Growing up in Florida, Michele Oka Doner saw her father become a judge, then a mayor. If Miami gave her the civic gene, Detroit, where she moved in the late ’60s after studying at the University of Michigan, taught her how to put it to use. While there, Oka Doner, now 80, took her art off a pedestal (literally), giving viewers more direct contact with her sculptural relics inspired by the natural world. In the decades since, she’s brought her work even further into the public arena. Her mile-long floor installation at Miami’s airport is seen by over 50 million travelers a year.

The New York-based artist spoke to CULTURED ahead of the unveiling of Talisman, a new installation composed of 300 illuminated heads conjuring a sacred grove on the Park Avenue Mall at 66th Street this spring.

What are you sitting with these days, what’s on your mind in the studio?

I’m hoping today the final engineering drawings are approved by the MTA. Because the Talisman installation is going to be on the mall that runs over the tunnel for the Metro North. So I was put on a diet of 8,000 pounds. Then I have trees that will hold the Talisman. When they go in, they’ll be dormant. But when their leaves come out, as spring and summer unfold, they’ll have weight. So I had to do everything practically to get under this 8,000, including counting the weight of the leaves on all these trees. I’m being metaphoric—that would be like counting grains of sand.

This isn’t the first time you worked on a project that involved the MTA. You installed Radiant Site at the Herald Square station years ago.

Yes, that piece is now in 35 plus years old. I won a national competition for that in 1987. I was new to New York. I’d been here maybe five, six years. And I submitted a very simple project for Herald Square, an inversion to create light instead of darkness when you descend. I basically sent in two paragraphs and a sample of a tile that was very low luster. I knew about luster from Pewabic Pottery in Detroit, where I had lived. When I won it, I was very surprised, but the idea resonated. I present transcendent ideas, instead of a visual assortment of elements. The whole idea of transcendence and talking to the community—the civic gene is what I call it—has always been a great motivator and has really helped me achieve a full and remarkable career in the public realm, as well as the private and the personal.

Can you distill where that civic gene comes from?

I grew up in a home that was civically oriented. My father was a judge and he ran for election in Miami Beach, Florida, in 1945. That’s the year I was born. My first 12 years were engaged with the community. People would come up to him in a restaurant if we were out for lunch. I listened to him speak to people about their issues—people didn’t hold back, it wasn’t as formal or removed [as nowadays]. He also had a law practice, and he made house calls. After dinner, I would go with him and listen to people express the problems that unfolded as you live a long life—a lot of them had to do with wills and estates. Then finally, he ran for mayor of Miami Beach. So my entire childhood from 1945 till I left for college in 1963, there was always a campaign or a discussion at the dinner table of what was going on in the city.

And I’ve [made work for] three federal courthouses and had to meet the judges. The first thing I said [each time] was that my father was a judge, and that disarmed them. They knew I would understand what they were doing. I find, in the life of an artist, as somebody once said to me, “Use everything you’ve got.”

Working in public art means that you’re not in the vacuum or bubble most people associate with artists. You’re interacting with so many stakeholders from the get go, involved in a network of other needs, interests, or limitations. 

You’re also in service of a greater community. One of the bibles of my library is Lewis Mumford’s The City in History. In the beginning, he just nails it, with the Paleolithic era, which is when we settled down. You had caves to leave the collective hope and dream in. He also says that building cities made us into a civilization. That’s the wonderful thing working in a foundry has given me—a sense of what it really takes to make [something]. And living in Detroit too—it was the beating heart of this country when I came—was all about tool-making and creating. So Miami gave me a language, but Detroit really gave me the opportunity to put it to use and to see how it served.

When did you start thinking of yourself as an artist?

In 1960, when I was 15, artists were not so celebrated and talked about. They were a group of a band of crazy people, who cut off their ears or sat in a bar like Toulouse-Lautrec. It wasn’t a profession, so to speak. There was no money in it either. None of the artists I knew were quote unquote successful. But I come from a line of artists and scribes. So the hand-eye coordination and visual literacy was enormous in my home, so I had a head start. My mother always said her father studied fresco painting in Odessa. And when he came to this country, he worked in the first Metropolitan Opera House on the frescoes there. I had an aunt who was in Provincetown with Hans Hoffman and was in what would become the Whitney Biennial with Tibor de Nagy and Betty Parsons. She has kind of fallen off the charts because she’s what today we would call neurodivergent. She wasn’t very sociable; she didn’t like going to, you know, the Cedar Bar. But I would visit her at her West 13th Street apartment as a child. So I saw her life. 

How do your ideas for your installations come to you? We can use the Talisman project as an example of that. Where does the idea for these illuminated heads come from?

Well, I had never done anything like that. But in 2009 or 2010, Guy Laliberté, who was then the generator of the magic behind Cirque du Soleil, commissioned me to make an outdoor setting for guests in his beautiful property in Ibiza. So I made a radiant disc table that would seat 12 to 14 and a beautiful bench around it—both of them cast bronze. He wanted a scrim to go over it to protect from the sunlight and the rain. I had been to Ibiza, and I said to him, “You’ve got these fabulous old ancient carob trees. Why can’t we make a sacred grove?” So they dug up all these fabulous old carob trees. I thought it might be dark in there so the idea of lighting the trees hit me. I always loved fireflies, so I thought, I should do something that feels like a million fireflies in the trees. Then I thought about the “Soul Catchers” series that I’d been doing—these shapes I’d make into lanterns. So I said to him, “Why don’t you pay me a design fee. I’m going to make you something. And then if you don’t like it, I’ll take it all back and give you back your money.” I made 110 of these talismans, they’re now called. That’s how it began. 

I always wanted to come back to the idea, because it was so magical. And so when I was invited to [work on something for] Park Avenue, I looked at the trees, and I remembered how at Christmas time they ran that long row of [lights] that came on at dusk and kept going all night. The problem was I couldn’t touch their trees—the Parks Department wouldn’t be happy. Then I proposed to bring my own trees, and they were even more unhappy. They said there would be confusion between the art project and the Parks Department project. You see, this is what these projects are—they’re a process. So then one morning, I woke up and had an aha moment: If I bring the trees and put them on a pedestal, then they’re an art installation, and no one will be confused. So I then invited everybody to the studio and showed them a rendering of the trees up on a platform. You know where I think I got the idea is when you go to botanical gardens, and you see their bonsai collection, these miniature trees are on these long tables. 

How has your idea of what art can and cannot do evolved over the years since you came up as an artist? I know that some of your early works, like A Death Mask, were quite political. You’re obviously very engaged with the natural world. I wonder how your idea of the power of art to move people has evolved, especially as someone who’s been doing so much of it in public.

You know, we, as artists, have the power to advocate. This is not about politics. This is much deeper. Artists, we’ve gotten off our track. I think that there’s a lot to be said on that. I look back on my Detroit years, just recently working on a zine for “Talisman,” because I did these small heads that were seeds in a pod. It was right after the Three Mile Island [accident]. It was the Republican convention in Detroit in 1980. Some artists got together, and I made two pods with these seeds inside that had mutated into skulls. That is the power of an artist. It’s not in the street. It’s not in somebody’s face. It goes into the unconscious, into the mind, into the body, into the soul. We’ve come through a time of big everything—big scale, big color, big balls. And, you know, there’s nothing more powerful than a sprouting seed in the dirt. It’s going to feed. It’s going to become a tree that gives shade. We have to get back to seeing again. And that is a big order. It doesn’t come back with aggression. It comes back with seduction. 

You’ve worked with so many materials. How has your experience of the labor and the effort of art-making evolved over the years?

That is so important. Because we are evolved neurologically to move our hands. We come from separating nuts and pulling the meat out. We come from banging them with a stone to get them open. We come from pulling the roots out to harvest a carrot. You don’t see a bag of nuts in a grocery store with a shell anymore. When I was in Syria, before the terrible wars, I was with somebody who had a beautiful collection of textiles. And you know, damask cloth comes from Damascus, it has such a long history. We were invited to the home of one of the oldest families. And the collector said to the woman, “Miriam, tell me I can’t find any damask cloth. There’s nothing.” And she said, “My grandmother told me that in her day, all the women embroidered. And all the nervous energy came out of the tips of their fingers. And today everybody takes pills.” Wow, what an image. Think about it. Working with my hands has allowed me to process, to slow down, to connect to my primate self. Look at what we’ve come from and how much we’ve discarded that has made us a very anxious and neurotic culture at the moment.

What do you think has been the single greatest challenge of your career?

It is a challenge to take a singular voice, when the consensus is that you belong to either this group or that group, this trend or that group. That’s a challenge, but it wasn’t a burden I couldn’t shoulder. I enjoyed so much the process of transforming thoughts and dreams into a visual that I just kept going. I stayed on my track. Even in graduate school, I was the first woman really in this [program], and there were six men. I knew I didn’t want to be them. I didn’t want to paint stripes or targets. I didn’t want to weld I-beams. There was nothing they were doing that spoke to me. 

What advice would you give an artist who looks up to you?

Well, it’s interesting, I remember reading as a child that there could be no Mozart today, because Mozart composed in a world that had silence, but today, there was too much static. So I have a quiet life. I really do take my time, and I don’t go on devices. And I still don’t know how to turn on our screen. I’m not a big watcher, because by the time television came to our home, I was 6 or 7, and I was already outside every time I had free time. I’ve never been a spectator, I’ve been a participant. 

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When Marcia Tucker founded the New Museum in 1977, the city of New York was barely emerging from bankruptcy. Music bolstered the weary metropolis—that year alone saw the birth of hip hop during an infamous 25-hour summer blackout, the opening of Studio 54, and the golden age of punk. Art was changing too. Artists who’d lived in lofts since the 1950s and ’60s saw a gallery scene emerge around them in Soho, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s SAMO tag began to crop up across Manhattan, and the Heresies Collective and A.I.R. Gallery injected feminist critique and concerns into a still all too male-centric ecosystem. The New Museum arrived onto the scene as quite the novelty—it was the first contemporary art institution to open in New York since WWII and a distinctly downtown one at that. 

In the almost five decades since, the museum has continued to serve as a counterweight to its loftier Uptown peers, giving both early exposure and historical resonance to an ever-morphing avant-garde. The institution settled into a permanent home in 2007, its SANAA-designed tower like a futuristic ship anchored on the Bowery. On March 21, the New Museum will re-open with double the footprint: a 60,000-square-foot expansion courtesy of OMA has shot up next door.

To mark the occasion, we paired three artists featured in “New Humans: Memories of the Future”—the first exhibition to unfurl over the entirety of the new New Museum and the latest in a history of choral group shows that act like temperature checks on the time (this one grapples with the living legacy of technological change)—with three members of another industry that’s indissociable from downtown New York: fashion. Over the last few weeks, independent designers Hillary Taymour of Collina Strada, Claire Sullivan of Miss Claire Sullivan, and Zoe Gustavia Anna Whalen welcomed Camille Henrot, Ivana Bašić, and Cato Ouyang into their studios for a fitting. The freewheeling conversations that followed zigzag from eulogies to bygone downtown eras to the city’s affordability crisis, becoming intimate referendums on what making a life—and a living—as a creative in New York looks like in 2026.

Below, Claire Sullivan, who since leaving Vaquera has made a name for herself with designs favored by pop stars (Addison Rae, Lady Gaga, Rosalía) and artists alike, meets Ivana Bašić, a Serbian sculptor whose works mingle human abjection, material transcendence, and alien futures. Her Blossoming Being #2, which depicts a figure in the midst of leaving its bodily form behind, will be on view in “New Humans.”

What are your New York origin stories?

Claire Sullivan: I was born and raised in Virginia, but my mom grew up in Jamaica, Queens, and my dad grew up in Brooklyn Heights so I grew up coming to New York all the time. When I was like 5 years old, I decided I was determined to live in New York. I said, This is going to be my home. I went to school in Chicago, then I moved to New York in 2016. What about you, Ivana?

Ivana Bašić: I moved to New York in 2010. I lived in Serbia before that, which is where I was born. I was born in Yugoslavia in the ’90s, and by the time I was 13, we had already had two wars. There was all the trauma from the collapse of the entire country, culture, currency and economy—every single part of reality collapsed by the time I was a teenager. It was a really intense thing to live through. People were just really trying to survive there. There was no space for anything beyond bare life and survival. 

I was just really suffocating there because there was nothing else that was possible. Museums were closed for 20 years. I didn’t study art because there was no art at the time in the country, and I didn’t even know anything about it. So I studied design. I had these young professors who were really excited and really cool, and they were telling me about New York all the time. And it became, in my mind, this place to go to—the center of the world—where you can measure yourself up against the best ones. 

So I applied to a couple of schools, and I eventually did my master’s in what turned out to be a technology program [at NYU], which I was not aware of because I’d never been to the States and applied online. I ended up being in this program with people making robots and iPhone apps; it took me two years to realize that it wasn’t an art school. I didn’t realize there was this whole other world of makers. I found my way eventually to the art world, but I really came to New York as an absolute outsider in every single possible way.

