Last Friday, Paul Kasmin Gallery and Artspace.com hosted a Hurricane Sandy Benefit Party at NYC’s Hotel Americano, kicking off their long-term collaboration to help raise funds for the ADAA Relief Fund aiding galleries impacted by the storm. The party launched a series of limited-edition prints based on artist William N. Copley’s work, “Think (Flag)” (1972),  with proceeds going to the cause. ARTINFO spoke to some of the guests — including ADAA director Linda Blumberg and Paul Kasmin’s Bethanie Brady  — about Chelsea’s ongoing recovery from hurricane damage and losses, and the ways in which galleries have overcome their competitive spirit to rally together. 

To see footage from the benefit party, click on the video below:

Was there art on the walls when 
you were growing up?


I grew up on small farm. There was no art on the walls, but my parents encouraged curiosity. More important, my great-grandfather collected artifacts, natural history curiosities, and folk art, all of which I inherited at age 8. It was an obsession as a child and I showed it at my own “museum,” which I called Smithsonian Jr. Even today many of my most prized possessions are from that collection.

What is the first work of art you remember being affected by?


My great-grandfather sculpted in stone, and I have very early memories of a bust of George Washington in a classic folk art style that he must have made around 1910.

How did you choose your specialty?

I’ve been interested in non-Western art since childhood. After living
 and studying in Japan for several years, focusing on ceramics including ancient material, I had a grant to study pre-Columbian art in Latin America — mostly in Guatemala. There I discovered textiles while doing research. At that time the material was still in the field. When I returned to the U.S., I realized that this was an overlooked area, and for a while 
I ran a folk art import business from a commune on a farm in Iowa.

When did you first open your gallery, and what drew you to the business?

In the fall of 1983 I moved to Chicago. With my shop experience I decided naively to open a gallery. It turned out to be good timing, because contemporary art was very hot here in the early ’80s, and I had set up my gallery right in the middle of things. The gallery specialized in tribal textiles for the first 10 years, then broadened to include other areas, but I always sold to a lot of crossover collectors.

What is the most challenging part
of running a gallery today?


There is a great deal of political baggage heaped upon the antiquities market. Material that has been in the U.S. legally for decades is now in collecting limbo if it lacks paperwork documenting its excavation prior to 1970. There needs to be a reevaluation and a new set of standards. Dealers, collectors, and museums need to collectively and creatively resolve issues of repatriation and stewardship.

How has your market been changing?


The interest in using ethnographic art as a decorative theme in commercial venues like banks and law firms has waned. The trend is
 the same in the residential market. Presumably this is fashion and will change again in the future. But 
it’s clear that the interest in photography, mid-century modern design, and Minimalism has negatively affected
 the market for tribal art, and particularly tribal textiles. There are few thematic collectors with sophisticated connoisseurship guiding them. The challenge 
is to find a young audience for non-Western art who can replace their aging parents as collectors and enthusiasts.

In which art fair do you most 
enjoy participating?


Favorite contemporary fairs are Art Miami and Expo Chicago. That said, the International Fine Art and Antique Show in New York in the fall is exciting for the high quality of people who visit it. Art fairs are absolutely essential to our business. Approximately 80 percent of our business is a result of fairs. We participate in about five a year. Generally I find contemporary fairs more interesting than antique fairs. The audience is larger, more enthusiastic, and for many, their first exposure to ethnographic art — we are often the only exhibitor of tribal art in such fairs.

What has been your strangest experience in the art trade?


For some unknown reason people call me with bizarre questions. I once 
got a call asking if I knew where to get a Styrofoam horse head. In fact I did. While in high school, I got a certificate in taxidermy, so I was able to refer them to a taxidermy supply house. Maybe that’s why I get so many weird calls.

If you could own any artwork
 in the world, price no object, what would it be?


The Intihuatana stone from Machu Picchu, Michelangelo’s unfinished Awakening Slave, the garden 
at Ryoanji in Kyoto — all rocks!

This article was published in the November 2012 issue of Art+Auction.

Once relegated provinces of sullen suburban middle schoolers and bad latter-day Tim Burton movies, Gothic is back in a big way. The fall/winter 2012 runway shows saw different variations on the prevailing trend. For what was his final collection for Yves Saint Laurent, Stefano Pilati turned out an army of iron maidens festooned in chain mail and leather. At Givenchy, Riccardo Tisci married leather fetishism with equestrian suiting. Similarly, the first eight looks at Valentino were a study in Steampunk leatherwear. Darkness permeated Alber Elbaz’s Technicolor ’80s boardroom atmosphere at Lanvin. Nina Ricci’s Peter Copping played with the witchy allure of sheer black and oxblood chiffon. Rick Owens’s floor-sweeping and face-obscuring vestments evoked women of the cloth. Even Michael Kors took a walk on the dark side, in the neighborhood of leather and dueling plaids. Frida Giannini transformed the Gucci girl — a creature synonymous with itsy bitsy mini dresses and trendy handbags —into a dandified femmes fatale decked out in lush velvets, illusion lace, and floor-length capes.

The fall runway’s flirtation with dark glamour has already translated to trend-chasing mass retailers like Top Shop, Asos, and Urban Outfitters. Street style doyennes, who wouldn’t be caught dead in a Hot Topic, are photographed wearing leather, lace, witchy asymmetrical hemlines and sleeves, crucifixes, and giant safety pins. The trend has no signs of slowing down. As ARTINFO recently noted, fashion’s obsession will all things noir infiltrated the typically pastel-dominated spring collections.

The history of Gothic unofficially begins with the Sack of Rome by the East Germanic Visigoths in the year 410, an event that marked the end of the Classical period and the beginning of the Middle Ages. As architectural historian Fiske Kimball notes, from the Renaissance to the 19th century, the term became a catchall pejorative for “barbaric,” non-classicizing styles, (though Gothic architecture — characterized by the prominence of valuated arches — was actually developed and perfected in France).

In a modern sense, Gothic begins in the 18th century with two interlocked trends: the Gothic Revival in architecture and the Gothic novel, both of which embodied a nostalgia for the Middle Ages against the secular rationalism of Enlightenment thought and Neoclassical aesthetics. While Neo-Gothic architecture was often an ideologically conservative movement — designed to fortify nationalistic and religious sentiments in a rapidly industrializing Europe — the Romantics used Gothic buildings as the locus of picturesque decay, the brooding passions of Byronic antiheroes, and wellsprings of supernatural horror.

From its beginnings in the 18th century, Gothic was a retro style, a rejection of modernity, a retreat into an aestheticized vision of a distant past. Talking about “Gothic revivalism” is almost redundant. An anti-movement that was revivalist from the beginning, Gothic will never die. As cultural historian Catherine Spooner argues in her essay "Undead Fashion: Nineties Style and the Perennial Return of the Goth,” it’s already “undead” and perennially returning: “Within the world of fashion, it is this enduring potency of gothic images for imaginative self-identification that leads to their perennial revival.” The raccoon-eyed Goth we know today, which emerged from postpunk music scenes associated with acts like Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Cure, and Joy Division, drew on this classic cocktail of horror and romance.

The catalog for Valerie Steele's FIT exhibition “Gothic: Dark Glamour,” attributes the 20th-century Goth’s all-black uniform to the Victorian cult of mourning, which prescribed a dress code of all-black widow’s weeds. In the ’90s, Jean Paul Gaultier, Alexander McQueen, Olivier Theyskens, Yohji Yamamoto, Rick Owens, and John Galliano hoisted the Gothic style onto the pedestal of high fashion. As Spooner puts it her essay, the “sad goth” upgraded to the “Gaultier goth.”

A resurgence of Gothic in fashion fits into our current zeitgeist, where romantic escapism is taking on dark nuances. While prosperous economies typically look toward a brave new sartorial future (note the roaring ’20s or the mod early-’60s), economies like our own often escape into the past. Nineteen-seventies stagflation was accompanied by a full-scale 1930s revival. The long hemlines and hyper-feminine glamour of the ’30s harkened back to the belle époque.

