A LOT HAS CHANGED IN MIAMI since the arrival of Art Basel two decades ago. The city, which I called home for many years, has witnessed an influx of new creatives, the reinvention of its neighborhoods, and its fair share of headlines. But some things never change. Over the next few days, amid Miami’s busiest week, I hope you have the chance to breathe in the ocean air, sip a Cuban coffee, and soak up a much-needed dose of vitamin D. I also hope you’ll take an afternoon to leave the fair floor and explore the city’s institutions and galleries. These are the forces that keep Miami’s art scene buzzing all year round.
In the following pages, we highlight the best of what’s on view around the city, and sit down with figures shaping how we eat, drink, and see art here. There’s a deep dive with artist Vanessa Raw—courtesy of fearless curator and muse Destinee Ross-Sutton— whose work is the focus of a new show at the Rubell Museum. Culinary powerhouse Mario Carbone gives us a sneak peek at his second Miami address. We also spotlight two long-standing satellite fairs—as well as a brand-new one—that continue to introduce rising talents to the city’s creative ecosystem.
But that’s not all. We couldn’t resist bringing a little bit of New York to Miami—so this issue’s cover story is dedicated to one artist who’s leaving his mark on Manhattan. Lucien Smith is a household name for most art lovers, but for CULTURED’s Art Basel Miami issue, he tries something new. This winter, the artist will reopen FOOD, the iconic artist-run restaurant founded by Carol Goodden, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Tina Girouard in 1971. “If I can provide a space for [artists] that doesn’t feel soul-sucking, but also provides them with some resources, I think it can be a sustainable business,” Smith tells writer Rachel Corbett of the 80-plus artists he plans to hire as restaurant staff.
You’ll also meet a group of 30 artists—the members of our ninth annual Young Artists list—who are cutting a bold path through our uncertain moment. This fall, I was thrilled to announce that MZ Wallace will be providing one of these 30 makers with an unrestricted $30,000 grant. This initiative marks the second year that the list provides not only recognition, but also meaningful financial support.
I hope you’ll carry some of the indomitable creativity and energy represented in these pages with you into 2025.
See you in Miami.
32
MEET THE GALLERIST DUO FIGHTING FOR UKRAINE FROM MIAMI
The couple behind one of the city’s hottest new galleries is bringing their mission-oriented curation to this year’s Art Week.
34 SIX MIND-EXPANDING PRESENTATIONS TO SEEK OUT AT DESIGN MIAMI
These creators push materials as far as they can go.
36
MIAMI’S NEWEST CULINARY HOT SPOT TOUCHES DOWN
This December, Mario Carbone opens the doors of his latest enoteca -inspired eatery.
36
GIMME SHELTER
Raisonné gallery debuts a restored version of Raymond Camus’s influential Marabout House in Miami.
38
VANESSA RAW’S GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS
Ahead of the British painter’s debut U.S. solo exhibition at Miami’s Rubell Museum, she spoke to Destinee Ross-Sutton about her year of firsts.
40
THE MORE, THE MERRIER
These are the satellite fairs worth your time this week.
40 TALK OF THE TOWN
Make sure to catch these extracurricular happenings off the fair circuit.
42
THE ART DIET
Miami’s art scene is going full tilt, with a host of local icons and boundary-pushing newcomers imbuing the city with color, emotion, and intrigue.
44
FOOD FOR THE SOUL
Before the doors opened and the plaster dried, Lucien Smith brought CULTURED into his new restaurant, sharing his vision for the revival of FOOD.
46 A CULT ARTISTS’ HANGOUT GETS A NEW LIFE IN MANHATTAN
Lucien Smith is building a distinctly non-commercial, communal space for artists (and the people who find them interesting) to hang out.
49
YOUNG ARTISTS 2024
The 30 artists on CULTURED ’s ninth annual Young Artists list are bursting with idiosyncrasy, curiosity, and gumption.
Lucien Smith in New York.
Photography by Jeremy Liebman
Sarah G. Harrelson Founder and Editor-in-Chief @sarahgharrelson
Meet the Gallerist Duo Fighting for Ukraine from Miami
THE COUPLE BEHIND ONE OF THE CITY’S HOTTEST NEW GALLERIES IS BRINGING THEIR MISSIONORIENTED CURATION TO THIS YEAR’S ART WEEK.
BY JACOBA URIST
ABOVE: Julia and Max Voloshyn in Miami at the gallery’s “Haunted I” presentation, 2024.
IF NOT FOR MIAMI ART WEEK, Julia and Max Voloshyn, the founders of the city’s buzziest new art gallery, would be in a war zone a world away.
The couple—who founded Kyiv’s Voloshyn Gallery in 2016—came to Miami three years ago with their daughter (now 4) to exhibit at NADA and Untitled Art. The family ended up catching Covid and postponing their return home, which led to their opening a prescient pop-up exhibition, “The Memory on Her Face,” featuring Ukrainian artists responding to the 2014 Russian invasion of Donbas. They never left.
By February 2022, Russia had launched yet another brutal invasion of their homeland, and the Voloshyns became full-time Miami residents. “We still maintain our programming in Kyiv,” says Max—a Herculean feat that involves balancing safety precautions and limited resources to manage exhibitions remotely with their team back home. When Russia first attacked Ukraine, the couple closed their space for over a year—converting it into a bomb shelter that housed artists and gallery employees during the harsh winter months. “The U.S., as a country built by immigrants, has a deep and interconnected history with Ukrainians,” says Julia. “In our time here, we have met so many individuals whose grandparents or great-grandparents were Ukrainian. Now, [they] feel a renewed connection to the culture and share in the country’s ongoing tragedy.”
Today, Voloshyn’s Allapattah outpost features a program of Ukrainian and Eastern European artists,
calling attention not just to the attempted erasure of the Ukrainian way of life, but also the plundering of their cultural identity. “Ukrainian artists received a significant wave of attention when the full-scale invasion began,” says Julia, noting that it has waned over time. “The crisis in Ukraine is far from resolved, and Ukrainian artists continue to create works that reflect their lived experiences, the trauma of war, and the resilience of people.”
Keeping the flame of attention alive has become the gallery’s objective—one it’s furthered on the art fair circuit, from the Armory Show and Liste Art Fair Basel to Felix Art Fair, Arco Madrid, and Independent. “Russia’s attempts to appropriate, erase, and rewrite the cultural narrative of Ukraine are well-documented,” Julia asserts. “This cultural theft has left Ukrainian artists facing a dual struggle—not only to survive and create amidst the ongoing conflict, but also to ensure their history and contributions are accurately represented.” The gallery isn’t “just about art,” she adds—it’s a space of resistance and cultural preservation. Ukrainian artists “need a steady platform for their voices.”
This month, Voloshyn will present “The Radial Bone,” a solo exhibition of painting, graphics, and sculptural installations by artist Nikita Kadan, who will be traveling from Ukraine to Miami for the occasion. “This is more than an art exhibition,” echoes Max. “It’s a dialogue about cultural violence, and how artists respond to the violence that permeates their world.”
SIX MIND-EXPANDING PRESENTATIONS TO SEEK OUT AT DESIGN MIAMI
THESE DESIGNERS AND MAKERS PUSH MATERIALS AS FAR AS THEY CAN GO, REVIVE ANCIENT CRAFT TRADITIONS, AND MAKE OUR SURROUNDINGS A WHOLE LOT MORE INTERESTING.
BY LEE CARTER
EACH DECEMBER, DESIGN MIAMI serves as a welcome respite from the frenzy of Miami Art Week. Of the 20 fairs scattered across the city, it may be the only one with art that collectors can—at least in theory—use.
This spirit of expansiveness and generosity inspired Curatorial Director Glenn Adamson’s choice of “Blue Sky” as this year’s theme. Adamson, a leading design and craft expert, told CULTURED that he landed on the all-encompassing concept to celebrate the 19-year-old fair’s “history as an important platform for the 21stcentury avant-garde.” He sees design as “an experimental, risk-taking, and ultimately optimistic venture” where “some of the boldest leaps of imagination and innovation are created under one shared sky.”
Design Miami’s latest edition returns to Pride Park, across the street from the Miami Beach Convention Center, after a momentous year. The organization launched a new Los Angeles edition in May, followed by activations in Basel and Paris. Now, more than 45 international galleries are slated to show at its flagship event, which runs from Dec. 3 through 8.
With offerings ranging from an emu-egg-studded cabinet to an ethereal canopy bed that looks like the brainchild of Ernesto Neto and Gustav Klimt, Design Miami embodies the notion that for ambitious makers, the (blue) sky is the limit. To get a taste of the range of creative visions on offer, here are six presentations at the fair to seek out.
Southern Guild
Yanxiong Lin, Last Dance Bronze Chair, 2024.
Charles Burnand Gallery
London-based Charles Burnand Gallery’s booth, titled “Haptic Horizons,” imagines a future where design objects push the boundaries of form and craftsmanship while remaining “profoundly tactile,” in the words of the gallery’s founder, Simon Stewart. Examples include the provocatively titled, cast-bronze Last Dance Bronze Chair, 2024, by Yanxiong Lin; Studio Furthermore’s Diode Dining Table, 2024, made from recycled aluminum car wheels; and the uncanny curved wood compositions of Heechan Kim (a finalist for the 2024 Loewe Foundation Craft Prize), informed by the art of canoe-building.
Æquō
Mumbai gallery Æqu ’s presentation is inspired by the concept of global humanity. For its second Design Miami outing, the gallery will present a unique blend of traditional Indian craftsmanship and contemporary design. Each featured work adheres to a philosophy of balance, in which both designer and artisans share credit. The hollowed proportions of French designer Valériane Lazard’s Ajanta daybed and chair, for instance, take their cues from the 2nd-century Buddhist cave temples of central India and are hand-carved by craftsmen in Bangalore.
The Cape Town and Los Angeles–based gallery Southern Guild returns to Design Miami with an array of contemporary ceramics by 12 African artists who can lay claim to the ancient material’s modern resurgence. Zizipho Poswa will exhibit sculptures celebrating African womanhood—in particular the practice of umthwalo (the Xhosa word for “load”), in which women transport heavy items on their head— while Andile Dyalvane has embellished his exuberant clay sculptures with cow hair, grass, and leather to conjure Xhosa spiritual healers. “Vessels, sculptures, seating, tables, lights—the possibilities for ceramics are wide open,” cofounder Trevyn McGowan tells CULTURED, “representing an energetic and ancestral lifeline for the artists.”
Victoria Yakusha
Ukrainian artist Victoria Yakusha, who splits her time between Kyiv and Antwerp, returns to headline Design Miami’s Curio program, more focused displays inspired by cabinets of curiosity. In the new collection, she explores Ukraine’s Polissia region, home to dense forests awash in moss. Each piece of furniture conveys a unique geometry and tactility, echoing the natural world. Dark green upholstery, for instance, evokes moss-covered stones and beadwork represents morning dew.
Andile Dyalvane, Igqirha, 2024.
Valériane Lazard’s Ajanta daybed.
Victoria Yakusha, Grun Armchair, 2024.
The Future Perfect
With forward motion built into its very name, the Future Perfect—which has outposts in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco—will introduce nearly 100 new works from more than 20 artists and designers this year. Six of them are presenting in Miami for the first time, says gallery
founder David Alhadeff. They include Vikram Goyal, a New Delhi–based engineer turned artist whose elegant designs draw on artisanal metalwork techniques and Indian craft history, and Bahamian-American artist Anina Major, who crafts ceramic pieces plaited to resemble basketry.
Co lin King’s Design Mia mi Shopping List
Ahead of the fair, CULTURED’s Design Editor-at-Large Colin King leafed through the extensive offerings to find a handful of items sure to be out the door as soon as it opens. Here, find the pieces worth fighting the crowd for.
SARAH MYERSCOUGH
GALLERY
I love the delicate patterns and unusual shapes that George William Bell is able to achieve in glass, and the golden gradients and bulbous form of this vessel for Sarah Myerscough Gallery make the piece particularly enigmatic.
George William Bell, Abstract Form Study.
GALERIE PATRICK SEGUIN
Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert
Sydney-based gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert is a Design Miami first-timer. “Our curation challenged artists to present highly refined designs or objets d’art through their unique Australian vernacular,” the gallery’s eponymous director told CULTURED. For David Tate, who was raised on a nature reserve and emu breeding ground, the result is an upright cabinet evocatively festooned with ethically sourced emu eggs and feathers.
