Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter, State of the Arts i Cultured Magazine

In April of 2023, André Holland embarked on what would become a three-month-long routine: a daily commute from his home in New York to Titus Kaphar’s New Haven, Connecticut, studio to learn how to paint. Even for Holland, a veteran performer who enters a period of deep research for every role he plays, this was a new level of immersion. Kaphar, a MacArthur “genius grant”–winning painter, was developing a feature film—his first—that would excavate the scar tissue of his relationship with his estranged father. Kaphar wanted Holland to play him, so he had to know how to paint. “We would always talk about ‘the line,’” Holland recalls of those months of preparation. “Bad painting in movies is one of Titus’s pet peeves. He would tell me, ‘Choose a line and…

On the one hand, Charles Atlas’s work has always had a temporal focus, capturing the fleeting feeling of live performance, the immediacy of personal interactions, the perma-scroll of TikTok, and the free association of thought. On the other, recognition is long overdue for an artist who has been working for over five decades, basically invented the translation of contemporary performance onto screen, and has collaborated with the likes of Merce Cunningham and Marina Abramović. For the past 10 years, Atlas has been working with his gallery, Luhring Augustine, to find a museum capable of handling the technical challenges that a retrospective of his work involves. “There’s not many museums that could do it,” Atlas says, adding that his ICA Boston exhibition, on view through March 2025, involves 31 channels of…

People typically don’t think about the lighting arrangement overhead when perusing the shiny baubles at Cartier, or communing with culture at SFMOMA or the Shed in New York. The Mathews family of Lucifer Lighting would like to keep it that way. “We have this expression: ‘Design. Define. Disappear,’” explains Gilbert Mathews, Lucifer’s founder and CEO, in the company’s impeccably shadowless Tribeca showroom. “The design element relates to the minimalism of the fixtures, in which advanced optics can shape light to perfectly define any object while disappearing into the ceiling, so all you see is the brilliance of the space.” The San Antonio, Texas–based family—Gilbert; his art-specialist wife, Suzanne; and their daughters Alexandra and Roselyn, who both rank highly in the company—has cultivated an eclectic portfolio of clients over four decades…

It wasn’t until adulthood that Ana Cláudia Almeida, who grew up in Rio de Janeiro, realized how close she lived to a national park. “Rio is famous for its nature and beauty, but I lived in an area of the city that had the dirtiest rivers. My relationship with nature was very ambiguous,” she tells me from her studio in New Haven, where she will complete her MFA at Yale next spring. Living in a country revered for its natural beauty while being isolated from it created a sense of duality that is now the focal point of Almeida’s work, which includes painting and installation. Currently, the artist is presenting in a two-person exhibition with her friend Tadáskía at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno. The pair met back…

Kristin Walsh’s sculptures exist somewhere between sleek fantasy and a bad trip. They take the shape of industrial apparatuses extruded through a fever dream—gears, engines, carburetors, street lamps—their contours smoothed into clean ambiguity. They often appear turned on their head or installed on the wrong side, as if experiencing a psychic breakdown. Walsh fabricates everything in her Yonkers studio, which you might be surprised by given their perfect finishes—any trace of the artist’s hand is buffed away, aligning each work with the dehumanized reality of modern mass production while also subverting it. Walsh cuts, welds, and polishes her enigmatic sculptures from sheet and tube metal—a grueling, labor-intensive process that simultaneously refers to and ignores the entire history of industrialized efficiency—making it both beautiful and dysf-unctional. By yanking public infrastructure from…

Shala Miller just wants to get a handle on it. Through video, photographs, sculpture, and poetry, Miller attempts to understand their big feelings, primal drives, and shocking interpersonal experiences. Take, for example, the photograph Likeness Unidentified, 2022, a broken bust in which the artist’s naked torso holds an inscrutable pose—either self-pleasure or self-protection. Or video works like Mrs. Lovely and Mourning Chorus, both 2021, where fictitious characters played by Miller, or the artist as themself, sing of devastating hurts. As a painfully shy child in Cleveland, Ohio, who sang in two local youth choirs, Miller secretly dreamed of a career as a performer but lacked the confidence to audition for solo spots. When their mother received a digital video camera as a retirement gift, Miller discovered a tool that would…

