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Juliette LESOURD
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CONTENTS Winter 2023
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JUERGEN TELLER TURNS THE LENS ON HIMSELF This December, the artist will reveal his most ambitious—and personal—exhibition to date, at Paris’s Grand Palais Éphémère.
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OVER THE HILL, INTO THEIR PRIME CULTURED asked a group of 11 female artists, all over age 75, about perseverance, rejecting society’s expectations, and searching for joy through creative expression.
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TELLING IT SLANT British painter Anj Smith discusses the process of making art for—and about— the body, with her friend, designer Erdem Moralioğlu.
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MEET THE DEALER DUO THAT PUT NORDIC DESIGN ON THE NEW YORK MAP Over the past 25 years, Kim Hostler and Juliet Burrows have brought a Scandinavian sensibility to the city. Now, they’re upping the sculpture game with their fledgling Tribeca gallery.
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DISPATCHES FROM THE DIASPORA In her work, artist Zadie Xa weaves together a quilt of cultural touch points—vestiges of the many places that have shaped her.
104
TALKING ABOUT THE WEATHER Sigrid Nunez’s latest novel, The Vulnerables, is a pandemic-induced examination of solitude.
106
OUT OF OFFICE This season, Givenchy’s Shark Lock Cowboy Boots and street-ready Voyou bag are the perfect pieces for those prepared to stand out from the crowd.
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A REVOLUTION IN NATURAL WINEMAKING Dry Farm Wines is at the forefront of an industry sea change.
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DREAM IN THE RHYTHM Grace Wales Bonner talks to curator Michelle Kuo about “Spirit Movers,” the designer’s new show at MoMA.
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KING OF THE MOUNTAIN For Claudio Marenzi, president of his family business, Herno, growing a company is like cultivating an art collection.
Fran Lebowitz shot by Daniel Arnold in New York. 52 culturedmag.com
CONTENTS Winter 2023
120 128 130
A NEW KIND OF PATRONAGE Chelsea Neman Nassib’s dedication to cultivating artists’ careers has made her an innovative force. NENGI OMUKU CHARTS THE EMOTIONAL TOPOGRAPHY OF HOMECOMING The artist’s depictions “of collective grief and collective rest” have made her a breakthrough name in the Lagos art scene. THE META PUN OF HERNAN BAS The Miami native’s foray into conceptual work has its own twist: None of the pieces are made by the artist himself.
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IN PRAISE OF USELESSNESS Swiss-American sculptor Carol Bove called poet and playwright Ariana Reines to talk about her debut show with Gagosian, “Hardware Romance.”
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WHERE SCENT MEETS FORM Miami-based artist Shawn Kolodny is transforming the storefronts of Creed boutiques this winter with his large-scale installations. MCQUEEN AND BIANCA STIGTER 138 STEVE EXCAVATE AMSTERDAM’S DARKEST HOUR
The husband-and-wife duo discuss their latest creative encounter, an epic documentary about Amsterdam’s occupied past.
142
A DELICATE BALANCE Armani/Casa’s 2023 home furniture collection is full of treasures.
144
MAKING A LIFE IN LOS ANGELES Six creatives reflect on the city they call home— and the forces that brought them there.
Adam Alessi photographed in his Los Angeles home studio by Julie Goldstone.
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158
CLIMBING THE FAMILY TREE Savanah Leaf’s debut feature film offers a tender glimpse into motherhood. Next, she will probe the void left by an absent father.
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CONTENTS Winter 2023
162
PRADA’S ART-FILLED SOCIAL CLUBS DELIGHT. THEN, THEY DISAPPEAR The Italian fashion house’s event series alights in far-flung locales before dissolving into thin air.
168
IT’S FRAN’S WORLD As Fran Lebowitz embarks on an international speaking tour, one young writer charts their parallel paths through the city.
ARTISTS 2023 178 YOUNG Twenty-seven artists from across
geographies, mediums, and perspectives comprise CULTURED’s eighth annual list.
208
THE STATE OF THE FAIRS Three art dealers at different stages of their careers give CULTURED an exclusive look at the reality of the art fair ecosystem.
216
THE YEAR OF THE HORSE Writer Travis Diehl investigates our anxious, equine-inflected age, and the art world trends that have emerged from it.
222
SET IN STONE These 11 timepieces represent the pinnacle of craft and innovation.
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EASTSIDE VISIONS Photographer Emmanuel Sanchez-Monsalve and fashion editor Yashua Simmons bring Louis Vuitton’s latest collection to life in Los Angeles.
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LOUIS VUITTON’S SIGNATURE BAGS GET THE ARTIST TREATMENT The artists behind this year’s Artycapucines share the processes behind their wearable works of art.
Tiye Amenechi wearing Chanel, photographed by Shawna Ferreira in Los Angeles.
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ELIZABETH DEBICKI BRINGS DIOR’S TIMELESS REFINEMENT TO LIFE The Australian actress, known for her poise and force before the camera, is the face of the latest La Rose Dior collection. STILL GOING In a new book, photographer Jim Goldberg examines his own life, capturing the artifacts, ambitions, and anecdotes that made him who he is today. INSIDE DIOR’S SECRET GARDEN Devotees of the French house traveled to the shores of Lake Como to watch Victoire de Castellane’s floral high jewelry designs bloom at the storied Villa Erba.
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NICOLAIA RIPS Writer
At only 17, Nicolaia Rips emerged onto the literary scene with a memoir at the ready. Trying to Float, 2016, her debut release, is a chronicle of growing up at the Chelsea Hotel in New York. Since then, she’s contributed work to Interview, Air Mail, The Face, The New York Times, and The Paris Review. In this issue, she meditates on Fran Lebowitz’s output, or lack thereof, and the trials of being a writer in the “content” era. “I’ve always felt between the Frans—Drescher and Lebowitz,” remarks Rips of the assignment. “I hope to have captured even a thimble of Lebowitz’s charm, tenacity, and wit—and that she never reads it.”
DANIEL ARNOLD Photographer
“Life uninterrupted” is how New York–based Daniel Arnold characterizes his work—predominantly street snaps that teem with humor and poignancy. He has documented moments ranging from home births and high fashion launches to the Met Gala and the 2016 presidential campaign trail, as well as multiple inaugurations. In this issue, he captured cover star Fran Lebowitz in New York’s Greenwich Village. “I got right up in Fran’s face at one point, too close honestly, and I told her through the camera, ‘Don’t worry, it’s a wide lens, it’s not as intense as it feels,’” he remembers. “Before I could finish, she scoffed and spat back, ‘I don’t care. I’ll never see any of this.’ I really liked spending time with her, no joke.”
GEOFFREY MAK Writer
Most writers are excited by the idea of sitting down with an art world legend. Often, Geoffrey Mak finds himself seeking out a different kind of interview. “I love seeing artists earlier in their career, before the market hardens their style into something easily recognizable,” he says of the four emerging artists he profiled for this issue. “It’s also the time when they’re
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the most rebellious—not to make a point, but because it’s the only way they know how to be.” This April, Mak will release Mean Boys with Bloomsbury, an essay collection combining personal history and cultural criticism. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, and The Guardian. He is an online editor at Spike Art Magazine.
NICOLAIA RIPS, PHOTOGRAPHY BY ISABEL FILER; DANIEL ARNOLD, PHOTOGRAPHY BY DAMON CROMER; GEOFFREY MAK, IMAGE COURTESY OF GEOFFREY MAK.
CONTRIBUTORS
HIJI NAM
TRAVIS DIEHL
SHIRLEY NGOZI NWANGWA
For New York–based Hiji Nam, the seemingly disparate fields of art writing and psychoanalysis may channel the same impulse. “I’ve sometimes wondered if talking to artists was the origin of my interest in pursuing clinical training,” she muses. The former Artforum editor turned frequent contributor profiled CULTURED 2023 Young Artist honorees Willa Nasatir and Alex Tatarsky for this issue. “What drives us towards the questions we pose and how we give them form, in art and in life? To me, Willa and Alex exemplify artists who have metabolized these questions into the heart of their work,” she says.
Is there such a thing as anxious art, or only art made by anxious people? In this issue, writer, editor, and critic Travis Diehl explores the prevalence of the potent emotion in the art world. Diehl, who is based in New York, has contributed work to The New York Times, The Baffler, and X-TRA, to name a few publications. “At this stage of society, horses are basically ornamental,” he reasons, referencing a motif in the piece. “The police ride them through major cities, we take their drugs, we name restaurants after them. All of this is supposed to make us feel less anxious.”
For Shirley Ngozi Nwangwa, interviewing honorees from CULTURED’s eighth annual Young Artist portfolio prompted an unexpected bout of self-reflection. “The way that mosie romney spoke to me about the importance of cultivating peace in their life and in their practice put me at ease,” she recounts. “It was a reminder that I, too, could benefit from taking some time away in nature or wherever I could find some quiet to tend to myself, my body, and my thoughts.” The Brooklyn-based writer has contributed work on art, race, gender, and politics to The New York Times, New York magazine, and The Nation, among other publications.
Writer
Writer
EMMANUEL SANCHEZ-MONSALVE Photographer
In 2015, Miami-raised Emmanuel Sanchez-Monsalve moved to New York to pursue a career in photography, leaving behind a background in dance. Since then, he has shot for publications including i-D, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vogue Italia, and worked with brands like Polo Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, and Oscar de la Renta. “I was thrilled to shoot the Louis Vuitton story for CULTURED with a cast that I could relate to, being Latino myself,” he says of his work on this issue. “As a photographer, my aim is to capture authenticity in people’s natural surroundings, and the quinceañera shot was a dream come true. It brought back nostalgic memories of my childhood attending so many in Miami.”
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Writer
HIJI NAM, IMAGE COURTESY OF HIJI NAM; TRAVIS DIEHL, IMAGE COURTESY OF TRAVIS DIEHL; SHIRLEY NGOZI NWANGWA, IMAGE COURTESY OF SHIRLEY NGOZI NWANGWA; EMMANUEL SANCHEZ-MONSALVE. PHOTOGRAPHY BY JULIANA GONZALEZ.
CONTRIBUTORS
JULIA HALPERIN
JIM GOLDBERG
MICHELLE KUO
“For this issue, I sat down with three art dealers at different stages in their careers for a no-holds-barred chat about the art world phenomenon everyone loves to hate: art fairs,” explains Julia Halperin, CULTURED’s editor-atlarge and the co-founder of the Burns Halperin Report, the largest report of its kind tracking equity and representation in the art world. From 2017 to 2022, she was executive editor of Artnet News, and her writing has appeared in The New Yorker and T: The New York Times Style Magazine, among other outlets. “The calculus that goes into these presentations is so complex,” she says of the fairs dissected in her incisive roundtable. “I don’t think I’ll look at an art-fair booth the same way again.”
While many photographers find themselves snapping pictures and moving between projects at shutter speed, Jim Goldberg’s career is marked by long-term, collaborative work. The artist examines American stories surrounding class and community. He has exhibited across the country, published several books, is held in public collections—including at MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery, LACMA, the Library of Congress, and the Art Institute of Chicago— and has received three National Endowment of the Arts fellowships in photography, and a Guggenheim fellowship.
"MoMA’s collection is vast and endlessly surprising,” says Michelle Kuo of the museum where she serves as the Marlene Hess curator of painting and sculpture, and where she most recently collaborated with designer Grace Wales Bonner on an exhibition for the Artist’s Choice series. “Grace and our teams were able to find extraordinary things—talking in-depth about the process is a bit like talking about a treasure hunt, and an adventure,” says Kuo, who spoke with Wales Bonner about the collaboration for this issue. Kuo is also currently a critic at the Yale School of Art and is writing a forthcoming volume on the postwar organization Experiments in Art and Technology.
Writer
Artist
Curator
YASHUA SIMMONS Stylist
“It was an image of a Black prima ballerina on the cover of my Howard University acceptance package that changed the course of my life. It was the moment that I recognized that representation matters and that images have the power to influence and inspire,” says Yashua Simmons. Since he began styling, the Yonkers-born, LA-based creative—a former fashion editor at Elle and fashion director of
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Out magazine—has maintained a dedication to instilling cultural narratives and highlighting people from marginalized communities. In this issue, Simmons partnered with his long-time collaborator Emmanuel Sanchez-Monsalve, setting Louis Vuitton’s latest Spring/Summer Pre-Collection in Eastside Los Angeles to craft nostalgic “images out of an old photo album, rediscovered after the passage of time.”
JULIA HALPERIN, IMAGE COURTESY OF JULIA HALPERIN; JIM GOLDBERG, IMAGE COURTESY OF JIM GOLDBERG; MICHELLE KUO, PHOTOGRAPHY BY PETER ROSS. IMAGE COURTESY OF MICHELLE KUO AND MOMA; YASHUA SIMMONS, PHOTOGRAPHY BY KADEEM “KJOHN” JOHNSON.
CONTRIBUTORS
Founder | Editor-in-Chief
SARAH G. HARRELSON
Executive Editor MARA VEITCH
Chief Revenue Officer CARL KIESEL
Editor-at-Large JULIA HALPERIN
Vice President, Brand LAUREN ANDERSON
Senior Creative Producer REBECCA AARON
Publisher LORI WARRINER
Associate Editor ELLA MARTIN-GACHOT
Director of Marketing GEORGIA LUNDBERG
Editorial Assistant SOPHIE LEE
Italian Representative—Design CARLO FIORUCCI
Copy Editor EVELINE CHAO Casting Director TOM MACKLIN Junior Art Director HANNAH TACHER Contributing Arts Editors, New York JACOBA URIST, KAT HERRIMAN Contributing Fashion Directors ALEXANDRA CRONAN, KATE FOLEY European Contributor GEORGINA COHEN Podcast Editor SIENNA FEKETE
Interns CAMILIA FATEH POLINA CHEREZOVA AMELIA STONE MCKENNA MATUS KELSEY PECCHIA PALOMA BAYGUAL SOFIA LIEBLEIN Prepress/Print Production PETE JACATY Senior Photo Retoucher BERT MOO-YOUNG
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LETTER from the EDITOR It’s hard to believe that this issue marks eight years of CULTURED Young Artists lists. As most of you know, supporting emerging voices has been one of the driving motivations for the magazine since its inception. Our team, and the friends we tap for their insights on a perpetually evolving artistic ecosystem, dedicate an incredible amount of energy and thought to assembling these lists. Give this year’s edition due attention; the 27 featured artists will demand it sooner or later. We are grateful to dedicate our pages to their paths, and hope their stories inspire and transport you. Hope is exactly what I’m left with after leafing through our portfolio on 11 female artists over 75. Their remarkable tenacity and willingness to weather any storm —whether personal, professional, or creative—is proof that standing one’s ground is a lifetime achievement. Our cover star, the indomitable Fran Lebowitz, embodies a similar vein of unapologetic grit. “An anti-celebrity who’s
managed to maintain relevance despite waging a decades-long campaign against the concept,” as writer Nicolaia Rips describes her in our cover story, Fran is a living litmus test for our modern world’s distractions and disorders. That chaos, and how it’s been translated and transcended by artists, is what writer Travis Diehl channels in his essay for the issue, a madcap meander though the age of anxiety. Elsewhere in the pages that follow, poet and playwright Ariana Reines and sculptor Carol Bove sing the praises of uselessness; CULTURED Editor-at-Large Julia Halperin unpacks the art world phenomenon we love to hate—art fairs—with three visionary dealers; and British painter Anj Smith sits down with her friend, the designer Erdem Moralıo ğ lu , to talk about making work that rewards patience. Describing one of her works, Smith says, “I love this idea of flickering possibility in our dark moment.” May this issue remind you of all that’s possible.
JUNE /JULY 2023
Sarah Harrelson and CULTURED’s European contributor, Georgina Cohen, celebrate Frieze London at Claridge’s ArtSpace. Photography by Bertie Watson.
HANK WILLIS THOMAS | SHEREE HOVSEPIAN | JOEL MESLER | MARY HEILMANN | SARAH AIBEL | SANFORD BIGGERS | RASHID JOHNSON | ERIC FISCHL
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Sarah G. Harrelson Founder and Editor-in-Chief @sarahgharrelson Follow us | @cultured_mag
STEVE MCQUEEN / ERDEM / SIGRID NUNEZ / CAROL BOVE / JIM GOLDBERG / HERNAN BAS / JUERGEN TELLER TIM BLUM / GRACE WALES BONNER / SONIA GOMES / LYNDA BENGLIS / SAVANAH LEAF
CULTURED’s year in covers.
FRAN LEBOWITZ shot in NYC. Photography by DANIEL ARNOLD.
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JUERGEN TELLER, MOTHER WITH CROCODILE, BUBENREUTH, 2002. © JUERGEN TELLER, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
JUERGEN TELLER TURNS THE LENS ON HIMSELF This December, the artist will reveal his most ambitious—and personal—exhibition to date, at Paris’s Grand Palais Éphémère. by MARA VEITCH
WHEN
JUERGEN
TELLER
took on his latest venture, his first thought was, “How do I handle this?” he remembers over the phone. “I knew I didn’t want to do that Art Basel cubicle thing.” The venture in question is “i need to live,” the largest exhibition of the iconic photographer’s 30-plus-year career, which will open at the Grand Palais Éphémère on Paris’s Champ de Mars this December. Rather than cordon off the works on view by era or theme, Teller is opting for something far more intimate. Designed with a single entry-point, the show unfolds “like a film or book” of Teller’s life. “It starts with four rather heavy photographs,” he explains. First, a portrait of Teller as a baby, taken by his father. “It looks just like my 6-monthold daughter, and also like a photograph I would have taken,” he says. Next, a snapshot of an
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article announcing his father’s suicide. Then comes one of Teller’s mother with her head in a crocodile’s jaws, followed by a blackand-white shot of the photographer himself standing naked on his father’s grave. “You see this absurdity, the frightening aspect of life, the grotesqueness,” he muses of the show’s forceful preface. But there’s joy and tenderness, too. The exhibition’s title, for example, is born of a will to transcend these darker moments. “My father chose to go this way, but I want to live—for my wife, for my children, and for myself. I need to live.” Toward the end of the exhibition, a series of iconic celebrity shots—
Kim Kardashian, Iggy Pop—are reenacted with the help of 6-month-old Iggy, Teller’s daughter with his wife and collaborator Dovile Drizyte. “It was an adventure for all three of us,” concludes Teller. “We had fun.”
“I WANT TO LIVE— FOR MY WIFE, FOR MY CHILDREN, AND FOR MYSELF. I NEED TO LIVE.” `
OVER THE HILL, Artists don’t receive a pension when they reach retirement age. But that is not why so many of them continue to work well into their 70s and 80s. Most simply can’t imagine navigating the world any other way. The Brazilian artist Sonia Gomes, for example, has been tinkering with her clothes and surroundings since she was a child. The American painter Joan Semmel resolved to dedicate herself to art-making in her early 20s, after the birth of a child and a life-threatening illness. This group of 11 female artists over 75 has much to teach us about perseverance, rejecting society’s expectations, and searching relentlessly for joy through creative expression. Like all creatives, they play a variety of roles in the world. But perhaps the most important one is showing the rest of us what is possible.
INTO THEIR PRIME Joan Semmel | Lynn Hershman Leeson | Barbara Chase-Riboud | Pippa Garner Jacqueline de Jong | Simone Fattal | Sonia Gomes | Betye Saar | Liliana Porter | Dara Birnbaum 70 culturedmag.com
JOAN SEMMEL Joan Semmel’s exploration of one of art history’s longest figurative traditions—the nude— has made her a flagpole of feminist art for the past five decades. From her unflinchingly coital “Sex Paintings” to her recent dissections of the aging female form—which will be featured in her first exhibition with Xavier Hufkens next spring—the native New Yorker is unrelenting in her dedication to distilling the experience of occupying a body.
“
I got married at 19, after graduating from Cooper Union. I wanted to have a ‘normal’ life, not the life of a ‘starving artist,’ so I became a housewife so to speak. I had a small baby, and then I got sick. I had a round of tuberculosis, and I was hospitalized for about six months. That was the point, I think, where I decided that I wanted a life in art. It was about building a sense of myself as separate from the family, that I had my own life and my own identity that went beyond whatever function I fulfilled as a wife-mother. That was my way of insisting on my own identity … My work was always about the audience of one, of myself. I didn’t look for an audience. I painted what was important to me, and it had to find its own audience.” Photography by TAYLOR MILLER
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LYNN HERSHMAN LEESON For much of Lynn Hershman Leeson’s nearly six-decade-long career, her prolific contributions to the ever-evolving landscape of New Media—from her use of then-radical technologies like touch screens to her Tilda Swinton–starring cyborg comedy Teknolust—were treated as an asterisk. Thankfully, that oversight has begun to be corrected in the past decade, through a slew of exhibitions and catalogs. At 82, Hershman Leeson is busy making art about another kind of future: immortality.
“
I went to the Cleveland Museum of Art almost every day when I was growing up. It kept me sane. I think I learned to draw by studying the Leonardo [da Vinci] drawings that were in the museum. Being able to take a pencil or a pen and create this trail on paper seemed so magical— it was always an adventure. I never thought it would be what I did. The key [to being an artist] is just believing in what you’re doing, continuing to question what you’re doing, and creating things that you feel are vital to your time. I couldn’t just do painting and drawing because I couldn’t compete with four centuries of that kind of work. Living in the Bay Area, I realized that I could use the materials of my time, particularly technology, to talk about the issues of my time.”
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Image Courtesy of LYNN HERSHMAN LEESON
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Todd Gray Rome Work November 18, 2023
1700 S Santa Fe Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90021 +1 213 623 3280 vielmetter.com
BARBARA CHASE-RIBOUD At the age of 16, one of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s woodcuts entered MoMA’s collection, the first in a lifetime of achievements. Sixty-eight years later, the same museum hosted an exhibition that put her work in dialogue with that of Alberto Giacometti. A sculptor of modern monuments, “an accidental historian,” and an incisive poet, she continues to redefine the scope and significance of living a creative life with every mark she makes.
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Over my life, I stumbled into situations in Egypt, Turkey, Paris, and Rome that seemed to view me as some kind of extraordinary prize. It didn’t bother me that people find me exotic. I am an alien; most artists are aliens. I’ve lived in the position of l’étranger—the stranger. I didn’t think my life was so extraordinary when I was living it. In retrospect, yes. But living to the end degree is something that one does not out of ambition but out of ignorance. If I were to tell a young artist anything before they leap into this cesspool, it would be that they should travel, they should read, they should learn how to draw, and then they should make their choice. Educate yourself before you leap, not after you leap.”
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Photography by SOPHIE ELGORT
PIPPA GARNER Pippa Garner has held a zany mirror to American consumerist culture for over 50 years. Her inventions—high-heeled roller skates, escalator stepladders—are wry parodies, situating her in the vein of absurdist icons like Meret Oppenheim and Andy Warhol. Garner spent her career relegated to the art world’s periphery—perhaps a result of her experiments with “gender-hacking” in the early ’80s. But at 81, Garner is finally getting her flowers, and she has a string of recent exhibitions (her first solo museum show at Art Omi, an appearance in the Hammer Museum biennial, and a show at White Columns) to prove it.
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I was drafted out of ArtCenter College of Design and flown to Vietnam to be a combat artist, sketching and taking pictures. Much later, I became ill from my exposure to Agent Orange; that’s what’s taking my life now. After I came back from Vietnam, the art world kind of descended on me. I amused myself with [inventions] I thought had to be made. The word ‘consumerism’ guided a lot of things I did—I liked the way objects were cycled through and then discarded. Things got obsolete so quickly, and I felt sorry for them. It’s like I never outgrew my childhood notion of wanting to bring things to life. I haven’t been able to keep up with what’s happening in art now, but it seems like there’s a somber quality to a lot of work. I think some of the humor and absurdity might be missing.”
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Photography by HANNAH TACHER
JACQUELINE DE JONG During this year’s Paris+ par Art Basel, Jacqueline de Jong brought baked potatoes— natural and ceramic—to a pond in the Jardin des Tuileries. Stormy weather and the pond’s resident fish had their way with the installation, but de Jong left the experience certain that she could still translate her ideas into reality. That unshakeable resolve has fueled the Dutch artist to confront grave topics with a singular sensibility over a six-decade career.
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The advice I give to young artists is to be curious, and stay curious. Try to inhale as much as possible around you and within you to get material for your work. What gives me the energy to make art is the act of doing it. The result, when you’re lucky, might also be very exciting, but it’s mainly the act. When I see a work of mine that I haven’t seen in a long time, I surprise myself. Like recently at Art Basel, there was a painting [on view] I hadn’t seen for almost 60 years. Then another painting that was in Australia came back too, which has a very enigmatic text. I have no idea where and why I wrote this text and put it into this painting from 1965. There are many things that are still enigmas to me, and that is exciting.”
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Photography by GERT JAN VAN ROOIJ
New York Album November – December
RAQIB SHAW
PABLO PICASSO
Raqib Shaw, A Nous Deux Maintenant!! (Day Version), 2022, acrylic liner and enamel on aluminum 21 ¼ × 27 ⁹⁄16"
ADRIAN GHEN IE
Self-portrait from Paris–Biarritz sketchbook (Carnet 214), 1918 graphite, 3 ½ × 5 ¼" © FABA Photo © 2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Adrian Ghenie, Untitled, 2023, oil on canvas, 78 ¾ × 78 ¾"
pacegallery.com
SIMONE FATTAL The art world doesn’t interest Simone Fattal. The Syria-born, Lebanon-raised painter and sculptor has spent the last decades in a different temporality, experimenting with the primordial nature of clay and the ancient texts—like the Epic of Gilgamesh, The Iliad, Works and Days—that fuel her sculptural archaeology. The ceramic civilizations she spawns give these epics a new life, forging space in a “headless world” to consider humanity’s odyssey.
