REFRAMING THE NARRATIVE ANNUAL YOUNG ARTISTS LIST / FEMALE CREATIVES RE-CONCEPTING FOOD / THE PHOTOGRAPHIC REALM OF ART AND ACADEMIA
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CONTENTS Winter 2022
62 CULTURED BY CULTURE In honor of our first decade, we gave 10 of our favorite collaborators creative license to realize a one-of-a-kind Cultured cover in any expression of their choosing.
64 66 PLAYING WELL WITH OTHERS Five cross-categorical artists discuss opening up their practices to other perspectives. 76 UNCHARTED TERRITORY After leading galleries in London and New York, Lucy Chadwick dares to conquer new terrain in Biarritz by opening the first contemporary art THE NEW NOW Defying traditions, powerhouse dealmaker Brooke Lampley demands a new era in art acquisition.
space in the dreamy French seaside town.
78
SETTING THE SCENE Gogo Graham’s need for authenticity informs her radical fashion collections that reflect a futuristic Baroque era with optimism for a better tomorrow.
82
LIBERATING THE UNTOLD Combining classical painting compositions with distinct fabrics, Dawn Williams Boyd creates beautiful imagery that confront America’s dark past.
88 NOWHERE ELSE I’D RATHER BE Rachel Fleminger Hudson cannot escape
the 1970s, nor does she want to. The young photographer creates vignettes that excavate the past with intimate humor and heaps of nostalgia.
90 STEFANIE HEINZE IS REORDERING REALITY Evading
classification, the German artist revels in disorienting her viewers with her exquisite oil paintings.
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IS A BETTER BLUEPRINT FOR THE ART WORLD POSSIBLE? GBA cofounders Karen Wong and Derrick Wiggins are fundamentally rethinking antiquated art models through their new platform.
Jaydan and Nick wear full look Dior Men. Photography and styling by Rachel Fleminger Hudson.
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ARIANA PAPADEMETROPOULOS BABY ALONE IN BABYLON NOVEMBER 12, 2022 – JANUARY 7, 2023 VITO SCHNABEL GALLERY 455 WEST 19TH STREET, NEW YORK
Francesco Clemente, White Rose, Red Earth, 2010, Oil on canvas, 86 5/8 x 69 3/4 inches (220 x 177.2 cm); © Francesco Clemente; Courtesy the artist and Vito Schnabel Gallery
JESSICA WESTHAFER SOMEWHERE THAT’S GREEN NOVEMBER 9, 2022 – JANUARY 7, 2023 VITO SCHNABEL GALLERY 43 CLARKSON STREET, NEW YORK
Francesco Clemente, White Rose, Red Earth, 2010, Oil on canvas, 86 5/8 x 69 3/4 inches (220 x 177.2 cm); © Francesco Clemente; Courtesy the artist and Vito Schnabel Gallery
CONTENTS Winter 2022
96
ART SALON What does a visual artist from LA have in common with a former hair salon owner from Houston? In the case of Mark Bradford and Tina Knowles Lawson, it’s an appreciation of hairstyling, art, and turning side hustles into success stories.
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PIERRE HARDY CASTS SHADOWS IN STONE AND DIAMONDS, TOO In Hermès’s Les Jeux de l’ombre, romantic, opaque shapes become three-dimensional pieces of jewelry that challenge the perception of their form.
108 117 RISK TAKERS Legends in the making, these creatives have taken a leap from their formal origins—
COUNTER CULTURE Four emerging chefs who are changing the way we eat, think, and enjoy food.
whether it be fashion, art, or design—traversing disciplines and expectations.
133
MIDTERMS Paused between semesters, three photographic leaders from academic institutions—Yale’s Gregory Crewdson, NYU’s Dr. Deborah Willis, and UCLA’s Catherine Opie—identify new image-makers changing the discourse of their craft.
142 MIAMI SPRAWL With 45,000 square feet of amenities, the first-ever EDITION Residence is setting a new standard in branded living in Miami.
152
REFRAMING THE NARRATIVE Chance the Rapper’s latest endeavors cross the definitions and expectations of art and entertainment to connect, represent, and advance Blackness.
Chance the Rapper at Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago, Illinois. Photography by Philip-Daniel Ducasse and styling by Ronald Burton III.
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CONTENTS Winter 2022
Zoé Blue M. in her Los Angeles studio. Photography by Kobe Wagstaff.
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YOUNG ARTISTS 2023 Cultured’s annual list comprises stars of the biennials and darlings of the market, as well as brand-new talents that we can’t wait to see more from. Their through-lines come together into a kaleidoscopic parallel universe of imaginative perspectives.
180 RESTAGING THE MOMENT Dior Photo Award winner
Rachel Fleminger Hudson purposes the house’s men’s collection as an entry point into her world, where nostalgia and irony intertwine for flashes of candor.
194
ADD TO QUEUE Captured on the streets of Paris between the hubbub of runway shows, these artists cross genres and composition for a new era of musical intrigue.
214 IN THE REALM OF THE DESIGNER Kelly Behun fashions
residences with a cerebral approach and a discerning eye for contemporary art, a command no better realized than at her light-filled Southampton address.
224
TRUE TO FORM As the lines between art and fashion continue to blur, Louis Vuitton’s fourth edition of Artycapucines begs the question: were those boundaries ever really there?
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CONTRIBUTORS
Photographer
Dutch photographer, film director, and music video director Anton Corbijn is best known for lensing some of the world’s most renowned creatives, and for this issue, he captured 10 female musical artists on the streets of Paris in “Add to Queue.” His portraits feature storied artists such as Joy Division, Tom Waits, The Rolling Stones, Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, Gerhard Richter, Ai Weiwei, and Marlene Dumas. In the early 1980s, Corbijn began his foray into music videos and has directed for Johnny Cash, Arcade Fire, Nirvana, Metallica, Nick Cave, Coldplay, The Killers, and more. He is currently the creative director behind the visual output of Depeche Mode, and is responsible for U2’s principal promotion.
THEASTER GATES Writer
Internationally recognized for his social-driven installation art, Theaster Gates has exhibited his work at some of the world’s preeminent galleries and museums. His multidisciplinary practice focuses on space theory and land development, as well as sculpture and performance. He currently lives and works in Chicago, where he is a professor in the University of Chicago’s Department of Visual Arts, and serves as special advisor for its arts initiatives on and off campus. He spoke with cover star Chance the Rapper for this issue of Cultured. “Chance’s work pushes the boundaries of contemporary music,” shares Gates. “It has been a pleasure to witness his artistic evolution and to celebrate his interest in convening Black artists. I’m grateful for his friendship.”
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SUE S. CHAN Curator
Sue Chan is the mastermind behind new developments in the food industry. She began her career as the brand director of Momofuku, where she oversaw public relations and marketing for the international restaurant group. She is the founder of Care of Chan, a food culture agency that collaborates with the world’s premier culinary, film, fashion, art, and design brands, she also recently took on the position of director of programming for The New York Times Food Festival. In this issue, she curated the story “Counter Culture,” which features some of the young talents redefining the food space.
PHOTOS BY STEPHAN VANFLETEREN (CORBIJN), MATTHEW GLUECKERT (CHAN), RANKIN PHOTOGRAPHY (GATES),
ANTON CORBIJN
CONTRIBUTORS
Writer
Rose Courteau grew up in Arkansas and lives in New York City. In addition to contributing to The Atlantic and T Magazine, among other publications, she is currently enrolled at New York University’s MFA program for fiction. “I felt cosmically lucky to write about her,” she says of the artist Dawn Williams Boyd, whom she profiled in this issue. “She’s stayed true to herself, and I love that she’s finally being rewarded (and remunerated!) for it.”
ELISHA TAWE Writer
Elisha Tawe is a London-based audiovisual artist who acts as one half of the creative duo GRAY417C, and is also the Black culture editor of Trippin magazine. For his first contribution to Cultured, Tawe interviewed some of the talents included in the magazine’s annual Young Artists list. “As a young Black creative, it was an absolute pleasure to have the opportunity to contribute to the list by spotlighting other Black creatives who are carving out their own lanes and redefining what it means to be a Black artist in the 2020s,” says Tawe.
MARTIN PARR Photographer
Award-winning photographer, curator, filmmaker, and collector Martin Parr has influenced visual culture for over 30 years. His distinctive eye for the quirks of everyday life has made his work timeless and unforgettable. Born in Epsom in Surrey, England, he found his passion for photography at a young age, and was encouraged by his grandfather, a keen amateur photographer. “I enjoyed her energy her dedication to all things 1970s,” Parr says about Rachel Fleminger Hudson, whom he captured for Cultured. “I recognized an obsessive tendency in her, which in my mind means we have to take her seriously as an artist.”
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SELF PORTRAIT (COURTEAU), ALEXANDER WARD (TAWE), SELF-PORTRAIT (PARR) COURTESY OF MAGNUM PHOTOS
ROSE COURTEAU
CONTRIBUTORS
Photographer
PEYTON DIX Writer
Peyton Dix is a Brooklyn-based, LA–bred writer and social media strategist. Her work has been featured in publications such as, Elle, Bustle, Office Magazine, and primarily focuses on amplifying Black and queer voices. For Cultured she wrote “Add to Queue,” a portfolio of 10 musical artists who are all blurring lines and crossing boundaries.
PHILIP-DANIEL DUCASSE Photographer
New York–based photographer Philip-Daniel Ducasse was born in Quebec, Canada, and raised in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Since beginning his practice, Ducasse has committed himself to honoring communities that reflect his heritage; he has taught photography in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo, and is creative advisor for the nonprofit Lens on Life. His work has appeared in Vogue, WSJ Magazine, i-D Magazine, and British Vogue, and he has photographed campaigns for the likes of Calvin Klein, Hood by Air, and Burberry. “Chance was by far one of the coolest and most humble artists I have had the opportunity to work with,” says Ducasse of this issue’s cover subject. “We spent a great time talking about his travels to Ghana, his investments in art, and his newfound interest in Haitian music. This shoot was one for the books.”
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Best known for his portraits and precise imagery of interiors, Björn Wallander photographed interior designer Kelly Behun’s Southampton home for Cultured. Born and raised in the harbor town of Västervik, Sweden, he eventually moved to Oslo, Norway, to pursue his passion for photography, where he assisted others while simultaneously developing his own personal style. Now based in New York City, Wallander has spent the last decade shooting for the likes of Architectural Digest, WSJ Magazine, and New York Magazine, among others.
PHOTO BY ANDINA CLARCKSON (DIX), PERNILLE SANDBER (WALLANDER), SALVATORE DEMAIO (DUCASSE)
BJÖRN WALLANDER
Mi Acuario (detail), 2022, oil paint and oil paint skins collaged on canvas, 241.3 × 360.7 × 3.8 cm / 95 × 142 × 1 1/2 in. ÓAngel Otero. Photo: Thomas Barratt
Angel Otero
Swimming Where Time Was
Through 23 Dec New York, 22nd Street
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Founder | Editor-in-Chief SARAH G. HARRELSON Executive Editor JOSHUA GLASS Managing Editor TALI JAFFE MINOR Creative Producer REBECCA AARON Fashion Directors ALEXANDRA CRONAN, KATE FOLEY Contributing Art Directors MAFALDE KAHANE, DAVID WISE Editor-at-Large KAT HERRIMAN
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Letter from the Editor
One of the greatest pleasures of both my personal life and my decade-long experience of editing Cultured is the opportunity to spend time with the artists we feature. As we approached this seventh edition of our annual Young Artists List this past summer—an arduous undertaking, considering the volume of talent that is constantly surfacing—an ambitious idea struck me: I should visit each studio of everyone under consideration. In these personal environments, I thought, I would gain a better understanding of each artist’s practice, and who they are as people. Ultimately, life got in the way. While our incredible writers and photographers, such as Kat Herriman, Dean Kissick, Isabel Flower, Roeg Cohen, and more, were able to visit each artist and interact with their work on a personal level, I only had limited chances to do so myself. Those cherished moments of listening to new ideas and learning different approaches, though, offered me more than enough inspiration to get through what has been a dizzying fall schedule. Today’s global landscape of young talents is nothing short of miraculous; I hope you will take the time to dig into this special portfolio and explore even more on
Sarah G. Harrelson Founder and Editor-in-Chief @sarahgharrelson Follow us | @cultured_mag
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your own. And if you follow the many paths Cultured’s featured Young Artists have taken over the last seven years, you may agree it’s remarkable to witness what comes next for them after this unique moment. Of course, there are several other important stories in this issue, too. Our cover feature is dedicated to the young talent Chance the Rapper, who speaks with fellow Chicagoan Theaster Gates about finding himself in the Ghanaian cultural hub of Accra, and his new cross-disciplinary focuses—including a surprising performance at Art Basel this past summer. From a look at four food artists reshaping the culinary world to our ongoing series Risk Takers and sweeping fashion editorials, we present images and ideas intended to spark dialogue. That is, after all, our responsibility as purveyors of art. This being the final issue of 2022, we are closing a time of significant growth for Cultured and will embark on another chapter of our evolution in the year ahead. Thank you not only to our loyal readers but also to our dedicated, small-but-mighty team. We are mindful every day of what a privilege it is to create an independent magazine for you all—and to be able to shape and share ideas and opinions that matter to us.
WINTER 2022
On the cover: CHANCE THE RAPPER shot on location at Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago, wearing a Bottega Veneta suit. Photography by Philip-Daniel Ducasse. Styling by Ronald Burton III.
PHOTO BY HANNAH TACHER
Sarah Harrelson with curator Erin Christovale at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, where Cultured hosted a private tour in partnership with Mastercard.
CORNELIUS ANNOR
SUSUMU KAMIJO
RICHARD PRINCE
ANASTASIA BAY
BASIL KINCAID
PETER SAUL
ANA BENAROYA
SOPHIE LARRIMORE
SALLY SAUL
KATHERINE BERNHARDT
RACHEL SIMON MARINO
KEIICHI TANAAMI
WILLIAM N. COPLEY
MARYAN
YUICHIRO UKAI
MIYOKO ITO
JIM NUTT
JOHN WESELY
VENUS OVER MANHATTAN ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH DECEMBER 1 - 3, 2022 BOOTH F6
Tschabalala Self
Manuel Solano
Nicolas Party
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Mary Weatherford
In honor of our first decade, we gave 10 of our favorite collaborators creative license to realize a one-ofa-kind Cultured cover in any expression of their choosing.
Pat Steir
Genevieve Gaignard Derek Fordjour
Ming Smith
Derrick Adams
TSCHABALALA SELF, Leisure Lady with Bun in Pink Dress, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias, London. MARY WEATHERFORD, Through the Trees, 2021. Private collection. Photography by Fredrik Nilsen Studio. CHRISTINA QUARLES, Yer Gunna Reap Jus’ What Yew Sow, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Pilar Corrias, London. Photograhpy by Thomas Barratt. MANUEL SOLANO, Brilliant Stunningly Beautiful Gorgeous Art, 2022. Photography by Jetmir Idrizi.NICOLAS PARTY, Portrait with Bat, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photography by Adam Reich. DEREK FORDJOUR, Swashbuckler, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery. Photography by Daniel Greer.PAT STEIR, Rainbow Waterfall #3, 2022. © Pat Steir. Photography by Elisabeth Bernstein. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth NY. GENEVIEVE GAIGNARD, Image courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles. Photography by Jeff McLane. MING SMITH, When Sun Comes Out, Alicia Keys, Los Angeles 2021. Courtesy of the artist.DERRICK ADAMS, Hug Me Around My Neck, 2022. Image courtesy of Derrick Adams Studio and LGDR.
Christina Quarles
HAIR & MAKEUP BY DANI LEVI
By Lisa Kwon
Portrait by Emma Marie Jenkinson Brooke Lampley with Yoshitomo Nara’s Light Haze Days / Study, 2020, included in the recent The Now evening auction.
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Defying traditions, powerhouse dealmaker Brooke Lampley demands a new era in art acquisition at Sotheby’s. Brooke Lampley powers through the auction house with the energy of a season finale episode. Though she has an unflappable poise while heading Sotheby’s as the Chairman and Worldwide Head of Sales for Global Fine Art, behind the scenes she demands a certain accelerated pace that allows the auction house to enjoy meaningful turning points and go out on a high every year. In between Sotheby’s most visible sales, she is securing rarely-seen fine art pieces from private collections and engaging guest curators to present lots to the market with fresh points of view. This November, Lampley sits squarely in the auctions, representing high-profile clients in a sea of bidders who want the best of the best. With Lampley in her post since 2018, Sotheby’s landed back-to-back record-breaking years. The most recent highlights: in 2021, it recorded a historic year in sales at $7.3 billion, and this year the company is keeping record pace as it has already sold more than $1.6 billion in Modern and Contemporary Art—up 50 percent compared to the same period in 2021. Lampley loves the rush. “I can’t live without the pace,” she says. “I love experiencing art, but I also love having to make assessments, take risks, and do it all with my clients. Those judgment calls are where a lot of the challenge lies, and also the excitement in what I do.” High-velocity sales results are a key measure of success for anyone in her position, but that’s not to say that Lampley isn’t incredibly measured in her role. Sotheby’s November sales in Modern, Contemporary, and The Now categories for fine art reflect what the business-savvy visionary has observed about present-day collectors. Nowadays, according to Lampley, her clients embrace and prefer diversification; at auction they are just as likely to buy a Mondrian painting as they are to buy a pair of last summer’s Virgil Abloh–designed Nike Air Force 1 Louis Vuitton sneakers. Their cumulative taste—from art and music to handbags—paints the picture of what makes this new type of collector distinct. “I feel like the trend of collecting in a capsule or in a particular lens is dated in a sense,” Lampley says. “Serendipity is a more recent phenomenon in the market, where people are expressing themselves through a lot of different channels and signifiers.”
The Now category was established last year to reflect the new ways that people engage with art. It represents a vital mix of style and media, a macrocosmic view of what is happening in the contemporary world. Artists in this category are generally those who have been practicing since 2000 and whose markets are still evolving. “It’s an opportunity to comment and take a position in the art world,” says Lampley. “I expect for this stage to be about equity, a place where we participate in and continue the crusade of rectifying the imbalance in the market for historically underrepresented minorities.” Among others, November’s sale in The Now includes a painting by the buzzy Anna Weyant, who is known for her engrossing portraits of porcelainskinned women; a surprising piece by Yoshitomo Nara that strays from his signature Pop style and opts for an ethereal, patchwork quality akin to Hilma af Klint; a mesmeric narrative drawing by the immersive Toyin Ojih Odutola, who asks questions about the world through sacred experiences; and a major painting by Salman Toor, best known for his moving depictions of queer South Asian men in melting metropolis settings. Broadening their scope has kept Lampley and her team busy in how they approach art periods predating the aughts. The reframing of their marquee Modern and Contemporary evening auctions—a result of internal discussions of how to reconsider works of the time in juxtaposition to The Now—has been well received. “The auctions were indubitably well-understood and positively responded to,” says Lampley. “That was a huge success for me and the team, and really helped unify us in a common vision and goal.” Included in this November’s marquee sales are works that are considered radical breakthroughs at the time of their completion. Among Lampley’s favorites are the Cubist The Guitar on a Table by Pablo Picasso (which she asserts “combines the radical language of cubism with a very sunny palette inspired by his time in the south of France”), Piet Mondrian’s Composition No. II from 1930 (“probably the best Mondrian to ever come to market and poised to set a new record for the artist at auction”), and an extraordinary, richly hand-painted sculpture by Alberto Giacometti, a vanguard in his discipline for his critical approach and studies of existential philosophy.
A considerable number of these works come from the contributions of former Whitney Museum president David M. Solinger and former Museum of Modern Art chairman William S. Paley. Sales from the latter collector’s acquisitions will support several charitable organizations as well as a new endowment established by the Paley Foundation to support MoMA’s new projects in digital media and technology and to provide for new acquisitions. Lampley is up for the continued task of reacting and answering to tradition. She imagines a future at Sotheby’s where the means by which anyone can experience art is further flattened. Aside from Sotheby’s exhibitions always being open to the public, its recent foray into online bidding and global live streams further breaks the rigidity of buying art, allowing any enthusiast to be immersed in the visual experience and truly feel as if they could phone bid. Then there is the excitement of DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) banding together to make art more ownable—a phenomenon that Lampley personally experienced last November. “I was really taken by the populist idea of community ownership,” she says. “At Sotheby’s it was a new hurdle for us to have a DAO buyer and to process that registration for our sale, and we were proud to be able to do that. We wanted to create that access and make it possible for the DAO to participate.” Ultimately, a single bidder took home the first-edition copy of the constitution, outbidding ConstitutionDAO at a sale price of $43 million with fees. With Lampley at the helm, it seems as if the continually-evolving Sotheby’s will practically lap itself after one year. Time will tell whether it will once again come out on top in 2022, but Lampley’s leadership has inarguably transformed how the general public sees the auction house. By engaging all kinds of collectors, its is more alive than ever. Before we part, I ask Lampley what she is looking forward to after the November sales. With a laugh, she reminds me of the global scope her work encompasses. “I can’t think beyond then. Somewhere on the horizon I will have holidays with my family and that is comforting to know, but right now we’ve got Hong Kong, London, Paris, and then New York sales and right now in my mind I’m in all of those places.” It’s a fast-paced original drama: this is Lampley’s powerhouse life.
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PLAYING WELL WITH OTHERS By Sarah Powless
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SILVIA VENTURINI FENDI
IMAGE COURTESY OF FENDI.
OUR SUSTAINED COLLECTIVE APPETITE FOR COLLABORATIONS PROVES THAT THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY IS NOT ALWAYS A SOLO ACT. HERE, FIVE CROSS-CATEGORICAL ARTISTS DISCUSS OPENING UP THEIR PRACTICES TO OTHER PERSPECTIVES.
Since 1994, Silvia Venturini Fendi has steered the reins of her family’s nearly century-old fashion house. Her storied career has seen her create alongside other artistic titans including Karl Lagerfeld and Kim Jones, each bringing a different signature to Fendi’s collections and point of view. Now, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Baguette bag, the brand’s matriarch is collaborating with actor Sarah Jessica Parker on a shimmering capsule collection that references her iconic Sex and the City character’s introduction of the item into pop-culture history.
WHAT ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT QUALITIES FOR YOU FOR A SUCCESSFUL COLLABORATION? I like collaborations to work as a constant exchange of ideas. Freedom of expression is fundamental, and I want the talents I work with to express their ideas and vision of Fendi in an unrestricted way. WHEN WORKING WITH ANOTHER, HOW DO YOU STRIKE A HARMONIOUS BALANCE BETWEEN YOU AND SOMEONE ELSE? I always love to confront myself with other people. This is something that I probably learned from Karl [Lagerfeld]. I like to nourish myself with other people who have different kinds of experiences. Working with Kim [Jones] reminds me a lot of how I used to work with Karl. When he’s here in Milan we spend all the time together, doing everything together. And when he’s not here we message each other. We’re engaged in a constant dialogue. WHY DO YOU CHOOSE TO COLLABORATE? At Fendi we always say that “nothing is impossible.” We like to take risks—to look at new possibilities and place them in contrast with our old rules. Partnering with different artists and designers can shift the perspective and create something disruptive and unexpected.
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As one of the most accomplished multi-hyphenates in the entertainment industry, musician, designer, and entrepreneur Pharrell Williams is no stranger to collaboration. However, his latest venture, Joopiter, a philanthropically minded, digitalfirst auction house and content platform, sees him entering a new space. For the company’s debut auction—Son of a Pharaoh, which took place this fall—Williams partnered with a new class of experts to perfect the project. It also highlighted the artist’s own career of creating one-of-a-kind objects with others, including a historic astronaut gold pendant made with Jacob the Jeweler.
WHAT INSPIRES YOU TO COLLABORATE WITH OTHER CREATIVES? I’ve always been a collaborator. At my core, I am a music producer, which is all about coming together to share ideas and create something. I am inspired by so many things, but most of all I am inspired by the idea of collaborating; the idea of two different energies and perspectives coming together to create something unique. WHAT QUALITIES DO YOU LOOK FOR IN A COLLABORATING PARTNER FROM BOTH A CREATIVE AND PERSONAL STANDPOINT? It’s important to work with someone who is open. That’s how the best collaborations happen. You have to enter the room ready to see something through someone else’s eyes. I always am.
