Cultured Magazine September/October 2019

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RIGHT NOW VIRGIL ABLOH Takashi Murakami Texas Isaiah Maurizio Cattelan No Sesso Ming Smith

SEPT/OCT/NOV 2018

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Virgil Abloh photographed by Petra Collins in Chicago.

PROJECT OF MASSING PROPORTIONS Architects Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill embark on a new property overlooking Biscayne Bay. 58 FIRE STARTER British artist Sarah Lucas is quite literally turning up the heat for her fall survey at the New Museum.

60 CHANCE ENCOUNTERS For Mary Weatherford’s Gagosian solo debut, the painter embraces the magic and serendipity of nature.

62 COME WHAT MAY With solo exhibitions in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Sônia Gomes reflects on the evolution of her sculptural practice. 64 CULTURED 25 We’ve gathered 25 exhibitions, happenings and moments that have caught our attention.

77 THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE GLAMORIZED Mauricio Arango’s films look unflinchingly at violence and ask viewers to do the same.

92 WALKING THE WALK Paula Crown translates political ideals and environmental activism into art that goes viral.

94 WE’RE IN YOUR HEAD Paul Chaat Smith and Jarrett Earnest in conversation about the inseparability of Indian culture from American life. 96 LET THERE BE LIGHT Helen Pashgian is a quiet storm shaping light, color and perception itself.

98 A WORLD OF POSSIBILITIES Under the direction of Nahema Mehta, Absolut Art is a one-stop global gallery.

108 ORIGINALITY IS OVERRATED Maurizio Cattelan joins forces with Gucci’s Alessandro Michele for an exhibition at the Yuz Museum.

110 KEEP UP Pilar Corrias toasts a decade of taste-making with a Philippe Parreno show that nods to her past.

112 STEPPING OUT Paul Andrew, the renowned shoe designer, shows his creative passion through collecting.

114 REAP WHAT YOU SOW Early next year, Agnes Denes will inaugurate The Shed with her first major solo exhibition in New York City.

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TAKING OFF THE MASK Leilah Babirye is forging a path of hope for gay rights in Africa by bearing her truth on behalf of those that can’t.

CONSIDERED TABBOO! East Village icon Tabboo!’s works on canvas are finally taking center stage.

THE VINYL SUBLIME Artist Jennie C. Jones and Glass House curator Cole Akers discuss the tangible experience of listening.

FUTURE AND FUNCTION Casey Cadwallader propels Mugler forward with inclusivity, innovative aesthetics and a nod to contemporary art.

HEART OF GLASS Liza Lou’s first New York show in a decade demonstrates that artistic gambles can pay off.

MARKET MADNESS Producers Debi Wisch and Jennifer Stockman share the inspiration for The Price of Everything.

CREATIVE EVOLUTION Virgil Abloh and Takashi Murakami are breaking down long-standing creative borders while constructing new cultural bridges in “AMERICA TOO,” their latest meditation on the times, at Gagosian Los Angeles.

STOP, LISTEN, WAIT Monica Uszerowicz checks in with skyrocketing young artist Texas Isaiah, who revels in the pauses.

NON-CONFORMING NARRATIVES Meet five young photographers upending notions of queerness and using the lens to create their own.

BACK TO SCHOOL Architect Mark Lee shares his thoughts on the future of Harvard and his firm’s project at the Menil Drawing Institute.

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120 122 126 128 134 138 142 150 160 164 170

PHOTO BY BRANDON STANCIELL

An outtake from No Sesso’s summer show at the Getty Museum.

NO PEDESTAL REQUIRED Designer Pierre Davis of No Sesso isn’t concerned about finding a category for her avant-garde line.

RECONSIDERING THE ARCHITECTURE OF MEMORY Leslie Hewitt creates works that challenge the notion of history as a static truth.

MEETING OF THE MINDS Collectors Mitchell and Emily Rales are displaying their expansive trove of art at their private museum, Glenstone.

NATURAL PHENOMENON Artist and environmentalist Olafur Eliasson creates a culinary experience and his LA gallery debut.

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS Ming Smith reflects on the milestones that have marked her career.

ROLE MODELS Atelier E.B, Beca Lipscombe and Lucy McKenzie's fashion line, takes over the Serpentine.

THE SEEKER Lina Iris Viktor navigates entangled histories, using narrative as her compass and gold leaf as her medium.

ISLAND MEMORIES Christo discusses the documentary exhibition on Surrounded Islands at the PAMM with director Franklin Sirmans.

BACK TO NATURE Rogan Gregory creates a bronze candlestick holder for this issue’s Cultured commission.

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176

184 188 194 198 202 206 Virgil Abloh photographed by Petra Collins in Chicago; Takashi Murakami

210 photographed by Tomohiko Tagawa in

Tokyo. This October, they collaborate in

216 “AMERICA TOO,” at Gagosian Los Angeles.

CALIBER RM 07-01

RICHARD MILLE BOUTIQUES ASPEN • BAL HARBOUR • BEVERLY HILLS • BUENOS AIRES • LAS VEGAS • MIAMI • NEW YORK • ST. BARTH • TORONTO

BRANDON STANCIELL Photographer

MONICA USZEROWICZ Writer

JARRETT EARNEST Artist and Writer

A portrait and fashion photographer based in Los Angeles, Stanciell’s work revolves around the portrayal of black men in the media and uses flowers to help reshape how we think about black men. “It was really special to shoot inside and around the Getty and incorporate some of the art in the images,” he says of his No Sesso shoot—his first for Cultured.

Monica Uszerowicz is a writer and photographer in Miami. She is the former film and performing arts editor for the Miami Rail and her work has appeared in several publications including the Los Angeles Review of Books. For this issue, she spoke with Texas Isaiah about his tender photographic practice, which removes the power imbalance between photographer and subject and emphasizes genuine care.

Jarrett Earnest is an artist and writer whose book, “What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics,” is out this fall from David Zwirner Books. “I read his history of the American Indian Movement a few years ago and just sobbed,” Earnest says of Paul Chaat Smith. “I knew I had to include him in my book.” Earnest’s first piece in Cultured is an excerpt from his interview with Smith.

PETRA COLLINS Photographer Petra Collins is a photographer and filmmaker based in New York and LA. For this issue, the former Cultured cover subject turned her camera lens to fellow creative force Virgil Abloh, who she captured on the streets of Chicago. “It was so fun shooting Virgil in his favorite city. It’s important to me to shoot subjects in environments that they are comfortable with or challenged by. We shot around Virgil’s favorite illegal and legal public art.

Public art is a big thing we connect on and I loved seeing his favorite works.”

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PHOTO BY ADAM DAVIS (STANCIELL); ANDREW KERR (USZEROWICZ); SELF PORTRAIT (EARNEST)

Contributors

FRANKLIN SIRMANS Museum Director

ISABEL FLOWER Writer

TED LOOS Writer

Franklin Sirmans is the director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami and sat down with Christo in advance of PAMM’s exhibition documenting the artist’s 1983 installation Surrounded Islands. “He’s optimistic about the power of art to unite, but he's also clear about humanity and its many flaws,” says Sirmans of the legendary artist. “He speaks with an urgency that gives faith to the idea that art can at least bring us to the table to talk about change.”

New York-based Isabel Flower was formerly an associate editor at Artforum magazine and is currently a writer for the experience design agency Elephant, as well as cohost of the Top Rank podcast. She covered No Sesso for this issue and wishes she could attend one of Pierre’s embroidery workshops, where the designer shows how the house’s clothes are made.

In this issue, Ted Loos, a contributing Cultured editor since 2012 who frequently writes for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, interviews collectors Mitch and Emily Rales and artist Liza Lou. “Given that Lou’s show is opening a half-block from my apartment, I was interested to hear about her work with glass and her commitment to social practice.”

JESSICA LYNNE Critic Jessica Lynne is a writer, critic and co-founder of ARTS.BLACK, a journal of art criticism from Black perspectives. She met with Leslie Hewitt in late July to discuss some of Hewitt’s recent projects, the artist’s relationship to photography, sculpture, time and memory, and their shared love of Toni Morrison.

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© 2013 MUSEUM ASSOCIATES/LACMA (SIRMANS); PHOTO BY MARCEL ROSA-SALAS (FLOWER); JANET LOOS (LOOS); TAYLOR ALDRIDGE (LYNNE)

Contributors

MATTHEW MORROCCO Photographer

SVETLANA KITTO Oral Historian

COLE AKERS Curator

Matthew Morrocco is an artist who, in addition to being featured in our piece on queer photographers, also shot artist Leslie Hewitt for this issue. “One of the joys of photographing Leslie was getting to see her pictures come to life in her space. She lives inside her work as a seamlessly integrated extension of herself that is beautiful to witness firsthand.”

Svetlana Kitto is a writer and oral historian in New York. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Guernica and the book “Occupy!” (Verso). She also curates the art and reading series Adult Contemporary. “My favorite thing about interviewing Leilah Babirye was the reminder of how much goes into making a body of work. Beyond time, materials, sacrifices, it also takes the messiness of living and loving and healing.”

Cole Akers interviewed artist Jennie C. Jones in advance of her exhibition at the iconic Philip Johnson Glass House in New Canaan, CT, where he is the curator. “In her installation, Jennie poetically extends and complicates familiar narratives of modernism and abstraction that are embedded at the site.”

ROGAN GREGORY Artist Based in New York, Rogan Gregory is a fashion designer-turned-sculptor who draws on the natural world for inspiration. Gregory, whose show “Known Unknown” at R & Company opened this month, created a set of bronze candlestick holders for this issue’s Cultured Commission.

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PHOTO BY JOE KRAMM / R & COMPANY (GREGORY); SELF PORTRAIT (MORROCCO); LAKE VEREA (AKERS)

Contributors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief Sarah G. Harrelson sarah@culturedmag.com Creative Director Carlos A. Suarez Executive Editor Sara Roffino sroffino@culturedmag.com Editor-at-Large Michael Reynolds Associate Editor Kat Herriman Associate Art Director Katie Brown Digital Media Editor Jessica Idarraga Landscape Editor Lily Kwong New York Design Editor Mieke ten Have New York Contributing Editor Wendy Vogel Contributing Architectural Editor Andrew Heid

Copy Editors Anna Bonesteel, Vered Engelhard, Bartolomeo Sala Contributing Editors Susan Ainsworth Sarah Arison Trudy Cejas Laura de Gunzburg Jae Joseph Nasir Kassamali John Lin George Lindemann Ted Loos Doug Meyer Fernando Mastrangelo Franklin Sirmans Michelle Rubell Sarah Thornton David Sokol Michael Wolfson Lucas Zwirner Contributing Photographers Zack Garlitos François Dischinger Douglas Friedman Jeremy Liebman Kevin Lu Aubrey Mayer Matthew Morrocco Landon Nordeman Matthew Placek Jason Schmidt Stephen Kent Johnson Warren Elgort Simon Watson

Publisher Gail Feldman gail@whitehausmediagroup.com

Account Executive Elizabeth Resnick elizabeth@whitehausmediagroup.com Senior Accountant Judith Cabrera Senior Photo Retouchers Bert Moo-Young, Matt Stevens

Chief Executive Officer Mike Batt

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In the Now

In front of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where Virgil will have his first museum exhibition next year; polaroids by Petra Collins from our shoot; Virgil with Alexander Calder’s Flamingo.

September is not just back to school. It is the beginning of a new year for fashion, art and design. The pressure is high to emerge from summer wiser and inspired. We thought long and hard about how to craft an issue that speaks to the moment. Our break came with our cover story subjects, Virgil Abloh and Takashi Murakami.

As the founder of the brand Off-White and the newly appointed menswear artistic director of Louis Vuitton, Virgil ushered in a new era of couture this spring. His creative talents aren’t limited to design, though: the polymath is also a DJ and consummate collaborator. We were captivated by the longstanding friendship between Virgil and Japanese superstar artist Takashi Murakami, who has been at the forefront of the art world’s obsession with pop culture for decades. In October, Virgil and Takashi’s third exhibition together opens at Gagosian Los Angeles. While their hectic schedules would not allow for a shoot together, we photographed Takashi in his Tokyo studio, while Virgil took us around Chicago to his favorite public art works with photographer (and former cover subject) Petra Collins. I flew to Chicago for our shoot on an August morning with a small crew of five, while Virgil arrived on time and alone. His humility and calm were striking. In our cover story conversation, moderated by Cultured’s executive editor Sara Roffino, Virgil credits his focus and creativity to being “in the now.”

At Cultured, we love bringing together emerging voices with legendary talents. This issue shines a spotlight on an intergenerational group of image makers. We were thrilled to catch up with the pioneering photographer Ming Smith. I first met Ming this summer at our June cover party. As Rebecca

Bengal writes in her profile, Ming has come a long way since she hand-delivered her portfolio to MoMA in 1975. Elsewhere in our pages, mid-career artists Leslie Hewitt and Jennie C. Jones speak about the role of archives in their work, while young artists Lina Iris Viktor and Texas Isaiah experiment with self-portraiture. Our roundup of young queer photographers shows how up-and-comers grapple with questions of history and representation. Rounding out our issue is our exclusive Cultured commission for which we tapped nature-loving designer Rogan Gregory in advance of his September show at R & Company’s expansive Tribeca space.

Fresh on the heels of summer events in New York City, the Hamptons and Aspen, we are energized for our busiest season. We hope you’ll join our expanding community with a VIP subscription. Sign up now to get exclusive access to Art Basel parties and our tailored itinerary. If you’re out in the world, pick up your copy of Cultured at EXPO Chicago, Frieze London and Salon Art + Design and museums such as LACMA, the Whitney, the New Museum and ICA Miami.

Sarah G. Harrelson Founder and Editor-in-Chief @sarahgharrelson

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MASSING PROPORTIONS

BY STEPHEN TREFFINGER

What began as three lines on a piece of paper promises to become an iconic fixture on Miami’s water front. Una Residences, the 47-stor y condominium tower designed by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill, will preside over Biscayne Bay in the South Brickell neighborhood.

The shape, like other aspects of the project, was the result of overlapping aesthetic and practical considerations. “The first gestural sketch of the building was very simple. One squiggle on the land side, one straight line on the water side and a little squiggle at the top,” says Gill. It was based, in part, on the concept of contrapposto in classical sculpture, whereby a figure’s weight rests mostly on one foot so that its shoulders and arms rest in an offaxis from the hips. “These statues had that kind of relaxed and less formal approach. And that’s really the stor y of where the massing itself and the distribution of program came from,” he adds. The duo sought to capture such nonchalant elegance in the architecture itself.

The cutaway also provided better views for the lower floors, says Smith, which would have been partially blocked by existing structures had Una had a straight profile. “Vlad, I believe, identified that it is not a great view until you get above that neighboring building and asked if we could pull it away.”

Vlad would be Vladislav Doronin, the international Russian real estate developer, Chairman and CEO of the OKO Group LLC, which is the developer behind Una Residences. He approached Smith and Gill after seeing some of their other projects—done separately and together—including the Burj Khalifa in Dubai (Smith), the Pearl River Tower in Guangzhou, China and the Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia, currently under construction. Doronin, it should come

58 culturedmag.com

as no surprise, was an ideal client: visionary, articulate and with a definitive idea about what architecture should be. (His own house in Russia is Zaha Hadid’s only residential project.)

The placement of the drop-off and amenities areas, like the fluid design, benefitted from the meeting of form and function. The building’s electrical transformers had to be accessible to the power company from the exterior— and at ground level and the entrance to the parking garage is also at grade.

Lifting the pool area up was a way to shield residents from such goings-on.

It’s a win-win: the views are much better up there. Smith and Gill wanted the arrival zone to be a carved-out podium space, something to capture you “in the body of the building and create a room around that experience of arrival,” says Gill.

Una’s interiors, are based, in part, on an Italian yacht, The Riva, which Cerone says “is an image of nostalgia, yet it is performance driven, modern.

The boat is at once minimal and yet perfectly appointed and luxurious.” Using warm, natural materials that complement each other—wood and highly polished metal—the vibe is both sleek and comfortable. Gill and Smith were, of course, pleased that they also got to oversee this aspect, which is not always a given. “Some developers want a completely different experience on the inside than they do on the outside. It’s not something that I really understand,” says Smith.

The project turned out so well that OKO has already tapped AS + GG to undertake another in the area, this time an office building. “No great client, no great project. It’s really that simple,” says Gill.

©ADRIAN SMITH + GORDON GILL ARCHITECTURE

Una Residences, designed by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill, is the newest development on the Brickell Waterfront.

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View of Lucas’s This Jaguar’s Going to Heaven, 2018, in flames on site.

“It’s not easy burning a car in the city. The guys and I had to travel with half a car behind us on a flatbed truck, a Jaguar, all the way to somewhere in New Jersey. An obliging fire department agreed, on a voluntary basis, to have the car burnt on their premises. It was a long hot drive out of New York. The firemen and -women were all assembled when we arrived. They asked me what I had in mind. I said, ‘Well, I’d like it really burnt out, so you know, and can feel, exactly what happened to it at a glance.’ We positioned the half car on a suitable area of hard standing. I was expecting to douse it in petrol. But they filled it up with straw and put a match to it and the whole thing went up. It was like The Wicker Man. Everybody was enthralled with the spectacle. Even firemen don’t get to start fires.” —Sarah Lucas

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chance encounters

© MARY WEATHERFORD; PHOTO BY FREDRIK NILSEN STUDIO; COURTESY OF GAGOSIAN

Weatherford’s Red Writing, 2018

“Once going out on a whaler on a late afternoon in August, between coastal islands in Maine, we met a boat returning for the day. We said ahoy, and asked after it. The skipper of the other boat, waving, in a voice raised above the motors as we passed, yelled, ‘It’s always a good day when you see a whale!’ There is nothing on this earth like seeing a whale. It is the ultimate. My paintings are about these kinds of experiences.” —Mary Weatherford

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THE TWE NTY FIVE We’ve gathered 25 exhibitions, happenings and moments that have caught our attention—and we think they’ll capture yours, too.

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On November 1, Miami says hello to its first Creative Time Summit. This year’s theme derives its inspiration from the unique position the Floridian city occupies in relationship to climate change, international immigration patterns and queer cultures. Titled “On Archipelagos and Other Imaginaries—Collective Strategies to Inhabit the World,” the summit brings together artists, scientists, technologists and philosophers for a discussion on how we can do better by one another. Tickets are available online.

CREATIVETIME.ORG Crack Rodriguez performing during the Creative Time Summit “Of Homelands and Revolution” in Toronto, Canada, 2017.

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Grace Weaver’s ten-step, 2018

Dancing with Paint For Grace Weaver’s solo debut with James Cohan, the New York-based painter unveils a body of work that embraces the imperfections of the painting process. “Painting is so much about problem solving, and acrylic comes with its own set of challenges,” Weaver says during a visit to her studio. Her new series celebrates the quick-drying nature of acrylic paint and the choreography of her custom brushes and markers, which she implements in order to create her striped shirts and continuous lines. See her works through October 28 and head to culturedmag.com for an extended conversation.

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PHOTO BY SARAH TRIGG; COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND JAMES COHAN GALLERY; PHOTO BY ANTHONY GEBREHIWOT, COURTESY OF CREATIVE TIME

From a distance Aaron Curry’s sculptures often look like twodimensional monsters. As one gets closer the flattened image expands, and one sees his abstractions for what they are—a negotiation of mass, color and form. On October 14, Curry and his greatest hits land at The Bass in Miami for “Tune Yer Head,” a solo survey that takes the form of an immersive environment.

To transform the museum halls into a fully realized landscape, Curry will install complementary carpet and wallpaper for the first time. In short, his colorful beasts will have a place to call home! THEBASS.ORG

PHOTO BY DANIEL PÉREZ; COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

Show Stopper Kayode Ojo’s background in photography is not always visible in his sculptures, but his attention to detail shines through. This past April, Paula Cooper Gallery’s Laura Hunt paired Ojo’s work with Zoe Leonard’s—a comparison that helped reveal the young artist’s roots as an image maker. This September, Ojo receives his first Parisian solo show at Balice Hertling—an ideal FIAC sidetrack.

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Kayode Ojo’s Overdressed (Black), 2018 culturedmag.com 79

“When Tara Willis and I set out to curate a show together, we quickly landed on movement, place and identity as central themes uniting our work,” says Grace Deveney, the assistant curator at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. The resulting group exhibition, “Groundings,” invites six artists into the museum to perform and rehearse as if full-time residents. Deveney adds, “We hope this show awakens in our viewers a new consideration of the forces—both seen and unseen—that govern our daily lives.” MCACHICAGO.ORG

Ceal Floyer’s Overhead Projection, 2006

Sue Williams’s All Quiet, 2018

Body Positive This past February, New Yorkers were treated to a rare showing of Sue Williams’s early paintings at Skarstedt’s uptown gallery. The cheerful palette and blatant eroticism of her ’90s canvases provide context for the bodily abstractions in her new work.

Those traveling to London this fall can see this transition in all its glory, at Williams’s exhibition of new paintings on view at Skarstedt’s UK location.

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PHOTO BY ANDREA ROSSETTI; © 2012 ANNETTE KELM COLLECTION MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART CHICAGO, GIFT OF JENNIFER AUBREY, 2015.15; © SUE WILLIAMS, 303 GALLERY, NEW YORK

Annette Kelm’s Untitled, 2012

On November 16, Berlinbased artist Ceal Floyer makes her triumphant return to London with a solo show that takes over the recently renovated Lisson Gallery.

Known for her sly sense of material humor, Floyer’s upcoming exhibition promises to address—or perhaps more accurately, undress—the updated white cube. “The subtle but significant remodeling of Lisson’s space since my last show there seemed to call for a subtle but significant change of approach (even the door has moved around the corner),” she says nonchalantly. You can almost hear her smirk.

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PHOTO BY CHRISTIAN DEFONT; ALBIN DAHLSTRÖM, THE MODERNA MUSEET, STOCKHOLM; MUSEO CASA MOLLINO, TORINO

Vita Haas and Lucy Weisner’s pop-up retail concept, Café Forgot, acts as a platform for young and even reluctant fashion designers to connect with new customers. Based in New York, the female-run boutique set up shop at 165 Duane Street this summer, offering one-of-a-kind garments from designers like Lou Dallas, Gauntlett Cheng, Poche and Onea Claire. This November the duo launches their first book and latest retail space. Learn more about their unique approach to commerce on culturedmag.com.

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Sinuous Curves Zanotta was one of Carlo Mollino’s earliest supporters, and this year, the design house pays homage to the Italian architect by re-issuing several of his pieces, including the Fenis chair. Captured here by Mollino himself (who dabbled in erotic photography), the Fenis chair’s curvature is emblematic of the slinky forms he introduced into the furniture vocabulary of the 1950s and ’60s.

ZANOTTA.IT The star of “The Encyclopedic Palace,” the 2013 Venice Biennale exhibition, Hilma af Klint’s nonobjective paintings and drawings from the early 20th century reset the timeline for abstract imagery. A reclusive figure whose works did not emerge on the market until well after her death in 1944, Klint’s biomorphic compositions call to mind horticultural diagrams conceived on psychedelics—and showcase a level of mysticism not found in successors like Kandinsky. This fall, the Guggenheim gives over Frank Lloyd Wright’s Rotunda to the late artist’s legacy.

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Hilma af Klint’s Untitled, 1920 culturedmag.com 81

Genesis Belanger’s Acquiesce, 2018

Aaron Aujla and Benjamin Bloomstein started making furniture for private commissions under the name Green River Project LLC two years ago. Since then, their New Yorkbased business has grown exponentially through word of mouth. This October, Green River Project launches its first showroom, an East Village space where the duo plans to program dinners as well as debut their latest pieces, like this bamboo and brass floor lamp from 2018. Get the full scoop on culturedmag.com.

GREENRIVERPROJECTLLC.COM A strike of marble, a throw of fur, a sconce twisted to look like a branch: these are signature moves from interior designer Ryan Korban’s repertoire, celebrated in all its glory in his second monograph, “Interiors,” out this September from Rizzoli. With images of Korban’s recent projects for Balenciaga and Alexander Wang, the new book aligns the designer with his fashion peers. We asked the designer about the new book and what we could do to make our spaces better. Read the transcript on culturedmag.com. RIZZOLIUSA.COM 82 culturedmag.com

Bamboo and Brass Floor Lamp, 2018

PHOTO BY NAHO KUBOTA; PHOTO ANDREW JACOBS; COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND NATHALIE KARG GALLERY

Body (and bawdy) humor connects the work of painter Emily Mae Smith and ceramicist Genesis Belanger, who will mount their first collaborative exhibition organized by Valentine Blondel at Perrotin New York in November. Across different mediums, both artists respond to the flattened plane of screen-based visual culture. PERROTIN.COM

Activist Agenda

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND XAVIER HUFKENS, BRUSSELS; PHILLIPS

Given the scope of climate catastrophe, it is clearer than ever that drinking water is a human right in dire need of protection. On September 21, Phillips hosts a charity auction to benefit One Drop, a humanitarian group working in Latin America to provide access to clean water.

