CHLOË SEVIGNY and SINIŠA MAČKOVIĆ AN UNTOLD LOVE STORY Photographed by Roe Ethridge
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CONTENTS April/May 2022
54 56 NO QUESTION MARK British-Ghanaian portrait photographer Campbell Addy explores what it means to be a Black, queer artist and publishes his first
FANTASY IN FABRIC As China’s first homegrown couturier, Guo Pei is finally getting her own survey show featuring over 80 painstakingly intricate works.
monograph, Feeling Seen.
58 THE DOCTOR WILL SEE YOU NOW Photographer and documentarian Jamel Shabazz speaks about his multiple upcoming exhibitions, including “Eyes on the Street” at the Bronx Museum of Art.
60 MARÍA MARTÍNEZ-CAÑAS USES COLLAGE TO UNCOVER THE
ABSENCES Cuban-born, Miami-based experimental photographer María Martínez-Cañas explores exile and her heritage.
62 AGAVE AS ART Casa Dragones founder Bertha González Nieves’s passion for tequila, and art, runs deep.
64
I CAN’T LEAVE YOU LIKE THIS Photographer Douglas Friedman captured the last days of David Beebe’s Bad Hombres, a memorable Tex-Mex joint in Marfa, Texas.
66
SEEING DOUBLE Bronx-born painter Alexandria Smith, known for exploring Black identity and girlhood, gears up for another blockbuster season.
72
CAN JAYME LAWSON HELP TURN HOLLYWOOD INTO A TOOL FOR GOOD? The young actor is learning how to balance newfound influence while staying humble.
Derek Fordjour with Jazzland (2022) at his David Kordansky Gallery exhibition in Los Angeles. Photography by Brandon Hicks.
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CONTENTS April/May 2022
78 84 WITH THE COSMIC CRUISER COLLECTION, CELINE LEANS IN Headed by Hedi Slimane, the fashion brand taps emerging artists for a collaboration
EARTH HEALERS Leah Thomas and Isra Hirsi are eco-communicators and activists pushing for an environmental movement that includes everyone.
that embraces underground culture.
94
IN PURSUIT OF A BETTER, GREENER WORLD Three young landscape design studios demand attention as they lead the way in changing principles for the betterment of our world.
100 FAKING IT WITH H. JON BENJAMIN Actor H. Jon Benjamin, the voice behind Bob Belcher and many an iconic animated character, has helped define the form of adult cartoons.
104
ABSTRACT THOUGHT Kylie Manning’s paintings seem to radiate light from within. What’s their secret?
106
IMAGINARY FRIENDS ARE REAL FRIENDS Painter and sculptor Alake Shilling creates a cast of creatures that keep her (and you) company when the going gets tough.
114
YOUNG COLLECTORS 2022 This year’s cohort shares a passion for supporting artists in ways beyond purchasing.
128
DANCING IN THE WOMB Art world couple Chloë Sevigny and Siniša Mačković talk about creative endeavors and keeping their marriage secret for an entire year.
Model Seohyun Kim in Louis Vuitton, photographed by Jesse Jenkins. Styling by STUDIO &.
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CONTENTS April/May 2022
Natasha Lyonne wears a full Schiaparelli look and rings by Sylvie Corbelin and Kallati. Photography by Ellen Von Unwerth. Styling by Cristina Ehrlich.
136
THE HOUSE THAT TASHA BUILT Russian Doll’s Natasha Lyonne speaks with fellow director Greta Lee to unpack why personal stakes make the show special.
146
NOT A MONOLITH The Asian diaspora is being given more agency and representation in luxury fashion, an industry that historically marginalized anyone not white.
170
FOR HIS NEXT TRICK Derek Fordjour explores the history of Black magicians in a multisensory takeover of David Kordansky Gallery.
174
SHE GOES BY THE TREMBLING OF HER INNER WORLDS The spiritual force of artist Vanessa German’s “Power Figures” refuses to be articulated.
180 LIKE FABULOUS ROMAN CANDLES Dior’s Kim Jones took his love of an American literary icon and turned it into Dior Men’s Fall 2022 collection.
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Stage Fright Curated by Rachel Harrison
9 0 9 M A D I S O N AV E N U E N E W Y O R K
Yves Klein. Sculpture éponge rose sans titre (SE 204) (detail), 1959. Dry pigment and synthetic resin on natural sponge, metal stem, and stone base, height: 15 1⁄4 inches (38.5 cm)
Lisa Brice Last Chance Salon
3 E AST 89 ST R E ET N E W YO R K
With thanks to Salon 94 Lisa Brice. Untitled (detail), 2022. Oil and conté crayon on tracing paper, 78 3⁄4 × 40 inches (200 × 101.6 cm)
Matthew Krishanu Undercurrents
3 E AST 89 ST R E ET N E W YO R K
Matthew Krishanu. Four Nuns (detail), 2020. Oil on canvas, 70 3⁄4 × 55 × 1 3⁄4 inches (180 × 140 × 4.5 cm)
LELANIE FOSTER
LISA KWON
ROE ETHRIDGE
Lelanie Foster is a portrait photographer from the Bronx, New York, whose work honors the strength and beauty of Black and brown people while encompassing themes of identity, sisterhood and community. Foster’s projects stretch across the commercial, fashion, documentary and fine art worlds, and include commissions and publications by Nike, the New York Times, Universal Pictures, Hulu, BET, W Magazine and Interview magazine. “We really wanted to capture a men’s fashion story with movement that felt statuesque and structured at the same time,” she says about her work for this issue. “It was a play between the two in the end.”
Lisa Kwon is a writer and reporter based in Los Angeles. Her writing includes coverage of arts and food culture, tenants’ rights and local resistance movements against gentrification and displacement. She has work in Eater, Life & Thyme, National Geographic, Time Out and elsewhere. For this issue, Kwon wrote a reflection on the shifts in representation of the Asian diaspora in the fashion industry. “The accompanying spreads of models in Louis Vuitton’s Spring Summer 22 collection is a reminder to any young Asian, Asian American or Asian in America that fashion is stagnant without us,” she says.
Roe Ethridge is a New York-based artist and photographer. In his photographs, Ethridge uses the real to suggest—or disrupt—the ideal. Through commercial images of fashion models, products and advertisements, as well as intimate moments from his own daily life, he reveals the fine line between the generic and the personal, merging art-historical genres such as the still life and portrait with the increasingly pervasive image culture of the present. For this issue, Ethridge shot cover star Chloë Sevigny and her family.
Photographer
ELLEN VON UNWERTH Photographer
Germany-born Ellen von Unwerth gained acclaim with her sensual Guess campaign in the early 1990s, since followed by campaigns for many of the world’s iconic brands. She is a regular contributor to many international Vogue editions, and has directed short films for designers, commercials and music videos. She won first prize at the International Festival of Fashion Photography in 1991, a LUCIE award for her achievement in Fashion Photography in 2019, a Royal Photographic Society award in 2020 and an Iconic Photographer Influencer Award in 2021. For this issue, she shot cover star Natasha Lyonne, saying, “Natasha is such a talented and fun actress. We had a great time shooting at Chateau Marmont, 23 years after our first shooting together!”
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Writer
Photographer
SELF PORTRAIT BY LELANIE FOSTER; PHOTO BY NIC EMMONS; SELF PORTRAIT BY ROE ETHRIDGE; SELF PORTRAIT BY ELLEN VON UNWERTH
CONTRIBUTORS
JESSE JENKINS
CAMILLE BACON
CRISTINA EHRLICH
American photographer and director Jesse Jenkins is known for finding joy in melancholic scenes. His images have a distinctive palette and texture brought to life by his love of darkroom printing. Jenkins started his career directing music videos before moving into fashion photography. His work is featured in publications such as Love, M Le magazine du Monde and AnOther. Commercial clients include Miu Miu, Marc Jacobs, Simone Rocha and Stella McCartney. “For this issue, I drew inspiration from a poem, ‘Violet Hat,’ by Tsin Kuan, taken from the book Chinese Moonlight: 63 Poems by 33 Poets: ‘Violet blossoms / Cover mountain top / Like big hat / I turn look / Sunset paint hat / Red as fire,’” he says.
Camille Bacon is a Chicago-based writer and curator who, as she says, is building a “sweet Black writing life,” as informed by the words of poet Nikky Finney and the infinite wisdom of the Black feminist tradition. “The opportunity to write about Vanessa German came at a time when I needed, desperately, to return to my own spirit,” says Bacon. “It has been a joy to step up to the welcome challenge of translating a core facet of such a spiritual body of work into the written word. Spending time with German’s work allowed me to return to myself and I wish the same for you.”
New York-born Cristina Ehrlich danced professionally until the age of 27, and retired to pursue her other love, fashion. As a stylist, she has worked with iconic photographers such as Patrick Demarchelier, Mert and Marcus, Peter Lindbergh and Ellen von Unwerth. Her work has been featured in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle and more. She styled Natasha Lyonne for this issue’s cover, saying: “It was a moment where all the stars aligned. The energy of the photographer, talent, wardrobe and creative direction made for a beautiful day.”
Photographer
D’ANGELO LOVELL WILLIAMS Photographer
Mississippi-born and Brooklyn-based photographer D’Angelo Lovell Williams is a Black, HIV-positive artist focused on expanding narratives of Black and queer intimacy through photography. Williams has had four solo exhibitions with Higher Pictures and the 2020 show, “Papa Don’t Preach,” was presented in collaboration with Janice Guy at her gallery in Harlem. His work can be seen in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Vanity Fair and others. For this issue, he photographed multi-hyphenate Camrus Johnson and models in Malibu. “It felt as if Dior Homme’s Fall 2022 collection was meant to be experienced in person and photographed in the landscape,” Williams says. 46 culturedmag.com
Writer
Stylist
SELF PORTRAIT BY JESSE JENKINS; PHOTO BY FELTON KIZER; PHOTO BY ALMIN ZRNO; SELF PORTRAIT BY D’ANGELO LOVELL WILLIAMS
CONTRIBUTORS
CONTRIBUTORS
MARION KELLY
TRAVIS DIEHL
BIANCA GRACIE
Marion Kelly is a New York-based stylist and creative consultant from South Carolina. He started his career as a fashion editor for Allure and Teen Vogue and then decided to go full-time as a freelancer and step deeper into his practice as a stylist. Kelly has worked with brands and magazines such as Dazed, CR Fashionbook, Italian Vogue, Ralph Lauren, Farfetch and Levi’s. “It was my pleasure working on this latest issue of Cultured with D’Angelo Lovell Williams, where we were able to reimagine the Dior Homme collection,” he says. “The location was beautiful and brought a different element to the story.”
Travis Diehl is a writer, freelance critic and the online editor at X-TRA. His work appears in Art in America, Frieze, The Baffler and the New York Times, among other publications. For this issue, he profiles Derek Fordjour on the occasion of two projects in Los Angeles. “Forget movie magic,” he writes of his visit to David Kordansky Gallery, where Fordjour was installing. “This was plain old magic. The gallery transformed before my eyes from a white cube into a wood-paneled church basement, then a vaudeville theater, complete with rippling velvet curtains and the soft clinking of admission tokens—a stage upon which the abridged history of Black spectacle in the United States would play.”
Bianca Gracie is a New York-based music and pop culture journalist. Her words have been featured in Harper’s Bazaar, SPIN and PAPER. For this issue, Gracie profiled rising actor Jayme Lawson, who most recently starred in The Batman and will portray a young Michelle Obama in Showtime’s The First Lady in April. “Speaking to Lawson was so refreshing because she’s not letting the weight of having a Hollywood big break affect her,” Gracie says. “Her goal is to mirror the experiences of marginalized communities through her roles and that’s what makes her one to watch.”
RICKY MICHIELS Casting Director
Ricky Michiels is a casting director and modeling agent based in New York. Previously he was the senior photo and bookings editor at numerous publications, including V Magazine, CR Fashionbook, Office Magazine and NYLON. He currently casts for a variety of editorial and advertising clients including Vogue, T Magazine, Calvin Klein and Christopher John Rogers. “Over the course of several issues of Cultured I’ve loved being involved in securing both established and exciting emerging talents that have distinct voices, which are relevant to shaping today’s culture,” he says. “I’m so honored to collaborate with such a great team and bring our creative visions to life.”
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Writer
Writer
PHOTO BY RASAAN WYZARD; PHOTO BY ERIN WATSON; PHOTO BY JEFF STASHBOX; PHOTO BY ISAAC ANTHONY
Stylist
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Letter from the Editor
With our April/May edition, I set the intention of creating an issue that emphasized all the great things we’ve done with photography and all the places we are hoping to go. This required working with the consistent contributors who push us daily, and also reaching out to names we’ve always aspired to work with, like our cover photographers Ellen von Unwerth and Roe Ethridge. A highlight for me earlier this month was navigating a Malibu farm with photographer D’Angelo Lovell Williams, who was first featured in the magazine as a young artist and is now a beloved contributor. The photos Williams took of Dior Men’s Fall 2022 collection remind me that fashion photography can still excite me when done right. On a frigid March day in New York, photographer Lelanie Foster joined forces with stylist Ian Bradly to bring forth the puckish spirit of Celine HOMME’s new Cosmic Cruiser collection with up-and-coming artists. Not to mention Jesse Jenkins, who captured models Lian Koster, Seohyun Kim and Xue Huizi dressed in Louis Vuitton by Studio & in a shoot that paid homage to the historic and contemporary influence of the Asian diaspora on fashion. The attention-grabbing portfolio they made together takes my breath away. A huge thank you to Louis Vuitton for providing the head-to-toe looks for this stunning editorial. Projects like these remind me that my dream of commissioning world-class photographers to capture contemporary art and fashion—and its movers and shakers—has become a reality. From the portraits of those on our Young Collectors List, to the sumptuous image-driven fashion portfolios, the pages in this issue illustrate the fact that our photographer roster has never been more exciting, and we plan to push it further with every issue.
Sarah Harrelson tours Hun-Chung Lee’s ceramic studio in Santa Monica, California. Photography by Brandon Hicks.
We have wonderful role models in our cover stars Natasha Lyonne, Chloë Sevigny and Siniša Mačković, who are great artists and friends. Their persistence and willingness to take chances on their art inspires us to continue on the same wavelength. This issue is dedicated to the timeless sparkle they share, which dusts all those around them with the wisdom to lift up others. We are eternally grateful for the caretakers of the cool, the gate openers, the family that is made not only by blood and marriage, but also by choice. Lastly, thank you to our Cultured family.
On the cover: NATASHA LYONNE wears a full Schiaparelli look with Akila sunglasses, Sylvie Corbelin earrings and ring and a Kallati ring. Photography by Ellen Von Unwerth. Styling by Cristina Ehrlich. Makeup by Molly R. Stern. Hair by John D. Sarah G. Harrelson Founder and Editor-in-Chief @sarahgharrelson Follow us | @cultured_mag
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On the cover: CHLOË SEVIGNY and SINIŠA MAČKOVIĆ wear head-to-toe Maison Margiela with baby Vanja. Photography by Roe Ethridge. Styling by Becky Akinyode and Haley Wollens. Makeup by Francelle Daly. Hair by Jimmy Paul.
April 8– June 11, 2022
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FANTASY IN FABRIC
WHAT IS CURRENTLY INSPIRING YOU? During the pandemic, I have been thinking more about human society and the meaning of life. I would say the inner strength of the human spirit is the inspiration for my recent works. As a designer, much of my inspiration comes from real life. The pandemic is a global challenge. People’s love, courage and dedication in the fight against it are common to all humans. HOW DOES COUTURE EXCITE YOU IN A WAY THAT READY-TO-WEAR FASHION MIGHT NOT? Readyto-wear originates from commercial needs, and it inevitably has to consider economic value. The meaning of haute couture lies in expression of spirit and emotion. Through it, I can transform my knowledge of the world and my perception of life into physical existence and inspire people, which is challenging to achieve through readyto-wear design. YOUR WORK HAS PUT CHINESE HAUTE COUTURE ON THE MAP. DO YOU SEE YOUR Guo Pei (right) backstage at a haute couture show in Paris. PIECES AS HAVING SUCH A MISSION? My works come from my heart, and my heart is my reflection and reaction to the world and life. Traditional Chinese culture nurtured me, and this country continues to provide nourishment for me. Therefore, I am very honored and proud that people can experience the “Chinese taste” in my works, which I think is expressed naturally rather than added deliberately. WHAT DO YOU HOPE YOUR PIECES EVOKE IN YOUR FANS? Love. All my works are born from love, and the power of love is what I want to convey. BY ELIZABETH FAZZARE 54 culturedmag.com
COURTESY OF GUO PEI
As China’s first—and most famous—homegrown couturier, Guo Pei is used to pushing the envelope. Her haute couture gowns are physical manifestations of theater, and have been worn by American pop princesses like Rihanna and Chinese celebrities like Angelababy. Though she has been creating for more than 20 years, the designer is finally getting her first comprehensive survey show. Opened April 16 at Legion of Honor in San Francisco, “Guo Pei: Couture Fantasy,” features over 80 painstakingly intricate works, many never before seen by the public.
PIE R PAOLO C ALZ OLAR I PAINTING AS A BUTTERFLY Mar ch 1 8 – Apr il 23, 2 0 2 2
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507 AND 509 W EST 24T H ST REET, NEW Y ORK
NO QUESTION MARK
HOW DID YOU ARRIVE AT THE TITLE? Initially, it was Feeling Seen with a question mark. It was going to be about how I’m trying to feel seen. Then, upon speaking to my friend Devin Morris, he was just like, ‘It’s not a question anymore, is it?’ AND WHAT ABOUT THE COVER? Before we even designed the book, I came to realize that the cover had to be a Black woman because I am a product of a Black woman. As for the color—it’s weird. I find that when I’m working through emotional pieces or times in life, red is a constant. I thought this would be quite nice, for the beginning of my career, my first book to have red, Black women, “feeling seen.” RED SEEMS TO BE REALLY POWERFUL IN THIS BOOK. Every time I’ve had to look at my archive, it’s always the thing that jumps out at me. For me, red symbolizes passion, blood, death and romance. I’m an intensely emotional person, so I find subconsciously I’ve been attracted to little pathways of exploration through color. Sometimes it’s a soft red, and sometimes it’s deep and passionate. I don’t know if I’ll use red in the future, now that I’m so aware of it. The last six years have just been exploration, and you know, finding oneself and all that malarkey. A shot from “Hereditary” by Campbell Addy for Niijournal 56 culturedmag.com
STYLING BY RASHARN AGYEMANG; HAIR BY ISAAC POLEON; MAKEUP BY MATA MARIELLE; SET BY ADDY AND KING OWUSU; CASTING BY NII AGENCY
At 29 years old, Campbell Addy has shot portraits of the leading Black figures of our time. Still, the British-Ghanaian photographer needed encouragement to accept Prestel’s offer to publish his first monograph. Feeling Seen is a collaborative and diaristic account of the photographer and his work, exploring what it means to be a Black and queer artist. With a foreword by British Vogue editor-in-chief Edward Enninful and an in-depth interview with Ekow Eshun, Feeling Seen contains Addy’s already iconic covers and candid outtakes, documenting an artist’s star that’s only rising.
THE DOCTOR WILL SEE YOU NOW Jamel Shabazz is a healer whose magic touch is the camera. With three simultaneous institutional exhibitions, including a new survey focused on New York titled “Eyes on the Street” at the Bronx Museum of Art, we checked in with the man that has used art to spread love and connection.