For Jeffrey Meris, anything can be sculpture. The multidisciplinary artist’s materials of choice are everyday objects aggregated en masse—say, a bucket’s worth of Coca-Cola or a pile of shoes belonging to migrants. He considers the medium “a place of infinite possibility … rather than a constant, fixed place in the world.” Meris, born in Haiti and raised in the Bahamas, first developed his artistic capacities as a costume maker for Junkanoo, an annual festival of masquerade, drumming, and dance celebrated throughout the Bahamas since the 17th century. As a child, he met the esteemed Bahamian painter and architect Jackson Burnside through Junkanoo circles, and later encountered conceptual artist Tavares Strachan, who famously shipped a four-and-a-half-ton ice block to Nassau. Meris soon made his way into the world of contemporary art,…

Peggy Chiang practices a surreal form of stagecraft, transforming the most mundane objects into uncanny works of art. Her creations inhabit strange and mysterious places: For Halcyon Lunch (No. 2), 2018, Chiang constructed a tiny, luminous bamboo forest inside a Coca-Cola can. A ceiling fan in the woods, a motorized piece made during a 2022 Skowhegan residency, spun slowly while suspended among the trees that populate the legendary school’s campus. Contrary to the safer preferences of the art market, Chiang makes beguiling, sometimes ephemeral, and often conceptually opaque sculpture—a practice that was nurtured by formative years spent in Baltimore’s experimental arts community. But she moved to New York this summer following her first solo show with dealer Laurel Gitlen, who found a ceiling fan in the woods “poetic, but tough.”…

Charles Mason III applied for one of the country’s more competitive graduate art programs without ever taking a painting class. After studying graphic design at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, he “compiled anything fine-art related” from his undergraduate career into an application to the Parsons School of Design at the New School in New York. He got in. Mason didn’t stay long—he dropped out after a few months in 2014 to return to Baltimore, where the Black Lives Matter movement was gaining steam. “I wanted to be on the ground back home and protest,” he says. But even a few months was long enough to make an impact. He met artists like former New School instructor Steffani Jemison and, for the first time, saw “Black and Brown artists who…

Paige K. B. is an artist and a writer, but conspiracy is her medium of choice. Like paintings or sculptures, or fantasy realms, you can make them from scratch. In a memorable kinetic work, shown around the first anniversary of Jan. 6, she reprised the green-on-yellow Gadsden Flag flown by libertarians and far-right wingnuts (“Don’t tread on me!”) using a swimming plastic frog in a shallow pan of urine-yellow liquid. “I’m interested in the form, not the content,” K. B. tells me from her studio, which she moved to the Whitney ISP this fall. “There is no content.” She points out that QAnon started as a joke, but made itself a movement. Conspiracy is a container and its contents could be anything. Accordingly, K. B.’s exhibitions can be bewildering to…

A hulking tree trunk will spend the winter in one of MoMA PS1’s galleries this year. Measuring eight feet tall and assembled out of foam, cement, wood, and over 3,000 braids of synthetic hair, the sculpted relic constitutes Malcolm Peacock’s latest exercise in endurance. Punctuated by a sonic tapestry of recordings that immerse visitors in moments of “Black convening,” the installation is not a static sanctuary, but a continually evolving act of presence. When we met ahead of its unveiling this fall, Peacock was already calling Five of them were hers and she carved shelters with windows into the backs of their skulls a milestone piece. The Raleigh, North Carolina–born, Baltimoreraised artist began work on the installation last January, a few months into a Studio Museum in Harlem residency that the…

Giacomo Puccini’s 1924 opera Turandot may seem like unlikely source material for a 30-year-old artist. For Covey Gong, the opera—set in a mythical Peking laden with all manner of gilded chinoiserie and featuring characters with nonsensical “Chinese” names—has proven to be fruitful, if unsettling, terrain. “The set objects were ‘Chinese-looking,’ but they don’t have an actual reference. It’s just an Orientalist construction,” the Hunan-born, New York–based sculptor tells me. Earlier this year, Gong exhibited a suite of works inspired by the opera, as part of a solo show at New York’s SculptureCenter. The artist took familiar motifs—a fan, a sloping roof, a tiered stage—and translated them into delicate, skeletal forms, interrogating and reconstituting their authenticity in the process. “I think of theater sets as objects that project a certain fantasy…

