Stories by name

Tucson: Kitty Brophy epitomises how perception and reality are often at odds, how assumptions can be frequently wrongheaded, and the ways superficial attributes can mask deeper, darker, much more interesting depths of the soul. Behind and beyond the chic demeanour and sunny disposition is a person committed to her powerful, uncompromising art, belying the impression some...

New York City: Kunle Martins’ status as an OG of the Lower East Side is well deserved. Kunle, aka EARSNOT, aka IRAK, is the eponymous founding member of the IRAK crew, made up of misfits, outsiders, skaters, and graffiti artists. IRAK gained street cred while catching the eye of the ever-elusive art world, who couldn’t get...

St.Louis: Katherine Bernhardt was born in St. Louis and lived there for the first 18 years of her life. At that point, she left for the Art Institute of Chicago, then moved to NYC. She lived in NYC for 22 years. Two years ago she moved back into her childhood home in St. Louis with her...

Stockholm: Before this interview with Kali Malone I took a long walk from my house to my office, listening to her record The Sacrificial Code. Three of the tracks were recorded at the concert hall Studio Acusticum in Piteå, roughly a thousand kilometres north of Stockholm. I was there for a residency, creating a sound...

on writing from home, and her fascination with other writers I have been working (and by that I mean writing) from home for nearly a decade. During this time, I’ve learned how dramatically a home itself can affect the work that’s done inside it. Beyond that, I’ve learned of the labyrinthian, often ridiculous rituals writers...

I was thinking recently about the theory, the one where a butterfly in Montana flaps its wings and a week later a hurricane hits Hawaii. While its complexities and nuance are well above my understanding, the basic idea is that small causes may have large effects. I can trust in the idea that this is...

The biography of the iconic New York artist Kembra Pfahler is as wide-ranging as it is productive. It includes formative years spent in LA’s punk scene, a decade-long ‘day-job’ as a video dominatrix, stints modelling for Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler, she’s been a muse and model for a diverse range of designers, including Calvin Klein,...

Bringing the fantasy into reality Los Angeles: Kenny Scharf is an artist who has worked with objects, interiors and kitsch for his whole career even if he’s best known for his paintings. He made TVs, cars, telephones, a crib for his daughter, pillows, boomboxes, a piano, a mixer and exhibited some of them in the Customized...

New York City: A few years ago, Katie Stout was asked to create a bedroom as part of the Curio program at the Design Miami fair. The word ‘curio’, however, didn’t even begin to describe the results. Something straight out of a teenage girl’s wildest fantasy (or worst nightmare, depending on where you grew up),...

We embarked from Braddock, Pennsylvania, where we stayed at a former convent now a rooming house for idealists attempting to turn Braddock into something it isn’t and probably never will be again. Though the steel mill is still operating, barely, Braddock is basically a broken-down ghost town, despite the efforts of a small band of...

Small things big London: At 71 Albert Street, Camden Town, lives a little man called Ken Garland. He was born in Devon, in the Southwest of England, 82 years ago. As a teenager he was a conscript soldier in Germany, where he bought his first camera and learnt to speak a bit of German. When...

Pyongyang: Koryo Hotel. A 143 metre high, twin-towered hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea with 43 stories, opened in the glorious year of 1985, intended, as are all monuments in the country, to showcase the strength/glory/insert forceful adjective of North Korea. The Koryo constitutes exactly 50% of the amount of five star hotels in Pyongyang—and, according to...

Welcome to the empire of the generalised rebellion Grenoble: In the winter of 2013—after a long trip from Barcelona on a very cold morning—I was walking in the streets of Grenoble, not really knowing where I had to go. I got another SMS that, again, ignored my request for an address: ‘Get some whisky and beer’. I...

‘At one end of the spectrum are those who set value on day-to-day living according to a humanist perspective. Then there are others, such as myself, who envision an abstract expanse of so-called symbolic space, where all everyday concreteness will be rejected as a way of recovering fundamentally human qualities’. ‘At times people other than...

New York City: Kim Hastreiter founded Paper magazine to give voice and a platform to a generation of New Yorkers who were recreating the world their way. She and I met through mutual friends and became close through Kim’s fantastic salon-style dinners, where she opens her apartment and her extensive worldview (and actual view of...

Lagos: The Lagos-based fashion designer Kenneth Ize wears his heart, and his art, on his sleeve. During even the most casual of conversations, he can’t help but express his true beliefs, and this same emotional authenticity runs through his collections. Predominantly created from his bespoke hand-woven textiles based on aso oke—a traditional Yoruba fabric that translates...

Soft pink truth Sydney: My mother used to ride her bike around Rottnest Island with a pink, blue, and yellow Ken Done kangaroo print bicycle seat attached to the back, and two year-old me strapped into it. That seat was a dream; the colours were bright and warm and absorptive, somehow both saturated and bleached, almost...

2016 marks the 20th anniversary of Klaus Biesenbach’s arrival in New York City. In that time the German-born curator has racked up a seemingly endless exhibition résumé, at both MoMA PS1 and MoMA, including solo shows of Douglas Gordon, Olafur Eliasson, Doug Aitken, Mickalene Thomas, Kenneth Anger, and Henry Darger, to name but a few....