The beauty of this 1960 floor lamp by French midcentury icon Jean Royère is in the delicacy of the metal strands that support its seven identical paper shades, arranged at different heights for a simple yet dynamic look. I particularly appreciate the way the thin tendrils are bunched in the center, then splay out at the bottom to form a stand. Gestural design at its finest.
LAMB GALLERY
In the simplicity of their shapes, these sofas and ottomans from Lucía Echavarría’s Magnetic Midnight maison are perfect for an informal lounge area at a beach home. Pairing the ticking stripe on the cushions and a bengal stripe around the bases also creates a clever visual effect.
JCRD DESIGN
Lina Bo Bardi’s furniture never disappoints. These stools, which date from 1979–82 and were sourced by JCRD Design, are a great example of Brazilian modernism’s expression in furniture. Formed by combining strips of tropical hardwood into planar elements, they cut a strong silhouette—though admittedly, are not the most comfortable to sit on.
Cabinet by David Tate.
Vikram Goyal, Tropical Chased Foyer Table.
Lina Bo Bardi, SESC stool, 1979–82.
Magnetic Midnight by Lucía Echavarría sofas and ottomans, 2023.
Jean Royère, Persian floor lamp, 1960.
Miami’s Newest Culinary Hot Spot Touches Down
This December, Mario Carbone opens the doors of his latest Miami eatery in Coconut Grove.
“Miami’s food scene captures the essence of the city itself—its blend of cultures, vibrancy, and relentless energy,” says Mario Carbone. In the decade since he opened his celebrity-filled namesake eatery in Greenwich Village, the Queens-born chef has increasingly turned his attention to Florida’s cultural capital. In 2021, Carbone— along with the co-founders of his luxury hospitality brand Major Food Group—opened Miami’s Carbone outpost to rave reviews, with its buzzy sister establishment Contessa following suit the next year.
In mid-December, the legendary chef and his cohort will welcome a new project into the fold. Carbone Vino, inspired by the warm atmosphere and family-style menus of the classic Italian enoteca, will open in Coconut Grove this season, boasting one of the largest wine collections in all of Miami. But where its predecessors offer unparalleled decadence, Vino hits a slightly cozier note: “Our goal is for Vino Coconut Grove to embody the essence of the greatest neighborhood restaurant,” says Carbone.
In honor of the restaurant’s grand opening, Vino’s founder sat down with CULTURED for a chat about the inspiration behind Miami’s next culinary hot spot.
Major Food Group has been around for 13 years. What’s your biggest takeaway?
The importance of creating something unique for every location. Each restaurant requires us to immerse ourselves in the local culture, understand the physical space, and adapt the design accordingly. The biggest surprise is how profoundly our vision has resonated with people—not just in Miami, but across all of our locations.
GIMME SHELTER
Debbie August’s Raisonné gallery will debut a restored version of Raymond Camus’s influential Marabout House during Miami Art Week.
“MIAMI’S FOOD SCENE CAPTURES THE ESSENCE OF THE CITY ITSELF—ITS BLEND OF CULTURES, VIBRANCY, AND RELENTLESS ENERGY.” MARIO CARBONE
How has your relationship to Miami evolved since opening Carbone in 2021 and Contessa in 2022?
Since the reception of our first Miami outpost, Carbone, we’ve seen how open the city is to innovative, luxury hospitality. This openness has allowed us to form genuine connections with our guests, whose support has only deepened our bond with the city. Miami has experienced a remarkable surge in hospitality concepts, and it’s rewarding to play a role in that culinary evolution.
For Raisonné gallery founder Debbie August, few structures better represent the contemporary potential of historic designs than the Marabout House. Conceived by Raymond Camus in the late ’50s—in the self-taught legend Jean Prouvé’s studio—as an easy-to-erect, easy-to-transport shelter requiring just four men, 13 pieces of aluminum, and one hour to construct, the prototype has come to represent the alluring concept of doing more with less.
This year, Raisonné will present a restored version of the structure during Art Week—complete with complementary midcentury furniture designed by the likes of Prouvé, Charlotte Perriand, and Pierre Jeanneret. To mark the occasion, August tells CULTURED why she chose this moment to bring the project to Miami, for its first showing outside of France.
What made you choose to present the Marabout House during Miami Art Week?
The Marabout House’s history and design speak to the fusion of art, innovation, and function. Originally created by Raymond Camus and built in the workshops of Jean Prouvé in 1958, the design was a response to the need for quickly deployable, lightweight housing during the Algerian War. The structure’s ease of assembly reflects
What can Carbone lovers look forward to at Vino?
This new space is truly special—we found it almost two years ago, and it just felt right. Inside, Vino channels the legendary enotecas of Italy: destinations with extraordinary wine and cuisine that are essential to the fabric of their cities. Every detail—the vintage Ginori pattern we drew upon for the menu, the curated interiors, the playlist— works in harmony to create a space that feels transportive and authentic.
today’s push for efficient and adaptable housing design. Revisiting Camus’s design allows viewers to examine how past solutions can inspire future architecture. How did you approach the restoration process for the structure?
The details of its original design were preserved, and we added carefully curated interior elements that enhance that historical context. Camus’s original design was honored in this reconstruction of the second prototype of the Marabout House and the space will be filled with furniture by renowned designers like Jean Prouvé, Charlotte Perriand, and Pierre Jeanneret.
How does this piece fit into Camus’s larger body of work? Camus, an early leader in prefabricated housing, designed this military structure for efficiency and versatility— qualities that defined much of his work. We also see a clear connection between Camus and Jean Prouvé, who admired the design. Prouvé was known for his commitment to lightweight, demountable, modular structures; the Marabout House was an obvious influence on his 13-sided 1969 Total filling station designs. It became an integral reference in Prouvé’s teaching.
To schedule a private visit of the Marabout House from Dec. 2–7, please email info@raisonnenewyork.com.
Raymond Camus’s Marabout House.
Mario Carbone at Vino Carbone in Miami.
Makers in Place: Kohler Celebrates 50 Years of Arts/Industry
Curated by Michelle Grabner for Kohler Co., this vibrant exhibition features the work of artists who have participated in the acclaimed Arts/Industry residency program, a collaboration between Kohler Co. and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.
DECEMBER 2–7 | NOON–10PM 3946 N MIAMI AVE MIAMI, FL 33127
Closed for a private event on December 5 | 5–9PM
KohlerCompany.com/Arts
Vanessa
Raw’s
Garden of Earthly Delights
AHEAD OF THE BRITISH PAINTER’S DEBUT U.S. SOLO EXHIBITION AT MIAMI’S RUBELL MUSEUM, SHE SAT DOWN WITH CURATOR— AND, IN THIS CASE, MUSE— DESTINEE ROSS-SUTTON TO REFLECT ON A YEAR OF FIRSTS. BY DESTINEE ROSS-SUTTON
IN VANESSA RAW’S PAINTINGS, nude women recline in idyllic surroundings, intertwined with nature and each other. The tableaux, free from any objectifying gaze, conjure a sublime pleasure: There’s a sense that whatever happens in the painter’s world is pure.
I first encountered the British-born artist’s work at Frieze London in 2023, where she had her breakthrough debut, selected by Tracey Emin as part of the fair’s Artist-to-Artist section. Raw’s gift for blending sensuality with lush, Edenic settings drew me in immediately (I even managed to acquire a work from the presentation for myself).
My experience with Raw’s work was so affecting that I included the artist—an Olympic triathlete in a past life—in “Unapologetic WomXn,” a group show focused on expressions of female sexuality that I curated during this year’s Venice Biennale. Soon after, she asked me to pose for two new works— Storm in the Morning Light, 2024, and This is how the light gets through, 2024—the second of which was created during a residency at the Rubell Museum in Miami. Both pieces will be on view as part of Raw’s first institutional show and U.S. solo, opening at the museum in time for Art Basel Miami, and will travel to the institution’s arm in DC in 2026.
To mark the opening of the eponymous exhibition, I had a conversation with Raw—conveniently tacked on to the end of our second posing session in Miami this fall—about how far she has come, the inspiration-sparking rituals that fuel her practice, and why she brings the women from her life into her work.
Destinee Ross-Sutton: This is your second successful career—you spent 11 years as a professional triathlete competing internationally. Does that have any impact on your work as an artist now?
Vanessa Raw: Maybe. Triathlons taught me how to keep pushing and searching for answers every day—which I was always doing because I was always injured. The physicality of it all crosses over. I’ve always had this need to test what I am capable of; I truly don’t think any of us knows. I still run as often as I can. It keeps me sane, inspires me, brings me back to a flow state if I lose it, and reminds me of the beauty of nature.
DRS: Mera Rubell said that, upon visiting your studio, she and her husband [Don] were blown away by your ambition and discipline. They were thrilled to provide you with a residency to support you in creating this solo presentation—and your largest work to date [This is how the light gets through, 2024]. You created such a compelling body of work in a short period of time. What do you hope people [take away from] this show?
VR: A feeling of connection, presence, and love—and perhaps a feeling of belonging. Other than that, I’m not sure I want to direct anyone in any particular way. I try to paint as intuitively as possible, so often the elements are multifaceted in their meaning—sometimes in ways I’m not conscious of.
DRS: What are your influences?
VR: Women in the Picture by Catherine McCormack was one catalyst for this work. Centering women’s pleasure is so necessary—historically women have been the object
rather than the subject, and it’s their pain and the violence toward them that’s been centered. Another big influence is nature. In Margate, I tend to run in the middle of the day as a break. I absorb as much of the colors and textures as I can before I return for a second session in the studio. There’s also a need to experience myself fully—to work through memories and transform them into something positive and in my control. I want to feel connected in an often disconnected world.
DRS: How do you center yourself in light of all the attention you’ve gotten?
VR: Well, I don’t feel like anything has changed, really. I’m painting every day and my critical brain is as strong as ever. Maybe when you’re this critical, other peoples’ opinions don’t affect you much. It’s great that people like the work, but it feels more like a relief at the moment. As corny as it sounds, I’m painting intuitively, so I can’t necessarily take the credit. As long as I’m doing that, anything good in the painting is coming through me rather than from me. Any crappy bits are probably my ego resisting the painting.
DRS: Margate seems to play a substantial role in how your career has progressed.
VR: It’s been amazing for me. I’m so grateful to have Tracey [Raw’s studio is in Tracey Emin’s TKE Studios] and Carl Freedman Gallery. I absorb bits of the landscape on my runs—sometimes whole scenes—and the women [in my work] are mostly artist friends from Margate.
DRS: I discovered your work at Frieze London in 2023, where Mera and Don Rubell first acquired it. That, combined with the experience of seeing Tracey’s work at the same fair, was the catalyst to curate “Unapologetic WomXn: The Dream Is the Truth” during Venice this year. I’m grateful I was able to include your work Nothing to Lose in that show.
VR: The exhibition looked amazing! Each artist was so carefully selected; it was an honor to be part of it. I was busy making my first solo show for Carl Freedman Gallery [“On Earth We Weren’t Meant to Stay”] and it was right after working on the show at the Rubell Museum, so I had to miss it. You have posed for many artists—Amoako Boafo, Kehinde Wiley, Tim Okamura, and others. And you posed for two of the works in my Rubell show. Why did you agree to pose for me?
DRS: There are a few reasons. First, the idea of catharsis—finding joy in a challenge. I had an almost instant feeling of nerves and discomfort, so I decided to see that as something to embrace. I like that your subjects exist in their own universe that almost doesn’t rely on a viewer. Their focus is on each other; they enjoy this Eden-like natural intimacy within the work. There’s power in the work’s softness, which encourages the same thing within my own femininity. I relaxed into it. I imagined I was with my friends at the beach. It was a beautiful experience for me—I found something to reinforce the idea that nudity isn’t just sexual—and I found power in that vulnerability. Despite how contentious a topic female sexuality and women’s bodies are, your work maintains a sense of purity. What are you imagining as you create these worlds?
VR: As a woman painting women, I’m automatically creating work for a female gaze. I imagine and situate my subjects in places of safety, and I genuinely feel love for the women I paint. I hope that shines through. When I use found imagery, there’s a transformation process from male to female gaze, which transforms the feeling associated with the image. I take back the power.
Destinee Ross-Sutton and Raw in the artist’s Margate studio.
Vanessa Raw in the studio.
EAST
MEETS WEST
Untitled Art expands its roster this year with the largest contingent of Asian participants ever recorded in Miami.
