June/July/August 2023

Fantasyland

BEYOND BELIEF

Minimalism and Its Afterimage

Larry Bell

Liz Deschenes

Dan Flavin

Frank Gerritz

Marcia Hafif

Peter Halley

Ralph Humphrey

Donald Judd

Ellsworth Kelly

Jonathan Lasker

Sol LeWitt

Richard Long

Robert Mangold

John McCracken

Howardena Pindell

Robert Ryman

Fred Sandback

Jan Schoonhoven

Sturtevant

Christopher Wilmarth

CONTENTS

June/July/August 2023

CULTURED HOSTS A PANEL ON COLLECTING

In partnership with Louis Vuitton, the magazine hosted a panel of art collectors at the fashion house’s Meatpacking District pop-up in New York.

INSIDE DIOR’S GARDEN OF EDEN

The house’s annual summer capsule collection brings a touch of playful kitsch to Beverly Hills.

STUDIO FREQUENCIES

Six artists reflect on their relationship to music, and share the sounds that keep them company in the studio.

44 46 48 60

SUMMER DISPATCH: PHOTOGRAPHY

Four iconic photographers dig through their archives for an image that conjures a musical era and an intimate moment.

THE STEALTH LUXURY OF SAVETTE

New York–based designer Amy Zurek is transcending the trend cycle to craft heirlooms for a new era.

PLACES TO GATHER

Belgian architect and designer Vincent Van Duysen reflects on his approach to distilling intimate memories into a collection of versatile pieces for the home.

SUMMER DISPATCH: POETRY

To mark the season, three groundbreaking contemporary poets share musings from their summer hideaways.

68 70 73 82

A NEW CHAPTER

Pageboy, Elliot Page’s writerly debut, offers an intimate glimpse into the life of an actor who has grown up alongside his audience.

Clothing and accessories by Dior Autumn/Winter 2023-2024 collection. Photography by Pat Martin.

CONTENTS

June/July/August 2023

SCOTT SAMPLER’S SECRET SAUCE

For the former filmmaker turned viticulture renegade, natural wine is a form of artistic expression and resistance against a conformist industry.

SEAWATER AND PSYCHEDELICS

Tara Walters’s ethereal painting practice is informed by a fine blend of psychic retreats and spiritualists.

84 86 90 92 94 102 106 116

THE TIMELESSNESS OF TØKIO M¥ERS

The British musician and producer has a slate of collaborations and solo projects on the horizon. They’re pulling him in new and exciting directions.

WELCOME TO THE BALMING TIGER UNIVERSE

As K-pop sweeps the globe, the rising Seoul-based group is adding new dimensions to the genre.

YOUNG CURATORS 2023

The annual list features six practitioners blazing new paths in a crowded field.

LITTLE STUDIO OF HORRORS

Javier Barrios’s practice, rooted in the work that surrounded him in childhood, will be on view this summer for his first solo show with Clearing in Brussels.

STANDING ON THE CORNER

The music collective is heralded for blending sounds of the African diaspora with the raw energy of New York. This summer, they present an avant-garde sonic installation at MoMA PS1.

SHYGIRL’S FANTASYLAND

The musician speaks with Jeremy O. Harris about forming her own sultry, silky brand of experimental pop.

CONTENTS

June/July/August 2023

CAConrad at St. Mark’s Church in New York. Photography by Mary Manning.

160

BRONTEZ PURNELL AND STEVE LACY ON CHURCH CHOIRS AND CLUB RECORDS

124

Brontez Purnell DMs his friend, musician Steve Lacy, for a conversation about gatekeeping, witchcraft, and being the loudest one in the room.

130

MARTINE SYMS AND BEN BABBITT ON CELLISTS AND HYPNOTISTS

The artists dissect their fortuitous meeting, the connection between the human body and technology, and the creative potential of hanging out.

136

THE MAN WHO TURNED BLONDIE’S HAIR BLACK

Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein reminisce about their collaboration with the late Swiss artist H.R. Giger.

140

3 RECORDS THAT CHANGED HANIF ABDURRAQIB’S LIFE

Writer and poet Hanif Abdurraqib takes a break from penning his forthcoming book to reflect on the albums that raised him.

146

EVERYONE HAS QUESTIONS FOR CHRISTINE AND THE QUEENS

To mark the release of his latest album, the musician answers questions on life and love from his friends and collaborators.

150

INTO THE WILD

With its Autumn/Winter 2023 collection, Dior pens a billet-doux to three women who subverted the dictums of their time: Catherine Dior, Édith Piaf, and Juliette Gréco.

BILLIE MILAM WEISMAN AND LARRY BELL ON ART IN LOS ANGELES

The pair connect for a conversation about the city that defined their careers.

168

THINKING WITH YOUR HANDS

Five cutting-edge design studios reflect on their processes and inspirations—from road trips to local landscapes.

178

OBJECTS OF AFFECTION

The season’s finest high jewelry unfurls across a verdant botanical wonderland.

ALEC SOTH Photographer

Minneapolis-based photographer Alec Soth has published over 25 books of his work—including Songbook (2015), I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating (2019), and A Pound of Pictures (2022)—and has had over 50 solo exhibitions at institutions including the Jeu de Paume in Paris and Media Space in London. In 2008, he created Little Brown Mushroom, a multimedia enterprise focused on visual storytelling, and in 2013, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is also a member of Magnum Photos. For this issue, Soth shot poet Danez Smith, a fellow Minneapolis creative, at home. “I’ve been a fan of Danez’s urgent poetry for a long time,” says Soth. “What a pleasure to peek into their world.”

MARTINE SYMS Artist

Martine Syms has captured the art world’s imagination with a practice that combines conceptual grit, humor, and social commentary. She has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship this year. Syms has written and directed three feature films: The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto, Incense Sweaters & Ice, and The African Desperate. Ahead of her first solo Sprüth Magers show, she speaks with fellow artist, frequent collaborator, and friend Ben Babbitt.

CONTRIBUTORS

MARY MANNING Photographer

New York–based photographer Mary Manning has had solo exhibitions at Canada gallery and Cleopatra’s, and at Sibling in Toronto. Last year, they curated the exhibition “Looking Back/ The 12th White Columns Annual” for White Columns. Grace Is Like New Music, a book of their recent works, was published by Canada in 2023. The photographer spent an afternoon with poet CAConrad outside St. Mark’s Church for this issue. “Making a portrait with CAConrad in the west yard of St. Mark’s Church was a dream assignment,” says Manning. “When we finished, CA generously gave me a tarot reading with the most beautiful deck I’ve ever seen.”

LÉON PROST Photographer

Autodidact Léon Prost strives to catch what goes unseen. As a French reportage photographer and director, Prost traveled in Romania with his analog camera, documenting his journey through the country. He has shot for publications including L’Officiel Hommes, M le magazine du Monde, and Regain. For this issue, the photographer turned his lens on FrenchLebanese architect Lina Ghotmeh.

KARLA LEYVA Photographer

Karla Leyva is a transdisciplinary artist working to analyze the fantasy around colonized bodies in an increasingly digital world. Implicit in her work is the desire to expand the body beyond the flesh, the desire to leave the periphery, to be seen, touched, felt, consumed, and discarded. Leyva has shown her work in Pereira, Los Angeles; Portland, Oregon; London; and across Mexico, where she currently lives. She entered the world of Javier Barrios, a fellow Mexico City resident, for this issue. “What I like the most about him,” she says, “is that he works very hard to be the great artist he is now.”

JESSE GLAZZARD Photographer

Jesse Glazzard was born and raised in Yorkshire and lives in London, after graduating from Central Saint Martins in 2019. He has documented moments among his close friends over several years, and has shot and directed for brands including Calvin Klein, Ssense, and Adidas, among others. A regular CULTURED contributor, the photographer captured French musician Christine and the Queens for this issue in Paris. “I love working with Chris,” says Glazzard. “It was especially nice this time because I got to see some of the city. We started the shoot with a few push-ups.”

LARRY BELL Artist

Taos, New Mexico–based artist Larry Bell is one of the most noteworthy representatives of abstract art in the postwar period, with a career spanning nearly six decades. Bell’s medium, “light on surface,” often utilizes the technology of thin film deposition of vaporized metals and minerals on glass surfaces. Bell exhibits extensively in museums and galleries across the world, and is the recipient of numerous public art commissions. For this issue, he spoke with collector Billie Milam Weisman about their parallel lives in the arts. “I always enjoy talking with Billie,” says Bell of his longtime friend. “She is a real fixture in the LA art scene.”

Curated by Ricky Swallow

Through August 4, 2023

September 5 – October 14, 2023 LOS

Celebrating David Kordansky Gallery’s 20th Anniversary

Through August 19, 2023

SHARA HUGHES

DEANA LAWSON

September 9 – October 21, 2023

DAVE HOLMES Writer

Dave Holmes is an editor-at-large and columnist for Esquire whose work has appeared in publications including the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, and New York magazine. He is thrilled to have interviewed the artistic polymath that is TØKIO M¥ERS for CULTURED’s summer music issue. When it comes to his other summer music picks, Holmes will tell you this in confidence, because he feels he can trust you: He still listens to that first Wilson Phillips album about once a week.

CONTRIBUTORS

LEGS MCNEIL Writer

In 1975, Legs McNeil co-founded Punk magazine, serving as the publication’s “resident punk,” which involved drinking, interviewing rock stars, and spreading chaos wherever he went. In 1988, McNeil’s drinking privileges were permanently revoked, and he became a senior editor at Spin before releasing the books Please Kill Me (1996), The Other Hollywood (2005), and Dear Nobody (2013). In this issue, McNeil spoke with Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein about making the cover art for KooKoo, Harry’s debut solo album, with artist H.R. Giger.

NELL KALONJI Stylist

London-based Nell Kalonji is senior fashion editorat-large for AnOther Magazine and a guest fashiondirector-at-large at Luncheon. She has collaborated with photographers such as Alasdair McLellan, Collier Schorr, Craig McDean, Jack Davison, and Nadine Ijewere. For this issue, she styled cover star Shygirl for her fantastical 1950s-inspired shoot. “Shy and I love collaborating on editorials like this,” says Kalonji. “It allows us to play with a wider range of characters than we can for stage or carpet looks. Shy was transforming in front of our eyes and getting into character, but it felt really natural— like this is her world.”

madison moore Writer

madison moore is a writer and DJ based in Providence, Rhode Island. He is the author of Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric, a 2018 ode to fabulousness as an act of queer resistance published by Yale University, where he received his PhD in American studies. moore has contributed to The Atlantic, Theater, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies. This summer, he will be the scholar-in-residence at the Sag Harbor arts organization the Church. In this issue, the writer introduces a conversation between the genre-defying musicians Steve Lacy and Brontez Purnell.

Founder | Editor-in-Chief

SARAH G. HARRELSON

Senior Editor

MARA VEITCH

Senior Creative Producer

REBECCA AARON

Fashion Directors

ALEXANDRA CRONAN, KATE FOLEY

Associate Editor

ELLA MARTIN-GACHOT

Editorial Assistant

SOPHIE LEE

Copy Editor

EVELINE CHAO

Junior Art Directors

HANNAH TACHER, ORIANA REN

Contributing Art Directors

MAFALDA KAHANE, SARA PENA

Editor-at-Large

KAT HERRIMAN

New York Contributing Arts Editor

JACOBA URIST

Podcast Editor

SIENNA FEKETE

Contributing Editors

JULIA HALPERIN, LILY KWONG, MARTINE SYMS, FRANKLIN

SIRMANS, SARAH ARISON, DOUG MEYER, CASEY FREMONT, MICHAEL REYNOLDS, DOMINIQUE CLAYTON

Chief Revenue Officer

CARL KIESEL

Publisher

LORI WARRINER

Italian Representative—Design

CARLO FIORUCCI

Interns

LAINE ALLISON

ISABELLA BARADARAN

CAROLINE BOMBACK

MARIA CLARA COBO

ELIZABETH COHAN

SOPHIE COLLONGETTE

MARIANA DE JESUS SZENDREY

AMELIA STONE

Prepress/Print Production

PETE JACATY

Senior Photo Retoucher

BERT MOO-YOUNG

CULTURED Magazine 2341 Michigan Ave Santa Monica, California 90404

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ISSN 2638-7611

WALTER PATER, THE 19TH-CENTURY ART critic, once wrote that “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” It’s true— when a meal or a painting or a piece of writing comes together perfectly, it sings.

Our summer music issue takes a deep dive into this idea. We turned to artists, writers, musicians, and people who do a little bit of all those things, and set them the insurmountable task of defining their relationship to sound.

Studio Frequencies, our portfolio focused on the music that keeps artists company in the studio, is one approach to this. In it, Jordan Wolfson points out the absurdity of the exercise, responding to a question about his earliest sonic memory with, “Insane question.”

Wolfson is right. Music is so intimately intertwined with daily life and with memory that it’s almost impossible to account for its influence on our lives. We discovered this ourselves while putting the issue together.

The following pages celebrate a group of artists who pull inspiration from across disciplines and channel it into music. Brontez Purnell—novelist, poet, and a musician in his own right—speaks with alt-R&B icon Steve Lacy about “flow, melody, and cadence,” three formal qualities shared by musical composition and narrative form. Martine Syms and Ben Babbitt, frequent collaborators who teamed up to create a soundscape for Syms’s first solo exhibition at Sprüth Magers in Los Angeles, discuss music’s centrality to their existence, and their anxieties about and experiments with A.I.-generated vocals. Poet and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib contributed three graceful paeans to the albums that changed his life. Our summer poetry portfolio, curated by Associate Editor Ella Martin-Gachot, sees three of the form’s boundary-breaking contemporary voices share sound bites from their summer hideaways. Shygirl, the issue’s cover star, talks

to playwright and critic Jeremy O. Harris about building the music career that she fantasized about during her early Tumblr days in Southeast London.

Summer is about experimentation and creativity, but it’s also a time of unexpected community. For this reason, we’re thrilled to present our special limited-edition artists cover—shot by William Jess Laird as part of our first of two Hamptons issues guest-edited by Joel Mesler—which spotlights a spectacular group of artists who have found camaraderie together during long summer days out east. The limited release, which will be available in select locations starting in late June, is a testament to coming together and the intimacy of the season, and we’re very proud to see it out in the world.

I hope that this issue provides you with some inspiration—for your summer playlists, dinner table conversations, and beyond.

LEFT: SHYGIRL shot in London, wearing a dress by Molly Goddard

Photography by Rachel Fleminger Hudson. Styling by Nell Kalonji

Creative Direction by Studio& and Rachel Fleminger Hudson

CULTURED HOSTS A PANEL ON COLLECTING

This April, CULTURED partnered with Louis Vuitton to host a panel of art collectors at the fashion house’s Meatpacking District pop-up in New York.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY DAVID BENTHAL

TO COMMEMORATE THE RELEASE OF THE SIXTH ANNUAL YOUNG COLLECTORS LIST, CULTURED took over Louis Vuitton’s kaleidoscopic popup space this spring for an evening of conversation and champagne. The magazine presented “The Art of Collecting,” a panel moderated by CULTURED founder Sarah Harrelson, who invited members of the magazine’s extended family—including Hannah Traore, founder and director of Hannah Traore Gallery; Kickstarter CEO Everette Taylor; notable collector and Gagosian liaison Sophia Cohen; and Caio Twombly, co-founder and co-director of Amanita Gallery—to share their collecting stories. Guests such as Jasmine

Wahi, Nina Runsdorf, Sharon Coplan Hurowitz, and Dana Farouki gathered to take in the latest iteration of Yayoi Kusama’s collaboration with Louis Vuitton. The whimsical space was outfitted in bright green polka dots and floral sculptures to welcome the arrival of the spring season. The evening’s panelists, decked out in their Louis Vuitton finest, expounded on their personal collecting philosophies and the principles that have shaped their creative careers. For those onstage, building a collection is an exercise in stewardship, not ownership. “I don’t see myself as a collector,” said Taylor. “I see myself as a caretaker of the work.”

INSIDE DIOR’S GARDEN OF EDEN

THE 18TH CENTURY BROUGHT about a suite of innovations, including the steam engine, the piano, and the establishment of the novel as a literary genre. The period also engendered an aesthetic revolution in Europe, with tides shifting toward frivolous rococo. One of the key elements in this maximalist revolution was toile de Jouy, a traditionally monochrome fabric featuring vignettes of countryside scenes, romantic picnics, and luscious flora and fauna. This summer, the style—the

18th century version of a comic strip—will make its way to beaches and tennis courts with Dioriviera, Maison Dior’s annual summer capsule collection that takes Toile de Jouy Sauvage, a dusty pink and gray interpretation of the classic pattern, as its leitmotif.

Designed by Dior’s creative director of women’s haute couture, ready-to-wear, and accessories collections, Maria Grazia Chiuri, the collection presents a slew of summer necessities adorned with Toile de Jouy Sauvage. Dioriviera will be

available in nine pop-up boutiques in idyllic summer destinations across the world, from Capri to Saint Tropez and Beverly Hills. The maison will take up residence in the iconic Beverly Hills Hotel through the summer season, offering Dioriviera disciples and newcomers alike the opportunity to browse iconic bags like the Lady D-Lite and the Dior Book Tote, along with scarves and satin shirts adorned with the enduring house code.

Channeling the playful kitsch of toile de Jouy, the pop-up’s interior

takes the form of an immersive sandcastle filled with life-sized sand sculptures of wildlife, giving visitors a taste of lighthearted luxury. Surf-inspired cabins line the perimeter, offering Dior parasols, yoga mats, and surfboards. Poolside, guests will recline under Toile de Jouy Sauvage–coated cabanas, where they can schedule boutique relaxation treatments at the Jardin des Rèves Dior Spa. The pop-up experience promises to be a lush summer respite, this year and every year.

The house’s annual summer capsule collection brings a touch of playful kitsch to Beverly Hills.

AN ARTIST’S STUDIO IS A HAVEN—A SOUNDING BOARD FOR IDEAS GOOD AND BAD, A COMPANION ON DARK DAYS AND INSPIRED ONES. THESE SPACES PLAY OCCASIONAL HOST TO CURATORS, COLLECTORS, AND FRIENDS, BUT IN THE DAY-TO-DAY HUM OF CREATION, THEY WRAP THEIR PROTECTIVE ARMS AROUND THEIR ARTISTS, ENVELOPING THEM. CULTURED ASKED SIX MAKERS WHOSE WORK SPANS THE DISCIPLINES OF ARCHITECTURE, PERFORMANCE, PAINTING, AND SCULPTURE TO REFLECT ON THEIR RELATIONSHIP TO MUSIC, AND SHARE THE SOUNDS THAT KEEP THEM COMPANY IN THE STUDIO.

FREQUENCIES

The Los Angeles–based provocateur is known for an extensive, uninhibited practice that probes identity politics, pettiness, and the baseness of the virtual-industrial complex. Wolfson’s work, which has taken the form of video, sculpture, installation, photography, and performance, is neither dogmatic nor didactic, opting instead for an uneasy opacity. This summer, the artist’s transgressive streak will be on view through July 22 with “Drawings,” a show that mines the (short) life and legacy of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. at Gagosian’s Basel outpost. In December, the National Gallery of Australia will host a survey of the artist’s work. When it comes to the relationship between music and art-making, Wolfson’s philosophy is simple: Less is more.

WHAT IS THE ROLE OF MUSIC IN YOUR PRACTICE? Depends. I used to think pop was radical; now I just like sculpture.

WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE WAY TO LISTEN TO MUSIC? [With] Apple AirPods Max in a La-Z-Boy at my studio, or driving at night.

WHAT’S THE BEST STUDIO SOUNDTRACK? We don’t listen to music at the studio, but probably everyone laughing and enjoying working together.

WHICH MUSICIAN WOULD YOU ASK TO WRITE THE SOUNDTRACK TO YOUR LIFE? I’d never dare to ask that of another artist, but since you did… Erik Satie.

FIRST SONIC MEMORY? That’s an insane question.

JIBZ CAMERON

PHOTOGRAPHY

BY CHARLIE GROSS

FUNKADELIC

PINK FLOYD

AUSTRA

THE POINTER SISTERS

CARDI B

LINTON KWESI JOHNSON

PATRICK COWLEY

FEVER RAY

CHARLOTTE ADIGÉRY

PRINCE

YOKO ONO

JANET JACKSON

RAY LYNCH

BRIAN ENO

LEE “SCRATCH” PERRY

NINA HAGEN

GRACE JONES

DONNY HATHAWAY

PENGUIN CAFE ORCHESTRA

LATTO

FREE KITTEN

DICKS

LAURIE ANDERSON

BLACK SABBATH SNEAKS

SONIDO GALLO NEGRO CAN NORMANI

PERE UBU

As a 10-year-old, Jibz Cameron wrote in a poem, “I am the wolf. I run / through the forest. / I howl / back / AND forth / through the forest. / looking for that place / the place where I / can let it all out.” In the nearly four decades since those words flowed out of her, Cameron—better known as her high-camp alter ego Dynasty Handbag—has found myriad pockets and platforms of expression, from her Los Angeles variety show “Weirdo Night,” which will be resurrected this summer, to a topsy-turvy take on Titanic this past May at New York’s Pioneer Works. This fall, the artist’s visual practice will be on view in the Hammer Museum’s “Made in L.A.” biennial. Cameron’s musical landscape is as riotous and polychrome as her persona.