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When I left Beirut and went to the United States [in 1980], I had to put all my paintings in boxes. That was a traumatic experience, and when I arrived in the U.S., I just didn’t want to paint. The Bay Area was so wonderfully beautiful, but I didn’t know it. I had nothing to say about it; it wasn’t mine. After some time, I had the idea of doing a publishing house. I started the PostApollo Press in 1982. When I felt that the Post-Apollo could somehow stand on its own feet, I took up sculpture. I discovered a whole new way of expressing myself. It’s a really wonderful way of living, of searching, of discovering, of expressing all that one needs to do.”
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Photography by CHRISTOPHE BEAUREGARD
SONIA GOMES Raised in Caetanópolis, the fabled birthplace of Brazil’s textile industry, Sonia Gomes left a legal career behind at 45 to commit herself fully to art-making. True to her roots, Gomes’s assemblages combine secondhand textiles with driftwood, creating forms that appear almost alive. Though her inclusion in the 2015 Venice Biennale positioned Gomes on a global stage, the artist has always found inspiration within.
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Since I was young, I always needed to tailor what I wore, to be different. I believe there was already a calling for art in what I was doing, but it might also be because we, as Black people, are entirely invisible, looking for visibility. I am still driven by the impulse to alter everything I see. Creating is a need for me, and it has never crossed my mind to abandon it. In the early 2000s, when the work was beginning to gain recognition, I produced cathartically. I used to stitch and cry, stitch and cry, and create nonstop. Lately, I have become more formalist. I enjoy spending more time exploring the shapes within the work. I’m constantly seeking abstraction, asymmetry, volumes, and, above all, beauty. The work is alive, and so am I.”
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Photography by PABLO SABORIDO
www.toddmerrillstudio.com Light sculpture: Jamie Harris // Vase: Maarten Vrolijk // Table: Stefan Rurak
BETYE SAAR As a child, Betye Saar witnessed the construction of the Watts Towers from broken glass, rusty tools, and seashells, and determined that history is best represented in the detritus of real people’s lives. Saar, now 97, has maintained this conviction over a 50-year career, using found objects to articulate the Black American experience and critique its commodification. Though she’s sworn off of deadlines, Saar has one more museum show in the works, open this month at the Huntington in Saar’s native Los Angeles.
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I was a curious child, a child of the Depression. I looked at the ground as I walked [and] picked up flattened pieces of metal, buttons, pretty scraps of paper. I treasured these little things. In the ’70s, it all came together for me. I combined my printmaking and my collecting, and suddenly it was called ‘mixed media assemblage.’ During the Civil Rights Movement, I was a young mother. It was hard for me to join the protests in person, so I protested in my studio instead. I’m 97 now, and I still do my watercolors almost every day. I thought I was done with commissions, but I couldn’t resist saying yes to my new project at the Huntington next month. I’m from Pasadena, so it’s full-circle art.”
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Photography by TRACYE SAAR-CAVANAUGH
LILIANA PORTER Liliana Porter has appeared in over 450 exhibitions in 40 countries. She coyly attributes this accolade to the sheer number of years she’s dedicated to her craft, which has spanned printmaking, painting, photography, and more since her teenage years in Argentina. At 82, she’s as invigorated as ever, planning her next move: a return to theater, perhaps? Another dalliance with film?
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FORTY YEARS (SELF-PORTRAIT WITH SQUARE 1973), 2013.
When you start working, you have many points of reference. After a while, you see a pattern, you recognize the subject that keeps coming up. [For me] it was the simultaneity of the real and the virtual, that relationship. I always start with the idea and from the idea I go to the technique, not the other way around. The technique has to be in service of the idea. That’s why I did theater, or things that I didn’t especially study. If whatever you do is true, it’s going to be good, if it’s something that you really like and relate to and need. It’s important to use yourself as a point of reference and then look for what you need outside and not the other way around. The key thing is to really have a dialogue with yourself and be true to yourself.”
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Self-portrait by LILIANA PORTER
David Lewis Art Basel Miami Beach 2023 Booth 43
Barbara Bloom Thornton Dial Tomás Esson Todd Gray Leah Ke Yi Zheng Israel Lund Mel Odom Kan Seidel Peter Schlesinger Greg Parma Smith Thornton Dial, Springtime on the Hillside, 2011 (detail)
DARA BIRNBAUM In her late 20s, Dara Birnbaum left a career in architecture behind, dedicating herself to an art practice that explored the role of television—both a sedative and a stimulant—in shaping American culture. During her nearly 50-year career, the New York native has produced subversive video and installation works that, in their appropriation and manipulation of television imagery, pioneered a radical form of expression that has become a shorthand in today’s image-driven culture.
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When I was young, I was so in love with what I thought art could do for a culture. I knew I had great talent, and I didn’t want anyone to touch that. I was an architect originally, and [then] I went to the San Francisco Art Institute. [Afterwards] I moved to Italy with my lover. I remember walking into a small gallery thinking people were watching television, but [they weren’t]. That was the first time I ever saw a tape produced by an artist, and it whetted my appetite. When I went back to New York, a friend gave me a Portapak and that was it. I wanted to challenge what television was. Even after 45 years, there is still nothing I want more than to give myself and my voice to a world that I feel has gone awry.”
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Photography by PHILIP BIRNBAUM
Jan 27 — May 19, 2024
HUNG LIU LIVING MEMORY
This exhibition is co-organized by five undergraduate students in the Curatorial Practicum: Exhibition Development and Design course in the Museum Theory & Practice Concentration, taught by Ellen C. Raimond, Associate Curator of Academic Initiatives at the Nasher Museum. The student co-curators, all part of Duke’s Class of 2024, are Nicole Kagan, Eliza Henne, Elayna Lei, Bailes New and Madeleine Reinhard.
nasher.duke.edu
Hung Liu, The Martyr (detail), 2001. Color lithograph with collage, 30 x 30 inches (76.2 x 76.2 cm). Collection of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Gift of Turner Carroll Gallery and Hung Liu Studio; 2022.28.7. (C) Hung Liu Estate/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.
LYNDA BENGLIS Lynda Benglis likens her work to an open system, a setup that both responds to and challenges its surroundings. Since the 1960s, the Louisiana-born artist, now 82, has been circling questions of gender representation and the bounds of painting and sculpture in her provocative practice. Though she builds off figures like Jackson Pollock, Benglis traces her first conceptions of what an artist is to a figure much closer to home.
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My mother was an artist. She drew portraits of her children early on, but then she had a nervous breakdown and my father committed her to an institution. The nurses tried to force her to draw, thinking that she would be better off. Back then, women artists had to give up a lot. I began to mock what women were supposed to do, what women were told to do, women as objects, Marilyn Monroe. I never thought about leaving my practice because I was always looking for something to fulfill my wanderings, I think. I’m a wanderer and a logician. I’m attracted to people who are scientists, and I love artists too. I think it’s the same game. You have to build on ideas, and ideas can be huge questions that are not answerable easily.”
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Photography by WILLIAM JESS LAIRD
The Condominium is not owned, developed, or sold by Major Food Groups or its affiliates (“MFG”). This condominium is being developed by 710 Edge Property, LLC, a Delaware limited liability company (“Developer”), which has a limited right to use the trademarked names and logos of Terra, One Thousand Group and which uses the Villa marks under a license from MFG, which has not confirmed the accuracy of any of the statements or representations made about the project by the Developer. Any and all statements, disclosures and/or representations shall be deemed made by Developer you agree to look solely to Developer with respect to any and all matters relating to the marketing and/or development of the Condominium and with respect to the sales of units in the Condominium. Oral representations cannot be relied upon as correctly stating the representations of the developer. For correct representations, make reference to this brochure and to the documents required by section 718.503, Florida statutes, to be furnished by a developer to a buyer or lessee. These materials are not intended to be an offer to sell, or solicitation to buy a unit in the condominium. Such an offering shall only be made pursuant to the prospectus (offering circular) for the condominium and no statements should be relied upon unless made in the prospectus or in the applicable purchase agreement. In no event shall any solicitation, offer or sale of a unit in the condominium be made in, or to residents of, any state or country in which such activity would be unlawful. All images and designs depicted herein are artist’s conceptual renderings, which are based upon preliminary development plans, and are subject to change without notice in the manner provided in the offering documents. All such materials are not to scale and are shown solely for illustrative purposes. Renderings depict proposed views, which are not identical from each residence. No guarantees or representations whatsoever are made that existing or future views of the project and surrounding areas depicted by artist’s conceptual renderings or otherwise described herein, will be provided or, if provided, will be as depicted or described herein. Any view from a residence or from other portions of the property may in the future be limited or eliminated by future development or forces of nature and the developer in no manner guarantees the continuing existence of any view. Furnishings are only included if and to the extent provided in your purchase agreement. The project graphics, renderings and text provided herein are copyrighted works owned by the Developer. All rights reserved. WARNING: THE CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF REAL ESTATE HAS NOT INSPECTED, EXAMINED, OR QUALIFIED THIS OFFERING.
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PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALEX DELFANNE. IMAGE COURTESY OF ANJ SMITH AND HAUSER & WIRTH.
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TELLING IT SLANT On the occasion of her show with Hauser & Wirth in New York, British painter Anj Smith discusses the process of making art for—and about—the body with her friend, designer Erdem.
OVER THE LAST two decades, Anj Smith has mined the tangled veins of ecological decay and the gendered form to spawn seething, ethereal paintings that flicker somewhere between portraiture and landscape. The Kent, U.K.-born artist’s practice is characterized by a refusal to speed up, allowing her to add one gossamer layer of meaning after another to her cryptic, densely packed works. As a result, Smith’s paintings unfurl cunningly—revealing themselves to the viewer who pauses long enough to drink them in. This month, a new series of the artist’s works are on view in “Drifting Habitations” at Hauser & Wirth’s 22nd Street location in New York. Ahead of the show’s opening, Smith visited the studio of her friend, Erdem Moralıoğlu, whose eponymous womenswear line reflects a similar reverence for history, memory, and inscrutability.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY TOM MANNION. COURTESY OF ERDEM MORALIOĞLU.
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ERDEM MORALIOĞLU: Anj, whenever I see a work of yours, I have an immediate desire to untie it. There are so many secrets hidden in the corners and layers of each piece. I was intrigued by something in the exhibition catalog for your upcoming show. You speak with Dr. Orna Guralnik—a specialist in the transmission of trauma—about the idea that trauma can be inherited. How do her studies of the human mind connect to your work?
ANJ SMITH, ROSEMARINUS, 2023.
ANJ SMITH: With the new series of nudes that I’m about to show, I’m exploring what it’s like to inhabit a female body in a way that is not definable, linear, or easily gettable, but rather presents a self in flux, with all these historical gazes or idealizations laid upon it. Dr. Orna was very helpful in showing me that we can be 100 different people a day. She gave me the language to express that. MORALIOĞLU: You discuss the tension between anxiety and the erotic. These are seemingly opposing forces—the erotic is something that draws you out, anxiety turns you inward. How do you relate to that push and pull? SMITH: I’m painting in a way that I hope produces that push and pull in a viewer. There are things that draw you in—a luscious palette, impasto or glossiness—but there’s also a refusal at play. One thing I’m always trying to work out is, How do I point to the most important moment in a work to the viewer? The same may be true for you, Erdem. There is so much detail in your garments—embroidery embedded under tulle, lots of diaphanous layers. How do you expect people to encounter and read your clothes? MORALIOĞLU: There are different phases to a body of work. You have a show, which is like a manifesto to introduce your concept. It’s almost like creating a film—the lighting, the sound, the earrings, the shoes, the movement, and the makeup come together to embody what you’re trying to say for the season. Then there’s the phase where that dress hangs in a store, and gets absorbed into someone’s life who you don’t know, and who doesn’t necessarily know that the dress is inspired by a Victorian “House of Hope” from 1860, or by Deborah [Cavendish, duchess of] Devonshire. But back to you, Anj. The writer Claire-Louise Bennett has contributed to the exhibition catalog—The New Yorker has described her work as a “war against narrative.” Does that resonate with you?
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“MY WORK HAS BEEN CALLED SURREAL, BUT FOR ME, IT’S NOT SURREAL. IT’S JUST NOT LINEAR.” —Anj Smith
SMITH: Absolutely. History has been presented to us in this linear way by a very specific group of people. If you’re on the outside of that group, as I feel I am, you learn to communicate in a more oblique way. I made a painting for this show called But Tell it Slant [2023], which is a reference to an Emily Dickinson poem. If you’re going to tell the truth, she advises, do it incrementally, gradually. My work has been called surreal, but for me, it’s not surreal. It’s just not linear. I also chafe a bit at the term because the surrealists didn’t accept women, so it feels like clumsy terminology. MORALIOĞLU: I struggle with it too. Dalí is so uninteresting to me. But Bosch, I love. That’s surrealism to me. I do want to ask about your female nudes, the ones standing in the water. One of them is But Tell it Slant, and the other is Rosemarinus [2023].
SMITH: It’s funny, I had a studio visit with someone many years ago, and he was physically repulsed by all the hair on my figures. He goes, “Why are they so hairy?” I was mortified because they were clearly self-portraits. I’m still slightly traumatized. Anyway, these paintings are an exploration of that. I love that they’re both standing in water, this mysterious element without any set contours. These paintings are about having a kernel of agency, being able to foster hope and creativity in the midst of all of this current murk. MORALIOĞLU: When you begin a work, are you mapping out an equation that you already know the answer to, or is painting a process of exploration? SMITH: I do understand the answer before I start. I’m always really mindful that people
spend a nanosecond looking at painting. I’m trying, on one level, to create a work that’s legible to the viewer who stops by for one second. But beyond that, I’m trying to invite the viewer to slow down. The paintings are quite aggressive in that way; they require time to unlock. Small details will emerge slowly, and things become legible after minutes. In our throwaway culture, everything is disposable and cheapened. What I’m doing is quite countercultural—it’s a slow burn that rewards and nourishes you over an extended period. MORALIOĞLU: I feel like you’re describing the work Intermittence [2022]. It’s a blackened sky with a singular, elasticated lightning bolt. It’s distinct from the rest of the paintings in the show. SMITH: The title comes from Dante. I was reading the Inferno, as one does for a bit of light re-
lief. There’s a tier in Dante’s vision of hell that is complete murkiness; the only light sources are these blinking fireflies. I love this idea of flickering possibility in our dark moment. There is also an ambiguity at the heart of the piece: Initially, it feels quite celebratory. It could be a firework. But if you spend some time with it, you’ll see a few spent flare canisters in the foreground. The assumption could be made that this is a distress flare. It’s a response to living in our conflicted time. MORALIOĞLU: I’m fascinated by your ability to weave these dialogues and histories into your work. SMITH: I’m not one of these artists who feels you can ignore the past. I see that in your relation to the history of fashion and textiles. I love your jacquards—a textile that, originally, existed to make sumptuous brocades and damasks
more accessible for people. You’re making this historically loaded textile relevant in a new time. MORALIOĞLU: I’ve always been fascinated by history. I love using a silhouette or a textile technique from the 1920s or 1860s to shapeshift or travel in time. It’s that layering, all those little tangents that come together to tell a story.
“IN OUR THROWAWAY CULTURE, EVERYTHING IS DISPOSABLE AND CHEAPENED. WHAT I’M DOING IS QUITE COUNTERCULTURAL— IT’S A SLOW BURN THAT REWARDS AND NOURISHES YOU OVER AN EXTENDED PERIOD.” —Anj Smith
ANJ SMITH, INTERMITTENCE, 2022.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALEX DELFANNE. IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND HAUSER & WIRTH.
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MEET THE DEALER DUO WHO PUT NORDIC DESIGN ON THE NEW YORK MAP
WHEN IT COMES to collectible Nordic art and design, you would be hard-pressed to find two American dealers better versed than Kim Hostler and Juliet Burrows, life partners who founded their eponymous Manhattan gallery 25 years ago, before Hans Wegner and Finn Juhl were household names. Today, Hostler Burrows has a second location on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, as well as an art gallery, HB381, in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood, which specializes in contemporary sculpture and ceramics—an offshoot of their passion for Nordic sensibilities and a curatorial outlet for Burrows, who has organized 10 shows, with six accompanying artist catalogs thus far. “We obsess over everything,” says Hostler of the pair’s success and longevity in a Google-dominated world where vintage Arne Jacobsen is a fairly easy find. “[Our offering is] super edited. We're invested in how everything is supposed to look, how it will feel, the whole experience with each piece.” Put simply, she adds, “It’s about our taste.”
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Over the past 25 years, Kim Hostler and Juliet Burrows have brought a Scandinavian sensibility to the city. Now, they’re upping the sculpture game downtown with their fledgling Tribeca gallery space. by JACOBA URIST While their 10th Street New York flagship proved a timeless design locus, the couple came to realize that an art hub it was not. “We did several exhibitions in that space and we didn’t get the traffic”, recalls Burrows of the decision to debut HB381 south of Canal St. last year. "And we wanted more art world eyes on the work. Building on the response at fairs like Design Miami and Fog, we wanted to offer greater exposure for the artists.” Since then, they’ve mounted exhibits in their new space from the likes of Danish glass artist Bjørn Friborg—his first solo presentation in the U.S.—and Helsinki-based Jasmin Anoschkin, whose “Supercharged Lollipop Valley” conjured a folk-meets-pop art fantasia that stopped plenty of downtown foot traffic. On view this winter: Steen Ipsen’s glossy ceramic sculptures, which showcase organic
abstraction at its finest. “It’s wonderful that craft has been embraced by the art world,” says Burrows, who was originally a dancer. “There’s something about a sculpture that’s alive. It’s like movement. It’s like dance.” Reflecting on a journey that includes 9/11 and the financial crisis of 2008, Hostler admits, “At the beginning it was about personal freedom, being able to pay the bills, and being able to work around beautiful things.” As Hostler Burrows rounds 25 years, what have its founders learned about themselves and the art world’s volatility? “If you can find something beautiful and somebody else wants to have it in their home, that’s a good feeling,” muses Hostler. “Working in beauty feels like such a privilege and a luxury itself. You open a door and you try something. If it doesn’t work, you close the door and try something else. We’re free.”
Photograph by ALEXANDRA ROWLEY
AGO Projects, Mexico City Altman Siegel, San Francisco Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York Anthony Meier, Mill Valley Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco Casemore Gallery, San Francisco Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco Crown Point Press, San Francisco David Lewis, New York David Zwirner, New York Demisch Danant, New York Fergus McCaffrey, New York Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin Gallery FUMI, London Gladstone Gallery, New York Haines, San Francisco Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco Hostler Burrows, New York Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco Jessica Silverman, San Francisco Karma, West Hollywood Lebreton, Monte Carlo Lehmann Maupin, New York In celebration of its tenth anniversary the fair launches FOG FOCUS, an invitational designed to showcase art by young artists as an integral part of San Francisco’s
Gió Marconi Gallery, Milan
Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles
Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York
Et al., San Francisco George Adams Gallery, New York Johansson Projects, Oakland
CELEBRATING 10 YEARS fogfair.com
Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Beverly Hills / Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
CULT Aimee Friberg, San Francisco
January 17, 2024 Preview Gala Benefiting the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Magen H Gallery, New York
creative ecosystem.
Crèvecœur, Paris
JANUARY 18-21, 2024 FORT MASON CENTER
LUHRING AUGUSTINE, New York
Mendes Wood DM, New York Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York Micki Meng Gallery, San Francisco NILUFAR, Milan Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles
Jonathan Carver Moore, San Francisco
Ornamentum, Hudson
OCHI, Los Angeles
Pace Gallery, New York
Schlomer Haus Gallery, San Francisco
pt.2 Gallery, Oakland R & Company, New York Rebecca Camacho Presents, San Francisco S94 Design, New York Sarah Myerscough Gallery, London Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles Talwar Gallery, New York Tina Kim Gallery, New York
DISPATCHES FROM THE DIASPORA
In her work, artist ZADIE XA weaves together a quilt of cultural touch points—vestiges of the many places she’s called home.
THINK OF YOUR FAVORITE hip hop song. More likely than not, it is laden with samples situating it within an expansive and nonlinear history. This stitching together of references lays the groundwork for multidisciplinary artist Zadie Xa’s practice. “As a young person, I would recognize different vocal clips from different songs,” she remembers. “They’re an homage to a moment in time.” Xa’s work, often shown in collaboration with her life and creative partner Benito Mayor Vallejo, weaves together references to her Korean heritage, diasporic touch points from a childhood in Vancouver, and experiences from more than a decade spent in London, where she earned her master’s in painting from the Royal College of Art. In one of the works featured in “Nine Tailed Tall Tales: Trickster, Mongrel, Beast,” Xa’s first 102 culturedmag.com
solo presentation in South Korea at Seoul’s Space K earlier this year, the mythological character Grandmother Mago is presented astride a haetae beast. The goddess is revered for her wisdom—a gift of old age, which many cultures take great measures to delay. Xa’s Mago depiction, much like the artist herself, straddles the symbolic implications of both East and West. “I suppose it is a very soft political gesture to move that pendulum away from the center,” she says of intermingling her reference points. But the practice isn’t without its challenges. When exhibiting in the West, Xa is mindful of not exoticizing her subjects. In the East, she worries their inclusion will be interpreted as cavalier. “I have to let things go and accept that people will read things the way they do. As soon as the work leaves you, it is its own autonomous thing,” she relents.
“I SUPPOSE IT IS A VERY SOFT POLITICAL GESTURE TO MOVE THAT PENDULUM AWAY FROM THE CENTER.” Next spring, Xa will make her Parisian debut with Thaddaeus Ropac, a milestone made less daunting by the gallery’s tight-knit team. The work is still in its nascent phase, but Xa— who creates in response to the locale of each show—is exploring themes of dramaturgy, costuming, and fashion. How does an artist pushing against the center take on the global cultural capital? “In many ways, the center point is kind of exotic for me,” she contends with a smile. “It’s a different thing.”
PHOTOGRAPHY BY ARTIFACTS. IMAGE COURTESY OF THADDAEUS ROPAC GALLERY.
In her work, the artist weaves together a quilt of cultural touch points—vestiges of the many places that have shaped her.
Paul Pfeiffer
November 12, 2023– June 16, 2024 The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA Right image: Paul Pfeiffer, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (30), 2015. © Paul Pfeiffer. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio November 12, 2023– June 16, 2024 The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA Right image: Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio, 601ft² para el Lago Suchitlan / 601 sq. ft. for Lake Suchitlan (detail), 2023, amber, found objects, volcanic stone, and stoneware on wooden support. Image and work courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles and Mexico City, © Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio.
moca.org
TALKING ABOUT THE WEATHER Over the course of nine books, Sigrid Nunez has earned a reputation for flouting the literary world’s rules. Her latest novel is no different—a pandemic-induced examination of solitude that begins with a meditation on the weather. by SOPHIE LEE SIGRID NUNEZ is upstate, escaping the Manhattan bustle of her daily life for the serenity of the Yaddo writers’ retreat in Saratoga Springs. Her latest book hasn’t even hit shelves yet, but Nunez is already ideating, ready to dive back in. The Vulnerables, her ninth novel, is a winding chronicle of life during the pandemic. An unnamed New York protagonist finds herself bird-sitting a macaw while cohabitating with a chaotic college student who appears at the door without warning. At Yaddo, Nunez is sharing space herself—with a “terrifically friendly” dog who keeps her company while she sets to work unspooling the narrative of her next book. To mark the release of The Vulnerables, she takes a moment to reflect on the novel and her renegade approach to literary norms. SOPHIE LEE: The book opens with a passage about the weather, and notes that this is not the proper way to begin a book. Did you take that as a personal challenge? SIGRID NUNEZ: I started writing this book in the spring of 2020 when we were all in lockdown. It really just came to me. The first sentence of Virginia Woolf’s novel The Years is, “It was an uncertain spring.” I thought, This is an uncertain spring. Dickens’s novel Bleak House also starts with the weather. I grew up being told that “It was a dark and stormy night” was the stupidest, worst, most horrible way to begin a book. But when you think about it—why? LEE: Your narrator is a writer living in New York. It’s hard not to think that her character might be inspired by your own life. NUNEZ: It’s unavoidable. If you have a first-person narrator to whom you have given your gender, your age, and your profession, it would be silly to expect that readers wouldn’t think that some of this was coming from the writer’s own life. But the truth is, I don’t write autofiction. I write books that are really hybrids. There’s always a narrator that I, as the author, identify with strongly. If I’m having this narrator reflect on certain things—what it feels like to be in lock-
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down or what it feels like to be alone, what she thinks of a certain movie she’s seen—that’s going to reflect Sigrid’s feelings and ideas. But the things that happen in my books are almost exclusively invented. LEE: I remember this line from the book, about choosing a pseudonym: “Sugared Nouns was the computer’s suggestion, after spell-checking my name.” NUNEZ: That was real. I just couldn’t resist! I’ve always wanted to use it somewhere; it was so funny. I thought, Well, now you’re naming the narrator your name. That is usually only done in autofiction, but where else am I going to put that hilarious thing? LEE: You started as an editorial assistant at the New York Review of Books. NUNEZ: I wish I had paid a little bit more attention. I didn’t really want to be there. Our jobs as editorial assistants were 100 percent clerical. We had typewriters and phones on our desks. We kept saying, “Why don’t they hire real secretaries?” They would’ve done a much better job, because our typing skills were not so good. When the editor would dictate, it was like a panic attack. Nevertheless, you could watch the editing process, you could see how everything was put together, you could read the writers, and I did that. But I was always distracted by the life of the young and cutting corners, keeping the job as minimal as possible. It is a moment in time where you have a certain invisibility, which can be an advantage as far as being a fly on the wall. LEE: You weren’t turned off by the literary world after they made you get their coffee and do their typing? NUNEZ: Not at all. There were so many good writers connected to the Review and, because it was New York, they were often in the office. You didn’t have a privileged position at all, but you had the privilege of seeing these people you admired. You didn’t think, Why are they not
noticing me? Why would they notice you? You’re an idiot. You can’t even type. LEE: When did you realize you could make a career out of writing? NUNEZ: I went to an MFA program. I worked at the Review a little before and a little afterwards. It was a hard path, but it was an obvious path. That’s what I had to do: Sit down, keep writing, try to get something good, and try to get it published. I always wanted to do that even when it wasn’t working out, even when I didn’t like what I wrote. I just plowed on. LEE: Did winning the National Book Award for The Friend in 2018 feel like a turning point? NUNEZ: It didn’t, because I’d written so many books before. It changed one thing hugely: Because of that prize I now have a large number of foreign translations. LEE: Are future readers, say 30 years from now, a consideration for The Vulnerables? NUNEZ: I never think about what the book is going to be, how it’s going to be read years from now, or whether it will make sense. I’m only concerned with now. There’s another rule of writing: Never tell the reader something she can figure out for herself. Never assume that your reader is not as intelligent as you are. You don’t have to explain everything; this is boring and repetitious. I’m talking to someone who is not only as intelligent as I am, my equal in all ways, but also somebody who’s just been through what I’ve been through. When you read a book about the present day written as if it were a historical novel, you just want to throw the book across the room. LEE: There’s obviously an intergenerational narrative here. Were you thinking about that a lot during the pandemic? NUNEZ: You mean, did I fantasize about some gorgeous young hunk who was suddenly in my space? Who was also a really nice guy who just wanted to get high together? You know, maybe I did!
PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARION ETTLINGER. IMAGE COURTESY OF SIGRID NUNEZ.
“I GREW UP BEING TOLD THAT ‘IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT’ WAS THE STUPIDEST, WORST, MOST HORRIBLE WAY TO BEGIN A BOOK. BUT WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT IT—WHY?”
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A REVOLUTION IN NATURAL WINEMAKING Since founding Dry Farm Wines nearly a decade ago, Todd White has spent his time traveling the globe to identify and collaborate with local winemakers who uphold heritage vineyard traditions. Today, the brand is at the forefront of an industry sea change.
TODD WHITE believes he looks younger to-
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PHOTOGRAPHY BY YANNIK ROHERE. IMAGE COURTESY OF DRY FARM WINES.
day than he did a decade ago. He credits this rejuvenation to what he calls his biohacking lifestyle, a philosophy of optimizing one’s habits to take charge of typically passive biological processes—aging, for example. For White, this means a strict regimen of 22-hour intermittent fasting, Wim Hof breathing (submerged in ice cold water), journaling, meditation, and adhering to a ketogenic diet. Needless to say, he only drinks natural wine. The story of Dry Farm Wines begins eight years ago. “I was looking for a better way to drink wine,” says White. In 2015, he was living in Napa Valley, and at the beginning of his biohacker journey. Wine, once a treasured indulgence at the end of the day, became difficult to tolerate. White began a deep dive into the wine industry’s well-obscured underbelly, emerging with a number of concerning insights: Of the U.S.’s 12 most pesticide-heavy types of produce, grapes ranked eighth. As the result of certain additives, many American wines cannot be deemed vegan. White shifted his focus to natural wine, which the industry designates as “organically farmed, fermented with native yeast, and additive-free.” Rather than making the switch on the movement’s good reputation alone, White “took it a few steps further by quantifying the health aspects of these wines through lab testing, in addition to their excellent taste profiles.”
OPENING LA FEB 2024
ZIZI PH O P O SWA - LO N G B E AC H WO R KS
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Later that year, the serial entrepreneur unveiled his own operation: Dry Farm Wines. Named after a natural farming practice, the company boasts partnerships with over 800 family growers across Europe, the result of deep connections that White formed while traveling the globe in search of vineyards that upheld heritage winemaking traditions. “You need that spiritual connection to nature, that understanding that everything is connected,” he notes. The bottles are sugar-free, low in sulfites and alcohol content (under 12.5 percent), low in carbohy-
drates, and independently lab-tested to ensure they meet the company’s stringent guidelines. The results speak for themselves: Dry Farm Wines’ customer base has grown steadily in the near-decade since its founding, earning the loyalty of the likes of Halle Berry and Molly Sims.
“IF YOU CAN CHOOSE WINE THAT TASTES BETTER AND IS BETTER FOR YOU, WHY WOULDN’T YOU?”
For White, this growth is the logical result of an offering that is remarkably rare in the viticultural community: natural wine grown traditionally, without toxic additives or chemical interventions. “When you taste these wines, you immediately notice the difference,” he says. “They are ethereal, they are supernal, they rise above what you know.” But commercial success aside, the mission of Dry Farm Wines is a simple one: “If you can choose wine that tastes better and is better for you,” says White, “why wouldn’t you?”
PHOTOGRAPHY BY RUSH KEMP. IMAGE COURTESY OF DRY FARM WINES.
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Stephanie Syjuco, Total Transparency Filter (Portrait of N), 2017. Inkjet print, 40 × 30 in. (101.6 × 76.2 cm). Courtesy the artist; RYAN LEE Gallery, New York; Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco; and Silverlens, Manila. © Stephanie Syjuco. Photo: Courtesy the artist; RYAN LEE Gallery, New York; Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco; and Silverlens, Manila
October 20, 2023–April 7, 2024 Tickets at guggenheim.org
DREAM IN THE RHYTHM Grace Wales Bonner talks to MoMA curator Michelle Kuo about “Spirit Movers”—the visionary designerʼs new show at the New York institution—and her reverence for the act of making.
OVER THE LAST DECADE, Grace Wales Bonner has established herself as a sort of synthesizer of creative worlds. The designer has earned a coterie of accolades, including an appointment last year as Member of the Order of the British Empire, for her contributions to fashion—the fruits of her deep research into Afro-Atlantic musical and visual art traditions and her own South London upbringing. Recently, she turned to the museum as a new forum for that inquiry. After making an acclaimed curatorial debut at the Serpentine Galleries in 2019, which focused on the resonance of shrines with Black culture and aesthetics, Wales Bonner is turning her attention to the hand and its ability to channel new life into everyday materials. The result is “Spirit Movers,” the latest edition of MoMA’s Artist’s Choice series, which the designer curated alongside curator, writer, and editor Michelle Kuo. The exhibition, which features some 50 works from the museum’s vast permanent collection, takes up residence in the hushed, apse-like space on the institution’s ground floor—a fitting locale for a show that treats the act of making with spiritual reverence. The show, which opened Nov. 18, is accompanied by a book, Grace Wales Bonner: Dream in the Rhythm, in which the designer mines the museum’s archives to explore the links between poetry, music, and photography. CULTURED brought Wales Bonner and Kuo together to discuss the intention behind the exhibition.
Many of the pieces in the exhibition are works on paper—notes, documentation, poems. That feels in line with this idea of past lives.
a lot of freedom in thinking about the people and materials that could come together in the exhibition.
WALES BONNER: I definitely feel the presence of hands in these works—there’s quite a direct connection to making. It’s also about the purity of translation, whether through assemblage or writing. Again, it connects to the idea of spirit movers, as if something is moving through the hand, what moves through the material and what emerges from that movement.
KUO: And his attention to the everyday, like so many Fluxus artists, highlighted these mundane events—water dripping, a light turning on and off—linking them to some kind of performative culmination. The discovery process was such a big factor in establishing this range of works in the show. I remember when you came to visit MoMA’s big warehouse… I don’t know if you found that helpful.
MICHELLE KUO: One example of these works on paper is by Minnie Evans. It’s a diminutive work with all these curvilinear tracings in different colors. For Evans, making these drawings was a spiritual practice—one that maybe even channeled certain mysterious forces. Another example is an Agnes Martin work, essentially a gold leaf monochrome surface. When you look up close, you see these are trembling handdrawn incisions. There’s this really nice play throughout the show between systems and the handmade—two processes that speak to the ritualistic, meditative action Grace mentioned. Many of the objects and images in the show imply some kind of duration—whether of making or of past lives.
What were the early premises of this show?
You had free reign over MoMA’s enormous permanent collection for this show. What were some of the early touchpoints that helped you cut a path through it all?
GRACE WALES BONNER: I’m fascinated by this idea of the translation of sound. Rhythm is embedded into creating and assembling work, and that was interesting to me as an entry point. There’s also the idea of spirit movers—objects or materials that have had a past life and how they are repurposed into something else. I also wanted to explore how gesture and movement can be part of the art-making process as well.
WALES BONNER: I was really inspired by Benjamin Patterson. I didn’t know much about him before this exhibition, but I was very drawn to his work. He seemed like this mysterious figure, and I was fascinated by trying to decipher his work through the traces he left behind—his instructions for performances were these cryptic clues to understanding his work. Patterson as a starting point allowed for
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WALES BONNER: It’s strange to encounter these amazing works in a warehouse. As soon as they come out of the crate, their energy fills the space. MoMA’s collection is so vast that the challenge was to gather around a certain theme, to create some imaginative potential between the works. There are so many ways it could have gone. Michelle, how has this process differed from previous collaborations you’ve overseen for the Artist’s Choice series? KUO: Bringing in collaborators for Artist’s Choice has always been about putting forward an unorthodox vision of the permanent collection—and of history—in ways that curators might never do. Grace’s sensibility comes from years of deep archival research into Afro-Atlantic history, but also into materials. Grace has mentioned being inspired by the way that clothing offers a direct and sudden connection to these histories in her own work. This seemed like a natural and exciting opportunity. Grace, what is the effect you want to achieve when people enter the gallery? WALES BONNER: It’s important to me to leave
BENJAMIN PATTERSON, PAPER PIECE, 1960.
“IT’S IMPORTANT TO ME TO LEAVE SPACE AROUND THE WORK SO THAT YOU CAN HAVE A VERY DIRECT AND CLOSE ENCOUNTER WITH IT.” –GRACE WALES BONNER space around the work so that you can have a very direct and close encounter with it. I want each one to feel like a portal into a certain feeling. KUO: Grace created a quiet and meditative space in a niche that isn’t connected to any other spaces in the museum. So, “Spirit Movers” has a chapel-like feel. We should also mention the collaboration with Peter Mabeo. WALES BONNER: Yes! It was special to work with Peter, an incredible designer working with artisans in Botswana who made some display elements in the exhibition. In the display, I wanted to play with the natural materials— brass, panga panga wood—that appear throughout the exhibition. This exhibition is unique for the Artist’s Choice series, in that you also put together a book, Grace Wales Bonner: Dream in the Rhythm. What was the impetus behind it? WALES BONNER: I was so inspired by the photographs in the collection. I wanted to create something that explored the themes of the show while remaining pure in terms of form. The book explores sonic potential embedded within photography and poetry. Overall, this process has been about ways of seeing, and translating ideas through completely different mediums. That’s why I got into design in the first place. Grace, does the process of putting this show together mirror your approach to fashion design? WALES BONNER: Ultimately, no. This has been a chance to work on a longer timeline, to create something that lasts longer than a 10-minute fashion show. That’s a different headspace. I see my research process as an artistic and spiritual practice. It fuels everything I do,
THE GILBERT AND LILA SILVERMAN FLUXUS COLLECTION GIFT. IMAGE COURTESY OF THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK. © 2023 BEN PATTERSON
whether that’s designing clothes, curating an exhibition, or creating a publication. It’s one of the most pure, spiritual, and direct parts of my work. That process of gathering and assembling is very meaningful for me. Kuo: Grace, you’ve always linked disparate fields together, whether it’s design, music, literature, poetry, or the visual arts. You’ve also done that in this show with different histories. I love that you’re going to see a Bauhaus photographer’s image of a Black orchestra conductor’s hands in the same space as a set of prints by Jean Dubuffet that look like rubbings of the earth. It shows us that we can think about modernism
in synesthetic ways—not just privileging the visual, but sound, touch, even temperature. All of this undermines Western histories that center the visual in many ways, and offers a singular look into the histories of modern art that we have at the museum. Wales Bonner: Oh, thank you. That’s beautiful.
“I’M FASCINATED BY ... THE TRANSLATION OF SOUND.” –GRACE WALES BONNER
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KING OF THE MOUNTAIN For Claudio Marenzi, president of his family business, Herno, growing a company is like cultivating an art collection. Now in its 75th year, the Italian luxury brand has pushed beyond its signature expertly crafted raincoats to meet a new era.
CLAUDIO MARENZI IS
in constant motion. He spends three days a week on the shores of Italy’s Lago Maggiore, at Herno’s headquarters in Lesa, before traveling the 300 kilometers east to Zanè. The town in the foothills of the Alps is where his other company, activewear brand Montura, is based. “Always moving,” he says over Zoom of his weekly forays across his home country. He’s sitting in the Herno offices, an arsenal of luggage visible in the background. “My wardrobe is here. I live more in my offices than in my actual house.” In 2007, Marenzi stepped into the role of CEO at Herno—the raincoat brand founded by his grandfather, Giuseppe Marenzi, in 1948. Together with his wife, Alessandra Diana, Giuseppe began crafting the high-performance cotton raincoats, soaked in castor oil salvaged from abandoned World War II planes, that would become the brand’s calling card among the well-heeled of Europe. The company shifted its focus in the ’80s, manufacturing garments for brands like Prada, Gucci, Jil Sander, and Louis Vuitton. “We lost ourselves a little bit in that period,” muses the younger Marenzi. “The goal afterwards was to find it again.” For the
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61-year-old, who now serves as president, that meant returning to the company’s twin roots of innovation and tradition—prioritizing sustainable materials while making inroads into new product lines. In 2021, under Marenzi’s leadership, Herno acquired Montura. In its resourcefulness and dynamic approach to weatherproofing, the alpinist outfitter embodies a modern interpretation of the Herno ethos. In a family company, lines can blur. A product launch is a form of childbirth, a company acquisition is a marriage, and the workplace is like a second home. Indeed, Marenzi keeps more than his wardrobe in his offices. Much of his art collection—which includes works by notable female artists such as Pae White, Suzanne Jackson, and Candice Breitz—ultimately makes its way onto the walls of Herno’s open-format headquarters. He is especially proud of an Andrea Bowers cardboard collage, emblazoned with the words, “SISTERS BE STRONG,” that hangs in the space. “Here in this company, we are more than 80 percent women,” he says. “I like to give a message to all our workers to be strong. It’s nice to have these conversations that transcend business.”
Art was always a calling for Marenzi, who bought his first painting from a local artist at 15, using wages from a summer spent in the family’s factory. As his collection blossomed in his early 20s, he dedicated himself to hosting exhibitions for emerging Italian artists. Then, the family business came calling. “Work took over, but art is still deeply related to what I do,” he says. “Artists are sensible enough to catch on to the needs and desires of society before society [does]. That’s also important when you are [in] fashion.” Marenzi also sees building an art collection as an apt metaphor for growing a company. “When I look at my collection, it’s coherent. Herno started with one functional, artful item,” he says of the brand’s raincoats. “When you are guided by purpose and innovation, any new addition will feel sensible.” With the acquisition of Montura still in its fledgling stage, Marenzi has his hands full merging the new company’s production infrastructure with Herno’s own—a process he describes as “an art, too.” Through it all, he asserts, “Art is always at the heart. It has helped me—and the company—to achieve what we have today.”
TOP: THE HERNO OFFICES IN LESA, ITALY. BOTTOM: WORK BY ANDREA BOWERS, SISTERS BE STRONG, 2013, ON THE HERNO OFFICE WALLS. IMAGES COURTESY OF HERNO.
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VOICES VESSEL 01/ RIVE ROSHAN, 2023/ COURTESY OF RADEMAKERS GALLERY/
The Global Forum for Design December 6-10, 2023 Miami Beach, Florida Preview Day/ December 5 Public Days/ December 6-10, 2023
A NEW KIND OF PATRONAGE By SCARLET CHENG Chelsea Neman Nassib founded Tappan Collective, her virtual gallery platform, just over 10 years ago. Today, her tireless dedication to cultivating artists’ careers has made her an innovative force.
WHEN
CHELSEA
NEMAN
NASSIB
founded her online art gallery in 2012, the idea was new—and rather startling. Art has to be seen in person, right? Especially if you’re thinking of buying it. But after graduating from the University of Michigan with a BFA in painting, Nassib thought otherwise: “After school, it felt like the path to success wasn’t clear. I began working for an interior designer, and we started selling my work to our clients.” While those clients could well afford to visit an art gallery, she realized, they felt put off by the experience: barricades of staff who size up visitors and avoid providing straightforward pricing information. By this point, Nassib had moved back to her hometown of Los Angeles and decided to set up a different business model. Like its namesake, a space that nurtured Nassib’s own creative perspective and her interest in the art historical canon, the virtual gallery was grounded in the premise that art should feel accessible and visceral. “Building Tappan has always been about creating a safe space for people to engage with the work,” she says. “For me, that was in the artist’s studio—as an artist in critique, up close and personal with the work. I wanted to make that experience available for others.” Tappan Collective launched with the work of 20 artists on the platform, selected by Nassib for their talent and promise. It proved remarkably successful. Today, Nassib and her team work out of a sleek contemporary space on Melrose Avenue, where they represent about 100 artists from across the world. Tappan generally holds group shows, with all the work available online. When we meet,
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CHELSEA NEMAN NASSIB AT TAPPAN COLLECTIVE'S HEADQUARTERS ON MELROSE AVENUE.
there’s an eye-catching exhibition on view, featuring meditative paintings by Ryan Snow, meticulous drawings of ordinary objects by Claire Salvo, and bold ceramic vessels by Vince Palacios. I’m especially taken with a piece by Alyssa Breid, in which threads are woven across the surface of the canvas. For Nassib, who navigated the challenging road to art world success in her own practice, providing artists with support—not just in sales, but in strengthening and evolving their work— is a central tenet of the company ethos. (This may be why a number of the Collective’s artists have managed to catch the attention of bigger galleries, progressing to respected names
including Marianne Boesky, Beers, and the Hole.) Finding the right artists has been key to the company’s longevity, and has led to the cultivation of a dedicated community of collectors who come to Tappan to discover emerging talents from across mediums and geographies. Staff members make recommendations, and Nassib makes studio visits. “I’m looking for somebody with a unique stroke, works that are an expression of someone’s essence. People who are able to tap into that level of creativity can bring beautiful things into the world,” she says, later adding, “And of course, beauty is important.”
Photography by EMMA MARIE JENKINSON
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NENGI OMUKU CHARTS THE EMOTIONAL TOPOGRAPHY OF HOMECOMING After returning from the UK, artist Nengi Omutu adopted sanyan, a traditional textile, as her canvas, and sociopolitical shifts in her native Nigeria as her subject matter. A decade later, her depictions “of collective grief and collective rest” have made her a breakthrough name in the Lagos art scene. by HANNAH MCGIVERN
FOR AN ARTIST, finding the right medium is like entering a long-term relationship. The same tentative early forays, headlong tumbles into blissful togetherness, and reckonings with practical constraints make both experiences feel at once challenging and rewarding. If the bond is meant to last, there are always new revelations to be made—even after years together. This is the experience that Nigerian painter Nengi Omuku has had with sanyan, a handwoven textile reminiscent of linen. Women traditionally use this cloth—a Nigerian symbol of prestige dating back to precolonial times—as head ties, skirts, and sashes for celebrations. Omuku discovered the artistic potential of the material after moving back to her native country in 2012, following six years at University College London’s Slade School of Fine Art. A decade later, her expressively textured oil-onsanyan paintings have positioned her as a rising star in the Lagos art scene. Textiles have long been a source of inspiration for the 36-year-old artist, who was raised in Port Harcourt by a florist mother and a geologist-turned-Anglican-bishop father. After returning home, Omuku entered a period of figurative painting, draping her subjects in fabrics. But the artist’s discovery of sanyan shifted the focus of her practice. She took a year off from exhibiting in order to experiment with the material, learning how to layer paint onto it until it appeared “almost like a palimpsest.” Its earthy appearance also “change[d] my palette,” she explains, pushing her toward ethereal shades that lend
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a timeless quality to the work. Her source material ranges from live sitters, to local media photographs of protests and celebrations, to her own imagination. Omuku’s treasured collection of sanyan cloths, salvaged from local vintage markets and ordered by size and pattern, sits in her studio in Lagos. Her most monumental painting is Eden, 2022, a utopian landscape with figures journeying across a patchwork of blue-embroidered strips plucked from her collection. It fills a room at Hastings Contemporary on England’s south coast, where she’s currently staging her debut solo museum exhibition, on view through March 2024. The title speaks to a recent turn toward landscape in her practice. Eden is surrounded by scatter cushions, wooden stools, and locally sourced house plants, an installation first presented by Pippy Houldsworth Gallery at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2022. (At this year’s fair, Omuku’s work will be shown at both Pippy Houldsworth and Kasmin’s booths. She is also the subject of a solo exhibition, opening Dec. 9, at Kristin Hjellegjerde’s Palm Beach location.) The human impulse to seek solace in nature runs through the works on view at Hastings, all made between 2021 and 2023, as part of a “subconscious” response to the housebound anxiety of the pandemic. The Impressionists have been a powerful influence for Omuku, who points to the “liberating” impact of visiting Giverny, the home of Claude Monet, during a residency in France.
Another inspiration comes from closer to home: her mother, whose horticulture business she worked at for several years after returning to Nigeria. “I realized in preparing for the show that my first encounter with art was my mum’s colored pencil drawings of floral arrangements and landscape designs,” she says. Even as the natural world has become a protagonist in the new paintings, Omuku maintains that her central concern is the inner landscape. In recent years, many of her works have been charged by a sense of sociopolitical crisis in Nigeria, along with what she describes as a corresponding mental health crisis. The works are expressions of “collective grief and collective rest,” she says, meditations on “how we, as a community, were dealing with the instability in our country, how we were mentally processing everything.” Coming home to Nigeria after art school marked a turning point in Omuku's practice— and not just because of her discovery of sanyan. She notes an essential shift in her thinking about questions of individual identity as they relate to the well-being of the collective. In 2019, Omuku founded a nonprofit in Lagos called The Art of Healing, taking inspiration from the U.K. arts and mental health charity Hospital Rooms. The organization brings artists into the hospitals of Lagos, where they run art therapy workshops and paint collaborative murals. “It’s the most fulfilling part of my practice,” she says. “It’s one thing to express myself, but I feel like this is the true reason why I am painting.”
Photography by STEPHEN TAYO
NENGI OMUKU POSES WITH <BATHERS> (LEFT) AND <SCATTERED SUNBEAMS> (RIGHT), TWO OF HER WORKS IN PROGRESS, 2023.
NENGI OMUKU POSES WITH BATHERS (LEFT) AND SCATTERED SUNBEAMS (RIGHT), TWO OF HER WORKS IN PROGRESS, 2023.
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THE META PUN OF HERNAN BAS The Miami native’s foray into conceptual work has its own twist: None of the pieces are made by the artist himself.
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“I ALREADY KNOW what the headlines will be: Bas at the Bass,” jokes Miami-based artist Hernan Bas as he prepares the final works for his solo show, “The Conceptualists,” opening Dec. 4 at his hometown museum. “It’s fitting though,” he admits. “The show is a play on conceptual art, so I don’t mind a pun.” Known for his expressionistic, figural paintings of androgynous young men, Bas has often embraced the double entendre. “The Conceptualists” expands on his interests in queerness, desire, the occult, and the absurd, but does so through the creation of fictitious conceptual artists who engage in eccentric behavior as part of their practices. Bas began the series over two years ago, debuting the works in two parts: the first at Victoria Miro in London and the second at Lehmann Maupin in New York. The Bass exhibition marks the series’ debut as an ensemble, and will be joined by seven new “Conceptualist” pieces exhibited for the first time—including Bas’s largest painting yet, measuring 9 by 21 feet. “‘The Conceptualists’ stems from a series loosely based on the hobbies that emerged in the pandemic,” says Bas. “Everyone was doing things they didn’t normally do, like baking bread. I started painting characters doing bizarre things and called them conceptual artists as a way to excuse their behavior and to poke fun at art itself—conceptual art is always the butt of jokes. “It also gave me the opportunity to make conceptual art, but not have it be my own,” he continues. “So if you don’t like the work in the painting, it’s not mine.” With the onus of authorship removed, Bas was able to conceive
work that he wouldn’t otherwise physically create. In one piece, his fictitious artist sits in the milk aisle of a grocery store with a Polaroid camera. A nod to the old practice of depicting missing children on milk cartons, the subject leaves photographs of himself in public places when he feels lost. In another, a sculptor whose medium is popsicle sticks is so devoted to his craft that he insists on eating the popsicles instead of buying them clean. The title states that he is in the process of making his “inevitable last work”: a coffin. “They’re sad and morbid pieces, but I don’t want viewers to take them too seriously,” says Bas. “Humor is an important part of my work, even if it’s subtle. Looking back at the series, there are a lot of paintings that spark discomfort. I hadn’t realized that before, and I’m not sure what it says about me,” he adds, laughing. Bas insists his subjects are not selfportraits, but acknowledges that their interests sometimes mirror his own. They also, intentionally or not, parallel his practice. The exhibition culminates in his largest work to date—a panorama of an artist’s studio based on Bas’s own. The work, which contains references to the other paintings in the show, “is a very important piece for the series,” reasons the artist. “It’s a Wizard of Oz moment where the emerald curtain parts, and the viewer realizes that this character has painted all of the other works.” The subject in this final piece surveys his own creations as if organizing his own exhibition—the very experience Bas is having now. “I don’t like the word,” he admits, “but I guess the show is a little meta.”