Today, the typically Gothic taste for eroticizing death and obsolescence — as one Steele puts it, transforming “the fear of death” into “a kind of sexually-charged horror,” is evident in the vampire mania that’s swept popular culture since the release of Stephanie Meyer’s “Twilight” books in 2005. As innumerable writers have noted, “Twilight” fetishizes abstinence and equates sex with violence and death. (Meyer’s primly sadomasochist fantasy was teased out in E.L. James’s blockbuster erotic novel “50 Shades of Grey,” which was originally disseminated online as “Twilight” fan fiction.)

In the hands of moralists like Meyer, the new Gothic means neoconservative recourse to Victorian gender politics entrenched in repressed desire. Though it’s set in the present day, “Twilight” — like all Gothic novels — is a flight from modernity.

But regardless of its politics, Gothic speaks to a desire to be someone else and somewhere else. The mantillas, capes, and courtly leather body armor that are in style today are the flipside of Meyer’s chastity-obsessed, antifeminist Gothicism. Gothic fashion isn’t for shrinking violets. The wearer becomes architect and sole protagonist in a fairytale of her own making, momentarily transformed into a walking anachronism from a shadowy underworld.  

— Kate Middleton's Photography Praised: A series of images uploaded to the new website of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge — Prince William and Kate Middleton— features a series of exquisite landscape photographs the latter made during an official tour they took of Southeast Asia and the South Pacific, including Yann Arthus-Bertrand-style aerial photos, and black-and-white images evocative of Ansel Adams. Even more impressive, St James's Palace confirmed that the camera used was not a professional rig, but a pocket-side point-and-shoot. [Guardian]

— Hopper's Minister Suspected of Theft: Gail Levin, a leading Edward Hopper specialist, has accused longtime Hopper family friend, the late Reverend Arthayer R. Sanborn— whose extensive collection of the American artist's works are on view in the Edward Hopper House Art Center in Nyack, New York — of coming into the works in less-than-legitimate ways. "I gave my youth to Edward Hopper scholarship, and I don’t want to see this perversion of the truth," said Levin, who penned Hopper's catalogue raisonné. "How did he get hundreds of drawings? He had the key to the family home in Nyack." [NYT]

— British Hill To Receive Nipple: As part of a breast cancer awareness campaign spearheaded by the charity Cancerkin, the light artist Bruce Munro will create a large glowing dome for the top of Long Knoll in Wiltshire, effectively turning the rounded hill into a massive Land art breast. The installation, "Beacon on the Hill," will consist of 2,730 plastic bottles lit with pink and blue LEDs, and will take a team of five one week to assemble beginning this weekend. "This hill and surrounding countryside has long been my 'canvas'," Munro says. "I lost a dear friend very young to breast cancer. By illuminating the night sky for a brief moment, I hope to send the message 'you are not alone'." [Guardian]

— David Hockney Does Opera: The British landscape painter is the 15th artist to take over Vienna's largest canvas: the stage of its opera house, the Staatsoper. An opera veteran who has already worked with Milan's La Scala and New York's Metropolitan Opera, Hockney used his trusty iPad to create the preliminary sketches that eventually resulted in the 1,894-square-foot painting "Wien Musik." The first artist to take over the Staatsoper's stage was Kara Walker in 1998. [AFP]

— 18 Months to Restore Vandalized Rothko: The Tate Modern's Mark Rothko conservation specialists said that it might take as long as one year and a half to undo the damage inflicted upon Rothko's "Black On Maroon" (1958) by rogue Yellowist Vladimir Umanets last month, a much longer estimate than originally hoped for. "There was a lot of speculation about the scrawl being made a marker pen, but it wasn’t. The damage was made with ink which has made a deeper mark," a museum spokesperson said. "Initial examination indicates that the painting will need an extended period of conservation treatment to address the damage." [Telegraph]

— Imelda Marcos's Assistant Accused of Art Theft: Vilma Bautista, the former secretary of Imelda Marcos, and two of her nephews have been accused of trying to sell a trove of artworks that were taken from the New York home of former Filipino president Ferdinand Marcos in 1985, including Claude Monet's "Le Bassin aux Nymphéas" (1899), which they successfully sold in 2010 for $32 million despite the buyer's reservations about its provenance. "The integrity of the international art market must be protected," said Manhattan district attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr. "This indictment sheds light on what happened to major works of art missing for more than 25 years." [NYT]

— Donated Dali Brings Goodwill Good Money: An etching by Surrealist Salvador Dali, "Reflections" from his "Cycles of Life" series, which was dropped off at a Goodwill donation center in Washington state earlier this month, has sold for $21,005in an online auction, with the money going to fund 12 scholarship programs to provide job training for people with disabilities. "We saw the Dali on the news and thought it would be a great way to add to our collection while supporting a great cause," the anonymous East Coast collector who snapped up the work said. "We donate to Goodwill all the time and are very happy that our purchase is helping those in need." [CNN]

— Dealer Solves Portrait Mystery: The art historical detective work of Bendor Grosvenor has paid off; thanks to the employee of London dealer Philip Mould, the U.K.'s National Portrait Gallery has re-identified an 18th-century portrait said to be by the "circle of Anton Raphael Mengs" as Henry Benedict Stuart (1725-1807). "I’m delighted to report that the [gallery] has finally agreed to re-identify its portrait [as] Prince Henry Benedict Stuart," Grosvenor said, "Cardinal York (or Henry IX as he is known to Jacobites)." [TAN]

— Eisenhower's Son Blasts Memorial Design: President Dwight D. Eisenhower's son John S.D. Eisenhower has penned a letter addressed to Senator Daniel K. Inouye, the Eisenhower Memorial Commission's vice chairman, taking issue with Frank Gehry's disputed design for the Washington, D.C. monument. "We as a family cannot support the Eisenhower Memorial as it is currently designed — in concept, scope, or scale," he writes. "We request that lawmakers withhold funding from the project in its current form and stand back from approving the current design." [Washington Post]

— Broad Museum Adds Another Major Outdoor Sculpture: The recently opened Broad Museum at Michigan State University has acquired and installed Jonathan Prince's massive outdoor sculpture "Vestigial Block" (2011) which was bequeathed to the museum by collectors Julie and Edward J. Minskoff. The newly installed block of stainless and oxidized steel has been installed outside the Zaha Hadid-designed institution alongside its other signature outdoor sculptures by Roxy Paine and Steve Miller. [Press Release]

VIDEO OF THE DAY

Watch Jonathan Prince's "Vestigial Block" (2011) being installed at the Broad MSU:

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For more breaking art news throughout the day,
check ARTINFO's In the Air blog.

LOS ANGELES — Now in its second year at Art Basel Miami Beach, Art Public, a collaboration with the Bass Museum of Art, revamps Collins Park into an outdoor art venue packed with site-specific installations, sculptures and other works, as well as a series of performances. Christine Y. Kim, 39, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and co-founder of the Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), has returned as curator of the exhibition, and sat down to talk with ARTINFO to discuss the upcoming event. 

You were the inaugural curator for Art Public Art Basel Miami Beach in 2011. How is this year different?

Because of the success of Art Public last year, we started with a lot of momentum and support this year. From a mechanical and administrative perspective, it’s helpful knowing the nuances of the Collins Park site, everything from the lumps in the grass and the sprinklers to city zoning and permitting. Curatorially, there’s less of a clear discourse that runs through the projects this year.

How many art works are in the exhibition?

22 works of art including performances.

What are you most excited about seeing?

After speaking with artists, doing studio visits, drawing the space and mocking it up, it will be exciting to see how all those things come together and work formally.

Are there any overarching themes or through lines?

How we approach notions of the monument in urban landscape. Miguel Andrade Valdez [Monumento Lima translation – Collins Park, 2012] is projecting a series of images of monoliths in and around Peru, like a concrete roadblock, a graffiti wall and a public monument. The three videos are projected and looped, with the sound and cacophony of Lima, on the cylinder in the middle of the park, making it a 360-degree experience. The cylinder reads like a late 1960s edifice or outdoor sculpture, which is now used as art storage. Mark Hagen [To be Titled (Additive Sculpture, Miami Screen), 2012] made a sculpture, related to his body of work from “Made in L.A.” [the 2012 Los Angeles biennial at the Hammer Museum], of poured concrete in cheap beverage containers. He culled different containers from the Miami Beach area to create the screen sculpture. In a way, it’s thinking about public monuments versus monuments made by happenstance. To that end, the third work to discuss in this context is a very large piece, [Untitled (The Space Beneath Us), 2012] by Jose Dávila, I would say it measures about 50x50 feet, that is sunken into the lawn in the center of Collins Park. Creating a square in mustard yellow colors is his homage to Joseph Albers. The piece is created with traditional Mexican tiles made by Cerámica Suro from Tlaquepaque, Jalisco in Mexico. Fabulous performers [mezzo-soprano] Alicia Hall Moran and [jazz pianist and composer] Jason Moran, who is a MacArthur fellow, will do an instrumental performance inside the piece inspired by the lounge-y life of leisure in Miami. 