WHAT’S THE BEST SOUNDTRACK TO GET DRESSED TO? Before a show, I need something mighty, like the Stooges or Megan Thee Stallion, to get me doing air kicks, gnashing my teeth, and stomping about with borrowed confidence. If I need to get grounded, I listen to Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Mass in B Minor.” One of my favorite compositions of all time is “India,” by John Coltrane. I don’t want to sound like a dick. This interview is like, “What music do you like?” And I’m all, “Bach, complex jazz?” But there you have it. I love Bach, and I love John Coltrane. Do I understand it? No, and nary shall I try! Whomst cares!

FIRST SONIC MEMORY? I was obsessed with the radio and never wanted to miss a song, so I would record it at night. Like, I put a tape in the tape deck to record the radio and then flipped it in the middle of the night. I also called the radio a lot and demanded that songs be played. I was about 7 or 8 when “Cum on Feel the Noize” by Quiet Riot (best band name of all time perhaps) was on the Top 40, and I remember calling the radio station telling them to play it again. I remember this really well because it’s also a shameful memory—they laughed at me.

FAVORITE SOUND? I bumped my head into a gigantic wind chime recently, and it was like I was scoring my own cartoon. The sound of an outdoor concert from far away is a great, sad, weird sound. Dogs howling with a siren. Any double bass drums. Frogs. Getting up to pee at 3 a.m. and hearing an owl. Windshield wipers.

WEIRDEST SOUND YOU CAN MAKE? I can do a decent Martha Stewart impression.

July 8 — August 19, 2023

“Perpetual Portrait”

CALVIN MARCUS

THE BEACH BOYS RADIOHEAD KRAFTWERK

The words “surreal” and “absurd” are thrown around when Calvin Marcus’s name comes up. But the San Francisco–born, Los Angeles–based artist tends more towards the deadpan and discomforting. His deceptively nonchalant paintings, forays into sculpture, and screen-printed works dilate the longer you observe them. This summer, a work of Marcus’s will be included in Clearing’s first Art Basel booth, and the artist will continue to develop his Tuscan TOMATO Residency with the gallery’s Brussels director, Lodovico Corsini. In the midst of these varied projects and practices lies a deep connection to music, which offers the artist both a contemporary catalyst and a time-travel machine.

WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE WAY TO LISTEN TO MUSIC? My studio has wooden floors and a large wooden ceiling, so the acoustics are really nice; it’s the best place to listen to music. It sounds so good and big to be in there with my favorite music of the moment.

WHAT SOUNDS DO YOU ASSOCIATE WITH LA? Cars accelerating. There are also a lot of birds in my neighborhood. Every time I’m on the phone with someone walking my dog around, the person on the line always comments on how loud the birds are.

FIRST SONIC MEMORY? My uncle swimming across a lake on a family camping trip we went on as kids. I still hear his voice and the sound of the water around him.

FAVORITE SOUND? The sound of a skateboard passing by gives me great nostalgia. I’ve been skateboarding since I was 12—less now, but I still love the sound of the hard wheels and loud bearings. It sounds like a snake striking perpetually.

Clay Pop Los Angeles

Curated by Alia Dahl

June 24–August 12, 2023

Diana Yesenia Alvarado

Alex Anderson

Alex Becerra

Genesis Belanger

Seth Bogart

Kenturah Davis

Woody De Othello

Sharif Farrag

Ryan Flores

Joel Gaitan

Melvino Garretti

Lizette Hernandez

Stephanie Temma Hier

Sydnie Jimenez

Grant Levy-Lucero

Candice Lin

Jasmine Little

Amelia Lockwood

Jiha Moon

Ruby Neri

Maija Peeples-Bright

Brian Rochefort

Jennifer Rochlin

Brie Ruais

Stephanie H. Shih

Alake Shilling

Peter Shire

Christopher Suarez

Magdalena Suarez Frimkess

Amia Yokoyama

Maryam Yousif

Bari Ziperstein

CHASE HALL

ROBERT GLASPER

STEVIE WONDER

CHARLIE WILSON

TYLER, THE CREATOR

FUTURE

A TRIBE CALLED QUEST

JIMI HENDRIX

BLACK SABBATH

Q-TIP

DIZZY GILLESPIE

NIPSEY HUSSLE

CHARLES BRADLEY

TUPAC SHAKUR

ANDRÉ 3000 AND BIG BOI

KENDRICK LAMAR

EARL SWEATSHIRT

ARETHA FRANKLIN

LENNY KRAVITZ

NAJEE

NOEL POINTER

BOB MARLEY

JAY-Z

RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS

THELONIOUS MONK

STEVE LACY

ANTHONY HAMILTON

GENNY!

LAURYN HILL

ELTON JOHN

GIL SCOTT-HERON

B.B. KING

WHITNEY HOUSTON

LYFE JENNINGS

KIRK FRANKLIN

MARVIN SAPP

ESTHER PHILLIPS

BOBBY CALDWELL

EARL KLUGH

ESTHER PHILLIPS

CANDI STATON

This year, Chase Hall developed a relationship with the opera. The New York and Los Angeles–based artist was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera to create a set of paintings inspired by Luigi Cherubini’s Medea last fall, and renewed his ties with the hallowed institution in the spring with a vast painting honoring Terence Blanchard’s Champion —an epic chronicle of boxer Emile Griffith’s life—which was blown up to even more colossal proportions to adorn the building’s facade. This summer, the CULTURED Young Artist 2021 alum confronts another behemoth, Jackson Pollock, in an exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum, the second in a series of artist-led presentations called “A Lover’s Discourse.” For the painter, music is a mirror, a history book, and a portal to transcendence.

WHAT IS THE ROLE OF MUSIC IN YOUR PRACTICE? Music has been a father figure, a brother, a mentor, a diary, a Pandora’s box, an ancestor, a journey, and a mirror of my questions and concerns. It has allowed me to locate what art is and to see how it disseminates into real-time culture and humanity. I’m like a poor man’s Rick Rubin—I can’t play a lick, but I know what I like and feel, and what it has showed me of myself, others, and the world.

WHAT SOUNDS HAVE INFLUENCED THE WORK THAT WILL BE ON DISPLAY AT THE ASPEN ART MUSEUM? Free jazz, percussion, samba, freestyle rapping—areas of music that are challenging, intuitive, guttural, spiritual, and informed by the many years prior to their action. The possessive qualities of painting often remind me of someone catching the Holy Ghost, or their eyes rolling back into their skull as they blare through their saxophone. Music is a space, and so is painting—it’s about making that space one you love to come home to.

FIRST SONIC MEMORY? Growing up, my mom always played Elton John and Tupac [Shakur] in her old black Toyota 4Runner, smoking cigarettes. Those two are etched into my memory.

The transformative power of art meets the spirit of individuality and ingenuity in one-of-a-kind collectible design and artisan-crafted fine art. Authenticity and uniqueness lie within the exceptional craftsmanship and artistic expression of independent studio artists.

ISHI GLINSKY

PHOTOGRAPHY BY

RUBEN DIAZ

NTS MIXTAPES

POWWOW SONGS

PHILIP GLASS

YELLOW MAGIC ORCHESTRA

YVES TUMOR

BEACH HOUSE

Ishi Glinsky’s practice mimics the meticulous virtuosity of a composer. The Los Angeles–based artist is tied to the landscape—and baseball team—of his adopted home, but through his work he digs into the traditions and creative ecosystem of his tribe, the Tohono O’odham Nation, and other North American First Nations. This summer, Glinsky will bring these concerns, and their material articulations, to the fore as part of the Hessel Museum of Art’s “Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-determination Since 1969,” and Tiwa Select’s presentation at the North American Pavilion in London. In the fall, the artist heads back to LA, where he will be featured in the Hammer Museum’s “Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living.”

WHAT SOUNDS HAVE INFLUENCED THE WORK THAT YOU’LL BE SHOWING AT THE BIENNIAL? One facet of my next sculpture is inspired by the stillness and silence of the start of a powwow. It’s about creating a memory of viewing and participating in the Grand Entry of a powwow, while also zeroing in on the regalia and objects that create a roar, [the] concert of sounds mostly meant for healing.

WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE WAY TO LISTEN TO MUSIC? Headphones. I like to keep what I’m listening to private. I have a shared studio space, but even if no one is around, I’d rather crank up my headphones than use a speaker.

FIRST SONIC MEMORY? Quail songs and thunder from the summer monsoons. The sound and smell of desert monsoons are very particular to the Southern Arizona desert and different from anywhere else.

FAVORITE SOUND? My partner’s laugh, gessoing a canvas, the sound of a home run.

LINA GHOTMEH

PHOTOGRAPHY BY LÉON PROST

ANA MOURA

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH

MILES DAVIS

IBRAHIM MAALOUF

AMÁLIA RODRIGUES

FAIRUZ

OUM KALTHOUM

NINA SIMONE

ARVO PÄRT

DHAFER YOUSSEF

ZIAD RAHBANI

NICCOLÒ PAGANINI

CHILLY GONZALES

FELIX MENDELSSOHN

MARIA CALLAS

The Paris-based architect—whose projects include the Hermès workshops in Normandy, the Estonian National Museum in Tartu, and the Stone Garden apartment block in her native Beirut—grew up wanting to be an archaeologist. Though fate had other plans, she brings from that field a meticulous sensibility regarding landscapes and the passing of time, as well as a fascination with the most humble of materials. This June, Ghotmeh will travel to London to debut her design for the 22nd edition of the Serpentine Pavilion, baptized “À table.” The French dining call is a fitting motto for Ghotmeh, whose connection to music emphasizes the gathering of disparate elements—no matter the origin, generation, or genre.

HOW DO YOU THINK ABOUT SOUND IN THE SPACES YOU DESIGN? I work with sound engineers to study the sound experience within the spaces I design. Each one has a different sound requirement. When working on atelier spaces such as Hermès, the sound of hammers and leather working tools is rendered musical with the acoustic paneling used on the walls. At the Palais de Tokyo restaurant, Les Grands Verres, the high space and the risk of noise reverberation shaped our material choices for the renovation; everything was orchestrated to have the most intimate experience.

WHAT’S THE BEST PLAYLIST FOR GATHERING AROUND A MEAL? The whispers and laughter of people around the table.

WHAT SONG REPRESENTS WHERE YOU’RE AT IN YOUR LIFE AND PRACTICE AT THE MOMENT? “Overture (‘Sinfonia’) in C Major” by composer Marianna Martines.

DAVID MONTGOMERY

In 1967, the Brooklyn-born, London-based photographer, known for his intimate approach to portraiture, became the first American to photograph Queen Elizabeth II. Four years later, he took on another British heavyweight: the Rolling Stones.

“I WAS MAKING A LIVING AS an advertising photographer, but I also did a lot of editorial work for The Sunday Times. I was shooting plenty of royalty and prime ministers for the magazine. I ended up taking this picture of the Rolling Stones as a favor for a friend of mine. I never went to clubs, I was not on the scene—I was the scene, if you know what I mean. Mick [Jagger] was a couple of hours late; it was summertime and hot. The rest of the band was politely sitting around. By the time Mick came, we were all a bit hungry. There was a fish and chips shop down at the bottom of the road. I thought, Well, since they’re an English band, I’ll shoot it in a fish shop for some nice local color. Everybody eats fish and chips, nothing glamorous about it. There were some teenagers in there, but nobody paid any attention to us. That’s the great thing about London, or England anyway. The band was busy talking amongst themselves, so I had my hands full getting them all to look at the camera. I was starting to get a bit fed up with it. I thought, Let’s just get this done. I want to go home and have supper. Mick was clearly tired, not the most dynamic, but you knew he was ‘the one.’ I’d photographed Jimi Hendrix, who was truly special, the Queen, and even Paul McCartney, but Mick is like electric, you know? Look, they’re the greatest rock-and-roll band in the world. That’s all there is to it. The fish and chips shop is still around, only it moved down a half a block. When I go there, I always think, Did that really happen? Was that really real? ”

On the following pages, four photographers share an image from a summer day that continues to inspire them.

MING SMITH

Over a half-century–long career, the Detroit-born, Harlem-based photographer—and the first Black woman photographer to have a work acquired by the Museum of Modern Art—has captured the auras of music legends like Grace Jones, Sun Ra, and Tina Turner. But for all her stirring portraits, it is a candid summer snapshot that sticks most with Smith, a testament to the resilience and joy of Black family.

“I WAS MARRIED TO WHAT I WOULD call an avant-garde jazz musician. It was a period of lost jazz. Jazz always represented the freedom coming out of Black culture. I was touring with his group, the World Saxophone Quartet, all over the world—and I would work along the way, too. Here, I was attending this cool festival in Atlanta, Georgia, where a long list of musicians, including Kenny G, were performing. I was heading toward the entrance, which was crowded with people ready to celebrate and relax on a nice summer day, and I saw a family. They were just hanging out in the park. The Atlanta Child Murders [of 1979–81] were happening that summer. These were young Black boys—I think there were 28 of them at the time—who had been either strangled or stabbed or shot, and they were found not far from where

they were murdered, in a park. It sent shock waves around the world, but the media was saying, ‘Well, it was tragic and everything, but these children didn’t have fathers.’ What does that have to do with it? So when I saw this family, I was like, Look, there’s a father right there … How beautiful is that family? They were working class folks. There was a father with his arms around his wife, and their two daughters, just swinging back and forth. They were in a private moment, a family moment. You know, I shoot cultural icons—Tina Turner, James Baldwin—but this photograph was expressing something bigger, something totally sincere, something that was political, but beautiful. I love this image. I knew when I took it that it was a winner. Even without the history, it would have been a special one for me.”

DEREK RIDGERS

For over four decades, British photographer Derek Ridgers has been capturing the rough edges of concerts, musicians, and their wildest fans. One late night in the ’80s, he turned his lens on the Cramps, and captured the psychobilly band sweating and screaming onstage.

“THIS IS THREE-QUARTERS of the rock band the Cramps harmonizing into one microphone. It was Sunday, April 6, 1986. The weather was overcast in Deinze, which is in Belgium. I remember that day very well because our trip was written up in the U.K. magazine Time Out, and I shot this photograph on commission for them. I’d traveled there early that morning from London with a coach-load of rabid, rockabilly Cramps fans. We headed back to London on the same coach after the gig ended, so it was a round trip of about 26 hours. The headline of the piece was ‘Hell on Wheels.’ It wasn’t really hell for me, but the journalist who wrote it was much less tolerant of spending that long in the company of a lot of overenthusiastic Cramps fanatics.

I was 35 at the time, and I was very lucky to get the job because I’d only been taking photographs professionally for three or four years. If I’d had a camera when I started going to concerts in my teens—when rock was far more fringe—I

could have taken some incredible shots. I saw Jimi Hendrix in December of 1966, and I was so close that I could have operated his pedals for him.

The Cramps were a truly fantastic live band—one of the best I’d ever seen. They didn’t take themselves too seriously, but they took the music very seriously. Poison Ivy was hugely interested in vintage guitars. She was a great rhythm guitarist and, I think, still cruelly underrated. In any case, they certainly weren’t an all-ages band. Lux Interior would sometimes disrobe and wag his weenie at the audience.

I’m not sure a 72-year-old ex–rock-photographer is at all qualified to talk about the music scene today, but for me, the heyday of guitar-based rock was really the ’60s, and the genre properly came of age in the ’70s and ’80s. Since then, it’s been in a slow decline, endlessly repeating itself. I hope I don’t sound like an old curmudgeon, but I suspect I do. So much about life now is better than it was. Just not live rock.”

JAMEL SHABAZZ

The Brooklyn-born Jamel Shabazz has captured the raw alchemy of street life across the world, but the photographer is best known for documenting the birth of hip hop in his hometown. His instinctual style allows him to capture city dwellers at their most confident and expressive—in moments of celebration, uproar, and ennui. On a humid evening in the ultimate crucible of humanity, Shabazz snapped a photo that has stuck with him to this day.

“It was a Saturday night in Times Square during the summer of 1981. It’s just a group of friends enjoying the evening with their boombox. I had just gotten home from Germany, where I’d been stationed, and I took this photograph during a period when I was rediscovering the New York that I had been so homesick for during those years. I used to hear the song “What’s Happening Brother” by Marvin Gaye in my head whenever I photographed the streets. That song is about a Vietnam [War] veteran coming back to America, and he’s trying to understand what’s happening.

As a young photographer who was trying to get better, Times Square was the place to go. Back then, it was like Las Vegas for many young people. People from all five boroughs and the rest of the world would gather there to see a movie,

go to dinner, and just socialize. On this particular evening, I was developing my skills shooting at night, and as you can see from the composition, I was still figuring it out. Technically, this is not a good photo—it’s full of distractions. I spent pretty much the entire afternoon and early evening standing on the corner of 7th [Avenue] and 42nd Street. When the trains came in, hundreds of people would get off who I wanted to photograph; I would pull them over and show them my portfolio and engage with them, and like that I built up a body of work. I found a lot of couples, and focused my lens on love, diversity, [and] people from all over the world. When I saw this group, I thought, Everything is there. The fashion is there, the friendship is there, the hip hop is there. It just represented everything to me.”

New York–based designer Amy Zurek is transcending the trend cycle, crafting heirlooms for a new era.

THE STEALTH LUXURY OF SAVETTE

CONSTANTIN BRÂNCUSI SCULPTURES, a plastic tote from New York’s Chinatown, and the sunlit paintings that line the walls of the Whitney Museum of American Art are a few things that have inspired the unconventional handbags designed by Amy Zurek, who founded her luxury brand Savette in 2020. “I absorb the world around me,” she says on a cloudy New York afternoon, “and that impacts the design of the pieces.”

Zurek wants to reframe the narrative around accessories by designing impactful, timeless bags that can be cherished forever by people who celebrate any aesthetic—from Lady Gaga to Emily Ratajkowski, both of whom are devotees of the brand. She doesn’t design with trends in mind, striving instead to create modern heirlooms to be passed down through generations. This is an undertaking that the designer is well-prepared for: After studying fine art and art history at the University of Pennsylvania, Zurek graduated from the fashion design program at Parsons School of Design and landed jobs at luxe, minimalist brands, including Khaite and The Row.

One afternoon, Zurek was taking stock of the gaps in her own wardrobe. “I was looking for a bag that was minimal, clean, and thoughtfully crafted from highquality materials, but wasn’t overly plain or austere,” she recalls. “Something that had a subtle but recognizable element that wasn’t a logo.” Thus, Savette was born—and so was the Symmetry Pochette: a compact, ladylike bag and crowd favorite, with a petite top handle and an oversized turn-lock. “It’s not the most functional everyday piece,” she says, “but there’s a simple sophistication about it.”

Though Zurek’s pieces conjure a vision of pristine, elegant femininity—the kind of thing you’d see in an Audrey Hepburn film—she insists they aren’t meant to be babied. Rather, they’re made with timelessness in mind, and feature resistant materials like woven leather. “Often, women are worried that a bag is going to get scratched, or they’re going to wear it in the rain, and it will be ruined,” says Zurek. “Our bags aren’t bulletproof, but that was definitely something we considered. If you’re investing in an item, you want it to last.” Every piece is made in Italy, in a three-generation family-owned factory, with all materials produced on-site or in neighboring regions of Italy.

True to the Savette ethos, which nods to family heirlooms and fine art, Zurek’s mother and grandmother serve as the designer’s personal style guides, inspiring the shapes and textures of the young brand. “I have a lot of jewelry from my grandmother,” says Zurek. “She collected a lot of Georg Jensen and Elsa Peretti. I really treasure those pieces, and they inspired some of our hardware elements, like our signature locks.”

As the hunt for fresh design trends wages on—Balletcore! Indie sleaze! Barbiecore!—Zurek is carving out a space for herself in a crowded fashion landscape. “I wanted to make handbags that exist outside of the cycle of trends,” she says. “I think that’s an uncommon design philosophy today, when we’re inundated, season after season, with newness.” What’s next for Savette? Zurek sees the brand expanding, perhaps first into small leather goods or a limited collection of homewares. But at the moment, her focus is clear. “I want the bags to be wearable by many kinds of women in all seasons.” she says. “Our guiding principle is timelessness.”

“I have a lot of jewelry from my grandmother. I really treasure those pieces, and they inspired some of our hardware elements.”

Places To Gather

Last year, Belgian architect and designer Vincent Van Duysen partnered with Zara Home to launch Zara Home+, a collection of furniture and accessories for the living room. This year, the duo have partnered for a second collection that takes the dining room—a space of gathering and tradition—as its focus. To mark the release, Van Duysen reflects on his process of distilling intimate memories into joyful, versatile pieces.