“When you collaborate with others and make it an open, safe, and creative space, the outcome and potential for success is limitless.” 68 culturedmag.com
WHY DO YOU THINK COLLABORATIONS HAVE BECOME SO POPULAR IN RECENT YEARS? There’s no one else giving you feedback or asking you to consider how it can be done differently when you create something yourself. When you collaborate with others and make it an open, safe, and creative space, the outcome and potential for success is limitless. WHAT IS A DREAM COLLABORATION THAT YOU’D LIKE TO DO IN THE FUTURE? I have a few coming…. Wait and see.
PHOTO BY ERIK IAN. IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.
PHARRELL WILLIAMS
PLAYING WELL
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For the New York–based experimental designer, collaboration is second nature. Developing designs, images, and objects for both artistic and commercial clients daily, Ganz is an expert at bringing out his partners’s vision through his own media, a skill no better seen in his new project with Swiss modular furniture designer USM this winter. Taking on its iconic Haller system, Ganz has co-created a sixpiece collection of contemporary, moveable storage units that reflect the brand’s commitment to innovation, as well as his own bold, cerebral style. WHAT ARE KEY FACTORS FOR YOU FOR A SUCCESSFUL COLLABORATION? Mutual trust, respect, and a willingness to try new things. HOW DO YOU STRIKE THE PERFECT BALANCE BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR PARTNER WHEN COLLABORATING? It’s less about a perfect balance and more about finding common ground where you can work together, rather than against each other.
“I choose collaborators who have qualities I don’t have, both conceptually and culturally.”
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HOW HAVE PAST SHARED EXPERIENCES AFFECTED YOUR OWN WORK AND CREATIVE PROCESSES? There is something to learn from every collaboration. The most important thing for me is figuring out how to protect your work from too many outside influences that you can’t control while remaining flexible enough to be able to adjust to things you can’t change. I choose collaborators who have qualities I don’t have, both conceptually and culturally. The collaboration with USM, for example, was one of the most challenging because of all the intricacies in the production process, but I also learned most, and am most proud of it.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY LUCAS CREIGHTON. IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.
BEN GANZ
PLAYING WELL
CARMEN D’APOLLONIO JAN 6 - FEB 4, 2023
RAFAEL PRIETO Partnership is a daily practice for the creative director of Savvy Studio and co-founder of avant garde lightmaker Marrow, who looks for meaning and intention in all projects he joins. This winter Rafael Prieto’s unique fabric light
sculptures that he created with French artist Loup Sarion take on new emotions in Grand Tour Hospitality’s highly-anticipated Holiday Bar. The forthcoming, sister of stylish NYC eateries Saint Theo’s and American Bar
PLAYING WELL will debut new renderings of Marrow’s objects—made by hand-stretching linen over oblique shaped steel—that will illuminate original Alex Katz paintings for what the designer explains as “an unexpected sense of tranquility.”
NOWADAYS, COLLABORATIONS SEEM TO BE A MAINSTAY IN THE CREATIVE WORLD. WHY DO YOU THINK ORGANIZATIONS AND INDIVIDUALS ARE SO KEEN TO TEAM UP? I think everyone wants to have a conversation, dialogue, and expand their possibilities and share… at least I do. WHAT HAS BEEN THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE YOU’VE FACED WHEN COLLABORATING WITH ANOTHER CREATIVE PERSONALITY? Process. The purpose is always there and clear, but sometimes—almost every time—it can take a minute to find the right path. And even that can lead to a more successful collaboration! At the beginning you might just be talking. That little moment of uncertainty can be the real solution.
“There must be an emotional motive to do it, and creativity is indeed an emotion.” 72 culturedmag.com
PHOTO BY ADRIANNA GLAVIANO. IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.
WHAT QUALITIES DO YOU LOOK FOR IN A POTENTIAL PARTNER? Intention and thoughtfulness. Technique of course matters, but it comes secondary for me. There must be an emotional motive to do it, and creativity is indeed an emotion. I have to like and appreciate the person and their work.
TThhis condominium is being deis condominium is being developed bveloped by Ty TCH 500 Alton, LLCH 500 Alton, LLC, a Delaware limited liabilitC, a Delaware limited liability company (“Dey company (“Developer”). Any and all statements, disclosures and/or representations shveloper”). Any and all statements, disclosures and/or representations shall be deemed made ball be deemed made by Dey Developer you agree to look solely to Developer you agree to look solely to Developer with respect to any and all matveloper with respect to any and all matterters relating to ths relating to the marke marketing and/or deeting and/or development ofvelopment of ththe Ce Condominium and with respect to thondominium and with respect to the sales of units in the sales of units in the Ce Condominium. Orondominium. Oral representations cannot be relied upon as correctly stating thal representations cannot be relied upon as correctly stating the representations of the representations of the dee developerveloper. F. For correct representations, makor correct representations, make reference to the reference to this bris brochochure and to thure and to the documents required be documents required by section 7y section 7118.5038.503, Florida statutes, to be furnish, Florida statutes, to be furnished bed by a dey a developer toveloper to a a buyer buyer or or lessee. lessee. TThhese ese materials materials are are not not intended intended to to be be an an ofoffer fer to to sell, sell, or or solicitation solicitation to to buy buy a a unit unit in in ththe e condominium. condominium. Such Such an an ofoffering fering shshall all only only be be made made purpursuant suant to to ththe e prprospectus ospectus (of(offering fering circular) circular) for for ththe e condominium condominium and and no no statements statements shshould ould be be relied relied upon upon unless unless made made in in ththe e prprospectus ospectus or or in in ththe e applicable applicable purchpurchase ase agreement.agreement. In no eIn no event shvent shall any solicitation, ofall any solicitation, offer or sale of a unit in thfer or sale of a unit in the condominium be made in, or to residents of, any state or countre condominium be made in, or to residents of, any state or country in why in which such activitich such activity would be unlawy would be unlawful. Fful. FOR NEW YOR NEW YORK RESIDENTORK RESIDENTS: THE CS: THE COMPLETE OFFERING TERMOMPLETE OFFERING TERMS ARE IN A CPS ARE IN A CPS-1S-12 APPLIC2 APPLICAATION ATION AVVAILAILABLE FRABLE FROM THE OFFEROM THE OFFEROR. FILE NOOR. FILE NO. CP2. CP21-001-006565. All. All images and designs depicted himages and designs depicted herein are artist’erein are artist’s conceptual renderings, whs conceptual renderings, which are based upon preliminarich are based upon preliminary dey development plans, and are subject to chvelopment plans, and are subject to change withange without notice in thout notice in the manner pre manner provided in thovided in the ofe offering documents. All such materials are not to scale and are shfering documents. All such materials are not to scale and are shown solely for illustrown solely for illustrative purposes. Rative purposes. Renderings depict prenderings depict proposed views,oposed views, whwhich are not identical frich are not identical from each residence. No guarom each residence. No guarantees or representations whantees or representations whatsoeatsoever are made thver are made that eat existing or future views of thxisting or future views of the pre project and surroject and surrounding areas depicted bounding areas depicted by artist’y artist’s conceptual renderings or oths conceptual renderings or othererwise described hwise described herein, will be prerein, will be provided orovided or, if pr, if provided, will be as depicted or described hovided, will be as depicted or described herein. Any view frerein. Any view from aom a residence or frresidence or from othom other portions of ther portions of the pre propertoperty may in thy may in the future be limited or eliminated be future be limited or eliminated by future dey future development or forces of nature and thvelopment or forces of nature and the dee developer in no manner guarveloper in no manner guarantees thantees the continuing ee continuing existence of any viewxistence of any view. F. Furnishurnishings are only included if and to things are only included if and to the ee extent prxtent provided in your purchovided in your purchase agreement. Tase agreement. Thhe pre project groject graphaphics, renderingsics, renderings and teand text prxt provided hovided herein are copyrigherein are copyrighted workted works owned bs owned by thy the Dee Developerveloper. All righ. All rights reserts reserved. Wved. WARNING: THE CARNING: THE CALIFALIFORNIA DEPORNIA DEPARARTTMENT OF REAL ESMENT OF REAL ESTTAATE HATE HAS NOS NOT INSPECTED, EXAMINED, OR QUALIFIED THIS OFFERING. T INSPECTED, EXAMINED, OR QUALIFIED THIS OFFERING.
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HIROKO TAKEDA
PLAYING WELL
IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.
New York–based Japanese textile artist Hiroko Takeda is known in her creative community for her material inventiveness and quiet strength. Her recent experiment with Toronto multi-disciplinary designer Paolo Ferrari led to the creation of the Ame chair, a handwoven functional art piece that features a shaggy back made of strands of natural fibers that drape emotionally down to the floor. The elegant cross-practice collaboration not only demonstrates Takeda’s proficiency in her own craft, but her seamless adaptability, too. WHAT IS MOST IMPORTANT TO YOU FOR A SUCCESSFUL COLLABORATION? There are many important factors—open-mindedness, good communication, readiness to act… Perhaps the key factor is trust. IS THERE SOMETHING IN PARTICULAR THAT ENCOURAGES YOU TO COLLABORATE? It’s the opportunity to stretch myself and to realize something that I couldn’t do independently. Creating something with others is a way of self-expression, too, and for finding new ways to communicate with the world. HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN THE ART AND DESIGN WORLD’S FASCINATION WITH COLLABORATIVE PROJECTS? I think in our high-tech world today, people can feel isolated, and that we have a desire or hunger to connect and to collaborate. At the same time, with new communication tools we are introduced or exposed to new people and worlds and can work across distances more easily than in the past. It’s not only the makers, too. There is also a great audience for collaborations today.
“Collaboration is the opportunity to stretch myself and to realize something that I couldn’t do independently.” 74 culturedmag.com
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UNCHARTED TERRITORY By Stephanie Sporn Portrait by Neige Augusta Céleste Thébault
After leading galleries in London and New York, Lucy Chadwick dares to conquer new terrain in Biarritz by opening the first contemporary art space in the dreamy French seaside town. The preferred resort destination for generations of royals and haute société, Biarritz, France has long enjoyed an illustrious global reputation with its gastronomic offerings, surf and sport culture, and commanding architecture—its famed Hôtel du Palais built by Napoleon III for Empress Eugénie counts Queen Victoria, Coco Chanel, and Frank Sinatra among its notable guests. The seaside city’s fine art scene, however, has surprisingly lagged far behind. Having visited the French coastal town annually for 33 years, Lucy Chadwick, 41, believed in Biarritz’s untapped potential. “It has a rich cultural history and present,” says the British-born gallerist. “Biarritz is a very special part of the world to be based.” She had considered establishing a gallery in the area for years, but her final push came during the COVID-19 pandemic, when dealer Gavin Brown closed his eponymous company where Chadwick served as director. Seeking a new creative challenge beyond New York and London, she, along with her husband—the celebrated hair stylist, Duffy—and son, Jack, left for France and never looked back. In July 2021, Chadwick opened Champ Lacombe, her first solo venture and Biarritz’s first contemporary art gallery. “It’s very rare to find an internationally connected town that hasn’t been scooped up into the contemporary art bubble,” she says. Named after the bustling street where it is located, Champ Lacombe is steps away from the beach and the legendary Les Halles market. Last year, Chadwick opened an adjunct space 30 minutes inland, which offers a rural landscape ideal for outdoor sculpture exhibitions, as illustrated by Gaetano Pesce’s boundary-blurring works, which were on view this fall. Chadwick was the initial liaison between the iconic sculptor and Bottega Veneta
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Creative Director Matthieu Blazy, who collaborated on a sweeping, site-specific installation for the Italian fashion house’s ready-to-wear show this fall, during which the gallerist also walked the runway. While Chadwick feared her gallery might struggle to grow a consistent audience, she has encountered the opposite. This is in part due to Biarritz’s prime location: a four-hour train ride to Paris and a five-hour drive to Madrid, with leading institutions, such as the Guggenheim Bilbao, as well as the CAPC Musée d’art Contemporain in Bordeaux, a stone’s throw away. Nearby northern Spanish cities San Sebastián and Santander also offer an exciting host of younger art spaces. Chadwick’s interest in a wide array of artistic venues stems from her transatlantic career. The gallerist was raised in central London by an architect father and a mother who was a fabric buyer for Liberty. After studying fine art at University of Oxford, she worked in the publishing department at Tate Britain from 2004 until 2008. “About a month into my job, I was given the task of interviewing Robert Mangold.” she says, remembering the gift of such opportunities. “I never take the proximity I have to extraordinary minds for granted.” It was during her 11 years at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise where the gallerist developed her most formative relationships with artists, including Joan Jonas, Alex Katz, Arthur Jafa, Mark Leckey, and Elaine Sturtevant. “She was a savant-like human. You would hang onto every word she said,” recalls Chadwick of Sturtevant, whom she describes as her “leading light.” The late American artist has been deemed by many as the “mother of appropriation art” due to her repetitions of iconic Pop work. “She was addressing our digital world at a moment when it
wasn’t a popular line of discussion. She understood the impact of technology not just on art, but also on humans.” The video work by Sturtevant Plato’s Dual Action: Same/Idea/Transposed was the genesis of Champ Lacombe’s inaugural exhibition, “Same / Idea / Transposed,” a group show that also featured Jafa and Leckey, and was themed around the dissemination and permanent transformation of an image. No longer tethered to the competitive ecosystem in which official artist representation is paramount, Chadwick wants Champ Lacombe to be a project-based space where she can collaborate with art-world friends as well as both familiar and new talents. This fall, she organized “j~o~y r~i~d~e,” an exhibition with Zeinab Saleh, a London-based artist whose interdisciplinary practice encompasses painting, drawing, and video. Next spring, she and Taylor Trabulus of New York’s Company Gallery will curate a group show that explores notions of the Baroque. “I have always been interested in the conversational quality of an exhibition,” says Chadwick, who aspires for Champ Lacombe’s programs to be progressive and intergenerational. With community involvement top of mind, the gallerist plans to engage a local art school, and will present workshops and live performances for a larger audience. She is already dreaming up a collaboration during Le Temps d’Aimer La Danse, an annual festival that welcomes numerous dance companies and artists to Biarritz. As for more geographical expansion, Biarritz remains Chadwick’s focus. “I want to be mindful of not running before I can walk,” she says. In terms of Champ Lacombe’s grand ambitions, perhaps power walk is a more apt descriptor.
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GOGO GRAHAM HEARS YOU The designer’s need for authenticity informs her radical fashion with subversive collections that imagine a future that is at once Baroque and optimistic. By Kerane Marcellus Portrait by Tomás Stockton Gogo Graham is leading fashion’s new guard in New York. The interdisciplinary artist founded her subversive brand in 2014 after shifting her focus from studying biology at the University of Texas at Austin to textiles and apparel. Since then, Graham has reflected on the world around her through unique storytelling and fabrication that, according to Graham, “gives new life to forgotten, discarded, and recycled materials” while marrying fantasy with the familiar. For her runway show this past September, models sauntered down a dimly lit Bushwick, Brooklyn, space somehow both exposed and obscured. Accessorized by sheer hooded masks, Graham’s looks were daring, delicate, and deconstructed: skin-tight miniskirts with raw edges, lace-y layers of silk and jersey, and prairiecore dresses slashed and shredded. The reworked and upcycled Spring/Summer 2023 collection was inspired by speed—not only as a reflection of our social economy but also, more specifically, as a reference to “speedrun” videos, in which players record themselves online racing to the end of video games in absurdly short lengths of time. Remixing gamer culture with sustainability, Graham is a creative who is comfortable working with multiple stimuli, moving easily between worlds. (Continued) 78 culturedmag.com
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Remixing gamer culture with sustainability, Graham is comfortable working with multiple stimuli, moving easily between worlds.
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And while her identity as a trans woman informs her artisty and her role as a designer, it does not define it. “When I first started, I thought I needed to be doing something that really changed the way that people think about gender identity,” she remembers. “But I realized that I was not an activist myself, I was a fashion designer. Things should be said by the people who actually know what they’re talking about.” Because of this, Graham looks to those she’s met at protests—writers, artists, and changemakers, such as Hari Nef and Hunter Schafer—to shape and represent her brand, often casting them in her fashion shows or collaborating with them on projects. “They constantly inspire me,” she explains. Like her muses, Graham says that the fashion industry needs substantial change: specifically, the resurfacing of the “heart and soul.” “I don’t want brand recognition to continue to be the most important thing,” she says. “That’s not exciting or interesting to me if you’re already some big rich entity.” As for her own her work, Graham insists on telling stories that are a genuine expression of her own story and those of her friends. Graham’s hope is that when people encounter her authentic, provocative creations, they will feel that they are heard and understood.
LIBERATING THE UNTOLD
Dawn Williams Boyd isn’t afraid of discomfort. Combining classical painting compositions with distinct fabrics, the Atlanta-based artist creates beautiful imagery that confront America’s dark past. There aren’t many photos of the 1921 Tulsa Race on the city’s buildings. Unlike most paintings, howMassacre, when white mobs razed the city’s afflu- ever, Boyd’s are made with a collage of fabrics, cut ent Black Greenwood District. Though it’s been and stitched together with intricate detail. Looking described as one of the largest single instances of closely at Massacre on Black Wall Street, you might State-sanctioned violence against Black people in fall down a rabbit hole, noticing its ingenious deployAmerican history, the relatively few images that exist ment of each fabric, like the delicate lace panels of its aftermath are black and white, and mostly bodi- used for a storefront’s windows or the black and less. Limited by the era’s technology and prejudice, brown batik bearing Ghanaian Adinkra symbols that they fail to capture the depth or scale of the tragedy. serves as a tree’s bark—and a subtle reference to For this reason, the artist Dawn Williams Boyd Greenwood District’s African roots. chose to make Massacre on Black Wall Street, one It’s striking, I tell her, to see something so of a dozen paintings included in the “The Tip of the horrible depicted so wonderfully, in a medium that Iceberg,” which was on display at Fort Gansevoort inevitably conjures the comfort of quilts and all in New York when we first spoke this September. the womanliness that they imply. “Grandmotherly,” Measuring nearly five-by-ten feet, the work presents offers Boyd, finishing my sentence. She hears comthe event as a narrative panorama: a group of white ments like mine a lot. “I love the dichotomy of this men cock and aim their guns as townspeople hide, beauty representing such an ugly thing,” she says. surrender, or lie dead on the ground above a cache “I want to tell you a story that you want to listen to.” of human skeletons buried beneath them, while a Boyd was visiting New York from Atlanta, plane decorated with American flag and Ku Klux Klan Georgia, where she lives with her husband, fellow insignia flies overhead, dropping Molotov cocktails artist Irvin Wheeler. It’s also where she spent her
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childhood, which included enrollment as the first and only Black student at a Catholic girls’ high school located on a former plantation. The school shut down after her junior year, but not before her biology teacher was tasked with creating an arts curriculum. The first assignment? Create a papier-mâché bust of a classmate. “That was my Eureka moment,” says Boyd. “My portrait of Debbie Walsh was the only one in the room that actually looked like the person.” When she left home to study fine art at Stephens College in Missouri, her mother, an educator and lecturer, was supportive, but encouraged her daughter to professionalize her artistic ambitions. “I didn’t do that,” says Boyd, who gained representation with Fort Gansevoort in 2020. Instead, she took a position after college at the Atlanta Regional Commission, and, later, at United Airlines in Boulder, Colorado, where she worked as a reservationist for 29 years until her retirement in 2009. During that time, she raised a family and continued making (Continued)
Portrait by Neige Augusta Céleste Thébault
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“I love the dichotomy of this beauty representing such an ugly thing.” art—sometimes on the job, where office manage- of fill, the works aren’t designed to keep you warm. ment periodically assigned her to make posters for Neither does Boyd feel quilting accurately describes internal use. (“I had a whole little cottage industry her process, which remains rooted in the principles going,” she laughs—almost any task was better of classical painting in which she trained. The term quilt “gives you a specific connotation,” says Boyd. than answering phones.) She also co-founded an It’s worth considering why an artist might feel artist collective, ULOZI—the Swahili word for voodoo dark arts—that championed Black artists in the compelled to distinguish her work from, say, the area and acted as a paid consultancy to surrounding slippery category of “craft” to which a quilt might institutions attempting to broaden their outreach to be assigned. In 2005, the critic Margo Jefferson non-white audiences. “I was oftentimes token,” says suggested that debates over art versus craft felt Boyd. “I used to say that I was a triple threat: I was increasingly passé. As evidence Jefferson cited “The female, I was Black, and I was talented.” Quilts of Gee’s Bend,” a large collection of quilts It was through community involvement that Boyd made by generations of Black women in an isolated came to adopt cloth as her primary medium, when, area in Alabama of the same name; The Whitney in 2001, she was asked to lead a workshop on the showed the work in 2002-2003, and their unique textile art of Faith Ringgold in honor of Black History abstractionism introduced many to a new way of seeMonth. While preparing for the class, Boyd learned ing textile art. That seminal show inspires “The New that Ringgold often demounted canvases from their Bend,” which features the work of 13 contemporary frames before sewing quilt pieces onto their bor- artists, including Boyd, practicing within, and sometimes shattering our notions of the textile tradition, ders. The technique addressed two fundamental on view at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles this fall. challenges that Boyd had continually confronted in her traditional painting practice: namely, that she Boyd used to write down ideas for paintings has never had a knack for stretching canvas; and in a small notebook that she carried with her, though shipping frames and other rigid materials—including after misplacing it—a ”terribly devastating” loss the plywood that she had, for a time, adopted as an —she now keeps a running list on her phone. At alternative to canvas—was prohibitively expensive. the beginning of each year, she reviews it and forInspired by Ringgold’s innovation, she took it further mulates a new series organized, usually, around and scrapped canvas altogether, using fabric, thread, a title. The result can be an entire story arc, as embroidery floss (and, occasionally, beads and other with “Ladies Night,” a series of four cloth paintings accents) for her designs. “I get to indulge myself,” begun in 2009 that depicts groups of women as she says. “I can go into a store and see a gorgeous they groom themselves and enjoy a night out at a ficpiece of fabric and find a use for it. I can liberate tional “Billie’s Bar and Grill.” Sometimes she works it from the bolt.” topically: “The Tip of the Iceberg” draws its themes Boyd’s work defies simple categorization. Though from the many evils society tolerates but whose some might describe her paintings as quilts, she consequences are rapidly compounding beneath doesn’t refer to them as such. They offer little by way the surface of daily perception. Boyd made most of a quilt’s traditional function, for one thing; devoid of the works in the last year, with some exceptions,
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such as All Through the Night: America’s Homeless, which uses panels of textured tan cotton to portray a cardboard box sheltering a family. (Scraps of an old log cabin pattern quilt gifted her by a friend serve as the family’s blanket and add a dash of material self-reference to the tableau.) Some, like In Fear For My Life, inspired by the murder of Tamir Rice, illustrate specific historical events. Others play more purely with abstraction, such as Ka Orda, which imagines the dichotomous god of Chaos and Order in L. E. Modesitt Jr.’s fantasy novel The Mage-Fire War as half Black woman and half white man, the latter pieced together with gender-bending soft pinks. Many showcase organza, Boyd’s favorite fabric. Diaphanous and shimmering, in her hands it becomes the atmospheric cigar smoke in Smoke Filled Rooms, and smog in This Uninhabitable Earth. The second time we spoke, in October, Boyd was back in Atlanta but preparing to visit New York again to discuss “Woe,” another collection of hers on display at Sarah Lawrence College. After making art for decades with little recognition, she’s enjoying her new, larger audience—“It’s about time!” she says—though of course its attendant engagements take time away from her painting. Right now she’s in the early stages of two small series, one called Fear, which reimagines iconic photos associated with race relations in America, and one called Families. (She’s waiting for the dust to settle from the 2024 presidential election cycle before she delves back into overtly political commentary.) She wouldn’t say much more about either project at the moment, except that she has “made a commitment” to use some of the fabric she’s had stored away for a long time but resisted cutting. “You know, stop hoarding that fabric and then go ahead and use it for something.”
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Dawn Williams Boyd, Massacre on Black Wall Street, 2022.
