Winter Issue 2025

Luc Tuymans Yohji Yamamoto

One invention at a time

A.-L. Breguet redefined the art of horology with his inventions. His pursuit of perfection continues to inspire those shaping the future. To celebrate this legacy, Breguet introduces the new Reine de Naples 9935, paying tribute to the first wristwatch.

ICONS TESTED

Greatness isn’t achieved in an instant. It’s tested until there is no question—only performance.

DECEMBER 1ST — 7TH

FASHION EXPERIENCES

MUSEUM & GALLERIES

The Prelude

curated by Rashid Johnson

presented by Berkowitz Contemporary Foundation

debuting December 2nd

Paradise Plaza, Miami Design District

151 NE 41st St Suite 133

Page 62 (clockwise): Arne Glimcher photographed with his dog, Max, by Tom Scanlan at Pace in New York. Monica Lewinsky photographed wearing a Celine jacket, Hermès sweater, and Van Cleef & Arpels necklace by Molly Matalon. Artwork and furniture in Belma Gaudio’s London home by Christina Quarles, Nicole Wermers, Fernando and Humberto Campana, and Vladimir Slavov; photography by Mary McCartney. Alison Roman photographed by Matías Alvial in New York.

Page 64 (left): Sarah Lucas, She Came in Through the Bathroom Window, 2023. Photography courtesy of the artist and Sadie Coles. Kristen Stewart photographed wearing Chanel in Los Angeles by Shane McCauley.

Page 66 (clockwise): Kyle MacLachlan photographed wearing Prada in Los Angeles by Jack Bool. Jay DeFeo’s Untitled, 1973, in Rob Tetters’s home, photographed by Billal Baruk Taright. The Los Angeles Ballet photographed wearing Bvlgari by Olivia Malone. Jordan Firstman photographed wearing Tom Ford in New York by Matías Alvial.

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Supporting young artists has been at the heart of our mission since the day I started CULTURED, which makes celebrating the 10th anniversary of our Young Artists list all the more meaningful. To honor the list’s first decade, we gathered more than two dozen of its alums at MoMA PS1 to reflect on how their careers have evolved since we first met them and to speak candidly about how the art world has shaped—and sometimes challenged—their paths. Together, these artists paint a vivid picture of where we might go from here and remind us of the power and necessity of community. This issue also celebrates our second annual MZ Wallace and CULTURED Young Artists Prize, which continues our commitment to giving the artists we platform the freedom to dream and create on their own terms.

Elsewhere in the issue, our second annual Artists on Artists portfolio brings together legends from across disciplines for candid dialogues. From the vantage point of age and wisdom, Yohji Yamamoto and Luc Tuymans reckon with the choices they made when they were starting out. Cult actor Kyle MacLachlan crosses the generational divide with the zeitgeist-defining comedian and filmmaker Julio Torres. On the heels of her directorial debut, Kristen Stewart sits down with her frequent coconspirator, Olivier Assayas, for a filmmaker’s therapy session. Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård rings up former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich for a sprawling dialogue about the cultural collateral of capitalism, and digital natives Jordan Firstman and Rachel Sennott discuss the dark underbelly of one of contemporary culture’s most fraught trends: vulnerability.

No issue marking the end of the first significant chapter of our new millennium would be complete without a look back: These pages also include a time capsule of 25 images captured by 25 photographers over the last 25 years. The expected sights—presidential inaugurations and climate disasters—run alongside intimate moments of quiet reckoning, despair, and ecstasy shared between people. If the past quarter-century has taught us anything, it is the power of these moments of communion. These pages are a potent reminder of that.

CONTRIBUTORS

“Meeting

Rob Teeters and Bruce Sherman reminded me of what I value most in photography.”

BILLAL BARUK TARIGHT

“I

was honored to shoot creative women who have a strong aesthetic expressed in the stunning environments they have crafted.”

MARY M c CARTNEY

“Kyle MacLachlan was one of the warmest, most enthusiastic people I have ever had the chance to work with. He was very keen to

pose amidst the mystery of life.”

JACK BOOL

“The Schomburg Center theater’s legacy, which shaped the early careers of artists like Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier, felt like a fitting backdrop for Mr. Tazewell.”

— ASHLEY M c LEAN

BILLAL BARUK TARIGHT

Photographer

“I was delighted when Sarah Harrelson reached out to ask me to shoot for CULTURED,” says Billal Baruk Taright. “Rob Teeters made for an ideal first assignment.” The photographer—who opened his studio in 2013 after holding positions at Dior and Mario Testino’s Higher & Higher, and has since worked with the likes of Jacquemus, Vogue, and Hermès—traveled to Sagaponack to shoot the art advisor and his ceramicist partner Bruce Sherman before sharing an impromptu lunch in their sunlit kitchen. “Meeting this couple reminded me of what I value most in photography,” he recalls, “the chance to see how creative people shape the way they live. Being welcomed in like that is a gift.”

MARY M c CARTNEY

Photographer

Mary McCartney shot two stories for this issue. “First, a sunny day spent with Eiesha [Bharti Pasricha] (and Biscuit the pony),” she recalls, of her time with the hotelier and designer’s expansive Oxfordshire grounds. Next, McCartney visited collector Belma Gaudio’s London home, filled with pieces by Christina Quarles, Lucio Fontana, and more. “Both creative women have a strong aesthetic expressed in the stunning environments they have crafted,” McCartney notes. The photographer is known for her portraiture as well as her Emmy-nominated forays into TV and film. Her work is held in collections including the V&A, National Portrait Gallery, and the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès; it has also appeared in National Geographic, British Vogue, and GQ

JACK BOOL

Photographer

“Before my wife and I started dating, we were roommates. We lived in an old Victorian house in West Oakland by the ports. Most nights we’d share a cigarette on the porch and watch Twin Peaks,” recalls Jack Bool. Cut to last fall, when the photographer found himself shooting Kyle MacLachlan holding an owl in Los Angeles’s Forest Lawn Cemetery for CULTURED. “I wanted to pay homage to Kyle’s roles over the years through Lynchian locations and classic, refined styling,” explains Bool. “Kyle was one of the warmest, most enthusiastic people I have ever worked with. He was very keen to pose amidst the mystery of life, giving his suiting and gestures an almost sculptural quality.” Elsewhere, Bool has worked on projects for the likes of Adidas, Nike, musician Leon Bridges, and WSJ Magazine

ASHLEY M c LEAN

Photographer

Ashley McLean explores Black identity, masculinity, memory, and personal geography through photography, video, sound, and installation work. For this issue, she photographed a figure who has charted similarly wide-ranging territory: the Oscar-winning costume designer Paul Tazewell. “I photographed him at the theater of the Schomburg Center in Harlem, a space steeped in Black cultural history,” she explains. “The theater shaped the early careers of artists like Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier, and felt like a fitting backdrop for Mr. Tazewell.” McLean, who was featured in CULTURED’s 2025 Young Photographers List, has also exhibited internationally at the Arles Photo Festival and in the Dior Photography and Visual Arts Award showcase. She is a recipient of the Aperture x Google Creator Labs Photo Fund.

CONTRIBUTORS

“ What first struck me about Eiesha Bharti Pasricha was her taste, which is so authentically her own.” DOMINIQUE SISLEY

“In working with a medium, as well as confronting oneself, one can achieve masterpieces.”

DONATIEN GRAU

“Some people made new friends. Old friends were reconnected. The moment definitely felt special and exciting.” —DANA SCRUGGS

“Alison Roman and Jordan Firstman carry a kind of lived-in confidence that resists performance.”

— MATÍAS ALVIAL

DOMINIQUE SISLEY

Writer

“Eiesha Bharti Pasricha’s taste is so authentically her own,” notes Dominique Sisley of her encounter with the hospitality entrepreneur. “She looked immaculate in a silk brocade-lined shirt (her own design) and suede loafers from British high-street stalwart Marks & Spencer (which, on her, looked like The Row).” For this issue, the writer met with Pasricha to learn how she creates the immersive worlds of her private members’ clubs and hotels—replete with custom furniture, scents, and a painstakingly sourced minibar. “‘What is actually going to feel incredible?’ You get the sense this question really matters to her, and her self-assurance—and obsessive attention to detail—was totally compelling,” says Sisley. The London writer is currently the editorial director of Dazed and a contributing editor at AnOther

DONATIEN GRAU

Writer

Dr. Donatien Grau is a philologist, the head of contemporary programs at the Musée du Louvre, and editor-in-chief of Alphabet Magazine—but he describes himself first and foremost as “a conversation partner to artists.” He has sat for David Hockney and talked with everyone from Jeffrey Deitch to Sadie Coles. For this issue, he facilitated a meandering dialogue between artist Luc Tuymans and designer Yohji Yamamoto. The old friends touched on everything from their home countries to their childhood fears. “Going deep into one’s psyche, one’s traumas, does not negate the making of extraordinary works of art,” Grau says of the talk. “In working with a medium, as well as confronting oneself, one can achieve masterpieces.”

DANA SCRUGGS

Photographer

A decade ago, CULTURED published its first Young Artists list. This year, the magazine tasked Dana Scruggs with the difficult job of wrangling nearly 30 previously featured creatives into a single shot for a look back at the series’ lineup of alums. “What I love about the images is that everyone is connecting with each other in a genuine way,” she says of the shoot, which took place at MoMA PS1 in October. “Some people made new friends. Old friends were reconnected. The moment definitely felt special and exciting.” Scruggs’s work has appeared in Time, New York Magazine, and The New York Times. Her photos are also in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian.

MATÍAS ALVIAL

Photographer

2024 CULTURED Young Photographer alum Matías Alvial shot two cultural fixtures— Jordan Firstman and the writer and chef Alison Roman—for this issue. “Alison and Jordan carry a kind of lived-in confidence that resists performance,” says Alvial. “I wanted to shoot them in a way that felt conversational— like catching someone mid-thought.” The photographer’s ongoing “35mm diary” documentary project, capturing the 2020s, best exemplifies a body of work that lingers in the space between intimacy and memory. Alvial’s photography has appeared in i-D, The Los Angeles Times, and New York Magazine. He is also currently the art director of FLAMER, a New York–based cannabis brand.

CONTRIBUTORS

“Mindy Seu is the psychoanalyst of life online.” —JAMIESON WEBSTER

“Daniel Arnold is 45 and balding, a nice guy, living in service of his roll-a-day picture habit in the visual overload of New York.” —DANIEL ARNOLD

“ I’ve always been drawn to the stillness behind performance, to the quiet pulse of practice.”

— OLIVIA MALONE

“Dominique Fung has woven her art through New York... its art fairs and galleries, its landmark sites, and even its nightlife.”

— LINDSAY GELLMAN

JAMIESON WEBSTER

Writer

“I have anxiety about the Internet,” admits Jamieson Webster, a practicing psychoanalyst in New York. She recently launched Neurotica, a new column for CULTURED, with a conversation featuring artist and author Mindy Seu, which appears in this issue. The pair tackled everything from sex online to A.I. psychosis. “[Mindy is] the psychoanalyst of life online: puncturing our fantasies and exposing our erotic and aggressive entanglements,” says Webster, “reminding us that what is, is built by us, slowly, over time. There is no Oz behind the curtain.” Webster also teaches at The New School for Social Research and is the author, most recently, of On Breathing, out this year with Catapult.

DANIEL ARNOLD

Photographer

Daniel Arnold’s photography has been featured in Vogue, The New York Times, and Interview, as well as at exhibitions at New York Life Gallery and Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art. The bio he shared for himself heavily downplays his accomplishments: “Forty-five and balding, a nice guy, living in service of his roll-a-day picture habit in the visual overload of New York.” He contributed a photo from President Trump’s inauguration to this issue’s time capsule portfolio, in which image-makers from across disciplines and regions shared an image that, to them, defines the spirit of the new millennium’s first 25 years. Arnold’s new Loose Joints monograph, You Are What You Do, spotlights the underbelly of his endless output— Arnold notes it “is lately divided between self-indulgent documentary and fashion magazine pictures.”

OLIVIA MALONE

Photographer

“I’ve always been drawn to the stillness behind performance, to the quiet pulse of practice,” says Olivia Malone. For this issue, the photographer went behind-the-scenes with the Los Angeles Ballet company as dancers donned their Nutcracker costumes for the upcoming season—along with a litany of Bvlgari jewels. “Photographing dancers in their rehearsal studio felt like a way of honoring that interest—capturing both the discipline and the enduring beauty of ballet,” adds Malone. The photographer, who works between Los Angeles and New York, probes the abstract and sculptural possibilities of her medium—her 2020 monograph, Tonal, being the most fully realized example of this pursuit. Her work has also been published in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and The New York Times.

LINDSAY GELLMAN

Writer

“Dominique Fung has woven her art through New York,” says Lindsay Gellman, who dove into the rising artist’s oeuvre for this issue, “its art fairs and galleries, its landmark sites, and even its nightlife.” What emerged from the pair’s conversation is a portrait of an artist testing the artistic capacities of each of these usual and markedly unusual avenues. “I wanted to examine how she drew on historical references to create fresh possibilities,” says Gellman. Elsewhere, the journalist has published work in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Yorker, while also serving as an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia Journalism School.

DESIGNED

MARA VEITCH Executive Editor

JOHN VINCLER Co-Chief Art Critic and Consulting Editor

SOPHIE LEE

Associate Digital Editor

SAM FALB Assistant Editor

SOPHIA COHEN Arts Editor-at-Large

ALEXANDRA CRONAN

KATE FOLEY

Fashion Directors-at-Large

JACOBA URIST

New York Arts Editor

KAREN WONG

Contributing Architecture Editor

GEORGINA COHEN European Contributor

TOM SEYMOUR London Correspondent

ROBERT GOFF Travel Columnist

RALPH DELUCA

Contributing Art Market Writer

DIANA ISKANDAROVA ANNA PATCHEFSKY

KARLY QUADROS

ERIN ZHANG

Editorial Interns

SARAH G. HARRELSON

Founder, Editor-in-Chief

JULIA HALPERIN Editor-at-Large

JOHANNA FATEMAN Co-Chief Art Critic and Commissioning Editor

ELLA MARTIN-GACHOT

Senior Editor

ALI PEW

Fashion Editor-at-Large

JASON BOLDEN

Style Editor-at-Large

EMILY DOUGHERTY

Beauty Editor

MINA STONE Food Editor

EMMELINE CLEIN Books Editor

SAMAH DADA Culinary Columnist

JAMIESON WEBSTER Cultural Columnist

EVERYTHING STUDIO Art Directors

EVELINE CHAO

MEGAN HULLANDER Copy Editors

KRISTIN CORPUZ Social Media Editor

MILA DIAZ

LAYLA HUSSEIN Social Interns

CARL KIESEL Vice President, Chief Revenue Officer

LORI WARRINER

Vice President of Sales, Art + Fashion

DESMOND SMALLEY

Director of Brand Partnerships

IAN MALONE

Director of Brand and Events

MICHAEL RIGGIO

Vice President, Fashion

PRIYA NAT Sales Consultant, Home + Travel

CAROL SMITH Strategic Advisor

ETHAN ELKINS

DADA GOLDBERG Public Relations

HAILEY POWERS Marketing and Sales Associate

PALOMA BAYGUAL NESPATTI Digital and Marketing Coordinator

PETE JACATY & ASSOCIATES

Prepress/Print Production

BERT MOO-YOUNG

Senior Photo Retoucher

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Junior Graphic Designer

Jeffrey Deitch presents...

LINDSEY LOU HOWARD

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IGNACIO GATICA

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SHARIF FARRAG

ADRIAN SCHACHTER

FRANCESCO IGORY DEIANA

REGINALD SYLVESTER II

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ZOE BLUE M.

MATT MCCORMICK

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MAX XENO KARNIG

ALFONSO GONZALEZ JR.

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‘Optimistic,

Aren’t I?’

Pace founder Arne Glimcher has dedicated his eighth decade to 125 Newbury—his personal petri dish for ambitious art projects. The gallerist has no intention of slowing down— he signed a 10 -year lease on the Tribeca space.

BY JULIA HALPERIN

In the winter of 2021, Arne Glimcher, the founder of Pace Gallery, told his son Marc that he had an idea for a show. The younger Glimcher—Pace’s CEO—replied that his father would have to wait three years for a slot in the calendar.

For the now 87-year-old Glimcher, who founded the original Pace in Boston in 1960 with $2,800, this was unacceptable. So he decided to open his own gallery, named after Pace’s first address: 125 Newbury.

In the three years since it opened, the gallery has become an essential stop on the Tribeca circuit. Some of the works aren’t for sale; most of the artists aren’t represented by Pace, although the space exists under the megagallery’s umbrella. A Kiki Smith show followed in November, pairing her nightmarish paper mannequins from the ’90 s with recent bronze birds.

CULTURED sat down with the indefatigable dealer for a rapid-fire interview about where the appetite for risk that’s defined his career has led him.

It’s been about three years since 125 Newbury started. You signed a 10 -year lease, right?

Optimistic, aren’t I? But I don’t feel old in any way.

The program is a surprising mix of artists who you’ve worked with for a long time and younger artists who haven’t shown in New York, like Max Hooper Schneider.

I put a fortune into Max’s show. I built a pond. I’m thrilled that I can do that. That’s my role: to help make something original and wonderful happen.

Do you also have to make it pay for itself?

Frankly, 125 Newbury doesn’t pay for itself. I can’t get the audience down there—the people who would really pay the money.

Do you think if you were starting out today, you would have the same success?

I don’t think you could open the original 125 Newbury Street today. I opened it with no artists and an empty space. I had enough to keep it going for three or four months. Very luckily, my older brother had some success already, and kept lending me money.

What have you done when an artist has shown you work that you think is not good?

It’s not my role to say it’s not good. If I believe in the artist, I show it.

How do you cultivate drive and curiosity? You could just relax on the beach.

For the most part, I’ve never been able to go away for more than a couple of weeks. Even when I’m doing that, I’m writing. I’m just finishing my memoirs.

What was the process of writing that like?

It’s a fabulous ride but also a fabulous fall, because nothing is like the times that I lived in.

Is there anything you were nervous about sharing or revisiting?

I think some people will be unhappy. But I’m not a mean person; I haven’t had a nasty life. It’s been challenging, but it’s been a marvelous life.

The Ritual Humiliation of Life Online

BY JAMIESON WEBSTER

What counts as human in an era challenged by artificial intelligence? As a psychoanalyst, I was taught to leave the terrain of the human and inhuman rather uncertain because it is. After all, the unconscious is rather inhuman—a little like a large language model. Attune to the anxiety of patients, I was told. Approach what is real and really challenging. But that was then. Now, we all have anxiety in spades, disoriented in such a wildly shifting technological landscape. Down the rabbit hole, we are Alice in Wonderland swimming in a pool of our own tears because we followed the directions that said, “Eat Me.”

All this technology is celebrated for its increasing frictionlessness, but it is making the experience of real life feel like agitation we can’t process. Looking at the technology of his own times—which amounted to glasses, telephones, and trains—Freud thought man looked like a ridiculous prosthetic god. The satisfaction that came from technology was cheap, he said, like sticking your leg out of the covers and pulling it back in to feel warm. Little did he know about googling, scrolling, or swiping.

Where are our bodies being snatched? The question sounds paranoid until you realize how much intimacy has already migrated online. To trace this digital libidinal history—and what it means for pleasure, fantasy, and control—I spoke with Mindy Seu, artist, theorist, and author of this year’s A Sexual History of the Internet

Jamieson Webster : I asked the psychoanalyst Darian Leader if he was worried about A.I., and he said no. If this is a widely available technology that gives [people] someone to talk to, he didn’t see it as a bad thing.

m indy s eu: Chatbots are really a mirror of a loneliness epidemic. But at the end of

Columnist Jamieson Webster and Internet theorist Mindy Seu talk data doms, consent, and chatbot-ing our way through the loneliness epidemic.

the day, I think what people need and want and crave is intimacy, and they’re exploring multiple channels for getting that. As the porn historian Noelle Perdue points out, no matter how extreme the ends of pornography are, the most searched position is always missionary. And amidst all of this, culture will emerge on the sidelines for people who want more than this … With all new technologies, there’s this period of people getting accustomed to what’s possible before they’re able to figure out what the breaking points are.

Webster : Artists always pick up a technology and try to figure out how to break it very quickly. They usually have less moral panic. I worry a lot about the seamlessness of technology. Life is very agitating and aggravating, and we must work hard to metabolize life. I feel like technology sells us something that’s the opposite: making life feel infantilizing. We have a very master/slave relationship with technology … What do you think of the future of Internet sex?

s eu: Mistress Harley coined the terms “tech domme” and “data domination.” Data doms don’t do any in-person work. It’s only about the exchange of power and humiliation play. She will get remote access

to her sub’s machine, and she can control their computer. She has been banned from every single platform, every single payment processor, even though she’s, quote, unquote, not having conventional sex.

Webster : For Freud, all fantasy somehow is a fantasy of being submissive because even if you’re a dominant, you still have a submissive part of yourself somewhere that you’re messing around with.

s eu: Melanie Hoff, who’s an artist and sex cybernetic assist, says that when you have vanilla heteronormative sex, it’s perhaps the clearest example of non-consensual BDSM because you are just having sex the way that you were trained by a heternormative society to have without the conversation. Regardless of whether you’re doing anything kinky or not, it’s important to understand how to talk and negotiate the terms of pleasure.

Webster : So basically our whole relationship online is a non-consensual BDSM vanilla sex experience. We’re just doing what we’ve been trained to do.

A HOME FOR THE AGES

In the ’80 s, French couturier Emanuel Ungaro began reimagining a medieval estate. Now, his daughter is finishing the job.

In 1176, the Knights Templar built a compound called Domaine de La Cavalerie. Emanuel Ungaro acquired the crumbling ruin in 1985, immediately setting about refurbishing and replanting the grounds. The French couturier, who experienced 2 0th-century acclaim dressing bold-faced names including Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Catherine Deneuve, had been searching for a sanctuary away from the bustling streets of Paris. La Cavalerie’s bones—which include the original La Commanderie building, as well as the 17thcentury Bergerie and 160 acres of rolling hills, olive groves, and forests—fit the bill.

After Ungaro’s death in 2 019, his daughter, Cosima Ungaro, and her husband, Austin Feilders, who run the creative agency

Concept out of the French capital, took the reins. Filtering their forebear’s design legacy through 21st-century sensibilities, they introduced geothermal power, 1,000 more olive trees, and a vision for multi-purpose hospitality. At the heart of the estate, which can now be booked for stays or events, is a single, guiding principle: “shock and awe.”

La Cavalerie’s library, tucked into the Commanderie building, is a living testament to this one–two–punch ethos. As immediately dazzling as it is laden with well-traveled references and hidden facets, the room distills Ungaro’s fearless craftsmanship and magpie-like sensibility. For CULTURED, the Domaine’s new stewards shine a light on a few of the hidden gems it contains—and the sui generis design philosophy they reveal.

Ungaro preserved a deep connection with the estate’s medieval roots, from the integration of the aptly-stylized library ceiling to a five-year restoration of the 12th-century chapel on the property, where he and his wife, Laura, were wed.

La Cavalerie is packed with antiques and artworks collected from trips to Milan and Parma, where antiquarians, fairs, and dealers became key sources of Italian design inspiration for Ungaro.

The designer obsessed over placement—a chain’s length, an object’s eyeline—and balanced proportions were all given due attention. Even the light switches sat particularly low, positioned so he could flick them with the back of his hand when departing a room.

Through the doors to one of the terraces and beneath the night sky, Ungaro once pointed at the moon with a younger Cosima by his side. “Everything I’ve gained in life,” he said, “I asked the moon for it.”

A television hid behind a bronze-brown wooden cabinet—an example of the designer’s restraint and insistence on discretion. Function never overpowered form.