The sale includes contemporary luminaries like Camille Henrot, Anne Imhof and Nicolas Party (seen here).

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Nicolas Party’s Sunset, 2018 culturedmag.com 83

Pope.L.’s Rebuilding the Monument (chicago version/ the vitrine problem/ two of three), 2007

New York is enchanted with Pope.L. His pungent installation at the 2017 Whitney Biennial won him the Bucksbaum Award and his neon-lit sign on the High Line captured the public’s imagination all summer long. The artist feeds the frenzy this fall with “One thing after another (part two),” his new show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash. The exhibition includes a series of Re-Photo collages that he describes as “figural encounters,” which combine photos of body parts and appropriated print imagery.

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Sam Jablon’s paintings begin as phrases that he renders in a series of small studies, which evolve into larger and more frantic compositions.

His newest poetry arrives at Freight + Volume this September, in its most triumphant iteration yet.

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View of Sam Jablon’s New York studio

“©POPE.L; COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND MITCHELL-INNES & NASH, NEW YORK; FREIGHT+VOLUME

Facing Off

PHOTO BY HELEN M. POST, WESTERN REGIONAL ARCHIVES, STATE ARCHIVES OF NORTH CAROLINA.

Anni Albers in her weaving studio at Black Mountain College, 1937.

Please Touch In her 1982 essay “Material As Metaphor,” Anni Albers wrote: “How do we choose our specific material, our means of communication? ‘Accidentally.’ Something speaks to us, a sound, a touch, hardness or softness, it catches us and asks us to be formed.”

This October, the Tate dives into Albers’s process, with a survey exhibition of more than 300 works by the artist. The show aims to capture the richness and diversity of her oeuvre—especially her modern approach to the medium of textiles. TATE.ORG.UK culturedmag.com 85

Born almost 20 years after English sculptor Barbara Hepworth, the late American artist Naomi Feinberg’s abstract forms evoke the powerful compositions of the modernist icon. Like Hepworth, Feinberg was pioneer in her own right, quite literally carving a space for herself in the male-dominated midcentury art scene. On September 13, Lobel Modern gallery celebrates Feinberg’s unique sensibility with a survey of her work.

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Naomi Feinberg sculpting in her studio in the 1960s.

Even by his standards, Andy Warhol is having a big year. The Whitney’s blockbuster Warhol show opens this November, and the Dia Art Foundation brings his monumental installation Shadows (1978–79) to the Calvin Klein store in New York before it travels upstate to Beacon. For a more intimate moment with the late Pop icon, head to the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, where an exhibition selected from Warhol’s collection of negatives and contact sheets is on view starting September 29. Check out culturedmag.com for more on Warhol and the people who knew him best.

Andy Warhol’s Contact Sheet [New Years Eve party at River Café with woman in Marie Antoinette mask, Benjamin Liu and Larissa, Michael Musto, Tama Janowitz, Paige Powell, Ron Galella], 1987 86 culturedmag.com

PHOTO BY CRISTINA MOLINA; GIFT OF THE ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION FOR THE VISUAL ARTS, INC., 2014.43.2926. ©THE ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION FOR THE VISUAL ARTS; COURTESY LOBEL MODERN

Shattering the Mold

Cage-Free

IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND KASMIN; PHOTO BY ELI LOTAR; COURTESY OF FONDATION GIACOMETTI

Artist Walton Ford is always on the hunt for new stories to unpack. This fall, he hones in on the Barbary lion—a subspecies that has been immortalized throughout art history, from Roman architecture to the MGM Studios logo. Opening October 10 at Paul Kasmin’s new Chelsea flagship, “Barbary” celebrates the king of the jungle and its entanglement with our collective images of power.

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Walton Ford’s Leipzig 20 Oktober 1913, 2018

Small and Mighty As Alberto Giacometti’s Guggenheim-swallowing retrospective comes down this September, Luxembourg & Dayan shines the spotlight on the Swiss artist’s miniature sculptures made between 1935 and 1945. Created against the backdrop of World War II, these petite figures demonstrate Giacometti’s desire to move towards the human and fragile rather than dealing in the politics of the monumental. LUXEMBOURGDAYAN.COM

Giacometti in his room at Hôtel de Rive, Geneva, October 1944.

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Wolfgang Tillmans's How likely is it that only I am right in this matter?, 2018

Liaigre’s second New York City showroom in the NoMAD district.

When Christian Liaigre launched his eponymous brand in the 1980s, the French interior designer joined the ranks of photographer Herb Ritts, model Christy Turlington and Anna Wintour, who collectively defined the era’s upscale glamor. This fall, Liaigre ushers in a new chapter with the brand’s second New York flagship, located in the up-and-coming NoMAD district.

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Artist Mira Lehr in front of Creation, 2017

Global Healing Artist Mira Lehr sees female energy as a healing force that could potentially save our planet. The diversity and fragility of her local ecosystem are threads that anchor her September exhibition “Tracing the Red Thread,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami. MIRALEHR.COM

© WOLFGANG TILLMANS. COURTESY THE ARTIST AND DAVID ZWIRNER, GALERIE BUCHHOLZ, BERLIN/COLOGNE, AND MAUREEN PALEY, LONDON

The provocative title of Wolfgang Tillmans’s September exhibition at David Zwirner in New York, “How likely is it that only I am right in this matter?”, is a fitting introduction to Tillman’s decades-long career examining originality and truth in image-making. The artist takes on this question with an increasing political urgency, in works that address smartphone technology, darkroom techniques and activism.

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Tara Donovan’s Untitled, 2014

Perfect Synergy Tara Donovan’s fall solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver provides the bluechip artist a rare opportunity to look at the links between the different mediums she engages.

She credits the curator Nora Burnett Abrams with shedding light on the relationship between her sculptures, immersive installations, paintings and drawings. “Abrams has created poignant juxtapositions within the exhibition that demonstrate how works in different formats and from different time periods share many of the same aesthetic concerns,” Donovan says.

Make the connections yourself with a visit to the show, through January 27.

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Brilliant.

Beautiful.

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Mauricio Arango shooting Revolution’s A Lie, the artist’s more recent work, which is set in New York City.

THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE GLAMORIZED

BY CALEB MATHERN

When art asks us to be horrified, Colombian filmmaker and conceptual artist Mauricio Arango asks: To what end? “Passive witnessing is one concern I have,” he explains. The filmmaker considers how traumatic events can make people feel helpless. “Maybe I’m tired of questions of ‘What you can do?’”

Now based in New York, Arango works from a high-rise suite in the Hudson Yards (“Housing lottery!” he grins) that he shares with the 20-yearold cockatiel featured in his latest film, Revolution’s A Lie (2018). Arango takes many months, even years of editing to achieve the refined and alluring rhythms that define his oeuvre.

Arango draws inspiration from the horror of Japanese director Kaneto Shindo and the beauty of Korean director Hong Sang soo. For filming, he frequently heads back to South America and assembles his crew. To The Dead (2016) was shot in Colombia in Bogotá’s Central Cemetery, near where Arango grew up. During filming, the artist was mugged and lost some of the footage. Like a ghost from the past imposing limitations, this event led him to restructure the remains. He did so by delivering a hard-boiled narration over Fellini-esque

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splashes of colorful flowers adorning statues and crypts. Much like in this film, death is a big presence in his work, but never in the same form.

Across his filmography, Arango wryly casts himself in whatever role is needed, often learning the skills required from scratch in residencies like the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California, the MacDowell Artist Colony in New Hampshire and Manhattan’s El Museo del Barrio.

Arango’s meditative The Night of the Moon Has Many Hours (2010) is his most technically ambitious movie, having been filmed at night and on water. Ants swarm over a stretch of barbed wire. A fisherman awakes in the night. He walks through the woods to a river and boards a flatboat, casting off with a long oar. He pulls seven bodies out of the water, all young men, and lays them across the deck, their doppelgangers reflected in the inky black below.

This story actually happened. A lot. Bodies floated through Colombian waterways in the 1990s and early 2000s as right-wing paramilitary groups executed left-leaning citizens and dumped them there. Having lived in Bogotá through this period, Arango avoids all explanation. Without giving clear reason to grieve, the film forgoes the loaded

intentions of catharsis, understanding that Styx is no good place for a reunion. In darkness you see nothing. In the river you see yourself. Arango’s intended audience has spooky implications.

In Revolution’s A Lie, Arango the writer steps in, this time unassumingly slipping painful pieces from his own life into the story of a New York City acting coach who ends class early to catch a gallery screening. Arango recruits Manhattanbased acting coach Grace Kiley to clip and arrange her toenails and wipe her pet bird’s ass, amassing effortless portraits of the mundane. It marks his first project to be shot in New York after landing the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum. His commitment to capturing new imagery never keeps the films’ understated sound design from stealing the show, though, in the end ceding duties to his regular Foley artist.

Arango completes No Weight Whatsoever, his second film of 2018, this fall.

From Revolution’s A Lie: “Against his good intentions he showed a perverse angle. He felt complicit. Images were indistinguishable from what he hated.”

Artist Agnes Martin near her home/studio, Cuba, New Mexico, March 1973 © Gianfranco Gorgoni / Contact Press Images

Agnes Martin / Navajo Blankets September 28 – October 28, 2018

Traveling to New York, November 14 – December 22, 2018

229 Hamilton Ave

PALO ALTO

WALKING THE WALK

BY KAT HERRIMAN

Venice is sinking beneath my feet, and I think I can feel it.

The architecture biennial has flooded the city and I’m on my way to “The Architecture of Memory,” Paula Crown’s exhibition at a former glass factory, co-commissioned by Dallas Contemporary and the American Pavilion.

A mimosa greets me, served in a flute that contrasts with the party detritus spread across the villa floor—a sea of ceramic Solo Cups. I don’t recognize their precious nature on first blush, as they are convincing fakes with airbrushed faces. The trompe l’oeil effect of Crown’s painting highlights the dings of the cups’ folded porcelain bodies. It is a kind of crime scene and my impulse is to turn away from the mess, which is a reaction that Crown is counting on. “It’s a call to action,” the artist says.

“The party is over and all that is left is a question: Who will clean it up?”

The query is a simple one, and my answer leaves a lot to be desired.

Single-use cups and bottles are so commonplace that one is rarely confronted with their monstrous half-life, let alone the reality of their part in a plastic-filled sea. By lavishing throwaway objects with distinctive personalities and precious materiality, Crown brings attention to the individual’s accountability within the bigger picture. That’s why each cup is named for an archetype, such as Sorority Squat or Loner. “I felt it was necessary to create a kind of cast, so that people could see themselves in the crowd,” Crown says. “There is a power vacuum in our leadership right now. Creative people need to step in. The traditional tactics aren’t working and it is up to independent thinkers to not only advertise our values but to experiment with creating solutions.”

Our conversation overlaps neatly with a viral post of a beach filled with trash that my friends and I repost on Instagram ad nauseum, as if we will never again order an iced coffee or bottle of water. I’m seasick, but Crown is hopeful. She leverages social media’s predilections for theatrics in order to broadcast her messages to a wider audience. In her installation and sculptural work, she employs the drama of scale and surface detail to such effect that her work demands documentation. Jokester (2018), a

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collapsed, 10-foot Solo Cup adorning the high hills of Aspen this fall, is a perfect example. “I was thinking about how I could emphasize this message of environmental responsibility,” Crown recalls. “And then it became clear. I’ve got to really make this big. I’ve got to make something that normally feels benign impossible to ignore.”

Climate catastrophe has been a recurring subject in Crown’s work and often dovetails with her political endeavors. She is a founding member of For Freedoms, a nonprofit focused on instigating civic engagement through art and education, and she sees her involvement in the organization as a vital part of her responsibility not only as a citizen but also as an artist.

When we spoke in May, Crown was busy planning a new intervention alongside For Freedoms: an inflatable public sculpture designed to fly near Mar-a-Lago. “It’s going to be a huge, black golf ball with a ‘1’ etched in its face,” she says. “It’s an image I’ve been thinking of a lot lately, especially in relationship to computer code. We have a president who is blackballing the country by emphasizing this false sense of difference between us, but at the end of the day we are all just ones and zeroes.”

The golf ball is not just a visual pun for Crown but a form that lends itself to conversations around privilege as well as celestial metaphors.

At “I am FOR,” Crown’s exhibition at Fort Gansevoort this summer, she brought these references together using a luxurious alabaster. The first output in her Entitleist series, the CNC-carved stone was visible from the street: a gesture emblematic of the kind of confrontation that Crown’s work invites.

In her studio, the artist challenges her biases by keeping her process open to new techniques and mediums. “I’m a scientist at heart,” she confesses. “It’s so important to keep learning and my studio is my lab.

There is this belief that change is spontaneous, but the truth is that everything of value requires effort and persistence.” At its core, Crown’s practice is an exercise not in conceptualism but in self-discipline and reflection. She paints a picture that feels as romantic as it is within reach.

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Crown installing “The Architecture of Memory” at a 2,200-square-foot former glass factory in Venice. The preciously crafted ceramic replicas of disposable cups are a comment on consumer waste. culturedmag.com 95

WE’RE IN YOUR HEAD

Walking into “Americans,” on long-term view at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., you see a short animated video called The Invention of Thanksgiving. It begins with the “Indian head test pattern,” a graphic black-and-white card used by television stations from 1930 to 1970, featuring an arrangement of circles, crosses and a chief in feathered warbonnet. Someone asks, “What is Thanksgiving?” and the image zooms in to the chief, whose mouth drops down puppet-style to reply, “Thanksgiving is insane.” The video then cuts to a stop-motion collage wryly illustrating the spoken words, which continue: “It’s this huge, incredible disaster of highways and airports and it’s crowded and the weather’s awful.

A meal that takes days, sometimes weeks of preparations. Emotional turmoil. Fights…” This slanted playfulness is not what I expected from a video at the National Museum of the American Indian on Thanksgiving—which is the point.

The deadpan voice continues: “The way that it’s corny, it’s cartoonish and kitsch, is kind of a protective layer to sort of not get too direct about it. So, underneath all those things, Thanksgiving is about trying to come to terms with this difficult truth about the United States: that the country is a national project that came about at great expense to Native people.

And it’s not enough that we’re a good country, we kinda have to be the best countr y. But Native people and African slaver y, those two things together, are huge challenges to how you process this.” At this point the animation spells out “Native People + African Slavery” as equating a brain on fire. After walking through the histor y—that the infamous meal in Plymouth did indeed happen but was completely forgotten until the 1840s, and even then, it doesn’t become the holiday we know today until the 20th century—the narrator concludes: “It was a footnote. And we rescued it from being a footnote, because that has meaning now. So, by the 21st century, Indians are an indivisible part of what creates the United States.

It’s not a chapter that happened and it was bad and we got over it. We’re in your head. We’re in your pantry. We’re in your garage. This imagery— representations, advertising—Thanksgiving says, however imperfectly we remember Indians, we’re remembering Indians. With all the problems with it, it’s still a powerful idea, and it’s still powerful to not photoshop Indians out of the national narrative.”

This voice, with its disarming humor and searing intelligence, is that of the exhibition’s co-curator, Paul Chaat Smith, who has been a major figure in Native arts and culture for the past 20 years, ever since he published the magisterial history “Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee” with Robert Allen Warrior in 1996. This generous, goofy and deadly serious short video is a kind of manifesto for the rest of the exhibition, which invites visitors to engage with the role of Native American imagery, mythology and stereotypes across several hundred years of US visual culture.

Chaat Smith’s book of essays, “Everything You Know About Indians is Wrong”

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(2009), is a primer for the stakes of Native American art and identity in contemporary culture. I interviewed him about his life and work for my new book “What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics,” which is out this fall from David Zwirner Books. The following is an excerpt from our conversation, which focuses specifically on the “Americans” exhibition.

I see your new exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian, “Americans,” as a summation of a lot of the ideas you’ve worked on for a long time. How do you see them taking shape in this particular exhibition?

When we were first starting to plan this show, we were influenced by an important symposium with some of the smartest people in Native studies, called “You Can’t Teach American History without Teaching Indian History.”

The punchline is, Of course you can, because it’s done all the time. The level of Indian scholarship now is just extraordinary—it’s like a golden age.

Despite that, when these people teach undergraduates, it’s like it’s still 1970. The needle hasn’t moved. Despite all of the public campaigns and great scholarship, in terms of an average American’s knowledge of Indians, it’s still almost at zero. What that tells me is, It’s not about more information, and it’s not about correcting false ideas about histor y or stereotypes—because we’ve been doing that forever, and it hasn’t moved the needle. The radical notion of the “Americans” exhibition is that we’re telling visitors, You’re part of the Indian experience by virtue of being an American—Indians are so embedded in American national identity, in visual culture, that this really is about you. With this show we’re trying to say, You are part of this construct.

I think in 2004, it would have been a fair criticism to say you could come to our museum and learn about the Northern Cheyenne, and that’s cool and interesting—they had great art and ideas about the universe—but then you could leave and it asked nothing of you. Because it had nothing to do with you—I mean, atomized exhibitions are constructed that way. Instead, with this show, we’re saying, There is no you without us: everything about this country is entangled with Indian consciousness, identity, history, continuing up to this day—it’s in all our heads. That’s risky, because it’s giving the audience a lot of power.

When I was researching “Like A Hurricane,” I saw that throughout history, there is this recurring thread of feeling sorry for Indians. Back to the very beginning—Lo, the poor Indian! You get people writing in the mid-19th century lamenting, We’re screwing over the poor Indians—it’s so sad—so we made this funny slogan: Lo, the poor Indian! Guilt about Indians has produced disastrous results quite often. The famous thing about the Carlisle School, where Indians were sent off the reservations—when it’s discussed, they often show a cemetery full of dead Indian children. Very subtle. It wasn’t a great place, but what people leave out is that, first, many Indians sent their

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Jarrett Earnest’s photograph Paul Chaat Smith, 17 July 2018, New York.

kids there because it was much better than schools on the reservation; second, private boarding schools all over the world were fucking horrible— think about rich, upper-class English boarding schools and what goes on there. But most important to me is that the guy who ran it, who famously said, “Kill the Indian to save the man,” was a radical Republican antiracist.

For his time, he was the most militant Nation-reading Bernie bro you could find. Because these were radical ideas, to take Indians and educate them.

Most of the Indian world at that time wanted assimilation—it was just a question of on whose terms, and how much. When Indians today say, We wanted to stay the way we were—that’s against reality, which is really hard to admit.

How has your conception of the audience shifted with this show?

This show will get a million-plus visitors a year—all kinds of people, 90 percent of whom are non-Indian. If I’m interested in reaching that kind of mass audience, if it really works, it’ll be something they think about the next day. It’ll be something like, Trump says “Pocahontas,” and they’ll say, Oh, I learned these cool things about Pocahontas at that exhibition. Noticing the place names and the images will reinforce the idea that Indians are par t of your life, whether you’re white or

South Asian or whatever. That this is par t of the experience of living in this countr y.

I think it’s a pretty accessible thought that when we’ve rained down “Tomahawk” missiles on 15 countries in the last 30 years and called the South Bronx “Fort Apache” in the ’70s, these are not unimportant psychological elements of the country that are worth investigating, without instantly becoming about manifest destiny or white supremacy. How do we avoid that trap? That’s what I’m trying to get to. A lot of it is helping people feel that it’s just kind of cool to think about. Museums are organized around didactics and messaging and all of that—I just think humans are so complicated. I never want to be proscriptive. If I get people with the spectacle, and they’re thinking about how Indian experience is part of their own individual life in a different way—that’s success. I think the shift is thinking more deeply about who the audience actually is and what’s the most impactful thing we can do. To do that turns out to be sailing against the zeitgeist and saying to the people wearing those red “Make America Great Again” baseball caps, Come on in. Learn about this. Be part of it— without irony, without, We’re going to show you how bad you are, how wrong you are. I think that’s what’s radical about it.

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Light and Space pioneer Helen Pashgian at her 2014 LACMA exhibition. The artist has been an integral part of the Los Angeles art world for decades—beloved by curators, critics and fellow artists.

LET THERE BE LIGHT

BY SARA ROFFINO

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I am three minutes late when

I arrive at Helen Pashgian’s studio, tucked in a parking lot off an unremarkable Pasadena alleyway. Before I can knock, she opens the door—tall, lithe and emanating an elegance that is at once immediate and understated—and ushers me in to her dimly-lit studio. She has just returned from the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, at which she is a regular attendee, and is telling me about a previous year’s talk given by late American diplomat Richard Holbrooke on the political and economic complexities of Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia and its relationship to the Saudi Arabian oil pipeline and the Strait of Hormuz, in the Persian Gulf. I quickly realize this is a studio visit unlike others.

We enter her workspace and I find our seats are arranged, waiting for us: two directors chairs opposite a single disc of quietly luminescent pure green color.

Throughout our hour-long conversation, which I am not allowed to record, I alternate between tr ying to write down ever ything Pashgian says and giving my full attention to her words. Phrases from my notes include: “out of time and space,” “reaction to the world in which we live,” “California as melting pot,” “a space where words are no longer sufficient,” “dissolution,” “memor y,” “DeWain,” “Wheeler,” “Bell,” “Mar y,” “Peter,” “Turrell,” “internal journey,” “how light travels through color,” “the light is the object.” Such fragments reveal enough of Pashgian to situate her clearly within California’s Light and Space movement. Yet

BOTH IMAGES COURTESY TOTAH

any words, I think, are insufficient to capture the sentient experience of her work or the significance of her discoveries within the histor y of ar t, color and light.

Trained as an ar t historian with a focus on the Dutch Golden Age, Pashgian’s reverence for Vermeer, aka the painter of light, has been fundamental to her thinking for more than 60 years. She made paintings for a while after returning home to California from her studies in Boston, but eventually gravitated toward more experimental materials, such as a polyester resin so toxic it has since been banned. While her media have changed throughout the course of her career, her insistence on light as the object of her work has not wavered. For Pashgian, light is not a metaphor or a symbol or an allegor y; light itself is both medium and message.

Pashgian is rare among ar tists for many reasons—one of which is her willingness to talk about nostalgia without irony, distance or dismissiveness. She has spoken about a particular nostalgia in her life, one that she relates to early childhood memories of playing in the tidepools along the California coast and watching the way light moved through the water and animated the creatures below the sur face.

Something about her description of this reminds me of the Por tuguese word saudades, which I mention to her, explaining that it has no direct English translation but is more or less a sense of longing for something indescribable. She tells me to write that down.

When I think our visit is coming to a close, Pashgian instead leads me by the arm to a different darkened room in the building, imploring me to keep my eyes aver ted from ever ything around me except the Eames roller in which I am to sit. I find my way to the chair looking down, cover my eyes with my hands and unlike ever y other instance in life when I’ve been told not to look, I actually don’t. I’m aware that I’m smiling, though I don’t yet know what is going to happen.

It feels like a long time before Pashgian says I can open my eyes.

When I do, it takes a few minutes to process what I am seeing: a glowing circle of yellow, undefined by the space around it, seems to float before me. The lights in the room are low but not completely off, and it’s almost as if the color is gently pulsating or breathing. My eyes and brain are unable to reconcile what is before me and I am completely transfixed.

At some point, Pashgian seats herself next to me and I can feel her anticipation. She is waiting for my response, but I can’t summon any words. After a few minutes, she hits my arm with a lack of restraint that is both surprising and charming. “Do you see it?” she asks.

Eventually I tell her that it feels like what I imagine it would be like if we were able to look directly at the sun—something we are aware of ever yday, but can never truly see. It’s not so much a visual correlation with the sun that I am experiencing, although that is present, but more a sense of seeing something beyond the limits of physical capacity.

Pashgian tells me to get closer, so I stand up and walk around the epoxy disc in disbelief at the fact that this seemingly ethereal orb of color is actually the result of immense human labor and precision.

Pashgian resists a spiritual reading of her work, an understandable position for someone whose practice requires scientific acuity, high-tech material and skilled fabricators. Yet being in her studio was, for me, undeniably transcendent—the sor t of experience that simultaneously heightens one’s awareness of physical existence and blasts one beyond of the limits of that physicality. “It’s what you feel when you have that internal flux that comes from a moment of awe,” says her New York gallerist David Totah, whose eponymous Lower East Side galler y included Pashgian in “Transient,” a two-person show last year.

