Cultured Magazine - June/July/August 2022 by CulturedMag

SUMME� PERFORMANCE REVIEW

STARRING

EVAN MOCK KING PRINCESS MAYA HAWKE REMI WOLF LUKAS GAGE ANNIE HAMILTON MILES GREENBERG SADIE SINK

The Arts & Culture Podcast

Kennedy Yanko

NEW YORK

BOSTON

B E V E R LY H I L L S

ASPEN

C O S TA M E S A

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CONTENTS June/July/August 2022

38 PERFORMANCE REVIEW We asked nine performers of all kinds to give us a sense of the state of performance and what being on a stage is like today. 60 FLOWERS FOR FISH Aspen Art Museum curator Stella Bottai sets out to stage a retrospective of Italian design legend Gaetano Pesce in the mountains. 64 THE IMBALANCE OF FREEDOM AND ARTISTIC VISIBILITY At Kavi Gupta, the rapper, activist and budding curator Vic Mensa curates the group show, “SKIN+MASKS: Decolonizing Art Beyond the Politics of Visibility.”

66 AFTER THE FLOOD After Hurricane Sandy washed away her entire archive of work, Stef Halmos dreamed up Foreland, a communal campus for creatives.

THE MAKING OF A TECHNICOLOR COAT To celebrate its 110th anniversary, Poltrona Frau partnered with artist Felipe Pantone to create the most daring collaboration yet.

70 ON A JOURNEY WITH VAGABON Laetitia Tamko, known

to her fans as Vagabon, is headed to Upstate New York this summer to bring her music to Storm King Art Center.

TWO NEW YORK CLASSICS IN ONE Photography art bookstore Dashwood Books lends a curatorial hand to The Mercer hotel.

CHILDREN TAILS Marianna Simnett cutifies violence and questions corporeality in an absorbing video installation at the Venice Biennale.

King Princess wears Bottega Veneta, photographed by Angalis Field. Styling by Tess Herbert and Jade Forrest Marks.

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CONTENTS June/July/August 2022

78 82 COACH GOES POP Coach’s creative director, Stuart Vevers, dips into late Pop artist Tom Wesselmann’s archives for the brand’s latest capsule collection. 86 THROW ME INTO THE LAVA The admiration between musician Remi Wolf and actor Lukas Gage flows both ways and it’s searing. 92 INDUSTRY AND NATURE IN TWO ACTS Curator Eugenio Viola, artist Gian Maria Tosatti and Valentino’s creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli respond to

LIFE, AS JENNI KAYNE INTENDED Brentwood-based mogul Jenni Kayne continues to grow her West Coast lifestyle empire.

Tosatti’s Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

96 LIGHT DARK ROOM PLAY Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s intimate portraiture flips the script bringing the behind the scenes into prominent display.

100 YOUNG CURATORS 2022 In a long year of biennials—Whitney, Venice, Documenta—

curators feel more centered in the conversation than ever before.

114 HERO TRACK While we were awaiting the release of the fourth season of Stranger Things, star Maya Hawke recorded her second album, out this September.

122

GEN Z IRL Seven Gucci-clad talents tell us what’s new, what’s next and how they stay motivated.

Annie Hamilton photographed by Sophie Elgort at Yankee Stadium in New York.

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CONTENTS June/July/August 2022

Artist Devin N. Morris, photographed by Aubrey Mayer.

140 HOLD ON BABY, KING PRINCESS IS CALLING The pop

sensation’s new record is set to be the album of the summer. In conversation with actor Brandon Flynn, the artist speaks about songwriting and accepting the truths of oneself—good, bad, ugly.

148 THE SUN KING Louis Vuitton’s 2023 Cruise collection

was strutted down the central corridor of the 1965 Salk Institute, marking the campus’s first fashion show.

154

IT’S ALWAYS HALLOWEEN IN LOS ANGELES LA-based artist Sayre Gomez’s paintings of worn-out signage and ominous sunsets look closely at consumerism.

160 LONESTAR IS HOME Artist Devin N. Morris meditates on direction and the way it collapses far and near. 166 DIOR FOREVER, BUT ESPECIALLY NOW With 30 Montaigne, the fashion megabrand embraces the physical shopping experience for a modern age.

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PHILOMENA EPPS

LUKAS GAGE

JORI FINKEL

Philomena Epps is an art critic and writer living in London whose words can be found in Artforum, Frieze and Flash Art. For this issue, she interviewed the multidisciplinary BritishCroatian artist Marianna Simnett about her new life in Berlin, her commission for the 2022 Venice Biennale and her inclusion in the exhibition “ESPRESSIONI CON FRAZIONI” at Castello Di Rivoli in Turin, Italy. Over her career, Simnett has engaged “with the slippages between species, and metamorphic, psychic and scientific instances of bodily transformation,” Epps writes, “displaying corporeality in numerous abject, visceral and squeamish iterations.”

Lukas Gage is an actor, producer and writer who has starred in The White Lotus, Euphoria and Assassination Nation. He recently wrapped production of the forthcoming feature film Down Low, which he co-wrote and stars in, and will be featured on season four of You. For this issue, Gage interviewed singer and friend, Remi Wolf. “Remi operates outside the traditional norms of the music industry with the innate ability to not follow the rules of traditional song writing and genres and this has made her one of the most interesting artists of our generation,” he says.

Los Angeles-based Jori Finkel writes about art for publications including the New York Times and The Art Newspaper. She is the developing producer of Artist and Mother, an Emmy-nominated PBS documentary about artists who make motherhood a part of their work and author of nonfiction book, It Speaks to Me: Art that Inspires Artist. For this issue, Finkel met with artist Sayre Gomez in his studio near downtown Los Angeles and they compared notes on the city’s visually riotous urban landscape and their shared suburban Chicagoland roots.

Writer

WILLIAM JESS LAIRD Photographer

William Jess Laird is a director and photographer who documents the worlds of art and design. Laird’s work has been featured in many respected galleries and media outlets, including Architectural Digest, The Financial Times, David Zwirner Gallery and The Shed. For this issue, Laird captured the 2022 class of Cultured’s Young Curators List, saying, “The New York art world is always changing, so having the opportunity to connect with some of the young curators leading this change was an absolute pleasure. Our city has such strong cultural institutions, and it’s clear they are in great hands moving forward.”

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Actor

Writer

LUKAS GAGE: PHOTO BY BRET LEMKE; JORI FINKEL: PHOTO BY TODD FINKEL; WILLIAM JESS LAIRD: SELF-PORTRAIT

CONTRIBUTORS

Kasmin Sculpture Garden On view from The High Line at 27th Street

LAURA MAY TODD

SOPHIE ELGORT

DANIELLE RADOJCIN

Laura May Todd is a Canadian-born, Milanbased journalist covering design, architecture, interiors and style for publications like Architectural Digest, Elle Decor, T Magazine and The Wall Street Journal Magazine. Prior to her work as a journalist, she was an editor at publishing house Phaidon Press. For this issue, “I spoke with Coach’s creative director Stuart Vevers, a British transplant in New York, about the brand’s upcoming collection dedicated to the work of American Pop artist Tom Wesselmann,” she says. “We talked about the late artist’s archive, Vevers’s enduring fascination with American youth culture and his thoughts on the not-so-ironic resurgence of the 2000s-era ‘It bag.’”

Sophie Elgort is a photographer, director and storyteller based in New York City, known for her portraiture. Her work has been featured internationally in publications including Vogue Thailand, Rolling Stone and Paper Magazine and she has created images and films for brands like De Beers, Alice + Olivia and Mercedes Benz. For this issue, Elgort shot actor Annie Hamilton in the Bronx saying, “Cultured creative director Kat Herriman had the idea to shoot at Yankee Stadium during a game to make this a true back to New York story. Annie’s charisma and relaxed attitude made it clear why she is a star in the making and made the shoot an adventure that reminded me why I love what I do.”

Danielle Radojcin is a journalist and podcast creator from London, and an alumna of The Courtauld Institute of Art. She worked at Vogue and GQ before moving into the world of digital media, beginning at ASOS and then as director of programs and broadcasting at MatchesFashion. She has hosted and produced podcasts for clients including Wallpaper*, Miu Miu and London Gallery Weekend. For this issue, Radojcin toured the newly transformed Dior flagship store in Paris and wrote about its design. “What struck me was how much the other visitors were enjoying the experience of being in the space,” she says. “Even though it’s more convenient to shop online, it’s obvious that people still crave real-life experiences.”

Writer

EMMA MAGIDSON AND HENRIQUE CIRILO Set Designers

WayOutStudio was born out of a collaboration between set designers Henrique Cirilo and Emma Magidson. Cirilo moved from a farm in Jaguaribe, Brazil to New York to pursue his passion for creative direction while Magidson, formally trained in graphic design and architecture, began her career creating museum exhibitions. They instantly connected while designing sets for fashion shoots and runway shows together at Stefan Beckman Studio. For this issue, the duo created sets for the covershoot with Maya Hawke and an editorial of Gucci-clad Gen Z talents, where the everyday could stand out, saying: “Seemingly boring objects like a filing cabinet or picnic table can be beautiful for both their strong formal qualities when juxtaposed against dramatic, fluid, colorful fashion.”

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Photographer

Writer

LAURA MAY TODD: PHOTO BY LIAM CUSHING; SOPHIE ELGORT: SELF-PORTRAIT; DANIELLE RADOJCIN: PHOTO BY JENNIFER MOYES; EMMA MAGIDSON AND HENRIQUE CIRILO: ALEX DENTON

CONTRIBUTORS

VIELMETTER LOS ANGELES

Paul Mpagi Sepuya Daylight Studio, Dark Room Studio September 2022

1700 S Santa Fe Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90021 +1 213 623 3280 vielmetter.com

SADIE SINK

JOHN ORTVED

JOHN SPYROU

Theater and Hollywood actor Sadie Sink had already made a name for herself in entertainment when she joined the cast of the critically acclaimed Netflix hit series Stranger Things in 2017’s season two as “Max,” a girl with a complicated history and a suspicious streak, alongside the Emmy-nominated cast. In this issue, Sink speaks with cover star Maya Hawke—musician and her Stranger Things costar—about set secrets, the show’s musical roster and Hawke’s forthcoming album.

A Canadian based in New York, journalist John Ortved’s articles on culture and style have appeared in publications such as the New York Times, New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Vogue. For this issue, he profiled cover star and multihyphenate Evan Mock, a Gen Z talent known for his role in the HBO revival of Gossip Girl and his career as a professional skater and surfer. “Evan is a breath of fresh air,” Ortved says. “I run into him in the city and he’s always up to something—skating, shooting, making a scene. He’s always got something to say, which is rare in itself, but he’s also got great manners. He’s a treat.”

John Spyrou is a portrait and fashion photographer based between New York and London. After receiving his master’s in biochemistry in 2013 in the United Kingdom, Spyrou moved to New York to pursue his lifelong passion, photography. His varied visual oeuvre shares a common vein—in his images, calmness and intensity manifest into a balanced evocation of anti-realism. For this issue, Spyrou photographed musician Vagabon, who he describes as “a beautiful soul with a lovely voice. The shoot was brief, but our connection was thoughtful and considered, producing a wonderful portrait of the artist.”

Actor

MECCA JAMES-WILLIAMS Stylist

Mecca James-Williams is a New York- and Jamaicabased stylist whose work focuses on merging fashion with storytelling. She finds joy in creating imagery to empower, inspire and connect the Black diaspora. Having worked with publications like Vogue Japan and W Magazine early in her career, as well as with Solange, she understands the power of fashion as an art form. For this issue, James-Williams styled Gen Z talents for a Gucci special photographed by Micaiah Carter. “It was a joy to utilize one brand to bring everyone into a character that illuminated their personality yet provided me a canvas to play and dream,” she says of the experience.

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Writer

Photographer

SADIE SINK: PHOTO BY ERIK CARTER/NETFLIX; JOHN ORTVED: PHOTO BY SARAHMAY WILKINSON; JOHN SPYROU: SELF-PORTRAIT; MECCA JAMES-WILLIAMS: PHOTO BY HEATHER HAZZAN

CONTRIBUTORS

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I N T E R M I XO N L I N E . C O M

Letter from the Editor

We open this issue with a set of interviews of which I’m very proud: an intergenerational cohort of some of the most unique voices in the expanded field of performance, from musicians, dancers and artists to comedians, critics and theorists (page 38). We catch up with the great Taiwanese septuagenarian, Tehching Hsieh, who famously mounted six durational performances during the 1970s and ’80s—each lasting a full year—where he did things like live inside of a cage and tie himself with a rope to fellow artist Linda Montano. In a way, his legendary work prefigured our current world, where the boundary between life and theater has collapsed, and we find ourselves, perhaps nowhere more profoundly than online, constantly on a stage. The portfolio also includes conversations with Detroit DJ Carl Craig, artist Nora Turato and multihyphenate actor Annie Hamilton. But that’s just the opening salvo. Next, we have a trio of cover conversations with Gen Z stars who have grown up in this new world of spectacle. We start off with one of our cover stars Evan Mock—the skateboarder Gossip Girl reboot actor headlines an editorial shot by photographer Micaiah Carter of promising talents like Sophie Thatcher and Tama Gucci—all clad in Gucci (page 122). Then, we dive deep with cover stars King Princess and Maya Hawke, both of whom have new music out this summer in addition to a plate of collaborative projects. We shot both creatives on a marathon day in the middle of New York Frieze week. I had just returned from the West coast after Louis Vuitton’s Cruise 2023 show at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, and in the thick of four events with brand partners I love, I found myself bouncing from exhibition to exhibition looking at new work by the artists Cultured has long admired and championed, and celebrating new friends at spring galas and benefits, in a frenzy of energy after emerging from another period of frequent postponements. It was a moment that showed just how generative Cultured has become as a site of collaboration and creativity. We have friends and dialogues in all different industries including, most recently, a Web3 development—which we announced in the middle of the art fairs—and is the magazine’s next frontier. $CULTURED, the very first media company social token, dropped this past May, thanks to a friendship with P00Ls. This is all to say, the performance reviews are in—and attendance is at an all-time high. One thing we can conclude for sure is there is no better investment than supporting and nourishing the creative people in your life.

Sarah Harrelson at the Louis Vuitton Cruise 2023 show in La Jolla, California.

On the cover: KING PRINCESS wears a No Sesso top with stylist’s own jeans and talent’s own boots. Photography by Angalis Field. Styling by Tess Herbert and Jade Forrest Marks. Hair by Rutger. Makeup by Mariko Hirano. On the cover: MAYA HAWKE wears a full Coach x Tom Wesselmann look. Photography by D’Angelo Lovell Williams. Styling by Marion Kelly. Hair by Peter Butler. Makeup by Nick Barose. On the cover: EVAN MOCK wears a full Gucci look. Photography by Micaiah Carter. Styling by Mecca James-Williams. Creative direction by Lucas Lefler. Hair by Nero. Makeup by Chiho Omae. Mock’s grooming by Jenny Sauce.

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

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GAETANO PESCE: MY MOUNTAINS SPECIAL EDITION × ASPEN ART MUSEUM On the occasion of his exhibition My Dear Mountains (May 27–October 9, 2022) at the Aspen Art Museum, Gaetano Pesce has created a limited series of unique vases inspired by Aspen’s natural landscape. Titled My Mountains, they are available for purchase at aam-possession-obsession.com.

ASPEN ART MUSEUM 637 East Hyman Avenue, Aspen, CO 81611 aspenartmuseum.org | 970.925.8050 Hours: 10 AM–6 PM, Closed Mondays Admission to the AAM is free courtesy of Amy and John Phelan AAM exhibitions are made possible by the Marx Exhibition Fund. General exhibition support is provided by the Toby Devan Lewis Visiting Artist Fund. Additional support is provided by the AAM National Council. My Dear Mountains is curated by Stella Bottai, Curator at Large, and its organization is supported by Salon 94 Design.

Aspen Art Museum

MOUNTAIN / TIME A GROUP OF MOVING IMAGE INSTALLATIONS BY 12 ARTISTS On view May 27–September 11, 2022

ASPEN ART MUSEUM 637 East Hyman Avenue, Aspen, CO 81611 aspenartmuseum.org | 970.925.8050 Hours: 10 AM–6 PM, Closed Mondays Admission to the AAM is free courtesy of Amy and John Phelan Leadership support of Mountain / Time is provided by the Rosenkranz Foundation. AAM exhibitions are made possible by the Marx Exhibition Fund. General exhibition support is provided by the Toby Devan Lewis Visiting Artist Fund. Additional support is provided by the AAM National Council.

ASPEN ART MUSEUM 637 East Hyman Avenue, Aspen, CO 81611 aspenartmuseum.org | 970.925.8050 Hours: 10 AM–6 PM, Closed Mondays Admission to the AAM is free courtesy of Amy and John Phelan

Leadership support of Mountain / Time is provided by the Rosenkranz Foundation. AAM exhibitions are made possible by the Marx Exhibition Fund. General exhibition support is provided by the Toby Devan Lewis Visiting Artist Fund. Additional support is provided by the AAM National Council. Special thanks:

Triadic Ballet, 2021. Six-channel video installation, color, sound, 8:53 min. Dimensions variable Courtesy the Rosenkranz Collection Promised gift, Whitney Museum of American Art

Annie Hamilton at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, New York, photographed by Sophie Elgort.

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Performance

REVIEW We asked nine performers of all kinds— from art to dance to music and more—to give us a sense of the state of performance and what being on a stage is like today. By ELIZABETH FAZZARE and KAT KERRIMAN

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Annie HAMILTON

Performance Review

The actor only abandoned Los Angeles a year ago and yet she already has a New York Times profile— that’s how excited the city was to have her. Manhattan seems to have had an impact on Hamilton too—she took the wild popularity of her candid self-tapes and Instagram Q and As and turned them into her very first stand-up act, already packing out the Jane Hotel. PHOTOGRAPHY BY SOPHIE ELGORT WHAT IS YOUR PREFERRED PREPERFORMANCE RITUAL? I try to acknowledge how I’m feeling that day, speak my thoughts out loud, be direct with myself about what’s bothering me—and then I try to pump myself up with confidence. I like pretending I’m Lou Reed. “How can I be brave like him? What does being fearless look like on stage?” Mostly I end up fist pumping and screaming, “PUNK ROCK!” But really, I like imagining that I’m a rock star. Sometimes the pretending injects me with so much false gratitude I want to call up everyone I know. That never works out. I end up making a lot of apologies if I pick up my phone. WHAT’S THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR STAGE SELF? I’m figuring that out! Since my work is largely autobiographical, I find myself performing in my personal life for the sake of getting material for my work. I’ve always done things so that I can later tell the tale. I like living as if I don’t know where I’ll sleep at

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night (sometimes I don’t— though I stole this sentiment from Titanic). But I hope I eventually grow out of behaving impulsively and erratically “for the story.” It can be painful. In my own shows at the Jane, I want my presence to reflect how I am in

real life: it would be really sweet if each audience member leaves feeling like they just sat down with me in private. HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE THE ROLE AND RESPONSIBILITY OF AN

AUDIENCE? I can actually see the audience at the Jane, so I appreciate when they look like they’re into me. I do a better job if I feel like I’m loved. The less demanding answer would be to laugh with and at me, dammit.

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Nora TURATO

Performance Review

The linguistically sly artist ran a marathon this winter with back-to-back shows at MoMA and 52 Walker, both of which left us pleasantly tonguetied. In Turato’s world, print and performance are an inseparable and insufferable couple with words between them, which is why we needed the answers below.

THE BEST ADVICE FOR STAGE LIFE? Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse and then perform, perform, perform, perform—like that, in a circle. Stop to reflect here and there, take mindful breaks between the takes so that the nervous system has time to adapt to the new challenge. There is this famous saying in neurology: “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” Neuroplasticity is a fundamental process for creating a breathtakingly good performance. Being a good performer really comes down to knowing what you are doing and how. That’s what confidence is and everyone loves confidence. People pay money to see confidence. Every breath, every gesture, every consonant has to be scripted and etched into your muscle memory so that you can freely enter the flow and confidently play with it when on stage. Basically, your body is an instrument and you gotta know your scale, inside and out, so that melodic oscillation can come up “naturally.” I really think people want to see effortlessness that comes from military grade prep, that can only be achieved through tons and tons of effort. It’s a great

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COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND 52 WALKER, NEW YORK

PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHRISTAAN FELBER

paradox every performer confronts. So, best advice: drill, drill, drill, drill!!! And then drill some more and don’t forget to rest. WHAT’S

THE

RELATIONSHIP

BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR STAGE SELF? My stage self is a weird ass byproduct of my real self. My real self is super easy going, lazy and submissive and it’s precisely because all the mad energy goes

into work. My stage self is a form of controlled madness. My work is my punching bag. People who know me through my work and then meet me privately tend to realize they totally miscalculated who I am.

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Tehching HSIEH

Performance Review

Though the New Yorkbased artist retired from his art career in 2000, Hsieh’s perpetual series “One Year Performance,” which he endured through the ’70s and ’80s, still defines the genre. Whether it was living tied to a partner or punching a time card every hour for a year, the septuagenarian’s works relentlessly plumbed the poetry of the everyday in search of aesthetic tautologies. These hardwon visual throughlines in part established the precedent from which the era of lifestyle brands and influencers grew. PHOTOGRAPHY BY QINQIN LI WHAT IS YOUR PREFERRED PREPERFORMANCE RITUAL? I do experiments to test the work, to find out if I missed anything. HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE THE ROLE OF AN AUDIENCE? My work has strong invisibility; audiences will use their own life experiences to imagine and think about the work. The audience is the witness of the work; without an audience, my work wouldn’t exist. DOES RECORDING A PERFORMANCE CHANGE HOW IT FEELS TO MAKE IT? My performance is real-time at the present. Document is recorded time. When time passes, the work is gone. The document is the trace and evidence of my work.

