Rooted, Relevant, and Evolving: Rajiv Menon on Redefining South Asian Diasporic Art

August 12, 2025

interview by Parrie Chhajed

With each new generation of immigrants from South Asia making their way to the various corners of the world, so too does their culture and unique interpretation thereof. With the context of comparison, they offer perspectives on their homeland that challenge the idea of authenticity deriving from one’s geographic placement. Thus is the crux of Non-Residency, a group show that comprises sixteen artists of South Asian diasporic identity curated by Rajiv Menon. Bringing the work of non-resident South Asian artists directly to Jaipur is a first for the young gallerist and curator who opened Rajiv Menon Contemporary in Hollywood, California, in his quest to bolster representation of the Indian diaspora within the United States. He refers to these artists as the Non-Resident School, effectively defining a voice of Non-Resident Indian (NRI) taste that is both united and richly diverse by way of its orientation.

Sahana Ramakrishnan
*The People Under The Sea*

PARRIE CHHAJED: First off, congratulations on the exhibition. The work and the scale of the gallery is quite remarkable.

RAJIV MENON: Thank you so much. It’s really been a mission of mine to bring South Asian art to the U.S. and build a new audience for what I believe is some of the most important work happening globally. Seeing such a meaningful response has been incredibly rewarding.

CHHAJED: Let’s start with Non-Residency. It’s a cleverly charged title. How did it come about, and what does it mean to you personally?

MENON: One of the early inspirations was the ongoing cultural debate around “NRI taste.” I was very attuned to the perception of this gap in sensibility between India and its diaspora. While that gap is real, I wanted to understand its emotional and social underpinnings—and more importantly, how those conditions can be fertile grounds for art-making. I didn’t want this to be just an art exhibition. I wanted Non-Residency to act as an intervention in the culture itself—to challenge how we think about the relationship between the motherland and its diaspora, and to elevate diasporic voices as central, not peripheral, to the narrative of Indian art.

CHHAJED: This is also your first professional project in India and the first time a singular gallery is showcasing at the Jaipur Centre for Art. How does that feel both personally and professionally?

MENON: Immense. I’ve always been in awe of Indian galleries—their coherence, their mission, the way they’re contributing to defining India’s national visual identity. That spirit is what I wanted to engage with. As a diasporic gallery, we don’t operate within India’s territorial boundaries, but we are equally invested in its cultural perception globally. This exhibition is my way of asserting that the diaspora isn’t just looking in from the outside—we’re in dialogue. We’re translating, challenging, and innovating alongside what’s happening in India.

CHHAJED: The exhibition is set in Jaipur’s historic City Palace, yet it tackles themes like migration, displacement, and otherness. How did the palace’s context influence your curatorial choices?

MENON: I really wanted to play with that irony—the grandeur of a heritage space colliding with deeply contemporary diasporic narratives. Jaipur, in the Western and diasporic imagination, often represents fantasy and opulence. By placing diasporic work in that setting, it creates a tension. The goal was to force the viewer to confront that gap and start a dialogue between heritage and the now. The Jaipur Centre’s mission aligns with this—to open up heritage spaces to contemporary voices, and that made it the perfect partner.

CHHAJED: What was the initial spark for this exhibition—what made you feel that Non-residency was needed now?

MENON: Over the past few years, I’ve seen a distinct shift in diasporic art—a cohort of artists in conversation with each other, building something that felt like a movement. I’m calling them the Non-resident School—artists working through similar themes and aesthetics, but with singular visions. Many are already in major museum and private collections, but the world wasn’t seeing it as a movement yet. Non-residency is my way of announcing that. It’s a statement: This is not isolated brilliance—it’s a cultural wave that’s reshaping how South Asian identity is viewed globally.

Kelly Sinnapah
*Mary Violette’s Book The Girl with 3 Eyes*, 2025
JCG18987
photograph by Christopher Burke Studio

CHHAJED: And that wave is definitely visible—not just in art, but across music, fashion, and literature as well.

MENON: Absolutely. Indian fashion, in particular, has had such an incredible global presence lately. When I meet young designers and creatives from India, there’s this shared vision—to show that Indian aesthetics are not just relevant, but leading on the world stage. Whether it’s garments or fine art, we’re participating in the same cultural project. That’s why it’s so important to me that my gallery also acts as a platform to showcase fashion and other creative expressions from India.

CHHAJED: Diasporic identity is often framed through nostalgia. But this exhibition feels like a break from that. Was that intentional?

MENON: Very much so. One of my biggest critiques of diasporic work is its frequent fixation on the past. I wanted this show to be about the future—about innovation. The artists featured are using their identities not to look back longingly, but to create something new. This is about possibility, not just memory. I wanted to challenge the idea that diasporic work is a diluted echo of Indian culture. It’s not. It’s its own form—rooted, relevant, and evolving.

Installation view. *Non-Residency.* Jaipur Centre for Art 2025

CHHAJED: That’s a powerful shift. You’ve also spoken about moving away from “authenticity” as a standard for Indian art. Can you elaborate?

MENON: The notion that work must be created in India to be authentically Indian is limiting—and frankly outdated. Authenticity is not fixed. It evolves. What we think of as “authentic Indian culture” today is different from fifty or a hundred years ago. Diasporic art is no less authentic just because it’s created elsewhere. It reflects the lived experiences and social contexts of the artists. If we continue to gatekeep Indian culture through rigid authenticity, we miss out on incredible new voices and visions.

CHHAJED: The artist list for Non-Residency includes a rich mix of intersectional identities. Was that intentional?

MENON: I don’t believe curation should be a box-ticking exercise. But if you’re genuinely tuned into the landscape, diversity happens naturally. I wanted to present a wide spectrum of diasporic experience—not just the dominant post-1965 immigration narrative. That’s why including Indo-Caribbean artists was essential. Their work speaks to layered displacements and complex racial and cultural identities. This isn’t just about representing different experiences—it’s about expanding the aesthetic language of the diaspora.

CHHAJED: What was the process like of choosing the artists and curating the show?

MENON: A joy. The majority of the works were created specifically for this show. Many artists responded to the location of Jaipur itself. Anoushka Mirchandani, for example, created a painting in response to Jackie Kennedy’s iconic shoot in Jaipur. Nibha Akireddy, who’s currently in residency at JCA, explored the history of women polo players in the region. The curatorial framework—non-residency as both a social and aesthetic concept—also led me to explore the uncanny. There’s a distortion, a doubling that diasporic artists often experience when engaging with the homeland. That tension became an aesthetic throughline across the works.

CHHAJED: Earlier this year, you also launched a permanent space in Hollywood. How has the journey been of creating a gallery focused on South Asian art in the U.S.?

MENON: There was a huge gap on the West Coast for South Asian art, and the response has been incredible. Not just from the diaspora but from the broader art community. Museums have been especially supportive, and that’s a major signifier of cultural impact. But yes, one of the challenges is the lack of cultural literacy—many Americans don’t have a deep understanding of India. That’s why our gallery isn’t just commercial—it’s educational. I want people to understand the context, the complexity, and the multiplicity of Indian art.

CHHAJED: How did the collaboration with the Jaipur Centre come about?

MENON: I attended their opening last year and was deeply moved. Noelle Kadar and HRH Sawai Padmanabh Singh have a truly global vision for Indian art. It felt like the perfect place to make a cultural statement, to bridge the diaspora and the homeland. Their level of ambition and taste matched the gallery’s, and the collaboration just made sense.

CHHAJED: Were there any surprises along the way?

MENON: The journey is still unfolding—the show installs next week! While I visit India often and it feels like home, bringing art here as a business is a new experience. There’s been a learning curve, but this is only the beginning. We’ll also be showing at the India Art Fair in February and plan to keep India as a consistent part of our programming.

CHHAJED: If Non-residency is a homecoming, what’s next?

MENON: In September, we take on a different kind of homecoming—I’ll be curating a show in my hometown of Houston, Texas, at the Untitled Art Fair. The theme will also be homecoming, and like all my curatorial work, it’s deeply personal. I think this pair of shows—India and Houston—reflects the scope of my own identity and vision. After that, we’ll show at Untitled Miami during Art Basel and continue regular programming in our Los Angeles gallery.

Non-Residency is on view through October 5 @ Jaipur Centre for Art Gate No. 1, City Palace, Pink City, Jaipur, Rajasthan 302002

Rajiv Menon at the opening of *Non-Residency* at Jaipur Centre for Art

A World With No Safe Word: An Interview of Nicolette Mishkan

August 5, 2025

Nicolette Mishkan
*Lethe’s Harem*, 2024-2025
Oil on linen
48 x 60 in121.9 x 152.4 cm

interview by Summer Bowie

What if death were just a blackout between this life and the next? With its memories wiped clean in a cycle of spiritual cleansing, your soul might carry only faint notions of who you once were, like a SIM card with a brand new hippocampus. Such is the gist of the River Lethe, an underworld tributary from ancient Greek mythology whose waters wash away all remembrance of one’s existence. In Lethe’s Tavern, the fabled Greek river becomes a watering hole where painter Nicolette Mishkan’s ego goes to slosh around, bifurcate, and eventually sing its swan song. Informed equally by Sufi mysticism wherein wine is used to symbolize the intoxicating effects of divine love, she annihilates her sense of individuality by eliminating any distinction between herself and others. Together, these figures revel in the ultimate surrender to their fate, a resplendent transcendence into the unknown where who she once was lies buried without even an epitaph. The following interview took place at Megan Mulrooney on the occasion of the exhibition’s closing and has been edited for length.

SUMMER BOWIE: I want to start by talking about the River Lethe—what it is and how it came to be the crux of this body of work.

NICOLETTE MISHKAN: I came across an essay on the River Lethe in Greek mythology one day, and I was really intrigued by this image of a river in the underworld where if you drink from it, it wipes your memory clean. You want to avoid drinking the water so that you can keep the memories from your previous existences and carry them into the next life. So, it feeds into this imagery of an eternal cycle—the forgetting and redoing and forgetting again.

Before that, I had been thinking about wine from a Sufi perspective and the belief that it brings you closer to the divine. I like the mixture of that imagery in terms of divine intoxication as a form of spiritual love and also the idea of dispersing your ego and memories and thoughts. Depending on the level of consciousness you bring into it, it'll either connect you with something higher or return you to the cycle of renewal.

BOWIE: It’s interesting in this way that you’re discouraged from drinking the water, but of course, we all come into the world with a fresh slate. So, these works propose a wonderful embrace of that surrender. I love the way these figures are experiencing moments of everything from folly to ecstasy to utter exhaustion. There’s an aspect of labor you can see that really speaks to the more challenging aspects of submission.

The show also makes reference to the Sufi concept of ‘fana,’ which has to do with ego death and connection to the divine. And it’s also the first show you’ve done where you appear as each and every figure. I like how you approach this idea of ego death in a very counterintuitive way, because you’ve lost all that makes you unique.

MISHKAN: Yeah, I mean from a practical standpoint, I wanted it to be consistent. And I like the idea of multiple selves that represent either your multiple potential realities or different timelines merging, or even just the idea that everyone is a reflection of you. Every work an artist makes is inevitably going to be a self-portrait. Plus, it’s easier because I’m always available..

BOWIE: Are you photographing yourself from multiple angles and then placing those in, or are you finding that you need certain angles as you’re in the process of creating the painting, and then going back and re-photographing?

MISHKAN: It’s both. It’s like, oh, I know what I want, so let me just…. It’s embarrassing. I set up the camera and I’m like, [assumes a few different poses] you know. And then I took videos and grabbed stills from those as well.

BOWIE: The movement aspect is really clear, so I can see the way that film stills would lend themselves well to these figures. One major recurrent theme across all of your works is the way that they empower people to connect to the divine feminine. Can you define what the divine feminine is for you?

MISHKAN: When I started the series, I was thinking of the role of wine according to the Sufis and then it branched out into other cultures and their relationships with wine. And then, I was thinking about this river as a trance into the subconscious, in this moon-like place. As I kept going, I got into more of this story of the feminine descent. Part of that is this cyclical period in everyone’s life, it happens a million times, where she’s forced to start over. Part of that is releasing all the attachments to who she is: I’m a mother, a daughter, a businesswoman, an artist—letting go of all those identity markers. It’s also about letting go of her attachment to a very patriarchal society. We’re raised in this logical, mathematical world that forces us to let go of what makes us feminine: our intuition, connection to our body, emotionality. These are the things that make women strong. Sometimes it just catches up with you and you have to evolve. And part of that evolution is the descent into your subconscious, facing certain things, letting go, coming back.

Nicolette Mishkan
*Lethe's Tavern*, 2024-2025
Oil on linen
48 x 60 in121.9 x 152.4 cm

BOWIE: The subject of female empowerment comes up a lot in your work, but I feel like your take on it is a direct reflection of not just being a woman, but being an Iranian-American woman.

MISHKAN: It’s just so ingrained. I grew up in America and I was never forced to cover up the way they are, but I still see instances where I’m doing that dance. They’re treated as second-class citizens, essentially, and it’s terrifying to see how a country can go so far backwards so quickly. We see the women over there fighting for rights that we have here, but we take it for granted because we don’t realize how fragile it is.

BOWIE: Right. The Woman, Life, Freedom movement is asking for something that we currently have in America. But, the far-right has already dismantled Roe v. Wade and defunded family planning clinics that provide everything from birth control to STD screening and pap smears. So, we may be allowed to expose more of our bodies, but the misogynistic foundation of Western society is always pulling back on the liberties that we assume are fixed because our grandmothers already fought for them and won.

MISHKAN: A lot of it comes from this religious mentality. You’ll see people who leave one extreme religion only to find another one with equally extreme practices. Coming back to the series, I want to appreciate the feminine and embrace her because I think that without that, we’re imbalanced, and you can see it all over the place. It’s very imbalanced; women are so repressed. And it has to get so extreme. Women have to go out there and cut their hair off. In Iran, they’re getting their eyes shot out and it’s all because of their hair.

BOWIE: The young women of Iran are fighting back in this way that is just unbelievably intrepid. It’s extremely humbling. But speaking of extremes, a lot of people don’t know about your previous practice as a performance artist and the character you called Permaid. Was that the genesis of this avatar that you found in the siren?

MISHKAN: Permaid was a project I did with my friend and it was just purely out of love. We didn’t really understand what we were doing. We would put this faceless latex mermaid out in the world and take photos and it was candid. But in the end, I realized it was a lot about learning to embrace yourself and all your differences and loving every part of yourself.

After that project ended, I really wanted to continue exploring the siren theme. And part of Permaid was this inherent S&M thing, which is just always in the back of my mind. It’s about sexuality whether I want it to be or not. But, it’s more this idea of what you consent to in your day-to-day life and how we live in a world where there’s no safe word. So, if you are aware of what you’re consenting to, you’re far more empowered. The mermaid is such a feminine symbol. She mirrors women in today’s society very well and the way that our strengths are held against us.

BOWIE: There’s an extremism about her in the sense that she’s faceless, and already, the mermaid is basically sexless. Yet, she is this symbol of sensuality and in many European seafaring mythologies she is a temptress who lures sailors to inclement, stormy waters. So, if you saw her it was a sign that you were going to die. Yet, Permaid’s facelessness really impedes her ability to beguile. There’s not an inch of skin exposed—it’s almost like a sexy burka. I imagine it was incredibly difficult to breathe in this costume.

MISHKAN: Oh yeah, it’s very psychological. You freak out while your face is covered and your breath gets short. It suffocates a little bit, but you just kind of breathe into it. It’s very weird. I’d be in that suit sometimes for a very long time. I imagine it’s similar to a burka, where you can see them, but they can’t see you. It's very dehumanizing and weird from a sensory perspective. It’s like a sensory deprivation tank. You can get zen with it and eventually you get used to it, but I didn’t really enjoy it.

