Cultured Magazine Sept/Oct 2021 Issue by CulturedMag

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CONTENTS September/October 2021

48 MIND THE GAP As the first Black female photographer to shoot American Vogue’s cover, London-based photographer Nadine Ijewere has enjoyed a career of firsts, documented in a new monograph.

50 FRIENDLY FIRE German photographer Juergen Teller rose to fame in the 1990s for his matter-of-fact editorial style. Now it all comes neatly packaged in a new book by Rizzoli. 52 THE NEWSPAPER MAN This fall, Jim Jarmusch’s papery receipts make their way into the art world with a new book, Some Collages, and a corresponding exhibition in New York. 54 STILL REELING With an important homecoming show at the Parrish Art Museum in Upstate New York on the horizon, we checked in with experimental filmmaker and artist Peter Campus.

62 BETYE SAAR ON HER BLACK DOLL COLLECTION Artist Betye Saar’s lifelong collecting pursuit is now playing out in an exhibition at Roberts Project in Los Angeles.

HOW TO FEED ARTISTS In conversation with Urs Fischer, chef Mina Stone discusses what it means to cook, to eat and to be fed.

A FAMILY AFFAIR Though architect Annabelle Selldorf has been designing furniture, lighting and home accessories under the moniker Vica since 2004, her new fall collection marks a reinvention.

TAILOR MADE On Max Mara’s seventieth birthday, Creative Director Ian Griffiths plums the exuberance of the brand’s nameless luxury for a fall collection.

74 FURNITURE FOR ALL At the helm of her first furniture line, Slash Objects, Arielle Assouline-Lichten tells us about her next venture in New York this winter.

BIA dances beachside in Malibu. Photographed by Gillian Garcia. Styling by Jared Ellner. Rings by Cartier. 32 culturedmag.com

CONTENTS September/October 2021

FARM TO CLOSET Prolific fashion designer Stella McCartney discusses growing up on a farm, how farming and fashion go hand in hand and how ethical, sustainable behavior drives her company.

CLIMB EVERY MOUNTAIN To celebrate the opening of its new store on Rodeo Drive, high-fashion skiwear brand Moncler asked pop artist Steven Harrington to fill the space with California dreams.

84 A TURBULENT DANCE WITH IDENTITY 28-year-old Nigerian-British

painter Tunji Adeniyi-Jones prepares for his first solo shows in the United Kingdom, at Charleston and White Cube Bermondsey.

88 DOUG AITKEN’S GREEN LENS REFLECTS A HOPEFUL

FUTURE Since it was commissioned for Saint Laurent’s Spring Summer 2022 Menswear show, artist Doug Aitken’s Green Lens has looked outward.

Urs Fischer in Los Angeles. Photographed by Matt Cowen.

90 LET’S TALK ABOUT SEX Jems makes men’s condoms with a female touch and wants to help us have safe sex that’s great sex. 92 HOMECOMING KING Architectural designer Germane Barnes is centering Blackness, one project at a time, and preparing to return to his Chicago roots. 96 BUILDING A BETTER WORLD While perhaps they’ve yet to achieve starchitect status, we believe these five landscape designers deserve a prominent place in any good design pantheon.

104

STEPPING OUT AGAIN Nightlife legend Ian Schrager of Studio 54 fame and party young gun Anya Sapozhnikova of Brooklyn’s House of Yes reflect on going out then and now.

114

BIA’S BONA FIDES There’s more to come from mononymous rapper BIA, who tells Khalila Douze she’s at work on a new flow.

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Fall Winter 2021 2022

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CONTENTS September/October 2021

122

LAUGHING, NOT CRYING Tiffany Haddish discusses her pivot from standup and ensemble cast to sharing headline-billing with Oscar Isaac in Paul Schrader’s anticipated new poker drama, The Card Counter.

130 WHAT WE KNOW NOW Renée Green and Kandis Williams have never met IRL, but they share a frequency as artists invested in language, publishing and their collusions with the visual.

136 140 THE GAMES WE PLAY Natalie Morales and Mark Duplass discuss their unusual movie, Language Lessons, and the epiphanies that came along the way. 148 CHLOE FLOWER’S POPSICAL IS AN EXERCISE IN GRATITUDE

LIFE ON STAGE Painters Emma McMillan and Alex Katz’s almost decade-long dialogue is made up of nearly as many paintings as it is bitch sessions.

Musician Chloe Flower wants to elicit vivid physiological responses from her audience, and does so without the need for words.

154 DON’T LOOK NOW Valentino Creative Director Pierpaolo Piccioli sees

the potential in all of us (and invites us to do the same).

160

SAY IT LIKE YOU MEAN IT We caught up with the comedian and essayist Phoebe Robinson to talk about what it’s like to climb into the driver’s seat.

164 ACCESSORY FOR ART HISTORY Louis Vuitton builds on its legacy of collaboration with six new artists’ editions.

186

DO YOU KNOW DESE? The 2010 party scene in New York wouldn’t have been the same without the influence of the Club Glam founder, fashion provocateur and artist.

Chloe Flower is downtown strutting in a Margot92 trench. Photographed by Diana Markosian. Styled by Madison Guest. 36 culturedmag.com

CONTRIBUTORS

MUNA MIRE

JARED ELLNER

WHITNEY MALLET

Muna Mire is a culture writer and television producer based in New York. They currently work on Showtime’s Desus & Mero, the eponymous late-night talk show of comedians Desus Nice and The Kid Mero. Mire’s writing and criticism can be found in the pages of Frieze, The New York Times Magazine, GQ and Eater, among others. For this issue, Mire interviewed Phoebe Robinson—comedian, bestselling author and co-host of the everpopular 2 Dope Queens podcast—lauding her as “a comic whose voice is essential and whose body of work and budding media empire represent the future of comedy.”

Los Angeles-based Jared Ellner is a stylist with deep editorial experience and knowledge. After freelancing at Vogue at age 19, Ellner graduated from Parsons School of Design with a BFA in fashion design. Shortly after, he began working at Garage and became the publication’s associate fashion editor within two years. For this issue, the stylist worked his sartorial magic on musician BIA, our fall cover star. “BIA has a radiance about her that follows wherever she goes, so I kept her styling quite simple to let her character shine through,” Ellner says. “Shooting her on the beach in exclusively Bottega Veneta felt like the perfect way to pay homage to her spirit and viral success.”

Whitney Mallett is a writer and filmmaker living in New York. She’s interested in examining the relationship between subculture and the mainstream, the ever-shifting character of subversion in the face of commodification, and strategies for healthy living. Her practice spans writing and editing for magazines, directing documentaries and music videos, hosting and producing radio, brand consulting, modeling, curating, as well as writing fiction and screenplays. She’s held editorial positions at New York Magazine, PIN–UP Magazine, Editorial Magazine, and Gayletter. For this issue, she profiled a new condom company called Jems. “They’re giving condoms an aesthetic makeover,” she explains, “but also aiming to inspire more open conversations around sex.”

CARLOS “KAITO” ARAUJO Photographer

CARLOS “KAITO” ARAUJO is a photographer and filmmaker from New Bedford, Massachusetts. At the age of 19, he moved to Los Angeles to work alongside Sean “Diddy” Combs as a director and photographer for Combs Enterprises, leading KAITO to document some of pop culture’s biggest names. Since then, he has taken the photography world by storm. As a director, he has created cutting-edge commercials, and has captured iconic moments as a photographer that have been featured in the likes of Billboard, GQ and Vogue. For this issue, KAITO photographed comedian and cover star Tiffany Haddish in Los Angeles. “We all know and love Tiffany’s humor from her TV and film projects, but I think we both knew that for this shoot we wanted to do something unexpected and fresh,” KAITO says of the experience. “It’s still true to Tiffany, but a different side of her, that people don’t typically see.” 38 culturedmag.com

Stylist

Writer

PORTRAIT BY CHRISTINA CURRAN; PORTRAIT BY CALLUM WALKER HUTCHINSON; PORTRAIT BY DIVAD

Writer

KATHARINA GROSSE Repetitions without Origin

Gagosian Beverly Hills

KHALILA DOUZE

ALVIN KEAN WONG

EMMA MCMILLAN

Khalila Douze is a Chicago-based writer and artist manager whose interviews and essays on music and culture have appeared in The FADER, i-D, SSENSE, Dazed, Pitchfork and like publications. She is also an intuitive healer and has been featured in Vogue for her tarot practice, where clients consult her to gain clarity and affirmation through personal readings. Douze profiled viral rapper BIA—who has taken the internet by storm and collaborated with hip-hop icon Nicki Minaj—for this issue. “It has been a joy to get to know the inner workings of a woman whose steadfastness and commitment to authenticity and having fun defies an increasingly mystifying industry and uncertain world for musicians,” says Douze.

Alvin Kean Wong is a photographer who was born and raised in Singapore. Although he studied mechanical engineering, Wong always gravitated toward the artistic. He picked up his first camera at the tender age of eight and what started as an after-school pastime became a means to explore and understand the world. Wong has worked with an array of international brands and publications. For this issue, he photographed comedian Phoebe Robinson in New York. “Phoebe is very real and she eased up to the camera almost instantly,” reflects Wong. “Her honesty and kindness are really admirable. She just rolls with the punches and makes the best out of everything.”

Painter Emma McMillan’s work delves into the archives of 1960s and seventies modernism, invoking moments when decorative and fine arts were inflected with psychology. Her forthcoming exhibition at the Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation excavates architect Paul Rudolph’s work as a muralist and his attention to the fusion of religious imagery and 1960s high glamour. For this issue, McMillan spoke with her longtime mentor, patron and fellow painter Alex Katz about theatricality and style in mid-century New York. Their epic gossip sessions have endured for a decade, and McMillan has become a frequent subject of Katz’s work. “He’s done more for art than most people will ever know,” she says of Katz. “Interviewing Alex is one of the myriad expressions of his beauty.”

Writer

DIANA MARKOSIAN Photographer

Diana Markosian takes an intimate approach to her photography and video storytelling in work that is both conceptual and documentary. Her projects have taken her to some of the most remote corners of the world and have been featured in National Geographic, GQ and Vanity Fair. Markosian brought her talents to this issue of Cultured capturing pianist Chloe Flower in New York. “Chloe has an elegance to her,” Markosian says. “With these shoots, you really try to capture the essence of the person in front of you, and the moment she started playing the piano and really being in her moment, allowing her to be who she is without me present—that felt exciting to me as a photographer.”

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Photographer

Artist

PORTRAIT BY MARY VAUGHAN JOHNSON (DOUZE); PORTRAIT BY YUXIN (WONG); PORTRAIT BY BEN TAYLOR (MCMILLAN); PORTRAIT BY PHILIP CHEUNG (MARKOSIAN)

CONTRIBUTORS

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ALEX RAMOS

EVELYN PUSTKA

KARRIE JACOBS

Alex Ramos is an artist, editor and writer living and working near San Francisco. Trained in animation and filmmaking, Ramos’s work maximizes storytelling and its potential to communicate emotional abstractions, regardless of medium. They are a regular contributor for NPR Music and editor-in-chief at Sunstroke Magazine. For this issue, Ramos profiled classically-trained composer, producer and pop pianist Chloe Flower. “Flower and I bonded over our shared emotionality,” Ramos says. “The pianist exudes a love of the whimsical. She knows what music moves her, and how to achieve that through her own creativity.”

Evelyn Pustka is an artist and photographer living and working in Venice, California, whose work centers the tension between serious narrative and playfulness. “I want viewers to laugh a bit, while also finding themselves elsewhere on the spectrum of emotions,” she explains. Her work has been featured in galleries such as ASHES/ASHES and David Zwirner and seen in publications like Vogue Runway and Document Journal. Pustka shot directorial duo Natalie Morales and Mark Duplass for this issue before the premiere of their new movie Language Lessons. “Photographing Natalie and Mark was really a fun time,” reflects Pustka. “Their knowledge of comedic writing and directing is well-layered with complexities, making my time spent working with them truly enjoyable.”

Karrie Jacobs is a writer who analyzes architecture, cities and design for a variety of publications and a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts’s master’s program in Design Research, Writing and Criticism. She is the founding editor-in-chief of Dwell, founding executive editor of Colors and author of nonfiction book, The Perfect $100,000 House: A Trip Across America and Back in Pursuit of a Place to Call Home (2006). “Landscape architecture is most often about retooling nature to match human desires,” Jacobs says of her work for this issue— profiles on landscape’s living legends. “But what I learned from the interviews I did for Cultured is that some designers now hope to retool the profession and dedicate themselves and their unique body of knowledge to saving the planet.”

Writer

LAW ROACH Stylist

Law Roach is a celebrity stylist, known for transforming the wardrobes of Hollywood A-listers like Celine Dion, Anya Taylor-Joy, Ariana Grande and Zendaya. Roach grew up on Chicago’s South Side and began his fashion career in vintage, moving to New York to open his first boutique, Deliciously Vintage. His later Chicago outpost of the store caught the attention of Kanye West, and Roach relocated to Los Angeles to begin styling full-time. For this issue, Roach dressed our cover star, comedian Tiffany Haddish, another client on his impressive roster.

42 culturedmag.com

Artist

Writer

SELF-PORTRAIT BY ALEX RAMOS; SELF-PORTRAIT BY EVELYN PUSTKA; PORTRAIT BY ED KRATT (JACOBS); PORTRAIT BY EASTON SCHIRRA (ROACH)

CONTRIBUTORS

DAWOUD BEY In This Here Place

September 10 - October 23, 2021

Dawoud Bey, Cabin and Benches, 2019, 48 x 59 inches, edition of 6 with 2 APs © Dawoud Bey, Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York

475 TENTH AVE, NY NY 10018

Founder | Editor-in-Chief SARAH G. HARRELSON

Creative Director KAT HERRIMAN Architecture and Design Editor ELIZABETH FAZZARE Art Director KATIE BROWN Assistant Creative Producer REBECCA AARON Senior Copy Editor DEAN KISSICK Podcast Editor SIENNA FEKETE Contributing Editor, LA ELI DINER Copy Editors BINGHAM BRYANT WALLACE LUDEL Landscape Editor LILY KWONG Contributing Fashion Editor TESS HERBERT Contributing Editor MICHAEL REYNOLDS

Publisher LORI WARRINER Italian Representative—Fashion RULA AL AMAD rula@culturedmag.com Italian Representative—Design CARLO FIORUCCI carlo@fiorucci-international.com Interns LIZA MULLETT JUAN GRACIA CLEO KANTER MAIA FAUVRE ANDE EDMUNDS

Contributing Editors SUSAN AINSWORTH, MARIA BRITO, ALEX GARTENFELD, MIEKE TEN HAVE, ANDREW HEID, NASIR KASSAMALI, GEORGE LINDEMANN, FRANKLIN SIRMANS, SARAH THORNTON, SARAH ARISON, TRUDY CEJAS, LAURA DE GUNZBURG, DOUG MEYER Prepress/Print Production PETE JACATY Senior Photo Retoucher BERT MOO-YOUNG

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

TO SUBSCRIBE, visit culturedmag.com. FOR ADVERTISING information, please email info@culturedmag.com. Follow us on INSTAGRAM @cultured_mag. ISSN 2638-7611

44 culturedmag.com

A PERMANENT INSTALLATION BY CHROMASONIC Now Open

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Chromasonic is an immersive light and sound experience to inspire expanded states of awareness, radical presence, and connection. Fusing art and science, Chromasonic makes light audible and sound visible. The works blur boundaries of physical reality and human perception, suspending participants in time and space. Chromasonic embraces both physical and virtual sensory technologies to explore the potential of art as a catalyst to harmonize cognitive and somatic states.

Photo: Julia Girardoni

CHROMASONIC.COM @CHROMASONIC

Letter from the Editor

NOT SINCE CHILDHOOD, WHEN THE MONTHS MELTED FASTER THAN YOUR POPSICLE, HAS A SUMMER EVER GONE BY THIS QUICKLY. Back then, I couldn’t wait to spend all those long days with friends, and that’s still true today. This summer flew by because we spent it with our community. We brought back our dinners, starting with a lunch with Aspen’s young collectors and Valentino in the mountains and followed by a 60th birthday party for Diptyque in Los Angeles during Felix Art Fair. We also held our first curated weekend of studio visits and previews in the Hamptons with VIP readers new and old—this is your sign to join today! I had forgotten how much I love bringing people together to talk. I must confess I even missed panels (thank you again Casey Fremont, Djuna Bel and Claire Breukel for joining me on stage, and Burberry for the opportunity). With all this in mind, I pushed the editorial team to think about icebreakers and how we could make this issue act as a catalyst for new conversations. In our pages, you’ll find the beginnings of a new thread between artists Renée Green and Kandis Williams and a frank discussion of theatrics between confidantes Alex Katz and Emma McMillan. Even cover star Tiffany Haddish agreed, speaking with director and friend Paul Schrader about their first project together, The Card Counter, which debuts at the Venice Biennale this September. While their conversation reveals that this is

Haddish’s first time acting in a drama, Schrader argues that it is just the beginning of a new era for the stand-up comic. Something Haddish shares in common with our other cover star, breakout musician BIA, is an impeccable work ethic which has propelled them both to pop culture’s center stage. In Khalila Douze’s profile of BIA, the songwriter reveals how, now that her flow is under wraps, her next challenge is to finish her inaugural R & B album. As far as our own conversation starters go, I’ve found myself compelled to tell friends and strangers alike that our new website is on the way this fall. It’s hard to contain my excitement for the new design, which will make on-thego reading even easier for our growing audience of digital subscribers. I am also happy to announce that our podcast, Points of View, will be renewed for a season two after our pilot with our fabulous Podcast Editor Sienna Fekete ended at the top 25% of all downloads. The success of our first podcast speaks to the spirit that fed us this summer. After a year in solitude, the conversation is on the upswing. I feel more committed than ever to be its champion and put forward voices from every corner of culture. Break the ice and reach out to us by joining our VIP program and our mailing list.

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

SUBSCRIBE TODAY AT CULTUREDMAG.COM 46 culturedmag.com

From top left: Shot by Stewart Shining, Sarah Harrelson holds a custom piece by Rogan Gregory in her Laurel Canyon home. On the covers: BIA: Photographed by Gillian Garcia. Styling by Jared Ellner. Hair by Kieanna McBeth. Makeup by Amber Perry. Dress, earrings and ring by Bottega Veneta. TIFFANY HADDISH: Photographed by CARLOS “KAITO” ARAUJO. Styling by Law Roach. Hair by Ray Christopher. Makeup by Ernesto Casillas. Haddish wears a Claudia Li dress, We Dream in Colour earrings and Tiffany & Co. ring.

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

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French Art de Vivre

MIND THE GAP

¶ WHAT’S THE LAST IMAGE ON YOUR CAMERA ROLL? Nadine Ijewere: A picture of me and my dad. HOW DO YOU NARROW DOWN A DECADE OF WORK INTO A SINGLE BOOK? This was hard and there is so much work that I would have loved to include. I mostly selected more recent work because it represents where I am at as an artist currently. HOW HAS EDITORIAL CHANGED OVER THE LAST DECADE? Less budget. LOL! ¶ WHAT DO YOU WANT TO SEE MORE OF IN PUBLISHING? More young photographers of color telling their stories. DOES PHOTOGRAPHY EVER MAKE YOU FEEL LIKE A TOURIST? Yes, especially when I am photographing someone new. It’s almost like visiting a new place that I’ve never been to before. Getting to know the person, paying attention to every detail of them, it’s magical… most of the time. WHAT IS THE WORST SIN A PHOTO BOOK CAN COMMIT? For me, it’s faces in the gutter. I think if you’re going to have a two-page spread it’s very important to be aware of the gutter and what it does to your image. IF WE SEE YOU COMING WITH A CAMERA, WHAT SHOULD WE DO? Be yourself, don’t be shy; or be shy, if that’s yourself. Magueye Diouck and Yacine Diop, Love Buzz, Nataal, June 2019. 48 culturedmag.com

IMAGE © NADINE IJEWERE, 2021.

As the first Black female photographer to shoot American Vogue’s cover, London-based photographer Nadine Ijewere has enjoyed a career of firsts. This fall, Ijewere hit another milestone with the publication of her first monograph, which gathers over a decade of editorial, commercial and personal work into one eponymous volume for Prestel. Here, Ijewere tells us all about it.

FRIENDLY FIRE

German photographer Juergen Teller rose to fame in the 1990s for his matter-of-fact editorial style. His candid images of models, celebrities, strangers and friends radiate with the complications of life: humor, death, ugliness, unremitting beauty. Now it all comes neatly packaged in a new volume of his shoots by Rizzoli: Donkey Man and Other Stories: Editorial Works Volume 1. We caught up with one of the greats.

¶ IN YOUR MIND, HOW HAS EDITORIAL CHANGED OVER THE LAST 30 YEARS? HOW HAS IT REMAINED THE SAME? Juergen Teller: Certain good magazines I work for give me more space and pages and I have more freedom to publish fairy tales. WHAT DO YOU WANT TO SEE MORE OF IN THE FUTURE OF PUBLISHING? That magazines still exist in the future. I am very fond of them. IS IT IMPORTANT FOR PHOTOGRAPHY TO SEEK HONESTY? Photography can be anything. WHAT DOES IT MEAN, “HONESTY”? I’m honest to myself in terms of taking pictures, building narratives and what I want to express. DOES THE ACT OF PHOTOGRAPHY FEEL LIKE A PERFORMANCE? Yes, it can. You are like a director and gently direct people in front of the camera (or behind) to whatever you want to achieve. It’s a performance in terms of how you behave and make subjects laugh or be serious. DESCRIBE YOUR FAVORITE SHOOT OF THE PAST SIX MONTHS. It’s a project my fiancée Dovile and I are working on that is related to our wedding, where the wedding guests will be given a personal gift. More I can’t say yet, but it’s excellent, exciting fun, physically demanding and something I’m proud of. WHAT’S THE LAST IMAGE ON YOUR CAMERA ROLL? Outside a bar in Venice, watching Italy beat England in the football final of Euro 2020. 50 culturedmag.com

S elf- po r t rait b y J U ERGEN TELLER fo r CU LTU R ED M AG A ZI N E

INI ARCHIBONG HIEROPHANY OCTOBER 7 - NOVEMBER 2, 2021

THE NEWSPAPER MAN

¶ WHAT ATTRACTS YOU TO NEWSPRINT AS A MEDIUM? Jim Jarmusch: I remember as a kid I received a microscope for my birthday. The first thing I examined through its lenses was a tiny scrap of torn newspaper. I was astounded. Instead of a single, solid, sheet-like material, it was in fact a tangled mass of threadlike fibers, a chaotic jungle of microscopic pulp. Fascinated, I then checked other types of papers, and some fabrics, which were also interesting and even unexpected—but nothing was quite like the texture of a newsprint. Ever since, the fragility and inherently temporary nature of this particular, and now nearly obsolete, material has attracted me. AND COLLAGE? For years now I’ve been constructing these small, very minimal collages. I use only newsprint for their sources, and most involve only the removal and/or replacement of heads— possibly the most minimal way of reorganizing visual information. Faces and heads become masks for me, and I can change or switch identities, details and even species. The reproduction on newsprint of a drawn or painted head can replace a photographic one, or vice versa. I never use sharp cutting tools, like scissors or X-Acto knives, always preferring rougher, partially torn edges. This preserves that particular texture I first observed through my little microscope. 52 culturedmag.com

Po r t rait b y SA R A DR I V ER

COURTESY OF ANTHOLOGY EDITIONS.

Jim Jarmusch is an anomaly that revels in others. Known best as an independent filmmaker, Jarmusch also nurses a prolific art practice: he makes surrealist collages of found images and articles from newspapers. This fall, Jarmusch’s papery receipts make their way into the art world with a new book, Some Collages, out from Anthology, and a corresponding exhibition at James Fuentes in New York.

BALHARBOURSHOPS.COM

More is More

STILL REELING

¶ WHAT DOES EXHIBITING AT A LONG ISLAND INSTITUTION DO FOR THIS PARTICULAR BODY OF WORK? Peter Campus: I shot most of the work at Shinnecock Bay. It makes me happy to show the work so near to it, at the Parrish Museum in Water Mill. WHAT KIND OF SCOUTING GOES INTO YOUR COMPOSITIONS? My choices have everything to do with the present moment. My choices have to do with the weather, the direction of light, the tides, the mood I am in that day. I go to many areas over and over, year in and year out, yet every moment they look so different. It’s usual for me to consult tidal charts for the day and place I’m filming. ARE YOU INTERESTED IN LANDSCAPE PAINTING? Dutch landscape painting influenced me a lot, and ancient Chinese landscape painting. French painting of the 19th and early 20th century. And then there is English landscape painting of the 19th century. I had easy access to the Metropolitan Museum to study landscape painting. Oh, and peter campus, blanch, 2021, a videograph sequence from upcoming exhibition. then there’s El Greco’s View of Toledo and Seurat’s drawings and did I mention Morandi’s landscapes? And August Sander’s wartime landscapes along the Rhine, and Daubigny’s paintings made from his own boat drifting along the Seine. WHAT ROLE DOES ABSTRACTION HAVE IN THIS BODY OF WORK? Everything I do is abstract. That is, everything has a large conceptual aspect to it. Video’s physicality is illusive since it is composed of energy rather than mass. It only contains a reference to material presence. Still the illusion to physicality grounds it, particularly since I work in landscape. One can look at a painting and see paint and canvas. With video, looking closely shows pixels. Therefore for me showing the pixels is as important in video as seeing paint is in painting. 54 culturedmag.com

COURTESY OF ANTHOLOGY EDITIONS.