In just over a decade, Untitled Art has become a staple of Miami Art Week. This year, from Dec. 3 to 8, the fair will welcome more than 170 participants, its largest slate of exhibitors yet.
The 2024 program features the largest contingent of Asian exhibitors ever seen during Miami Art Week—a reflection of this year’s “East Meets West” focus. “This theme goes beyond appreciating diverse cultures,” Executive Director Clara Andrade tells CULTURED. “It highlights our shared responsibility to cultivate a deeper understanding of the global community in which our fair plays a vital role.”
Also returning is the fair’s Nest section, which offers subsidized booths to mitigate the cost barriers of fair participation. “Miami’s diversity serves as the perfect
An Art Fair With Accessibility at Its Core
The Open Invitational debuts in Miami, highlighting artists with physical and mental disabilities.
NADA Turns 22 in Its Birthplace
The New Art Dealers Alliance has spent two decades growing alongside its flourishing home base.
For its 22nd edition this year, the New Art Dealers Alliance welcomes over 150 voices in contemporary art to Miami, including more than 50 first-time exhibitors.
Galleries and art spaces from Buenos Aires to Pittsburgh will be represented at the fair—taking place from Dec. 3 to 7—with newcomers like Zurich’s Blue Velvet, Paris’s Cadet Capela, and Los Angeles’s Sea View.
NADA’s growth over the last two decades has mirrored the cosmopolitan influence of its hometown’s flourishing creative landscape. “This year’s fair is set to be a game-changer,” Executive Director Heather Hubbs tells CULTURED. “Jasmine [Wahi, this year’s Curated Spotlight curator] is spotlighting bold, powerful voices from the Global South. Plus, [we’re] leveling up with an expanded NADA Presents program that will keep the energy buzzing throughout the entire fair.”
—GRACE WAICHLER
platform to celebrate multiculturalism and set the stage for dialogue, continuing the fair’s mission of cultivating a sustainable art ecosystem,” Andrade concludes. “Asian artists and their diaspora have been crucial in supporting the current discussion around diversity and inclusion.” —SOPHIE LEE
Co-founded by gallerist David Fierman and arts patron Ross McCalla of the Outsider Institute, the Open Invitational centers artists with mental and physical disabilities. “The art world, maybe the entire world, is currently lacking in authenticity, human connection, and a fresh perspective,” says Fierman, “something our artists and organizers effortlessly possess.”
Open from Dec. 2 to 8 at the Design District’s Palm Court Event Space, the Open Invitational will highlight organizations with home bases from New York to Oakland. Local support for the initiative is courtesy of Craig Robins, the Miami Design District, and the nonprofit Bookleggers Library.
“We need some positive stories about the art world in the press, not just doom and gloom about speculative busts and galleries closing,” adds Fierman. “At a time of heightening personal divisions and a mega-corporate art world, we bring openness and collaboration.”
—GRACE WAICHLER
CARTIER’S HOLY TRINITY
This Miami Art Week, Cartier presents “Trinity100,” an immersive exhibition that charts the iconic collection’s story. First designed in 1924 by Louis Cartier as a ring with three intertwined bands of platinum, rose gold, and yellow gold, Trinity has become synonymous with understated elegance. Among other facets of the brand’s history, the Miami Design District pop-up will spotlight poet and playwright Jean Cocteau, who famously wore double-stacked Trinity pinky rings, and trace Cartier’s fascination with harmonious triads. To cap it off, the French house provides a sneak peek at a new collection that infuses Trinity’s timeless allure with animal motifs. Tigers, panthers, and snakes—what a trio.
23 NE 41st Street | Dec. 4–8
FENDI TAPS A RISING BRITISH DESIGNER FOR A VISIONARY COLLECTION
This winter, Fendi will unveil an exclusive collaboration with British furniture designer Lewis Kemmenoe at the annual Design Miami fair. Showcasing a series of collectible wares, the line blends Kemmenoe’s avant-garde aesthetic with Fendi’s attention to detail, alchemizing materials like timber, stone, and polished metal. Select pieces will also be displayed in the Italian house’s Design District shop windows, alongside a very special edition of the brand’s Peekaboo bag.
19th Street and Convention Center Drive | Dec. 3–4
Sketch by Lewis Kemmenoe.
Billy Bolds, Untitled, 2023.
Alfredo Dufour, Bee, 2024.
The Icons of Icons “Trinity100” room.
Cross Lypka, arke's clamor, 2023.
The Art Diet
THIS WEEK AND BEYOND, MIAMI’S ART SCENE IS GOING FULL TILT, WITH A HOST OF LOCAL ICONS AND BOUNDARY-PUSHING NEWCOMERS IMBUING THE CITY WITH COLOR, EMOTION, AND INTRIGUE—FROM JOSÉ PARLÁ’S SWEEPING HOMAGES TO LUCY BULL’S HYPNOTIC UNIVERSES.
BY GIULIANA BRIDA
“UNVEILING MASTERS IN THE CITY”
Where: Opera Gallery Miami
When: Dec. 3, 2024–Jan. 2, 2025
Why It’s Worth a Look: Celebrating Opera Gallery’s 30th anniversary, this show nods to Miami’s unique role in the global art world and the gallery’s steadfast dedication to South Florida’s creative community. From Art Miami’s early influence in the 1990s to Art Basel’s game-changing arrival, the presentation captures Miami’s transformation into a cross-cultural nexus where art reshapes, connects, and redefines.
Know Before You Go: Featuring an impressive lineup of 31 artists, from Andy Warhol and Alex Katz to George Condo and Mickalene Thomas, the exhibition is a dynamic salute to Miami’s rise as a cultural capital and Opera Gallery’s 22year love affair with the city.
“PSYCHOMACHIA” BY AUSTIN LEE
Where: Presented by Jeffrey Deitch at 35 NE 40th Street
When: Dec. 3–8, 2024
Why It’s Worth a Look: Since his arrival in the art scene in the 2010s, New York–based artist Austin Lee has blurred the lines between technology and emotion. Inspired by the 14thcentury frescoes of Giotto, his new solo presentation draws viewers into an allegorical battle of virtue and vice—a concept that feels especially relevant in today’s hyperconnected world.
Know Before You Go: Lee’s Garden Love, 2024, and other pieces merge VR-based drawing with airbrush on canvas, turning a Miami Design District white cube into a dreamlike exploration of human psychology.
“PHANTOM LIMB” BY GONÇALO
PRETO
Where: Andrew Reed Gallery
When: Through Jan. 4, 2025
Why It’s Worth a Look: Portuguese artist Gonçalo Preto’s work delves into the depths of human consciousness, using light, focus, and subtle tension. Like traces of half-remembered dreams, his large oil canvases offer glimpses into the ephemeral nature of memory and perception.
Know Before You Go: A highlight of the exhibit, An Abundance of Caution, 2024, showcases Preto’s mastery of soft value transitions. A ghostly, brainlike form with bulging eyes hovers on a pale canvas, its tendrils fading into abstraction.
“IN DIALOGUE” BY ULLA VON BRANDENBURG
Where: The Bass Museum of Art
When: Through July 6, 2025
Why It’s Worth a Look: Two great minds meet in this Bass Museum show juxtaposing Ulla von Brandenburg’s polychrome universe with a colossal mural from the late Lebanese-American artist Etel Adnan. Known for reviving forgotten moments and cultural quirks, von Brandenburg blends film, textiles, and sound into an all-encompassing experience, harmonizing with Adnan’s 14-by-21-foot fresco in a lively duet of color and form.
Know Before You Go: Drawing on the spirit of abstract icons like Sonia Delaunay, the show explores how shapes and spaces tell stories, bridging generations and geographies.
“HOMECOMING” BY JOSÉ PARLÁ
Where: Pérez Art Museum Miami
When: Through July 6, 2025
Why It’s Worth a Look: This highly anticipated exhibition marks the Miami native’s return to the canvas after a harrowing, Covidinduced coma in 2021. It features a new series alongside a site-specific mural that brings his tactile style to life. Each piece showcases the artist’s signature layering of paint, plaster, and collage, capturing the transient history of a city through brushstrokes that echo local narratives of displacement and adaptation.
Know Before You Go: One of the museum’s galleries is reimagined as Parlá’s studio, complete with paint-covered tables, vinyl records spinning, and archival memorabilia tracing his Cuban roots.
“THE GARDEN OF FORKING PATHS” BY LUCY BULL EDDIE MARTINEZ
Where: Institute of Contemporary Art Miami
When: Dec. 3, 2024–March 30, 2025
Why It’s Worth a Look: Lucy Bull has worldbuilding down to an art. Her latest works— some over 10 feet wide—pulse with a cosmic energy that feels both intimate and endless. The 16 canvases on view here are portals into a place where color and form blur reality, inviting viewers to see, then see again.
Know Before You Go: The ICA Miami’s stairwell becomes part of Bull’s vision through a new site-specific commission curated by Gean Moreno, transforming the space into an immersive journey through the artist’s imagination.
GONÇALO
LUCY BULL, 4:28, 2024. PHOTOGRAPHY BY ELON SCHOENHOLZ, AND COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY
AUSTIN LEE, JOY, 2023. PHOTOGRAPHY BY ADAM REICH, AND COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND JEFFREY DEITCH
JOSÉ PARLÁ, AMERICAN MINDSCAPE, 2024. PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND PARLÁ STUDIOS
FOOD FOR THE ARTIST’S SOUL
IN NEW YORK, LUCIEN SMITH IS BUILDING A DISTINCTLY NON-COMMERCIAL, COMMUNAL SPACE FOR ARTISTS (AND THE PEOPLE WHO FIND THEM INTERESTING) TO HANG OUT. BY
FIFTY YEARS AGO, New York was in decay and on the brink of bankruptcy. The stock market crashed, Robert Moses was carving up the Bronx, property values were plummeting, and large swaths of the city were vacant. Artists flocked to cheap live-work lofts in SoHo and a prescient group of art dealers opened galleries in the neighborhood. But there were no restaurants and few places to hang out. In 1971, three avant-garde artists—Gordon Matta-Clark, his then-partner Carol Goodden, and Tina Girouard—opened FOOD. Offering such delicacies as hard-boiled eggs stuffed with live shrimp and recipes improvised on the spot by the artist staff, it was as much an early exercise in relational aesthetics as it was a restaurant.
Today, the problems facing New York are at once entirely different and the same. The city is now home to a wealth of restaurants, but many are either prohibitively expensive or part of corporate chains. The housing market is booming, but skyrocketing rents are squeezing artists out. As a result, the yearning for uncommercialized creative space feels as urgent today as it did 50 years ago.
“I AM MAKING ART. IT JUST HAPPENS TO LOOK AND FEEL LIKE A RESTAURANT.”
— LUCIEN SMITH
Matta-Clark’s estate, says of the creative landscape today. “The fact is, when you look at how art movements evolve, what’s so important are spaces that are not purely capitalist spaces.”
Smith consulted with Goodden (the only living founder of the original FOOD) and Fiore on how to preserve the restaurant’s original spirit while tailoring it to the needs of artists (and diners) today. Goodden showed Smith a photograph of Matta-Clark and his friend, the composer Philip Glass, wearing dust masks while the original FOOD was under construction. Smith wanted to be a part of “carrying that torch” by helping construct his own restaurant. “We just went in there and started doing it; it was built by us,” Smith says.
Smith, along with his handyman Yakov and his business partner Laurence Chandler, the former manager of Kanye West’s Yeezy brand, are in the process of renovating a former Chinatown dumpling spot, where rent is about $5,000 a month, with the hopes of opening in time for the December holidays. Like Matta-Clark’s “anarchitecture,” in which the artist cut open and sliced up buildings, Smith says the FOOD relaunch “revolves around demo design.”
The menu, however, will be a little different. For lunch, Smith will offer salads, sandwiches, and two types of stew or curry, one with meat and one vegetarian. “There will be things in there that are, like, questionably edible, you know, to have some fun,” Smith adds.
As inspiration, he points to one of Matta-Clark’s specialties: “Matta Bones” involved the staff cleaning just-eaten meat off of the bones and then stringing them into necklaces for diners. “I’m still trying to figure out what the hell Used Car Soup was,” he says of another dish.
RACHEL CORBETT
That’s why the artist Lucien Smith is relaunching FOOD for the 21st century. “I know from living in New York that there’s nowhere I can go where, like, something might be fucked up. It’s just all so serious,” he says.
