR A G I LLIG PHO TOG R A PH Y BY DA R I A KOB AYA SH I R I TCH
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The success of Phoebe Bridgers’s 2020 album, Punisher, means a strange new spotlight on an artist fueled byquiet sensibilitie s.
ST Y LI NG BY T E S S H ER BERT M A K EU P BY S A N DY G A N Z ER H A I R BY N I K K I PROV I DENCE
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Bridgers with Maxine the pug. This page: vintage dress from Palace Costume; Agent Provocateur underwear and bra; Veronica Beard headband. Previous page and cover: Loewe dress; Wolford bra and underwear; Doc Marten shoes.
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Phoebe Bridgers is walking me through Phoebe Bridgers is walking me through a trip to the grocery store. She shops mostly at health-food stores, her dream cart half full of beverages (Topo Chico, guava GT’s Kombucha, rhubarb Cawston Press) and half full of hot-bar foods (a too-busy schedule has made cooking difficult). Bridgers is an impulse buyer, but particular in taste, and her aversion to wastefulness means she buys only what she needs. She fears running into acquaintances (“way more terrifying than running into a mortal enemy”) and mentions that one of the biggest perks of veganism is the way it simplifies choice (“there’s just less to think about”). Habits of convenience seem the inevitable by-product of Bridgers’s recent success—her album, Punisher, gaining increasing acclaim after a year of glowing press and four Grammy nominations. Bridgers’s music is just as likely to appear in year-end “best of” lists as depression TikToks, but, more than anything, Punisher zeroes in on the slow churn of living. Songs weave through dreams, family, friends, disguises. “What interests me more than extreme sadness is daily monotony,” Bridgers explains, “that drowning-in-your-own-life melancholy.” For the 26-yearold, who grew up in Pasadena, California, and has been playing shows since middle school, her work has evolved from a place of self-admitted melodrama (“the songs I wrote when I was a teenager were like what I thought songs should be”) to an easy, diaristic candor. I ask if Bridgers feels stuck in the cycle of promoting Punisher, having done so from her home in Los Angeles every day since its release in June 2020. She is grateful but honest; interviews take up a lot of time and energy and she sometimes fears that she is cultivating an unpleasant part of herself. “I’m afraid it’s going to make me really self-centered,” she says. “I get loud when I’m nervous. I want to fill silence and usually do it by talking about myself. I’m worried that it’s going to exacerbate that trait.” Punisher is her sophomore album, though Bridgers is also known for an extensive roster of collaborations that span her ongoing project boygenius (with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker) to one-offs with artists like Courtney Barnett and Fiona Apple. Though her mom insists she was a natural performer from a young age, Bridgers feels the need to expose the other side of this: a theatricality
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that, in retrospect, makes her “itchy.” “I’m trying to have more empathy for myself at that time,” she tells me, talking through her emo teens at a performing-arts high school in the Glee-era. “Whatever it was got me here, and God knows what I’ll think is cringey about my current persona and stage presence in a few years.” The first woman she ever saw rock was Patti Smith, which inspired her to wear “Patti Smith cosplay” to school. In old photos and videos, there’s a sweet dorkiness to her bright-eyed nature, but she is at peace and poised when holding a guitar. She is never nervous. There’s not much perceptible difference between Phoebe Bridgers the person and Phoebe Bridgers the performer. When I joke about her training someone else as a Phoebe stand-in for interviews, she is momentarily serious, “I can’t even do that with social media. I have a very controlling attitude about that stuff.” Bridgers has spoken previously about industry folks trying to coax her online brand into something more coherent and polished, but she has remained herself—an artist who is electrified by the nirvana of a well-uttered “little bitch” and whose merch store hits like a Zazzle fever dream. This exterior for the softness of her music makes sense: vulnerability couched in the defense mechanism of humor.
“What interests me more than extreme sadness is
otony.” daily mon
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Left and previous page: Kwaidan Editions jacket and pants; vintage veil and shoes from Palace Costume. Here: Mimi Wade jacket and skirt, Lou Dallas tights, Gucci shoes, stylist’s own earrings. culturedmag.com 109
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inspiration returning. “I’m gearing up to make something,” she says with confidence. “I can actually take stock in my space.” A tour later in the year is also starting to look a little more possible. With no end to good press in sight, Bridgers is caught in a blistering spotlight for someone whose music is born of the quiet intimacy of regular life. When I ask if she’d rather lead a cult or join one, she gives the question her full attention. “I’m not organized enough to be a cult leader,” she says. “I don’t like being the center of attention 100% of the time.” She’d prefer a “yoga and lentil mush” cult, but only “if there were no dark sexual undertones.” Perhaps the Cult of Phoebe Bridgers is meant to thrive in the space between song and listener—a non-hierarchical wilderness of relation, a mirror for the world.
“I do n’t lik eb ein g
the cen ter
of att e
nti on 10 0% of the tim e
In spite of her love for casual vulgarity (you can buy a “Fuck Phoebe Bridgers” fisting sweatshirt at phoebefuckingbridgers.com), Bridgers gravitates more toward honesty than controversy. She pauses to think before she speaks and listens carefully. She writes mostly without regrets but feels guilty about incorporating those close to her into lyrics: “It’s possible that’s because I feel like I’m monetizing something private.” She checks in with those she does include in her songs and, sometimes, both as subjects and as bandmates, they end up contributing to the final product themselves. The self-awareness of her lyrics is a lived thing. Bridgers has grown to fame in articulating not necessarily feelings but the conditions that create them. “I don’t want to italicize the subtext,” she says, adding that her friends are tired of hearing her repeat this line. Though she doesn’t feel she’s naturally good at setting a scene, her songs tend to create tiny stages. Listeners don’t dwell in her heart or brain as much as they tag along in the backseat of a car, at the doctor’s office, out by the garden—there to witness and inject some subtext of their own. This is a result, perhaps, of a lifetime of dissociation. “I’ve spent a lot of money on therapy to make sure that I can connect feelings with real time and be more in my body,” Bridgers says. Much of her fan base relates to these same tendencies and is looking for templates to understand their own experience; Bridgers’s music is a jumping off point for processing and feeling. Though she’s been virtually performing on a weekly basis since Punisher’s release, Bridgers says she’s been in a creative pause. In the background of our call, her pug puppy Maxine barks, pees and wanders into a rat trap. Her record label, Saddest Factory, launched its first release—the album Super Monster by bedroom-pop musician Claud—back in February. She’s just moved into a new home. All this aside, she feels some kind of
Left: Ashley Williams dress; Wolford tights; Veronica Beard headband; stylist’s gloves and earrings. Here: vintage Vivienne Westwood suit from Replika Vintage.
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Sophia Cohen Dana Farouki Molly Gochman Jesse Lazowski Vikram Ravikumar Jack Siebert Everette Taylor Ezra J. William Moe Harkless
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YOUNG COLLECTORS 2021
In assembling our annual roll call, we found ourselves pleasantly surprised by the abundance of new faces and advocates for the arts. Ambitious in their intentions and deep-pocketed in resources, together the class of 2021 embody everything that works about the current patronage system, while leaving behind its more insidious malpractices. We see signs of hope and progress in their dedication to research, peer-centered investments, socially-engaged dialogues and appetite for listening and looking as much as speaking.
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INFLUENTIAL FASHION PLATE AND jet-set entrepreneur Ezra J. William moved to New York with the intentions of a diplomat, but as a student spent years adjusting to the city’s curvatures. Now, at age 31, Williams has recommitted his attention to expanding the social and cultural infrastructure between his native Indonesia and the West. His first efforts manifested a restaurant, Wayan, which sits in the heart of SoHo. The construction of the luxurious Balinese bistro put William in touch with local hospitality-business circles, where art kept appearing like a ghost at the door. The whisper became a shout when a viewing of Dior and I, the documentary on Raf Simons’s first season with the storied fashion house, demonstrated the need for a symbiosis of his favorite disciplines. Simons’s spray-paint coats blew the doors open. William saw immediately that any pathway to broader cultural exchange would need to include contemporary art. “Hospitality and fashion always felt like a little world,” he smiles. “I needed to let collecting in.” Using friends and muses like Beth Redmond and Michael Xufu Huang as lodestars, William began to wade into the depths of art fairs and gallery hopping. He found himself attracted to the same idioms he admired in fashion design: subtle monochromatic palettes and attention to the details of process. In his glamorous black-and-white living room, these preferences come through like a light perfume with the pairing of a wall-swallowing light-blue abstraction by Wolfgang Tillmans and a beaded goat by Paola Pivi above the mantel, and a mirrored panel by Adam Pendleton. He points out a Genieve Figgis rendition of Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) as a thankfully early purchase. He’s market conscientious, but doesn’t let that be his guiding principle, nor trends, which he understands come and go thanks to his experiences in couture. “I’m interested in where this journey will take me,” he says. “Keeping this in mind I have to start humble.” A recent trip to Titus Kaphar’s New Haven residency program NXTHVN was top of his mind when we connected. “What’s happening there is really special,” he says, taking out his phone to show me the work of one fellow in residence, Allana Clarke, whose leather-like acrylic oozes appeal to his love of texture. One day, he hopes to create an institution like NXTHVN focused on cross-cultural exchange, which feels even more urgent given the current rise of anti-Asian violence in America; his plan is to take on the problem with the same nuance and sensitivity he seeks in artists.
EZRA J. WILLIAM PORTRAIT BY RYAN PLETT
Ezra J. William in his West Village living room with Adam Pendleton’s mirrored work River.
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JACK SIEBERT PORTRAIT BY ANDREW FRIENDLY
FAMILIAL BONDS ARE A recurring part of the collecting narrative, but rarely does the energy flow up. Jack Siebert is the anomaly who got his mother, Hollywood powerhouse Leslie Siebert, hooked on art. He pinpoints their start to a 2015 trip to the Rubell Museum’s show “No Man’s Land”, during Art Basel Miami Beach: “That exhibition was foundational for us.” Their joint acquisitions since have not surprisingly skewed heavily female, with empowered, established painters like Jennifer Guidi, Luchita Hurtado and Mary Weatherford leading the charge. Their selections feel self-evident, almost impulsively mandated. So far, they have “no regrets.” For example, Jack describes Guidi’s giant obsessive abstractions at “No Man’s Land” as a call to action, and since seeing them has focused his own attention on beauty, especially the kind without borders or a name. “Maybe abstraction is trending again,” he sighs, as we discuss a recent rash of articles declaring the death of figuration’s reign. “My background is fashion, so I’m used to trends, but the truth is that trends come and go, but abstraction will always have a place because it’s embedded in the quest for the unique.” A former fashion buyer raised by a prescient talent scout, Siebert knows stardom can appear in any corner. He admires figurative artists like Gerald Lovell, Brian Calvin, Jenna Gribbon, Chloe Wise and Alex Foxton, and considers their vision of the world necessary for building a well-rounded collection. Furthermore, he also places special focus on supporting his peer group’s evolution on both sides of the aisle, and is converting friends into collectors too. “I like being close to the artists, and sharing our commonalities of experience. Watching them grow as my own eye develops is super rewarding,” he says. “Investing in young artists is also a more feasible entry point for someone my age who wants to get involved but doesn’t know where to begin. Art can be an intimidating arena to enter alone.” Perhaps this is another, subtler tip: collecting is better with friends and family in tow.
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Jack Siebert sitting with Mary Weatherford’s Solar Glare (2019).
VIKRAM RAVIKUMAR PORTRAIT BY RYAN PLETT
VIKRAM RAVIKUMAR BEGAN ATTENDING Ellie Rines’s New York gallery, now called 56 Henry, back when it was still a jolly closet on 55 Gansevoort Street. The beer-warmed crowd that spilled out of the jewel-box-sized space operated as a kind of gateway drug to a larger cosmos of Downtown gallery communities, where Ravikumar, an inventor of medical devices, discovered a compatible outlet for his left-brain needs. His first purchase of a shaped canvas by Graham Collins broke the seal, transforming the Upper West Side resident from spectator to actively engaged. These days he is picking up two to three artworks a month from a constellation of personality-driven spaces like 56 Henry, Helena Anrather and Situations. This consistent investment in the physical output of select imaginations mirrors Ravikumar’s office life, where he problem solves within the medical space, creating alongside his father. The task of bringing different inventions to market gives Ravikumar an appreciation for the scrappy ingenuity of upstart gallerists who must build and shape the context around a practice so it can flourish in a wider world. “In my job, the bottom line is always about functionality and cost-effectiveness,” Ravikumar explains. “In art, I found an escape from that mindset.” The entrepreneur finds himself drawn to work that examines the aesthetics of power through the lens of the outsider or perceived outsider. This translates into an admiration of material originality, humor and those that engage with the idea of passing. For example, he has two works by Cynthia Talmadge, who toys with the nostalgia of coastal elites by invoking their coded aesthetics through obsessive procedure. Her paintings are hung not far from plaster work by LaKela Brown that picks up the language of archaeology and classical sculpture but switches the subject matter to histories of Black fashion and culture. It could be said that all of Ravikumar’s ambitions move towards disruption of the establishment. A second-generation immigrant and the son of physicians with artist friends, Ravikumar remembers going to MoMA as a part of his Westchester childhood, yet this familiarity didn’t save him from a chilly, albeit brief, encounter in his early twenties with an Upper East Side gallery when visiting a friend at work. “It felt like a mausoleum,” he recall. “That is why I’ve always been attracted downtown, to where people take their programs seriously and other things less so. I like the idea of shepherding in the next generation. I think that is something I’ll always do in my collecting. I don’t see myself graduating from the community I’ve built.” Vikram Ravikumar at home with two Cynthia Talmadge works, one referencing the cover of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities and the other an ode to the Frank E. Campbell funeral home on the Upper East Side.
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SOPHIA COHEN PORTRAIT BY GRIFFON LIPSON
DESPITE BEING RAISED BY one of the most prominent US collectors, Steve Cohen, Sophia was the only one of seven siblings to find their way to art. It wasn’t a straight shot either. She started her studies in archeology, relaxing into the idea that “humans and what they make was going to be a lifelong obsession” over dusty toothbrushes in Turkish excavation sites. However, a masters at Christie’s reoriented her course, placing her on the contemporary gallery track and toward her true calling to “connect people with objects that inspire them.” Her entry point, the now-defunct Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in Harlem, supersized her fantasies about what working with living artists and their archives could look like. A move to Gagosian, where she’s now a sales associate, pushed out whatever doubt was left. Her appetite for collecting grew alongside the discoveries and relationships she forged at work like ivy tendrils channeling up a spire. Her Union Square apartment stocks the evidence: a mix of young artists I don’t recognize with stars like Jonas Wood and Takashi Murakami. Looking closely is a huge source of pleasure for Cohen, who views the studio-visit ritual as the ultimate industry perk. On the phone, she animatedly recounts a recent one with painter Loie Hollowell, whom she greatly admires. Early trips into artists’ private spaces with her father, who is still her favorite art-viewing partner, remain formative and inspire her annual trip to the open studios of the New York School of the Arts, where she always picks up a work. A small painted landscape by recent graduate Taissia Basaria is hanging in her bedroom when I visit. Another drawing, by a Gagosian art handler, that feels somewhere between Ken Price and George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, also catches my eye. “You have to look everywhere,” she smiles. Now 27, Cohen radiates an infectious enthusiasm for art. She’s happy for it to take over every corner. In her spare time, she is the co-chair of the Guggenheim’s Young Collectors Council, where she channels some of this energy and warmth into expanding the museum’s Generation Z and Millennial base. “At the moment, I like the bleed between everyday life and my job,” Cohen says. “My clients, the artists I work with—that’s just another way to say my friends. These are people I’d invite to my wedding, the people I want to see at dinner.”
