Transforming a City Through Creativity

The Warhol Museum's Dan Law on building a 21st-Century arts district, Andy's real legacy, and an ambitious new plan to keep innovators in Pittsburgh.

It’s been a tough few weeks (months? Years?) for many of us. The world feels unsteady for so many reasons, and I have few answers.

Part of the joy of writing this newsletter has been speaking with folks who are trying, in their own ways, through their talents, skills, and hard work, to make things just a little bit better, brighter, or more interesting. There’s so much to be anxious about that it can feel easier to step back and retreat. And while mutual aid, direction action, and community engagement are so important, so is finding joy when you can. For me, writing Slow Ghost has been such a joy, and I want to thank all of you for continuing to read, subscribe, share, and champion this tiny little part of the internet.

As always, if you know a creator we should highlight, contact me at slowghost@substack.com or in the comments.

~Laura

Slow Ghost logo: Tyler Lafreniere. Image courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum.

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Read
How media shaped the queen of Italo disco.
A brief history of the line, and why we’re willing to wait on it.
How technology is changing the way we talk.
Why grassroots journalism in Toronto is transforming lives and creating new templates.

Check Out
This mesmerizing hologram and lazer art exhibition hidden within a Tribeca basement gallery.
Press Play 2024, Pioneer Works’s upcoming weekend-long fair of books, records, art, and all-things-entertainment.
This archive of protest inspired typography, now on view in LA.
Bjork’s new Paris sound installation inspired by AI and the natural world.
And finally, a happy Luna Luna to all who celebrate.

Travel
AFAR just released its list of “12 Beautiful Places to Spend Your Winter” and somehow left off Quebec City, which (from personal experience) offers complete Francophonic immersion in an actual wonderland of Nordic thermal spas, night toboggan rides, ice hotels, and general all-around cold weather joy.
Hi, just planning my trip to the Glasgow Zine Library.
Armchair traveling to this real-life Grand Budapest Hotel tucked into the “Monaco of the Alps.”
A final hat tip to the king of accessible travel guides.

Ghost Friends
Last week, the Bronx Museum of the Arts unveiled ARGENTUM, a permanent lighting sculpture by Grimanesa Amorós inspired by New York’s interconnecting boroughs. Read our interview with Grimanesa here.

Brookynites: stop by SCENT CRAFT, A limited edition perfume collaboration between Park Hyun Gi, ufoparfums, and disc.global today at Goyo Space [26 Greenpoint Ave, 1 PM - 6 PM]. Read our interview on UFO Perfume’s Maxwell Williams here.

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Funding the Future of Creative Entrepreneurship

Dan Law wants to keep artists and innovators in Pittsburgh — taking a page from Warhol’s legendary playbook.

Dan Law, standing left. The Courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum

Dan Law is the Associate Director of the The Andy Warhol Museum and the driving force behind The Pop District, a 10-year cultural and development plan to transform Pittsburgh’s creative economy, which since 2021 has generated over $3M for creative professionals. Law also spearheads The Warhol Academy, The Pop District’s workforce prototype mentoring teenagers to mid-career professionals with paid fellowships and job opportunities. The museum is also in the final stages of planning The Factory, a creative arts and events center.

Law was recently listed as “One of the Most Influential People in the Art World” by The Observer.

What brought you to The Warhol.

I started six years ago as the Director of Development. I'd come from economic development and the startup space and was producing a music and innovation festival called Thrival, a Tech Week/Pitchfork concept, in Pittsburgh. I was focused more on the innovation and creative economy of the startups our nonprofit supported, and the incubator and accelerator work we were doing for early-stage startups. We were throwing music festivals on basically construction sites or brownfields, but they were free and could fit many people. We had everyone from Wiz Khalifa and Logic to Panic at the Disco, Raekwon and Ghostface, and The Chainsmokers.

On the innovation front, we had emerging and early-stage startups to Andrew Yang, who later ran for president, talking about universal basic income. He had started Venture for America, and we were a Venture for America nonprofit with VFA fellows. That was the anchor of my experience in interdisciplinary arts and the creative economy. That kind of background isn’t unusual to a New Yorker because of the nature of New York's economy, but in Pittsburgh, it's less so. There are fewer mature industries in the creative or innovation sectors. Not for lack of trying or intelligence or best efforts, it's just challenging getting traction. 

We're a relatively small city, and walking around, you don't immediately think, “This is where I can be enormously successful in the arts or media.” 

But you are starting to change that with The Pop District, which has taken work.

Yes, and fundraising. I got called to The Warhol to raise money because I was a good fundraiser, which is always needed. Andy's from Pittsburgh, in the same neighborhood as Carnegie Mellon, Pitt, and the Carnegie Museums. That's why The Warhol is in Pittsburgh. His nephew, Donald, who worked at The Factory, is with the museum. It's a family affair.

When I got here, I did a “superlative inventory,” which is a fancy way of figuring out what we're best at. I looked around and thought, “Wow, there's some obvious stuff. This is where the world's most extensive collection of the most famous, influential artist sits.” We were in the unique position of traveling the collection worldwide, too, where millions could see Warhol. By extension, we have become more than a museum.

It’s an art museum, but also a global steward of Warhol's life and legacy.

We took those three terms, “art, life, legacy,” and said, “Okay, we do the art well, what do we do about life? What do we do about legacy?” And what does it mean for the art to be in a place like Pittsburgh? How does this make sense for the community?

I did a needs assessment and reviewed our finances. The Warhol is not rich. Contrary to popular belief, it isn’t a well-endowed museum. It should have somewhere between $50 to 70 million in endowment to make its daily operations work. We do not. We have a third of that. It puts pressure each year on fundraising, which we do in a very Warhol fashion, entrepreneurially, through our store, ticket sales, traveling exhibitions, and individual fundraising. But my question was, is there a way to bridge this financial gap sustainably that gets outside the museum's four walls?

If you come to Pittsburgh and see where The Warhol is, it's in an office park on the North Shore. It doesn't ring out, “This is a global arts destination.” So, the expression we use is “inside out.” How can we turn the museum inside out? “How is it going to spill out onto the street?”

Definitely.

The second piece is community relevance. “How do we respond to community needs?” Coming out of COVID, we’re discovering our arts and culture institutions have to meet a much more diverse and immediate community circumstance as an ecosystem.

We had a choice to make. We also worked with a group from Washington, DC, called Chora Creative, and conducted a community needs assessment. What came from that assessment from 150 stakeholders, companies, and individuals, particularly our Northside community, was, “We need things for our kids to do after school. We needed family-sustaining wages, good jobs, and better access to the museum.” It wasn't an immediate call for more art on the wall or more shows.

True community outreach.

It was a clarion call that our community saw us as a core asset to meet basic needs. Using that data and looking at the organization's finances, we determined the model. We needed to codify a world-class art and community engagement program. However, we didn’t make them compete with one another, which is unique for museums. It took another four years to really cultivate.

In May 2022, we publicly launched what we now call The Pop District –  a strategic and programmatic museum expansion with three core verticals. One is a public art vertical, which revolves around commissioning artists, either Pittsburgh-based or national, to come and do installations. So far, we've had projects from Typoe, Mikael Owunna, Laura Jean McLaughlin, Yoko Ono, Michael Loveland, and KAWS.

The second vertical is a campus expansion. How do you increase the physical footprint of the museum into the neighborhood to boost a more creative economy?

How do you?

Our first step was to build a “Print Lounge,” which was just an old bar we turned into an education and learning space that could hold events at night. Then, we bought a parking lot next to the museum that is the future site of a new creative art center called: The Factory.

The third vertical is our workforce development program. This is the beating heart of The Pop District and closely ties to Warhol's life and legacy. How do you ensure the next Andy Warhol doesn't have to leave Pittsburgh to become Andy Warhol? Because the minute he graduated college, Andy was out the door to New York. The workforce development piece is a creative economy program particularly focused on professionals staying in Pittsburgh and succeeding. We do youth and adult components for about 150 people a year. 

We also built a 10,000-square-foot workforce lab. Half of it is a content creation studio, “The Warhol Creative”; half of it is basically a classroom and school. The space is designed for professional development training and small business activity. The training part is called “The Warhol Academy,” and we offer free diplomas in digital marketing, which is what Warhol would be doing now if he were a young professional. He was a commercial illustrator in the 1950s, but now would be in graphics, design, social media. 

He would've loved it.

He would. The Warhol Academy also offers a paid fellowship program. We do filmmaking, post-production, and content creation fellowships. Warhol evolved from The Factory in the 1960’s as a filmmaker and then grew his film practice, Interview Magazine, Warhol Films, Inc., and Warhol Enterprises. We're bridging all eras, from commercial illustrator to the Warhol 60’s Factory-era with creative placemaking, and then moving into enterprise with filmmaking and content creation, honoring that part of his legacy.

Then, we have high school programs primarily for 13 to 18-year-olds, giving core skill-building experiences: soft skills coupled with design technology. But these skills are now quickly becoming hard skills.

Post-pandemic it feels like interpersonal skills are the new “learn to code”?

