CULTURED Art Basel Miami Beach 2025

A DECADE OF YOUNG ARTISTS

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FOUNDER

Sarah G. Harrelson

EXECUTIVE

Mara Veitch

EDITOR-AT-LARGE

Julia Halperin

CO-CHIEF

Johanna Fateman & John Vincler

SENIOR

Ella Martin-Gachot

ASSOCIATE

Sophie Lee

ASSISTANT

Sam Falb

ART

Everything

CHIEF

Carl Kiesel

VICE

Lori Warriner

DIRECTOR

Ian Malone

VICE

Michael Riggio

PUBLIC

Ethan Elkins

Dada Goldberg

MARKETING AND

ASSOCIATE

Hailey Powers

DIGITAL AND

COORDINATOR

Paloma Baygual Nespatti

PREPRESS/PRINT

PRODUCTION

Pete Jacaty & Associates

The art world is rarely without something to say about the evolution of Miami—especially on the eve of Art Basel Miami Beach.

In this issue, writer Janelle Zara talks to gallerists weighing the feasibility of making the journey to Miami on a shoestring budget. Meanwhile, the Bunker Artspace’s Maynard Monrow and Laura Dvorkin reveal how they staged a major show of LGBTQ+ work just 15 minutes from Mar-a-Lago. As calendars fill with an insurmountable number of commitments, figures including Casey Fremont and Alex Israel weigh in on the messy business of navigating gallery dinners while dodging less-than-gracious diners and braving the open bar. We also offer our guide to the best shows, satellite fairs, and other happenings across the city.

In these pages, you’ll also find our 10th Young Artists list, a roundup of 27 rising talents to look out for in Miami and beyond. For the second year in a row, we’ve partnered with MZ Wallace to offer the MZ Wallace and CULTURED Young Artists Prize, continuing our commitment to providing one artist from our annual list with the material aid so necessary to making the work that inspires us. We also gathered more than two dozen alums from the list to mark its 10 -year anniversary. In these pages, they reflect on how their careers have evolved since we first met them and speak candidly about the biggest challenges—and proudest moments—they’ve experienced along the way.

See you at the fairs.

Sarah G. Harrelson Founder and Editor-in-Chief

YOUR GUIDE TO MIAMI GALLERIES AND MUSEUMS THIS WEEK

FROM UP-AND-COMING GALLERIES TO MAMMOTH PRIVATE FOUNDATIONS, CONSIDER THIS YOUR WELL-ROUNDED ART DIET.

“LANDSCAPES”

BY STUDIO LENCA

Where: David Castillo Gallery

When: Through Jan. 31

Why It’s Worth a Look: The artist’s first solo show in Miami brings together his vibrant paintings of “Historiantes,” figures in his native El Salvador who re-enact oral histories of colonization.

Know Before You Go: Studio Lenca, who lives in Margate and works out of Tracey Emin’s TKE Studios, has work on view concurrently at the Rubell Museum in Miami and MoMA PS1 in New York.

“THAT WAS THEN, THIS IS NOW”

Where: 119 NE 41st Street, Miami

Design District

When: Dec. 2–Jan. 2

Why It’s Worth a Look: For Jeffrey Deitch, a booth at Art Basel Miami Beach isn’t enough. He’s spreading out with a pop-up exhibition featuring a range of buzzy artists including Leyla Faye, Hannah Taurins, and more.

Know Before You Go: Deitch has organized high-gloss exhibitions in Miami for years, sometimes in partnership with Larry Gagosian. This year, he’s going solo.

“DISORDER” BY

ANETA GRZESZYKOWSKA

Where: Voloshyn Gallery

When: Through Jan. 10

Why It’s Worth a Look: The Polish artist, born in 1974, makes the kind of work about familial dynamics with which psychoanalysts would have a field day. This show is no different.

Know Before You Go: The centerpiece is a new body of work, THE DAUGHTER, 2025, which captures the artist in staged tableaux with relatives wearing a hyperrealistic mask based on her own face when she was 14.

Where: The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami

When: Dec. 2–Mar. 29

Why It’s Worth a Look: This is the first posthumous survey of the Chicago-born abstract sculptor, who died in 2023. It charts his evolution across 25 works made between the 1950s to the 1990s.

Know Before You Go: What you’ll see in the museum is just a small slice of Hunt’s output. He also created more than 150 public art commissions, many of which are engaged with themes of social justice.

“COMING FORTH BY DAY” BY WOODY DE

OTHELLO

Where: Pérez Art Museum Miami

When: Through June 28

Why It’s Worth a Look: The Miami native is best known for hand-built ceramics that transform everyday objects—clocks, telephones, mirrors— into anthropomorphic, spirited figures. For his first hometown museum solo, he will present new ceramics, wood sculptures, and a large bronze.

Know Before You Go: This show is one you can smell as well as see. The installation includes clay-painted walls and herbal scents.

“BLUE MAGICK” BY SHAYLA

MARSHALL

Where: Walgreens storefront, 23rd Street and Collins Avenue When: Ongoing

Why It’s Worth a Look: Inside one of the most highly-trafficked Walgreens in Miami Beach, Shayla Marshall has created two scenes: one of a mother tending to her daughter’s hair and another of a drugstore aisle stacked with braiding hair products and combs.

Know Before You Go: The artist says that the presentation—organized by the Bass and the Bakehouse Art Complex—reflects her journey from “absence to visibility” as safe products for Black hair became easier to find.

“NOX PAVILION” BY

LAWRENCE LEK

Where: The Bass

When: Through April 26

Why It’s Worth a Look: The show brings viewers inside a fictional therapy center called Nox (short for “Nonhuman Excellence”), where sentient self-driving cars undergo psychological treatment.

Know Before You Go: The Londonbased artist has explored the Nox universe in his work since 2023; this presentation includes a two-channel film, an interactive video game, and more.

“FIRST

LIGHT” BY

THOMAS HOUSEAGO

Where: Rubell Museum

When: Dec. 1–Sep. 27

Why It’s Worth a Look: The first single-artist survey to take place at the expanded Rubell Museum presents more than 20 sculptures and collaged paintings by the Los Angeles-based art world bad boy-made-good Thomas Houseago.

Know Before You Go: The private museum will also present solo presentations by emerging stars including Yu Nishimura, 2025 CULTURED Young Artist Lorenzo Amos, and Young Artist alum Ser Serpas.

“CHANGES: REFLECTIONS ON TIME & SPACES”

Where: Spinello Projects

When: Dec. 1–Jan. 10

Why It’s Worth a Look: To mark the Miami gallery’s 20th anniversary, founder Anthony Spinello is bringing together work by 15 artists with ties to the gallery, including Agustina Woodgate and Eddie Arroyo.

Know Before You Go: Making the presentation all the more personal, the works in the show are all drawn from Spinello’s private collection.

“INDIGENOUS

FUTURISM”

BY CECILIA VÁSQUEZ YUI

Where: Mindy Solomon Gallery

When: Through Jan. 10

Why It’s Worth a Look: Inspired by the concept of Indigenous Futurism, Cecilia Vásquez Yui, a member of the Shipibo-Conibo tribe, creates ceramic sculptures that recall technological objects sent from a future era into the rainforest of the present.

Know Before You Go: With a population of more than 20,000, the Shipibo-Conibo people are one of the largest Indigenous groups of the Peruvian Amazon.

“A WORLD FAR AWAY, NEARBY AND INVISIBLE: TERRITORY NARRATIVES IN THE JORGE M. PÉREZ COLLECTION”

Where: El Espacio 23

When: Through Aug. 15

Why It’s Worth a Look: The show at the private contemporary art space founded by Jorge M. Pérez takes a broad look at how territory shapes identity, memory, and belonging through nearly 150 works by more than 100 international artists.

Know Before You Go: Curated by Claudia Segura Campins, Head of Collection at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, the exhibition places the work of local Miami artists like Nina Surel and Jennifer Basile alongside such famous names as Chris Ofili and Pat Steir.

“UNDERWATER AND UNDERNEATH” BY LAURIE SIMMONS

Where: Andrew Reed Gallery

When: Through Jan. 17

Why It’s Worth a Look: For the beloved photographer’s second show with the Miami gallery, Simmons is presenting works from three series that span the early 1980s to the late ’90s.

Know Before You Go: In the series “Water Ballet” and “Family Collision,” human forms and toy figurines float underwater. The third series, “Underneath,” features surreal images of mannequins framing unsettling domestic scenes.

“THE BEST SHOW DURING MIAMI”

BY SUSAN KIM ALVAREZ

Where: KDR

When: Through Jan. 10

Why It’s Worth a Look: Aside from the fact that the show has perhaps the best title of any exhibition on view during Miami Art Week, it boasts dense paintings teeming with animals, cartoon figures, and plant life.

Know Before You Go: The Miamibased artist draws from her Cuban, Vietnamese, and Jewish heritage to create dreamscapes that sometimes include her relatives as she imagines they looked when they were younger.

If You See Nothing Else at Design Miami…

The 2025 edition of the revered design fair, which celebrates its 20 th anniversary this year, ushers in a cadre of gallerists and artists reviving esoteric processes, paying tribute to American design forebears, and manipulating known materials into foreign forms. These six booths are not to be missed among the wealth of offerings on view.

BY LEE CARTER

Marking 20 years as the leading design fair, the increasingly international Design Miami opens its doors in its hometown this week. Under the curatorial leadership of Glenn Adamson, the 2025 edition’s theme is “ Make. Believe .”—a rallying cry for imagination and ingenuity. “We’re creating a conversation about skilled craft and unfettered imagination,” he notes, “and the way those two things continually inform each other.”

The fair, which runs from Dec. 2 -7, once again transforms Pride Park on Miami Beach into a whirlwind of collectors, gallerists, curators, and design cognoscenti, not to mention the curious art crowd that never fails to drift over from Art Basel Miami Beach at the Convention Center next door.

This year’s edition of the fair will play host to over 70 galleries—including 25 first-time exhibitors—who have taken the theme to heart. Together, the designers and dealers participating in the 2025 program lean heavily into material exploration, from Rich Aybar’s compact rubber armchair, modeled on the gooey tactility of a slug, on view with Milan’s Delvis (Un)Limited, to Jack Craig’s sculptural manipulations of synthetic carpeting for Detroit’s David Klein Gallery. Narrative, too, comes to the fore: London’s Charles Burnand Gallery presents intricate yet monumental works with enough backstory to fill a book. Several exhibitors tip their hats to visionary forebears, as with Moderne Gallery’s focus on the pioneering woodwork of George Nakashima and Superhouse’s tribute to the radical furniture artists of the 1980 s. Given the range of perspectives on view, CULTURED has selected six presentations that embody Design Miami’s dream-big ethos this year, each one imaginative and ambitious in its own way.

Delvis (Un)limited

A champion of Italian craftsmanship, the experimental Milanese art-meets-design space has earned a reputation for spotlighting fresh young practitioners. Its booth offers an eye-popping mix: Rich Aybar’s rubber Slug Chair marries whimsy with high concept, while Objects of Common Interest unveils a rock-like, shock-pink resin creation that pops open to reveal a hidden bar and speaker system inside.

Adrian Sassoon

Devoted to ceramics, hardstone, and glass, the London gallery promises to dazzle Design Miami visitors with its explorations in contemporary craft. Highlights include jagged, geology-inspired vases by Kate Malone and luminous cast-blown glass works by Joon Yong Kim, the Seoul-based designer renowned for his poetic oscillations between transparency and opacity.

Wexler Gallery

Philadelphia’s Wexler Gallery’s booth features a compelling lineup of newly represented designers. Among them is German artist Henry Baumann, whose globular towers of translucent resin evoke amoebic, primordial ooze—playful, biomorphic, and mysterious. Mining an altogether different vein is the British designer Sofia Karakatsanis, who is debuting a series of hand-carved wooden chairs. Known for her intuitive process and reverence for raw materials, Karakatsanis lets the wood’s grain dictate each piece’s form, transforming raw timber into oneof-a-kind sculptural furniture.

Friedman Benda

A Design Miami stalwart, Friedman Benda gallery returns with a characteristically idiosyncratic presentation featuring architectural designer Javier Senosiain, ceramic artist Nicole Cherubini, and Fernando Laposse, the young Mexican talent known for transforming unconventional materials such as corn husks and agave fibers into yeti-like “monster” lamps, among others. The buzzy outfit—with locations in New York and Los Angeles—will also debut The Lost Cloth Object, a joint effort between Stephen Burks and Italian wood manufacturer ALPI. This collaboration sees the American designer and Columbia professor of architecture juxtapose motifs from the textile traditions of the Kuba Kingdom of Central Africa— particularly the bold, geometric patterning of embroidered Kuba cloth— with the color, grain, and texture of endangered woods.

Superhouse

The New York gallery was founded in 2020 with the mission of giving trailblazing yet overlooked American furniture designers from the late-20 th century their flowers. This involves taking a fresh look at the audacious 1980 s when, as founder and director Stephen Markos puts it, “American designers started to treat furniture as art—deeply personal, political, and full of attitude.” This year, Superhouse presents landmark pieces by 12 of the era’s most impactful designers, many of which have never before been shown to the public. Standouts include Dan Friedman’s exuberant folding screen, as riotous as it is playful, and Alex Locadia’s molded-leather Batman Chair of 1989 , of which only two were produced.

Charles Burnand Gallery

The London institution brings a spiritual edge to the fair this year with a look beyond function and form and toward the mystical and monumental. New works by designers including Marc Fish, DEGLAN, Fabrikr, Kyeok Kim, and Studio Furthermore delve into esoteric processes and materials—from charred iroko wood to color-shifting dichroism and the stacking of opaque hanji paper. At the center of it all is Jan Waterston’s Strata Cabinet—the British designer coaxed solid ash into a sinuous, monolithic presence that feels both ethereal and grounded.