Sophia Cohen in her New York home with Anna Park’s Meet Me in the Middle (2020).
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“WHAT YOU’VE GOT TO under-
Everette Taylor sits close to Derek Fordjour’s sculpture Imperious 48 (2020). Behind Taylor’s head: Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe’s Portrait of Juliette Roberts and Samantha Grey and Jadé Fadojutimi’s I’m just one crawl away (both 2020) hang out.
EVERETTE TAYLOR PORTRAIT BY RYAN PLETT
stand is that I started collecting at 27, so I’d show up to these galleries in joggers and streetwear, and I don’t think they were used to people who looked like me being interested in fine art,” Everette Taylor, now 31, says. “Swizz Beatz told me he often encountered the same experience.” Taylor’s breakthrough came in the form of a chance introduction via the same website he is now the CMO of, Artsy. “When you don’t grow up in the contemporary-art world, you need someone to open the door. That person for me was [Chicago gallerist] Mariane Ibrahim. She was the first one who gave me access and made it possible for me to start collecting from other galleries rather than straight from the studio,” he says. Their first deal together was for a work by Lina Iris Viktor, who Taylor had spotted on Instagram, and led to a fruitful friendship that the entrepreneur credits for turning him on to art-market darling Amoako Boafo ahead of the hustle. Taylor’s appetite is omnivorous. The sole rule that guides purchases is Black and Brown artists only, but other themes have bubbled up. One is female double portraits. He gravitates towards images of women sharing secrets, embracing, working alongside one another, as an homage to the closeness of his mother and her sister, who passed away. The only portrait of himself he has is by Henry Taylor, a favorite of his. For Taylor, the most important aspect when it comes to buying is having a personal connection to both the artist and the stories that their work carries. “I can walk through my collection and almost every single piece has a personal anecdote that pops up,” he says. “I think the only artist in my collection I haven’t spoken to personally is Sam Gilliam.” Only a couple of years and one big career pivot in, Taylor feels the art’s holistic sensibility taking over. “It’s almost consumed each and every part of my life,” Taylor laughs. The corroboration is splattered across every surface of his apartment, which the executive recently had to up-size to fit his burgeoning holdings. “I want to live with the work I buy,” Taylor says. “Art requires care and maintenance.” I ask who would be worth making more space for. His ultimatum: Noah Davis, Julie Mehretu and Stanley Whitney.
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JESSE LAZOWSKI PORTRAIT BY RYAN PLETT
ART COLLECTING SNUCK UP on Jesse Lazowski by stowing away in her suitcase. The jewelry designer, who during less restricted times travels the globe to collect her precious and semi-precious materials, makes a habit of tucking art pilgrimages to places like the Naoshima island sculpture garden or Niki de Saint Phalle’s follies into her jam-packed schedule. “There is nowhere I won’t go to see a James Turrell,” she says, laughing with herself. These journeys to all corners of the world for art’s sake acted as the catalyst to her own budding collection, which she is slowly putting together with the help of friend and advisor Rachel Kay. Kay tells me Lazowski has an innate understanding of artistry and a maker’s eye that is constantly developing with the more that she sees and is exposed to. They spent the past decade regularly sending each other installation imagery and jetting together to museums, galleries and fairs. Lazowski, in turn, credits their buddy system for getting her out of the passive role of observer and into the active role of facilitator. “When I get incredibly excited about something, she always pushes me to be thoughtful and answer the why,” she says. “I learn about the world through art and I feel lucky I get to do that with Rachel.” When it comes to taste, she claims color often steers her gut and has since childhood. This instinct sends Lazowski towards palette-sensitive creatures like Sterling Ruby, Rebecca Morris, Sanford Biggers and Wolfgang Tillmans. She takes special pleasure in complex processes and sculptural forms thanks to her own studio wrestling matches. “I know the ache that can go into each and every little decision of making something,” she says. What she is really looking for is an original point of view informed by an understanding of history. Firsthand research is essential to her eponymous jewelry line, and this studious rigor is something she admires in others’ work too. She takes it as an invitation to dig into specific times and theorems. This value for the past is something she inherited from her parents, who she is leisurely converting into cohorts in art. Last year she gifted her father a piece by Hank Willis Thomas, after an epiphany-like viewing he had while shadowing her to a Crystal Bridges opening, and now he’s got the bug. Evolving alongside her peers, Lazowski hopes to become a puissant recruiter and interlocutor for the community.
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Jesse Lawoski in her Bleecker Street boutique.
MOLLY GOCHMAN PORTRAIT BY JEFF BARNETT-WINSBY
COLLECTING SNUCK UP ON MOLLY Gochman, who, as a practicing artist with institutional chops,
Molly Gochman poses with works generated at the Wassaic Project, an Upstate New York nonprofit that the collector supports.
never envisioned herself in the role of patron, but rather as a manic participant. Today, however, Gochman takes collecting more seriously than most. When we speak she places stress on things like the messiness of stewardship and “the responsibility and work of taking care of art.” Mierle Laderman Ukeles, an artist who in the 1970s penned a seminal manifesto about the labor and creativity that goes into acts of maintenance, surfaces as a mutual idol of ours. To be a custodian or caretaker, in Gochman’s world, carries weight and value; perhaps not surprisingly given that she’s an ambitious installation artist and the mother of two small children, but a refreshing break from the narrative in which art objects are traded like baseball cards, without much regard given to the real needs of their sometimes physical bodies. Right now, Gochman is almost whispering. She explains she’s admiring a Joseph Cornell drawing she keeps in a closet to protect it from damaging UV rays. She laments that it also needs some time in the sun—in front of more eyes. These are the paradoxical complications and needs of art that both torment and inspire her to be more mindful and innovative. This distinct sense of gravity informs the type of work Gochman collects, which began mostly as prints of favorites like Agnes Martin, but has since evolved. Overall, there is an emphasis on female practitioners, as well as those who engage with issues surrounding social justice, which Gochman herself wrestles with in the studio. Laderman, Mary Helena Clark, Adrian Piper, Simone Leigh all glimmer in the vortex of her eye, but we speak specifically about Lygia Clark. When she was first dipping her toe in the water, Gochman remembers running into an early Bicho work (a tabletop geometric beastie) at an art fair and crying. “It was a piece she made for her son and it stopped me cold,” Gochman says. “It felt like I was speaking across time and space, having this extremely intimate connection with someone who I’ve never met and passed away years ago.” These are the kinds of experiences that motivate her purchases. Early on she bought a lot from charity auctions, where she’d pick up beloved foundlings, but as she’s grown older her acquisitions and commitments to causes have become more precise, to everyone’s benefit. She is, after all, the author of Give-away Project, a recurring social-practice performance in which the artist releases material goods back into the general population. She’s also on the boards of Creative Time and the Wassaic Project, and is growing more comfortable with the expertise she brings to these meetings as an informed interrogator and hands-on maker. “My aims have always been towards public art,” Gochman says. “To be honest, Creative Time was always the pinnacle for me. It’s an institution dedicated to bringing an artist’s dream project to life.”
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DANA FAROUKI PORTRAIT BY RYAN PLETT
ONE OF DANA FAROUKI and her husband’s first dates was at a performance by Walid Raad at The Kitchen. He had read about it in The New Yorker and was looking to impress. It was her first introduction to the work. When she looks at the pieces of Raad they’ve since collected together she still gets “butterflies.” Today Lebanese artists are well represented in their joint collection, and many of them are friends. The couple’s romance, kids and many years later, continues to intertwine with art. “I think that first experience was a moment when we realized we were on the same wavelength,” Farouki says. “We rarely—actually, I don’t think we ever have—disagree upon an artwork. I think it’s a good sign.” Farouki sees life and art layered like a mille-feuille—deliciously inseparable and crackling with excitement. In her professional life, she is the founding chair of the Guggenheim’s Middle Eastern Circle and sits on the boards of both Creative Time and MoMA PS1, where she is often leaned on as a Middle Eastern cross-cultural expert thanks to her impressive résumé in the region, which includes consulting roles with Art Dubai and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi project. The role of interlocutor also plays out in her collection, which has only one guiding mandate: living artists full stop. Farouki feels strongly that buying the art of your time allows for you to engage with it more dynamically. To this end, her collection focuses on peers and those a little bit older, who she sees as mentors. She looks for a sense of humor and a dedication to the queries they posit. She cites artists who span all mediums: Basim Magdy, Matt Connors and Olafur Eliasson for instance. “Middle Eastern storytelling often has this surreal element that I look for in an artwork regardless of its maker,” Farouki says. “Sometimes fiction gets closer to the truth.” Getting outside of the bubble comes as second nature to Farouki, who grew up as the daughter of a pioneering curator—her mother ran a nonprofit exhibition space dedicated to Middle Eastern artists in the 1980s. For those who don’t share Farouki’s eclectic pedigree, however, the peripatetic curator and collector recommends using biennials as an entry point. “Besides the opportunity to explore a new city and see how different art scenes function, biennials like Sharjah are a great way to discover artists,” she says. “Kochi is next on my list.” To find the right one, she recommends paying close attention to curator announcements and following favorites. “Curators can be resources for discovery and sometimes bellwethers too,” she smiles.
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Dana Farouki with Marwan Rechmaoui’s The Arab World in her New York home.
IT’S PROBABLY CLICHÉ TO begin by citing the well-worn truth that even, if not especially, across wildly different fields, the characteristics and constraints of virtuosity remain remarkably constant. JJust 3 years shy of 30, and 3 inches shy of 7 feet, Maurice “Moe” Harkless has already spent 9 years in the NBA, and is currently playing with the Sacramento Kings.At the same time, the charming athlete began to earn a reputation in the art world. Unlike many of the last decade’s newly minted collectors, who operate on spectacle and hype, Harkless has cultivated a nearly extinct level of connoisseurship, marked by careful listening. Before acquiring a piece, he likes to talk to the dealer about the strategies the artist used, both material and conceptual, to make the work great. How a painter gets in and out of an image, for example, or maybe how a figurine has been specifically configured to both collide with and circulate within culture—some might call this the artist’s game plan. When asked what’s come up on his radar in the last year, Harkless says he’s had his eye on Amoako Boafo’s portraits since he learned that the improbably masterful renderings were finger-painted. In Boafo’s work, self-imposed restraint is acrobatically transformed into the artist’s exuberant signature. Often aesthetic achievement is measured by cultural influence, but Harkless instead narrows in on something else entirely: process and execution. He sometimes even draws on his own experience making art while taking a cartooning class in high school when talking about his collecting. The athlete’s attraction to challenging limitations isn’t confined to the basketball court or the picture plane. His commitment to moving culture forward is mirrored in his desire to affect real political change. On his website, Harkless has collated resources on Blackowned business, mental-health resources for the Black community and voting guides, alongside lists of Black contemporary artists and musicians. These interests inspire each other, converging to form a unified platform anchored in excellence and equity. One of the standout works in his budding collection shows a basketball player suspended at his summit and about to shoot. Aptly titled Two Years and Counting (2018), the relief print by Nina Chanel Abney represents a moment of perpetual striving and strife. It’s an image of enduring intensity that visually stands in for everything Harkless represents.
MOE HARKLESS PORTRAIT BY CECILE BOKO
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THE ART OF DIS COM FORT
WITH AN A24-PRODUCED SHOWTIME VARIETY SHOW OUT IN MAY, ZIWE’S MULTI-PRONGED UNIVERSE MOVES INTO CENTER STAGE. MUSICIAN AND PLAYWRIGHT LEAH HENNESSEY SPEAKS WITH HER ABOUT MAKING GREAT ENTERTAINMENT AND EMBRACING EVERY MEDIUM AS A TOOL FOR CHANGE. PHOTOGRAPHY BY FARAH AL QASIMI. STYLING BY OLUWABUKOLA BECKY AKINYODE.
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WHAT’S YOUR NEW SHOW? ARE YOU SICK OF EXPLAINING IT YET? LEAH HENNESSEY: What’s your new show? Are you sick of explaining it yet? ZIWE: I have a variety show that’s premiering on Showtime, May 9. I actually just got off an edit session to talk to you. What I like about the show is it is so diverse and they are so many different aspects to it. There are interviews, music videos, fake commercials, sketches and there are field pieces. If I ever got bored making the show and talking about it, then that would be troubling. HENNESSEY: I’m really excited to see how you push all your techniques with your new show. Your natural comic timing is obviously inspired but the way that you work the edit, I can see that you’re thinking about post tricks and little treats. Seeing how multimedia-dense and fast-paced your work like Baited is and then comparing that to your Instagram Lives, which are so raw, makes me wonder: does it ever get frustrating that audiences seem so much more ravenous for your unfiltered work? The work with the least artifice and art? ZIWE: I cannot control how people react to my work. I wish I could, but I can’t. All I can do is cast a wide net, because I’m someone who has multiple interests. I really like the intensive 60-minute interviews with Alyssa Milano and Caroline Calloway, as much as I do the hyperproduced aspects of an interview with Gary Richardson, as much as I like a music video with just me. It’s, like, pick your poison as an audience member. You might respond to the music videos or you might not have any clue that I do interviews, or you might like my hyper-produced interviews, but you might not watch my Instagram Live show because it makes you anxious. It’s really up to you as a consumer, as a viewer to decide what you like, but I can’t choose what’s more important to me, because they’re all important to me, because I invest my time, energy and hard work into each of them.
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Miu Miu jacket and turtleneck, Gauhar earrings, Kelty Pelechytik rings. Previous spread: Alexander McQueen jacket, pants and sunglasses; Burberry corset and bracelet; David Yurman choker; Falke socks. Hair by Latisha Chong. Makeup By Merrell Hollis. Nails by Kayo.
HENNESSEY: In the intro for your song “AOC Bamba” you said, “While my artistic triumphs usually erupt from the heart, this video is an emanation of the mind.” I thought that was intriguing. Do you have a heart-mind split with where your work comes from? ZIWE: It’s complicated because my work is mostly satirical. Just from that perspective, I have to have a strong POV, but in that strong POV, I think that there’s criticism worthy of every sort of subject, myself included. I make fun of myself in my work because I’m very aware of the fact that I’m not perfect, I don’t know everything, I’m human. That’s the heart-mind split where, obviously, I enter my POV as a Black woman that grew up in New England, who is a Pisces and went to private institutions, but attended public elementary school. All of these things collect to make me have certain perspectives on the world and certain really strong takes, but ultimately, I like to take a step back with analysis because I am open to learning. I’m open to changing my mind. I’m open to being wrong. That critical thinking plus my emotional approach is really what drives my satire because I want to say things that are really sharp and poignant. HENNESSEY: Why do you think people are more interested in the raw unfiltered interview-style stuff and aren’t as hot for these genius funny songs you’re doing? ZIWE: I don’t know. Here’s the honest-to-God truth, my YouTube Baited series, that was criminally under-watched. It did not blow up until I broke out with my Instagram Live series, but mind you, what I was doing with Instagram Live, I had been doing that series on every Thursday for two months before anybody noticed, so I would interview someone, it would get 20 views, and I would want to apologize to them because no one was watching.
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“WITH EACH INTERVIEW, I FEEL
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RESPONSIBLE FOR CREATING A
DOESN’T HURT.”