Emanuel Ungaro’s preferred seat faced the concealed television. He would settle into this chair with one leg over the arm—a warm break from the composure he maintained in Paris.

A COSMIC JOURNEY

The patron and founding board member of Ballroom Marfa has devoted her life to beauty in all its forms. It’s also the driving force behind Loulu Hawai‘i, her clean cosmetics line.

BY SAM FALB PHOTOGRAPHY BY HIPPOLYTE PETIT

Allison Sarofim’s birth was celebrated with a Mark Rothko. That gift—from her father to her mother—set the tone for a creatively exalting life. The patron moves effortlessly between worlds few can permeate: the rarefied circles of the art world, where institutions like Ballroom Marfa count Sarofim as a founding board member; the realm of beauty, where her Loulu Hawai‘i line cemented her as an early adopter of clean skincare; and the fashion sphere, where she is a member of the invite-only philanthropic charter Friends of the CFDA.

Raised in an art-rich Houston home, Sarofim developed a discerning and cosmopolitan eye that now informs every facet of her life. She first drew inspiration from Hawaii’s lush landscapes for her skincare line at a family property in Oahu, designed by Modernist architect Vladimir Ossipoff. At her equally serene New York abode, she sat down with CULTURED to chat about the legacy her parents left her, and the one she’s carving out for herself.

Where does the story of your personal collection begin?

Well, I could start at the very beginning. I was born in Houston, Texas, and my parents were friendly with Mark Rothko. My father gave my mother a Rothko when she gave birth to me. My mother then generously gave the picture to me on my 30th birthday, which was a huge surprise as well as unbelievably generous. It is a very personal and special piece.

What is the first piece you ever bought?

An Andy Warhol gold-leaf portrait of Stuart Preston. Years later, my friend Bob Colacello visited and shared a few stories about Stuart and pointed out his initials in the corner, which gave the picture not only context but history.

What was your biggest influence in fostering your passion for art?

That’s very simple—my parents. I grew up in a house where we were surrounded by artists and art. My father was, and my mother is, a great patron of the arts. She was

appointed by [Dominique] de Menil in 1996 to be the life trustee of the Menil Collection.

Are you working on any new projects at Ballroom Marfa?

We just acquired the 75-year-old Auction Sale Barn. Long known as the Bull Room, it is a historic barn that was used by the Hereford Cattle Association to auction cattle and has been transformed into a performing arts space by Ballroom Marfa. We have had 350 music shows over the past 22 years, so it all makes perfect sense. We want to create a magical, intimate venue in West Texas that hosts dance, film, music performances, and theater while we continue to empower and shine a spotlight on visual artists.

Why create a beauty line? What was missing from that world, and what made you feel ready to offer it?

When I started my cosmetic journey, there were not a lot of clean skincare products on the market, which I felt was really missing from the luxury beauty space.

After spending so much time in Hawaii, I saw the potential of certain botanicals and was so inspired by the spirit of aloha that permeates the islands.

How, for you, do the worlds of art collecting and beauty overlap?

I am extremely lucky that I grew up with so much visual stimulation. Art has provided the framework in the way I see the world, the way I experience nature, and the way I look at fashion, architecture, objects, and even food. I see beauty in the most random, mundane, and often unexpected things. I think you can find beauty in almost anything if you are open and looking. This perspective informed my approach to creating Loulu Hawai‘i. I found beauty in the natural wonder of Hawaii. A friend of mine observed that Loulu was my love letter to Hawaii. It is a place I love, a place of healing, calm, and renewal.

“I think you can find beauty in almost anything if you are open and looking.”

What’s your philosophy around innovation and efficacy? How does having your own bio-farm and lab on Oahu help?

My philosophy around innovation is simple: be creative and use innovation to elevate the efficacy of your products. For example, we use sustainable bio-farming to grow microalgae in our Honolulu lab, upholding the Hawaiian principle of aloha ‘a¯ina, respect and care for the land. Precision fermentation allows our Hawaiian microalgae to grow under optimal conditions, which produces consistent specialty compounds with known beneficial efficacies for the skin, all without disrupting the local flora. Our scientists are truly amazing. Having our lab on Oahu has allowed us to dream and think big!

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 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. I tried to do Spider-Man but he looked like a ballerina!” she once told New American Paintings of the caped crusader).

Beyond the cartoon veneer lies a painter deeply engaged with the history of abstraction. Early oil works

from the 1980s 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.

The American Shaker community counts only three remaining members, yet the radical religious movement has left its mark on everyone from Frances McDormand to Reggie Wilson. A new exhibition immortalizes its contributions to the culture.

BY KARLY QUADROS

On the eve of the American Revolution and its ongoing experiment in secular liberal democracy, Ann Lee and eight religious followers sailed to the New World with an even more radical vision of society: building heaven on Earth. Their idea was simple: social, sexual, racial, economic, and spiritual equality for all. Their communes— which eventually stretched from Maine to Kentucky and attracted thousands of converts—reflected their religious devotion and these progressive values. The society was racially integrated 75 years before slavery was abolished, and women held positions of leadership almost 150 years before they earned the right to vote. Far less inhibited than the Puritans, they trembled, whirled, and swayed in trance-like dances during worship, earning the nickname the Shakers.

Because they believed that the quality of their craftsmanship revealed their devotion to God, the Shakers developed a distinct material culture, situated somewhere between traditional crafts and modern design. The exhibition “A World in the Making: The Shakers” arrives at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia on Jan. 31 to explore the design implications

All Shook Up

of their radically egalitarian lifestyle. Co-organized with the Vitra Design Museum, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Wüstenrot Foundation, and the Shaker Museum, it presents a lost American utopia through furniture, clothing, tools, and architectural pieces, including an immersive reimagining of a Shaker meeting house.

The show also pays homage to the Shakers’ distinctive style of religious ecstasy; it includes a selection of “gift drawings” received during divine visions, as well as a screening of a dance performance choreographed by Reggie Wilson inspired by Shaker services.

Today, only three Shakers remain in the U.S. (it’s hard to perpetuate a religion when its members are celibate). But their cultural history is gaining new visibility even beyond the ICA show. In 2028, the Shaker Museum is scheduled to unveil a new campus in Chatham, New York, designed by Selldorf Architects. On Nov. 20, the artist Suzanne Bocanegra and actor and producer Frances McDormand opened a show at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles developed with the Shaker Museum. As part of their exploration of the Shakers’ dedication to caretaking, McDormand and Bocanegra rocked special guests in an adult-size cradle on opening night.

In Miami, a Collective Hallucination Is Set Loose

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, “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 in Miami through Feb. 14. 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, mind-bending 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. When you place pieces next to each other, it teases out different dimensions—they start speaking to each other. 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.

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 well known 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 of it 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.

Crying in the Kitchen With Alison Roman

The chef’s new cookbook arrived just in time to save us from the festive season’s hosting rigmarole. She has a few additional tips to share that were almost too juicy to print.

BY SAM FALB

Alison Roman knows exactly what to cook, bake, and pour to keep delicate dinner politics in balance. The chef—a former New York Times columnist, Bon Appétit alum, and owner of upstate New York grocery First Bloom—has nurtured a devoted following drawn to her colloquial approach to cooking’s complexities and spawned viral one-word recipes in spades (her holy trinity: the Stew, the Cookies, and the Dip). Fresh off the November launch of her fourth cookbook, Something From Nothing, Roman gets down to the meat and potatoes of holiday hosting— from awkward seating arrangements to what happens when the ice runs dry.

What are you grabbing from First Bloom for the perfect holiday party?

These really expensive anchovies [by Don Bocarte] are very worth it. When you eat them, you’re like, “Oh my God, I’ve never had anything like this.” If you show up for a dinner party with those and really good salted butter, people are like, “You are incredible.” The salted butter comes from Cowbella, which is a creamery up in the Catskills. It’s a marigold color—beautiful, fatty, creamy. And to round it out, a Nordic crisp bread.

When was the last time you cried in the kitchen, and why?

Probably in the last few months. I was postpartum, and having a baby is hard. I was doing a lot of crying in the kitchen, but not about the kitchen.

At a holiday party, would you rather run out of ice or alcohol first?

Even if you do not drink, you need ice. That’s non-negotiable. If you run out of ice, it’s game over.

It’s torrentially snowing, Irving Berlin is playing, and you have 30 minutes before hangry guests arrive. What are you— tastefully—throwing together?

I’m buying a rotisserie chicken because I don’t have time to roast one. I’m making three really good vegetable sides: a good tomato, a leafy-herby salad, and beans. I’m picking a recipe from the book that uses canned beans, which cuts the time in half.

You’re working on the seating chart for a holiday dinner. Where do you put the couple that always bickers in public?

One on each end of the table.

Your socially awkward cousin?

Near the middle so I can keep an eye on them, but not too central. It’s a very delicate balance.

The person who can’t put their phone away?

Just don’t invite them.

THE MONICA LEWINSKY OF IT ALL

Three decades after her life was unraveled on the Internet, the American lightning rod is making space for new narratives online.

By Emmeline Clein

The day after I met Monica Lewinsky, I found myself in tears on a flight. The other passengers shared my vaguely manic anxiety: We were flying amid a government shutdown that cut the number of working air traffic controllers in half. I’d lied to various people about what day I was leaving New York—there was a party I was desperately hoping to avoid—and now I was coming clean on Delta’s messaging-only Wi-Fi.

Lewinsky (who knows a thing or two about government shutdowns, lies, and crying) taught me that even the most minor musings can change your life. So I let myself alternate between texting confessions and typing out petty, desperate—and admittedly pretty funny—poems into my Notes app. She also taught me, and an entire generation of young women, that shame can be a backpack filled with rocks—but if you’re willing to be brave, it can become a lens through which to finally see the writing that was always on the wall.

When we spoke, Lewinsky sat in her living room in Los Angeles, with a framed painting of a blister-pink heart hanging on the wall behind her, describing a life forged from the wreckage of bearing her own heart in public, against her will, as a young woman. Lewinsky’s story is a cipher for much of what ails our media ecosystem and our politics today— from her circuitous route to finding an authentic form of feminism to the seismic shift her story fomented in political reporting and the role of the Internet. Thirty years later, we’ve seen the tides of feminism rush in only to recede, while the Internet’s initial democratic promise has given way to a breeding ground for fascism, misinformation, and misogynistic ideology in the manosphere. Lewinsky’s story teaches us to closely watch the small fractures that can trigger tectonic shifts.

Today, Lewinsky is the host of the podcast Reclaiming and a producer of American Crime Story: Impeachment and The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox She’s interested in the healing potential of attention, in listening to people who have too often been poked, prodded, and violently exposed. “We rubberneck the car accident,” Lewinsky observes, “How many of us think, five minutes or five weeks later, I wonder if that person is okay? ”

“Yelling ‘fuck face’ at someone in my car is a reclaiming moment.”

Lewinsky brings a sense of optimism—tempered, of course, by a bit of well-earned cynicism—to the stories that made unwitting celebrities out of regular people. She believes the concerned and curious outnumber the callous online, even if the cruelest, crudest voices dominate. After all, Lewinsky herself has been burned by the Internet. Hers was one of the first political scandals to be broken by a blog and dissected online ad nauseam; she has called herself “patient zero of losing a personal reputation on a global scale.” (The day the Starr Report went live in September 1998, Internet traffic across the U.S. doubled.) The growth of social media has made this phenomenon status quo for regular people—something Lewinsky hopes to change.

In fact, a group of regular teenagers changed Lewinsky’s life for the better. In 2014, she published a memoiristic essay in Vanity Fair, marking the end of what she calls her “dark decade” and the beginning of a healing and harrowing journey back into the public eye. She was riddled with anxiety about how the piece—a melancholic, droll, and ultimately sanguine account of the decades-long fallout of the “epic humiliation of 1998”—would be received. So she winced when a gaggle of girls approached her outside the (comically positioned) marquee of Slut: The Play What followed was a heartwarming surprise: The girls told her they were reading her essay in their feminist club. The experience prompted Lewinsky to reevaluate her place in political history. Could her story be a sororal one, about surviving the misogynistic miasma we all stumble through? Could it belong to a canon, connecting her to women she hadn’t previously seen waiting in the wings? It was the beginning of a

personal “paradigm shift” that put her back in the driver’s seat of her own life. (Relatedly, Lewinsky told me that she’s been embracing her road rage: “Yelling ‘fuck face’ at someone in my car is a reclaiming moment.”)

In a take economy defined by hyper-specific, politicized, algorithmically forged silos, I think Lewinsky’s feminism—her willingness to brook nuance and take a joke—is one we need. She maintains a winking poise, derived from having endured the psychic fallout of public slut-shaming at a scale hardly seen since, to the point that it dwarfed the more intimate pain of the sexual relationship that sparked it. Many argue that the infamous relationship, rife with power differentials and gendered dynamics, was inherently abusive, but Lewinsky did not necessarily see it that way at the time. In the wake of #MeToo, she wondered, “Did my story fit into this? Did I have a right to reevaluate what happened?” She did—and ultimately decided that her experience “wasn’t sexual assault, but it was a gross abuse of power. I didn’t tick every box. I was mindful of not wanting to be a lightning rod that took [attention] away from what felt like more important discussions [at that time].”

For Lewinsky, reclaiming is about agency, choosing when to step in and out of the spotlight, and ensuring that the person living a life is its one true narrator. It does not happen in a single moment: “It is an ethos, a way of moving through the world. It has loss, and therefore grief. Everybody has a reclaiming story,” she tells me, even if we struggle to recognize them as such.

Single at 52, Lewinsky is not troubled by the stifling storylines about “spinsterhood” that she was raised on—far from it. “So far, my 50s have been the best decade of my life,” she assures me. “I hope I can show younger generations of women that it actually gets better.” For my own sake—and for that of women in their early 30s, depressed and teary in airports everywhere—I hope she’s right.

An AfroBrazilian Tête-à-Tête in Chelsea

BY SOPHIE LEE

Unlike many of his peers, Luis PérezOramas is not interested in separating artists by generation or medium. “We can be the contemporaries of whoever has existed, yesterday or today,” the Venezuelan art historian and curator says. “It is a matter of existential and intellectual decision.”

At Nara Roesler’s New York outpost, he has paired the AfroBrazilian artists Alberto Pitta, 64, and Elian Almeida, 31, in a show that collapses those very boundaries. On view through early January, Pitta’s layered canvas silkscreens add symbolic folk flair to Almeida’s colorful yet uncluttered explorations of Brazil’s history in paint. (The former’s work is “an impressive catalytic force,” notes Pérez-Oramas, and apparently inspired Almeida to try his hand at screen printing during a studio visit between the two, arranged ahead of the show.)

Alberto Pitta and Elian Almeida were born three decades apart, but they’re both riding career highs this year. A new show thousands of miles from home revels in their intersections— and contradictions.

Though Pérez-Oramas would argue for the atemporal nature of each practitioner’s work, the exhibition is particularly well-timed. Pitta is coming off of a sustained wave of intercontinental attention; four decades into his career, he was featured in last year’s Biennale of Sydney, a choral group show at the Palais de Tokyo this spring, and the Bienal de São Paulo, which runs through January. Meanwhile, Almeida’s canvases have been cropping up in shows across Brazil since his debut solo with Nara Roesler in 2021, also curated by Pérez-Oramas. Artists of his age “have taken the courageous path of symbolically questioning the underrepresented presence of Black bodies and stories within the dominant art system in Brazil,” says PérezOramas, who has enjoyed seeing the concurrent rise of Pitta’s profile. “This circumstance makes them contemporaries,” he says.

“Afro-Brazilian culture is an axis, not a margin for Brazilian culture,” continues Pérez-Oramas, “even if an elite-driven dominant form of representation has, until recently, lacked its monumental significance.” As visitors filter into the Chelsea gallery this winter, they’re greeted by a decidedly quotidian object, a functioning carrinho de café, or coffee cart, elevated to artwork status through Pitta’s polychrome lens. The teetering trolley cannot literally transport gallery-goers to Salvador, where the artist is based, but a sip of coffee may be all it takes to have them linger and see the work with fresh eyes.

Left: Elian Almeida “Farewell, Our Lady to God. If time allows, I shall return here again. Come renew me. Farewell, Our Lady to God. Help my people. Help me to say goodbye. Until the day of judgment. Farewell, Our Lady to God. Farewell, home. Farewell, longing. Where the

birds grew sorrowful. Come renew my longing. Farewell, Our Lady to God,” 2025.

Right: Alberto Pitta, The one who brings abundance to the home , 2025. Photography courtesy of the artists and Nara Roesler.

Minimalism Could Never

In London, Belma Gaudio has built a treasure trove of trendagnostic curiosities, both humble and monumental. The more aesthetics clash, the better.

BY SAM FALB

It is clear, from the moment you step inside Belma Gaudio’s London home, that she delights in contrasts. “We mix eras and styles,” she says, “from traditional Italian to modern French to contemporary, taking the best from each and putting them together in new ways.” Gaudio and her family fled Bosnia and Herzegovina when she was 8. She then lived everywhere from Bratislava to Kuwait before eventually settling in the U.K. as an adult. Perhaps as a result, she has an eye for friction—between worlds, eras, and strains of creativity.

As founder of Koibird, the London fashion, homeware, and wellness boutique, she’s built a platform where art and commerce mingle in a continuous tête-à-tête. Koibird’s interiors are made over twice a year, allowing for an ongoing aesthetic evolution—an extension of Gaudio’s ethos writ large.

Her fascination with collecting began early. “I hoarded stuff,” she recalls, “whether it was snakeskin scraped off the dead snakes found in the garden, Eastern European paper napkins that looked like they were made of lace, or the little stickers that came in chocolate bar wrappers.” That same omnivorous curiosity has extended to her participation in the art world today, especially when it comes to discovering low-key, rising talents instead of going all-in on overnight sensations. “It destabilizes the whole system,” she posits. “It’s very dangerous for speculation to overtake substance, and it raises a bigger question about what value in art really means.”

Among the many works that line her home, one stands out: a custom Michelangelo Pistoletto dining table entitled Mar Mediterraneo. Shaped like the Mediterranean basin and surrounded by chairs Gaudio has gathered from around the world, the piece serves as both sculpture and a testament to her well-traveled sensibilities. “The idea of it is to love your neighbor no matter how different they are and how uncomfortable it is to sit next to them,” she laughs. “You have to make it work, and love the differences!”

“I HOARDED STUFF— WHETHER IT WAS SNAKESKIN SCRAPED OFF DEAD SNAKES FOUND IN THE GARDEN, EASTERN EUROPEAN PAPER NAPKINS, OR THE LITTLE STICKERS THAT CAME IN CHOCOLATE BAR WRAPPERS.”

GABRIELE MÜNTER

Contours of a World November 7, 2025–April 26, 2026

cult classic A Dip in the Baignoire

Bathtubs and watches once had little in common. Then, Louis Cartier came along.

BY ERIN ZHANG

In 1912 , Louis Cartier—the grandson of the jewelry house’s founder, LouisFrançois, who had died eight years prior—introduced a small tweak with a radical impact: an oval watch silhouette. By 1973 , that elongated design had evolved into the current Cartier Baignoire and earned a cult following for its rejection of the circular standard. Its name, which translates to “bathtub,” played no small role in the timepiece’s soft power triumph. Bathtubs and watches were once deemed incongruous, too.

When Cartier reintroduced the Baignoire in 2023, it went from an insider’s favorite to a widely sought-after piece, boosted in part by its ability to be effortlessly stacked with other Cartier jewelry. This November, the house released yet another version with two designs: an 18k white gold iteration and a mini design in 18k yellow gold, sprinkled with “à pois” diamonds.

The former is almost completely covered in diamonds (647, to be exact, which take more than eight hours to set). The mini—with its inviting facade and curved sinews—is lined with 29 brilliant-cut diamonds on the face,

while 46 more of the precious stones are sprinkled along the bangle. Underneath the sparkling outer layer lies formidable craftsmanship—diamond settings carved flush with the metal before placement.

The mechanics are equally precise. A quartz movement powers swordshaped steel hands, ticking against a dial protected by curved sapphire glass. The clasp is an exercise in subtlety, integrated into the bangle at six o’clock for a seamless finish. Like its namesake, the Baignoire is no necessity—it’s a delight.

EXPOSE YOURSELF

For just shy of two decades, Iiu Susiraja has been making serious work with silly props out of her home in Turku, Finland. Her latest exploits are on view at Gratin this winter.

BY JOHN VINCLER

I have a theory about succeeding in middle age that I have never before confessed to anyone. It is this: Embrace your inner clown. Not playing the fool for laughs, but resisting stagnation by regularly pushing yourself into discomfort or vulnerability—yes, even risking appearing like a buffoon—so as to better understand where you end and what you want. Iiu Susiraja, who turned 50 in September, is a paragon of this.

The Finnish artist and photographer’s 2023 exhibition, “A style called a dead fish,” curated by Jody Graf at MoMA PS1, remains one of the most memorable New York shows of the last decade. Susiraja, who still lives in her hometown of Turku, began her career in her 30s. Her pictures prefigure the aggressive yet ambiguous tonal registers of a self-portrait painter like Sasha Gordon, whose David Zwirner debut had people lining up outside the Chelsea gallery this fall. Rooted in the body like the work of Ana Mendieta, able to disarmingly meet the gaze of the

camera like Francesca Woodman, and trying on the paraphernalia of gender only to explode it like Claude Cahun, Susiraja’s work is both firmly connected to an art-historical matrix and unlike anything I have ever seen.

We spoke this fall ahead of the opening of her first New York solo since PS1 at Gratin on Dec. 11. After initially also making occasional domestic still lifes, she now only takes self-portraits, while also sometimes producing sculpture and installations (like one involving four office photocopying machines, which will distribute audience keepsakes over the course of the Gratin show). At the time of our video call, she was recovering from bariatric surgery, in her parents’ home—the only other location, beyond her own apartment, where she has staged photographs in recent years. With clowns on my mind, I begin by asking her about great physical comedians like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. She mentions a fondness for British comedy, but also cites Lars von Trier’s 1998 Dogme 95 classic, The Idiots, as an important influence.

In most, she is fully nude. In two, she sits beside or holds a TV displaying her image. Like Laundry day, many feature balloons, including Lift up, Breasts, 2025, where the strings of two floating helium balloons are affixed with duct tape to her nipples. It’s a wry commentary on aging from an artist who in one early picture held a broom horizontally across her pendulous chest, not needing any assistance from her hands to keep it there.

“I am a homebody,” she says, parroting the English idiom I just introduced to her. Beyond the clear domestic confines of her work, the word also gets at Susiraja’s relationship to her own corporeality. She speaks forthrightly about her gastric bypass surgery,

“My art is me.”

In her work Susiraja plays the straight man, never breaking. But there are cracks. In her photo Clown is trying to be magician’s bunny, 2018, she wears a tank dress in her living room, her left foot standing in a black top hat as she looks out to the viewer with a constellation of six red clown noses affixed to her face. In Laundry day, from the same year, she stands beside a drying rack from which hang three balaclavas (and nothing else) with the strings of three yellow balloons clipped with clothespins to her breasts and lip (or tongue) as the balloons hang limply. Her face is, as ever, expressionless, though I interpret it as a deep inscrutability rather than a void. Deadpan is the word applied again and again by critics and commentators to this fascinating tension between opacity and openness. “The thing that has always struck me is how her images manage to be both profoundly forthright and slippery with ambiguity,” Graf says of what drew her to Susiraja’s work. “She disarms the viewer with a directness that evades explanation.”

During our conversation, Susiraja sends me a PDF with thumbnail images of new photos she will show at Gratin.

noting that, while she wants to always take care of her health, she also delights in observing her body’s metamorphosis. I confess to her, I normally wouldn’t mention the procedure in my writing, but she insists that she thinks of it as part of her art, citing as an influence the French artist Orlan, who has utilized plastic surgery as a medium. “My art is me,” she concludes.

