April/May 2023

Cathy

Until 22 July

KEHINDE WILEY: HAVANA

KEHINDE WILEY: HAVANA

APRIL 28 - JUNE 10, 2023

APRIL 28 - JUNE 10, 2023

Dawoud Bey: Pictures 1976 – 2019

April 29 – June 17, 2023

BEYOND BELIEF

CONTENTS

April/May 2023

TILTING TOWARD MILLENNIA

This spring, friends, aides, and decades’ worth of artworks traveled from across the globe to convene in New York for Wangechi Mutu’s momentous survey at the New Museum.

HALLOWED HALLS

For years, LGDR has been a driving force in the art market. Now, the creative family is making a home for itself at one of the most historic addresses on New York’s Upper East Side.

MANIFESTING MEMORIES THROUGH SCULPTURE

This April, Daniel Lind-Ramos takes his monumental assemblage works to MoMA PS1 for his largest exhibition to date.

IRISH MODERNISM MAKES LANDFALL

Ciaran McGuigan is bringing his homegrown family design business—and the perception of Irish craftsmanship—into the 21st century.

CARRYING ON THE CURATORIAL BLOODLINE

In the midst of a historic blizzard, Amy Adams braved the elements to dig out her snowed-in Portland gallery, inviting beloved artists and collaborators to celebrate Adams and Ollman’s 10th anniversary.

DECISIONS MADE AND UNMADE

Ten years after Rachel Cargle left her marriage, she ruminates on the life she left behind, and the strength and conviction that allowed her to pursue the one she wanted.

PROGRESS AND PRESERVATION

In Shanghai, “Gucci Cosmos” brings the Italian fashion house’s rich history to life through an exhibition curated by Maria Luisa Frisa and designed by Es Devlin.

LEAVING IT ALL IN THE STUDIO

Brooklin Soumahoro likens his works to bursts of lightning, an apt descriptor for an artist who pours every ounce of his energy onto his canvas.

72

DON’T SIT DOWN

Misha Kahn harnesses advanced technology to envision his whimsical furniture designs, a number of which are on view at Friedman Benda in Los Angeles this spring.

74

CO-AUTHORING A SENTENCE

Multidisciplinary art collective Moved by the Motion uses movement, music, and installation to unearth the hidden narratives buried in the Western literary canon.

CONTENTS

April/May 2023

WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

In the face of threats and censorship, Russian collective Chto Delat wages an unrelenting battle to protect freedom of speech in its home country.

SEAN, THOMAS, AND LAUREN KELLY

With Sean Kelly’s two children joining him as partners, the family gallery expands across the country.

PENNY PILKINGTON, WENDY OLSOFF, AND EDEN DEERING

Wendy Olsoff and Penny Pilkington founded PPOW to create a space for underrepresented artists. Olsoff ’s daughter, Eden Deering, became part of the team in 2018, joining the ranks of women that she grew up admiring.

LUCY MITCHELL-INNES AND DAVID AND JOSEPHINE NASH

Lucy Mitchell-Innes and David Nash have shaped their gallery program into one of the most respected in the city. Now they’re expanding their contemporary program with help from their daughter, Josephine Nash.

84

FRANCESCO AND CHIARA CLEMENTE CREATE PARALLEL PORTRAITS

Influenced by the adventurous work of her father, the Neo-Expressionist painter, Chiara Clemente has followed her own winding path to filmmaking.

88

PETER AND SALLY SAUL GET ALONG QUITE WELL

The rebellious painter and subversive sculptor share a studio in their compound in upstate New York, where each serves as the other’s muse and champion.

92

PAULIN’S CLOSEST CONTINUE HIS LEGACY

PIERRE

In the years since Pierre Paulin passed, a triumvirate of loved ones—the designer’s wife, Maïa WodzislawskaPaulin; son, Benjamin Paulin; and daughter-in-law, Alice Lemoine—have extended and redefined his legacy for a new century.

96

SALAM ALAIKUM AFRICA

Chanel’s Métiers d’art is an annual celebration of craft and creative encounters. For this year’s collection, artistic director Virginie Viard unveils a historic merging of French design and West African tradition, all made by hand.

102

PLEASURE, LONGING, AND POWERFUL DESIRE

Doron Langberg doesn’t aim to shock. Rather, the artist’s fleshy, figurative oil paintings of explicit love-making scenes reverberate with passion, luring us in with raw emotion and sensuality.

Artificial intelligence-generated artwork featuring Louis Vuitton Spring/Summer 2023. Artwork by David King Reuben.

CONTENTS

108

PARENTING SHOULD BE LIKE PAINTING

When Emily Ratajkowski was around the age that her son, Sly, is now, she often found herself under the care of her father, the painter and sculptor John David Ratajkowski. On the eve of Sly’s second birthday, Emily and John reflect on the art of child rearing.

COLLECTING FOR THE FUTURE

In the era of the multi-hyphenate, CULTURED ’s sixth annual class of Young Collectors spotlights art lovers who are guided by their instincts and trust in their communities.

THE TIES THAT BRUISE US ALSO BIND

When Seán Hewitt published All Down Darkness Wide last summer, he found himself grappling with the ghosts of his own past—and with the legacy of trauma in queer literary history.

THREE GENERATIONS AT THE TABLE

Alice Waters and her daughter, Fanny Singer, host a family reunion of sorts over a meal made from fresh local ingredients, with the family’s youngest member—Fanny’s own daughter, Cecily Singer—at the center of the action.

120 136 142 148

YOU LIVE WHERE?

In secluded colonies tucked into the American Southwest, colorful Earthship communities repurpose ancient building practices and recycled materials into passive structures powered by the sun and wind. These off-thegrid compounds offer us clues about how to live in a changing world. Welcome to Earthship Way.

160

WE MAKE BEAUTIFUL THINGS. THEN WE SET THE WORLD ON FIRE.

David King Reuben uses cutting-edge A.I. technology to create new worlds, dressing computer-generated models in sleek, decadent clothes from Louis Vuitton’s Spring/Summer 2023 Ready-to-Wear collection.

ELAINE SCIOLINO Writer

Elaine Sciolino is a Paris-based contributing writer and former Paris bureau chief for The New York Times. She is currently writing her sixth book, which is about “falling in love with the Louvre.” Says Sciolino: “For the past decade, Benjamin Paulin, Alice Lemoine, and Maïa WodzislawskaPaulin have formed the trio behind the family business Paulin, Paulin, Paulin. Their aim is simple: shed new light on the works of late French designer Pierre Paulin. I met them at their Paris house, an architectural gem which also serves as their showroom and headquarters.”

SALMAN TOOR Artist

Pakistani-born and New York-based Salman

Toor’s sumptuous and insightful gurative paintings depict intimate quotidian moments in the lives of ctional young, brown, queer men ensconced in contemporary cosmopolitan culture. His work oscillates between heartening and harrowing, seductive and poignant, inviting and eerie. A solo presentation of Toor’s work, “No Ordinary Love,” is on view at the Tampa Museum of Art until June 2023. He is the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, and his work is in the permanent collections of the Tate, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, among others. The artist contributes a series of previously unseen sketches in this issue that accompany Seán Hewitt’s meditation on the role of trauma in queer literature.

JEANNE VACCARO Writer

Jeanne Vaccaro is a writer and curator. Her book in process, Handmade: feelings and textures of transgender, explores the labor of crafting an identity and was awarded the Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation. Vaccaro is an assistant professor of Transgender Studies and Museum Studies at the University of Kansas, and co-founder of the New York City Trans Oral History Project. For this issue, she considers the nature of collective art-making. “Artist collaborations possess a commitment to practice and to ritual that remakes the everyday as a site of possibility and change,” says Vaccaro.

SAM HELLMANN Photographer

The Instagram of Paris-born photographer Sam Hellmann is brimming with portraits of friends and celebrities like Bella Hadid and Oscar Isaac. Hellmann began her career as a photographer on movie sets before expanding into writing, directing, portraiture, and fashion work. In this issue, she turns her lens to the Paulin family. “It’s always a strange and interesting exercise to take someone’s portrait in their home,” Hellmann says. “It felt as if everything was aligned in perfect balance between the space and the people living in it. Even the children drawing in the kitchen were so peaceful and quiet; it was only at the end of the shoot that I realized they were there.”

CONTRIBUTORS

SEAN DAVIDSON Photographer

Sean Davidson’s work documents interior architecture and contemporary design within commercial, personal, and institutional contexts. For this issue, Davidson travels to Taos, New Mexico, to explore the sustainable architecture practices of Earthship communities. “It seems like the future is always found out in the desert,” says the photographer. “Earthships seek equilibrium with the land and gaze up toward the stars to nd their power. The quietness of the land makes this an incredible place to hang out and photograph.”

DAVID KING REUBEN Artist

Multidisciplinary artist David King Reuben works out of London on pieces that interrogate religion, God, and human beliefs, a re ection of his ultra-orthodox upbringing and eventual divergence from these teachings. This year, he will release a conceptual album accompanied by hundreds of hand-drawn, animated stills and an immersive live performance. Recently, Reuben has also delved into the world of arti cial intelligence. In this issue, he blends this cutting-edge technology with designs from Louis Vuitton’s Spring/ Summer 2023 collection. “Innovation is the ultimate disrupter of industries,” says the artist, “and as we’ve seen with the likes of Airbnb and Uber, no sector is safe from transformation. While I do not claim to have taken down the fashion industry, it is undeniable that the winds of change are blowing in its direction.”

Made

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CONTRIBUTORS

SEÁN HEWITT Writer

Seán Hewitt is a Dublin-based writer and literary critic. His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, won the 2022 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and his poetry collection, Tongues of Fire, won the Laurel Prize in 2021. This year, his book of new versions of queer tales from Greek and Roman classics, 300,000 Kisses, will be released with Clarkson Potter. For this issue, he investigates the cultural politics of queer trauma in literature. “Maybe writers gift us some more time in the furnace, and a hand to hold ours while we are there, and perhaps that reformation is the place where queer happiness, where queer liberation, comes to life,” says the writer.

DOMINIQUE CLAYTON Writer

Los Angeles and Toronto-based Dominique Clayton has a host of job titles: writer, curator, dealer, founder, and contributing editor for CULTURED. The Columbia University and SCAD graduate founded her eponymous gallery and art advisory to serve as an incubator for emerging artists— particularly those of color and women. She has held positions at Lee Daniels Entertainment, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Broad, Jeffrey Deitch, and WACO Theater Center’s Wearable Art Gala. In this issue, Clayton speaks to Brooklin Soumahoro, a self-taught French painter with an expressive body of work.

GREGORY HALPERN AND AHNDRAYA PARLATO Photographers

Gregory Halpern and Ahndraya Parlato are photography professors at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Together, the husband and wife have published nearly 10 books of their work. The pair, a family in their own right, collaborated to photograph Emily Ratajkowski and her son, Sly, in their Manhattan home for this issue’s cover story.

Founder | Editor-in-Chief

SARAH G. HARRELSON

Executive Editor

JOSHUA GLASS

Senior Editor

MARA VEITCH

Senior Creative Producer

REBECCA AARON

Fashion Directors

ALEXANDRA CRONAN, KATE FOLEY

Editor-at-Large

KAT HERRIMAN

New York Contributing Arts Editor

JACOBA URIST

Associate Editor

ELLA MARTIN-GACHOT

Editorial Assistant

SOPHIE LEE

Contributing Art Directors

MAFALDA KAHANE, ORIANA REN

Contributing Columnist

RACHEL CARGLE

Podcast Editor

SIENNA FEKETE

Landscape Editor

LILY KWONG

Contributing Editors

FRANKLIN SIRMANS, SARAH ARISON, LAURA DE GUNZBURG, DOUG

MEYER, CASEY FREMONT, ALLISON BERG, MICHAEL REYNOLDS, DOMINIQUE CLAYTON

Publisher

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ISSN 2638-7611

LETTER EDITOR from the

FOR OUR SECOND ISSUE OF THE YEAR, we set out to make sense of that messy, magnificent thing we call family. It’s an idea so big, so ever-changing, and so profoundly personal that it was difficult to pinpoint exactly where to begin. We quickly realized that, if you look for it, our families—the ones we choose, the ones we are stuck with, and the ones that form out of circumstance—play an enormous role in our stories. We decided to focus on those fundamental moments where a group of people, related or not, transform into more than the sum of their parts. Some of the relationships spotlighted in this issue have blossomed over decades—like the artists Peter and Sally Saul, who have been together for 50 years, or Alice Waters and her daughter Fanny Singer, a new mother herself. Others were born out of that elusive combination of trust and creative synergy—such as Wu Tsang’s collective, Moved by the Motion, a transdisciplinary and transcontinental art group working across film, music, and art. We wanted to give you an intimate glimpse into these complex and layered relationships, and we wanted to go deep—which is easier said than done.

Naturally, this journey begins with our cover star, Emily Ratajkowski. In all that she does, the actor, author, and entrepreneur is unafraid to speak her mind on the issues that matter to her—from motherhood to consent to creative ownership. Like many of us, Emily has become fascinated with the unexpected ways that her earliest experiences continue to inform the most essential aspects of herself. In an honest and affectionate conversation with her father, the artist John David Ratajkowski, Emily revisits a childhood spent inventing and exploring worlds while being both a student and collaborator in her father’s studio attached to their family home. Now, as a new mother, Emily is focused on offering the same experiences to her son. Her genuine interest in the power of human connection gives us a window into the engine of her success.

This issue also features our sixth annual Young

Follow us | @cultured_mag

Collectors list, a major undertaking that I am very passionate about. Every year, I spend a great deal of time talking with trusted friends to bring together a cohort of people who are using their privilege and platforms in thoughtful ways. We visited all 11 collectors in their homes, taking their portraits in front of the works that mean the most to them. Kat Herriman, CULTURED’s editorat-large, spent time with each of them, diving deep into their very personal collecting habits, the values that drive their acquisitions, and their unique philosophies of patronage. We hope their stories inspire you to support artists in any way you can. In the end, that is CULTURED’s mission.

As always, a big thank you to my dedicated team. I hope you have as much fun reading these pages as we did putting them together.

THE ART MARKET 2023

A report by Art Basel & UBS. Launching April 4.

Tilting Toward Millennia

AS WANGECHI MUTU ZOOMED WITH ME from her sunset-lit Nairobi studio earlier this spring, her team in New York, where it was still morning, was at work preparing for the KenyanAmerican artist’s then-upcoming show at the New Museum. One aide made wrinkles in Mutu’s sculptural fabrics; another gouged gallery walls with what the artist calls “wall wounds.” In a matter of days, the artist would join these friends, some of whom had come back to work with her after 20 years, for a gathering she describes as a family reunion. The metaphor could also be applied to her works—as we spoke, Mutu’s paintings, collages, videos, and sculptures were traveling from across the world to convene in the museum and make themselves at home.

Mutu, 50, achieved international acclaim in the early 2000s for her lavish collage admixtures of the mythic and mundane—crouching pinup models with crocodile tails and women pinning serpents with their stiletto heels. These “otherworldly superhero beings,” she imagined, “could redeem us from our bullshit and our small-minded problems that hurt us so tremendously.” Upon securing U.S. citizenship in 2015, she began dividing her time between Nairobi and New York. “Intertwined” (curated by Vivian Crockett, Margot Norton, and Ian Wallace) traces the connections, in terms of place as well as aesthetics, in Mutu’s practice over decades. In the show, the heroines of her mid-2000s collages—their bodies mottled with disease or decorative camouflage— acquire movement in the animated video The End of Eating Everything, 2013, and a third dimension through sculptures including The Glider, 2021, a soil-and-charcoal serpent goddess with holes for scales.

Mutu’s work has long addressed gendered violence and colonialism, but her historical imagination also tilts beyond history and toward millennia—an expansive perspective from which, she says, “our tribalisms completely dissolve.” Her sculptures, while governed by the same logic of accretion as her collages, seem more assured of their place in the world. She makes her clay from the soil in Nairobi, which she bakes in the sun, and adorns her sculptures with natural materials she has gathered from the land: moth wings, quartz, driftwood, bleached skeletons of sea animals. “To be drawn to these materials, to be able to recognize their beauty,” says Mutu, “that is my prayer.”

This spring, friends, aides, and decades’ worth of artworks traveled from across the globe to convene in New York for “Intertwined,” Wangechi Mutu’s momentous survey at the New Museum.

Leah Ke Yi Zheng

Hallowed Halls

For years, LGDR has been a driving force in the art market, embracing the synergy and contradiction sparked by the diverse expertise of its founders Dominique Lévy, Brett Gorvy, Amalia Dayan, and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn. Now, the creative family is making a home for itself at one of the most historic addresses on New York’s Upper East Side.

IN ANOTHER LIFE, the walls of New York’s 19 East 64th Street mansion were adorned with the likes of Sandro Botticelli, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Paul Cézanne, and Rembrandt. The limestone-fronted edifice was completed in 1932 by Gilded Age architect Horace Trumbauer to house the private art dealership Wildenstein & Company, with adornments and arch windows inspired by the 18th-century Parisian Hôtel de Wailly. Now, LGDR will continue the building’s intimate entanglement with the arts by establishing its flagship gallery in the Upper East Side townhouse.

The Wildenstein family of art dealers hosted Old Master and Impressionist exhibitions at 19 East 64th Street for more than half a century before converting it into a private residence in the 1990s, with 11 members of the family bouncing between its five floors. Harry Brooks, the dealership’s former president, used to jokingly refer to it as the “most expensive tenement in Manhattan.” Indeed, when the Wildensteins finally sold the building to an anonymous buyer for $79.5 million in 2017, the sale set the record for the highest price ever paid for a Manhattan townhouse.

(The building broke the record again a year later when it sold for $90 million.) The grand home changed hands a few more times in the following years before LGDR acquired it in 2022 and set to work restoring its interiors in collaboration with architect and designer Bill Katz and HS2 Architecture.

To inaugurate its new flagship, the gallery has organized a transhistorical exhibition that marries the townhouse’s roots with its new, forward-facing raison d’être. “Rear View”— an exhibition of nearly 40 paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and photographs of the human figure from behind—opens this month and runs through June 3. Throughout its two floors of exhibition space, 20th-century masterworks by René Magritte and Francis Bacon enter dialogue with pieces by living artists such as Fernando Botero and John Currin, along with new commissions from artists including Francesco Clemente, Diane Dal-Pra, Urs Fischer, and Eric Fischl. The exhibition shines a light on the enduring resonance of the human posterior in figurative work, encouraging viewers to examine the past as well as what’s to come.

Manifesting Memories

LEGEND HAS IT THAT LOÍZA, a small town that sits on the northeastern coast of Puerto Rico, takes its appellation from a Taíno kasike, or tribal chieftain, called Yuiza. She changed her name to the more Spanish-sounding Luisa after marrying Pedro Mejías, an Afro-Spanish conquistador who accompanied the first wave of European colonizers in the 1500s. Over the next five centuries, her geographical namesake would witness the arrival of Yoruba tribe members brought to Puerto Rico as enslaved Africans, the birth of the bomba and plena musical traditions, and the loss of hundreds of lives and homes to Hurricane Maria.