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WHAT’S THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR STAGE SELF? In my work, there is no difference between art time and life time; they are both doing life. The difference is that art has a form. I

shall follow the roles and discipline. WHAT DO YOU HOPE TO SEE MORE OF ON STAGE IN THE NEAR FUTURE? Time is a big theme and, like a container, artists could

create different works freely to fill it in.

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Madame GANDHI

Performance Review

From obtaining an MBA at Harvard while touring as MIA’s drummer, to making international headlines for “free bleeding” during the 2015 London Marathon, Kiran Gandhi—professionally known as Madame Gandhi—has effectively combined her talent as a musician with her passion for advocacy. An “electrofeminist,” the core of Gandhi’s work is “music that’s good for you,” like rejecting misogynistic lyricism and organically sourcing sounds for her upcoming EP. PHOTOGRAPHY BY JUAN SILVA WHAT’S THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR STAGE SELF? I chose an artist name because I wanted to create some distance between my evolving self and the self that is publicfacing. I chose the name Madame Gandhi because I liked the idea of celebrating feminine styles of leadership, while still preserving my heritage and roots. My artistic practice is learning, growing and workshopping my personal values and ideals as Kiran; and then graduating them up to the Madame Gandhi project, ready for sharing. I think a lot about societal norms and this shapes my personal value system. When I put a song out, I want to stand by the lyrics I am writing. I want to be sure they are true, authentic and inspired. ATTENTION SPANS ARE DECLINING— RESEARCH FOUND SUPPORTIVE

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Styling by Victoria Bisous. Makeup by Susana Ospina. Creative direction by Sara Scifu.

DATA IN DENMARK—HOW DOES THE ATTENTION ECONOMY AFFECT THE WAY YOU THINK ABOUT PERFORMANCE? HOW CAN PERFORMANCE BE PART OF HEALING THIS DEFICIT? I always think of my shows as more of “an evening with Madame Gandhi,” where I think about designing an experience for the audience end-to-

end. I want folks to feel interested, engaged and curious when they come in; and uplifted, motivated and re-energized when they leave. No online experience can replace human-to-human interaction. I was really impressed with how many big artists designed virtual versions of their shows in the pandemic, and while I do think about that often,

there is an indistinguishable sense of community that comes from sharing space and enthusiasm with others. I have been on stages since I was little, and that’s where I do best holding an audience’s attention. I like to, see who I am speaking to and speak authentically from that divine moment. I find that space more challenging in social media.

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Carl CRAIG

Performance Review

Grammy-nominated producer and DJ Carl Craig blew the house off the Venice Biennale when he played the Canadian Pavilion’s afterparty for Stan Douglas. We can still hear his set ringing in our ears. This is typical of the way the Detroit-born sound pioneer moves, whether he’s installing at the Dia Art Foundation in Beacon, New York or taking over the speakers at Berghain in Berlin. PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOE GALL WHAT’S THE MOST IMPORTANT PIECE OF ADVICE YOU’VE GOTTEN FOR BEING ON STAGE? Usually when it is time for me to play, I like to watch some type of comedy beforehand. I look at DJing like comedic timing, you know? You play the right song at the right time and you have the people’s attention. You can have a routine but if the audience isn’t feeling it then it just doesn’t work. So I watch sets from the likes of Mike Epps, Kat Williams, early Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor… These guys are how I really get inspiration to do what I do on stage. Comedians really know how to do it and that’s advice I take with me. WHAT’S THE RESPONSIBILITY OF AN AUDIENCE? The audience should be ready for anything. The audience can be completely locked into the perception of what they think you should be doing instead of who you actually are. With that in mind, they have to be prepared to go on a journey, and help the person taking them on that journey. The DJ isn’t necessarily a pilot who takes

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off, flies and lands smoothly, that’s not the job. A performer should push the boundaries while they’re on stage and push you to open your mind to what a performance is, or what music is.

WHAT THEMES ARE YOU CURRENTLY EXPLORING IN YOUR WORK? I had to start looking at how I play as if I’m Tiger Woods playing golf: I’m trying to go for a perfect game. I’m trying to do

something that I feel is as perfect as I can get it and that’s really my main theme when I’m playing. By the end, I want to feel like I played a perfect game and be confident in that.

S U S TA I N A B LE LU X U RY 3 8 4 B LE EC K E R ST R E E T A N OT H E RTO M O R ROW.C O

Catherine COHEN It may be a cliché that stand-up comedians work out their issues on stage instead of in therapy, but for Catherine Cohen, it’s a career. In her part-musical, part-comedy cabarets, the millennial performer and podcaster pokes fun at the awkward realities of dating, sex, adolescent memories and mostly, herself. As she says in her recent Netflix special The Twist…? She’s Gorgeous, she “just can’t stop creating content.” PHOTOGRAPHY BY ZACK DEZON WHAT DO YOU HOPE TO SEE MORE OF ON STAGE? Fabulous clothes. WHAT’S THE MOST IMPORTANT PIECE OF ADVICE YOU’VE GOTTEN FOR BEING ON STAGE? If you’re not having fun, no one else will! WHAT IS YOUR PREFERRED PREPERFORMANCE RITUAL? 12 hours of peaceful sleep, vocal warmups, lots of water and a Red Bull if I’m feeling wild. WHAT SONG IS ALWAYS ON YOUR PRE-PERFORMANCE PLAYLIST? “Successful” by Ariana Grande! WHAT’S THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR STAGE SELF? I love her! She’s so talented. WHAT THEMES ARE YOU CURRENTLY EXPLORING AND HOW CAN WE EXPECT TO SEE THEM MANIFEST IN NEW WORK? The deep endless void within that will never be fulfilled, the crushing weight of social media-induced envy, botox… This is what’s on my mind lately!

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Performance Review

Styling by Kelsey Randall.

Connor HOLLOWAY As a corps de ballet dancer in the American Ballet Theatre, Connor Holloway takes to the stage with elegance and grace, but what is most important to them is that each performance is authentic. The Louisville, Kentucky-born talent, who also helped to launch ABT’s TikTok with a promo of stunning leaps, pas de deux and pique turns set to Too Short’s 2006 hit “Blow the Whistle” that declares— sarcastically—“*YoU cAn’T dAnCe To ThAt*,” is on a mission to do away with their art’s historically elitist vibe and make classical ballet feel “accessible, inclusive and fun.”

Performance Review

Connor Holloway in a full COMME des GARÇONS look.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY TOMMY TON WHAT’S THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR STAGE SELF? Can I say it’s complicated? I love to perform. There are parts of me that come alive on stage that don’t live and breathe in any other setting and that’s really special. But I also believe that success as a performer really requires a type of unwavering confidence. I’ve always struggled with my confidence as a dancer. (I call myself a recovering perfectionist.) So, for me to find joy and freedom on stage, I have to actively silence my inner critic. I don’t know that unwavering confidence exists, but I still aspire to it, nonetheless.

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WHAT IS THE ROLE AND RESPONSIBILITY OF AN AUDIENCE? I think an unfortunate misconception for audiences attending classical performance art forms is that there is a strict etiquette to follow. Although I cannot speak for all performers, I say, “Hype us up!” Applaud, laugh, gasp, cry! Let us know you’re out there and on the journey with us!

The greatest performances I’ve attended or have been a part of are the ones where the audience and the performers feel like they’re in conversation with each other. WHAT DO YOU HOPE TO SEE MORE OF ON STAGE? Being gender nonbinary, I’m hopeful for a near future filled with more gender inclusivity

on stage—especially in classical ballet. I think potential is limited when institutions pigeonhole artists, characters and narratives into one preconceived box. In a time where revivals sprout like dandelions, I want to be surprised by out-of-the-box casting and character interpretations. Better yet, let’s write some new stories!

THROUGH SEPTEMBER 18, 2022

DALLAS ARTS DISTRICT nashersculpturecenter.org

Lynda Benglis is made possible by generous support from Cheim & Read and the Dallas Tourism Public Improvement District (DTPID). Lynda Benglis, Elephant: First Foot Forward, 2018. White Tombasil bronze, 48 x 64 x 61 1/4 in. (121.9 x 162.6 x 155.6 cm). Photograph: David Lavikka, courtesy Cheim & Read, New York. © 2022 Lynda Benglis / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Miles GREENBERG

Performance Review

In long-durational works that treat his own body as a living sculpture, the New York-based performance artist presents the surreal, the uncomfortable and, always, the extreme. Ritualistic and physical, performances like Fountain I, a sevenhour work shown at WORTHLESSSTUDIOS’ new Brooklyn space in late May, find the Marina Abramović protégé creating a world of his own, and allowing audiences to explore it, for whatever amount of time they choose. PHOTOGRAPHY BY KANRAPEE CHOKPAIBOON WHAT’S THE MOST IMPORTANT PIECE OF ADVICE YOU’VE GOTTEN FOR BEING ON STAGE? Robert Wilson once taught me to picture that the back of your neck, right beneath your skull, is like the string of a bow; then, imagine pulling it tight with an invisible arrow aimed straight at the audience. Maintain that level of tension with them. I love that image and I use it all the time. IS THERE A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR STAGE SELF? I never felt like there was much of a distinction. I get very introspective when I perform. When I’m onstage, I feel even closer to myself than I feel when I’m alone. ATTENTION SPANS ARE DECLINING. HOW DOES THE ATTENTION ECONOMY AFFECT THE WAY YOU THINK ABOUT PERFORMANCE?

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HOW CAN PERFORMANCE BE PART OF HEALING THIS DEFICIT? Duration has always been my answer to this. I personally have an extremely short attention span. I tend to feel awkward watching something in a gallery for 45 minutes or sitting in a theater for two hours.

If a piece is running for seven, 12 or 24 consecutive hours, you aren’t expected to watch it linearly because you literally can’t. It gives the audience agency over their own viewership—there’s no beginning or end. In my experience, the audience tends to be very receptive.

WHAT’S THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN YOUR ARCHIVE AND YOUR LIVE WORK? The documentation is always an artwork unto itself in my practice. The editing, archiving, reinterpretation and re-staging are all extensions of the performance for me.

TRAKGIRL

Performance Review

Building a reputation on bringing the XX chromosomes to the recording booth, music pro-ducer and songwriting wizard Shakari “TRAKGIRL” L., collaborates with headline snatchers like FKA Twigs, Omarion, Jhene Ako and Björk who seek her out to punch up their own work. She’s the secret sauce spicing up the field right now–-but it’s her solo ambitions everyone should be on the lookout for. Her latest single release “CANDYMAN” is out now and, after years behind PAY US TODAY, boosting fair remuneration for multi-talent creatives like her, she recently launched Future of Sound, a mentorship program that amps up underrepresented producers.

TRAKGIRL wears a full Gucci look. Styling by Mecca James-Williams. Hair by Nero. Makeup by Chiho Omae. Creative direction by Lucas Lefler. Set design by Emma Magidson and Henrique Cirilo. Casting by Ricky Michiels.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY MICAIAH CARTER HOW DOES THE ATTENTION ECONOMY AFFECT THE WAY YOU THINK ABOUT PERFORMANCE? HOW CAN PERFORMANCE BE PART OF HEALING THIS DEFICIT? Translating music to a live setting is an art form. As creatives, we should push the boundaries and give our most authentic selves to the stage by creating an experience with our audience. People pay attention when they feel something both

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sonically and visually, a moment in time that can’t be recreated. HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE THE ROLE OF AN AUDIENCE? The artistto-audience connection is special. I believe the audience should be mindful that artists take a lot of time perfecting their craft and putting a lot of energy into their live performances. Respect is a huge factor.

The audience is a vessel, like the artists. They both fuel off of each other. It’s a language.

raphy, stage presences, emotion, etc. I’d also love to see more womenled bands.

WHAT DO YOU HOPE TO SEE MORE OF ON STAGE? More journeys and stories on the stage and live performances built with intention. I love versatility across all mediums in a live performance—not only the music but stage design, choreog-

WHAT’S THE MOST IMPORTANT PIECE OF ADVICE YOU’VE GOTTEN? Advice that I stand by is to take your time. I’m forever a student, and life is truly a journey. Take your time to enhance your craft and create what feels good to you.

RUBELL MUSEUM WASHINGTON DC Opening October 29, 2022 www.rubellmuseum.org/dc

Five decades of feminist art practice Cecile Abish Alice Aycock Leilah Babirye Phoebe Berglund LaKela Brown Cynthia Carlson Lea Cetera Susan Chen Sue Ann Childress Pamela Council Lizania Cruz Glorianna Davenport Florencia Escudero Alanna Fields Emilie L. Gossiaux Susan Hall Ilana Harris-Babou Mary Heilmann

Audrey Hemenway Loie Hollowell Maryam Hoseini Laurace James Mablen Jones Carol Kinne Christine Kozlov Hannah Levy Brenda Miller Mary Miss Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski Dona Nelson Catalina Ouyang Anna Park Louise Parks Shirley Pettibone Howardena Pindell Adrian Piper

June 6, 2022 to January 8, 2023

Sylvia Plimack Mangold Reeva Potoff Erin M. Riley LJ Roberts Aya Rodriguez-Izumi Aliza Shvarts Paula Tavins Astrid Terrazas Tourmaline Merrill Wagner Grace Bakst Wapner Rachel Eulena Williams Kiyan Williams Jackie Winsor Stella Zhong Barbara Zucker

thealdrich.org

FLOWERS FOR FISH

When Aspen Art Museum curator Stella Bottai set out to stage an exhibition of the work of Italian design legend Gaetano Pesce, she knew to emphasize his reverence for the unique and the ways it can pop up even within the apparent conﬁnement of repetition. Upon receiving a virtual ﬂower arrangement from independent curator and producer Eliza Ryan, Bottai commissioned Ryan to respond to 17 mountain-shaped resin vases designed by Pesce for the exhibition titled “My Dear Mountains” with arrangements that, like his work, stand out as an ensemble as much as individually. PHOTOGRAPHY BY CARTER SEDDON STELLA BOTTAI: Do you recall how we first met? ELIZA RYAN: Yes, I wrote to you at the beginning of the pandemic; I was in rural Connecticut. When everything stopped, I started taking long walks and collecting flowers and branches and making arrangements. I could focus on it for hours. I asked a friend who owns a bookstore in Chinatown, called Aeon, if he would send me a specific book: Bruno Munari’s A Flower With Love. One thing I took away from it was that anyone could make arrangements from any type of materials. I found that incredibly encouraging. I started sending photographs of my arrangements to people, and then I thought, in this time when so many people are separated from loved ones and can’t connect in person, I can send messages from one person to another via email. I started A Flower With Love Virtual Munari and friends would ask me to send a message to another friend. SB: I’m remembering there’s something in the book about how the arrangements you see in it

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Installation view of Gaetano Pesce’s “My Dear Mountains” at the Aspen Art Museum.

should not be copied. ER: Yes. Munari ends with, “There are a lot of examples in the book, but not to copy, it’s more important if you invent them yourselves, seeing as now you know how, ciao ciao.” SB: I’ve been thinking of this idea of avoiding repetition because for Gaetano Pesce, the idea of uniqueness and individuality within forms that repeat is important. We decided to introduce a number of works that would span about 50 years and show different sides of his practice. Gaetano is interested in this idea of design and architecture being portraits of a community. ER: What’s interesting about the vases is that although a lot of the forms are the same, the colors and the actual physicality of the resin makes each a unique object. Similar to how I think about arrangements. There are some repetitive forms or styles that work well together, but it’s also a response to the vessel or the object. SB: Flowers are interesting in relation to Gaetano’s work because they imply a sense of impermanence. For this exhibition we had to create sculptures with flowers in response to the vases that will last throughout the show—from May to October—which brought us to think about dry flowers initially, and then fake flowers. What’s interesting is they don’t look fake and allow for possibilities natural flowers might not. ER: Definitely. This was the first time I’d worked with fake silk and plastic flowers, and it was really fun to go to the Flower District in New York. SB: Gaetano is interested in natural forms, not as a celebration of nature as such, but rather for the possibilities of unique forms emerging even within patterns of repetition. For example,

his Organic building in Osaka, Japan is one of the earliest to include live plants within it. The conversation between his work and live flowers, plants and shapes starts quite a long time ago. In our show, you responded to the vases more in terms of a universal shape. ER: Yes. For me, the process begins with the selection of stems and flowers/buds or leaf shapes—color is very important, both bright and bold/dark tones. I look for the shape of the branch and how buds, flowers and leaves are arranged. I don’t necessarily think about how they will go together, this happens later with each specific vessel and environment. In the case of Gaetano, the room felt alive with his force, his genius, his humor, both in his past and new work. You (Stella) included many archival works, which all heavily influenced my designs. There was almost a domestic scene that was created with the chairs and the tables, and the frames and shelves. That was also incredibly inspiring. SB: Did you find that the vase being a figurative image affected how you were thinking about it? ER: It offered an opportunity to be playful with the design. Some of the vases looked to me like ocean waves with a crest on top with the white and blue juxtaposed. Some were volcanic looking and some were mimicking the mountains. His use of color was incredibly inspiring. Things come together intuitively. You’re not sure of the direction it’s going, but you know when you hit it. SB: Well, in a way, it’s almost as if Gaetano was there in person, even if he isn’t, because his objects and design have such a strong voice. That’s why I see this as a collaboration even though it’s been done in stages.

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CECILIA VICUÑA Spin Spin Triangulene Tickets at guggenheim.org Cecilia Vicuña, Autobiografía (Autobiography), 1971 (detail). Oil on canvas, 23 1/2 × 25 1/4 in. (59.7 × 64.1 cm). Collection Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Museum purchase, Elizabeth W. Russell Foundation Fund, 2019. Photo: Matthew Herrmann, courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London. © Cecilia Vicuña

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THE IMBALANCE OF FREEDOM AND ARTISTIC VISIBILITY The activist, rapper and budding curator Vic Mensa curates the group show “SKIN + MASKS: Decolonizing Art Beyond the Politics of Visibility,” opened June 18 at Kavi Gupta in Chicago. Summoning Antilles-born author Frantz Fanon, Mensa reflects on the legacy of Black identity and will donate all proceeds of the exhibit to artists in Ghana through Save Money Save Life, the nonprofit he founded centered around the accessibility of art, culture and entertainment. BY ATTICUS BERGMAN PHOTOGRAPHY BY EVAN JENKINS APPROXIMATELY 22 YEARS AGO, Kavi Gupta

founded his namesake gallery in Chicago. Since then, the gallery has expanded its footprint to include three exhibition spaces, as well as a publishing imprint, research center and conservation warehouse. As the gallery has grown in tandem with the city around it, so has the gallery’s dedication to its local context. Chanelle Lacy—currently installed as Kavi Gupta’s director of programming and artist relations—describes the gallery’s location as a “reprieve from the pressure cooker of New York,” remarking that their regional setting provides an occasion not only to engage with Chicago’s cultural wealth, but also to incubate projects that would be challenging to realize

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amidst the constricting formulas that define institutional success in cities like New York. The inhibiting presence of social expectations—especially as they pertain to racial categories—is also one of the overriding themes of “SKIN + MASKS,” a new exhibition that Kavi Gupta is preparing in collaboration with Vic Mensa. Over the course of the last decade, Mensa has recorded with Kanye West, formed a hip hop collective with Chance the Rapper and received a Grammy nomination for Best Rap Song; however this project will mark his debut as a curator. When I spoke with Mensa, it quickly became clear that he considers the persisting vitality of the past to be the most precious organ in his creative and curatorial life—an organ whose cellular tissue is constructed, atavistically, from the voices and legacies of his ancestors. Fortunately, the fact that his father was born in Ghana has gifted the intellectually voracious polymath with a relationship to his own intercontinental background that he says many Black Americans have been denied by the transatlantic slave trade, whose collosal violence permanently amputated the generational memory of an entire population. Lacy explains that Mensa’s relationship with Ghana has also been an invaluable resource for the gallery, observing that his experience on the ground in Africa has brought artists to her attention that she would otherwise have never encountered. In response to this thought, Mensa stresses that, for him, his ancestral foothold is not only an asset but also a responsibility, which has motivated him to become increasingly involved in funding infrastructure to support the Ghanaian artists that have inspired him. To better understand Mensa’s impulse to curate the work of his friends and fellow artists, one need only turn to the words of Frantz Fanon, whose first book, Black Skin, White Masks, inspired the title of the exhibition: “I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects. Sealed into that crushing objecthood, I turned beseechingly to others. Their attention was a liberation, running over my body suddenly abraded into nonbeing, endowing me once more with an agility that I had thought lost, and by taking me out of the world, restoring me to it.”

Vic Mensa and Chanelle Lacy at Kavi Gupta’s Elizabeth Street gallery in Chicago.

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Stef Halmos at Foreland in Upstate New York.