BOWIE: There’s a compelling paradox with your body on full display and your complete anonymity. There’s a lot of symbolism there in terms of the female experience. And in these works, we can see traces of Permaid’s with the black latex mask, but now it’s a hood with her face exposed. She’s been liberated in a certain respect, but we’re reminded that it’s still her. Can we talk about your use of water in these works as a symbol of rebirth?

MISHKAN: I wanted to create a world that’s like this entrance back into the womb. And part of that approach was in these thin washes of paint that build up the darkness. Also, in a lot of literary symbolism, water, when it's out of control, can represent a sort of mental schizoid state. And I like the idea of water as a subconscious realm of collective thought progression. That’s where I imagined the heroine entering—in this deep subconscious shadow world.

Nicolette Mishkan
*Ritual of Forgetting*, 2024
Oil on linen
24 x 20 in61 x 50.8 cm

BOWIE: There are a couple other motifs that you play with that take the form of talismans, like the latex hoods and poppy flowers. Can you talk about those?

MISHKAN: The latex hoods throughout my paintings prior to this have always been my nod to S&M. But with this series, I wanted it to be a representation of the ego, like that last thing holding her together. And as the series keeps going, they start coming off. With the poppies, I was researching symbols for forgetting, and they started coming up. I like that intersection of this addictive, devotional, all-consuming vice.

BOWIE: You play a lot with this juxtaposition between inebriation and purification. There’s the Dionysian belief that wine brings you closer to the gods that you’re referencing, and then this mythology of the river Lethe making you forget—pulling you away from yourself.

MISHKAN: Yeah, the symbolism of wine comes up in so many different cultures. You have wine representing the blood of Christ. For the Zoroastrians, it represented the fire of the sun and a kind of substitute for blood. In a lot of cultures, wine is something that connects you to the divine or life force, and I like that idea. Intoxication is a process of stepping outside of yourself and connecting to something else. Like this, the heroine is sort of letting down her ego, she's letting down her walls, forgetting her disconnection with others, and reconnecting with her shadow side, as well as her instincts and intuition.

BOWIE: There’s several interesting art historical references that we see in this series, particularly Dorothea Tanning and Leonor Fini. Something I find really intriguing is not just your connection to them as Surrealist female painters that work with the body, and mortality, and nature. But on a personal level, Dorothea Tanning had this history of working in fashion illustration, much like you. And then with Leonor Fini, she had that famous photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson, where she’s nude, bathing in water, and she has this very classical hourglass figure, much like your own, which is a relatively rarefied body type. Do you remember how you discovered either of their work?

MISHKAN: I'd say both of them were always kind of floating around as soon as I got internet access. I was coming across the imagery and it always really spoke to me. You look at it and sometimes you have no idea what's going on. It really touches a part of my brain. But I think Surrealism has historically been a place where women were taken seriously. It's a great entry point for any female artist because it's so welcoming for some reason.

BOWIE: I mean, part of me wonders how much of it had to do with how sexually liberated the female Surrealists were. Like, the narrative around Max Ernst discovering Dorothea Tanning through her Birthday painting, which was a topless self-portrait and then leaving Peggy Guggenheim shortly thereafter for her is pretty telling. Or the fact that Cartier-Bresson’s most famous and valuable photograph is of Leonor Fini nude with a shaved pubis. I want to talk about this palette you chose for these works because it’s very different from your previous works. These wine-dark reds, greenish grays, ashen roses. Where did the inspiration for this palette come from?

MISHKAN: I don’t remember why these colors happened. The imagery that came up in my research and imagination was in this palette and I really liked it, so I went with it. And as I kept going, I started to realize that it's actually really moldy. And I think mold speaks well to this idea of breakdown and regeneration. It wasn’t intentional, but it works.

Nicolette Mishkan
*Midnight Abyss*, 2024-2025
Oil on linen
24 x 36 in61 x 91.4 cm

BOWIE: [Gestures toward a painting] I love that one so much because she gets to this point where she almost can’t take it anymore. It reminds me of the last stage of child labor right before you start to push. I’m curious about the embodiment of the siren and how she guides your way of living.

MISHKAN: You know, at the end of the day I’m a very cheesy girl; I’m very cringy. I just like mermaids and I chose to lean into it. I always loved them as a kid and I still love them. She’s so endlessly fascinating and the more I think about her, the more dimensions she reveals to me. Whether it’s the way she’s historically demonized as representation of the whore, or valorized as the divine feminine—a woman who's strong in her emotions and intuition. She's a timeless symbol.

BOWIE: Do you drink while you paint?

MISHKAN: There was a period where sometimes I would drink the night before. There was something about the hangover that was interesting to lean into. And then after a while it wasn’t…

BOWIE: You can feel that with these. You can feel the ecstatic moments of drinking and the eventual burn out. Especially with that moment where you’re pouring yourself another drink and the version of yourself receiving it is like, this is a good idea.

MISHKAN: That’s what I’m doing when I’m drinking. I’m just really having fun with myself. But the addiction aspect is always floating in the back of my head. The addict is in me and I’ve dated so many of them. But I embrace it because there's something about the addict mentality that is passionate. I like the intensity. I even like the destructive aspect. I don't fight it. I just try to appreciate it. When it comes to these ideas of connecting with the divine, it’s both intoxicating and kind of delusional. If you’re drinking to forget, the cycle just repeats itself versus if you're celebrating, it's a different thing in my mind.

Nicolette Mishkan
*Limbic Override*, 2025
Oil on canvas
14 x 10 in35.6 x 25.4 cm

BOWIE: Are they doing both?

MISHKAN: In this series, I like the idea that you could read it a million different ways. Maybe she’s ending back where she started, or maybe her rebirth is leading to a positive transformation.

BOWIE: On the subject of rebirth and a certain feminine continuum, you originally learned to paint as a child because your mom taught oil painting and you used to sit through her classes. I'm curious how your mom feels about your painting practice?

MISHKAN: She’s very supportive. She’s super open-minded and liberal compared to a typical Iranian woman, but when I first sent her the list of work she was like, “Oh, there’s a lot of nudity, and I wanted to bring my friends.” And I was like, “Don't worry about it. You don’t have to bring them.” But then, she did anyway. And I do love that this is really my connection to her in a way. It’s so deeply a part of her that it’s part of me too. And she did teach me. I remember being super young and her being like, “Okay, here are your colors, start mixing.” And that's how I learned oil painting.

BOWIE: So, it sounds like you’re challenging her in a lot of ways and she’s growing from it in terms of pushing through that discomfort.

MISHKAN: Yeah. I mean, she’s also why I got into classical painting because that’s just what I grew up around. I was always in a house full of paintings of nude women and I didn’t realize that that’s kind of weird.

BOWIE: Just not as much self-portraiture happening, I imagine.

MISHKAN: No. There was a lot of Rococo and Neoclassical painting going on. It’s very Persian.

BOWIE: Right. That separation between artist and subject lends itself to a much less vulnerable practice.

MISHKAN: Exactly.

Nicolette Mishkan
*Delta Waves*, 2025
Oil on canvas
14 x 14 in35.6 x 35.6 cm

AYA TAKANO'S World Comes to Los Angeles

July 31, 2025

AYA TAKANO’S “how far how deep we can go" exhibition at Perrotin in LA invites visitors into a mystical world which offers an escape and hope for a brighter existence.

AYA TAKANO *地球上のすべての生物のスピリット | the spirit of all life on earth*, 2025. 130.3 x 162 x 3 cm | 51 5/16 x 63 3/4 x 1 3/16 inches. Oil on canvas. ©2025 AYA TAKANO/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy Perrotin.

interview by Poppy Baring

Inspired by all art forms from Expressionism to the erotic art of Japan's Edo period, from manga artists such as Osamu Tezuka to Gustav Klimt, AYA TAKANO has been creating her own intimate fantasy since the age of three. Born in Japan in 1976, the painter, illustrator, and highly recognised Superflat artist welcomes LA residents to her new exhibition titled “how far how deep we can go”.

TAKANO presents otherworldly nymph-like characters that are extraterrestrial and yet still connected to and reflective of our reality. Drawing from the past and thinking to the future, she creates a limitless existence where time, gender, and age are undefined. Through various mediums, the Japanese artist investigates our inherent consciousness, exploring what it means to be marked by the past and connected to all life that occurred before us and will exist after us. Held in LA, home to spiritual seekers as well as recent environmental catastrophe, the exhibition offers a universe where all souls prosper as equals, a space where compassion prevails. In this interview, TAKANO provides insight into her worldview and her day-to-day life, asking visitors to look inwards and reconnect with the “radiance of all life.”

POPPY BARING: To start, how did the concept for “how deep how far we can go” begin? Was there a specific inspiration that made you want to investigate ancestral consciousness and speculative ecology?

AYA TAKANO: As I deepen my thoughts on the mysteries of the universe and life forms, as well as the mystery of consciousness—which I am exploring as the theme of my life—I came to feel that I want to depict a journey of fusion beneath the collective unconscious.

Los Angeles has a spiritual culture, and because [of] sad events such as wildfires, I thought it might be an ideal place to depict a journey of the heart.

I believe that each of us should travel within ourselves and create our own mythology. Personally, I hope for the creation of a mythology of coexistence, compassion, and bliss— something that breaks away from capitalism. I wanted to make it into an exhibition that encourages such a direction.

BARING: Also relating to the exhibition title, what does ‘depth’ mean to you, not just spiritually but also in terms of making, presenting and reacting to art?

TAKANO: I believe that the spiritual is fundamental to everything — to city-making, music, clothing, food, lifestyle, behaviour, love, education, and politics. It is the origin of all things.

"Depth" has a spiritual meaning.

BARING: Your work depicts an interconnected and harmonious mystical world, what’s it like bouncing between that world and reality?

TAKANO: An interconnected and harmonious mystical world is something that is happening within communities of non-human living beings.

Recent studies show that trees and fungi in forests actively communicate and help each other. Of course, there are cunning plants and there are also plants with wisdom. There are cows that give milk to wild foxes, and cows that don’t. But humans take far too much, always one-sidedly. I hope we head toward coexistence, and I believe it is possible.

BARING: Would you say you always exist in both worlds or are the barriers between them somewhat distinct?

TAKANO: I believe that in the unconsciousness of every person, in the truly deep part, inside the body, there is wisdom.

AYA TAKANO *アフリカ、牛と一体化する生活を送る子 | in africa, a person lives a life being one with a cow*, 2025. 80 x 100 x 2.5 cm | 31 1/2 x 39 3/8 x 1 inches. Oil on canvas. ©2025 AYA TAKANO/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy Perrotin.

BARING: You draw from the past and think a lot about the future, can you think of key ways that the present influences you? How does your day-to-day life feed into your imagination and practice?

TAKANO: I believe that everything is truly contained in the present. Only the present creates the future. I want to live the present with all the strength I can give.

I spend my daily life for the exploration of the secrets of the universe. That does not only mean reading books, thinking, or meditating, but I believe that all of my actions deeply affect both my work and my life, so I value taking care of things like cleaning, cooking, and staying physically active on my own.

BARING: How has living in Japan influenced your practice?

TAKANO: Growing up surrounded by manga, anime, characters, and science fiction has had a strong influence on my art style. At the same time, I am deeply interested in Japan’s ancient culture that has continued for over ten thousand years, as well as the wisdom embedded in Budo (Japanese martial arts), Butoh (Japanese dance), and music. These elements have also profoundly influenced me.

BARING: Can you walk us through a typical day in your studio? How do your pieces begin?

TAKANO: Taking care of my cat, looking after my boyfriend (who is a manga artist and insanely busy, so he can’t do much himself), cleaning, doing daily necessary shopping, hiking in the mountains, visiting the beach, reading books, and painting — these are the things I do.

My artwork is born out of these everyday activities.

BARING: Many of the characters in your work appear suspended between worlds—child and adult, earthy and celestial—all living in an undefined time. What attracts you to these in-between states?

TAKANO: They are undifferentiated spiritual beings living deep within all existence. I believe such beings exist within us, and I depict them in my work.

BARING: Your work presents an ideal existence and provides hope for that, how and why do you think your work remains positive and hopeful?

TAKANO: I have a strong hope that everyone can coexist in harmony in a better world. Because of that, I believe I must keep expressing hope and freedom in my work.

BARING: Finally, there is an element of, particularly female, teenage nostalgia. What role does femininity play in your work and why do you think this is a recurring component?

TAKANO: Since the advent of written records in modern civilizations, femininity has been oppressed in most cultures. However, I feel that the root of life itself lies in the feminine, especially as some studies say the Y chromosome is gradually disappearing.

I believe that the right-brain, unconscious world will emerge more strongly than the logical, authoritative, left-brain world in the future. The spirituality of teenage, or even earlier childhood, is not merely nostalgia but a pathway to a better future.

‘how far how deep we can go' is on view through August 29th 2025 at the Perrotin Gallery, 5036 W Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90019.

AYA TAKANO *地球上の全植物の精 | the spirit of all plants on earth*, 2025112 x 145 x 3 cm | 44 1/8 x 57 1/16 x 1 3/16 inches. Oil on canvas. ©2025 AYA TAKANO/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy Perrotin.

Put On a Face, Any Face: An Interview of Kenny Scharf and Shai Baitel

July 21, 2025

interview by Kim Shveka

It’s not often that an artist and a curator connect the way Kenny Scharf and Shai Baitel do. Emotional, the biggest show of Scharf’s career, didn’t come out of a typical museum timeline or curatorial trend. It came from Baitel’s urgent feeling of injustice that the art world hadn’t given Scharf the recognition he deserved, and he wanted to change that. When we spoke, Scharf joined the Zoom call straight from his studio, answering questions with a paintbrush in hand. It felt intimate and telling: Scharf doesn’t separate art from life. His world is constantly in motion, fueled by color, feeling, and spontaneity.

The dynamics between Scharf and Baitel set the tone for a conversation that highlighted the reverent partnership between them, whose collaborative spirit is at the heart of the exhibition. What initially started as an interview about an art show quickly turned into a rhythmic conversation about friendships, personal stories, timing, and how things can easily fall into place when two people believe in the same thing.

Scharf came up in the late seventies and early eighties in New York, rubbing shoulders with Basquiat and Haring, bringing a psychedelic, cartoon-fueled energy that set him apart. He paints like he’s channeling something from another planet, but also something deeply familiar and simple. Emotional is more than a retrospective—it’s a long-overdue celebration of a singular voice in contemporary art.

KIM SHVEKA: What are some of your earlier memories of art?

KENNY SCHARF: I didn’t know much about art, just what I got from TV shows, when they had a typical artist in a beret holding a palette with a brush. When I got a little older, my parents took me to the Huntington Library in LA to see “Pinkie” by Thomas Lawrence and “The Blue Boy” by Thomas Gainsborough. It was a whole big deal. Everyone always rushed to see it, like “Oh, you like art? You have to see those two.” I was very excited back then, but to be honest, I didn’t really know what was going on with the art world until I was at my neighbor’s house. They had this book on Dalí—I’ll never forget the feeling I had looking through this book—I was completely blown away. So, that was a very conscious feeling of recognizing art, I think I was about ten.

I was growing up in the suburbs in the sixties, and we didn’t have access to art, but we had those stores called head shops, they would sell skateboards, T-shirts, posters, and smoking paraphernalia. I used to go and look at the psychedelic posters, and they also had [René] Magritte, Dalí, and MC Escher, so I got that also through the head shops.

SHVEKA: This exhibition is built around six core feelings: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and awe. Shai, why did you decide to organize Kenny’s art in this way?