It’s hard to look away from Susiraja’s mise-en-scène. Her home becomes a reflection of the viewer’s own interiority, a space to contemplate what stretching our understandings of ourselves can teach us about self-acceptance. Beyond the humor, beyond the surreality, beyond the documentary, her work is a thing of beauty.

Tishan Hsu’s Great Unknown

The 74 -year-old artist claims never to have made futuristic work. But his output—which grapples with the mysterious matter of our connected lives— reveals how technologically porous we’ve become.

TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHY

BY TAYLOR DAFOE

It’s growing ever more difficult to tell where the virtual ends and our skin begins. The artist Tishan Hsu has sought to give form to that creeping sensation for the past 40 years through sculptures and prints that mutate between hallucinogenic pixelscapes and fleshly figures. His interest in this nebulous territory dates back to the mid-1980s, when he worked as a word processor at a Wall Street law firm. Even then, he says, “I felt a paradox between the presence of my body and the virtual distance of the emerging landscape I was immersed in.”

Hsu, now 74, is speaking from his warehouse studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He is surrounded by the tools of his trade: plastic compounds and dyes, a piano-sized printer, a computer in a corner cubicle that

recalls those early word processor days. As much as the world has changed since his Wall Street era, the fundamentals of Hsu’s practice have not. “I feel the struggle has been to identify and express a feeling, or an emergence,” the Boston-born artist explains, “that I do not yet understand.”

Hsu’s use of the word “emergence” nods to his fall show of the same name at Lisson Gallery in New York. The exhibition, which runs through January, features new biomorphic UV prints affixed with silicone appendages that, in several cases, resemble the digits of a hand penetrating a computer screen. As much as this image evokes Cronenbergian body horror, Hsu maintains his art isn’t speculative or futuristic. “I was never that interested in sci-fi because I never saw what I was doing as sci-fi,” he notes. “I was trying to take what was in front of me and propose that there’s something very unknown here.”

That Hsu has touched a cultural nerve is evidenced by the recent superbloom of interest in his practice. “Emergence” caps a six-year run of high-profile shows at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto; New York’s High Line; the 59th Venice Biennale; and the 58th Carnegie International.

But even as the world began catching up with Hsu’s art, he was still in the process of getting there himself. The aha moment came with “Liquid Circuit,” his first survey, which opened at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in January 2020. It was a cruel twist of irony that the exhibition coincided with the pandemic, but nevertheless, it enabled him to see, for the first time, four decades’ worth of creations in a single space. “I suddenly understood what it was trying to do,” he says.

When asked what that was, Hsu resists answering directly, insisting that he works through intuition, not intent. There is something ominous in his work—something that says, “This is not good.” But Hsu is not editorializing, just paying attention. “When people have said that there’s a sense of foreboding in it, I just say, ‘Look at the world we’re in.’”

On The Level

A quick browse through the Level Shoes web page easily turns into a longer one. There’s a levity to the experience that other footwear behemoths, with their vast and endlessly taxonomized offerings, seem to lack. The platform’s “Seasonal Reset” edit, for example, sees a creamy suede Dolce & Gabbana loafer situated comfortably alongside an iridescent Paris Texas slingback and a retro, long-tongue pony hair Adidas Samba—an irreverent assortment of textures and styles that signals something fresh and energetic.

A youthful eye is at the heart of the company’s ethos. “If you look at our website or our social media,” says Level CEO Elisa Bruno, “Ninety percent of the faces you see are Level employees.” Exciting? Yes. Maybe a little risky too, but Bruno—who signed onto our Monday morning Zoom in a casual sweater-andtrouser look that culminated in a pair of glittery three-inch heels, which she somehow managed to wrangle into the frame—likes that. “Our Gen Z employees are connecting the brand with a younger audience in a very fun, playful way.”

Bruno has been with Level—which was founded in Dubai in 2012—since 2020. After leadership roles at companies (including Zegna, Dolce & Gabbana, and a 12-year stint at Burberry) with singular, time-honored sensibilities, pivoting to the helm of a multibrand platform felt like a breath of fresh air. “Sometimes people ask me why they should shop on our platform rather than visit a brand’s beautiful flagship,” Bruno says. “I always tell them, ‘Because we’re cool.’”

That’s not to say that Bruno has no reverence for legacy. “At Burberry, the employee culture was very strong—it led to a strong vision for the product, the aesthetic, and the way we engaged with clients,” she notes. “That became my foundation for everything I do.” At Level, the results of her approach speak for themselves: In 2024, the brand saw a whopping 640 percent uplift in social

Just as the fashion world prepared to call time of death on multibrand retail, a new shopping platform has proved that the model can still capture cool.

engagement. On the strength of this response, Level entered the United States—among the platform’s top five markets, with an equal split among male and female clientele—this year online, and plans to open a brick-and-mortar space stateside by 2027.

Level may be growing in prominence stateside, but for Bruno, size isn’t everything: “The giant platforms are already here. We may be really little, but we have very clear ideas of how our consumers like to shop with us,” she asserts. “We’re going to continue focusing on them, because it’s what makes us a good alternative to the competition.” The recipe is clear: less

emphasis on logo, and more on curating a tempting mix of luxury, performance, and unknown brands that might not ring a bell, but spark a sense of discovery in the shopper worn down by a constant barrage of familiar product.

As a new year looms, Bruno has some thoughts on trends that will endure—heels are in, and boots with a distinctive heel, “one that says something,” are covetable. When it comes to breakthrough brands, she demurs: “I don’t like to mention brands, because the other ones say, ‘Elisa, you like them more!’ No, I love you all. You’re like my kids.” Photography courtesy of Level Shoes.

Where Would We Be Without Robert Rauschenberg?

As his centennial celebrations flood the art world, five creatives spell out how the indelible artist gave them permission to break the rules.

Jasper Johns once said that Robert Rauschenberg “invented more than any artist since Picasso.” Rauschenberg, who was born in Port Arthur, Texas, on Oct. 22, 1925, was a voracious traveler who refused to limit his artistic output to a single medium and relished collaborations with choreographers, dancers, designers, and scientists. Through his “Combines,” he collapsed the boundary between painting and sculpture and brought real-world objects—ranging from a pillow to a stuffed eagle—into his art.

The celebrations of the artist’s centenary, which began this fall and will stretch into 2026, are just as interdisciplinary, sprawling, and ambitious as his oeuvre. There are no fewer than eight major institutional presentations of the artist’s work around the world, a book of the artist’s writings published by Yale University Press, and a national tour of the Trisha Brown Dance Company and the Merce Cunningham Trust, featuring Rauschenberg’s sets and costumes.

To explore the artist’s wide-ranging influence, CULTURED asked artists of all stripes to reflect on his legacy.

“I DON’T USE THE VOCABULARY OF CANVAS AND PAINT [BUT] I WAS DRAWN BY JEALOUSY EVERY TIME I SAW HIS WORK, BECAUSE OF THE MAGIC OF HIS VISION.”

—Elizabeth Streb, choreographer

“ONE OF THE MOST MONUMENTAL CONTRIBUTIONS BOB MADE WAS BRINGING TOGETHER ART AND TECHNOLOGY, AND CONNECTING ARTISTS WITH THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY.”

—Jeff Koons, artist

“There’s a kinetic charge to his work that was singular and that spoke directly to my somatic self. He really was a choreographer at heart.”

—Stephen Petronio, choreographer

“HE TOOK SEEMINGLY DISPARATE ITEMS AND TRANSFORMED THEM INTO BEAUTIFUL WORKS OF ART THAT ALSO REFLECTED THE TIME PERIOD IN WHICH THEY WERE CREATED.”

—Jason Wu, fashion designer

“His work opened the door for me to find my own way into abstraction … It gave me a model for how to work with the materials around me, to see social realities as inseparable from aesthetic ones.”

—Mark Bradford, artist

WORLD RENOWNED ARTISTS CREATE LIMITED EDITION DINNER PLATES TO BENEFIT

Life Down Under

Yuka Kashihara had a revelation underwater. She hasn’t been the same since—and neither have her paintings.

BY SOPHIE LEE

Yuka Kashihara saw something while scuba diving in Okinawa late last year. The Japanese artist wasn’t looking down into the abyss, but up to see bubbles trailing toward the surface. “[They] looked like stars in the night sky,” she recalls. “In that moment, I felt that everything was connected.” Back on land, the painter shared the thought with her diving partner, the neuroscientist Nobuko Nakano, who recommended the book The Magic Furnace for further exploration. The 1999 tome became the inspiration for Kashihara’s new exhibition, aptly titled “Stardust.”

In The Magic Furnace, prolific science scribe Marcus Chown outlines the universal building blocks of our world. “Every flower you pick contains atoms blasted into space by stellar explosions that blazed brighter than a billion suns,” he explains. Kashihara drives home this principle in her latest compositions (on view through Dec. 8 at Palm Beach’s Acquavella Galleries), which at a glance could be either abstract landscapes or microscopic renderings of cells. A swath of blue here, a few lines of green there— is that a fish in water or mitochondria in motion?

One work, Bubble Star, 2025, is a clear recreation of the artist’s underwater vision, showing jagged light breaking through the waves, but even there, the bubbles puncture the canvas much like another form of interplanetary light. The artist’s paintings have long been inspired by her travels (“driving

across the North American continent, walking the Milford Track in New Zealand, climbing Mount Kinabalu on the island of Borneo”), but with “Stardust,” she moves beyond these disparate touchpoints and toward a kind of thesis about the interconnectedness of the places she’s been. “It became clear that I, too, am made of stardust,” Kashihara muses, “and

that realization felt profoundly natural. [And all of] the primeval landscapes I have encountered in my life, if traced back far enough, [they too] were once stardust.” Wherever you go, there you are again.

BUCCELLATI ON BUCCELLATI

The Milanese jewelry line has left a mark on every fashionable port of call. This winter, Shanghai—where the house first touched down in 2017 —gets the Buccellati treatment with a new exhibition dedicated to the family behind it all.

It was his winding golden lace, cascading gems, and horticulturally inspired creations that earned Mario Buccellati his moniker, “The Prince of Goldsmiths.” A century later, the jewelry and silverware boutique he founded in Milan in 1919 has become a sprawling maison with clientele in every fashionable port of call.

A new exhibition in Shanghai captures this transformation from maker to monument. “The Prince of Goldsmiths. Buccellati Rediscovering the Classics” has taken over the Shanghai Exhibition Center in the city’s luxury district through Jan. 5 with six immersive sections curated by Alba Cappellieri, Ph.D., the director of the master’s program in Jewellery & Accessories Design at the Politecnico di Milano. “The Prince of Goldsmiths” comes after a first iteration in Venice last year, and a decade after Buccellati landed in mainland China with its Shanghai outpost. “China’s passion for craftsmanship inspires us,” CEO Nicolas Luchsinger says of the maison’s choice of locale for the exhibition’s second pit stop.

Visitors land in “The Buccellati Generations,” which features four brooches designed by Mario, Gianmaria, Andrea, and Lucrezia Buccellati—emphasizing the role the family has long played in Mario’s business. “An Italian Family Story” continues the narrative, taking guests through the family’s archival photography, documents, and personal items. The show traces the maison’s journey, from its expansion by Mario’s brothers to its eventual stewardship by his children and grandchildren.

In “Manmade Wonders,” the inspirations of these three generations are broken out into themed rooms. “Wonders for Special Occasions” sees Italian couture interpreted through evening bags and clutches, craftwork projected larger-than-life and animated throughout the space. “Wonders of Beauty and Proportions” finds the commonalities between the formal inquiries of architecture and goldsmithing. Meanwhile, “Wonders from the Past” materializes Mario and his son Gianmaria’s interest in classical antiquities, highlighting silver Boscoreale cups made by the pair.

“Natural Wonders,” the next space, brings to life the Renaissance— an enduring touchpoint of the maison and the period from which Mario drew his earliest techniques. Projected stone arches stretch over period-typical botanicals, while down the corridor, “The Buccellati Craftsmanship” displays a collection of the designer’s tools. Finally, “The Gallery of The Icon” welcomes visitors to a room with towering white columns, upon which high jewelry masterworks from the 1920 s to present day are projected in a swirling, immersive display.

Perhaps the most striking leitmotif of the exhibition is the remarkable consistency of the maison on view. Through decades, changing hands, and geographic expansion, Buccellati has kept its focus on craft and heritage techniques. It’s a feat few can pull off when companies pass from boardroom to boardroom instead of over dinner tables and generations. But Buccellati, after all, knows a thing or two about family.

IT ALL WORKS BETTER TOGETHER

Longtime collaborators Kilo Kish and Morgan Amirah know how to strike gold onstage or in front of a camera. They bring the same instinct to dressing—and Jimmy Choo’s winter accessories give them plenty to work with.

BY SAM FALB

A creative practice is no easy feat to cultivate. Like meditation or prayer, developing one requires discipline, sublimation, and, above all, time. This process becomes even more complex when a collaborator enters the mix. For Kilo Kish and Morgan Amirah, the cacophony of creative exchange is the best part. Kish’s work spans sound, performance, and design— most recently translated into last spring’s EP Negotiations and this past summer’s film series “American Gurl: Seeking…” at the Academy Museum. Amirah, her frequent creative director and choreographer, has lent expertise to projects like music videos for Negotiations and the pair’s 2022 short film series “Still Dreaming.” Though they approach their shared work from radically different perspectives, each has a deep reverence for how the other thinks, feels, and processes. “Kish and I typically know what we want,” says Amirah, “And we ask each other just enough questions to constantly progress.”

This difficult-to-strike balance between instinct and dialogue—or, as Amirah puts it, “excitement with a tone of preparedness”—gives the friends and collaborators a magnetic allure in the creative worlds they move through. Another covetable pairing? Jimmy Choo’s Eliot Slippers matched with the iconic London brand’s Bar Hobo. Worn on the streets of New York, the combination—like the duo themselves— is undeniable.

“There’s always something that we are eager to share or explore. Usually, one of us says something along the lines of, ‘I’ll do this,’ making space for clarity—and of course play.”

— MORGAN AMIRAH

“My workflow is very unique to me, so anyone who can plug into that and just understand it is half the battle. What I do enjoy about collaboration is finding new roads you might not have gone down alone.”

— KILO KISH

Show Me Your Luggage

From Louis to Vuitton, a gargantuan new volume from the French house, traces more than 170 years of history.

BY ANNA PATCHEFSKY

It follows that a house renowned for its signature monogram canvas would favor other forms of symbolism, too. Louis Vuitton’s iconic print, devised by its eponymous founder’s son Georges, emerged in 1896 as an affirmation of longevity—its interlocking initials weathering decades, designers, and heirlooms purchased and repurposed.

Now, From Louis to Vuitton, a hulking volume from Assouline, traces all 171 years of the house’s visual history in over 300 images. The narrative opens with a 14-year-old Louis Vuitton leaving Anchay, his home village in eastern France, for Paris. More than 400 pages later, the tome culminates with the birth

of the monogram canvas—Georges’s tribute to his father’s unlikely journey from luggage maker to household name. Between these bookends, the founding family’s history flickers to life in the form of archival photographs and film stills that highlight Louis Vuitton’s indelible mark on culture (think a frame from Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited with Owen Wilson, Luke Wilson, and Jason Schwartzman trudging through the countryside, LV luggage in tow).

One illustration in the tome, a dainty pen drawing of a bellhop inscribed with a short phrase, narrows the wealth of material down to a simple ethos: Montre-moi tes bagages, je te dirai qui tu es. Show me your luggage, I’ll tell you who you are.

Work in Progress

The long-awaited Museum of West African Art opens in Benin City—and addresses a pressing 21st-century question.

BY FOLASADE OLOGUNDUDU

What does it mean to reimagine the museum in the 21st century? One answer may be found on Sapele Road, in the heart of Benin City, Nigeria, where the Museum of West African Art (MOWAA) opened the first phase of its public campus last month. Constructed in the millennia-old tradition of rammed earth and surrounded by moats, the 15-acre walled site pays homage to the precolonial empire of the Benin Kingdom while seeking to dismantle outdated hierarchies between fine art and artisanal craft, oral tradition and scientific research, and historic and contemporary collections.

When the museum was first announced in 2020, it was expected to serve as the future home of Benin Bronzes restituted from European museums. Since then, however, a complex fight over who owns the plundered objects—the Nigerian government, the Oba, or MOWAA— has prompted the museum to change course. MOWAA’s director, Phillip Ihenacho, confirms that, while the

museum aims to be a good custodian of restitution efforts, “it is not our sole purpose.”

Instead, its ambitions are much broader. The MOWAA Institute boasts an outdoor amphitheater, a 100-seat auditorium, conservation laboratories, and a library. It also houses hundreds of square feet of gallery space that is being inaugurated with the exhibition “Nigeria Imaginary Homecoming,” an expanded version of the much-discussed Nigerian Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale.

“THE MISSION IS TO THINK ABOUT HOW ARTISTS CAN BE PART OF RESHAPING A NEW NATIONHOOD.” —Aindrea Emelife

The original lineup included artists like Precious Okoyomon and Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, who work out of the U.S. The MOWAA iteration will add four more who are based in Nigeria: Kelani Abass, Modupeola Fadugba, Ngozi-Omeje Ezema, and Isaac Emokpae. “The mission is to think about how artists can be part of reshaping a new nationhood,” says Aindrea Emelife, MOWAA’s curator of contemporary and modern art.

The MOWAA campus, which will open in stages in the coming years, also includes an Artisans’ Hall, where local craftspeople will sell their work; a guest house for visiting scholars and

artists; public gardens; and a performance center. Partnerships with Oxford University, Cambridge University, and Nigerian cultural agencies shaped its foundation. The museum will present key objects from the Nok civilization, the Ife Empire, and Benin, alongside treasures from communities that had less political power but rich aesthetic traditions.

Toyin Ojih Odutola’s charcoal and pastel renderings of characters inhabiting a space inspired by now-extinct Mbari ritual houses in southeastern Nigeria are among the works included in “Nigeria Imaginary Homecoming.”

“There’s much to understand and unlearn,” the New York–based artist says. “‘Homecoming’ as an act of home-making holds what collectively came before and carries what can be. These foundations have shaped us… our geographies are vast and shifting.”

HOW

MAGGI HAMBLING AND SARAH LUCAS BUILT ONE OF CONTEMPORARY ART’S GREAT FRIENDSHIPS

By Tom Seymour

Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas share a birthday— and a friendship that’s lasted a quarter of a century. To mark their London duo show, they sat down to talk shop, sexy stuff, and Suffolk.

British artists Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas met at the famed Colony Room Club in London on their shared birthday, Oct. 23, a quarter-century ago. Hambling was turning 55; Lucas, 38. Ever since, they have nurtured a creative kinship—and many nights in Suffolk pubs. This winter, an exhibition across two London galleries, Sadie Coles HQ and Frankie Rossi Art Projects, serves as a testament to their friendship and creative kinship.

The show, “OOO LA LA,” runs through Jan. 24 and coincides with a landmark Rizzoli monograph on Hambling and a major museum survey of Lucas at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki. The duo are as mischievous and unsparing in conversation as they are in their work: quick with a story, skeptical of legacy, and endlessly hungry for experimentation.

You first met on your birthday at the Colony Room, introduced by the late writer and man-about-town Sebastian Horsley. What did that encounter spark in terms of friendship and artistic kinship?

maggi hambling: Sebastian Horsley was a fantastical presence in my life, calling me “mother” while I called him my “wicked son.” He posed for me in life, and I continued to paint him after he died. Thanks to him, Sarah and I met at the Colony—both well-lubricated—and fell into each other’s arms with delight, recognizing something important in each other.

Sarah l uca S : Not long after, I got a place in Suffolk close to where Maggi lives. We began running into each other at social events there as well as in London, and gradually it turned into making arrangements—birthday drinks, supper at the pub, that kind of thing.

You’ve both portrayed each other—Sarah with Maggi, 2018, and Maggi with oil portraits of Sarah [over the years]. What does making these works reveal?

l uca S : We’re having another go at it. Mine’s unfinished for now, but it’s very amusing and compelling. I’d rather leave it to the sculpture to say what’s discovered.

h ambling: I always try to paint the spirit beneath the surface. With Sarah, it’s her aspect of being poised for action. My third attempt at a new portrait goes for that action.

The new Bury Street exhibitions are described as revealing “life’s proximity to death” and a “defiant exuberance.” How do you each balance that darkness and vitality?

h ambling: By magic.

l uca S : It’s more about balancing it in life and mood. I’ve always been a bit up-anddowny—even more so as I get older. In art, it’s a matter of embarking and seeing what jumps out. Recently we’ve been meeting in a more purposeful way: Julian [Simmons], my partner, photographed us; I cast Maggi’s feet and had mine cast. It’s unusual to see each other in work mode, and the social side of that feeds in too.

Sarah, your “Bunny” sculptures, created with stuffed stockings, aim to “bring old things back to a state of freshness.” Maggi, you’ve said painting creates an “eternal present tense.” How do you see art reanimating the past for the present?

l uca S : I usually use fresh tights—rarely the used kind, unless they’re very special. But yes, I work with things that already exist. Maybe nostalgia plays a part. Art has to bring freshness or novelty, otherwise we’d be bored. To be uplifting, it has to be surprising. But everything comes out of what went before. It’s rare for art to arrive completely out of the blue.

h ambling: Oil paint is live, sexy stuff, which, in the right hands, is permanently happening—past, present, and future— on the canvas in front of the viewer. A painting can only move people insofar as the artist has been moved by the subject.

Maggi, this fall you marked your 80th birthday with a Rizzoli monograph featuring voices like Cecily Brown, who you once mentored. How do you reflect on longevity and legacy?

h ambling: Thank God for Cecily and New York for saving my life at the time

of my heart attack in 2022 . I never reflect on legacy. As I get older, I try to say more with less, and continue to make everything an experiment.

You’ve both lived in Suffolk for decades. Has rural life shaped the way you work?

l uca S : Not directly. The way Maggi uses the sea, for instance—I don’t do that. But circumstances always slip in. I just do what I do.

h ambling: My routine’s the same in London and Suffolk: up early, make a drawing. The difference is the sense of the whole day in Suffolk, with its changing time and light. In London, it’s monotone. But it’s useful to leave a painting for a couple of days, whether in the city or the country. Paintings cook while one isn’t with them.

What kind of stories emerge when you’re together?

h ambling: They just happen, and they’re unpredictable.

l uca S : Maggi always has a story up her sleeve and presents it beautifully. I’ve no idea what I say—whatever’s triggered by the question or by Maggi. But if the audience applauds, I think: That must have been all right then.

What do you hope audiences will see in the dialogue between your works—and perhaps in your friendship?

h ambling: I never dictate. It’s up to people whatever they see, whatever they feel, whatever they take away.

l uca S : I’d hope it makes some sort of picture of friendship.

What can art do?

h ambling: Food feeds the stomach but art feeds the spirit.

l uca S : When a show is good, it makes people feel better. That’s the result I hope for.

“Art

has to bring freshness or novelty, otherwise we’d be bored. To be uplifting, it has to be surprising.”

— Sarah Lucas

“Oil paint is live, sexy stuff, which, in the right hands, is permanently happening.”

—Maggi Hambling

Elevate Your Screen Time

CULTURED has partnered with Samsung to build an entirely new kind of collection.

BY SOPHIE LEE

Today, you might want an Adam Pendleton work hanging above your mantel; tomorrow, perhaps an Oscar yi Hou? That kind of switch-up would normally be unthinkable. But CULTURED has teamed up with Samsung to bring a selection of our favorite contemporary pieces to the company’s The Frame and QLED TVs. Owners can choose to display some 60 works by today’s most distinctive artists on the screens, which transform into a digital canvas while in art mode.