AFTER THE FLOOD Hurricane Sandy washed away Stef Halmos’s entire archive of work in one big gulp. The loss left the artist fantasizing about a communal studio where creatives and their needs came first. She found her answer in the Catskills, renovating an 85,000-square-foot old mill campus in concert with its future tenants into Foreland, a multipurpose oasis by artists, for artists. Now near completion, it boasts more than she could’ve hoped for. Here, Halmos sounds off on its origins. BY KAT HERRIMAN / PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOSH GOLEMAN Where did the idea for Foreland come from? In 2012, I’d just finished my master’s degree in San Francisco and was coming back to Manhattan. My U-Haul box was supposed to be stored in Harlem for a couple of weeks while I got settled and then Hurricane Sandy hit. A couple of weeks later, I learned everything I ever made was lost. When I was finally ready to spend money on a studio again what I found were slapdash and unsafe spaces. I knew I could do better.

our dirt with more value than our buildings because those can always be knocked down. I knew I was never going to be a big swingingdick Manhattan developer. And I understood that my story was only an example of everything else that was going to be happening to all of us creatives over the next 20 to 50 years. I started to look outside the boroughs. I went to get an ice cream cone across the creek from what now is our flagship building, thinking, That’s my building. That’s it.

What was the first draft like? My idea was, maybe I’d buy a brownstone or a warehouse and have five or six studios, and we’d all chip in. But the more I studied New York real estate, the more I understood that we treat

How will Foreland’s programming fit into the dayto-day life of the campus? When the buildings were empty, I wanted one weekend where all the empty stairwells and giant open floors had different people playing or performing. Performance helps

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us with our spacial understanding. I remember in 2008 David Byrne did this installation called Playing the Building, a Creative Time project down at the point of Manhattan, where big old shipyards lie. There was a piano in the middle of the room with all these strings coming out tied to unseeable niches within the building. You’d go and hit a key and then somewhere up in a rafter, a nail would ding against a steel beam, making you see the space clearly. It sounds like you’ve created an instrument you are excited for others to play. The biggest change with being a studio practitioner versus building a studio for other people is just that. My ego isn’t so big that I can’t say with full confidence—and joyfully—that the things other people are going to make here will far exceed what I could. You need tenants with imaginations as big as yours. No, it’s about meeting people where they are. Artists have come to expect a lack of architectural thoughtfulness, safety and design in the spaces they rent from faceless landlords that sit on big commercial buildings waiting for them to grow in value. They’re complacent around things like. I couldn’t tolerate it anymore.

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The Making of a Technicolor Coat

In honor of its 110th anniversary, Italian design house Poltrona Frau partnered with Argentine-Spanish artist Felipe Pantone to create one of its most daring collaborations yet—a rainbow-printed eco-leather that reinvents an iconic armchair. BY ELIZABETH FAZZARE

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110-year-old Italian homegoods and furniture company Poltrona Frau’s Archibald armchair may not be its oldest design, but it is certainly one of its most iconic. Relaxed and inviting, with a slouchy appearance thanks to the gathered, pleated leather of its backrest, the chair is minimal and structured—thin piloti hold it upright and fore-arms can lean on subtly plateaued armrests. Upholstered in tan leather, it feels classic; in forest green hide, it feels fresh, fun and enduringly stately. And it was the perfect canvas for Argentine-Spanish artist Felipe Pantone. This year, in celebration of more than a centurylong history of sustainable craftsmanship, Poltrona Frau commissioned the talent to transform the Archibald into a work of art. Pantone’s practice draws upon his background in graffiti and penchant for design, incorporating geometry, Op Art mind-benders and references to the color wheels of his art school past. His limitededition re-envisioning of the Archibald, which launched this past April, presents a smattering of Pantone-esque color squares—blues, reds, oranges, yellows, purples and white—printed on Poltrona Frau’s Impact Less® leather, which is tanned without use of chrome, using limited chemical components and recycling all water used in the production process. By 2025, the company will use this sustainable material for all its leather products, continuing a lifelong commitment to eco-friendly design, using natural, durable materials. “The way Felipe uses color is similar to our approach,” says Poltrona Frau CEO Nicola Coropulis referencing the company’s recent transformation of the palette of hues available for its entire collection of pieces for the home, from items as small as glass vases to as large as sectional sofas and king-sized bedframes. “I also like his neo-psychedelic way of interpreting art,” he continues with a smile. The project reflects the design house’s 2022 mantra, “true evolution,” a theme throughout all its new releases this year. Though all 110 editions of the chair—the number another celebration of Poltrona Frau’s birthday—have sold out, the project will be on view at the flagship showroom in Milan this June during Salone del Mobile and miniatures can be purchased as a keepsake. “This object represents not only our 110-yearlong history but also a projection into a new and different future,” says Coropulis. “It brings us into the field of art and to younger generations that are close to the work of Felipe Pantone.”

COURTESY OF POLTRONA FRAU

CRAFTED BY JEAN-MARIE MASSAUD in 2009,

On a Journey with Vagabon

Laetitia Tamko, known to her fans as Vagabon, explored a stark and puposefully different sound in her latest sophomore album, an eponymous record from 2019. With a new gig at Storm King Art Center in the Hudson Valley on June 25, she’s showing her fans that her music will forever bend, grow and adapt, just like her. BY MOLLY WILCOX / PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOHN SPYROU LAETITIA TAMKO IS CAREFUL with her words and music. So when she was asked to perform at Storm King Art Center’s “A Summer Night” in Upstate New York this June, she knew she’d have to create something special, even magical, to share with her audience. The Cameroon-born, New York City-raised musician wasn’t always so sure that music would be the path for her. The self-taught indie star got her musical start during her senior year in high school when her parents bought her first acoustic guitar from Costco but put her passion on the backburner while she studied engineering at The City College of New York. However, she couldn’t suppress her natural urge to write and create songs for too long. Her first record, Infinite Worlds, was born between exams and homework in 2017 under the monkier Vagabon. To Tamko’s initial surprise, it gained national acclaim. After that, engineering took a back seat to music. In late 2019, Tamko released her second, self-titled album, Vagabon, written and produced nearly entirely by her with a completely different sound and feel to her paired-down, indie debut. “I wanted to make a statement about the kind of artist I want to be and to also show the different sides of me,” she says of the music, which she finally began touring across the United States late last year. “So many artists have multiple things that they can do. And I wanted to make that statement upfront. I’m going to make these

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“I wanted to make a statement about the kind of artist I want to be and to also show the different sides of me.”

records and the kind of fans I want are those who are down to go on that journey with me.” Vagabon is more sonically complicated and synthesized than Infinite Worlds. In it, Tamko uses more beats and incorporates sound waves and electronic signals that add to her voice and traditional instruments—she plays several, including drums, guitar and keyboard. Combining her already interesting and authentic vocals with overlapping synthesized sounds creates a modern, pop-like tone to the songwriter’s mellow vibe. As an engineer, she’s curious about the evolution of music and the endless possibilities that come with producing. Tamko sees her albums as snapshots in time, archival pieces of whatever exploration or mental capacity she was in at those moments. Because life is anything but consistent, she knows that her next one will adapt in style from everything she’s learned since creating Vagabon. And as she embarks on the journey of being an artist, it’s important for her to change as she grows and learns. She’s intentionally not boxing herself in, in any measure. As a musician, Tamko chose the pseudonym Vagabon because of the sound and the ease with which people could pronounce it—compared to her French birth name that Americans could never seem to get right—and the sense of adventure that came with it. “It’s funny, in some cultures it means someone who’s kind of all over the place and not put together—it’s not a good word!” she says of the word “vagabond,” from which her stage name is inspired. Despite the connotation, the definition seemed to fit. “Growing up, I’ve always had this sense of going places, and I don’t mean career-wise, I just mean physical places. I always wanted to leave and explore. What I did know for sure is that I didn’t want my name to be mispronounced.” Surely, though, as Tamko gears up for her Storm King performance on June 25 wherein she will play Vagabon for a crowd, an experience delayed by the pandemic after COVID-19-based tour cancelations in 2020, the name Vagabon will be said loud and clear by fans from around the world, art-loving New Yorkers included. “The landscape is so beautiful, I’m really excited to be performing there,” she says of the sculpture park venue, which will be open afterhours for the special event. “Especially at night, it’s like a national treasure. I’m really looking forward, as a New Yorker, to be performing amongst these sculptures in the landscape under the summer sky in the Hudson Valley.”

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The predominant photography art bookstore Dashwood Books, lends a curatorial hand to The Mercer hotel with a fabulous floor-toceiling mahogany private bookshelf showcasing rare titles from its original 33 Bond Street storefront. The man behind the New York staple, photographer and former Magnum Photos cultural director David Strettel, shares his thoughts on his latest collaboration. BY BECCA LINCK SINCE THE EARLY AUGHTS, Dashwood Books in New York has been the paramount location for art book launches and signing parties and, of course, a go-to for bibliophiles in search of the rarest and newest finds in the photography realm. In 2005, photographer David Strettel set out to create the unique space to offer a selection of rare titles ranging from contemporary photography to fashion and lifestyle. “I opened the doors when many independent bookstores were closing due to the dominance of Amazon and came to retail with no previous experience and some naivete,” he says of the 33 Bond Street shop, “but I felt that a specialty bookstore in a city like New York still had some value,

The Library, curated by Dashwood Books at The Mercer in New York.

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especially when the books I celebrated where often not available elsewhere and had physical qualities to them that really needed to be handled to be appreciated.” Dashwood has since catered to long-time customers and friends who have developed a close connection to the store. Fostering such close ties has led to the curation of private collections for individual clients who trust the store, and Strettel himself, to create personalized reference libraries that match their taste to a tee. Strettel has worked with luxury brands such as Gucci—where he created a library of over 1,500 titles at its SoHo flagship—and caught the attention of equally artful locations.

COURTESY OF THE MERCER

Two New York Classics in One

This year, just three blocks away from its Bowery storefront, Dashwood Books curated its first hotel library at The Mercer, where clientele can browse through stacks carefully chosen by Strettel himself. Located in the heart of SoHo, The Mercer is a 74-room boutique hotel built in 1890 and designed by the late French interior designer Christian Liaigre. Now, upon entering its lobby, guests are greeted by a mahogany bookshelf filled with special tomes from its neighboring independent shop. In curating this reference library, Strettel wanted it to complement the overall feel of the hotel and for the lobby to be “a private space where one can be left alone to really engage with the books.” In addition, his aim was “to add to their existing collection so there is a broad range of reference books on the visual arts, but still include enough surprises so that even a casual browser is rewarded with inspiration,” he says of the partnership. The Mercer hotel visitors can enjoy a martini from the bar and flip through Strettel’s exclusive literary picks. He is confident there is a book for every overnight guest. Titles included range from The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift: Intellectual Barbarians by Annebella Pollen to Susan Meiselas’s Carnival Strippers - Revisited. After all, he says, in putting together the hotel’s personalized collection he kept in mind, “the nature of their clientele: knowledgeable in the arts, with discerning taste and looking for something out of the ordinary.”

Artist Marianna Simnett straddles in-progress sculpture Prayers for Roadkill (2022).

CHILDREN TAILS Marianna Simnett cutifies violence and questions corporeality in an absorbing video installation at the Venice Biennale. BY PHILOMENA EPPS / PHOTOGRAPHY BY SPYROS RENNT A FURRY, OVERSIZED TAIL pokes through a pair of red velvet curtains, beckoning us to enter. Like Hansel and Gretel following their breadcrumbs, this sumptuous 75-foot tail lures the viewer into the wild and opulent world of The Severed Tail (2022), an immersive three-channel video

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installation made by Marianna Simnett for “The Milk of Dreams” exhibition at the 2022 Venice Biennale. The show is curated by Cecilia Alemani, who chose its title after the children’s book by surrealist artist and writer Leonora Carrington. Simnett’s engagement with the slippages

between species and metamorphic, psychic and scientific instances of bodily transformation, fittingly embodies what Alemani has dubbed “the bizarre union of [the] human, animal and mechanical” in Carrington’s oeuvre. Simnett has probed the interconnectedness of human and non-human beings during the last decade, displaying corporeality in numerous abject, visceral and squeamish iterations. The Severed Tail centers on the idea of tail loss, instigated by studying the controversial practice of animal tail docking, a traumatic impact of overbreeding. In her anti-heroic, fable-like narrative, which follows a piglet’s epic journey, Simnett explores gender and empowerment along with the dissolving boundaries between species and the repossession of our animal selves through instances of fetish, performance and play. “Living in Berlin has been very influential. People live outside of their own skins here,” the British-Croatian artist says. “There’s a beautiful and safe atmosphere of love, care and solidarity within the role-play and fetish club scene, like the Pup Play community I immersed myself in as part of my methodology.” Along with the work of Carrington, Simnett’s numerous influences include Samuel Beckett, Angela Carter, Hans Christian Andersen and Marina Warner. “I’m very choosy about what I want to read, I make sure it’s a weird list,” she notes. “I also read academic and scientific essays about tail docking and early experiments on mice, looking at tail mutation genes and cell divisions.” The dramatic crescendo of the 20-minute long video was informed by seahorse sex and mating practices, with Simnett explaining how she was inspired by how, “in the natural world, the female deposits the eggs into the male pouch, then the male fertilizes the eggs and gives birth.” Before The Severed Tail, Simnett was working on the 16mm film Prayers for Roadkill (2022), currently exhibited in “ESPRESSIONI CON FRAZIONI” at Castello di Rivoli in Turin, Italy. Here, she initiated a labor-intensive and almost intolerable process of collecting, cutting up and stuffing roadkill, to then animate them in a series of humiliating and nightmarish stopmotion episodes shot on vivid Ektachrome color reversal film. Simnett describes these films as “deliberately strange and seductive, in contrast to earlier hard-edged works.” Their cute, cartoony appearance, akin to a perverse interpretation of the Looney Tunes, questions “the ‘fun’ violence that was deemed safe for children to watch,” despite enacting vile, disturbing scenes, such as one enacting shaken baby syndrome. “This was made in the spirit of DIY and punk. I wanted to torment the viewer into thinking about what we

“I’ve never wanted to make something beautiful, shiny or aesthetic. That’s just not what I’m interested in.”

Clockwise from below: Prayers for Roadkill (2022); A selection of handprinted limitededition photographs from “The Severed Tail” by Vitali Gelwich: (from left to right) i never cared much for children; poison of her touch; my delicious hog; a tale about a tail; no tears please, piggy (all 2022).

deem acceptable,” she says. “Why is one death is more important than another?” For viewers to watch the film, she made furniture in bold primary colors, comprised of sculptural casts of her body emulating the positions of killed animals. “They’re on rocking bases, which creates a synergy between self-soothing practices and mania, with that gesture of madness also mirroring the loop used in animation.” “I’ve never wanted to make something beautiful, shiny or aesthetic. That’s just not what I’m interested in. I’m often misinterpreted as being very shocking, but I’m not creating sensational or slapstick horror,” she says. “I’m drawn to the violence that we inflict on others, on animals. Through all my work is the pervasive entanglement of ourselves and the other: how do we decide who is the other and who is ourselves?”

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OCMA

The new Orange County Museum of Art opens October 8, 2022 on the Segerstrom Center for the Arts Campus in Costa Mesa, CA

Visit ocma.art to learn all the ways you can join us to celebrate!

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Brentwood-based mogul Jenni Kayne continues to grow her West Coast lifestyle empire. Both a designer and a Virgo with a well-trained discerning eye, Kayne aspired to be the next Ralph Lauren or Donna Karan when she launched her brand at age 19. With her love of all things Pacific Natural, as her Rizzoli title suggests, her latest enterprise is a revamped 20acre property in Santa Ynez, California dubbed The Ranch, and the luscious estate has it all: baby goats and rescue ponies, yoga by the pool and thoughtful interior design everywhere your eyes may wonder.

Life, As Jenni Kayne Intended By Gabby Shacknai Photography by Devin L’Amoreaux

The Ranch’s great room features Jenni Kayne Home Brentwood bouclé chairs, a Bay coffee table and a Sedona jute rug.

California— what with its cool, effortless, laidback style and attitude—has always been the driving inspiration for Jenni Kayne. The Los Angelesbased designer, who launched her eponymous brand two decades ago at just 19 years old, built her clothing line around this very ethos, quickly becoming known for sumptuous knits that could be thrown atop athleisure at the farmer’s market just as easily as they could be worn with jeans for drinks by the beach. But building a fashion empire as synonymous with California as palm trees or In-N-Out Burger was never going to be enough for Kayne; instead, she wanted to follow the paths of Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein and build an entire lifestyle universe. Just as she has entered new life stages like marriage and motherhood—so too has her brand. “As I started to have kids, my life became more about entertaining, buying our first house and designing a home,” Kayne explains. “So, as I personally got into these areas, it would reflect in the business.” It was this transition that inspired the brand’s first expansion in 2017: the introduction of Jenni Kayne Home. Crafted around the same cool California aesthetic and fused with Kayne’s newfound love of interior design, the collection focused on décor items, like alpaca throws and hand-poured candles. But in the five years since, the line has grown to include furniture and accent pieces for every corner of the home, from linen-upholstered beds and leather chairs to ceramic lamps and seagrass glassware. Now, Jenni Kayne Home is an essential, and sizable, element of the overarching brand. Its pieces are woven throughout the 15 stores from coast to coast, including the newly opened showroom in Brentwood, California and six more on the way. Yet, even with this continued expansion, Kayne felt that the actual experience of living in a Jenni Kayne home was still missing. “I thought, ‘How great would it be to design a space where people can walk into and really feel what the brand is about? Where they can not only be surrounded by our designs but can actually slow down, get grounded and experience this approach to living well,’” Kayne says. “We saw a need for this and wanted to do a Jenni Kayne house where we could host cool retreats and activations and have people come stay.” When it came to selecting the site for this new home, the answer was obvious from the start. “I love all of California, but I really love Santa Ynez,” Kayne says. “I’ve spent a lot of time up there, and there’s really nothing like it.” Just two hours

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“I always talk about living well, and really, it’s not just about what everything looks like; it’s also about the experience and how you’re taking care of yourself. To me, it’s all one picture.” —JENNI KAYNE

north of LA and 40 minutes north of Montecito, Santa Ynez has experienced something of a renaissance in recent years, with new hotels and restaurants opening by the month, but this didn’t stop Kayne and her team from finding the perfect property. Nestled amongst rolling green hills with incredible views, they discovered a 20-acre ranch that had been abandoned since the 1970s—she knew this was it. Renovations began in September 2020, and less than two years on, the ranch is now complete, outfitted from top to bottom in the Jenni Kayne lifestyle. “When you walk into the stores, you see everything that’s Jenni Kayne. But when you walk into The Ranch, it’s filled with 90 percent Jenni Kayne furniture along with some vintage pieces, so it really feels like you’re walking into someone’s home,” the designer notes. Highlights also include Kayne’s new Vista collection, a five-piece natural teak outdoor furniture line. “You’re seeing every space curated at the fullest, and if you come for a retreat or a weekend, you’ll literally feel like you’re living the lifestyle, from going to breakfast at my favorite local bakery, to taking a trail ride, to just lying by the pool or doing yoga by the deck.” The Ranch’s events and activations, too, will follow this approach, allowing guests to immerse themselves in this way of life, even if

Above: A vista from The Ranch. Right: The Ranch kitchen is outfitted with Jenni Kayne Home Pacific mugs and dinner plates.

Designer Jenni Kayne at her Brentwood home.

just for a short time. Several branded retreats are planned at The Ranch this summer— currently, the team doesn’t have a day that isn’t reserved until August. The programming differs per group but The Ranch offers farm-to-table dinners, horseback riding, spa treatments, floral arranging classes and more. The opening of the Jenni Kayne Ranch also represents a new opportunity for the brand, one that Kayne has been pondering for some time. “The goal is definitely to get into hospitality in a larger way, but we don’t exactly know how that looks yet. It could be a hotel or a bed and breakfast or just creating more retreats,” she says. “I always talk about living well, and really, it’s not just about what everything looks like; it’s also about the experience and how you’re taking care of yourself. To me, it’s all one picture.” As she considers diving into this new realm, though, the designer is sure not to think of it as anything but an expansion of the existing Jenni Kayne brand. “I’m equally as inspired by designing all of these categories so, to me, it’s not about fashion versus furniture versus hospitality,” she explains. “It’s all one world, and that’s truly how I see it. The sky’s the limit on what’s next.”