YOU HAVE THREE DIFFERENT SOLO SHOWS GOING. HOW DID YOU PICK OUT WHAT WAS RIGHT FOR THE BRONX MUSEUM OF ART? Initially I wanted the show to be cities around the world, but when the curator told me they wanted an even more narrow assignment, the streets of New York, that made it easier for me. My main goal was to showcase images that I rediscovered. Images that had never been shown before. Most people know me as one that has documented young people and posed images. I wanted to get out of that pigeonhole. WHAT WAS IT LIKE TO COMB YOUR ARCHIVE WITH A MUSEUM SHOW IN MIND? It was incredible. The past 40 years I’ve been constantly traveling. Covid slowed everything down and allowed me to be home. I immediately bought a new scanner and I started pulling out all these amazing negatives from the 1980s that I had no memory of whatsoever. ARE THERE ANY PARTICULAR WISHES YOU HAVE FOR THIS SHOW? If all goes well, I’ll be able to make a playlist so when you step into the space, you can really get on my frequency. It is my hope that this place can make people feel good, especially as we look at the times that we live in now, people not really embracing each other in the way that they once did. When you see my exhibition, you are going to see that spirit of love, you are going to see that embrace in a time before. It is my hope that people will see it and say it’s because of this show that they want to now be a photographer of their times. Jam el S h aba z z’s Bit te r s wee t . Lo we r Ea st Si d e , N YC . 19 82 . 58 culturedmag.com
Pablo Outdoor collection, design Vincent Van Duysen. bebitalia.com
MARÍA MARTÍNEZCAÑAS USES COLLAGE TO UNCOVER THE ABSENCES
Cuban-born, Miami-based experimental photographer María Martínez-Cañas explores exile and her Cuban heritage by layering family artifacts, from wallpaper to dresses to family photos. She spoke with us about collage, lost love and her exhibition at The Bass, now on view. BY MOLLY WILCOX ARE YOU IN YOUR STUDIO RIGHT NOW? Yes, my studio is in my home, so I’m also in my home in the area of Miami called Little Havana. YOU WERE BORN IN CUBA AND GREW UP IN PUERTO RICO—HOW DID YOUR CHILDHOOD AND UPBRINGING INFLUENCE YOU AS AN ARTIST? I never imagined that I would end up becoming an artist. My parents were art collectors, and in Puerto Rico, there was an extraordinary energy of artists [who were] Latin American, Puerto
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Rican, Cuban. There were musicians, visual artists; I think that was a really strong influence in my life. Being Cuban exiles—I was only three months old when my parents left Cuba—for my parents, photography was very important. [Photographs] could introduce family members or even show us who our family was. Every time there was a Cuban that left Cuba, you would get a phone call that said, “I was able to take your wedding pictures out,” or, “I was able to take these pictures out.” I did not realize it then, but
PHOTO COURTESY OF DANIEL VIÑOLY
Artist María Martínez-Cañas in her “A Room for Eden (To Ana)” installation at the Frost Museum of Art in Miami.
I realize now the importance that photography had for them as a way to introduce our heritage and our roots. And to us kids, even though we weren’t able to grow up in Cuba, we’re still able to feel extremely Cuban. YOU HAD A FASCINATION FOR YOUR MOM’S CAMERA FROM A YOUNG AGE. WHEN DID YOU KNOW THAT WOULD BE YOUR CAREER? When I knew? The night before taking the SATs. Because I opened my first exhibition in Puerto Rico the night before taking them. And it just happened that me and this other young girl, we were 17 years old, just walked into a photo gallery and told the guy that we wanted to have a show there. THAT’S AMAZING. And what’s even more amazing is that he actually said yes! YOUR WORK REGULARLY USES ARCHIVES TO MAKE SOMETHING NEW AND MODERN WITH SOMETHING OLD. HOW DID YOU FIRST GET INTO ARCHIVES? I always heard my entire life that I looked like my paternal grandfather, but he passed away when my father was only 15 years old. So I never saw an image of him until much later, maybe not even until I was in my 20s. Suddenly this photo tells me a story of who I am. I see photography, in many ways, as the ability to tell a story. If you really look at a photo, if you study a photograph, you’re able to know so much about the people in the image and about the things inside the photograph. HOW DOES COLLAGE APPEAR IN YOUR LATEST WORK AT THE BASS MUSEUM? In December of 2020, I lost my mother suddenly. We weren’t expecting for her to pass away. It was of course very difficult for us. I found original wallpaper in my home that was covered in flowers. And I found things of my mother’s. The work is a collage of linen, bedding and even some of her personal materials. The way that the work was made was by layering a piece of fabric that she took out of Cuba in the 1960s, and her bedsheets from Cuba, which are in pristine condition. I glued them in and then decided to glue one of the original wallpapers right on top of the dress. I took very light sandpaper and started sanding it, and the pattern of the dress started to show. It became a subtraction technique of sorts, of removing and allowing something to come up. If you think about it, very much like archaeology, you start moving the ground and suddenly the optics start coming out. It’s not about revealing the dress completely. It’s this idea of uncovering. The title for the show is “Absence Revealed.” It’s about revealing that absence and that loss of someone so dear to me.
AGAVE AS ART
From a young age, Bertha González Nieves’s destiny seemed to be intertwined with tequila. Every week, young Nieves could be found at her grandmother’s house for lunch, where meals would always start with a copa de tequila. After years of begging for a taste, Nieves finally understood what the adults at the table were always enjoying. In her early 20s, Nieves was elected by the Japanese government to represent Mexico. Part of the job involved exploring Mexico’s rich culture—which included a three-day trip to Tequila, Jalisco, where Nieves’s destiny with tequila was cemented. As she recalls, Nieves immediately reported back to her parents, saying, “I know what I want to do. I want to go into the tequila industry.” Her parents thought her obsession with tequila would wane and that it was simply the flavor of the month. But this flavor stuck. Her entrepreneurial spirit was cultivated and her skills as a businesswoman were honed during her 10 years of working in the tequila industry. Nieves took everything she learned and started her own company, Casa Dragones. Nieves pictured at LGDR alongside While Nieves is one of the few women leading sculptures by Celia Vasquez Yui. the tequila industry, she realized early on that she “did not want to be defined by my gender,” she says. “Rather, I wanted to be seen as a professional in the category and I have always led with that.” Nieves has taken her immense success and used it as a launching pad for collaborating with others, whether it be young women getting started in the tequila craft or Mexican artists that are just as prideful of the rich culture of Mexico as she is. Read more at culturedmag.com BY REBECCA AARON 62 culturedmag.com
PHOTO BY COKE O’NEAL
Photographer Coke O’Neal captured Casa Dragones’s founder, Bertha González Nieves, at New York gallery LGDR, formerly known as Salon 94. The gallery’s senior director, Alissa Friedman, describes Nieves as “an iconoclast and visionary.” Nieves, she says, “brings the same qualities to Casa Dragones—tenacity, passion, exquisite taste and adventure—as she does to her many art collaborations.” Cultured learns just how deep her passion for tequila, and art, runs.
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Douglas Friedman, Bad Hombres No. 3 (May 24, 2020).
I CAN’T LEAVE YOU LIKE THIS Photographer Douglas Friedman captured the last days of David Beebe’s Bad Hombres, a memorable Tex-Mex joint in Marfa, Texas—Friedman’s home of choice—as a gift for its owners. An exhibition of Friedman’s photographs is now on view at The Capri (an iconic mid-century roadside motel). PHOTOGRAPHY BY DOUGLAS FRIEDMAN
HOW DOES THIS PROJECT FIT INTO YOUR LARGER PRACTICE? I put down the fine art side of things to be a commercial photographer. It doesn’t mean that I don’t approach my commercial photography from an artistic or creative standpoint. I really work hard to want every picture of a room or a chair to be beautiful. Then, to be able to spend some time in Marfa and do something for the sake of doing it… it was nice to dip my toe back in the waters of being creative. The endgame is the picture. HAD YOU EVER WORKED IN THE SERVICE INDUSTRY? When I was 15, I was a dishwasher in New York
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City at a gyro sandwich shop called From Gyro to Eternity. I worked as a waiter, I was a barback, I was a bartender, I was a soda jerk in an ice cream parlor. I excelled at that one but I got fired a lot. I talked too much to the customers and my drinks, I poured them too heavy. WHAT WAS THE LAST DAY OF SERVICE AT BAD HOMBRES LIKE? There wasn’t a party. Maybe that’s because— [chuckles]—we were in the middle of a global pandemic. Marfa is a tiny, tiny, tiny little sensitive flower with a hospital that’s three hours away. As a town, as a community, we took the pandemic very seriously. Restaurants were open. They weren’t necessarily seating inside. There
wasn’t a big moment of a blowout celebration to commemorate. I went in, they served some burgers, and then it closed. DO YOU EVER FEEL LIKE THE VILLAGE HISTORIAN? Actually, it’s funny you would say that. Yes, because dear friends of mine had a restaurant in Marfa called The Capri, and I pleaded with them to do a cookbook because I just thought their food was so beautiful. They agreed, and so I was able to just shoot this cookbook that was so much more than a cookbook. It was about the community, it was about West Texas, it was about Northern Mexico. Then the restaurant closed. I got to tell you: This little tiny town changes. It’s constantly evolving. Every time I go back, I’m like, ‘What’s going on here?’ It used to bother me a little bit. Like, ‘Oh, it’s changing. I loved it the way it was.’ Now, I’m learning that this is what Marfa is and to not get too attached because it’s going to change. I’m so glad we had the moment with Bad Hombres and it was sad that it was gone, but something else will happen and now we have this incredible collection of images and we’re able to have this show to raise money for the Presidio County Community Fund, which is important to all of us. We live in a painfully rural part of America, the largest unpopulated landmass and one of the poorest counties in Texas. HOW DO YOU DESCRIBE MARFA TO STRANGERS? Marfa is incredible. I came from New York City and now I live outside of town at the end of a dirt road surrounded by nothing. It gives me a chance to collect myself every couple of months before I head back out into the commercial photography world. MAYBE THIS IS THE BEGINNING OF A BOOK. SOMETHING ABOUT MARFA. It could be. I don’t see myself going anywhere. I’m too wrapped up in this little place. Earlier, last year when I was getting frustrated with the rapid pace of the change in town, I was like, “I’m leaving. I’m going to sell my house and get out of here.” Someone came to town and made me a very generous offer and when presented with the actual reality of leaving successfully, I was like, “Oh God, I don’t think I want to.” I’m going to stay. Blow some more money on that house. Raise some more money for this library and the community fund and keep chugging away at it.
A DA M S I LV E R M A N MARKS AND MARKERS APR 28 - MAY 21, 2022
“How can I convince an art world that sees me and the body I inhabit first, before they see the work?” asks artist Alexandria Smith, who’s known for exploring Black identity and girlhood through her flatly painted, semiabstract, mirrored figures. “I’ve really worked my ass off and done so much for myself,” she says of her first big solo show, “Pretend Gravitas and Dream Aborted Givens,” which opens at Gagosian in New York on April 28. Born in the Bronx and now based in London, Smith is head of painting at the Royal College of Art, but no stranger to the superstar gallery: her work has previously been shown in two group presentations curated by Antwaun Sargent at its New York and London outposts. Currently, Smith is gearing up for another solo exhibition at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, come June. Here, she speaks on preparing for her blockbuster season ahead. BY JACOBA URIST
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PORTRAIT © AMOROSO FILMS, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND GAGOSIAN
SEEING DOUBLE
“PRETEND GRAVITAS AND DREAM ABORTED GIVENS” FEELS LIKE A DECIDED SHIFT IN YOUR PRACTICE FROM THE TWO-DIMENSIONAL TO THE THREE-DIMENSIONAL. HOW ELSE IS IT A CHANGE? This new body of work is a departure from the collage paintings that I’ve been making over the years. Previous works drew on symbology that I’ve been using since before graduate school—so, over a decade now—which references identity development and amalgamations of girlhood. I call these new works “dimensional assemblage paintings,” and they have more of a linear narrative arc than my previous pieces. The world within these paintings is connected. Part of that connection is the symbol of the window that repeats in all the paintings that I’m making for my Gagosian show. WHAT DO WINDOWS REPRESENT IN THESE PAINTINGS? For me, the window allows multiple perspectives to be present at one time. As the viewer, you are looking into a different world within the rectangle of an artwork. Additionally, within the confines of the painting you’re looking at another world through this window. And then, the figures are also looking through this window. There’s a shared perspective, but there’s also a disruptive one at play. I use windows to play up a level of confusion so that the viewer isn’t quite sure where they are within the story—and the characters I’ve created aren’t either. WAS THERE A SPECIFIC INSPIRATION THAT SPARKED THE MOVE TO THESE CUT-OUT WORKS? When I first moved to London in 2019, right before the pandemic, I visited Venice with our RCA students on a study trip to the Biennale, and I went to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. I had never seen this before, but right next to a few of the paintings they had relief replicas of the artworks. You could go over to these mockups and feel the paintings. I was blown away. I remember thinking, ‘My goodness! This is the perfect way to make artwork accessible to people who are visually impaired.’ My dad, who passed away this past December, was visually impaired, so he couldn’t see any of my work. My experience at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection led me to think about dimensional paintings.
CAROLINA CUCINELLI COLLECTS ART HISTORY The co-president and co-creative director of Brunello Cucinelli reveals how art is sewn into the fabric of her home and life in Perugia, Italy. BY ELIZABETH FAZZARE
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HOW DID YOU BEGIN TO BUILD YOUR OWN COLLECTION? I am a great art lover. When I was in high school, I decided to study art because I wanted to learn about the history of art, from classical to contemporary art, and I also wanted to better explore different artistic techniques. The passion for collecting was also passed on to me by my father, who has been collecting art, especially classical art, for many years. WHAT WAS THE FIRST PIECE YOU COLLECTED? It was L’Annunciazione ad Abramo by Artemisia Gentileschi, an extraordinary painting that was given to me by my father and previously belonged to his collection. I am very attached to this painting, not only for its artistic value and beauty, but above all for the values it stands for. Gentileschi was a very talented painter who lived between the end of the 16th and the middle of the 17th century. I believe that her life can make us reflect on the role of women and female artists, a very topical issue for our society today: she experienced very painful events, yet she never stopped fighting for her art and her dignity. IS THERE A DEFINING THEME TO YOUR COLLECTION? I like to juxtapose pieces of more classical art with contemporary works, particularly black and white photographs. I love the contrast sparked by the proximity of different styles and eras because I think that it can always lead to something new, intriguing and unusual. HOW DO YOU FIND THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FASHION AND ART? DO THEY INSPIRE EACH OTHER IN YOUR WORK AND ART COLLECTING? Art and fashion are very closely linked; I would say they are inseparable. For me, fashion is a very powerful expression of art without filters and it needs no interpretation because it goes straight to the heart. Like many art forms, fashion is imagined with the mind and realized with the hands: I am thinking of the craftsmanship behind our collections, such as the Opera knitwear creations, garments made entirely by hand by our incredible craftswomen. Often, the inspiration for new collections comes from an exhibition or a visit to a city... art and culture are two fundamental elements in our collections. WHAT ARTISTS ARE INSPIRING YOU RIGHT NOW? Although I love discovering new talent, I also love going back to my “old loves” I’m thinking of the incredible paintings by Caravaggio, or the
PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF BRUNELLO CUCINELLI
Clockwise from left: Artemisia Gentileschi, L’Annunciazione ad Abramo; Carolina Cucinelli’s home in Perugia, Italy is decorated with family photographs and inspiring magazine clippings.
drawings by Leonardo da Vinci. These artists are always present in my personal mood boards, just as black and white photography also has a lot of space. The genius of photographer Peter Lindbergh is a constant inspiration. I love his style, the power of the looks, the plasticity of the bodies... I think he interpreted fashion in a very unique way. HOW DOES UMBRIA ITSELF INFLUENCE YOUR COLLECTING? I am very attached to my land. Umbria is rich in history and culture—just think of the great painters of the Umbrian School: Perugino, Raphael’s master, Piero della Francesca and Pinturicchio. And I also like the fact that art and craftsmanship have always gone hand-in-hand in our region. I’m thinking, for example, of the Templar Church of San Bevignate in Perugia, which dates back to 1200;
the church stands on top of a Roman complex: under the nave, archaeologists found some basins during excavations that were allegedly used for processing fabrics! WHAT IS MOST EXCITING ABOUT CERAMICS TO YOU? I like to think that ceramics are forged by hand, slowly taking shape on the press under the eyes of the craftsmen. In Umbria, we have a long, rich tradition of working with ceramics, which is why we have decided to pay tribute to it in our lifestyle collections through a line of ceramic items in the colors of the earth and with irregular details that make each piece unique. DOES THE ART MARKETPLACE HELP YOUR DISCOVERY? The art world is always part of my daily inspiration and research, especially when I am traveling. I
think that art and artists are a great way to learn about different cultures, eras and countries; to broaden my horizons; and to feed my curiosity and desire for discovery. WHAT IS THE NEXT PIECE ON YOUR RADAR? My husband and I have commissioned a series of half-busts for our private collection that feature some important figures and personalities of contemporary times, such as Mahatma Gandhi and President Barack Obama. I like the juxtaposition of the ancient concept of sculpture and the subjects being contemporary individuals: it sparks a very interesting contrast in style. AND WHAT IS THE LAST PIECE YOU PURCHASED? Actually, it was a gift: a beautiful painting to which we are very attached. It is Saint Andrew by Giovanni Santi, a painter who lived in the second half of the 15th century and the father of Raphael.
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fernandowongold.com
Beyond The Surface
Collage, Mixed Media and Textile Works from the Collection
June 16, 2022 – February 19, 2023
Njideka Akunyili Crosby, “The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born” Might Not Hold True For Much Longer (detail), 2013. Acrylic and transfers on paper, 64 × 82 7/8 inches (162.6 × 210.5 cm). Collection of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Gift of Marjorie and Michael Levine, 2016.21.1. © Njideka Akunyili Crosby.
NASHER.DUKE.EDU
Jayme Lawson wears a Chanel top, shorts and earrings. Hair by Cheryl Bergamy for Exclusive Artists using Contents Hair Care. Makeup by Jessica Smalls for The Wall Group.
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Can Jayme Lawson Help Turn With the tailwinds of both critical acclaim and blockbusterdom, the actor is still learning how to balance her newfound influence and staying humble. By Bianca Gracie Photography by Ryan Plett Styling by Jason Rembert
Hollywood Into a Tool for Good?
The pressures of the entertainment industry can be overwhelming for most Gen Zers, whether it’s meeting Hollywood’s box office expectations or failing to create a viral moment. But these standards barely faze Jayme Lawson. Despite already notching multiple critically acclaimed films on her belt, the 24-year-old actor’s ultimate goal is to spark change. Lawson has quickly proven her on-screen presence isn’t fleeting, most recently appearing as mayoral candidate Bella Reál in The Batman, which is, at the time of this writing, the highest-grossing film of 2022. She will also portray a young Michelle Obama in Showtime’s The First Lady anthology TV drama (premiering April 17), starring alongside industry veterans like Viola Davis, Michelle Pfeiffer and Gillian Anderson.
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“It became very clear to me that the work I do is for my mother, my sister, my niece and younger me.”