Sullivan: That’s a really inspiring story and so New York too. New York is full of people who felt like outsiders or who came to New York to get away from something. Do you feel like it’s been the escape you needed?

Bašić: Definitely for what I wanted, which was to come to a place to be free from the self I was before and create a new one from scratch. It is a place of such high density, high ambition, and high competitiveness. It will extract the maximum of your potential out of you, and I wanted that. In that way, it’s a catalyst for whatever is in you. 

But honestly, I don’t know anybody who has lived the life I have lived in New York, having a corporate job for 12 years and working nights and weekends in the studio to create an art practice. A lot of the art world comes from way more privileged backgrounds. Increasingly, fewer and fewer people are able to penetrate in this way. It definitely felt like a place of a lot of opportunity, but I’m not sure it feels like that now.

Sullivan: It’s one of the most magical cities in the world, but it’s also one of the most expensive cities in the world to live and to make an art career and to keep your feet on the ground.

Where do you go to feel inspired, and where do you go to feel seen? I’ll go to the museums and galleries, and I’ll get inspired by art. But I feel like where I mostly get inspired is actually on the dance floor, like the New York nightlife scene. When I first moved to New York, I was going to China Chalet and putting on a cute look and going to be seen. 

Bašić: Me too.

Sullivan: That was so important to that era for me, like 2016 to 2018. Then I started going more into the rave scene, and I just remember getting overtaken by the music. All of a sudden it didn’t matter that I was there wearing something—it was that I was there dancing. That’s a huge part of my inspiration: just making these connections on the dance floor—I don’t even know what their names are. We just dance together when we see each other. Where do you go to find inspiration?

Bašić: A lot of my inspiration doesn’t come from the outside—I very much turn inward. But I think in terms of things about New York, I’ve been to this place Earth a couple of times. There was this play by Gideon Jacobs called Images that was really amazing. It was one of the things that stuck with me for a while. Being an artist who works with such high production, with such a heavy material practice, this idea of creating a space that showcases work that is ethereal and immaterial—the opposite of this capitalist professional artist model—is really inspiring, and something that I feel like my practice is also moving toward. Also downtown, there’s this space at 365 Canal Street called A365, that my friends Florian Meisenberg and Henry Gunderson have been running. It’s this amazing loft where they throw these private parties and salons and gather poets and artists and make shows. It’s really beautiful and feels warm, like family. It’s something one needs to ground oneself in this hustler life of New York.

Sullivan: I think it was Jane Austen who said everything happens at parties. I feel like everything happens through connection for me.

When you first moved here, did it meet your expectations? How did it surprise you?

Bašić: It was quite a culture shock, to be honest. There are so many cultural conventions that you don’t really know at first—there’s a way of participating in a certain scene, in a certain economy. Especially the art world—it’s so opaque in terms of the way you’re supposed to communicate, the way power structures work, the way hierarchy works. All of those things are impossible to see from the outside, and nobody can really teach you or tell you about it. That was the biggest learning curve. 

I didn’t really understand at first that you’re supposed to build a network. I was like, The work is going to do its thing. And then I realized, No, it’s not. It took a while. This is something I really try to share with my interns and students that come through my studio: to open up this black box of how you enter the art world, build a network of allies and people who support you and people you support back. That’s your lifeline in New York. 

Sullivan: The point about New York allies is really true. When I first moved here, my mom dropped me off at the Myrtle Ave/Broadway stop, and I got on the train with a suitcase to go stay with my cousin in Manhattan. I remember getting on the train and looking around and being like, Okay, I guess I live here now. Looking at everyone on the train, I thought, If everyone here can figure it out, I can figure it out. And every time I go across the bridge and see the skyline, I still get excited. There is a certain amount of jadedness that happens. I have to remind myself every day that I’m actually living my dream just by being here. What I would tell myself [back then] is to continue to be authentic. In New York, there can be a pressure to put ourselves in a box—what we do, who we interact with, what scene we’re part of. I’ve spread across a lot of different networks in New York. It’s not strategic: I genuinely gravitate toward different people and spaces. I would tell that to anyone new here: Don’t have too high expectations, allow things to flow. But also, you have to work really freaking hard to be able to live here. New York is for hardcore dreamers.

When you’re talking about building a network and finding community, how did you go about that? Who were your early champions?

Sullivan: When I first moved to New York, I immediately started interning for Vaquera, where I eventually became a creative director and owner with the three others. That just immediately plugged me in. I feel very grateful that I came into the city and just immediately got plugged into this scene. I ended up making so many friends working in nightlife too. I worked in a couple different restaurants and bars and at a certain point was working at a bar in Bushwick that was also a club. I met everyone I am close with in nightlife in that space. It’s about remaining open and willing. I would have never been in the same kind of conversations that I was in with Juliana [Huxtable] or with DOSHA [Antonio Blair] of House of LaDosha or with these people who were frequenting the bar that I was at if we weren’t just there building community.

Bašić: I started building my practice in a way that was quite uncompromising in terms of my materials and the way I was making work. As a young artist just starting with very limited financial means, that set the work apart from the very beginning. People were making work with what they could afford, and I was working like a maniac—corporate job and nights in the studio—just being like, I will make the work the way it needs to be made. If I need to work all the time to make the money to make the work, I’ll do that. 

In the beginning, it felt like we had this whole generation of artists going out together. It felt like this amazing, vibrant time, like such a community. The first show I ever had was in this space Grand Century that Dora Budor, Olivia Erlanger, and Alex Mackin Dolan were running in their studio. Everyone was living on Broome Street. We were all going to China Chalet. A lot of us were just starting our careers, not necessarily knowing where we were going, but full of enthusiasm and hope. Looking back, it’s really amazing because pretty much everyone created an incredible career for themselves. 

Early on I understood: you need to go to openings. You meet people. You create this community. I was also really lucky early on to meet Chrissie Iles from the Whitney, who is an incredible curator. I was lucky enough to work with her on the show at the Whitney, “Dreamlands.” That was my first big break. Then there was a show with Signal at Andrea Rosen, which was a huge part of my career because they had the most amazing community gathered around there. Beyond that, the thing that really changed the full track of my career—and this is what made New York possible—was that I didn’t go to art school, and I had absolutely no idea how to make anything. I started out with this revolt toward the technology program I was in. I was so depressed by the banality of technology, so I had this impulse to escape into materials. I started experimenting and making all this mess, and I went to Craigslist. It was like the universe sent me this person whose name is Bill Mulkins, who is this material alchemist who worked for Frank Stella and Louise Bourgeois. I found him on Craigslist. He was sick at the time and couldn’t really work, and he was looking for a job. We started working together, and he taught me pretty much everything I needed to know in order to start. He became my collaborator and my friend, and we worked for many years together. He was effectively the MFA I never had. 

What do you think is missing from New York right now?

Sullivan: New York is so full; I don’t necessarily think there’s anything specifically missing as a whole. One thing I would love to see more of in the fashion community are spaces to come together beyond just going to shows. New York is having a rich moment right now. A lot of people are leaving, and that’s creating a vacuum for more inspiration and talent. Of course there are institutions I miss—diners I used to eat at that closed, clubs that don’t exist anymore. I grieve that, but I do think there’s a pendulum swing. My friends just opened a shop called Surrender Dorothy, which has such an old New York feeling. I think more of us are swinging back toward building community in a tangible way that’s less online.

Bašić: Over the past five years, it’s felt almost impossible to make work in New York, and in the U.S. in general. The prices of fabrication and materials have gone up so much that if you’re a sculptor, it’s effectively unsustainable to make work here. When I arrived, New York felt like freedom and experimentation. Now everyone is shrinking their work. If I make it any smaller, it’s going to be jewelry. It feels like New York is becoming a place for presentation, not production. Creativity is not in New York—that’s a massive problem. Even for where I am in my career. Not even talking about young artists who are supposed to come here. The interns who come through my studio come from extremely privileged backgrounds; I don’t see as many working-class kids trying to make it. Class diversity is completely disappearing, and honestly, those who come from the most underprivileged backgrounds are often the most radical thinkers and artists. They have the most courage to break rules. It’s such a loss if those people cannot participate anymore. 

After the pandemic, there was this explosion of new project spaces and downtown avant-garde scenes. It felt like things were going to change for good. But everything reverted back, even worse than pre-pandemic. It feels like the dead-on grip of capitalist corporate America. All the places that have been here more than 15 years are closing. Everything new opening is for the wealthiest. That doesn’t feel good. 

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Sign up for our newsletter here to get these stories direct to your inbox.

When Marcia Tucker founded the New Museum in 1977, the city of New York was barely emerging from bankruptcy. Music bolstered the weary metropolis—that year alone saw the birth of hip-hop during an infamous 25-hour summer blackout, the opening of Studio 54, and the golden age of punk. Art too was changing. Artists who’d lived in lofts since the 1950s and ’60s saw a gallery scene emerge around them in Soho, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s SAMO tag began to crop up across Manhattan, and the Heresies Collective and A.I.R. Gallery injected feminist critique and concerns into a still all too male-centric ecosystem. The New Museum arrived onto the scene as quite the novelty—it was the first contemporary art institution to open in New York since WWII and a distinctly downtown one at that. 

In the almost five decades since, the museum has continued to serve as a counterweight to its loftier Uptown peers, giving both early exposure and historical resonance to an ever-morphing avant-garde. The institution settled into a permanent home in 2007, its SANAA-designed tower like a futuristic ship anchored on the Bowery. On March 21, the New Museum will re-open with double the footprint: a 60,000-square-foot expansion courtesy of OMA has shot up next door.

To mark the occasion, we paired three artists featured in “New Humans: Memories of the Future”—the first exhibition to unfurl over the entirety of the new New Museum and the latest in a history of choral group shows that act like temperature checks on the time (this one grapples with the living legacy of technological change)—with three members of another industry that’s indissociable from downtown New York: fashion. Over the last few weeks, independent designers Hillary Taymour of Collina Strada, Claire Sullivan of Miss Claire Sullivan, and Zoe Gustavia Anna Whalen welcomed Camille Henrot, Ivana Bašić, and Cato Ouyang into their studios for a fitting. The freewheeling conversations that followed zigzag from eulogies to bygone downtown eras to the city’s affordability crisis, becoming intimate referendums on what making a life—and a living—as a creative in New York looks like in 2026.

Below, Zoe Gustavia Anna Whalen, who cut her teeth at Eckhaus Latta before striking out on her own with an eponymous label that’s turned fashion shows into ritualistic séances, meets Cato Ouyang, whose iconoclastic installations confront the psychological collateral of objectification, gender violence, and desire’s relationship to devotion. Their work otherwise, spite: 1. whores at the end of the world / 2. from every drop of his blood another demon arose (1829-1840), which takes a propagandist 19th-century British cartoon as its starting point, will be on view in “New Humans.”

What are your New York origin stories?

Zoe Gustavia Anna Whalen: I was very eager to move to New York when I was a teenager. I came once for a friend’s 16th birthday. I cried when I had to leave, which is so crazy. I was just very impatient to start my life. I ended up coming here for school—FIT—when I was 18, which was great. Then I also fell out of love with the city for a long time. New York has this quality—it’s like a mirror. It reflects how you feel about yourself. Whenever I don’t like it, it’s usually because I’m unhappy in other ways. When I do like it, it’s because life is generally good. 

Cato Ouyang: I lived in Illinois until I was 7. After we moved to New Jersey, we lived in a town called Parsippany, which was about an hour by bus from Port Authority. My first real memory of coming into the city is my parents driving us to Flushing with some extended family friends. We went to this giant mall food court, and I had a mango pudding that I fell in love with. Going to public school in New Jersey, we would occasionally take trips into the city for trips to the Met. As rebellious teenagers, we’d take the bus into the city and wander around Chinatown or Washington Square Park. But I wasn’t very hard as a kid—these were very wide-eyed and innocent excursions. I ended up going to school in the Midwest, at Washington University in St. Louis. That was the first time I met wealthy kids from New York, and being around them actually made living in New York feel more impossible to me. As I started taking art seriously and thinking about my future, I thought New York was off the table—that it just wasn’t possible.

I really felt this way, even through finishing graduate school at Yale. I was applying for all kinds of scholarships and opportunities—basically anything that wasn’t in New York—but nothing really wanted me. At the time, a lot of my friends were living here, and someone I knew had an opening in a studio here, and I just took it. I thought, Well, I guess I’m moving to this place and I’ll hope for the best.

What’s something you’d love to tell yourself back when you first moved here?