WHAT IS THE ETHOS OF THIS COLLECTION? It’s about time and traveling down memory lane. The goal was to translate my DNA into a full program, hearkening back to the last 30 years of my work. The starting point for this challenging exercise was to revisit the key elements that defined my signature, distill [the] shapes and forms, and instill purity into these new creations.

DID YOU FIND INSPIRATION IN OTHER FORMS OF VISUAL ART, FILMS, OR TEXTS? I am like a sponge absorbing the most diverse disciplines. Everything has the potential to inspire me: a documentary, images on Instagram, books, galleries, movies... It’s all filtered through my empathy and my imagination. That’s how I create. But I’m most creative when surrounded

by people. Daily encounters are what inspire me the most. And my travels. And my team!

HOW DO YOU MAKE SURE YOUR PIECES STAND THE TEST OF TIME? At the core, there’s organic material and shapes, tactile and textured pieces, and clean, pure lines.

YOU USED OAK, ASH, JUTE,

COTTON, AND LIMESTONE IN THIS COLLECTION. WHAT DREW YOU TO THESE MATERIALS? First of all, they have texture, warmth, and character, and they age well with time. They are all natural and sourced locally. We like to collect the scraps—solid oak, for example—and upcycle them for smaller pieces such as candle holders or plate servers.

SUMMER DISPATCH POETRY

Senses awaken in summer hours, whether they’re spent in stifling cities, sleepy countrysides, or on breezy shores. Soundscapes swell to accommodate the rhythms of outdoor gatherings, and scents waft—a tableau vivant of life in all its forms.

To mark the season, three groundbreaking contemporary poets share their musings on the sounds of summer.

DANEZ SMITH

How does a life accumulate? How does it write itself on skin, and leave its mark on our insides? Danez Smith reckons with these questions through their explosively present poetry, which mines humor as much as pain. Following their acclaimed poetry collections Homie and Don’t Call Us Dead, their newest compilation of poems, Bluff, will publish in 2024. A scribe of a Black, queer experience, Smith pens a summer dispatch from their Minneapolis home.

MORNING, MAY

they’re back! the babies are back! opened the window this morning, as it’s the time of year for opening the windows, and there they are! the babies! laughing! crying! arguing! laughing! cussing! running! getting in line! getting into fights! laughing! singing! singing! the kids singing down the slide or swinging singing a song stitching the same air they slice making half-moons with light-up shoes. they’re singing! laughing! laughing! playing! The children are playing! someone tell the future, tell the earth, tell July, tell the former-children, the number -one enemy of children, that the children are back! they are laughing! we have not killed them all! there are still children! there’s still time! there are babies and they are playing playing playing and the sun is giggling on their faces and the moon hasn’t yet gone her way she’s standing by her door, counting the children so she can balance the books again through their windows tonight. the children! the book of the dead is not yet final. outside, the rabbits are ready to rob the gardens, the squirrels are back on their mess, the dogs have been evicted back to the yards. and the babies are back. don’t tell the country where the children are. please let the babies see September. please tell my country our children are gone. tell the guns and their husbands that we lost the babies in the snow. tell the politicians their prayers worked, they don’t have to think of the children anymore. i hear the babies though the window. lord, let them stay the only sound. the babies are alive! hide them before America finds out. now what will we do about Time?

CACONRAD

CAConrad fell for poetry as a child, rummaging through library shelves to absorb the words of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Emily Dickinson. In 2005, Conrad began developing their (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals, structures that instigate an “extreme present” in which to write. Today, they live just up the Connecticut River from the place where Dickinson spent her life: Amherst, Massachusetts. This summer, their work—nearly five decades’ worth—will be honored with a show of poetry as art objects at the Batalha Centro de Cinema in Porto, Portugal. To mark the occasion, they share a poem from their forthcoming book, Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return, a collection of odes to yearning, the weather’s consequences, and the passing of time.

it was sexy how you politely declined the larger halo ocean waves travel thousands of miles never revealing the source of their power enough poems have been wasted on human cruelty we dig hard to find the other world press pen with everything in us write Gate to open 9 pages at once stay open ignore how much you want to close I love you it must be said I love you can you hear it arriving after countless miles hold my hand as we feel relief with the crashing waves

SANDRA CISNEROS

Sandra Cisneros writes from the in-between. The Chicago-born author is a citizen of Mexico and the United States, a maestro of both poetry and prose, and a transgenerational voice. Last fall, she published Woman Without Shame/Mujer sin vergüenza, her first book of poetry in 28 years, and was also awarded the prestigious Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. She is currently adapting her beloved bildungsroman, The House on Mango Street, into an opera with composer Derek Bermel. From the sanctuary of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where Cisneros has lived for the last 10 years, the poet shares a sound bite from a brewing storm.

HOUSE ALARM, SAN MIGUEL DE ALLENDE

I can get used to the boom of fireworks at dawn detonating dogs, roosters, donkeys, church bells jolting the faithless awake on holy and unholy days,

Padre Dante’s wobbly hymns warbled from a loudspeaker,

the Otomí procession of armadillo guitars, ocarinas, conch shells, drums thumping a furious beat, but–can’t get used to this: the billionaire’s house alarm wailing like a weary child at el Mercado San Juan de Dios.

Worse, los mexicanos see me as una gringa, think it’s my house alarm. I don’t have one. But, for safety’s sake, can’t say this.

The billionaire’s gone to New Zealand. This the reason his San Miguel house sits vulnerable to local and extranjero rage all season.

Summer simmers the ire of neighbors against all newcomers who have raised the rent and made living in el centro imposible.

Afternoon rains arrive ahead of the hurricanes that straddle both coasts every summer.

Clouds drag a violet shroud of rain across the valley. Beyond the gauzy mountains, strands of lightning crackle louder than the neighbor’s house alarm.

Temperature plummets. Scent of silver.

Pirul trees shiver a drizzle of dust. Palm trees sashay brittle skirts. Basso profundo rumble. Jackpot rush of coins breaking from the heavens.

¡La ropa, la ropa! Housewives rescue rooftop laundry snapping in the wind sweeping in from Celaya, fifty kilometers away, the most dangerous city in the republic, home base to our home state’s cartel.

But we live in the most beautiful city in the world. With nary a worldly care, save a false alarm. Or so our realtors swear.

Land Spirit in the On view through

This exhibition is organized by Trevor Schoonmaker, Mary D.B.T. and James H. Semans Director, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Major support for Spirit in the Land is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. Lead support for Spirit in the Land is provided by the Ford Foundation.

nasher.duke.edu

At the Nasher, Spirit in the Land is supported by the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation; The Duke Endowment; the Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Family Fund for Exhibitions; the Frank Edward Hanscom Endowment Fund; the Janine and J. Tomilson Hill Family Fund; Katie Thorpe Kerr and Terrance I. R. Kerr; Alexandria and Kevin Marchetti; Parker & Otis; Lisa Lowenthal Pruzan and Jonathan Pruzan; and Caroline and Arthur Rogers.

Barkley L. Hendricks, Under Zim’s Tree, 1998. Oil on canvas, 17 1/4 x 17 1/4 inches (43.82 x 43.82 cm).

Collection of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. Gift of Susan and Barkley L. Hendricks to commemorate naming Trevor Schoonmaker as Mary D.B.T. and James H. Semans Director of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, 2020.6.2. © Barkley L. Hendricks. Courtesy of the Estate of Barkley L. Hendricks and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

“Look at any story about fame. How does it end? It’s strange that these narratives are still so alluring in our society. Literally every celebrity memoir or biopic— it all ends the same.”

A NEW CHAPTER

ELLIOT PAGE HAS BEEN ACTING since the age of 10. With turns in Juno, Whip It, Inception, and The Umbrella Academy, Page was unmissable, a household name. But the actor was also performing in his personal life—the role of the young starlet, eminently talented and touchingly self-effacing. Until the actor came out as transgender three years ago, he was frozen in place by the bifurcated demands of celebrity: an easily marketable varnish and a smiling face, or a parody of suffering worthy of tabloid coverage. With his new memoir, Pageboy, the actor peels back years’ worth of calcified preconceptions, offering a powerful counternarrative to the ones that have swirled around him since childhood. The memoir—a collection of aching, tender, and raw vignettes that draw on the historic violence, Indigenous erasure, and natural beauty of his hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia—chronicles moments of furtive, youthful love, isolated Hollywood adolescence, and the lurching process of finding queer community. To mark the book’s release, Page sits down with CULTURED’s senior editor to reflect on the ritual and relief of putting pen to paper.

MARA VEITCH: What was your relationship to writing before taking this on?

ELLIOT PAGE: It was minimal. In the brief moments when I did engage with it, I felt some form of a flow. But I could never sit for long periods or stay with something. It would be a spurt, and I’d move on. I love to read—that’s a big part of my life—but writing to this degree, not so much.

VEITCH: Did any of the writing from those spurts find their way into Pageboy ?

PAGE: A couple did. There were old notes in my phone that I drew from.

VEITCH: The book is full of these tiny, crystal-clear moments. In a life that’s full of tiny moments, how did you decide which ones to hold up to the light?

PAGE: The first time I actually, seriously sat down, I wrote that first Paula chapter, which came out stream-of-consciousness. When the book deal became real, I spent the first couple of weeks feeling, not necessarily overwhelmed, but the acknowledgement of what I’d taken on. At first I focused on whatever came up organically. As I went on, I’d pick an age or a period, and think of a story—or a relationship or a friendship—that covered that period, and build upon it.

VEITCH: Did that overwhelmed feeling come from the pressure of sifting through your own experiences, or was it more like, “I owe pages”?

PAGE: I guess both, and the fear of never having written something to this extent. Every time I read a book I think, How the fuck does somebody do this? That, plus talking about things that, of course, were not easy to talk about. I really felt that in my body as I wrote. It was fascinating, like, I’d hunch over, I’d start to sweat. I would try to strike a balance for myself: Okay, this week I wrote about a rather traumatic incident, so next week I’ll write about getting to wear a Speedo as a kid

VEITCH: How did your work as an actor inform your writing process?

PAGE: I imagine lots of writers do this, but it felt like I could visualize each memory, and translate it on paper in a way might be be similar to translation

from script to screen. It was as if I was watching each moment, which helped me to write it in a more cinematic way.

VEITCH: Who were some of the writers who fueled your writing process?

PAGE: I mean, where do I begin? In terms of memoirs, I love Saeed Jones’s How We Fight for Our Lives; Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and The Argonauts; Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel; Carmen Maria Machado’s In The Dream House; and Tanya Tagaq’s Split Tooth. The way they’re strung together, the way they flow, the way they just keep pulling you forward…

VEITCH: You return often to the history of Halifax—the Halifax Explosion, Indigenous erasure, resource extraction—and how it seeps into the architecture of your family. Why did you decide to make Halifax one of the book’s primary characters?

PAGE: It’s about my fascination with time—all the life that has come and gone, that shapes who we are. Some awful things, some positive things. It’s also about my personal interest in things like the Halifax Explosion. Eventually my editor had to say, “Okay Elliot, that’s enough about that.”

VEITCH: You return often to our insignificance as human beings. Can you elaborate on that?

PAGE: I think often of my own life in relation to grains of sand, the stars, and the sky. I have some days where that thought is quite scary and sad, and other days where that thought is really exciting and liberating. It makes me feel less precious about myself, the things that have happened to me, or the anxiety and stress that I’m dealing with. Like the book coming out, for example. I say to myself, Elliot, you’re a tiny speck. There are a lot of books in the world.

VEITCH: Is that a form of resistance to the pressures of celebrity? I don’t remember many moments in the book where you fully embrace your relationship to fame.

PAGE: It does feel awkward and it always has. I’m finding my love for acting again in such a significant way, which is really special. I loved it as a teen—when I discovered film and art and all these things, and then was able to play all these interesting roles. That was thrilling. What a true gift to get to throw yourself into something like that. The attention—or being told that you’re special because of it—felt very odd and uncomfortable, and I think just simply not true. It can enhance those feelings of emptiness and loneliness. I mean, look at any story about fame. How does it end? It’s strange that these narratives are still so alluring in our society. Literally every celebrity memoir or biopic—they all end the same.

VEITCH: Has your relationship to that uncomfortable side of things changed?

PAGE: Now, everything feels different. Before, when I’d get recognized on the street, I had a difficult time with it. Now, my ability to interact with people when they want to chat, or want a photo, is totally new. I feel present, and I have lovely conversations with people. It’s a significant shift.

VEITCH: How do you want people to feel when they read this book?

PAGE: It’s weird to think—oh my gosh—people are gonna read this, you know? We’re all so pressured to become this narrow version of who we are. We take in all these toxic and unhealthy expectations, and we’re not encouraged to be our full selves. A part of me hopes it allows people to feel seen, to explore internally, investigate, and be who they want to be. I hope it helps people to say, you know, “Fuck you,” to those pressures and fully step into their authentic selves.

“Pageboy”—Elliot Page’s writerly debut, out this month—offers an intimate glimpse into the life of an actor who has grown up alongside his audience.

SCOTT SAMPLER’S SECRET SAUCE

THE FORMER FILM DIRECTOR TURNED VITICULTURE RENEGADE CHOSE NATURAL WINE AS HIS FORM OF RESISTANCE AGAINST AN INDUSTRY STUCK IN ITS WAYS.

SCOTT SAMPLER HAS FOUND HIMSELF in an industrial complex in Buellton, California. He came to the dusty Central Coast community by way of Beverly Hills and Los Feliz to open his winery, where he makes the “porch pounders” and fine wines that are sipped in some of Los Angeles’s most prestigious restaurants. The winery is more of a creative studio, filled with vestiges of his past lives. His dog, Serge, and cat, Shangy, keep him company in a curated yet cluttered space stacked with crates of vinyls ranging from bossa nova to hip hop, framed works by his artist father, and his own portraits of infamous LA microstars.

Sampler’s upbringing is steeped in Old Hollywood lore—he grew up as a regular at Musso & Frank with Frank Gehry’s daughters as his babysitters, and landed his first job as Quentin Tarantino’s assistant. The proximity to fame never dazzled him—one night, when Tarantino asked Sampler to drive him to a party, he declined. He had a date at a Dizzy Gillespie concert lined up, and plans to make movies of his own.

After studying philosophy and fine art at the University of California, Berkeley, Sampler returned to Los Angeles in 1990, where he wrote screenplays and directed angst-ridden music videos for ’90s rock bands. Along the way, Sampler collected wine obsessively. That’s what happens when your foodie parents sneak you sips at L’Orangerie. “Wine was always in the background,” recalls Sampler. To add some color to days spent writing scripts, Sampler hosted a string of dinner parties that he called “Saucefest,” where collectors, gallerists, and artists gathered for bacchanalian evenings featuring Sampler’s infamous pasta sauce, inspired by his grandmother’s recipe.

While searching for reprieve from heartbreak at a friend’s house in Malibu, something clicked. With his wine collection at critical mass and the vast untouched acreage of the Santa Monica Mountains surrounding him, Sampler decided it was time for a new chapter. “Talking to the producers and agents for the action comedy script I was rewriting was not that exciting,” he recalls, “but talking to the viticulturists and winemakers I befriended was very interesting. It brought me down to earth.”

He was determined to emulate the style of his favorite old school Italian producers, from Barolo to Friuli, who made slow wines with long macerations—

but with no chemical intervention save for minimal sulfurs at the bottling stage. “Everyone thought I was crazy for wanting to make wine this way,” says Sampler, “but it was my calling. The sirens were hurtling me towards the rocks.” While the idea of natural winemaking is increasingly popular among makers and tasters today, the concept of making wine without a laundry list of additives was practically taboo in 2010, the year of Sampler’s first harvest. When the vintners and wine experts in Sampler’s periphery rebuffed his vision, he redoubled his commitment to natural winemaking as a form of artistic expression—and protest against the status quo.

Ultimately, he found a like-minded mentor: a Santa Barbara winemaker who showed him where to source the fruit and shared his own fermenters. The crush facility, where Sampler planned to process his wine, also doubted his non-interventionist philosophy, forcing him to sign a waiver stating that he would pay for the wine even if it tasted like vinegar. He managed to curry favor with the facility’s owner, a zany septuagenarian surfer, who ultimately gave him a key to the place. The first batch turned out exceptionally well.

The result of Sampler’s tireless, meticulous labor spoke for itself. When Sampler placed his first bottles at Spago in Beverly Hills, he realized that by wrangling an unconventional process, he had managed to touch something inside people. “The sommelier [at Spago] broke down in tears of joy in the middle of the tasting,” he recalls. For Sampler, the sommelier’s reaction— along with the art world’s embrace of his bright, funky wines—was proof that his protest was not in vain.

Countless tears, graveyard shifts, and sold-out vintages later, Sampler’s wines can be found in restaurants like Bell’s in Los Alamos, Otoko in Austin, Blue Hill at Stone Barns in New York, and all the best natural wine shops in-between. Sampler rarely leaves his studio during fermentation, tasting his wines constantly at each stage in his proprietary process. Thirteen years later, Sampler’s operation boasts three flagship lines—the Central Coast Group Project, L’Arge D’Oor, and Scotty Boy!—each with distinct personalities, but all the result of long maceration, skin fermentation, and conscientious objection.

“THE SOMMELIER AT SPAGO BROKE DOWN IN TEARS OF JOY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE TASTING.”

SEAWATER AND PSYCHEDELICS

THE DRIVE FROM ARTIST TARA WALTERS’S cornflower blue Malibu hideaway to the parking lot of her sunlit studio in the downtown Los Angeles Arts District takes 25 minutes, if you time it right. It takes closer to an hour and a half if you make an innocent stop at the Palisades Village Erewhon, which ends up being too crowded, so you console yourself with gluten-free, sugar-free brownies from Lauren Conrad’s favorite bakery down the street and then head back to Erewhon to validate your parking ticket with a single cucumber seltzer.

No matter how fast or slow you drive afterwards, the sloshing in the back seat is inevitable. It’s not the seltzer, but the sound of two tall plastic buckets filled with clear seawater Walters collected off the coast of Point Dume yesterday.

“Pretty good,” says Walters, as she stands in the middle of her industrial studio, evaluating the water’s transparency before snatching a still-wet painting as large as she is from the wall. In one fluid gesture, she lays the bowing stretcher gently on the floor and drowns it in a hefty pour of saltwater. There will be more waves to come before the painting is finished. I imagine an exhausted Mickey Mouse in the studio below, bailing out a rising sea like in Fantasia, but of course, in reality, the puddle will soon be dry. Tomorrow, after the water evaporates, only the tea leaves and trace minerals will remain: a shimmering film suspended in oil paint.

The process of marrying paint and sea is reminiscent of 1950s action painters like Helen Frankenthaler, but relatively new to Walters. It is the result of a series of epiphanies the 33-year-old artist had during graduate school at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, studying with professors like artist Laura Owens and critic Bruce Hainley. While the former remains a mentor, it is the latter whom Walters credits with pushing her to paint by putting the kibosh on a series of burned compositions on canvas she used to apply to school.

“Bruce said, ‘Stop painting with fire. LA has enough fires,’” recounts Walters with a laugh. “I would not be where I am today without him.”

Down a material crutch and overstocked on candles, Walters decided to lean into astrology and spiritualism to see if another door would open up. It was not the first time she had reinvented herself. As a teenager in Washington, D.C., she was a wild-horse breaker, ballet dancer, and choir girl, known among her teachers for her penchant for art. So when she injured her face playing softball in her backyard, a year in bed wasn’t an opportunity for rest and relaxation but a chance to shift directions. Walters eventually became a weekend ceramicist, a vocalist by the name of Faery Teeth, and a member of Lee Barron’s Cloud Club, the avant-garde Cambridge, Massachusetts–based artistic cooperative counting Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer as members. She also decided to return to both horses and school, landing at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where her teachers told her grad school was a necessary next step.

In the end, her many life experiences collided at a weeklong psychic retreat in Ojai. It was there that Walters found her new direction and began, as she calls it, “dropping in.” “I would just see all of these visions. A horizon. A boat in the mist. A moon. And then I would start painting them or write them down to paint later,” says the artist. She later adopted a surrealist technique that involved pressing a wet canvas face-down on the studio floor to see what pareidolia emerged from the debris.

Walters informally refers to this misty body of work as her “future-telling paintings.” That is what some of them have gone on to do. Before she found her bungalow tucked in a hidden lurch of Malibu coastline, she painted its view. A month before her beloved horse Cessna passed away, Walters put the finishing touches on her first official portrait, which doubled as an homage to a formative encounter with Laura Owens’s untitled horse painting from 2004. When Walters saw the work in the artist’s 2017 survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art, she took it as a sign she could be a painter too. “The freedom in her work gave me permission,” she says. “There weren’t a lot of other artists painting the subject matter she was and being taken seriously for it.”

Art history interests Walters, but it doesn’t subsume her. I’m the one who starts name-dropping to see what will happen. I open with Rose Wylie, Cecily

Tara Walters’s ethereal painting practice is informed by a fine blend of psychic retreats, seawater, and spiritualists.

