Would you rather be single in Manhattan now or in 1995? That was one of the questions asked at the 30th-anniversary celebration of Candace Bushnell’s final Sex and the City column in the New York Observer, now simply Observer. During Fashion Week at sunset, well-heeled guests gathered atop the CORE: Club terrace to hear Bushnell speak on a panel alongside some of today’s biggest content creators: Lola Tash of My Therapist Says and ballerina and influencer Violetta Komyshan. It was moderated by me, also a former Observer sex columnist.

Bushnell’s column ran from 1994 to 1996 and would go on to spark a cultural phenomenon. She describes it as more Edith Wharton than Playboy, more social anthropology than sex. There are, after all, “only so many different ways people can do it.”

One could feel the seasons changing; the warmth of summer still lingered, but with the beginnings of a chill. New York’s history was all around—across the way was the St. Regis hotel (where Salvador Dalí stayed and Mick Jagger rang in his 30th birthday on the roof) flanked by the Peninsula and a church with its spire rising up just below. Same places, a different time, and yet so many of the same questions.

Guests sipped Cosmopolitans in the waning sun, waiting for the panel to begin. A gust of wind blew by, and the panelists took their seats, backlit by the warm glow of the city lights. Observer’s Merin Curotto introduced the panelists and thanked REAL, co-founded by Gary Spitalnik, for hosting the evening, along with partners Frédérique Constant and inKind. She noted that Frédérique Constant had outfitted the panelists with watches, in what, she quipped, “may be the first time that anyone has tried to keep a conversation about Sex and the City on schedule.”

What was the most Sex and the City thing that had happened to the panelists this past month? I’d been in the throes of talking to a guy on Raya when he told me he was coming to New York. I asked when, and he ghosted me. Tash, dressed in a pink blouse and matching long pencil skirt, had been on a date when her phone fell through a grate. A film was shooting on the street and production stopped to help. The police got involved, too, and eventually the phone was fished out. “My whole life is on that phone. I’m not backing it up,” she said. The saga took four hours. And as for her date? “The poor guy” spent it by her side; Tash called it a bonding moment.

As for Komyshan, she was asked to shoot a video at the restaurant Bibliothèque to help an anonymous man find love. Bushnell thought it sounded like a great reality show, and she would know. For Bushnell, striking in a fitted, diagonally striped dress of mustard, lavender, brown and white, the most Sex and the City thing of late was shooting an actual reality show. The Golden Life, Bushnell said, is about women over 55, their friendships and the understanding that “your girlfriends are still really important to you.”

“Women are always inspiring to me in this city,” she said. “They’re the best and they’re the coolest and they’re all super accomplished.” That, she said, “seems very Sex and the City to me.”

When asked how Bushnell’s column had inspired her, Komyshan singled out “My Unsentimental Education: Cupid Has Flown the Co-op (The End of Love in Manhattan).” An English journalist meets an investment banker who, after two weeks, takes her to the Hamptons to see the house he’s building and meet the architect. She assumes he’ll marry her. Back in England, that would have meant something. Six months later, the reporter gets smarter. “Relationships in New York are about detachment,” she concludes. But how does one get attached when one wants to? “Honey, you leave town.”

“The original Charlotte,” Bushnell exclaimed.

There was a stir in the audience, as though Bushnell had mentioned an old friend everyone knew well. Komyshan added that her boyfriend lives in London. He had seen her on Instagram and asked a mutual friend to introduce them. They met in real life: a hybrid of 1995 and now.

Tash, meanwhile, had been inspired by Bushnell’s anthropological eye. For My Therapist Says, she and her collaborators observe their friends and their interesting tales, memorializing them in humorous, one-image captions. She called memes “a modern form of capturing that time and moment in our lives.”

As for how one actually meets someone, Bushnell still believes in 1990s methods—specifically, meeting in real life. “It’s always been a feature of New York City that it’s a place to meet people in person,” she said. “And that’s really how things happen.” Still, she conceded, “it would be sad to think that’s not true anymore, but maybe it’s not.”

I worried that it wasn’t, that dating apps were making people feel more disconnected and easier to just stay home and swipe from the comfort of bed. Then again, as I looked around at the terrace overflowing with fashionistas, I realized perhaps it was time to take Bushnell’s advice myself. She was firm. “You just have to go out every single night. Don’t say no. If somebody invites you, go.”

Bushnell has also always believed that women should make their own money and not rely on a man. “Now, I feel like this is something that women are really understanding for the first time,” she said. “The industrial romance complex is really, really big in women’s lives and a lot of women really believe in it. And I’ve never believed in it.”

The panel ended with this not-so-simple question posed above: would you rather be single in Manhattan now or in the nineties? There was some hemming and hawing, but everyone ultimately chose “now.” Bushnell did too, adding that if she were 35, writing “Sex and the City” with all those attractive men on dating apps, she’d be having a good time. “Everyone would be like Samantha in ‘Sex and the City’ all the time.”

Post-panel, Bushnell’s friend Sarah Cuyler called Candace “spicy,” from “the shoes, the dress and the attitude” to “the consistent delivery of the same message that women are wonderful and empowered and that they come first.”

Nearby, Tash and Komyshan were gathered with friends under a heat lamp. Tash said she was “absolutely floored” to have been on the panel with Bushnell and had been trying to keep her cool. “I’m such an admirer of her work,” she said. “She’s such a great inspiration for so many generations after her.” It was also a full-circle moment. “Our book was based on her book of essays,” Tash said. My Therapist Says: Advice You Should Probably Not Follow, a collection of essays published six years ago, is now being developed into a TV series.

Tash finds Bushnell’s voice and satire “quick and quippy and so relevant 30 years on.” She added, “I think she said that there’s this age barrier. I don’t think that’s true at all. I think she can still hit it and throw down with all the young’uns out there.”

Komyshan, who wore a vintage gray Richard Tyler dress and sparkling, crystal-embellished Roger Vivier stilettos she’d brought out for the occasion, said that being on the panel with Bushnell was “surreal.” “She’s such a character and so cool. Can you imagine what the ’90s were like with this woman? She probably has stories for days.”

“I was born in ’96, right?” Komyshan said. Yet she found Bushnell’s columns relatable, although there was one thing she thought was different. She’d recently seen a woman throwing out a cigarette because everyone “vapes and stuff.” Though she doesn’t smoke herself, Komyshan saw it and thought, “That’s chic.” When she came across one of Bushnell’s columns declaring that love was in and smoking was out, she joked, “I feel like love is out and smoking is kind of in now.”

Then she set the record straight. “Don’t get me wrong. I love love. I’m the most romantic of the romantics.” Her final verdict: “Love is not out, but cigarettes are back in.”

On the other side of the terrace, entrepreneur Woodie Hillyard thought it was fun to consider what Bushnell’s column was then and what it might look like today. “I think dating is such a modern part of life in New York City. It’s the fabric that holds everyone together,” he said. “Everyone has a crazy story.”

As to whether he’d rather be dating now or in 1995, Hillyard chose the latter. “I think we’d all be a little more locked in,” he said. “There’s so much distraction on your screen, and I also think communication would just be a lot more direct.” Back then, “you’d call people. Buzz them.” He smiled at the novelty. “Beep them, and they’d call you, which I do prefer. I love calling people, and I feel like that’s very taboo today.” He also admitted to overthinking texts, and “that just needs to go away.”

What could change this? “I think you go back to IRL and make a phone call okay again.”

Best-selling author Sarah Hoover, whose book The Motherload made waves with its unsparing take on motherhood, mused that if she were single, she’d rather date in 1995. (Hoover is married to artist Tom Sachs.) But then she swung back because in 1995, there wasn’t an app where women could complain when things went south, as they “inevitably would.”

“Men are annoying,” she deadpanned. “And I feel the more ability we have to complain about it, the better off we are, because it’s such a way to bond with other women.” At the end of the day, “it’s about your girlfriends.”

Was there hope, I asked. “Yes. I really think there is,” Hoover said. “I’m a boy mom, and I’m raising my son to fucking listen.”

As the evening wound down, I caught up with celebrity fashion stylist Nolan Meader, who said the panel made him fall in love with New York even more. “It’s a place of characters. Nobody boring lasts here long.” As for Bushnell, Meader felt there were very few people who had changed the landscape of the city the way she had. She “paved the way” for women to be more empowered and in charge of their lives, and had inspired millions of women and gays to come to New York to live theirs. He added that she was also responsible for Manolo Blahnik becoming part of the cultural zeitgeist. “You’re not a New Yorker unless you own a pair,” he joked.

When it came to dating, Meader thought people in New York were more secure being themselves, and perhaps there was less focus on finding someone because they were more content with the lives they had built. “I certainly feel that way,” he said. “If I find someone, I find someone. If I don’t, I’ve got the best friends in the world, and I live in the greatest city in the world… And I think Candace Bushnell is very responsible for that.”

Brooke Korine Miller looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize herself. She had never expected to have breast cancer at 25. The model, actress and, by her own admission, “a little bit of a hypochondriac” says it was her vigilance that led to finding the small lump. While she was fortunate enough to have the resources to save most of her hair and buy new skincare products and makeup “to feel a little bit pretty,” not every woman does. That’s why she founded Pretty With Purpose, which helps women pay for cold capping, microblading, skincare and other treatments that can help them feel like themselves again. “The idea,” she said, “is to give women some of that strength and confidence back and remind them that they’re not standing alone.”

She launched the nonprofit over Labor Day weekend at her stunning East Hampton home. Upon arrival, her husband, venture capitalist Harley Miller, welcomed guests into a living room with a soaring, vaulted honey-toned wood ceiling, a large gray stone fireplace and a wall of windows. Brooke would later describe their home as “kind of like a ski lodge, but it also works in the summer.” The compound was once a recovery house; Leonardo DiCaprio was rumored to have stayed there.

On the stone patio, framed by wild grasses, black-eyed Susans and clipped hedges, guests sipped Aperol Spritzes and nibbled on a cheese plate with figs and olives. A long table beneath a white umbrella was set with floral china and arrangements of pink roses and carnations. Brooke greeted loved ones, friends and fellow survivors in a flowing pink floral halter dress, whose designer she couldn’t name without checking the tag—House of CB. Across the lawn, under a pergola, Artemis Archive offered Reiki and sound-bowl healing, while by the pool, Renata França taught guests how to perform lymphatic drainage massage on themselves.

The highlight of the luncheon was a conversation between Brooke and her breast surgeon, the world-renowned Dr. Lisa Newman, whom Brooke credits with “getting the cancer out of my body.” Dr. Newman told Observer she was “thrilled and stunned” that Brooke had started her own nonprofit to support breast health awareness, particularly among young women. “Brooke is a role model for how you can do it successfully and stay productive, stay active and stay gorgeous.”

(Dr. Newman has seen the impact of breast cancer in both her professional and private lives. “Just a few years ago, my sister was diagnosed with breast cancer. Within 36 hours, we lost her. So it’s a very, very personal thing for me.”)

When guests gathered for the discussion, Brooke introduced Dr. Newman, who she’d met the day after her diagnosis. “Mind you, it was Mother’s Day,” Brooke told the group. “She could have been doing a million things, but she made time to see me, and I’ll never forget how much that meeting reassured me during one of the scariest moments of my life.”

Dr. Newman, who drove out from New York City for the luncheon and would make the return drive immediately afterward because she was on call, emphasized that most women diagnosed with breast cancer will do well thanks to advancements in treatments, allowing them to “continue to live fabulous, productive, beautiful lives.” She also pointed out that we’re all at risk (men included, and there’s an increasing incidence of breast cancer among younger women) and stressed the importance of early detection. She added that staying fit and active can lower the likelihood of developing breast cancer. “The rule of thumb is that the diet that’s good for the heart is also good for breast health,” she said, recommending low-fat foods and plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables.

She then paused and said she didn’t want to “stand between you guys and a fabulous meal.” A flurry of hands immediately went up with questions.

Lunch from Il Buco followed. Plate in hand by the buffet, Val Talve, who met Brooke the year they were both diagnosed with cancer, recalled sitting with her at the hospital. “We talked about losing our eyelashes, eyebrows, our hair, comparing pictures of our hair,” she told Observer. “I’m just really proud of her, because I know how hard it is to show up for others after showing up for yourself and creating something incredible for other women who don’t have the money for wellness, healing and beauty.”

Brooke’s husband, Harley, who has been by her side throughout and watched Pretty With Purpose come to fruition, told Observer that seeing the organization come together was “incredible.” He referred to himself as her “sparring partner in the background” and her “silent partner.”

When asked about research showing that marriages are more likely to end when women become seriously ill than when men do, Harley called the statistics “pretty reprehensible.” The newlywed continued, “For me, it wasn’t even a question. I leaned in so much harder. There wasn’t a day when I didn’t think she was the most beautiful. It’s interesting because it was such a slow progression downward. So I was eased into that. And even on her darkest days, I was like, ‘You’re so beautiful to me.’ And then post-chemo, when she was recovering, every day it was like, ‘You were literally even more beautiful to me than you were yesterday.’ So it was a wild roller coaster.”

As the afternoon wound down, guests left with gift bags that included skincare products from Codage, Paris, a foldable, chargeable pink pocket mirror with lights, a pink baseball cap with the Pretty With Purpose logo and a discount code for Sonata, a doctor-led personalized health concierge focused on prevention (and the event’s sponsor).

After a quick outfit change—into a loose black T-shirt and black jeans—Brooke curled up on a white couch, her knees tucked underneath her. She had been up since 6 a.m., cutting flowers and making bouquets with her mother and friends. She said that she was proud of herself for pulling the afternoon together. “It’s scary to go for it.”

She sees Pretty With Purpose becoming a community, a place where women can go for advice, support and to know that things can be okay. She plans to see what women need and respond to it. “That’s where my heart is,” she added. If a woman comes to PWP looking for something specific, like a facial or lymphatic drainage massage, she wants it on the record that she “will make that happen.”

When she was first diagnosed, Brooke said she wasn’t afraid of dying but of losing her life—her sense of self, her relationships and her then-boyfriend, Harley. “It’s crazy to think back that he might not want to be with me because I had cancer,” she said. “But those things go through your head, and I want women to know it’s normal and nothing to be ashamed of. It’s also okay to mourn the life you once had and totally embody the new person you are. And it’s hard.”

“Every woman who beats breast cancer will talk to you on the phone, like it’s a community,” she reflected. “They say it’s the worst club with the best members.”

Last Thursday, the iconic Pierre Hotel threw its annual Smash Bash, a New York tennis fête that this year featured star players Alexander Bublik and Anastasia Potapova. It was, as one guest put it, “the pregame to the game,” firing up anticipation for the final Grand Slam tournament of the season, the U.S. Open.

It’s apropos that this year’s U.S. Open theme is “Celebrating Our New York Story”—more and more, the city’s kings and queens of hospitality are hosting tennis-themed celebrations. And what is more quintessential old New York than the Pierre Hotel? Coco Chanel and Elizabeth Taylor lived there. Audrey Hepburn celebrated her Oscar win for Roman Holiday in a Pierre suite, and Al Pacino danced the tango in the hotel’s Cotillion Room in Scent of a Woman. In more recent years, the hotel has been a mainstay for celebrities preparing for the Met Gala, including Lady Gaga and Shakira. In Ocean’s 8, Anne Hathaway’s character prepares for the Met Gala in the Presidential Suite.

The Smash Bash was inspired by the tradition of U.S. Open players staying at the Pierre. The fête began humbly in 2017 in Perrine’s alfresco setting but has since grown to more than 200 guests, moving this year into the hotel’s 18th-century-inspired French neoclassical Grand Ballroom.

There, under its cascading Murano chandeliers, guests mingled, sipping Taittinger Champagne and Grey Goose Honey Deuces adorned with mini tennis rackets as they waited for the main event: a table tennis match starring Potapova and Bublik, followed by an opportunity to play the pros themselves. A DJ spun tunes, and over a raw seafood bar, a chef shucked oysters, the waiting bivalves stacked on ice among sliced orange and lemon moons. In the very middle of the ballroom was a ping-pong table and a line of fans forming to take pictures with Bublik, who broke into the world’s top 10 this year.

Known for his big serve and being a character, he has, over the last two years, made a tremendous resurgence. His agent, Stefan Leiner, reflected on what changed, telling Observer that “he just manages his energy really well, like taking breaks and recovery. And then if you start winning, it helps a lot. Confidence kicks in. It’s more fun.” On technique, Leiner added, “He has a really, really good forehand now.”

Bublik has been open about burnout. “I just stopped whining and got back to work,” he told Observer. When pressed as to how, he answered, “You have to understand if things aren’t going your way, you have to change something. I was losing matches and I was complaining, complaining, complaining. And then I said, ‘Okay, I have to stop.’ And then I stopped.”

And what was his favorite New York dish? “None,” he deadpanned, though he added that he’s always happy to find a chili dog. He was then whisked away to play a game of ping-pong with Potapova. Later, we heard a party-goer say, under his breath, that while Bublik might be one of the best tennis players in the world—at ping-pong, not so much.

After weaving around high tables where attendees opined on tennis, nibbling on passion fruit caviar, toasted brioche with foie gras or tennis racket-shaped pasta with creamy truffle sauce, we caught up with international star Potapova, formerly ranked No. 1 in juniors and currently No. 25 in the world. Like Bublik, she has improved her ranking dramatically in the last year, which she credits, in part, to hard work and maturity. “I think it’s more about how I treat myself being a professional athlete, because it’s such a different life. If you want a good result, you need to be a tennis player 24/7, no matter what you do. Even if today I have an event to attend, tomorrow I need to be on court, playing again. I need to go to bed earlier, make sure I’ve recovered and eat well.”

Since she’s constantly playing around the world, she travels with her family, boyfriend and her toy poodle, Buya, to give her a sense of normalcy. “She’s actually a superstar of the tournament,” she said of her pup. “Everybody loves her.” Among the things Potapova loves are fashion, Hermès handbags especially, one of which she happened to be carrying. She was also wearing a Chanel jacket and Saint Laurent slippers, but pointed to her black fitted dress. “It’s just Zara, girls!”

Around the ballroom, a green glow lit the white fluted piers from below, washing across the trim around the 20-foot ceilings. A large bouquet of sunflowers and orange blooms, arranged with tennis rackets, adorned the dessert station, where a line of chocolate U.S. Open trophies sat among almost every mini dessert one could think of, from tiny tiramisu to Gala apple tart tatin.

Television personality Tom Murro, who described himself as just a guy at a party, told Observer he’d never been to a bad Pierre event. “It’s that old New York charm,” he said, then joked, “The Pierre always gives me chocolates and wood-handled umbrellas when it’s raining. And then, of course, there’s Jill Fox.”

Fox, the Pierre’s director of sales and marketing, laughed, adding that Murro has been coming to the Smash Bash since before she worked there. “People are coming back every year now, forming a new kind of community. I could tell you so much about the history, but really, it’s more like making our own history.”

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Last weekend, the Watermill Center’s annual Summer Festival 2026, ‘Limitless Time,’ presented by Van Cleef & Arpels, unfolded over two days, drawing more than a thousand well-heeled guests to its sprawling 10 acres in Watermill, Long Island. But this year’s festival was unlike others. It was the first Summer Festival since its founder, the indomitable Robert Wilson, passed away in 2025. How would this surreal, otherworldly festival fare without his direction and the moment of silence before the annual summer dinner he’d long become known for?

There was little the legendary Robert Wilson didn’t do. An avant-garde director, playwright, choreographer, performer, set and lighting designer, sculptor, painter and video and sound artist, he collaborated with Philip Glass on the celebrated opera Einstein on the Beach, which nearly bankrupted him. Over the decades, he worked with the likes of Tom Waits, Laurie Anderson, Marina Abramović and Lady Gaga, among many other stars. In 1992, he founded the Watermill Center as a place for artists from around the world to explore their creativity and find support. The task of carrying it forward now falls to Charles Chemin, who has been part of the Watermill Center since he was 10 years old.

Saturday also happened to be the 50th anniversary of Einstein on the Beach. At the start of the night, Observer spoke with Noah Khoshbin, curator of the Watermill Center, who curated “DiAlogs,” an exhibition of Wilson’s three-dimensional work. Asked what Wilson might have thought of the show, Khoshbin said he believed he would have loved it. “He’d come in, go into each room, and move one chair a few feet. And then he’d say, ‘Bravo.'” As for the evening ahead, Khoshbin offered that guests would move through “a nonlinear, emotional reaction. The night would begin dreamlike, turn absurd, and become transcendent by the end.”

And absurdist it was. Tiki torches lit a path in the woods where a Lincoln Town Car, half covered in foliage, doors open, played a haunting oldies song. On the other side, a man sat inside a white billboard, legs dangling, lost on his phone. Beside him, the words “YOU CAN” were cut out, the setting sun glowing through the letters. The crowd’s attire ranged from women in gowns and stilettos, not an easy feat on such uneven terrain, to others in more sensible footwear.

A pebbled staircase surrounded by white and purple flowers led to a hut one ducked into. Inside, a spotlight shone on dirt that smelled like earth with a hint of manure while a man wrapped like a mummy phonetically sounded out words like “DREEM” as a mouth moved on a screen to eerie music. Moving on, a phone rang among the trees, and curious guests picked up to an emotional voice on the other end. A shirtless man in a cowboy hat chopped wood. Dancers on stilts in long white skirts arched backward and forward, perhaps weeping or in ecstasy. A man in black vinyl wrestled a spiky Styrofoam-type monster to the pulsing sound from Lou Reed Drones. It was an ocean of senses.