Colson Whitehead entrusted the adaptation of his Pulitzer-winning 2019 novel, The Nickel Boys, to first-time feature director RaMell Ross with just two words of emailed encouragement: “Good luck!” Before Nickel Boys, Ross had just one directing credit to his name: 2018’s Oscar-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening. The lyrical snapshot of life as a Black American in Alabama earned the artist and filmmaker a meeting with the producers bringing Whitehead’s fictionalized account of atrocities documented at the infamous Dozier School for Boys to the screen. The Florida reform school, which shuttered in 2011, was the subject of years of investigation linked to the rampant abuse—and close to 100 unrecorded deaths—of its students. The film—shot entirely in point-of-view—follows two Black teens through their efforts to survive the institution, interspersed with…

“We do not have a particular relationship with fashion,” say Shohei Fujita and Chisato Yamano, the artistic duo behind Kyoto-based ceramic studio Suna Fujita. “Our work involves staying at home and working. We rarely meet people, so when choosing what to wear, we prioritize functionality.” Though the artists’ wardrobes are built around more utilitarian aims, Suna Fujita’s latest collaboration with Loewe proves that their imaginations know no such constraints. The Spanish luxury house’s holiday collection transforms the Japanese ceramicist duo’s signature whimsical creatures—from space-dwelling octopi to deep-sea hamsters—into a fantastical array of accessories, including a submarine-shaped bag that opens with a press of its chimney. The collaboration’s origin story is as unexpected as its results. Loewe discovered the artists some years ago through a simple DM. “We received an inquiry…

Laura Citarella speaks fondly of the cultural education her parents gave her as a child in Argentina. Although she was born in La Plata, the capital of the country’s Buenos Aires Province, the memories she cherishes most are from the summers she spent in their hometown of Trenque Lauquen. This small city in the Pampas region later became the backdrop for a number of the director’s films, including her celebrated 2022 feature Trenque Lauquen, which follows two men searching for the missing woman they love and earned Citarella a nomination for the Orizzonti Award for Best Film at that year’s Venice Film Festival. More recently, the country’s low grasslands served as the setting for El Affaire Miu Miu, a short commissioned by the cult Italian house as part of their…

“Does that seem like an awkward painting to you?” Loretta Dunkelman was examining a foamcore model of New York’s Polina Berlin Gallery in her Lower Manhattan loft. Looking anything but “awkward,” even as a tiny printout, the painting in question was rimmed by lemon yellow, with blue and white passages resembling clouds. It would soon be prominently displayed at Polina Berlin. The 87-year-old artist displays confidence—along with moments of doubt—in a practice that has long been out of the spotlight. Over her six-decade career, Dunkelman co-founded A.I.R. Gallery, the pioneering SoHo venue dedicated to female artists. Her work has entered the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Smithsonian Institution. But like so many female artists of her generation, Dunkelman has faded from the art world’s memory,…

The great novelist and art critic Gary Indiana, who passed away on Oct. 23 at age 74 and left a hole in the city’s literary firmament the size of his name state, isn’t generally remembered for his favorable reviews. Maybe it’s because even his positive assessments were not positive—not in tone. They emerged from a deep anticapitalist snobbery. A “rave” from Indiana, circa 1985–88, during his tenure as senior art critic for The Village Voice, might start with a scathing blind item or two about the vacuous or vulturous characters he encountered on the gallery beat. His caustic disdain for the commercial structures and depraved figures of the (art) world was justified, implicitly, on aesthetic as much as political grounds. Though in the universe of his writing—by the rules of…

FINDING LOVE MAY SEEM ANTITHETICAL TO NAVIGATING THE INS AND OUTS OF A FAST-PACED, FLAKEY, AND OFTEN FINANCIALLY DRIVEN ART WORLD. BUT SOME OF US LIKE A CHALLENGE, AND THE INDUSTRY’S ROMANTIC INHOSPITALITY MAY BE THE VERY THING THAT MAKES DATING WITHIN IT SO HARD TO RESIST. SOME ART-WORLD COUPLES HAVE WITHSTOOD THE TEST OF TIME (CARROLL AND LAURIE, ANYONE?); OTHERS HAVE SPIKED MANY AN ART PUBLICATION’S WEB TRAFFIC WITH THEIR TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS. BUT WE’RE NOT HERE TO JUDGE—AFTER ALL, THERE’S NOTHING LIKE A GOOD RUMOR, AN AWKWARD OPENING RUN-IN, OR A MEET-CUTE ON THE FAIR FLOOR. TO FIND OUT HOW THE ART WORLD DATES, CULTURED ASKED DOZENS OF ITS DENIZENS FOR THE ROMANTIC RULES THEY LIVE BY—FROM BLANKING YOUR PARTNER AT THEIR OPENING TO THE RATIONALE FOR SLEEPING…