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COACH GOES POP Coach’s creative director Stuart Vevers dips into late Pop artist Tom Wesselmann’s archives for the brand’s latest capsule collection. Suffice to say, the figurative depictions of domestic scenes and lush red lips are amongst the British fashion designer’s fascinations when it comes to American culture. BY LAURA MAY TODD

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THE AMERICAN ARTIST Tom Wesselmann was one of the pioneering figures of the Pop Art movement in the country. Born in 1931 in Cincinnati, Ohio, Wesselmann originally pursued a career as a cartoonist, but following a revelatory moment encountering Robert Motherwell’s Abstract Expressionist painting Elegy to the Spanish Republic in New York’s MoMA, he switched paths and embarked on a life dedicated to art. Throughout his career, which spanned from the late 1950s to his passing in 2004, Wesselmann explored the language of mass culture, which he skewed and reproduced by means of painting, collage and sculpture. “I’ve always been interested in Pop artists of that era,” says Stuart Vevers, creative director of American fashion and accessories brand Coach, referring as well to Wesselmann’s contemporaries like Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol. “So Tom’s work really resonated with me.” Wesselmann’s art is at the top of Vevers’ mind at the moment. Why? Because this summer, Coach is launching a capsule collection of bags, clothing, footwear and lifestyle goods adorned with Wesselmann’s most iconic artwork. “I’m perpetually curious about American pop culture, whether it’s TV, movies or art,” he continues. America may be a far cry from his native Yorkshire in northern England, but Vevers’ CV has covered some miles. He cut his teeth in the late nineties working for luxury houses like Louis Vuitton, Givenchy and Bottega Veneta before being appointed creative director at Mulberry in 2005 and then Loewe in 2007. In 2013, he snagged the top job at Coach and has been there ever since. But leading a brand so steeped in classic Americana as Coach— which was founded in Manhattan in 1941 and has since carved out a niche as a “down-toearth everyday house,” as Vevers describes it—has allowed the Brit abroad to explore these fascinations on a grand scale, which his recent projects attest to. Last year, he and his team produced a kitschy homage to 80s public access TV, starring the likes of Michael B. Jordan and Debbie Harry, while the FW22 runway show titled, “Somewhere in America,” took place on an imagined suburban street. “It’s always had a certain sense of exoticism about it because I didn’t grow up with it,” he adds. “Even the very mundane feels fascinating because I first witnessed it in a movie or television show. Everything has a glow of Hollywood about it.” Knowing that, it makes sense why Vevers would be drawn to Wesselmann’s paintings and collages. His blindingly colorful canvases were often blown up billboard-size and played

STUART VEVERS: COURTESY OF COACH

Stuart Vevers.

Coach campaign images by Juergen Teller.

on the quotidian images dominant in advertising and contemporary culture at the time—food and packaging ephemera, consumer products, women’s bodies reduced to their various parts— always in simplified palettes that ironically leaned on the ultra-patriotic shades of red, white and blue. In his Still Life #16 (1962) collage, for instance, Wesselmann depicts a manicured woman’s hand, likely cut from a magazine, pouring a can of Libby’s Fruit Cocktail into a dessert glass. Around it sit two bottles of Seven Up, a cigar and a narrow vase of roses pasted flat against a photograph of a lighthouse— nothing that would be out of place in the typical American home. “It was a lot of pressure choosing the perfect artwork, to make sure you represent the artist in the right way,” Vevers says. “This is Tom Wesselmann and Coach coming together, so it was important for us to understand not only what we could take from his work, but also what Coach could contribute.” The final pieces are

“I’m perpetually curious about American pop culture, whether it’s TV, movies or art.”

a playful blend of both parties: leather bags embellished with red-lipped smoking mouths; a denim mini-skirt printed with a still life painting of a lipstick tube, matchbook and sunglasses; a white t-shirt with a bouquet of blooming tulips, among others. It’s also interesting that in a moment in which Vevers has been sifting through these symbols of American culture, a fashion-savvy younger generation are plundering his own house’s archives. The mid-2000s Coach look—a logo-print mini bag slung over the arm of a buzzy celebrity—has become just as much of an enduring symbol of that era in American cultural history as the objects Wesselmann depicted in his paintings were of his. Vevers agrees that it’s become a cultural emblem of sorts, and that this current revival has brought into focus his own legacy as a designer. Because, who knows? Maybe we’ve yet to see Still Life with Coach Bag up at the MoMA one day.

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FIRE FIGURE FANTASY

Selections from ICA Miami’s Collection On View Through Oct 30, 2022

Christina Quarles, Ascent, 2021

Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami

Reserve Your Free Ticket Online icamiami.org

61 NE 41ST St Design District 305 901 5272

2022 International Artist Honoree Yinka Shonibare Photo by James Mollinson

SUMMER SERIES:

Featured Artists & Conversations Thursdays, July 7 - August 4, 2022

Presented in Honor of Toby Devan Lewis Premier Sponsor:

Join in person or virtually to hear stimulating conversations with today’s most influential artists. Tony Lewis | Yinka Shonibare | Liz Larner Jeff Wall | Maysha Mohamedi

RECOGNITION WEEK July 11 - 16, 2022

A week-long celebration of our 2022 International Artist Honoree Yinka Shonibare. The week will feature a Critical Dialog: What’s so Real About Photorealism?, Mini-Art Making Workshops, Summer Seriese: Featured Artists and Conversations, a Gala Dinner and will conclude with the 40th Annual Art Auction and Community Picnic.

LEARN MORE AT ANDERSONRANCH.ORG

Just 15 minutes from downtown Aspen 5263 Owl Creek Road | Snowmass Village, CO 81615 | 970/923-3181 | info@andersonranch.org

The admiration between actor LUKAS GAGE and musician-songwriter REMI WOLF flows both ways— and it's searing. Their creative dialogue, which lives mostly in their text messages, defies the gravity of timezone and packed rehearsal schedules in order to be viable. They never have officially put their love to paper—but for Cultured they made it happen. With Wolf on tour preparing the drop of her deluxe album, Gage decided to skip the niceties and do a deep dive into the world of her debut album Juno, by asking about the voices in her head, what makes her tick and how individual influences collide to create her signature blend of pop.

THROW ME INTO THE LAVA Photography by DANIEL PRAKOPCYK Styling by HALEY APPELL

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Remi Wolf wears an Issey Miyake dress with Gucci top and shoes. Jewelry by Mondo Mondo. Hair by Matia Emsellem. Makeup by Archangela Chelsea.

LUKAS GAGE: REMEMBER WHEN I RAN INTO YOU IN NEW YORK, ON THE STREET, SHAKING. I WAS NERVOUS. REMI WOLF: No, you weren’t! You were nervous? LG: I WAS A MILKSHAKE. I’M TRYING TO LEARN FROM YOU. RW: Oh, I like that. LG: PUT IT IN A SONG. GIVE ME A SHOUT OUT. RW: Shaking like milk, Lukas Gage. I didn’t know that. You’re from San Diego. LG: WHICH IS WHERE YOU WROTE "LIZ"—I DID MY RESEARCH. RW: I wrote "Liz" in San Diego. I wrote "Sally" in San Diego. I wrote "Buttermilk" in San Diego. I wrote a lot of songs in San Diego. LG: WHY DO YOU GO TO SAN DIEGO SO MUCH? RW: My brother lives down there right now. And I kind of love it. It’s like LA, but it’s way more peaceful for me. There’s no entertainment industry going on at all. My mind can actually be clear. Sometimes in LA I feel like I’m choking on everything. You know? LG: LA FEELS LIKE VEGAS TO ME. I HAVE TO GET OUT AND CLEANSE MY BODY AND DRIVE DOWN TO SAN DIEGO AND JUMP IN THE OCEAN AND SEE MY DOGS AND THEN I CAN COME BACK AND BE A NIGHTMARE. RW: I can only be in LA for three weeks, max. Luckily, I‘m touring, which is also a whole other fucking beast. Touring makes me miss LA. LG: THE MISSING IS WHAT MAKES LA GOOD. BUT THAT’S NOT HOW I WANTED TO START THIS. WHAT’S IT LIKE BEING MY MODERN SHAKESPEARE? I WAS LISTENING TO YOUR ALBUM, I CAN’T STOP. AND THERE’S SOME THINGS THAT YOU WOULD THINK ARE JUST FUNNY SILLY LINES, AND THEN THE MORE YOU LISTEN TO THEM, THE MORE YOU DISSECT THEM, THEY BECOME REALLY FUCKING DEEP AND LAYERED AND INTENSE. LIKE, "FRONT TOOTH," FOR EXAMPLE, IS REALLY HITTING HARD LATELY. RW: In terms of writing shit? It’s all improv. I’ll get these like super creative modes where I’ll just be singing out loud and a line will come up and I’ll be like, ‘That resonated with my soul.’ It’s hard to describe it. In a way the music

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kind of pours out of me and I really try not to think about it too hard. But my songs do mean so much to me. The songwriting is very therapeutic. Most of the songs on Juno manifested within an hour. I don’t go back and change lyrics. If I don’t like a song I tend to not go back to it; I abandon things. I want to stop doing that though. LG: DO YOU HAVE A FOLDER WITH ALL THE SONGS YOU HAVEN’T RELEASED? RW: They are definitely somewhere in my phone. I’m brutally unorganized. LG: THIS IS A DOUBLE QUESTION: DO YOU FEEL LIKE THERE’S A SONG THAT PEOPLE HAVE MAYBE SLEPT ON? OR IS THERE ONE IN CONTRAST THAT YOU’RE SURPRISED POPPED OFF? RW: Yeah, dude. "Photo ID" was my least favorite song on that EP. I was like, ‘Everybody’s gonna fucking hate this song. I shouldn’t be putting this out.’ And little did I know: billions of TikTok streams. It was kind of the beginning of TikTok 2.0; like the Wild West. I feel like now TikTok has a little bit more structure to it. But at the time, I was just like, ‘What the fuck?’ In terms of songs people don’t know, I’m pretty lucky because the people who are my fans know every song. LG: I KNOW EVERY SONG. RW: That makes me so happy because I don’t want to be an artist that puts out one single and then you’re fucking dead. I want to give people a full meal. I want people to eat up the whole thing. LG: I’M IMAGINING A CHARCUTERIE BOARD WITH EVERY LITTLE FLAVOR. THERE’S SOME JAZZ GOING AND SOME BLUES THROWN IN AND THERE’S SOME LIKE ANDERSON PAAK HERE AND THEN SOME LIKE DOJA CAT, BUT IT’S ALL YOU. DO YOU WANT ME TO TELL YOU WHAT SONGS I THINK PEOPLE ARE SLEEPING ON? RW: Yes. LG: ALRIGHT, "BUTTERMILK," "VOLKIANO," "SALLY" ARE PRETTY POPPING. PEOPLE THAT AREN’T ULTRA FANS NEED TO NOT SLEEP ON THOSE SONGS. RW: That is so interesting. "Buttermilk" was one of those songs that I wrote in my house. LG: I FEEL LIKE IT’S ONE OF THOSE SONGS THAT YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO WITH HEADPHONES OR YOU CAN’T HEAR THE DIFFERENT LAYERS. RW: I also fucking love "Volkiano" too. It's one of my favorites, And yeah, it is simply "volcano" but I said it weird. LG: I REMEMBER WHEN YOUR ALBUM CAME ON. I LOOKED IN THE MERRIAM-WEBSTER

DICTIONARY AND TYPED IN "VOLKIANO." I WAS LIKE, ‘IT MUST BE A WORD.’ BUT IT’S SIMPLY A REMI-ISM. RW: We wanted to make a video for either "Sally" or "Volkiano." LG: IT NEEDS TO BE "VOLKIANO" OR "SALLY." I’M OBSESSED WITH YOUR AESTHETIC SIDE WE SEE THROUGH MUSIC VIDEOS. IT’S SPY KIDS ON ACID, ALWAYS. I FEEL LIKE I COULD REALLY COLLAB WELL WITH YOU ON IT. I HAVE A FEELING OF WHERE YOU MIGHT GET SOME OF YOUR INFLUENCES FROM, BUT WHAT ARE YOU INSPIRED BY? RW: I got deep into Spy Kids, like three years ago and it overtook me. I love the weird little stupid gadgets like the gum that you would chew and then electrocute baddies? That shit is so sick to me. I obviously fucking love color and psychedelic-looking shit. I was super inspired by kid shows like The Big Comfy Couch and Peewee’s Playhouse. We were filming in quarantine on no budget, which forced us to create shit that doesn’t look like anything else. We also ran the whole thing through VHS. LG: THAT FUZZINESS GIVES IT A FILTER THAT I MISS. RW: It’s full of nostalgia. And it’s real, we literally printed the footage onto a VHS tape. LG: WHAT ARE YOU WORKING ON NOW? RW: I’m putting out a deluxe album. There are gonna be four new songs and then some acoustic shit and some other stuff going on. LG: DO YOU FEEL THAT AS YOU’RE BLOWING UP, PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO DILUTE YOUR CREATIVE CONTROL? RW: I don’t think people are purposefully doing that. I’ve gone through a lot of changes in my team in the past three months, very good changes. I’m in this phase right now in my life where I’m trying to be really purposeful about curating the people around me, which I’ve never really done before on such an intentional level. I’m really trying to make it so that every single person in my life is someone I love and brings great shit out of me and I bring good shit out of them. LG: IT’S MAYBE PART OF GROWING UP. I ONLY WANT TO WORK WITH PEOPLE THAT I FOUGHT WITH AND I’M FRIENDS WITH. AND THAT’S WHEN THE BEST COMES OUT AND I FEEL THE MOST AUTHENTIC TO MYSELF. RW: The industries that we’re in try to tell you there’s this big producer you got to work with, there’s this big director and there’s this person, they did this and this, and you get distracted by the names. I’ve realized that it truly means nothing. Somebody could have made one of my

favorite things ever and then I go to work with them and there’s no chemistry. LG: IT’S ALMOST LIKE: NEVER MEET YOUR HEROES. REGARDLESS OF CREDITS, I WOULD BE BETTER OFF DOING STUFF WITH JUST THE HOMIES. RW: I’m one of those people that are acquaintances with everybody. And I can get along with anyone. But I have five people that are my core group that I keep really close. I feel like you’re kind of the same way. LG: HAVE YOU EVER SLEPT WITH ANYONE TO YOUR MUSIC? RW: Fuck no. I never listen to my music. If somebody puts it on, I’m like, "Turn it off. Turn it off." Sometimes I’ll be on set and whoever the photographer is, or the producer will be using a playlist, and then my song will come up. I’ll literally stop the shoot. LG: AS AN ACTOR, I CAN’T STAND THE SOUND OF MY VOICE OR WHAT I’M DOING WITH MY FACE. BUT WHAT IS IT ABOUT THE MUSIC THAT YOU’RE LIKE, ‘PLEASE GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME?' RW: I don’t know. It’s just embarrassing acknowledging that people are perceiving my music outside of me. It makes it too real. LG: I DEFINITELY DON’T WANT TO WATCH ANYTHING THAT I’M IN. RW: I’m very similar. When I was writing Juno, I was barely listening to anything. I hated music at the time. And I think that’s kind of why I poured so much into Juno because all of the music industry was pissing me off. Now, I’m a little bit more at ease. I like music again. LG: WHAT MUSIC HELPED YOU GET THERE? RW: For Juno, I was listening to a lot of Beck and Santana and Michelle Branch and the Japanese Breakfast album that dropped last year. Now, I’m listening to a lot of Mac DeMarco, The Flaming Lips and Third Eye Blind. LG: THEY FUCKING HOLD UP SO MUCH, YEARS AND YEARS LATER. I ACTUALLY SAW THEM LIVE THREE YEARS AGO AT A CASINO. AND IT WAS LIKE ME AND A BUNCH OF MOMS HAMMERED. RW: Why are you always with moms? LG: THEY JUST FUCK WITH ME. THEY GET ME IN A WAY. MAYBE BECAUSE I’M VERY CLOSE WITH MY MOM. ARE YOU CLOSE WITH YOUR MOM? RW: I feel like I's closer with my siblings than I am with my parents. It kind of goes in and out. LG: I HAVE A LOT OF ANGER THAT I HAVE TO GET OUT, AND SOMETIMES IT COMES OUT IN MY ACTING AND MY WRITING AND I FEEL THAT WITH YOU TOO. WHEN YOU BELT, YOUR ANGER AND YOUR RAGE COMES OUT

Wolf wears her own dress.

SOMETIMES IN THE MUSIC. BECAUSE YOU ARE OTHERWISE SO CALM. RW: Correct. I have a lot of anger that I need to release. And it’s nice when I’m on tour because I’m able to literally do it every night. It’s so cleansing, right now I feel pretty chill. I feel like my singing is me screaming at the world. LG: THERE’S SOMETHING VERY PRIMAL ABOUT YOUR SINGING THAT I CAN FEEL IN MY BONES. THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT BEING AT YOUR SHOW THAT MAKES ME FEEL LIKE I’M AT A HOUSE PARTY, EVEN THOUGH YOU’RE PLAYING FOR THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE.

RW: I love you at my shows. You’re always jumping. LG : IT’S SO PSYCHOTIC. BECAUSE EVERYONE IN THE AUDIENCE WANTS TO KNOCK ME OUT. BUT I’M LIKE, CAN SHE SEE ME? RW: I see you and I fucking love it. I want everybody to be doing it that hard because I’m going fucking hard. I love that you’re giving it back to me. Right now I’m performing for Lorde’s audience because I’m opening for her. And it’s such an experience. I’m learning how to control my body and make subtler movements that still make an impact. It’s very interesting. Maybe I want to be an actor.

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R E D I S C OV E R PA R A D I S E I N YO U R O W N B AC K YA R D

Embrace the cultures and nationalities that make Greater Miami unique. Our rich and diverse communities boast influences from around the world. From Miami Beach to the Everglades, and from South Dade to North Miami, discover the people who make our destination global. With stunning outdoor spaces, iconic beaches, and a vibrant art scene, there’s plenty of memories waiting to be made in multicultural Miami. Visit MiamiandMiamiBeach.com for more..

INDUSTRY AND NATURE IN TWO ACTS

BY SARAH HARRELSON WHY DID THIS FEEL LIKE THE RIGHT MOMENT TO GIVE THE ITALIAN PAVILION OVER TO A SINGLE ARTIST? EUGENIO VIOLA: It was a long-awaited decision, despite the controversies related to it. GIAN MARIA TOSATTI’S WORK ALSO SEEMS PARTICULARLY PRIMED TO COMPLEMENT THE THEMES RAISED IN CECILIA ALEMANI’S “THE MILK OF DREAMS” BIENNALE, WHICH CONSIDERS THE INVISIBLE LABOR OF THINGS LIKE MOTHERHOOD AND WHAT THE SURREALIST CAN TEACH US ABOUT OPTIMISM. HOW DID YOU SEE TOSATTI’S WORK SPEAKING TO CECILIA’S SHOW? EV: The meta-pandemic condition has acted as a powerful historical accelerator of social and economic processes that are now re-emerging with dramatic urgency and great uncertainty. Tosatti’s “History of Night and Destiny of Comets” is built on this urgency, offering a sensational and unyieldingly optimistic vision of the present, creating a balance between the errors of the past and the prospects for the future. Indeed, the work does not express any dramatic position, but rather a proactive, optimistic one: the critical issues of the present

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are used and interpreted in a way that will help us take on the challenges of the future. Tosatti metaphorically opens a window onto a parallel world, reflecting aspects of the real world while always remaining unreal, and this is the main point of contact, I believe, with Alemani’s vision. WILL GETTING TO THIS MORE OPTIMISTIC PERSPECTIVE TAKE A PUSH? GIAN MARIA TOSATTI: I think we need more than a push. I even think that we can push ourselves. The change won’t come from anywhere other than our own awareness. Education has a crucial role. An under-educated society will not understand the real challenges that we are about to face. An under-educated society is vulnerable. CAN CHANGE COME FROM THE FASHION WORLD? WHAT IS THE IMPORTANCE OF HAVING VALENTINO AS PARTNER FOR THIS ARTWORK? GMT: Valentino is one of the many companies trying to align their research and production policies to the trajectories of real change in terms of their use of resources. Many players in the market are running faster than our politicians in this perspective. And, like I said, the path of change is one we must walk together.

HOW DO YOU SEE FASHION’S ROLE IN THIS FUTURE? PIERPAOLO PICCIOLI: While staying true to the purpose of creating beauty and allowing people to dream, fashion must be relevant for today. Tosatti’s work talks about our history, memory, human fragility and the stubborn fierceness of nature. It questions our mistakes and gives hope of catharsis and reconciliation. This is the reflection I would like to associate fashion with. WHAT DO YOU HOPE YOUR PAVILION MIGHT SPARK GLOBALLY? PP: Democracy is based on debate. And in that, I don’t include social network chats. That is the opposite of debate. That is talking into the void. A forum with many people taken from culture, industry and science, confronting themselves on important topics related to energy, garbage, recycling and art is a good contribution for an ecology of our thoughts. DO THE DISCIPLINES HAVE TO INTERMINGLE FOR US TO GET ANYWHERE NEW? PP: Art has always been and will always be a source of inspiration for fashion design. At least for mine. This influence involves the chromatic research, the figurative aspects, the techniques, but most importantly ideas and emotions. The immediate reaction a piece of art can determine, be it positive or negative, is something fashion can stimulate too. What really connects the two dimensions of art and fashion is the power to shake consciences, subvert scenarios, make the impossible possible. WHERE IS VALENTINO TRYING TO TAKE THE CONVERSATION? PP: Valentino has walked a great distance from the elitist atelier of the Eternal City towards the international and eclectic community of today. There is a serious openness towards new forms of expression, a genuine curiosity which constantly animates my studio and my people and I couldn’t be happier about it.

COURTESY OF VALENTINO SPA

For the first time in its history, the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale has elected one artist as a representative, as opposed to its habitual group exhibition. It was the decision of curator Eugenio Viola, but ultimately the ambitious spirit of artist Gian Maria Tosatti and the support of Valentino, that made it possible to pull off perhaps one of the most compelling presentations Italy has shown to date. Composed of a sequence of abandoned factory floors and bedrooms, Tosatti’s haunted house installation, “History of Night and Destiny of Comets,” mediates on the labor we don’t see and that, as a result, we are all slowly losing to automation. Here, Viola, Tosatti and Valentino’s creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli respond to how the ephemeral experience of walking through this artwork connects to the real world.

From left: Eugenio Viola, Gian Maria Tosatti and Pierpaolo Piccioli in Venice, Italy.