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Nowhere Else I’d Rather Be By Ashley Simpson Portrait by Martin Parr “It always feels sacrilegious,” says Rachel Fleminger Hudson. The North London–born photographer, researcher, and costume designer is sitting on her bed in Finsbury Park, talking about having conversations about her art. At 24, she’s just beginning to unpack what it means for her work to be viewed and perceived, and, moreover, what it is to be not just the creator but the subject, too. “Having people interested in your work is so weird,” she says, reflecting on the array of transportive scenes she erects and captures. Fleminger Hudson’s emotive, richly cinematic work is rooted in 1970s aesthetics and the worlds these material factors subside in and create. With color and texture central to her process, her images look like they could be vintage ephemera; but they are, of course, very much the product of a contemporary Gen Z artist. “It’s such an interior experience for me. It’s almost like having a room that’s covered in posters and pictures of everything that you love, and then saying, ‘My bedroom’s got loads of posters on the wall.’” Since winning the Dior Photography and Visual Arts Award for Young Talents this past summer, Fleminger Hudson and her practice have increasingly become a point of exterior analysis after many years of quiet image making. Held in partnership with Luma Arles and the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d’Arles, it has become a launch pad for emerging visual artists, with the winner receiving
a €10,000 grant as well as a commission by the fashion house. “A lot of it is to do with postmodernism and modernism,” says Fleminger Hudson, returning to her craft. Growing up in Holloway, London, in a family of artists, art teachers, and art critics, visual expression and consideration was always integral. As a child she submerged herself in the cultural artifacts of her parents, listening to 1950s and ‘60s classic comedy radio, and watching children’s programs decades after their release. “I’ve always thought the ‘70s were funny, but not funny ha-ha. I wasn’t laughing at it; I was laughing with it,” she says. “It was a time when modernism was at its high point, but it was also falling. If you look at anything from that era, you can see all these modernist elements pushed a step further. That step has this either really horrible or tacky feature that is funny to me. Everything is super-exaggerated in a very knowing way, and I think that is my personality. I’m very slapstick.” Beyond the last cry of modernism, fantasy and reality, the self-knowing humor of a muted ‘70s olive green, the range of emotional expression that seemed so much more accessible in an era before ubiquitous, overly-aware self-construction, punk and bootboy glam, and the ability to recreate an imagined past by living each intricate detail today are all themes explored in the Fleminger Hudson’s studio practice, which began when she entered her
Rachel Fleminger Hudson cannot escape the 1970s, nor does she want to. Winner of this year’s Dior Photography and Visual Arts Award for Young Talents, she creates vignettes that excavate the past with intimate humor and heaps of nostalgia.
school’s photography club darkroom at 13. Over a decade later, creating for her is a theory-based exercise that includes painstakingly enacted studio sets and historically accurate costume design, but also highlights acts of engagement in everyday life. “Every single thing I’m wearing right now except my pants and socks is from the ‘70s,” she gestures. “And if I could, I would wear it all. I try to because it’s a practice. It helps to have borders around things.” In a sense, Fleminger Hudson’s works represent the peaks of her self-constructed nostalgic experience, and act as windows to a more emotive period, a moment of unexamined existence created in ultraaware, grinning (de)construction. Take her photos from the Dior Prize: One sees a woman in all red “walking” two dog sculptures with a look of absurd bliss on her face. Others show retrofit football fans grasping for autographs and leaning, vulnerably, over the stands, completely unguarded in their desire. The latter is a direct reference to the work of Iain S.P. Reid, an Edinburgh-born photographer who captured Manchester United hooligans in the mid-‘70s. The scenes are bold, emotionally unfiltered, and tied to a specific time and place. “It’s all about pushing a moment to make a moment. You push a moment, so you get these still fragments out of it,” she explains. “There is a lot of bravery in the characters. I’m interested in those moments of personal expression.”
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STEFANIE HEINZE IS REORDERING REALITY Evading classification, the German artist revels in disorienting her viewers with her exquisite oil paintings. By Chiara Di Leone “Welcome to my prison!” Stefanie Heinze greets me before we climb the circular stairs to her large studio space nestled in a Kottbusser Tor courtyard in Kreuzberg, Berlin. I turn around for a moment to gaze outside of the large windows, and when I look back she is nowhere to be seen: Heinze, 25, disappears behind one of the massive canvases resting on the stained walls, the artworks turning one by one as if they have just acquired lives of their own while she attempts to place them in the right orientation. I am still pleasantly disoriented, though—a feeling that you slowly become accustomed to when looking at her work. Her deliberately insubordinate paintings are a committed and joyful exploration of escapism. “It’s about going constantly around the corner; it is a very consciously evasive process,” Heinze says of her practice. “The way I draw is very conscious, though. I do a line and a shape and then I say OK, I am leaving, bye.’” But what exactly is she avoiding? When asked, Heinze answers confidently: history. “History and classification,” the artist clarifies, and “the well-known ways to interpret images.” This antagonism to the stiffness that comes with being bulked together with the similar could easily be dismissed as ahistorical, a resistance toward being overlooked by being understood and therefore wanting to impose oneself above the rest. But one must resist this reading and keep looking. It is worth it. In spite of resisting facile references, order, and linear interpretations, Heinze’s work revels in precision, which is detectable in her intentional lines and impeccable compositions. More than this categorical rejection of order, she plays with classification by creating work that lives uncannily in between histories, like the Eastern Bloc, where she was born and raised; art movements like Surrealism; forms like automatic drawing; and people like her accomplished teachers at the Academy of Fine (Continued)
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Arts Leipzig, where she studied. There are surrealist elements in there, too, but though one can observe semi-recognizable shapes melting into one another, her subjects are not dreamlike: they are ordinary, at times domestic, and very often mundane. The elements in these compositions are almost never intact, and are often mixed with one another in monstrous and joyful emotional landscapes. Just like tender monsters, her canvases are meant to break the order of things, resisting figuration and challenging what we believe to be real, fixed, and stable. These are works about change: they play the role of messing with reality by disembodying it and assembling it again in unlikely ways.
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for questions rather than answers. In this sense, Heinze’s insecurity is a progressive force, rather than a hindrance—it can be domesticated. “It comes from my experience of being lost as a child and building an island through drawing and painting,” she explains. Heinze keeps building her islands in and outside of Berlin. In the summer of 2022 she temporarily relocated to Castel Caramel, a prestigious artist residency and cultural platform in the South of France. The site sits atop a hill on the Côte d’Azur, minutes away from Monaco. It once served as a remote atelier to the Austrian artist Ernst Fuchs before it became host to an official program in 2018. Founded by London-based art advisor and curator Maria-Theresia Mathisen, the residency continues the tradition of its originator by inviting prominent contemporary artists to work there each summer. During her time , Heinze focused on two large-scale oil paintings that echo the vastness of the pristine surroundings in the South of France, which stand in stark contrast with her usual Kottbusser Tor working environment. The abundance of natural light and her encounters with the living world at Castel Caramel played a key role in shaping these pieces: earthen elements abound on the canvas, ranging from dolphin mouths to dog parts to deep-green backgrounds. This fall Heinze debuts the results of the residency in her new exhibition at Capitain Petzel in Berlin, entitled “Dimensions of the Fool.” If the hero’s journey is the established and patriarchal way of progressing linearly through life, her trajectory is closer to that of another archetypal figure—the fool. Foolishness and openness are qualities the artist links to coming from a place of curiosity, uncertainty, and “seeing what happens.” In Heinze’s words: “The fool is just there to nudge, to show that there is another world. The fool does not have a mission. I believe in wild cards, literally.” Far from the prison the artist jokingly inhabits, Heinze’s real world is a place where desires and differences open up “different mechanisms to deal with insecurity and fears.” Her work conjures systems to escape what is—in her eyes—outdated, and imprints a joyful exploration on canvas that keeps the viewer guessing and wanting more.
There is a certain equality in both Heinze’s subjects and the intended, imagined, and perhaps conjured audiences of her work. Just like a dog, a banana, body parts, and a striped tape can all live on the same 2-D plane, her audiences are invited to take part in the conversation. “My works evoke confusion, which is something we can all relate to,” says the artist. “But it is a confusion that I put in order.” Questions of gender surface through the formal, procedural aspects of the art-making process while eluding the familiar discourses around patriarchy. It is deliberately indeterminate work: her pictorial vocabulary gives us a language that “Dimensions of the Fool” is on view at Capitain Petzel affords new ways of seeing the world, ways that from until December 23, 2022, at Karl-Marx-Allee 45 are not prescriptive, that invite suspicion, that long Berlin, Germany.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY BILLIE CLARKEN COURTESY OF CAPITAIN PETZEL, BERLIN.
“My works evoke confusion, which is something we can all relate to. But it is a confusion that I put in order.”
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IS A BETTER BLUEPRINT FOR THE ART WORLD POSSIBLE? KAREN WONG AND DERRICK WIGGINS ARE SURE OF IT. By Blake Abbie
Progressing both commerce and curation, the co-founders of GBA are fundamentally rethinking antiquated art models through their new platform. “We’re focusing on changing things,” Derek Wiggins begins, discussing the systemic inequities of the art world he has observed for some time in his own community of graffiti artists. “Some of my friends have been dismissed by a system that didn’t respect their artwork as art, because of what they looked like, their skin color, or where they came from.” Galvanized by the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and the Stop Asian Hate movement, he left his career building startup companies in 2021 before reaching out to Karen Wong, former deputy director of the New Museum, to start GBA (Guilty By Association). The digital marketplace, which launched this fall, is, as Wiggins describes, “a digital bridge to empower the creative unseen, redistribute wealth, and re-engineer an antiquated system,” and, in doing so, is changing the art industry as we know it.
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“We are creating a platform so that talents who are simply hidden in plain sight have an opportunity to share their work and stories,” adds Wong, who oversees the artistic endeavors of the company and prioritizes inclusivity and representation. She recalls seeing a series by the artist Susan Chen in the fall of 2020, and being so struck because she hadn’t expected to see herself, an Asian-American woman, reflected in an artwork, as well at a recent MoMA donor event in which she and a friend were the only people of color in attendance. To counteract these all-too-common social narratives, GBA highlights what the founders call “creative unseens,” who have been excluded from mainstream artistic circles, in particular due to race, but also those who are selftaught or whose work is considered street, folk, or otherwise.
More than just change through curation, GBA is also challenging the economies of the art market through new concepts of art buying and selling. “Wealth is held by collectors, galleries, and museums, and the ‘starving artist’ is a real thing,” explains Wiggins. “One percent of artists make it out of school and into a gallery, 80 percent of which are white male--owned and operated. These galleries take 50 percent of the profits, so artists are stuck in a lane of making what sells versus what they want to do.” With GBA, artists earn 75 percent of the net income of their sales; the other quarter goes back to the company—a structure that GBA believes will support a more sustainable art practice. “Why can’t artists sell at a consistent pace?” continues Wiggins, referring to the disconnect between exhibition frequencies and artistic creation: Galleries
PHOTO BY DOMINIK TARABAŃSKI COURTESY OF GBA.
“GBA is a digital bridge to empower the creative unseen, redistribute wealth, and re-engineer an antiquated system.” — Derek Wiggins
typically show the work of artists once every few years, even though they’re constantly producing. With GBA, there’s no need for artists to wait to sell— drops can hit the marketplace anytime GBA and the artist so choose. Wong and Wiggins are building as they go. In their pre-development phase, GBA organized a show of Asian-American artists supported by 3.1 Phillip Lim, and a sale of chair artworks by Camella Ehlke, founder of streetwear brand 555 Soul. More recently, GBA presented a show of reimagined Mardi Gras ceremonial suits by the DuVernay Collective, whose members practice the Black Masking Indian culture of New Orleans. For its official inaugural drop this fall, “Gen Z by Gen Z,” GBA put out an open call to artists across the States. A selection of young artists from a multitude of backgrounds, many of whom are still in college,
were chosen by their Gen Z peers. “You can make a masterpiece at a young age!” Wong exclaims. They’re also debuting ArtCities, a program that delves into single American locales in order to spotlight its artists with the first regional city spotlight, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, starting this December. “We know the art world cares about five art schools, right? And The New York Times only cares about one,” Wong explains. “But there are almost 300 art departments across the country.” You might call Wong and Wiggins producers and creative directors, or engineers drawing new blueprints for art, but—most importantly—the co-founders are mentors serious about making lasting change. Wong extends the invitation: “We are hoping to shift the narrative and have people join us on this adventure.”
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ART SALON By Dominique Clayton Portrait by Lorenzo Diggins, Jr.
What does a visual artist from LA have in common with a former hair salon owner from Houston? In the case of Mark Bradford and Tina Knowles Lawson, it’s an appreciation of hairstyling, art, and turning side hustles into success stories. When Tina Knowles Lawson and Mark Bradford met, there was instant chemistry. But it wasn’t just their shared love of art and philanthropy that sparked but something else unexpected: they both had careers at hair salons. While Bradford navigated freelance hairstyling in Los Angeles for many years, Knowles Lawson owned a successful salon in her native Houston. Black-owned beauty salons and barbershops have long been considered more than a place for hair care; they are often safe spaces for family and relationship advice, a place for local vendors to sell new merch, unofficial childcare centers, and so much more. A trip to the hair salon is often a whole day experience so relationships between clients, hairdressers, and other waiting guests certainly have time to grow into a level of intimacy like none other—much like the relationship between artist and collector. While Bradford has since become a world-renowned artist, Knowles Lawson, also known among friends and colleagues as “MT,” has become an ambitious art collector and philanthropist. “Within five minutes, we just knew each other. We didn’t even have to go through the awkward stage,” says Bradford, reflecting on their first meeting. “I talk in a very specific way which she picked up on,” he continues, alluding to the particular kind of banter that has come to define hair salon conversations and confessionals. “We just kind of went into instant friendship.”
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I understood Bradford’s sentiments about her after our first few interactions. I spent a summer day at Knowles Lawson’s Hollywood Hills home to photograph her impressive art collection, which includes works by historic artists like Henry Ossawa Tanner, Elizabeth Catlett, and John Biggers, as well as by younger artists including Toyin Ojih Odutola, Genevieve Gaignard, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, and Rob Pruitt. There’s also a lovely portrait by her granddaughter, Blue Ivy, daughter of Beyoncé and Jay-Z. After spending time with the pair, I began to see many similarities, from passion to succes and the fact that they both maintain close ties to their hometown communities. Bradford’s nonprofit organization, Art + Practice—which he co-founded in 2014 with Eileen Harris Norton and Allan DiCastro—is based in Leimert Park on the same block where he once worked as a hairdresser. In addition to providing free public access to its museum-curated contemporary art exhibitions, the organization supports transition-age foster youth in LA through its partnership with First Place for Youth. Similarly, Knowles Lawson stays close to her Houstonian roots while being immersed in LA’s cultural scene. She currently serves alongside husband as co-artistic directors of WACO (Where Art Can Occur) Theater Center. “Richard and I started WACO to have a place where the dreams of artists could be manifested, and to create opportunities
for young people to experience things beyond their zip code,” she explains. The organization empowers artists of color and inner-city students, exposing them to all aspects of art and life that may not otherwise have the opportunity to experience. “I had a mentor who poured into me, and brought me to see Alvin Ailey as a young person. We work to recreate that experience for the kids and the artists we serve every day.” “Tina’s fundraising is about sustaining these programs which create a kind of creative scaffolding around young artists, young people. She’s really trying to develop the next generation of creative thinkers, and that takes sustainability and that takes money,” says Bradford, who was the Art Icon honoree for WACO Theater Center’s Wearable Art Gala 2022, which was hosted this past October and also awarded Angela Bassett the Film & TV Icon Award. “She’s doing even more than she knows.” That sentiment was shared by many of the artists in this year’s gala auction who donated works to support the cause: Derrick Adams, Rob Pruitt, Shinique Smith, and April Bey, among them. “Tina and Richard have created an organization that really is about sustainability, and having programs that teach young people,” Bradford reflects, adding: “They are investing. That’s what I call an architecture around young people. And that I respond to a lot.”
“She’s really trying to develop the next generation of creative thinkers and that takes sustainability.” —Mark Bradford
Tina Knowles Lawson and Mark Bradford at the artist’s sprawling Los Angeles studio.
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©ELIZAVETA PORODINA IMAGES COURTESY OF HERMÈS
PIERRE HARDY CASTS SHADOWS IN STONE AND DIAMONDS, TOO
In Hermès’s Les Jeux de l’ombre, romantic, opaque shapes become three-dimensional pieces of jewelry that challenge the perception of their form. By ROXANNE ROBINSON 98 culturedmag.com
A shadow is never pure black,” says Pierre Hardy, creative director of Hermès jewelry. “It takes color, depending on the light source.” Citing artists like Caravaggio, whose use of chiaroscuro took the technique to a new level, as well as less apparent Bague double practitioners of the style, such as Andy Warhol and Triptyques lumière Roy Lichtenstein, Hardy is referring to his latest high pavé-set brown jewelry collection, Les Jeux de with l’ombre, which just diamonds and set arrived stateside after debuting in Paris summer. withthis black jade, “My favorite painter of all time is Caravaggio,” blue chalcedony, moonstone, continues the designer. A native Parisian, Hardy and studdiamond. ied the plastic arts at L’Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan before beginning his professional career designing shoes at Christian Dior. In 1990 he was recruited to join Hermès to oversee footwear, and in 2001—two years after establishing his own quirky shoe brand— the French luxury house added jewelry to his purview. His 2010 launch of Hermès’s Haute Bijouterie—high jewelry collection—set the precedent for the maison to express its codes via one-of-a-kind precious gemstones and metal pieces. (Continued)
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It was especially noticeable with spessartite garnets and yellow diamonds utilized in raw, unpolished, uncut states, and paired with an interpretation of the shadow via ombré pavé on rings or dangling streams on earrings, both made from colored diamonds. Hardy can’t pinpoint the exact moment he realized the theme of the new collection, but the finished pieces’s transformation from idea to reality was what left a poignant impression. “What’s exciting about high jewelry is that you create it once; you can do anything once,” he says. “There are very few creations where you can say nothing is impossible.” The sentiment like also describes how he helped conceive Les Jeux de l’ombre’s introductory presentation this fall in New York. Upon discovering the choreographic work of Lina Lapelyté, the designer had an idea that recalled Marilyn Monroe’s iconic dance number in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. “I love the feeling of pink, red, and black—very bright and dark at the same time,” he explains. “It’s very theatrical and grand, but I wanted it to be more modern and cooler.” Given artistic rein to interpret the jewels, Lapelyté and
“The interesting result is the shock in the meeting of the two different fantasies, characters, and points of view. The confrontation that happened is something that I couldn’t anticipate.” In the same breath, the designer is quick to dispel any soft or murky notions of shade. “Nothing is more graphic than a silhouette,” he confirms. “The subject has many impressions: color, movement, and shades, but the shadow is a graphic cutoff that gives so much information. It’s very precise in its exact shape.” To recreate his shadows, Hardy indulged in pavé black diamonds on a chain design made from white diamonds, and used black enamel and jade to mimic what the stones themselves cast. He discovered the effect while sourcing gemstones, cataloging their density and transparency, and capturing their likenesses on his mobile phone. “The white light produced a colorful prism reflection; it was magic and beautiful, like a rainbow,” Hardy explains. “My iPhone and iPad were very important tools during the design process.”
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her 18-member troupe imagined a composition that was much more intimate and engaged shadow theater staging. “It was more like a cabaret, where the proximity between the stage and spectator is lessened. It’s quite close, so you could see the jewelry,” he recalls. Hardy stops short of calling it a collaboration. “Each person has their job,” Hardy continues. “When asking an artist to create and sign a piece, directing it didn’t come to my mind.” Considering the designer pursued dance in a past life, his ability to step back reinforces the humility he’s known for and even offered him a bit of a surprise: “The interesting result is the shock in the meeting of the two different fantasies, characters, and points of view. The confrontation that happened is something that I couldn’t anticipate.”
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© MATTHIEU RAFFARD IMAGES COURTESY OF HERMÈS
“Shadow helped [Caravaggio] dramatize and announce the subject, keeping the rest of the background in the dark, focusing on the light,” says Hardy, recalling the Italian Baroque artist’s Bacchus painting. But the classics weren’t the designer’s only inspiration when he was developing the 53-piece collection, which consists of Hermès motifs such as the whip and the chain, imagined as necklaces, bracelets, rings, and earrings. Most notably, each object’s settings feature an additional layer of gemstones meant to mimic the shadow the piece would make when cast in light. Color in Les Jeux de l’ombre is revealed in a range of stones Hardy says were often chosen for their saturation of hue rather than their provenance. He made a concerted effort, in fact, to steer clear of a classic gemstone combo (ruby, blue sapphire, emerald, and white diamond) explaining, “I needed to create an iconic color range for Hermès, which is famous for its use of color in silks, leathers, and beauty. The color field and shades are very specific.”
www.toddmerrillstudio.com Light sculpture: Jamie Harris // Vase: Maarten Vrolijk // Table: Stefan Rurak
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10975 SW 17th St., Miami, FL 33199 | 305.348.2890 | frost.fiu.edu María Magdalena Campos-Pons (b. 1959), Floating between Temperature Zones, watercolor, gouache, and ink on paper, 2019, 25 5/16 x 33 inches, Private Collection. Image courtesy of the artist and Gallery Wendi Norris This exhibition and catalogue are made possible by the Terra Foundation for American Art. Additional generous support for the exhibition is provided by Ramón and Nercys Cernuda and the Shadravan Family, the Gazitua family, ArtesMiami/Aida Levitan, Ph.D., and the Darlene M. and Jorge M. Pérez Endowment. Additional support has been generously provided by the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners; the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs and the Florida Council on Arts and Culture; and members of the Frost Art Museum.
Luis Gispert and Jeffrey Reed, Stereomongrel, 2005. Super 35mm film, color, sound, 12 min., transferred to video. Courtesy of Moran Moran Gallery. ©Luis Gispert and Jeffrey Reed
LUX ET VERITAS Through January 8, 2023 Only at NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale
Presenting sponsor: S. Donald Sussman Additional support provided by Funding Arts Broward, Inc. Major support for NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale is provided by the David and Francie Horvitz Family Foundation, the City of Fort Lauderdale, Community Foundation of Broward, the Broward County Cultural Division, the Cultural Council, and the Broward County Board of County Commissioners, and the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Arts and Culture, the Florida Council on Arts and Culture, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
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COUNTER CULTURE When Sue Chan began her restaurant career as an assistant at Momofuku in 2009, David Chang and his punk rock approach to dining represented one dimension of food celebrity, while classically trained fine dining chefs, like Thomas Keller, were the other. “There wasn’t much in between,” says Chan, who founded her food culture company Care of Chan six years ago. Now, those iconoclasts inhabit one side of a spectrum, and food artists like Laila Gohar are on the other, while a host of different perspectives—bakers, farmers, butchers, and even foragers—lie in between. “As more people grow to love food, others with different backgrounds, education, and training have entered the industry,” she says. “And with that, a new era is upon us, one where food is influenced by other parts of culture, most notably art and design.” To that spirit, the emerging chefs that follow are changing the way we eat, think, and enjoy food.
By REBECCA AARON
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PARIS STARN
BROOKLYN
“I love the occasional fine dining experience, but I’m also somebody who eats with my hands a lot.” Paris Starn in her Brooklyn home, where she conceives, creates, and captures her confectioneries.
Portrait by JUTHARAT PINYODOONYACHET
Four years ago, Paris Starn was perhaps best known for her fashion line, Paris 99, which was inspired by her great-grandmother’s cooking aprons. When the clothing brand shuttered during the pandemic, she found herself with more time on her hands. “Everyone in my house was working,” says the 28-year-old, who happily took on the responsibility of “feeding everybody.” She began cooking and baking all day, then photographing and sharing her creations on Instagram. But it was never meant to be a business, Starn says, despite it quickly becoming one. Focused primarily on baking, Starn’s work today spans sweet and savory dishes, which the art history graduate student captures in a realistic, vanitas-esque style, reflective of the amount of time she spends in museums. Drawing inspiration from both of her grandmothers—one made a career in the arts, the other was an antiques dealer—the chef transports her audience to different eras while injecting a modern playfulness that lightens each dish, in image or in real life. The ornate cakes that Starn designs echo the banquet tables in paintings on display in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is with unique ingredients like watermelon and bow-shaped meringue, though, that she imbues her own sense of style: Hems are piped atop her oblong cakes. Balls of braided bread are peppered with halved figs. For those not yet able to taste a Starn-baked delicacy, the culinary creator captures her cakes’s emotions with her camera. Showcasing her expert plating—including the unique dishware carefully paired with each piece—as well as her adroitness with pastry, each social media post she makes has a zoomed-in ruggedness that documents her work in its final, permanent form. The act is reminiscent of the launch of a runway collection: every one-ofone exists only temporarily on the plate before it’s whisked away for another’s consumption. Starn’s work is playful, decadent, and always pleasurable.