I can’t create my work because of what’s hot and what’s the trend. If you’re always chasing something, you’re never going to catch up. You’re following the trend and not setting it. All I can do is continue to make and create stuff that I believe in, that has value and that isn’t just for the moment but can last for a long time. It has shelf life. With Baited and my YouTube series Ziwe, you could watch them today and it’s still pertinent to the conversation that we’re having. Then my hope with the interviews I did with Caroline Calloway, Alexis Neiers, Alyssa Milano, is that while I did them in December of 2020, while there was a racial reckoning happening, that you could watch these videos in 10 years and they would still be crucial to the conversation about racial discrimination in the United States. Similarly, my hope with the music that I create is that in 10 years from now, while it may not have 10 million views, it might not be the hottest song on YouTube, people can still take something from the art. That it’s useful and thoughtful and still relevant. I’m really not trying to make things inherently to be the hot new thing. I’m just trying to make work that is sustainable and thoughtful and that has a really important, crucial, unique and fresh approach. Whether I’m ahead of the curve by several years and no one cares, I can’t control that. All I can control is what I make and what I say. HENNESSEY: The dichotomy between sustainability and being prolific is really illuminating, because what you’re saying is exactly right, which is that it’s about making things sustainably. For some people, that might mean putting a video out every month and then for some people that might mean making something every year. It’s not about quantifying it. ZIWE: Yes. Honestly, it’s about quality for me. My proudest moment is the fact that people watch my YouTube series and say, “Wow, this is so funny,” three years, four years, five years later after I’d made it, back when I was in my early 20s and didn’t know really much about producing. Hopefully, that’s the case with my other work, but if not, I’ll continue to create important things to me. All I can do is entertain myself. HENNESSEY: So, during the pandemic everyone got really domesticated and cozy, but also just sat in pure terror, which is a very weird combination. It’s interesting that some of your stuff really is blowing up under these conditions, because it’s almost like you are simulating social failure, or social discomfort, which is the opposite of this comfort-seeking mode that people have been in. In a sense do you think people are starved for social failure?
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ZIWE: Oh, I had never considered that. I don’t know if people are starved for social failure. HENNESSEY: When we’re so isolated, we crave contact and love and being seen and affirmation, but I also think that there’s a part of us that craves the high stakes of socializing. ZIWE: Yes, I don’t know about that, but what I can say is that there was a sense of community in the comment section of my Instagram Lives, that is undeniable, where the show was an interview, but the show was also who was in the group chat, who was in the comments, anyone from Janelle Monáe to Kalani to Julio Torres to Quinta Brunson, there was a wide range of people engaging. It was like you were in a movie theater and people were talking. It was invoking that feeling that we hadn’t experienced because we were all isolated in the pandemic to not spread the disease. I definitely think that the communal experience was alive during my Instagram Live for sure. HENNESSEY: I’ve definitely seen that on some Lives. I wonder if anyone’s ever fallen in love in the chat section. ZIWE: I don’t know, but that would be sick. I would love to be a minister and bless their wedding. HENNESSEY: Oh my God, now someone’s going to read this and then lie and say that they fell in love on your Instagram Live. ZIWE: That’d be awesome. I’d be happy to do it. HENNESSEY: I know in your song “No Notifications” you say, “What are you going to do when you get offline?” But what are you going to do? ZIWE: You die. HENNESSEY: That’s it. Die? ZIWE: What am I going to do when I get off-line? Is that the question? HENNESSEY: Yes. ZIWE: Rest, but there’s a long way to that. There’s a long way before I get off-line, I have a lot of work to do. HENNESSEY: Do you love being online? ZIWE: It’s not that I love being online, it’s that being online is at the crux of my work. I grew up at a time where the Internet has acted as a blessing and a curse. As a curse, because it united people who don’t believe that people of color should have human rights. But conversely, I’ve been able to get past roadblocks and gatekeepers and break through in a way that was physically impossible to do had I been 10 years older. Because of the Internet, as a young Black woman who is funny and has quippy short things to say and who
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has a love for media, I’m able to create and people are able to see my work. There’s no Instagram Live without the Internet, I couldn’t have had those conversations about race in the public sphere without it. I don’t even know how I would have learned enough about Bernie Sanders and universal health care to make a song called “Universal Healthcare” and talk about how it’s a human right without the Internet. While the spread of misinformation is real, I also have to credit the Internet for how I’ve been able to expand my platform and hopefully say things that are important and reflect and speak for people who maybe aren’t able to. HENNESSEY: When you go on Instagram Live, for instance, do you feel like you’re getting ready to do a performance in a hyped-up way, or do you feel dread? ZIWE: I don’t feel dread, but I feel nervous. I always want to make sure I’m asking the right questions. I don’t want to offend anyone or make any jokes that don’t punch up. I was so nervous before my Alison Roman interview because I wanted to support a community that I’m not a part of in a way. With each interview, I feel responsible for creating a productive conversation that helps and doesn’t hurt. That’s really important to me and that’s what you’ll see with my Showtime A24 show. That’s even the case with my music and my YouTube series. I’m not trying to create negativity. I’m not trying to tear anyone down. I’m just trying to have productive, thoughtful conversations that really empower people to live their best lives and to go forth in the world and be better people, myself included. I want to leave my interview feeling like I am healing and not hurting. If you’re asking how do I feel before my Instagram Live, I feel responsible. I still proceed with all of those mixed emotions anyway because I’m human. All I can do is go forward with intentions and then try to be exact in my intentions, and then if I fail, apologize, and if I do well, continue to the next project and bring those same concerns and excitements and joys and fears to whatever I do, so that I can continue to make productive, thoughtful, meaningful art that stands the test of time, hopefully. HENNESSEY: You really understand that conversations are a game and that there’s ways to heighten the tension and create an arc. ZIWE: Oh, thank you. I’ve written all my life, so I approach words as if they have power. HENNESSEY: If everyone could imagine that, what a beautiful world we’d live in.
Burberry top and pant, Versace bra, David Yurman bracelets and earrings. Stylist’s own choker. Previous spread: Bottega Veneta dress, shoes and accessories.
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Actors Darrell Britt-Gibson and Max Minghella have an astutely considered approach to their
DEPICTING AMERICA, PHOTOGRAPHY BY RYAN PFLUGER
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craft, taking on only projects they feel might make a larger impact than solely a fantastic performance.
ONE ROLE AT A TIME Photographed here wearing Dior Men’s new collaboration with artist Amoako Boafo, they certainly know how to make an impact.
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Writer Gabby Shacknai catches up with both men, Britt-Gibson a star of the Oscar-nominated film Judas and the Black Messiah and Minghella gearing up for the release of season four of The Handmaid’s Tale, about what’s new, what’s next and what’s important in Hollywood.
Darrell
Britt-Gibson
Darrell Britt-Gibson has spent his career surrounded by giants. From his first appearance on The Wire to his memorable part in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, the actor has worked with some of the most celebrated talents in Hollywood. But with his recent project Judas and the Black Messiah, starring opposite big names, like Daniel Kaluuya and Martin Sheen, takes a backseat to another big name: Bobby Rush, the cofounder of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers, a longtime congressman and the man BrittGibson plays in the film. “There’s just a tremendous responsibility that comes with portraying someone like Mr. Rush,” the 36-year-old actor says. “We’re playing with real people’s lives, and we owe it to them to give it our all and leave nothing on the table, because that’s what they did in real life.” From the minute he set foot on set, Britt-Gibson knew this wouldn’t be just another movie, that instead it would be a tribute to Black history, a testament to battles fought and sacrifices made and an opportunity to right the record about the Black Panther Party. “Because the history books have wiped the Black Panther Party and who they were, now there’s this piece of art, which is just a two-hour film, but the hope is that after people see this movie, they’ll be inspired to go do their own research and want to find out what the Panthers stood for and how they did it,” he explains. “This will be here forever—for generations coming up now and after that and after that—and this film will take on a life of its own.” Though Judas is set in 1960s Chicago, the actor can’t help but notice the many parallels it has to today’s America, and more than half a century after Fred Hampton and his contemporaries were unjustly targeted and attacked, Britt-Gibson hopes that the country can finally come to terms not only with its checkered past but also with its present. “52 years ago, Chairman Fred Hampton was assassinated in his apartment while he slept, and last year, Breonna Taylor was assassinated in her apartment while she slept. And in both cases, no justice has been served,” he says. “When you’re Black, this is nothing new to you. This fight has been a forever fight for us.” While he says Hollywood awards and accolades don’t mean much, BrittGibson still believes that the inclusion of Judas among them is ultimately a good thing. “Being nominated for Best Picture forces people to watch this film, and it forces them to have those uncomfortable conversations,” the actor notes. But beyond that, he thinks those conversations have the potential to lead to real change. “There are not two Americas. There is one America, and we all live in this one America, where people who are Black and Brown are not treated fairly,” he says. “You can’t hide from it. We are all here, and this is the America that we all live in, so let’s have these conversations and create some actual change.” 134 culturedmag.com
Max
Minghella
When Max Minghella considers a new part, he doesn’t dream up a lengthy backstory for the character, nor does he contemplate how he’d play the role or even whether it would advance his career. Instead, he looks at what surrounds it— the writing, the directing, the actors cast alongside him—and decides if the project is holistically something he’d like to be a part of. If it is, the part doesn’t matter, and he’d play a waiter with one line just as soon as he’d play the leading man. It’s this approach that led to his roles in David Fincher’s The Social Network and George Clooney’s The Ides of March early in his career, and it’s what convinced him in 2017 to play Nick Blaine in The Handmaid’s Tale, a part that has since defined Minghella’s career. “When I act, sometimes maybe to my detriment, I really try to serve the overall movie more than myself,” he explains. “I have a lot of friends who are brilliant actors, and I know when they think about taking a role, they tend to think about the character, but it’s very difficult for me to think from that point of view, which may have to do with my origins as a person.” As the son of award-winning writer and director Anthony Minghella, the 35-year-old actor has been enveloped by film his entire life. He was privy to the worlds of editing and post-production from a young age, and while his contemporaries were combing the pages of To Kill a Mockingbird and Lord of the Flies, he was busy reading his father’s drafts of The Talented Mr. Ripley and watching The English Patient for the umpteenth time. Despite his obvious interest in filmmaking though, Minghella’s parents urged him to stay in school. “It was an ongoing battle with myself,” he remembers. “I think there was half of me that wanted to please my parents, but I also knew that I was fairly stupid and not academic and really only cared about movies. And it took me a long time to sort of make peace with that.” When he was 17, however, Minghella saw a production of Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth in London’s West End and realized his undeniable passion for acting. “I had always known that I wanted to work in film,” he says. “But weirdly, I don’t think acting was really on my radar at all until I started doing it professionally.” In the years that followed, Minghella appeared in various blockbuster and indie films alike and began making a name for himself as an actor. But along the way, he rediscovered his childhood fascination with working behind the screen, and in 2018, wrote and directed his first film, Teen Spirit. “For me, it all has to do with chapters of life,” he says. “I think in my twenties, acting really made sense for me. You’re trying to find yourself as a person, and acting is such an expressive way of doing that and exploring facets of your personality. But as you get a little bit older, I think you look for a different kind of autonomy.” With some directorial experience now under his belt, Minghella feels it comes more naturally to him than acting does, but he insists that he enjoys them both equally. Following the success of Teen Spirit, he, alongside his bestfriend-turned-production-partner Jamie Bell, had big ideas for more projects—but as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, it became clear that the world had other plans. After a year of writing and producing from home, though, 2021 is poised to be a substantial year for Minghella, with the fourth season of Handmaid’s Tale premiering in late April and his latest movie, Spiral: From The Book of Saw, hitting theaters in May. And even as the fate of film post-pandemic remains uncertain, the actor is convinced the industry will return bigger than ever. “Maybe it’s just my naive optimism, but I believe the theatrical experience will return, and I believe that there’s something essential about cinema,” Minghella says. “That’s why, right or wrong, even as TikTok and video games and streaming explode, I still believe in telling these stories and these experiences on the big screen.”
Minghella and Britt-Gibson hang out in the lush gardens of Casa Perfect in Los Angeles. All clothing by Dior Men. Styling assisting by Jade Marks. Grooming by Sonia Lee using Dior Beauty and Oribe Hair Care. culturedmag.com 135
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The Portrait Artist
As the 2020 Hugo Boss Prize winner, Deana Lawson is about to open an exhibition of her photography at the Guggenheim in New York. BY EMMANUEL OLUNKWA
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Last week, I spoke to Lawson about her forthcoming show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and her recent implementation of mirrored frames into her work. Lawson refers to these as a “silver reflective lining between the subjects, who are being seen by the audience and figures that see as well,” which further siphons and exaggerates the subject/participant dynamic. When asked about the theme, Lawson is quick to pronounce that it is “a continuation of the
Self-Portrait, 2012.
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L
Their hands have been forced in that they came to own and define culture, but only were able to innovate in certain ways given the technology available to them at the time, whether that be language, sound or, more recently, the Internet. What else to do when the only architecture available for you to thoroughly inhabit and explore is your body? That’s the driving ethos behind Deana Lawson’s art practice and photography work.
SELF-PORTRAIT: © DEANA LAWSON, COURTESY OF SIKKEMA JENKINS & CO., NEW YORKL © DEANA LAWSON, COURTESY OF SIKKEMA JENKINS & CO., NEW YORK; AND DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY, LOS ANGELES.
Black people have been positioned and produced as subjects to experience such a disproportionate reality, one where they’ve been displaced and prohibited from owning property (capital) or building empires.
larger body of work, but this show takes on the manifestation of the spectral quality that’s always been there subtly. But now it’s being taken to the next level in terms of how history and futurity is presented, and not in the Photoshop or post-production realm of things either. I’m talking about the more traditional photographic sense.” It’s important to think of photography as a considered craft beyond the mores of representation that have conditioned us to deftly justify pointing the capturing device at Black-skinned individuals and collective bodies of people near and far as a revolutionary practice or politic. Photography is a science, it’s a sacred practice and profession that requires something to be given away in order that something can be captured—it’s less oriented and anchored to capital (monetary exchange), but it’s more about an energy exchange than anything else, where the person in front of the camera has to trust you in order to give pieces of themselves away. Lawson is the 2020 Hugo Boss Prize winner and the 13th artist and first photographer to win the prize since its inception in 1996. The recipient receives an honorarium of $100,000 and a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York. I was wondering how to think through and describe a canonical Lawson image and the only likenesses that plagued my mind were figures who define the Renaissance movement. You know: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Sandro Botticelli and Caravaggio. Compositionally, it’s the only reference that lives in my head and doesn’t compromise the integrity of Lawson’s sheer grit and ingenuity. Her work is also a visual composite that aligns with the portraits of King Louis XIV and the royal family of Versailles. See, I’m in a bit of a word, image, and reference bind, in which I’m trying to figure out: How do you reference something without saturating it or leaving it overexposed, even vulnerable? “How does one describe those who haunt a Deana Lawson photograph?” is a question that has perplexed me, and King Louis XIV, also known as the Sun King, is a good surrogate/pioneer. I would go so far as to even call him an architect, because of how he used and activated the materials and technology available to him during his reign in France. He constructed the Palace of Versailles after growing tired of his time in the city, deciding to erect a monumental emblem and symbol to represent what would become France’s center of entertainment, culture and art. I have been enamored with King Louis XIV ever since visiting Versailles a few times and bearing witness to the family portraits that dress and define the halls of the palace. In answering the question and call of what makes Lawson’s photographs sing, I started thinking about the failure of the conversation around politics of representation. I think an inherent misconception of the discourse on representation politics is the idea that in order to re-present, listening to the image and seeing the subject is a requirement. It brings to mind a quote by scholar Tina Campt from her seminal work Listening to Images (2017), where she writes of the problem of ensuring Black futurity and asks, “How
does a Black feminist grapple with a future that hasn’t happened but must, while witnessing the mounting disposability of Black lives that don’t seem to matter? What constitutes futurity in the shadow of the persistent enactment of premature Black death?” To which she later answers, “Through these images they fashion a futurity they project beyond their own demise. Rather than fleeing or submitting to a future imposed upon them, they face down the image that would negate the complicated truth of the lives they have lived, in order to interrupt the narrative of their own demise that threatens to extinguish their capacity to claim a life lived in dignity and complexity.” To which I would say that the driving ethos of Lawson’s photography concerns itself more with the question: How does one lay claim or give photo/ imagraphic proof and integrity to the lives and legacies that are often denied? In Lawson’s case, you must stage it to claim. When asked about her practice and if people have ever understood what her work is about, she says, “I think they feel the energy, and I know that I want people to get a certain feeling. I want it to creep up on you and stay with you; the power of the still photograph has a staying power. To be honest, sometimes interviews are hard and writing artist statements is hard because I’m always trying to figure out how I’m going to give them that feel, that’s why I tend to shy away from giving interviews. I’m able to get at the root of what writing can do; there’s something about prolonged thought that I tend to do much better in. Being a witness makes me think of more photojournalistic photography, whereas mine is, well, I don’t know how to describe it.”