“New York, I love you, but you’re bringing me down.” With those 10 words, LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy captured both the agonizing contradiction and perpetual allure of the five boroughs. Perhaps no city in the world means more to more people, but New York carries that gravitas with a shrug. Like any chimera, the metropolis eludes definition and defies the constraints of reality. Making a life, and a living, in such a nerve-jangling, shape-shifting locus is a challenge—one that millions of people take up daily with devotion, gritted teeth, and no small dose of delusional optimism. In the following pages, CULTURED convened a cross-section of individuals who embody the chaos, charisma, and creativity at the heart of New York—16 people quite literally shaping the spirit of the city. Some were…

In the fall of 2009, Titus Kaphar recalls pacing the floor of his Los Angeles gallery anxiously awaiting Venus Williams’s arrival. It was his first solo exhibition in the city, and the team at Roberts & Tilton (now Roberts Projects) told him that the tennis star had recently spotted one of his paintings. “I kept thinking, She might come in today, she might come in tomorrow,” he recalls. In addition to being a seven-time Grand Slam champion and film producer, Williams has collected art—sans advisor—since she was in her late 20s, championing artists like Simone Leigh and Adam Pendleton, and even guiding her sister Serena on her own acquisitions. Over the last two decades, she’s also channeled her creative energies into a design practice, V Starr, and penned two books.…

ANA CLÁUDIA ALMEIDA HANNAH BEERMAN DRAKE CARR PEGGY CHIANG JUNE CANEDO DE SOUZA LEYLA FAYE COVEY GONG CAMERON A. GRANGER RAVEN HALFMOON DAN HERSCHLEIN MIKA HORIBUCHI DAVID L. JOHNSON PAIGE K. B. LE’ANDRA LESEUR CHARLES MASON III ISABELLE FRANCES MCGUIRE KATE MEISSNER JEFFREY MERIS SHALA MILLER LOUIS OSMOSIS CATALINA OUYANG MALCOLM PEACOCK RYAN PRECIADO EMIL SANDS BROOKLIN SOUMAHORO MICHELLE UCKOTTER OLIVIA VIGO KRISTIN WALSH FAYE WEI WEI QUALEASHA WOOD There’s been a lot of hand-wringing lately about how contemporary art has lost its edge. You may have heard that the field is in a state of aimlessness. It’s uninspired. It’s backward-looking. The 30 artists on CULTURED’s ninth annual Young Artists list offer a powerful rejoinder to this idea. Their work is bursting with idiosyncrasy, curiosity, and gumption—all necessary ingredients for…

At 26, Emil Sands observes a stricter schedule than many type As twice his age. Each day, he wakes up at 6 a.m. and reads for half an hour before settling in to write until 11:30 a.m. Then, he exercises and eats lunch before heading to his painting studio to work for the second half of the day. At 8 p.m. he goes home, eats dinner, does a crossword puzzle, and falls asleep. “I’m a very ambitious person,” Sands reasons. He has to be: Scribner has contracted him to write a memoir about his experience growing up with cerebral palsy, and he’s simultaneously finishing a new body of work for an exhibition opening at Kasmin Gallery in January. Art and writing are, for Sands, intimately connected. As his disability began…

If Louis Osmosis didn’t exist, he would invent himself. As his chosen name implies, the artist, born and raised in New York, seems to absorb our rich, concentrated world with glee, reformulating high and low culture alike as streetwise assemblies of arch art history and sidewalk trash. When I visit his basement studio in Chinatown, which he shares with a fellow Cooper Union alum, he’s wearing a T-shirt designed by Pope. L and Supreme, depicting one of the late artist’s “crawls” across New York. “Redundancy is the thing I tend to go back to,” Osmosis tells me, especially “the Warholian flavor of it.” Through spritely wordplay and citation, his work tries to “compound inertness onto a thing so much that it starts to implode.” Nearby stands part of his gruesome…