RoseLee Goldberg, Performa’s founder, told Observer, “Everywhere you look, Robert sets us up to have a view. Every step we take, you can be sure that he somehow thought of it.” Further on in the woods, Laurie Anderson, her circular amber frames matching her violin, performed A Hole in the Sky with Shane Weeks and members of the Shinnecock Nation. Mikhail Baryshnikov slipped into the crowd.

Other longtime Wilson collaborators, legends themselves, performed as well. Lucinda Childs and Christopher Knowles read excerpts from his plays; French actress Isabelle Huppert returned to lines from works she had performed with him across three decades; and Madeline Hollander presented Parallel Diagonals, inspired by the 45-degree angles in Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach.

Notable attendees included fashion designer Cynthia Rowley, gallerist Arne Glimcher, sculptor Arlene Shechet, director Susan Stroman, news anchor Rosanna Scotto and Sailor Brinkley-Cook.

At the end of the dirt path, the woods opened into a square where guests sipped LALO margaritas and even a “Limitless” lager, and grazed on a smorgasbord of chilled watermelon and feta, burrata, sweet corn orecchiette and more. Bites by BITE were a delight to the tongue.

Dancer Katherine Crockett dazzled in a strapless nude-colored gown flecked with sequins. She told Observer that Wilson had directed her in multiple productions and changed her life. “He sparked my imagination. When I’d walk on stage, he’d say, ‘Remember, you’ve been walking for a thousand years.'” She mused on his wisdom. “If you think you’re going in the right direction, change directions.”

And she recalled the time he spoke at a gala: “An artist only needs three things—encouragement, encouragement, encouragement and the funds to make their art come true.” Asked what he might think about this particular evening, she thought he’d be excited about the young and acclaimed artists who’d come together to honor him and that he was a part of their becoming. “It’s extraordinary what I’ve seen walking through, and what we have yet to come.”

As guests grazed, a performer wheeled by, collecting trash in return for garbage-scented ice cream. A nearby guest winced. “It really does taste like trash, and I can’t get rid of the aftertaste.”

The crowd then turned to Julie Shanahan, who led an audience-participated dance drawn from Pina Bausch’s The Nelken Line, demonstrating the arm and hand movements for each season. Participating guests formed a joyous procession, winding through the crowd to Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues.”

As the chain dispersed, many continued on toward a simultaneous staging of part one and part two of Wilson’s I Was Sitting on My Patio This Guy Appeared I Thought I Was Hallucinating. On the way, Observer caught up with Evelyn Dugan, a former artist in residence, then a summer intern and now on staff. She wore a strapless jumpsuit, her strawberry hair pulled back and a delicate smattering of freckles across her face.

Asked by another guest if Wilson had been scary, she demurred, “He had a large presence, but I don’t think he was scary. He was demanding, very genuine, very detail-oriented, but also very funny and honest.” She added that he set the center up well with the intention of longevity. “He wanted this to be a place where artists could connect, not just with him, but with each other and then build this network for the world.” As for the festival’s theme: “Bob had a way with time. It wasn’t a linear thing. How can we stretch it to find more moments within it?” And then she disappeared into the crowd.

It was a double-sided stage: on one side, Christopher Nell in a black suit; on the other, Julie Shanahan in a white gown. Guests could move between the two. Nell called out from the stage: “There’s so little time, we’re wasting it. That’s fine with most elephants.”

As the night chilled and some guests drifted indoors, Observer spoke with Elka Rifkin, a former Watermill Center director who’d come back this year to volunteer and support Charles Chemin, the new artistic director. “The night has been remarkable,” she said. “It’s what Watermill has been, but I feel it’s on the cusp of what Watermill will become.”

Then the sound of two hundred cymbals by EYE reverberated across the grounds, and everyone poured back into the square. It came in waves, building, softening, crescendoing again. A blueberry crumble of sorts with mint was served to a rapt audience. It was transcendent. Then DJ King Shabazz closed out the night.

Had Wilson left enough of a roadmap for the Watermill Center to thrive without him? “A lot of people use the word legacy when they look at Watermill,” Elise Herget, the managing director, told Observer. “I think it’s more than that. I think it’s a continuation of something Bob created—not only a space for him to make work, but one he always intended as a framework for other artists to work within.” She paused. “I’m here all the time. I live and breathe this place right now, and it’s amazing. And through that, I can kind of feel like his presence has never left. It’s in every choice of line, every blade of grass that was planted over the past thirty years.”

After all, in Bob’s world, time was never linear but limitless.

Mikhail Baryshnikov, Charles Chemin, Lisa Rinehart and Elisabetta Di Mambro

Carlos Sotos

RoseLee Goldberg

Pati Hertling, Thomas Rom, Maureen O’Boyle and Adrian Danchig Waring

Connie Beckley

Arden Wohl and Jonah Freeman

Dianne Shabazz Varnie

Laura Regensdorf and Ronnie Gensler

Barry Holden, Nina Yankowitz, Barbara Rubin and Michael Royce

Mark Epstein, Arlene Shechet and Dakota Jackson

Sandra Gluck and Peter Gluck

Madeline Hollander

Brian Belott and Noah Khoshbin

Hannah Gottlieb-Graham and Thomas Rom

Krista Bard

Elena Ulansky and Anu Manocha

Setpheap “Peace” San, Illia Rybii and Dario Vaccaro

Asher Liftin

Jordan Wise and Eric Viner

Susan Stroman and Margaret Garrett

Bill Campbell

Emmanuelle Perrin and Sailor Brinkley-Cook

Yuchang Xiao

Arne Glimcher

Cynthia Rowley

Indira Cesarine

Rachel Risso-Gill and Oliver Risso-Gill

Michelle Crowe Hernandez

Cleo Ahn

RoseLee Goldberg and Sasha Okshteyn

Christine Wächter-Campbell and Gaila Stawski

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Ariel Adkins and Will Sealy

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Oliver Thym and Juliet Arrieta

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The world demands definition, certainty and arcs of triumph, yet best-selling writer and professor Ocean Vuong offers something very different. His novels and poetry catapult readers into the ineffable, often jolting them into unprecedented perspectives. He employs metaphors that disrupt thought and open the heart, drawing us into the lives of the working poor, the people upward mobility would rather not think about. He stays with an image or a feeling and asks, “What else?” In Vuong’s most recent book, The Emperor of Gladness, he writes about the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut: “We pay taxes on every check to stand on the sinking banks of a river that becomes the morgue of our dreams.”

Vuong came to the U.S. at two, learned to read English at 11, was the go-between translator for his mother and grandmother—women who filled him with tenderness and the hauntings of the Vietnam War—and has become one of the most celebrated authors of his generation. His trajectory is the redemption story America loves, and yet, he questions the very crown he wears. “I’m still perplexed as to why the works have taken off in the way they do,” he reflects. “To me it’s all like niche material—gay, sad descriptions of New England weather. Why are there millions of copies across the world… I’m glad, but I don’t know why.”

Perhaps because as much as people crave certitude and answers, it’s the questions that make us feel alive. Vuong is the author of two poetry collections and two novels. His debut collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, won the T.S. Eliot Prize, among others, and Time Is a Mother was a Griffin Prize finalist. He is a recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” Grant. His first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, a New York Times best-seller, has sold over two million copies in 41 languages. His newest, The Emperor of Gladness, is an Oprah’s Book Club pick, a finalist for the Dublin Literary Award and is out in paperback now.

The Emperor of Gladness follows 19-year-old Hai, a college dropout struggling with addiction, who stands at the edge of a bridge, ready to jump, when he’s distracted by an old woman wrestling with a laundry line. When the wind takes a bedsheet, he calls out and gives himself away. Grazina, a Lithuanian immigrant still plagued by World War II with bouts of dementia, talks him down and takes him in. She offers Hai a room in exchange for his caretaking, and the two form an unlikely bond. With a second chance at life, he gets a job at HomeMarket, a fast-casual restaurant, where he meets a cast of quirky characters he laughs with and roots for, all of them just barely getting by.

I met Vuong this spring at the National Poetry Series dinner at Balthazar, where he was one of the readers. I was seated at a long banquette, flanked by writers, although there was an empty seat next to me. When Vuong popped up from under the table, I felt like I’d won the lottery. We had a wonderful conversation, which we’d pick up a month later over Zoom. I had spent days immersed in his writing. So when he appeared on screen, I found myself tearing up. I apologized.

He replied: “That’s what it’s about. The culture fetishizes this steely, objective thing. But nothing is objective. No journalism is objective. Joan Didion was so radical in proving that. She’s like, ‘I’m a small woman in a room looking at the world, and that needs to be understood.’ So much of my work is about that. I’m grateful for your experience and for opening with this vulnerability. Why fake anything? Everyone gives us a form to present ourselves in. That’s the easy way. It’s always available. Who has the courage to break from that model?

Thank you. You’ve talked about being drawn to the threshold, the moment between the rose and the bud, the in-between that we’ve been taught to ignore, because it has no name. How do you write toward that?

I don’t know when I realized this. Maybe it was my study of Zen Buddhism, where there were these Zen koans that would say things like, “The grass is not green”… “An elephant is only big when it’s next to something small.” What those koans do is destabilize definition. When you look at words, which we use as signs, literally signs to get us places, everything in between the bud and the rose lasts much longer. And yet, we don’t care to have a name for it. So much of life is like that. We say childhood, adolescence, adulthood. But is it just that simple? So much of that time was defined as one word, childhood. But what is grieving inside that space? Experience is infinite and words are finite.

The tension is how do I use finite material to capture the infinite? It shouldn’t be possible. I think it’s about being skeptical of the words, which is a strange thing for a poetry professor to say. But is the word enough? You’re given childhood and adulthood, but is that enough? For most people, that’s fine. That’s serviceable. Let’s move on. Let’s get a job. Let’s do things. But the writer would say, “I don’t think that’s enough.” I don’t think the dictionary has two poles there. I’m insistent that there’s so much in the middle. And then the task is to pay attention to that, to be present to that, and ask, “What else? What else is there?” And when you lean in, you think, “Oh gosh, there’s no definition for this thing between.” But it’s incredible. Look at the rose. Look at it. It’s not even rose-like anymore. It’s self-destructing into rose. How do I describe that?

You have so many beautiful metaphors in your work. You juxtapose life and death, and you almost feel them simultaneously. How do you construct that? What’s your process?

I think metaphor is one of the oldest forms of thinking. That’s what I insist on, that it’s not just writing, it’s thinking. You can look at a building and see a gravestone. “Whoa.”

So I think, do you have enough courage to make the jump and be silly? Because as soon as you say something like that, you have departed from the mimetic world that everyone sees. You are now risking something antithetical to what’s there. You have ventured into the land of different thinking, and now you have to follow that. Can you sit in that discomfort, hold that silliness, and then follow it through to a historical reality? And if you can stay there and describe it, you say that it’s suddenly ironic that an island that was achieved and realized through attempted Native American genocide and the burial of enslaved people would then resurrect gravestones as a way to realize itself as triumphant.

And it’s often an intervention in thinking. It’s a disruption. It’s a tear. Isaac Babel said, “The sunset is a beheading.” You’re like, “What?” If it’s provocative enough to feel true, the mind snags on it, and you think, “Wait a minute, maybe the sun does roll away from the earth like a beheaded head.” And now we’re in this different space. Thinking is where I’m most interested, but it takes courage. I tell my students, “You’ll find a way to write a strong metaphor. You can use simile, or the colon, as Pound did. But the harder task is, have you looked at the world deep enough to come up with something that has correspondence and dissonance?” Most people misunderstand that metaphor is only about correspondence, that agreement. But it’s actually also the dissonance, the fact that a building will never be a gravestone. So both the resonance but also the refusal. That’s tension. It will never be completely coincided.

It seems as though that tension itself is also a threshold.

A refusal to resolve itself. Anne Carson talks about this in a beautiful book called Eros the Bittersweet. She says that lack of correspondence is actually where Eros, the idea of love and desire, is strongest. It’s not in the final touch. That’s why in the Sistine Chapel, they don’t touch. It’s much more powerful when the hand reaches for the beloved rather than touch the beloved.

I want to get to your books. I reread On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous alongside The Emperor of Gladness. They’re very different, and yet the themes are similar. On Earth reads more like a poem or a meditation, where Emperor is a more structured novel. What are your thoughts on the two?

I always thought that the two novels were kind of twins. Fraternal twins. They’re in the same womb, but they have different kinds of makeups. Emperor is kind of like a sly prequel. If the first novel is a document masquerading as a novel, it’s poetic because it’s really a letter. A letter is a document from one person to another. The second novel is really a novel, third person. So my question was, if Little Dog wrote a letter to his mother, what novel would he write if he had to write a first novel? So I was doing a kind of puppetry. If the speaker in On Earth had to truly write a public-facing debut, what would he say? The Emperor of Gladness is his public, and On Earth is his private document. It’s the same consciousness with two different facing interiorities. That excited me.

Everyone else said, “Oh no, you’ve got to tell another story. Do sci-fi. Make a big radical leap.” I said, “No.” It’s the same story, but from a different angle. My whole career so far is just to prove to myself what I always believed but did not truly know, which is that our questions—as inexhaustible as they feel—when will you find the end of them?

There’s this anxiety of reinvention that is a kind of capital drive, incongruent or even false to life itself. You see it in the cereal aisle. “Now better tasting.” You just need more sugar. “Now new packaging.” We fetishize constant renaissances that are fabricated. We do change in life, but not at the pace of the market.

You’re also very funny. You’ll have these killer lines. I’ll be sobbing and then burst out laughing.

That’s life. It should all be there, right? On Earth, I did not want to be funny there. I did not have the chops to be funny. It’s also dealing with the stories of the women who raised me. I didn’t feel like I had the right to invite laughter onto their stories. Emperor is more my experience. So I was like, “Oh, you can laugh at me, because I think I am funny.” My life is funny. And there’s a kind of absurdity to the humor. You can tell I grew up as a millennial watching The Office. The Office is very imbued into that story. And then the challenge is, can you have office humor in an opioid crisis, around houselessness and dementia? And I’m like, “Well, yeah, because it happens.” In fact, you might need it to survive through those things.

How do you define autofiction?

Beautiful. One of the questions I really wanted to explore in Emperor was, who is a legitimate storyteller? Fiction is lying. Autofiction is lying. Dementia is a kind of lying. How much of it is truly displaced memory? She’s telling a kind of story as well when she’s having flashbacks of World War II. She’s a kind of novelist too. The people in that world lie to each other, not because they’re evil, but because they have nothing else to give. Sometimes they lie because the reality is too shameful. It’s too painful to face the truth.

And I think, on a larger ethos in our American puritanical culture, we fetishize purity and honesty. Our politicians are congratulated for thinking the same way for 40 years, as if that’s a good thing. The career suicide for a politician is to be a flip-flopper. So we perform truth. But of course, in the back rooms, our politicians make separate deals. They lie to us all the time. The worst thing you can be in America is a fraud. You could murder, and people could debate whether it was justified. Was it self-defense? But fraud, forget it. The judgment is over. The trial is just a procedure at that point. Whereas in Catholic countries, the imagination is much more metaphoric, and there’s much more openness to a nebulous morality around deception. Christ, his body is bread. It could be blood. The saints perform miracles.

But then you could call deception a metaphor.

Yes. And so what I’m asking is, what is truth? Whose truth is revered? A novelist is a revered liar. But someone who goes to the welfare department and exaggerates their poverty (what do you exaggerate from a nine to a 10?) is suddenly a horrible person, a freeloader on government assistance. The core of that disgust with the welfare state, for so many upper-middle-class Americans, particularly on the right, is deception. It’s not that we hate poor people necessarily. It’s that poor people lie. But the heart of it is that the deception is sometimes necessary to get past that threshold, because there’s a bureaucratic judge. There’s almost an Olympics of suffering. Speaking as someone who’s been in a welfare office and a heat assistance office, you have to do this indignity where you show up and be put together enough to be worthy, to prove to the officer that you’re worthy of assistance, that you’re contributing to society, but also strategically be poor enough to be deserving of this help. Meanwhile, everyone around you, deceiver or not, is poor enough to not be doing well. So who gets to be a legitimate liar, and who doesn’t?

What’s interesting is that the right, who are so worried about deception, elected the biggest deceiver probably known to humankind.

And what was his moniker? “Promises made, promises kept.” It’s like a hallucinatory, surreal dreamscape where you can just say that, run with it, build your career on lies and it would still work. That’s the power of the propaganda of purity. As long as you can perform purity, it doesn’t matter.

There’s a big difference between truth with a capital T and purity.

And truth with a capital T has been recruited. His social media company is called Truth Social. That’s what I mean. There we go. You found it. Definition. We all know there’s many different truths. There are different spaces between truth, and yet we have only one definition of it. And we are in a battle of definitions, because the words are not enough.

And Facebook took Meta.

They’re going to go find us after this comes out. We’re going to be on a list. We’re calling them out too closely.

Let’s talk about the title of The Emperor of Gladness. There’s a haunting scene where they are killing hogs that have lashes like humans. It’s almost as though they’re killing themselves, for the sake of survival, and they don’t even get the bonus. And then there’s the story about England winning over the emperor of Japan with pork, with religion coming in behind it. How does that relate to the title?

The book destabilizes the title. If you saw it on a bookshelf, The Emperor of Gladness, you’d think, “I’m in for a good mood. What could go wrong with a book called that?” But being the poet that I am, I think this is a wonderful way to upend the title’s definition. In the first chapter, you realize the town of Gladness doesn’t exist. It’s now called Millsap. So East Gladness is a kind of lost thing. To be east of Gladness is to be east of nothing. To be east of a ghost. So now you’re the relic.

Like the emperor’s cloak.

Right. So now it’s less triumphant. And when you learn about the hogs, you realize they’re not called emperor hogs because they rule over anything. They’re named after the person who will consume them. And is that also what it means to be named in America? To be named after the thing that will consume you and spit out your bones for profit? It’s an elegiac title. To be an emperor of gladness is to be named after something that will consume you. Meanwhile, the center of that thing doesn’t even exist. This triumphant title is full of holes, and it collapses under its weight. And maybe that is what the American Dream is, that wonderful, provocative moniker that collapses as soon as you start to live in it.

Do you think even the rich are caught up in that machine, ultimately consumed by it?

I think so. The difference between the one percent and you and I and most Americans is that they cannibalize each other eventually. But their consumption destroys the rest of us. They can only eat each other. Meanwhile, they eat all of us. And the little extension of that metaphor is Linda McMahon’s campaign, which the hogs are involved in. She orders those hogs for a fundraising dinner for a $50 million campaign that she will lose anyway. So it’s for what? Who truly wins? The emperor will die after eating all those hogs. And that gets us into a more spiritual, existential question that the book asks at the end. The boy is looking up at the sky, and he’s trying to tell his mother that it looks just like the inside of a body. The sky is as immense and endless as all of us.

This is while he’s simultaneously lying to her, pretending he’s in medical school and in the middle of dissecting a corpse.

And the only way he could keep up that lie was that he went into a slaughterhouse with his coworkers. So in a way, he’s performing autobiographical fiction. He’s using real experience to perpetuate it. The book is really about fiction as a philosophical form. Grazina and Hai are two novelists stuck in this world, both of them making things up. At the end, they realize that they were both novelists who never wrote anything. And that’s what I really wanted to hope for. Not, “We’re Ocean Vuong, best-selling novelist.” No. We’re all novelists.

I come from storyteller women who never wrote anything down, but they were novelists. They had exposition. They had character development, they had detail, they had dialogue. They even made voices. They were like one-woman shows when they were telling these stories in the kitchen. As a writer who has moved through class mobility, I’ve noticed that everybody is a storyteller, but only certain people who have entered certain spaces are congratulated for it, whereas other stories are not revered or legitimate.

This is the first book you wrote entirely after your mother’s death. Are there any words you’d want to share about her presence in it and how that might have been different for you?

A writer’s life informs their work even in subtle ways. I wrote this entire book after my mother passed, and I thought, “How do I represent her in a way that feels true?” Her presence is ghostly in the book. She’s alive, she’s on the phone. Every decision he makes is involving her, but she’s never there. That feels true to how she feels after death. She’s always around. I always think about her. The thereness is gone, but the presence is there. So I wanted to mimic that feeling without writing a dead mom book.

Sony, Hai’s cousin, is obsessed with the Civil War. His father fought for the losing side in Vietnam, so he relates more to the American South because they were defeated, without it seeming to click that the South was fighting for slavery.

Sony’s character is foundational, because it shows that history is also a kind of fiction. The Lost Cause films, like Gettysburg, have been praised as being historically very accurate. And it is. And yet it lies by omission. Slavery is not centered in that film. Robert E. Lee, played by Martin Sheen, is seen as this benevolent, spiritually torn genius. And that sways an American child like Sony, who thinks, “That’s also my father, someone who fought in the Civil War for the South, who lost.” So when you remove the horrors from your historical textbook, you can create a kind of propaganda, even if you’re telling the truth.

So Sony is torn. “Why do I love and relate to the South? Because the film made me feel that.” He represents American historical turmoil from the textbook to the film and the media. He doesn’t know how to resolve it. And that to me is the most honest representation of American historical embodiment, where we don’t know what to do with a country founded on slavery and attempted Native genocide. But we hold it all. He becomes that unresolvable vexation of American life.