This fall, the artist will travel to London for her solo presentation with Kristina Kite Gallery at Frieze Art Fair.

Brown, Florine Stettheimer, and Karen Kilimnik: chicks who love their horses, flip the canon upside down, and aren’t afraid to wash out. Walters concedes the point—“I love them”—and then counters with her hometown heroes: the Washington Color School. “I paint in stains,” she says. It’s true that Walters now builds all of her paintings layer by layer using a technique that recalls the saturated, unprimed canvases of Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, but she adds her own LA twist. Walters discovered the process by accident around the same time she learned to drop in. “I had this bucket of seawater hanging around the studio for a long time, and then one day in a fit of frustration with a painting, I dumped it all out. When I returned, my studio was covered in glitter,” recalls Walters. “I thought, This is insane. What is the ocean showing me? Then I started figuring out how to mimic that effect in the paintings. It evolved into this primal state where I was just staining and staining and staining and staining with water and paint.”

The first suite of these fortune-telling saltwater paintings comprised “Whispers,” Walters’s ArtCenter graduation show in 2020. The following year brought “Dropping In,” her well-reviewed debut at Kristina Kite Gallery, which featured hazy tableaux worthy of Lisa Frank: big bouquets, fairy-tale castles, and frisking dolphins. None of these figures made it to the edge of the frame, nor did any of Walters’s paint—instead, her images remain suspended inside the canvas like wavy portals to other dimensions. This has become a visual idiom for the artist and a gentle reminder that her images are of the mind and spirit rather than of the earth. In creating these gateways, Walters hopes to transport the viewer to other planes of consciousness. “I always like the part of the painting where it looks like it’s abstract and then it’s not,” says Walters. It’s these moments of misreading that make space for the doubt necessary to believe in something intangible. I’m not surprised to learn Walters identifies with spiritualist artist and medium Hilma af Klint, who loaded her canvases with cookie crumbs and keys to other dimensions. They share a belief in painting’s ability to deliver the viewer to the sublime.

By some fate of Walters-sized proportions, after spending the day shadowing her pilgrimage from sea to studio, we are reunited not a month later in another improbably surreal setting: Venice, Italy. Walters is making her international debut at Barbati Gallery with “Sailing to the Garden Party.” Later this fall, I’ll see her again in another port, London, for her solo presentation with Kristina Kite Gallery at the Frieze Art Fair. I don’t know if I’ll make it to Shanghai for her show at Antenna Space in May 2024, but if Walters sees it in one of her dreams, it might happen. At the moment, she is working on a door painting, adding a knob where there originally wasn’t a way to get in. What will happen when she opens it? Just beyond the threshold, I hear the waves of decision and coincidence crashing into one another like an ocean’s roar.

“I had this bucket of seawater hanging around the studio for a long time, and then one day in a fit of frustration with a painting, I dumped it all out.

When I returned, my studio was covered in glitter.”

THE TIMELESSNESS OF TØKIO M¥ERS

“INDUSTRIES LIKE TO PUT THINGS IN A BOX,” says TØKIO M¥ERS, with genuine bewilderment. The 39-year-old pianist, producer, arranger, and— according to an unexpected new collaborator—“musical alchemist” is sitting in his London home, having just received the masters for his upcoming solo piano album. He’s also putting the finishing touches on yet another full-length record of indefinable, intimate, arena-filling, hip hop–infused classical electronic music, and getting ready to drop a multimedia tribute to a mathematical concept and a watch. TØKIO M¥ERS will not be confined.

His senses won’t, either. “I have this thing called synesthesia,” says M¥ERS. It’s a sensory phenomenon in which a person’s perceptual pathways merge and interact. One might taste colors, perceive time as having a shape, or, in M¥ERS’ case, experience music visually. “I see sound with color,” he says. “I have from an early age, before I knew it had a name. I just knew I was hearing music and seeing specific colors.” He’s in good artistic company here: Painter David Hockney experiences synesthesia, as did Wassily Kandinsky, and writers Vladimir Nabokov and Arthur Rimbaud. In the world of music, a list of famous synesthetes is as scattered across the genre map as M¥ERS’ music: Franz Liszt, Dev Hynes, Billy Joel, Aphex Twin, and Andy Partridge of XTC (whose song “Senses Working Overtime” we can now understand on a new level). “[Synesthesia] helps me to write, to remember huge archives of songs, to get into the zone of playing and performing and arranging,” says M¥ERS. “It really is magic.”

M¥ERS’ writing process starts at the piano, the first instrument he picked up as a kid. But a London upbringing allowed him to add new colors to his sonic palette. “As I got older, I started to branch out and go to clubs and festivals, and I found myself being influenced by new cultures and sounds. I started to learn drums, synthesizers, and steel-pan percussion. But it all starts at the keyboard.” These days, the keyboard is nomadic. “You don’t have to be in a really expensive studio anymore. I travel a lot now, and I make sure to have my laptop, a hard drive, and a miniature keyboard. I can get the thoughts out in an instant. It’s a great time to be making music, because of that freedom.”

A mind that naturally combines sound, color, and shape can only be a benefit to M¥ERS’ latest assignment. In June, he’ll unveil “Timeless,” the first musical contribution to Jaeger-LeCoultre’s interdisciplinary Made of Makers program, in which the luxury watchmaker collaborates with artists and craftspeople to, as CEO Catherine Rénier says, “explore and extend the dialogue that exists between horology and art.”

“Timeless” is a tribute to the brand’s iconic Reverso watch. “We’ve created four chapters to represent the four sides of the watch. You’ll hear the chiming sounds of the actual timepieces falling onto the watch’s display in the manufacture,” explains M¥ERS. And since the ratio of the watch’s width to its length is 1.618—the “golden ratio,” a proportion found throughout natural and man-made forms, and in Rénier’s words, “a universal signifier of beauty”—the tempo of the piece is 161.8 beats per minute. “Timeless” will provide the soundtrack to Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Golden Ratio Musical Show, a video installation projected onto sheets of falling water, debuting in Los Angeles this summer. And just to add some color, the piece will be in the key of G minor, because, adds M¥ERS, “that’s the key where I see this golden ray of light.”

“Getting played on the radio is a challenge,” he admits. “Everything is in a box there. Are you classical, are you EDM, are you hip hop?” We’re speaking just days after the passing of another indefinable music legend last March. “Ryuichi Sakamoto really opened a door for people like me to push the limits. I can do shows with just a piano. I can do shows with piano and orchestra. I can create a set that’s chilled and relaxed, or I can get the party going like we did in Qatar in front of 40,000 people for the World Cup. I genuinely hope that there’s a kid watching what I do and seeing it in the same way.”

Who needs radio, anyway? How archaic. How pre–TØKIO M¥ERS. Music that isn’t bound by genre may be a challenge to market, but it stands a much higher chance of becoming timeless itself. M¥ERS’ 2017 debut album, Our Generation, combines classical piano with hip hop and EDM for a sonic experience detached from time or trend—tunes you could hear at a piano bar as easily as at the Electric Daisy Carnival. When I ask M¥ERS what’s musically timeless, his answer comes quickly: “Clair de Lune” by Claude Debussy. “I play it almost every day at the piano,” he says. “Last time I was in Paris shooting a video, I started to play it at the piano, and the video crew started whistling right away, from the first note to the very end.”

“I’m definitely choosing the hard road,” he says. “But when it pays, it really pays in terms of the magnitude of the connections.” Soon, M¥ERS will release Our Generation II (“The same kind of vibe, a whole montage of what I love.”), and the solo piano album for which he just received the masters. A tour is imminent, but there’s a lot of tech and lighting to work out. It all adds up to a sound and a career that’s easy to love when you stop trying to classify it. Just listen and let it diffuse through your senses.

The British musician and producer has a slate of collaborations and solo projects on the horizon, and they’re pulling him in new and exciting directions.

“I’m definitely choosing the hard road. But when it pays, it really pays.”

WELCOME TO THE BALMING TIGER UNIVERSE

AS K-POP SWEEPS THE GLOBE, BALMING TIGER—THE RISING SEOUL-BASED GROUP— IS ADDING NEW DIMENSIONS TO THE GENRE. LATER THIS YEAR, THE ALTERNATIVE K-POP GROUP WILL RELEASE THEIR FIRST FULLLENGTH STUDIO ALBUM, AN AMALGAMATION OF THE KALEIDOSCOPIC REFERENCES THAT INSPIRE THE BAND’S 11 MEMBERS.

“SOS,” a recent single by the Seoul-based band Balming Tiger, is an erratic heartbeat of a song. It opens with an electric riff, softens into bass-heavy grooves, then quickens, the vocals oscillating between whispery declarations of love, husky rap verses, and moans of despair. It’s dizzying—and dizzyingly catchy. In the accompanying video, five of the group’s 11-plus members wander through Hong Kong in a lightstreaked dream reminiscent of Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express. No two Balming Tiger songs are alike, and the combined effect renders their catalog startlingly distinct. “SOS” is palpably Balming Tiger: floating between languages, with each member given their chance to shine.

Already beloved names in Seoul’s art and independent music communities, the members of Balming Tiger—among them filmmakers, visual artists, writers, singers, and producers—cohered in 2018, finding cross-disciplinary synergy through music. The group recalls the moment they came together: “It was natural. It had to happen,” they say over email. “Making fun music while giggling, not worrying about what others think—that’s what Balming Tiger means to us.” They’re a multilingual “hip hop” group, to be sure, but playful enough that their sound feels limitless. Between their individual and collective projects, the group’s members are wildly prolific, with each project united by a sense of ecstatic experimentation.

The same year they became a group, Balming Tiger established a technicolor cosmos of visual art, short films, and a broad discography: the Balming Tiger universe. Several singles feature a corresponding cartoon—in the comic for “Kolo Kolo,” two anthropomorphic felines neutralize a demonic clown with a bowl of malatang —and most album covers double as standalone artworks. “In some cases, the music actually begins with visuals. It’s never just about supplementing the music,” says the group. In 2021, the collective debuted “The G.O.A.T.,” a YouTube series of cartoon shorts highlighting the work of Asian artists, including filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, sculptor Lee Bul, novelist Qiu Miaojin, and architect Wang Shu. “We wanted to feature great artists across genres—although not well-known worldwide,” they

say. (The group’s pan-Asian sensibility is reflected in its name, which is a play on Tiger Balm, the analgesic ointment originally developed in Myanmar.) Despite the buzz that surrounds them, Balming Tiger has yet to release a full-length studio album—their first, a culmination of the EPs, films, and comics that they’ve created over the last six years, will be released later this year.

Balming Tiger describes themselves as “an alternative K-pop group,” and the term is certainly fitting. Most listeners understand the world of K-pop as a subsection of pop music, with performers known as idols and a manufactured audio production process. But this definition belies the complex artistry of said icons, and the genre’s multidisciplinary depth. K-pop, in reality, is a cinematic universe that encompasses creative design, film, and a wealth of musical styles. “Our work is a mix of many genres—but it’s always K-pop, even if it’s unfamiliar,” says Balming Tiger. The group has always released their music independently, but they were catapulted into a new echelon, sharing a spotlight with the biggest band in the world, after “SEXY NUKIM,” their 2022 single featuring BTS’s Kim Nam-joon, aka RM. (The K-pop idol and burgeoning art collector is also a longtime Balming Tiger fan.)

In interviews, the group laughs often. At their shows, crowds inevitably form mosh pits. They poke fun at each other with the sweet humor and buzzy joy that comes from finding your people. “We are very lucky to be at the center of the culture while Korean content is becoming a global phenomenon,” says Balming Tiger. “At the same time, this is something that we, as a country, already have. We’ve consistently presented stories that we’re good at—the most Korean, the most personal. The same is true of Balming Tiger. Rather than assessing what the global trend is, we try to express something personal and essential.”

“OUR WORK IS A MIX OF MANY GENRES— BUT IT’S ALWAYS K-POP, EVEN IF IT’S UNFAMILIAR.”

YOUNG CURATORS 2023

THESE DAYS, anything from a sock drawer to a hotel minibar can be curated. Late-aughts lifestyle brands saw “curation” as a catchall for “in good taste,” but what those marketing geniuses didn’t grasp was the root of the practice. The verb “to curate” comes from the Latin curare, which means “to take care of.” This is what great curators do—attend to the world, and its political, aesthetic, social, spiritual, and physical realities—with great empathy. Sometimes this means mounting exhibitions. Sometimes this means seducing funders. Sometimes this means creating a space to utter out loud what we all need to hear. Curators play, at any given moment, the role of coach, administrator, figurehead, protector, heretic, writer, academic, installer, soothsayer, or friend. It is a critical, often thankless calling that requires a Renaissance man’s arsenal. The best curators have mastered these roles not only because they care, but because they have a unique vision to contribute. Curating is an active practice, and CULTURED’s eighth annual young curators list celebrates that sense of forward motion. These six practitioners span movements, mediums, and approaches to institutional and guerilla curation, but each is attentive and thoughtful in all that they do. In their own words, they reflect on the art of blazing new paths in a crowded field.

ASHTON COOPER

ASHTON COOPER ENTERED the art world as a journalist before deciding to enrich her practice with an institutional perspective. Now, the Hammer Museum fellow and art historian has a front-row curatorial seat for the shaping of the museum’s fall exhibition, “Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living.”

As the Hammer Museum’s current Luce Curatorial Fellow, you are immersed in one of the world’s greatest experimental and academic institutions. I remember one of the first shows you curated in 2016 at the Knockdown Center in Queens, a cultural venue also prized for risk-taking. “Read My Lips” was really important for me. It was

a two-person exhibition of paintings and sculptures by Loren Britton, as well as prints and video by Kerry Downey. In that show, I was really thinking through what it means to flirt with the refusal of visibility of queer and transgender artists, and how that translates to art projects. In conjunction with the exhibition, I staged a roundtable symposium on the notion of queer abstraction, which was emergent at the time. That transcript ended up being published in a scholarly journal and continues to circulate in new conversations.

The roundtable was recently quoted in a book called Trans Care [by Hil Malatino], published in 2020. The past 10 years or so have made it clear

that it’s not enough to bring under-recognized artists into institutional spaces. We need to rethink the ways that we describe and historicize their work. I’m really interested in how artists think about their own identifications in relation to their art-making practices, both historically and now.

You also have a writing practice. How does that inform your vision?

My first job after Barnard [College] was as an art journalist. I still write reviews for Artforum regularly. When I started, I was talking to artists constantly, and I began making connections across studio visits and across different practices. I decided to do my own shows to bring these artists and their ideas together. Since 2016, I’ve done nine shows in nonprofits and galleries. I realized I was interested in working institutionally to deepen my practice, so I started my PhD at the University of Southern California in 2018, which I’m finishing at the end of the year. I’ve specialized in modern and contemporary art, with a focus on queer, feminist, and anti-racist approaches to historical thinking.

Tell us about “Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living.” More than other U.S. biennials, it’s known for introducing and amplifying the most significant, emerging artists of the day.

I feel incredibly lucky to be working on “Made in L.A.” There are 39 artists in the show, and getting to know each one of them is such a pleasure. It’s been energizing to be welcomed into so many studios. Diana Nawi and Pablo José Ramírez have been amazing curatorial mentors. I am inspired by the energy that they bring to their work and their kindness. Diana and Pablo have conceived this incredible structure, where the show is organized in these constellations of loosely conceived genealogies of Los Angeles artists.

I wrote an essay for the catalog that focuses on one of those constellations. My approach to curating is guided by clear feminist politics. In the simplest sense, that means combating systems of exclusion and devoting attention to under-recognized artists. I’m interested in challenging and revising the dominant narratives about contemporary art that tend to exclude non-white methodologies and practices that exceed easy categorization.

STEPHANIE SEIDEL

IT’S NO SURPRISE THAT STEPHANIE SEIDEL’S work at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami has helped bring the international art world to the city. A thoroughly contemporary curator in all respects, Seidel unearths the understudied facets of every artist’s narrative, from emerging voices to household names.

You joined ICA Miami in the spring of 2016. What makes the museum a unique place to focus your curatorial practice?

Two things are unique and special to me about the ICA’s exhibition program. On one hand, it brings artists to a museum platform to exhibit their work for the first time, such as the shows I worked on for

Diamond Stingily or Tomm El-Saieh. The second thing is providing new insights into established artists’ work, whether less-known or understudied. When we showed him, Tomm El-Saieh was a super-established artist who wasn’t known in the United States much. The ICA Miami presents artists that you can’t find anywhere else in the U.S. and puts them on the map. Everybody knows Judy Chicago as the Dinner Party artist, for instance, but when we undertook the show “Judy Chicago: A Reckoning,” that I co-curated [in 2018–19], we exhibited many other works. We showed super-minimal early sculptures and superfigurative ’80s paintings to create different narratives and went into depth on the artist’s practice. Recently, I organized “Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight,” a survey that brought lesser-known installations to life that hadn’t been seen for 30 years. The show has toured to the Frac Lorraine in Metz, France, and to Kunstmuseum Luzern in Switzerland.

How do the exhibitions you organize influence the museum as an institution?

What’s most important to me and to the museum is creating scholarship around our programs through lectures, talks, and seminars. Every large show has an exhibition catalog. Personally, as a curator, it’s important to shape narratives that have not been told loudly enough.

Miami also provides a singular context for art viewing.

It’s a very dynamic city that’s unique for the influence of the Caribbean diaspora. In many ways, it’s the crossroads between North America, South America, and the Caribbean.

What’s next?

I’m currently working on a presentation for the artist Tau Lewis—who is going to win the Ezratti Family Prize for Sculpture, awarded by the ICA Miami to a living artist—with a newly commissioned groundfloor installation. I’m also working on a show for Zilia Sánchez, a Cuban artist based in Puerto Rico, which opens next year. I’m interested in historical and contemporary forms of feminism—not as applied to female artists, but rather a way of approaching things and unearthing narratives that lie outside of the mainstream.

BERNARDO MOSQUEIRA

AS A CURATOR dedicated to Latinx art, Bernardo Mosqueira helped solidify Rio de Janeiro’s significant international contemporary art scene. Now, he’s set his sights on reframing the curatorial conversation in New York.

You are the inaugural ISLAA Curatorial Fellow at the New Museum, in partnership with the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, which supports emerging curators dedicated to Latin American and Latinx art. How would you describe your journey there?

I was only 21 years old when I curated my first show. Since then, I’ve been working at different institutions. I was part of the curatorial team of Galeria de Arte Ibeu for five years, which is a very experimental and important institution in Rio. In 2015, I started developing Solar dos Abacaxis [as an artistic developer], a project that started literally from zero and now is the most active and important nonprofit art space in Rio. At Solar, we did almost 50 shows in the past eight years. In 2019, I decided to do a master’s at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. I moved straight from Rio to upstate New York, which was

a very radical decision. After two years there, I moved to New York City, and started working at the New Museum a month later. Over the past two years, I’ve helped curate seven or eight projects there. It’s been a very prolific period at the institution.

What is the overarching theme of your curatorial practice?

I’ve been working a lot to build bridges between Brazil and all of the territories in the Global South. I work with a lot of artists from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, which is actually very hard to do. There aren’t many institutions in Brazil showing contemporary art from these regions. Now that I’ve moved to New York, it’s been very important for me to try to change the way that artists from the Global South are portrayed and categorized. I’m trying to identify the different forms of violence that artists from the Global South have to endure in order to leave, to work, and to show here.

Can you describe a recent show that embodies this ethos?

One was a 2022 group show that I co-curated with Mariano López Seoane at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art called “Eros Rising: Visions of the Erotic in Latin American Art,” in which we selected works from ISLAA’s gigantic collection of Latin American art, from the 1950s until now. We also commissioned a whole new group of acquisitions to the collection that were all made in the last several years. We had some very important names for Latin American art history, such as Artur Barrio, David Lamelas, and Feliciano Centurión. We added very radical artists too: Wynnie Mynerva from Peru, La Chola Poblete from Argentina, and Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro from Brazil. It was unique, trying to reshape the most conventional narrative about Latin American art.

Another one was Daniel Lie’s “Unnamed Entities,” [2022], at the New Museum, the artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States. It was a big installation, made with natural materials. There were plants sprouting and rotting, mushrooms growing and decaying; the smells, the color, and the shapes were constantly changing. It was strange and spiritually powerful: How can we think about life and death in nonbinary ways?

ZOE LUKOV

INDEPENDENT CURATOR ZOE LUKOV reinvents the rules with her nonprofit Art in Common, bringing contemporary artists to audiences well beyond the white cube. Based in Malibu, Lukov is no stranger to the curatorial echelons of biennials and art museums—but now, her goal is to situate art in public life.

Your career trajectory includes researching dance in Colombia on a Fulbright fellowship, working at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and assisting artistic director Franklin Sirmans ahead of the Prospect New Orleans triennial’s third edition, before eventually becoming chief curator at Faena Art in Miami.