Daniel Lind-Ramos was born in Loíza 70 years ago to a family of seamstresses, carpenters, and mask-makers. Throughout his decades-spanning practice, the assemblage sculptor has made work from, about, and for the place where he grew up and still lives, the island’s unofficial capital of Afro-Puerto Rican culture. Using found and gifted objects— palm fronds, rusty pickaxes, blue FEMA tarps, and DVD players—he constructs monumental figures that trace the traditions, tales, and traumas of Afro-descendant communities in Puerto Rico and beyond. “Even though the works are inspired by Loíza, and Loíza is the filter through which I experience life, I am sure these experiences are shared by humanity,” the artist says. “For me, objects are charged with experiences, whether they’re personal or collective. That is what interests me in my work: how memories manifest through them.”

This spring, MoMA PS1 will present “Daniel LindRamos: El Viejo Griot—Una historia de todos nosotros,” the artist’s largest exhibition to date. The show will weave together long-standing and recent themes in Lind-Ramos’s practice through a presentation of 10 large-scale works. These include Centinelas de la luna negra, 2022-23, and El Viejo Griot, 2022-23. The first is a meditation on mangroves and their role as buffers to persistent erosion in a changing climate, and the latter refers to an “elder storyteller,” a character in the Fiestas de Santiago Apóstol, a celebration that takes place in Loíza each summer. Through the exhibition, the artist uses sculpture as a means for storytelling, refiguring rhythms past and present, and reflecting humanity in all of its textures.

Daniel Lind-Ramos brings his monumental assemblages— expressive containers of memories rooted in the Afro-descendant communities of Puerto Rico and beyond—to MoMA PS1 this spring for his largest exhibition to date.

WITH THE EXCEPTION OF THE FANCIFUL ROMANTICISM of fashion designers John Rocha and his daughter Simone Rocha, Irish design typically conjures images of lace, harps, and Celtic wood carvings. “It’s been attached to craft and diddly diddly diddly,” says Ciaran McGuigan, the creative director of his family business, Orior, “and I want to stay well clear of that.”

The brand was born after McGuigan’s parents, Brian and Rosie McGuigan, spent time in Denmark in the 1970s gaining exposure to furniture and design. When the pair returned to Ireland at the end of the decade, they vowed to bridge the gap between their new knowledge of Scandinavian aesthetics and their Irish heritage, founding Orior in Newry, Northern Ireland. More than 40 years later, the design operation is still very much a family affair. In addition to Brian, Rosie, and Ciaran, Katie Ann McGuigan— Ciaran’s younger sister and a London-based fashion designer—also contributes her eye to Orior, advising on creative direction and designing prints for the brand.

As a teenager, McGuigan landed stateside after earning a soccer scholarship at the Savannah

College of Art and Design. It wasn’t long before he realized that SCAD was more of a design mecca than a sports one—and perhaps not the best place for him at the time. When he was given the opportunity to play professionally in Sweden, he quickly hopped on a plane back to Europe. Eventually, he returned to the noted art school to play soccer (and also complete his film degree). When he graduated in 2014, McGuigan decamped to New York to expand the family business—which by then had evolved from a small local outfit to a full-fledged international operation. In 2022, Orior opened a 4,500-square-foot flagship in New York’s SoHo neighborhood which serves as a portal into the brand’s ethos.

Despite all of McGuigan’s innovations, though, quality and craftsmanship remain the backbone of every Orior piece. The company uses the finest textiles, leather hides, marble, and glass procured from purveyors across Ireland. The marble and lime-stone come from stonemasons S McConnell & Sons in Kilkeel, Northern Ireland. “We get the blocks from all over the place, and then we cut them in the size we need,” explains one artisan. Orior’s crystal tabletops

come from world-renowned glass sculptor Eoin Turner in Cork, Southern Ireland. Each piece is made-to-order; no two tables, chairs, or credenzas are exactly alike.

All this to say: every Orior piece is a work of luxury. The brand’s round Marmar table is made from a single marble slab, a Brutalist form that incorporates Orior’s trademark curves. Its Easca coffee table combines teardrop-shaped Irish green marble legs with a curved tabletop made from fine Irish crystal, and the Atlanta sofa’s sloping arms are complemented by a fringe-trimmed bottom. The Bianca chair, which resembles a plump pair of lips atop walnut legs, looks at home in any curated interior.

“We’re going to put Ireland on the map for design and furniture,” McGuigan asserts, and he’s certainly off to a good start. Orior has a cult following of notables—from Jon Gray and Maggie Gyllenhaal to Kelly Behun—and has collaborated with McGuigan’s fellow SCAD alum Christopher John Rogers on a capsule collection of chairs that fuse the fashion designer’s vibrant palette with four of Orior’s signature chairs. For followers of Ireland’s design evolution, the future looks bright.

Irish

Modernism Makes Landfall

Ciaran McGuigan is bringing his homegrown family design business—and the perception of Irish craftsmanship—into the 21st century.

THIS PAST FEBRUARY, PORTLAND, OREGON saw its heaviest snowfall since 1943. The record-setting blizzard arrived the same week as two other local milestones: the 10th anniversary of Adams and Ollman, one of the city’s most influential art galleries, and the 50th birthday of its owner, Amy Adams. These factors swirled together one Saturday afternoon as friends and fans braved the icy conditions for the gallery’s celebratory exhibition. Prior to the opening, Adams cleared the space’s snow-covered sidewalk wear-ing a polka-dotted Balenciaga party dress, metal shovel in hand.

The gallerist is a tireless advocate and cheerleader for her artists, qualities she attributes to her mentor, John Ollman. The owner of Philadelphia’s legendary Fleisher/Ollman gallery is known for a nationally resonant program that spotlights the self-taught. Relationships are at the heart of Ollman’s business, a value he instilled in Adams, who runs her gallery more like a household than a money-making endeavor. “We always sold to a lot of artists because they were looking at art that wasn’t part of the mainstream for inspiration,” Adams says. “Artists have always been my favorite people to sell to, and over the years, that network has grown to include curators and more traditional collectors, too.” Jasmin Tsou of JTT gallery and gallerist and critic William Pym also consider themselves descendants of Ollman’s curatorial bloodline. The three collaborate with each other as siblings might—staging shows and tackling art fairs together. This is the type of family Adams believes in: the kind where ideas are shared and everyone benefits.

For the gallery’s 10th anniversary, Adams prepared an encyclopedic group show—which also doubled as the first time that all of her artists found themselves in the same room. She had staged an abridged version of this anniversary exhibition at Felix Art Fair a week earlier, but that night, in Adams and Ollman’s glass-fronted space, there was finally enough room to present the community that Adams spent the last decade forging in all

its richness. There was a Joseph E. Yoakum landscape and a Bill Traylor image of a mustachioed man safely distanced from Kinke Kooi’s outstretched octopus arms. A large Jessica Jackson Hutchins sculpture of a jointed ceramic figure slouched over the back of an armchair at the center of the proceedings.

Portland wasn’t in Adams’s initial plan. Born on the East Coast to working-class parents, she remained in Philadelphia after school, ending up at Ollman’s prestigious but unassuming gallery by chance. In her three years there, Adams made herself essential—so much so that when her husband accepted a job in Nike’s Portland offices, Adams joked that her only option was to open Fleisher/Ollman’s West Coast outpost. In a way, she did—affixing her mentor’s name to her own and carving out a space in the city for artists who hunger for a sense of family.

Among those in attendance at the gathering was figurative painter Katherine Bradford, who first met Adams when the gallerist was a student in her class at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Their relationship blossomed when Adams made the move to Portland to open her gallery, and exhibited Bradford’s work for the first time a year later. Another show soon followed, and the two have worked together closely ever since. “It’s really important to me to belong to a group of people that are fun, kind, supportive, and interesting to be with. It’s just the way I wanted to be as an artist, and that’s not what you’re going to find at all galleries,” Bradford says. “When Amy and I are together, we laugh.” Since 2013, Adams has placed Bradford’s work in esteemed institutions including the Brooklyn Museum, the Portland Museum of Art, and the Menil Collection in Houston. The artist gives Adams a lot of credit for her overdue recognition: If a rising tide lifts all boats, then Adams is the ocean. Likewise, her gallery operation isn’t simply a business venture—it’s a lifeline tethering like-minded makers, no matter where they reside, to a cozy idyll on the Pacific coast.

Amy Adams braved a historic blizzard to dig out her snowed-in Portland gallery, where she gathered longtime friends and collaborators to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Adams and Ollman.

Decisions Made and Unmade

IT HAD BEEN NEARLY THREE YEARS. Three years of being his wife, of being celebrated for how “well” we showed up in the world. Three years of being praised for our union, a model of “what was possible” for many people in our small, midwestern, Apostolic Christian community.

We met in our sophomore year of college. He told me within weeks that I was the woman God said would be his wife. I relished the idea of being chosen by a man I found so incredibly kind and beautiful. To this day, I’m not sure if there is anyone I’ve laughed with more.

But as my marital fantasy unfolded, a feeling of uneasiness began to seep in. Even before things became serious, my gut—that unnerving, visceral voice inside me—told me that he was a good man, but that didn’t mean he was a good man for me.

The feeling persisted. I wrestled with it over days and nights, feeling anger towards it, trying to pray it away. I even shared it with him, hoping he would say something that might dissolve the boulder of shame and frustration in the pit of my stomach. He said that he felt certain enough for the both of us. I depended on that. But the feeling stayed with

me on that joyful night after Sunday dinner when he proposed to me in his father’s living room. It stayed as we looked into each other’s eyes and said “I do” at the county courthouse. It stayed with me through family vacations and holiday meals, through sweet evenings together by the fireplace in our new home, through the daydreams we’d share about our future children.

The feeling stayed with me right up to the moment—nearly three years into our marriage—when I looked into his eyes again and let him know I had to leave. The fact that I didn’t feel grounded in, passionate about, or deeply committed to him was a sign that he wasn’t receiving what he needed either. Somewhere in the world was a woman who would feel absolutely certain about him. Staying in the marriage was not only dissolving me, it was hindering him, someone I cared about, from finding the things he deserved.

I was terrified. I found it difficult to reckon with my identity outside of my marriage. I was also reeling from the adrenaline rush of self-confirmation that filled my body the moment I left our shared home for the last time. As I drove down the highway at 80 miles per hour toward the house

where my grandmother would hold me in my grief, I felt an unrecognizable relief me. It was explosive and allconsuming—not so much joy, but a recalibration.

As women, we are taught not to trust ourselves, and to believe any voice besides the one that knows us best—our own. We are destined to become an amalgamation of what others think we should be: a mother, a lawyer, a “lovely daughter,” perhaps even a mistake. This ancient societal framework leaves us with little room to chisel out a self that we define.

It reminds me of an adage that I’ve often been told: women used to “be more loyal back in the day.” I cringe at the suggestion. “Back in the day,” women had even less opportunities to assert agency than we do now. They couldn’t simply decide that a marriage wasn’t a good fit—they had to consider what life as a divorcée would mean for their livelihood. While this is still true for many, resisting these expectations was unimaginable before—I certainly don’t believe all women were merely doting wives.

The truth is, my divorce was what germinated my relationship with my courage. I made the conscious decision that doing the hard thing was worth it for my well-being: for the sake

of kindness, for the sake of possibility, for the sake of self.

It has been 10 years since I left. Ten years since we signed our separation papers in the same courthouse where we got married. We shared a meal together afterwards, a soft nod to our commitment to stay kind through the pain. Over these 10 years, the seed of courage that I planted flourished. I nourished it with acts of self-knowing and trust, like my move to the big city, my five-month solo trip around the world, my dive into a meaningful career, my decision to relish in my choice to be child-free. I founded a nonprofit organization dedicated to mental health, wrote a memoir, and continued to pursue my well-being day by day by day.

I often think about the version of myself that stayed. I consider what she might be doing in that parallel universe of choices unmade: the version of me that bent to the pressure to be what so many others desired but just did not feel right. I imagine a wife still living in Ohio, raising beautiful Black children, and celebrating a decade of being married. I think about what that gut feeling might be doing to her as she shares her life with a good man—even though she knows that he’s not good for her.

Ten years after leaving her marriage, the academic and author ruminates on the life she left behind, and the strength and conviction that allowed her to pursue the one she wanted.

RearView

Debuting this April in Shanghai, “Gucci Cosmos” brings the Italian fashion house’s rich history to life through interactive installations and rare archival artifacts curated by Maria Luisa Frisa and designed by Es Devlin.

HOW DO YOU SHOWCASE MORE than a century’s worth of design without falling prey to nostalgia?

That is the question Maria Luisa Frisa was tasked with answering as the curator of “Gucci Cosmos.”

For the theorist and critic, the expansive archive exhibition—which opens this month in Shanghai before touring the world—offers a deep dive into the Italian fashion house’s past and present—and the unique and inspiring ways that they intertwine.

“It’s an extraordinary opportunity to traverse the universe of Gucci and tell its story through the ever-different lens of the clothes, objects, elements, people, and contexts that have made the house an iconic trailblazer,” says Frisa, who worked with artist Es Devlin to spotlight the house’s gift for reflecting and shaping culture over the last century. From the brand’s beginnings as the namesake luggage atelier of Guccio Gucci to its later years under the leadership of visionaries like Tom Ford and Alessandro Michele, “Gucci Cosmos” highlights iconic designs—like the red velvet suit Gwyneth Paltrow wore to the 1996 MTV Video Music Awards—alongside never-beforeseen artifacts plucked from its archives. The exhibition serves as a sweeping survey of the brand’s legacy ahead of the arrival of its newest creative director, Sabato De Sarno, who will debut his first collection with the Italian house at Milan Fashion Week in September.

Debuting at West Bund Art Center in Shanghai, the immersive exhibition consists of eight rooms that spiral backward and forward through Gucci’s creative eras. Devlin is known for futuristic and abstract productions that she has termed “stage

sculptures’’—like the wooden conical Poem Pavilion that she devised for the U.K. Pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai, which featured a series of massive poems written through visitor interaction and A.I., or Room 2022, a 7,000-square-foot labyrinth at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2017. The artist applied her unique practice of combining geometric arrangements with audio and visual mapping to Gucci’s archive, creating a cyclical layout for the show that, when viewed from above, resembles a series of interlocking cogs—a nod to the industrial heritage of the Shanghai space.

“Gucci and its history over the past century can be mapped through an ability to evolve and expand on the mutability of our own consciousness, as well as its ability to make cognitive shifts,” says Devlin.

The harmony of Frisa and Devlin’s creative partnership is evident in the seamless alignment of the show’s curation and its design—each gallery tells a story through a mixture of objects, light, and sound. Guests enter through eight revolving doors reminiscent of the years that the brand’s founder spent as a porter at London’s Savoy Hotel. A rotating display of suitcases dating from the 1920s to the present takes viewers on a journey across far-flung locales over the decades.

The next room is an homage to the brand’s equestrian heritage—namely its signature horsebit motif, which adorns leather handbags and shoes and is printed on silk scarves. Flora, a classic Gucci pattern that depicts a romantic tangle of flowers and insects, serves as the theme for the exhibition’s third space, where larger-than-life

Progress and Preservation

creatures taken directly from the pattern are suspended in a mirrored alcove above iconic garments, including a silk minidress from 1969 and Michele’s iconic denim jacket embroidered with the house’s slogan, L’Aveugle Par Amour

As “Gucci Cosmos” winds onward, guests are confronted by two nearly 30-foot-tall statues highlighting Gucci’s penchant for genderless dressing. The space spotlights a number of pivotal design moments, including Michele’s Twinsburg Spring/Summer 2023 collection, in which identical twins modeled matching looks. The next room is for handbag lovers, spotlighting notable pieces such as the Diana, the Jackie, and the Bamboo. Nearby, an enormous cabinet of curiosities display punk-inspired Gucci designs, including a spikeencrusted leather bag, deer-shaped beakers, and a Ford-era electric guitar.

The penultimate display highlights more than 30 Gucci looks arranged by color and inspiration, a manifestation of the brand’s enduring dialogue between modernity and heritage. Drawings by local artists are projected onto a mesh background, a display that links the exhibition to its host city. A final moment of awe awaits visitors at the exit: two large-scale reproductions of the 15th-century Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral in Florence, where Gucci was founded. The brand’s scarf patterns light up the walls, creating a striking kaleidoscopic effect that marks the exhibition’s culmination—a fitting ode to the brand’s origins, and its enduring source of inspiration.

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Leaving It All

Brooklin Soumahoro likens his works— complex, calculated, and painstakingly precise—to bursts of lightning, an apt descriptor for an artist who pours every ounce of his energy onto his canvas.

AT FIRST GLANCE, Brooklin Soumahoro’s paintings appear manufactured. “I want it to be so good, so technically flawless,” he says, “because that’s how I work—like a machine.” But this self-description belies the level of warmth and care that he pours into every piece. “I grew up playing sports, and my coaches would always say, ‘You have to leave it all on the field.’ I need that feeling of leaving it all in the studio.”

The 32-year-old artist works in both large- and smallscale formats but isn’t defined by either: “Size is not a parameter for how much power a work holds,” he says. Indeed, a walk through Soumahoro’s Los Angeles studio reveals works of various sizes in progress, including a series of large oil paintings that he has termed “energy fields.” They consist of multi-colored backgrounds overlaid with intricate webs of fine black lines resembling netting or hosiery and glinting with hints of color. He refers to a series of much smaller colored pencil works as “lightning fields”—detailed linear patterns accentuated with bright bolts of color that explode from their surfaces like trompe l’oeils. This month, two of these massive, black lightning fields will travel to Denmark, where they will be exhibited as part of “Black and White,” a group show at Collaborations in Copenhagen.

Soumahoro, who was born in Paris, has lived in London, São Paulo, and New York, and speaks seven languages—a multifaceted perspective that adds layers of complexity to his work and allows him to tap into expansive modes of thinking. “Traveling around the world and taking in all of those experiences—you put them in your jar,” he says. “At some point, you shake all of that up. I’m interested in perception in painting and perception in life.”

The artist is on the brink of an exciting stage of his career, with shows lined up in Venice, Paris, and Brussels this season. This burst of exposure is the product of very intentional growth; Soumahoro is careful when selecting where he shows his work. “I probably say no to more shows than that I say yes to,” he says. “I ask myself, Does this project sit well with me? ” He applied the same level of introspection to develop his process, which is an extension of his meticulous personality. “I need to be able to enjoy it,” says the artist. “If I’m doing something that I don’t like, I’m not going to last very long.”

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Girl on the Grass

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Through meticulous craftsmanship and rigorous studio experimentation, paper, resin, neon, cardboard, and rubber become innovative materials that advance what is possible in contemporary design.