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ANANAS ANANAS
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LOS ANGELES AND MEXICO CITY
Photography by CAITY KRONE
“It’s a very beautiful thing to see, to witness people becoming the artwork.” —Eléna Petrossian
For the opening of Jeremiah Brent’s new LA store, Atrio, Verónica González (far left) and Eléna Petrossian incorporated sculptural pieces from the interior designer’s collection to create an edible installation.
Eléna Petrossian and Verónica González are the masterminds behind food-art studio Ananas Ananas. The duo’s name emphasizes the universal language of food with, ananas translating to “pineapple” in multiple languages. Operating between Los Angeles and Mexico City, the studio focuses on storytelling— creating edible installations and dining experiences for artists, brands, and galleries to encourage audience interaction with food in a multi-sensory, experimental way. The pair achieves this by withholding utensils and napkins from their get-togethers, as well as tables and seating. Instead, guests are encouraged to eat with their hands: standing and interacting with the meal, and those around them, in new and meaningful ways. For the food itself, Petrossian, 32, and González, 29, draw inspiration from the recipes of their grandmothers. They derive techniques and flavors from the past, tweaking each to create dishes that might seem recognizable to guests, but are presented in different forms. Themes of Northwestern Mexico and the coast are present in González’s work, while Armenian and Iranian ingredients like pistachio, rosewater, and saffron loom large in Petrossian’s palate. When combined—and they often are—the flavors are almost as unique as their presentations. For the form and structure of these holistic food experiences, Ananas Ananas looks to architecture, as well as nature’s textures like terra-cotta—mediums that are not edible, but that surely would be transcendent if they were. At their core, Petrossian and González are creating comfort food in the form of an experimental party. When it is all over, only bits of tortilla, crumbs, and smeared sauces remain. That, they say, is their favorite part of all.
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SUEA CHO
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NEW YORK CITY
Portrait by JUTHARAT PINYODOONYACHET
“I have an affinity and deep love for cuteness, prettiness, deliciousness—and I know I have good taste. These things combined lead to my creations.”
Suea Cho putting the final touches on one of her highly sought after—and highly adorable—cakes.
Because Suea Cho dreams in food, the installations, offerings, and environments she composes for her experimental dinner series and cake service feel like dreamscapes. From an angelic butter mold to surreal carrots, each creation is imbued with a quality of airiness, lightness, and fantasy. Inspired by her journals and her sacred ventures to farmers markets, her pieces challenge how we should see, consume, and even think about food. Whether that’s by intentionally being tactile or jarring, Cho’s goal is to engage through form, table setting, and the performance of hosting itself— much of which is displayed through her hard-to-book Suea’s Dinner Service. More than designing for viral attention, her work is firmly rooted in her Korean heritage and her experience in fashion, as well as from her world travels from Montana to Paris and throughout South America. It’s not fusion, though, but more so an understanding of when one ingredient or concept might be better suited than another. After all, Cho, 28, began cooking because she wanted to learn how to make “American” food, as she calls it—truly an impossible task to undertake without borrowing from other cultures. Her father, an architect, and her mother, who studied art history, had an early influence on shaping her path; whether it was fashion or food, she always knew she would end up creating. Now she gets to do both, proposing unique and unexpected concoctions like a kitschy supermarket cake topped with a photo of a baby deer and studded with candied cherubs or her butter candles, which melt to become a dipping sauce. Cho’s work expands on the exploration of what food means right now—or at least how she sees it in her mind. With the need to balance aesthetics while satiating her guests’s appetites, the chef has shied away from confirming her work as art, arguing that food shouldn’t be a “sacred, untouchable item,” but rather should be playful and inventive.
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FURNITURE
LIGHTING
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TAKERS LEGENDS IN THE MAKING, THESE MULTI-HYPHENATE CREATIVES HAVE TAKEN A LEAP FROM THEIR FORMAL ORIGINS—WHETHER IT BE FASHION, ART, OR DESIGN—TRAVERSING DISCIPLINES AND EXPECTATIONS. BY JOSHUA GLASS 117 culturedmag.com
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BEVERLY NGUYEN
After a career of steaming, pinning, and packing, the stylist has not crossed off fashion entirely from her CV, but her new endeavors into the world of home cultivate her interest in design and connections to her community.
Portrait by EMMA MARIE JENKINSON
IT ALL STARTED WITH A DREAM TWO YEARS AGO for Beverly Nguyen—literally. Temporarily domesticated by Covid-19, she went to sleep in the Los Angeles hills in a life she couldn’t recognize. When she awoke, she knew she had to return to her New York, not for fashion per se—the near-decade career she had been developing under the red-carpet dresser Kate Young—but for something entirely else: She wanted a store. The third daughter of two Vietnamese refugees, Nguyen was born and raised in Orange County, California, and grew up in what she recognizes now was a split existence, marked by financial uncertainty. Her family lived in the type of picturesque, gated neighborhood reality TV has made the community known for, but things at home were not always sunny. Her parents ran a clothing factory in Santa Ana, a town away from the ‘burbs, but a world apart entirely. “They’d work all day and then at night my mom would go to all her vendors asking for money or an extension or whatever she needed to do,” says Beverly, explaining how the housing crisis of the early aughts was particularly difficult for their fragile family business. “Of course, she was dressed up with her little heels,” she recalls. “It was very much a dual life.” This dichotomy is something Nguyen has come to know well. Young love inspired a cross-country move from her studies at San Francisco’s Academy of Art to New York, where she found herself working in the beauty department at Vogue, despite knowing nothing about hair and makeup. It was a gateway to working at retailers Opening Ceremony and La
Garçonne, where she eventually met Young. They immediately hit it off and Nguyen ended up managing her styling operation for the likes of Margot Robbie, Natalie Portman, and Selena Gomez for nine years. It’s near-certain the pair would still be working together if it hadn’t been for Nguyen’s unprompted vision in her slumber. In a former Chinese temple in the Chinatown/Two Bridges/Lower East Side nexus, Beverly’s NYC opened at 22 Ludlow Street with a two-month lease in the Spring of 2021. On the shelves were kidney-shaped ceramics made in collaboration with Fernando Aciar and culinary tools from nearby Chinese restaurant suppliers hurt by the pandemic. Louis Rambert of Rafael de Cárdenas designed the space, and her parents manufactured towels and linens. Despite its immediate popularity, Nguyen says the brick and mortar—which ended up doubling its lease until August—was extraordinarily hard work, and it was all on her shoulders. Many a time she found herself rushing from a glitzy photo shoot or fancy dinner to a vendor of her own in much the same way her mother did decades before. Eventually, Beverly’s NYC gave way to another pop-up at Rockefeller Center, where she became the first Asian-American woman to own a store at the landmark location, and a “permalance” space at Nordstrom’s New York flagship that still features her namesake virgin olive oil and chopsticks, as well as a collaboration with Material kitchenware. “If it doesn’t work out then it doesn’t work out, but I can’t live without trying,” she tells me over martinis this past September at Paris’s Au Pied de Cochon. We’re both in town for the fall runway shows, and Nguyen says that the restaurant is one of the oldest in the city. Curious, I ask her how she explains what she does now since style is very much still a part of her picture. In a beguiling Christopher Dress little black dress that spirals her frame perfectly she smiles, “I say that I work in fashion and that I also own a home store. You can have both.”
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The influential menswear designer has always been an audiophile. Through his speaker design studio Ojas, his life-long hobby has become a bespoke operation that spans the senses.
Portrait by TOMÁS STOCKTON
THOSE LUCKY ENOUGH TO VISIT DEVON Turnbull’s Brooklyn Navy Yard studio—which, in all honesty, is more of an assembly site than a creative space to meditate—are usually surprised. “Half of the time people think we’re a much larger operation than we are,” he laughs. “The other half much smaller.” The warehouse is actually medium-sized, and comprises multiple areas for millwork, metal shaping, carpentry, and technical engineering—a welcome expansion when Turnbull relocated his headquarters from the top floor of his Clinton Hill, Brooklyn townhouse two years ago. In many ways the move was eye-opening of sorts: Turnbull’s on-and-off hobby, Ojas, was becoming something much more. Turnbull’s parents, both Transcendental Meditation teachers, moved the family out of New York and to rural Iowa when he was 11. He grew up in what he calls a “culturally secluded community,” finding not only an escape but also a love in music. After dropping out of high school, he got his GED at the age of 17 in order to attend the Art Institute of Seattle, where he studied sound engineering. It was there that Turnbull took on the name Ojas—a Sanskrit word that comes from his TM upbringing and roughly translates to “essence of vitality”—which he used not only as his DJ moniker, but also an overall umbrella for creative projects ranging from creative direction to graphic design. When he moved
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to New York in 1999, Ojas was leaning much toward the latter, and in addition to branding the T-shirts and stickers Turnbull sold at hip Lower East Side boutiques, it became his graffiti tag, too. Ahead of fashion’s streetwear boom, Turnbull co-founded Nom de Guerre in 2003 with Holly Harnsongkram, Wil Whitney, and Isa Saalabi. Insisting it was a “social science project” rather than a fashion company, the now-defunct collective has been heralded by Hypebeasters as the one that got away, and continues to have a cult following for its pioneering, militant fabrication, skate-rat aesthetic, and mysterious approach to men’s style. “Nom de Guerre anticipated many of the most tiresome aspects of contemporary menswear culture,” Rob Nowill wrote in 2018 about the brand’s influence. “There are legions of menswear obsessives who still talk about it as a seminal label, bringing credibility and fashion authority to the world of streetwear.” At the same time, Ojas became Turnbull’s personal audio experiment, in which he designed one-off “sound sculptures” for himself and enthusiasts he’d meet around the world. When NDG folded in 2010, Turnbull kept the hobby as his creative outlet, taking on a slew of advertising jobs across fashion. A decade and some change later, all of that has changed. “It’s become way more successful than I ever thought it could be,” says Turnbull, who established Ojas as an official entity three years ago. Instantly recognizable for their brutalist designs and cartoon-like audiphone toppers, Turnbull’s bespoke speakers can be seen everywhere from Supreme stores to New York’s Lisson Gallery—where he staged an installation this summer—and require at least four months to be crafted. Comprising hand-made carpentry and vintage hi-fi components sourced from all around the world, the devices utilize Ojas’s signature horn-loaded compression drivers for what the founder calls an “uncompromising sound.” Indeed the quality is much more important than look or feel for Turnbull, who admits he experienced bouts of hesitation as his venture began to formalize. “I didn’t want people to think I was a poser,” he explains, referencing perhaps his long design portfolio. “My primary interest in audio is acoustics, not aesthetics. Everything I do is for the quality of sound. Everything has a reason.”
DEVON TURNBULL
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“Ultimately, it’s all part of one journey.” The ceramicist and sculptor draws on cultural stimuli for her elegantly minimal works of art and design, but her background in organic food and farming will always be close to her heart.
SIMONE BODMER-TURNER
Portrait by ABDI IBRAHIM
THE LEAVES ARE BEAUTIFUL THIS TIME OF YEAR at Simone Bodmer-Turner’s new house. Situated in New Salem—a tiny Western Massachusetts town she reassures no one else has heard of—the home away from her Brooklyn, New York home is a recent purchase from a friend as a means to detach from her artistic practice. Secluded and quiet, the vast property boasts plenty of woodland and even a scenic pond. This past summer Bodmer-Turner had a great run with cucumbers in her vegetable garden, but with the drop in temperature she finds herself currently with too many tomatoes. Winter squash, Japanese kabocha, and lots of herbs also fill her plots, not to mention the usual fall stew suspects of fennel, celery, and rhubarb. “I wouldn’t quite call it farming,” Bodmer-Turner laughs over the phone on her now-routine return drive from country to city. Flower beds dot the perimeter of vegetation, and when I suggest they are for her alabaster-colored vessels, the artist pauses, “Yes, but for the birds, bees, and butterflies, too.” Perhaps her most visible works, Bodmer-Turner’s vessels—ceramic vases that combine ancient ceremonial details with modern design—comprise her studio’s permanent collection and draw upon influences from Pre-Columbian stirrup water receptacles to midcentury modern lighting styles. Made to order, the glazed stoneware is but just one component of her ethereal design practice, which spans sculpture, interior installations, and furniture design. She debuted her first collection of ceramic furniture and lighting this past year, too. California-born and Massachusetts-raised—on the other side of the state, in Manchester—Bodmer-Turner
was not always working with clay. She studied English at the College of Charleston, flirting loosely with fine arts before moving to New York for an enticing office job. Needless to say it wasn’t for her, but her lifelong interest in cooking and farming encouraged her to take on a role at the farm-to-table sustainable-food-delivery start-up Good Eggs. “We were ahead of the time,” she says, referring to the popularity of green food subscription services today. Bodmer-Turner worked there for three years doing a bit of everything: by day she was rolling coolers from Upper East Side bakeries to Chelsea Market or picking up pasture-raised chickens to bring to Brooklyn, and at night she began taking ceramics classes on the side. Food education, though, and the connections she made between the growers, the handlers, the eaters, and the land were what she enjoyed most. When her time at the start-up was coming to an end, she decided that not only did she need to get away from the city, she also needed to farm. “I was there from 6 a.m. to 3:30 p.m,” she says, recalling the summer of 2015 in which she juggled working at Appleton Farms, part of a land conservation group in Massachusetts, and the Market Restaurant, a now-defunct seasonal farm-to-table restaurant owned by Alice Waters’s godson Nico Monday. “They let me out early so that I could drive to the restaurant, where I’d open at 4:30 and work until 11 p.m.” The experience wasn’t Bodmer-Turner’s first time on a farm nor in the kitchen, but it was the most intense, and it informed the young artist even more about sourcing and feeding. Bodmer-Turner was inspired to take a trip to Nepal, where she where she learned about land degradation and taught organic farming and composting to several women’s groups. Afterward, she continued her travels to Myanmar and Cambodia before ending the trip in Japan for a residency at Shiro Oni that would go on to shape her approach to ceramics. Unlike the serial lives we see in entertainment, not all interests nor past experiences are linear, and though the artist did once explore a few landbased dying techniques, there is no direct correlation between her time spent harvesting the earth and the organic work in her studio now. “Ultimately, it’s all part of one journey,” admits Bodmer-Turner, whose thumb for now is focused on her pottery—and her garden, of course.
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FRANCISCO COSTA “Nothing is ever perfect. That is the beauty and challenge of discovery. You have to keep reinventing.” The fashion veteran, who designed alongside Oscar de la Renta and Tom Ford before overseeing Calvin Klein’s women’s collections for over a decade, returned to the jungles of his native Brazil to find himself. What he didn’t expect to discover were the beginnings of his eponymous natural beauty line. Portrait by CLÉMENT PASCAL FRANCISCO COSTA NEVER IMAGINED HE WOULD stop designing clothes. Growing up in Guarani, a small Brazilian municipality three hours outside of Rio de Janeiro, fashion entered his life at an early age. His mother fiercely outspoken as she was stylish, owned a children’s clothing line, and after school he would visit her factory to learn about fabrics and colors. When she passed away, he decided to leave their 3,000-person town for New York. Studying English to get by, the 21-year-old Costa enrolled in night school at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where he supplemented his conjugation lessons with technical classes about construction and fashion theory. Soon enough his natural talents in the craft were clear, and after graduation he was swept up by Herbert Rounick, the Seventh Avenue fashion titan whose license company He-Ro Group created pieces for the likes of Bill Blass, Bob Mackie, and Oscar de la Renta. “It felt like a dream. I was working with everyone I looked up to,” remembers Costa, who, upon the passing of Rounick, went to work for de la Renta himself. He stayed with the iconic American house for five years, mastering craftsmanship and the art of couture (de la Renta was simultaneously the creative director Pierre Balmain’s namesake) before joining Gucci in 1998 to
work as an assistant to then--creative director Tom Ford. By the time Costa arrived at Calvin Klein in 2003, he was ready to take charge. In his 13-year-tenure, Costa completely reimagined the American brand’s ready-to-wear collection. Building off the style of the founder for whom he took over, Costa’s CK was intentionally restrained and yet sophisticatedly modern. It echoed moments of Klein’s own minimalism while also experimenting with unconventional materials like bouclé textures, patent leather, as well as faux fur—Costa was one of the first to do so—and technical tailoring. He won the Council of Fashion Designers of America’s Womenswear Designer of the Year for his work at the brand in 2006 and again in 2008, in addition to many other accolades, including the National Design Museum’s Fashion Design Award. Behind the scenes, though, a worry was festering inside of the designer, and as the decades in fashion lengthened, so too did his disillusionment. “It just didn’t feel right,” explains Costa, who had become increasingly alarmed about the effects his industry had on the environment as well as his responsibility around it. Conservation had always been a passion point (he once introduced upcycled Scottish yarn into his CK collections), but he admits the pace of the fashion system wasn’t conducive for real change. So he went searching for something else. On a six-month journey into the Amazon, Costa found exactly what he was looking for in Acre, an isolated state on the border of Peru six hours from civilization via canoe. It was his first time in the Brazilian rainforest, and he had gone to meet members of the Yawanawá tribe, who introduced him to breu. Used for centuries to enhance calmness and focus, the ceremonial resin is derived from the sap of an almaciga tree. It was breu, as well as his own reconnection to the earth, that inspired an idea for the former fashion designer: a clean beauty line connected to nature. “That really was the magic behind it all,” Costa says. “The aroma smells like the rainforest. It opens up the sixth chakra.” From there he traveled down the Amazon River, discovering rare native fruits, serums, and medicinal herbs and collaborating with local chemists and botanists. When he emerged, Costa Brazil was born as an eco-beneficial beauty brand with a four-product gender-neutral line of oils and fragrances. Three years since its founding, the skincare brand has expanded across all categories, introducing a hyaluronic acid and acai serum, a sleek steel lymphatic drainer, white jungle eau de parfums, and much more. I ask Costa how it feels conceptually to design without the seasonal runway restrictions— how does he know when something is completely perfect without a hard timeline or a fixed amount of product? “Nothing is ever perfect,” he says with a smile. “That is the beauty and challenge of discovery. You have to keep reinventing.”
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In her 13 restaurants, the celebrated Isreali chef has challenged conventions and crossed cultures. Now, she’s bringing her unorthodox point of view to the black box stage and the small screen as she adds in comedy to her ever-evolving menu. Portrait by EMMA MARIE JENKINSON
EINAT ADMONY MANY MIGHT KNOW EINAT ADMONY AS THE “Queen of Falafel,” but the “ultimate balaboosta” (Yiddish for “perfect housewife”) is her title of choice—at least when she’s in the kitchen. Born in Bnei Brak, an Isreali city just east of Tel Aviv on the central Mediterranean coastal plain, Admony grew up learning spicy Persian dishes under the direction of her mother, an Iranian immigrant, and enjoying a traditional Yemini breakfast every shabbat morning as insisted upon by her father. A Moroccan neighbor—in many ways a second mom—taught her how to hand-roll couscous, and by the time Admony had left to serve in the Israel Defense Forces as a driver and an ad-hoc cook, she had captured all of the seasonings and flavors of Middle Eastern cuisine. “I’ve been everywhere,” she surmises, rolladexing through her brief enrollment in higher learning, free time roaming around Germany, taking food-discovery trips across the globe, and finally, her move to New York, where she now lives. “I toured the world in my 20s. Even now with kids, I still travel so much, but never did I think I’d ever go to Albania.” One of the first to popularize Israeli cuisine among Americans, the chef has opened an impressive 13 restaurants that draw upon her multicultural upbringing, including the ever-popular Taïm franchise, where perfectly-crispy falafel balls are served atop fast-casual grain bowls; Kish-Kash, a now-shuttered couscous-focused cafe in Manhattan’s West Village; and, her crown jewel: Balaboosta, a fine-dining reimagination of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern fare. “I’ve made a career out of being a housewife,” she says playfully, hinting at her ability to render 126 culturedmag.com
“It’s important to be able to laugh. Especially women, we need to be able to have that relief.” dishes that might be considered “comfort food” contemporary. “Cooking is a way to express my love and compassion for those around me. It is also a way to connect the past with the present and future.” Along the way, the James Beard Award semifinalist has established herself as a TV personality on the likes of Chopped and Guy Fieri’s Tournament of Champions thanks to her deadpan humor that combines the authority of the head of a kitchen with the cheeky subversion of a countercultural critic. “I like the camera,” she jokes, “and the camera likes me.” It’s the camera, in fact, that is driving Admony to Albania as she begins her next venture: her own television show. Self-produced, the travel series will follow the chef as she meets various groups of women making significant changes around the world. Food, of course, will be a large part of the developing project, but so will sustainability as well as—perhaps unexpectedly—comedy. The chef has long been a distant admirer of the genre, but a chance offer from New York’s historic Comedy Cellar a couple years ago to collaborate on the venue’s restaurant, Olive Tree Cafe, brought Admony closer to the stage. “I didn’t think I had enough restaurants,” she jokes. After taking several stand-up classes, she was fascinated by the challenge. “I’ve led kitchens, appeared on TV shows, and been on-stage at events,” she says. “That is easy for me. But to stand there in a dark room alone and try to make people laugh is something else.” She relates this fear to the nerves she faced when she first set out to launch Taïm in 2005, but now with different kind of stakes. Still, the chef insists she must go forward with it, and while her upcoming series will not contain any formal monologues, the organic nature of Admony’s conversations will offer as much hope as they will humor. “It’s important to be able to laugh,” she says. “As women especially, we need to be able to have that relief.”
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ARUSHI GALLERY LOS ANGELES | LONDON | NEW DELHI
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December 1 – 3, 2022 Photograph taken by Mateo Garcia / Belle & Company
Paused between semesters, three photographic leaders from academic institutions—Yale’s Gregory Crewdson, NYU’s Dr. Deborah Willis, and UCLA’s Catherine Opie—identify new image-makers changing the discourse of their craft.
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HOBBES GINSBERG Graduate Student at the Yale School of Art
Hobbes Ginsberg, Self Portrait with Karen, Making Pancakes, New Haven, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist.
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What does it look like when two women build a home together? That’s one of the questions Hobbes Ginsberg asks herself from her apartment in New Haven—one she has shared with her girlfriend for three years through a pandemic and, now, an MFA study at Yale School of Art. Ginsberg, 28, started taking photos to get to know her hometown of Granada, Nicaragua. As she began to familiarize herself with the medium, she wanted subjects on hand to fiddle with her camera and identify her style. The most ready and willing? Herself, she admits. “As I began experimenting, it became a fruitful exercise in self-expression,” Ginsberg shares. “I was in a safe space to explore my queerness and there were no pressures—things could exist in my photos before they needed to exist in real life.” Now, Ginsberg has expanded her practice to something else that reflects her reality: the concept of queer domesticity. “I like to bring in signifiers of the home—items from the kitchen, tables I built for the living room, to investigate what making a space looks like together,” she adds. The work follows bright yellows reflected in checkered pants and flower vases to the warm orange-reds as photo frames or hair highlights affixed to baby blue textures—a bold color palette that still provides a sense of comfort. “Hobbes has gone on to explore the constructs of the quotidien domestic space she shares with her partner in a way that considers every detail,” shares Yale School of Art’s Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Photography Gregory Crewdson. “She paints the walls, makes furniture herself, and literally builds a world of meaning that blurs the line between life and art in a very compelling way.” The home she captures in her photos matches her studio, her dress, and even her website’s graphic design. And that’s on purpose. As someone who describes herself as pursuing a “fully encompassing art practice,” her “aesthetized style” comes through in her self-portraiture, still lifes, and everyday candids. Working outside of nuclear family confines, Ginsberg’s work challenges the notion that the home is a gendered space and how it can instead be, in her words, “more collaborative and uplifting.”
“Hobbes has gone on to explore the constructs of the quotidien domestic space she shares with her partner in a way that considers every detail. She paints the walls, makes furniture herself, and literally builds a world of meaning that blurs the line between life and art in a very compelling way.” — Gregory Crewdson culturedmag.com 135
DENISE STEPHANIE HEWITT Junior at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts
From “Found, Fond,” 2022 by Denise Stephanie Hewitt. Image courtesy of the artist.