We call it the “new trades” working in creative media. Traditionally, elitism has been required. But being a creator and an artist doesn't require fancy degrees. Warhol certainly didn't come from the most auspicious circumstances. So, we graduate about 150 people a year through the workforce program who may not otherwise have ready opportunities.

The campus expansion is the physical footprint of the museum beyond the galleries and the four walls. Then, we have our workforce program that addresses family-sustaining wages, things for our kids to do after school, and access to the museum. Museums are intimidating places: but our public art is free. These are examples of what we call “on-ramps” into our ecosystem and the creative economy, focusing on training, jobs, and opportunity. Getting people closer to the artwork and the museum in a way that benefits them. All of the opportunities inside our workforce programs are either paid or free. 

The Warhol Creative just finished a project working with NBC Universal. But we have clients around the country. We have a cruise line, MSC, we have Miami City Ballet, we have Dell Technologies, Lenovo, and Motorola. Our Miami City ballet work was in Times Square last year. Our studio has twelve people, but six of the twelve come from our fellowship program.

That's incredible.

There's this transfer of knowledge and talent from the workforce program into the small business work we do with our content studio. And that small business is now a million-dollar business that gives back earned income to the museum to help with operations.

The system you've put in place both creates free education and is also self-sustaining –that’s so unique.

We dedicate at least $150,000 of operating support to the museum annually from The Warhol Creative. Creating a global destination and constructing a creative arts center that offers more earned income, music, national touring events, programs, film, and comedy lectures is critical. Once you put all those revenue assets together, it serves as a form of endowment in and of itself. But it's not overnight. It's an overnight success almost a decade in the making. We circled 2030 as the year when we can say, “Okay, it's finally doing what it's supposed to be doing” and it becomes almost like oxygen to Pittsburgh. When people don't even remember a world without The Pop District.

I remember Pittsburgh once referred to as “one of the last places in America to achieve The American Dream.” It's very entrepreneurial. 

Well, that window is closing. Capitalism is effective at working in its best interest. That's not a criticism, or a value-setting judgment. It is what it is. It's the economic system we live in. To a New Yorker, housing prices here are reasonable, but Pittsburgh is getting expensive for those not from global markets. When we talk about creatives and the creative economy — people rely on solid economies to keep their businesses going — so expensive housing and food all work in contrast or opposition to a burgeoning arts scene.

This isn't a rant on gentrification. We have a responsibility to work with artists and help them gain robust perspectives on business and economics, which is fundamental to Warhol's practice. It's a business, the art of Warhol, and the business of art is what we do.

Money has always been a dirty term. We want to talk about the practice; we want to talk about the process. But the elephant in the room is that artists must pay their rent and mortgage and raise their families. Creatives need to do that. It's an industry like any other, and it is affected by both micro and macroeconomic trends. We have many Pittsburgh-based artists with solid fundamentals in business and planning. But those fundamentals are rare across the board.

In any creative industry!

We have a responsibility to help. That's part of the training and school. It's saying, “Hey, learn your business through and through here.” It's okay to embrace the business aspects and be a bit more like Warhol. You don't necessarily have to celebrate the day-to-day of money and finances, but let's avoid putting artists out of business.

How can folks get more involved?

There are two immediate ways: come to Pittsburgh and see it. Go to the museum, walk through, and see the collection. We'll always have something going on where you can get a one-on-one or group experience related to The Pop District. We have a program called the Network Factory, and in the summers, we do Final Fridays. We have public art installations to engage with.

You can also mentor young people in our program. You don't have to be in Pittsburgh to mentor. We have a diploma program with graduates. We have high schoolers working and figuring out their futures, and you can mentor them, virtual or in person.

Finally, all this still relies on individual and private philanthropy and corporate support. We have a sustainable production studio and are planning a creative arts center. However, a substantial amount of this mission work relies on core philanthropy. We're a non-profit, not a Fortune 500. Help us speak with industry leaders, people with audiences, and those who are intellectually curious about this work. 

Are there any shows coming up?

We have two. The first is an exhibition about Warhol's print practice curated by our director of collections and exhibitions, Amber Morgan. Right after that, our director of learning and public engagement, Nicole Dezelon, is curating a Sharif Bey show, a Pittsburgh-based artist.

I'll leave you with this: entrepreneurs are artists. Warhol has some perfect quotes about business being “the best art” – but the builder is not always the sustainer or the manager. Quite often not. The artist is the catalyst, the designer, and the vision, but it is incumbent upon the ecosystem to find the sustainers. Warhol didn't run Warhol Enterprises, The Factory, or Interview without Vincent Fremont or Bob Colacello or Fred Hughes. That's part of the whole puzzle — all of these folks needed to work together — the magic of The Factory was this combination of forces. And it's speaking to this fundamental idea: why can't we always have this?

All above images courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum.

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Slow Ghost is a newsletter covering the next wave in culture, brought to you by writer and editor Laura Feinstein. 

Grimanesa Amorós Has Something to Say About Hope

Four decades ago, the Peruvian light artist arrived in New York with just two bags. Now she's illuminating some of the city's most iconic parks and structures.

Hello all,

I’m sure everyone is more than a little stressed about tomorrow’s election. Since I have nothing new to add to the conversation, and am more than a little nervous myself, today’s send is focused on an incredible artist I’ve been privileged to know for several years. Grimanesa Amorós moved from her native Peru to New York City in the 80s with a dream of living the artist’s life and then did everything in her power to achieve it. She has been a source of inspiration since I first interviewed her for the Times in 2014 and continues to be fearless — whether she’s layering long strands of LEDs under the hot Arizona sun or scaling one of the city’s most iconic hotels to give it new, alien dimensions. I hope you enjoy, and see all of you on the other side~

Laura

Slow Ghost logo: Tyler Lafreniere. ARGENTUM, The Bronx Museum of the Arts | Manhattan, NY. Image courtesy of Grimanesa Amorós.

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Read
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A new exhibition at The Hispanic Society Museum & Library explores the estrado (traditional feminine private drawing rooms), and its roots from Islamic Al Andalus to the Americas. 
If BonBon didn’t do it for you, Greenpoint’s Teak now has all your favorite Scandinavian candies.

Travel
If you’re traveling to Miami for Art Basel next month, The Museum of Sex just opened its first satellite location.
A food-inspired tour of Mexico City.
The first major UK exhibition of artist Mike Kelley, “Ghost and Spirit”, is now on view at the Tate Modern and even has an excellent capsule collection.
Dreaming of spending a cozy weekend at Troutbeck, whose seasonal cultural offerings have just gone live.

Stream
An actually interesting virtual roundtable on literary fiction from excellent substack the Auraist.

Support
Girasol, a grassroots, direct-action NOLA-based non-profit organization that offers comprehensive legal representation and social work services to those historically marginalized by the immigration system.

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Grimanesa Amorós Doesn’t Give Up

The Peruvian-born artist has created acclaimed light art, sculptures, and installations across the globe, often in some of the most inhospitable climates. But each time, it still feels like the first.

Grimanesa Amorós is a Peruvian-American light artist whose work draws from South American cultural legacies and the communities surrounding her sculptures. She has exhibited and created works in Finland, Venice, Paris, Beijing, and New York's Times Square. Amorós has received the Bronx Museum of the Arts: AIM Alumni Artist Award (NY), The National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship (Washington, DC), (among others) and has collaborated with top musicians and creatives, including Grammy-nominated Meshell Ndegeocello, actress Maya Hawke, and the World Monuments Fund.

OCUPANTE, Ludwig Museum Koblenz. 2016. Courtesy of Grimanesa Amorós.

Slow Ghost: You have been doing so much lately. I'm happy you were able to make this interview work before your next project.

Grimanesa: Luckily, I had the month here in New York, so my studio trumped everything. I had four lectures; I am so grateful to have work I could share with others. That's the important part!

Someone once told me, "work begets more work", and it's stuck with me.

For me, it's about recommendations. I am selective about the proposals we choose to participate in. Imagine if we spent all our time making proposals that didn't go anywhere. Like many architect friends, you would be required to have a studio section dedicated to proposals. 

Courtesy of Grimanesa Amorós.

Not enough people know that it's not just about endlessly applying – most is your network.

Many of my projects come from people seeing my work in a space and liking it or something that made them think. Sometimes, they call from different states and countries, and I ask how they heard about me. Many, if not most, say, "Well, I saw your work at XYZ, and it made an impression," or something like that.

AZURE, 2021. Courtesy of Grimanesa Amorós.

I’d love to hear how you got into art.

I want to share that part of my practice in my lectures. It provides people with a clearer understanding of where my work is coming from. For example, I'm obsessed with domes and bubble shapes and the organicity of my work –  it is because I grew up in Lima, Peru. Peru is a very biodiverse country. It's the desert, the mountains, the Andes, and then you have the Amazon. The jungles have these incredible, different types of biodiversity, not only in the plants but also in the types of animals. Growing up by the Pacific Ocean, I experienced its ferocity; the waves and, at the shore, these formations of sea foam became very sculptural and moved and reflected with the sun. When I was little, I started poking them. I studied them and was fascinated by how the light reflected on them. 