With an important homecoming show at the Parrish Art Museum in Upstate New York on the horizon, we checked in with experimental filmmaker and artist Peter Campus, who has spent the last decade or so capturing and abstracting the watery landscape of Long Island on film. Here, he tells us how to film landscapes like you’re painting them.

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AWOL ERIZKU

Scorched Earth

September 18 – October 23, 2021

Awol Erizku, Rerock, detail, 2020 – 2021

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Installation view: Betye Saar, Resurrection, 1988, at Cal State Fullerton, California. Courtesy the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California.

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BETYE SA AR ON HER BLACK DOLL COLLECTION

You could say artist Betye Saar’s new suite of watercolors started in the 1960s, when the now 95-year-old artist began collecting Black dolls in Los Angeles. This led to a lifelong collecting pursuit that is now playing out in an exhibition at Roberts Project in Los Angeles called “Betye Saar: Black Doll Blues.” Here Saar answers our inquiries on the matter.

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When did you start collecting dolls? As a child, I never had a Black doll. I usually had dolls that my mother found, and every year she would repaint their hair or make a new dress. Black dolls were not manufactured back then. If there was a Black doll, it was a rag doll that your grandmother or mother or someone else had made. When I was young, there was a radio show called Amos ‘n’ Andy, which had a couple of white actors playing Black characters. In the show, Amos got married and had a baby who was called Amosandra, and they made a doll for that character, who was Black. The show was so popular that everyone wanted those dolls, including white kids, but by that time I was already in college at UCLA. As I experienced it, that is how Black dolls came into being manufactured, with the exception of rag dolls that were made by hand. I love buying things at antique stores. In the late 1960s, I found a black doll on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, California, by Book Soup and the old Tower Records, and I was fascinated with it. So I didn’t begin collecting Black dolls until I was an adult and I started to notice them at swap meets and elsewhere. Then friends began gifting them to me and my brother gave me some which had been discarded by someone. Friends and family still give me Black dolls. My daughter Alison just gave me a Topsy-Turvy doll for my birthday that she bought at a flea market in Maine last month. Do you collect other things besides dolls? Yes, I have many collections. I like things that are made from recycled materials. That has always been more interesting to me than new products. I have collections of shard-mosaic vessels, mercury glass, elephant teapots, as well as outsider, tramp and prisoner art. What drew you to the medium of watercolor? What’s your favorite quality about it? I’ve always used watercolors for personal notes and also sketchbooks when I travel. Throughout COVID, things were so strange and I wasn’t interested in making big art or assemblages. I was interested in creating watercolors, but I didn’t know what I wanted to paint. I have a large cabinet of toys and Black dolls, so I decided to concentrate on painting a series of Black dolls from my collection. Usually, people think about watercolors as being very light and airy, but I enjoy using them as rich, saturated, bright colors. What’s the last picture you took? Last week, I took a photo of my family at my 95th birthday party with my iPhone.

PORTRAIT BY ROBERT WEDEMEYER; ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF ROBERTS PROJECTS. LOS ANGELES.

Black Dolls from the collection of Betye Saar.

“I like things that are made from recycled materials. That has always been more interesting to me than new products.” –Betye Saar culturedmag.com 63

HOW TO FEED ARTISTS Beloved by artists and epicures alike, chef Mina Stone has built a career cooking studio lunches and gallery dinners and sharing the recipes that create them. Since 2019, her café, Mina’s, at MoMA PS1 in Queens, has brought a signature, balanced, emotionallydriven menu to a greater audience of foodies. Her recent second book, Lemon, Love & Olive Oil, is illustrated by Urs Fischer, one of the artists she regularly cooks for. Here, the two discuss what it means to cook, to eat and to be fed. PORTRAIT BY MATT COWEN

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URS FISCHER: You say, to you, food is about emotions. How would you describe that emotional aspect of cooking and eating? MINA STONE: I think I cook well when I’m in a good emotional state, and when I feel tapped into those that I’m cooking for. UF: Is there a performative aspect to how you understand yourself as a chef? MS: Yes, it’s funny you should ask that. Somebody else used that word recently and I was reflecting on the past when I would cook at Gavin Brown’s gallery. People would walk upstairs to the kitchen and think me working there was performance art or a happening. It always made me laugh. UF: How do you envision a meal? Are there many moments where you improvise? MS: I have an initial idea of what I feel inspired by and then I bring things in to make it whole. Maybe I decide on the main dish and then ask: “What are the other elements that are going to add the freshness, the texture, the color, the beauty, the nutrition to the meal to bring it all together?” There must be a balance in everything that you eat. My second book took five years to write because all the recipes were journal entries. I often take photographs and cook things repeatedly that I really like, just tasty and easy meals. Those stay with me when I sit down to write out a recipe list for a book and it ends up a reflection of things that I’ve made in a period of time that still feel relevant. UF: How do you find the inspiration to start a new dish? MS: I think it’s being exposed to a different kind of food, through travel or a friend or somebody that made something that I ate and liked. I bring it through my sifter and make it my own. Going to Russia was transformative because I learned a lot about food. When I lived in Greece for a year, I learned a lot about food. At the time, I often don’t even realize it’s happening. I notice it later when I incorporate those things that I was exposed to into how I cook. UF: I know you have been a mentor to some younger chefs. When you cook with somebody else, how open are you to letting them do their thing? MS: In a more private setting, like a dinner where I’m cooking with other people, I really like that collaboration. I love multiple people tasting a dish and saying, “More salt, less this.” I feel like then you can make something amazing that you couldn’t have made on your own. However, at the café, there isn’t as much room for that collaboration. Consistency can feel stifling sometimes, and because you don’t have access to your customers, you don’t get to see their responses. UF: When I go to restaurants and cafés, I am comforted by food tasting the same every time. Children like a dish to always taste the same. MS: That’s true, and they’re your toughest critic.

Urs Fischer stands amongst the impressive cacti in his Los Angeles backyard.

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A FAMILY AFFAIR Though architect Annabelle Selldorf has been designing furniture, lighting and home accessories under the moniker Vica since 2004, her new fall collection marks a reinvention. Launching September 30, Vica by Annabelle Selldorf will reflect the family history of the company, which was begun 70 years ago by her grandmother Vica-Maria as an interiordesign studio in Cologne, Germany, and has since been transformed into a brand known for contemporary, streamlined and well-proportioned designs by Annabelle, her architect father, Herbert, and her interior designer mother, Dodie. New names for some of the line’s most iconic pieces allude to familial lore while new collection additions continue craft traditions. It just got personal. BY ELIZABETH FAZZARE

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What is your favorite furniture memory? Probably my favorite is one from my aunt’s house—I would have been a toddler, certainly under four, and I recall sitting on the floor and being mesmerized by an upholstered pouf she had that served as a kind of stool and side table. I would endlessly turn it over and over and enjoyed the tactility of it. It was the memory of this that eventually led me to develop my Marien cube. How does the new Vica collection bring a sense of history to contemporary design? The collection is fundamentally modern and has a timeless quality; the pieces easily fit into new environments as one might move or pass them down. Over the last year we have been editing, refining and adding new pieces to the line, including several designed by my father, like the Brubeck sofa, and the Dodi chair, which my mother designed. Thinking about those connections that cover many decades has been really gratifying. The designer’s trademark is often a signature chair. What is yours? “Signature” feels somehow limiting, but one chair I am particularly proud of is the Gabi chair. It was designed initially as a dining chair for a residential project in Cologne, but I use one at my desk at home and have another in the office as part of a lounge seating area. It is both practical and elegant at once. What makes a good design? AS: I think good design exceeds its purpose—it not only delivers whatever was required but an almost ineffable extra that comes from getting the balance just right, doing enough but not too much. What makes a good design? I think good design exceeds its purpose—it not only delivers whatever was required but an almost ineffable extra that comes from, in my mind, getting the balance of things just right, doing enough but not too much.

Annabelle Selldorf lounges on the Herbert chair—named for her architect father—by Vica by Annabelle Selldorf.

Po r t rait b y J ER EM Y LI EBM A N culturedmag.com 69

THE DESIGN LEADERSHIP NETWORK CHAMPIONS COMMUNITY, COLLABORATION, GROWTH, AND BEST PRACTICES IN THE HIGH-END DESIGN INDUSTRY BY CREATING TAILORED EXPERIENCES, EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMS, RESOURCES INCLUDING EFFORTS TO ADVANCE DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION IN OUR INDUSTRY FOR ITS MEMBERS WHO ARE PRINCIPALS OF ARCHITECTURE, INTERIOR DESIGN, LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE FIRMS, AFFILIATED DISCIPLINES, MEDIA PARTNERS, AND CORPORATE LEADERS. JOIN US

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Robert Andy Coombs, Sunset at Grand Haven Beach II, 2017, inkjet print on metallic paper, 40 x 60 inches, courtesy of the artist. This exhibition was made possible with generous support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Art Dealers Association of America Foundation, PNC Bank, the Office of Commissioner Ken Russell, the Coconut Grove Business Improvement District, and the members of the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum. Additional support has been generously provided by the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners; the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs and the Florida Council on Arts and Culture; and members of the Frost Art Museum.

Tailor Made Max Mara Creative Director Ian Griffiths shepherds the brand’s dedication to the woman who doesn’t need a man telling her what to wear, but rather a friend with an Italian tailor hookup. On the occasion of Max Mara’s 70th birthday, the designer plums the exuberance of that nameless luxury for a fall collection. BY K AT HER RIM A N

ACHILLE MARAMOTTI LAUNCHED Max Mara in 1951, then a brand with a small inventory of offerings (a single coat and suit) but an outsized understanding of what women want. Raised in his mother’s tailoring and pattern-cutting business, Maramotti knew that great quality demands not only material value but an element of fantasy, and that there were women who would appreciate the open-ended qualities of a brand not loyal to one individual, but rather an appreciation for Italian craftsmanship. So even though he employed visionaries like Karl Lagerfeld and Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, they worked anonymously behind the face of Max Mara, behind the local manufacturers that brought Maramotti’s innovative vision of luxury for all to life. “When Achille Maramotti founded the brand, he declared that his intention was to dress the wives of the local lawyers, the wives of the local doctors, not the princesses and the countesses who ruled the Roman couture scene,” current creative director Ian Griffiths explains. “[And those women] went out to get jobs of their own. They rose, rose, and Max Mara went with them.” This ascension is at the top of Griffiths’s mind, for Max Mara’s 70th anniversary turning to the archive for inspiration on how to best celebrate the milestone. He landed a graphically charged exclamation point from a 1950s campaign, which became the muse for an English-inflected Fall 2021 collection. With an almost Wes Anderson-like punch,

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the punctuation mark points back to Maramotti’s exuberance for the mésalliance of fashion and functionality and those garments that command that excitement even amid the din of the everyday. The collection follows suit with a heavy focus on coats, both the signature teddy bear style and a slew of thornproof options that marry Griffiths’s recent move to the Suffolk countryside with Maramotti’s legacy of utilitarian elegance. The looks that don’t include an effortlessly-cut cottagecore suit jacket or tall-grass-sweeping coat veer towards Max Mara’s other strength: knitwear. “1951,” a callback to the house’s founding year, scrolls across many of the pullovers and a bomber, creating a kind of logo moment that is rare for the brand. Perhaps they will become collectible with age. Like les Incroyables (the Unbelievables), the French dandies who in 1790 combined fashionable fantasy garments with English country clothes, British outerwear has always been a keystone reference point for the Max Mara woman, whose cosmopolitan powers don’t end at the city’s edge. The designers who helped give her this Britannic inflection—including Lagerfeld, Anne-Marie Beretta and now Griffiths—envision her as an undaunted protagonist capable of riding horseback and stomping through uncertain terrain. The feminine chords of cottagecore, this decade’s brand of dandyism, do not ring here. The low-key glamour of cashmere linings and pleated organza replace the need for

the corsets and billowy gowns of Downton Abbey roleplay. There are moments of unexpected softness, and see-through kilts wave from beneath their substantial outerwear sheaths. Surprise is an element rarely associated with Max Mara, whose decades of unassuming dedication to construction and refining must-have staples made Maramotti one of the wealthiest people in Italy. In addition to being a creator of garments, Maramotti was known from the beginning for having led an enigmatic lifestyle. He purchased his first artwork at the age of 25, and when he died at 78 he had a world-renowned collection of avant-garde work from the 1970s and eighties. (He also made his own Parmesan.) His genius came in the ability to value the imagination of others, from the designers he worked alongside to the artists he admired. These sallies away from the expected egoism of fashion are what initially made Max Mara so sustainably compelling, and they continue to animate it today. By reviving staples like Beretta’s iconic 1980s draped coat (the “101801”), while at the same time pushing back on his own darlings like the teddy bear coat—which this season arrives in new colors and cuts—Griffiths honors Maramotti’s exclamation point with his own egolessness. “The mission to design real clothes for real women may not sound very inspiring,” he remarks, adding, “But Maramotti never said classics had to be conservative.”

Images from the Fall Winter 2021 Collection. culturedmag.com 73

Furniture

Arielle Assouline-Lichten has been around the world, studied under Toyo Ito in Tokyo, worked at some of the world’s great architecture firms, founded design agency Slash Projects and furniture line Slash Objects, competed on Ellen’s Next Great Designer— she’s done it all. Now she tells us about her next venture in New York this winter. BY NATALIA TORIJA PORTRAIT BY CODY GUILFOYLE

BROOKLYN-BASED DESIGNER ARIELLE Assouline-Lichten was trained in architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and has a substantial résumé that includes working for international firms like Bjarke Ingels Group, Snøhetta and Kengo Kuma and Associates. Except, Assouline-Lichten reckons, “I didn’t even go into architecture school wanting to be an architect. I just wanted to learn how to make things physically and to learn about the tools. I always knew that I was going to have an alternative path but I didn’t necessarily know what that was going to turn out to be.” She says this matter-of-factly, which feels somewhat invigorating considering the highly competitive and fast-paced nature of architecture. “I came out of that program not knowing much about the general world of design that encompasses furniture and product,” she continues. “I was sort of naively attracted to this smaller scale as I was observing this maker culture in New York.” She began offering a multitude of design services with Slash Projects in 2014. She had been following Sight Unseen magazine’s trailblazing reporting on the work of young designers and in 2016 she pitched the idea for an exhibition booth to SU’s founders Monica Khemsurov and Jill Singer, for which she designed her first furniture collection, and founded her offshoot, Slash Objects, that same year. Assouline-Lichten has an exceptional flair for enhancing the aesthetics instilled in everyday materials like rubber and stone, and a tendency towards minimalism that stands apart largely because of the integrity of the process in her work. When working on a residential project with an “old New York-inspired palette” that included marble, brass and steel, she was simultaneously designing a gym, and suddenly saw the recycledrubber floor sample next to the others. Something clicked. “The challenge I posed to myself was to take a recycled material that’s not something

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anybody would look twice at, and elevate it by pairing it with these other long-lasting and beautiful materials,” she says. While enrolled in the GSD program, AssoulineLichten was part of a group of 12 students selected to study for three months in Japan under architect Toyo Ito, whose work and research in the aftermath of the 2011 tsunami was the basis for a series of projects that directly addressed environmental, housing and community issues faced by displaced people living in temporary trailer-park campsites. “We were thinking how architecture could play a role in helping to provide a sense of community, of belonging and home” Assouline-Lichten says. “Actually, as part of my group project we were designing furniture pieces and smaller-scale solutions as an element that would bring people together and as something that could translate into how the human body really relates to the built work.” Design crits came from architects including Junya Ishigami and Kazuyo Sejima. This helped forge her vision of creating impactful architectural interventions for her master’s thesis titled “The Micro and the Multitude,” and consisting of about seven “microarchitecture interventions in New York City” aimed at transforming our perception of both our immediate environment and the urban whole. “It’s very much about the boundary between art and architecture and how these moments and these interactions with materials can allow us to reframe our preconceived notions of the built world.” Next up for Assouline-Lichten is a selfproduced show to coincide with NYCxDESIGN in November 2021. The pop-up’s location is TBD but one thing is for certain: “I don’t want to do trade shows anymore,” she says. “It’s not really the right platform, and I want to be open to bring the idea of an experiential show and to think of how much more impactful that will be for the viewer.” The new pieces, a series of mirrors that intersect her well-known marble cubes she sources from

slab remnants near her Greenpoint studio, are the first of a forthcoming body of work that will incorporate sinuous forms for the first time. “I had never really worked with organic shapes before,” she says, “so the new mirrors are a variation, or maybe an iteration, that relates my work that came before to the work that I developed on the [Ellen’s Next Great Designer] show in 2020”—for which she layered onyx,

for All brass, wood and stone in a four-piece collection titled Rift to compete for the grand prize. Arielle Assouline-Lichten came from the male-dominated world of architecture and is now in the only slightly less male-dominated world of design. She recognizes the importance of rewriting the history of design from a perspective of equality. “I am very much inspired by women that have come before me like Eileen Gray, Gae Aulenti and Charlotte Perriand, and understanding what it took for them to create such lasting and impactful work,” she says. This is something that informs every one of her works, an awareness that is ever present: “It’s part of the conversation of making sure that women are represented in the creation of furniture. I think it’s pretty insane that a huge percentage of all of the furniture that we live on is designed by men.”

Designer Arielle Assouline-Lichten in the Adri chair, whose seat is made of recycled rubber.

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S T E L L A M C C A R T N E Y, P R O L I F I C FA S H I O N D E S I G N E R A N D

IN HIGH SCHOOL, I PLASTERED the walls of my bedroom floor-to-ceiling with glossy magazine images. One of my favorites was a mid-aughts advertisement from the fashion designer Stella McCartney. It featured a Polaroid image of McCartney herself, probably around age four. She’s bedecked in dozens of necklaces and sitting on the floor with an adorable, albeit rather petulant, expression on her face. I liked how different this ad looked from the slew of others I had up on my wall; there was something deeply personal and almost endearing about it. Being granted a view into a private moment from someone’s childhood was in a way more arresting and shocking than the sexually provocative advertisements that ran elsewhere in magazines. This private expression of someone’s life in a highly public and commercialized sphere also hinted at something universal about the tone of her brand, though at the time I couldn’t put my finger on it. I now realize what it was that grabbed my attention about that photograph and how it speaks to what sets McCartney apart: her brand is dictated by her own steadfast personal values. While researching for my interview with the designer, I came across something that seemed to confirm her emphasis on leading with what’s meaningful to her. In a 2012 profile in The New York Times Magazine, the designer’s husband Alasdhair Willis says to McCartney that “ultimately, what you offer the market is derived from how you live your life.” Perhaps this ability to hew to her personal values in an immensely public arena isn’t so surprising based on the publicity any child of a celebrity musician receives, no matter how sequestered they were as children. But the result of McCartney’s emphasis on what she believes

D AU G H T E R O F PAU L A N D L I N D A M C C A R T N E Y, S P O K E W I T H C U LT U R E D T O D I S C U S S G R O W I N G U P O N A FA R M I N S C OT L A N D, T H E W AY S I N W H I C H F A R M I N G A N D FA S H I O N G O H A N D I N HAND, AND HOW E THICAL, S U S TA I N A B L E B E H A V I O R D R I V E S H E R C O M P A N Y—T H E W O R L D ’ S L O N G E S T- R U N N I N G E N T I R E LY V E G E TA R I A N H I G H - E N D L U X U R Y FA S H I O N B R A N D.

BY EUGENIE DALLAND PORTRAIT BY DOUGAL MACARTHUR

in can’t be underestimated: to date, Stella McCartney is the longest-running high-end luxury fashion brand that is completely vegetarian. Her commitment to using leather and fur alternatives is a goal she’s stuck to since her first collection, in 2001, and in this regard, McCartney is a lone island in a sea of brands that espouse ethical intentions, but are far from actually committing to them. I spoke with McCartney about how she weaves her personal values into her public work, what influenced her decision to create a fully vegetarian fashion brand, and

how there isn’t that big of a difference between farming and fashion. Can you tell me about the first few seconds of inspiration for a collection, garment or project? At the start of the pandemic last year, when we were first getting used to being in isolation, I had the opportunity to reflect about the creative process and how usual it is for artists, musicians, architects and designers to create in isolation. Innovation often comes during times of solitude, and I found myself getting back to those moments. I’m used to working with a team, and I suddenly found myself during these insular moments rediscovering what made me want to be a designer. How has your creative process changed over the years? What piece of advice would you give your 2001 self? If I could give any advice to my 2001 self it would be to follow through on your promise: it’s a constant journey, but it will have a massive positive impact. You know, at the beginning, the way I approached fashion wasn’t trendy or cool. I was ridiculed for wanting to work sustainably and people doubted that I would see success without using leather or fur in my designs. By committing to sustainable practices, we have definitely faced challenges and made sacrifices along the way, but I’m proud of how far we have come. What is something you remember vividly from your time working with tailors on Savile Row? I remember working with those guys and thinking that they were like the builders of the fashion industry. You know, the nuts and bolts. Making a jacket is really like building a building. I’m constantly referring back to the skills I learned in those three years, and tailoring is and always will be completely part of the Stella McCartney DNA.

Closet Farm to

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I read something your husband said in a profile of you in The New York Times Magazine that really resonated, which is that what you offer the market is derived from how you live your life. How do your personal values translate into the work you do? Throughout my creative process, I try to lead by example, and I think about the planet the minute I start to make something. With the values I practice, I’m not making a sacrifice; I truly believe that each step we take forward we can help to move the needle in a better direction for the planet and future generations. Can you tell me about an early experience you had with an animal that left an impact? There’s not one instance in particular; however, I do have very fond memories of many animals from when I was growing up. As a family, animals were an integral part of our everyday lives, especially during our time on our organic farm in Scotland, and I really thank my mum for making me more aware of their welfare. She loved every creature, and that is something that has stuck with me to this day. I’d love to know what it’s like having a farm. That experience seems so distant to me from being a fashion designer, I’m curious what that means to you. Actually, it’s fascinating, because I grew up on an organic farm and now what I do for a living really is farming! Farming and fashion go hand in hand, which I think many people forget. So much of the fashion industry’s supply chain starts with the farms—which is why traceability is so important for us as a brand, as we will only work with farms that treat their animals, land and farmers with respect. You’ve said that one of the things a brand needs to do in order to succeed with regard to sustainability issues is to focus on great design. Can you tell me a bit more about this? I have always said you should never sacrifice style for sustainability. I think this is important because even if you have this really great product in terms of the sustainability credentials, if it’s not a great design, people won’t want to buy into it and will instead seek out something that’s not as good for the planet. Who has been your greatest teacher? My mum and dad have always been my greatest inspiration and teachers. They set such a strong example for me with their ethics and dedication to vegetarianism, environmentalism and global activism. I have carried those precious values with me through life and they inform all of my work. What is a piece of advice that someone said to you that left an impact? My very chic grandfather on my mother’s side always told me,

“Staying power is the most important thing.” I have carried that all through my life. But you also have to be responsible in every way, that’s how you will stand out. I want the way I do business to become the norm in this industry—so I am no longer an exception. What forthcoming projects are you most excited about? It’s not a project per se, but one material I’m particularly excited about, that we used in our Winter 2021 collection, is the responsible and traceable wool from regenerative farms. This is an area we are putting a lot of focus on at the moment because we see regenerative agriculture as the future of the fashion industry and a real solution in helping to make the industry more sustainable.

Regenerative agriculture is also referred to as “carbon farming” because it increases biodiversity, regenerates topsoil, improves watersheds, enhances ecosystem services and sequesters carbon in soil. The farm we have been working with is based in Australia and has been practicing “Natural Intelligence Farming” for over 10 years now, honing their approach together with leading soil scientists and local indigenous communities, after years of trial-and-error on their lands. They have restored thousands of hectares of degraded lands through their farming practices, and also place animal welfare at the center, which was one of the main reasons we chose to partner with this particular farm.