Last year’s pieces were performance-driven and political, can we expect the same this year?

There are very individual nuanced, poetic, ironic and literal ideas, images and objects that have been put into the mix very consciously. It’s about taking advantage of the access this event and art fair enables in bringing in discursive spaces. The performances certainly are very closely tied to political considerations of voice, volume and demographic. Dave McKenzie [Declaration, 2012] is having a plane flown above Collins Park carrying messages – like the ad banners people are used to seeing over the beach advertising a DJ at a club or Corona. His own text is going up, which are intimate personal messages in the form of marriage proposals with gender neutral names, so it’s not just ‘will you marry me?’ it’s ‘can you marry me?’ 

You have included a few L.A. artists – notably Mark Hagen, Alex Israel, Ruben Ochoa and Ry Rocklen – in the exhibition. Do you find that, working and living in L.A., you gravitate towards the city’s artists?

Of the studio visits I do, half of the artists are here, but of the work I reviewed and sought out not in the form of studio visits but by phone and Internet, or artists whose work I was seeing at Documenta and various exhibitions, 70-80% of the work I was looking at was outside of LA. Artist selection in Art Public is very international.

Are there any specific works in Art Public which resulted from your curatorial activities in L.A.?

Teresa Margolles’s gorgeous benches [Untitled, 2010] that were at LACMA will be in Collins Park. When creating these concrete benches, she mixed the concrete with water from morgues that was used to clean dead bodies in Culiacán, Mexico who were victims of drug-related incidents.

How has curating this project influenced or affected your curatorial activities at LACMA and LAND?

It can’t be separated out for me, it all feeds one into the other. While working on the James Turrell show, which I’m co-curating with Michael Govan, I’m thinking about what people call the ‘repression’ of architectural components for the sake of purity. Turrell considers architecture like sockets, molding, windowsills, and elements that are otherwise charging the space to be a frame. As an institution, we’re operating as a white cube. Working in outdoor spaces is incredibly challenging and rewarding because you can neither suppress nor free that location from history, weather and the sound of traffic. That’s why I start with Turrell: that charge, which you cannot rid an outdoor space of affects the access to and meaning of the work. Curatorially, it’s extremely exciting to have layered contexts like that, it’s a multidimensional frame.

What charge do you get from Los Angeles and LACMA?

The way that, if you stand on Wilshire Boulevard at 4 a.m. on a weekday, you hear a sound that sounds like traffic in the distance and the silence of the middle of the night. But that sound is actually somehow mixed with the bubbling of the tar underground [from the La Brea Tar Pits] so you have these simultaneous nuanced sounds from opposite corners of the spectrum: earth’s geological rumblings versus the sound of Toyotas from circa 2012.

Todd Selby captured the world’s attention four years ago when he started his now famous website The Selby, which offers an inside view of the interiors of creatives’ homes. About two years ago Selby launched his Edible Selby column in the New York Times’s T magazine, capturing sustainable food culture around the globe, from sea foraging in the San Francisco Bay Area to behind-the-scenes views of some of the most popular restaurant kitchens. Selby recently turned Edible Selby into a colorful coffee table book. ARTINFO spoke with the photographer about his experience as a food photographer, how he selected his subjects, and his Thanksgiving plans.

How did you go from a developmental studies major at U.C. Berkeley to a photographer?Ea

I worked in politics for a while and I really wanted to do something creative, so I came to New York City and I tried a lot of different things and I ended up a photographer. I did logo design, I did flash web design, I did consulting for venture capital firms, I worked at a men’s magazine, that’s pretty much it.

Did you have any criteria when selecting your subjects for the book?

Of course. It was very much a process. I consider myself a creative documentarian, so I find people that I find interesting that I could tell visual stories about, and provide some kind of service to people that get the book, and it’s something interesting to me and the readers. It was very much trying to find people that had inspiring stories and were doing something very creative.

How is food photography different from shooting interiors?

It’s much more difficult. It’s much more intensive. Instead of being in a very relaxed home-type environment, you’re in people’s places of work, which is a totally different situation. Very intense and high-pressure places. It’s faster, working in much stranger lighting conditions, with so many people around. It’s very challenging.

Did you give any direction while shooting in restaurants?

It depends. Some were very fly on the wall, reportage style, and some were much more collaborative and involved. It really depends on the subject — if they wanted me to come observe what they do, or they wanted to get more into it with me.

Did you gain weight while shooting this book?

Probably.

Did you get to eat at every establishment you shot?

Pretty much. I’ve been eating very well.

What were the most memorable places you visited?

There’s so many. It was like two years of my life working on this project pretty intensely and traveling the world, exploring, finding these places, and I feel like “Edible Selby” is very personal to me. It’s pretty much like a diary of my favorite experiences and places. People would ask me what I’ve been up to in the last couple of years and I couldn’t really explain it. And now I have that there. It’s like my diary.

I know this is going to be a hard one. What were the best things you tasted?

Probably a little highlight was the lumpfish roe and grapefruit granitée at Relae in Copenhagen, which was in the book. It was one of my most favorite things I ate. It was incredible.

What did you learn about the restaurant industry while working on this project?

I’d known this is hard work, but I really learned how hard it was, and how many hours you put into it. It was so many people working together to have all these things happen all at once at the right time. Timing is so important and having it come to your table in perfect, perfect condition.

What are your plans for Thanksgiving?

Just to be with family. One thing I’m very excited about is my fiancé aunt is a very good cook and she’s making corn soufflé, but not the French soufflé, like a Midwestern soufflé, which is like sticks of butter and cheese and corn and potatoes. It’s delicious.

You’ve shot people’s homes, workplaces, and restaurants — what’s next?

It’s a secret of course.

No hints?

No.

When will we start seeing that pop up on your website?

That’s a secret too.

Click on the slideshow to see images from “Edible Selby,” $35 at abrams.com.

PARIS — Though not quite as well-known as his compatriot Martin Parr, Paul Graham, winner of the 2012 Hasselblad Prize, may possibly be one of the greatest visionaries in contemporary British photography. Over his prolific career as an artist, he has consistently received high acclaim both for his earlier color documentation of social issues and for his more recent, impressionistic, storytelling images along similar themes. His current show at Le Bal, the contemporary photography center in Paris (through December 9), presents his newest series, “The Present” (2011) as well as “Beyond Caring” (1984-85), an early series that documented British unemployment offices.

When it appeared, “Beyond Caring” was revolutionary — its use of color and large-sized prints, contrary to the black-and-white work of many of his peers, pushed critical photography into a new medium. To avoid the “no photography” rules of the unemployment offices he wanted to capture, Graham would often put his camera down next to him to shoot, which kept his subjects at human level. Rather than dramatizing the plight of the dole-line workers waiting to be helped by social services — of which he was then one — Graham instead presented a view into the real-world social stasis of Thatcher’s England.

“The Present” presents a different type of view on New York, where Graham has now lived for 10 years. The third work of a trilogy made in the U.S. — including “American Night” (1998-2002), in New York, and “A Shimmer of Possibility” (2004-06), road-trip images inspired by the short stories of Chekhov, through trips across the country — these more recent works capture the minutiae of everyday life, either the quietly sublime or its daily struggles. With overexposure and saturation, Graham uses luminance to emphasize the significance of the mundane.

While “The Present” executes the same formula as the previous works, Graham has here organized the images into diptychs, the same place captured at two successive moments, changed only in very subtle ways. In 8^th Avenue and 42^nd Street, a police officer is replaced by a mail carrier, also in uniform, to humorous effect.

Perhaps what Graham’s new series most reveals is just how fleeting the present really is; in these everyday moments in public places, with faces and street names obscured from memory, time slips by us with little imprint, much like a daydream. 