When I got hired by MOCA, Jeffrey Deitch was there. He ended up being my master’s program in understanding how to put exhibitions together, how to add to the canon of art history, and how to oppose it. My mom was also an art historian. She took me to openings and exhibitions, and art was a natural part of my life growing up. My curatorial practice definitely stems from a focus on the body, and I think that generally, when I curate, there’s a focus on performance. But when there isn’t performance, there’s a lot of work that has to do with the body.

Your 2021 exhibition “Skin in the Game,” which debuted during Miami Art Week and went on to Chicago the following year, comes to mind. That show dealt with our skin and how things are transmitted and perceived through the body. That was an important show to me. We were in the pandemic, and I was finding footing outside of an institution, trying out this new idea— Okay, I can do these kinds of feral exhibitions that exist in unlikely places. This trajectory has not just been about creating new spaces for art, but allowing people to feel connected to art who might not otherwise. I’m trying to encourage people to see art as a basic human right. Art is the way we tell our stories. We can all understand it, even though there are barriers to entry.

Tell me about Art in Common, the nonprofit you founded.

I partnered with cultural producer Abby Pucker to bring “Skin in the Game” to Chicago, to create a roving exhibition model that responds to each city it’s in: commissioning new work from local artists, and placing it in context with more canonical works or more historic, established artists. The model that Art in Common follows is that all exhibitions are free and open to the public. They’re not in a gallery or museum. You don’t necessarily know how you’re supposed to engage with the work when you enter, so it allows for a more immediate access point. There’s music. There’s a party. It’s this other experience of what contemporary art can be or how to create dialogues within these spaces.

JORDAN CARTER

JORDAN CARTER arrived at the Dia Art Foundation, a site-specific earth-art mecca, by way of the Art Institute of Chicago—with a passion for Fluxus and a long-standing reverence for artistic intentionality.

You’re a Dia Art Foundation curator with a specialization in Fluxus and global conceptual art of the 1960s and ’70s. Did you have an aha moment about the avant-garde artistic movement? When did you realize it was your life-long curatorial mission? I got my undergraduate degree at Brown University, where I was introduced to the notion of curatorial practice. I took a senior seminar in the Department of Modern Culture and Media about object theory, which looked at non-object art, how objects gain cultural value, and how they become contextualized in museum collections. After that, I did several internships—first at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and later at the Studio Museum in Harlem, which was very informative for me. My pivotal moment was during a year-long internship at the Museum of Modern Art, where I worked specifically in the Fluxus collection. I learned about Fluxus at Brown, so I hit the ground running at MoMA—unpacking it physically and conceptually—working on a collection exhibition which showed in 2013 and 2014, called “There Will Never Be Silence: Scoring John Cage’s 4’33”.”

After four years at the Art Institute of Chicago, you transitioned just over a year ago to Dia. The nature of the work that I do is that you need to see it in person. After a lot of pandemic setbacks, I finally opened the first U.S. solo exhibition of artist Stanley Brouwn at the Art Institute of Chicago this spring, with a concurrent, distinct, and complementary presentation of Brouwn’s work at Dia Beacon. Many people in the United States are unfamiliar with Brouwn, who is powerful, elusive, and very intentional around the conditions of his work— he did not allow any interpretation, reproduction, or photography of it. He disavows the notion of biography and bibliography as mediating factors in the experience of artwork. The Art Institute has a full range of his object-based practice, and I was able to complement that experience with two rooms of “site-responsive” works at Dia Beacon. I’m excited to have these exhibitions on view at both locations.

What is a curatorial issue that you’re preoccupied with at the moment?

After the Stanley Brouwn exhibition, one thing has me thinking: We talk so much—in curatorial practice, in the academy, and in dialogue with artists—about notions of refusal. But what does it mean to refuse?

What does it mean to withdraw? How can an artist’s legacy persist into the future if there’s no scholarship around it? Sometimes the most rigorous thing is to do nothing at all. My co-curator Ann Goldstein and I did our very best to realize something that would not compromise Brouwn’s intentions. Of course, it would have been fantastic to write a book, but I’ve been asking myself, What does it really mean to host refusal and honor an artist’s intentions?

KAREN VAN GODTSENHOVEN

FROM HER PERCHES at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute and Ghent University’s art history department, Karen Van Godtsenhoven has taken feminist theory and design to new heights. Now a freelance curator, Van Godtsenhoven embraces the interdisciplinary art of fashion curation, one garment at a time.

During Covid, you left your associate curator role at the Met and moved to Antwerp with your husband, while expecting your first child. What’s it like to curate for the Met remotely?

It’s a new world. I couldn’t have imagined before that I’d be able to work on such intense projects from abroad. With regards to my personal life, I’m very grateful that this worked out, but I do miss the photo shoots at the museum.

Describe some of your recent curatorial projects in New York.

In fall 2019, the Met’s “Camp: Notes on Fashion” drew [over] 250 objects from the 17th century to the present. Susan Sontag’s essay “Notes on ‘Camp’” provided the framework for the exhibition,

and we organized a lot of outdoor activities with the drag and LGBTQ+ community. After that, I worked on the museum’s kimono show during the pandemic [“Kimono Style: The John C. Weber Collection”], which had a more serene vibe. As a fashion curator, I’m free to mix media. We had kimonos and Western costumes, but also a lot of magazines, hair accessories, and fashion books from Japan. At the Met, there are 18 departments to draw from. Because it’s an encyclopedic museum, you learn from people from all these other disciplines. I’m not stuck in a fashion bubble.

How has fashion evolved as a medium?

Fashion enjoys a lot of cross-pollination—maybe because as fashion curators, we’re used to being sort of in the “lower arts.” We’re not old master paintings. But much has changed over the last decade because of big shows at the Met, like “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty,” which illustrate that fashion has become more serious and has to fight less to earn a place in museums.

You’re currently finishing your PhD in fashion theory at Ghent University, where you studied literature and gender studies as an undergraduate. What’s different 20 years later?

When I was here [as an undergraduate], there were no fashion studies. It wasn’t an academic field. Now, fashion studies are very popular—there aren’t enough professors. I’m pursuing a PhD in design poetics, which looks at feminist theory and how it connects to the work of female designers from the 1960s to today. This new generation of students makes their own shows in the metaverse. They’re teaching us, too.

LITTLE STUDIO OF HORRORS

ARTIST JAVIER BARRIOS’S PRACTICE IS ROOTED IN THE WORK THAT SURROUNDED HIM IN CHILDHOOD—THAT OF MEXICAN MURALIST JOSÉ CLEMENTE OROZCO AND THE DRAWINGS HE AND HIS BROTHER SCRAWLED ON THE MANILA PAPER–LINED WALLS OF THEIR MOTHER’S HOME. THIS FALL, THE ARTIST WILL BRING HIS EERIE, FECUND WORKS TO BRUSSELS FOR HIS FIRST SOLO SHOW WITH CLEARING.

JAVIER BARRIOS DOESN’T KNOW HOW OLD he was when he first stared up at José Clemente Orozco’s menacing murals at the Hospicio Cabañas in Guadalajara. The vaulted hellscape lives rent-free in the artist’s psyche anyway. As a child, he and his siblings would dodge scorching squares of sun as they ran along the porticos downtown before seeking reprieve in the cold, domed chapel where, in the 1930s, the Mexican muralist realized 57 separate vignettes across the ceiling. A Gesamtkunstwerk embedded with veiled allegories from Mexico’s history, Orozco’s murals depict a violent world on the verge of collapse, a place where peaks of sailing ships are almost indistinguishable from the furious seas that whip them: a kingdom made of line and flame.

On a hot fall day, I strained my neck to examine Man of Fire, the central panel in Orozco’s riddled composition, in which a man appears to be either slipping into a fiery abyss or summoning it to life. Nearby, images of landscape and pain mingle: Severed torsos could be confused with rocks, and buildings cringe in agony. If you know Barrios’s botanical drawings of ferociously faced orchids and petal-ringed skulls, it is easy to see why the Mexico City–based artist calls Orozco his compass. “He’s one of those artists that every time I feel lost, I look at the work and I’m like, Okay, maybe this way,” says Barrios. Part of what makes Orozco Barrios’s patron saint is the career he cut as both an insider and an outsider. Like his peers Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, Orozco was employed by the Mexican government, but he wasn’t very successful at bolstering its reputation—he was too busy being a genre-defining visionary.

More than his contemporaries, Orozco commandeered the mural as a form that could handle the kind of gray area not typically afforded by politics. Orozco’s grotesque hybrids—knights riding horses with two heads or mechanical haunches—embody both humor and despair. Barrios displays a similar passion for loaded ambiguities. His drawings of hybrid flower monsters, in their John James Audubon specificity and Hayao Miyazaki ingenuity, scare up images of colonial looting and cultural extraction without ever referencing them by name. Beautiful ends cannot be separated from their violent means.

Barrios looks to visual culture where beauty and death’s codependency is emphasized. The artist has an affection for Sunday cartoon strips, where characters infinitely die and respawn. He is a lover of Jigoku Zoshi, the 12th-century Buddhist hell scrolls, and the fiery, grinning demons they depict. He playfully connects the language of Japanese anime to that of Mexican artists like Orozco. “They both put strong, unlike images together but in a very funny way that reinforces both. I admire work that can do multiple things at once,” says Barrios. “People assume illustrations of hell are disconnected from botany, but I can see there are some things that they could teach each other.”

I first encountered Barrios’s work at the Drawing Center in New York. A cluster of his yellow paper monsters were the standout for me in a yeartopping 2022 group show organized by the Walker Art Center’s curator of visual arts, Rosario Güiraldes, titled “Drawing in the Continuous Present.” The exhibition addressed the bifurcated thinking on what makes a drawing a drawing, manifested by two seminal exhibitions: Connie Butler’s 1999 survey “Afterimage: Drawing Through Process,” at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and artist Laura Hoptman’s “Drawing Now: Eight Propositions,” which she guest-curated at the Museum of Modern Art in 2002. Güiraldes digested both schools of thought—drawing as a verb and a noun—and proposed her own “both/and” synthesis: Drawing is neither a process nor a product, but a multifaceted tool for fantasizing,

translating, and spiritualizing. In Barrios’s furious and loose images of Frankenstein flowers on his signature manila paper, Güiraldes found an expression of her argument. “Drawing is beyond art. It is language,” Barrios tells me.

We are sitting in the living room of his Condesa apartment in Mexico City; its casual magnificence would make any digital nomad blush. Every available surface is adorned with either life or art. Cartoons and books on ancient civilization are stacked so high that they are indecipherable from the furniture. Sheets of paper are everywhere, and Barrios is the weight holding it all down. He milks a pause and then says, “Of course, I love art. I love art-making. I love being an artist … but drawing came before, and it’s going to be there after. If art ends in the future, drawing will survive.” Drawing as a survival strategy is something that traces back to Barrios’s earliest days. His mother used to line the walls of their home with manila paper so that instead of scolding her children for making a mess, they could make the world their own. A few years later, Barrios’s mother signed him up for Sunday afternoon art classes. The other students were adults; he was 14. It was in this senior citizen painter’s circle that Barrios found his first mentors, people who spoke his language.

How many sheets of paper have drifted through Barrios’s life? It would need to be weighed in tons. He used to buy it by the kilo. One day, when he ran out of white paper for class, he grabbed some of the manila paper his mother still had handy. He found in its yellowness an old friend; it would become a key part of his practice. “In school, my teachers used to tell me that it wasn’t a good idea to make art from this naive attitude of creativity and that I had to study,” says Barrios. “I still research, but I’m trying to not talk too much about it.” His books nod in silent reply. A departure from the chokehold that conceptualists like Gabriel Orozco and Abraham Cruzvillegas had on the 1990s Mexican scene, Barrios’s drawing for drawing’s sake is almost heretic. “Sometimes I even felt selfish about still working with [the orchids] because it’s so satisfying that I even feel I’m being lazy not trying different things,” he admits.

The truth is that Barrios has already exhausted other avenues, and his house is full of proof. He makes zines, sculptures, drawings, and paintings, which all coalesce in the jungle he shares with his anthropologist partner, Montserrat Pérez Castro. My favorite detail of the place is the halo of orchids that rings Barrios’s studio across the breezeway from his kitchen. Mug in hand, he opens the door and we look at a work in progress pinned to the wall like a butterfly. The little, verdant office reminds me of Invernadero, 2022, Barrios’s greenhouse sculpture that went on view across town last fall at his Mexico City gallery, Pequod Co. The uncomfortably large dollhouse operates like a lightbox, transforming his sinister watercolors into a Josef Frank–like paper lantern.

Barrios points to one of the razor-faced blossoms in front of us and cracks a textbook on pre-Columbian art. Lately, his attention has landed on sacrificial obsidian knives produced in central Mexico in the 14th and 15th centuries. “These knives show the profile of a face with eyes and teeth,” explains Barrios. “Teeth were related with fertility and seeds, and so the act of cutting the chest with the tooth side of the knife was also interpreted as a type of planting. The act of taking life was the same motion as creating it.” These fecund weapons are the driving force behind Barrios’s first solo show with Clearing, which opens in Brussels in September. The beginnings of the exhibition are just starting to sprout, with Barrios tending them like a careful gardener. Each one is an evolving affirmation of life, happily licking death in the face.

ASSUME ILLUSTRATIONS OF HELL ARE DISCONNECTED FROM BOTANY,

“PEOPLE

BUT I CAN SEE THERE ARE SOME THINGS THAT THEY COULD TEACH EACH OTHER.”

STANDING ON THE CORNER

This summer, Gio Escobar—the heart of the post-genre music collective known as Standing on the Corner—will present an avant-garde sonic installation at MoMA PS1 that blends the group’s New York roots with their ancestral ties to Puerto Rico and the African continent.

“LET’S HIT THE STREETS,” says Gio Escobar, the enigmatic frontman of the music collective Standing on the Corner. It is a warm day, past 70 degrees, and he suggests that we take a walk outside his pop-up acupuncture center in the East Village, the Taíno Needle Science Institute, currently operating out of Performance Space New York. He lives in Crown Heights, the neighborhood that raised him, but the acupuncture center—smack-dab in the middle of downtown Manhattan—is where he spends his days.

It makes sense that Escobar, a musician whose power stems from his ability to combine the sounds of the African diaspora into singular musical pieces, is enamored with an integrative medicine practice that has been around since the Ming Dynasty. It seems to have brought tranquility to a number of Black activists of the past. “I recommend trying it,” he tells me, but I’m an acupuncture virgin. This is my first time even seeing a clinic.

Escobar fell in love with it after learning that George Jackson and Mutulu Shakur, two of his revolutionary idols, practiced acupuncture. “Their unbreakable love for their people inspired me. I feel indebted to them to do my part for my community, to help my brothers and sisters,” says Escobar. The idea to open the acupuncture space, which will be accessible to the public through June, materialized after several failed attempts to lead music workshops at Rikers Island, the infamous New York prison complex. “It is important to fight for every single person,” he says. “I am an artist, and I have several ways to use those tools. Acupuncture is one of those ways.”

My anxiety around our meeting is about more than just needles. For those at the creative heart of alternative music, Standing on the Corner—a loose group of musicians that orbit around Escobar—is known for making some of the most compelling, genre-irreverent music of our moment. Escobar formed Standing on the Corner in 2016, and took its name from Children of the Corn, the notorious Harlem supergroup formed of rappers Big L, Killa Kam, Bloodshed, Herb McGruff, and Murda Mase. “They were

style-forward cats. It was the outfits and the fashion when it came to those guys, for me,” says Escobar as we walk down the block, cigarettes in hand. Everything seems to go right when two native New Yorkers are together.

Before we left the acupuncture center, Escobar showed me the piano that sits in the space. In a few weeks, it will be transported to MoMA PS1 in Queens for the opening of “Seven Prepared Pianos for the Seven African Powers,” a durational, sonic multimedia installation that nods to the African sensibilities that surround Standing on the Corner’s music. The centerpiece is a large installation that brings together spiritual aesthetics and specialized instruments. It is made of seven custom-built pianos, and Escobar’s composition will be played on all of them. Cameras will be installed in each instrument and projected onto a large screen, allowing viewers to experience its complexity in real time.

“Think of it as a carousel,” he tells me with excitement. “Not because it’s turning, but because there are so many elements in this piece. Each stage houses its own piano.” The composition, titled “Bembé Secreto”— or “secret party”—is half music, half historical practice, connecting the sounds of Standing on the Corner to the diasporic African and Puerto Rican communities that Escobar hails from.

As a New York collective, Standing on the Corner’s music is eclectic— eclectically Black. Their music is free-form and jazz-leaning, fueled by manipulated vocals and fearless improvisation. Each album draws from a disparate mix of genres: funk, hip hop, soul, jazz, indie rock. But above all, the music is refreshingly unprescribed and experimental: “Anything I put out in the world is never intended to be different,” says Escobar. “I just want to figure out the best way to express A-B-C.”

But Escobar’s music is different—fearlessly political, reflecting the scope of African music both traditional and contemporary, and resisting industry-imposed constraints. “Side X,” the opening track off the group’s

2017 album, Red Burns, opens with a piercing, weary line about the murder of Eric Garner at the hands of the NYPD: “The inability to breathe is what this album is about.” Compared to more self-righteous, hectoring groups like Public Enemy or Black Star, Standing on the Corner presents an alternative approach to weaving activism into music: They’re genuine progressives, in touch with dialogues around gender, sexuality, and policing.

In many ways, we are where we’re from—and Escobar’s neighborhood has given him a lot to work with. As a kid, he lived in Williamsburg and Crown Heights, but made his bones in the latter neighborhood, where he felt at home among the African American population. He grew up on a steady diet of G-Unit and the Diplomats; some of their style and swagger injected itself directly into the soul of an artistically inclined young man. As a result, Escobar and his collaborators reflect the multiculturalism of their home city—he is Puerto Rican, multi-instrumentalist Nate Cox and drummer Savannah Harris are Black, former member and saxophone player Caleb Giles is also Black—and the neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Harlem where communities of color melded together harmoniously before the Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams eras, and before the influx of white renters and classist transplants uprooted them.

Rather than conform to the demands of a Eurocentric musical canon that has become the industry standard, Escobar focuses his efforts on eroding the barriers that divide the world music genres that surround him— because pop is not the stuff he grew up with, and because there comes a time for every artist of color when they reach their limit for stomaching the whistling whiteness of a media machine dead set on planting its flag on Black and Brown people.

“No disrespect to anyone who makes that music,” he says, “But I choose to only discuss the canon that I grew up with in my community: the African canon.” When I ask Escobar how it felt to see the number of Puerto Rican and Black people in Crown Heights dwindle as he got older, he appears more reserved. “I sometimes think gentrification is almost cliché,” says Escobar. “Everything has a reaction. When things get bad, that can create something new and creative. We’ve got to make our micro-communities.”

Escobar is ready to perform in a white cube setting in the city that he grew up in; it would be any New York kid’s dream to play in the same borough that raised the likes of Nas and Prodigy. But for Escobar, this sense of local pride is also a global one: Moving through Brooklyn’s pockets of Caribbeans and Puerto Ricans often feels, to Escobar, like taking a trip to the homeland. The chaotic harmony of these places—their bodegas and street corners—is what consumes and fuels his work, but don’t expect him to sell you on it. “I’m not presenting this to anyone,” he asserts. “If you know, you know.”

“Anything I put out in the world is never intended to be different. I just want to figure out the best way to express A-B-C.”

June 22–October 22, 2023

Nairy Baghramian:

Jupon de Corps

Aspen Art Museum

637 East Hyman Avenue, Aspen, CO 81611 aspenartmuseum.org | 970.925.8050

Hours: 10 AM–6 PM, Closed Mondays

Admission to the AAM is free courtesy of Amy and John Phelan

AAM exhibitions are made possible by the Marx Exhibition Fund. General exhibition support is provided by the Toby Devan Lewis Visiting Artist Fund. Additional support is provided by the AAM National Council.

fernandowongold.com

SHYGIRL’S FANTASYLAND

BRONTEZ PURNELL AND STEVE LACY ON CHURCH CHOIRS AND CLUB RECORDS

MARTINE SYMS AND BEN BABBITT ON CELLISTS AND HYPNOTISTS

3 RECORDS THAT CHANGED HANIF ABDURRAQIB’S LIFE

THE MAN WHO TURNED BLONDIE’S HAIR BLACK

INTO THE WILD

EVERYONE HAS QUESTIONS FOR CHRISTINE AND THE QUEENS

COLLECTOR BILLIE MILAM

WEISMAN AND ARTIST LARRY BELL ON THE LOS ANGELES ART SCENE OF THE 1960S

THINKING WITH YOUR HANDS

OBJECTS OF AFFECTION

6.21.2023

SHYGIRL’S FANTASYLAND

PHOTOGRAPHY BY RACHEL FLEMINGER HUDSON

STYLING BY NELL KALONJI

CREATIVE DIRECTION BY STUDIO&

SHYGIRL IS FORMING HER OWN SULTRY, SILKY BRAND OF EXPERIMENTAL POP. THE 30-YEAR-OLD LONDONER RELEASED HER DEBUT ALBUM, NYMPH, JUST A YEAR AGO, BUT IN THAT SHORT TIME HAS BECOME A BONA FIDE ARTIST’S ARTIST—A STALWART, SELF-GUIDED WORLD-BUILDER WHO ESCHEWS CATEGORIZATION IN HER WORK AND PERSONA ALIKE, EARNING NODS FROM THE LIKES OF RIHANNA AND ARCA. BUT SHYGIRL WAS A FINE ART PHOTOGRAPHER FIRST, STUDYING THE MEDIUM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL BEFORE TURNING HER FOCUS TO MUSIC. THIS SPRING, SHE RELEASED NYMPH_O, THE DELUXE EDITION OF HER DEBUT, FEATURING POP ICONOCLASTS TINASHE, SEVDALIZA, DETO BLACK, AND ERIKA DE CASIER, ALONG WITH A CLUTCH OF INSPIRED REMIXES BY DISRUPTIVE SIRENS LIKE BJÖRK AND EARTHEATER. WITH NYMPH_O, SHYGIRL SHOWS US THAT REINVENTION IS HER RESTING STATE. HERE, SHE SPEAKS WITH THE PLAYWRIGHT, CULTURAL CRITIC, AND ACTOR JEREMY O. HARRIS, FRESH OFF OF THE RED CARPET AT CANNES, ABOUT TUMBLR, LOSING FANS, AND EMBRACING VULNERABILITY.