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Joy Lights: Draga and Aurel. Neon and resin

Sarcomere Console: Joseph Cleghorn and Connor Moxam. Cardboard, bronze, resin, rubber

Paper Chair №5 and №14: Vadim Kibardin. Paper, cardboard, rice plaster

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Don’t Sit Down

Misha Khan’s kaleidoscopic Brooklyn studio is bursting with life and color—almost as much as the whimsical furniture he creates inside it. The designer harnesses advanced technology to envision works that surpass even his own imagination, some of which are on view at Friedman Benda this month in LA.

A GOLD-FINISHED, BRONZE TABLETOP rests on a crinkled pedestal that emerges from a glazed blue boulder. A light fixture ringed by pink shearling hangs in the air like a flying saucer. A couch is composed like a jigsaw puzzle of interlocking, brightly colored biomorphic shapes. With each oneof-a-kind piece he designs, Misha Kahn, 33, gives physical form to the universe that exists in his mind.

“I’m trying to build this whole parallel world through these objects,” he says. “We’re so used to imagery that reflects a skewed vision of our world, but we’re not used to seeing objects that do that. A functional object quickly allows you to imagine other things that exist in that vein. You can extrapolate a whole scene from there, with architecture and vehicles.”

To understand Kahn’s métier, it’s important to know that he stumbled into it. After transferring to the Rhode Island School of Design from a small art college in his native Minnesota, he entered the school’s furniture design program, one of the few majors that allowed transfers. It was at RISD that Kahn discovered his love for designing things that could, at least in theory, be used. “It was really hands-on,” he remembers of his object training, “and very friendly toward making idiosyncratic oneoff things.”

A boyish-looking Brooklynite who lives in Greenpoint and works, flanked by six assistants, in a studio in Sunset Park, Kahn dresses colorfully enough to compete with his furniture. In 2021, he joined forces with the fashion designer Dries Van Noten, who gave the artist a show at his Los Angeles store and collaborated with him on a splashy silk bomber jacket and a T-shirt, adorned with shapes suggestive of internal organs and color-stained like a Helen Frankenthaler canvas. The following summer, he staged his most comprehensive exhibition to date at the Villa Stuck, an Art Nouveau house museum in Munich, Germany, where his dreamy oblong pieces cheerily held their own within boldly patterned and marble-laden rooms. As part of the show, the museum furnished Kahn with a robot that the designer programmed to make paintings in the garden. It is now one of two in his studio—the second robot does three-dimensional carving. Utilizing advanced technology to put a twist on traditional forms and practices excites Kahn; he plans to use the Munich robot to produce an enormous painting for an upcoming corporate commission in New York’s Hudson Yards.

Kahn, who is mounting his fifth exhibition with Friedman Benda in nine years this month in Los Angeles, approaches the labor-intensive

craft of furniture design with the spontaneity of a sketch artist, adopting improvisatory techniques and delighting in the aesthetic paradoxes that emerge as a result. Early in his career, he made a mirror frame by sewing together bags that he filled with yellow vinyl resin. “I was looking for loopholes,” the artist explains. “You see the stitches and the wrinkles from the bag, but you get a liquidy, smooth polish from the vinyl.” Seeking “super immediate solutions to casting,” he crumpled tin foil casserole trays and filled them with wax to create a mold for a one-off bronze work, the crinkly surface of which is about as far as you can get from the hyper-smooth hide of a Jeff Koons balloon dog.

When Kahn first discovered virtual reality software, he heralded it as a liberating means of improvisation. “You can fluidly draw things in V.R., manipulating this pretend clay,” he explains. After using the software to model his designs, Kahn would bring them to life, converting the 3-D files into fiberglass or metal sculptures. At first, the process felt as immediate as crushing tin foil, but eventually he realized he was losing more than he gained. “There was a satisfaction to seeing something so synthetic in the real world,” he says. “But now, V.R. is never the only tool that I use to make something. The first time you see it, it’s magic. Then you see it again, and it’s a party trick.”

These days, when Kahn uses V.R., he no longer renders the original forms it generates. Instead, he blends them with components that he crafts with his hands. Last year, Kahn made a large stainless steel table using digital design software before embellishing it the old-fashioned way. “Seeing the table combined with handmade glass pieces that fit into it is so pleasing to me,” he says. “There’s a tension from this very traditional craft meeting this hyper-digital object. It feels like the next step.”

Kahn’s designs are subversive and uncomfortable—physically and intellectually. His chairs don’t invite you to sink into them, and his tables are unlikely to support a dinner party. “On good days, I feel like I’m getting away with it,” he says. “On bad days, I feel there’s a design crowd that views me as making fringe, non-participatory objects.” Kahn takes comfort in his belief that the boundary between such categories as artist and designer is constantly eroding. “Ultimately, I think people want more and more fluidity,” he says. “The silos of culture take a lot of work to maintain. The next thing on the horizon is obvious. No one cares.”

Misha Kahn’s designs are subversive and uncomfortable—physically and intellectually. His chairs don’t invite you to sink into them, and his tables are unlikely to support a dinner party.

HOW, IN A TIME OF ACCELERATED ISOLATION, can we keep our beloved close? For filmmaker Wu Tsang and performance artist Tosh Basco (formerly known as boychild), the answer was revealed when the pair began playing with translation as an artistic medium. As the story goes, Tsang relayed a story to Basco, which she retold through body movement. This fluid process of call and response eventually led to the formation of Moved by the Motion, a collective of interdisciplinary artists with an ethos of opensource collaboration. The group was born in 2013 from a “desire to work with loved ones near and far,” says Basco, and to create work that “feels like a layering or unfolding.” For Tsang, the visual artist Charles Atlas and choreographer Merce Cunningham’s legendary artistic partnership offered an invaluable roadmap for forming a collective across continents and disciplines. “The beginning felt like falling in love creatively,” she says. Since then, Moved by the Motion’s members have focused on “sustaining that feeling.”

Dubbed “a band” by scholar, poet, and Moved by the Motion member Fred Moten, the collective swells with interlocutors as needed, counting Tsang, Basco, Moten, artist and filmmaker Jordan Richman, dancer Josh Johnson, electronic musician and composer Asma Maroof, and cellist Patrick Belaga as its artist-members. Beyond this constellation is a galaxy of collaborators including artist, writer, and filmmaker Sophia Al Maria and visual artist Kandis Williams. In 2022, Tsang and fellow members presented MOBY DICK; or, The Whale, a silent film adaptation of Herman Melville’s 1851 epic novel. Accompanied by a live score composed by Caroline Shaw, Andrew Yee, and Asma Maroof, a crew of sailors dressed in costumes co-designed by Telfar Clemens embarked on a journey across the high seas, transcending race and gender in pursuit of gelatinous,

glowing blubber. The same year, they dove deep into an equally canonical literary work with their play Pinocchio, a fantastical journey that explores the metamorphosis of a log into a “real boy” through poetry, movement, and virtual reality.

Group work can be emotionally taxing—but for ambitious art-makers, it serves a utilitarian function, too. “Collaboration is essential to the process of making large-scale works,” says Maroof. “It’s never about any singular artist. It takes a village to raise a baby, and that’s what we’re doing here.” For Basco, the process also functions as an act of resistance. “There’s a tendency in the Western world to champion genius and individualism,” she says.

Moved by the Motion is definitively interdisciplinary in its process. The collective disperses each new idea among its members, allowing it to constellate across various planes of expression. For Richman, this process is an art form in itself: a polyvocality emerges as “the boat sails in the wind of the subject at hand,” he says. “We are the whales beneath it, watching and admiring each other’s understanding of that perspective.” For Maroof, the experience is akin to watching a sentence be co-authored. Working off a shared prompt—a novel, a beat, a snippet of choreography— allows the artists to enter a state of creative improvisation. “We start off doing a lot of reading. Then WhatsApp groups form along with playlist streams,” Maroof laughs. “Lots of Post-it notes on the wall, some recordings, wiggles, and giggles.”

Moved by the Motion’s commitment to instinct remakes the everyday as a site of possibility and change. “A lot of our creation happens through trying things without overthinking them,” Tsang says. “No matter where we start, we trust that we will end up somewhere entirely different by the end.”

Co-Authoring a Sentence

Moved by the Motion, the multidisciplinary collective led by Wu Tsang and Tosh Basco, explores translation as an art form across continents and disciplines.

“Collaboration is essential to the process of making large-scale works. It’s never about any singular artist.”

—Asma Maroof

What Is To Be Done?

FOR 20 YEARS, CHTO DELAT (“What is to be done?”) has been a leading voice in leftist activism in their home country of Russia, making work about art’s revolutionary potential to galvanize the public and activate political change amid persistent threats to freedom of expression. The collective was founded in 2003 by a working group of artists, writers, philosophers, and organizers from St. Petersburg and Moscow, and its work has been exhibited at institutions across the world, including the New Museum, the Centre Pompidou, and the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City. Chto Delat’s members— choreographer Nina Gasteva, artist and filmmaker Tsaplya Olga Egorova, writer and musician Nikolay Oleynikov, and artist and activist Dmitry Vilensky—produce video works, radio programs, publications, and public performance actions that center democracy, workers’ rights, and antifascism with the intention of suturing together art, activism, and theory. While the organization’s name references a 1902 political text by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, it was primarily inspired by Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel of the same name, which Vilensky cites as a guide “for how to construct emancipatory collectives and make them sustainable within a hostile society.”

Stalled revolution is a recurring theme for the group—Chto Delat draws on Situationist theory to emphasize the ongoing possibility of self-actualization amid Russia’s tumultuous political shifts. In Chto Delat’s vision, art cannot be divorced from history or politics— rather, it is a tool to rectify narratives of oppression and give a voice to the marginalized. Its art-actions combine realist, surrealist, and absurdist elements with public spaces—city streets, university buildings—insisting that art’s role in society should not be confined to the gatekept halls of the museum. Its 2022 film installation, Canary Archives, expands on the metaphor of a canary in the coal mine (a warning sign to alert miners of danger) to underscore its members’ resistance to the military invasion of Ukraine. Among its nods to the Russian avantgarde, a modernist art movement that flourished after the Russian Revolutions of 1917, the collective publishes an English-Russian newspaper on issues central to Russian activist culture. The independent press uses manifestos, leaflets, and communiqués as tactics of democratic communication in an otherwise choked media environment. In 2013, Chto Delat opened the School of Engaged Art in St. Petersburg, an incubator that invites newcomers to train

in its philosophy through seminars and group work. The school became a flashpoint for Chto Delat in 2022, when accusations began to swirl that the collective was, in Vilensky’s words, “a training ground for young activists engaged in subversive anti-state activities.” Soon after, police searched the home he shared with Egorova, and confiscated computers, hard drives, and literature in anticipation of a criminal trial. Vilensky, Egorova, and Gasteva sought asylum in Germany, and now reside in Berlin.

For Vilensky, a key member of Chto Delat, group work is a way to resist “individualistic and selfish ideas of artistic genius.” Operating with a Creative Commons license, which allows for the free distribution and use of the group’s work, is a vital tenet of Chto Delat’s commitment to freely transmitting and sharing its message.

“We advocate strongly for free access to our artistic production,” Egorova asserts.

Making socially engaged art requires Chto Delat to function as a “democracy of initiatives.” Any three members can act under the collective’s name so long as the project is presented to the wider group first.

“Everything happens through collective discussion and is based on trust,” Gasteva says. Together, members edit and revise their ideas, accepting disagreement as a part of the process. “Of course, we have conflicts,” says Vilensky, “and whoever has the most passion is the one that wins.”

Through war and censorship, Chto Delat—the leftist, Russian-born collective of artists, writers, and philosophers—demands a revolution for freedom of expression.

SEAN KELLY launched his New York gallery out of his SoHo home in 1991, working privately before opening a public space four years later. His daughter, LAUREN KELLY, and son, THOMAS KELLY, grew up surrounded by the work of art world titans who evolved into an extended family for the young siblings. Now, they are partners in their father’s business—which today represents artists such as Kehinde Wiley, Dawoud Bey, and Candida Höfer.

FAMILY HAS BEEN AT THE HEART of Sean Kelly Gallery ever since the dealer opened his namesake business in the family’s SoHo home more than 30 years ago. Since then, Sean Kelly’s artists, collectors, and staff have watched Sean’s children, Lauren and Thomas Kelly, grow up—and eventually join the business. Sean claims to have used reverse psychology to get them involved. “I guess it worked,” says Lauren. “I knew exactly what he was doing,” adds Thomas.

When Sean opened his gallery, he and his wife, Mary, had just moved from England with their small children. The art world became a support system for the new arrivals, with a community of dealers, curators, and artists—whom Sean knew from his career curating British museum shows for the likes of Richard Deacon and Antony Gormley—sharing tips on raising a family in their new city. “To us, it was just life,” remembers Lauren. “There were artists everywhere and artwork all over the walls, but as kids, we didn’t know anything else. The art world was both magical and mundane. When we grew older, we became aware that seeing Auntie Marina Abramović whipping herself wasn’t a part of normal life for our high school friends.”

According to Lauren, her professional entrée into the industry felt natural. She joined her father’s gallery after college in 2006, working in various capacities before stepping into her current role as partner. Thomas joined in 2012, leaving behind a career in real estate to help the gallery open its current West Chelsea location in New York. “His ability to oversee large projects and logistics proved crucial,” Sean says of his son. Like his sister, Thomas is now a partner in the family business.

While working as a family may have felt organic, it hasn’t always been easy. “We have all the normal problems one might expect with a parentchild relationship,” says Sean. “Bringing those into a business requires patience and goodwill; we’ve spent so many years working together that we’ve reached an equilibrium. It was well worth it because it brings me great joy to spend so much time with my family. I get to see them grow and evolve professionally and personally. I get to spend time with my grandchildren. I’m very fortunate for this, and I don’t take it for granted.”

His children and partners echo the joy that comes from working together. “He is the most loving and obsessed grandfather I’ve ever met,” says Lauren. She and her brother add that their father’s mentorship has

been crucial on both professional and personal levels.

This tight knit family dynamic also benefits the gallery itself: In an industry notorious for high turnover, Sean Kelly is an outlier. Several staff members have been with the gallery for decades. “The artists and collectors we work with appreciate the continuity as well. They see we are committed to growth,” says Sean. Indeed, the family’s investment in the future offers a sense of security and sustainability to artists searching for a dealer who can be trusted to shepherd their careers. “Being a family impacts the business at every level,” says Lauren. “The artists saw us grow up into, hopefully, mature adults. They know our mother, Mary, who is deeply involved in the gallery, especially on a social level. They’ve seen us start our own families as well.”

Now, these close bonds have led the gallery to expand to the West Coast. Its new Los Angeles outpost, a project that Thomas led, marries the aesthetic of Sean Kelly’s New York location—glass offices with a sleek wood front desk—with breezy California design. The family hired Toshiko Mori, the architect who designed the gallery’s New York location. “We’ve known Toshiko for over 30 years, and trusted her to convey the visual language of Sean Kelly with an LA twist,” says Thomas. Mori collaborated with Hye-Young Chung Architecture to renovate a former yoga studio into the new gallery space. “The decision to open in LA was purely artist-driven. It was to expand our roster and give current artists a chance to create work for a West Coast audience. It’s been incredible to see how the LA community has embraced us, from museum professionals, to other dealers, to collectors,” says Thomas, who moved his own family to the West Coast for the project. “This isn’t a small thing for any of us. My sister gives me a hard time because we are very close, and I moved 3,000 miles away.” This sacrifice is not lost on Lauren. “I do curse him a little,” she jokes. “It’s hard not being in the same city, but it does give me a great excuse to visit.”

The LA expansion is a sign of the gallery’s commitment to the West Coast metropolis—and to the future of the art world during a time of great change. “I’ve been going to LA for decades,” says Sean. “I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been told that LA is the next big thing in art. I always had faith that it would mature into what it’s become, and I’m proud our family is a part of that.”

“As kids, we didn’t know anything else. The art world was both magical and mundane. When we grew older, we became aware that seeing Auntie Marina Abramović whipping herself wasn’t a part of normal life for our high school friends.”

— Lauren Kelly

When WENDY OLSOFF and PENNY PILKINGTON founded PPOW in early 1980s New York, they created a space for marginalized and underrepresented artists to speak out about racism, sexism, homophobia, political corruption, and other prevailing issues of the time. Olsoff’s daughter, EDEN DEERING, became part of the team in 2018, joining the ranks of women she grew up admiring. Now, she is spearheading curatorially-driven programs outside of the new release cycle and welcoming the gallery into its fourth decade.

“ONE OF THE GREAT THINGS ABOUT BEING A CHILD in the art world is that adults really listen to what you have to say and appreciate your point of view,” says Eden Deering. “Artists see children as peers and treat them with a tremendous amount of respect.” As the daughter of PPOW Co-Founder Wendy Olsoff, Deering counts some of the most talented figures in contemporary art as her friends, including PPOW artists Betty Tompkins, Robin F. Williams, and Portia Munson. Now, as the gallery’s director, Deering works alongside her mother and Penny Pilkington, the fierce duo who founded the organization (the name comes from their initials) in the burgeoning East Village art scene in 1983, establishing a welcoming community that continues to foster experimentation and creativity.

“We were only 26 when we started the gallery, but we knew intuitively that we were creating a path for underrepresented artists,” says Olsoff. Many creatives were flocking to the neighborhood—a notorious hotbed for punk, hip-hop, and graffiti art—at the time, opting for counterculture community over the established art scene of uptown Manhattan. “It was important for us to engage with the East Village and make our exhibitions inclusive,” she adds. “When the community gave us the thumbs up, we knew we had a successful show, even if it wasn’t recognized by the greater art world. In hindsight, working in a vacuum for decades gave us the freedom to construct our own path, showing women, people of color, and LGBTQ artists.” Pilkington and Olsoff instantly set themselves apart from their commercial peers, exhibiting political art and supporting marginalized artists when many would not. They moved to SoHo in 1988, then Chelsea in 2002, and have been in TriBeCa since 2021. After working together for four decades, the two have become like sisters. “That makes Eden one of my favorite nieces!” Pilkington says.

When Deering was born in 1991, the gallery was firmly established with a roster of groundbreaking artists. “I remember spending a lot of time with them,” Deering says, “especially Carrie Mae Weems, who once shot film footage of me and my father dancing; Terry Adkins, whose studio I visited during his artist residency at Dartmouth College; Janet Henry, who was also

my elementary school art teacher; and Bo Bartlett, who I worked with as a model for years.”

Olsoff never expected her daughter to work in the commercial space but always knew she’d end up in the arts. “As a child, Eden was extremely deep, original, and creative, expressing herself in dance and writing,” Olsoff explains. “Her insights were always emotional and compassionate. She wept while watching [Akira] Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai at age 10. I am not making this up!”