“I look at it as just doing my job. [These roles] are just the material that I always gravitated to,” Lawson tells me, about not feeling the weight of responsibilities that a “big break” could carry. “So to then see how everything is unfolding, which is completely outside of my control, genuinely humbles me. I’m truly blessed and thankful that this is my experience.” A Washington, D.C. native, Lawson was inspired by her hometown’s culture—a liveliness inherent in everything from its gogo music to political activism—and watching classic sitcoms like The Cosby Show and I Love Lucy. The acting bug officially latched on when her mother signed her up for a twoweek intensive summer theater program, where the naturally shy girl had an opportunity to break out of her shell. From there, the actor attended the Duke Ellington School of the
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Arts, where she later returned to teach students at the height of the pandemic. Not long after she received her graduation diploma in May 2019, from New York’s prestigious Juilliard School, Lawson scored her first role as an Angolan immigrant named Sylvia in Farewell Amor, which was a Sundance Film Festival favorite in 2020. It’s clear that acting fuels Lawson in deeper ways, as she intentionally chooses roles—such as her defiant character in The Batman, modeled after politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—that aim to give young women of color agency. It’s a mission she’s been working on since putting on Water, a play written by Tarell Alvin McCraney during her sophomore year at Juilliard. “James Baldwin describes it as a sense of paranoia when your experiences are not being voiced. I find that plagues a lot of different communities that often are
misrepresented or not represented at all,” Lawson says. “Part of the reason why I love acting is I can help cure that a little bit by having somebody see themselves being reflected. It became very clear to me that the work I do is for my mother, my sister, my niece and younger me. When I’m auditioning for roles, I’ll ask myself, ‘Does this character serve any of them?’ If not, then I will gladly say no. And if there’s room to better curate the role so that it does speak to young Black and brown girls and women, then I will engage in that way.” The actor’s confidence is reflected in her portrayal of a preWhite House Michelle Obama in The First Lady. There’s a certain grace, poise and a bit of sassiness that we know and love from the beloved advocate. But Lawson’s Michelle Obama is more curious and carefree. “Curious is such a great word. I wish I would’ve heard that before. I read
her book and watched a documentary and all these interviews to begin to shape the young woman before the icon,” Lawson says. “I had a lot of fun crafting this version of her.” Lawson has the rest of 2022 all laid out: she reunites with Viola Davis in The Woman King (in theaters on September 16) and will play American civil rights activist and journalist Myrlie Evers-Williams in the biographical drama Till (set for an October 7 release). As her plate continues to fill up, she’s maintaining a balance. “It is easy when doing these roles to get swept up in the world of the character. So I try to find things that really center me: the prayer life that I have, meditation, doing acts of service in my church and being around my family,” Lawson explains. “When I’m not Jayme the actor or the performer, but Jayme the daughter, the sister, the auntie. That helps me remember that life is not about me.”
Shoes by Giuseppe Zanotti.
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Earth Healers Throughout Western history, conversations about the environment have excluded BIPOC voices and low-income communities, often the very groups most directly impacted by climate change. The idea of climate justice, now a driving force of the larger environmental movement, not only tackles the struggles surrounding the protection of the planet, but also asks the question: for whom? Cultured speaks with Leah Thomas and Isra Hirsi, ecocommunicators and activists who are pushing for an environmental movement that puts equity, inclusion and intersectionality front and center.
BY RACHEL SONIS
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PHOTO BY CHER MARTINEZ
Leah Thomas
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PHOTO BY AWA MALLY
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Isra Hirsi, photographed in Gold Medal Park in Minneapolis.
Leah Thomas
Isra Hirsi
WHEN CONDUCTING RESEARCH FOR her newly released book,
GROWING UP IN MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota, 19-year-old climate
The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People + Planet, 27-year-old climate activist Leah Thomas took a fine-tooth comb to status-quo environmentalism, examining widely accepted truths and proving her hypotheses with data and transcripts. One of the first premises was that Earth Day, an annual event for environmental protection that started in the spring of 1970, was far from inclusive. “I remember, after hours of researching, I stumbled across this man whose name is Arturo Sandoval, and he was the only Chicano activist that was a part of the [first] Earth Day committee,” Thomas reveals. “There’re transcripts of him talking about how the Earth Day movement was not diverse at all and did not prioritize the needs of people of color.” Thomas felt vindicated. “I was like ‘I knew it!’” she exclaims. “It was very affirming for me because people have been talking about this for 30-plus years.” The idea for the book came around the same time that Thomas co-founded Intersectional Environmentalist, an organization that spawned from her fourslide, viral Instagram graphic explaining the term in June 2020. Drawing on the framework of Black feminism, particularly professor Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work with intersectional feminism, the idea of intersectional environmentalism centers BIPOC and underrepresented voices in the struggle to advocate for climate policy that physically aids those communities. “People need clean water; people need clean air,” Thomas says, when thinking about what she wishes people knew about environmental justice. “And that shouldn’t only be a privilege of the white and wealthy.” Like the organization of the same name, The Intersectional Environmentalist functions as a toolkit for a more inclusive environmental movement and features the voices of 30 contributors as well as Thomas’s. While Thomas felt a sense of urgency to meet the moment and the demand for information for both initiatives, she knew she couldn’t do it alone. “There are so many people that have been doing this work for a really long time. I was like ‘Ok, how can I point people in the direction of them and not try to be some like, one-person show?” she chuckles. “There are so many people, and I love that.”
activist Isra Hirsi was driven by her identity as a Black Muslim woman and her family’s political involvement to immerse herself in social advocacy. She often went to protests and organizing meetings with her mother, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. But it was the public health crisis in Flint, Michigan, and the expansion of the Line 3 pipeline—which has leaked millions of gallons of oil in the United States—that led Hirsi to take further direct action and to join her high school’s environmental club in 2017. When she got to her first meeting, she was disappointed to find that the club was overwhelmingly white. “Being in that space was really frustrating because I knew about environmental racism at that point,” Hirsi explains. “I knew about Line 3; I knew about pollution levels in Black intercity communities, and this organization was talking about camping, water fountains, and things that were important but just too surface-level.” She reveals that, while it was disappointing, it was also a source of motivation for her to change these systems. In 2018, Hirsi gained national attention as co-founder and co-executive director of the US chapter of Youth Climate Strike, where she held those positions for two years, helping organize thousands of climate protests across the country. Now in her first year at Barnard College, Hirsi has stepped away from the organization and is focused on a climate advocacy practice that is grounded in intersectional, local community work. “Before going to college in New York, I started doing a lot of local work in Minneapolis,” she shares. “More so to focus on my neighbors, especially because there’s a huge homeless crisis and opioid crisis in Minneapolis, so focusing on the people who are near me, I think, is super important.” Hirsi explains that intersectional environmentalism is an inherent part of climate justice because climate work is, at its core, people work. “I’m fighting for the people, while I’m also caring about the animals, the water, the Earth,” she says, stressing that social justice and centering marginalized communities within climate conversations is not just vital—it’s paramount. She sums, “Every issue is environmental justice.”
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Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum FIU May 7 — August 7, 2022
10975 SW 17 th St., Miami, FL 33199 | 305.348.2890 | frost.fiu.edu Lalla Essaydi, Harem Revisited #55, Chromogenic print, edition 3 of 15, 2013, 30 x 24 inches, Gift from the Collection of Steven E. and Phyllis Gross, FIU 2021.13.5, ©Lalla Essaydi, Courtesy of the artist and Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum FIU receives ongoing support from the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners; the Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs, the Florida Council on Arts and Culture and the State of Florida; and Members of the Frost Art Museum.
Celebrating 50 Years
Main Event, Celebrating SCI-Arc’s First 50 Years, Supporting Students for the Next 50 Honoring Frank Gehry, Alison Saar, The Herald Examiner Building / Georgetown Company, Walt Disney Imagineering, and celebrating SCI-Arc’s founders.
Gala April 30 Los Angeles Tickets at sciarc.edu/mainevent
WITH THE COSMIC CRUISER CO Hedi Slimane taps emerging artists for a collaboration that collides underground culture with high fashion.
By Annabel Keenan Photography by Lelanie Foster Styling by Ian Bradley
Youth culture and individuality are at the core of CELINE HOMME’s Cosmic Cruiser collection. Creative director Hedi Slimane selected the work of 14 artists to adorn a variety of designs, including sweatshirts, bucket hats, skateboards and wide leg jeans. Blending a stick-and-poke aesthetic and an almost emo angst, the pieces in Cosmic Cruiser represent a mix of subcultural concerns. Created in the early days of the pandemic, the collection radiates energy, like a visual representation of the pent-up urge for stimulation. The artists selected include young, up-and-coming graphic designers, painters and musicians, all of whom work with an element of griminess. We spoke to four of them about their broader practices and inspiration for the works adapted by CELINE.
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LLECTION, CELINE
All clothing and accessories by CELINE HOMME. Grooming by Ali Scharf. Movement direction by Kellian Delice. Casting by In Search Of Agency.
LEANS IN
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Sara Yukiko Mon transport you. Like opening a time capsule from the late ’90s/early 2000s, her drawings and prints are full of nostalgic references to classroom doodles, stickers, and the clash of corporate iconography and DIY culture, interests she honed while training in design and media arts at UCLA. Often using butterflies and cartoon animals—rendered in a dark, Xerox-like way—Mon also gravitates towards motifs that remind her of growing up in San Francisco and spending summers in her mother’s hometown of Kumamoto, Japan. “I’m a very nostalgic person,” she says from Brooklyn, where she now lives. “I use images that I have personal and emotional relationships with.” Reimagining this familiar imagery in slightly chaotic or off-putting collages, Mon seeks a mix of irony and sincerity. Often collaborating with her partner, Chris Lloyd, her work has been exhibited with several emerging galleries, including group shows at Gern en Regalia and A.D., both in New York. Mon’s drawing for CELINE, a simple outline of a heart with the words “lucky lover” written inside, appears to have jumped off the page of a notebook. Festooning beanies, bucket hats and a skateboard, Mon’s drawing crackles with youthful vitality. Though cheery, her heart, like much of her work, peels back the cuteness associated with a symbol of love, incorporating a toughness and nonchalance with its rough edges and sketchy handwriting. Mon’s collaboration with CELINE is one of the few in Cosmic Cruiser that incorporates text. The artist saw the words “lucky lover” written on a sign and thought of the phrase as “a reminder that through it all, it’s important to feel lucky and thankful for the love you have.” The simplicity of the phrase is earnest and heartwarming. “The original work was from a show with my partner, Chris Lloyd, at Gern en Regalia,” she explains. “The exhibition explored our love and how it’s communicated through animal processes.”
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SARA YUKIKO MON WANTS her work to
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Emerson Snowe IN 2016, EMERSON SNOWE picked up a pen and started drawing. “It began as a practice in mindfulness,” says the Australian artist and musician known for upbeat pop songs, synth-filled tracks like “Frankenstein” and “If I Die, Then I Die.” “I would pass time writing in journals and then paired my writing with blind-line drawings on the opposite pages. They’re all done as a stream of consciousness.” Speaking over Zoom from his home in Berlin, Snowe flipped through his notebooks showing drawing after drawing, which he titles based on the day he made them. His piece for CELINE is titled 12th of August. What began as a meditative process and a form of documentation became almost obsessive. The artist was constantly making drawings, experimenting with color and letting the movement of the lines take over. The simple act of repetition gave him a way to feel present. “I was at a point where
I was sick of over-analyzing things and I wanted the process to be genuine,” he says. His buoyant drawings evolved, sometimes growing to resemble entire bodies. In others, the lines became frenetic. Snowe’s work appears in CELINE’s designs in two variations: dense, energetic drawings that resemble his filled-in notebooks, and bold yet sleek lines that form elegant faces. The former appears on white and denim pants, while the latter adorns a tan coat; thick, black lines stream across the surface in a simple yet powerful cascade of faces. The marriage of the drawing and the unembellished tan jacket feels like kismet. The garment’s simplicity mirrors Snowe’s creative practice, as he explains: “I reached a point creatively both in music and in art where I wanted to get back to the bare minimum without all these instruments or grand plans. Stripped of all of that, what was left was honest, genuine work.”
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“In a way they just present themselves. I’m often surprised at the sort of conjuring.”
Scott Daniel Ellison
MONSTERS, VAMPIRES AND SUPERNATURAL beings populate Scott Daniel Ellison’s paintings. Often looking back at the viewer with creepy eyes and toothy smiles, Ellison’s creatures seem to be watching us, just as we’re watching them. “As a kid I was obsessed with horror movies and the magazines that covered them,” he says from his home in Beacon, New York. “I’m still interested in many of the same things and my mind just sort of fills in the blanks.” Skulls, snakes and cartoonish portraits of Freddy Krueger fill his artwork, which has been shown nationally and abroad, including at ClampArt in New York and Galerie DYS in Brussels. Painted in his signature flatness and palette of black and dark greens, with references to folk art and
Above: Sketch by Scott Daniel Ellison. Previous spread: Sketches by Sara Yukiko Mon and Emerson Snowe.
Scandinavian mythology, Ellison’s works are like a mix of Edward Gorey and Tim Burton, creepy creatures with an endearing, storybook quality. The imagery selected for CELINE, White Snake and Cripy Smile, happen to be some of Ellison’s favorite paintings. “They chose images I was coincidentally quite attached to,” he says. For the Cosmic Cruiser collection, small, beady eyes and oversized monster smiles appear on sweatshirts, jackets and shirts. Jagged teeth fill their uneasy grins, and one of the creatures has pointed ears reminiscent of Batman, or a cat. Though he weaves general references to popular films, Ellison approaches his work without an agenda. “In a way they just present themselves,” he says. “I’m often surprised at the sort of conjuring.”
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Sketch by Amy Dorian.
AMY DORIAN HAS DEVELOPED a loyal cult following with her brand Rare Boots, which feature her fake band logos, drawn and screenprinted onto small, limited edition clothing runs. For CELINE, curious, innocent puppies dominate her all-over pattern print. Seen jumping, sitting and playing, the little white puppies appear on sweaters, pants and beanies. The cartoonish animals are characteristic of Dorian’s style, which she developed while studying illustration and printmaking at Ringling College of Art and Design. Dorian grew up in Orlando and is now based in New York. Stemming from her interests in printmaking and popular culture, she often takes inspiration from magazines, ads and movies, like the animated characters that proliferate in her hometown. Unfit for Disney, however, Dorian’s illustrations reveal her partiality for edginess. “I draw snakes, swords, naked ladies with wings and flaming skulls. I’ve always incorporated grit into my work,” she says. “Even if what I make ends up looking glamorous, I like the element of
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Amy Dorian
grit and humor.” Everyday objects also come into play in her illustrations. The CELINE puppies were inspired by a plastic trinket she saw in a dollar store. Elevating kitsch, Dorian’s puppies have a goth allure that fits perfectly in Cosmic Cruiser. “The entire collection seems to have this great quality where something glamorous is a little rough around the edges,” she notes. Dorian says she found the toy puppy at the end of 2020, a time when she was reflecting on the “craziness” of the year. The innocent, playful puppy seemed to reflect her feelings towards the state of the world. “The expectant, naïve look of the puppy really drew me in,” she says of the piece, titled Brain on 2020. “I thought about how strange it was to feel hopeful about a new year at the end of 2020, when the feeling of uncertainty still lingered. It was strange to feel all of that at once, and this little toy puppy was a perfect representation of what was happening inside my head.”
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“Even if what I make ends up looking glamorous, I like the element of grit and humor.”
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Gillian Wearing in collaboration with Wieden + Kennedy, Wearing, Gillian (detail), 2018. Color video, with sound, 5 min. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Council, 2019.67. © Gillian Wearing, courtesy Maureen Paley, London; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles; and Regen Projects, Los Angeles
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IN PURSUIT OF A
BETTER, GREENER WORLD Three young landscape design studios demand attention as they lead the way in changing practice principles for the betterment of our world. BY ELIZABETH FAZZARE
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Brooklyn-based Future Green Studio designed the gardens at local art organization Amant. Below: In California, the Sea Ranch Lodge landscape was reinvigorated by Los Angeles- and San Francisco-based firm Terremoto.
PHOTO BY IWAN BAAN; PHOTO BY CAITLIN ATKINSON
AS AN URBAN DWELLER in the early phases of the pandemic, when the world was on lockdown, having access to a green space—whether a backyard, a public park or a plant-filled balcony—made living in isolation just a little more bearable. For those located in closer proximity to nature, a forest walk, a beach stroll or a desert hike felt like a moment to decompress safely. Adjacency to nature is scientifically proven to make humans feel psychologically better according to multiple sources and studies, including the American Psychological Association, and researchers at the University of Chicago; University in Ontario; and University of Melbourne, among others. In the design world, architects are exploring what this could mean for interiors. While biophilia may be a buzzword, its counterpart, neuroaesthetics, is not. The latter is a neuroscience concept that examines the relationship between mental health and closeness to natural or well-decorated environments. Landscape designers (and their historic peers) have been proving the hypothesis in their work since Gilgamesh planted the world’s first known garden in Sumer, in southern Mesopotamia, circa 2900 BCE. Being outside of the built environments where we live, work and shop, in gardens where trees rustle, flowers bloom and grasses sway, is like a serotonin symphony for the brain. It’s why Aristotle retreated to the grove at the Lyceum for his peripatetic walks, and why nature retreats like the 1869 Mohonk Mountain Resort in upstate New York or, more recently, the 1964 Sea Ranch on the northern coast of California were designed. Both are still in existence and remain popular to this day for the same reason. The practice of landscape design has historically received less recognition for its contributions to shaping society and bettering our world than that of architecture. Certainly, there is not a venerable cult of personality around practitioners in the same way that starchitects have become household names. However, the aforementioned Sea Ranch was a turning point in this narrative: landscape designer Lawrence Halprin was hired by the developer client as the head of the project, which is a 5,200-acre sustainable living community nestled within the sea grasses that blanket the rocky cliffs of the oceanside area. This highly unusual hierarchy meant that landscape, not architecture, dictated the project’s design, and proved its worth to an industry that had long written off garden-making as a superficial pursuit of beauty. Structure is not always a main selling point, the innovative community argues—although, in this case, the Charles Moore-designed redwood-slatted bungalows are just as charming as the miles of trails designed by Halprin along the Pacific coast, which feel so integrated they could have always been there. Perhaps that has historically been landscape designers’ disadvantage to receiving spotlight: good garden planning feels so natural, one can’t imagine much thought went into it. Certainly though, much did, and today’s practitioners are taking on even larger roles in their work, beyond providing the psychological joy that greenery brings. As climate changes become more drastic every day, they are designing natural solutions, like porous flood barriers, urban food gardens and native plantings, projects that mitigate weather-related destruction, feed those in food deserts, and maintain the balance of local ecosystems, respectively. The power of plants cannot be overlooked.