Outside of a sur vey of Southern California ar t at the Parrish in

2012, a group show at David Zwirner in 2010 and one at Metro Pictures in 2012, Pashgian’s work hadn’t been on view in New York since the early ’70s. She did, however, have a significant solo exhibition at LACMA in 2014—during which the museum’s director Michael Govan referred to her as not just a great pioneer of the Light and Space movement, but “one of the great pioneers of ar t generally.”

This season, a series of Pashgian’s columns and spheres feature prominently in London at the Hayward Galler y’s “Space Shifters” exhibition on view from September 26 through Januar y 9, 2019. TOTAH is also including Pashgian’s first-ever black sphere in “Polarities,” a group show through October 14 that proposes to showcase the way in which color can destabilize contrasts. It’s a fitting context for the ar tist: our conversation made me think of Isaiah Berlin’s “Roots of Romanticism,” in which the philosopher traces the transition from the Enlightenment belief that all knowledge is attainable if one asks the right questions to the Romantic notion that the universe is inexhaustible and infinite. While it is tempting to think of Pashgian’s work as a sor t of Romantic ideal—with its saudades and its ethereality—to do so would be a denial of the fundamental rigor of her practice. In Berlin’s text, he summarizes the Romantic position: “If the universe is a form of activity and not a lump of stuff, if it is infinite and not finite… how can we possibly tr y to describe it?” He continues, “When we tr y to describe the light we can describe it accurately only by putting it out.

Therefore do not let us describe it.” Pashgian’s discs and spheres and columns composed of light itself put for th the possibility that we are not limited to description in ar t, or in life.

Pashgian depends on technical rigor to shape her works, but the effect for viewers goes far beyond the material reality.

Pictured here is an untitled work in cast epoxy from 2010–11 that was included in “Transient” at TOTAH last year.

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A WORLD OF POSSIBILITIES Is Nahema Mehta everywhere at once? The CEO and cofounder of the art-buying online destination Absolut Art spends about 10 days a month in her home in New York, with the rest of her time jetting between Stockholm, London, Hong Kong, various other cities in Europe and Asia, and soon Africa, as the company expands its focus to artists living there. “It’s a little unsustainable now that I’m going on seven months pregnant,” Mehta laughs, calling from Switzerland during a brief family visit en route to Sweden. But it’s all in a day’s work.

“We look at different parts of the world and we see where we think it would be interesting to explore the art scene,” says Mehta. “Then I literally hop on a plane and go with the curator from artist studio to artist studio.”

Fittingly, the Absolut Art tagline reads, “bringing the world’s artists to a global audience.”

The site provides full-service support to anyone with an internet connection who’s interested in buying art, from online art advising to digital visualizations of what a piece might look like in your living room. Absolut Art’s inventory is made of limited-edition prints ranging from $100 to a few thousand dollars, commissioned exclusively from artists, mainly emerging, based anywhere from Stockholm and Los Angeles to Berlin, Havana and soon Hong Kong. They belong to a roster that Mehta assembles in close collaboration with local curators, the likes of whom have included art-world veterans like Francesca Gavin in Berlin and Samantha Culp in Los Angeles, alongside under-the-radar talents like Abel Gonzàlez in Havana.

Their role is to help Mehta navigate a landscape of emerging or less widely known artists. In Havana, thanks to Gonzàlez, she was able to spend time with artist Hamlet Lavastida, whose works countering Cuban political and military propaganda have resulted in his three-year exile from the country. “The bravery around that is so spectacular,” Mehta says. “I remember fighting tooth and nail with Absolut to say that we need to find a way to make his art available. Because of all the sanctions, I worked with our legal team for over a year to make that happen. That’s sort of part of our premise, bringing those voices to the foreground.”

The vast potential for the internet to break boundaries in the art world, both in the buying and selling of art, is something that Mehta recognized early on. While more traditional modes of collecting have been typically intimidating and exclusive—”You can’t afford this, so you’re not from the right socioeconomic background to participate in this,” as Mehta characterizes it—an online platform could provide a space for a “seamless, contextualized and inclusive experience for people.” Following career stints in law and private equity, Mehta founded the online platform Art Remba in 2010, back “when you couldn’t get a gallery or an artist to want to be online.”

“I think that it was a little bit of fear of what it would do to the existing ecosystem,” she explains, “but in fact it was just going to extend its reach.

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BY JANELLE ZARA PORTRAIT BY ROBERTO CHAMORRO

Today it’s seen more as another channel for anyone, an artist, or a gallerist, or a museum to do their work, rather than something that was going to be threatening their livelihood.” In 2014, she caught the attention of a Swedish vodka company who wanted to buy her services and Absolut Art was born. As the art world more comfortably progresses into the internet age, it opens itself to a world of possibilities.

In 1970, influential German philosopher Theodor Adorno claimed that “great artists since Baudelaire were in conspiracy with fashion.” He wasn’t all wrong. Today, crossover collaborations between art and fashion have achieved unprecedented attention.

Bizarrely borrowing the title of Marina Abramović’s blockbuster MoMA exhibition from 2010, “The Artist Is Present” is a collaborative exhibition between Gucci’s creative director Alessandro Michele and art world’s favorite prankster Maurizio Cattelan—here, acting as curator. In a cryptic statement the show is described as “an act of appropriation,” focusing on artistic projects that envisage the copy as a paradigm for global culture.

These preoccupations feel rather timely in the age of social media, where plagiarism has become unmissable—and yet uncontrollable. China, the world capital of counterfeit, provides a somewhat appropriate context for the exhibition, which will be hosted at the YUZ Museum in Shanghai.

“The Artist Is Present” looks at the dynamics between creation, appropriation, copy and authorship. You’ve previously said that “originality doesn’t exist in itself”; but rather it has something to do with the “capacity to add.” What prompted this project now, and in this collaborative form?

When in 1988 they discovered that the Shroud of Turin was a 13th-century

interested in testing the power of an image and a title presented in a completely different context, as it was for the ”Shit and Die” exhibition in Turin that I curated with Marta Papini and Myriam Ben Salah in 2014. In this way, the project overcomes the physical boundaries of the exhibition and becomes part of the media discussion.

Are we anywhere close to the resolution of dream and reality, as professed by André Breton in his “First Surrealist Manifesto” almost a century ago?

In a way, yes. We are surrounded by something that’s more similar to a cloud, but it’s sticky, pervasive and perverse as a blob: Misinformation and post-truth news are the daily nightmares that have substituted reality, and we can’t help but share them. Our subconscious, our fears and our passions became the material for unscrupulous people to make money every time we tap on our phone.

I’m not sure whether Breton meant this, but this is definitely where we are now, much further beyond than The Twilight Zone.

In China, the concept of copy differs widely from the Western perspective.

Copies are often considered of equal value to the original. How has working there informed your position?

I’ve recently learned that Eastern culture, not just the Chinese, has been based for ages on the concept of reincarnation. Because time is circular, the sense of progress, of an old time versus a new one that is typical of a culture that

ORIGINALITY IS OVERRATED

artifact and not the impression of Christ’s body on his shroud, no one thought of stopping the veneration of the artifact. I had always wondered how that was possible until I realized that the difference between copy and original is only a question of faith. One could say that it is this fascination that led Alessandro [Michele] and I to meet: we both believe in the originality of the copy.

What was it like working with Alessandro Michele and how did the conversation come about?

Alessandro, probably inspired by his personal Renaissance iconography world, decided to take up the role of patron (quite a reckless one, to be honest!) and commission me to curate a show, challenging me to find a way to raise the level of discussion around the dichotomy between copy and original. I’ve been gifted a total freedom of choice with regard to the artists and how to show them, and this absolute liberty has no price. I guess I’m in the best position after Pope Sixtus IV’s commissioned Michelangelo the Sistine Chapel. Maybe even better.

Anything you can tell us about the project’s title, which is borrowed from the high-profile, seemingly unrelated MoMA retrospective of Marina Abramović?

Marina Abramović’s “The Artist Is Present” has been the mother of every contemporary art show: it’s the one that everyone knows. To copy the title and take inspiration from the advertising campaign seemed the most natural thing to do for a show that claims to be the reign of copies in all its possible forms.

Marina and her practice have nothing to do with the exhibition itself, but I was

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considers time as a straight line, is not even considered. The most classical example is that of Buddhist temples, which are demolished and rebuilt continuously: Where we see a new building, Asian culture sees the reincarnation of the previous one. Reincarnation is the first prerequisite for understanding the copy as the original equation that underlies the whole exhibition.

Plagiarism claims are frequent in all creative fields, which social media has made nearly impossible to go unreported. Do you think the establishment and those in a position of power have a responsibility to credit and engage with lesser-known talents?

Of course, when there’s the possibility, I’m a fan of the “share responsibly, and credit everyone” motto. Copying is the gesture we do most often during the day.

Every time you share content online, you’re potentially plagiarizing someone. The battles over copyright have been lost and overcome by the sharing way of life.

You can’t go back from that, so the best option we have is to accept it and deal with it. Ideas are like raindrops: They fall on everyone in the same way at the same time, but only some people feel the rain. Others just get wet.

Nearly a decade ago, soon after Obama stepped into office, you speculated, “Sooner or later, something dramatic is going to happen.” Have we reached that moment yet?

It may have happened, it may not have happened, but it could have happened.

The tragedy is that no one was there to see it, they were all too busy reposting it.

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

Three stills from Yuri Ancarani’s 2018 video, The Artist Is Present with Maurizio Cattelan and Gucci. culturedmag.com 111

KEEP UP

BY ELIZABETH KARP-EVANS PORTRAIT BY SARAH MUEHLBAUER

“It is a big deal, but some galleries are 50 years old,” Pilar Corrias asserts with a casual finality when I ask her about the 10 years she has spent running her eponymous London gallery, which opened in 2008, the year of a global financial collapse. Overnight the art market nosedived, and when many spaces were shutting their doors, Corrias enlisted Rem Koolhaas to design her 3,800-square-foot Fitzrovia space. She opened that October with four artists on her roster and inaugurated the gallery with a Philippe Parreno exhibition. Today, she represents 24 emerging and established artists.

When Corrias recounts the decade spent building her program, she is at times excited and always sincere, with an unflappable confidence. Much of the openness and inclusivity that has recently emerged in the art world has been forged by women with this sort of self-possession.

Corrias’s gallery is a testament to this shift, with a diverse program of artists from four continents—63 percent of whom are women—working across painting, sculpture, video and performance. Corrias’s staff is more than 50 percent female, and when she needed a new website she hired Metahaven, an Amsterdam-based art and design collective who Corrias calls “the ultimate anti-corporate designers.”

“Many people say the art world is not what it used to be, that it was so much better before. Now it’s so aggressive and so competitive and it’s global,” says Corrias.

“This is all true. But I think that it’s a much better place if you’re from China, if you’re a woman, if you’re AfricanAmerican. It’s a tougher, more competitive art market, but it’s also more inclusive.”

Corrias’s mother was a painter, and she grew up looking at art—she counts a portrait of her mother and grandmother by Diego Rivera as part of her personal collection. She studied fine art at the University of Exeter and received an MA in art theory from Goldsmiths before starting at Lisson Gallery in 1993, when she was 23 years old. “I was hired as a receptionist,” she recalls. She stayed on for 10 years, eventually becoming a director before

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leaving to join Haunch of Venison gallery in London. Her next big step was launching her own space with Parreno— showing just one work, Fraught Times: For Eleven Months of the Year it’s an Artwork and in December it’s Christmas (October). The realistic cast-aluminum Christmas tree sculpture was Parreno’s first tree, and marked Corrias’s place among the handful of high-profile female dealers in London, including Sadie Coles, Maureen Paley, Victoria Miro and Alison Jacques.

For the gallery’s 10-year anniversary, Corrias is planning a Groundhog Day event on October 2. She has asked Parreno to do another solo show—same place, same time, new work—but this time with a “dead” Christmas tree with no decorations, cast from stainless steel and painted to look frozen. Coinciding with Frieze London, Parreno’s anniversary exhibition celebrates the past, while the gallerist’s fair booth highlights the future with a presentation that includes works by only the female artists she represents: Koo Jeong A, Cui Jie, Helen Johnson, Tala Madani, Elizabeth Neel, Christina Quarles, Tschabalala Self and Shahzia Sikander, among others.

Quarles, who has her first solo show with the gallery this September, notes Corrias’s fearlessness in showing art beyond two-dimensional media by women. “I always look at the work first, but I love the fact that so many of the dynamic artists represented by the gallery are women,” she says. “As a woman navigating an art world dominated by men, it is meaningful to work with Pilar and her team of strong women in high-level positions.”

Fellow gallery artist Ian Cheng recalls the first time he met Corrias in 2013. “We talked for three hours and I had the feeling that she was weaving together, on the spot, a vision of how my early and unproven ideas could find a place in the world and flourish. Her energy, optimism and business inventiveness has 100 percent changed my life. Pilar is a radiant force of nature.”

With Frieze and several institutional shows of her artists planned for this fall, it’s shaping up to be a very busy anniversary. This seems to invigorate Corrias, who has consistently and unflinchingly fostered unconventional talent across both gender and age lines. When asked about the next 10 years, Corrias’s future plans include one day having a much larger space. For now, she is focused on continuing to do exhibitions and build a roster of artists that reflects a global art world, one she has undoubtedly helped to create.

Pilar Corrias at the New York studio of Gerasimos Floratos, one of the artists she represents.

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STEPPING OUT

BY OSMAN CAN YEREBAKAN PORTRAIT BY ANA KRAŠ

Some of the most memorable moments within the history of visual culture have emerged in the space where fashion meets art, from designers collaborating with contemporary artists to painters and sculptors utilizing refined fabrics and patterns to plumb emotional depths. For Paul Andrew, the 39-year-old recently-hired creative director of women’s collections at Salvatore Ferragamo, art is more than aesthetic inspiration— especially since he acquired his first Richard Serra painting. “The work is super graphic with a gorgeous saturated use of black and an amazing texture that is spoken through the paint,” Andrew says. “This work began a narrative that continued after seeing an exhibition in Paris of the work of Pierre Soulages,” recalls the designer, who is arguably among the industry’s busiest, managing his own namesake brand of shoes and accessories in addition to holding his critical role at Ferragamo, following various positions at Alexander McQueen, Donna Karan and Narciso Rodriguez.

The British-born tastemaker’s weekly schedule includes sojourns in Florence, where the Ferragamo headquarters is located and New York, the city he has called home since 2000. “We live in a global society with local nuances but with a dynamically connected appreciation for the arts,” he explains about different art communities in Europe and the United States.

"I’m fortunate to see the same exhibitions on tour from city to city. What makes the experience unique each time is the environment, the curator’s hand translating the show to a different space and the ways the audiences react to how the art changes with its surrounding.”

Traces of Andrew’s bicontinental life are evident in his art and design collection, which balances American and European heavy-hitter Abstract Expressionists Robert Motherwell, Josef Albers and Soulages with contemporary painters willing to take technical experiments with buoyant colors. Such artists include Federico de Francesco, an Italian-born, New York-based painter of tumultuous brushstrokes and Argentinian Conie

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Vallese, whose work in sculpture and painting blurs notions of representation and perspective. “I’m certainly not rooted to one area for too long, which makes exposure to the art world all the more adventurous and opens the channels from which I acquire art: auctions at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, boutique galleries and often directly from the artists themselves,” he explains of his collecting habits. Asked about the correlation between sculpting and shoe design, Andrew says: “For me, shoe design has always been a form of sculpting. The initial process of creating a shoe requires a skilled hand to mold the heel and the last, a step which I’m still very involved in to this day.”

The son of an artisanal upholsterer father who worked for the Queen at Windsor Castle, Andrew grew up immersed in boundary-pushing creativity and commitment to technical precision. Living in Berkshire, not far from London, his family reserved weekends for visits to the National Portrait Gallery, Tate Britain and the Victoria & Albert Museum, which, he asserts, provided him a groundwork for his aesthetic vision. These visits and the context his family provided for him helped cultivate Andrew’s appreciation for the arts now reflected in his sharp approach to shoe design.

The parallels between Andrew’s hard-edged and opulent stilettos and the determined and sumptuous lines in his art and design collection are are unmissable. Recalling Ferragamo’s visionary work with Futurist painter Lucio Venna in 1930s, Andrew suggests a possibility for crossing paths with artists in forthcoming seasons: “I’m really keen to continue this honored tradition, exploring potential artistic collaborators for future collections.” Is he interested in wearing a curatorial hat or publicly exhibiting his collection outside his city apartment, rural Connecticut home and the Upper East Side office? “My collection is personal to me,” he says.

“I prefer to call it passion, a passion that speaks not only though the art I acquire but also the creative messages I develop in designing a collection.”

Designer Paul Andrew takes inspiration from the colors, textures and forms found in modern and contemporary art for both Salvatore Ferragamo and his own shoe brand.

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Stealth Richard Shemtov

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Since your exhibition career began in the 1960s, you have participated in more than 600 shows throughout the world. How has the motivation behind your work evolved over time?

It got stronger.

In addition to monumental artworks, drawings and sculpture, you have created reclamation and master plans for entire urban areas. What do you believe the role of the artist should be in civic life?

Your question implies that artists should work according to preset rules.

Art doesn’t follow rules, it is a language that everyone can understand if well expressed. True art is subtle but powerful, imperceptible but monumental. Its often invisible materials can undermine egos and misguided belief systems. It can help the world if people listen.

You have said Rice/Tree/Burial, realized in 1968 in Sullivan County, New York, was your first act in eco-philosophy. Can you speak to your ecological and non-ego-based approach to site-specific work and how it differentiates you from other land artists?

I am glad so many other artists are now working in this medium that I pioneered 50 years ago. If you are looking for differences, it is the longevity of my vision. I look way back and forward as much as possible, and works I did 50 years ago are as fresh as if done today. The issues it dealt with are the issues of today. Getting ready for this big show at The Shed is making me look back at my work and I am amazed at what I was able to create. And without much help or acknowledgment, as my work had been marginalized until recently. I was busy with research, with impossible wild projects, and not being in the limelight, so to speak, made my work as strong as it was and is. Looking back I see that all my work was trying to help humanity with some problem, offering benign solutions. I am writing a book now where I explain this.

One of the greatest public art projects in New York was your 1982 Wheatfield—A Confrontation, where you planted two acres of wheat in a Battery Park landfill. How do you reflect on the work 35 years later with

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all that has transpired since, from the fall of the Twin Towers to the urban development of the land?

It was a triumphant moment in time, a confrontation of human greed, mismanagement and complaisance that have since remained the same or worsened. The people who stood around the field during my harvest in silence, those who cried and those who asked me to keep the field going probably sensed that.

While your work is deeply rooted in an interest in the natural world, it also is science-based and grounded in mathematics and human evolution. How do you understand and express the relationship between nature and humanity?

Your description of my work answers the question.

At 87 years old, you will have a solo show next year at The Shed, a new center for artistic invention at Hudson Yards. Given the profound breadth of your work, how are you approaching the show and what do you want people to come away with?

Enlightenment. Mentioning my age is common in interviews, as if it mattered. Yes, I survived this long, and if I can make more relevant art, I will survive much longer. Creativity is like fresh air, like a transfusion. It protects one and keeps one going. Give me a reason to make art, to be creative, and I’ll respond with small miracles, sometimes even big ones if I get the inspiration and if they let me. There is so much I still want to do, and there was so much I was held back from doing. Prejudices are inherent in human nature, and those I’ve encountered in my lifetime are chickenfeed compared to what the world must endure on the large scale, from bad leaders to stupid followers to circumstances.

What is your hope for humanity now?

I still have great hope for us. Resilience and the swing of the pendulum will right the wrong, as all of this is part of life, all of it nourishes the psyche.

I love humanity with all its mistakes and wrongdoing, all its brilliance and talent, all its sacrifice and enduring.

©AGNES DENES; COURTESY OF LESLIE TONKONOW ARTWORKS + PROJECTS

Denes photographing on the site of her Wheatfield—A Confrontation, which was installed in a Battery Park landfill in 1982. culturedmag.com 119

EMOTIONAL APPEAL

At times, speaking with Eric Hoffman can feel more like talking to

a therapist than a design specialist. He reads brands, situations and people with a deftness that is charming and disarming. “What we do requires emotional intelligence to understand our clients’ world and their needs,” he explains. “We are always aware of the vulnerability that they might feel when it comes to identity development. Our role is to support them and help build their confidence.”

Together with his nimble, dynamic team, he has cemented Hoffman Creative as the go-to studio for design and brand identity development that is smart, sensitive and refined. “Design is ultimately about understanding people,” he says.

Hoffman, who founded his creative agency a decade ago in New York, has worked with an impressive roster of brands across art, design, interiors and hospitality. Clients include heavy hitters like Calvin Klein, Rizzoli, SBE Hotel Group and Coty Beauty as well as respected industry leaders and bright lights such as Atelier AM, Aero Studios, Lévy Gorvy and the Haas Brothers. The agency increasingly specializes in discerning creatives who understand that investment in good design translates not just into business growth, but into genuine engagement and loyal relationships with their respective audiences, too.

It’s not hard to see why clients come back to Hoffman Creative time and again for repeat consultation. “We spend a great deal of time and energy building relationships. We do our best work when we have relationships founded on mutual respect and trust; these partnerships get stronger over time,” Hoffman says. In an industry that often only deals in aesthetic remedies, Hoffman’s agency goes deep and gives medicine, not band-aids or gloss.

“We describe ourselves as creative partners, not service providers,” he says. Knowing the difference has no doubt been key to forging ongoing relationships that are simultaneously personal and professional. It’s a crucial factor in delivering meaningful design work, whether it’s a comprehensive visual identity for an interior design firm, a creative direction template for a product launch or a digital world for a physical brand. “The digital realm is by nature a very cold experience,” Hoffman says. “We craft digital experiences with charisma and warmth.”

In our era of speed and convenience, when you can build yourself a website in minutes and design a logo in seconds, solid design experience working with some of the world’s most successful aesthetes and perfectionists counts considerably. Against this backdrop, Hoffman speaks of the personalized value he and his team brings today: “Everything we do is bespoke, designed with and for each client in its entirety. Too much design work today feels soulless and derivative. We help brands create something personal and proprietary that resonates emotionally with them and their values. We deliver simplicity, clarity and focus.”

Arguably, this matters today more than ever. Whether as clients, customers or commissioners, we respond to brands whose personalities and values we feel aligned with. Effective design is not about dressing up, but about building confidence to clearly communicate with integrity. It’s not so different from therapy after all.

BY HUGO MACDONALD PORTRAIT BY STEPHEN KENT JOHNSON

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The Hoffman Creative team at their New York studio. Pictured from left to right: Jeff Albert (sitting), Omar Aqeel, Eric Hoffman, Joseph Ligotti (on sofa), Jasper the dog, Wren Sieber, Chris Paolini.

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TAKING OFF THE MASK

I meet up with sculptor Leilah Babirye at the diner La Bonbonniere in the West Village on a sweltering Monday afternoon. Before we even sit down at our proudly unglamorous Formica table, Babirye is telling me a story. Her brother is threatening to disinvite her friends from his upcoming wedding in Uganda, where she is from and was forced to flee in 2015 after being publicly outed as a lesbian. “My friends there are all activists and openly gay,” she

explains. “But he said, ‘I invited pastors, elders and people from the church—your friends will come with their locks, women dressed like men, men dressed like women.’” She smiles to herself as if to say: His loss—it won’t be a party without them.

Since finding a home in the queer scene of Kampala, Uganda, Babirye has insisted on bringing her community with her everywhere she goes, and most especially into her work as a

sculptor. For her first solo exhibition this past spring at Gordon Robichaux, Babirye made activist material out of her utopic, celebratory vision of queer life. The show, “Amatwaale Ga Ssekabaka Mwanga II (The Empire of King Mwanga II),” paid homage to the little-known, openly bisexual King Mwanga II who, in the late 19th century, fought against the colonial rule of Uganda by Western missionaries. Colonization would eventually poison the people against long-

BY SVETLANA KITTO PORTRAIT BY MARK HARTMAN PRODUCED BY MICHAEL REYNOLDS

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Babirye takes a chainsaw to a tree stump at Socrates Sculpture Park. Born and raised in Uganda, Babirye started carving masks as a way of addressing the violent homophobia she and her friends faced there.

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held cultural norms of matriarchy, feminine worship and queerness, helping to create the present-day environment of open hostility and homophobia that forced Babirye into exile.