THE MIDSIZE DEALER’S GUIDE TO MIAMI ON A BUDGET

WHILE THE MEGAGALLERIES RENT OUT CARBONE AND SHACK UP AT THE EDITION, SMALL AND MIDSIZE GALLERIES GET THRIFTY TO SURVIVE ONE OF THE BIGGEST WEEKS IN THE ARTWORLD CALENDAR.

BY JANELLE ZARA

The art world’s annual retreat to Miami can look very glamorous—that is, “if you squint,” says New York gallerist Margot Samel. For every capacious Escalade pulling up to the Edition, there is an emerging dealer splitting an Uber to an Airbnb with a colleague. “Miami gets expensive fast,” Samel explains. “The quiet, unglamorous choices are the ones that save you.”

Samel, who will make her Art Basel Miami Beach debut this year with a solo presentation of Argentine painter Carolina Fusilier, is one of

many exhibitors who will be spending strategically in Miami. The mounting costs of shipping, booth fees, airfare, and hotels are challenging, especially on top of the year-round expenses of running a gallery during a challenging year for the art market. Jeffrey Lawson, founder of Untitled Art, told ARTnews that he had been shrinking the size of the fair’s booths to accommodate struggling gallerists’ budgets.

The consensus among young dealers is that fairs provide a level of exposure that wouldn’t be possible otherwise—which keeps them coming back, even if participation is a gamble.

“For a gallery like ours, especially in a slow market, the fair can feel like stepping onto Wheel of Fortune,” says NADA exhibitor Marina Vranopoulou, founder of the Athens, Greece, gallery Dio Horia. “You spin, you hope, and you try to land in the right spot.”

Making it through Miami Art Week on a shoestring is possible. It just requires preparation, fortitude, and foregoing certain luxuries. Ahead of the whirlwind, we gathered a few tips from the dealers who are making it work.

GETTING THERE

“We run on low-drama operations: no last-minute flights or hotels, no 11thhour framing,” says Samel, who started planning for Miami in June. “The trick is booking hotels before the ink on the acceptance letter is even dry.” Walking distance from the fair is ideal, she adds, for avoiding hellish traffic and expensive Ubers.

Artist Alex Nazari, founder of LA gallery Gattopardo, recommends flying into Fort Lauderdale, a less popular and therefore less expensive hub than Miami International. From there, she’ll drive off in the car she rented through

Costco for the low price of $250 a week, plus the $65 annual membership. This year, she is presenting a suite of paintings by Raffi Kalenderian at NADA (small enough to ship in a cardboard bin rather than a heavy wooden crate and easily carried home in the event they don’t sell).

And rather than compete in Miami with a million different events, she’s throwing Kalenderian a party in LA before the fairs begin. “So many people aren’t coming to Miami, and I’d love for them to see the work,” Nazari says.

A LITTLE HELP FROM YOUR FRIENDS DIY ART HANDLING

According to a recent Artnet report, add-ons at Art Basel can range from $128 to access an electrical outlet to as much as $800 for an additional light—all frills small gallerists have learned to do without. “We minimize absolutely everything,” says Vranopoulou, who even brings her own chairs from home, packed into the same crate as the art. Any works that don’t fit into the crate go into her suitcase. Once onsite, she’ll build out a conceptual, post-apocalyptic group presentation with her husband, Tom. (In true small-business fashion, family members double as cheap labor.)

Cole Solinger of the San Francisco gallery House of Seiko prefers not to outsource any work he can do himself. Tapping into skills he learned as an art handler, as well as in “remedial” woodshop at art school, he’s building the frames and slipcases for his group showing at NADA. Rather than flying out an extra salesperson or seeking one out in an unfamiliar town, he also plans to staff the booth himself for the entire fair. So will Nazari, whose preferred form of caffeine is Ito En bottled green tea. “It keeps you perky without the crash and coffee breath,” she notes.

Do-it-yourself doesn’t necessarily mean going it alone. Over the years, Samel has developed a circle of peers she can rely on for emotional support and other resources. “We share shipments, share staff, share Advil,” she says, and at other fairs in the past, they’ve shared Airbnbs. “Nothing bonds people faster than making pasta in a barely functional rental kitchen.”

Although it’s an arduous week, dealers say it’s worth going out in Miami at least once. “I let my friends who work at big galleries pay for dinner,” says one Miami exhibitor. Cutting out drinking and smoking also goes a long way. “I just don’t believe people are closing deals at 2 a.m. after four martinis anymore,” the exhibitor adds. “Get on an SSRI and get on with it.”

The Collector’s Edit

This season, take a note from the late Peggy Guggenheim with a fair-week wardrobe that channels breezy abundance.

Any art-world veteran will tell you that an art fair is a fashion moment. Even when the sartorial choices are understated— gallery blacks, sleek suiting, endless cashmere—they never fail to telegraph a delicately attuned sense of status, par for the course in an ecosystem that is relentlessly self-aware.

It’s always refreshing to catch a flash of irreverent glamour weaving its way between gallery booths. Few figures have occupied the role of the art world’s sartorial north star better than Peggy Guggenheim, legendary heiress and inimitable patron of avant-garde artists including Wassily Kandinsky, Mark Rothko, and Jean Cocteau.

Guggenheim’s commitment to the experimental extended to her wardrobe—which, in her youth, featured no small number of cellophane-wrapped gowns (courtesy of her good friend Elsa Schiaparelli), and, in later years, gave way to piles of golden jewelry, mismatched earrings, and a notorious pair of saucer-sized sunglasses (commissioned from another friend, the artist Edward Melcarth). Whatever the collector wore, she wore it with ease— reclining, with a dog on each side, in her personal gondola as it glided through the Venetian canals.

Guggenheim’s spirit is alive and well in Miami this year, and ready to be channeled into bold looks that leave a strong impression on more restrained dressers. Classic silhouettes—A-line dresses, mercilessly cinched trench coats—accompany heavy gold accents—a cascade of diamonds, a formidable cocktail ring, a steep metallic heel (Level has the one you need)—and art-conscious statement pieces (a Dior Lady Art bag, naturally). The look, this season, is breezy abundance.

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The Miami Social Calendar

From power panels to late-night invites, these are the Art Week moments that will define the season outside the Convention Center.

The Events

DECEMBER 1–4

Miami, WE ARE ONA Style

The collective arrives in Miami with an immersive culinary installation at the newly opened Andaz Miami Beach, conceived in collaboration with designer Sabine Marcelis, whose luminous material language sets the tone for a multi-sensory dining journey with the José Andrés Group. Andaz Miami Beach, 4041 Collins Avenue

DECEMBER 2–8

Galerie Estrada’s First Art Week

Etéreo, the vintage clothing concept by Zabrina Estrada, is expanding its Miami footprint with a gallery space. Its inaugural presentation, “Transcultural Salon: 1910–1930,” explores a moment when the East and West intersected, featuring pleated silks, hand-painted velvets, and brocades.

Galerie Estrada, 7636 NE 4th Court

DECEMBER 2

A Fireside Chat with ECOLOGIES

Moderated by CULTURED Editorat-Large Julia Halperin, this conversation brings together leaders from an array of institutions to discuss how we build and sustain creative communities. Panelists include NADA Executive Director Heather Hubbs, Knight Foundation VP for Arts Kristina Newman-Scott, and PAMM Director Franklin Sirmans.

Ice Palace Studios, 1400 N Miami Avenue

DECEMBER 3

Champagne, With a Side of Sam Falls

Ruinart toasts its “Conversations with Nature” partnership with Sam Falls, hosting a cocktail that merges champagne ritual with the artist’s atmospheric, earth-driven sensibility. This is also the last chance to see Falls’s installations before they move permanently to the Maison Ruinart in France. Miami Beach Convention Center, 1901 Convention Center Drive

Marni’s Next Chapter Unlocked Marni extends the vision of its new creative director, Meryll Rogge, with

an art installation curated by the designer at the line’s Design District boutique. It’s a must-visit for those seeking the inside scoop on where the Italian house is headed next.

Marni Miami Design District, 173 NE 40th Street

The New York Literati’s Touch-Down

Nina Johnson hosts a toast to The Whitney Review’s latest issue and “Acid Bath House,” Jarrett Earnest’s deliriously fun group show at the gallery—complete with go-go dancers, spoken-word performances, and an ice sculpture emblematic of Miami’s flamboyant take on partying. Brother’s Keeper Bar, 1710 Alton Road

Sukeban Strikes Again

The legendary all-female Japanese wrestling league returns for a one-night Miami takeover, creative-directed by co-founder Olympia Le-Tan, with a cameo by drag queen Violet Chachki. Expect spectacle, sweat, and a rowdy crowd.

Miami Beach Bandshell, 7275 Collins Avenue

Miu Miu Hits Refresh

In a swirl of glass, velvet, and brushed metal, Miu Miu is reintroducing itself to the city just in time for Art Week. Featuring the latest Holiday 2025 collection, the line fêtes the launch of its newly redesigned boutique with an invite-only party (but don’t worry, the boutique doors will be open to the public as soon as the champagne is cleared).

Miu Miu Design District, 190 NE 39th Street

The Critics’ Table Heads to Miami What is the role of criticism today? How does it relate to the rest of the art world? CULTURED is staging a live edition of the Critics’ Table to parse these questions and more with Co-Chief Art Critic Johanna Fateman, alongside contributors Jarrett Earnest and Whitney Mallett.

Ice Palace Studios, 1400 N Miami Avenue

CULTURED Goes Tropical

Step out of the fair circuit and into the Jean-Georges Miami Tropic Residences for CULTURED’s panel featuring Editor-at-Large Julia Halperin, artist Marcel Dzama, Hanabi

art consultancy Founder Jamie Stagnitta, and the Residences’ architect Glenn Pushelberg. Jean-Georges Miami Tropic Residences, 3501 NE 1st Avenue

Manolo Blahnik and Achille Salvagni’s Dolce Vita

At the Miami Beach Edition, architect and designer Achille Salvagni raises a glass alongside Manolo Blahnik in an evening honoring craftsmanship and a shared dedication to living life beautifully.

The Miami Beach Edition, 2901 Collins Avenue

Burberry’s Miami Makeover Burberry partners with BritishAmerican artist Sarah Morris on a vivid redesign of its Miami Design District façade, reimagined in her signature abstract geometry. The collaboration will receive a toast at an in-store cocktail followed by an intimate dinner at Andaz Miami Beach, hosted by Morris herself.

Burberry Design District, 112 NE 39th Street

When the Art World Crowns Its Own

The Art Basel Awards, which were announced earlier this year, will culminate in a grand ceremony hosted during this year’s Miami Beach edition. BOSS (the awards’ presenting partner) will inaugurate the BOSS Award for Outstanding Achievement—granted to an artist with both purpose-driven work and global visibility—while 12 gold medalists will be honored with their prize.

New World Center, 500 17th Street

DECEMBER 5

Brunch With a Bite

Chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten hosts a tasting brunch and dinner at Matador Room (also at the Miami Beach Edition). The family-style experience blends signature favorites with seasonal dishes, beginning with a bespoke welcome cocktail.

The Miami Beach Edition, 2901 Collins Avenue

NADA

The Fairs

Back at Ice Palace Studios for its 23rd edition, running from Dec. 2-6, NADA gathers nearly 140 galleries, art spaces, and organizations from 30 countries and 65 cities. Expect a mix of rising talent, first-time exhibitors, and NADA stalwarts, as well as a programming series presented with the Knight Foundation, PAMM, and CULTURED

Ice Palace Studios, 1400 N Miami Avenue

Untitled Art

Untitled Art returns to Miami Beach from Dec. 3-7 with a 160-deep exhibitor list that spans emerging galleries, nonprofits, and global heavy-hitters across mainstream and emerging art locales. This edition sees the fair continue its “Nest” sector for young galleries and deepen its climate commitment with the Gallery Climate Coalition.

Ocean Drive and 12th Street

Satellite Art Show

From Dec. 4-7, the artist-run Satellite Art Show transforms the entire Geneva Hotel into a maze of installations, galleries, and experiences—an intentionally unruly counterpoint to Miami’s more buttoned-up fair circuit. Raw, strange, and always memorable, it pulls in an audience hungry for the unpolished edge of Art Week (and includes a nightly party at the hotel bar).

The Geneva Hotel, 1520 Collins Avenue

Open Invitational

For its sophomore edition in Miami, the Open Invitational renews its commitment to highlighting progressive art studios and artists with disabilities. Founders and industry veterans David Fierman and Ross McCalla see the fair, which runs Dec. 1-6, as an exercise in what a friendlier, more inclusive art ecosystem could look like.

Melin Building, 3930 NE 2nd Avenue

‘Thank You For Asking’

Maribel Pérez Wadsworth and Kristina Newman-Scott, the Knight Foundation’s new leaders, are on a mission to ensure that the arts remain woven into the fabric of cities across the U.S.

Newspaper magnate siblings John S. and James L. Knight established their eponymous foundation with $9 ,047 in 1950 . Their belief? That a well-informed community could best determine its own true interests and was essential to a thriving democracy. Since then, the foundation has supported the people, insights, and organizations that lead to healthier communities, including by investing in culture and those who make, research, and write about it. Over the past two decades, the impact-focused nonprofit has doubled down on its commitment to the arts sector, pouring more than $485 million into arts and culture initiatives across the country. That support, at a time when federal funding is decimated every day, is no small gesture. Against this fraught backdrop, Maribel Pérez Wadsworth, who joined Knight as the President and CEO in 2023 , sees “hope and momentum at the local level.”