Deering did eventually enter the art world, interning at PPOW as a college student before working at Christie’s and then Gladstone Gallery. She also helped launch Duplex with friend Sydney Fishman to support emerging artists and provide a platform to experiment freely, a venture Deering is still involved with today. In 2018, she decided to formally join PPOW. “It became clear to me that I wanted to support and be part of what PPOW was doing. I genuinely felt connected to their program, politics, and important legacy,” Deering says. “Wendy and Penny are strong, independent, empathetic, and ethical people. I love supporting what they have built and continue to build upon.”

Since joining PPOW, Deering has helped usher in a new chapter, spearheading the program of its second TriBeCa location, which opened next door 18 months after the gallery first entered the neighborhood. “With our main gallery committed to nine shows a year, we realized we needed more space,” Pilkington explains. “Eden’s ability to curate great exhibitions and her interest in bringing on new artists gave us the confidence to double in size. It’s wonderful to see Eden build on PPOW’s history and help navigate our path into the 21st century.”

Indeed, both of PPOW’s founders express how grateful they are to have Deering as a part of the gallery’s future, crediting her with their continued growth. Deering, for her part, gives the credit back to her predecessors. “Penny and Wendy are never afraid of change and are always open to new ideas,” she says. “That’s what made it possible for us to celebrate the gallery’s 40th anniversary this year.”

MITCHELL-INNES AND DAVID NASH were uniquely positioned to start a family business. As former heads of the worldwide Contemporary and Impressionist & Modern Art divisions of Sotheby’s, the pair has extensive experience working with blue chip artists. When they transitioned into the realm of private dealing, their years working in the secondary market proved crucial to understanding how best to nurture artists’ careers.

It was Mitchell-Innes that left the auction house first in 1994 and began to work with the conservatorship of Willem de Kooning, who had a body of work and no dealer. “I had two young children, Josephine and Isobel, and the job at Sotheby’s required a tremendous amount of travel. I felt it was best to start my own business,” she recalls. David followed suit two years later, and the pair started their gallery that August. “It was a big risk for us,” he says. “The business was either going to be a huge catastrophe or a great success. We’re lucky and grateful it was the latter. I was very happy to have Lucy lead me through the early years of learning how to be a private dealer.” After de Kooning died in 1997, Mitchell-Innes & Nash was pivotal in valuing his work, and the estate of Roy Lichtenstein soon followed. The gallery spent the next several years working exclusively with artist estates. “We created something of a cottage industry,” continues David. “We were particularly qualified for the processes involved, which are complicated and technical, and we had a lot of experience establishing steady markets with longevity in mind.”

The gallery’s strength with estates firmly established Mitchell-Innes and Nash as a leading name in the secondary art market. As their business grew, the two founders increasingly brought their business—and their interest in other cultures, including Egyptian and preColumbian—home with them. “My parents have always loved collecting from different cultures and periods,” says Josephine (“Josie”) Nash. “Art is what I’ve always known As a child, it was hard to under-stand that was an exceptional thing. Growing up, my sister and I knew that the gallery was a place of business, but we definitely wreaked a fair amount of havoc there.”

In the early 2000s, Mitchell-Innes & Nash started working with living artists, a program that Josephine has become pivotal in growing since she joined the gallery in 2011. She has worked to expand the program and added younger and emerging artists to the roster, including Yirui Jia, Marcus Leslie Singleton, and Tiona Nekkia McClodden. Josephine, who began as a gallery assistant before eventually becoming a partner and senior director, previously held jobs in and outside of the art industry—including a stint traveling around the world to meet with politicians and public figures as the assistant to a prominent

journalist. “Art and the family business have been at the dinner table my entire life, so it made sense to try it out,” she explains. “I never left.”

Collaborating with her parents professionally has been rewarding for Josephine, a sentiment that her parents share, too. “I think everyone understands how comforting it is to spend time with people who have common interests,” MitchellInnes says. “I am excited to get on my hands and knees in a remote garage to discover a work of art firsthand and subsequently sell it to a major New York institution. That could seem odd to some people, so it’s nice that my family understands.”

Josephine’s parents may have started the business, but she has helped grow the gallery’s contemporary vision. “We couldn’t be happier that she enjoys what we created,” Mitchell-Innes says. “It’s also been rewarding to see how she’s grown. It’s hard to explain what it takes for a business to evolve and succeed. Josie just gets it. I am proud that we have increasingly come to rely on her to lead us.”

Since 1996, husband-and-wife team DAVID NASH and LUCY MITCHELL-INNES have shaped their gallery program into one of the most respected in the city. With the help of their elder daughter, JOSEPHINE NASH, the pair are expanding their contemporary program as they look toward the future.

Francesco and Chiara Clemente

Create Parallel Portraits

Influenced by the Neo-Expressionist work and adventurous spirit of her father, Chiara found her own winding path into the art world. Now, the documentary filmmaker has embraced the role of portraiture— a format she inherited from Francesco— in her own creative practice.

FOR PAINTER FRANCESCO CLEMENTE and his daughter, documentary filmmaker Chiara Clemente, intimate portraits have always been a central part of art-making. But how has the pair’s relationship influenced their identities and individual practices? Francesco’s nearly surrealist watercolors and oils present strange characters and dream-like scenes laden with rich symbolism. He is also known for his stylized portraits of fellow artists, a theme that is the central focus of Chiara’s practice. Her films, which she likewise refers to as “portraits,” are poetic narratives grounded in an equally strong aesthetic sensibility. The father and daughter’s close bond has resulted in a shared ethos—a kindred approach to looking at people and the worlds that they inhabit.

A native Italian, Francesco spent his 20s traveling extensively in East Asia before settling in New York in the early 1980s, where he raised four children. He rose to prominence in that decade as a member of Transavanguardia, a movement defined by the rejection of Conceptualism in favor of a return to Figurative art and Symbolism, blending a Neo-Expressionist style with the in fl uence of Indian religious and folk traditions.

As a result of her father’s work, art has been the main character in Chiara’s life story. The filmmaker, Francesco’s eldest child, was 5 years old when the family moved from Rome to New York, where her father set up his painting studio in their downtown loft on Broadway. “We grew up in the middle of everything,” Chiara says of her Greenwich Village upbringing, “which was a great inspiration for my own work.”

Dinners at the Clemente house involved a rotating cast of artists and intellectuals from Francesco’s close-knit community. Rather than being sent to bed, Chiara recalls, she and her siblings were invited to participate in the festivities—and these nightly salons proved as influential for her as they did for her father. It’s no surprise, then, that Chiara’s films often revolve around the stories of fellow artists: In her short film series, Beginnings, creative visionaries from Christian Louboutin to Yoko Ono reflect on their early years, and her 2008 feature film, Our City Dreams, offers portraits of fi ve luminaries living

and working in New York, including Marina Abramović and Kiki Smith.

When filming her subjects, Chiara often asks about their early years. “There’s a very natural reaction to the experiences from your youth that influences who you become,” she says.

“When Chiara was a child, a friend of mine used to call her the ‘Daughter of the War,’” Francesco laughs, recalling Chiara’s unorthodox upbringing. “She was next to a funeral pyre in Varanasi, [India], when she was still in her mother’s womb. She climbed the Himalayas on the back of a donkey when she was 8 months old. When we hired a babysitter for Chiara in New York, the woman who came saw our dilapidated loft, devoid of any furniture, and said, ‘Oh, okay! I’ve been camping before!’”

This nomadic sensibility, inherited from her father, proved useful in Chiara’s young adulthood. Much of her early artistic development was defined by a need to cut her own path, first by gravitating toward filmmaking as a teenager, then by traveling extensively—a journey that mirrors her father’s. After graduating from high school, she left Manhattan to study filmmaking at Los Angeles’s ArtCenter College of Design before returning to her birth country, where she landed her first documentary job interviewing the American Pop artist Jim Dine for the Roman television channel RaiSat Art. “I had to travel a great distance in order to find connection and inspiration,” says Chiara.

Francesco sees parallels between the experience of parenting and his own artistic practice. “Waiting is the key,” he says, “waiting for a painting to appear, for a feeling to unfold and surprise, to learn the many truths that make a person. It has been said that children are born with a loaf of bread in their hands. I take this to mean that each child has their own particular destiny, their own inclinations—all we need to do is let them be what they become.”

The concept of waiting for a subject to reveal themselves is one that both Clementes bring to bear on their portrait work. For Francesco, whose interests often revolve around spiritual and symbolic systems, it’s a grounding style that he has returned to throughout his career and into the present. Francesco’s portraits might also be

seen as an atlas of his personal influences and peers, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Fran Lebowitz, and Toni Morrison. The paintings in this ongoing series boast a stylized approach, playing up defining features in the sitter’s face or demeanor to tease out their inner world. “You see something intimate about the person,” says Chiara of her father’s portraits. “That’s something I do with my work, too: I try to really get into the character I’m portraying, not just their external story.”

While this constellation of characters has shaped the work of both father and daughter, it is New York—the metropolis that welcomed the pair during pivotal moments in their respective lives—that most captivates their imaginations. “New York has the singular quality of being a large city that feels small,” Francesco muses. “The skyline of New York can be drawn from memory, even by a child. It’s a city where you can meet your heroes in the street.”

Today, Chiara resides with her own family in Lower Manhattan—near her childhood loft, where her father still produces much of his work. Chiara chose not to give her daughters, 8 and 4 years old, the Clemente name, hoping that this might afford them a chance to forge their own identities in or out of the arts. But the connection might run too deep to resist: her eldest daughter’s initials spell “art” (a coincidence that her mother swears was accidental), and she often spends Sunday afternoons drawing in her grandfather’s studio.

Chiara and Francesco have collaborated, too. Her 2005 short film, Three Worlds, was about her father. This spring, Francesco is exhibiting his paintings in India for the first time as part of “Sangam/Confluence,” a group show at the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre in Mumbai. The show will also feature a series of newly-commissioned video portraits by Chiara of several of the exhibition’s participating artists (including her father). But while the themes of both Clementes’s oeuvres overlap significantly, it is their philosophy about humanity that binds their work together. Whether through painting or film, Francesco and Chiara reveal people in their complex entirety, making each subject feel familiar and, ultimately, like family.

“It has been said that children are born with a loaf of bread in their hands. I take this to mean that each child has their own particular destiny, their own inclinations —all we need to do is let them be what they be come.”

— Francesco Clemente

Peter and Sally Saul Get Along Quite Well

The rebellious painter and subversive sculptor share a renovated studio in their upstate New York compound, where each serves as the other’s muse and champion.

“I’VE HAD TWO LUCKY MOMENTS,” says painter Peter Saul. “The first one was way back in the 1950s, when I met an art dealer who would support me for the next 33 years. The next was in 1973, when I met Sally.” As art world couples go, the Sauls have to be one of the most enduring. Sally, an accomplished sculptor, was born in Albany, New York; Peter grew up in San Francisco. After some youthful meanders, they both migrated to the Bay Area, where they were introduced by mutual friends. That was 50 years ago.

Peter had been painting for a couple of decades already, developing a twisted, rubbery style in which his figures—caricatures pulled from American nightmares, from politicians to activists to soldiers—contort until they’re nearly abstract. He says his use of DayGlo paint has less to do with psychedelia than with the desire to snap viewers’ attention to certain parts of a composition. These trippy qualities don’t come from drugs—at least not directly—but from comics. “If you’ve got a gun on one side of the canvas and a person who’s pressing the trigger on the other side, their arm just has to reach out,” he says. If the canvas is “interesting,” to a “normal person,” then it goes out the door. Peter’s career trajectory matches his irrepressible style. “I didn’t think of myself as an artist, really,” he admits. “I thought of myself as a rebel against the idea of a normal workday. I wanted to stay home with a beautiful woman and do anything I wanted.” He’s pretty much succeeded.

Sally, meanwhile, earned an MA in American Literature at San Francisco State University. “When I met Peter,” she remembers, “I started looking more thoroughly at the art that was around me. At that time, the West Coast was beginning to take ceramics seriously, whereas on the East Coast, it was still considered craft. I started gradually working with clay.”

The couple spent their first years together in Port Costa on the Carquinez Strait, northeast of San Francisco. They lived in a warehouse loft

with plenty of space to work. Gradually, the two decided to move closer to New York and the real art action. A friend linked them up with a dealer who, for insurance purposes, needed someone to watch her vacation house upstate in Chappaqua 11 months out of the year. “Our daughter was born there,” says Sally, “and Peter’s younger son came to live with us. And then in 1981 we moved to Austin.”

Peter was offered a position at the University of Texas at Austin, where he taught for nearly two decades. The city proved a good place to raise a family, says Sally; their daughter could take lessons in swimming and Suzuki violin. Sally, too, had a breakthrough. She took ceramics classes, first at a local studio, then at the university. She remembers using the gas kilns out on the patio. “It was a ritual. You learn how to brick up the front of the kiln and how to gradually turn it up.” During the winter, Sally says Austin resembled ancient Egypt. During the summer, it was more like the Gobi Desert—and crawling with roaches. They started spending summers in the Northeast.

In the year 2000, they settled in Germantown, New York, 90 miles north of Manhattan. The property already had a separate studio building, which they renovated for the ages, with sage green cladding to match the surrounding woods. Clay is heavy, so Sally gets the ground floor; Peter works upstairs. “We get along quite well in the studio,” says Sally. “Maybe better than we do in the house.” In fact, the pair seem to have an unusually supportive relationship—attentive to the other’s work without imposing—a pas de deux that few ambitious artist couples seem to manage.

While their work at first glance couldn’t seem more different, closer inspection proves the opposite. Sympathetic to one another, the pair’s wall works and sculptures are adept at drawing out narrative through strong use of color; both bear traces of San Francisco Funk and Modernist withdrawals.

“I think we’re influenced indirectly [by one another],” says Sally. “Sometimes you don’t realize it until later, and then you see how you picked up an idea subconsciously from the other person.” This doesn’t bother them at all. They also agree politically—an important ingredient of domestic harmony, since Peter is known for his invectives against dogmatic figures and national crucibles, from Saigon to Abu Ghraib, Richard Nixon to Donald Trump. (In at least one case, he turned his brush against art critics.) But the artist is quick to note that his personal views are more “relaxed” than his visually antagonistic paintings suggest. Sally, more circumspect, also folds politics into her work, such as a recent bust of Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. dressed like the Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards.

Germantown is their redoubt from the blood and guts and flag-waving of the contemporary moment. One of Peter’s most flattering, even beautiful portraits is of Sally, posing in Montmartre, Paris, her hair blowing back and her lips parted. Sally has returned the favor with at least one wholesome ceramic bust of Peter. And there’s some tender subtext wherever pairs of figures appear in her sculptures: Traveling, 1998, for example, consists of a Sasquatch couple covered in textured brown hair; the male has blue eyes, the female brown—just like them.

“I thought of myself as a rebel against the idea of a normal workday. I wanted to stay home with a beautiful woman and do anything I wanted.”

— Peter Saul

Pierre Paulin’s Close Ones Continue His Legacy

A decade and a half since Pierre Paulin’s passing, his wife, son, and daughter-inlaw are working to restore the French furniture visionary’s place in design history by celebrating his lesser-known creations—and producing some of his unrealized works for the very first time.

the unknown corners of his creativity. While the aptly named Paulin Paulin Paulin is a family business, two older half-siblings from Pierre’s first marriage—Dominique and Fabrice Paulin, a painter and furniture designer, respectively—are not involved, according to Benjamin. The trio’s company spotlights their patriarch’s lesser-known works, producing many of them for the first time as limited-edition collectibles.

The birth of Benjamin and Lemoine’s first daughter, Irène, in 2013, was the “earthquake” that compelled the couple to dedicate themselves fully to the family firm. Benjamin put his career as a musician on hold, and Lemoine dropped her nascent knitwear design business. “I was a little depressed by the music industry,” says Benjamin. “And I was working every weekend for hours and hours,” his wife adds.

THE LATE FRENCH FURNITURE DESIGNER PIERRE PAULIN rose to fame in the 1960s and ‘70s with his candy-colored, fabric-stretched, exuberant, and flexible places to sit. He furnished several private presidential apartments at the Élysée Palace, and created curved, tubular banquettes for the Grande Galerie of the Louvre. In the ‘60s, New York’s Museum of Modern Art added three of his animated chairs—F300, Tongue, and Ribbon—to its permanent collection.

Over the years, Paulin moved in and out of the spotlight. The carefree whimsy of his Mushroom, Oyster, Tongue, and Tulip chairs fell out of favor. Along the way, he founded a company with his wife, Maïa WodzislawskaPaulin, designing mass-produced household items—razors, travel irons, toilet bowls, plumbing fixtures, and plastic outdoor furniture—under licensing agreements without his name. When the company was sold in the early 1990s, Pierre was forced to retire. Adrift in Paris, he retreated to a house he built high in the Cévennes mountains in the South of France.

“At first, he was very angry, then he channeled his energy to redefine the landscape surrounding our house in the Cévennes,” says Maïa. “Pierre didn’t belong to any group or community. He was a loner. He used to say that his voice didn’t matter; his objects did,” she recalls. “It was a very bad shock, a very hard period…There was a lot of bitterness in him,” adds Pierre’s son, Benjamin Paulin. Then in 2009, the designer died of cancer at the age of 81, leaving plans for numerous unrealized creations behind.

For the past decade, Maïa, who is 80, has worked with Benjamin, 44, and his wife, Alice Lemoine, 37, to revive the designer’s legacy and revel in

Today, the couple runs the operation. They have refined their promotional message so masterfully that they rattle off facts and figures at high-speed and finish each other’s sentences. Maïa may seem to be overshadowed, but her role is integral. She was Pierre’s right hand during his life, founding Paulin Paulin Paulin in the months before his passing to preserve his name and legacy. (Incidentally, Lemoine’s mother was once his colorist.) The Paris home that Benjamin and Lemoine moved into last year with their three daughters near Bastille serves as a small museum, showroom, and headquarters for the firm. Originally an industrial bakery, the structure was renovated by the famed French architects Jean-Michel Wilmotte and Pierre-Louis Faloci. Its floor-to-ceiling glass walls frame Paulin’s soft sofas and chairs, offering views of a garden adorned with his white outdoor furniture. An elevator connects the ultra-modern, white building’s four levels. From the street, the structure appears nondescript, giving away none of the secrets of its interior.

A single-pedestal version of Pierre’s 1981 canary-colored Cathedral table stands deep in the basement. The designer regarded it as one of his masterpieces, although it was never produced as more than a prototype during his lifetime. The ceiling-mounted spotlights shine through the aluminum-and-glass surface, creating a wash of angled shadows on the floor. It is said to be worth more than $75,000, but the family considers it gauche to talk about money. “We prefer not to give prices,” says Benjamin. “But how are people going to know?” I ask. “They can call me,” he laughs.

“For us, it remains a passion; we’re not particularly interested in becoming an industry,” Maïa explains. “We’d like people to include our pieces in their art collections.” The family’s dream is to build a museum dedicated to nearly 400 of Pierre’s works on the grounds of the Cévennes home where Maïa still lives. Benjamin has been buying vintage pieces made by his father with this exhibition in mind.