Later, I made an incredible trip to Iceland, where I encountered the Northern Lights. It changed my life. I started thinking, "If I could only share this with others, wouldn't it be amazing?" It took two years to come up with ideas on how to share this ephemeral part of life. I had a moment when I thought, "Should I take my camera and take pictures? Or should I just leave the moment absorbed?"

Looking behind the lens detaches you from being totally immersed in yourself. Of course, I chose to live in the moment. I don't have any pictures, but that's how I started working with light in 2000.

ARGENTUM, The Bronx Museum of the Arts | Manhattan, NY. Courtesy of Grimanesa Amorós.

What was your journey from Peru to New York? Did you come here for school or your own personal fulfillment?

I knew since I was 11 that I would not live in Lima. Don't ask me why. I would walk the streets and say, "I have to memorize the names of the streets and everything because I know I'm going to live abroad." I grew up with all these movies set in Manhattan and came away with romantic visions of these artists' bohemian lives in New York City. I started fantasizing, and when I arrived in 1984 when I was 21, I went, "This is my city." Then, I began actualizing the dream with just my two bags and started my life as an artist. 

I moved around a lot, which became a great way of knowing each part of the city. "I live on the West Side, then on the East Side, Downtown, the Bowery."  And then, of course, I had the typical jobs we all did when we started. I mean, you name it, I did the job. In those days, I saved my money, and fresh paints were the first thing I would buy. There are many wonderful stories from my time in New York when I was young.

Courtesy of Grimanesa Amorós.

It's important to know that you didn't immediately move to New York and have a practice in your beautiful Tribeca space. A lot came in between.

It was a journey — even having a studio — a journey. Imagine a mountain — my career has been step by step. I didn't go up quickly, but going up slowly and solidly gives you a particular understanding, which is essential to knowing what you want as an artist and how you want to share your creativity with others.

When did you feel like you started to hit your stride?

I realized I wanted to be an artist when I was very young. I said, "Grimanesa, I prefer to live on $50 a week, maybe not even eat, but to focus on doing my work. I felt I wouldn't be able to develop my work further and move forward if I didn't practice. It's like with musicians that they have to practice every day for six, maybe eight hours. I have a friend who's an incredibly noted classical guitarist, and even now, at a certain age, she still practices six to eight hours a day. If you don't focus, you don't progress. So live with less and do what you love because at least you are fulfilling your purpose.

LIGHT BETWEEN THE ISLANDS 4, 2013. Courtesy of Grimanesa Amorós.

What was the first commission you were passionate about?

There have been a couple. I always feel like I'm still 21, and every time I have a new commission, it's like it's the first one. I'm grateful I have this space and location to share the work.

But the one I remember being very excited about because it was important on many levels was Times Square. It was about technologically sharing my cultural heritage in such an incredible space. Hundreds of thousands of people were coming every day, at all times, even until four or five in the morning. I remember going to install it in Times Square. You have to go after 12 o'clock at night because there's just too much traffic. You could only install the piece from one to five AM because once again, starting at 5:30 AM, the city comes back to life. Of course, this was way before the pandemic. 

UROS HOUSE. The Armory Show, Times Square Alliance | New York, NY. Courtesy of Grimanesa Amorós.

Then another one I did that I loved was Prospect Park in Brooklyn. At all times, I saw people engaging with the piece, putting towels under it, looking up and taking images, and even families having picnics embraced by the piece. I never realized how interactive art was and how people's experience of it could the work. It was amazing.  

HEDERA. BRIC | Prospect Park Brooklyn, NY. Courtesy of Grimanesa Amorós.

When you begin working on a project, do you visit a space and then see what would be a good fit or do you look at what you are already working with and go from there?

It depends. It would help if you went as much as possible when it's a permanent installation. I remember I had to go to Mumbai for two days for one project, and I'm so glad I did. I couldn't have done that piece otherwise. The piece in Mumbai is so large; if I hadn't gone, even to see how enormous it was and how the piece would occupy it, I wouldn’t have been able to make it happen so perfectly, as it seemed to belong to the space. That gave me a lot of information about how I would need to work.

But even when it's a place that might be temporary, depending on the piece's scale, it helps. For me, it facilitates the conciseness of your ideas for the space.

IUGO. ODA Architecture, Nexus | New York, NY. Courtesy of Grimanesa Amorós.

You work on such a large scale. I imagine there's many more things to consider than if someone is just doing a painting or a mural. You have to think about the light, the weather, and the overall climate.

Oh my god, yes. For example, imagine the engineering behind a project like the one I did on the water in Scottsdale! And 118-degree weather! We had the challenges of space and the weather, which played a massive part. 

I also did a large piece in Saudi Arabia, and I remember squinting my eyes at one point because we were in the desert, so when the wind blows, you get wind storms. I had to secure glasses because my eyes hurt. But that's what I love. That's my romance with the process. I embrace challenging situations because they awaken me and make me think quickly. I always say, "I'm never afraid of anything except rats." But planning is essential for these difficult situations.

GOLDEN WATERS. Scottsdale Public Art | Soleri Bridge Scottsdale, AZ. Courtesy of Grimanesa Amorós.

You have to be so physically fit to do these installations. There is so much energy and manual labor involved, and you don’t have a team of 15 doing it all for you. You still are very physically a part of the art making.

In my time as an artist, the physicality part has played a vital role. The hours I work have not changed since my twenties, but what has changed is how much weight I can carry. I'm very aware of my health. I don't deprive myself of anything, but I believe in balance. You have to stay active and fit. I meditate. I have been doing that since I was maybe 15. Mornings and nights. And that makes me release any stressful circumstances or long days you have when you install because when you're installing, there are deadlines, and it's like being on Broadway – the show must go on. There will be a day that's an opening for the press. There's another for the VIPs and another for the public. You have to be ready no matter what. So sometimes it's very long hours.

But it's important because I don't want to have a side business of maintaining these pieces. Again, it comes with the choices you make as an artist. By being there, I make sure everything is done correctly from the beginning. Each element is checked one by one. We have to. I prefer to do that, but it's part of maintaining your reputation. So people know that if they're going to commission the work, you're going to be able to handle it. That's why I cannot have so many projects a year.

Courtesy of Grimanesa Amorós.

It's interesting how you managed to keep your practice both small, headcount wise, and still impactful. How do you choose what is worth your time?

When I did the Peninsula Hotel, the facade of the landmark building on 55th Street, I can't tell you how many hotels called me right after. That was a very successful project. You have to think about what you want as an artist! I like to balance public work, museums, exhibitions, collaborations, and lectures because that's the whole of what I'm trying to share and communicate with the world. 

It's easy to pick who you want to work with in some ways because you'll notice a style from the first email. When a person is responsive and professional, the whole project will go that way. We artists sometimes need to realize that as much as we want to do a project, the other side has to want it to match, to do it as much. So, if that synchronicity doesn't happen, you must be strong and say, "No, this is not for me. I don't want the headaches."

There's no drama in my practice because I am very good with my choices.

PINK LOTUS. The Peninsula Hotel, New York, NY. Courtesy of Grimanesa Amorós.

What are you working on in the coming year?

There's one project I can't wait to do with the city of New York. It's called FLEXUS. I'm doing something differently with my work. For me, it's essential with each project to ask myself, "Can I challenge it to do something differently, even though it's in the electronics or the electrical hardware technology or in the physicality of the actual sculpture and material?"

I'm constantly researching and developing. However, working with the city takes a lot of work and its a slower process. It takes a couple of years, but I have learned a lot and you'll see it soon because it's going to be permanent.

AZULIN New York, NY 2022. Courtesy of Grimanesa Amorós.

Are you doing any traveling?

I'm going to London because I collaborated with a fashion brand that does couture. We've been working on this project for two years, which is quite interesting because the material is leather. It's not clothing or lighting but an innovative and different piece. With art, you’re always creating and thinking of new ways to communicate with your audience, creating your language, sharing your message, and shifting your practice, allowing it to be seen differently. 

So I'll go to London and Miami for Art Basel, then wrap up my year in Germany and Tunisia. Travel balances me, and the world has so much to offer. When I travel to a country, it often inspires me. I'm traveling the whole country from north to south, east to west. Tunisia has UNESCO sites, interesting architecture, and deserts. 

AMPLEXUS, Cultural Palace, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia 2022. Courtesy of Grimanesa Amorós.

What would be a dream project?

I'm interested in public outreach projects like Prospect Park. With the right partnership, you can find innovative ways to embrace the public and make them think more creatively in their own lives.

I'm also interested in projects collaborating with different sectors, such as an outdoor opera. I would love to create a sculptural lighting piece, which has to be a collaborative process between the director, the performance, the singers, the actors, the costume designers, the artist, and, of course, most importantly, the story. There are a lot of elements for it to work, and not just having the piece be something exterior, but how you involve the audience and see the performative part of it with the sculpture is challenging.