Ouyang: Do not move in with random Internet people in a basement just to save a little money. That did not turn out well. I responded to one of these ads looking for a queer-friendly, POC-friendly roommate. Of course, it was a white guy writing the ad. I was in the basement; it had no door. On the same night I had watched Parasite in the cinema, I came home as it was raining. My room was covered in two inches of water. I had been there less than a month, and I was so overwhelmed. I thought I could make this work, maybe build a walkway out of pallets and elevate everything. But I really just needed to leave.

Whalen: Eighteen is an overwhelming age in so many ways. I remember living in a dorm, having a very sheltered, cute college life in the middle of Manhattan. The campus had a weird walking campus feel, and also felt like a concrete high school. I remember my mom leaving after moving me in, and just thinking, What am I doing? This is so crazy.

I was still coming out of my suburban upbringing. I had gone to a countercultural hippie school where nothing was mandatory, everyone had a vote, and I had a New Age-y mom. I was clinging to a sense of being a normal teenager, dressing in what was normal for 2013—tight black skinny jeans and cute tops. I was trying to be a girl I wasn’t, but there was another side to me I was trying to figure out. It’s always embarrassing to reflect back, remembering what it felt like and looked like at that point in my life. Could it have been any other way? There were things I loved about this normie side of myself that loved pop music and wanted so badly to conform. 

[FIT] gave me an introduction to the city in a way I could comprehend. I had all of these amazing experiences: going to Central Saint Martins for a term, studying in Florence. I was working and interning the whole time I was in school; I was so eager to be in the industry. I interned for Eckhaus Latta for much of my time during school because I knew people who were also interns there. It reopened my mind to how I could dive into the countercultural, hippie side of myself that I had been repressing. I had no idea how these things connected, and I was going through a very research-driven process.

In some ways, I don’t know if things could have happened any other way. I wish I could tell my younger self, “You don’t have to try so hard.” But I don’t know if I would be who I am if I hadn’t been trying so hard all the time. In college, I was suffering through immense loss and grief. I lost my father, followed by friends and family members, my childhood home, and my mom struggled with cancer. It was a massive upheaval and a reckoning with the underbelly of what it means to be alive. Having something material to cling to and dedicate myself to kept me afloat. I would go back and say, “You are doing great, you’re on the right path—just keep going.” 

What did downtown New York mean to you at the time, and what does it mean to you now?

Ouyang: I remember when I first visited the city from grad school in New Haven, Chinatown—especially anywhere between Canal Street and East Broadway—was the only place in New York where I felt comfortable being. Seeing my friends living precarious, hectic lives, thinly spread, and then coming into the city to work, I would think, Am I resilient enough to do that? Uptown felt posh in a way that felt really forbidden to me. Downtown, the crowded streets, noises, and different Chinese dialects made it all feel more alive. Many artists I knew living in Brooklyn and Queens would come into the city to congregate. At the time, all the galleries were still in Chinatown and the Lower East Side. They hadn’t moved to Tribeca yet. In 2017–18, I was very much anti-Eurocentric in my thinking. I was considering what it meant for these galleries to exist in historically Chinese neighborhoods. 

I finished undergrad in 2015, having been almost consecutively in St. Louis for four years. Apart from wealthy international Chinese and South Korean students, there was not a large Asian American demographic. It was a very segregated city. Seeing people of all races on the subway was so new to me. Having a studio in Sunset Park and hanging out downtown, taking the N-R train connecting these ethnic enclaves, and seeing so many Chinese people in one place—I would sometimes burst into tears on the train because I felt at home, compared to the suburbs. It’s made me feel safe and included.

Whalen: My first introduction to downtown was when I was interning at Eckhaus Latta near East Broadway. I would get lunch at Dimes—this was around 10 years ago—before the height of Dimes Square, but while it was building toward it. China Chalet was in its heyday. Telfar would have these crazy after-parties after shows, it felt magical. Maybe in my head I didn’t feel like I belonged there, but there was space for me to be there and experience these parties in my early 20s. I feel like something’s changed, and the zeitgeist of what’s cool downtown is about more kindness and communication compared to then. It’s also funny that that comes with less opportunity for real-life social engagement. So much of the scene has shifted to Brooklyn. Bushwick has some of that energy, but downtown is still centered around East Broadway, pretty much. From other conversations I’ve had, there seems to be a truth in the way people are willing to engage with one another, and that gives me hope for what it trickles down to in the future.

Ouyang: I love China Chalet. I had one very magical introductory night there. It was the night I was accepted into grad school. I was on the sidewalk outside. We had just come from a bar, I had a can of celebratory Sprite in my hand, and I got the email. I was screaming, jumping up and down, telling myself, No, no—people thought I hadn’t gotten in. Then I went into this Chinese buffet-restaurant, with people smoking inside, thinking, Where am I? The grunginess of it felt very grounded, as if the crowd had another energy. I have very specific memories of it. 

Where do you go to feel inspired in New York? Where do you go to feel seen?

Ouyang: Whenever I feel like my soul or psyche needs nourishment, I go to Grace Church on East 10th and Broadway. The organist, Patrick Allen plays Bach for an hour most weekdays at noon. The program is called Bach at Noon, and anybody can go in. They have this beautiful little yard in front that has a single apple tree; the church inside is really just a respite. There’s also Louise Nevelson’s Chapel of the Good Shepherd, which is inside of kind of a new-age church in Midtown. It has a lot of Nevelson’s artwork, in white and gold rather than her customary black. It’s a tranquil space. 

I don’t really think so much about being seen. Most occasions when I have to go downtown recently, it’s only if I feel compelled or obliged to go to an exhibition opening or reading, and be perceived by a jury of my friends and enemies.

Whalen: When I really need something, I try to leave the city and go be in nature; I feel like that’s kind of the reset point. As soon as I’m able to look around me and not see a structure, I feel relief wash over my body. I’m starting to get to that point right now. I just kind of need to go see some trees—real trees, not manicured ones. I feel very perceived because of where I’m living and where my studio is located right now. I’m in the Dimes Square-downtown trifecta point, so I feel like any time I leave my house, it’s an opportunity to see someone I know. I’m kind of trying to counter that. So much of my practice is about trying to inject a little bit more realness or humanity into a passion, which can be so much about creating an image. I’m trying my best to arrive as I feel each day with the acknowledgement that I might be perceived. There are days that I walk into my studio with sweatpants and greasy hair. Other days, I wear heels and a full look because I feel like it.

What New York texts resonate the most with you?

Ouyang: I don’t think it’s so much about work that’s been made about New York specifically. It’s more about the huge gap between the mythology of New York in the media and the reality of artists actually living and working here—trying to make a living and inevitably responding to that experience in their work. I think about someone like Louise Nevelson, walking the streets of Soho with her son, picking up pieces of wood and discarded materials and bringing them home to turn into sculptures. 

I think about Martin Wong, making these huge paintings in what was basically a closet-sized apartment. His Lower East Side paintings capture a moment when the neighborhood really looked like hell on earth—everything broken, buildings on fire. The energy was just so intense. One of my favorite albums is Temple IV by Roy Montgomery. He’s from New Zealand, but the album was inspired by the death of his first great love. Afterward, he spent a night camping on top of a Mayan temple in Guatemala, and then he came back to the East Village and recorded the album alone in his apartment over the course of a week. Living here was probably much harder back then in some ways, but it was also more flexible. People just found ways to make it work.

Whalen: I love watching TV shows about New York. Living here can be a bit of a struggle, and I think learning how to exist—and even thrive—within that struggle is such a universal experience for people in the city. In a strange way, that’s part of what makes it work. There’s also such a rich lineage of artists responding to New York. I know it’s kind of a cliché to mention, but Patti Smith’s Just Kids is something I think about a lot. I didn’t read it for ages because I thought it was too mainstream, but when I finally did, it honestly sparked this renewed obsession with the city for me. The way she writes about New York—especially Manhattan—is so succinct and vivid. You understand immediately why the book is so popular. It feels like a love letter, not just to a time in her life but to the city itself, and it really encapsulates the experience of being here.

I also think about Kathy Acker’s writing. I don’t necessarily resonate with her in the same way. She’s much more of a badass than I am, but I find her incredibly inspiring. Her stories make me want to live with less of a plan, to just go out and let experiences unfold. The more willing you are to wander down a random street, or go to something without knowing what will happen, or let the city’s mysteries reveal themselves, the more magical it becomes. That sense of mystery feels like something we’ve lost a bit in contemporary life. With our phones, we’re always in control—we have maps, we know exactly where we are, we’re in constant communication. But that also means we don’t always allow ourselves these random moments of connection or inspiration anymore. I think we need more of that. I need more mystery.

How has the spirit of the city made its way into your practices?

Ouyang: A core part of my work is stubbornly Old World and romantic in a way that sometimes feels un-American and frictive against—or at the very least disconnected from—the no-nonsense spirit of this city. Perhaps where we intersect is in irreverence and simultaneity. My references are multitudinous and unfixed, my handling of material is simultaneously precise and unskilled in a way that’s maybe related to how the palimpsests of this city are so dense and free of self-consciousness. There’s a freewheeling quality to it. In October, I was in China for a few months, in Hangzhou and Beijing, where the new developments and constantly-updated subway systems are functional and clean to the point of being faceless. There’s this kind of glossy, child-friendliness to that city infrastructure that really unnerved and bored me. I got so restless and fed up there. Coming home, taking the J train from the Jamaica AirTrain station, I felt a profound joy and identification with this city. We are both unapologetic and unfazed.

Whalen: It’s made its way into my practice through the magical realism and grit that I associate so much with New York. I love to highlight the lives lived with the textiles I use—the stains and handwork that go into each garment, or even working with rust to intentionally create stains to use as dye. There’s also real glitz, glamour, and fantasy to New York. The whole body of work that I’m creating is a fashion practice that holds this perception of myself in a world that I want to inhabit, and to have a community of people inhabit it with me. But it’s also real clothing. There’s a real person making it, and there are real emotions and textiles behind it.

What do you think is missing from New York right now?

Ouyang: Places to smoke cigarettes indoors, and a few extra subway lines in Brooklyn! But also, you know, fixed income for artists and affordable studio space. There is so much empty real estate in New York, sat on by mercenary landlords. I have heard stories of certain visual artists privately finessing access to work space for rates below market or even for free, but as much as a part of me is drawn to unregulated markets and under the table transactions, it would be nice for these opportunities to be more equitably accessed. I say that with the caveat of observing how an abundance of state funding for the arts in countries like Germany and the Netherlands has also produced a kind of neutering effect on work made, where there emerges in creative trends a kind of generic toothlessness. It’s a maligned trope, but a certain degree of urgency does keep work sharp. That is also increasingly rare to encounter or allow for in New York, as artists with few exceptions are now expected to traffic in respectability politics and affirmational soundbites.

Whalen: What’s missing from New York right now is public funding for the arts, and more places to do beautiful things for free, like beautiful parks and more access to publicly-funded beauty. While I love the grit of New York, beauty is an essential part of life that is desperately missing when you create barriers between connection with nature, with ourselves, and with other humans. If I could add one thing to New York, it would be that—more parks, more attention to the craft and detail in the architecture, interiors and trees.

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When Marcia Tucker founded the New Museum in 1977, the city of New York was barely emerging from bankruptcy. Music bolstered the weary metropolis—that year alone saw the birth of hip-hop during an infamous 25-hour summer blackout, the opening of Studio 54, and the golden age of punk. Art too was changing. Artists who’d lived in lofts since the 1950s and ’60s saw a gallery scene emerge around them in Soho, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s SAMO tag began to crop up across Manhattan, and the Heresies Collective and A.I.R. Gallery injected feminist critique and concerns into a still all too male-centric ecosystem. The New Museum arrived onto the scene as quite the novelty—it was the first contemporary art institution to open in New York since WWII and a distinctly downtown one at that. 

In the almost five decades since, the museum has continued to serve as a counterweight to its loftier Uptown peers, giving both early exposure and historical resonance to an ever-morphing avant-garde. The institution settled into a permanent home in 2007, its SANAA-designed tower like a futuristic ship anchored on the Bowery. On March 21, the New Museum will re-open with double the footprint: a 60,000-square-foot expansion courtesy of OMA has shot up next door.

To mark the occasion, we paired three artists featured in “New Humans: Memories of the Future”—the first exhibition to unfurl over the entirety of the new New Museum and the latest in a history of choral group shows that act like temperature checks on the time (this one grapples with the living legacy of technological change)—with three members of another industry that’s indissociable from downtown New York: fashion. Over the last few weeks, independent designers Hillary Taymour of Collina Strada, Claire Sullivan of Miss Claire Sullivan, and Zoe Gustavia Anna Whalen welcomed Camille Henrot, Ivana Bašić, and Cato Ouyang into their studios for a fitting. The freewheeling conversations that followed zigzag from eulogies to bygone downtown eras to the city’s affordability crisis, becoming intimate referendums on what making a life—and a living—as a creative in New York looks like in 2026.