“We believe art should be available beyond the walls of museums and galleries,” says Sarah Harrelson, CULTURED’s editor-in-chief. “By partnering with Samsung, we’re able to

further amplify the visions of today’s most influential artists by bringing art into homes.” The partnership, which launched earlier this fall, marks a significant step forward for Samsung’s contemporary program and follows its collaborations with the likes of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Keith Haring Foundation, and Art Basel.

To celebrate, CULTURED and Samsung invited guests to dinner at the Samsung Art Gallery in Chelsea on an unusually balmy October evening. Works from the new collection were illuminated on screens around the table, as art and media pioneers talked shop alongside featured artists. Over the next two days, the public streamed into the pop-up gallery to plot their next hang at

home. Cocktails clinked after sunset as the crowd took in everything from Andrea Marie Breiling’s hazy visions to Emma Webster’s twisted naturescapes in sparkling resolution—the first pieces in what will be a living collection curated between Samsung and CULTURED. Other participating artists include Theresa Chromati, Chris Martin, and Kate Meissner.

“We’ve long honored the great masters of the past,” says Sang Kim, executive vice president and head of North America services business, Samsung Electronics, “and with CULTURED, we’re now offering those of the future as well.”

GeNeratioN After GeNeratioN After GeNeratioN

Naiomi and Tyler Glasses grew up seeing and listening to their grandmother weave. The siblings’ new home collection for Ralph Lauren is a testament to the craft she passed down to them.

BY SAM FALB

In Ralph Lauren’s Canyon Road Collection, siblings Naiomi and Tyler Glasses—the former returning for a second artist-in-residence collaboration with the storied brand—translate generations of Native craftsmanship into objects that give depth to contemporary life. Traditional Diné motifs such as “eyedazzler” diamonds and Spider Woman crosses multiply across an array, from bedding to dishware, that has the whole home in mind. It’s a reminder that the roots of American design run deepest in the hands of its first storytellers.

You both come from a long line of weavers. What’s your earliest memory of weaving, and how did your grandmother—a key influence—shape your practice?

Naiomi Glasses: My earliest memory of weaving is when I was 5 years old. We were sitting in my late grandma’s hogan [a traditional Diné structure], and I had just gotten a crochet kit, which I don’t think I had even figured out. At that young age, it really made me appreciate the magic that my grandma was creating on her loom. I always admired the craft and knew that I would eventually learn. I was 16 when she showed us how to hand-spin wool, and allowed us to use her stockpile of undyed wool for our own weavings.

t yler Glasses: My earliest memory of weaving is when I was 4, hearing the rhythmic thump of the weaving comb on the loom, with our grandma’s radio playing the local station KTNN in the background. It’s a sound that plenty of Diné can relate to hearing, and when I hear that thump of the comb with music playing softly, it’s like she’s still with us. I started weaving at 21. She always told us that weaving would make a life for us, so we fully embraced that.

What does weaving mean to you outside of the physical craft?

Naiomi: We can trace back seven generations of weavers to the darkest time in our history, Hwéeldi, when Navajos were held captive during the Long Walk. I think about all the people and traditions we lost there. One of my grandmothers from generations ago decided to take on and continue this Diné craft. Just the act of weaving and creating something during such a dark time shows the resilience of our people.

Were there patterns and details of Dinétah that you wanted to ensure came through in the collection?

t yler: The textiles include motifs like eyedazzlers and horizontal diamonds found in many Navajo weavings and those of other Indigenous communities. There are also geometric elements like zigzags, repeated triangles, and fine stripes, representing the mountains and natural rock striations found throughout our homelands.

Do you see this collection as an example of how design houses can engage with Native artists?

Naiomi: Working with [Ralph Lauren] for several years, there’s a lot of respect and admiration for artisan craft, and I’m proud to be part of an effort to bring even more authenticity through collaboration. I hope this model inspires others, and encourages Native artists to share their work with the world.

CULTIVATE HARMONY

NEW (OLD)

DOMINIQUE FUNG’S WORLD BRAVE

By Lindsay Gellman

The Canadian-born artist has made a name for herself with interventions both ambitious and wallpaper-friendly. Her greatest accomplices? A beginner’s mindset and a sense of humor.

“Her work takes these themes of chinoiserie that are almost stereotypically revered, and it turns them on their head, injecting a sense of audacity.”

—ANNIE SHI

When the High Line first approached her to commission an outdoor performance piece last August, Dominique Fung wasn’t sure she was the right person for the job. The 38-year-old artist had long been interested in theater and film, but staging a site-specific performance would be a departure from her typical practice, which had until then focused on painting and sculpture. She agreed to think about it.

“A Leaf’s Pilgrimage,” the lyrical odyssey through the life of a tea leaf that emerged from her decision, ran for three days in early September. The performance centered on the interplay between a guide who seems to be visiting from the ancient past and an assistant rooted in the present day. The pair led the audience through scenes that evoke how tea is grown and picked, allowed to wither on bamboo slats, then packaged.

“I still feel like I’m a fledgling in terms of my art practice and career,” Fung says of the creative exercise. “I’m willing to try things out to see if they work or don’t work.”

The artist’s openness to trialand-erroring her way through the opportunities that present themselves has brought her intricate and often wryly humorous work into vastly different art contexts. As part of the Art Production Fund’s Art in Focus commissions in 2023, she took over Rockefeller Center with the epic A Tale of Ancestral Memories, a 125-foot scroll-like mural, and a series of sculptural and painterly interventions around the Midtown site. For the Armory Show last year, Fung built a whimsical wooden installation resembling a market stall, heaped with birdcages and draped with sculptural sausage links. In January, she’ll show new paintings in Massimo de Carlo’s thumbprint of a space in Paris, viewable 24/7 through its front window and a livestream online. The scale, medium, and backdrop vary, but Fung’s thematic blueprint—dusting off chapters of Chinese history, mythology, and the iconography that’s trickled down from each, then reimagining them with both wit and a critical eye—rarely does.

Fung’s parents, who had roots in Shanghai and Hong Kong, immigrated to Ottawa, Canada, where the artist was born in 1987. She got an applied

“I still feel like I’m a fledgling in terms of my art practice and career.”

— DOMINIQUE FUNG

arts degree from Sheridan College near Toronto before moving to Brooklyn in 2016. In New York, the nascent artist began to spend time in the East and South Asian collections of institutions like the Met. Moved by the design of these ancient objects, she acquired catalogs that now make up a studio reference library of sorts.

“Dominique is countering certain practices of Orientalism and exoticism,” Eugenie Tsai, the former senior curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum, tells me, before adding that the artist has “an instinctual talent for suggesting stories—having something unfold in time.”

When Annie Shi, one of the trio of restaurateurs behind New York’s King and Jupiter, set out to design the space for her Chinese wine bar, Lei, Fung’s shadowy canvases were central to the mood board. (They connected and became friends after Shi admired Fung’s work at Rockefeller Center.) Fung had an idea for Shi: For a 2021 solo show with Jeffrey Deitch, she’d created patterned wallpaper depicting cranes.

Upon close inspection, the birds were up to no good—drinking, mating, defecating. The two agreed the print’s cheeky humor was ideal for the walls of the bar’s bathroom. “It takes these themes of chinoiserie that are almost stereotypically revered,” Shi says, “and it turns them on their head, injecting a sense of audacity.”

The High Line commission required a similar irreverence and improvisational approach. During one of the performances, a black storm cloud loomed overhead, and staffers distributed ponchos just as the characters begin to discuss how, ultimately, like the tea leaf, we “all must face the water.” Then, raindrops began to fall. Fung worried that guests might leave early. Instead, she was delighted to hear someone muse that “it was actually really romantic.”

Photography by Dana Scruggs

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.

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 26 Young Artists—representing every edition of the list thus far—for a reunion photoshoot at MoMA PS1, where Yto Barrada’s courtyard installation Le Grand Soir 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.

Home for the Holidays

ILLUSTRATIONS

BY AHIMSA LLAMADO

JULIA CHIANG

Artist Julia Chiang lives and works in Brooklyn with her husband, Brian Donnelly (better known as KAWS), and their children. She’s shown her intricate, abstract paintings everywhere from Rockefeller Center in New York to Nanzuka in Tokyo.

What’s one touch that makes your holiday adornments distinct?

The kids’ creations are usually the best. We’ve made countless hanging decorations from felt, with balled-up yarn, glitter, googly eyes, and beads glued onto them. We’ve cut up paintings into different shapes and hung them as ornaments. We like Sculpey. We save as many as we can and gift them, too. We see no difference between the bracelets the kids make to wear and the beaded decorations that hang off every doorknob, window latch, and cabinet knob—only they know which is jewelry and which is holiday decor.

What makes the holidays in New York unlike anywhere else in the world?

There’s an intense energy during the holidays. Lincoln Center, shopping at Sahadi’s on Atlantic Avenue, the origami tree at the Natural History Museum, ice skating in Prospect Park—it can feel like too much, but I love it.

Traditions aren’t always traditional. When winter arrives, artist Julia Chiang and her children turn to the kiln to craft ornaments. Every Christmas Eve, chef Jess Shadbolt and her family gather around a fondue pot instead of a pine tree. Designers Brendon Babenzien and Todd Snyder eschew the holidays’ sartorial staples in favor of tartan ties and cashmere. As the days grow shorter, this group—all with a connection to one of New York’s most iconic holiday locations, Rockefeller Center—offers a glimpse inside the festive rituals of the city’s creative set.

JESS

SHADBOLT

In 2016 , British chef Jess Shadbolt left her mark on New York when she opened King in SoHo with Annie Shi and Clare de Boer—the recipes of which are compiled in a new tome, The King Cookbook. In 2022 , the trio followed their ItalianFrench bistro with Jupiter, an Italian gem in Rockefeller Center.

What’s one festive tradition you never stray from?

I’m not sure why, but my family always serves a cheese fondue on Christmas Eve. We sit around the fire, stirring bread and potatoes and pickles into a pot of melting cheese and dipping them into freshly cracked black pepper. The dish is very indulgent, very simple, and very easy to prepare, which is always appealing this time of year. We are echoing the tradition this year at King—it will be on the menu!

What do you most like to serve when entertaining for the holidays?

I stick with slow-cooked braises or one-pot wonders when entertaining. These dishes are not only hearty and deeply flavorful, but they can easily be prepared in advance, which gives you more time at the table. Right now, I am cooking braised duck legs with prunes and Beaujolais—a recipe from our new cookbook—served with crushed celeriac. It’s all the flavors of the season, with a festive flair.

TODD SNYDER

Todd Snyder, a Polo Ralph Lauren and Gap alum, lives in New York with his three daughters. The ethos of his eponymous line, founded in 2011, is inextricable from the style of the city itself, and has outposts everywhere from Madison Avenue to Rockefeller Center.

What do you most like to serve when entertaining for the holidays?

The incredible Dan Kluger taught me how to make the world’s greatest roast chicken: You’ve got to brine it. Full stop. Plus, a little duck fat in everything is always a winner. And in case of emergencies, have a kick-ass lasagna prepared.

What detail brings your holiday decorations together?

A monochromatic palette. Simplifying color goes a long way.

Is there a piece in your closet you make sure to pull out this time of year?

I have a brown-and-cream buffalo cashmere work shirt that I obsess over. It sounds sappy, but it reminds me of holidays as a kid, and I love it.

Have you ever committed a holiday-party faux pas?

Having hosted a few holiday parties over the years, I would say keeping the bar open all night isn’t always the best idea.

BRENDON BABENZIEN

Long Island native and Brooklyn resident Brendon Babenzien is the co-founder of menswear brand Noah and the creative director of J.Crew’s menswear, which has outposts across the city and at Rockefeller Center.

What detail brings your holiday decorations together?

I am a huge fan of the holidays and quite like a country style: wooden ornaments and not too much shine; white lights, no color. Some of the decor we have is very old and has been in my family for quite some time. My stocking, for example, was handmade by my grandmother. It’s about to be 54 years old.

How do you manage holiday-entertaining stress?

Only entertain people you really want around. Make entertaining about true family, friends, and people you would like to become friends with—no pretense. Stick to entertaining people who will support you without judgment, even if you burn the dinner. Holidays should be a time of peace and reflection. Don’t bury yourself to impress people.

Is there a piece in your closet you make sure to pull out this time of year?

I have a handful of tartan ties that make holiday appearances. They’re not fancy. I buy mine from Lochcarron.

WHAT HAPPENS AFTER

Julie Delpy has grown out of the starlet label that made her an icon and into something much more interesting: a filmmaker and actor free to make her own choices.

By Elissa Suh

Schell

Julie Delpy isn’t the least bit sentimental. “It’s far in the past,” she says of Before Sunrise, the 1995 film that made her a Gen X staple, with a shrug. “It doesn’t exist in my life anymore.” The 55-year-old actor is voluble, and a little mischievous— not unlike Céline, the sharp-tongued romantic she made famous, or like a person who has been underestimated for decades. On a late morning this fall, she spoke freely about fame, freedom, and the uneasy business of being remembered, but only glancingly and reluctantly about the film trilogy—which marked its 30 th anniversary this year—that reshaped how the world saw her, even if she never changed that much herself.

A decade before Richard Linklater came calling, Delpy was already steeped in European art-house cinema. After JeanLuc Godard discovered her, she starred in Mauvais Sang by Leos Carax, earning a César nomination (France’s equivalent of the Oscars), and in Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors trilogy, building a career marked by a restless curiosity for complex cinema. Then came Before Sunrise, a modest American indie that became an unlikely cultural touchstone, and its follow-ups Before Sunset and Before Midnight Delpy hasn’t watched the movies in years, though her teenage son recently did. His verdict? They’re cute, but Stalker, the slow-cinema classic by Andrei Tarkovsky, is much better. “I have to say, Stalker is fucking genius,” she concedes with a laugh. Whatever the Before films meant to Delpy and the rest of us then, she, at least, is well beyond them now.

When the first installment of the Richard Linklater trilogy premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, its quiet, livedin mood rippled through theaters like a secret. The film features one of cinema’s most enduring meet-cutes: Céline (Delpy) follows Jesse (Ethan Hawke) on a whim, stepping off the train in Vienna. They amble through the city, transforming a cheap date into something life-altering. In an era of romances like Materialists and Palm Springs, where self-awareness and irony buffer emotion, the premise of Before Sunrise—two strangers talking their way through an unbroken day off the grid—feels radical in its simplicity, and achingly difficult to imagine now.

What’s often forgotten, especially today, is how much of the trilogy’s

voice—its humor and its female realism— came from Delpy herself. “I picked my name, I picked the book I was reading, and I picked my family,” she says about recalibrating Kim Krizan’s script. In the process, she rendered Céline “an active romantic, not a passive one.” Her writing lent the films the grounding sting of feminine self-awareness that kept them from drifting into fantasy, and kept audiences coming back.

Though Delpy and Hawke were officially credited as co-writers on the sequels, Before Sunset and Before Midnight, she treads carefully when discussing her contributions to the first film, which was the subject of a years-long public dispute. “It was like treason,” she says of the bitter situation. “I went away from the business for a while because of that.”

But Delpy has never been one to lick her wounds for long. She pivoted to directing, making a string of smart, prickly films—like the darkly comic Lolo and the historical thriller The Countess, but most didn’t have international distribution beyond 2 Days in Paris and 2 Days in New York, a pair of neurotic, selflacerating romantic comedies. “There’s a huge difference between how my work as a director has been received in the U.S., where it barely exists, and in Europe, where some are cult movies,” she notes, half-amused, half-exasperated, and thoroughly over Hollywood’s nonsense.

Delpy, who splits her time between LA and Paris, insists her choices have nothing to do with ambition—sometimes to her disadvantage. “I’m not driven by ego,” she says. “I go with what feels right for me.” She wrote her latest feature, Meet the Barbarians, because she felt it was an important story to tell, “not because I thought it was a hit.” In it, a small French town prepares to welcome a Ukrainian refugee family—only to be surprised when a Syrian family arrives instead. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2024 to warm reviews and has been a conversation starter in Europe, though, like most of her work, it hasn’t found U.S. distribution. “Apparently, refugees are not very in, especially when they’re Arabs,” she deadpans.

Still, creative freedom matters more to Delpy than reach. “I never want to be anyone’s creation,” she says. People think of her less now than they did in her starlet years, which suits her fine. “I’m not the

pretty girl anymore—and, personally, I don’t give a shit,” says Delpy, who makes a point of wearing the same dress to every public event. “With what’s going on in the world, I am uncomfortable showing up with thousands and thousands of dollars on me.”

That fierce sense of autonomy has become her signature. In Hostage, one of Netflix’s most popular miniseries of this year, Delpy plays the president of France, navigating a crisis with icy authority and flashes of weary humanity. The show’s success revealed a new facet of Delpy to a wider audience; many who first met her as a romantic lead discovered her as a commanding, middle-aged woman in power. “She’s someone who made every compromise to rise to the top,” Delpy says of her character. “Fortunately—or unfortunately—I’m the opposite. I’ve made very few compromises in my life and career. Maybe I’d be further along if I had.”

Delpy is already turning her attention to the next challenge: Ruben Östlund’s The Entertainment System Is Down, a jetblack ensemble comedy co-starring Keanu Reeves—“that one is pure fun”—and more projects she’s not ready to announce just yet. For now, she prefers to stay in motion. “I’m looking at the future,” she says resolutely. “Nothing else matters.”

“I’m not the pretty girl anymore— and, personally, I don’t give a shit.”

NAOMI BECKWITH GETS LOST ON PURPOSE

By Charlotte Burns

THE CURATOR AND GUGGENHEIM DEPUTY DIRECTOR HAS TRAVELED ACROSS THE GLOBE

TO FACE HER MOST PROMINENT CHALLENGE YET.

“Well, it seems neither one of us made the rapture, darling.”

It’s Sept. 24, 2025—the day the world was supposed to end. Despite a flood of doomsday prophecies and goodbyes on social media, the sun has risen. The curator Naomi Beckwith greets the non-apocalypse with typically wry humor.

Four thousand miles from Chicago, where she was born, and New York, where she continues to serve as deputy director and chief curator of the Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, Beckwith is in Kassel, Germany, where she recently relocated as artistic director of Documenta 16. Every five years, this sprawling, inherently political exhibition—which was founded in 1955 to reinvigorate a ruined city and reestablish Germany as a player in the global art scene after World War II—transforms into the intellectual nerve center of the art world for 100 days. Beckwith’s edition opens in June 2027.

She has arrived to find a nation in flux. “You can be in one Germany and know nothing of another,” she says of the modern nation-state, which unified in 1871, was later divided, then reunified in 1990. “I think everyone forgets that it’s a young country.”

Kassel itself has shifted from the country’s center to the eastern edge of postwar West Germany and now back again. “It’s a space that’s still trying to figure itself out—and that’s actually remarkable,” Beckwith says. “When you’re in a place where everyone’s asking questions, possibilities unfold.”

The debate about what it means to be German has sharpened since the former chancellor, Angela Merkel, instituted an open-door policy for refugees in 2015. For Beckwith, it feels “palpable” that Kassel is “shaped by

immigration.” She walks to work every day at the Museum Fridericianum on Friedrichsplatz, where immigrant families gather in the evenings. “It feels a bit like Queens,” Beckwith says. “On the skin of the city, you see a place allowing people to exercise their cultural practices.”

Art institutions—including Documenta—are part of the ongoing debate. The inclusion of a work with antisemitic imagery in the show’s previous edition led to outcry, sparking contention over free speech and religious persecution in a country still grappling with its past and a cultural realm reckoning with its relationship to the Israel-Gaza conflict.

For Beckwith, being abroad brings new resonance to conversations about belonging. It’s a theme she has explored throughout her career, from the Studio Museum in Harlem to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. She earned a reputation as a brilliant curator with a rare ability to surface stories that might otherwise remain untold. She uses her rigorous academic knowledge to crack conversations open, making the complex more inviting and bringing different positions and cultures together.

Those interests also shape a major exhibition she has organized as guest artistic director at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris this fall, entitled “Echo Delay Reverb: American Art, Francophone Thought” and on view through Feb. 15. It examines how French theory has influenced artists in America, and vice versa. Beckwith describes the project as an exploration of how “ideas circulate, get masticated, and spat out in very different ways.”

Now living in Germany, those dynamics aren’t theoretical for

Beckwith. She speaks little of the language, and finds herself “utterly confused half the time.” But feeling lost has been instructive. “I have to allow myself to become a little bit of an innocent and depend on other people to build a community,” she says.

As Beckwith learns about her new home, the approach of Documenta X curator Catherine David—the first woman and the first non–German speaker to lead the exhibition in 1997— lingers as a model for how movement can shape meaning. “She had a beautiful parcours through Kassel,” Beckwith says of the French curator’s edition, which mapped a path through the city. “I’m deeply interested in how she imagined Kassel as a framework for thinking globally.”

“I always remind myself that art has a much longer memory than politics.” — NAOMI BECKWITH

The first Black woman to lead Documenta, Beckwith has appointed an all-woman curatorial team—also a first. She wrote a short list focusing on curators possessing “intellectual acumen and commitment to real collaboration”—all female, as it turned out. “When I drew it up, I thought, Well, look what we have here,” she says.

Beckwith is “very open to collaborating,” says Andrea Karnes, the chief curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, who has partnered with her on exhibitions including Rashid Johnson’s touring survey. (On view at the Guggenheim through Jan. 19, it opens in Fort Worth in March.)

Karnes describes Beckwith as “a visionary” who brings “sweepingly big-picture” ideas into sharp focus. “With Naomi, there’s intellectual rigor but also generosity of spirit. No idea is a bad one. She’s willing to go down any road in her thinking, then has a way of sharpening it that makes the show stronger.”

“Her persona’s very serious, but there’s this other bright side of her,” says artist Nick Cave, who has worked with Beckwith for more than a decade, including on his major survey at the MCA Chicago and Guggenheim. “We laugh a lot. She’s super smart, but she’s also strategically brilliant in understanding the space she’s working in. You have to be like a magician.”

For Beckwith, everything begins in artists’ studios. Cave describes the “great deal of time” she has spent with him there, “understanding the nuances behind what it is I’m trying to do” and “always questioning the work.” Similarly, the Johnson exhibition was “almost 20 years in the making,” she says. “I get to walk into someone’s studio and say, ‘I’d love for you to be in this exhibition and what do you want to do?’” she says. “That’s a real gift.”

Beckwith has less lead time for Documenta than most. The selection committee resigned en masse in 2023 amid controversy over accusations of antisemitism and a broader debate about free expression in Germany, before a new one was appointed in July 2024. It announced Beckwith’s selection later that year.

She and her team are adapting accordingly. She quotes a term they learned during a recent research trip to Brazil—mutirão—to define their approach. “It’s about getting things done quick, fast, in whatever way it takes,” she says. “You do it with people, you do it together, collectively.”

Rather than imposing a grand theory, Beckwith wants to spotlight what artists are making now. “A lot of people start with their intellectual, academic framework that pulls things in, rather than saying, ‘Oh, something interesting is happening in this little corner of the world, maybe we should pay attention,’” she says. She proposes that curators “allow ourselves to recede a bit, to let the artists speak and shine.”

“Kassel is a space that’s still trying to figure itself out—and that’s actually remarkable.

When you’re in a place where everyone’s asking questions, possibilities begin to unfold.”

— NAOMI

BECKWITH

“Naomi is not just of this moment. She also is of the future.”

— NICK CAVE

Beckwith’s curatorial drive is “still very much about inclusion of voices that don’t get included,” she says. “I also want to think about practices that don’t fit so neatly into the history of modernism—which we’re all kind of still beholden to.” That includes multimedia practices, collective practices, self-taught artists, and other traditions that “come out of cultural histories and practices rather than the academy.”

There are many curators who have inspired Beckwith, from Okwui Enwezor of Documenta 11 to Harald Szeemann of Documenta 5. Szeemann “was one of the first curators to say we need to bring what you would call popular culture, basically media culture, into conversation with the arts,” she says, “that it’s not some rarefied realm.”