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Climb Every Mountain

WHAT DO YOU GET WHEN you cross a Californian psychedelic-pop aesthetic with one of Europe’s most luxurious mountaineering and skiwear fashion brands? For the Los Angeles-based artist Steven Harrington, it’s a chance to meld his dreamlike color palette with some of Moncler’s iconic characters for the opening of their new flagship store on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. Harrington, best known for artwork characterized by a sunsoaked Golden State aesthetic, seems a natural fit for a collaboration with the Italian brand. In celebration of the new boutique, the artist lent Moncler’s The Pupazzo art toy a dose of his California “chill,” merging whimsical and childlike iconography with the brand’s “mountain spirit” mascot. A Southern Californian native who grew up in the nineties, Harrington’s upbringing was immersed in skate and music culture, and these influences have seeped into his work. “Being born and raised in LA, color is a really big part of my practice,” he explains. “I’ve found throughout travels that coastal climates are less afraid to express themselves through fashion. That’s a big part of the colors I use in my paintings.” From Los Angeles’s ubiquitous palm trees to the mountainous terrain of Griffith Park or Santa Monica’s ocean breeze, the city itself provides endless inspiration for Harrington to draw upon. In the case of Moncler, The Pupazzo was no exception. Harrington’s version sports a laid-back look that borrows from the surrounding landscape: the mascot’s jacket patterns are reminiscent of Venice Beach boardwalk beachwear and clothing that incorporates elements of the warm weather, clear blue skies and natural beauty of Southern California. At first glance, Harrington’s dreamy worlds seem innocent enough, but upon closer examination, even Technicolor landscapes catch on fire. Although marked by a certain playfulness, Harrington’s cartoon universe also serves as a way for him to address heavier subject matter that ranges from politics to environmental concerns to personal dilemmas. Relying on

animation’s approachable nature in order to draw viewers in, it is also a way to “speak to audiences regardless of location, religion, sex or even race,” he explains. Even The Pupazzo’s sunglasses symbolize a deeper meaning, referencing “personal anxieties that we all share,” Harrington says—a way to shield oneself from the outside world. “We’re always seeking balance within our own life. I find myself constantly returning to that duality.” Not limited to one medium or process, Harrington’s practice encompasses everything from large-scale paintings on canvas to sculpture and prints. With a background in graphic design and illustration influencing his work, all his pieces begin with a drawing that is then translated into other forms. “It’s where I find the most inspiration, serenity and happiness. I constantly try to get myself back to that white page,” he says of his creative process. “The finished form is in a sense, a drawing. If you can draw it from any perspective, it’s a successful sculpture.” For Moncler, the artist returned to a motif he has often explored, the palm tree, which manifests as a massive sculpture for the brand’s new Beverly Hills shop window. Beyond serving as an icon synonymous with Los Angeles, the palm tree has become symbolic of Harrington’s work as well, which he credits to a by-product of growing up in the world of branding. “I realized the power of repetition within art. The icons and imagery I use are about that repetition and letting the art evolve,” he says. At the end of the day, Harrington’s fascination with Los Angeles never ceases to be his ultimate muse, and it is certainly evident in the new collaboration. “I’m an optimist at heart,” he says. From the sun-bleached colors of the natural landscape to research trips spent driving around, the city’s palette finds its way into his craft. “I love the outdoors. A lot of my inspiration comes from getting out into the world. If I never get out of the studio, I end up making art about art.”

B Y D A LYA B E N O R

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PORTRAIT PROVIDED BY MONCLER.

To celebrate the opening of its new store on Rodeo Drive, high-fashion skiwear brand Moncler asked pop artist Steven Harrington to fill the space with California dreams. From Monestier-de-Clermont (“Moncler”) to Milan to Beverly Hills, it’s time to go exploring.

Artist Steven Harrington was tapped by Moncler to help the brand celebrate its West Coast expansion.

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HUMAN•KIND

Curated by Wava Carpenter

The Global Forum For Design December 1/2/3/4/5 2021 CONVENTION CENTER DRIVE & 19TH STREET MIAMI BEACH. USA

COLLECTIBLE DESIGN/ FURNITURE/ LIGHTING/ OBJETS D’ART/

Experience and shop the fair in-person and online at designmiami.com

@DesignMiami #DesignMiami

Nalgona Chair 10/ Chris Wolston, 2021/ Courtesy of The Future Perfect and David Sierra

Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum FIU Opening September 1, 2021

10975 SW 17th St., Miami, FL 33199 | 305.348.2890 | frost.fiu.edu Leonardo Drew (American (b. 1961), Number 134D, 2012, wood, paint chips, acrylic and graphite on paper in Plexiglas box, 37 3/4 x 37 3/4 x 21 1/2 inches, Collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer This exhibition was made possible with generous support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Art Dealers Association of America Foundation, PNC Bank, the Office of Commissioner Ken Russell, the Coconut Grove Business Improvement District, and the members of the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum. Additional support has been generously provided by the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners; the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs and the Florida Council on Arts and Culture; and members of the Frost Art Museum.

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WAYS , and that all comes down to what’s happening in these paintings,” says Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, the 28-year-old Nigerian-British painter, referring to how his travels, heritage and multicultural upbringing inform the figures in his new canvases. I caught up with the London-born, New York-based artist as he was at work in his Brooklyn studio preparing for a November 2021 exhibition with the London gallery White Cube, who began representing him this August. Large, muscular bodies rendered in rich colors float throughout the paintings. Limbs painted in violet blues and deep reds curve expansively throughout the picture planes, and it feels as if the fluid poses could come from a state of dance, conflict, embrace or flight. The figures appear androgynous, balanced and tuned into both their feminine and masculine energies. There is an intentional youthfulness to them that Adeniyi-Jones wants to speak to the sense of turbulence in their lives as they emerge into new life stages and senses of self. It’s symbolic of his own continuous becoming. Flaming floral patterns brush and lick against their flesh. The bodies possess strength and grace, taking up space across the canvas and in our imaginations. It is a testament to Adeniyi-Jones’s own expanding imagination on what it means to be a Black body in the world, with an ever-broadening sense of identity. Born in London to Nigerian parents, Adeniyi-Jones made a transformative trip to Nigeria in 2012 while studying Fine Art at Oxford University. His uncle introduced him to Nigerian artists like Bruce Onobrakpeya and Olu Amoda, who helped him understand the value of his artistic heritage. “The artists I met in Nigeria encouraged me to see and embrace the position I was in, being from a number of different places and able to speak to a number of different cultures

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and histories at the same time,” says Adeniyi-Jones. “I recognize that trip as the moment when I began to understand my place in relation to those kind of masters and practitioners. It’s when I recognized that I even had a position to hold to begin with. The work I made started to shift after that. I started to make work that was very focused on who I was, my identity as a Nigerian-British person. Before that point, I was performing what I thought the identity of an artist should look like. After that trip, it became very clear that I had something quite personal and important to share.” After finishing at Oxford, Adeniyi-Jones left England for America and in 2017 he received his MFA from the Yale School of Art. His growing body of work continues to represent his experience as a Black man who exists across countries and cultures from England to Nigeria to North America and Senegal. He acknowledged that as he grows as an artist, the figures in his work are continuing to evolve, becoming “more busy, more crowded, dynamic and elastic.” “When I started a bit back, I was definitely trying to say that these are Yoruba-inspired characters, but now I want [the interpretation] to be more open and accessible. I feel like I’m trying to paint a figure now that is more versatile culturally, so it’s not specifically a West African figure. It could be a Black American, Black European or someone from anywhere else.” When he moved to America, AdeniyiJones was immediately taken by his new exposure to the rich and fantastic world of Black figurative painters like Kerry James Marshall, Aaron Douglas and Barkley Hendricks. “As soon as I moved to the East Coast and I was exposed to everything from James Baldwin to the Harlem Renaissance, my relationship to all this history [that until

then] I hadn’t been in contact with and that I couldn’t actually feel as being relevant to me changed,” he says. “I would read about some Baldwin story, then I’d go for a walk and I would experience something unlike anything I could have in London or anywhere else and I’d go, ‘Okay I understand this.’ There’s a very specific kind of Blackness in this country that has affected everything that’s happening [in my paintings]. The work got hypercharged by that self-definition I was speaking to as well. It’s benefited from me attaching myself to an expansive kind of history of the Black experience.” A recent resident of Kehinde Wiley’s Black Rock program in Senegal, the experience left an indelible mark on Adeniyi-Jones. He says it added a layer of texture and complexity both to his work and to his personhood. The figures he’s working on now first began taking shape in Senegal, and he admits to possessing a sense that certain spirits of the place remain in his consciousness. “There’s turbulence in this work, and these characters are less tight than in my previous work. They are reaching out in a different way,” he says, adding that he’s become more keenly aware of the weight that comes with moving through the world in a Black body. “I think it’s important that these characters express a kind of strength, enough to deal with that weight. It’s important they express a level of preparedness for that.” Adeniyi-Jones says he is telling us that these free-flowing figures are indeed Black and brown bodies, but he’s trying to highlight that fact through features like strength, fluidity and physicality, rather than through skin and facial details. “I’m trying to translate the weight of the movement, the experience of being Black and read in different ways in different places. It’s important to note the weight of this aspect of our existence.”

Tunji Adeniyi-Jones works on a canvas destined for his November 2021 show at White Cube Bermondsey.

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Doug Aitken’s Green Lens Reflects a Hopeful Future

Since it was commissioned for the Saint Laurent’s Spring Summer 2022 Menswear show, Green Lens—a mirrored, foliage-covered structure built by Doug Aitken off the coast of Venice—has looked outward. Not only in a literal sense, with its reflective exterior, but also as a symbol for a more harmonious relationship between art and nature. BY ANDE EDMUNDS

WHEN DESIGNER ANTHONY VACCARELLO commissioned artist Doug Aitken to create an installation that would serve as the stage for Saint Laurent’s Spring Summer 2022 Menswear show, the two conceived of a project that would have an impact far beyond that opening night. Following the runway show, the work was donated to the city of Venice and remained open for the public. And so Aitken’s Green Lens was born, a large structure set on the island of Isola della Certosa, off the coast of Venice. “In the world that we live in, culture is siloed,” says Aitken. “But it’s interesting when things are opened up and you say, your art form is clothes and design and that explodes here for a few hours one evening and then for the rest of the duration this work lives on its own in different ways.” On July 14, Green Lens hosted the unveiling of Saint Laurent’s Spring Summer 2022 Menswear collection, and today it floats off the coast of Venice, open to all. It’s a structure built from mirrored surfaces and living foliage, so the dynamic installation changes with its setting, activated by light, the elements and, of course, the viewers. “When you think of Venice, you think of this pristine, elegant vision of the past, and I didn’t really want that,” says Aitken. “So I searched different islands there, until we found [Isola della Certosa] which was kind of a surreal, parched-earth, desolate place. I thought that this could be an interesting canvas for a project, in a space that was not the traditional, cliché kind of vision of Venice, but instead someplace which was kind of raw and wild and that had been neglected and abused.”

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Aitken set out to create an artwork that could have a nurturing impact on the land, and so the greenery adorning the reflective structure is native to the island. “We were actually working with the caretakers of the island, choosing vegetation, plants, trees, foliage,” Aitken shares, “so that the artwork might disappear in its physical incarnation, but all the vegetation from it, planted on the island, [would] then begin to grow a forest.” With recent historic flooding, Venice is also “on the front lines of global warming,” as Aitken puts it, which added an urgency to Green Lens, as it may serve as a beacon for a future in which art has a more mutualistic relationship with the spaces it inhabits. “I wanted to make something that was a freestanding artwork that was not indoors, was not something that you had to pay admission for, just completely open to the people to occupy, to be empowered, to author and experience out in the open,” Aitken says. The people who visit Green Lens and walk in and around its mirrored walls are threaded into the piece, becoming a part of the dynamic structure. This notion of acting in harmony with one’s surroundings is a central metaphor to the vision of a more environmentally conscious future. “We don’t want to see art tethered to one formula or one format. We want to see all possibilities open,” says Aitken. “And if art can create a bridge where there is none—with philosophies and ideologies and groups of people—that’s really one of the greatest strengths that it has.”

Doug Aitken’s Green Lens (2021) installed for Saint Laurent’s Spring Summer 2022 Menswear runway show.

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Detail of a Jems campaign featuring couples. Photo by Alessia Gunawan.

Let’s Talk About Sex Jems makes men’s condoms with a female touch. Its founders want you to talk about intimacy, protection, inclusivity, kink, joy. They want to help us have safe sex that’s great sex—to experience more pleasure. BY WHITNEY MALLETT

LET’S RETHINK THE ASSUMPTION that condoms reduce pleasure. “You can actually have enhanced pleasure if you’re not shamespiraling after a hookup,” suggests Berkeley Poole, creative director of the new condom company Jems. “Or if communicating about wearing a condom in the first place starts a conversation that expands to what turns you on and off.” Conversation, according to Poole, is a big part of what the creators of Jems are hoping to spark with their condoms: “Sex is one of the most universal human experiences and we don’t talk about it, as a culture, or we don’t talk about it openly.” Canada-based Jems is part of a new wave of women-led sexual wellness companies trying to change that stigma with designforward reboots of adult products. It’s doing for condoms what brands like Unbound and Goop have done for sex toys—creating something chic you won’t feel sheepish about leaving out on your nightstand. And with its focus on simple ingredients—just natural latex and silicone lube—transparently presented, Jems

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feels akin to The Honey Pot, which has similarly revolutionized feminine hygiene products like tampons and personal lubricant. Jems co-founder Whitney Geller explains that the inspiration to redesign the condom came to her between pregnancies when she was in need of birth control and, browsing boxes of Trojans and Durexs at the drugstore, realized none of the packages had any of the ingredients listed. “It’s also just an embarrassing product with an embarrassing package emblematic of toxic masculinity,” she adds, emphasizing what her team is aspiring to change. “We want to shift the narrative so it’s a part of your everyday life, like buying lip gloss.” One way Jems is changing the story is through publishing educational editorial content that talks about consent, boundaries, pleasure and play, facilitating a more expansive dialogue than that which most of us got in sex ed, with its reductive warnings about babies and diseases. On their website they feature holistic-minded interviews with polymaths and change makers like Cecilia Gentili, founder of Transgender Equity

Consulting and an actress on Pose. On Instagram you can get a sense of their lush and inclusive vision of sexuality via photo editorials—soft, intimate couples portraits by Alessia Gunawan and wet, juicy product shots by Alex Paganelli. Jems also collaborated with artist Michael the III to create a surreal reimagining of the condom how-to manual. “It’s so heteronormative how these instructions have been written in the past,” Geller notes. “Things like this we’ve loved to flip on their head, and make them not like medicine going down but fun and accessible.” In spite of this sophisticated, creative approach, Jems is committed to making sure the product is not more expensive than your average rubber. “We don’t want it to be a premium product that’s exclusionary,” affirms Geller. And in addition to values like inclusivity and transparency, Jems is championing vulnerability and tenderness. “Emotions have not been a part of how pornography and other media tells us how to have sex,” Poole acknowledges. “But sex is not an act in isolation, it’s an experience that mind, body and spirit are all a part of.”

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HOMECOMING KING GROWING UP ON CHICAGO’S West Side, Germane Barnes loved the annual back-to-school block party. A collaborative, communal and self-organized event, his neighbors would pool their resources for school supplies, cook enough to feed a small army, and gather to celebrate life and each other’s company. All of this was done simply in the name of neighborliness. This vision of

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urban community stuck with the designer, who is now the owner and principal of the Miami-based firm Studio Barnes, winner of the 2021 Architectural League and Harvard GSD Wheelwright prizes, as well as a 2021 Rome Prize Fellow. His practice explores the relationship between architecture, identity and agency, with a particular lens on domesticity and Blackness.

Barnes’s past projects have included architectural interventions that explored the symbolism of such spaces as porches and community gardens, and this September the designer is experiencing a homecoming of sorts. For the 2021 edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, he’s returning to the idea of those community gatherings of his youth for Block Party, an architectural

Designer Germane Barnes in his studio at the University of Miami School of Architecture, where he is an assistant professor and director of the Community Housing Identity Lab.

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Lighting assistant: David Ortiz Photo assistant: Helen Peña

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collaboration that activates and converts a vacant lot in his hometown neighborhood into a new public destination. For Barnes, the project has an even greater and more personal mission, one that is captured across all the work he does: creating a platform to center Blackness and give voice to those that have historically gone unheard. “I’m going to bring back a history of our city that’s often not talked about, but is such an important part of the ways in which we protect ourselves,” he explains. The project is part of The Available City, a curatorial concept led by biennial artistic director David Brown and inspired by the untapped potential of Chicago’s vacant lots, of which Brown says there are over 10,000. Throughout the show, 10 of these sites receive urban interventions like Barnes’s, moving the biennial entirely away from its usual polished hub at the Chicago Cultural Center and into the city itself. With Block Party, Barnes hopes to shirk the city’s negative, racist stereotypes. “Everyone loves to talk about Black-on-Black crime and ask what Chicago is doing to protect itself. Nobody realizes that no one’s fighting the systemic discrepancies more than us,” he says. “There’s neighborhood watch and all these internal things that never get any type of exposure.” In collaboration with assistant professor in Environmental Design at the University of Colorado Boulder Shawhin Roudbari, MAS Context and local organizations Westside Association for Community Action and Open Architecture Chicago, Barnes’s Block Party creates a modular, durable and climbable play structure to spotlight the way Black communities on the West Side have built themselves up, both metaphorically and physically. It invites visitors and neighbors to mingle and gain an appreciation for the vulnerable neighborhood’s ingenuity, resilience and rich modernist architectural history. Since he was a child, Barnes knew that he either wanted to be an architect or an NBA player (or both). As he started on the path toward architecture, he was hard-pressed to find Black peers or mentors in classes, as professors, teaching assistants and, later, at design firms. A good support network is crucial to anyone’s success, but particularly when larger social systems are at work against you,

as is true for people of color and those from disenfranchised communities. Architecture academia is an unforgiving world where crit sessions can find peers chastised for the use of lesser-quality materials and tools, says Barnes. For those less privileged, doing the best with what you can is not rewarded, and, as the 35-year-old designer puts it, “To be frank, I don’t like that shit.” Today, mentorship is a large part of his own studio practice, and

while at the same time he was offered a job working with Pritzker Prize-winning starchitect Jean Nouvel in Paris. “I had to listen to my heart,” he says. “And my heart said, ‘You’re always saying you want to do stuff in Black neighborhoods because, being Black, you know what it’s like. Go to Miami.’” It’s the same attitude that brought him to this edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, one he sees in complete alignment with the

“ E VERYONE LOVES TO TA L K A B O U T B L A C K- O N BL ACK CRIME AND ASK W H AT C H I C A G O I S D O I N G T O P R O T E C T I T S E L F. N O B O D Y R E A L I Z E S T H AT N O O N E ’ S FIGHTING THE SYSTEMIC D I S C R E PA N C I E S M O R E T H A N U S .”– G E R M A N E B A R N E S being unabashedly himself is something he refuses to change. “If you don’t see people who look like you, you’re less inclined to believe that they exist,” he says. Recently, Barnes was the youngest participant in the Museum of Modern Art’s “Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America” exhibition—its first ever to feature an all-Black roster of creatives, where his presentation explored what it means to be Black in Miami. The Chicago native’s decision to begin his own studio in the Magic City was borne out of his dedication to this cause. At 27, he was faced with a decision: He and his Woodbury University architecture graduateschool professor Jennifer Bonner of MALL had won a competition that would allow them to design architectural interventions in the struggling Miami suburb of Opa-locka, Florida,

kind of contribution he wants to make with his architecture, and to his other current projects: a house and accessory dwelling unit, both in South Miami; a home in Belize for a childhood friend and a film about Miami as a Black city. “For all I know, I could have been in Paris, just making models in the basement all day, as opposed to actually changing the community.” He tells me an anecdote that exemplifies this: For his Wheelwright Prize headshot, he sent in portrait options in a pink fur jacket. To any hip-hop lover, the iconic image of rapper Cam’ron decked out in pink mink at the Fall/ Winter 2003 Baby Phat runway immediately springs to mind. Coincidence? Most definitely not. “I’m not going to send in standard art,” he says, unapologetically and with a smile. “I flipped the architecture photo on its head because I do it for my culture.”

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BUILDING If we’ve learned anything from the past year—which featured a global pandemic, biblical fires and floods, and recordbreaking international protests—it’s that sustainable public spaces are an invaluable and irreplaceable part of our lives. So it follows that those who create these outdoor areas also deserve heightened awareness and respect. In recent decades, landscape architects and designers have played an increasingly significant role in shaping our communities 96 culturedmag.com

A BETTER and developing urban spaces that are more hospitable to pedestrians, bicyclists, pet owners and people who want to gather or just need some fresh air. But these professionals generally remain less lauded than the high-profile architects who design our buildings. While perhaps they’ve yet to achieve starchitect status, we believe these five designers— all of whom think deeply about our relationship with the natural world—deserve a prominent place in any good design pantheon.

WORLD

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KATE ORFF

The newly-opened Greenpoint Library and Environmental Education Center in Brooklyn by SCAPE.

“There is a massive need to completely hit the reset button on the methods, the goals and the outcomes of landscape architecture.” —Kate Orff

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UNTIL RECENTLY, IT MIGHT HAVE been fair to say that much of Kate Orff’s work was about revealing natural systems hidden in urban places. The 49-yearold founder of SCAPE, a landscape architecture and design studio based in Manhattan and New Orleans, has built a reputation for wedding deep research to designs that make lost or neglected ecologies visible to city dwellers. Now, however, she can see that strategy isn’t anywhere near enough. Historically, landscape architects have designed what Orff terms “micro paradises,” pleasant pastoral interludes, but that phase is over. In a “globalized, interconnected world with all the systems in a state of collapse,” Orff argues, “there is a massive need to completely hit the reset button on the methods, the goals and the outcomes of landscape architecture.” What does this reset look like? Orff, who also directs the Urban Design Program at Columbia University, points to SCAPE’s Chattahoochee RiverLands project, a planned 125-mile trail system for walking, biking and boating along a neglected Atlanta-area waterway. “I love that project because it’s at the scale at which we need to be thinking and acting,” Orff says. She also mentions the newly completed Living Breakwaters, a 2,400-foot-long series of artificial oyster reefs (with real oysters) that SCAPE has been working on since the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. It’s largely invisible because it is underwater, but it is positioned to protect Staten Island from future storm surges. Orff believes it’s the “first nature-based infrastructure project at this scale.” But the reset she envisions is even bigger than those projects. Through Columbia, she’s involved with an initiative to undo the damage done to the Mississippi River by a century’s worth of flood-control measures bulldozed into place by the Army Corps of Engineers. “We’re about to lose the Mississippi as a living system,” Orff contends. It’s a disaster she’d like to devote herself to preventing. A revitalized Mississippi, all 2,318 miles of it; that would truly be “nature-based infrastructure” working at scale.

PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF SCAPE/TY COLE.

BY KARRIE JACOBS

PHOTOGRAPHY BY CARMEL BRANTLEY.

The John Volk estate in Palm Beach, Florida, by Fernando Wong Outdoor Living Design.

FERNANDO WONG BY ELIZABETH FAZZARE

“I use classical principles and geometry to allow the design to be almost invisible.” —Fernando Wong

KNOWN FOR HIS COLORFUL, CONTEMPORARY, beachside landscapes and his sensitive, thoughtful interventions in the historical gardens of both commercial and private clients, the Miami-, Palm Beachand Southampton-based landscape designer Fernando Wong of Fernando Wong Outdoor Living Design has been lauded for the careful hand with which he approaches his craft. Most recently, he was a recipient of the Traditional Building’s Palladio Award for an extensive renovation of the late architect John Volk’s storied three-acre estate in Palm Beach, Florida. While lush, layered foliage and flowers may be his forte, Wong’s project sites are often in the shoreline cities most at high risk of seeing the immediate and devastating effects of climate change, so the responsibility to design beautiful things in a better, more sustainable manner is also central to his practice. For Wong, this means incorporating native plants—of which these environments tend to have a large and varied selection, from flowers and shrubs to edible trees—into his work. He is of the belief that the creation of beautiful, intentional spaces can be a vehicle for spreading knowledge. The practice of designing with local vegetation “allows us to utilize the existing

landscape and bring pollinators and birds. It allows nature to come back to our towns,” Wong says, adding that his hospitality clients are heeding the call of this “new trend that is finally reaching the heart of the market.” He notes that municipalities are more frequently setting requirements for percentages of native plants included in landscapes based on zone. “I use classical principles and geometry to allow the design to be almost invisible,” says the designer. In doing this, he allows a site’s architectural and natural focal points to remain the central visual element of the space, while his gardens are built to support and accent these starring roles. Currently, Wong is designing the gardens for the Four Seasons Fort Lauderdale in Florida, which is slated to open in early 2022. There, vegetation will do double duty as it frames white-capped sea vistas while also screening out traffic. In 2019, the designer used his light touch to achieve a similar green vision for Miami’s luxury Surf Club. “When you see the Surf Club, how can you compete with the horizon, the clouds and the ocean?” Wong asks, matter-of-factly. Any Magic City-goer can tell you he’s right. With increased dedication to smart, sustainable landscape practices, those views will be here to stay a while longer.

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A plaza at the Oakland Museum of California, whose grounds were renovated this past June by Walter Hood of Hood Design Studio.

WALTER HOOD BY KARRIE JACOBS

“When we’re talking landscape in this country, from the beginning, when we talk about landscape it’s political. I mean, where we live in a post-colonial sort of landscape.” —Walter Hood TRAINED AS A LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT, but also as an architect, an urbanist and an artist, Walter Hood is more concerned with the cultural terrain than the natural one. Oakland-based Hood, 63, who doubles as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, finds it difficult to disentangle any given project from the social forces that surround it. Asked about the responsibilities of the landscape architect in the present moment, he replies, “When we’re talking landscape in this country, from the beginning, when we talk about landscape it’s political. I mean, where we live in a post-colonial sort of landscape.” The land itself, he contends, is “highly politicized.” So too the landscape. If you look at the projects that Hood Design Studio has done over the years, many of them don’t appear to be freighted with meaning. A plaza next to the Broad Museum in Los Angeles is made verdant by transplanted olive trees. A redesign of the Oakland Museum of California’s gardens is deferential to the modernist style of the original. If these projects have a political message, it isn’t obvious. On the other hand, Hood’s contribution to the Museum of Modern

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Art’s recent exhibition “Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America” proposed to revamp San Pablo Avenue in Oakland by building ten ebony high rises, each embodying an ideal from a 1966 Black Panther manifesto. And a project Hood is designing in Jacksonville, Florida, is called Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing Park. It’s named for a song often considered the Black national anthem. The park marks the birthplace of its composers. Renderings show a landscape that is almost a pictogram of the song, an amphitheater with an upward tilt that appears to be supported by giant, pre-cast concrete letters spelling out the title. “There are certain projects where you don’t even want to try to create ambiguity,” notes Hood. Essentially, Hood doesn’t believe that his profession—any of his professions—can solve problems that are beyond the reach of society as a whole. “I’m trying to write a piece right now, a couple of thousand words on public space,” he says. “And I’m just at a loss. You know, our democracy is so damaged at this point that we just can’t agree on things collectively, which means then that there’s a large part of our society that just gets left out, that knows we don’t have any resources or answers for them.”