Below, Hillary Taymour, who founded Collina Strada in 2008 and has molded the brand into an irreverent and evolving experiment in sustainability, meets Camille Henrot, a multi-disciplinary artist whose interventions across sculpture, film, and soon performance playfully but poignantly interrogate our relationships to each other and the planet. Her film In the Veins, premiering in “New Humans,” centers on the experience of parenting children in a time of climate apocalypse. Henrot’s first play, Commedia dell’Arte, will premiere at the Aspen Art Museum’s AIR Festival this summer. It uses anthropomorphic animals to unravel the trials and tribulations of paying rent in New York.

What are your New York origin stories?

Camille Henrot: Mine’s a bit of a dramatic story. In 2011, I was in Japan during the big magnitude 9.0 earthquake for a conference. It was at that moment I thought, Wait, I can’t die because I want to live in New York; I want to have children; I want to show that I care about all these things, but I haven’t achieved them. 

I decided to rent out my apartment and find a place in New York. I found a very small apartment in the East Village; I wanted to be in Manhattan, to be in the heart of things. I met Massimiliano Gioni, and during my fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution, he invited me to produce work for the Venice Biennale, which became my work Grosse Fatigue, 2013. I received much more interest for my work than I got in Paris, or France in general. I felt very welcomed by the art community. 

Hillary Taymour: I was living a little outside of Los Angeles when I started making handbags. My goal was to be a designer, but you couldn’t really achieve that there. So in 2010 I moved to New York and became a fashion designer here. Like you Camille, I moved into this tiny Lower East Side studio apartment. But I thought, I can’t fit in here. My clothes can’t fit here. So, I moved to Williamsburg. I’ve only ever lived in three apartments in the city. Since 2013, I’ve been living in the same apartment in Hooper Grove on South 2nd Street.

What’s something you’d love to tell yourself back then?

Henrot: “Calm down, you’re going to make it.” I would also say, “Sleep!”

Taymour: To not design for what she thinks people want to see but for herself. 

What did downtown New York mean to you at the time? How has your relationship to it changed? 

Henrot: I was partying a lot when I was young. The film Party Girl really captures the spirit of that time, even though it was shot way before I arrived in New York. It was funny to me because she loves going out, but she’s a nerdy librarian during the day. She is into books and systems during the day but is really messy at night. I could really relate to the intensity of this character. If I had grown up in New York, I would’ve 100 percent been like her.

Anyways, I moved to the Lower East Side from the East Village very quickly because my first apartment was just too small. The LES was really miraculous. I was in front of Seward Park. Even just going to get coffee, I met so many people that I became really close friends with. The artist Elizabeth Jaeger was my direct neighbor. There were other art people in the neighborhood too. Like Eliza Ryan, for example, who is a curator at large at the Aspen Museum. And Josh Kline and DIS Collective was around the corner. 

Then during Covid, I was sort of violently removed from New York. I couldn’t stay in the U.S. because my visa was expiring and the government offices were closing down. Then, financial problems made things more difficult. My gallery Metro Pictures closed as well. Since returning, I’ve lived on the Upper West Side, which is so morally, ethically, fashionably, and geographically the opposite of where I used to be. But you know what? I like the UWS’s spirit, the proximity to the river. The big houses and all my windows face the park and the river. My neighbors are all psychiatrists, writers, and poets. There’s even a sex therapist. Most of my friends here are over 75 [laughs], but I really, really love it.

The Lower East Side is truly my youth, but somehow I don’t have that much nostalgia for it because it has changed a lot. It’s more luxurious, less punk and grunge. What I miss is just being able to see my friends without any plans.

Taymour: For me, downtown New York was just the coolest place to live in the world. I remember, I would have my friends just buzz my apartment and be like, Come on, we’re going here. No one would even text or call you, just buzz. It was a completely different life. You could do fucking everything. 

Like you, I was also such a party girl. My best friend at the time was Ben Detrick. He used to write about parties in The New York Times when we were in our 20s. So I would go to places and tell the people at the front door, “I’m meeting Ben Detrick here,” and they would be like, “Come on in.” I was like a party monster. 

I took dressing very seriously. I wouldn’t leave the house without being in the most bizarre look. I feel like people stopped dressing for New York. Back then, I really thought about my outfit each day. It wasn’t about being comfortable or dressing for the weather. None of that mattered. When I was younger, New York really meant extravagance—being totally over the top. It made me into an artist. Now, because everything is so expensive, things have changed. 

Where do you go now to feel inspired in the city? And where do you go to feel seen?

Henrot: I love to walk. I find a lot of inspiration just walking in the streets of New York. In fact, my very first artwork here was very inspired by books that people were selling on the streets which they don’t sell anymore. People would also leave furniture, like a door or a chair or a broken lamp, on the street, and I would bring that to the studio. I did a series called “Is It Possible to be a Revolutionary and Like Flowers?” where I was making ikebana flower arrangements using, in part, a lot of discarded elements from the street as sculptural elements in the works.

I still feel inspired by New York museum shows: MoMA, the New Museum, the Guggenheim, SculptureCenter, the Studio Museum in Harlem. For all the change New York has been undergoing, the museums are still giving and giving.

Taymour: I go somewhere in nature to get inspiration because I really need to touch grass to reset. I either go Upstate or to the dog beach in Prospect Park. My dog prefers the real beach though. He just got back from Miami. I also enjoy going to see friends’ exhibits. I like to go see art when no one’s around. Sometimes they’ll let me into the Met when it’s closed. I don’t really get inspired in crowds, unless I see a really nice outfit. And I just go to fashion shows to be seen.

What New York texts resonate the most with you?

Taymour: When I first moved here, there was that Alicia Keys song “Empire State of Mind” that everyone would play. That was like my alarm clock. 

Henrot: It’s not actually a song about New York, but I associate it with New York. When I first arrived, I was living like a teenage boy and listening to Bryan Ferry’s “Avalon” all the time. That song is very connected to my first few years here.

How has the spirit of the city made its way into your practices?

Henrot: New York is very present in my work. Saul Steinberg is the reason I moved to New York in the first place. There was a poster in my kitchen growing up from The New Yorker where Ninth Avenue is pictured as the center of the world (View of the World from 9th Avenue, 1976). I took this poster very literally as a child. I decided that if New York was the center of the world, I was going to be there.

A lot of my drawings are inspired by Steinberg. Every person in this city looks like they’re coming from a different world. For me, that sense of individuality was so freeing and liberating, because the way I draw figures is sometimes very varied; one figure might be very realistic and the other very minimal. This inconsistency or absence of a singular genre in my work was something I felt judged negatively for when I was in school in Paris.

Taymour: I have such a core group of friends who are all very unique. I’m drawn to all types of creatives. My family is very normal, so I don’t have any normal friends. I would like to have more doctors as friends so I can call them with questions. So when I design collections, I’m thinking, What is this person, this artist, going to wear to her gallery opening? What is she gonna wear on a date? What are you wearing to Miami? I always joke with some of my other designer friends that they dress the people who collect the art, and I dress the artist. I guess I’m drawn to the more eclectic crowd of New York. 

What is the greatest challenge of working as a creative in New York today? And the greatest privilege? 

Henrot: The greatest challenge is rent. Zohran Mamdani needs to absolutely change this. Right now, landlords get a tax cut if the space is not occupied, which allows them to keep elevating the prices higher and higher, even if that means spaces are left vacant for years. The prices in New York are not suited to the market. They’re artificially inflating it. Changing that would create a much healthier relationship to real estate because right now landlords are basically subsidized. It’s the creative people who need to be supported and subsidized. Without them, New York wouldn’t be New York.

Taymour: The greatest challenge is being able to pay your team, pay your rent, pay everyone, and also live in the city. It’s this constant give, give, give, and no one’s actually getting the money at the end of the day. The greatest privilege is to be able to create the type of shows that I do and that some of the biggest editors and critics in the world actually understand what I’m doing. They understand the humor behind the brand, and they respect it. I feel the greatest privilege is being respected within the industry. 

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In a way, the 129 fashion shows Dries Van Noten staged as the creative director of his eponymous brand from 1986 to 2024 have prepared him for this moment. But the Belgian designer, now 67, is the first to admit he’s also in entirely uncharted territory. 

Van Noten is calling me from the Palazzo Pisani Moretta, the 15th-century Venetian palace he and his partner Patrick Vangheluwe acquired last year. When sketching out the possibility of opening a foundation in Van Noten’s name, the couple had first envisioned staying in Belgium, the country where they had always lived and done business, and finding a space that could serve as a blank slate—“neutral, not too big, and not too complicated.” The palazzo, with opulent interiors dating from the 18th century, is neither. 

But Van Noten is finding joy, freedom even, in the challenges the setting imposes. “We can only blame ourselves if we have a lot of work now,” he admits. “We didn’t stop to have a quiet life—that was what scared me most.” Indeed, although he handed the reins of Dries Van Noten over to Julian Klausner in 2024, the designer still handles the brand’s beauty arm and supervises store design with Vangheluwe. And the Fondazione Dries Van Noten, which will open its inaugural presentation on April 25 before planned renovations in the fall, is certainly keeping him occupied. 

“The Only True Protest Is Beauty,” curated in partnership with Geert Bruloot, will take over 20 of the palazzo’s rooms with more than 200 works. (Bruloot has also organized an exhibition opening March 28 at Antwerp’s fashion museum MoMu on the Antwerp Six: the now-mythical constellation of Belgian designers Van Noten belongs to.) The through line of the show, and of the foundation, is craft. Over the last quarter century, the designation has become a loosely applied buzzword, linked both to the fetishization of the handmade in algorithmic times and the growing cachet of collectible design. In the presentation, Van Noten reclaims its latitude, orchestrating a free-associative parcours through his own rolodex of favorite makers—from artist Steven Shearer and sculptor Peter Buggenhout to ceramicist Kaori Kurihara and designer Christian Lacroix. 

Like the clothes that made Van Noten famous, the foundation promises to be ebulliently eccentric and thought-provoking without feeling pretentious. As the countdown to its unveiling narrows, the designer sat down for a candid conversation about his next chapter.

When you were at the helm of your brand, you were known for these terrifically organized days—biking to your office, listening to Studio Brussels radio on the way in, ordering the dish of the day at dinner. It’s a kind of structural rigor that was also reflected in your uniform of the dark blue sweater and khaki or dark blue pants… 

Let me take the blue scarf off so you see… It’s a dark blue sweater.

I love it. Since retiring in 2024, are you allowing yourself a bit more freedom with how you spend your days, or are you still very structured? You obviously have taken on this massive new initiative with the Fondazione opening in a few weeks.

It’s busy! I just came back to Venice yesterday evening. It was our fashion show in Paris, and I still have to be present there and look with one eye at what’s happening. My partner Patrick and I still do the stores and beauty and perfume. It would be difficult to let it go completely, but this is just like three or four days a month—a perfect quantity. Then of course, we have this new adventure, which forces us also to be quite structured because a lot of things are happening. We made our life not easy by saying, “Okay, in a few months’ time, we’re gonna change a palace into a museum-level exhibition venue, where you have air conditioning, lighting, etc…” 

It’s intense, but we really enjoy it. Some people said to me, “Oh, you’re gonna be so happy now that you’re retired. You have so much time for your gardening, your flowers.” I already saw myself only meeting people of 70 years old and talking about flowers and gardening and what you have to prune, and I said, “No, this is definitely not for me.” I need young people around me, I need that kind of creativity and busy-ness and problems for which you can find an answer. It’s structured, but the nice thing is we don’t have that terrible rat race of four fashion shows a year, ready or not. Now we can decide our own rhythm. Nobody obliges us to do so many exhibitions, presentations, and talks a year—it’s our own choice. And I have to say living in Venice also gives you a lot of space in your head. 

I’m curious about the choice of Venice. You’re so deeply associated with Belgium, and Brussels and Antwerp, and you’re choosing Venice for this next chapter of your life. You’ve spoken about it as a “living city,” which is interesting since so many people see it as a postcard or associate it with the past. You also chose to acquire a pre-existing building instead of going with a clean slate. 

We took the decision seven or eight years ago that I would stop [working as creative director] at 65. Covid happened, so it delayed that until 66. We had time to think about what exactly we wanted to do and where. Originally the idea was to do it in Belgium; I was very open to that. Then we said, “Why don’t we try to live in another country? We lived our whole life in Belgium, it would be nice to experience something else.” We’ve always loved Italy—we have our summer house here in the south of Italy. So we said, “Okay, let’s discover a few cities here.” We went to Rome, to Florence, to Venice. 

Venice was really a surprise. Everybody thinks they know it because you go every two years for three days to Venice. You say, “Oh, there’s a lot of tourism, but it’s beautiful.” You see interesting exhibitions, and you’re off. We had the chance to stay in the apartment of friends for 12 days, and we discovered a really different city. You see that Venice is also a living city, a working city. There are really good schools, a lot of young people. There is really something bubbling.