America wants the triumph story. Rags to riches, the happy ending. Your book doesn’t give us that.

I knew what I was getting into was risky territory, as an American, as a storyteller, as a teacher. And it’s been proven true. A lot of readers have written to me really upset. And I understand, because we have made it so that we come to literature or film or art as a mode of uplift and repair. There’s some really primordial beauty to that. It goes with our allegiance to prayer, to song. You go to these things in turmoil for pain to be alleviated. But it could easily be captured by the market. And at this juncture in the 21st century, American art has been expected to perform this commodified pain relief, a kind of opiate, a kind of Advil. And I thought the worst crime I could do, as someone who grew up in the working poor, was to write a story of the working poor that just makes the reader feel good. Or even worse, to say, “Oh, it must be so noble to be impoverished, so we don’t have to be. It builds character. So let them go to the welfare office and build character.” I had to find this balance of telling the story with dignity and truth, and to have transformation without change.

I did feel that transformation. I walked away with an open heart, even though the book ends with him in a dumpster, looking up at the sky. You tell us what happens to everyone else—the whole cast at the grocery store—but not Hai and his mother. Why?

That was a really important trajectory, and it’s quite deliberate. He starts the book looking down on a river, and he ends looking up at the sky. That’s the transformation. And that’s so simple that most people say, “That’s not enough. He has to pull himself up by the bootstraps, get a scholarship, become a doctor, confront his mother, she forgives him.” But I said, “No.” That is enough. That is major. The decision to not kill yourself, even if your life ends, is major. He started with the idea to take his own life, and he ended without having that idea ever again.

He empties out his bank account and gives the money to Sony to get his mother out of prison. I wasn’t sure if that was generosity and an emptying of self that’s almost a renewal, or if he was closing out because he was ending his life.

I’ll say this. There are three possible endings to this book, and there is textual proof for all three. I don’t mean to be coy about it, but it’s not important to me what happens to Hai. It’s up to your interpretation. That’s another kind of formal impulse of mine. Often we want the protagonist to be the closer, the individual who drives the story. Instead, the individual here is what brings us into the community. It’s a kind of Trojan horse. We use Hai to tell a communal story. I wanted to de-center the protagonist. He gets us in, but he doesn’t get us out. The story is about the community.

I was talking to Oprah and Gayle in the back, and they had this debate and tried to force it out of me. They’re like, “Tell us.” They had two different interpretations. I said, “I will not. I will not. It’s not important.” But that’s what I want. I wanted that debate. It’s like what is a legitimate life?

Let’s say he does die. So many people do early on. They die tragically in the sense that they die too soon. There are people who die days out of the womb, months. But it doesn’t mean they had a tragic life. That’s what I’m getting at. He’s lived a life where he steps away from the edge of the bridge, and then for these nine months, he is the center of someone’s life. I’ve talked to so many mothers and fathers who’ve lost their children to opiates and addiction, and they feel there’s so much tragedy around it. And I have to tell them, “Look, I’ve had friends, I’ve lived through it, even though it looked absolutely tragic the entire time from where you’re standing—and it’s not easy, I’m not saying it’s all Froot Loops—but chances are your son and daughter and child was really important to somebody. They were the center of someone’s life even while they were going through this. Just because they had a tragic death does not mean their entire life was worthless and tragic.” It was filled just like Hai’s in these nine months. That’s if we assume he died.

At the National Poetry Series you said, “On my most naive and optimistic days, which are few and far between, I know that our species’ oldest invention is poetry. I believe poetry came first. And I also believe it will come last. It will be our final act if we ever get to do it.” Can you say a few words about that?

If the Anthropocene could be bracketed by two poems, it would still be worth it, despite all the damage we could do. And I do believe poetry is what rises out of the rubble. Even a post-apocalyptic rubble. Let’s say there’s absolute nuclear war, and there are only a few stragglers who won’t make it because it’s too much. I believe that they would chant and sing and poetry would be the final act.

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The Parrish Art Museum’s Midsummer Gala: In the Clouds could not have been more on theme. After a Saturday of dramatic thunderstorms and a flood watch, 700 guests—many in haute couture—arrived at the museum, and what could have been a washout was an absolute blowout. The gala raised more than $1.7 million in support of the museum’s exhibitions, education initiatives and inclusive programming; honorees included philanthropist Ellen Katz and artists Enoc Perez, Joan Semmel, Hiroshi Sugimoto and, in memoriam, Pat Steir.

The Parrish is a long, sleek, single-story building on 14 acres of meadow in Water Mill. Designed by Herzog & de Meuron, it was inspired by the potato-field barns local artists once turned into sun-drenched studios. Its landscape, at once wild and manicured, is home to iconic sculptures like Roy Lichtenstein’s Tokyo Brushstroke I and II, which one can walk around and recognize from Montauk Highway.

The Parrish’s executive director, Mónica Ramírez-Montagut, who helped choose the honorees and the theme of the night, said that this year’s gala stemmed from Sanford Biggers’ current exhibition. Biggers also helped create the gala’s visuals and the idea of a night in the clouds.

For Biggers, clouds are a recurring motif. Standing under cartoon-like clouds made from aluminum and acrylic, Unsui (Cloud Forest), he told Observer, “During the pandemic, I spent most of my time out here, and one of my ways of staying calm and connected to the universe was looking at the clouds for hours at a time.” Wearing a necklace with two dangling silver cloud charms, he added, “When I was asked to do something at the Parrish, I thought it would be a great way of considering the landscape and the cloudscape here.” He hoped people would walk away from the evening feeling a sense of “inspiration, calm and wonder.”

Guests in colorful attire wandered the galleries while trustees gathered for a photo in front of a classic Ellsworth Kelly. The evening’s co-chair and trustee, Charlotte Pilaro, in a sequined, pale-yellow dress, said she’d been worried about the weather, but that the rain had given them an opportunity to show the art. “We’re just thrilled that everyone is inside and appreciating the art, because that doesn’t always happen… We’re an art museum, right?”

Pilaro was joined by her co-chair, Yanina Fuertes, who said much of the night’s fundraising would support ACCESS PARRISH and the museum’s educational and community programs. “Kids as young as four and five come to the museum to appreciate and create art.”

That mission was reflected in two Eastport-South Manor students, who beamed as they described their six-month internship at the Parrish. “We were immersed in Long Island art and the local artists, so it was really nice to connect with where we’re from, as artists, because we’re both very interested in the arts,” said Julia Castone, a senior. “It’s very difficult for high schoolers to get involved with things like this because you have to have connections. The Parrish making itself so available is such an incredible opportunity.” She added that the museum had reached out to their art teacher. “We’re public-school students, so you don’t usually get opportunities like that.”

The Dixons played live music against a backdrop of fluffy clouds while Parsons dancers, dressed in white, leapt across the room as guests crowded around, Casa Dragones-sponsored Coconut Cloud Margaritas in hand.

Near one of the bars, bookended by cascading blue-violet hydrangeas, actor John Leguizamo and gallerist and designer Lisa Perry seemed like old friends. When asked how they knew each other, they laughed. “We don’t. We met five minutes ago.”

Leguizamo, who has a place in Amagansett, spoke about the museum’s director as a force. “To have Mónica, a Latina, head of the whole museum, to me is everything,” he said. “It’s such a beautiful hug. It just makes me feel seen and included.” Art, he added, “is always at the forefront of resistance, of speaking truth to power. Protecting artists and giving them space to do what they do and express themselves is very important—it’s where we should be putting our money and our time.”

Among distinguished artists were Sanford Biggers, Sheree Hovsepian, Gwen O’Neil, Enoc Perez, Ugo Rondinone, Will Ryman and Nina Yankowitz. Other notables in attendance included trustee Astrid Hill, Chris and Christina Cuomo, restaurateurs Gabby Karan and Gianpaolo de Felice, Assemblyman Tommy John Schiavoni, New York State Assemblymember Rebecca Seawright, philanthropists Karen and Dennis Mehiel, H.H. Sheikha Alia Al-Maktoum and fashion designer Jonathan Simkhai.

Attendees next moved onto the Mildred C. Brinn Terrace, where a marigold gown ballooned in a warm gust of wind. Tables were adorned with powder-blue and white blooms by Arthur Golabek Flowers, and guests dined on an appetizer of sesame-crusted shrimp. After Katz received the Parrish Philanthropist Award, a short video played in which Katz recalled that, at 14, her grandmother took her to the brand-new Guggenheim, where she was awestruck by Philip Guston’s paintings. She described art as a lifelong refuge and source of beauty, saying that collecting and donating works to museums brought her great happiness because they could be shared with others. “This is the legacy that artists make for us to relish and leave for multiple generations to follow.”

A dinner of corn-nut-crusted steelhead trout gave way to a lively paddle raise, followed by coconut key lime cake for dessert.

Then the sky opened with a downpour—the kind that soaks to the bone—and bare-shouldered women wrapped themselves in baby-blue cloud towels, designed by Biggers and gifted by sponsor Capital One. The weather was unruly and electric—and, after days of thick smoky air from the Canadian wildfires, refreshing.

For a moment, the rain stopped, just before the evening’s final act: the Afterglow, a dance party where guests let down their hair to DJ Jason Fioto. It wasn’t just any night. Mother Nature had given her sartorial wink.

Joan Semmel

Catherine Dumait-Harper

Angelica Semmelbauer

Justine Leguizamo, Allegra Sky Leguizamo, John Leguizamo and Sanford Biggers

Lynn Savarese and John Savarese

Bertha Gonzalez Nieves and Chris Cuomo

Kathryn Kerns, Eric Viner and Alexander Hankin

Kerone Vatel

Alexandra Dennett and Abyah Wynn

Howard Oshrin

Jonathan Simkhai and April Hennig Karras

Steven Horowitz and Amy Horowitz

Alexandra Longanecker

Hadassah Richardson and McKenzie Hart

Jean Shafiroff

Vinnie Kumar, Steven Horowitz, Astrid Hill Lloyd, Kimberly Taylor, Fred Seegal, Sandy Perlbinder, Charlotte Pilaro, Marty Cordes, Andrea Pemberton, Karen Mehiel and Louis Meisel

Rebecca Seawright and Louise Braver

Pauline Forlenza and Riccardo Forlenza

Irina Kro Eicke

Michelle Hellman and Anthony Warnke

Richard Perry and Lisa Perry

Maurice Cheeks, Kharay Keyatta and Sanford Biggers

Elizabeth Kurpis

Martha McLanahan and Ugo Rondinone

Yelena Feuerman and Kurt Feuerman

Kate Reibel and Will Ryman

Gregory Carballada and Jill Lytwyn

Fran Lebowitz, Ellen Katz and Brooke Garber Neidich

Tommy John Schiavoni

Gwen O’Neil, Astrid Hill Lloyd and Stewart Lloyd

Monica Elias

Trisha Stern, Seth Stern, Sheree Hovsepian and Stacey Griffith

Monica Ramirez-Montagut, Ellen Katz and Fred Seegal

Fred Mwangaguhunga and Notoya Green

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There was a certain New York magic last Wednesday night—an unknown and unexpected thrill in the air. Knicks fans held their breath for Game 4, and a few blocks away, at the Town Hall theater near Times Square, Performa: Live on Broadway—a one-night-only, vaudeville-inspired benefit—brought together 14 acts and more than 50 artists, spanning music, theater, dance, comedy and visual art.

The not-for-profit behind the evening, Performa, was established in 2004 by art historian and professor RoseLee Goldberg, now the organization’s founding director and chief curator. It commissions artists from around the world—many of them visual artists who’ve never made live works before—to create new performances staged throughout New York City. Its sprawling three-week November biennial has become an art-world fixture and favorite.

Town Hall has its own history of unexpected nights, uncannily relevant. It was built in 1921 by suffragists who designed it with democratic seating (literally coining the term “no bad seats”). On a November night, one of its founders, Margaret Sanger, was arrested onstage for speaking about birth control. Her supporters followed her into the street, singing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.”

More than a century later, the venue was crowded with anticipation. Notable guests included Solange and Tina Knowles, the actress Alia Shawkat and MoMA’s head of performance Lizzie Gorfaine and former New York Times chief art critic Roberta Smith. Artist Laurie Simmons was also in attendance, there to see Music of Regret—a three-act film first screened at Performa’s inaugural biennial in 2005—presented with live singers and musicians for the first time. Meryl Streep, who stars in it, once told Simmons it belonged on Broadway. Twenty years later, Simmons told Observer, “it sort of is.”

Winding lines climbed the staircase as people waited for refreshments. Nearby, others ran their hands along Barbara Kruger’s red-block-lettered hoodies: “Want it, buy it, forget it.”

Amid the pre-show buzz, Observer caught up with Ernestine White-Mifetu, the Sills Foundation Curator of African Art at the Brooklyn Museum. Performa, she said, has “really been impactful to the ecosystem of New York,” creating spaces where you see “a diverse range of artists and visitors, whether they’re young children or adults.” The proof was in the room: “The six-year-old in a fabulous silver dress with her mom, to the granny—they’re all here.”

The show opened with a restaging of Chair/Pillow, a 1969 work by the legendary choreographer Yvonne Rainer. Dancers moved white bed pillows, circled metal folding chairs, sat and stood with deliberate, expressionless precision. As longtime Performa affiliate Sozita Goudouna told Observer, one of the organization’s gifts is the chance to experience historic performances “that our generation didn’t have the possibility to see.”

Next up, comedian and late-night comedy writer Casey Jost joked that he’d found old Yelp reviews from the 1920s backstage. “These are all real,” he deadpanned. “Five stars. I saw a small, yet-to-be-established basketball team, the Knickerbockers, playing down the street. And they were on a winning streak until President Harding came to Game 3. Warren G. Harding, you tyrant.” Later, he left the audience stumped on whether his shock of white hair was dyed or au naturel.

A few spellbinding acts followed: the multidisciplinary artist and musician Lonnie Holley, whom the Guardian named one of “30 acts to see before you die,” belting at the piano; and a sequence from Marcel Dzama’s To Live on the Moon (For Lorca), his 2023 Performa commission, featuring a live dancer as a glinting gold moth, slightly frightening, against a projected black-and-white film.

Award-winning SNL writer and comedian Julio Torres took the stage next, wandering on with a curved metal rod strapped to his chest, a Diet Coke dangling from the end. As he grabbed for it, he missed, and failed again. He explained, matter-of-fact: “I went to a Barry’s Bootcamp, and they install these on us to… run faster. It’s a great workout, I’m not gonna lie. It’s to keep you always striving towards a goal that is just out of reach.” Throughout the act, he swiped at his precious soda. When he finally struggled across the stage floor and managed to secure his Diet Coke, it was empty. “Now, what did we learn today?”

Anne Imhof brought a tender ache with a piece drawn from DOOM: House of Hope, her 2025 work for the Park Avenue Armory; Goldberg, a longtime friend and now collaborator, had asked for this love song specifically. “You have to do this one,” Imhof recalled her saying. It opened with red lights blinking and a loudspeaker intoning numbers—hours, minutes, seconds—as a lone ballerina, en pointe, swept the stage. Between arabesques and pliés, she paced, hands on hips, and looked into the audience as if it were a studio mirror. It was the kind of performance that makes you put your hand to your heart. “Live performance is a vulnerable field,” Imhof reflected. “It doesn’t produce objects. It’s like the ephemeral, it’s like these beautiful, magical moments. You have to protect them.”

The lights came up. Red signs with white lettering had been passed out to the orchestra seats, and Jost instructed wavering arms to lift them overhead, each tilted just so. From the balcony, the words assembled, some crooked, some slanting, the whole thing gloriously imperfect. On cue, Jost photographed it. People got out of their seats to look: the message was fragments of Barbara Kruger’s Untitled (Questions), asking, “Who is beyond the law? Who is silenced? Who is bought and sold? Who dies first?”

Another favorite, serpentwithfeet, entered the stage in fog. He wore a black boxing glove on one fist and a red glove on the other and sang “Wander.” He’d been interested that night, he told Observer, in “suspending disbelief, and inviting others to suspend disbelief.”

Live performance has a way of doing that. Simmons told Observer that she’d found the night beyond her wildest expectations and reflected on what live performance stirred in her. “That sort of immediate, unexpected, it-can-all-go-wrong thing is so much more like what making art feels like. I’m not talking about having a polished show… I’m talking about what goes on in the studio when you’re actually making things. That unexpected part, at least for me, for an artist, is what’s really exciting.” Watching her own piece performed live, she thought everything could go wrong. “But you know what? None of it matters. It’s all okay in the moment.”

There was a melancholy underneath her delight. “RoseLee’s keeping the idea of performance art alive,” Simmons said. She’d arrived in New York at the height of it. “Believe it or not, there was a point where the market wasn’t ruled by money. It was ruled by ideas about the avant-garde. I would sit in a gallery on the floor and listen to Laurie Anderson play her violin. There was so much to see, and you didn’t have to pay a penny.” Goldberg, she said, is “keeping something alive that could so easily die with everything else that’s dying now.”

Goldberg knows that fragility. In an age when, as she put it, “nobody has time to read or look or see,” she prizes the chance for audiences to sit for an hour, their attention “riveted on new ideas.” Someone had recently come up to her about a piece they’d seen and said, “I’ll never forget it.” She loved that. “That’s a good housekeeping seal of approval, that you’ll see things in performance you’ll never forget.”

And just like that, in an unexpected twist of its own, the Knicks completed a historic comeback, winning by one point with one second left. A New York miracle. The city roared, still in disbelief, full of hope. The unexpected, it turns out, can be very sweet.

On a sweltering Wednesday evening in May, stars, philanthropists and dancers with enviable posture sparkled on the red carpet at Cipriani 42nd Street. The occasion: ABT’s 2026 Spring Gala honoring Katie Holmes, whose “genuine love for the arts and steadfast support of our mission make her a truly deserving honoree,” said company director Susan Jaffe. Holmes, accompanied by her mother, beamed in a white Ashlynn Park peplum top and voluminous ankle-length skirt—structured yet effortlessly breezy.

Notable guests included Katie Couric, Michael Imperioli, Constance Wu, Zac Posen, Iris Apatow, Sai De Silva and Nate Berkus, among others. Caroline Kennedy served as Honorary Chair of the evening, continuing her family’s longstanding support of ABT, which mounts its spring gala each year to support the company’s performances, education programs and community initiatives.

For many in attendance that night, ballet stirs wonder—it feels deeply personal. “Ballet is like living sculpture,” Imperioli told Observer. “When I watch it, that’s how it kind of reveals itself.” Wu called ballet “one of the most beautiful art forms,” adding, “I just love the discipline, the craft, the elegance, the athleticism, the musicality, the sensitivity. It’s just gorgeous.” For Posen, the art is almost elemental. “I think it’s as important as eating, sleeping and making love. I think it’s part of humanity,” he told Observer.

Guests in bright-colored gowns and well-cut tuxedos mingled beneath the neo-Renaissance arches, clinking champagne glasses while eagerly anticipating what Jaffe jokingly called the “Reader’s Digest version” of a new production of Don Quixote, staged by herself and Susan Jones. A perennial audience favorite first staged in 1869, the ballet is known for its high-spirited energy, technical virtuosity and Ludwig Minkus’s rousing score.

After cocktails, attendees were ushered to tables adorned with towering orange-and-gold floral arrangements featuring a first course of cucumber, avocado, corn and cherry tomato salad alongside Kalamata olives and Cipriani’s signature breadsticks. As the assembled balletomanes dined, actor Alex Hurt took the stage to present Holmes with her award. “For Katie, dance is not just movement—it’s joy, it’s eloquence, it’s beauty, it’s connection. It’s a way of saying something that words can’t quite reach,” Hurt said, before praising Holmes for her support of the arts and ABT, adding, “You make rooms warmer, you make work better, you make people braver.”

Holmes accepted her award with grace, telling the audience she was “in awe of ballet… Ballet itself has informed, healed and entertained the many generations that have come before us. And I am always stunned by what feels like an offering, a gesture inviting human connection, a welcoming into the world of poetry that is ballet.”

Dancers then took to the stage in a whirl of vibrant hues, performing selections from Don Quixote. Inspired by Miguel de Cervantes‘s classic tale, the ballet follows the idealistic knight and his loyal squire as they champion the young lovers Kitri and Basilio. Principal dancer Skylar Brandt dazzled as Kitri, leaping across the stage in a ruffled tangerine dress. “Performing the role of Kitri had been a dream role of mine since I was a child,” she told Observer. “Don Quixote is one of those ballets that is so playful. I always thought it seemed like it would be the most fun to dance. As my teacher told me, Kitri must burn brighter than a thousand suns. I hope the audience could feel her radiating joy.” We can confirm, they certainly could.

After a long applause, Chilean sea bass with lemon and capers arrived at the tables, followed by an assortment of miniature pastries including Napoleons, zabaglione cake and tiramisu. Over dessert, associate artistic director Clinton Luckett reflected on the deeper meaning of Don Quixote: “The question at the heart of the ballet is love or money. Kitri’s father wants her to marry the rich fop Gamache, but she is in love with the poor barber Basilio. Don Quixote is the quest for Kitri and Basilio to become married and realize their love.”

“In the ballet,” he added, “the answer is love.”

