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

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

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?

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


text by Karly Quadros

It was February 2024, and one model at the Women’s History Museum show couldn’t stop falling over. Determined, she trundled down the runway only to trip once again. The culprits were obvious: two enormous, cumbersome brown boxing gloves attached to the toes of classic stilettos. “Take them off!” cried members of the audience, a mixture of fashion insiders and queer iconoclasts. Still, the model made it to the end and hoisted the gloves in her hand, triumphant. K.O.

Unlike most New York footwear, the shoes of Women’s History Museum are not designed with functionality as a priority. In a city where pedestrians reign supreme and comfort is a must, the shoes of fashion label/art duo/vintage store curators Amanda McGowan and Mattie Rivkah Barringer are here to tell a story. Whether they’re white wedding heels bedazzled with a clatter of bones and colorful pills or gold boxing slippers rendered into precarious platforms by two wooden pillars, the shoes of Women’s History Museum exist in the sweet spot between strength and softness, power and precarity, barbarity and beauty.

Vintage remains an essential reference point for the duo. They maintain a carefully curated secondhand designer shop on Canal Street, sort of a modern-day SEX, stocked with everything from ‘80s Vivienne Westwood and ‘90s Gaultier to Edwardian furs and linens. In a similar style to early Alexander McQueen, Barringer and McGowan mine fashion references of the past – Victorian riding boots, rocking horse platforms, 70s crocodile skin clogs – for highly stylized fashion performances that entice as much as they reject traditional categories of beauty. The result is something that feels entirely 2025 in all its shredded, everything-out-in-the-open glory. Throughout Women History Museum’s nine staged collections, they return to similar references: animal prints and pelts; competitive sports, particularly boxing; and New York City, with the coins and shattered glass that cover the sidewalks. The clothes bare skin and barb it too.

Shoes, in many ways, remain the ultimate fetish object. They’re exalted, often the most expensive part of an outfit, yet they spend most of the day in contact with the filthy sidewalk. They’re civilizing, often constricting, and conceal the foot, which remains almost as hidden from public life as the body’s most nether regions. Shoes have often been used to control women as with painful and restrictive footbinding practices, yet their erotic potential is undeniable, as with the long, sensuous lines created in the body with a clear plastic pleaser. It’s no wonder that they served as the basis for Women’s History Museum’s latest show at Company Gallery, on display until June 21. Autre caught up with Barringer and McGowan to talk stilettos, surrealism, and the seriously sinister parts of living – and walking – in New York City.


KARLY QUADROS: Can you tell me about the inception of the show?

AMANDA MCGOWAN: We started working with Taylor Trabulus at Company many years ago.  Not very long after we started, she wanted to do a pop-up shop with us.

We were gonna maybe do an art show with her in the city at some other gallery, but there was drama and it didn't work out. Then she got promoted at Gavin Brown where she was working at the time, and basically she out of nowhere gave us this big art show opportunity there in 2018. After Gavin Brown ended [in 2020], she went to Company Gallery and we did another solo show there, and then they signed us on as artists. We've been working with them since Covid, like 2021. 

This show was actually their idea. It was their idea to do an overview of all the shoes that we've done over the past five years because we actually didn't realize how many we have done. There’s a lot and they're all different. Some have been seen in an art context. Some were in fashion shows. But in a way, they work as standalone art objects, so it made sense to show them in that way. 

The displays that we created for the show, those platforms, were actually wall works that we did for the show at Company in 2021. We made all these prints on paper and then we did these collages imitating ads because that show in 2021 was about recreating an abandoned mall space. The panels were to mimic advertising or storefront environments.

QUADROS: The shoe is such a deceptively simple concept, but there’s a lot that emerges when you see them all next to each other like that. At Autre, our last issue just went to press and the theme was ‘desire.’ We actually had Mia Khalifa on the cover wearing your paw shoe.

MCGOWAN: I saw that! We were talking recently – speaking of desire – about how there is such a sexual element to shoes, a sensuality.

QUADROS: They’re the ultimate fetish object.

MCGOWAN: They are. There’s something about seeing the shoe alone too, not on a foot, which is its own fetish.

QUADROS: Can you talk a little bit about how fetish and sexuality play into your design practice here in the show and elsewhere?

MCGOWAN: I feel like clothes have such a relationship to those topics because there’s such a rapport with the human form, with the body. I feel like it’s one of the reasons it’s not considered an art form because it has this feminine and bodily quality to it that makes it segmented away from formal art world consideration for most people.

MATTIE RIVKAH BARRINGER: There’s just so much loaded with fashion mentally for people. Women are expected to be sexually available or sexually pleasing in a patriarchal society, and clothing is such an interesting way to interfere in those types of codes and signals and take ownership over being specimenized in this way as a woman. 

MCGOWAN: Inherently, clothing and shoes are binding the body. There is this kind of BDSM quality to clothing, and shoes specifically – there’s something about a heel controlling the foot, constricting it, the animal claw within the shoe. There’s something very animalic about human feet – this kind of unruly, weird part of the body – and aestheticizing and controlling it with this beautiful shoe. 

We use a lot of animalic references in the shoes as well. There’s something about female sexuality and animal prints, animal symbology that I feel is somehow connected. Specifically in the fashion industry and in art history, the connection between the animal and the sexual and the woman is so saturated in the imagery. It also, I think, has been interpreted in contemporary feminism perhaps as a degrading comparison. We’re interested in that comparison because I feel like there can be a degrading aspect of it, but then there’s also this other countercurrent where it is kind of positive: I think of Jungian psychology, the positive anima where you’re in this positive relationship acknowledging the animal side of yourself as a human animal. Something about that to us is interesting or empowering to think about. 

And yet, at the same time, we’re trying to point out the possibly negative ways that humans can be animals towards each other in a very cruel world. There’s a lot of very dualistic things about the whole animal reference that is interesting to us in our work.

QUADROS: It’s interesting because fashion is one of the major things that separates humans from animals. We adorn our bodies; animals do not. There’s something maybe post-human about it – does that resonate with you?

BARRINGER:  I feel like throughout time, women and animals have been exploited and used in a lot of ways. So there's also that connection where there's something inherently feminine perhaps about animals too.

MCGOWAN: Everybody does participate in adorning themselves whether or not they consider themselves interested in fashion. It's an activity that is distinctly human.

BARRINGER: In its more negative permutations, the actual industry and making of clothing has a cruelty that we could attribute to like the animalistic behavior of just devouring and consumption.

QUADROS: Some of the shoes – for instance the ones with the bent and broken hooves – recall the sculptures of Meret Oppenheim. I also think of the cloven toe of Margiela tabis, which I’ve seen elicit really strong reactions from people who aren’t invested in fashion. Can you talk a little bit about your exploration of abjection, the uncanny, and yuckiness in your work?

MCGOWAN:  There's such a fine line between femininity being beautiful and being abject.  Within the patriarchal reality spectacle, if a woman has too much makeup and you can tell that she's wearing makeup, it's grotesque, but if she's wearing the type of makeup that really makes her look natural or youthful, then she's beautifully feminine.

We’re very interested in this historical time travel – what the codes were at one time that are different from now and how different depictions and ideals of femininity throughout time contradict the ones we have now.

BARRINGER: Also living in New York City is so abject. We’re very close to abjection all the time. There’s something very medieval about being in New York City. When I’m making something that I think is beautiful, it makes sense to have something abject as part of it in a weird way because it feels like that’s the world that I’m in. It feels more true.

QUADROS: Do you guys have any gross or crazy New York stories?

MCGOWAN: My God, where do I begin? The first show that we did that was a big production last February, somebody punched Mattie in the face on the subway, literally going to see the venue.

QUADROS: Oh my God, I’m so sorry.

MCGOWAN: I feel like New York City has gotten so crazy. It’s like an open air institution.

BARRINGER: I’m surprised that I haven’t seen a dead body yet in New York. I feel like the area we’re in feels so charged from a past time. Looking into New York history, that area used to be like the financial district. It was a port because it’s right on the water, and there was crazy stuff happening there throughout time. You can feel that history.

QUADROS: I feel like that’s certainly reflected in New York fashion right now. Your clothes feel really interested in the messiness or the intensity of the city.

MCGOWAN: I think it feels more, like you’re saying, like the reality. We’re in a time where you’re very confronted with reality. There is a need for fantasy as well, which we try to do, but we also need to acknowledge the reality at the same time.

BARRINGER: Fantasy needs to be mitigated with something that feels more honest to us.

QUADROS: New York is so known for its extremely functional shoes – power suits and sneakers, squishy foamy Crocs. They have to be functional since it’s a city ruled by pedestrians. Meanwhile the shoes in the show are distinctly less functional: towering wooden platforms, Victorian-style shin braces. What do you think of when you think of New York footwear? How do your own designs work with or against that?

MCGOWAN: Mattie has always worn platforms since I’ve known her for the past fifteen years.

BARRINGER: I find platforms easy to walk in, but I just have always wanted to be taller. I’m five foot three, so I always wanted to be tall.

MCGOWAN: She always wears Vivienne Westwood rocking horse shoes, which for me, I probably wouldn’t be able to walk around the city in them, but for her, they’re comfortable. 

BARRINGER: I like being above street level when I can ‘cause it feels very beautiful. I feel cleaner somehow.

QUADROS: My dear friend who lived here for a long time told me when I moved here, don’t wear open-toed shoes unless it’s a platform because a rat will run over your feet.

BARRINGER: (laughs) A hundred percent. My husband, he’s from Singapore, so he likes wearing open-toed shoes, and he only wears flats. He’s the only New Yorker that I’ve ever seen who wears sandals on the ground.

MCGOWAN: I do think there’s an obsession. For me, I wouldn’t wear heels all the time in New York. We’re interested in the fantasy of what shoes could be. If I could make a shoe that I could wear every day, not in a practical way, what would it look like? That’s how they also become an art object because they’re not really functional things. These ones have a bit of a defensive quality, like they have a weapon built in basically.

BARRINGER: We felt so enveloped in the New York atmosphere. We were really looking at the buildings and the statues. This post-human thing where you are becoming the city, the metal and the hard building materials felt like something that we were really talking about with the clothes we were doing in the last year.

QUADROS: In many ways, it’s the exact opposite of the ballet flat, which has recently come back.

MCGOWAN: And it’s not comfortable either. I used to wear ballet flats all the time when I was younger, and my feet always hurt.

BARRINGER: There’s no support.

MCGOWAN: I’m always frustrated with shoe options. My whole life, I’m always dissatisfied with what’s available and what is functional but attractive. Even though there’s a lot of shoes, a lot of them are not great in different ways.

QUADROS: What have you settled on now?

MCGOWAN: I wear Marithé Francois Girbaud vintage shoes because there’s something about the split soles, the rubber shoe, it laces up the front. It’s a supportive ankle situation. Something about the way that those shoes are made are so comfortable to me but they’re also attractive. Like they don’t look like grandma.

The boys in New York City will stop me all the time and be like, “Bro, your shoes are so sick.” And I’m just like, “They’re just comfortable.”

QUADROS: When you’re sourcing now, where are you looking in terms of beauty and inspiration?

MCGOWAN: It’s almost like we’re thinking about archaeology or something. Our practice of souring materials and vintage can feel quite archaeological and specific, looking for, I don’t know, maybe a narrative or an untold story. I think for our next collection we’re thinking about archaeology as this search for self and identity through clothing and also thinking of these as artifacts or monumental objects.

I don’t think we’re going to do an actual fashion show. We’re going to do a lookbook in tandem with an art exhibition, so we’re also thinking of clothing that’s going to stand on its own and not really have to be in movement.

BARRINGER: We always think of ourselves as weird time travelers from a time that didn’t exist. Like historical futurism.

QUADROS: The Fifth Element. Spaceships, but also the pyramids.

BARRINGER: Exactly. There’s so much history and so many stories, people’s individuality that we don’t know about throughout time.

QUADROS: So you’re not doing New York Fashion Week then?

MCGOWAN: We are not this year. We might release a lookbook around Fashion Week, but we’re not doing a show until next year. We’re burnt out. We’re very interested in doing more shows in the future. We really want to take time to do a show in Paris in the future. So we just need to regroup and take time. 

Fashion moves so fast, and it’s not always realistic to create things at that level when you’re self-funded. It’s just us and our interns. It’s not like we have a giant team. For us, this has been the most rigorous fashion schedule that we’ve shown on. It’s been three shows within the space of a year.

And doing runway is a lot. It doesn’t look like it’s as much work as doing an art show or an exhibition, but it’s actually so much harder in comparison when you don’t have endless resources to pour into it. It’s one of the hardest types of creation because there’s not only the functionality of the garment, there’s the live element. It’s basically working for six months on something that’s gonna be seen for twenty minutes. You have to have so many relationships and people involved. In New York especially it’s hard to find venues. It’s a whole thing.

QUADROS: Fashion Week is in a weird place right now too. Your show in particular had a lot of buzz, a lot of really positive responses that what you’re doing is something unique.

MCGOWAN: Thank you. And we don’t wanna abandon New York. I think a lot of our inspiration and identity is very linked to this place, but it’s an experiment that we want to show in Paris. We’re also interested in French fashion history and that lineage. So it feels like a personal goal.

Image courtesy of Company Gallery

It's A Real Carnival at Jeffrey Deitch Right Now

Photo by Genevieve Hanson


text by Karly Quadros

The beginning of May in New York is time for Frieze: time for smart, clipped suits, time for well-to-do collectors, and time to pack into the vaguely dystopian honeycombed behemoth known as The Shed. And then, there was Jeffrey Deitch.

On May 3, a cavalcade of artists, burlesque stars, magicians, drag queens, sword swallowers, latex fetishists, fan dancers, scenesters, and bright young things stepped right up for the night of all nights, the show of all shows, a spectacle to bring even the stodgiest gallerist to their knees: a carnival. Presiding over the whole thing was master of ceremonies/artist Joe Coleman, who curated the group show and contributed a variety of artifacts from his own personal Odditorium of historic circus curios. The gallery was packed tight with art and packed even more tightly with people. A glimmering merry-go-round twirled next to a bulging, fleshy sculpture and ornate Coney Island mermaid costumes. The over forty artists invited to participate ranged from big chip favorites like Anne Imhof and Jane Dickson to cult favorites like Kembra Pfahler and Nadia Lee Cohen to contemporary favorites like Raúl de Nieves and Mickalene Thomas to historic figures like Weegee and Johnny Eck. Coleman, a lifelong devotee of the carnival and performing arts, made a point to include and celebrate the work of circus arts performers that have made up his own found family for decades.

‘Circus’ is a word often used to evoke a sense of chaos and farce — a political circus, a clown show — but the festival of carnival, which is celebrated in more than fifty countries around the world, has a more subversive history. The elaborate masks, headdresses, and costumes that have made carnival celebrations in places like Venice and Rio de Janeiro so iconic were a way of turning the daily socio-political order on its head. Class, gender, sexuality, and power were turned on their heads and marginalized communities, enslaved people and queer people especially, were able to express themselves with more freedom in public.

The American circus tradition is deeply troubled by its own abuses against people of color, disabled people, and animals, but it is undeniable that circuses were also alternative spaces for survival and community for those who couldn’t or weren’t allowed to live freely in mainstream society. In many ways the carnival, with its wild exuberance, unabashed sexuality, hair-raising feats, ramshackle opulence, seedy thrills, and thicker than blood bonds is the ultimate expression of the found family. We caught up with curator Joe Coleman to talk more about the exhibition, flea circuses, Times Square’s sleazy history, roadside attractions, and more.

QUADROS: It's Frieze week right now, so things feel a little more buttoned up, which is why I feel like the show coming out at this point in time was so refreshing.

COLEMAN: Well, these people are like family, so it just comes naturally to me. Some of them, like Jo Weldon produced a work of art for the show, and she had never made a work of art before. Her piece was amazing. People like Bambi the Mermaid have been in the art world for some time. I put some of her costumes in the show because the Carnival is the burlesque house. It's the [Coney Island] Mermaid Parade. It’s Mardi Gras. It's the old Coney Island Wax Museum. It's Times Square back in the day. It encompasses all those things, at least in my imagination. So I wanted to bring everybody on board.

QUADROS: Why Carnival? What is your personal relationship to the circus and who are some of the first artists you reached out to?

COLEMAN: My connection to the carnival dates back to childhood. I was born in Connecticut near Bridgeport, where PT Barnum had a home. As a child, I went to to the Barnum Museum. And when I was very young, I took my first trip to New York, to Times Square where I saw these huge posters of burlesque performers on the street.

QUADROS: Back when it was a little seedy. (laughs)

COLEMAN: Yeah. That's what was fascinating to me, especially as a child. It seemed like those women were eighty feet high on those billboards, plus I got to peek in and see what they were doing. I was also brought to Hubert's Museum where there were sideshow performers and a flea circus. From that day on in my childhood imagination, that was the place I wanted to live. So, when I was in my late teens, I moved to New York, and it’s never disappointed me. I've lectured and performed in Coney Island, and certainly it's been the subject of my paintings. I also have quite a large collection of artifacts dealing with wax museums, sideshows, burlesque and I've included a lot of my archive in the exhibition as well.

Photo by Genevieve Hanson

QUADROS: What inspired you to start collecting?

COLEMAN: It’s really an indescribable urge that you find, or maybe it found me. I didn't find it (laughs). It’s wanting possession of me. Certainly there's a lot of contemporary art that's inspired by the sideshow and by burlesque and even the flea circus people. I have a whole section on miniatures in the exhibition. But aside from the contemporary artists, I wanted the real artifacts and artisans to be appreciated too. There is a real flea circus in the exhibition. There's also works by people that have actually been a part of the carnival. People like Camille 2000 who was an amazing burlesque star from the ’70s ’til the 2000s. There’s one of her great costumes in it. And Liz Renay, also a great burlesque star, author, and filmmaker—she’s in John Waters films, but she also did some B-movies in the late ’50s. Some of her paintings are on view as well. Also, Johnny Eck—have you seen the movie Freaks?

QUADROS: Oh yes.

COLEMAN: He was the Half Man in Freaks who was very charismatic, probably stole the whole movie. He was a fascinating artist himself, so his screen paintings are on exhibit. He was famous for his painted scenes that went into windows and door frames. It was unique folk art. In Baltimore he also made puppets and put on puppet shows. Those and his train are on view. One of the ways he made money was by running this miniature train for children.

QUADROS: That sense of found family is so clear. One of my favorite books is Geek Love by Katherine Dunn. So much of that book is about this deep bond between self-created circus freaks. Can you talk a little bit about that concept and how it manifests in the show?

COLEMAN: Katherine Dunn was a good friend, and I also love that book. I mean, when you find each other, you just get each other. I've seen so many performers rise up in the ranks in Coney Island, and they’re all dear family. Whitney and I have been married for twenty-five years now and our marriage was really a carnival-style marriage. We were married by a ventriloquist dummy named Dutch. He's on exhibit at the gallery as well.

Our wedding was attended by many circus performers and artists. I arrived in a hearse inside of a coffin, and my six groomsmen pulled the coffin out of the hearse after it backed into the barn at the American Visionary Art Museum. They walked a New Orleans-style funeral to the altar, placed the coffin up, and I came out of it and went for Whitney. (laughs) You can also see on display our coffins that were made in Ghana. There's this fantasy coffin tradition, where if your favorite thing is a martini, you can have your coffin made into a martini.

QUADROS: Were there any sort of unexpected additions to the show?

COLEMAN: Walton Ford produced a new work just for the show, which I was thrilled to get. Also, John Dunivant produced a new work for the show, and Mu Pan, and several people that I just reached out to were so sweet to give something to the show, like Robert Williams and Guillermo del Toro. I had pretty much everybody I wanted in the show.

QUADROS: Carnival itself originated in Europe and then was taken to the Caribbean as this tool for political expression. It's a time when common people can wear costumes and speak the language of the ruling class to mock and criticize them. Were you thinking at all about political critique when organizing the show? Or did anyone bring a piece that brought that to life for you?

COLEMAN: Certainly. There's several works that deal with that. One in particular that I was really blown away by is Jo Weldon's piece. She's very well known in the burlesque community, but she's also a sex worker and very unapologetic about it. She made a doll. There's a whole section on dolls in the exhibition that includes Kembra Pfahler’s dolls, but Jo Weldon's doll represents the history of sex work. It's a pretty dramatic and incredibly personal, controversial piece. She's also spoken at the UN about the rights of sex workers. She has such a powerful voice.

QUADROS: Back in the day, the circus really had the power to shock and disgust. People would go to freak shows and pass out in astonishment. These days, I feel like there’s a real sense of over exposure. People are exposed to so much online that they feel calloused, but are there ways that the circus can still shock us? Obviously, you mentioned its power to jostle up people's preconceived notions about sex work, but is there a power to the circus beyond shock value?

COLEMAN: Yes. Obviously there's things beyond shock value, though whether it can change things or not remains to be seen. But it has its effects on people. If you get under people's skin and they take something with them, that's enough. There's all kinds of expression in this show. It’s nice that it could be fun and wild and serious and scary at times. That's what I always liked about carnival. It’s scary and exciting and sometimes it teaches a lesson.

QUADROS: Maybe you're a little repelled by it, but you're also very attracted to it at the same time. It's very frank about some of our deepest desires; the kinds of things we don't want to face.

COLEMAN: There's something wonderful about that—to have a place where you can experience those things.

QUADROS: I'm also interested in the circus as a non-traditional history of America, or the alternate history of the outlaws, the conmen, the thrill seekers. So many of our enduring myths of the country come from the circus, like Barnum and Bailey or Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. What makes that so enduring and timeless?

COLEMAN: It was important to have people that have actually been an active part in some way. Like in the case of John Dunivant—he’s an accomplished artist, and that seems enough reason to have him in the show, but what you may not know is that he created Theatre Bizarre in Detroit, and it's one of the most amazing spectacles of carnival or circus in the past twenty-five years. For many years it's been in this Masonic temple with so many rooms that you get lost. You can't even see the entirety of theater. There’s ghost trains inside, burlesque stages, and art everywhere.

QUADROS: That reminds me of like the House on the Rock or something like that. These American people that just get an idea in their head and create their fantasy world.

COLEMAN: Yeah. And that’s what carnival is all about, really.

QUADROS: Manifesting your dream world.

COLEMAN: Yeah. If there’s something in the world that you always wanted, and it doesn't exist, you have to make it yourself.

QUADROS: But then, there's also the thornier history of carnival. It's always been this haven for the marginalized, but it has also historically been a place where racial stereotypes are reinforced. When you were curating the show, how did you reckon with that?

COLEMAN: There's certainly works of art that deal with it, like Narcissister’s work. She's got one of the most powerful sculptures in the show. Or there’s Derrick Adams’ Ferris Wheel image. I think it's better for them to talk about those works themselves, but it's definitely a part of it. Exploitation has always been a part of the carnival.

QUADROS: In many ways it's part of the art world too. These are ongoing questions about spectacle and viewership.

COLEMAN: Exploitation can certainly be found throughout America in various ways. Really throughout the world.

QUADROS: Do you have an especially unique piece from your own collecting from the historic archives that's in the show that you want to talk about?

COLEMAN: The most unique and rarest one is a ticket to the Tammany Museum, which was the first real dime museum. It predates Barnum; it’s from the late 1700s. Barnum's American Museum eventually took over the Tammany Museum site, so this predates the whole tradition of the dime museum and the sideshow itself in America. And I have an actual ticket to the Tammany Society. You had to become a member in order to see the museum, which consisted of wax figures, taxidermy … you know, what people are making at sideshow museum’s today is pretty much based on what was set up at the Tammany Museum.

QUADROS: What a historic artifact. But then, you also have this flip side, right? People mostly think of the circus as something historically situated with traditions like burlesque that have been around for so long. But you also have some pieces that incorporate new technologies, like the interactive Nadia Lee Cohen piece. Was that something you intended to bring in?

COLEMAN: Yeah, that’s a really great piece. It blew me away when I saw it and interacted with it too. It's one of the most powerful pieces and I think the Carnival would've always wanted to grow with technology, so that does not seem to contradict it at all. When motion pictures became popular, the first places that really started showing them were dime museums and sideshows.

Nadia Lee Cohen, Entitled, 2025
Silicone, sheet metal, and glass

QUADROS: There's something very tactile about that world. Everyone instinctively knows what the aesthetics are.

COLEMAN: Yeah, but Nadia's piece does prove that the technology works really well with the subject.

QUADROS: People think of Carnival as being relegated to the past, but we still get it peeking through into popular culture every now and then. What does Carnival look like in modern times?

COLEMAN: I think it looks like Jeffrey Deitch's gallery right now.

Carnival is on display at Jeffrey Deitch in New York until June 28.

Photo by Genevieve Hanson

Ric Heitzman: A Pee-wee's Playhouse Production Designer on Art, Animation, and Finding the Humor in Anything


text by Karly Quadros
portrait by Joshua White

“Guess who’s at the door, Pee-wee!”