SHAI BAITEL: I was fascinated by Kenny’s approach to the canvas, the way he incorporated emotions blew me away. Throughout history, artists have tried to incorporate feelings through gestures and form, and Kenny does it in such a simple and effortless way. It was incredibly effective in communication, which immediately threw me into the phenomenon of emojis. I saw Kenny’s work as some kind of prophecy; he was able to not only reduce it to such an incredible way of simplicity, but also fast-forward to the way we communicate now. There are no other artists that have achieved such a level of effective communication. During research, my team and I looked into the science of emotions and found Paul Ekman, a psychologist who studied universal facial expressions across cultures. He identified six core emotions that unify all humans: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and awe. I realized that Kenny does it in the same way, which blew my mind. Kenny hasn’t gone to the school of anthropology, but he came to the same conclusion. When you observe Kenny’s creatures, it’s like observing humanity, with the same understanding of where those emotions are divided. This revelation became the foundation for the exhibition, and the reason it’s called Emotional.

SHVEKA: Your work first resonated in the 1980s during a time of underground energy and cultural rebellion. But today, it feels like your art resonates for a new generation as well—it’s more relevant than ever. What do you think they see in your work that mirrors or differs from the ’80s?

SCHARF: Thank you. Because I made my name in New York at that time in the ’80s, and it was such a celebrated group, people associate me with that period. But I don't feel particularly attached to any time, I feel I’m very much in the moment that I’m living in. I feel that possibly the rest of the world is catching up to me just now. So in that respect, it’s not like it has different messages so much for today as it did then; these are universal things. Art should be able to exist in any time; it shouldn't speak only to one time because you want it to last forever. That was always in my mind.

SHVEKA: You often mix pop culture with sci-fi surrealism and bright colors. Can you go further into your creative process, and how do you translate your mind into your work?

SCHARF: It’s nothing I think about, it's just kind of natural. I show up every day and start with no plan, just go. My subject matter goes way back to childhood. Growing up in LA, in the early ’60s, there was this cultural obsession with the future. After Sputnik launched in ’57, the space race began, and there was this optimistic future idea of rockets and forward motion. It inspired everything—ads, cars, TV. The cars looked like rocket ships. We really believed by 1984 we’d be vacationing on the moon. I loved this idea and I believed it.

But then the ’70s hit, and that whole fantasy just died. We went from this crazy colored plastic sci-fi imagery to avocado green, macrame, and beige. Cars were boxy, architecture dull, and no one seemed to care about that dream anymore. I didn't want the fantasy to end, so I continued this fantasy on my own.

BAITEL: You know, Kenny, my art career began with Sputnik, too. I don’t know if I ever told you. Twenty-five years ago, I was working at the United Nations, and it had tons of artwork that was just terribly curated. When you enter, you had a collage by Chagall, six or seven carpets from Iran next to it, a pagoda from Japan, a stone from Jerusalem, and the Sputnik from Russia. It was chaotic. I mentioned it to my boss, who sent me to the head of facilities. He told me the U.N. had over 5,000 artworks gifted by member nations—but no curator. He handed me the checklist, and I just started organizing exhibitions myself. That was the beginning of my interest in art—so yes, it all started with Sputnik for me too.

SCHARF: (Laughs) Wow, there you go, the Sputnik. Can you guys see me, or am I out of the picture? Because I'm painting at the same time while we talk.

BAITEL: Oh, Kim, you have such an authentic interview.

SHVEKA: Definitely! While you paint, I wanted to ask more specifically about the emoji paintings. Do you see them as a translation of your emotions? Other people’s emotions? Who are the emojis?

SCHARF: They're everyone. And they're me. There are no rules. I started them in 2018, and I finished them in 2022, so it was right during COVID.

That was obviously a very emotional time for everyone. Well, we’re still having emotional times. It’s a combination of how I feel inside, with what’s going on in the world, and my reaction to that. Sometimes it’s outside, sometimes it’s inside. Sometimes it is someone I just looked at in the street. Sometimes, I’m in a really bad mood and I want to be in a good mood, so I make myself happy. And sometimes it’s the opposite: I’m in a really bad mood and I want to give the anger a way out. There are no rules. As we know, you can have so many emotions at the same time, in the same day, in the same hour, in the same minute. So, they’re all over the place, just like I am, and like emotions are.

BAITEL: I had previously suggested a lot of the things that resulted in the dialogue that Kenny and I had for the past two years or so. It was also about me learning about Kenny and his interaction with the environment, his love for the Earth, nature, and plants. His love for LA, for the ocean, the beaches. All of that goodness and greatness is very pure and very natural. It’s a double meaning in a way. There is some naivety in his artwork, which I love so much.

Kenny’s personality is embedded so greatly in the art, something that you don’t see every day with artists; he’s very honest. He’s very candid in his art making. Every day, when I would call him at about 9 AM in LA, he would always say, “Shai, I’m swimming.”

SCHARF: (Laughs) I just came back from the ocean.

BAITEL: You see? He swims in Venice Beach, and when you walk the promenade, there are a lot of characters, a lot of creatures. He encounters those characters when he walks the promenade, then he goes to the studio and paints them. You might not realize it, but you can see the funky, the playful, the colorful, the vibrant. There is such incredible dynamics between them. So there’s a great wealth of inspiration in the context of Kenny’s everyday.

SHVEKA: Well, I guess it’s a good thing you have a beach near you. Is that the idea behind building a beach in the exhibition space?

BAITEL: Yes, I wanted to bring the greatness of the beach to the Chinese audience as well, and this is why we created the Kenny Scharf Beach Club on the first floor of the museum. It is probably the first urban beach created in Shanghai. This is exactly the reason for those who do not have a beach to experience, we brought them a utopian beach, à la Kenny Scharf.

SHVEKA: How does the Chinese audience react to it?

SCHARF: It blows me away. I’ve gotten pictures sent to me of all the strollers, kids come with their shovels and their pails and their parents and the grandparents, and they hang out in there. It’s like 100 million degrees outside and humid, but inside is air-conditioned splendor, and you can look at the river. It’s kind of sad (laughs) but it’s kind of sweet. Next time, we have to put an actual swimming pool in there.

BAITEL: It’s a perfect fantasy. Exactly like Kenny said. The sand is not real; it’s pink. You have the water in the background, but it’s of the river. And then, you have all the creatures, which aren’t real either. But all together it gives you a great escapism into the closest thing to a beach club, that could be maybe Venice Beach, in California.

SCHARF: Or Mars. (laughs)

SHVEKA: (laughs) Well, denial is a river. Shai, since the emojis weren’t connected to any specific emotion from Kenny’s side as he drew them, how did you align each emoji to a certain emotion?

BAITEL: When I visited Kenny in LA, we explored how visual languages have evolved. We went back to ancient Egyptian symbols and Ekman’s research on universal facial expressions and their connection to emotion. Though often seen as stereotypes, these expressions are biologically real. We looked at Kenny’s artworks—not just the tondos—and identified emotional themes. Grouping them was fascinating, and even with some debate between Kenny, my team, and me, we eventually agreed on six core emotions. That process was a discovery in itself.

SCHARF: When I was a kid, I came across a “how to draw a cartoon” book. The rules I learned there are basically what I applied to the tondo paintings, and it worked. I really studied it. But it’s not always exactly defined; there’s no exact science.

SHVEKA: I guess if there were disagreements between you two during the curation, the audience might also say, “But this isn’t angry,” or “This isn’t fear,” which adds a layer of playfulness.

SCHARF: Exactly like life—things aren’t always exactly how you think it is, it just causes you to think about it more.

BAITEL: We wanted to allow the audience to interpret it on their own. It’s not written in stone, but rather a recommendation; it’s just the way we felt about it. Even when we explain it through art history, looking at Caravaggio, Goya, Rembrandt, or any of the masters, it’s about how they incorporated emotions based on specific scenes or events they were depicting.

SHVEKA: You said you see your artistic style as timeless, but I would still love to know: how do you think the ’80s influenced you in becoming who you are today?

SCHARF: I understand why people are so excited to learn about the ’80s. I think the reason is that my generation was the last one before the internet changed everything. Before that, there was a real urgency of place, especially for artists who wanted to participate. Something that doesn’t exist anymore because you can be anywhere now. In the old days, nothing compared to being in the same room with people. That sense of community of artists meeting in the same place—that’s what used to happen in the ’80s. It also goes back to Paris, Berlin, and earlier times in history. Artists would gather and create together.

SHVEKA: Gen Z and millennials are incredibly nostalgic. We always return to that longing for the past, thinking that things were better back then, without the noise of technology.

SCHARF: I was the same way. I was obsessed with the Beatniks of the ’50s, and we could pretend we were part of that world, because it hadn’t changed much. But the change from the ’80s to now? It’s insane how different it is. We can never go back, and it’s very hard to pretend to live in that world if you choose to, because then you have to be completely off the grid, and no one really does that. The ’80s were the very last moment of that kind in history.

SHVEKA: Would you go back if you could?

SCHARF: Oh no! Definitely not. I wouldn’t want to relive all that pain. People romanticize the ’80s, but there was a lot of death. What I always say is: the truly romantic period was the late ’70s to 1982. That’s when AIDS began, and overnight, the atmosphere completely changed. People celebrate that brief moment of freedom in the early ’80s. I was lucky—I caught the tail end of it. I moved to New York in 1978. I was still a teenager. ALONE (laughs).

SHVEKA: I wanted to ask about the relationship between you two because it seems like you’re very good friends. How did you merge during the curation process?

SCHARF: Well, I’m always skeptical. It took a while to convince me, but Shai was so enthusiastic, I couldn’t say no, and we started doing it, and it became very exciting.

BAITEL: Kenny was indeed skeptical, but I knew I wanted to do a large show for him. He’s a giant. He’s the last voice from a historic time in contemporary art; his contributions will be studied for generations. In art, there’s often this sophistication that can feel patronizing, skipping over huge parts of society. I always say—and this is also Kenny’s philosophy—art belongs to everybody. There will always be great artists who cater to the elite few. But Kenny reaches millions, I wanted to emphasize that. I also felt there was injustice in the art world. For years, there wasn’t a proper large-scale survey of Kenny’s work in a museum space that matched his impact. In the end, I found a way to convince him. And like Kenny said, we became friends in the process. Honestly, it’s impossible not to fall in love with Kenny. He’s adorable. I love good people. I told him it’s the first out of many. I hope for this show to travel to as many museums as possible because it carries a great message of optimism, of goodness, while at the same time, it educates the audience on this important chapter of art during what I described as the East Village movement. It is the greater chapter of emotions in art. We really have become close friends through the process, and I know this friendship is for the long run.

SCHARF: That’s right, baby!

SHVEKA: Did Kenny let you take the lead, or were you both part of the curation process?

BAITEL: Every item is Kenny’s fingerprint. I can suggest ideas, but in the end, the voice of the artist has to be the center. The curator is a facilitator, a translator to the audience. For instance, the emotions are divided into segments, and each segment has a color. I went to Kenny for him to give me a color for every emotion. He also gave me the soundtrack for every segment.

SHVEKA: Who composed the soundtrack?

SCHARF: Scott Ewolt. He is the composer and editor of the music. He composed specifically for every emotion. He’s a visual artist, but he’s also a DJ. He works on the soundtracks for a lot of the environments I do.

SHVEKA: As Shai mentioned before, you believe that art is for everyone. It’s also a fundamental ideology of street art. Can you talk more about the decision to collaborate with fashion designer Kim Jones for Dior?

SCHARF: Fashion and my art always came together. When I was a young artist, I was always incorporating my work on t-shirts and objects. Art had no boundaries of where it belonged, and of course, fashion can easily combine without effort. I had my very first show in 1979 at Fiorucci, a store that is no longer here. I was making clothes and selling them at different fashion stores; they were all handmade. To this day, I’m still making one-of-a-kind clothes. I often use silk screen in the canvases, and instead of washing it, I’m like, “let’s throw it on some t-shirts.” I always dreamed of collaborating with the major designers because I not only want to make quality, but quantity is also a great thing. So, having these collaborations is perfectly natural; it’s what I’ve been doing for decades.

SHVEKA: I think it’s safe to say that fashion houses are somewhat obsessed with collaborating with artists.

BAITEL: There’s something curious about fashion houses reaching out to artists in greater numbers this past decade. What was curious about the approach of Kim Jones is that he was trying, similarly to Kenny, to bring the quality of the Parisian couturier in a way that the audience can relate to. Kim understands the power of artists that originated on the street; he has a very sharp eye for identifying what can actually work. Not every brand aligns with the artist in a way that results in collections that are successful, both artistically and commercially.

SCHARF: It was the highest-selling collab between an artist and a luxury brand in history. Kim really studied the art. That’s why it worked. He did it so well that I didn’t change anything they showed me.

SHVEKA: How do you hope people will experience your work? When visitors come to the exhibition, how do you envision them receiving and emotionally engaging with what they see?

SCHARF: I offer many levels to the viewer, but I never want to dictate how the viewer interprets. If the viewer wants to delight in the joy and color and shape and surface, that is great. But if the viewer chooses to see more, I offer that too. It’s all up to the viewer how far they want to go and think about any other concept besides what I offer on the surface.

SHVEKA: Do you feel a certain responsibility for the people influenced by your art?

SCHARF: Lately I’ve been saying, “I'm really sorry.” (laughs)

SHVEKA: Do you have any favorite reactions of people when they see your art?

SCHARF: I just like to see people looking and really studying it and taking their time, because then it lets me know that it’s keeping them for more than a second. Anything anyone’s going to say is going to be nice. I would love to eavesdrop and hear people say bad things. (laughs)

Emotional is on view through October 8, 2025, at MAM Shanghai, 4777 Binjiang Avenue, Pudong New Area, Shanghai

It Has Its Own Presence: An Interview of Ceramicist Kathy Butterly

July 7, 2025

interview by Maisie McDermid

Kathy Butterly, sixty-two, is one of forty-one women whose work is being showcased at The Grey Art Museum’s exhibition, Anonymous Was A Woman. The show celebrates the recipients of the grant, anonymously awarded to mid-career women artists living and working in the United States. Butterly’s ceramic sculptures—Heavy Head (2002), Chinese Landscape (2005), and Garter (1996)—are three of the 251 works on display until July 19, 2025.

Butterly, born in Amityville, New York, splits her time between New York City and Maine. “If I didn’t have Maine as an outlet, I don’t think I’d still be in New York,” she said over the phone from her home in Maine. Butterly did not come from an art family—one of the reasons she initially believed she would study interior design over an art like ceramics. But once she began studying at Moore College of Art and Design, where she met American sculptor Viola Frey, she discovered her passion for combining painting and sculpture. While she sipped juice from a wine glass and I coffee from a ceramic mug, we talked about the evolution of her work, her Anonymous Was a Woman grant, and the different functions of the interiors and exteriors of her lively sculptures.

MAISIE MCDERMID: When did you make your first sculpture? And what do your earlier works feel like to you now, compared with the works you’ve made in your recent career?

KATHY BUTTERLY: Technically, my first sculpture was at Moore College of Art. That’s where I got the bug to work with clay. It’s so interesting because I’m the same person. I’ve just experienced a lot. But when I look at the work, I know it’s mine.

I was really inspired by Marsden Hartley and George Grosz. These were my punk rock years, so my work was really kind of aggressive, like illustrative carvings and storytelling on the outside. Now, I don’t necessarily want to tell a story anymore, but I want to express the vibe of what’s going on in the world right now. I’ve evolved from describing ideas to just putting out a vibe. This is a feeling. It’s more condensed and more about abstraction. I’m tightening the parameters more and more. Right now, up in Maine, I’m trying to get rid of as much excess baggage as possible.