But I'm always careful about more gimmicky things, like sensors. "Interactivity" has become very popular. But ensuring a piece doesn't lose value over the years is important to me – the universality of it. So that when you see it 20 years from now, it still resonates.

ARGENTUM, The Bronx Museum of the Arts | Manhattan, NY. Courtesy of Grimanesa Amorós.

During this time when things feel dark and it often feels like we're going to be in this moment forever, what are some things giving you inspiration?

As an artist, you believe in humanity and have ideas about freedom. Freedom goes along with universality. In a way, it's parallel. Since I work with light, that also helps because you have to be authentic and transparent, and somehow, you parallel your life with what you do with the work. 

Authenticity and communication are essential for all artists, not only visual artists. If I'm working with my collaborator and there's an issue, I clarify it and make it a point. This way, we are all on the same page.

GOLDEN ARRAY, Mumbai, India, 2021. Courtesy of Grimanesa Amorós.

Is there anything that you wish people knew about you and your work that hasn't already been covered?

Since I was in my teens, LPP has been very important to me, as it consists of love, passion, and perseverance. We have to be hopeful; we still have to persevere; we cannot give up. You have to keep at it. LPP has helped me throughout my career.

Sometimes, young artists are required to realize that when they receive a rejection letter, why waste their time feeling sad? These are the thoughts of six judges; the world comprises billions of people. You must do more than just work to please or that everyone will like. Some people like abstract, some like figurative or minimalist, who knows? You have to persevere. Tears and feeling bad about yourself will sink your spirit, which will not help you keep going and have the energy to be creative. 

It's important for people to know. Confidence is important when discussing a project because other individuals or companies are required to feel comfortable with what you're going to be able to manage. 

I would like to finish my thoughts with a reminder to be humble and open.

 Grimanesa Amorós

More Slow Ghost
Raymond Pettibon Appreciates Your Black Flag Tributes
Inside Daan Roosegaarde's Dream Factory
Pivoting to witchcraft with Meredith Graves

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Slow Ghost is a newsletter covering the next wave in culture, brought to you by writer Laura Feinstein. 

How to Create a Global Community Space

Kaave Pour helped launch Space 10, one of the most pivotal design institutions of the 21st century. Now, he's moved on to bigger and better things.

Hi everyone,

We’re deep into fall in NYC, though we seem to be wafting between summer and winter, depending on the day. But enough about the weird weather. Next week is Halloween, when the city is at its most creative. Dogs dress in their finest, people get wild, and a trip to Greenwood Cemetery becomes the hottest ticket in town. In honor of this strange, beautiful city’s commitment to bringing together communities of all kinds, today’s send is on building intentional spaces for gathering and collaboration.

I hope you enjoy it. As always, if there is a creator you think we should highlight, contact me at slowghost@substack.com or in the comments.

~Laura

Slow Ghost logo: Tyler Lafreniere. Image courtesy of Space 10.

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Read
Irish designer Simone Rochas’ beautiful new book with Rizzoli.
How freelance designers are handling the great AI boom. (And how everyone else is.)
And if you’re really curious, here is a brief intro to the future of AI slop.
The decadent desserts that fueled Versailles’ most debaucherous parties.
A few of the brightest ideas that never saw the light of day.
How to become an oyster sommelier.
WHAT ART DOES, a new tome by Brian Eno and Bette A., explores the limits of fictional worlds, from detective novels to soap operas, and their impact on art-making.

STUDIOKCA, Skyscraper (the Bruges Whale), Photo by Matthias Desmet.

Check Out
SVA’s "Plasticulture: The Rise of Sustainable Practices with Polymers," an exhibition by Project Vortex, an artist collective that creates fantastical works from plastic debris.
The Dream Baby Press Writing Club is back at a Brooklyn Burger King near you (and this time features writer Mary H.K. Choi).
If you’re in NYC and looking for Halloween plans: Comedian Julio Torres is throwing a costume party that looks absolutely legendary, with co-hosts Bowen Yang, Natasha Lyonne, and John Cameron Mitchell. A portion of the proceeds will support G.L.I.T.S, a Black trans-led organization fighting systemic discrimination.

Bea Holmberg

Travel
Embracing the Swedish art of sleep with the 72-Hour Cabin.
Just in time for election day, Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) released their schedule of low-cost fares.
In New York, the Basilica Farm & Flea Holiday Market is set to return bigger and better.
This NY Times guide to the Berkshires is pretty good, but if you message me, I’ll give you the real deal.

Apply
The David Prize, which awards five New Yorkers working on ideas for extraordinary change with $200K, no strings attached. 
Berliners: Highsnobriety is looking for a new Creative Director.
BALENCIAGA is looking for an intern and Sustainable Materials Research Assistant.

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The Art of Community Building Goes Global — and Back Again

Image via the Danish Design Awards

Kaave Pour is a Copenhagen-based creative entrepreneur. As the former co-founder, CEO, and Creative Director of SPACE10, he led the acclaimed research and design lab, incubator, and events space until its closure in 2023. Kaave’s practice stands at the intersection of design, culture, and technology and has included collaborations with Apple, MIT, the UN, and IKEA (a main partner of Space 10). Kaave now masterminds several new projects, including a restaurant, a farmhouse and retreat, and a new European design and technology company centered on building the home of the future.

Slow Ghost: what are you working on now?

Kaave: After we ended Space 10, it was the first time I didn't have a huge team that reported to me in eight years. I spent time with my daughter and friends and decided to live for myself. Now, a friend of mine, who's a filmmaker, and I have a new space. Last November, we bought a restaurant, and it's been full – full of people and fun and memories – ever since. It's a different business than what I've been used to operating within — everything from hiring the team to designing it to choosing the tiles and the menu. Now, my partners will be the restaurant –  and the head chef will run it from there. But I still take a shift occasionally and go out on the floor, which is quite fun. I'm also moving from one place to another within the city into a house we are renovating and painting.

Space 10

You certainly are busy.

We are also renovating a farmhouse in the middle of a forest in Sweden. But that's a side project that isn't commercial. I'm also slowly gearing up to launch my next long-term venture. With these projects, what I'm doing is a little bit like a window. I knew I had a year where I could have fun with things. Where I could be my own partner without anyone expecting anything. No decisions had to be floated with anyone other than me. And they are almost done, so I'm starting to move back into reality.

Can anyone visit your restaurant?

Yes! It's called Graziano, and it's Tuscan-inspired. We wanted to create something of a low-key home away from home. It's fully booked for two or three months at a time and quite busy. We just got a good review and then had 1200 bookings come through in one night. We also sold 25% of the restaurant to twenty-five friends and family partners. Some friends who have a beer brand bought a percentage. Some who run a bakery bought another percentage. My wife bought a percentage. A friend who runs an eyewear company called Flatlist bought a percentage. It's a community business in that sense. It's not what will make my retirement easy, but it gives me a lot.

Was it always your dream to open a restaurant?

My cousin and I, with whom I'm running it, have talked about doing a restaurant since he was four. He is now a chef and has been in the industry for a long time. He wanted to make great food but was, I think, fed up with the old industry standards. Here, 80 to 90% of our staff are badass women who left way better-paying positions because the culture was toxic. 

But one key part of it was to create something more local. A community home away from home. I took a lot of what I learned from Space 10 in terms of building a business based around storytelling values, a way to operate things easier, and see if that could be applied to something completely different. In the end, I'm more of an entrepreneur. Selling something new gets me going. But this also fits into my longer-term focus, where I'm trying to do projects related to the home. Whether I do keynotes, advisory, startups, or invest, it's always with home as a thread. These small local eating and drinking establishments are becoming an extension of the living room. And the knowledge I will get from this can also be applied to some of my bigger endeavors that perhaps are beyond my little locale.

You're working on so much, it's hard to imagine you have bigger projects up your sleeve.

It's such a massive project. But I see it all as one project. When we stopped Space 10, at that point, we were consistently running maybe 40 to 80 projects in parallel. We were 40 in Copenhagen and 140 full-time externally.  I've always had a lot of projects going, but it doesn't feel overwhelming if you organize it as one narrative or with one focus. But if I did things in a completely different area, I would feel overwhelmed. Suddenly, it's a new mindset and new knowledge that you need. But people can do much more than we believe if it's within the same space. We are just stretched so thin across so many things we need to be good at.

Birgitta Wolfgang Bjørnvad

How did you conceptualize Space 10?

It started with two of the other co-founders, Carl and Simon, who had met the CEO of IKEA for another project. He later became the CEO of INA group, the mothership that owns IKEA and others. It was his task to restructure the whole shebang. He understood he needed to look at the business differently and how IKEA acted in terms of being part of a larger network and attracting a younger audience. He asked Simon and Carla if they had ideas for how to do that. "We don't, but we can design a setup where we can find out," they told him. He came back and said, "Okay, think about it." Then they called me, and we had ten months to develop a model for how IKEA could work with innovation. They may have expected we would develop some internal setup for which we would be hired, but we said, "We don't want to be employees. But we would like to work with you within our own company." Then they said yes. I'm still surprised today that they did. 