Katie Holmes

Gregg Hymowitz and Marcella Hymowitz

Sharon Patrick and Maria-Cristina Anzola

Katie Couric

Michael Imperioli, Victoria Imperioli, and Laura Miller

Ivy Getty

Constance Wu

Tina Leung, Malcolm Carfrae, Sai De Silva, John Wattiker and London Scout

Priya Shukla

Zac Posen

Julie Halston

Stella Abrera and Dennis Walters

Hannah Marshall

Alex Hurt and Anaïs Mitchell

Alessia Fendi, Isiah Magsino, and Anne Imhof

Zhong-Jing Fang and Douglas Gavin

Guillermo Bichara and Viviana Bichara

Susan Feinstein and Leonard Feinstein

Yuchang Xiao and Fangqi Li

Ingrid Thoms

Pj Pascual and Scout Forsythe

Anh Duong

Leah Cunningham, Charles Buddeke and Ruoyi He

Arielle Patrick

Irina Dvorovenko and Francis Morrissey

Tina Raja

Catherine Hurlin and Christine Shevchenko

Roman Zhurbin and Stella Abrera

Cristine Arroyo and Andrew Barth Jr.

Christian Zimmerman, Lola Abigail Koch and Jim Coakley

Betsy McBride

Ray Rasco, Nancy McCormick, Sarah Feil Lewin and Alexa Isbell Wolman

Seth Lockwood and Kyle Ridaught

Ulla Parker and Julian Polak

Susan Jaffe and Jacqueline Mars

Samantha Barry

Melvin Lawovi

Zac Posen and Brie Welch

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Painter Kathleen Gilje’s life has unfolded like a Felliniesque film, where dreams and destiny are inseparable. Born in 1945 and raised in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, Gilje grew up in an immigrant family. She was always drawing and painting, but it never occurred to her that painting could be a career. After graduating from City College of New York, her parents gave her a round-trip ticket to Europe. She stayed for more than five years, and Italy changed everything.

Gilje traveled between Rome and Naples, where she worked as a conservator of paintings. It was there that she fell in love with Old Masters and began to see them almost as “living, breathing things.” She learned how layers expand and contract, how paintings crack, pop and age—almost like a lifespan. This was where she learned, as she later put it, the meat and potatoes of restoration. It was also where she began to explore making her own work. Eventually, she returned to America, rented a loft in SoHo and began painting full time.

Gilje is known for revisiting historical paintings, making contemporary interventions. As the art historian Linda Nochlin wrote in Art in America, she is “as much a conceptual artist as she is a dyed-in-the-wool painter.”

Gilje is also my mother. Her studio was my childhood landscape. Growing up inside an artist’s life long enough, you learn that art is not a job. Art is soul. It’s persistence. It’s an obsession. It’s learning how to stay within something for it to reveal itself. Her work questions the accepted versions of truth and exposes what has been buried or erased. Power and vulnerability coexist in her work. So do beauty and disruption. And so does love. She gave me the framework and the gumption to question the societal stories we inherit and to trust my voice—whether I was writing “The J-Spot” column or speaking out publicly during #MeToo.

Gilje’s work has been shown in museums internationally, with solo exhibitions at the Bruce Museum, the List Center at MIT, the Williams College Museum of Art and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, among others. She currently has an exhibition at the Morris Museum, “Iconic: Kathleen Gilje Repaints Art History,” which brings together three decades of her work and is on through April 2026.

Our conversations took place over lunch in the loft where she paints and I write. It’s where we’ve always talked about art, literature, politics and whatever we’re thinking through at the moment.

Have you always loved art even in childhood?

I think I was born with a paintbrush in my hand. That was how I played. All I did was draw. I grew up in an immigrant family and had a fairly conventional upbringing, although my mother was a little unconventional in that she was an avid reader. I can’t remember a time when she wasn’t reading. When she took breaks, she wrote poetry, all while raising three children. As a child, when I wanted a book, she didn’t hand me a children’s book. She handed me Omar Khayyam or Balzac, and I couldn’t make heads or tails of any of it. At a certain point, she began painting. I remember seeing my mother painting in the kitchen.

Did you ever think you could have a career as a painter?

I went to college and majored in art and literature, but I thought I would have to do something else. I remember taking art history classes and watching slides being projected while the professor talked. The paintings felt distant. What I learned about art came later when I lived in Italy. I had always dreamed of going to Europe. I wanted to get out of the small world I grew up in and see a bigger world. After I graduated, I traveled through Europe and landed in Rome. I would go to the park, Villa Borghese, and draw the trees, or I would walk around at night and look at the buildings and think, “This is the most amazing place.” It was very different from Brooklyn. Everything was old. You could see where people, for hundreds and hundreds of years, had worn the steps down with their feet. There was such a presence of history—of life, of past and present.

By the fall, I needed a winter coat and I was running out of money. I had to get a job. When I was in college, I worked part-time restoring high-end furniture. Occasionally, paintings would come in, which I’d restore too, but I knew nothing. I faked it. In Rome, a friend told me there was a famous conservator, Antonio De Mata, on Via del Babuino. So I walked there and knocked on these old, gigantic doors. When the professor came out, I said I was looking for a job as a restorer. He was very short, Neapolitan. He asked what experience I had. I looked him straight in the eye and, in my broken, miserable Italian, said, “I was the conservator for the Metropolitan Museum of New York.”

Had you planned on padding your résumé like that?

No, it just came out in the moment. He knew that was ridiculous, but Americans were popular back then, so he said, “Okay. We’ll try.” I started as an apprentice. I did little things at first, like sweeping the floors, and gradually began working on paintings. I was taught how to reline paintings and how to inpaint damaged areas. I learned the whole makeup: the canvas, the preparation, the paint. I became aware of time periods—how cracks from the 1500s were different from the 1700s, how paint dries and behaves. And by having a great mentor, I learned quality. And then De Mata was invited to become the chief restorer at Capodimonte in Naples, a museum on top of a mountain. He brought his team, and there I restored Caravaggios, Titians, Tintorettos and Riberas.

Did you make your own art as well?

Yes, I started working in plastics and doing painting and sculpture as well.

Why did you decide to leave Italy and come back to New York?

I had an exhibition in Milan. When they found out I was a woman, they said, “We don’t show women because they get married, have kids, it’s usually the end of their career and we don’t want to invest.” I was extremely disappointed. I thought to myself I’d have a better chance in America. I think I felt, too, it was time to go back.

How did you find your footing in New York?

I didn’t know many people. An old friend told me artists were moving into SoHo, into these large empty spaces that had once been factories. So I found a loft and fixed it up to make it livable. I wasn’t sure how I’d support myself, but fortunately, because of my background, I was introduced to a very important conservator, Marco Grassi. I worked on great Old Master paintings, which allowed me to pay my basic expenses and make my own work.

What was your work like at that point?

The work was figurative, but very simplified, with strong primary colors. I was interested in breaking the surface. The idea was to integrate the figure or the object with the background, so that they melted into each other. The figure and the ground would bounce back and forth.

When did art conservation and being a fine artist converge?

It began when I stopped working for Marco Grassi and went into business for myself. One of my clients, Stanley Moss, had a major collection and I restored paintings for him. At one point, I was restoring a small El Greco, The Fable. I was alone with that painting in my studio from morning to night, seven days a week, for weeks and weeks. I knew every inch of that painting perfectly. I could see the brushstroke—how he pulled it, the direction, the weight he put on the brush. I could see how one area was done loosely and indifferently and another area was pure magic. A turn. A twist. I could almost feel his wrist twisting. The closer I got to the painting, the more I sensed his presence. It wasn’t hostile. It was warm, like, you’re saving my painting or you’re doing it right. I felt like his hand touched my left shoulder, as if there was a bond between artists and time. Ever since that moment, I’ve felt that artists—all artists—are like pearls on a string. We’re all on the same string. We’re all interconnected.

And then you copied the painting.

After that, I ran out and bought a stretcher and canvas. It was the same size as the original. I copied the painting not to sell, but to learn. That’s something artists have always done—they look to other artists to learn. When Stanley Moss came to the studio, I was proud and showed it to him. He said, “I didn’t give you permission to do that. I could sue you.” I said, “Oh, come on, Stanley.” And he said, “Well, if I don’t sue you, can I buy it?” I told him I’d have to make a change. In the original, a monkey, a rogue and a boy were lighting a candle, so I added an electric light bulb. It had to do with time and where we are now.

Was that the beginning of this body of work?

One of the first works in the series was after El Greco, Portrait of Cardinal Niño de Guevara, Grand Inquisitor, Restored, 1993. The Cardinal was a leading figure in the Spanish Inquisition, which persecuted and executed countless people. In the painting, he sits on his throne, his hands gripping the arms of the chair. I saw the tension in his hands. There was a feeling of death and anxiety. Behind him, I painted Andy Warhol’s Orange Disaster series of electric chairs. That’s how I made my choices. I began to see that everything represents something. I started bringing different artists and ideas together. Although I have always loved the act of painting, in the end, it’s the conceptual part that gives me the most joy.

When your background as a conservator and your love of painting came together, did it feel like something opened up and clicked?

I think I was really connecting with myself. When I came back from Italy, I felt like a bit of a misfit in the New York art world. But when I started doing these paintings, it was something that came very naturally to me. I was finally in touch with my own unique experience. At that point, I stopped trying to fit in and started saying, to thine own self be true. The only thing I had to offer was myself—for better or for worse.

I wanted to ask you about motherhood. Did being a mother influence your work, or did you try to keep it separate? As a kid, I always wanted you to paint me.

I did paint you.

Yes. But as a kid, I wanted the focus you put on your work to be on me. Of course, that changed over time and you did end up painting me in my twenties.

I think that being a mother and having you and your brother made me a much fuller person, a richer person. Being a mother is complicated. In many ways, you get so much from your child, more than you give. A lot of my feelings about life and emotion came out of motherhood. And sometimes I’m not able to explain those feelings with words, but I can use—

Your paintbrush.

Yes.

One of my favorite early paintings of yours is Portrait of an Old Man with a Child, Restored, after Domenico Ghirlandaio. His name sounds like “girl and daio,” and the child has curly blonde hair so I thought it was a little girl like me, looking at her grandfather. And through the window, you replaced the landscape with Magritte’s The Castle of the Pyrenees, a castle on a floating rock above the sea, which is when I fell in love with his work.

I love that you thought it was “girl and daio.” The child looks up at the old man with such loving eyes, and the original painting was damaged, which, to me, is part of its beauty. Sometimes in my work, I recreate the consequences of age. The damage becomes part of the painting. The old man and the boy represent love and the floating rock, eternity.

I want to talk to you about Susanna and the Elders, Restored, 1998, your installation based on the painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, because it had such an impact on me growing up. I didn’t fully understand it at the time, but I knew it was powerful. What originally drew you to Artemisia’s work?

I first encountered Artemisia Gentileschi’s work when I was living in Italy. I remember seeing her painting Judith Slaying Holofernes. She had painted bright red blood everywhere. I remember thinking, “Oh my God, I’ve never seen anything like that.” Artemisia was the daughter of Orazio Gentileschi, a well-known Baroque painter. He had several children, but Artemisia inherited that strange art gene. It doesn’t distinguish between male or female.

Her rendition of the biblical story Susanna and the Elders is about sexual abuse. Two elders spy on Susanna while she is bathing. They demand sexual favors and when she refuses, they threaten to ruin her reputation. Artemisia painted this subject from a woman’s point of view. Susanna is pressed against a stone wall while the men loom over her from above. It’s oppressive. If you look at how male artists painted Susanna—someone like Tintoretto, for instance—she often appears to be flaunting herself, almost as if the men are the victims.

It’s eerie, because later Artemisia’s own life would almost mirror Susanna’s.

Yes, not long after she painted Susanna and the Elders, Artemisia was raped by her tutor, Agostino Tassi. What followed was a long, humiliating trial. Tassi called witnesses to claim that Artemisia was a “badly behaved” woman. She technically won the case, but it took its toll. Eventually, she rebuilt her life and became the first woman admitted to the Artists’ Guild in Florence.

So when I painted Susanna and the Elders, Restored, I drew on my background, using methodologies in conservation such as X-rays. I created a painting in lead white under the original, showing Artemisia screaming and wielding a knife. In the trial testimony, she describes throwing a knife at Tassi after the assault. The X-ray of that image is displayed on a lightbox beside the painting.

Linda Nochlin wrote that your work functions best in what she called “textual complicity, not scholarly literalism,” where meaning emerges through the viewer’s participation. How conscious are you of the viewer?

I’m very aware. I often write texts to accompany the work, but not everyone sits around reading art history books—and that’s fine. What matters to me is that the viewer brings themselves to the painting: their experiences, their emotions, their history. They see the work through who they are.

Nearly 20 years after you painted Susanna and the Elders, Restored, I never would have imagined that I’d speak up in the #MeToo movement. Looking back, it feels as if Artemisia helped shape my courage, as though her spirit lived in the loft through your work—a lineage of women in a world that has so often treated us as objects rather than heroines. I wanted to ask you about your 2006 series Curators, Critics, and Connoisseurs. How did that come about?

I was interested in painting collectors and figures in the art world the way Andy Warhol once did. I liked the idea of collaboration, of inviting them to imagine themselves in a painting within art history. I used to run into the art historian Robert Rosenblum at the NYU pool. He was one of the leading scholars on Ingres. I asked him if he would ever consider sitting for a portrait, and he agreed.

In his essay on the series, he later wrote that when you suggested he be painted as Ingres’s Marquis de Pastoret, it was “almost enough to make me believe in reincarnation,” since people had long told him he resembled the Marquis.

Yes, Robert was very funny. When he saw the finished portrait in my studio, my art dealer at the time, Francis Naumann, turned to him and said, “Now you’re immortalized.” And Robert said, “I just wish I had that outfit.”

Another portrait that I find particularly striking is of Lowery Sims, the art historian and curator for modern and contemporary art.

Lowery wanted to be painted as Napoleon with a gun. I painted her after Ingres’s portrait of Napoleon, but with the addition of a rifle. The pose is similar to Eldridge Cleaver’s famous photograph Huey P. Newton in a Wicker Peacock Chair. In a review of the show, Sims told The Wall Street Journal, “Put these icons together, and it represents my interest in art history and being spawned in the age of the Black Panthers.”

Linda Nochlin, who wrote Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?, was someone you deeply admired and when you asked her how she wanted to be painted within art history, what did she choose?

I assumed Linda would choose Courbet, since she’d written so extensively about him. But instead, she chose A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. She wanted to be the barmaid. In Manet’s painting, the barmaid appears somewhat distant, almost weary. Linda was anything but that. Her presence was commanding. This portrait is included in the Morris Museum exhibition.

You then went on to paint the philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto as Socrates, Robert Storr along with his wife Rosamund Morley after Degas and the former New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman as The Thinker after Eakins. Kimmelman later told The Wall Street Journal, “It’s a funny thing seeing a painting of yourself when you’re supposed to be judging paintings.” In your current exhibition at the Morris Museum, you include Woman with a Parrot, Restored, after Courbet. The painting shows a reclining nude woman, her arm lifted as a parrot lands on her hand. Next to it is an X-ray.

This piece is very much about the male gaze, which Courbet seemed to have struggled with. Instead of remaining outside the painting as the observer, the X-ray reveals a male nude beneath the surface, painted in lead white, hidden under the parrot’s perch. The male figure becomes part of the painting, but you can only really see him in the X-ray.

Does that mean the male nude becomes objectified himself?

I think it has more to do with the conflict around the gaze. There’s also a sense of humor to it. It’s almost as if he couldn’t help himself, so he jumped into the painting—like going down the rabbit hole.

You’re also showing a new body of work inspired by Zurbarán’s female saints. What drew you to them?

Zurbarán painted almost 60 female saints. The saints were a way for the church to reach people. I like to think of them as the Kardashians of their time because they were so famous. People knew of them and related to them. Many of the saints were punished and betrayed, often portrayed in horrific torture scenes. What’s striking is that Zurbarán painted these women with great dignity, standing larger than life, with elaborate dresses and vivid colors.

How did you approach making what you call Las Santas de Zurbarán, The Cult of Unruly Women?

I painted four saints and used four models. I bought different brocades and constructed their elaborate skirts. All four saints wear wife beater tank tops because saints usually have terrible stories of abuse and I wanted a contemporary thread that united them.

For instance, Agatha of Sicily is the patron saint of sexual abuse. In Zurbarán’s painting, she holds her severed breasts on a plate. In my painting, she holds two Saint Agatha cakes in the shape of a woman’s breasts. There’s actually a Saint Agatha Day and in Sicilian bakeries you can buy these cakes with a little cherry on top. Behind her are ominous and threatening donkeys after a painting by Goya. Your father, sculptor Robert Lobe, made the wooden frames, which I designed and painted, adding brief texts that tell each saint’s story.

One of my favorite saints in the series is Margaret of Antioch. To me, she exemplifies how creativity can never be erased, even in the face of darkness.

Margaret is the patron saint of childbirth and creativity. According to legend, she was swallowed by the Devil disguised as a dragon, but the Devil couldn’t contain her power. She burst through his stomach and emerged unharmed.

Speaking of creativity, I love the story behind Leonardo da Vinci’s Ginevra de’ Benci. What drew you to her?

It’s an absolutely gorgeous portrait. Ginevra was a poet. She’s very young here and we don’t have much of her writing, but we do have one line that survives. “I ask your forgiveness, and I am a mountain tiger.” Here she is—this docile, beautiful young woman—and even back then in 1490, through her poetry, she’s telling you who she is. So I painted a tiger tattoo bursting through her chest. And it makes me think that throughout history, women have always had mountain tigers within.

Yes, women have always had interior lives. They have goals and dreams of their own.

And maybe they can’t always fulfill them.

But they have spirit. I wanted to ask you about the creative process itself. Often when I’m writing, things can feel messy for quite a while. You’ve always told me to stay with it, that whatever I first saw or felt is still there to be found. Can you elaborate?

It can be very painful, especially if you’re really stumped or going through a transition. But creativity—the process of creativity—is the most exciting thing. Getting it in the end, almost like once it’s over, it’s over, right? I think the thing is, love what you’re doing and be persistent. Because if you love what you’re doing, you enjoy doing it and then it’s easy to be persistent.

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Laughing out loud while reading a history book may seem unlikely, but that’s exactly what author Jennifer Wright delivers in her latest bestseller, Glitz, Glam and a Damn Good Time. Why shouldn’t history be accessible and entertaining? After all, Wright points out, “In the 19th century, they were human beings, bumbling through countless moments of idiocy just the way we do today.”

Enter Mamie Fish, Glitz, Glam and a Damn Good Time’s irreverent and witty heroine. Or, as Wright bluntly puts it, “Mamie pretty much said only inappropriate things.” Born Marion Graves and later nicknamed “The Fun-Maker,” Mamie rebelled against the stiff, strictly blue-blood parties of her era, replacing them with raucous, theatrical affairs—each one outdoing the last. Themes included a surprise monkey dressed as a prince, a donkey crashing a dance, and a dining table turned into a pond with live ducks paddling about, just to name a few. Mamie made quite the splash in Gilded Age New York and Newport high society.

More than a century later, at a time when the U.S. Secretary of Defense reposts his pastor’s video opposing women’s right to vote and TikTok trad wives perform subservience while making millions, Fish’s legacy feels like both a wink and a warning. It reminds us that domesticity can be a stage and a cage, and that social influence was one of the few tools women had to access power. As Wright writes, “In a world where entertainment was currency, [Mamie] was richer than a king.” It seems that when women are given even an iota of power, they can make kingdoms out of breadcrumbs—and that’s pretty kick-ass.

Speaking of kick-ass, Jennifer Wright is a fiercely funny, witty, and scrupulous author of seven books. Her subjects range from historical plagues (Get Well Soon) to an infamous 19th-century abortionist (Madame Restell) to the thirteen worst heartbreaks in history (It Ended Badly). She was also the political editor-at-large for Harper’s Bazaar, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Post, The Washington Post and last—but certainly not least—Observer.

Jennifer is also a friend. We met at Observer over a decade ago, back when I was writing “The J-Spot” column and she was covering style—which is fitting, because Jennifer sparkles in a ballgown like no one else. She wears them effortlessly, often in support of the arts and causes she deeply believes in. She’s a feminist in full regalia. When we caught up last week, she quipped that our long friendship was like a child—now old enough to be entrusted with responsibilities. What follows is a transcript of our conversation, edited for length.

First of all, congratulations on being a USA Today instant bestseller.

Thank you! I think a lot of that owes to the finale of The Gilded Age coming out at the same time. I think there were a lot of people who wanted their HBO Gilded Age fix who were happy to pick up a book about the era. Mamie Fish is a character on the show, and the actress who plays her narrates the audiobook, which was fantastic. I hope Mamie Fish gets her own spin-off.

It feels full circle that you’re being profiled in Observer. Tell me about your role there? 

I edited the style supplement for a while, which was very fun. We got to interview people like Dita Von Teese and Kelsey Grammer. There were a lot of really fun interviews. It was great writing about New York parties at the time. It was a wonderful, glamorous little chapter of my life.

How did your first book, It Ended Badly, come about?

My first book sold about the same time I was at Observer. I was in my twenties, and I’d gone through a lot of breakups. My friends had gone through a lot of breakups. And a lot of people in the past had gone through breakups, and theirs were so much worse than anything we were experiencing. For instance, Edith Wharton, at 40 and after a long marriage, finally had an orgasm with her new lover, but then he ghosted her. She wrote him hundreds upon hundreds of letters, and he never replied. So if you ever felt guilty about sending 12 texts in a row to your ex, don’t. Like Edith Wharton has you beat. And she went on to write some of the best books of all time.