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At 20 years old, Denise Stephanie Hewitt conducts standard tours for prospective NYU students in her role as a campus ambassador and R.A. What’s out of the ordinary is that, while juggling a junior’s photography major at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, she touts a resume that spans a cover shoot for Marie Claire to a highly circulated Barneys New York campaign. “I live this Hannah Montana double life,” she says. “I’ll be in class and then get an email from Vogue saying, ‘Hey, Simone Biles needs coverage for the Met Gala.’” Hewitt attributes her prodigic career to the team at Red Hook Labs, a collective she discovered while exploring the South Brooklyn neighborhood as a part of a high school “project week.” With the guidance of the studio’s Executive Director Jimmy Moffat (also the co-founder of the premiere photography agency Art + Commerce), she was quickly immersed in the creative network of high-end fashion photography, with new colleagues like Tyler Mitchell. But even as Hewitt has catapulted to creative stardom, her approach to the work remains grounded, familial, and, in the words of her mentors, intimate. Renowned artist, professor, and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts Dr. Deborah Willis echoes that sentiment, celebrating Hewitt as a “compassionate photographer” with an impressive “storytelling aspect… specifically with narratives that explore Black women and beauty.” A fact that resonates in her latest work, which centers a backdrop she has often drawn inspiration from: her grandmother’s brownstone in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. Her grandmother, Agnes Stephanie, emigrated from Saint Vincent to New York and, after balancing multiple jobs, eventually bought her own home that is still kept by the family. She opened up certain floors of the brownstone to other Caribbean immigrants finding their footing, and established a moral code that her granddaughter holds close to this day. Denise’s ongoing photo series, “Found, Fond” revisits this space entrenched in family “as if the house is a museum, going into cabinets with photos I didn’t even know existed, through shelves I had never dared to touch.” She captures various family photos against textured backgrounds like the dresser countertop of her grandfather, the living room bookshelf with a Bible, and a toaster oven full of foil-wrapped bread. For the artist, the series demonstrates “the weight of what the family means, particularly for the Black diaspora” that has faced a colonial history of purposeful ancestral erasure.
“I was initially impressed by the storytelling aspect of Denise’s work, specifically about women of the Black diaspora. She is a compassionate photographer exploring new narratives about Black women and beauty.” —Dr. Deborah Willis
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AMINA CRUZ Graduate Student at the University of California, Los Angeles
Amina Cruz, Untitled, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist.
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“From the stark reality of how a portrait works within queer culture to how landscape creates place that implies identity politics, Amina creates work that serves multiple important meanings.” —Catherine Opie
Amina Cruz came to photography unlike most. She was raised with the bulk of her family in Tampa, Florida, while her father resided in Miami. They couldn’t live in the same city because, at the time, he was an FBI agent “deeply” undercover. At 14, she discovered her father’s stakeout Nikon left behind from his travels. She never gave it back. The job of an FBI agent meant a mobile childhood for Amina. Unable to build intimate friendships, she relied on photographs—they recorded her memories in ways that lasting relationships could not. Her art also served as a vehicle for social interaction. As a shy kid, Cruz would lean on her work to engage with passersby. “I needed the camera to go into these social spaces,” she shares. “When I brought my camera, I was the photographer. I didn’t have to be Amina.” This practice built the foundation for Cruz’s focus on portraits.
Cruz officially learned her trade on a film camera from 1954. Without a focus nor light meter, she could only estimate how each photo might turn out. Taking portraits thus evolved into a spiritual practice of presence. “It made me really slow down,” she emphasizes, “and ask, ‘What am I taking a picture of? Why am I taking this picture?’” For her, this almost-meditative approach—an intention in navigating a space rather than overtaking it—is how Cruz, as she describes it, “queers or browns the creative practice” and honestly documents her community. The photographer’s untitled work, which she is developing for her graduate thesis at UCLA, is an organic continuation of her series “They Are Their Own,” which centers on queer people of color. She hopes that her thesis serves as more of a narrative, an “entryway to otherness,” one where cyanotype portraits on watercolor paper and photos of a farm—the
very land where she sourced pigment used in this series, and where her grandparents met as migrant workers—are in conversation with her photos. “From the stark reality of how a portrait works within queer culture to how landscape creates place that implies identity politics, she creates work that serves multiple important meanings,” says Catherine Opie, Chair of the UCLA Department of Art. Her pieces seek to validate the idea of living in one’s own world and emphasize beauty in what has historically been seen as marginal. And her message particularly resonates with queer viewers, many of whom have reached out to Cruz on social media saying they have never seen queer people presented in the way she captures them. “It’s a great reminder that this is really important,” she adds. For Cruz, this archiving of her own community “naturally evolved, but now feels like a gift given to me.”
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Spirit in the Land Feb 16 – Jul 9, 2023
This exhibition is organized by Trevor Schoonmaker, Mary D.B.T. and James H. Semans Director, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Lead support for Spirit in the Land is provided by the Ford Foundation. Major support for Spirit in the Land is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. At the Nasher, Spirit in the Land is supported by The Duke Endowment; the Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Family Fund for Exhibitions; the Frank Edward Hanscom Endowment Fund; the Janine and J. Tomilson Hill Family Fund; Katie Thorpe Kerr and Terrance I. R. Kerr; Alexandria and Kevin Marchetti; Lisa Lowenthal Pruzan and Jonathan Pruzan; and Caroline and Arthur Rogers. Hew Locke, Mosquito Hall (detail), 2013. Acrylic on chromogenic print, 83 7/8 x 49 3/4 inches (213 x 126.4 cm). Courtesy of the artist, Hales Gallery, and P•P•O•W. © Hew Locke. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2023.
nasher.duke.edu
IMAGE COURTESY OF TWO ROADS DEVELOPMENT
Designed by architect Bernardo Fort-Brescia and Alessandro Munge of Studio Munge, the 55-story glass building will be the EDITION’s first residential-only property in the world.
MIAMI SPRAWL In the last decade, Miami’s Edgewater neighborhood has become a destination for those who want waterfront living in the heart of the city thanks to a series of new luxury residential towers that have risen from its shores. Now, the art and entertainment–proximate area will be home to a new superlative standard in branded living: The first-ever EDITION Residences. By ELIZABETH FAZZARE
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“Nothing replaces geography. The perspective is magical.” —Bernardo Fort-Brescia
Ten years ago, the 1.7-square-mile neighborhood adjacent to Wynwood in Miami was a low-density residential enclave with stunning Biscayne Bay views. Local developer Two Roads Development spotted its potential early on: “Two-thirds of Miami is made up of the Florida Everglades, so there’s not a lot of land,” explains managing partner Taylor Collins. This shore-hugging area, however, was surrounded by a growing arts and entertainment district—the Design District, Wynwood, street art, and shopping—and is an easy commute to the offices of the business district. After purchasing land in 2010, Collins and his colleagues built their first luxury high-rise residential tower, Biscayne Beach, in the neighborhood in 2017, then Elysee in 2021. Its third—EDITION Residences, Miami Edgewater—will break ground next summer. The new tower, however, is not just another exciting milestone for a booming residential neighborhood; it’s also a new standard in luxury branded living. The 55-story, 649-foot-tall glass building will be the EDITION’s first residential-only property in the world, melding Creative Director Ian Schrager’s penchant for contemporary minimalist design with the amenities and services synonymous with the hospitality brand’s name. Architect Bernardo Fort-Brescia of Arquitectonica and Alessandro Munge of Studio Munge are bringing this vision to life. The “edgy-yet-elegant” structure is sleek and crystalline, says the architect, and was designed with its natural setting in mind. “On approach, the building curves, leading the eye to the Bay,” Fort-Brescia explains. “From the Bay, the corner erodes in a moon shape, cresting with a sail-like profile. Its ground level is monumental, with columns following the concave form of the silhouette.” This arcade announces EDITION Residences, Miami Edgewater to the existing pedestrian promenade, known as the Baywalk. Above, residents will enjoy gracious one- to four-bedroom layouts with floor-to-ceiling windows and spacious terraces from which to admire the natural surroundings that inspired the tower. “It was important for us to provide water views for all of our residents,” notes Collins, and equally
important to assure this, despite the rapid expansion of Miami’s skyline. “Every unit has unobstructed vistas in perpetuity,” he says. Units range from 1,952 to 3,864 square feet in size, and luxury finishes mark the soft, warm, livable interiors by Munge, which emphasize an indoor-outdoor feel. In addition, three triple-height penthouses at EDITION Residences, Miami Edgewater will offer private rooftops and pools, and across the building, an array of gardens by Fort Lauderdale–based landscape firm EDSA bring flora to the sky. The property’s 45,000 square feet of amenities reflect its creative connection to the world of luxury hospitality, including two pools with cabanas, a gym with private training rooms and state-of-theart workout machines, an extensive spa, a club lounge, library, private screening room, dog spa and park, children’s play area, and kids club, as well as four guest suites that residents can reserve for their visitors. These lifestyle extras help to set the building apart from others, but in general, says Collins, demand for quality new-build apartments in Miami is high. “Miami had a lot of growth in residents coming from the Northeast,” he says, “and the pandemic just threw gasoline on that.” While appreciations are no longer as ballooned as they were in 2021, rates are healthy, and moving more into a “normal” range, says Collins. Edgewater has reaped these benefits for over a decade since Two Roads Development’s initial investment. Seeing it change through these visionary placemaking efforts is rewarding, says Collins, and that an international brand such as EDITION would choose to plant its first all-residences flag here “shows how strong this neighborhood is, and how much growth is to come.” Certainly, the site’s natural assets have helped it along the way, as has its central location. Edgewater has matured into a destination in its own right, and its tower residents are getting the best the city has to offer. “Nothing replaces geography,” says Fort-Brescia. He continues, “the perspective is magical.”
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DANIEL ARSHAM DEC 1 - 4, 2022
Miami Design District 3925 NE 39th Street Presented by JAYARAM X EVERYREALM X FUTURE GALERIE
NOV 23, 2022 - Feb 4, 2023 Miami Art Week Reception Tuesday, Nov 29 | 7-9pm
Also on view: Room for the living/ Room for the dead by Miami-based artist T. Eliott Mansa and Portals of Introspection, a video exhibition guest-curated by Donnamarie Baptiste featuring by Dimitry Saïd Chamy, Mikey Please, Duke Riley and Paul Ward
3852 N Miami Ave | Wed-Sat 11-5pm
Ronny Quevedo, liga deportiva del imaginario, 2018. Wax on unstretched muslin. 15 1/2 x 13 in (39.4 x 33 cm). 18 1/2 x 16 1/4 x 1 5/8 in framed (47 x 41.3 x 4.1 cm framed). Courtesy the artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York © 2022 Ronny Quevedo
RONNY QUEVEDO: ULE OLE ALLEZ
EXHIBITING ARTISTS FROM AFRICA AND ITS DIASPORA
For Those Of Us Who Live At The Shoreline | La Vaughn Belle image courtesy of artists & Ndr Nw Mgmt Gallery
Location: Design District 4220 N Miami Ave. Miami, FL 33127 visit www.prizm.art for details and registration SPONSORS:
YEAR 10
Image courtesy of the de la Cruz Collection. Pictured: "Untitled",1995 Billboard Dimensions vary with installation © Felix Gonzalez-Torres, courtesy of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation.
Together, at the Same Time 2022 - 2023 Exhibition
Harumi Abe | Carlos Alfonzo | Kathryn Andrews | Eddie Arroyo | Tauba Auerbach | Patricia Ayres Hernan Bas | Loriel Beltran | Walead Beshty | Peppi Bottrop | Mark Bradford | Joe Bradley Agustín Cárdenas | Dan Colen | Martin Creed | Aaron Curry | Salvador Dalí | Peter Doig Kaye Donachie | Chris Dougnac | Tomm El-Saieh | Isa Genzken | Felix Gonzalez-Torres | Mark Grotjahn Jennifer Guidi | Wade Guyton | Guyton\Walker | Rachel Harrison | Arturo Herrera | Jim Hodges Thomas Houseago | Alex Hubbard | Shara Hughes | Alex Israel | Rashid Johnson | Alex Katz Martin Kippenberger | Wifredo Lam | Glenn Ligon | Michael Linares | Nate Lowman | Pepe Mar Adam McEwen | Ana Mendieta | Murjoni Merriweather | Sarah Morris | Albert Oehlen Paulina Olowska | Gabriel Orozco | Laura Owens | Jorge Pardo | Manfred Pernice | Seth Price Rob Pruitt | Christina Quarles | Bony Ramirez | Sterling Ruby | Dana Schutz | Xaviera Simmons Diego Singh | Josh Smith | Vaughn Spann | Reena Spaulings | Rudolf Stingel | Su Su | Ilona Szwarc Rufino Tamayo | Kyle Thurman | Cosima von Bonin | Kelley Walker | Elizabeth M. Webb | Jonas Wood Christopher Wool | Yesiyu Zhao
42nd Street
NE 43rd Street
NE 1st Ave
23 NE 41 Street | Miami, Fl 33137 Miami Design District | 305.576.6112 www.delacruzcollection.org
N. Miami Ave
de la Cruz Collection
44th Street
NE 42nd Street
23 NE 41 Street NE 41st Street
Art Basel Miami Beach 2022: Tuesday, Nov. 29th through Saturday, Dec. 3rd, 9:30AM - 4:30PM Admission Free
ON VIEW NOV 19, 2022–APR 23, 2023
Donald Rodney, In the House of My Father, 1996–97. Photograph, C-print on paper, mounted on aluminum; 48 × 60 1/16 × 9/16 in. (122 × 153 × 1.42 cm). Lent by Birmingham Museums Trust on behalf of Birmingham City Council. © Estate of Donald Rodney.
FORECAST FORM ART IN THE CARIBBEAN DIASPORA, 1990s –TODAY Lead individual sponsorship for Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s –Today is generously contributed by Kenneth C. Griffin. Lead support is provided by the Harris Family Foundation in memory of Bette and Neison Harris; Zell Family Foundation; Cari and Michael Sacks; the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; Jana and Bernardo Hees; Mellon Foundation; Gael Neeson, Edlis Neeson Foundation; and Karyn and Bill Silverstein.
Major support is provided by Julie and Larry Bernstein, Robert J. Buford, Citi Private Bank, Lois and Steve Eisen and the Eisen Family Foundation, Marilyn and Larry Fields, Nancy and David Frej, the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation, Anne L. Kaplan, and anonymous. Generous support is provided by the Elizabeth F. Cheney Foundation and by Marisa Murillo.
This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. This exhibition is supported by Etant donnés Contemporary Art, a program from Villa Albertine and FACE Foundation, in partnership with the French Embassy in the United States, with support from the French Ministry of Culture, Institut français, Ford Foundation, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, CHANEL, and ADAGP.
1 1 .30.2022
Reframing the Narrative Young Artists 2023 Restaging the Moment Add to Queue In the Realm of the Designer True to Form
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Chance the Rapper wears a Bottega Veneta suit.
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REFRAMING THE NARRATIVE Chance the Rapper has had an explosive jump from young Chicago poet to sound artist and cold-blooded MC philanthropist. His latest interdisciplinary endeavors—including “The Highs & The Lows,” a music and visual arts hybrid that he premiered at Art Basel, “Child of God,” an exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Black Star Line Festival in Accra, Ghana in January 2023—cross the definitions and expectations of art and entertainment to connect, represent, and advance Blackness.
BY THEASTER GATES
PHOTOGRAPHY BY PHILIP-DANIEL DUCASSE STYLING BY RONALD BURTON III culturedmag.com 153
THEASTER GATES: If we could go back a little, Chance, I want to hear you talk about your progressions, because it would be unfair to just start at, “Well, I was making these songs, and I want them to be in a museum.” CHANCE THE RAPPER: Coming from the written word, I was never talented in the visual arts. I can’t even draw a straight line. I always respected what I saw, but I couldn’t create anything beautiful or fully understand the ins and outs of it. The first time I really got to see the impact of visual art was when I made [the mixtape] 10 Day, because of the cover art created by Brandon Breaux, whom I know you work with. It’s crazy how many connections you and I have, by the way. Brandon turned photographs that Nolis Anderson took into these visceral digital paintings. People responded to them before they could even get to the music. The museum thing now is two parts. First, I want to stamp the moment of what it feels like to release art. As artists, we have visions or ideals that we put into our pieces, but we don’t always necessarily share them. When we do—when we decide to document them or to publish them or to put them into the world—it feels like a big moment for mankind… for existence. Giving art the space to live, and to be able to be in the presence of the artist and the audience at that initial moment, is radical, almost liberating. Secondly, when you see art in museums, the pieces are typically on loan from a collector or gallery. All the artists own the pieces for all the work I display. It’s important because a lot of people aren’t regularly exhibited artists and some artists die before their work gets displayed in a museum. TG: This here is your admission to being committed to a set of artists that are not totally discovered by the constituencies of the art world; folk who are still emerging in their practice. To be able to give them this platform is a beautiful collaboration, gift, and outcome. CTR: I’m trying to document where Blackness is in 2022 and 2023 as it pertains to being on the precipice of revolution, and how that feels for all these people from around the world. I’m from Chicago, Yannis [Davy Guibinga] is from Gabon, and Joey [Bada$$] is from New York; having all these different expressions around the same idea gives the true and clear experience of what we deem it to be. TG: I think of you going from Chicago to the Venice Biennale in your video for “The Highs & The Lows.” You got your crew. Y’all got these frames. You’re showing everyday Black life in Venice—artful Black life—and using the medium of film to reposition yourself as a musician. It’s not just about rap, rhyme, or language. You’re framing Venice so that the person that might feel completely foreign to the art world can be like, “No, nigga, I’m in the frame. My boy Vic is in the frame. Thelonious is in the frame. We’re in the frame.” These moves that you’re making are at the edge of a contemporary moment where the music world doesn’t know what the fuck to do with it and neither does the art world. You got the Kehinde Wiley puffer on, and you’re moving from what historically had been a silo into a new world.
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CTR: This revolution that’s happening is not dependent on any single person like me. It’s on the people. We’re all tapping into it and coming into it at the perfect time. TG: In this moment, there are some important brothers and sisters behind the camera: Kahlil Joseph, Bradford Young, Ava DuVernay. Cinematography allows so much possibility for music because you’re able to extend your words onto this visual platform and add so much more dimensionality. I’m thinking about “A Bar About a Bar,” which, for me, is a hit. Like, you got church hits, you got conceptual hits, and you got hip-hop hits. But, “A Bar About a Bar,” that’s my shit. Because it’s… nothing. And in that nothingness, you get to lay with a world that’s non-linear. CTR: I’ve been trying to get back to that freedom where I create art because I am an artist, not just because I have a story to tell. Not just because I believe in a certain idea. Not just because I need to make money. The first idea that I had [for the music video] was to just have singular text on a screen with black negative space and have my words be the focal point. Being allowed to be playful with my words is the best that I will always be. The freedom to be able to do that is why artists like being artists. TG: I’ve never had a conversation with my gallery about losing a market because of what I made, but I suppose it must be different for musicians. Do you do what’s expected by the public or the producer? Or are there other things that we need as artists? “A Bar About a Bar” feels like you’re in partnership with artist Nikko Washington; there’s some more meat on these bones. But I also think music should allow for honesty from its artists, like “This album is gibberish,” or “I’m not the revolutionary on this album,” or “This is my booty album. It’s to my girl at two in the morning.” CTR: That’s the issue with being an entertainer: when you’re symbolic, you become commodified. People need you for a specific reason and stepping outside of that can cause dissonance. Celebrities are put into these frozen images of themselves that people identify with—which is great—but then they become tied to them. Great artists are always themselves. You have to remember that the audience isn’t one specific person. At the end of the day, you still have to create, and you still have to share. That is our gift. TG: I love the fact that you’re this Black bridge—this diasporic bridge— from Chicago to the Continent to the Caribbean—with Black Star Line Festival. This idea of a gathering is something that I believe in deeply, and it feels very close to Black Artists Retreat. CTR: I played Johannesburg in 2018, but I was in and out. It’s not typical to send American artists to play shows on the Continent, and that’s by design. My first time going to West Africa was this year. Vic and I were having a conversation in Ghana about all the misconceptions of the area and how loving and inviting it was, especially in Accra. That’s really when I started working on the festival. There ended up being so much more love and curiosity than I would have expected.
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“GIVING ART THE S P A C E TO LIVE, AND TO BE ABLE TO BE IN THE P
R
E
S
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N
C
OF THE ARTIST AND THE AUDIENCE AT
THAT
INITITAL
MOMENT , IS RADICAL , ALMOST LIBERATING” CHANCE THE RAPPER CAPTION TKTK OPPOSITE: TKTK
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PHOTOGRAPHY Philip-Daniel Ducasse STYLING Ronald Burton III GROOMING Tia Dantzler and Yousseff Eltoweissy Special thanks to the Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago
Everyone wanted to help. It was eye-opening to see how many of us have just been waiting on the opportunity. TG: Ghana is where I would go if I ever wanted to see the love of Black people… or even the origin of love. Ghanaians have it in their eyes and in their voice. I don’t ever want to seem like ignorantly generalizing people, but there is kindness, man. CTR: Ghana’s first president founded the country on global Blackness, Pan-Africanism, and free Africa. It’s been in the fabrics of our history. What’s crazy is that I didn’t go out there with the expectation of having any historical lineage or connections, but it turns out that my great-great-grandfather was a Garveyist and my great-grandmother grew up very close to the Church. I also found out a lot of Black people have been going to Accra since the ‘20s. Walking through the streets there, I’d run into people from 187th Street, Inglewood, California, wherever in Chicago. TG: Like you said, it’s always been there, and we’ve been going back. But I do think that through your personhood and music, you’ve been able to bring this idea to the next generation of young people. I think about my boy Tremaine Emory and Supreme;
fashion is another route to travel ideas. CTR: Growing up I was never big into fashion, but this experience really made me realize how much it is a part of art and design. I saw how much time goes into sketching, sourcing material, and telling stories with pieces, but also how hard it is to realize these ideas as a Black person. The other side is the idea of commercialization. How radical is it that Kehinde even did that jacket? In the art world you rely on a gallery to find you the best collector to give you the best price. A lot of times power or autonomy comes from commercialization and from making things more accessible. So Kehinde’s jacket sparked a deeper conversation for me: what does it mean to be the owner of the IP of a work beyond that singular first piece that you make? TG: I built a band called the Black Monks of Mississippi as a vehicle to meditate on the history of slave spirituals and gospel music. There are moments when I hear your voice and it feels like you’re intentionally channeling a young Chancellor. CTR: Speaking on faith is very radical in this time— as well as throughout history—and the music that says it with the most fervor has always been gospel. Lately, I’ve been loving music the way that I loved it when I was 14. It comes out in performances and even in the recordings. I’ve gone back to basics. TG: It’s beautiful to see that. I don’t know what to call it, but I feel like there’s room for a new kind of performance genre. If you look at David Bowie, Def Leppard, or Metallica—you know, the white boys— they dressed up. Then you look at Earth, Wind & Fire, and The Spinners. They were fly, too. All of that was performance, fashion, and music. I think that you’re in a place where you’re starting to push those boundaries even more. CTR: I’m trying to give what I have in the moment, and not be so hesitant about things, because I’ve been on the extremes of both ends—just going, going, going or too strategic. I’m trying to find the middle ground. Part of that comes from recognizing my community is so much larger than what I thought it was. From what I’ve heard, photographers still struggle to be recognized in the same art space as sculptors and painters, but you gave us the platform to tell our stories. That’s the community I at some point hope to get to, you know; to be able to put people in that situation, too. TG: I’m telling you, Chance, you’re already there. Thank you for being such an amazing ambassador to the spoken word, to the tonal word, to the rhythmic and metronomic word. In all these ways you’ve been able to evolve one’s personal, creative journey into a lifestyle befitting of a world-class artist.
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2023 YOUNG ARTISTS LIST Over the past seven years, our shared understanding of what contemporary art is, what it looks like, and what, if anything, it should do, has changed so much. At the end of each, Cultured has exhaustively collected ideas from every show we’ve seen, every story we’ve published, and every rumor we’ve heard, in order to compile our annual list of Young Artists who are capturing the moment. When considered over time, these thoughtfully considered lists flow together into an evolving story of art and society—the zeitgeist. This year’s selection of Young Artists comprises stars of the biennials and darlings of the market, as well as brand-new talents we can’t wait to see more from. Between them, some vital, and often surprising, trends emerge: a wish to tell stories; a taste for figuration, for craft and the handmade; an interest in folk traditions and pop culture; a feeling for psychedelic color and magic; and an urge to wield beauty to unexpected ends. In addition, there is often a desire to explore the past in order to recover what has been forgotten, to chart a different path forward. All these throughlines come together into a kaleidoscopic parallel universe of imaginative perspectives. This was 2022, and a glimpse into what 2023 may reveal. 158 culturedmag.com
BONY RAMIREZ SEDRICK CHISOM ANNA WEYANT DOMINIC CHAMBERS EMMA WEBSTER ZOÉ BLUE M. ADAM GORDON FELIPE BAEZA LUDOVIC NKOTH ANNA PARK BRANDON D. LANDERS ANTHONY CUDAHY EMMANUEL LOUISNORD DESIR EMMA McINTYRE ERIC-PAUL RIEGE KIYAN WILLIAMS SASHA GORDON WALTER PRICE ALFONSO GONZALEZ JR. FRIEDA TORANZO JAEGER
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BONY RAMIREZ BY MONICA USZEROWICZ PORTRAIT BY TOMÁS STOCKTON
TAKEN TOGETHER, THE ARTIST'S PIECES FORM A COSMOLOGY, A TAXONOMY OF REPEATED SYMBOLS AND REFERENCES TO CARIBBEAN HISTORY: MACHETES, SEASHELLS, PLANTAIN TREES, CRABS.