Anyone who was a kid in the late-80s (or a lover of camp, kitsch, and tactile production design in any subsequent decade) knows the phrase well. Emanating from a jolly windowpane, it signaled the entrance of any number of zany characters: a rhinestone cowboy with an animated lasso, a bobbleheaded salesman, a 1950s beehive towering to the ceiling. Every Saturday morning at 10 a.m., the cast and characters of Pee-wee’s Playhouse pogo-sticked around a mid-century, candy-colored dream home, stuffed to the brim with puppets, papier mache, and wallpaper only the 80s could produce. Pee-wee Herman – the impish avatar of host and comedian Paul Reubens who is the center of a new two-part documentary, Pee-Wee As Himself, airing on May 23 – was the clear heart of the show, but it was the world of Pee-wee’s Playhouse that had kids wishing they could live inside their own surrealist bungalow.

Artist Ric Heitzman worked on Pee-wee’s Playhouse as a production designer, puppeteer, and voice actor for characters like Mr. Window, Cool Cat, and the Salesman. Even after the show ended in 1991, Heitzman’s art is packed with a boundless gestural joy and cast of characters straight from Sunday morning cartoons. Working across comics, cartoons, and commercial animation, Heitzman’s Escher-like paintings have a technicolor psychedelia to them, packed densely with explosions of color, hatching, and characters romping their way through their worlds.

Heitzman’s new show, Squiggly Dee, is on display until June 9 at Face Guts, a storefront gallery project from artist and former animator Tim Biskup, in collaboration with White Box LA. The two artists got together to discuss Pee-wee’s Playhouse, recurring dreams, and finding the humor in anything.

TIM BISKUP: What’s your favorite animal to draw?

RIC HEITZMAN: I draw a lot of insectoid characters. The first thing that came to my mind is Triceratops because that’s the animal I like the most, but I don’t draw it very often. I think about it a lot. Everything I draw is a mashup. I noticed I draw a lot of things that look like donkey-giraffe compilations. There’s a lot of insectoid things like centipedes and millipedes, things that look like human heads and insect bodies. That’s been in my head for a long time. It’s probably from playing with bugs as a kid. Kept everything in boxes with wax paper over them.

BISKUP: Of all the Pee-wee’s Playhouse characters, which one was the most like you?

HEITZMAN: Mr. Window. Mr. Window is the most open. Mr. Window [dips into the character’s cadence] is also just my voice. ‘Hey, Peewee, guess who’s at the door!’ That’s basically all I said. ‘It’s the King of Cartoons!’ I liked the character of the window. I liked it because it was really happy. All those characters were happy, but that particular character was big and happy. Plus, I designed it.

BISKUP: Was there one that you didn’t like?

HEITZMAN: No. There was nothing on that show I didn’t like. Even the characters that other people didn’t like, I liked. To me, it was like a sandwich. If you take away something, you don’t know what else would be there anyway. We were recently together as a group, and George McGrath, the writer, said he never liked the salesman character because the exaggerated size of his head always bugged him. But it functioned in the narrative as this irritating thing. It bothered him – it was supposed to bother everybody. That’s the point. 

BISKUP: You’ve told me so many great stories about famous people that you’ve just randomly run into: your James Brown story, the Belushi and Akroyd story is incredible, the Dolly Parton story.

HEITZMAN: I was just in the right place at the right time. A lot of people came to [Pee-wee’s Playhouse]. I met a lot of people, not necessarily through Paul [Reubens], but through my associations with Paul when that show was on.

BISKUP: Can you tell me a random one that you haven’t told me yet? Have you met Liza Minelli?

HEITZMAN: No, I haven’t met Liza Minelli. I did go to a drag show when I first moved to LA and there was a really great Liza Minelli imitator.

BISKUP: Cher?

HEITZMAN: Oh yes, I’ve met Cher. She came to the Playhouse. She was on the Christmas show. That was amazing to meet her because she was really sweet.I don’t know how old she was, but she looked amazing. When people came on that show, either they were fascinated by it, because it was like being in Candyland, everybody walking around with their mouths open, or they were terrified.

She was one that was absolutely terrified. Paul introduced her to us before we did the shot. She admitted to us she was nervous because she always did stuff for adults and she didn’t know how to do this. Paul was like, “Don’t worry about it. Just play it the way you play it. Don’t worry about who it’s for.” It was just funny to see someone who does these giant stage shows and performs all over the world, and they come on set and they’re insecure about it. You wouldn’t think somebody that big would be that vulnerable.

BISKUP: The way that you’re talking about it gives me a great picture of what it was like to work there and the amount of vulnerability it created in people whether they were feeling joy or fear.

HEITZMAN: Most people felt joy. That’s the thing that I can say that I’m proudest of about that show. You were able to convey a pure sense of joy. You do that too. Your stuff has joy in it. To me, that’s the best thing in the world. It’s harder to be funny than it is to be serious.

BISKUP: It’s vulnerable.

HEITZMAN: Comedy has tragedy in it, but it still has to be funny. 

That show afforded us, at least afforded me, a view into this world that I never expected to have. I didn’t come out here to do that. I always just wanted to be an artist. In fact, when we first got an Emmy, I was like, “What is that?” I always heard that term, but I was like, “What is an Emmy really?” I remember when they said, “You won an Emmy,” I was like, “This is great, but could I get a show somewhere? Show my art?” 

That’s what I wanted. In other words, if you’re not going for this stuff, you look at it slightly differently. It was a window into a world that I never thought I’d ever have a window into. I was always like, [ silly voice] “Golly!”

BISKUP: [similar silly voice] “Look at all this cool stuff!”

HEITZMAN: Some of it was cool, but also the personalities! Like you said, I have stories. I literally have seen every kind of behavior on set that could ever happen: tantrums, people punching walls, people throwing themselves down in the middle of a scene crying. It’s a place where people feel comfortable just going to pieces. I’m not talking about people in front of the camera. I’m talking about the director, the costumer, the lighting person, somebody falling out of the rafters, the wardrobe catching on fire. You just go, this is Hollywood, man. This is wild. This is uncharted territory. Something can happen at any minute. I know workplaces can be like that. It’s emotional craziness but also technical craziness, and sometimes it’s both at the same time. People’s emotions are really raw in live action shooting. That’s the great thing about animation. You’re gonna see it through very slowly. 

BISKUP: It’s gonna develop over a long period of time, and you’re gonna be alone.

HEITZMAN: You’re never gonna be patient enough.

BISKUP: When you’re talking to somebody, do you see the cartoon version of them?

HEITZMAN: I see a humorous version of what’s going on very often. It’s exaggerated. I almost see a punchline before it’s coming. Someone can be telling a poignant story, and I don’t mean to make fun of them, but you get ahead of them and you think, is this gonna be a joke? But there’s no joke. But in your mind you imagine the joke.

BISKUP: Do you think about how you would draw them?

HEITZMAN: Now that I’m a seasoned artist, I could translate that at any time. I’m not as ambitious as I used to be because otherwise I get frustrated because some of this stuff passes in a moment. It’s really only at that moment, and it makes me happy. 

The characters get exaggerated, almost like Hee-Haw or some other TV show like Monty Python. It’s the kind of stuff I’ve always been drawn to. Everything just gets exaggerated in my head. I find it very humorous and it puts me in a good mood and happy. It’s a state of mind that I’m in most of the time.

BISKUP: I actively look for funny things that people say. I have a tendency to share my interpretation of what somebody said that was obviously not what they meant to say. I have a way of picking language apart and thinking of different ways to think about something that somebody said that makes it funnier. Does that ever make you feel crazy?

HEITZMAN: I think it's an inner world. I thought about that for a long time because even from an early age it makes you more isolated, developing another world or being able to look at your subconscious. I would say a lot of people are not in touch with their subconscious. Maybe I’m not using the right term.  

I have lots of examples of being somewhere – especially when I was dating women, and even with Lorainne, my wife – and I’ll be sitting somewhere with a really big smile on my face, and she says, “Why are you smiling like that?” And I’m honest. I’ll say, “If you could see what I’m seeing in my head right now, you’d be very happy too.” 

I have a really rich inner world. I could close my eyes right now and just start imaging stuff, and it’s always really entertaining to me, even when it’s dark, just because it’s cool looking [laughs]. You get caught up in your own imagination. That’s what an artist does.

BISKUP: I felt like I was crazy when I was younger, but now…

HEITZMAN: When did you start feeling like that, I wonder?

BISKUP: I was not doing well in school, and my mom was trying to figure out why and she took me to some doctors to get tested. They told her, “He’s really smart!” The translation I made in my head is, Okay, I’m really smart, but I’m not doing well in school, so I must be crazy. I just sat with that idea in my head for most of my life. I explained everything based on that.

HEITZMAN: But you weren’t scared of yourself, were you?

BISKUP: I think this is why I avoided drugs. The one time I smoked weed, it was really existentially terrifying. All the big fears that I didn’t even realize I had came out, and it was just like, Oh God, I cannot do this. I cannot let that stuff out of the bag. I always felt like there was this stockpile of craziness inside of me that I just had to keep a lid on.

HEITZMAN: When were you first conscious of this?

BISKUP: I had terrible nightmares when I was a kid, so I was scared to go to sleep.

HEITZMAN: Were they recurring nightmares?

BISKUP: I don’t think they were recurring until my thirties. Then I started having them, and they helped me get out of a career that I was troubled by and start actually making paintings. 

HEITZMAN: Have they gone away?

BISKUP: Yeah. When I was working in animation, I kept having these dreams that there was a portal inside my house, and on the other side of this portal, there was a whole universe of these characters and it was my responsibility to help these characters escape.

HEITZMAN: That’s a good responsibility. Unless they were characters of ill repute.

BISKUP: No, they were defenseless little guys. And my house was a machine that would help them get into my dimension. Eventually I stopped working in animation and started making paintings and selling them in galleries. And all of those dreams went away.  I had a friend who was having dinner at our house one night and she said, “Those were your paintings. Those were the characters from your paintings.” You got something like that?

HEITZMAN: Oh yeah. Going through the entertainment industry, it’s just a different approach to creativity because it’s creativity on demand, and that’s very different from creativity when you’re just sitting around daydreaming. When I was in the industry, most of what I was doing in my dreams was trying to figure out the jobs that were ahead of me. If I had a storyboard or something, all I could do in my dream was turn it over and over again.

But I had a recurring nightmare when I was really young that went away about the time I was a graduate student in college. A Tyrannosaurus was always coming at me, and I was always running into a room where my mother was. Her back was to me so I never saw her face, then I looked out the window, and it wasn’t the Tyrannosaurus but a tornado coming, and that’s when I woke up.

BISKUP: So the dinosaur wasn’t as scary as the tornado.

HEITZMAN: Yeah, because a tornado was something that would happen in my real life.

BISKUP: It makes me think of the storm drawing from your last show here. You told me some kind of emotional stuff that was wrapped up in that.

HEITZMAN: Most of my drawings address the humor that I feel most of the time. At least, I hope most of those drawings exude a certain humor that’s chaotic and spastic. But sometimes when I’m frustrated, usually about something in my life, some situation that I can’t really do anything about – I can’t spend the money, I can’t fix this, I don’t know the answer, damned if you do, damned if you don’t – I’m just trying to struggle through something. I don’t know what the answer’s going to be so I just try to put it into the drawing, and those drawings tend to be pretty dark, just because of the nature of indecision and lack of control.

There’s a bunch of these drawings that I wouldn’t show anybody. They’re just messed up.  Some of ‘em I painted over. It’s a side of you that you’re not proud of, so you’re not sure how people would interpret seeing them.

BISKUP: Do you think they show clearly that emotional intensity that you’re not comfortable with? Would I see that if I looked at it?

HEITZMAN: I don’t know. I just know how it resonates with me when I look at it. It’s okay. I captured that and put it in the bottle. But I don’t want it out of the bottle.

BISKUP: I have those too.

There’s pieces that I have that I’ve shown that may be dealing with really intense things that I don’t want to talk to people about necessarily, but nobody’s going to get that from looking at it because there’s an abstraction that kind of takes it away. But the energy that it transmits is still really powerful.

HEITZMAN: I tend to just put those things away and go on to something else. The one that you saw, it’s not that I like that one particular drawing and I didn’t like the other drawings. It’s just there’s something revealing, something when I see it that irritates me. It doesn’t make me go, “I want to show that to people.” There’s a lot of stuff in portfolios: it’s the evil portfolio.

BISKUP: Would you show me?

HEITZMAN: Maybe. I’ve shown very few people that just because it really is stuff I should get rid of. There’s also stuff that’s just not politically correct from a long time ago that I’m ashamed of. I’ve destroyed a lot of that. I don’t know why I haven’t destroyed the rest because it really needs to be.

BISKUP: It’s interesting because listening to that new Robert Crumb biography, he talks about flushing his work down the toilet for years. When he finally unleashed those things on the world, that’s when he really achieved fame and fortune.

HEITZMAN: I think that I’d be flogged. I think about that portfolio that I’m talking about, and the reason I haven’t thrown away some of that stuff is because I rendered it very well. It’s an evil thought, but I rendered it really well.

It’s funny because, especially when I had commercial artwork to do, the illustrated kind of design, I clenched a lot. I was really good at the beginning about starting with really loose drawings, but then when I had to formalize it I got really tight. I didn’t like where it went.

It affected my sleep. It affected a bunch of stuff about me. But people don’t know the difference. They say, “It looks great!” and you’re like, “God, it really kills me.” With commercial work, I felt it in my shoulders. My wife, she’s the most honest person. She’d just look over my shoulder and go, “Why did you tighten up?” She knows. After a little stretch, when I got out of [commercial work] and started doing animation, she’d say, “I’m so glad you don’t do that anymore because you don’t tighten up like you used to.” In animation, you don’t have time to tighten up. I was doing storyboards as fast as I could possibly draw them. I didn’t have time to think, This has got to be perfect.

BISKUP: I know some really good storyboard people who draw terribly, but their ideas are so good.

HEITZMAN: You know, I was freaking out when I first got into it. I never thought I was very good at it. When you turn it into a client for the very first time and you’re like, “Are they gonna understand this? Is this gonna make any sense?”

BISKUP: I talked to John Kricfalusi once about storyboarding. I was a background painter at the time. And you know what he said to me? He asked, “How old are you?” And I said, “I’m thirty.” He goes, “Don’t you think it’s a little late to be learning how to draw?”

HEITZMAN: [laughs] Wow. That’s supportive.

BISKUP: He loves to do that. He’s a challenger, man. Let me just say, I never did storyboards. That was me trying to get into storyboards, and that’s what he said. Thanks, John.

HEITZMAN: When I started doing storyboards, which was in Chicago, I realized fairly early on, you might be able to imagine the scenes, but you’re around a lot of people who can’t. In other words, they’re relying on you. 

Now, translating those drawings and being able to make it look like what they want it to look like? They don’t know what they want it to look like, but they know they don’t want it to look like R. Crumb or some funny animal comic. I had a really hard time drawing serious storyboards for serious things. They always looked rubbery. I couldn’t un-exaggerate. 

BISKUP: That is the inherent problem with animation: you’re working with people above you who are essentially going to tell you to make it less good.

HEITZMAN: You start out with a great idea, and you end up with one that’s just been cut to pieces. That’s the way most animation in America is. They say things like, “We have an artist-centric studio,” because they think that’s what they want to have. People love to rag on producers, and I can honestly say that there are producers to be ragged on, lots of ‘em. But I’ve also found producers who were really smart and who really believed in art and were just as good about managing people. But it’s few and far between. There are a lot of stupid people who ask you to do stupid things for stupid reasons.

It’s a hard business. But it’s mostly psychological. It’s not the art as much. It’s the psychology of trying to get all those people at the table to agree on something without too many opinions. Because they all want to have an opinion. 

HEITZMAN: Disney was the worst. I started out as a storyboard artist, and I worked myself all the way up to director. Then I was creative director, which is above the line. I didn’t know what that meant ‘til I was above the line. You’re just this über-head that looks over everything. “Oh, we can’t do it that way. This can’t be done that way.” If somebody’s really weak, you have to step in and say, “This person’s not doing their job.” I have to help them do whatever it is they’re doing or get rid of them.

BISKUP: How many years was that before you got there, above the line?

HEITZMAN: Oh that was a long time. That was way after Pee-wee. At least twenty years before I got to that. And I was just somebody that didn’t know that was a job.

In cartoons, it was not that developed. It was really small at Funny Garbage when I was doing cartoons for Cartoon Network. They wanted me to develop an entire division to make cartoons.

BISKUP: I was at Nickelodeon working at Oh Yeah! Cartoons at the same time. What a trip.

HEITZMAN: That was in ‘99.

BISKUP: I left the industry in 2001.

HEITZMAN: What forced me out of that industry was 9/11. Funny Garbage was very close to the Twin Towers. That was the Monday after I delivered the contract. I did twenty-five one-shot cartoons, three TV series, and a music video. I delivered that contract on Friday, so I was not in a hurry to get to work. I looked out the window of my building and the plane went right into the tower. It was the wildest thing to see. I knew something was wrong.

BISKUP: Whenever I think of leaving  animation, I always think of pulling back a bow string. Like my whole time working in animation was like tightening, tightening, and then all of a sudden I shot into a gallery. Is that what this feels like for you?

HEITZMAN: No, I went too long in that business. I burned myself completely out, and I couldn’t work for a while. I couldn’t really do anything. I took on too much. I couldn’t think funny.

Basically I couldn’t go anywhere unless I pitched something and it sold. I’d directed, I’d produced, I’d co-written things. People expected me to be delivering. Everybody said, “Okay, just bring us a product, and we’ll either do it or not.” I did that for a while, and I just got burned out.

BISKUP: How did you get back?

HEITZMAN: I taught for a while. I thought when I first started teaching that I would have a regular paycheck because I didn’t have one doing those jobs. They were always just up and down. I thought, This will give me some time to think out where I’m at. And it did. 

My whole trajectory with my work outside my art is that I’ll do as best I can until I get really tired of it, and then I’ll just walk away from it completely. This last walk away – which I hope is the last walk away, I hope to just be an artist the rest of my life, that’s what I want to do – I finally got to the point where I walked away from teaching. Even if I do it part-time, my head is going to be so distracted. I can’t make the art I want to make.

When I did that, I looked back and I was like, “God, I’ve had forty-five different careers where I’ve walked away from that career saying, ‘I can’t do this anymore. I have to do my art.’” You were smarter than me.

BISKUP: [laughs]

HEITZMAN: Right after Pee-wee, a lot of people that were close to me decided not to do this anymore. A lot of big artists I knew who were working partially in the industry like you were, they just decided to jettison the whole thing and be artists and make a go of it. I was a little insecure. I felt like I couldn’t.

I know you did what you did, and I have to say to this day, I really admire you for doing it. I admire all my friends who did it because I was insecure and I didn’t do it. And I feel like now I’m doing it.

BISKUP: When I did it, it was far more profitable than animation.

HEITZMAN: That’s the secret I didn’t know.

BISKUP: But only for about four years. And then there’s been fifteen years of barely making it. But having those four years in my head, I know I just gotta survive until there’s another wave. I’ve survived on that idea.

HEITZMAN: You’re good at looking ahead and strategizing. I’ve learned something from you in that world.

BISKUP: I think I really had to break away from the strategic part for a while. That’s what [storefront gallery space] Face Guts was about for me, just seeing how strategic I had been and that it was not working. I had reached a point where I was pushing so hard, and I think I was pretty annoying to most people. I realized that I had to get more loose and play around more and enjoy myself more. Being able to step away from strategy for a while made something energetic that I think was powerful and more true to who I am, so now I can be more strategic again.

HEITZMAN: You have the confidence because you know who you are. I’m a little behind you, but at the same time, I understand. I’m gaining on the confidence side.

BISKUP: I see this work and your last show as such a clear vision of who you are.

I haven’t asked you any of the questions I wrote down!

HEITZMAN: [laughs]

Leda Was Always the Swan: An Interview of Marianna Simnett

The mutability of power and pleasure takes center stage in Charades @ SOCIÉTÉ, Berlin.

Marianna Simnett
Leda Was a Swan (production still), 2024.
Courtesy the Artist and Société, Berlin.
Photo/ Leander Ott

interview by Summer Bowie

How we present ourselves and what we aspire to project is in an everchanging relationship with those around us. It is a story we’re telling about ourselves, to ourselves. In Marianna Simnett’s Charades, her second solo exhibition with SOCIÉTÉ, the inherent masquerade of existing in a society is examined from the ancient allegories that undergird our collective worldview to the personal histories we replay in our minds. It is a power play where nothing is ever fixed. Undermining the very foundation of Greek mythology’s Leda and the Swan, she contends that the swan was never Zeus in disguise, it was actually just a hand puppet. The subject of the story thus shifts from that of rape to masturbation when the subjects of the story exchange their masks. Persistent obfuscation is an everpresent quality within the work. In this way, she is asking you to decide whether the charade is just a playful game amongst friends, or if it is indeed an act of mockery.

SUMMER BOWIE: Greek mythology has been a recurring theme in some of your most recent work. Is Leda Was a Swan the first piece that puts your work in dialogue with a mythology that dominates the art historical canon?

MARIANNA SIMNETT: In 2019, I made a sculptural work called Hyena and Swan in the Midst of Sexual Congress, which, less directly, was also preoccupied with flipping the same myth. In 2022, I revisited Athena and her inadvertent role in Marsyas’ demise. Titian did a painting of the Flaying of Marsyas, who was flayed because he challenged Zeus to a musical contest and failed to play the flute upside down. 

I try to talk about these minor myths that don't get painted by people like Titian because they're either too female or too monstrous or too unimportant. So, yes, this is the first time I am confronting such a Top-of-the-Pops myth, and I’m not even trying to change its essence other than maybe reveal a blindspot. 

BOWIE: The polymathic quality of your work seems to have been developing since early childhood. From drawing and painting to music, text, film, installation, and beyond. You even taught yourself to taxidermy roadkill for previous works. It’s clear that you resist categorization and pigeonholing, but is there also an insistence on the role of the artist’s hand in the process that prevents you from outsourcing aspects of the work, as other artists of your stature are often wont to do?

SIMNETT: I’ve always enjoyed being in direct contact with my output. There’s an integral back and forth dialogue between my thinking and making. However, I also don't fetishize the artist’s hands. There can be an overstated importance of ‘touch’, which leans into the glorified image of the artist as genius, which suffuses the work with auratic value and power. For me, it is precisely that sludgy, messy middle that excites me. It’s also dangerous for artists to bend to the incessant demands of the market. One would hope that art is not a party trick to be reproduced at anyone’s whim.  It doesn't feel like a healthy response to just take orders and make more. On a larger scale, that’s eventually going to make you fall into a sinkhole. And I would not be proud of that work on my deathbed. (laughs)

Video Still
Marianna Simnett
Leda Was a Swan, 2024
Courtesy Marianna Simnett and Société, Berlin 

BOWIE: You recently started working with AI in your practice. When did you first start using the medium and what initially sparked your interest in it?

SIMNETT: I started working with AI in 2021 with Blue Moon, which was about the story of Athena carving a flute from a deer bone. I am attracted by antiquated tales and how they still resonate with what’s happening today. I’ve now produced a series of myths using machine learning, which explore our own relationship to AI and its infiltration upon our lives. Using it was a way of becoming friends with this ‘other.’

The way I approached it was not trying to be too clever. I don’t call myself an AI artist, it’s just yet another tool in the box. Everyone is undeniably already using it even if they are not aware.

BOWIE: It is starting to integrate very seamlessly into everything we do. At this point it’s only a question of how we want to use it.

SIMNETT: It’s a reflection of us. I think we perversely fantasize being destroyed by machinery. But at the end of the day, we are the ones making the models, and we have the chance to invent weird and wild experiences. In Leda, I don’t rely on text prompts and shoot all my own datasets from scratch. It’s a deliberately closed palette that I’m working with.

BOWIE: How did you go about setting up the AI model for Leda? I don’t know if that’s getting too far into the weeds…

SIMNETT: I mean, no. Well, that’s funny because there are weeds in the film and they represent Leda’s orgasm. (laughs) I wanted to reveal that Leda was always the swan. Her hand is the swan’s beak and she’s masturbating. It’s a tale of violence turned into pleasure. I worked with AI artist Arash Akbari, DoP Leander Ott, and Producer Henry Eigenheer. We set up the model by filming data sets of me performing in front of a makeshift set modeled upon a fresco of Leda and the Swan discovered in Pompeii in 2018. Every sequence was filmed about fifteen times so that we had a vast number of images to feed the model, and then it would regurgitate badly reconstructed video sequences, which I used as film editing material the same way that I would make an analog film. I was simply given new material by the AI based on what I fed it, which produced this interesting confusion.

Video Still
Marianna Simnett
Leda Was a Swan, 2024
Courtesy Marianna Simnett and Société, Berlin 

BOWIE: That feels like a very genuine collaboration with the medium rather than a basic outsourcing of the tedious, or even creative, parts of the work. You’re actually creating more tedium for yourself.