What were you doing before working at Observer? 

I had been writing a column called “Shelved Dolls” for a website called The Gloss, which sadly no longer exists. It was about historical women and forgotten fashion icons of various periods.

Is this when you became interested in history? 

Well, I’d always been interested in history, but it was the first time I realized that there was a real audience for women in history—and for a woman’s perspective on history, written in a chatty, conversational way. I think it made me realize that there were women alive in history. Funny things happened in history. And it was okay to say that those things were funny, and to take a somewhat more lighthearted, irreverent view of the past.

If I had learned history with your humor and if it hadn’t been centered on men, I would have been far more interested.

I think if you’re lucky, you have wonderful teachers growing up who do take that point of view. I think most professors have realized if you want to get students engaged in history, you’d better find a way to tie it to their lives today.  And I think those people are generally very understanding and very happy about what I do. The people who are unhappy about what I do are, frankly, older men who want to feel smart because they’ve read a history book, while imagining themselves swilling brandy in a library lined with leather-bound volumes. I don’t think those are the only people history should be for. I think history should engage with women’s lives as they were and as they are today.

I read that you want history to be for people who care about Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

I do. I think if you enjoy gossipy modern-day things—if you want to talk about who your favorite couple is on Love Island—you might also enjoy talking about who your favorite couple is in the 19th Century because they were also having fabulously dramatic escapades and love affairs and very high profile divorces where they accused one another of giving them syphilis.

What do you think the impetus was for Mamie to throw these outrageous parties and how did that impact the greater culture?

This is a period where women couldn’t really make money and couldn’t enter politics. So if you are an ambitious woman, what is your outlet? It was crawling to the top of the social heap, which Mamie was able to do, rather surprisingly, because she was not the most beautiful woman of this period, and she was not the wealthiest either. She did it by the sheer force of her personality, her creativity and her wit. This was at a time when Mrs. Astor’s parties were never described as being much fun.  A socialite wrote that the only way she kept herself amused at one of Mrs. Astor’s three-hour dinners was by rating everyone on a scale of one to ten on how boring they were, with one being just the absolute worst and ten being a genuinely fascinating person. Not a single guest merited more than a three.

Mamie kept her dinners to 60 minutes which could be a struggle. Some guests said they were clutching their plates as they were being whisked away. But Mamie always promised there would be something more than dinner—like circus performers, or a play where everyone would be roasted, or a party where guests would wear their clothing backwards, or one where they had to talk like giant dolls and be seated with actual dolls.

When Mamie entered the social scene, parties were very formal. How did she change that?

Mamie was lucky that she grew up in a household where—although they fell on very hard times—she had mingled with New York Society. She knew the basic rules, but she also knew how to break them just enough to avoid completely alienating people. One of the first parties she threw that was incredibly controversial was a lily pad dinner, where she turned her dining room table into a pond with ducks paddling back and forth. People thought that this was very clever and creative—except for Ward McAllister, who was absolutely infuriated. He wanted American society to run the way British aristocracy ran in Europe where it was very formal and there was a rule code. It was actually her husband, Stuyvesant, who was able to get Ward McAllister kicked out of society as Mamie Fish’s social star was rising. Stuyvesant loved his wife so much that all of her enemies were his enemies, forever.

Did the men gain status from these parties?

Absolutely. If you were a man with a wife or daughter who wanted to enter society, Mamie had an incredible amount of power to say, “I will put her on the guest list for one of the parties, but you’d better help my husband with his financial dealings, and you’d better vote alongside him in the board meetings.”

You’d have to be lucky enough to have a supportive husband. 

Yes, but you have to assume that they at least want to make their wives happy, or certainly they want to make their daughters happy. So yes, women are still relying upon men’s largesse, but it was at least a way to exert social power. And all of this was also a relatively new thing. At the beginning of the century, the overwhelming majority of Americans lived in the remote countryside, so it was revolutionary when the country moved towards cities and suddenly you could go to a party in 15 minutes. Now you have a social life. Now you can start saying, “These are my female friends because we have common interests.”

I do think it’s interesting that there is such a fascination today with returning to this agrarian way of life, where TikTok trad-wife influencers are like, “I just live all by myself on a farm with my many children and my husband who’s in a photo once in a while.”

What do you think is behind the trad-wife trend?

I think these women are playing at Trianon. Marie Antoinette had a lovely little rural estate where the servants would go out and clean off the eggs every morning before Marie Antoinette would go out. And like a child on Easter, she’d find the eggs sitting in a nest and be like, “Being a farmer is such fun!” These TikTokers are making millions of dollars cosplaying being a farmer’s wife. And a lot of them have tremendous help behind the scenes. I’m sorry, but your house does not look like that if you have seven children. I promise you, they have some help coming in, which is perfectly reasonable.

I do think, because we are all on our phones so much today and the grind of city life can be a lot, it is lovely to imagine that we might have a life where we just spend our days wandering through the fields, picking fruit from trees and watching our children run freely through meadows.

What drew you to writing about Mamie?

I wanted to write about this period partly because, in the course of writing Madame Restell, I had so much leftover information about interesting female figures from the period. In Madame Restell, I got to talk a lot about the poverty and the dark underside of the Gilded Age. But that meant that I was constantly brushing up against reports of fabulous parties, interesting socialites and Newport exploding. I wanted to write a book about what was glamorous and delightful about this period. And I do think women are behind so much of that. When we think about the fashion, the beautiful houses that were constructed, the writings, the art, the elegance of it, that was not masterminded by railroad tycoons (many of whose names we’ve forgotten today). It was masterminded by their wives.

I think that’s so interesting, because when I look at billionaires today, they seem to be spending their money on steroids that have blown up their bodies into these Michelin Man shapes, like one tire stacked on top of another, and on rocket ships going into space—which is the most phallic thing I can imagine. It’s not being spent in these feminine ways.

Who would you compare Mamie Fish and her circle of socialites to today?

I would actually compare them to influencers. They seem to have an incredible level of control over their own image. They seem to think very hard about how they’re presenting themselves and what is on brand for them.

I think it’s interesting that Mamie supported women striking in the garment industry but was against the suffragist movement. 

I always wonder how much Mamie was really against it. I think you could say, “I don’t need the vote because my husband votes the way I tell him to vote.” Stuyvesant Fish was described as a knight who would ride into battle at Mamie’s slightest word, so he probably just voted however Mamie felt like voting. But there were very few women that this was the case. That is why it is better to have the vote for yourself.

As a historian, do you feel like you have any insights about where we’re headed as a society? 

I think there’s this idea that the arc of history always bends toward justice, and that’s very pleasurable. But I think it gives people the false impression that the arc in history keeps getting ever more liberal and ever more compassionate. It can swoop back. In the 1850s, lots of people were having abortions and talking about them. By the 1880s, that would’ve been inconceivable. So yes, the fact that you have a right, as we have all found out with Roe v. Wade, does not mean that you get to keep it forever. The arc of history doesn’t always get better and better and better for you.

Do you know what you’ll be writing about next?

Hopefully, it’s going to be about Phineas Gage. He was the railroad worker in 1848 who was using a tamping iron to pound explosives into rock so that the railroad could go through a mountain range. His tamping iron caught on a piece of flint, flew backwards and exploded through his left eye socket and out through his brain. Miraculously, he survived, but his personality entirely changed. Before the accident, he was very upstanding, solid and responsible. Afterwards, he became filthy, profane and a conman. It was the first time people began to realize the soul might reside in the brain. So what did that mean for religion and for identity?

The screen rights to Madame Restell were optioned with plans for a TV series.

It was bought by a British production company, so I imagine you’ll see it on the BBC before it airs here. But my goodness, I’m amazed anything ever gets made. There are just so many steps to it. So fingers crossed!

There’s this running joke that whatever you write about comes true.  Like when you wrote about historical plagues in Get Well Soon, and then Covid happened.

That is a running joke about my books. I started writing Madame Restell when Roe v. Wade was still the law of the land. It’s about a 19th-century abortionist and how abortion became illegal in America in the 1870s. And Glitz, Glam and a Damn Good Time is about parties—so everything’s going to be fine, you guys.

To experience the work of renowned multimedia artist Joan Jonas is a bit like trying to articulate the origins of the universe. Her mediums span video, performance, sculpture, drawing, literature, found objects—and elements like wind, time, space and sound. Over the years, I’ve found myself wondering: What isn’t her work about? Indeed, Jonas has never stopped “exploring, learning and referencing,” though she overlapped forms from the beginning because, for her, they all related to each other like a poem. “How do you explain a poem?” Jonas asked me when we connected last month. “You can, but it’s difficult. It’s better to read it.”

Born in 1936 and based in SoHo for six decades, Jonas is a trailblazer in video, performance and installation art. For decades, she’s been revered internationally, but in the past year, she’s taken her hometown of New York City by storm. In 2024, the Museum of Modern Art held a stunning retrospective of her work, “Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning,” spanning over fifty years of the artist’s illustrious career. Around the same time, the Drawing Center presented an exhibit focused solely on her drawings—many of them depicting animals: owls, dogs, rabbits, fish and insects. They felt playful, even joyous. Most recently, her show “Empty Rooms” at Gladstone Gallery explored themes of loss and revival—stitched paper stretched across empty sculptural frames, accompanied by video, music and fifty drawings of leafless trees that somehow seemed full of life.

Though Jonas began as a sculptor, her artistic trajectory shifted in 1970 after a trip to Japan. She returned to New York with one of the earliest portable video cameras and was transfixed. Her first video piece, Wind (1968), captured her artist friends on a snow-covered Long Island beach, wrestling against the elements on one of the coldest days of the year. In the creation of that piece, she was influenced by the late 1960s dance movement, where everyday gestures became a kind of choreography. Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy (1972) marked the first time Jonas performed in her own video. Dressed in erotic clothing and wearing a mask, she inhabited the persona of a seductress. “It was the interaction between the camera and the body,” she told me, “and how it could be used in different situations and how it was recorded.” What struck her most was the immediacy—the fact that you could see yourself on screen in real time while performing. “That was kind of revolutionary for everybody at that moment.”

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Last June, I visited Jonas’s MoMA retrospective with my mother, a painter. Together we wandered from room to room, soaking up wild creativity that often felt less like a museum and more like an unfolding dream. I was particularly moved by Jonas’s work with mirrors, inspired by Borges’ Labyrinths. Mirror Piece I (1969) and Mirror Piece II (1970) featured performers holding long slabs of mirrors in a choreographed sequence, reflecting the audience back on itself—an early meditation on the power of the gaze, gender hierarchy, fragmentation and spatial perception. One of the pieces I could hardly tear myself away from was Volcano Saga (1989), a video adaptation of a thirteenth-century Icelandic saga featuring Tilda Swinton as a woman whose dreams foretell future love and loss. Swinton’s singsong voice weaves through surreal visuals—Swinton superimposed over sweeping Icelandic landscapes that feel like characters themselves. I felt like I might fall into the screen.

I first heard Jonas’s name through my parents’ longtime friend, artist Gwenn Thomas. Thomas is close friends with Jonas, has photographed much of her early work and has appeared in her pieces. Jonas had always felt like a mythic presence. When we finally spoke, she was warm but precise, direct without ever being pinned down. In conversation, as in her art, she resisted easy definitions—rearranging sentences, opening new possibilities even as one might try to contain her meaning.

I loved “Empty Rooms.” According to the exhibition text, the show was about loss and empty spaces and your process of revival. How did the concept come about?

I got the idea because at my age, your friends start to disappear. Around the time of the opening of my show at MoMA, several people passed away. I don’t want to refer specifically to that, but I thought when each person leaves, there’s an empty room. It just came to me like that. When I came back from Canada last summer, I began to think about what an empty room would be. The shapes—I made them on a small scale (about a foot in diameter), and then they were enlarged. The only way I could do it was to make a small model first and then take it to a place where they make steel frames. Those are what you see in the space. I was interested in working with form. I tried to make shapes and forms that I had not made before. I didn’t want them to look like lamps or things I’d already done. I wanted them to be new.

Tell me about the drawings of trees on the wall. I noticed they didn’t have leaves.

Other people noticed that, too. I got the idea because I have this Japanese paper I made them on and then crinkled. (The forms are made out of another kind of Japanese paper that we sewed onto the frames.) I love trees, and I love the forms. I find them fascinating. I am probably going to go on drawing trees after this, because I like it when the leaves are gone. You see the framework, you see the structure, you see the branches. That’s what I’m interested in. And it also has to do with going into another phase. I mean, the leaves always come back. Do you see what I mean?

Absolutely. Even though they didn’t have leaves, they had so much movement. And with the crinkled paper, it almost felt like the ocean to me. Let’s talk about the video in the background. It came from the 2015 Venice Biennale’s “They Come to Us Without a Word”?

The video wasn’t shown like that in Venice. All of my performances are structured differently. They have the same imagery and references, but they’re structured for a different kind of audience. When I did the performance in Venice, a couple of the performers couldn’t be there, but when I came back to New York and we did the performance, I was able to rework the video background. So the performers, myself and my editor worked on it for quite a number of days, putting that together in relation to the shadows and the reflections and the windmill. I don’t usually explain my pieces, but the windmill has significance in relation to the idea of loss and things going on and on.

I also noticed hands reaching, almost like they were trying but failing to grasp.

There was no inherent meaning when we developed those hand movements and the use of some of the props. It’s how it all adds up. I like it that you interpret it in your own way in relation to the idea of empty rooms or what’s lost and so on.

Even though the show is about loss, I found it very peaceful.

I really didn’t want it to be sentimental or about the sadness of loss.

Then there was the accompanying music, which you collaborated on with jazz musician Jason Moran. How did that come about?

I met Jason in 2004 or 2005, and we began working on a piece called The Shape, the Scent, and Feel of Things. We worked at Dia Beacon for six weeks developing the score. I had the script, the ideas, the text and the projections, and Jason came in and played music. My movements were developed in relation to Jason’s playing live on a grand piano, and we’ve worked together that way a number of times. This time, I asked Jason to send me a few clips—pieces of music he already had—and I chose the music from them.

I was delighted by the whale sculpture called Whale from Myles From Nowhere by Myles Kehoe, an artist in Nova Scotia. I understand you’ve spent a lot of your summers there?

I have a friend in Nova Scotia who has an antique store, and I get many props from him. I think that he got all the pieces for that, including a buoy and the rake and so on, and then gave it to a friend of his to put it together. Usually, I collect folk art or what you could call outsider art. I hate to use these words, but I do collect objects like that. This is one of those objects I found in Canada last summer, actually at the same time that I got the idea for “Empty Rooms,” and it was put in at the last minute. I just thought it added—I hate to put it in words—a content. If we think about whales and what’s happening with whales… that’s all I’ll say.

Your work spans so many mediums. How do you explain that expansiveness?

I think it’s just time—from the very beginning, starting with art history and studying the history of art. I never thought of dealing with the vastness, but in the beginning, the first writer I dealt with was Borges. And Borges writes about the universe and about the infinite aspects of the universe. For instance, for “Empty Rooms,” I take separate parts and put them together. I used to say it was like cooking. I don’t say that anymore, but it is like cooking. When you take two elements—two ingredients—you put them together, and the third ingredient forms a chemical reaction in a way. It’s a kind of collage method, and then it’s not a collage anymore because it’s merged into one piece.

In 2024, you had a retrospective at MoMA that overlapped with a show at the Drawing Center. What was it like walking through the history of your work?

It was just simply thrilling for me. I don’t think about, “Oh, this is my history.” I’m just happy to see them out there. Art is about communication, and so it’s wonderful to be able to communicate and have that exchange with an audience.

One of the things I loved about the Drawing Center show was how the animals had such personality. Were you playing when you made those drawings?

There are two different kinds of drawings. The ones I do in performance, which are done quickly, and in relation to a particular piece. One of my favorite examples was when Jason played one of my favorite pieces of his, and I was making bird drawings. They’re very simple—one after another, very fast—in relation to Jason’s music. The other kind of drawing I make in my studio, like the owl drawings, and I’m very careful about them. Those are very studied and slow. I’m trying to make a drawing that I like.

I read you found a rock that you used to trace your dog’s head?

I have templates, so I have different things to inspire drawings, like the rocks. I collect rocks in Canada, actually, and my collection includes these shapes that look like animals.

I’m curious how you entered the art world. You worked at Dick Bellamy’s gallery. Did you meet a lot of artists? 

I was in that world, as we all were. Gwenn was in that world. They were my friends. I went to Columbia Graduate School and got my master’s in one year, and then I moved downtown. I had gone to a school in Vermont where David Whitney had gone, and he worked for Dick Bellamy. One day I walked into Dick Bellamy’s Green Gallery, and there was a receptionist job, which I took immediately. David Whitney arranged it for me. He was a visionary, Dick Bellamy, and he showed many people that became important later on. I learned a lot about what was going on. My education continued from art history to what was going on in that gallery and just being around downtown. I worked there in ’65, and I didn’t start showing until five years later.

What led you to take that leap and start showing your work?

When I thought I was ready. It’s hard to describe. It was when I thought I had something to show.

Were you bursting to put your ideas into the world or was it something else?

I wasn’t exactly bursting. The first thing was that the dancers in the sixties were all giving workshops. I had never performed in public, so I took the dance workshops. It wasn’t just Trisha Brown—it was Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton and Deborah Hay. Trisha had a workshop where you could bring something in and show it to a very small group of people, and experiment in that way, and gradually develop a kind of language. Yvonne was more about running around the room, doing more physical exercises. They all taught differently. That’s how I made a slow transition into the kind of work I do now. Later, when I went to Japan and bought a video camera, that was the next step. I began with mirrors. I was inspired by Borges, and his writing really got me into making my own work. The mirror became my main prop and metaphor at that time.

I know you don’t go by theory, but Mirror Check seems feminist.

It did have to do with feminism. There was a wave of feminism in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. It was very important for me, as it was for many other people—and for men, too. It was a reference to feminism, but not specifically. It was the mirror, the idea of looking at one’s own body and having control of the gaze.

I read that you were shy, so I can only imagine the courage it took to stand up there naked.

It wasn’t easy. Fear is a big stimulator. I used to get terrible stage fright. I no longer feel that way, but in the very beginning, definitely. And if I was afraid of something, I thought, “Okay, I have to do it.” Fear was an inspiration and a push.

It’s amazing that you saw fear as a motivator because some people shut down.

It’s in my work, this phrase, “What am I afraid of?” I did a little piece with children, and I said to them, “What are you afraid of?” And they said, “I am afraid of…” What are you afraid of? I like that phrase and that question.

I read that one of the reasons you got into performance and video was because sculpture and painting were male-dominated fields, and there was an opening in these newer areas?

At that time, yes… it was an opening in a way, but it was also just the obvious place to go for many reasons. We don’t have that same moment at all now.

You started out doing happenings and performances with Richard Serra, who was a minimalist. This is a question from my sculptor father: is your work a rejection of minimalism?

I wouldn’t put it that way, but yes. I was trying to get away from minimalism in the very beginning, and I was with Richard. He’s a brilliant artist, and I loved his work, and he’s a great guy and brilliant. But I wanted to get away from minimalism, frankly. So I’ll just say yes.

You grew up in New York and New Hampshire—did those places shape you? I read you felt like an outsider growing up because you moved around a lot.

I grew up in New York until I was about 12, and then we moved to Long Island. Every summer, until I was 17, we went to my grandmother’s house in the mountains of New Hampshire, which was very beautiful. But New York City was always the center. I also went to five different schools before I graduated, then went to college, then the Museum School and then Columbia. I was always new to the class—an outsider. I think that helped. It has a relationship to how I make art. And it’s not bad to be an outsider, actually.

Did you ever have a moment in your career where you thought, “Wow, I’ve really made it”?

When you say, “I’ve made it,” then what do you do? No, I never thought that. But after the MoMA retrospective, I thought, oh, finally. People didn’t know my work for many years. I mean, they knew me. They knew individual things. I had support. All those years, I called myself an artist’s artist because the artists were the ones who came to see my work and who supported me. But people on the outside didn’t know my work, which was, not sad, but hard for me. And so when I had the show at MoMA, finally in New York where I live, my work was seen. I wouldn’t say I’ve made it, but I was happy about it. And the same with the Drawing Center show.

Let’s talk about the old New York. I love the video Songdelay, shot in 1973 in an empty lot on the Lower West Side off the Hudson. The boat passing by became another character, and then there was the clapping of bricks to create a delayed sound.

I love New York. I used to live on Charles Street, and then these lots opened up in SoHo so I moved here. That was amazing, to have a space to work like that. These were very rough places. It was a dangerous neighborhood, but it was an interesting and exciting time for artists. Before, there were these big holes—I call them holes—where you could work in these empty lots, torn-down buildings looking old. It all got gentrified. That landscape interested me. I wouldn’t necessarily want to do a performance in the present landscape. I did this one piece in the ‘70s where I just decided to take my props—my cones—and go down to Wall Street. I asked Pat Steir to come with me, and we took the cones, and she and I were dressed in dresses. We improvised. A guy named Andy Mann had a camera, and he recorded us. It was beautiful. You couldn’t do that now. You’d have to get permission. That was very inspiring for me.

Did you want to be an artist when you were a little girl?

