Art has always been a medium for individuals to leave a piece of themselves behind. A signature, a story, a vision imprinted on the world. In Edition 13 of THE OG, we celebrate artists who transcend the traditional boundaries of painting by creating work that pushes the limits of their medium and leaves an indelible mark on our collective cultural consciousness.
OSGEMEOS transform cities into vibrant dreamscapes, infusing imagination into public spaces and redefining how we engage art in daily life. José Parlá captures the beauty of time and memory through textured works that layer surfaces in stories of resilience and transformation. Bisa Butler reimagines portraiture with vibrant quilted masterpieces, honoring history and bridging generations through bold, emotive storytelling. Anthony Akinbola elevatesthe everyday through materials like durags, transforming the familiar into previously unseen narratives.
The artists of Edition 13 remind us that to leave a mark doesn’t necessarily mean using a brush on canvas. It means reshaping the world around you, transforming the materials and spaces available to create something that demands to be remembered.
As you turn these pages, we hope their stories inspire you to leave your mark–something lasting, meaningful, and wholly your own.
Edition 13
FEATURED
FEATURED
kate
Bryan
In this thoughtful and dynamic conversation, Ché Morales sits down with Kate Bryan, global curator for Soho House, to explore how art can shape environments and reflect the soul of a city. From her early days at the British Museum to building one of the largest private art collections in the world, Bryan shares her journey and curatorial philosophy rooted in inclusivity, local culture, and artist-led storytelling. She reflects on the power of site-specific installations, the importance of supporting overlooked talent, and how she’s redefining the role of art in spaces meant to be lived in. With anecdotes that span continents and creative communities, Bryan offers an inspiring look at what it means to curate with both purpose and heart.
bisa
butler
Bisa Butler’s quilts are both a balm and a battle cry—works of radical tenderness that center Black identity, resilience, and love. In a world marked by injustice and erasure, her fabric portraits reclaim space for stories too often overlooked, transforming historical and everyday figures into vibrant monuments of care. Rooted in ancestral craft and cultural memory, her art confronts systemic neglect—particularly around Black motherhood—while offering healing through beauty, precision, and truth. Each stitch speaks to a deeper purpose: honoring the past, affirming the present, and imagining a more just future.
jon
key
“Black, Queer, & Untold” is more than a book—it’s a radical act of preservation. In it, Jon Key reclaims the histories of Black and Queer artists, designers, and visionaries whose contributions have long been buried or ignored. Through painstaking research and deeply personal storytelling, Key transforms the archive into a living, breathing space of remembrance and resistance. By centering identity, legacy, and community, he redefines the role of design as both cultural mirror and tool for liberation. His work invites us to see history not as static but as something we actively shape—foregrounding the creative brilliance and resilience that has always existed at the margins and insisting it belongs at the center.
swoon
Swoon’s work is a radical embrace of emotion—bold, accessible, and unapologetically earnest. Her art channels chaos, grief, and beauty into immersive installations that refuse detachment, collapsing the boundaries between the personal and the archetypal, between the domestic and the monumental. Through pieces like Medea and The Light After, she transforms personal trauma into shared experience, inviting audiences into psychic spaces shaped by family, loss, creativity, and survival. In doing so, she challenges the patriarchal norms that equate emotional vulnerability with artistic weakness, proving instead that feeling—especially the big, messy kind—is a source of power. Her work doesn’t ask to be interpreted; it feels first, and speaks second.
nina
surel
In Madres todas, Nina Surel creates a mythico-historical archive of maternity that reclaims the feminine body as a site of power, transformation, and ancestral knowledge. Through ceramic vessels cast from women’s pelvises, mosaics inspired by botanical medicine, and hybrid figures drawn from myth, Surel reimagines motherhood not as a fixed role but as a generative force rooted in ecology, ritual, and collective memory. Her work resists linear timelines and cultural taboos around aging, offering instead a matriarchal cosmology where bodies are fertile, fluid, and storied. With clay as both medium and metaphor, Surel sculpts new narratives from the fragments of history, crafting a vivid, tactile language of feminine resilience and interdependence.
