Edition 8
The Art of Design
Everything we touch was designed by someone.
The places we occupy, the products we use, and even the lives painstakingly designed for public consumption on platforms designed to turn the human eye toward screens. Design shows us what will come next: the museum that will be built, the clothing style that will sell. It holds the future in place with a few strokes of the pen, the scissor, the hoe, the brush. In this issue of the OG, “The Art of Design,” we meet the artists and visionaries who are designing the culture of the future. Rejecting the cult of conformity that drums out tidy designs for others to replicate, these groundbreakers are creating work and community that inspires the next generation to design themselves, authentically.
Front & Back Cover Artwork By: Nick Cave
FEATURED
FEATURED
Alexandre
Diop
Materials that one might consider waste Alexandre Diop brings to the fore. Hershey's wrappers, cookie jars, containers, vessels are part of the reality he disrupts and elevates. Featuring political and literary figures in his painting-material assemblage, Diop steps beyond boundaries of politics and medium to consider fluid materiality and challenge art elitism. These materials age, they hold history, and they carry "a scent of wreckage as we are asked to accept the damage and move into a newly emerging reality."
February
James
Part of the work of artists is to, rather than translate the untranslatable, turn the process on its head. We yearn for interpretations, sometimes from artists themselves, but to do so reduces the purpose of art. February James sits in this space of social miscalculations and misinterpretations, all of which inform our understandings of her works, ourselves, and the human condition. So, we take the hands that these paintings hold out and have faith in the confusing but enriching paths they take us. In these faces we see meaning in the process of making itself.
Tommy
Zung
As much as any art work, platform, or object, our spaces, lived in and worked at, are informed by design. We make our place in the world alongside and often at odds with the nonhuman beings and environment around us. As such, according to designer Tommy Zung, design needs to anticipate an engagement with these complex systems. No longer should we only see design as a closed loop of function and art. Design needs to be holistic, and that means respecting nature and incorporating it when thinking about design's impact on our lives and the planet. Only then can we envision futures and build something beautiful and lasting.
New
Wave
In New Wave Art Wknd, founder Sarah Galvak navigates a confluence of talent, politics and money. She sees it as a platform to showcase the works of underrepresented artists: women, LGBTQ+ and BIPOC, whose works have been historically ignored and are nevertheless critically present and urgent. In this, The New Wave also offers a residency programme for artists across the world to overcome constraints of money, time, and space to hone their craft. To Galvak, curating an art scene also means being of service to the artists and communities intertwined with it.
Pratt
Forward
Presented By: Mickalene Thomas
Drawing from their experiences of pushing through the art world, wishing and thinking constantly about camaraderie, mentorship, and solidarity in collectives, Mickalene Thomas and Jane South have established the Pratt Forward program. They seek to furnish that gap of "what comes after, and how you should prepare for it?" in art schools. Art after all is about a business, a career. In this interview, Thomas and South discuss their experiences that orbit around spaces, relationships, and community and how they inform their motivations behind this extended and educational support program for up-and-coming artists.
Jeff
Staple
In the STAPLEVERSE, there is an origin story. Being the only child of immigrant parents, Jeff Staple's interests in high school traversed cultural and social expectations. His early interests in sneakers bloomed into an array of fields: sports, rap, graphic design, typography, and graffiti. Soon his staple shirts caught the eye of local boutiques and made waves. His penchant for graphic art resonated with Fader magazine's street art sensibilities. In this interview, Jeff Staple talks design, culture, and the thought and care behind the STAPLEVERSE.
Linda
Goode
Bryant
The future that filmmaker and activist Linda Goode Bryant sees is mired in vulnerability. Alarming news on looming food crises has spurred Bryant to think about agronomic practices in communities of color. Taking inspiration from her project Just Above Midtown, an exhibition foregrounded by artists of color, Bryant aims to cultivate spaces that ensure a thriving future of food. Project EATS's neighborhood farms are informed by the communities around them. The project has now also extended to food distribution services and a pharmacy program, always couched in a philosophy of mutual exchange and care.
Nick
Cave
In the interstices of art, activism, and performance, Nick Cave cultivates outlets for joy. The Chicago legend unravels boundaries of the medium--books, suits, textures, and spaces all become transformed, transfigured as they grapple with fraught emotions, politics, and identity. Fiber is used to map brain scans of Black youth suffering from PTSD, while sound suits and hula hoopers instigate movement and expression in "dance-a-thons." Cave stands equally unparalleled in the boundlessness of design, leaving nothing untouched and unexplored.