“There’s this sense that if you’re not participating in the commercial art world in some way, then you’re not a legitimate artist,” Jessamyn Fiore, the co-director of
Just as the original FOOD was staffed largely by artists, Smith plans to hire a rotating cast of around 80 employees, mostly artists, who can sign up for shifts based on their availability. “If I can provide a space for them that doesn’t feel soul-sucking, like a normal job, but also provides them with some resources, I think it can be a sustainable business,” Smith says. “The goals are: Are the people who work here having fun? Do they feel like they can contribute to and change it?”
Smith knows all too well the ways that capitalist forces can corrupt artists’ livelihoods. When he was in his early 20s, collectors began flipping his paintings at auction for increasingly astronomical prices. In 2014, a landscape he painted from Winnie the Pooh as part of his senior thesis at Cooper Union sold for $389,000—over 38 times its price just three years earlier. But before long, the speculators who had manipulated that skyrocketing trajectory decided they were done with the artist—and his record-setting painting became almost impossible to resell.
These days, Smith says, he’s not making much art. Instead, he’s focusing on his nonprofit Serving the People, which hosts discussion groups around the world, and, of course, FOOD. If the restaurant works out, Smith is already looking toward expanding to other cities, like London or Milan. Then he changes his mind about his career. “I am making art,” he says. “It just happens to look and feel like a restaurant.”
Gordon Matta-Clark, Clockshower, 1973.
Gordon Matta-Clark, Carol Goodden, and Tina Girouard shot outside FOOD by Richard Landry, 1971.
EAT UP
THIS WINTER, LUCIEN SMITH WILL REVIVE TINA GIROUARD, CAROL GOODDEN, AND GORDON MATTA-CLARK’S LEGENDARY ARTIST HANGOUT, FOOD, IN NEW YORK’S CHINATOWN NEIGHBORHOOD. BEFORE THE DOORS OPENED AND THE PLASTER DRIED, SMITH BROUGHT CULTURED INTO THE GUTTED SPACE, SHARING HIS VISION FOR WHAT WOULD BECOME THE PROJECT’S SECOND ITERATION. PHOTOGRAPHY BY JEREMY LIEBMAN STYLING BY JESSICA WILLIS
“THE FIRST WORK OF GORDON Matta-Clark’s I saw was at MoMA. I was in my second year at Cooper Union, feeling frustrated, even thinking about transferring to architecture. But then I thought of Gordon—how he was a trained architect making art. I found a kind of comfort in that and decided to stay in art school.
Fast-forward to a few years ago. I was struggling with Serving the People, the foundation I’d been running for about a decade. It was finally picking up momentum, but at the time, I felt like I was running out of steam. I had this idea for an autonomous organization, but I panicked and started to think about creating a physical space for it, which went against everything the foundation stood for. I started considering alternative art spaces because the last thing New York needed was another gallery. I wanted to create a place that could operate daily, not just draw people for shows or openings. I first looked into Claes Oldenburg’s The Store, and from there, I rediscovered Gordon’s FOOD, his collaboration with Carol Goodden and Tina Girouard.
My good friend Laurence Chandler was working with Yeezy at the time, and I’d heard rumors that Ye was thinking of starting a restaurant. I told Laurence, ‘You should check out FOOD. If you guys do it, I’ll quit being an artist right now and come work for you!’ We laughed about it, but when Laurence left Yeezy, I messaged him, like, ‘Should we just relaunch FOOD?’
What was genius about the original FOOD was how these incredibly talented, creative people didn’t care about the culinary world’s expectations. Carol, Gordon, Tina, and all the other collaborators seemed more interested in just having a local spot where there wasn’t one, creating a place of their own for neighboring artists. They used FOOD as another medium. Art always has a separation—not everyone can purchase or live with it, so there’s always this degree of distance. Food, on the other hand, is something you can literally digest. I’m excited to provide that experience for people who may not be into art—or not into food as art. I’m curious to see how people will respond. I’d love for FOOD to be a kind of slapstick, hilarious melting pot where people can create memories, good or bad.
Everywhere I look, things are just beautifully packaged and designed. If this restaurant can be anything, I hope it’s imperfect.”—LUCIEN SMITH
Lucien Smith wears a top and skirt by Marc Jacobs. Shoes are artist’s own.
Lucien wears a jacket, shirt, pants, and tie by Balenciaga and hat from Alias Costumes Rental. Shoes are artist’s own.
Lucien wears a jacket and pants by Bottega Veneta, hat from Alias Costumes Rental, and vintage glasses from Azyr Specs. Shoes and shirt are artist’s own.
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ANA CL UDIA ALMEIDA
HANNAH BEERMAN
DRAKE CARR
PEGGY CHIANG
JUNE CANEDO DE SOUZA
LEYLA FAYE
COVEY GONG
CAMERON A. GRANGER
RAVEN HALFMOON
DAN HERSCHLEIN
MIKA HORIBUCHI
DAVID L. JOHNSON
PAIGE K. B.
LE’ANDRA LESEUR
CHARLES MASON III
ISABELLE FRANCES MCGUIRE
KATE MEISSNER
JEFFREY MERIS
SHALA MILLER
LOUIS OSMOSIS
There’s been a lot of hand-wringing lately about how contemporary art has lost its edge. You may have heard that the field is in a state of aimlessness. It’s uninspired. It’s backward-looking.
The 30 artists on CULTURED’s ninth annual Young Artists list offer a powerful rejoinder to that idea. Their work is bursting with idiosyncrasy, curiosity, and gumption—all necessary ingredients for great art.
On the surface, this group has little in common beyond national affiliation (all live or work in the United States), age (all are 35 or under), and vocation. They work in media ranging from robotics to photography to textiles, and draw from sources of inspiration as disparate as video games, family heirlooms, and the New York subway system. They are based up and down the East and West Coast, as well as a few places in between (two of them live in Oklahoma).
Look a little closer, however, and you’ll find some telling convergences. A number of artists on this list are interested in kindred themes, like the allure and trap of domesticity, the mind-expanding potential of science fiction, and the simplistic and sometimes distorted histories we are taught.
It is also notable that this class of Young Artists is, to some extent, a product of the pandemic. Many of them spent formative years—whether in art school or as freshly hatched professionals—in lockdown. At home in Chicago, Isabelle Frances McGuire taught themself to code and changed the trajectory of their work in the process; in Baltimore, Charles Mason III painted and drew his way through isolation, refining his artistic language along the way.
We have only just begun to consider how this chapter has and will continue to shape the rising generation of artists. But it is fair to say that, after the crucible of the past few years, they have come out the other side alert and even emboldened. Now, the ball is in the art world’s court to make space for them to thrive.
—JULIA HALPERIN
CATALINA OUYANG
MALCOLM PEACOCK
RYAN PRECIADO
EMIL SANDS
BROOKLIN SOUMAHORO
MICHELLE UCKOTTER
OLIVIA VIGO
KRISTIN WALSH
FAYE WEI WEI
QUALEASHA WOOD
Le’Andra LeSeur, There is no movement without rhythm, 2021.
Photography by Joseph Robert Krauss
EMIL SANDS
26 NEW YORK | BY RACHEL
CORBETT
At 26, Emil Sands observes a stricter schedule than many type As twice his age. Each day, he wakes up at 6 a.m. and reads for half an hour before settling in to write until 11:30 a.m. Then, he exercises and eats lunch before heading to his painting studio to work for the second half of the day. At 8 p.m. he goes home, eats dinner, does a crossword puzzle, and falls asleep.
“I’m a very ambitious person,” Sands reasons. He has to be: Scribner has contracted him to write a memoir about his experience growing up with cerebral palsy, and he’s simultaneously finishing a new body of work for an exhibition opening at Kasmin Gallery in January.
Art and writing are, for Sands, intimately connected. As his disability began to define his life—in ways he deeply resented—the artist developed a fascination with bodies, beauty, and the aesthetics of normality. He went on to
study classics at Cambridge before earning a master’s degree in ancient art. All of these experiences are interwoven in the book.
“It’s kind of an extension of my personal story,” he says. The memoir explores his interest in “the idea of success and normality being really closely tied together, and a world that I was left out of. Then it’s punctuated with different looks at classical sculpture, the idea of the body beautiful, the idea of masculinity, marbles and muscle, all wrapped up into one.”
Sands, who didn’t formally study art until he moved to the U.S. from the U.K. three years ago on a postgrad fellowship at Yale, is now at work on paintings that consider bodies in space. With these figures, it’s “all about the curves, the way the hand hits your hip, the way that lifts up a bit of skin,” he says, “and what the light does to the shadows and the curves.”
Photography by Daniel Santos
“THESE PAINTINGS ARE ALL ABOUT THE CURVES, THE WAY THE HAND HITS YOUR HIP, THE WAY THAT LIFTS UP A BIT OF SKIN, AND WHAT THE LIGHT DOES TO THE SHADOWS AND THE CURVES.”
JUNE CANEDO DE SOUZA
The work of June Canedo de Souza deals in the evidence of embodied experience, from the routines and rituals that form the scaffoldings of day-to-day domesticity to the cumulative degradation of life that is perpetrated by bureaucracy. Such interrogations—which have occupied the New York–based multidisciplinary artist’s practice across several decades and mediums (in the 2010s she worked as a professional photographer, and in the 2020s she completed an MFA with a focus on painting)—return again and again to the often-overlooked toils of women, especially what she calls “the performative aspects of domestic labor and care work.”
Canedo de Souza’s art, even when dealing in the seemingly mundane, exposes the lasting imprints of the politics of gender, class, and ethnonationalism on our bodies and in our memories.
Dessert Table, 2024, a painting on canvas and cheesecloth that she made this past summer while in residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, conjures the feel of the fabrics,
particularly crocheted and imitation lace, that the women in her family “draped over sofas, tables, windows, and walls” to mark celebrations. The suite of new paintings it belongs to, wrought in oil, acrylic, pastel, charcoal, and clay, scrutinizes the aspirational ostentatiousness of American birthday parties and the elusive promise of assimilation through consumption.
Another series from last year, exhibited as her thesis at Bard and titled “All the Ways I Hold My Baby,” processes the intuitive embraces of early postpartum, which the artist works through in paintings like Night Feed, 2023, whose soft motion lines rock back and forth.
It is these gestures, carried through generations and across borders, that she seeks out in materials and on surfaces, asking where embodied experience leaves its trace. But a surface is only the outermost layer. Canedo de Souza’s work seems also to wonder, wistfully, how we might contend with the impossibility of expressing the wholeness of experience, the eternal partialness of memory.
35 NEW YORK | BY ISABEL FLOWER
KRISTIN WALSH
35 NEW YORK | BY MAX LAKIN
Kristin Walsh’s sculptures exist somewhere between sleek fantasy and a bad trip. They take the shape of industrial apparatuses extruded through a fever dream—gears, engines, carburetors, street lamps—their contours smoothed into clean ambiguity. They often appear turned on their head or installed on the wrong side, as if experiencing a psychic breakdown.
Walsh fabricates everything in her Yonkers studio, which you might be surprised by given their perfect finishes— any trace of the artist’s hand is buffed away, aligning each work with the dehumanized reality of modern mass production while also subverting it. Walsh cuts, welds, and polishes her enigmatic sculptures from sheet and tube metal—a grueling, labor-intensive process that simultaneously refers to and ignores the entire history of industrialized efficiency—making it both beautiful and dysfunctional. By yanking public infrastructure from its daily context, Walsh is making visible the barely hidden systems that govern our movements, laying bare the outsize agency we allow gleaming scrap to exert on our lives.
Walsh’s work has been included in group exhibitions at Helena Anrather, Lisson, and other taste-making Manhattan galleries. Her solo debut came this September at Petzel’s Uptown space: a curdled paean to the city’s hostile subway architecture—turnstile gates, defensive
engines, and other mechanical nightmares.
A native of Emerald Isle, North Carolina, Walsh isn’t self-taught—but in many ways, her practice is closer to vocational trade than fine art production, more machinist than Modigliani. “I’ve always made
LOUIS OSMOSIS
28 NEW YORK | BY TRAVIS DIEHL
If Louis Osmosis didn’t exist, he would invent himself. As his chosen name implies, the artist, born and raised in New York, seems to absorb our rich, concentrated world with glee, reformulating high and low culture alike as streetwise assemblies of arch art history and sidewalk trash. When I visit his basement studio in Chinatown, which he shares with a fellow Cooper Union alum, he’s wearing a T-shirt designed by Pope.L and Supreme, depicting one of the late artist’s “crawls” across New York.