In the past, young people very often left immediately after their studies to Milan or Rome because Venice was too expensive. Now Milan and Rome have become far more expensive than Venice, so some people also stay here. I found it really intriguing because of course you have that confrontation of people from all over the world coming here, buying a palazzo, and just living here a few months a year, and the more underground scene with small galleries and grassroots situations. The combination is really interesting. Where you have a big machine, like the Biennale, you automatically have also those small things disturbing it. 

What has living in Venice brought out of you? 

You have no idea what difference it makes that there’s no cars, no traffic lights, no bikes. It’s super cliché but it creates so much more space in your head. You can focus more on things which are important in life. In Belgium, I was easily traveling two hours a day to the office and back. You count what you can do in those two hours here in Venice, and it’s really fantastic. And there’s the mentality of course—I was working like crazy in fashion. My partner and I always worked nearly seven days a week. But in the year, year and a half that we’ve been in Venice, we already have many more friends. People are very open—there is a mentality of sharing and having nice moments together.

Going way back, can you speak to me about your earliest relationship to craft and making? I know your family was steeped in the garment industry. 

My mother and father always were looking at how furniture was made, how embroidery from tablecloths were made… And growing up in [a fashion store], you look at how fabrics are made, you see how garments are made. It was a part of my education. And I think having had the career of a fashion designer, I was spoiled because you have the possibility to look at beautiful things to use for your own creativity. And doing a fashion show is like a piece of theatre. You’re talking with people who are doing lights, with people who are doing music, makeup, hair… so many different disciplines. You’re talking with fabric developers. It’s a very technical thing. And we always lived in listed houses where restoration was always a challenge. So craft has always been part of me.

Have you ever thought about picking up another craft?

I never had time to do that. When there was a little bit of time, we were in the garden, which also helped me to stay in balance as a human, because fashion is so hard and so fast that it was necessary to have something which literally puts you with your two feet on and in the ground. That kept me alive. The other passion I have is food and cooking and making jams. Again, it was really a counter-reaction to the job of fashion designer, because it’s a kind of instant gratification. You work one or two hours, then immediately you have 36 pots of jam or a nice meal which you can share with people. In fashion, it’s always mid- to long-term. 

I wonder if in your fascination with other forms of craft there’s a connection to your choice to make prêt-à-porter only, and not couture. To make the everyday poetic, not just the special occasion. 

The reason I wanted to do prêt-à-porter, not couture—although we made quite a lot of pieces which were nearly couture-like—was really because I don’t like to make things which are theoretical. I like to make things you can wear. I always compare my job to a good baker—if you make a beautiful cake but nobody eats it, what’s the point? With the foundation, we have the intention to show all different aspects of craft. You have a lot of craft which gets very close to collectible design, to the point where collectible design has gotten on the same price level as contemporary art. It’s very good because a lot of people can live from it and it can push things very far. On the other hand, I appreciate as much people who make a simple chair that you can sit on. And even a comfortable chair, not just a beautiful chair you look at. In the presentation, I know already that I took a little too much from the gallery-level of design. I really want to create my own network of people who are doing things which are daily things, which you actually can use. 

You have to see this presentation as an exercise. We don’t know yet exactly what our voice is going to be. I want to see where we can use our resources, what would be the most helpful and most important. The idea is not only to put up beautiful exhibitions in the future, but also really to support. Is it with organizing talks? Is it just inviting young artists and artisans here as residents? We don’t know yet. We started the whole project in the beginning of September, so it’s already going really fast. In the meantime, we are working on the restoration of the palazzo, which is going to start in October. 

The Dries Van Noten voice in fashion was so singular. I think it’s interesting that you’re saying that with this foundation the voice is still becoming. You’re still understanding the DNA of it.

I think it would be pretentious to say, now already, “I know exactly what I’m going to do.” 

I’m sure you also researched and visited other foundations. Maybe you don’t know yet what it will be exactly but was there anything where you felt like, “I don’t want it to be this.”

The last thing I want is to do only exhibitions and presentations, although we’re starting with a presentation. But between April and the end of September, when the restoration starts, we knew that we only had time to do this type of presentation. It’s a starting point; from that, we’re going to do talks with schools, we’re going to organize meetings, we’re going to do something around music. We’re going to invite a bunch of young winemakers from the Veneto to tell their story, and the wine is going to be served in glasses made by young artists and artisans in Murano. Those types of things. Not everything has to be prestigious, beautiful, chic, complicated, and expensive. We can also do very simple things.

It seems like an insistence on life. It can be a little more ephemeral and not necessarily go down in history. Can you tell me how you discovered the artists and makers featured in this inaugural presentation?

I always look very attentively. I have a very visual memory. Of course I also use my phone. I have a huge quantity of pictures of things I like, and they’re all mostly in my head. In the evening you see something quickly on Instagram, you buy a magazine, you see something there, and you start to collect. Then you have things from the past, which you’ve known already for a long time. It will be very interesting to see how everything comes together because in my head I’ve really created a kind of narrative between the pieces we’re showing and with the palazzo. 

How does the process compare with putting on a runway show? Do you feel like it’s prepared you for this, or do you feel like the challenges are very different?

Of course you have to be organized. But the creative part—putting things together—is a different way of looking. It’s not only your own work—you’re putting together the work of others. A fashion show is your own collection, and the only person you have to be happy with at the end is yourself. Here you have to work with people who created something. We have the responsibility, on the one hand, to respect the vision of the designer or the artist or the craftsman, but also that it makes sense in the totality. This has sometimes been a little bit more difficult—to convince artists and artisans to trust us. It is going to be a kind of confrontation. Seeing an artwork in a white cube in New York and in a palazzo here in Venice are two completely different ways of looking. We will have to learn a lot, I think.

Are there any exhibitions that you and the team have seen recently that have been inspirations for you? Especially ones that engage with a site. 

I went to the Fondation Cartier in Paris, where you also see the combinations of all different things, which is very interesting. Of course there is also Homo Faber, which I thought was very inspiring. Although I know that the last one—“The Journey of Life”—by Luca Guadagnino was kind of controversial… Some people really liked it, some people thought that craftsmanship was too much on a pedestal, that it was too beautiful and that the production was sometimes overwhelming the pieces. 

You’re mentioning beauty in the context of Guadagnino’s Homo Faber exhibition. The title for your inaugural presentation is “The Only True Protest Is Beauty.” I know that it’s based on a song by Phil Ochs, but I wonder how you see the place of beauty right now in a world that is honestly filled with ugliness.

The full sentence of Phil Ochs is: “In such ugly times, the only true protest is beauty.” But we asked for permission to use only the second part, because I said, “I don’t want to work nearly one year around a sentence which starts with something so negative.” Of course, beauty can also be kind of an escape. But pure escape is not right either, because you have to be realistic. In that way, the word protest is also very good. Beauty for me is so much more than just prettiness. The concept of beauty is so universal; for me, to use this as protest, to survive the ugliness of the world, I think is a very good thing. And this presentation is kind of a search. [The sculptor] Peter Buggenhout, for example, was really surprised that we dared to call his work beautiful because he wants to make people feel uncomfortable. But I think it still results in something beautiful. It will be the first thing you see when you come into the palazzo. 

Can you tell me a bit about your relationship to optimism? Optimism can sometimes be seen as naïve, but I think it can also be a form of protest—to progress, to move forward, to continue. Do you feel like this exhibition has taught you anything about that?

For me it’s about looking forward. Beauty is also moving forward. Beauty is not standing still. I always look to the past; I respect it enormously. But I always try to do things looking toward the future. I always tried to make beautiful clothes, but when they were not different from the ones before, I was kind of unhappy, because I wanted to challenge myself to stay relevant by moving forward. Sometimes big steps, some seasons smaller steps. 

Can you tell me about the rationale behind the fashion pieces you’re including in the presentation? You have Comme des Garçons, Christian Lacroix, but also the Palestinian designer Ayham Hassan. 

Lacroix is really one of my loves. I did the collaboration with Christian Lacroix, and I had the frustration that the collection we did never really came alive because of Covid. So I knew I still wanted to do something else, because I think he really deserves to be put in focus—to show the pieces and the way that he made them, the kind of madness, the craftsmanship… The end of Lacroix was also partly because of this: He couldn’t stop sometimes. What was interesting was that Lacroix, of course, is more traditional beauty. And at a certain moment I saw some outfits of Comme des Garçons, especially from after 2015, when Rei Kawakubo decided not to make outfits anymore for the catwalk that were meant to be worn. They became more theoretical, nearly sculptures of fabric, movement, and emotion.

It’s two completely different starting points—one based in a historical, nearly costume world, and the other really starting from a very theoretical approach. But at a certain moment they grow toward each other. It’s surprising how much they reinforce each other. And with Ayham, I loved what he was doing immediately when he came out of fashion school. I think he’s one of the best examples of what we are saying here, with the “Only True Protest Is Beauty.” You can’t only mourn in your life. With what is happening in Gaza, you can’t only mourn. You also have to think about tomorrow. Fashion in that way is the best escapism. It feeds your dreams for tomorrow by creating something beautiful.

Can you tell me what it’s been like to observe the fashion world with a bit of remove over the past two years? Do you like what you’ve been seeing? Who are you following? 

I follow it the same way that I follow all other crafts because for me it’s also a kind of craftsmanship. I also have several people who follow things for me—especially the young designers. We are building our network also to go out to even the young people who are not really so visible. But I’ve never really been part of the fashion world. We were always very happy to be in Paris or London, and maybe go to one or two parties. But I was even more happy to go back to Belgium, to my garden and my dog, and start working on the collections. Of course, fashion the last few seasons has been super complicated with all the changes of designers. But also nice things are happening now. Meryll Rogge is doing a good job [at Marni], I’m very happy for her. I’m very happy for Julian, who’s doing a fantastic job with our brand. 

And speaking of beauty, what was the last thing you saw that you found beautiful? 

The moon yesterday when we arrived in Venice. That’s enough for me.

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Cynthia Hawkins tried paint-by-numbers as a child in the ’50s, but immediately knew it was not for her. It was Piet Mondrian’s tree series that gave her permission to leap toward abstraction as an undergrad at Queens College. It’s a movement she’s been making her own ever since. Her inclusion in this fall’s landmark “Hard Art” exhibition at MoMA PS1 (opening Nov. 5) will put her work in conversation with the practice of over 40 other fellow Black abstract artists, from Sam Gilliam to Carolyn Lazard.

At 76, Hawkins has also cemented her legacy as a scholar and curator, but it’s her compulsion for mark-making and pursuit of color that keeps her coming back to the studio. The artist called us up from her Poughkeepsie atelier to talk about the latest iteration of a series she’s been working on since 1979, YouTube spirals, and her advice for young practitioners looking to balance art and life.

What are you currently sitting with in your studio? What is today looking like for you and the canvas?

I am working on the fifth iteration of my “Maps Necessary for a Walk in 4D” series, which I’m calling—permanently or tentatively—Fielding Space or Maps Fielding Space. The previous four iterations were a buildup of these organic shapes with the map. This time I’ve taken the big organic shapes out, and we’re seeing how it goes. The background is still pretty vibrant, but it’s more abstract expressionist in feeling. I am trying to see how long I can hold off complicating it further. The way I use color is continuing here in that there is a deep consideration of complements. I am using this linear mark that was the original path for the “Walk in 4D,” which was from 1979.

Remind me, it was from your commute in New York?

Yes, from my apartment to the 86th Street subway station. I raised it on a 45 degree angle. This was not part of the previous 30 or 40 paintings, but it is now. I’ve done 40, 50 works on paper to flesh it out. I don’t plan much. I get a feel for the new direction and do a lot of small works on paper and then go for it. 

You’re speaking about holding off or holding back in this iteration of the series. How does that restraint feel to you right now?

The inclination is towards the complexity of the last three [iterations]. There’s this complexity of organic shapes mixed with some sort of geometry, some weird little forms, circles, and small squares. All of it doesn’t happen in every painting, but in those paintings the depth of field was much deeper, which was something I wanted. I’m trying to maintain the depth through the color relationships in the background, the layering, and the surface marks. If the background is red, then we can have a pinkish-red shape move out of the background and a green passing over it, creating a complementary shock. 

I know you did a whole investigation into green, and you’ve spoken about how challenging the color is to work with. Is there a color that is speaking to you these days?

I’m in love with orange and yellow. Yellow gives me a thrill; it excites my eye. 

Switching gears and going all the way back, there’s a sweet anecdote I read about your father teaching you to draw Mickey Mouse cartoons as a child. Can you speak to me about your early relationship to art making—both in taking it in and making it yourself? 