Beckwith is approaching Documenta with the same capacity for flux and possibility she’s found in Kassel itself—aware of the weight of history, and its potential for change. “I’m always imagining that the very structure of this exhibition could be different next time, or two cycles later. Germany could be something very different,” she says. “And I always remind myself that art has a much longer memory than politics.” For Cave, Beckwith’s curatorial approach is defined by this broad lens. “Something that’s extraordinary about her is that she’s not just of this moment,” he says. “She also is of the future.”

ON I I T T R R A S S S T T

LUC TUYMANS × YOHJI YAMAMOTO

KRISTEN STEWART × OLIVIER ASSAYAS

PAUL TAZEWELL × CYNTHIA ERIVO

STELLAN SKARSGÅRD × ROBERT REICH

R. CRUMB × GEORGE DiCAPRIO

KYLE MacLACHLAN × JULIO TORRES

JORDAN FIRSTMAN × RACHEL SENNOTT

DAVID × SYBIL YURMAN

Artists have a reputation for being loners, disappearing into isolation and resurfacing from their trance only for sustenance, sleep, or the obligatory appointment. The caricature is effective in its depiction of creative compulsion, but its lived experience is far from uniform. Most artists—whether they’re a painter, writer, actor, or designer—are beholden to a creative community for inspiration, commiseration, or a reality check. (When money is tight, perhaps even a literal check.)

CULTURED’s second annual Artists on Artists portfolio is dedicated to these critical cross-disciplinary alliances, without which much of our rich cultural heritage would not exist. At a time when public funding for the arts is dwindling and anxiety dominates, we asked a cadre of artists we admire to sit down with someone who inspires them to make the work they really want to make. Together, they consider the question: What can art do?

Their answers remind us why we seek art out in the first place—and why it’s worth protecting at all costs.

Luc Tuymans first met Yohji Yamamoto on a visit to Japan with his wife, the Venezuelan artist Carla Arocha, in 1999. The Belgian painter had opened his debut exhibition with David Zwirner in New York a few years earlier. He was fascinated with the Japanese designer’s simultaneous precision and undone ease—qualities evident in his own politically oriented paintings.

Who could have predicted that, more than 25 years later, the two men would still be friends, savoring simultaneous career milestones (at 82, Yamamoto’s business is generating more than $200 million a year; Tuymans, 67, opened a show of large-scale works, his 18th with Zwirner, in New York this November). Just days after Yamamoto debuted his Spring/Summer 2026 collection, at an October Paris Fashion Week show Tuymans attended, the pair reunited at Yamamoto HQ for a cigarette and a chat about anger, black clothes, and cowboys with their frequent sparring partner, the writer Donatien Grau.

MAD MEN

Luc Tuymans is not just a great artist, he is also a great Yohji Yamamoto fan. He follows a kind of uniform, always in black—as if colors belong not in life but in art. It makes sense, then, that he would appreciate the work of a designer who, for nearly 50 years, has aimed to make black the greatest color for clothes.

The presentation of Yohji Yamamoto’s Fall/Winter 2025–26 menswear collection in Paris last January featured a number of artists on the runway: Yohji-san invited Luc to lead the group, and he immediately agreed. He did not do it for any other reason than care and admiration. Yohji-san was so moved by his presence during the fittings—as well as that of his wife, artist Carla Arocha—that he asked them to walk the show together, a celebration of their commitment and love.

Eight months later, toward the end of September, I visited Luc at his Antwerp studio and home. He told me, in his nonchalant way, that CULTURED had asked him to do a conversation with Yohji Yamamoto. Immediately, themes for their dialogue started spinning in my head: their attachment to place—Antwerp for Luc, Tokyo for Yohji— the role of medium, the importance of rebellion and critique, and of course, anger (where we started our conversation). I told Luc that I would love to be their sparring partner; Yohji-san was up for it, too.

This brings us to an upstairs room at the Yohji Yamamoto offices in Paris, on an early October afternoon just two days after the designer’s show, which Carla and Luc attended. We sat for a conversation that could have lasted hours—a very beautiful, moving moment, in which a deep understanding emerged between two of the greatest artists of our time.

—DONATIEN GRAU

“Both of you make work that contains a lot of anger, which you manage to transform into brilliance.”

—DONATIEN GRAU

Donatien Grau : Both of you make work that contains a lot of anger, which you manage to transform into brilliance. I would be delighted if you could tell me about your first memory of anger.

Yohji Yamamoto: My life started from anger. My first anger was at the age of 3 years old. My mother told me, “Your father was brought to the war.” Two years before the war ended, he was taken to the army on a boat. My father [wrote her to say] that, because he had been given a warm-weather uniform, maybe he was being sent south. This was his last message, in 1945 Can you imagine?

When I was 5 or 6 years old, my mother showed me the report of how his life ended. It was written on a small piece of yellow paper that he died [while his boat was approaching] Manila. He never arrived. I got so angry at the Japanese government, at the army.

Grau: Do you have a childhood trauma or anger, Luc?

Luc t u Y mans: My parents’ generation also came up during the war. Both my parents lost brothers. My father got a phone call way later, when I was not living at home anymore. He went to answer the phone out in the corridor, and when he came back, he was very distraught because somebody had finally explained to him how his brother, who had been killed during the war, actually died. It was shrapnel wounds and things like that.

Our family was in two camps. My mother was Dutch, and there was the Resistance. My father was Flemish, so there you had a complicated history of collaboration. During dinner, it was always a fight. My sister and I would eat very fast just to be away from the table. I got angry about that—not at my parents, but at the rest of the world, or the outside, let’s say. That may be where this phobia with the idea of the war came from.

Grau: These moments of anger have stayed with you; you can still feel them today. Some people just stay angry and can’t cope, can’t deal with their lives. But you

have managed to make something from that anger, and that thing is your work. Can you tell me about that?

Yamamoto: I was a young kid, angry at my own government, thinking that they were lying. I thought I was going to do something violent, that I’d end up in prison because I couldn’t accept this big lie. During that same time, my mother decided to study how to make clothing for three years. So she sent me to my grandmother and great-grandmother’s country house far away. By the house, there was a river, a mountain, and the sea. The two of them would watch me play in the water; they were so sweet. Even now, I would like to go back to that moment.

Grau : It seems that first there was anger. Then, thanks to your mother, your grandmother, and your greatgrandmother, it was transformed by discipline and love. That could be considered a definition of you.

Yamamoto: That’s true. Two years after that, my mother visited us. She looked like a beautiful modern woman from Tokyo. I couldn’t talk to her. I felt like, Who are you?

Grau : Luc, a lot of your work also deals with anger, discipline, and in more subdued ways, love.

t u Y mans: I was bullied in school because I was silent, skinny, blonde, and blue-eyed—so I looked like the perfect student, but I wasn’t. Since my mother was Dutch, they shipped me to a boys’ camp in Holland in the summers. One day, on a huge square, there was a competition where 150 kids had to make chalk drawings. I won the yellow sweater. When I went up to the podium, I thought, This is what I can do to be accepted. Not that I knew what an artist was—I just felt that I had an ability.

Yamamoto: When my mother brought me back to Shinjuku, I was a primary school student and I was studying Kendo. I remember one day practicing some moves, and I accidentally hit an American soldier. He didn’t get angry with me, and suddenly I started liking the American army. The American soldiers had been our enemy, but this particular one didn’t get angry at me. Around the same time, I remember playing catch with my friend, and the ball hit a very beautiful car. It belonged to the head of the Shinjuku yakuza. The driver got angry, and he shot at me. I was a kid! An American soldier hadn’t gotten angry at me, but a Japanese yakuza driver did. How do you feel when you hit this kind of occasion?

“When I first saw a fashion show, I was like, What! All this work for half an hour? My work is immobile; it has to be still, contemplated. Your work moves around in society.”

—LUC TUYMANS

Grau : Luc, Yohji-san just told us about his ambivalent relationship to Japan and America. You also had a very early relationship to America.

t u Y mans: When I first went, I was amazed by the fact that Americans were always so positive back then. That was endearing to me, because, where I come from, it was not the case. They have a great respect for the old culture that they came from. On the other hand, there was also a misunderstanding, to a certain extent.

Grau : Americans misunderstand your work?

t u Y mans: Many Americans do understand the work, but in terms of feeling, in terms of the emotional context, it is different for them.

Yamamoto: When I was living in Shinjuku, a customer of my mother’s worked in a cinema. I started [watching] cowboy movies. At first, they looked so brave and nice. But after four or five films, I noticed that cowboys were killing the so-called Indians.

Grau: It’s that ambiguity of who’s right and wrong, which is, Luc, central to your work.

t u Y mans: Yes, but without the sense of moralizing— that is the worst thing. When you actually try to discern the fact—like you did when you found out about [your father and] the war—you find out that things are much more ambiguous. I was fascinated by power—not to have it, but to analyze it, to see how it functions.

Grau: Luc, you often use very subdued colors. You, Yohji-san, have said many times that black, because it is understated, is sometimes the greatest statement.

TUYMANS:

The most interesting thing in Mr. Yamamoto’s work is the detail and the disregard of detail— a complex situation which is, on the one hand, very Japanese, and on the other hand, not at all.

GRAU: Do you agree with that, Yohji-san?

YAMAMOTO:

I’m sorry to say, it’s only a technique to make people feel less bored.

TUYMANS:

That’s a good answer.

“I started to always wear a black T-shirt so as not to disturb people’s eyes, and I still do now. This is the moment when my work in so-called fashion started.”

—YOHJI YAMAMOTO

Yamamoto: When I started helping my mother make clothes, we had so many customers who asked her to make things from fashion magazines—all those pages were covered with colorful floral prints. I would look at the photos and at the customer. I thought, It would be impossible to make this clothing for that person. I began to hate colors and prints. I started to always wear a black T-shirt so as not to disturb people’s eyes, and I still do now. This is the moment when my work in so-called fashion started. At that time, black was not a fashionable color at all. It was worn at funerals.

Grau: But look at your Spring/Summer 2026 collection. You also love color.

Yamamoto: Not really. I only love Japanese red. Japanese women used to wear kimonos, and the final piece was red. Maybe I can bravely say that the most appealing colors are black and red.

t u Y mans: I started wearing black when I was 16 , I think. Color for me is never straightforward. It’s about tonality, temperature. Flat color is like sculpture—there have to be layers. Now I work in a much more colorful manner, but it took me years to get the right contrast. I was always afraid to overdo it. Only a couple of years ago did I finally dare to play more with contrasts. Probably because I’m a bit older now.

Grau: Luc has thought a lot about what he wanted to discuss with you, Yohji-san, and has all these ideas. Luc, I would love for you to say what you’ve been thinking about in relation to Yohji-san.

t u Y mans: The most interesting thing in Mr. Yamamoto’s work is the detail and the disregard of detail—a complex situation which is, on the one hand, very Japanese, and on the other hand, not at all.

Grau: Very Flemish, too.

t u Y mans: Yes, it’s very close to where we actually meet.

Grau: Do you agree with that, Yohji-san?

Yamamoto: I’m sorry to say, it’s only a technique to make people feel less bored.

t u Y mans: That’s a good answer. I’m also fascinated by the deconstruction of the clothes, which was new when you did it. I have always had a great respect for designers. When I first saw a fashion show, I was like, What! All this work for half an hour? My work is immobile; it has to be still, contemplated. Your work moves around in society.

Grau: You are both passionate smokers. Luc, you wanted to quit, but can’t. You, Yohji-san, have never tried.

Yamamoto: I never thought about it.

Grau: What do you feel when you smoke?

Yamamoto: I started smoking cigarettes when I was 16 years old. I never, ever thought about stopping. I can die anytime. If I were to think about making my life longer, I would quit cigarettes. But I have never thought about that. Tomorrow, I can go up there or down there. But I’ll never stop.

t u Y mans: It’s a way of transporting yourself somewhere else. Even though I tried to get rid of it, it keeps coming back because it is embedded in the work process. The dopamine slows me down, and gives me time to think.

Grau: My last question to both of you, Yohji-san and Luc, is: What can art do?

Yamamoto: Very often, art can make people feel braver or feel fantastic, but sometimes art can make people feel down, sad. It has this double power.

t u Y mans: Art can make people reconsider, and maybe eventually think. It’s, in a very weird way, a distorted form of hope. And it’s a necessity in life.

‘WHY THE FUCK DID IT TAKE ME SO LONG?’

by Shane McCauley

Kristen Stewart fought to get her directorial debut financed, and won. She fought to get it into theaters, and won. To celebrate her victories and reflect on the hard road that led to them, the actor-turned-filmmaker sat down with Olivier Assayas, who has directed Stewart twice, for a conversation about grit, the industry, and the enemy within.

“I’m not gonna sit around and wait for someone to pay for my movies ever again. I’ll just do them for fucking nothing. I will steal them.”

—Kristen Stewart

Olivier Assayas didn’t read the screenplay for Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut, but he would have greenlit the project immediately. “This is the movie of someone who needs badly to make a movie,” he tells Stewart over Zoom one morning in November. Assayas, who directed the 35-year-old actor-turned-filmmaker in 2014’s Clouds of Sils Maria and 2016’s Personal Shopper, knows a thing or two about a film made on one’s own terms at all costs. For Disorder, his own 1986 feature debut, he was offered the crew of the monumental French director Alain Resnais. Assayas turned the opportunity down, opting to continue working with his far less seasoned peers. “The foundational decision I made in filmmaking,” he continues, “was not to go the safe route.”

With The Chronology of Water, an adaptation of championship swimmer Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir of the same name, Stewart demonstrates the safe route is of no interest to her either. The Imogen Poots-led deep dive into the long shelf life of trauma refuses linear narrative or easy viewing. The reviews it received out of Cannes, where it premiered in May, testify to Stewart’s ability to successfully helm an unconventional project. American audiences will see for themselves when the film arrives in theaters Dec. 5, but Stewart has already proved her mettle to the audience member she cares about most—herself. The Chronology of Water spent almost a decade in development limbo, a period during which the actor became well acquainted with rejection. “Every producer in town was like, ‘So what’s it about? A swimmer who gets raped by her father?’” she tells Assayas. “That’s just a hard no.” It’s telling that it was a little-known indie distributor, the Forge, that picked up the American rights for the film, reaffirming for Stewart that Hollywood is no petri dish for independent cinema these days. “You have to leave this country to do that,” she insists.

But Stewart isn’t done with the industry just yet. Next year, she’ll star in her wife Dylan Meyer’s directorial debut, The Wrong Girls, opposite Alia Shawkat. The film will be her first comedy, proof that

even someone who has been a fixture onscreen since the age of 9 can still surprise us. For this Artists on Artists conversation with Assayas, she sifts through the victories, obstacles, and lessons of a life spent making movies.

Olivier Ass AyA s: I can see the notes for your film on the wall behind you. Do you function like that?

Kristen s tewA rt: Well, I’ve only functioned once in my life, this being my first [directorial] project. It was necessary to see the movie as a body, because some of the fractured memories in the story needed to find a different circuitry.

Ass AyA s: You are disturbing the logic of how a film has to be made because you have an intuitive knowledge of what it is, of what it should be. This film is adapted from a book you love, which is an excellent starting point. At the same time, it’s a self-portrait. I think it’s very close to the bone.

s tewA rt: I just wanted to be the person who got the ball rolling. I’m a really good follower. I’m such a faithful soldier, but it’s really fun to lead the charge. I thought this book really lent itself to adaptation because it lacks any kind of structure that makes it easy to digest or palatable. I was like, This feels so much more like a whole life, a DMT trip, or a dreamy recollection. This is a film about one person—but that doesn’t mean it was easy to make. We draw ourselves every single day. Sometimes that self portrait’s hideous, disgusting, selfhating, lacerating. Other times, it’s cool. To attempt to say something true about yourself or a character is such a slippy, squirrely thing. Making movies is inherently embarrassing because it’s egotistical.

Ass AyA s: I see it as a privilege. It’s about understanding the world in ways that are not open to everybody. You have to be constantly aware of that, and you must be up to the task.

“I think art is a disease. You’re born with it, you know?” –Olivier Assayas

Stewart: Which is why women don’t normally do it—we are not trained to accept that. It’s not our first instinct to fill that role. It’s audacious. That’s what the book’s about, too—her finding her voice. If it feels like a self-portrait it’s because, look, I’m 35 years old. I’ve wanted to make movies since I was 9. Why the fuck did it take me so long?

aSS aya S: Ultimately, it was an epic. It was a fight. It was a war. And you won the war.

Stewart: It’s just a way of relating to reality. It’s not fundable entertainment industry fare. The script was very hard to read.

I guess now that I’ve done it—not to sound too dramatic or self-aggrandizing, but against all odds— there is the feeling that execution is inevitable. I’m not gonna sit around and wait for someone to pay for my movies ever again. I’ll just do them for fucking nothing. I will steal them. I will not wait another eight years to make a movie. I will just operate in Europe in complete liberated isolation, and then hope that some American distributor will buy it after we make it. Independent cinema in America is a farce. People are going to fucking quote that all over the Internet, but it’s true. I apparently make independent movies, and it’s like, barely

aSS aya S: I wrote to you after watching the film. I was just so happy for you because I felt that you had the fight of your life and you won. It reminded me of how I started making movies. My first screenplay was not as abstract as the movie you made, but it was daring for the times. I remember a producer who told me, “You know what? I’m producing a film by Alain Resnais, the famous French filmmaker, and I’ll give you the crew. You will have an experienced crew that will guide you.” I wanted to make that movie with the guys I’d been working with when I made my short films, who were my age, who shared my taste. The foundational decision

I made as a filmmaker was not to go with the seasoned professionals, but to trust the kids I’d started with. Sometimes, a film crew can be like a punk band.

Stewart: I’ve seen you talk about that first movie, and it genuinely encouraged me to avoid “studio musician” engineers that have been suggested to me. The times when the movie found itself about to fall apart were when people who were overly experienced were sinking the ship, and they needed to be removed. Our producers were not confident, thrilled, or happy with me at all.

aSS aya S: When you want to break the mold, when you want to make movies that open doors for yourself and for other people, it’s going to be tough. No one understands where you’re heading—not because you are so far ahead, but because you are somewhere else. What do you think art can do?

Stewart: It can make the world a much bigger or smaller place. We make art to get closer to each other, but at the same time, when you make really good art, the vacuous spaces that you find yourself inhabiting as an actual human become immense. What can art do? I don’t know. Keep a lot of people from offing themselves?

aSS aya S: I think art is a disease. You’re born with it, you know? I need to have my back to the wall to be able to make anything, because it comes from insecurities. When you’re acting, writing, or directing—there is pain. You deal with the pain, and art is the result. You also have to protect it—from the industry, from the boredom of modern droning. Movies are living proof that at least there’s one kind of art that can reach the mainstream. I started as a painter, a clumsy painter, but a painter. I dropped the idea of being a painter because I knew I would never connect with my times, whereas the power of movies is the fact that you can communicate with more people. Art is about proving that it can be done.

Paul Tazewell and Cynthia Erivo spend hundreds of hours shaping the characters they respectively costume and incarnate.

WHAT ARE YOUR INTENTIONS?

From Harriet to Wicked, those dressing room deliberations have left their mark on our cultural fabric.

Photography by Ashley McLean

“This is everything,” Paul Tazewell told the audience as he held his Oscar aloft at Los Angeles’s Dolby Theatre earlier this year. In the crowd, the muses he has dressed, from Ariana Grande to Rachel Zegler, rose to give him a standing ovation. That night, the Akron, Ohio, native became the first Black man to win the award for Best Costume Design for his work on Wicked Voluminous tailoring aside, Tazewell’s trademark is his collaborative bent—bringing silver screen A-listers and aspiring theater actors alike into the dressing room for long and winding conversations about character direction. “How do you see this role?” and “What are your intentions?” are just two of the queries that have yielded some of this century’s most indelible costumes. There was his Lin-Manuel Miranda one-two punch with 2008’s In the Heights and the culture-shifting 2015 run of Hamilton. A turn at the Metropolitan Opera with Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones, based on the memoir of former New York Times op-ed columnist Charles M. Blow. And of course the worldwide phenomenon that is the Wicked franchise. Two short months after his Academy Award win, Tazewell stepped out at the Met Gala to showcase his collaboration with Thom Browne for carpet mainstay Janelle Monáe. “This collaboration is just the beginning,” he noted. “More to come.”

It was on the set of 2019’s Harriet, where she starred as abolitionist Harriet Tubman, that the designer first met his now-frequent co-conspirator, Cynthia Erivo, who chronicles her life onscreen in Simply More, a memoir out last month. They found themselves side by side again when Erivo was cast as the all-green Witch of the West, Elphaba, in 2024’s Wicked. Before they reunited for the release of Wicked: For Good in November, the pair sat down to discuss how what happens in the dressing room—existential questions, scrapped ideas, and reality checks—lays the foundation for everything we see on screen and stage.

CYNTHIA ERIVO: The first time I met you was in a little studio.

PAUL TAZEWELL : We were in that weird, political building they had put us in.

ERIVO: I remember you had so much around you: sketches, fabrics, tulles, everything. Wonderland. And this little space where we would take photos. We were just getting to know each other. It was fast, wasn’t it?

TAZEWELL : There was a bond that happened. You gingerly walk into it because you’re trying to figure

“I remember thinking, I have a say in this. That’s really cool.” —Cynthia Erivo

each other out, but then you find a safe space with each other, which happened very easily with you.

ERIVO: I remember the first time I saw the sketches— I think it was Harriet’s green dress—that was [like], Oh, you see her how I see her. For a long time, we only had one well-known image of Harriet, quite serious and staunch. But you researched and found that picture of her in that beautiful gown. That’s how I had seen her in my head. That [famous] picture is so far away from the beginning of her story.

TAZEWELL : Those designs were some of my favorites, because it gave me the opportunity to represent her depth and grief. You said to me that you saw her in the same way that I did: a woman who has gone through the journey of being all parts of a woman. With everything that we’ve done together, I expect that you’re going to invite that kind of journey.

ERIVO: You asked me, “What do we want her coat to look like?” I remember thinking, I have a say in this. That’s really cool.

TAZEWELL : Remember the photo shoot that we did at the very end? There’s one [photo] where you’re in that caped coat—the blue one when she becomes an officer—and it was one of my favorite photos of the two of us. I was adjusting something on the coat, but it was just such a wonderful moment.

ERIVO: We have to make sure we get those pictures whenever we can, so that we spot those moments, because I feel like we’re going to be doing this for a while, you and me. When you start figuring out what each character needs for their story, at what point does the sketch happen?

TAZEWELL : I’ve got to find myself in the story—with Wicked and even with Harriet. When I found that photograph of Harriet, I said, “I can see the depth of who this woman is and I can identify with her. Therefore, I can dress her.” With Elphaba, it was the same. I was listening to the music over and over again. I started to identify with her, with the story, because it made direct sense with my own journey as a Black man, feeling marginalized, all those things. When

“I can see the depth of who this woman is and I can identify with her. Therefore, I can dress who she is.”

—Paul Tazewell

Jon [M. Chu, the director] mentioned he was speaking to you, I thought, That’s perfect. Why hasn’t this been done before? I designed the wardrobe [for] Elphaba first, and then the rest of the world defined itself according to who she is. As people are cast, I’m adding in the DNA of those actors—of you and Ari [Grande] and Jeff [Goldblum]. The way that I work is always going to be defined by who’s playing the role. You have to find the reality within the fantasy, because we’re going on this journey and we need to believe it for that moment in time.

ERIVO: It has to match both the character and the actor’s DNA.

TAZEWELL : I get into a fitting and I ask a lot of questions: How do you see yourself as this character, what are your intentions, and how I can bring that out? There’s a beauty in working with you because you are able to articulate where you are with the character.

ERIVO: Did you always want to put Elphaba in trousers or did that come along when I was cast?