It was quite a small scale, beginning with four people, but over time, the method we developed was validated in terms of bringing brand and cultural impact. After three years, we decided to expand with business impact and helped form and develop strategies to invest in ventures and design new products. And then it just grew from there. It was not a calculated pitch with a curve. Part of it was good timing. Then, I took over as CEO of Creative two or three years after we started to grow. We realized we couldn't do everything by intuition; we had to be more strategic. That's where we ended up having a larger footprint in terms of awareness and working across markets and countries. But it definitely was timing.

It was such a pivotal space. Are going to continue that work with your new project.

Right now, I'm still defining. I've taken on an advisory role for a few companies and invested in others, but I want to make something my own again. At Space 10, we did great when it came to creating an indirect impact by forming broader conversations around design. We had over a thousand job applications a year for a team of 30. But our ability to make concrete, tangible change depended on the organization we worked with, which I now see. But I don't want to work as a proxy anymore or be in a situation where someone else needs to say yes to confirm things. So, my new company will be a design company focused on imagining and building a "new home" and primarily centered on explorations and ventures. Not so much the studio model where we would work with companies.

My goal is to build primarily technology-driven products that enable healthy, sustainable living. I'm also working on a heat pump and a new safety sensor, a home insurance kit and a new scale that can measure health, a laundry machine that doesn't require a lot of water, and a way to purify your water through techniques while also conserving it.

The Ideal City: Exploring Urban Futures, by Space 10 and Gestalten

These sound really interesting.

I'm trying to move into hardware without it being phones. A lot of innovation has been focused on the phone for the last two decades, and we are at a tipping point where the home will be a new battleground for design. There's such potential right now, especially in industries like furniture lighting. Most of the real change is in home hardware, which hasn’t been changed for so long. A heat pump is a good innovation from a climate point of view, but they look like shit and are impossible to operate. My next move is to conceptualize these mechanisms so that you can create a better experience and design around it and make an R&D lab for my own products, not necessarily for others.

Space 10 Mexico City Pop-up

Back at Space 10, you did such interesting work with both global pop-ups and innovative materials. It really felt like you were at the cutting edge.

One project I was close to pursuing but might not be the right person to do is a company called Made Again. I had the idea of creating a platform marketplace and a label where all these excellent materials with so much potential but don't have the scale could live. These groups must also establish connections with those who should buy the materials. I wanted to create a value chain around it from the facilities to process, gather, or invest in these separate categories of products. Then, make a few products within the company to show the world through design weeks and sell them. 

There should be a focus on Europe first since they're the biggest sustainable, recyclable materials marketplace. However, Nike, IKEA, or anyone who wants to work with these materials could use the label to validate the customers and show that these materials are appropriately sourced, recyclable, and sustainable. But to make this successful, you need someone great with materials and a business expert to run it. A lot of this is a proper supply chain business. Finding companies and buying them is easy and fascinating, but this will not be my forte.

Photo by Kasper Kristoffersen

There's such an untapped world with these materials, from spider silk to shoes made from bananas.

Yeah. When you think about it, it's fucking crazy how these materials are being developed because it's the complete opposite of how materials usually would be created. Typically, it's super centralized, massive in scale, huge in volume, and bad for everyone, both the body wearing it and the climate. But these smaller players need a little bit of the same as what media or brands have seen with platforms or what social media has done for storytelling. Where it's democratized for a lot more. Or what Shopify has done for e-commerce. Who is that player that will be the Shopify of innovative materials without necessarily having to reinvent every single step of the journey?

Pieces of Home, Space 10 Mexico City

But if they could create it, it would be such a game-changer.

In the EU, one of the biggest topics is paper waste. If you could take it and repurpose it into new material, you could tap into a vast amount of material. For something like apple waste, it's almost more of a niche material company, which also should exist. It will be fun to see how those two compete, the ones who use plastic or paper or, you know, some of the groups recycling food and vegetables. Then, some of the more experimental ones are as much about the storytelling as the volume. 

Follow Kaave Pour.

More Slow Ghost
The Subversive, Transfixing World of Jelly Art
Copenhagen's Fabrics of the Future
Artist Daan Roosegaarde's Florescent Dream Factory

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Slow Ghost is a newsletter covering the next wave in culture, brought to you by writer Laura Feinstein. 

What is a Nomadic Art Museum?

You can curate thought-provoking work anywhere — even a bog.

Hihi,

I’m just going to come out and say that this email was supposed to go out in August. Then, well, life happened. Primarily, an extensive road trip through Scandinavia, starting in Copenhagen, snaking up through the Danish Riviera and along the Western Coast of Sweden, stopping in the port of Oslo before heading to the fjords through Lofthus, the “fruit basket of Norway,” before turning back to present on “Manufacturing Materiality” and the fabrics of the future at The Conference in Malmö, Sweden. (If any editors who read this are looking to commission, trust me, I have plenty of material.)

This summer, I also did a deep dive for Wallpaper on how a female winemaker-turned-biotech-perfumer is swapping fossil fuels for fungus, yeast, and sugar; interviewed David Seth Moltz of D.S. & Durga on building a perfume empire from his Brooklyn kitchen for The Creative Independent; and wrote the press release for Mrs. Gallery’s newest show, Body of Work, up through November 2nd. (Read the Slow Ghost on going DIY in the art world and gallerists Sara Maria Salamone and Tyler Lafreniere here.)

Today’s send is on an incredible curator who is taking her practice outside the (white) box and bringing immersive, tactile art from the plains of the Upper Midwest and parks of Chicago to a bog in Upstate New York.

I hope you enjoy it. As always, if there is a creator you think we should highlight, contact me at slowghost@substack.com or in the comments.

~Laura

Slow Ghost logo: Tyler Lafreniere. Image courtesy of Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum.

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Read
How the costumes of Gregg Araki’s Doom Generation shaped 90s underground style.
Keel Labs unveils its first seaweed-fiber clothing collection with Outerknown.
The French perfumer behind the internet’s Favorite fragrance.
Is this the rebirth of ABC NO RIO?
A new history of the American worker explores the myths of U.S. exceptionalism.

Check Out
Gothic Knit Club, a haunting, Faulkner-inspired photo collab from the deep south.
This photographic journey into Ghana’s e-waste crisis.
The newest from Conflict Kitchen, a Pittsburgh-based culinary art project that from 2014 to 2017 served cuisine from countries the United States was in conflict with, using food to engage in discussions of cultures and regions beyond headlines.
The Criterion Mobile Closet, a roving replica of Criterion’s legendary film archive built inside an 18-foot delivery van, is bringing its Criterion Closet Picks to Brooklyn Bridge Park and St. Ann’s Warehouse. [Saturday, October 26, and Sunday, October 27, 10 am-6 pm.]

Travel
The strangest and most beautiful spots open to the public for Open House NY.
It’s spooky season in Sleepy Hollow and nearby Irvington, NY — home of author Washington Irving as well as your narrator (hi!). I recommend a tour through the newly restored and perennially haunted Armour Stiner Octagon House, a Gilded Age manor overlooking the Hudson right off Metro North.
If you’re in Europe: road trip to the charming Nordic coastal city of Grebbestad, the “Swedish capital of oysters,” for a schooner ride and an oyster safari (then warm up at Grebys for the seafood buffet).

(Editor’s Note: we’re looking to expand the travel section, so let us know if you have feedback.)

Support
Brooklyn’s beloved indie comic store Desert Island will close if it can’t raise this by October 15th.
For Freedoms and artist Autumn Breon's The Care-Van, a traveling social installation addressing voter suppression and promoting civic engagement.

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How To Build A Nomadic Art Museum
An interview with Black Cube’s Cortney Lane Stell

Cortney Lane Stell is the Executive Director and Chief Curator of Black Cube, a nomadic contemporary art museum based in Denver, Colorado. An independent curator since 2006, she has collaborated on numerous exhibitions nationally and internationally for museums, university galleries, biennials, and art events. She has worked with artists like Liam Gillick, Cyprien Gaillard, Daniel Arsham, and Shirley Tse, among others.

Courtesy of Black Cube.

Slow Ghost: I’d love to hear you explain what Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum does.

As an organization, we produce site-specific work that increases access to contemporary art and supports creators by producing ambitious projects that move artists’ practices in new directions. We are headquartered in Denver but produce projects regionally, nationally, and occasionally internationally. We collaborate with artists to situate ideas within the context of the world, and have produced projects on historic landmarks, alleyways, ghost towns, agricultural land, tailor shops, cemeteries, and more.  We endeavor to help grow artists’ experience, whether working in a new medium, at a larger scale, collaborating with fabricators, reaching specific audiences, or even simply getting the chance to work outdoors. We work closely with artists to produce the projects, not as a studio assistant, but as curatorial and production support and guidance. We also describe ourselves as a nomadic organization. This means pushing against the idea of a traditional institution rooted in one place or community and embracing a structure that is itinerant, slippery, rhizomatic, and dynamic in order to situate art in relation to the world and specific communities.

Interesting. 