Besides learning how to draw Mickey Mouse, which was absurd, the first instance was [You Are an Artist host] Jon Gnagy, who was on TV. I got these drawing sets where you put the plastic on the TV—that was the best thing ever. I watched it all the time. Then I tried paint-by-numbers, but it was not for me. I would occasionally make a watercolor for somebody who didn’t feel well, and I would spend a lot of time on it. But by then I was thinking of about 100 other things that I could be when I became an adult.

Your formal art studies start at Queens College, when you walk by a ceramics studio. You don’t go into ceramics but painting instead. When did you first see yourself as an artist?

Not long after that episode. I was planning to be a history major, but then I went to the art department. You had to take all these preliminary classes, where they would decide whether you could be an art major. That was wild. I worked very hard at it. I still hadn’t decided whether I was gonna do oil painting. I thought I was going to do watercolors. I thought I was going to be [American watercolor painter] Charles Burchfield.

How did oil present itself?

First of all, it was so much easier, oh my gosh. And bigger so you could really get around in there. My real work began with these charcoal drawings of gym equipment, then of chairs laid out on the floor, laterally, and just drawing the intersecting lines from the front and from the back, layered. I don’t know how long I did that, maybe 15 times. They were small, then they got more complicated, and as I added geometry to it, they got bigger. 

It was around then that I saw Mondrian’s drawings of trees, and that completely opened up everything because I wasn’t inclined to follow the rules. As I say, there’s enough people doing figurative work, I don’t need to do it. But to transition from the natural to the intellectual, say, was critical. Of all the people that influenced me back in that period, Mondrian was the most important. Hans Hoffmann came a little later. 

When I was in college, I knew too many young artists who never knew what to paint next. I thought, I don’t ever want to be in that position. And I never have. My work begins somewhere within these geometric drawings of equipment and this linear mark making, and they get combined at some point. I always felt I was acquiring not just a method, but a vocabulary, a bag of tricks.

What state of mind do you need to be in face the canvas?

You get to the studio, you mess around for a little bit, then you turn around and look at what you’re working on. When I was in Rochester, I started to leave the mess palette from the day before as a reminder. I would only clean it up in the morning. But I have to say, the worst thing happened: I started watching YouTube. I’d go in, have my coffee, and watch YouTube. It’s taken over my life. 

What are you watching on YouTube?

Well, it started out being quite reasonable. Then one day, I happened to see little toddlers doing something cute. It’s just like, “Oh, what’s this? Oh, what’s this?” Sometimes I listen to music, but I can only listen for 20 minutes or so.

What do you listen to?

Jazz or classical. But then I just have to close the laptop. Everything is so much better when there’s no noise at all.

You were an avid reader as a child. Has literature continued to play a role in your work?

After I finished my dissertation, I didn’t read anything for two years. Believe me, I collected enough books to last me quite a while so it wasn’t my intention to not read anything. I just wasn’t under any pressure. Since then I’ve been collecting catalogs of work that I like. I found a catalog about Native American abstraction from 1940 to 1970 that I didn’t know existed, and Arab abstraction from the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, that I didn’t know existed. I haven’t read any of them yet, but I have them all. I read some scholarly stuff that relates to aesthetics and Black aesthetics, and some philosophy, like Katherine McKittrick, who’s at the University of Toronto. I have three Fred Moten books. Fucking hard, oh my God. 

It’s important that people understand that nothing comes easy, if you want to do right by whatever field it is. I saw in one of your articles that you asked somebody if they ever thought about giving up doing their work. I’ve had that thought a couple times, but I always had a plan. Just a few years ago, I could visualize myself walking down the road with a guitar on my back—by myself, mind you. Finally, my husband got me a guitar for Christmas, and I didn’t take a single lesson. I picked it up and it was very uncomfortable. I just realized, in order for me to be really good at it, I would have had to put in as much time as I have put into painting. So I was like, “Well, you might as well just go paint.”

You’ve had a parallel career in academia and as a gallery director at universities. I would love to hear what it’s felt like to have a hand in how art is contextualized. You’re not just in your studio—you’ve engaged with so many different stakeholders from students to the general public. 

Because I’m so invested in what I do, I’ve always been accessible. If we’re at an opening and somebody asks questions, I’m always available to have that conversation. When I started teaching studio art and then art history classes, I always wanted people to understand the ramifications, that art is not separate from the everyday, it’s not separate from your history. 

Any vocation comes with a certain amount of sacrifice, what do you feel like you’ve given up to be, and stay, an artist?

I wouldn’t say that I gave up anything, I fought to keep it. Eventually I had two kids and there was a time where I would occasionally just go mad, like, “I’m going to the art store. I’m getting this no matter what. I don’t care.” I fought to keep [my practice] ongoing, because I wouldn’t know who I was without it. People ask about having kids, like, “Don’t they get in the way? How do you keep working?” For the longest time, you can just put them in a playpen in the studio with you; they don’t care. They interrupt you when they’re 30 years old; it doesn’t matter. You just have to find your way around it. The hardest thing is having a full-time job and making time. But if you are not from a wealthy background, you have to have a job. Nobody said you had to paint eight hours a day. In a whole [week] if you get 20 hours in there, it’s fine. 

Interest in your work has blossomed over the past couple of years. How does it feel?

It is really great; I am very cautious. When other artists ask me how this happened, I [tell them] I really feel like a third party is required. My friend in Durham, North Carolina, who is not even a painter, knew a lot of Black artists and a lot of collectors. He would just send emails to everyone he knew, like, “Do you know about Cynthia Hawkins?” And I do the same. When I saw the Just Above Midtown show [at MoMA], I told Chris about Janet [Olivia Henry]. I was like, “You’ll love her work, blah, blah, blah.” And he was taken right away. It’s totally paying it forward, but it’s really about the stuff you like and the people you think are interesting.

What advice would you give to a young artist who looks up to you?

Not to stop. When we came up, we never thought about money. All we wanted was an exhibition, a group show. You really just have to be committed. Everybody has periods where they don’t work as much—that doesn’t mean you stop. It’s interesting how much I think about my work. It pops in my head in the kitchen, when I’m falling asleep, when I wake up. Once you’ve been so engaged for so many years, to think about not doing it is really unthinkable. It’s as important a part of your life as your kids. You’re not the same if you stop doing it. 

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Trying hard may be rewarded in the offices of Silicon Valley or the kitchens of Michelin-starred restaurants, but in the world of fashion, the specter of effortlessness still reigns supreme. 

Few people have emulated nonchalance (or landed on the mood boards of people trying not to try) like Carolyn Bessette Kennedy and JFK. Jr. The onetime Calvin Klein publicist and America’s prodigal son would have always been famous, but the legions of looks they left us with—as a result of the enduring and often overbearing media attention they received during the mid to late ‘90s—have made the couple eternal.

John F. Kennedy Jr., who struggled to make a name for himself outside of his family’s shadow, first as an assistant district attorney then a magazine publisher, thrived as a fashion darling. He used the preppy playbook of his background as a jumping-off point for a style at once deliciously reckless and relatable. Biking in a suit has never been recommended, but he went there—and yuppies have been questioning their means of commute ever since.

Instead of trying to mask her more humble origins with gaudy status symbols, CBK stuck to a pared-back palette and streamlined silhouettes that have aged enviously well and remained faithful to a pantheon of minimalist deities like Yohji Yamamoto, Ann Demeulemeester, and, of course, Calvin Klein. Her sensible streak—capacious bags, comfortable shoes—have made her synonymous with luxury that doesn’t need to sacrifice practicality to be elegant. 

Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette, the latest entry in Ryan Murphy’s decades-long excavation of the American psyche, follows the couple’s, well, love story from its fits and starts in lower Manhattan to their untimely deaths in a plane accident in July 1999. Behind all the aesthetic effortlessness onscreen is no small undertaking. When preliminary images from the show began to circulate last summer, the Internet concurred that the clothes were… all wrong. To course-correct, Murphy and show-runner Connor Hines tapped Rudy Mance, an erstwhile editor and costume designer who’s worked on American Fiction, The Alienist, and a trio of Murphy shows. Armed with a wealth of research and rigorous sourcing, he revamped the wardrobes of his leading man and lady, played by Paul Anthony Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon, and has helped inspire a new wave of CBK and JFK Jr. fashion fandom. 

As the show continues to pick up steam ahead of its finale March 26, we called up Mance to talk about what it took to get there. 

What was your idea of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy and JFK. Jr. when you were brought onto the project, and how did it evolve over the course of filming Love Story, as you got to know these characters through clothes?

My idea was similar to everyone who was a fan and appreciated their style. We knew what they had worn, especially JFK Jr.. We knew his whole life what his personal style was and could use that to inform who he was in terms of the character we were portraying. For Carolyn, it was a bit trickier, only because there were very few photos of her prior to 1996, when they came together and she started getting photographed relentlessly. That was much more challenging—figuring out who she was before they met. I worked backwards with her. I looked at who she was toward the end of her life in the last photos and went back through our research. We pieced together who we thought she was and used the clothes to tell that part of her character.

Love Story covers a big chunk of the ’90s, when so much is happening in fashion. In the span of just a few episodes you have Calvin Klein, the ascent of Kate Moss and heroin chic, the guarded minimalism of CBK, and the preppy maximalism of JFK Jr. How did you situate your protagonists within all this?

Fashion is often very geographical, so even in our series—portraying New York in the ’90s—George magazine had a very different look from Calvin Klein, and what was happening in the Lower East Side was very different from what was happening at the Odeon. These are all places we went to in our series. From a costume design perspective, it was great to be able to go to all these different locations and tell the story through clothing of who these different types of people were.

JFK Jr. was one of the original New York male hipsters—lots of sportswear. He would always wear suits here and there, but he didn’t really start wearing power suits every day until he launched George. He was so great with his style of mixing things together; even when he started to wear suits, he still would do weird, quirky things like wearing a beautiful Armani structured suit with hiking boots and a backwards baseball cap on a bike. 

For Carolyn, we spoke with people who had studied her and worked with her. She always looked very put together, even if it was thrown together: That was just part of her je ne sais quoi, if you will. So even if we show her on a day off, it’s in her sweatpants and a polo shirt with the collar popped and a sweater. We do see her throughout the series go from the Roxy to JFK’s world in Tribeca. She definitely became much more aware of what she was wearing and much more guarded in her appearance. Toward the end of her life, she wore a lot of Yohji Yamamoto. Yohji himself has always described his aesthetic as “armor for your life.” I feel like she really identified with that. Aside from them just being beautiful clothes and almost architectural pieces, I do think there was a sense of security that she felt in them.

There’s this phrase that people throw around, that a costume speaks before you do. With Carolyn, since she really didn’t speak to the press, what she wore is what we have left of her. How did it feel to help Sarah Pidgeon incarnate her emotions through clothes? In episode 5, the detail of the scarf that Ethel Kennedy basically tells her to remove or the sunglasses being taken on and off during the proposal scene are so telling. 

She’s wearing that scarf, and when she takes it off, it’s revealed that she’s wearing pearls. There were one or two photographs where she wore that exact dress with the pearls. So I thought—and Sarah agreed—that if we were going to do that look, this was the moment to do it. She never really wore pearls, and pearls, to me, are a very iconic quick read of what WASPiness is. In our story for the character of Carolyn, that was her slight way of being like, “I’m trying to be a part of this world that I’m not really a part of.” 

God bless Sarah, she and Paul were in literally every other scene, so we did so many fittings. We would sneak them in whenever we could, whether it was at 5 a.m. before they went into hair and makeup for a scene or after a 10- or 12-hour shoot day. It was just as important to the two of them to get it right as it was for me. With Sarah in particular, we share an almost brother-sister bond because of this show. There are no two other people aside from us that were in that room, in those fittings, figuring out who this woman was going to be, or at least how we were going to portray her through the clothes. 

In anything based on real life, there’s that tension between faithful recreation and reinvention. Did it ever feel like you wanted to bring her or him into a slightly different part of your sartorial imaginary?

The moments in their life that were so well documented, it was important to get those 100 percent accurate. Like the heartbreaking fight in episode 5, for instance, which was blasted everywhere. Or the scene where they come back from their honeymoon and they’re hounded by the press, and he comes out and says, “Guys, give her time,” and he’s in that beautiful blue suit, which we made. Then she comes out—and luckily we had all of the archived pieces—wearing that beautiful camel Prada pencil skirt with the Prada men’s black V-neck sweater and the boots and the purse. I think it was head-to-toe Prada. 

We had this wealth of iconic archival clothing and pieces. Like the green Valentino coat, it was like, if we don’t use it here, then we’re not going to use it. That was an interesting challenge, deciding where we were going to place these. I definitely took some creative liberties in terms of her wearing a certain dress to a dinner. But it’s also like, who’s to say she didn’t wear that dress two or three times and there’s just not a photograph of it? 

Are there any Easter eggs that you snuck in for the CBK and JFK Jr. stans?