Her show offered an alternate future, a gender- and power-fluid take on King Mwanga II’s kingdom. A series of wood and ceramic sculptural masks, named for contemporary Ugandan princes and princesses, their genders and titles conflated, stood on pedestals in the center of the room reigning supreme. “I picked names from the present day because that is what my generation is familiar with… We need to make our own history and legacy,” Babirye explains. Adorning both the masks and the sculptural reliefs on the walls of the gallery were found materials such as chains, nails, plastic bags, mousetraps, old cell phones and locks.

Babirye’s choice to use trash in the work is intentional—the pejorative for a gay person in the Luganda language is ebisiyaga, which means sugarcane husk. “It’s rubbish,” explains Babirye, “the part of the sugarcane you throw out.”

Babirye’s life was set to go on a very different track back in 2006, when she was on her way to check out the law school at

female empowerment through the instruction and practice of art, Babirye thrived and produced. Students were taught European sculptural techniques used in the works of Alberto Giacometti and Henry Moore, as well as methods from African sculptural traditions, like carving and burning. (A fusing of styles and methods took hold of her process early on: She would fashion her reproductions of Henry Moore’s reclining figures using bloated animal bones.) For her major, she focused on PanAfrican women’s hairstyles—sculptures of women with elaborately architectural braids, wigs, twists and locks fashioned out of cloth, yarn, chains, old film—that she would stay late in her studio every night working on. “My love was my art. I had no time for dating.”

After she graduated, she began trying to sell her work and make a living as an artist. She also started going out to gay bars in Kampala, solidifying important relationships and developing a strong connection to the queer community. At the end of her gap year, her father and professors were pressuring her to go back to university and get an advanced degree in sculpture. She began looking for a dissertation

In the years that followed, Babirye went ahead in her pursuit of new methods and meanings, her art becoming her activism.

There’s no mask-making or decorative woodcarving techniques unique to Central Africa; to learn the basics, Babirye sought out a local group of artisans that were producing masks in the West African tradition. Since the skills were borrowed and new to her, she had to get creative with the form and materials, a transcultural alchemy that helped her develop her own style and point of view, and a body of work reflective of the diversity of African art traditions.

In the homophobic climate that would reach its climax with Uganda’s infamous antihomosexuality bill in 2013, Babirye’s work became increasingly urgent. In 2014, she was publicly outed in a massive inflammatory story in a local tabloid. Babirye had applied to the Fire Island Artist Residency in New York and was accepted. Fearing for her life, she left Kampala in 2015 with a travel visa and hasn’t returned since. And on Valentine’s Day of this year, she was granted asylum, an arduous process three years in the making.

Kampala’s Makerere University and came upon the university’s art school instead. There she saw Dr. Lilian Nabulime, a well-known artist and star of the university sculpture department, bent over a giant tree stump carving. “When I saw Dr. Lilian doing something I thought was supposed to be done by men, I said, ‘Could I do this?’” Nabulime encouraged Babirye to come to the art school and study sculpture with her.

Believing that there was no future for her in art, Babirye’s father insisted that she take courses in computer science and engineering; it would be another year before he would agree to pay her tuition for art school. Once there, and under the guidance of a prodigiously accomplished female faculty (including Nabulime, Margaret Nagawa, Dr. Rose Kirumira and Sylvia Katende, all of whom participated in the pivotal 1995 “Women on the Move” show at Nommo gallery in Kampala) geared toward

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topic. On television, she had seen footage of the memorial for David Kato, a young gay rights activist who had been violently murdered in his home. His friends, many of whom she knew from the community, were wearing masks over their faces at the funeral to protect their identities.

The televised images of her friends’ concealed faces was a watershed moment for Babirye.

She had found her dissertation topic: She would make masks as a way to talk about the struggle the LGBT community faces in Uganda.

“That’s when I started making real art,” she says. “I thought, why not be wild and come out now? I was having issues with my family; my brother and dad were hearing rumors… My anger popped out. I was going to do things my way, not my parents’ way.” Nor the way of her mentors. When she told her professors what the masks would represent, they rejected the topic outright and left the room outraged.

As a fellow at Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, where she made a 12-foot sculpture that will be part of the Socrates Annual opening October 7, Babirye was given a production grant and daily access to the park’s studio and facilities. Unsurprisingly, she is keeping similar hours to the ones she did in art school: “The first to arrive and last to leave,” her gallerist Sam Gordon tells me. As to where her imagination is currently drifting, she muses affectionately: “I think I need to return to hair.” In an art world loaded with empty, trending gestures towards resistance and freedom, Babirye’s sincerity cuts through the noise, an embodiment of lived activism.

Perhaps this is because Babirye never forgets whom her work is for. Love for her community fuels her sculptural forms, forms that exhume a dense tangle of queer struggle, joy and detritus, and get free.

After learning West African carving techniques from a group of local artisans in Kampala, Barbirye developed her own takes on the material and form. Here, a face emerges from the sculptor’s blade. culturedmag.com 125

CONSIDERED TABBOO!

BY OSMAN CAN YEREBAKAN PORTRAIT BY DAVID YARRITU PRODUCED BY MICHAEL REYNOLDS

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On a scorching New York Sunday, Tabboo! welcomes me to his Alphabet City apartment, where a generous variety of plants orchestrate a domestic greenery. We perch by a living room window that opens up to a city full of inspirations, seen in his recent cityscape paintings that were exhibited alongside works of his from the 1980s to great acclaim at Gordon Robichaux gallery last fall. “I have always been a prolific painter who never stopped working,” the artist explains of the attention his canvases have garnered in recent years. Some of his earlier work, including two paintings from 1982 and a large selection of Xerox art and collage flyers for his early performances and exhibits in the city, was recently included in MoMA’s group exhibition “Club 57: Film, and Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978–1983.”

“In my little cocoon, I’ve been fermenting and getting better and better,” he adds, the word “better” echoing inside the one-bedroom apartment where he has lived for 40 years. In the ’80s, Avenue C stood for “crazy,” defining anyone who risked stepping foot in the brutal neighborhood (Avenues A, B and D were nicknamed “all right,” “brave” and “death,” respectively). Despite its agile gentrification, Alphabet City is critical for Tabboo!, and so is his apartment-cum-studio. “The best thing about this place is its gorgeous sky view,” he says, pointing at the endless blue framed by skyscrapers edge to edge. “When I first started my cityscape paintings, I was on my personal spiritual quest,” he remembers. “The way the sky communicates with people is completely different than reality down here.” From wall-spanning to intimate scales, his paintings come from this living room and are created horizontally with cues from his surroundings. Accompanying his foremost medium, acrylic, are occasional dashes of glitter, of which he has an unending stash scored more than 30 years ago when a glitter factory on 14th Street shut down and discarded boxes of leftovers on the street.

Born Stephen Tashjian to Armenian-American parents in Massachusetts, the artist eventually moved, gradually building a reputation as a drag performer, illustrator and stage designer. For a pseudonym, he combined the first two letters of his last name with the name of his aunt, Boo, the only artist he knew growing up. “I used to do my makeup the same way I make my paintings,” he laughs. He applied similar makeup to Marc Jacobs for a photo shoot during their collaboration for the designer’s 2016 fall collection, in which Tabboo! hand-painted directly on garments for the runway show and Jacobs used his artwork on a wide variety of clothing and accessories.

Even during the height of his stage career, Tabboo! held onto his paint tubes and linen canvases. Of his many creative outlets, painting encapsulates his overall creative force, with hints of nightlife and drag mixed in. The eccentric figures in his recent paintings, such as The Prince or Geisha To Go (both from 2018), are inspired by puppets in his collection. While his urban views are wildly mesmerizing with their nocturnal melancholia or luminous zeal, the standing figures based off his puppets manifest his panache. Their impossibly intricate fashions and unabashed flamboyance salute Weimar Era extravaganza and the heyday of the East Village in the ’80s—two eras particularly inspirational for Tabboo!. In addition to the lushness of his brushstrokes, his untouched linen surfaces elevate the figures as if they are a stage, building up yet another layer of texture and meaning.

Busy months are on the horizon for Tabboo!. He created artwork and imagery for this year’s return of the East Village’s iconic drag festival, Wigstock; Gordon Robichaux’s NADA Miami booth will be dedicated to his new paintings; and his imagery is be featured on a bookmark, tote bag and advertisements celebrating Printed Matter’s new East Village location. And, for those looking for even more Tabboo!, sweatshirts featuring original artwork by the artist are now available via the über-popular streetwear brand Supreme.

Tabboo! in the East Village apartment where he has lived and worked for almost 40 years.

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COURTESY OF THE GLASS HOUSE.

Jennie C. Jones in the Philip Johnson Glass House Sculpture Gallery, where her site-specific audio collages are on view this fall.

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Cole Akers: By bringing together art history and music history, your work reframes our understanding of the past. You’ve described a facet of your process as “listening as a conceptual practice.” Can you elaborate on that?

Jennie C. Jones: “Listening as a conceptual practice” was a phrase I wrote in my sketchbook 10 years ago. And it has hung around and haunted me since then. It even became the title of a graduate seminar I taught. I would say it’s a form of mindfulness, a deep, immersive pleasure you can have in those moments when you’ve abandoned your other senses and you are “in it.” For me, those embodied sensations also come with a real heavy sense of conceptualism and of art history as I’m listening. Regarding confluences, my approach is that of a revisionist, in that I’m using the filter of postmodernism in order to unearth and reposition ways of thinking. I’m employing strategies of collage in order to play with how modernist history was constructed. The nowpassé term would be neo-modernism. It means, in a way, that history can become the source, it can become content, but in its deconstruction and reconstruction (or re-composition musically) the outcome seems to gently land under the umbrella of conceptual art.

CA: Your project at the Glass House takes on histories of abstraction through the lens of the year 1970. I’ve been thinking about Darby English’s writing on this period, in which he says that late modernist abstraction was a fertile source of thought about racial subjectivity. How do you understand your work in relationship to histories of abstraction at that time?

JCJ: When I truly experienced the different sites surrounding the Glass House itself, the 1970 Sculpture Gallery stood out because of your very reference! What a period of turbulence and profound shifts. I wanted to bring the complicated energy of 1970 into the structure of the Sculpture Gallery—the complexities of the events beyond the Glass House grounds— and insert that directly into the sharp, crisp structure. Darby English’s book “1971: A Year in the Life of Color” is a text I had long been waiting for, as an offspring of that moment. He brilliantly unpacks a critical juncture for Black abstraction but also highlights and gives proper

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description to many often ignored artists of that era, such as Peter Bradley, Frederick Eversley, Al Loving, Raymond Saunders and Alma Thomas, who even though much older than the other artists is the only woman cited. In a way with this project I offer up the sonic counterparts—Sun Ra, Milford Graves, Yusef Lateef, Alice Coltrane, Dorothy Ashby, Pharaoh Sanders, The Art Ensemble of Chicago and others.

CA: What were your first impressions of the Glass House site and your thinking about its history?

JCJ: We’re always surprised the first time we encounter cultural icons that we’ve seen images of—from paintings to landmarks and buildings.

When we confront our preconceived ideas about them, sometimes mythologies shrink. I thought the Glass House would feel cold and transparent, but it felt much more insular, calm and gentle than I expected. I guess one associates glass with a slickness, more than a lens in which to see through—I did anyway! Even though the house is “exposed” it feels quite intimate, and I think that’s because of its scale.

I am a fan of human scale versus the intimidation and ego of monumental scale— both in art and architecture.

CA: You’ve made site-responsive sound works for museums and galleries, but this is your first work for a house museum. How has the context shaped your approach?

JCJ: The second time I came to the Glass House, you made me feel very welcome by saying, “The Glass House is your house.” In many ways it cannot be and never will be, but for a few months I can haunt those spaces.

I think there is always a way to lean into the structures rather than fight against the space, and I tried to create sound pieces that would ease in yet push against those environments.

That’s always been a method of mine. My goal for the Glass House was to make something circular, like the surrounding landscape— generous like the trees. And for the Sculpture Gallery, something that was pointed, sharp, that climbs up into the space but pokes at your ears like the events of 1970.

CA: In our early conversations, you spoke about the notion of the crossfade—the act of amplifying one sound as another fades out—as

a way of producing a more expansive history of abstraction than has been generally acknowledged. What do you hope that visitors will take away from your work?

JCJ: Historic moments are constantly spinning and turning around, which is in part where the project’s title comes from, “Revolutions Per Minute.” I think the saddest part about where we are historically at this flabbergasting, disgusting and absurd moment is that it’s weirdly familiar, but amplified via the plethora of media outlets. I hope audiences walk away with some residue that touches them in an ephemeral, poetic way—that it might stick with them longer than one revolution, one turning. The days spin so quickly lately and the experience of listening is too trite when it is reduced to a commute, car speakers or headphones on a subway.

CA: We’ll publish a limited-run 45 RPM record— your first—as a component of the project. What do you think of the 7-inch as an object?

JCJ: The 7-inch was invented in 1949 by RCA, actually the same year the Glass House was built. It shifted and, in some ways, democratized the distribution of music. It also created the idea of a single release, a single-song offering. The LP or long-playing record changed how composers thought: It gave them more time.

One expands time and one shortens time, but opens access. Poetically and embarrassingly, the 45 single is full of nostalgia for me. The object itself is a delight—the size of the palm and fingers spread out. It's a simple paper sleeve and jacket containing an isolated sonic gesture, one song per side. And the adaptors are the coolest utilitarian widgets.

I’ve spoken about how we’ve lost “components,” the tangible objects associated with listening in this specific way. Sure, you can have 3,000 songs on your phone in your pocket, but you don’t have the moment of crossing a room to turn a record over or experiencing the stillness of hand required to place a needle onto vinyl or the crunched eyebrows when digging through a box looking for what to pull from a sleeve next— that type of curation. I think all those reasons (and DJ culture) are why records still exist.

Sometimes it’s good to be hardwired instead of wireless, detached and waiting for an algorithm to choose the next track.

PHOTO BY LANE CODER, COURTESY OF THE GLASS HOUSE.

Jones’s installation is in conversation with the interior of the Glass House’s Sculpture Gallery, where Frank Stella’s Raft of Medusa Part I (1990) is part of the permanent collection. culturedmag.com 131

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FUTURE AND FUNCTION

BY JASMIN HERNANDEZ PORTRAIT BY SOL SANCHEZ

“I don’t have one muse, and I don’t believe in just one kind of woman,” Casey Cadwallader, 38, says during a call on a Friday morning in late July. “What I did was put a bunch of women together in a space to do a photoshoot, but what I was dreaming about was what they were going to talk about together,” he adds. The models in Mugler’s Fall 2018 collection—Cadwallader’s big moment as the brand’s newly appointed artistic director—included new influencers like the queer Dominican-American, New Jersey-bred rapper 070 Shake and nonbinary French DJ Dustin Muchuvitz, alongside alums of the house Debra Shaw and Amy Wesson.

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In Cadwallader’s 25-piece capsule collection, Shaw wears a mock neck asymmetrical coral gown with delicate draping, 070 Shake models a cropped black leather biker jacket and Wesson stuns in a sculptural black suit with deep-flared trousers. Other notable pieces include streetwear and denim elements, oversized cinched jackets, high-waisted velvet pants and a red belted patent leather coat. “Instead of doing a capsule with inward-facing, I could’ve done a project about a certain kind of dress and done it 25 different ways. Instead I did outward-facing, where I imagine representing a bunch of different things I wanted in the collection later.” Cadwallader adds, “Whether that is leather, structured

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tailoring, sculptural tailoring or very complicated fluid dresses. Maybe that one pink dress will have four babies the next season, and that one structured jacket will have its own range.”

Cadwallader’s appointment at Mugler was announced in December 2017. The artistic director stepped into the role previously held by David Koma, who after four years left to focus on his namesake brand, and Nicola Formichetti, Mugler’s inaugural artistic director who was helming Diesel before stepping down late last year. Cadwallader’s fashion pedigree is both bonafide and particular, with a degree in architecture from Cornell and an internship for Marc Jacobs that drove him into fashion. Previous stints at TSE, Narciso Rodriguez, Loewe, J. Mendel and serving as Acne Studio’s design director demonstrate his adaptability and range to work for distinct fashion brands.

Both Cadwallader’s Fall 2018 and Resort 2019 collections palpably evoke those of Thierry Mugler, with bodycon staples and powerful suiting filtered here through a technological contemporary lens. A fashion titan

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of the ’80s and ’90s, Mugler’s fantastical and surreal designs defined ’80s maximalism with cinched waists, soaring shoulder pads and pure sex on the runway. In the ’90s, Mugler—who remains creatively active— embedded himself in pop culture, directing the original cut to George Michael’s “Too Funky” music video and dressing Demi Moore in the nowiconic black gown for Indecent Proposal.

“I tried to make a connection back to the spirit of Mr. Mugler, though I’m very different from him,” says Cadwallader. “We have different passions, but we have many things in common: architecture, sculpture, form, a love of women.”

Wandering through the recent Camille Henrot exhibition at Palais de Tokyo, Cadwallader walked straight into a sculpture by British artist Samara Scott. At the time, Cadwallader was already thinking about making transparent trench coats with the interior printed or hand-painted, and the seeds of a collaboration were planted. “This woman has the most insane sense of texture and color,” Cadwallader says of the Glasgow-

PHOTOS BY ARNAUD LAJEUNIE, COURTESY OF MUGLER

Cadwallader’s Fall 2018 and Resort 2019 collections for Mugler recall the brand’s maximalist ’80s aesthetic.

based artist. “Working with Samara is very exciting for me because it’s really about letting a project take its own shape. We pushed each other to make these trench coats with all of her crazy materials vacuum-sealed into this ultrasonically-welded, double-layered PVC.” Two of the coats the duo designed made it into the debut Fall 2018 collection—the one modeled by Wesson is a wearable piece of art akin to Scott’s kaleidoscopic visual compositions of debris and everyday objects.

Cadwallader and Scott work organically, with no expected rollout of pieces per season, debuting whatever works and feels right as a collection approaches. More coats along with “stretchy and sexy” pieces are in the works for Spring 2019.

In just six months at Mugler, Cadwallader has already made his mark at the house and beyond. In May 2018, the team was in the midst of Resort 2019 week when the designer was asked to submit sketches for Beyoncé’s On the Run II tour. The entire team switched gears to “Beyoncé week,” creating five complete looks—three of which the pop icon wore

on stops in London, Cardiff and Paris, where she was in head-to-toe leopard with a wide-brimmed hat, jacket and bodysuit.

As Dan Thawley, editor-in-chief of A Magazine Curated By, explains it, “Before even putting on a runway show, Casey has been able to express his far-reaching vision for Mugler, which is less about riffing off vintage silhouettes and more about considering the radicalism that Thierry Mugler brought to fashion in the ’80s. Casey is thinking about different body shapes, about technical finishing and new ways of mixing fabrications.

His idea of the Mugler woman is more about the Mugler person, or the kind of individual that can embody a Mugler personality.”

“What I’m trying to do is to continue refining my formula—how much of it has to do with tailoring, fluidity, art and material innovation,” explains Cadwallader. “The most important thing for me is sculptural tailoring, and that really comes from my architectural interpretation of form-making, which is inspired by Mr. Mugler’s own hyperarchitectural form-making.

That’s one of the things I want the house to be most known for.”

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HEART

OF

GLASS

BY TED LOOS PORTRAIT BY MICK HAGGERTY

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Fourteen years ago, sculptor Liza Lou began working with Zulu women in Durban, South Africa to create her sculptures using thread and seed beads. She’s since moved her studio to Topanga Canyon, but still works with many of the same women and returns to Durban several times a year.

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We rely on artists to take big risks, think instinctually and follow their creative muses on our behalf—otherwise, what’s the point? If their work feels like it’s too much part of a career plan, it’s a bit too close to home for the viewer, who probably has one of her own to worry about.

You can’t accuse Liza Lou of looking too much before she leaps. At age 19, she chose to work in glass before it became clear that it was, as she puts it, “the slowest possible way to make an impact artistically.”

At 35, she moved to Durban, South Africa, to make art with the assistance of local Zulu makers—not exactly on a whim, but impulsively for sure. And she ended up living there for a decade.

“I didn’t do a lot of research, I didn’t think it through in a really deep way,” says Lou, now 49, who recently moved back to the Los Angeles area. “I just said, ‘Okay, I’m doing it,’ you know?” She laughs. “Because if you think too much about these things, you really can get freaked out and then not do them. So I kinda went for it.”

Some of the fruits of all these risks are now on view at Lehmann Maupin Gallery in Chelsea, through October 27. “Liza Lou: Classification & Nomenclature of Clouds” is the first show in the gallery’s new digs, artfully turned out by architect Peter Marino on the ground floor of a new building that holds the Hill Art Foundation upstairs (and above that, one of NYC’s most expensive condos).

The exhibition holds a massive work, The Clouds, 2015–18, clocking in at 114 feet long, comprised of oil paint on glass beads that are woven together. It’s ethereal and despite its size somehow feels light, as if it might float away while you’re not looking.

“I’ve been thinking about clouds as my starting point on this body of work, and I worked on it for about three years,” says Lou of the duration, which helps explain why this is her first New York show in a decade. “I call it a painting, but it’s about collapsing the boundaries—the edge between painting and sculpture. At what point does something tip over into sculpture, at what point does it tip over into being a painting?”

Her whole career has been devoted to asking those kinds of questions. And they have won her some serious recognition, including, in 2002, a MacArthur Fellowship. But that was after she had set her own course—she’s aware of the pitfalls of responding too much to the encouragement of the outside world. “I’ve been really lucky to have that validation,” she says. “But I also felt that, by hook or by crook, I would make my work. That’s what I would say to any young artist: No matter what, you have to resolve to do the thing you need to do. But don’t wait for that moment when other people figure it out.”

Lou was born in New York but raised mostly in Southern California.

She dropped out of the San Francisco Art Institute after one semester.

“I wanted creative and intellectual freedom,” she says. She got a studio and started making work. The breakthrough came in 1996 with Kitchen, a large piece made of an entire American kitchen covered in glass beads that was the product of five years of work. (It’s now in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.) How did that feel? “As if you could add up all of the moments when you had your shit together and see them all at once,” she says.

Formally, she found her voice early—something between painting and sculpture that satisfied her interest in shades of metaphorical gray.

But it was her bold decision to live in South Africa and work with Zulu women that brought her methods into focus.

Lou was a pioneer of social practice, a term being used more and

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more these days to describe when artists involve at-risk, vulnerable or simply under-resourced communities in their work and, by doing so, give something back. At first, it was just a temporary visit. “I rented a dance hall by the docks of Durban and started with 12 women who had never had formal employment,” recalls Lou. “But all of them had experience with beads.”

Her work evolved with the beading abilities of the women and, 14 years later, she still commissions them to work on her projects.

“I totally fell in love with these women,” says Lou. “They were so fabulous and so much fun, and I still work with the same ones.”

Beyond the personal relationships, the philosophical underpinning of social practice kept Lou’s attention, she says. “It was interesting for me to ask, Can I make sure that there is meaning in terms of making of the work itself? Can I make sure that the way my work is made has integrity, it’s rooted in the real world and can make a difference in it?”

Although Lou now goes back to Durban a couple of times a year, she felt it was time to move back to the United States with her husband, the graphic artist Mick Haggerty, and their 10-year-old daughter. But she chose Topanga Canyon, outside of Los Angeles— itself an off-the-beaten-track location not far from where fellow female iconoclast Mary Corse lives and works. It’s not a place where you go to attend art world parties, it’s a place to do serious work and, in Lou’s case, to find meaning in contradictions.

Think of glass itself: it’s breakable, yet it has the potential to last for thousands of years, as a trip to the ancient art galleries at the Getty Villa demonstrates. As Lou puts it, she’s found a home exploring “the interplay between fragility and tenacity.” In more ways than one.

PHOTO BY JOSHUA WHITE; COURTESY THE ARTIST AND LEHMANN MAUPIN, NEW YORK, HONG KONG, AND SEOUL

Lou’s Primary (2018), made from woven glass beads and thread, is among the recent works in her Lehmann Maupin exhibition, Lou’s first New York show in more than a decade.

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MARKET MADNESS

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Sara Roffino: How did this project come to life?

Jennifer Stockman: I started observing startling and disturbing changes in the art world over nearly three decades of being a collector and involved in museums. It became tougher and more competitive for museums to buy contemporary art with their limited acquisition funds because the prices were so high. And unpredictable prices at auction were also affecting my own ability to collect the art I wanted. The market was becoming white-hot and very competitive, with new collectors from every nook and cranny around the world.