Photography by JOSH ARONSON
“IF YOU DON’T LIKE THE WORK IN THE PAINTING, IT’S NOT MINE.”
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IN PRAISE OF USELESSNESS Carol Bove’s unexpected move from David Zwirner to Gagosian earlier this fall unleashed a squall of art world headlines and head-scratching. Now that the dust has settled, the Swiss-American sculptor called the poet and playwright Ariana Reines to talk about the motifs and message behind her debut show with the gallery, “Hardware Romance.” by ARIANA REINES
“HARDWARE ROMANCE is a germinal work,” Carol Bove told me this past October, “not a seminal work in the masculinist sense, but a germinal one.” Created while she was working on “The séances aren’t helping,” her monumental four-part commission for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s façade, Hardware Romance is a meditation on the full spectrum of stainless steel’s polarity, conceived for interior—perhaps even domestic—space. The piece distills fascinations that have marked Bove’s oeuvre since the 2000s: the relative strength and delicacy of a given material, the history of countercultural and mystical thought, a certain emphasis on relationships— between objects and materials, and between materials and their history—condensed into a single, succinct statement. The sculpture, which consists of one of Bove’s signature “polka dot” discs polished to mirror-like perfection, embraced by an almost-humanoid form rendered in crumpled stainless steel tubing, playfully invokes the myth of Narcissus, turning the normally unreflective surface of stainless steel—with its ut-
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terly utilitarian and even warlike sobriety—into the shining field through which the material seeks to know itself. It’s a koan about love and self-knowledge and the limits thereof. “Hardware Romance” is also the Swiss-American sculptor’s first exhibition with Gagosian, following her much-watched departure from David Zwirner. It arrives in a wave of expansive energy following the October opening of “Fragments of a Faith Forgotten,” the major Harry Smith exhibition at the Whitney, co-curated and designed by Bove, not to mention sold-out works at Paris+. I caught up with her by phone in Switzerland last month. ARIANA REINES: So Hardware Romance was made contiguously with the work you made for the Met façade commission in 2021? CAROL BOVE: It happened at the same time that I was doing the works for the Met. I was able to really take my time with it. There was no deadline; I was just doing it because I needed to see this thing. The disc [in the work] has a stainless steel mirror finish, a process that
maybe six places in the world can do perfectly. It’s really difficult work, and most of them won’t even take the job because it’s such a bitch. The result is that it looks digital. REINES: That’s one of the things that I love about your work. As an ignoramus viewer, my eye is trained to identify certain surfaces or industrially produced effects that I’m used to, but your objects have this aura that goes completely against that cognitive preparation. That’s where the romance and the mystery emerge in what you’re doing. BOVE: From the beginning, I have been determined to not have my personality in the work. I don’t want it to be crowded with the quirks of my particular being, so that there’s space for you to fill it with something. It is what you bring to it. REINES: The stainless steel in “Hardware Romance” and the aluminum in the Met commission remind me of my romantic feelings for certain 20th-century aesthetic and design norms.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY JEFF HENRIKSON. ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND GAGOSIAN.
“FROM THE BEGINNING, I HAVE BEEN DETERMINED TO NOT HAVE MY PERSONALITY IN THE WORK.” –CAROL BOVE
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I found myself thinking of mirrors that you can’t really see your reflection in—like in a prison bathroom—those surfaces where you’re looking for your reflection and it’s there, but occluded by some industrial process. That’s why I find your work very dance-like. It’s like dancing with a partner—you’re creating conditions so that improvisation is possible. At the same time, your work is so deeply considered and philosophized. How do the empirical parts of your process interact with the spontaneity of it? Do you get lightning inspirations? BOVE: I’m really interested in other people— and seduction. I think a lot about the viewer. I imagine a viewer who is somewhat defiant, and who has to be disarmed in order to get close. It’s through phenomenology that you are addressed as a viewer and then can find your own home in the work. A kind of difficult assault comes later, because the way the works come together is the result of all the worst parts of our society, including war. The process of making these things is horrible, the extraction of these metals from the earth is like the kind of midwifery where you cut the baby out. My work has these really dark shadows, but it’s not pretending that they aren’t there. REINES: There’s a fascinating, dignified respect for the stranger in play here—or else the work doesn’t function. I can feel an ethics in that. Can I ask you about your spiritual practice? BOVE: Sure. I sense that you deal with this too—you want to communicate, but your audience is skeptical about spirituality. You can lose credibility if you say the wrong thing, and you already have the liability of being a woman. I’m really into lojong slogans. It’s a medieval Tibetan thing; there are 59 slogans for awakening bodhicitta and strengthening it. Your mind is making thoughts all the time; it’s crazy how many billions of repetitive, useless thoughts you have during a day, a month, or a lifetime. To have something you can return to that awakens the dharma, I find that helpful. REINES: I think of my work in terms of uselessness. It’s an ethos: Nobody needs what I’m writing. I remember Oscar Wilde saying, “Art is total-
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ly useless,” or whatever. I was just like, “That’s hot, that’s the coolest thing I’ve ever heard.” BOVE: It goes so against the grain. It contains a paradox: People need uselessness, so then it serves a purpose. That is a way to depolarize a power dynamic—through a field of meaning that doesn’t have a point. REINES: That’s why art is such a relief. It allows the parts of you that are deadened by that dynamic to reawaken. I’m thinking about what you said about midwifery and violence in the materials you work with. Before alchemy and chemistry split off from each other in the 17th century, when people were just experimenting with how substances interacted, there was this idea that you ought not to just pour acid on something to impose change, you should work with the material. In your work, you take these big industrial tubes and make them bend and dance—you have to do things to them to make them do that. Do you think about gentleness when you’re working with these materials, or is it more erotic and S&M than that? BOVE: Making large-scale and steel works happens really, really slowly. There is a kind of gentleness in working with the steel. There are no sudden moves. The way that the compression works, it’s almost like an embrace. That’s how the softness is drawn out of the material. Steel is very hard, but under certain conditions it’s liquid—so actually, it’s just relative, and one factor of that is time. This has been a current in my thinking for a while, but now I have a more deliberate practice of thinking about scales of time. If I can expand my sense of time to contain 500 years, then making something slowly seems to happen really fast. You can kind of walk around and live according to your own sense of time. REINES: One of the things about your practice is the way you work with proportion and relativity in a very specific way. Which is to say, What is gentle? Steel. You contrast heavy or delicate materials to stimulate the mind towards that sort of contemplation about strength. I could say your work is about strength—a boring thing to say. BOVE: It’s not boring, it’s taboo.
“I’M REALLY INTO LOJONG SLOGANS. IT’S A MEDIEVAL TIBETAN THING; THERE ARE 59 SLOGANS FOR AWAKENING BODHICITTA AND STRENGTHENING IT. YOUR MIND IS MAKING THOUGHTS ALL THE TIME; IT’S CRAZY HOW MANY BILLIONS OF REPETITIVE, USELESS THOUGHTS YOU HAVE DURING A DAY, A MONTH, OR A LIFETIME.” –CAROL BOVE
CAROL BOVE, HARDWARE ROMANCE, 2021. PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARIS HUTCHINSON.
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WHERE SCENT MEETS FORM
PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOHNNY COOKE. IMAGES COURTESY OF HOUSE OF CREED.
Miami-based artist Shawn Kolodny is transforming the storefronts of Creed boutiques around the world this winter, bringing the house’s signature perfumes to life with his largescale installations.
SHAWN KOLODNY is known for his giant, reflective bubbles. You’ve seen them before— clustered at the entrance to art fairs, floating in pools, and lining fashion week catwalks. This winter, the artist’s effervescent installations will fill the windows of perfumer House of Creed’s boutiques. “Crafting a single artwork is a challenge in itself; producing 30 unique pieces while maintaining a consistent foundational design across them was an intricate endeavor,” says the artist. Following their debut at the Creed boutique in Miami’s Design District, the city where Kolodny is based, the works will be dissemi-
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nated to their various homes across the globe this November. Assembling and shipping the works—made from gold- and silver-mirrored acrylic, as well as amber neon lighting—is a feat, but never one that derailed the shared goals of the collaboration. “From the outset, Creed embraced my vision,” he remarks. “Their more than 250- year heritage of craftsmanship mirrors this appreciation, showcasing our mutual reverence for artistry and detail.” When conceptualizing the display, Kolodny found a familiar touchpoint in the reflective surface of Creed’s angular signature bottle. The silhouette features prominently in his design, which is lined with the artist’s trademark
spheres in complementary shades. The displays are joined by an array of Creed’s holiday scent selections: black-bottled Aventus, the floral Carmina, and a solid gold-wrapped Millésime Impérial. “My goal was to craft a work which was reflective of Creed’s enduring history,” says Kolodny. Next, the artist and the brand will honor that history with another collaboration, this time in the City of Miami Beach: a large-scale public sculpture on Española Way during Miami Art Week, adding a layer to the relationship. For Kolodny, the additional project was a no-brainer: “Creative liberty is the cornerstone of an authentic partnership between an artist and brand,” he says.
STEVE MCQUEEN AND BIANCA STIGTER EXCAVATE AMSTERDAM’S DARKEST HOUR
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Photography by EVA ROEFS
“YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO MAKE WORK ABOUT THE THINGS WHICH ARE UNDERNEATH YOUR BED, AND THAT’S WHAT WE’VE DONE.” —Steve McQueen
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“YOU CANNOT SEE THE WAR [IN AMSTERDAM]. BUT WHEN YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPENED IN ALL THOSE HOUSES, IT CHANGES YOUR PERCEPTION OF THEM. EVEN ANNE FRANK WAS HIDING IN A BEAUTIFUL CANAL HOUSE.” —Bianca Stigter
OCCUPIED CITY, the latest opus from British director Steve McQueen, asks audiences to remember Amsterdam’s darkest hour—its five-year-long occupation by Nazi forces and the ensuing decimation of its Jewish, Roma, and Sinti populations—in the present tense. In his acclaimed new documentary, McQueen takes a street-by-street, door-to-door journey through his adopted home, unearthing its devastating reality during the Second World War. Captured between 2020 and 2023 and accompanied by adapted narration from Dutch historian and filmmaker Bianca Stigter’s 2019 tome Atlas of an Occupied City, the 262-minute epic bears witness to the horrors of prolonged violence, and warns against the resurgence of extremism. Here, McQueen and Stigter—creative and life partners—unravel the story behind the documentary. BIANCA STIGTER: The occupation was always in the background when I was growing up in Amsterdam. You felt that everyone knew, “Oh, don’t buy at that shop because they were collaborators.” The strange thing is that Amsterdam is very much a 17th-century city. You cannot see the war there, but when you know what happened in all those houses, it changes your perception of them. Even Anne Frank was hiding in a beautiful canal house. STEVE MCQUEEN: Growing up in London, the war was promoted as our finest hour—you know, “stiff upper lip,” “keep calm, carry on,” all those things. It was seen as a victory, and all the other stuff was swept underneath the carpet. I mean, the reason I’m here today is because my parents were called over from the West Indies to rebuild Britain after the Blitz. So in some ways it’s part of my existence. Similar to the pandemic, I feel that there was a silent
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trauma going on, but it was eclipsed by this victory. That’s the British psyche—there’s so much damage done, but you always put up a front … When I moved to Amsterdam, it made me think about Britain and how the war was perceived there. STIGTER: I started to work on this period when I was studying history—first, with a focus on monuments and how the war was remembered. There are quite a lot of monuments in Amsterdam, but it’s not in the active memory of the people. So I wanted to make a kind of guide book or time machine where you could access that period. When people in Amsterdam see the book, they always say, “Is my house in there?” MCQUEEN: You can think of Anne Frank as a front for the Second World War in the Netherlands because that’s promoted very vigorously. Other things are not, [like the fact that] out of the 100,000 Jewish people who were taken away, 60,000 or more never came back. That’s the biggest number in Western Europe. Like in the U.K., there’s a lot of things that are brushed underneath the carpet. I understand in a way—you have to put one foot in front of the other to go on. But it’s very important that we understand that what we’re looking at right now is a reflection of what happened not so long ago. What the film does is bring that into the present. The whole idea is to make these people human and not just a number or a statistic. STIGTER: I think that partly addresses why the book is so thick and the film is so long. The most haunting part for me [in writing the book] was if I could not tell a story about people because there was so little known about them. You knew they were born, they lived here, they
were murdered. That’s a very difficult feeling because sometimes when you’re doing work as a historian you feel like, At least I can make it so that it’s not forgotten. MCQUEEN: And we didn’t have to go to some far-off country to do it, it’s right on our doorstep. [As an artist] you should be able to make work about the things which are underneath your bed, and that’s what we’ve done … When I was first thinking about making this film, your book wasn’t in my psyche. I thought, What happens if I get this old footage, and I shoot new footage? I could actually match one on top of the other. In the same frame, the living and the dead—I thought that could be amazing. Then, you were writing the book, and I was like, “Wow, the text is the past and the image is the present.” We were living in the same house, having two different thoughts on the same thing. It’s almost like [the Beatles’s] “A Day in the Life.” John goes, “I read the news today, oh boy.” And Paul’s in another room going, “Woke up, fell out of bed / Dragged a comb across my head.” And it’s like, “Hey, why don’t we put those things together?” STIGTER: And we had a great team. MCQUEEN: Extraordinary. We worked together for three years. We were high on this project. All of us were Amsterdamers, and I imagine we were high on it because we saw places we knew with new eyes … We shot on 35 mm, which was very important because it’s the ritual of making film with five-minute rolls. It was one of the best experiences of my life as far as making work, and of course that’s because I was doing it with my wife. Who knew? STIGTER: When you’re living in the same house, you tend to cross each all other the time.
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STEVE MCQUEEN, OCCUPIED CITY (FILM STILL), 2023. IMAGE COURTESY OF A24.
A DELICATE BALANCE Armani/Casa’s 2023 home furniture collection is full of treasures, from reeditions of domestic classics to its first outdoor pieces. by POLINA CHEREZOVA
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MILAN’S PALAZZO ORSINI, home to Giorgio Armani’s eponymous empire since 1996, has witnessed the life cycles of dozens of couture collections. This past April, on the occasion of Salone del Mobile, the storied site played host to a new chapter in the brand’s evolution. Armani opened the doors of its luxurious laboratory to the public for the first time ever to reveal Armani/Casa’s inaugural outdoor collection and a reimagined offering of domestic classics. Musing on the parallel between his design division and its sartorial counterpart, Giorgio Armani himself reasons, “The strongest link between Armani/Casa and my fashion collections is the need to be functional and comfortable without sacrificing luxurious materials and a strong sense of style.” This delicate equipoise materialized in offerings like Armani/Casa’s revamped versions of the signature Sofia chair, Antoinette dressing table, and Camilla desk. Hand-crafted in Italy, the stippled mother-of-pearl pieces are a testament to Armani’s reverence for the most extravagant of design movements, such as Art Deco. “My work, both in fashion and in design, is a constant pursuit for balance that comes from the choice of materials and the expert skill of the hands that create it,” continues Armani. This meticulous savoire faire is evident in the new iteration of the cylindrical Antoinette vanity table, which boasts an exquisite outer layer of handmade shell mosaic, along with a smooth black maple interior. The classic design is complemented by the addition of a hidden seat, whose moiré-patterned cushion echoes the visual codes of the house’s garments. The Camilla writing desk, for its part, conveys the sleek modernity of a city like Milan, with its bold metal foundation and angular structure. The elaborate mother-of-pearl tiles are framed by light brass detailing, while the interiors of the pull-out drawers wear a chic matte black lacquer. The desk’s companion, the Sofia dining chair, also channels a geometric quality, its clean lines and right angles punctuated by a polished mosaic that, from a distance, tricks the eye into perceiving an everchanging pattern. These “precious pieces,” as Armani calls them, are sure to embellish the lives, and lifestyles, of those who adopt them into their homes.
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IMAGES COURTESY OF ARMANI/CASA.
MAKING A LIFE IN LOS ANGELES Six creatives reflect on the city they call home—the forces that brought them there, the lessons it has taught them, and the ways it has transformed their practices.
Los Angeles is alive with contradiction: Urban expanses tumble into the sea, deserts fade into mountains, and Hollywood moguls share coveted canyon real estate with New Age artist communes. It is this clash of sentiments that draws hopeful creatives from denser cities to LA’s ragged center in search of space: to make work, to find family, or to reinvent themselves. Photography by SHAWNA FERREIRA Styling by STUDIO& All clothing and accessories from the CHANEL CRUISE 2023–24 COLLECTION
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Ariana Papademetropoulos
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ARIANA PAPADEMETROPOULOS Artist
“I love the duality of Los Angeles. It’s haunting and beautiful. Very dark but also has its light … the land of smoke and mirrors, the land of delusion. That’s what’s so scary and incredible about it— you can create your own reality. The more I leave, the more enamored with it I become.”
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ARTA GEE
Model and Actor
“I was born in the Bronx—my parents are Albanian from Montenegro. I take a lot of pride in that, because they have a rough story of coming to the States and creating this life for us. Coming to LA has taught me patience. It was a challenge to adjust. Of all the places in the city, my jujitsu gym is one of the main communities and support systems I have in my life. It’s where I learned how strong I am.” 148 culturedmag.com
ESSENCE HARDEN Artist and Curator
“I’m constantly surprised at how beautiful I find LA. I love seeing all the fruit trees that are everywhere, but also the intense industrial landscape of the place. I’m like, Man, this place is wild for its cement and persimmon trees at the exact same moment.”
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TIYE AMENECHI Filmmaker
“It has been an uphill battle getting used to this city. I don’t know if I will ever fully understand it. I love the beach, but my relationship to it is complex. I can't swim so it's a place I come to marvel at. Since I came here, I realized I had spent the majority of my life in my comfort zone. Now, I’m learning to sit with discomfort.”
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JANE MOSELEY Model and Artist
“I originally moved here for the space—I got tired of lugging paintings and sculptures on the subway. I’m also a big nester. Creating a sanctuary is very important to me, and I wanted to be surrounded by nature and to have lots of animals. When I got my place, it was completely desolate. Just dirt. Slowly, I’ve been able to transform it, which has been so rewarding.” culturedmag.com 151
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MASSIMA BELL
Actor, Model, and Musician
“Two years ago, I got a cheap used car near my dad’s farm in Iowa and drove here. I didn’t have a plan—it was very much a trust fall—but LA opened its arms to me immediately. I’m still learning how to stay connected with the natural surroundings while existing in this major metropolitan area. A huge part of that is walking up hills. That process of elevating myself to get a different perspective on the city I live in has been a beautiful part of my experience here.” 154 culturedmag.com
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Charles Gaines: 1992–2023 Special Exhibition / 3rd Floor / Nov 16, 2023 – Mar 17, 2024
Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami
Reserve Your Free Ticket Online icamiami.org
61 NE 41ST St Design District 305 901 5272
Buy tickets
December 8–10, 2023 Miami Beach Convention Center
Maria Nepomuceno, Treze bocas (detail), 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
CLIMBING THE FAMILY TREE Savanah Leaf’s debut feature film, Earth Mama, offers a tender, surrealist glimpse into motherhood. Next, the breakout filmmaker will probe the void left behind by an absent father. By CLAIRE MARIE HEALY Photography by KOHSHIN FINLEY
SAVANAH LEAF is enjoying her homecoming. “I grew up in a house down the street,” she says when we meet among the terraced brick houses of London’s Vauxhall neighborhood on a weirdly balmy October morning. “When I was little, my mum used to drop me over the low fences in the backyard to visit my neighbors.” But it’s the San Francisco Bay Area—the filmmaker’s adopted home from age 9—that provides the backdrop for Earth Mama, her feature debut this year. The film—which follows expectant mother Gia (Tia Nomore) as she navigates the foster care system and her own struggle with addiction—grew out of Leaf’s 2020 documentary short on the topic, The Heart Still Hums, which she co-directed with Taylor Russell. That research, combined with her family’s own experiences (Leaf’s younger sister was adopted as a
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newborn from a similarly struggling birth mother) planted the seeds that would become Earth Mama. “The documentary gave me a deeper connection to this story, and also brought up more questions that I wanted to explore,” she muses. “What does it mean to be fit to parent? And who determines that?” Leaf imbues her protagonist’s relentless daily routine with flashes of surrealistic beauty— tender close-ups of Gia’s belly, panoramas of trees that seem to inhale and exhale—an audiovisual landscape that gives rhythm to the physical and emotional interiority that is becoming, and being, a mother. “Pregnancy is an inner world within you,” says Leaf. “These expressions in the film have to do with her relationship to her child, but also to the lineage of Black women that came before her. She is in this
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Savanah Leaf, at home in London, wears a full look by Ferragamo. Shoes are Leaf’s own.
very claustrophobic environment, but she’s right down the road from the water, the redwoods. That holds so much weight in terms of how long [Black women] have been on this planet.” Alongside these hymns to the natural world, Earth Mama is filled with reverence for life’s smallest aesthetic pleasures: a set of plastic mood rings, for example, which Gia gives to her son and daughter to help them feel close to her while they are in foster care. Like her unborn child, such offerings seem filled with potential and possibility. But, as with the postcard-like
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“WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE FIT TO PARENT? AND WHO DETERMINES THAT?”
backdrops customers choose in the photo studio where she works, there is also pain in these gestures, a sense of fulfillment that is just out of reach. “It was a way to reflect on how we showcase our families to the rest of the world,” she says of these scenes, which feature Dominic Fike as Gia’s coworker. “They represent all those versions of family that [Gia] longs for.” Though Earth Mama is remarkable in its hyper-specificity, Leaf understands why so many viewers seem to relate to Gia—after all, she does herself. “There is so much masking and
Savanah wears a tank top and heels by Paris Georgia and pants by Pronounce.
hiding that you have to do, especially as a Black woman in these spaces,” she says. “Like, how do I fight for my kids, and show them I’m a good mom; how do I get angry enough, but not too angry? Those layers of holding back, in order to move forward, are things I feel in my life.” These days, Leaf is shifting the focus of her personal excavation to the Londoner in her. “The act of writing is very therapeutic,” she says of her forthcoming screenplay, which is informed by her relationship with her absent father. “I’m really intrigued to explore that side of me—and
“I’M TRYING TO PROTECT MYSELF, WHILE ALSO BEING AS VULNERABLE AS I CAN. WHAT DOES THAT LOOK LIKE?”
what it means to be biracial.” At the moment, Leaf is balancing the attention garnered from Earth Mama, which showed at the London Film Festival this fall following its U.S. premiere at Sundance in January, with returning to a more introspective space. That undertaking is shaped by reading about other directors’ processes (she cites the journals of the Dardenne brothers as one resource). “I turned 30 this year. It’s a real moment of transition,” she concludes. “I’m trying to protect myself, while also being as vulnerable as I can. What does that look like?”
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PRADA’S ART-FILLED SOCIAL CLUBS DELIGHT. THEN, THEY DISAPPEAR.