For Maïa, the countryside home is already a museum of sorts. Her husband’s spirit dwells in the rooms he built and the designs that furnish them. He retreated there dejected, at a low point in his career. But high in the mountains, he channeled his frustration into a new kind of creativity— clearing away dead trees, restoring stone walls, and carving new roads— starting a new chapter late in life that enabled his legacy to persist today. “Pierre spent all his energy on creating this place,” Maïa reflects. And indeed, she says, “It is an extraordinary space between heaven and earth.”

ONE RADIANT DECEMBER DAY late last year, the Senegalese singer Obree Daman led a procession of École des Sables dancers around the restored tile floors of the Ancien Palais de Justice in Dakar, Senegal. “Salam Alaikum Africa,” he belted as the troop crisscrossed through clusters of starry-eyed fashion folk who had come to Senegal from across the globe. “Peace be to Africa.” His ensemble moved in agreement, winding their way through the historic space.

The performance was not for the Dakar Biennale, Africa’s largest art gathering—which originally revived the fallen Brutalist building after decades of disrepair—but rather for Chanel’s Métiers d’art 2022/23 runway show, the first European fashion event of its kind in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The event was a precarious undertaking for fashion, in light of Senegal’s socio-political past, and the quintessentially French maison’s limited ties to the country. Fortunately its headlining collection, perhaps Chanel’s most important of the year, does not disappoint.

Karl Lagerfeld began Métiers d’art (“art professions”), Chanel’s annual line that celebrates the brand’s artisanal workshops and craft specialists, in 2002. Since then, the event has become a highly anticipated moment on the fashion calendar, debuting dreamy creations that live between the worlds of haute couture and readyto-wear. As the name suggests, these collections grant Chanel’s most esteemed artisans the opportunity to flaunt their skills. But unlike most experimental undertakings, the hand-crafted garments and accessories are wearable, too.

Under its late artistic director, the house presented its Métiers d’art collection everywhere from Salzburg, Austria, to Dallas, Texas. When Virginie Viard, Lagerfeld’s long-time right hand, took the reins after his passing, she collaborated with filmmaker Sofia Coppola to rebuild Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel’s original Rue Cambon salon for the first Métiers d’art of her own. That was around the time that she conceived the idea for her latest collection. “We’ve been thinking about it for three years,” explains the designer. “I wanted it to happen gently, over several days of deep, respectful dialoguing.”

At the former palace in Dakar, a site of both French colonial rule and the country’s independent governance, Viard inaugurated a three-day cultural festival—which featured local creatives like Daman across the realms of music, film, and art— anchored by the presentation of her Métiers d’art 2022/23 collection. The concept behind the body of work was to layer meaningful Senegalese elements with the house’s own alluring mainstays. To round it out, the designer found an “explosion of energy” in what she terms the “pop-soul-funkdisco-punk” motifs of the ‘70s. “Real dialogues,” Viard says of these varied bodies of inspiration, which were “nourished over the long-term.”

Entering boutiques this June, Viard’s Métiers d’art 2022/23 collection blends Chanel’s unique repertoire with the spirit of Dakar. A plethora of motifs throughout the 62 looks call to mind not only the romantic symbols from Chanel’s archive, but also the fauna seen that day in December at the Palais de Justice. Feminine tweed ensembles made by Maison Lesage, Paris’s oldest embroidery atelier, and retro flared trousers are decorated with ornate camellias crafted by resident feather and flower maker, Lemarié. Vibrant embroidery crafted by specialist Atelier Montex adorns the line in the vivid hues of the Senegalese landscape, and layers of beads and pearls finished by house goldsmith Goossens recall traditions of African beadwork and the glamor of Chanel’s eponym. “It is this human and warm dimension that motivates my work and that I try to re-transcribe. I put all my soul into it,” Viard says of the collection’s inception. “These marvelous encounters from which artistic adventures like this one are born—that’s what drives me.”

Each Métiers d’art occasion is memorialized in new ways. December’s runway show concluded with a musical performance by South African DJ and producer Mandisa Radebe, and over the course of the following three days, other Dakarbased talent collaborated with Chanel on programming. Though the fashion house has not yet revealed the location for the next Métiers d’art debut, Chanel’s forthcoming destination show, Cruise 2023/24 Ready-to-Wear, will take place this May in Los Angeles, where the house has just opened a new Beverly Hills boutique.

Chanel’s Métiers d’art might be the fashion house’s most important annual release. For this year’s collection, which arrives in boutiques this June, Artistic Director Virginie Viard unveils a beautiful, historic reckoning between French fashion and West African tradition, all made by hand.

Salam Alaikum Africa

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Though his explicit scenes in oil might seem jarring, Doron Langberg doesn’t endeavor to shock. Rather, his fleshy, figurative paintings resonate powerful emotion, enthralling us with the beauty and sensuality of queer passion.

FOR HIS RECENT SOLO PRESENTATION with Victoria Miro Gallery at Frieze Los Angeles, Doron Langberg, 37, exhibited a suite of oil paintings of flowers in the mountains of Israel, where he grew up; of friends and lovers napping in the dunes of Fire Island, New York, the iconic queer and artistic holiday destination where he spent last summer; and of passionate sex.

His practice involves a rhythmic back-andforth with the outdoors: many of Langberg’s paintings begin as smaller works made en plein air and later evolve into the grand, vibrant works he’s known for creating. A little, symphonic study of a sunflower bush in a ditch outside his family home—one of the only plants to survive the rainless Israeli summer that year—was painted outdoors on a French easel. Afterward, he made a much larger version in his studio— Sunflowers, 2022. The arid tangle is rendered in scraggly, dry brushstrokes, and the thick paint is sanded out in places, leaving patches of pale air and giving the grass a ghostly surface quality.

On Fire Island, Langberg painted wild hibiscus bushes, the long grass in the infamous Meat Rack cruising woods, and intimate close-up portraits of his friends on the beach—outdoors on an easel once again, but this time with thick, vibrant strokes of rich crimsons, magentas, fuchsias, and muddy browns. Back in the studio, beginning on the floor, he coated another canvas with a thin film of turpentine from a spray bottle and swept bold, gestural brushstrokes with big calligraphy brushes and diluted oil paint over it, creating an Abstract Expressionist backdrop for his sultry, dancing Hibiscus, 2022. After the turpentine had evaporated, he moved it onto the wall and continued to apply heavy, confident bursts of color. Another favorite from his Frieze booth, Lovers at Night, 2023, shows two men sleeping. A murky, moody green scraped across the canvas by squeegee is foregrounded by fragmented bodies, their soft, liquid, dreaming flesh melting into messy abstraction. And lastly,

there’s Lovers 1, 2022: a technicolor cacophony of thick, gestural smears, splatters, and drips.

We speak in Upper Manhattan, during golden hour. Gorgeous amber light reflects in the skyscrapers downriver. Langberg wears a vest; he has a sweet, boyish face and tousled hair. His apartment is incredibly hot (I say this as someone who keeps a sweltering apartment myself). Against the backdrop of the illuminated city, as day turns to night, he talks passionately about his love of painting and how he arrived, along a winding path, as one of the most talked-about stars of figurative painting’s new wave.

He was born in 1985 in Yokneam Moshava, a bucolic suburb of Haifa in northern Israel, in a valley on the edge of Mount Carmel. His parents were professors, and their neighbors kept cows and sheep. He began documenting the wildflowers there only a few years ago, but he has been painting since he was 6 years old. His schooling was thoroughly focused on the arts, and even in high school, when he had not yet come out as gay, much of his work was nude selfportraits. “It’s this idea of representing myself and my body,” Langberg reflects. “I almost took for granted that it would be a vehicle to express my interiority.” Conscription is mandatory in Israel, so from 18 to 21, he served as an airplane mechanic in the Air Force, which he hated. But he was stationed in Tel Aviv and was able to take weekly painting classes with the very traditional, hyper realist painter Aram Gershuni. “I came to class in my uniform,” he recalls. “It was very silly.”

Langberg moved to the United States to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, which is also rather academic and traditional. He got his first studio as a junior and began working with specifically queer subject matter, a journey that started with an erotic home video. “Around 2009,” he recalls, “I went home for winter break and hooked up with this guy, a friend, and we recorded it just for fun.

Pleasure, Longing, and Powerful Desire

When I got back to my studio, I was looking at it and I thought, I really want to paint from this.” He had long been obsessed with Edgar Degas’s 19th-century free-form Impressionist sketches of ballerinas and Parisian life, in which a rough scribble might morph into a scene in the background and a face might appear in a corner. For Langberg, the home video dovetailed perfectly with the formal concerns he found in Degas, as it featured “these entangled bodies, one in front of the other.” It brought up the same questions of negative space and fi gure-ground relationships he had already been thinking about. Langberg made some small graphite drawings from that video, and everything fell into place: the form and the content. He keeps many of the same concerns today—a love for art history’s great Modernists, depicting private scenes of gay life, the people that matter most to him, and the workings of human desire.

After Pennsylvania, Langberg went on to study at Yale, where he encountered a much broader range of artistic practices and had a good support system. After graduating in 2012, he moved to New York with a bunch of friends from school, sharing a studio in the same building in Ridgewood, Queens, where he still works today. In addition to his solo booth debut at Frieze, Langberg has an exhibition up at the Rubell Museum in Miami that is on view until November, and he will open his soon-to-beannounced fi rst solo European museum show next year. But it didn’t all happen overnight. “Oh,” he smiles, “there was a long quiet time.”

When Langberg graduated, art was dominated by process-based abstraction. It was a time when few in the art world were thinking much about the fi gure. “Figurative painting was super cringe,” he recalls. “You could not talk about intimacy or connection; those things were just not present in the conversation. No one cared, which was, in retrospect, liberating. But at the time, I took it very personally. I didn’t understand why people didn’t care.” Bur rather than becoming a process-based abstractionist bro (and honestly, judging from the bright turpentine-spray-and-calligraphy-brush grounds of his Hibiscus paintings, he could have been a great Abstract painter), he leaned deeper into his instincts, continuing to work with oils, returning to painting from observation after having stopped for a few years, and dedicating himself to mastering his craft.

The abstraction craze fi zzled out after a

few years, but it was only in the late 2010s that, somewhat unexpectedly, figurative painting returned—taking hold of the market and the museums. Langberg was as surprised as anybody, but he and many of his painter friends see a return to fi guration as connected to the deteriorating political situation in the U.S. and beyond. “The more people feel infringed upon, the more urgent that conversation becomes,” he says. “When you’re thinking about work that deals with identity—whether it’s sexuality, or race, or gender—when you experience push back in your personal life, it motivates you to look at those aspects of yourself and think deeper about them.”

Langberg believes a great painting connects you to the artist in an immediate way, capturing what it means to be that person like no other object can. “It’s the manifestation of another person’s desire or what they think is beautiful, or sexy, or touching, or sad, or crushing, or important,” the artist says. “Seeing another person through their paintings, or seeing the person an artist depicts through their paintings, is incredibly touching and powerful.”

For him, this quality of presence is deepened further by the queerness of the work. “Growing up with the perception of something that’s so deeply connected to every other part of you,” he continues, “really made me want to assert the fullness of that experience—and how layered it is, and how beautiful it is—in the clearest way I can. That’s a big reason why I’m so specific and explicit with the sexual work. It’s absolutely pornographic, but that is part of our everyday experiences.”

This brings us back to Lovers 1. Langberg thinks it is the most explicit painting he’s made, and he has made some very explicit work. It is a giant close-up painting of two men fucking from behind, rendered in big, joyous brushstrokes in every sour-candy-color of the rainbow swirled rapturously together: like a J. M. W. Turner storm inside an acid Malibu sunset, like a neon Willem de Kooning painting of an asshole. Langberg has said before that he admires Pierre Bonnard, and that “what’s masterful about him is that he really uses every color in every painting, and trying to balance this rainbow palette is really almost impossible.” For Lovers 1, he has thrown the fullblown, vivid palette into the action himself. The painting was kicking around in his studio for a while before the artist could make it harmonious, before he felt it was worthy of its subject. “The

stakes are so much higher when it’s an explicit painting. You can make a shitty painting of flowers, but you can’t make a shitty painting of guys fucking,” says Langberg. There is a greater sense of responsibility because this is not a scene you see a lot in the world. It also has an intense shock value, but his intention is not to be shocking. “In order to show and talk about what I want to,” he says, “without that message being derailed by the fact that it’s a really explicit image, the painting has to be really strong.” It has to be bold. It has to be honest and true.

There has only been one time that Langberg made a sex painting from observation. Two good friends hooked in front of his easel. “That was a really beautiful, intense experience that I loved,” he recalls. But the rest are from photos, some of which he has taken himself. Every painting he makes is connected to a personal experience, and all of his formal decisions stem from a desire to articulate those experiences. As an artist, his greatest aspiration is to make work that resonates with people.

I wanted to profile Langberg because I like how lascivious—how hardcore and passionate and desiring—his paintings can be, and I believe we need more of that in art and in life. We should be evangelizing desire.

Near the end of our conversation, I ask if he thinks about fucking when he is painting. Without missing a beat, he tells me a story about a former student coming to visit him in his studio in Ridgewood and asking, “Do you just think about sex all the time?” His answer was, “No, I think about painting all the time.” He continues, “It’s very important to be as close to painting as possible. Even during sex, painting is the lens through which I experience the world. And in my mind, those moments that are particularly meaningful, or emotional, or beautiful, or sexy, all go through painting as an experiential filter.”

Let’s finish where we began, in the flowers. Langberg says that fl owers—like the ones he’s been painting in the mountains and in the bushes by the sea for the past few years—are probably his most indulgent subject matter. “There’s a real kind of giving in to how beautiful painting can be and how beautiful fl owers can be,” he concludes. His sex paintings, his loving portraits, and his flower paintings are all connected by gestures of pleasure and longing; and full of the powerful desire and beauty that is too often missing from life.

Parenting Should Be Like Painting

Collecting for the Future

The Ties That Bruise Us Also Bind

Three Generations at the Table

You Live Where?

We Make Beautiful Things. Then We

Set the World on Fire.

Parenting Should Be Like Painting

When Emily Ratajkowski was around the age that her son, Sylvester (“Sly”), is now, she regularly found herself under the care of her father, the multidisciplinary artist John David Ratajkowski. While her mother, the scholar and curator Kathleen Balgley, pored over her writings, Emily passed hours on the floor of her dad’s studio—steps from her childhood bedroom and attached to the family’s quaint San Diego home by translucent double doors—as he labored over his paintings and bronze sculptures. Today in New York, the actor and entrepreneur makes collages in her own time, a pursuit born from being a student in her father’s art class—which, for any other high schooler, would have been a nightmare. Between the coasts, the pair remain each other’s critic and confidante, sending their thoughts on one another’s work in place of texting pleasantries. On the eve of Sly’s second birthday, the father and daughter take an opportunity to reflect on the art of parenting, Emily’s foray into the art world, and how art became inseparable from their family life.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY GREGORY HALPERN AND AHNDRAYA PARLATO CREATIVE DIRECTION BY STUDIO&

Emily Ratajkowski: I remember going dumpster diving with you as a child. We’d get bones, paper towels, and then you’d paper mache them. You made masks for me.

John David Ratajkowski: And musical instruments! And Christmas ornaments. I still have so many of the ones you made from painting scraps of my wood. Some people recently came into my studio and asked me when I made them. “No,” I said, “my 5-year-old did that.” Our house in San Diego was a very small one; we lived very close together. The studio took up about half of it, and that was where you played. I took away the toxic paints, of course. When we ended up with another little place in Southwest Ireland, where I was represented by a gallery, that house became a playground for you, too.

Emily: And Mallorca, [Spain].

John: Yes, Mallorca, where my friend and I rebuilt an old ruin. Emily: These three houses are all part of your practice. You built our San Diego home, and you worked on the Ireland one, which was pretty beat-up. I remember summers in Spain helping you restore that place, too. You learned a local rock-building technique to make the patio.

John: There are some great photographs of 7-year-old Emily mixing cement. I always thought of those houses as big sculptures. There was always a connection between art and living space. You played a huge part in that.

Emily: Even when I was 5, you’d come to me with one of your large works in progress and say, “What do you think about this one?” Or, “I’m trying to figure out this color problem. Does this orange work here?” It was the same with the houses. Building and making is your way of being close to the people you love.

John: There is an artistic trust in those types of conversations. I’m not too precious about things like that.

Emily: But you like what you like.

John: Yeah, I do. Maybe it’s a question of boredom, but my art moves around a lot. I’ll do these almost photorealistic portraits, and then I’ll snap back into Abstract Expressionism.

Emily: And mediums: You do bronze; you’ve done ceramics. Honestly, you’ve done everything.

John: I don’t like being stuck—I never have. That’s kept me in the art world all these years. So it was an obvious step, to me, when you moved into acting. I mean, your mother is a writer, and I’m a visual artist. I knew whatever you did was going to be art-related. It’s just who we are.

Emily: I was jumping around back then, too. At one point, I was going to go to Sarah Lawrence for writing, then I went to UCLA for art—and at the same time, I was acting. I was all over the place. Fortunately, you were and are so good at encouraging and nurturing creative impulses. So much of making art or having opinions about art—even having taste—requires risk. You have to put yourself out there. I was just at the Academy Awards, and I saw one of your former students, Jonathan Wang, right after he got his Oscar for

Everything Everywhere All at Once. His fucking Oscar. He told me you were the reason he became an artist.

John: The first day I met that kid, I thought, He’s gonna be just fine. If you take somebody who knows who they are and put them out in the world, they’ll do great things. My feeling about life, in general, is to make things first and talk about them later, you know? Raising you, I wanted to put everything out there—ideas, materials, questions—and leave you alone with it. You always found your way through your art and your career. Afterward, I’d tell you what I thought was good and what you could do better. Emily: We had a very atypical family structure. You both had your lives, and I kind of came into that. I like that neither of you ever stopped. It made me good at having adult conversations from the time I was young.

John: Your vocabulary was always something that worried me a little bit because you could sit down and talk with a 40-year-old when you were just 6. I’d say to myself, Don’t make her think; just let her be. Now, watching you as a mother, I think you have the same connection with Sly. A lot of parents can’t do that. They direct their child’s life when parenting should be more like painting: Give them the tools and see what comes out of it. Then, talk with them about it later.

Emily: I agree. I’m rusty now, but at one point, I was a decent drawer. I remember you telling me back then that drawing was all about seeing. You always told me, “Don’t think about what it’s supposed to look like. Pay attention to the lines and the shapes and the proportions.”

John: You move as fast as you can, but time moves faster than you. There was a point in my life when I realized that you had become the teacher— that you knew more than me and could show me a lot. Because of that, I was able to move into this century a lot more smoothly than I would have just sitting in my studio. The art world has become very different compared to what I was used to.