“Redundancy is the thing I tend to go back to,” Osmosis tells me, especially “the Warholian flavor of it.” Through spritely wordplay and citation, his work tries to “compound inertness onto a thing so much that it starts to implode.”
Nearby stands part of his gruesome take on the nuclear (and “nuked”) family: a quartet of mannequins pasted with stringy red viscera like the notorious plastinated corpses of “Body Worlds.” “The prompt I gave myself was, What if
objects,” she says. “I’m less interested in art than I am in things.” She spends a lot of time trawling “car guy” forums. “You figure out a way to get there, but maybe it’s not the easiest way. I would love to have a union guy come by the studio one day and show me some tricks.”
Alibaba manufactured mannequins where the colorways were ‘rot,’ ‘decay,’ and ‘cadaver’?” It’s Charles Ray’s postmodern classicism, a rancid homage.
Osmosis’s vibe is, if not the starving artist, then the subsisting one. Dangling from the low ceiling is one of the spiraling assemblages he calls “Centrifugal Pickles,” oversized flypaper channeling Isa Genzken’s magpie taste for the shiny and lenticular. The sculpture appeared recently in Kapp Kapp’s Armory Show booth, surrounded by the artist’s paintings on drywall slabs depicting wriggling cartoon maggots and flies speaking in carrion puns. Splotchy auroras of drink rings, rendered in rainbow hues, cover the backgrounds. “The prompt I gave myself was, What if black mold decided to go pop?” You’d get the musty walls and boozy uninhibitedness of Osmosis’s studio.
“THE PROMPT I GAVE MYSELF WAS, WHAT IF ALIBABA MANUFACTURED MANNEQUINS WHERE THE COLORWAYS WERE ‘ROT,’ ‘DECAY,’ AND ‘CADAVER’? ”
Kristin Walsh, “The working end” (Installation View), Petzel, 2024. Photography by Sebastian Bach, and courtesy of the artist and Petzel
grab poles, toxic fume–belching gas
Portrait photography by Devlin Claro; Artwork photography courtesy of the artist and Kapp Kapp
MIKA HORIBUCHI
CHICAGO | BY MAX LAKIN
“When I was younger, I learned to draw by copying images—essentially without even realizing it,” Mika Horibuchi tells me from her Chicago studio. “That’s a pretty universal starting point. The inclination to imitate is natural.”
Horibuchi’s paintings extend the biological imperative for mimicry toward its conceptual limit. Her delicate watercolors of pretty landscapes and flower still lifes are, in truth, oil reproductions of photographs of delicate watercolors of pretty landscapes and flower still lifes, painted by her grandmother. Horibuchi’s versions pan out to reveal the trick, including the linen backing. “There’s a blunt and transparent approach to it all,” the artist says. “My intention is to put artifice onto the surface. To reveal the deception. To create space for new meaning.”
Like Vija Celmins and Rudolf Stingel, Horibuchi is interested in the act of seeing. The artist’s compositions make plain the suspension of disbelief all art asks us to exercise—what she calls “the willingness toward magical thinking.” Her work attempts to pinpoint where a fiction begins, and where it falters.
“Copying to me is a form of translation,” the artist says. “Even simply looking at something, there’s always distance there. With copying, I’m interested in the multiple stages of translation, sometimes mistranslation of a source, and how representations of representations can become originals.” Her investigations look toward the goal of creating a reactive spiral—something that begins to copy or reference itself. As for imitating her grandmother’s watercolors? “They don’t really get easier for me,” she says, “which I think is a good thing.”
OLIVIA VIGO
26 NEW YORK | BY
RACHEL CORBETT
Olivia Vigo grew up going to 4-H and helping out her beekeeper father in their Northern California agricultural community. She learned to weld at a young age, developing what she calls a “mentality of doing everything yourself.” It makes sense that she went on to study industrial design and found her passion in utilitarian objects: shelving, storage containers, old car parts.
Having moved around a lot as a teenager, Vigo, now 26, is particularly attuned to the emotional roles functional
SHALA MILLER
30 NEW YORK BY
DANIELLE JACKSON
Shala Miller just wants to get a handle on it. Through video, photographs, sculpture, and poetry, Miller attempts to understand their big feelings, primal drives, and shocking interpersonal experiences. Take, for example, the photograph Likeness Unidentified, 2022, a broken bust in which the artist’s naked torso holds an inscrutable pose—either self-pleasure or selfprotection. Or video works like Mrs. Lovely and Mourning Chorus, both 2021, where fictitious characters played by Miller, or the artist as themself, sing of devastating hurts.
As a painfully shy child in Cleveland, Ohio, who sang in two local youth choirs, Miller secretly dreamed of a career as a performer but lacked the confidence to audition for solo spots. When their mother received a digital video camera as a retirement gift, Miller discovered a tool that would finally help them open up. At 13, they began making self-portraits and obsessively compiling
have this drive to add a domestic motif.”
an archive of their parents’ lives. Soon, with guidance from their older sister, they downloaded a simple photo-editing software and began experimenting with placing text on top of images. Inspired by a community of other kids who shared pictures from their lives on Blogspot and Flickr, Miller saw image-making as their way to perform.
For the artist, who also sings original compositions under the name Freddie June, voice is the purest form of expression. “I didn’t know you could shape a voice as if it was a material,” they say. Their resulting monologues are rooted less in the confessional culture of social media than in the vulnerable testimonials of jazz singer Betty Carter or playwright and filmmaker Kathleen Collins.
A recent project, Obsidian —a collection of lithographs, double-exposed photographs, and palm-sized 3D-printed sculptures based on the artist’s crew of alter egos—offers Miller a more tangible way to examine the limits of self-portraiture and self-exposure. “I like having something in my hands,” they say, “literally or metaphorically.”
“I LIKE HAVING SOMETHING IN MY HANDS—LITERALLY OR METAPHORICALLY .”
objects can play in the home. For example, a dresser, wardrobe, or crate may contain “things that are being saved,” she says. Perhaps they are “things we keep through heartbreak and the history of it.”
“I feel stuck in this weird design box, where I am thinking about the domestic sphere,” she continues. “The things I gravitate toward making are the parts that don’t feel traditionally female … like the welded, the formed, the rendered, the sterile-type items. But in the end, I always
Take a mechanic’s stool that Vigo cast in lace, or a vase she made out of steel, car door handles, and Bondo, then painted bubblegum pink. The vase, another kind of container, “is the most ancient domestic item for a multitude of functions,” she says. The question she asked herself while making it is one that’s now central to her practice: How can I redo this form using materials that wouldn’t typically enter the interior space?
Vigo’s latest answer—a series of lamps that vaguely resemble television sets—will appear in a two-person show with Giangiacomo Rossetti at American Art Catalogues in mid-December.
Photography by Drake Sweeney
Photography by Shala Miller
Photography by Lucas Creighton
FAYE WEI WEI
30 NEW HAVEN
BY RACHEL CORBETT
It’s hard to tell by looking at Faye Wei Wei’s intricately gestural, almost tangled paintings that they often spring from simple objects or images, like a seashell, a tortoiseshell pillbox, or a hyacinth garden in a T.S. Eliot poem. The artist surrounds herself with odds and ends that intuitively draw her in, and sooner or later, they surface in her work.
“It’s like absorbing all the things around me and then pushing them back out,” she says. “I like it to be a sort of ritualistic flowing of the paint, [where] you’re making these gestures and reacting to each one. It’s really difficult and disobedient how the paint reacts.”
She’s had this impulse for sublimation since childhood, when she began collecting acorns and covering them with gold leaf. After attending the Slade School of Fine Art, Wei Wei began exhibiting at galleries, including New York’s Situations and Galerie Kandlhofer in Vienna. Now 30, Wei Wei is preparing to spend the next 18 months drawing from very different surroundings. The London native recently moved to the U.S. to attend Yale’s MFA program. Living in the comparatively small
DAN HERSCHLEIN
35 LOS ANGELES | BY JASMINE WEBER
“Suburbia is a space of theater in my mind,” muses Dan Herschlein from their Los Angeles studio. “You walk down a street at night, and all the streetlights look like stage lights.”
The artist, who grew up in Bayville—a 1.5- square-mile “time warp of a town” on Long Island’s North Shore—is skilled at capturing a sense of yearning and ambient unease, and the sterile artifice of suburban life has proven particularly fruitful subject matter. They grew up working on a clam-digging boat with their dad, who also built furniture. His influence “has really informed the way that I make art,” Herschlein observes. “It’s important to me that the thing is made by my hands. Anyone can relate to a thing that’s made by somebody’s hands.” Perhaps to honor the trace of Herschlein’s own hand, their work—eldritch reliefs or sculptures rendered in plaster or epoxy putty— undulates. The 35-year-old, who remembers finding comfort in horror films as a child, often returns to haunting motifs of “threshold spaces” like eggs,
windows, doors, fences, and beds— fragile boundaries that shield tender things. Last year, a selection of the artist’s eerie tableaux were featured in the Hammer Museum’s “Made in L.A.” biennial. Their corporeal figures appear to be peering or warping, while walls and curtains seem to ripple and stretch, conjuring the discomfiting sensation of membranes shifting.
The context in which their work is shown is top of mind for Herschlein, who holds some reservations about the “alienating and unwelcoming” aspect of gallery spaces and seeks to exhibit in ways that allow for casual public engagement. In 2018, their installation in the window of the New Museum offered passersby a glance at a haunting scene of disjointed body parts—a headless, slumped figure reaching toward a missing limb suspended in the air, which in turn reaches for its long-lost body. “The space where you see the work is not just a room in which I put the work,” reasons Herschlein. “I want it to be something else—like a little burrow to think in.”
town of New Haven has been a culture shock. “Being here feels like you’re in a simulation,” she says. “The only places to go are the studio or my dorm room, or there’s like one student bar.”
On the plus side, she’s been doing nothing but painting. For inspiration, she goes to the university’s famous Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where she pores over illuminated manuscripts, diagrams of trees, and 15th-century books about fireworks. But don’t expect to see the results of this research anytime soon. The artist is strictly “incubating” while in school, “and hopefully coming out with a body of work that’s really, really amazing.”
“I LIKE IT TO BE A SORT OF RITUALISTIC FLOWING OF THE PAINT, WHERE YOU’RE MAKING THESE GESTURES AND REACTING TO EACH ONE.”
Photography by Jojo Korsh
Photography by Olivia Reavey
Photography by Will Pippin
QUALEASHA WOOD
28 PHILADELPHIA
| BY RACHEL CORBETT
Qualeasha Wood says she approaches life like the arcade game Frogger, jumping impulsively from perch to perch and hoping for the best. Given the vertiginous career she’s traced before the age of 30, that’s hard to believe.
The artist’s work—including her signature jacquard tapestries that fuse religious and Internet iconography—has made headlines, appeared across the art-fair circuit, and been acquired by the likes of the Met, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz’s Dean Collection.
Frog or not, it’s a good thing she follows her instincts. As a teenager, Wood opted to forgo the military in favor of art school. Later, she switched majors on the advice of one of her heroes, the late painter Faith Ringgold. Wood met her in the midst of an “identity crisis” during her undergraduate studies at RISD. She admitted to Ringgold that she wasn’t enjoying drawing (she was an illustration major at the time) and wished she’d gone into printmaking. Ringgold “stressed the importance of self-determination,”
JEFFREY MERIS
33 NEW YORK
BY DANIELLE JACKSON
For Jeffrey Meris, anything can be sculpture. The multidisciplinary artist’s materials of choice are everyday objects aggregated en masse—say, a bucket’s worth of Coca-Cola or a pile of shoes belonging to migrants. He considers the medium “a place of infinite possibility … rather than a constant, fixed place in the world.”
Meris, born in Haiti and raised in the Bahamas, first developed his artistic capacities as a costume maker for Junkanoo, an annual festival of masquerade, drumming, and dance celebrated throughout the Bahamas since the 17th century. As a child, he met the esteemed Bahamian painter and architect Jackson Burnside through Junkanoo circles, and later encountered conceptual artist Tavares Strachan, who famously shipped a four-and-a-half-ton ice block to Nassau. Meris soon made his way into the world of contemporary art, and then to America and the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, from which he graduated in 2015 before completing an MFA at Columbia.