I became interested in trying to understand the when, why and how the art world was changing. Was this a unique time in our history, or has this phenomenon occurred in the past each time markets became flush with new funds? I started asking everyone I met what events they attributed to these drastic changes in the art world—where art was now being thought of as a tradable asset. Some very smart people thought it was when Alfred Taubman bought Sotheby’s in 1983 and turned the auction house into a “shopping mall.” George Condo thought it all changed when Damien Hirst made a diamond skull and sold it for $100 million. Others thought maybe the idea of collecting and selling living artists started with the Scull auction in 1973. Anyway, answers were many and across the board, and it only piqued my interest to find out more. I knew that

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no one had yet produced a documentary on the subject of the layered, complex and non-transparent art world, and I became very interested in documenting this through storytelling. I knew making a documentary on this subject would be a long and complicated journey, and it was in early 2012 that I started putting the pieces together. About two years later I met Debi.

Debi Wisch: And we went on a hike.

JS: Yes, we went on a long hike called Sunnyside in Aspen and by the end we had decided to form a company and call it Hot & Sunny Productions. We realized right away that we shared many common goals and were both eager to make this film happen.

DW: I was looking for a way to do a film about the art world and who makes it and why. Once we connected, we probably spent a year talking about where to begin. Do we follow students? Do we follow emerging artists? Older artists?

Female artists? We had a gazillion questions, but the big question was how to cover it all in one film. Our goal was to be broad and illuminate the plethora of questions that exist in the art world. We wanted to observe the ecosystem and let the audience reach their own conclusions. We did not want to pass judgment, nor did we want to be myopic.

JS: As art world “insiders,” we knew that very few people in the entire world

For the documentary The Price of Everything, producers and art world insiders Debi Wisch and Jennifer Stockman, pictured here in Marilyn Minter’s studio, used their intimate knowledge to trace the changes in the art market.

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COURTESY OF HBO

were exposed to what we see and experience in the art world. We take for granted meeting famous artists in their studios, talking to brilliant curators about collection strategies, visiting the homes of major private collectors around the world. These opportunities are a rare privilege, and one of our objectives was to share them with an audience who might never set foot in a museum or an artist studio. We wanted the film to be interesting and engage audiences of all demographics.

SR: You have an incredibly diverse group of artists in the film. How did you decide who to include?

JS: We knew we needed artists who had different career trajectories and interesting personal stories. We needed dealers, experts from the auction world, art critics and people from the museum world. The challenge was to find people who would open up their heart and soul in front of the camera, which is not easy, plus one never knows how someone is actually going to come across on screen.

DW: I remember when the director Nathaniel Kahn came back from his interview with Larry Poons upstate and exclaimed “We have a film!” Early on we made a decision to focus as much as possible on the artists. We also always knew we wanted to look at when the market changed and when the commoditization of art became a thing. We discussed many points of departure, and we ended up deciding on the Scull auction because there seemed to be a consensus on that

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being a pivotal moment in contemporary art history. We wanted to show that there wasn’t a randomness to all of it. It’s rooted in something specific—or a confluence of events.

JS: It was important to show a range of artists. Our talented archivist Judy Aley was able to find awesome footage of dozens of artists painting, sculpting, photographing, going back to the ’60s and through the present. Edward Dolman, who’s now the chair of Phillips auction house, talks about the differences between the ’60s and the international art world that exists today. There’s a wonderful scene in the film that puts this archival footage together, with Dolman’s narrative accompanied by David Bowie’s song “Fashion.”

DW: That sequence alludes to the fact that when you look at artists today, you wonder who’s going to be around 20, 30, 40 years from now. Who’s going to be relevant and why? I was in Los Angeles last week and someone used Jacob Kassay as an adjective. Can you imagine for a young artist what that would be like?

SR: What does commoditization actually mean for the art and the artists?

DW: That’s a question of what you value and why—and our view might be slightly different than other people’s views. There’s a line at the beginning of the film where Paul Schimmel states that there would be no golden age without gold— and if there weren’t hundreds of more people buying art, there wouldn’t be thousands of more artists making art. He concludes by stating that bubbles

A video still of Larry Poons from The Price of Everything; opposite, George Condo at work.

make beautiful things and you want to keep the thing floating. Obviously there is a downside to the ramped-up volume of it all, but the positive side is that there are so many more people making a living in the art world, even if navigating this labyrinth has become increasingly complex.

JS: Looking back in history to the Renaissance when artists and art flourished, even then there were collectors only interested in the prestige and status art conveyed. Then the robber barons of the early 20th century bought Renaissance paintings from Europe to give them cultural and intellectual currency, and not necessarily because they loved the art per se. I used to be very upset with the idea that art has become a commodity for so many, but I have now accepted it, for better or worse. For sure it’s likely to remain a commodity, especially when five of the top banks in the world are advising their clients to buy art along with bonds, equity and gold and are encouraging their customers to borrow against art, like a mortgage on a house. Whether or not you think this is despicable, as Barbara Rose says in the film, there are people who look at art as a business. Many of us who think of art as another religion have always held it to a higher standard. So it’s sometimes painful when there are people out there only interested in using art to create another profit center.

It feels like blasphemy.

DW: Artists are also criticized for being successful. If you’re an architect, you’re

also selling ideas and creativity. It’s not that different from art. And when an architect or filmmaker or designer accepts a huge commission, they’re not criticized, they’re applauded.

SR: The film doesn’t try to answer these questions. Why did you leave it open in this way?

JS: Because there are no easy answers to the question of how to determine the value of art. Simon de Pury opens the film by saying that “the most expensive works have the greatest value.” That’s basically the hypothesis that is disproven over the next 96 minutes of the film.

DW: People only value cultural artifacts if they’re expensive. Larry Poons says in his Larry-esque way: How can the most expensive artist be the best? It’s not like baseball where your batting average is your batting average. It’s brilliantly put, and it’s so true. Some experts can decide tomorrow that George Condo no longer has talent and his market would plummet. It’s all very precarious.

JS: In most markets there are financial criteria and other objective ways to make credible valuations. This is less so in art, and the fact that art is traded and unregulated just makes it even more complicated. There were so many issues we wanted to cover, but 97 minutes is just not enough time to do so.

DW: I hope that we show that there’s an aspect of the art world—the actual art—that’s sort of priceless. Art outlasts us all, it actually matters!

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CREATIVE EVOLUTION 150 culturedmag.com

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more than 10 years ago in Murakami’s studio. Since then, the Japanese artist has continued apace with his multihyphenate global practice making deeply layered fantastical paintings, supporting younger artists through his gallery platform Kaikai Kiki and presenting his work in myriad exhibitions, including a 2010 retrospective at the Palace of Versailles. Meanwhile, Abloh has rocketed to the top of the fashion universe, a position confirmed via his appointment earlier this year as Men’s Artistic Director at Louis Vuitton. Through it all, the two have built a friendship and a shared creative practice that pushes against the parameters of both fashion and art, shaking the foundations of the institutions.

Sara Roffino: You’ve known each other a long time. What about each other do you remember from first impressions?

Virgil Abloh: At the time when we originally met I was working on an album packaging for Kanye West. I was the assistant on that project, and what I learned and admired and what stuck to me about Takashi’s process from the very early days is the impact of his creative exercise. I saw the way he executes an idea in an artistic sense—how not only it is creative but that it is well-versed and well-executed in every way.

Takashi Murakami: Kim Jones told me he also came at the same time to my studio, do you remember?

VA: Yeah, I remember, but it’s been so many years of working hard that the memories are tricky.

It’s the sign of a good life.

TM: You guys have made success. I’m still in the same place. [Laughter.] Virgil was an assistant or intern then and now he is the center of the fashion industry. There’s just no comparison.

VA: I think what makes us a powerful combination is that we embrace the now. We come from two different worlds and two different practices, but we found our point of intersection in the work we create together, which is a commentary inspired by current times and current freedom.

SR: You both have had to prove yourselves in a way that others haven’t because you have not come from the traditional places or educational systems that people come through in your roles as a major contemporary artist and head of a fashion house. How has that experience informed or driven the creative process?

TM: This might not answer your question, but I really want to understand the mystery of how Virgil does all his work. On Instagram it looks like right now he’s just a DJ, but at the same time he is approving designs for Off-White and Louis Vuitton and doing all these other jobs. It’s quite a mystery. I want to know how he does it so I can do it as well. [Laughter.]

VA: For me, in order to be interdisciplinar y I have to live with interdisciplinarity. I work in one stream of consciousness. How I know an idea is relevant is by diversifying myself—in the kind of people I talk to, relate to, the industries I work in, the cities I travel to. When it comes to having creative output I’m drawing from increasing experience, so the method to my madness is to do all the things that I’m inspired by and not remove myself from anything that interests me.

TM: Do you never get sick or tired even though you’re doing everything? [Laughter.]

VA: I don’t work. I’m just living. The things I do are my calling. The only things I feel compelled to do are to put out creatively and have a dialogue with the world. The world consumes art but it also consumes music, it also consumes fashion and utilities. All those things have someone deciding what they should be and I’ve made it my practice to have an opinion and an output.

TM: Virgil is just so driven to do his absolute best, he must be very good at creating an environment around him that makes everyone do their best.

VA: It’s an honor.

SR: Virgil once said that when things are uncomfortable in a collaboration is the moment when a new space can emerge. Have there been any uncomfortable moments that were ultimately creatively fruitful within your collaboration?

TM: I don’t recall such an uncomfortable moment in this collaboration, do you, Virgil?

VA: Our collaboration, I think, is rooted in filling a void. We both see a space within the art world for artists to come together and create. It’s weird—in a way it doesn’t feel like a collaboration, it feels like we’ve joined our brains together to think of an output, which I find more advanced than the word collaboration.

SR: How would you describe the void that you’re filling?

VA: It’s the notion that an artist’s work sits differently if they combine with somebody else to

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Kyoto Ensō, 2018 Acrylic on canvas mounted on aluminum frame 55 1/2 x 47 1/4 x 2 inches 141 x 120 x 5 cm

© P VIRGIL ABLOH AND © P TAKASHI MURAKAMI. COURTESY GAGOSIAN

Virgil Abloh and Takashi Murakami first met

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make artwork, and by us making these exhibitions and wanting these exhibitions a certain way, we find that we’re engaging a new population that is interested in art. And we’re having a dialogue with our own followings and the collectors of our own art, which I find super interesting.

TM: We’re really lucky that there are clients who are willing to buy these collaborative works.

Both from the art world and the fashion world there are a lot of people enjoying the project and acquiring the works. That’s the reason we can push this project forward. The shows in London and Paris were very successful. We’re doing the next show in Los Angeles, where we can do a much larger-scale show.

SR: Takashi has very maximalist aesthetic with bold colors and much more going on visually than the minimalist Bauhaus-inspired aesthetic Virgil usually works in. What is it like to work with somebody whose aesthetic approach is so different?

VA: Visually, I work in a realm that’s a lot about presence, the idea, the representation, the abstraction. So I wholeheartedly believe in Takashi’s concept of the superflat. And his work articulates that in a visual form that I identify with. I can be quite maximalist as well, depending on the medium or the premise. What’s been intriguing in the collaboration is how we’re able to combine iconography and these symbols that are known as part of Off-White—be it the red tab or the yellow industrial strap or the cross logo—and draw a relationship to Takashi’s iconography, signaling a marker of the two worlds coming together.

TM: At first it looks as if Virgil’s work is very minimalist, but I think that as he progresses he will continue—just as he is in fashion—eating and digesting all these different forms and directions in art and then creating something that reflects them. Virgil and I are similar in that when we move forward, we eat up the forms around us and digest them. Virgil’s speed is so much faster, I’m hoping I can keep up and not get completely digested myself.

SR: Takashi has employed a lot of satire in his practice, whereas Virgil talks about irony a lot, although the practices themselves are obviously ver y sincere. Satire and irony are impor tant tools for a critical approach to any sor t of creative output. I’m wondering if you can talk about what the use of satire and irony accomplishes and how it comes together in the work you do together?

TM: When I’m watching YouTube and I see surfers riding enormous waves—maybe they are taken there by helicopter and build momentum using a Jet Ski and then they ride the huge wave—that’s what the mood is like in this collaboration. Virgil is a surfer and everyone, including myself, is saying, “Really, can you ride such an enormous wave?” but we all go by helicopter to the wave and it works. Surfing is only possible because these huge waves are born because of how this earth is and because of how the universe is, and the weather conditions that create the huge wave. When I’m working with Virgil I feel like the important thing is to be on the same rhythm and taking the same step as the environment around us, so I haven’t been thinking about irony. I’m just thinking: Can we ride this huge wave? And, oh yeah, we did.

VA: Satire and irony are looming themes that are part of our now. I think they describe contemporary thought and the generation that exists now. Maybe that’s what creates the wave Takashi is referencing. Our dialogue is not so much embedded in the art, it’s embedded in the atmosphere that we’re creating.

SR: You’ve both approached your practices in specific relationship with the audience—with an intention to shift a perspective or to open up a perspective. How does this specific collaboration do that and go beyond just bringing people from the art world to the fashion world? What are the linguistic or institutional frameworks you are hoping to shift through this collaboration?

TM: Because I am much older than Virgil, Virgil has commented on the work that I have already done, especially my collaboration with Louis Vuitton. The fact that he referenced it made me really happy because while the collaboration was noted in both the art industry and the fashion industry, it wasn’t viewed as anything significant in either world. But I found that there was a recipient in the form of Virgil. He digested it and it became part of his own expression. Art is sort of a closed-off industry. Today with social media it looks like people are in dialogue and expressing together but it’s still a solitary process, so to know that there was a recipient and for Virgil to actually explain to me what he received and how he expressed it was such a fresh feeling. I was moved by it. In terms of the new audience, Virgil has created a new window so it is a new experience for me, and that’s why I can come up with new ideas as well.

VA: I mimic what Takashi said. It’s part of the motivation that there’s a new audience. There’s been a boundary between art and fashion that you couldn’t cross. In my own work I’m interested in showing how those lines can be crossed and how new bridges can be built. The great thing

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is our two exhibitions at Gagosian have shown what the new audience looks and feels like and what they’re intrigued by. That Takashi and I have been able to make work that represents that community is quite inspiring.

SR: That kind of leads into my next question. In Western art history, there’s a pattern of a group wanting to overcome the institution and develop a new system and then becoming the people in power. We’re in a moment where that’s happening with you becoming that establishment.

How does that feel and what does it mean for the people that might come next?

VA: For me that’s part of the motivation. As the world evolves, we should feel it evolve. I think the establishment should evolve to give new opportunities. I see that as what unites Takashi and I. In the 10 years I’ve known him, I’ve seen his work with Kaikai Kiki Gallery and I’ve learned about many of artists he has given a platform to through his own work. Mr. Madsaki is a favorite artist of mine who I was introduced to because of Takashi’s generosity. I learn from him.

TM: People in the artworld are probably still looking at this collaboration coolly and not too enthusiastically, which is the way it’s been since my collaboration with Louis Vuitton. Maybe in 10 years someone who is lining up outside to buy our collaboration T-shirts will become a famous designer and say, “Oh, that was my inspiration.” Maybe then we’ll know the kind of effect this had. At this moment, at least in the artworld, the perception is still a little bit cool.

SR: You both exemplify a breaking down of the accepted difference between a brand and an artist. How do you feel you embody that shift and what are the implications of it?

VA: It’s hard to compare artists, but the ones that sort of represented a time or were leaders of a movement treaded the line between name as brand and artwork as brand as an extension of their identity. More than anything I think we’re behaving in a modern way and we’re not letting any perception hold us back, which is the ultimate freedom. The only way to really measure these moves is to wait 30 years and see.

TM: There is a zone of supremacy in the art world and there is a sense that fine art is the most precious and has the highest status. My collaboration with Virgil is trying to create something that is completely outside of that framework, so I totally understand why the reaction is not warm. And I believe that even though Virgil is young, the achievement of our collaboration will become apparent after Virgil has died. Right now, there’s not much we can do about the reception. Of course, I care about the reception, but I feel like we shouldn’t care about it and keep on, because in the future, I think this collaboration can become part of a history that will recognize what we did. I think that at least a few young people are really looking at it now, and, like I said earlier, it would be great in 10 or 20 years from now if I’m still alive people will say it affected them or it inspired them.

SR: I think it goes back to something Virgil talks about a lot, which is the role of Duchamp behind all of this, and Duchamp’s presentation of the urinal as Fountain, and what that means about what art can be and who can be an artist.

VA: Yes, I think that essential to your question is intention and the practice that predates output.

Takashi and I are figureheads of an intense study that has taken place over many years about something that speaks about art now. Trying to define art or what makes an artist is an age-old question that may or may not be at play. I don’t know if I’m answering your question, maybe Takashi can take it from there.

TM: It’s destiny that Virgil has become the designer of Louis Vuitton and now Louis Vuitton has come to have a world-class museum, the Louis Vuitton Foundation. It’s become so complex now, and it’s not just about artists trying to transmit their ideas, from the brand side they’re approaching the art and artists as well. So people who understand the context of art are not only interested in what artists are thinking but now they’re really in tune with the market and the environment surrounding art. Museums used to be just nonprofit organizations with a benevolent existence, but now it has to do with branding as well, and Virgil and I are also involved in fashion brands but the collaboration itself is between the creators and doesn’t really have to deal with the brand. It’s very complex. It’s that huge wave I was talking about that we’ve been surfing.

When I heard that Virgil became the designer for Louis Vuitton, it was around the time I was writing an introductory article for him because he was chosen as one of the Time 100. I really felt it was some kind of fate. Maybe I think that way because I’m old, and maybe Virgil is still laughing in his usual laugh— VA: [Laughter.]

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Installation view of Takashi Murakami and Virgil Abloh TECHNICOLOR 2 June 23 – July 22, 2018 Gagosian Paris - Project Space

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© P VIRGIL ABLOH AND © P TAKASHI MURAKAMI. COURTESY GAGOSIAN

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STOP, LISTEN, WAIT

In a 2016 self-portrait from Oakland, California, Texas Isaiah is on a wood floor, knees to chest, head bowed—in mourning or in gratitude or neither. Maybe his eyes, here, are for seeing himself. If he’s melancholic, it’s graceful. His fingers hang delicate as leaves, and the arch of a plant stretches over his body like a rainbow, cosseting him into the crook of some invisible arm. It’s an image that illustrates stillness, then bestows it.

Texas Isaiah’s photographs—of friends, lovers, strangers—feel like the unveiling of a love between him and the sitter, a pause in the thick of genuine care. That the images feel is their power; the experience is collaborative, the sitters’ vulnerability shared with his own. The story of the photographed belongs to them, though Texas Isaiah renders it in full bloom. “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed,” Susan Sontag once wrote, but that was years before Texas Isaiah was born.

“It is incredibly important for Black and Brown TLGBQIA+ folks to be photographed, and to have a consensual and thoughtful space that promotes personal agency,” Texas Isaiah tells me over email on the eve of his birthday. When he photographs someone for the first time, he asks, “What is your relationship to photography?” and “How do you feel when you are being photographed?” These questions, he says, “open up a particular kind of space to explore how we can collectively create an image together.”

After moving from New York City to Los Angeles, Texas Isaiah began to ask himself these same questions. “I want to photograph my own body without repeating violent patterns,” he explains. “Some visual works are very

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anthropological, and my body isn’t here to be examined. That is why I lean towards using chiaroscuro within my work. The shadow protects me, and the light caresses me.”

Texas Isaiah photographed me a decade ago when he was shooting lots of young folks at parties between 2008 and 2012, after too many Manhattan punk venues closed down. “The dance floor was our safe haven,” he recalls.

“I think about all the people I surrounded myself with and witnessed from afar, growing up. Folks who felt cemented and confined. An entire landscape of limited access to nutrition, education and opportunities. It is one of the many experiences that have led me to investigate how care, protection, legacy and intentionality can be processed through photography.” Texas Isaiah gravitated toward young black folks; “the conversations between us were effortless,” he says, “a soft space that neglected the gender binary. I found myself feeling like myself.”

That period would help cultivate Texas Isaiah’s understanding of topophilia, the loving bond that people can have for a place, a guiding lodestar for his practice. His first introduction to the concept was his upbringing in Brooklyn, within a family from Barbados, Guyana and Venezuela. “I am a first-generation Black indigenous individual,” he says. “I acknowledge the many homes my ancestors come from, however Brooklyn is the home I am most aware of in this body.” How safe and loved does a body feel, his images seem to ask, in relation to its surroundings? Drawing from his and his sitters’ relationship to the site, the work grows and transforms just like people do.

When Texas Isaiah honors his ancestors, he

forms narratives about himself too. His recent photo series, my name is my name, “began as a conversation I was having with myself and my ancestors about the remnants of grief,” he explains. Texas Isaiah documented himself in a state of mourning, silently communicating with his ancestry. The project, displayed in a new incarnation earlier this year at We Buy Gold in Brooklyn, slowly grew into a public space.

Composed of a vibrant altar he occupied daily, it was an exploration of both self-communion and the delicate place where private pain and communal transformation meet. “Where my name is my name i existed is in a space of mourning and grief,” he says, “my name is my name iii transformed into a healing space for myself, with the thoughts of the Black trans men who have found themselves experiencing copious amounts of erasure.”

With the project still ongoing, and a busy year behind him—showing in “The New Contemporaries Vol. 1” group show at Inglewood’s Residency Art Gallery, collaborative work with EJ Hill on view at the Hammer Museum as part of Hill’s inclusion in the “Made in L.A.” biennial and a talk at Art + Practice in Los Angeles—it would have been natural to ask what’s next, but I’m glad I didn’t. “I like to take things slowly,” he says. “We romanticize being ‘busy’ but we don’t often hold space for rest. I’m looking forward to feeling even more fulfilled, producing self-portraits that embody joy and the complexities and possibilities of what it can be like to love and be loved. I am thinking about the love between Black Trans people, specifically Black trans men/non-binary masc folks. I am always thinking about how to be better: a better person and visual narrator.”

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

Texas Isaiah represented in two recent self-portraits.

Here, a mantra of care, 2018.

Previous spread, my name is my name iii, also 2018.

NON-CONFORMING NARRATIVES

BY EM GALLAGHER

“You can embrace a term like ‘queer’ and not be defined by it,” Res says as I leave their studio.

This idea is a throughline between the practices of five emerging photographers—Elliott Jerome Brown Jr., Lia Clay, Naima Green, Matthew Morrocco and Res—who represent the vanguard of the medium. Their recent work probes concerns shared by many young artists: How can the intersections of identity be expressed through an art practice? How should we navigate visually-driven social media platforms? How can artists communicate queerness differently in personal versus commercial and commissioned work? And what are the possibilities of expressing oneself as an individual while identifying with a larger community?

Attempting to fit these five young artists into a box would be impossible. Queerness refuses form in contemporary photography, and that very mutability injects images with a newfound energy.

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COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.

Brown’s Low tack, 2018, is an unstaged portrait, but the artist imbues it with a sense of theatricality.

Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. “Most of my photographs aren’t staged, but I do strive to make something that is theatrical,” Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. tells me at his kitchen table on a stagnant summer night. The dichotomy between natural and theatrical seems

irreconcilable, but Brown proves otherwise. The photographer shoots candid moments, often of close friends, family and fellow artists.

This could make for a straightforward narrative of personal intimacy—yet Brown finds a way to move beyond conventional portraits.

His collaborators are found with their backs turned, eyes scrunched in laughter and bodies contorted away from the lens. They shift our point of view, asking us to leave the literal behind. “There’s a reason why I insist the biographical information not be the most

important reading of the image. I don’t want my relationship with the person I’m photographing to end the conversation.” Rather, Brown says, “I’m interested in the residue of presence or activity, which encourages a slower, more ambiguous reading, versus an image that explicitly shows that action.”

In repurposing biography, Brown’s work requires a reckoning with the broad words associated with identity politics. “At the beginning of college,” Brown remembers, “my artist statement literally said, ‘I am looking at the intersection of blackness and queer identity.’ I was being confronted with all these terms, and it took time to make them my own.” This process was helped along by the artist’s taking a series of self-portraits—an introspective process that solidified Brown’s interest in framing narratives, rather than playing a starring role.

In September, Brown braces for a new act: journeying to New Orleans, where he begins a ninemonth residency program through the St. Roch Community Church in the 8th Ward.

Though this residency marks the first time Elliott Brown will live outside New York, he expresses a gravitational pull to the region. “I have a deep relationship with the South, though it feels internal rather than physical,” he says.

Emanating an unmistakable warmth himself, Brown will have no trouble drawing from his new life and cast of collaborators.

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Clay’s Ita in Prospect Park, 2018, epitomizes the ease and warmth that the photographer elicits from her queer and trans subjects.