MARTHA SCHWARTZ BY KARRIE JACOBS

“We fucked it up so badly. Fundamentally, we have to unfuck up the earth, we have to regenerate it. If we’re going to survive, we have to see it in a different way.” —Martha Schwartz

In Chongqing, China, the 2019 Hot Pot Master Garden at the Upper Yangtze River City Flower Art Expo was designed by Martha Schwartz Partners.

NEW YORKERS MAY REMEMBER Martha Schwartz, 70, as the woman who replaced Tilted Arc, a much hated and controversial Richard Serra sculpture in a Lower Manhattan plaza, with an array of goofy circular benches surrounding Hostess Sno Ball-shaped grassy mounds. That was in the 1990s. Since then, most of her landscape projects have been in China or Europe. Typically, they’re urban plazas punctuated by startling blazes of color and surprising sculptural interjections. If landscape architecture is a balance between nature and artifice, Schwartz appeared to lean toward the latter. But not anymore. Speaking from her Harlem studio, she explains, “I’ve actually stopped practicing as a landscape architect.” Instead she’s repositioned herself as a crusader for her profession’s role in stopping global warming. As a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, she’s gotten to know her neighbors, specifically the university’s geoengineers. “And they know everything you need to know about climate change.” Schwartz argues that some 70 percent of the world’s populations will be living in cities by 2050. So how those cities are built is crucial to the planet’s survival. “I have a grant from Harvard to study the linear urban forest,” she says. The basic idea is that the infinite amount of land currently used as streets and covered in asphalt needs to be permeable, so that storm water replenishes our aquifers, and intensively planted with trees. What might the planet-saving approach to landscape design look like? Schwartz mentions an airport-design competition her firm won. The project is unbuilt and she can’t reveal the client, but the idea—dizzyingly counterintuitive—is that it would be the world’s first “carbon negative” airport. The airport would essentially be a vast earthworks sculpture made from types of rock that “bond with carbon dioxide and sequester carbon.” While the concept itself is seductive, what clearly sold the project was the renderings depicting a swirly, colorful, incredibly futuristic terrain. But Schwartz’s main work right now is making the case, through lectures and lobbying within the profession, that landscape architects are uniquely positioned to radically remake urban places and help undo the urban “heat-island effect.” Her argument is simple: “We fucked it up so badly. Fundamentally, we have to unfuck up the earth, we have to regenerate it. If we’re going to survive, we have to see it in a different way.”

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PIET OUDOLF BY KARRIE JACOBS

“What I think of curved paths is that every move you make your perspective changes.” —Piet Oudolf

may be the 21st century’s most famous gardener. Typically, allstar gardeners, like the 18th century’s Capability Brown, are revered for taming the landscape, imposing order on nature’s chaos. By contrast, Oudolf is known for planting grasses and perennials that inject a measure of wildness into exceptionally tame locales. When Oudolf, who enjoys tending his own garden in the Dutch village of Hummelo, talks about his work, he cites two qualities that sound contradictory: “resource-efficient and emotionally poignant.” But it’s not a conflict to Oudolf: “You want to make a garden that feels good in the context of the time that we live in, with our environmental problems.” But his concept of responsibility has less to do with the environmental virtues of the plants he chooses and more to do with how the gardens shape those who encounter them: “Responsible gardens are gardens that can teach you, make you feel good. It’s a world unto itself. So you can lose yourself. That’s what I feel when I walk into my own garden. I feel that I come into another world.” Asked to design a garden for the German furniture maker Vitra, Oudolf walked its architecture-filled grounds. He chose a spot in front of VitraHaus, the Herzog and de Meuron-designed building consisting of elongated houses stacked like fireplace logs. The garden, which opened this summer, is a meandering network of paths designed to allow visitors to get just a little bit lost. “What I think of curved paths is that every move you make your perspective changes,” he says. Oudolf believes the gardener’s role in the future will be much the same as it is in the present, although the simple act of sowing and tending plants “becomes more important every day.” His contribution toward the well-being of the planet, however, has more to do with how being among wild grasses and flowers make us feel: “I think that the gardens we make are contemplative, that people walk slow and stand still.” The plants, he adds, are there “for the soul.”

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PHOTOGRAPHER LORENZ CUGINI; © VITRA

DUTCH LANDSCAPE DESIGNER PIET OUDOLF, 76,

The Oudolf Garten at the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany, was designed by Piet Oudolf in 2020, and fully blooms this September.

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STEPPING OUT AGAIN LONG CONFINED BY THE PANDEMIC, MANY SOCIAL LIFE-LOVING AMERICANS ARE EXPERIENCING AN INDELIBLE, ALMOST MANIC DESIRE TO GATHER, PARTY AND CELEBRATE LIFE. THOUGH MANY OF OUR FAVORITE HAUNTS WERE ECONOMIC LOSSES TO THE YEAR-LONG SHUTDOWNS, THOSE THAT SURVIVED ARE BACK WITH AN EVERMORE ENTHUSIASTIC VENGEANCE. IN NEW YORK, THE SCENE HAS ALWAYS BEEN HOT, AND PEOPLE ARE NOW READY TO PARTY LIKE IT’S 2021. NIGHTLIFE LEGEND AND HOTELIER IAN SCHRAGER OF STUDIO 54 FAME AND NEW YORK PARTY YOUNG GUN AND PERFORMER ANYA SAPOZHNIKOVA OF BROOKLYN’S HOUSE OF YES REFLECT ON GOING OUT THEN AND NOW.

MODERATED BY ELIZABETH FAZZARE PORTRAIT BY CHAD BATKA

ELIZABETH FAZZARE: HOW HAS THE PANDEMIC CHANGED OR NOT CHANGED THE WAY THAT YOU VIEW A PARTY?

ANYA SAPOZHNIKOVA: What hasn’t changed is this intrinsic need for people to just get together and dance. That is indestructible. Nightlife will survive against all odds. As an industry, we’ve been suffering, and the fact that there’s not even a doubt about us coming back has proven what we’ve already known: as long as there are humans, the desire for people to gather and celebrate is always going to be here. A lot of nightlife has

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gotten into this frivolous place where there’s a lot of partying, but why are we doing it? What are we celebrating? Now, coming back from the pandemic, we’ve all found the things that are important to us. I think people are a lot more selective about who they’re choosing to celebrate with. Being confronted with our mortality has proven that life is finite. I’m hoping to see nightlife take a turn in a more meaningful, more intentional direction. IAN SCHRAGER: I agree with a lot of what you said, if not all of it. I do believe that the pandemic has made people increase their humanity toward each other and has given them an opportunity to reflect on what’s important. I’m not a believer in paradigm shifts. I don’t think that anything is going to be different. We have an instinct to socialize. We always have, for the last 5,000 years. Whatever’s

going to change in nightlife has been going on since before the pandemic and we’ll just continue to evolve. It’s one of the reasons I have so much respect and regard for Anya, because I think she’s doing what people want today. It’s got much more depth and much more meaning. There’s more variety and entertainment than what was happening before, which is why she has been so successful. I look at the pandemic as a short-term thing. We forget the bad and always remember the good. We do that in life in general. When the pandemic does finally get settled, people will be ready to go mad, and I’m sure Anya has everything planned in order to accommodate that. AS: I see an exuberance in people that I didn’t see before. I think the enthusiasm and the commitment of the audience is palpable. People come out in more

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COURTESY OF THE ARTIST. © DUSTIN PITTMAN.

elaborate costumes. People show up earlier, people dance harder, people stay longer. People are really present now. IS: There’s a pent-up demand to go out. I think people are going to go out with abandon. I see it at the hotels and I see it at the restaurants and the bars at the hotels. People are ready to go out there and reclaim their life. EF: You both have experience in the contemporary nightlife scene and you also have experience in the nightlife scene of yesteryear. What differences do you see in people’s attitudes towards going out or what they’re interested in doing when they go out? AS: Through the rise of social media and the Internet, the underground has really permeated into the mainstream. When I started performing in clubs in my early twenties, there was definitely a separation between the underground events and the events in the Meatpacking District with bottle service where we made the money. Now, with House of Yes having bottle service, and participating in Ian’s five-star hotel and doing very House of Yes things, I’m seeing a beautiful cross section of resources, self-expression, and art. I think it’s the best possible outcome. Having funds for the artists to make art is what we’ve all been moving towards. IS: When you put that all together, that’s where the combustible energy comes from. And it’s so true about somebody going into a nightlife place that is the real deal and feeling the absolute freedom to be whoever you want, to do whatever you want, as long as you don’t hurt anybody and you don’t do anything illegal. The whole point of nightlife is to have an outlet to express yourself. It was that way back in the days of Studio 54, and it is still the same way here; it’s that same freedom. The ability to mix and match and put a lot of different people together is really where the energy comes from. AS: I think entropy in nightlife is the most important ingredient, because otherwise a lot of places come in and do one thing really well, and then it just stalls. But having entropy and that intentional chaos, I think that’s the magic ingredient for sure. EF: What prompted each of your decisions to create spaces for nightlife? Did you find that this organized chaos was lacking and you wanted to create it? IS: There’s a lot of expedience. Business is an opportunistic endeavor, and with nightlife you didn’t really have to have a lot of money. You really didn’t have to know very much. You just wanted to make people happy, and there was no barrier

Diana Ross, New Year’s Eve, 1979. Photographed by artist Dustin Pittman.

to entry. Anyone could go into a place, paint the walls black, put something over the stove and play a record player and have people dance. At that time, when I got into nightlife originally, it was just from the baby boom. People were coming back to New York from school, they were inhabiting the city. They all wanted places to go. People were waiting in line to get into a club, getting a lot of abuses. If the place was a spot, they wanted to get in no matter what. And I just thought, being a person that didn’t have a lot of money and didn’t know very much, that this was a business that we should go into. I went in with a partner who really enjoyed the personal interaction with all the people, hanging out with everyone and so on and so forth. That wasn’t the part that I enjoyed. I enjoyed creating this atmosphere that was the catalyst for everybody going mad. All you had was the magic that

you can create, very ethereal and ephemeral. And now I see that Anya is evolving and taking further what we did and turning it into a much more sophisticated, multimedia, sensoryoverload experience that really makes it into the entertainment business. It gets much more legs and depth and shelf life. That’s how nightlife was evolving, and I think they’ve really hit the zeitgeist with it. AS: Thank you. I just wanted to party with my friends, and I wanted my friends to have a good time at my house. We have lived in a big loft, and so it all started organically. We also weren’t of age to get into a lot of clubs when we originally got into the underground. So it was kind of the only option—you either perform and participate in the nightlife that is happening, or you create your own. It happened really organically in the beginning, and as we’ve scaled up, we’ve really

“‘WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL? I KNOW WHAT SCHRAGER DOES. HE RAISES THE MUSIC AND LOWERS THE LIGHTS...’”

looked at the pieces and kind of dissected it— what makes us special? What makes it work? What makes it financially sustainable? But the model at the beginning was very pure: just throw the best house party, and our house party is going to have aerialists and marching bands and DJs and crazy décor. It wasn’t until much later, when we started scaling up, that we began analyzing why it works. The reason I think House of Yes is a success comes down to the hospitality aspect. The hospitality is something that you don’t see, and when it’s perfect, it falls into the background and you just feel right at home in this crazy, sensoryoverload place. Unless people are comfortable, they can’t really have a good time, so if we’re going to be pushing people’s boundaries and pushing the envelope on what people can expect on a night out, they need to feel welcome and at home. IS: That’s the way it always works. Anybody creates something that they themselves like, they have that kind of light touch. AS: There is an interesting cross section that’s happening with nightlife and wellness. If I remember dressing rooms 10 or 15 years ago, it was a disaster. People were screwed

up on everything. And now, everyone is sober. I think there might be this significant shift occurring where people are coming more for the entertainment and less for the alcohol. IS: There’s a very delicate balancing act because, what we do, almost by definition, there’s excess involved. But that’s true, people are coming for the entertainment and that’s what’s new and fresh to me. AS: I’m hoping for a healthier nightlife in this next chapter. EF: Tell me about the best party that you’ve ever attended. IS: I always used to love the Halloween parties because there were no boundaries, no restrictions. There were a couple of parties that we did at Studio—one party had three or four tons of silver glitter on the floor. It was maybe three or four inches thick everywhere. It was coming out of people’s rugs six months later. That was kind of magical. And then I remember one time where we had 10-foot walls of dry ice that you had to walk through. AS: I think my favorite was our last Halloween party. As nightlife people, it’s Halloween every day, but then the whole world catches up with you and it’s like, alright, now we’re all in this together. We threw a party at Grand Prospect Hall. It’s our annual Halloween called City of Gods. We’re doing one in LA and New York this year, and we basically just take all our favorite things and put them into one party. What we do is create these experiences that the world does not want to populate. The world wants to keep going nine to five, get your job, capitalism, pay your rent. We are like a quirk in the system. It’s not supposed to be happening. You’re not supposed to have people flying over the ceiling. You’re not supposed to have 6,000 people dancing their faces off in costumes that they’ve worked on for a whole year. IS: I would say the same thing, but in a little bit of a different way. Everybody lives their life in the box. What we do is outside the box and that’s why people like it, because it’s not something they see or experience every day. I recently did a partnership with a big hotel company in London and the European person said, “What’s the big deal? I know what Schrager does. He raises the music and lowers the lights.” They kind of can’t get it. And thank God we think outside the box, because people want what they don’t experience every day. AS: Nightlife is what’s happening in the world, boiled down and distilled into an intense pressure cooker. That’s why a lot of activism and social change comes out of it. It’s reactive to the world. That’s why it’s going to last forever,

because it’s always a reflection of what’s happening to humanity. IS: I think everything is about capturing the moment, everything. And anything that’s successful and innovative, anything in any business, not only nightlife, is out of the box. Because that’s what gets people excited, something new—not too new or they get challenged—but just new enough. This is an area that interests me tremendously. The iPod was around for 20 years before it became successful with Steve Jobs. The TV was out there for almost 30 years before it got accepted. The car was out there for 20 years before it was accepted by people. You have to be able to read the mood and feel if the culture is ready to embrace something. Being too soon is as bad as being too late. That’s where this judgment call of a creative person becomes critical. And you always bet on the person that has a long line and history of success. I know what Anya does! She lowers the lights and raises the music. That’s it!

“THEY KIND OF CAN’T GET IT. AND THANK GOD WE THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX, BECAUSE PEOPLE WANT WHAT THEY DON’T EXPERIENCE EVERY DAY.” —IAN SCHRAGER culturedmag.com 107

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Blowing Armchair by Seungjin Yang (edition of 30)

Experience the powerful, dreamlike photographs of artist Deana Lawson. Timed tickets at guggenheim.org The Hugo Boss Prize and the exhibition are made possible by

Deana Lawson, Barrington and Father, 2021. Pigment print, 187.3 × 147 cm © Deana Lawson. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

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Bia’s Bona Fides Crying, Not Laughing What We Know Now Life on Stage The Games We Play Chloe Flower’s Popsical Is An Exercise In Gratitude Don’t Look Now Say It Like You Mean It Accessory for Art History Do You Know DeSe?

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A L L C L O T H I N G B Y B O T T E G A V E N E TA

BIA’s Bona Fides

The mononymous rapper surfaced onto the international stage with her “Whole Lotta Money” single floating through TikTok, but there’s more to come from this tireless vocalist and writer, who tells Khalila Douze she’s at work on a new flow. PHOTOGRAPHY BY Gillian Garcia STYLING BY Jared Ellner culturedmag.com 115

Those familiar with both the zodiac system and any of New York City’s boroughs would probably agree that “I put on my jewelry just to go to the bodega” is a statement as quintessentially Leo as they come.

This astrological sign is often characterized as a highly lovable attention seeker always ready for an audience, even on a quick walk to the corner store. The rapper BIA, whose birthday falls on the fourth week of Leo season, delivered this line with a punch that stands out on her biggest song to date, “Whole Lotta Money,” the remix of which features Nicki Minaj and has staked a claim on the Billboard Hot 100 for weeks. “It was definitely one of my biggest goals to have a song that people really knew me for,” BIA says. “I’ve had other songs that people know from me, but none that could really put a face to me. This is like my first song for my reintroduction to the world,” she adds. Spoken like a Leo! This summer, BIA’s fluid voice and flawlessly made-up face (she aspires to start a beauty line one day) have infiltrated our virtual realities, with “Whole Lotta Money” sound-tracking

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TikTok dance videos and memes as well as our haphazard social reopenings, from nightclubs to festivals, across the country. It’s a song whose infectious beat and unapologetic flamboyance have brought many of us joy in times of disruption and uncertainty. For BIA, it is a song that has propelled her into her next chapter. No longer an artist on the rise, she has officially cemented herself in the pop-culture zeitgeist. With a jam-packed schedule of appearances and performances, her downtime these days is sparse. When she calls in for her interview, BIA is winding down from her set at the Lollapalooza festival in Chicago, and less than a day away from her next trip to Florida, where she’ll make a pit stop in Tampa before heading to Miami to host a club night alongside rapper 50 Cent. “This is the busiest I’ve ever been in my life,” the Los Angeles-based rapper

admits, explaining that since April she rarely has more than 24 hours at home in between stints across the country. “I’m not home long enough to grocery shop anymore. By the time I get back, everything is spoiled or I can’t cook. It’s these little random things that you miss, but you’re just so happy to be on the road and busy at the same time,” BIA shares, seemingly beaming with gratitude. The woman is booked —a far cry from her time spent in quarantine making music in isolation and, impressively, learning how to do her own nails. Born Bianca Miquela Landraw, BIA grew up in between Massachusetts, where her Italian mother raised her and her younger sister, and Manhattan, where her Puerto Rican father lived. “I was always back and forth, I’ve always been around different cultures,” BIA reflects. “I remember Puerto Rican Day parades—this

Earrings and ring by Bottega Veneta, bracelet is talent’s own, worn throughout.

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“Now, it feels like I’m entering into a new chapter, a chapter of authenticity.”

was probably before Spanish Harlem was gentrified. You would go outside and see people selling plates of food in front of their house from a table. It was like the whole neighborhood knew each other,” she recalls, sharing how much she misses the New York she remembers. As a self-identified tomboy, BIA spent the free time of her younger years hanging out in studios where her friends would record songs. “Being with them, I learned so much about rap, what sounded good to me sonically and what didn’t,” she says. For BIA, music’s potential is to bring people together, and it’s something she takes pride in initiating in her songs: “When you have different people from different cultures— Puerto Rican people, white people, Black people, Asian people and people from all different races—singing “I go to the bodega,” you’re bridging cultures together. That’s what it’s all about.” In some ways, the past year is a fresh start for BIA, who, despite lots of experience in the music industry—she’s been putting out music since 2012—made quite the statement with her second official release, 2020’s EP For Certain. The project, much of which was produced by her longtime friends from Boston, Lil Rich and AzizTheShake, features rappers Lil Durk, Doe Boy and 42 Dugg. “I always try to work with people who I have good relationships with in real life, so all the collabs on my project were hand-picked… people that I’m fans of and vice versa,” BIA says about the EP. Over the years, she’s earned accolades

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from the most admired musicians on the planet—from Rihanna, who called her collaboration with Russ, “Best On Earth,” her “new fav song,” to Pharrell. BIA was signed to his label, i am OTHER, from 2014 to 2019. Early in her career she starred on Oxygen’s Sisterhood of Hip Hop, and in 2016 she supported Ariana Grande on tour alongside singer-songwriter Victoria Monét. Since, she’s made songs with J Balvin, Kali Uchis and Doja Cat, and written songs for other artists. But it is For Certain that has finally put BIA’s face to her name. “Now, it feels like I’m entering into a new chapter, a chapter of authenticity,” the rapper says, hinting at past struggles to know herself. BIA is coy about the challenges: “I’ve addressed a lot of them in my music… ‘First Day Out’ and songs like that. My fans would definitely know what I’m referring to,” she says, touching on the trust issues and business conflicts her lyrics suggest. “Everything I do, I’m super certain about and feels good to me.” At a time when women rappers are at the forefront of popular music (Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion, Doja Cat, etc.), it is exciting to witness the power of “BarBIA”—an amalgam of “Barbie,” a reference to Nicki Minaj’s Harajuku Barbie alter ego from which her “Barb” fans derive their epithet, and “BIA.” “Nicki invited me to her house and we worked on the verse the first day,” BIA recalls. “It didn’t come right away. She was really pushing my pen in a good way, really like, ‘No, I’m not rocking with that line. Try to do this instead.’ You know what I’m saying? She was pushing

me to go in a different flow. I felt like I had found a big sister in her. She’s taught me a lot in such a short time.” As BIA leans into the most exciting time of her career, she has her heart set on expanding her range as a musician. She reveals that she’s working on an R & B album and having a blast recording it. “A lot of people don’t even know that I can sing, so I’m excited to get that out and see what people think,” she shares. “I used to always try to sing, but didn’t have any vocal control or anyone around me that really knew how to sing and tell me how to get better.” As she spent more time in studios, she trained her voice. BIA credits Pharrell especially with encouraging her to experiment with her vocals: “He was the first person to put me on Auto-Tune.” Now more than ever with her mind on her future, BIA feels she still has so much left to accomplish, including world tours, arena tours, a makeup line and nailing the alchemy needed to balance her time better. “I used to be just like them, I had dreams just like them, I used to work at the mall at Foot Locker just like them,” she says, about the fans that have kept her going all these years. “To have that support when they sing your lyrics and know your songs is the greatest feeling to me.” At a time when virality, overnight success and an oversaturation of releases define the music economy, it is simply refreshing to watch an artist like BIA flourish through more traditional means—the living proof that hard work, talent and determination is still enough.

Earrings by Presley Oldham. Hair by Kieanna McBeth. Makeup Amber Perry.

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PHOTOGRAPHY BY CARLOS “KAITO” ARAUJO STYLING BY LAW ROACH

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This summer, Tiffany Haddish changed the tune of her singsong voice. Even perceptible in a couple of episodes as Tuca, her cartoon alter ego from Tuca & Bertie (Haddish’s Adult Swim collaboration with fellow comedian Ali Wong and cartoonist Lisa Hanawalt), this switch in tenor was the acoustic signal that not only Tuca but Haddish herself was evolving. Haddish, whose career flourished over the past decade, first as a stand-up and later as necessary billing for any ensemble-cast farces, is now sharing the headline with Oscar Isaac as his love interest and boss in Paul Schrader’s anticipated new poker drama, The Card Counter. The trend continues in her upcoming flick, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022), with Nicolas Cage—who she plays straight too. Here, on the occasion of The Card Counter’s release at the Venice Film Biennale, Haddish discusses the pivot with friend and director Schrader, in addition to why gardening is great, paying extra for rehearsal is always worth it and making movies is just like playing pretend. 124 culturedmag.com

Ashi Studio dress, We Dream in Colour earrings and Stuart Weitzman shoes. Previous spread: Aliétte dress, We Dream in Colour necklace and earrings and Tiffany & Co. rings.

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LBV dress, We Dream in Colour earrings, Rallati ring and Le Silla shoes.

PAUL SCHRADER: You’re looking good. TIFFANY HADDISH: So are you. You’ve lost some pounds, huh? We’re over here getting skinny together. PS: Well, I’ve also stopped drinking. TH: Where you left off, I picked up. PS: I’ve got a lot of traveling and work to do. TH: I was just in Panama wondering why we are not releasing this [movie] in South America? Are we releasing this movie in South America? There are so many casinos in South America and I really love them. PS: I don’t know what that costs. Today I got an Italian campaign; I’ve got a few other things lined up. TH: But what about South America? There’s a bunch of people like me and Oscar in South America. There are casinos galore. PS: I’m sure there’s something in the works. When it comes to this part of the film, I like to keep it at arm’s length because there is nothing you can do about it, it’s going to happen. All you can do is worry. TH: Paul, I’m just like this: I don’t want to see my movie on bootleg at a fruit stand, because they had Girls Trip (2017) on bootleg at a fruit stand down there. PS: Well, we should be so lucky (chuckles). KAT HERRIMAN: I’m wondering how much time you both had spent in casinos prior to making this movie, and how many casinos you spent time in while making it? Did it change the way you saw them? PS: Well, we made the film on what they call the Redneck Riviera, which is a strip of the Gulf Coast. There were about six or eight casinos that we were able to use. That was our home base. I did some gambling once when I was younger, but it doesn’t really interest me that much. I see these kinds of things as metaphors. I never rode as a taxi driver, I was never a gigolo, I was never a society escort, I was never a drug dealer. I was never a raver, but I find these occupations of interest, metaphorically. The same thing about poker players. There’s something interesting about the deadness of that occupation. That’s what draws me: not the occupation itself, the metaphorical quality of the occupation. The next one I’m going to do is about a horticulturalist. TH: You’re doing my life story. PS: Are you a horticulturist? TH: Oh my gosh. Can I show you my garden right now? We had a wonderful production of plums this year, then I got huge bell peppers growing, cayenne pepper and tomatoes. Oh, I’m growing Devil’s Breath. Horticulturists can make drugs, you know. PS: With all these plants have you been able to get on the road? TH: Yes, that’s why my coffee plant is dying. I just came back from Panama. I was actually there looking to buy some farmland. PS: But what about on the road to work? TH: Oh, to do stand-up? PS: Yes. TH: Yes. Well, no. I haven’t done any stand-up shows out of town. I’ve been doing a bunch in town though and I love it. It’s good money. It’s better money than I’ve ever made doing comedy shows before. PS: How big an audience can you have now with COVID in LA? TH: Well, to be honest, I’m not sure. I feel like a lot of these shows are illegal. If you want to write a movie about horticulturalists and their illegal doings, I got your back. KH: How about illegal casino trade? TH: I spent a lot of time in the casinos before this movie. A lot of stand-up comedy happens in casinos. I spent three years at the San Manuel Casino doing comedy shows and gambling.