My father wanted me to be an artist. I have to say, it takes a certain kind of confidence to say, “I want to be an artist.” I didn’t have it growing up for some reason. I liked to draw. My father, who was a failed writer, put that energy into me. It really was my mother who didn’t want me to be an artist. She thought it was unstable, that I wouldn’t be happy and that I wouldn’t have any money. My father was very different. So it’s not that I wanted to be an artist—I thought of being an artist. But it took me a long time to have the confidence to say, “Okay, I’m an artist.” I’m sorry my father didn’t live to see what I do. I’m really sorry about that. I would’ve loved to have him know what happened, but you can’t have that.

You have a great love for ecology, and you’ve made pieces involving the ocean. With so many animals on the verge of extinction, it seems like an homage to them.

I find it very painful what’s going on now in the ocean. For instance, the reason I started focusing on ecology, after all those years of working outdoors and being inspired by nature, was that I started working with a Halldór Laxness piece called Under the Glacier. He’s an Icelandic writer. He’s very poetic, a wonderful writer, and he writes about nature. But when I started working with Under the Glacier, I immediately thought, well, that was written in 1968, and now glaciers are melting. That’s what led me into that area, then I focused on that aspect of the world in relation to my world.

You layer and repurpose videos for different pieces. Is there something specifically that draws you to doing that?

Sometimes I like to take things from the past and juxtapose them with something in the present. Like the piece I made with the Halldór Laxness idea about the world being underwater and the melting ice. In 1972 or ’73, I made a video called Disturbances, which I shot in a swimming pool in the country, someplace in Pennsylvania, with myself and two other women dressed in white nightgowns, swimming underwater. I’m recording it, and you can see the reflection on the water. Later on, I put parts of that video into the piece about climate change, Reanimation. That changes the little clip I took from the past. I do that sometimes, like I did just now for “Empty Rooms.”

How do you come up with titles for pieces? Is it intuitive?

It is intuitive. I try to think about what the piece is about, what the piece is. Sometimes, like with “They Come to Us without a Word,” the title just comes to me. And Reanimation came from the book, so different ways.

“Good Night Good Morning” is such a beautiful title.

That had to do with a video I made. I got up in the morning and said, “Good morning” to the TV. At night, I said, “Good night” to the camera. That was when I had my Portapak. “Good Morning, Good Night.”

I love the wind piece—your very first video. What was it like to have wind be another character?

It was kind of magical. I didn’t know there was going to be so much wind that day. I made that piece indoors and had simulated wind with fans, although nobody knows that. So it was serendipity that the wind came up that way. And then it became part of my work and also one of my characters. The wind is always there. If it’s windy, I really like to go out, because the wind animates things and changes them and transforms things. It’s a force.

Gwenn Thomas said in Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning, “It’s like Joan is the source. She’s like the sun with different spikes coming out, a non-linear progression. She goes back to the source and comes out differently.” I thought that was beautiful.

Yes, I like that, too.

Photographer, director and now TV host, Sophie Elgort, grew up with a camera in hand. Cameras were literally everywhere, always within reach. Long before iPhones, she brought cameras to school and summer camp, styling and snapping pictures of her friends. It was exhilarating and fun, but she never considered it for her career. Photography was what her dad did. Perhaps you’ve heard of him—legendary fashion photographer Arthur Elgort?

While he may have given her a tip or two along the way, Elgort has blazed a remarkable path of her own. Her photographs have appeared in publications such as Cultured, Elle, Paper, Teen Vogue and Vogue Greece, among many others. She has photographed a long list of stars, including Brooke Shields, John Waters, Naomi Watts and Rose Byrne. Her fine art photography is represented by the prestigious Staley-Wise Gallery. Now, her latest project, Portrait Mode with Sophie Elgort—a weekly ALL ARTS series—blends her love of storytelling through images and words.

As playful as it is profound, the series transports viewers to an intimate set as Elgort interviews and photographs creative icons like the venerable musician and producer Nile Rodgers, EGOT-winner Rita Moreno, ABT principal dancer Skylar Brandt and, last but not least, her father, Arthur Elgort, who is known for his natural-light style and for championing the careers of Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington. At the end of each episode, in an unexpected twist, she asks her guests to take her portrait, and the results are delightful.

I sat down to talk with Elgort at her Tribeca office. Afterward, she brought me next door to her spacious, sunlit studio where arched windows framed Lower Manhattan. Before I left, I was inspired to take her photo with my iPhone, and she gave me some pointers: “no to portrait mode” (she likes to snap fast) and a flash always adds a good pop.

Your father is a legendary photographer. Did you ever feel pressure to follow in his footsteps or feel intimidated by the idea of becoming a photographer yourself?

I never felt pressure. I actually never wanted to be a photographer. It’s like when kids grow up with parents who are doctors—some want to follow in their footsteps, and others want to do the complete opposite. I was the latter. Photography was always fun, something we were always doing. I’d bring my father’s cameras with film to school and photograph my friends, but I didn’t see it as my path because that’s what my dad did.

So you became pre-med! Tell me about that.

I was in an a cappella group, and for some reason, almost everyone in the group was pre-med. One day at rehearsal, they were like, “Why don’t you just take the pre-med requirements, just in case?” Someone wrote the ten required classes on a napkin. I looked at them and thought, “Okay, I can do that.” So I started taking them, but then I realized that I didn’t actually want to be a doctor.

How did you transition to a career in photography?

My friends started a company right out of college, where they would repurpose vintage clothing to sell it online. They asked my opinion about different photographers, and I remember thinking, “No, not that one, not that one.” Finally, they just asked, “Would you do it? We’ll give you free clothes in return.” I said, “Yes, of course,” so I started shooting for them, and the photos ended up in Teen Vogue with my name attached. From there, people started reaching out, and I thought, “Oh, I guess this is a thing now.” So I never felt any pressure. In fact, my father was excited that somebody else wanted to do photography in the family. Both of my parents were very encouraging.

Did your father give you tips along the way?

He did, but since he shoots a lot with natural light, he’s not so much into strobes. I realized I actually had no knowledge of that, so I took a lighting course.

Let’s jump into Portrait Mode. How did it come about?

Over the pandemic, my husband, Eric, and I were staying with my parents for a while. I had no work because everything had been canceled. My dad wasn’t working either, so I came up with this idea to do an IGTV Instagram series where we’d talk about one of his photos each week. It was so low production. I just propped up my phone on some books and hit record. It was just us talking off the cuff and natural, but people loved it because it was authentic. I ended up getting connected with Diane Masciale at WNET (America’s flagship PBS station.) She watched what we’d done and said, “This is great, but it’s not quite right for us.” She gave me feedback, we kept in touch, and a few years later, I invited her to a photography show I had at Lafayette 148’s Soho store. After seeing my work in that context, she said, “Let’s revisit this. Let’s brainstorm something that would make sense for both of us.” We came up with Portrait Mode with Sophie Elgort.

That’s such a great lesson on not letting “rejection” deflate you.

I always try to take advice, especially from people who have more experience in an area than I do. There was so much I didn’t know about making a TV show, so having that guidance was invaluable.

How did you decide which creative icons to feature in the first season?

We made a dream list of guests, and we wanted to get people in different genres of the arts. I started reaching out, which is something I’d never done before. I asked my PR friends, “How do I do this?” They helped me draft an email, and I did personal reachouts. I’m so happy we got some serious legends on board.

Your first episode features the Nile Rodgers. You two had such great rapport.

He is an absolute legend. Those who might not know his name—they’re few and far between—definitely know his music. He was in a band called Chic and did Le Freak and We Are Family. He just won a Grammy for Beyoncé’s latest album. He produced Daft Punk’s Get Lucky, David Bowie’s Let’s Dance and Madonna’s Like a Virgin. And he’s still making an impact, not just musically but through his We Are Family Foundation, which empowers young voices. His partner, Nancy Hunt, who I put in the episode, runs it. She’s an amazing woman.

Let’s talk about Rita Moreno. She’s 93 years old and seems like she’s embarking on her next big chapter!

I was definitely a little starstruck. She’s a fireball of personality, a total spitfire. At one point, she just broke into an a cappella jazz song, and she was entertaining everyone by making jokes. We then turned the camera on her and let her take my picture. Each guest has such strong points of view, and I wanted to learn from them. And, of course, Rita was trying to get me to act. She’s like, “Now look over there and act surprised!” I tried, and she went, “No, that’s not how you do it!” And I was like, “Rita, I am not an actor! I’d need a lot more time to make it look real.”

And then there’s Skylar Brandt, a principal dancer at ABT.

My God, she’s such a talented, amazing, beautiful dancer. And what’s cool about Skylar is that she really had to work for it. She didn’t have the “right” feet, the natural arch ideal for ballet, but she made it. Talk about work ethic!

She has a huge Instagram following.

Huge, but I think it’s really authentic. People use that word a lot, but she’s very true to herself. She has a good vibe, and she’s really funny.

She must have been a dream subject for you since your photography has so much movement.

Yes! We actually filmed her first, which got me going. I’m so comfortable filming dancers, and we just had a really good rapport.

What was it like interviewing your father, Arthur Elgort?

I knew I had to include him—he’s how I got the original idea. He’s a legend. I was like, “How special is it that I get to do this on him?”

He has a great sense of humor.

He’s a good chatterer, too. I think it felt really natural and fun. And we’re always taking pictures.

Does he ever critique your work?

Sometimes he does with my more artsy work. I’ll slow down the shutter speed, and it’ll be soft. He’ll be like, “That one looks blurry,” and I’ll say, “Yes, Dad, that was on purpose.” And he’ll be like, “Strange.”

What do you hope people take away from Portrait Mode?

I want people to see these artists in action and really get to know these personalities. The episodes are short—under 20 minutes—so they’re very watchable. We’re putting them online, too, which is great for younger audiences. Maybe people will discover more about their work and go down the rabbit hole.

Where do you hope the show goes?

I’d love to get everyone on my dream list, and then there are a ton of people at different points in their careers, which would be interesting.

Who’s the top person on your dream list?

So many people! But if I had to pick one—Lin-Manuel Miranda. That would be epic.

How do art and business intertwine for you?

I don’t have a big team, so as an artist, I still have to do all my own pre-production and post-production. That involves everything from marketing to the boring stuff like invoices, accounting and emails. It would be nice to only be an artist, but at the same time, I think it’s interesting knowing what’s going on in my business, and then I can make more informed decisions. I also run a business called Clickhouse, which started as a headshot business and has expanded to a team of great photographers shooting and editing corporate videos, as well as event coverage.

You’re also a mom of three! How do you handle it all so gracefully?

Thank you! We have an amazing nanny during the week, and my husband brings the kids to school every day on his way to work. Weekends are family time, but if I have a job, we’ll fill in with a babysitter. If we’re traveling, Eric’s parents will come stay with the kids or my mom will come sometimes in a pinch. It’s a juggle, and it wouldn’t be possible without help.

I know you’re also passionate about empowering and helping women.

I’ve always been interested in helping people where I can. I feel like I’ve been really fortunate. I grew up with parents who supported me, and throughout my career, people have been generous with advice and have helped me. Years ago, I started an organization with my friend Carolyn Pride called Through Our Lens, a mentorship program empowering young women and high school girls through photography. Our motto was ‘Representation Matters,’ and the goal was to give them access to the industry and tangible skills to get a job in the fashion industry. It’s hard to find your path, and it’s really important to me to help people who have it harder than others.

Do you think art is political? Or what do you feel the role of art is?

It can be. I think art is important. I think of art as everything. It’s anything that makes you feel something. And when I’m on set my favorite part about photography is chatting with people and getting to know them. I like to see them in action. I don’t care about photographing products, I care about people.

Women’s stories and contributions have largely been overlooked in our nation’s history.  The National Women’s History Museum (NWHM) is changing that—and Cheri Kaufman is helping. On a gusty Monday evening in late June, Kaufman, co-founder of Kaufman Astoria Studios and New York Chair of the National Women’s History Museum, dazzled in a Marc Bouwer gold sequined suit at the Upper East Side home of artist Kelly Stuart Graham. The duo greeted guests with what one socialite described as “orgasmic” hors d’oeuvres and champagne before ushering them into Graham’s sexy, lacquered living room. The occasion? A star-studded benefit for the museum. The programming? An intimate fireside chat with the passionate woman’s rights advocate (and A-list movie star) Demi Moore. Who knew feminism could be so chic? 

“It’s a party house,” quipped Will Fleming, telling Observer that Graham and his late husband, John Barman (a prominent interior decorator), “really wanted to create a sense of community, different areas and moods.” 

As to why he lent his house for the evening, Graham told Observer that the museum was important and “whatever Cheri wants, I want to help her with it. I wouldn’t be where I am today without the influence of women in my life.” The host added, perplexed, “I have never understood why women are treated the way they are. Why is it taking so long for the Women’s Equal Rights Amendment to ever happen?” Candace Bushnell, a vision in Silvia Tcherassi and aqua Manolos, called Cheri “a huge supporter of women.” Media mogul Gerry Bryne said, “Cheri is a dynamic woman who continues to make a difference.” On this point, it seems nobody disagrees.

Fern Mallis, Ann Dexter-Jones, Saundra Whitney, Elizabeth Kabler, Jill Furman, Richard Rubinstein, Lisa Fayne Cohen and James Cohen, Lydia Touzet and Rudy Touzet, and other fixtures of New York society flocked to Graham’s glimmering home, overlooking an epic Park Avenue view of the New York City skyline. Kaufman introduced the indomitable Demi Moore, who had just told Observer how extremely honored she felt to be “inducted into a group of women I greatly admire.” 

Moore sparkled like Hollywood in a sequined-fishtailed skirt and silk Charmeuse blouse as she shared “unlike” Hollywood advice that was raw and poignant. She spoke about her new film, The Substance, which explores the issues of aging and accepting ourselves as we are. “It’s kind of like the male perspective of the ideal woman that women have bought into,” she said. On young women and girls, Moore spoke about possibility. “How we relate to the issue actually is the issue. And when we change our perspective on how we are seeing it, we can create it.”

Following an elegant dinner, as guests nibbled chocolates and cookies, Observer asked Kaufman if she had any last words of advice for women. “Look for some older women, watch what they’re doing, and follow in their footsteps.”

More than once, Observer has called Candace Bushnell the ‘real Carrie Bradshaw,’ but by now everyone should know that her Sex and the City alter ego is only a small part of the ‘real Candace Bushnell.’ The fiercely feminist Bushnell is, in no particular order, an international best-selling author, celebrated novelist and successful producer. Her critically acclaimed one-woman stage memoir, “True Tales of Sex, Success and Sex and the City” opens at the Café Carlyle tomorrow (April 23) for a limited run after stints at the Daryl Roth Theater and in theaters around the world.

Bushnell’s “Sex and the City” column, of course, originated in 1994 at this very publication (then the storied New York Observer broadsheet) before quickly morphing into a book, an HBO hit starring Sarah Jessica Parker, the first of two motion pictures and, eventually, an unstoppable cultural phenomenon.

On a warm day in April, I met Bushnell off Madison Avenue for tea at the Carlyle’s Gallery. So much talent and so many stars have moved through its art deco halls, it seemed like the perfect spot to chat with the glamorous and witty OG Carrie Bradshaw. Bushnell, true to fashion form, was sporting a black blouse with elegant shoulder ruffles, black leather pants with silver zippers, yellow heels and a hot pink handbag. Not only was it thrilling to interview one of my feminist heroes, but as a former sex columnist for the Observer myself, I’d always felt I had big stilettos to fill. (Yes, she still wears Manolos.) And just like that…after actually meeting Bushnell, those shoes felt even bigger.

How did you end up with your iconic column in the New York Observer?

When I first came to New York at 19, I wrote a children’s book. I wrote for anybody and everybody I could write for. This is all part of my show, “True Tales of Sex, Success and Sex and the City.” Then I wrote for women’s magazines, which was the precursor to “Sex and the City.” I was already writing about my Samantha, my Miranda, probably back in the eighties, but I always wanted to write a column. I had a column in Mademoiselle for probably a month or two months, and then the editor left or got fired or something, which was always happening. I started writing for the New York Observer and doing profiles for them, and the profiles were really, really popular. Everybody was talking about them. Then the editor-in-chief asked if I wanted to have my own column, which just put a frame around work that I’d already developed. I’d already developed my voice, and I’d already been writing professionally for 15 years when I got the “Sex and the City” column.

What was it like working with Peter Kaplan, the legendary editor-in-chief of the New York Observer?

It was a very male-oriented, Ivy-League-mentality kind of place. There was a lot of hazing and people were tough—they threw phones. Kaplan didn’t do that, but other people did. Publishing was a slightly violent business. But Peter was brilliant, and he would just say these things that you just realize, “Wow, that’s really it.” In those days, being an editor was a creative job. He felt like it was his job to somehow get the story out of the writer. It was a different mentality.

How quickly did your column “Sex and the City” take off? You became a star.

It happened right away. Again, I talk about that in the show. I think after I’d written five columns, I sold it to Morgan Entrekin [publisher of Grove Atlantic] as a book. Then the column was really like a serial book, which was obviously what I’d been wanting to write my whole life—a book. People faxed [the columns] to their friends in LA, so from the beginning I had Hollywood calling. ABC wanted it, HBO wanted it, Fine Line, New Line, some other probably movie company that doesn’t exist, and I flew out to LA. It was exciting.

What was it like navigating that?

I didn’t know anything about that business at all. It took me a while to sell it to Darren Star. They say publishing is or used to be a little bit of a gentleman’s business. There’s not that much money to be made. But in TV and entertainment, there’s a lot of money. When there’s a lot of money to be made, people are not, in general, equitable. Nobody gives you a good deal out of the kindness of their heart. The goal is to give as bad a deal as you can get away with, and that’s business. If you’re in it, you understand it, you know how to negotiate it, and you have power. Otherwise, if you’re an outsider, you don’t have that kind of insider access.

And it was sexist.

Back in 1995, women did not have the same kind of power that they have now in Hollywood. It was very different, and there’s a bit of an attitude of—I mean, the whole world was like that, right?

I read that you consulted on the HBO series “Sex and the City” up until Mr. Big got married, and then you felt you no longer related to Carrie. Why is that?

I tell that story in the show, too. At the end of the second season, Carrie and Mr. Big have a bumpy relationship. They break up, they get back together again, and then Mr. Big dumps Carrie and marries somebody else. Somebody he thinks is marriage material—meaning more conventional and less trouble, which is exactly the same thing that happened in my real life. I thought that that was maybe the end of the series, and it fit with my thesis that guys like Big come and go, but your girlfriends are always there for you. But then it’s not over, and they want to make another season, so they have Carrie have an affair with her now-married ex-boyfriend, Mr. Big. And as I say, that’s when a part of me “un” became Carrie Bradshaw because to me it wasn’t feminist. I’m sort of the opposite of that.

Let’s talk about “True Tales of Sex, Success and Sex and the City.” How did the show come about?

I met David Foster and his manager, Mark Johnson, and then we had a meeting. Mark said, “Why don’t you try to do a one-woman show?” I was like, “Why not? What do I have to lose?” I wrote it at the beginning of  2020, and then I started working with [director and choreographer] Lorin Latarro. He found there were Broadway people who were interested, they raised money, and we ended up workshopping it at Bucks County Playhouse. And then we brought it Off-Broadway to the Daryl Roth Theatre, which seems crazy to me. Like what?! Then it closed because of Covid.

Have you always had an interest in acting?

I had some interest in it, but it was kind of brief, and it was a long time ago. When I first started doing [the show], it was more like doing a dressage test than writing a book or an article. It’s performative. It’s choreographed, you say this here and say that there, but then there’s another aspect of being creative within that medium, which is an interesting thing to explore and figure out. There are timing aspects, certain ways that you say certain lines, and it’s very physical. It’s not just me standing up with a microphone. There’s a set. There are little props. There are little tiny skits. I fall off the couch, and it’s fun to do. I actually love doing it.

Sex and the City just came out on Netflix. How do you think it resonates with today’s 20-something audience?

I can only speak from my experience, which is that I have so many young women come up to me as they have been doing for the last twenty-five years saying that Sex and the City saved them, inspired them and changed them, but mostly gave them a different way to look at their lives. And I’ve had women from all over the world say this to me. For a lot of young women, it’s like a rite of passage to watch it when they go to college. These 20-somethings are watching it on Netflix, but there was a whole generation before them of 20-somethings that watched the DVDs with their new friends in college.

I feel like Sex and the City made talking and writing about sex less taboo and more mainstream. 

I didn’t write about very much sex at all. There were some things in there like threesomes, but it wasn’t graphic in any way. I always felt like I was writing about power structures between men and women and heterosexual relationships. I thought I was really being much more of a social anthropologist.

On a panel, you said that Sex and the City is feminist because it’s like, “Hey, you know what society? We are single women in our thirties and guess what, we’re getting on with it, we’ve got our friends, we made a different kind of family… there isn’t something wrong with us because we don’t want to follow the narrow prescriptive life of what society tells women they can and should do.”   

The women were pretty courageous [back then], I have to say. I knew a lot of single women, and there was a real camaraderie. We had to look out for each other. It was a man’s world, but also New York City was a place where—and here’s why I wrote Lipstick Jungle which I always thought was the next step after Sex and the City—ambitious women make it. There are a lot of really successful women here, and that to me is the most interesting thing. That was what was edgy. Now there are more successful women, there’s a freedom and you’re allowed to be ambitious. Whereas before you couldn’t. It was like Martha Stewart and Anna Wintour and Tina Brown, but people wrote horrible things about them all the time. If you were a woman and you were successful, you were also going to be punished.