Lucia
Hierro
Lucia Hierro confounds perspectives. Her pieces exaggerate consumer items in size and presence, distorting our sense of real and fantastical and asking to look not just deeper, but slower. These products then become part of a dialogue. These everyday items bought with supposedly little thinking and consumed ephemerally is now given a stage that wrestles with culture and class. Hierro goes after a universal that isn't apolitical: it is a conversation that opens up larger questions of injustice that get glossed over when we buy Ajax dishwashing liquid and Goya Maria cookies.
John
Marquez
John Marquez is candid. A real estate developer, art collector, and founder of Marquez Art Projects (MAP), Marquez's interest in art is one of unbridled passion. As his interests lie in the non-traditional art world, so does MAP prioritize young and emerging artists--such comes from the desire to support them but also pragmatism, as a lower price point means that he gets to buy prolifically. And true to MAP's maxim "Less Words, More Art," he resists explaining and overcomplicating his relationship to the works he's collected. "Art! It's enough."
Sam
Van Aken
What started off as a purely aesthetic project for Sam Van Aken has turned archival: Van Aken began with splicing plastic fruits together and making visual hybrids of hybrid trees. Now, rather than being a commentary of biodiversity, his works are biodiversity. The Open Orchard is a genetic bank, preserving heirloom varieties while documenting the loss of these once prolific genes. His trees contain indigenous and migrant parts of the region's ecological history, tying together cultures and cultivars, cuisines and conflicts. Just as the trees are a collage of different varieties, Van Aken's works are now projects spanning fields of agriculture, ecology, history, and art.
Angel
Otero
Artist Angel Otero recalls his experiences in art school in the US while maintaining a foundational, evolving relationship with his childhood home, Puerto Rico. He talks about his art inspirations, such as Arnaldo Roche Rabell and Jackson Pollock who, like Otero, subverts expectations of paint and canvas. Otero's own approach to painting is tactile, almost sculptural, employed to create "dreamy, distorted renderings of furniture and domestic spaces" with a fascinating interplay of textures and colors. While praised for his technical painting, he also does not shy away from other creative risk-taking, working with sculptures and using motifs of Spanish-style ornamental gates used in Puerto Rican neighborhoods.
Dan
Colen
Over the last two decades, Dan Colen's practice has diversified and proliferated. His works now include painting, sculpture, installation, and performance. His materials range from traditional paint to bird shit and chewing gum. However, Colen resists the binary high/low aesthetics that accompanies his approach. Instead, he cares about making marks. Each person involved in his works leaves a mark. Every mark is unique, and they tell a story that informs the journey of his craft.
Amani
Lewis
Amani Lewis grounds their design sensibility in material investigations, mixing paint, pastel, glitter, and collaged images--paying close attention to faces, bodies, clothes, and postures. And as Lewis makes art and music, they ponder questions and complexities regarding the time and space of leisure afforded by people who make art. Lewis also incorporates Bible verses and spiritual language in their pieces, engaging with Christian iconography and philosophy and opening up a conversation on religious themes in art. With community and divinity in constant mind, Lewis approaches their work with a ferocious grace.
Sam
Joblon
Sam Jablon combines paint and text, poetics and aesthetics, to bring a reflexive, often loud, experience. And just as the words sing, tease, and yell at you, the colours flicker. Jablon turns viewers and himself into subjects. "If we read his paintings to ourselves--they're his thoughts; if we say them out loud--they become ours." Taking inspiration from the likes of Cy Twombly, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Joan Mitchell, he toes the line between visual and poetic, marrying line, color, and text to make very arresting and present pieces.
Sebastian
Errazuriz
In employing and learning more about artificial intelligence in art, Sebastian Errazuriz hopes to create a language of his own that re-imagines objects in daily living. Such can be achieved by understanding how AI functions to avoid its recognition. As such, he attempts to elude not only the viewers of his art but complex machine systems that aggregate and analyze unparalleled amounts of information. At the same time, he subverts art world's hierarchy by turning fancy decorative pieces of wealthy families with no use into functional furniture, blurring boundaries between art and function and posing a question to Western ideology and power. This act of cannibalizing art history is intimate to Errazuriz's scientific and analytical approach to design.