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I only played blackjack and I never spent more than $20. If I lost $20, I was out. PS: You had worked at this very casino that was our home base, right? TH: Yes, I did a comedy show there. I sure did. I’ve done comedy shows at casinos all over the country. KH: Now, when you do comedy shows at casinos, will you be thinking of La Linda? TH: I’ll be honest with you. Playing La Linda didn’t change how I saw casinos. It changed my idea of how a woman can get a man to do certain things, how I approach people about things. PS: One of the interesting things about working with Tiffany is she’s a trained comedian. It’s from a lesson I learned long ago from Scorsese. In Taxi Driver (1976), we had a role that wasn’t very interesting and he cast Albert Brooks. I said, “Why did you cast Albert?” He said, “Well, the role wasn’t very good. I thought Albert would make something out of it.” I’ve always remembered that, and over the years cast stand-ups as straight performers: Richard Pryor, Cedric the Entertainer and now Tiffany. It’s a way to take a role and put another dimension on it. A little trick I offer up. Also because these performers want to add another dimension to their career. I said to Cedric, “I don’t want you to be funny.” He said, “If I thought you did, I wouldn’t have taken the job.” (Laughter.) KH: Is Paul accurate? TH: No, I dreaded every second (laughs). Of course, I was excited. I was more excited about Paul. He could have asked me to be a cat and I would have been super happy about it. I’ve been a fan of his for a very long time. I really think we should do another Cat People (1982). PS: Well, it was interesting when we first had a reading with Oscar. Tiffany was really overworking the script, because when you’re on stage and you’re live and something dies, it dies. If you’re in a film and something dies, they fix it. I had to tell her, “Pick and choose where you’re going to try to get your laughs or where you’re going to get your emphasis, because if you try to hit every line, it won’t work very well.” I don’t know if you remember that first table reading. TH: Well now, this is what I will never forget. You said, “Tiffany when you speak, you sing.” I said, “No, I don’t.” And you said, “Yes, you do.” I said, “No. I don’t.” You said, “Yes, you do.” I said, “No, I don’t.” You said, “Yes, you do.” (Laughter.) And then I realized, “Oh, I do.” When you’re doing stand-up, there’s a rhythm to it. PS: The rhythm tells people when to laugh. TH: Exactly. It was definitely me working on just being straight, which sometimes feels boring to me in the moment. Then when it’s done, when he goes, “Cut.” I’m like, “Damn, that was freaking awesome. That was really good.” It was a little uncomfortable because I was definitely not in my arena, but I was having fun playing somebody else’s game, if that makes sense. And what’s great about working with Paul is he knew exactly what he wanted and how he wanted it. I love that we rehearsed the way we did, because I knew exactly what to expect when I came in to do the scenes. It wasn’t like, “Is this going to be good enough? I hope they like this.” I already know what Paul wants, so I know what to give him. That is a ton of relief. PS: One of the upsetting things I’ve heard from actors is they run into more and more productions that don’t like to pay for that extra week for the actors to be on location. Rehearsal time is the best time of all because there’s no responsibility. You can fail in every possible way. The fact that you’re supposed to do it. You have to learn how to fail at rehearsal so you don’t have to fail on somebody else’s dime. I was just talking to Sigourney Weaver, who’s, obviously, not a newcomer, and she says, “A lot of the films that I do, there’s no rehearsals.” She came up through that old school where you rehearse, you rehearse and rehearse. I feel sorry for some of these younger actors who don’t get rehearsal time. TH: Every movie that I’ve ever been in where we had rehearsal has made over $100 million. I’m just going to say that. I’m just putting that out there. Every

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movie that we didn’t have rehearsal only made like $80 million (laughs). But it’s true. [Rehearsal] gives you a chance to pretend to try different ways. Remember, Paul, I was trying so many different ways? I tried an accent at one point. PS: I have a question, Tiffany. I’m very curious about this film that Nick [Cage] has just done where he plays himself. You were in that, right? TH: Yes. PS: What did you play? TH: A federal agent. PS: Nick Cage has done a film where they paid him a godsmack of money to play himself. I’m just very interested in how that’s going to come out. TH: I think it’s going to be hilarious. My character’s not funny at all. I don’t say or do anything funny. My job in that movie is to push the story forward. I literally bring the “oh shit” moments to the table. I create conflict for him, but I’m very straight, not funny at all. It would’ve helped me so much working with you because it helped me take the music out of my voice. KH: I’m wondering how rehearsal effects on-screen chemistry, which you and Oscar had so much of. What challenges do you face when creating onscene intimacy? TH: Well, I love playing imaginary. I’ve been playing it for many, many years. It helps me to escape the pain of life that happens from time to time. Have you ever played house? Your mom and brothers and sisters, your aunties and uncles, everybody is at the house, but you’re playing house with your next-door neighbor. You’re bossing him around, saying, “You’re the husband, and you need to do this, and you need to do this.” There are people all around you, but you are playing together, right? This is the way I’ve always imagined it. The cameras are like Mom and Dad and we are just two actors playing house, playing travelers, playing whatever. [The cameras] are there, but they don’t really matter. What matters is who I am playing with. Who am I creating this slice of life with? So with Oscar we connected beforehand. We have got a lot of things in common, and when those cameras are right there, we were right here [motioning to eyes]. There’s a lot of, I would say, eye gazing involved. There’s a lot of paying attention to his body language, my body language. PS: One of the interesting things about COVID, we got shut down about 75% of the way through, and we had a long hiatus before we were able to come back and finish. Because of this I could show parts of the film to various people, like Scorsese, and ask: “What am I missing? What am I missing?” One of the things that I started to realize I was missing was the push-pull between these two characters. It was during that interim where I wrote that thing where he says to her, “I like this thing we have.” She says, “What thing?” He says, “This friendship.” In order to just suddenly put the knife at it and say that she doesn’t want this to be a friendship, and he doesn’t know how much he’s heard it. KH: What was it like returning to La Linda and navigating this moment of love unrequited? TH: For me it was like, “Okay, I know this feeling, I know what this is. I’ve been there. I know how to deliver that.” It was like a whole other chunk of character. It was a lot of conversations with Paul like, “Exactly what do you want? Will you break it down for me?” Overall, I enjoyed it. I felt like it was the best learning experience for me. KH: You had said that playing La Linda taught you new ways to manipulate men? I’m wondering if you’ve taken those lessons into your real life or if you’ve used them on Paul. TH: No, I haven’t used it on Paul. I just keep it straight-up with Paul. I might’ve used it in my personal experiences though. Lets see what happens when I take the music out of my voice and get real quiet.

Cong Tri dress, Jennifer Fisher bracelets, We Dream in Colour earrings and Stuart Weitzman shoes. Makeup by Ernesto Casillas. Hair by Ray Christopher.

“THIS IS THE WAY I’VE ALWAYS IMAGINED IT. THE CAMERAS ARE LIKE MOM AND DAD AND WE ARE JUST TWO ACTORS PLAYING HOUSE, PLAYING TRAVELERS, PLAYING WHATEVER. [THE CAMERAS] ARE THERE, BUT THEY DON’T REALLY MATTER.” –TIFFAY HADDISH

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What We Know Now RENÉE GREEN and K ANDIS WILLIA MS have never met IRL, but they share a frequency as artists invested in language, publishing and their collusions with the visual. Both educators, editors and filmmakers, Green and Williams have carved pathways through art’s traditional categories to create new spaces to explore.

A film still from Renée Green’s Partially Buried Continued, 1997.

This has included founding publishing houses (Williams runs Cassandra Press) and dream production companies (Green’s Free Agent Media is more than a decade old). As a reward for this pioneering, they’ve been repeatedly told by institutions that there is no lineage for their ideas and work, when in fact it’s quite clear it is only a Zoom call away. Here, we ask Green and Williams—ahead of major shows at the KW Institute and Ebony Hayne’s new Tribeca kunsthalle, 52 Walker, respectively—to break the ice and begin unpacking the potential of what this intergenerational dialogue could look like. culturedmag.com 131

RENÉE GREEN: What year was that? KW: 2006. RG: I had a film retrospective at the Jeu de Paume in 2008. KW: Yes, exactly. That’s where I first got familiar with your work. I was leaving France when that exhibition opened. I have private beef with the whole art world for your work not feeling centered. RG: Thank you! KW: It was really nice to get your dossier for this interview because it’s like cutting teeth trying to find your catalogues. RG: That’s crazy, because there’s so many of them. KW: I know. RG: It doesn’t make sense, but this relates to publishing, the way things circulate between countries and between languages, as well as how certain institutions distribute work. One of the main gaps you might have encountered is that I was not in the United States for about 12 years. I was always back and forth, but most of my production was abroad, so that created a schism in terms of visibility. I wasn’t necessarily thinking about connecting or being present all the time. I’m always out of sync, which I don’t actually mind. I was focused on doing my projects and on what I was interested in. I was doing different forms of investigation and

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research, thinking and producing work. In 2003, I returned to the US and I lived in California, which is not New York, for eight and a half years. I was going to LA, but I wasn’t trying to be part of anything. KW: It’s funny, with the last couple years, especially with the pandemic, I feel like it’s really interesting how fractured, how in sync and out of sync the work that we do is. I’ve been thinking about how much in front of time they are, and I don’t want to say they’re “ahead” or “avant-garde,” because I know those phrases have connotations that are very much behind innovation. They’re like capturing mechanisms, but I’ve just been crunching and thinking about that in terms of how do we site ourselves in that cycle? How can we attune without syncing? I’m so grateful for how out of sync I’ve been. It saved my life a little bit. You know what I mean? It saved my practice for sure. RG: I agree with that. That’s why I say it doesn’t bother me at all being out of sync. I’ve also been examining a different kind of pacing. For example, focusing on where I am and what I want to do there, that is my focus, so that can take me to all kinds of times and places. During this time of stillness and not too much travel, it’s been possible to reflect on these things while still working. I’m focusing now on a survey exhibition, and I know that this kind of exhibition can seem to clash with what I want to perceive in the present, yet it too is facing now. The exhibition is called “Inevitable Distances.” This process has allowed me to think about an asynchronous way of being and perceiving. Even if there are moments of asynchronicity that can be very resonant, there are still distances. There are differences and distances between all of us. KW: Silences as well—I feel like distances and silences. When you say “distance,” I immediately think of “dissonance.” A friend of mine, Leilah Weinraub, made a documentary about central LA lesbian clubs called Shakedown (2018), and she was talking to Mireille Miller-Young, who wrote A Taste for Brown Sugar (2004). She was editing it for like 10 years and one of Miller-Young’s questions was, “Why now?” Leilah replied, “After 10 years of gathering all this footage, it was like the world wasn’t a place where I could speak about what I had done over the last 10 years until now.” RG: Yes, that happens. Researching your work for this conversation, I was really struck by a lot of things that you have actually said and have been referencing, because they resonate with a number

of my works that you would not have seen. I would say almost all the topics that you touched on, particularly botany and gardens. KW: I think about “Fear, Flight and Fate” from Sites of Genealogy (1990) all the time. I think I’ve only seen those couple of magazine images from it. RG: That work has only been presented once, and it’s going to be reconfigured in the Berlin exhibition, which is going to be a very unusual survey. It’s still unfolding as we speak, with a number of participants who I hadn’t met before. I knew the person who invited me, Mason LeaverYap, and they wanted me to be in conversation with some younger people from different places who they thought could be interesting to be in touch with about the work. Most of them have only seen the work in reproductions. They have not ever physically encountered it, and so much of these works have to do with a visceral encounter, as well as space and sound. Sites of Genealogy, the piece that you mentioned, is going to be in Berlin at KW [Institute for Contemporary Art], and I’m rethinking how that can happen because it was sort of a solitary performance during a year, in the peripheral spaces of PS1, before it was gutted and renovated to become MoMA. I used the cellars, the stairway and the attic. KW: It’s interesting because I feel like I’ve lived in Germany for a while too, for 12 years as well. RG: That’s a long time. Are you still living there, or are you back and forth? What are you doing? KW: I don’t know right now. I feel like I gave a lot of time away in 2020, and I’m really fighting to find time again. I’ll do whatever gives me time. RG: I’m there too, yes. KW: I’m waiting for a necessity to show its face and for innovation, or some idea, to follow. Right now, I’m thinking so much about theater and this weird operative semiotic space that is like caricature and is the mimetic demands that caricature places on how we behave in public basically. It’s the Shakespeare thing, I guess, the theater of the world. He’s a white writer from the sixties, but Peter Brook, who wrote The Empty Space (1968)—do you know this text? RG: I don’t know that text, but I’m familiar with Peter Brook. KW: He calls it the deadly theater. There is the rough theater, the holy theater, the immediate theater and the deadly theater. I don’t really agree with all those distinctions, but I feel like there’s almost mediocre boundaries or something in

SEMBA KIZOMBA CANDOMBE CAYENGE, COROBA: DANCE NOTATION ON CASCADING SELLOUM PHILODENDRON ARRANGEMENT: COURTESY OF NIGHT GALLERY AND DAVID ZWIRNER. SITES OF GENEALOGY: COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND FREE AGENT MEDIA; IMAGE: TOM WARREN. MISE-EN-SCÈNE: COMMEMORATIVE TOILE: COURTESY OF THE ARTIST, FREE AGENT MEDIA, AND BORTOLAMI GALLERY, NEW YORK. PREVIOUS SPREAD: COURTESY OF THE ARTIST, FREE AGENT MEDIA, AND VIDEO DATA BANK, CHICAGO.

Kandis Williams: I feel like you’re one of the artists that I discovered after going to Cooper. I spent half my time at Cooper at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, and I didn’t find out about your work until the end.

between. It is like the means of production are the only differentiating force. How have you made moving in between so many hybrid forms of production, especially going from a book to a room to a concept, feel so natural? That’s why I really feel like I resonate with your practice. It actually makes me angry that I haven’t seen more of your work because I feel like I was denied language where I’ve had individual conversations about how my work might fit into art history. I’ve been told, “We don’t know where it fits, there is no place for it. It’s too much. It’s too dense. It’s too da, da, da, like you’re not an expert at, you’re not a professional of, you’re not an expert at…” RG: Where to begin with that? I am looking at formations, like university for example. What you describe is the response I got too, when I wrote my thesis in 1981, Discourse on Afro-American Art. It focused on the discourses being developed in the 1920s and 1960s, but through the documents, what was possible to find written by writers of African descent as well as of European descent. Looking at those two time periods and the relays between those decades, there was a possibility that people who lived during the 1920s would still be alive in the 1960s, which was the case with W. E. B. Du Bois. I remember when I was trying to find an advisor in art history. I was an art student, but I was trying to cross into other disciplines. That was the moment people tried to cross over, trying to mix things together, and the whole notion of the interdisciplinary was something that you were encouraged to do, yet there was no infrastructure, there were no means to actually do it effectively. And then, everybody seemed to be afraid of it. I actually don’t think it’s ever been resolved. I was actually pushed to a music professor of African descent to be my advisor. The art history professor said he did not feel competent to weigh in on those writings, even though they were all about art. I was saying,

Above and right: Renée Green’s Sites of Genealogy (1990) and artist’s documentation of Mise-en-Scène: Commemorative Toile (1992-94). Left: Kandis Williams’s Semba Kizomba Candombe Cayenge, Coroba: dance notation on cascading selloum philodendron arrangement (2020).

“Well, the sources are from the art cultural realm.” And there was a third advisor, someone else who was in Asian Studies, a sinophile. Those are the people that I ended up having on my thesis committee; but it was a stretch to get anyone to engage, beyond my thesis advisor. KW: Yes, it feels to me like especially in the last two or maybe four years, following the last fascist tide or something, Blackness seems to serve a very different architectural program than before. There’s a lot of mandates to perform and to participate in Blackness. The constructs are almost split. I’m realizing so much structural violence is embedded in literary fiction and in narrative devices. The image propels so much violence, and then we’re asking violent images to stop being violent. RG: I’ve been finding it extremely perplexing, the past four years in particular. There seems to have been an erasure of the questioning that had arisen 20, 30 years before, questions about the image, about representation, even Laura Mulvey’s analysis about the position of women in front of the camera. Things that I was very conscious of in the late eighties, when I was trying to make work that could address some of these questions.

KW: There’s a book by Carrie Lambert-Beatty called Being Watched (2008), and it’s about Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s. RG: I’m familiar with the book. I know Carrie, Yvonne is a friend. KW: Oh, wow, great. Well [Yvonne] talks about mass media and the quote is like: “The problems that might have always been a part of experiencing art, but which at times in particular places become newly problematic and less productive for artistic work,” and she calls those “seeing difficulties.” I feel there’s an interesting thing, seeing that idea, but through Simone Browne’s surveillance culture, and just understanding that mass media has always been positioned as surveillance or it comes out of surveillance technology of the slave population. RG: These are things that I have continued to be interested in, but bringing them together with some of the theoretical observations about representation, because that’s where I see a schism and that’s something that I aim to address. It’s very interesting, thinking about the choices of what to begin with, to think about, what it is that stimulates one, or what resonates for one. The reasons as to how one gets to culturedmag.com 133

something, rather than reacting to whatever is being projected onto you. In the present moment, there’s a lot that’s projected onto people. I would say it’s pretty violent and suffocating. I’ve been really interested in creating another way, another kind of space for existing, because this current moment is very silencing. And it seems like a contradiction, because there’s such an incredible amount of presence in the media. KW: Saturation. RG: Saturation, yes. Also, I would say it’s very noisy at the moment, so it’s quite difficult to make any distinction. What do you think? KW: It’s hard because it is so obviously violent. There’s a semiotic posturing towards care and extensions of care, but there’s no material move towards it. There’s a lot of semiotic and propagandistic sloganism, then the same demands are being placed on the same bodies to live without structure and support. I’ve been exalted in one moment and told that I don’t understand A from B in the same breath by the same people. You know what I mean? RG: I do know exactly what you mean, I definitely do. KW: That feels like it’s part of the condition, the same condition that maybe has left us without a lot of access to your physical works and probably that leaves people without access to my physical works. RG: It is encouraging that we’re actually having a conversation, that it’s been possible for something to be found and that someone wanted us to meet and talk. I’ve been focused on working really intensely during these past years and decades. My focus hasn’t been on promotion. What drives me hasn’t been about trying to present myself or the work, but to actually make the work so that it can exist and be placed somewhere where I can protect it. It required a certain amount of independence and agency, which I took. It was definitely not given. The care is not happening as described; what you described is a lot more accurate. KW: Steep learning curve, it’s funny. RG: And this is something that I learned looking at musicians and their approach. They don’t produce the same physical matter that we do, matter that we have to store or place somewhere, so I’ve been reflecting on what are the differences between a poet, a musician, an artist, and a filmmaker? How is anything supported, and how can it continue through time? KW: Yes. I’ve been half-jokingly calling myself a bootlegger for a really long time, and it’s a caricature that I am invested in. Also dramaturgy, I did a lot of dramaturgy. I love the title, because 134 culturedmag.com

no one knows what it is (laughs). So I can really just respond to situations in a lot of ways and I can invent a title as I like to see it. I’ve been thinking about dance that way too, when you really read dance, when you read about dance. I have maybe a handful of black theorists that I have access to, and many of them are people like Donald Bogle, who’s a Hollywood historian, or Brenda Dixon Gottschild, who in almost every forward talks about her lack of exposure or her lack of access and distribution. They’re great books and have been really pivotal for me in thinking about how overexposed and then how saturated and simultaneously how silenced so much of the apprehension around black bodies is and so much of the cognition around Black bodies. When I work with Black

Kandis Williams’s Modernity is not merely a compromise between novel forms of commercially driven social organization and this archaic cultural pattern of patrilineal exogamy, but more fundamentally, a deepening of the compromise already integral to any exogamy that is able to remain patrilineal (2019).

dancers, there’s a vernacular that I can fall back on that is very strong movement language. Then when I work with other kinds of dancers or other trained dancers, it’s like we lose the language for describing the raceless, genderless parts that we share and how to move hands, fingers, arms—because they aren’t reflective of their training of what to call their body and emotion. RG: That’s very interesting while thinking about language and its gaps; it relates to how it can be possible to understand anything between people, as well as between cultural forms. I don’t think it’s impossible, but I believe that involves patience and attention and listening and maybe stillness or just being with people in a different way or being open to something that hasn’t happened yet in the ways that people are

used to. It’s very interesting to me to hear how you think about this, but it also brings forth the question of language and words, of analogy. How is something translated? How does that happen? KW: Yes. I look at performance a lot across the app TikTok. It really makes it painfully clear that most of our English-language-speaking mimetic narrative devices come from Black vernacular English or Black song or Black fans. It’s an app that can take 30 seconds, or now it’s three minutes, of audio. You know TikTok? RG: I haven’t used it, but I know of it. KW: It’s interesting because it gives this fractured, dangling semiotic form, and then it’s like you can see it just hit all these different surfaces. It’s fascinating for me because I feel like it’s a dis-identification, it’s the propagandistic reordering, but it’s also this shifting—maybe towards the cliff. RG: That’s the other thing. I want to get to a certain subjectivity, as there are many variables and possibilities of how combinations of people, of things, could or can exist, and yet, there’s still a lot that’s missing. KW: It’s interesting, that kind of transculturation—You talk about transculturation a lot as well. RG: A lot (laughs). KW: There’s a theorist I love named Bracha Ettinger, who talks about trans-subjectivity and trans-subjectivization, which is again, how we, as people, go about creating the other and then creating self from the other. Tiktok just allows for these trans-subjective iterations, and it’s funny too, because it is something that happens on all Internet sites, but this is a really extreme lexical variation, rendered in a hyper niche community. And the opposite happens, where it’s like, we’ve been told so often that we have a pidgin English or Black vernacular, especially AAVE [African-American Vernacular English], and then that debated form of English is actually a stabilizing iterative. It’s the iterative. It’s like the lingua franca of the Internet, and that vernacular ends up stabilizing and reordering. It’s weird because I illustrated this Adolph Reed essay a couple of years ago called— RG: Oh, Adolph Reed. He was someone I was involved with many years ago in an editorial project; ultimately, we didn’t produce the publication, but it’s interesting that you mention him, because the project I was working on was with Joe Wood, who sadly passed away or disappeared in 1999, as he never was found. We wanted to produce a journal around 1994, and it was called Turn; Adolph Reed was the elder we were in conversation with.

MODERNITY IS NOT MERELY A COMPROMISE BETWEEN NOVEL FORMS OF COMMERCIALLY DRIVEN SOCIAL ORGANIZATION AND THIS ARCHAIC CULTURAL PATTERN OF PATRILINEAL EXOGAMY, BUT MORE FUNDAMENTALLY, A DEEPENING OF THE COMPROMISE ALREADY INTEGRAL TO ANY EXOGAMY THAT IS ABLE TO REMAIN PATRILINEAL: COURTESY OF NIGHT GALLERY AND DAVID ZWIRNER.