“Suburbia is a space of theater in my mind,” muses Dan Herschlein from their Los Angeles studio. “You walk down a street at night, and all the streetlights look like stage lights.” The artist, who grew up in Bayville—a 1.5-square-mile “time warp of a town” on Long Island’s North Shore—is skilled at capturing a sense of yearning and ambient unease, and the sterile artifice of suburban life has proven particularly fruitful subject matter. They grew up working on a clam-digging boat with their dad, who also built furniture. His influence “has really informed the way that I make art,” Herschlein observes. “It’s important to me that the thing is made by my hands. Anyone can relate to a thing that’s made by somebody’s hands.” Perhaps to honor the trace of…

Qualeasha Wood says she approaches life like the arcade game Frogger, jumping impulsively from perch to perch and hoping for the best. Given the vertiginous career she’s traced before the age of 30, that’s hard to believe. The artist’s work—including her signature jacquard tapestries that fuse religious and Internet iconography—has made headlines, appeared across the art-fair circuit, and been acquired by the likes of the Met, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz’s Dean Collection. Frog or not, it’s a good thing she follows her instincts. As a teenager, Wood opted to forgo the military in favor of art school. Later, she switched majors on the advice of one of her heroes, the late painter Faith Ringgold. Wood met her in the midst of an “identity…

Leaning against a nine-foot, bronze-cast double figure, Raven Halfmoon tells me, “I have drawings of this space, of my work here, from four years ago.” That was long before her Salon 94 solo debut, which opened in September, was even on the horizon. We’re standing in the New York gallery’s Stone Room, the sun-flooded crown jewel of the renovated Beaux-Arts mansion, which does indeed seem like a dream site for Halfmoon’s art. With its marble floor and arched casement windows, it’s a gleaming foil to the pair of roughly hand-modeled works she’s placed here—including The Guardians, 2024, whose stitched-together femme beings stand watch, immovable on their formidable pillar-legs. Inspired by installation photos from previous exhibitions at the gallery, which have featured towering, deity-like sculptures by Niki de Saint Phalle and…

Most of us intended to spend the pandemic learning a foreign language or reading War and Peace, but ended up bingeing The Queen’s Gambit instead. Isabelle Frances McGuire actually followed through with their pandemic goal: teaching themselves coding and robotics on YouTube. “I spent the day with a little worksheet writing notes, doing essentially a fake college class,” they recall. In the process, their art practice transformed. McGuire, who studied film, video, and new media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, began incorporating haunting robots and animatronic figures into their work, creating mashed-together sculptures from cast-off toys, mannequins, found objects, and 3D-printed elements. (Imagine a gentler, nerdier, and less cynical Jordan Wolfson.) “I started to see my work as basically like a coding process,” McGuire says. The…

The fall of 2011 was a watershed moment for David L. Johnson. A few weeks into his first year at Cooper Union, the Occupy Wall Street movement took root in Zuccotti Park, just two miles away from the school’s East Village campus. Less than two months later, Cooper announced it would no longer offer free tuition, which it had done since 1859. Months of student protests ensued. Gates, 2012–13, the earliest work the now-30-year-old artist has documented on his website, was made in the aftermath of this period—a moment when art’s relevance to activism was being tested in real time. One evening, Johnson arrived at Tompkins Square Park to find it shuttered, part of a wave of premature closures the NYPD and Parks Department unleashed on public spaces post-Occupy. He…

For Kate Meissner, painting is about mind games. In the artist’s canvases, women (or fragments of them) are positioned within claustrophobic structures, hunching or contorting themselves to fit. Highly saturated and theatrically lit, her scenes are realms where the commercial and corporeal intersect—calling to mind peep show stages, for example, or storefront windows filled with mannequins. Meissner, who often uses herself as the model for her figures, is drawn to “any place where the body is on display”—where it is “examined or probed.” They’re on display, yes—but Meissner’s femme figures remain elusive. Their faces are never visible, and “there’s a lot of slippage between what is flesh and what appears to be plastic,” the artist muses. In the past, Meissner based her tableaux on small dioramas—miniature architectural spaces that she…