As the nation settles down to bountiful feasts that celebrate Thanksgiving, a holiday linked to the early traditions of settlers in the United States, ARTINFO takes a look at five Native American contemporary artists — Anna Tsouhlarakis, Teri Greeves, Dustinn Craig, C. Maxx Stevens, and Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds — whose work reflects the cultures of the many tribes indigenous to our nation, whose histories are also an essential factor of its origins. From innovative uses of traditional techniques to contemporary approaches  historic themes, these artists from around the country present the complexities of the modern Native American experience.

Click here for a slideshow of these five artists' works.

Elmgreen & Dragset’s productions are often associated with buildings, particularly structures into which we can peer, like voyeurs. Some are permanent, like Prada Marfa, 2005, the high-end fashion store they constructed in the Texas desert town, which Donald Judd’s Chinati Foundation has turned into an art mecca. Most are transient, such as Death of a Collector, their installation within the group show they organized for the adjacent Danish and Nordic pavilions at the 2009 Venice Biennale, or the ammonium-scrubbed bureaucratic structure they created in London’s Serpentine Gallery for their 2006 exhibition “The Welfare Show;” or the prison-cell-cum-installation in which two characters, artists each, are locked in the play, Happy Days in the Art World, produced in New York for Performa 11 last fall. These environments not only establish a sense of illicit spectatorship, they also allow the artists to indulge their fascination with design and to expose the ways architecture reinforces power, all the while creating a mise-en-scène for their narratives. Still, none of these structures, not even the freestanding apartment block they constructed inside the ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art in Karlsruhe for their show “Celebrity—The One & The Many” in 2010, can match the extravagance of their studio, in Berlin’s Neukölln borough.

A converted water-pumping station dating to 1924 that they bought from the city some six years ago, the boxy construction, with its tall, narrow windows emphasizing the height of the brick façade, looks like a modernist industrial cathedral dropped into a sleepy, residential district. One enters directly into the enormous main production room, where the windows zoom up like zips of light to the ceiling three stories above. Marbled green-and-black tiles running around the lower five feet of the perimeter reinforce how much the towering white walls dwarf you. A series of walkways and a long platform with a line of desks for clerical work stretch through the space high above the floor. Such is their concern for the comfort of their employees that the artists have rigged these platforms with cables and pulleys, allowing the people and their desks to shift position with the sun.

On the day I visit, the floor below looks more like a packing facility than a fabrication shop. Boxes and crates are piled against the walls and near a thick rectangular pillar. One slatted crate, stamped “artwork: handle with care,” is balanced on its smashed corner, from which Styrofoam peanuts spill out; the joke of course being that the crate is itself the work. A nearby bunk bed whose top bunk — mattress and pillow included — faces downward (and which I recognize as a prop from Happy Days in the Art World) reminds me that Elmgreen & Dragset’s pieces often feature doublings and mirrored images. One thinks, too, in this regard of the paired “houses” from “The Collectors” at the 2009 Venice Biennale. With a lampooning intent, such couplets frequently reflect the “real” world back at the art world, and vice versa. The studio itself was conceived as a place to merge art and life. “We don’t want to have these professional transitions between what is private and what is public,” says Dragset, gesturing to the large main space. “We use this as a showroom sometimes or for hanging out with the staff.” The irony, however — and with Elmgreen & Dragset there is usually the inflection of an arched brow — is that the studio isn’t really where their art is made.

“When we make our works,” says Elmgreen, “very often we’re on the road. It’s much more inspiring when you travel.” “Here [in the studio] everyone needs us,” interjects Dragset. “If you get an idea, you need to forget about the problems of executing it — you can’t concentrate on how many screws should be in the work or will the bronze corrode or the gold leaf fall off,” Elmgreen continues. “Those are the things we do here, the troubleshooting, making it look good, changing it, talking with workshop fabricators. Then when we’re away, we play.”

Elmgreen & Dragset collaborate best while traveling in part because they no longer live in the same city. Indeed, if their work tends to suggest dark narratives — the death of a collector, the breakdown of the welfare state, the anomie that celebrity obsession can visit upon “the many” — their own story is one of perseverance in the face of adversity. They met in Copenhagen in 1995, when Michael Elmgreen, who was born in the city in 1961, was writing and performing poetry, and Ingar Dragset, a Norwegian born in 1969, was studying theater. For the first 10 years of their artistic collaboration, they were a couple. By the time they bought the Neukölln studio, they had broken up. Remarkably, their professional relationship has survived, even flourished.

For a time both men lived in the building, each occupying one of the five stories that make up the rear section of the pumping station. About four years ago Elmgreen, who has boyish blond hair and a dour expression, moved to London. “I got fed up with Berlin,” he explains. “I’m always having to move every 10 or 12 years because I think, ‘Oh no, it was much better at that point in time.’ The city is not going to change, so if someone is going to change, it must be me, no?” He’s able to escape to a holiday home in Barcelona and travels to Berlin for work 8 to 10 days each month. The rest of the time the two keep in touch via Skype, e-mail, and telephone. (They communicate in Danish.)

When he’s in town, Elmgreen sometimes stays in a bedroom on the top floor of the studio, off a capacious living room with a steep A-frame roof, dark wood floors, and just a few items of furniture: A stuffed white goat watches over three sleek but welcoming chairs arranged under a skylight. The third and fourth floors serve as guest rooms. Dragset, who resides elsewhere in Berlin with his boyfriend, the artist Simon Fujiwara, keeps an office on the first floor. The stairway linking the floors is lined, somewhat haphazardly, with paintings, photographs, and small sculptures the men have bought from younger artists.

“The whole idea of the building was to not be too professional,” says Dragset, dark and bearded, yet with a sunny disposition. “At some point we had 12 to 15 people employed here, and I felt like I wasn’t an artist anymore — I was a director, and I don’t want that. Now we’re down to six people who have been working here for a long time — it’s very much a big family.”

Communal lunches take place in the long, combined kitchen and dining area on the second floor. Everyone takes turns cooking. Today, while enjoying frikadelle — wonderfully savory Danish meatballs—with a green salad and potatoes, I inquire about a monochrome white painting propped against a wall. Elmgreen tells me it’s a framed, square layer of paint removed from a gallery wall in the Guggenheim Museum, in New York, and mounted on canvas. It’s one of a series of such paint swathes taken from museums around the world that forms half of “Harvest,” their second solo show at Victoria Miro, which remains on view at the London gallery through November 10. (They also work with Galerie Perrotin, in Paris, and Taka Ishii Gallery, in Tokyo.) Dragset explains that they hired one of Germany’s best conservators, someone “who normally takes down frescoes, very precious,” to remove the paint samples.

Coinciding with the duo’s exhibition at Victoria Miro is their ominously titled installation Omna Una Manet Nox (“One Night Awaits Us All”), 2012, at the London flagship store of Louis Vuitton. A golden vulture surveys an otherwise inviting four-poster bed, suggesting that the “one night” may be endless.

Elmgreen cuts in: “What’s fun is that white is considered neutral, but from institution to institution, the color tones, the structure, the kind of paint they use is completely different. So together they have this painterly quality where it looks like some weird, ’50s modernist painter who got upset with his monochromes and wanted to test out the different kind of ambiences of the white.”

The effect, I admit, is stunning — and not nearly as freakish as the stuffed vulture that has been staring us down throughout lunch. What’s with him, I ask. Elmgreen says they’ve decided to include the figure of the vulture in every show they do from now on, even if it’s just a photo in the bathroom: “We call him The Critic.” There’s a white vulture in the Victoria Miro exhibition and, at the Louis Vuitton flagship store on London’s New Bond Street, a golden one perches atop a white four-poster bed in an Elmgreen & Dragset installation on view through November.

Despite their popularity, the duo has suffered their share of slings and arrows in recent years. Even before its unveiling in Helsingør, Denmark (Hamlet’s Elsinore), last June, Han, their male counterpart to Copenhagen’s bronze sculpture The Little Mermaid, incited front-page condemnations. “That is really a big surprise for us,” says Elmgreen, “because we thought we were making a very subtle, poetic work that would be playing with and challenging the perception of the history of the two cities.” Han, which means “he” in Danish, sits in the same position as The Little Mermaid, upon a rock that is the same shape as hers, but he and the rock are fabricated in stainless steel, which mirrors the sky and sea. And he’s nude.