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STUDIO ZEWDE telling you something,” says landscape designer Sara Zewde. “It either reaffirms your place or makes you feel like you don’t belong. I’ve always been curious about that.” In 2018, when the Hood Design Studio alumna began her own firm, Studio Zewde, after moonlighting on independent projects for years, it was based on the principle that landscapes can be used to tell stories much larger than the aesthetically beautiful arrangements of grasses, trees and flowers. How one feels in a space, and what it says about a place, is “fundamentally a design question,” she says. The project that convinced her to leave an establishment studio for her own was in Seattle’s Africatown—an opportunity to create a temporary activation on a 2.4-acre plaza in the historically Black neighborhood where gentrification is looming. After a series of engagement sessions, residents presented what they wanted for the area’s future: an outdoor living room for events and community gathering. Midtown Plaza encompasses the three main disciplines of Studio Zewde—urban design, public art and landscape architecture—and altered an unused space using the idea of tactical urbanism, the design concept that a successful, community-driven temporary change in an urban environment can eventually become permanent. Currently, the studio is working to place-keep in locations across the United States, from a new park surrounding an Instagram-famous graffitied pier in Philadelphia, to a new two-acre park at a former psychiatric center in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. The latter is part of a new housing development by architect Sir David Adjaye that will bring 900 affordable units and a fitness-programmed green space to the second most underserved neighborhood, in terms of park access, in the city of New York. A walking path, perennial garden and large
Sara Zewde of Studio Zewde. Opposite: A rendering of the Studio Zewde-designed park at Philadelphia’s Graffiti Pier.
lawn will be part of the program, Zewde says, but it was important that much of it be left to the future residents. This decision helps to stamp out some of landscape design’s biases. “One thing that we see in a lot of neighborhoods of color is the parks are overly programmed. There are basketball courts and not really places to just sit and hang out,” she explains. “Designers, too, kind of default to feeling like we have to give them things to do. There’s a sense that if you leave it unprogrammed, people will be unruly. It was important to us to advocate for having a flexible place where people can do whatever they want: you can just sit down on a bench and take in the spectacle of your community.” As much as Zewde wants her landscapes to tell the stories of their neighbors, she also wants those neighbors to be able to tell their own stories in her landscapes. Though just in the design phases, an upcoming project in Switzerland will be the physical embodiment of this. Alongside a plethora of collaborators, including 2022 Pritzker Architecture Prize winner Francis Kéré and designers Ini Archibong and Yinka Illori, she is designing the gardens for a new “African chalet” in the Alps, part of which will serve as an artist residency for people working in activism on the African continent. Her design is a study in craft, she explains, and the “idea is to integrate the building traditions of Africa specifically into a contemporary residential landscape,” using patterning and water as a central feature. As construction is set to begin this summer, Zewde will also be putting the finishing edits on her first attempt at traditional storytelling, a new book about the little-known period of landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted’s life that he spent traveling through the American South to write about the conditions of slavery on assignment for the New York Times. Zewde’s tome, which is scheduled to hit bookstores toward the end of this year, the bicentennial of Olmsted’s birth, will explore how this previously overlooked 14 months of his life could have affected the designs of one of the world’s most famous landscape architects. “When I realized there was no book about it, I tried to ignore it and move on with my life, but it haunted me,” Zewde says of her motivation for writing it. “I was curious. I retraced his steps to the South. I spent four months with his personal letters, and now I’m writing my reflection from that.” After all, just after his research trip, Olmsted designed what would become the model for modern, urban green spaces everywhere: New York’s Central Park.
“It was important to us to advocate for having a flexible place where people can do whatever they want.”—Sara Zewde
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PHOTO BY GLADEMIR GELIN
“YOUR ENVIRONMENT IS ALWAYS
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IMAGE COURTESY OF STUDIO ZEWDE
WITH A STUDIO WHOSE NAME
translates to “earthquake,” Los Angeles- and San Francisco-based landscape design firm Terremoto can be expected to shake up the industry. In 2014, founder David Godshall set out to do just that with his former business partner. “We wanted to create gardens and landscapes that embodied our own explicit ideas and values,” Godshall explains. “It felt like there was a bit of a void in landscape architecture at the residential level and the bigger level of gardens being deeply contributing to culture-making.” Since then, Terremoto has established itself as one of the most dynamic design firms in LA, displayed implicitly in the ever-developing list of principles they set for themselves (goals include being “concurrently respectful and skeptical of history,” doing away with plastic irrigation systems and avoiding all temporary garden designs), and explicitly in the breadth of projects they have taken on, from private residences to community plots. Their current approach to landscape-making is called “Radical Gardens of Love and Interconnectedness,” a groovy way to say that the studio cares about creating projects that are both context-sensitive and responsive to the needs of the larger world. At the moment, principal of the San Francisco office Story Wiggins and her team are overseeing the realization of their landscape design for the new Sea Ranch Lodge, which opened its first phase in October 2021 with a refresh— courtesy of designer Charles de Lisle—to its interiors and restaurant and a new art gallery showing rotating exhibitions of work by the community’s original architects. Terremoto’s role was to create within an existing icon of a landscape—specifically, to redesign the plantings around the Lodge and in the courtyard of its adjacent hotel, whose renovation will make up the project’s second phase. “That landscape is so incredible,” says Wiggins, with reverence in her voice. “You really just have to do almost nothing, which as a designer is a
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challenge in and of itself, but it’s been a refreshing journey.” Her team is also working with the client on a more long-term project whose scope will extend further across the Halprin-designed acreage. Also ongoing is Test Plot, a project that started as a grassroots land stewardship initiative to revive Los Angeles’s Elysian Park, and has since become the subject of a landscape studio course at the University of Southern California and a catalyst for community partnerships across the city’s underprivileged green spaces. Each circular Test Plot is evidence of what care and design can do for civic spaces. Though only 30 feet in diameter, their reach is far larger. “We’re at a point where people are reaching out to us from different parts of the country, and we’re trying to figure out how to be something that’s much bigger than Terremoto,” says Godshall. “Really, the goal of it is to get ecologically appropriate plants into the ground and to connect people in the nearby communities to that active engagement. It’s starting to get momentum, and we’re just going along for the ride.” Next, Terremoto is hoping to make their focus on fair and ethical labor go viral. Though it took the slowdown of a pandemic and a racial reckoning to bring this to the surface, the fact is that, once designed and praised, landscapes are physically built and maintained by low-wage, often undocumented workers. The firm has taken a stand and now ensures that all the landscapers of its gardens are fairly compensated. As Terremoto ponders in its online Land and Labor manifesto: “What’s the point of building environmentally considerate landscapes if we’re not also taking into account the wider social, political, and economic landscape?” Though this work may be just beginning for the studio, overall, Godshall is hopeful that changes are coming. “Increasingly, people are coming to us and really wanting to build gardens and landscapes that are deeply principled,” he says. “That brings us great joy.”
PHOTO BY CAITLIN ATKINSON
TERREMOTO
FUTURE GREEN STUDIO
PHOTO BY RAFAEL GAMO
ON HIS MEANDERING WALKS THROUGH BROOKLYN,
At Amant, So-IL’s architecture and Future Green Studio’s softscape are wholly integrated. Opposite: Sea Ranch Lodge.
“We’re trying to create these almost magical-realist spaces and ideas grounded in research, much like a historical fiction book might.”—David Seiter, Future Green Studio
landscape designer David Seiter became fascinated by weeds. Pushing through cracks in the asphalt, sucking drops of moisture out of rain puddles, surviving tramplings by dogs in fenced-in sidewalk planters, these resilient, spontaneous plants and their will to grow, despite all, became the research basis of his firm Future Green Studio. “I always have been interested in investigating those spaces in between building and architectural fabric,” explains Seiter of his affinity for psychogeography, which he believes originated in response to a childhood spent in suburban Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where bounded front lawns and penned farm fields did not encourage much neighborhood wandering. They did, however, support his gardening business as a teen. After meeting his native New Yorker wife at Vassar College and following her back to the city, “exploring the edges of South Brooklyn brought me to a focus on the lateral plants that take root in these places.” He began Future Green Studio in 2008 with an approach to landscape that brings this attention to detail to projects of all scales, and considers as-is project environments as valid groundwork for design, rather than a site to be razed and started anew. And instead of charging others with the role of building out the design, the industry standard, the firm follows a design-build model, bringing their own designs to life off-paper or screen. Having grown up with does-it-all experience as a gardener, Seiter felt his workdays spent in a “laboratory of learning” amongst a variety of people with different skill sets would be more fulfilling and ensure that their projects were completed using equitable labor. It also means that Future Green Studio peruses research into a variety of new technologies not usually in the purview of a traditional landscape architecture office, like digital fabrication for urban intervention projects. “We really try to ground a lot of our work in actual data,” Seiter says. “I think that also applies to people in technical activities because, in a way, we’re writing fictions. We’re trying to create these almost magical-realist spaces and ideas grounded in research, much like a historical fiction book might.” In practice, this manifests as a kind of layering effect of landscape and urban design, where green spaces are given contemporary meaning through references that also reveal the histories of the sites. The Red Hook-based studio’s particular expertise is in urban environments. Recently, Future Green Studio collaborated with fellow Brooklyn studio SO-IL on Amant, a new art center in the borough. Tasked with designing and building the softscape around the organization’s three new buildings, the project is an exercise in relationships—building to landscape, plants to plants, mycorrhiza to roots—and a slice of a regional native landscape in the middle of dense, industrial Bushwick. Currently, Seiter and his team of 38 employees are creating an outdoor living room for a new arts district in Newark, in the form of a plaza for the new SOM-designed New Jersey Performing Arts Center. Across the Hudson River in New York’s Upper East Side, they are redesigning the central medians up 100 blocks of Broadway, starting at 70th Street, as “linear corridors for wildlife and people,” Seiter describes. The goal is sustainable, resilient landscapes that volunteers—through the nonprofit Broadway Mall Association—will be proud to care for. In all these instances, the existing informs the new. “To not have that more critical eye towards these plants that were all around us in Brooklyn, at some point, it just felt irresponsible, honestly,” Seiter admits. Now, others are following suit in his words about the weeds. “There is a really interesting conversation about plants and weeds versus beta plants taking root right now in our community.”
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Faking It With H. Jon Benjamin The actor and voice behind Bob Belcher and many an iconic animated character has helped define the form of adult cartoons. BY ED WINSTEAD PHOTOGRAPHY BY RICHIE KHAN
AMONG THE STRIKERS and revolutionaries who took the streets of Paris in 1968 were a few who felt especially fond of the earth. They were called néoruraux, and they ended up starting something like 500 little farming communes across France in the years that followed. One group of kids from the Sorbonne settled into the dusty embrace of a beautiful old farmhouse in the mountains in Ardèche. They hired a farmer to run the place, a stern man who knew what he was doing, and all of them worked the terraced hills together. Over the years the revolutionary fires burned themselves out. The kids went off to the kinds of careers you imagine people who attended the Sorbonne might. Other people came and went, and the commune carried on. Time passed. But the founders still visited in the
summers, many of them. The French are very good about vacations. It was the summer of 1990 and a lot of those first kids, the founders, were coming back. One of them was suffering from AIDS and, near the end, had decided that the farm in the beautiful hills was where he wanted to die. As it happened, an American kid named H. Jon Benjamin was staying there, too, on the advice of a friend of his aunt. There’s supposed to be something particularly honest about farming. It’s essential, in the sense of fundamental. At the literal root of the whole human project. And Benjamin is a pretty honest guy, depending on how exactly you define it. Though, while Benjamin did spend six weeks picking beans for an old French man in the mountains in Ardèche who’d wake him up before dawn to get ripped on Syrah in the village
together before heading to work in the fields, those two things are likely unrelated. The definition of honesty here is important, because acting, and comedy, and doing voice-overs for what’s come to be called “adult animation” (a genre that’s really entered a heyday over the last 10 years or so), lend themselves to different kinds of truths. “As a kid I was interested in comedy concepts, for sure,” Benjamin says. “Sort of subverting reality. Creating things like that. Little fake tokens of comedy.” He’s talking about bits like one he did when he was in elementary school, an interview he recorded on a cassette player with an astronaut who’d been to space on Voyager 1. He took it to school and played it for his classmates, who went wild over it before discovering, after his teacher pointed this out, that
Voyager 1 was unmanned. So the subversion of reality has always been a thing for Benjamin. In the ’90s he often performed in a recurring comedy night, “Eating It,” on Mondays at the Luna Lounge on Ludlow Street in the Lower East Side. He’d sometimes put on elaborate set pieces, like throwing a fake bar mitzvah for his nephew. One of those Mondays, Benjamin and another comedian, Mike Lee, hired two male escorts to have oral sex on the stage. As a question of honesty, you can look at this from two perspectives: that it’s the product of a financial transaction, a commissioned performance, and so in some sense inauthentic; or that it was a real, unsimulated blowjob, simple as that. There was something of this in Jon Benjamin Has a Van, too, which ran for a season on Comedy
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“I think the show itself kind of dictates the tenor and the mood, and that’s at once self-fulfilling and self-regulating. It’s a parallel universe, really.”
The actor H. Jon Benjamin takes a sunny walk near Prospect Park in his hometown of Brooklyn, New York.
Central in 2011—scripted scenes that read like accidents, like things that you, the viewer, just kind of happened across. The show “was great, I loved doing it, but it was flawed. We weren’t quite able to pull the whole thing together,” Benjamin says. The second season was written, though it never made it to production. Among the old friends and regular collaborators who joined Benjamin on the show were people like Leo Allen, who co-created and co-wrote it, Jon Glaser, David Cross, and Nathan Fielder, the latter of whom Benjamin had worked with on some episodes of Demetri Martin’s show Important Things. Fielder’s Nathan For You works in much the same vein, stripped down a bit and leaning even further into the ambiguities of comedic performance. “I think it was a natural transition for him,” Benjamin
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says, “and then he ended up doing a better job at consolidating that… He made it simpler. We were a little bit all over the place, which is kind of like me.” In the spring of 2021, while the COVID-19 pandemic was grinding through the beginnings of its second year, Benjamin posted a video on Twitter in which he describes spotting a green heron on a pond and then, after watching the heron, looking up to see three bald eagles in flight. When he gets to the part about seeing the eagles he starts to break down, his voice cracking, until suddenly he’s sobbing. He’s been doing regular “Bird Reports” ever since, noting his sightings from a house in upstate New York, or around Prospect Park in Brooklyn. A comedian crying is always a kind of test for the audience, because you can never
be entirely sure you’re reacting appropriately—is it a bit, and if so, are you in on it, or are you being played? If it’s not, are you a cynical monster, or the empath you’ve always assumed yourself to be? Here’s Benjamin on the eagle video: “Well, that was fake.” Grade yourself accordingly. But it’s not so much that it was fake as that it was acting. Pretty good acting, too. And there’s nothing all that unusual about the manipulation of reality, or, for Benjamin, the manipulation of an audience. As he says, “It was a reproduction of something that happened to me. But not the genuine article. I never thought I would be breaking down the Bird Reports like this.” One place where any ambiguity around artifice really falls apart, though, is in cartoons. There’s no danger of mistaking one as real. So it’s a little strange that Benjamin’s two longest-lasting parts are both animated—Archer in Archer and Bob in Bob’s Burgers, with 24 seasons and one forthcoming movie, The Bob’s Burgers Movie (May 27), between them. But Benjamin has been doing voice-over work for a long time, going back twenty years to Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist, when he played the eponymous therapist’s son. Loren Bouchard, who created Bob’s Burgers, was a producer on Dr. Katz, chopping up the long, meandering improv sessions with Benjamin and the rest of the cast into coherent episodes. “Loren and I spent a lot of time together, and that was really fun, when we were starting—to get a call at 10:30 at night and grab a six pack and go to the recording studio and listen to what he was doing, and running into the booth, fixing stuff.” And it’s that relationship with Bouchard, more than any other, that’s shaped his voiceover work. “I didn’t train for that or anything. I wasn’t the guy who could do impressions or put on other voices or do an Australian accent. That stuff is pretty foreign to me. Australia is pretty foreign to
me. Sorry about that.” And while the world of fake international espionage in Archer is foreign to most of us, too, the world of Bob’s Burgers is decidedly not. Part Married… With Children, part King of the Hill, Bob’s Burgers is uninterested in the absurdity and hyperbole possible in cartoons, and very interested in the realities of making the rent while raising children—things you rarely see on television. “I think the show itself kind of dictates the tenor and the mood, and that’s at once self-fulfilling and self-regulating,” Benjamin says. “It’s a parallel universe, really.” The first few episodes of Bob’s, as busy people seem to call it, were a little bit mean, more in keeping with one of Fox’s other animated comedies, Family Guy. But the show quickly adjusted course toward something more rounded off around the edges, though no less clever or engaging. There’s none of BoJack Horseman’s drugs, booze, sex, or mortality. There is a mortuary next door to Bob’s Burgers, which figures heavily in the pilot, but otherwise nobody in the universe of the show ever gets any older, and they tend not to die, either. Still, there is a pessimism central to Benjamin’s own sense of humor. Not fatalistic, but an embrace of the other possibilities that failure can engender. For a long time, Benjamin steadfastly believed that Bob was not much of a cook. He says he used to tell Bouchard that “nobody goes [to Bob’s restaurant]—it’s always empty. So maybe it’s bad.” But as the show has evolved, so has its explicit depiction of Bob’s talent for cooking. In one episode some local chefs come in the shop and sincerely love the food. “I might have been wrong. I’ve admitted it. Now I guess I’m embracing the fact that Bob’s pretty good at what he does.” Benjamin is not quite as comfortable in the kitchen. “In the first two minutes of trying to prepare something I’m covered in sweat,
and acting erratically, and bumping into shit, and being agitated. And it’s like a mortal fear about what I’m about to do. Like going to battle.” He thinks he might have inherited it. “My mother was never very comfortable in the kitchen. She cooked a lot of meals at home, but it was a struggle. She will not like me saying that but I think she’s aware of it.” While the kids in Bob’s Burgers haven’t aged in the eleven years the show’s been on the air, Benjamin’s own son is now in his first year of college. Ambiguity, again, does the interesting work of confusing your understanding of your place in a relationship: “That was a big change in my life, kind of not having dictatorial control over another human being and giving that up. I mean, that’s somewhat of a joke, but as a parent you kind of start losing a very clear relationship with your kid once they start gaining independence. It becomes a little more opaque.” He knows he caught a lucky break in having two jobs that he could do remotely when the pandemic hit. Archer was mostly a matter of reading the script into a mic anyway, though there were adjustments with Bob’s, which was a more collaborative, improvisational affair. They’ve had to give a lot of that up these last two years. But the “general discontent in the world” he felt at the outset of the pandemic, a product of personal developments, like his newly empty nest, and the roiling crises of the Trump administration, has started to ease up. “It’s getting better now,” he says, though maybe he’s joking. “My mood’s improving slightly.” In the meantime, he’s joined a CSA. Going back to the land—a little bit. “I’m getting boxes of potatoes and root vegetables and some bitter green stuff and sausages.” He’s cooking a lot of stews, makes a nice carnitas, and has gotten pretty good at Bolognese. He is, he says, getting better.
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Abstract Thought Kylie Manning’s paintings—bridging modernist and contemporary art—seem to radiate light from within. What’s their secret? BY KAREN ROBINOVITZ
A FEW MONTHS AFTER KYLIE MANNING’S debut New York show at Anonymous gallery, an exhibit that received much buzz and instantly sold out, I was sitting in a Pace Gallery viewing room. Samanthe Rubell, the gallery’s senior director, was FaceTiming me from an artist’s studio. But I couldn’t pay attention to what she was saying, because Manning’s ethereal paintings were distracting me. “What is that work in the background?” I asked. Manning’s work contains a poetic intellect, achieved through gestural abstractions of androgynous figures using pure powdered pigments. She thinks of her bodies of work like a family. When painting, she often references her personal photographs from the 1980s—“not out of nostalgia,” the artist says, “but because it is a massive image bank that usually consists of large groups of people wrangled like wet cats to document a moment. The compositions in my works often require large groups of figurative implications. It is a natural and personal starting place.” Growing up between Alaska and Mexico, Manning often worked as a commercial fisher, which is where she formed an intense relationship with nature. Indeed, there is a decidedly aquatic flow to her brushstrokes. Her parents were art teachers too. Sitting in the back of her parents’ classes, painting a nude model, was the norm. While she paints with the sophistication of someone decades older than her 30-something self, Manning is only in the early stages of a burgeoning career. Her work is already in several collections, including at the ICA Miami and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. She has a rigorous process that involves stretching the canvas, sizing with rabbit skin glue, spreading oil ground by knife and sanding down multiple layers. Her path to completing a work is philosophical and a priori, which makes sense, since she studied philosophy at Mount Holyoke before getting a master’s degree from New York Academy of Art.