KW: I feel like Adolph Reed is also your elder, so he’s my grand-elder. But the article is called “The Trouble With Uplift.” It was published in 2017, so it was very much about public-facing, forward-facing, participatory Blackness that White institutions were really calling for. Black Is Beautiful 4.0. And that article really did not give that. RG: I may have read that article. His writing causes reactions, negative reactions. That’s one of the reasons why we wanted to work with him. KW: Yes, his reaction to Black Panther (2018). And one of the reasons why I was so honored to be illustrating this thing. I think conversations over dinner tables in 2020... there was a moment where “The Trouble With Uplift” was too painful. In 2016, I think we were producing new calluses, especially around language that didn’t avail us of the dissonance and discomfort that we were feeling. We were looking for Black joy, we were looking for Black unity, we were also looking for Black Is Beautiful 4.0. It’s impossible to not see those coming together on platforms like Facebook. It’s impossible to not see the uplift as Disney+ and, thereby, cartographically seated in Hades or something (laughs). In that way I saw our generation building dissonance around participating in the structures that our generation was producing, the social structures and the structures of dissemination and structures of publication. I saw us producing a new dissonance around participating in things like... RG: One of the things that I’ve observed lately is that there are certain gaps that happen between generations. Perhaps because those who opened things up are gone, like Joe. There are others who are quite present, and others, they’re super present (laughs); so, there’s a simultaneous combination of blinding and silencing. I like to think about durations, the long span of humans producing, those before us, and those continuing. There’s always all the stuff that seems like a problem or boring, the daily aspects of being an artist that aren’t captured in a photograph, or if it had ever been captured, it might not be the photograph that anybody would care about. It would be great to continue this conversation. KW: Yes, because we didn’t even touch publishing... RG: I know, but all of these things are related to publishing: what we haven’t found, what it is we’re making. Now, we both have made things, and these can be found and they can be reprinted. That’s what we were just celebrating at Bortolami Gallery recently: the reprint of Camino Road, a book that I wrote and published as part of an exhibition in 1994 for the Reina

Sofía in Madrid; it was quite interesting for me to learn about your recent work dealing with what’s imagined to be a Spanish form. KW: Can I ask you one last question? RG: Sure, yes. KW: Can you just maybe describe what it was like for you and your career but then, also for the positioning of Black artists politically, in terms of the global shows in ’93? RG: Oh, the global shows of ’93. The one that would have been most known would have been the Whitney Biennial, and that was not totally global. I would say that in 1993 there weren’t too many people of African descent circulating

“I like to think about durations, the long span of humans producing, those before us, and those continuing. There’s always all the stuff that seems like a problem or boring, the daily aspects of being an artist that aren’t captured in a photograph, or if it had ever been captured, it might not be the photograph that anybody would care about.” –RENÉE GREEN

through the art sphere. They were just like a few artists then, but many more surfaced around 1997, I would say. I think it’s important to actually understand this, as it’s just been bulldozed over, the fact that there actually wasn’t a global circulation at the time. It was mostly European. It is important to understand when things in the so-called “global” emerged in a big way. I would say that it was in 1997, with the Johannesburg Biennale and the Gwangju Biennale. There had been two previous biennales, but it was in 1997 when things really peaked in a different way. I know it from the people that I was with then, and how we were working internationally. What we’ve had mostly up until now has been a curator’s perspective, we haven’t had the artists’ perspective. We’ve had people giving

props to the curators, yet the artists have a really different story. It will be interesting for that to come out further. “Inevitable Distances” is just a little start. KW: What was the perception of cinema at the time? RG: I can’t speak very in-depth about cinema at that particular moment, but I was writing through it. I wrote about Spike Lee in relation to things that were taking place at the moment. I wasn’t, as a person producing anything, part of cinema, but I was a very careful observer, developing a critical stance. I was curious about how it was unfolding. It was exciting, but at the same time, as things were opening up, I had a lot of questions, including the whole gender dynamic going on; that was happening quite strongly with Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) and all the discussions around it. It would be interesting to go into these things in more depth. In MIT, I have a project called Cinematic Migrations. That’s been the space in which I can examine these questions; it grew out of my wish to engage with people that I had not been in conversation with during the 1980s and in the early nineties. It’s been very helpful to have these conversations, as I wondered, “Where are they now and how do they think about those times? What have they been able to produce for a duration of time, not just as a one-off?” As a way into these discussions, I focused on John Akomfrah and Smoking Dogs Films, formerly Black Audio Film Collective. And that’s transatlantic. I’ve been interested in a more international mixture, because in the US context, for me, it just got suffocating. That’s why I wanted a world tour. I thought, “There’s a lot here that resonates and connects in ways that we’re not usually focusing on,” and there’ve been indications through time, from the end of the 19th century, like José Martí, many writers and poets and artists. I wanted that to keep coming back, not to just disappear. KW: Just getting to have conversations now with people that you didn’t have access to before is a real recuperation. I think there are recuperative conversations that can end certain silences between film, theater and dance. RG: Also people of the same generation, the people who didn’t live as adults through the 1960s or the 1970s, but who were 21 in 1981. That perspective has still to come through. I guess we’re running out of time, as we are now in 2021. I have no idea what we were, but it was enjoyable (laughs). KW: I giggled. I’ll giggle for the rest of the night (laughs). culturedmag.com 135

Life on STAGE Emma McMillan

spent 2013 as broke as she’d ever been, so when fellow artist Nicole Wittenberg suggested she could make some quick cash posing for the painter

Alex Katz she jumped.

The friendship that followed is still one of the most generative outlets McMillan enjoys. Katz too. Their almost decade-long dialogue is made up of nearly as many paintings as it is bitch sessions. The two share a love of history, especially music, dance, film, and art. They also share a packed Fall calendar, with the 94-year-old Katz gearing up for a Gladstone Gallery exhibition and McMillan unveiling a multi-year commission for the Paul Rudolph Foundation’s new curatorial endeavor inspired by the biblical story of Susanna. Here the two share a snippet of their ongoing repartee with a focus on their mutual love of theater.

EMMA MCMILLAN: Is there anything you want to talk about? We can just talk about painting. I was thinking about the dancers that you were painting for the show at Tramps. Alex Katz: I’ve been involved with dancing since the late 50s, with Paul Taylor. When you see a dancer on the stage they’re about one inch high, and what you experience in my paintings is lifesize. I did a series of dancers with the torsos about four or five years ago, so this time I thought I’d do the faces and try to apply to them the emotion and experience you have when you see the dancers on stage. EM: All in a face, all in a portrait size. AK: And the relationship between two people. I called up Paul Taylor, and Michael Novak, who’s another dancer, came too. I photographed them and they kept making wonderful gestures, one after the other. It’s kind of funny because when they choreograph, they take three or four hours to

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do a couple seconds of dance, and here they were knocking out one gesture after another. Then the hard part is deciding what I’m going to use. So I lay them on the floor and start cutting them, using tape, sorting what you need or what you don’t need. Then I painted them and decided to use green instead of the shadows. EM: The green for the stage light, so the deepest shadows become green. AK: Yeah, the shadows become green. I tried to use black and a purple, and it seemed kind of heavy and traditional. When I used the green, it looked right. They had a lot of stage makeup, and I did a painting 40 years ago with Paul Taylor in bright colors. There’s this woman Emma King who used to dance with the City Center—she’s Lois Dodd’s granddaughter, and she still sits like a dancer—so I told her to put on stage makeup and come over. So she did and I did these ones, four feet tall, that’s when I did the green. Then I

used the Paul Taylor dancers and took the green with me, and they said oh the way King had her makeup is old-fashioned, we don’t do that anymore, we just put a little dot by the eye. I paid no attention. I put the red where she put it then I put it on the guy’s lipstick. EM: His mouth in bright red lipstick. AK: Meanwhile, I did a series with her, six of them, and worked out the green, and the colors and the big ones with violet backgrounds. I lightened the green, which made it seem like stage lighting. I was just painting things; it was kind of crazy because I would make my decisions as I was painting. It wasn’t really pre-planned. These things all work out, very mysteriously. EM: The red comes fast, the green comes fast in these gestures—moving like on the stage! AK: The decision is very arbitrary. I never did anything quite like it. I like the idea of showing them under a bridge. It’s the chicest place in town.

Alex Katz, Dancers 11, 2019

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the Russians never paid attention to the floor, so I made the floor bright green. Bright green on the floor, bright blue on the top. And then I put the dancers in pastel colors. I never saw it, but apparently it was okay, because Paul called me up and he asked me to do a second piece. Paul also told me to never explain anything to the lighting man, just say when you want it out, when you want it light, and when you want it down. And that was great advice, because I use that with printers; when you work with printers you don’t explain, just tell them what to do. When we performed it, the lighting man was a guy who worked for Merce Cunningham. And he did stuff in the round, he was spinning and said something like, but I’m doing it and you’re not. EM: You wanted it flat, like a painting. AK: Yeah, and Paul said green on one side and red on the other. And then get the colors to spin, and accelerate it. We had no money, so you had ribbons, an inch and a half, two inches—every yard was a ribbon. From the ceiling to the bottom. EM: Oh, and Rudy Burckhardt made a movie! AK: It’s kind of great. With one part of it, the music drops out and the colors are spinning. EM: The box stops, but the dancers keep going. And the ribbon kind of accelerates that motion. It gives you a fast frame. AK: Right. And they could pack the whole set into a cigar box. EM: Roll it to the next town. AK: That was pretty good. And I kept going with Paul; I could try all kinds of things with Paul. I once put the set across the street, it was the first time I ever lived near people. I wanted something—you think of music as fashion, so I wanted something post-Cage. It was in the 70s, and I think that Cage was not on top at the time. It was traditional at this point, and you think fashion. EM: He wasn’t avant-garde anymore. AK: It was avant-garde, but it wasn’t fresh. Nothing to do with music; it was about fashion. John Ashbery had a lot of music, so we went on to his place and Paul said Beethoven, and I said you’ve got to be kidding. And then I said Brahms, that’s more like it. Then he played this record, [Iannis] Xenakis. He’s this guy who’s an architect, who worked for a producer. EM: He made the buildings for sound. AK: He did this stuff in Holland and the producer didn’t give him enough credit, so he said I’m going to be a musician. He made this abstract music. I remember it really sounded new. So I said let’s use that. It turned out to be a pretty good piece of music. I listened to it 30 or 40 times, it was kind of interesting. We had no idea if it would make sense; we couldn’t rehearse it, really. EM: It just happened once.

AK: It happened on stage, opening night, looking out and saying, well, we got away with it. After that I started making sets, and they were to make something I hadn’t seen before, like killing center stage. EM: By annihilating the focal point? AK: Yeah, the center stage was gone. It took about 30 years, and we did it with Sunset (1982) which is the best one of all of them. I was doing a painting and I said, wouldn’t this make a great dance? Sometimes the world’s in front of you. EM: It goes fast. Youth is done. AK: It goes fast and it’s gone. So I said to Paul, I’d like to do this, so I added a railing and cut off a third of the stage. EM: The railing was for the dancers to hold? AK: Yeah, it was about 3 feet high. Behind it I painted leaves, kind of big 1930s leaves, and a plane behind that. I put the guys in beige with red hats, like soldiers, and the women I put in white dresses. Charles James did all the fitting; he sort of sculpted the dresses. Light, thin material. And my ex-wife sent me this loon music. The loon music was great, but it couldn’t cover the whole piece. So we looked for something else, and we went to John Ashbery again and found some Brahms, and Brahms was almost right. Then we got Edward Elgar’s Requiem, a great piece of music. We used loons and Elgar’s Requiem. At a certain point, it’s all bright and the guys are dancing in front of the girls and the girls are dancing with the guys. EM: It’s very glamorous. AK: Yeah, and then the lights go down and the loon music comes on and they all go upstage, to the corner, and the next thing you know there’s a guy and he’s being carried by the girls and the whole thing changes. The soldier. Coming down from the cross that he picked up from Caravaggio’s [Deposition of the Christ.] EM: Oh, that’s wonderful. Jesus is upside down. AK: He came right side up though. They take him across the stage and put him down, the lights go on and they start dancing again. And finally, the guys go off and one of them drops the hat and the girl comes over and picks it up. And that’s the end of the piece. EM: That’s wild. That’s beautiful. AK: They keep playing it. Really terrific piece. And the dancing was fabulous. And the girl who picked it up was a great dancer. The pause when she’s going down to pick it up was fantastic. And other dancers have done it, but none of them could do exactly as she did it. EM: Was it hesitation? AK: Yeah, a little hesitation. It was fantastic. EM: Yeah, it breaks your attention. It breaks you out of it. AK: It stops the whole thing. Well that was the end of it, we did something else, we loved the set

PREVIOUS SPREAD: COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND ARS.

EM: You have a way of finding that! AK: Well, I have no defense. Gavin [Brown] told me to take a look at the place, so I went and looked. It was so funny I couldn’t believe it. EM: The paintings look really good in these office spaces. AK: They look like a 30 year old did ‘em. EM: Do you know the piece the dancers were performing when they were in the studio? AK: No, they just went from one position to another. I was amazed at how many good pictures they made. EM: And you’d done sets for ballets too, right? AK: I did 30 years of sets. EM: 30 years of sets! AK: It was a lot of fun. Doing costumes and sets, it’s just as much for me—it’s like doing a painting. It’s that much energy, it’s that important. EM: Same decisions. AK: When you work with dance, the costumes have a life of their own, the setting has a life of its own, the dance has a life of its own. The energy is amazing. It extends way past the painting. It’s instantaneous. And the first one I did, I was absolutely shocked at the energy it made. Paul had a friend Edwin Denby, a dance critic— EM: An amazing writer, yeah. AK: You read his stuff? EM: Yes, he was incredible. Rudy Burckhardt’s grandson Jakob was one of my teachers at Cooper. I learned sound composition from him, and he got me reading all of Denby. AK: You’re lucky, then. The other one I would recommend is Balanchine’s book on Tchaikovsky. It changed my mind on Tchaikovsky; I see him through Balanchine’s eyes now. I thought Balanchine liked him because he was decorative. Balanchine liked everything around him decorative. EM: Yeah, it’s pretty enough to be decorative but there’s something deeper. AK: Yeah, something more. The idea was to make the sets and costumes not that good. Nothing muscular. So Robert Rauschenberg was doing stuff with Paul, and he had a table that was a still life, and the still life was attached to Paul’s back. EM: He was very conceptual. AK: All ideas. So Paul said, I’m not dancing like this. He said, I think Alex can do sets and costumes. I had no idea that I could, so when they asked me I had a lot of opinions about dance and staging. Martha Graham and Balanchine had the light in spots and they wanted to add value to the arts. They had all sorts of dance light, it’s not like real light. EM: It’s acute lighting. AK: And I said, I wanted white light, flat, so it’s like daylight. Then I made it into a collage. They have a canted stage, so you could see it. And I know

but we couldn’t get it right. When you do theater, you have to be theatrical. People do it naturally; I’m not natural I just figure it out. We used to dye colors and we couldn’t get the colors right. Paul couldn’t care less because he’s involved with the dance, but to me the colors are very important. So I said, they’re not right and tomorrow it’s going on, so I’ve got to go in there and throw the costumes on the floor as hard as I can, and if it’s not fixed by tomorrow you’ll never see me again. EM: You’re speaking their language! You have to be a diva. AK: They fixed it. It was a lot of fun. EM: Do you think about choreography in your nondancer paintings? AK: Well, gesture and motion are important. That’s been my hand from the beginning. I think the paintings are about time and light. EM: It’s theater. You’re moving more than you ever had, with the new ones. AK: It goes way back. With the dancers I was always involved with movement. I did that in the ‘60s. But also the gestures that are of our time, like smoking a cigarette was in my time. And there’s no history of that in painting. So you get into gestures that belong to your time, not anyone else’s. EM: The selfie. AK: Well you’re trying to get the immediate present. That’s what the idea is. When I was young, I read a Reubens book. The teacher told me to get it. I just fell in love with the Impressionist painting, it never left my system. Soft and gentle, and I like the lighting of de Kooning and Kline, it’s very immediate. I wanted to paint a lot like de Kooning or Kline or Pollock, where it’s really quick, unlike Impressionist painting. Then it becomes this sensation of seeing something faster than you can think. I’m trying to paint that, and you can’t do it and you can’t make a realistic painting, because realistic is not what most people believe—realism is a variable, it keeps changing. EM: It’s in your mind. AK: In anyone’s mind. You see things culturally, not through your head but through your culture, and the culture keeps changing and people’s idea of what’s realistic keeps changing. If I’m trying to do something realistic, I know it’s going to be obsolete in 40 years, just as Rembrandt’s realism is obsolete. EM: So was Rembrandt fashionable? AK: Moderately fashionable, because there was Reubens at the same time, and Reubens was making 1930 Cadillacs. EM: Big, wide hips. AK: He had a whole thing. My brother once had a Cadillac convertible, red with black leather seats. So I said something about, why don’t you get something better like a Bentley? And he said where can you get something with this

A portrait of Alex Katz by McMillan commissioned by Cultured. McMillan has a side practice of portrait commissions.

much jazz for the money? And that’s Reubens. EM: I think Rembrandt would be a horse-drawn carriage. Something a little downcast. AK: In art school, a history teacher told us Picasso is like Reubens and Rouault is like Rembrandt. Rouault is a greater artist than Picasso. EM: That’s a lot to think about. AK: For me, Rouault paints technically very nicely, but it’s so fucking heavy. EM: It’s heavy and very linear. AK: Kind of corny. And I don’t think of Reubens as being corny. He’s just big and you see some good Rubens, the whole idea becomes ridiculous. He’s got so much pizzazz. EM: It’s very soft and playful. AK: He does motion real well. More motion than image. Bill de Kooning is like Reubens, the images aren’t so hot but the motion’s great. EM: It’s wonderful. Just thinking about the space around the figures with Reubens. You don’t think about the negative space. AK: It’s not a picture. Rousseau and Dali, they made images. You can’t forget the image. EM: Things are activated and moving off each

other kinetically. AK: I find I’m an image maker, I make images. And if you paint it real well, it has power. More power. EM: Have you ever read this movie critic, André Bazin? He was a surrealist film critic. He’s all about the psychology of film. He was a Freudian and he was all about how similarly the way the mind absorbs image before culture, before anything. AK: The first blast of an image. EM: Yes, he’s all about that first blast and the free association of the surrealists. AK: When I went to art school, the prevalent thing was Freud and communism. And a couple of other things I found horribly uninteresting. EM: Communism’s horribly boring. AK: Freud was very boring to me. I was interested in jazz and basketball. And dancing. We’d go to the Palladium dancing. That was interesting to me. EM: That’s before discotheque, so was it like band music? AK: Yeah, they had this live Afro-Cuban stuff with Machedo. They would take the whole audience and blow it apart. He was unreal. EM: That’s fantastic. Freud doesn’t dance after all.

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Morales wears Jovana Louis suit, Stuart Weitzman shoes, Misho necklace and Lapima Collection sunglasses. Duplass wears NorBlack NorWhite shirt and pants, Bally shoes and Gentle Monster sunglasses.

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The Games We Play Natalie Morales and Mark Duplass made leaps forward during quarantine while the rest of us watched. Here they discuss their unusual movie, Language Lessons, and the epiphanies that came along the way. By Leah Hennessey Photography by Evelyn Pustka

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WHILE MOST OF US ARE just grateful to have survived the latest incarnation of global catastrophe, there are those overachievers and malcontents in our midst who bemoan not having used the past traumatic epoch to do something more “productive,” like learn a language or make a film or cultivate new friendships in virtual reality. And then there are those among us who actually made a movie while doing Spanish immersion with their new best friend. Those people are Natalie Morales and Mark Duplass, and (thank the god of failed prodigies) there are only two of them. Unfortunately, they are impossible to hate. Their film, the Morales-directed Language Lessons, presents the two writer/director/actors as infinitely lovable, and although they play characters distinctly different from their auteur selves, the on-screen relationship reveals a complex intimacy that simply cannot be faked. The gimmick of Language Lessons—the whole movie takes place on Zoom—is easily the least interesting thing about it. This is a movie about the dance of friendship, the courtship of trust and the magic of grief. In the film, Adam (Duplass) is given the not-so-welcome gift of one hundred online Spanish lessons, paid for and orchestrated by his boyfriend as a surprise. His instructor, Cariño (Morales), enters the film in the awkward position of forcibly immersing Adam in a language in which he is not only not fluent, but not particularly interested in becoming fluent. Then (SPOILER (but not really because it’s in every description of the movie) ), Adam’s boyfriend dies, and through a simple twist of fate Cariño is the first person he tells. Despite the framing device, this is not a film about casual interaction or about fetishizing banality. This is a high-stakes love story. The relationship does not fit neatly into categories of romance or specifically sexual attraction, but a love story it is nonetheless. While Natalie Morales was directing Language Lessons she was simultaneously working on her official directorial debut, Plan B, a slightly different kind of love story, about

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best friends who have to hit the road to find a plan B pill. Judging from her (simultaneous) first features, telling the truth about these kinds of fraught, deep connections in the most effortlessseeming way possible is apparently her thing. Naturally, trying to establish an authentic rapport with these two experts on contemporary intimacy was a little nerve-racking, especially on their home turf of Zoom, but I just kind of pretended I was in the movie. Leah Hennessey: I just first of all wanted to congratulate you both on a fantastic film. I watched it last night, was very moved. I didn’t cry as much as I cried watching Plan B, but I was very moved. I was telling Natalie how much I cried watching Plan B. Mark Duplass: Same here, same here. LH: I heard you guys talking at South by Southwest about the state of mind you had during the pandemic, in this extreme historical epoch that we’re still living through, but have lived through. I’m really interested in the state of your creativity and what led to this film—and the over-quoted David Lynch thing about having the image of the severed ear in the grass and how that one image sparked the whole movie or whatever nonsense that is. MD: I can start with that because it did start on my end. And those two things you’re asking about, for me, state of mind and spark, are inextricably linked with this project. And logistically it started when we were a couple of months into the pandemic. I was actually doing fairly well, from an emotional and spiritual standpoint. I was there with my wife and my two kids. We all like each other. I’m in a place where our company was still able to work on things in postproduction. So we weren’t struggling as many others were. But I found myself with extra time on my hands and I found myself opening myself up to different things for the first time in a long time because I didn’t have such a busy schedule. And so I started taking online Spanish classes to brush up on my Spanish with this institute in Guatemala that was having financial troubles. And I found it really interesting that over this 2D, choppy Internet connection where I was taking conversational lessons, rather than it stifling the connection I had with this person, because we were so bad at small talk we ended up talking about more interesting and emotionally more resonant things more quickly. And I thought, wow, that’s very interesting. The 2D, pandemic nature of communication has made us connect more quickly rather than less quickly. And I thought that was interesting. So that was the spark and it didn’t go much beyond that. And then of course everything else in my

production, logistical brain took over from the history of how I make things, which is: well, this is a movie we can make cheaply, we can make it during the pandemic with somebody in their house and me and my house. And all of that stuff started taking off in my brain. And that’s when I called Natalie and wanted to see if she could partner with me on this. LH: And what about you, Natalie? Natalie Morales: I don’t think I was in as good of a place as Mark. I was going through a hard time. Not only in taking in what was happening in the world in general to people I didn’t know, but also to people I did know that were sick and, in some cases, died. And in my personal life I had just gone through a lot of big life stuff, a big breakup. The first movie I was set to direct that I had worked for on for two years up to that point got shut down the Friday before the Monday we were going to start filming. People’s hair had been bleached (laughs). And by the time we started filming this, which was either late May or early June because... I’m trying to think about when that phone call was. I’m sure it’s in my texts— that first text you sent me that was just “Do you speak Spanish?” (laughs). MD: (laughs) I think it was late May. That’s what I want to say. NM: By the time that rolled around, the only sort of creative things I had gotten up to—I was trying to do what I could do for people at that time, which was soothe in any way. So I was reading chapters of The Little Prince on my Instagram Live for kids, for people in general. I was just sort of wallowing the rest of the time, not knowing whether Plan B was ever going to come back or what was going to happen next, or if we were all going to die, you know, etcetera. So then I got that call from Mark right as I had started writing a feature with my best friend and comedy partner. We were in the thick of writing and Mark’s like, do you want to make a movie? And I was like, okay! (laughs) So we did it. And it was such a buoy for me, getting to work with Mark in this way. We had worked together on Room 104 (2018-2020), but not actually together. He had written both the episodes that I directed and he was there for production meetings and stuff, but we never actually worked side by side. So that was really exciting for me because—and I’m not flattering Mark, he knows this already—I’ve always been such a big fan of his and of the things he does. And, also, with everything I do, work-wise or otherwise, I look at it as a learning opportunity. It was a really interesting way for me to get a close-up look at how his brain works and how he makes a movie. And I don’t know if this is how

Morales wears Heaven by Marc Jacobs shirt, jacket and skirt, Free Lance boots and EF Collection necklace. Duplass wears The Elder Statesman sweater, Paul Smith pants and Bally shoes.

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Duplass wears Paul Smith suit, Dries Van Noten shirt, Vivienne Westwood tie, Bally shoes and Gentle Monster sunglasses. Morales wears The Elder Statesmen top and pants, Laines London slippers and Misho earrings. Mark Duplass styled by Jules Wood. Natalie Morales styled by Kimmy Erin. Hair and makeup by Diana Ivanov. Photo assistance by Jonathan Chacon. Special thanks to the Isrow family for their generous hosting.

