For the first time, we’re calling our annual art issue the Artist Issue. It feels fitting, and certainly due, given that artists have a greater agency over their practice and careers than ever before. And we—as fans, advocates, or patrons—have more access than ever. Two years into this pandemic, and our increased utilization of technology has resulted in an explosion of avenues to create, show, connect, and collect art. The bittersweet and sometimes brutal reality of life’s fragility has emboldened cultural practitioners to say, “Yes, let’s go for it.” And this spring, we are celebrating the sentiment.
Madison Cario, the inaugural CEO at Minnesota Street Projects in San Francisco, is taking a stand when it comes to advocating for creators. They will no longer try to convince you why the arts are important. We all know they are. By changing the language around fundraising and supporting the arts, they’re showing that art is an investment, one that you want to get in early on.
Hannah Traore opened a gallery in New York this year, unafraid to do it her way. Working with artists whom she’s proud to call friends, she’s sharing her ideas exactly the way she wants to, unencumbered by cumbersome precedents or antiquated models.
Jennifer Guidi, whose work graces one of the issue’s three covers, shared with us about what it was like to find success in art after 40. She said that once she connected with her practice on her own terms, people connected with it, too. Following her own path of meditation and artmaking, her sand-based paintings, which feel both of this world and another, elicit a grounding feeling not dissimilar from what she herself feels when painting them.
Pieces in silk by Billie Zangewa, another artist we are thrilled to have on the cover, challenge ideas around what is an appropriate subject. She unabashedly depicts her day-to-day acts as a woman and mother, with a tenderness and beauty we admire. This is her act of feminism, one that is still radical in this art world.
Sarah Meyohas has been carving her own path her entire art career. With a background in both finance and art, she’s created work that finds beauty and poetry in advanced technology and concepts like cryptocurrency, adding a dash of feminism, too. Currently exploring a not-so-new technology in holograms, she’s also ready to share another side of herself, now unafraid of how it’s received. She’s an investor and a good one, too. And she doesn’t care who knows it.
Ezra Miller has been creating generative digital art for years, often working with brands to further and subsidize his personal practice. The possibilities for releasing, showing, and selling digital art that have opened up thanks to the explosion and reception of NFTs given him the chance to finally be compensated for his artmaking.
Finally, we are thrilled to have Nicolas Party on our cover, captured at his studio in New York, a setting that explodes with color, much like his paintings, installations, and murals. Using pastels and paint, his current major solo show at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art explores our relationship with nature, and how that’s been depicted in art over time. Party’s curiosity and love of art history is infectious, and his embrace of color is intoxicating.
We hope you find the conversation with artists in our pages as invigorating as we did. As always, we are following the artists’ lead, and taking the lessons they shared with us to guide the way through 2022 and beyond.
Download the full issue HERE.
Nicolas Party in his studio, photo by Steve Benisty.