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PRADA MODE, the Italian fashion house’s exclusive and ephemeral event series, follows the art world’s calendar, alighting in far-flung locales with mind-bending installations before dissolving into thin air. by KAT HERRIMAN
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THE LINE SNAKES down the block, diluting and re-forming as people step out to see what’s going on closer to the door. There are paparazzi—the old-fashioned kind, wielding long, telescoping lenses—flanked by amateurs with iPhones at the ready. There must be someone inside—perhaps even a few. The queue leans ritzy: art dealers and their clients, hotshot artists, musicians of the moment, models and muses of all molds. Only after you are safely on the right side of the velvet rope do you realize you’re entering more of a mirage than a venue. Tomorrow, this will all be gone, the only evidence of its existence on your camera roll. The art, the music, the stage, and the crowd will disappear as quickly as they arrived. This illusionary time capsule is Prada Mode. The series’ first iteration, in 2018, coincided with Art Basel Miami Beach and tapped artist Theaster Gates to create a sitespecific installation. Since then, the Italian house has landed in Dubai with Damien Hirst, in Los Angeles with Martine Syms, in Paris with Trevor Paglen and Kate Crawford, and in Shanghai with Jia Zhangke, among other location-artist pairings. Each creative was offered a distinctive locale at a key moment and then set loose to design a novel salon for people to party, gossip, and conspire. The 10th edition of the roving project took place this September during the second edition of Frieze Seoul, with curator Lee Sook-kyung acting as the locally hired gun. Lee, in turn, recruited three acclaimed South Korean filmmakers—Kim Jee-woon, Yeon Sang-ho, and Jeong Dahee—to bring their work off the screen and into the room. It was one of Prada Mode’s most ambitious programs to date—not just because there were three contributors building out their own cinematic universes in a complex tucked away in Seoul’s historic shopping district, but also because the fashion house successfully connected multiple creative constellations, from the booming film
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“I TOLD PRADA THAT TO SEE MY VISION THROUGH WOULD TAKE A LOT OF SUPPORT. THEY DIDN’T FLINCH.” —YEON SANG-HO
ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF PRADA
“PRADA MODE BURNS BRIGHTLY, SWALLOWING UP HEADLINES, ATTENTION SPANS, AND EVENING PLANS BEFORE DISAPPEARING INTO THE NIGHT.”
industry to the international art scene. As Yeon put it during his talk with longtime collaborators Cho Young-kag and Yang Ik-june, “I told Prada that to see my vision through would take a lot of support. They didn’t flinch.” What the filmmakers created at Prada Mode weren’t like exhibitions, they were exhibitions, and more thoughtful than most of the presentations at the fair itself. Yeon built a haunted boarding house replete with a crime scene, Kim constructed a dreamy park of pyung-sang (traditional Korean picnic tables), and Jeong assembled an animated library. It wasn’t their fleeting nature that made them feel so remarkable, but the intensity of the audience’s engagement: People hung around from day to night, haunting the cafes, speaking intimately with friends in front of strangers, and dancing until the lights went out. As a project, Prada Mode, now five years old, is a special alcove within the storied fashion house. It doesn’t have any permanent homes like Fondazione Prada, nor an endless cycle of seasons like the atelier. Instead, the concept is a shooting star that comes out to play when the planets align. It is often synched up with Frieze or Art Basel, but not exclusively. Prada Mode burns brightly, swallowing up headlines, attention spans, and evening plans before disappearing into the night. It is this mythological quality that makes it the rogue, hypersocial cousin of the Prada family. What the event does best is surprise and delight by mobilizing the house’s long-standing coterie of artists, architects, musicians, and filmmakers to concoct ephemeral clubhouses all over the world. This allows clients and creatives alike to live for a day in the Prada universe.
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The Colin King Collection for The Future Perfect
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It’s Fran’s World Young Artists 2023 The State of the Fairs The Year of the Horse Set in Stone Eastside Visions Louis Vuitton’s Signature Bags Get the Artist Treatment Elizabeth Debicki Brings Dior’s Timeless Refinement to Life Still Going Inside Dior’s Secret Garden
IT’S
FRAN’S WORLD Like her fellow divinities, FRAN LEBOWITZ, PATRON SAINT OF NEW YORK, doesn’t make contact, she makes appearances: at the bodega to replenish her Marlboro Lights supply, at the ballet, or on the Manhattan streets she’s traversed for more than half a century. Here, Nicolaia Rips— who became a published author at 17 and grew up in and around many of the STORIED HAUNTS IN LEBOWITZ’S REPERTOIRE—charts their parallel paths through New York. By NICOLAIA RIPS Photography by DANIEL ARNOLD
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ON A SATURDAY NIGHT IN OCTOBER, I took the B41 bus to Flatbush to hear Fran Lebowitz. As I milled around the Kings Theatre’s gilded lobby with the Fran-fans (hot 20-somethings, married lesbians, members of food co-ops), everybody—even the diehards—seemed curious as to what exactly the performance would entail. It was a talk. Fran Lebowitz is a talker. She’s also a wit, a woman of (few) letters (her slender volumes Metropolitan Life and Social Studies were combined in 1994 into the still-slender Fran Lebowitz Reader), an inactive activist (Fran is an outspoken lesbian and political presence), a smoker (she’s smoked so long it’s cool again), an actor best known for playing herself, a Martin Scorsese muse (see: Pretend It’s a City and Public Speaking), an orator, a New Yorker, and a curmudgeon. She’s a cowboy boot–wearing, buttoned-up, fast-talking icon. To Fran, everything was better years ago, and even then, things weren’t so good. What, I wondered as I watched the theater fill, is Fran Lebowitz’s legacy? While she may seem an unlikely hero for young New Yorkers, she’s polling Bernie numbers, and I think the answer runs deeper than a Netflix show introducing her to new audiences. In her approach to the world, I see all my fears refracted: The threat of ever having to “do” something with your life. The terror of writing a book, or (and this one is personal to me) a second book, or, God forbid, a third. Beyond the existential anxieties that have spooked humans since they first dipped nib in ink, there are also some new fears, like the sickening idea of relevance. Maintaining a place in current society means continuing to produce, well, anything. Often, I feel like I’m on a hamster wheel, working, posting, going nowhere, eating kibble. We’ve created a culture that’s too fast and too greedy for our own comfort. Detaching from my phone is impossible; any act of creation is welded to self-promotion. Our experiences are mediated by an imaginary board of fans. How can we please them? How do we create to satiate our own magnified expectations? We’re so caught up in ourselves that it can be hard to recognize time passing. Often, Fran told her Flatbush disciples, young people ask her for advice on how to live. Like she knows the right way to live, or like there is a right way to live. Maybe it’s because Fran has no cell phone, computer, or typewriter. This means that, for all her nostalgia and reluctance to change, she possesses contemporary culture’s most coveted prize—she is incredibly present. In this sense, Fran, who claims she’s “always been old at heart,” is really very young. In “My Day: An Introduction of Sorts,” from Metropolitan Life, Fran gives an introduction to her day, which involves oscillating between a semi-recumbent position on her couch and a fully recumbent one in her bed. She writes of the mail she receives: “Nine press releases, four screening notices, two bills, an invitation to a party in honor of a celebrated heroin addict, a final disconnect notice from New York Telephone, and three hate letters from Mademoiselle readers demanding to know just what it is that makes me think that I have the right to regard houseplants—green, living things—with such marked distaste. I call the phone company and try to make a deal, as actual payment is not a possibility. Would they like to go to a screening? Would they care to attend a party for a heroin addict?” 170 culturedmag.com
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It probably isn’t the right way to live, but it’s HOW I LIVE AND HOW A LOT OF MY FRIENDS LIVE. There’s somehow never any money, but a lot of screenings and parties for heroin addicts.
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Writing, especially when you’re young, is one of those great professions where the more you do it, the broker you get. It probably isn’t the right way to live, but it’s how I live and how a lot of my friends live. There’s somehow never any money, but a lot of screenings and parties for heroin addicts. I grew up in New York, and even when I was young, I wasn’t young. I turned young at 22, when the city unfurled itself. The train goes anywhere. The nights are a bacchanal, celebrating short films that miraculously aren’t short enough or art openings that are too packed to ever see the art. The days are exercises in escapism—trips to the Rockaways, or the Neue Galerie, or the Golden Mall in Flushing—tinted by the feeling of being one tiny cell in the city’s anatomy, and accumulating just enough small victories to feel like you possess the world. The city’s pleasures are the sweet and secret purview of the young—eking out “regular” status in a restaurant or a bodega, walking down a street where you know everybody, yelling at bikers, yelling at drivers, yelling at pedestrians, exiting the subway station on the right corner because your internal compass is magnetically attuned to two rivers. New Yorkers are sentimental hypocrites. Fran understands this well. People want Fran to tell them how to live because it seems like she’s figured out one of the most challenging parts: how to escape expectations—the world’s and one’s own. She’s an anomaly—a writer who doesn’t write (although, if I had to write everything by hand, I’d be an orator too), an evergreen icon who walks the streets of New York unencumbered, an anti-celebrity who’s managed to maintain relevance despite waging a decades-long campaign against the concept. She does what she’s always done, and the world envies her for it. When a blue-haired girl in the Flatbush audience called out a question about legacy, Fran shook her head dismissively, offering a pithy, “I don’t care,” followed by, “If you’re worried about what people will think about you after you’re dead, you have other problems.” I’ve never been one for audience participation, so instead of asking a follow-up question I choose to read between the lines: Spending your time on the hamster wheel worrying about being forgotten makes you no better than a rodent. The human experience is an unending stream of small humiliations and miseries that culminates in The Big One. Doing something with your life can be as simple as going to dinner, making ends meet, walking the neighborhood, or talking with friends (with friends like Toni Morrison and Scorsese, Fran has had the upper hand here). Not everything has to be documented, it can just be said. If you take that as the baseline, you can go about the task of living with your hands free, leaving you prepared to seize a flash of good fortune. As the question of legacy lingered malodorously in the air of the Kings Theatre, I thought, possessed by Fran’s spirit, What a stupid question.
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People want Fran to tell them how to live because it seems like she’s figured out one of the most challenging parts: HOW TO ESCAPE EXPECTATIONS— the world’s and one’s own.
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Alex TATARSKY Theresa CHROMATI Emma STERN Aurel Haize ODOGBO Hardy HILL mosie ROMNEY Giangiacomo ROSSETTI Jasper MARSALIS Isabelle BROURMAN Kahlil Robert IRVING Shuriya DAVIS Willa NASATIR Omari DOUGLIN Oscar YI HOU Olivia VAN KUIKEN Oshay GREEN Cassi NAMODA Dominique KNOWLES Adam ALESSI Julia YERGER Connor Marie STANKARD S*an D. HENRY-SMITH Jes FAN Violet DENNISON Charisse Pearlina WESTON Jo MESSER Adraint Khadafhi BEREAL
Being an artist is no ordinary occupation. It demands a way of seeing, a kind of relentless attention that can’t be turned off. In recent years, creatives have been forced to contend with the increasing commercialization of the cultural ecosystem, a stormy political landscape, and a wobbling economy. Between the MFA-to-solo-show pipeline and an emphasis on relentless social media self-promotion, our culture has never been more focused on the question of how to “make it” professionally as an artist. How to make a life as one isn’t as simple of a calculation.
2023
CULTURED’s eighth annual Young Artists list arrives amid this existential maelstrom. The 27 makers featured in these pages, all 35 or younger, are a testament to the resourcefulness and optimism required to choose not only the work, but also the life of an artist. They represent a wide range of geographies, mindsets, and mediums. Some have shown their work in august institutions; others operate entirely outside of the traditional gallery system. Some practice in a vacuum, while others would never dream of working alone. Some compare their work to committing a crime, others to creating an avatar. While the Hong Kong– and Brooklyn-based Jes Fan works at the molecular level, New York native mosie romney uses eBay hauls and dreams as raw material. LA-based Jasper Marsalis sees his practice as a “suite of questions” to answer each day, while Houston-born Charisse Pearlina Weston regards hers as a way to interrogate systems of oppression. What unites them all is a commitment to their unique visions and an urge to follow their own compasses, no matter the weather.
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ALEX TATARSKY AT THE MOMENT, Alex Tatarsky is deep in what they call “sad boy studios,” which consists of their bedroom, their mind, and hundreds of notebooks that say nothing. It’s a zone of research for Sad Boys in Harpy Land, the New York native’s episodic, decade-long performance project that adapts Goethe’s 1796 story Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship—a tongue-in-cheek bildungsroman about a German boy who dreams of becoming a theater artist—and simultaneously pokes at and deflates the genre’s typically linear idea of progress.
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34, New York By HIJI NAM
The scope of Tatarsky’s work ranges from deliriously riotous solo plays such as Americana Psychobabble; to Shanzhai Lyric, the “poetic research and archival unit” they co-founded with their longtime collaborator Ming Lin; to Canal Street Research Association, the organization’s living theater offshoot and “fictional office”; and a recent residency as an ornamental hermit on the Glen Foerd estate in Philadelphia. Each undertaking is marked by a playful approach to a serious commitment: getting to the bone of many of the art world’s deeply embedded ethical contradictions. The Goethe adaptation germinated in their early 20s, when Tatarsky, 34, first began making so-called “solo performances” and confronted a crisis of meaning around both of those words. What does it mean to be solo, a person, an individual; and what does it mean to perform that? While their stage presence tends to be refreshingly unhinged and hysterical, Tatarsky is warm and grounded in person, with a soft lilting voice that occasionally bursts into fits of giggles. “I realize these ideas might sound a little heavy-handed. But remember, I do identify as a clown, so it’s lighthearted,” they say, laughing. “It’s the first time they’re calling me a playwright, and I keep being like, ‘I’m just an experimental clown artist!’ Clown makeup is just stylized tears, translating your sorrows into some form of aesthetic delight.” Like most of their work, Tatarsky sees Sad Boys—which debuted last year at New York’s Abrons Art Center and will be staged at the Midtown off-Broadway staple Playwrights Horizons this month (hence the playwright honorific)—as ongoing, life-long projects. “The way finished products are sold and premiered is antithetical to how a lot of performance practice is, which is growing and shifting over the course of a life,” they tell me. “I feel devoted to a work’s unfinished-ness and sense of unraveling, to letting the seams show.”
“Clown makeup is just stylized tears, translating your sorrows into some form of aesthetic delight.”
Photography by ZOE CHAIT
METAL SUPPORTS —structures with the hard-line industrial feel of a factory farm’s machinery—fill the space in “DOOM BLOOM,” Theresa Chromati’s show with Dallas’s Tureen gallery this winter. Their severe edges are softened by the florid tenderness of the prismatic canvases they buttress—and by the fantastical botanical sculptures (so-called scrotum flowers) that wrap around them like vines. A recurring motif for Chromati, the scrotum flower is just one species in the elaborate mythological taxonomy of otherworldly beings that populate her work. The testicular flora serves as an attendant to the multifaceted “central figure” that presides over the artist’s canvases. “[It’s a totem] that’s been woven into my paintings for years at this point,” says the Baltimore-born and -based artist. “It has been a guide, a friend, a listening ear for this central figure, as she stretches, lets go of herself, defines herself.” Trained as a graphic designer, the 30-yearold has constructed her visual world by positioning layer after layer on top of one another, a process that echoes the way images are fashioned in virtual space. Glitter and felt serve as the erotic paraphernalia of her alien species, deployed to form nipples, a phallus, or secretions. Self-portrait by THERESA CHROMATI
An impressively supple patinated bronze figure produced for her solo show at San Francisco’s Jessica Silverman gallery last spring, along with the scaffold-like supports the artist began making for her show at Veta in Madrid last summer, are the products of Chromati’s recent foray into metal. These works speak to her desire to “expand what’s 30, Baltimore happening in the realm of the paintings into this realm”—to By HENRY DEXTER explore the dissolution of the pictorial fourth wall. For the artist, it’s all about freedom, dynamism, and movement. Openness and audacity are at the core of her work—“and questions,” she concludes, lots of questions. Chromati’s latest work, which will also be on view in Jessica Silverman’s Art Basel Miami Beach presentation, threads elements from this radically destabilizing symbolic ecosystem through a veil of normality with impressive technical and artistic ingenuity. In her experiments with new dimensions, the artist deepens her focus on the act of processing and reflecting the otherworldliness of humankind itself—“how vast, how nuanced we are” as a species.
THERESA CHROMATI “[I’m trying to] expand what’s happening in the realm of the paintings into this realm.”
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IN EMMA STERN’S fantasy world, hot girls reign supreme. Since she graduated from Pratt Institute in 2014, the New Jersey–raised artist has been fleshing out her universe of “Lava Babies”—technicolor and otherworldly avatars who metabolize and reimagine classic tropes (pirates, rock stars, and cowgirls). With every series, she adds a new chapter to her ever-expanding epic of hot-girl mythology. “It’s all about building a universe and bringing these artifacts back with me,” says Stern of her approach to world-building. (She considers her social media presence a performance piece and created her first avatars online as a preteen exploring the still-new corners of the Internet.) “Paintings are one of those artifacts; sculpture, animation, and video are others,” she adds. But writing is the membrane that holds the visuals together. Stern often devises a backstory for each painting, from which she creates a digital sketch with 3D modeling software that becomes a blueprint of sorts. While Stern’s practice is multidisciplinary, painting is her greatest love. “As soon as you put oil paint on canvas, it’s in dialogue with art history and the tradition of portraiture,” she says. In Daisy (banger!), 2023, a young musician in a bikini top and micro skirt perches unabashedly on a drum kit, a drum stick barely obstructing the view up her skirt. “These are images that tend to exist in the weird underbelly of the Internet,” continues Stern. “That’s the interesting part for me: the way painting recontextualizes these tropes.”
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“It’s all about building a universe and bringing these artifacts back with me.”
EMMA STERN
31, New York By MEKA BOYLE
The artist’s work has been described by turns as pornographic and “ironically misogynistic”—but Stern rarely deals with nudity and prefers authenticity to irony. As far as any dialogue with the male gaze goes, she feels the conversation has run its course. “I’m tired of talking about it,” Stern declares. “Not everything is in reaction to, or for the benefit of, a hypothetical male audience.” Her hyperfeminine avatars are an extension of herself, after all. Nevertheless, Stern is gradually incorporating men into her work. “I have this perfect little universe, but at a certain point I’ll need to introduce some conflict,” she concedes. On the heels of her solo exhibition, “Penny & The Dimes: Dimes 4Ever World Tour,” at Almine Rech’s London gallery in September, Stern is recharging and preparing for her first solo museum exhibition at Pond Society in Shanghai this spring. This will be the first time her motley cast of avatars will come together—a kaleidoscopic world of mermaids, rock stars, centaurs, elves, pirates, animals, school girls, and femme fatales—under one roof.
Photography by TOMMY RIZZOLI
AUREL HAIZE ODOGBO’S interest in collage stems from her fascination with her chosen medium’s ability to take a fragment of our world and breathe new life into it. Using hard and soft pastels, metal leaf, and bird feathers as sinew, the Nigerian-American artist stitches images from the glitchy ecosystem of role-playing games together with signs, symbols, and cultural artifacts from the Yoruba tradition in pursuit of something “angelic.” “Ancestor worship held so much power in my adolescence,” says Odogbo, who is transgender, when she calls from a “self-appointed” residency in Berlin. “It allowed me to believe in myself when I didn’t have a reason to, and when everyone around me told me not to believe in the young woman I was growing into.” The Baltimore-born artist’s fascination with the virtual also surfaced in her youth, when she would watch her older brother play classic video games on the TV—her face bathed in the flickering light of an alternate universe, entranced. These games became the “possibility model” for Odogbo’s life as an artist—they proved that one could build and inhabit another world. She found herself particularly fixated on avatar creation and “on the ability to design a body without the constrictions of our world.” She saw the voltaic screen of her monitor as a kind of “digital altar or portal,” a place to commune with a vast network of imagined forms. During the spiritual journey of Odogbo’s teenage years, her personal exploration of precolonial traditions and beliefs stood in stark contrast with the strict, prescriptive Christian religion of her father. The membrane that separates what we denote as “the sacred” and “the
Photography by TIANNA STRICKLAND
AUREL HAIZE ODOGBO
27, New York By HENRY DEXTER
“[Ancestor worship] allowed me to believe in myself when I didn’t have a reason to, and when everyone around me told me not to believe in the young woman I was growing into.”
profane” loomed large in the 14 ambitious psychedelic collages she showed in “Quasiii—PortalsUponPortals,” her debut solo exhibition at Deli Gallery’s Mexico City outpost this summer. In the show, her abstract meditations on the angelic and the alien relied on speculation as their primary narrative mechanism, introducing us to deities that wait in the far-off future, shooting out from the picture plane like solar flares from a neighboring galaxy.
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ONLY A FEW YEARS AGO, Hardy Hill identified as a theologian. The artist—who is as lithe and mysterious as the figures who populate his dry and withholding copper intaglio etchings—studied printmaking as an undergraduate at RISD before pivoting to religious studies after his first encounters with the art world’s commodified underbelly. “Art seemed to no longer make sense as a form,” he remembers. In 2017, Hill enrolled at Union Theological Seminary in New York, in search of “something that felt more honest.” For Hill, theology came to represent “this dematerialized, impersonal version of art,” and academia promised some kind of critical distance from the forces of the market, which of course, he laughs, “turned out not to be true.” After graduating from the seminary in 2020, the artist returned to printmaking with obsessive fervor. “A print is something you have to commit like a crime,” he explains. Unlike with a painting, “there’s no amorous exchange.” His drawings, like the most gripping cold cases, are at once tidy and unresolvable. Each work begins with a simple phrase, selected by the artist to describe the relationship between a set of often male, muscular, and spry figures. The resulting image is at once a straightforward translation of the text and a total betrayal of it. Sober, meticulous, and withdrawn, Hill focuses on scenes from domestic, not spiritual, life. If his drawings have an animating principle at all, it is self-abnegation. When asked about the curious absence of religious iconography and divine narratives in the work, Hill muses, “In the Gospels, God never appears.” This is not to say that the 30-year-old makes “Christian art or even theologically inflected art,” but rather that the interplay in his drawings between what’s there and what’s not echoes the silence and truancy of the Abrahamic traditions. Recently, Hill has made a significant departure from the technical minimalism that marked his early work with a new series of drawings done on film and exposed as photographs. These works, which he calls “contact prints,” wrestle with the artist’s ongoing interest in the camera. They also return hue, shadow, and lushness to Hill’s work, which long concerned itself with the surgical excision of everything that he felt constituted excess. In the spring of next year, these new works will be presented in Hill’s second solo exhibition at New York’s 15 Orient, which promises to confirm his singular status as a thoughtful and unpredictable image-maker.
HARDY HILL
30, New York
By HENRY DEXTER
“A print is something you have to commit like a crime. There’s no amorous exchange.”
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Photography by ALLISON LIPPY
“My studio ... belongs to me in a way that I haven’t experienced before. That brings me joy.”
BEFORE they begin a new
MOSIE ROMNEY
project, mosie romney pulls a tarot card. “I recently got the Chariot, [which] feels reminiscent of a spiral staircase,” they explain from their Catskills studio. “I’ve been thinking about spiral staircases as they relate to cycle-breaking and fantasy, entering other worlds … I’m making paintings about the spiritual journey and the physical journey.” Romney grew up in New York City and studied at SUNY Purchase, where the now 29-yearold learned to appreciate the region’s hush, as well as its abundance. Nature helps clear their
Photography by MARY MANNING
29, Queens and the Catskills
By SHIRLEY NGOZI NWANGWA
head, and it is this lucidity that leads the artist from conception to finished product, translating a combination of daydreamed imagery and foraged objects, many sourced from eBay, into various abstractions on canvas or mixed-media assemblages. Romney’s creations explore the concept of existence in all forms and in all places, mythical and biological. They often meld painting and poetry, making potions out of matter and swirling them around in an ethereal truth brew. In “Rhizome St./Fugue Avenue,” their first solo exhibition with New York’s P.P.OW. gallery this fall, the artist dispatched from a multi-timeline universe, whose characters are connected, mysteriously, to each other. To make the series, they assembled found materials like metal studs and plastic baby figurines in a process one might liken to putting the pieces of a dream puzzle back together. The resulting paintings’ palette—at once brilliant and muted, like the arching lines that punctuate each work—forces viewers to behold and traverse a seemingly infinite expanse. When romney is not time traveling, they are destination hopping—thankfully, never alone. “Oopsie is definitely a support dog,” they say of their Lab/pit bull mix. “Being a painter is lonely … She reminds me to take breaks, go outside. When she eats, I eat. When she needs more drinking water, I need to drink too.” Romney doesn’t take for granted the lifestyle they’ve been able to cultivate as an artist. Having worked since they were 16, they relish not having to report to any place they don’t want to. “Now I check into my studio, and it belongs to me in a way that I haven’t experienced before. That brings me joy.” This state of enchantment permeates romney’s canvases, which vibrate with the potentiality of a reverie. The only question is what they will dream up next.
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“I don’t want any despotism, any strict lineage … the idea of making a painting was about breaking with lineage.”
THERE ARE ABOUT the same number of muscles in the hand as there are in the face, Giangiacomo Rossetti reminds me. For the New York–based artist, the comparison stresses the sheer expressive capacity of both body parts. “The hand is everything in painting,” he says, citing French theorist Pierre Klossowski’s influential but little-known 1965 text Les lois de l’hospitalité. Indeed, Rossetti’s emotionally brooding portraits present human flesh as at once sophisticated and articulate, brawny and robust. This exaggerated verisimilitude is central to his process, which resembles the tumultuous reactions by which the natural world evolves and transforms itself. Having come to painting late after experimenting with conceptual art, Rossetti educated himself through an excavation of art historical texts and technical bulletins. Perhaps it is this autodidactic excitement that fuels his volcanic fits of productivity. The Milan native’s work rose to prominence on the cusp of the present figuration phenomenon. Today, the 34-year-old muses, “There is definitely an oversaturation of figurative painting, but there were also quite a few periods in which there was just figurative painting… for thousands of years. So I guess it can be fine.” When the artist turned to the canvas, he felt like he was doing something “rebellious.” Today, the idea that painting a figure could be an act of defiance appears absurd, but perhaps that is the point. “I don’t want any despotism, any strict lineage,” he proclaims, before concluding, “to begin with, the idea of making a painting was about breaking with lineage.” In Fantasia n.6 – Contratto devozionale, 2020, a work first exhibited in Rossetti’s 2020 solo show at Greene Naftali, one figure drives a stake into the arm of another with a metal mallet. The piece began as a celestial scene where two planetary bodies held each other in orbit, but Rossetti decided the image wasn’t working. He altered the picture’s composition,
GIANGIACOMO ROSSETTI
34, New York
By HENRY DEXTER
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resulting in a painting whose subjects seem to emit an almost gravitational intensity. On the phone, he proudly observes that recently, he’s experiencing a similar moment in the studio, “where everything is beginning to fall apart.” He’s working on a new show with the New York gallery, which is slated to open next spring. It’s one of those periods where everything is up for grabs again, where pictorial decay and creative rebirth intermingle to tremendous effect.