“But it doesn’t have a fish tail. And it’s really not erotic at all,” says Dragset. “He’s just naked, like she is, and she’s been sitting there naked for I don’t know how many years now.”

“We didn’t expect, in 2012, the population in a country like Denmark to be so upset about a different masculine image,” says Dragset.

Days before Han was unveiled, Happy Days in the Art World, translated into Danish, had its premiere at the Royal Danish Theater in Copenhagen. When first shown in New York, the play received decidedly mixed reviews. Like many people, I wondered why they’d done a theater work in the first place. Question posed, Elmgreen took the bait: “Part of trying to do things in different ways and to work with new media is also trying not to be lazy, not just do the routine thing — but it’s also not being afraid of failing.” Warming to the subject, he continued, “The art world has become so much like any other field today, people are hyper-afraid of doing something that is not functioning, of making a fiasco. It’s a pity, because all the really surprising stuff comes out of not being afraid. And who fucking cares if you fail? I love to see my colleagues fail — and they love to see me fail. It’s not a world disaster. It’s only because of vanity that you’re afraid of failing. If you try to cut off that vanity a bit, something fantastic might happen now and then.”

Sprawling throughout the lower level of an exclusive apartment complex in the Seoul Forest Park area of the South Korean capital is the boutique, invitation-only art fair, Gallery Seoul, now in its second year. A television crew trails an immaculately dressed couple. The VIP lounge is overflowing. Watching it all with a stately air, Hyun-Sook Lee sits beside a Jean Prouvé designed gueridon pedestal table from 1946 at the booth belonging to Kukje, the gallery she founded 30 years ago and has built into one of the most powerful in Asia. The fair has been open for less than an hour, and Lee is generally optimistic if noncommittal about its success. “It is not bad or good so far,” she says, despite having obtained reserves on both Anish Kapoor’s striking wall sculpture Twist Wave Oval, 2011, and Bill Viola’s video Tempest (Study for the Raft), 2005, playing in a purpose-built screening room at the back of the booth.

Lee has the practiced patience of a seasoned dealer. By nature she is reserved and modest, which belies her tremendous strength of character. In three decades of dealing she has quietly, steadily assembled a roster of stellar artists. In addition to Kapoor and Viola, she represents or has shown many of the best European and American artists of the last half century, including Ghada Amer, Louise Bourgeois, Cecily Brown, Alexander Calder, Eva Hesse, Anselm Kiefer, Paul McCarthy, Joan Mitchell, and Lee Ufan. At the same time she has helped broaden the international audience for more than one generation of Korean artists, including Haegue Yang, Kimsooja, Gimhongsok, and Hong Seung-Hye. Education, she says, is her real business.

Lee stays at the fair for a few more hours before politely excusing herself to a client and heading across town to the Kukje campus in the historic Samcheong-dong district, near the Gyeongbok Palace. In addition to the gallery, which her daughter Suzie and son Charles help run, she has a restaurant, wine bar, and café where fresh bread is baked daily. Suzie manages the gallery with her mother while Charles looks after the rest of the business. Altogether Lee employs around 80 people, roughly 30 of whom are dedicated to the gallery business. In New York, her eldest daughter, Tina Kim, operates an eponymous gallery (though the programming is entirely independent).

Opened this past spring, the latest addition to the Seoul complex is an exhibition building designed by the New York–based team of Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu. Known as Solid Objectives — Idenburg Liu or SOIL for short — the firm designed Frieze New York’s ballyhooed giant tent on Randall’s Island. Located just steps from the two more traditional buildings that have long hosted the gallery’s shows, the new Kukje building is an architectural marvel: Bead-blasted, stainless-steel chain-link mesh — with more than 510,000 hand- beaten links — covers a boxlike polished concrete structure. Inside, the ground floor boasts 1,500 square feet of unobstructed display space and a 19-foot-high ceiling. A theater and administration and catering spaces sit below grade, allowing the structure to conform to the scale, if not the style, of the low-rise, urban neighborhood. The roof doubles as a terrace, offering views over Seoul, while skylights filter natural light into the interior. The design and construction of K3—the other two buildings are called K1 and K2 — took three years and cost around $4 million. The building won several architecture and design awards, including, in 2011, the award for distinguished unbuilt project from the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

Paul McCarthy’s “Nine Dwarves” exhibition, drawn from his successful “White Snow” series, inaugurated K3 in May. Based on characters from the 1937 Disney animated film, McCarthy’s grotesque versions of the benign fellows, rendered in garishly bright silicone, filled the gallery. His giant Apple Tree BoyApple Tree Girl, 2010, in painted aluminum, presided over the courtyard. Lee says she chose to launch the building with McCarthy because his work embodies the scope of Kukje — the name means “international” in Korean — and its commitment to showing difficult new art. “I have made it my mission to introduce the best international artists to Korea and also the best Korean artists to the world,” Lee says. Subsequent solo shows have featured Bourgeois, Calder, and Kimsooja.

Lee and her husband, the businessman Byong Soo, were passionate collectors long before she became a dealer. By the 1970s the two were amassing holdings of antiquities and traditional Korean ceramics and modernist Korean paintings. A gallery seemed the logical next step. “My tastes changed over time, and opening a gallery space would give me the opportunity to see new art and expand my own collection,” Lee says. “But Korea at that time was pretty conservative and everyone in my family, including my husband, was against the idea of me — a woman — starting a gallery.” In 1982 she opened a small space on Insa-dong, a popular shopping street, where she showed Korean masters working in the modern tradition, including Ucchin Chang, Youngkuk Yoo, Jonghwa Byun, Chicho Oh, and Kwan Nam. “I really liked meeting artists and as a young collector I often went out of my way to meet them,” Lee recalls. “So when I started, it was a small, salon-like space where I worked directly with artists to put together special exhibitions. The artists were very helpful and gradually everyone became excited about my gallery. I was the only space exclusively showing oil painting at the time — most of the other galleries favored Asian ink paintings.”

Korean society underwent a transformation in the late 1980s following the ouster of the military dictatorship of General Chun Doo-hwan and a return to democracy. The nation opened its borders and claimed the international stage as Seoul hosted the 1988 summer Olympic games. Travel restrictions were loosened, international import and export controls were relaxed, and Koreans were returning from vacations abroad with a newly discovered taste for contemporary art. This emerging generation of collectors — bolstered by the support of acquisitions by newly built museums — helped confirm Lee’s expanded ambitions. In 1987 she moved Kukje into a larger space, a converted contemporary home in Samcheong-dong. “When branching out to Western artists, I began with the exhibitions of those already acknowledged as historically important,” Lee explains. “There were many Koreans who had studied abroad, so by this time there was a small but growing community that was familiar with the artists — but they were still quite surprised at first to see exhibitions in Korea. Showing these seminal artists also encouraged museums in Korea to branch out to Western art.”

Initially Lee collaborated with New York dealers like Paula Cooper, André Emmerich, and Arne Glimcher. Later she worked more directly with artists. “The artists liked her,” her daughterSuzie told me, “for she was enthusiastic and genuinely interested in their work.” Through the 1990s Lee organized exhibitions of Jonathan Borofsky, Bourgeois, Anthony Caro, John Chamberlain, Jim Dine, Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, Robert Ryman, Tony Smith, Frank Stella, Rudolf Stingel, and Cy Twombly. A friendship with the preeminent English dealer Anthony d’Offay enabled her to show Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer. “At first it was difficult to contact Western artists of that stature, which is why I worked with foreign dealers when I began,” Lee recalls. “But these dialogues led to reciprocal exchanges with Western galleries, such as when the Korean artist Cho Duck Hyun had a solo show with Emmerich. I also worked with Korean artists who were living abroad, like Yang.”            

As the reputation of Kukje grew, so did its footprint. The original home had been renovated and expanded over the years, but by the new millennium the gallery had outgrown it. A three-story modern gallery, dubbed K2, was built across a small street in 2007. With the addition this year of K3, the buildings define a courtyard space that Lee plans to use for outdoor events. Engaging all three venues, the gallery will maintain a program of roughly 15 shows per year in addition to participating in 7 to 10 art fairs.