Since January, her mission to champion “artists and institutions as local entrepreneurs, job creators, and community builders” has met its match in Kristina Newman-Scott, the Foundation’s Vice President for Arts. A cultural Swiss Army Knife, Newman-Scott has left her mark everywhere from the art scene of her native Jamaica to the State of Connecticut, where she led the Office of the Arts and State Historic Preservation Office. Ahead of Miami Art Week, where CULTURED, NADA, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami will stage ECOLOGIES, four days of dialogue tackling a cross-section of urgent topics, CULTURED sat down with the executive to talk about leading with curiosity and care.

Kristina, you have approached art from every angle in your career. You were a practicing artist, you worked in radio and TV, you led arts organizations like BRIC as well as Connecticut’s Office of the Arts. Is there one of these experiences that feels like it really paved the way for what you do now?

I would not be at Knight today had I not had all of those experiences. But working for the city then state government, I really had to learn how to not make

assumptions about what people thought the importance of culture was in society. I also got close proximity to city concerns and workings—from the mayor to parks and water to small business development. That really helped me start to understand what it means when you’re tuned in to the people that you’re here to serve, and was the genesis for [my understanding of] how culture, when placed appropriately, can amplify some of these bedrock challenges.

Art can be a conversation starter about so many things, whether that’s climate or housing. It’s a way to open people up.

That’s what I love about working with artists. Because I started out as an artist, I have so much respect for how they lift up the things that they’re trying to communicate. When I worked for the State of Connecticut, we partnered with the Land Art Generator to bring artists, designers, engineers, and community members together in Willimantic for a design challenge centered on renewable energy and public space. The proposal that was selected, Rio Iluminado, was not just a beautiful artwork but a sculptural energy system that used the sun, the river, the cycles of the seasons and the movement of local species to teach us about climate, reciprocity and resilience. This kind of work doesn’t just illustrate solutions—it helps people envision them. Instead of being like, “Here’s a five-point plan that tells you why you should care.”

And when did you first become aware of the Knight Foundation’s work? What conversations have felt the most exciting to you since joining?

Knight came into my world when I was with the State of Connecticut. There was always this great research that Knight would share with the field, and I think I was conducting our own art strategy plan for the Office of the Arts. Since joining, I’ve been doing a lot of grounding work. It’s important for me to work from a place of understanding and curiosity. I want to be service-oriented. Things are moving so fast, and I don’t make any

assumptions. What feels like a win for me is that across our cities, we’ve been curating these conversations where we’re hearing from different leaders coming in to sit with culture [workers and] artists at the table, some for the first time. I feel really energized by that because we’re using our influence—not just in terms of the money that we’re investing, but in gathering, convening, and connecting.

The other amazing thing about this job must be the sheer geographical expanse of the places that Knight is investing in— from Saint Paul to Akron to Miami. Our country is changing in real time. What has it felt like to be working in these different communities in this fraught moment?

Maribel often says that the power to create change is not lost, it’s local. In a place like Akron, we see organizations really experimenting with the policy shifts they can make through an organization like ArtsNow. You’ll see downtown Macon reimagined by an artist and a city planner. There are these visionary leaders who recognize the value of culture. Every place has their own kind of special sauce, but one thing that has been consistent is

that there is an openness. No one is like, “Prove it to me.” They’re all like, “Oh no, tell me more.” It’s a really generative time. If we can test some of these ideas around the arts as infrastructure in authentic ways across our Knight cities, they become models for the entire nation.

What’s a lesson you’re taking from this first year into your next year with Knight?

That I don’t think it’s our role in private philanthropy to be prescriptive. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had grantees look at me and be like, “Thank you for asking.” Before designing an art strategy that is going to be responsive, relevant, and connected, it has to be informed by the people we are in this work with.

Pop Goes Pensato

Joyce Pensato’s darker leanings were often belied by her penchant for depicting cartoon characters. A new show of the late artist’s work lays these dueling forces bare.

BY SAM FALB

Joyce Pensato never met a Mickey Mouse she couldn’t disfigure. The late painter— known for turning pop culture’s most recognizable cartoon faces into dripping, manic images—found a rich terrain, both emotionally and formally, in the onscreen realm. The Brooklyn native’s canvases were always loud, even when rendered in black and white. She wielded enamel with a masterful

HIBA SCHAHBAZ

edge, distilling the iconography of mass culture into something as grotesque as it was human.

Six years after her death at the age of 78 , the ICA Miami has organized an expansive posthumous survey, on view through March 15. The show brings together more than 65 works spanning five decades, from her earliest Batman sketches to the explosive enamel paintings that defined her late era.

“We wanted to bring renewed attention to Joyce’s critical place in American art history,” ICA Art + Research Center Director Gean Moreno tells CULTURED

“Her practice intersects Abstract Expressionism, Pop, and a uniquely personal visual language, yet she has often been overlooked in canonical narratives.” Leading the charge are the ICA’s artistic director, Alex Gartenfeld; curator Stephanie Seidel; and Moreno. Gartenfeld first worked with the artist in 2013 , commissioning murals that traveled to Rome and Paris. Then, in 2017, the trio invited Pensato to create a site-specific installation for the museum’s “The Everywhere Studio” exhibition, which explored the significance of the artistic sanctum. This year’s

show, the most comprehensive presentation of her work to date, unfolds across character-themed rooms—featuring The Simpsons, South Park , Mickey Mouse, and Batman. (“I see him as strength and real power,” she once told New American Paintings of the caped crusader. “I tried to do Spider-Man but he looked like a ballerina!”)

Beyond the cartoon veneer lies a painter deeply engaged with the history of abstraction. Early oil works from the 1980 s reveal the influence of her mentor, Joan Mitchell, with broad slashes of color and flurries of energy. As Pensato’s confidence grew, so too did her wit. “We kept circling back to the tension Joyce draws between humor and darkness,” Seidel continues. “On the surface, her subjects are familiar cultural icons, but she pushes them into a psychological terrain where comedy dissolves into tragedy.” Her influence, they posit, can be felt in the work of a generation of artists, like Sean Landers or Cosima von Bonin, who came of age two decades after her. In their gestures, whether painted or performed, one senses the echo of Pensato’s insistence that art can—and should—simultaneously entertain, disturb, and illuminate the complications of contemporary life.

DIANA EUSEBIO

mocanomi.org

Miami Meets Here

At Miami Tropic, Jean-Georges brings his culinary vision home with the city’s first abc kitchens, curated lifestyle programming, and striking interiors by Yabu Pushelberg—all overlooking Miami’s vibrant Design District.

ON MIAMI TIME

IN MIAMI’S DESIGN DISTRICT, THE PATEK PHILIPPE BOUTIQUE IS A CULTURAL DESTINATION WHERE HERITAGE AND HOSPITALITY COMMINGLE.

PRESENTED BY PATEK PHILIPPE

MIAMI DESIGN DISTRICT BOUTIQUE

BY MARA VEITCH

Today’s Miami, any longtime denizen would agree, is a place of continual reinvention. However, a few things endure: an Art Deco ethos, all-consuming jungle flora, and, of course, a taste for the sumptuous.

The marriage of the city’s old spirit and new appetite is best embodied in the Miami Design District, a cultivated hub for public art, luxury retail, and dining. At its heart, tucked in a 1920 s neoclassical gem, is a Patek Philippe boutique that encapsulates the Miami Design District’s focus on craftsmanship.

Patek Philippe was founded in 1839, and has long been synonymous with an unwavering legacy. The Miami boutique aligns with Patek’s values, and remains committed to providing the highest level of quality and service for current and future generations.

“We wanted the design to feel timeless, so it’s as relevant today as it will be 15 years from now,” says managing partner Brian Govberg, whose family has been a retailer for Patek Philippe since 1987

Inside, the boutique unfolds more like a living room than a retail floor; it’s an unhurried environment replete with lounge seating, a

champagne bar, and a private ivy-covered terrace that beckons clients to linger. Since the timepiece boutique opened its doors in 2022 , it’s become clear that its function has indeed followed its form—clients make ritual pilgrimages to the space for a moment of respite in the midst of the bustling district. “We think less about transaction,” Govberg says, noting that the demand for Patek Philippe timepieces often outpaces availability. “We think more about education, connection, and building relationships over time.”

When a curious visitor arrives at the boutique for their appointment, they are paired with a knowledgeable advisor who has undergone an extensive training program with the brand, ensuring each potential client receives an education and service consistent with Patek Philippe’s highest standards.

For the Patek Philippe Boutique Miami, the goal is simple: offer the kind of experience one remembers. “Even if a client doesn’t purchase a timepiece during their visit, they leave with a story, and a sense that they are welcome.” Perhaps that’s why the space is always humming—with collectors, connoisseurs, and the curious alike.

Mina Stone’s Miami Vice

This tropical twist on a cold-weather staple was inspired by our Food Editor’s trove of Art Basel Miami Beach memories.

BY MINA STONE

This salad is a feast for the eyes and the mouth: colorful, crunchy, tangy, and sweet. It is a perfect addition to the holiday table, as it pairs well with any main dish. Even better, you can make it ahead of time. Imagine this as a classic winter salad that went down to Florida for Art Basel Miami Beach. Cabbage is abundant in the Northeast, while mangoes are one of the most prolific Florida crops. The salad is perfect on its own or mounded on top of roasted fish, pork, chicken—you name it. A few fun facts about the salad. One: It is vegan. Two: The pistachio and the mango belong to the same plant family, Anacardiaceae. Three: It’s heavenly to eat!

Eamon Ore-Giron: Conversations with Snakes, Birds, and Stars

48 & 52 Walker Street

November 7 - Decemeber 20, 2025

Art Basel Miami Beach

Booth G20

Dec 3 - 7, 2025

A Glamorous Collective Hallucination Hits Miami

Jarrett Earnest dropped acid at a bathhouse in Washington, DC. The resulting trip brought the renowned critic all the way to Miami, where he’s curated a queer séance of a group show at Nina Johnson.

BY ADAM ELI

When I sat down to interview Jarrett Earnest over soggy eggs and burnt toast at the Washington Square Diner, my first question was, essentially, “How the hell am I supposed to interview you when the show hasn’t gone up yet, and the press release is just a list of artists and a story about you taking acid at a gay bathhouse?” The group exhibition in question—which could only be titled “Acid Bath House”—is on view at Nina Johnson through Feb. 14 . It is the second show Earnest has curated at the Miami space; for his first, in 2014 , he positioned a massive mermaid tail by artist Ann Liv Young in the center of the gallery and draped a pirate flag over its sign. The critic, with his bushy beard and arms tattooed with pieces by Caravaggio and Tom of Finland, has become something of a cult figure in New York’s queer art scene. Some fear him, many desire him, and nearly all seek his approval. “Acid Bath House” features photography, sculpture, textiles, painting, and drawings on paper from artists including Juliana Huxtable, TM Davy, and Genesis Breyer P­ Orridge. Not unlike their curator, the works’ combined effect evokes a reverence for celestial, mind­bending pleasure. To make sense of the séance, I grilled Earnest on his South Florida roots, queer trash, and why getting lost in the sauce is rather glamorous after all.

Tell me about the show.

After the experience described in the press release, I decided to do a show based on queer erotic psychedelia. I’ve curated big group shows before, and I can’t use renderings. I can’t imagine where all of the pieces will go, because an artwork has all of this embodied information that is surplus to an image of it, surplus to how you might describe it. When you place pieces next to each other, it teases out different dimensions—they start speaking to each other. And

that’s what is exciting to me about curating a show. It’s a form of crafting an argument. If you could make that argument any other way, then it doesn’t really need to exist as an exhibition. It could be a book, a podcast, an article.

What are you arguing here?

I’m still waiting to discover that. One thing I love about art is that it’s like spending time with someone. A painting holds a physical space in the room but also a kind of presence. It’s an extension of the person who made it. The show is about pleasure and connection. It’s filled with people I’m super excited to think about together. It feels like throwing the best party ever.

In the press release, you ask, “Does ‘queerness’ still exist? Is it a force? Does it push toward liberation, toward fluidity and change, or is it too easily mired in defining architectures of privilege to get out of its own way? Can we separate queerness from ‘identity’ as it currently functions? And, if so, should we?” Can you speak to that?

The word glamour, historically, comes from a kind of magic—a spell that changes one’s ability to perceive you, and reality generally. That’s what I like about queer artists, especially the ones that I am including. For example, I’m including this LSD drawing by Steven Arnold that has never been shown. He was a photographer who made sets and costumes out of garbage, turning them into just the most unbelievably elegant phantasmagoric images. He died of AIDS and

isn’t as well­known as he should be. There is a lineage of queerness where you are given trash and, through your imagination, skill, and belief, make it into something fabulous. Glamour is probably what I miss the most in our present reality. There’s so little glamour these days.

What’s something that is completely unglamorous?

The Internet is not glamorous. Contemporary fashion is not glamorous. The way that so many artists our age want to be little professionals is unglamorous. They act like their interest is in making commodities. When you want to participate in the “market” or the “art world” in a certain way, you’re forced to produce too much too fast. To me, spending time is glamorous. You can get lost, which is the beauty of an artistic and intellectual life—the capacity to forget where you’re going and end up somewhere else.

Not to be a diva or anything, but then why are you showing during Art Basel Miami Beach?

You are so right. I am not an art­fair person— I do not set foot in them—but I come from South Florida and I care a lot about how fucked up it is. Florida has become a roadmap of our dystopian future. It’s really leading the country in its insane anti­trans legislation; it is so grim. While the international art world is focused on South Florida, it is important to me to acknowledge this. So the context is not necessarily about Art Basel; it’s about Florida, queerness, and transness in this extremely hostile environment.

Fifteen minutes from Mar-a-Lago, one art space has something to say on behalf of Florida’s LGBTQ+ community.