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“There are no sketches or predetermined compositions,” she says. “I want to figure it out with and in front of the viewer, so that they can read how the piece was formed.” She uses pure pigments such as safflower oil. “While this is wet, I take a rag and begin to pull the composition out by wiping and ripping away the saturation,” she continues. Each work is found or born from within the piece itself. Her marks on canvas are explosive, energetic, yet refined and elegant. Her oeuvre is contemporary but has the qualities of historic abstraction and impressionism. “My entire life is focused on visual analysis so there is always a faint residue of someone I was reading about or looking at,” she says. Manning’s menagerie of influences currently consists of ’60s poster design, female impressionists and illustrator Rick Griffin, the famed designer of Jimi Hendrix concert posters and Surfer magazine editorials. The books in her light-drenched Brooklyn studio are a reflection of the nuances in both the artist’s work and mind—Robert Frost poems, Aristotle’s Politics and Poetics, Dutch Golden Age painter Frans Hals and Willem de Kooning. Manning often thinks about pigment history as well, describing it as “subconsciously powerful and emotive, in a way we haven’t even begun to figure out. When you use ultramarine, for example, you begin a conversation beyond time and space with every other artist that has used ultramarine.” Her goal is for pieces to feel “thin and radiant at the same time.” Like the Dutch Baroque masters, each layer of her paintings is separated with a thin wash of oil, creating a window for a lustrous, translucent effect. “It feels like the brights are both below and at the surface of the work, as if it’s glowing from within,” she says. Her almost spiritual approach is clearly captured in her timeless work. Manning’s own thoughts and feelings are apparent in each brushstroke, and it’s impossible to stare into one of her paintings without engaging in a dialogue with it.
Kylie Manning’s Piggy, 2021.
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COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND ANONYMOUS GALLERY. PHOTOGRAPHY BY SHARK SENESAC
ALAKE SHILLING
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Imaginary Friends Painter and sculptor Alake Shilling— pronounced Ah-lahkay— creates an adorable cast of creatures. They keep her (and you) company when the going gets tough.
Are Real Friends
By Charles Moore Photography by Emma Jenkins
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ALAKE SHILLING
Multimedia artist Alake Shilling in her West Coast home studio working on Star (2022). Previous spread: a detail from Space Cat (2022).
BORN AND RAISED IN LOS ANGELES, Alake Shilling spends the bulk of her workday in comfortable silence, creating peacefully in her living-room studio. The artist, born in 1993, finds inspiration in cartoons from her childhood, from Mickey Mouse and Betty Boop to the Care Bears, and her work includes a universe of recurring, made-up characters. Shilling enjoys shopping for household goods—crushed noodles and flours, exotic salts, cotton balls—and crafting premixed textures for her paintings and sculptures. For Shilling, it’s all tactile. Pivoting more and more toward sculpture, such premixing is vital, allowing the artist to build things smooth and soft and gelatinous, things others want to touch. With sculpture, the process is more improvisational. Shilling elaborates, “The clay simply tells me where it wants to go.” It often becomes a cat or a turtle or another
form of beguiled wildlife. It’s always a surprise, the clay and glaze coming together in a manner that may well seem beyond her control. Shilling maintains a rich inner life, allowing the images she conjures, eyes closed, to come to life in her work. Though she never knows what might happen, she wants those moments—epiphanies, in a sense— to translate to her canvases and sculptures. She enjoys working from home; previously, the artist leased a few studios, but she felt the process interfered with her creativity. Wes Anderson films help fuel her artistry. Those occasions where she needs a bit of background noise while she works, Shilling will play Anderson’s Rushmore, finding community in the director’s eccentric, artistic characters, enjoying the nostalgic comedy of the coming-of-age film. She hopes to communicate
a deep relatability in her work. Growing up, Shilling often felt disconnected while visiting art museums. Though she enjoyed looking at the works, most positive feelings were quickly shrouded by an overwhelming state of confusion. Therein lies the connection to her own artmaking, lively cartoon paintings living in vivid worlds, surrounded by trains and cars, thick clouds and blooming flowers. The works are reminiscent of childhood in a way that allows the viewer to understand immediately. This all feels good to Shilling, who tends to question her abilities in other areas of her life. While there are times where she grows so anxious that she hesitates to leave home, she’s confident in her artistic vision and finds solace in the sheer act of creating something beautiful. Shilling describes completing a piece as the “best feeling in the
world,” all while emphasizing that there’s nothing else like it in her life. She continues, “The feeling is indescribable. So, to reach that feeling again is what keeps me going.” Some of her latest work includes a sculpture Shilling will release with Avant Art this summer. Entitled Lady Dots (2022), the piece is the second of four sculptures in a series curated by Darren Romanelli. A cute cartoon bug with pronounced eyelashes rides in her anthropomorphic car, which shares a similar facial expression. Light blue and full of emotion, the work depicts the same enchanting, playful characters for which the artist is known. “These works are important to me,” Shilling explains. “They help me express my love of pop culture and fine art.”
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A peek at Caterpillar and Mushrooms (2022).
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ALAKE SHILLING
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YOUNG COLLECTORS 2022
Experts. Lovers. Supporters. Hobbyists. Patrons. Enjoyers. Those who seek to live with art come at the act for all different reasons. Where they overlap is in their belief in the power of art to enrich the quality of one’s life in multiple dimensions. Here, nine individuals from Venice Beach to Rome share the reasons they took the plunge and their tips on how to get into the pool.
BY KAT HERRIMAN
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Jon Gray in Los Angeles with Alfonso Gonzalez Jr.’s El Pato (2021).
JON GRAY Portrait by Zoe Chait
JON GRAY STARTED BUYING ART years before he realized where he had developed the proclivity. He had soaked it up at home, during weekend dawdles through the halls of the Studio Museum with his mother when they were all living together in Spanish Harlem. He describes his grandmother’s house papered with posters and other visual representations of Black life: “The things my grandmother collected were things she found on
125th street and put on the wall. It was just to have the ambiance, you know? To have a home surrounded by Blackness. I grew up in a revolutionary environment,” Gray says. “Art came to me.” And art won’t leave him alone. When I first heard of Gray, it was as a founder of Ghetto Gastro, an industry-disrupting food collective from the Bronx that had every gallery and art institution clamoring for a dinner. Now, Gray is an artist in residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Jon Gray of Ghetto Gastro Selects,” an exhibition he curated from Cooper Hewitt’s permanent collection, just closed in February. Gray is completely enmeshed—and yet it is still the first memories of his grandmother that drive his own collecting habits, as well as the friendships he made along the way, like with curator Larry OsseiMensah, who encouraged Gray early on to do studio visits. Or his friend Todd Merrill, who encouraged him to attend his first Art Basel Miami Beach in 2008, where he saw “30 Americans,” a life-changing show of the Rubell family collection featuring icons like Rashid Johnson, Renée Green and William Pope.L. “Seeing all of this art on the walls and the representation of Blackness, I was very inspired but also a little sad. Besides the Studio Museum, we often don’t get to see this type of representation within our homes,” Gray recalls. “That had me thinking like, ‘What can I do to be a part of the conversation?’” He jumped in hands first, the same way he did with Ghetto Gastro, by lending both money and time to practices that resonated with him. “Community is immunity,” Gray says. “People of color create a lot of value, and oftentimes the value is taken into different communities. I wanted to really support artists of color. For me, it’s not just about the object or painting or sculpture, which is probably why I’m interested in living artists.” Not just living artists, but artists who give back, like Mark Bradford and Lauren Halsey. The emphasis on what we can do in this life for each other comes up again and again. Gray is one of those individuals that can harmonize the micro and the macro. He’s not a flipper or a speculator, but instead, someone who finds the process just as important as the result, if not more so. This is why the term collector, with its colonial roots, doesn’t quite sit right with him. “Artworks have a piece of the artist in them and I’d never want to walk away with that. I like to be that additive sauce to whatever is going on,” he says. “What can the things I buy do when I’m gone? How can I serve? Is there a cohesive story that everything fits into? I think about [the art I own] as chapters or pages in a book.”
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Rocky Xu with Eric Mack’s Brand (2016).
ROCKY XU Portrait by Zoe Chait
DURING ROCKY XU’S DECADE
at Nike corporate, the globetrotting consultant spent his fun money on collectible streetwear. It turns out sneakerhead culture is a gateway drug to art. Once the thrill of the drop ran dry, the only way to get up again was to investigate those voices the fashion designers around him were always ringing for ideas and imagery. This led Xu to names like KAWS and Futura, artists in the street-to-Perrotin pipeline. The deeper Xu got into his first gallery programs, the more nuanced and committed his desire became.
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Xu replaced amassing shoes with small-run editions, and now he’s interested almost exclusively in the one-of-a-kind. I spy pieces by emerging and waitlisted artists like Genesis Belanger and Jonas Wood lurking in the background of our Zoom. Xu swears by investing in artists who you’ve met. This makes his understanding of the work more multidimensional, but then he lists exceptions, like color-field genius Sam Gilliam, a favorite right now, which suggests the rule is more mission than restriction. For Xu, community is the filter through which he operates and buys: He likes his group chats with preview PDFs, art fairs as excuses for a run-in, the half-hour studio appointment that ends with a “two-hour lunch at a favorite place just up the street.” Sidebars are always welcome. Xu pays this energy forward. Setting aside funds for small galleries is his number one tip, along with the axiom “trust your gut,” a tidbit he personally credits to his art-world confidante, the aforementioned Jon Gray, with whom he’s in constant communication. Gray is part of a matrix of friends that shape Xu’s participation and purchasing. In fact, Xu and I connected on the recommendation of curator Kyla McMillan, who has become an important interlocutor for Xu (and myself), introducing new artists into the thread and sharing expertise on what’s going on globally. Friends like Gray and McMillan, and the conversations (and sometimes parties) they foster, are paramount to how Xu assigns finance and time. When looking at work to purchase, materials and their resale value are also taken into consideration—but not worshiped. Themes, conscious and unconscious, are given plenty of elbow room. Perhaps that’s intuition speaking. “At Felix [Art Fair], I was told by several gallerists that I have a very LA collection,” Xu says. “I didn’t know what that meant at first but maybe I am starting to.” What makes him so LA though isn’t the Sayre Gomez, the Friedrich Kunath and Jonas Wood pieces, it’s his commitment to making meaning with others. The art leaders of LA have historically embraced the role of mentor, citizen, collaborator, co-conspirator. Xu only moved to Los Angeles three years ago, but his desire to make things better aligns him with the elders. I think about Lauren Halsey with her Summaeverythang Community Center, Lucy Bull’s desk gallery and the spaces that preceded them, those by Eve Fowler and Laura Owens, and Mark Bradford’s landmark Art + Practice, not to mention the brains behind my personal favorite LA outfit: Bel Ami. Wood’s poker nights even come to mind. Indeed, the city of angels has recruited another.
DANIELLE AND MATTHEW GREENBLATT Portrait by Jon Henry
WHAT I LIKE MOST
about Danielle and Matthew Greenblatt is that they only buy art they both love. In this way, their budding art collection, which already includes painters Sterling Ruby, Christina Quarles and Joseph Yaeger, serves as a living archive of their romance, and the obstacles they’ve overcome together. Matthew, who works in finance, is immunocompromised and spent more of the past decade than he’d like in hospitals. Danielle was always by his side. Therefore, mortality and its antecedents are a not so subconscious thread in the artworks they are drawn to. In fact, it was
the resonance of Rashid Johnson’s “Anxious Man” series that they credit for their collecting habit. Matthew spotted the life-affirming work in a documentary and reached out to Hauser & Wirth with a cold call. To my revelation and theirs, they were offered the piece. But they passed on sticker shock alone. “I was intimidated by the number. It was the early days,” Danielle says. Matthew adds: “That was the one that got away. I think about it almost every morning. It was a lesson that if something is a stretch you can probably find a way to pay for it.” Don’t worry, not only did they eventually buy
a Johnson work, they have three. And on top of that, their first post-lockdown date was actually a masked studio visit with Johnson, a surprise organized by Danielle for Matthew, for him to finally get to ask “all my nerdy little questions.” Talking about art with each other, friends and acquaintances takes up most of their free time, and that’s how the New York-based couple likes it. When they aren’t at their desks (Danielle owns a fine-jewelry PR company), they are winding their way through galleries and museums. “Seesaw [app] is the greatest invention ever,” Matthew says. They’ll also splurge on international trips to see an exhibition. They went to Paris for two days to catch Jean-Michel Basquiat at LVMH. As COVID concerns wane, those plans are escalating again. Seeing things in person is a critical tool for discovery, but so is Instagram, where Matthew parlays with like-minded collectors and curators as first and secondary sources for his intensive vetting. “He’s very research-oriented and I’m instinct-driven,” Danielle says. “He has the ability to balance my off-the-cuff, visceral reaction, which is great.” Matthew nods. “One of the best pieces of advice we ever got is that it’s not enough to love it,” he says. “Because you are going to love more than you can afford to [buy].” I find this funny coming from a couple whose ferocious love for each other and art is what brought the three of us together in the first place—and then I realize my mistake. Meaningful love requires action. For Danielle and Matthew this means only buying things together, which requires them to spend a lot of their time looking at art side by side. The process has encouraged them to give back to the cities that are close to them. They are starting with ICA Boston. “We met and went to school in Boston. We felt it as a place where we could maximize our impact,” Danielle explains. Economy of scale is something that Matthew and Danielle seem particularly attuned to. They approach collecting with a marathon mindset: Pacing is important, and sometimes less is more. Love alone is not enough, there has to be passion, and passion is best when shared. “It started with his grandmother taking us to shows and now it’s the other way around. We take her to everything and show her what we love and what we’re looking at and what’s happening,” Danielle says. “She’s seeing it through our eyes.” Matthew and Danielle Greenblatt with Rashid Johnson’s Untitled Broken Men (2020).
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JAMES AND KIMBERLY ELBAOR Portrait by Evan Jenkins
“THIS REALLY STARTED BECAUSE my sister [Caroline] has zero interest in interest rate curves, it turns out,” says James Elbaor, founder of investment firm Marlton LLC, with a laugh. James identifies as a hardcore finance guy; Caroline Elbaor, an independent writer and curator, does not. Art became their bridge. It was something that pulled James out of his head and something that brought Caroline down to earth. “I hate to use the word currency between us because it’s not like Caroline and I buy things together, but it is a language between us, a way for us to stay very close together. Because we’re in our mid-30s, it can be easy to get engrossed in work, in life, in kids. You lose touch with people that aren’t having that same experience, and art has been this constant for Caroline and I to rebase our relationship.” Art also became the foundation of another important relationship: James’s marriage to Kimberly Trautmann. His love of art was his secret weapon on his first few dates with the fellow financier, head of DRW Venture Capital. Armed with a list of galleries to see, assembled by Caroline, he knew that even if the date bombed, there would always be good art. Skip ahead 10 years, and the Elbaors now live in Chicago with kids and a burgeoning collection. As self-described obsessive analysts and numbers people, the couple’s tastes surprise not because of what they buy, but why. They aren’t market hawks. They don’t blue-chip hunt—instead they stay loyal to their generation (millennials), and occasionally track down pieces they saw during those early strolls through New York together. Zombie formalism is an ongoing fascination. David Ostrowski, Lucy Dodd, Garth Weiser, Israel Lund, Lucien Smith. Ditto with Oscar Murillo, whose 2014 chocolate factory exhibition at David Zwirner was one of the first exhibitions they remember seeing together. Retroactively seeking the souvenirs of young romance: What could be more personal? More
enviable? Their introverted approach also shapes the way they buy. They shy away from most fairs and boards, putting their energies instead into extensive reading (they swear by Cultured, Elephant and Frieze) and dialogues with trusted advisors. The couple enlists two separate ones, Andrew Dubow and Gabriela Palmieri, who are powerful search engines and a way to sidestep some of the politicking they encountered when peeping turned into buying. “As we began looking for certain artists, we found the cold-calling wasn’t working anymore, which was frustrating,” James explains. “Once you get to a point where you are seeking out something very specific, working with an advisor makes total sense.” At the moment they are both grooving on Jesse Mockrin from Night gallery; they also bought a Robert Nava from the LA gallery a year ago. They are open to new things as well as those from the early-to-mid-2010s. Not every acquisition has to be an agreement, but it does have to be purposeful, because they want to live with the work, and identify with that experience more than any other part of the process. The war in Ukraine has James returning to their William Macro, a piece which deals in censorship. Kimberly is caught up in the glow of the new Stephanie Hier in their dining room. “The painting is so detailed, technically excellent, and fresh,” says Kimberly. “Living with millennial female artists is important to how I think about building our collection and is something I’ve been able to share with James, broadening his aesthetic.” Pushing one another is the name of the game. “Kim and I wouldn’t even say that we’re necessarily collectors as much as we are enjoyers,” James explains. “We have gone through this journey not because something’s just interesting to us, but because we like learning and it has become a way to bring our relationship, our relationships in general, closer.”
Kimberly and James Elbaor stand alongside Lydia Blakeley’s Echo Falls (2019) and Grant Levy-Lucero’s Cheez-it (2021) and Sunset Moon (2021).
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JON NEIDICH Portrait by Roeg Cohen
BROOKE GARBER NEIDICH,
a jewelry designer and prominent member of the Whitney’s board, taught her children that to be an art patron you must be a contributor, not a consumer. So, after frequenting galas and art fairs in his early twenties, her son, Jon Neidich, knew he had to get more involved. The hospitality entrepreneur set his sights on Creative Time, whose over-the-top annual parties aligned with Neidich’s own budding interest in bringing cinematic plots back to New York nightlife. He specifically recalls a Creative Time gala in a Chinatown buffet hall where artists, socialites and dragon puppeteers were passing tequila and dancing the night away. “I remember thinking this certainly puts the fun into art,” Neidich says, cracking a smile. Neidich has a similar life-affirming effect on the projects he touches, a quality that he eventually brought to the Creative Time board (family friend Anne Pasternak insisted Neidich make a name for himself before letting him join). In 2012, Neidich opened Acme night club on Great
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Jones Street after stints managing legendary clubs like Le Bain and the Boom Boom Room. According to a recent New York Times profile, Neidich is still helping get his mother and Pasternak’s friends into the glamorous basement space when they aren’t asking to go to his new one: a plush jazz club upstairs called The Nines. At Creative Time, Neidich’s powers for bringing people together made him a central shepherd in the search for a new director when Pasternak left for the Brooklyn Museum. He knew they found their new leader when they interviewed curator Justine Ludwig. “We really needed someone who was going to be inspirational both internally and externally. Somebody who was going to be respected by artists because that’s what the organization had been founded on,” Neidich says. “But what none of us realized at the time is that Justine also has this incredible natural ability as an executive director which has been the greatest gift.” Together, they’ve made Creative Time stronger than ever with Neidich playing chairman, and are currently gearing up for their most ambitious year yet with multi-city, career-defining projects by Charles Gaines and Taryn Simon. Five years in, it is only now that Neidich is finally starting to gain perspective. “I look back at my involvement in the organization as being something that I’m the most
proud of,” he says. It’s not the only reason he continues to stick around. He likes the close contact with the artists that Creative Time affords, as Neidich continues to find living and working with art inspirational. For instance, he describes a “wholesome” Tracey Emin neon reading “Trust Yourself” hung above his door as a kind of semiotic rabbit’s foot whose sacred energy was critical during the years-long build out of The Nines, his self-confessed biggest career risk to date. “Those words almost became a mantra,” Neidich says. “There were some very sleepless nights that were involved, where I’m pacing all over the apartment and all of the sudden having that work speak to me.” For Neidich, work takes on more meaning with time. The Donald Sultan painting of smoke rings that decorated his childhood bedroom adorned the original Acme restaurant. His mother has never sold artworks and he plans to continue that legacy. “My advice is buy things that you want to live with and if you want to get involved in an organization, find one whose projects speak to you and do everything you can do,” he says, “When in doubt, write a check.”