“I’ve always wanted to be a fashion photographer,” Lia Clay says with childlike conviction. True to form, she was only a kid when photographs of her grandmother’s cross-country travels captivated the young ingénue. “She had an old Olympus camera, and I was this stubborn eight-year-old interested in the new toy. She said I was too young to figure it out, so of course I picked it up and started taking pictures.” Now, Clay is perhaps the most commercially successful trans photographer working in fashion.

Like most pioneers, Clay must be clever: carrying the weight of representation while evading the box people want to put her in. “Being a trans photographer, I’m always having to preface my work with being a trans woman first and a photographer second.” Clay puts her practice first, delivering portraits that exude empowerment and ease from her queer and trans subjects.

One such example is a recent cover story for The Cut, where she shot High Maintenance co-creator Katja Blichfeld. In the image, the showrunner’s brazen, direct gaze penetrates Clay’s empathetic lens.

For Clay, empowerment must extend behind the lens as well. “I’m really adamant about creating a more inclusive set environment. My

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BOTH IMAGES: COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.

Lia Clay

first assistant is another trans woman, and I want to use her until the day I die.” Growing serious, Clay adds, “When I walk through doors in this industry, I have to be aware that I’m not only walking through doors for myself, but for other trans photographers. It’s not just a personal endeavor.”

Currently, Clay is focusing on personal projects outside of her fashion commissions. It is deeply

important that this body of work can exist outside the instrumentalization of trans bodies by the fashion industry and the media outlets that she regularly shoots for. “Every photographer goes through the need to separate their personal from their commercial work. My personal work is about being entirely in control. I’m a Taurus—I have to control things.”

Morrocco’s Standing Among Berries, 2017, is part of Orchid: Seasons, a series that defies the body-over-mind paradigm for queer art.

Matthew Morrocco I often think about the writer Maggie Nelson describing a Q&A she held during a book tour, in which an audience member asked the thenpregnant Nelson if her “condition” inhibited her writing practice. In a comic internal dialogue, Nelson

laments: “Leave it to the old patrician white guy to call the lady speaker back to her body.” Here she is responding of course, to the implied oxymoron—“the woman who thinks.”

Matthew Morrocco’s forthcoming project, Orchid:

Seasons, seeks to reckon with another implied oxymoron—“the queer who thinks.” Morrocco takes umbrage with the body-overmind paradigm as the default mode of expression in feminist and queer art. “The emphasis on how marginalized people use,

care for and struggle with our bodies is another way we are trapped in a system that keeps us down,” says Morrocco.

Orchid: Seasons is year-long investigation spanning photography, installation and video, unfolding over quarterly 10-day exhibitions.

Aesthetically, the Orchid series harkens to abstract Color Field painting, mixed with the ritual elements of Ana Mendieta’s landscape performances. In these experimental portraits, Morrocco wears a zentai suit, effectively embedding himself into color gradient fields of the photographs.

Morrocco likens this bodily slip to the practice of minimalist painter Ellsworth Kelly, who was allowed to engage with concepts beyond his homosexuality, because his work did not directly implicate the body.

Orchid seeks to locate a queer narrative apart from representing the carnal body—Morrocco seeks not to bury one’s experience, but to expand the way one’s experience can be expressed. “I think it’s really important to stake a claim in the world of ideas with this work,” Morrocco says of Orchid: Seasons.

“Ellsworth Kelly represents that in many ways. By reflecting on his work, I’m making a point about how queer people are only given access to these realms if they cover their identities up, but we shouldn’t have to do that. This work is really about breaking free and letting myself think about difficult contemporary concepts of economy, communication and history in public.”

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BOTH IMAGES: COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.

Green’s Untitled (Riis), 2017, visualizes a community of queer femmes of color.

Naima Green Naima Green is not afraid to give her subjects power. “The photographer has so much control over their image making process,” Green says, “but a lot of the work I made last year was about submission.” In this spirit, last spring the Brooklyn-based artist, writer and educator sent an email to a list of friends, lovers and loose acquaintances with the following vague invitation: “I’d like to take a portrait with you,” it read. “You will have the opportunity to direct me through a brief experience.”

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For the subjects that consented, the appropriately titled Attraction Experiment became an experiential portrait series taken in one of the last old-school photo booths in Brooklyn. In the grainy, black-and-white film strips, the photographer executed instructions provided by her collaborators.

Some requests were as simple as asking Green to exhale as the camera snapped, while other demands were more complex. One sitter asked the photographer to participate in a Meisner technique activity—an intimacy-building,

observation-based acting exercise—with her in the booth. In the portrait series, Green appears beside her many-gendered subjects in various states of play, surrender and—yes—palpable mutual attraction.

Green’s portraits often cultivate community, queer and otherwise. Attraction Experiment exists alongside longer-term projects like Jewels from the Hinterland (2013–present), in which Green responds to the limited representation of people of color in urban green spaces,

utilizing spaces like Brooklyn’s Prospect Park to frame and foster an expansive community of black artists.

Located somewhere between Attraction Experiment and Jewels is the recent portrait Untitled (Riis), which reveals emergent concepts that the artist plans to further develop. This beach scene depicts the forged community that Green’s practice celebrates, but also hones in on her nascent interest in visualizing and making space for femmeidentified queer women.

Res’s The Recycling, 2018, communicates queerness in a subtle way, filtered through the artist’s life.

Res On Res’s studio wall is a photoshopped collage of Catherine Opie portraits with the people removed, leaving behind backgrounds with only the faintest traces of life. “I don’t know why I did it,” the photographer admits. “It’s not conscious yet.” If the motivation isn’t conscious, the act of appropriating the work of Opie—a

photographer who depicted her queer and BDSM communities from the ‘90s onward—certainly feels relevant. Res, who recently received their MFA in photography from Yale, plans to utilize their new, generously lit studio space in Bushwick to embark on a series of free-form portraits this fall—a genre the photographer has a productively taut relationship with.

“I’ve always felt resistant to portraiture, formally,” Res says. “I think it partly has to do with being queer and the experience of being labeled and reduced.” This resistance functions as a site of tension: How does one communicate something as multifaceted as identity when the portraiture game has been historically so rigged against

marginalized communities? It is a question that suspends Res’s practice in a state of constant investigation. “With the context removed, you are relying on the body alone to communicate an individual’s identity. I don’t know if it’s possible to see somebody in their complexity in the portrait itself.

And what about the presence of the photographer? In formal portraiture it’s not something we’re supposed to think about.” As an artist of the new queer vanguard, Res recognizes the strategic positioning of identity in front of and behind the camera.

“In my work, I am most interested in the ‘me’ of my queerness, rather than the ‘we’ of my queerness. The work seen here explores queerness in the way that most of my work does, in that it is taken directly from my life, and filtered through me. I believe the queer in the work is subtle, but if you are looking for it you can find it—I love leaving things in my work for the people who know to look for them.”

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Because the Menil Drawing Institute houses light-sensitive works, the architects focused on the transition of light between the exterior and interior.

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Andrew Heid: As the new chair of the architecture department at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, you’re very much embedded in the professional academic culture of architecture. What differentiates and connects your projects to your practice?

Mark Lee: There’s certainly a difference between the project we have in our office and the project we have at school. At school you are with a group of colleagues with very different agendas, and the pedagogy is very different from one’s own practice. I try to separate that. In terms of our firm, Johnston Marklee, we have always believed in the everyday building as the fabric of the city. I think throughout my and Sharon’s [Johnston] education there has always been a focus on iconic buildings—the one percent of buildings that would change the world. In contrast, we have noticed that the quality of everyday architecture in most cities is declining; it’s in the hands of the developers. If we believe in architecture as a discipline and a medium, in order for that architecture to regain its power, the quality of 99 percent of everyday architecture has to raise. We strive to adhere to that in our practice. We try to have a certain agenda based on the specificity of the project while staying rooted in history and the physical context of the city. In many ways I think we have a more European attitude about the city, for instance, thinking about the building as one of many components.

AH: A set piece as opposed to an object in the city.

ML: Correct. There’s not a formula that we adhere to. Sometimes you get the subject of the buildings in the context, but sometimes the context is nothing and your future building is the context. Understanding which direction to take for each project is important for us.

AH: You mentioned a European sense of building. Was that influence from your teachers at the GSD? ML: Sharon and I met at Herzog & de Meuron’s studio at the GSD. They were important mentors and teachers for us. At that time they were very different from anyone else. On the surface, their work seems minimal and restrained, but there is this extreme intensity about their work.

AH: Isn’t the strength in their work from their teacher Aldo Rossi in Switzerland? This idea of the city and typology and memory...

ML: Yes, absolutely.

AH: How did that trickle down from their studio into your work?

ML: After we studied with them, I spent a few years in Switzerland as a teacher. I learned the strength of Rossi and why he was important at that time, which was when Lucius Burckhardt was an important sociologist and very powerful within the architecture circle. Burckhardt’s message was that you can do anything except architecture; architecture was really vilified. When Rossi said there’s nothing but architecture, it was very refreshing. It was like a pendulum swinging in the opposite direction. We understand Rossi’s attraction, but we also understand his sense of typology works within a more Italian or Lombardian sensibility that was perhaps not in line with the opportunity given to Herzog & de Meuron and the generations of Swiss architects after them when Switzerland was developing these new agglomerations or suburbs, many of which fused [Robert] Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction with Rossi.

AH: There is no context in these Swiss suburbs, just like there’s no context in Las Vegas.

ML: Exactly. Or the context is the gas stations, the signage, an embracing of banality. You can almost imagine Venturi’s buildings without the symbolism—that mannered way of dealing with modernism actually worked very well with the Swiss vibe. Although Rossi’s influence was more a part of this official culture, I think Venturi also plays an important role.

AH: You have addressed context and typology in your work, but how does the aesthetic notion of your work play out?

ML: I think one of Ed Ruscha’s famous quotes was when he was asked what type of response he would like to solicit from his audience and he said he wanted them to say “Huh?” and “Wow.” That really resonated with us, and we understand it as defamiliarization as a prelude to cognition and delight. We desire our work to be less loud. We want our buildings to have a sense of mystery.

AH: I’m always drawn to this idea of the project behind the project, or the intractable problems of the discipline that architects confront. How would you describe the Menil Drawing Institute as addressing disciplinary questions, circulation, envelope, transparency, façade or materiality?

ML: We wanted to address the boundaries of architecture. In school we were taught to dissolve boundaries, but after we left school, we asked ourselves what architecture does best: it’s actually building boundaries. As a result, our work always has a definitive profile. The new Menil Drawing Institute faces a future sculpture park. We wanted the scale to be somewhere between the prewar houses and the Twombly gallery and wanted a timeless feeling, so a new visitor to the campus won’t be sure whether it was built before or after the Twombly. That’s part of the essence of the

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PHOTO BY ERIC STAUDENMAIER

The Vault House designed by architecture firm Johnston Marklee in Oxnard, California.

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place we want to preserve. We chose a really hard boundary facing the sculpture park; it’s the future southern entrance to the campus, so the building has a certain confidence and definitive aspect. But on the east, west and northern sides, as it approaches the residential neighborhood and different landscapes, it’s much more broken down. When entering the building, you always enter a courtyard first, which is barely defined by a few walls and a porch with landscape in the middle. It belongs to the building as well as to the garden and the outdoor space. It’s a kind of in-between place.

It acts as a transition not only between architecture and landscape, but as a space that is shaded by existing trees to adjust one’s eye before you enter the building, because the Drawing Institute is dedicated to works on paper with very sensitive lighting requirements. We didn’t want a manmade effect going into a very dark space from a bright space. The sequence of walking in, from the outside to the inside, gradually diminishes the amount of brightness. It doesn’t feel like a bright space because your eyes have enough time to adjust. This was one of the biggest issues we dealt with. Another is the typology of the building. We did a lot of analysis of the campus before we started designing. We noticed a liturgical aspect to the buildings: the Rothko Chapel, the Byzantine chapel, the central space of the main Menil Collection building has a nave-like quality, and the Dan Flavin installation has a broader space. There’s also the history of the Menils. She was a Protestant, he was Catholic and they supported the church, civil rights and social justice. So we felt that the liturgical feeling would work well for the Drawing Institute. We looked at a lot of monasteries and cloisters to inform the courtyards. In some monastic cultures there are two courtyards—one for the nuns to intermingle with the public and one inner courtyard that the public is not allowed to access. Similarly, there are two courtyards outside and one that the public has only visual access to. It really serves the people that work there as well as visiting scholars.

AH: For me, the courtyards break down the separation of public and private space in a very powerful way that blurs the boundary between inside and outside landscape. That again answers these intractable problems of architecture. On the one hand it creates this strong boundary, and on the other hand it’s actually dematerializing it with the garden and courtyard.

Going back to the question of the project of the practice versus the project in the academy, I wonder if you could talk about your project in the academy in critical terms. How does one translate the academic conversation of criticism more generally to educate and expand the audience?

ML: Academia is a place for discourse and discussions. I like the model of the Enlightenment, where there is a certain decorum, but once you have that you can be very open-minded about sharing if you agree or disagree. It is important not to take it personally. Oftentimes, discussions become so vicious and forensic—arguing to win an argument. But architecture is a collective practice. Even with decisions I don’t agree with I treat my colleagues with respect, and this ethos is important for the academy. Once we have the base we can have a discussion.

AH: What do you think are the different trajectories at the GSD right now, and how will you insert yourself or inflect those trajectories?

ML: I think there are many different trajectories. It’s a large school, so there are many directions and generations—certainly a very optimistic one that was exposed to computer-generated design when it was very new, and a later generation that sees it as something more ubiquitous. They see the problems but lack that overconfidence that it alone can change the world. I think it’s important to have the extremes, but the important thing is to cultivate discourse and discussion. We want the students to make their own decisions and not to be acolytes or followers.

AH: So besides the project of liberalism and openness, do you see yourself bringing an agenda to the GSD?

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ML: I certainly do. I want to emphasize the importance of building. I am a product of my beliefs, my time and my background. I was trained at a time when architecture could be the answer to any problem. Architecture can engage any issue in cultural study. In hindsight, there are some issues that architecture might not answer, and if you want to do this you should be a filmmaker or a software designer. I’m not interested in asking what is the problem, but what can architecture contribute best to that problem?

Oftentimes in the past, in academia, architecture is treated like a trash can.

Whatever problem is out there is thrown to architecture. I think it’s important to define the limits of what it can do. But we have to first ask what architecture cannot do. We cannot solve world hunger, but we can contribute in a smaller way. Understanding the perimeter actually helps liberate architecture to focus on what it should do best. Mastering the understanding of the built environment is important—something I would like to continue to focus on in school.

AH: What about criticism today? How does one educate the general public regarding architecture? How can we create a more critical, enlightened public?

ML: To put it very simply, there are critics that write for the general public and there are critics that write for architects and other critics. These two realms need to be closer together. Certainly in the first example the critic has a role, the responsibility of deciphering architecture for the general public and understanding the interest of the general public.

The latter, which is a bit more specific and inside baseball—it just serves its own purpose. It becomes this feedback loop with no way out. I think one of my models is Adolf Loos, who wrote in such a simple way but with a lot of erudition. He wasn’t trying to be indecipherable, to close off the general public. It has a certain democratic way that I aspire to.

Architecture is a very slow art. It’s best when you give it time and presence.

AH: How do you balance your professional practice and your academic project?

ML: Not to sound pessimistic, but in the context that we practice, architects have very little power. Within the academy you can come up with a program at the tail end of a much larger bureaucratic process, where much has been decided and you are hired to give it form. I think one or two generations before us believed in a certain type of posture of resistance. In my generation, even speaking for a younger generation, maybe we see that early form of resistance translated into form is purely rhetorical.

AH: Like a language.

ML: Correct. There is not really a modernist, avant-garde model. For architects to be transgressive we have to take more of a Trojan Horse approach and find a way to do something else within that structure. It’s a very subtle way of doing it.

Clockwise from top: Mark Lee pictured at the Nolitan Hotel in New York; a rendering of the Menil Drawing Institute’s interior; the Pavilion of Six Views in Shanghai, China.

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Designer Pierre Davis had been making clothes since middle school, before founding No Sesso in 2015.

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BY ISABEL FLOWER PORTRAIT BY CLIFFORD KING

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Pierre Davis grew up at the turn of millennium rocking sneakers, sweat suits and classic Tommy. But even as sportswear reigned supreme, she was equally intrigued by the femme glam staples in her mother’s and grandmother’s closets—plush furs, elaborate hats, and stacks of black hair and style magazines. She pored over these glossy pages, filling notebooks with sketches of the astoundingly intricate hair styles. This drafting practice soon led to her first clothing designs. By middle school she was trying her hand at cut and sew. In 2015, an undergrad fashion school project blossomed into her Los Angeles-based label No Sesso— Italian for “no gender.”

Now 28, Davis also came of age in lockstep with the internet and social media, and the accompanying, unfathomable changes in our perceptions of space, time, information and communication. Like many gleefully insubordinate millennialowned brands, No Sesso is difficult to summarize. Its enchantingly peculiar clothes are unisex, unsized and tough to place within conventional garment classifications. The items resist the idea that there’s a right way or person to wear them.

Almost all of the brand’s models are people of color and some are gender non-conforming or transgender.

Images for No Sesso’s latest collection (NS 2018-1) were staged against an inflatable silver plastic backdrop that calls to mind the set of a Hype Williams video. Garments include metallic coveralls cut like a Dickies work suit; a sheer, loosely-woven pastel shift flecked with glitter; and a boardwalk-style airbrushed tee in searing sunset hues that reads “BOSSY DEAL WITH IT” in fat bubble letters. Abstract, asymmetrical tailoring confronts logo-heavy sportswear staples. An array of reconstructed, hand- sewn, knitted and reconstructed pieces are made with athletic fabrics, denim and iridescent clubwear materials. The models wore Nikes (one of the brand’s sponsors): Monarchs (the almost twodecade-old, recently rediscovered normcore staple), as well this year’s best-selling VaporMax. Despite an increasingly competitive market that is forcing the biggest fashion companies in the world to adapt (and fast!), young labels are hardly pressed. With drop releases now an industry standard, it is hardly surprising that Davis pays little attention to seasonal trends or buying cycles. And following streetwear’s lead, No Sesso and others align themselves with their local creative communities, often collaborating with other brands and multidisciplinary peers. Last spring, No Sesso partnered with LA-native avant-streetwear label Come Tees (founded in 2009 by Sonya Sombreuil, an art school alum with a painting degree) to produce “COMESESSO.” There were exuberant, hand-screenprinted dresses, two-piece sets, JNCOstyle wide-leg jeans, a bucket hat, cloth earrings and a small backpack. Colorful graphics cheekily hijacked luxury house signatures, like Gucci’s GG diamond stitch and Versace’s thick

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For No Sesso’s Getty Museum presentation in August, the brand drew upon the collection’s Greek and Roman statues with sports jerseys and crocheted knits transformed into togainspired gowns.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRANDON STANCIELL

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banded stripes and block capitals. Lime green, blush pink and periwinkle were paired with a rich chocolate reminiscent of Louis Vuitton leather. Engaging the now-commonplace reflexive strategies of the logo flip and the bootleg, the collaboration produced one-of-a-kind craft objects while simultaneously pointing out that “authenticity” has become an all but meaningless category.

One might wonder if and how Davis will grow No Sesso’s prêt-à-porter, given the brand’s commitment to unique, laborintensive handiwork. While the NS 2018-1 collection introduced a handful of sporty basics for sale in their e-shop, a jacket from 2016, completely covered with embroidered depictions of black women in various hairstyles and resplendent gold hoops, required six months to complete. Davis does not see No Sesso’s clothes as moveable inventory or even as haute couture, but rather, she told me on the phone, as “art objects that might someday be in a museum.” And indeed, No Sesso is already in these spaces and participating in such dialogues. In August, the brand was invited to hold a show at the Getty as the final installment of the museum’s summer evening series Friday Flights. Kelsey Lu scored the event and played cello on the runway. For the capsule, Davis took as reference points the ornate historical costumery depicted in the museum’s collection, re-contextualizing baroque extravagance within present-day concerns about resources and representation.

However, for fashion to become more like art, it must become, in some way, anti-fashion. Even the alleged merger of fashion and art—from artists walking runways to museums hosting contemporary fashion exhibitions—relies upon the same perceptual dichotomies that maintain them as mutually exclusive. Art has (at least in theory) always resisted creating exactly what fashion has relied on—a product that is both reproducible and scalable. And art’s value still requires that it remain antithetical to mass anything—mass production, mass culture, mass taste.

Slowly but surely, a changing of the guard is underway across these once dauntingly opaque and exclusive creative industries—and metrics of value and taste are shifting too.

Among numerous intersecting catalysts, one is an awareness among young creatives like Davis about the limitations of traditional models of representation by and within elite cultural institutions and corporations alike. It has been clear for 20 years that prevailing iterations of identity politics were not subverting the fashion industry, but rather lending it content and credibility.

Davis told me that she’s frustrated that representations of black, brown and non-cisgender people are often little more than marketing ploys—tactical moves for titillating an ever-widening and diversifying customer base. With a different kind of authenticity in mind, Davis and her peers are insisting on working with and designing for their own communities. They are redefining the terms of and the relationship between fashion, art and popular consumption. They are pushing and pulling at these precarious boundaries, exposing the fundamental instability of hierarchies of culture—of art/fashion and niche/mass. This means looking for alternatives—alternative ways of dressing, alternative communities, alternative measures of success.

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The runway at the Getty was a fountain on the museum’s famous grounds. All looks by No Sesso. Styling by Pierre Davis & Autumn Randolph; hair by Malcolm Marquez; makeup by Paige Marton.

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RECONSIDERING THE ARCHITECTURE OF MEMORY

BY JESSICA LYNNE PORTRAIT BY MATTHEW MORROCCO

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Leslie Hewitt in her Harlem studio. The artist’s sculptural photographs open points of access to untold histories. culturedmag.com 185

As an artist working in both photography and sculpture, Leslie Hewitt situates herself in what she calls the “liminal space” between the two. It’s a comfortable positioning where she can be attuned to what the disciplines of photography and sculpture grant her as she creates her work.

“I am attracted to being here physically,” she shares with me as we sit in her Harlem office on bright summer afternoon as she prepares for her September solo show at Perrotin in Paris and her presentation at the Carnegie International, opening October 13. “Sculpture never has to argue that point; it is not an illusion. It is here with you,” she continues. If sculpture allows Hewitt to assert a physical presence, then photography provides her with an opportunity to consider temporality. The photograph is both the object and the conduit; it tugs at the elasticity and fragility of time. “Photography gives a little bit more because it is not just the now, it is also what just was or sometimes what was even further back,” says Hewitt. “It can be about memory in this other way.” What results are sculptural photographs that challenge our relationship to space, narrative and memory.

Hewitt’s still lifes are often comprised of different types of ephemera—mid-20th-century books written by authors grappling with questions of human rights and race through sociological and poetic means, archival photographs from the ’60s through the ’80s, magazines from the same era, family photographs (though not always of her own family) and handwritten notes and drawings—that encourage new ways of reflecting upon histories. They suggest a shape or relationship, yet never overprescribe their own meaning. Further, as sculptural objects, these photographs become the material through which Hewitt intentionally disrupts the parameters of what the images can do and perhaps more importantly, what they should do. Consider her ongoing series Riffs on Real Time, begun in 2002. Each iteration of the series consists of 10 color photographs that depict a small snapshot laying on top of a larger object placed on a floor of varying surfaces. Scenes of domestic interiors, cityscapes, landscapes, protests and other gatherings deliberately call into question

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the relationship of time between the images as well as the viewer’s relationship to time and the histories evoked. In this way, Hewitt calls for a new epistemology, a new rendering of how memory is constructed and how its architecture is interpreted.

“When I first started to make the prints for Riffs on Real Time, many people asked where the photograph was and I thought that was actually really beautiful. At first it was a critique. ‘I don’t see anything.’ But what an amazing metaphor. ‘I don’t see you; where are you?’ I’m right here, but you don’t see me. How can we both look at something and see different things?” The

decision to occupy this “in-between,” is meant to engage viewers in varied modes of seeing and entering her work. “It is not a redacted text,” Hewitt affirms as we walk into her studio space, “it’s here, but it is here in a way that might be less recognizable and requires the patience to make a new relationship, which I think is required of us because of the way in which meaning has been prescribed for us and on us.”

What I know in this moment of exchange is that the “us” is not universal. Hewitt is speaking specifically to and about Blackness. And to disrupt static, linear renderings of black histories is a task that certainly manifests itself through that which is tactile and visual.

Her series Make it Plain (2006), for example, takes up 1960s Black protest images

as its subject. The series features a set of five unglazed color photographs. In the third photograph, a square wooden board rests atop a copy of “Black Protest: History, Documents, Analysis, 1619 to the Present” and the “Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders” by Joanne Grant. A black-and-white snapshot of young Black people sits at the top of this arrangement, resting on its side, and in the upper right corner is a photograph of two smiling Black men. What of quiet resistance?