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“My favorite part of directing is hiring a bunch of people that are so much better at their jobs than I am. And then going, like, what do you think?” —Natalie Morales

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he’s made a movie before. I know elements of it were not the same at all. And, like he said, the Spanish lessons were sort of the germ of it all. Then we came up with these two characters and decided to go off and write them on our own before we came up with the story or anything. Then we figured out how to bring those two together and crash them into each other. When we shot it, I was writing with my writing partner in the mornings and shooting this in the afternoons. I think we shot it in four or five days. Is that right? MD: It was like four or five half days basically. LH: That’s amazing. I’m so glad you guys found each other. I’m so glad for all of us. I’m very interested in the process and in your separate processes. And I feel like you guys are both very functional, polymathic multitaskers. I feel like, over this time, I’ve been asking people a lot about the rituals and games and systems they devised for working in a new way. For me, I started a songwriting workshop with my friends every Thursday. And we still, to this day, every Thursday at eight o’clock, all get on Zoom and play a new song we’ve written that week to each other. And when that wasn’t enough, because this is all like an addiction, when that wasn’t cutting it, my friend and I picked up this book called The Frustrated Songwriter’s Handbook. And there’s a challenge in the book to write and record 20 songs in 12 hours. And that completely jumpstarted my whole songwriting in a new way. I just kind of started collecting these weird games and rituals and challenges and crazy stuff, not to maximize productivity, but to feel okay and get anything done. So I was interested in the two of you—and it doesn’t even have to be about the movie, it could be about other projects—but with the movie, did you guys come up with any new rituals or systems? Did making this movie feel like a game and a ritual? And did you guys teach each other any new systems like this? NM: It is interesting that you bring that up because all of the games and rituals and ways I had figured out how to live life and be a human and be productive were gone when COVID hit. And I realized, when I was writing with my friend, we would sit together on Zoom and I could not concentrate. I couldn’t focus on anything. I kept interrupting her. I kept hearing a noise and looking outside. And then at a certain point, I literally looked at her through Zoom and went, I should get tested for ADD. It was something that I had always thought about, always in the back of my brain. And I’ve learned so much about this in the last year. But the back of my brain was always like, you just want the easy way out,

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you just want to cheat. You just want someone to give you a prescription to Adderall, so you can clean your house. That’s all you want. And while that’s true (all laugh), I was like, let me just actually talk to my doctor about it and actually be frank because if this is the only way I can make money right now, if the only way I could earn a living is by sitting with my friend and writing and I can’t physically do it, then something is wrong. And so I talked to my doctor and she gave me tests for depression and anxiety and ADD. I passed the ADD test with such incredible flying colors. The questions on the test were so eyeopening to me because I was like, all this time I thought I was just annoying and there’s an actual reason for it and all of these things that I do that I hate that I do are all symptoms of this. I’ve done them since I was a child!

year in so many ways. But especially with work. With that diagnosis, I was able to go easier on myself, understand what I was doing and what I needed. So in answering your question, I think I was able to build actual new systems within myself and my own life that are pandemic-proof, that I didn’t have before, because all of my systems relied on other people’s scheduling and pressure and last-minute deadlines that suddenly were gone. I didn’t have to show up anywhere. So then my body was like, “You don’t have to do anything. What do we do now?” Working with Mark was inspirational in so, so many ways. There’s an impostor syndrome that kicks in for me. Mark doesn’t let you linger in that too much and it’s kind of awesome. It really pushed me to trust myself more and to also

“The biggest thing that happened to me during the pandemic was that I realized that I wanted to keep working.” —Mark Duplass

ADHD in women is incredibly underdiagnosed. It’s underdiagnosed in girls and very underdiagnosed in grown women. For example, I look back at stories that my mom used to tell, like, “When you were in kindergarten, you used to talk so much and talk to everybody so much and get up off your desk, your teacher moved your desk next to hers for the whole year.” And I’m like, “That wasn’t a sign to you, that I wrote backwards and mirrored, that wasn’t a sign that I might’ve been dyslexic!?” So what was amazing about that diagnosis is that it completely changed my life and it made me appreciate the cases in which ADHD gave me such a superpower in hyper-focus and an ability to be a so-called polymath, which is just me looking for dopamine anywhere I can find it (laughs), whether it’s making movies or making a pie. So I realized where I could allocate those things. I became appreciative of those weird things that my brain was doing by understanding them more. So everything changed for me last

believe that my ideas and thoughts and opinions are just as valid as Mark’s or anybody else. It was really supportive in that way. And I am very appreciative of that. LH: That’s so beautiful. Pandemic-proof routines and strategies and ideas are the gift that keeps on giving. MD: First of all, Natalie, it was so great hearing you talk about that. A lot of that resonates with me in a great way. For me, in terms of my systems and my little things I set up for myself to stay productive, to stay healthy and whatnot—the biggest thing that happened to me during the pandemic was that I realized that I wanted to keep working. I was not able to work in the way that I normally could because of the physical limitations of the pandemic, which led me to want to make projects like Language Lessons. Part of that was about continuing to make art because I am compulsive about it and my engine is running that way. So part of that is

rhythmic, but part of it is about wanting to deeply connect with people. What I’m discovering about myself is that I like making these small movies. I don’t write ensemble movies because I don’t like big parties. I like small movies because I like one-on-one long dinners with people. I knew that by making this movie with Natalie I would have a chance to have this deep one-on-one connection with this person that I really liked that was on the periphery of my life, that I had a sense was a soulful individual that I would like to connect with more. This sounds more surface level than I want it to, but what would be an efficient way to make a piece of art which satisfies that compulsion, while also having a meaningful connection with a person at the same time? And then being able to share that very connection with the world, because that’s what I think people respond to in the movie. Adam and Cariño are falling in platonic love with each other. What you’re also experiencing is Mark and Natalie getting to know each other really well and improvising and making each other giggle as we surprise each other. There’s something about that that I really love. So I like the efficiency of doing that all together in one little bucket. So that, that occurred to me. The other thing I’ll just say overall with the pandemic is that I wrote tons and tons in the thinking of, “Well, when things get back to normal, I’ll be able to make these things.” I’m like a squirrel storing up for the winter. But what I realized in the process is that I’m one of the few people I know who loves writing—all the writers I know, they fucking hate writing. They do it so that they can get to production, which they love doing. But I loved being inside by myself, facing the page and myself and failing and then getting up and feeling “Oh, I won, I feel really great!” What I discovered through that whole process and through the whole pandemic is that I am an introvert who masquerades as an extrovert. Because I’m an actor or whatever, I can behave like the president of the student council and I can go to a party and look like that. But at the end of the day, that’s actually not who I am. And I like being inside with the page, or with just me and Natalie, or just me and my wife, or just me and my kids. So it was actually a really good learning process for me. LH: Jumping on the president of the student council thing, after watching Plan B, I feel like I have to ask you guys, do you think that you guys would have been friends when you were 17? MD: I know we would have. NM: Oh, totally. We would have found each other in whatever school we were in and been like, “Hi, let’s be weird together.”

MD: “Let’s be weird.” Also the rapid pace at which we would have been making horrible art. Just terrific, unwatchable things. NM: We would’ve had a really bad band. You know how I know we would have been fast friends in high school is because the way we actually became friends was peripherally at parties. We just kind of found each other. I mean, high school is actually forever, really. You just figure it out and that’s how I know. LH: I love thinking about you guys having a horrible band together. That’s really cute. Mark, it’s really interesting, you saying that making work together is sometimes the most efficient, expedited process of getting close with someone. I just learned something from you saying that. MD: It’s church and ceremony for me, it’s everything altogether, you know? LH: Because I always tell myself the kind of limited narrative that in order to get close to people, I need to involve them in my work and needing to have everyone I’m friends with be someone I work with and vice versa. But I think it’s interesting to think of it as not the only way. It’s just the fastest, most efficient way. I can tell from your work, Mark, that you are absolutely a collaboration addict. I was wondering, Natalie, do you identify as a collaboration addict? NM: I don’t know that I would say addict because I do really like making things on my own, but I will say that I love it. It’s my favorite part about this particular business. There is no movie that is made alone, even if you write and direct it and you’re the only person starring in it, someone else has to be there at some point. There’s always someone else working with you, at least in another place. And to me, It’s always been the fun part. My favorite part of directing is hiring a bunch of people that are so much better at their jobs than I am. And then going, like, what do you think? And then watching other people around me become very excited to do what it is they do and all for the same goal. LH: This is very rich, what you’ve shared with me here. Is there anything else that you want people to know about this movie or about Plan B? NM: With Language Lessons, it was such a surprise to me. I don’t know if it was that way for you, Mark, but because we were making it in such a bubble and we didn’t know if it was going to ever be seen by anybody really, that when we finished it and certainly when it went to Berlin and it got the reception that it got—it was like somebody had seen a part of me I didn’t know anybody could see. It’s such a special feeling because my only intent in making that movie and making it with

Mark is to tell a very honest story about being seen by somebody and somebody loving you for no reason, just because you’re you. It comes from a part of me that I didn’t even realize I was projecting. Only after it was done was I like, “Oh, yeah, that’s the me inside screaming out.” And I’m glad I got to make that with Mark and that he trusted me to make that with him. MD: I feel the same way, Natalie. I couldn’t have said it any more clearly. You said it perfectly. We’re so lucky that the movie came out watchable, thank God, because you just never know when you’re making something like this. But, even this conversation that the three of us are having right now, is different than maybe an average sort of interview, where we’re all kind of sharing some things and you’re telling us about your songwriting with your friends. I think that the movie sort of engenders that spirit of a quietness and a gentleness and an openness to be seen and to be valued. And I appreciate you sharing that with me and Natalie. I appreciate you coming to a place where you felt like that would be part of this conversation. And I love that it made it a much more enjoyable conversation for me. LH: Thank you. Normally I would say something self-deprecating at the beginning, like “I’m not really a journalist, I’m a writer, director, musician.” I was like, “I’m talking to these guys, I don’t need to say anything about who I am, I’m just going to be myself.” And I even—you can’t see, Mark, but Natalie can see—I even have my camera turned onto my insane, chaotic work space, which I didn’t feel the need to you know, Instagramify. NM: I find your work space very inspiring. LH: (laughs) Thank you. It’s really chaotic. But I was like, they can see it, they get it. NM: Mark, there’s a sewing machine and a guitar and a black-and-white tiled floor and a chest, and a lot of stuff on the wall (all laugh). LH: A box of pedals and a theremin and a Velveteen Rabbit poster. But I just wanted to say, it’s very funny being in the middle of this now after watching this movie—it’s like a weird self-insert fan fiction. But you both really let yourselves be very lovable in this movie. Even though you’re sharing so little, there’s an openness and a vulnerability. I was especially amused at the beginning because I had seen Creep (2014) and I was like, “Is this the same guy?” This is the same boundary-crossing guy, but in a very different body. I really loved that about it because it’s a part of you that you’re sharing that is honorable, truthful and what all actors strive for, some kind of soulful essence. And you guys accomplished that, which is a feat of not just acting, but directing and writing.

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CHLOE FLOWER’S POPSICAL IS AN EXERCISE IN GRATITUDE CHLOE FLOWER IS A MUSICIAN WHO WANTS TO ELICIT VIVID PHYSIOLOGICAL RESPONSES FROM HER AUDIENCE, AND WHO DOES SO WITHOUT THE NEED FOR WORDS. BY ALEX RAMOS PHOTOGRAPHY BY DIANA MARKOSIAN STYLING BY MADISON GUEST 148 culturedmag.com

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Flower photographed at home in New York. This page: earrings by Stephane Roland. Previous spread: trench coat by Margot92.

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“I REMEMBER JUST THINKING OF THE [FOLGERS COFFEE COMMERCIAL] MUSIC AND THINKING OF JUST HOW MUSIC HEALS,” SHE SAYS. “IT HEALS ANYBODY. YOU NEVER LISTEN TO A SONG AND YOU’RE LIKE, ‘DAMN, I FEEL WORSE.’”

THE PIANIST, COMPOSER AND PRODUCER ADMIRES MUSIC THAT TRANSPORTS AND ANIMATES THE LISTENER, IMBUING THEM WITH THE ENERGY TO PUSH FORWARD, EVEN IF THAT STRENGTH OCCASIONALLY EMERGES THROUGH TEARS. “I just want to make people cry,” she says, laughing. It’s a goal she picked up from R & B tunesmith Babyface, who took Flower under his wing in 2010. Their relationship launched her decade-long pursuit of completing a record that took risks, not quite qualifying as either classical-crossover or pure pop. Flower wasn’t afraid to take her time creating, waiting until the right opportunity came to release it, and recording nearly 200 songs in the process. “I passed on several label deals because I didn’t feel that pressure,” she says. “I wanted to release it the way I wanted to release it. It’s really my album. It’s me. I produced it all.” Released in July, Flower’s self-titled debut melds classical with pop and hip-hop, incorporating dynamic beats, deep bass and thematic spoken word (read by Deepak Chopra) into delicate piano compositions. Spanning three acts—innocence, suffering and hope—with a prelude and finale, Chloe Flower is a dialogue between the artist’s internal and external life, executed in a way that maximizes her dexterous musicianship and unique ability to pull from the DNA of pop music. The album was written and recorded between studios and Flower’s Brooklyn apartment throughout much of last year’s lockdown, around the same time the world protested in the wake of George Floyd’s death. Sixtythree floors above ground, she could still hear the rallying. “I was definitely deeply emotionally affected by everything happening,” she remembers.

While tracks like “Get What U Get”—which “has a little bit of a Chopin étude in it”—are based on personal strife, songs like “Flower Through Concrete” emerged as a result of seeing the world mobilize in the face of the pandemic outside of her home. “You have that physical connection, even though you feel so alone,” she said of the experience. There’s a similar, inspired incandescence in “No Limit,” which Flower based off Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” for organ; in it, she transforms a lengthy composition into three minutes of fiery energy. Listening to the song, it’s as if you can imagine Flower’s passion on the piano, banging her head along to the drums. Besides Chopin and Bach, the record also features a contemporary selection: a rendition of Billie Eilish’s smug, minimalist hit “Bad Guy.” Without Eilish’s tongue-in-cheek lyrics, Flower’s rendition relies on the pianist’s ear. “I don’t have anything else to focus on. You hear everything in my music,” she says. “I heard this Danny Elfman, Tim Burton vibe in the song,” she recalls. “I just heard all these instruments. I heard the celesta; I heard the glockenspiel, on top of the symphonic instruments.” Flower’s rendition forgoes manipulated field recordings and uncanny production, opting for a sonic aesthetic closer to American Gothic than Eilish’s electropop. Not only does Flower lead the melody with her piano, but she also embellishes it with glissando and glittering triangle. The last third of the song is especially evocative, transforming Eilish’s braggadocio into an old Western backed by

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“MUSIC HAS THAT ABILITY WHERE, AFTER YOU LISTEN TO A CERTAIN SONG, YOU FEEL STRONGER.”

a similar synth bass. “To me, it was important to have at least one song that I knew everybody would know,” Flower explains. “So that they can listen to music in a new way, and hear the song and be like, ‘Oh, I never thought that this would sound this way.’” The composer plays pop music to her advantage, drawing listeners in with something familiar before diving into her instrumental world. Flower categorizes her genre-bending sound as “Popsical,” a term she coined to encompass her musical interests and ambitions after feeling boxed into common misconceptions about classical music—that it’s either hard-to-follow symphonies or spa music. She wanted to create a hybrid that merges pop’s accessibility with classical music’s ability to create fantastical, transcendent experiences. “I love Disney movies. I love the soundtracks,” Flower says. “Music has that ability where, after you listen to a certain song, you feel stronger.” The composer herself unearths strength in the different styles she puts into practice on the record, which she describes as “almost like a mixtape.” The magic Flower describes is best heard in “Love Story,” a bittersweet tune that blossoms through piano before being met with strings and ultimately resolving in a rupture, trickling out until the song ends. Flower has been playing piano since she was two years old, and her love for popular music has existed for just as long. “I always loved pop music. I would always just want to be a part of it,” the artist says. “And then it became, ‘What can I learn from it?’” Flower’s objective of making classical, instrumental music more accessible was accelerated after the 2019 Grammy Awards, when she performed alongside Cardi B. Mothers began to send her clips of their young ones playing the piano; one girl even pushing away a microphone—because Flower “didn’t have that” onstage at the Grammys. Accessibility, however, doesn’t only make a less-understood genre more

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popular, it also inspires young people to pick up a new activity. “I want kids to want to learn how to play an instrument,” Flower says. The pianist has been a longtime advocate for human-trafficking survivors, having worked with the Coalition to Abolish Slavery & Trafficking and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. It was around the time she delivered a speech at the United Nations as a music-education ambassador that she began to put art and activism together. “It’s a tool of prevention. Music has this really amazing way—that I saw firsthand—of overcoming that material poverty, overcoming that lack of identity,” she says. “It brings communities together. It gives you an opportunity to feel proud of yourself for something.” Flower champions the egalitarianism of music, an art form that one can learn regardless of their age, gender and other arbitrary metrics that get in the way of one’s potential. The artist understood this at a young age because of her mother, who she remembers volunteering at her elementary school. Flower’s mother made the class do an activity that mimicked a racial exercise which encouraged students to question how their physical features—including their skin color—could materially affect them, but also how it shouldn’t hinder them from connecting with each other. Flower also brings up a memory of being nervous to play in front of a nursing home: Before stepping out, her mother gave her a talking-to; rather than viewing the performance as a showcase for her talents, Flower’s mother encouraged her to see it as an opportunity to “provide a service.” “My parents always taught me that you don’t live your life to just live your life,” she says. “You should always care about your community and other people.” All her life, Flower was nurtured by the music that spoke to her without the need for words. Now, it’s her turn to nurture others.

Flower poses near her piano, which was once owned by Liberace. Dress by Ioannes. Styling: Madison Guest for The Only Agency. Photo assistant: Brendan Mclnerney. Makeup: Walter Obal at the Wall Group using Make Up For Ever. Hair: Danielle Priano.

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VA L E N T I NO CR E AT I V E DI R EC TOR PI E R PAOLO PICCIOL I SE E S T H E POT E N T I A L I N A L L OF US (A N D I N V I T E S US TO DO T H E SA M E). T H E ROM E-BOR N DE SIGN E R I S NOW F I N DI NG I NSPI R AT ION I N V E N ICE , A N D, L I K E T HOSE W HO BU I LT T H E A NCI E N T CI T Y, H E’ S DI SCOV E R I NG BE AU T Y EV E RY W H E R E . 154 culturedmag.com

DON’T LOOK NOW

BY KAT HERRIMAN PORTRAIT BY MICHAEL BAILEY-GATES

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LONG BEFORE FLOTILLAS OF mega yachts and cruise ships swarmed the Venice canals, the city endured countless naval sieges and enemy landings. It was the center of the universe after all—a lynchpin connecting empire to empire. This critical juncture in the plumbing of a growing world was a dream come to life for the merchants who became rich off of its star-crossed geography. As commerce flourished, they transformed Venice into a bourgeois fantasyland where each function and trade received its own island. Burano for lace. Murano for glass. The slipper-footed Venetians were able to preserve their hoard for centuries thanks to the same ingenuity that let them craft a paradise out of a lagoon. The particulars of these achievements— which included growing trees into the shape of ship parts—can be studied closely at the Museo Storico Navale di Venezia. It was my seventh trip to the city by the time I learned about this unmissable institution. Venice rewards recidivism; as soon as you think you know it all, another wonder appears. A church you can boat under. A club that still lets you smoke inside. A family restaurant hidden in a semi-decommissioned private airport. A painting to make you cry. A runway show in a shipyard. The Arsenale, where one finds the Museo Storico Navale di Venezia, is best known

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today as home base for the Venice art and architecture biennales, but this summer, the historic hub became the stage for another kind of spectacle: Valentino’s haute couture show. It turns out the Rome-born Creative Director Pierpaolo Piccioli harbors an affinity for Venice. “I saw the finale in my mind almost a year ago, and it was in Venice,” Piccioli says. “I knew it from day one. Of course the liaison between Venice and art has something to do with it, but it wasn’t just that. The place we chose, the Gaggiandre, is historically recognized to be one of the places where the mastery of Italian craftsmanship did unbelievable things, and on top of that Venice is truly a magical place.” The improbable technological imagination and dedication to craft that first brought Venice to life is what makes the city special to Piccioli— perhaps because these are qualities that he and the city have in common. Piccioli, like the Venetian navy in the 15th and 16th centuries, revels in the slow burn. Not born into means, they both have weaponized inexhaustible imaginations to tackle their obstacles. They have focused on big-picture gains rather than singular victories. The story of Piccioli’s ascension to the seat of Valentino does not read like the limp wave of nepotism nor a pre-packaged scheme by a groomer, but rather a hands-

on education through the world’s most prestigious fashion houses, starting with an internship at Brunello Cucinelli. Since stepping out on his own, the designer has consistently produced unabashedly beautiful attire that, while not always made in the velvet-rope aesthetic of the house’s namesake, shares Valentino’s passion for the exquisite and the cosmopolitan. Piccioli’s reign at Valentino garners fashion favor on all sides and from critics like Vanessa Friedman, Robin Givhan and Hamish Bowles. After the Venice Haute Couture show, for instance, Bowles wrote that Piccioli’s rainbow finale brought him to tears in his requested white ensemble. In Friedman’s review in The New York Times she declared: “[Mr. Piccioli] is the best colorist since Yves Saint Laurent,” a trait which she claimed was “on full display” in addition to “his throwaway elegance, and his generosity.” In a way, Friedman’s assessment is the ultimate compliment for the designer, who considers color essential to how he operates. “Colors are an obsession,” he says. “I can’t really tell where all of this comes from, it’s something maybe instinctive, that has to do with my inheritance as an Italian, soaking up art even when I didn’t know I was learning something. A passive knowledge of beauty that turned into an urge for expression maybe.

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“HUMANITY H A S A LOT TO OF F E R , A N D W E N E E D TO BROA DE N T H E SPEC T RU M OF OU R V I SION. T H E MOR E DI V E R SI T Y W E GE T TO K NOW, T H E BE T T E R ; T H E MOR E VOIC E S W E GI V E SPAC E TO, T H E BE T T E R .” 158 culturedmag.com

to play with the idiosyncrasies of others like a painter might use a brush. His enthusiasm for the creativity of his collaborators hints towards another quality of Piccioli’s: his sincere affection for people. He holds an almost childlike excitement for the potential of others, and hopes his garments can pass this sentiment along to the wearer. “Humanity has a lot to offer, and we need to broaden the spectrum of our vision,” he says. “The more diversity we get to know, the better; the more voices we give space to, the better.” Diversity, in this case, represents an openness to ideas from all directions. It is the same mindset that allowed Venice to assemble itself from all the enterprising individuals that made its shallow waters home. It is also this kind of thinking that has enabled Piccioli to learn from mistakes. For instance, in 2015, Piccioli and his then co-creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri’s Africa-inspired show drew deserved criticism for its touristic appropriation. That Valentino stands worlds apart from the one Piccioli is now in the midst of manifesting. In Robin Givhan’s 2020 profile for The Washington Post Magazine she noted: “In three years, Piccioli had moved from parachuting into Africa and mining it for inspiration to simply welcoming Black women into a world that he has always loved.” Givhan here was speaking about a

2019 haute couture show where Piccioli made the focus casting Black femmes—something that he has continued to do ever since. Slow progress is not something that fashion often talks about because it’s not particularly glamorous or newsworthy, but Piccioli breaks this rule. His movements, perhaps drowned out in the 2010s by the jokes and kitschy revivalism of Alessandro Michele and Demna Gvasalia, now feel centered in a new way. The practical, minimal, effortless figure is rising again on the heels of New Bottega, Phoebe Philo’s return and a new suite of independent brands like Commission and Kwaidan Editions. Piccioli feels like a forefather to this trend—a tailor working diligently through the ruckus towards the sincere. This September, Piccioli will debut his SS22 collection. There were no hints to be given when we spoke, though he discussed it as if the clothes themselves were simply a vehicle for something grander. “In the future, I will be radically working on what I like, surrounded by the people I love and trust. I will keep on using my voice to share my vision and my values, so no predictions or hopes of any sort,” he says. “I think that the best thing we can all do for our future is to do whatever we were doing before, but better; much, much better.”

ALL PHOTOGRAPHY EXCEPT PORTRAIT COURTESY OF VALENTINO.

What I know is that colors resonate with everything I do or think.” The Venice show seemed to get everyone else vibrating on this wavelength with its unending parade of hues from acid lemons to royal purples. Perhaps Piccioli is, as he suggests, blessed with a talent for an art osmosis that allows him to take in the everyday and tap into its sublime nature. It’s as if he not only has a way of harvesting the psychedelic potential of the dormant magic inside every living thing, but an ability to share his findings with the world. Piccioli hastened the process for this summer’s haute couture show, or rather pursued it on more active terms, by entering into dialogue with over 10 different fine artists including Francis Offman, Katrin Bremermann, Luca Coser and Kerstin Brätsch. The idea was that Piccioli would work alongside curator Gianluigi Ricuperati to submerge himself in multiple aesthetic dialogues from which he could pull different threads and tie new knots. The resulting group features a heady mix of abstraction and figuration, both of which were visible in the final garments. James Nares’s one-stroke wonders adorned a cape, while Alessandro Teoldi’’s layered hands patched together to assemble the hills of a voluminous gown. The range Piccioli inhabits is undoubtedly what makes his world so compelling. He’s able

Collage depicts the Valentino Des Ateliers Haute Couture Fall-Winter 2021-2022 show in Venice, where guests were instructed to wear all white and the models showed up in full color. Singer Cosima can be seen setting the mood for the sunset runway show in the historic Arsenale.