“As far back as I can remember, I’ve had a crayon in my hand,” Leyla Faye tells me. The child of a mime-inspired method actor and a jazz musician, the painter grew up going to a local art center in her hometown of Minneapolis. She remembers looking forward to its annual May Day Parade, for which the community assembled large-scale papier-mâché puppets that would dance down the streets. “The roads would be lined with people,” Faye recalls, “and the puppets would interact directly with the crowd.” The awe and energy Faye felt back then is at the core of her artistic inquiry today. In works that have made a splash at the likes of Frieze New York and Karma International in Zürich, the artist pays homage to her colorful upbringing—often…

Few restaurants have the sex appeal of Cote. With three locations—in New York, Miami, and Singapore—and a fourth in the works in Las Vegas, the Korean barbecue staple has established itself as a consummate crowd-pleaser—if you can snag a reservation. Behind it all is Simon Kim, a hospitality powerhouse who got his start at his parents’ restaurant in Tribeca before scaling up to Vegas and Manhattan fine dining in the aughts. This year, the Seoul native introduced Coqodaq, a new fried-chicken-forward eatery in Flatiron, and announced a monumental three-story dining nucleus on Madison Avenue. How does he do it all? Kim lets CULTURED in on a few of his secrets. 2024 has been a huge year for you. How do you keep your cool? The secret to keeping up is…

Each year, 50,000 people visit The Bass Museum of Art. “The Bass’s audience is diverse,” says Executive Director Silvia Karman Cubiñá. “When our curators plan exhibitions, we make sure the art offers multiple cultural and intellectual touchpoints that are engaging to this wide audience.” Since opening in 1964 to house the private collection of John and Johanna Bass, the museum has become a tentpole of the city’s creative ecosystem—bolstered by seasonal influxes of visitors around events and fairs like Art Basel Miami Beach. In 2022, the institution was awarded $20 million as part of Miami Beach’s General Obligation Bonds, a $159 million sum that supported 16 city-owned cultural institutions. In addition to ringing in its 60th anniversary, the museum is now in the throes of its next period of expansion.…

Joan Snyder is a morning person. Whether she’s in Brooklyn or Woodstock, the 84-year-old artist wakes up at 5 a.m.—“if not earlier”—on any given day. She makes tea, eats breakfast, hangs out with her partner Maggie, a retired judge, and does the crossword puzzle. Then she heads to the studio. Sitting in her Upstate atelier, Snyder admits hers is a hermetic life. “The pandemic was perfect for me,” she adds with a laugh. “I didn’t have to go anywhere or see anyone. I could just paint every day with absolutely no interruptions.” Art has been a solace for six decades. Before her Whitney Biennial inclusions, before her Guggenheim Fellowship, before selling out solo shows, Snyder was an anxious sociology student at Douglass College. Then she discovered painting. “It was literally…

Of the many ingredients in a master perfumer’s repertoire, few represent the craft better than orris. One of perfumery’s most luxurious ingredients, the substance is prized for its powdery, floral scent and laborious provenance: extracted from the pulverized bulbs of the iris flower, dried at 40 degrees Celsius over two years, then crushed into a fine powder and distilled by hand. The product of carefully orchestrated transmutation—one ton of iris bulbs produces about two kilograms of essential oil—orris is an exercise in patience. “There is a specific link between matter and time,” observes Nicolas Bonneville of the craft of perfumery. “You cannot rush it. The process reveals the scent.” That reverence for time is a driving force behind the French perfumer’s work. Bonneville fell in love with the discipline as…

The work of June Canedo de Souza deals in the evidence of embodied experience, from the routines and rituals that form the scaffoldings of day-to-day domesticity to the cumulative degradation of life that is perpetrated by bureaucracy. Such interrogations—which have occupied the New York–based multidisciplinary artist’s practice across several decades and mediums (in the 2010s she worked as a professional photographer, and in the 2020s she completed an MFA with a focus on painting)—return again and again to the often-overlooked toils of women, especially what she calls “the performative aspects of domestic labor and care work.” Canedo de Souza’s art, even when dealing in the seemingly mundane, exposes the lasting imprints of the politics of gender, class, and ethnonationalism on our bodies and in our memories. Dessert Table, 2024, a…