Emily: I’ve been interested in the whole muse-artist dynamic in the age of the Internet for a while. What is the value of anything anymore? When I wrote my essay [“Buying Myself Back” for New York magazine], I was thinking about ownership because of the market around the commodity that I had [become] as a model. My body—my image—had been a huge part of how I built my living, but I realized that I was not getting the biggest cut of it. There was a photograph that was taken of me [for Sports Illustrated ] that I put on the Internet, and then it was taken and remade by someone else into a physical thing, [a painting by Richard Prince]. Returning it to the Internet as an NFT [Buying Myself Back: A Model for Redistribution] and owning that value was my idea.

John: The world is moving so fast that I’m not sure what ownership means today. Like you said, it’s really complicated.

Emily: The question of ownership—in art, in life—is tricky for me. I don’t like the idea of limiting ownership over beauty, but in a capitalist world, there’s so much value assigned to these ideas.

John: When I was young, I used to wonder, If you’re very rich and you can afford an Edgar Degas, is it your responsibility to let the world see it? Or can you just lock it up in your house? There are always questions about what is public and what is private—what responsibility do we have to make things accessible?

Emily: It’s often very unfair who gets the credit, especially when people are trying to live off of it. It’s a question that I don’t have the answer to, but I have found that marginalized people and women are often the last people to get the credit they’re due.

John: I think you’re right. Emily, when you moved [from California to New York], you did something that I really loved. You had a painting made of your mother and me, and that’s how you’ve connected Sly to us—“This is your grandfather; this is your grandmother.”

Emily: It was done by Michael Harnish, who went to Laguna College of Art and does these really masterful portraits. He came to your house—which, as you know, is an artwork in itself—and was blown away.

John: There’s a collage in your house that I made of my father back when he was my age. It was a long time ago, but now I’ve grown to look like him. When I walked into your house the other day, Sly pointed it [out] to me like,

“Hey, that’s you.”

Emily: That was so crazy. It’s become a multigenerational piece.

John: He makes these connections through the paintings on the walls, which I think is a really good educational practice.

Emily: It reminds me of what you did every year for my birthday when I was younger. I’d choose two animals, and you’d make me themed paintings. “Cows and owls” was one. This year, you continued that tradition for Sly— you made a collage of dogs for his birthday. He’s so into it.

John: Kids gravitate toward what they see, and so far he’s been surrounded by art. That doesn’t mean he’s going to be an artist, but he will grow up understanding it and appreciating it. When you were growing up, I used to tell you to fall in love with something—not with a person, that’s going to happen on its own—but with a process. Whether it’s making or building, don’t just do it. Fall in love with it. I think you’ve done that throughout your life. I’m not so much a part of that process now—I’m more of a voyeur. But I’m very pleased that there is love in it. That’s all I wanted for you.

“There was a point in my life when I realized that you had become the teacher—that you knew more than me and could show me a lot. Because of that, I was able to move into this century a lot more smoothly than I would have just sitting in my studio.”

—John David Ratajkowski

Collecting for

Young Collectors 2023 the Future

If the 199 0s and the aughts were the decades of Rockefellerand Peggy Guggenheim-sized mega-collectors, then the 2020s are the era of the connoisseur. CULTURED’s sixth annual Young Collectors list spotlights a new generation of curious and energized art buyers who trust in their instincts and are guided by their communities. As these newcomers—who span disciplines, collecting strategies, and frames of reference—grow more comfortable calling themselves collectors, their investment in the arts reflects a commitment to nurturing the experimental, diverse, and aesthetically exquisite. The truth is, collecting has never been more personal.

On wall: Lex Brown, Beyond Red, 2021. Chair from William Powhida installation, In Conversation: William Powhida and Ben Davis, 2035, 2017. On shelf: Works from Boyang Hou, Nikita Gale, Dawn Cerny, Kevin Beasley, David Horvitz, and Keith J. Varadi, as well as Horvitz’s Nostalgia, 2021. Photography by Pär Bengtsson.

Seth STOLBUN / Houston

After traversing the country and holding roles in many facets of the art world, the Houston native eventually found his way home—a journey that has informed his collecting philosophy.

SETH

STOLBUN IS A THIRD-GENERATION HOUSTONIAN,

and one of those rare individuals who has played almost all the roles that the art world has to offer. A School of the Art Institute of Chicago graduate, Stolbun is the former owner of an erstwhile apartment gallery, an active producer, and—when the moment calls for it—a curator. Stolbun’s resume gives him a bird’s-eye view of an industry famous for its opacity, and it shapes his collecting habits. This broader perspective also informs his other ventures in the art world, whether as an active member of organizations such as Artadia and Triple Canopy, or as an executive producer behind a new Dis video, DKP is Market Socialism. Stolbun credits the pandemic’s imposed timeout for forcing him to crystallize his philosophy into a plan of action. Sequestered in Houston and unable to stroll New York’s Lower East Side, where he once kept a pied-àterre (he was forced to abandon it during the lockdowns of March 2020), Stolbun began honing in on the art world communities that he once inhabited. “At SAIC, I saw friends graduate to relatively major success, and others that began to question if they should continue making art,” Stolbun explains. “I’ve been getting involved with artists who question the precarity of the art world and its conditions in general, and figuring out what I can do to disrupt those narratives.” Since then, Stolbun has championed the work of painters like Hyegyeong Choi (a former classmate), and multidisciplinary artist Thomas Huston—but the majority of the work he helps to produce is video-based. Superlative examples include an ambitious Andrew Norman Wilson work from 2011, Workers Leaving the Googleplex, that now lives at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A piece by Julia Weist that Stolbun facilitated, From The Future, 2020, is now on view at his alma mater. “I try to support nascent practices holistically, getting involved in projects before they have a gallery exhibition or a home,” the collector says.

Though he brims with insider knowledge, Stolbun’s advice for newcomers is more or less the same as the mantra he follows himself: Act local. Identify small but dedicated causes. Make incremental, real steps. Right now, this means supporting homegrown nonprofits like the Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought out of New Orleans, and being a regular patron of F Magazine, an experimental operation—not quite a publication, gallery, nor artist project—run by Adam Marnie in Houston. “It’s something that Houston hasn’t had,” Stolbun says. “What Adam is bringing down here is really important to support.”

Sonya YU

The entrepreneur never felt at home in the art world until she realized that she had an opportunity to reshape it for the better. In the years since, she has instilled her core value— access for all—into every project she takes on.

SONYA YU NEVER SAW HERSELF becoming a collector when she first started visiting galleries. In fact, she felt like an outsider. But as Yu became more comfortable in white cubes, the act of collecting introduced her to larger concerns that aligned with her own values—namely accessibility for all. “I didn’t feel inclined to engage,” Yu recalls. Things shifted when her close friends began to collect. “Seeing my peers who felt not only impassioned but comfortable in these spaces made me wonder: What would it look like if I did it in my own way? ” she remembers. “Now, I find myself asking different questions, like, What does it mean to be a collector? And, How do I use my privilege and platform to support creative visions and ideas?”

Questioning the status quo is a lifelong habit of Yu’s. It’s also the backbone of her approach to patronage, which leverages her professional strengths to uplift those on the margins of society. This commitment begins with her institutional affiliations: Yu is an outspoken and engaged board member at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. She keeps homes in both cities and serves as a de facto ambassador between the neighboring art worlds. This means that during this year’s Frieze Los Angeles, Yu was not just a spectator but also a host. She threw an al fresco breakfast for the SFMOMA board, and launched Myles, the omnivorous arts and culture magazine that she started with friends Jeff Staple and Zach Houghton Glassman. The publication is just the latest embodiment of Yu’s hands-on methodology—and if its opening night event is any indication, a new and much-needed community has been born.

Intimacy is the thread that connects Yu’s projects with her personal taste. Her LA home, for example, doesn’t hit viewers over the head with one artist or theme, but rather draws them in slowly with artworks that reward the act of looking closer. Imagine celestial drawings by Vija Celmins alongside Wolfgang Tillmans still lifes; a portrait by Salman Toor a stone’s throw from a monumental, enveloping Mary Corse in blazing white; and a figurative sculpture by Kelly Akashi sprouting glass blossoms outside in the garden.

Yu adds a sense of gravity to every subject, brand, and community she throws her weight behind. Her best tip for collectors still looking to find their footing is to do so in the company of trusted peers. “What I look for in life is a deeper human connection,” Yu says. “I’m not going to be able to take this stuff with me—however pretty or valuable it is—so collecting doesn’t have to be this isolating experience. Find people who you want to hang out with, go look at art, and then talk about it. It’s a great way to jump-start the engine.”

When Adam Mashaal acquired his first work in 2015, he also acquired some art-making materials— a few oil paints and canvases—of his own. The tech founder eschews art world politics, opting to get his hands dirty instead.

SO MUCH FOLIAGE AND ART POPULATE Adam Mashaal’s longtime East Village, New York, apartment that it is hard to distinguish one from the other. It is a jungle teeming with beauty both real and imagined. Moments after entering, the eyes adjust and individual species leap out: a new 112-color Jonas Wood kitchen print, an iceberg by Harold Ancart, a gloppy Allison Schulnik painting of flowers and kittens, a Calvin Marcus photograph of fallen palms disguised as asparagus on a large ceramic plate, and a wall-swallowing Liang Fu portrait with a tentacle-like light effect. The verdant tableau continues onto the fl oor with large fl ower pots punctuated by spiky ceramic booby traps, a medium that Mashaal found himself experimenting with at Greenwich House, a West Village ceramics institution where amateurs and professionals—such as Trisha Baga and Betty Woodman—gather around the kiln. Mashaal falls somewhere in between those two designations: He has been making music since he was 12 and designing products since 2005. For the founder, anything worth hiring for is worth trying yourself: after launching his own mobile app development company, Pressto, in 2010, he found himself doing everything from graphic design to UX and coding. When Mashaal decided to start collecting back in 2015, he also picked up a couple of canvases and some oil paints at the suggestion of artist Brendan Fagan aka Judith Supine, who became his gateway into the wormhole of contemporary art. “Making art is a good exercise for anyone thinking of collecting,” Mashaal says.

This DIY attitude has informed the evolution of Mashaal’s collection, too. He bought one work through an advisor, an early call on Toyin Ojih Odutola, which he loves, but soon decided to do his own legwork. The beginning was rocky, but with time Mashaal found his own way of doing things. He spent years chasing down his latest conquest, a Nathaniel Mary Quinn face, before finally acquiring it. “If you miss something, always continue to express interest. Bring it up again and again with the gallery,” he says. Persistence is key, as is keeping a healthy distance from what Mashaal calls the “checklist collector.” “There’s a lot of FOMO that goes into art collecting. If you get too close to the social dynamics, you run the risk of doing it for validation rather than out of genuine passion,” he says. “A lot of people go on Instagram and see a collector and say, ‘Oh wow, look at this really popular collector. If I build a collection like theirs, I might be popular too.’ To me, the best part of building a collection is making it uniquely your own.”

Georgia FORD

The child of Hollywood royalty always felt more at home around art than film. But above all, it’s her love for nurturing community that motivates the legendary dinner party host.

IF GEORGIA FORD THROWS A POOL PARTY, you find a way to go. You do not spill your drink on the Marc Kokopeli diaper tank that is parked under a pornographic nude by Heji Shin. You do not get caught touching the Robert Bittenbender. Ford is, after all, a legendary name in New York and Los Angeles. She is the Emily Sundblad of the West Coast—a consummate host, patron, party girl, producer, curator, performer, and artist.

As the daughter of Hollywood royalty (actor Harrison Ford and award-winning screenwriter Melissa Mathison of E.T. and The Black Stallion fame), one might assume she grew up on film. But Ford was raised in the art world, the haven where her parents spent their free time, and quickly adopted it as her own. She flipped through Sotheby’s catalogs for kindergarten show and tell. In her pre-teen years, she fast-forwarded through Clueless to the scene where Cher Horowitz shows her father’s Claes Oldenburg to a love interest. During those years, Ford admits to overlooking the traditional works in her parents’ collection—the Édouard Vuillards and the Jules Pascins—opting instead for the Cy Twomblys that filled the home of Earl McGrath, the legendary music producer and art gallerist (and Ford’s godfather). To Ford, McGrath was a confidante, an usher into the world of modern art, and a blueprint for a life well-lived (Jerry Hall hailed him as the funniest man she had ever known). “Earl was the greatest host of all time. His whole life was about having dinner parties and bringing people together. You’d walk into his home and see works next to one another that you would never fi nd in a gallery,” Ford says. “That’s something people are losing: the spiritual necessity of what it means to be a host, to invite people into your home, and to party.” Ford is a beacon of this dying art form, and her collection is an expression of it. Before she moved to LA three years ago, she spent two decades in New York, knitting together a tight group of artists, designers, and revelers over big dinners and late nights. This is where she met Alexander Shulan of New York’s Lomex Gallery and Joseph Geagan of Gaylord Apartments in LA, both of whose programs she actively supports. The two cities’ intertwined art histories are

manifested in Ford’s collection, which is loaded with early works by Geagan, Kokopeli, Valerie Keane, and Bittenbender—reveling in the half-baked concepts and underdeveloped techniques that illuminate the mature work that comes after. As an artist herself, Ford is drawn to the belabored, crafty experimentation of these protoworks—delicate, ambitious constructions that evoke their mortal makers. In other words, Ford’s house is always full.

When it comes to more recent purchases, the market’s loss is Ford’s gain. “Everyone is invested in buying paintings—especially fi gurative paintings—right now, which is wonderful. I’ve taken that opportunity to go buy sculptures instead,” she says with a sense of genuine luck rather than judgment. As Ford speaks, she becomes distracted. A package is arriving, and people are on the way over.

Reilly OPELKA / Miami

The tennis player’s abiding curiosity—and gift for turning transactional relationships into authentic ones—has served him well as a budding collector.

SOME COLLECTORS CAN’T KEEP TRACK OF ALL THE ARTISTS that fill their homes. Others are on a first-name basis with them. Reilly Opelka actually plans the year around his—starting with Friedrich Kunath, whom the junior Wimbledon champion tennis player refers to as “Freddy.” First introduced by their mutual acquaintance Matthew Chevallard, a CULTURED Young Collector alum, Opelka and Kunath’s friendship quickly ballooned into constant contact. Before the athlete was benched for an injury earlier this year, the painter could be found in the stands at every match, and if Kunath ever FaceTimes you from his studio in Los Angeles, it is safe to assume that Opelka is somewhere within earshot. The friendship has been formative for both, and its influence is manifested in the growth of Opelka’s expanding collection. “Freddy was a gateway,” Opelka says. “He opened the door for me.” It wasn’t long before Tim Van Laere, Opelka’s “biggest mentor in art,” walked through it.

“I have found that the art world can be quite unwelcoming. I’m so thankful that Tim has been the opposite,” Opelka says. “I can ask him anything.” A commanding Belgian with a twinkle in his eye and an ever-present cheeky smile on his face, the gallerist dedicates his time to irreverent artists that take their work seriously and see life as a joke waiting to be told. Some members of Van Laere’s roster appear in Opelka’s collection—including Jonathan Meese, Rinus Van de Velde, and Kati Heck—many of whom the collector has met and quickly struck up close friendships with. In “Legende,” Heck’s show at Tim Van Laere Gallery last May, Opelka was not only a guest, but also a muse featured in one work. “That might have been my favorite show of last year,” the athlete recalls. His intimate connection to artists like Kunath, Heck, and Van de Velde has enabled Opelka to adopt a different approach than most: he buys the artist, not just the work. “I look at them as a whole,” he says. “I buy from artists I’m a fan of, and that is one thing I’ve never regretted. I’m not as particular about the work itself—I’d rather have something from one of my favorite artists than cling onto individual works. I’m stuck to the ones I love most.” This philosophy is not exclusive to living artists nor those in Opelka’s personal network. He has a self-described German fetish, for Albert Oehlen, Kai Althoff, and Georg Baselitz in particular. “Oehlen said something that really resonated with me: ‘All great artists, at some time, end up playing with the abstract,’” Opelka recalls. “That is something I definitely take with me when thinking about my collecting.” A professional in the spotlight himself, it makes sense that Opelka would admire painters whose approaches evolve and progress with time. One match doesn’t make a champion.

Frederick HUTSON

FREDERICK HUTSON DIDN’T SET OUT to become a collector. You might say he became one when his interior designer, Daniella Villamil, tasked him with filling a couple of blank walls in his home with works that resonated with him. Unsure where to begin, the founder and CEO of Pigeonly—a platform that makes it easy for people to search, find, and communicate with incarcerated loved ones—stumbled upon a different kind of search engine: Saatchi Art, which became both a portal of discovery and an art world shopping cart. When his inaugural purchase arrived—a huge abstract painting of Jesus by the South Korean artist GyoBeom An—its monstrous wooden crate took Hutson by surprise. What does 210 centimeters look like anyway? Hutson found himself drawing out his decorating assignment—buying works that would not necessarily fit, but that spoke to him. A Nathaniel Mary Quinn work was a milestone in this DIY education. Hutson had been following Quinn online and reached out to inquire about a possible purchase, having recently discovered that many artists’ works aren’t necessarily available for just anyone to buy. To Hutson’s delight, Quinn and his gallerist, Rhona Hoffman, made a work available, citing the ethos of Pigeonly, which fosters connection in spite of physical or economic boundaries. Over the next couple of years, Hutson watched in awe as the value of Quinn’s work skyrocketed during a flood of exhibitions and critical af firmation. With his assignment now completed, the thrill of the hunt is what keeps the Hutson coming back—not to mention the community he has built over nearly a decade of collecting. Hoffman continues to be an informal mentor for the collector, while his art advisor, Anwarii Musa, introduces him to new names and young practices. Ethan Buchsbaum of Almine Rech Gallery consults on the work Hutson buys from the gallery, and on his journey as a young collector. Everette Taylor, a fellow collector and the CEO of Kickstarter, occasionally offers another sounding board. This elite group of advisors reflects Hutson’s dedication to thoughtful consumption while never abandoning his own taste. “Even though the style has changed over time, I tend to be attracted to works that challenge our perception of things we find comfort in—whether that’s religion, money, relationships, success,” Hutson says. “Often, I’m a walking contradiction. Sometimes we don’t want to embrace that, and we want to push that under the rug. I’m happy and comfortable owning it.” He cites Derrick Adams and Janiva Ellis as artists that challenge comfortability and transform the familiar into something illuminating, alien, and sometimes sinister.

After founding Pigeonly, a platform that helps people to communicate with incarcerated loved ones, Frederick Hutson discovered that collecting art offers even more connections.

Hutson’s strengths as an entrepreneur have served him well in the art world. He credits the growth to the effort he puts into relationships, and stands by the age-old adage: go to them. When Vaughn Spann had one of his first shows in Tokyo, Hutson traveled across the globe to put in face time with the rising painter’s gallery and express his interest. “If you’re a collector and you’re serious about it, you have to show people that you care,” Hutson emphasizes. “I’ve been offered works that celebrities and high-net-worth people wanted access to—it’s because of these relationships.”