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COURTESY OF THE ARTIST, DOCUMENT CHICAGO AND VIELMETTER LOS ANGELES

Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Daylight Studio (OX5A5290), 2021. Right: Dark Room Studio (OX5A8486), 2021.

PAUL MPAGI SEPUYA’S INTIMATE PORTRAITURE FLIPS THE SCRIPT THE RESULT OF A PERFORMANCE BETWEEN DROP CLOTHS, TRIPODS AND RAW WOODEN BENCHES OF BOTH THE SUBJECT AND THE PHOTOGRAPHER—

LIGHT

DARK

BRINGING THE BEHIND THE SCENES INTO PROMINENT DISPLAY. IN THE LIGHT OF DAY THAT HEIGHTENS THE INTERACTIONS BETWEEN THE NUDE BODIES ALL ARE CENTRAL FIGURES IN THEIR OWN RIGHT.

ROOM

BY JANELLE ZARA

PLAY

Artist Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s forthcoming fall exhibition at Vielmetter Los Angeles, “Daylight Studio, Dark Room Studio,” is an homage to that era, as well as the traditions of homoerotic visual culture. In his second solo exhibition at the gallery, the photographer’s studio appears as “one particular space that functions in two different ways, according to time and illumination,” he says. In the white light of day, his subjects recline amid the objects of the 19thcentury studio: the curtain, the rug, the pedestals and pillows, with the occasional pair of glasses or Birkenstocks shed and laid by the wayside. In the dark of night, conversely, his subjects become the blurs of bodies in motion captured under long exposure, bathed in the low, red light of the titular dark room space. The dark room is a doubleentendre, both the space where film and prints are developed, and the clandestine queer space where erotic collisions unfold. Sepuya, 39, is best known for his portraits, and the tender intimacy with which he approaches his subjects. “They’re all friends,” he says; sometime between 2004 and 2005 he stopped shooting models and strangers in favor of various loved ones and lovers, former, current or future. They appear in his images often reflected in mirrors, sometimes nude, sometimes intertwined or locked in an embrace that evokes the figuration of Rodin. (Many reportedly resurface as profile pictures on dating apps.) They’re not posed, he says, but captured in improvisational states of play or flirtation. His presentation in the 2019 Whitney Biennial included images of, as well as taken by, writer and poet Ariel Goldberg, and fellow photographers Clifford Prince King and Giancarlo Montes Santangelo; in each of these images, they’re holding their own cameras. One photograph features the artist A.L. Steiner reclining on a wooden box topless, in a pair of black jeans, her hand adjusting the lens while Sepuya’s is pressing the shutter. The sense is that each subject has some agency in his or her own image. Although themes of queerness and race are pervasive throughout his imagery, Sepuya has no intentions of making overt statements 98 culturedmag.com

PHOTO BY CLIFFORD PRINCE KING; RIGHT: COURTESY OF THE ARTIST, DOCUMENT CHICAGO AND VIELMETTER LOS ANGELES

IN THE 19TH CENTURY, THE EARLIEST DAYS OF STUDIO PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE UNITED STATES AND EUROPE, PORTRAITS WERE TAKEN BY THE LIGHT OF DAY.

Drop Scene (0X5A9306), 2021. Left: Sepuya.

about body or identity. “The primary focus of the work is photography,” he’s often said, where his processes and tools, the frequent subjects of the images, are on full display. There is no Photoshop or digital manipulation, just physical elements in his studio that make one another visible: the velvet drop cloth, the mirror and the camera. The blackness of the drop cloth has a way of illuminating every fingerprint, streak and smudge on the mirror, rendering the mirror as part of the image. The mirror, in turn, reflects the camera, which is always present in Sepuya’s work. Even his titles, like Dark Room Studio (0X5A8413) or Dark Room Studio (0X5A8486), are file names assigned by the camera; the gaps in their numerical sequence are an indicator of how many outtakes took place in between. As a teenager growing up in Southern California, Sepuya developed his love for photography collecting magazines, whether art, fashion or pornography. He moved to New York to study art at NYU, where he earned his BFA in 2004. “New York was a place where I looked somehow successful, because when you’re really busy, no one knows how anyone’s actually doing,” Sepuya says. Early in his career, he had won critical acclaim for Shoot, a zine of nude portraiture, and published his first monograph, Beloved Object & Amorous Subject, Revisited, in 2007. Life in that city, however, proved to be debilitatingly expensive and, in 2014, he moved back West to enroll in UCLA’s MFA program. “It was a way to leave New York in a way that felt productive.” Sepuya is currently an associate professor at UC San Diego. Sepuya’s work is now in the permanent collections of LACMA, MOCA Los Angeles, The Guggenheim, The Whitney, The Getty and more. His friends continue to be a source of inspiration in his practice, although inspiration isn’t quite the right word. “I feel like inspiration has a sense of detachment, as a distant viewer,” he says. “The thing that happens when you’re in a community of artists is that you become part of a conversation.”

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IN A LONG YEAR OF BIENNIALS—WHITNEY, VENICE, DOCUMENTA—CURATORS FEEL MORE CENTERED IN THE DISCOURSE THAN EVER BEFORE. BUT IT'S THE LOOMING CHANGING OF THE GUARD AT TOP ART INSTITUTIONS THAT HAS EVERYONE SPECULATING: WHAT OPPORTUNITIES WILL THESE SEISMIC SHIFTS SHAKE OUT FOR UP-AND-COMING FOUNDERS AND DIRECTORS?

YOUNG CURATORS 2022 WE BELIEVE IN ALL NINE OF THE CURATORS FEATURED HERE AND THEIR ABILITY TO NOT ONLY ASCEND TO THE NEXT LEVEL BUT RESHAPE THE LADDER FOR THE BETTER AS THEY GO. BY JACOBA URIST PHOTOGRAPHY BY WILLIAM JESS LAIRD 100

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52 Walker founder Ebony L. Haynes in Nora Turato's "govern me harder" solo exhibition.

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EBONY L. HAYNES 52 WALKER/DAVID ZWIRNER

FEW CURATORS HAVE SHIFTED the paradigm in the mega dealer stratosphere; fewer still can be said to have made the art world slow down. And yet, that’s precisely what Ebony L. Haynes has done with the debut of the hotly anticipated Tribeca offshoot of David Zwirner, which opened last fall. The new space functions differently than Zwirner’s other locations or from any other bluechip outpost for that matter: 52 Walker—Haynes’s brainchild, of which she is senior director—resembles a kunsthalle, with longer viewing timelines and four immersive shows per year. Highlighting scholarship and research, an edition of the gallery’s publication series “Clarion” accompanies each artist exhibition. Inside the first-floor loft, remodeled by architect Annabelle Selldorf—an aesthetic unto its own—visitors can easily forget the work is indeed for sale. “Departing from the traditional commercial gallery format, my personal curatorial practice, which focuses largely on conceptual and research-based artists from a range of backgrounds and stages in their careers, is a trademark of the space,” explains Haynes, whose graduate studies centered on art criticism and curatorial practice at Ontario College of Art and Design University. Although it opened during the height of New York COVID in October, 52 Walker has prized safe, in-person art viewing from go; to encourage visitors to see and consider the works—rather than scroll through their website—no images were released until later in the exhibition run. “A challenge before 52 Walker, for me, was finding a place where I could curate as any institutional curator would, but with the added responsibility of having conversations around selling the art, and everything that comes with that role,” says Haynes of the hybrid she’s created. Haynes started off with a bang—an inaugural show by Los Angeles-based multimedia conceptual artist Kandis Williams who challenges systems of labor exploitation. Artists who’ve followed include Nikita Gale and Nora Turato. “I hope that 52 Walker is an example of how different models can exist in the art world,” says Haynes. “I’m not proposing that people should follow this model. Rather, I’m eager to continue to demonstrate how other models can exist and add to the art world conversation.”

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“IN A CITY AS COMMERCIALLY-DRIVEN as New York, it is particularly important to provide space for conversations around art that aren’t driven by the market,” says Anjuli Nanda Diamond who was recently appointed artistic director of New York-based The 8th Floor. Diamond joined the foundation ten years ago and recently returned

from a hiatus to earn her master’s degree in art business from Sotheby’s Institute of Art. Established by collector-philanthropists Shelley and Donald Rubin to broaden art access for New Yorkers, The 8th Floor champions artists addressing unsung narratives. “As an organization, we are determined to have a voice

ANJULI NANDA DIAMOND

THE SHELLEY & DONALD RUBIN FOUNDATION/THE 8TH FLOOR

that reflects both the diverse cultural landscape of the city and the communities that inhabit it,” Diamond says. Part of the Shelley & Donald Foundation— endowed in 1995 to support the arts and promote human welfare—The 8th Floor celebrates artists’ role in driving social change, through performance, exhibition and salon-style discussion. “I feel fortunate to have evolved with the organization over the years, from gallery assistant to curator and now as artistic director,” adds Diamond, who also edited the foundation’s twovolume publication An Incomplete Archive of Activist Art (2022) which traverses the history of the Rubins’ art and justice mission. While new to the helm, Diamond has long left her mark on the institution’s curatorial DNA, with a critical eye on art world structures. Case in point: her current show “Articulating Activism,” co-curated with Irish artist George Bolster, draws from the Rubins’ private collection to engage issues of feminism, migration and colonialism. The checklist ranges from Betty Tompkins and Firelei Báez, to artist groups like Guerrilla Girls and ACT UP. “Many of the pieces were acquired during my time working for the Rubins, and I feel a particular affinity for these artists who continue to resist and reject oppressive conditions,” she explains. “José Ángel Toirac, Guerrilla Girls and Tsherin Sherpa have vastly different backgrounds, coming from countries with varying political circumstances, as well as access to education and training. Yet, they have a commonality in their questioning of basic human rights, weaponizing their position as artists to draw attention to injustices.”

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“I WANT OUR ORGANIZATION to think through how to keep work feeling unrecognizable and new,” says Kyle Dancewicz, deputy director of SculptureCenter, the nonprofit contemporary art museum in Long Island City, Queens. “I think it’s especially important for small organizations to make space for work that can be at the outside edge of language and discourse in order to continue questioning the functions, resources and purviews of institutions in our current lives.” Founded by artists in 1928 as The Clay Club by sculptor Dorothea Denslow, SculptureCenter is known to feature under-recognized and emerging voices—many have gone on to significant acclaim, such as Sanford Biggers, Rashid Johnson, Ugo Rondinone, Anicka Yi and Simone Leigh—Dancewicz describes the Center’s exhibition approach as a kind of “faithbased curating,” reflecting the support of a few committed people behind an artist’s vision. After serving as interim director and director of exhibitions and programs since 2020 and previously managing Mad. Sq. Art, the public art arm of Madison Square Park Conservancy, Dancewicz is quick to add that he doesn’t consider himself a curator, nor has he ever pursued a classic curatorial role. “I really respect my colleagues whose creative and professional commitments are more strictly within this discipline,” he explains. “But I think what I do at SculptureCenter is a specific subset or version of curatorial work that asks how much an institution can learn from, change from, or use its structures to support artists as they move through the world and make the work they want to make. There is some skill overlap, but my focus is different.” Dancewicz’s spring show “Lydia Ourahmane: Tassili,” resonates strongly in the political landscape. “A number of years ago Lydia exported a series of oil barrels from Algeria, which became the first art objects to leave the country legally since independence from France in the

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early 1960s and new cultural patrimony laws were put in place,” he says. “Her work created a new legal possibility for artworks to move between Algeria and elsewhere. Lydia’s project for SculptureCenter was a huge undertaking, featuring a 45-minute film of a walk in the Tassili n’Ajjer desert park.”

KYLE DANCEWICZ

SCULPTURECENTER

ROSARIO GÜIRALDES THE DRAWING CENTER

“DRAWING IS SO BEAUTIFUL because it’s a medium that reaches far beyond fine art or contemporary art,” says Rosario Güiraldes, The Drawing Center’s associate curator. “It’s democratic. It’s universal. It’s accessible. We’ve all done it at some point in our lives, so it breaks out and participates in the world at large, beyond a kind of art historical context.” As a contemporary curator of a medium-centric institution—she’s been at The Drawing Center since 2017—Güiraldes finds the lens anchors her in a flood of cultural chaos and information. An Argentinian based in New York, she spent the last four-and-a-half years, curating two recent shows at The Drawing Center. “Fernanda Laguna: The Path of the Heart” (2022) was a sweeping survey of the Argentine artist—still sousradar internationally—and a personal one for Güiraldes. “The artist was one of my earliest experiences at 16 or 17 when I still didn’t even know that I wanted to pursue a career in the arts,” she says. “I take very seriously the kind of responsibility and agency that curators have, being in the position where you can open doors for someone, invite them to be part of the conversation or build a bridge, in this case with Argentina and the global south where I’m from.” After two years of social distancing and isolation, drawing has never felt as timely or as raw. This spring, “Drawing in the Continuous Present,” comprises nearly a hundred works on paper by thirteen artists across ten countries. The selections explore the primacy and possibilities of drawing throughout the pandemic. “Most of the artists in this show are also very good painters or sculptors, in addition to being incredible draftspeople,” Güiraldes says. “But

drawing has had this historically contentious relationship with art history. In my conversations, I tend to talk about drawing as the middle child of mediums. I had a very visceral need to reassert why I’m working in the contemporary art field. Why drawing? The experience of the past two years gave me an intuitive sense of why the immediacy of drawing is so relevant right now.”

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LEGACY RUSSELL THE KITCHEN

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STEFANIE HESSLER

SWISS INSTITUTE

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LEGACY RUSSELL THE KITCHEN

NEARLY A YEAR INTO her role as executive director and chief curator of The Kitchen, Legacy Russell has already left her stamp on the nonprofit arts space in Chelsea, celebrated for the experimental and the avant-garde since 1971. “The Kitchen is a place for creative people to delve into risky, sticky, complicated and playful work,” she says. “It is the type of work that colors outside the lines and exists in the heart and the mind, in striving to feel and think at the same time.” The first Black leader of the progressive art center, she arrived at The Kitchen via the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she was associate curator of exhibitions. “I am, first and foremost, a curator,” says Russell, who grew up in the East Village, amid its vital club scene, and earned a graduate degree in art history from the department of visual cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. “I love working with artists and with creative communities. I arrive at The Kitchen with a curatorial vision that drives the directorial goals.” Russell is also an established theorist and author, with two acclaimed books, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, and the forthcoming publication, Black Meme, which explores the construct of the meme as mapped onto Black visual culture from 1900 to the present and won her the 2021 Creative Capital Award. This past winter, Russell presented Sadie Barnette’s “The New Eagle Creek Saloon,” a collaboration with The Studio Museum in Harlem to bring the artist’s installation that reimagined the first Black-owned gay bar in San Francisco to the East Coast. Established by Barnette’s father Rodney, founder of the Compton, California chapter of the Black Panther Party, The New Eagle Creek Saloon operated in the 1990s as a safe social space for the multiracial queer community. In response to the artwork—a testament to The Kitchen’s leadingedge, cross-disciplinary mission—Russell launched the organization's nightlife and club culture residency with critic, DJ and assistant professor of gender, sexuality and Women’s studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. “As much as we need experimental places for artists emerging in many ways across many points of their career arc to do this work,” Russell explains, “we also in the field need to provide a place for curators, educators and producers to grow in a radical and dynamic vision that extends beyond the rules of the white box.”

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STEFANIE HESSLER STAKES A BOLD CLAIM on the art world’s density. “I envision to really change the structure of Swiss Institute to respond to this moment of shared urgency that we are experiencing both socially and ecologically,” says the newly appointed director of the East Village contemporary art nonprofit, which explores visual and performing art, as well as design and architecture, from a Swiss context. “I want to become carbon neutral through looking at the ways we work with materials, energy and travel. And I plan to bring in exciting artists that will work on ecology, gender and social justice. I think of it as a holistic ecosystem. My vision is really that it will be an integrated institution.” Previously head of Norway’s Kunsthall Trondheim, where her “Sex Ecologies” exhibition landed international praise, Hessler is already known for a curatorial

STEFANIE HESSLER

SWISS INSTITUTE

process and writings that engage environmental realities and society—but New York affords her nextlevel visibility. “I think an institution like SI can become a role model for how institutions can work in the future,” she explains. “Because it’s a mid-sized institution, you can make changes that can be felt much more quickly, and you can experiment in a different way than you can at larger places.” Hessler believes the time is ripe for an integrated, radical shift in perspective. “Right now is actually the moment when people are more open to these changes,” she argues. “They feel not only the necessity and urgency, but also the joy and possibility of changes that make our lives and the lives of other human beings so much better.” At the same time, she’s adamant about maintaining a feminist approach to leading her organization’s next iteration. “To me, that means I’m not just coming in and saying, ‘Okay, everything will be this way or that way,’” she clarifies. “I actually want to come in and listen, and be responsive to the institution, to the environment, to what has been done before and to what needs to be done going forward.”

which explored ways in which artists used the paper of record to address and reframe issues after the 2016 election. “FLAG isn’t immune to working fast,” Rider says. “But our exhibitions are on view for up to three months at a time, which allows for thoughtful programming, time to commission scholarly texts and other opportunities to expand the conversation around the shows.” He continues, “I spend a lot of time in artists’ studios and see as many museum and gallery exhibitions as possible. During these visits, I collect ideas and themes that could possibly be applied to future exhibitions.” Known for the unexpected, Rider draws influences from far and wide, pulling on vast reserves of art historical and cultural knowledge. Most recently, he curated “In Search of the Miraculous” (2021-2022)—a 20-artist extravaganza, ranging from minimalist artwork by German sculptor Wolfgang Laib, to 4,000-year-old Egyptian scarabs—inspired by Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader’s 1975 disappearance at sea. When FLAG closed to the public during COVID, Rider didn’t stop public programming. “I organized a series of virtual ‘impossible exhibitions’ in which 25 artists, curators, collectors and friends—Polly Ap-felbaum, Anthony Elms, Jim Hodges, Helen Molesworth, Nicola Vassell—were invited to create shows for Instagram that didn’t need to take logistics or practicalities into account,” he says. “It was all possible here.”

JONATHAN RIDER THE FLAG ART FOUNDATION

AS A NEW DIRECTOR of The FLAG Art Foundation, time is on Jonathan Rider’s side. “The contemporary art world moves at a breakneck pace, which can foster a what’s-next culture of looking at and think-ing about art,” says Rider, who’s spent the better part of a decade at the nonprofit exhibition space in the heart of West Chelsea, founded by art patron and philanthropist Glenn Fuhrman in 2008. In the spirit of a kunsthalle, FLAG borrows artworks

from various lenders—artists, galleries, private collectors, institutions—to mount six plus solo and thematic group shows annually, whether organized in-house and curated by Rider, or designed by guest curators and artists themselves, such as blockbuster presentations by Awol Erizku and Elmgreen & Dragset. The Foundation is also heralded for its nimble response to current moments in the collective consciousness, such as “The Times” (2017)

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PRIYA KHANCHANDANI THE DESIGN MUSEUM

PRIYA KHANCHANDANI’S CURATORIAL CAREER is as interdisciplinary as one comes. As head of curatorial at the Design Museum in London, her exhibitions span design, fashion, architecture, music and popular culture. “I don’t really see the world as being divided by the fixed boundaries of disciplines,” she says. “There is

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much to be gained by working in the in-between spaces. Those who haven’t tried it are missing out.” Khanchandani started out as a lawyer and, up until two years ago, she was the editor of ICON Magazine, the British publication with a fresh, intellectual take on architecture, design and culture.

KHANCHANDANI: PHOTO BY MARK COCKSEDGE

“I recently curated a display about the fashion designer Bethany Williams. Each of her projects involves a partnership with a different charity or community,” says Khanchandani of the current exhibition, which deals with social and environmental issues. “Before that, I worked on a very different exhibition about another woman I admire greatly, the musician Amy Winehouse.” This season, Khanchandani unveils “WEIRD SENSATION FEELS GOOD: The World of ASMR,” a pioneering exhibition for visitors to experience the emerging field of creativity around designers who generate Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response—the physical sensation of euphoric calm, or body tingling, triggered by sound, touch and movement. In partnership with ArkDes, Sweden’s National Centre for Architecture and Design, the show shifts the significant ASMR online movement to an immersive, museum environment. “Be prepared to kick your shoes off, lie back in a cushioned space and experience sound, touch and tingles,” Khanchandani says. “It’s been a challenging time for the arts sector. We’ve emerged from a pandemic, during which we had to close our doors to the public. For the first time, we are confronting a long legacy of exclusion in a constructive way, following Black Lives Matter,” she says. “We have a long way to go, but there are more opportunities than before for positive change, and untold stories to tell, which makes the arts sector a dynamic place to be right now.”