A Rainbow Statement In A Red State

BY SOPHIE LEE

“I once heard someone, upon entering Beth Rudin DeWoody’s home and spotting a Tom of Finland and many other queer-themed works, say, ‘It looks like a gay man lives here,’” recalls Laura Dvorkin, the co-curator of the Bunker Artspace. It’s not the expected take on the storied patron and Palm Beach art space founder’s collection. But DeWoody is cementing her perennial dedication to the queer canon with “Beyond the Rainbow,” a new show of LGBTQ+ work organized by Dvorkin and the space’s co-curator Maynard Monrow, as well as 19 other artists, curators, gallerists, architects, and writers.

Inspiration first struck when DeWoody visited Paris’s Centre Pompidou two years ago, and took in “Over the Rainbow,” a similar celebration of LGBTQ+ creatives. “That experience sparked the idea to create an exhibition of our own at the Bunker Artspace—one that honors the LGBTQ+ community and their art, impact, and activism at this pivotal moment, and in this crucial place: Florida,” explains Monrow, nodding to the fact that since his election in 2019, the state’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has been pursuing an aggressive campaign to roll back protections for queer families, limit healthcare for trans citizens, and prevent education on gender and sexuality in schools. (The Bunker Artspace also stands a mere 15 minutes from Mar-a-Lago.)

DeWoody’s desire to weigh in on the state’s political climate is a natural extension of her longstanding engagement, says Dvorkin, who points to the patron’s support of organizations like God’s Love We Deliver dating back to the height of the AIDS crisis. The new show, open by appointment only through May 1, 2026 , features artwork by boldface names like Catherine Opie, Andy Warhol, Nicole Eisenman, and Lyle Ashton Harris. Dvorkin and Monrow note less of a focus on including only queer artists, and more of an interest in identifying pieces that limn queer themes of identity, diversity, and representation, or that resonate personally with the panel of curators. “The installation process was an exciting and deeply meaningful journey—one that revealed unexpected connections and conversations,” shares Monrow. “For instance, we placed a Martin Wong drawing of skeletons alongside a handmade exhibition announcement by Felix Gonzalez-Torres and a General Idea work on paper titled AIDS (Reinhardt). Together, these pieces form a powerful curatorial statement on the AIDS epidemic.”

Elsewhere, a room resembling an “old-school library” is filled with books and other work by the likes of Joe Brainard, John Ashbery, and Allen Ginsberg. There are also spaces dedicated to the late Nancy Brooks Brody and Pippa Garner, who was approached to be a curator, but died before the exhibition was put together. Though the Bunker is now flush with these kinds of critical tributes and pieces, Dvorkin wants to ensure her community knows that “first and foremost, this exhibition is a celebration.”

Art Basel Miami Beach

Booth C23

December 5–7, 2025

Congratulations to Cecilia Vicuña, who is nominated as an Icon Artist in the 2025 Art Basel Awards.

A FIELD GUIDE TO THE GALLERY DINNER

WE GATHERED A CROSS-SECTION OF ART-WORLD INSIDERS TO WEIGH IN ON THE GRAND SOCIAL EXPERIMENT THAT IS A GALLERY DINNER. FROM END-OF-THE-TABLE EXILE TO MID-PARTY B12 INJECTIONS, NO CAUTIONARY TALE, DEBAUCHEROUS EXPLOIT, OR HOT TIP WAS OFF-LIMITS.

BY ELLA MARTIN-GACHOT

Few art-world events are simultaneously as mythologized and dreaded as the gallery dinner. At a great one, you might observe deals being made, career trajectories fast-tracked, and maybe even the next great industry tryst ignited. At a bad one, you could be seated next to someone who has no idea who the artist is, or perhaps worse, isn’t aware that they are already dead. The speeches are interminable. There’s not nearly enough

THE BEST AND THE WORST DINNERS

“I was at a dinner where the crowd was so massive that I didn’t eat. To make it worse, there were ‘VIPs’ who were served at their tables, while other guests weren’t. It’s very bad form to have two levels of guests.”

MERYL ROSE, collector

“I went to one for a close friend’s show where the gallery director only invited his random bros. No press, not even any collectors. I thought, Damn, my friend really needs a new gallery.”

— JANELLE ZARA, writer

“I was recently at a dinner that Jose Martos and his wife, Servane Mary, hosted at their beautiful apartment for Michel Auder’s show. That was really great—an intimate, intergenerational mix of smart and funny people drinking too much wine and smoking cigarettes.”

TIF SIGFRIDS, partner at Canada gallery

STRATEGIC SEATING

“If there is an artist on each side of me, it’s heaven! The worst is to be seated next to an obnoxious collector who insists on showing pictures of their collection.”

MERYL ROSE

“Seated dinners are stressful for everyone—from the hosts to the guests. Someone should publish a book of select seating plans from historical gallery dinners; it would provide a fascinating insight into how the art world functioned at different times.”

MATTHEW HIGGS, artist, chief curator and director of White Columns

“People think the end of the table is exile, but it’s where the best conversations happen.”

CHRISTIANA

INE-KIMBA BOYLE , founder of Gladwell Projects

“The best seat? Beside Sharon Stone— no contest. The worst? Beside an art dealer without hosting privileges.”

ALEX ISRAEL, artist

wine flowing to wash the whole ordeal down. You get the picture.

The gallery dinner is an antiquated exercise. Yet, as a contracting art market and the Covid pandemic have reshaped how the art world spends its time and money, this particular brand of gathering endures. To explore its strange staying power, we asked industry veterans to spill their best and worst memories, hot tips, and words of wisdom for those wondering what a seat at the table really gets you.

“There was a White Cube dinner in an embassy. Stunning setting, candlelight, a great assortment of loose-lipped guests who were well-acquainted with the royals. It was also one of the worst, as I was seated across from a collector who had flipped multiple pieces of mine at auction. They didn’t recognize me and kept trying to make small talk.”

NATALIE FRANK , artist

“I would like to be seated next to Joan Jonas and her dog. Or L.J. Roberts and their dogs. Or Dominique Fung and her dog. Or Timothy Lai and his dog. Or maybe just their dogs.”

PAMELA HORNIK, collector

LOCATION IS EVERYTHING

“The best location is a home... or Mr Chow.”

CASEY FREMONT, executive director of the Art Production Fund

“Somewhere terribly chic, possibly with a bit of faded glory or something pastoral and garden-like—so, the Chateau Marmont.”

—HELEN

MOLESWORTH, curator

“The best location is a private home you’ve always wanted to see, and when you get there the host says, ‘Yeah go ahead, take a look in my closet. Raid my pill cabinet. Drink whatever wine you think has the prettiest label.’”

SARAH HOOVER, writer

“Anywhere but behind a velvet rope, where I literally sat once at a friend’s dinner.”

ARDEN WOHL, poet and philanthropist

“Just because Hudson Yards is close to Chelsea does not mean it’s a good place to host a dinner.”

—SARAH GOULET, publicist

“The best location is Gasthaus zum Hirschen, a tavern and hotel run by a third-generation family about 30 minutes by car outside of Basel. Galerie Max Mayer has its Art Basel dinner there.”

PAUL LEONG, collector

“The best location is definitely in the middle of a gallery surrounded by an artist’s work. At a James Cohan dinner for their first Byron Kim exhibit, Byron’s seven-anda-half-foot-tall night sky paintings were installed all around us. Each one revealed itself as dinner went on, very similar to the experience I once had at an Ad Reinhardt David Zwirner opening. As I sat in the middle of the gallery talking with the artist’s daughter, Anna, all 13 of those black paintings started to come alive as my eyes adjusted to every nuance.”

MIHAIL LARI, collector

“Confirming a seated dinner and not showing up. Or showing up and leaving an empty seat halfway through dinner.”

MICHAEL NEVIN, co-founder of the Journal Gallery

“Rearranging the place cards.”

ALEX ISRAEL

“Trashing the venue or the food at the table—or worse, being rude to staff. I’ve seen it, and it’s the kind of thing that lingers. The art world never forgets bad behavior at the table.”

CHRISTIANA INE-KIMBA BOYLE

“Treating spouses as less important… and seating them next to people who couldn’t be bothered to talk about or care about the art.”

MIHAIL LARI

“If it’s an open kitchen, people feel like it is okay to come and just pick off the plates. It’s so weird, yet it happens every single dinner. People see food in front of them, and something primal kicks in.”

MINA

STONE, chef and author

NO ONE COMES FOR THE FOOD, OR DO THEY?

“I don’t care about the food as long as it’s served by 9 p.m. and there is dessert.”

BENJAMIN GODSILL, art advisor

“Andy Warhol said it best.”

MICHAEL NEVIN

“I was always trained for there to be an open bar and wine on the tables, and I do think it really feels convivial, more European, and more fun. I remember being at an art event where they poured the wine, and at some point, it got so exhausting because they never came around … The wine should be good, but that does not mean it has to be expensive. I serve more white than red, but there should be both.”

MINA STONE

“Cocktail hour is called that for a reason. You get one hour, then people need to be fed something on a large plate.”

SARAH HOOVER

NOTABLE SIGHTINGS

“The weirdest thing I ever witnessed at a gallery dinner was Sylvester Stallone getting handsy with my friend who was interviewing him.”

NATALIE FRANK

WHAT HAPPENS AT THE GALLERY DINNER…

“A girlfriend and I wanted to remain cool and mysterious by not eating from the buffet, and instead snacked on too many pot brownies.”

CASEY FREMONT

“At a Sprüth Magers dinner many years ago, the person across from me abruptly stopped speaking to me. They still give me the cold shoulder to this day. Was it something I said? We’ll never know.”

JANELLE ZARA

“It’s always fun when the dinner’s at someone’s home. I’ll never forget one such evening at the former residence of my friend, the LA collector Rosette Delug. The night ended in her palatial bathroom, the entire party queued up for B12 shots in the tush—administered, naturally, by our fearless hostess herself.”

ALEX ISRAEL

“I sat next to Jeffrey Gibson at a gallery dinner, and he took a selfie of us on his disposable camera. I’m still waiting for a copy of that photo.”

“Not knowing who the artist is, and not having seen the show.”

—NATALIE FRANK

“Texting during the remarks.”

— PAUL LEONG

“Over-ordering. The horrible last ‘meat course’ when no one is hungry anymore, the shame of being witness to so much waste.”

HELEN MOLESWORTH

“Great food is a connector as well as good wine. When the company is not up to the test, it helps you survive terribly dull conversations.”

VALERIA NAPOLEONE , collector

“Good food is a plus. Good company is a must!”

TIF SIGFRIDS

“Dinners are supposed to start ‘promptly’ after the opening, but they never do. I’m usually starving by the time the food arrives.”

PAUL LEONG

“Once, I witnessed a dealer and a collector quietly arrange an entire loan for a major exhibition between courses. It felt like a piece of art history was being drafted in real time at the table— a reminder that these dinners can be as consequential as they are convivial.”

ARDEN WOHL

“Mid-conversation, a gallery director came up to us and started eating off of my friend’s plate. Yes, we were all a little tipsy. No, none of us were tipsy enough for that.”

JANELLE ZARA

“The weirdest was a dinner in a castle in Venice for an artist who had quietly passed away, although no one knew it at the time. The night ended with an EDM DJ set that lasted until 4 a.m. I woke up to the news a few hours later. In hindsight, I think the dinner was technically a ‘celebration of life’ thing?”

CHRISTIANA INE-KIMBA BOYLE

PAMELA HORNIK

A WORD OF ADVICE

“I think museum directors and curators should publicly reveal which gallery dinners they attend, just like British politicians have to declare any ‘gifts’ that they receive. This would be useful information!”

—MATTHEW HIGGS

“Seating charts are minor masterpieces of diplomacy—trust the system, and make the most of whoever lands next to you.”

SARAH GOULET

“Thank the people that served you. Just to go up to the catering team and say, ‘It was really good. Thank you for this evening.’ Even a wave from the door. Anything to feel like the service portion was acknowledged is really nice. It’s never annoying.”

MINA STONE

A DECADE OF YOUNG ARTISTS

247 ARTISTS, 10 YEARS, COUNTLESS DELIBERATIONS. TO MARK THE FIRST DECADE OF CULTURED ’S YOUNG ARTISTS LIST, WE GATHERED A CROSS-SECTION OF ALUMS AT MOMA PS1.

Photography by Dana Scruggs

There is a school of thought that takes issue with magazines and nonprofits that sort and platform artists based on age, citing the art world’s sometimes exploitative relationship to novelty and the need to make room for an idea of emergence that isn’t tied to youth.

CULTURED is one of those magazines. Every year for the past decade, we’ve nominated 20 to 30 artists aged 35 or under for the Young Artists list. Some were already market-endorsed when they were featured, others surfaced from staunchly underground scenes. Some received MFAs from lauded programs, others were lifelong

autodidacts. Their practices have been equally wide-ranging: Among the 247 artists featured since 2016 are a clown, a comedian, a stonemason, and an aspiring actor.

We compile these lists with the firm conviction that looking to younger artists is about more than finding the next hot thing. Each time, the exercise brings us back to the drawing board: Who is shaking things up? Who is the art world overlooking? Who is asking the questions no one will?

The exercise surfaces a constellation of voices who are reckoning with a messy world through the work they

make. Their relative youth is really the least interesting thing about them.

And the Young Artists list alums have continued to surprise us at every turn. Since being featured, they have ventured into new mediums, started bands, designed handbags, shown at every conceivable scale and in every conceivable climate. They’ve lost everything, called out the art world’s hypocrisies, and formed mutual aid networks while they were at it. To celebrate a decade of their accomplishments, we welcomed 27 Young Artists—representing every edition of the list thus far—for a

reunion photoshoot at MoMA PS1, which became a colorful backdrop for Dana Scruggs’s unconventional riff on a yearbook picture. Some of these artists have been close for years; others have never met in person. But if the mood on set revealed anything, it’s that they are stronger together.

WHAT’S THE SINGLE GREATEST CHALLENGE OF BEING AN ARTIST TODAY?