Jon Neidich in his New York apartment.
CAIO TWOMBLY Portrait by Arianna Purgatorio
YOU WOULD THINK THAT a grandson of Cy Twombly—the canonical abstractionist—currently in the midst of building out an ambitious gallery in Florence would claim that art was his destiny, his birthright. But in school, Caio Twombly pursued other contact sports. He only made it to art later, on his own terms, and he plans to maintain them. As a collector, Twombly keeps himself on a short leash; he buys sparingly and purposefully. Ninety percent of the work is authored by artists Twombly works with at Spazio Amanita, his gallery. The common denominator? “It always feels like art that I would want to make, if I had the skill, if I had the talent and the possibility, if everything was aligned,” Twombly answers. As a grade schooler and then teenager in Switzerland and Rome, Twombly bought drawings off of classmates. “When I was a kid, I was never impressed by technical drawing. I appreciated it, of course, but [what I liked] was very instinctive for me,” Twombly says. The same applies to his first purchase: a Robert Nava painting he spied on Instagram while in New York for university. “I’d [curated] some shows before that, but I wasn’t obsessive about looking everywhere. I hadn’t had something that really touched me as much as Robert’s works did,” Twombly shares. “For me, it was so immediately obvious. There was nothing I could compare it with. I had practically no knowledge of how it worked, it was completely instinctive.” Living with Nava’s work flipped something on. Afternoons of video games gave way to more committed exhibition planning and now have blossomed into a full gallery program. My first brush with Twombly was during Frieze LA, where Amanita partnered with Young Collector List alum Jack Siebert on “I Do My Own Stunts,” featuring artists like Jenna Gribbon and Kylie Manning (page 66). The party raged all night. Amanita will maintain an international footprint with projects like this but the larger impact will surely be in Italy, where Twombly has the opportunity to create a bridge between the New York scene he knows and contemporary artists he’s meeting in Florence, Venice, Rome and beyond. “If I do shows with young artists in Florence, they have to be significant and done with care, but I also want everybody to have fun,” Twombly says. “Being in a place like Florence, you are afforded the liberty of being more emancipated from the professional and the socially constructed environments that you see. There’s going to be a paradigm shift here and I’m going to do this.”
Part of breaking the mold is creating new traditions. Amanita doesn’t limit itself to exhibition making and fairs. They host artist residencies and, in tandem with their seasonal programming, have created a parallel permanent collection that gives a sense of object permanence to a project that is otherwise infinitely flexible and open. “It’s something that artists are attracted to and it creates more of a sanctuary for what we’re trying to foster,” Twombly says. “For me, it’s a place where I can concretely see what we’re doing, a chronological narrative of our development.”
Caio Twombly in Rome with his dog, Marcel, and Robert Nava’s Traitor Joe (2018).
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Jeff Magid with Jadé Fadojutimi’s A Toast To…? and Genesis Belanger’s acquiesce (2018).
JEFF MAGID Portrait by Jon Henry
WHEN JEFF MAGID BOUGHT a Henry Taylor painting he didn’t know it was going to become a kind of reliquary of his time in Los Angeles. Magid acted on instinct, the same gut feeling that had sent the young musician westward from his East Coast roots. Someone had told Magid fate lived in Los Angeles and he went to look for it. But he unlocked something more peculiar: contemporary art. He still laughs when recounting an all-artist poker game at the behest of Slater Bradley. “At the time I would say to people, ‘Hey, this is my friend Slater Bradley,’ He’s a modern artist,’” he says. “I didn’t know the difference between modern and contemporary art.” Bradley took modernity in stride–acting as an early guardian angel by introducing Magid to names like Taylor and Charles Ray. That’s all it took. Magid fell down the rabbit hole. “One of the things that inspired me about Henry was he didn’t seem to care about hierarchy,” Magid recalls of those early days. “He welcomed everyone.” Inclusivity is a tradition Magid has sought to keep front and center in his own movement through the arts. His collection follows a payit-forward logic partially informed by his own experiences as a young artist. That is to say he recognizes the power of a vote and the tip in the scale it can be at the right moment. “I hope to be the person that stands up early on,” Magid says. “So many times, that’s one of the only things missing from a great artist getting the recognition they deserve.” Speaking to artists about the practices that lift them up and challenge them is a part of identifying the right voices to advocate for. He can cite lineages of discovery. Taylor to Noah
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Davis. Kylie Manning to Doron Langberg. Tomm ElSaieh and Diego Singh to Constanza Schaffner. Inevitably perhaps, his holdings have a distinctive West Coast twang (Taylor, Davis, Ray, Bradley), but the plot is always evolving. Magid, for instance, recently helped the Hammer Museum acquire a work by British abstract painter Jadé Fadojutimi, whom he is a strong advocate for. Facilitating these kinds of institutional purchases is something Magid makes a concerted effort to do because it can be a small but tangible part of helping institutions become more representative of the publics they serve. He sits on the Emerging Art Fund committee at MOCA LA, but has also helped the ICA Miami and Los Angeles County Museum of Art bring new works into their permanent collections. In 2022, Magid plans to take his support a step further. He’s opening his own exhibition space and artist residency in Mexico City. The broad strokes include experimental time and real estate for artists and curators alike to try out the things they haven’t done before with no market pressure on top. The main aspiration is to pilot ways of dismantling the gap between art space and street. “I hope to change the experience for those whose first impression of the art world is that it’s all about who is important,” Magid says. “I want to be part of making art inclusive.”
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Harry Hu with Anna Park, Last Call (2021).
HARRY HU Portrait by Jon Henry
THERE ARE MANY MYSTERIOUS things about Harry Hu but the most striking is his talent for turning inertia into momentum. Hanging out with Hu makes me feel like I’ve been happily subsumed into a cartoon snowball; a one-on-one inevitably expands into three or four or five and then you’re at an eight-person, two-hour lunch trying to figure out how many Uber XLs you’ll need to get everyone to a Whitney Biennial walkthrough. Will everyone be able to get in? Hu, a Whitney Museum patron, smiles: “Of course.” Meanwhile, plans for studio visits and phone number exchanges crowd the door, as one invitation opens into another. Hu’s generosity of spirit is contagious and ultimately the engine that makes it all run. Our first meeting was supposed to be a photoshoot but it bled over into an entire afternoon which would have tumbled into evening if I hadn’t needed to return to my desk. The world is Hu’s office, and this collision of friends and strangers is his preferred daily routine. Art and relationships are given the liberty to go at their own pace. It is not a 9 to 5. “We are all pieces of the art world,” Hu says. “If we got together we could see the whole map. That is why I’m always traveling. That’s why I put myself out there.” Hu lives mostly between Los Angeles, his home, and New York, where he’s moving more full time this summer. He’d been spending a week at a time in the city for months before pulling the trigger. Hu likes the energy of New York and the ease of getting to the next destination. He’s a voracious gallery goer. “I want to see everything,” he says. His friends are also increasingly in New York, including Anna Park, whose studio we crash. There’s a gigantic Vegas-themed triptych by the young Blum & Poe painter loosely based on a
casino weekend they spent with Park’s boyfriend, painter Mike Lee. This work is personal to Hu in a literal way; but everything he buys or participates in has some nugget of real connection buried inside. He likes commissions. He likes Alex Shulan at Lomex, Andrew Dubow at Ramiken and gallerist Matthew Brown. He likes The Hairy Who (at first for the joke and now the aesthetics). He only does primary markets. Hu is all in on artist’s artists. He values a laugh. He doesn’t feel connected to what everyone else has. He believes in the power of curators and institutions. Hu wants to deal in things that are complicated and truly rare, friendships included. In fact, he started a non-profit artists residency (Horizon) with a couple of friends (Jason Li and May Xue) during the pandemic and then hired one of the most prescient curators, Christopher Y. Lew (formerly of the Whitney) to lead its curatorial vision. Lew in turn picked two curators, Wassan AlKhudhairi and María Elena Ortiz, and will continue to do so annually as part of Horizon. This core group will select the four artists they plan to host during the course of a year. They started with Laurie Kang. Next is Sara Cwynar and then Phillip John Velasco Gabriel. He pauses on Gabriel. “For me, [collecting] is all about the relationship of the artist, the story of my life and how it touches me as a painting or as a sculpture, why are they doing this?” Hu tells me, continuing: “That’s why I want to get a work home, to start looking at it more, to explore and feel different things,” he says. “Like Phillip’s paintings, for example, are so visually saturated and unlike anything I’ve seen before. I look and look again. I have to have it.”
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UPCOMING VISITING ARTISTS Carlos Rolón* | April 3 - 23 Paul Mpagi Sepuya* | April 18 - May 1 Ken Gonzales-Day* | June 12 - 18 Camille Utterback* | September 4 - 17 ALSO FEATURING Deborah Anzinger | Ricky Armendariz Diedrick Brackens | Will Cotton Jordan Ann Craig | Rafael Fajardo Elliott Hundley | Maggie Jensen Autumn Knight | Calida Rawles
The Anderson Ranch Arts Center Visiting Artist Program provides space and time for artists to create work in our studios. Throughout our history, this simple mechanism has been the cornerstone of our artistic mission, and Anderson Ranch has provided hundreds of opportunities for artists to visit and complete projects within their practiced expertise, or offered assistance for artists to branch out into other media. Through the Visiting Artist Program, Anderson Ranch aims to enrich our community and maximize our facilities for the use of the artists and the creation of artwork.
* Includes a Free Public Lecture. Register for the event and receive a link to live-stream the lecture virtually or attend in person.
REGISTER AT ANDERSONRANCH.ORG Located 15 minutes from downtown Aspen, Colorado Anderson Ranch Arts Center 5263 Owl Creek Road Snowmass Village, CO 81615 970/923-3181 | info@andersonranch.org Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Visiting Artist, April 18 - May 1 Darkroom Mirror (0X5A0752), 2019, 34x51”
4. 1 8.2022 Dancing In the Womb The House that Tasha Built Not a Monolith For His Next Trick She Goes By the Trembling of Her Inner Worlds Like Fabulous Roman Candles culturedmag.com 127
By the time the gossip columnists broke the news that they were dating, actor and filmmaker Chloë Sevigny was already pregnant with gallerist Siniša Mačković’s already famous child, Vanja. And despite the paparazzi prowling their native SoHo, they managed to keep their marriage secret for an entire year. This hard-won secrecy is a testament to their joint coolness, though their low-key personalities feel out of sync with their ambitions. In 2021, Sevigny landed a role in a Luca Guadagnino film (coming up) and wrapped a major role in the murderous biopic, The Girl from Plainville (out now). Meanwhile, Mačković helped shepherd Karma gallery’s meteoric expansion. We can never know what really goes on behind closed doors— especially when it comes to prominent families—but we can dare to ask.
Dancing in the BY KAT HERRIMAN
PHOTOGRAPHY BY ROE ETHRIDGE STYLING BY BECKY AKINYODE AND HALEY WOLLENS
Chloë Sevigny and Siniša Mačkovič wear full Maison Margiela looks. Sevigny wears Miu Miu socks. Makeup by Francelle Daly. Hair by Jimmy Paul.
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WANTED TO START WITH HOW YOU TWO MET. CHLOË SEVIGNY: I was single for a while. I wouldn’t say I was really on the hunt, but I was open to trying new things. My friend Lizzi Bougatsos is an artist in the band Gang Gang Dance. She’s from Long Island and has a very funny attitude about everything. One day she was like, “There’s this boy that works at Karma and I love talking to him about art. He’s got a good sense of humor. He likes to talk shit.” She kept bringing him up for months and months. She’d told me he was younger and I was like, “Does that mean he’s too young?” She was like, “No, you have to meet him. We should go to the gallery.” SINIŠA MAČKOVIČ: We met the night of Spencer’s opening but we didn’t really speak though. CS: Spencer Sweeney, who’s a painter and one of my oldest friends, was having a show uptown [at Gagosian]. There was an afterparty at that Japanese restaurant that [Larry Gagosian] owns. I went with Lizzi and I think maybe [artist] Aurel Schmidt, who’s another one of my close friends. And Lizzi was like, “That’s the boy that I was trying to introduce you to.” Siniša and I started staring at each other. We might have talked. The details are a little blurry. SM: We locked eyes and kept looking at each other for a while. Then after that we didn’t really speak for a minute but we were asking our friends about each other [laughs]. Then we had our first date at Souen, across the street. A lunch date.
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CS: You were also here for a party one night. SM: That’s true. CS: We danced together at the Karma party. SM: We did dance but was it before or after? CS: One of your friends was like, 'Something’s going to happen with those two.' That was before. Yes, remember you told me that? Then a few nights later, it was the joint Canada and Karma gallery dinner for Christmas. I went. Siniša came down and sat across from me and just stared at me again. I was like, “Wow, this kid is bold.” I was like, “All right, I like this.” Then I was like, “I think you should ask me out on a date.” SM: That was all a preamble. CS: Then we went out on our first date. Souen. I thought, this is not going to be fun for me because… I like to be prioritized [laughs]. But the date lasted all night. He played hard to get for a little bit. I would tease him about it and he would go, “Well, I’m here now, aren’t I?” He was playing the long game or something. SM: And then one night we went to the Pyramid Club. CS: Which is our favorite thing to do together. We were once dancing at a party together before we started dating. I was dating some other boy, and I saw him outside. I think Siniša knew I was dating this other boy and he was like, “Can we see each other or hang out?” I think I kind of extracted myself from the other situation to be available. DO YOU GUYS ALL LIKE DANCING TOGETHER TOO? CS: Vanja loves to dance. He was always dancing in the womb. Siniša is a wild dancer if you’ve never seen him. HAVE Y’ALL HAD AN OCCASION TO DANCE RECENTLY? SM: We were at some house party in LA and it was like people were dancing but— CS: The music wasn’t right for dancing. SM: It felt like we were going to dance and then we didn’t and that was a bummer. CS: Remember one night we just danced on the street. One of our first dates. There was music coming out of a window, right? SM: Yes. CS: We went to Omen [a Japanese restaurant in SoHo]. I kept trying to be a high roller to seduce him. He brought me some fancy books. Early on when we were dating, he’d always bring a book, which was very charming. SM: Books are such a good present because you can really connect with somebody through it. It’s not just an object.
CS: Long story short: We went dancing one night at the Pyramid Club, now we have baby Vanja. I WAS TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHEN THE MEDIA DECIDED YOU WERE DATING. THERE WAS A PAGE SIX ARTICLE ABOUT YOU TWO MAKING OUT IN THE PARK AND THEN IT SKIPPED TO THE PREGNANCY ANNOUNCEMENT. ARTNEWS CALLED YOU THE PIONEER OF THE HOLLYWOODART WORLD CROSSOVER. CS: I’m a really indie version of Jennifer Lawrence and her art husband [laughter]. But I remember those pictures that they took. It was right around the corner. Of course, we live in SoHo and part of the perils of being over here is the paparazzi presence. I think I was even pregnant in those kissing photos, but we hadn’t announced it yet. Then we actually staged a photo because my publicist was like, “This is a way to control it. This is what all celebrities do.” We went for that. We dressed up and now, we’re both embarrassed by our effort. SM: Press is all about controlling the narrative or whatever. It’s as Hollywood as it sounds. CS: Like when Rihanna posted her [pregnancy photos] recently. The ones in the pink coat. She obviously had done the same thing. I was like, “Look, they did it too.” SM: Theirs were better. I WAS GOING TO ASK YOU SOMETHING ABOUT BEING CALLED A POWER COUPLE BUT INSTEAD I FOUND AN ARTICLE IN VOGUE CALLING YOU THE ULTIMATE COOL PARENTS. DO YOU IDENTIFY WITH THAT? SM: I think we’re a power couple actually. Cool parents—I don’t even know what that means. CS: Right. Well, I was always labeled cool, an “it girl,” yada yada. I think just by virtue of being in New York we will remain fairly “cool.” I think keeping current is really important. SM: We definitely both work in culture, whether that’s cool or not. It’s just such a funny idea being cool parents [laughs]. Were hippies cool parents? CS: At a certain point, you’re just not cool anymore, I feel like I’m not cool, but I feel like I can provide Vanja with a stable base to discover his own cool.
Sevigny wears a CDLM shirt and skirt with Miu Miu socks and Maison Margiela shoes. Jewelry by Patricia Von Musulin.
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SM: I always find it funny to think about how I grew up and who my parents are. I grew up in the suburbs and I had to find out everything for myself. I found out what kind of music I was actually into from watching films and going to shows. CS: Now is such a different time with the internet. It won’t be the same, right? SM: It’s similar. It’s a similar kind of process. CS: My dad had a very cool record collection and I had an older brother who was way cooler than me. That’s how I learned. SM: I didn’t have any of that. Vanja has all that. He lives in New York City. CS: I am a little bit nervous about that. I want Vanja to have somewhere to aspire to be. Which was our experience growing up in Connecticut. It was like, 'We want to get to the city.' Vanja’s already here. HE SEEMS REALLY SWEET, FOR NOW. CS: Yes, he seems kind-natured. He likes to share his toys with the other kids to get them to play with him. He’s also very playful and goofy and likes to make funny faces and funny noises. SM: Yes, he’s intentionally entertaining. He does that all the time. HE WANTS TO MAKE YOU LAUGH? SM: All the time. CS: It doesn’t seem serious or maudlin or anything. Thank goodness. I guess that comes when they are teenagers. Have you ever watched the Seven Up! series? NO. TELL ME. CS: It’s a very interesting documentary where they follow this group of kids from age 7, every seven years. It started in the ’60s and the filmmaker is making the case that like, 'At 7, you are who you’re going to be,' which is why the formative years are so important. By 7 you are who you’re going to be when you’re 70. I really recommend watching it. It’s terrifying to watch people age really... I FEEL LIKE KIDS SPEED UP TIME BECAUSE THEY MAKE FOR COMPELLING CLOCKS. YOU CAN SEE THEM GETTING OLDER. CS: It’s like the one thing people say: 'Oh, it happened so fast.' That’s what you hear most often, right? 'Enjoy it because you’re going to blink your eyes and they’re going to be teenagers.' SM: Even now, he’s not even 2 but it feels like it’s been four days or something like that. It’s so compressed. DID BEING A GALLERIST, AN ART-DAD, PREPARE YOU AT ALL FOR BEING A DAD-DAD? SM: No.
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Sevigny wears a full Miu Miu look with Monbouquette anklet.