“I AM THE 2021-2022 CURATORIAL FELLOW at The Kitchen,” says Fekete of the legendary arts space. “But I very much see myself as an independent curator, having worked with many art and community spaces.” She rattles off a list of cultural mainstays: Knockdown Center, CultureHub, BOMB Magazine, Ethel’s Club, On Air Fest, 8 Ball Community, Playground Youth and POWRPLNT, attesting a unique breadth of focus. As for her role at The Kitchen (under fellow

Cultured Young Curator Legacy Russell’s helm), Fekete cites the organization’s historic 19th Street building’s expansion and reconstruction this summer as a source of inspiration. “It is a transformative and chameleon-like space that has the capability to transform with every new project and energy that an artist brings in,” she says. Fekete recently organized—alongside The Kitchen’s senior curator Lumi Tan—the solo

SIENNA FEKETE

CURATORIAL FELLOW, THE KITCHEN

exhibition “Where there’s love overflowing” of New York-based, multi-media artist E. Jane, who performs as the persona Mhysa and probes the traditional boundaries of gender, race and digital identity. “The exhibition is very much a celebration of the Black femme diva, an ode to love and the legacy of Black femme musicality throughout history,” says Fekete. “My hope is to curate through an educational lens, and to make sure the exhibition, performance, lecture, workshop—or whatever kind of program—feels accessible, affordable, intersectional, intergenerational and is able to reach lots of people in and outside the art world.” A project of particular pride is also Rhea Dillon’s "Video Viewing Room," a presentation Fekete curated for The Kitchen as part of a larger series that makes recent video works and archival recordings available online. “Dillon presents her brilliant video (Working Title) Browning 2025, an audiovisual rumination on the word and color: brown,” describes Fekete. “Collaging together recordings of poetic response by the artist’s friends and collaborators— Dachi Cole, Yves B. Golden, John Glacier, Ra/Malika Imhotep, Kandis Williams, Sydney Vernon, Mandy Harris Williams and TWEAKS—the work gestures towards the imperative that words are central to any effort to make sense of the world around us.”

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6. 17.2022 Hero Track Gen Z IRL Hold On Baby, King Princess Is Calling The Sun King It’s Always Halloween in Los Angeles Lonestar Is Home Dior Forever, But Especially Now CULTUREDMAG.COM

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Maya Hawke wears a Coach x Tom Wesselmann coat, pants by Bottega Veneta and vintage shirt and shoes by Church’s. Hair by Peter Butler. Makeup by Nick Barose. Set design by Emma Magidson and Henrique Cirilo.

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WHILE WE WERE ALL ANXIOUSLY AWAITING THE RELEASE OF THE FOURTH SEASON OF NETFLIX’S BINGEABLE CLASSIC “STRANGER THINGS” DURING ITS PANDEMIC-LENGTH HIATUS, RECENT JUILLIARD DROPOUT MAYA HAWKE—WHO ALSO HAPPENS TO BE ONE OF THE SHOW’S MOST BELOVED LEADING WOMEN, NOT TO MENTION UMA THURMAN AND ETHAN HAWKE’S DAUGHTER—GOT UP TO SOMETHING A LITTLE DIFFERENT: SHE RECORDED HER SECOND ALBUM, OUT THIS SEPTEMBER, WITH 13 NEW TRACKS THAT TAKE EQUAL INSPIRATION FROM THE POETRY OF JOHN DONNE, AN ANCIENT EGYPTIAN SCULPTURE OF A BLUE HIPPOPOTAMUS IN THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, AND THE “RIDICULOUSNESS OF MALE ACTORS” EVERYWHERE. HERE, SHE CATCHES UP WITH FELLOW CO-STAR, SADIE SINK, TO DISCUSS HER IRREVERENT CHARACTER’S EMOTIONAL ARC, HER OWN CREATIVE PROCESS, DEFENSIVE MECHANISMS AND PORTRAYING MULTI-DIMENSIONAL WOMEN ON SCREEN. PHOTOGRAPHY BY D’ANGELO LOVELL WILLIAMS STYLING BY MARION KELLY

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OW ARE YOU BOTH FEELING ABOUT THE RELEASE OF STRANGER THINGS? MAYA HAWKE: What I’m most excited for the audience to see is Sadie’s performance. It’s what this show has been missing, in my opinion, it’s the emotional core. To see the trauma and the events that have happened to all of these kids through all these seasons, really start to register with them emotionally. Sadie does such a beautiful job of being the heart of the show and taking all those feelings in. SADIE SINK: They’re good writers. MH: We’re lucky. SS: Very, very lucky. I’m excited for Joe Quinn. MH: Me too. The cast members are piling on but when you watch it, each person makes sense. You were exactly what the show needed in season three and continue to be the breath of fresh air. SS: Big casts can get a bad rap for too many storylines but life has a lot of storylines. It has that realistic feeling of new people being introduced. Your world gets bigger as you get older, and it’s aging with its kids that way. HOW OLD WERE YOU WHEN YOU JOINED THE SHOW?

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MH: 19. I’m 23 now, turning 24 this summer. SS: These are crucial years. MH: I don’t really feel like I grew up on the show in any way. I feel, the way that my character and I have mirrored each other is that Robin made more friends as I made more friends. Robin starts as a loner and then a little bit of an outcast; I came in a little like a loner. SS: It’s so funny that you say, you felt like a loner when you first joined, because when I met you, I remember my first impression was you were so sure of yourself. I admired that so much. It was my second season, but I still had major imposter syndrome. MH: I feel like you and I have different defense mechanisms. I have a confidence defense mechanism, that’s hiding a little insecurity and you have a quiet mechanism, that’s hiding the unbelievably confident. I was definitely worried about failing miserably in front of tons of people. And probably equally excited. Stranger Things is one of the few things at that moment that was as heavy as my parents. I was excited to get enough credits under my belt that being a celebrity kid was only a piece of the larger

picture and not the whole picture. So in the end, I crossed my fingers that I wouldn’t fail in front of the Stranger Things fans. SS: You succeeded. MH: Thank you. SS: Did you find or did you make any interesting discoveries about Robin during season four? Did Matt and Ross [duffer] tap into any specific talents? MH: Well my ability to talk quickly. They definitely tapped into it. SS: Many monologues. MH: I might deliver the brunt of the language in the show but in the smallest amount of time possible thanks to my motormouthing. But what I love about Robin is that they gave her permission to be a cool dork. I was talking about this earlier, I was kind of cool in high school and I was a dork. I feel like movies often create this binary of the popular kids, there’s the shallow one-dimensional cool kids and then there’s the dork. I feel like Robin is someone people could look up to and want to be like. One of the things I’m happiest about the season is that she’s so openly and aggressively weird.

Aximusant, quo maionem haruntur? Qui idel moloratem doluptianda sedi dellorem recerum debis ullaborem debisciis esequos torrovid quodi doluptia quo corecat.

Hawke wears a T-shirt by JW Anderson and hat by Lavender, with vintage pants, belt and shoes.

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Hawke wears a Coach x Tom Wesselmann T-shirt, pants by Altu and belt by Patricia Von Musulin with vintage shoes and Falke socks.

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“I FEEL LIKE ROBIN IS SOMEONE PEOPLE COULD LOOK UP TO AND WANT TO BE LIKE. ONE OF THE THINGS I’M HAPPIEST ABOUT THE SEASON IS THAT SHE’S SO OPENLY AND AGGRESSIVELY WEIRD.”

SS: I feel like before you joined, all comedic relief was centered around the male characters. Then you completely shook that up. DID YOU KNOW THAT ROBIN WAS GOING TO BE SUCH A FUNNY CHARACTER? MH: The honest answer is no. I didn’t know that was going to be a big part of my life, nor did I know that that was going to be a part of my life on Stranger Things, but I aspire to have both things be true. Going to a set every day and playing with your friends and making jokes is definitely a really light way to move through life as a creative person. And it’s not stupid. A joke is either going to land or not based on what word is emphasized and whether it punches and when the cut hits and whether you look left or right at the exact moment. There’s a science to its work. Even though Robin does take on this comedic role at times, you talked about having to be vulnerable on screen, and I’m wondering how that manifests. MH: Acting and music, and creativity, in general, is a place. Sometimes people say actors are liars but, for me, it’s the place where I can’t lie. It’s the place where lies feel poisonous, you have to find a way for everything to be true. Connect the tissues of you and the character. I feel the same way in music where for me, it’s faith and sanctuary and a place where anything

is possible, but everything has to be true. The truth is we all have immense darkness, immense humor, immense grief, immense anger in us. My music is super lyrical for me, and there’s definitely real messages that I’m trying to communicate within the songs, but I honestly do the same thing as an actor where I implant a little secret in every performance, something the camera doesn’t know. One thing my dad told me is to imagine that every performance is a letter to someone. Every time you go on screen as an actor, your character is a letter to someone. There’s something you’re trying to communicate to somebody in your life. Every performance is a letter and every song is a letter. SS: With music, when did you start? When did you get into that? MH: I got into it at a really young age when I was first realizing that I was dyslexic. I was writing things down and putting my thoughts and feelings to little melodies so I could communicate them later, and then I took guitar lessons. It was right around the time when my parents got divorced and I was having a lot of feelings and wanted to express them in a way that felt like someone could hear. So I started writing songs. I did it in a pretty serious way through 9th grade, and then I stopped for five or so years and started again when I started working. SS: I’m curious about how this next release is going to depart from “Blush” and your past work. What can we expect? MH: You can definitely expect something that’s tonally more modern. It’s by no stretch of the imagination pop, but it has a buzz and a polished sensibility. It definitely has way more storytelling and eccentricity in the lyrics. There’s questions about the fate of a muse, someone who people are always making art about but can’t make art themselves. There’s a song based on a John Donne poem. There’s a lot of different worlds, but they all build this cohesive storyline for me about inner light, the thing that will carry you forward and show you the next place to go. That’s what that album is

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generally about. It came together spontaneously, in the middle of shooting Stranger Things. We were on hiatus, which is also the title of a song on the record, and I was trying to get three songs made. All of a sudden, instead of three days I had three weeks and plenty of words and feelings. We got together this trio of three guys, Christian Lee Hutson, Benjamin [Lazar] Davis and Will Graefe and by the time we finished in the studio two weeks later, we had 13 songs. For some reason, all four of us were desperately in need of some shakeup internally and everyone came in and gave it everything they had. SS: We have a lot of musical co-stars on Stranger Things. Could anyone expect a collaboration offscreen? MH: I doubt it. We all like each other, but I think that our music is an effort to carve out our individuality outside of the show because as much as we would love working together on it and have fun, the weight of the show would overpower whatever music we made together. It would feel more gimmicky than it would feel authentic. At least in the way that it was received. None of us really want that for our music. DO YOU BOUNCE IDEAS OFF EACH OTHER? MH: When I get excited about something that I’m making, I’m not a good secret keeper. If I buy someone a present, I give it to them right away. I’m the same way when I write songs. “Can I play it for you right now?” I want to know what you think right now and then a week later. And I do and then it’s a week later and I hate it. I want to share it while I feel like it matters to me and then I’m like, “Oh, it’s terrible, never mind.” SS: When we were filming you were also working on this album. What was it like to jump back and forth? MH: The nature of the show, because there are so many storylines, is that it takes so long to film and there’s a ton of downtime where you really can’t do anything else, unless you’re me and are insane. If it wasn’t for Stranger Things I probably wouldn’t have made a record, much less two. It was the nature of being like, “Wow,

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“THERE’S ONE SPOOF SONG ON THE RECORD ABOUT MAKING FUN OF HOW RIDICULOUS MALE ACTORS ARE, AND I’M REALLY EXCITED TO DO THAT ONE BECAUSE IT’S A CRITICISM THAT NEEDS TO BE OUT THERE.”

I’m in Atlanta, I’ve worked two days this week, what am I going to do with my darn self?” SS: I just want to lie down for a bit. You call me when you’re ready, I’ll show up. DO YOU HAVE A FAVORITE TRACK ON THE NEW ALBUM? MH: What I’m most excited to share with listeners is the sonic cohesion of the record. The lyrics are sporadic but sonically from front to back the songs transition into each other; there are lyrics in some songs that repeat and there’s a coda that keeps coming back. This album has a lot of my imaginary friends in it. One has already come out. I put out a song a little while ago called “Blue Hippo” about this piece at The Met called “William” the Hippo. There’s one spoof song on the record about making fun of how ridiculous male actors are, and I’m really excited to do that one because it’s a criticism that needs to be out there. One of my favorite quotes ever that I’ve told Sadie many times was said to me by an amazing French hairdresser who goes, “Maya, you know, an actress is just a little bit more than a woman and an actor is just a little bit less than a man.”

Coach x Tom Wesselmann bags.

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Gen Z irl

The next generation is here, and they’re finally off Zoom. We’re excited to introduce them. We asked seven Gen Z creatives to tell us what’s new, what’s next and how they stay motivated in a world so often filled with doom and gloom. Newsflash: they care—and deeply—about art, music, politics and social issues. And they’re all about to have the summer of their lives. After all, they are the future. Photography by MICAIAH CARTER Styling by MECCA JAMES-WILLIAMS All clothing by GUCCI

E VA N M O C K

KRISTEN WHITE

SOPHIE TH ATCHER

ANTHONY IPPOLITO

W ISDOM K AY E

AJANI RUSSELL

TA M A GUCCI

Hair by Nero. Makeup by Chiho Omae. Evan Mock’s grooming by Jenny Sauce. Creative direction by Lucas Lefler. Set design by Emma Magidson and Henrique Cirilo. Casting by Ricky Michiels.

Evan Mock BY JOHN ORTVED

CATCH EVAN MOCK, IF YOU CAN. I highly recommend it. I had the opportunity recently, at The River, a new bar in New York’s Chinatown, where he showed me his journal, which Madonna had autographed at dinner the night before. “She signed it, ‘Don’t be a pussy’ and wrote a heart. ‘Madonna,’” he told me. The surprise in running into Mock—the 25 year-old model, pro skateboarder, actor, director, photographer and probably something else by the time this article is published, who is ubiquitous and never seems to stop moving—is not that he’s dining with Madonna, but his utter affability, in relaying the story. He has the most disarming and lovely way of speaking. The look is part of it—an absolute sweetness aligned with ideal facial symmetry. So lean and agile he’s nearly serpentine, but no venom. People this good looking and famous aren’t supposed to be this nice. And yet… “I have a special way of connecting with people,” he tells me on the cusp of Memorial Day weekend from the HBO Max Gossip Girl set at some giant house in Long Island, he doesn’t know where. “It’s just the way I was brought up: your family and your friends are everything. So I think once you start treating everyone like that, it’s such a different, natural, raw, way of conversing with someone,” he says. Despite landing a lucky few minutes, I’ve found Mock to be inescapable for the past few years. He’s at the good parties with photographer Gray Sorrenti, on all the cool Instagram feeds (most notably Frank Ocean’s, back in February 2019, the post that launched Mock into the stratosphere); on Gossip Girl where he plays Akeno Menzies, a fancy skater boy challenging his own sexuality; looking down on us from his Calvin Klein billboard at Houston and Lafayette. The one-time surfer and pro skater has been absolutely everywhere: the Met Ball, where he wore a $12 million Cartier necklace; shooting a Saint Laurent campaign;

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sitting front row at Balmain’s runway shows; starring in the Fendi campaign; at the Ralph Lauren show, Dior, Thom Browne. The list goes on. Part of my shock at how very unassuming, open and genuine Mock was, has to do with our current status of celebrity. Andy Warhol’s attributed notion that everyone will be famous for 15 minutes still stands, but replace the word “minutes” for “megabytes.” On the one hand, we’re all online, all the time. Everyone is performing for a screen. So much hustle; so little creativity. Mock, on the other hand is simultaneously always doing things, making things—utterly un-self conscious about it. This year, he made $MAHCOIN, his own cryptocurrency, developed with P00LS, a leader in the social Web3 world. He’s just released his fashion line, Wahine, a 12-piece capsule with stylist Donté McGuine, featuring versatile items—gym shirts with logos, corduroy shorts and, with maybe a wink, mock necks that you can wear in the ocean—that reference his home state (the word “wahine” means “woman” or “wife” in Hawaiian). “It’s a little bit of a bicoastal kind of unisex line—my outlook on Hawaii culture and fashion but mixed in with 12 personal pieces that I took out of my own closet,” Mock says. “I pulled a lot of inspo from early photos of Hawaii surf culture, but it’s also a mix of corduroy, early 2000s raver stuff.” Does Evan Mock rave? “Sometimes it gets a little too crowded and hot and sweaty. I get claustrophobic, but I do like just closing my eyes and dancing.” He’s almost ready to announce a fashion collaboration with Nordstrom. He’s working on a skate part—a series of clips that skaters use as their calling card. For now, Mock is spending his summer filming season two of Gossip Girl, which has its own challenges. “It’s really time consuming. It’s hard for me to actually adjust to having such a set schedule,” he says. “I just don’t even really want to get into it.” Instead, he’d rather talk about skating. It will take him to Europe after Gossip Girl wraps in August. He’s just returned from Jamaica, where he was skating in Port Antonio. “Actually, there’s a pretty good-sized skating culture there. Parks are being built, slowly but surely. Hopefully they keep popping up over there because the kids really enjoy being there, and I feel like the more parks you can skate, the more you can grow the community,” he says. To wit: he’s been working with Tony Hawk’s The Skatepark Project, trying to raise funds to create more parks

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in underserved areas. Not that he’s turning his back on the screen. He wants to do a film, in fact, “I really want to do an action movie.” What? “On Gossip Girl, I’m not really doing anything. I’m in a classroom. I’m sitting down. I’m walking. I’m not jumping out of airplanes or anything and I think it’d be fun.” Alright. What else? What does he really want to do? When is he happiest? “My eyelids closed in my bed,” he says. Really? He has to think about it. “I am super lucky and super blessed to be able to even say I’m doing such positive things in my life. I can’t live without it,” he says. “But it’s definitely not all flowers all the time.” In an age of Instagram, PR, agentry and credulity, to hear someone who could be so caught up in these speak honestly, not just about their work, but about themselves, is as rare as it is brave. Madonna would be proud.

Actor, Designer, Model and Skater, Age 25 TELL US ABOUT YOUR CREATIVE PROCESS. WHEN ARE YOU MOST CREATIVE? When I’m traveling to somewhere I’ve never been—or somewhere I know very well—I take the opportunity to think and perceive that location in a different way than most people would. HOW DO YOU PREPARE FOR A ROLE OR GET INTO CHARACTER? No distractions, and creating the ultimate environment to allow myself to get in the headspace I need to be in. WHERE DO YOU HOPE TO BE WHEN YOU’RE 30? In a position to help others, even more than now. WHAT OUTFIT MAKES YOU FEEL THE MOST CONFIDENT? Something I designed or created because I’ve got to live my truth. I can’t be making things that I wouldn’t absolutely love or want to wear. WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE SUMMER FASHION TREND? Wahine purple corduroy shorts. WHAT IS YOUR SONG OF THE SUMMER? “Agua Fria” by The Bongo Hop. WHAT’S A SONG FOREVER ON YOUR PLAYLIST? “Why Can’t There Be Love” by Dee Edwards.

“I am SUPER LUCKY and super blessed to be able to even say I’m doing such POSITIVE THINGS in my life.”

Wisdom Kaye Model, Age 21

WHAT OUTFIT MAKES YOU FEEL THE MOST CONFIDENT? Something that stands out, but not too much. There’s a sweet spot where your look is different from everyone else’s, but it isn’t too over the top or looks like you’re trying too hard. WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE SUMMER FASHION TREND? I’ve always been into that sort of tennis-core area when the heat is piercing. I’m not sure if it’s trending, but the combination of short white shorts with socks and shoes of the same color and a slim top always has me feeling spry, even if I’m not too physically active that day. WHO DO YOU FOLLOW ON TIKTOK? I follow people who make me laugh, entertain or educate me. It ranges from creators who make humorous skits, to others who make soccer edits, to those who make political content, with a few fashion people in the mix. I used to follow people just because I thought they were attractive, but then that made me feel ugly, so I unfollowed them all and never did that again. DESCRIBE YOUR DREAM PARTY. WHO IS ON THE GUESTLIST? I’m not a party person, so I’ve never dreamt of assembling one or even given thought to who I’d invite. But hold me hostage and force me to throw one and I would hire a group of scientists to build a device to travel to different universes and collect alternate versions of Wisdom Kaye. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE QUALITY IN A HUMAN? Authenticity. WHAT IS YOUR SONG OF THE SUMMER? “Promotion Man” by Merzbow.

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Tama Gucci Musician, Age 24

WHEN DO YOU MAKE YOUR BEST MUSIC? I’ve always loved to make music super late at night, like 12 to 3 in the morning. Now that I have more space to myself, I’ve fallen back into that timeframe of making music! WAS THERE A FAVORITE MOMENT ON YOUR RECENT TOUR? My favorite memory of the tour was when my best friend Alberto came to the third tour stop in Washington from Miami! It really meant a lot because not only was it my first time touring but he’s seen me grow up and blossom into what I am now—and he knew the lyrics to the music. I saw him singing from the stage! It’s nice to know that I have friends that show up for me. WHAT IS THE LAST THING THAT INSPIRED YOU? My community of ravers—from the fashion, to the music, to the way they show love and support toward each other. WHO IS YOUR STYLE ICON? My style icon isn’t one specific person. It’s the iconic dance hall queens from Jamaica! Many times, when I wear crazy looks, people think it’s solely the club kids that I’m referencing but it’s actually the dance hall queens: the original club kids! WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE SUMMER FASHION TREND? I do love a mesh tank. It’s the Caribbean in me. WHERE DO YOU HOPE TO BE WHEN YOU’RE 30? I hope to be even more successful, with many hits under my belt that I’ve performed or written for others… and operating fully out of a space that I own. More happiness, wealth and good health for the future. WHAT IS YOUR SONG OF THE SUMMER? “Challenge” by me. “I feel so cute, babe/ I’m in the mood,” that’s the anthem!