MCDERMID: How did it feel to present your work professionally for the first time at Franklin Parrasch Gallery, versus previously showing your work in classroom settings?

BUTTERLY: I was so excited. Franklin Parrasch had contacted me, saying he wanted to meet me. He asked if I could bring in a sample of my work, and I did. Then he offered me a show for the next month. And I was like, What? Yeah, there’s no way. He told me I should really think about it, so I went home and thought about it.

At the time, I was living in Hoboken, New Jersey, with my now-husband, then-boyfriend, Tom Burkhart. I was living illegally in an old factory building on a futon next to my kiln, and I would work as a waitress to earn money and teach summer camp for kids in Brooklyn. I thought, You know what? I’m just going to go for it. So I called him up, and in one month, I put together seven pieces. But I didn’t sleep. I literally slept next to the kiln. I actually brought one piece to the opening warm, like you could still hear the glaze crackling a bit.

MCDERMID: As the Anonymous Was A Woman Grant defines itself as an unrestricted grant of “$50,000 awarded yearly to fifteen women artists over the age of forty at a critical junction in their career,” how was 2002, the year you received the grant, a critical junction in your career?

BUTTERLY: Back then, the award money was $25,000, which is probably equal to $50,000 now. But you didn’t apply. Somebody nominated you, and they were anonymous. You had no clue you were being nominated, and then you had no clue you were going to get the award.

I had a one-and-a-half-year-old and a three-and-a-half-year-old, and I was at the park with them when my husband told me there was something on the answering machine. He was like, “You have to call this number.” I went to a pay phone on the street and called the number. I don’t remember who answered, but they said, “Oh, you’ve been awarded the Anonymous Was A Woman grant, and it’s $25,000 unrestricted.” And I just started crying. It was so important. I definitely needed the money, but it was also recognition of my hard work. And what came from this, for me, was monumental. After receiving the award, Laura Hoptman was curating the Carnegie International, and she invited me to be part of the international. It changed my life.

MCDERMID: Is there a community amongst the recipients of the Anonymous Was A Woman grant?

BUTTERLY: Before, there was not because we didn’t know who Susan Unterberg was. She remained anonymous until she revealed her identity. She then organized a picnic at Madison Square Park for anybody who had ever received an award. There were a lot of amazing women in the park that day—painters, sculptors, filmmakers, and photographers. It was the first time I ever met Susan Unterberg, so I slipped her a little note, like a thank-you note. After that, we got in touch, and we hung out. We’re friends now. I consider her a dear friend.

MCDERMID: Could you briefly walk me through your three pieces in the Grey Art Museum exhibition? Did you choose them, or did the curators request them?

BUTTERLY: The curators requested them. These pieces are all from around 2002 because they wanted to honor the period from when I got the award. They wanted to showcase Heavy Head (2002) because I made that piece right around 2002, which was right after 9/11. It represented the fear that was in my head—all closed up, not an open vessel. You know, having two children and living in the lockdown zone in lower Manhattan was terrifying.

The other pieces—Chinese Landscape (2005) and Garter (1996)—started from a pint glass shape. They’re from a very generic form, and what I try to do is cast it and then manipulate the form to find meaning in it. They’re kind of like my kids; they both came from exactly the same place, like me and my husband, my body, yet they’re so uniquely different. With Chinese Landscape, I was thinking about going somewhere other than being in my head; after 9/11, it was about going someplace else.

Image courtesy of The Grey Art Museum

MCDERMID: I like the way you spoke about the gendered elements of your work in an interview once before. You said, “The works are an extension of myself. It’s from my point of view. Because they’re abstracted, I also think they’re open to interpretation. But, yes, they’re very female, and I’m proud of that. Especially starting out in the time that I did with ceramics.” Could you elaborate on how femininity appears in your work? What does that look like to you?

BUTTERLY: A lot of those early pieces were very fleshy and very sexual; it was when I fell in love with my husband. And I don’t believe in holding back. I just make what needs to be made. My thing is that we’re universal. Everybody has the same feelings; we just don’t talk about them.

Another thing that gets spoken about pretty often with my work is that it’s physically small. But when I’m working on it, it’s my universe—that four or five-inch area. It’s a metaphysical experience for me. That’s my world, and that’s my love affair. Or sometimes I’m having a fight with my work. But that’s the piece, and I have to make something that feels really right and genuine. I want my work to feel as though it’s supposed to be here, that it has every right to be here. It has to have an internal spirit to it, or, you know, a life force.

It’s so interesting to me—this idea of using a form, such as a vessel or cup. It’s a space unto itself. It contains space that’s nowhere else in the world. That’s its space. It’s part of our world, but then it contains its own world. And there are many times within a piece that I’ll really work on the interiors.

MCDERMID: This intrigues me—the interior of a piece. Usually, when looking at a sculpture, I focus my attention on its exterior.

BUTTERLY: With Garter and Chinese Landscape, oh, my goodness, they are equally about inside and outside. Chinese Landscape is luscious. There’s a pool of glazed water at the bottom. The green is all clay that I applied from taking a tiny pin and poking it like thousands of times, until it created what looked like moss. And then I glazed it.

So after 9/11, when my head was closed and the form was so closed and full of fear, I opened up. I felt like I didn’t want to be fearful; I wanted to expose everything. That’s when the insides of the vessels became as important as the outside.

MCDERMID: Your pieces to me feel very alive; I mean, the creation process of a ceramic sculpture itself feels very lively with the heat and reaction elements in the kiln. Can you tell me about how you feel life in your works? And how do you decide when a piece is finished?

BUTTERLY: Sometimes you just know when a piece is done, and it’s a surprise. I’m trying to fire my works less, but I’ve been known to do anywhere from 10 to 35 firings in the kiln. So, it’s an additive process, and it’s very intuitive. I keep adding colors until the piece feels right, or I’ll carve those tiny little beads. I don’t know if you’ve witnessed any of the beads, but there are these tiny, little beads that are hand-carved in place with a tiny pin. So it’s really labor-intensive, and it’s a labor of love. It’s meditation, in a way. In this world, I’m finding that sometimes I need something to focus on that’s just a bead, you know?

Up here in Maine, I’m getting ready for two shows. I’ve been up here a month and a half, and I’m just carving forms. I was working on nine projects recently at one time, and they all kind of have this conversation. There are different things to be done on different ones at different times. And I would find myself like, Is this done yet? You know, Come on, get it in the kiln. Let’s get ready for glazing. And then, in my heart, I’m like, No, I probably got, like, two more days to work on this. So then I would have to go into another one.

I’m not in a rush, why? What’s the point? The point is to be present and make something with intention and honesty—to go forward and learn more, to get fully absorbed into what I’m experiencing, and to give 100% to the piece I’m working on. To get it to the point of not needing me anymore because it has its own presence.

Diane Arbus and the Webs We Weave

June 23, 2025

Diane Arbus, *Constellation*, 2023–2024, The Tower, Main Gallery, LUMA Arles, France. All artworks © The Estate of Diane Arbus Collection Maja Hoffmann/LUMA Foundation. Installation Photo © Adrian Deweerdt

text by Kim Shveka

Diane Arbus’s photography has long unsettled and fascinated viewers, defying easy interpretation. In Constellation, the newly opened exhibition at The Armory, curator Matthieu Humery brings a second life to her work; not to explain or categorize, but to invite quiet, intimate dialogue between the viewer and the photographs. Featuring 454 photographs from the artist’s archive, including many rarely seen, the exhibition defers any chronological or thematic structure, favoring a layout without linear direction, making every encounter entirely unique and unpredictable. The experience is haunting, dissociating the viewer from the fact that they’re in an art show, and instead allowing them to sink into provoked emotions, completely immersed in an entirely human experience, dissolving the distance between audience and the subjects.

In our conversation, Humery shares what it means to curate with restraint, how working with a posthumous body of work introduces both freedom and distance and what it felt like to place each image by hand in the space, listening for their rhythm.

KIM SHVEKA: Arbus’s work has often been misread or misused, sometimes seen as too voyeuristic. How did you approach this complexity in your curation?

MATTHIEU HUMERY: What I really wanted was to find a way to present her entire body of work without interpreting each image individually. I deliberately avoided passing any kind of judgment, neither my own nor anyone else’s. Instead, I wanted to create a system that would allow all 454 images to be seen together, in a way that encourages the viewer to explore freely and draw their own connections.

The structure of the exhibition forces a certain kind of encounter: one where the visitor must navigate the work for themselves, discover things on their own terms, and confront the images through personal experience. That process of self-directed exploration invites a different kind of understanding—intuitive, intimate, open-ended.

In this context, the photographs that are sometimes labeled as voyeuristic may appear in a different light. Rather than being intrusive, they might reveal something more fragile, even tender. Seen within the full constellation of her work, they begin to feel less like transgressions and more like windows into something deeply human. That’s the complexity I wanted to preserve, the sense of a gaze that doesn’t impose meaning, but instead looks back at us.

SHVEKA: You worked with hundreds of unpublished photographs. How did you balance discovery and restraint in your selection? Do you find it easier or more challenging to curate art by a deceased artist?

HUMERY: I didn’t make any distinction between well-known and previously unseen images. My approach was to dismantle all the usual categories, to mix the series, the themes, the formats, and to avoid any chronological or hierarchical structure. I deliberately sought to blur the boundaries, to let the images coexist freely, regardless of their familiarity, their subject matter, or their scale.

As for working with a deceased artist, I’m not sure whether it’s easier or harder, but it is certainly different. There’s always something that escapes us. Death introduces distance: it forces us to reflect on a body of work that is complete, and yet whose interpretation remains permanently open. In a way, once an artwork has been created, and even more so when the artist is no longer here, it escapes its maker. The work survives, but it does so on its own terms.

SHVEKA: In building this exhibition from Neil Selkirk’s archive of posthumous prints, how did you navigate the tension between honoring Arbus’s artistic autonomy and interpreting her legacy through your own curatorial lens?

HUMERY: As I mentioned before, my intention was never to interpret the work, but rather to create the conditions in which each visitor could encounter the photographs and make sense of them on their own terms. I believe that’s the most respectful approach one can take with an artist’s work, especially with an artist as complex and singular as Diane Arbus.

By resisting a curatorial voice that explains or contextualizes too much, I hoped to preserve her autonomy, to let the photographs speak for themselves, and to allow the viewer the space to look, to feel, to connect, and ultimately to decide. In that sense, the exhibition is less about offering a definitive reading than about opening up a field of possibilities

SHVEKA: The use of mirrored walls behind the photographs creates a powerful effect. Can you speak about the decision to include the viewer in the visual field? What did you want to make visitors feel?

HUMERY: The viewer becomes part of the fragmented portrait of Diane Arbus reflected in the mirror. They are not only witnesses to the work, they are also participants in it. Within their field of vision, they see the entirety of her oeuvre without ever fully grasping its boundaries. They themselves become one of the elements of the constellation, just like each of the photographs reflected around them.

In that moment, the line between the image and the viewer disappears. The visitor is no longer separate from the work; they are inside it. And I find that idea poetically very powerful.

SHVEKA: The exhibition deliberately avoids a set path or narrative, creating infinite routes with free guidance. (I encountered several women clutching the show’s notes like a treasure map as they were on a scavenger hunt looking for the artist’s self-portrait or her image of Jayne Mansfield.) What was the intention behind it? Were you afraid to intimidate visitors with this “organized chaos” approach to the design?

HUMERY: I deliberately wanted there to be no fixed path through the exhibition. Each visitor should have their own experience that is unique and unrepeatable. It’s a bit like walking through the city: you never know who you’ll come across, and you’ll never encounter the same people in the same way twice. That sense of unpredictability felt essential.

I also wanted to evoke the wandering, the drifting that Diane Arbus herself experienced as she walked the streets of New York, camera in hand. Maybe at first the layout feels disorienting compared to a traditional exhibition, but I think you quickly adapt. You stop trying to “follow” something, and instead, you begin to look. You begin to discover. And that, to me, feels much closer to the spirit of Arbus’s work.

SHVEKA: What responsibilities do you think a curator holds when deliberately designing disorientation, especially with a body of work that potentially unsettles?

HUMERY: I don’t believe it’s necessarily a curator’s job to offer comfort or clarity. Art isn’t meant to reassure, it’s meant to provoke, to raise questions, to unsettle. If a sense of disorientation leads the viewer to truly see, to slow down, to engage differently, then it’s not a risk, it’s a necessity.

Frankly, I find the idea of protecting the public from discomfort more disturbing than any so-called “destabilizing” artwork. We live in a world that is profoundly disorienting, politically, socially, and emotionally. If an exhibition reflects some of that complexity, it’s not a failure of design. It’s a mirror. So no, I wasn’t afraid of disorienting the viewer. I trusted them. And I believe that this kind of experience can be not only challenging but transformative.

SHVEKA: You’ve highlighted showing the “extra-photographic dimension,” that equilibrium beyond the images. How do you see risk, chance, and exploration coming out from the viewer’s movements around the room?

HUMERY: The relationship between the intra-photographic (what is captured within the frame) and the extra-photographic (what lies outside of it—spatially, socially, temporally) is central to this exhibition. The space is conceived not as a neutral container but as an active field of interaction. The movement of the viewer becomes an extension of the photographic act itself, a continuation of Arbus’s own wanderings.

By eliminating any prescribed path, the exhibition encourages risk: the risk of getting lost, of not understanding, of encountering an image at the “wrong” moment. But it’s precisely through this destabilization that exploration becomes possible. The visitor must engage physically and cognitively, not only looking at the images, but navigating the relations between them, including their own place within that field.

Wim Wenders visited the exhibition and told me he wished he could come back and photograph the visitors themselves, wandering, looking, hesitating. For him, it was like a mise en abyme: the images looking at the people, the people becoming images. And I think he’s right, that dynamic creates a subtle tension, a kind of living echo between the photographs and those who come to see them.

SHVEKA: Was there a moment while going through the images or installing the exhibition that brought up strong emotions or something unexpected?

HUMERY: Yes. I placed each of the 454 photographs myself, physically, alone, directly onto the walls and structures. I didn’t rely on any digital tools, no simulations or previews. Just the images, the space, and time. For three days, I hesitated, adjusted, stepped back, and moved forward again. And then, quite suddenly, everything aligned. As if the images began speaking to one another (or precisely not speaking to one another but speaking to me), without effort. It was as if the exhibition revealed itself. That moment was almost transcendent. Quiet, yet deeply moving. I felt a kind of communion with the work (with her work) that I hadn’t anticipated. To be so immersed in it, to feel it take shape around me, was a rare kind of privilege. A moment outside of time. And as the rhythm of the images settled into place, one after the other, I found myself thinking, quietly, gratefully, of Marvin Israel.

Diane Arbus: Constellation is on view through August 17 at the Park Avenue Armory.