Many forces in the contemporary art field have created this sort of "big flat nowness" that exists everywhere — the field is laden with white-walled nowhereness that provides a pristine, secularized, religious-type of space allowing audiences to contemplate artworks devoid of context. With the exponential growth of the contemporary art market, museums, and fairs all look the same, and the artists are the same, which has created this hegemony or, what feels like to me, flatness. You'll see one Koons and a similar one at a different museum. The networked era has also supported a social media-based monoculture, where our sense of time is flattened. The upside of this flattening is that people are hungry for context. What's cool about producing art that relates to site, place, community, and/or context is that audiences can find a there —"there" meaning they can connect the work they are seeing to a geographical or sociocultural context, and they can do so largely without art historical knowledge. 

Gabriel Rico, La inclusión de mi raza. Courtesy of Black Cube.

Lowering the gatekeepers.

When you place art in the public realm, especially the kind of work that Black Cube produces, it's a unique experience. The work can be approached just as a tree, person, bird, building, or any other object in their environment. We don't overload signage with art historical text or international art English – and we lean into situations that help folks be curious about their surroundings. We're in a moment in society where people are divided. Everyone is becoming more tribal in their belief systems and social circles, and creating curiosity and public space is an opening experience. Black Cube projects wedge the door back open a bit. The organization functions in this unique space to help create connectivity, relationality, and, as I said, curiosity. For example, look at our permanent projects: Community Forms by Matt Barton and Historic Sight by Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis.

That’s so interesting.

Audience engagement must be embraced as a never-ending challenge and opportunity for a moving institution. We once did a project in an airplane hangar on the boundary between Denver and the edge of Aurora, CO. One side had the state's highest per capita household earnings. The other, the Aurora side, had one of the lowest. In this project, we learned it was easier to communicate with the higher-earning community through social media, whereas the Aurora side required hand-to-hand, door-to-door communication. There was a sizable refugee community, so doing this work required sensitivity to all languages and comprehending the nuanced socioeconomic realities to ensure all felt welcome. The other amazing thing about producing temporary projects in the public realm is that they enliven a space and help people imagine different possible futures for it. I've had the privilege of reading lots of visitor feedback.

That is quite a large endeavor.

It's interesting to ideate an organization and then run it. I've learned so much about that gap between theory and practice. Writing a business plan for moving from site to site differs from navigating the changing legal, regulatory, historical, cultural, political, and economic realities that make communities unique. Fundraising also changes dramatically from project to project; it is, for example, much more challenging to fund rural projects. Though the context variability can make the projects challenging, it makes them more vibrant and connected.

Pipelines, Julia Jamrozik + Coryn Kempster

It’s not just curating big experiential public art projects or ribbon cuttings. There's so much behind it.

Yes, we build projects from the ground up and often enfold the community in the research and production of the projects. So, they are not the traditional way institutions present artworks to audiences. We spent two and a half years producing a 160-acre earthwork in a farming community, and part of that involved supporting local food coalition initiatives in the area, as food scarcity was a real issue (which initially felt ironic given it was a farming community).

These projects take time to earn the trust of the locals, especially marginalized or indigenous communities, and it also takes time to generate enough interest for audiences to travel to projects. There are often divides to be bridged; common perceptual clashes include urban/rural divides, outsiders versus insiders, or dissonance between local and foreign. We once did an exhibition in a historic mining town, and it was important to regularly attend town hall meetings to show our participation and commitment. You must find many ways to learn about the community, what folks care about, and what they are challenged by.

Rachel Hayes, Horizon Drift.

What was your work experience before Black Cube?

Before Black Cube, I had an experimental independent curating practice and was a gallery director at a college for almost a decade. Earlier in my career, after an undergraduate study abroad experience, I spent time living in Italy before returning to Denver to work at a museum in an educational and curatorial capacity within the contemporary art department. Working with curator Dianne Vanderlip was formative, as she curated from a sense of space, which deeply resonated with me. I got close with the curator emeritus at the Denver Art Museum and kept doing independent curating. Nine years ago, I had the opportunity to ideate and establish Black Cube from the ground up, along with the David and Laura Merage Foundation. Now that I've had almost a decade to reflect, I realize I pulled a lot from my experience working as a rave promoter in the early 2000s.

Useless Sacrifice, Anna Uddenberg.

That's incredible.

Rave promotion and production involved scouting sites, getting access to buildings, organizing musical talent, and establishing and nurturing audiences (and much more). More mystery was available for parties in those days as we were not so hyper-connected yet. Maps to parties were often available at specific gas stations. It was before cell phones. It was very DIY. I now see how formative this was for me. Another was growing up with a father in construction and parents who fixed and flipped our houses. We moved around a lot, always thinking creatively about homes, trying to find opportunities, and assessing the communities around those homes. Being in an environment where my parents constantly looked at properties and imagined how they could make them different—thinking about the trees, neighbors, or the community around the houses was interesting. They also had to assess and develop a plan, figure out its feasibility, develop the budget, get all the permits, physically do the construction, and then we would live in the house. My father had his real estate license and would sell the houses himself. Watching my father go through this process of building something from nothing, over and over, gave me agency. It made me realize you can have this big idea but need to break it up into different phases and assess the other skills you need and have. I often saw him take on and move through things that intimidated him. It was kind of like running a small organization.

Between Us: The Downtown Denver Alleyways Project, Group Exhibition, Downtown Denver, CO.

That certainly is an education.

I see now how these experiences have supported my path, but there were also times when I felt like an outsider in the field. Taking a stray cat curator approach and non-traditional routes empowered me with real experience, which has been so helpful in realizing ambitious site-specific and site-relational contemporary art.

I also benefit from being based in the American West, where there's a lot of possibility and often more flexibility and space to embrace untraditional ideas. It’s perhaps a similar quality that many artists in the 60s found in their part of the world: wanting to do something but not knowing how, and committing to figuring it out step-by-step. This, paired with experience, has made me realize how owning this approach is exciting and feasible. 

WE ARE BODIES (The Archaeology Files), Anuar Maauad.

“From using raves to funding your undergrad to creating large scale community works.”

I've been on an untraditional educational path. While working as a gallery director at a college, I went to the European Graduate School in the Swiss Alps for my Master's, at a program modeled after Black Mountain College. Some of the leading contemporary thinkers were there, and I had classes with Simon Critchley, Slavoj Žižek, Alan Badou, and other prominent philosophical thinkers and filmmakers like Claire Denis and Catherine Breillat. It was this tiny international school in a town with no cars. I went in the summers, so I was able to work at the same time.

A Nomadic Art Museum: Black Cube 2015 – 2020 surveys groundbreaking, site-specific art projects produced by Black Cube during its first five years, which span across the United States and Europe.

That sounds like an incredible experience.

Many curators go into art history or administration and stay in the field. Still, I'm interested in the world and being around philosophical thought and thinkers shaping contemporary belief. There was an LA Times article about EGS that said students either become unemployable or wizards, and I'm a little bit of both, even though I have a wonderful job. Regardless, we're a weirdo pack of folks. The school is so nontraditional that I was surprised to find it existed when I arrived, even though I had paid all my tuition deposits in advance. It felt like a gamble but opened my mind in many ways.

With each year I work at Kickstarter I have more respect for people who really put everything on the line for their creative projects. If you could make any creative ambitions come to fruition what would it be?

My dream project, that's so interesting. With us, the legacy of working within the community and the process is a big part of it. I've learned not every artist is a good fit, but having a self-aware artist is crucial when producing these high-stakes projects. The quick hit is that I would love to do something on the moon that engages with a collective that somehow expresses the diverse tapestry of humanity and the unity of our species.

Rachel Hayes, Horizon Drift.

The small stuff! Ha. But I don't think that's far flung considering there are now so many artists working on space-related projects.

It may be feasible, but who is the audience? Who is the community? What are the ethics around that? What's rewarding is stepping into a community with openness and humility, being connected, understanding what's important to them and what their challenges are, and collaboratively producing artwork. 

To this day, one of my most significant markers of success was a project on the U.S.-Mexico border with Adriana Corral at a former human processing facility called Rio Vista Farms in Socorro, TX. During World War II, there was a program to bring in agricultural and railroad labor. Essentially, processing facilities like these put millions of Mexican men through dehumanizing and unsafe practices. They would go through, get inspected, and essentially enter a gas chamber and be sprayed with DDT or Zyklon B, a chemical later adopted by the Nazis for the extermination of humans. However, all these chemicals and floor plans were initially developed in the U.S.

We started working on this project around 2017 when Trump was at the height of his build-a-wall drama. I was worried about somehow opening up the community to hate; they taught me that this was part of their daily life. I saw how border life was, I visited factories and experienced the inextricable connection between the countries, and I also saw how my perception of the news media was skewed. They were not afraid to talk about border issues. This community, just outside El Paso, dealt with a lot, including poverty, flooding, and other basic needs that were largely unmet. They were also a vibrant and connected community with support systems that I was inspired by. We spent much time with Adriana Corral, the artist, and myself, connecting with Victor Reta, the head of Parks and Rec, to understand the logistical dimensions of working with this site and community. We also connected with Seheila Casper at Saving Places, who helped us understand and honor the historical importance of this site.