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Axis, 2018. Right: Signs, 2016.
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AXIS AND SIGNS: PIGMENT PRINT. © DEANA LAWSON, COURTESY OF SIKKEMA JENKINS & CO., NEW YORK; AND DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY, LOS ANGELES.
Photography is a science, it’s a sacred practice and a profession that requires something to be given away in order that something can be captured—it’s less oriented and anchored to capital (monetary exchange), but it’s more about an energy exchange than anything else, where the person in front of the camera has to trust you in order to give pieces of themselves away.
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The Introspective Lens
Celebrated photographer Dawoud Bey looks back at his past to invoke new revelations about the histories and narratives that have shaped his illustrious, decades-long career.
By VIVIAN CHUI. Portrait by EVAN JENKINS. 146 culturedmag.com
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For over 40 years, Dawoud Bey has dedicated himself to creating nuanced portraits of marginalized realities.
The artist found his footing during the 1970s as a young photographer in New York City, where he roamed Harlem’s streets in search of fleeting moments to turn his 35mm lens towards. While Bey belongs to an influential generation that disrupted the hegemony of white patriarchy within the institutional and commercial art worlds, his practice has always been defined by a style of its own. In his mostly monochromatic images, soft interplays between light and shadow draw viewers’ attention towards details that, taken together, highlight the idiosyncrasies and daily rhythms that make up Blackness in America. In later years, Bey expanded his practice by taking his camera elsewhere in the United States and around the world. Street photography eventually gave way to a studio practice, which resulted in poignant series: colorful Polaroid portraits during the 1990s, compositionally inspired by Rembrandt’s
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paintings, and Class Pictures from the 2000s, which utilized the photographic medium as a means to socially engage young people in powerful, three-way exchanges between the artist, institution and community. Over the last 10 years, Bey began to directly confront the nation’s legacy of racism and violence towards the Black community through disquieting, yet moving, images that convey the tragedy of the young lives lost to the Ku Klux Klan’s 1963 bombing of a church in Birmingham, as well as the glory of journeys towards freedom along the Underground Railroad. Soon before the opening of his retrospective “An American Project” at New York’s Whitney Museum—the last stint of an exhibition tour that began at the San Francisco Museum of Art and passed through the High Museum of Art in Atlanta—I turned to Bey for answers regarding his ruminations on life and art.
VIVIAN CHUI: Let’s start with the beginning. You were born and raised in Queens and came of age during the 1960s and 1970s. What was your youth like, and would you say that it informed your later approach towards artmaking? DAWOUD BEY: I’m certainly a by-product of those tumultuous decades. My youth was, on the one hand, largely uneventful, and, on the other hand, full of the drama from being in the first generation of Black kids to be bussed into largely white schools. Whenever I turned in an exceptional homework assignment, the white teachers assumed I must have copied it from somewhere. They had no idea that I probably had more books, and of more kinds, in my home than they did in theirs. I was constantly being scrutinized and misjudged. It was a real Twilight Zone-like experience. By the time I was a teenager, I’d had enough, and was in full rebellion mode— staging sit-ins at my high school, locking the principal in his office with other Black students and progressive white students, demanding Black teachers and giving students a more active voice in their education, participating in the Vietnam War Moratorium, and joining the Black Panther Party. It was a time of social upheaval all over the country, and that was my life—participating in that moment. The saying
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND MACK.
A Couple at a Main Street Bus Stop, Rochester, NY, (1989) from Street Portraits (2021).
at that time was, “You’re either part of the solution, or you’re part of the problem.” So, I was determined to be a part of the solution, to change the status quo. VC: Were there any specific “aha” moments when you realized that your calling was photography?
“The first artist who deeply influenced me was Roy DeCarava. He was the first Black artist to make photographs purely as DB: The moment that photography came on the radar for me was when I went to the Met at age 16, to see the “Harlem on My Mind” exhibition. It was the first visit to a museum on my own, and the first time that I saw images of ordinary African Americans on the walls of a museum. It began to give me a sense of what I might do with the camera that I got from my godmother years before, as well as a radically different sense of the museum. Though I had no idea how it would unfold, I began to think about photography in a different way, and that set me on my path. VC: Some of your earliest works were created throughout Harlem during the 1970s. What was it about that specific neighborhood that drew you in? DB: My parents both lived in Harlem before I was born, and met in church. We used to visit relatives and friends there when I was a child. So, the neighborhood is a part of my own personal narrative. I wanted to both revisit the place of my family’s history, while also contributing something to Harlem’s long history of cultural and artistic production. Two things that interested me were making photographs in which some aspects of the past were visible in the present; and also, to create work that constituted an honest and non-stereotypical representation of that Black urban community, which was too often described through a lens of social dysfunction and pathology.
VC: Around this same time, you began to meet and befriend many contemporaries— David Hammons, Kerry James Marshall and Lorna Simpson, to name just a few. Could you describe that moment in New York City? DB: New York in the 1970s and 1980s was extraordinary. There was a vital conversation going on between the group of Black artists that I came up with, regardless of medium. The poets, musicians, painters, sculptors, photographers, dancers... We were all one community, and met each other within the context of the institutions that gave us a collective place. The Studio Museum was very much at our center, as were Just Above Midtown gallery, the Alternative Museum and Exit Art. These were organizations that came into being to support artists of color, when mainstream institutions were not even aware of any of us. We pretty much built our own community, because we knew that we didn’t have anyone if we didn’t have each other. VC: Are there any artists, both from your cohort as well as from older generations, that particularly inspired you, or changed your practice in some way? DB: The first artist who deeply influenced me was Roy DeCarava. He was the first Black artist to make photographs purely as an expressive act, not as a photojournalist. He had developed a unique visual and material language to talk about African Americans in photographs, in a way that was poetic. They were a generation ahead of me, but I befriended some of the photographers in the Kamoinge collective, particularly Lou Draper, Shawn Walker, Tony Barboza and Danny Dawson. They became, for me, affirmation that there were Black photographers out there who were making meaningful work. Through the Studio Museum, I met Jules Allen and Frank Stewart, who at that point had more experience so I learned from them; as well as Carrie Mae Weems, with whom I’ve had an ongoing dialogue that has continued over these decades. VC: And outside of art, what are some things that inspire you? DB: I actually began my professional creative life as a drummer. John Coltrane—the power of his music, the extraordinary technical facility and his acknowledgment that there was a moral and spiritual imperative to his music— had a profound impact on me. Saxophonist
David Murray is probably the contemporary jazz musician who most inspires me; I never miss an opportunity to hear him play. When I’m in New York, I can usually be found at one of the jazz clubs. The Village Vanguard, which is a kind of sacred space; Jazz Standard, which has now permanently closed due to the pandemic; or Smoke, on the Upper West Side. In Chicago, I’m a regular habitué of the Jazz Showcase. Jazz clubs are my thinking rooms. VC: I want to talk about a few important series from your practice. Young people have always had a presence within your work, but they became a primary subject during the 1990s and early 2000s. How did Class Pictures come into being? DB: I began working intentionally with young people as the subject of my work in 1992, when I was invited to do a residency at the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips, in Andover. That was the first time I spent an extended amount of time making work with and about them. I realized that they had not only been essentialized, but also left out of the conversation around contemporary art. In Class Pictures, I set out to represent who American high schoolers were at that particular moment—to not only make portraits of them, but to bring their actual words and voices to bear on how they wanted to describe themselves to the world.
an expressive act, not as a photojournalist. I’ve always been highly conscious of the spaces that my portrait subjects occupied.” VC: After that, there was The Birmingham Project from 2012, which I personally think is one of your most powerful bodies of work yet. DB: While I was making that work—which is about the six young African Americans killed on September 15th, 1963—Trayvon Martin was killed in Florida. It was a reminder, if one was
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needed, that the past is very much the present. In addition to the four girls who were killed in the dynamiting of the 16th Street Baptist Church that Sunday, two young boys were killed as well. One was shot in the back by a police officer in the disturbances that broke out after the bombing. The other, while riding his bike, was killed by two white teenagers after they left a pep rally that celebrated the bombing. The Birmingham Project initiated what has become
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an ongoing history project, in which I am looking at ways to make the African American past resonate in the contemporary moment. VC: More recently, you turned your lens towards landscapes, whether it be urban sites around Harlem or pastoral settings situated along the Underground Railroad. Are there shifts in the way that you approach photography when you shoot landscapes as opposed to human subjects?
DB: Portraits and landscapes are very different ways of thinking about narrative within a photograph. I’ve always been highly conscious of the spaces that my portrait subjects occupied, so place has always been a kind of undercurrent in my work—as a part of narrative that contextualized individuals and situated them in the world. Night Coming Tenderly, Black, the Underground Railroad series, was created from the imagined vantage point of a fugitive African American escaping slavery and moving though that landscape. For me, the human presence has not disappeared entirely from my photographs. They’re just not in front of the camera. VC: This brings me back to the present: “An American Project,” which is your most expansive retrospective yet. Is there anything that became newly clear to you, upon seeing over four decades of work displayed under one roof? DB: The thing that I probably think most about, when I look at the exhibition, is how well those early photographs from the 1970s have held up. I was 21 or 22 years old when I started that work, and hadn’t been to art school yet. I’m pleased to still really like looking at them, 46 years later. The retrospective is an interesting thing. Most artists are always looking forward to the work to come; I know I am. It kind of forces you to stop momentarily and take stock. My work is very much an ongoing American project.
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND MACK.
Left: Two Boys on Carrollsburg Place, Washington, D.C., (1989) from Street Portraits. Right: A Man with a Broom, Rochester, NY, (1989) from Street Portraits.
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When Life Is Going Really Bad, But You’re Trying to Act Like It’s Not Performer Alexandra Tatarsky Talks to Comedian Megan Stalter While Spiraling Ever Deeper Into the Void (On Panera Bread and Pivoting) PHOTOGRAPHY BY MUNACHI OSEGBU
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When I think about Megan Stalter, I think of beanbags, wallto-wall carpeting, hobbies, Starbucks, parking lots, tube tops and dreams.
Comedian Megan Stalter traded the Midwest for summer all year around.
I think about the sadness and wonder of living through such a lonely time. I think of mediocre hotel swimming pools, panic attacks and palm trees. The Megan Stalter persona possesses an unhinged basicness taken so far it folds in on itself, interrupts its own flow and glitches out. Megan Stalter’s Twitter banner at the time of writing this was a photo of a Panera Bread drive-thru. I consider the hermeneutics of Panera. The first time I went to one I was teaching theater to precocious teens at a performing-arts high school in New Jersey. The experimental playwright who got me the gig drove us to Panera on our lunch break. The only other option was a Pirate-themed hybrid burger joint/strip club and it didn’t seem appropriate to eat there and then go right back to teaching minors. The second day of our workshop we lunched at the Pirate sex burger disco; Panera was too depressing to return to two days in a row. Gazing at Megan Stalter’s Twitter banner, Panera Bread suddenly feels like the key to everything. The corporate American bakery occupies that same Megan Stalter sweet spot of delusional aspiration: a strip-mall chain pretending it’s a European cafe. Panera Bread is operated by the same corporation as Au Bon Pain, which I can never help but read as “Oh Good Pain.” The name has always sent a shiver right through me. Panera Bread was also, at one time, the largest provider of free WiFi in the whole United States, a factoid which somehow breaks my heart. I wish I could be meeting Megan Stalter at a Panera Bread in her hometown of Dayton, the sixth-largest city in Ohio and home to the National Museum of the Air Force. We could sit in Panera and watch life go by. I’d describe all the details that comprise the gentle dance of humanity, these sweet and wretched American lives ordering a Southwest Chile Lime Ranch Chicken Salad as democracy collapses.
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But, in our ongoing pandemic-induced isolation, the norms of the profile form no longer hold, as we are denied the pleasure of observing and divulging the physical details of our subject’s world: the stuffed unicorn mounted on the wall at magician Derren Brown’s house or the bluehaired wife of the saloonkeeper at Frank Sinatra’s favorite bar—a woman they called the “Blue Jew” and who I always hope to meet in a dream. Given the circumstances, it really depressed me that I couldn’t spend a day or two actually meeting up with Megan Stalter at Panera and then cruising to a local parking lot at dusk for a chance to describe the signage and the charming regulars in lawn chairs and the junk-food packaging that might roll by like tumbleweeds. But in these months which may become years, the world is a rectangle: the most responsible way to commune with others is to stare directly into one’s own phone. This is a state of affairs Megan Stalter understands intimately, as the anointed queen of quarantine comedy. She gets up in the morning and makes at least 5 or 6 Cameos, mini masterworks of derangement for which fans pay $45 to send a personalized video to, say, a brother who just graduated from the University of Houston. She does lots of emails and lots of Zooms. Sometimes she records a cartoon voice, sometimes it’s a podcast. She constantly thinks up ideas for videos, putting out a new one every couple of days. And, in those delirious first months of lockdown, she livestreamed demented themed experiences for hours nearly every night, often as masterclasses in bungee jumping, or watercolor, or understanding what’s funny about Megan Stalter’s comedy. I show a video to my little brother and he says, “What is this?” Exactly. “She parodies how people are... on the Internet?” In part. The sound on her videos cuts in and out, her body on screen splinters into squares, words trip over themselves and escape transcription. Megan Stalter is constantly glitching, an aesthetic strategy that draws in part from a lineage of Internet glitch performance instigated by queer BIPOC artists. As Legacy Russell writes in her 2020 manifesto Glitch Feminism, “A glitch is an error, a mistake, a failure to function. Within technoculture, a glitch is part of machinic anxiety, an indicator of something gone wrong… The glitch aims to make abstract again that which has been forced into an uncomfortable and ill-defined material: the body.” Video chatting, our conversations look eerily like her livestreams, as I am beamed right into a Megan Stalter set: her little brother’s living room in Ohio. She shows me the Halloween-themed acrylics her younger sister foisted upon her and we talk about how truly debilitating fake nails can be. She tenderly gestures towards a nearby beanbag, sent to her as promo. (“This is the beanbag we
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love. Everyone should have a beanbag.”) We talk about the Church, the Internet and how nervous she gets ordering coffee at Starbucks. Afterwards, I’m left with a familiar quar feeling: intensely intimate pixelated engagement, then jolted back to being alone in my bedroom, wondering in my default mode about the point of life. Internet performance is like an omelet made of synthetic egg; it tastes kind of like the real thing and you’re hungry so you eat it but it doesn’t quite nourish you—there’s a sense of emptiness when it’s done, and maybe you feel a bit ill. This is a strange time for live comedy where the place it used to happen doesn’t exist. We all deal with this hollow sense of no-place differently—humans, I mean, and also comedians. Performers with no place to perform all have our meaning-making fixations. I, for instance, became obsessed with compost. I was soothed from March through September only by the knowledge that to accelerate the rot, everything needs to be ripped to shreds. I spent lockdown on my fire escape tearing up cardboard boxes from everyone’s Internet orders and watching my neighbor call out after his seemingly unnamed dog, “Dog? DOG!” Megan Stalter decomposes daily as well, falling apart for legions of online followers who get to know the subtle minutiae and permutations of in-jokes and references, allusions and callbacks, patterns and surprises, in a baffling outpouring of what we call content. “I get a lot of good out of it,” says Meg, “But I don’t think being on your phone all day is good. Ask yourself: ‘Am I online because I’m connecting with people or am I scrolling because I’m having an anxiety attack?’” In 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the closure of live comedy venues and a subsequent “pivot” to front-facing camera comedy. That’s from the Wikipedia entry on front-facing camera comedy. New York Times comedy critic Jason Zinoman, who once politely yet firmly declined an invitation to a show of mine, has declared front-facing camera comedy the dominant comedy form of the COVID-19 crisis. But what I’m really interested in is this word, “pivot.” When was it decided we all had to pivot?! Or that some of us pivoted and others… didn’t. Now that your life is over, how have you pivoted? You pivot, I pivot, she pivots, we pivot! We’re in the middle of a pandemic and goddammit, we’re pivoting! The pivot is the central axis on which a mechanism rotates—the turning point on which some matter depends. Etymologically, pivot apparently comes from an old French word for “penis.” Fitting since, despite it all, we’re expected to keep thrusting, cascading our seed out into the ether, determined to spread beyond ourselves. These days, a pivot most often refers to a career move, more recently in reference to COVID-19. In a world of lies, the dictionary tells the truth.