BARBARE: A Celebration of Amazigh Heritage Through Food and Fashion At Hotel Grand Amour

June 22, 2025

interview by Oliver Kupper

From June 26 to 28, 2025, chef Walid Sahed and fashion designer José Lamali present BARBARE, a multidisciplinary artistic project at the Book Bar in the Hôtel Grand Amour in Paris. Blending fashion, food, and storytelling, BARBARE is a three-night celebration of the duo’s shared Amazigh heritage—an intimate encounter between tradition and contemporary expression. The project was born from a dialogue between two creative practices: the kitchen and the atelier. For Walid Sahed, cooking is a deeply human act, shaped by memory, migration, and material. Born in Algiers and raised in Pantin, Sahed is the founder of the beloved neighborhood restaurant Les Pantins. His journey has taken him from the kitchens of the Stafford Hotel in London and Le Bristol in Paris to far-flung kitchens in Melbourne and Delhi, experiences that inform his generous, worldly, and emotionally resonant cuisine. Grounded in French culinary craft and open to global influences, Sahed creates food that speaks of belonging and transformation. José Lamali, co-founder of the fashion-art label Études Studio and current artistic director of Aigle, brings a parallel sensitivity to material, memory, and reinvention. A Franco-Moroccan designer whose practice began with secondhand clothing, Lamali’s work blends urban aesthetics with minimal structure and conceptual depth. Over the past decade, he has redefined French fashion through more than 20 Paris Fashion Week shows and, more recently, through his leadership at Aigle—where he has reimagined the brand’s outdoor heritage with a focus on sustainability and transmission. A recent foray into culinary studies marks his growing interest in the sensorial and ritual aspects of creation. Together, Sahed and Lamali have imagined BARBARE as a living installation—where traditional Berber flavors, garments, gestures, and stories unfold in a contemporary setting. The evenings will feature a menu inspired by North African cuisine, including mechouia salad, a light chicken tajine, and other seasonal dishes. Guests are invited to share in an immersive experience that honors the past while celebrating transformation, hybridity, and cultural resilience. BARBARE is not only a tribute to Amazigh identity—it is a space of exchange, warmth, and creation where roots become routes, and where tradition and modernity meet at the table.

OLIVER KUPPER: Since your Amazigh roots are the origin of this unique culinary experience, maybe we can start with both of your personal histories and how they have influenced your practices.

WALID SAHED: I was born in Algiers (Algeria) in 1986. Both of my parents were born in the Atlas Mountains and belong to the Kabyle ethnic group, which is one of the many groups that make up the larger Amazigh (Berber) people—natives of North Africa. My roots have always influenced my practices and my worldview, but this is the first time I’ve created a project that expresses part of my Amazigh identity.

JOSÉ LAMALI: I’m a French-Moroccan designer. I founded Études Studio and was later named artistic director at Aigle. I’ve spent over a decade shaping a visual and narrative-driven approach to fashion—a journey that’s far from over. While I remain fully engaged in the world of fashion, I’m also drawn to multidisciplinary practices. With Barbare, I continue exploring themes of identity and transmission through food, alongside my friend Walid Sahed. My Amazigh roots, through my father, who was born in Morocco and came to France in 1968, are a quiet but constant source of inspiration in everything I do.

KUPPER: Can you tell us how this inspired the collaboration?

SAHED: With José, we wanted to honor our roots and bring them to the forefront. We also wanted people to understand that the Amazigh people are native to North Africa—from Libya to Morocco, across the Sahara Desert. It’s a vast culture that is too often forgotten.

LAMALI: This collaboration is about celebrating where we come from—not through clichés, but through culture, nuance, and emotion. The name Barbare comes from the word once used by invaders to describe North African people they didn’t understand—seen as “savages.” It’s from this word that Berbère later emerged. But these people called themselves Amazigh, which means “free human.” We carry that freedom in us. Our identities are layered, and rather than explaining them, we let them speak through what we create. Barbare is simply a joyful, creative expression of that richness.

KUPPER: Can you talk about the marriage of food and fashion?

SAHED: For this collaboration, we imagined a kind of exchange in which each of us stepped into the other’s world. José entered my culinary world to co-create a menu, and I entered his world to design unique T-shirts.

LAMALI: For me, fashion and food are both intimate ways of expressing my sensitivity. As an art director in fashion, I work with shape, rhythm, and emotion—building visual narratives. With Barbare, I’m not a chef, but I approach food with the same instinct: creating moments that carry meaning, memory, and presence. It’s just another way to tell a story—one you can feel and, this time, taste.

KUPPER: What can we expect from this pop up?

SAHED: A genuine moment of sharing. It will be a tribute to who we are: French, Amazigh, Algerian, and Moroccan. Food is the most universal thing in the world, but it can also be a window into history and identity. With this pop-up, we want to bring a native North African vibe to the table.

KUPPER: How did you two meet originally?

SAHED: I met José a few years ago at my restaurant in Pantin. He used to come with his wife and kids. I immediately connected with his energy.

LAMALI: I used to come into Pantin with my wife and kids—he says it was my energy, but really, it was his. And his sausage with potato purée.

KUPPER: How does Paris influence your practices - as a city rich with culinary expectations but also one with a rich multicultural fabric?

SAHED: Paris is incredibly inspiring—a truly creative city full of diverse influences. I believe we should pay more attention to the cultures shaped by France’s colonial past. These cultures push us forward and keep our identity evolving. It’s a vast heritage that I love working with.

LAMALI: Paris has always been at the heart of my work in fashion—it’s a city where style, culture, and ideas come together naturally. It’s also a place where food and identity are deeply linked. What I love about Paris is that it’s not just a capital of taste, it’s a space where different cultures meet and mix every day. That richness quietly shapes everything I do—in fashion and now through Barbare.

KUPPER: In a world of conflict, how can interdisciplinary practices and collaborations like this carve a path to hope for the future?

SAHED: I believe our differences make society richer and more dynamic. Collaborating and sharing across disciplines is a way to send a message of hope. That’s exactly what we’re trying to do. With this collaboration, we wanted to highlight a part of our culture that contributes to our shared identity. Having multiple cultures in one society is a gift—and we’re proud of it.

LAMALI: I couldn’t have said it better — it’s all about sharing, connection, and showing how diversity can be a source of beauty and strength.

Reservation at 01.44.16.03.30 or online Book Bar, Hôtel Grand Amour 18 rue de la Fidélité. On June 26th, Autre will be celebrating the release of its DESIRE issue at The Book Bar from 6pm to 8pm with special guests Mia Khalifa and Nick Sethi. Light bites and drinks will be complimentary. For full dinner service, make a reservation above.

Phoebe Bor and Sam Macer: A Conversation between Two Young British Designers

June 19, 2025

Phoebe and Sam, 2025, by Luke Soteriou In London. — *Phoebe and Sam,* 2025. Photographed by Luke Soteriou In Macer’s studio in London.

interview by Poppy Baring
portraits by Luke Soteriou

Despite the oh-so-competitive fashion industry and the unpredictable nature of the creative job market, young designers Sam Macer and Phoebe Bor demonstrate that there are many different ways to achieve results in this turbulent world. Both designers, who have been friends for several years, have forged their own way and achieved great success. Bor, who has recently graduated from Central Saint Martins (CSM) and is currently experiencing all the attention that comes from an outstanding degree collection, discusses her experience of university, her inspirations, and how she feels about the industry that awaits her.

Sam Macer, who completed the Central Saint Martins foundation course alongside Phoebe, was not accepted into the undergraduate degree programme. However, before finishing his year of studying, his final project, which was a beautiful performance piece involving setting a skirt on fire and letting it burn, received a lot of online attention, giving him the platform to grow on his own. Five years down the line, Macer has dressed stars such as Rosalía, Julia Fox, and SZA.

Both artists discuss their experiences in a way that only friends can. They have a very candid conversation concerning the pros and cons of the type of environment somewhere like CSM creates, their different ways of working and how they have, and continue to remain inspired and authentic. They provide great insight into what it’s like being a young designer; whether you’re just entering the industry or already fully immersed.

POPPY BARING: How did your friendship start?

PHOEBE BOR: We met on our foundation year, I think it was on our first day and there were a group of people standing outside and Sam was there. I introduced myself and we became close straight away … I think we all just went to the pub that evening and then the rest was history, but I found out later that Sam actually thought I was someone completely different for about four months.

SAM MACER: There was another girl that I thought was Phoebe. After three months of being friends, I asked Phoebs about her dad’s jewelry business and she said my dad’s not a jeweler.

BOR: He just thought I was someone completely different. But yes, we hit it off on the first day.

BARING: What would you say are your different inspirations and ways of working?

MACER: I think you probably look more inwardly, it’s more personal but my work is not, I don’t think I draw on anything personal for my work. So I’d say that is the biggest inspiration difference.

BOR: I think I am generally more inspired by personal experience. I grew up and spent a lot of time in the South African bush and I learned a lot through that about nature’s natural materiality. I drew inspiration from the similarities between that and animal textures and started making comparisons. There were so many similarities and links and that inspired me.

BARING: For your final show and with sourcing all of those materials, how is that funded?

BOR: There are opportunities to be sponsored. I got sponsored by a young company in Japan. You reach out to people or people come and find you, but a lot of it you have to fund yourself. There are also scholarships on offer, but that creates a big difference between the ability of people. So, for example, the LVMH scholarship is twenty thousand pounds, so some people have that to play with and some people don’t. So yeah, it’s definitely not an even playing field.

BARING: You both have created amazing art but have been down different paths, how do you think being accepted or rejected by a prestigious institution shaped your confidence, creative approach, or professional path?

MACER: I guess my process wasn’t really a choice. I think it’s relatively common for people to take a year out and reapply to start again the next year, but I didn’t really have the patience or didn’t feel like that was going to be worth me taking out a whole year. So then, it was just a big process of teaching myself everything and learning from there. There has been a lot of learning on the job, making mistakes whilst actively working.

BARING: Even before graduating from the foundation, I remember a teacher not liking the fire idea. Would you say at that point you were already beginning to do your own thing?

MACER: It was definitely an intentional move. I think they were more scared about the danger of it but at that point, I knew there was nothing set up for the future, so I think part of the thought process was I needed to do something really impactful, like borderline shocking, just to make a statement to build a foundation to work off. So yes, I was definitely thinking about that in the making of it.

BARING: Now being five years on your own in this industry without being taught, do you look at that as a positive?

MACER: It was definitely the best thing that happened to me. I learned that craft and execution are really important in my work and having seen Phoebe at university and knowing her experience, that really isn’t actually a taught thing. Even at university, there is still a lot of teaching yourself, especially at places like CSM where they really push the creative aspect of it rather than the craft and technical side of making. So, I don’t think I would have got on well there, I don’t think they would have got what feels important to me.

BOR: It is a very different process. I definitely struggled to find my feet hugely in the first few years of CSM. You get so distracted because there is so much around you. So much noise and then I felt like my placement year (spent working with Harry Pontefract) really helped me, hugely. Just going into industry and having that as a way of learning. I much preferred learning in that capacity and took that mindset when I went back for my final year. I think that that helped me develop my own way of working.

BARING: Do you think those different directions suited you as artists innately or do you think you adapted to the situation you found yourself in?

MACER: I think it makes sense for me as a person. I’m quite reclusive and private anyway. I’ve said to Phoebe I don’t know how she manages to work around that many people. I think it’s impossible being around that many people creating to not have their input coming in. Being able to build my own world here [in his studio] has served me well, but there’s a big part of it—for example this collection, I’ve been working on for probably about a year already and it’s just that collection and me here without any kind of affirmation along the way. That’s quite an intense process because you can get super in your head, seeing the same things every day. Quite often, you find yourself spiraling and going, well that's shit, I don’t like that, or that's boring, or I’ve moved on from that. So, I think that contact part of it is missed and that's quite a valuable thing.

BOR: I couldn’t do what Sam does. I would really struggle. I definitely appreciate the structure and I don’t think I could do without it. I still want to continue having that structure, I enjoy being around other people and it was really important to me to have other people’s input at the same time because you can take it or leave it. There’s a freedom to it, you don’t have to take on everything that everyone says but to have someone reacting to something is really important. It’s that constant ping pong, back and forth in your head and it keeps the blood flowing and the mind ticking over a bit. So, I take my hat off massively to Sam because to go through the process without that would be hard.

MACER: I think working in the industry at the most normal level will fit pretty perfectly in the middle. Where there’s not as much intense engagement as you have at university but also it’s not as isolated as just working on your own thing. If you’re working in a house, it would probably fit perfectly in the middle.

Phoebe's work, 2025, Photographed by Charlie Biglin.

BARING: With so much competition and with that all being right in front of your face on social media, which to some extent is a necessary part of your job, how do you remain productive, original, and confident?

MACER: It’s fucking hard. It’s really hard. I find it really impactful seeing people’s stuff all the time. The brain is going too crazy and I think there’s a lot to be said for just really staying in your own lane with the blinkers on either side because I think as soon as you start looking left or right then it’s easy for the car to just fly off the motorway.

BOR: I would say that I find it quite freeing to believe that in the fashion industry kind of nothing is original anymore. You have to break free from the idea of, oh that’s a jacket that’s been cut before.

It’s about curating stuff in your own way and matching stuff up that makes sense to you. Sometimes the new thing is bringing part of yourself to something that’s already been created. That’s original in itself. Having worked on design teams as an intern, your eyes are open to the fact that that is what a lot of places do, they go through archives and they go through vintage and people send vintage down the runway too and that’s allowed because you’re pairing it with something you’ve made and maybe that’s the fresh thing in itself.

BARING: How do you feel before and after these big moments? I can imagine It’s a big build-up of emotions, what’s the build-up and wind down of that like?

BOR: My biggest moment has definitely been my final collection and I was so nervous. We have an internal show and then we have a press show. When I found out that I was closing the internal show, it just blew my mind because I just thought about myself in the first year and I would have never in a million years thought that that would be the case.

It’s really overwhelming. At CSM, there’s a lot of pressure when you realize what a different opportunity it provides. They invite so many people from industry to that show and it is put on such a pedestal. If you are successful, there is a huge amount of attention and it is quite scary. I had never had that kind of recognition from people before and the immediate reaction was, oh when’s this going to stop, when’s this going to run out, I need to do something else now to keep the momentum, I gotta keep my legs running and moving and trying to hustle out of it. So, you think it’s going to be a big relief but it never stops, but we love it.

BARING: What are your biggest fears or anxieties going forward into a very competitive industry and how do you overcome them?

BOR: Technology. Me and technology, we don’t really mix too well. In big houses, there is a lot of Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign all these things and I’ve never felt that that has been my creative practice, I never lean towards it, I’m not inspired by it hugely and have had the freedom to be like that up until now. I guess because at Saint Martins you are allowed to create in whichever way you choose, but when you go into a company, you have to mold yourself into the way that they do things, but I guess I enjoy the craft and using my hands.

MACER: My main anxiety is probably just sustainability of my energy because there’s so much failure and the work that you see publicly is probably fifteen to twenty percent (max) of the work that I do. There are so many let-downs and peaks and troughs of emotions within such a tight period of time and it’s hugely taxing. I’m definitely still learning the methods of processing it. As soon as I finish a job, I try to maintain my energy by almost forgetting about it and acting like it’s never going to happen because there are too many moments of getting huge opportunities that never come to fruition.

BARING: I imagine the highs and lows become more intense as you put more into it. How many days do you work?

MACER: I haven’t taken a day off this year. Monday to Sunday. For example, working with people in America, you’re expected to be awake when they are awake. There is no time off, it’s always go. There is a big work guilt. There’s also that thing of once I go on holiday, you’ll get a million jobs. It’s everything, you put all your energy into it and I don’t think there is a huge amount of reciprocal respect there, with the people you’re working with I think it's often treated as quite disposable. If you go on a music video shoot for example, there will be a whole room full of racks of clothes and you know four looks are going to be made out of that, so your chances are always slim, you’re always hedging your bets with it.

BARING: Even in terms of payment, I understand the being paid in exposure idea, at least at the beginning, but has that shifted for you now?

MACER: It’s probably only come about recently in the last eight or nine months, (through) recognising the amount of time I’m putting into it, and just holding respect for what I’m doing. I think the working for free for exposure thing, it’s often not an equal payoff considering the money and energy you’re putting into it.

BOR: I mean I’ve done this whole show and there’s been exposure in quotation marks, which I’m so grateful for and has opened some doors for more “exposure” but at what point do I know that I’m valuable enough to be paid? You have to make the decision for yourself and that’s a massive risk as well because then comes the thing of maybe no one wants to pay you and then what. You feel like, am I just going to sink to the bottom?