By 2022, he was an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. As a part of that year’s cohort, Meris made To the Rising Sun, a 12-foot, round burst of crutches affixed to a double-sided geodesic dome. He found himself thinking of “a solar body, but also about a microbial virus.” It’s one of a number of works that illustrates his fascination with repetition at every scale. Many of Meris’s steel works are both intricate and majestic, a sensibility he learned from the spectacular pageants of Junkanoo. These include “Catch a Stick of Fire,” started in 2021, a series of arboresque metal chandeliers bearing live flowers; and Mouth to Mouth, 2019, a canopy of jugs and tubes placed on lounge chair frames.
Today, Meris’s practice is focused on healing. For his newest project, which opened at Prospect New Orleans in early November, he worked with the U.S. Coast Guard and the Civil Aviation Authority of the Bahamas for over a year to create Our Moon Shines, For All the World to See, two monumental beacons of light that will flash Morse code in New Orleans and Nassau. The exchange, taken from a Christian song Meris sang daily in school and serving as something of a mantra for the artist, reads, “I am a promise / I am a possibility.”
particularly for Black women, Wood recalls. The next day, Wood received an inscribed copy of Ringgold’s Tar Beach
“Dear Qualeasha,” it read, “you can fly and be a printmaker.”
“I switched my major immediately. I think it was the same day,” Wood remembers. Recently, the artist took
another creative leap of faith, departing from her typical medium. For a collaboration with the tech company OpenAI, she fed selfies and other images of herself into a large language model.
The process produced what she describes as “a weird cybernetic future version of myself that I named Q2, who embarks on
this Matrix-themed journey. It’s all set to Lana Del Rey.”
Intrigued? Then don’t miss Wood’s next project: an installation opening at Philadelphia International Airport in May 2025. While details are still under wraps, she says it will involve a 39-foot-long glass case and “a giant error screen.”
Photography by NaBrayah Jones
RAVEN HALFMOON
33 NORMAN, OKLAHOMA
| BY JOHANNA FATEMAN
Leaning against a nine-foot, bronze-cast double figure, Raven Halfmoon tells me, “I have drawings of this space, of my work here, from four years ago.”
That was long before her Salon 94 solo debut, which opened in September, was even on the horizon. We’re standing in the New York gallery’s Stone Room, the sun-flooded crown jewel of the renovated Beaux-Arts mansion, which does indeed seem like a dream site for Halfmoon’s art. With its marble floor and arched casement windows, it’s a gleaming foil to the pair of roughly hand-modeled works she’s placed here—including The Guardians, 2024, whose stitched-together femme beings stand watch, immovable on their formidable pillar-legs. Inspired by installation photos from previous exhibitions at the gallery, which have featured towering, deity-like sculptures by Niki de Saint Phalle and Huma Bhabha, Halfmoon imagined scaling up her own earthenware figures to occupy this imposing room too.
The Caddo Nation artist, who lives in Oklahoma, uses traditional Indigenous pottery techniques while updating and customizing ancient forms, marking her pieces with graffiti-style tags and incorporating pop culture imagery. Her
pieces have political and personal gravitas—she favors stacked faces and doubled forms that represent, she says, “myself, my mom, the powerful women who raised me, and my ancestors”—but her sculptures are not without humor.
In the tabletop bust Bucked Off Again, 2024, for example, a woman stenciled with lightning bolts wears a cowboy hat and flips off the world with a redmanicured middle finger. While Halfmoon doesn’t depict specific individuals, this work feels like her unstoppable avatar.
Officially on a career hot streak, the artist also has a traveling exhibition that originated at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and will make its final stop at the Contemporary Austin in early 2025. When I ask what’s next for her, she muses over how to find a kiln big enough for her hulking clay figures. There’s no question that she has imminent plans— both culturally speaking and quite literally—to break even more molds.
DRAKE CARR
31 — NEW
YORK
BY EVAN NICOLE BROWN
Drake Carr made his first foray into the art world on the walls of a Bushwick dive bar.
When Happyfun Hideaway wanted to commission a vibrant work to adorn its dance floor, the Flint, Michigan, native— who also tended bar at the watering hole—delivered. The 31-year-old multimedia artist adorned the space with raunchy, life-sized figures inspired by peers and friends that would later become his signature. “Gum would get stuck to them and sweaty people would press up against them,” the artist remembers. “It’s really satisfying to see these things that I labored over get lived on.”
The distinctly cosmopolitan nature of Carr’s work has drawn the attention of numerous gallerists with an eye for the off-kilter: The artist has shown at Anat Ebgi in Los Angeles along with New York hot spots like Fierman, Situations, and Ethan James Green’s New York Life Gallery. For the latter, Carr held one of his
“walk-ins”—live portrait-drawing sessions in which he whips up stylized fashion sketches that illustrate the whimsy of his New York contemporaries.
“I find myself drawn to art that feels collaborative in some way,” Carr reasons. For the artist, there’s a difference between his private sketchbooks, which he fills with drawings born out of “compulsion,” and the work he creates with an audience in mind. “A lot of the people I’m drawing are in these very graphic, dramatic poses that come from the poses that I’m in myself as I work,” Carr continues. “It’s sort of like dancing—often I’ll end up actually dancing and then getting back to drawing.”
Next year will be a busy one for Carr, who has a solo show at Megan Mulrooney Gallery in Los Angeles in April and another one slated for the fall with Kapp Kapp in New York. In the meantime, his nightlife roots remain an essential part of his artistic identity. “When I imagine a museum survey of my work … my mind goes to creating installations of some of the places where my art has lived,” Carr muses. This personal connection draws out the emotions of each of his subjects—and renders a snapshot of a community that’s constantly reinventing itself.
Photography by Will Pippin
Photography courtesy of Salon 94
HANNAH BEERMAN
32 —
NEW
YORK | BY SARA ROFFINO
Hannah Beerman may technically be a young artist, but there’s something in the painter and her work that far surpasses her age. It could be the profound sensitivity and intensity with which she approaches her practice—living and working in the same space, moving between canvases in the early morning’s solitude.
It could also be that Beerman has spent her entire life deeply immersed in art. Her childhood home in Nyack, New York, was also the childhood home of American assemblage legend Joseph Cornell. Beerman’s father is a painter and her maternal grandmother is a printmaker, both of whom worked from that same house. Growing up, Beerman would sneak into their shared studio and make sculptures out of scraps fished from the recycling bin. “I didn’t realize I was making art,” she says. “It was just a way of existing. I didn’t know that being a painter or an artist was separate from being a person.”
Beerman works from the floor of her studio, rotating between canvases and
naps. The artist incorporates materials as diverse as a stuffed dog toy or dried flowers to create works that are threedimensional, but which she sees as neither sculpture nor collage. Though her canvases are comparatively small in scale, there’s a rawness to them— almost as if going any larger would be more than one could bear.
For a time, Beerman wanted to be a writer, and still holds poetry close. There’s certainly something lyrical in her paintings, which could easily disassemble into disparate objects, but cohere instead. After completing undergraduate studies at Bard—where she met and befriended her late mentor Carolee Schneemann—Beerman moved to the East Village, where she got to know performance artist Karen Finley and the poet Eileen Myles. “This is seriously dangerous work ripping open painting to see what it can hold,” Myles wrote after meeting the artist. “Hannah Beerman owns the world.”
No argument here.
DAVID L. JOHNSON
30 NEW YORK | BY ELLA MARTIN-GACHOT
The fall of 2011 was a watershed moment for David L. Johnson. A few weeks into his first year at Cooper Union, the Occupy Wall Street movement took root in Zuccotti Park, just two miles away from the school’s East Village campus. Less than two months later, Cooper announced it would no longer offer free tuition, which it had done since 1859. Months of student protests ensued. Gates, 2012–13, the earliest work the now-30-year-old artist has documented on his website, was made in the aftermath of this period—a moment when art’s relevance to activism was being tested in real time. One evening, Johnson arrived at Tompkins Square Park to find it shuttered, part of a wave of premature closures the NYPD and Parks Department unleashed on public spaces post-Occupy. He began rearranging the sectional fences blocking access to the park into a series of absurd positions—a ballet of misbehaving barricades.
“I DIDN’T KNOW THAT BEING A PAINTER OR AN ARTIST WAS SEPARATE FROM BEING A PERSON.”
Obstructions of all sizes—from planters preventing access to what could be shelter to property-line plaques that
void “squatter’s rights”—have proven fruitful material for the native New Yorker ever since. In his best-known series, “Loiter,” Johnson extracts the spikes fixed onto standpipes to preclude their use as seats. Divorced from their destiny, these fragments of hostile architecture get afterlives in environments like the Palais de Tokyo or Frieze London, where they become enmeshed in a no-less-fraught web of aestheticization and monetization. But for the artist, it’s their absence that looms larger. “If someone uses the standpipe as a place to sit,” Johnson says, “that’s the artwork doing its thing.” An upcoming show at Fanta in Milan will see Johnson circling back to the socio-spatial collateral of Occupy Wall Street. The artist sees each of his interventions as ongoing, a reflection of a lifetime spent observing his hometown and its long tradition of subverting imposed frameworks. “I’m also interested in pointing to all of the other people who are involved in these types of actions,” he concludes. “It’s part of a larger series of gestures— and a larger history of refusal.”
Photography by Sean Donnola
Photography by Sarah Alice Moran
CAMERON A. GRANGER
31 NEW YORK/COLUMBUS, OHIO |
When we meet in early fall over Zoom, Cameron A. Granger stresses the collaboration at the heart of his multimedia practice. “Me and the homies, we’ve been making work for almost a decade together,” he says. The artist is fresh out of the inaugural In Situ Artist Fellowship at the Queens Museum of Art, which culminated in the solo exhibition “9999”—an experience he describes as “the most fun I’ve ever had making a show.” The resulting presentation, on view through January 2025, is an exercise in world-building. Inspired by the roleplaying video games he loves, Granger carefully weaves nostalgia with futurism, examining legacies of structural racism through themes of science fiction, spirituality, and cultural memory.
Granger was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, but spent most of his 20s in Columbus. Bad City, the fictional town at the heart of several of his short films, is “almost one-to-one with Columbus,” he says, but can evoke any “post-industrial town with a Black community that’s been sucked dry by urban development.” The most recent addition to this collection is Here & there along the echo, a 27-minute pseudo-documentary about a
BY JASMINE WEBER
neighborhood plagued by black holes that emerge like “wounds in space-time.” It’s clever, surreal, and experimental, bringing to mind triumphs like Random Acts of Flyness and Neon Genesis Evangelion.
“I think a lot about sampling music ... I think of it like a signal, kind of, to history, to communities,” says Granger, who sees his own work as a sampling tactic, too.
“I use a lot of songs or parts of songs that have certain histories attached to them.
And I’m hoping that that’s a way of calling out to people that I want to engage with the work—and hopefully, they hear it.”
Before his time at the Queens Museum, Granger was a 2022 artist-inresidence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and his short film Before I Let Go was awarded Best Experimental Film and an audience choice award at the 2023 BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia. Next up is a solo show at Kate Werble Gallery, opening in January 2025. He’s also working on a prospective addition to the Bad City universe and continuing to make zines, a longstanding part of his practice. His work is iterative, he tells me, growing out of previous editions, recalling and remixing the sights and sounds encountered along the way.
For Kate Meissner, painting is about mind games.
Meissner, who often uses herself as the model for her figures, is drawn to “any place where the body is on display”—where it is “examined or probed.”
BY KATIE WHITE
In the artist’s canvases, women (or fragments of them) are positioned within claustrophobic structures, hunching or contorting themselves to fit. Highly saturated and theatrically lit, her scenes are realms where the commercial and corporeal intersect—calling to mind peep show stages, for example, or storefront windows filled with mannequins.
They’re on display, yes—but Meissner’s femme figures remain elusive. Their faces are never visible, and “there’s a lot of slippage between what is flesh and what appears to be plastic,” the artist muses. In the past, Meissner based her tableaux on small dioramas—miniature architectural spaces that she constructed and filled with small handmade figurines. For the exhibition “Tableaux Rosa” at Lyles & King earlier this year, Meissner dreamed bigger. “I made a human-sized version,” she explains. “I built out a four-by-eight-foot plexiglass box with hanging curtains and all these different latex materials.” The artist staged photographs of herself within the confines of this seedy theater, her body partially obscured by the curtains (a recurring motif for the artist, which she describes as a “divider between reality and fantasy”).