JEREMY O. HARRIS: I met you through your music. You worked with SOPHIE, who dated a friend of mine. We also shared a hair stylist, Latisha [Chong]. I was excited that I had a crumb of a connection to you. When I met you in real life, it was like meeting a character you’d read about and fallen in love with deeply.

SHYGIRL: Latisha told me, “You and Jeremy need to link.” I was aware of you, but when someone tells me that someone else likes me—especially when that person provokes a public response—I’m like, “You have my full attention.” I’m conceited in that way. When I learned more about you, I was like, “This person is on my frequency.”

HARRIS: What does that frequency look like to you?

SHYGIRL: There’s a curiosity in our work, a capriciousness in how we approach things. You used to post these videos—collages almost—that give new context to things we take for granted. That’s how I see what I do. It’s like, Here’s something you think you’re familiar with—think again

HARRIS: Did that come from your upbringing?

SHYGIRL: I grew up in Southeast London, but I wanted to get out. Some people are content with where they are—some never are. I know social

media is a boring topic now, but I’m so into how we use it as a tool. I found my old Tumblr the other day. It was funny to see what I wrote when I was still living back home with my parents, wondering what the world was like.

HARRIS: I’m making a documentary right now, and I talk about how Tumblr inspired my curiosities. Tumblr kids are the most interesting people. The same is true of TikTok, which is similar in its ability to throw something your way that you had no idea about.

SHYGIRL: I look back at some of my early artwork and photography, and it’s obvious that I was very much in my Tumblr phase. But it’s good to find inspiration outside of the Internet. Now I’m making things on a bigger scale, so I have to ask myself, What inspires me when I’m not being fed things?

HARRIS: Totally. Those spaces allowed me a degree of anonymity from being read by identity markers—like the fact that I was so obviously gay, or the fact that I was Black, or even the fact that I was poor. I curated my Tumblr so that I could be anyone. Was your personhood shaped in a positive way by that anonymity?

SHYGIRL: I did not speak to anyone in my real life about my Tumblr. I had a whole other life where I could reshape myself in a way that I can’t now,

because I’m more visible. If I were to say, “What is Shygirl to you?” you’d have an idea. I try to reinvent that idea every time I make new work to give to people, and it’s hard.

HARRIS: That’s another thing that draws me to your music. That fantasy life, that idea that when you give the world your work, it’s no longer you doing it—it’s your avatar, it’s Shygirl. That avatar could be anything, and you can project whatever you want onto it. It feels queer to me in a way.

SHYGIRL: I’ve never really spoken about my queer identity. My music and the visual landscape that I created speak for me, you know? I like that I’ve accurately represented myself in my work without having to explain too much. For me, art should be left for the audience to engage with—and I put my body, my whole being into it. I’ve let myself be interpreted as the audience decides.

HARRIS: There’s been an erosion of cultural literacy around what art-making is and how art functions. People like you resist that deeply because, when you have a visual art practice, you don’t necessarily feel the need to talk much. The work is somehow a portrait. Is your relationship to explaining your art shaped by being a fine artist?

SHYGIRL: Definitely. That’s why I’m drawn to people that move things forward and are inspired

by what came before. That’s why I’m drawn to you—the language you use inspires me. I don’t want to be in a bubble on my own, I want to be cross-pollinating.

HARRIS: I love it. What’s next for you, Shy?

SHYGIRL: I was really fulfilled by my first album, and learned a lot about electronic music and my own taste. Now in the studio, I strip things back to focus on my songwriting. I’m incredibly happy now, but when I first started making music I really wasn’t. That was a journey in itself. The thing is, everyone will get to know me better as I get to know myself. I definitely plan to be in people’s faces forever; I’ve decided that. I enjoy the platform I have and the pressure it gives me.

HARRIS: You know when you read a magazine, and one quote is really big because it’s like the bomb quote of the interview? You just gave CULTURED seven of them. Are you hyper-aware of what you say, or do amazing bon mots just fall out?

SHYGIRL: They just fall out. But I enjoy words and I definitely know which ones to pick. I’m good at writing hooks, but we already know that.

HARRIS: Do you have a practice right now? I’ve been trying to process the fact that my job has become less interesting to me. Before, I wrote plays secretly. Now, I’m like a famous writer, so

WAS FUNNY TO FIND THE THINGS

I can’t just go do other things, because I pay my bills by writing plays. The minute playwriting became a job, it became boring. I think it’s partly because I never had a practice where I wake up every morning and write. I’ve just started doing that, and now I like writing in a new way.

SHYGIRL: I start every song by finding that phrase that makes me say, Where the fuck am I taking this? That’s what I’ve been trying to do in the studio recently by taking away the direction and not knowing for sure if I’m making a dance record. That leaves me vulnerable, because I’ve built a fan base through alternative electronic music. It’s harder, at this stage, to give an audience a different sound and expect them to stay with you. I’m still in my introductory phase, even if there is some notoriety.

HARRIS: Do you worry about losing people?

SHYGIRL: I might lose them, and I need to be okay with that. In the end, I’m the only one who needs to stay onboard. As long as I’m engaged, there is more to come.

HARRIS: In theater, there’s this idea of the “emerging playwright” and the “established playwright.” There are emerging playwrights who’ve been writing plays much longer than I have, but because I’ve been to Broadway, I’m no

longer allowed that title. But I still need to believe that I’m an emerging playwright, right? If I don’t remember that my voice is still growing, I’m going to plateau.

SHYGIRL: You almost have to split yourself in two. There’s the side of you that’s aware of how people see you, and the side that you keep naive. The latter is the artistic one that sees things brandnew every day.

HARRIS: How do you keep that side protected?

SHYGIRL: I change my environment a lot. I say yes to things that make me nervous. I articulate my feelings to those around me. Recently, I stopped partying so much. I didn’t have an issue, I just thought, Let me see what this makes room for.

HARRIS: What has that felt like?

SHYGIRL: Things fall into place when you let them. I was on tour when I made that decision, and fell completely into the bubble of a relationship. I was never the type of person to dive in like that—I was into my autonomy. It turned my ideas about myself upside-down. I turned 30 this month, so I’m having my whole mid-life situation, but I’m also able to make braver creative decisions because of the work I’ve done and its reception. I’m so grateful to my audience for that, but I hope they trust me with whatever I choose next.

“IT

I WROTE WHEN I WAS STILL LIVING BACK HOME WITH MY PARENTS, WONDERING WHAT THE WORLD WAS LIKE.” –SHYGIRL

AHEAD OF THE RELEASE OF HIS NEW RECORD, NO JACK SWING, AND THE OPENING OF HIS DEBUT SOLO SHOW, “ANTI-ALTER EGO,” AT NEW YORK’S TROTTER&SHOLER GALLERY THIS SUMMER, BRONTEZ PURNELL DM’ED HIS FRIEND, MUSICIAN STEVE LACY, FOR A CONVERSATION ABOUT GATEKEEPING, WITCHCRAFT, AND BEING THE LOUDEST ONE IN THE ROOM.

BRONTEZ PURNELL AND STEVE LACY ON CHURCH CHOIRS AND CLUB RECORDS

“IT IS A PRIVILEGE TO BE ABLE TO EXPERIMENT,” says Brontez Purnell. In all that he does, the Oakland-based punk provocateur is animated by a sense of play. Purnell moves promiscuously among the disciplines of filmmaking, dance, writing, music, and performance art (he also plays with the East Bay punk band Gravy Train!!!!).

The 40-year-old artist’s work is exciting partly because he is not afraid to go there. His writing is filled with humor and longing, bursting with urgent commentary on queer social, sexual, and romantic life. Winner of the 2018 Whiting Award for Fiction and the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Fiction, he is the author of The Cruising Diaries (2014), Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger (2015), Since I Laid My Burden Down (2017), and 100 Boyfriends (2021).

This month, Purnell drops No Jack Swing, the latest of the artist’s forays into the radically new. The breezy seven-track LP is the inaugural release from Papi Juice Records, a new arm of the long-running New York dance party and art collective, in collaboration with DJ Josh Cheon’s Dark Entries Records, a bellwether in preserving the queer underground sounds of San Francisco. “Josh [Cheon] reissues lost records from Patrick Cowley’s estate, and Patrick Cowley worked with Sylvester, so this collaboration is kind of historic,” says Purnell. The split release is certainly momentous, because it situates the artist at the heart of the most exciting synergy in contemporary queer music history, a line that connects Patrick Cowley and Sylvester to Papi Juice, which has long centered queer people of color in nightlife and in music. “Papi Juice really is just a circuit

party for queer POC. If we had that in our 20s, we wouldn’t have been this fucked-up,” muses Purnell. “We were always in these gay spaces with these crazy older white dudes, and that wreaked havoc on our self-esteem.”

With an iconic trio of production credits from the elusive composer and producer Nightfeelings, Purnell himself, and Telfar Studios—yes, that Telfar— No Jack Swing is bright and ecstatic, composed of layered phone recordings. “All the guitar parts, the saxophone, cellos, and violins were recorded as voice memos,” says Purnell. The artist comes from a long line of vocalists and blues musicians, and the record features appearances from Cody Critcheloe of SSION and Andrea Genevieve of Purple Rhinestone Eagle. But No Jack Swing’s most powerful cameo comes from the New Zion Missionary Baptist Church choir of Belle Mina, Alabama, which Purnell grew up singing in. “All them girls be in church singing,” says Purnell, recalling his childhood spent in choirs with his cousins. “So I was like, ‘Yo, I want my cousins singing on these tracks.’”

The main thing Purnell wants you to know about No Jack Swing ? “No Jack Swing is a new wave record. No Jack Swing is a mutant R&B record. No Jack Swing is a punk record,” he says, animated. “This is the electroclash record I should have made in 2004. But you know what? Twenty years late is better than never.” Here, Purnell talks with Steve Lacy—another artist known for his genre-blurring experimentalism—about live music, choir practice, and the icons that came before.

madison moore

“I’M A 40-YEAR-OLD GAY, BLACK MAN WHO PLAYS POP PUNK. I FEEL LIKE I DID SOMETHING WRONG— LIKE, AREN’T I SUPPOSED TO BE A HOUSE DJ OR SOMETHING?” – BRONTEZ PURNELL

STEVE LACY: What inspired you to make an electronic album? Who are some of your inspirations when it comes to putting vocals on electronic beats?

BRONTEZ PURNELL: I’m a 40-year-old gay, Black man who plays pop punk. I feel like I did something wrong—like, aren’t I supposed to be a house DJ or something? Either way, during quarantine I wanted to make a “dub” record— like old-school Jamaican style. I had friends in places like Oakland, Paris, Los Angeles, and New York record many of the parts on their phones, in their bedrooms. I layered it all together but then, I dunno, the early effects felt a little too DIY and scrappy, and I wanted to go FUCKING MAXIMAL. No Jack Swing in my head was supposed to be like Kid Cudi meets Meredith Monk, but somewhere along the way I ditched the pretensions and allowed myself to just be a pretty Black boy making a pop record—and like, why the fuck shouldn’t I?

LACY: I love your album title. It gives me a familiar feeling. How do you come up with titles? Do you have them in mind prior to making your records?

PURNELL: TITLES ALWAYS COME FIRST. I’m a conceptual artist before I’m anything else, even when I make music. Improv and jamming are for jazz musicians and fucking hippies, and I’m neither.

LACY: Who are some of your inspirations when it comes to putting vocals on electronic beats?

PURNELL: KeiyaA, Pamela Z, Frank Ocean meets Frank O’Hara, the Slits, ESG, Brijean Brijean Brijean, Le Tigre, and the Beastie Boys’s Paul’s Boutique

LACY: I’m a huge fan of your books. Jeremy O. Harris sent me Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger, and I’ve been obsessed with you ever since. I’ve also read 100 Boyfriends, which I loved. I’d imagine writing a book and writing a song are two different processes for you, but I’m curious—what are some parallels between the two, if any?

PURNELL: When writing songs, you can actually get away with being a super cheesy poet in a way that you can’t really get away with when you’re, like, a printed poet. If you took every Sam Smith lyric, put it in a book, and marketed it as STRICT literature, the poetry community would want BLOOD. I’m not dissing Sam Smith of course—I love her or whatever—I’m saying that the thing that sells their words is their voice and the character that they embody when singing about heartache, loss, or longing.

Poets have to make sure that they are putting something on the page that can animate the dead space in ANY reader’s head. But also, I think literature, and the English language in general, is heavily gatekept by some pretty lame and stifling precepts. When you make songs you can slur sounds, force rhymes if you’re confident enough, and hell, you can even make words up. Soundscapes in general are just an entirely different universe from the written word. That said, I feel like I sometimes write really beautiful—even clever—shit that gets buried under melody and production. It’s weird to say, but sometimes in music, the writing and the sound are like two different babies fighting for their mom’s attention.

LACY: I hate when people ask me this, but I’m gonna ask you anyways. Do you have a dream collaborator, not limited to music?

PURNELL: TBH, working with Nightfeelings [who produced No Jack Swing] was one of my biggest dreams! I first kicked it with him over a decade ago. He was going to Oberlin [College and Conservatory] and studying sound and film I think, and he invited me to host the gay student union ball. This was, like, 2011. I thought Teengirl Fantasy, his project at the time, was so peculiar and avant-forward, and I really wanted to collab with him. SO I FUCKING DID. Another dream collaborator is whoever produced Lady Miss Kier’s, like, 30year–long unreleased drum-and-bass record—I wanna make a drum-and-bass record with that person. And last but not least, JANET JACKSON.

LACY: Are you a good texter or a bad texter?

PURNELL: I tend to over-text. Someone will text me, like, “How was your day?” And I’ll be like, “OMG MY CHILDHOOD WAS SOOOOOO HARD, THERE WAS THIS ONE TIME…” I’m fucking gross.

LACY: You have your own flow, melody, and cadence. I hear you sing and automatically know it’s you based on that flow. What music did you grow up with that shaped your melodies? They’re so quirky and weird, but also so charming and soulful. I really love that.

PURNELL: I grew up in a cotton field and singing in church—JUST LIKE TINA FUCKING TURNER. Belle Mina, Alabama, my hometown, is just three hours southeast of Nutbush, Tennessee, which is Tina’s hometown, but I digress. I started singing in church in the late ’80s, and we didn’t even have a microphone or P.A. The song belonged to whoever could sing the loudest, not the prettiest. It’s such a FUCKED-UP pecking order, but I think it influenced me spiritually. I have spent a lifetime battling how I feel about my voice: how it sounds and why it sounds how it sounds. I was put in speech class when I was 5, which I now look back on with this dark epiphany that they did that because I sounded like a faggot. I’ve never really stuttered or anything, but I do tend to draw out vowel sounds, which is maybe just a Southern thing in general. Either way, it took me A LONG TIME to love my fucked-up voice.

But I think in music, conformity of sound is ALWAYS the goal. When I was in art school at [University of California,] Berkeley, I learned from this sound artist, Xandra Ibarra, that before colonization, the vowel sound “A” was pronounced differently in every country. Then, the gatekeepers decided that it had to be one sound worldwide—think of how many beautiful sounds were destroyed in that balance. I often think about this notion of A.I. taking over music—A.I. took over music over a decade ago with auto-tune! I don’t mind auto-tune, but I’m more interested when we critique it as a tool of conformity. Anyway, I like the word “quirky.” It’s a cute segue into saying that something sounds “non-conforming,” so thank you bb <3. That was a VERY LONG way to say, basically, that I’m a weirdo who doesn’t mind someone singing off-key as long as they are genuinely singing their heart out. I think that, sometimes, singing has to be ugly.

LACY: Do you have a favorite movie genre?

PURNELL: It’s called a choreo-movie. The best examples for me are the Yvonne Rainer films. They deal with poetry, image, movement, and text onscreen, and jumble all these things up. Another word for this is “dislinear narrative.” I sometimes write for TV, and when I do that, I have to sit through 90 hours of people literally talking psychobabble—which, like, barf. The fact that I WATCH THEM make shit up in front of me, just to put five minutes’ worth of story on a screen, makes me wanna fucking kill somebody. So in my free time, I would rather watch non–plot-driven things—“dislinear narratives” OR stories on Instagram. I find watching 300 Instagram stories in a row INFINITELY more entertaining than 98 percent of the movies they put out these days.

LACY: Do you remember the first physical record you ever got?

PURNELL: I was, like, 16, and I was in Montgomery, Alabama. I had my dad buy me a record player, and I bought the first album by the B-52’s—I got “Dance This Mess Around” tattooed on my arm a short time later, when I was 19—and Blondie’s Parallel Lines simultaneously. It’s funny that I call myself a “punk,” whatever that even means anymore, but my first vinyl records were these new wave records. Long story short, that was a fun-ass summer.

LACY: What are your thoughts on music festivals?

PURNELL: I hate crowds, and these days I’m always afraid that some guntoting America-lover is going to shoot up the fuckin’ place—GIRL REAL TALK. Honestly, my favorite place to listen to music is an empty bar where I have room to twirl like a fucking princess. I like consuming music alone or with maybe 20 close people; call me crazy. I lived in punk warehouses for most of my adult life, so there was always some band playing in my living room. Because I experienced so much music in this private way, I got kind of spoiled. THAT SAID, I also practice witchcraft and believe that festivals and shit are super important to normal human functioning—it’s also a very epic way to experience music. Standing with 30,000 other people who are all on the same page mentally is its own drug, and I think it makes manifest something in the ether. I can’t hate on it, but at the same time, the idea of standing in line for a porta potty at Coachella? EW! GIRL, NO!!!!!! To quote Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders, “Not me baby, I’m too precious.”

LACY: I stole this question from Chef Alisa [Reynolds] but it’s a good one: If you were to lose your sense of smell and taste forever, what would be your last meal?

PURNELL: Duh. HUMAN FLESH! I’ve always been, like, curious.

“I STARTED SINGING IN CHURCH IN THE LATE ’80S, AND WE DIDN’T EVEN HAVE A MICROPHONE OR P.A. THE SONG BELONGED TO WHOEVER COULD SING THE LOUDEST, NOT THE PRETTIEST.

IT’S SUCH A FUCKED UP PECKING ORDER, BUT I THINK IT INFLUENCED ME SPIRITUALLY.“

− BRONTEZ PURNELL

THE AFRICAN DESPERATE, MARTINE SYMS’S 2022 FEATURE FILM DEBUT, ROCKED THE ART WORLD WITH ITS INCISIVE CRITIQUE OF CREATIVE INSTITUTIONS AND THEIR IMPENETRABLE VOCABULARY, ITS PSYCHEDELIC MUMBLECORE PLOT, AND DIAMOND STINGILY’S BRILLIANTLY DEADPAN DELIVERY AS LEAD CHARACTER PALACE BRYANT. THESE ELEMENTS WERE SEWN TOGETHER BY A RABID FEVER DREAM OF A SCORE, HATCHED BY SYMS, COMPOSER-CHOREOGRAPHER COLIN SELF, AND BEN BABBITT. THOUGH THEY ONLY MET A FEW YEARS AGO, SYMS AND BABBITT—WHO HAS WORKED WITH ANGEL OLSEN, WEYES BLOOD, AND HOW TO DRESS WELL, AND CO-FOUNDED THE VIDEO GAME STUDIO CARDBOARD COMPUTER—HAVE BECOME CLOSE COLLABORATORS. THE LOS ANGELES–BASED PAIR’S LATEST UNDERTAKING IS THE AUDIO COMPONENT OF SYMS’S FIRST SPRÜTH MAGERS SOLO SHOW, “LOSER BACK HOME,” WHICH RUNS THROUGH THE SUMMER. HERE, THEY DISSECT THEIR FORTUITOUS MEETING, THE CONNECTION BETWEEN THE HUMAN BODY AND TECHNOLOGY, AND THE CREATIVE POTENTIAL OF HANGING OUT.