SIMNETT: Right. It’s precisely the opposite. Much more tedium. It’s also boring because I don’t even get to perform in the way that you might on a theater stage. It doesn’t care about talent. It just wants the goods. I was trying to do very dynamic, generous movements for the camera, so that it would have enough to chew on. But it doesn’t read subtle facial expressions. These just get blurred. So, it was really about gesture, movement, tableaux, mise en scène, lighting, props; all the basic elements.

BOWIE: This exhibition is very concerned with the fluid boundaries between individual and collective behavior. You also live and work between New York and Berlin, two cultural capitals that are currently in a state of ideological crisis. What role, if any, has the current political landscape played in the conceptual framework of Charades?

SIMNETT: I hope that people will feel the undercurrents even if I never land directly on the nose. But I can’t help but imbue the work with an omnipresent feeling or that deep, rumbling state of the Earth right now where there is so much collective feeling and pain. It’s alluded to, but not directly stated. There is something implausible about the multiple realities that we are forced to live with today. And the flooding of painful disasters whilst the chirpiness of another conversation is going on at the same time. The collision of some of these worlds is almost unbearable.

BOWIE: Do you feel as though our individual behaviors are getting lost in the collective behavior—that we’re losing track of our sense of internal motivation in our pursuit of the status quo?

SIMNETT: Yes. I think we’re being puppeteered by dopamine and addiction, and our brains are becoming less capable of individual thought. We’re being retrained to find quick, shorthand ways of responding to nuanced situations that then inevitably recondition our minds.

BOWIE: Charades is also rooted in notions of masquerade. You employ humor in your sculptural work with objects like the merkin to address historical examples of what we expose about ourselves in the act of hiding. Would you say this is a timeless phenomenon, or is the performativity of everyday life an evolving process?

SIMNETT: I’m with Judith Butler on the notion that the construction of identity is through performance, as opposed to there being any preexisting original ‘I.’ It’s malleable and mutable and unfixed. So, yes I think that’s timeless. I instinctively occupy many bodies, and I’ve done so since way before the internet became such a big part of our lives. I have multiple names, multiple personas—that is just how I have always lived and felt most comfortable in my skin. I think it’s innate.

 

Marianna Simnett
Caked, 2025
Oil on canvas
200 x 150 cm.
Courtesy of the artist and SOCIÉTÉ, Berlin

 

BOWIE: Can you talk about the mutability of power and how it’s addressed in some of the sculptural works?

SIMNETT: Power and idolatry are addressed through the choice of subverting or remaking what is commonly known as a reliquary, which is an object formally used to house the remains of saints after their death. There are some really fascinating ones encasing jaws and teeth, or lockets of hair, or bones, or ash; very macabre morbid objects. Often the remains of these bodies are not seen. They’re just implied to be inside. But the objects themselves are very ornate and bejeweled. In the Medieval era, they were thought to be much more than just objects, they were a powerful connection to the divine. For Charades, I have created my own twisted version of the reliquary.

There is a bronze bust with a nipple extracting milk made of pearl, an arm dressing as a wedding cake, a foot wearing a horse shoe. So, I am pointing to this ancient tradition of worship using classical materials in all the wrong ways.

BOWIE: There’s a wonderful inversion happening with the beautiful object that’s meant to hold the macabre turned into the macabre object that’s meant to represent something sacrosanct.

SIMNETT: Exactly. And then there’s the merkin box. There’s a presentation of six merkins that we have produced out of human hair, and they are also presented in a treasure box with cast bronze masquerade apparatuses in there, like combs and brushes and eyelashes and mirrors.

BOWIE: We just wrapped our Desire issue where we also thoroughly explored Lacan’s theory of the Other as it relates to desire and jouissance. And I was curious if you might talk about the way that you address these ideas in Leda Was a Swan.

SIMNETT: Through all of my work, there is this sense of the pleasure/pain dichotomy. With Leda Was A Swan, I didn’t want to destroy the story. I wanted to transform pain into pleasure, rape into masturbation. Not to say that masturbation is necessarily always pleasurable. It can also be painful, distressing, lonely; it can be so many things.

It’s interesting to repeat exactly the same story but just substitute the god with a puppet. There’s still aggression, fighting, tumbling—I wanted to keep it ambiguous as to what this orgasm was. Speaking of the weeds, we cut from a shot of the swan heading towards the pubic region, and then it transforms into a shot of the swan’s hand traveling through some pond weeds before it opens up into an orgasmic expression by the corpse bride, Leda. We cut away from the action and go into the one and only exterior shot, when we are actually going into the body.

BOWIE: That’s interesting because one of the artists in the issue whose work talks a lot about jouissance and the Lacanian Other is Isabelle Albuquerque. Her work also came up a lot for me as I was researching your œuvre, because she also subverts the subject-object relationship by instead making it subject-subject.

SIMNETT: (laughs) My merkin maker actually made some merkins for Isabelle.

BOWIE: What a small world! And that’s the same thing that’s going on with you in this work. It’s not Zeus and Leda, subject-object…

SIMNETT: …This is subject-subject. It’s quite thrilling to split yourself up like that and to think about these meeting points between different subjects overlapping with each other.

BOWIE: In the piece, you turn your body into a literal grey area by playing the role of both Leda and Zeus in swan form within the same body. In an interview we published with writer Constance Debré, she said, “We’re all victims and we’re all guilty.” I’m curious if you agree with that.

SIMNETT: Yeah, I think so. Being a survivor of sexual violence myself, I have to understand my own position. There are choices one can make, different ways to narrate the story without obfuscating the truth. Not for anyone else, just for yourself. It’s so important, so empowering, and so hard. 

Angela Carter inspired me when she reconceived Zeus as a puppet in The Magic Toyshop (1967). It was one little sentence that made me think, he's just a toy!

BOWIE: I want to talk about the way that these themes of gender, power, vulnerability, and identity are very prevalent in your work. But more specifically, this mutability of all the above as a society. Do you think we’re losing our ability to parse through the grey area?

SIMNETT: Social media preys on the attention economy, which has no outlet for nuanced thought. The way that we communicate to others is fundamentally shorter, snappier, and less about long-form opinion.

BOWIE: Right. We tell ourselves we don’t have enough time for a 5-minute video, but by the end of the day, you probably made time to watch a hundred 5-second videos. We don’t remember most of it, but we keep consuming more than we can digest.

SIMNETT: It’s like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Are we all just going to eat until we become butterflies? And then die within two days.

BOWIE: Right, be beautiful for one minute and then go out. (laughs)

SIMNETT: Collectively. (laughs)

Marianna Simnett
Mute, 2025
150 x 200 cm.
Courtesy of the artist and SOCIÉTÉ, Berlin

BOWIE: I want to talk about Faint with Light. It’s an audio and light installation, but also it’s the recording of a durational performance in which you brought yourself in and out of consciousness via hyperventilation. Can you describe the experience of creating the work?

SIMNETT: I hired a professional medic to stand in this recording studio while I fainted four times. I learned how to faint from YouTube, from these kids posting videos of themselves doing it to get high. When you reduce your carbon dioxide and faint, it gives you a euphoria. I did have a seizure by the fourth and I was advised not to do it a fifth. The recording is in real time. There’s no editing. It’s just faint after faint after faint after faint.

The experience of fainting comes in stages. You first hyperventilate on your haunches, you close up your air passageways by closing up your lungs and getting very small into a ball. You keep hyperventilating until you feel your extremities go quite cold and your tongue starts tasting a bit like metal. And then, you suddenly stand upright and you strain your glottis. That causes your blood to be pushed down from your brain into your body and your body’s reflex is to become horizontal, to get the blood back into your brain as quickly as possible and for the air to get back into your lungs.

This piece is inspired from a Holocaust story of survival. My Jewish grandfather fainted when he was shot and they left him lying with the dead. He woke up and bit his arm to check he was alive, because he thought he was dead. He was Yugoslavian-Croatian, so he also lived through that war as well. He had a horrifically traumatic life. He was in concentration camps, fought in the French resistance, and was a very miserable and mean man. He was actually very mute. So silence has a lot to do with the piece as well.

For me, the physical act of fainting was—as it was for the little boys—very exciting, very euphoric. That work was really about a gap as opposed to a presence. When I listened to the audio recording back, the sound that I was interested in was this guttural noise that happens when I’m unconscious. It’s really hard to faint. You have to hyperventilate for ages and it’s painful. That’s the barrier you need to go through. Once you cross that barrier, you’re like, oh, I have to go that far. And then it’s easier. So, it took many failed, exhausted attempts to get to one faint. 

I didn’t want to understand my grandfather’s experience. I just wanted there to be an acknowledgement that there was this anti-body in the room somewhere. It’s brutalist, it’s almost like a heart monitor. The audio is governing the light, which rises and falls with my breath, and it’s the strongest light you can get. Blinding. When I’m fainting, it’s this raw, very orgasmic, huge sound and the whole wall goes bright white. That’s my black out. So, it’s this inverse of my experience in a way.

BOWIE: It sounds like it mirrors childbirth. The first time is so difficult, and then once the body learns how to do it, subsequent births get much easier. But there is so much that gets lost in the long-term memory because forgetting the pain makes it easier to try again.

SIMNETT: Absolutely. And actually all of the memory of fainting was absent because the split second after that point of pain, you’re out cold. You’re somewhere else. And then, you wake up into a deep, deep disappointment at the world. I was absolutely horrified that I had to come back.

BOWIE: Our treatment of bodies, both human and animal is addressed extensively (possibly always) in your work. Are there any specific life experiences that led to this recurring motif?

SIMNETT: I’m trying to be choosy about the way I approach this because anger, violence—it’s not a secret that that’s been around me since birth. But I don’t wish for the work to be autobiographical. I don’t want to start giving you woe is me stories about things that happened to me in my childhood. It just doesn’t seem relevant. But, am I angry? Sure. Did things happen? Yes. I don’t know what miracle landed on me as a kid, but the transformation of whatever I had—which was a deep anxiety and fear and loathing and all these negative emotions—were channeled into this fuel that is absolutely inextinguishable. It’s just a fire up my bum that won’t go away. (laughs)

BOWIE: That sublimation seems to constantly keep fueling itself. You also problematize the tropes of beauty and monstrosity in a very interesting way.

SIMNETT: There are so many standards to adhere to and idealized versions of female beauty. What’s funny about my appearance is that I can subscribe to the ideal if I perform it. And so, it can be confusing for people, especially men. I had to get rid of a photographer recently because he was a creep and he was making me feel really uncomfortable. I was reflecting on it with my butch lesbian friend who was like, “I never get looked at like that. I get pure hatred. Like, I wish you didn’t exist.” 

I don’t know which one’s worse, but in that room, I had my makeup on, I was posing in front of the painting and doing the thing that you’re supposed to do. And I just couldn’t do it. His eyes and the vibe was just all wrong. It’s really about understanding that there are as many identities and versions of beauty as there are human beings in the world.

BOWIE: That comes back to this idea of embodying different identities. Sometimes when you embody, say, a hyper femme identity, under a certain gaze, you feel very empowered. Under another gaze, you feel diminished and want to embody a completely different identity, because you don’t always have the power to change the gaze.

SIMNETT: Of course, I held it all together and then burst into tears as soon as he’d left. It just completely broke my shell. That was such a perfect example of getting overly beautified, being well-behaved, and then not being able to behave in the moment.

Marianna Simnett
Scored, 2025
Oil on canvas
110 x 150 cm.
Courtesy of the artist and SOCIÉTÉ, Berlin

BOWIE: Which begs the question of who’s misbehaving in that situation? I want to talk about the paintings. Can you tell us a little bit about the images and the ideas that you explore in these works?

SIMNETT: Yeah, absolutely. It’s the first time I’m showing oil painting. One comes from a memory of these invisible feet coming underneath the chair and pushing my feet, but in slow motion so that I didn’t even know it was happening until my feet were jammed between this anonymous person’s feet and the wall. It was a way of silently showing me that I was being attacked from behind. It was a public bus, but the act was a private violation under the chair. I exaggerated and fantasized over it in my mind for many years. A lot of the works are suggestive of power play. There’s a still life on a vanity table with little objects and a very fine-tooth comb with pubic hairs stuck between the teeth. It could be the comb for the merkins or suggestive of getting ready to put on that day’s mask.

BOWIE: The setting of the stage, perhaps. Do you feel like there have been any misinterpretations of yourself thus far in your career that you want to correct?

SIMNETT: I think there are risks that I take that are not always digested, just due to the sheer amount of medium-hopping. If my work risks a kind of randomness, I would hope that by the time I reach ninety, that that’s been solved. Like in the [Louise] Bourgeois sense of being able to see a coherence over a lifetime. It also comes back to this victimhood, which really relates to the show. This show is bold in its lack of deliberate attack upon the viewer. Maybe that’s a first for me. I’m not trying to assault anyone this time.

Charades is on view May 1 through June 28 @ SOCIÉTÉ Wielandstraße 26 10707 Berlin

Crumb Hearts: Sonya Sombreuil in conversation with Dan Nadel

Sonya Sombrueil of Come Tees and writer Dan Nadel talk Robert Crumb, Eric Kroll, and watching the dirty old man go from artist to muse.

Image credit: Eric Kroll

text by Karly Quadros

For a certain kind of weirdo, R. Crumb is a god. The grandfather of underground comix, his work teems with a highly specific dirty-little-bugger-ness that hit just as 1960s San Francisco counterculture was getting into full swing. He defined a sickly funny visual language that inspired the likes of ‘90s alt comic anti-heroes like Daniel Clowes and Jamie Hewlett as well as painters like Louise Bonnet and Nicole Eisenman. In his cartoons, Crumb depicts himself as a combination of ornery, neurotic, and randy, chasing down (or fleeing in terror from) Catholic schoolgirls with chubby thighs and languorous hippie chicks with their asses hanging out of their bell bottoms. His fetishes are unmistakable; a Crumb girl exists in a category all her own. 

His other character creations share similar cult status. Mr. Natural, a guru with a Santa Claus beard and a priapic nose, was a great dispenser of ‘60s absurdist wisdom, while his relentlessly bootlegged Keep on Truckin’ cartoon fetches prices in the hundreds if you manage to find a vintage t-shirt carrying its image. Perhaps nothing captures Crumb’s signature cocktail of sleazy satire like his comic strip Fritz the Cat about an unrepentantly hedonistic hipster tabby cat. An X-rated film adaptation of the comic strip from cult animator Ralph Bakshi was released in 1972; Crumb was so worked up over creative differences with the filmmakers that he immediately killed off the beloved Fritz, dispatched by a scorned ex-girlfriend who stabbed him in the back of the head with an ice pick.

In recent years, the art world has grown to embrace Crumb’s work a little more. A 1994 documentary by Terry Zweigoff on Crumb brought his work to a larger audience, and he’s now represented by David Zwirner. Crumb’s notebooks, full of obscene jokes and intrusive thoughts, sell for around a million dollars each. On display is his adamant lack of self-censorship but also a technically dense, exuberantly gestural personal style.

Sonya Sombreuil, artist and founder of the LA streetwear brand Come Tees, has found a muse in R. Crumb, inspiring a limited collection of t-shirts, panties, and long sleeves emblazoned with Crumb’s artwork. The collection’s campaign is shot by legendary fetish photographer Eric Kroll who, in addition to his landmark “Sex Objects” series has also shot Robert Mapplethorpe, Grace Jones, Madonna, Kenneth Anger, and Andy Warhol. Sombreuil was joined by Dan Nadel whose biography, Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life, is out April 15. The two discussed Crumb, fetish, photography, and flesh.

KARLY QUADROS: When did you first encounter Robert Crumb’s work?

SONYA SOMBREUIL: My parents had a TV in their bedroom and underneath their TV there was a dubbed tape that just said CRUMB in big red block letters. As a little kid I was like, oh, that must be for kids. And my dad was like, “Nope, don’t watch that yet.” I grew up immersed in ‘60s, ‘70s counterculture ephemera. So I encountered it really early, and my dad would always get me Crumb for Christmas.

DAN NADEL:  I first found the work because I was at a comic book convention when I was like twelve or thirteen. The dealer asked what I was into and I said “Maus,” so he handed me American Splendor, which had this great Crumb cover and Crumb stories inside. Those were written by Harvey Pekar. They're these amazing tales of working class Cleveland and record collecting and just like quotidian life, and those drawings just totally knocked me out. A year later in a used bookstore, I found a copy of Head Comix. I was with my dad, and he bought it for me. I don't even think he looked inside. That rearranged my head.

It also felt completely normal for some reason. It was very familiar. I knew it was my own little world, but it was completely familiar to me.

SOMBREUIL: It’s funny that he has this corrupting influence.

NADEL: It’s educational, Sonya. How dare you? [laughs]

SOMBREUIL: For me it was! I guess I’m lucky.

NADEL: It’s true.  For a lot of us – I mean, for me – he was part of a gateway to all other art. A real inspiration in that way. It opens up a lot of other interesting doors.

SOMBREUIL: Before I got the subject matter, I knew it was for me.

NADEL: It’s weird when you find things there for you. I felt the same feeling when, like fifteen years later, I first ran across Christopher Forgues and Paper Rad and Fort Thunder. It was like, oh yeah, this was made just for me. It’s a curious thing.

QUADROS: There’s a recognition there. For me, Crumb is the ultimate avatar of the outsider, a helm that was then taken up by the likes of Daniel Clowes and Charles Burns. In the 20th century, there was some edge to the people who embraced or satirized their neurotic preoccupations, but these days it seems like our whole world is ruled by repressed and intrusive thoughts run amok. Is there a danger in identifying too closely with being an outsider?

SOMBREUIL:  No. Crumb’s work, and why it's so important now, is the Charlie Brown phenomenon. Charlie Brown is the anomaly in his universe, but we're all Charlie Brown. And I feel the same way about Crumb's work. It's the recesses of your psyche. That was his content. He portrayed himself as this disgusting, irascible person, but he wasn't lauding those ideas. He was just revealing them. 

I think what's interesting about now is that there's a lot of people feeling offended. But actually, I think that the stigmas that are important to our society are ones that Crumb upheld in this work. And I think some of those stigmas have deteriorated in kind of a messed up way that I'm not sure we've seen the end of. People talk about the idea of decency or something – like obviously his work is indecent, but that's the point.

NADEL:  That's the point. It makes me think of Steve Albini, another avatar of edgelordiness. Before he died, he talked about how he regretted being so edgelordy, that he didn't quite realize that the stuff could be taken the wrong way. But at the same time, he remained this highly moral character with a really strong set of values. And what's so interesting about someone like Crumb is that, yeah, he gave vent to all this misogyny and racism. He also critiqued it, and it was also extremely clear where he stood.

It's still a blinking red warning sign at work. Even though it feels like it's too late for the warnings in some ways, his sense of awareness still feels very important even if we're completely swept up in it, like a tidal wave, swept up in the nastiness. But I think it's still really important. 

The thing about guys like Clowes and or someone like Julie Doucet or Robert, Aline [Kominsky-Crumb, Robert Crumb’s wife who is also a cartoonist], is that no matter where we are, that feeling of being outside is always accompanied by a really deep sense of self-reflection and, in many cases, deep self-loathing that is paired with a real meditative attempt to look inside and understand what it's all about. That, I think, is also a crucial difference between edgelord kinda work because they're really trying to understand. They're not just trying to fuck with you.

Image credit: Eric Kroll

SOMBREUIL: I’ve been talking about Crumb as a kind of wounded healer. He has these emotional and psychological wounds that he’s vociferous about, and in his own family, [you see] the effect that those wounds could have if they are accompanied by a different set of actions other than artmaking. But paradoxically, he’s healing the society that produces those kinds of wounds. When we shun that kind of work or say it’s a problem, you lose the potential impact of looking at yourself and looking at the world you live in.

NADEL: A s Robert would say, you have to deal with it. He always says “I’m both Mr. Natural and Flakey Foont.” He's the wise man and the fool. As he's gotten older, I think there is this instinct to heal. I think there always was this… wanting to understand and making work that would exercise these demons as much as show them. 

SOMBREUIL:  I heard this expression recently that someone said. They said this is a perverted attempt at healing. And a very literal attempt.

QUADROS: It makes me think a little bit about punk as a subculture. There’s this perverted sense of both reflecting and healing the ills of society. Crumb’s work especially was very integral to developing the aesthetics of punk and zine culture, underground comix.

NADEL: That was one of the fun things about writing this, realizing that influence didn't stop at hippiedom and it didn't stop in comics. One of the things that got me wanting to do it in the first place was knowing that the late Mike Kelley was a huge fan. Punk magazine was in part inspired by Crumb and then made fun of him, in this great judo move. Then people like Mike Kelley or Jim Shaw would take it up and put it through a conceptual blender. 

It just continues to have so many lives right up to the surprise that Sonya was so into it. The surprise that someone outside of my purview would be at all into it and so game was so much fun. It was such a great surprise because you never really know with him. I know that he's not forgotten because there's so much hubbub around the book, but you never know who's reading and who out there that's making art is into his work.

QUADROS: When you were making Come Tees, Sonya, were those some of the aesthetics you were drawing from when you were first beginning that label?

SOMBREUIL: Definitely. He is a looming figure in my personal cosmology.

I realize he’s that for a lot of artists. It’s like being into Jimi Hendrix when you’re into music. But it definitely feels very personal to me, like it’s possible to have a personal relationship with an icon. I tried being various forms of a Crumb girl for Halloween many years in a row. I tried putting cross hatching on my face. Come Tees, especially early Come Tees, had a lot of those qualities, cross hatched figures and speech bubbles, very conventional comic imagery.

NADEL: Did you ever make comics?

SOMBREUIL: I need an artist grant so that I can write my comic. Oh yeah, the least moneyed genre of all time.

NADEL: Maybe it would be worse if you were a poet, but otherwise… [laughs]

SOMBREUIL: In a way I’m a cultural dilettante. Compared to people who are into comic books, I don’t know almost anything. I know Art Spiegelman, the greats, but I’m into them profoundly. I really love the genre that is not fantasy. Did you say the word is prosaic?

NADEL: Nonfiction?

SOMBREUIL: Quotidian.

NADEL: You and me both.

QUADROS: Since you mentioned being a Crumb girl for Halloween, maybe you can talk a bit about the editorial and how you went about trying to capture the essence of the Crumb girl.

SOMBREUIL:  I have been obsessed with Eric Kroll for a few years. I had an amazing epiphany when I actually met him. I thought that I was obsessed with his archive that he posts all the time. But then I realized I was just obsessed with his constant posting, which is similar [to the editorial], totally mundane. No one in my generation could ever post like that. [laughs] It's amazing. He's so funny. I realized that I had misunderstood my interest in him. 

Many years ago, I reached out to him without knowing almost anything about him. I reached out to him to see if he would shoot for me, and he said, “I don't see how I fit into your world.” I was like, maybe we could meet up and talk about it. And he was like, meet me at this diner. But then I realized it was in Tucson. [laughs]

NADEL: Seriously? It was in Tucson?

SOMBREUIL: That’s where he lives! We all flew there.

NADEL: I always assumed he lived in LA.

SOMBREUIL: I did too. But no, he lives in Tucson.

NADEL: You flew there? Where?

SOMBREUIL: We stayed in a hotel. He offered to put us up, but there’s literally no standing room.  His house was incredible. I had no idea that he had shot the cover of the Zweigoff documentary. He was just like, “Oh yeah, they hated how much I charged them for my Crumb photo.” And I was like, “Oh what was your Crumb photo?” [laughs]

NADEL: That’s incredible.

SOMBREUIL: And then I just have intimate knowledge of what a Crumb girl is.

I had a couple friends who were down, who I knew were like in the archetype. It was an amazing thing because they're artists too. There was this really cool flip where Crumb and Kroll are actually our muses, these two artists who fetishize women.

Everyone knew what the assignment was. We all feel like we gained like a best friend. He just wanted to shoot things on his iPhone. He ended up making all these extravagant requests for different cameras, and I rounded up all of it and then he was like, “I hate these machines!” So he just shot everything with his phone.

NADEL: It’s such an interesting thing, that flip, because I showed Robert the Kroll photos. I explained because he’s still so… Crumb, that he couldn’t get his head around the idea that some young – meaning under the age of 50 – some young artists, particularly young female artists, would be even the slightest bit interested in him. Which, at a certain point, he should get over since young artists of all genders have been interested in him for about sixty years. But I showed him those pictures and he was like, “Oh my God, they really got it. They really understand what it is.”

And he’s self-aware enough to understand that what you got wasn’t just appealing to his kinks, but what you got was a particular way of thinking about the body and of embracing one’s body. I think he even used the term ‘body positivity.’ I was like, “Where did you learn that?” [laughs]

To make somebody like Kroll or Crumb your muses is such a great reversal because it flips the power. And it also lets them relax in a funny sort of way. It’s okay, now somebody else can make the art. There are other people in the game, and that’s good. It’s a good thing that it’s neither slavish imitation nor highfalutin, conceptual stuff. It’s just this other strain. For somebody like Crumb, who’s always been very generous about that, it’s refreshing and cool, especially in this mode, to see your treatment of the graphics. The things you picked were so left field and so interesting. 