It’s hard to tell by looking at Faye Wei Wei’s intricately gestural, almost tangled paintings that they often spring from simple objects or images, like a seashell, a tortoiseshell pillbox, or a hyacinth garden in a T.S. Eliot poem. The artist surrounds herself with odds and ends that intuitively draw her in, and sooner or later, they surface in her work. “It’s like absorbing all the things around me and then pushing them back out,” she says. “I like it to be a sort of ritualistic flowing of the paint, [where] you’re making these gestures and reacting to each one. It’s really difficult and disobedient how the paint reacts.” She’s had this impulse for sublimation since childhood, when she began collecting acorns and covering them with gold leaf. After attending…

At first glance, one might not recognize Ryan Preciado’s artworks as portraiture—but his painstakingly crafted sculptures are imbued with the presence of many collaborators, family members, and friends he has accumulated over a lifetime. Raised in Nipomo, just south of San Luis Obispo, and now living and working in Los Angeles, his brightly lacquered objects often take inspiration from West Coast lowrider culture, or nod to his Chumash and Mexican-American lineage. When Preciado and I met in October, he mentioned a chance encounter with a young Boyle Heights bike-shop owner just before his work was included in the Hammer Museum’s 2023 “Made in L.A.” biennial. The two spoke about various tools and their sculptural qualities, ultimately inspiring Preciado’s Bird in Boyle Heights, 2024, which made it into his recent fall…

Olivia Vigo grew up going to 4-H and helping out her beekeeper father in their Northern California agricultural community. She learned to weld at a young age, developing what she describes as a “mentality of doing everything yourself.” It makes sense that she went on to study industrial design and found her passion in utilitarian objects: shelving, storage containers, old car parts. But Vigo, now 26 and based in Brooklyn, sees these things in both practical and deeply personal terms. Having moved around a lot as a teenager, she’s particularly attuned to the emotional roles functional objects can play in the home. For example, a dresser, wardrobe, or crate may contain “things that are being saved,” she says. Perhaps they are “things we keep through heartbreak and the history of…

Hannah Beerman may technically be a young artist, but there’s something in the painter and her work that far surpasses her age. It could be the profound sensitivity and intensity with which she approaches her practice—living and working in the same space, moving between canvases in the early morning’s solitude. It could also be that Beerman has spent her entire life deeply immersed in art. Her childhood home in Nyack, New York, was also the childhood home of American assemblage legend Joseph Cornell. Beerman’s father is a painter and her maternal grandmother is a printmaker, both of whom worked from that same house. Growing up, Beerman would sneak into their shared studio and make sculptures out of scraps fished from the recycling bin. “I didn’t realize I was making art,”…

For artist Le’Andra LeSeur, history is an embodied experience. Her multimedia practice grapples with the weight of the past on people navigating the present. For her New York institutional debut, “Monument Eternal,” on view at Brooklyn’s Pioneer Works through Dec. 15, LeSeur decided to dig into a history close to home. “When I moved from the Bronx to Georgia at age 11, my family would visit Stone Mountain Park,” the artist recalls. “Then I started digging into that site’s history.” The 3,200-acre park—the state’s most popular recreational destination—is the infamous home of the Confederate Memorial Carving, a massive, 190-foot-wide high-relief sculpture of three Confederate leaders. “Stone Mountain is where the modern KKK was rebirthed,” explains LeSeur. Completed in 1972, the monument—which is larger than Mount Rushmore—is protected from removal or…

“The horror genre kind of operates as a ready-made,” says Michelle Uckotter. “I get into [my work] by playing with those signifiers. It’s fun to salvage or cannibalize elements of cinematography.” The 32-year-old artist’s oil pastels do just that. Uckotter cites slashers like The Shining and Rosemary’s Baby as inspiration for her haunting tableaux, which vibrate with anticipation and ambiguity—like film stills plucked from a moment of peak suspense. “Film is the modern education of the masses that took off where painting stopped,” Uckotter says. “As ways of communicating, the [two art forms] are joined at the hip.” Blocking a shot is not unlike establishing the composition of a painting, and it is this shared process of filling space—in Uckotter’s case, mostly decrepit and abandoned domestic settings—with people that guides…