Meissner, who has lived in Los Angeles since completing her MFA at Yale in 2021, draws heavily from the visual lexicon of film. The psychological unease and surrealism evoked by directors like David Cronenberg, David Lynch, and Todd Haynes are sources
“I’M LOOKING FOR THIS MOMENT OF ANXIETY WHEN THE FAMILIAR SUDDENLY APPEARS STRANGE. HOW CAN THAT BE MANIFESTED IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE BODY?”
of inspiration when it comes to making work that conjures a creeping sense of unease. “I’m looking for this moment of anxiety when the familiar suddenly appears strange. How can that be manifested in the construction of the body?”
In addition to Lyles & King, Meissner has also shown at New York’s 1969 Gallery, and in January will open her first institutional exhibition—the largest showing of her paintings to date—with the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts in Birmingham, Alabama. What message does she want visitors to come away with? “I want there to be an openness [in my work], an ambiguity where you’re not quite sure if something is living or fake—the combination of anxiety and curiosity that creates.”
Photography by Sean Donnola
Photography by Hiroshi Clark
CHARLES MASON III
34 BALTIMORE | BY JULIA HALPERIN
PAIGE K. B.
BY TRAVIS DIEHL
Paige K. B. is an artist and a writer, but conspiracy is her medium of choice. Like paintings or sculptures, or fantasy realms, you can make them from scratch. In a memorable kinetic work, shown around the first anniversary of Jan. 6, she reprised the green-on-yellow Gadsden Flag flown by libertarians and far-right wingnuts (“Don’t tread on me!”) using a swimming plastic frog in a shallow pan of urine-yellow liquid. “I’m interested in the form, not the content,” K. B. tells me from her studio, which she moved to the Whitney ISP this fall. “There is no content.” She points out that QAnon started as a joke, but made itself a movement. Conspiracy is a container and its contents could be anything. Accordingly, K. B.’s exhibitions can be bewildering to the uninitiated. Connections leap among varied
Charles Mason III applied for one of the country’s more competitive graduate art programs without ever taking a painting class. After studying graphic design at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, he “compiled anything fine-art related” from his undergraduate career into an application to the Parsons School of Design at the New School in New York. He got in. Mason didn’t stay long—he dropped out after a few months in 2014 to return to Baltimore, where the Black Lives Matter movement was gaining steam. “I wanted to be on the ground back home and protest,” he says. But even a few months was long enough to make an impact. He met artists like former New School instructor Steffani Jemison and, for the
“HOW DO I CELEBRATE PEOPLE WHILE THINKING ABOUT WHAT THEY ENDURE? WHAT ARE THE CONDITIONS FOR SOMEONE TO LOVE THE BLACK BODY? WHAT ARE THE CONDITIONS FOR SOMEONE TO LOVE ME?”
first time, saw “Black and Brown artists who were successful, teaching, and showing.” In the 10 years since, Mason has returned to New York to show at esteemed spaces including the Studio Museum in Harlem, Venus Over Manhattan, and Simone Subal Gallery. He began to find his own voice as an artist in 2017, when he resumed his formal studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. (He graduated with his MFA in 2019.) One of his teachers suggested he look at the work of Anselm Kiefer. “It took me the whole semester to finally watch this video— What is this white German going to tell me?” Mason recalls thinking. Soon after clicking play, however, he was struck by Kiefer’s use of sunflowers to explore themes of trauma, rebirth, and endurance.
The encounter sparked Mason’s own interest in the flower as a recurring motif in his paintings and collages. His interpretation is childlike and graphic, sometimes appearing front and center, and other times poking out from behind a swirl of abstract lines or layers of rope, fabric, and paper. Mason sees the flower as a rich symbol that ties him to his father and grandfather. “There’s the phrase, ‘Give people their flowers while they are with us,’” he muses. “How do I celebrate people while thinking about what they endure? What are the conditions for someone to love the Black body? What are the conditions for someone to love me?”
paintings, drawings, and installation elements. Her recent booth at the Armory Show, with Blade Study, featured a thick, realistic painting of an iPhone case, an enlarged painting of her business card from her days as an editor at Artforum, and an ambiguous mixed-media painting flecked with cherry blossoms and fragments of backwards text. The work is highly personal, says K. B., but “personal material is always someone else’s found material. So you have to treat the personal as if you’re holding it at a distance, like it’s an object and you’re examining it and thinking, How do you use this?”
Pantone’s quirky “color of the year” has become another of K. B.’s assets. One wall of a 2023 show raged Tangerine Tango, a shade of aggressive mud, which nods obliquely to the year of its reign, 2012. “It’s important to bring in things that are totally impersonal and totally outside of me,” K. B. says. “Something like, you know, a trend.” She describes the way the absurd declaration of an annual color serves as a “bat signal” for companies to tint their products. The gimmick becomes true, and the form follows.
“I’M INTERESTED IN THE FORM, NOT THE CONTENT. THERE IS NO CONTENT.”
Photography by Glenford Nunez
Photography by Joseph Robert Krauss
RYAN PRECIADO
35 LOS ANGELES |
BY JASMINE WEBER
At first glance, one might not recognize Ryan Preciado’s artworks as portraiture— but his painstakingly crafted sculptures are imbued with the presence of many collaborators, family members, and friends he has accumulated over a lifetime. Raised in Nipomo, just south of San Luis Obispo, and now living in Los Angeles, his brightly lacquered objects often take inspiration from West Coast lowrider culture, or nod to his Chumash and Mexican-American lineage.
When Preciado and I met in October, he mentioned a chance encounter with a young Boyle Heights bike-shop owner just before his work was included in the Hammer Museum’s 2023 “Made in L.A.” biennial. Their meeting ultimately inspired Preciado’s Bird in Boyle Heights, 2024, which made it into his fall show, “Portraits,” at New York’s Karma gallery. An oversized fastener is cast in shiny, polished bronze underlining the grandeur of an otherwise nondescript utilitarian instrument. “I call it a portrait because it’s a vision of him,” Preciado says, referring to the shop owner.
MICHELLE UCKOTTER
32 NEW YORK | BY
EVAN NICOLE BROWN
“The horror genre kind of operates as a ready-made,” says Michelle Uckotter. “I get into [my work] by playing with those signifiers. It’s fun to salvage or cannibalize elements of cinematography.”
The 32-year-old artist’s oil pastels do just that. She cites slashers like The Shining and Rosemary’s Baby as inspiration for her haunting oil pastels, which vibrate with anticipation and ambiguity—like film stills plucked from a moment of peak suspense. “Film is the modern education of the masses that took off where painting stopped,” Uckotter says.
creating what she calls a “subtle, simmering hint of sex and violence.” A single question looms: Is anyone there?
“There’s something disturbing—a detachment from identity—that I’m chasing,” muses Uckotter. This series is a departure for the artist, who first developed an assemblage practice while wandering Baltimore’s alleyways and getting her BFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art. “Oil pastels allow me to have this dusty quality … the waxiness gives them a grunginess that I really enjoy.”
On view simultaneously at Karma was “4 x 4,” an exhibition curated by Preciado consisting strictly of four-by-fourinch works from 48 members of his community—including his grandmother, artists like rafa esparza and Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, and collaborators like Ryan Conder and Peter Shire, both mentors.
A decade into his career, Preciado is opening his first solo museum exhibition, “So Near, So Far,” at the Palm Springs Art Museum through spring 2025. The show puts Preciado’s practice in dialogue with that of Manuel Sandoval, a Nicaraguan-American woodworker whose collaborat-ions with architectural giants like Frank Lloyd Wright are underrecognized and scantily documented. In researching the carpenter’s work, Preciado was inspired to recreate a dining set originally designed by Sandoval. The piece is a material representation of community and lineage—an homage to one of the many people who shaped him.
Blocking a shot is not unlike establishing the composition of a painting, and it is this shared process of filling space with people that guides much of the Cincinnati-born, New York–based artist’s work. Uckotter’s figures, often ghostly women, seem either to lure the viewer deeper into the scene or to be lost in it themselves,
Photography by Valentina von Klencke
In February, Uckotter will take her signature brand of uncanniness to the screen in a concurrent solo show with Matthew Brown Gallery in New York and two-person show with Marc Selwyn Gallery in Los Angeles. The artist will debut her first film work, which is currently untitled and still in the editing process. “The film is processed through the paintings, but at the same time it’s this [new] avenue,” she concludes. “It’s expanding the vocabulary of what I make and what my concerns are.”
PEGGY CHIANG
| BY JANELLE ZARA
Peggy Chiang practices a surreal form of stage-craft, transforming the most mundane objects into uncanny works of art. Her creations inhabit strange and mysterious places: For Halcyon Lunch (No. 2), 2018, Chiang constructed a tiny, luminous bamboo forest inside a CocaCola can. A ceiling fan in the woods, a motorized piece made during a 2022 Skowhegan residency, spun slowly while suspended among the trees that populate the legendary school’s campus.
Contrary to the safer preferences of the art market, Chiang makes beguiling, sometimes ephemeral, and often conceptually opaque sculpture—a practice that was nurtured by formative years spent in Baltimore’s experimental arts community. But she moved to New York this summer following her first solo show with dealer Laurel Gitlen, who found a ceiling fan in the woods “poetic, but tough.” Chiang presented just one sculpture in the gallery’s Lower East Side space: Toss
in the asphalt, 2023, a garbage truck’s rusty maw accompanied by the sounds of clamoring machinery, muffled shouting, and the slightest hint of classical music.
Recently, Chiang made Forming, 2024, a constellation of takeout boxes perched on stained tablecloths, with lids made to look perpetually fogged with steam. The boxes conjure a phantom restaurant that exists only inside the artist’s mind. But rather than elucidate the intention behind her works with detailed explanations, the artist prefers to leave room for mystery. “I would rather present little crumbs of information,” she says. Viewers will have to rely on their own imaginations to fill in the rest.
Photography by Zhidong Zhang
Photography by Carlos Jaramillo
COVEY GONG
30 NEW YORK
| BY EVAN NICOLE BROWN
Giacomo Puccini’s 1924 opera Turandot may seem like unlikely source material for a 30-year-old artist. For Covey Gong, the opera—set in a mythical Peking laden with gilded chinoiserie, featuring characters with nonsensical “Chinese” names—has proven to be fruitful, if unsettling, terrain. “The set objects were ‘Chinese-looking,’ but they don’t have an actual reference. It’s just an Orientalist construction,” the Hunan-born, New York–based sculptor tells me.
Earlier this year, Gong exhibited a suite of works inspired by the opera as part of a solo show at New York’s SculptureCenter. The artist took familiar motifs—a fan, a sloping roof, a tiered stage—and translated them into delicate, skeletal forms, interrogating and reconstituting their authenticity in the process. “I think of theater sets as objects that project a certain fantasy of a place or a narrative,” he says. “Sculpture has a similar effect; it embodies something outside of itself.”
Gong grew up during an era of great change in his home country. “Government
LE’ANDRA LESEUR
35 TULSA | BY KATIE WHITE
For artist Le’Andra LeSeur, history is an embodied experience. Her multimedia practice grapples with the weight of the past on people navigating the present. For her New York institutional debut, “Monument Eternal,” on view at Brooklyn’s Pioneer Works through Dec. 15, LeSeur decided to dig into a history close to home.
“When I moved from the Bronx to Georgia at age 11, my family would visit Stone Mountain Park,” the artist recalls. “Then I started digging into that site’s history.” The 3,200-acre park—the state’s most popular recreational destination—is the infamous home of the Confederate Memorial Carving, a massive, 190-footwide high-relief sculpture of three Confederate leaders. “Stone Mountain is where the modern KKK was rebirthed,” explains LeSeur. Completed in 1972, the monument—which is larger than Mount Rushmore—is protected from removal or alteration by Georgia state law.
“Monument Eternal,” which borrows its title from Alice Coltrane’s biography, is
anchored by a seven-minute film that stitches together footage of LeSeur in slow-motion free fall from the mountain’s peak. The film is narrated by the artist, in the form of spoken word poetry. “How could I consider my own Black queer body as a monument that I could honor in this place?” asks LeSeur. “Collapse becomes a space, an opening, allowing for an experience of transcendence.”
LeSeur, now a Tulsa Artist Fellow, played college basketball at Bucknell University before finding her way to art when she enrolled in a class on a whim.