“There’s a lot of symbolism in my work that is specifically very Caribbean and unless you’re from that part of the world, sometimes you’re not going to get it,” Bony Ramirez, 26, tells me from his studio in New Jersey. He hasn’t returned to his hometown of Tenares, Salcedo, in the Dominican Republic since relocating to the U.S. in 2009, but his memories inform the contours of his surreal paintings, which are typically comprised of mixed media: Mod Podged layers and cutouts, the blades and hilts of machetes. After graduating from high school, Ramirez worked in construction, a family trade that “gave me a good knowledge about how to problem-solve," he says. “In the beginning, I couldn’t afford wood panels, so I’d just make my own.” Entirely self-taught, the artist began sharing his work online and, in 2020, was featured in a virtual show at Thierry Goldberg Gallery, which now represents him. Taken together, Ramirez’s pieces form a cosmology, a taxonomy of repeated symbols and references to Caribbean history: machetes, seashells, plantain trees, crabs. In En El Mismo Trayecto Del Sol, a severed head is speared upon the length of a palm frond, a crab claw gripping its drooping tongue. “This one was detailing the rebellion of the people in the Caribbean against its colonizers—the people are represented by the
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crabs,” Ramirez explains. “We have these freshwater crabs in the D.R. and Haiti; Haiti was the first Black republic to have a revolution, to be free.” Whether rebelling or at rest, Ramirez’s figures always feel a bit magical, with rainbow ears (a nod to the interior of clams, he says) and curved limbs that swirl, wavelike, around plants, shoreline edges, each other. Many of them are genderless, and some aren’t entirely human: in Fiera: Views From the Outside, a part-girl, part-tiger joyously feasts on her prey. They are part of the landscape, posted up outside stores or soaking up coconut water-rain; the emotive quality of their faces is singularly arresting. Ramirez, who once planned to become an illustrator of children’s books, still draws his figures with wide, cartoonish eyes. They have their own agency, even a desire to be seen. “I feel like if I make a figure and they are not shown in the world, they never existed.” These days, Ramirez is looking forward to his solo exhibition with François Ghebaly Gallery in January. He’s excited to work with sculpture, incorporating into his practice taxidermied animal heads, ceramics, and metal works—a natural progression from a practice in which bodies become more than human. “Every time I use a taxidermy piece,” the artist says, “it’s going to be a self-portrait.”
The Angel Moroni in charcoal flames rises above hooded klansmen, who fade in and out of their own negative images. An acephalic man, face carved into his chest, rests a foot on his own decapitated head in the crimson flames by the juniper tree. Perplexed hundred-year-old wanderers are lost in an acid-green swamp. Sedrick Chisom, 34, paints some really crazy scenes. They are crazy both formally and in terms of content—nobody else in this world is making images like these. The artist grew up in North and West Philadelphia, lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and is represented by Pilar Corrias in London and Matthew Brown in Los Angeles. He began turning the titles of his paintings into short stories, and then into a dark-magical-realist three-act play, 2200, while studying for his MFA at Rutgers University. Now everything he makes comes together to form a grand dream narrative that he thinks he’ll probably be working on for his whole life. “It’s a world that I put all of my
SEDRICK CHISOM
BY DEAN KISSICK PORTRAIT BY ROEG COHEN
interests in,” he says. “Anything I’d want to draw or paint or write basically exists in this world.” In an age of cinematic universes, Chisom is one of the only artists out there building his own complete artistic universe. “Decades after people of color elected to leave the earth, the last two nation states in North America have technologically and culturally declined to the state of America during the Antebellum South,” he describes the developing proposal. “This world remystifies, and supernatural events begin to occur. A mysterious incurable disease plagues every white person, causing the color of their skin to change or darken. Simultaneously, another group of mutated people—the “monstrous race”—emerges. The two nations band together to harass and war with the monstrous races. Despite this conflict, climate change and nuclear winter will ultimately determine the fate of the people in this territory…” This is the world left behind once Black people have left: A world ruined by whiteness and capitalism. A grim tale, a hideous, ugly tale, you might think, except—it’s stunningly beautiful. The intensely layered and seductive artworks depict a land haunted by spirits and mythological beings, by angels of darkness; a space of bright vivid hallucinations conjured by scraping, spraying, smearing paint across paper backed with raw canvas. Here are paintings that drip and burn, that glow with alluring toxicity. A polarized country rendered in polarized colors; a nightmare that feels like a dream. It’s the end of history and it’s beautiful. “The viewer gets drawn in by aesthetics related to enchantment, I think,” he says. “Often in enchantment you expect escapism, but I like the idea of reencountering all those things the viewer expects to leave behind when they enter such a world.” As for his play, Chisom says he hopes to put it on one day: “I have tunnel vision with everything I work on, so it would mean taking a break from painting for a bit, but hopefully I’ll do it in the next few years.”
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ANNA WEYANT Anna Weyant’s studio does not afford the figurative painter much distance from the task at hand. Her desk, the paints, the kitchen, the library, and even the door are all one well-calculated pivot away in what constitutes a living room on New York’s Upper West Side. If something goes wrong in one of her larger-than-life compositions, she’s nose-to-nose with it. She’s up to her eyeballs. In this unflinching proximity, Weyant taught herself to kill her darlings. And how do you make critical cuts to work so close it feels like a limb? Sometimes you need scissors. On a fall visit, the 27-year-old is tucked in with Sprout, her dog, duking it out with her largest canvases to date for her hotly anticipated Gagosian debut in November. The New York gallery, whose volumes have historically dwarfed the ego of any artist self-inflated enough to try to fill them,
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earns the distinction of being a monster worthy of Weyant’s morbid curiosity. “I get a rush from exhibiting,” Weyant says. “My desire to do it outweighs my desire to cancel and move to Utah.” This paradox is at the center of her practice: Weyant actively grapples with her shyness and simultaneous desire to be seen in her paintings, which usually feature young white women often caught mid-compromise undermined by sexiness and camp’s double-edge. The violence arrives implied and soft; it is a very particular strain—the kind tied to the legends of visible women like Marilyn Monroe and Billie Holiday, whose historians seem more obsessed with how they suffered than with their beauty or talent. Weyant’s subjects aren’t necessarily celebrities, just young women she knows well enough to ask for the more provocative poses she needs from sitters.
BY KAT HERRIMAN PORTRAIT BY JEFF HENRIKSON
Performed in the privacy of her studio, Weyant’s process is not about traumatizing and subjugating, but rather is an exploratory game of pretend that allows the artist and her intimate to try on, without threat, the same bitter plot lines some people fantasize punishing young women with. The finished pictures strum art-historical notes—like Balthus’s brooding erotica, Domenico Gnoli’s fiber fetish, John Currin’s lips, Lisa Yuskavage’s flowers. Weyant’s lonely girls wear the defeated postures of the martyrs who’ve come before them, but there’s more agency and humor lurking underneath. The exhibition’s title, “Baby, It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over,” furthers the allusion. “This one feels really personal for a million different reasons,” Weyant says, pausing for a moment to consider. “I guess I just liked the idea of having these girls take up so much space.”
“EVERY ARTIST NEEDS TO HAVE THAT MOMENT WHERE THEY FEEL VALIDATED—NOT BY THE OUTSIDE WORLD, BUT BY THEMSELVES.”
In the near-decade since Dominic Chambers, 29, set off on his artistic journey, he’s never had the opportunity to present his artworks with his family in attendance. However, that’s all about to change with his upcoming solo show at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. “As I’m coming home I’ve been thinking about my relationship to certain spaces,” says Chambers. “In St. Louis I grew up in the hood; if you were thinskinned, you wouldn’t survive there. I’ve been interested in transportive spaces: trains, libraries, and basketball courts. I’ve started thinking about what all these spaces have in common and what they represent to us as the Black community.” As we speak, Chambers’s Shiba Inu, Mars, barks in the background. “I’ve also been really inspired by poets lately. I love the way poets utilize their prose to depict imagery.” While still at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design working on his BFA, Chambers completed a residency at Yale. He applied to the university’s graduate program but was rejected. In the meantime, he took on odd jobs in fashion and as a chocolatier. “I developed a new body of work, with no resources. I wasn’t making paintings, I just did a bunch of drawings. I had to rely on my own voice, outside of an institution. Those drawings were significant because they were the first things that came directly out of my own imagination. They spoke to my commitment to my craft. Every artist needs to have that moment where they feel validated—not by the outside world, but by themselves.” After later reapplying, Chambers received his Yale MFA in 2019. This period of self-exploration reframed how he approached his later work. It allowed him to delve deeper into his interest in Blackness and the surreal; resolve anxieties around his practice; and deal with remnants of self-ambivalence from his childhood. He appears less driven by a search for acclaim now. An aura of lucidity permeates his new works. He opines: “You leave things around because they were part of your creative interest or intrigue. You aren’t looking for an answer. My works have already taken me to places that exceeded my own imaginations. They’ve shifted my material reality. As long as I’m on that creative train, I’m not necessarily interested in a destination—as long as wherever I stop along the way, I leave something significant behind.”
DOMINIC CHAMBERS BY ELISHA TAWE PORTRAIT BY BHASHA CHAKRABARTI
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EMMA WEBSTER
BY DEAN KISSICK PORTRAIT BY IZAK RAPPAPORT
“IN MY LIFETIME I’VE SEEN SPACE BECOME PLURALIZED. BETWEEN THE DIGITAL AND REAL, WE ARE EXPECTED TO BE IN TWO PLACES AT ONCE.”
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This August, Frieze opened its art fair for the first time in Seoul, South Korea, and to coincide, Perrotin gallery opened a new space in the city’s Dosan Park, inaugurating it with a solo exhibition by Emma Webster. Titled “Illuminarium,” it was a journey into a land of illusions: a land without people but full of strange tall curling trees and transforming slopes, glowing dark forests, and balls of lights in the sky. A mannerist dreamscape melting surreally around us painted in oils. Webster, 33, grew up in the beach town of Encinitas, Southern California, and lives up California 1 in Los Angeles now, in a particularly beautiful part of the world. The reason her landscapes are so unique is that she composes them herself, like a symphony. This began while she was studying for her MFA at the Yale School of Art and building countryside dioramas lit by flashlight. In 2020, she taught herself how to do the same with the 3-D modeling software Blender, where she now she builds her new worlds: pulling in sketches, watercolors, photographs, whatever’s inspiring her, exploding them into 3-D landscapes in virtual space, illuminating them with virtual lighting and the colors she wants. “Color poses an interesting challenge,” she says. “In reality, it’s reflected waves, but with sculpture, there’s tension between the painted texture and the light cast upon it.” When she’s happy with the composition—her composition of the landscape and how her image of that landscape is framed—she paints it by hand on canvas, as landscape painters have done for centuries. Each finished work is a window into her virtual world. (Continued)
Landscape painting for Webster is a history of how space is perceived. Our understanding of space has changed a lot this century, she says: “We’ve hacked the eye. We have access to non-human sight in the form of data. We can see more of space without the limits of our bodies: astral, microscopic, aerial surveillance. In my life-
time I’ve seen space become pluralized. Between the digital and the real, we are expected to be in two places at once.” The artist makes her art in two places. She sculpts her landscapes in virtual space and inhabits them there, explores them, before stepping back outside of them to paint them. So, does she feel situated within those
painted landscapes? “The sensation is like being in a walled secret garden. The limit makes each landscape a kingdom I can know and fill,” she says. “There’s a strangeness in knowing there’s an end to the fake horizons. A warm claustrophobia. But do I feel comfortable there? Do I feel as if they are a part of me? No, not really.”
ZOÉ BLUE M.
BY MONICA USZEROWICZ PORTRAIT BY KOBE WAGSTAFF In Zoé Blue M.’s oil painting Two Lines a woman sits at the edge of her bathtub holding an oozing peach. The bathroom is the color of marigolds, the scene surreal and warm. The figure is at rest, daydreaming, but she encapsulates the inexplicably live feeling of Blue M.’s paintings. Her subjects are wide-eyed and glowing, like cartoons about to step off the canvas; once you look away, it seems, they’ll move. Blue M., 28, who was born in France and grew up in Los Angeles, has a French father and Japanese-American mother; Two Lines is based on Momotaroˉ, a Japanese folktale about a couple who find a peach that, to their delight, contains a small boy. The painting is part of a series presented at Independent Art Fair 2022— all of them referencing other folktales from Japan, as well as nodding to the five element
theory of traditional Chinese medicine. Blue M. finds inspiration in storytelling—fables, archetypes, Noh theater, anime, and manga—and in her own memories, retelling them in her paintings and exploring the physicality and emotions of womanhood, its joys and horrors. Her massive, colorful girls cry foot-long tears, load slingshots, stick out their bright tongues. “They’re kind of me,” Blue M. says, “and they’re kind of my friends, my mother, my grandmother, historical figures... They appear in my mind much like a memory or a dream.” There’s a visceral physicality to the artist’s process, partly due to the energetic vitality of her figures. “They have agency. I’m working on a painting with a lot of figures in the space. One particular figure… I felt a responsibility to render her in a way that she deserved.”
The dialogue between Blue M., the worlds she loves, and her paintings is palpable. At both the LA and New York City iterations of “Wonder Women”—an exhibition of 30 Asian American and diasporic women and nonbinary artists at Jeffrey Deitch, curated by Kathy Huang—Blue M.’s paintings Mie Cut: Loss and Spot Marked, Light Feet feature ping-pong players, a sport the artist herself loves (her brother, Jiro, founded Little Tokyo Table Tennis, an informal community of players in LA). Still, Blue M. says, “I find that people’s projections of their own relationships onto my work are as valuable to me as what I’ve put in it to begin with. As hard as I can try to paint something to be exactly what I need it to be, you’re still coming to the table with your own experiences. I think that is amazing. I think that’s what makes images so powerful.”
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ADAM GORDON
BY KAT HERRIMAN PHOTOGRAPHY BY ROEG COHEN
THE KITCHEN
Adam Gordon, Untitled, 2021.
More or less everything Adam Gordon, 36, makes is about painting, even when it’s not. Even when it’s a long, darkened home garage on the Parisian periphery, with a corridor composed of a singular LED beam clamped to a chair that you must walk around to get to, where a fluttering plastic curtain lays waiting for you to pull aside in order to enter a coil heater–warmed chamber with a chocolate-gone-bad scent. There, a small window compels you to look inside, like the staggered slats of Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés. Because even here, Gordon’s work is about using composition and light to scare up emotions—it’s just that in this case, the artist manipulates time and architecture rather than his traditional pigment and linseed oil. That acute discomfort one experiences staring through the neatly framed keyhole of his recent Parisian installation at Galleria Zero is not so dissimilar to the upset caused by Duchamp’s woman spread-eagle, holding a candle in Étant donnés. This time the scene is not graphic, but rather quietly horrific. Spoilers to follow.
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The fact that Gordon’s work can even have spoilers is emblematic of the ways he often sits in opposition to his peers. He does not have social media. He forbids installation shots (lest someone else take it upon themselves to distribute them on social media). He requires most exhibitions be experienced one at a time, without the comfort of a phone, and usually at night. These stipulations, which may seem petty to some—and are outright barriers for others—actually do something for Gordon’s work, like any formal decision. “I like setting up a place where you can, just for a moment, be as alone as you ever really get,” he says. “Art is a space where you can carve that out.”
Rare experiences sans social approval are Gordon’s call to arms. He knows a casualty of his cause is alienating people, but he embraces that as the nature of the work, and a way to struggle against speed for speed’s sake. Gordon likes to let things creep. His installations and portraits and brooding monochromes of interiors (like the ones on view at the 2022 Whitney Biennial) all take weeks to come to life. Peeping through the hole in Paris, I held my breath. I wanted to stay, but I could see a person watching someone else and it made me shiver, despite the heat, wondering who was watching me. The plastic sheet sighed. I jumped.
“I LIKE SETTING UP A PLACE WHERE YOU CAN, JUST FOR A MOMENT, BE AS ALONE AS YOU EVER REALLY GET. ART IS A SPACE WHERE YOU CAN CARVE THAT OUT.”
“WHEN PEOPLE LEAVE HOME THEY TRY TO RECREATE WHAT THEY REMEMBER SO IT BECOMES THIS HYBRID FORM OF WHAT YOU THINK HOME IS.”
FELIPE BAEZA BY SARA ROFFINO PORTRAIT BY CLIFFORD PRINCE KING
There’s a tenderness to Felipe Baeza’s work that belies the intensity of the collisions below the surface. Using printmaking techniques—but unconstrained by the need for a press—his practice marries elements of sculpture, collage, embroidery, and painting with imagery ranging from religious to erotic. “I construct from remnants,” he says from his studio at the Getty Research Institute in LA, where he’s in residence through June 2023. Baeza lived in Mexico until he was 7, when he reunited with his parents in the Latin neigh-
borhood of Pilsen, in Chicago. “I didn’t experience Mexico until I left Mexico, in many ways,” he says. “When people leave home they try to recreate what they remember so it becomes this hybrid form of what you think home is.” In other words, our memories are also remnants. “Have you been to a Catholic church in Mexico?” Baeza, 35, asks, recalling the surreal aesthetics and his childhood fascination with the imagery and fabulations. “Many of the churches are built from the rubble of old buildings that
were demolished to create something else.” The layers of the artist’s work are material, but they are also conceptual and historical. There’s an inherent commentary on colonialism, but perhaps above all, they are investigations into the human psyche and the relationship between images and memory. Baeza’s works are in clear discourse with the images in C.G. Jung’s The Red Book and concepts of the collective unconscious. He accesses that sense of the unconscious, physically binding images and memories that are segregated in consciousness to perhaps remind us of all the ways we are shaped without realizing it. Coming off his recent participation in “The Milk of Dreams” at the 59th Venice Biennale, Baeza—who is represented by Maureen Paley in London and has recently shown at the Fortnight Institute in New York and The Mistake Room in LA—is taking some time to make without the pressure of showing. After his residency at the Getty the artist will spend time at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, Colorado, and then will move to the Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva Island in Florida. Then, hopefully, we’ll get to see the fruits of this time of cultivation.
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LUDOVIC NKOTH
“YOU CAN FEEL THE PSYCHOLOGY EMBEDDED IN THE FIGURES. MY FIGURES ARE NOT CALM; YOU CAN TELL THEY ARE NOT CALM EVEN WHEN THEY ARE IN POSITIONS OF REST.”
BY ELISHA TAWE PORTRAIT BY TREVOR TONDRO
Figurative painter and fellow Cameroonian Ludovic Nkoth joins me via Zoom. He’s currently in Paris for a 10-month residency at L’Académie des beaux-arts. We’re discussing culture shock and our experiences as third-culture kids, having both spent a large portion of our formative years away from Cameroon. “The way it shows up in my work is through displacement. Many of the figures I paint visually don’t look like they belong in the spaces they are painted in,” Nkoth, 28, explains. “You can feel the psychology embedded in the
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figures. My figures are not calm; you can tell they are not calm even when they are in positions of rest.” It’s apparent Nkoth’s nomadic lifestyle has shaped how he situates himself within the contexts of the spaces he inhabits. It’s formed fissures in his conceptualization of home, raising questions around belonging, isolation, and the Black Atlantic. Gearing up for his second solo show in Los Angeles next year at François Ghebaly, he’s researching historically Black families to un-
derstand the nuances of family dynamics. “I’m very interested in how these figures move within the context of their families, and how that affects the next generation. I am trying to bring forth traditions and cultural knowledge that only existed on the African continent for many years but have been borrowed for profit by everybody else. I want to tell these stories through an African lens.” His 2020 self-portrait Holding On To Hope depicts himself fully nude, his body contorted into a fetal position and pressed against a cold white floor, elucidating his feelings about the expectations placed on Black men to present as conventionally masculine. “We aren’t raised to be vulnerable,” he states contemplatively. “Every time we take a breath it’s expected to be a ‘man’s’ breath. With my work, I’m asking how we can reframe Black masculinity. We’ve been objectified for so long.” The decision to undertake this residency in Paris—the epicenter of Cameroon’s former colonizer— was no mistake; it has allowed him to spend time dissecting the history of post- and pre-colonial relations between the two nations. Sitting back in his chair, he stares at a wall of recent works, then excitedly reveals that after years of conjuring memories and digging into family archives for inspiration, he plans to begin staging photographs and mapping out contemporary manifestations of Blackness through his own lens. However, for now, he’s laser-focused on his spring 2023 solo show in LA. “It’s about staying on the path, staying curious, and being willing to be uncomfortable.”
Anna Park, 26, was born in South Korea and brought up in Salt Lake City, Utah, where her mother, a pharmacist, encouraged her love of art with after-school classes. One day, local art teacher Bruce Robertson saw one of Anna’s drawings on display a mall and got in touch with her school to invite her to attend his weekly life-drawing classes. Before long, she had set her heart on a creative career, and dreamed of working at a major animation studio like Pixar. She went on to study illustration and animation at Pratt—but halfway through, she felt the allure of a life as an artist and left for the New York Academy of Art. That’s where Bill Powers spotted her drawings in 2019: “The school had installed roughly 40 pieces from the AXA Art Prize new student art competition,” the art dealer explains. “One drawing in particular struck me as haunting and equally comical: Anna Park’s Parent Teacher Conference was one part Bacchanalia and two parts The Walking Dead.” That formula proved to be fruitful; her first-ever solo show at Powers’s Half Gallery in 2021 was a sold-out success. She’s
ANNA PARK BY DEAN KISSICK PORTRAIT BY ROEG COHEN
since joined Blum & Poe, with whom she’s had solo shows in Tokyo and Los Angeles, where she is currently exhibiting until December 17. Park’s large dynamic virtuoso charcoal drawings are cacophonous impressions of American dreams: a celebrity with a glowing white smile mobbed by news reporters; fragmented figures swirled into stars and stripes; wedding cakes and bouquets sliced up into patterns. Violins, motorcycles, cowboy hats, and excited faces emerge from bold movements that engulf the viewer in disorientating, unfurled time and space. It’s a breathless new American form of Cubism. The Americana comes from Utah and the chaos from her New York home. Her churning, tumultuous, hand-drawn explosions also channel the unstopping waterfall flow of information and entertainment that powers the contemporary. Her subject is our country, our phones, the way we live now. These are drawings you can stare at for a really long time; after a while, they’ll begin to reveal themselves to you, her characters will come to life, and her stories will stream around you.
HER LARGE DYNAMIC VIRTUOSO CHARCOAL DRAWINGS ARE CACOPHONOUS IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICAN DREAMS: A CELEBRITY WITH A GLOWING WHITE SMILE MOBBED BY NEWS REPORTERS; FRAGMENTED FIGURES SWIRLED INTO STARS AND STRIPES; WEDDING CAKES AND BOUQUETS SLICED UP INTO PATTERNS.
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BRANDON D. LANDERS BY ELISHA TAWE PORTRAIT BY KOBE WAGSTAFF
“I DON’T LIKE TO SHOW A LOT. I HOLD VALUE TO MY ART. IT’S NOT JUST SOMETHING TO PUT ON A WALL. I’M NOT JUST TRYING TO PAINT BECAUSE I THINK IT’S CUTE. I WANT PEOPLE TO FEEL JOY, BEAUTY, SADNESS. I WANT TO USE IT TO SHOW OUR EXPERIENCE AS BLACK PEOPLE.”
Following a short hiatus from his artistic practice, Brandon D. Landers, 37, is finally back in his studio, stretching canvas and preparing to produce his next body of work. He’s just moved to a bigger space back home in LA, after spending nearly a decade in Bakersfield, California, and plans to have his latest works match his new surroundings. “I wanna get a little bit bigger. I wanna be able to walk into my paintings,” he exclaims. “I want to submerge in them. I want them to bear over me pretty much. Really big. Life-size.” Music plays a role in his work, which today heavily leans toward sculpture and painting. “I got music blasting. The old smooth guys that’ll lay it down on the track for you,” he shares, noting that Luther Vandross and Barry White are often heard seeping out from the cracks of his studio. “It could be some dramatic classical shit or Nipsey Hustle. It keeps me connected to the art.”