Phoebe and Sam, 2025. Photographed by Luke Soteriou at Macer’s studio in London.

BARING: Has there been anything that has surprised you about the industry so far?

MACER: You hear these generalizations about what the fashion industry and the characters that exist in that world, and probably from an outside point of view you think those are slight caricatures, but I think it’s very much a reality. It’s just as cutthroat as people describe it. So, the biggest learning curve is really holding your ground and respecting your work as much as you can because no one else is going to respect it or treat it as well as you are. You have to grow a very thick skin because there’s a huge amount of failure.

BOR: The most important thing is, you have to be in love with it. You have to be excited by the opportunity and the risk. That’s what’s got to keep you ticking, it all has to be enjoyable, you have to love the drama a little bit because it’s never going to go away, but you feel like you’re part of something beautiful and bigger.

The most shocking thing I’ve found is the complete lack of money at the bottom end of it. In most other industries, working for people the hours that you do, you would be paid. And it’s not even just your work, they pick your brain and that’s just expected. It’s not that the people I have worked for are any different from others in the industry but they feed off your commitment and you have to prove yourself. It’s a huge privilege to be able to do it to be honest because it’s not kind to people who can’t afford to do it.

MACER: It’s a huge problem that is right at the top of the industry. I can’t afford to pay my interns and there is no way I can switch that up and be like, “Okay, we’re going to change the system, I’m going to pay you.” because that means I need to be paid more by the people I’m working for and they need to be paid more by the people above them. So, it’s really hard to make that change from the bottom and make it more accessible and inclusive.

BARING: What do you think other designers do well to gain exposure, do you think there is a deciding factor?

MACER: I think you can apply this to anything in the industry, there is no formula. There is no rule book to say if you want to be in this job, follow steps one through ten and you’ll end up in that position. But that’s the exciting thing about it because you can forge your own path but it makes it more like the wild wild west, you’ve really got to figure out your own shit.

BOR: You have to have your own formula. If you have someone else’s formula, it’s not going to work, or it might work for a second but it’s definitely not going to last.

MACER: There’s also so much dependence on time and place, if what you’ve made really hit a nerve—like the Conner Ives t-shirt, the Protect the Dolls t-shirt, that was so politically aligned in timing that it really blew up and created so much social traction. I guess that was just a very smart intuition thing from his point of view.

BOR: I know people bang on about it, but it’s genuinely about authenticity. You can tell so clearly the difference and that’s coming from a place where for a long time I didn’t have it. It is original when you’re authentic and when it’s not it can be very very obvious. There is something to be said for shock factor these days. Sometimes people go very big and that is also seen as impressive. But when you do that, there’s a danger of it not being sustainable. Then again, if that’s authentic to you, it often works.

Phoebe’s work, 2025. Photographed by Grace Vigrass.

BARING: What’s a piece of advice you would give each other, based on your own experience?

MACER: If I were in Phoebe’s position, I would just try as many things as possible and really not overthink what you’re doing. Just throw yourself at anything that comes your way. That’s probably responding to what we were talking about earlier at university. The most valuable thing about it is the freedom to play. That gives you so much chance to dive deep into what feels right with what you’re making, rather than thinking of everything as being part of public (consumption) and being perfect.

So, if I were in your position, I would explore and experiment and have fun.

BOR: I would probably say have faith in yourself, because you work so hard. Keep working like how you’re working and it can’t go too wrong.

I would say Sam hugely motivates me, I mean we spend a lot of time together and watching him work as hard as he does is so inspiring, genuinely. It’s so so impressive and has just broken boundaries of what one person can do and allowed my mind to explode with what I’m capable of. It’s given me confidence to do all the things that I’ve done. I see you doing so much and it’s like, wow if you really sit down for seventeen hours a day you can get a lot done. So I just would say, “Stop beating yourself up so much and have faith in your work ethic and craft.”

Also, don’t be so picky with stuff. He’s a perfectionist, we are very different In that way. I'm less of a perfectionist.

MACER: I was thinking that with the SZA job, there was a lot of stuff that took me around two days to perfect that is very much not apparent in any of the videos.

BOR: Yeah, people can’t tell in those situations so it’s actually not necessarily always worth the agony you put yourself through.

MACER: Yes, you have to think about the bigger picture.

*Phoebe and Sam*, 2025. Photographed by Luke Soteriou in London.

The Erotic Gaze: Ireland Wisdom on Intimacy, Immortality, and the Art of Looking

June 2, 2025

Painter Ireland Wisdom speaks with longtime collaborator Carlye Packer about the sensual rituals of portraiture, the psychic tension of play, and why painting from life is an affair of devotion, desire, and death.

portraits by Austin Sandhaus

In this intimate conversation between gallerist Carlye Packer and painter Ireland Wisdom, what begins as a reflection on their creative partnership unfolds into a meditation on intimacy, eroticism, play, and mortality. Wisdom, whose portraits are painted from live models in prolonged silence are charged with a psychic intensity. She speaks with Packer candidly about her relationship to the body, desire, and the mythic tradition of being seen—and of seeing. As they revisit their early collaborations and look closer at Wisdom’s new Dance Macabre series, the dialogue dances between the sacred and the scandalous, from Goya to Dorian Gray to Georges Bataille. As friends and colleagues, they muse about works that are made like someone chasing the moment before it is lost. Whether you are a sitter or simply a viewer, you are invited to enter that entanglement with her.

CARLYE PACKER: Okay, so it is a pleasure to be interviewing you. We have known each other for over ten years, and started working together about three years ago when I did your first major solo exhibition at my old gallery location on Sunset, which was the original American Apparel flagship store. That exhibition was presented in October of 2022 and was an exhibition of how many portraits? Twelve?

IRELAND WISDOM: Twelve portraits and two still lifes.

PACKER: Yes—all set against a black Goya-esque background and all painted from live models, right?

WISDOM: Yes, I was trained in Florence on how to paint from life, using an old technique that started with Leonardo da Vinci called “sight size,” which is painting a figure or anything really in the scale of life. It was a technique that was sort of brought back to life by John Singer Sargent in the 19th century. So I have continued carrying out that really old tradition, I continually choose to paint from life with my models sitting in front of me.

PACKER: A lot of your paintings tend to be very sensual, with direct eye contact, mostly nude or semi-clothed. As a viewer, there is obviously a very deep connection between you and the subject being painted—what is that relationship to your subjects and your relationship to painting them and their relationship to you as they are being painted?

WISDOM: Well, desire has always been linked to themes of love and intimacy, a yearning between two figures. In choosing a model and them accepting my request to paint them, there is a sort of bond of intimacy established.

PACKER: How is it that you choose your models?

WISDOM: So, usually it just comes from an impromptu feeling of inspiration. Either it's a close friend that I've known for years that has been a consistent muse or it's another type of instant attraction to an unknown person—someone that just kind of wows me, who grabs my attention, someone who feels iconic, timeless, very slay. It’s a very Dionysian impulse. I’m drawn to the essence of something or someone that just feels memorable and usually I’m physically attracted to them as well, which is why a deep sensuality comes out in my portraits; a kind of intenseness that you can feel within their eyes and their facial expressions, a sort of combination of hunger, lust, devotion or appetite.

PACKER: What actually happens in the process, when you're in-person painting someone?

WISDOM: There's a really interesting dynamic between the artist and the sitter, a very genuine experience that is hard to put into words. It’s like trying to capture the powerful feeling that is the human condition, that of being desired and of desiring another person—it’s like trying to establish a lost object, or a dream once you awake, or the tension between how someone appears externally, their unconscious mind, how I see them, how I want them to be seen, how I want them to be immortalized and how they want themselves to be immortalized, and the tension between those things are all in play—all while they are looking me in the eye, and I’m looking back at them.

PACKER: It’s giving very Titanic.

WISDOM: Yes. (laughs) It’s very titanic, but it’s also very Dorian Gray. It’s an erotic sort of adventure—I mean the experience of being immortalized in oil is a very particular and deep experience. The model basically sits in silence—in a meditative state—which feels like a rare experience these days—to be observed and captured over many hours, over many days—in slowness—especially in this digital era.

PACKER: I have sat for you for a portrait and it definitely felt like a weird out-of-body affair.

WISDOM: It is a sort of affair, there’s something scandalous inherent in this tradition of painting from life. It’s an expression of energy flows and an obsessive concern with the erotic, with myth, with self-mythologizing, the sacrifice of giving one’s self, the nature of excess. It’s an entanglement of energy, a giving and a taking from both sides. I usually choose to paint my subjects looking directly at me, so when it's finished, the viewer looks at the painting and the subject is looking directly at them. The viewer then becomes a part of this entanglement as well.

PACKER: I think one of the best examples of this is your reclining nude portrait of Marco, in his Danskos, with the papaya split open. I feel like when we exhibited that painting, people wanted to know who he was, what your relationship was, and why does he look so good?

WISDOM: (laughs)

PACKER: Someone had actually described, when viewing the painting, that it made them feel hungry.

WISDOM: (laughs) Yes, definitely. It’s giving appetite.

PACKER: Most of your paintings elicit those questions for people. Like when we exhibited the portrait of Yeha (“The Keyster”) at Felix this year, people were so curious to know more.

WISDOM: What did they want to know more about?

PACKER: Everything, really. Whenever I exhibit your work, it demands a sort of curiosity from the viewer.

WISDOM: Yeah, I feel like “The Keyster” was a great infusion of reality and surrealism. Or rather sort of an infusion of the psychic tension between play and its ambiguities.

PACKER: In what sense?

WISDOM: Well, she has her arms open, pointing towards two different keyholes. It kind of symbolizes these basic, everyday decisions we have to make. How it all comes down to which one we pick? And she is standing there, being playful about the decision making process, which is something I think is important for us to remember—it sort of goes back to Bataille's ideas about play—like how he believed that death reveals the impossible and that play is a way of seeing this.

PACKER: Well your new series of paintings is very overtly death-oriented.

WISDOM: Yes, this new series is focused around the Medieval genre of the Dance Macabre, or the dance of death. In the past this was illustrated in a poetic yet literal way, the idea that all are equal before death. Obviously, they were dealing with the black plague back then. Now, in my current series, I’m using a lot of similar imagery, but thinking about death not necessarily in the ending-of-life way, though that as well, but rather as the series of endings that we all go through that make way for new cycles to come. My own personal take is about one having an ego death and dancing with it.

PACKER: Which circles back to the playfulness that is in most of your paintings.

WISDOM: Yes, I find that play is one of the most important things, the muses do keep musing.

PACKER: Who would be your ideal next muse?

WISDOM: I see people all around me that I would love to have sit for me. Julia Fox would be nice, I don’t really know why, probably because I just read her memoir. But I also saw this old man walking today, when I was walking to meet you, and asked for his number, he was serving homage to Jusepe de Ribera. Maybe one of the presidential portraits, not in the near future, but in the far far future, when I’m much older. Or the Pope, that would be iconic.

PACKER: Would you paint the Pope nude?

WISDOM: Only if he let me.

Islands Within: The Multiplicity of Kilo Kish

May 29, 2025

With her latest EP, Negotiations, Kilo Kish confronts the emotional toll of digital culture and reclaims space for nuance, rest, and plurality in response to an industry built on speed.

interview by Summer Bowie
portraits by Dana Boulos

Despite the ever-shifting expectations of digital culture, American artist of sound and screen Kilo Kish continues to carve out a space entirely her own—one that defies genre, challenges structure, and insists on emotional honesty. With her latest EP Negotiations, Kish turns her gaze inward and outward, interrogating the increasingly blurred boundaries between human and machine, performance and authenticity, burnout and resilience. Through textured soundscapes, fragmented narratives, and a visual aesthetic that’s both nostalgic and hypothetical, she invites us into a world where self-care is a form of resistance.

How do we nourish the spirit while navigating systems that rarely pause for breath? Kish speaks candidly about the emotional labor behind her output, the philosophies that anchor her worldview, and the freedom she’s found in embracing multiplicity—of identity, of media, and of meaning. What emerges is a portrait of an artist in motion: reflective, adaptive, and uncompromising in her pursuit of truth through art.

SUMMER BOWIE: Your new EP, Negotiations, is all about the slippery contemporary landscape of rapidly evolving technology, emotional instability and the struggle to escape our algorithmic silos. Are there any specific life experiences that inspired its conception?

KILO KISH: This EP is focused more on the music industry and the social expectations of artists in 2025 and how they can lead to burnout without proper self-care and protections. With this one, I thought a lot about these creative systems imposed and the internal creative systems in the body, heart, mind, and spirit that require the same nourishment to perform. Just wondering to myself, where is the nourishment going to come from in the future? How do we build ourselves strong to survive and thrive creatively? In thinking of stamina and productivity, what first came to mind was robots, autonomous factories and storefronts, and systems that don’t require rest. So, the visual and creative world was built from that.

BOWIE: Your visuals—album covers, fashion, and videos—often evoke a futuristic yet nostalgic feel. How do you develop the visual language for each project, and what role does mood or time period play in your aesthetic decisions?

KISH: I didn’t want the impression to be so futuristic or on the nose, I always love bringing in the conversation about technology or the present in settings that don’t necessarily evoke it, so we chose this ’90s office building. I build the world first and then the music, so I’m always clear that the mood of the music and the visual world will be harmonious. When making films that go with the music, I’m already really clear on the characters and ideas that I want to employ, so then it’s just finding collaborators and explaining the world to them.

BOWIE: What does a typical creative cycle look like for you—from idea germination to completion? Is your process more intuitive and chaotic, or do you map things out structurally from the start?

KISH: It’s very intuitive. My approach to storytelling is purely an internal dialogue and a spiritual practice of just listening. I only make work when I know I am supposed to make it and that comes from hearing from god or my own questions about my path. The first step is just listening—I’m always living and listening to what is next and where I should go. Journaling helps. But I’m always working on multiple projects, so while I am doing one I may get a clue for something else and write it down. I’m always gathering references, so when things pop up that may work for the new project I build out digital spaces for that. As I finish one project, I eventually have all the clues I need to begin the next one. That usually consists of rough ideas, questions, visual references, art direction, rough treatments—but a sense of the world is built internally, and I have a direction. Once I know the world, I start the production process of actually making. So I’m always making at least five to ten projects but in various stages of completion. But a lot of it is just listening, getting quiet enough to have enough alone time or internal practice to feel what wants to come forth next. I’m often wrong about order or timing, but it always works itself out.

BOWIE: You’ve seamlessly blended music, visual art, and fashion in your career. Do you see these disciplines as separate expressions, or are they different languages telling the same story? How do you navigate where one ends and the other begins?

KISH: I think it depends on the project. They work in tandem to create a more expressive world or story, to me it’s all intuitive and they’re all important to sharing ideas. It all feels very natural to me to play in these different spaces, in expressing this nature to others over the years there were always outside requests to slim down, or streamline who you are, now it’s a bit more accepted, which is great. But before, so much of my time was spent trying to explain how or where things began and ended, which was the “focus,” and I just confused myself ultimately. I saw a coach who helped me to detangle it and I see these extensions now as islands, all of them exist as parts of me and my way of telling stories, and there are bridges between them at times, and these configurations can change, but they are all me, and all existing in me always. There are islands I haven’t discovered yet. I’ve grown more comfortable holding this version of myself as truth. I really like this song by Empress Of called “What Type of Girl Am I?” It’s a question I’ve asked myself tons of times too.

BOWIE: In addition to your 2021 video and track “American Gurl,” you also curated an exhibition of short films of the same name with co-curator Zehra Ahmed, first at Hauser + Wirth and most recently at MOCA in Los Angeles. Can you talk about the genesis of that project?