Since everything in life that you cared about was canceled, could you tell us a bit about your penis? Megan Stalter has pivoted magnificently. “I’ve never felt more connected to God and the world than right now,” she says. “We have all had hell this year. It’s allowed me to think that what God or the universe really wants from us is to take care of each other all the time. I do feel closer to people who follow me now, because everyone needs it more. The numbers have grown.” The genius of her comedy is an exploration of precisely this human contradiction: where holy intentions meet megalomania. Megan Stalter’s comedy is shot through with an insecure, desperate, deluded humanity in which the horror of being a person manifests in minutiae. It has an honesty about the lengths we’ll go to for attention, to feel loved and to find a sense of meaning amidst the banal hellscape of existing. Her work is a meta-pivot: the point around which she turns is that there is no point except to keep turning. As I write I fall deeper into despair. What about everyone who can’t pivot so well? In dance, a pivot is a spin anchored by stepping out steadily onto one foot and then using the other to sweep yourself in the opposite direction. If I can’t pivot, then that means I’m just awkwardly standing here, trying to place one foot forward into a world that no longer exists. I’m the Fool in the tarot deck, paused at the cliff of the abyss, a little zero above my head while Meg Stalter’s chihuahua yaps at my heel. But even the Queen of Coins weeps: “I love doing Instagram lives and all this stuff, and people are watching,” Meg sighs, “But you can’t replace the live feeling. We were addicted to that and it’s gone. I really miss performing live. The first couple months I couldn’t even look at certain outfits without sobbing.” I was, of course, very jealous the first time I saw Megan Stalter perform, live and in-person, when it was a normal activity to sit close together and breathe in windowless rooms. Back then, we even spat liquids onto one another’s faces when the occasion demanded, for what is the height of uncontrollable guffaw if not the spit-take? Watching Megan Stalter perform I felt almost too jealous to laugh, but not quite, because what I also felt was confused, and confused is one of my favorite things to feel. Confused is a feeling I seek out and surf, like Hamlet, Shakespeare’s melancholic prince of Denmark, unable to navigate a rotten reality but indulging in the accompanying fracture of self. A Megan Stalter performance recalls the sensation I had when my little brother and I stumbled upon a public-access TV show one Christmas back in 1996. A woman was singing fairly badly but not terribly on her couch for a very, very long time, while an electric yule log burned and burned. I have been trying to get back to that feeling ever since. (“What
Megan Stalter basks in the California sun in The Alley at Redcar Properties.
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is this?” Exactly. “Is she parodying how people are…?” In part.) Megan Stalter’s delusional sticking-to-it-ness makes every beat an opportunity for linguistic stumbling wherein she chews and chomps up words that stutter forth into a strut, tripping and retreading (n)ever closer to some point that doesn’t matter. Two steps forward, and two and a half dancing backwards in heels. How could a woman take the stage and be both so utterly inept and yet so bafflingly self-assured? And how might I, too, somehow reach this same height of deranged confidence, a confidunce confidancing with myself? Magda San Millan, whose choreographic practice encompasses stand-up about changing dirty diapers and paintings of men being devoured by their own cocks, says of Stalter’s work: “I like her spoken sloppiness. She regularly shits on grammar and sentence cohesion in an urgent way, as if she needs and trusts us to get to the point without her fully articulating it. And when I saw her live she was an asshole to the audience. But a giggly asshole.” I don’t remember specifics from Meg’s show that blurry night in February just before the lockdown, but the feeling that remains for me is potent and shapely and could be described something like: Shimmying sideways in glittery slingbacks with a twisted ankle and a pedicure the creamy green of Fort Lauderdale key lime pie. Or: A stick of salted butter that knows it deserves center stage but starts melting in the stage lights—then realizes we love a meltdown most of all, this glorious and sticky loss of form. The performance makes us realize we want to melt down, too, and be this honest about our desire to be famous, our secret conviction that we should be famous, our utter failure to be famous (meanwhile, something is rotten in the state of Denmark). I was most struck by Megan’s lovable brashness—brusque, deranged, tender—directing and dismissing the audience in a vibratory hum of desperation. “I need you so bad I’m gonna cry and clog this mic with my snot but you need me more so c’mere and slurp my snot!” is kind of the vibe I recall. A bit of a Santa Claus dynamic: I squeeze down this damn chimney to bring you my gifts, yet without you, I have no purpose. Leave me milk and cookies so I know you care; I’ll spill the milk on the carpet so you know I was here. No use crying over spilt milk, unless it makes for good TV. I ask Meg about her worst show. Is it possible, when the whole shtick is that it’s not working, for something to still just not work? “I was doing a fake blood bit where I start talking and blood comes out of my mouth. It was so wrong for the venue. Usually the blood comes out and everyone erupts in laughter but it was totally silent and then some lady was like, ‘Are you okay?’ I had to do my whole set with blood all over my face while everyone’s for real worried. The whole time you’re thinking to
yourself: ‘They just don’t get it.’ Honestly, when it’s bad it’s so funny. Some of the people get it and some of the people don’t, but the people who do get it think it’s even funnier that the other people don’t.” (I’ve taken to this as advice for life: When things are going horribly, just imagine a cosmic audience laugh-crying along with you at the absurd and bloody shit show you’re somehow starring in.) Megan Stalter’s videos extend this virtuosic ode to floundering in little off-key ditties of amour to the wildly insufficient ways one might attempt to cope with the ongoing collapse of both capitalism and meaning by, say, rearranging house plants in an overly floppy hat. Megan Stalter’s characters are often on the brink of tears, a ring light visible in their eyes like a circle of Hell in Dante’s Inferno,
“I’m always like ‘I’m Megan Stalter.’ They’re all versions of the same person and they’re all delusional. Their life is going really bad but they’re trying to act like it’s not.” Amen. or tugged into view with a nonchalant Brechtian display of artifice. Drawing on a comedic trend of the deluded female performer who thinks she’s a star, the trope offers itself as a parody of fame-hungry me-culture while also embracing its trappings, at times “leaning in” so far that the critique tips over into the very thing it purports to ridicule. An undercurrent of Stalter’s videos is a delight in mocking cis white woman heteronormativity and the displays of victimhood that can slip with insidious ease into dangerous defensiveness. Variations on a theme, the white woman in one sketch who asks for “Thai—not spicy!” is a version of the white woman in another who says, with a self-satisfied shrug, “I had to call the police on her. Sorry! I’ll do it!” The white woman who says, “Mi amor, pass me the fern!” is a version of the white woman who says, “This is a court of law, gurly!” A performative fragility belies a violent demand for her comfort and safety to be prioritized at all times. I finally admit nervously to Meg that my interest in her work is in part anthropological: her bits offer me a wee peek into a Midwestern Christian white America in the midst of its own self-reckoning. I’m fluent in the gorgeous comedy of extremely Jewy Jews (Sarah Squirm, Lenny Bruce, Larry David,
my mom) and those I might call honorary Jews (Lorelei Ramirez, Ruby McCollister, Gritty) but truth be told I have had few encounters with Stalter’s brand of post-Pentecostal humor (she grew up in the church and says there’s truly nothing like speaking in tongues). Megan reassures me, “I’m really obsessed with all Jewish holidays” and then explains: “The people I’m making fun of are people I know in Ohio. They’re all very Midwestern characters—people who want to seem kind but they’re not. There’s goodness here, too, but the commentary is embedded in all of these characters. I never wanted to do characters who are weird and random just for the sake of being weird. These characters believe all this bad stuff but they’re trying to be good people. No one’s all good or all bad. I like to do characters that feel really real, and those are the people I grew up with.” Megan had barely made the move to NY from Chicago when the pandemic hit and she decamped to her family home, a chance to further study her surroundings. There she found the ideal straight man and collaborator in her brother, Nick Stalter, who shot and edited their YouTube magnum opus Little Miss Ohio and can be heard muttering throughout the special, “that was for my boys in editing.” The film has the tone of a Christopher Guest movie made by the Kuchar brothers, splicing found footage of beauty contestants with a motley array of character studies: lady who posts up early in a beach chair in the casino parking lot every day to snag her favorite slot machine; woman who has decided to live permanently at the Marriott hotel pool following the death of her husband; woman pretending to be a longtime Denny’s waitress; girl in church youth group leaving too many voicemails. What the characters share is a commitment to living in a fiction, banal yet romantic, stars of a biopic nobody made in the middle of a country that’s falling apart. To my coastal elite ear, Megan Stalter’s flat Midwestern accent is most audible at the A in phrases like “I’m having a full-on panic attack” or “I’m going to drink that Lysol and pass out” (these declarations brought on because her podcast guests all failed to show). In a beguiling mixture of utter casualness combined with trying too hard, a hyperbolic suicidality is at the core of her appeal. Her rise to fame as queen of front-facing camera comedy coincided with a moment when the president was instructing citizens to drink bleach. Megan Stalter’s comedy thrives in this desire for self-combustion in full view, brought into the realm of the utterly “relatable.” Who isn’t having a panic attack and craving some Lysol? “All the characters I keep as my name,” Megan Stalter tells me. “I’m always like ‘I’m Megan Stalter.’ They’re all versions of the same person and they’re all delusional. Their life is going really bad but they’re trying to act like it’s not.” Amen.
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Style as a Form of HARLEM-BORN E N T E R TA I N E R A N D S T R E E T- S T Y L E I C O N K E RW I N F RO S T B E A M S S TA R- S T U D D E D FA S H I O N H I S TO RY A N D CHARIT Y TELETHONS TO O U R S C R E E N S .
BY DA R N E L L- JA M A L L I S BY PH OTO G R A PH Y BY M Y L E S PE T T E N G I L L
Hope
Over even your fanciest sweatpants? We asked Kerwin Frost to self-style three pandemic fashion looks. Here, on his return from the grocery store, Frost wears a hat by Mental, a T-shirt by Real Bad Man and MEALS pants.
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“People who know less do better,” says Kerwin Frost, “because they’re not restricted in those walls.”
While reading—the street-style icon’s new favorite lockdown hobby—he wears a vintage hat and shirt, pants by MEALS and shoes by Walter Van Beirendonck.
For Frost, who’s known as a talk-show host, comedian, DJ and street-style icon, style can play an integral role in connecting audiences to hopeful messages of happiness and joy in this delirious era. Growing up, he looked to figures like Missy Elliott and Mykki Blanco, who defied fashionable conventions in favor of showing their authentic selves and in so doing reshaped the way we think about the power of fashion. His own elevation as a public figure began with his association with Downtown New York street culture about a decade ago, when VFILES and Off-White were in the ascendancy. It was there that he made critical connections to lifelong collaborators like Virgil Abloh; however it was in his own neighborhood of Harlem, way uptown, that the foundations for his unique way of dressing were laid. Speaking about his quirky ensembles from that era, he says, “When I was growing up, I wore a lot of hand-me-downs, sharing the same pair of jeans through cousins, or sneakers. I used to have to wear bigger sneakers, and now I’ll purposely wear a size 14, and I’m a size 10, to give that extra oomph and emphasize that idea of shared clothing.” Instead of reinventing himself as his celebrity increased, and catering to the restrictive whims of the creative industries he meanders through, he transformed his struggle into an opportunity to inspire his future rather than run from it. Back when he was still in high school, he used to sneak into New York Fashion Week shows, using his style to get into these sacred bubbles covertly. “I remember going to hotel lobbies and sitting there with a suit on because I thought it was funny,” he recalls. “It’s so interesting to understand how wearing a suit changes the language of who you are.” He soon realized that he was not limited to these protocols, and that he could “mix all these things,” creating a lane for himself and others who felt similarly. Using his early brand-development experience from the Spaghetti Boys, he is now embarking on a partnership with Adidas, extending the same messages of joy and hopefulness from his persona into the clothes. culturedmag.com 161
“When I was growing up, I wore a lot of hand-me-downs. I used to have to wear bigger sneakers, and now I’ll purposely wear a size 14, and I’m a size 10, to give that extra oomph and emphasize that idea of shared clothing.”
In today’s world, where learning about one another is so vital not only in an abstract sense but also to protect people from harm, Frost’s approach is to bring people together and reach out to the public. His Kerwin Frost Talks series, which he streams on YouTube, has hosted a range of stylish guests, from Shayne Oliver to Jeremy Scott to A$AP Rocky, and brilliantly uncovers fashion history interwoven with the intricacies of guests’ lives in ways that even museum curators could never evoke. Says Frost, “It’s also weird because it’s not just a designer you’ll get that information from; sometimes it’s from artists you maybe didn’t think would have a specific style, like Mac DeMarco. He has this flooded jean, cargo-jacket style he cemented, but then all the kids who looked up to him started dressing like that. I live for those moments.” In Frost’s world, developing his lane and telling the stories of others who move in the same way exudes this sense of hope many people are craving. Telling these same narratives through music, after George Floyd’s death, Kerwin and his partner in love and life, Erin, produced an acclaimed 12-hour telethon to benefit Colin Kaepernick’s Know Your Rights Camp. The event brought his peers together in ways no one had thought to last year, empowering his viewers while raising funds to protect the community that raised him. Furthermore, the millennial generation and those younger have received an unfairly bad rap for not filling their predecessors’ shoes. Conversely, Frost is a shining example of these generations, building on social changes and progress by those before him, but in a way that effortlessly connects younger audiences to these ideologies and speaks to the future we are entering.
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We’ll try anything we can just to get some sunshine during lockdown. To jump rope, Frost wears a mask, top and pants by 69. Shoes by Adidas.