As the gallery grows, Lee continues to nurture a broader taste in her clientele, as she has done for Bill Viola, for example. Over the last decade, Viola has become a prominent gallery artist, shown regularly at fairs worldwide, as well as in Seoul. “At first the concept of showing, let alone selling, a moving image — not a painting — was difficult,” Lee says. “But I worked hard to make sure the Korean audience understood Viola’s ideas. One thing that has made a big impact is that the artist has visited Korea and given lectures, which have always been packed with hundreds of enthusiastic attendees.” Speaking more broadly of the developing tastes in the country, Lee says, “Korean audiences are very sophisticated and there has been keen interest in contemporary art since the beginning. But I must admit, it has taken 30 years of work to foster the committed collector base that now exists.”

Like many dealers, Lee’s personal collection reflects her relationships with artists and designers. Her art is distributed among various offices, her holiday home on Jeju Island, and her main residence, not far from the gallery, in the Seongbuk-dong area. There, the first artwork you see upon entering is a work on paper by Bourgeois, showing a female figure. It is inscribed with a personal dedication to the dealer. “We were friends, I like to think,” Lee says. “She was so kind and supportive of me and the gallery.”

Hanging near the Bourgeois, Mitchell’s painting Afternoon, 1969–70, leads to the living room, where three more paintings — Andy Warhol’s Flowers, 1964; Ed Ruscha’s Busters’ Land, 1993; and Anselm Reyle’s Black Earth, 2008 — mingle with a pair of short-legged “toad” armchairs in mahogany, circa 1925, by Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann, as well as a Jean Royère daybed, from 1940, and a new plank table by Mira Nakashima. Works by Stephan Balkenhol, Brown, Hesse, Roni Horn, Yeondoo Jung, and Yang are on view upstairs.

The kitchen and the dining room also showcase art and design. A dozen Prouvé standard chairsfrom1951–52 surround a 1960 Pierre Jeanneret dining table. On the wall behind the head of the table hangs Kapoor’s Up Side Down (Green), 2008. Opposite a wall of glass that looks onto an atrium are bookshelves from 1961 by Charlotte Perriand that hang above a rare credenza, a collaboration between Perriand and Prouvé, called 1 Bahut à 5 portes, 1958–60. Nearby is Lee Ufan’s From point, 1980, a quiet painting that is easily overlooked. Lee began collecting the design pieces decades ago. “Some of the designers I became interested in were working during the same period as artists I had worked with,” she says, “so it was natural for me to start looking at the works of modern designers.”

The house, a two-story rectangular, ultramodern concrete structure with living areas downstairs opening onto a garden, was designed by Lee’s son-in-law Jaewoong Chung, the husband of her daughter Tina Kim. A design dealer as well as an architect, Chung is collaborating with Lee to ramp up the market for design in Korea.

Kukje hosts a yearly design show: Exhibitions have been devoted to Prouvé, Perriand, George Nakashima, and, most recently, Joris Laarman.“Architecture, furniture, and art are all linked, and these important connections inspired me eventually to organize the design exhibition each year,” Lee says. “These shows became a chance to link a culture’s intellectual milieu with its artistic movements. Also, these shows are an excellent opportunity to showcase how one can live with art and pair it with design.”

Lee herself is most at ease in her home, living with art and design. Justifiably proud of what she has achieved, she has no plans to slow down. “There is so much to do,” she says, over a cup of green tea, “and every day it feels like there is more and more, as the art world gets bigger and more global.” I nod my agreement, but I’m not worried: Nobody I know is better prepared for the challenges than she.

This article was published in the November 2012 issue of Art+Auction.

For her commission at the 2007 Sharjah Biennial, the Egyptian-German artist Susan Hefuna conceived a site-specific installation titled Mirage 07. Based on the boxlike, rectangular billboards shilling for Western products and lifestyle that have been erupting across the landscape in neighboring Dubai, her 26-foot-long rendition in super-reflective gray glass was installed in the middle of a square in the city’s heritage area, where it bore silent witness to the foot-traffic to-and-fro, allowing passersby to watch themselves as if on a movie screen, the banalities of daily life supplanting the exigencies of capitalism. “There’s not a lot of street life in the Emirates,” notes Hefuna, “but in this area there was a lot, because it was near a mosque. And this was like a mural, or a living video.” But come 4 p.m., when the blinding desert light began to settle in the sky, the box went transparent, and one could see the word mirage sandblasted onto its back wall: partly an existentialist gag, but also a serious comment on the contingency of our experience of reality. As is typical of Hefuna’s works, it began as a mirror for her viewers and ended as a kind of lens for normally invisible cultural constructions.

Because Hefuna’s oeuvre is truly multimedia — she works in photography, digital video, sculpture, drawing, and what could be termed participatory installations — the Sharjah commission is as representative as any of her works before or since. It certainly encompasses some of her abiding vectors of inquiry: an anthropological fascination with public space, an affinity for architectural models, and an interest in the effects of passing time and the slipperiness of meaning when context changes. Hans Ulrich Obrist, with whom Hefuna has done projects for the Serpentine Gallery in London (including a tent-based work group at Hyde Park’s Speaker’s Corner during the 2011 Arab Spring), has described her practice as an exploration of “parallel realities.”

It would be simplistic to state that Hefuna’s work springs from the unbridgeable space between her dual cultural identities, but it would not be false. In fact, the artist herself would go further: “My background is the reason I became an artist,” she says. “I have these two roots.” Her father comes from a small community near Alexandria, in the Nile Delta, where the villagers still trek daily into the cotton and rice fields, their rhythm of life unchanged for centuries. Hefuna, 40, spent the first eight years of her life there before moving with her family to Graz, Austria, nearer to her mother’s native Germany, returning to Egypt in the summers. “I always had this experience that I was the same person, but I was in different places, and people saw me from the outside differently. As a child, this isn’t easy. You just notice something is different, and you can’t explain things.” For as long as she can remember, she has used drawing to express herself. “I drew these themes on paper, for myself, to have my own escape. It was just a tool,” she explains.Susan Hefuna Uses Simple Strategy to Create Perspective-Changing Works

Naturally, she ended up in art school, in Karlsruhe and then Frankfurt, where she studied new media under the semiotics and performance specialist Peter Weibel in the early 1990s. True to this background, Hefuna brings a keen sense of the uses of mediated images and an understanding of how our habitual movements through the material world might be mapped and re-presented to us. Early in her career Hefuna developed an interest in the formal and metaphorical qualities of the mashrabiya, the traditional Arabic window screens that shield a home’s female occupants from the street’s gaze while allowing them to see outside. She began taking photographs, including self-portraits, using a pinhole camera, often with a mashrabiya visible in the foreground or the background. With their blurred focus and incidental intrusions that come from the pinhole’s long exposure, the images, such as 4 Women 4 Views, 2001, tickle the line between faithful documentation of a subjective experience and a kind of nostalgic, orientalized vision of Cairo and the Nile Delta, depending on who is doing the looking. She found that the subtexts that had always been present in her work were thrown into sharp relief when the works were exhibited outside of Europe for the first time. “The year 1992 was really a key moment,” she says of the first time she showed in Cairo, at Akhnaton Gallery. “I became much more aware that it depends on the viewer what they see in my work. There are different layers, which some people see and others don’t.”

In 2004 Hefuna began designing actual mashrabiyas, custom-patterned pieces that incorporate a word or a phrase — in English, Arabic, or both — drawing each one out at full scale and commissioning copies from the dwindling number of craftsmen in Cairo who still knew the ancient trade. These she hangs directly on the wall, like a sign or a gridded Minimalist painting. Hefuna notes that the first time she showed the screens in the West, “people only viewed them as abstract.” But in a different context, “the same work becomes totally different.” (She compares them to the Egyptian singer Oum Kalthoum’s inflected vocal stylings, in which “words are like images, how they can contain different meanings even in the same language.”) For instance, some of her mashrabiyas contain the Arabic word ana, or “myself,” a claim of subjectivity that Hefuna seized in 2006, when she was teaching at Helwan University and the German University in Cairo and chafing under the social strictures brought on by political tension. “I had the feeling that nobody takes a stand, not even the smallest — we don’t even say ‘I,’ ” she notes. Even “ana,” when uttered by people she met on the street and videotaped, was enough to garner police inquiries when she showed the footage at Cairo’s Townhouse Gallery.