After the exhibition, they asked me to participate in their community cookbook. To this day, being invited to contribute has been one of my greatest markers of success, as it showed how we developed deep and meaningful relationships in producing and presenting Adriana's work. So, I don't know what my big dream idea is, but I know that I want to have that kind of impact.

What are you working on now?

We're doing web-based work in New York. Rindon Johnson also partnered with Jordan Loeppky-Kolesnik to create chromed sculptures placed in a wetland site that look almost alien against the landscape. We're building the website and will have webcams on the sculpture so you can view them day or night through all the seasonal changes. These sculptures are placed within the flooding zone of a forested area, so they'll change dramatically. 

Rindon Johnson and Jordan Loeppky-Kolesnik, "Sitting a little way off, beyond the trees, so as to remain in the full ambit." 2024. Installation view, Saugerties, New York.

That’s so interesting.

Last April, we also opened a project in Chicago with the artist Brendan Fernandes titled New Monuments | Chicago. It's the first in a series we're working on with Brendan, a choreographer who does public interventions around monuments. His work focuses on creating spaces of hope and possibility, particularly around places with historical significance or monuments to white colonial figures inconsistent with their surrounding communities. Getting the green light on the project was challenging, particularly with current conversations around contentious monuments. 

Chicago-based artist and 2022 Black Cube Artist Fellow Brendan Fernandes, New Monuments | Chicago. Presented in association with the Chicago Park District. Architectural Intervention by AIM Architecture.

Tell me more.

During the uprisings in 2020, Chicago experienced a lightning rod moment around the Columbus Monument at Grant Park. Former mayor Lori Lightfoot removed it in 2021 under the cover of night. Even though the City of Chicago has audited its monuments since then, it was still cautious about engaging monuments because of safety factors. New Monuments | Chicago was greenlit at the beginning of February 2024, meaning we had just a few months to execute this complicated project. The work ended up being a sculptural intervention around the General John Logan Monument, the second most prominent after Columbus.

The Logan Monument is interesting because Logan is a complicated figure. He was celebrated for his work in local government before becoming a general, then worked within the federal government and became the founder of Memorial Day. But earlier in his career, he passed legislation prohibitive to Black people in Illinois during the Great Migration. Later, when he experienced firsthand the oppression of minorities, he evolved and helped legislate, including for women's rights. 

The sculptural intervention around the monument was made with mirrored materials, making it look like a prism. At some point, mirrors were perpendicular to the sculpture, and the scaffolding was intended to make the space look like it was in transition. "Was it coming down? Was it being restored?" The mirrors reflected the city and the audience. We received support from AIM Architecture based in Shanghai, who designed the scaffolding, and had a choreographed performance at night to reference Lightfoot's gesture. We also had a written prompt: "How can we become a monument?"  We developed silver tags with paperbacks where people could write their responses and a shipping container on site staffed by gallery attendants where people could fill out the prompts, which were displayed en masse. We also placed kiosks with tags throughout the city at different cultural institutions to broaden that outreach. It was so cool to see the community respond to these prompts. 

Truly.

When you do something in a public space, you never know the response or if the community will be receptive, and we had more responses than expected. With Brendan Fernandes’ work, people were walking by, and some were upset, asking, “Is this under construction?” or “Are they taking it down?” Others, in turn, were like, “Just tear it all down.” I know we are doing good work if audiences have strong options, either positive or negative.  After all, I feel that stimulating space with the remarkable visions of artists is truly magical only when it meets the public.

Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum. All images courtesy of Black Cube.

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Slow Ghost is a newsletter covering the next wave in culture, brought to you by writer Laura Feinstein. 

The Genius of Perfume

Writer, DJ, and olfactory artist Maxwell Williams on scents raves, starting over, and the power of DIY fragrance.

Hi everyone,

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about scent. Not just how smell is the sense most tied to memory, yet the least understood, but also its incredible ability to shift our perceptions. Lavender oil can rocket you back to a sun-drenched vacation or memories of a beloved family member. A whiff of tuberose on an overheated city day can transport you over continents and decades. As David Seth Moltz of Brooklyn’s D.S. & Durga put it: “Perfume is armchair travel.”

I’m not the only one who got into collecting perfume samples and kits during the pandemic. And I won’t bore you with the many statistics showing that the perfume industry has exploded in popularity over the last few years. When we were locked down, forced to eat our own terrible cooking day in and day out while facing an uncertain and terrifying era we are only beginning to unpack, scent was one of the few ways to escape the confinements of daily life and stretch our “legs” a bit.

Today we have an interview with journalist-turned-perfumer Maxwell Williams of UFO Parfums, whose work focuses on the ways we interact with and are driven by scent. Their work challenges the notion of what a perfume can be and the context in which it lives in.

I hope you enjoy, and as always, if there is a creator you think we should be highlighting, hit me up at slowghost@substack.com or in the comments.

~Laura

Image: COME TEES x UFO PARFUMES, Slow Ghost logo: Tyler Lafreniere.

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Read
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How an abandoned school outside Hudson became the summer’s most enigmatic art destination.
What old photographs of Grace Jones tell us about nightlife now.
How polluted waterways are being cleansed using floating wetlands made of trash.

Check Out
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Laura Dern’s closet.
SVA’s upcoming retrospective of design legend Stefan Sagmeister.
Summertime Gallery, which celebrates neurodiverse artists while providing a platform to exhibit work and secure funding.
To celebrate its upcoming exhibition 'Moderation Biased,' NOWHERE, the multipurpose hub for NYC-based Japanese creators will host a silkscreen printing workshop featuring original designs and with E.A.K. Ramen serving cold noodle summer ramen and snacks. [August 10th]

Travel
One of my favorite design-y spots in Buenos Aires, Casa Cavia, gets an anniversary design update. (And if you’re traveling to the city this summer you can also read my full guide for GQ.)
More than a little curious about Francis Ford Coppola’s new hotel.
9 Global festivals worthy of your vacation time.
A brief list of U.S. cities that will pay you to move there.

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A Nose By Any Other Name

How a fascination with the olfactory took journalist-turned-perfumer Maxwell Williams around the world and back.

Institute for Art And Olfaction

Maxwell Williams and their work defy the easy elevator pitch. They served as an editor at several top indie magazines for years while writing for Vogue, Condé Nast Traveler, Art in America, The New York Times, ACLU Magazine, GQ, Dazed, and Departure. After taking a break from the tumultuous world of media, they’ve pivoted to olfactory art and experiences, their work blending sculpture, photography, and performance, which has led to solo exhibitions at Galerie de Thorigny (Paris), SEASON Gallery (Seattle), Olfactory Art Keller (New York), the Institute for Art & Olfaction (Los Angeles) and a residency at Mediamatic (Amsterdam).

Through their genderless perfume label, UFO Parfums, inspired by rave culture, Williams has collaborated with brands like Come Tees and OBEY, creators Parker Ito and Tea Hacic-Vlahovic, the poet Ariana Reines, and musician Reggie Watts. They have also contributed several chapters to the book The Essence: Discovering the World of Scent, Perfume & Fragrance (Gestalten, 2019) and wrote and directed the auditory-olfactory horror play LUXURE/OCCIRE, performed at the Experimental Scent Summit 2018 in London.

UFO Parfums

Slow Ghost: It's so interesting that, and correct me if I'm wrong, you started perfume as an area you wanted to explore and now it's a major part of what fuels you.

Maxwell Williams: Yes, it did start that way. I took a class at the Institute for Art and Olfaction almost ten years ago. The Institute just celebrated its 11th anniversary. But I took a class when it was first starting. I became friends with the founder, Saskia Wilson Brown, who's a linchpin of the community. I kept going to the classes, which became a hobby, but I also loved it. Immediately, I understood it to be this multifaceted thing I could explore in many different directions. There were so many places and questions I could try to answer. Maybe it was my journalism brain that was like, "Oh, wow, this is so interesting, and all the answers aren't there yet, so maybe I can look more into it." So, I started studying and researching, both in the practical aspect and as a researcher. Later, Saskia decided she wanted to form a board and asked if I wanted to join, and I've been on it now for about six or seven years. 

Peau D’Ange, a collaboration between Halcyon Veil x UFO Parfums

Simultaneously, I was a journalist for 15 years or so. I started my career in New York and then moved out to Los Angeles. I worked as an editor on the executive side, but that was still with independent magazines — everything from running photo shoots to writing articles. Then I went freelance and just wrote for a long time, and enjoyed it. But then the industry started to collapse, and as we all know, thousands of journalists are now without jobs because so many publications have gone under. So, the freelance industry became really competitive. My rates started to go down even though my experience had gone up, and I was seeing this constricting of the industry. At the same time, I got stiffed on a couple of big projects where I had to go to the city of New York and was part of a landmark Freelance Isn't Free Act lawsuit against a publication that didn't want to pay a few thousand dollars. But as a freelance writer, a few thousand dollars is the difference between staying in your living place and paying your credit card minimum payments.