It’s just great to have another set of eyes, another mind on this stuff that isn’t usually getting to play with it. Despite how much we love Kroll and Crumb, it’s remained within a fairly circumscribed set of people or a certain aesthetic for decades. It’s so cool to see it broken out of that mode. Nobody else would’ve chosen those images or nobody else would’ve designed things the way you designed them. They’re just completely making it fresh again.

SOMBREUIL:  I rewatched the documentary when you had first contacted me, and I was really moved by it because I felt first of all: the archetype of the outsider, that's still my inner monologue. I resonate with it so much. It's not an adolescent thing. It's eternal. And there's a lot of agony in that. 

It's funny, as a female viewer of his comics, because those comics had his idealized female form and it was like, “Hair? Unimportant. Face? Unimportant. Race? Unimportant. All that matters is they have big muscular thighs.” It felt like it gave me permission. Its soul breaks from the incredibly oppressive standards that are forced upon women. Both angles of it were healing for me. 

I thought a lot about the ways that Kroll and Crumb are the same and the way they're different. The women that they represent, the women in their worlds are almost always playing along on some level. When you think of Aline as a character, she's intelligent and she's bawdy and she is neurotic, and he portrays her so lovingly. It's an important feature in his work. 

NADEL:  I started on the journey of this book seven years ago. I was at an art opening actually. I was at a dinner and I was seated next to this woman named Sarah Lazin, and we got to talking. It turned out that she had moved to San Francisco in the late sixties and went to work for Rolling Stone magazine. She was part of this crew of female editorial workers who banded together in that time to to work together against these, you can imagine, ultimate macho rock assholes of the universe at that time. She's a badass. And she told me, “Crumb gave me permission to feel okay about my body.” And that kind of gave me a way in. Because I then interviewed a lot of women from that era, many of whom said the same thing, that his drawings were the first time that they felt okay about the way they looked.

There's a flip side to that, which can be a little bit like what my friend Naomi texted me the other day. She was joking, but it was partly real. She was like, “Did Crumb used to love bomb?’” There's a little bit of “I understand your body, no one else.”

But if you didn't know him, and you were Sarah, let's say, and it's the era of Twiggy and Peggy Lipton, I think that vision of women was really liberating. Obviously there was a lot about it that was also not so good. But nothing is. We all want things to be black or white, and it's all a big gray. 

SOMBREUIL: But I think the whole point is that women are treated sadistically, and that it’s sympathetic towards them. Like in the same comic I was walking about, he talks about the “sadistic women’s shoe industry.” And he says something like the tragic aspect is that these women have been the subject of ridicule their whole lives and have a negative self-image. It’s so compassionate.

And obviously there’s straight up obscenity, but that’s where humor is involved. Nothing is funny to everybody, and humor depends a little bit on taboos. There’s the funny, fucked up part of it, and then there’s the part of it that I think is incredibly sensitive.

NADEL: I agree. It’s interesting though because, of course, there’s another part of him. There’s a great interview from ‘68 or ‘69 where the interview goes, “You don’t really feel this way about women, do you?” It was about one of the Snatch comics. He says, “Sometimes I hate women.” There is that, that you have to contend with, but it’s part of the package. I guess what I’m saying is that some of it, you can’t even excuse. It’s just gnarly. But it’s part of the greater body of work.

Image credit: Eric Kroll

SOMBREUIL: You can’t defend it, and I don’t identify with all of it, but I think that the greater effect of it on a person, or at last on myself, was that it’s about objectification itself as a phenomenon. And a lot of it is about how women objectify men.

NADEL: It’s not something that has been written about much actually. It should be more. There’s much more nuance in all that work than he would lead you to believe. He’s often his own worst advocate in that sense.

SOMBREUIL: I think he has said that he doesn’t know where a lot of it comes from.

NADEL: That's right.

SOMBREUIL: It’s like this funny fairytale we have about drugs, that you take them once and you have ego death and then you’re just connected to the collective unconscious. That’s, to me, a funny way of talking about him, but it’s like he connected somewhere to something that’s very dark and twisted and resonant, and he has not taken full responsibility for it in a way that I relate to as an artist.

NADEL: That’s really interesting. There’s no explaining it. Bob Dylan said he didn’t know where the songs came from either. I think it’s the same with Robert. He connected into this larger consciousness, and he stayed with it for a very long time.

He’s still with it. He showed me a comic he’s working on. It’s all about paranoia, and it’s right on the money. It’s so specific to him, but he has this ability to be talking right at the reader, saying things that seem like they’re just the product of his own very particular imagination until you realize he’s talking about all of us, and that we all have this baseline paranoia, or a baseline set of visual cues or languages that we share. Somehow he both keyed into that and then iterated it so that it became his own. It’s highly unusual. You’re right, he doesn’t fully take responsibility for it, and maybe that’s good. Otherwise he’d be a whole other kind of artist. He can’t explain it. He refuses to.

SOMBREUIL: For someone who produced things that piss so many people off, for him to not accept full authorship of it is probably not the best PR.

NADEL: No. Terrible. [laughs]

SOMBREUIL:  But I think what he's saying is very truthful, which is that like he doesn't know where it comes from, and what he is responsible for is his technical ability to relay it. As corny as it is, it's like the artist as a mystic.

QUADROS: In some ways, it makes me think of the word ‘fetish’ and its origins as something religious or mystical, a ‘fetish object.’ It’s not just your kinks, but an object that gains higher meaning, a grander meaning than the sum of its parts. His obsession with it has imbued more inside of it. Not that he’s the first artist to make art about his fetishes, of course.

NADEL: But what he’s doing that’s different is that it’s in comics, so it’s not obscured. It’s so direct because it’s on paper and in a stack of things that you find in the basement or on a tape. The difference between it and, let’s say, Picasso or de Kooning or John Currin making art about their fetishes is that there’s no separation between you and the thing. You don’t have to go anywhere to experience it. The thing that you’re holding is the thing. It becomes a much more direct relationship.

SOMBREUIL: I never thought about that. Like the personability of privacy. It’s like a porno.

NADEL: Totally because you can lay in bed and read it. That was one of the great pleasures of comics in general growing up. It was my own thing. You watch a movie, somebody can walk in. You’re in an art museum or an art gallery, somebody’s going to be on their phone or whatever. But holding that thing… I think that’s one of the reasons why people feel that Crumb is theirs in a way that people don’t normally feel about other artists.

SOMBREUIL: His innovation is another flip, which is that the object of desire is often totally repugnant. You think about a John Currin, and it’s unrelenting. It’s quite sinister.

NADEL: I love those. Not all of them, but I love some of them a lot because they’re so thorough and twisted.

SOMBREUIL: Yeah, but to me the misogyny is much more evident there than in a Crumb comic where everything about it is obscene. Somehow that makes it a little bit easier to understand what he’s talking about. The nuance of it.

NADEL: Painting can be so nuanced, but it exists in a particular structure whereas comics have space to stretch out. And even though it’s maybe a more limited pictorial language with fewer tools – it’s just ink on paper – I think it does allow for a certain amount more nuance, especially in those areas.

[phone chimes]

SOMBREUIL: Would the ‘70s ever have happened if there was an iPhone? Definitely not.

NADEL: No, no. Too much technology in the way.

SOMBREUIL: Kroll was really engrossed in his phone. We were like, “Please use the camera, please.” And he was just like, “That’s not how this works.” But the more I look at the iPhone pics, the more I’m like, they’re incredible.

NADEL: What does he do all day? Does he have an archive?

SOMBREUIL:  He lives in the most incredible temple to erotica and photography in general. There's barely room to snake through all the different rooms. One room is just an island of files where you have to narrowly walk around. It's a relatively small house, but there's photos plastering the ceiling, the bathroom wall. Everything and anything you open up is just filled with photos. He OD'ed on beauty. He just loves photos and women. 

He loves women's clothes. I was thinking about him and Crumb because they both seem to really love dressing women. Crumb informed my personal style so much. I was like, “Yes, this is a flattering way for me to dress.”

When we were hanging out with Kroll, I was like, “Do you think you're just in women's clothes?” And he was like, “I've definitely thought about it.” He has like 10,000 bathing suits. We kept joking about it because he had only so much energy for shooting the photos – at a certain point he was like, “This is boring. I'm gonna take a nap,” – and then the next day he took us thrift shopping, and he had so much energy. He loved taking us shopping.

He’s incredible. Really good company and lovely and not a pervert. You feel comfortable around him. That’s part of his effect.  You feel like you could very easily take off your clothes, but it doesn't actually feel sexy at all. But I think immediately we were all really comfortable with him. But his house is incredible. It's a little bit of a tragedy because I'm not sure that it will ever be adequately archived. He’s a historian of erotica.

In the end, right before we left, he was like, “I have to show you some of the photos. This photographer's really important.” This guy would just go up to women in Washington Square Park and take photos of their hair. He had a hair fetish. I think it was like in the ‘60s. They're all black and white photos, just of someone's bun or someone’s hair as they’re moving by. I think people hated that and yelled at him. I don't think it was common to be photographed then. But they're important because they're anomalous. They're not in any other genre of erotica.

NADEL: I love the idea of those hair pictures. That’s so interesting.

SOMBREUIL: They’re really magical and really weird. They’re somehow about… shyness, like really profound inhibition. Because that’s as far as he could go: snapping a picture of a stranger’s hair.

NADEL: It makes me think of Christina Ramberg. She’s a Chicago painter in the ‘60s and ‘70s who specialized in refashioning women’s bodies but also really focused on hair. There’s also an Italian painter named Dominic Gnoli who did unbelievable paintings of hair. It’s a very particular thing to zoom in on, like with Crumb and shoes. If somebody’s deep into it enough, it’s a whole world basically. It opens up a whole universe of artmaking.

I was talking with Robert about a guy here in New York named J.B. Rund who we’ve all come in contact with in some way because he was an early champion of Eric Stanton. In the ‘70s, he was really responsible for bringing back a lot of the forgotten erotica before Taschen got involved.

It’s not as if there’s much writing about this stuff outside of these particularly obsessed people. And once they’re gone all the information in their heads is gone too. I think about that a lot. It’s not history that’s found its way even into cultural archives. It’s really sixty levels below the subculture. They’re gonna take the information about, like, what guy on 43rd Street sold what magazine to who. All that’s gonna go.

SOMBREUIL: I think there’s a laziness now about these kinds of histories because of the Internet.

Kroll is a national treasure. I think we all were wondering what we were in for, like this could be strange. He’s mercurial and cranky, but he’s also really lovely and sweet. He clearly really loves women.

There’s a lot of these kinds of histories that I wish were recorded. It was a really fun shoot because we got to go from taking photos to just sitting around for an hour while he’s going through boxes and boxes of photos, telling us the stories of everything. It’s interesting because being into erotica puts you super deeply in the margins. He showed us this book of his called the New York Years. It’s photos of Nam June Paik and all his artist friends. Like he wasn’t some obscure, random pornographer.

NADEL: He was around.

SOMBREUIL: I think it’s different now. I don’t think he would be sidelined as much. But that’s also what’s great about the whole precept of underground comics. It’s for the initiate. Even if it’s an enormous audience like with Crumb.

NADEL: It’s for the initiate, but it doesn’t take a password to get in. It’s accessible.

SOMBREUIL: I talk about this because my work is mostly on t-shirts, but you can’t get more democratic than a comic book.

NADEL: And a t-shirt.

SOMBREUIL: My t-shirts are not so democratic, unfortunately.

NADEL: You gotta make a living. That’s why you’re not making comics!

A Love Letter in Motion: An Interview on Fashion, Film, and the Erotics of Desire with Kate Biel & Kimberly Corday

Love Is Not All directed by Kimberly Corday and Kate Biel

interview by Eva Megannety

In fashion, desire is often draped in fabric, but for Kate and Kimberly, it lives in motion. In their collaborative short Love Is Not All, the two artists trade runways for reels, channeling longing, beauty, and decay into a filmic fever dream. Against the backdrop of a world increasingly obsessed with speed and spectacle, their work feels like a deliberate pause - a place where emotion lingers, glances haunt, and the act of getting dressed becomes a cinematic ritual. As fashion continues to merge with entertainment, film has become the new frontier for designers looking to craft legacy, not just collections. For Kate and Kimberly, fashion isn’t just about fabric and fit - it’s about emotion, storytelling, and cinematic escapism. And through their lens, each frame becomes a love letter to the art of getting dressed. We spoke about the allure of the fashion film, the seduction of storytelling, and why, for them, desire can only be truly captured in movement.

EVA MEGANNETY: Can you both walk me through the inspiration behind Love Is Not All? How did Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem shape the vision for the film?

KATE BIEL: Okay, so it’s sort of an extension from the first shoot I did with Kimmy, a couple of years ago. I think it was 2022. It centered around these somewhat sinister, feminine archetypes, isolated in a black void. It felt like a commentary on the ostracization and alienation that stems from feminine hunger and desire. Like Kimberly’s garments, it’s a feeling that’s both ancient and modern. We wanted to explore that further because we felt like we were onto something.

KIMBERLY CORDAY: It’s interesting that the poem led us to the film, but once we had the visuals in front of us, our initial idea of using voiceover to recite the poem felt like overkill. Watching the dailies gave us the same feeling as the poem.

MEGANNETY: How do you both feel the film captures the essence of the poem? How did you approach translating such a powerful literary work into visual art and fashion?

BIEL: Kimberly and I both have such a personal connection to this poem, it resonates with each of us in similar but different ways. For me, it encapsulates all the love stories that have really stuck with me: Phantom Thread, The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James, or even my own relationships. I've always seen love as tragic but necessary - nothing transforms you like romantic love. It’s overwhelming, humbling, a constant ego death. Torturous, but it’s also how I’ve grown the most, personally and creatively. In the film, we wanted to explore that duality, love’s destruction and its fertility, through each vignette.

CORDAY: When we were first discussing the short, I had kind of given up on looking for love. But I’ve always been a romantic at heart, so I was constantly grappling with those two sides of myself. This poem was kind of like my single woman manifesto because it encapsulated that same feeling through a combination of flowery language and macabre imagery. And the irony is … I met someone while working on the short.

MEGANNETY: Did that change your view on the project?

CORDAY: Yeah! In pre-production, I actually consulted him about the budget because I’d never handled a short film before - I’m not a line producer, so I really didn’t know what I was doing. And now, we’re literally engaged.

MEGANNETY: Oh my god! That’s insane, congratulations. What a beautiful full-circle moment.

CORDAY: Thank you!

MEGANNETY: Kimberly, your brand is known for merging punk aesthetics with a softer, more feminine touch. How did you blend these elements in the film’s character design and overall art direction?

CORDAY: Well, I never explicitly set out to make things that are both pretty and punk. I even fought that instinct for a while because I was afraid of being boxed into a genre. But I guess it’s just in my nature; it’s what I gravitate toward when I create.

MEGANNETY: The film seems to feature a lot of gothic undertones. How did the gothic genre influence the design of the wardrobe and visuals?

BIEL: Totally. I think the gothic genre is something that both Kimmy and I have always been attached to. For me personally, I love the erotic melancholia experience in Victorian era romance. There was this dying for love and being seen and being worshipped, but also was just not a fun time to be alive in, you know? And so, I think the gothic genre does a perfect job of challenging the romanticized, over-idealized notions of love. It adds these elements of fear and haunting to the mystery of human connection. And we wanted the visuals to be reminiscent of a ghost story, which is like unsettling yet bewitching, just like being in love.

CORDAY: Echoing what Kate said, I really love the gothic genre, so it comes up unintentionally in most cases. And so this time I thought, why fight it? Let's delve deeper into this. We were looking at a lot of medieval art and early horror films like Jean Cocteau's rendition of Beauty and the Beast from 1946, and just let ourselves play in that world and have fun with it.

MEGANNETY: Desire is often a central theme in both fashion and storytelling. How does Love Is Not All explore the idea of desire - whether it’s longing, obsession, or the pursuit of something unattainable?

BIEL: Yeah, I think we grounded that theme really clearly in the lead’s journey, the way the film begins and ends. With desire, there’s always this element of danger and risk. You have to give yourself away entirely, and there’s just a lot of risk with that loss or gain, because you could entirely lose yourself in that. And so in the first scene, our lead enters this portal through consumption, and she’s honoring her hunger for more while still being uncertain if she’ll come out on the other side fully intact. And I would argue that we’re our most feminine when we allow our desires to take control and overpower our reasoning, our logical thinking.  It creates something scary and uncomfortable, but also violently beautiful.

MEGANNETY: I love that analogy. The film has an ethereal, almost dreamlike quality. Do you think desire is something inherently surreal or unattainable in some way? How does this influence your artistic choices?

CORDAY: For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a fantasy addict, like growing up, I was obsessed with the artist J.W. Waterhouse, who painted pictures of nymphs and Roman Gods and sorceresses. I never wanted to leave that world, and honestly, I still haven’t. It makes reality a little easier to manage. Escapism plays a huge part in my brand’s aesthetic. Kate and I were referencing a lot of the surrealist painters like Paul Delvaux and Leonor Fini, whose works very much feel like a fever dream. So I’m happy to hear that translated.

BIEL: Totally. The vignettes start with this idealized version of love and romance, but as the film progresses, those fantasies start to crack. We wanted to show the inner conflict of desire - this constant dance between fantasy and reality.

MEGANNETY: Fashion is so intertwined with desire - whether it’s being seen, expressing yourself, or embodying something else. How does your work tap into the psychology of desire?

CORDAY: I feel like right now, people are hungry for romance and eroticism. There was an article a few years ago called Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny, about the simultaneous fetishization and desexualisation of the body on today’s screen. I’m hearing desire in a lot of new music, especially pop, but it feels like film and visual arts are devoid of it right now. Kate and I grew up on Steven Meisel editorials, McQueen and Galliano runways … we want to bring that tension back, that tug-of-war between romance and something more lascivious. 

MEGANNETY: In an era of fast fashion and fleeting trends, how do you think desire influences consumer behavior in the fashion world? And how do you both navigate that in your work?

BIEL: We both have similar, but different approaches given our medium. But personally, I try to slow myself down and remind myself that desire can be achieved through scarcity as well. That being selective, thoughtful, and precious in producing my work versus working from a quantity over quality mindset ultimately does a better job at serving myself and the audience. And that it’s sort of just like comparing casual sex with love and passion. 

CORDAY: Yeah, I’ll echo what Kate’s saying there. I’m personally interested in romance, not pornography. And I want to create things that haunt you or make you desperate to seek out, almost like an unrequited crush. Pornography is immediate and disposable. Romance is about withholding, delaying gratification, which is the sensation that I’m interested in recreating in my work. 

MEGANNETY: I love that. Fast fashion is like pornography. So accessible in today’s world too. It’s a shame. Do you think the pursuit of artistic creation is driven by desire? If so, what kind of desire fuels your work?

BIEL: I would say my work is honestly only driven by desire to really get down to brass tacks. Like my desire for approval, my desire to feel something, my desire to be seen, my desire to be understood and to understand the people around me. Desire is just exhausting, but also the only thing that gets me out of bed. 

MEGANNETY: Yeah, I really relate to that.

CORDAY: To be honest, I have no idea why, but it feels like I was bit by some bug that keeps me up at night creating and doubting myself and starting and stopping projects. It’s just in me and I follow it because it’s better, or somehow less painful than the alternative.

MEGANNETY: Your process involves manipulating materials like old lingerie and boudoir remnants. Can you explain how this Frankensteinian approach plays a role in the storytelling of the film and fashion pieces?

CORDAY: You know, the making of this film didn’t really change my process, it’s pretty much the same whether I’m creating for a stockist or a performance. But, what I can say is, any time I make something, I come up with characters who might wear what I’m working on. In this case, I had outlines of vignettes and Kate’s input to help build out the characters. 

MEGANNETY: So you had the garments first, and then the characters kind of grew from there?

CORDAY: Kind of. I made the garments based on the ideas Kate and I came up with for each vignette.

MEGANNETY: Fashion films are such a captivating way to showcase a brand’s narrative. Why did you choose to tell the story through a fashion film rather than traditional runway presentations or photography?

BIEL: When Kimmy and I first started, we were watching so many films where fashion was the heartbeat. One that really stuck with me was a documentary on Helmut Newton. There’s this incredible moment where Charlotte Rampling is being interviewed about modeling for him before she became an actress and she was saying that with modeling there’s this kind of frustration that comes about a still photographic session and it’s almost like you’re on the point of a climax and you’re stopped all the time and you’re frozen and your energy keeps coming up, it keeps coming up but it has to be still. 

And while in film, that climax moment is really lived in - fully realized and honored - I think that’s why we have a handful of these scenes in the film with no cutaways. We linger on the subjects, lavish in their desire, to the point where it feels almost extravagant. And so I would argue that desire can only truly be represented through motion. 

CORDAY: I was going to say, I think there’s a story built into my personal work and Kate’s personal work. Someone, upon first meeting me, told me that my brand brought up visuals of a 17th-century Versailles woman having a mental breakdown, which I just love. The stories are already there, they’re just waiting to be expanded on. And a fashion film felt like the natural next step for my work.

MEGANNETY: Kimberly, your brand has been described as walking the line between “punk” and “unapologetically pretty.” How do these contrasting elements work together in Love Is Not All, and what does that duality represent for you as an artist?

CORDAY: Yeah, I like to think it’s just an extension of my personality. I’m overly polite with a trucker’s mouth. And I listen to Vivaldi and Minor Threat in the same sitting. I think the contrasting elements in my work, the ultra-feminine and the unexpected decay are just a natural expression.

MEGANNETY: What do you hope viewers will walk away thinking or feeling after watching Love Is Not All? Is there a particular message you want to convey through the film’s narrative and visuals?

CORDAY: I would like to haunt someone. I don’t need the viewer to understand what they just watched. I just hope that they walk away with a distinct feeling. And I hope it’s not a passive viewing. That’s the effect that LEYA’s work had on me throughout the editing process. I was haunted by the score that they made for the short. 

BIEL: Yeah, I’d kind of say the same. Kimmy and I have this love relationship through our collaboration, we’ve gone through so many eras of creativity and ideas. And this film is sort of a tailing off point from the first photo shoot we’ve done. It kind of shows that love is this open project, and there’s no big end. And it’s not necessarily romance, but it also shows that creativity is erotic in and of itself. So yeah, it’s about the many ways we, as creators, explore eroticism, desire, and love, and how it’s never-ending. A constant, open discourse.

Submerged Dreams: An Interview of Xiaoqiao

Photo credit: Erika Kamano

interview by Maisie McDermid

As a child, London-based artist, harpist, vocalist, and model Xiaoqiao spent summer days watching water lilies on a pond near her house in Hefei, China. These early moments of  “fluid and empty” time beside water have leaked into her earthly music characterized by angelic vocals, fluid harp, and electronic effects. Her debut EP, Weltschmerz, composed of four songs— “Lethe,” “Magnolia Dream,” “Weltschmerz,” and “Fleur de Sel—” flows through lost and re-encountered memories. 

Each song, vibrating with contemporary sound effects, reimagines ancient feelings—tales from Greek mythology and Taoist parables. In “Lethe,” Xiaoqiao reflects on the Greek river of forgetfulness in the Underworld. Her second single and title track of the EP, “Weltschmerz,” comes from one of Xiaoqiao’s poems and her interest in Renaissance polyphonic choir. “Magnolia Dream,” her third song, references one of Xiaoqiao’s favorite childhood stories, Zhuangzi's Butterfly Dream—a tale about a man who is not sure whether he dreams about being a butterfly or if the butterfly dreams about being him. “Fleur De Sel,” Xiaoqiao’s final piece, honors her studio cat, Fleur, whose recorded purring sounds appear on the track itself. 

Here, Xiaoqiao dives into her first glimpse of a harp in a music store, the making of her otherworldly music video, “Lethe,” and existing between London’s fashion and live art scenes.

MAISIE MCDERMID: Tell me about the underground live music gigs in Beijing you went to when you were younger—these atmospheres and your first exposure to music.

XIAOQIAO: I'm in a very typical Asian family situation where your parents have you pick an instrument to learn. I studied piano. But I didn't really enjoy it because it felt like I was forced to do this.

But then, when I was fifteen, I wanted to learn guitar. I met my guitar teacher, who is a bassist in an underground band. I was never exposed to that world before because I was raised in a very, very strict traditional Chinese family. He would tell us stories about them doing crazy stuff, and it was just a new world unveiled to me. And I was so crazy about underground rock music. In my adolescence and uni, I was not really going to school. I was always in Beijing, seeing all these bands. The freedom of the spirit behind it sparked me. It made me want to make music. I wanted to be one of those people. 

MCDERMID: Did you want to be in this underground scene or just to create similar music? 