The notion of the mashrabiya as a membrane that both deflects and admits meaning would later be echoed in Mirage 07, a kind of live enactment of Hefuna’s “Crossroads” digital video works, which she began in 2002. On a visit home to the Nile River Valley, she made a two-hour film from a perch at her parents’ house above an intersection in town. The effect is oddly mesmerizing: Tunic-clad villagers come and go, greet one another, depart — nothing much happens, exactly, which points up the ultimate inscrutability of “the other.” In 2006 Hefuna upped the ante when she was invited to exhibit in a show in a church in Frankfurt and made Via fenestra, an hour-and-a-half-long video of herself sitting in a chair in the square outside the church, a surprisingly harrowing experience. “If you sit in Egypt on a chair in the street it’s normal; nobody cares,” she explains. “In Germany, it was even scary.” People accosted her, asked if she was a Gypsy, demanded to know what she was doing there, whether she was religious. “I didn’t move, I didn’t talk, I was like a sculpture,” she says. “It was a very interesting experience, and also very tense. You use a very simple thing like a chair and put it somewhere in another culture, and people project on you.” But her audiences are “not innocent,” she adds: “If you view something, you are responsible for what you see.” More recent works actively explore that implication, as in the series of short videos filmed surveillance-style above the Edgware Road street markets in London’s “Little Cairo” in 2010, currently screening at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design through January 20.

In the same way that her videos unfurl in real time and space, so do Hefuna’s ink drawings, where she says ideas for her works in other media begin. Small in scale, about 20 by 10 inches, and usually incorporating a second or third layer in tracing paper, they feature dots and grids or systems of lines that can be read as highly subjective architectural renderings. In fact, Hefuna uses the cities in which she works as references, mood-setters, for the drawings, which, though strictly nonrepresentational, nonetheless betray certain hallmarks of her surroundings. A series done in Istanbul in 2011, for example, seems somehow to contain the narrowness of the buildings and streets, claustrophobia mixed with soaring height. “Before I begin a series of drawings, I do nothing for a few days; I just go walk outside, and I have to have my own atmosphere,” she explains. Once her mind is stilled or lulled into a meditative, trancelike state, she begins to draw. She takes an automatic approach, starting with a thin brush and a single dot, “and then the line is unfolding” in a single stroke — no planning, no redos.

Draftsmanship plays a key role in Hefuna’s first cross-disciplinary collaboration, an exhibition and performance piece with the choreographer Luca Veggetti titled Notationotations, which will be presented at The Drawing Center in New York in September 2013. It takes the dot and sets it in motion. Set against a series of drawings done in New York and a new “Crossroads” video work shot at the corner of Broadway and Broome Street, the first part of the performance has Hefuna sketching on the surface of a stage covered in sand, which Veggetti will overlay with his own interpretive steps. In the second half of the piece, Hefuna draws with chalk directly on the miked floor, only to have her lines blurred by two dancers’ shuffles: a schematic conjured in three dimensions even as it is erased.

Working with Veggetti has been fruitful for Hefuna, pushing her to create at a much larger size. Moreover, she is for the first time working “within” the drawings, an experience that, like her Frankfurt church video, has united her mind and body. It’s for this reason that they maintain a specific intimacy. “I use very simple things,” she says. “Very simple things that show complex things.”

This article was published in the November 2012 issue of Modern Painters.

There are few Americans in the international winners’ circle of blue-chip modern designers, but George Nakashima is now certainly one of them. “He’s the only American designer who is popular among Europeans and in Asia,” says Robert Aibel, of Moderne Gallery in Philadelphia, a leading specialist. “He’s popular all over the world.”

Nakashima, a Japanese-American woodworker and MIT-trained architect, has taken his place alongside Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann, Carlo Mollino, Charlotte Perriand, Jean Prouvé, Marc Newson, and others who constitute the heart of the current market for high-end collectible design. Prices for Nakashima’s extravagantly naturalistic furniture rose substantially in the 2000s, up to a record $822,400 for Arthur and Evelyn Krosnick’s Arlyn dining table in redwood burl and black walnut, offered at Sotheby’s New York in 2006. Although this high has not been repeated since the market’s crash in 2008, unlike some of his peers’, Nakashima’s values have recovered and returned to a level enjoyed in 2003 and 2004.

Influenced as a young designer by the spiritual integrity of the Shakers and as a maturing woodworker by the “soul” of the trees whose wood he used, Nakashima worked from his studio in New Hope, Pennsylvania, for 44 years until his death in 1990, executing commissions for Rockefellers as well as for appreciators of more modest means. The great value of his objects lies in their inherent uniqueness: Large or small, grand or chaste, each exhibits the skill, philosophy, and signature of the designer responding to the wood’s silent guidance, what Nakashima called its “particular destiny.” And the works’ broad appeal crosses stylistic boundaries. Rudy Ciccarello, who bought the record-setting Arlyn table, is an Arts & Crafts collector; it was his first modern design acquisition.

WHAT THE MARKET WANTS NOW

Though Nakashima did much clean, straight-edge work, what collectors favor now are the “free edge” pieces that put the wood and the woodworker on dramatic display through inkblot-like shapes, swirling burls and grains, fissures, and Nakashima’s signature butterfly joints. Several of his half-dozen design groups, most notably the Conoid and Minguren I and II series, feature these elements, and the forms that show them best are dining, coffee, and end tables, though cabinets, sideboards, benches, and lamps can also have them. Almost all of Nakashima’s seating is straight-edged, though there are exceptions.

THE GOLDEN ERA

Recognized as a master craftsman in the United States and Japan by the mid 1970s, Nakashima continued to refine his techniques and design families and to invest in more exotic woods. Meaghan Roddy, a specialist in the design department at Phillips de Pury & Company in New York, which sold a 1981 buckeye burl walnut table for $104,500 in December 2010, confirms that output from the ’70s and ’80s is considered prime: “It’s the same designs, but more money, better wood, and he’s honed his craft.”

GOOD, BETTER, BEST

The 2000s boom flushed an abundance of previously unseen material — some say an overabundance — from the homes of Nakashima’s original patrons. Pieces are offered each season at Christie’s and Sotheby’s in New York and larger regional outlets like Los Angeles Modern Auctions and Rago Arts and Auction Center in Lambertville, New Jersey (which has historically enjoyed a surfeit of material because of its proximity to New Hope), but the houses have become increasingly discriminating about what they offer. Experts agree that Nakashima is very much a market of “good, better, best,” and buyers should shop accordingly. “Start with the wood,” advises Richard Wright, director of the Wright auction house in Chicago. “Is it an exceptional piece of wood? Is it an excellent execution of its form? The best pieces have fantastic proportion.” Then, he says, consider provenance and condition.

THE STUDIO SURVIVES

Since Nakashima’s death at age 85, his daughter, Mira, has run the studio, which produces approximately 65 designs on commission — including classics of George’s and originals of hers, such as the Keisho collection — from an expansive inventory of wood, some of it selected by George himself. Although he rarely signed and dated his work unless asked, more usually writing the client’s name in black marker on the underside of the wood they had chosen — that mark, an order card, and frequently a shop drawing are now the keys to identifying a Nakashima piece. Posthumous production is signed and dated. Very occasionally, a work begun by George and completed by Mira after his death is attributed to both.

GAUGING PRICE

As for any blue-chip designer, exceptional examples will fetch exceptional prices, though they are lower today than the records set in 2007 and 2008. According to James Zemaitis, a senior vice president of 20th-century design at Sotheby’s, Nakashima’s coffee tables, perennial favorites for their manageable size as well as their beauty, might reach $150,000 for a best-of-the-best example, but the bulk are priced between $20,000 and $30,000. On October 28, Rago will offer a 1982–83 Minguren II table in French olive ash burl and walnut with an estimate of $30,000 to $50,000. Another popular model, the Kornblut case, saw prices rise in the mid 2000s but should be under $40,000 today, says Aibel. Because of the amount of material being offered, comparison shopping among sources is useful. If the asking price seems questionable for something not too out of the ordinary, check the studio’s catalogue. Contemporary studio commissions, which remain in demand, basically set the prices for standard examples, even many vintage pieces. The romance of the process—going to the studio, selecting the wood, and working with Mira as a patron — is far more in step with the Nakashima heritage than mere furniture shopping.