KISH: Zehra had featured some of my video work in her womxn in windows shows previously. We first worked together more closely when I did the Midnight Moment with Times Square Arts. The concepts from American Gurl felt so expansive and like there was a lot more to explore so Zehra proposed creating a film exhibition together, kind of blending what we both already do, and so we started working on bringing that to MOCA some years ago. The Hauser show and the Gantt Center show were pleasant surprises in between that initial idea. We have an upcoming guest curation at the Academy Museum this summer as well! Zehra and I gel well creatively, and we’ve found a beautiful niche that’s been really rewarding to bring to the public.

BOWIE: In works like American Gurl, there’s a conversation around digital identity and the hyperreality of modern life. What’s your perspective on how technology affects our sense of self—and how do you channel that in your art?

KISH: There’s this constant questioning of the self against other things, and these other entities: people, systems, spaces, etc, are constantly in our view and held against our bodies. At this point, detachment from that source of information, inspiration, or entertainment is difficult for lots of us. Although, when explored with purpose it can be very rewarding, I love scrolling through pages and pages of reference or researching things that pop into my mind. But the thing is, you never really know what you will come across or how it might affect you, so I try to give myself breaks or grace around processing time online. I think I aim for freedom and this attitude of being above it all, but in our industry, perception is important and it exists whether you choose to commune with it or not.

BOWIE: Your music often challenges traditional pop structures, mixing spoken word, noise, and ambient textures. What draws you to sonic experimentation, and how do you balance abstraction with accessibility?

KISH: I guess I just want everything, all the time. It’s part of the “problem” of my work and what makes it unique. I try to balance things that seem to be in opposition or find the threads that connect them. I think boredom with who I’ve been before is a huge motivator for me, I like evolution and watching ideas change over time. But really, I’ve always just identified with otherness, like, “we could do that, but what about this, we don’t know what happens if we do this.” I just love being an explorer, of our blip in time, of the inside, and the outside.

BOWIE: Much of your work explores identity, consumerism, and modern alienation—often with philosophical or existential undertones. Are there particular thinkers, books, or theories that have significantly shaped your worldview and creative output?

KISH: I’ve always been a very spiritual and purpose-driven person, so years and years of meditating on god have informed this approach to life that says, we all have a purpose and we’re meant to explore, give, and live as humble and as noble as possible, sharing the truth and gifts of our spirit with the world, seeing the body as a channel for ideas to come forth. Like in another life, I could have definitely been a nun, I like the idea of being in service to all but yourself. But too much of this, this martyrdom of the artist part that’s always in the background, was responsible for much of the burnout I touch on in Negotiations. At the same time, I am a product of my environment and my world that says, “Grab up as much as you can for yourself and become the biggest version of yourself you can be.” I’ve read so many self-help, productivity, meditation, stoicism, healthy living, spiritual texts, etc. I have this fixation on what it means to live a good life. I think learning to balance these elements and giving grace for what is left unknown is what I’ve been focused on recently. I constantly return to the Denial of Death (1973) by Ernest Becker and Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911) by [Wassily] Kandinsky. But much of my practice is intuitive and listening to myself and what comes forth.

BOWIE: Many of your lyrics feel like internal monologues, offering listeners a peek into your thought process. How do you decide what emotional truths to share, and do you ever feel the need to protect parts of yourself from the wider public?

KISH: I do, but not so much in the art itself. Music to me doesn’t always have to be about the songwriter, so you can hide a little in that space if absolutely necessary. There is this reality and fiction existing at the same time and we expect that too. I think I definitely protect myself elsewhere, in my personal life, or even meeting people in public, even if I just performed for tons of people, I can be really shy afterwards. Also online, I’d rather just present the work than present myself to camera daily.

BOWIE: As someone who often moves outside of genre norms and mainstream expectations, how do you maintain your creative independence in an industry that can reward predictability? Have there been moments where you had to fight to stay true to your vision?

KISH: To me nothing really feels like a fight. It either just has to happen or not, and you’re on board, or you’re not, and I’m just following that flow in the dark a lot of the time. It can be stressful at times, though, waiting for things to unfold completely, but I know the decisions I need to make to serve the purpose of the project. I think there are many paths to winning, some just require carving out. Everything I have set out to do I have done bit by bit, and if I haven’t, I’m not done yet. It can be daunting and demoralizing for sure, because repeating yourself or your angle time and time again begins to change the meaning behind the words. There is this interview with Venus and Serena Willams’ dad where an interviewer keeps questioning them about a statement one of them made in confidence, eventually their dad stops the reporter, reminding him that the more times you question someone on something they hold true, they begin to lose confidence around that idea. Believe them the first time. I think this business can do that, wear you down, or make you feel small for wanting a different option or another path, or confuse your value or worth with that of numbers. Imposter syndrome is real and definitely plays a role, but I’ve learned to accept that my perfectionism is ingrained even if it’s unattainable. It try to give myself grace in that when I remember that everyone is grading by different measures.

BOWIE: Looking ahead, what kind of artistic legacy do you want to leave behind? Are there unexplored mediums or themes you're still yearning to dive into that might surprise your current audience?

KISH: I just want to continue to build worlds that people can live and explore themselves in—sonic, video, written, visual, performance. Creatively, I just want a lush, rich, expansive life that pulls from all elements. I would like to be prolific in that sense, not overthinking things, just exploring and doing. I’d like to direct a bit more, short narrative, or maybe make a play or opera. I would love to make more performances that involve music and dance. This year, I’ve done more creative work for others and that’s been rewarding. I designed a book called City of Angels for my good friend Jasmine Benjamin, about LA style. I want to play with nature, make physical spaces, grow food, and build landscapes. There’s still so much left to do.

Everything Has to Come At the Right Moment: An Interview of Francisco Costa

May 22, 2025

From Calvin Klein to sustainable skincare, the maternal gaze is a guiding principle for Brazil’s prodigal son.

interview by Summer Bowie
portraits by Keith Oshiro

Francisco Costa’s path from the rarefied world of high fashion to the heart of the Amazon is a story of return—both to his geographical roots and to a practice that prioritizes community care by design. Born in the small town of Guarani, Brazil, Costa was raised by a visionary mother who ran a garment factory that empowered hundreds of local women and modeled what would now be considered a quietly radical form of sustainability.

Shortly after losing his mother during his adolescence, the budding young designer moved to New York to study fashion at FIT. An early and formative experience working for a Seventh Avenue garment manufacturer who held licenses for major designers, including Oscar de la Renta, led to Costa eventually working directly under de la Renta, becoming part of his atelier and learning the foundations of luxury design and craftsmanship. This apprenticeship was pivotal—it exposed Costa to the world of refined, couture-level design and helped him develop the precision and discipline that would later define his own minimalist aesthetic.

In the late 1990s, Costa moved to Gucci, where he worked under Tom Ford. This period helped sharpen his sense of modernity, sex appeal, and branding. Best known for his decade-long tenure as the Women’s Creative Director at Calvin Klein, Costa became a defining voice in modern reductionism—an editor of excess, who found beauty in restraint. But even then, his instinct was to reuse, reimagine, and reconnect with materials in deeply personal ways. All along the way, his mother’s ethics of care and resourcefulness continue to shape Costa’s worldview.

With the founding of Costa Brazil, he turned his attention from clothing the body to nurturing it. A pivotal trip to the western Amazon introduced him to Indigenous communities and powerful natural ingredients like breu, a sacred resin with antimicrobial and spiritual properties. Guided by partnerships with organizations like Conservation International, Costa built a brand that honors the land, its protectors, and the rituals that sustain both.

In every sense, Costa Brazil is an extension of its founder’s ethos: pure, considered, and deeply connected to place.

FRANCISCO COSTA: I love that you have all those books behind you.

SUMMER BOWIE: One of the best perks of running a magazine is that we’re constantly receiving beautiful new books that allow us to really sink our teeth into all of the art that we’re exploring. It’s quite a privilege.

COSTA: Isn't that fun? So let me show you my little treasure, because I'm obsessed with books, so I built this little library. This is my pride and joy.

BOWIE: You recently published your own gorgeous book, 555: Revisiting The Fashion Archive of Francisco Costa (Rizzoli, 2023).

COSTA: It's really sweet, that book, because I don't like to look back so much, but I encountered myself in the Calvin Klein archives and I said, how can I actually put this to work? So, I started talking to a few photographers and suddenly I had twenty-one photographers that wanted to shoot the project. It's great because it's also seeing the clothes on and out of context. To me, that works the best.

BOWIE: There's something that feels much more genuine when you look at the collections this way, rather than in a campaign.

COSTA:It wasn't about getting the ‘fashion’ picture, you know what I mean?

BOWIE: I think people forget that you were the first designer in the US to stop using fur. The fashion industry, however, is still an environmental disaster and is currently having this big return to real fur. Did any recent industry trends have anything to do with you making that transition from fashion to sustainable skincare?

COSTA: No. In fact, it goes all the way back to my childhood. I grew up in a very small town in Brazil, and my mom had started this business, which was a children's manufacturing company. All the women that worked in town worked in her factory. She had 725 employees in a town of about 3000 and supported a very sustainable way of living. For instance, whatever textile would remain, she would donate to smaller communities in the rural areas, and she would teach the women how to make quilts. There was always a connectivity with the way she would empower the women with new skills and materials. When I started creating this brand [Costa Brazil], the minute I started engaging with manufacturers, I thought, I don't want to just put my name on something that exists. It’s the same way I created my collections—most of my textiles were created by me. This was a very sustainable approach, though I didn't even know it at the time. I would go to a mill in Cuomo, and they often took me backstage, which I loved. I would go into warehouses filled with yarns—things that have been sitting there since the ’50s—and I always found myself turned on by reinventing, by recreating, reappropriating. With my Fall 2011 collection, I went through knitwear companies in Scotland and in Northern Italy, took all the remnants they had, and I boiled everything. I created a whole new fabric.

BOWIE: So, your mother was really the genesis of both your inspiration in fashion and sustainability?

COSTA: And community care. She was very involved in the community. She was involved in the church and she was civically minded. The mayors of town over the years would come to my house. They used to have meetings there, which was bizarre because she was also so concerned about the wellbeing of the people who worked for her. She really had an impact on me. When I started creating Costa [Brazil] it was that transition, but it wasn't, because for me, it was a process. I was still at Calvin when I started thinking of creating my own brand and I thought it would be a lifestyle brand. I would have furniture linens or what have you, because I love lifestyle. But then, I kept on editing and editing and editing until the Francisco Costa idea ended up becoming Costa Brazil. All of a sudden, the direction changed into beauty because I was really heavily inspired by Piero Manzoni. (Francisco pulls out a book and shows a picture of Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit can). This is what inspired my packaging.

BOWIE: Oh, yes, of course. The shit cans.

COSTA: You can see how it inspired the candle packaging. Obviously, being on the cusp of Arte Povera, he used not only humor, but elements of highs and lows. That was the genesis of it all. When the name changed from Francisco Costa to Costa Brazil, it felt very radical, but it wasn't about me anymore. It was about creating a brand that spoke about the coast of Brazil and something that could be amplified to many regions: the coast of the Amazon, the coast of Rio, the coast of whatever. It could tap into locations that give that sensibility of the wholesomeness of Brazil. When you say the word ‘Brazil,’ it takes you in so many different directions, but often a very happy place, a curious place. People imagine Brazil being this Xanadu, and so it just felt like it really worked that way.

BOWIE: Costa Brazil is clearly deeply rooted in nature and Brazilian heritage, but you also currently chair the America's Council at Conservation International. What does that work entail?

COSTA: Well, I was working with the Special Olympics in Brazil, designing some of the uniforms. Then, I ended up on the west coast of the Amazon, where I stayed with a tribe called the Yaminawá. They are one of eleven tribes of the same ethnicity in that region. The people there are so gentle and beautiful, and being in the forest itself is beyond magical.

While I was there, I was introduced to this resin called breu that they use on a daily basis in many of their rituals. At the time, I was already affiliated with Conservation International, but I engaged a lot more as they helped me identify communities within the area, which were already under cooperatives. C.I. and the Brazil Foundation were very important partners that were able to guide me into sourcing everything properly. So, that helped me build this web of people in the Amazon, which I could go and visit.

I also ended up in a state called Amapá, which is near French Guiana and when I got there, I met a single three-generation family that does all the sourcing for three ingredients. I also found Kaya in another region, which has a coconut-like structure. It looks surreal and ancient and the oil is filled with super powerful proteins.

BOWIE: What are the applications of breu within the Yaminawá community?

COSTA: It's a sacred resin. While it's fresh, it's very white and pulpy, and then when it oxidizes, it becomes this rock. After we analyzed it in a lab, we discovered that it is also a mosquito repellant. The Yaminawá often throw those rocks into several different fires throughout the land, but I had no idea at the time that they were doing it to repel mosquitoes. They keep those fires burning day and night, and then prayer is part of it too. If a child is upset and crying, they will have the child inhale the smoke from the resin. It's known to be very relaxing, a little bit like palo santo. It has those esoteric properties. It is also antimicrobial. Discovering something with all of these incredible qualities felt like a dream. It was a lot like discovering a linen that had been sitting in a warehouse for fifty years.

BOWIE: I’m wearing the face serum right now and it has a really wonderful natural fragrance but it’s completely unscented. It feels very light and fresh without drawing too much attention to itself.

COSTA: The serum is the only sku that we have that's not oil based, but you have big potent ingredients in there. Of course, hyaluronic acid being one of them, which is not a Brazilian thing. But then, you have guarana. Guarana is a tiny little seed that's really powerful. It's very well known in Brazil, because they make soft drinks out of guarana. It has an energizing characteristic to it. So, if you feel a tingling, that’s the guarana activating the skin. And then, it also has camu camu, which is pure vitamin C. We curate our ingredients in the best way possible. It's not about the marketing aspect of the brand, it's about the function of the active ingredients, the product itself.

BOWIE: That really mirrors your approach with fashion, because you are so known for your minimalism. You’ve always chosen materials that speak for themselves.

COSTA: I think I’m more of a reductionist than a minimalist, because I love everything. But, as part of my design aesthetics and my way of living, I always like less. I like to be surrounded with a lot of objects, but I don't want to see all of them all the time. Everything has to come at the right moment. I switch my whole house around all the time, which makes my husband crazy. But the editing is so important. Every maximalist moment is followed by a minimalist moment. So, you have to see it all and then you have that cathartic moment when you reduce it all down to what’s functional.

BOWIE: There is something so cathartic about the editing process. How far have you reduced your living space?

COSTA: Well, when COVID hit, I was in Florida where I had just bought an apartment, but there wasn’t anything in it yet. I ordered two beds before I moved in and that's all I had. I stayed there for the first eight months of the pandemic with almost nothing. It's very hard for me to live without books, though. By the end of the eight months, I had tons of magazines and books.

BOWIE: What does true luxury mean to you today? Especially in the context of sustainability?

COSTA: True luxury is having time. Not having to be somewhere or to do anything. It is a total luxury to be able to edit your life. We are luxury because even though we are a small brand, we are a refined brand. The ingredients are almost unattainable. So, to bring a little bit of the Amazon of Brazil into your home, it's a luxury. And we go through so much to share those ingredients ethically. This work is serious.

BOWIE: How do you balance the tension between haute beauty and environmental responsibility?

COSTA: The beauty business is very interesting to me. There's actually a lot of protocols, and I respect those protocols, but I don’t know if everyone else does. I had zero protocols in fashion. Fashion is very abusive and it’s also very unsustainable. To think that I turned nights and nights with everybody working like insane people. And for what? Just because I wanted to change half of the collection? It’s irresponsible. But, fashion is like a pressure cooker. It makes you insane, because you're not just pleasing the retailers, you have to please everybody. And you're very vulnerable. It's never enough.