Ashley MERRILL / Los Angeles

Ashley Merrill seeks out work that challenges her expectations. So, it’s no surprise that many of the acquisitions in the investor’s formidable collection were sparked by serendipitous encounters in faraway places.

DO YOU KNOW JEFF WALL’S PHOTOGRAPH Parent Child, 2018? It features an angelic toddler, peacefully feigning sleep on the sidewalk beside a clearly frustrated father wearing a “here we go again” expression. The silent scene is at once brutal and beautiful. When serial entrepreneur and investor Ashley Merrill first saw it, she couldn’t help but relate. “I thought, If that isn’t parenting, then I don’t know what is,” Merrill tells me. The artist, and that image in particular, floated around in Merrill’s subconscious for years, only to resurface during an afternoon of eating and gallery-hopping in Paris with her husband.

What makes the encounter so romantic—and nearly impossible to believe—is that Wall was also in Paris and in the same gallery. Upon learning of his impact on Merrill, the artist made himself available to the couple, fielding their questions about the work. They ultimately bought the photograph and hung it in their home. This is one of the many serendipitous and thought-provoking stories that spill out of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art board member when she discusses her collecting journey. When asked what binds the works in her collection together, she pauses. “I have this company called The Deep. It’s all about the questions that we can ask ourselves to be more philosophical on a day-to-day basis,” she says. “What I love about music is the same thing that I love about painting and photography: all of them have this ability to shift perspective. My favorite artists are the ones that conjure that same questioning, that same philosophical journey.”

One of the things the bona fide disruptor relishes is work that challenges our assumptions about what we think we know. She admires this quality, for instance, in the conceptual work of Jose Dávila. She owns two of the Mexican artist’s works and can imagine herself with more, but each purchase has to have its own logic and a place to live. Merrill does not believe in storing art. She treats each work she buys as an extension of the family, and appreciates all the complications that come with hosting these kinds of permanent relatives.

Of course, this commitment means the barrier for entry is high. Merrill tries to buy thoughtfully, sometimes calling in experts to consult on large purchases. She encourages those just starting out to go slowly and look at emerging practices. Young artists are a great way to take risks at an accessible price point.

Emmanuel TARPIN and Marc AMBRUS

The jeweler and business owner have built their lives around the pursuit of beauty in all its forms—but the pair get just as much joy from changing one another’s minds about a work’s beauty as they do from agreeing about it.

EMMANUEL TARPIN AND MARC AMBRUS grew up frequenting museums and galleries with their parents, and have since oriented their lives around art. For the couple, beauty is the raison d’être, and collecting is just one means of serving it. In the morning, when they wake up in their glassy SoHo sky box, they have breakfast beside an Albert Oehlen and a night sky by Thomas Struth. They spend their evenings in the wooden embrace of Charlotte Perriand and Pierre Jeanneret chairs, awash in the warm glow of their extensive collection of lamps. Their flat in Paris has a distinct aesthetic, but the couple assures me its confines are likewise filled to the brim.

Tarpin and Ambrus’s shared taste for the exquisite is not relegated solely to their living spaces. On Ambrus’s wrist, I spy a Cartier Crash watch—the perfect embodiment of a household in which the little things are held to the same high aesthetic standards as the big ones. Indeed, Tarpin, a jeweler, harbors a fondness for kinetic art (pieces that utilize gravity, time, and movement), which he luxuriated in during his four-year apprenticeship as a Van Cleef & Arpels bench jeweler. These hard skills— paired with his studies at the prestigious Geneva University of Art and Design, and a lifetime of sculpture work—culminated in the launch of his namesake atelier in 2017. Following in the footsteps of jewelers like Joel Arthur Rosenthal, Tarpin makes pieces that are one-of-a-kind: some are commissions; others are born of spontaneous inspiration and later devoured by his eager waitlist. “A piece of jewelry is something a person will give to their child,” explains Tarpin, “It will stay in the family. It’s something symbolic.” The natural world is often Tarpin’s jumping-off point, but over the years, art has become more of a reference.

Perhaps this shift in Tarpin’s influences is owed to the unique perspective of his tech entrepreneur partner, who was shaped by 1980s titans like Christopher Wool, Donald Judd, Martin Kippenberger, Struth, and Oehlen. Tarpin recalls that, though he was always impressed by Judd’s 101 Spring Street home, he did not relate to the work at

first. “You changed my mind,” Tarpin says to Ambrus. “Judd is essential,” Ambrus replies, nodding. “Sometimes I make him change his mind, and he does the same,” Tarpin adds. Not long ago, the jeweler made a number of bracelets inspired in part by the 2020 Judd retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Beauty is an evolving rubric, the fluctuations of which the two lovers attend to with care—but always with the same wide-eyed awe of two children who once looked forward to a day at the museum.

Deidrea MILLER and Jens SCHOTT KNUDSEN

DEIDREA MILLER, THE HEAD OF COMMUNICATIONS for

Christie’s Americas, and her partner, Jens Schott Knudsen, began cultivating their love of art long before they met, encouraged by their respective mothers. For Schott Knudsen, a photographer and lawyer who grew up in Denmark, that meant watching his parents bring home treasures from local charity auctions. Miller, for her part, honed her eye on the antique fair circuit, combing through the manifold offerings with her mother in search of vintage posters. Today, the walls of the couple’s home are filled with the fruits of their early labor. With little room left, the couple focus their efforts on filling the gaps on their apartment’s walls with small, poignant punches; photographs and drawings often lend themselves to the cause. The micro-dose methodology works well for Miller, who is a self-professed impulse shopper. “I have to buy small works now because I don’t have the wall space,” she laughs. “I’m not ready to give up my posters.” When Miller finds something she absolutely must have and it does not fit in her space—as was the case with a Nikita Gale sculpture from the artist’s 52 Walker show—her all too receptive parents are called in as temporary custodians. (Although Miller suspects that they may never relinquish the Gale in question.)

As art world professionals, the couple’s collection reflects the tight group of artist friends they have made over decades. Last year, they bought two smaller works from the cinematically proportioned sculptor Adrián Villar Rojas. Since then, the artist and his family have become friends. Though they know it is not possible in every circumstance, Miller and Schott Knudsen encourage new collectors to cultivate similarly genuine relationships with artists—talk with them about their work and ask them for advice on purchases from their corpus. The moral of the story for these two lifelong devotees is that collecting is, at its best, a reflection of the buyer and their values. “It is a very personal activity for us,” Schott Knudsen says. “Every work we own has a story attached to it.” Miller agrees, adding, “Early in my collecting journey, it was very important for me to have artists who represent Black beauty in my home, and to share them with my daughter.” She tells the story of haggling for an Edward Small painting with her mother’s help, and of a more recent acquisition, an almostabstract composition of braids by Akilah Watts. “When I saw the work, it put such a smile on my face. It reminded me of being a little kid, and how rare it was to see that kind of representation in a piece of art,” Miller says. “That night, I took it home with me because I thought, this is something that belongs in my home. Now it’s something that we enjoy looking at every day as a family.”

For this collector couple, the best acquisitions are those that grow from genuine relationships. They also have to fit into the few remaining spaces on the already-crowded walls of their home.

David LIU/ Dallas

The fashion entrepreneur was overwhelmed by the art world’s unspoken rules before he learned to tune out the noise and follow his own instincts. Now, he’s the chairman of the Dallas Art Fair Foundation, and plays a role in shaping the future of the Dallas Museum of Art’s permanent collection.

DAVID LIU AND HIS PARTNER, MICHAEL FOUNTAS, made their first acquisition at the Dallas Art Fair in 2017. Now, the co-founder of the fashion brand Leatherology is the chairman of the Dallas Art Fair Foundation, the governing body that determines what works from the fair and beyond will join the Dallas Museum of Art’s permanent collection. Liu’s entry into the art world re fl ects the native Texan’s passion for the subject, but it is also a poignant indicator of non-inclusivity in the industry. “I didn’t know if collecting was something that I was allowed to partake in for a lot of my life,” Liu says. “In art, there is this arti fi cial barrier to entry. I didn’t come from a collecting background, so there’s always been this feeling that it wasn’t meant for me.” In his Dallas home, the collector is surrounded by the happy ending to this story: an intimate Ludovic Nkoth work, a Doron Langberg, a large Oscar yi Hou. Liu’s origin story highlights one of his hometown’s strengths—its welcoming attitude toward beginners. Liu has become an embodiment of this muni fi cence and a leader for others.

It’s a role that took time to grow into, Liu reminds me. “For a period of time as a collector, you feel like you’re collecting by what you hear. That’s a really dangerous place to be because there’s just so much happening. I was overwhelmed by information—especially on social media,” he says. “Coming from tech, I think what I see online is the most important thing in the world, but it’s really the algorithm feeding me things. It’s very easy to stay in the echo chamber.” Over time, he learned to stop mindlessly scrolling and instead fall into the rabbit holes that captivated his intellectual curiosities. Now, Liu gravitates toward the kind of beauty that is produced through meticulous skill and humble materials. As a result, he finds himself buying works on paper as often as he does paintings. “I love how a work on paper almost feels more textural,” Liu explains. “There’s a temporal feeling to a drawing. You can almost sense the artist working on it.” He also has an af finity for smaller works—ones that he can hang and rehang in different groupings, teasing out new dialogues with each new arrangement: “Every time we rehang, we discover new threads that connect our works.”

Painting: Livien Yin, Thirsty No. 1, 2022.

Ceramic: Sharif Farrag, Prickly Jar (Sublime Spiral), 2020.

Photography by Jonathan Zizzo.

Hannah BRONFMAN

GROWING UP, HANNAH BRONFMAN had two role models for collecting. Her father, the former CEO of Warner Music Group, Edgar Bronfman Jr., took the heritage approach—which meant lining his home with Latin American icons like Diego Rivera, Roberto Matta, and Wifredo Lam. Her mother, the actor Sherri Brewer, swung the opposite direction as an early supporter of the vanguard, including today’s titans Simone Leigh, Derrick Adams, and Mickalene Thomas. A legend in her own right who was lauded for supporting Black and underrepresented voices before doing so was “trendy,” Brewer’s investment in and excitement about the artists of her time has been passed down to her daughter, who channeled the energy into developing her own artistic practice.

During her teenage years, Bronfman gravitated towards ceramics and sculpture, mediums that infiltrated reality more than the wall-bound works her parents favored. Her attraction to three-dimensional practices revealed an adolescent desire to distinguish her aesthetic from her parents’—although it ultimately became a manifestation of their belief that art is a calling and necessity. Bronfman decided to continue her art studies at Bard College, but she shifted her attention away from sculpture and toward the performative aspects of expression when she developed a following as a DJ. For Bronfman, the pursuits were not mutually exclusive; she saw music and contemporary art as utterly intertwined languages that her family had spoken for generations. In the years since, not much about her philosophy has changed. In her current capacity as an angel investor, Bronfman says she is focused on “minority founders who are creating a better future for the planet’s products and platforms,” an adaptation of her mother’s worldview applied to a new field.

“When I was DJing, my friends were artists, so it was really easy to go to studios and gallery openings. Now, I feel like I am learning more about art over the dinner table with friends,” Bronfman says. Her mother plays a role in that process, as does her husband, fellow DJ Brendan Fallis. The couple keep simple rules for their acquisitions: If they are both drawn to a work, can afford it, and it fits at home, they buy it. “When you’re creating a household with someone, the artwork needs to speak to both of you,” she says. “The artists that my husband and I are drawn to are young, emerging talents.” Bronfman appreciates artists who have something to say but have not yet been heard. This, perhaps, is a byproduct of a career spent helping inventors and disruptors grow. Somewhere in the background, her inner sculptor is also present—a teenage self who is concerned with material reality and how it can be used to envision new possibilities.

The former DJ transformed a youthful passion for the arts into a lifelong commitment to helping others realize their creative potential.

The Ties That Bruise Us Also Bind

When Seán Hewitt published All Down Darkness Wide—an aching memoir about the fragility of love and youth—last summer, he found himself grappling with the ghosts of his past and the legacy of trauma in queer literary history.

How can a writer transform the pain of private experience from something isolating into something that links us irrevocably together? Is the queer literature of recent years steeped so deeply in trauma that it forgets to embrace joy? Where, as Hewitt puts it, are the sunlit San Francisco streets?

For the poet, whose memoir dwells in the twilight purgatory of a trauma that is ultimately averted, the writing process was marked by a desire not to revel in violence and pain but to critique the social systems that impose them. By pulling back the curtain on private moments of anguish, fear, and shame, Hewitt lets the light in—welcoming a found family of fellow travelers to bask in its warmth.

I HAVE ALWAYS LIKED SAD NOVELS. Sad music, too. As a child, I nearly wore out my CD of The Verve’s Urban Hymns, sitting on my bedroom floor, pressing the rewind button on my portable stereo to hear Richard Ashcroft singing, again and again, that he’s “like a cat in a bag, waiting to drown.”

On one level, the scene is ridiculous. I had a happy family and a happy childhood. What could my 10-year-old self possibly get out of a song about drug use, regret, the painful dissolution of a life? Maybe we fail to give children credit for the depths of their emotions. Perhaps, in my childhood room, I was rehearsing my adult life before I lived it. Perhaps I was rehearsing empathy. Perhaps I was imagining what it would feel like to be “a cat in a bag, waiting to drown.”

Queer literature, in recent years, has been accused of harboring an obsession with trauma. The sincerity of its voice, too, has been seen by the writer Paul McAdory as evidence of solipsism and navel-gazing. In other words, trauma and sincerity are about the “I,” not the “us.” From Ocean Vuong to Garth Greenwell, A Little Life to The End of Eddy, queer identity has been, in the critic Kevin Brazil’s memorable phrase, “mortgaged to unhappiness.” What happened to the found families of Armistead Maupin and the sunlit San Francisco streets?

When I think of queer family, I remember a man called Anthony. I was 17 years old, recently out, but furtively dating. Well, dating is the wrong word. I hardly ever met up with the men I spoke to online. I lived in a semirural village in the north of England, and I didn’t know anyone else who was queer, so the Internet gave me the chance to look further a fi eld— literally beyond the fields—and into the closest cities. That was where this family lived. I don’t remember much of the conversations I had with these men. I do, however, remember one thing I said to Anthony—two years older than me—before I arranged to meet him.

One evening, over Myspace Messenger, I was pressuring him to admit something I thought was obvious. “If you had the choice,” I asked, “wouldn’t you choose to be straight?” It seemed so self-evident to me. If I could fit in—if I could just be normal—everything would be easier. Everything would be right. It was, perhaps, my deepest and most impossible desire. I said that I would choose it in a heartbeat, and he insisted that he wouldn’t. I remember feeling skeptical and surprised at

his response, but he grew more insistent. “Don’t say that again,” he urged. “Don’t think it. Don’t wish yourself away.”

At that point in my life, the idea that queerness might be a gift, rather than a form of isolation, was a bizarre contortion of sense. In my mind, queerness was, in fact, “mortgaged to unhappiness,” and the payments were something I’d prefer to be free from. Still, Anthony’s words changed me. I thought about them for weeks. I had always been gay, but after our conversation, I decided to be gay. I had heard the messaging before (“It’s good to be gay!”) but only believed it when it came from someone with the same past, the same experience.

Living in a place far from queer life, books rehearsed queerness for me; they framed it. When I read James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room or Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, I don’t remember feeling that they cemented queerness as a life of misery, though they were certainly books that had tragic plots and plenty of despair. Instead, these stories showed me that the structures of the world produced unhappiness, and that those structures needed to be changed. In other words, the function of the trauma wasn’t to traumatize but to critique.

When it came to writing my own memoir, which deals with queerness, grief, and suicide, I met this idea head-on. Was I just writing another “sad, gay book”? Was I picking at old wounds? What was my purpose? I wanted to avoid trauma for trauma’s sake. I didn’t want to disturb my reader without reason. When I experienced trauma in my own life, I often turned desperately to books—to other queer writers—to act as guides. I made sense of my life through their words. So, I soaked my own narrative in time, filling it with the ghosts not only of my earlier life, but of queer history, too. I wanted to give context to the trauma, but I also wanted to ask what made it possible. I wanted to explore the cycles of history to learn how we can tear our way out of them. The trauma had to have a function; for me, the function would be to move myself and my reader toward liberation.

Liberation means freedom from the straight gaze, where the link between queerness and trauma is rooted. One of my earliest memories is of a neighbor, who was otherwise kind to me, telling me as a child that I shouldn’t be gay because gay men were unhappy. It’s a common enough story. For a long while, I was afraid that admitting any unhappiness would

prove my neighbor’s point. Perhaps, with the arc of history tending toward unstable public safety among gay men, queer readers have felt a taboo around their shame, a taboo around the dif fi culties of growing up in the closet, revelations that go against the dictum of pride, liberation, and happiness.

But the specter of the straight reader and their potential judgment was never strong enough to stop me from writing. No matter how isolated the story or how personal, the revelation of trauma in literature has a familybuilding function—and a political function, too. Perhaps what I mean is that literary trauma finds its true purpose when it lifts us out of one life and into another, when it situates us within a collective.

In my book, I wanted to avoid using trauma as tension or as a way of building a character’s backstory. Instead, I reversed that idea: the backstory would be a way of sifting through history to explore why the traumatic event might occur. The Indian-American poet Meena Alexander writes that “we have poetry so we do not die of history.” Her words seem to capture the ideas of redemption and escape that I explored in my own pages.

Once my memoir came out, I felt a revelatory connection to a queer community. I received intimate, beautiful messages from people who had found themselves in the book, and this seemed to redeem the trauma, to transform it into something good. In charting a history that echoed so many other people’s, the book bound us together. What I thought of as its most private revelations were not isolated feelings of shame but flickers of common experience. All Down Darkness Wide became a site of mutual recognition, and reading became the thing that extinguished shame (pride’s dark opposite) by unraveling the secrecy that it feeds on. Writing doesn’t just rely on bonds—it creates them. In Tomasz Jedrowski’s 2020 novel Swimming in the Dark, the narrator reads an illicit copy of Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room:

“And the more I read, the more scared I became: the immensity of the truth and the lies I’d been telling myself all these years lay before me,

mirrored in the narrator’s life, as if someone were pointing a finger at me, black on white, my shame illuminated by a cold, clear light. In the brightness I could examine it with almost scientific clarity, and suddenly the narrator’s pain didn’t soothe my pain anymore. His fear fed my fear.”

Shames illuminate each other, but they also allow a place for clarity, for connection, for change. They can be dif ficult, but these acts of reading are family work. They do not follow bloodlines, but lines of mutuality: common experiences and common dreams.

Many of our queer classics, including Giovanni’s Room, end in tragedy, with the general (and, I think, patronizing) idea that this plotting made such books more tolerable for straight readers. In later years, the idea of queer joy has come hand-in-hand with ideas of queer progress, as if sadness and trauma are incompatible with political freedoms. It seems to me that the opposite might, in fact, be true. There is something to be gained from the trauma plot, which can establish those same relationships that are at the heart of queer family.