A couple here and there. I would say the biggest Easter eggs were that they both wear their clothes [several times]. They weren’t the type of people to wear something once and be done. Through research, I would see JFK Jr.’s favorite T-shirt that he’d be photographed in once or twice, then I’d see that same shirt two years later, very worn and faded and the neck would be stretched out. So I placed [items like that in] a couple of times. She also wore a lot of his clothes. So there are a couple of times where you’ll see him wearing a pair of boxer shorts in one episode, and then an episode or two later she’ll be wearing those boxers. I would wear them in to show the passage of time, but also just to portray them as a real couple.

There’s the moment I love in an early episode where she takes his button-down and wears it to work, where Calvin photographs her. Beyond the couple at the center of this, you’re working with all of these other legendary characters. You’re recreating the Calvin Klein of that era with Alessandro Nivola. You have Naomi Watts’s Jackie O. and Grace Gummer’s Caroline Kennedy, who contrary to Carolyn have been in the public eye for most or their whole lives. These are all such loaded figures. How did it feel to round out the costuming universe of the show with them?

With Jackie O and Caroline, there’s definitely a sense of them being not necessarily more reserved, but refined. They really did know their place and understood that, as Naomi’s character says, “People grew up with us in their living rooms.” I feel like so many times when everybody sees Jackie O., it’s always her most iconic looks, whether it’s the pink suit or her at Hyannis Port. But we were portraying her at the end of her life, when she started to unfortunately get sick. We were very intentional to show her a little bit more relaxed and casual. And as her illness progresses in the series, we started doing things like sizing up. Even though she’s wearing vintage Celine and Chanel and Ferragamo, we deliberately made everything a little bit more oversized—like her trench coat—just to play with the silhouette and to show her frailness.

And what about recreating the Calvin Klein offices? 

We went to every single place we could to find vintage Calvin from that time period. Aside from it just being an incredible aesthetic, we kept a very, very controlled color palette of black, white, gray, tan, which was real at the time. We had read somewhere that if you worked at Calvin, you either wore head-to-toe Calvin or head-to-toe Prada. 

And Alessandro is an incredible actor. He had one pair of boots he just loved that he wore a lot. I think we even gifted them to him at the end because we were just like, these boots belong to you now. We would get him dressed and then I’d go and knock on his door just to make sure he was okay. He’d open the door and have on some music or be watching some old interview of Calvin, and would just give a pose or a stance that was very iconic of Calvin at that time. 

Having spent such a long time in their archives and constituting them onscreen, who do you see as the inheritors of JFK Jr. and CBK’s style today?

They were equal parts timeless, incredibly ahead of their time, and so of the time. I came up as an assistant fashion editor before I got into film and TV. From the first photograph that was taken of Carolyn, she was an instant icon. And same for JFK Jr. I don’t really think the two of them have ever left the mood boards. Even towards the end of filming, one of the assistant directors sent me a picture of a random girl walking in the East Village, and he was like, “CBK look-alike.” We are seeing it on the streets, and we’re probably just going to continue to. 

What was your favorite look of all to put together—the one you feel the most attached to?

The one that gave me the most sleepless nights was perfecting the wedding dress. That is one of the most photographed and referenced and researched dresses in the world, designed by Narciso Rodriguez. Narciso was a friend of hers. He started with her at Calvin, but then he went to design for Cerruti. It’s such a simple design, but it’s just so perfect and draped so well. One of my assistants found out that Narciso got the fabric at B&J Fabrics, a fabric shop here in New York—a great one that still exists. They still had, 30 years later, this little swatch of it. It’s yellowed now, a different color, but they still had the actual swatch of the fabric. Through them, we contacted the mill in Italy and got the fabric shipped over. We recreated the dress out of the real fabric. And Manolo Blahnik was incredible; they allowed us into their archive, so it’s the real shoe too. The company that made her veil and gloves is still around, and they still had their sketches from when they made it. So they recreated that for us. And for him, his suit was actually made bespoke by Gordon Henderson, her other best friend at Calvin, who’s also portrayed in the series. She was very loyal as a friend. So those two costumes were the most important—not only to pay our respects to Carolyn Bessette and JFK Jr., but also to Narciso and Gordon, who were both incredible designers. It was really important for me to do them justice as best I could.

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Steel is strong enough to reinforce a building, yet delicate enough to form a scalpel. In the artist Maren Hassinger’s work, the material adopts both of those qualities, but mostly it is alive. Over the years, her sculptural interventions have been activated by the elements, time, and bodies (namely her own and that of Senga Nengudi, her fellow artist and co-conspirator since the ’70s). The 78-year-old’s largest retrospective to date opens at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in June. Ahead of that occasion, we called her up to discuss her feelings about public art, what an early rejection taught her, and why she never became a starving artist.

What are you sitting with these days in the studio?

I’ve been making these vessels; most of them are middle-sized jars and bowls, and now they’re starting to get much larger. They’re supposed to still be able to be recognized as vessels, but they might be floor to ceiling. And why I’m making vessels, I’m really not sure. How many kinds of things can a person make?

What are these vessels holding for you right now?

Just air!

And what do you think a change in scale will bring out of the work?

The bigger things are, unfortunately, often the more powerful, especially in relationship to your own body. 

Looking back to the very beginning, I wonder if you can tell me about your first experience with art. You trained as a dancer, and your father was an architect. You went to Bennington College and were turned away from becoming a dance major, and studied sculpture instead. Can you walk me back to your first encounter with art-making and when you first saw yourself as an artist?

Bennington was probably the place I discovered that. It was devastating to me that I couldn’t be a dance major. I went there to be a dance major. I had studied dance but I was coming from Los Angeles, and although it is a very sophisticated place, it’s not New York. When I got to Bennington, I realized that the students had been taking dance classes on a daily basis for maybe five years. I’d never done anything like that. I just took the Saturday classes, because I was going to school. I did not realize that people studied like that at that young of an age. I was naïve, and my parents didn’t know—that was a New York thing. So I got to Bennington and realized I was really behind. They said I was much better in art, and I didn’t even think about art. 

I was in Isaac Witkin’s sculpture class, and he went crazy for my pieces. And the dance people went crazy with how bad I was. It was such a big deal to get there and get myself straightened out about being 3,000 miles from home, that I just decided to stay. Isaac was a tremendous teacher. I did one sculpture at the beginning of class. I don’t even remember what it was, but everyone in the class was raving about what I had done. To me, I was just doing something. 

When did you realize that you could integrate movement and dance into your sculptural work? 

I guess I was always really interested in motion and nature. I got involved with wire rope—I have used it up to this moment. That seemed to provide the motion that I was missing from dance. I didn’t actually have to tap my foot or go on a diet to do it.

In the ’70s, when you’re back in LA, you did a project with CETA [Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, a jobs program that employed artists across the U.S.] and so did Senga Nengudi, who you would develop a long friendship and collaboration with. Could you speak to making art in Los Angeles versus making art in New York?

Wanting to finally end up in New York was because I wanted to earn a living. I wanted to be able to sell my work and get cash back for it. That was not going to happen very easily in Los Angeles, it’s just not that kind of place. 

You’ve made several public artworks, including a collaboration with the Metropolitan Transit Authority, which is still on view at the 110th St 2/3 stop. Was it important to you to make art that people would encounter in their daily life?

No. I wasn’t bound and determined to be a public artist. I don’t know what I was bound and determined to be. I think I was bound and determined not to starve. A public artist is never known, it’s always an anonymous person. They’re making these things that’ll stand out properly, but maybe don’t have a whole lot of aesthetic value. 

How has your idea of what art can and can’t do evolved over the years?

It’s like language, you can do anything, but everybody has to understand that they have a particular interest in limitation. I see my limitations and I work with them. Using steel is a limitation, one which I adhere to for the most part because I don’t have to worry about longevity. If I’m doing a weaving and it’s made out of fabric, that’s a problem because there’s always going to be a huge sensitivity to the atmosphere around it. You have to watch out for mold and insects. With steel, you have none of that. Nobody’s gonna try to eat a piece of steel.  

And you can bend wire rope any way you want to. I like linear things, and the wire is linear. I like the way it can mimic nature. And it’s not heavy, so I can deal with it on my own. 

Do you feel like you’ve given up anything to stay an artist over five decades?

I never starved to death because I did get an MFA and taught, so I always had a paycheck coming in. What I may have given up is doing more artwork because I was so busy going to bed at night so I could get up and go teach. But everything worked out fine. I enjoyed teaching. My students might not have gone on to be artists, but they did learn something in those classes—I’m sure they did.

Can you tell me about your collaboration with Senga, and where it started?

It started as a series of phone calls. She was home with young children and could not get out of her house. Then the boys grew up and we were still friends and talking about things, so we remained close. I was free to share crazy, wild ideas; it was always a wide open conversation. We laughed a lot too. Laughter is important. 

Who else do you feel has left the biggest impact on your career? 

Bernard Kester, who was my graduate school teacher [at UCLA], was very encouraging. Susan Inglett, my art dealer, is very encouraging. Who else? I guess enough people for me not to stop and to have the crazy idea I could actually make a living as an artist. Which I have, knock on wood.

If you could give a young artist who looks up to you a few words of advice, what would that be?

Don’t stop. Your family will say, “Don’t do that. Go be a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher. You’ll starve to death.” That is not true: I have not starved to death. In fact, I need to diet.

Does doubt have a place in your creative process?

I have to make decisions all the time. I’ve tossed things that I didn’t think were working and tried to think of ways to make it better. I was fortunate that pretty early on, I was introduced to Susan Inglett. She accepted me and signed me up to have a show. She found she could sell things. All of a sudden, I was a professional. Basically I think one can do what they feel comfortable doing in a really good way. And if you want to do this thing, you can do it because you’re competent at it.

And what’s been the single greatest joy of being an artist for you?

Just making things I wanted to make. Nobody told me to make this thing over here or that thing over there. You are in charge. I knew that I might not ever sell anything, but if I got this MFA, I could probably teach art in the school system, and that’s what I did. They actually paid. I could pay my rent and buy food. I enjoyed teaching. I’ve had a good life. Knock on wood.

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Many of Cayetano Ferrer’s projects begin in archives—an apt breeding ground for work that worries itself with time and how it is annotated, warped, and reinterpreted.

The 44-year-old artist was born in Honolulu; when he was around 14, his parents, originally from Argentina, moved the family to Las Vegas. It’s notable that one of Ferrer’s earliest pieces, a farrago of casino carpeting exhibited at the first “Made in L.A.” biennial in 2012, was inspired by the experience of pulling at the seam of one such specimen in Vegas, and revealing the cement underneath. (His first institutional solo show, at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 2015–16, paired a version of this work, Remnant Recomposition, with rarely exhibited artifacts and architectural remains dating from the 1st century C.E.)

His inquiry into the life cycle of objects both ancient and contemporary continued when Ferrer salvaged fragments of the original William Pereira-designed LACMA buildings, repurposing them in a suite of different projects, including his latest show, “Object Prosthetics,” on view Jan. 31 through March 14 at Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles.

Ahead of the opening, the artist, who is embarking on a PhD in Historic Preservation at Columbia University, gave CULTURED a studio visit.

What’s on your studio playlist?

Lately, I have Yasuaki Shimizu’s album Kiren on heavy rotation. It has a perfect balance of mechanical rhythm and tonal experimentation, equally perfect for generating ideas and physical labor.

If you could have a studio visit with one artist, dead or alive, who would it be?

The painters of the caves of Lascaux.

What’s the weirdest instrument you can’t live without?

The Kool Glide Pro. It’s a hot iron seaming machine that allows me to construct works from odd-shaped remnants in a way that wouldn’t be possible with a traditional iron. It’s basically a handheld microwave with a ’90s design that looks like it could be a prop from Star Trek.

Do you work with any assistants or do you work alone?

It tends to be project by project because the demands shift constantly. For my upcoming show Object Prosthetics, I had a lot of support from Max Cleary, who is a fantastic artist in his own right.

Have you ever destroyed a work to make something new?

In a way, yes, I work with a lot of fragments, and that includes components of prior works, but I don’t always think of it as destruction. There are always traces that travel with a fragment, so in a way, it’s more of a transformation. 

When do you do your best work?

Walking through a new city for the first time or looking out of a train window.

On a scale of hoarder to Marie Kondo, where do you fall?

When I relocated to New York recently, any hoarder tendencies were mediated by necessity. I still never got rid of any books.

What book changed the way you think about art?

Caetano Veloso’s Tropical Truth is a powerful memoir of making art and music amid Brazil’s right-wing dictatorship. The concept that stuck with me is antropofagia, translated as “cultural cannibalism,” which describes a subversive strategy of ingesting and transforming dominant cultural forms.

What’s your studio uniform?

A blue-collar uniform shirt and a white T-shirt. 

Tell us about the best studio visit you’ve ever had.

A memorable visit happened before I had a dedicated studio in Los Angeles. In 2011, I met with curators from the Hammer Museum at California Donuts on 3rd and Vermont. We had a great conversation about casino architecture that developed into a project at the first “Made in L.A.,” the following summer.