In beauty, at least I know the limits. The way I look at sustainability is the people. How do we protect and empower them? This three-generation family, for example. It’s fundamental that these people can live their lives and continue to manage the land. The Indigenous people are the protectors of the Amazon and there are millions of communities throughout the region.

Another consideration has to do with protecting and empowering the consumer. That means creating a quality product that is functional and beautiful with packaging that's genuinely thought out. This is the most difficult aspect for a designer. So, there are parts of the packaging that are not sustainable but they serve a function. When I created the plastic octagonal cap, it was because it needs to have a grip. We’re talking about oils. That's a protective consideration to prevent the glass from breaking.

BOWIE: Do you ever see yourself returning to fashion in a more traditional sense? Or is beauty and wellness where your heart is now?

COSTA: I love fashion. It's just that fashion doesn't love a 60-year-old man. Fashion is for the young and it should be. I have no interest in going back to fashion because I have nothing to prove. But if I wasn't so busy running this business, I probably would create a couture collection. There's nothing more sustainable than that, you know? The oldies, like Balenciaga, only cut the fabric if somebody ordered a dress. So, there's zero waste. I would've loved to be more playful in that area, or to make a difference in a large corporation with the restructuring of its supply chain. But not just to be a designer showing another eight collections a year. If I could make a difference on a large scale, under a group, I would do that in a heartbeat.

Artist Karice Mitchell Deconstructs the Black 'Playboy' at Silke Lindner in New York

May 21, 2025

Karice Mitchell
Paradise (Triptych), 2025
Archival inkjet print, custom frame, sandblasted glass, vinyl

text by Karly Quadros

“I love using familiarity as a way to ask unfamiliar questions,” says Karice Mitchell.

Drawing from Players magazine, often dubbed “the Black Playboy,” Mitchell’s photo-based works explore the no man’s land between exposure and illegibility, frankness and mystery, modesty and obscenity. Through her closely cropped diptychs, triptychs, and modified images sourced from the pages of this landmark magazine of Black erotica, she explores the self-definition, personal expression, and resilience of Black women. Economy of Pleasure, her latest show at Silke Lindner and her first solo exhibition in the U.S., hones in on the early 2000s: the era of the video vixen, digital downloads, and lower back tattoos. Sand blasted over intimate images of a woman’s shoulder, a hoop earring, a pristine pump and a French pedicure are words pulled from the magazine’s pages and models’ nommes de guerre: angel, sensation, paradise.

After a frustrating moment of censorship when she was commissioned to do a public work of art in her native Vancouver, British Columbia in 2023, Mitchell returned more committed than ever to her project exploring the representations of Black women in adult media. While it may seem salacious, the work itself is deeply sensitive and interior. There is recognition between women who have worked to claim their bodies as their own through ink, jewelry, donning clothing, or shedding it. The work is seductive but withholding. Notably missing are the Players models’ faces — rather than exposing these women to judgment and interrogation once again, Mitchell’s work gives the audience only glimpses of a personality and a life lived. Her work is an interrogation, a negotiation, and a reclamation. The rest is on the viewer.

KARLY QUADROS: Can you talk a little bit about yourself, your practice, and how you got here?

KARICE MITCHELL: I live in Vancouver. I'm an assistant professor full-time at the University of British Columbia. I teach photography there. That work does inform my practice in a lot of ways.

I'm really interested in one publication in particular: Players magazine, which started in the early seventies and stopped in about 2005. It was dubbed as the Black Playboy at the time.

I did my master’s thesis during Covid, which was a terrible, weird time to be making art. I had moved back home, and I didn't have access to camera equipment. I was always a photographer, but the pandemic was a time for me to reassess. What can I do that's readily accessible and within my means?

I started going to used bookstores, and that's when I found Players magazine. At the time I had no idea what it was, but the images were intriguing to me. So I started making collages with the found imagery, and then after doing some more research for my thesis, I found that it was this really crucial publication for its time in terms of facilitating Black representation. The first editor-in-chief was a Black woman, and she really cemented a particular direction for the publication.

It has a really interesting history that intersects with politics, music, culture, and it was something that was reflective of its time. The women that were in the magazine, that were posing nude, there was a certain kind of allure to them. It felt distinct. It felt cultural, feminine, and very familiar in terms of the women in my family and their rituals of adornment, as well as my own. I was really interested in mining that subtext throughout the images in order to speak to its specific history.

QUADROS: That’s fascinating to hear that the first editor-in-chief was a woman.

MITCHELL: Especially for that kind of a publication, which we often attribute to facilitating or being simply for the male gaze – which it absolutely is. But something in my practice I'm interested in doing is looking at the images and asking, “What am I picking up on through my engagement and act of looking?”

QUADROS: Have you ever tried to reach out to her?

MITCHELL: She passed away a couple years ago. Her name is Wanda Coleman. There's one interview that she did. I forget when it was published. It seemed very early 2000s. She talks about the complexities of starting the magazine as a woman, the tensions that were present at the time. But she did also say at the time she had carte blanche to do whatever she wanted.

It facilitated this very distinct vision for the magazine. She left after a couple of issues, unfortunately. Then the magazine started to go into all of these different directions that I think appeal more to how we understand pornographic visual content today.

But I'm interested in those pivots and in the kind of shifts. With Silke’s show, a lot of the images were from the 2000s, which is seen as being the era that is the most “dirty” or “trashy.” But is there room, maybe, to filter some kind of agency with these images as well?

Engaging with these images from the early 2000s, I see so much of video vixen culture or those modes of representation and femininity – a lot of body modification. There’s this pivot where there’s this very bold risk-taking in terms of the ways in which Black women were adorning themselves. There’s longer nails. There’s a lot of tattoos.

QUADROS: Maybe we can speak a little about adornment – jewelry, acrylics, tattoos – in that era, and how they related to Black women, their bodies, and Black culture more broadly.

MITCHELL: This is something that I think about all the time, as a Black woman. In a family or a lineage of other Black women, a lot of us are born into these rituals of self adornment. When I was born, the first gift – and this is something that I still have – you get a gold necklace. And it has your initial. It has a stamp affirming who you are. That kind of practice is so familial and feels really precious to me.

I think about my aunties in the early 2000s, their acrylics and like the sounds that they would make and what they would look like when they were speaking. It's something that I picked up on as a very young child and in a lot of ways has informed the way that I take up space today.

I think about my mother and corporate settings. She immigrated to Canada from the UK in the ‘90s. One of the things she would say, when she moved to Canada, was that everybody wears sweatpants. “Why don't people dress up when they're outside?” That proclamation of the way she represents herself, especially when she had to navigate the corporate world as a Black woman, was so important to her self-preservation.

Today what we're seeing is a lot of those trends being watered down and bastardized in the context of social media. What does it mean to stake a claim to something that is so authentically true to yourself, and then also watch it be denigrated, but then praised on certain bodies?

QUADROS: There’s this never-ending cycle of cultural innovation and then rejection, often by a white mainstream because that style is “in bad taste” or “too much” or “too Black.” But then there’s this eventual assimilation that we’re seeing happen now, especially with the early 2000s, in a way that feels very uncritical.

MITCHELL: I'm in Canada so it's a bit different, but I’ve been witnessing America swing this pendulum into a very sex negative, puritanical, evangelical view and positioning of sex, this anti-pornographic rhetoric. But if we rid pornography, that's not gonna rid us of patriarchy, white supremacy, and misogyny. It's always going to be there.

I also think about that ongoing rhetoric that is trying to demonize sex but then also permit it only in these weird, codified mainstream ways. It's all of these different contradictory things happening.

QUADROS: With your artwork, like where do you fall in that?

MITCHELL: In a way, it's complicating. I see my work as interventions to ask questions. I don't ever wanna say that the work is solving all the problems. That's not what I'm gonna do at all. I don't think art should do that.

When I initially started doing this work, I would have to follow this historical lineage around unearthing the kinds of traumas and violence that had been enacted against the Black female body. That's something that is oftentimes now not being taught in schools: the wars, the transatlantic slave trade and how the Black female body was this vessel of reproduction, labor, and this particular kind of violence that is misogynoir. In a way, I'm sitting with that.

I think my work and my interventions and my interpretations are trying to find the pleasure, find the joy, find the desire and the sexiness and in these subtle suggestions. I think I'm trying to imagine something otherwise. I love using familiarity in a way to ask unfamiliar questions.

QUADROS: This question of the archive and what to glean from it and what to leave, that's something that like Saidiya Hartman writes very clearly about.

With your work, you're taking us very close. Your work is intimate, almost interior. I find that really interesting because that's the way that sexuality is often expressed: erogenous zones, small touches, little moments like that. The things I love about my body are, for instance, these freckles I have right here on my face or my little tattoo. Your zooming in quality takes away some of the more objectifying quality.

MITCHELL: It’s kind of reorienting, or maybe a different way of looking. In the 2000s era, it was raunchy. It was there for a particular kind of gaze that I'm trying to reject in my own way.

I compared [my work] to when you're at the club, and you're in the girls' bathroom and all the women are like, “Oh my god, your hair, your nails, your outfit. Love it, love to see it.” And that's maybe the kind of approach. It’s like women taking some form of control given the kind of nature around the making of the images. So I love calling attention to those little details.

QUADROS: I love this idea of the girl's bathroom too because it makes me think of the “much-ness” of the work. I don't wanna say “too much-ness.” But there's something where the subjects can't be fully contained in the print. The images are so close. The words are spilling out onto the gallery walls. Could you maybe talk a little bit about how you engage with the frame and the idea of containment?

MITCHELL: The text has been a new step in the work, and I think it came out of me looking at the covers and seeing the way that on the cover of a magazine, the woman's shoulder would be covering a little bit of the text and like the body on the cover would be like spilling over in these moments. The text is also very particular, and it's very objectifying in a way, but the body is disrupting it. I was really interested in that small moment of disruption of the way this publication is trying to define the body.

It's all text found in the magazines themselves. Some of the pseudonyms of the models – like Angel and Candy and Sweetness – there's this kind of sugary quality to the names that I absolutely fell in love with. I really like this idea of persona and character and the way you represent yourself. What is your character? What is your armor? What do the nails and the hair and the earrings look like? How can I make this spill over into the work in this larger sense?

QUADROS: Persona comes up a lot in photography with subjects, right? You said you teach photography, so I imagine that's been a large part of your practice for a while.

MITCHELL: It becomes this generative site to determine how you want to represent yourself. I do think more complexly about representation as a whole, especially considering art and the art world, the kinds of representation that are deemed as “good” and then “not good” and feeding into this neoliberal understanding of representation, that just because more Black people are behind the frame, that's a good thing. But are we questioning the kinds of representation we're redeeming as being accessible, as being mainstream?

I think that pornography and committing to this archive in my work, has made a lot of people cautious. Like, why are you walking this line? But Black women were there, and I think that deserves our attention to some degree. That representation is there, so how are you gonna wrestle with it? I'm really interested in the gray area of representation.

QUADROS: Something about representation too is that it’s literally built into or excluded from the technology, right? Cameras originally weren't really constructed with darker skin tones in mind. It's really only been in the past couple decades when we're starting to see directors of photography, cinematographers that can actually handle darker skin tones. Like I just saw Sinners, and it looks spectacular. But it took us a while to get there.

MITCHELL: Oh my God. That movie. It's funny you actually bringing up that movie because I think the use of eroticism in that movie really stuck out to me. Like people assume that couldn't occur given the obviously violent systems in place, but for like sex and eroticism to still bleed out – I love it. It was so good.

QUADROS: And female pleasure, right?

MITCHELL: That’s right.

QUADROS: I saw that at Brooklyn Academy of Music, which is a little historic movie theater around here, and it was a sold out showing. And that was a crowd that was like hollering laughing. There was a man behind me that was audibly horny. (laughs)

MITCHELL: I love it. Like, we were horny during that time. It's the humanity, right? It's humanizing to acknowledge that was absolutely the scenario and the case.

QUADROS: I guess one thing that I was wondering about though, with your photos, obviously, like they're very closely cropped. There's not a lot of faces. How do you think about anonymity with the source material and your work?

MITCHELL: This is something that I'm still thinking about. I think a lot about other artists’ work like Lorna Simpson or Mickalene Thomas who go to the Ebony archive or the Jet archive. They include the faces of the women in their work. And I do think there is this reason to be specific or to outline that specificity within the archive to show the particular faces of the women that were there. I find that can be a way to humanize the subjects of that particular time or within that era through image making.

My work is about the women in the archive, and it's also about other things. So I think anonymity becomes this way of trying to speak to the other things that I'm interested in. I've played or toyed with the idea of faces, but for me, I think I'm interested in a kind of body politic and maybe that's the draw to then focus on the body, but it's something that I'm still figuring out.

QUADROS: Is there anything you think people fundamentally misunderstand about your work?

MITCHELL: Yeah. People are always like, “Why aren't you behind the camera?” And I'm like, “Girl, it's not about me.” I mean, it is, but it isn't. It's about the images.

There's this constant demand when you're dabbling in terms of this representation to make yourself fully legible, right? To make the subjects fully legible. I think that's why I'm pushing back against this use of the gaze or use of the face because there's this constant expectation that as a Black person, you have to show up in a way that's fully intelligible, oftentimes to a particular kind of white, patriarchal gaze. And in a way, I think this is maybe an exercise of refusal in that.

The initial hesitation with the work is because it's pornographic. Not to deny the way in which porn does contribute to fetish, contribute to particular kinds of understandings of racial ideologies or gendered ideologies. I think that's where the hesitation does potentially lie. But I don't think the answer is to continue to disregard it or to silence it.

QUADROS: Do you still take photos? Do you still have your own photography practice?

MITCHELL: I do still take photos. Actually for a public artwork that I did last year, I was behind the camera and I took a picture of myself. Because it was a public installation and it's like in Vancouver, BC, they rejected the work without a reason. It was just a proposal of my hand, satin, and some pearls, which was in reference to the archive. But they rejected it without the possibility of resubmitting.

It felt like a good decision on my part to implicate my own body in that process, rather than the images, because at least then it's a rejection of me. I made the decision to be behind the camera because then I have full control, in a way.

Then after the rejection, I was like, Would it have mattered if it was me or somebody else? I think just the idea of a body there for the sake of itself, is what people just didn't like, because it's a public work. I didn't look very different from any type of ad that uses sex to sell something, to be this capitalist thing. But as soon as it's reclaiming it as something else, it becomes a bit of an issue.

QUADROS: Wow. I'm so sorry you had to deal with that.

MITCHELL: It's okay. We still rose. We still did something. They're operating out of this fear that people are going to say things about the work, and they don't wanna deal with the backlash around that.

QUADROS: I don't know how it is in Canada, but now in America, you can't even make public art about Blackness or really any marginalized identity without fear of losing your funding.

MITCHELL: It's crazy that simple visibility is deemed as a threat. It was really eye-opening. I was like, “So this is where we're at.” And, mind you, this is the way that I navigate my day-to-day life. This is how I have to exist, how I have to navigate the world. And somehow in this deeming it as unacceptable – what do you have to say about me and like other people that look like me? What is being subtly suggested there?

Untitled (Angel I), 2025

Archival inkjet print, custom frame, sandblasted glass, vinyl

Sensation (Diptych) , 2025

Archival inkjet print, custom frame, sandblasted glass

Angel (IV) , 2025

Archival inkjet print, custom frame

Angel (II) , 2025

Archival inkjet print, custom frame, vinyl

A Conversation with Amanda McGowan and Mattie Rivkah Barringer of Women's History Museum

May 20, 2025