XIAOQIAO: It’s about creating something out of the norms. It was intriguing; they were writing new chapters of themselves, of the culture. Especially back then, the underground artists were not seen. But I can see all the love and belief in their work. That moved me, even when I didn't know much about the music. 

MCDERMID: Was it difficult getting your parents to understand your interest in this experimental music? 

XIAOQIAO: It was definitely very challenging; they always thought I was going to some random nightclubs. I mostly did not share this music with them; it was kind of a secret. But then I started making my own music when I was 25 or 26, and things really changed. 

I was also doing modeling at the time. Once I had some savings, I bought a harp. From there, I decided I had to do this thing that I always dreamed of. My family is probably one of the voices in my head that would hold me back in the past. But then, I told myself that if I don’t start doing this right now, I might never be able to. Now, they’re actually kind of fans of my music. 

MCDERMID: I was somewhat surprised to see that you went to London to study cinema and film rather than music. Tell me about your interest in visual storytelling.

XIAOQIAO: I chose film because it balances my parents’ expectations of me with what I love. I think cinema is one of the very big oceans of inspiration for me doing anything in general. When I was taking my course, my teacher played Maya Deren. She’s one of the pioneers of experimental Surrealism in cinema, and she’s one of the first female filmmakers. Seeing her film at that time changed my life. It’s like you don’t know whether you’re in a dream or you’re awake. Everything dissolves—time and space dissolve, and reality and dreams dissolve. That fluidity and feeling is something that inspired me in so many ways. 

MCDERMID: The line between reality and dreaming appears a lot in your work. Have you always been interested in this distinction? 

XIAOQIAO: I feel more able to connect to it and articulate it because of cinema. I am a big fan of Andrei Tarkovsky, Maya Deren, and this Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. I remember when I watched the film Solaris from Tarkovsky. It's about a guy in a spaceship who visits his past life, and Solaris, the planet, is covered by the ocean of subconscious memories. The ghosts are like hidden undercurrents that keep visiting you. 

I'm very drawn to all these worlds because I think dreams are so important to us. They are like everyone’s cinema at night. In dreams, you get to meet your most hidden echoes and discrete voices, which are lost in the misty forests of everyday life. As humans, we need cinema. We need to be in the darkness and lose ourselves sometimes.

Photo credit: Erika Kamano

MCDERMID: Do you feel like your harp gives you access to these dream-like spaces?

XIAOQIAO: Yeah. I remember when I was a child, my dad took me to the music shop to buy me a piano. When I went in there, there was a huge, golden harp in the middle of the music shop that I’d never seen in my life. It was just completely mesmerizing. And, of course, we didn't get a harp; we got a piano. 

But then, I discovered Alice Coltrane’s music, and she kind of approached the harp like a portal rather than a classical instrument. And there was no structure. It's like this feeling of everything being dissolved, and nothing is concrete. She played it like ocean waves of sound, and I feel like it's transcending you to a dreamscape. I wanted to create this sound around me. In my music, I use the harp with all the contemporary electronic effects, like watery, soaked reverbs or echoes. I want it to sound like a ritual of dreams. The harp really sounds like water, like streams. And it's almost like the ocean of mind, the streams of consciousness. And I feel everything is sinking.

MCDERMID: How many harps do you now own?

XIAOQIAO: I have two. I have one that is slightly smaller, which is very easy to carry for live shows. And then I have a big, dark red, mahogany one.

MCDERMID: From the videos I've seen of you dancing, your hands seem to move very naturally in the way that your hands move when you’re playing the harp. I’m curious: did the physical experience of playing the harp come naturally to you—the delicate hand movements? How did you begin to learn? 

XIAOQIAO: At the very beginning, when I was first able to afford a harp, I was full of excitement. I was fully experimenting with it because I had been waiting for that moment for so long. I have a background in guitar and everything, but I have never felt as connected to an instrument as I do with the harp. Even before I had a harp, I already had all these ideas in my mind that I wanted to create a new sound on a harp. For example, all the electronic paddles make it super watery, like you're in the underwater world or something. It was very intuitive for the first several months. Nothing was right, but I felt good. 

It got to the point when people started asking me to perform. And then, I was like, Okay, I actually want to learn the rules. Not to rule your instrument, but to be friends with it. To have a deeper connection with your instrument, you have to know the rules, right? And so I was having online courses. I remember I had to play a set for my friend’s brand at the ICA. It was for their Fashion Week presentation. And that was the first main show I had to play, and back then, my fingers were still very silly. And I did have a phase where I would sit there for at least ten hours a day just to do it. And then, I actually almost hurt my finger because I was practicing it so much. But once I knew the rules, I was able to have a much deeper conversation with my baby.

MCDERMID: I’d love to hear about the making of your EP. How did it come together and were there any surprises along the way?

XIAOQIAO: We started the EP in late 2022, so it's been almost three years. This one is basically my first release work, and it was the first time I worked in the studio. The way I like to create music really comes from improvising, and, at the time, I was learning to play the harp. 

My processes start from intuition, improvisation. Sometimes, I play silent films in the background and start improvising on my harp. It’s really wherever my body is leading me, and my hand is leading me. Then I started to build—laying bricks, building a little palace. For me, the ideas for the work always come later. I don't want to frame or structure it. And then, after the improv, I sit down, and the ideas arrive like fish. They’re like fish that swim to the surface of the ocean. It’s like the subconscious is doing it. 

For example, my first single is called “Lethe,” inspired by the Greek mythology of the under-river of Lethe, about forgetfulness. And that’s one of the fish in my ocean, in my head. While I was putting the bricks of my improv, that swam up. That’s kind of how every song came by.

MCDERMID: I find it interesting you put on silent films while you create music. Tell me about this and how visuals influence your creative audible process. 

XIAOQIAO: I used to always put on Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon. It was one of my favorite shorts. It transcends me to a space that I forgot about. I'm able to completely forget about time, space, or where I am. It's my core, and I’m able to peel off all the layers, all the conditions out of it. It’s like a meditation for me, this kind of slow cinema. With writing music, you have to expose yourself. You're putting yourself back into the incubation chamber where you come from. These filmmakers have really helped me to connect to that space. It's about letting go, and then it just flows naturally, like the fish.

Photo credit: Erika Kamano

MCDERMID: I like the imagery you mention about fish coming up to the surface; it reminds me of the scenes of you floating in water throughout your music video. As someone interested in both music and film, it must have been a special experience, bringing the two together for your first music video. What was the experience like? How did you know you wanted this song, in particular, to be visually represented? 

XIAOQIAO: I don’t really see myself as a musician. It’s really about building a whole world rather than one element, rather than just presenting the music. Visuals are definitely essential to building a world. As for this music video, I’ve always been obsessed with water. It’s a holy presence, but it’s also a very poetic metaphor. It’s where everyone comes from, like the environment of a womb. But then it’s also similar to the inner world, like the undercurrents and the flow. 

The song, “Lethe,” is about forgetfulness. It’s about this river that erases your memory. I was working with my friend Erica Kamano, who is an amazing photographer, and we kind of worked it out together. 

I wanted to build a paralleled labyrinth of a world made from everything that inspires me. I wanted it to be a space that is beyond time or reality—a space between waking and dreaming. It’s a forest full of mist, which, for me, is like a forest of your memory. It’s like when you sleep in the night, and you revisit that memory, that space in your dream, and then all the memories flow like mist, and you’re trying to see it all. 

In the beginning, we wanted to only create an underwater music video. But then, when we were plotting it down, I felt like I actually wanted it to be a parallel universe with myself and my shadow self that kept echoing. I try to create a world where I’m able to meet this shadow self in the deepest dream, and I get to hear all these lost echoes—vulnerable dreams, memories, feelings, and tears. Then, we’re able to meet through this river, and I decide to embrace that shadow and echo rather than eliminate the memory. 

MCDERMID: What was it like, filming in the water? Do you like being in water? 

XIAOQIAO: I learned how to swim for this music video. I never knew how to swim, and I don't know why, but I wanted to learn how for this video—like shallow diving, not deep diving, and underwater dance. I did it in like two or three weeks. 

MCDERMID: Wow. Is the river real or constructed? 

XIAOQIAO: It’s actually in a studio. We tried to make it look like a river on the surface. 

MCDERMID: That’s amazing. It really does look so real, very earthly. 

I see you’ve performed in a variety of spaces—churches, runways, art galleries, etc. How much do these environments influence the music you perform? 

XIAOQIAO: It comes back to the idea of building a world. In this world, every element matters. And when I have the access to do everything I want, I like to re-create my dreams. We had this show a few years ago at 180 Strand, and we made a whole moss set in the concrete ground. The environment helps me feel grounded. 

At the very beginning, when I was starting to do performances at serious galleries around two years ago, I definitely felt scared. Before I went on stage, I was almost in a panic attack. But the way I calmed myself down was to find a quiet space where I could visualize an environment where I felt safe. 

Sometimes, I envision myself in a cave—there’s a waterfall in front of me. And then, I am going to step on that stage. But this is where I am. I’m playing to nature rather than all these big curators and stuff. 

Churches are so beautiful because, again, they are one of the things that kind of exist out of time. You can really see the passage of time in them. I am able to have a connection with all the ghosts that have lived there. They’re watching me, and we’re having a conversation. The beautiful, very big sound in the church hall is like they’re echoing with me. So, I feel very lucky to be able to play my music to these ancient ghosts.

MCDERMID: As you exist in both the fashion and live arts scene in London, how do you compare working in both performance spaces, whether it be walking a runway or playing the harp in a gallery?

XIAOQIAO: After I graduated, I got signed to a modeling agency. I was doing shoots and stuff. The power is very instant, and it’s very visual. So you get the adrenaline straight away from your presence; from your skin, what you wear, the fabrics. 

I enjoy both. Walking down the runway—to compare with the music—is more like presenting strength. It’s bam-bam, and then the light hits you. You present that sight, and that’s where the power comes from.

But doing the music performances is really not about performing the strength. It’s about the opposite. It’s about being vulnerable. When I perform, I forget what I look like. I forget my skin, I forget my bones, I forget my fabrics. It’s just a fluid spirit in there, and I feel nothing. Everything dissolves around me.

MCDERMID: I've noticed brands like Vivienne Westwood and Alexander Wang have photographed you with your harp. Is this a way for you to merge both fashion and music? How does it feel being photographed with your instrument, which I imagine very much feels like a part of yourself? 

XIAOQIAO: Exactly. The shoot happened the first year that I learned harp, and I was not even doing that many performances back then. I feel, firstly, very lucky to be seen as a musician with my weapon, with my baby. That was at the very starting point of my music-making, and I feel that it definitely moved me to embrace myself more in what I want to make.

MCDERMID: Yes, this feels special. I rarely see models being photographed with items important to them. 

XIAOQIAO: I feel very lucky because I did several campaigns even after that with ID, also a film with Alexander Wang—they had me try to play rock music on the harp. I feel very grateful to be seen with the instrument; it’s very personal, to be honest. 

MCDERMID: I know you draw inspiration from Alice Coltrane, one of few harpists in the history of jazz. Does her existence as a rare artist inspire you? Do you come across harpists often? 

XIAOQIAO: There is one harpist who I really love who is also putting all the very celestial effects on her harp; her name is Mary Lattimore. She’s one of the contemporary women artists who I look up to. I take inspiration in a very philosophical way. I kind of take their spirits rather than their fabrics. For example, Alice Coltrane, for me, is to have the idea that you can interpret a traditional historical instrument. You can approach it in a completely fluid, new way. And you can bring the sound of a dream to life. Even if it’s intangible, it can flow on an instrument.

Xiaoqiao’s debut release Weltschmerz EP is out today on Spotify, and her “Lethe” music video is on YouTube.

Y-3 Debut Their SS25 Campaign Featuring Petra Collins and Moni Haworth

Petra Collins and Moni Haworth collaborate on the new Y-3 Refresh Campaign

interview by Karly Quadros
photographs by Moni Haworth

Moni Haworth and Petra Collins have always focused on the liminal spaces of American suburbs: teenage dreams confined to bedrooms, silhouettes pressed against Venetian blinds, cut-and-paste condos spiraling down culs-de-sacs like soap in a drain. The two longtime collaborators have teamed up once again for the campaign of another collaboration, Yohji Yamamoto and Adidas’ Y-3 Spring/Summer 2025 collection. From the simultaneously sporty and delicate Regu Mary Jane to Petra’s doppelgängers, duality takes centerstage. Autre caught up with Moni Haworth to talk about crafting the dreamy world of Y-3’s new collection.

Image credit: Moni Haworth

KARLY QUADROS: What was the starting point/inspiration for the campaign?

MONI HAWORTH: Y-3 wanted to build on the strange world Petra and I have played with for years, featuring Petra as various versions of herself. We wanted a kind of ‘nowhere but everywhere’ backdrop in a way mirroring the pieces, which from a distance appear classic but on closer inspection reveal many unexpected details.

Image credit: Moni Haworth

Image credit: Moni Haworth

QUADROS: You and Petra have been working together for so long. What’s the secret to an enduring collaboration?

HAWORTH: Voice notes. (laughs) We have a constant stream of communication from the most mundane details of our day to huge debates on AI, the end of the world, etc., all via voice notes, back and forth.

QUADROS: The great ballet flat comeback was not on my bingo card for 2025, and I’ll be honest, I still am resisting that trend. But the ballet sneaker like the Regu Mary Jane or other styles like Simone Rocha’s ballet tracker feel more resonant — instead of girlish and formal they’re lithe and aerodynamic. What’s so alluring about these contemporary hybrid styles?

HAWORTH: Yes, hah, I love ‘ballet sneaker’ trending. We were super excited to shoot the Regu Mary Jane. It fit so well into the hybrid world we wanted to set this in … a kind of future/past chemistry!

Image credit: Moni Haworth

QUADROS: Can you talk a little bit about the short film that you made for the campaign? What were you trying to explore? Did it bring up anything unexpected for you?

HAWORTH: The idea of two versions of Petra coming together via me was the concept we wanted to explore. Petra often sends me the craziest voice notes of dreams she’s had. We wanted to dip into that feeling when you’re not so sure you’re remembering a dream or an actual experience, the hazy speculation and the weirdness of sharing a dream. The unexpected thing was the hawk perched on a pole right in front of us and being able to capture it taking off in front of Petra. That was perfect!

Image credit: Moni Haworth

A New Story Every Day: An Interview Of l'Area's Edouard Chueke

The Center of Le Marais’s Social Scene Is A Mom & Pop Restaurant/Bar Serving Lebanese/Brazilian Fusion & Drinks Until Late

 
 

interview by Abraham Chabon
photographs by Kenna Kroge

L’Area tonight, like every Saturday night, has spilled a crowd of well-dressed twenty-somethings out onto the streets. The rain comes down in a light haze, and smokers rotate in groups out of the doors. Some women’s fur coats are being flattened by the rain that rolls off the edges of their slanted umbrellas. The smokers hug the small, flat green face of l’Area and step away from the windows, from which you can see, behind and around them, a growing crowd inside the bar.

L’Area, during the day, is a quiet restaurant that serves Lebanese and Brazilian food on a side street between Bastille and Le Marais. The food feels home-cooked, comforting; it’s rich curries and shawarma, black rice and pita bread, citrusy ceviche, and a cold glass of white wine. You can’t go to l’Area and order just one thing—a meal at l’Area means a table covered in plates.

But at night, l’Area becomes something else—an overflowing bar where you can start or end your night, a refuge from the rain, good drinks and good music, but also one of the hearts of Paris’ youth scene. L’Area attracts artists, students, musicians, and, during fashion week, half of everyone who’s left their afterparties. It’s designed for conversations, for making connections. At l’Area, you can find a photographer for your brand, a writer for your magazine, or a date for next Saturday.

Inside the bar, the soft light feels as if it could all be from the glow of candles. The walls are mostly covered with thick white paint that thins in some important places and cracks in others. On each wall, there are mirrors, tchotchkes, and photos and paintings in thick and thin frames. The bar’s counter is long and shining and turns at one end to meet the wall.

The wall behind the bar has a splash of blue and green tiles. There are glass shelves covered in glass bottles and aluminum cans and corks and towels and art and busy hands and other things that a bar should or shouldn’t have. And the bar’s counter itself is covered in action and movement, the knocking of glass on the counter, the shifting of elbows under thick coat sleeves.

I move with the crowd as the room thins and then pushes out into the bar’s barely larger backroom, filled with a traffic jam of tables, benches, chairs, and people. You have to step over and squeeze past creaking wooden chairs with skinny iron legs. Boot heels catch on coats, elbows brush against the shoulders of drinkers, and backs press against backs. A small projector sends a faint blue glow—cut through by the shadow of the spinning ceiling fan’s blades—against a screen blocked by pots of flowers, a glittering silver lava lamp, and an enormous glass vase filled with coffee beans. Wine-soaked cushions and a floor sticky with Saint Germain lick the soles of boots and Puma runners.

The restaurant's owner, Edouard, steps into the backroom and lights his cigarette from a candle placed on a countertop. Edouard has silver hair and skin that looks like it has spent most of its life smiling. He wears a sweater knit tight like l’Area’s weave of tables and chairs. It is my first time back in two years; Edouard remembers my name.

There is no l’Area without Edouard. You would be hard-pressed to find a kinder man in Paris, and if you did, he would be nowhere near as cool. Edouard creates the culture of l’Area. When he can find a break between pouring drinks and hugging friends, he will pull you aside to connect you with someone he wants you to know. And all night, until the bar closes, through every backhanded glass, late reservation, and declined card, he keeps smiling.

I caught up with Edouard the next day. I sat at the counter as he paced back and forth behind the bar. I had to follow him with my phone so the recording would stay clear.

EDOUARD CHUEKE: It began with the food. Because of that, it began with Lily. People don’t always know this, but she’s the most important person here.

Lily is Edouard’s wife; they fell in love in Rio.

ABRAHAM CHABON: I haven’t met her yet, but you always say great things about her.

CHUEKE: She is completely essential. She arrives early in the morning and prepares everything—the ceviche, the dishes, all of it. She’s in the kitchen from 7:30 or 8:00 in the morning until 4:00 in the afternoon. And that’s the truth.

CHABON: I think you should probably give yourself more credit. You are so important. If someone loves coming to l’Area, part of that is because they love coming to see you. How do you think you’ve you built these connections? 

CHUEKE: Thank you so much. I try to receive people, make them feel welcome, and friendships will just happen from that. For me, that’s the most important thing. The connection first comes from my love for electronic music, photography, and fashion—my wife too. There are a lot of students who come here, as well as some young fashion designers. They come, we talk, we discuss things. It’s a place for that—to meet, to exchange ideas. 

Edouard lights a cigarette for me. 

CHABON: At a certain point, this bar must feel like a part of your family.

CHUEKE: Yes and no. It’s a real love affair.

I’ve had offers—good offers—to open other places, even in New York or London. But the mentality wasn’t the same. That’s why I decided not to do it. Even here in Paris, I had offers, but it wouldn’t have been the same. I’m happy we have this kind of relationship with the people here.

For me, the best part is that whether you come at night or just for Sunday brunch and a coffee, I’m happy you choose my place for that.

CHABON: You’ve told me before you just want to be a Mensch, what does that mean to you? 

CHUEKE: When I say I want to be a mensch, that’s something my father taught me. It means being clear, being correct with people, being honest. To be as honest as possible. To be kind. And not to be jealous. I don’t care if someone opens a new spot down the street. I say, "Thank God." I do my own thing in my own way.

I have friends in this business who make huge money, even with fewer customers than I have. They serve more expensive food, more expensive drinks. But I don’t care. I’m happy here.

People only see the surface of this place. They don’t see the work behind it, everything we’ve created. My wife and I both know—we’re never going to be rich from this. But we’ll have a good life, filled with good things.

Edouard scoops ice from a silver bucket into my hazy yellow glass of Pastis. 

 
 

CHABON: That honesty is what draws people to this place. And you feel it from the design.  It feels natural like it was put together with the intention of being genuine to who you are. You have family portraits, personal touches. Did you or your wife design it?

CHUEKE: My wife, mostly. Everything on the walls—that’s her. If you stop and really look, you’ll see we have pieces from some of the most important French artists, American photographers, even a Paris Photo Prize winner from five years ago. We wanted to bring that here.

Edouard gestures at the art hung in the room, wafting a cigarette through the air. 

CHABON: How did it start? How did l’Area become what it is?  

CHUEKE: There was a French radio station—Radio Nova. After the first two months, they fell in love with this place. They told all the DJs and musicians about it. And people just started coming. And it has stayed like that, always the right people who care about the same things. 

CHABON: Paris has a long history of bars and cafés being hubs for creatives. Do you feel like you’re continuing that tradition?

CHUEKE: I never really think about it like that. When we bought this space we knew Le Marais was on the rise but also it was an old part of Paris, filled with history. That was important to us. I love Paris, and it’s history, but I don’t think I was creating something only French. I think the connections, the creativity, can happen anywhere. I know we’ll be here for a few more years, but when this place is done, I’ll probably open another one. Maybe in Naples, maybe in New York. A smaller one—just breakfast and lunch. But with good music, good people, the same kind of identity as here, and the same people will come, and it will give people the same thing.

We have to pause our conversation; someone has called Edouard personally to make a reservation. 

CHABON: How do you keep going? Running a bar like this must be exhausting.

CHUEKE: It’s in my blood. Every day is a new day—that’s something my parents taught me. And this place, it feels like a movie to me. A new story every day. New characters, new relationships. That keeps me going. Also, I don’t drink much. I sleep four hours a night. I try to take care of my health, but it’s not easy.

CHABON: Do you ever worry about l’Area losing its identity as it gets more popular?

CHUEKE: Never. Because the people who come here, they become part of it. Even the celebrities—they feel at home. That’s what matters. And they wouldn’t come if they didn’t want to be a part of it, you know? 

 
 

Borderlands: An Interview of Hugo Crosthwaite

Hugo Crosthwaite, La Anunciación (The Announcement), 2024
Courtesy of the artist and Luis de Jesus Los Angeles

interview by Karly Quadros

Ex-votos are a form of Mexican folk painting, part prayer, part diary, they are a dedication to the saints and a plea for guidance during difficult times. They’re sometimes crude, sometimes polished, sometimes funny, sometimes heartwrenching. Te pido perdon virgencita pues jugue con fuego (I ask you to forgive me, Virgin, because I played with fire) reads one on a painting of a woman with red skin and devil horns beckoning a man in bed while the Virgen de Guadalupe looks on. Another celebrates two luchadors who met in the ring and found love. Another thanks the Santo Niño de Atocha for surviving a late night encounter with two extraterrestrials.

Inspired by his own close encounter with death, Tijuana and San Diego-based artist Hugo Crosthwaite decided to take on the tradition of ex-votos with a new series of large-scale paintings. The show, Ex-voto, is a series of overlapping snapshots of the city of Tijuana, dense narratives of daily life at the border. Just as in the ex-votos, the physical and spiritual world mingle in scenes of border crossings, street vendors, and women at rest. The Tijuana of Crosthwaite’s paintings is not quite the real one and not quite the sin city of the American imagination. Instead, it is multilayered, a place that we tell stories about and are always returning to across the border fence.

KARLY QUADROS: Can you explain what an ex-voto painting is?

HUGO CROSTHWAITE:  Ex-votos are a tradition that happen here in in Mexico and in Latin America. It's this idea of painting agradecimientos, gratitude, miracles. They're usually painted by families, by common people. They place them on church altars. Usually this happens more in the central and south of Mexico. This doesn't really happen on the border here where I live in Tijuana, so I decided that I wanted to do my version of ex-votos that reference the situation here on the border in Tijuana and San Diego. I wanted to play with the narratives that happen usually in the ex-votos where you see angel characters or saint characters involved with people, the surrealism that's behind that.

Usually when you look at the ex-votos, you're looking at miracles, sometimes with extraterrestrial things or extra-sensory things. I love seeing some ex-votos that say, “Thank God, because I saw these aliens and they tried to abduct me.” They go from very extraordinary, fantastical things to trying to escape an abusive husband or “Thanks to San Virgencita because I was able to not get caught that I had an affair with my best friend's wife.” The narratives range from fantasy to strange things to things that deal with the problems of society in terms of poverty and violence. 

QUADROS: To me, they’re similar to your paintings in two ways. One is that they’re both very narrative – there are stories in your paintings that you feel like you’re dropped into. The other similarity that I see is these paintings include the physical world and the spiritual world, layered on top of each other.

CROSTHWAITE:  For the longest time growing up here in Tijuana, I never really had access to culture in the [Mexican] South. It just happened after 9/11 when they closed the border and this influx of immigration happened. We started seeing culture from Oaxaca and from other places start to appear here in Tijuana because of migrants settling here, hoping to cross into the United States. For example, the Day of the Dead wasn't really celebrated here in Tijuana, but now you see that happening. So, one of the consequences of immigration that has happened with the city of Tijuana is that now we're being exposed to many of the things that usually, when I was growing up here in Tijuana, I wasn't.