Perhaps as a result of this early athletic career, the body—its limitations and its triumphs—figures consistently in her practice. In “Monument Eternal,” LeSeur debuts a series of glassworks, which interested her as a means of capturing her breath. “I have an understanding of my body’s physical presence, a sense of control physically in terms of what I can endure,” says LeSeur. “In my work, there is a spiritual element that allows me to push past the physical to whatever’s beyond.”
policy was relatively open in the ’90s,” he explains. “Everyone was very hopeful— all of my family members planted their hope in me in some ways.”
Gong says the SculptureCenter pieces were designed to be “like Legos”—easily broken down into individual pieces, transported, and assembled on-site. This choice was in part an economic one: Gong doesn’t have a studio, per se.
Instead, he rents a shared workspace for $280 a month. “It’s hard for me to make a lot of work there,” he says. “But since I don’t have a studio, I don’t have to commit myself to a certain medium or way of making.”
The artist’s lack of studio space also reflects the level of transience in his own life. “I don’t really have roots in America; there’s no family there,” Gong
shares over the phone from Beijing. Indeed, 2025 will see Gong traveling to and from East Asia—first for a presentation at Empty Gallery’s Room of Spirit and Time in Hong Kong, and later for a solo exhibition with Antenna Space’s new project space, Antenna-tenna, in Shanghai. “It’s kind of strange, to go back and forth,” he says. “I think that experience informs these objects.”
Photography by Melissa Lukenbaugh and courtesy of the Tulsa Artist Fellowship
Photography courtesy of the artist and Derosia
Photography by Jacob Holler
ANA CLÁUDIA ALMEIDA
30 NEW HAVEN | BY SARA ROFFINO
It wasn’t until adulthood that Ana Cláudia Almeida, who grew up in Rio de Janeiro, realized how close she lived to a national park. “Rio is famous for its nature and beauty, but I lived in an area of the city that had the dirtiest rivers. My relationship with nature was very ambiguous,” she tells me from her studio in New Haven, where she will complete her MFA at Yale next spring. Living in a country revered for its natural beauty while being isolated from it created a sense of duality that is now the focal point of Almeida’s work, which includes painting and installation. Currently, the artist is presenting in a two-person exhibition with her friend Tadáskía at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno. The pair met back in Rio, when Almeida was a member of Trovoa, a collective of artists of color formed in 2017 as a forum to share ideas and provide mutual support. “Community was a big part of my education as an artist,” explains Almeida.
CATALINA OUYANG
31 NEW YORK | BY TRAVIS DIEHL
In 2017, Catalina Ouyang made a dire self-portrait in the form of an elongated Capitoline Wolf, lying on its side with two long rows of bulging teats and a human head. Called bitch bench, it served as a seat from which to view two monitors displaying concrete poetry based on a Title IX report: “the section that declares my rapist is innocent,” the sculptor explains. Ouyang asked poets and artists to “appropriate” and reinterpret that text— nearly one hundred have so far—then recut their responses. “I am the Capitoline Wolf,” they continue, “bearing the weight of the history of men.”
Ouyang, who grew up in the suburbs of Illinois and New Jersey and got their MFA from Yale, often forces counterintuitive
“THERE’S A BIT OF TRANSGRESSION IN THE MAKING, OR AN INSISTENCE ON PUTTING THINGS TOGETHER WRONG.”
Trovoa not only gave Almeida the chance to better understand her practice, but it also set the stage for her to contextualize her upbringing as the daughter of a pastor in contemporary Brazil. “I started to think about how growing up in that way affected my relationship with sexuality,” she remembers. She also began to wonder how those same forces are imposed onto nature and the landscape. “It feels like the attempts to control the body are actually a rehearsal for controlling a space,” she adds.
Almeida approaches the material with a fluidity that comes through in broad swaths of color on canvas, which she often liberates from its traditional support structure in the spirit of Sam Gilliam. Her smaller works are dense abstractions that verge, bracingly, on representation without succumbing to it. “I like to work the surface so that you can trace the movement that I
junctions—of materials, styles, and perspectives. The personal meets the world-historical; polymer clay abuts wood. “There’s a bit of transgression in the making,” they say. “Or an insistence on putting things together wrong.” But what they describe as an “almost fascist need to dominate a material” is juxtaposed with an “ethos of humility or anti-mastery. I’m always trying to work a little bit beyond my existing skill level or physical limit as a small, weak person.”
Their work can be devotional, if ambiguously so. Their “reliquaries,” a series of carved and encrusted wood figures based on a young girl Balthus used as a model, have small, hinged doors in their thighs or chests that house waxy, pinioned forms. They have no heads, like wooden fragments of icons. “The redaction of the identifying visage has been a strategy of protection,” they explain, “but also a marker of shame.”
A suite of wall-mounted sculptures of abstracted fetal puppies, “pronoun of love,” curls away from the viewer but toward silvered or black mirrors. The dog is the wolf, they say, but “bred and raped and bastardized into something that literally can’t breathe or find food for itself.”
made there,” Almeida says. “I want to create this idea of the passage of time.”
Almeida’s deconstructed canvases make her point loud and clear: Lay bare the forces holding things up, and what remains will be just as powerful.
Photography by Bruno Leão and courtesy of Quadra
MALCOLM PEACOCK
30 NEW YORK | BY ELLA MARTIN-GACHOT
A hulking tree trunk will spend the winter in one of MoMA PS1’s galleries this year. Measuring eight feet tall and assembled out of foam, cement, wood, and over 3,000 braids of synthetic hair, the sculpted relic constitutes Malcolm Peacock’s latest exercise in endurance. Punctuated by a sonic tapestry of recordings that immerse visitors in moments of “Black convening,” the installation is not a static sanctuary, but a continually evolving act of presence.
When we met ahead of its unveiling this fall, Peacock was already calling Five of them were hers and she carved shelters with windows into the backs of their skulls a milestone piece. The Raleigh, North Carolina–born, Baltimore-raised artist began work on the installation last January, a few months into a Studio Museum in Harlem residency that the PS1 showing concludes, pulling from research on redwoods he’d initiated after two summers spent in the Pacific Northwest. It is the only artwork he will have made in 2024.
Peacock is well aware that most young artists would be warned against dedicating close to a year to a single piece. “Not when you’re 30,” he tells me with a laugh.
“I WOULD RATHER HAVE A DIFFERENT CAREER BEFORE I SETTLE.”
But that one-track mindset has paid off thus far. “I have made six things in the last five or six years and they’ve all been the standout thing of every group exhibition that I’ve been in,” Peacock reasons. The Studio Museum residency is just the latest in a round of institutional attention— including the 58th Carnegie International Fine Prize and a duo show with fellow
Young Artist Shala Miller at Artists Space—that the interdisciplinary artist has garnered since earning his MFA at Rutgers University in 2019.
When asked where he thinks the next five years will take him, Peacock doesn’t blink an eye. “I just want to keep moving like this,” he says. “I would rather have a different career before I settle.” Refusing
ISABELLE FRANCES MCGUIRE
| BY JULIA HALPERIN
Photography by Kevin Weil
Most of us intended to spend the pandemic learning a foreign language or reading War and Peace, but ended up bingeing The Queen’s Gambit instead. Isabelle Frances McGuire actually followed through with their pandemic goal: teaching themselves coding and robotics on YouTube. “I spent the day with a little worksheet writing notes, doing essentially a fake college class,” they recall.
In the process, their art practice transformed. McGuire, who studied film, video, and new media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, began incorporating haunting robots and animatronic figures into their work, creating mashed-together sculptures from cast-off toys, mannequins, found objects, and 3D-printed elements. (Imagine a gentler, nerdier, and less cynical Jordan Wolfson.)
“I started to see my work as basically like a coding process,” McGuire says.
The art world took notice in 2023, when McGuire debuted a solo show at King’s Leap in New York that ingeniously remixed symbols and sounds from famous video
to settle, or to settle down—that daily dissent grounds Peacock’s practice. Whether he’s braiding, leading breathing exercises, or running while reciting an inner monologue, the artist is interested in making the experience of effort—and the (often invisible) barriers to accessing rest and recreation—manifest. What comes after? A long exhale.
games. McGuire approached the two floors of the gallery like levels of a game. Each had two sculptures that served the role of guardians protecting a warrior child (downstairs, the child figure was Baby Yoda, programmed to frantically scan the room). The legendary curator Bob Nickas deemed the show one of the best of 2023 in his year-end review.
Since then, the Chicago-based artist has stood out in group shows at Artists Space in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. In December, they will present a new body of work at Chicago’s Renaissance Society, inspired by a different kind of American cultural phenomenon: Abraham Lincoln. McGuire plans to build a one-to-one facsimile of the Kentucky cabin that was historically marketed as Lincoln’s birthplace (it is, in fact, a reconstruction). While the project might seem like a departure, McGuire sees it as a continuation of their interest in the line between truth and fiction. Plus, any game worth its salt begins with a complex origin story for its hero.
Photography by Courtney Sofiah Yates
BROOKLIN SOUMAHORO
34
LOS ANGELES | BY SARAH NECHAMKIN
There’s a pervading myth that art and math are diametrically opposed. For Brooklin Soumahoro, however, expression and order are happily in sync. “I have a very mathematical brain,” the Los Angeles–based painter tells me, calling from his native Paris. “Lines, grids, color, composition, textured surfaces—that’s always been my thing.”
That predilection is evident in each step of Soumahoro’s process. Before beginning a painting, he produces countless graphs of chromatic relationships, preliminary pattern documentation, and writings on color theory, recording each formal detail of a given work in a large binder. “When I start my painting, I know exactly when it’s going to be finished,” Soumahoro explains. “I like to come to the studio prepared and leave knowing what tomorrow’s job will be.”
In the studio, the artist listens to music with sonic frequencies that match his color patterns; when a song works, regardless of genre, he’ll listen to it on repeat for weeks. (In 2023, he was among the top 1 percent of Spotify’s U.S. listeners.) That same year also saw him make standout appearances in
group shows across Europe—garnering the attention of François Ghebaly, who gave him a solo in Los Angeles this fall.
It’s no surprise that Soumahoro’s profile is rising across the globe. Having lived everywhere from Philadelphia to São Paulo, the self-taught artist is a polyglot for whom the canvas is a means to “digest” a world of influences. But it’s the particular romance of the South of France that’s consistently captured his soul. “The Open Window,” Soumahoro’s François Ghebaly show, drew inspiration from Henri Matisse’s painting of the same name, which depicts a sunny Riviera scene. Soumahoro’s color palette—fluorescent greens, sunset pinks, apricots—reflects that of the French master’s 1905 work, but the strict abstraction that informs his canvases more closely echoes the lesser-known, moody proto-Rothko that Matisse completed nine years later, after the start of World War II, Porte-fenêtre à Collioure. According to Soumahoro, it’s a prime example of the emotive power of minimalism: “No bullshit, straight to the core. They say every road leads to Rome, but what’s the easiest path?”
“As far back as I can remember, I’ve had a crayon in my hand,” Leyla Faye tells me. The child of a mime-inspired method actor and a jazz musician, the painter grew up going to a local art center in her hometown of Minneapolis. She remembers looking forward to its annual May Day Parade, for which the community assembled large-scale papier-mâché puppets that would dance down the streets. “The roads would be lined with people,” Faye recalls, “and the puppets would interact directly with the crowd.”
The awe and energy Faye felt back then is at the core of her artistic inquiry today. In works that have made a splash at the likes of Frieze New York and Karma International in Zurich, the artist pays homage to her colorful upbringing—often relying on swaths of papier-mâché to give a sense of dimension and texture to her canvases. “Childhood is a carnivalesque time,” she muses. “Your relationship to the world is still so porous, and there’s less distinction between your body and a bird’s body. … Painting slips me back into that mode.”
Another space from her youth looms large in the painter’s vernacular. Faye’s mother served at a diner, where the artist
“CHILDHOOD IS A CARNIVALESQUE TIME. YOUR RELATIONSHIP TO THE WORLD IS STILL SO POROUS.”
also worked as a teen before moving to Rhode Island to start a BFA at RISD. Killing time in the restaurant, she would study the regular diners, who became characters of sorts for the nascent artist. “Viewing [them] had a huge influence on me in terms of how I think of persona and identity and the stage—how it all melds into the everyday world,” she says. That exploration plays out in real time in Faye’s canvases, which depict oversized and almost cartoonish figures, often splayed in acrobatic positions. Composites of fairy tale archetypes, the artist’s memories, and self-portraiture, the bodies on display shapeshift through a theater of emotions, from astonishment to malaise. The work leaves a discomfiting sensation in its wake—a trace of a more innocent age.