Photography by MARY MANNING
“I WAS VERY INTERESTED in car design when I was younger,” recalls painter Jasper Marsalis. “I took this summer course, and the instructor explained that in their prototypal phase, you could only draw cars facing one direction. That really bothered me.” That anecdote foreshadows the fixations that would emerge, years later, in the 27-yearold musician and artist’s work: a subversion of perspectival conventions, a complication of linearity, and an emphasis on the unreliability of optical experience. “It sparked my fascination with art-making, or with art-making as a suite of questions,” says Marsalis, who is currently on the road touring his debut album, Excelsior, under the moniker Slauson Malone 1. Today, his artwork—the result of that suite of questions— sprawls well beyond a single medium. Intimately scaled oil paintings depict the vastness of light, while large-scale works contract as if under pressure. Occasionally, Marsalis makes three-dimensional “drawings” out of soldered aluminum pieces that glisten like spider webs on the surface of his canvases. In his exhibitions, one finds bowling balls on a gallery floor, their holes stuffed with ear plugs or their rotundity interrupted with a wooden wedge. These
Photography by HANNAH TACHER
JASPER MARSALIS
anthropomorphic sculptures capture the simple physicality of the human figure—they make you feel the weight of your head on your shoulders. In solo exhibitions at Los Angeles’s Kristina Kite Gallery, London’s Emalin, New York’s Svetlana, and Minneapolis’s Midway Contemporary Art, the prolific 27, Los Angeles young multi-hyphenate has channeled his fixation on the By HENRY DEXTER insufficiency of the senses into artworks that force viewers to interrogate their own ability to perceive the world. And the ear, he contends, is just as treacherous as the eye. Marsalis’s musical output is as compositionally attuned to disorder and chaos as the artist’s two-dimensional work. For the Los Angeles native, the stage and the picture plane are interdependent, parallel forums for expression, but that doesn’t make the exchange a seamless one. “Going between music and art, two economic worlds that secretly I think really hate each other,” he muses, “that’s an inherently unstable position.”
“Going between music and art, two economic worlds that secretly I think really hate each other, that’s an inherently unstable position.”
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ISABELLE BROURMAN BEARS a striking resemblance to Lee Lozano. Like the late iconoclast, the New York–based artist maintains a rigorous painting practice that draws her attentions inward, while simultaneously pursuing an undercover life that draws her out into the world—to the edge of disappearance. Brourman moonlights as a sketch artist, sneaking into courtrooms to bear witness to landmark trials all over the U.S. Getting access to these courtrooms often requires a disguise. Sometimes it’s as simple as carrying a sketchboard; other times it’s more ornate—a certain kind of blouse paired with a dusty rose lipstick, ever so slightly smudged across teeth, can make you invisible. (When Brourman covered Depp v. Heard, she spent months in disguise. Her recordings of this marathon performance exist in the form of mixed media artworks or Notes app diatribes.) Unlike her seasoned peers who work to capture the room’s realism, Brourman is not interested in likeness, nor in casting villains and angels. The 30-year-old is there to capture emotional information—what is lost in a verdict. She feeds off trespassing’s high risk and reward, enjoying adrenaline’s
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tightrope grip and the way it transforms her from bystander to participant. Brourman’s characters are not for an audience; they are a way for the artist to take back her body. Last summer, at “Virginia is for Lovers,” her show at Murmurs gallery in Los Angeles, Brourman brought the terrorizing physicality of the courtroom to life by making a courtroom replica adorned with her Amber Heard and Johnny Depp trial drawings, including bar napkin scratchings—small breadcrumbs pointing to the afters-culture of celebrity trials. One piece, titled Bruise 30, New York Expert, hung on Heard’s side of the reconstructed courtroom and laid out her contusions like a mood ring chart—each color swatch paired with a meaning. The watercolor, colored pencil, and ink artwork was inspired by the testimony given by Depp’s metadata expert witness, who opined on the extent of her injuries. “It is interesting that someone in metadata would be called as an expert on bruises,” the artist points out. Brourman is currently attending another high profile trial, which means we only have an hour to chat. “I am fighting to play,” she tells me. “Each trial demands something different, each person on the stand, each city. Where is the release, and what needs to be released?”
ISABELLE BROURMAN By KAT HERRIMAN
“Each trial demands something different, each person on the stand, each city. Where is the release, and what needs to be released?”
Photography by ZOE CHAIT
KAHLIL ROBERT IRVING
31, Fayetteville, Arkansas, and Saint Louis, Missouri By SHIRLEY NGOZI NWANGWA KAHLIL ROBERT IRVING is not interested in being seen, nor is he interested in being part of a scene. “I’ve been making things out of clay since I was 12 years old,”
he announced in a 2022 interview with Mass MoCA. “I don’t have anything to prove to anybody.” In the 19 years since Irving embarked on his relationship with ceramics, the sculptor has shared the company of eminent artists, showing at institutions as mammoth as the Whitney, MoMA, and New Museum. His sensory practice synthesizes his experience of the world as a Black man—what it feels like to be continuously inundated with images and videos of police killings of other Black men, for instance—with the study of perception, playing primarily with the literal and metaphorical aspects of sight. Irving’s latest exhibition closed at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center in November. An excavation of recent history, “Archaeology of the Present” featured a collection of sculptures that embody the layering technique for which the artist is best known. These amalgamated masses consist of amorphous debris and easily recognizable pedestrian objects like vases, teapots, and soda bottles positioned at different angles, their volume covered in part by fac-
similes of news clippings, social media posts, or commercial decals. The works are often mistaken for found objects; Irving encourages those who detect the discrepancy to continue deconstructing what they know about the “fossilized” slice of time that is represented by the full sculpture. “If someone is able to decipher the code,” he explains, “then they have access.” From his studio in Fayetteville, Arkansas—where he is currently a guest artist at the University of Arkansas and working toward a showing of “Archaeology of the Present” at Saint Louis’s Kemper Art Museum—Irving weighs his words on questions of accessibility and marginalization in his work and the greater art world. Last year, he experienced racist mistreatment while staying in a hotel. Around the time of the incident, he had also been tasked with taking care of his grandmother who later passed away. Making work—choosing creation over internal decimation, self-determination over powerlessness—simultaneously heals and fuels him. “I’m constantly reminded that this is a marathon,” he concludes. “But I also remember that the world is on fire, and I just gotta do what I can while I can.”
“I’m constantly reminded that this is a marathon, but I also remember that the world is on fire, and I just gotta do what I can while I can.” Photography by ANDREW CASTANEDA
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SHURIYA DAVIS DIDN’T CAPTION their bruise-colored, semi-abstract homages to Big Gay Idiot DJ, the early 2010s phenom formerly known as DJ Total Freedom, when they posted them on Instagram. In September, the Alabama-born, Mississippi-based artist began flooding the app with these brown, purple, and green premonitions from a muddy future. After a summer of silence (due to a health crisis) from a hitherto loquacious account, the posts were the first sign that Davis was in the studio again. “Working with portraiture is the quickest way for me to get ideas,” they confess over the phone. For the 27-year-old, the process is a kind of emotional shorthand. “I’m always returning to those images of DJ Total Freedom. They have an intimacy,” says Davis. “Those images set the tone for what I’m interested in making: figures that are deep and contemplative about the world they’re existing in.” Muses, like DJ Total Freedom, enter the studio via Instagram screenshots and websites like Black Archives, a well of documentation that underscores the plurality and complexity of Black experiences. Once applied to a work however, a reference image—even one freighted with meaning—functions less as a blueprint than as something to riff on. It’s no surprise that Davis looks up to Georg Baselitz, whose work embraces that moment where portraiture grazes abstraction. Nor is it shocking that Davis claims they learned to draw from studying Willem de Kooning in undergrad at the Rhode Island School of Design. Unlike their figurative peers’ interest in representation as a way to affirm certain
narratives, Davis does not seek resolution. The messiness of personhood is left intact. “I lose track of where things begin and end a lot, so I try to make paintings that portray that,” they say. “One mark helps another mark find its resonance. I make use of every mark so that there are no accidents in this creation.” At the moment, following memorable inclusions in group shows like Nahmad Contemporary’s “Ugly Painting” and a run of sold-out solo exhibitions, Davis’s marks are still in their accumulation phase. But there are more presentations on the way, at New York’s Derosia, and at Stars, their long-term gallery in Los Angeles. That’s enough of a plan for Davis. Painting has their full attention.
“I lose track of where things begin and end a lot, so I try to make paintings that portray that.”
SHURIYA DAVIS 27, Byram, Mississippi By KAT HERRIMAN
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Self-portrait by SHURIYA DAVIS
“I’m happy that my work still feels mysterious to me, that it doesn’t feel solved or like I’ve reached the edges, the contours of the thing.”
“I WAS TALKING WITH A FRIEND the other day, and she said that being an artist is thinking, This is bad, this is very, very, very, very bad, but not derailing it,” says Willa Nasatir, laughing. “Like throwing a birthday party and wanting to cancel it at the last minute. But the thing about being 33 is having a better grasp of how to sit through that.” The artist is in a serene mood when I meet her at Los Tacos near Tribeca Park, and says that she hasn’t been feeling the post-show depression that often hits two to three weeks after an opening. The show in question is her third solo exhibition at Chapter NY, the gallery that has represented the Los Angeles native since 2016. The obligatory CV line about Nasatir tends to include the fact that she had a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art five years out of Cooper Union, but what’s useful in approaching Nasatir’s compositions across photography and painting is the psychoanalytic dictum at the heart of her work: Everyone and everything that appears in our dreams is a part of ourselves.
Photography by MARY MANNING
Nasatir’s pictures break down and anatomize the solidity of objects by splitting them up into parts, giving form to how the body is marked by and yields to the multiplicities of desire, power, and pleasure. As an observer-participant of the world she depicts, her process is arguably one of the subject reflecting on herself as an object, and the central theme of her work might be that of relationships—those that constellate the fractured facets within personality, sexuality, and friendship, dynamics that are never concretized but drift in an ever-shifting tide of ebbs and flows. A couple days before our meeting, Nasatir had a dream that an Angelyne-like figure driving a hot pink Corvette backed into her car. The strongest emotional current in the dream was one of relief, she remembers, as she’d recently switched her car insurance from California to New York. She pauses as she realizes she’s made a photograph of a brick smashing into a toy Corvette. It’s currently hanging in the Chapter NY show. Why did she make it? “I’m not
sure,” she grins. “I guess to fulfill the dream I had a month and a half later.” She seems genuinely bewildered by this, but reasons, “I’m happy that my work still feels mysterious to me, that it doesn’t feel solved or like I’ve reached the edges, the contours of the thing.”
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“I have a duty in this field to advance it and to think about it in deeper ways.”
FOR OMARI DOUGLIN,
OMARI DOUGLIN
everything begins with a sketch. This includes the first paintings and sculptures the New York–born artist made at LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, all the way up to the works that appeared in “Wave Gods 2” this past spring. For that exhibition at New York’s Ramiken gallery, a stack of Douglin’s character sketches of Black figures were transformed into a formidable papier-mâché army with the help of custom piñata makers in Mexico. The act of translation feels reminiscent of the exchange between Arte Povera conceptualist Alighiero Boetti and the Afghani weavers
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who turned his instructions into the tapestries that comprised his “Mappa” series, charting the globe’s disputed borders from 1989 to 1991. Douglin doesn’t mention Boetti specifically, but art history is a preoccupation of his. In his paintings, he frequently cites passages from a canon that stretches from Édouard Vuillard and Martin Kippenberger to Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks, putting them in dialogue with other signifiers and burnt ends. Douglin literally paraphrased peer Lukas Quietzsch during their doubleheader at Ramiken this fall, depicting his friend’s still-wet abstraction floating in a thought bubble. Not every reference is as linear. Douglin’s work is often compared to artists like Kippenberger, Michael Williams, and Sigmar Polke because of the way these semi-abstract painters confuse the eye, obfuscating how the work was made to unnerving effect. The difference is that Douglin is not interested in automation (screen printing or otherwise) when it comes to painting. He wants to probe how the medium could address sculpture without the printer. This was a discovery the now 31-year-old made at Cooper Union where, like many of his classmates, he emulated Wade Guyton and Laura Owens by stacking images in Photoshop. “It was becoming this technique to maximize production,” says Douglin. “I have a duty in this field to advance it and to think about it in deeper ways. [In the end,] I realized that I didn’t need the computer.” Douglin taught his hand how to layer like a machine: clean, purposeful. Almost digital, but still human. Room 3557, his curatorial side-gig, is perhaps the largest manifestation of Douglin’s belief in handson engagement. The artistic equivalent of Hogwarts’s Room of Requirement, a fictional space that adjusts its nature to accommodate the vision of the inhabitant, the project is Douglin’s valentine to Los Angeles as a recent transplant, his way of diving headfirst into the city and making a place for art for its own sake.
31, Los Angeles By KAT HERRIMAN
Photography by JULIE GOLDSTONE
OSCAR YI HOU IS in his poetry era. In his “poem paintings,” a private lexicon of hieroglyphs— cranes, the yin and yang symbol, Western spurs—serve as standins for the artist. “It’s the universe of the paintings, and it’s up to the viewer if they want to decipher it or not,” the New York–based, Liverpool-born painter says of the works, which have served as a means to document his relationships with loved ones over the years. In one example, an ongoing conversation (and exchange of writing) between yi Hou and his close friend Elmo Tumbokon resulted in Old Gloried Hole, aka: Ends of Empire, 2022, an evocative commentary on American imperialism and queer identity that stands at nearly seven feet tall. On the canvas, Tumbokon strikes a commanding presence: His shadow is cast against the reimagined American flag’s red stripes, which are rendered in obscured text (a reframing of the welcome letter that the Filipino-born Tumbokon received when he became a naturalized U.S. citizen). “Historically, minorities have always had to operate with a kind of subterranean semiotics, language, or codes,” says yi Hou, who was born to Cantonese immigrants in England. The 25-year-old found a kindred spirit in the late Chinese artist Martin Wong, who shared an interest in subversive forms of language, homoerotic imagery, and cowboys. “It’s important to keep Wong—who died of [complications related to] AIDS—and his generation of artists’ practices alive by reexamining them, by rearticulating them, by responding to them so that they still remain interlocutors within contemporary discourse,” he emphasizes. The young artist’s mid-20s have been marked by a number of major milestones. Last year, he published an eponymous collection of poetry, essays, and memoir with James Fuentes gallery that posed the question: “What is art after representation?” For his first solo museum show at the Brooklyn Museum, “East of sun, west of moon,” which ran until this September, he acted Photography by JOSÉ A. ALVARADO JR.
OSCAR YI HOU as the de facto curator, selecting works, writing wall texts, and fleshing out a thesis. With his premise outlined across museum walls, yi Hou freed himself from the burden of having to explain himself going forward. Now, he’s beginning preparations for an upcoming show with James Fuentes in New York. “My life this past year has been undergoing a state of expansion,” he says. What’s next? “I’m going to contract—hunker down and attune myself to the pleasure of painting.”
25, New York By MEKA BOYLE
“I’m going to contract—hunker down and attune myself to the pleasure of painting.” culturedmag.com 193
“I think about the question of what it means to make a feminist painting a lot. What does that look like?ˮ
“THE CHARACTER IS
OLIVIA VAN KUIKEN
contemplating her pregnancy, like, ‘Do I give myself an abortion with a knife? Do I jump out the window?’” explains Olivia van Kuiken. The 26-year-old painter is giving me her elevator pitch for The Trumpets of Jericho, an experimental fable about an expectant young woman trapped in a tower. Its author—Unica Zürn, a Surrealist renegade often overshadowed by her other half, Hans Bellmer—wrote the text after giving birth to two children and going through a self-induced abortion. Zürn and the 1968 novella have been a compass of sorts for van Kuiken since she first
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discovered the book as a freshman at Cooper Union. She turned to them once again this year in preparation for her first solo show with Château Shatto, which will open in time with Frieze Los Angeles next February. From her own turret in Queens, a second floor studio overlooking a mom-and-pop auto shop, the artist points to the themes—bodily alienation, linguistic abstraction, the “edges of experience”—that continue to rivet her and translate easily to her narrative-allergic body of work. “I think about the question of what it means to make a feminist painting a lot,” she muses. “What does that look like?” Growing up in New Jersey, van Kuiken was well aware of the traps a woman can fall into. “I was raised by the suburban moms there,” she remembers. “A lot of their husbands divorced them, and they would end up having to work at places like Petco. That made me crazy and really depressed as a kid.” In high school, she found some solace in black-and-white darkroom photography, hoping to follow postconceptual doyenne Liz Deschenes’s footsteps and pining to be in Rookie, from which her work was rejected for being “too abstract.” The figure eventually made its way into her work, but van Kuiken isn’t interested in dwelling on its subjectivity. “When people are in my paintings, they’re like placeholders,” she explains. “Like bathroom signs, almost.” (The depictions of women on their deathbed that framed her solo show at Chapter NY earlier this year typify this depersonalization; in her panoramic treatment of their corpses, they became more landscape than life force.) Text, too, has surfaced in recent works, like a gestural hurricane of a painting stamped with “UNICA” in Cooper Black font. Looking at it across the studio, van Kuiken says she’s aware the lay viewer won’t recognize her cherished inspiration’s first name. That’s the point.
26, New York
By ELLA MARTIN-GACHOT
Photography by TOMMY RIZZOLI
“IT’S KIND OF HARD FOR ME to even call myself a visual artist,” confesses Oshay Green over Zoom. “It’s a bit intimidating to me in a way … There’s an intention, and there’s a responsibility, to being one.” It’s not surprising that Green, who is based in Dallas, struggles with the moniker. The show notes for “This whole time I’ve been seeing the same shit I had seen in my dreams,” Green’s solo show at Blinkers in Winnipeg, Canada, last year, highlight his self-taught bonafides and his origins as a welder and sound designer. At 29, Green has been making music much longer than visual art—the materiality of sound gives him a language for his three-dimensional work. The term “artist” only became relevant to him in 2018, when he started tinkering with metals, pallets, wood, and steel in a painter friend’s Dallas studio. Green simply thought, Why not? His oblique relationship to the artist monPhotography by JONATHAN ZIZZO
OSHAY GREEN By TIANA REID
“I’m working out of necessity. I’m trying to create some sort of liberation.”
iker is mirrored in his installations: assemblages composed of found materials that have not quite transcended their prior status as debris, the uncanny trace of their past lives an aura that hovers around them. Green uses materials such as concrete, ink, rope, obsidian, and charcoal to render industrial prisms through 29, Dallas which the mythology of capitalism, decay, and mortality are refracted. Even the artist’s influences form a kind of layered collage—splashes of Madlib and J Dilla with a touch of Nam June Paik. When I ask him why he makes work, Green mentions survival. “I’m working out of necessity. I’m trying to create some sort of liberation—I’m not talking about freeing the fucking world or anything,” he muses. “I am just looking for the key that opens a door to something else.”
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HOW DO YOU LEARN A CITY? “The cadence is different,” says Cassi Namoda, who often travels to far-flung locales to paint. “And the light in every city is different.” In the summer of 2018, she was painting in a garage in Maputo, Mozambique, where mosquitoes came in to interrupt her at dusk and dawn. At night, after the heat cooled down, she took refuge in bars, where the dark of people’s clothes glowed under dim lights. Those nocturnal scenes appeared in her paintings for “Bar Texas,” her show at Detroit’s Library Street Collective later that year. Born in Maputo, the 35-year-old has spent a large part of her life shuttling between Uganda, Kenya, and New York. When she was 16, living in Uganda, her photojournalist neighbor gave her an old Nikon. One day, she took a trip down to the Nile, which churned in front of her as monkeys scurried up trees. A Swahili proverb jangled in her head: “The day a monkey is designed to die, all trees become slippery.” Moved, she decided she wanted to make art about African stories, not like the paintings she saw in New York museums. She took a photograph that later hung on the wall in her first Los Angeles exhibition at François Ghebaly in 2019. After studying cinematography at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, Namoda transitioned to painting full-time in 2016. She was drawn to the medium’s approaches, both gestural and figurative, to stage compositions fraught with tension and longing. Sad and stupid desires, 2022, shows a man with knitted brows, smoking. His face is painted in broad brushstrokes. In his eyes, a pinprick of red harmonizes with the burning cherry at the tip of his cigarette. What is he thinking about? Namoda has made a name for herself within a revival, in the last decade, of Black figuration, typified by painters like Toyin Ojih Odutola and Amoako Boafo, who, like her, saturate their subjects’ faces with psychological complexity. Recently, however, Namoda has turned toward abstraction with scenes that reference disaster and migration, on display earlier this fall in “A gentle rain is dying,” a show with New York’s 303 Gallery. Existential migrations in Mecufi, 2023, shows migrants wrapped in blankets, evoking a crossing that brings to mind the treacherous Darién Gap between North and South America. Their faces are planes of color without punctuation, unknowable. “There needs to be questions with the viewer,” she concludes. “Maybe you don’t answer all of them.” 196 culturedmag.com
“There need to be questions with the viewer. Maybe you don’t answer all of them.”
CASSI NAMODA 35, New York By GEOFFREY MAK
Photography by ANDRES ALTAMIRANO
DOMINIQUE KNOWLES DOMINIQUE KNOWLES’S ADORATION of horses began in childhood, when he started riding in the Bahamas. “I drew horses because I desired horses,” the 27-year-old artist says. Perhaps this bond is the genesis for the movement, yearning, and mark-making that present themselves as something of a spiritual trinity in his work. When the artist turned 14, he became immersed in the community of artists that orbited his uncle’s contemporary art gallery, Popopstudios International Center for the Visual Arts, in the Bahamian capital of Nassau. “Painting offered an alternative way of living that the horse stables did not,” he explains. “I can be emotional in the paintings. It’s a different sense of community that is a bit more self-governing, eclectic, and unique.” Fueled by this early exposure, Knowles found his way stateside, earning a BFA and MFA in painting at the School of the
Photography by GEORGIE HAMMOND
27, Paris and Chicago By TIANA REID
“The most important thing is the intimacy in the painting, the intimacy between the painting and the viewer, or between the artist and the expression— it’s this alchemy of intimacy.”
Art Institute of Chicago, where he completed his studies in 2020. Today, the artist’s paintings could be described as character studies that explore, with spiritualistic dedication, a single being or act. Every brushstroke arcs and billows so that Knowles’s central figures appear at once to be moving and melting—rendered in a palette of rustic, almost prehistoric oranges, browns, and reds. “My Beloved,” his most recent show, which ran this past summer at Hannah Hoffman Gallery in Los Angeles, was an homage to Knowles’s horse, a lifelong companion who died in 2021. The show featured eight works bearing the same title—The Solemn and Dignified Burial Befitting My Beloved for All Seasons, 2023. The artist painted the windows of the gallery an earthy ochre, bathing the space in warm light to create a cathedral-like hush. Indeed, one painting felt almost reminiscent of an altarpiece. In Knowles’s swirling atmosphere of death and rebirth, mourning seems to be a requirement for engagement. “The most important thing,” he says, “is the intimacy in the painting, the intimacy between the painting and the viewer, or between the artist and the expression— it’s this alchemy of intimacy."
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A FACELESS MAN WHISPERS into a woman’s ear. Her face looks stricken, though the viewer will never know what she heard. Beholding this is like waking from a nightmare: You might not remember the dream, but you still feel the residue of dread hovering over your body. Adam Alessi based Cruiser’s Creek, 2022—the titular artwork in a solo show at Clearing’s Brussels location last year—on a still from a 1985 music video of the same name by British post-punk band the Fall. The composition mirrors the frame, but the woman’s face was Alessi’s fabrication. The artist will often rework a face in his paintings until “it feels like it’s paying attention to you, it’s judging you.” These prying likenesses synthesize an almanac of references, from horror films to illuminated manuscripts to memories of his Los Angeles childhood. Almost all of Alessi’s countenances sneer, leer, or grimace—creating the claustrophobic feeling of being watched. If affect theory and informational surveillance networks are the two dominant epistemes of our moment, the artist traffics in both. While the 29-year-old’s paintings resemble older traditions, like the works of Gustav Klimt and Aubrey Beardsley, the anxiety they provoke speaks to today’s conditions, where total scrutiny
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of civilian life has created an age steeped in self-consciousness. Alessi aims to trigger a feeling of “inescapable embarrassment,” not sexual so much as perverse. When Alessi was growing up in Los Angeles, he couldn’t look at stacks of folded clothes, because he would see faces in the creases. Eerie visages, dumbstruck and skewed, populated his first solo show at Smart Objects in Los Angeles in 2020. He has since included grids and landscapes in two recent solo shows for Clearing—first in Brussels, then in New York this summer—displaying his signature palette of lilac, burnt umber, and moss. In his Los Angeles studio, Alessi is tinkering with surreal ceramic cups, funky descendants of Méret Oppenheim’s fur-covered table setting. He’s also embarked on a series of grid paintings—patches of moody ochres, stone gray—that evoke the same sinister feeling of his goblins, but abstracted. He’s noticed that after an intense period of painting, he sleeps more deeply. The comedown of what he describes as an “anxiety-based practice” affords him, and by association the viewer, a kind of purge. The work, though, remains—continually bearing witness to these suspended moments of horror, the sense “that at any moment, a balloon behind my head is about to pop.”