“Survival.”

HANNAH BEERMAN

“Money. It’s boring and upsetting to say, but that’s what’s ruining everyone’s lives. It all goes to landlords. Artwise, that’s easy; it’s just like, Does it rock or not? And you have control over that.”

BORNA SAMMAK

“Wanting the work to evolve and to not be as impacted by others’ opinions or other work I’ve been seeing.”

SASHA GORDON

“Having to fight a new battle every fucking day. Speaking the language of the trenches. Keeping a Duolingo two-week streak in Trenchanese.”

LOUIS OSMOSIS

“The storm of images we have to contend with.”

—OSCAR YI HOU

“Acceptance.”

THERESA CHROMATI

WHAT’S THE SILLIEST THING A COLLECTOR, CURATOR, OR JOURNALIST HAS ASKED ABOUT YOUR WORK?

“There was a British collector who told me about his visit to India: ‘Even though they were

so poverty-stricken, they still had so much joy in their eyes.’ That was a tough one.”

AJAY KURIAN

“Honestly, I think things could get stupider. Everyone’s a little too informed. I feel like most people’s questions are almost too heady. I challenge someone to ask me stupider questions.”

— MARTINE GUTIERREZ

WHAT’S BEEN THE PROUDEST MOMENT IN YOUR CAREER SO FAR?

“Two things from the 2017 Whitney Biennial stand out. One was working with Tiffany & Co. and going through that whole process with five other artists. It felt like this weird camp where we got to work with this multibilliondollar company and do whatever we wanted. Then I had this installation in the stairwell, and this little girl—she couldn’t have been more than 3 or 4—was reaching for one of my sculptures. Her mother said, ‘I know that’s your favorite, but we have to go.’

That really did it for me.”

AJAY KURIAN

“A homecoming exhibition I had at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis in 2023, 10 years after leaving St. Louis to pursue my education in the arts.”

—DOMINIC CHAMBERS

“To be able to look at a piece and just let it be. Getting to that moment where I don’t have to pack everything in, and instead be like, It’s done, move on.”

THERESA CHROMATI

WHERE DO YOU SEE YOURSELF IN 10 YEARS?

“Back in my home country, the Dominican Republic. Somewhere close to the beach, where I would have my studio close to the water. I could see myself being, like, 100 years old and still working.”

BONY RAMIREZ

“In New Orleans, in a halfbathhouse, half-metal venue.”

BORNA SAMMAK

“Retired, ideally. The survey is happening this year, and then it’s just gardening.”

—MARTINE GUTIERREZ

WHAT’S A RUMOR ABOUT YOU THAT YOU KIND OF WISH WERE TRUE?

“That my work is really cerebral.”

—ANDREW ROSS

“That I’m dating Timothée Chalamet. Everyone confuses me with Kylie [Jenner] all the time, it’s crazy.”

—CHLOE WISE

“They’re all true, babe.”

—MILES GREENBERG

Miami Beach, USA

YOUNG ARTISTS 2025

When CULTURED debuted its first Young Artists list a decade ago, we were coming off a few years of a booming art market. Some emerging artists had made six-figure sums from a single exhibition. But what goes up must come down—and down it went.

The same boom-and-bust cycle is happening now. What we know from experience is that artists who are coming up at this moment have more freedom to experiment, to fail, and to grow. To help lighten their load, for the second year in a row, CULTURED is teaming up with MZ Wallace and an expert jury to award one artist from our 10th annual list an unrestricted $30,000 grant.

The following pages introduce 27 artists aged 35 and under who are working in the United States at a time of great economic uncertainty and political upheaval. They were selected from dozens of submissions by the magazine’s editors and contributors, as well as art dealers, collectors, and artists from around the world. Each has a rising profile, something important to say, and a novel way in which to express it.

SHEN XIN

35 — SAINT PAUL, MNI SOTA MAKOCE (MINNESOTA) AND PORTREE, ISLE OF SKYE

Operating out of New York and Los Angeles, as well as Tucson, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Saint Paul, the artists in this year’s cohort work in media ranging from video games to precious gemstones. But they rarely restrict themselves to a single material (or even one home base). And for all that talk about young people being sexless these days, plenty of them are unafraid of exploring the erotic in their art.

One thing they all share is a commitment to pushing their work into uncomfortable, sometimes revelatory, and deeply engaged places. CULTURED will continue to mirror that commitment, now and in the years to come, no matter the weather. Thanks to the work of these artists, the future looks bright.

This year’s Young Artists Prize winner will be selected by MoMA curator T. Lax, Hammer Museum curator Erin Christovale, and Met curator Jane Panetta. The recipient will be announced on Dec. 10.

What’s in a name? Shen Xin, who was born in Chengdu, China, has centered their practice on what the language we use surfaces, and leaves out, since earning an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2014. Their work—exhibited at the Swiss Institute, Walker Art Center, and through Dec. 21 at Edinburgh’s Collective—filters this inquiry through moving image, performance, and writing that draws from personal history, myth, and scientific research.

Describe one work you’ve made that captures who you are as an artist. Since the relationship between the works and myself is not unchanging, I can describe the most recent work I’ve made. It is a 16mm film with a short duration in black and white, and the film is developed by utilizing the leaves of a type of cotoneaster on the Isle of Skye. Titled Bearing Fruit of Fondness, it’s a film that explores innate belonging of mother-child patterns in one’s life through filming the everyday, that is absent of both strangeness and familiarity.

Describe your work in three words. Truth, kindred, light.

What’s an artwork you didn’t make, but wish you had?

On my father’s bookshelf, I encountered

Liverpool from Wapping by John Atkinson Grimshaw when I was little. I was taken by the warm light; it reminded me of how we used to pass by windows and shop fronts like that. The quality of this light near the water is hard to come by today.

What’s an underrated studio tool you can’t live without?

A pair of binoculars. If you live in built-up areas this might sound strange, but I live in the country and it’s a form of distraction I enjoy: watching those who come and go in the sky and in the ocean.

Is there a studio rule you live by? I try to tune into my aspirations before I start doing anything, while keeping in mind the subject for every practice.

COCO KLOCKNER

34 — NEW

Coco Klockner cut her teeth in the DIY music scene of the early 2010s, where she finessed a sense for sound, site sensitivity, and timing that has percolated into sculptural interventions shown at Silke Lindner, lower_cavity, and, most recently, in her first institutional solo, on view at SculptureCenter in Queens through Dec. 22. Her material lists have included everything from sounding rods to a first-aid kit—all fodder for an ongoing investigation into strategies of transfeminine representation and beyond.

Describe one work you’ve made that captures who you are as an artist. A piece I return to is from 2022 . It consisted primarily of sculptural adjustments to a set of hi-fi tower speakers that I grew up with. They played a sound piece that was very slightly modulated by convolution reverb profiles taken at 10 -minute intervals of the space that the work was installed in, creating a duplicated reverberation of the space—as if there was a perfect sonic model of the room inside of the room.

I think about the disclosures demanded of trans people—always but especially this year—and how a perpetual demand to know what’s inside, what’s underneath, what a voice sounded like, and so on, operates. The sonically doubled room somehow felt like a resonation of that dynamic, but also just a very earnest experiment in how material functions when it’s performing.

Imagine someone gives you $150,000 to make anything you want—no strings.

What are you making?

I would buy a boat and install one perfect sculpture inside of it before sending it out to sea somewhere, maybe near Point

In Yasmine Anlan Huang’s Her Love is a Bleeding Tank —featured in the 2024 Whitney Biennial—the Guangzhou-born artist refracts both the yearning and alienation of girlhood through a cartoon image projected onto an increasingly watery eye. The video poem distills Huang’s cross-media interest in channeling the codes of melodrama and the “good girl” archetype into work that probes everything from fetish to techno-capitalism. Her second book, Becoming Everyone, Everywhere, will be published early 2026.

Nemo. I’d like for it to circulate in the ocean forever.

What’s an artwork you didn’t make, but wish you had?

Jason Rhoades’s The Costner Complex (Perfect Process) from 2001. Gorgeous, mind-altering, strange, depressing, uplifting.

What’s an underrated studio tool you can’t live without?

Cookies and treats within arm’s-length distance.

Is there a studio rule you live by?

Cookies and treats within arm’s-length distance need Tupperware; mouse-chewable plastic from the store is not enough.

Who are the three people, alive or dead, invited to your dream art-world dinner party?

Greer Lankton, Candy Darling, and Harun Farocki would be so funny. I think Harun would clam up, Greer would be starstruck by Candy, and Candy would just be eyes glued on the door for the next most glam person to walk through.

YASMINE ANLAN HUANG

29 — NEW YORK AND LONDON

Imagine someone gives you $150,000 to make anything you want—no strings. What are you making?

This would be ideal for realizing my first medium-length film, which I am currently fundraising for. It centers on an optical condition known as a rosette cataract, which, as its name suggests, manifests as a rosette pattern in the eye. The protagonist wakes to find herself afflicted with it, and as she adapts to this metaphorical affliction, her altered vision causes her to romanticize war, pain, and violence. In my previous films, I didn’t have the resources to fully realize the haunting, intertwining beauty and violence of my vision. For this one, the central optical effect cannot be achieved by makeup but requires CGI, which I’m no expert in and costs a lot. With this no-strings-attached money, I could work with specialists of CGI and lighting to realize the work’s full potential.

Describe your work in three words. Self-referential, innocent, and monumental.

What’s an underrated studio tool you can’t live without?

Honestly, since I travel so frequently and have to pack everything—like works, tools, etc.—into my 30 -inch luggage, it’s hard to imagine anything I could truly not live without. In such conditions, everything seems disposable. In a sense, my luggage becomes my studio. With that being said… do Bluetooth speakers and professional headphones count as studio tools or studio vibe boosters?

Is there a studio rule you live by? Follow the spreadsheet and calendar entry, and never be a deadline fighter!

ALICE BUCKNELL

32 — LOS ANGELES

ASHER LIFTIN

Describe your work in three words. Constructing a picture.

Tell us about a teacher who changed the way you think about art.

When I was 12 years old I met an older artist named Christian Aldunate, who was teaching students how to use spray paint to write graffiti on large paper sheets on the street in Brooklyn. He brought me along with him to openings of other graffiti artists. It was a community where art wasn’t hoarded but dispersed. In graffiti, a word becomes an abstraction that solves the problem of subject matter. The creative problems lie in form and color. I use images today in a similar way: starting with an image, decoupling it from its meaning or associations, and finding ways to translate it into a painting.

Imagine someone gives you $150,000 to make anything you want—no strings. What are you making?

A book that is all 25,669 photos I’ve taken that are currently in my references folder on my iPhone.

Considering the cultural relevance and influence of video games, it’s surprising they haven’t become a more popular artistic medium. Alice Bucknell shows just how much potential they have. A recent video and video game of theirs explored LA from the perspective of its rivers, moths, and other nonhuman inhabitants to examine the politics of drought. The artist, who has held residencies at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the New Museum’s NEW INC, is also the founder of New Mystics, a digital platform merging magic and technology.

Describe your work in three words. Kaleidoscopic, roaming, speculative.

What’s an artwork you didn’t make, but wish you had?

When I was in art school I had this dream of making a game like Zach Gage’s Lose/ Lose, 2009 —a permadeath video game that lets you shoot aliens but deletes files on your hard drive with every kill. I wanted to do the opposite, a kind of suggested content simulator, where the game would fill your HD with stuff it thinks

you’d like based on what it could glean from your files and gameplay; the game itself would be this extremely awkward text-based dating simulator. In the era of sycophantic, slop-laden A.I., this game would be easier to make than ever.

What project do you have coming up that you are especially excited about?

The game I’m currently working on— Earth Engine—and its film component, Ground Truthing. This project takes my interest in the affective and ecological dimensions of game worlds to the scale of the planetary. In this game, the Earth is the main player—its emotional states are shaped by player interaction and climate data, and it evolves with the humans that move through it.

What art-world trend would you like to see die out?

Biophilic art, NFTs, and ironic painting.

Is there a studio rule you live by?

I’m pretty flexible with my studio routine, but it’s essential for me to break contact with the screen at least once a day and go touch grass. In LA, this often ends up being long mountainous hikes in the Angeles National Forest near my house. Surprisingly, the long natural side quest always ends up playing a really big role in the simulated worlds I build.

Asher Liftin got his big break at the tender age of 12, when he was chosen from a towering pile of submissions to create original artwork for Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom. Two college degrees in cognitive science and visual art later, he now creates trompe l’oeil compositions that look as if they are tapestries but are in fact finely rendered, pointillist compositions inspired by arthistorical still lifes and history paintings.

What’s an artwork you didn’t make, but wish you had?

Paul Sietsema’s enamel phone paintings. He covers the actual phone and surface in a monochrome enamel paint, photographs it, and then repaints the painting with the same enamel paint. The final painting is an optically seductive collapse of subject and object.

What’s an underrated studio tool you can’t live without?

Muji pens.

What art-world trend would you like to see die out?

Art-world trends.

Is there a studio rule you live by?

I won’t eat too much when working out an idea. Ernest Hemingway wrote in A Moveable Feast that he could see paintings much more strongly on an empty stomach, and this helped him understand Cézanne’s landscapes. That always stuck with me. I thought it made sense that if your body is hungry, your mind would be more open.

Brian Oakes’s exhibitions look like an extremely organized mad scientist’s lab. For their breakout show at Blade Study in New York in 2024, the artist created a miniature sorting machine like those used at waterfront distribution centers—but instead of shipping containers, Oakes’s machine sorted diorama-like tableaux in a mysterious rhythm. In their increasingly sophisticated work, which also includes circuit boards and precious stones made from common materials, Oakes asks probing questions about value, automation, and desire.