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Every industry needs its chaos agent, and thank God the art world has Pat Oleszko. The 78-year-old artist, who has lived in a Tribeca loft stuffed to the brim with her creations since the ’70s, reflects the issues of our time back at us with wit and gravitas through performances that pull from burlesque, commedia dell’arte, and protest movements. Her rich archive of inflatables and costumes is the subject of her first New York solo show in 35 years at SculptureCenter, on view through April.

You have a lot going on these days, Pat. What are you sitting with? What’s on your mind?

It’s so very thrilling to have this [SculptureCenter] show. Then the [Whitney] Biennial… stuff’s out, people see it. But all I really want to do is make work about our descent into fascism and the massive climate problem. I really thought that I was going to be able to make some new work for the SculptureCenter show, but I simply didn’t have enough time. The only way that I can deal with iniquity and the awfulness of the situation is to create work. It’s very frustrating that I’m not able to channel my great sadness and fury into something that’s palpable. I hope once the show is up I’ll have time to start making stuff [again]. 

You’re not making new work right now, but I can imagine the past few months have had you looking at a lot of your old work—with SculptureCenter, the Whitney Biennial, and your presentation at Art Basel Miami Beach last December. Have you re-encountered any of them in ways that challenge or complicate how you first saw them?

There’s so much work, and in all of that there is the fact that I am the vessel, the armature, the motivation of the stuff… I put myself in so many different situations, and a lot of them were quite brutal.

I’m looking [back] and I’m sort of in awe that I did those things—placing myself in the middle of society where [I] might be welcomed, laughed at, or challenged by any number of people that were viewing it. I don’t have any fear about putting myself out as a fool, but it’s different as a person with experience. I know how to handle the crowd; I know essentially what’s going to happen in a lot of circumstances. But I’m still fearful of what might happen to me in different situations, whether it’s on the stage or in the street. I know much more, but it’s still terrifying. It’s always hard and it’s always easy because that’s what I have to do.

I wanted to ask you about how your experience of vulnerability and labor have evolved over the years. As you said, you’re the instigator for the work. It doesn’t exist without you activating it—whether that’s pressing a button and inflating it or wearing and literally embodying it. 

I have journals, and I have kept a record of all my exercise, what time I get up, and how much I weigh for years. The energy has changed, so I’m more watchful of how much energy I can spend in pursuit of this stuff. I still don’t recognize the fact that I’m 78 years old. Inside, I’m just the same. I’m a Taurus, so I’ve had a massive amount of strength to pummel myself to do these things.

The other thing is I’m doing exactly what I want to do. My whole life I’ve been living the exploration of this gift that I discovered. I’m never happier than when I’m working, and the thrill of putting the piece out in public is better than any drug I’ve ever had. If I fail, oh my God. 

Failure can be so fruitful, though.

Absolutely. There’s nothing, nothing like failure to propel you. I give my whole self to a project, so if I fail, it’s going to be a magnificent failure. You never make that mistake again. It forces you to grow.

When did you know that this was what you wanted to do—that this was a gift you wanted to claim?

I knew I was going to be an artist in kindergarten because we had to do a self-portrait, and mine was so clearly the best in the class. I always had millions of projects. When I got to college—and going to the University of Michigan at that time, I believe, was like going to the Bauhaus or Black Mountain—there was just a pervasive brilliance with the students and teachers. I had two teachers, Milton Cohen and George Manupelli, and one of them said a few things to the class that made me realize that what I was thinking about could be expressed on my body. I couldn’t learn how to weld—my things kept falling down—so I was working at home and sewing. Then I realized I was six feet tall, so I could hang the work on myself. That was my eureka moment: engaging with the public, with ideas, and putting them out, not in a hallowed white cube.

Who do you think have been the most important conversation or thought partners over the course of your career?

There have been many… Rose La Rose, who was the mentor who ran the strip house in Toledo. Burlesque was a huge influence on my career, and she was the smartest woman I’d ever met. She was an enormous influence—as important as going to art school. I certainly spent a good part of my life in the movies, and Buster Keaton was an example of an undaunting humor and being resolute in the face of adversity, which kind of characterizes what the fool is about. I don’t know how many film festivals I’ve sat through happily in the dark watching him and wishing I could be him.

The use of language has been very important, and a lot of that came from my dad, who spoke many languages and always inserted them in conversation, completely flummoxing us children. I always loved language. The use of language is no different than the use of the body. I can manipulate the body into anything, but still underneath it’s a body that has to walk down the street, take the subway, ride the bike to do the gig… I like writing about the work almost as much as I like making it. And oftentimes an idea will appear in language, like, “Bingo, I have to go do that.” Then I have the greatest time in the world, even though I may not know what the fuck I’m doing with the piece. I’m getting to know it as I’m making it; we all grow together. Then I put it on, and there has to be some language to speak about it. And that language is usually unique to that character. 

Have you given up anything to be and to stay an artist?

I haven’t given up on anything. I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing. It’s the best expression of my talents. Everything that I’ve ever done that has been more pedestrian, I have manipulated into my work. When I was a waitress, every night, it was a different kind of waitress. When I was stripping, I wasn’t stripping like they were…  

I mean, I wish I had some more money, but I’m not interested in that. I’m only interested in making a kind of a world that is taking on these different challenges and dealing with that in my own way, so that I can point out absurdity or the tragedy of the moment. 

How has your idea of what art can and can’t do evolved?

You try your best, and you do it with as much rigor and thoughtfulness and invention to try to direct attention to something, to speak to people, to motivate them, to make them recognize stuff that they might be hiding from or that might be hidden from them. I don’t have any false expectations about what art can do, but I do believe that art is memorable in a way that reaches many more senses than didactic stuff from governments or organizations, particularly in my field, which is working through humor. You make people laugh, and one, you give them enjoyment. Two, then they have to think about what they were laughing at and why. 

I’m not putting myself in the same echelon, but the great humorists have always had a problem being taken seriously. Even though Chaplin and Keaton and Jacques Tati were doing incredible work, it took the world a long time to recognize the fact that it was true brilliance. If you’re good you get a lot of mileage. I have something that will keep me occupied into eternity. I’m happy I went to college and got an education about how to be an artist at all times. Money well spent. 

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“One of the very first goals I had in mind was that nobody leave the building happy.”

Udo Kittelmann is not organizing a funeral or directing an adaptation of King Lear. The German curator is describing his experience “editing an audiovisual poem” from a sampling of early film entries (think Alice Guy-Blaché, Georges Méliès, Walt Disney) and a cross-section of contemporary video works from the repositories of Julia Stoschek, the leading collector of time-based art.

When on our Zoom in January, I repeatedly make the mistake of calling the resulting “What a Wonderful World” an exhibition, Stoschek and Kittelmann alternately and diligently correct me. Calling their project, on view at Los Angeles’s Variety Arts Theater Feb. 6 through March 20, a poem is the pair’s way of signaling their will to question how we have come to ingest art, moving images, and where they intersect. They hope the dose of re-enchantment this nomenclature convention surfaces will reach the audiences that walk through the five-story parcours, too.

Although featured works from the likes of Lu Yang, Bunny Rogers, and Paul Chan feel particularly indissociable from the technological advances of our era, Kittelmann insists on their shared lineage with Disney’s earliest animations or Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou; life, loss, love, and the persistent need to make meaning of it all, are evoked over and over again. In a peak screen-time time, Kittelmann asks viewers to reach beyond their desire for entertainment to access a more raw experience of these capsules of humanity. Here, he and Stoschek chart what the process of assembling “What a Wonderful World,” the Julia Stoschek Foundation’s first major appearance Stateside, has shown them.

CULTURED: We’re going to be talking a lot about moving images, so I wanted to ask, what was the last moving image that moved each of you?

Julia Stoschek: The image that’s stayed with me most recently is Dara Birnbaum’s work, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1978–79, which is part of “What a Wonderful World.” It’s my screensaver. We are living in such a challenging world, and the only way we can survive is if we transform all the time. I love the idea of becoming Wonder Woman. [Laughs]

Udo Kittelmann: Just yesterday, my oldest son’s child turned a year old. His mother took, by coincidence, [a video] of him walking on his own for the very first time. To see how proud he got, like, Wow, something is now totally different with my body. You could see him smiling. Then, of course, he fell again on the floor. It was quite touching; it’s a real artwork in a way.

CULTURED: Udo, you’ve been formally associated with the Julia Stoschek Foundation since 2021, when you joined the advisory board. Where did the conversation for “What a Wonderful World” begin?

Stoschek: I’ve known Udo for nearly 20 years. I knew how he curated. My connection to Los Angeles started when I became a member, from 2018 to 2022, of MOCA’s Board of Trustees. The idea was born to show part of the collection in LA, and we started talking about this three or four years ago. Udo, you came up with the idea to connect contemporary video works from my collection with silent movies and early cinema classics.

Kittelmann: For many years, I was working on the idea to put into dialogue not just contemporary time-based art but silent movies and so on—to bring up the idea that the topics have never changed. It’s always about how people behave with each other, how they fall in love, how they fight with each other—whether in a more private relationship or between nations. The first visionary moving images were already filmed by the beginning of the 20th century. What has changed? Only the aesthetics, and the different generations’ experiences of being in love or fighting.

“A project like this, we will do once in a lifetime.” — Julia Stoschek

CULTURED: Julia, were you familiar with silent film and early cinema before this? Did any make a particular impact on you?

Stoschek: No, not before. But let’s talk about The Skeleton Dance from 1929, one of the earliest animations. You see these skeletons emerge from their graves and start dancing. On the one hand, it seems a bit funny and ironic, but on the other, it’s also brutal and a bit shocking. We placed it at the entrance area, so it’s a welcome, but it’s also a gentle reminder of mortality.

Kittelmann: I very much want to avoid that people—after they take this journey through the building and see these many, many, many thousands of images—leave in the mood to join a party. I’d want them to go home and find a comfortable place to reflect on what all these works were about.

CULTURED: The moving image recently has become almost purely about entertainment or distraction, so that’s an interesting intention.

Kittelmann: Not to entertain, but to come up with something that’s quite provoking about where we are…

Stoschek: …today. This show is holding up a mirror to the state of the world.

Kittelmann: It’s obvious that the title quotes Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World.” It was first released in 1967, a time when the whole world was quite chaotic. Demonstrations were all over the planet, especially around the Vietnam War. It was a tough, if not brutal, time. And Armstrong decided to come up with this song to give you the message, “Don’t give up dreaming.” This was the thread that led me through the whole collection to find these works. Julia’s collection is very much about these essential video-based artworks. There’s a tiny minority of them that entertain you.

Stoschek: It’s not a massage. [Laughs] 

Kittelmann: But we were quite careful not to make it all in all too sad, too frustrating. There is hope, yeah?

CULTURED: Julia, this is the first time the Foundation is having a major showing in the U.S., in the capital of entertainment—Los Angeles. How did you take into account the American audience in organizing this?

Stoschek: I definitely wanted to have it in LA, not in New York, because it’s the birthplace of visual modernity. My collection has this focus on the moving image, starting from the ’60s until today, that speaks directly to this history. I’m sure that the LA visitors grew up with the film industry and with movies. We’ll also have special opening hours from 5 p.m. until midnight. We’re all doing it for the first time; I’m very excited to see how people will react.

Kittelmann: I really believe that the works we selected are quite emotional. I don’t see a big difference in where it will be presented. As long as we all have a heartbeat. People are asked to feel very free in how they walk [through the space]. There is no sign that tells you where to go or what to see. Even with the text in the magazines we’ll give away, we try to avoid interpretation. It’s very much for everybody, not just the art world elite or the discourse-dependent crowd. There is no moral behind it that we want to prove; you may take the moral out of it. [Calling it] an audiovisual poem hopefully already brings you into a different mood.

CULTURED: What has working on “What a Wonderful World” taught you about where audio-visual and time-based art is headed, or what’s missing?

Kittelmann: What we completely left out is something that was built on A.I.

Stoschek: But it’s also not really part of my collection. I never found the right work. Content-wise, there was nothing that really touched me. I’m open to everything, but what I’ve seen until now, I’ve not been too into.

Kittelmann: We really did take this challenge to experiment in times where, in the art world, fewer and fewer exhibitions are experimental. I’m personally very happy that “What a Wonderful World” will be on view at the same time as the “Monuments” show [at MOCA and the Brick]. To have those projects side by side is amazing.

Stoschek: A project like this, we will do once in a lifetime. I hope that as many visitors as possible can see and join the show. It is a pop-up for six weeks with special opening hours, and we have an incredible side program as well. I really hope people enjoy the show.

Kittelmann: We also forgot to say—it’s banal but not banal—is that everybody is asked to take popcorn for free. They can walk around with popcorn. Why not? We are not a museum.

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