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CS: You have a nurturing role at the gallery. You help artists navigate opportunities. SM: That’s what a gallery does in general, I think. CS: Right but a lot of people just think you sell art. They don’t realize what that actually means. My mom still has no idea [laughs]. SM: You can imagine [artists] like kids and gallerists like parents, in that you care about where they’re going to school or who their friends are. But I think that’s infantilizing. Because the stakes are obviously higher with a kid. They’re helpless without you for a long time. That’s why I see myself more as a partner with the artist rather than someone who holds their hand to cross the street. CHLOË, DID PLAYING A MOM ON TV HELP YOU PREPARE TO BE A PARENT? CS: My girlfriends always said that I was the most maternal of our group, but I think I was also maybe just a little more successful, able to take care of people financially a little more, and also a little more practical and sane. So that role fell on me. HOW ABOUT PLAYING A MOTHER WHO’S LOST A CHILD IN THE GIRL FROM PLAINVILLE? CS: It was very profound and emotional. Everything was right there on the surface, very easy to access as far as imagining what losing a child might feel like. SM: And Vanja was going down there with you while you were filming. CS: Sometimes. I was really missing him when he wasn’t. It was the first time I was working away and was navigating those emotions. It was pretty hectic. WHEN YOU ARE TOGETHER WHAT DO YOU TWO LIKE DOING MOST? CS: Going to bed together [both laugh]. DOING NOTHING? SM: When we can, yes. CS: Yes. We had Vanja in bed with us for a long time because we liked all being in the bed together. SM: Yes, it’s very sweet. CS: He also loves to have us cuddle with him and
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tickle him. He’s very into dragging us to the bed for cuddle sessions. We used to really like going out with him till he started walking and then he didn’t want to be contained. We’re hoping that’s going to pass. SM: We would take him to dinner and stuff like that. CS: He loves Omen. It will make us sound like total assholes, but the ladies there love him and he loves all the little plates. We’re going to start bringing him out again. SM: We also like walking around. On weekends, we don’t really do activities or anything like that. We just walk. CS: And we like being on the beach. That’s one of our favorite activities. We were trying to make it a thing to go to Provincetown every summer. Vanja’s first summer we went. The second summer, I got a job in Savannah so we had to cancel our plans. Those were some of the nicest days we’ve had with the baby. He also loves going in the water. SM: We were in Jamaica for a little vacation in January. He was just running all over the whole resort. We didn’t get into a car for a week. He had the run of the place. DO THE THREE OF YOU EVER SEE ART EXHIBITIONS TOGETHER? CS: Sometimes. I wanted to see that puppet show at the Museum of the City of New York and that Goodnight Moon show. They made a room that looked like a book. SM: That seems weird. CS: It still probably would have been charming. Could have been very like, Alex Da Corte. You’d never stick it out [laughs]. YOU BOTH HAVE SPENT YOUR LIVES WORKING WITH ARTISTS. WHAT ARE THE UPSIDES AND THE DOWNSIDES TO THAT DEMOGRAPHIC? SM: I like working with artists even if they’re difficult to work with, whatever “difficult” might mean. They do have a singular kind of vision, and it’s fun to be a part of that. CS: When working with an artist there is a level of risk you have to be willing to take on. I was probably into the worst Werner Herzog and Woody Allen movies. SM: I think also with directors, it’s very different because directors are much more world-creating. CS: Artists can be too. SM: Yes, for sure, but each film is a very elaborate world, whereas an artist’s practice just kind of keeps going. I WAS THINKING ABOUT HOW THE PHRASES “ARTIST’S ARTIST” AND “CULT FILMMAKER” END UP IN THE SAME SOUP OR SOMETHING. CS: Right. Or auteur. Because they seem to be more pure of heart or not wavering in their… I don’t know, who’s really an artist’s artist? I have
a lot of artist friends and they’re all in their own worlds. I guess I would consider a lot of my friends to be artists’ artists. I would also consider certain filmmakers to be that, but I feel like there’s also ways to exist within a bigger system and still do that. Like the Coen brothers, or David Fincher. He doesn’t even write his own movies. There’s a lineage of that in film. Film is so collaborative but I feel like certain filmmakers give more credit to other people’s contributions than maybe fine artists do. WHAT’S IT LIKE INVITING VANJA, A NEW CAST MEMBER WITH HIS OWN STORYLINE INTO YOUR PICTURE? CS: When I was younger I was like, “Do I want a baby or do I want a family?” And the truth is I wanted someone who would be here for me [laughs]. I have some friends who have kids that they are really close to, like Mary and Mario Sorrenti and Rita Ackermann—they’re very much in their kids’ lives. SM: Because the kids still probably live with them. CS: Well, that’s a good thing. If we can make a bigger apartment, then it’s more appealing. I FEEL LIKE THIS WHOLE APARTMENT MAKES NEW YORK LOOK MORE LIKE A RICHARD SCARRY BOOK. CM: Oh, my God. Those are our favorites. We do a lot of Busy, Busy Town. Vanja calls it “town.” I Am a Bunny is one of my favorites. I really want to get I Am a Mouse. SPEAKING OF OUR SURROUNDINGS: WHAT WAS IT LIKE COMBINING YOUR ART COLLECTIONS? FROM SNOOPING I KNEW CHLOË HAD A DAMIEN ECHOLS WORK AND A KAREN KILIMNIK. CS: We haven’t really. There aren’t that many walls in this apartment. And I like space. SM: I’ve brought a few things over, like Ann Craven and a Mark Flood. CS: He really wants to get another apartment, so we can have a library. That will be nice. SM: I have a lot of books too. MY BOYFRIEND AND I ARE TRYING TO KEEP OUR BEDROOM TO JUST A CRUCIFIX ARTWORK BY OUR FRIEND ELIZABETH ENGLANDER AND A BED. CS: I would like to live minimally, but we have this small child… SM: Yes. I can’t believe we can even fit all the stuff. It just keeps going. He has his own room now. He’s going to keep growing.
Sevigny wears a Miu Miu shirt, belt, shoes and socks with Vaquera shorts and Monbouquette earrings. Lighting design by Christian Larsen. Lighting assistance by Sam Kettell. Styling assistance by DeVanté Rollins.
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The second season of Natasha Lyonne’s acclaimed time traveling show, Russian Doll, premieres April 20. It achieves what most second seasons don’t—it got better, richer, more expansive. What’s also impressive is that the series is only one more plank in a much larger barn that the actor, director and now showrunner is building. Lyonne is using her forties to redefine her relationship to public opinion. Her vision of the ideal future looks remarkably close to her present: a family of collaborators driven solely by the desire to help each other realize the depths of their creative potential. Here, in conversation with her comedy soulmate and now fellow director Greta Lee, Lyonne unpacks why personal stakes make Russian Doll special, and what the smallest doll at the show’s heart teases about her larger hopes for Animal Pictures, her production company with Maya Rudolph and Danielle Renfrew Behrens.
The House That Tasha Built
PHOTOGRAPHY BY ELLEN VON UNWERTH STYLING BY CRISTINA EHRLICH
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Greta Lee: This has been so many years in the making. TV always takes a long time, but this, in particular, is a little different because of COVID. It really is atypical to have that many years between getting to revisit a story in a world and character. Was that something that you were thinking about?
NATASHA LYONNE: Well, as you know, my main hobby is thinking about all the things, and I’m always just impressed that I get paid to do it. I sit and I think about all the permutations and iterations, and in general, the arrow of time, the block universe [the theory that past and present exists simultaneously]. I wonder about these questions all the time. What is it? What was meant to be? What else could have been in a show about parallel universes and multiverses and simulations? What other final forms could Russian Doll season two have taken, depending on a million different factors? Chloë [Sevigny] was eight months pregnant. Here’s my best friend, my sister and the whole world. The big event is that she’s pregnant, and, I’m in my tiny universe being like, “Don’t worry. I’ve written it into the season.” GL: Is that what happened? NL: Yes, Chloë was pregnant, which was like, on a human/sister level, such a huge event. My best friend’s first baby. That’s as close as I’m going to get to being an aunt in this life. Anyway, then all of a sudden here comes COVID, now it becomes a much greater event, the terror of the first-time mom giving birth during COVID. GL: Oh my God, I didn’t know that. NL: And then it was the strange weirdness; we’re now all in some whole separate microcosm of obsession. We talked so much about figuring out things that were in the realm outside of our control, and we banded together. It felt to me very old-fashioned, almost like a ’70s movie, or an art project we were doing together because we would have these human tethers going where, collectively, we were all trying to reconcile the events of the world around us, which were so much greater than anything we had the personal power to control, which is so counterintuitive when running a physical production. Of course, on a very core level, what it meant was that the scripts kept shifting to make
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sense. Originally, Chloë’s part was crafted very lean because she was only going to be able to shoot with us for like three days. But by the time we were filming she had a 1-year-old and could shoot more. In other words, the world kept expanding and contracting, and almost revealing what it actually wanted to be. I remember with you, you were just like, “No, I’m going to Budapest.” I was like, “Really, you think it’s possible?” GL: I knew. I was like, “I’ll see you there,” and you were like, “There’s no way.” I know it sounded like a pipe dream at certain points, but it’s wild. It was very meta in that way. I think of you as the premier thinker of our industry, Tash. I want to know specifically what was in your head aside from all of these different strings and the things that you kept having to calibrate and shift accordingly for. I remember us talking a Viktor Frankl book, and I remember talking about Stephen Hawking. NL: In season two, we brought in The Order of Time, this book by Carlo Rovelli, an Italian theoretical physicist. The book is about the nature of time. It suggests that there’s essentially no evidence to support the idea that we’re experiencing time correctly—rather, it’s just subjectively experienced according to a set of agreed-upon principles. There’s a possibility that all moments are happening all the time. The first episode is called “Nowhen,” meaning, essentially, a time without time. I have no ambition to be a science authority but I would just say that, as a storyteller, I do have life experience in which I feel like I can intuitively grasp a lot of the concepts that are being proposed in books like Rovelli’s, and use them as jumping-off points for a spiritual science-fiction that meditates on deeper existential questions. I actually wanted to talk about Minor Feelings, if you’re open to it, because I think it’s so interesting that you, me and Michaela Coel—with her show I May Destroy You—are part of this new genre
that’s happening. I’m not afraid to claim that space anymore. I’m definitely my own flavor. Meaning if you like it or you don’t, it’s none of my business at this point in my life, but it’s okay for me to acknowledge that I am my own fucking thing, and to say that I know for a fact you and Michaela Coel are too. We’re intellectuals, frankly, and I think that it’s interesting that we’re exploring trauma and the way that we want to go about that storytelling is so specific. What I’m saying is that this idea of an arrow of time, or a block universe in which all moments are being experienced—yes, that’s an interesting scientific concept, but in practical application, what that means is that I can walk into a room and the air can take me back to my childhood, and I have the wherewithal and the maturity and the therapy to know that I might be experiencing this moment incorrectly. I am interested in how we experience time as this fluid thing, and yet we’re living in this world where there’s an expectation to keep pressing forward despite those feelings that I believe are somewhat universal. GL: One of the things I’m looking forward to is seeing how people respond to the scope of Russian Doll. There are parts of it that are like sci-fi, there are parts of it that are historical narrative, all the while you are tackling these very humanistic themes that are true to everyone. It’s incredible for me to watch a season and feel like, ‘Wow, Tasha is tackling identity.’ There are so many different ways for all of us, as different as we are, to investigate those questions: who are we, where do we come from? Why the fuck are we the way that we are? I love that with this season, you were able to think about time and space without being zeitgeisty. Your universe doesn’t feel small, it feels super expansive. NL: My hope with Russian Doll is that with each season we’d make it to the smaller doll, we would get closer to the heart of the matter. It is a search for the truth. Season one is so much about mortality. The setup is that she’s having this real midlife crisis, she’s turning 40, and, obviously, the character borrows so much from Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, and this sort of shtick. Then [this season], it’s like, ok, I’ve stopped dying. I’ve figured out how to go from being a defiant nihilist who’s disconnected from finding human connection and a reason to live—but can I now actually make sense of my life? GL: I remember the first time you were explaining the idea of Russian dolls. This idea that you are getting closer and closer. What’s the smallest doll for you? NL: That is a big question. I always think about what it would feel like to be truly free, walking through life unencumbered by expectation or this
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.
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Lyonne wears a Schiaparelli bra and catsuit, Akila sunglasses, Sylvie Corbelin earrings and ring and a Kallati ring.
“It’s okay for me to acknowledge that I am my own fucking thing.” —Natasha Lyonne
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sense of a life unlived because, inevitably, it is a collective experience that we’re in. We’ve set up all these tent poles and rules for what it means to have a meaningful life. Then we’re always beating ourselves up for falling short. As if it’s about winning and losing; my sense is that this whole idea is warped, and it’s the source of so much suffering. But I don’t really know what the endgame is. I’m always amazed Netflix and Universal give me money to ask this team of brilliant women to try anyway. We just sit there and essentially think together and read all these books. I don’t know that we’re ever going to crack that littlest doll, but that struggle is at the heart of the question. GL: This season, those women, you got Alice Silverman. Who else? NL: It’s Alice Silverman from season 1 and [writer] Cirocco Dunlap from season 1. [Producer] Regina Corrado, who’s incredible. Alison McDonald, who’s awesome. [Producer] Alice Ju, she’s just extraordinarily brilliant. It’s just ridiculous. She’s a philosophy major, so she just makes me so happy. She’s such a radical thinker and really gets it. [Producer] Zakiyyah Alexander, who’s awesome and now showrunning Grown-ish with Yara Shahidi. Lizzie Rose, who is our writer’s assistant, is also one of Chloë’s best friends. It’s a radical group of women. Amy Poehler is, of course, a co-creator of the show, so she’s always weighing in, having these very long conversations. Lily Burns, who’s an EP on the show, always really gets in there with scripts and ideas, and is always bringing up string theory. [Actor and producer] Tami Sagher, [actor] Jocelyn Bioh and [writer] Flora Birnbaum are the ladies who didn’t participate in the season. Jocelyn, for example, who’s now just this wildly acclaimed playwright—her fiancé, Austin, is the doctor in the very first scene, who opens the door with, “Easy on the Oedipus, I just woke up.” Paige [Gilbert] is the nurse that I get into it with in the first scene in the waiting room. She was one of the stars of Jocelyn’s play School Girls. It stays pretty tight-knit, this core group. Remember, I would be calling you to just ask you your opinion about the ideas in the show, not only your character. GL: I remember some of those. NL: I am almost spooked to make something without you, directorially. I’m always just like, “Greta, can you be in this?” “Greta, will you do this?” I like it that way. It makes it feel personal. GL: Now I’m thinking about it, I am in awe, the whole cast, literally no self-takes. This is like your troop of people. It’s amazing to arrive at that. What’s more important than that, to have your people? NL: I like that it makes it feel very homegrown in a way. I’m always so moved by you, in particular. You and [actor] Charlie [Barnett], [actor] Rebecca [Henderson] and [actor] Liz Ashley. This season you
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would just look at me with this light in your eyes and be like, “Yes. Sure. Let’s do it.” GL: Natasha, because we love you. NL: You’re going to make me cry. GL: It’s not the point to make you cry. You shouldn’t be crying, but it’s true. It’s because we love you. That’s what the tether is. NL: I love you guys. In some ways that is the littlest fucking Russian doll. Like when you and me are on the motorcycle with the sidecar in Budapest at 4 a.m. and we’re trying to get our goggles off and you’re just doing little Greta bits. That for me is where it gets very moving. Another example is seeing Chloë, who’s my safest person in the world. She embodies a mother who’s ultimately the biggest head-trip relationship of my life, and without a head-trip, she’s externalizing it in her own take on-screen. GL: It’s that act of love. NL: Chloë’s scent is so familiar to me as a source of comfort and safety over the past 25 years. I’m just watching her on a screen that’s definitely not scratch and sniff, and yet I’m in the editing room having these emotional, silent tears running down my face because I’m just like, “Look at fucking Chloë showing up in this way.” GL: It was also so amazing for us to watch you. You’re the lead actor and you’re directing and you’re showrunning, and to watch you do that is bonkers. It’s just like, “Wow.” It’s mind-blowing. Did you like it? NL: I loved it. It’s the fine artist in me that wants to make the exact frame, the exact way. And then I’m living inside of it so completely that all of the things that I need to do as an actor become much more accessible. I’m not performing for anyone at that point. There’s nobody to say, “Good job,” “bad job.” It’s more like we’re collectively living inside of the show together. GL: I love shooting like that so much. That outside/ inside shit, it can be so useful and effective to do that because you have your director’s hat on and you’re the lead. It’s a shortcut. NL: Well, it’s why I was always so overwhelmed by you and [actor] Charlie [Barnett], and [actor] Rebecca [Henderson], and [actor] Liz [Ashley]. You guys are so fucking good in those parts that it’s like you own them now. I always have such John Cassavetes, Spike Lee fantasies. It just felt like we were this inner circle, and that we are now the holders of this world that we’ve created together. I just like that feeling. There’s something to that. We’re just Maxine and Nadia passing the joint the way they would. It’s funny that we are not these characters. GL: I’ve joked that it’s something about your face, your voice combined with mine. There’s just something about you that always feels like home for me
as a performer. Also, your face demands that I have to be present with you. There’s no cheating. Then, when we are, it’s flying. It’s cruising. It’s everything that an actor would want. NL: What makes Russian Doll so specific, is that it’s very high-concept, but at its core, it’s such a human show. We’re really all trying to say something together, even when we don’t quite know what it is. It is something about chosen family and center-staging characters who are otherwise relegated to the outside. I get so moved by the thing, I can’t even tell you. When we finished, we went to dinner and I started crying at that dinner because it was finally over. Everybody had stuck with it. Nobody let go and they’d kept trying to make it better the whole time through; we just kept writing and then we kept storyboarding. I love the work in that way. GL: Those are your tethers of love. They wouldn’t have that much care for what they did and their work if it wasn’t tethered to you. I really hope that you can feel that and accept that and receive all of that, all those tethers to you. What’s it like now that it is over? NL: It’s pretty overwhelming. I play a lot of chess on my phone, probably four hours a day of just disappearing into some other space. GL: That’s probably too many hours. I feel compelled to say that as a friend, but okay, go on. NL: No, it’s really weird. We’ve agreed upon phones being normal even though they’re clearly insane. I’m like, ‘Oh, I’ll just sit here quietly with this little chess game, over and over in a loop, and try to just process what it is to be a person.’ This is very much round two at showbiz for me. I know that there is no happiness or real settled feeling to be had. Working hard to get it as good as you can is the happy place. I think that is where the chess habit came from. GL: Well, what’s next for Tash? NL: It seems like my journey is not to have a family in a traditional sense. I’m so in love with this company that I have with Maya [Rudolph] and Danielle [Renfrew]. I’m starting to see the flowers bloom from the seeds we planted when we started the company. We had a premiere for our first documentary called Sirens, which is about this Middle Eastern all-female heavy metal band. They’re fucking rad. The documentary went to Sundance, and Sundance, obviously, didn’t happen because of COVID, so we had this get-together in Echo Park. The filmmakers were there and so were the ladies from the band. So was Cirocco and Sammi Cohen, who’s the director of our first feature and hers, called Crush. It’s like a queer, high school rom-com, and it’s fucking great. It’s so sweet and moving. All these ladies were there together, and Danielle and I were just sitting there like, ‘Holy shit, this is Animal Pictures.’ All of these women doing their
Lyonne wears an Oscar de la Renta dress, Gucci shoes and sunglasses, Saint Laurent necklace from Albright Fashion Library LA, Sylvie Corbelin ring (snake), Pasquale Bruni ring (flower) and Anita Ko band and V rings. Photography assistance by Clara Rea. Styling assistance by Bridget Blacksten and Julia Urneda.