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SPEAK,
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SEMINAL CHINESE DOCUMENTARIAN WANG BING FINDS NARRATIVE,
MEMORY
AND MEANING IN THE EXPLICATION OF TIME. BY RAHEL AIMA
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She tells of how she was forced back to the office after a failed suicide attempt and arrived to rescue her husband from a re-education camp a scant few weeks too late. Her monologue is devastating yet never becomes sensationalistic. The camera never leaves the scene, even when she gets up to go to the bathroom. “It’s like a memory vanished,” Wang explains of the campaign when we Skype, through a translator, in January. Within a twoyear period, between 500,000 and 2,000,000 “rightists” within the Communist Party were purged by means of jail, torture and internment in labor camps; many died of starvation before they were formally rehabilitated over the next few decades. For most filmmakers, one such historical episode might result in a single film. But Wang, who is considered China’s foremost documentarian and an auteur in his own right, returns to the subject again and again. A picture of the period accretes through both interviews with survivors, such as in Dead Souls (2018) and Beauty Lives in Freedom (2018), and fiction like 2010’s The Ditch, coming into focus like a slowly loading GIF. Wang’s oeuvre is full of quiet, patient excoriations. His films eschew political grandstanding for finely observed portraits of those marginalized by contemporary Chinese society—factory workers, ethnic minorities, the unhoused and the dispossessed. Many are set in geographically peripheral provinces, too: the northwest, where he grew up; Shenyang in the northeast, where he went to school; and Yunnan in the southwest, where he relocated for his health. “Every province has different stories,” he explains. It’s also worth emphasizing that his is not a cinema of deprivation or struggle but rather of being made obsolete, whether by the Chinese Communist Party’s design or by capitalism. Wang is uninterested in imposing the narrative or moral frameworks that are so prevalent in both state-sponsored and dissident cinema. When asked about the tension between observation and witnessing, he replies that “words like witness, it’s not my way of thinking. I think more in a cinematic way.” Although shooting has been interrupted by the pandemic, he is currently working on a film on West African traders in Guangzhou, which will include footage from a trip he made to Lagos in 2019. Although he attended film school and started his career working in the Chinese film
OF THE ARTIST. COPYRIGHT WANG BING.
Work bleeds endlessly into life, economic marginalization and dispossession intensify and even the spaces between seconds feel elongated and extended. The director’s 2007 documentary Fengming: A Chinese Memoir begins by following an elderly woman home, up hilly snow-lined paths and into her modest apartment. It is only when she settles, tiny in a leather armchair, that we see her face. For the next three hours, she speaks about her life as a journalist and the many brutalities and privations that she and her family endured under Mao Zedong’s mid-century Anti-Rightist Campaign and its long aftermath.
COPYRIGHT WANG BING, 2002. COPYRIGHT WANG BING, 2009. COPYRIGHT WIL PRODUCTIONS, 2007. PORTRAIT COURTESY
OVER THE LAST YEAR, MANY OF OUR LIVES HAVE TAKEN ON THE SLOWED-DOWN TEXTURE OF A WANG BING FILM.
industry, Wang quickly grew disillusioned; he prefers the freedom, creative possibilities and financial viability of shooting alone or with a barebones crew of three or four at most. (His films are not shown in the country except very recently in art contexts, but circulate as DVDs.) They are largely unscored, which he attributes to his “very, very low post-production budget.” The use of diegetic sound, with music filtering through only as a ringtone or on the radio, further helps to avoid any cheap sentimentality. This becomes especially apparent in Mrs. Fang (2017), which chronicles the last week in the life of a bedridden elderly woman with Alzheimer’s disease, her life ebbing away even as the camera looks on. Wang’s films are also, as a rule, extremely long. He first became known for the nine hour and 11 minute-long Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2002), which charts the decline of heavy industry and its effects on local families through gorgeous long takes that somehow never approach the timbre of ruin porn. Cinema is usually an exercise in contracting time, but it is further dilated in 15 Hours, which was commissioned for documenta 14 in 2017 and features a single 15-hour take of a garment processing factory, and Crude Oil (2008), a 14hour documentary about oil extraction. Watching a film of this length shifts the viewing paradigm, of course. In this, Wang’s work is analogous to other slow cinema, or art films like Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993) and Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010). But a better framework for understanding might be in the tradition of labor cinema. There’s a certain dignity accorded to work, especially of the repetitive, unglamorous, grinding kind that keeps global capitalism going, with attention not just to the end products but to the process of their making. It’s the antithesis of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 statement that “drama is life with the dull bits cut out.” Take the comparatively sprightly 92-minute Man with No Name (2010), which trails a silent hermit over the course of a year. His environment is desolate yet stunning through the seasons, all wheat, gold, and later, snow. We watch him gather wood and water, plant and harvest his patch of a field, mend a mud-walled abode, and cook in the small cave he calls home. Slowly, we realize that we are seeing an entire cycle of resource gathering and production, except that here it’s not capitalism, but subsistence.
Stills from Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2002), Crude Oil (2009), Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (2007). Left: a portrait of the filmmaker.
“WORDS LIKE WITNESS, IT’S NOT MY WAY OF THINKING. I THINK MORE IN A CINEMATIC WAY.”
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THE DANCING TRIPTYCH
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BY BRIDGET FOLEY PORTRAIT BY INEZ & VINOODH
GLOBE-SPANNING COLLABORATION WITH CHOREOGRAPHERS MADELINE HOLLANDER AND GU JIANI.
HERMÈS’S ARTISTIC DIRECTOR NADÈGE VANHEE-CYBULSKI TALKS US THROUGH HER RECENT,
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FASHION IS A PECULIAR DISCIPLINE, defined in equal measure by renewal and repetition. Its constant quest for newness occurs on an unforgiving seasonal schedule: creativity on demand, like it or not. Despite calls over the last several years to slow the excruciating pace, and some renegade behavior determined to do just that, for the most part the fashion calendar had remained constant for decades, anchored by the two runway seasons during which brands introduce the next retail season’s shiny new clothes. Then came COVID, the uber-disruptor. The mysterious airborne assailant hit in the West in February of last year, its arrival more or less simultaneous with Fall 2020, which is now considered within the fashion industry as the last normal season. Across fashion, presentation norms went out the window, as designers strove to come up with alternative ways of showing their collections. Confined to her apartment in Paris’s 9th arrondissement with her husband and baby daughter, Hermès’s artistic director Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski wondered how to connect with the brand’s global markets. For Spring, she produced a book to send to fashion editors and retailers who would otherwise have traveled to Paris. As Fall 2021 approached, VanheeCybulski felt the need for something more kinetic, something that would look forward to a mobile future, free of restraint. But under lockdown, the possibilities remained limited—or so she first thought. “It was like a nightmare,” Vanhee-Cybulski recalls during a video chat. “I had to stay home. I had to cook.” Not that the domestic life was so terrible, but Vanhee-Cybulski acknowledges that being a designer, particularly the artistic director at a storied house, affords certain privileges of which one typically takes ample advantage. “You have access, and you see a lot of beautiful things before you start a collection, right?” she says. This time however, “It was, ‘Where can I find inspiration in this vernacular? Where do I get it, between the kitchen and the hallway and my bedroom?’ It was not possible this time. So I had to find new ways.” That challenge produced an awakening of imagination. VanheeCybulski found it uplifting, and wasn’t just limited to her own reaction to the pandemic. Rather, in conversations with friends engaged in creative pursuits, she learned that many felt similarly motivated, a discovery she now applies more broadly to the human condition. “We have shown how we can be surprisingly resilient in terms of creativity. I think it has shown our humanity,” she says. Human resilience manifests in internal power. Hermès’s resources manifest in power of a different sort. Together, they led Vanhee-Cybulski to Triptych, a bold, ambitious concept. Hermès has a long, rich history of working with artists. This time, Vanhee-Cybulski felt the urge to seek collaboration on an artful piece; one that, in response to the physical restrictions of the pandemic, would focus on movement. Her heady, audacious idea was to develop a project with a strong dance component in celebration of the resilience of women. She commissioned two female choreographers, Madeline Hollander in New York and Gu Jiani in Shanghai, to each create a work featuring all women dancers. These dance pieces
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@HUADONG
The Shanghai leg of the Hermès FW21 Tripytch, choreographed by Gu Jiani.
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Two snaps from the New York leg of the FW21 runway show, choreographed by artist and Cultured “30 Under 35” alumnus Madeline Hollander.
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@SASHAARUTYUNOVA_4
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would bookend a full-scale fashion show, produced and staged in Paris. It would all occur live online, across the three cities and time zones. Given the intricate individual staging required in each locale, plus the overall coordination necessary to roll seamlessly from one city to the next, the risk-reward ratio was about equal—tremendous possibilities either way. Reward won. This past year, the very notion of “showing” their collections has been fraught for all designers, as they’ve been forced to come up with digital alternatives to the live show. It’s been a huge learning curve, and stressful to boot, so the inclination (for this critic, at least) is to tread lightly with criticism. That said, many of the resulting presentations, particularly numerous fashion videos, have been, at best, earnest, E-for-effort affairs. With Triptych, Vanhee-Cybulski achieved one of the year’s few genuinely compelling presentations. In fact, while one is loath to acknowledge positive subtexts to this pandemic nightmare (at least beyond reaffirmation of those most essential elements we didn’t realize how much we took for granted: health, family, friends, a sense of belonging and, yes, workplace normalcy), it has opened certain creative opportunities, and not only for the creatives themselves. Once upon a time (early 2020), most fashion shows were 12to 14-minute works which, even though filmed for digital posterity, were intended as one-time-only in-person events for limited audiences. The rare digital gems of the COVID era can be savored by millions of people at any time and repeatedly, like a Netflix favorite. Triptych merits multiple viewings. Vanhee-Cybulski says its genesis was about “ubiquity” and “gratitude, a certain sense of acknowledging the solidarity” between Hermès and its global customer base. Yet, first and foremost this was a seasonal fashion show. And in fashion shows, the clothes matter. Vanhee-Cybulski’s are beautiful, standing up to the bravado of the grand-scale presentation with a chic elegance that, from the runway, radiated both strength and serenity. Beyond that aura, Vanhee-Cybulski isn’t much one for tidy runway narratives that offer too narrow a view of women. “I don’t have one protagonist in mind. I don’t want to pigeonhole women,” she says. “So for me, it’s always interesting to start from a wardrobe.” For Fall, she wanted that wardrobe to express joy, the joy of getting dressed, of leaving the house with someplace to go, and represented that with her sets, three different interpretations of a specific, iconic shade of orange. It appeared in Triptych as dramatic theatrical curtains in New York and references to Hermès boxes in Paris and Shanghai. “It’s interesting to talk about something which is reassuring and that also has a promise of beauty, of joy. When you see an orange box, an orange bag,” Vanhee-Cybulski offers the famous luxury packaging, “you are smiling.” Indeed so, and her Hermès Fall collection offers much to smile about. Vanhee-Cybulski came of age as a designer while working for two masters of modernist chic: Martin Margiela (himself once creative director at Hermès) and, at Céline, Phoebe Philo. Her aesthetic philosophy shares with theirs the belief that high function is essential to compelling fashion, and not merely its occasional happy side effect. Here, Vanhee-Cybulski developed an impressive range of beautiful clothes for a sophisticated woman. One sub-theme: a continuation of the
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sensuous side she first explored for spring. She proclaimed that area her “risk zone,” and realized it for Fall in numerous alluring dresses and languid skirt looks, including those worn by Hollander’s New York dancers. As for Vanhee-Cybulski’s comfort zone, “it’s more about the blanket coat, the whole reassuring [feel] of the cashmere double-face, the gorgeous wool.” Such sumptuous beauties abound, with graceful movement added via dramatic fringing. Vanhee-Cybulski’s palette—mostly earth tones, with lively shots of pink and orange—makes for a dichotomy that goes beyond a seasonal whim. “It’s the collision of the Hermès world,” she says. “We talk about the force of the leather-making, the saddle-making, which is all those earthy, natural colors. And then you always have this silk, splashing and disturbing the vision just by its nature, because it is very restless.” Leather is the origin of Hermès and continues as the house’s defining feature, a fact that Vanhee-Cybulski celebrates in her ready-to-wear. Yet she is also increasingly mindful of changing views on leather usage. For Fall, she gave careful consideration to ensure that no application was gratuitous, whether in an exquisite outerwear piece or the banding on a fluid skirt. “We are a house of leather,” she says. “But we are quite conscious about the way we source, we work. So yes, leather is visible, but it is not at all something which is pouring out everywhere. It is an evolution. You have new behavior; you have new values.” She thus made “a conscious choice” to reduce the amount of leather clothing. “I don’t want to [eliminate it]. It’s not about this; it’s more about showing the excellence of that material.” The most overt example of that goal is evidenced in Triptych’s Shanghai section, during which Jiani’s dancers wore leather trousers with tops in Hermès’s tattersall check for their lyrical, athletic performance. VanheeCybulski’s goal: to show leather’s functionality beyond its stereotypical readyto-wear associations, such as “rockabilly and punk. We can dance in leather,” she says. An understatement, for sure. Jiani drew on traditional Chinese dance motifs in creating her piece, which was a wonder of acrobatic grace. VanheeCybulski had approached the choreographer specifically to add powerful punctuation to the three-part global event. Conversely, she wanted to work with Hollander, with whom she’d collaborated previously, to create anticipation, while capturing a sense of urban energy. Hollander played on the idea of walking in New York to conjure a sense of suspense. “We wanted to get the attention of people; we wanted to keep them on their toes,” Vanhee-Cybulski says. “We also wanted to build up a crescendo so that you would have this expectation [for the runway show]. It’s almost like a dream.” That expectation foreshadowed the Paris show, which in turn rolled seamlessly into Jiani’s portion. Vanhee-Cybulski was drawn to the idea of working with a Shanghai-based choreographer, because in the West we have such limited exposure to Chinese artists. “It was a big message of sharing,” she says. Once she studied Jiani’s work, she was transfixed. “I said, ‘This is so what we need.’ Dynamism. The theme of taking risks. The whole body language, the symbolism of the hands. I saw this as a very strong, positive message for everybody.” Not to mention that Jiani’s work just plain captivated its audience. As Vanhee-Cybulski puts it, “You know when it’s the end [of a performance], and you just don’t want it to end?” Which could also be said of Triptych as a whole.
PHOTO: GASPAR RUIZ LINDBERG.
An embroidered detail from the Paris FW21 runway show.
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P H O T O G R A P H Y B Y D AV I D B E N J A M I N S H E R R Y
SCR ATCHING AT T H E
ADOBES M O V I N G TO S A N TA F E , S H AW B O W M A N CONFRONTS THE HISTORY AND POLITICS OF THE CITY’S ARCHITECTURAL CHARM.
IN 2013, I JOINED WHAT proved to be a great hemorrhage of New Yorkers decamping to Los Angeles in search of the bourgeois-bohemian California dream. (I like to claim that I was among the vanguard of that particular hemorrhage, at least.) Like my fellow transplants, I yearned for adequate space and light so my fiddle-leaf fig could thrive and a cupboard stocked with Heath Ceramics, and LA really came through. Of course, I neglected to close the door behind me, and New Yorkers continued to pour in, driving up our rents and making it impossible to get a walk-in at Speranza, let alone Little Dom’s. The pandemic has only opened the floodgates wider, because those who have the luxury of working from anywhere might as well hunker down somewhere more pleasant. This theoretically applies to me, so I’ve upped
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the ante by moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico, the oldest and highest capital city in the country, and a place whose charming character is in no danger of being diluted by my SoCal sensibilities. After all, it’s mandated by law. Santa Fe has long opened its arms to the “creative class” and other lovers of beauty and history—you can probably even name a few— especially after its viability as a trade center was stunted by the rerouting of the railroads in the early 20th century (and the later decommissioning of Route 66) and cultural tourism emerged as a defining industry. Visitors were captivated by the charms of the prevailing adobe architecture, so city planners decided to double down on what set Santa Fe apart, instituting a series of standards in the 1950s to ensure consistency
and satisfy tourists’ appetites and expectations, thereby codifying the “Santa Fe style.” Existing structures that fit the bill were protected, but new constructions were also required to be built in the style, and some grand old buildings were radically retrofitted, most notably the previous state capitol. The full story of how this style took shape is a little more complicated, of course, and in examining how this “City Different,” as it calls itself, came to be so, I’ve also discovered some disquieting ways it’s not so different. Right before I moved here, I’d heard talk about a noticeable influx of Angelenos, which gave me pause. Was I a cliché? A scourge? But when I consulted Google on the phenomenon, I was pleased that the only trend piece I could find was published in 1991, by the AP no less. This
The School for Advanced Research, an example of Pueblo Revival architecture.