Hugo Crosthwaite, Ricos Elotes (Delicious Corn), 2024
Courtesy of the artist and Luis de Jesus Los Angeles

QUADROS: Is that where all the skulls in the paintings come from?

CROSTHWAITE: Yes. Here in Tijuana we're in this area where we're not Mexican enough, but then also we're not American. It’s because Tijuana is the most northern city of Mexico, so there's a lot of cross-culturalization between San Diego and Tijuana, American culture and Mexican culture. 

In my case, I was born in Tijuana and I grew up here. My family is from this area, and I don't remember learning English. It just happened naturally because my father had a curio shop where we sold Mexican items to American tourists. My life was selling stories and selling this idea of a Mexican culture that Americans wanted to see.

I've been an artist for thirty years almost, and all of my work comes from my sketchbook. I just sit in a coffee shop or I sit waiting for the bus, and I draw people.  All of the narratives in all of my work comes from these sketches. I grab a lot of the faces and the environment of Tijuana. It’s not really portraiture because I’m drawing in a very clandestine way. Sometimes people think I’m doing something very suspicious, but then I show them the drawings. That’s the magic of art. Sometimes they share back. I’ve had people sing to me. I’ve had people recite poetry because they feel like you’re presenting something of art and they want to give some art back to me.

It’s not really like taking a picture or documenting something. It’s more being able to grab impressions of the city and expand these into the narratives that go into my paintings.

QUADROS: What are some of your earlier memories of art?

CROSTHWAITE:  All my life I was going to school in the morning and in the evening I was working in the curio shop. I remember growing up with a lot of visual stimuli surrounding me. I would just do drawings to pass the time. It was a way of playing around while I was waiting for an American tourist to come in.

Part of what we did in the curio shop was tell stories, and that was the way of selling things. It was an American tourist expecting to hear a story as part of the interaction. In these paintings, it's also this idea of a transaction that happened, like in the original ex-votos. A miracle happened, so you're obliged to return the favor by painting this ex-voto as a way of making amends or making a payment. As a child, I would sell this notion of Mexico to an American public that was expecting certain stories, something exoticized. I feel like this series of paintings is playing with this idea that Tijuana is selling itself to the United States.

QUADROS: So in your paintings, is it the real version of Tijuana or the exoticized version?

CROSTHWAITE:  It's somewhere in between because it's also playing with the fantasy. There is this notion of Mexico, especially in the city of Tijuana, because, during prohibition in the United States, Tijuana became this hub for bars. It became like a Sin City, like when you think of Las Vegas today. Tijuana was the place to come, have a drink or get divorced.

It developed this reputation, what they call La Leyenda Negra. I wanted to play with this idea of La Leyenda Negra, how Tijuana was seen as this place that's selling itself to the American tourists or what is expected by the American tourists seeing Tijuana.

For example, in the 1930s and ’40s, there were these Tijuana Bibles, which were these little pornographic books that were printed in Chicago. They were little comic books that had, like Mickey Mouse having sex with Donald Duck and that kind of thing, which were sold for five cents or whatever. This was a completely American invention, but they were called Tijuana Bibles. 

Again, it's this idea that they're not from here. They're not from America. They're coming from some other place, from Tijuana, from this lawless border. Going South, there's no law and order.

QUADROS: Some classic American icons like Mickey Mouse show up in your paintings, but there’s also this idea of Americans crossing the border to deposit their own sins. I think of those big liter jugs of Coca-Cola in your paintings, in a sense, reflecting American commerce going over the border to do their dirty work that they wouldn’t do at home.

CROSTHWAITE: Yes, exactly.

QUADROS: I was thinking a lot about commerce when I was looking at your work. The characters sell tickets, they sell fruit, they talk on phones. It’s hard not to see the work in light of these recently implemented tariffs that are, once again, straining the relationship between our two countries. What roles do commerce and trade play in your work and the lives of the characters that you depict?

CROSTHWAITE:  Like I mentioned earlier, Tijuana is a very touristy city. Even now the tourism in Mexico has gone beyond restaurants or shops or beer. Now even medical tourism is very important in Tijuana.

The economies between Tijuana and San Diego are extremely interconnected. In the morning, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans cross over legally to work in the United States, and you see a lot of Americans starting to live in Tijuana because housing in San Diego is becoming too expensive. There's this interconnectivity between both cities. The border serves as an obstruction to this natural flow of people and commerce and ideas and culture. 

QUADROS: There’s a rich history of border art too – art that is sometimes literally on the border wall or fence, or art that is otherwise about the border. Do you see yourself in this tradition? What do you think defines border art?

CROSTHWAITE: I try not to define border art. I’m an artist, for example, that was born in Tijuana but I have American citizenship. I live in both Tijuana and San Diego. So to me, this area has always been this double identity. I grew up with this kind of schizophrenic notion. Both languages are in my head, Spanish and English. Both cultures are in my head.

When I was growing up, I would get to see all the American movies before anybody else in Mexico saw them. These films would travel to Mexico City, and then from there they would get distributed. When Star Wars came out, I saw it first in San Diego. Most of my family from further south wouldn't see it until six months later. 

My work is about this double identity and the struggles. How do you identify yourself when there is this very distinct line of culture that's being placed on the border? My family settled here way before the American border was imposed, way in the 1840s. My great grandfather fought in the Mexican American War on the American side because they were conscripted by the American army. Then he settled in Rosarito, in Tijuana, and then suddenly the border came up so my family, the Crosthwaite name, which is very old here in the Californias, was suddenly divided between Mexico and the United States.

What am I Mexican or American? Those questions of identity and history and memory permeate through the work, this surreal place in between two cultures, two languages. 

QUADROS: Frida Kahlo’s border painting [“Self Portrait Along the Border Line Between Mexico and the United States”] is like that too, right? She’s standing in the middle with America on one side and looking to Mexico on the other, and she’s in neither.

Hugo Crosthwaite, La Linea (The Line), 2024, Acrylic and color pencil on canvas
Courtesy of the artist and Luis de Jesus Los Angeles

CROSTHWAITE: It’s also the notion of the mestizo, the blending of the Spanish and the native.

QUADROS: And it comes back to the ex-votos, folk traditions and more pagan traditions mixing with Catholic imagery and traditions. There’s a few paintings with this imagery like “La Linea” and “The Woman Grabs the Snake.” Can you talk a little bit about Aztec imagery?

CROSTHWAITE:  In “La Linea” it’s the very important figure of Coatlicue, the Aztec goddess, mother of the Aztecs. She's basically the revered mother that gave birth to Huitzilopochtli, who is the god of war. Coatlicue was later replaced by the Virgen de Guadalupe when the missionaries came and tried to sell this idea of Catholicism to the Aztec people.

Even though it's a very strong image with skulls and snakes, to the Aztec people, she represented motherhood. She represented love. She represented birth. She represented all these things that were about life.

QUADROS: It’s similar to what you were saying before where Mexico is vilified or seen as darker and more sinful, but the things that actually seem sinister, like serpents and skulls, are actually very life-affirming and beautiful. And, on the other hand, the American exports that seem very wholesome, like Coca-Cola and Disney, are actually quite insidious.

CROSTHWAITE:  In this painting, you're seeing this idea of this double culture of Mexico and the United States. You're seeing images of Coatlicue on either side and in the center images of Mexican culture and American culture. You see the bottle of Diet Coke. You see Mickey Mouse. You see the cell phone. You see all these things that are an amalgam of culture on the border.

QUADROS: What was your experience like pulling together the show?

CROSTHWAITE: I've been an artist for almost thirty years, and funnily enough, all of my work was always in black and white because I never studied formally how to paint. I've always been making black and white drawings. But a couple of years ago, I was diagnosed with testicular cancer, and I went through chemotherapy. It was a very hard year and I couldn't work. So my sketchbook became the source of all my work, something that I could work on in my bed, small and not a lot of effort.

I had never contemplated doing color in my work. I decided I want to do an ambitious series, large canvases that just explode into color. As I was starting to do this, the idea of the ex-votos came about, giving thanks for regaining my health, being able to work again, being able to work big canvases. It was this gratitude that I felt towards life and towards my career and the people that supported me.


Ex-Votos is on display through April 5 at Luis de Jesus 1110 Mateo St., Los Angeles. Hugo Crosthwaite will be in conversation with Carolina Miranda at the the gallery  on March 22 2-3 PM.

Hugo Crosthwaite, Tijuacolor, 2024, Acrylic and color pencil on canvas
Courtesy of the artist and Luis de Jesus Los Angeles

Color Vision: An Interview of Master Printers Guy Stricherz & Irene Malli

William Eggleston 
Greenwood, Mississippi (red ceiling), 1973

interview by Oliver Kupper

Phillips is set to present Color Vision: Master Prints from Guy Stricherz and Irene Malli, a landmark series of auctions celebrating the unparalleled artistry of the dye transfer process. The first auction, happening on March 18, 2025, will feature the master prints of William Eggleston, including his Los Alamos portfolio and the highly sought-after "Magnificent Seven" large-format dye transfer prints. These works, crafted by Stricherz and Malli at Color Vision Imaging Laboratory, represent the pinnacle of color photography, offering collectors a rare opportunity to acquire the definitive prints from one of the most influential printers of the past four decades. I sat down with Guy and Irene to discuss the rare and fleeting magic of the dye transfer process in anticipation of next Tuesday’s auction at Phillips.

OLIVER KUPPER: When you first started, there was this explosion of color happening in culture from pop art to fashion, photography, cars, manufacturing. All this was happening in a relatively short amount of time, and you were both instrumental in the mastering of dye transfer printing. What do you attribute to this explosion of color and culture?

GUY STRICHERZ: Most of the advertising in magazines — Life, Look, Vogue, Esquire — that was in color. The rest of the editorial was in black and white. Newspapers were all black and white. And in photography, black and white was considered the only way to go as a fine art photographer.

I guess it was color television that brought color. It just exploded in the magazines. Everything was in color: Newsweek, Time, all the magazines. Young photographers like myself graduating from college in 1974, we all knew the history of Stieglitz, Steichen, Adams, Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, all black and white. But people of my generation were all interested in color.

KUPPER: How did you two meet originally?

STRICHERZ: I opened the lab in 1981 with a friend of mine in New York City on Prince Street in Lower Manhattan. We offered limited editions to fine art photographers. I had a partner. He left, so I put an ad out in the New York Times.

IRENE MALLI: I had worked in a commercial dye transfer lab from the time I graduated from college. After two and a half years, I was kind of tired of printing advertising photos and commercial work was already starting to go digital because of digital retouching capabilities. So, I was getting ready to go to graduate school and do something different. My mother talked me into looking in the newspaper one more week for a new job. And there it was: Fine Art Dye Transfer Printer Wanted. And I thought, Well that might be fun. I’ll apply for that job. And here we are, thirty-five years later. So, we did meet in the workplace, and we ended up falling in love.

KUPPER: Who were some of the photographers that you grew up admiring?

MALLI: A lot of them were black and white photographers: Bruce Davidson, of course, Eggleston. My tastes are pretty wide ranging. Nan Goldin was very big when I was in college, but she was never a client. I never did Cibachrome. That was very big in the eighties. Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince were using that a lot.

KUPPER: Can you talk a little bit about the dye transfer process? What makes it so stunning?

STRICHERZ: The process is a color separation and assembly process. So you have a film original and then you make separation negatives. You separate the color of the original transparency in three layers: cyan, magenta, and yellow. You separate them using a red, green, and blue filter. 

The assembly part of it can be for metal plates, for offset lithography, for silkscreen, for gravure, or for intaglio. But in this case, we’re not making a metal plate or a silkscreen, we’re making a matrix. A matrix film is the film made by Kodak for dye transfer. The process is about 150 years old, it's the same process as the Technicolor movie process. That’s why when you see these old Technicolor movies – Gone with the Wind, Wizard of Oz, all the way up through Apocalypse Now – you see that brilliant color that has not faded. You see movies from the ’50s that are Kinemacolor, there’s been a severe fading frequently of the yellow, the magenta. None of the movie processes hold up like Technicolor..

Dye transfer could be lower case ‘d’ and lowercase ‘t,’ but when we’re talking about what we do, we use a capital ‘D’ and a capital ‘T’ because we use all original Kodak dye transfer materials. They stopped making them in 1992. They’re almost gone. We have just a little bit of material left, but we acquired a large stock of materials from Kodak when they stopped manufacturing them and we bought stock from several other labs that had materials left over. So we’ve had a large stockpile over time.

 
 

KUPPER: Is William Eggelston still using your printing services?

STRICHERZ: The last batch that we did was the last show at the David Zwirner Gallery [The Last Dyes, 2024]. 

MALLI: That’s his last project in dye transfer. It had some works from [William Eggelston’s] Guide. And it also had works from other projects, maybe ten or twelve from Outlands.

It’s the only analog color process that’s on fiber-based paper. The paper has no silver in it. It enables the paper to absorb a very large amount of dye, giving you an extremely wide range of tone and an extremely wide color palette. The dyes are not layered like they are in all other color processes – Cibachrome, Type C chromogenic, Ektacolor. It doesn’t matter which one you roll first. It has a lifespan of 500 years in dark storage, the longest of any color process. And it has excellent light stability.

KUPPER: How did you initially meet William Eggleston?

STRICHERZ: Through our friend Rose Shoshana at the Rose Gallery in Santa Monica.

MALLI: Might have been ‘95 or ‘97. The first big project we did was in ’98 for the Hasselblad Foundation when he got that award.

STRICHERZ: I discovered William Eggleston’s Guide book in 1976. I thought it was just tremendous. I had been photographing natural light outside, and the book really impressed me. I loved the way he roamed the world free and captured what was before his eye. 

MALLI: I’ve always appreciated his ability to find beauty in humble surroundings. Beautiful light can fall on anything. His knack for composition is always amazing.

KUPPER: Through this process that you’ve mastered, do you think you’ve allowed photographers to broaden their horizons in terms of what they’re able to achieve with their images?

STRICHERZ: Our goal has always been to assist the photographer in realizing their full vision that they had for that image, whatever that might be, to interpret their work in the way that they want us to interpret it. We always have a very personal relationship with the photographer in regards to what they’re visualizing. It can be very emotional.

MALLI: And it can just be personal taste. Especially if it involves the color red. The color red is the most difficult color to get exactly right. In other processes, you don’t have the same control as in dye transfer to get the exact shade of red that a photographer might want.

STRICHERZ: I will say this about dye transfer: you have an incredible amount of control while you’re making these prints.

KUPPER: I’ve spent time in the dark room. It’s not fun after a while getting things exactly right.

MALLI: You learn to not make mistakes. (laughs)

STRICHERZ: The first big project we did at the CVI in New York was Bruce Davidson’s Subway project. After that, we did some work for Irving Penn. We did quite a bit of work for the photographer Hiro, Evelyn Hofer, Arnold Newman, and Larry Burrows, who’s the greatest photographer of Vietnam. He died in a helicopter crash in Cambodia. We printed the Magnum retrospective in 1989. That was at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris at the International Center of Photography. We’ve worked for over sixty-five photographers. We did over a hundred images for Ernst Haas. Mitch Epstein – we did his project called Recreation. Mark Cohen, Graciela Iturbide, Zoe Leonard. We did a fair amount of work with Annie Leibovitz.

MALLI: Every photographer that we’ve worked with is a different artist with different preferences. It’s rewarding to be able to make a variety of different kinds of dye transfer prints. With Bruce Davidson’s Subway, his idea was to have it very intense, everything printed very dark, very saturated, very contrasting. And Zoe Leonard wanted everything to be very delicately printed with softer colors, except for the reds. Evelyn Hofer wanted a classical look to her work, very refined. It made it interesting over the years to do things a little differently for different photographers.

KUPPER: Do you have a personal favorite of William Eggleston’s?

STRICHERZ: I like the boy with the shopping cart.

 

William Eggleston
Memphis (supermarket boy with carts), 1965

 

KUPPER: That’s his first photograph in color.

MALLI: I like the girl on the grass with the brownie camera [“Untitled” c.1975]. I first saw a very small print of Green Shower [better known as “Memphis,” c.1971] when I was a teenager. I grew up in Connecticut, and I was visiting the Museum of Modern Art and I saw the photograph. That always made an impression on me. I had no clue at the time when I was 15 or 16 years old that someday I’d be printing that image.

KUPPER: The girl in the grass is amazing. Apparently she was zonked out on quaaludes in that image.

MALLI: I don’t think I knew that story until after we printed it. To me, there’s a quality of innocence in that. I don’t know if in today’s world, a young woman would be that open. I relate it to my own childhood of growing up in the country. We had a big field next door and we would go out there and lie on our backs, and look up at the sky, and have these long conversations. So, I view it as a more innocent picture. Someone being zonked out, it almost ruins it.

William Eggleston
Memphis, Tennessee (Marcia Hare), circa 1974

KUPPER: What do you think the future of color is in the digital age?

STRICHERZ: The problem with digital is there’s no veracity there. When you look at a classic photograph made with film you feel that it has captured something in the real world as it was. This is a picture of something from the real world that hasn’t been manipulated. Film photography definitely has a verisimilitude that is deeply embedded into the filmic process. Prior to digital, you didn’t have that many choices. You could have chromogenic type c print like Ektacolor, you could have a Cibachrome made, or you could have a dye transfer made, or maybe a Polaroid. Cibachrome was just too high contrast. It was fine for some people’s work like Cindy Sherman. The plastic base, a substrate, had a very high-gloss surface. It was extremely delicate and the type c chromogenic or Ektacolor print had a more muted tonal range. It was difficult to get a good blue sky and it didn’t have the same lustrous surface as a dye transfer. None of them could really compare to a dye transfer. One will notice a dye transfer side-by-side with a digital print right away. I think photography has changed. I don’t think that we look at photography in the same way that we did in the past.

The dye transfer print has an intrinsic value. It has substance. The paper is heavier than all the papers used for digital inkjet prints. When you pick it up, you can hold it like this. It’s an object of art.

 

Guy Stricherz and Irene Malli, circa 1994

 

Energy From The Underground: An Interview of Mikio Sakabe

Mikio Sakabe is a designer, a teacher, and an experimenter. He runs two labels, MIKIOSAKABE and the footwear brand grounds, creating style that comes to life from Tokyo to the world. He is also a mentor for young Japanese designers, founding MeSchool, a fashion school that provides the same education opportunities in Japan that have been historically limited to Europe.

 

interview by Abraham Chabon


In a cold, concrete garage, buried behind metal fences and dusty staircases dimly lit by glowing exit signs, a crowd gathered on thin benches. Gold and silver emergency blankets distributed upon entry caught and refracted the light from camera flashes and the fluorescent whites that beamed from above. With the shrieks of a piano and the hums of a deep bass, the grounds Fall/Winter 25-26 show began.

grounds is known for its avant-garde and vibrant designs. Shoe’s understated uppers burst into large, cloud-like soles — a rejection of expectations and mass-market footwear. Sakabe has said he wants to “defy gravity.” With grounds, this has two meanings: the inflated, bubbling soles let the wearer float above roads and floors, but in fashion, gravity is not only physical, gravity is the pull of trends, the temptation to do what’s expected. Sakabe resists this, breaking new ground.

Sakabe continues his experimentation with his latest collection by taking the brand in a new direction. Previously, grounds could be best described as playful, fantastical. But in that sub-level garage the collection was industrial, festering, wonderfully unconventional, and pushing the limits of footwear. Styled by Betsy Johnson, the models began to march down the runway. The shoes where violently oversized, rubber layered on rubber, shoe melting with shoe, the bulbous clouds signature to grounds’ designs erupted out from under thin socks. Cables hung off from shoes like bungie cords wrapped around luggage. Leg warmers scrunched onto sneakers, and padded high socks wrapped around legs like medieval armor. There where large rubber soles like the treads on a tank, and some toe boxes curled upwards like a jester's boots.

The clothes were just as unconventional. Flowing wide legs spilled onto shoes, shoulder pads jutted dramatically from coats. Leather gloves, stacked belts, and oversized sunglasses adorned models with matted hair. Everything was unusual, dark — a collision of industrial and organic — yet, true to Sakabe’s touch, remarkably fun.

I caught up with Sakabe after the show for an interview.

ABRAHAM CHABON: How do you continue to innovate and push boundaries in an industry that not only constantly changes, but changes so quickly?

MIKIO SAKABE: I never start with the design of the shoes or clothes, I think about what will be the next experience, what's the future of the human being, what can be different, what will become interesting, what will be humor in the future.

CHABON: Previously you experimented with 3D printed shoes and clothes. With this collection, you continue this DNA of experimentation with materials. What draws you to that?

SAKABE: For me, the process of design is experimentation, not only using the existing ways of the making. I want to be an experimenter. If we try new methods then we can make new types of shoes. 

 
 

CHABON: How is the process of designing footwear different from designing clothing? 

SAKABE: I try to put away that relationship. I think I am a little bit of an architect. An architect of fashion, both shoes and clothes.

CHABON: This collection is different from things you've done before. What were your motivations for moving in this direction? 

SAKABE: I want to be always changing. With this, I just wanted to make more. More movement, more power, energy from the underground. That was a new feeling I wanted to try. 

CHABON: How do you balance the things you are working on and continue to put your best effort into everything? 

SAKABE: Even busy people can be more busy. There is much more I want to be busy with. 

CHABON: You talk about learning from others, from Walter Van Bierendock to everyday people you see in the street, how do you find inspiration?

SAKABE: I'm inspired by everything, not only fashion, I am inspired by an ordinary day. 

 
 

CHABON: What role did Betsy Johnson play for you as a collaborator? 

SAKABE: So much, because she has a really different way to design. So, it was very exciting because I cannot be like her. I want surprises, I surprised her, and she would surprise me.

CHABON: At MeSchool you are a teacher and a mentor, do you think you have learned from your students as well?

SAKABE: Yes, so much. It is 50/50. I learn as much as I teach. Young people can show you new ways to look at things, they know the world differently, they can show you new ways to know fashion.

CHABON: Is there anything you want to talk about with this collection, things you want people to know? 

SAKABE: I don't want to tell things. I hope people feel something from it, and then they will know what it means. 

 
 

Everything She Touches Turns to Gold: an Interview of Colette Lumiere

interview by Karly Quadros

Fuck art, let’s dance.

It’s the attitude that Colette Lumiere had become known for, immortalized in a mural that she painted on the wall of iconic ’70s downtown New York nightclub and art scene haunt Danceteria. She’s celebrated for her bold personas and expansive multimedia projects from street art to installations to fashion collaborations, yet her later evolutions have received less attention. A new show at Company Gallery, Everything She Touches Turns to Gold, running until March 1, explores the artist’s career in the ’80s as she ventured off to Berlin under the guise of a new persona, the mysterious Mata Hari and the Stolen Potatoes.

Lumiere always had a surprisingly contemporary attitude toward blurring the boundaries between the public and the private, between art and commerce. She began by painting cryptic sigils on the SoHo pavement at night and has shown art everywhere from the MoMA to Fiorucci shop windows to German nunneries to nightclubs. Her longest running piece was a 24/7 installation in her own apartment, stuffed from floor to ceiling with champagne and blush-ruched fabrics, a polymorphous punk rock Versailles. Lumiere took that louche crinkling of fabric from her Living Environment and translated it into harlequin frocks that she wore like a uniform. Her influence reverberates widely from Vivienne Westwood and Madonna’s ragged, spunky takes on period clothing to the elaborately staged personas of Cindy Sherman and Nadia Lee Cohen.

Growing frustrated with the limitations put on a young female artist, in 1978 Lumiere staged her own death in a performance at the Whitney Museum. She emerged a few days later at PS1 Contemporary Art Center, beginning an ongoing dynasty of artistic personas and eras. Everything She Touches Turns to Gold features the artist’s under-celebrated paintings, mostly from the early ’80s, “metaphysical portraits” exploring herself, her friends, and the subconscious. While her ’70s works recall historical reclining nudes including staged photos and durational performances in which she napped in poses modeled after classical paintings such as Manet’s Olympia. Her Berlin period, instead, foregrounded motion. The figures in her portraits wave. They evade. They drift and dream and run away.

I recently met up with Lumiere at Company Gallery to explore the new collection. Now in her  seventies, Lumiere is as true to herself as ever in a ruffled white blouse beneath a hot pink Victorian riding coat. Tunisian-born and French-raised, her accent is caught somewhere between her native French and a dry German lilt. We spoke about Berlin before the wall came down, resisting categorization, and, of course, potatoes.

KARLY QUADROS:  I wanted to focus on the gallery show because it covers this specific period of time: Berlin in the ’80s. Rather than focusing on performances and living spaces, this one is much more concerned with visual art and paintings. A lot of what is written about you concerns a smaller period of time: a lot of your ’70s work, your show at the Whitney where you killed your first persona. But there's still several decades of artwork after that.

COLETTE LUMIERE:  Interesting how people focus on one thing to describe you. They get set.