TAZEWELL : You were already cast. It was a push to imagine, If she is in control of her evolution, what would

“I have the spirit of an actor. I just don’t get to do the performance.” —Paul Tazewell

she do? All the work that we did with Harriet—I’ll always go back to you running through the field in the grass. It was that kind of athleticism, tenacity, energy that you bring to playing a character, and the commitment to bringing forward that story. It inspired me to open up the possibility of how we can reshape who she is.

ERIVO: Is there a different process for working on a play or a musical than a film?

TAZEWELL : The muscles are the same. I’m always thinking about character and the most compelling way to tell the story. With stage, it is easier to be an abstraction. There’s a suspension of disbelief, and you buy into it. With film, you’re going to have people in real spaces. The costume has to then follow that. And the scheduling— especially for two films shot at the same time—is a nightmare. We had to figure out your whole story before starting to shoot. Except for that last book, which we didn’t talk about. That was perfect, because we were able to spend so much time manifesting who she was together, and then we just knew who she was.

ERIVO: I don’t know that many people would be able to roll with the punches in that way. You move through

the journey of these characters, these people, the piece, and as you’re learning them and growing with them, you discover a thing that this person might need. I would bring that to you and you would just accept it and say, “That is a good point. What do we do?” How do you make the time to make something completely new in the middle of making what’s there?

TAZEWELL : You live in the world of “yes.” That’s how I choose to design, especially for Wicked. My priority was to make it as right as possible. You said once, “I think we want to investigate this.” It was important to investigate, and then it failed. If I start to say, “Oh no, we can’t do this,” it sets up a different kind of dynamic that isn’t creative.

ERIVO: What I love about your process, because I’ve heard you talk about it before, is the way you draw from the world around you so that everything is still technically connected to what’s outside of us, as well as being a part of what we are on the inside.

TAZEWELL : I’m a huge analog researcher. I love going through books and being inspired by photographs and paintings. I put all that in the pot and then I pull out of that where appropriate. A lot of it is visceral: I would look at you during a fitting, mock something up, and know that it was the right thing.

ERIVO: When did you know that this is what you wanted to do?

TAZEWELL : When I was in college in North Carolina, we had Ann Roth as a guest teacher. She mentioned that I should pursue costuming.

ERIVO: Ann Roth, as in Ann Roth, Ann Roth?

TAZEWELL : Yes, she was doing Places in the Heart. That was the movie with Sally Field, set in the ’30 s on a farm. She mentioned to me that there are very few people that are really studying streetwear and applying that to design. It was a blessing, but then as I evolved—because my love was research and work and classics, the door opened towards those pieces that were very specific to Black culture—it felt limiting. When I was 16 years old, I designed and performed in a production of The Wiz in high school. I made the choice to step behind the actors, but I also have the spirit of an actor. I realized that I [could] step into the shoes of any character and design for them. I just don’t get to do the performance.

ERIVO: You can put yourself in the shoes of the character, but also, once that has been done, you are able to step back and allow whoever is playing the character to influence the work from their end.

TAZEWELL : A costume on a rack is a dead costume. It only comes to life once you step in and breathe life into it. That is the extra part of design: having the foresight of how you’re gonna move in the costume, and then that becomes part of the design overall. That’s what I love; that’s my joy.

ERIVO: If you could design for any director, who would it be?

TAZEWELL : Gosh. [Guillermo] del Toro.

ERIVO: Is there a piece of cinema that exists that you wish you could have designed for?

TAZEWELL : Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Also, The Leopard, Death in Venice, and A Room with a View, which have amazing designs.

ERIVO: I have one last question for you, Paul. What can art do?

TAZEWELL : Having experienced what we both did… it was everything. It was you, it was Ari, it was Jon, it was all the rest of the cast, everyone it took to make that happen. I hope that it will be epic in some way, and that it will be a really meaningful story that will touch hearts. That’s why I do this: to tell stories as clearly as possible so that people can take something away and make the world better. I don’t know what the next one will be yet, but I’m waiting. And I hope you write it!

ERIVO: That really is the heart of it, isn’t it? It’s why we do what we do—we are trying to communicate with the world that surrounds us and simultaneously make it a better place. Both of us are quite lucky that we get to do it together often. And hopefully we will keep doing it often, if you’ll have me.

TAZEWELL : Anytime.

CRUMB V. DICAPRIO

R. Crumb and George DiCaprio sit down to discuss the glory days of underground comics—and a new show of Crumb’s work at David Zwirner in Los Angeles. The conversation inevitably turns to autoerotic asphyxiation, astral projection, and acid trips.

Life as an underground comic book artist in the 1970s was as freewheeling as you imagine—just ask Robert Crumb and George DiCaprio. The two men, now in their 80s, had the kind of meet-cute that only old-world New York could conjure: DiCaprio offered his illegally inhabited loft to Crumb’s crew. The encounter was fortuitous. Crumb got DiCaprio the animation job that led him out West, where he ended up working as a comic book distributor and became the father of celebrated actor Leonardo DiCaprio. Meanwhile, Crumb emerged as one of the leading satirists of American culture. In November, he released Tales of Paranoia, his first solo comic in 23 years, published by Fantagraphics. Coinciding with an exhibition of new drawings and prints at David Zwirner in Los Angeles, on view through Dec. 20, the book explores personal and mass paranoia—particularly surrounding illness and disease.

To revisit the bad trip that inspired Crumb’s new book, the creative scene that formed them, and the future of their art form, the two friends connected with cartoonist Sammy Harkham—a member of a younger generation shaped by their work—for a sprawling Artists on Artists conversation. Conspiracy theory, autoerotic asphyxiation, escaping jail astrally—nothing was off the table.

Sammy Hark H am: How did you two meet?

GeorG e DiCaprio: Bill Skurski, an East Coast underground comics guy, told me you were in town, and I said, “I have this loft that can put up the Cheap Suit Serenaders.”

robert Crumb: We were always looking for some place to mooch, and we had no money.

DiCaprio: This was an illegal loft, which meant you couldn’t sleep there at night. There was an elevator in the middle, and supposedly, the fire department would ride up and look around to see if anyone was living there. All we had to do was find places to sleep that they couldn’t see.

Hark H am: And then you came to LA?

DiCaprio: I came in ’73. Luckily, Robert did me the big favor of mentioning my name to [American animator and filmmaker] Ralph Bakshi, who was putting together a movie called Heavy Traffic.

Hark H am: What was the job?

DiCaprio: I was an animation assistant, which was almost like slave labor back then. You had to punch the holes in the vinyl, and it all had to be perfect—otherwise,

it didn’t line up. I remember staying in that studio for four or five days at a time and just sleeping on the floor.

Crumb: There was very little financial reward in comics in those days. You had to do it for the love of it. A lot of people would dabble in it and say, “What’s the point? Hardly anybody reads it. It’s a lot of work.”

Hark H am: It’s still the same.

Crumb: Well, that kind of keeps the comic business pure because the bullshitters that go for the money and success and fame take one look, and think, Eh, not here.

Hark H am: What are your current obsessions?

Crumb: I’m conspiracy-obsessed. I probably shouldn’t say that publicly.

Hark H am: You’ve been interested in paranoia and conspiracies for a long time. What sparked you to actually put it on paper in Tales of Paranoia?

Crumb: It took me a long time to figure out how to do that in a comic. Comics are all about action; conspiracy is very abstract. My worst fear was that it would just be me talking, panel after panel, which is not everybody’s favorite thing.

Hark H am: George, what about your big inspirations these days? What do you collect?

DiCaprio: Underground art. I have one especially incredible piece: a letter by [cartoonist] Vaughn Bode¯ to Leonardo [DiCaprio] before he was born, about how wonderful his life was going to be. Poor Vaughn passed away two weeks after he wrote it. I keep the letter because people say he committed suicide. The letter to unborn Leonardo is not the kind of letter written by someone who has suicide on his mind. It’s an artifact that I cherish.

Hark H am: What was the official cause of death?

Crumb: Well, I heard that he was sexually kind of odd. He was doing one of those strangulation things.

DiCaprio: Autoerotic asphyxiation. It was an accident, I’m convinced of it.

Hark H am: Recent books like Flamed Out: The Underground Adventures and Comix Genius of Willy Murphy help me realize that even through that era

that has been so romanticized by cartoonists of my time, it was actually a horrible, awful existence.

Crumb: People had a good time, though. A lot of dope smoking and a lot of fucking going on. And you could scrape by in those days. Rents were cheaper.

Hark H am: At that time, comics were permeating the culture. Now it’s a lot more difficult.

Crumb: Did I hear you say permeate? No, comics didn’t permeate the culture. It stayed on the fringe. It was never mainstream.

Hark H am: I guess I’m thinking about stuff like East Village Other, and those free papers—how it just seemed to be all over because of the press syndicate.

Crumb: It was strictly in the hippie youth culture. The rest of America knew nothing about it.

Hark H am: George, you and Robert lived in San Francisco and worked for [San Francisco underground comic publisher] Ron Turner.

DiCaprio: We did a comic book with [American psychologist and psychedelics advocate] Timothy Leary called Neurocomics. He had written a book called Neuropolitics, which was so complicated. Neurocomics was an attempt to simplify some of the very good ideas in there. I know that you have a different opinion of him.

Crumb: I admired Leary when I was taking LSD, then I made fun of him in a comic, and he was very angry. He cursed me out in print. He said I was one of the most dangerous people in America, and I’m proud of it.

DiCaprio: He once claimed that if we were able to inhabit outer space in a no-gravity situation, our evolution would speed up geometrically. That’s an interesting theory.

Crumb: That’s around the time when I thought he was getting kind of unhinged. We’re a long way from overcoming the gravity issue. Long-term, being in space is not good for the body. The other way to overcome gravity is astral travel.

Hark H am: You have studied that?

Crumb: I’ve studied the out-of-body thing and experienced it. It’s not that hard, but it was too time-consuming to practice. I wasn’t especially gifted at it.

Hark H am: George, have you ever dabbled in that?

DiCaprio: There’s an interesting cousin to astral projection.

Crumb: Remote viewing? I studied that too.

DiCaprio: Then right after that, acid came along— another form of astral travel.

Crumb: The thing about LSD is that you’re a complete amateur when you’re 22 years old. You take this drug, and suddenly you’re in a world that’s basically made for professionals to travel in.

DiCaprio: Leonardo did a movie called Inception that deals with dream states and stuff like that. After that, people started sending me material about how to induce a dream where you’re flying. I started gathering information about it, and suddenly, a lot of people were writing me as if I knew a lot about it. Then, I discovered that everyone who was writing to me was in jail. I had to leave that chat room.

Crumb: Huh, that’s interesting. A couple of people that I was corresponding with in prison were writing to me about how to escape physically, not astrally.

Hark H am: George, when did you first discover Robert’s work?

DiCaprio: It was a big book called Head Comix that my friend showed me. It wasn’t a comic book. Then, you surprised me by recommending me for that job. Inadvertently, you were an agent of change.

Crumb: Well, I’m not sure getting involved with Ralph Bakshi did you any favors.

Hark H am: But that turned out to be a great job in terms of what it taught you as an artist.

Crumb: In those days, you’d learn by mistakes, a lot of them. When I saw the first printing by Rip Off Press of Big Ass Comics, I thought, Oh no, what a mess, oh my God. It’s a lot to figure out. That to me is still my favorite format— the simple comic book—what they now call a pamphlet.

Hark H am: Final question. What can art do?

DiCaprio: Wow. What can art do?

Crumb: It can express, entertain, confuse, disturb. And it can fill a space behind your couch.

Kyle MacLachlan is the rare unproblematic fave in Hollywood.

WELCOME TO THE UNCANNY VALLEY

His genuinely good vibes have made him a staple of all the screens—big, silver, and iPhone.

Kyle MacLachlan has had a grip on us for a long time. His name may mean different things to different people, but America knows the 66-year-old actor in its bones. Perhaps it’s because of the enduring lucidity of the Lynchian world he brought to life with projects like Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, which continue to resonate as portraits of a dissonant American psyche, now more unhinged than ever. Perhaps it’s because of his warm unknowability—the sense that, under the clean-cut proto maledom of his characters, something is “a little detached, a little clinical, with a few screws loose,” as his Artists on Artists interlocutor Julio Torres put it when the pair sat down for this conversation.

This gift for eerie duo-tone performance has served MacLachlan well over a career that spans decades and genres—starting with 1984’s Dune, which catalyzed his relationship with David Lynch and American audiences, through to his memorable 21stcentury appearances as Trey MacDougal in Sex and the City and the mayor in Portlandia. MacLachlan’s latest chapter features a turn in the grisly thriller series Fallout, a recently launched podcast (What Are We Even Doing?) spotlighting younger cultural fixtures like Kaia Gerber, Benito Skinner, and Dylan O’Brien, and a social media presence that’s earned him waves of new fans.

As the actor prepared for the release of season two of Fallout, MacLachlan sat down to reflect on his zeitgeist-shifting career with someone he deems worthy of carrying the Lynchian mantle: the filmmaker, comedian, and writer Julio Torres.

KYLE MACLACHLAN: I’m sorry I’m late, Julio. I was on Google Meet, but you were here on Zoom.

JULIO TORRES: You were in limbo, which seems appropriate for this conversation.

MACLACHLAN: And for my whole oeuvre.

TORRES: I heard you were holding an owl at the shoot.

MACLACHLAN: Yes. It’s rare to see an animal like that so close, you know, literally face-to-face. The owl was really well-behaved. I was not.

TORRES: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a real one before—just those statues they have in New York to scare pigeons away. If there were a statue to scare you away from a place, what would that statue be? Who is your predator?

MACLACHLAN: Oh, everything. Any statue meant to scare me away would transfix me—I would go down a rabbit hole about the craftsmanship, the historical resonance… I would be devoured on the spot. How about you?

TORRES: Probably my, like, email inbox.

MACLACHLAN: Julio, after Los Espookys, I did a deeper dive on you, and I watched Problemista. I was so intrigued and charmed because your voice is singular. You have your own way of telling a story and of looking at the world, which I recognize, of course, from David [Lynch]. Those voices are so rare.

TORRES: Oh my God, it’s always a dream to create something that is appreciated by the people you’ve been excited about forever. I first became aware of your work chronologically. By that I mean Dune, Blue Velvet, then Twin Peaks

MACLACHLAN: Dune was the first screenplay I ever read—and it’s when I met David Lynch. It was a sevenmonth shoot, and we became friends. While we were filming, he passed me the script to Blue Velvet.

TORRES: It’s crazy that Dune was your first movie. Your first-ever film is this big, big, big project. Then your second is a cultural phenomenon.

MACLACHLAN: Same director, completely different feel, obviously. Looking back, it’s very odd how I got to

“The owl was really well-behaved. I was not.”

— KYLE MACLACHLAN

where I am today. With Blue Velvet I was kind of along for the ride—and also out of my depth with Laura Dern and Isabella Rossellini and Dennis Hopper. But I was in David Lynch’s world, which was so comfortable. It was wonderful to see him at ease because Dune was very difficult for him.

TORRES: It’s wild that a studio saw his first films, Eraserhead and The Elephant Man, and said, “He should make Dune.”

MACLACHLAN: Of course, the book was adapted by David. It’s a filtering of different visuals and moments from the book through David’s mind, you know? Which is so brave to do. It reminds me of your ability to let the creative lead. You don’t—judge isn’t the word—you don’t block a feeling or a path. You follow it.

TORRES: But you do the same. Your roles are all very much in line with what I believe to be your voice as an artist. Is that voice compatible with who you are as a person, or have you just become a muse for these characters that you perform well, but don’t feel an emotional connection to?

MACLACHLAN: In my career, there really hasn’t been a singular genre of movie, or type of character. I’ve really been all over the place, and part of that is pure survival.

TORRES: I really think of all your roles as Kyle roles. Even with Sex and the City or Desperate Housewives your character is always a little detached, a little clinical, with a few screws loose. Like, who else would they possibly cast?

MACLACHLAN: Well, at least it’s been an interesting journey, successful or not.

TORRES: You probably have very siloed audiences—a lot of people who recognize you from certain work have maybe not seen all the other work, I bet.

MACLACHLAN: There are specific fan worlds that have not necessarily crossed over. There is the Sex and the

“I don’t need an extremely different world, just one that’s slightly off. What I like is the chance to carry the audience on my back through it.”

—KYLE MACLACHLAN

City/Desperate Housewives fan—that’s fairly cohesive. There’s the sci-fi Dune and Portlandia fan. Now there’s a new wave with Fallout. But I think the main difference is age. Some of the things I’ve been associated with have just stayed in the ether, you know? Sex and the City was shot 25 years ago, but my gosh. I was at my son’s homecoming recently, working the Ferris wheel booth. A high school student came up to me—she couldn’t have been more than 15—and said, “Were you in Sex and the City?” Half of me goes, Yes, and the other half is like, You shouldn’t be watching Sex and the City. She asked for a selfie. It’s me looking like her grandpa. Like, “Look, mom, I took a picture with Charlotte’s detached first husband.”

TORRES: That’s crazy—but also rare. All the work that you’ve done, people are watching and rewatching, and will for generations.

MACLACHLAN: Listen, there’s plenty along the way that is forgettable. But some have stuck, and as I’ve gotten older, the gratitude level for that goes way up. It allows me to have this conduit to a younger generation. That comes with responsibility, of course, but it’s also fun. I love interacting with people.

TORRES: I even wonder if a filmmaker’s desire to work with you goes hand in hand with their desire to put their work in the lineage of what you’ve done. I mean, I don’t know how detectable this is, but I do feel that Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet were an influence on Desperate Housewives.

MACLACHLAN: You’re absolutely right. Twin Peaks changed what was possible on television. When we signed on to do Twin Peaks, no one in the cast expected it to go beyond a pilot. It was like, “We are going to do a pilot with David Lynch. We’re bringing anarchy to television.” But no one was going to buy it. It would be too weird. Then they did, and we were like, “Whoops, okay.”

TORRES: It definitely—for me at least—opened the possibilities of what you can do with tone in television.

MACLACHLAN: Twin Peaks was a murder mystery whodunnit, but the music was different. The look was different. The pacing was different. Everything was different about it.

TORRES: Is there a genre or world you haven’t entered that is interesting to you? It can be as vague as something with mermaids.

MACLACHLAN: I don’t need an extremely different world, just one that’s slightly off. I like to carry the audience on my back through it, which is kind of what I did with David. I often think I was a stabilizing force in some of his creativity. Not that he needed stabilizing, but just for the audience to sort of anchor to on the way down. How about you? You seem to really live in this “anything can happen” space, and there’s such a purity to your characters. We’re kind of similar in that way.

TORRES: I do think of myself as a guide, but I never intend to deliberately disorient. My struggle, constantly, is to be clear. In my early scripts, everything feels murky—then I work on bringing those things into focus so they become more accessible. If I were to drop you into a different world, you’d be an entity of some kind— not fully human. I don’t know what it is yet. Maybe— are you time?

MACLACHLAN: Oh, interesting.

TORRES: And you’d have a verbal tick of saying what time it is.

MACLACHLAN: And ask all sorts of questions. Are you behind? Are you ahead? Are you where you’re supposed to be?

TORRES: Questions, yes.

MACLACHLAN: His whole struggle is to be in the moment. Or, is he always in the moment?

TORRES: [Laughs] He’s just constantly present.

MACLACHLAN: Our last question is, “What can art do?”

TORRES: I mean, you look at your oeuvre and it’s a list of anomalies, right? That feeling of possibility is very important to me. I hope to continue doing the same as you have—making work that is true to my point of view, and that does not follow the parameters of success or trends.

MACLACHLAN: I think having many kinds of stories and points of view available goes a long way towards helping us understand and appreciate difference. It’s strange when we pretend that there’s just one way to do things—I don’t even know what that would look like.

STELLAN SKARSGÅRD ENTERS THE DOOM LOOP

Photography by Jeremy Liebman

The 74-year-old Swedish actor, who recently starred in Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, has a grim perspective on the state of the world. We called in Robert Reich—the academic, author, and former U.S. Secretary of Labor (who, surprisingly, has a much more optimistic vision of our collective future)—to give him a pep talk.

A frigid Scottish oil rig. A sun-drenched Greek isle, awash in a sea of turquoise. An antiques gallery in an alien megacity. Stellan Skarsgård has a gift for fitting in, no matter where he is.

For the last six decades, the Swedish actor has brought a metric ton of gravitas to every role, whether in his taboo-breaking turns with Lars von Trier or levitating from a pit of black ooze in Dune. Despite his willingness to stare into the abyss, Skarsgård has a wry, paternal side. His latest film, Joachim Trier’s Grand Prix–nabbing Sentimental Value, puts his sensitivity on full display, and may just win the 74 -year-old performer a long-awaited first Oscar nomination.

Skarsgård, it turns out, also has a strong sense of civic duty. Unlike many others in his position, he speaks with clarity about corporate monopolies and systemic injustice. To the actor, film can be a form of resistance. “Art,” he says, “should be automatically radical.”

So strong is Skarsgård’s commitment to this assertion that, for this Artists on Artists conversation, he asked to sit down with Robert Reich, the former U.S. Secretary of Labor and recent high-profile opponent of the Trump administration. Reich, an economist and academic who has served in the administrations of multiple presidents and built his career on addressing income inequality, has flexed some creative muscles himself. Last summer, he was the subject of The Last Class, a documentary capturing a professor’s struggle to reckon with his own mortality and the broken society that his students will inherit. In August, he released Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, which weaves the public servant’s childhood experience of bullying into American narratives of corporate greed, wealth disparity, and political extremism.

Here, the pair discuss the wave of conservatism and demagoguery that has swept across the U.S. and toward Europe—and why there might be a way to turn the tide.

Robe R t Reich: Stellan, you are very much an internationalist. Sweden has always been a beacon for the notion of common good and social justice. I’m very interested in how you see what’s happened in the U.S.

Stellan Ska RS gå R d: Well, it’s not only in that country—it’s what happened all over the Western world. The big changes started in the ’80 s, but the foundation was laid before that. To me, it was unbelievable that people could support the new Chicago school of economic thought [emphasizing free markets and minimal government intervention] and believe that it would work. You’ve been warning them, but politicians went with

it. Even in Sweden, the Social Democrats went with it. We had a prime minister at the time who said, “What’s the point? The market rules.” That was a defeatist way of seeing things.

Reich : Obviously, the market is a human creation— very much a creation of government. The question is, How do you create the market?

I was under the impression that Sweden understood this better, even in the ’80 s. There’s an easy, straightforward explanation in the United States: You had big money, mostly from large corporations, begin to infect the entire political process, and change the rules of the game and how the market was organized. It created a doom loop in terms of widening inequality and the corruption that comes from it. But Sweden didn’t suffer the same doom loop, did it? Is money in politics as much of a problem there?

Ska RS gå R d: It’s a global world we live in. The moment America gave up and gave in to the market, Sweden did as well. We started privatizing everything.

Reich : I’m old enough to remember the optimism after the Second World War that came with a very large middle class and the idea of a country dedicated to some degree to humanitarian values. The goal was to continue widening the circle of prosperity, so more and more people could ascend into the middle class. The irony is that prosperity may have blinded us to the difficulty of maintaining a democracy.

In other words, you can’t maintain democracy if all you have are individuals whose goal in life is personal acquisition. Democracy requires a lot of attention, a lot of work. It requires a great deal of preservation, particularly in a society where large corporations are becoming even bigger, where there is monopolization, and where labor unions are shrinking. That’s the story of America in the postwar era.

We became too confident. We stopped noticing that the institutions we took for granted were fragile. Donald Trump is the culmination of decades and decades of this carelessness. We allowed the working class in the United States to become understandably cynical and angry.

Ska RS gå R d: I think you point that out very well in your book. When Trump was first elected, I read a book called Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie [Russell] Hochschild. That was an eye-opener for me. She lived for five years alongside the Tea Party movement in Louisiana. You understood that they felt left behind. It’s frightening reading.