ELOISE HESS

30 — LOS ANGELES

The difference between a photograph and a painting has been a dialectical conundrum for artists, critics, and historians alike over the past two centuries. In the case of Eloise Hess, it’s impossible to tell in which bucket the work belongs. The 2024 Yale Painting/Printmaking MFA grad developed a distinctive imagemaking process that involves transferring photographs wet onto absorbent paper, embedding the print in an encaustic surface, and painting, carving, and otherwise manipulating the resulting image to create records of passing landscapes, shadows, gestures, and, above all, time.

Describe one work you’ve made that captures who you are as an artist. Early Morning Tomorrow was important for me, and I’m happy to move forward from it. The paintings are screenprints of photographs I took with my dad. He pointed one camera, and I shot through its viewfinder with another. Each photograph is encircled by a shadowy frame that is the tunnel of the viewfinder, equally occupied by the space photographed and the space of the camera. It’s about the attempt to hold onto and the attempt of translation.

Describe your work in three words. Time, resonance, capacity—capacity, resonance, time.

Imagine someone gives you $150,000 to make anything you want—no strings. What are you making? I would use it to live—to be able to make whatever comes, without worry about making a living. And if worried, as I have been, it’s important to live,

BRIAN OAKES

30 — NEW YORK

What project do you have coming up that you are especially excited about? For the past several months I have been slowly developing a process for creating synthetic opals, rubies, and emeralds, and now I am working on sapphires. I also recently found a supplier for extremely small ferrite toroids that I am trying to weave together into a magnetic core memory module. A lot of the things I have been making in the past year and a half or so have tried to deal with divination (prediction) as a systematized asset, but lately, I’ve been trying to think about memory in a similar way.

Describe your work in three words. Automated labor systems.

Tell us about a teacher who changed the way you think about art.

Mel Di Giacomo was an incredible photographer and a mentor of mine in the town I grew up in in New Jersey. When I was in high school, I would go to his photo studio and talk with him for hours at a time about art and what

it meant to be an artist. I have distinct memories of standing outside of church with Mel every Sunday, making sure everyone who needed a seat got a seat until mass would start. Then he and I would step outside and talk about art, I’d run inside for communion, and then come back out to continue our discussion until service ended.

Imagine someone gives you $150,000 to make anything you want—no strings. What are you making?

I would make an entire supply chain. Or a sorting facility and distribution port. Or a fully automated factory—maybe one that produces crystal oscillators for integrated circuits.

What art-world trend would you like to see die out?

Neon signs, interactive art, using tape to cover power cables.

Is there a studio rule you live by? Messes are generative.

to be able to make whatever comes, anyway.

What’s an artwork you didn’t make, but wish you had?

It’s not possible, nor should be wished, but can be a lesson. Liz Deschenes assigned us that lesson, to make a version of another artist’s artwork. I made a version of an R.H. Quaytman painting of a Katarzyna Kobro sculpture. I don’t wish I’d made it, but sometimes I do wish for a system like hers, perfectly open and closed, lifelong.

What’s an underrated studio tool you can’t live without?

A microwave and a mini-fridge. I don’t leave the studio during the day.

What art-world trend would you like to see die out?

Less gossip (it will never die), more belief (let live).

Is there a studio rule you live by? Go to it. Also, walk, take in the sun.

TUNJI ADENIYI-JONES

33 — NEW YORK

Tunji Adeniyi-Jones’s contribution to the Nigerian Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale was an exercise in the perspective shift: The London-born, Brooklyn-based artist installed a luminous orange and yellow painting of swirling abstract and figurative forms on the palazzo’s ceiling. It embodied Adeniyi-Jones’s talent for infusing the history of West Africa and the mythology of his Yoruba heritage into paintings that feel distinctly contemporary. White Cube began representing him in 2021, and his work is in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art and Pérez Art Museum Miami.

Describe one work you’ve made that captures who you are as an artist. A painting called Dance in Heat, which is in the collection of the Pérez Art Museum Miami. It’s a bright red and orange painting depicting three figures in motion. The museum had it on display for a long time, and I was told that the audience really loved it. It encapsulates everything that I’ve become as a painter. I’m interested in figuration. I’m interested in abstraction. I’m interested in color, shape, line, and form. All that is present and on display in this piece.

Describe your work in three words. Bright, bold, and resonant.

Imagine someone gives you $150,000 to make anything you want—no strings. What are you making?

I would probably use it to start a line of clothing—nothing too crazy, just

pants, jackets, and tops. The artist

Sterling Ruby has a line of clothing that coincides with his studio practice quite nicely. I’ve quietly always liked that idea.

Tell us about a teacher who changed the way you think about art.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye encouraged me to move to the U.S. to pursue an MFA 11 years ago. After making this move, one of my MFA professors, Sam Messer, gave me a book about the artist Bob Thompson, whom I’d never heard of or seen before. Both gestures are pretty ordinary, but they totally altered the course of my life.

What’s an underrated studio tool you can’t live without?

Wet wipes are crucial, especially if you work with oil paint.

What art-world trend would you like to see die out?

Needing to add music on your Instagram post to reach a wider audience. I guess that’s more of a social media gripe than anything else.

Is there a studio rule you live by?

This is aspirational, but I need to leave either my phone or my laptop at home, as a rule. I get infinitely more work done without them.

Who are the three people, alive or dead, invited to your dream art-world dinner party?

Definitely Ernie Barnes and Michael Bennett, two NFL athletes who turned to the arts. There are many discussions to be had about the intersection between these disciplines. The third guest would be Grace Wales Bonner.

WITT FETTER

31 — NEW YORK

Witt Fetter has painted the White House Situation Room, an inflatable slide in the shape of the sinking Titanic, and a highway advisory sign announcing a false missile alert. The Los Angeles–born, New York–based artist blows up these real-life scenes of American surreality and bathes them in a dreamy, violet-blue haze. Her buzzy outings at Fierman and Derosia galleries have made her one of the most visible figures in a cohort of young artists remaking famous images in an effort to understand and expose the hold pop culture has over us.

Describe one work you’ve made that captures who you are as an artist. In Diana, 2022, a woman sits on the edge of a diving board suspended over the ocean. The painting is a self-portrait that traces the compositional structure of a photograph of Princess Diana. The work is an aesthetic gesture with deeply personal resonance and an exploration of visual signs that circulate within a network of images. Like a Möbius strip, I want a painting to function as a continuous plane that points in two directions— inwards into a mythology of the self and outwards into a specific historical and cultural context.

Describe your work in three words. My practice is motivated by grief, desire, and faith. It mourns the inevitability of loss, it yearns to establish a connection between myself and the other, and it is committed to the possibility of transcendence.

Tell us about a teacher who changed the way you think about art.

My grandfather introduced me to oil painting when I was 10 years old. He taught me how to mix colors, render

forms, and depict light, shadow, and atmosphere. This is when I began to recognize the colors I use today in the landscapes of my childhood growing up in Southern California. As a tribute to my grandfather, I begin each of my paintings with an undercoat of violet, just as he did with his paintings.

What art-world trend would you like to see die out?

Fluorescent lighting in galleries and press releases that read like riddles.

Is there a studio rule you live by?

Unfortunately the only studio rules I have are ones that I fail to live by.

What’s an underrated studio tool you can’t live without?

The studio sofa is a place to contemplate, envision, and sleep. It provides a protective shelter amidst the turbulence of my creative psyche.

Who are the three people, alive or dead, invited to your dream art-world dinner party?

Jack Whitten, Paul Thek, and the quantum physicist Carlo Rovelli.

A standout in the latest Istanbul Biennial and the Hammer’s 2025 edition of “Made in L.A.,” Ali Eyal’s multidisciplinary practice meditates on the violence he and his family endured at the hands of the U.S. military during his upbringing in Baghdad in the ’90s and 2000s. Equally important to him is the legacy of that violence, which he calls “the after war.” The grotesque, cartoonish figures in his paintings render the absurdity and distortion of state violence more sharply than realism ever could.

Describe one work you’ve made that captures who you are as an artist. My work is rooted in my family and the memory of our lost farm, using imagination to revisit places shaped by war and absence. In my video Tonight’s Programme, I made a farewell to my missing father through a video installation in a stormy hall in Baghdad.

Describe your work in three words. Rotted. Hunting. Imagination.

Imagine someone gives you $150,000 to make anything you want—no strings. What are you making?

With that freedom, I would rebuild my father’s burned car as a large-scale sculptural installation. It was burned by Allied Forces shortly after his disappearance. The car was the most expensive possession we had; selling it would have kept us afloat as we sought to move. Rebuilding my father’s car would become a form of compensation through art for my mother, who carried the greatest losses after his disappearance and the destruction of the only hope she had to continue the journey.

What’s an artwork you didn’t make, but wish you had?

I wish I had made [William-Adolphe] Bouguereau’s Dante and Virgil. I saw it in Paris; it is a life-sized painting. The strong composition, powered by bodies and eyes, drew me in. Dante, Virgil, and a demon watch the struggle between two naked damned souls. One of the young men has his teeth in the throat of the other—in the front of the throat, right below the mouth. The circle of observers so close to the action is a recurrent theme in my work. The delicate erotic element is a theme I would like to explore in my own work.

What art-world trend would you like to see die out?

Prioritizing fame over the quality and depth of work.

Is there a studio rule you live by?

Embrace laziness. It’s in those quiet, slow moments that my work actually takes shape.

MIMI PARK

29 — NEW YORK

Dust, seedlings, a diminutive handmade robot rolling around in a sweater—these are just a few of the elements that make up Mimi Park’s artistic world. The South Korean artist, who has shown at SculptureCenter, Bard’s Hessel Museum, and Sebastian Gladstone, creates objects that whir and move—until they don’t. Sometimes she repairs them, sometimes she lets them rest, and sometimes she invites viewers to take them home. It’s all part of her examination of responsibility, care, and value in art and life.

Describe one work you’ve made that captures who you are as an artist. Most recently, I made a set of paper sculptures for SculptureCenter titled “Dahlia.” It’s made of recycled shredded atomic-blue colored paper and it’s in the shape of a type of firework called “Dahlia.” I created the arrangement using small pieces of the shredded paper to create lines on the floor of the space. The shapes disappeared within minutes of the exhibition opening due to attendees walking over and through the pieces. I liked seeing something that I had worked so hard on take on a new form due to circumstances that were beyond my control.

Describe your work in three words. Dots, lines, planes.

Tell us about a teacher who changed the way you think about art. Homemakers. I learned from many blogs about things such as which types of produce are in season, how to use citrus peels as a disinfectant, how to open

and close the kitchen—all the small to large steps to keep the “house” system running. I apply these methodologies to keep my studio running.

What’s an artwork you didn’t make, but wish you had?

Fortunately, I have been able to make all of the artworks that I wanted to make. The ones that haven’t been realized will happen when it’s time for them to.

What’s an underrated studio tool you can’t live without?

Somewhere to lie down.

What art-world trend would you like to see die out?

Toxic materials.

Is there a studio rule you live by?

Leave when I want to leave.

Who are the three people, alive or dead, invited to your dream art-world dinner party?

My mom, Paul Thek, Füsun Onur.

LUZ CARABAÑO

30 — LOS ANGELES

LORENZO AMOS

23 — NEW YORK

Describe one work you’ve made that captures who you are as an artist. There’s a painting I just made; it’s of a seated figure that feels like a quiet summary of everything I believe in. The space around her carries as much weight as the figure itself—the wall, the traces of color, the atmosphere between things. I think about painting as a living surface, one that records every movement and hesitation that built it. In that sense, the work is less a depiction than an imprint—paint describing itself, and the world it comes from. That’s what Material Realism means to me: when an image becomes inseparable from the substance that makes it.

Describe your work in three words. Painting about painting.

Tell us about a teacher who changed the way you think about art. My friend Alex. He taught me that sometimes the worse you do something, the better it becomes. There’s a freedom in letting go of control. Alex has also

A critic once likened a painting by Luz Carabaño to “a minty block of fudge, with its glossy surface and uneven ridges.” The Venezuelanborn artist made her name with diminutive, delectable, and imperfectly shaped canvases painted in candied hues that look blurred or buffed. Her work has captivated the tastemaking dealers at galleries including Nina Johnson, Lulu, Hoffman Donahue, and April April. At a moment when so much painting shouts for attention, Carabaño’s work silently beckons from across the room.

Describe one work you’ve made that captures who you are as an artist. While still in grad school, I was cutting panels using a bandsaw when my friend, Valeria Tizol Vivas, suggested I make a painting from a very small offcut. I’ve forgotten what visual reference I had while painting it, but that small piece— later wrapped in linen and gessoed— became a strange painting of jagged lines extending in many directions. I called it araña. It was simple, it felt spontaneous, tied to the world, but something of its own, too. I later gave the painting to that friend.

Describe your work in three words. Curious, enigmatic, practical.

Tell us about a teacher who changed the way you think about art. Through reading, I’ve learned much from John Berger. His words have given me space to reflect and taught me to deepen my own sensibilities.

What’s an underrated studio tool you can’t live without?

I’ve used the same palette knife since I started oil painting. It’s an extension of my hand and mind. Its elongated form and history also make it quite special.

What art-world trend would you like to see die out?

I’m not sure it’s much of a trend, but I’m not a big fan of iPad art.

Is there a studio rule you live by?

Since moving into my current lightfilled studio three years ago, I paint only during daylight hours. Having the full spectrum of the sun’s light allows me to really see the colors I am working with.

Who are the three people, alive or dead, invited to your dream art-world dinner party?

Natalia Goncharova, Luchita Hurtado, and Etel Adnan.

Upon first glance, the paintings on view in Lorenzo Amos’s debut solo at Gratin last fall seemed to be the work of at least three distinct artists. Some had the thick mark-making of an AbEx canvas, others the aloof composition of a Hockney portrait. But each of these perspectives converged in a space that is distinctly Amos’s: his living room-slash-studio. It’s there that the quiet and the chaos of his evolving iconography find their footing.

tattooed my whole body. It’s an ongoing collaboration between us, part of the same language of marks and mistakes.