I really began as a painter. But it wasn't long before I got restless. It was in the air. I was very naïve, and I wasn't coming from Yale or whatever. I was coming from nowhere, actually. It was before street art became popular. There was a bar on Spring Street where I did a lot of my graffiti work. I always had an accomplice, a friend, a girlfriend or somebody helping me out, watching for the police

Simultaneously, I was creating the environments that I lived in. I got intrigued with using space in a different way. This was a time where art changed completely, and unconsciously, I was picking up on that.

I used to go to the nightclubs. It was at Max's Kansas City. No place like it ever again.

The people hanging out there were all famous artists. They were [Colette adopts a macho stance] men, and I was a young girl and I usually had another young girl with me. But one night I met [land artist Robert] Smithson, and we had a long conversation. I said I had learned about him and we were doing the same thing. I think he was rolling his eyes. He had other ideas in mind, but we took him to my place, which was near where he lived and he walked in my environment and then he sobered up. We gave him a cup of coffee, and we talked about art. And from then on, he introduced me to everyone. Richard Serra, Carl Andre. That was my beginning.

QUADROS:  Why did you decide to go to Berlin?

LUMIERE:  Sometimes I just like to give up. Surrender. You always want to plan your life, and then sometimes I find it's best to surrender.

So, I was really at that stage of my life, where my Living Environment had come to an end. I think I was ready to be dismantled. I lived in an artwork that was ongoing. It was very extreme, and I was part of that artwork. And there was another element, which was my landlord, who tried to throw me out from the beginning [laughs]. So it was coming to a climax. And then I get this invitation to go to Berlin. How convenient! 

I don't know why I'm talking about my past again. This is really a problem I've noticed. But this show is Mata Hari. We're talking the ’80s! Berlin was a new beginning. 

QUADROS: Who is Mata Hari the persona?

LUMIERE:  Actually, I didn't know at all about Mata Hari the person when I chose that name. The reason I chose Mata Hari was because I knew she was a spy… You had this image. The Berlin Wall was not that far away.

None of my personas are actually about the name. A lot of people think Olympia, it's Olympia from Manet, Justine, it's de Sade, but none of them are. Of course Mata Hari has something to do with the name, but I had to make something new out of her. So, it became Mata Hari and the Stolen Potatoes. It was the potatoes because it was the food for Germany. Then stolen made it more mysterious, dangerous. That's what I felt Berlin would be like. I would take pictures of myself, running like somebody was going to catch me, like the police or the Gestapo.

I got into [the show’s videos] because it's really old footage. One of them was staged at the opera where I did a music video that was interrupted by the police. I have a tendency to do things I should not do for the sake of art, of course, because I'm obsessed. I had the approval of the director who I had done sets and costumes for at the Berlin Opera.

We were just starting to rehearse. It was a potato song, which is in the show as well. It was called, “Did You Eat?” Well, apparently that was not legal. And everybody came out from the kitchen, from the offices. “What is going on here?” And here I am doing my music video rehearsing. We were just at the beginning, and the police came. And I said, “You're not gonna stop this.” I said to everybody working with the band, “Let's just go. Let's just finish it.” At the end, my wig is like half down. People don't know this when they see the video.

QUADROS: What was the Berlin art community like?

LUMIERE: At the beginning there was a lot of resistance for me, and there usually is. I've noticed this everywhere I go. First of all, I'm a foreigner. And number two, it was the height of the wild painters, the Berlin guys – Lüpertz and Rainer Fetting. It was a whole crew of them. They were very macho, and they ruled the scene. They were very serious, and they drank a lot, and they were very depressed. And here I am, bringing my art to a nightclub. I took a boyfriend's Volkswagen and I painted it and put the potatoes in. I arrived in the Volkswagen, and I did an installation in the nightclub they all went to. It was called, There's a New Girl in Town.

This German art magazine came out with a story that art in the nightclubs is what's happening. In New York, there was Palladium. It was where all the big artists like Schnabel, Clemente, Keith Haring, Basquiat, and Colette [went], but Colette was on her own always. So, it explained how I kind of started that way back before in Danceteria. Then they were respectful. Then I won them over, and they were nice to me.

QUADROS: Can you speak a little about the Silk to Marble series? Many things come up for me: the seductress, a statue of Venus, a nun, decommissioned artwork covered in a sheet, perhaps even a dead body covered in a sheet.

LUMIERE:  Well, you just described it. It's not that I'm against high tech or having a big budget, but usually I don't have either available. So I'm very good at transforming material. It was an evening at home bored and I'm leaving, [so I said] “Let's make some art!” I had this one sheet. It was very organic. Organic is a big word in my work. 

They were first exhibited in Berlin, in the house, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, which was beautiful because it was a nunnery, so it had these oval religious arches, white walls. It was perfect for the series. And then out of nowhere at the opening, I appeared behind one of the columns way up – the ceilings were unbelievably high – and there was special music composed for that performance.

QUADROS: A lot of your performance work is inspired by art history and the canon, often subverting or playing with classical images. But these “metaphysical portraits” seem to come from somewhere else entirely. What can the world of dreaming offer us?

LUMIERE:  My art was trying to reach the invisible, the unknown. That's what I'm reaching out for… I don't care what the trend is… I don't like trends because trends are things that happen and leave, and I'm interested in the eternal. Artists – I guess they’re called visionaries – they follow that line, and they're mystical in a way. I try to stay away from describing myself as that, but that's what interested me from the beginning: the metaphysics, magic, the mystery of life and art. I'm always seeking for another dimension. That's what my soul is looking for, and whatever way I can manifest it, whether it's canvas or performance, that's my goal.

The feminine influence is a big thing too. Now it's much easier for women, but at the time I was doing it, my work was labeled feminine, like it was an insult. Even the women were insulted by me. Like I was an insult. Because I impressed my femininity in my paintings and the way I dressed. I always have fun anyway. That's another thing. Fun is very important. 

QUADROS: You like to build the whole world.  It can't just stay in the gallery. It has to be in the streets, and in the club, and in the bedroom. 

LUMIERE: In the bedroom, yes!

QUADROS: Were you part of the punks?

LUMIERE: Oh yeah, of course. But I also wasn’t. I was never a part of anything is what I’m trying to tell you. In the clubs it was so cool to be mean! [Colette adopts a snarl and a tough pose.] I like punk, but I don’t like it when it goes in a very negative direction. So I created my own thing, which was a contradiction. I added the Victorian look, the soft look, and mixed it up with the tough look because it was only black, black, black.

QUADROS: It’s interesting because Victorian fashion is very confined and restricted, like a corset. But your clothing is much lighter and more playful.

LUMIERE: Well by 1980, I was getting restless to get rid of my Environment, but I wasn’t really ready. So, I started wearing it. It was an experiment in walking architecture. The whole idea was to use space in a different way.

I work very intuitively and later, I get what I meant, you know? I think intuition has its own intelligence. We live in a culture where intellect is so celebrated, not that that doesn’t have its role. For me, it’s always been about the unity of the mind, body, and the emotions. There’s a cerebral part of my work. There’s an emotional quality. I think this show reflects that. 

QUADROS: Do you think you can explore something with painting that you can’t reach with performance or fashion or music?

LUMIERE: I love it and I don’t love it. I’m a loner, really. I like my private life. But it’s a contradiction because I also like to have large audiences and speak to lots of people. Painters are usually by themselves. With fashion and with music and with all of the other parts, I’d probably do a lot more, but I don’t want to because this is my first love. Being who I am and on my own time, that’s me.

QUADROS: I do think you were forward-thinking being so multidisciplinary. Nowadays, it’s so hard for people to make a living doing just one thing. So you see artists that collaborate with fashion designers or build window displays, all the things you used to do.

LUMIERE: I was always interested in pushing that line between art and commerce. And now it’s merged. And I don’t approve of that. But I pushed it.

QUADROS: Do you feel responsible for the people you’ve influenced?

LUMIERE: No, because in the end it’s not me. But it is interesting.


Everything She Touches Turns to Gold is on view through March 1 @ Company Gallery in New York City at 145 Elizabeth St.

Pop Psychology and Picasso: An Interview with Jason Boyd Kinsella On His Artistic Roots

interview by Oliver Kupper
introduction by Chimera Mohammadi

In the furnace of adolescence, Jason Boyd Kinsella’s world fell apart into the neat building blocks of identity that make up the Myers-Briggs personalities. Thirty years later, he’s finding new ways to put the pieces back together again in geometric patterns. In his portraits, smooth, inorganic shapes against flat backgrounds become vivid, abstracted bodies, occupying startling emotional space. The tension between inhuman and intimate is amplified by the contrast between his clear reverence for the Old Masters and his own unique brand of decidedly modern cubism. Kinsella’s exploratory practice responds to the deterioration of visual truth in the Internet era by seeking the psyche of each sitter. Melding cool modernity with rich intuition, Kinsella’s ever-evolving expressions of personhood have enkindled the excitement of an international audience.

OLIVER KUPPER: It would be great to start with your later-in-life career as a fine artist and your 30-year hiatus. How long have you been painting, and what was the initial impetus to leave your previous career and dedicate yourself to fine art full-time?


JASON BOYD KINSELLA: Fine art has always been the primary compass in my life. After graduating from university with my Fine Arts degree, I got a job in advertising, which was a fun way to use my creativity. I sharpened my creative tools across multiple mediums and I got to work with some incredibly talented people who taught me a lot about craft, ideation and creative discipline. In many ways, it was a creative masterclass.
While I was working in advertising, I still painted and drew in my home studio, but I never showed that work. I just created for myself. 
In 2019, my artwork took a very surprising shift. Almost overnight, my painting began to take on a deeper personal meaning and purpose. The intersection between my studies of the Old Masters, my fascination with psychology and MBTI, and my work experience suddenly collided on the canvas. I knew intuitively that something special was happening, so I threw myself into it completely and never looked back.

KUPPER: You describe your works as psychological portraits. What is it about psychology versus physical attributes that interests you more?


KINSELLA: We live in a world where you can’t completely trust what you see or hear. A person’s true likeness can be altered with Photoshop, digital filters, or even plastic surgery. People can hide who they really are behind an augmented version of who they want to be. This is the undependability of a portrait of the flesh. My practice is concerned with discovering the most authentic depiction of the self by way of the psychological portrait, where everything is laid bare.

KUPPER: When did geometry enter the field in your oeuvre of psychological portraits? 


KINSELLA: After university, I developed a deep passion for modern art. Once I discovered artists like Jacques Lipchitz, Henri Laurens, Picasso, and Henry Moore, a light suddenly switched on in my mind. I couldn’t resist the art of subtraction because of its sober directness. I didn’t set out to incorporate geometry into my work, but I guess it makes sense that it would become a central element in my oeuvre. 

KUPPER: You received the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator book as a child, which would have a profound influence on your work—what was it about this book that fascinated you so much and who originally gifted it to you? 


KINSELLA: It’s funny how the mind works. My mother gave me a book when I was a teenager called, Please Understand Me, which was a book about the Myers-Briggs personality indicator. It included a self-test which I took, I quickly learned everything about the building blocks of my personality (INFJ), and it was a startlingly accurate self-portrait. I couldn’t believe that I could be reduced to these psychological building blocks and then assembled into 1 of 16 personality types. I remember feeling a bit disillusioned that there were only 16 different personality types on a planet with billions of people.
From that day forward, I don’t think I thought about people the same way. It took many years for that experience to manifest itself in my artwork, but there’s no question that it had – and continues to have – a profound effect.

KUPPER: What do you think you have brought from the world of advertising to painting and what have you left behind? 


KINSELLA: There is no question that, without my experience in advertising, I couldn’t do what I am doing today. I worked with some incredibly creative people that taught me how to get the most out of my ideas. I also learned a lot about psychology and self-discipline. It was those twenty-five years of preparation that enabled me to get the most out of what I do today. I took some great memories and lessons, and I don’t feel that I left anything behind. It was a very natural and necessary progression into my creative journey. 

KUPPER: Your sculpture is really interesting—what is your approach to sculpture versus painting? 


KINSELLA: Some people are surprised to learn that my sculptures always begin as paintings. I find this to be the most intuitive way to flesh out an idea. I really enjoy the interactivity and exploration that a sculpture offers the viewer. Every vantage point of the sculpture offers new insights into the subject's personality. It’s no surprise to me that some of my biggest influences are sculptors, furniture designers and architects (Moore, Lipchitz, Juhl, and Hadid, Gehry, Picasso, Wegner etc…)

KUPPER: Where do you start with a portrait—is it a jumble of imagined geometry, or do you have specific visages in mind? 


KINSELLA: When I start a portrait, I don’t think visually. I just focus on the feeling about a person and then I let my hand interpret that feeling. The results are always surprising and unexpected.

KUPPER: How do the Old Masters and other influences play into your work? 


KINSELLA: My formative influences have a big range. My schooling was primarily the Old Masters. That’s where I developed a strong affinity with portraiture, especially with the work of Rembrandt, Dürer, Jan van Eyck, Hans Holbein and Caravaggio. Their work was always loaded with mystery and emotion. I also was drawn to the work of Singer Sargent and Anders Zorn – more for the elegance and simplified palettes.

KUPPER: What role does color play in your paintings?


KINSELLA: Color is very important to my work. It is a key element in conveying a sitter’s emotions. 

KUPPER: How do you navigate the tension between creativity as a personal outlet versus art as a means of communication with an audience?


KINSELLA: I am in a quiet conversation with each painting while I make it. It’s a highly personal and intimate process that doesn’t include anyone other than myself and the subject. When I paint I never think about the audience because I am making the work for myself.
But sculpture is different. I definitely consider the audience when I am making a sculpture because I want the work to be accessible for everyone. Things like scale and the point of view are important to consider so as to enable people to interact with the work in the most personal way possible. 
Digital is also different. Often I will think about how people can interact with the work on digital platforms to potentially take ownership over a piece. (Especially on mobile phones).

KUPPER: Your work has been received with enormous positivity—not only amongst an art audience, but also collectors. How has your perception of success in art changed over your career?


KINSELLA: I am deeply grateful that my work resonates with people. That positivity really energizes me. A big part of my life has been spent visiting museums, galleries and reading art books, so it is very fulfilling to see that my work has found a place alongside the people and places that I venerated for so long. It fills me with a lot of joy. I just continue to make the work for myself, while continually pushing into the unknown to see what I can find. 

KUPPER: In your latest exhibition at Perrotin, Emotional Moonscapes, your paintings existed on multiple floors and within multiple mediums—where do you see the future of your paintings? Any unexplored mediums?


KINSELLA: Over the past five years my work has evolved in craft, medium and narrative. It’s hard to say for sure what things will look like in the future, but finding new and relevant ways to express my visual language is central to energizing my practice, and I will continue to lean into that everyday.

Scrap: An Interview of Calla Henkel

 
 

interview by Oliver Misraje

Stepping out of the chaos of Santa Monica Blvd and into the New Theater to meet Calla Henkel for our interview about her latest book, Scrap, had the transportative quality of entering a portal; exiting the speedy streets and entering the hermetically sealed darkness of the cool, dark, velvet-lined theater for a different kind of vector. Side-stepping two girls in prom dresses rehearsing a cat fight, Henkel mentions she had just returned from a swim at a public pool a block away, thus explaining her swimwear. She has an incredibly disarming demeanor—a calm, collected amiability rare for Los Angeles, perhaps equal-parts informed by, and resistant of, the twelve years she spent in Berlin running TV, a smorgasbord performance space, nightlife venue and film studio with Max Pitegoff (also co-founder of the New Theater).

The New Theater is something of a nexus for the burgeoning literary scene and (stagnating) gallery-circuit of Los Angeles, buttressing each through its unique hybrid programming. And not unlike the New Theater, her latest novel Scraps is an intersection between Henkel’s understanding of narrative and lived experience within the arts. It’s a lesbian neo-noir trojan-horsing a deeper critique of the gallery system, true crime, and the underbelly of schadenfreude inherent to both.

OLIVER MISRAJE Scrap operates in the incredibly rare space between a commercial thriller and a hyper-localized critique of the art world. What is it about the thriller genre for you that makes it the ideal form for that kind of discourse?

CALLA HENKEL I love thrillers because they provide a really fast engine, and you can strap anything to it. The art world may not be completely interesting when you talk about it in another set of prose or language, but there's something about a thriller that allows me, as a writer, to focus on minutia, sadness and pain, the flaky parts of a universe which would otherwise maybe be annoying, but because it’s a thriller it can still be consumed with violent pleasure.

MISRAJE You can plug into it.

HENKEL Exactly. Photography and theater have an immediacy. And in a funny way, the thriller novel sort of replicates that immediacy. It is like the cocaine of literature. There's a relief and a joy in that for me. For a long time, Max Pitegoff, my artistic collaborator and I were writing plays in Germany, partially in German, partially in English. And I was like, “These are for twelve people.” I wanted to find a format to write in that was more accessible, but still allowed me to exorcize the same questions I’d had when making theater. 

MISRAJE The social dynamics of the art world, especially from the perspective of industry, is so heavily gate kept—I’m curious how you’ve had to tweak the thriller in relation to such a specifically in-grouped context.

HENKEL I think a big problem is that the art world lends itself to such a unique bastion of extreme satire. It’s a total tragicomedy and it’s easy to make fun of it. But it never feels right because the pain is in the detail. You know, it's not in the big funny abstract painting with an insane price, It's the mechanics of the exchange of energy. That is what I think is rarely captured well. I'm really interested in the politics of labor; how works are sold and in turn how they're used to sell an idea of politics or a performance of identity. The art world always looks fake because what’s portrayed is not what it’s really about. But I wrote the book when people I knew were dropping out of the art world. There was a lot of complaining and melodrama at the moment, and my gut reaction was to sort of laugh, and be like, Cool, then do it. Nothing's holding you here. I stole a lot of their rhetoric for the book. I think it’s interesting how people working within the arts pretend like it's a cage that they're stuck in—when in reality they've decided to be there. And I think Esther, the main character, is caught in this thought trap, which is only exacerbated by her obsession with revenge, which disables her from moving forward.

MISRAJE I appreciate the gray morality of Scrap. There’s a nuance to each of the characters that feels very human, regardless of their social and class positioning. The relationship between Esther and Patrick especially stands out.

HENKEL I don't plan my books out in advance. Really, not at all. I’m always surprised by who my characters become throughout the writing process, so none of them end up representing one thing or another. There is never a moral agenda. With Esther, she was a character who reacts linearly, so every time she gets hit with something, she goes ten inches farther than she should each time, which mirrors the logic of true crime. It's invasive but I also think true crime has this propeller engine where they have to get to the bottom of something within the time-span of an episode. But violence is confusing. And those two things together create this type of narrative netting where people are constantly trying to cover violence with something that makes total sense, but it never makes total sense. With Esther, she has this desire for justice that’s really just a desire for a palatable shape. And that's not real.

MISRAJE Was Esther a character you channeled from within or without?

HENKEL I always have this feeling that there's a bar or like an annex in the nightclub in my brain where the characters sit and smoke cigarettes until I finish the story. It can be annoying and kind of disruptive to have them always there, especially with someone like Esther. She was a difficult character to live with in my head. It got quite claustrophobic. It's this thing where you satisfy them with an ending, and till that ending is set they're just blabbing at me all day long. So, I feel like most of my characters usually sort of get what they want. But It's not always the right thing.

MISRAJE It’s a monkey paw situation.

HENKEL Right. It just maybe costs something they weren't willing to pay, but they didn't know that when they made the request. I had this meltdown because I had written this Esther as someone who has nothing to lose which is arguably very difficult narratively speaking. But then I realized, Oh wait, that has to become her power. So, that enabled the ending.

MISRAJE Do you consider yourself a noir writer?

HENKEL It's so funny because I never would've decided for myself that this is what I’d be doing. ButI also really love committing to a form. That’s what I like about the theater we run here, because it’s a form. We could do pop-up Shakespeare in the park or whatever, but instead we have fifty red seats and a bunch of lights. When you commit to a form, you really have to sit inside of it, literally speaking. And that’s also what I am doing with writing. So yeah, I guess I do consider myself a noir writer. 

Each Person Is A Portal: An Interview Of Seffa Klein

 
self-portrait of Seffa Klein standing in front of bismuth painting on woven glass
 

interview by Summer Bowie

The human race has been gazing at the stars with a sense of wonderment since time immemorial. These cogitations have inspired the creation of everything from religious mythologies to monumental earthworks to marine navigation, space navigation and innumerable inventions in between. It is a universal human experience where most of us encounter our first existential ponderings and Seffa Klein is no exception. What is exceptional about her experience is that she comes from a family of artists whose careers have been dedicated to exploring universal truths in the realms of art, science, and spirituality, which has afforded her the unique opportunity to engage with these profound questions further in the light of day rather than extinguishing them. While most of us are told to invest our time and energy in more realistic endeavors, the Klein family is deeply rooted in the belief that this is as real as it gets. Gallerist Jérôme Poggi recognized this unique quality of the Klein family as one of artists who foster each other’s practices rather than competing with one another, which inspired him to curate a solo exhibition of Seffa Klein’s works alongside selected works from Yves Klein, Rotraut, Marie Raymond, and Günther Uecker, who are respectively her grandparents, great-grandparent, and great-uncle.

BOWIE: I want to start with the concept of the exhibition, which brings together a constellation of works from you and your extended family. How were the works of your family members selected and over what duration of time was your selection of works created?

KLEIN: The gallery owner, Jérôme Poggi, sent me some selections of my grandmother's works and Marie Raymond. He has great vision and it was a really collaborative process. It was such a different way to do a show, because the narrative that people have around that kind of thing is one of being in someone's shadow or feeling this pressure that just doesn’t exist in my family. This show made so much sense because on one hand, as my first big solo show, it addresses this question of how I relate to my family. But the question always used to be totally around Yves Klein. And when I started talking to him about the shared interests I have with Yves Klein, I was like, “Also, there's Rotraut and there's Marie Raymond, his mother, and then my parents [Yves Amu Klein & Kathy Klein], and Gunther Uecker. It's not just me and Yves Klein.” It was especially important for me to bring my female ancestors into it. And also to emphasize that my family, both through marriage and through blood, is this distinct alignment of a certain energy. As for my works, those were made from 2018 to now.

BOWIE: So, it covers quite a long span of time. Were the SK Bricks some of your oldest works? 

KLEIN: Yeah, those started in 2017. But these pieces are more recent in the show.

Galerie, Poggi, Seffa Klein, A Family Constellation, 2024 © .Kit

BOWIE: So, your pieces were selected first, and then the curation of your family's pieces was based off of those. It’s interesting to curate a show with the works of an entire family starting from where we are now and then to look back at where some of these roots are exposing themselves in your work.

KLEIN: There's a grace in the way that I feel about having my family in the show. It feels non-competitive. It’s an embodiment of the kind of ideology that I'm pushing forward in my work, which is this interconnected, interdependent, more feminine way of being.

BOWIE: It is very rare because with all artists just on an individual level, there is this oscillation between the actual flow state where you are allowing the work and the ideas to come through you, and the ego that pushes back to question what you’re doing.

KLEIN: It’s like a comet that hits the Earth.

BOWIE: Right. The ego hits and it's already such an issue as an individual to make sure that it's not taking up too much space. That Le Monde feature on the exhibition mentions the way that children of major artists often don't try to become artists themselves, or they choose different media as a way to minimize comparisons. But your family has done this exceptional job of keeping their egos out of the way in support of each other's processes.

KLEIN: Yeah. It's unusual. It's sort of like a top-down building, where the structure starts with our fixation on the stars and other shared concepts. So when a group of people are all shooting inwardly towards these universal ideas and creating from that space, there's almost this secondary quality of the physical where—of course there's overlap—we're all thinking about the stars and universal truths; things that belong to everybody. They don't belong to one artist. And so there's this sense of, if your main inspiration is something that's so much greater than your own ego, that humbling aspect is a part of the inspiration itself. It's more about the devotion to the work than it is about the individual ego. Although, I'm sure there's been a lot of ego that I'm not even aware of because there's isolation for each of us.

 

Seffa Klein
Multiple Displacement (Sun Machine), 2019
Bismuth metal woven glass
76.2 x 61 cm
30 x 24 in

 

BOWIE: Is there any particular member of your family whose work you feel resonates with you most?

KLEIN: I think we're all kind of equally inspired by nature, space, meditation, these universal, larger ideas, than we are by each other. Each person is a portal to a different element or aspect of these universal realities, and throughout my childhood I gazed into these pieces by my family members that I saw as examples of a human being dedicating their life to a pursuit and really achieving a level of mastery with that.

BOWIE: The stars are obviously a major influence on all of you. How exactly do they inform your practice?