osgemeos
In their endlessly imaginative, spiritually layered universe of Tritrez, twin brothers OSGEMEOS transform urban chaos into playful mythology—blending São Paulo’s street energy with dream logic, music, and memory. Working in perfect synchronicity since birth, their art is a seamless improvisation of graffiti, folklore, and hip-hop culture filtered through a deeply personal lens of Brazilian identity. Their iconic yellow characters, surreal cityscapes, and immersive installations act as portals—equal parts whimsical and political—that invite audiences across the globe to step inside a more poetic reality. Whether painting alleys or filling museum walls, their message remains rooted in transformation through imagination, shared language, and radical accessibility. At the Hirshhorn, their retrospective Endless Story traces not just their visual evolution, but their belief in art as a life practice and a bridge between worlds.
José
parlà
José Parlá’s work traces a deeply autobiographical journey through memory, migration, and mark-making, connecting the surface of the city to the soul of human experience. Rooted in his parents’ calligraphy, the visual language of hip-hop, and the textures of urban decay, his paintings layer abstraction, history, and gesture into living archives of place and identity. From early influences in Puerto Rico and Miami to his formative years in New York’s underground scene, Parlá has developed a practice that treats walls as both witnesses and storytellers—fragments of collective struggle and resilience. His recent works, including Homecoming at Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Writer’s Library at Far Rockaway, blend community, memory, and architecture, honoring the social dimension of art in public life. By using abstraction to evoke what is often unspoken or erased, Parlá conjures a universal language—figurative without figures, political without slogans—offering spaces for reflection, recognition, and return.
ROSIE
LEE
Mark Fleming and Russell Clayton of Rosie Lee reflect on 25 years of creative entrepreneurship as an ongoing experiment—equal parts risk, curiosity, and cultural navigation. Grounded in a belief that community is both a value and a necessity in an increasingly fragmented world, they explore how trust, collaboration, and improvisation shape everything from brand strategy to business structure. With Against Time, a spin-off entity acting as a kind of exploratory tugboat, they create space for agility in the face of AI and rapid change, while allowing Rosie Lee to maintain its steady creative core. Throughout, their insights blur the lines between business and philosophy, design and life, always returning to the simple belief that good work stems from good people doing things for the right reasons—without knowing exactly where it might lead.
FAILE
Faile, the artist duo formed by Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller, transforms the raw materials of pop culture, urban decay, and street art into layered narratives that question permanence, power, and belief. With quilting as both metaphor and method, their recent works stitch together spiritual symbolism, consumerist iconography, and architectural form—offering soft, pliable structures that carry the weight of hard cultural truths. Whether through ephemeral wheat-paste collages or monumental installations like Temple in Lisbon, Faile bridges graffiti’s immediacy with a deeper visual archaeology, creating immersive environments that evoke both myth and memory. Their practice reclaims discarded fragments of collective consciousness, elevating the visual noise of the street into sacred, story-driven spaces—where art functions as both relic and revelation.
FRIENDSWITHYOU
Friends With You transforms art into a spiritual, communal technology—a prismatic platform for radical joy and shared myth-making. Drawing from rave culture, techno-spirituality, and symbolic storytelling, their work resists the cynicism of the contemporary art world by offering playful, emotional experiences that aim to heal and unite. Whether through inflatable installations, AI-powered fuzzy robots, or their Ocean series of mythic paintings, they blur the line between sacred and silly, exploring how cuteness, weirdness, and wonder can coalesce into a new kind of posthuman mythology. Beneath the bright surfaces and childlike aesthetics is a deep philosophical inquiry into how humans might relate to each other, to the Earth, and to the unknown futures ahead—not with fear or isolation, but with hope, empathy, and a willingness to build new cultural meaning together.
ANTHONY
AKINBOLA
Anthony Akinbola reimagines the everyday through a lens of cultural inheritance, using durags, hairstyling wax, and animal hides to challenge systems of value, identity, and consumption. His practice blurs the lines between sculpture, painting, and installation to explore how objects associated with Black life and global labor economies can be both celebratory and subversive. By foregrounding materials that carry lived histories—intimate, communal, and geopolitical—Akinbola critiques capitalist hierarchies while affirming the aesthetic power and conceptual richness of the familiar. His work democratizes abstraction, insists on inclusivity in institutional spaces, and reminds us that the most profound truths often reside in the objects we overlook.