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The New Mexico Museum of Art is also built in the Pueblo Revival style.
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In 2013, I joined what proved to be a great hemorrhage of New Yorkers decamping to Los Angeles in search of the bourgeois-bohemian California dream. (I like to claim that I was among the vanguard of that particular hemorrhage, at least.)
led me to believe that I could possibly once again get in on the ground floor of a diaspora, at least in the eyes of the public record. But now that I’m here, I’ve gathered anecdotally that those Santa Feans whose arrival predated mine are already irked by the changing feel of the town, and the newcomers that they hold responsible. This cohort also includes a steady incursion from the east, with wealthy, mostly white Texans swarming over the state line in search of lower property taxes and ample space for their sprawling new constructions (often second or third homes), which is, without doing much research, what I assume Texans like. On the other hand, one might generalize that the affluent, also mostly white Angelenos now flocking to the city crave vintage, original detail, instead of that faux-dobe that others might be content with. Along with all those other authentic touches that are basically a crime to skimp on, even on the McMansion-ified outer margins of town: roughhewn latillas covering our ceilings and surrounding our properties (called “coyote fencing” in this context); quirky corner fireplaces; nichos to house our objets; and corbels wherever possible. But the terms “original” and “authentic” are often misleading, and Santa Fe style is a useful illustration of why. Essentially, Santa Fe style is both a description and a prescription of the vernacular expressed by local architects and builders, developed from the first pueblos up until 1957, when the style was effectively frozen in time and made law, largely through the efforts of influential local architect John Gaw Meem. This organic accretion of styles is what makes
Santa Fe style uniquely difficult to define, but I asked Santa Fe–based architectural historian and storyteller Rachel Preston Prinz to try anyway. She describes it as “a mishmash that includes indigenous architecture, Spanish architecture, Mexican period, and early American period architecture to 1957.” The sedimentary layers of Santa Fe’s architecture reflect the region’s history of successive jurisdictions: the pre-colonial period, the Spanish settlement, the brief interlude of restored indigenous rule after the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, Mexican independence in 1821, American conquest 25 years later and New Mexico statehood in 1912. Other styles and innovations, imported from Europe and elsewhere, made their way along the Santa Fe Trail and the eponymous railroad, especially in the years leading up to statehood. But Prinz laments that today’s Santa Fe style is often inaccurately conflated with Spanish Pueblo Revival (the two terms even share a Wikipedia page). While this is what we most often picture when we think of Santa Fe architecture, Territorial Revival really deserves to share top billing with Spanish Pueblo Revival. Because once you find out what the former is, you see it everywhere. When we moved into our house here, I noticed these little triangular pediments over each window, which I assumed were the lark of some 90s-era renovator because I associated that shape with neoclassicism, seemingly random and postmodern in this context. I fantasized about bringing the house back to its “original glory” by removing them, if we ever had the financial wherewithal to indulge in something so frankly unnecessary. I was also somewhat bummed out by the state capitol building that I was passing multiple times a day, thinking how boringly out of character it seemed. How misguided I was! Cursory research revealed my pediments and the capitol are classic examples of the Territorial style (and its revival). Though it shares many traits with Pueblo architecture (adobe construction, flat roofs), Territorial style emphasizes symmetry and simplicity and usually includes brick copings and the aforementioned neoclassical details that were fashionable during New Mexico’s territorial (pre-statehood) period, in stark contrast to the bulbous asymmetry, setbacks, and heavy wooden ornamentation that defines Spanish Pueblo Revival. I was comforted by the knowledge that neither the capitol nor my pediments were wanton aberrations, and in fact I now regard them fondly.
It’s also enlightening to take a peek at the city code, to see how the bureaucracy has kept up with the times with respect to enforcement of Santa Fe style. The official justification is “to preserve and protect the identity and character of Santa Fe, and enhance the business economy; and promote water conservation and efficiency through preserving natural areas.” It’s no accident that this style of architecture emerged in a drought-prone region with a yearly average of 325 sunny days and wide temperature variation. The thick mud walls, small windows and strategic positioning with respect to the sun made these structures extremely well-suited to the high-desert climate. If the environmental sensitivity dovetails with our current (hopefully permanent) focus on sustainability, it’s also just much easier to comply with commonsense energy-conservation tactics based on what the original stewards and inhabitants of this land knew long before Europeans arrived. But no matter how the city’s style is defined, it’s not too surprising that the arbiters of these aesthetic movements have also largely been affluent white transplants, lured to Santa Fe for many of the same reasons tourists and “internal expats” like me flock here today: light, fresh air and that Santa Fe style. It was this ilk who initially saw the economic value of preserving the uniform, unique aesthetic by mostly appropriating indigenous form factors and materials. So the trend continues and reveals one way Santa Fe isn’t unique: the drive to define as “authentic” whatever state the place was in when rich white folks arrived, and to wield money and power to pass and enforce rules, under the guise of preservation, to ensure that some “out-of-scale” affordable housing can’t pop up in the backyard, contributing to an urgent housing shortage here. Thankfully, I understand that the city government is currently grappling with how to accommodate more density without breaking character and becoming another Albuquerque or, God forbid, Denver. It’s not going to be easy, but they did figure it out in the pueblos, after all, where communal living was the norm. The city, as official policy, set out to dazzle out-of-state aesthetes and deep-pocketed empty nesters and it’s worked like a charm since well before New Mexico even was a state, for better and worse. But now that I’m here (and I do love it, by the way), let’s cool it a tiny bit with the charm and the change—the wait at La Choza is already too long.
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HERTOPIA
Still from Cauleen Smith’s short film Sojourner (2018).
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TEN ARTISTS PRESENTING FEMALE-CENTERED VISIONS OF A UTOPIAN FUTURE OR MYTHIC PAST. BY JANE URSULA HARRIS
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“In order to rise from its own ashes, a phoenix first must burn.” — O C T AV I A E . B U T L E R
Artists have long turned to the spiritual and mystical in times of crisis or amid objectionable conditions, seeking alternative understandings of reality. The Romantics responded to the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution by finding manifestations of the sublime in nature. The Symbolists rejected the rationalist worldview of the fin de siècle by retreating into dreams and myths. And in the aftermath of World War II, Abstract Expressionists plumbed the collective unconscious, exploring notions of the artist as shaman which Joseph Beuys would later fully embody. By the 1960s, with the rise of Pop and Conceptual art, spiritual expressions came to be regarded as out of step with the art of the dawning postmodern age. Feminist artists like Mary Beth Edelson and Judy Chicago learned this in the 1970s when their goddess-centered works were dismissed as essentialist and retrograde. Donna Haraway summed up this skeptical view in her 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” declaring, “I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess.” The recent spate of contemporary art exhibitions devoted to the spiritual and utopian suggests the tide has turned. In 2020 alone, there were several group shows that took up such themes, including “All of Them Witches” (Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles), “On the Spiritual Matter of Art” (MAXXI, Rome) and “Utopian Imagination” (Ford Foundation, New York), to name a few. None, however, have considered the significance of worldbuilding through a distinctly intersectional feminist lens. Of course, the voices of women—trans and cis—have been historically silenced: we’re only now discovering the likes of Hilma af Klint and Agnes Pelton, for example, and these were white women. At a moment when global warming, COVID-19, and white male supremacy threaten our very existence, the aggregate value of such matriarchal, sibylline revelations seems incalculably relevant. The 10 artists gathered here powerfully attest to this vitality. Exploring the age-old nexus of myth and fantasy, they traffic in magic, archetypes, time travel and metamorphosis. Like Octavia E. Butler, they regard science fiction as a force of agency and resistance, and invoke the Surrealist belief in imagination as a vehicle for liberation. The individual works chosen represent key moments in each artist’s career, exemplifying the revolutionary potential of speculative histories and futures alike. By blurring the lines between the ancient and alien, the utopian and monstrous, the real and fantastical, they offer decolonized, empathic and reparative views rooted in feminism. Together, these female-centric visions summon not just new and forgotten worlds, but ways of thinking that might actually save us. 182 culturedmag.com
CAULEEN SMITH (previous spread) Cauleen Smith was raised by two social workers, and her artistic worldview was shaped early on by an ethics of care, and later by her film studies and interests in Afrofuturist feminism. These influences culminate in the kaleidoscopic installation Give It or Leave It (2018), an intergenerational portrait of three Black mystics and the utopian worlds they built for others: musician Alice Coltrane and her Santa Monica ashram; sculptor Noah Purifoy and his Outdoor Desert Art Museum; and Rebecca Cox Jackson, who founded the first Black Shaker community in the mid-19th century in Philadelphia. Amid personal and sacral objects, repurposed props, embroidered text banners, mirror balls and custom wallpaper, the installation contains projections of several of her short films comprised of new and archival footage. The 22-minute work Sojourner (2018) is among the most striking. It follows 12 young women of color on a spiritual pilgrimage from Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers to Purifoy’s magical haven in Joshua Tree. As they move from site to site, they carry a set of orange banners emblazoned with one of Alice Coltrane’s cosmic revelations: “At dawn sit at the feet of action. At noon, be at the hand of might. At eventide, be so big that sky will learn sky.” In the poignant final scene, the bohemian band sits by the Pacific Ocean listening to the Combahee River Collective’s 1977 Black feminist manifesto crackle forth from a transistor radio. The spirit of Sojourner Truth seems to move through the gathering, echoing a message of solidarity and self-determination.
Allahyari used 3D modeling, 3D scanning and 3D printing to achieve this re-creation of the monstrous female/queer figure.
MOREHSHIN ALLAHYARI Morehshin Allahyari’s research-driven multimedia project She Who Sees the Unknown (2016–2019) conjures the ancient powers of six jinn, supernatural creatures from Islamic mythology and theology: Huma, Ya’jooj and Ma’jooj, Aisha Qandisha, the Laughing Snake and Kabous. Weaving together a universe of text, video, sculpture and performance, the project employs 21st-century methods like 3D printing and virtual reality to reactivate the mythic potential of these fearsome, shape-shifting spirits of Islamic literature and pre-Islamic legend—a far cry from the comical wish-granting genies of Disney’s Aladdin and I Dream of Jeannie. They are portals to worlds beyond the limits of Western knowledge. Allahyari drew upon historical and personal sources alike to limn their individual legends, from the 14thcentury illustrated manuscript Kitab al-Bulhan (Book of Wonders) to her grandmother’s stories of encountering jinn in the village bathhouse. Each jinn is personified as female, regardless of their traditional gender, reflecting the artist’s celebration of the monstrous feminine as a wellspring of otherness. Huma, a three-headed jinn often represented with horns and a tail, becomes in Allahyari’s multimedia retelling “She, Huma, who shatters the unjust subject.” Known for her supernatural ability to cause fever and madness in humans, Huma is reimagined as a harbinger of global warming. All the jinn in Allahyari’s feminist epic wield their mythic, monstrous powers to engender change through revelation, functioning, in the artist’s words, as “new beings and becomings” that can “challenge and change the power structures that exist in our political and social realities.”
Resurrecting the 1970s-era slogan “The Future Is Female” decades after it was all but forgotten, the Future Feminist Collective, founded in 2014, repurposed the lesbian separatist declaration for their own utopian aims. Their manifesto, The 13 Tenets of Future Feminism, emblazoned on 13 circular slabs of rose quartz (believed to purify and open the heart, and protect against environmental pollution), centers on the healing potential of archetypal feminine values such as empathy, intuition and collaboration. The collective, a group of artist-musicians comprised of Anohni, Bianca and Sierra Casady (of CocoRosie) and Johanna Constantine and Kembra Pfahler (of The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black), created the work as a series of guiding principles they believed were necessary correctives to the violence and degradation patriarchy has long wreaked. The first tenet calls upon age-old associations of women with nature, unabashedly declaring, “The Subjugation of Women and the Earth Is One and the Same.” In a similarly provocative nexus of associations, the fifth advises, “Relieve Men of Their Roles as Protectors and Predators,” reminding us that expressions of chivalry and femmephobia are two sides of the same coin. Perhaps most telling is the collective’s second tenet, “Future Feminism Requires the Participation of All People.” A clarion call for all genders—cis, trans and nonconforming—to join in, it summons the pluralist and generative nature of the feminine that lies within everyone.
FUTURE FEMINIST COLLECTIVE
The 13th of the 13 tenets of Future Feminism that were etched into rose-quartz slabs. culturedmag.com 183
Viva Ruiz began her Thank God for Abortion (TGFA) project in 2015, amidst the shuttering of abortion clinics and the rise of religious-right extremists intent on reversing Roe v. Wade. Her own “divinely guided” agenda sought to provoke those who presumed that no person of faith could be pro-abortion. Pushing back, she created the eponymous slogan, designed to be simultaneously joyous and unsettling. Initially printed and disseminated on T-shirts, the dissonant declaration soon spread to protest banners, posters, flags and “party looks.” Eventually, it found fruition in a giant pride parade float with theme music and choreographed dance. “My practice is basically rage and ecstasy,” she explains. “There’s a lot of screaming and a lot of dancing.” This radical insistence on celebration foregrounds the global intersectional nature of abortion politics and unshackles the procedure from shame. The child of devoutly Catholic Ecuadorian immigrants, Ruiz is both subversive and sincere when she repurposes church rituals, symbols and liturgical garments in TGFA exhibitions and performances, like the white dove that interlaces her slogan and the gold cross she wears around her neck. She sees her reclamation as a necessary act in a war against femicide. Until there is a world where abortion is free and accessible to all, Ruiz will carry forth her TGFA message, dressed all in white behind a customized riot shield, ready to do God’s work.
VIVA RUIZ
A still from Viva Ruiz’s music video “Thank God for Abortion Anthem.”
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Tuesday Smillie’s watercolor paintings on display at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum.
TUESDAY SMILLIE In her multimedia body of work Reflecting Light into The Unshadow (2012–2018), Tuesday Smillie has created a series of banners, textile collages, prints and watercolor paintings inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s groundbreaking 1969 sci-fi novel The Left Hand of Darkness. Smillie’s homage is a celebration of both the book’s proto-transfeminist leanings and the author’s acknowledgement of its shortcomings. Le Guin’s admission in two subsequent articles that her book’s use of male pronouns to connote gender neutrality and its simplistic vision of a post-racial society were problematic, an instance of autocritique rare among novelists. For Smillie, this willingness to model an evolution in one’s thinking was as radical as imagining a warless, sexually liberated, utopian future of androgynous beings. The artist’s replication in watercolor of the covers of 15 different editions of the book traces another kind of evolution, revealing the text’s changing and varied significance across time and culture. Working from used copies, her meticulous renderings of these reprints capture every stain, scratch and blemish with the same care that she devotes to the fonts and illustrations. The artist reminds us that in such flaws, like those of the text itself, one can glean revelations as meaningful as those intended by design—if we’re willing to look.