KLEIN: My fascination with stars began with growing up in Arizona, watching the meteor showers every year. We would go to Arcosanti, this attempted utopian community out in the desert, and sleep up on these concrete dome roofs. My dad would bring his telescope and we'd go and lay out for the Leonid meteor showers. He always had telescopes and would tell me about the stars. My mom has also always been super into science. And then, when I was ten, we moved to northern Arizona where there’s no light pollution at all. The sky is completely black and you can see the entire Milky Way. That was just my everyday view. We lived in this Earthship. It's a house made of tires and dirt inside a hill and the roof is flush with the top of the hill, so you can just walk up the hill and then go lay on the roof, and you really don't have anything in your periphery. So, you actually feel like you are lost in space. It’s that sense of awe, amazement, truth, and terror. I was super addicted to this combination of feelings like, I'm gonna die, I'm amazed. If this is truth, I can gaze into the mysteries and have this sense of being on the precipice of the believability of my own existence. How did this happen? You're staring out there like, So that's the universe. That's the majority: darkness and stars, and this is my experience right here. It's just so wild that out of anything in the whole world that could have happened, this happened. I would try to have these existential moments as much as possible. 

But yeah, the stars were definitely my first, most powerful and consistent window into those states. It was like an outward reflection of the inward states that I was most interested in having. My work today is still really focused on cultivating inward states. And so my connection to the stars is as much ideological as it is perceptual. And then, I started getting really into astrophysics when I was probably around fifteen. I was studying quantum mechanics and getting into particle physics and since then, it's just been a regular passion. I’ve always been very drawn to understanding the smallest unit of something. I have a hard time believing something just because someone says it. I need to know down to the particle scale how that works, then we can talk about the molecular scale, and then the material scale, and then the social scale, and then I'm with you. It all started with looking up at the stars. A lot of people don't feel that the mysteries of the universe are accessible or useful to ask about. There's this block and I think it's because they don't have those kinds of experiences with the vaguely thin interface between self and infinity.

Seffa Klein
Multiple Displacement (you are hovering between shadow and reflection), 2018
Bismuth and gallium metal on woven glass
101.6 x 142.2 cm
40 x 56 in

BOWIE: The interference of the urban lightscape certainly hinders our ability to tap into that dialogue. What you were saying made me remember learning about the search for the Higgs-Boson, or the God particle when I was in college. It was the hottest topic in particle physics for a couple of decades. That was my first understanding of where science meets spirituality. Can you talk about the way that your work blurs those lines between art, science and spirituality?

KLEIN: Absolutely. The Higgs-Boson and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN has been a big part of my life as well. I was ten or eleven when they first turned that thing on and thought it might open up a black hole and suck up the world. I stayed up until midnight because that was when they were turning it on. I was like, I'm not gonna miss it if a black hole comes and takes everything. I'm not gonna have that happen in my sleep. (laughs) People have this idea that there are separate categories in life and it's so dull. They engage with their constructs around reality rather than reality itself. I'm really interested in engaging with reality itself, and I do that through science, through spirituality, and through art. They're all the same thing. But I think it's this idea of getting close to what is real. 

People have this idea that meditation is metaphysical, science is empirical, and art is creative, and they're all separate. They think you can only interface with art or science if you’re educated accordingly. And you can only truly interface with meditation if you're insane enough to sit still for many hours a day and go to an ashram or something. Everything is accessible and we have the opportunity to engage in all of these fields as different sides of seeking. Meditation is one way in which I seek to understand and comprehend the nature of the universe as are science and art. I think scientists have a deep sense of spirituality, especially particle physicists. I'm attracted to science because I see it as a site for magic as much as I see spirituality or art as a site for magic. Magic is a word I love because it's the first word that gives you wonder as a child. Magic is real and it's science. And so, my practice has evolved into creating work that's very invested in telling the viewer that they have the power to interface with the deepest truths and reality. It's not hubris to want to interface with those things. You can do so with respect and grace, and I believe it's actually what we're here to do.

Seffa Klein
New Stream, 2019
Bismuth metal and Bismuth Eutectic Alloy on woven glass
106.7 x 142.2 cm
42 x 56 in

BOWIE: Right. Seeking those deeper truths is actually a rather humble pursuit.

KLEIN: It's very humble. It's funny because society is set up in a way to make us believe that it's ridiculous, but stifling that urge is actually very destructive for us and the planet. So, I feel a sense of urgency around creating these ontologies that humans could inhabit in order to create a more sustainable future.

BOWIE: At UCLA, you were studying both art and astrophysics and you originally wanted to become an inventor. So, how did you eventually decide that the application of your scientific studies would find their way into your art?

KLEIN: Somehow the rumor got started that I earned a degree in astrophysics, but I didn’t, although I did aspire to becoming an inventor as a child. I don't know if I ever really thought I'd be a scientist. I was getting an art degree at UCLA and wanted to take classes in astrophysics, which is why I went to UCLA and not CalArts. I always knew that I wanted to take science classes as a way of learning information that would eventually go into the art. I've always been an artist first and foremost. 

BOWIE: Bismuth is one of the most prevalent materials that you use, but you manage to almost paint with it, because it appears in many different colors in your works. How does that work?

KLEIN: Essentially, when I apply the metal, it's silver. And so I'm weaving these different layers and then I'm coloring it through a controlled oxidation process that allows me to isolate one of six colors from the metal.

BOWIE: The other material that you work with a lot is gallium, which is interesting as a metal because it's liquid at body temperature, so you can warm it into a liquid state in your hand and it also has the power to dissolve other metals. I love the piece that I saw in your studio, the aluminum ladder that had the rungs broken down the center by gallium. I wanted to ask you more about the significance of this metal in your work.

KLEIN: Gallium was really the first metal I started using. I happened across it through different research that I was doing. To be able to hold metal in your hand and it melts, it feels like holding a living being in your hand. This material has an emotional quality to me. For something to change states in your hand, it's so tender. It's also non-toxic—it's used in body scans, so you can put it into your blood and everything. The only other low-temperature liquid metal I’ve seen is mercury, which is very toxic. So, I sort of fell in love with the human quality of gallium. It has the ability to be disruptive, to seep into other metals and destroy their molecular bonds—it's this very watery, feminine kind of secret power. It can literally destroy a tank just by sitting there and seeping into it. It's so elegant. The ladders that you saw in my studio were called Access Ladders. They emphasize the idea that we have access to all the information, but that the climb is not up, it’s actually through this presence in every moment. That’s the infiltration of reality that gallium represents to me. In those pieces, I put one little drop of gallium on each rung and then left it in the sunshine until I could just crumble the rungs in my hand.

BOWIE: Are there any other metals that you would like to work with in the future?

KLEIN: I definitely have some on my list. Sometimes I use bismuth eutectic alloy. The appearance is kind of like bismuth, but it has a lower melting point of about 120 degrees Fahrenheit, whereas bismuth is about 560 degrees. So, I can use a hair dryer to warm it up and paint with it. In the beginning, with my first paintings, I was using bismuth and gallium. There was this great suspension between the two metals on the surface where if the painting gets too hot, the gallium will drip and destroy it. But at a certain point I realized my collectors don't want gallium on their floor. (laughs) I need to save this for some kind of installation. It just doesn't really work for small paintings that get bought and sold.

 

Seffa Klein
R.Failure > 5, 2019
Bismuth and flowers on woven glass
109.2 x 86.4 cm
43 x 34 in

 

BOWIE: My last question for you has to do with something you had said in a previous interview about how in the future you would like to create “monumental works that have a tangible, positive effect on our ecosystem.” Are there any specific ideas you've been dreaming about or meditating on?

KLEIN: Right now, I'm in the realm of the ideological. My work hasn't really gone into the realm of being completely sustainable or actually being able to mediate environmental issues. But I love the idea of creating works whose function is not only to create a conceptual, pictorial experience for humans, but also to create some sort of experience for nature itself. As humans, we have this pictorial experience that opens our mind and allows us to transform internally because of this openness that happens semiotically through the composition. If I superimpose that process of transformation and openness onto the environment, how could we create that same sort of interface and what would that look like? What would be an experience of art for the environment? I'm sitting with that question first because I think art is not the thing that's going to mediate environmental issues. We need real technologies to do that. At the moment, I'm invested in blurring these lines because I feel like there are so many questions that we haven't asked. I’m in the space as an artist of asking these new questions that don't have to make logical sense, like what is a tangible artwork for the environment? 

BOWIE: That might be the full circle to your original childhood ambitions of being an inventor. Maybe your art practice and your inventions will blur the lines between those two endeavors.

KLEIN: I think so. Inventor is a better word for artist, or maybe inventor is sort of what artists have become. I mean, if you think about it, the pre-Modern definition of the word ‘artist’ was a very different thing.

BOWIE: It was what we would now consider a technician, almost.

KLEIN: Yeah. We never really updated that word. An inventor is a thing that a child wants to be. Most people have more specific jobs, right? So, maybe that's what art is.

BOWIE: Maybe it is.

 
 

Seffa Klein, A Family Constellation is on view through July 13 @ Galerie Poggi 135, Rue Saint-Martin, Paris 4

Cheap & Trashy: An Interview of Babymorocco

 
babymorocco, Erika Kamano, y2k, man kneeling, bodybuilding
 

interview by Abraham Chabon
photography by Iris Luz and Erika Kamano

Babymorocco loves beautiful women, cheap purple vodka, Gwen Stefani, and bodybuilding. He hates irony, uninspired people, and boring nights. The London-based recording artist has burst drunk, buff, and confidently into the music scene in the past two years with a distinct sound and an entirely original look. He sings about sex, partying, girls, and his ego over bubbling synths, Drum and Bass hi-hats, pounding 808s, and floating basslines. His subject matter is cheap, trashy, and vain, but it has an authenticity and humor that balance his narcissism with charm. ‘Rocco’ doesn't want you to take him too seriously; his aesthetic reflects that. Babymorocco looks like he belongs just as much on stage in a London warehouse as he does in a strongman porno mag. He makes it hard to tell the two apart. If you've seen Babymorocco live, you've probably seen him with his pants off. Sex appeal has always been important to male musicians, Jim Morrison had his long hair and bursting leather pants, Elvis wore unzipped bedazzled jumpsuits, Babymorocco has short shorts, tight T-shirts, and bulging biceps. He’s like a pitbull on a bender. He took a break from recording his upcoming project in the studio to talk. 

ABRAHAM CHABON: I'm a big fan. I loved your music as soon as I saw the music video for “Everyone.” You have that line, "They'll say I have narcissistic personality disorder, but when I smile, I don't have to pay for my coffee order." I love that. 

BABYMOROCCO: Yeah, that shoot was a good time. I wasn't even meant to do that in New York. We were meant to do it in London, but they flew me out to do it.  It was really fun.  

CHABON: It looked like a good time. 

BABYMOROCCO: Thank you. Genuinely. It was a peak moment for me because it was when things were getting serious, so to make a video about everyone wanting to look like me felt right. 

CHABON: Your whole look is so good, and I think, especially right now, having a look is so important. And I don't know anyone else who has the bodybuilder thing going on. 

BABYMOROCCO: It works. I don't really test my strength, though. I don't utilize my strength. I just want to look like a pornstar. That's it. 

CHABON: Is that how you would describe Babymorocco? 

BABYMOROCCO: Babymorocco is a part of my life, what I'm doing right now. That's how I describe it. It's my music, it's my art. It's a way to channel a side of me. It's totally me, but it's a way to channel a side of me without having to question it. I believe that as people, we have lots of parts to us, versions of ourselves. Babymorocco is a way that I can express myself the way I want; It's the swaggy, confident side of me.  

CHABON: Do you have to turn it on at a concert before you perform?  

BABYMOROCCO: Oh yeah, totally. Yes. 

CHABON: What's the procedure before going on stage? 

BABYMOROCCO: I do press-ups and get wasted. Usually, having sex before performing is really good for me because I look the most flustered; it makes me look sexier. It gets the adrenaline going. 

CHABON: You are surrounded by a lot of talented people. How did you form your community?

BABYMOROCCO: I mean, I love beautiful women, and I love beautiful women who are on their shit. My friend, Echo Seireeni, is an amazing artist. Ikeda is under my label, Phat Boy; she's also an artist. Erika Kamano is a massive photographer. Iris Luz, a creative director and photographer. These are bad bitches, but bad bitches with a mission. My crew is called The Girlfriends. In truth, they make up Babymorocco. They rule my life; they rule my world. They can slap me, shout at me, scream at me, and I'll come back begging for more every time. That's it. 

CHABON: And you live in London?

BABYMOROCCO: I grew up in Bournemouth, in the south of England. It's a little beach town. I live now in London in a swaggy little house. It's a good time. There are four people. There's a jewelry designer, a photographer, a footballer, and a pop star. And some cats. 

CHABON: Do you think your Moroccan identity shows in your music? Does it contribute to your identity as an artist? 

BABYMOROCCO: My family is from Casablanca, but I am from the UK, so Baby is the English side, and Morocco is the Moroccan side. For a while, people thought that because I was Moroccan, I had to make a kind of sound attributed to that, or I had to speak on it all the time. I think I can just be Moroccan and make pop music without being an ode to Morocco. And I'm sure there will be a time when I do, especially when I go back, but not too much yet. But, in “Crazy Cheap,” my most recent song, there are aspects of Moroccan music, drums, and vocals. There's some essence of being Moroccan in it. That's part of my identity, part of who I am, but that's it.

CHABON: Your ethnicity can be important to you and part of who you are, but it doesn't need to be essential to how you express yourself.  

BABYMOROCCO: I just want to be a Moroccan boy who makes it really big. I want to be on the Wikipedia page of notable pop stars from Morocco. I will be. 

CHABON: When did you start making music, and how did you discover your sound? 

BABYMOROCCO: I properly started making music in 2022, but I only started making and releasing the music I wanted to in 2023. That's when I started working with the producers that I liked, people that I respected, I wanted to make proper real music. I need it to be those synths, that sound that I grew up with. I need it to be UK. I want to create that fun, good time, trashy music, almost to the point where it's kind of shit. My influence is lots of French Electro like Yelle. I also love all of the early Space Cowboy stuff produced for Lady Gaga. And, of course, Avicii. Reality Star music from the UK, like Joey Essex. Bass Hunter is one of my biggest inspirations. There are so many. I can just go on and on with inspirations. The most important thing with music, for me, is an artist that can produce music and it's relevant and popping and swag and emotional; it speaks for itself. It's not trying to be anything specific. I hate genre. Don't try to limit yourself to a sound. Don't box yourself in, let other people do that for you.

CHABON: If you could collaborate with any musician, who's the dream?  

BABYMOROCCO: Who is the fucking dream? Gwen Stefani. But there's so many artists at the moment; who I would like to collaborate with? London feels exciting again. 

CHABON: COVID and quarantine put a freeze on things in art and music. It paused a new youth scene from starting and delayed the development of a culture. But stuff has started picking up again, and an identity is starting to be formed. 

BABYMOROCCO: I feel like people just want to have fun again. And not in an ironic way. We want to have an actual good time. I want to turn up; I want to do trashy shit. There was this time when everything with music had to be ironic to be accepted. It had to be a meme and funny. That was lame to me; it was so overdone; it wasn't authentic; it didn't mean anything. People may think I'm doing that with my music because I mention stuff like sex and partying, but that's very authentic to me. I'm a British boy. I would go to Magaluf, and I would go to Ayia Napa. I've been to all those islands. I've been up since I was thirteen years old.

CHABON: Our generation took irony way too far. It was a way to experiment and do the weird things you wanted, but you could justify if they weren't received well by saying it's ironic.   

BABYMOROCCO: You can hear when you listen to some music that it's a joke. There is a difference between not being serious and being a joke.  I'm passionate about partying. I'm passionate about women. I'm passionate about the UK. I'm passionate about beautiful things. I love drinking and partying. That's it. That's me. 

CHABON: On a weekend night in London. Where can the people find Babymorocco?

BABYMOROCCO: My friend Rain runs this night called Genesys, and that's a great time.  

CHABON: Talking about the contemporary scene, whether you're looking at Hyper Pop, or the Indie Sleaze revival, or the rave scene, I think that masculinity isn't really something that's embraced. There is an appreciation of the androgynous, experimenting with sexuality and identity, and breaking through gender roles and gender conformity. But you have a very masculine presence that stands out. Do you think about your masculinity? Is that something that you consider?  

BABYMOROCCO: I'm just doing me. I'm not working out to be a man or be healthy. I want to look sexy, swaggy, like a pornstar. At the gym, I'm turning up because the gym and music go hand in hand. The pump of working out properly gets you in that zone to listen to music. 

CHABON: You have a new tape coming out; what does this project mean to you? 

BABYMOROCCO: We're at the studio right now. I've been working with Dear Cupid, who's all about French Electro, and Frost Children are putting the final touches on it. It's going to be another character. It's going to be a spin-off of Babymorocco. He's called Jean-Paul. 

CHABON: Is it important to you to have a distinct identity with each tape?

BABYMOROCCO: Yes, a thousand percent. In this one, Jean-Paul is a French boy. It's like Babymorocco if he was born in France and lost loads of weight. I'm trying to get to your weight because you've got the cheekbones and stuff; that's what I need to get back again. I have to get skinny. I've been cutting weight recently. It needs to be skinny muscle because Jean-Paul is more mysterious. Morocco was a French colony, so I'm reclaiming it. 

CHABON: Can you say when the project's coming out? 

BABYMOROCCO: It's meant to come out in the summer. Coming soon.

CHABON: And with the record label Phat Boy, what's the idea behind that? Are you looking to sign artists? 

BABYMOROCCO: I love music, and I want to keep going in it, and I want to sign beautiful people to beautiful pop beats. And marry those two together. We have a lot coming up. At the moment, It's more of a collective, but I do want to turn it into a proper label. 

CHABON: Have you ever thought about making it  multimedia?

BABYMOROCCO: I would love to, especially with the live shows. I said the other day that I'm so bored of clubs. I want to perform on the beach, at art shows, and installations. I just want to make it crazy. The crazier, the better for me.

CHABON: If you have to get back to recording now, I can let you go. I'm looking forward to the new project.

BABYMOROCCO: Alright, well, thank you a lot, Abe. I appreciate it. And you're going to like the new stuff; it's a massive step up. It's crazy.

Tits Up: An Interview of Author Sarah Thornton

Annie Sprinkle "Bosom Ballet" 1990-91, courtesy the artist

interview by Mieke Marple

From the auction house to the titty bar, the art fair to the witches’ retreat, Sarah Thornton has moved her ethnographic eye from the art world to the titty world—and we are all better for it. Tits Up: What Sex Workers, Milk Bankers, Plastic Surgeons, Bra Designers, and Witches Tell Us about Breasts explores what breasts mean to five different breast-experts. The result is an ambitious collage of uplifting sagas (also the original name for Thornton’s book before the publisher asked her to change it). Thornton and I met over Zoom to talk about some of these lived experiences, particularly her own—everything from what inspired her to write the book in the first place to how writing it changed her relationship to her own body. 

MIEKE MARPLE: How are you doing?

SARAH THORNTON: I’m excited. I worked hard on Tits Up and I care deeply about its content and mission. I’m keen on a broad readership. I don't want to just preach to the converted. Yes, it's a feminist book, but it’s also critical of the women's movement’s general disregard of breasts. While researching breasts from different grounded locations — a strip club, a human milk bank, an operating room, a bra design studio, and a pagan witches’ retreat in the redwoods — I realized that each of these social milieux raised issues of historic discomfort to mainstream feminism. The American women’s movement has generally not embraced sex workers, breastfeeding, or beautification, and definitely not plastic surgery. It has historically had a negative relationship to fashion and has been embarrassed by feminist spirituality. 

It feels good to grapple with an elemental body part. All humans have nipples and most of us have a relationship to breasts. But Tits Up is full of surprising information. I hope Tits Up is useful for conscious-raising.

MARPLE: You told me that Tits Up is the best thing you've ever written. How do you know that? Or when did you know that?

THORNTON: I love researching. Every time I write a book, it's like completing another PhD. This is my fourth book and it took me six years. During that time, I had the benefit of twenty-three student apprentices because I was a scholar-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley. Their library research allowed me to be even more ambitious for the ethnographic part or primary research of the book. 

I also think I'm getting better as a writer. My voice is pretty distinct. It's mine. I'm not apologetic. So, it’s my best book because of the depth of the research and my greater facility at conveying insights in entertaining ways. 

MARPLE: When did you know that this was the book you had to write?

THORNTON: Well, um, I didn't initially know it was a book. I started off by writing an article called “A Brief History of My Boobs.” It then became a therapeutic preamble to a deeper investigation as well as a position statement and declaration of purpose. When you write about a body part, you need to be honest and clear to both your interviewees and your readers about where you're coming from. Then, I started reading everything I could get my hands on. I have bookshelves full of breast-related books, body books, and feminist books. Then, there were hundreds of academic articles, usually very siloed in terms of discipline. But there was not much written that joined it up together.

MARPLE: No holistic view.

THORNTON: Exactly. So, after reading everything I could get my hands on, I realized nobody had written the book that I would write. I realized there was very little about contemporary breasts, especially the in-person real world of living bodies. I've taught media studies, but living breathing experiences (rather than virtual ones) are what give me a buzz. I realized that nobody had done what I felt I could do. And I knew I could do it because I’d written Seven Days in the Art World. I understood early on that a kaleidoscopic perspective on breasts could be rendered as an engaging five days in the titty world.

 

Chitra Ganesh "Black Vitruvian Tiger", courtesy the artist

 

MARPLE: How did you choose those five worlds? And what were some of the other ones you considered?

THORNTON: I started out by interviewing between fifty and seventy possible experts. I interviewed all sorts of people like ballet dancers, breast cancer survivors, gynecologists, feminists, all sorts. And what hit me over the head were five clusters of people who were saying things that I had not heard before — things that blew my mind.

MARPLE: Because they have been largely marginalized from mainstream feminism?

THORNTON: Yes, absolutely. They were the people who had the most interesting things to say about breasts. The number five was not a specific choice. It was just the number of worlds that came up as relevant to the story of breasts in America today. I didn't see another social world or boob environment that I needed to examine in the same way as these ones.

MARPLE: Is there any significance to the order of the worlds, starting with the strip club and ending with the witches’ retreat?

THORNTON: I moved from dominant perceptions of breasts to more obscure ones. The dominant view of breasts in America is that they are erotic playthings. I thought, okay, I'm going to start there, but I'm going to look at it from the sex professional's point of view. The women who make a living from breasts as erotic objects. The second prevailing association, because most women become mothers, is breastfeeding. Even women who don't breastfeed will have had the experience of their boobs get big when they’re pregnant as they prepare to breastfeed and their milk comes in. The most obscure niche culture is the nature-worshiping neo-pagans that came out of the hippie movement. So, the chapters move from perceptions of breasts that are mainstream through to a very small subculture, but the religions I touch on in that chapter are huge: Judaism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism. So, I intersperse the very specific with a pretty grand historical narrative. 

 

Loie Hollowell "Milk Fountain," 2020-21, courtesy the artist

 

MARPLE: And at the witches’ retreat? Was it mostly older people?

THORNTON: Yes! The other trajectory is from young to old because age is super important for the life of our chests. The youngest interviewees are in chapter one, “Hardworking Tits.” Sex work skews young. Then, comes “Lifesaving Jugs,” and motherhood. Between postpartum and menopause, a massive number of breast surgeries happen. Chapter 3, “Treasured Chests,” discusses all the “Mommy Makeovers,” the lifts, trans surgeries, and the plastic surgeries that women have after cancer. The bra chapter, “Active Apexes,” named for the apparel industry term for nipples, is for all ages, but then “Holy Mammaries” focuses on the crones. So, yes, the lifecycle is part of the chapter sequence.

MARPLE: Interesting how the dominant view intersects with youth and the most obscure intersects with age, though that is where the most collective wisdom and grandest insights lay. Of course, that mirrors societal attitudes towards women and the devaluing of them as they get older. Still, I appreciate the youth-to-old-age life span in Tits Up. It gives the book this subtle, epic narrative quality.

THORNTON: Thank you. I aspire to epic. 

MARPLE: So, how did writing the book change you?

THORNTON: Oh, my god. Well, I feel much happier in my body. I actually feel transformed by the experience of researching and writing the book. All of my characters’ experiences and insights have enlightened me and uplifted me. I feel less stressed and shamed by my fake boobs and my aging. I still lament the loss of my original, natural breasts. But then, losing them led me to write a book that I'm really proud of, which I would never have written.

MARPLE: Why not?

THORNTON: I don't think I would have felt like I had the authority. In writing “A Brief History of My Boobs” which appears in the book’s introduction in an abbreviated form as “Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder,” I was like, you know, the gals have chalked up quite a bit of experience. They’ve never done sex work, but they’ve understood from the inside a lot of important narratives – budding womanhood, sexual harassment, breastfeeding, cancer scares, amputation, and reconstruction. Then, I did all the reading, and interviewed over two hundred people, and did all of that on ethnographic on-site fieldwork. So, I'm not a doctor. I don't have the obvious credentials about “breasts,” but I have gathered, synthesized, and thought hard about many women’s perspectives. I know a hell of a lot about tits, jugs, chests, racks, and knockers. 

 

photograph by Aya Brackett