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SAY IT LIKE YOU MEAN IT

MULTI-HYPHENATE TALENT PHOEBE ROBINSON IS ON HER THIRD BOOK AND HER FIRST SOLO HBO SPECIAL. WE CAUGHT UP WITH THE COMEDIAN AND ESSAYIST TO TALK ABOUT WHAT IT’S LIKE TO CLIMB INTO THE DRIVER’S SEAT. B Y M U N A M I R E P H O T O G R A P H Y B Y A LV I N K E A N W O N G 160 culturedmag.com

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PHOEBE ROBINSON IS ON HER MOGUL SHIT. The 36-year-old comedian, essayist and actor is branching out in multiple directions, finally cultivating the seeds she’s diligently planted on her decade-plus journey in comedy. She’s about to go view the location where she will tape her first hour-long stand-up special, Robinson tells me over Mediterranean-style eggs. It’s early for me, but I’m already on my second cold brew. We’re sitting in an Israeli restaurant in Park Slope, a stone’s throw from the apartment Robinson shares with her partner, musician Luke Downs. She’s set to give two performances in mid August inside the dome at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. “My two executive producers, Mai and Jose, styled the set while I was in LA shooting my pilot,” she tells me, absolutely beaming. Like every stand-up, Robinson missed performing for a live audience during the pandemic. But, unlike most stand-ups, she’s returning to live performance in the biggest way possible. Robinson is fulfilling her lifelong dream: to film an hour-long stand up special, which will air on HBO Max. “I always wanted to have a special. I just really was obsessed with Wanda Sykes, because she’s such a perfect stand-up, and she had a special on HBO. I was like, ‘That’s going to be me one day.’” Robinson’s stand-up is deeply millennial. She is the self-deprecating queen of the confessional. She’s relatable, and she frequently makes herself the punchline. But it would be a miscalculation to see her comic sensibility as

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anything but optimistic, if occasionally humbled by reality. Robinson is notedly also one of the foremost arbiters of lady thirst online—if you’ve seen her #ThirstThursdays on Instagram, I need not say more. A recent post starring Chris Evans of accidentally-posting-his-dick-online fame elicited a warm chuckle from me. Robinson moved to New York from Ohio to attend Pratt Institute in the early aughts, studying screenwriting and graduating in 2006. Her family, by the way, are utterly wholesome: her parents are supportive Midwestern vegans and her elder brother is a civil servant, an Ohio state representative. Robinson worked briefly for a New York-based production company before impulsively taking a stand-up class at Carolines in 2008 and falling in love. Shortly after, she decided to pursue a comedy career. A few years later, in 2011, Robinson began the Blaria (Black Daria) blog—a proving ground where she would hone her comic voice and court a young millennial audience online. In a way, the latest phase of Robinson’s career is a return to her blogging days. She’s always been a Swiss Army Knife talent: a writer of comic essays, a stand-up performer, an actor and, for the first time now, she’s stepping into the role of publisher. Robinson has just launched her own imprint called Tiny Reparations under Plume, a division of Penguin Group. Robinson’s elevator pitch: a highly curated selection of literary fiction, nonfiction

and essays from underrepresented writers. Of course, part of being a mogul is being the boss. Not a boss, the boss. “I feel like I’ve learned so much because you’re like, ‘Oh, I want to be a boss,’ but you don’t think about picking the best health-care packages or managing employees’ expectations,’” Robinson tells me. The imprint dovetails with yet another of Robinson’s projects: her production company (also called Tiny Reparations) under ABC Studios. All of her content—an upcoming pilot for Freeform, the interview show she hosted on Comedy Central, her stand-up special— has come to be through her own production company. The imprint will serve also to integrate Robinson’s books, including her latest collection of essays, Please Don’t Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes. She is now in creative control of her own content at every level, and she can build a pipeline for developing books for television through her production company—“That’s the goal,” she tells me. Like many creatives before her, Robinson’s prolificity came from all the rejection she’s faced. She was turned down from every late-night show she applied to. “I thought to myself, ‘The best way I’m going to have a career is if I double down on my voice, because I can’t mimic other people’s voices,’” she says. “I think I have all these different skill sets because I had the time to develop them and make mistakes and figure it out and get rejected.” Lucky for us, she’s just getting started.

Robinson wears SemSem dress, Stuart Weitzman shoes, Annie Costello Brown earrings and Jennifer Fisher rings. Previous and next spread: Tibi suit, Mia Becar shoes and Jennifer Fisher rings. Styling by Ryan Young. Hair by Sabrina Rowe. Makeup by Delina Medhin.

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Accessory to Art History

Louis Vuitton builds on its legacy of collaboration with six new artists’ editions. BY Abigail Glasgow PHOTOGRAPHY BY AM+PM Studio in Paris STYLING BY Lisa Jarvis

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The modern day “collab”—a marriage of entities that by virtue of being in the same sentence separated only by an “X” seeks to fold a new audience into a brand’s current list of disciples— has a laundry list of matches made.

Beyoncé and Tiffany & Co.? Iconic. Indya Moore and Tommy Hilfiger? Sign us up. Ghetto Gastro and Beats? Heaven-sent. Art alliance has found its stride when it exists across likeminded mediums—fashion, music and even cuisine. At the helm of this concept, however, was Louis Vuitton. At 167 years old, Louis Vuitton’s experience with radicalizing art and ideating brand monuments far surpasses that of startups “disrupting the narrative” of their fill-in-the-blank industries. The luxury fashion and good house’s impressive approach dates back to its origin tale, wherein a 14-year-old Vuitton sought out a more convenient way to have his bags as travel companions; trunks of the 1800s were not at their innovative prime. Replacing rounded lips and odorous pig’s hide exteriors (used to waterproof contents) with the archetypal grey Trianon canvas and a flat, stackable top, the prodigal teenager’s functional experiment became a historical staple. From this point forward, Louis Vuitton was in the business of architecture—taking what we have accepted as standard, questioning where in fact we can poke holes and building something new that still pays homage to its inception.

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PAOLA Pivi

“Louis Vuitton understands and appreciates the nature of my art, therefore there isn’t much difference from my process [and theirs].” –Yayoi Kusama

As competitors followed the suitcase’s lead, not-so-subtly mimicking the rectangular trunk blueprint, Vuitton and his sons worked to distinguish themselves further. In 1896, son Georges Vuitton birthed the brand’s celebrated monogram canvas. Up until this point, any initial on luggage could only be attributed to a bag’s owner but, in the spirit of recognition, the Vuitton family marked themselves permanently. The result is a modernday strategist’s dream when it comes to omnipresent brand identity and this pursuit of difference is what attracted minds from various walks of life to the trunks. With Louis Vuitton, a bag metamorphosed into an outlet personal to its creator—from explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza to writers Ernest Hemingway and Françoise Sagan. Personalized pieces are ingrained into Vuitton’s DNA. Centuries later, the team channels a history of intentionality into collaborations wherein Louis Vuitton is the canvas. The Louis Vuitton ethos is rooted in individuality—recognized by consumers from every corner of the globe—and has informed a history of collaborations that meet a diverse set of eyes where they are. Because the brand validates the artistic license of an artist, honoring one’s perspective and medium, it subsequently allows that creator’s supporters to feel intimately connected to the perhaps more intimidating L and V monogram.

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LOUIS VUITTON D HOMOGENEOUS A THE REBELS, THE AND THE STRAIGH

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OESN’T SERVE A UDIENCE—IT’S FOR SNEAKERHEADS TLACED ALIKE.

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At 167 years old, Louis Vuitton’s experience with radicalizing art and ideating brand monuments far surpasses that of startups “disrupting the narrative” of their fill-in-the-blank industries.

In 2012, this meant celebrating the work of now 92-year-old sculptor and artist Yayoi Kusama. “Louis Vuitton understands and appreciates the nature of my art,” the nonagenarian shared at the time of the collaboration, “therefore there isn’t much difference from my process [and theirs].” Louis Vuitton’s capability to mirror a partner builds something that simultaneously commemorates the other while remaining authentic to the brand. In love with her affinity for the infinite, the brand tapped Kusama to splatter her quintessential spots, traditionally hosted on phallic forms, instead on bags and silk scarves. Together, the union of the two brands birthed another iteration of recognizability. While the brand’s mark threads every collaboration in some way, Louis Vuitton has taken on multiple forms of rebellion like that of their collaboration with Kusama. Shortly before the artist’s Louis Vuitton debut, the brand handed over the reins to graffiti-inspired designer Stephen Sprouse. Known for his coupling of what the New York Times coined “uptown sophistication...with a downtown pop sensibility,” the late artist was chosen with the intention to obscure the expressive lanes of fashion, art and graffiti with a Louis Vuitton bag line. The Spring Summer 2001 collection of seventeen models created a surge in press coverage and replicated prototypes; and when the Keepalls and Speedys physically went live, they barely saw the light of day as a collective, almost consistently sold out. In another example of breaking the status quo, the brand made way for Sprouse to interrogate the sacrosanct of its monogram. In questioning its own tradition, Louis Vuitton simultaneously invited in a new wave of spectators and clients. Because creating a platform for other artists is as intuitive to Louis Vuitton as the founding trunks themselves, when the brand celebrated its 150th anniversary in the early aughts, it brought Takashi Murakami’s manga-inspired craftsmanship to its collections instead of

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ZENG Fanzhi

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presenting the expected heritage-based deep dive or revisioning. The Japanese contemporary artist is another independent known for highlighting the friction of high end and accessible imagery (e.g. anime) in his work. A white backdrop made festively ornate by the subtle drip of brightly colored LVs, the Louis Vuitton x Murakami handbags—beloved by the likes of Jessica Simpson and Lindsay Lohan—are tangible memories of desirability for those of us whose early exposure to luxury could be summed up by a glimpse at the fashion books stacked in our parents’ magazine racks. In other words, it’s our first memory of cool. Perhaps one of the most famous collaborations to date, the Multicolore Monogram canvas not only put more budding fashionistos onto Louis Vuitton, but also boosted Murakami’s work with a placement in Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Louis Vuitton’s rolodex continues to surprise even those incredibly tangential to the fashion world. Perhaps your skater chic neighbor touts their Supreme-embellished handbag, your Arsenalloving partner has the Vuitton 3D-printed encasement of the 2018 FIFA World Cup engraved in their memory or even your five-year-old nieces and nephews get excited to play with the brand’s dollhouse, Malle Maison Vivienne. While we all may not own a Louis Vuitton piece ourselves, we can certainly appreciate its historical influence and versatility, knowing that with each collection drop we’ll learn something new about the brand’s past or its artistic collaborator. Louis Vuitton doesn’t serve a homogeneous audience—it’s for the rebels, the sneakerheads and the straightlaced alike. And its collaborations don’t serve to simply add followers to an Instagram profile— they seek to evolve Louis Vuitton into a new, more futureforward version of itself every time. After all, Louis Vuitton trunks have never been just large empty boxes—they’re a house for Louis’s imagination.

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GREGOR Hildebrandt

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Dreaming Together

Louis Vuitton handed its famous Capucines bag over to six artists from around the world and gave them access to its atelier. In their imaginative hands, the Capucines becomes a remake of a famous performance with a leopard and cappuccinos, an ode to Alighiero Boetti, an image from the hills and valleys of China and a painting for the body.

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Donna HUANCA ARTIST DONNA HUANCA’S meteoric rise to the international stage has glossed over some of the delicate flourishes that made this catapult possible. Luckily her Capucines design brings them back to earth. The American artist’s instinct for collage and painting more often than not spills over its allotted canvas and into reality’s pool. This causes playful friction between personal and public mythologies. For instance, Huanca’s living installations at the Zabludowicz Collection in London and, more recently, the Belvedere in Vienna threw audiences headfirst into her symphonic ocean of brushwork, body paint and sounds. Her Capucines embodies this assemblage approach to working through its recycling of visual anecdotes from previous series. Embracing the slapdash and streaky blues that have become Huanca’s calling card, the small handbag becomes a constant reminder of the artist’s hand and the viewer’s corporeality. “Working at the relatively small scale of a bag reminds me of the body paintings that inspire all my painting,” Huanca says. “Painting on skin is very freeing, as an ephemeral, interactive and effective site for expression.”

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Zeng FA NZHI THE BLURRY VISAGE ON Chinese painter Zeng Fanzhi’s Louis Vuitton bag is almost instantly recognizable as a self-portrait by post-impressionist iconoclast Vincent van Gogh, making it part of a larger series Zeng began in 2017 to revisit the historic painter’s selfies one at a time. As the first contemporary artist to show at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Zeng is acutely aware of his place in history, something his figurative paintings have explored since his art-school thesis, a triptych based on a hospital across the street from his home. The refrain of van Gogh for the sake of this collaboration suggests a desire to collide two different timelines, fashion and art, in an explosion of texture and color. “The whole process was nourished by my experience of visual observation,” the artist says. “The Louis Vuitton artisans then added an extra layer to the process by developing their application of the work onto the Capucines bag’s surface, which reflects the texture of the original work really well.”

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VIK Muniz

THIS IS NOT VIK MUNIZ’S first time collaborating with Louis Vuitton: the fashion house is a sponsor of the Brazilian artist’s creative youth education programs in Rio de Janeiro. However, it was the first time Muniz was asked to work alongside the atelier’s craftsmen. He is happy to say he took the privilege to its outer bounds to pay homage to his hero, the late Italian genius Alighiero Boetti; in particular, his Tutto series, in which all the matter of the world is massed into kaleidoscopic embroideries. Tutto’s aims seem to align well with Muniz’s own mythologizing of the handbag as a space. “Inside anybody’s handbag is a cosmos and a portal to another dimension, the universe,” he says. “If you dreamed up all the things you’d go crazy, which is why I focused on the outside as a canvas.” In Muniz’s version, sunglasses, martinis, Eiffel Towers, giraffes and dolphins spin into a white leather infinity. With four different techniques of appliqué on display, each bag is, like every Muniz work, an exercise in expertise.

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Paola PIVI

PICTURE THIS: A LIVE LEOPARD mincing through the halls of the Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland amongst a sea of 3,000 cappuccinos. Artist Paola Pivi’s One Cup of Cappuccino then I Go (2007) orchestrated a once-in-a-lifetime performance—one that is now forever inscribed on an LV Capucines bag in materials almost as precious and precise as the original. A former Venice Biennale participant with a flair for aestheticizing the impossible, the Italian conceptualist pushed the craftsmen at Louis Vuitton’s atelier to their limits to create a textured recreation of the exhibition that includes gold-leaf-topped coffee cups and an embroidered beast. “Working with the Louis Vuitton experts was extremely pleasurable,” Pivi says. “They challenged themselves; nothing they did was easy, it required their maximum skills. I am totally happy, because I’ve been so involved in the creation. My art has been protected because of the quality of the entire operation.”

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GREGOR Hildebrandt GREGOR

HILDEBRANDT

HAS

always called the underground music and publishing scenes muses for his work, which transgresses the boundaries between mediums with the same punkish bravado as his heroes. One might reasonably assume this love of the bleeding edge would keep the German artist at arm’s length from the center of the fine-art and fashion worlds, but, in fact, he is their darling—beloved for his stylized subversions of the recognizably avant-garde. For his collaboration with Louis Vuitton, Hildebrandt reimagined the intersecting LV clasp as a slice of a vinyl record, hearkening back to his best-known bodies of work, which incorporate castoff cassette tapes and records. “I have always been interested in motifs, logos and patterns,” the artist says. “This merging of music and the Louis Vuitton signature feels like a new technique.” We promise you’ve never heard of a bag quite like this.

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Huang YUXING HUANG YUXING MAKES SOME of the most sought-after landscape paintings in the world. These canvases typically overwhelm the viewer in a flare of color, but now you can carry one on your wrist. The Chinese painter’s idiosyncratic hills align themselves with the ridges of Louis Vuitton’s Capucines, setting off its boxy architecture with a pandemonious palette that is barely held in place by hot pink borders. Pink is an essential color in Huang’s repertoire and likewise becomes a lynchpin detail for his Capucines. The central image of a river, which is just perceptible in the abstraction of the iconoclast’s hand, winks at the artist’s earliest work and acts as a potent signifier for perpetual renewal that feels aligned with fashion. “In principle, artistic creation and fashion design have something in common. But the former features a broader dimension. It not only focuses on the present and the future, but also the traditions,” Huang says on the relationship between the two. He adds, “Of course, things are different for every artist. About fashion, there are still many things for me to understand, but I’m quite interested in having a good grasp of the future trends of design.”

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DO YOU KNOW DESE? THE 2010S PARTY SCENE IN NEW YORK WOULDN’T HAVE BEEN THE SAME WITHOUT HER. DEVAN DÍAZ REFLECTS ON THE INFLUENCE OF CLUB GLAM FOUNDER, FASHION PROVOCATEUR AND ARTIST DESE AS SHE ENTERS A NEW DECADE—AND WHAT COMES NEXT FOR HER AND THE CITY SHE HAS ON A LEASH. PHOTOGR A PH Y BY ROB K U L I SE K S E L F- S T Y L E D B Y D E S E 186 culturedmag.com

Detail of a Jems campaign featuring couples. Photo by Alessia Gunawan.

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I’M IN THE VIP SECTION OF THE STANDARD HOTEL’S BOOM BOOM ROOM, AND DESE ESCOBAR IS TRYING TO GET IN. She looks chic against the Meatpacking District’s white-collar crowd, wearing all black The Row with an aughts Balenciaga bag hanging on her elbow. Pride weekend is said to be beginning here, with a (not very) secret Madonna performance. The “VIP” is a cramped corner with panoramic views of Hoboken, New Jersey. I’m squeezed in between the latest winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race and Zachary Quinto. The line of demarcation between us and the rest of the crowded bar is a terse bouncer and a short rope one could easily step over. Someone from inside the VIP is trying to vet DeSe, but no luck. I climb my way out to be with her. She asks me a rhetorical question: “This is pride?” New York City’s grand reopening, for many, simply means a return to hierarchy—a comeback welcomed by the celebrities and influencers that populate the crowd. Everyone’s watching each other watch themselves through their phones. At Le Bain, the club opposite the Boom Boom Room, people are in limbo. They can hear what’s going on but the door is closed. My friends are stuck outside so I leave to be with them right as Madonna hits the stage. Her hair is blue, not blonde. A real sign of the times. The next day I heard a rumor someone got trampled at the door. “I hate going near 14th Street. I feel better off the grid,” DeSe tells me as we recall the night a few weeks later. It’s a Friday evening and we’re trying to find a place to eat without a reservation. Everywhere is an hour wait. We begin in Dimes Square, where she’s just moved into her first solo apartment. As the queen of downtown’s club scene for the better part of the last decade, this proximity allows her to keep an eye on what’s happening. DeSe walks around comfortably, without checking street names or the map on her phone. When one restaurant doesn’t work, she knows where to go next. We stop every few feet so she can air-kiss someone or receive a compliment on her outfit. Tonight she’s demure in a denim miniskirt and red kitten heels. Her hair appears wet from a shower but her face is completely made-up. “I moved here from Los Angeles on July 10, 2010,” she begins, “Last year, on the tenth anniversary, I went to a party at my first 188 culturedmag.com

apartment. I made out with someone in my old bedroom.” It was from that place on Canal that she first spotted future friends Telfar Clemens and Shayne Oliver. Terence Koh lived across the street. “I got to see this downtown community that I knew I wanted to be a part of.” At the time she was working in fashion design and going out in Chelsea. “It was the wrong crowd for me.” As a graduate of the Otis College of Art and Design,

she was overworked and underpaid, and DeSe became disillusioned with the industry fast. “I didn’t like the mistreatment of the pattern makers and salespeople. It was very bleak.” Life as she knows it began when she saw House of Ladosha perform. The year was 2010, and the queer rap duo fused ballroom lingo with the Internet. During this pre-Instagram time, we were all using Tumblr to fuse fashion imagery with music and text. The front woman, Dosha Devastation, changed everything with the song “BMF-Black/ Model/Famous” and lyrics like: “I think I’m Kate Moss/Naomi Campbell/Up in French Vogue/You

know the pose.” DeSe was rerouting her life during this moment. “I was so unsure of what to do after quitting my job. I started going out more and a few friends invited me out to Bushwick.” This was 2011, right before gentrification rapidly transformed the neighborhood. “It was a lot of walking through warehouses in the dark. No streetlights. When you heard music you knew you were at the right place.” It was the golden age of Tumblr, a time when serving looks began to replace gender. Far from the exclusionary systems DeSe had left behind, these parties put fashion into action. “It was something about Dosha’s stage persona that made me comfortable identifying as a trans person, especially in this early time—pre trans tipping point.” Soon after, she became part of the House of Ladosha, with Dosha as house mother. Frankie Sharp had started throwing events at Santos Party House. Dosha was hosting at the time, and she asked DeSe to come along. Their friendship began with getting ready to go out in a small apartment they’d eventually become roommates at on Ludlow. “Ssion would perform, and we were raging with the DIS Magazine people. It was a time when everything started to open up.” They got paid one hundred dollars a night to host, which felt lucky at the time. “There was innocence in nightlife—we all just wanted to be around each other. We were so excited to get paid to go out.” Soon after, she began hosting for Ladyfag, and fellow House of Ladosha member Juliana Huxtable regularly DJed. “It takes a village to organize a party. I couldn’t have done it without my friends.” With no choice but to wait for a restaurant, she takes me to one of her favorite spots for soup dumpling appetizers. “I was just here this morning,” she says as the hostess recognizes her upon entry. We’re seated immediately, and the moody fashion girls to our left straighten their backs at the sight of her. She doesn’t have a million followers on Instagram or a blue check mark, but she’s popular in the old way. If you know, you know. “I love to cause friction,” she tells me, as she orders for us and hands the waiter back the menu. After years of throwing a string of the best parties of the last decade, this city is hers. “We

did Club Yes in 2013, which was my first big party. I even got to take it home to LA,” she recounts of her time hosting at Le Bain. “I knew the bar would make thousands of dollars when I threw my parties, and I didn’t make a fraction of that.” Her Instagram bio reads “CLUB GLAM NYC / MADAME HOLLYWOOD.” She doesn’t disclose her age, and every time I tap through her story she’s either on a boat with a hot guy or selling old designer clothes. How does DeSe make her money? It’s all a mystery. “I worked at Beacon’s Closet for a while, which was really good for my shopping habit. The finds there are so good.” She identifies as an “AltKardashian,” and her lifestyle mirrors this title. The mystery of how it comes together is part of her glamour. When Club Yes came to an abrupt halt in 2014, she returned to LA to recalibrate. “I was spiraling and doing too much coke. I can be a little wild sometimes. Thankfully I met my Glam Collective dolls around that time.” She’s talking about Fiffany and Kyle Luu, who she refers to as her slaysian sisters. “It was Kyle who told me to think about what kind of career I wanted.” At the time, Kyle was styling Travis Scott during trap music’s rise in popularity. “Today the kids are into techno, which is cool. I prefer to hear it in Berlin where you can feel it in the concrete.” So, what’s the sound of New York? “It’s Hip Hop for me,” she says. “I need to see an S-curve on the dancefloor.” I don’t totally understand what she means, but I get it. She started a party called Thotlandia that ran from 2014-16 at a strip club in Bushwick. “This was towards the end of the Brooklyn DIY spaces,” she remembers. “There was a certain lawlessness. I think a good party needs that.” Enter Club Glam at China Chalet, the party that defined Instagram from 2016-2020. “We used Facebook for all the other parties, which was laborious. You had to manually invite everyone.” The visual nature of Instagram made it easy for DeSe to stamp the party with her aesthetic. She started “Glampaigns”—video art pieces depicting downtown figures dressed in each party’s theme. DeSe is now considering selling these as NFTs. “We really wanted to encourage people to dress up, and be whatever their definition of Glam is.” Glamour, to her, is an impression: a mode of

being that communicates for you. On the phone, Kyle Luu summarizes DeSe perfectly: “She’s a valley girl. She’s the queen of the suburbs. She likes to look hot and she wears whatever the fuck she wants.” To me, it’s the perverse girlishness of Miu Miu. It’s pink, it’s pussy, it’s what Octavia St. Laurent would describe as “Little Girl Type.” It’s pure feminine indulgence. At the start of the pandemic, China Chalet

shut down. It was the last breath of the 20th century, meaning we all were doing coke and smoking indoors. You could sit and chat inside the booths at the front of the club (that doubled as a restaurant), or rage on the banquet hall turned dance floor. At the height of its reign, Glam got the stamp of approval from Vogue, and the magazine threw a voguing ball with Pat McGrath there in 2017. I loved Glam because it was the easiest place for a transsexual to get laid. No one wants you at the gay function and the pressure of disclosure at a straight bar is too much. DeSe’s face at the head of the party made it easy.

Despite Club Glam’s brand specificity, the party always drew a mixed crowd. This was where the mullet enbies, art collectors, IG baddies, and broke skaters convened. But how? “I started posting my drawings online and getting some art-world attention. Then came the art bros,” DeSe explains. Gallerist Jared Madere of Bed-Stuy Love Affair helped her navigate the art world and find a place for her work, which takes from fashion illustrations, but with DeSe’s own narrative applied. She met an international crowd once her work started showing in Europe, and they’d stop by her parties when they were in town. The women in her drawings are caught in suspended states of glamour, like getting dressed or making eyes with a cab driver. She even uses vellum paper, the translucent material used for tracing in fashion school. “The paper reminds me of the egg rolls I used to make with my family.” With this in mind, she even took her drawings to the deep fryer. The result is like an overshared meme, degraded and run through thousands of screenshots. This past spring she showed a collection of them at V.O Curations in London. “2021 hasn’t really impressed me yet,” DeSe says with a sigh as we finally sit down for our meal. We recount the urgency and freedom of last summer, and how necessary parties felt after long days of protest. DeSe tells me about the illegal raves she attended beneath the Kosciuszko Bridge and how much she misses living off of unemployment. I do too. “I’m not in a rush to start a new party,” she says,”but I could see Club Glam coming back.” We agree that everything feels too desperate, too eager to return to normal. She’s a little bored, but optimistic. After a year without nightlife, she’s still figuring out the best way to get everyone inside. “I never want one kind of person at my parties. I always needed them to be about something beyond identity. A good party has it all—cis, trans, young, old.” She has big plans for fashion week, a new weekly party at The Jane Hotel, and a production company in the works. Whatever it is, we’re all waiting on her to say the word. Before we part ways, she repeats her adage from earlier in the night: “Let’s cause friction. culturedmag.com 189

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