To see furniture works by George Nakashima, click on the slideshow.

This article was published in the November 2012 issue of Art+Auction.

Name: Laura Letinsky

Age: 50

Occupation: Artist and Professor at the University of Chicago

City/Neighborhood: Chicago/Hyde Park

Current Exhibition: “Still Life Photographs” at the Denver Art Museum, 100 West 14th Avenue Parkway, Denver, Colorado, through March 24, 2013.

Your current exhibition, “Still Life Photographs” at the Denver Art Museum, charts your career over a 15-year period. How did your interests and style change over that period of time?

I’ve shifted from an earlier interest, belief really, in the notion of origin. I mean the idea that what is before the lens is a point of origin. Instead, I have come to understand that which is pictured as a set of ideas about how to see. 

Your subjects are half-empty glasses, tableclothes dirty with crumbs, and unwashed dishes. What interests you about the refuse of our meals? Is every meal a potential still life?

Yes, every meal is a potential still life, but only so far as anything and everything is fodder for the camera. 

In terms of my interest in photographing after the meal, I was interested in the photograph as an event always in the past, only as the past. These ideas have been beautifully articulated by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida. Photographing this scene after meals were eaten was a way to think about remains, stains, and what resists, including what resists photography.

In your most recent work, you photograph cut-out photographs of food and objects arranged like still lifes, rather than the objects themselves. Why add this layer of separation from your subjects?

It’s less as a separation from reality and more of an actuality in that the way we come to know the world is largely through photographic media. A tomato has less to do with an aesthetic interaction and more about the idea of  tomato, hence the red flavorless pulp we call “tomato” that gets used to adorn salads. 

If you didn’t photograph food or domestic spaces, what would you photograph? 

It’s easier to answer what I’d do if I didn’t photograph or make art. Private eye? Farming is similarly appealing, as I’m uncertain of results instead beguiled by process.

Your work recalls the Dennis Severs House in London, where the late artist carefully arranged chaos out of objects as a living, highly atmospheric still life. Have you ever been there?

No, it sounds amazing. I’ll be in London in January and will go see it. I love the Gardner in Boston. I wish I could claim that highly-atmospheric and controlled arrangements typified my space, but instead I have to settle with chaos, despite my best efforts!

What project are you working on now?

I’m continuing with my photographic work, building on what I’ve begun with the “Ill Form Void Full” work. I’m hoping to do some travelling, particularly in Istanbul as I’m interested in its place as a juncture between pictorial conventions of Islamic decorative practice and Western European narrative depictions. I don’t want to be simplistic in my observations, and so want to do more research about this as it relates to gender, architecture, domesticity, and psychology. 

Describe a typical day in your life as an artist.

Wake up too early because of kids and daily demands; think about what to make for dinner; take a run while I mentally organize my day; grab a breakfast with my family of my homemade sourdough bread, strong coffee, and fruit; everyone off to work and school; the suck of email, or class prep and if I’m lucky; off to the studio by mid-morning where I’ll work til I pick up my sons; if summer, the garden, if winter, the grocery store; an hour or so of cooking, dinner (lately fixated on learning about various Asian cuisines); kids’ bath and bed; another email foray; an hour of relatively mindless, but pretty decent, television, or if I’m extra lucky, a movie; a bit of reading, usually the “New Yorker” even if several years old; bed. Repeat with variations due to teaching, administration, exhibition, grant application, holiday, etc. 

What’s the last show that you saw?

“Danh Vo” at The Renaissance Society.

What’s the last show that surprised you? Why?

Chen Yujun at Boers Li Gallery in Beijing. They are incredible paintings and the installation of the work set up a strange narrative structure.   

What’s your favorite place to see art?

Definitely The Renaissance Society here in Chicago. Also the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the Galleria Accademia in Venice, the Cluny Museum in Paris, the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall … so many!

What’s the most indispensable item in your studio?

Light. Then, scissors. 

Where are you finding ideas for your work these days?

I’ve become a bit more of a recluse with the writers Gertrude Stein, Diane Williams, Lynne Tillman, Lauren Berlant, David Foster Wallace, Lydia Davis, Anne Carson, and Wisława Szymborska. And then a mix of music from Rodney Graham to Arvo Pärt to Sigur Rós to Nick Cave to Danger Mouse to Nina Simone. In terms of artists, I have my go-to’s, including and especially Giorgio Morandi and E. J. Bellocq, as well as trying to pay attention to “naïve” historical photography, interested in what was “accidentally” included in the picture frame and how these tropes have become endemic to our current predilection for ambiguity.

Also delving into long-term, cyclical interest in decoration and ornamentation with Loos, of course, and Derrida, and others.

Do you collect anything?

I try not to have anything so valuable that it hurts if it’s lost. It’s not possible, and I do have objects that although not of marketable value, have great sentimental value. I’m not methodical in my collecting, rather it’s things I adore. I’ve amassed sets of dishes that are different whites and ivory, but similar because of a gold line around the rim which has extended into other not-quite-matching-but-related porcelain and glassware. I love books and covet them. My grandmother was a seamstress and I grew up loving fabric; I’m ecstatically excited in fabric stores and have yards and yards of fabric with big, big plans. Clothes are a bad, bad habit, with the Belgians a big, and expensive, favorite along with Rick Owens and Watanabe.

What’s the last artwork you purchased?

Valerie Snobeck is actually the only art I’ve purchased. A drunken auction night. I prefer to do trades with artist friends. Bartering is the way to go!

What’s the first artwork you ever sold?

A “Venus Inferred” print to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, bless Anne Tucker. 

What’s the weirdest thing you ever saw happen in a museum or gallery?

I think I read, what happens in the art world stays in the art world. 

What’s your art-world pet peeve?

Taking art too seriously. Taking art too flippantly. 

What’s your favorite post-gallery watering hole or restaurant?

In Chicago, Maria’s, Avec, Publican, or Big Star, if food is involved. My house. In New York, more of a pre-watering hole, Tía Pol in Chelsea or The Standard.

Do you have a museum/gallery going routine?

It’s different at home than when traveling. At home it’s more frenetic, dipping in here and there, when and where I’m able, whereas when I travel, I’m more likely to make days of art-seeing along with other forms of cultural tourism including, or rather, especially, food. 

What’s the last great book you read?

Anne Carson, “Autobiography of Red.” A re-read actually.

What work of art do you wish you owned?

Garry Winogrand’s  “Hollywood Boulevard, 1969” and Félix González-Torres’s “Untitled (Perfect Lovers),” with the two clocks.

What would you do to get it?

The longing is part of the pleasure, no? 

What international art destination do you most want to visit?

Istanbul is on the top of my list right now, along with Mexico City, but India is the ultimate destination that I feel I’m saving myself for, or maybe working up for. Art is a part of it, but really, it’s the entire culture of these places that interests me. 

What under-appreciated artist, gallery, or work do you think people should know about?

Can we play “marry kill fuck” instead?

Click here for a slideshow of Laura Letinsky’s work

Since founding her label Zero + Maria Cornejo out of a Nolita storefront in 1998, 50-year-old Chilean-born designer Maria Cornejo has won hearts over with her sophisticated, sculptural, functional creations, which incorporate a little bit of edge. You can get an idea about what her clothes say from the women who wear them – Cindy Sherman, Sofia Coppola, and Michelle Obama are among her many admirers. Since the beginning, fashion editors like W’s Stefano Tonchi and Harper’s Bazaar’s Mary Alice Stephenson have been championing work.

This Thursday, Cornejo and her label take to the world of performance art as one of the sponsors of Performa’s elaborate 2012 gala, Relâche – The Party. Expect to see a few of the soirée’s guests wearing her intricate designs. For this edition of the Tastemaker, Cornejo tells ARTINFO about her anti-aging weapon, why she loves Shelter Island, and her current clutch of choice.

Click on the slideshow to see Maria Cornejo’s Tastemaker picks.

Visit Artinfo.com/fashion for more fashion and style news.

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