ADAM ALESSI 29, Los Angeles By GEOFFREY MAK
“[There’s] the sense that, at any moment, a balloon behind my head is about to pop.”
Photography by JULIE GOLDSTONE
JULIA YERGER 30, Los Angeles By KAT HERRIMAN
of things I can’t really control but I am attached to. When I look at something, I turn it into a cartoon.” As an illustrator, Yerger leaves a lot to her viewers’ imaginations, and it is this plastic ambivalence that leaves the door open to the sinister. This was the case with “Yard Problems,” her inaugural solo show with Clearing at the gallery’s Brussels compound this fall. The colors of Yerger’s abstracted landscapes were vivid, glowing from within, and still somehow foreboding. It made you wonder what might be hiding in plain sight, and what we can expect next from an artist so invested in the formal qualities of infinite potential.
“Cartoons are great abstractions. They are beautiful but also have the capability to hide so much.”
JULIA YERGER WISHES she still had her Photoshop fan art, the stuff she exhibited as a teenager in “naughty, guilty places on the Internet.” That early output would be generative fodder for the oil paintings that the 30-year-old artist is making now. In their compositional density, they resemble those early collages as well as the more sophisticated digital frescoes Yerger later made while studying at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and in Los Angeles after graduating. These days, the East LA–based artist rarely spends studio time online, beyond the occasional use of a computer for sketching. But the screen’s influence on the work persists anyway, driving Yerger’s canvases toward acts of compression. “In painting, I try to translate the spirit of my digital work. There are super-close-up details and super-receded graphic ideas happening all at once,” she says. “I’m working through that in the painting, where it is a lot more challenging to make it what I want.” The intricacies of oil paint are ultimately what attracted Yerger to the medium. At MICA, she got her fill of idea-driven work that only required one or two decisions to cook. Yerger consciously implemented the reverse approach, where each move begets the next three. It is in the fissiparous nature of semi-abstract art, the splitting and dividing of possibility into subsets of infinity, that Yerger has found a home. That is not to say that there aren’t acts of simplification in the artist’s work. Cartoons are a major influence, although Yerger doesn’t watch them and never really did. “To me, cartoons are great abstractions. They are beautiful but also have the capability to hide so much,” she says. “It’s a combination Photography by JULIE GOLDSTONE
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CONNOR MARIE STANKARD
IN THE FOURTH GRADE, Connor Marie Stankard found an American Girl doll catalog in the mailbox of her New Jersey home. She begged her parents to buy her one, but the dolls were too expensive. So she made her own, molding clay and stuffing it into a sock. “A cursed doll,” jokes Stankard. To-
31, New York By GEOFFREY MAK
day, she sees this as the crystallization of her art-making impulse: wanting something out of reach—an idol of some perfect girl, a simulation with no original—and making her own fucked-up version instead. Stankard’s 2022 solo show at Lubov, “Ava, Chloe, Blair, Nicole,” presented paintings of girls with contorted and utterly possessed-looking faces. Chloe, 2022, bares eyes the shape of car headlights. Taylor Jeanne, 2022, has sickly, lavender-tinted skin. As references, the artist uploaded images—of friends, strangers, Lily-Rose Depp—onto Artbreeder, online GAN software that can warp faces according to categories such as “emotion,” “earrings,” or “age.” Stankard’s subjects are vampiric, but too vapid to be lethal. They’re glamorous, in the way that luxury aesthetics often tease danger (cuteness is for the middle class). And “they’re not self-portraits, but they are autobiographical,” she acquiesces. The 31-year-old doesn’t make work about the Internet so much as she uses its methods of constructing meaning as the operational logic of her practice. Screenshots from an eBay listing and Stankard’s Instagram “Explore” page served as two references for a painting I saw in her Chinatown studio for Night Gallery’s Frieze London presentation this fall. That a woman isn’t an entity so much as an aggregation of circulating images—“a chimera”—feels uniquely digital. As we stood in front of a naturalistic sketch of the writer Olivia Kan-Sperling, I winced when Stankard told me she planned to slice the image to create “some combination of half a face, and then [on] the next panel, abstraction, ultimately creating these exquisite corpses.” It’s a pun on the parlor game, as well as a literal corpse: as if these effigies of downtown debutantes can serve as body doubles, taking the hit as corporate and misogynist fantasies, even violent ones, are flung onto them. Stankard says she wants to distill a kind of “build-a-girl” recipe, the myth that a combination of the right signifiers—a pouty lower-lip, a Dior anti-aging mask—makes a girl. Or rather, the image of one. So, why not butcher them? “Images can really take a lot of abuse,” she says. “This is the safe realm of an artwork—a fantasy which is not real.”
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Photography by AVA PELLOR
“Even when I’m working alone, I’m not actually.”
“THE SPEAKER OF this
as an individual genius. Like the prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba once said, “Everything worthwhile is done with other people.” Henry-Smith embodies this by using art to underline our interdependence. In 2019, they published a cookbook in collaboration with poet Imani Elizabeth Jackson, under the moniker mouthfeel. Consider the Tongue combines photography and poetry, featuring historically Black recipes, like gumbo and oyster stew. They chose the format of the cookbook to explore food’s unique ability to bring people together. “A lot of the first oyster bars in New York were owned by recently freed slaves,” they explain. “It’s where abolitionists would meet.” For years, Henry-Smith has refined the art of hanging out. “Portrait-making is an element of conversation,” they say, describing their snapshots of friends in Lunar New Year, a short film from 2021 for 47 Canal. In front of the camera, poet Slant Rhyme and scholar Ryan Clarke pose with relaxed intimacy. Both are ravers. “The dance floor is an extension of our study,” reasons Henry-Smith. Taking after Amiri Baraka’s poetry on John Coltrane, Henry-Smith has also looked to echo the music of their contemporaries, like the noise musician Dreamcrusher, who inspired Henry-Smith’s poem “Another Country.” This act of annotation has culminated in performances with co-conspirators like the techno DJ Shyboi, with whom Henry-Smith is currently working on a collaboration, titled what mosses!, in conjunction with L’Rain and Justin Allen. Another musical project—a solo album under the name astringency principle of the looking drum—occupies a slice of the life they split between New York and Amsterdam. If kinship is Henry-Smith’s medium, the rapture of a well-accompanied life is their subject. Across their practice, the artist presents people not in collective struggle, per se, but in shared joy: at raves, dinners, poetry readings. In Henry-Smith’s hands, these practices become what they call “technologies of togetherness.” “Even when I’m working alone,” they assert, “I’m not actually.”
S*AN D. HENRY-SMITH
poem is in a tizzy in a huffy & a 1/2, she’s feeling / down on her luck,” reads the first line of “earworm,” a poem from 2019. “I am her, I would do anything for her / survival,” it continues, setting up the catchy, propulsive pace the following lines will follow. The verses swerve from subject to object, destabilizing the “I” as a sovereign entity, liquefying into a rhythmic empathy that feels urgent, alive. The sculptor of those words, S*an D. Henry-Smith, is a quiet revolutionary. Through their collaborative, multi-disciplinary practice, the 31-year-old is out to destroy the myth of the artist
Self-portrait by S*AN D. HENRY-SMITH
31, Amsterdam and New York By GEOFFREY MAK
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“THE TEARS THAT YOU CRY when you’re sad, when you’re happy, or when you’re yawning are actually different molecular compositions,” Jes Fan explains over Zoom. “Thinking about things at the molecular level excites me.” These are recurrent themes in the Hong Kong– and Brooklyn-based artist’s work: smallness, intellectual engagement, and the biological code that underpins and defines our turbulent emotional lives. Fan was born in Canada and raised in Hong Kong before moving to New York in 2014 to study. In his almost 10 years in the city, the artist has developed a practice that harnesses installation, sculpture, and video to design, test, and even farm substances including oysters and plants. Whatever the focus, Fan’s work of late has emphasized exploration, process, and continuity. Currently, the artist—who graduated with a BFA in glass from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2014—is at work on the third chapter of an ongoing series called “Sites of Wounding,” which began in 2020. The first chapter, which he presented at Hong Kong’s Empty Gallery earlier this year, took a local oyster species as its launch point, and included video works and large glass-embalmed shells, evoking the museumification of nature, body modification, and artifacts of global capitalism. The latest chapter will focus on soybeans and the process of soy milk–making, using the liquid as a video projection surface. “I have a fascination with these underlying networks of labor and materials—it comes to me quite organically, because my family worked in factories, and my dad ran a factory in China,” he says. The simplicity of Fan’s persistent thematic inquiries (how is something made? Where, by whom, and for what purpose?) allows for a current of complex themes to emerge, which the artist prods at and unravels. Fan’s sculptural interventions echo with the concepts at the heart of his work. In Bivalve I and Bivalve II, both 2023, bubbling, glass forms drip from shells made of resin. The pieces are situated in an industrial frame, asking viewers to confront the ways that organic materials are embedded in complex systems of labor, and how they endure in the face of destruction and extraction. But though he confronts the viewer with these heady questions, Fan understands that he is implicated, too. “I extend these questions and apply them to myself,” he asserts. “How am I made? What am I made of?”
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JES FAN
33, Hong Kong and New York
“I extend these questions and apply them to myself. How am I made? What am I made of?”
By TIANA REID
Photography by ALLISON LIPPY
VIOLET DENNISON
34, New York By KAT HERRIMAN
Photography by ALLISON LIPPY
VIOLET DENNISON MAKES paintings with the precision and foresight of an installation artist. This is an affectation that the Bridgeport, Connecticut–born artist developed over nearly a decade of showing sculpture—frequently in Europe, where the young conceptualist found a following amongst kunsthalle directors with the resources and room to chase her ideas down the rabbit hole. Dennison, 34, fondly recalls arriving to install solo exhi-
“Art can happen very fast. That is how I work—don’t let the paint dry.”
bitions with nothing but a “recipe”—no art—to execute. For her, “recipe” is a flexible-enough term to include serious acts of plumbing, as evidenced by her 2017 show “Transcend” at Jan Kaps gallery in Cologne. For Pipe Re-Route, one of the exhibition’s many interventions, the artist laparatomized the bathroom wall, redirecting the faucet to flow onto her longtime gallery’s floor. You knew when people washed their hands: The dribble became a gush. At the New Museum Triennial a year later, Dennison arrived with bundles of Floridian seagrass. She liked the hydrophyte’s wellness-industry associations and its relentless impulse to ejaculate seeds and lasso passersby into becoming unwitting messengers in their odyssey back to the sea. At some point during the triennial, the curators decided the seagrass was a little too eager, and Dennison was obliged to glue the thalassic strands down. As an artist, Dennison revels in unexpected results, like misbehaving seaweed. The element of surprise keeps her coming back day after day to her treehouse-like studio in New York’s Financial District. Lately, her experiments have been drifting toward her first love: oil paint. She reminisces about a devout high school art teacher who taught her to mix pigments, and an undergraduate experience at New York University that later turned her allegiances to conceptualism. Today, her process hews more closely to the latter. It is preparation-intensive and finishes with a burst of athleticism. Some ideas start on paper, others on the screen, and then they switch, migrating from digital space to easel and back again until a satisfying composition arrives on canvas. “[When I was working on installations], I realized art can happen very fast. That is how I work,” says Dennison. “Don't let the paint dry.” This means not being too precious, even when her current subject matter is Ovidian mythology and the symbology of flowers. There are things in the pipeline as always, like a show at Jan Kaps this past summer, but it’s too early to know what direction the water is flowing just yet.
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35, New York By CAMILLE OKHIO IN ITS RAW FORM, glass embodies conflicting states of existence: hard, soft, sharp, smooth. It can be stiff and unyielding, yet delicate enough to interact with the most sensitive sites: the mouth, the eye, the hand. Shattered, it slices and severs. For Charisse Pearlina Weston, the material is a tool of resistance. Though synonymous with fragility and transparency, in her hands it becomes a means by which to obfuscate and protect. She molds it into a medium of refusal, a poem in physical form. The New York–based artist first discovered glass in 2016, while searching for a way to layer text and photography. Her approach is straightforward: She relies mostly on slumping or hot-folding the material while it is in the kiln. “I have been painted as a glass artist, though I am not formally trained,” says Weston. “My interest in glass is as a conceptual vehicle.” Glass is one of several mediums within the lexicons of sculpture and writing that the 35-year-old uses to explore Black intimacy, mourning, memory, and interiority. When she injects it with images and words (often poems or found quotes), it serves to highlight the manifold ways in which Black safety and belonging are consciously degraded. More specifically, Weston confronts police brutality, unsolicited interpersonal intervention, and the ways the Black body has been seized, used, and perceived nonconsensually. In “of [a] tomorrow: lighter than air, stronger than whiskey, cheaper than dust,” a solo exhibition at the Queens Museum last winter, Weston suspended a large artwork, of the same name as the show, from the ceiling of a central gallery. Its installation was foreboding, intentionally confusing the movement and bodily autonomy of visitors, forcing them to change course. The work built on the gesture of defiance embodied by
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CHARISSE PEARLINA WESTON
an unrealized resistance act proposed by the Brooklyn and Bronx chapters of the Congress of Racial Equality at the beginning of the 1964–65 World’s Fair, which was held where the museum now stands. As she excavates the past through her work, Weston also sustains her momentum as a rising star in the conceptual art arena. With sculptural works included in an upcoming show at Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany, and new work unveiling this fall at MoMA PS1, she is turning to other materials, like canvas, to interrogate and dismantle strategies of oppression, while maintaining her connection to glass.
“My interest in glass is as a conceptual vehicle.”
Photography by DENZEL GOLATT
ADRAINT KHADAFHI BEREAL 25, New York By KAT HERRIMAN
IN SEPTEMBER, Bottega Veneta invited Adraint Khadafhi Bereal to its Spring/ Summer 2024 show in Milan. It was the 25-year-old Waco, Texas, native’s first European fall. He texted, “I’m walking around so much and forget to eat because I’m afraid that the city will disappear between blinks. I’m taking pictures, refusing to really look at them. It’s like sketching, for a time when I can afford to stand somewhere for long enough to scatter the dust that’s now up to my ankles.” Bereal is a poet by disposition. It comes out whether he is walking around a foreign city, writing an essay, or shooting a fashion editorial. His art reeks of literature. Sometimes the association is direct, like with his next project, currently in its research phase. He is trying to figure out why Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde only shared the same stage once. Bereal’s work always starts with a quandary. From there, field research, interpretation, and divination ensue. The Black Yearbook, his breakthrough work, asked what the real Black student body of his alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin, looked like—the one not shown in the brochures. The project became a multiyear feat across universities, combining interviews, essays, and photography, and culminating 206 culturedmag.com
in a self-published encyclopedia of personal testimonies and portraits that fell somewhere between a W.G. Sebald-ian novel and Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s 1979–80 Touch Sanitation project, where she shook the hand of every garbage worker in New York. A portion of The Black Yearbook ran as a prominent New York Times feature in 2020, but this January, it will take book form with Penguin Random House. Reflecting on the milestone from his home in Brooklyn, Bereal notes that The Black Yearbook was not about making pictures, but being present in the stadium, the dorm room, the frat house, or the quad. The all-in approach and investigative thrust of the work aligns Bereal with artists like Leigh Ledare and Jill Magid, social provocateurs who don’t flinch at the mess we’ve made. “The truth is just as important as an imagined reality,” says Bereal. “We’re walking towards much harder times, and that deserves space. I’m exhausted with ‘Black joy,’ I want to know what comes after rage. Is it sickness?”
“I’m exhausted with ‘Black joy,’ I want to know what comes after rage. Is it sickness?” culturedmag.com 206
Self-portrait by ADRAINT KHADAFHI BEREAL
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THE STATE OF LABOR’S BOOTH AT ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH 2022. PHOTOGRAPHY BY MIKHAIL MISHIN. IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTISTS AND LABOR, MEXICO CITY.
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THREE ART DEALERS AT DIFFERENT STAGES OF THEIR CAREERS GIVE CULTURED AN EXCLUSIVE LOOK AT THE REALITY OF TODAY’S ART FAIR ECOSYSTEM.
THE
FAIRS By JULIA HALPERIN culturedmag.com 209
Visiting an art fair as an artist, I’ve been told, is like watching your parents have sex. Getting anywhere close to the action feels obscene, but the fact that it happens is healthy and even necessary—as long as those who are not directly involved don’t have to think about it. Since the debut of the first modern art fair, Art Cologne, in 1967, the number and scale of these commercial events has multiplied exponentially, reflecting and fuelling the expansion of the art market as a whole. No fair symbolizes the art world’s growing association with pop culture, celebrity, and excess more than Art Basel Miami Beach. First held in 2002, the event began as the fun-loving, sunny alternative to its buttoned-up Swiss sibling at a time when collectors from the Americas were becoming increasingly powerful. Twenty-one years later, ABMB, as it is now known, is a juggernaut, generating an estimated annual economic impact of roughly $400 million for Miami and spawning countless satellite fairs, marketing pop-ups, and parties entirely unrelated to art. Through it all, one thing hasn’t changed. When this year’s edition of the fair opens to VIPs on Dec. 6, dealers will be standing in the middle of their booths, hands behind their backs, ready to do business, just as they were two decades ago. To get their take on the evolution of ABMB and everything it represents, CULTURED assembled a roundtable of three gallerists at different stages in their careers: Tim Blum, Pamela Echeverría, and Ellie Rines. Blum, who co-founded the influential Blum & Poe gallery in 1994, has contributed to the rise of Los Angeles as a global art capital and exposed American audiences to Japanese cultural figures from Takashi Murakami to the leading names of the Mono-ha movement. He has attended ABMB from the very beginning, but returns this year under the banner of his new independent venture, Blum. Echeverría worked at the influential Mexico City dealership Galería OMR before establishing Labor gallery in 2009, which has earned a reputation for cerebral, political, and ambitious projects. She has seen up-close the fair’s evolving relationship with collectors in Central and Latin America. Finally, Rines— who founded her New York gallery, 56 Henry, in
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2015—will be attending Art Basel Miami Beach as an exhibitor for the first time this year. Here, the trio discuss the ways that fairs serve as a microcosm of the art world’s evolution—for better or for worse.
a lack of embarrassment. But I do think it’ll be good for getting a bunch of curators to see the work. Our program doesn’t really lend itself to art fairs easily because we don’t have a bunch of inventory lying around.
Tell me about your first Art Basel Miami Beach experiences. Tim, you went to the very first Miami fair in 2002. What was it like?
We’re showing a project by Cynthia Talmadge. It’s an imagined reconstruction of the studio of Mary Pinchot Meyer, a Sunday painter and DC socialite. She was a mistress of JFK’s—she got him into LSD, trying to get him to imagine a more peaceful existence. She either committed suicide or was murdered, and all of her belongings were confiscated by the CIA. There will be six monumental paintings, imagined objects, and researched objects.
TIM BLUM: A charming, small-town gathering. It was not the art world that we’re in now, and Miami Beach was not what it is today. Collins Avenue was boarded up, and there were tumbleweeds—almost literal tumbleweeds—going down the boulevard. It was super strange to see all the Euro-chic dealers kitted out and walking down Collins. All the dealers that you know now, and either hate or love, were getting going then. PAMELA ECHEVERRÍA: We applied in 2010 with a project by Héctor Zamora. When he sent me his proposal, I was so seduced by the power of the work. A couple weeks before the fair, I realized there might be a problem. It was composed of 12 industrial fans blowing through wind cones, like the ones at the airport. It was so loud. I can’t tell you how much money I spent on bottles of tequila—I left them on every booth nearby with a note asking for forgiveness, because it was real torture. In the end, we did well. And nobody forgot about us. Ellie, you’re doing Art Basel Miami Beach for the first time this year with a project in the Positions sector, which is dedicated to installations by emerging artists. That’s a real investment for a young gallery, but you’ve made the calculation that this is the right move for you. Why? ELLIE RINES: It remains to be seen; talk to me on Jan. 1. There’s obviously a level of prestige associated with Basel. Last year, people were coming up and telling me that it was such a crime that we weren’t let in. We didn’t apply. So I guess part of the reason for doing the fair is for
How much are you investing in the project? RINES: Well, we’ve already had to put in $30,000 for production because it’s a shorter time frame. So Cynthia has about five assistants in the studio—it’s all super labor-intensive. These days, that kind of experimental art-fair presentation is limited to sections dedicated to younger galleries and special projects. But back in 2006, a boom time in the art market, Gavin Brown presented a nearly empty booth with an Urs Fischer sculpture of a crumpled cigarette box on the ground. He described that presentation to me later as “cocky poetry,” which he said is no longer particularly welcome or appropriate at art fairs. Do you agree? BLUM: Art fairs sum up, in a microcosmic way, our art world. The fair, ultimately, is the quintessential definer—and it’s a great leveler, too. Fairs used to be a place where you’d strike that balance between capital and something like the project that Ellie is doing. Hopefully at the end, it all balances out. I’ve certainly had a history of doing that—in Art Basel Statements in 2000, we did a Sam Durant installation that was, in retrospect, psychotic. It was a Southern rock ’n’ roll Zen garden and a shack that he constructed out of scrap.
“I’VE BEEN INVOLVED WITH A NUMBER OF ARTISTS WHO TRIED TO DEMOCRATIZE THE ART WORLD— BUT THE BEST INTENTIONS OFTEN GET SIDESWIPED, EITHER BY EGO OR THE SEDUCTION OF CAPITAL.” –TIM BLUM
Photography by BRAD TORCHIA
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PHOTOGRAPHY BY RAMIRO CHAVES. IMAGE COURTESY OF LABOR, MEXICO CITY.
“ART BASEL IS ABOUT PRESTIGE. YOU MIGHT LOSE MONEY DURING THE FAIR, BUT AT THE END OF THE DAY, YOU HAVE THE ANGUS BEEF STAMP ON YOUR FOREHEAD, AND IT KEEPS YOU SELLING THE WHOLE YEAR.” –PAMELA ECHEVERRÍA
ABMB BY THE NUMBERS $2,520 The cost, per night, of a hotel room at the Setai during this year’s Miami Art Week.
Did you sell it? BLUM: Fuck no. We ended up just smoking pot on the porch and gave out joints. That’s a different time right there, right? Certainly, it’s not what I’m up to these days. Right now, it’s all painting all the time, all marketed and presold. It used to be, at these fairs, including Miami, there’d be curatorial and museum groups coming through with trustees. Now, the city has become so insane that the fun has worn off for some people. ECHEVERRÍA: Totally. Little by little, you started noticing that the Europeans decided not to go anymore. It was the party economy that ended up sort of destroying the vibe. I can tell you that people in Mexico go to Art Basel weekend just for the parties. BLUM: The Florida component is not insignificant, by the way. I have plenty of clients, friends of mine, who won’t go to Florida again. The last political one, at least that I remember, must have been in 2016 after Trump was elected. We actually did a whole thing with Henry Taylor and Sam Durant trying to make a statement. It feels kind of empty and weak, in retrospect. That’s the thing with art fairs. Art is supposed to be engaged with the world, but you’re also in this hermetically sealed container. How do you deal with that tension? BLUM: There’s no easy answer. I’ve been involved with a number of artists who tried to democratize the art world—but the best intentions often get sideswiped, either by ego or the seduction of capital. I guess you just have to hold true to what you’re doing and if you believe in it, do it. Or just show abstract painting and call it a day. That, uh, was a joke. ECHEVERRÍA: No, it’s true. We have a program that is profoundly political and in your face. And it’s always a struggle. You have to add a little candy, too. During the pandemic, when everybody was panicking and nobody knew if they were going to die tomorrow, I started changing the work
277 The number of galleries
participating in the 2023 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach.
$34 The price of one order of spicy vodka rigatoni at Carbone Miami Beach.
35% The proportion of gallery sales
generated at art fairs in 2022, according to the latest Art Basel UBS Art Market Report.
$1,000 The cost, per square meter,
of a medium-sized booth in the main galleries section of Art Basel Miami Beach this year.