What’s an artwork you didn’t make, but wish you had?

Any nice Bonnard. Probably a bathtub or an interior scene.

Imagine someone gives you $150,000 to make anything you want—no strings. What are you making?

A painting.

What’s an underrated studio tool you can’t live without?

My iPhone.

Is there a studio rule you live by? 9 to 5.

Who are the three people, alive or dead, invited to your dream art-world dinner party?

Andy Warhol, David Bowie, and Nina Simone.

CYLE WARNER

CHERRIE YU

30 — NEW YORK

If Cherrie Yu sees you moving out in the world and likes what they see, they might just ask you to collaborate. The artist—who grew up in Xi’an and Wuxi, China— makes videos, performances, and prints that explore the relationship between everyday movement, dance, labor, and play. In Trisha and Homer, 2018, they juxtapose a 1986 solo by choreographer Trisha Brown with the movement of a mopping maintenance worker named Homero Muñoz. Their recent work places the balletic, athletic, and highly specialized subcultures of ping-pong players and dancers side-by-side.

Cyle Warner uses materials—photographs, textiles, sculptures—to preserve his past and fill in the blanks of stories he doesn’t know. After graduating from the School of Visual Arts in 2023, he quickly began to stand out in major group shows. One of his evocatively titled fiber works, chasing a second sunrise; it’s no fun running alone, was selected for “The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition” to celebrate the Brooklyn Museum’s 200th anniversary last year. Next up: a prominent place in the Bronx Museum’s AIM Biennial, which opens in January 2026.

Describe one work you’ve made that captures who you are as an artist. we came together to watch the breeze, 2023, my first woven breeze block tapestry made during an impromptu workshop with friends. As we wove, ate, and listened to music, I realized the work’s mobility—how something referencing a permeable barrier could drift with air currents and travel between environments, carrying heirloom fabrics and community memory. It became a teacher for my practice, revealing how I approach making as a collective and reflective act, attentive to how material, memory, and architecture shape one another. My work begins in relation with people, place, and inherited histories—and moves toward forms that can hold what is before us, of us, and after us.

What art-world trend would you like to see die out?

Surface-level representation that only offers short-term support; what we need is sustained investment that outlasts the cycle.

What’s an underrated studio tool you can’t live without?

A video call. It might not look like a tool, but it’s how I stay connected with friends, family, and collaborators. It reminds me that work is never made alone. It keeps the studio open, allowing for conversations, stories, and exchanges to shape the work as much as the materials themselves.

Is there a studio rule you live by?

A rule I’m working to live by is letting the sun be my clock, listening to the work while there’s natural light and making the effort to leave the studio once it goes down. It’s a way of slowing down, giving the work time to speak back, and not pushing past the rhythm it sets.

Who are the three people, alive or dead, invited to your dream art-world dinner party?

Jack Whitten, Frida Escobedo, and Esperanza Spalding.

Tell us about a teacher who changed the way you think about art.

My friend and mentor Bryan Saner. Bryan was not my teacher at the Art Institute of Chicago, but I was introduced to him through my teachers Lin Hixson and Matthew Goulish. Bryan is an amazing woodworker, sculptor, performer, and dancer, and I did an apprenticeship with him for a number of years when I lived in Chicago. He taught me so much about the laboring body as the dancing body—not through lecturing but through working alongside him and observing how he moved through the world and alongside objects and materials. I have such fond memories of us doing things together, like caning an old chair, setting bathroom tiles, putting in floorboards, or washing out window screens at a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Oak Park. You might say, “Oh Cherrie, that’s so different from the work you do now.” But I really believe that the things on the periphery of what we do as artists are the things that mold us.

Describe one work you’ve made that captures who you are as an artist. In 2017 when I started grad school I made my first piece of video art called Wrestling Study. I thought of it as a performance for the camera and an experiment at the same time—a friend and I learned to reenact 30 seconds of a wrestling match in the moving traffic on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. I always think of it as a sort of key that opened up a lot of possibilities for projects to come, and I often return to it as an idea, a building block, or a tool in my repertoire and history of thinking.

What’s an underrated studio tool you can’t live without?

I have been really obsessed with saving all my coffee-cup sleeves since 2022 . I have a box of them in my studio. I used them for a number of things, and I kept finding new uses for them. I had to make masks for characters for a performance in 2023 , and I used them as a part of the masks because it was very sturdy and also flexible and soft. I recently used them as a part of the paste-paper process for bookmaking. In general, I am obsessed with cardboard texture materials.

HANNAH TAURINS

Hannah Taurins has been fantasizing about weddings recently. Hers is still theoretical, but the Houston native’s upcoming show with Tureen will focus on the life cycle of a love story. Nuptial aesthetics are a natural pit stop for the artist, whose drawing and painting practice has long coaxed spiritual undertones from seemingly superficial content like magazine spreads, pop anthems, and fangirl culture at taste-making galleries like Theta and Château Shatto.

Describe one work you’ve made that captures who you are as an artist. A painting called Spread, from my last show at Theta in New York. It’s of a woman splayed out on a shag rug, with her legs spread open. She’s only wearing a blouse, but in between her legs is a white vertical bar that censors the figure and also describes the seam of the book that the photo was in. “Spread” is a reference to her pose as well as a magazine spread. I made this painting quickly last year with gouache and pencil, but had been mulling over the image for some time. It’s representative of both my process, dwelling and then rapid fire, of my interest in the constructed feminine figure in relation to fashion and art history, and of the sensuality of form and material in my work.

Describe your work in three words. Sexy, colorful, fresh.

Tell us about a teacher who changed the way you think about art. I took Amy Sillman’s painting class at Cooper Union my last year there. She

shaped the way I think about painting— about approaching them, living with them. I remember once she described her process as creating a problem to solve. This is what I think about when I need to move a work along.

Imagine someone gives you $150,000 to make anything you want—no strings. What are you making?

I’m going shopping. And then making the work I make anyway. I feel very inspired by shopping—the retail experience, this totally plastic construction of value and luxury and glamor. I don’t feel restricted by money in my work at all. My compulsion is to make, but not to make the grandest work ever. Drawing as a medium is very immediate and accessible, but also relatively inexpensive to produce. The richness comes from the fount of influences, art and fashion history.

What’s an underrated studio tool you can’t live without?

An electric pencil sharpener. Saves my poor wrists.

SELMA SELMAN

34 — NEW YORK, BERLIN, AND AMSTERDAM

Growing up in a Roma community in Bosnia, Selma Selman often accompanied her family as they stripped precious metals from discarded items and sorted them at the family’s scrapyard. The ritual has become a recurring motif in her performances at venues including MoMA PS1 and the Venice Biennale. After extracting the metal in front of an audience, she melts it down and recasts it into sculptures—inviting discussions about value, labor, and exchange. A darling of the biennial circuit, she has been featured in Manifesta 14, Documenta 15, and the 2025 Istanbul Biennial.

Tell us about a teacher who changed the way you think about art.

Veso Sovilj—my professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina—is a man who doesn’t talk much. But once, he said, “Selma, if I want to see a good exhibition, I make my own.” I learned many things from him, but the most beautiful lesson was this: If you want to find your place in this world as an artist, you must fight with your knowledge. And that’s exactly what I do.

Imagine someone gives you $150,000 to make anything you want—no strings.

What are you making?

I would give it to my ongoing project and foundation, Get the Heck to School, which provides financial support for Roma girls in my village to complete elementary school, continue to high school, and later university. The goal is to help them become independent women. Even though I’ve been working on this project alone, I have never given up. When I started, only about 20 percent of the girls in my village finished elementary school.

Now, that number has risen to nearly 90 percent—almost all of them complete

school, and many continue their education further. This is a real transformation of life. Without this support, many of these girls would have been married off at a young age or simply given up on their dreams. I’d give all $150,000 to them—to their education and their future.

What projects do you have coming up that you are especially excited about?

My upcoming performance in which I will destroy the Mercedes I bought as the last gift for my father, who passed away last year. This is my first collaboration with Mercedes-Benz and the performance will be something very personal because it will also be a monument for my father. I am doing an exchange of value and labor with Mercedes-Benz.

What’s an underrated studio tool you can’t live without?

Old T-shirts, because when I paint I make a huge mess, and I never have enough towels. I also like to wear them—they keep me feeling strong.

Is there a studio rule you live by? Coffee and cigarettes before painting.

KYE CHRISTENSENKNOWLES

The work of Kye Christensen-Knowles is compelling evidence that rumors about the death of figurative painting have been greatly exaggerated. A recent solo exhibition at Lomex in New York showed off the Maine-born painter’s range and skill. In one gallery, a series of contemporary society portraits were by turns unnerving, chilling, and sexy; in another, epic scenes out of a science-fiction fever dream towered overhead. Christensen-Knowles’s work is currently on view in a group show at the closely watched private museum the Warehouse in Dallas.

Describe one work you’ve made that captures who you are as an artist.

Painting, 2019 –23. It’s a readymade: the studio rug that abutted my painting wall during four years of production, covered in the accumulated paint that fell from the canvases made in that time. Painting has always held, for me, a trace of swordsmanship; the rug, in this sense, is a kind of fencing piste that captures a tonal truth sought in all of my work— the tragic gall of nonverbal communication, and, above all, painting as rhetoric, as a recording device. It’s a painting made, quite literally, through loss.

Describe your work in three words. Oh, how thrilling.

What’s an artwork you didn’t make, but wish you had?

Vito Acconci’s Command Performance, 1974 , and Louise Bourgeois’s Cell (Arch of Hysteria), 1992– 93

Tell us about a teacher who changed the way you think about art.

Dike Blair comes to mind. What he encouraged in me ran counter to my natural gravitation towards loaded gravitas.

What’s an underrated studio tool you can’t live without?

A Q-tip.

What art-world trend would you like to see die out?

I don’t wish death upon anything.

Is there a studio rule you live by? Nothing so hard and fast. I don’t paint without gloves though.

Who are the three people, alive or dead, invited to your dream art-world dinner party?

Giacomo Leopardi, Maurice Blanchot, Shinji Mikami.

What does it mean to have a body? What does it mean to care for—or fetishize—a body? How does the medical system treat certain bodies differently? These questions are animating forces behind the work of the Canadian-born Panteha Abareshi, whose performances, videos, sculptures, and installations explore their experience as a disabled and chronically ill person, including elements that are often considered too taboo to touch. Their recent solo exhibition at Human Resources in LA included a screening of pornography followed by a discussion about the disabled body’s representation in fetish materials.

PANTEHA ABARESHI

Describe one work you’ve made that captures who you are as an artist. I would say CAREGIVING, which is incredibly special to me. It depicts a hand held with one finger pulled back by a string that is nailed into its own wrist, a pulse oximeter on its tip—a figure of the violence and painful balance in medical care and caregiving itself, whether in the domestic space or hospital space. I cast a silicone hand and mounted it onto the wooden block, nailing through the soft wrist to hold it in place. It’s a poignant articulation of power-imbalanced relationships. I am constantly examining within my work how the sick, disabled body is so often expected to hold the most painful of positions under the justification of its own care and management. The piece is tender yet cruel, violent yet soft.

Imagine someone gives you $150,000 to make anything you want—no strings. What are you making?

I would make a hospital set that would serve as an installation—a space mixing

work with actual medical staging of beds, IVs, medical equipment that are sculptures in and of themselves; an unsettling and uncanny facsimile of the medical space pushed to an aesthetic extreme. I’d also incorporate all sorts of sensory input—from the olfactory to the auditory.

What’s an underrated studio tool you can’t live without?

I have a large collection of medical supply ephemera; it’s my studio’s holy grail.

Is there a studio rule you live by?

I’ve had to become better about setting boundaries to protect my own health and my body as I navigate my disability and my studio practice. So, I guess my studio rule is that it’s okay to take the time I need to make the work. Rest is as necessary and valuable to my practice as actively working in the studio is. I have to remind myself of this—my instinct is to work myself to the bone and then pay the severe consequences of it with my illness and exhaustion, which can lead to health complications.

ALIX VERNET

Encounters with a place or person are often the seed for Alix Vernet’s distinctly downtown body of work. The recent Yale Sculpture MFA grad pours her collected observations—of a pair of caryatids reigning over St. Marks Place, say, or a NYC Parks monument technician power washing—into a laundry list of materials (cheese cloth, spray paint, stoneware). The resulting sculptural ephemera has made its way into solo shows at Market Gallery, Helena Anrather, and Harkawik.

Even before Maud Acheampong had their first solo show, the Ghanaian-American artist had accrued hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok. Their theatrical, reference-laden videos—which they perform as Dainty Funk, a digital avatar and drag persona—use socialmedia vernacular to meditate on heady subjects like surveillance and monstrousness. But their work takes on a different resonance in carefully chosen IRL settings like the Marshak Planetarium at City College of New York, where the artist performed earlier this year.

Describe one work you’ve made that captures who you are as an artist. A Yawn, A Scream, An Endless Opening of the Mouth, 2025, is a live performance piece that was presented at the CCNY Planetarium. The work features a compilation of videos of myself, filmed, directed, and edited by myself over the course of two years, accompanied by a spoken collection of personal writings about the end of the world projected onto the planetarium’s dome screen. I stared up at my past selves in a place we’d typically gather to stare up at the stars—to witness our small lives in the context of galaxies, quake at my own fear of God, and find peace in sharing those fears with people who might’ve been just as scared as me. It made me less afraid.

Imagine someone gives you $150,000 to make anything you want—no strings. What are you making?