Why do you and SO MANY people today still love talking about Sex and the City?

I don’t talk about it, but a lot of other people want to talk about it, and that’s great. I talk about my new work, the show that I’m doing, feminism, being your own Mr. Big and all the things that drive me as a writer, performer and a creative person in the world to do what I set out to do from the beginning, which was to try to show women a different way to think about themselves and their lives outside of the patriarchy. That’s been my mission since I was a kid. It still is.

I think that we’ve all been sold the fairytale of the knight in shining armor, and that’s problematic.

It’s problematic because being with a man can be physically dangerous for women. There are some really unpleasant truths about heterosexual relationships that we don’t acknowledge. And I think going for the guy who’s going to take care of you or the rich guy—this guy who’s going to be in love with you—can happen if you have the right circumstances, but if you don’t have a lot of the right circumstances, it’s maybe not going to happen. And so instead of spending your time investing in something that ultimately you can’t control because you can’t control how somebody feels about you or what they’re going to do for you, but you can control, hopefully, who you are in the world and, hopefully, the ability to make money and look after yourself. There’s a lot of pride in that.

But then there’s also the pay gap. The system is rigged against women.

If you look numerically at the 1%, only 3.5% of the 1% are women who made their own money. And to be in the 1%, you need to have a net worth of $11 million. Think about how many billions [that is]—think about all of the men who have more than $11 billion. Okay, so 96.5% of the women in the 1% are married to a rich man or inherited the money. That is wrong to me.

You’ve chronicled NYC’s rich and powerful. I get the sense that you have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the rich. I certainly do. 

New York is filled with rich people. There’s huge income disparity. I feel like it’s a problem. And it’s certain business practices that have been allowed in the last thirty years. I mean, there have been legal changes to how you can do business, and I think as a journalist you’re supposed to turn a little bit of a questioning eye towards the rich. You’re not really supposed to be one of them.

Like Truman Capote.

Truman Capote, Dominick Dunne, Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. These are classic topics for journalists. Of course, now we live in a different time. That was a time when people kind of revered the written word. There was a real status to that. Now there’s a real status to being an influencer. Our value system has changed. We live in an attention economy where it’s really all about getting attention. I mean, Carrie Bradshaw today would be Emily in Paris.

It’s not easy being an artist in the City.

It really isn’t. I mean, that’s sort of the tricky thing about New York. It needs to be a place where if you have a lot of creativity and artistic ability, you can still live here and you don’t need a zillion dollars. When I moved here in the late seventies, it felt really expensive, but somehow you believed you could inch up the ladder and kind of get there. Now it feels like a lot of these places are way out of reach. It’s a big difference if something is $2 million and something is $20 million. So many people came to New York in the late seventies and early eighties—like Cynthia Rowley. She was like, “I just made clothes out of my tiny studio apartment downtown.” She sewed clothes, and then a store said they wanted them. When I first moved here, you had to be creative and interesting, but you didn’t feel like, “Oh, I need to live in the best place” because everybody lived in a crappy place.

Finally, tell me about performing at the iconic Café Carlyle.

So many legendary people have done shows here; it’s incredible. Also, it’s just a very, very New York thing to do. I’ve been on stage and also in the audience, and it’s a super intimate experience—one that you really can’t get anywhere else. It’s just a really special room, and it has the original wallpaper. It has a really, really small stage, and people are right here. You feel like you’re in somebody’s living room. That’s kind of what New York is all about, isn’t it? These one-of-a-kind, one-time experiences.

Hank Azaria has won six Emmys, has had a legendary acting career (The Birdcage, Friends, Ray Donovan, Brockmire) and voices some of the most beloved characters on The Simpsons (Moe Syzslak, Chief Wiggum). He’s also a Tony Award nominee and a successful producer. With these and so many other credits to his name, Azaria is arguably one of the entertainment industry’s living greats, but what I find most inspirational about his life and his career is how his “own bad story,” as he puts it, became his “greatest strength.”

If you missed that story, first you need to know that Azaria has always loved to make people laugh. Since childhood, he has felt compelled to be funny—to cheer people up, to fit in. Maybe to avoid dealing with his own issues. The idea that his humor would cause anyone pain wasn’t on his radar. But in 2017, comedian Hari Kondabolu made the documentary The Problem with Apu in which he pointed out that The Simpson’s character, Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, was not only a demeaning racial stereotype of South Asian people but also voiced by a white guy. Azaria suddenly found himself at the center of a controversy and nearly canceled.

At first, he bristled, but Azaria’s familiarity with the Twelve-Step Recovery Model—the actor has been open about his struggles with alcohol addiction—let him see the problem with Apu as “an opportunity for growth as opposed to a curse to resent.” And so he committed to learning more, attending social justice seminars and, ultimately, landing on the decision to stop voicing Apu and to apologize. At one of those seminars, he met the founders of the Soul Focused Group, and that meeting would become the catalyst for a calling. Out of the controversy, Azaria co-founded The Human Solidarity Project, which makes core Soul Focused Group programming available to all for free.

I met up with Hank Azaria at The Smith on the Upper West Side. He was an open book, speaking honestly about his recovery and candidly sharing the roller-coaster of emotions he experienced after Kondabolu released his documentary.

What’s been your favorite role so far? And your favorite character you voice on the Simpsons?

The Birdcage. It meant a lot to me. It was my big break. I was doing a vocal impression of my maternal grandmother. We were Sephardic Jews, Spanish Jews, and they speak a dialect called Ladino, so it was a Spanish-speaking household. I worked on this Guatemalan accent for the role, and it sounded just like Grandma Esther.

[On The Simpsons] it’s definitely Moe. One of my heroes and one of the people I imitated was Al Pacino from The Godfather, which was back when Al was young and his voice was up here. I was playing a drug dealer in a play in LA at the time, and I used that voice, “I’m dying here, everybody’s coming down on me.” And [the producers of The Simpsons] liked it, but they said to make it gravelly. That became Moe bartending.

When did you discover you were a talented mimic?

From the earliest age I can remember, I just was able to do it. I loved doing Bugs Bunny and my family members. As a teenager, I not only would do this for my amusement but also to fit in.  With the tough kids I talked like this, “How you doin? What’s up,” and then with the athletes, I talked a different way: “What’s up, dude?” With the burnouts, a different way. I did it so convincingly that my persona would follow, and I got a little confused, like “I’m not sure who I am.”

On the podcast Dopey!, you mentioned a phase in your adult life when you didn’t know who you were or what you wanted.

I tend to lose myself in others. It’s, “Let me fit in with you. Let me do what you want to do so that you’ll like me, love me and take care of me.” Which is an odd thing because it skips, “Why not just take care of yourself?” but I didn’t learn that.

You felt like you had to go along with the other person’s script.

Exactly. With addicts and codependents, it’s at a really extreme level. I call it the contract and the messy room, meaning there’s this room where you throw in all the junk in your house, like a hoarder’s room. You don’t ever open the door or want to look in there. That’s where all of your pain, trauma, insecurities and low self-esteem are. You find someone else and go, “Let’s just deal with your stuff. You do what you want to do how you want to do it, and you just keep me out of that room.” The problem is it builds up an enormous amount of resentment because twice a month—that’s, like, a literal figure—you kind of want it your way: “Can I pick the restaurant?”

Do you think codependency was part of your addictions?

Absolutely. Whatever the “ism” is, whatever that motor is, that sick motor—alcoholism, food addiction, codependency, workaholism—it doesn’t really matter. I’m such a natural character actor and, let’s say, chameleon, it took me a long time to get onto it because I would round-robin them. If I realized I was drinking too much, I’d just switch it out.

When did you face the messy room?

I’m facing it right now. I haven’t had a drink in 18 years, but it’s one day at a time. I have to recommit every day. It’s like insulin for a diabetic or as my old shrink used to call it, “the plant principle,” meaning you can water this lovely plant every day for 30 years, but you’ve got to keep watering it every day or it’s going to die.

You wrote a beautiful tribute to your friend Matthew Perry in the New York Times. He took you to your first AA meeting and said, “It’s something, isn’t it? God is a bunch of drunks together in a room.” What do you think he meant by that? 

I didn’t know at first. I was like, “They don’t look like God to me. They look weird and scary, and the stories they’re telling about their past are not comforting.” What he meant was that if you put a bunch of drunks in a room or really anybody who’s been through any kind of suffering and they all talk honestly about what they’ve been through, how it made them feel and that connection… we have a saying in the program, “The opposite of addiction is not sobriety, it’s connection.” If you listen to others about their honest truth, usually about the lowest depth they were at, and then you share your own, that creates a kind of bond that reduces shame.

Before I researched you, I was a little nervous to ask you about Apu…

And then you realized I never shut up about it. The Reader’s Digest version is that I got called out for this character, Apu. I was bewildered and upset. It’s like, “I’ve been doing this character for 25 years. Why is this wrong all of a sudden?” And so I had a professional decision to make. Do I keep doing this voice or not?

On the one hand, I didn’t want to just cave to what back then we called PC pressure. I would jokingly say, “Is this real? Or is this seventeen hipsters in a microbrewery in Brooklyn deciding what we should say?” On the other hand, if I am doing harm, I don’t want to keep doing it. I really didn’t know. It turns out that my not knowing was the actual answer. That’s the blind spot itself.

From working with these guys [at The Human Solidarity Project] I discovered that for white folks, there are two blind spots. One is intention versus impact, meaning my intentions were good, so [my assumption is] I can’t be racist because I did Apu with love, enthusiasm and joy. And I won an Emmy for Apu, so how can that be? But the fact that we have good intentions blinds us to the fact that the impact might be not all that great. The second is that as white folks in our society, we don’t experience the consequences. We experience difficulties, but not those kinds and not so constantly. So it’s very hard for us—hard for me—to believe something’s real that I don’t really encounter. And this opens up a whole conversation about comedy. The thing I get the most pushback on is “Why is it okay to do Groundskeeper Willie’s Scottish voice or to do Cletus who has a Southern voice? Or why is it okay for you to be Police Chief Wiggum? You’re not a cop.” Which I relate to, because those were my first thoughts. What voices are okay or not okay for me to do?

In Hari’s documentary, he explains that one of the reasons it’s not okay is that, for a very long time, there was only one South Asian character represented on television.

Not only that, I’m a Jewish person. I’m assimilated into American society as I’m racialized as white. There’s a little bit of an asterisk because antisemitism is a real thing. But for the most part, I’m a white person in a white society and I’m assimilated. The tipping point for me was finding out that when hate crimes were perpetrated against 7-Eleven owners and convenience store owners, they were called “Apu” while they were being beaten, shot and robbed. That got away from us. So I was like, “Okay, this is real.”

How long did it take to get to the place where you were ready to apologize?  

About two or three years. I went to many, many seminars and that eventually led me to Dustin, Mahdi and Martin. Dustin was my seminar leader. His approach seemed to be very programmatic, connective and not shaming, truth-telling, and loving, which I responded to because I got a lot out of all the seminars I was in, but I got beat up in some of them, too. I was a pretty easy target as a white whale, as it were. But I hung in there because I felt like maybe I deserved some of it. Also, I wanted to learn, and I couldn’t afford to exit the conversation. I needed to make this decision about voicing Apu.

I thought their approach was so wonderful, and I wanted to give them money to help seed the nonprofit and spread it. But they said, “You should join us. You can’t just give us money. We appreciate the money, but become a facilitator and help spread the word.” They educated me on how to do that, and over time, we started sharing that we were all in recovery, which was a happy accident.

Do you have any advice for people who may be feeling similarly to how you initially felt?

I would say that I totally understand. There are very good reasons why you’re in that place. Society does not offer a wonderful template for having this conversation, and I don’t blame anyone for being reactive to it, sick of it, upset by it or triggered by it, but then I would pitch, look us up, The Human Solidarity Project. We’re in a place where you can have this conversation. There’s no ‘gotcha.’ There’s no contention. The way [my colleagues] said it is that they got very good at fighting racism and very bad at ending it… very good at pointing out what was wrong and not good at all at finding the solution.

I read that you are now friends with Hari Kondabolu?

We are friends. I think this year we may even go to some colleges together and give a little presentation spiel about our opposite ends of this.

Talk about a 180.

Realizing what I went through because of what Hari pointed out, my own bad story is actually my greatest strength. Why? Because it connects me with you. It connects me with other people. It gives me compassion, patience, and loving kindness, which I honestly didn’t have enough of before all that trauma recovery. I mean, if Hari and I can have a meeting of the hearts, I think anyone can.

Azaria’s movement has momentum

Soon after talking to Azaria, I Zoomed with The Human Solidarity Project co-founders Berwick Mahdi Davenport and Dustin Washington and senior consultant Martin Friedman, who shared their vision of a more unified and equitable world.

How did the Human Solidarity Project come about? 

Mahdi: We’ve been doing this work for 30 years. The approach we’d been taking to deal with racism was not healthy for us. Our lives were in conditions that we weren’t proud of. Health-wise, we had some addictions. Financially, we weren’t doing well. Our relationships were toxic within the social justice community. We had to change and take ownership of ourselves as individuals, and when we did, we created Soul Focused. Our intention was to focus on what was in our soul. Our soul wants us to be happy, healthy, and powerful people out in the world. And then on that journey, we met Hank, and together we created The Human Solidarity Project, which is what the focal point is now. The mission is to bring human beings together because racism is designed to separate people, to break people up. The antidote to racism is human solidarity, but it starts with self-solidarity. You get yourself together, and then you can get together with others in a healthy and genuine way.

How do you know when you’ve gotten yourself together?

Mahdi: I think the work starts when the healing starts. The moment you make a decision that you’re going to transform and you’re committed to it, transformation starts happening.

The Problem with Apu became the catalyst for Hank to learn about his blind spots. But what about people who don’t have that push? How do we get them excited about this work?

Mahdi: Racism makes us all take on a false identity. And you can’t be happy being someone that you’re not. It just won’t work. We know racism has played a major role in that. Sexism has played a major role in that, too. All of these imposed identities are weighing people down right now. We are so far away from who we are authentically, and we believe that we can’t get back to it. Hank will tell you that there was more happiness for him in this work than he ever thought that there would be.

Martin: Once you become racialized, it’s dehumanizing for everybody involved. The racialized idea of whiteness doesn’t reflect who we are, who I am, who you are. We have to be outside of who we are to be able to benefit from being white. That is something that we talk about—white people needing to heal. You don’t usually think about the person on the advantaged side needing that, but there’s sort of a trickiness when you have to heal from something that has been giving you benefits. I could see parallels with patriarchy, where women have been given benefits by going along with it, but there’s a cost.

Mahdi: Unhappiness is extremely expensive. One of the costs is generational impact. You pass it on to your kids when you are pretending that everything is fine when it’s not, and you’re really dying inside.

Dustin: What’s beautiful about everything we’re talking about is that none of us are on the top of the mountain. We’re constantly evolving beings and uncovering more about ourselves. One of the things I’ve told Hank, and I don’t know if he has fully embraced this yet, is that his calling is not necessarily to be an actor or a celebrity. I really think his calling (and he’s living it) is to be a spiritual teacher.

Alice Carrière’s memoir, “Everything/Nothing/Someone” is like a primal scream. The only way out of the pain is through it, and Carrière is up for the task. It’s no wonder acclaimed writer Dani Shapiro called her debut “a master class in memoir,” and Sarah Jessica Parker called it “extraordinary.”

From the outside, Carrière’s world dazzled. She’s the daughter of artist Jennifer Bartlett (widely known for her epic 153-foot painting, Rhapsody, in the permanent collection at MOMA) and the renowned German actor Mathieu Carrière. Bartlett was a staple of New York City’s celebrity circuit. In Carrière’s world, Anna Wintour dropped off clothes at Bartlett’s 17,000-square-foot townhouse in the West Village, Steven Martin joked at the table and Joan Didion sipped vodka on the rocks in Bartlett’s garden.

SEE ALSO: Sharon Stone Exorcises Pain Through Painting

But the glamour was a facade—one that Carrière boldly obliterates in telling her story. Her talented mother was an island unto herself, her father was immature and made sexually inappropriate remarks to Carrière and her parents’ marriage dissolved in a bitter divorce. Behind the scenes, Carrière self-harmed, developed a dissociative disorder, abused drugs and alcohol and endured the worst of the American psychiatric complex. And yet, what begins as a memoir about suffering and disconnection ultimately ends with forgiveness and gratitude.

I interviewed Alice Carrière at the Soho Diner over hot chocolate and pecan pie, and I was rapt.

You’re so honest in your memoir that there were moments I felt uncomfortable, but that’s also what made it so good.

It didn’t occur to me while I was writing it that I could say anything but everything. I think the candor—not to pathologize it—might be a result of the dissociation because I feel as if I’m not real unless I reveal everything about myself to everyone. And then having the structure of that writing, it’s like a hug. It’s like that sustained contact that I’ve craved my whole life.

There was a time when you couldn’t recognize yourself in the mirror. Can you tell me about your experience with dissociation? 

When I’m having a conversation with you I’m saying words I think make sense. There’s an impression of coherence and cohesion, but inside there’s this conversation that runs parallel to our engagement that can be really distracting… There’s also a level of the undifferentiated. There are no edges in a dissociated identity. But here we are. I am allegedly me and you are you.

It reminds me of Eckhart Tolle’s spiritual awakening. He was suicidal and he thought, “I can’t live with myself any longer” and then he asked, “Who is that I?” He became a witness to that voice.

It’s funny you mention that because I have a dear friend who is a Buddhist master, and he was telling me that what I describe sounds very much like an aspirational state for a lot of spiritual practitioners—this oneness with the world. And then I joke with him that on any given day I get to choose, is this a glitch or is it transcendence?

Not only was your mother a great artist, she was an icon surrounded by icons.  How did she know so many influential people?

She was a brilliant artist, a voracious reader and really funny. She had amazing style and great parties. Who wouldn’t want to hang out with Jennifer Bartlett next to the pool [on Charlton Street] and crack open three bottles of wine? She had wide-ranging interests. She read everything about everything. She loved gardening. She loved theater. She loved to dance. She loved music. And everyone around her was smart and interesting.

And she was good friends with Joan Didion? 

Very good friends. It’s so funny because I remember when I realized who Joan Didion really was. I had grown up with her and I was like, “Oh, that’s just that bird-like lady who drinks vodka-on-the-rocks in our garden.” Then I started reading her, and I got super weird around her. She then took me out to lunch after she’d read this awful novel I’d written at age nineteen. She later wrote me this incredible note that said, “There is no doubt you will lead a life of words. Thank you for sharing this amazing beginning, brilliant in so many ways.”

And you’d go on to write a brilliant memoir! Did your mother get to read it before she passed in the summer of 2022?

I gave her an early version, and she read it in a couple of hours. I sat outside in the living room, and I overheard her go, “Oh, incredible.” She said this out loud to no one, just to herself. And then I read her the first thirty pages of the final edit before she died. I had gotten the publishing deal, and I got to show her the book jacket too.

Then she read some of the more critical parts about her?

She did. I don’t see this as an indictment of her parenting. I am so grateful for everything she did. I have so much empathy for her. She liked to be surrounded by growing things, she always felt like she was killing things and that when she touched something, it would die. And I realized that her remoteness was an act of tremendous love.

She was trying to protect you from herself.

Absolutely. There is no petty resentment. She was one of the first female artists to make an incredible living off of her work. I have never met someone more passionate, more driven, more ambitious— the scale of her imagination! I saw Rhapsody while it was up at MoMA recently. I went up to commune with it, and I was so struck. It’s this piece that makes me unsure. It challenges the mechanisms by which I perceive the world. It also has such a sense of humor.

For research, I listened to an interview with her where she describes Rhapsody. She said that she wanted to make a piece that had no edges and that the space between the plates was the main actor. That made me realize that we had very similar preoccupations, and it reminded me of my own dissociated life where there are no edges, and where the gaps in the self are as significant as the more substantive parts of the self.

Your mother likely became a victim of the “Satanic Panic” that spread in the 80s and 90s. With her therapist, she unearthed memories of ritualized sexual abuse and murder that she turned into art. While you believe these memories were likely false, do you think she was sexually assaulted?

I wouldn’t be surprised. I don’t think that she was used in a sex cult or witnessed the murder of a young boy and was then made to bury the body on the beach. I do think that she was a woman in the world and that’s enough evidence for me that she was hurt. I don’t know who the culprit was. That’s the thing with this kind of trauma, it can be an accretion of small violations, or it can be one event. But there was damage. When she got to Yale, she would construct huge canvases that interfered with everyone around her because she was so nervous about being a woman there. I think that these false memories (which were outrageous and of mythic proportions —I mean, who can overcome satanic rituals?) made her inability to overcome her wounds seem more reasonable. In a way, it was disassociating from her reality, and I think she could feel less guilty about not being the partner or the mother she wanted to be.

You started to self harm at the age of seven. How’s your relationship with your body now?

It’s really interesting because I have a younger sister who’s a model and afraid of aging, and I have now entered this phase of my life of curiosity that has supplanted a lot of my fear. For example, let’s say my hair is going gray. I’m like “What is my body going to do next? How is it moving through time?” I also have existed as a size double zero and a size 16 because of the meds. It’s like an experiment. So I am profoundly interested in watching my body interact with time. It’s sort of what cutting used to do. I would cut myself, and then I would watch it heal.