MARTINE SYMS AND BEN BABBITT ON CELLISTS AND HYPNOTISTS

MARTINE SYMS: Ben, I met you in the summer of 2021, but already knew your name. A Ben Babbitt figure had been in several of my dreams before I met you. So, it was a matter of time, right?

BEN BABBITT: We met and then you texted me a dream that you had.

SYMS: Yeah, that’s how I got your phone number.

BABBITT: From your dream? That’s prophetic.

SYMS: That’s how my dreams work. I’m pretty tapped, you know. During the time we were working on The African Desperate, we were also just playing music together, which was really fun.

BABBITT: It all felt very natural and not forced. When you, Colin [Self], and I worked on the score, we formed a little band, and it was really joyful. You’re one of the easiest people to work with. It was the perfect mixture of support, acceptance, encouragement, and challenge. You obviously have your vision. It’s very dialed and confident, but you’re also very open and not too controlfreaky nitpicky.

SYMS: Scoring is just fun; it’s really fluid. I was in hypnosis earlier, and one thing we were talking about was my energy. I like to play, have fun with what I’m doing, and feel open to discovery. The hypnotist reminded me that I often bring that sense of play to situations, which I forget sometimes.

BABBITT: That dynamic is hard to describe, but it feels like there’s a mutual reaching for something. It’s like feeling around in the dark.

SYMS: Definitely. It’s always funny to me when someone’s not into music. I don’t understand that—it’s so fundamental to my existence.

BABBITT: I can’t talk to a person who isn’t into music. I can’t be in the same room with a person like that.

SYMS: You’ve been performing a lot lately—how is that experience different from recording?

BABBITT: Performing is like a hybrid of fixed, pre-composed stuff that I’ve spent tons of time on. But even if you’re playing something that’s fully baked, stuff still goes wrong onstage in front of an audience. Even just the way it feels, the vulnerability of being seen, I’m not really one of those people who feeds off that attention.

When I’m performing, I wanna feel some kind of visceral catharsis, right? But at the same time, I have a laptop onstage with me, which can make me feel trapped—it’s a delicate environment where, if you flick the mouse wrong, you can fuck everything up.

SYMS: For me, that’s where improvisation helps. I wanted to start doing shows where I share my computer screen but nothing is scripted, like, Okay, I’m just going to tell a story using this digital portal of images and sounds without trying to make it perfect or using Keynote or anything. What was exciting to me about it was the improvisation—once I felt like I was doing the same things, it became much less interesting to me.

I took voice lessons from [Odeya Nini] for years, and before that I took yoga classes at her house three times a week. She would always talk about the voice, how you’re touching people with it, how you can envelop people with it. It’s like this weird fingerprint, because only you have your voice. I go in and out of wanting to use my voice in my work, but I think you can bring a lot of disparate elements together through your voice.

BABBITT: You made an A.I. model of your voice for one of your recent shows

SYMS

[“Neural Swamp / The Future Fields Commission,” 2021], and it’s really fascinating and uncanny. There’s something about making music now that cuts through a lot of the existential confusion I feel in response to the oncoming tidal wave of A.I., or whatever the fuck is happening. I still want to hear a human voice—as hippie or cheesy as that is to say.

SYMS: I vocal tone every morning, so you can get as cheesy-hippie as you want.

BABBITT: In my early teens, I was drawn to people who were really in touch with the specificity of the human body and what it can do with technology—even really old technology, like a cello, for example. There’s an amazing, seamless melding of body and instrument. When you make music on the computer, it’s not that there aren’t stakes…

SYMS: No, but the stakes are different when you’re making work with humans. Being with other humans is always anxiety-inducing and exciting to me, and I seek that out.

BABBITT: I’m gravitating toward that human element right now, even though I find it to be pretty uncomfortable. But it’s two sides of the same coin—the physical anxiety and vulnerability, and also the excitement and thrill and feeling yourself surviving it, and connecting.

SYMS: That’s what I was thinking when you mentioned the melding of bodies and technologies. Like, the sound of an orchestra is very specific—it can only be achieved one way, and it sounds like nothing else. There’s also stuff that sounds like it came from a computer and could only come from a computer, and I’m equally interested in that—I want both of them. I recently started playing guitar again—sometimes I call it my “babe magnet,” because it just sits in my apartment and people are like, “Oh, you play guitar?”—but it’s true, an instrument has this pull to it.

BABBITT: I felt that way about painting in the past, because it’s not part of my work at all, and it’s not a screen. It’s a physical act that you can get lost in. The music for The African Desperate occupies an interesting place between fidelities. It doesn’t conform to the prescribed binary of, like, Is it hi-fi or lo-fi? Is it digital or analog? Is it performed or sampled?

We went for this almost psychedelic melting and collapsing of all those categories in the same piece of work. Do you remember when we did the endcredits song? You thought it sounded too shiny and flat, so we played the mix out loud and recorded it on my phone, then AirDropped it to my computer. We brought that into the session and fucked with it a bit.

SYMS: People really respond to that track. You can hear Colin and me in the background joking around and making noise. I’m gonna joke on myself by quoting Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. There’s one part in an interview [with Stevphen Shukaitis in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, 2013], where they talk about the Marvin Gaye album What’s Going On, and the idea of when voices turn into music as an example of calling a class into session. They talk about teaching and how there’s a moment, as a teacher, when you have to shift tones and command people’s attention—but you also don’t want to do that too soon. You want everyone to chat and do their thing first. That idea, of the shift from one mode to the other, really stuck with me. That’s what I love about that recording.

BABBITT: That’s how it feels to work with you. Somehow you have the ability to make all the hanging out and fucking around part of the work.

“IT’S ALWAYS FUNNY TO ME WHEN SOMEONE’S NOT INTO MUSIC. I DON’T UNDERSTAND THAT—IT’S SO FUNDAMENTAL TO MY EXISTENCE.”

–MARTINE

THE MAN WHO TURNED BLONDIE’S HAIR BLACK

Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein reminisce about working with the late Swiss artist H.R. Giger—the Oscar-winning mastermind behind the extraterrestrial monster in the 1979 film “Alien.”

The intergalactic collaboration and its aesthetic repercussions are the subject of Stein’s new photo-focused memoir, released this spring. To mark the occasion, Harry and Stein sat down with their old friend, the music journalist and co-founder of the seminal “Punk” magazine, Legs McNeil.

I HAD THE PLEASURE OF WORKING with Debbie Harry and Chris Stein in the mid-1970s on two fumetti -style features in Punk magazine—“The Legend of Nick Detroit” in 1976, and “Mutant Monster Beach Party” in 1978. They were two full-length photo-cartoon issues of the magazine, written by me and starring Harry. She was one of the funniest and most professional stars I ever worked with. Stein, Harry’s songwriting partner and Blondie bandmate (as well as her boyfriend for 15 years or so), contributed his fantastic photos to the projects.

Harry and Stein were always open to wacky and original ideas, so I can only imagine the fun they had when they met H.R. Giger, the cult artist who created the mechanical lizard-monster in Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi classic Alien. The release of H.R. Giger: Debbie Harry Metamorphosis: Creating the Visual Concept for KooKoo, Stein’s recently published coffee table tome that chronicles Harry’s collaboration with the late Swiss artist, reveals the world that the trio created around the singer’s 1981 solo album, KooKoo. But it was Giger’s Alien monster that first captured the cultural imagination. I mean, what kind of mind could dream up huge, abandoned spaceships equipped with pulsating alien eggs, and creatures that pop out and wrap their tentacles around your neck, feeding off you, before exploding out of your chest? “That movie was a cultural phenomenon,” Stein tells me. “Alien was just what it fucking was, and everybody was crazy about it.”

“I knew about Giger from the ’60s,” recalls Stein. “Some of his artwork was in head shops then, and it was so cool and weird.” Giger’s was a burgeoning name in late ’60s counterculture, but he exploded onto the music scene when Keith Emerson—of the English progressive-rock supergroup

around the corner from our apartment. So we decided to go. At the time, Giger wasn’t as well-known, so it was no big deal to anybody but us. Nowadays, it would’ve been heralded as one of the most important art shows of the decade, with lines around the block!”

By 1980, Blondie was one of the biggest acts in the business, having found multi-platinum success with their album Parallel Lines. It also didn’t hurt that the Giorgio Moroder–scored soundtrack for the 1980 film American Gigolo featured Blondie’s “Call Me” as its theme song. The song topped the charts for six consecutive weeks—the band’s biggest single and their second number-one hit in the United States. Despite their own celebrity, the pair were starstruck at the chance to meet Giger. “I saw him as sort of grandfatherly, even though he was a ladies’ man,” recalls Harry. “It was hard to reconcile this sweet, charming man with the guy who created one of the most terrifying monsters of the 20th century.” Stein remembers it this way: “[Giger] was there [at the gallery] with his Oscar. He and his wife [Mia] knew who we were because by that time we were the number-one band in the world.”

“So we invited them back to our apartment on 57th Street,” continues Harry. “We talked and had drinks and became friends.” Imagine Harry and Stein chatting for hours with Giger about things that slither in the unseen galactic night. It’s no wonder that a creative partnership was born. “It was Chris’s idea to get him to do the cover for my first solo album, KooKoo,” says Harry. Giger agreed and invited the pair to spend two weeks at his home in Zurich for the project.

When Harry and Stein holed up in the artist’s Swiss bungalow, the rumors they’d heard about the artist proved true. “I watched him work on a couple of

Emerson, Lake & Palmer—dropped by Giger’s Zurich, Switzerland, home in the early ’70s. “I remember it was a fairly modest bungalow from the outside, until you went in,” Emerson told Prog magazine in 2020. “The interior décor was overpowering, gothic to the extreme. From floor to ceiling his unique airbrush technique had transformed a simple room into a cathedral. Giger had gone three-dimensional—his toilet had arms coming out [of it], almost engulfing the sitter.”

Emerson was so impressed with Giger that he hired the artist to design the album cover for ELP’s 1973 album Brain Salad Surgery, an eerie extravaganza featuring a sarcophagus-like skull that morphs into a sexy woman’s mouth. “I was familiar with the album cover Giger designed for Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Brain Salad Surgery, and another record cover he did for a heavy metal band,” Debbie Harry tells me. “Chris and I were both fans of monster movies, especially science fiction monsters. They’ve always been part of the Blondie catalog, not only in our music but in our personal lives.”

The punk scene that revolved around CBGB, the Bowery bar from which Blondie emerged in the ’70s, was home to a ragtag amalgamation of musicians influenced by ’60s garage rock, like the Electric Prunes and the Strangeloves, as well as comic books, TV reruns, and, of course, monster movies. Harry and Stein, along with the rest of their cohort, were diehard Giger fans. “Shortly after Giger received his Oscar for Alien,” continues Harry, “Chris and I read that he was going to show his paintings and sculptures from the movie at the Hansen gallery at 41 East 57th Street, which was right

his books—he would send the pictures back many times for color corrections if a shot was a little too brown, or a little too blue. He was a perfectionist and his own biggest critic,” recalls Stein. “He also had a fucking life-size Alien [in the studio]. He told us that he would come down to the bathroom in the middle of the night, and it would scare the shit out of him. He considered that a great success, to make something that he was actually afraid of!” For Harry, it was business as usual. “I think we went right to work the next day,” she writes in Stein’s book, “learning to live with the monster in the corner.”

The result of their collaboration was an album cover with an intergalacticmeets-ancient-Egyptian feel to it. Harry’s signature blonde hair was dyed black, and four needles pierced her face. KooKoo attained only moderate commercial success, reaching number 25 on the U.S. Billboard 200, and was not the breakout hit that its producers Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of Chic hoped it would be. Still, it was a gas for Harry and Stein to dive deep into the world of one of their creative idols.

I asked Harry if it was difficult to make the transition from blonde bombshell to black-haired Wicked Witch of the West during her KooKoo era. “Debbie let the blonde thing go for a while when we were working on her solo stuff,” interjects Stein, “and it made the front page of the New York fucking Post. There was a picture of Debbie with dark hair, and the headline was, ‘Oh My God, What Did She Do to Her Head?’” Harry, for her part, agrees. “Oh Legs,” she sighs. “You know how the record companies are, and how the media wants you to stay exactly the same. They just wanted to hold onto the blonde thing.”

“CHRIS AND I WERE BOTH FANS OF MONSTER MOVIES, ESPECIALLY SCIENCE FICTION MONSTERS. THEY’VE ALWAYS BEEN PART OF THE BLONDIE CATALOG, NOT ONLY IN OUR MUSIC BUT IN OUR PERSONAL LIVES.” —DEBBIE HARRY

3 RECORDS THAT CHANGED

Through several acclaimed collections of essays and poetry, Hanif Abdurraqib has established himself as a tender and incisive voice in contemporary culture. There’s Always This Year, his forthcoming book about basketball and his Ohio upbringing, will be published in early 2024.

HANIF ABDURRAQIB’S LIFE

NIGHTBIRDS by

“I FIRST ENCOUNTERED NIGHTBIRDS, not through the sound of it, but through the look of LaBelle. When I was a kid, I saw a photo of LaBelle in their spacesuits on the wall of a friend’s house. Patti is leaning with her face in her palm. I thought, Who are these Black women from outer space?

I knew who Patti LaBelle was because my mother loved her. Nightbirds, for my money—and I think according to critical response, too—is the only good LaBelle album. The other ones are pretty rough, but they’re rough for a reason. LaBelle’s sonic impulses were all over the place. I adore Nightbirds because they found a sound that worked for them. The arrangements were deep in funk and had nice horns, but it’s also an album of sad songs. It’s an album about loneliness. Even ‘Lady Marmalade’ is kind of about loneliness.

Of all the albums on this list, Nightbirds is the one I listen to the most. There are certain albums that I am desperate to show people. One of my

greatest pleasures is flipping to side two of Nightbirds —one of the greatest side-twos in music history. It opens with ‘What Can I Do for You?’ It then goes straight into the title track. Then you get ‘Space Children.’

I was talking to a friend, another critic, about a Drake album—I think it was Scorpion —a few years ago. I was like, ‘There are 25 songs here, and I like maybe 10. That doesn’t feel like an album to me.’ He said, ‘So you can just make a playlist of the 10 songs you like, and that’s your Drake album.’ I thought, My job isn’t to make the Drake album. Drake’s job is to make the Drake album. I guess I’m old school—I always love the physicality of a record. Now, I’m fine to let that go, I can acknowledge that the era of the album as physical object has waned. But that doesn’t mean artists should lose their responsibility for narrative-building, for crafting a sequenced arc of songs, not just a compilation with the occasional hit thrown in.”

ASTRALWEEKS

“I REMEMBER WHEN A NEW BRANCH of the Columbus Metropolitan Library was built at the end of my street. That meant I could go to the library, sit in a little booth, and listen to CDs all day. I was at the mercy of the library workers who preloaded the CD changers, and I would sit there with a pair of headphones on. One day, when I was 16, I went and Astral Weeks was on.

I had no idea who Van Morrison was, no idea what I was getting into. Astral Weeks opens, and you’re drifting. It’s that space I really like where you’re almost asleep, but not quite. The phase where you’re awake enough to realize that you’ll soon be in a dream state. You’re still tethered enough to the waking world to relish the anticipation. That’s what the beginning of Astral Weeks feels like to me.

The listening pods were set up along the back of the library, which looked out into deep forest and overgrown grass. I remember listening to the album and staring out at what seemed like endless green. ‘Sweet Thing’ is such an

atrociously, offensively beautiful love song. I can’t believe that a person wrote that about another person. And Van Morrison was like 21 when he recorded it! There’s one line that I love: ‘And I shall drive my chariot down your streets and cry / Hey, it’s me, I’m dynamite and I don’t know why.’ What a beautiful lyric. There’s a certain ridiculousness to it—a love song that lays bare the absurdity of being in love.

I was at a hardcore show like five years ago in Cincinnati. It was one of the old-school hardcore shows I used to go to, where 30 or so very enthusiastic people thrash into each other. There was a point where the guitarist was tuning his guitar, and he started playing the opening notes of ‘Sweet Thing.’ It wasn’t a hardcore version, just a very tender, soft cover. I remember thinking, What an incredible, unlikely place for this song to pop up, what an amazing place for it to live.”

HOUNDSOFLOVE by Kate

“WHEN I WAS 18, I had a girlfriend with far more developed music taste than mine. She introduced me to Kate Bush’s sonic leap from her album The Dreaming [1982] to Hounds of Love [1985], which completely blew my mind. I grew up in a household where pop, world music, and jazz were played relentlessly, so I got heavy into the punk scene when I was 17. Everything I listened to had to be punk, industrial, hardcore, goth, or dark wave. I had repressed my affection for pop, and when I heard Hounds of Love for the first time, it unlocked that. I wish I could relive that moment. I remember it vividly—it was the summer of 2002, and we were at my girlfriend’s house. Her parents were on vacation, so we essentially moved in together for two weeks. It was one of those homes on the east side of Columbus where older Black folks lived, and everything was in its perfect place.

Because everything was pristine, we were confined to the record room, which had this horrendous, thick, lime-green carpet. Her parents had an

incredible record collection; it covered the walls from floor to ceiling. Summer was ending, and she was going back to college in Boston. It’s strange when you’re young and the end of something precious is near. It’s not a malicious feeling, more kind of mournful. I remember listening to ‘Watching You Without Me’ and looking across the room at this person I’d known since I was 11 years old, thinking, Man, we had a good run. It was my first healthy break-up. She’s doing very well. I saw her last month when I did a reading in Boston, where she still lives, and she came with her partner and her kid.

Hounds of Love and The Dreaming create an arc of companionship, feeding into each other. The Dreaming is a very good album, but you can see that it was a stepping stone for Bush. It felt like an experiment that had gone extremely well—daring but playful. I like lush, electric sounds, large extended notes pushed to the edge of breathlessness, and big, swelling crescendos. She had to make something very good in order to learn how to make something perfect.”

EVERYONE HAS QUESTIONS FOR CHRISTINE AND THE QUEENS

SAINTS ARE BORN FROM THEIR APPARITIONS, those evanescent moments where they are touched by the grace of a higher being. Redcar, better known under the moniker Christine and the Queens, has had a few such visions in the past year. The 34-year-old French musician is known for critically acclaimed releases like his 2014 debut album, Chaleur Humaine, and cusp-of-the-pandemic EP La vita nuova—sonic lightning bolts that slalom between shades of pop. With each project, Redcar sheds skins and dons new ones with theatrical flair. Last fall, he released Redcar les adorables étoiles, a sonic prologue to this summer’s Paranoïa, Angels, True Love

Though Redcar’s career has been defined by its dynamism, Paranoïa, Angels, True Love may mark his most meaningful departure yet. Recent years have brought significant change in the artist’s life. He lost his mother four years ago, and he came out as trans last year. For Redcar, who began work on the album from an eerie perch in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, the album chronicles a dark, desperate dive into loneliness and the sublime. Over about a month, he lived and worked monastically in a trance-like state of consciousness: “Every day was spent quite alone, praying a lot, walking for hours, seeking visions,” he remembers.

“Almost like a kid, I put myself in the state of waiting. I realized that I actually like music when it appears to me, or happens to me.” Produced by the legendary Mike Dean—who shaped the recent work of artists including the Weeknd, Beyoncé, and Lana Del Rey—and featuring vocal contributions from Madonna and 070 Shake, Paranoïa, Angels, True Love soars and plunges, bringing listeners on a heady emotional ride. “It was like working in a pure swarm of energy, and it made me feel so alive,” says Redcar of his angelic trio of collaborators.

Angels—including the artist’s late mother—are at the core of the record, which takes as its inspiration Tony Kushner’s 1991 play, Angels in America. The musician was drawn to the idea of otherworldly beings appearing in his life, and “breaking the fabric of space and time.” Music, though, remains Redcar’s forever teacher. “I love to be a student,” he says. “I love when music humbles my ass with cosmic slaps every time. It makes me grow as I go.”

To mark the release of Redcar’s opus, CULTURED asked a few of his friends and admirers to share their burning questions with the enigmatic artist.

To mark the release of his latest album, the musician answers questions on life and love from his friends and collaborators.

PERFUME GENIUS

“HOW DO YOU BALANCE WILDER CREATIVE INSTINCTS AND THE SPIRITUAL COMPONENT OF ART-MAKING WITH THE DEMANDS AND PRESSURES OF BEING IN THIS BUSINESS?”

That’s a fucking serious question, dude, but I still love you. Leave your husband for me. I’ve stopped thinking about business altogether. I’m the classic anti-capitalist teenager of the family—that makes me a living contradiction, but fuck it. Honestly, we are sailing towards everything sounding like fucking advertising music, bro. I turned to rock ’n’ roll as a way to protect myself from that. Sure, you can try to sell my songs, but I only want to make music that makes me feel something.