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“It’s a team sport. In this new era of inside-out, we get to have fucking autonomy because it’s our game. We’re the architects.” —Natasha Lyonne first major projects, they’re brilliant, and they’re all so different. That’s been very emotional for me, to watch it extend outwards. GL: I just realized that one of the very first times I ever laid eyes on you in person was in New York City at an audition in 2013 or 2012. I remember it was at one of the big networks, somewhere like in Midtown. We had progressed enough in our careers that it wasn’t a full cattle-call scenario, but there was a bunch of us. You walked in with like a baseball cap, and I couldn’t see who you were at first. You were talking and shooting the shit with everybody. You had a paperback book, and I can’t remember what paperback it was, but this book looked like you had been sleeping with it and eating with it and carrying this book with you everywhere you went. NL: I do love reading a book and keeping it in my back pocket. GL: I think that’s when I first was like, ‘That’s what I’m about.’ [chuckles]. I don’t know what it is, but that image of you, I still have it in my head and in my heart. To me, no matter what happens, you are still that person. That’s my guy forever. I was going to ask you where you see yourself in 10 years, but I don’t even really need to. I know. I see it. Natasha, for president. NL: President of fucking no man’s land. I like the idea of us winning together if that makes sense. Something really shifted in me. Getting behind the scenes was the greatest thing I ever did. I’m so grateful that I was supported in doing that. It was like, all of a sudden, everything made sense. Because we’re told so many things as women. The competition of the actress construct, it’s so much about it being either me or you. It’s never us together. GL: Right. NL: All of a sudden, there is this shift, which is, you winning means I’m winning. The whole game
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changed and really opened up for me, in terms of reconceiving how I saw everything. You want to keep the good guys close because I’ve had these patches where I’m totally irrelevant, unhireable, nobody cares. It’s like, ‘No, you fucking better be friends with Greta so she can give you a job so you can keep your SAG insurance.’ It’s a team sport. In this new era of inside-out, we get to have fucking autonomy because it’s our game. We’re the architects. I don’t want to live in their house, I want us to build the house, and we each get fucking rooms in our house, and we go visit each other in our rooms. That gives me joy, not anxiety. It’s not as lonely. I’m so excited for your upcoming show Minor Feelings that you’re adapting from this great memoir by Cathy Park Hong because it’s fascinating to me that we’re all asking similar questions about our own moment in time, which is: what is this feeling? And is it not the epigenetic footprint that’s mapped on each of us, whether we like it or not? Are you in the midst of writing? GL: I am, I’m deep in it. I really can’t say much right now, other than it’s going great and it’s really frightening work. NL: I’m so thankful to be out of that space right now, and so proud of you for being in it.
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NOT A MONO-
THE ASIAN DIASPORA—AN INCREDIBLY DIVERSE CATEGORY OF PEOPLE— IS BEING GIVEN MORE AGENCY AND REPRESENTATION IN LUXURY FASHION, AN INDUSTRY THAT HAS HISTORICALLY MARGINALIZED ANYONE NOT WHITE.
LITH
BY LISA KWON PHOTOGRAPHY BY JESSE JENKINS STYLING BY STUDIO & ALL ACCESSORIES AND CLOTHING BY LOUIS VUITTON 146 culturedmag.com
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Models: Xue Huizi, Seohyun Kim and Lian Koster. Makeup by Celia Burton. Hair by Hiroshi Matsushita. Nails by Sasha Goddard. Set design by Sean Thomson. Casting by Timoer Nulens.
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WHAT ONCE WAS FALLOW
is now flowering: In 2022, more of the Asian diaspora find themselves standing on greater ground to share their perspectives about their respective fields. Much of the collective strife— encapsulated in headlines and viral videos of hate crimes—has opened up a dialogue to define the multifacetedness of being Asian, Asian American, or an Asian in America, all of which consist of different classes, languages and histories. To celebrate one’s Asian background is to reject all the conventions that suggest Asianness is a monolithic identity, and to use the spaces that are now given to celebrate not just survival, but flourishing. This is true in luxury fashion as well, an industry that was once dominated by whiteness. There wasn’t always such plentiful space. Even up until the 2010s, fashion’s way of heralding Asians was by titling them the “first” of a certain descent to walk a runway, open a show or be named creative director for a luxury house. There was, apparently, scant incentive to provide anything more. In 2016, The Fashion Spot released a diversity report stating that, out of 236 spring print campaigns, approximately eight percent of the models were Black, four percent were Asian and four percent were Latino. But since the peak of supermodels like Kimora Lee Simmons, Ling Tan and Jihae, an era when Asian household names were few and far between,
photographers, designers, and labor forces alike have advocated for a changing of the guard. In the last decade, the fashion world has gradually seen new leadership hires at magazines, the creation of new talent agencies and funding for designers on the rise. The industry began to look more representative of its consumers and enthusiasts. The Asian diaspora has shapeshifted in fashion since the ’70s to advance their work and creativity. Thus, it feels right to see AAPI supermodels wearing pieces like those in Louis Vuitton’s spring and summer 2022 line, a season inspired, says creative director Nicolas Ghesquière, by the idea of vampires traveling through the ages and adapting to dress codes of those eras. Asians have always done this; from Chinese garment workers changing New York labor history to artists using technology to innovate on garment techniques such as pleating, they have floated through fashion’s constructs of time and space to assert themselves as vanguards in the industry. In May 2021, Washington Post Magazine’s Robin Givhan profiled several up-and-coming models about representing themselves in a modeling world that is starting to empower people of color. Titled “We Are All Models Now,” the report ends with a powerful insight: “Everything about modeling today is a political act. Sometimes it’s a laborious protest of rigid tradition [...]. But often, it’s simply a joyful declaration that we all should be able to participate in the fizzy aspects of life.” The gestalt of the fashion industry would be devoid of such joy if it weren’t for those behind the scenes, whose creative talents and voices have long been ready for the runway.
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For
Artist Derek Fordjour at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles with his painting Birth of Showtime (2022).
His Next
Artist DEREK FORDJOUR will astound and amaze as he explores the history of Black magicians and other iconic figures in a multisensory takeover at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles.
Trick BY TRAVIS DIEHL
PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRANDON HICKS
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tightrope artist Richard Potter, the figure is flocked by songbirds on the wire. The figures thus honored are a bit like Fordjour himself, performing maniac feats with materials. He makes paintings with a signature way of layering painted cardboard, aluminum foil and the pale pink newsprint of the Financial Times. This last layer is the “skin” of rationality, racial pun intended, a newspaper for financiers—“traders,” no less, although slaves aren’t indexed there—pointedly painted beyond recognition. Fordjour sometimes tears through the surface into bright pockets of pigment beneath, the raw color beaming through like light. Past series have explored other aspects of the Black experience— churchgoing, for example, including gospel choirs and hardwood benches but also public funerals of the likes of George Floyd, whose gold-plated coffin Fordjour depicted in 2020. The work in “Magic, Mystery & Legerdemain” continues that blend of virtuosity, meanness, ambition, and worldliness; heaven and earth, sky and street. In other words, the show surveys the outsized role of Black Americans in popular entertainment. The showgirl handing out tokens in the vestibule is echoed a dozen times by the women dressing
backstage in Twelve Gates, which Fordjour says reframes the trope that Black women are magical. Another fanciful history painting, Jazzland, stages the evolution of what many consider the only sui generis American art form, composed by former slaves on the masters’ instruments. Instead of recapping this pat narrative, Fordjour’s painting poses it as a question. Then there’s Birth of Showtime, a portrait of L.A. Laker Magic Johnson. Raised in the citrusless Midwest and newly arrived in the Southland, the star guard reaches in awe for a ripe orange on the bough, holding it airborne, palming it like a tiny basketball. For Fordjour, the moment is an allegory of when sport became spectacle. Johnson was the first of many Black basketball stars promoted as a rival to the white Larry Bird. Fordjour renders the ornament and grill of the waiting Rolls-Royce in sparkling tin foil against posterboard-orange shadows. Fordjour also understands the bittersweet wages of fame. A small bust of a Tuskegee Airman in a leather helmet, one of the Black pilots in the famous squadron fighting for the United States in World War II, resembles a football player of the era. The Kordansky show features three sculptures
RIGHT AND BELOW LEFT: PHOTO BY JEFF MCLANE
You can’t see Derek Fordjour’s show at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles without a token— at least, not without passing through a curving, chandeliered entryway, wallpapered with recent editions of the Financial Times (Ukraine, Putin, grain and gas in the headlines) staffed by a twentiethcentury showgirl, who will press a token into your hand. What awaits behind the turnstile and curtain, though, is not the blockbuster movie magic native to Hollywood; more like the timeless magic of vaudeville and carnival. But that’s not quite it, either—Fordjour’s show crackles with something like the astounding, prosaic illusionism of Henry “Box” Brown, a former slave who shipped himself to freedom via the Postal Service. “Box” Brown features in Fordjour’s Cargo, one of a series of new paintings that pay tribute to historic Black magicians of all stripes. Many made their careers not without certain professional sleight of hand. Fordjour nods to the proclivity of Black performers for wearing turbans in the South, for instance, to pass as Middle Eastern, as J. Hartford Armstrong does in the painting Float, depicted pulling a hoop around the levitating body of his daughter Ellen. In Birdman, a portrait of famous magician and
Fordjour with Cotillion (2022). Below and left: Installation views of Birdman (2022) in “Derek Fordjour: Magic, Mystery & Legerdemain” at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles.
“The figures thus honored are a bit like Fordjour himself, performing maniac feats with simple materials.” that amalgamate casts of the bust, stacked into a sort of trophy and plated in copper, nickel or gold like a budget parody of the winners’ podium. Their titles, respectively, dole out bitter advice: Futile Ambition; Never Go Alone; Don’t Bite the Hand. These sculptures are on view alongside others that sever and recombine the codes of Black athletic prowess—stacks of three balls balanced on disembodied knees, larger coal-black portrait busts burdened with vintage medals. They’re in a long, narrow side gallery, around the corner from the main space, facing a 35-foot-long painting of a Carnival procession through Salvador, Brazil. In other words, the juxtaposition of one more or less exploitative form of Black performance with a more spiritualized suspension of disbelief, the long train of the African diaspora reveling on its own terms. To get here, though, visitors pass through a final bit of theatricality: the white cube transmuted into a wood-paneled church basement, then decked out into a vaudeville theater, complete with rippling velvet curtains and the soft, final clinking of admission tokens—a stage upon which would play the abridged history of Black spectacle in the United States. Once a day during gallery hours, L.A.-based magician Kenrick “ICE” McDonald performs as Benjamin Rucker, aka Black Herman, a former assistant and student to a lineage of European illusionists who, along with their tricks, adopted their family name.
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SHE GOES BY THE TREMBLING OF HER INNER WORLDS THE SPIRITUAL FORCE OF ARTIST VANESSA GERMAN’S “POWER FIGURES” REFUSES TO BE ARTICULATED. AHEAD OF GERMAN’S SOLO NEW YORK PRESENTATION WITH KASMIN, CAMILLE BACON TAKES A DEEP DIVE. BY CAMILLE BACON PORTRAIT BY JON HENRY
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vanessa german photographed at Temple University campus where she is an artist mentor for “Disclosure: The Whiteness of Glass,” a project initiated by Related Tactics.
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n one of her poems, artist vanessa german writes, “I come to do a violence to the lie.” The lie, which german seeks to destroy with her sculptures, performances and community activism, is the perceived separation of people, places, and things. This is evidenced by projects such as “Love Front Porch,” where she paints and sculpts on her home’s porch and invites neighborhood kids to find refuge there. So, this poetic “violence” is in fact a generous reminder of what we might call the law of oneness: a primordial truth that all living entities, seen or unseen, are intrinsically connected. In allowing the unnamable dimensions of being, such as ancestral wisdom, to guide her, german’s work rescues our collective psyche from the white supremacist myth that we, as humans, can separate and control the happenings of our everyday lives. In particular, german’s “power figures,” sculptures of beings whose bodies are composed of a variety of found objects, point at the artist’s capacity to move through the world as an instrument of social healing. Crediting her practice for restoring her will to live, german began making artwork as a recuperative action after leaving a terrible job. Over a six-month period, she took her dog out on long strolls, carrying bags with her to collect objects found along the way. Further reflecting on the meditative nature of this time, german says, “My mind changes when I’m looking for stuff. Things open up in a way and I’m always looking for things that I’ve never seen before, which invites another open door.” She describes these moments of gathering as an “incremental turning-up of the volume of something inside of myself,” which helped her resensitize her body and open it to feeling again. “Finding a certain thing on the ground let me know that life was possible,” she says.
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Trans Sister Power Figure, 2021.
Left (and detail below): Endurance is a love story, 2016. Right: The Dreamer: Power figure into the joy of Dreaming, 2021.
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After accumulating a sizable volume of wood from her walks, she began stacking it in her basement until she arrived at a composition that, as she puts it, “felt so right.” She then asked herself what about it electrified her, and spent time listening for answers. This sort of spiritual inquiry made her feel excited to wake up in the morning again, recalling the infinite wisdom of Audre Lorde, whose essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” reminds us that our sense of what “feels right” is a key ingredient in building a habitable life. To this end, german muses, “The magic of stacking wood—that’s how I found a place to be.” From here, the artist brought additional degrees of complexity to her “power figures” by adorning them with other objects she found on her strolls, including shards of glass, bottles, charms, fabric, shells and mirrors. While these figures assume shapes that resemble the human form, they are not meant to represent specific individuals. Rather, german is interested in crafting an energetic impulse that affects the viewer, even if their particular meanings or purposes cannot be discerned. In the past, german has remarked that these figures are meant to serve as protectors of Black people against violence, and as celebrations of freedom and unbridled creativity. When we spoke, german noted that despite there being a void of human guidance in her life, to teach her she could “shape a life that I can live inside of by my own rules,” she intuitively knew from a young age that aliveness is a sacred experience, one to be molded and honored at one’s own volition. Considering german’s development—like everyone’s—was largely shaped by the material and ideological aftermath of the transatlantic slave trade, which seduces Black women into forgetting our sanctity and autonomy, her dual commitments to “working through the objects and materials I have” and to “always give myself the best options,” become all the more salient. For the artist, the “power figures” exist as “active technologies of the soul that touch the vast history that exists in the spiral of our DNA.” german’s sculptures do not demand that we “figure them out” and, instead, beckon us towards a reversal of the belief that everything exists to be known or understood. In their presence, we are encouraged to remove the intellectual burden of defining connections, and to accept that there are things which lie beyond our capacity to name, define and categorize. Ultimately, german’s work reminds us to be diligent students of the nonphysical realm, a space that can be deeply felt, but not necessarily articulated or pinned down.
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At the Frick Pittsburgh for the 2021 Blue Walk, german wore what she calls “The Grief Hoodie,” consisting of 300 blue satin ribbon roses. Like grief, it is heavy.
“FINDING A CERTAIN THING ON THE GROUND LET ME KNOW THAT LIFE WAS POSSIBLE.”
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Text Photography Styling
Rosa Sanchez D’Angelo Lovell Williams Marion Kelly
LIKE FABULOUS ROMAN CANDLES KIM JONES TOOK HIS LOVE OF AN AMERICAN LITERARY ICON AND TURNED IT INTO DIOR MEN’S FALL 2022 COLLECTION.
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All accessories, clothing and shoes by Dior Men. Grooming by Sonia Lee. Photo assistance by Rashad Royal. Casting by In Search Of Agency.
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Models: Sethu, Athiey Deng and Sekayi Smarr.
While designing Dior’s Fall 2022 menswear collection, artistic director Kim Jones drew inspiration from the adventurous life of American novelist Jack Kerouac. Influenced especially by the author’s 1957 road trip classic, On the Road, the clothes merge Parisian couture with sportswear: a saddle bag with climbing cordons, the Dior oblique bag in khaki, rope walking sandals, a Dior hiking boot and silk and leather pieces with illustrations from Kerouac’s book jackets. The creations were presented on December 9, 2021, at the Olympia London. In a space at the venue, Jones also presented an exhibition of rare books and manuscripts from Kerouac’s collection, which Jones has acquired over the years. Here, we took four rising stars on a road trip of our own, dressed in Dior in the Malibu hills.
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SETHU began modeling in his native South Africa about six years ago, mostly doing editorial shoots and walking for South African Menswear Week. One year into his career, he moved to Milan to model full-time, and later to Los Angeles, where he now lives. Today, Sethu has a list of high-end clients under his belt. He recently shot a Gucci campaign with Glen Luchford, walked the runway for Fendi and modeled for a Tom Ford campaign. He also posed for his first-ever editorial with Paolo Roversi for Vogue Hommes and was featured in Tim Walker’s “Wonderful Things” photography exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
SEKAYI SMARR didn’t know much about fashion when his agent, Nico Losado, discovered him through Instagram in 2017. At the time, Smarr was completing his bachelor’s degree in business marketing at Georgia State University. One year later, he landed his first big modeling job with ASOS, whose team flew him to London for several campaigns. The model has since moved to Los Angeles and gotten to work with several global brands including Adidas and Foot Locker. He also recently opened and closed the Amiri Spring Summer 2022 runway show and walked in the Greg Lauren Spring Summer 2022 show during Los Angeles Fashion Week.
ATHIEY DENG is a model by birth. The Ethiopia native who fled to South Sudan as a war refugee before settling with his family in Atlanta, Georgia, grew up doing photo shoots with his two siblings—who are also models and creatives—and by 11, he was doing so professionally. Now signed with Next Models, he opened Coach’s Spring Summer 2022 runway show last year and calls the late Virgil Abloh one of his biggest fashion inspirations. Like the Off-White founder, Deng hopes to step into design one day. As for what’s next in his modeling career, he’s working on campaigns with Calvin Klein and Italian streetwear brand GCDS.
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Camrus Johnson.
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CAMRUS JOHNSON just wants to be challenged.
“I think some of the most beautiful acting comes from being afraid to fail but doing it anyway,” says the actor and director, best known for his independent short films and role as superhero Batwing in Batwoman. Johnson, 31, moved to New York City from Georgia right after high school; he says his parents wanted him to go to college, but he felt he could learn more about the movie industry from the stage, the set, and behind the camera. “Short films, independent films—you name it, I did it. And I did it if it paid $10 or if it paid pizza, because I needed the experience,” he says. It was while he was acting in a sketch comedy with his two friends in 2014 when he first realized his passion for directing, and Johnson has since directed two animated shorts and one live-action short. He presented his first, Grab My Hand: A Letter to My Dad, at the NY International Children’s Festival, and got his first Oscar qualification. His second, She Dreams at Sunrise, which he based off his experience as his great aunt’s caretaker, was screened at the Tribeca Film Festival during an event honoring George Floyd last year. Johnson says representing the Black community and, at the same time, healing himself in public by creating work that is autobiographical, is the most special thing to him at the moment. And whatever projects he does in the future, he’ll continue to seek that element of honest emotion. “It’s very hard to tell a new story,” he says, “but when you tell it from your heart, there’s this raw thing that happens, where it sort of feels completely new, no matter what it is.”
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Jason Stopa, The Cycladic, 2022, Oil on canvas, 66 x 54 inches
Shelter From The Storm April 16 - May 28, 2022 KIMIA FERDOWSI KLINE
JASON STOPA
SARAH MIKENIS
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