I’m heading to Ghana to the plot of land my mom bought for my sister and I in the

southernmost part of Akosombo in the Asuogyaman District and building an obsidian, Vantablack dome whose floor is covered with the red powder of crushed cochineal beetles. I would film me and a group of fetish priests entering the dome in all-white ceremonial garments, dancing inside the dome, kicking up the red powder with our feet in the midst of ritual, and exiting the dome with our white garments turned red. Then, I would project the film on the inside and preserve the footprints of our dance with 3D-scanned molds.

What’s an underrated studio tool you can’t live without?

I love a comically large, full-length body mirror. In my live performances, it can be hard to remember my own body and its habits, so watching myself in the mirror gives mundane, untrained body movements more clarity and allows me to make those movements more precise.

Describe one work you’ve made that captures who you are as an artist. A lot of my projects begin through interactions that I extend further. I recently invented a job for myself as a prayer collector. It started when I ran into a church by accident to get out of the rain and got talking with the custodian. He told me about what it’s like to work there (a big project was peeling gum from under the 300 pews), he was not religious, but part of his job was interacting with visitors between sermons. When the priest isn’t there, he fulfills this de facto role of custodian for the world’s troubles and desires. In a way, I think that’s what an artist is. I started to see him more often and eventually helped with one of his tasks: collecting and refilling prayer cards in the pews, some of which just had scribbles and profanities. The priest explained to me that once the prayers are “processed” they get put into the recycling. It’s a storage problem to hold onto everyone’s prayers. I began coming weekly to refill and collect the cards. The way things can

be disposable yet sacred, the way materials can temporarily be imbued with a sort of power, and how we try to hold onto something until it goes to the trash. I think that’s what art is for me.

Describe your work in three words. Fits in purse.

What’s an artwork you didn’t make, but wish you had?

I don’t know if one artist can ever make another’s work because we all just have different gunk in our hearts that we deal with and that comes into our gestures. I do, however, love Yuji Agematsu’s “Zips.”

Is there a studio rule you live by?

That even the smallest increments of time you put into your practice have value, even if you can only find 10 minutes to research something, or 15 to test something and it fails, it matters. There can be a lot of pressure to be as efficient as possible with studio time, especially with other jobs and stuff going on. Whenever I get frustrated with not having enough time to be in the studio or feel like I’m not doing enough, I try to just start with five minutes.

What art-world trend would you like to see die out?

Seltzer waters replacing beers at openings. It’s hard enough to make small talk under fluorescents.

MAUD ACHEAMPONG

Justin Emmanuel Dumas doesn’t make paintings so much as “painting-shaped objects.” Sometimes, they slouch and lean against the wall like tired teenagers; other times, their surfaces peel outward like trap doors. In projects for the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, Dumas has exposed, rather than obscured, wear and tear. It’s all part of his interrogation of how infrastructural decay—on a citywide scale as well as a smaller one, down to a piece of furniture—shapes the way we move through the world and creates opportunities for renewal.

JUSTIN EMMANUEL DUMAS

31 — PITTSBURGH

Describe one work you’ve made that captures who you are as an artist. Détrompe Warp is a painting from my graduate thesis, and arose from a process of wrestling with a surface that had become so taut, it distorted the frame beneath. What felt like a series of failed attempts at getting the piece to remain flat became a lesson in conflict resolution, and the discovery of a slowly shifting, malleable work. It embodies my greater interest in works that change over time or hold the potential for new shapes and iterations.

Describe your work in three words. Fast, slow, and fluctuating.

Tell us about a teacher who changed the way you think about art. I was very fortunate to have my aunt, Sandy Dowe, as a music and theater teacher in middle school. We would do warm-ups through improv, which taught me to think on my feet and use whatever material or context was available. The stage sets we built and painted were my first chance to think about art spatially.

COUMBA SAMBA

25 — NEW YORK

Imagine someone gives you $150,000 to make anything you want—no strings. What are you making?

I hope to one day build a communal, brick oven pavilion, made of rammed earth and clay. The structure would be surrounded by a community garden and encourage the exchange of prepared foods and communion amongst artists and community members. The funds would cover the cost of labor and materials, and support the beginning of programming, including lectures and workshops.

What’s an artwork you didn’t make, but wish you had?

[Robert Morris]’s 1961 work, Box with the Sound of Its Own Making.

What art-world trend would you like to see die out?

Celebrities-turned-painters.

What’s an underrated studio tool you can’t live without?

A heat gun.

Who are the three people, alive or dead, invited to your dream art-world dinner party?

Mansa Musa, Andrei Tarkovsky, Sruli Recht.

Is there a studio rule you live by?

Proving yourself wrong can be a great way forward.

On the back wall of the Kunsthalle Basel, Coumba Samba recently installed 176 steel poles, four inches apart. What first looks like a nod to minimalist sculpture is, in fact, an evocation of the U.S.–Mexico border wall. The four-inch spacing was first adopted by George W. Bush and later taken up by the Trump Administration. Samba—who was born in New York, partly raised in Senegal, and now lives between New York and Europe—makes art about the permeability, arbitrariness, and absurdity of international borders and the way they shape our lives.

Describe one work you’ve made that captures who you are as an artist.

My “Red Gas” show at Arcadia Missa captures my artistic practice in the simplest sense—referencing politics through abstraction and using everyday forms to communicate international affairs. The show is composed of several found home radiators spread across the room and hand-painted in colors extracted from a photo of former Senegalese President Macky Sall shaking hands with Vladimir Putin at the Russia–Africa Summit in 2023. The show encapsulates my interests in global politics and how history is felt and experienced in our daily lives.

Describe your work in three words. Colorful, playful, curious.

Imagine someone gives you $150,000 to make anything you want—no strings. What are you making?

A public playground! A small one.

What’s an artwork you didn’t make, but wish you had?

I make most things that come to me! I find it inspiring and exciting, so I always want to start right away. Even with more complex works, I imagine that one day I’ll have the resources to create them.

What’s an underrated studio tool you can’t live without?

A rolling cart. Also the paint squeezing thing.

What art-world trend would you like to see die out? Insincerity.

Is there a studio rule you live by? Go consistently.

Who are the three people, alive or dead, invited to your dream art-world dinner party?

Pope.L, Kazimir Malevich, Barbara Kruger.

JESÚS HILARIOREYES

Jesús Hilario-Reyes describes themself as an “anti-disciplinary artist.” Moving fluidly between performance, sound, video, and sculpture, they are inspired by queer rave culture, migration, Western carnivals, and the traces that movement leaves behind. Their work can take the form of a vinyl installed on the floor of a club for one sweaty night or a sculpture inspired by the hurricane-worn mangrove forests of Hilario-Reyes’s native Puerto Rico. The artist has performed at venues including Documenta, the Kitchen, Gladstone Gallery, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Describe one work you’ve made that captures who you are as an artist. Honestly, I’d hope that I don’t make such a work. I feel like the postmortem of that would be crazy.

Tell us about a teacher who changed the way you think about art. This moment, which occurred during my graduate studies, came after a semester in which the sculpture faculty had been asking me why I had not incorporated sound into the works I was developing. I would answer, “No shade, but I just had to catch the 4 a.m. MetroNorth train to New Haven after playing a set in Brooklyn to make this studio visit. The last thing I want to do is bring the club to the gallery.” Nonetheless, I have to credit this epiphany to Sandra Burns, American Artist, Martin Kersels, and Aki Sasamoto. In one of my reviews, they asked me, “What do you do when the mix is not working? How do you change and adapt to something that

needs to be so present? … Do that with your art.”

That taught me a couple of things, one being: for things to “work” you should be most present with what is actually happening in front of you—how you freak “disharmonies” into function. Two, apply the spontaneity you practice on the decks to your studio practice. Make the decision, and see its outcome. Do not spend too much time wondering about the million outcomes you can get. And three, do not compartmentalize approaches in separate fields; allow them to inform one another, to merge into something new.

What art-world trend would you like to see die out?

Let me preface this by saying I’m a firm believer that there is enough space for everyone, but here are a few… American flags, iron fences, pianos, and gay boys taking pictures of gay boys.

TIDAWHITNEY LEK

In Tidawhitney Lek’s paintings, distinctions between interior and exterior, past and present, and foreground and background collapse. Her densely layered, brightly colored compositions reflect on her life as a first-generation American born to Cambodian parents. Her work has charmed visitors and curators alike since she made waves at the Hammer Museum’s “Made in L.A.” biennial in 2023. Next up: a threeperson show at Victoria Miro in London and her Art Basel Miami Beach debut with Night Gallery.

Describe one work you’ve made that captures who you are as an artist. It would be Refuge, which is up now at the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington in Seattle. The setting [of a bomb exploding outside a home while the family and a soldier look on] is fictional, but deeply influenced by the architecture of my home. It spans generations, an entire nation, a deeply embedded scar, an important narrative that’s not told enough. It’s also about disconnect, erasure, violence, future, and forwardness—a combination of topics that I found hard to start a conversation about because they’re so sensitive. I wanted a really strong piece, one that could start or join a dialogue. I let that sketch sit for a whole year while I worked out the kinks on the smaller paintings. It’s a heavy metaphor: a depiction of humanity in its vulnerable state informed by the powerful impression of art.

Imagine someone gives you $150,000 to make anything you want—no strings. What are you making?

I’ve been thinking about this mural for so long now. I’ve only ever made one and that was in 2019 for POW! WOW! Long Beach (now called Long Beach Walls). I got a lot of praise from the neighborhood—the city and the locals really loved it. I wanted to help uplift this really rough corner in our city, my part of the neighborhood called Cambodia Town, and thanks to a few colleagues I had the chance. Unfortunately, the mural only lasted five years. It was completely vandalized beyond repair along with a number of other murals in the city. If I was granted $150,000, I’d definitely create another amazing mural project for my city.

Is there a studio rule you live by? No fucks given in the studio. It’s your safe space—you only have yourself to blame.

ERIN CALLA WATSON

32 — LOS ANGELES

Erin Calla Watson’s debut solo exhibition in New York was the final show the gallery Foxy Production, which represented her, ever staged. For the exhibition, she manipulated 15 images from the catalogue of the famous 1975–76 exhibition “New Topographics” by adding the likeness of Australian supermodel Jordan Barrett. The project was so well-reviewed that it set off a fresh round of hand-wringing over the gallery’s closure. Since then, Calla Watson has continued to create ambitious, ghostly images that pull from the dark corners of the Internet—particularly the “manosphere”—to explore the aesthetics of the suburban gothic.

Describe your work in three words. Dark, frigid, humorous.

Tell us about a teacher who changed the way you think about art.

Scott Grieger, and by proxy his wife, artist Alexis Smith, who recently passed away. Scott’s a storyteller, and his experiences of the wild art scenes in Los Angeles and New York during the ’70 s–’90 s make me feel like I lived it too. Scott is my chosen family and father figure, and has taught me how you can make a family in the art world if you are lucky enough to find the right people.

Imagine someone gives you $150,000 to make anything you want—no strings. What are you making?

I really don’t spend much money on my work—the printing can be expensive, but, when I hear $150 ,000 I just think it would be best to take space to think, research, and focus.

What’s an artwork you didn’t make, but wish you had?

A Bruce Nauman taxidermy sculpture.

Is there a studio rule you live by?

I judge my work by a rule of three. I ask myself: What is in conflict in the installation or within a discrete image? If only two things are opposing, then it’s boring and I know I need to find a third element.

What’s an underrated studio tool you can’t live without?

My dachshund, Agnes. She observes, judges, and approves of everything I do in the studio.

Who are the three people, alive or dead, invited to your dream art-world dinner party?

Lee Miller, Robert Pattinson, and the Marquis de Sade. Sounds messy.

What art-world trend would you like to see die out?

Stylized work.

LAUREN QUIN

33 — LOS ANGELES

“It knocked me out.” That’s how Pace founder Arne Glimcher remembers his first visit to Lauren Quin’s studio. After showing the painter’s manic, neon-tinged abstractions at 125 Newbury in 2024, the mega-gallery announced her representation last August, and she’s slated for a solo show takeover of its outpost in Los Angeles opening in January. Quin’s iconography is just as seductive, idiosyncratic, and sprawling as her hometown.

Describe one work you’ve made that captures who you are as an artist. Sometimes, I will make a painting that sits up and sings for me—where it feels like I am cutting plastic, and the scissors start to glide. Then, there are paintings that torture me. They will take months or years to complete, and every inch is fought for. I prefer the struggle, because it shows me how to make the next five paintings. Cub Cross was one of those paintings—the sum of it is more than its parts.

Imagine someone gives you $150,000 to make anything you want—no strings. What are you making?

I am not being clever when I tell you, I am making what I want already. But, I have a pipe dream to build a sauna gallery in my backyard where people would make an appointment to sweat privately with a show. I would install a Blunk piece, or something conductive like a

Josef Strau aluminum painting. It would serve well for a ceramics show of course, but Picabia used to bake his paintings in the oven...

What’s an underrated studio tool you can’t live without?

Theracane, butter knife, boba straws.

What art-world trend would you like to see die out?

I see a lot of paintings right now where I feel like the figure is an excuse for a subject. This doesn’t apply to all figurative paintings, I just think they should get their hands dirty, metaphorically speaking.

Is there a studio rule you live by?

Don’t copy yourself, paint never acts the same way twice. Never ever put your water bottle on the same table as your paint thinner. A line from Rebecca Morris: wake up early and fear death! Describe your work in three words. Ready-made luck.

Who are the three people, alive or dead, invited to your dream art-world dinner party?

Only three? Francisco Goya, Joan Mitchell, Jean Dubuffet.

What’s an artwork you didn’t make, but wish you had?

[Gerhard] Richter’s series of paintings on top of photographs. As a whole they feel like a bridge in his career, but I find them to be so simple and perfect. He really made a type of mark with paint that is so singular it can never be used without acknowledging him.

CULTIVATE HARMONY