NO FAIR SYMBOLIZES THE ART WORLD’S GROWING ASSOCIATION WITH POP CULTURE, CELEBRITY, AND EXCESS MORE THAN ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH.
that I had around me at my place. I was like, Shit, I just want to look at a pretty painting. Maybe an abstract painting would be super nice to have. I realized that beauty is also a human necessity. And in the financial realm, it’s true that with 100 percent political art, it’s impossible. I want to talk about money. According to the latest Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report, sales at art fairs represented 42 percent of gallery revenue in 2019 and 35 percent in 2022. How does that compare to your experience? RINES: I don’t really think so much about the operating costs because we try to keep it pretty lean. I want the artists to be able to be in their studios full-time, if that’s what they want. We have a Google sheet on every artist, and we try to really look at their specific numbers. We can do a fair that’s less competitive than Basel and use it to drum up some money for an artist who is between exhibitions and whose bank account might be getting a little less comfortable. ECHEVERRÍA: The pandemic proved to us that we don’t need art fairs to live, but we do need art fairs for other purposes. The market in Mexico is growing faster and faster, and during the pandemic, super wealthy people had no choice but to look at local galleries. Our Rolodex increased. We are doing fewer fairs now. Each one needs a really clear purpose. Art Basel is about prestige. You might lose money during the fair, but at the end of the day, you have the Angus Beef stamp on your forehead, and it keeps you selling the whole year. People trust you because of it. But I don’t know how much longer this is going to be sustained because I feel that Art Basel and Frieze are now turning into lifestyle brands and not entities that support valuable artistic work. BLUM: Basel has the ultimate stamp. Frieze was always cooler on some level, but it was never as good. Of course people are going to tell you, Ellie, “Oh my God, it’s a crime that they don’t let you in.” Having been on the committees, there’s crazy-ass shit that goes on. I was on the Miami one for a long time. It was a good committee,
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and then it wasn’t. People have their own individual shit they bring, and they actually have an impact. If they don’t like you, they’re going to do whatever they can to make sure you’re not in. ECHEVERRÍA: Do you know what happened to me once? My application was leaked to this artist who started bitching about the proposal we sent. And this bitching went to top-level curators all over the world. And these curators emailed me asking, “What’s going on? This is bad.” So I understood the meaning of resilience at that time. I kept quiet. You keep going. BLUM: We didn’t do any fairs until we got into Art Basel Statements. We were such arrogant twats back then. We had to be, because we were from the West Coast and everybody thought we were from Nowheresville. We did Murakami and then Durant. And then a few years later, we were bounced. It was totally political because one of the main board members wanted to show Murakami—it was a quid pro quo. And at that point in the gallery’s career, the fair was a really important source of income. It was just like you described, Pamela. You have to be resilient. Fortunately, there are other ways to navigate now. They had to change the whole system. They can’t just bounce people anymore. Instead, you have to wait for people to either retire or die or commit a crime of some sort. ECHEVERRÍA: Depends on the crime. [Laughs] I think everyone would agree that fairs are one of the worst places to see art. But they are also the way that a lot of people do see art, especially really busy people. Ellie, you’ve said that you feel like fairs are an opportunity to show your program to curators in New York who don’t want to come downtown. RINES: It drives me nuts. We can put all this time into a solo show … we think it’s this important development in the artist’s work. And then I’ve got to bring everything to an art fair to get all the curators in New York to see it. I assumed that art fairs were supposed to be a way to drum up sales. But instead, I have to use them to get cu-
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ratorial attention, which is incredibly frustrating. ECHEVERRÍA: In the end, you have to use the fairs the way they work. For example, in Art Basel this year, these booths that I would look forward to every year, spectacular presentations that were planned for months and months and months—they’re gone. And there are even dealers adding prices to the wall labels. What’s so bad about that? ECHEVERRÍA: Well, I think having the price as the audience’s very first point of contact with an artwork is unfair to the work and unfair to the public. BLUM: I would never put prices out on the stand. RINES: I wouldn’t mind putting the prices up and then going to the beach. [Laughs] We were in Chicago and not one person asked us the price of these rockets that we were showing. So, I’d like people to be curious about the price, but I don’t know that I need to include it on the label. The thing is, it’s a commercial environment. It’s sort of silly to pretend that it’s not. BLUM: Should we roll it out? ECHEVERRÍA: I wonder if, instead of labels, we just put the price, not the name of the artwork. Nothing but the price. And big! [Laughs]
they’d take the whole floor, right? That’s a real story. One gallery was like, “Well, we’d like a contemporary stand on the second floor and modern on the ground.” That’s the chasm between the behemoths and a young dealer like Ellie. The fairs, they’re emblematic of all of it. If you were in charge of fixing the art world, how would you change art fairs? ECHEVERRÍA: That’s a tricky question. I think sometimes fairs just say, “If you agree to participate, it’s your risk.” Find a little empathy and compassion—especially with the young galleries—to make sure that they are not going to go bankrupt after the fair that you encouraged them so energetically to do. Appearing in the press does not pay the bills. RINES: It’s important to support the ecosystem. If I make a sale for a larger gallery, they’re usually very generous in giving me a percentage. And I try to pay that forward. At NADA, I always try to bring collectors over to the project section and say, “Hey, $1,200 is nothing to you. This gallery just needs to do that four times and then they’re going to be okay.” BLUM: It doesn’t change—it just gets more expensive. In this business, with all the art fair mania, what keeps you from getting cynical? BLUM: Change—always embrace change. I’m announcing a new gallery and identity and it’s not been fun, particularly, but it’s important. And remaining curious.
In 2019, before the pandemic, there was a lot of talk about the unfairness of the fair system. Larger dealers and smaller dealers were paying the same amount per square foot, but larger dealers were selling much more expensive art. So Art Basel and a few other fairs adapted by having larger galleries pay more per square foot to subsidize the smaller galleries. What do you think about that concept?
RINES: For me, it’s really the artists. Luckily I’m in New York, so I get to spend a lot of time with them. I find that to be the most rewarding part of my job: representing artists and getting to see them develop in different ways.
BLUM: I was supportive of a tiered structure. There was also a flip side where some of the major dealers were trying to leverage their power to get another stand. Of course, if they could,
ECHEVERRÍA: I agree, it’s the relationship with them. I pick the artists I work with because they fulfill my curiosity. In the end, the way I cultivate myself is through their vision.
“LAST YEAR, PEOPLE WERE COMING UP AND TELLING ME THAT IT WAS SUCH A CRIME THAT WE WEREN’T LET IN. WE DIDN’T APPLY. SO I GUESS PART OF THE REASON FOR DOING THE FAIR IS FOR A LACK OF EMBARRASSMENT.” –ELLIE RINES
Photography by LUCIA BELL-EPSTEIN
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RACHEL ROSSIN: “SCRY” (INSTALLATION VIEW), MAGENTA PLAINS, 2023. IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND MAGENTA PLAINS, NEW YORK, NY.
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IN TIMES OF SOCIAL ABSURDISM AND POLITICAL TUMULT, SUPERSTITION AND APATHY ARISE IN EQUAL MEASURE. TODAY, THAT RESPONSE IS EMBODIED BY TWO DRUGS FOR HORSES—KETAMINE AND IVERMECTIN. HERE, ONE WRITER REFLECTS ON THE EQUINE-INFLECTED, ANXIETY-RIDDEN ETHOS SWEEPING THE ART WORLD. By TRAVIS DIEHL
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IT DIDN’T TAKE the collective intelligence of Twitter long to realize that the chaos of our decade is embodied by two drugs meant for horses: ketamine and ivermectin. The former, a horse tranquilizer, has been a party drug for generations, but is newly and heavily marketed as a treatment for depression, addiction, and general soullessness. The latter, a livestock dewormer, ascended the manure pile of right-wing conspiracy theories as a dubious (and thoroughly debunked) prophylactic for Covid-19. Maybe we’re not so far from the days when railroad baron Leland Stanford set out to engineer the optimal racehorse on his Palo Alto ranch. The horse, after all, is a powerful symbol—a laborer turned ornament, an acceptable outlet for the fetish of good breeding. The New York police force still
HARRIS ROSENBLUM, ARCHANGEL (AFTER WOWAKA), 2023. IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND SARA’S.
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maintains mounted units at great taxpayer cost, and on social media, the “horse girl,” a human in thrall to animal strength, is resurgent. The horse promises to transport us to a simpler, nobler time. Meanwhile, your modern-day robber baron (read: Stanford Man) dresses like a slob and peddles snake oil online. In eras of existential stress, societies turn to superstition. On one end, the mental health establishment’s embrace of psychedelics promises to revive the holistic revolution of the 1960s. On the other, splintered factions put their faith in “Q,” who preaches the gospel of “doing your own research.” As in previous periods of tumult, artists play their role as soothsayers and deconstructionists, holding a mirror to the absurdities and contradictions of the
moment. Paige K. Bradley, a writer and artist, provides cryptic fields of signs, inviting us to connect the dots with little pieces of red yarn. The sculptor Harris Rosenblum produces equally eclectic work that puts various belief systems in dialogue. New York artists Rachel Rossin and Brian Oakes have returned to ancient Christian symbolism through the essentially mystic alleyways of technology. These four artists depict what could be described as the defining urge of our era, reaching for a form of devotion through their own constellations of belief-anchoring objects. Through Bible stories, video games, or a medicine cabinet of horse pills, artists are palpably seeking. In this endeavor, they share a dream with both the dissociating millennials snorting K and the amateur eschatologists hoarding equine antiparasitics. This October, Bradley published Drive It All Over Me, a long, spiraling essay in response to “Bad Driver,” a 2021 show by the artist duo Jay & Q at Maxwell Graham in New York. In one passage, she describes a pantomime horse as “two people in one outfit,” a pair of fractured beings loping along awkwardly, trying to reinhabit some truer form of mammal. Jay & Q’s retrospective at REDCAT nine years earlier centered on their sponsorship of a middling show-jumping prize in Germany. In it, two video works positioned the poetic litany of the horses’ names against a ledger of the pair’s conceptual artist forebears, like Christopher Williams and Marcel Duchamp. Bradley does what she was tasked with, then takes things a step farther, invoking conceptual artist Jack Goldstein and his impenetrable late artist books—typewritten binders of quotes arranged like concrete poems. Goldstein—who once spent a night buried underground as a performance piece, and did heroin alone in his trailer until he suicided—is a saint in the sub-rosa canon of paranoid art. His biographer, Richard Hertz, coined the phrase “CalArts Mafia” to describe the artist’s cohort. Bradley and I are both CalArts alumni. Goldstein and I share a birthday. These are the sorts of discursive connections prized by conspiracy theorists and artists—the type of thinking that makes ivermectin seem like a good idea. Where ivermectin connects the dots, ketamine buffers and transcends. The insights it offers, at ascending doses, can be dissociative, epiphanic, or hellish—but nobody takes
GEORGIA GARDNER GRAY, ESCAPING THE CITY, 2023. IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND REENA SPAULINGS FINE ART.
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it too seriously. We used to talk about irony. Now, the culture’s response to worldwide anxiety is ambivalence. God is a mushroom and an A.I. The worst will happen, and it won’t. The puckish Catholic symbolism unfolding among certain echelons of the godless art landscape, particularly along a stretch of Chinatown in New York, has a similar tenor. At Reena Spaulings, a painting show by Georgia Gardner Gray called “He Bombs” casts stand-up comics in various saintly and Christ-like poses. Harris Rosenblum’s show at Sara’s mixed the mythology of the tabletop roleplay game Warhammer with Bible stories, prepper gear, and decidedly profane materials: a lamb made from a combination of soy-based resin and bone broth, pink Realtree reliquaries, and a statuette of Hatsune Miku (the synthetic Japanese pop megastar who appears in concert as a hologram) made of clay sourced from a Wendy’s construction site. The artist works in the niche between nerdiness and saintliness, depicting the struggle for belief itself—a squirm-provoking inquiry in today’s ideological climate. Gamers may seem maladapted to outsiders, but the same was said of early Christians. Technology seems to offer new routes to divinity, prompting artists working with electronics to hearken back to careworn idioms and old gods. In Rossin’s recent show at Magenta Plains, an installation was shaped and lit like a chapel, and chunky pale paintings delicately printed with images of mechs—giant battle robots—lined the walls like altar panels. A round disc of LEDs on the ceiling played heavenly heatmap imagery and digital renderings of angelic, disembodied nerves. Cyborgs embody the desire to reengineer ourselves as wholly synthetic beings: unfeeling, unanxious. A recent group show at Blade Study, titled “Epiphany,” and an early show at Dunkunsthalle, a project space Rossin runs, featured sculptures by Oakes: circuitboard angels, their sharp black wings studded with LEDs, hanging in space from their wires. We are far from Precious Moments, lost in the awesome swirls of eyes and wings that characterize heavenly messengers in the Old Testament. Be not afraid, angels like to say. Anxiety is the unmanaged fear about what you can’t know or change, dwelling on a feeling of impending doom. Call it the Singularity, or the apocalypse, or just Sunday morning. Even a glimpse of that final pale horse would bring relief.
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HARRIS ROSENBLUM, THE SACRIFICIAL LAMB, 2023. IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND SARA’S.
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Designed by the world’s most respected watchmakers, these 10 timepieces represent the pinnacle of craft and innovation—luxuriant heirlooms to mark life’s fleeting moments. Photography by SEAN DAVIDSON Styling by WAYOUT STUDIO
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EASTSIDE VISIONS Eastside Los Angeles thrums with life—the kind that exists outside of the postcard visions of the city. Photographer Emmanuel SanchezMonsalve and fashion editor Yashua Simmons highlight family ties in the neighborhoods of El Sereno and Huntington, bringing Louis Vuitton Men’s Spring-Summer PreCollection 2024 clothing to life through nostalgic snapshots frozen in time. Picture a silver-haired woman with silver-capped front teeth standing at her kitchen sink. She faces a window that looks east. In an hour, she’ll be driving west, to work. For now, the dawn belongs to her. The sun begins its ascent over the San Gabriel Valley. The woman lifts a mug of coffee to her wrinkled lips and blows, flattening the steam. In this moment, El Sereno deserves its name. A rooster interrupts the silence. The neighbor’s pregnant pit bull howls. A hummingbird hovers just outside the window, dipping his beak into a Mexican sage’s white and purple blooms. The silver-haired woman watches him bob. The way that the bird moves his head, jerking it left, right, left, reminds her of her son, the one who treated his body like the Sistine Chapel. A tattoo of Our Lady of Fátima crowning his head. Lilies on his stubbly cheeks. The sacred heart of Jesus covering his own. The temple that was his body has been destroyed. She’ll visit what remains of him on Sunday, bringing roses, marzipan, and beer to the cemetery. Until then, she will swallow her bitter drink and wonder if the coffee sipped by the mother of the boy who stole her son tastes any sweeter.
Words by MYRIAM GURBA Photography by EMMANUEL SANCHEZ-MONSALVE Styled by YASHUA SIMMONS All clothes and accessories by LOUIS VUITTON MENʼS
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Pull quote here as the “anti-Melting Pot”—a vast constellation of enclaves that thrums with life. For this issue, stylist Yashua Simmons and photographer culturedmag.com 237
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Makeup by ESTHER FOSTER Hair by FITCH LUNAR Photography assistance by VICTOR PRIETO and LUIS RAMIREZ Makeup assistance by JESSICA HARRIS Styling assistance by ANDREW MCFARLAND, ARIANNA THODE, and LAURA CHERON HAQUETTE Casting and production by NATALIE LIN at IN SEARCH OF AGENCY
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Models: AMOR MORALES, JONATHAN GONZALES, EDUARDO CESENA, LUCKY, ISAAC PADILLA, and EDDIE LOPEZ BAUTISTA.
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LOUIS VUITTON’S 2023 ARTYCAPUCINES COLLECTION. ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF LOUIS VUITTON.
LOUIS VUITTON’S SIGNATURE BAGS GET THE ARTIST TREATMENT By KATIE WHITE
Now in its fifth edition, the French house’s capsule initiative invites contemporary artists to turn the Capucine bag into a canvas. The artists tapped for this year’s line of Artycapucines share the process and practices behind their wearable works of art. 248 culturedmag.com
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PHOTOGRAPHY BY PIOTR STOKŁOSA.
Art and fashion share a long and storied history. The two disciplines have inspired and informed one another for eons—the ancient Greeks carved peplos onto the caryatids of the Acropolis, and during the Renaissance, Venetian artists dazzled patrons with radiant depictions of fabrics and jewels. At times, the two mediums have met to scandalous effect—one need only think of the uproar that rippled through 18thcentury French society when painter Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun presented portraits of Marie Antoinette adorned in her decadent splendor. Louis Vuitton has a hand in this historic tradition. For over a century, the French house has thrived at the dynamic intersection of art, fashion tradition, and innovation. A legendary purveyor of expertly crafted luggage and leatherwares, the brand has never shied away from collaborating with artists who have defined their generations, from Takashi Murakami to Sylvie Fleury. This fall, Louis Vuitton announced that artists Liza Lou, Ziping Wang, Billie Zangewa, Ewa Juszkiewicz, and duo Tursic & Mille will collaborate with the luxury house on its 2023 Artycapucines. The capsule initiative, now in its fifth edition, invites leading contemporary creatives to turn the Capucine—one of the brand’s beloved bags—into a canvas. This year’s artists, each of whom demonstrates a unique embrace of sartorial principles and material expertise, have dreamed up striking interpretations that touch on the unexpected, the beautiful, and the conceptual, offering visions both playful and poignant. 250 culturedmag.com
ZANGEWA
PHOTOGRAPHY BY ULRICH KNOBLAUCH.
BILLIE
Billie Zangewa first encountered “the mysterious power of sewing” while watching her mother work on small projects with friends during afternoons filled with tea and scones. “It was her sacred space,” she recalls of the sewing circle. The Malawi-born artist, who now works from a home studio in Johannesburg, is known for her handsewn silk collages of intimate, photo-albumlike scenes. For her Capucine, Zangewa recontextualized The Swimming Lesson, a work from 2020 in which a young boy looks out at the vast blue ocean. The artist, who has a son of her own, says her works are a way of celebrating the innate power of womanhood and the personal and universal moments that make up a life. It’s a practice, she explains, that revels in “the small things.”
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& MILLE
PHOTOGRAPHY BY DANI PUJALTE.
TURSIC
Since forming in 2000, the Serbian and French artist duo Tursic & Mille have earned acclaim for their witty conceptual paintings and sculptures that reconfigure the surfeit of images circulating in our culture today. “Our approach evolves as we evolve,” the pair says of their more than 20-year partnership. Seeking surprise, humor, and chance, Tursic & Mille are always on the lookout for new avenues of expression. For Artycapucines, the artists worked in turns, adding and subtracting elements—an approach they say “offers two critical viewpoints, two sources of invention.” Emblazoned with a cinematic, 1950s-inspired silhouette of a man and woman with the word “Tenderness” scrawled above their heads, the duo’s interpretation presents a kind of visual riddle. “In painting, nothing is ever what it first seems,” they muse. “A simple change of viewpoint can, for example, transform a portrait into a still life.”
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IMAGE COURTESY OF LOUIS VUITTON.
Chinese artist Ziping Wang delights in contemporary culture’s visual cornucopia. Her bright, collagelike paintings playfully synthesize imagery from brand logos, food packaging, fabric patterns, and children’s toys, as well as centuries-old visual motifs found in Old Master paintings and Asian decorative arts. Defined by the artist’s clean graphic sensibility, these richly referential paintings translate maximalist aesthetics through a Pop art-esque flattening of the picture plane. Wang celebrates this whimsical mixing of tradition and modernity in her 2023 Capucine. The artist says she thought of the bag as a “movable sculpture” which she embellished with a mix of eye-catching patterns and shapes. Naming her bag Sweet Tooth, Wang was sure to add a few dulcet touches including a candystriped handle and a bright red strawberry design. Wang hopes the bag will evoke a sense of “pure celebratory happiness.”
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PHOTOGRAPHY BY PIOTR STOKŁOSA.
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PHOTOGRAPHY BY PIOTR STOKŁOSA.
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PHOTOGRAPHY BY JAN KRIWOL.
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Glamour takes a surreal turn in Polish artist Ewa Juszkiewicz’s painterly hands. Known for her reimaginings of historical women’s portraiture, Juszkiewicz shrouds the faces of her elegant figures with unexpected elements—a swath of fabric, a bundle of green leaves. These interventions interrogate societal expectations for female beauty while exposing, as the artist says, “what was often hidden behind the art historical canon: women’s emotions, wildness, and vitality.” Juszkiewicz has translated her 2021 painting Ginger Locks, depicting a woman’s face obscured by a decadent mass of auburn curls, into her Capucine. A luminous strand of pearls punctuates the bag’s handsome form. “Reflecting colors and different textures was crucial for me,” remarks Juszkiewicz. “By combining various techniques and materials, like hand-dyed leather and multilayered printing, the final effect is beautiful and sophisticated … Thanks to the elaborate manual work of expert artisans, each of my bags is unique.”
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LOU
IMAGE COURTESY OF LOUIS VUITTON.
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Beads, in all their kaleidoscopic, shiny iterations, are American artist Liza Lou’s material muse. “I can be walking down the street, and there will be a bead on the curb, glinting amongst old gum and candy wrappers. They sort of wave at me and flirt,” she muses. Her passion for beads has translated to her Capucine, too, with textured pastel beadwork embossed onto its surface. The effect is luminous and watercolor-like, with passages of pale purples, pinks, and bright blues suffused amid a bed of white beads. Lou—whose iconic work Kitchen [1991–96], a full-scale kitchen encrusted in a kaleidoscopic and dizzying sheet of beads, was recently on long-term view at the Whitney Museum of American Art—traded city life in Los Angeles for the tranquil vistas of the American West a few years back. Working from a studio in Joshua Tree, California, Lou says the new terrain has offered her a “sense of solidarity and connectedness with the world all around.” As for her Capucine, she hopes it offers a sense of wonder and possibility to those who encounter it. “I always hope my work can serve as a big friendly hello,” she declares.
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ELIZABETH DEBICKI BRINGS DIOR’S TIMELESS REFINEMENT TO LIFE Christian Dior’s love of roses was well-known. Their rich scent tinged his childhood in Granville, Normandy, and went on to inspire the hues and silhouettes of his womenswear designs. Today, La Rose Dior—the French house’s signature jewelry line—translates the strength and elegance of the brand’s design codes into precious metals and gemstones. The face of the latest La Rose Dior edition is none other than Elizabeth Debicki, the Australian actor whose poise and force before the camera makes her a fitting ambassador to introduce the collection to the world. Photography by SARAH PIANTADOSI 258 culturedmag.com
BOIS DE ROSE EARRINGS MAKEUP BY DIOR BEAUTY
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BOIS DE ROSE EARRINGS
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ROSE DIOR BAGATELLE NECKLACES
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BOIS DE ROSE EARRINGS, ROSE DIOR PRÉ CATALAN NECKLACE AND RINGS
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ROSE DIOR BAGATELLE NECKLACES
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ROSE DIOR BAGATELLE NECKLACES, BOIS DE ROSE EARRINGS
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BOIS DE ROSE EARRINGS, ROSE DIOR PRÉ CATALAN NECKLACE AND RING
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STILL GOING It took Jim Goldberg two decades to finish Coming and Going, his visual memoir released late last summer. In that time, the Californiabased photographer saw his daughter grow into an adult, published a bittersweet ode to teenage runaways, and cemented his legacy as a singular observer of the American experience. With his new book, Goldberg examines his own life, capturing the artifacts, ambitions, and anecdotes that made him who he is today.
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INSIDE Devotees of the French house traveled to the shores of Lake Como from across the globe to watch VICTOIRE DE CASTELLANE’s floral high jewelry designs bloom at the storied VILLA ERBA.
Dior’s SECRET GARDEN By LAURA MAY TODD
JUST PAST 8 o’clock on a Saturday evening in early June, the slate-colored clouds suspended above Lake Como appeared heavy enough to plunge straight into the water. It was not the kind of weather you’d hope for on the day of a garden party, let alone one organized by one of the most historic houses in French fashion.
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Photography by BRIGITTE NIEDERMAIR
ALL JEWELRY DIOR FINE JEWELRY LES JARDINS DE LA COUTURE
MAKEUP BY DIOR BEAUTY
Despite the darkening skies, guests appeared unfazed as they leaped off glossy wooden Riva boats (their seats upholstered in Dior’s Toile de Jouy fabric for the occasion) onto the private dock of the 19th-century Villa Erba. Most were bedecked in Dior’s greatest hits: embroidered tulle dresses, floor-sweeping chiffon gowns, and finely tailored tuxedos. They were gathered for the debut of the house’s latest High Jewelry collection, and many had traveled from as far as Australia, China, and the United States to witness what promised to be its most extensive presentation yet. In designing the collection, Creative Director of Fine Jewelry Victoire de Castellane drew from one of Christian Dior’s longtime sources of inspiration: the enduring magic of gardens. De Castellane’s team produced 170 unique pieces alongside three “secret watches” (their faces obscured by a jewel setting that slides outward to reveal the time), each one more extravagant than the next. That night, the rain held off. After a welcome cocktail, guests were ushered inside for a candlelit dinner beneath Villa Erba’s frescoed ceilings before drifting back to the garden, espresso martinis in hand, to experience the collection in person. Once everyone seated themselves on the prim garden furniture that snaked across Villa Erba’s lakeside lawn, models in couture by Dior Creative Director Maria Grazia Chiuri—corseted, calf-length dresses embellished with floral embroidery and swinging skirts made from layers of silk, each designed in dialogue with the High Jewelry collection—made their way along the grassy runway. They paused every few steps in their slow saunter down the path, allowing viewers to gaze at the immaculately set diamonds, tourmalines, and pink sapphires that adorned their wrists and décolletage. Beneath the beaming stage lights, the pieces glinted and glimmered like falling raindrops. The delicate, nearly cartoon-like florals that clustered across collar bones almost resembled beaded friendship bracelets, an allusion that imbued the collection with a decidedly youthful feel. The night’s standout piece was an articulated choker set with tiny, bejeweled illustrations of cheery rainbows, beaming suns, bumblebees, and leafy trees that became known colloquially as the “emoji necklace.” The festivities concluded with a second look at the collection followed by a three-course lunch on the nearby Villa d’Este’s manicured grounds the next day. The pieces, an homage to the playful and feminine, left an impression that lasted long after guests mounted their Riva boats to be whisked back across Como’s sparkling waters.
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