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read,” Baldwin once said in an interview. “The things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or whoever had been alive.”

Hearing that someone else feels as I did listening to The Verve on my bedroom floor—“like a cat in a bag, waiting to drown”—might, paradoxically, be the very thing that brings us to clarity, to possibility.

To feel joy might be to find this collective voice; the revelation of pain and heartbreak in literature might allow us space to imagine change. What do we feel when we read a book that speaks to us if not an intense, affecting intimacy? What happens when the voice speaking from the page is echoed by the voice within us, which somehow finds language through the book? What if thousands of other people go through the same trauma, feel the same thing, and come out changed? What is that, if not the furnace that makes a family?

Literary trauma finds its true purpose when it lifts us out of one life and into another, when it situates us within a collective.

Three Generations at the Table

Alice Waters and her daughter, Fanny Singer, host an impromptu lunch with help from 6-month-old Cecily Singer.

ALICE WATERS’S FIRST MEMORY is of eating strawberries fresh from her parents’ victory garden when she was 2 or 3. Fanny Singer, her daughter, says hers is of the taste of strawberry gelato, sweet and cold in her mouth. On a recent grey morning, Singer’s own 6-month-old daughter, Cecily Singer, was wriggling and cooing on the kitchen floor of their hillside Echo Park, Los Angeles, home as strawberries, fresh from the garden, macerated in tart citrus juice and redolent rose water. Later they would be served in their own syrup alongside a cloud of fluffy whipped cream, a charmingly unfussy coda to a casual family meal.

Could strawberries, of all things, be what unite three generations of women? Why not? Waters’s legacy may well be to show us that food is the invisible thread that ties us all together. After all, what are we but whirling dervishes that occasionally stop to sit down for a hearty meal? And if we’re lucky, don’t we share those meals with family in all its forms: parents, siblings, lovers, colleagues, children, friends?

Food has always been a means of connection for Waters. After an eyeopening trip to France as a young woman, she returned to America with a philosophy of eating rooted in the earth and divorced from the pre-packaged meals and frozen dinners of her childhood. It was there that she devised the vision for Chez Panisse, her iconic and influential Berkley restaurant that created the paradigm for “California cuisine”: farm-to-table, organic food that is simple and startlingly fresh. “I don’t know if I ever experienced that kind of beauty,” she recalls of that formative trip to France, “a beauty of the table, a beauty of the food that was in every market, these cute little restaurants. I fell in love. That’s what I wanted at Chez Pannise. I wanted it to feel like you were eating in somebody’s home.” So Waters created food that was seasonal and served it in a no-fuss setting: local flowers, real candles that leave a spatter of wax on the table, tablecloths and chairs from the flea market. She even learned calligraphy to write out the menus. “I never imagined that people wouldn’t like that,” she says. She has since bequeathed that same sensibility to Lulu, her restaurant in the courtyard of LA’s Hammer Museum that opened in 2021. “I do think it’s the only way to eat,” she says, “nearby and ripe.”

Look closely, and Waters’s family is everywhere in her work—starting with the network of food purveyors that have become the backbone of her business. “I was looking for taste, and I found that when I found the

farmers,” she says, holding Cecily as she gnaws on a raw carrot. “And there’s no middleman.”

Through her culinary pursuits, she has cultivated a sense of kinship unbound by bloodlines or marriage. “Chez Panisse became a family because we hired our friends,” she says. “People always say don’t hire friends because you’ll never be able to get rid of them if they’re no good,” she smiles. “On the other hand, it makes work such a pleasure. I’ve had the greatest relationships over these 50 years.” As the restaurant enters its fifth decade, it has become, like any family, a multi-generational enterprise. “Now they’ve all had children, and they’re coming back to work for us,” she adds, “which is great because they’re already trained.”

Waters’s focus on the next generation extends beyond her restaurant and into her nonprofit, the Edible Schoolyard Project, in Berkeley, California. Founded in 1995 with the belief that food practices should play a vital role in public school education, the organization reframes common academic subjects—math and social sciences—through the lens of food, from farming to cooking to eating. The initiative marries Waters’s past lives as an educator (she was a Montessori school teacher before pivoting to cooking) and an activist (a child of the 1960s, she was involved in anti-war and civil rights movements).

“Young people want to address the climate crisis. They understand that the food system is broken,” she says. “So if you’re studying the geography of the Middle East, you’ll be making pita bread and hummus. For math, you’ll be measuring, and stirring, and calculating, all of that. This has all been invaluable to me.” Bringing that sensory experience of food—one we engage with daily—to a classroom is a powerful way to bring these subjects to life.

“She’s always said that I was her proof of concept,” Singer laughs. She, of course, is an excellent example of her mother’s teachings. She recalls wandering through her yard as a child picking strawberries, raspberries, and snap peas. “It sounds so romantic, but it’s also practical,” Singer says. “If you have a garden, you build this treasure hunt for kids, and that makes them interested in being outdoors and exploring.”

Similarly, Singer recalls summers spent in France with her mother’s close friend Lulu Peyraud—after whom Waters named her second restaurant—and her brood. Singer forged some of her most treasured

The mother and daughter have collected a lifetime of memories in kitchens across California and abroad. On a recent rainy day in Los Angeles, the two hosted a family reunion of sorts over a meal made from fresh local ingredients. But this time it was Singer, not Waters, who presided over the festivities.

“ That’s what I wanted at Chez Pannise. I wanted it to feel like you were eating in somebody’s home.”

—Alice Waters

memories in Peyraud’s rustic kitchen with its open fire and ruf fled hearth curtains. “I would sit at that table and smell the garlic being mashed with a huge mortar and pestle and smell the vine cuttings,” she remembers. “It was a very sensory experience and something that influenced how I think about cooking—having people with you in the kitchen, touching and tasting things.”

Waters may be the chef, but on this rainy afternoon, it was her daughter manning the kitchen with her dear friend Heather Sperling; the pair moving in a choreographed dance of co-cooking. Sperling, a co-owner of Botanica, the cafe and restaurant in Silverlake, was searing halved potatoes and checking on the opaque and fatty filets of steelhead trout that were slowroasting in the oven. Singer, meanwhile, was preparing a salad of pink and slightly bitter chicories from Roots Organic Farm in Santa Ynez, tossed with thin slivers of radishes and tart, orange kumquats. The two met through a mutual friend. “When I moved here,” Singer explains, “Heather instantly became family. She was the first person to meet my now-husband. She coached me through those early days of motherhood.”

Singer is certainly her mother’s daughter. A writer and occasional illustrator, she collaborated with Waters on a book titled My Pantry: Homemade Ingredients That Make Simple Meals Your Own in 2015. In 2020, she released Always Home: A Daughter’s Recipes & Stories, and she is currently working on another book about salads. Singer is also co-owner of the online home and kitchenware e-commerce site Permanent Collection, which curates artisanal objects. “It’s all about good but functional design that helps support what you do in the kitchen,” she says.

As the meal came together, so did a constellation of loved ones. There was Christina Kim, a longtime friend and designer of the sustainable clothing label Dosa, who perched on Waters’s seat and gave her a quick snuggle. Kim designed the subtly alluring dress and duster coat that the legendary chef was wearing. Her clothing is made from organic materials and recycled fabric waste, a fashionable iteration of Waters’s own farm-totable kitchen methodologies. “I came here from Korea when I was 15. In the American school system, I had the chance to take horticulture and home economics,” Kim says. “I am who I am because of that education— being out there in the dirt.”

The cast of characters represented all walks of life: among them Waters’s longtime friend and Singer’s godmother, the comedian, writer, and producer Sue Murphy, tall and funny; David Tanis, the scruffy-faced chef and a partner at Lulu; and the novelist Emma Cline, with her piercing eyes. Singer welcomed her guests with a hug, dipping in and out of the kitchen and passing off Cecily to whomever was nearby and wanted to give her a squeeze. The moment recalled, in a way, the tableaux of Singer’s own childhood, when her mother knocked down the wall between their kitchen and dining room. “You could take something immediately off the grill and place it on the table,” Singer recalls. “I hesitate to call it dinner theater, because it wasn’t performative, but the experience of eating and the experience of cooking were one.”

They sat, chattering, as the food came to rest on green plates under the warm glow of a paper lantern. New friends and old friends joked and reached over one another to pass heaping dishes—a scene embodying what Singer says is her mother’s guiding principle: “there’s always room at the table.” Anyone who happened upon this gathering of tender-hearted acquaintances happily eating and sharing stories would be forgiven for mistaking it for a rag-tag family reunion.

In secluded colonies tucked into the American Southwest, colorful Earthship communities repurpose ancient building practices and recycled materials into sustainable constructions powered by the sun and wind. Inside these passive structures, the resolution to live without harming the environment becomes not only imaginable but possible, both in terms of architecture and community. Welcome to Earthship Way.

You Live Where?

Unity Earthship, like all Eartship homes, lives off solar energy rather than the traditional electrical power grid.

AFTER MICHAEL REYNOLDS GRADUATED from the University of Cincinnati in 1969, he went to the Taos high desert in New Mexico. There, the Kentucky-born architect began to experiment with recycled materials, building dwellings that looked eerily otherworldly, as if they had just touched down from outer space. In reality, Reynolds’s structures—Earthships—are the exact opposite: They rise out of the earth itself, and are built from materials that would otherwise be discarded. Tires, bottles, and cans mottle the buildings’ surfaces, which arch and slope to mimic the surrounding landscape of jagged mountains and swaths of desert. Travelers driving along Earthship Way—where the Greater World Earthship Community still resides today—might stumble upon a mosaic wall made from discarded beer cans or a house constructed from used tires. These structures have evolved significantly in the decades since Reynolds built the Thumb House, his first “beer can home,” and later patented his method of aluminum can construction in 1973.

At their core, Earthships are passive structures designed to provide six essential human needs: comfortable shelter, electricity, water, waste disposal, sewage management, and food provision. Powered by solar energy instead of the traditional power grid, they manage waste, temperature, and electricity through self-contained systems without relying on fossil fuels. The dwellings repurpose treated wastewater for their interior gardens, employ double-layer greenhouses that trap heat between their two walls as insulation for both plants and human inhabitants, and capture runoff water from their roofs. Typically, Earthship walls are made from old car tires filled with earth and stacked atop one another with added soil, stones, concrete, or adobe for stability. While Reynolds insists that function,

rather than aesthetic, is the main priority, the Earthships scattered along Earthship Way are visually striking. The ingenuity of their recycled materials often takes center stage, with commonplace items repurposed and elevated into new contexts. But every aesthetic detail has its utility: Earthships’ signature curved walls are designed to harness solar power, reducing the energy required to heat and cool its rooms, and their aluminum cans structurally function as bricks would.

Though sustainable architecture of this kind was popularized in America in the 1970s, its practices are, in many ways, rooted in ancient techniques. Pueblo Native American architecture across the desert in Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado features many of the same approaches, though without the addition of man-made plastic recyclables. In 1969, Buckminster Fuller—perhaps best known for the geodesic dome architecture he designed and built—published his book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. In its pages, the American architect, writer, and philosopher popularized the term “Spaceship Earth” as a way of understanding humankind’s relationship with the planet. Fuller followed the term with an environmental plea, writing: “We can make all of humanity successful through science’s world-engulfing industrial evolution, provided that we are not so foolish as to continue to exhaust in a split second of astronomical history the orderly energy savings of billions of years’ energy conservation aboard our Spaceship Earth.”

Today, the basic tenets of Earthship living go beyond those on display at the compound, where recycled and locally sourced building materials present a solution to growing issues of access on a warming planet. The global pandemic and countless extreme weather events of recent years

Tires, bottles,

and

cans,

mottle

the buildings’ surfaces,

which arch and

slope to mimic the surrounding landscape of jagged mountains and swaths of desert.

GOES TO A TREE...

Top: Earthships are passive structures: heating and cooling happens with deference to the natural world.

Right: While their designs are largely guided by functional decisions, Earthships have nevertheless developed a striking and recognizable aesthetic.

Earthship walls are often curved, sometimes as a design choice to absorb heat throughout the day—a thermal energy tactic—and sometimes shaped by their recycled tire or aluminum can structures.

WE JUST NEED TO

BE HUMBLE ENOUGH....

have illuminated the aws of complex global supply chains, diminishing access to raw materials, and the risks of relying on power grids. For the godfather of Earthships, the pandemic was proof that the concept he pioneered had come of age. “There were people—even wealthy people— waiting in line for food,” Reynolds recalls. “Homes became unlivable because the grid failed. Meanwhile, I was walking down my hallway barefoot, harvesting bananas.”

Reynolds, who was forced to give up his architectural license in 2000 due to his unconventional building practices, won’t let the law get in the way of his vision. Today, the radical architect runs an academy that teaches his methods, arguing that transcending traditional architectural practices presents a wiser—and more inclusive—approach to solving modern issues. The communal aspect of this knowledge-sharing approach can be credited for the movement’s achievements as well as its limitations. Indeed, the community that has formed around Reynolds is so insular that the vast majority of Earthship communities are contained within the New Mexico desert. For the Earthship way of life to reach a broader audience, Reynolds acknowledges that his designs need to be scalable. “We are following the path of the automobile,” he says. “It’s a horrible analogy, as the automobile has done damage to the Earth, but getting an Earthship home needs to be as easy as leasing a car.” To function comfortably in other climates, Earthships might require 5 to 10 percent water or solar power battery backup, a durability essential to their wider adoption. Despite questions around the adaptability of these designs, the possibilities of their broad application point to an exciting future: What if the basic tenets of Earthship living could be used to transcend single-family dwellings? How could Earthship architecture be implemented to transform public spaces?

For Earthship dwellers and enthusiasts, the hope is that these technological advances—and the commitment to indigenous and sustainable building practices that they represent—will be embraced outside of their community. Historically, back-to-the-land movements have become popular in times of crisis: during the Great Depression, after World War II, and—through Reynolds’s own efforts—during the energy crisis of the 1970s. Today, in the midst of an urgent climate crisis, this synergistic approach offers a pathway back to alignment with the natural world—one that its founder hopes will be implemented in high-density urban environments in addition to rural ones. “My mind always goes to a tree,” Reynolds says. “It’s all there in nature. We just need to be humble enough to see it.”

David King Reuben uses cutting edge A.I. technology to create new worlds, dressing computer-generated models in Louis Vuitton’s Spring/Summer 2023 Ready-to-Wear collection.

Beautiful Things.

We Make Then We Set the World on Fire.

How do you capture the essence of someone who is real? How about someone who's not? These questions lie at the heart of David King Reuben’s work. For the British multimedia artist, who was raised in an “ultra-orthodox” Jewish household, the merging of the unearthly with the everyday has cohered into an expansive art practice that takes religion as its central theme. “The most gripping magazine covers are usually close-up portraits of a famous person looking right at you,” he muses. “For hundreds of years in art history, that pose was reserved for Christ.”

Reuben’s swashbuckling, exuberant presence is as daring as his work, which has recently shifted to encompass image-making with artificial intelligence—a process he has undertaken in this portfolio spotlighting Louis Vuitton’s Spring/Summer 2023 Ready-to-Wear collection. Using a variety of A.I. image generators, he has created models, elaborate sets, and carefully calibrated lighting, reducing the hoards of producers, photographers, stylists, and assistants that typically populate the set of a fashion editorial shoot to an army of one.

In Reuben’s dazzling, chaotic worlds, models emerge from UFOs in plumes of smoke and stalk down burning supermarket aisles, unfurling a loosely narrativized sci-fi epic that traces the tangled relationship between humankind, the technology it creates, and the inevitable self-destruction that follows. “The people that you're looking at are

not real; they’re a blending together of many thousands of faces,” he says, reaching for the right words. “Essentially, they're aliens.” To the trained eye, the warp of A.I. glints in every corner: car-like forms that are not quite cars, an eerily elongated hand, a model’s slightly too vacant stare. But in the end, what is most uncanny about Reuben’s work is what appears real, because as hard as it is to believe, none of it is— except for the clothes themselves. Photographs of pieces from the new collection are painstakingly woven into every scene.

Reuben, who spent a flurry of all-nighters bringing these alternate universes to life, views this project as an act of creative destruction. “If you could create images that look just like Mario Testino’s and Steven Meisel’s using nothing but A.I., it could disrupt or destroy the entire market,” he says emphatically. But the prospect of outsourcing this world-building process to a computer program doesn’t strike much fear in Reuben’s heart: He is having too much fun. To the artist, these technological advancements—which he projects will be in the hands of 12-year-olds in no time—pose a healthy challenge for the art and fashion industries. “Whether or not to use A.I. in creative settings is such a frustrating conversation. It’s like a bunch of people standing around a pencil and talking about if the pencil is good, if the pencil is bad, if the pencil is the future of the craft,” Reuben says. “I think somebody should pick up the fucking pencil and start scribbling.”

“Excess is everywhere, and we can't touch it.”

and it is the raw beginning of everything. These perfectly formed hot people have landed, and the world is about to change. This is our collective human fantasy and our greatest fear: the mesmerizing, terrifying arrival of new intelligence on Earth. The aliens might be adventurers from another planet, but they also might be an enemy force. Will their arrival destroy us? Will they help us transcend the boundaries of life as we know it? Maybe neither; maybe we are more similar to them than we know. What do we humans do with the world? We make a mess of it. We take over the land and we build on it to fulfill our selfish needs, because that's who we are. We make beautiful things. Then we set the world on fire.”

—David King Reuben

“The UFO has touched down,

“So, we burn down the shop.

Is there a reason for doing it?

Rebellion against the arrival of these otherworldly beings? It’s hard to know. The place that feeds us, that gives us all we need to sustain life, is in flames—the table is broken, and there is food all over the place. We have left the vast desert for this land of abundance, where food is strewn across the parking lot, and nobody seems to be afraid. Excess is everywhere, and we can’t touch it—it’s a waste, but it is glorious at the same time. Everything that has been constructed is falling apart, and here in the middle of the desert, there is nowhere else to turn.”

The whole world is in flames, but there are still these insular pockets of beauty that fulfill one promise: to keep us perfectly, blissfully numb. We can press a button, and someone will serve us anything we desire at any hour of the day. A glamorous, sleek, controlled environment—another fantasy. This is where everything is headed, right?

But there is still tension between this alien technology and us. Twins, mirrored columns, and long hallways converge and echo one another until there is no boundary between what is real and what isn’t. A woman stands before us with her robot shadow lurking behind her—another self who is enviably free of our dull, human constraints. But look into her eyes. Is anyone there? We strive for this symmetry, this imitation of perfection, and it leads us here to this decadent lobby with no way out—no elevator to take upstairs to our rooms. No escape.”

—David

“We are dropped into a Tokyo Hotel Lobby, almost like it was all just a fever dream.

“We strive for this symmetry, this imitation of perfection, and it leads us here to this decadent lobby with no way out—no elevator to take upstairs to our rooms and no escape.“