LISA TADDEO MISTY COPELAND

“‘I AM DONE WITH BELONGING.’ I COMPLETELY RELATE TO THIS QUOTE BECAUSE I HAVE BEEN TOLD THAT I DON’T BELONG FOR MOST OF MY CAREER. DO YOU HAVE A SUPPORT SYSTEM YOU RELY ON THAT MAKES BELONGING FEEL LESS IMPORTANT TO YOU?”

My life has always been very complicated around this question of belonging. I lost my mom, and the great lesson of this grief is that I have all this love for someone who is invisible now. I know I sound like a very lonely boy, but that knowledge gives me strength every day. I also started touring again, so I’m starting a relationship with my tour family. I give so much onstage, and they become a strong support system. The only thing that brings me true acceptance and relief is praying to my mother, and praying to Jesus. I’m interested to see what that’s going to do to my dancing on this tour.

OCEAN VUONG

“WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU FELT TRULY PROUD OF YOURSELF?”

This morning, when I was sweating on my gym bike. I was like, Another day, Redcar, another day. You’ve got to show up for yourself every day. Mood.

“YOU HAVE THIS GRAND PASSION AND SENSITIVITY, AND YOU CREATE SUCH POWERFUL ART EVEN IN THE THROES OF EMOTIONAL UPHEAVAL. DO YOU FEEL MORE PEACE WHEN YOU HAVE UNITY, COMFORT, AND PROGRESS IN YOUR ARTISTIC EXPRESSION, OR WHEN YOU HAVE UNITY, COMFORT, AND PROGRESS IN YOUR ROMANTIC LIFE?”

Thank you for noticing that I open my heart. I think of true love as this all-encompassing empathy, and I’m still searching for that. So far, I’ve only experienced groundbreaking passion through friction. It’s been a great source of pain, but also a source of enlightenment in my music—which became the cathedral, the shelter where I went to make sense of things. This new record is a true heart-opener—I love music that feels like the listener and artist are processing together. I see that as my discipline now. But I think that kind of relationship is in my future. I’m looking for the kind of love that illuminates my personal life and my practice—for me the two are so intertwined.

ZOE LISTER-JONES

“WHAT’S YOUR LOVE LANGUAGE?”

I discovered it recently. It’s touch! I had no idea! I grew up reading so much literature, and after all that, my love language is touch? I used to be so sure of myself. Being an adult sucks.

WOLFGANG TILLMANS DÂM-FUNK

“IN YOUR SONG ‘GOYA SODA’ I UNDERSTAND YOU DREW INSPIRATION FROM THE WORKS OF SPANISH PAINTER FRANCISCO GOYA. DO YOU HAVE A FAVORITE ARTWORK?”

“Goya Soda” was inspired by the painting Saturn Eating His Children, which is about the connection between revulsion and desire. A favorite artwork? I would have to say Francis Bacon, but I can’t pick just one. His work is an intersection between abstraction, surrealism, poetry, destruction, truth, pain. Inside the genius of that work, there is tenderness.

“WE FIRST MET IN THE SUNSHINE OF LOS ANGELES. IF I WERE NOT CREATING MUSIC FULL-TIME, I’D MOST LIKELY BE A METEOROLOGIST. WHAT KIND OF WEATHER INSPIRES YOUR BEST WRITING?”

I suspect it’s sunny weather. I wrote “Tilted,” one of my best hits, on a sunny day. That’s a big component of why I’m going to move to LA—also to be close you, so that we can do sessions together.

AMALIA ULMAN

“DID AN ANIMAL EVER CHANGE YOUR LIFE?”

Yes, of course. My first real love was my childhood cat, who would sing along with me. He was my great love, and he died when I was 18. I had another cat with my ex-boyfriend called Scrunchy. He was a Maine Coon, and I lost him in the divorce. He was very chatty, and his giant paws were so fucking cute.

ELIZA DOUGLAS

“WHAT IS A QUESTION YOU HAVEN’T BEEN ASKED IN AN INTERVIEW, BUT WISH YOU WOULD BE?”

So many questions are never asked! It’s baffling, really. I’m surprised that people are always interested in the same things. I miss intricate poetic questions that make my mind race to a place I would never expect. I’d love to speak more about my approach to dancing and my background in theater. People acknowledge it and then they move on, but really it’s the core of my practice.

INTO THE WILD

With its Autumn /Winter 2023 collection, Dior pens a billet-doux to three women who subverted the dictums of their time: Catherine Dior, sister to the house’s founder and French resistance fighter who returned to Paris to become a florist; Edith Piaf, who dominated the airwaves with her soulful voice; and Juliette Greco, a bohemian who shaped Parisian style with her monochrome looks. The maison’s creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri, the maison’s creative director of women’s haute couture, readyto-wear and accessories collections, took the trio’s rebellious spirits as inspiration took the trio’s rebellious spirits as inspiration, crafting an effortlessly chic collection that, like its muses, is powerful, timeless, and a little bit wild.

by

ALL CLOTHING AND ACCESSORIES BY DIOR AUTUMN / WINTER 2023-2024 COLLECTION.

Makeup by KARO KANGAS

Hair by NIKKI PROVIDENCE

Casting by TALLULAH BERNARD

Photography Assistance by ALEX CONSTABLE

Fashion Assistance by TALLULA BELL MADDEN

Makeup Assistance by KRISHNA BRANCH-MACKOWIAK

Special thanks to MALIBU CANYON RANCH

COLLECTOR BILLIE MILAM WEISMAN AND ARTIST LARRY BELL

In 1982, Frederick R. Weisman purchased a historic villa in the leafy Holmby Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. Together with his wife, the curator Billie Milam Weisman, the entrepreneur and inveterate art collector moved over 400 works into the space, transforming it into a living homage to modernist, postwar, and contemporary art. Today, Billie helms the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, making its holdings— which include works by Pablo Picasso, Isamu Noguchi, Helen Frankenthaler, and Ed Ruscha—available to the public through tours and loans to museums worldwide. Here, Billie speaks to Larry Bell—the contemporary artist whose glass cubes she first encountered as a conservator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art—about the city that defined their careers.

ON THE LOS ANGELES ART SCENE OF THE 1960S

Kenneth Noland, Prime Course, 1964; Andrzej Lemiszewski, Untitled, 1983; Yves Klein, Victoire de Samothrace [Winged Victory of Samothrace], 1962; John Buck, Here and There, 1986; Larry Rivers, The Beauty and the Beasts I, 1975; Claes Oldenburg, Profiterole, 1989; Claes Oldenburg, Fagend Study, 1968-1976; Gwynn Murrill, Bird, 1991; Keith Haring & L.A. II (Angel Ortiz), Vase, 1982; Alexander Calder, Untitled, 1966.

“You can’t collect because of a trend or because it’s ‘the right thing to do’—you have to truly believe in the artist.”

—Billie Milam Weisman

CULTURED: How did you two first cross paths?

LARRY BELL: It was before the Punic Wars.

BILLIE MILAM WEISMAN: Larry, my first encounter with you was with your work, when I started at LACMA in the late ’70s. Years later, Fred and I drove to Taos to visit you. The only directions you gave me were, “Hang a right at the pile of rocks.” I found the pile of rocks, hung a right, and ended up at your neighbor’s. He was a pre-Columbian art dealer who I happened to know, and he showed us the way.

CULTURED: Describe the Los Angeles art scene at that time.

BELL: My closest friends were Ken Price, Ed Moses, Craig Kauffman, and that gang. We lived in Venice and kept each other amused outside the commercial gallery scene. The most interesting galleries at that time were Ferus Gallery, the David Stuart Galleries, and Virginia Dwan’s gallery. Nicholas Wilder was an important personality in the scene. He had a gallery on Santa Monica Boulevard.

WEISMAN: It’s important to remember that Los Angeles didn’t have a major art museum until 1965, when LACMA opened. Before that, there was just the Natural History Museum [of Los Angeles County]. Then the Museum of Contemporary Art opened, then the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, and now the Broad. Once these museums opened, our artists really started rising to the top. Before all that, galleries must have been where the arts blossomed.

BELL: The truth is, as artists, our excuse for being social was drinking beer with friends in their studios, looking at their work, and talking about it. We never got too precious about the work. Our relationships were based on humor—that was the glue that held everybody together.

CULTURED: Billie, what did you admire most about Larry’s work? How do you understand its staying power, given your museum background?

WEISMAN: I’ve always been impressed with Larry’s innovation in introducing the reflective qualities of art and the light it emits. He’s taken this focus to different mediums—canvas, paper, and three-dimensional cubes and large sculptures, which he’s done more in recent years. I think what connected all of the artists in that movement was the use of light, just like the impressionists in the South of France. Larry probably epitomizes that more than almost any other artist of that time.

CULTURED: Larry, as an artist, did you ever feel drawn to New York over Los Angeles?

BELL: We were all curious about the amount of action available to New York artists. It was a fantasy land in a weird way—there were many more galleries and museums at their disposal. There was no real art market in Los Angeles in those days. I don’t think any of us really thought there was going to be any money in what we did, although we certainly aspired to make a living from our work, which is everybody’s right. But making a living and making art are two separate acts.

WEISMAN: It seemed to me that New York artists didn’t communicate with each other like the LA artists did. You were all in constant communication. Did you see that camaraderie in the New York artists?

BELL: Absolutely. The first people I met when I went to New York were Frank Stella, Donald Judd, Larry Poons, and Richard Serra. You could go to a restaurant like Max’s Kansas City and sit down with people like Willem de

Kooning and William S. Burroughs. There wasn’t really a place like that in LA in those days, maybe with the exception of Barney’s Beanery. They all had access to the important curators, who wanted to be around interesting artists, so the scene was more mixed there. When Andy Warhol and his gang of crazies came to LA in 1962 for a show at Ferus, everybody was thrilled to host him. When I had my first show in New York, he threw a party for me at the Factory.

CULTURED: Billie, what drew you to the artists that you collected?

WEISMAN: I had just finished a graduate degree in art history when I met Fred. He taught me what I could never learn in school: to trust my passion. You can’t collect because of a trend or because it’s “the right thing to do”—you have to truly believe in the artist. That’s how I learned to look at art properly. Before that, I was looking for what I was supposed to see.

BELL: I agree. There are four tools that every artist needs: improvisation, intuition, spontaneity, and, most importantly, trust. You have to trust what you’re doing and flow with it.

WEISMAN: Those qualities shine through to a person who’s collecting for the right reasons.

CULTURED: Larry, how do you decide whether or not to trust a collector?

BELL: I never trust a collector. I never trust an art dealer, either. Of course, Fred and, later, Billie were big-time collectors and very giving people. When Fred traveled to New York, he always offered us artists a ride on his plane. I remember going [to his house] one morning, and seeing a crew of people rearranging his paintings. I was impressed with how much he cared about the work he collected.

CULTURED: What made your relationship evolve past a transactional artist/ collector dynamic?

BELL: The motivations for collecting are so varied that it’s hard to put your finger on anything but the generosity of the collector in welcoming all people to share their treasures. The Weismans threw incredible parties—if [someone like] Ellsworth Kelly was in town, they always invited local artists who could benefit from meeting them.

WEISMAN: Collecting is for the enrichment of your own life, but it comes with a responsibility to share. When artists make work, it becomes their baby. When we took on the responsibility of caring for an artist’s child, we understood the responsibility to not only maintain it properly, but to share it with the child.

CULTURED: What do you think is the role of art in public life?

WEISMAN: When I purchased my first piece of art, I had the urge to hoard it because I treasured it so much. Now, I’ll pull pieces from the walls of my own home and add them to exhibitions across the world—not because it has our name on it, but because I’m so proud that other people get to see them. It’s a wonderful feeling, and art can teach everybody, no matter their discipline in life, to be more open-minded.

BELL: Billie, please take care of yourself and stay around for a long time, because you’ve done a lot of good. I’m a collector myself—I have nearly 500 12-string acoustic guitars, and I think of them as sculptures that sing. Each has its own personality; I feel great joy from holding, playing, and possessing them. That feeling must be similar to Billie’s passion for art. They make me feel whole, and that’s what art is all about. Nothing but feeling.

“I never trust a collector. I never trust an art dealer, either.”

— Larry Bell

THINKING WITH YOUR HANDS: LOUIS VUITTON’S LATEST OBJETS NOMADES COLLECTION

We don’t often think of furniture traveling, making its way around the world in a plane or ocean liner. Indeed, luxury furniture and design objects are often thought of as immovable artifacts, destined to accumulate glances and dust in a museum or home. With its Objets Nomades collection, founded in 2012, Louis Vuitton seeks to overthrow the cryogenic sentence imposed on prestige design. Each year, the French house commissions the most ingenious creative minds to conceive playful pieces that traipse between practicality and extravagance. The 11 new Objets

Nomades presented at Milan Design Week this spring reflect Vuitton’s legendary savoir faire, material sensibilities, and dedication to technological innovation. Five of the participating studios offered CULTURED a glimpse into their processes and inspirations—from road trips to local landscapes.

ZANELLATO/BORTOTTO

GIORGIA ZANELLATO AND DANIELE BORTOTTO founded their eponymous studio in Treviso, Italy, 10 years ago. Since then, the pair has dabbled in product design, art direction, and interior design, and collaborated with storied brands, including Tod’s and Pierre Frey. For their third Objets Nomades partnership with Louis Vuitton, the studio created Basket Table, drawing on the French house’s research on woven materials.

WHERE DO YOU FIND INSPIRATION? Venice is very dear to us, and, because of its thousand years of history, it has so many stories to tell. It is our pleasure to express them through our projects.

HOW IS ZANELLATO/BORTOTTO’S ETHOS REFLECTED IN THESE NEW OBJETS NOMADES? Collaboration, dialogue, and exchange are fundamental principles for good design. During the development of our new Objets Nomades, we collaborated with Louis Vuitton’s design team to obtain the best possible result. Internally in our studio, the exchange of ideas is key—it leads to all of our choices.

WHAT’S A DESIGN FRONTIER THAT YOU’RE EXCITED TO EXPLORE? We would like to experiment with interior design. It is interesting to contextualize our design objects in spaces and mix them together with what we like.

ATELIER OÏ was founded in 1991 by Aurel Aebi, Armand Louis, and Patrick Reymond, and has been an Objets Nomades partner since the collection’s inaugural edition 11 years ago. This year, the Swiss studio—whose offices overlook the serene Lac de Bienne in La Neuveville—presented four new objects, including Quetzal, a bird-like mobile, and Chandelier, a 1.2-meter high leather- and light-filled sculpture.

WHERE DO YOU FIND INSPIRATION? In the Moïtel [our headquarters], there are spaces dedicated to projects that are either in progress or already completed. Our designers draw on the “living archive” of previous projects to inform and inspire new creations in the context of each new challenge. It is like the yeast in breadmaking: Something taken from one project is used to enrich and elevate the next.

HOW IS ATELIER OÏ’S ETHOS REFLECTED IN THESE NEW OBJETS NOMADES? “It is said that some think, others act! But the true condition of human beings is to think with their hands.” –Denis de Rougemont, [Penser avec les mains, 1972]. Our creative process begins by interacting with the material. We become familiar with it, and identify its characteristics, limits, possibilities, and phenomena. It is through our hands that we come into contact with it and that is why we express ourselves mainly through them—thinking with our hands.

WHAT’S A DESIGN FRONTIER THAT YOU’RE EXCITED TO EXPLORE? We are fortunate to be able to tackle projects of all sizes, from pens to residences. It’s exciting to see how our projects transform and scale—an object can be transformed into an installation that fills an entire space—or how our own techniques can inspire new creations.

“Playing and experimenting with the material is the common thread, the initial impulse that drives all our creations. We see this as a collaboration with the material.” –Atelier Oï

RAW EDGES’S BINDA SOFA FOR LOUIS VUITTON’S OBJETS NOMADES 2023. PHOTOGRAPHY BY PHILIPPE LACOMBE.

RAW EDGES

YAEL MER AND SHAY ALKALAY founded Raw Edges 16 years ago. In 2009, they were named Designers of the Future by Design Miami/Basel, and their star has steadily ascended ever since. With collaborators like Stella McCartney and Airbnb, and works in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Vitra Design Museum, the London-based duo balance a beginner’s mind with an expert’s skills. This equipoise was instrumental in the development of their new Objets Nomades, Binda Armchair and Sofa.

WHERE DO YOU FIND INSPIRATION? It’s not very romantic, but, as our ideas often come as a result of trial and error, “the place” of inspiration for us would simply be our studio. At the same time, when we are in the middle of a project and there are problems to be solved, it’s very important to leave the studio and go for a walk or a cycle. Solutions to problems come when you least expect them to.

HOW IS RAW EDGES’S ETHOS REFLECTED IN THESE NEW OBJETS NOMADES? Our work is about introducing playful new inventions. In our Objets Nomades “Concertina” collection, for example, we worked on a collapsible armchair that is folded in a beautiful and surprising way. It is very much related to the time when Louis Vuitton was founded, during the Industrial Revolution, when so many new inventions were presented.

WHAT’S ONE MATERIAL THAT ALWAYS TRANSCENDS YOUR EXPECTATIONS? Paper! Not that it doesn’t get enough credit, but it is still amazing what can be done with such basic material. The ease, directness, and beauty in creating paper models is magical, and sometimes it leads to even bigger surprises like Binda, our latest addition to the Objets Nomades, which started as a paper model of a tennis ball.

CAMPANA

CAMPANA CELEBRATED its 35th anniversary in 2019, and in the years since, its design legacy has become even more essential. Founded by Brazilian brothers Fernando and Humberto Campana, the studio is a true design Swiss Army knife, jumping from landscaping and furniture-making to scenography and fashion. For this year’s Objets Nomades, the brothers revisited their classic Cocoon hanging chair, which has been updated with a disco flair, and adapted their Bomboca sofa into a metallic sculpture.

WHERE DO YOU FIND INSPIRATION? In the most ordinary and banal things—on a city walk, amidst a forest, or in a foreign country. We capture a specific moment with our eyes and derive a story from it, which we then translate into an object. This process infuses our work with a sense of purpose and resilience. It is a constant endeavor to leave the world better than how we found it.

HOW IS CAMPANA’S ETHOS REFLECTED IN THESE NEW OBJETS NOMADES? The latest Objets Nomades pieces—Disco Cocoon and Bomboca Mirror—are about joy and celebration. They are beacons of light; they bring positivity and good vibes. They connect art and design, craft and technology, blurring the boundaries among disciplines.

WHAT’S ONE MATERIAL THAT ALWAYS TRANSCENDS YOUR EXPECTATIONS? Styrofoam, also known as expanded polystyrene. Our goal was to give this material a second life and reduce waste. During the prototyping phase, we discovered that Styrofoam is an excellent medium for exploring various crafting techniques. This realization led to “Meteoro,” a collection of armchairs, sofas, and shelves sculpted from upcycled polystyrene, covered with hand-stitched metallic leather. These pieces exhibit strength, durability, and lightness, proving that even Styrofoam, which is not well regarded in terms of sustainability, can have positive qualities.

ATELIER BIAGETTI

DESIGNER ALBERTO BIAGETTI AND ARTIST LAURA BALDASSARI, the husband-and-wife team behind Atelier Biagetti, made design-world waves in Milan with their 2016 Salone del Mobile presentation, “NO SEX,” a meditation on physical connection in a digitized world. This year, the studio’s Objets Nomades contribution is Flower Tower, a glistening and translucent lamp composed of 15 flower-shaped glass bubbles.

WHERE DO YOU FIND INSPIRATION? There are certain “optimal conditions.” One is proximity to the sea, since we were born by the seaside. Another is long drives. Our best projects were born in our car, during moments when there are no deadlines or interferences.

HOW IS ATELIER BIAGETTI’S ETHOS REFLECTED IN THESE NEW OBJETS NOMADES? The title itself gives us a sense of fresh, unprejudiced equilibrium with the natural environment around us. Flower Tower is an infinite column of light, a metaphor for our inner light. When we started this piece, we were thinking about a luminous landmark, a celestial totem that acts as a point of reference for a contemporary, domestic landscape.

WHAT’S ONE MATERIAL THAT ALWAYS TRANSCENDS YOUR EXPECTATIONS? Materials are related to our psychology; they’re part of the visible and legible DNA of each work. Flower Tower is made of crystalline blown glass that’s pure at the core, a fragile and translucent starting point.

“When we started this piece, we were thinking about a luminous landmark, a celestial totem that acts as a point of reference for a contemporary, domestic landscape.” –Atelier Biagetti

Objects of Affection

“We are made aware that magnitude of material things is relative, and all objects shrink and expand to serve the passion of the poet. Thus, in his sonnets, the lays of birds, the scents and dyes of flowers, he finds to be the shadow of his beloved; time, which keeps her from him, is his chest; the suspicion she has awakened, is her ornament.”