“Sweden is coming up right behind America in the race to the abyss.”

—STELLAN SKARSGÅRD

Reich : Arlie’s one of my colleagues. She believes in going right to where people are and talking to them. She was one of the first to systematically show that the common denominator in the working class is that they did not go to college. Many of them dropped out of high school—that’s the majority of people in the U.S. The working class was not just left behind economically but sociologically—in terms of their sense of belonging.

But I want to go back to Sweden. My impression is that there is still a great deal of respect for the working class there.

Ska RS gå R d: In the ’80 s, we were a very egalitarian society. We still have free schools and free universities and free healthcare, but it’s been undermined because the money has been withheld and the rich have become richer. Sweden is coming up right behind America in the race to the abyss, so to say.

Reich : From here, it looks as though the stresses in Europe are very much about immigration: Immigrants have been used as the vehicle for dividing European democracies, allowing authoritarian groups to gain ground. I think Trump is trying to do the same, but he’s finding that most Americans disagree with the techniques he’s using.

Ska RS gå R d: Sweden is one of the most Americanized societies in Europe. We’re all eating American culture, including me—I love American culture. It’s the nonculture I don’t like. We have a right-wing government now. Already, schools and hospitals were underfinanced, and now we have increased military spending. We are struggling to keep up the welfare state that we created after the Second World War. Even in France, [far-right politician] Marine Le Pen said that there are things that the market can’t take care of: infrastructure, healthcare,

“Art is like science. You need science, even if you don’t know what you will use it for. Paintings, film, and music don’t need to be especially didactic or tell people what to think. But they should explore something new.”

— STELLAN SKARSGÅRD

“What progressives need to say over and over again is ‘childcare, healthcare, housing.’ These are human rights. If it means higher taxes, particularly on the wealthy, so be it. If they don’t like it, they can move to another country.”

— ROBERT REICH

education. It’s what the Social Democrats should have said, but they were silent.

Reich : The silence of the Social Democrats, and the Democrats here, has been deafening. The goal of a society must be to reduce fear. One of the great advantages of a country that is investing in its people is that people who are not afraid are less susceptible to a demagogue.

Maybe we could talk about where we go from here. I would like to think that American culture is still very healthy. I visit so-called red states, Trump voters, and most of the time, they’re very kind. They’re not bigoted or hateful. I think people are feeling at the community level a degree of solidarity that I haven’t seen before.

Ska RS gå R d: That’s very optimistic. I’m not that optimistic, but you know more about it than I do because you’re meeting more students and young people. I was very optimistic about Black Lives Matter— it was a force that was unleashed. But at the same time, what did it come up with?

Reich : I think they were co-opted by other groups. Social movements take a great deal of time. Black Lives Matter is still here, it’s just gone a bit underground because the second Trump administration is so punitive. He wants confrontation, and people are smart enough not to give it to him.

In a parallel way to Black Lives Matter, #MeToo went underground. It’s not as active as it used to be. I don’t think the time is exactly right now. But it’s still there. The young people that I deal with every day have absorbed these movements. If I can give the entire structural movement a name, it would be “no more bullying, no more brutalization.” The powerful are no longer going to exploit and oppress the weaker.

Ska RS gå R d: But how do we make concrete demands that are not divisive?

Reich : What progressives need to say over and over again is “childcare, healthcare, housing.” These are human rights. This is what a nation does. The United States is the richest nation in the world. It’s richer than it has ever been. If it means higher taxes, particularly on the wealthy, so be it. If they don’t like it, they can move to another country. Corporations have to pay their fair share. That’s not a complicated message.

Ska RS gå R d: Do you think art and culture play a role in this? What can art do?

Reich : Art gives people a common language. It draws people into a community of common emotion and common insight. I first became aware of your work, Stellan, in Good Will Hunting, but I really remember River with Nicola Walker. That was such a powerful series. It gave me an insight, not only into your character but into culture, into the things we value and things that we don’t. The moral authority of a culture really depends on a fundamental agreement among people about what is right and what is wrong. And I think that what you do and what art does is it gives people those kinds of illustrations of public morality.

Ska RS gå R d: Art should be automatically radical. Art is good at expressing the human condition, especially the parts you can’t express in words. It’s like science. You need science, even if you don’t know what you will use it for. Paintings, film, and music don’t need to be especially didactic or tell people what to think. But they should explore something new.

Reich : Great art gives you a sense that you are embedded in a culture, in a community.

Ska RS gå R d: When I did theater, you could feel a moment on stage when suddenly the whole audience breathed at the same time. It was almost like their hearts were beating together. It’s a fantastic feeling.

JORDAN FIRSTMAN: F U L L Y D I L A T E D

He made his name with impersonations of flies, friendship, and himself. This fall, he returned to screens in his most stripped-down and sincere role yet in I Love LA, and began production on a directorial debut with daddy issues.

When Jordan Firstman clicks onto Zoom, he’s wearing a black baseball cap emblazoned with the words “Club Kid,” the title of his forthcoming directorial debut. The subtle plug could sum up the last year of Firstman’s life: all in, all the time.

He’s been working up to this moment for a while, breaking into the industry by writing for (and occasionally acting on) cult comedy shows like The Other Two and Search Party. While many took the 2020 lockdowns as an opportunity for self-reflection, Firstman hustled his way to Internet stardom with a flurry of impression videos. “This man is a walking deck of Cards Against Humanity cards,” Ariana Grande wrote on her Instagram story alongside Firstman’s take on “a woman who is not connected to the divine.” When the world opened back up, he pivoted to old-school forms of media, taking a starring role—one that was, bizarrely, also an impression of himself—in Sebastián Silva’s 2023 unfiltered, Robert Pattinson–produced gay epic Rotting in the Sun Firstman doesn’t post like he used to, and he seems intent on helping his audience realize he’s not just online or self-referentially funny. Over the last year, he bounced back and forth between filming Brian Jordan Alvarez’s English Teacher (he plays a toxic-lite love interest) and Rachel Sennott’s I Love LA, about a friend group reckoning with the growing pains of adulthood. Up next, Firstman will flex his directorial muscles with Club Kid, the story of a Brooklyn party boy who discovers he has a son, which he also stars in. He even released a debut comedy album, Secrets, somewhere in the mix. It’s almost too much. In this Artists on Artists conversation, Firstman sat down with Sennott to discuss the film he lost to a breakup, what ayahuasca taught him, and why their work may be difficult to digest—but well worth the effort.

Rachel Sennott : You’ve been going back-to-back. How are you feeling?

Jo R dan Fi RS tman: The back-to-back of it all has helped me release a lot of pressure. Sometimes I’m watching the episodes [of I Love LA] and I’m like, Damn, I am really free in this. I don’t feel nervous or insecure, even though there’s a lot of pressure. Charlie is my biggest role in a TV show, it’s on HBO, it’s your show…

Sennott : You thought every day, Do a good job or mommy is going to get really angry.

Fi RS tman: Rachel hits when you don’t act well.

Sennott : I do feel that though—you were so free and uninhibited.

Fi RS tman: In terms of my life’s journey, this is a big year in the memoir. Every year you think, Okay, I’m ready for it all to happen now, and I wasn’t. I had two TV shows in my 20 s that I had sold but didn’t get made. I wrote a movie with my ex that was about to get financed, then we broke up, so that didn’t happen. All my things didn’t happen. After I had my moment on the Internet, I had another show that I thought surely would happen, and that didn’t. I look back at that now and I’m so glad that wasn’t my first big thing in the world, because it was based on this fleeting, eccentric feeling I was having at that time, and it wasn’t really what I had to say as an artist.

I always questioned my work ethic when I was younger. I knew I was passionate, and I knew I was good and getting better, but I wondered if I was a hard worker. This year I proved to myself that I am.

Sennott : You really are. You were shooting English Teacher in Atlanta and would land in LA, come to the table read, and go back. Do you have a ritual for when you’re diving into a new character?

Fi RS tman: This is a bit Jeremy Strong of me to say, but I find a spiritual knowledge of them and go from there. I just have to live it. In English Teacher, I’m happy-go-lucky. I’m an elf, floaty and up. In your show, I’m a baller, I get what I want. I knew this person—I’m a hustler. Even when I don’t get what I want, I bulldoze through it. My character in the project I’m working on now has such a sadness and lack of self-assuredness. All of those things are part of me, which is why I will never beat the “playing himself” allegations, but that’s okay. I have a lot of different selves that need to be explored through character.

Sennott : I maybe have a personality disorder, and that’s what’s making me talented. Do you feel like you learn things about yourself based on the characters you play?

Fi RS tman: I definitely learn things. With writing, it’s impossible not to—we’re mining from real life. With Charlie and with your character, you made me see things in myself that I wasn’t aware of. It’s not the first time someone has written something based on me, but there’s a feeling—which I have to be okay with—that people want to see me humiliated. I’ve always struggled with being the jester. I’ve done a lot of ayahuasca, and during one trip I asked, “Am I the lion or the jester?” I realized I am both. The biggest struggle during the pandemic for me was that I was really just the jester. I felt like I had this other side of me that was deeper and more serious that wasn’t being seen. True [Whitaker] said she showed the pilot to some random French guy she met—she

“I will never beat the ‘playing himself’ allegations, but that’s okay. I have a lot of different selves that need to be explored through character.”

— JORDAN FIRSTMAN

shouldn’t be doing that—but he said, “It’s so funny, you just look at him and you laugh.”

Sennott : If I could defend my choice to humiliate you, what I really wanted to show—because of course I wrote the character with you in mind—it’s a side of you, but blown up: the hustler side. You are one of the most deeply sensitive, intuitive, empathetic people I know. You’ve helped me through some of the worst moments of my life, and you made them really fun. What I wanted to see from you in the show—and you give it a million times over—is your more vulnerable, sensitive side, and what happens when the things you lean on are stripped away one by one. In the beginning we see Charlie as his confident, brazen, Ari Gold self, and then what happens when he gets knocked down over and over and is humbled? How does he have that resilience, which you have and have had in your career?

Fir S tman: Bruce Wagner always says to me, “Everything is a false start.” Every project could be the one that changes your life, but is anything really going to change your life? Especially in this landscape, a Netflix show will come out and feel like the biggest thing ever, and a month later it’s like it never happened. People don’t understand how hard it is to get something made. The way people mix content and media now, it’s easy to see everything as equal, but no, this is years of your life every day. What you go through to get the money, the cast, everything—it’s insane, and it’s a miracle anything gets made. Then people see it and go, “Not watching.”

Sennott : I was in the office working every day for a year and a half. I’d post a TikTok on the weekend and people would comment, “Get to work, mama.” I’d be like, “I am, mama.” It’s a lot to get something made. But that’s why, when something does get made—like Club Kid, which I want to dive into next—it always feels like the thing you were meant to make. Do you believe in fate versus making your own fate?

Fir S tman: At this point, I have to give it up to the universe a little bit.

Sennott : Let’s give it up for the universe. In your movie—I’ve read the script, it’s incredible, I cried—the protagonist works in the club scene, runs this party with friends, becomes older and tired of it, and finds out he has a kid. This happened after you wrote the script, right? You found out you were going to be a father.

Fir S tman: They’re finding out within the next 30 minutes if it’s happening tomorrow or the next day. She’s

dilated as we speak. One centimeter. This year is crazy. It’s biblical to me.

Sennott : Either you knew deep down you were going to have a kid, or you manifested it.

Fir S tman: We should probably say it’s not actually my kid—it’s my sister’s. She’s a lesbian, and I gave my sperm to her. Uncle Daddy. By the time this is out, I’ll have a baby daughter.

Sennott : You’re in the process of acting and directing right now. What has been the craziest day on set?

Fir S tman: Maybe you were feeling this way but didn’t let me see it while filming I Love LA, but it’s the most vulnerable thing. It takes a village, but ultimately, it’s your thing.

Sennott : I was trying to hide from you how insecure I was the whole time because I knew if I called you being like, “Is this good?” you’d be like, “I don’t know, bitch, you hired me.”

Fir S tman: Every day you go from thinking, Oh my God, I’ve written the worst thing ever, to thinking, This will change the world. I’m putting my heart on my sleeve with this. This story is real to me. I feel it in my bones. During the pandemic I did an interview where the pull quote was “I just want every part of me to be seen.” For better or worse, I do. Sometimes it’s to my benefit, sometimes it’s a curse, but it’s who I am. Maybe there’s a perception that I’m a dick or annoying or—

Sennott : It feels like they just hate us.

Fir S tman: We both have this thing—you’re more traditionally hot, but still we both have an unconventional hotness that people are scared of. I remember when you showed me the stuff men have said about you.

Sennott : The Reddits and the Discords, yeah.

Fir S tman: All the hate I get is from gay guys. When have they ever been right? I don’t think you and I are easy to digest, but we’re more nourishing.

Sennott : To conclude, what, Jordan, do you think art can do?

Fir S tman: Everything.

Sennott : Period.

‘IT’S ALWAYS BEEN A LANGUAGE BETWEEN US’

Before David and Sybil Yurman were the faces of a jewelry empire, they were two artists experimenting with metalwork. Decades later, the same playful spirit animates everything they turn their attention to.

Before the jewelry empire, before the house in Amagansett, before David Yurman was ever a household name— there were two young artists living in New York. David was working under sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, and Sybil was a ceramicist and painter who had been taken under Sho¯ji Hamada’s wing. On their first date, David showed Sybil how to create patinas on metal, and the first piece of jewelry they worked on together was for Sybil to wear wherever she went. The couple, now in their 80s, have spent over 50 years together, making artwork and jewelry through the decades. It would be a cliché to say that they finish each other’s sentences, if it weren’t also true.

In the 1970s, as the Yurmans’ wearable works caught on among the downtown art set, Sybil—who had been keeping the business afloat by selling her paintings— came in-house, contributing the sharp eye that gave the David Yurman jewelry line its unique identity. These weren’t pieces for a man to buy a woman. These were pieces a woman could choose for herself. Though David and Sybil passed day-to-day management of the now-behemoth business off to their son in 2021, the couple is as busy as ever. Their personal archive—a treasure trove of paintings, sculptures, photos, and, of course, jewelry— is the subject of an extensive tome, Sybil and David Yurman: Artists and Jewelers, published last month. CULTURED sat down with the couple to reflect on where it all started.

Sybil y urman: Once I was given the key to Austin.

Davi D y urman: I think it was San Antonio.

Sybil: At the ceremony, Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, and all these formidable women spoke before me. I was–

Davi D: Intimidated.

Sybil: They even brought in a strategy person to rehearse me, and usually I never need any rehearsing. Probably 1,000 women came to this luncheon to hear me speak. I looked at them and said, “I realize you’re only interested because I’m David Yurman’s wife, but let me assure you, I existed before I ever met him.” Which is a long way of saying I was a person before I met David. I was a ceramicist at Berkeley. I worked in Raku pottery with Sho¯ji Hamada at the Corcoran in Washington, DC.

Davi D: It’s like if you said, “You know that guy Picasso? I was working with him in the South of France for about five months.”

Sybil: I didn’t graduate from high school. At a very early age, I played hooky from school, went to the Museum of Modern Art, saw the Monet paintings of the water lilies and said, “I just have to paint the feeling of what I see. I don’t have to know how to paint.” I started to make paintings and sell them, and I used the money to run away from home at 16

Davi D: Where did you run to?

Sybil: San Francisco. I lived in a place called the Hyphen House, where a lot of writers lived. Lou Welch and Michael McClure…

Davi D: When he wasn’t drunk, you’d see Kerouac there.

Sybil: In the daytime he wasn’t drunk, but he didn’t wake up ’til late in the day. I met David when I was starting to make jewelry. I got a job working for a group of sculptors, and David was one of them. I was told that he worked for Jacques Lipchitz, the Cubist sculptor, on the restoration of his African art collections, so he knew a lot about patinas, the finishing of metals. I wanted to do more of that with my jewelry. I asked him, “Could I come over and see your patinas?”

Davi D: The best line ever.

Sybil: I thought you liked me. You kept bringing me coffee in the morning, and I don’t even drink coffee. That was the first sense of betrayal: I drank the coffee.

Davi D: Our relationship started with a sense of betrayal. [Laughs] I grew up in Long Island. I was always going to the Village during school to listen to poetry and music. I was a terrible student, barely graduated, but I was a dancer and an athlete. I actually danced in the girls’ modern dance club. I was the only male dancing. What I couldn’t do is what got me to do what I could do. You move towards recognition and praise and things that fill you up. I had none of that at home. I had a very distant and sometimes cruel relationship with my family.

My father lost his belt and trimming business and became a salesman for a friend of his in lumber. In 10 th grade, I went to Eugene, Oregon, for two months. They had never seen a Jewish person. They didn’t know why I didn’t have horns. Then I realized that I was free to go anywhere. So when I was 16 , I traveled to Provincetown, where my sister was a waitress, and was dating a very interesting sculptor who was making welded bronze sculptures. He taught me how to make fire and move metal.

“You really can’t teach this— although I shouldn’t say that. It’s really the ability to play. I had to play, because anything else was torture.”

—David Yurman

Artists either have a natural inclination or they don’t. You really can’t teach this—although I shouldn’t say that because schools make lots of money doing it. It’s really the ability to play. I had to play, because anything else was torture. Even when I work with my design assistants for the last 40 years, I play with them. I was always worried about making a living, so I made direct-welded sculptures and turned them into necklaces and bracelets mostly. I learned how to sell, which I liked because it was a connection to people. When I first saw Sybil’s work, it was something she called “Sky Markings.” They were very airy, totally unforced. I was really attracted to them. I probably told you this, but I may have liked your paintings more than I liked you. The first two years, when we decided to do the jewelry business together, I couldn’t ship a box to the right address. Sybil was organized. She put thousands of dollars into the company to keep it afloat. I still owe her at least $60,000. I think it came out in the wash.

Sybil: I liked David’s work very much. He made these beautiful angels and figures. They were very lyrical. When we started dating, I asked him if he would make me something in his style that I could wear. That started this whole other world of ours.

We went into a gallery, and the woman asked me where I got the piece that I had on. I said, “David made it.” She asked, “Could you make more?” I said yes. He said no. I left the piece with her to show some customers. That’s what started this whole other world of ours. By the time we got home, she had sold four. He said, “Now what? Am I going to sit here and make these?”

Davi D: I made them in the maid’s room in Sybil’s apartment.

Sybil: It’s always been a language between us. Once, we were going on a date. I came down to his loft on Delancey to get dressed, but forgot my belt. He said, “I’ll weld you one.”

Davi D: I have no sense of time management. I thought I could get it done in about a half hour.

Sybil: It took closer to three. I fell asleep, and when I woke up, he gave me this great belt. We never made it to the party.

Davi D: Most of the concepts came from me and were edited by Sybil. She could come in and look and say: “It’s too thin,” or “I would never wear that,” or “I think you did that one last year.”

Sybil: When we first started, women didn’t buy jewelry for themselves. It was only a gift. Can you imagine? Even 50 years ago. A woman would usually be getting her money from her husband, so if she bought herself something it couldn’t be too expensive. Part of our objective was to allow women to express what they wanted, rather than getting that one little ring with a stone in it that didn’t express anything except someone’s affection for them. You asked why I went from art to jewelry. I felt that I could express myself within this other venue.

Davi D: We’re living creators that do art and jewelry. We’re husband and wife, like–

Sybil: Ray and Charles Eames.

Davi D: I thought Ray was the brother for years. I didn’t know that was his wife. Not that he was chopped liver, but she really was the powerhouse that kept their operation moving. I don’t know if Sybil is or I am. Some days I am, some days Sybil is. We’re a good balance.

Sybil: The biggest thing is that we’re both able to receive criticism. There’s a real feeling of self-assuredness and a stability that allows us to collaborate. We don’t have to compromise.

Davi D: No, you don’t compromise at all. [Laughs]

Sybil: Forget compromise. It’s not a good word because it’s not what you really want to do. You really want to collaborate. You want to hear the other person. It’s like dancing. We like to dance. We’ve been together for 57 years, so we’ve learned to work through all the bickering.

Davi D: Our other saying is…

Sybil: “It’s better to be kind than right.”

Davi D: These sayings come out of the things that we have the most difficulty doing.

“At the beginning, Sybil put thousands of dollars into the company to keep it afloat. I still owe her at least $60,000. I think it came out in the wash.”

– David Yurman

“Once, we were going on a date. I came down to his loft on Delancey to get dressed, but forgot my belt. David said, ‘I’ll weld you one.’”

– Sybil Yurman

ARTISTS 2025 YOUNG 10 YEAR

PANTEHA

ABARESHI MAUD

ACHEAMPONG TUNJI

ADENIYI-JONES

LORENZO

BUCKNELL

ERIN CALLA

WATSON

LUZ CARABAÑO KYE

FETTER

ELOISE HESS

JESÚS

HILARIO-

REYES

CHRISTENSENKNOWLES JUSTIN

YASMINE

ANLAN HUANG COCO

KLOCKNER

TIDAWHITNEY

ALIX VERNET CYLE WARNER

SHEN XIN CHERRIE YU

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.

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.

SHEN XIN

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

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

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 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

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.

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!

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.

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.

WITT

FETTER

TUNJI ADENIYI-JONES

Tunji Adeniyi-Jones’s contribution to the Nigerian Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale was an exercise in the perspective shift: The London-born, Brooklynbased 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.

33 — NEW YORK

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.

33 — NEW YORK

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.

ALICE BUCKNELL

32 — LOS ANGELES

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.

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 non-human 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.

ASHER LIFTIN

27 — NEW YORK

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 art-historical still lifes and history paintings.

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.

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.

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.

ELOISE HESS

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 image-making 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, 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.

JESÚS HILARIO-REYES

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 HilarioReyes’s native Puerto Rico. The artist has performed at venues including Documenta, the Kitchen, Gladstone Gallery, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

29 — NEW YORK

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. Metro-North 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 firstgeneration 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 three-person 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

33 — LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA

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.

ALI EYAL

31 — LOS ANGELES

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

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.

CYLE WARNER

24 — NEW YORK

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.

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.

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.

CHERRIE YU

30 — NEW YORK

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.

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.

JUSTIN EMMANUEL DUMAS

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.

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.

31 — PITTSBURGH

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.

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.

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 Canadianborn 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

26 — TUCSON

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.

COUMBA SAMBA

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.

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.

ALIX

VERNET

28 — NEW YORK

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.

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.

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 social-media 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.

MAUD ACHEAMPONG

HANNAH TAURINS

27 — NEW YORK

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.

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.

SELMA SELMAN

34 — NEW YORK, BERLIN, AND AMSTERDAM

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.

LUZ CARABAÑO

30 — LOS ANGELES

A critic once likened a painting by Luz Carabaño to “a minty block of fudge, with its glossy surface and uneven ridges.” The Venezuelan-born 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 light-filled 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.

LORENZO AMOS

23 — NEW YORK

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-slashstudio. It’s there that the quiet and the chaos of his evolving iconography find their footing.

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 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.

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.

ERIN CALLA WATSON

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.

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, neontinged 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.

Every generation sees the conditions of its existence as unprecedented. Twenty-five years into this millennium, this conviction has never felt truer. Surely an era like ours, defined by mass migration, A.I. girlfriends, a global pandemic, FaceTuning, climate catastrophe, an ever-widening wealth gap, and near-constant political upheaval, stands apart from everything that came before it.

Much art has been made in an effort to trace the contours of this brave new world, but few mediums play so poignant a role in this process as photography. Its practitioners hold a mirror to the vast expanse of the quotidian, digging into the gristle and elbowing through the crowd to capture the split-second that will, in time, define it all.

That’s why, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, we’ve asked 25 image-makers to share a single photograph they’d contribute to a time capsule of the era so far. Taken together, their contributions—which capture loaded landscapes, moments of uncertainty, and party politics— reveal the undeniable singularity of our times.