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Growing up in LA, Landers was a Boy Scout. “I would get a bus downtown for an after-school program. I’m a little dude, so I was always looking up, and everything was amazing to me.” Bewildered by the engineering, sculptures, and towering office buildings, the young Landers set out to understand how these were made. “My teachers helped me out, they pointed me in the right direction and told me artists make these things.” His oeuvre still consists of many of the same objects that caught his attention as a child, now formed on canvas by the strokes of his palette knife. “I pick and scoop like I’m icing a cake,” he says, crediting this process to his early sculptural works. “I don’t like to show a lot,” the artist says. “I hold value to my art. It’s not just something to put on a wall. I’m not just trying to paint because I think it’s cute. I want people to feel joy, beauty, sadness. I want to use it to show our experi-
ence as Black people.” Landers’s last exhibition was in 2020, at the city's Hammer Museum. “It was my first show here. I had to represent where I come from, so the first thing I thought of was family and friends. I painted a portrait of my friend Donte and his mother and some of my older cousins. They always talk smack, like: ‘Why you haven’t put me in a painting yet?’ So when I did, they were blown away.” Discussing his hobbies, Landers reveals he’s currently making time to reconnect to his wilderness roots from childhood, hiking in the mountains and returning to nature when he can. “It’s like a debrief for me to be honest. It’s just calming to be away from the city and all the pollution,” he says. “I have a little pet furry friend now. He’s a mixed Terrier. He’s a good distraction and I’ll just go on walks with him. He helps take me away from the studio.”
It may be surprising to realize that Anthony Cudahy is still a young artist. He has, after all, been showing his work for almost a decade—an accomplishment for anyone, but even more so for a painter whose work is part of the timeless, but not always current, figurative genre. Coming up in a New York drenched in theory and conceptualism, Cudahy, now 33, put his stock in color and the ways in which it can do more than represent. “I now understand color as a force or a person-
ality,” he explains. “It’s sort of a character in the paintings and its function is narrative.” A latent romanticism that whispered through the surfaces of Cudahy’s early canvases has risen to a crescendo in the past few years. In lockdown during the pandemic, the Brooklyn-based artist started making small-scale drawings, a departure from the larger works that made his name. The intimate portraits require a different sort of consideration and mark-making. “I sometimes have
ANTHONY CUDAHY BY SARA ROFFINO PORTRAIT BY ROEG COHEN
to layer six different colors to get the one I want,” he says of the labor-intensive process. The effort opened up new depths to his practice, and when he returned to his studio and canvases, he realized he had developed a new chromatic language. “The drawings changed the way I view color. The paintings got more complex and the color became a lot more relational in the sense that different chromas were more in dialogue with each other,” he says. Cudahy is one of those artists for whom making is always relational. Painting, for him, is a simultaneous conversation with artists like Caspar David Friedrich and Giorgione, as well as peers like Jenna Gribbon and Louis Fratino. Yet his interests are equally grounded in the sentient relationships among people and friends—who often become his subjects. Already represented by galleries Hales and Semiose, Cudahy joined the roster at Grimm earlier this year and has his first show at its Amsterdam site in November. The exhibition title, “A Pearl Caught Between My Teeth,” takes its name from the poem by his friend Paul Legault, who is featured in the works. Next spring, Cudahy has his first solo museum presentation at the Museum of Fine Arts in Dole, France. For this one, he’s been mining the museum’s storage spaces, finding inspiration in the works that lack attributions, building narratives based on the language he speaks best: color.
“I NOW UNDERSTAND COLOR AS A FORCE OR A PERSONALITY. IT’S SORT OF A CHARACTER IN THE PAINTINGS, AND ITS FUNCTION IS NARRATIVE.”
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“IT’S A POETIC WAY TO SPEAK ABOUT THE OVERWHELMING NATURE OF DISENFRANCHISEMENT, THE OVERWHELMING NATURE OF BEING TRIED.”
EMMANUEL LOUISNORD DESIR BY SARA ROFFINO PORTRAIT BY BRAD TORCHIA
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Even among a list of young artists, there are some who stand out for the combination of their youth and prescience. Emmanuel Louisnord Desir is one such artist. At 24, just three years after his graduation from Cooper Union, he has had solo shows with 47 Canal in New York, François Ghebaly in Los Angeles, and Jupiter in Miami Beach.
Born and raised in Brooklyn, Desir moved to LA two years ago, where he is now preparing for another presentation with 47 Canal. The works are larger this time around, perhaps something to be attributed to the scale of his new city or to the mental space one can find after leaving home. Desir’s practice is bravely and earnestly rooted in the Bible. References to Job, the Twelve Tribes of Israel, or the Book of Revelations are present throughout his work, which includes found objects as well as elements that are welded, cast, and carved. There might also be a sneaker or a baseball cap. Desir makes paintings, too. “With sculpture, you’re using material to define something, and with painting, you’re using colors and composition,” he explains. “It’s almost like with painting you’re illuminating, or projecting your mind onto it, but with sculpture you’re pulling out from the material.” The Bible in Desir’s studio is as alive as it may be in any pulpit—but do not misinterpret his work as religious. “Art is my churchlife,” he affirms. Rather, the stories are shared as parables. “The Bible speaks about a lineage of people who have been marginalized and neglected,” Desir explains. “These analogies are overarching.” His piece Infirmity, which was on view at Jupiter earlier this year, features an oversize wooden pendant strung on gold chains. “A pendant activates an outfit or your outlook on yourself, or is a nice accent,” he explains. “But here it’s a piece of jewelry that overcomes the size of the chains it’s hung on. It’s a poetic way to speak about the overwhelming nature of disenfranchisement, the overwhelming nature of being tried.” Desir’s ability to comment with an incision undergirded by compassion may be the best harbinger of what’s to come that we can hope for.
EMMA McINTYRE
“I LOOK TO SOME OF THE ROCOCO ARTISTS FOR THEIR SENSUAL MATERIALITY AND TOUCH; EROTIC CONTENT CONVEYED NOT ONLY THROUGH SUBJECT BUT THROUGH PAINT HANDLING.” BY DEAN KISSICK PORTRAIT BY BRAD TORCHIA Emma McIntyre, 32, grew up in Auckland, New Zealand, and now lives in Los Angeles under big sunsets that fill the whole sky. Her paintings of color, light, and movement glow from within. In 2022 she has had solo shows of her acid landscapes, mythological scenes, and pure musical abstraction at Air de Paris (“Up Bubbles Her Amorous Breath”) and Coastal Signs in Auckland (“Madonna of the Pomegranate”). Some of McIntyre’s works draw you into an illusory space; others are formalist-flat. All her large paintings begin on the floor: usually she’ll start with an oil ground and pour diluted oil paint onto it, or washed-out ink or acrylic, or an oxidization solution if she’s making a rust work. Her processes are experimental and instinctive, her results varied and highly unpredictable. These are paintings of chaos and chance.
Next she’ll usually pour on another layer and sometimes bring in other textures too by brushing or wiping the paint with rags. Then she’ll move her linen onto the wall for the subsequent layers, “which are usually applied in a few hours in a frenzy of brushes and rags, stamps, rollers, limbs, and whatever else is at hand. The technique at this point is improvisational; a lot of spontaneous action with various colors and brushes until the image starts to resolve itself,” McIntyre explains. “Sometimes it feels like I can almost see the finished work, and the painting process is about finding it.” Some paintings are marked by prints of her naked body or the scrape of her fingernails. These are compositions rich with sensuality, pleasure, and warm flowery atmospheres, sometimes inspired by 18th-century French fêtes galantes.
“I look to some of the Rococo artists, Fragonard and Watteau in particular, for their sensual materiality and touch; erotic content conveyed not only through subject but through paint handling,” she continues. “Fragonard’s frothing and ebullient forms, spilling and excessive, are most effective when offset by a lacuna somewhere in the painting. Withholding and restraint, or whatever else you might call it, are important aspects of desire. I’ve adapted this strategy in my own work, whether through a centripetal composition with an empty center, or through areas of blankness created by opacity or the blankness of untouched gesso.” Her paintings often dance around the edges, but close to their heart there is a pause, a rest, a sunny glade that pulls you right in.
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ERIC-PAUL RIEGE
“HÓLÓ WAS BORN FROM THE WOMB OF MY MIND BECAUSE, AS SOMEONE WHO DOESN’T HAVE THAT ORGAN, I SPENT A LOT OF TIME WONDERING HOW I COULD PASS MY EXPERIENCES DOWN. I DECIDED THAT MY MIND HAS THE POWER TO GIFT THINGS, AND THAT’S WHAT I’LL DO.”
BY KAT HERRIMAN PORTRAIT BY NATE LEMUEL Eric-Paul Riege doesn’t mind if you touch his work. The New Mexico–based weaver actually encourages tactile interaction with his three-dimensional tapestries, which often dangle from the rafters like earrings from a lobe. Jewelry is an evergreen touchpoint for Riege because of the symbiotic way the pieces relate to the body, and we to
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them. “One of my grandmothers told me that as indigenous people, particularly as Diné, we wear jewelry not only so The Holy People will recognize us, but because our jewelry listens,” Riege, 28, explains. “Sometimes our ears don’t listen as much as you want them to, but then you have this object that’s hanging from your ear that’s listening
just as much as you are. So the next time you wear that earring, it’ll remember for you, and help you listen.” At “Hammer Projects: Eric-Paul Riege” at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the artist emphasizes this intimate alliance between body and object with an entire forest of his idiosyncratic woven sculptures, Hóló̧llUllUHIbI [duet]. These are adorned with chunky handmade beads that rattle with pleasure every time the wind or a stray elbow blows through. “I was thinking of them as instruments,” Riege says of this new body of work. “These objects are living, they’re made for use.” In a video playing in the space, Riege demonstrates how he interacts with these objects—often using the choreography that evokes cleaning and caretaking. He strokes, he brushes, he lays these sculptures down to rest. During his extended performances, these actions take place in real time. At his show at the ICA Miami in 2019, Riege actually left the museum entirely, strolling out into the Design District while wearing his sculptures as clothing. This break of the museum’s fourth wall isn’t so much about disrupting the norms of art-viewing, but rather pointing to the ways objects enjoy dynamic lives alongside ours; through our exchange with them, meaning can accrue, as in any relationship. The most personal example of this in Riege’s practice is his son, Hóló̧, a doll birthed from the artist’s mind in 2019, who is an ever-changing vessel into which Riege can pour his insights, skills, and wisdom. “Hóló̧ was born from the womb of my mind because, as someone who doesn’t have that organ, I spent a lot of time wondering how I could pass my experiences down. How do I provide that for someone else?” Riege says. “I decided that my mind has the power to gift things, and that’s what I’ll do.”
KIYAN WILLIAMS BY ELISHA TAWE PORTRAIT BY TOMÁS STOCKTON
“I THINK OF EARTH AS A COLLABORATOR WHEN I’M WORKING WITH IT BY HAND. IT’S LIKE THIS DANCE, THIS EXCHANGE, WHERE I’M GIVING IT FORM AND WE’RE WORKING TOGETHER IN THIS SLOW, RHYTHMIC, MEDITATIVE WAY.” Kiyan Williams’s work manifests across several mediums, from sculpture and performance to video and installation, but earth remains a constant. “I think of earth as a collaborator when I’m working with it by hand,” the artist, 31, says. “It’s like this dance, this exchange, where I’m giving it form and we’re working together in this slow, rhythmic, meditative way. If you use too much pressure it collapses, but you have to use a certain amount of pressure to create forms. It’s changed my relationship to time and touch.” The New York–based, Stanford University and Columbia University alum pulled from a range of Black and queer influences to form their own way of seeing, critiquing, and conjuring. One of their first exhibited pieces to emerge from this process was Meditation on the Making of America. Collecting dirt from different sites imbued with fugitive, obscured histories connected to the Black American diaspora, Williams per-
formed a series of gestures involving their entire body, which resulted in a rough outline of the Continental U.S. To Williams, this was a way to speak to the foundational histories of colonial extraction that built the Euro-Western world. “Museums often consider the materials I work with as fugitive and messy, so inherently there’s this sort of institutional critique imbued in the work,” they tell me. “I’m interested in both materials and processes that we might name as quotidian. Earth is imbued with history and memory, and in working with it I get to engage with all that.” This fascination with the quotidian is clearest in Williams’s ongoing works around the American flag. When I ask how they arrived at frying the flag, they laugh before sharing, “I love to cook and one day I was cooking and I was amazed at how the fish I was frying immediately transformed when it was in a pan. I thought it was a beautiful sculptural process. The bubbles, the charring. So I proceed-
ed to create different iterations of that, but with a flag.” Their flag-fryings muddy the relationship between artist and spectator. The interventions invite the public to bring ingredients pertinent to their communities which are integrated into the public frying, imbuing the flag with elements of marginalized groups whose contributions to the development of the U.S. are often ignored. Williams plans to continue exploring through this iterative process. They are engaging with and enthralled by the works of the members of the contextures movement of the 1970s, and are situating their works within Black conceptual practices that gesture beyond figurative and abstract discourses. Currently, they are creating a series of follow-ups to the New York installation of their hardened earth sculpture: A reimagination of the Statue of Freedom, which sits atop the U.S. Capitol Building, entitled Variations of Freedom.
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SASHA GORDON
“CREATING THESE WORLDS WITH MY CHARACTERS HAS GIVEN ME A SENSE OF AUTONOMY. PAINTING THESE VERSIONS OF MYSELF IS THE ULTIMATE CONFRONTATION: I SEE MYSELF CLEARLY.” Sasha Gordon, 24, is the self-portraitist taking the art world by storm. She paints big, massively intricate, technically brilliant pictures of herself; many as different characters: sometimes looming closeups of her face, sometimes group scenes, sometimes voluptuous nudes, all in a style that brings to mind the Chinese Cynical Realists of the 1990s. She had her first solo
show in the summer of 2021 with Los Angeles gallerist Matthew Brown, who first came to visit her in Somers, Westchester County, when she was still a student at Rhode Island School of Design, and her work was hung throughout her Polish-Jewish-American father and Korean mother’s home. A year after the LA show, she’s a fast-rising star of figurative painting.
Gordon’s artworks begin with selfies and found images and continue with feeling. When she was growing up, the artist had trouble expressing her emotions, she says. Now she paints doppelgängers of herself with many different expressions and bathes her face in otherworldly colors and gradients, and more recently abstract patterns too. “I’m interested in ways of expressing internal emotions and feelings, not just by facial expressions and body language,” she explains. “I think the different textures and patterns of their ‘skin’ can convey the sensitivity of their bodies.” It’s a new approach to expressionist painting that comes from finding ways to express her emotions but also her identity: as a young, queer, Asian American woman growing up in a relatively small town, she never quite fit in, and over the years her artworks have explored her obsessive-compulsive disorder, her discomfort with her body, her complicated feelings about her own identity, and her journey through life. Gordon is part of the new wave of figurative painters exploring identity in all of its depth and complexity. Self-portraiture has helped her better understand who she really is. It’s helped her to feel more permanent and present. “In the past, dissociating and experiencing depersonalization was a way for me to avoid confrontation with myself,” she says, “I was in a sort of denial about my identity. Creating these worlds with my characters has given me a sense of autonomy. Painting these versions of myself is the ultimate confrontation: I see myself clearly.”
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“I love to dig my left hand in big buckets of paint, take a few steps back, close my eyes while imagining I’m Randy Johnson on the mound, and then see how many curveballs of paint I can get to land on the canvas,” says Walter Price. “After that I just pray.” He moves his paint around the canvas when it’s wet, scrapes it, and smears it. Sometimes he walks over it. Price’s paintings are mysterious bursts of deep layered colors and exuberant gestures in acrylic and vinyl Flashe paint. The late New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl described Price as having a “style-defying style” without any clear precedents. He’s one of a kind. Growing up in Macon, Georgia, Price, now 33, chose his path early on, in second grade. “Being an artist,” he reflects, “one has a choice of whether they want to please people or not. And I knew early on that I wouldn’t be proficient at having good customer service.” Price wasn’t here to please or to make nice with everyone; he wanted to be a painter and to be free. Having decided what he wanted to do with his life, it was just a matter of figuring out how: He served four years in the Navy on the USS Whidbey Island so that he could have his art school education at Middle Georgia College and the Art Institute of Washington paid for under the G.I. Bill, after which he moved to Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, and became a star. He now shows with Greene Naftali and The Modern Institute, while MoMA PS1, Camden Art Centre, and Aspen Art Museum have given him solo exhibitions, too. In his paintings you’ll see palm trees, cars, Black faces, American football players, furniture,
WALTER PRICE
Walter Price, Its the fire that holds our attention 2, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. Photography by Elisabeth Bernstein.
“THE BRAIN IS READY TO DECIPHER THINGS QUICKLY—ABSTRACTION CHALLENGES THIS. IT ALLOWS MORE OF YOUR STORY TO BE ADDED ONTO MY STORY.” BY DEAN KISSICK
fires, and scraps of paper. You’ll see color planes, patches, splashes, prints, spills, footprints, cutouts, dotted lines—a whole new world. Figuration and abstraction are smeared together, struggling to emerge from one another. Abstraction is a powerful force for Price because it prevents easy interpretation. “We all come from different perspectives,” he says, “and the brain is ready to decipher things quickly—abstraction challenges this. It allows more of your story to be added onto my story.” It’s a way of expressing his feelings and experiences while also speaking to everyone
else in different ways. It’s a unifying force that brings us together but offers no clear meaning. Price is not going to explain himself to you or to me either. There are marks in Price’s paintings that can’t quite be made out, let alone explained. He’s mentioned before that his painting contains “very dark” elements that can’t be easily deciphered. “When I use the words ‘very dark,’” he elaborates, “I assume people would think of negativity. ‘Very dark’ also evokes a sense of mystery. I like how we thirst for these things.” culturedmag.com 177
When Los Angeles native Alfonso Gonzalez Jr., 33, lived in Boyle Heights, he saw an eye-catching mural on the façade of a liquor store. “It got tagged over by a gang, then painted over again by the liquor store owner… It became all these layers,” he says. The artist was already in the habit of photography—he grew up painting graffiti, and graffiti writers document their own work; Gonzalez Jr. has also long been something of a flâneur, observing his city on long walks. “But since it was so close
to my house, I would always say, ‘Well, I’ll just get a photo of it later.’” Then it was gone. In his paintings and sculptures, LA is depicted with breathtaking realism: a bus stop bench replete with etchings; a palm tree–encircled apartment building; a cherry-red car, sans tires. Some of his work seems stripped directly from the city’s palimpsests, like the aforementioned mural. In the painting SAY NO MORE FAM, there’s a tag-stained brick wall, a barbershop storefront, and haircut
BY MONICA USZEROWICZ PORTRAIT BY BRAD TORCHIA
ALFONSO GONZALEZ JR.
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posters; these images are layered, like a city is layered, and they honor the way its residents inscribe it. “I’m fascinated by how a wall, or a small square, can feel like a certain place… you get all these hands and layers that went into making something look the way it does, the community’s relationship to public space,” says Gonzalez Jr. He doesn’t quite recreate scenes—he pays homage to them, playing with scale and adding jolts of humor. Aware of the erasure that comes with gentrification, he adds, “What I’m feeling is, ‘This is the last time it’s going to be like this.’” Gonzalez Jr. notes that the historical canon of LA artists—many of whom he adores—is limited to “primarily white artists. But there’s always been artists coming out of my community. I want to be part of the generation that understands that history, and I want to do that with the people that I believe in— my friends, the artists I care about, the artists who I don’t know but want to leave the door open for.” When I ask him if some of his work might be a love letter to his city, he pauses. “I never thought about that, but it’s definitely a love letter. I think about the kids who are growing up now who are never going to be able to experience what it was—and that’s the case for everyone. But I have so much love for my city, for the way I grew up, my environment, my culture, all these different things I’ve experienced.”
“I’M FASCINATED BY HOW A WALL, A SMALL SQUARE, CAN REALLY FEEL LIKE A CERTAIN PLACE. YOU GET ALL THESE HANDS AND LAYERS THAT WENT INTO MAKING SOMETHING LOOK THE WAY IT DOES, THE COMMUNITY’S RELATIONSHIP TO PUBLIC SPACE.”
FRIEDA TORANZO JAEGER BY GEOFFREY MAK PORTRAIT BY ANA HOP
“I LOVE THE FUTURE. BY IMAGINING THE FUTURE, YOU ARE, IN ONE WAY, CREATING IT.” Frieda Toranzo Jaeger is an optimist. She often paints visions of what she imagines the future will be after capitalism self-destructs—queer utopian fantasies and post-colonial futurities. She even believes in the future of figurative painting, which has been declared dead at the frequency of a biennial exhibition. She is currently the subject of a succinct, playful solo show, “Autonomous Drive,” at MoMA PS1. The exhibition greets the viewer with an enveloping, free-standing painting of the interior of a car, Hope the Air Conditioning is on While Facing Global Warming (Part I), which was originally exhibited in 2017 at her first solo show at Reena Spaulings Fine Art in New York. She told me the painting cost her $200 to make. She cut the wood herself, attaching the hinges between panels that allow her canvases to open and close, just like luxury car doors.
In her car paintings, Toranzo Jaeger, 34, often uses embroidery to pierce the sleekness of her canvases, which draw on the classic power imagery of auto advertisements. In utilizing the tactile, textural craft, she illustrates images that can be associated with femininity: a garland of flowers, or two nude women engaged in cunnilingus. In Mexico, where Toranzo Jaeger was born in 1988, the practice of embroidery is passed down among women; much of the embroidery in her paintings has been done by women in her family. From her studio in Mexico City, she will ship a canvas with a drawn outline of the painting to family members, who will stitch flowers and bodies in their own style—“I’m not a control freak,” she explains—and then send it back for her to paint. During her childhood, art wasn’t a big part of Toranzo Jaeger’s family life. In fact, she considers herself a late bloomer, discovering
artmaking at age 23 and attending University of Fine Arts Hamburg, where she studied with the painter Jutta Koether. In the tradition of her teacher, Toranzo Jaeger has also staged performances with her free-standing car paintings. For her 2019 performance at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, …And yet we are becoming, inspired by José Esteban Muñoz, she and two queer dancers moved inside, out, and around one of her canvases to spoken word and reggaeton. It was intentionally irreverent—to “break the preciousness of painting,” she says. Yet it was also to activate the concept of painting as a part of theater, partly inspired from altarpieces in worship rituals. In her cunning way, she draws from a painting’s past to chart unfamiliar visions for its future use. “I love the future,” says Toranzo Jaeger. “By imagining the future, you are, in one way, creating it.”
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Benjy wears a Dior Men jacket, shirt, tie, and glasses.
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RESTAGING THE MOMENT DIOR PHOTO AWARD WINNER RACHEL FLEMINGER HUDSON PURPOSES THE HOUSE’S MEN’S COLLECTION AS AN ENTRY POINT INTO HER WORLD, WHERE NOSTALGIA AND IRONY INTERTWINE FOR FLASHES OF CANDOR.
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THIS PAGE: Jaydan wears a Dior Men sweater and shorts; OPPOSITE PAGE: Danial wears a Dior Men jacket, shirt, tie, and glasses.
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THIS PAGE from left to right: Jaydan wears a Dior Men sweater, cardigan, and shorts; Danial wears a Dior Men sweater, pants, and glasses. OPPOSITE PAGE from left to right: Benjy wears a Dior Men jacket, shirt, and tie; Federico wears a Dior Men jacket, and shirt.
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THIS PAGE: Federico wears a Dior Men coat, sweater, shirt, boxers, and pants. OPPOSITE PAGE: Ayo wears a Dior Men jacket, shirt, pants, and tie.
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THIS PAGE: Danial wears a Dior Men jacket, shirt, sweater, and glasses; OPPOSITE PAGE: Benjy wears a Dior men jacket, shirt, tie, and glasses.
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From left to right: Jaydan wears a Dior Men jacket, shirt, pants, and tie; Federico wears a Dior Men jacket, shirt, pants, and tie; Benjy wears a Dior Men jacket, shirt, tie, socks, and shoes; Danial wears a Dior Men jacket, shirt, pants, shoes, and glasses; Nick wears a Dior Men jacket, shirt, pants, tie, shoes, and glasses.