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Kristen White Filmmaker, Age 26

HOW WILL YOU SPEND YOUR SUMMER? Chasing sunsets, maybe dip into Paris, and in the water as much as possible. I have a water addiction. AS A FILMMAKER, WHAT IS THE LAST THING YOU WATCHED THAT INSPIRED YOU? Atlanta because it’s forever tonally genius, and Severance was beautifully shot! I’m still sad they canceled Lovecraft Country! TELL US ABOUT YOUR CREATIVE PROCESS. To be honest, I’m most creative when I have a crush! Every time I crush on a guy, I find myself super inspired by the possibilities of the world. My friend and I have this saying: “Making muses out of the men who amuse us.” So, shout out to the muses. WHAT’S THE LAST PICTURE ON YOUR IPHONE? A still from the movie Before Sunrise, where Celine (Julie Delpy) says, “Reality and love are almost contradictory for me.” WHAT OUTFIT MAKES YOU FEEL THE MOST CONFIDENT? Anything Gucci; I’m a Gucci girl for life! YOU’RE TRAPPED AT THE TOP OF A FERRIS WHEEL. WHO’S BY YOUR SIDE? Trevante Rhodes. He’s hella lowkey and talented as fuck. Trap me anywhere with him, honestly. WHAT IS YOUR SONG OF THE SUMMER? “My Collection” by Future.

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Anthony Ippolito Actor, Age 22

WHAT IS THE LAST THING THAT INSPIRED YOU? This quote appropriated by Banksy: “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” TELL US ABOUT YOUR CREATIVE PROCESS. I like to paint and play music. There’s a meditative and cathartic feeling that comes from creating. I feel that in a generation where there is such a frenetic pace to everyday life, being inundated with stimulation from social media, it’s a good way to balance everything out. YOU’VE PLAYED CHARACTERS THAT RANGE FROM A HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT IN GRAND ARMY TO A YOUNG AL PACINO IN THE OFFER. HOW DO YOU PREPARE FOR A ROLE? It’s different every time, and that’s part of what makes it so exciting. You try to soak up as much as you can about the character and the world they’re in. The process is as unique as each story and character. The script is incredibly important as is the shooting style and the storytelling; to me, all of it informs the performance. WHAT’S THE LAST PICTURE ON YOUR IPHONE? A behind the scenes shot from set on The Offer that was sent to me. YOU’RE TRAPPED AT THE TOP OF A FERRIS WHEEL. WHO’S BY YOUR SIDE? Oscar Wilde. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE QUALITY IN A HUMAN? Kindness. WHAT IS YOUR SONG OF THE SUMMER? “Margaritaville” by Jimmy Buffet.

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Sophie Thatcher Actor and Artist, Age 21

DO YOU HAVE A FAVORITE SET MOMENT FROM YELLOWJACKETS? I strangely adored the mania and lunacy on set the first few days after the year-and-a-half break between the pilot and second episode. We shot all the plane crash sequences those first few days and bonded over the intensity of the content. There were very definitive breaks between laughter off-screen and screaming for your life on-screen. HOW DO YOU GET INTO CHARACTER? WHAT DID YOU LIKE MOST ABOUT PLAYING NATALIE? It depends on how I initially connect to the character, their circumstance and their setting. Natalie was easier to tap into because I felt emotionally connected to her off the bat. I even grew up on a lot of the music I’d imagine her listening to. If I were to do a more specific period piece with history I’m not well versed in, I’d do more thorough research. But with Natalie, it was about cultivating songs she would listen to get into her headspace as she felt all her frustrations rise to the surface. I imagined certain music as her primary outlet and release. MUSIC SEEMS TO REALLY DRIVE YOUR CREATIVITY. Finding new music usually helps me get in the zone and out of my head. I constantly have headphones in. I’ll spend hours on YouTube trying to find new music from different channels I subscribe to. ‘‘ll look for an ambient album I can space out to and write or draw to for an hour or so. I also try to go on long walks to get out of my head or reflect. If that goes well, I’ll feel refreshed after and maybe ready to work on something. WHERE DO YOU HOPE TO BE WHEN YOU’RE 30? I would like to have scored and directed my own movie by that age. I want to experiment more with directing, for sure. Hopefully, I’ll also be in a more satisfying place musically. WHAT IS YOUR SONG OF THE SUMMER? Anything by Royal Trux.

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Natasha Lyonne wears a vintage Versace dress from Decades, with Kallati and Hanut Singh rings. Previous spread: Versace dress, belt and shoes with Paco Rabanne headpiece from the Albright Fashion Library LA. Makeup by Molly R. Stern. Hair by John D.

Ajani Russell Actor, Model and Skater, Age 24

DESCRIBE YOUR DREAM PARTY. WHO IS ON THE GUESTLIST? I’m assuming I can invite anybody to this hypothetical party so I would invite Megan Thee Stallion, Picasso, all the members of Earth, Wind & Fire, Carrie Mae Weems, Prince, Takashi Murakami, Chrollo Lucilfer from Hunter x Hunter and obviously all my homies. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE QUALITY IN A HUMAN? Kindness takes the cake for me. You can be as “nice” as you want and still have a tiny heart. Kindness however is adjacent to empathy and thoughtfulness and love. WHO DO YOU FOLLOW ON TIKTOK? No one yet. I just made an account yesterday. I would like some suggestions for funny animal pages. WHAT IS THE LAST THING YOU WATCHED THAT INSPIRED YOU? I watched a movie called Gangubai Kathiawadi recently one morning right after waking up. I chose it because, in the previews, there was a woman that kicked a man in the chest for harassing her. Aside from it being shot beautifully and the main character’s brilliant performance, the story depicts a woman demanding and reclaiming the respect that’s long been due to her while protecting the women around her. Everything screamed “badass,” including the way she confronted her traumas. She was a boss! HOW WILL YOU SPEND YOUR SUMMER? Hopefully, I’ll be on an adventure somewhere warm, painting, laughing, swimming. At the very least I’ll be rolling around in the sun. WHAT IS ONE SONG YOU’LL BE PLAYING ALL SEASON LONG? “Sponono” by Kabza De Small. WHAT’S A SONG FOREVER ON YOUR PLAYLIST? “Nobody’s Supposed to Be Here” by Deborah Cox.

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King Princess wears a Bode shirt, Chopova Lowena pants and belt and talent’s own Tiffany & Co. necklace. Hair by Rutger. Makeup by Mariko Hirano.

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HOLD ON BABY, KING PRINCESS IS CALLING THE POP SENSATION’S NEW RECORD “HOLD ON BABY,” OUT JULY 29, IS SET TO BE THE ALBUM OF THE SUMMER. IT REPRESENTS TWO YEARS OF WORK BOTH ON SONGWRITING AND ON ACCEPTING THE TRUTHS OF ONESELF—THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE UGLY. IN CONVERSATION WITH ACTOR AND FRIEND BRANDON FLYNN, THE ARTIST EXPLAINS WHY THIS ALBUM WAS MEANT TO BE PERFORMED AND THE DIFFERENT EMOTIONAL REGISTERS IT EXPLORES, FROM LUST TO SELF-LOATHING. Photography by ANGALIS FIELD

Styling by TESS HERBERT AND JADE FORREST MARKS

RANDON FLYNN: How are you feeling? KING PRINCESS: I’m good. Doing a lot of stuff right now because my grandma needs help upstate and then I’m putting this record together so, it’s just been wonderful and completely manic. [chuckles] BF: [laughs] As any form of creation is—life and our projects intersect and it’s insanity in many ways. KP: What have you been doing? BF: I just wrapped up a project in Massachusetts, a movie, a fun horror. It feels like the movies we grew up on. KP: That’s hot. BF: Yes. It was really fun. It was a crazy cast. KP: What’s it called? You can’t say? BF: No, it’s called The Parenting. It’s me, Lisa Kudrow, Brian Cox… KP: I fucking love Lisa Kudrow. BF: Parker Posey. KP: Parker Posey? BF: Parker Posey. KP: Legends only. I fucking love Parker Posey. Parker Posey in fucking… What’s it called? Best in Show. BF: Oh my god. KP: That is one of the greatest performances, I think, in anything ever. BF: So, I listened to your new album… KP: Did you? They sent it to you? BF: They sent it to me. Are you going to go off? KP: No. I can’t deal with this releasing anymore. In a perfect world, I would finish the album and just give it to some gays and be like, “Play this for your friends. Put it online. Free download.” I’m not precious about this shit anymore. I just want it out and I want to go on the road and be on stage. BF: Are you excited to be on tour? KP: Oh, yes. Oh my god. Yes. I’m really fucking

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excited. I think this album is meant to be toured. I was on a break from touring because of COVID for this album. When you play shows, you realize immediately everything you did wrong in production because the best way to test it is to play it in front of people. You think you have this song that is going to go over great, and then it doesn’t and you’re like, “I know exactly what I did wrong. Thank you everyone for letting me know.” Being on stage is having this transfer of energy. It’s a fucking longterm committed relationship. BF: Yes. What are you looking for in terms of audience when they come? KP: I did a little bit of writing and I got to the core of what the album is about. In the past, I wrote about people who hurt me or scorned me and then used other people as the sounding walls to figure out my own feelings. I want this album to be a place of solace and for listeners to feel at home with this music and make it their own. I know they’re going to bring that when I’m on stage. BF: Out of curiosity, you’re saying this album is a bit of discovering the dislike of oneself. Do you feel like the album also provides the space for loving that part of yourself that you dislike? KP: I think it does, but a bigger part is having empathy for yourself. I needed to write this album to manifest that it’s okay to struggle with these things and that’s why we have art as a catharsis. The happy ending is I’ve made something that, when I listen to it, it makes me enjoy my own words and my own personality. I’m so lucky that I get to write albums and deal with my own bullshit in this way, and then give it to other people so they can deal with theirs. BF: That’s powerful. So often we’re told to change the parts that you don’t like about yourself but what if that part is really helpful?

KP: Any time you put out music or art, there’s a part of it that isn’t yours anymore. The truth is you’d have to be a brick house to not admit to the fact that those things are incredibly challenging the minute other people’s opinions come into play. But that’s only a part of what the record is about. It’s also about pussy. BF: Yes. It’s called Hold On Baby. Where does the title come from? KP: This is a funny story. I worship Ethan Gruska who is on the record amongst other fabulous people. Ethan is a huge part of why I felt like a kid again, in the studio. We were just two goobers, drinking, playing golf and making music. Ethan would do this loving voice of his grandfather like, “Angel, hold on baby angel, and it won’t be like that.” And we started singing that line. It sounded like a country song with those two loving terms of endearment. BF: That’s cute. KP: I do find myself saying, “Hold on baby.” BF: Who doesn’t? Okay. I’ve gotten little hints of: there was the pandemic, there was the lack of tour. Is that when you wrote the album? KP: I wrote a lot of songs and then this ended up being the refined version of what I wrote. Ethan and I wrote a lot of songs that will probably be on the deluxe version of this. And there’s little parts of the album that correlate to the pandemic, but I didn’t want it to be like pandemic vibes. BF: A good pandemic album. It’s what everyone wants right now. KP: That is not my vibe. [chuckles] BF: Where did you write it? KP: A lot of it was done at Ethan’s. A lot of it was done at Aaron Dessner’s studio in Upstate New York, which is magical. I did not want to take this session with this man I didn’t know. How wrong

King Princess wears a full Bottega Veneta look.

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King Princess wears a Maceo Berg hoodie with Telfar jeans. Talent’s own boots. 144 CULTUREDMAG.COM

“IT’S SO CRAZY HOW FOR EVERY DEMON YOU MEET WHO PUSHES YOU AWAY FROM WHERE YOU NEED TO BE, EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE THERE’S SOMEONE WHO BRINGS YOU A LITTLE CLOSER TO WHO YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE.”

—King Princess

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was I. I ended up atstaying there and immediately felt I just walked into heaven. I’m sleeping in this beautiful studio, which is so helpful when you’re working with someone because it’s immediately intimate, which is conducive to art. I was there for a week, his family made me breakfast every morning and we wrote “PS5” and “Changed the Locks,” my favorite song on the record, and “Crowbar” and a couple others that, again, will probably be on the deluxe. It was really magical. BF: I was thinking back on when we met, it was a pretty pivotal point in my life. KP: It was for me too. BF: I met you the night before I got sober. KP: Yes, I don’t know how much you want to talk about that. BF: We don’t want to go, balls to the wall. KP: Okay, we won’t. That was a really interesting night because I felt we had both been each other in that situation and there was this moment of looking at each other and being like, “Mm-hmm.” It was honestly one of my first real nights going out without being on illicit substances as well. Then to meet you and have this moment of connection, made me feel grown up in a really good way. We hugged and there was this transfer of comfort that I thought was really beautiful. BF: It was a lot of comfort and it was a pretty memorable moment. I remember making sure to text you and saying thank you and then I went to my first meeting. KP: It’s so crazy how for every demon you meet who pushes you away from where you need to be, every once in a while there’s someone who brings you a little closer to who you’re supposed to be. I felt very seen and appreciated in that moment and you were so sweet. BF: It’s been a pleasure to get to interview you, especially around this new album.

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“I NEEDED TO WRITE THIS ALBUM TO MANIFEST THAT IT’S OKAY TO STRUGGLE WITH THESE THINGS AND THAT’S WHY WE HAVE ART AS A CATHARSIS.”

—King Princess

I’m hearing about all these labels pushing TikTok and all these ways to promote an album. To do what you want to do is a real luxury and it’s pretty epic to see you fighting for it and persevering through it. KP: We love TikTok. It’s fun. But there are so many ways to skin a cat. Everything is so cyclical that hopefully what remains is care and good art. That’s what I hope and I think I know. BF: Fuck yes. KP: It’s going to be good. I did film this fucking video. BF: I’m a fan of your music videos too. KP: It always makes you feel like a star to do a music video. This one was fun to film because it was literally just a bar. [laughs] BF: Yes, I can imagine. I would like to be in a music video. KP: You can be in one of mine whenever you want. I can’t afford to fly you out, though. [chuckles] BF: There are things that you do for others [laughs] and you don’t expect much. KP: If I hit you up for a music video I’m not getting you a plane ticket, alright? Like, you’ve got to just come. BF: You’re not flying me on a PJ [private jet]? KP: I’ve never been on a PJ. I need to be on a PJ before I get you on a PJ. BF: Okay. That is fair. KP: I’ve been trying to finagle someone to just let me walk on. It doesn’t even need to be in the air. BF: A music video in a PJ, and then we get the best of both worlds. KP: I honestly think it would be like half my budget for the video. It’d be shot on iPhone. BF: Could be cool. KP: Don’t look at me like that if we don’t do a shoot. [laughter] We do camera. BF: As it should be.

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THE SUN KING

Louis Vuitton artistic director Nicolas Ghesquière has a seeming affinity for architecture, and his runway shows reap the benefit. His latest inspiration was found at La Jolla, California’s Salk Institute for Biological Studies, a 1965 Brutalist masterwork by Louis Kahn that also served as a sunset catwalk for the fashion house’s Cruise 2023 collection this past May. Boots and heels stomped travertine at the laboratory complex, but the models’ looks were something closer to a gladiator future, where historic silhouettes and modern textures took the idea of body armor to another world. By REBECCA AARON and ELIZABETH FAZZARE

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Sunset at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California.

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AS THE SUN SET ON THE SALK INSTITUTE FOR BIOLOGICAL STUDIES IN LA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA THIS PAST MAY, a parade of backlit models began to strut down its cardinal axis, revealing Louis Vuitton’s Cruise 2023 collection. Sequins, metallic fabrics and armor-like bodices commanded the attention of seated guests flanking the laboratory complex’s ready-made runway, a central corridor split by a rill that takes the eye from reflecting pool to Pacific Ocean. The Institute’s architect Louis Kahn had originally wanted to design a garden for the plaza, but his peer Luis Barragán convinced him to embrace the void to create a space where ideas, conversations and discoveries would be shared colloquially. Call it a fashion show, or a peripatetic walk, but the impact of this 1965 Brutalist design brought plenty more reason to wonder at the futurist looks by Louis Vuitton artistic director Nicolas Ghesquière. Since Ghesquière joined the fashion house in 2013, Louis Vuitton’s show locations have taken up his interest in places of architectural significance. His second Louis Vuitton Cruise, in 2015, saw models lap the poolside perimeter of the John Lautner-designed 1979 Bob Hope house. In 2019, Eero Saarinen’s then newly-

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This and following spreads: Looks from the Louis Vuitton Cruise 2023 collection.

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restored 1962 TWA Flight Center played runway to heels on its iconic chili pepper-red carpet while the Solari split-flap display kept ticker board time. In between, Oscar Niemeyer’s 1996 Niterói Contemporary Art Museum Brazil (2016) and I. M. Pei’s 1997 Miho Museum outside Kyoto, Japan (2017) gathered the fashionable set for these living presentations of collections for the season ahead. In 1959, pioneering virologist Jonas Salk—of polio vaccine fame—conceived his eponymous scientific institute with the goal of exploring biology’s bounds and its impact on society. In many ways, Louis Vuitton’s Cruise 2023 collection is stitched with the same ethos. The forward-thinking architecture, pala-tial in nature despite its unfinished concrete walls matched with a travertine central square— Kahn chose the materials for their likeness in color thinking of the grandiose effect of ancient Roman structures—set the scene for the procession of the stately fashions. Against an ever-intensifying setting sun, each look aided in the creation of a sort of alternate desert universe, where colorful and expressive textiles are tem-pered by natural materials with structural and sheath-like forms. “The Salk Institute has been a place of wonder for me over the years and Louis Kahn’s stunning Brutal-ist architecture against this extraordinary setting of the Pacific Ocean and the California sunset provides me with endless inspiration,” Ghesquière says, and in the context of the last two years’ coronavirus pandemic, the importance of its research work has only increased. “It also celebrates intelligence, knowledge and the belief in the power of science.” Much like the mirrored geometry that comprises the Institute’s two blocks of lab buildings, the Cruise 2023 collection makes generous use of tessellations and repeating patterns. Each look presents an innovation on a textile, their futuristic aesthetics defining factions of an otherworldly society. Some are distinguished by their tweeds, others by their royal jacquard prints or their leather mail. A trio of oversized angular cropped jackets trimmed with metallic tinsel fringe marked the end of the fashion show, the Salk’s Institute first. This architectural host, too, looks to the future. In postmodernist fashion, what you see

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of the building is what is holding it up. Support beams on the exterior of the structures allow for open layouts on the interior. Kahn’s inherently flexible design was ahead of its time, as was his approach to materiality. Despite their age— and saline-adjacent setting—the poured-inplace concrete walls and teak wood paneling show little wear; the Salk Institute still has 70 percent of its original material. While some pieces in the Cruise collection camouflaged into the natural tones of the man-made landscape, others glistened in the golden hour sun, both in harmony with the unique California topography and set amid a symphony of crashing ocean waves and electronic beats. These elements moved Ghesquière to present his creations here. After all, Salk himself said to Esther McCoy in 1967, “The building does guess tomorrow.”

“THE PACIFIC OCEAN AND THE CALIFORNIA SUNSET PROVIDE ME WITH ENDLESS INSPIRATION.”

—Nicolas Ghesquière

It’s Always Halloween in Los Angeles

By JORI FINKEL / Photography by AUBREY MAYER

LA-based artist Sayre Gomez’s paintings of worn-out signage and ominous sunsets are not exactly a nod to Ed Ruscha’s. While the photographic quality of the airbrush provides for impeccable features and trompe l’oeil effects, look closely and one encounters the artist’s resignation towards consumerism and our impending collapse. 154

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Sayre Gomez working on Davinci Staircase (2022).

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HEN SAYRE GOMEZ AND HIS WIFE WENT shopping for costumes at a Halloween City pop-up in Los Feliz five years ago, he noticed something odd: the store didn’t bother to install real signage, sloppily affixing its name over the existing Toys R Us logo on the building. Gomez thought it was the perfect image of our financially precarious, psychologically combustible times—“it’s not just a collage of two logos but two economic models colliding,” he says, describing how the bankruptcy of Toys R Us, a traditional retailer, stemmed from e-commerce and gigeconomy operations like Halloween City. The image stuck with him, and in 2021 he eventually made a massive painting (48by-175 inches) on shaped aluminum of the odd-combo signage, giving it the ironic title Spiritual America. He then used “Halloween City” as the name of his most recent show at François Ghebaly gallery and as the title of its centerpiece: a sculpture of a building that also had its original purpose hijacked. Known as The Reef, this monolithic, 12-story building near Interstate 10 was billed as “a creative habitat” but has found its real value as a platform for shockingly large LED video billboards advertising Kia cars and Patron tequila, among other brands.

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COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND FRANÇOIS GHEBALY GALLERY; HAUNTED LIQUORS: PAUL SALVESON; SPIRITUAL AMERICA: ROBERT WEDEMEYER

W Gomez’s miniature version comes with its own LED display that replicates (thanks to drone photography) the original ad stream, though with “digital glitches, like black spots or pink stripes to make the ads look distressed digitally, like the pixels are failing”—a way to puncture the shiny, happy surface of technofuturism. The Reef is just one example, he says, of how “data is more valuable than oil and this world isn’t what it seems. We have

this crumbling physical world and then we have the metaverse replacing it. It’s a weird moment, like the weirdest one maybe.” Gomez, 40, specializes in this weirdness that masquerades as everyday life, turning over-the-top LED displays, billboards, posters and other roadside signage into the central and inescapable subject of his artwork— sometimes as sculptures, but most often as airbrushed paintings that include trompe l’oeil

flourishes like door frames and windowsills. (Architecture is also the focus of a new show in Turin at the Foundation Sandretto Re Rebaudengo that skewers the fantasy of living like a king in downtown LA, where a particular set of Italianate apartment complexes tries to create the illusion of a timeless pre-urban lifestyle.) Although he has lived in the greater LA area for over 15 years, his knack for noticing things that the rest of us take for granted makes

him seem like a perpetual transplant. Raised in a Chicago suburb by a single mother, Gomez moved with her as a teenager to Fayetteville, Arkansas. He eventually returned to the city for a summer program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and, as a comics fan who loved to redraw favorite characters like Wolverine, he plugged into the local skatepunk-graffiti scene, paying attention to the overlooked urban edges.