When in 2009 the multimedia artist Saya Woolfalk first invented the Empathics, her fictional female race of hybrid beings who merged their human forms with those of plants, she imagined them populating an idyllic world she had created in an earlier project, No Place (2006–2009). The latter, like most of her work, consisted of video, dance-based performance and figural sculptures in fantastic botanical costumes. A speculative universe of harmonious abundance, No Place was inspired by the syncretic culture of Brazil, with its colorful spectacles like the festival of Bumba Meu Boi. When Woolfalk concocted Lessons from the Institute of Empathy (2012), an installation featuring ethnographic displays, she imagined it a research institute where the Empathics could figure out how to patent their chimeric powers and share them with others. By the time she came up with ChimaTEK, a mock-corporation that marketed related products, in 2014, her work had begun to explore the thornier implications of commerce and technology: what monetizing her utopian vision of post-racial, post-gender bliss would look like. The infusion of her psychedelic folk aesthetic with augmented reality, virtual reality and 3D animation at this moment in her practice no doubt informed these critical thoughts. The 3-minute video Life Products by ChimaTEK (2014) crystallizes these concerns, taking the form of an advertisement for a hybridizing machine. Fueled by luminescent rocks, the fantastical instrument enables users to erase and remix their identities, all while expanding their consciousness. In the real-world context of capitalist exploitation, Woolfalk’s Empathics suddenly become purveyors of engineered identity, their halcyon promise of transhumanism now as dystopian as it once was curative. It’s a sibylline message with a silver lining, because Woolfalk has not given up on building a better future through empathy, and neither should we.
SAYA WOOLFALK Woolfalk’s Hybridization Machine highlights the constant manipulation of the human body through surgery.
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CHITRA GANESH Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 Herland is often called the first feminist sci-fi novel, but in fact it appeared 10 years after Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s utopian novella Sultana’s Dream. Both imagine matriarchal societies where women are in charge, but Hossain’s vision of Ladyland—where men are cordoned off from public life and women instead rule—was a much riskier act of imagination, given that she was a Bengali Muslim woman, born and raised in the segregated system of purdah. Chitra Ganesh’s visual homage to Hossain’s seminal text, an eponymously titled series of largescale black-and-white linocut prints made during 2018–2019, embodies this subversive revolutionary spirit. Bringing to life the book’s vibrant imagery of female empowerment and eco-futurism, Ganesh showcases in particular Hossain’s embrace of science and education as tools of liberation and prosperity. Individual prints like Oracle in the Baoli Water Storage and Sultana University depict flying cars, miraculous botany and solar-powered energy. As a queer artist inspired by Hindu mythology, Indian comic books, Bollywood and Qawwali music, among other sources, Ganesh mines the euphoric and prophetic potential of Hossain’s Ladyland for a contemporary audience. Like the female deities, superheroes and warriors that populate her own futuristic narratives, her illustrations are full of political subtext and mystical reverie. Speaking of “the enduring relevance of feminist utopian imaginaries” to create a more just world, she holds fast to the belief at the heart of Sultana’s Dream—that women can save the day.
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Illustrations from Chitra Ganesh’s ode to Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream.
Vanessa German’s Power Figures are talisman-like assemblages that invoke the tradition of nkisi, spirit-invested objects which were significant in the art and material culture of the central African kingdom of Kongo. Like nkisi, German’s Power Figures serve as magical receptacles for the spirits of ancestors, though she devotes many to the living as well as the dead. German creates these lavishly embellished works to honor and protect victims of racism—from tennis legends Serena and Venus Williams to those murdered by the police. Blackness and queerness are the deities she serves in these figural works, which she fashions from bric-a-brac—fake flowers, castoff sneakers, keys, fabric, broken instruments and cutlery—and always tops with a Black head. The monumental work Laquisha Washington Crosses the Day Aware (2018) turns Emanuel Gottlieb Leutz’s iconic 1851 painting Washington Crosses the Delaware into a tableau of a parade celebrating the feats of ordinary Black Americans. Black-masked figures in colonial costumes, made from Ankara cloth, crowd a 17-foot long boat festooned with quilts and sequined fabric. Under the command of Laquisha, who stands taller than the rest and cradles a baby beneath a bib of cotton balls, the figures who row the boat use crutches for paddles. Alluding to the legacy of slavery on which the myth of liberty and justice for all is paradoxically founded, German’s heroic figures also embody the healing powers of love and art, which allow her to conjure, as she told an interviewer in 2019, “the Black Body into freedom.”
VANESSA GERMAN Miracles and Glory Abound, seen at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa.
Like the many roles Juliana Huxtable plays IRL—DJ, artist, writer, fashion muse—the self-portraits she creates in her photographic work express a relationship to identity that is expansive and fluid. Her formative series Universal Crop Tops for All the Self Canonized Saints of Becoming (2015) marked the beginning of her playful manipulations of her body in an anarchic exploration of desire. The human-alien creatures she transforms herself into offer an otherworldly vision of self-presentation that reflects her identity as a Black trans woman. Inspired by the symbolism of Nuwaubianism, a cult that posits that Black people are divine and white people the soulless spawn of alien reptiles, her sci-fi-styled avatars are playful nods to the power of fantasy to transcend trauma. Untitled in the Rage (Nibiru Cataclysm) features the artist nude but for a lizard-like skin of turquoise-green paint, an ankle bracelet and a cascade of long yellow braids. Sitting on her knees in three-quarter view that emphasizes her backside as well as her contemplative face, she inhabits a painterly landscape marked by a prominent full moon. The super heroine of Untitled (Lil’ Marvel) crystallizes the artist’s embodiment of Black femme resistance. Standing in a black leotard against a starry night sky, yellow-ball-tied braids flying above her head, she summons her supernatural gifts with outstretched palms to become all that she is: “cyborg, cunt, priestess, witch, Nuwaubian princess,” as she put it in 2015, when her work was included in the New Museum Triennial. In Untitled in the Rage (Nibiru Cataclysm), one of her photographs on display at the New Museum, Huxtable revisions herself as a self-described “cyborg, cunt, priestess, witch, Nuwaubian princess.” This quote, btw, like many here, has been repeatedly published without any specific citation).
Allyson Mitchell’s Ladies Sasquatch explores sexuality, the female form and the lost art of using reclaimed textiles.
JULIANA HUXTABLE Celestial self-portrait of Juliana Huxtable.
ALLYSON MITCHELL Allyson Mitchell is a lesbian filmmaker and artist, with a maximalist sensibility that finds its truest expression in large-scale installations like Ladies Sasquatch (2006–2010). The work, which reminds us that utopias are ultimately communal and separatist by nature, imagines a world of female bigfoots. Playful yet subversive, it features six giant figures made of fake fur, taxidermy supplies, 1970s-era textiles and abandoned craft projects salvaged from thrift stores. The six giantesses, some of whom bend to flaunt genital swellings, while others stand tall to flaunt their physical prowess, gather ritualistically around a leanto fire lay. The presence of small, hot-pink she-beasts, a soundscape collage of music and nature sounds, and theatrical lighting that illuminates the otherwise darkened forest complete the bewitching scene. As with much of her work, Mitchell confronts stereotypes here, merging caricatures of the big, fat, hairy dyke with B-movie depictions of Sasquatch. The latter’s spiritual roots in ancient indigenous folklore lurks within their menacing faces, fangs and claws, a vision of decolonized queer bodies. Fearsome and untamed, her outsized monsters are above all manifestations of what the artist has deemed “Deep Lez,” a form of radical dyke politics she sums up as “part quilting bee, part public-relations campaign, and part Molotov cocktail.”
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THE DRE A
Buazizi & E la M LIFE O F
HAILING FRO GENDER M THE MEXICAN CITY OF HETERO -NONCONFORM ECATEPE NORMAT I N G C, YOU C R EA IV MUSIC A ITY AND VIOLEN TIVES CONFRON NG ND BODY -POSITIV CE THOUGH FASH T E EROTIC ION, ISM. By Photograph NAHUI GARCIA y By RIKK I MATSUM OTO
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Alejandro in Lola top and Anel skirt, matching Juri gloves Styling by Adrián Guevara Castro. Make up by Ana Paula Antuna. Creative Direction by Alejandro Montes.
When the flight attendant approached Buazizi, they could not understand how she recognized them so easily. The airport was desolate apart from a few murmurs and echoing footsteps. Wary of the stranger, the reggaeton performer glanced over and noticed a piece of paper in her hand with their
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name written in black bold letters. They suddenly realized it was time to depart. So, they grabbed the boarding pass from the flight attendant, returned their attention to their tour and walked toward the departure gate. When the dream ended, Buazizi was not about to catch a flight to perform across the country. In fact, their name was not Buazizi, but Fernando Ordoñez, a photographer who had been capturing Mexico City’s underground warehouseparty scene since 2016, while imagining a career in reggaeton. With the assistance of their partner, DJ Guapis, they now began sketching ideas for a photo shoot and preparing their musical debut. If Buazizi was going to be real, if this was not just a dream but a premonition, what would the character look like? It turned out, they would dress like a stray cat, wear multiple capes and use lots of lip gloss. In 2019 their musical career had officially begun. For Buazizi and fashion designer Alejandro
Montes, two young creatives from the Mexican city of Ecatepec, the boundary between the world of dreams and the waking world—between desire and action—is permeable. A municipality of 1.5 million people in the sprawl of the Mexico City metropolitan area, Ecatepec is marked by poverty and is one of most dangerous areas in the country, where more than 1,000 women have been murdered since 2012. Through music and fashion, these two artists challenge the rigidity of the gender binary imposed on them by a heteronormative society that tries to dictate who they should be and what they should desire. Although they do not identify with the term queer, they experiment with gender pronouns and the plurality of the self. They remain firm in their artistic purpose and use their creativity on the battlefield of the so-called real world. Like Buazizi with music, Montes, the creator of the clothing brand Ela, took a circuitous route to fashion. In 2011, at the age of 18, she had
taken the admissions test to the National Autonomous University of Mexico, although she was already disenchanted with the prospect of pursuing an academic degree and a nineto-five job. What she wanted from school was community, life experience, to meet people with similar interests, hang out on the lawn of Ciudad Universitaria and enrich her understanding of the world that way. In August of that same year, she received a rejection letter. So, she entered a vocational school specializing in patternmaking. There her classmates were not students in their early twenties but rather women in their forties who treated Montes as an equal. It took her one hour—two buses and five subway stations— to get to school, but the journey was worth it. Going to class was like going to a slumber party where women brought sweet bread and gossiped amongst each other. The collective support that she experienced in the classroom made her realize that fashion design could become her profession, an avenue for intellectual and creative exploration. She began visualizing and sketching, presenting a fully developed clothing line as her final project. Through rejection, Ela was born. In 2019 Buazizi released their first two singles, “Momento’’ and “No pares.” Shifting back and forth between hypnotically pounding and melodic rhythms, these songs explore queer eroticism through reggaeton. In “Momento,” for example, Buazizi asks their partner whether it is the right moment to make a move, while they’re dancing perreo (a grinding dance style associated with the genre)—consensual sensuality on the dance floor. The music video for “No pares,” on the other hand, portrays a sexual fantasy, a group of sex workers partying in the middle of the street. The camera catches glimpses of male passersby staring at the women, who are kissing each other, caressing one another and walking confidently around the neighborhood of Doctores. Although celebratory and amusing, these fastpaced scenes capture the unsettling feeling that femme-presenting individuals experience in the street, trapped by the hypersexualization of the male gaze and the threat of femicide. The video gives visibility to the attraction that cisgender men feel toward transgender women, which in Mexico and other parts of the world is simultaneously erotic and taboo. Similarly, Fruit Tree—Ela’s first collection, launched in 2018—reevaluates the multiplicity of erotic desire. Montes designed each garment with a specific person in mind, giving them names of friends such as Erika, Mitzy and Tosh. The collection ranges from miniskirts with slits on the side, thongs with metallic hoops, and see-through crop tops—all without a predetermined gender in mind. These clothes instill in the wearer a positive
body-image, a whole-hearted embrace of the self. They reveal bits and pieces of the body in ways that defy the expectations (while acknowledging the inevitability) of undesired onlookers: some of them include embroidered sexually provocative silhouettes. Fruit Tree, in other words, is a direct response to the reality that most women and non-gender-conforming individuals experience in Mexico City and its surroundings. When her sister leaves home, for example, Montes tells her to keep her taser in the front of her backpack. During a phone call, Buazizi and Montes emphasize their shared inspiration in gender politics, nightlife and the city’s sometimes hostile landscape. “People have told me that listening to music makes them feel safe,” Buazizi says, “especially when walking in the streets alone.” But they refuse to be intimidated; the dream world of the city is there to be navigated. “I always
Through music and fashion, these two artists challenge the rigidity of the gender binary imposed on them by a heteronormative society that tries to dictate who they should be and what they should desire. tell my friends,” Montes says, “that as long as they have their phone, charger, driver’s license, passport, headphones and cash, then they are ready to step outside.” Buazizi does not write songs with a fixed idea in mind. Instead, they merge their dreams with politically potent real-life situations—instances of racism, classism, gender-based hate crimes and police brutality. The outcome is a dystopian representation of the life of the city. They manage their career with a powerful conviction. They do not work with anyone who exhibits a misogynistic, homophobic or transphobic attitude. Currently, Buazizi is producing a new EP for which they’ve tapped a range of collaborators: Chilean DJ Paul Marmota, who has previously worked with performers like La Zowi, Yung Beef and Bad Gyal; Colombian Gothic reggaeton performer Skellita and the Mexico-based queer performer LoMaasBello. The new songs will explore dreamier themes— nightlife, hotels, magic spells and rituals.
For Montes, the nighttime, more specifically the parties that occur at night, are the ultimate escape—the nirvana, the therapy session, the dream no one wants to end. In March, Ela presented Fruit Tree II, a continuation of the first collection. That is how the label operates, weaving together former ideas that are then reworked and reimagined as an exercise for growth. While Fruit Tree I focused on celebrating the diversity of bodies, Fruit Tree II takes a step further. It seeks to deconstruct the idealization of bodies by giving priority to asymmetrical patterns: the skirts and tops that once revealed a person’s sexual essence now wrap, mold and give new meaning to the body. Montes used recycled materials from the previous collection, such as mesh, cotton and spandex that could stretch and, therefore, alter the physical appearance of the wearer. “Like oranges inside a sack of fruit,” she says. In compliance with COVID-19 regulations, Ela is launching a virtual showroom to celebrate the Fruit Tree II collection. The showroom features an avatar, created by graphic designer and artist Oswaldo Erreve, acting as a model walking down a catwalk for an invisible international audience. Montes hopes that by interacting with the avatar, people outside of Mexico can become acquainted with the brand’s central message: to question our preferences, vulnerabilities and beliefs through clothing. Even as their efforts are bearing fruit, artists like Buazizi and Montes face numerous obstacles. This is one reason why the censorship of queer communities online should be worrisome, especially when the work of artists like Buazizi and Montes—who have been shadow banned from platforms like Instagram—is at stake. Without access to virtual platforms, artists outside advanced capitalist economies are bound to be marginalized. They cannot depend on social-media networks which replicate systems of oppression; they need communities that uplift, consume and support their work. Buazizi did not plan a career in the music industry, and Montes did not intend to be a fashion designer. Both of them possessed the desire to explore these pathways—sometimes in secret and other times shared with loyal confidants— but their living situation told them otherwise. The probability of earning a living or achieving success appeared minimal. Life had to speak to them through hidden messages, presenting them with dreams masked as revelations and triumphs disguised as rejections. Everyone dreams— at night, with their eyes closed, with their eyes opened, during a car ride, just before the alarm goes off. But maybe you have to be a little crazy to reject the conditions of your reality and bring your dreams to life.
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