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From left: Dior Men shorts, socks, and shoes; Dior Men pants, and shoes; Dior Men pants, and shoes.
All clothing and accessories available at all Dior Men boutiques and dior.com. Makeup REBECCA DAVENPORT using Dior Beauty Hair KEI TAKANO Movement Direction MACY KERRIGAN Models BENJY FORTNA, NICK FORTNA/SUPA/IMG, ROMAIN/NEVS, JAYDAN DAVIES/ NEVS, FEDERICO BERLUCCI/NEVS, AYOKUNMI SULE/NEVS Set Design RACHEL FLEMINGER HUDSON Production LILI FLETCHER Wardrobe Assistant TAMSIN MICHAEL, ORIEN CLEIS Makeup Assistant NANCY DUVAL SMITH Set Dressing LETTICE GATACRE Set Painting INEZ VALENTINE Set Assistants BELINDA NELSON, AIDAN BRENNAN, MANON WILSON First Assistant HARRY EZZAT Camera Assistants JOSEPH CRAVEN, JOSH JOHNSON-PRYKE Special Thanks BENJY FORTNA, JULIA FLEMINGER, CHLOÉE MAUGILE 192 culturedmag.com
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CAPTURED ON THE STREETS OF PARIS BETWEEN THE HUBBUB OF THE FALL RUNWAY SHOWS, THESE ARTISTS—MUSES IN THEIR OWN RIGHT—CROSS GENRES AND COMPOSITION FOR A NEW ERA OF MUSICAL INTRIGUE.
All clothing and accessories Louis Vuitton Fall/Winter 2022
Photography by ANTON CORBIJN Styling by STUDIO&
By PEYTON DIX
ADD TO QUEUE
Model and singer Imán Kaumann
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IMÁN KAUMANN
Imán Kaumann is simultaneously finding her footing in the music world while hitting her stride on the catwalk. Not only did she steal a handful of fashion shows this fall—from Off-White and Balmain to Versace and Louis Vuitton—the Argentine model released her inarguably sexy track “Arroyo Dorado” shortly after Paris. With only three singles in total so far—including “Suena el viento” and “Dónde Estás”—the artist has managed to hit viral success online, where she gives a behind-thescenes entrypoint to her nearly 400,000 followers on TikTok. Part of her social media presence allows Kaumann to not just give a firsthand look into what life as a model is like but also provides her the space to engage with her audience directly, an underlying power of human connection that her music seems to pull from.
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Jehnny Beth is a force to be reckoned with and has the talent to be recognized—a few in fact. The French-born musician, actor, composer, and former frontman of the band Savages is a spectacle to see live. Her staple slicked back hair look is chic, minimal, and smooth, but her music is slightly different—it hits you hard, fast, and loud. Listening to “Heroine” or “I’m The Man,” it’s clear that she’s tough—she shows it, and it works so well. But multi-hyphenate Beth has touched many other mediums of storytelling. The musician soundtracked the likes of Peaky Blinders, Ex Machina, and Riverdale and even starred in films such as Don Juan and An Impossible Love. To top it off, she’s also become a new favorite in the fashion sphere, having just walked for Alexander McQueen. “I like Blade Runner and grungy hair,” she wrote on her Instagram following the Spring/Summer 2023 fashion show. Though the runway look—long black leather gloves paired with a deconstructed dress over a mesh bodysuit—fit her perfectly, she’s someone who would excite 100 different ways over.
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If 2012’s “We Might Be Dead by Tomorrow’’ didn’t teach you how to love, then you were missing out on a whole era of heartbreak. Ten years later, older, wiser, and now a mother, Soko (born Stéphanie Sokolinski) and her music have matured. In addition to starring in Mayday on Hulu and B.J. Novak’s The Premise, the musician-slash-actor returned from Los Angeles to Paris, collaborated with Vans, and even wrote a few impromptu songs with her child, Indigo Blue. While the collaborative tracks are still to be released, the indie artist’s most recent album, Feel Feelings, is a sweet, somber sleeper hit. With a soothing voice and gutting lyrics, Soko’s music may not necessarily be mainstream, but she’s cultivated a loyal following and beloved fans. There is a constant tenderness to her sound, in fact, and an honesty that can melt even the coldest heart: You can always count on Soko to help you sink deep into your feelings, even if you don’t want to.
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PETIT The word might mean “small” in French, but Petlt the DJ, soon-to-be producer and musical artist is set to be big—or at the very least will make some noise. The stage name, which is spelled out with an “l” in place of its “i,” stems from Anastasia Shevtsova’s ballet training at St. Petersburg’s Vaganova Ballet Academy, specifically the petit battement technique, in which the legs and feet “beat” together quickly, often on pointe or as a jump. “It has been with me for a very long time, but I recently decided to
radically change my style, and I realized that I needed a different name to match,” explains the artist, who, prior to beginning her dance training, attended music school, where she practiced the piano and violin. Indeed, her first interests might have leaned toward the classical, but now she says she wants to be the person who makes people dance: “You control the musical flow and, in a certain way, guide people.”
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WINONA OAK
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Though Winona Oak has been releasing music since 2018, she and her signature black bangs are finally getting the attention they deserve. Her music videos—namely “He Don’t Love Me,” which has amassed well over 1 million views on YouTube—is reminiscent of peak-2000s Tumblr sound and visual aesthetics; both would have dominated the platform in its heyday. Warm and sultry, the 28-year-old, LA-based Swedish singer’s voice invites you in, while her look is a poignantly the opposite—sharp, cool, and with cheekbones that could cut glass. Her highly anticipated debut album, Island of the Sun, which just released this summer, is a moody yet upbeat journey that sometimes tricks you into not realizing a song is sad until you look up the lyrics. Its name is derived from its maker’s birthplace, Sollerön, which sits amidst the Nordic forest in Sweden. It’s an area known as the Island of the Sun, and is a place that Oak associates with enchantment, peace, and a yearning to return.
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METTE NARRATIVE
There was no missing Mette Towley’s clean shaven head of fluid dance movements in Rihanna and N.E.R.D’s “Lemon” music video that took the Internet by storm in 2017. But recently the Minnesota-born artist has made the leap from movement to behind the mic. “Dance was and still is the crux of how people know me,” the performer, who goes by the name of Mette Narrative, explains. “But I’ve always seen myself as an artist who wants to share my ideas and connect with people on a broader level, and I get to do that with music.” Her upbeat launch track, “Mama’s Eye,” was inspired by reuniting with her mother after a long stretch of being apart during the pandemic. Honing in on a new form of self-expression, Mette Narrative couldn’t be more excited to work on this side of her craft: “Music is a space where I get to share even more of myself with the world. To be witnessed is such an important thing for me as a performer.”
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Maresz has that Patti Smith kind of aesthetic. Maybe it’s her shaggy, dark hair coupled with the lo-fi photos littered across her trail on social media, but she’s got that effortless cool-girl look you might bookmark but are too timid to actually go back to for that haircut or that makeup trend. The Paris and New York-based musician and model—though she’s a bit of a vagabond traveling between cities like Stockholm, Milan, and more—may only have two singles out at the moment, but both hard techno tracks “Cosmopolitan” and “Lagum” transport the listener like nothing else. A bit of a jack of all trades, Maresz—whose given name is Maresh Miciula— illustrates, takes photographs, models, makes jewelry, and does much, much more.
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LALA &CE French-Ivorian artist and rapper Lala &Ce, whose real name is Mélanie Crenshaw, is smooth as hell and hard at the same time. Her music is a conglomeration of trap, rap, and R&B, and the look is a mix of fly, high-fashion pieces—Lala &Ce (pronounced “Lala ace”) came dressed to the nines to the Coperni show this September—meets streetwear. No matter the look, the Air Jordans always stay on. Born in Bron, France, and now based in Lisbon, Portugal, the artist’s music has an overarching theme of sexuality, but not all of her work is rooted in queerness or race. “SunSystem,” for instance, which released this summer is the perfect pick-me-up track, with its impeccable vibes and sultry beats built for the tough migration from warmer weather to a fateful winter.
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MAGGIE ROGERS
Musician and recent graduate of Harvard Divinity School Maggie Rogers is ready to return to an IRL world on the road—ready to reconnect with her fans, her beloved team, and even the bad tour bus coffee. Her most recent album, Surrender, asks you to do just that. Created during the pandemic, it leans into both the chaos and comfort of being, well, alive. The result is joyous, celebratory, loud, sad, and filled with feelings the singer-songwriter aims to share. “It’s a privilege to get the chance to soundtrack someone’s
life,” she says. “Life is so much richer when it has the right song playing with it. And to have the privilege to be a presence in some of the most intimate moments of someone’s life is just really special.” The album features some of her most personal work yet, and listening to it in its entirety, it’s clear that Rogers needed it for her own personal release: “It was really hard to make. There was all this tangled-ness. Now that it’s outside of my body, I feel so much lighter.” culturedmag.com 211
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VARSHA THAPA
Makeup by CYRIL LANE Makeup for Maggie Rogers by CELIA BURTON Hair by KEVIN ROUX Nails by SALLY DERBALI Casting by NICOLA KAST Produced by FARAGO PROJECTS Photo assistant: ANJA GRABERT
Varsha Thapa is one of the most beautiful people in the world, and her voice just might be even more alluring. The New York-based singer-songwriter, whose first plunge into music was with Sita Virgin, the band she started in 2018, has been seen on the cover of Vogue Italia, strutting down the runway for Rick Owens, and, more recently, in Ralph Lauren’s new fragrance campaign. But her aspirations are much greater than being a face for others. The rising star has stories to share, and her glorious voice is her conduit. Born and raised in Nepal, Thapa’s songwriting sprung from avid journaling, an outlet for the bullying she faced at a young age while in boarding school. Pouring the pain into her talents, the artist—with her sky-high voice, subtleties, and thick, waist-length hair that mimics a real-life Pantene commercial—sings with a beautiful tenderness. Her heart-breaking single, “Adhuro,” is the perfect example of her depths of feeling.
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IN THE REALM OF THE DESIGNER
Kelly Behun fashions residences with a cerebral approach and a discerning eye for contemporary art, a command no better realized than at her light-filled Southampton address. By Adrian Madlener
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Elizabeth Murray’s Wake Up, 1981, hangs on the wall behind Behun. The hand-painted chairs are by artist Kim MacConnel; a Joel Shapiro sculpture can be seen outside.
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A four-panel relief made from unfired clay by Jord-Ann Ramoudt hangs on the wall outside the library.
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With projects ranging from Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz’s sprawling La Jolla oasis to the interiors of Robert A.M. Stern Architects’s luxury Manhttan condominium building at 1228 Madison Avenue, Kelly Behun is a major player in contemporary American design. Celebrities and architects alike call on the celebrated decorator for her ability to masterfully transform homes so that they fully embody each client’s unique personality and idiosyncrasies. Through her practice, Behun not only responds to what her clients say they need but also helps them figure out what they actually want. Mixing high and low and bringing together items that might otherwise seem out of place, she creates cohesive environments on a case-by-case basis. Nowhere is the designer’s holistic vision better demonstrated than in her own Southampton house, which serves as a kind of test kitchen for new ideas. “So much of my work is spontaneous and emotional,” Behun explains. “My approach to design is to get to know each client as much as possible because it’s a relationship that is so intimate. To be invited into someone’s world to create a home for and with them is such an honor.” Set labels and traditionally defined styles are beside the point of Behun’s practice. It’s possible to mistake her ability to seamlessly pair disparate elements as minimalism, but her aesthetic proclivities are far more transcendent and conducive to each brief. “An igloo meets a yurt but with a Bugatti chair, it’s all good to me,” she adds. “I love the variety. It’s all about figuring out what excites the client. It’s also important to have a bit of irreverence and not take things too seriously. I learned this from working with Philippe Starck.” Though she didn’t receive formal training (Behun studied economics at Wharton), she credits her on-the-job training under the tutelage of powerhouse hotelier Ian Schrager with allowing her the freedom to approach design from a different perspective. “I came to my career in interior design from a more tangential path, but I wouldn’t change a thing because it got me to the place of doing what I love,” says Behun. “It felt life-affirming. Sometimes, it takes going down another path to get to where you need to be.” With the hotelier’s in-house team and its principal, Anda Andrei, she worked on blockbuster projects such as Miami Beach’s Delano and the Mondrian in Los Angeles. “It was a great foundation, but I prefer developing residential projects,” the designer admits. “The relationships you develop with your clients are very different. My passion is working directly with individuals and families.” Establishing Kelly Behun Studio about two decades ago, she’s been able to do just that while, along the way, developing product lines with the likes of The Rug Company, Hudson Valley Lighting, L’Objet, and The Invisible Collection.
“There’s probably no better way to distill a designer’s aesthetic worldview than to see their own home.” culturedmag.com 217
“My approach to design is to get to know each client as much as possible because it’s a relationship that is so intimate. To be invited into someone’s world to create a home for and with them is such an honor.”
Inside the loggia is an area rug made of African ceremonial textiles; a vintage lobster net hangs from the ceiling; on the fireplace is a paper sculpture by Irving Harper. A ceramic vessel by Paul S. Briggs sits atop a table by Tanya Aguiñiga.
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A sculptural plaster chair by Brooklyn-based artist Mike Ruiz Serra sits beside the pool.
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The designer’s bathroom is an homage to some of her favorite ceramic artists, including MyungJin Kim, Makoto Kagoshima, Cody Hoyt, Jonathan Cross, Roger Herman, John Born, and Brenda Holzke.
Integrating art and one-of-a-kind designs is integral to her hands-on, personalized process. Many of the apartments and houses Behun has decorated incorporate an eclectic array of striking paintings and sculptures, and also distinctive furnishings. A longtime fan of the late New York gallerist Holly Solomon and her pioneering advocacy for elevating mediums such as ceramics and textiles, which had historically been considered merely “craft” or “women’s work,” Behun’s homes are a testament to this approach to collecting. The spaces include handpainted chairs by the California artist Kim MacConnel, contemporary works by textile artists Mitsuko Asakura, and Sagarika Sundaram, as well as an ever-expanding ceramics collection with pieces by MyungJin Kim, Makoto Kagoshima, Takuro Kuwata, Roger Herman, Jeremy Anderson, Shizue Imai, Adrienne Fierman, and Monty J. “We try to be thoughtful about how we bring these elements into the home,” Behun reflects. “I don’t profess to be an art advisor, but I like to be a connector and point clients in the right direction when it comes to galleries in New York and elsewhere. I like to highlight the talents I’m excited about and that are worth following.”
“I like to highlight the talents I’m excited about and that are worth following.” For Behun, the worlds of contemporary art and collectible design are blurring as people are simply looking for quality pieces that have intention behind them. As is evident in her own Hamptons home, these items don’t always have to be pricey. “I still have these pieces that I got at Ikea on Long Island 15 years ago,” she notes. “They’re still there and bring me as much joy as something I could have paid many times more for—I put them next to a beautiful painting.” In fact, the designer often focuses on establishing object stagings that play off each other and the environments they occupy. “It’s important to have negative space in your home so that your eyes can pause and recalibrate,” she adds. “Each room is another opportunity to create a different interior landscape, a beautiful composition.” Also discernible is Behun’s increased focus on craft and unique works conceived by female artists and designers. “There’s probably no better way to distill a designer’s aesthetic worldview than to see their own home,” she concludes.
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Behun stands on her home’s oceanfront terrace, which features a woven bench by artist Tanya Aguiñiga.
“I don’t profess to be an art advisor, but I like to be a connector and point clients in the right direction when it comes to galleries… I like to highlight the talents I’m excited about and that are worth following.” culturedmag.com 223
AS THE LINES BETWEEN ART AND FASHION CONTINUE TO BLUR, LOUIS VUITTON’S FOURTH EDITION OF ARTYCAPUCINES, ARTIST-DESIGNED VISIONS OF THE FRENCH FASHION HOUSE’S STRUCTURED CANVAS BAG, BEGS THE QUESTION: WERE THOSE BOUNDARIES EVER REALLY THERE? 224 culturedmag.com
TRUE TO FORM Featuring artists like Alex Israel, Beatriz Milhazes, Urs Fischer, Vik Muniz, Paola Pivi, and Henry Taylor, one could mistake Louis Vuitton’s Artycapucines collaborations for the roster of an epic exhibition of some of the best contemporary art talents working today. Launched in 2019 and now in its fourth edition, the Capucines-as-canvases initiative allows a select group of creatives to reimagine one of the fashion brand’s most iconic bags. This fall, six more global artists have introduced nine new limited-edition designs to the ongoing collection. For these 2022 Artycapucines, craftsmanship shines and materiality reigns: Hand-stitched beads, 3-D printed leather, and embellished calfskin prove that when creativity is encouraged to flourish, flourish it does.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHRISTOPHE COËNON, COURTESY OF LOUIS VUITTON
DANIEL BUREN
Daniel Buren’s Artycapucines is presented in four colorways (50 per color) and incorporates the artist’s signature vertical stripes.
French conceptual artist Daniel Buren has long played with shapes in his practice. His 2022 Artycapucines design in no exception. This special piece—available in four colorways each a limited-edition of 50—is a geometrical composition that engages the artist’s signature vertical stripes. “My initial sketch was rather abstract, but the object’s function was still clear,” says Buren. “By making the handle an exact semicircle and transferring it to the body of the bag itself, two shapes emerged: a trapezoid and a circle.” In its coloring, art aficionados will recognize an allusion to one of the artist’s most spectacular recent works: Observatory of Light, which wrapped the exterior of the Louis Vuitton Fondation in Paris in 2016.
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Korean artist and Dansaekhwa movement co-founder Park Seo-Bo found his inspiration in one of his own paintings, a 2016 work from his Écriture series that boasts an intense red color. The bag’s textured surface was achieved with the assistance of his designer grandson, Park Jifan. A 3-D printed rubber injection recalled the artist’s sensory memory of an vibrant colorscape in Japan’s Mount Bandai valley: “The color was so intense that it felt like I was looking at a flame that was chasing me to my death,” Park explains of the experience. “That moment acted as a reminder that I’m only a tiny being in front of the vastness of nature. As the wind blew the clouds and the sunlight shone, one side of the valley remained neon red, while the other side became shaded and much darker. I thought I should paint this ‘harmony of nature.’”
PHOTOGRAPHY BY JAEHOON KIM, COURTESY OF LOUIS VUITTON
“The color was so intense that it felt like I was looking at a flame that was chasing me to my death. That moment acted as a reminder that I’m only a tiny being in front of the vastness of nature.”
PARK SEO-BO
Park in his Seoul studio; behind him hangs the 2016 work that inspired his handbag design.
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PHOTOGRAPHY BY SEAN DAVIDSON, COURTESY OF LOUIS VUITTON
PETER MARINO
Celebrated architect Peter Marino has a longstanding relationship with art and fashion, as a seasoned art collector and the designer of many boutiques across the world, including Louis Vuitton flagships in London, Los Angeles, Seoul, and Paris. His architectural practice often revolves around designing for artworks, while his 2022 Artycapucines edition was inspired by a singular piece: The all-black locked and studded design found its inspiration in a medieval box Marino saw in Venice while fundraising for Venetian Heritage, the preservation organization he heads. “We were raising funds to restore a 14th-century building in Venice called Scuola Grande San Giovanni Evangelista,” Marino recalls, “and I noticed a medieval box near the monumental staircase designed by Italian architect Mauro Codussi.” Its antique straps and closure motivated the exclusive design of a new slide-bolt closure for the Louis Vuitton bag.
Clockwise from top: Peter Marino took his inspiration from a Medieval box he came upon inside a 14th-century building in Venice. A vignette from his New York office and at right, an architectural model and design of a new building for Louis Vuitton Rodeo Drive.
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PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHRISTOPHE COËNON, COURTESY OF LOUIS VUITTON
AMÉLIE BERTRAND
CAPTIONS ALL HERE
Clockwise from left: A collection of pigments line the floor of Amélie Bertrand, whose design for Louis Vuitton is the first-ever to glow in the dark.
Born in Cannes and based in Paris, Amélie Bertrand’s club-ready Artycapucines design is the first-ever to glow in the dark. Spray-painted and ornamented with floral charms, the artist’s assemblage edition brings art out of the gallery and onto the street. “I immediately thought, a bag’s an object, so let’s treat it as a sculptural work,” says Bertrand, noting that she approached her Artycapucines with light in mind. “I wanted a bag that illuminates the night, like a nightclubbing bag, or like those scooters that people ‘pimp’ using those bright artificial light panels. You could say I wanted to pimp my bag!”
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KENNEDY YANKO
Inside the Brooklyn studio of Kennedy Yanko, with works in progress. Yanko employed 3-D printed rust to patinate the bag’s exterior, and designed it to be multifunctional as a handbag or clutch.
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PHOTOGRAPHY BY SEAN DAVIDSON, COURTESY OF LOUIS VUITTON
One of today’s most exciting and sought-after young artists, Brooklyn-based Kennedy Yanko uses found metal and dry sheets of paint to sculpt abstract large-scale works that, often, seem to defy gravity. For her Artycapucines design, however, she thought about the utility of the bag, and the person who wears it. “I was particularly interested in making something that was functional,” explains the artist, whose fashion-forward sensibility makes her a fixture at shows, both on the runway and off. “I wanted a bag that you could use at any event and with any outfit; for example, the handle comes off, and there’s a pouch underneath it, so you can slide your hand and then carry the bag as a clutch.” Referencing her own work, the bag’s body was patinated via 3-D printed rust.
CAPTIONS ALL HERE
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UGO RONDINONE
“The clown, with its recognizable, nonbinary character and outlandish costumes, is designed to entertain...
Though playful and color-forward, artist Ugo Rondinone’s harlequin-inspired, rainbow-handled 2022 Artycapucines bag has an important story to tell. “I knew the bag had to please and chose to use color as the main attraction, so I took two archetypal symbols that I often use in my work: the clown and the rainbow,” says the Swiss-born, New York--based artist, whose 2-D and 3-D body of work composes meditations on humanity and our most pressing contemporary issues. “The clown, with its recognizable, nonbinary character and outlandish costumes, distinctive makeup, colorful wigs, and exaggerated footwear, is designed to entertain large audiences. In my work, though, I have turned it into a character who doesn’t entertain, but instead just sits in contemplation. The rainbow is a communal archetype of unity and peace, while also referring to the gay-liberation movement.”
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PHOTOGRAPHY BY SEAN DAVIDSON, COURTESY OF UGO RONDINONE
In my work, though, I have turned it into a character who doesn’t entertain, but instead just sits in contemplation.”
Ugo Rondinone, at right, inside his New York studio, which is housed inside a converted church in Harlem. Above, his Artycapucines edition, surrounded by Small Mountains
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MICHEL MAJERUS PROGRESSIVE OPENING NOV 29, 2022 AESTHETICS
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Altman Siegel, San Francisco, CA Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, NY / Casemore Gallery, San Francisco, CA Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco, CA Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA Crown Point Press, San Francisco, CA David Zwirner, New York, NY Demisch Danant, New York, NY Fergus McCaffrey, New York, NY Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, CA Friends Indeed Gallery, San Francisco, CA Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, France Gallery FUMI, London, UK Gladstone Gallery, New York, NY Haines Gallery, San Francisco, CA Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles, CA
JANUARY 19-22, 2023 FORT MASON CENTER fogfair.com January 18, 2023 Preview Gala Benefiting the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco, CA Hostler Burrows, New York, NY James Cohan, New York, NY Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco, CA Jessica Silverman, San Francisco, CA KARMA, New York, NY kurimanzutto, Mexico City, Mexico Lebreton, San Francisco, CA Lehmann Maupin, New York, NY Luhring Augustine, New York, NY Magen H Gallery, New York, NY Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA / gió Marconi gallery, Milan, Italy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, NY Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, NY Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, NY
Modern Art, London, UK Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York, NY Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Nilufar Gallery, Milan, Italy Pace Gallery, New York, NY pt.2 Gallery, Oakland, CA R & Company, New York, NY Ratio 3, San Francisco, CA / Nonaka-Hill, Los Angeles, CA Rebecca Camacho Presents, San Francisco, CA Salon 94 Design, New York, NY Sarah Myerscough Gallery, London, UK Sprüth Magers, New York, NY Talwar Gallery, New York, NY Tina Kim Gallery, New York, NY Volume Gallery, Chicago, IL
Opens October 21, 2022 Tickets at guggenheim.org Yellow Tree 1, 2020. Oil on linen, 72 × 72 in. (182.9 × 182.9 cm). Private collection, Republic of Korea. Photo: Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery. © 2022 Alex Katz / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
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