25 IMAGES THAT DEFINE THE NEW MILLENNIUM

Twenty-five image-makers share a snapshot that encapsulates the hopes and heartaches of the first quarter-century.

JUERGEN TELLER

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM

“These three subjects in my work seem to me to have had the most significant impact in the world in the 21st century: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and Save the Planet.”

SINNA NASSERI

LOS ANGELES

“With a wildfire closing in, I wandered the tiny town of Hiouchi on the border of California and Oregon. A cat, sitting in for all of us, appeared elegantly in the middle of the road. I came back the next year but couldn’t find her. I picked this image because of the metaphorical—and real life— fire closing in on all of us.”

NAIMA GREEN

NEW YORK

“This is Sable [Elyse Smith, Green’s partner ] on her mom’s terrace, looking down at her mom Lisa’s phone; the homescreen features a picture of Lisa and her two beloved Yorkies, Lexi and Chloe. Lisa is on the couch in the other room. It is seemingly mundane, but connecting wasn’t always like this. When I think about how much our phones mediate our relationships and closeness, it feels absolutely bizarre to remember that there are so many other ways to love someone and hold them close.”

LELE SAVERI

NEW YORK

“These first 25 years of the third millennium (since the birth of Christ) have seen humans embrace the role as owners of planet Earth more than ever before. Property is such a big part of the way we’ve structured our society, and we’ve become so convinced of our superiority over other species and forms of existence that we believe this planet—with all its resources and living beings—is ours to use as we wish. This image reminds me of that.”

TREVOR PAGLEN

NEW YORK AND THE BAY AREA

“When we look out across the political infrastructures that characterize our current moment, we find the normalized violence of ICE kidnappings, covert transfers to third-party nations, a mature architecture of mass surveillance, and the demonization of political opponents. These are institutions of looming authoritarianism.

The groundwork for much of this was laid in the aftermath of 9/11, when the CIA and its partners developed systems of ‘extraordinary rendition,’ secret ‘black sites,’ and NSA-enabled mass surveillance. This photograph of a black site in Kabul, Afghanistan, speaks to how the exceptional violence of the Global War on Terror has become part of the everyday operations of the state—a state where ‘emergency powers’ have become a normalized part of everyday governance.”

GRISELDA SAN MARTÍN

MEXICO CITY, MEXICO

“This photograph from my series ‘The Wall’ was taken at Friendship Park, the only place along the U.S.–Mexico border where families separated by immigration laws were once able to meet face-to-face, through a metal fence. The photograph depicts José Márquez, standing on the Mexican side of the wall in Tijuana, visiting with his daughter on the other side. When this was taken, they had already spent 14 years unable to hug each other. He was deported from the U.S. after living and working in San Diego for 18 years. It’s both ordinary and extraordinary: a father and daughter sharing a fleeting moment together, separated by a few inches of steel and decades of migration policy.”

GERMAN LARKIN

MILAN, LONDON, AND LOS ANGELES

“This photograph, taken at the Met Gala in 2016, captures a moment of social choreography. A woman, phone aglow in her hand, strides across the ballroom, stepping over the sequined train of an attendee’s gown. Her confident movement slices through the tableau of posed elegance of a circle of VIPs. It’s an illustration of how the power has shifted within the blend of the glamorous and the corporate— characteristic of our times.”

“This is an image I took in the Khayelitsha township of Cape Town, South Africa, in 2018. In Khayelitsha, similar to other townships, children roam freely throughout the day while their parents work to support their families. Even though apartheid ended in South Africa in the mid-’90s, the ramshackle community is rapidly growing in population—a symbol of the poverty and racial inequality that still exists in South Africa. I was struck by how casually the kids played among the barbed wire, somehow avoiding injury despite their rambunctiousness. Later, I noticed the shirt, undoubtedly imported from an American donation bin, one of the girls was wearing.

‘Bold, Brave, Beautiful Me’—words that carry much greater truth and weight in Khayelitsha.”

MASON POOLE

LOS ANGELES

FELIPE ROMERO BELTRÁN

PARIS, FRANCE

“Produced through reenactments with young migrants awaiting legal status in Spain, this work reflects a suspended temporality that resonates with broader social and political conditions of the early 21st century. The image frames waiting as an administrative state— one that inscribes itself into bodies. Beyond representation, I propose the act of photographing as a performative space of memory. By reenacting what was never recorded, the documentary form opens new questions.”

CARMEN WINANT

COLUMBUS

“It is a fool’s errand, picking a single image to represent the last quarter century, but here goes anyway. This is one I made at an abortion clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, in 2024. It didn’t make it into the project that I was working on at the time, ‘The Last Safe Abortion,’ for reasons I can no longer recall. I think it speaks for itself, but I’ll say anyway that it records the anti-reproductive zeal of our time. There is something else, too. In its quietness, this picture also calls up the resistance to that tyrannical effort, and the tremendous care work being done on the ground, every hour of every day.”

LINDSAY PERRYMAN

NEW YORK

“I chose this photograph because of its relationship to history and its reimagining. Drawing inspiration from The Last Supper, it explores the nuance of gender within a historical framework, envisioning a world where trans identity exists not on the margins but at the heart of collective memory. Featured in the photograph are Six, Rio, Jo, Carrington, and Syrus, captured on March 17, 2025, during the making of the film La la Résistance. This image represents resistance through visibility, and the tenderness of being seen by a history that once refused to see us.”

MARTIN PARR

BRISTOL, UNITED KINGDOM

“Britain, a country in steady decline, is well represented here by a rainy day at the beach. Our weather is poor, even in summer.”

JEREMY LIEBMAN

NEW YORK

“In the summer of 2016, I flew to Vladivostok to photograph Vladimir Putin for the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek. After 16 hours of travel and six hours of waiting, I had one minute to take his portrait. When he entered the room, I saw myself from the outside, looking in. Afterward, I sat in on the two-hour interview, which ranged from the annexation of Crimea to Russia’s involvement in the upcoming U.S. election. Bloomberg ran this image with the cover line ‘Vladimir Putin just wants to be friends.’ Two months later, Donald Trump won the presidency, radically changing the trajectory of the 21st century. I was the last Western photographer to take Putin’s portrait, and nine years later, the experience still feels like a surreal dream—but doesn’t everything now?”

CARLOS GONZALEZ

MINNEAPOLIS

“Usain Bolt was dominant at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. Bolt won three gold medals and set three world records in the 100m, 200m, and 4x100m relay. Here he is winning the Men’s 200m with a world record set by Michael Johnson at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. These performances make Bolt one of the greatest athletes of the 21st century.”

RACHEL FLEMINGER HUDSON

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM

“My work is set in the 1970s, so I didn’t realize until recently that it is also a distinctly 21st-century project. Before, I’d felt that I was sidestepping ‘now’ by digging deeper into the visual archive. I came to realize that it is my relationship to that archive—the image stream of the Internet—that is so 21st century. My physical body is here, but my brain is somewhere else... So in making my work, I can bring my body and brain closer together, slide my body into the past and my mind into the present. This photograph was my first time making an image that was consciously aware of its presence in the image stream... floating into the black... ”

DINA LITOVSKY

NEW YORK

“This image, shot backstage at New York Fashion Week in 2019, shows models’ heels raw from days of runway shows, the strappy sandals exposing torn, bloodied skin. Positioned at the intersection of beauty culture, capitalism, and self-presentation, the photo resonated far beyond the fashion industry. It captures how women’s pain is aestheticized, normalized, and even rewarded—the suffering folded into the spectacle. Continuing a centuries-old tradition that beauty requires sacrifice, the pursuit of glamour still demands that discomfort be absorbed into the cost of visibility and that composure under strain is a condition of femininity.”

IVA SIDASH

LVIV AND KHARKIV, UKRAINE

“This is the view from my old classroom in my hometown of Lviv, after a Russian missile hit the school on Sept. 4, 2024. Two people stand at the window, looking at the ruins. It’s the same place where I once learned to read and dream. Now it’s filled with dust and memory. I keep thinking about childhood and war—how they should never be in the same sentence. About all the children who won’t return to their schools. About how easily the things we take for granted—safety, learning, happiness—can disappear. For me, this image holds both personal and collective history. It’s saying: ‘This happened, I was here, I remember.’ If one image could speak for this time, I’d want it to carry both pain and presence—and a hope that someone, someday, will still be looking back.”

“As a landscape photographer, I have devoted my life to exploring the landscape and the culture of this country. My first trip to the U.S.–Mexico border was in 2000, soon after graduating from the Yale School of Art. This southern border weaves its way through diverse terrains from dense urban sprawl to ancient geological formations where nature, history, and politics merge. Over the last 26 years of my life on the road, the border has remained a place of fascination and tension for me. As the daughter of immigrants, the border is more than a line on a map; it’s a symbol of our national struggle with belonging, surveillance, fear, and misconceptions. This photograph of Santa Elena Canyon in Big Bend National Park in West Texas holds those contradictions in its stillness, capturing both division and the enduring flow that connects us.”

VICKY SAMBUNARIS

GHENT, NEW YORK

MOHAMAD ABDOUNI

“I went for Doris & Andrea, 2019. This photograph reflects some of the defining conversations of the early 21st century. It speaks to visibility, acceptance, and identity at a time when queerness and family have become increasingly central in shaping public opinion.

It was taken in a home that no longer exists, having been destroyed in the 2020 Beirut port explosion a year later. It was the first house across from the port. So in a sense it is also a reminder of how quickly both personal and collective histories can shift.”

ALEC SOTH

MINNEAPOLIS

“This picture of a school lockdown drill was taken near where I grew up in exurban Minneapolis. The innocent girls in a classic American locker room remind me of my own childhood, but the underlying anxiety does not. For me, it’s a document of the post-9/11 world, where the threat of violence has become part of everyday life.”

ELLE PÉREZ

NEW YORK

“I chose to submit a photograph that was made a few days after top surgery, titled Spring. In the broadest sense, bodily autonomy, self-agency, and freedom are the definitive issues of our time. No matter what happens in the coming months and years, I want the future to know that transformation is both beautiful and possible.”

JULIO CORTEZ

DALLAS

“I chose this image because it reflects the state of affairs in 2020. An American flag, carried upside down past a burning business, reflects the anger sparked by a police officer’s killing of George Floyd, and also a message from Minneapolis to the world.”

DANIEL ARNOLD

NEW YORK

“This image was taken in Washington, DC, on Jan. 20, 2017. I chose it because funeral photos are too grim and intimate, and—outside of close-up personal-life changes—the most consequential energy of my 2000s has come from the nonstop Mickey Mouse pro-wrestling nightmare at the White House.”

“In the series ‘Temporarily Censored Home,’ I situated photographs in my teenage home in Beijing to queer my parents’ heterosexual space. These images taken in the past four years consist of portraits of me and other gay men in their domestic settings from my project ‘One Land To Another’; prints of my artwork made in the United States; photographs of landscape and built environment taken in the U.S., Europe, and China; torn pages from film and fashion magazines that I collected as a teenager; images from my family photo albums. Here, images of protest during Trump’s first presidency are juxtaposed with Mao Zedong’s statue. The photo of me and another man holding hands collapses in my parents’ dining room. Through positioning and layering images, I aim to juxtapose, contradict, and collapse space and time, reclaiming my home in Beijing as a queer space of freedom and temporary protest.”

GUANYU XU

CHICAGO

SARA ABBASPOUR

ALBUQUERQUE

“This photograph was made in Iran in the summer of 2024, in the aftermath of the Woman, Life, Freedom sociopolitical movement—a civil uprising in which women led a nationwide effort to reclaim dignity, freedom, and collective agency. This movement represents the most significant event of the 21st century that I have personally witnessed.”

CAN’T STOP, WON’T STOP

Hotelier and designer Eiesha Bharti Pasricha owes her successes to a worldly, uncompromising, and fictitious muse. This year, she launched an extremely limited capsule of tailored garments as yet another tribute to this symbol of feminine power.

By Dominique Sisley

Photography by Mary McCartney

Eiesha Bharti Pasricha is seated in an upstairs nook at Maison Estelle, the enigmatic Mayfair members’ club she co-founded with her husband, hospitality entrepreneur Sharan Pasricha. The Grade I listed Georgian townhouse is one of London’s best-kept secrets: a labyrinth of creaking corridors that open into rooms of maximalist opulence layered with art, lacquered wood, and bursts of green foliage. Phones are stickered at the door, all photography forbidden; nothing of the interior is ever shared online. The house belongs to Estelle, her “partly historic, partly fictitious” muse, Bharti Pasricha tells me. “Estelle is a woman who never got married. She has many lovers. She is a woman of the world, nomadic,” she continues over a steaming cup of fresh mint tea. “Everywhere she goes, she collects something: an antique piece, fabrics… everything goes into her trunk, and she comes home.”

If Maison Estelle is her London salon, then Estelle Manor is her sprawling country escape. Just an hour and a half outside the city, the 108 -room hotel and members’ club occupies the former Eynsham Hall estate in Oxfordshire. A mix of Edwardian bones and bold contemporary touches, the manor—jaw-dropping in its old English grandeur—opened in 2023 as a rural escape, complete with four restaurants, a Roman-style bathhouse, and rolling parkland. Bharti Pasricha describes herself as its “co–creative director,” along with her husband. “[The question was,] how do I make this feel like you’re coming to Estelle’s home? [Like] you are actually going to visit her country house?”

Bharti Pasricha’s aesthetic instincts were shaped by a childhood divided between New Delhi and Scotland. The daughter of telecom billionaire Sunil Bharti Mittal, founder of Bharti Enterprises, she grew up moving.

“I see myself firmly as an Indian girl. I’m very loyal to the fact that I’m an Indian,” she says. “But I do think being born in Scotland and having visited the country every year for two and a half months when I was growing up taught me the importance of silence.” India, she recalls, was all “color and chaos,” while Scotland was “raw and still.”

Her taste is partly the result of this cultural mélange, but Bharti Pasricha has always had an eye. As a child, she lingered over how a table was laid or flowers were arranged, but never imagined these instincts could shape a career. Instead, she studied politics and French at university, briefly considering work at the UN, before pivoting to fashion and backing a roster of young designers. It wasn’t until her husband took over the iconic Gleneagles hotel in Scotland that her sensibility found its canvas. She began feeding into the hotel’s look and feel—adding a “feminine” touch—and quickly

became hooked. “He basically oversees the operation,” she says. “And when it comes to the art, the uniforms, the tableware, the events, that’s where I come in.” At Estelle Manor, her influence is in the sensorial details. She developed a bespoke line of spa products and worked with perfumer Lyn Harris to create a house fragrance that lingers from the moment guests step into the car at Oxford station. Even the minibar became an obsession, labored over for a year and a half, and stocked with the finest silk scrunchies, tinctures, and face masks.

Two years after the manor’s opening, Bharti Pasricha struggles to sit still. This year, to keep the fantasy of Estelle alive, she launched Lady E, an extremely limited capsule of tailored pieces made in Naples. Guests at the Manor will be able to shop the line at The Muse, a newly opened concept store on the property. “Estelle’s world is never static, because she’s completely dissatisfied with anything at any given time,” Bharti Pasricha concludes. “And in some ways, that is my personality, too. Maybe she’s my alter ego.”

“Estelle’s world is never static, because she’s completely dissatisfied with anything at any given time. And in some ways, that is my personality, too.”

Rob Teeters believes that even the cup in your hand can change the way you experience the art before you. His Sagaponack home is a living tribute to nuance in all its forms.

A CUP OF COFFEE AND THE RIGHT CHAIR

By Sam Falb

by Billal Baruk Taright

Living with art is like being in a three-way conversation without an end in sight. The work itself is the obvious stakeholder, as is the space that contains it. The living room may play host to a discourse on abstraction, the dining room a reckoning with portraiture. For Rob Teeters, the bedroom challenges the purview of landscapes.

The advisor, who founded Front Desk Apparatus in 2006 and leads the Dallas nonprofit art space the Power Station, shares his 1950 s Sagaponack home with his husband, ceramicist Bruce M. Sherman. The latter’s latest polychrome pieces punctuate their shared collection with a winking energy and warmth throughout the modern glass-and-wood-led space. In the dining room, a third-century Roman marble head stands sentinel, while a Courbet portrait beckons down the hall; elsewhere, contemporary works by Wade Guyton and Sherrie Levine balance the craft practices on view with a more conceptual bent.

Teeters approaches each arrangement with the keen eye of someone who does this for a living—though, with no clients to please here, he’s given himself free rein. For CULTURED, the advisor reveals how he put together his most singular curation yet.

How do you draw the line between your personal taste and your critical eye as an advisor?

It’s a bit like climbing into someone else’s head and trying on a new personality. I could attempt to make each of my clients’ homes look like mine, but that would be monotonous for everyone. The key to being a good art advisor is knowing when to say yes and no, and understanding the client’s sensibility and interests in order to guide them to the very best artworks that represent those interests. It is important to me that the collections I build are reflective of who my client is, rather than a vacuous mirror of my own taste and aesthetics.

Do you find yourself living with art differently over time?

I live with a lot of art, but I don’t need to live with it all at once. In general, I prefer to live with less—it allows the work to

breathe. I like unearthing pieces from my storage unit after many years and seeing how my feelings about them change. A great artwork continues to unfold and reveal itself over time. If a work of art remains static without breeding new thought and feeling, it’s probably a mediocre work of art. If something is newly placed within a room—whether it be a painting, sculpture, a chair, or a new lighting fixture—the vibration of the room and all of its contents is affected, to a far more dramatic degree than many people realize.

How does showcasing work in your home change what you’re able to accomplish?

In my home, I’m in complete control of every element. The feeling of a painting or sculpture varies drastically depending on how it’s situated and the surrounding artworks—but also depending on the chair you’re viewing it from, the plaster finish of the walls, the scent of the room,

the texture of the carpet underfoot, or the feeling of the coffee cup in your hand as you view the work. This type of nuance doesn’t exist in the context of a gallery or museum, and it’s what makes living with art a very different experience.

What criteria do you follow when selecting the works that live on your walls?

I want any work I live with to continuously provoke thought and questions. I need the combined effect of all the objects together to amplify this experience—making it layered and complex to unpack. This is why I love living with a range of objects from various periods of art history. Combining a Roman marble head from the third century A.D., with a Gustave Courbet portrait from 1851, with Georges Jouve and Jean Després objects from the midcentury, with a Bahinemo Garra Hook from Papua New Guinea, against contemporary works by Wade Guyton, Sherrie Levine, and Richard Prince, a powerful cocktail emerges. This layering of history is reflective of how modes of art production have shifted and changed over centuries—from the ancient techniques of marble and wood carving to the production of paintings with digital printing technologies. I live with an artist, my husband, who produces ceramics. Needless to say, the production of art is a never-ending dialogue in our household.

What’s one work in your home that you have had an evolving relationship with?

That would be the 1958 landscape painting by Manoucher Yektai. I advise the Yektai Estate, and this particular piece was one of the early paintings I saw in Yektai’s former Upper West Side apartment that became instantly embedded in my mind. Yektai started spending time in the Hamptons in the 1950 s, and went on to make many abstracted landscape paintings using rural New York, Pennsylvania, and Vermont as material. Many of his landscapes were painted from memory rather than plein air or from photographs. Even though this painting is titled Pennsylvania Landscape, I see so much of the Hamptons landscape that surrounds my house today.

“ In my home, I’m in complete control of every element.”

“I live with a lot of art, but I don’t need to live with it all at once.”

“A great artwork continues to unfold and reveal itself over time. If it remains static without breeding new thought and feeling, it’s probably a mediocre work of art.”

by Noua Unu Studio

VARIOUS YOUNG WOMEN

All clothing and accessories Chanel Cruise 2025/26 collection

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DRESSING ROOM

As they counted down the days until the Los Angeles Ballet’s 20 th season of The Nutcracker, five dancers, adorned in pieces from Bvlgari’s Serpenti collection, readied themselves for the stage.

Snaked around a dancer’s outstretched limbs, Bvlgari’s Serpenti collection takes on a living, undulating elegance. The pieces—lithe and sinuous— mirror the silhouettes of the Los Angeles Ballet’s dancers, five of whom CULTURED caught in the midst of rehearsals for this winter’s The Nutcracker production, a hallmark of the company’s annual repertoire. Wearing a perfect complement to Bvlgari’s finest—new costumes by LAB Costume Director Chloée O’Hayon-Crosby, which will be revealed for the first time during the opening-night performance of “Waltz of the Snowflakes”—the ballerinas let us into their dressing room for one last look before the curtain comes up.

The cool weight of a necklace on skin obscures the blaze of heat that formed its materials. Temperatures climb to 1,948 degrees Fahrenheit before gold transforms into liquid and can be strung into delicate chains, links, and pendants— a feat of transformation that’s nearly impossible to envision. Photographer Sergiy Barchuk conjures this bygone heat with a series of images that reintroduces precious metals and stones to the fire that bore them, a reminder of the warmth we carry draped across our bodies.

Photography by Sergiy Barchuk

HOW TO MAKE A DEBUT COLLECTION

All eyes were on Jonathan Anderson’s first Dior offering this past June. The notorious world-builder brought fresh, if subtle changes to the storied house, marrying Dior’s heft with his own well-chronicled reverence for and experimentation with craft.

All clothing and accessories by Dior Summer 2026

Jonathan Anderson is a bright spot in what can often feel like bleak sartorial terrain.

With his Dior debut last June, the Northern Irish designer—a cherished master of the unpredictable and agent of the absurd—left a nuanced yet unmistakable mark with a Men’s Spring/Summer 2026 collection that riffs on French history while filtering in his own trademark gestures—painstaking handiwork and a reverence for craft. For CULTURED, the house pulls back the curtain on the collection, identifying the themes that thread their way through garments and accessories alike.

A CASCADE OF TASSELS

Anderson’s reimagining of the iconic Lady Dior bag involved a collaboration with textile artist Sheila Hicks, who covered the bag with “a nest of ponytails.” The unusual appliqué transforms accessory into art object. Here, delight transcends the binary—men streamed down the Dior runway in June with the bag in the crooks of their arms.

BRANDEBOURG DETAILING

The designer returns time and again to the Brandebourg style, distinguished by its oval fastenings and its burnished, formal quality. The tassels, hardware, and braided details take as much as 120 hours for Dior’s craftspeople to complete.

LITERARY TRIBUTES

In the Anderson extended universe, cinematic and literary figures are as central as his own fashion forebears. He gave the iconic Book Tote a refresh, covering the cotton and calfskin bags with details derived from several popular tomes. One standout is a highlighter-yellow design embroidered with “Dracula by Bram Stoker.” Others nod to James Joyce’s Ulysses and Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, pairing the designer’s Irish heritage with Dior’s French roots.

A REVOLUTIONARY FLOURISH

In another nod to historical dress, Anderson envisioned waistcoats and cravats updated with sumptuous details, like metallic embroidery and seed pearls laced into minute floral designs. The raiment synthesizes the designer’s signature clash—elegant yet irreverent.

PAINSTAKING CRAFTSMANSHIP

Dior’s Paris atelier spends 3,271 hours embroidering just one coat. Metallic thread is sewn onto the face of a houndstooth garment to create a glinting, etched effect. Such designs are only possible with the luxury of unlimited time—something that situates Anderson’s runway fare closer to the realm of haute couture.

SCULPTURAL SILHOUETTES

Anderson unleashed his love of structure on the Men’s Summer 2026 collection. Fabrics fold back on themselves to create origami-like shapes that billow from the hips. These offerings bring together the robust silhouettes that dot Dior’s archive with the fluid designs that characterize modern tailoring in an easy marriage.

REIMAGINED HERITAGE

A Dior cape reminiscent of the house’s ’60s stylings made an appearance in the new collection. Anderson incorporated a signature check, emblematic of the house’s codes, and draped the dramatic piece over slim-fit trousers and boots for an anachronistic feel.