At a certain point, I realized I didn't want to stay in the freelance writing game. I started doing some copywriting. But it wasn't as fun as journalism. At the same time, I was continuing to make perfume and loving it. I started attending conferences and being present in this international perfume community. I wrote for Departures and traveled to Grasse,  the home place of Western perfumery, to visit some of the most important areas. I began to understand my way around this field that is quite difficult to get into.

Institute for Art And Olfaction

Can you tell me more about that?

It's a closed-off place. As an independent perfumer who doesn't work for one of the seven or eight big perfume manufacturers, I'm producing and hand-bottling everything myself. It's extraordinarily difficult to build. I see a lot of parallels with journalism. As a freelance writer, you make those incremental steps. You write for the next publication, and then you go to the next publication and tell them, "Oh, I wrote for this publication," and they try you out. I'm doing much of the same, where I'll collaborate with a slightly bigger company next time. That's how it's become my primary career at this point.

You just came back from a perfume conference. What are these are like?

Every year, the Institute for Art and Olfaction holds an award ceremony that I consider to be the Golden Globes of the perfume industry. It's the more independent side of things. The foreign press does not vote on it; it's not the Oscars, which would be the more mainstream perfume awards (the FiFi Awards) that give all their awards to designer brand perfumes. We do the opposite. We hold an award ceremony for independent and artisan perfumers. Everyone from the indie perfume world and the olfactory art world comes. Those who are smaller companies and simply make their perfumes from home. We give out a series of awards at a fairly prestigious event. I wore a tuxedo this year at the ceremony, which was in Lisbon at a beautiful old building called Casa de Alentejo. If you look at the pictures, they are very baroque and ornate and beautiful.

Institute for Art And Olfaction

And this happens every year?

We did it online during the pandemic and then in LA the year after, which is our home space. We're trying to do it in LA every other year, but we've also been doing it in Amsterdam, London, and Berlin. We're going to try to do it in Asia in the future. We also do a series of events surrounding the awards. One is the Experimental Scent Summit, a curated program of talks and demonstrations that gets to the "new" in perfumery, developments, and technologies. One of our members, Jeffrey Paul, did a cocktail party this year with aromatic scented cocktails. Then, I always do a scented rave. I find a club in the city and do an installation. So, there are some beautiful scents when people come out and dance to techno.

People either think of perfume as super industrialized — the kind you buy at the big box stores — or something wholly intellectual and cloistered. You found this DIY space where you can get people to enjoy perfume and see it as something accessible. Like wine, it can be intimidating but doesn't have to be. 

That's personally my approach, and who knows where my journey will go. Eventually, I have dreams of not doing everything myself. I think I will always be the person who does the original blend, mainly for my own brand, but there are things I wouldn't say I like to do that I eventually would love not to be DIY. For example, I don't like to design my own website.

UFO Parfum

Oh, 100%.

I'm using a website template, but I would love to hire somebody to make something beautiful. Or even have people in the lab who can help or handle the business or logistics. Logistics are a nightmare for perfume. There are a lot of barriers to entry when you're turning it from a hobby of blending to becoming a company. And shipping is a huge problem. I need to go through a third-party shipper, and you need to have these really difficult to get hazardous materials certificates. It's a long and complicated process. Also, ideally, you want to have everything in-house if you're going to make an independent perfume company. All of those things are barriers to entry. It is very, like you said, hard to understand. A part of that is also the high overhead. I put every penny I made as a copywriter into my perfume practice. When making perfume, everything costs money, but you have to be willing to pay. And as somebody who doesn't have a trust fund, it's a tricky dance. I'm also competing with people that do have lots of funding. When people ask me how to do these things, I'm like, well, it's hard. But I'm happy to share exactly how I did it. But it's more challenging than you think it might be.

UFO Parfums

People have an illusion that all of us could become perfumers, but there is a strong business aspect behind it. For instance, if you want a specific scent, you need to get the raw materials in bulk.

The other thing is that it's not just getting it in bulk but getting it in breadth. What you want is to build a library of scents. I have thousands of different scents in mine, and each costs something to get. And then, when you find a formula, you buy them in bulk. But just to get the breadth, you have to spend so much money. It's crazy

If there was any person or group you could collaborate with, or any project you've dreamed of, what would it be?

I am doing some projects now that are dreams. I'm in this great position of not being jaded, I'm still a baby. I'm living the dream. Right now, I'm working with some music festivals to design merch items, perfumes, and then musical artists, which I'm not at liberty to say yet. One larger underground artist and I are planning and scheming a perfume. But I would also love to work with fashion houses, and am working with a designer named Rio Uribe for his label Rio Sport. He won the CFDA award nine years ago. I have worked with Obey Clothing and Come Tees, and I'd love to do more like that. And I'd love to work with outside-the-box brands. For instance, Hims and Hers made a perfume. I also want to work as a perfumer at other independent perfume companies that hire perfumers like Zoologist, American Perfumer, or Xyrena. But I'll never be able to collaborate exclusively with a big fashion house because they only work with the big seven or eight perfume manufacturers, or they have it in-house. I want to explore the next level down, the cool independent companies. And I'd love to work with more music festivals. 

One of the other companies I'm working with is everybody.world. We're doing two scents coming out this fall. This summer, I'm also teaching a class at the Institute about the history of scent and music and how they intertwine. Our senses of smell and hearing are interrelated in both physiological and sociolinguistic aspects. A lot of the words that are used to describe perfumes are borrowed from music. We talk about notes; we talk about a perfumer's organ. It has been interrelated and interlaced in a lot of different ways since the mid-19th century when Septimus Piesse, a perfumer, first described this idea of the notes of perfume. He had done that as a one-to-one type piece of music: here's what you're smelling and how it looks musically. And since then, it's been done that way.

UFO Parfums

If someone wants to learn more about this world, what are some books that really inspired you.

A Diary of a Nose: a Year in the Life of a Perfumer by Jean-Claude Ellena. He is the head perfumer behind a lot of Hermes perfumes. He's a genius. We love him. He's also a diarist and has journaled his life and put it into a couple of books and articles. It's not for the independent perfumer, but it gives some nice insights into how a perfumer thinks about scent. Also, Chandler Burr's The Emperor of Scent. It's a dialogue with Luca Turin, one of the people who popularized a sort of biological neuroscience and put a pop version of that into the mainstream. Luca Turin and his partner Tania Sanchez also wrote the book Perfumes A to Z, a pithy review of hundreds of perfumes. People take that as a bit of a critical volume.

Are there any events you want readers to know about?

There's another music festival that I'm working with called The Friends With Benefits Festival, which is happening in Idyllwild in August. I'll be there doing scents for their musical performances. In November, I'm mounting an exhibition that's a two-person collaborative between myself and Sean Raspet, an artist who works in olfaction, at the Olfactory Art Keller, an art gallery in New York that primarily deals in olfactory art. It'll be my second exhibition there. I also have a piece up in a show called Found Scents. I surreptitiously took some plant material from a notoriously restrictive botanical garden and tinctured the materials into this beautiful wearable perfume that I've called "Redacted Garden."

Olfactory Art Keller

The exhibition we're doing in November, Sean and I, is on our olfactory system, which was described much later than many of our other systems. It wasn't until 2004 that Richard Axel and Linda Buck won the Nobel Prize for explaining the olfactory system. They're still doing a lot of work mapping the genetic structure, and they're finding a lot of our olfactory receptors are susceptible to mutation or variation. So, we have been developing this perfume that only uses materials related to the olfactory receptors susceptible to variation of mutation. It's like an olfactory Rorschach test. Ideally, each person that smells it has some sort of mutation. Will smell something slightly or even vastly different.

So it says much more about you than the perfume.

Ideally. We are still determining how everyone's cones respond to light, but can gather information so that you see blue the same way I see blue. But some people have mutations in their cones and difficulty seeing green. We call that colorblind. Then, we have a similar term in our olfactory system called anosmia, with different degrees of anosmia. There's a complete anosmia, which means you can't smell at all. And then there's specific anosmia, which means that you can't smell certain molecules, and then there are degrees within that. You might have an anosmia, but that might not be complete, which is the variation we're discussing. You may smell something different than even the general population. For instance, many musks are related to these genetic variations. Perfumers will add different musk variations into a perfume they want to smell like musk because it's so common that many can’t smell specific notes.

That's so interesting. Thank you for breaking it down. You really do make this much easier for the average person to understand.

I hope so. I mean, that's my job as an educator! To try to help people understand what these systems are. A part of it, too, is that we're approaching it as artists, and trying to express the things that we learn in the best way to the general public.

maxwellwilliams.co

From the archives:

The Subversive, Transfixing World of Jelly Art
Pivoting To Witchcraft With Meredith Graves
Copenhagen's Fabrics of the Future
Raymond Pettibon Appreciates Your Black Flag Tributes

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Slow Ghost is a newsletter covering the next wave in culture, brought to you by writer Laura Feinstein.