The gathering unto ourselves to rest and take care of one another?

Hewitt’s collaboration with acclaimed cinematographer Bradford Young, Untitled (Structures) (2012), makes use of the Menil Collection’s extensive photography archive to illuminate lesser-known sites that were instrumental to the Great Migration and the Civil Rights Movement. Shot on 35mm before being transferred to HD, the 16-minute-and 47-second dualchannel film take us from the Arkansas Delta to Memphis and then finally to Chicago, traversing, in a nonlinear method, the architecture of an intimate history full of little recognized markers.

And yet, Untitled (Structures) does not traffic in nostalgia. Instead, Young and Hewitt use the film as a method for upending a location’s prescribed memory and offer the (moving) image as means of evoking an elasticity in how the history of a place is understood and subsequently inherited.

Hewitt’s work invites us to consider how we know what we know. From where is our knowledge about ourselves and our collective history inherited? What does a collective memory truly look like? It might only be right to argue that such a process is never complete.

Instead, we must consistently seek out new, careful entry points into an enduring inquiry.

As I left Hewitt’s studio after our conversation, I was reminded of a few lines from Elizabeth Alexander’s forward to the posthumously published short story collection “Whatever Happened to Interracial Love” by Kathleen Collins.

In it, Alexander declares Collins to be a “Black thinking woman,” a woman who “remind[s] us of ourselves,” and affirms that “we were not invented yesterday.” Hewitt is also such a woman.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND SIKKEMA JENKINS

Installation view of “Vanitas: Open System,” Hewitt’s 2017 solo show at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in New York.

Opposite: Aura, 2016.

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MEETING OF THE MINDS

ARCHITECTURAL PHOTOGRAPHY BY IWAN BAAN

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PHOTO BY IWAN BAAN; COURTESY OF GLENSTONE MUSEUM

The Raleses traveled around the world to private museums in Denmark and Switzerland to find inspiration for the serene setting. Pictured here is a water court within the Pavilions, the Glenstone Museum’s new Thomas Phifer-designed expansion.

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The lately oft-heard term “private museum” sounds exclusionary.

Glenstone, however, is anything but. On October 4, the Maryland modern and contemporary showplace unveils a massive addition—making it one of the country’s largest and most significant private museums.

Glenstone was established by the billionaire collectors Mitchell and Emily Wei Rales, and the couple has lavished attention on their brainchild.

The original Glenstone space, known as the Gallery, opened in 2006 on a bucolic and elaborately landscaped property, now some 230 acres.

Admission is free, both to the Gallery designed by Charles Gwathmey and the new Thomas Phifer–designed addition, the Pavilions, which multiplies by more than five times the exhibition space for works from a collection that numbers more than a thousand.

Even on an early visit when it was under construction, the vibe is serene but joyful, epitomized by Jeff Koons’s flower-bedecked Split-Rocker (2000), which commands a view atop a hillock. The Raleses are proud of their trove, but the museum doesn’t exist for self-flattery (they live close by, to keep an eye on it all). Admission is by reservation, so that when you’re there, the experience can really soak in.

Until now, Glenstone has stayed oddly under the radar—it’s less than an hour away from Washington, D.C., but a lot of local art lovers don’t know about it. Emily Rales, whose title is co-founder and director, jokes that the Gallery was their “starter museum”—true only if your idea of a “starter” is nearly 30 important works by Louise Bourgeois, which are on view this fall in the Gallery.

It will soon be hard to ignore, though, given the quality and quantity of art arriving in the Pavilions for October’s opening. The large exhibition space will feature pieces by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Marcel Duchamp, Eva Hesse, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Willem de Kooning, Barbara Kruger, Mira Schendel, Clyfford Still, Rosemarie Trockel, Anne Truitt and Andy Warhol—among others.

In other areas, Michael Heizer has two enormous and eye-popping pieces on view that immediately make Glenstone a hub for land art on the East Coast. Many of the goodies were under wraps until the last minute, but one of the most noteworthy facets of the Pavilions is its suite of entire galleries, each dedicated to a single artist. Robert Gober has one of these spaces all to himself for the single large piece Untitled (1992). Originally shown at Dia, it is comprised of a suite of sinks with running water, a painted forest on the walls and Gober’s signature stacks of altered newspapers.

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Gober, not one for small talk, says that the Raleses “really value the work they buy and collect complicated installations that very few people can care for.” He’s a student of the dynamic between the couple, too: “They are both different, and they complement each other. Emily is very intelligent, intuitive and kind. Mitch is that too, but has an overview of what they’re trying to accomplish.”

Emily describes their marriage as a “meeting of the minds.” When she met Mitchell in 2005, he was always already wildly successful in his global science and technology businesses and was finalizing construction on the Gallery segment of Glenstone. She was working at a gallery.

Things quickly progressed on both the personal and professional fronts. “We started writing our strategic plan before we even got married,” she says, laughing at the compressed timeline. “We started sowing the seeds of this idea: integrating art, architecture and landscape in a very holistic way. And we were planning for the long haul.”

This fall’s opening will be the fruit born of those seeds—in literal form, via the lush landscaping by PWP Landscape Architecture that surrounds Phifer’s architectural statement in concrete. From a distance, the Pavilions are meant to resemble a hill town of mysterious, rectangular forms, separate but clustered together; once inside the visitor realizes that they are all connected, surrounding a picturesque sunken pond filled with water lilies. The water view will mesmerize as much as the art, and the wellconceived spaces are likely to win plaudits and awards.

To figure out the architectural statement they wanted to make, the Raleses traveled the world to visit key small, personal museums, like Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the Fondation Beyeler in Basel and Houston’s Menil Collection. They wanted to hire a serious midcareer architect at the height of his abilities, but not a starchitect, and Phifer fit the bill (Gwathmey died not long after the Gallery was completed).

“We started to acquire room-size installations like Bob’s piece, and you have to design everything with that in mind,” says Emily. “And so that became the premise: each pavilion is a discrete entry into the world of an artist, but they all belong together.” The entrance to the Gober piece is quite cheeky—it looks like a temporary construction door, with peeling plaster and tape, but is in fact the finished gateway.

Emily, having checked out those private museums, has a succinct way of explaining their personal approach: “It’s not the typical blue-chip thing, where it’s just one treasure after another.” In thinking so deeply over a dozen years about not just buying the jewels, but fitting them together in the right setting, Glenstone stands apart.

Richard Serra’s Contour 290, 2004 and Tony Smith’s Smug, 1978/2005, with Phifer’s Pavilions in the background.

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PHOTO BY IWAN BAAN; COURTESY OF GLENSTONE MUSEUM

“They are both different, and they complement each other. Emily is very intelligent, intuitive and kind. Mitch is that too, but has an overview of what they’re trying to accomplish.”

—Robert Gober

Emily and Mitchell Rales had a shared vision for Glenstone, drawing up their plans for the museum before they were even married.

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PHOTO BY JULIE SKARRAT; COURTESY OF GLENSTONE MUSEUM

NATURAL PHENOMENON

BY JACOBA URIST

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Olafur Eliasson’s site-specific installation for the Marciano Art Foundation, Reality projector, 2018, plays with shadows by projecting light and the building’s own architectural forms.

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conceptual force that is Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. What is left to elaborate about a 25-year-long career that has garnered epic status in the art world and massive acclaim in the public realm?

Plenty, as it turns out. This season Eliasson embarks on two new ventures: presenting an exhibition, “The speed of your attention,” for Tanya Bonakdar Gallery’s Los Angeles outpost, and launching a pop-up restaurant in Reykjavík, which will serve the culinary artistry of the Studio Olafur Eliasson (SOE) Kitchen.

SOE Kitchen 101—as its temporary location is dubbed—provides diners with not only a sample of the food experimentation enjoyed in Eliasson’s Berlin studio cafeteria for more than a decade, but also a taste of the communal lunchtime ritual that Eliasson believes fuels his team’s creative process.

In both projects, Eliasson transcends the expectations of his audience, drawing on experts to entice viewers to use the range of their senses. “I like to say that the studio is not me; rather, the studio is next to me and we work together,” he says about his plans for “The speed of your attention.” “My process very much relies on inspiration from being among different people from different disciplines, especially scientists, and from problem-solving together.”

The breadth of Eliasson’s practice reaches beyond those of even the most socially-engaged artists. His project Little Sun, for example, founded in 2012 with engineer Frederik Ottesen, combines Eliasson’s design aesthetic with a social business model, providing small, solar-powered LED lamps to those living without reliable energy sources. In 2014, Ice Watch, a collaboration with a geologist, explored man’s impact on the climate by arranging 12 large blocks of ice transported from Greenland in a clock formation in central Copenhagen. Eliasson encouraged touching of the arctic sculpture, piercing the public’s conscience with a physicality that he felt graphs and data failed to provide. Ice Watch marked the publication of the UN’s Fifth Assessment report on climate change. “The issues of climate change and climate justice are more urgent now than ever before,” he told me. “I’ve been dealing with this in my work for a long time, and I believe art has the power to turn thinking into doing, and to make this crisis less cerebral and more visceral.”

Far deeper than simply participatory, much of Eliasson’s work asks visitors to engage in a self-reflexive process. Or as he’s known to describe it, to experience themselves experiencing art, witnessing the self from a third-person perspective.

It is his sense of art—not merely as object or even personal encounter, but as a form of community and motivation for collective action—that governs his oeuvre.

And his pop-up venture sits firmly within this paradigm. “The cooks bring everyone together each day with food,” explains Eliasson of his SOE Kitchen team. “This is incredibly important for our sense of connectedness. The kitchen staff are also doing experiments all the time, not so differently from scientists.”

Environmentalist and artist, Eliasson is preceded by his reputation as someone who creates site-responsive, full-body installations that immerse city dwellers in a spectacular artificial state of nature. In 2003, Eliasson restaged natural phenomena for London’s Tate Modern, transforming its massive Turbine Hall into a giant simulated sun, with mirrors and cloud-like formations that encouraged museumgoers to lie on the floor and bask in the “sunlight.” Shattering attendance records, The Weather Project still stands as evidence for curators that contemporary installations can be dazzling and re-orienting—both serious artistic endeavors and overwhelmingly popular tourist destinations.

Five years later, the Public Art Fund commissioned Eliasson to create a New York series, in which he constructed four manmade waterfalls along the East River.

“So much of the experience of public art is how people interact with each other and the artwork,” says Public Art Fund president Susan Freedman. “These waterfalls became sources of conversation with strangers. I can’t tell you how many times I heard, ‘I’ve lived in New York City my whole life and I’ve never been on the water and seen the city from this vantage point.’” She recalls sitting in the early morning hours with Eliasson, reflecting on his intimate connection to science,

art and nature. “I think The New York City Waterfalls was extraordinarily seminal for Olafur, and also for the field of public art and New York City.”

Now it’s LA’s turn. This summer, the city enjoyed its foray into Eliasson’s perceptual immersion at the Marciano Art Foundation, housed in a former Scottish Rite Masonic Temple on Wilshire Boulevard. The artist transformed the mammoth Theater Gallery into Reality projector—an architecturally-scaled, saturated-color artwork of high-intensity light beams shined through color-effect filter foils. Reality projector is Eliasson’s first piece that directly employs sound, produced in collaboration with the musician Jónsi from the Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Rós.

But when asked about the auditory component and the deafening rush of water I remembered as so integral to The New York City Waterfalls, Eliasson replied: “Essentially every artwork is dependent on all of our senses, so one could say there is always an auditory element. [But] the sound of Reality projector sort of functions as a score to a film.”

Eliasson’s previous West Coast solo show was more than a decade ago in San Francisco, and there’s been a palpable void of his work in LA, according to Marciano Art Foundation deputy director Jamie Manné. “When we first encountered this building, specifically the theater space at nearly 14,000 square feet and almost 40 feet of height clearance, Olafur was actually the first artist we thought of who could handle it,” explains Manné, as we sit beneath Eliasson’s prismatic chandelier sculptures in Marciano’s ground-floor atrium. “What we really loved about his proposal was that it was devoid of any objects. The space and viewer become the artwork in a way.” Critics have described Eliasson’s art as objectless, but that’s not to say his kaleidoscopic sculpture, also shown at Marciano, are any less relevant to his practice of challenging a viewer’s notion of reality. In the fall season of Art21 viewers have the opportunity to glimpse the rigorous modeling process of Reality projector, and Eliasson describes how objects are not necessarily the most interesting part of art. “It is what the object does to me when I look at it or engage with it that is interesting,” he says. “You are provoked into a more negotiating role. Instead of questioning the object, you are questioning yourself.”

Indeed, LA provides an optimal platform for an ecologically-driven artist who mesmerizes viewers with space, light and water. This July, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery debuted its California space with LA-based Charles Long, who was simultaneously featured in the Hammer Museum’s biennial “Made in L.A.” But Eliasson’s September exhibition solidifies Bonakdar’s commitment to international artists not yet featured in the city’s exploding gallery scene.

“We felt that following up Olafur’s Marciano show made a lot of sense,” Bonakdar says. “The character of the space plays a very important role when an artist is thinking of a show. I’m quite interested to see how some of the same artists we’ve shown in New York will address this space in radically different ways.” The September exhibition, then, picks up where Reality projector left off.

For instance, “The speed of your attention” features a freestanding sculpture with crystal spheres, one of the cornerstones of Olafur’s sculptural vocabulary.

“The newly opened Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is very beautiful, very hospitable,” Eliasson says. “And the display of my work interacts with and depends on the minimal space.”

Opposite: Eliasson’s Diurnal tide (day), 2018, part of the artist’s fall show at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in LA.

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COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND TANYA BONAKDAR GALLERY, NEW YORK/LOS ANGELES

One might reasonably expect that all has already been said about the

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THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

BY REBECCA BENGAL PORTRAIT BY KATSU NAITO

In 1975, Ming Smith very nearly

turned down the Museum of Modern Art. The Ohio-raised artist and recent Howard University graduate had been living in New York City for only two years, modeling for beauty advertising to pay the bills. When she dropped off her photography portfolio for review, a receptionist assumed she was a messenger, but when she returned to pick it up she was ushered immediately into the curators’ offices. John Szarkowski, the museum’s director of photography who spent his tenure there elevating photography to an art form and making the careers of such figures as Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander, wasn’t in, but as curator Susan Kismaric explained, the museum was keenly interested in acquiring some of Smith’s works. A price was named; Smith, who was used to putting her modeling earnings toward darkroom supplies, was taken aback. “That wouldn’t even pay for my expenses!” she recently told me of the figure. It is incredible now to think of any young artist telling MoMA no thanks, but Smith, whose extraordinary and humanist depictions, especially of African American people are experiencing a quiet but welcome resurgence of attention, certainly did. Kismaric urged her to reconsider. Think about it over the weekend, she said.

Smith did reconsider, and that year became the first African American female photographer to have prints acquired by the museum’s permanent

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collection. Today MoMA owns seven of her black-and-white works, including clear-eyed, graceful documentary photographs of mothers and children in Harlem. Also within the museum’s holdings are flashes of the hand-colored and dreamlike multiple-exposure prints and electrifying blur Gordon Parks referred to when he wrote of her pictures years later in an essay for her 1991 monograph “A Ming Breakfast: Grits and Scrambled Moments”: “Wondrous stuff crops up in her imagery, stuffing itself into her sight.”

“I always believed my work was bigger than me,” Smith tells me. “And the MoMA was a milestone. But then for 40 years there was nothing, no shows, no artist talks.” When she says this, she’s exaggerating, though not by much. The current revival of interest in her photographs was largely helped along by MoMA’s “Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography,” a 2010 exhibition which recontextualized Smith’s work alongside that of fellow experimenters in the form, including Diane Arbus, an influence, and her friend Lisette Model. Writing in the New York Times of a solo show that same year at June Kelly Gallery, Holland Cotter praised Smith’s “heartfelt and gorgeous” pictures: “It’s hard to think of another photographer who could set a misty head shot of the writer James Baldwin in a bank of dark clouds over the Harlem skyline and get away with it.” Last year, Steven Kasher Gallery hosted the first

Ming Smith, known for the ethereal quality of her photographs created through complex processes, has depicted important figures of black culture since the ’70s.

major retrospective of Smith’s work; and after the 2017 Brooklyn Museum exhibition “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85,” “I had women telling me they cried when they saw my pictures,” Smith says. This fall, as the Tate Modern-curated exhibition “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power” lands at the Brooklyn Museum, her pictures again gain a prominent place, perhaps pointing curators to bodies of work still largely unseen.

We are sitting in Smith’s apartment, with its twin views: a window onto

central Harlem where she now lives, and the living room, filled with evidence of the last 40 years, piles of large framed prints, and massive, taped-up ones.

The floors are heaped with more prints, framed and unframed, and boxes of slides. Smith, a striking beauty in her 60s, darts around the room barefoot among them, with dancer-like elegance. Visible here are years spent in music and traveling the world, as during her marriage to jazz saxophonist David Murray (whose portrait is among the MoMA holdings), as well as distinct and deeply

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affecting bodies of work, including an early 1990s series made in Pittsburgh, where she photographed people and places of the Hill District where playwright August Wilson set his Pulitzer Prize-winning dramas. Her musician son Mingus, whom she had with Murray, sits at a small desk nearby, poring through his mother’s digital archives.

The presence of the “wondrous stuff” Parks wrote of is palpable in this room—the record of an artistic and adventurous sensibility that casts uncommon light on artists and ordinary persons alike. The glitter and sequined cape of Sun Ra in Smith’s deservedly famous portrait of the avant-jazz musician unfurls winglike over his shoulder, seeming to shed layers of stars in his wake, a cosmic path. Face up on another stack of prints is a portrait of Grace Jones, head ecstatically thrown back, in a wash of glitter that Smith enhanced with daubs of pink paint. Jones, who was starting out as a model at the same time as Smith was a friend; “she called me and told me to come out to Studio 54 and take that one,” Smith says. “I knew her before she was ‘Grace Jones.’ But then again, she already was. Grace was always so free.”

Smith frequently refers to the most spectral moments in her work as “gifts,” and light as “spiritual.” Not religious, she clarifies—she means the way Rembrandt uses light or the way Brassaï does. Sometimes the spirit manifests in multiple exposures that create beautifully surprising connections; sometimes it’s simply the arresting, ghostlike blur in her portraits that suggests not just an instant, but a trail left behind. Smith’s affection for her subjects is as evident in her portrait of Alvin Ailey as it is of mourners watching the great choreographer’s funeral procession.

In 2001, after a dozen years living in Los Angeles, Smith returned to New York, the city that made her a photographer. She recalls those early days, living in Greenwich Village, heading out on modeling go-sees and eating at cheap diners near Washington Square Park, where she sometimes ran into Lisette Model and her husband eating dinner too. Model’s fearless street photographs were an early influence; she was also a friend. “I would ask her questions about love!” Smith says.

Just prior to her first acquisition by MoMA, Smith was invited by Lou Draper to join the African American photography collective Kamoinge, whose members included Roy DeCarava and Gordon Parks. She recalls meetings at Draper’s studio around 18th and Fifth “where all the photographers had studios then— Avedon, James Moore, Arthur Elgort,” Smith says. “Lou Draper was a great, generous teacher. You felt safe with him.” In her first forays into the darkroom, Smith had forgotten to buy a lens holder and Draper improvised one for her. “So that’s where that started,” Smith says of the handmade borders that still frame many of her prints with an imprecise, elegiac quality.

One of the core Kamoinge principles was the importance of Black photographers portraying Black people, which Smith seized with a surrealistic approach. When she photographed her writer and artist heroes James Baldwin, Romare Bearden and James Van Der Zee, she says, “I needed to present them as they appeared to me: larger than life.” The day of my studio visit happens also to be Baldwin’s birthday, what would have been his 94th. Smith met him not in Harlem, the neighborhood of his birth and formative years, but France, where he spent most of the rest of his life. “I met him at a jazz festival there in the late 1970s,” she says, “but here is where I really feel him. I wanted to show his presence in Black life in Harlem. I wanted to give you something else there, his spirit.” It was a humid day in Harlem, and as I bid Smith and Mingus goodbye and walked out in the streets, violet-gray clouds grew and filled overhead, sending down a fine drizzle of rain and calling out the umbrella sellers who always seem to appear out of nowhere on 125th Street. Looking up at the sky, it was impossible not to think of Baldwin looming there. Smith, of course, had put the picture in my head.

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Here: James Baldwin, James Van Der Zee and Eubie Blake in Skies of Harlem, Harlem, NY (1979). Opposite: Symmetry on the Ivory Coast, Abijan, Ivory Coast (ca. 1972).

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COURTESY STEVEN KASHER GALLERY, NEW YORK

A photo by Zoë Ghertner, part of a photoshoot of Atelier E.B’s Jasperwear 18/19 collection. The whole series was staged at public sculptures and monuments that hold significance for the duo, here the Legacy of ‘The Festival Pleasure Gardens’ from the Festival of Britain, 1951, Battersea Park, London with filmmaker Cara Connolly modeling the ‘Adrian shirt’ with “Vionnet” silk skirt (both available through their Serpentine show).

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ROLE MODELS

BY KAT HERRIMAN

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Beca Lipscombe first laid eyes on Lucy McKenzie at an opening in 2000. The recently graduated designer was on the lookout for someone to model for her eponymous label.

McKenzie agreed, but soon their friendship developed beyond that of muse and designer, transforming in 2007 into a collective fashion project they call Atelier E.B, named after the cities where they live (Lipscombe in Edinburgh, McKenzie in Brussels).

In hindsight, the white cube feels as fitting a birthplace as any for a line that circumvents fashion’s exploitative production pitfalls by aligning itself with fine art and leveraging its preoccupation with method and material.

“Through Beca I learned about the fashion industry and processes,” McKenzie says of Atelier E.B.’s roots. “We started to collaborate when it became obvious we had a similar interest in local history and attitudes to things like self-sufficiency and transparency.”

Whereas Lipscombe and McKenzie still maintain their own practices as an independent designer and an artist represented by Galerie Buchholz and Cabinet, Atelier E.B operates as a space for promoting shared concerns, including the preservation of indigenous crafts and rethinking traditional display and dispersion strategies. Over the years, the duo’s ideas have manifested themselves in forms ranging from garment design to immersive pop-up boutiques, furniture, zines and sculpture.

This October, all these elements will coalesce for “Passer-by,” the pair’s solo presentation at the Serpentine Galleries in London. Rather than follow some loose chronology, the survey-like exhibition focuses its attention on a longtime fascination of Atelier E.B: the mannequin, culture and commerce’s most overlooked muse. “As fashion designers, we understand how problematic it is to display clothing, whether it’s a photoshoot we are producing or how it hangs in one of our boutiques,” Lipscombe says of the exhibition’s theme. “I think when you look at the mannequin and its history you tap into this ongoing,

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contentious dialogue surrounding the body and its connection to value and taste. We wanted to tease out that history but use the pieces to create our own alternative narrative. We wanted to leave room for mannequins to play partner rather than surrogate.”

In this way, "Passer-by" stands as a subjective history of the mannequin, its displays and its connection with fine art. Fact and fiction mix to the point of hallucination in this show structured as an IKEA-like parkour.

Lipscombe and McKenzie dedicate the first chapter to creating context around their hero.

Using vintage models and images mined from extensive research into early window displays, they illuminate the evolution of marketing tropes. Their final installations, which strike the balance between department store and natural history museum, conjure the stately world pavilions where some of these products—and prejudices they engendered—were first shown.

“What struck us when looking into the history of mannequins was their relationship to the World’s Fairs,” McKenzie says. “Department stores were just being formed, so even their design felt revolutionary. It’s at the World’s Fair where people began establishing the vocabulary that we still see today.”

As soon as the conventions are set, Atelier E.B dismantles them, introducing its own interpretations. They asked for help inviting friends like Tauba Auerbach and Marc Camille Chaimowicz to create mannequins who wear examples from past collections. “What surprised me is that no one submitted a standing figure,” McKenzie says of the new sculptures. “In the past, we’ve also been attracted to a lounging position, but it was interesting to see our friends echo this impulse for a more casual posture.”

Emblematic of its creators’ reverence for the artisan’s imagination, this avenue of commissioned figures foreshadows the grand finale: an operational atelier where visitors can try on and purchase garments from Lipscombe and McKenzie’s latest collection. “It was

PHOTO BY ROB SMITH

A look from Atelier E.B’s project “The Inventors of Tradition II Collection,” 2015

important to us that there was a space in the exhibition for a more intimate interaction with the clothes,” Lipscombe explains. “We created an interior where you can have that human exchange between customer and sales clerk.