Left and top: Gomez’s Haunted Liquors (2022), which is based on a real building in Los Angeles called The Reef. Above: Spiritual America, (2022).

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Some art critics connect him to Ed Ruscha, but he shrugs off the comparison. “We both paint the LA landscape, and we are LA painters using airbrushes. But there’s no romance or nostalgia in my work. Why would you be romantic about a civilization collapsing before your eyes?” The better comparison might be John Baldessari because of his history of zeroing in on Southern California’s most ordinary yet improbable features (like impossibly tall, skinny palm trees) and exploring the unstable nature of photographic “truths.” “Photography before the Internet had the ring of truth,” Gomez says. “Now everybody knows about Photoshop. Airbrush’s initial function was photo retouching so it’s intrinsically connected to a lot of problems I’m interested in discussing.” After earning his B.F.A. at SAIC, where he shifted from graphic design to painting, he went on to get his M.F.A. from CalArts, still a hotbed of conceptual art. “It was so hard; I was in over my head because I can barely read. I got to CalArts and the theory thing really freaked me out,” he says. But he connected with CalArts guru Michael Asher on a personal level and with the landscape of strip-mall peculiarity, often driving aimlessly “just to learn about the city.” After graduating he worked odd jobs and held short-lived assistant gigs for artists Tony Berland, Kaari Upson and Paul McCarthy. His big break came in 2013 when Ghebaly

Left: Gomez with City on Fire (2022).

“Sayre has this incredible ability to render the texture of aged surfaces, whether it’s bleached out paper from a poster or the surface of a dirty window.”

brought his work to the NADA art fair in Miami and sold six pieces to collectors Don and Mera Rubell, including “text-paintings that had these aging effects,” the gallerist says. “Sayre has this incredible ability to render the texture of aged surfaces, whether it’s bleached-out paper from a poster or the surface of a dirty window.” Gomez was, at that time, working out of a small corner of a building in Boyle Heights that used to be a sewing and embroidery factory. He has since bought the building, renting out some sections to other artists. Most recently the Broad museum bought two large paintings from his “Halloween City” show with plans to exhibit them within the year. As for the sculpture by that name, Ghebaly reports they’re “finalizing an acquisition by a major American museum,” describing it as one of the artist’s most perceptive artworks, which “allows us to understand our city in a different way.”

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LODESTAR

Devin N. Morris doesn’t concern himself with destination, preferring instead to meditate on direction and the way it collapses far and near. The artist’s next act, following his peripatetic heart, has his multiplying fanbase hushed and waiting for a sign about where this is all headed. So far, it’s only up.

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By KAT HERRIMAN Photography by MARIANNA BLEY

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THE PREDATOR “The predator is the one who goes out and seeks vulnerable objects in neighborhoods that then become materiality,” Morris says. “The predator found a gate here.” Morris is in the Brazilian countryside, two hours from Rio de Janeiro tidying off a two-month residency at Residencia São João. It’s his second time after almost a decade ago when he dragged a damaged palm tree back and wrote a poem about it. “This time was more of a cleansing than a rediscovery,” he says. Morris made the decision this winter to pack up the studio and be nomadic for a little while. Let the predator drive. “The way that I had been deriving attachments to space was coming from a lack of perspective as opposed to abundance,” he says. “In my twenties, I had such an improper foundation. It was built not in the image of my own theory or my own practice, but my survival.” The Brooklyn home he tucked away in a decade ago is now too small for him, yet the city kept haunting him during his first weeks in Brazil—like an anxious ex. “I’ve been drawing graduation hats and burning gates, thinking about this false narrative of New York being filled with gatekeepers,” Morris says. “To me, that gate is typically of the mind and not necessarily of the expectation or the physical.”

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THE SALON Morris spells fashion with a capital F. “I only want to go to New York for fittings,” he wrote in his diary recently. In the last of his teenage years, in the alleyways of Baltimore, he dreamed about fashion as a way to tell his stories. “Color, presentation, expectation and the histories of costume are always present a little bit for me,” Morris tells me about his native tongue. “My studio is an atelier.” Each work is a new client in need of dressing even if that client is a door or a gate—it often is. “When I take a door and dress it, I’m literally trying to deal with how space and presentation of the body is so inherent and interconnected,” he says. The metaphorical atelier extends to all materials in the studio. If you see the same found fabric or wood veneer pop up in different works again and again, it’s because they are part of the same collection, one that isn’t finished until the material runs out. Morris once dated a fashion designer and came home to cut-outs of sleeves, pant legs and torsos laid out on the kitchen table. Pattern-making has always captured his affections because Morris is a quilter at heart. Everything he makes is a quilt. Even his most esoteric performances are given their form by a rigorous ritual of dismantling and mending. “There’s an overall energy of Black women’s knowledge that is everything,” Morris says. “Everything I learned is from the quilt, because my work is based on the poetry of collage (utilize what you have to make what you need).”

WORK IMAGES: COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND DELI GALLERY

hether it is a door wearing gloves, a painting of a man hanging laundry made of fabric or a performance thatching window frames together to make Louise Bourgeois-like cells, to speak about artist Devin N. Morris’s work it’s best to talk about distinct characters. You can start with the ones that informed him back in his hometown of Baltimore: his mother, his grandmother Betty and her husband, his grandfather Nate (“who everyone wanted to be when they grew up”), Grandma Carol; and then move onto the ones that Morris actively chooses to keep walking alongside like fellow artists serpentwithfeet and Campbell Addy. But what most people dawdle on, to Morris’s chagrin, is guessing the origins of the figures that appear in his sculptural paintings because, “I prefer to talk more specifically about the how than the what,” Morris says. The “how,” as Morris has taught me, is where you find the most important characters. In lieu of a step-by-step, Morris’s process could be depicted as a cast of archetypes, whose personalities are summoned for different perspectives. “I have to take on roles to make the art,” he says.

THE PUBLISHER 3 Dot Zine, Morris’s independent art magazine, catapulted the artist into microcelebrity before his paintings ever did. The magazine hosted salons—which Morris simultaneously curated, hosted and documented. “It was definitely a wonderful space for the Black L.G.B.Q.T. folks,” says musician and Morris’s confidant serpentwithfeet who used to attend 3 Dot events. “3 Dot Zine always felt like a circle where everybody was part of that process. Devin was collaging the conversations that were being had. He has a way of making everyone feel special and that’s what I think about when I think of 3 Dot days, just how alive those spaces felt, how he helped build community. We were all, all young Black artists on the come up, you know, and it was just great to sort of build with them in these spaces.” I remember 3 Dot as an anchor for the Bushwick Art Book and Zine Fair at Signal gallery in 2015. But in recent years, Morris, too burnt out on the media circuit, is turning his

“Everything I learned is from the quilt, because my work is based on the poetry of collage.”

attention towards more personal projects. In the mythology of Morris, the zine-maker is a tragic figure because it represents the time the artist first encountered scarcity, the art world’s false prophet. “[Financial realities] veered me off the wanting to produce zines, I want to be able to pay everyone,” he says. “I needed to think about what that looked like, and then also make money to be able to publish other people.” Serpentwithfeet offers another way of looking at it: “The sign of great work is if you can really pour, if you can spill on the page or the canvas or the stage. Perhaps when Devin is being private it is his way of preserving that for the canvas or for whatever medium he’s working with. It’s letting the tank fill up.” These days Morris has been saving the tank for painting but he foresees a return on different terms. The magazine, as a format, lends itself organically to a material practice rooted in collage. “If you come and work with me or 3 Dot on a publication, we are making an emotional

Left: Morris’s 2022 inprogress work Graduate in steps, plains, hearts, veins, plateaus, lanes, portals and portico. Above: This Might Be A Light Worker You Know, 2019.

object that is strong, smart, interesting and distinctly for you,” Morris says. “When I was doing all that 3 Dot stuff, [the collaborations] were fully based on my friendships at the time, and now the goal is, ‘What does 3 Dot Zine for Devin look like?’” Morris sees a return to publishing as inevitable. The right opportunity hasn’t hit yet, but the foundation work is done. “Now that I’m moving from a place of self-agency, it is going to be so easy for me to edit in the way that I know myself to be an editor,” he says. In the meantime, Morris is thinking about one of his earliest catalysts, the late fashion editor and creative director André Leon Talley, more than ever. “Growing up, reading André Leon Talley in Vogue, reading his books in high school, reading about the Gucci family, those things made me want to be opinionated,” Morris says. “That was the first gift to me as an artist, these opinionmakers, these statement people, statement objects.”

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THE EDITOR “I’ve always wanted to be the editor. When I’m at the studio, it’s like: ‘Are we doing that? Are we doing this?’ I’ll grab a door and hold it up to the piece-in-progress and ask: ‘Is this it?’ The elegance is what attracts me to some objects. For instance, this iron gate is gorgeous, it’s gorgeous. It reminds you of a solid sturdy home that doesn’t exist, that will never be built again.”

THE CARETAKER At home, there is no women’s work, there is no men’s work—it is just care work. Morris learned this from childhood, watching the ways his mother, grandmother and grandfather took care of each other. “Through their care, they changed me,” he says. To watch, in Morris’s world is not a passive process but an active, fire-breathing one that he describes as almost osmotic. In his childhood house, the how was maybe explained once and the why was reserved for those dedicated enough to the cause. His grandmother Carol and Morris used to watch Martha Stewart together and make dinner. She called him Martin Stewart. Home was a classroom and he learned to concentrate

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“The elegance is what attracts me to some objects. For instance, the iron gate is gorgeous.”

on your gaze remembering to look close at the things the eyes tend to skip in their haste—the maintenance, the plumbing, the bones, mom. “A lot of people overlook mom because she’s there every day. She’s there in every way. We don’t glorify how much she sacrifices. We are just annoying little pests and she’s just there, typically in a good enough mood.” Bowls of cereal scraped with spoons for last bites. Kids making a general mess. Grandfather relaxed with his paper. Mornings at Nate and Betty’s table unfold like a ballet with music, separate acts and interludes, the gestural shorthand of emotion. “You sat there, and she got your ass together. Don’t be playing on her table. She watched her TV and the paper and would make herself a more adult breakfast. If you wanted it, you could have some, but I always wanted cereal. Me, my cousins, my brother, we would do that. That’s when we had our society moment. I think of the studio as a society.” There is less cereal now but the simple fixings of good manners, empathy and care paired with self-possession inform Morris’s methodologies for working. The foundlings the predator carries

home get what they need according to their ailments but always with inflexible love and devotion. “I remember the day when I realized that cleanliness was an affirmation for living well,” Morris says. “I preach cleanliness to you because I want to affirm how to live well, how you can have a good day, how you can smell the breeze, open your window, clean your floor so that you can see the shifting light throughout your day so that you can feel the energy of whatever God presence is that exists. And we can transfer that to so many parts of our lives. The actual process of cleaning your body, cleaning your home, was my first understanding of spirituality.”

PARISHIONER

From left: A Long Time in This Home, 2021. Morris working on It Was the Reach in the End, 2022.

“I always felt pride in my family at church. At his family church, I was like, ‘This is actually holding everything—my whole family structure is here.’ A lot of young Black people, if they experienced church, know church was not only about God. Church was about Black culture. It was about living. It was a part of how you lived,” Morris says. Church’s spectacle, especially the Baptist ones in which Morris grew up, the attention to the details of the day and the essential belief that physical objects carry emotional weight, all infiltrate the artist from a top level. I think about the work of Thomas Langain Schmidt (his soup can angel altar pieces and aluminum foil chalices). Morris is less literal in his nods to religion but they are there in the pageantry of his compositions and his love of baroque textures, and in the reliquaries. “Sometimes I might write a very personal message in the piece, and then paint over it. Then add so many things that you never knew were there. I send them out into the world at times as charged objects.” When describing the charge itself Morris chooses the word spirit, which is as nebulous and infinity-reaching as an overmind, yet it is never spoken about in the abstract. The spirit lives in the bounds of physical reality, objects, structures, roofs—not because it has to but maybe God wants to be close to us too. “I am interested in connecting to transcendence,” Morris says, pausing. “I’ve experienced a lot of death in my life and, at first, I thought that mourning was a burden, but I think I am made to be close to mourning because I can share what I’ve learned about that transition of energy. That spirit would allow me to get through some of the hardest times of growing up. I found it in the transitional objects around me, the doorway or the window [of my house]. These things would help me find hope. I’m always trying to allude to this bigger thing.”

THE BIG BROTHER “It wasn’t an emotional opening night,” Morris’s mother, Angela, says of attending one of her son’s exhibitions. “But then another night when I got off of work, I rolled by the Baltimore Museum of Art, and I just pulled over and started crying. I was like, ‘My son has his work in the museum.’ I just was crying, and crying, and crying. Tears of joy. Devin, being an artist, has opened the door for the kids, and the family, to see that there are other avenues. You don’t have to do the traditional things that your parents are doing. You can do something else and be successful. It was important to me, for the kids and the family to see that somebody in their family has work in the Baltimore Museum of Art. I tell strangers on the street that my son is a successful artist with work at the Baltimore Museum of Art.”

THE PIONEER Morris plans to spend the summer in Baltimore as the pilot resident for Derrick Adams’s new art space, The Last Resort. He doesn’t need a home yet but when he does all he wants in it is a globe and a dictionary. At The Last Resort, he conceded to pencils. He’s been making more with them lately because they are easy to pack—and so primary in their actions. “Dimension has always been present [in my work], but I also wouldn’t mind a graphicness so that it feels like things come off the canvas a bit. I’ve been playing a lot with shading and shadow,” Morris says.

THE ARTIST There is this Louise Bourgeois sculpture of two hands touching, their enveloped forms resemble an informal yin and yang. Someone asked Bourgeois what it meant. She said she couldn’t answer the question. The gesture spoke for itself. This is the kind of work Morris wants to make: “a gesture that is so strong that I would never have to explain it.” I tell him about Heidi Bucher’s “Skins” series, how she would pour latex all over her childhood home to try to make impressions of it. I think his work is like that, especially the performances. Something about home and trying to channel that energy through lavishing the memory with abundance. Something about trafficking exclusively in the emotionally loaded. “I start every work wanting to cry a bit,” he says. “I thought my crying and even my honoring others was due to mourning, but it is not. It’s just that I am interested in sharing and pulling emotion, navigating it as textural material.”

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DIOR FOREVER, BUT ESPECIALLY NOW WITH THE NEWLY TRANSFORMED 30 MONTAIGNE FLAGSHIP, THE FASHION HOUSE EMBRACES THE PHYSICAL SHOPPING EXPERIENCE FOR A MODERN AGE. By DANIELLE RADOJCIN Photography by ROBERT POLIDORI 166 CULTUREDMAG.COM

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LINED WITH STATELY CHESTNUT TREES,

imposing hôtels particuliers and generous pavements, the Avenue Montaigne in the heart of the 8th arrondissement of Paris carries an air of quiet, elegantly-worn grandeur. The casual stroller will notice the signature red awnings of the Hôtel Plaza Athénée, the trendy scene outside L’Avenue restaurant and well-heeled shoppers enjoying the swathe of luxury boutiques bearing the names of Prada, Gucci and Chanel. The Seine sits just to the south; the Palais de Tokyo and the Musée d’Art Moderne are but a stone’s throw. When Christian Dior founded his haute couture house here in 1946, it was a calculated move designed to attract the neighbourhood’s cultural and financial elites. Fast-forward to 2022, and 30 Avenue Montaigne has reopened after a major two-and-a-half–year renovation. But how does a heritage fashion behemoth, now owned by luxury goods conglomerate LVMH, translate the the potency of the 1947’s New Look to a 2020s audience? Originally built in 1865 for the widow of a politician rumoured to be the illegitimate son of Napoleon, the building—created in the grand Haussmann style—was in just the right location and had all the potential to fulfill Dior’s vision. As he famously said, “Living in a house that doesn’t look like you is a bit like wearing someone else’s clothes.” Dior’s interest in interiors had originally been cultivated by his mother, who involved the young Christian in the decoration of the family home in Granville, Normandy. Later, in Paris, with the help of du jour interior decorators Victor Grandpierre and Georges Geffroy, and by absorbing the influence of his contemporaries (before setting up his fashion house, he worked briefly as an art dealer for Duchamp, Dalí and Man Ray), Dior developed a design code that resonates to this day. The result was a combination of Neoclassicism, Louis XVI style—think ormolu, large potted palms and Empire tenting— and the restraint of a grey and white palette, including flowers (via the recurring motifs of lily of the valley and the rose) and perfectly proportioned,

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Dior haute couture gowns on display.

rigorous lines (this is the creator of the Bar jacket and the Y-line dress, after all). The creators of the 2.0 version of 30 Montaigne have taken all these ingredients, blitzed them in a time machine and reconfigured them into a glossy 21st-century beacon of expertly crafted, experiential brand storytelling. The original building—save for the façade—has been completely transformed, wrapping around onto the adjacent street and now encompassing over 107,000 square feet (10,000 square meters) of boutiques, as well as a museum, restaurant, pastry shop and gardens. There is even a hotel suite, where an overnight stay will give you the keys to roam the venue as you

please, as well as the chance to see up close a triptych by Guy de Rougemont and furniture signed by Thierry Leproust and Yves Klein. Enlisted to help bring this 21st-century iteration to fruition were the architect Peter Marino, who says his brief from LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault was to make the store “unexpected, new, elegant and joyful;” garden designer Peter Wirtz, famous for remodeling the Tuileries Gardens in 1990; and the sceneographist Nathalie Crinière, who took inspiration, “mainly by looking out the windows of La Galerie Dior and thinking to [herself] that Christian Dior and his successors had also looked out at the street and the sky from those same windows.”

Much like in a grand European cathedral, on entering the store the visitor’s eyes are drawn upwards, first by an original ceiling light sculpture by Paul Cocksedge, which Marino describes as “abstracted white leaves falling freely in space,” and then by the enormous spiral staircase in the light-filled central atrium, at the top of which sit the haute couture studios. Wandering around (there is no clear-cut direction of travel; rather, one is encouraged to discover the space intuitively), guests can listen to music selected from Dior’s own collection in the elevator, sit on chairs upholstered in Miss Dior houndstooth check and even eat a Croque “New Look” from the menu, inspired by the Dior archive.

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“Much like in a grand European cathedral, on entering the store the visitor’s eyes are drawn upwards.”

The exterior façade of Dior’s 30 Montaigne in Paris.

“Like following a treasure hunt, the beadyeyed Dior aficionado will notice how house symbols have been woven into the decor.” Like following a treasure hunt, the beadyeyed Dior aficionado will notice how house symbols have been woven into the decor, such as the white Corian walls in the gallery cafe adorned with Cannage stitching, the 18thcentury Parquet de Versailles floors, the star motif from Dior’s own gris-gris or talisman, which is stamped on door handles and coasters, and the medallion chairs wittily reimagined by designer Sam Baron as a conjoined seating arrangement for guests. Immersive installations are nothing new at exhibitions these days; however, the Dior house has really kicked things up a notch. On entering La Galerie Dior (tickets are 12 Euros), the viewer

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is greeted with the truly awe-inspiring diorama: an enormous spiral staircase, surrounded by 3D-printed Dior accessories and displayed in a rainbow gradient from floor to ceiling. This pièce de résistance, my guide tells me, is the Instagram moment of the space—something a quick search for “#galeriedior” confirms. Moving through the exhibition space, a room titled The Enchanted Garden uses a combination of falling, twinkling lights and atmospheric music by sound designer Reno Isaac to showcase an array of exquisite ball gowns. Further on, an audio installation brings to life the voices of each of Dior’s seven artistic directors (after Monsieur Dior himself came Yves Saint Laurent,

followed by Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré, John Galliano, Raf Simons and today’s incumbent, Maria Grazia Chiuri), while a glass cabinet pays tribute to the famous women who have worn Dior (“No Dior, no Dietrich,” as Marlene, a fellow Avenue Montaigne resident, famously told Alfred Hitchock at costume fittings for the film Stage Fright in 1950. She got her way.) In yet another room of the Galerie, there are 13 in total, visitors can observe two dressmakers at work on a fabric using traditional artisan techniques—a reflection of the house’s belief in guarding the sanctity of these ancient traditions, which have been passed down through generations and are still used in haute

couture today. Some things, it is clear, cannot be improved through digital innovation. The experience of visiting the store is so engrossing—my tour took three hours—I found myself struggling to think of how a Dior flagship of the future could possibly improve upon this one. A Dior metaverse, perhaps, with visitors enjoying a masterclass with a reconstruction of the man himself? Or, the chance to sit front row at one of Galliano’s legendary shows? For now, customers are enjoying the heightened post– COVID-19 lockdown pleasures that a physical experience affords, while the spirit of Dior lives on—updated for a modern consumer and more desirable than ever.

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