Atelier E.B has always been about this kind of call-and-response to our customers.”

It’s true. Rather than eschew the utilitarian diktats of fashion in the name of being avantgarde, Lipscombe and McKenzie embrace a comfort-first approach. The designers believe that it is ultimately the owner who provides context and value to their garments. “I understand that some people expect or want fashion to be entertaining or challenging in the same way as fine art is,” McKenzie says. “But I’m more interested in fashion that generates its own internal logic and is about the feelings and experiences of the wearer, as with the

COURTESY PERES PROJECTS, BERLIN

A portrait of McKenzie and Lipscombe as a film still by Martin Clark.

sportswear of Bonnie Cashin or the dresses of Madeleine Vionnet. That’s why our clothes are so ordinary—it’s their presentation that activates their inner meanings.”

Photographers Zoe Ghertner and Josephine Pryde lead the way at the Serpentine.

Lipscombe and McKenzie asked the artists to shoot their new collection—cashmere and nylon tracksuits, soft jackets and 3D-printed cameo necklaces—as they saw fit, and then bound the results into an accompanying publication which will be published after the exhibition.

Of course, it wouldn’t be Atelier E.B if the designers didn’t invite the public to join in, which is why they designed Cleo’s, an app that allows users to upload and share their own fashion images without the pressure of likes or follower counts, and that encourages meeting in the real world. This digital extension of “Passer-by”

underlines what separates Atelier E.B from other independent labels like Bless, Bernadette Corporation and Susan Cianciolo’s RUN, which in the late 1990s sought to use the vocabularies of art and fashion to subvert both.

Atelier E.B’s goals aren’t simply about disruption, labor or displacement, but rather about establishing a sustainable network for cultural exchange.

One doesn’t need to look further than Lipscombe and McKenzie's list of thank yous— a slew of Scottish and Belgian manufacturers, umbrella makers, Ratti silk printers as well as the fashion house Vionnet—to see the full picture. Atelier E.B isn’t a language but a village: a joint purpose that allows individuals, including its founders, to flourish. “The truth is, I would have probably given up my own label and still be teaching or freelancing for others,”

Lipscombe says of Atelier E.B’s collaborative nature. “It’s a lonely business working on your own. What I enjoy so much about Atelier E.B is that Lucy and I work on it in isolation but then come together to share and discuss. If I still had my own label the garments would not be the same as we produce for Atelier E.B. Atelier E.B is two points of view, tastes, experiences, skill sets.”

Friendship forms the center of Atelier E.B, which is why perhaps the project resonates with me as a kind of sisterhood, one that seems to extend across centuries and binaries. Walking home past the mannequin shops that line 25th Street, I see my neighbors like never before. They are praying, lunging and leaping in yogic postures—twisting themselves into unfamiliar shapes in the dark.

We are all synchronized.

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BY JASMIN HERNANDEZ PORTRAIT BY TYLER JONES

THE SEEKER

Lina Iris Viktor’s first solo museum exhibition opens at the New Orleans Museum of Art in October. For the show, she has reconsidered the founding of Liberia, using archival materials, mythology and herself as Sibyl. culturedmag.com 207

“I feel like there are people who can look at the work—be they black or white, it doesn’t matter—who will take something powerful away from it, because it’s about the human experience,” says Lina Iris Viktor as we discuss her solo exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art, which opens October 5.

Beautiful references to Malick Sidibé, Chris Ofili and David Hockney are plastered on one wall of her whitebox studio, located in the heart of New York’s Financial District. On the other side of the space is a robust library brimming with monographs of figures including Samuel Fosso, Yayoi Kusama, Keith Haring and Alexander McQueen. While we chat, her young studio manager diligently works on production in the corner. It’s a humid July afternoon and I’m visually drinking in works-inprogress that will appear in the show, “Lina Iris Viktor: A Haven. A Hell. A Dream Deferred.”

The exhibition’s title aptly addresses the fraught and convoluted historical trajectory of Liberia, Africa’s first republic.

In 1822, Liberia began as a settlement founded by the American Colonization Society (ACS), a group of mostly Northeastern abolitionists who believed free Blacks and manumitted slaves would live prosperously by being repatriated back to Africa. More than 13,000 freeborn and formerly enslaved Blacks (including 3,200 Afro-Caribbeans) immigrated to Liberia throughout the next four decades, which ultimately led to conflicts lasting nearly two centuries as the settlement transitioned into an independent country. In the first few years thousands of émigrés succumbed to disease.

Over time their American elitist ideals clashed with the native tribes and their descendants.

The Americo-Liberians controlled the government, leaving the indigenous tribes with little to zero representation. “The reason why it’s such a fraught history is because it’s couched as altruistic, and it wasn’t altruistic. It was fearbased: ‘We don’t want rebellion from progeny or mixed-race kids of former slave owners who are well-educated and now free.’ It hit a boiling point,” Viktor explains. “Liberia was founded on this kind of dualistic idea,” she continues. “It’s like, Let’s take them back to the continent so we don’t have this potential rebellion on our hands, but it was also a missionary thing: Let’s bring Christianity to these uncivilized individuals on the west coast of Africa.”

Viktor is producing 11 works for the exhibition—some on canvas, some on paper— utilizing primary source materials such as 19th-century tribal maps of the west coast of Africa (used by the ACS during the formation of Liberia). She also depicts regional hairstyles, traditional and contemporary textiles, West African portrait studio photography and Viktor herself as a Libyan Sibyl. “Viktor brilliantly reframes the myths of the founding of Liberia, a free nation created by the oppressors for the oppressed. She embodies a postmodern Sibyl who prophesies a disruption and a possible return to the origins,” explains gallerist Mariane Ibrahim, who has represented Viktor since 2017.

When I visit Viktor’s studio, I see two canvases in various stages, each on its own work table, as several more lay in the other half of her studio. In the works, Viktor portrays Sibyl, a divine priestess, who takes center stage. In one, she is draped in a queenly crimson red and navy blue floral textile dress; in the foreground, a map of the Liberian Hinterlands from the early

“It is significant that the series should debut in the U.S. South, as the history of Liberia is intimately entangled with that of antebellum America,” says exhibition curator Allison Young. “It represents one chapter within this country’s own struggle to reconcile the moral and philosophical contradictions of its early years.”

During Viktor’s research, in linking Liberia to New Orleans, she encountered an enigmatic and controversial figure of New Orleanian history: the wealthy slave-owning John McDonogh, who is widely known across Louisiana as the benefactor of the public education system in New Orleans with schools named after him and a monument to his memory in Lafayette Square. McDonogh was behind a shrewd manumission scheme, where slaves could buy their freedom in 15 years time—during which McDonogh would continue to profit from their labor. As a chief member of ACS, McDonogh was key to the organization and many of his former slaves were among the first wave of immigrants to populate Liberia.

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20th century outlines indigenous kingdoms like the Mende, Gbande, Bassa and Kru. In the other portrait of the Sibyl, Viktor’s blue hair is styled in two large buns, her back is turned to the viewer and she is facing an ornate floral pattern featuring her signature 24-karat gold leaf. The textiles, hairstyles and portrait poses are not specific to distinct tribal communities, but are rich in cross-references, “When I’m looking at textiles and hairstyles, it’s more a survey of a whole region than a survey of a particular locale.

It’s more of an idea of a West African narrative than just a Liberian narrative.”

Viktor’s NOMA debut occurs during New Orleans’s historic tricentennial. In homage, a selection of the prestigious Orléans Collection— named, like the city, for the Duke of Orléans and counting Old Masters such as Rubens, Veronese and Rembrandt within its holdings— is also on view at the museum. “I was thinking about what it would mean to have classical portraits in visual conversation with the work I’m doing,” the artist reflects.

Living and working in New York and London, Viktor is a British-Liberian artist born in the U.S. in the 1980s. But, she says, “the fact that I am Liberian or that both of my parents are Liberian wasn’t the real driver. I’m not driven by an emotional inspiration. I’m not trying to find my roots. There is no feeling of displacement, or any of these things. It’s just about a really interesting narrative.” She continues, “it’s an interesting study of the pathology of these imperialists that feel they can go somewhere, wipe a slate clean and impart their ideas on other people’s land and space without any repercussions.” Viktor is well aware of the powerful lineage and remarkable history that has come out of the African diaspora, but she is clearly more interested in what is ahead.

“I have a very future-focused, not necessarily Afrofuturist viewpoint. We know where we have existed, but where would I like to see us exist?

If we don’t formulate those ideas, someone else will formulate them for us.”

Viktor’s Yaa Asantewaa (2016), with pure 24-karat gold and acrylic on canvas.

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COURTESY THE ARTIST AND MARIANE IBRAHIM GALLERY

A documentary photograph of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Surrounded Islands, installed around the islands of Biscayne Bay in 1983.

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PHOTO BY WOLFGANG VOLZ. © CHRISTO 1983

Franklin Sirmans: What was the impetus for you to become an artist?

Christo: I owe everything to my parents, like every child of course, but for me it’s very important because my mother was involved with art. She was working for the National Academy of Arts in Bulgaria. She told me that when I was a little boy I was drawing all the time so she decided that I needed private lessons. After school I was going to the studio of a real painter who painted with oil paint, making sculptures with wire, acetate to make scale models, cut-outs, everything. Every day instead of doing what children usually do, piano lessons or something, I was going to artists—not from the school, real professional painters. After that, in high school, I was seriously interested in world art and studio art, even during the communist time when things became very difficult. When I finished I applied to the Art Academy in Bulgaria, the School of Visual Art. I was accepted but the school was under a very old-fashioned system. In Bulgaria, everything in the early 20th century was modeled after the Kunstacademie in Vienna and Munich. You did an eight-year study, like medical school. The first four years you study everything: painting, sculpture, decorative art, architecture. I even had two semesters of medicine and depiction of the human body. After these four years, you decided what to be: architect, painter, sculptor or in the decorative arts.

FS: And you went to paint.

C: In the early ’50s. Around ’52, I was going to this school, but it was the height of the Stalinist period, just before Stalin died and after, when the doctrine of fascism was being very strongly implemented in art school. I was suffocated.

Bulgaria had no historical art collection and nothing about modern art. Even Van Gogh was considered a decadent artist. I had relatives in Prague, and I was really desperate during these first four years at art school because there weren’t any modern shows to see. I thought I should do everything possible to go to another country, but because my family was persecuted by the communists, I did not have any rights to do anything, not even rights to learn another language.

I was only learning Russian and speaking Bulgarian. But that urge to go out was so unstoppable that I did, finally. During the summertime I decided to try my chances and go to Prague. I bought a train ticket, but in the summer of ’56 something incredibly important in my life happened—there was a Bulgarian revolution in Budapest. There was an uprising against the communists, and when summertime arrived in Budapest, there was a huge fear that World War III would start and there would be no way to go to Prague by train. The only way was by plane, and I remember at the last moment I desperately tried to find money to buy a ticket to fly from Sofia to Prague, which was the first time I had taken a plane in my life. I arrived by myself. I had my student card from the University of Art in Bulgaria and I was thinking even if Prague is still a communist country, it’s better and I’d like to stay there. This was the first time I had the chance to see original works of Picasso and Paul Klee. They were in the basement of the National Gallery.

FS: So you were able to stay?

C: My idea was to not go back to Bulgaria. I was surviving by making paintings of friends and people in Prague and then I was eventually able to get to Vienna, not speaking anything except Bulgarian and Russian. I survived doing all kinds of odd jobs, washing cars, working in garages. In Vienna I became stateless with no passport, no nationality. I was a refugee. I wanted to go to Paris where everything was happening. I made portraits for the refugee officials of their children and families and they advised me to try to find my way to Geneva, Switzerland. In late August or September of 1957, I arrived in Geneva and I started to make money making portraits of friends of the UN people, and I worked very hard and finally, thanks to them, I was able to arrive in Paris in March of 1958.

FS: And you were able to continue painting the whole time?

C: Yeah, signing with my family name “Javacheff.” The abstract work or modernistic work I was signing with “Christo.”

FS: So you knew you were doing something very different between the representational work and the abstract work?

C: It’s like a writer who writes with a pseudonym to write books that sell very well.

I was “writing” portraits of children, wives and gentlemen and very big French families. Jeanne-Claude’s father was the huge hero of the French Resistance, he was a four-star general and a personal friend of General de Gaulle. That was how I met Jeanne-Claude. Actually, I did a portrait of Jeanne-Claude for myself and signed it Javacheff, then I wrapped that portrait with plastic, like my wrapped magazine, and signed on the wrapped portrait Christo. This portrait is in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego.

FS: This is the sign of a very different artist. How did the work change from being about painting and where you came from?

C: I was already doing these abstract pieces. I had the address of a friend of my father’s, a German friend who studied in Vienna with my father, called Mr. Rosenkranz. And when I arrived in Paris I wrote to him that I was in Paris, and one good day Mr. Rosenkraz arrived at my little room—one room with no water.

In the summer of ’58, he bought the first wrapped can, a little tube.

FS: What made you wrap the can? To start?

C: I started right away. I was not a painter. When we wrapped the Reichstag, the first critic the New York Times sent was not an art critic but an architectural critic.

In truth, the wrapped Reichstag was a type of new architecture from the start. I had not yet decided what I am.

FS: Absolutely, you do something very different.

C: The way the projects are built is very similar to how architects today work, how they build bridges. They’re completely outside of the milieu of how normal art is practiced.

FS: Completely! Just like the Miami project, Surrounded Islands, in 1983.

C: The sculptures were very free and the work required a high level of skill.

I involved readymade objects like a paint can, sometimes adding buttons of yellow fabric—but they’re very free, not static sculptures. They can be arranged differently. All these early and late ’50s pieces now belong to the Tate Gallery.

I remember they bought it at auction, but I gave the original collector instructions that the piece can be composed differently—there’s not one way to do it.

FS: What was the first installation you and Jeanne-Claude did together?

C: We had our first exhibition in Cologne in 1961. That’s when the galleries had a little space on the ground floor and I would put little cans or wrapped bottles like goods in the store windows. The gallery, like all the galleries, was in a very industrial area near the harbor of the Rhine River. They were closed Sunday and Monday, and Jeanne-Claude and I decided to do a temporary installation in the harbor yard using the merchandise and some stacked barrels. This was the first temporary installation we did together. And the people over the weekend could go see artists working outside, not in a gallery or in a museum.

FS: It’s a completely different way of thinking about art.

C: It is historical in a way because that summer, something extremely important was happening in my life, related to many other projects: The Berlin Wall was built. And of course, I was a political refugee. I left Germany thinking like in Soviet times, we won’t go with Germany. They were fighting and there were these horror stories. Everybody thought a third world war would start. I went back to Paris and I proposed in September of 1961 to do our Iron Curtain, blocking this small street in Paris, Rue Visconti, with barrels.

FS: The idea that the work existed outside of galleries or outside of normal art that you look at on a wall is very important, but the other idea that you say here is that you had such a concern for people and humanity and what was happening in the world.

C: I was concerned about myself, to be very frank. I thought I’d be sent to Siberia—I was so scared! For 17 years I lived like a political refugee. It’s not real life, it’s horrendous pain and suffering. For all those years I didn’t see my parents.

I’m very allergic to politicizing the works of art. They should be as they are, that is the true work of art—instead of becoming propaganda. Because I was scared of the Berlin Wall, I was so much a part of the boulevard and what was happening

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there at the time. I wasn’t thinking “Ah let’s do something because the Berlin Wall’s happened.” I don’t do commissions because I cannot imagine other things than what I am.

FS: So, you met curator and museum director Jan van der Marck right after getting your green card! He later invited you to Miami for the New World Festival and introduced you to Beth Dunlop. He was our founding director and opened the museum a year after Surrounded Islands. How did you meet him?

C: Oh, much later. I was living in Paris as a refugee with very little, trying to sell my modern Christo works. In 1961, before Rue Visconti, the new art dealers started to come from New York to Paris and started to see the new European artists. This is how I met the important dealer Leo Castelli. He saw my work and told me that if I went to New York, he would put me in a group show in his gallery on 77th Street. He became a good friend, and Jeanne-Claude and I started to dream about going to New York as soon as possible. To put money aside we started to sell works, and finally in February 1964, we arrived in Manhattan. Leo was organizing a spring exhibition for four young artists. He had one big room in his 77th Street location that was like a box without windows, just four white walls.

He invited four artists: me, Richard Artschwager, Robert Watts and Alex Hay. Each artist had one wall and for my wall, I decided to do storefronts. I only had to do the show window. I built a little storefront façade, with materials I found on the street in Manhattan and in my little room in the Chelsea Hotel. I put together doors, two parts of the glass and the storefront. I even wrapped an air conditioner above the door, and that storefront was exhibited by Leo in 1964.

FS: Wow, so is this how van der Marck saw the work?

C: Yes, it was a spectacular storefront. It is one of those rare pieces I did between 1963 and 1967.

That storefront period is very important because it was when I started moving away from the architectural façades. Two years later in 1966, I did a personal exhibition for Leo, where I built four corner storefronts, which is a very important piece I own. Unlike other artists, I don’t have exclusivity with any gallery. I worked with many galleries originally, but no one was willing to take care of our, my, things, and then, Jeanne-Claude and me, we had a big collection—thousands of pieces, like 3,000 pieces or more that we own. This is an enormous treasure that is mostly in Basel, but there’s a big storage in New York, too.

FS: Yeah, I saw so much in Basel.

C: I was in New York in the spring of ’64, living with Jeanne-Claude in the Chelsea Hotel, and we came back to our little boy who was four years old with his grandparents in Paris. We returned to Paris and after seeing what was new, I told Jeanne-Claude, “We should go to America.” We came with our Rietveld chair and all of these little things to America, like tourists, but after three months we became illegal aliens. For three years we were illegal aliens, but finally I got a green card in 1967. In 1973, I became an American citizen.

FS: And this was when you met van der Marck?

C: We had a call from Jan van der Marck, who was the curator of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. He was organizing an exhibition there where Martin Friedman was the director. They were trying to do an exhibition titled “Eight Artists/Bigger Image,” and I lent them plenty of pieces. The exhibition started in ’67 or ’68 in Minneapolis and traveled to St. Louis, where Emily Rauh was the curator. Meanwhile, my first solo exhibition in a museum was in Holland. While we were living in Paris, we became friendly with the great Dutch collectors Martin and Mia Visser who lived in Eindhoven, Holland. We also became friendly with the director of the Van Abbemuseum, Jean Leering, who was very eager to make my first personal exhibition happen of the storefronts, wrapped trees and all the packages in the spring, April ’66. It included the great storefront that was done

here in one big room in the Van Abbemuseum. Another room was the wrapped trees and many new other pieces. In 1961, still living in Paris, I tried to install the Iron Curtain. I also tried to wrap big brick buildings. I photographed little scale model packages and cut out people with cars and bicycles to make a photomontage called Wrapped Public Building, and a little text explaining what I was doing, how it should be wrapped, and how the ideal building to be wrapped should be a real public building, prison or parliament. Of course, there was no chance to do a prison or parliament. But the idea was known to a number of museum people and when we arrived here, Bill Rubin was the chief curator of MoMA. We were rotating the wrapped packages and the wheelbarrow and Bill was organizing a landmark 1968 exhibition at MoMA called “Dada, Surrealism and their Heritage.” It was a huge exhibition; he emptied the entire MoMA to hold it. Knowing that I did Rue Visconti, we tried to do a temporary transformation of the museum while it was closed, using that two weeks’ time—when nobody went—to wrap the museum and install Iron Curtain on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenue, called Barrels. Of course I did scale models and drawings, but the insurance company and the museum never gave permission. Then, in 1967 or 1968, I became friendly with a young Swiss curator who was very interested in my work: Harold Szeemann.

FS: Ah, my friend, yes.

C: He was preparing a show for the 50th anniversary of Kunsthalle Bern and he worked very hard to get the permission from the trustees and fire department.

The first public building was wrapped, the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland, in 1968, which was also the year I proposed wrapping the coastline in California. I was very close to Maurice Tuchman and we were working to wrap the coastline in California. We then had a visit from a young Australian art collector and businessman, John Kaldor, who wanted us to come to Australia to give a lecture. I said to him, “Mr. Kaldor, you have the longest coastline in the world, help us to wrap the coastline.” This is why in 1968, John found the coastline and in 1969, we wrapped the coastline near Sydney, Australia.

FS: The momentum was picking up.

C: Yes, and meanwhile, we started to sell more and we made many important friends including the publisher Harry Abrams, who was crazy over our works. He bought works or did trades with us. Because we were speaking French, we also became very friendly with the de Menils, who were then trustees of MoMA. FS: How did you end up in Miami?

C: We arrived in Miami when I was involved in an exhibition around Dade County.

FS: The New World Festival.

C: They invited us to do something. They said, “You’re with the architectural writer of the Miami Herald, Beth Dunlop. You have a car, and she will drive you around Miami-Dade County to see what you’d like to do.” I’d never been driven over the causeway, this big bridge—we asked Beth to drive us over it several times, crossing back and forth. Initially, we wanted to wrap the bridge on the causeway because we’d tried to wrap the Pont Neuf, but couldn’t get permission. Before Miami, in 1974, there was another art historian who became a good friend, Sam Hunter, who was organizing an exhibition in Newport, Rhode Island called “Monumenta.” He invited artists to do something outside in Newport’s surroundings, the harbor, etc. We covered the beach area of the coast with fabric in the summer of ’74. That was the prelude for the floating fabric in the water.

Then in Miami, Jeanne-Claude saw all these islands, and said, “Look, this is the perfect space to surround the islands—there aren’t any problems with the coast.”

She said, “There are so many,” and this was how the thing started.

FS: Why pink?

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PHOTO BY WOLFGANG VOLZ

Born in Bulgaria, Christo arrived in Paris a refugee in 1958. For years, he maintained two separate art practices: one of portraiture to support himself, and the other, the radical environmental interventions he has now made all over the globe. Here he is pictured with The Mastaba, constructed of more than 7,000 oil barrels last summer on the Serpentine Lake in London's Hyde Park.

C: You know, I was not very easy with that color. We started to meet many Hispanic people there and that energy, that dynamic and also the color, that very humid air—I was making drawings, little sketches with a very shy pink because I was not at ease with that shocking pink. But because the air is so full of water, we saw that from far away it needed to be a much stronger color—if not, you wouldn’t see it. From the very light pink, it became a deep, very strong pink, but to do that it was another huge work. We always try to buy the fabric in the United States for a US project, but that was the biggest amount of fabric we’d bought for any of our projects, 6.5 million square feet of woven fabric. We had to find a fabric that is lighter than the water and could float. The pink color came from iron, which is heavy, and it is very delicate when you try to make a floating material heavy. That project was an incredible engineering feat.

FS: Was it two weeks because of the materials, specifically?

C: No, all projects are two weeks. The most expensive part of the exhibition was the payroll—all the security, police, traffic control, etc. After two weeks Jeanne-Claude would say, “it’s enough.”

FS: Two weeks is per fect. It leaves an impression in ever ybody’s imagination forever.

C: That will never happen again. I will never wrap another island.

FS: But now we get to celebrate it with the exhibition.

C: The exhibition expresses a lot of the invisible aspects of the project.

We have these incredible archived materials and also real components— not just photography, but the real anchors, the real things. You can see how we engineered something marvelous. The fabric moved up and down with the tide and kept the exact proportion of the configuration of the floating material.

FS: Sometimes we talk about the work, or art critics and historians talk about the work in relationship to land art, and this idea of big projects outside in the landscape, to solitude and to the large expanse. You’re the opposite.

C: There are two ways I work: urban projects or rural projects. We need to have a human scale. In the countryside, we need to have a house, a telephone pole, a bridge, to see how high and how wide the project will be.

Running Fence and Surrounded Islands are both rural projects. You see the houses, the bridges, the little settlements, farms, all kinds of things. We’re borrowing that space to create a “gentle disturbance” for a few days.

And while we’re in the space, we inherit everything about that space. We didn’t invent the ecology of Biscayne Bay, but we’re in the real bay, not a photograph of the bay or the water or the island. We don’t invent the politics of the Reichstag, because we have the real Reichstag. There are sketches, drawings, films and photos, but for 14 days, our work was the Reichstag.

There are photos, but for 14 days it was the real Biscayne Bay, the real wind, sun, everything—very close to all these elements that are inadvertently in the image of what kind of project is done. The work is related to that physicality of the human living in the space.

FS: So many different ways that the work is acting with us.

C: They’re existing and we’re witnessing. The different relations and ways that people engage with it—each time we do a project we learn more.

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Interior by Joe Nahem of Fox Nahem; photo by Peter Murdock.

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