Do you feel compassion toward your scars now?

I do. They feel like a chronicle or an archive that I’m wearing. It’s like the strata in a tree trunk. One therapist I had made me have a consultation with a plastic surgeon to see if I could remove them, but I didn’t want to because it felt like a connection to little Alice. This was the only way she knew how to speak. And now I look at my scars and I go, “Oh, that’s what you were trying to say.” But I wasn’t using the right language.

I haven’t cut in fifteen years. I don’t have a lot of cravings for drugs or alcohol, but very rarely I do crave cutting. It used to happen when I was feeling angry because I’m not good at directing anger outwards.

Neither am I. Women have been socialized to turn their anger inward. Are you angry at the doctors who irresponsibly overmedicated you?

I don’t feel anger towards anyone except these doctors. Because you place your trust, your hope, and your desire to be healed in them, and in response, they actually hurt you. I want to be super clear, though. I think responsibly medicating saves lives and good therapy is always a good thing.

There is a powerful love story that unfolds with your husband Gregory. When you were struggling, it seemed he saw something in you that you couldn’t see in yourself.

He was a conduit between me and the higher. He didn’t impose anything on me. He wasn’t even like, “You should be sober,” even though that was the clear conclusion. But it was that sustained contact where he was just there modeling a life of authenticity, integrity, compassion and service.

How did you get sober?

It was a total accident. I was weaning off of Klonopin, the last med to go, which has a notoriously difficult withdrawal. Everything went haywire. My hands twitched, I had no control over my thoughts, I had gastrointestinal problems and I felt an invisible hand was choking me. I didn’t want to put anything in my body that would alter my consciousness so getting drunk sounded very scary, even though it’s what I did a lot.

I got sober because I wanted to have control over my body and not drinking was a way to get that control. Only afterward did I realize I had a drinking problem. Then everything got better. Within a year, I had repaired most of my relationships, finished my memoir, and signed with an agent.

Your memoir shatters the idea that money can buy happiness.  Do you believe your privilege delayed or helped your recovery?

If I had had to worry about pressing needs, I would have either risen to that occasion and gotten my shit together sooner, or I would be dead or homeless. It’s impossible to tell. It could have gone either way. But I mean, the privilege allowed me to stay alive and write this book.

Part of your healing was confronting your father, only to discover that there may have been misinterpretations. How are you able to hold the tension between how he wronged you and your love for him?

This book is about how many things can be true at the same time.  My father behaved in ways that may not be excusable and that doesn’t disappear just because I’ve reconciled with him. Throwing light on the misunderstandings validated my lived experience, and knowing what wasn’t true, strengthened my relationship to what was. Listening to and legitimizing his experience fortified my relationship with my experience which made me better at believing myself and in myself.

Also, exercising empathy for him doesn’t diminish the empathy I feel for myself. I learned through this process that I get to decide what I believe, what I feel, and what I want to do with those beliefs and feelings. That choice is what’s empowering and holding that tension contributes to the tensility of my love for him and my love for myself.

When your mother became ill, you took on the role of caretaker. It seems like it was a turning point for you.

That’s true. It was reality and not my mind turning against me. It was the very real threat of time, and no amount of magical thinking could change that. It was like a crash course in being human.

There is a touching moment in the book when you are holding your mother down so her nurse can disimpact her colon, and you realize you’ve finally found yourself in your mother’s arms. 

It was messy, funny, intimate and outrageous—all the things we could be and could be to each other when everything we demanded and everything we felt we’d lost wasn’t getting in the way.

The ending is stunning. Without ruining it, I’ll just say that you lovingly accept your mother’s proclivity to be alone, and she hands you a jewel of a metaphor.

It was like a cosmic gift. It was an incredibly painful and scary moment for both of us. After she died and I began to write about it, the ending revealed itself to be what felt like a transcendent collaboration, as if we were participating in and exchanging something sacred and vital.  It was a gift not only of the perfect ending, but she gave me a way to understand our relationship in the exact manner in which we both interpret the world—in metaphors and symbols.  I like to think that in the midst of grief, death and separation, it was an act of love, creation and connection.

To be in the presence of her work feels sacred, and Butler has helped elevate people’s perception of quilting, from a “lowly” woman’s craft to fine art. She has been commissioned to make quilted portraits for the covers of Time, Essence and #Metoo Movement founder Tara Burke’s memoir Unbound. She has had works shown and in the permanent collections at institutions like the Art Institute of Chicago and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American Art and solo shows at institutions like Katonah Museum of Art. And most recently, Jeffrey Deitch Gallery hosted “The World Is Yours,” an exhibition of Butler pieces inspired by hip-hop artist Nas.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Butler at her studio at Mana Contemporary, a sprawling art center in Jersey City, NJ.

Your cover for Tarana Burke’s memoir Unbound spoke to me, as someone who was part of the #MeToo movement. How did you end up working on that particular project? 

Tarana’s editor reached out to me and said, “Tarana likes your work, and this is a long shot, but is there any chance you would consider designing the cover for her memoir?” And I said, “Absolutely.” To do something for Tarana after she’s done something for so many women who felt they had the blame and that they needed to hide what had happened to them—it just meant a lot to be able to do something for her.

Can you walk me through your artistic process?

The first thing I do is peruse photographs to get an idea and allow myself to be drawn to an image. I prefer black and white photos because I can see a grayscale. I’ll blow the photo up, print it in my studio and sketch on top of the picture with a sharpie, identifying that value scale. What’s the lightest light? What’s the darkest dark? And then I make shapes I can cut out. Each shape will become another piece of fabric. At that point, I choose my palette, which takes the longest because I’m using color to express emotion in the way of modernist painters like Picasso and Matisse. Blue can represent calm or serenity, and red can represent fire or passion.

I also want a pattern to be in there as well. A lot of African fabrics have patterns of folk tales, wives’ tales and allegories. For instance, there’s a fabric known as ‘big lips.’ If I want that fabric in there, I’m trying to say that this person’s full lips are beautiful. I’m thinking about the color and the pattern and the meaning at the same time. After I’ve cut and arranged everything, I lightly tack it with fabric glue and a gazillion pins. I could have a base fabric of red, but everything on top of it could be ten or fifteen layers of other textures, colors and shades because I’m trying to make it look three-dimensionally modeled. And then I load it onto my sewing machine.

Your husband, DJ John Butler, played a song by Nas that inspired ‘The World is Yours’ at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery. How did that come about?

Nas has this song “One Mic.” And I wanted my work to feel like that song. I feel like the hip hop generation (the rappers, the producers—there’s something about musicians) have their finger on the pulse, and they’re able to make your pulse speed up and go back down. In Nas’s song, he rhymes really slowly. I know that he listened to the sounds of the street, or the M or A trains. As he was rapping, it was almost like he was running through the streets of New York, and then it was like somebody was chasing him. His cadence was way up, and then he brought it back down. I wanted to make my artwork as visceral as that song. I want people to feel something, and I want to be able to control it like a maestro. It made me start listening to Nas again.

SEE ALSO: Quilting as a Radical Act: An Exhibition Examines the Art Form’s Revolutionary Impact

How did you bring that cadence into your show?

I’m trying to bring people into my world so they can feel the humanity. The song came from our social status right now in this country. People are against each other, and they’re getting real tribal savage: ‘You’re not like me. You’re other.’ And so I wanted to convey the idea that you feel what I feel. The world is ours. We don’t have to fight each other to death. It belongs to all of us, and we should respect each other. Part of that is understanding other people’s emotions and realizing they’re just like yours. And Nas takes you with him on this journey through New York as he knew it. And I want my exhibits to be able to take people on a journey as I know it. These are the people I know. This is what Black people look like. This is what we feel like. And you’re going to see echoes of your own family there.

Tell me about the marching band that closed out your show at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery.

We had the Malcolm X Shabazz High School Band from Newark, NJ come through. It wasn’t planned that everybody would just start marching behind the kids, but that was the atmosphere. And then it was like a Pied Piper thing. People started coming from all over, and they were marching right behind the kids. By the time they came around to the gallery, it was magic. I never considered what would happen if you played jazzy drums in SoHo on a warm, sunny day in the spring. The kids marched right into the gallery up onto the main stage. You could see they were so proud. It was so good!

In your most recent show at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, the photos you worked from were more contemporary. How did that come about?

That happened during lockdown. I found myself in a conversation where I was talking to Beyonce’s mother and MC Hammer on Clubhouse—I think we were talking about NFTs. MC Hammer is very active in the digital art world. There were ten panelists and three hundred people listening in who could leave comments. That connectivity made me braver because there are living photographers whom I’ve wanted to ask, “Could I create a piece based on your work?” But I was always too shy.

I had always been fascinated by what happened before, but then here we were in this moment where what was happening in front of us was insane. And I wondered, why am I ignoring the now? Let me pay attention to my own story instead of who inspired my grandparents.

Maybe you had to start with the past to get to the present?

It definitely helped to create portraits of folks like Harriet Tubman when she was in her early forties or Frederick Douglass when he was twenty-nine. They seem like mythical figures, but they’re human beings, too. When I was creating a portrait of Frederick Douglass, I had to think about the thoughts that went through his head. Frederick Douglass is something else because he’s a force of nature freeing himself, escaping and teaching himself to read. He became the most photographed person, even more than Queen Victoria, in the 19th Century. Looking into his eyes, I realized there was so much more that I was not getting. I mean, when do we really look at other people’s photos for a hundred hours? I could see a spot in his eye. Then I read in his autobiography that he was beaten once and almost lost his left eye. But the spot was still there, the burst capillary. It was an intimate and deep conversation with a person who had a very different life than mine.

When you went to Howard University, you discovered a different way of painting. Can you talk about that?

The head of the department of art, Jeff Donaldson, founded a revolutionary Black Power art collective in 1960s Chicago called AfriCOBRA. My professors were the ones who laid the groundwork for a lot of the colors you see in my work because they created a new palette: Kool-Aid. Before that, the European painting tradition would’ve been the standard for art schools across all of the United States. Kool-Aid had multiple meanings. It was cool, as in we wanted our palette to match the colors people were wearing in the sixties—bright orange, yellow, bright green, bright red, DayGlo—all the colors turned up. But also, we wanted the colors of the African continent. You had students like my dad coming from a newly liberated Africa. You started seeing Nigerian kids on campus and Ghanaian kids on campus. Also, Black Americans were traveling to Africa to study, and they saw the colors of the marketplace. I think Kool-Aid was part of art being for the people and not just in museums and galleries. They wanted ordinary people to have art in their homes and to understand it.

After graduating, you earned a Master of Arts at Montclair State University. Is that where you learned to quilt? 

Montclair State’s core included fiber arts. It was there that I realized I didn’t need a canvas. This was the first time I could create art that suited my lifestyle. When I was a young mother, John worked all day and I was home with the kids. I needed to have art I could work on for hours with my kids right there, and quilting was that.

I read that your first quilted portrait was of your grandmother. What inspired that?

I painted a portrait of her when I was in grad school. Her health was ailing. She said, “You made me look like an old, old lady.” She hated it. So I made a quilted portrait of her wedding photo [Francis and Violette (Grandparents)] and she loved it.

Did she hang it on the wall or did she use it as a quilt?

She couldn’t get out of bed. Her name was Violette, so I had to use a purple violet fabric. But the quilt wasn’t that big. She would lay it across her legs. It was in tissue paper so when people came over, she would take the tissue paper off. She wanted everybody who came to sit by her bedside to look at this quilt.

Tell me about your quilted portrait of the mother and daughter, Colored Entrance. While the colors you chose are uplifting, I’m haunted by the sign.

That particular photo was taken in 1956, and Gordon Parks was using color photo film, which was new at the time. The colors were soft, pastel and grainy, which influenced the colors I chose. I chose an orange and white floral background. My niece and I noticed it looked like a creamsicle. It was like that orangey pastel cream. Because that’s what the first impression of that photo is. It’s a lovely Sunday or Saturday afternoon, and a woman and child are shopping on the avenue. They’re dressed very ladylike. The little girl’s in a lace dress. The woman is in heels. Everything about them is so gentile and feminine. But then there’s this huge neon sign glaring above their heads that says: ‘Colored Entrance.’ So that’s the horror aspect—it’s like a jump scare in a horror movie. And the sad part is that was the reality of American life.

After you graduated from Montclair State University, you taught high school art in Newark. I read that you were friends with a librarian who passed away, and that’s when you left teaching. Was that a lightbulb moment for you?

It was. Around that time, the librarian at the high school I worked at passed in her sleep, and she didn’t have a lot of family. My principal had a moment of silence for her, but these are teenage kids. It was supposed to be a minute, but they only managed 30 seconds. Within a few months, they’d hired another librarian. With my friend’s passing, I realized that the sun will still rise, the moon will still set and life goes on. So, what do you want to do with your life? Because if you wink out of existence, they’re going on without you. It was around that time that I decided I had to find a way to be an artist full-time.

Tell me about your upcoming museum shows. 

I’m currently preparing for a three-museum tour of a solo show that will begin in Washington, DC, and I’ll be the first Black woman to have solo exhibitions at two of the venues. It is a show that will have pieces from when I first started making quilts in 2001 all the way up to the present day. I think there will be about thirty quilts in the show.

In terms of the political climate in America, it feels like we’re moving backward at times. How should we process this? 

It scares me like everyone else, but I think that we have to remember that there were other times in the world and in this country where some people were actually enslaved. Some people were told by law, “You’re not a human being. You’re three-fifths of a human being. You don’t own your children. You don’t own your land. You don’t own your own body.” One thing Frederick Douglass said when he escaped was, “I’m a thief. I stole this head and these hands and these legs.” And that was his own self. If he could feel that there was better and more in this world and that there were good people, we can’t give up.

Harrison Ball is engaged to Zac Posen. If you already know this, it might be because you read one of many headlines last summer. 

“There’s this assumption that my life is happening because of Zac,” Harrison tells me. (Full disclosure: I’ve known Zac since childhood; he’s a dear friend.) “It would be stupid to ignore the fact that being with Zac has made it easier to be seen, but you still have to pay your dues.”

Harrison began paying those dues at four, shortly after he fell in love with dance and theater. Through bullies, chronic injuries and addiction, he worked his way up (way up!). At 30, at the height of his career, Harrison retired from his role as a principal dancer with New York City Ballet—but that’s not a bad thing. He’s been sober for five years and feels lighter than ever. He’s choreographing (“seeing my brain outside my head”) and pursuing a second career in acting. He’s in love.

“I’ve got somebody who is extremely creative, has been extremely successful, and has overcome enormous challenges personally and professionally,” Harrison says of his fiancé. “That is such incredible, clean fuel for my spirit—and I don’t even think we’ve really started yet.”

First of all, congratulations on your retirement from New York City Ballet. How have you been?   

Thank you! I’ve been feeling really focused and kind of natural, almost like I’ve been waiting for this moment to settle into myself. It’s incredibly freeing. What I’m excited about with acting is that it’s transferable. That I have this enormous amount of bodily intelligence I can plug into acting, really looping in what I learned as a dancer, is thrilling.                                                                                                                                    

Your final performance was so moving. “Afternoon of a Faun” choreographed by Jerome Robbins just blew me away. Tell me about what you were experiencing.

The audience was packed. During intermission, I lay down on the stage and did some sensory work. You’re supposed to feel like it’s a hot summer’s day, and there’s sunlight hitting you. I let the warmth from the lights wash over me, and I just stayed there while the stagehands set up. I shut everyone out.

What’s the story behind “Afternoon of a Faun”? 

Two dancers in a studio simply cross paths. There’s yearning and it’s sexually charged. Then there’s separation; they end the way they started. It’s theatrical. 

You were four years old when you started ballet. How did that come about? 

When I was born I came out colicky, like just miserable and crying. And the one thing that always calmed me down was classical music on NPR or the opera broadcast on PBS. I would shut up and go into that world. 

Eventually, I started to express myself in performative ways at home. When I was four, my mom took me to three or four ballet studios and allowed me to pick the one that I wanted to go to, which ended up being a professional ballet company. The studio was in downtown Charleston, which was rough and edgy. To get there, you had to go down this alley behind a funeral parlor. There was a screen porch with all of these professional dancers wearing their garb smoking and looking fabulous. I remember smelling their breath and seeing their skin up close. You could see the makeup eating each crack, but I loved that. There was a sense of another world. And then we walked into a black box studio, which also functioned as a theater. There was a costume shop and dressing rooms with lights around the mirrors. It just felt like real theater. So I started taking ballet classes and pretty promptly, I was performing with that company. 

Getting into NYCB is a huge accomplishment. Who nurtured your talent?

Being one of two or three male dancers in Charleston allowed people to see me. It fed me, and I do think I have a natural ability. I did have moments when I wanted to stop because I was bullied. People in Charleston played football and hunted. Here I was in school with a feather fan and blue kimono. My parents let me do that because that’s how I wanted to express myself. I think my parents and the ballet community really tried to bolster me with confidence, and the bullying made me focus on dance even more.                                                                                                              

What were your teens like?

It was very difficult for me to discern if I wanted to dance or if I wanted to be young. I didn’t really enjoy the sacrifice of dance, and you’re doing it 12 hours a day. You go from being the protégé to being one of 120. It’s shocking, you know?

Do you think that your injuries and addiction sort of went hand in hand? 

I think they did. I didn’t know how to pace myself. So that, compounded with the fact that I was a young man growing up and drinking a ton—I didn’t know how to regulate my nervous system. I was wild. I never slept, chain-smoked, snorted coke. I didn’t have an off button.

Were you rebelling against something? 

My parents were in the middle of a divorce. I also think that I was being held to the level of an adult from a really young age. I was living on my own at fifteen, and there was no real leadership in regard to things like how you balance a checkbook.

In your recent New York Times profile I was struck by the moment you broke both your feet simply by walking into rehearsal. You then fell to the floor and laughed. What kind of laugh was that?  

Absurdity. It was a sarcastic laugh and a relief. My life wasn’t sustainable. I just knew right away that this was going to be something. 

And it was something big. You went to rehab and have been sober since.

I really threw myself into rehab. And what you find is that rehab has little to do with drinking and drugs. It’s all about healing. And you learn the crux of your issues is how you’ve learned to regulate your emotions. 

You mentioned that you want to bring more awareness to addiction and that it needs to be talked about. What message would you want to convey to someone who is struggling with it?

Get to a meeting or a support group. Human connection is the number one way to heal. Pleasure can be taken in healing. You have to change the way you look at things. You’re not losing something, you’re gaining something.

Tell me about your choreography.

I recently choreographed a twenty-minute piece for the New Jersey Ballet (Zac designed the costumes). Watching the performance was exhilarating. It’s cool for me to see my brain outside of my head. You don’t see yourself when you dance, and when you watch a video it’s not the same.  That dimensionality of the work—the air, the smell, the energy of the house—you need all of that.

I think the ephemeral nature of dance is part of what makes it so poignant.

I hate it—the temporariness. You wanna hold onto it. You want to bathe in that moment. Like when I kissed Unity on the cheek on stage in “Afternoon of a Faun” I could just live in that moment forever.

Do you keep mementos?

I have all kinds of knickknacks from the theater. I have a door wedge from the Kennedy Center. The other month I was at a party and Patti Smith dropped a guitar pick, and I took it off the ground and now it’s on my desk. It’s gonna be great for the acting work when I do personal objects.

How do you think your engagement to Zac will inform the next stage of your life?

I feel there’s this assumption that my life is happening because of Zac, and I think that it might be stupid to ignore the fact that being with Zac has made it easier to be seen by people. But you still have to pay your dues. I don’t get to just be an actor. I think Zac, however, has given me this surge of confidence that I’ve never had before because I’ve got somebody who is extremely creative, has been extremely successful, and has overcome enormous challenges personally and professionally. That is such incredible, clean fuel for my spirit—and I don’t even think we’ve really started yet.

What’s your definition of success? 

As a performer, there are times you rehearse, rehearse, rehearse and you get to the performance, and it does not equate to what you put in. And that’s really disappointing. I think that for me, success can be defined by what I put in. Because at the end of the day, I was a principal in New York City Ballet, and that is a huge feat for somebody in my career. It was a confrontational moment when I realized the credits don’t transfer in the real world. It made me redefine success. Even with acting, it’s about being in the room, it’s about working on the craft, and it’s about those small successes that make me feel accomplished.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Carrie Able is a creative dynamo. She is a multi-disciplinary artist and musician working with extended reality. She is also a friend. I met her at a New Year’s Eve party shortly before the pandemic and was immediately drawn to her charisma. I have since discovered that not only is she a painter, a 3D printed sculptor, a metaverse pioneer, and a musician, but that her lyrics have the habit of breaking my heart. 

Last week, Able lent her hand (and her VR glasses) to show me her mind-bending 3D painting, Embers, an immersive work that reflects the fire of the human spirit. Like a toddler, I marveled at the layers of brilliant color suspended in the air. Embers was shown in Able’s solo exhibition during the 2022 Venice Biennale at the European Cultural Centre and soon will be audio-reactive, prompting different music to play when different parts of the painting are touched. Able has also shown at PULSE Art Fair and Art Basel Miami, and recently performed at Lume Studios in a show curated by the director of the Pace Gallery, Raina Mehler. 

Able’s single “Shield” already has over 4 million streams on Spotify, and “Paint the Silence” (which she also wrote and produced) was released today (May 5). When we last spoke, she’d just signed a record deal with AntiFragile Music’s Tom Sarig, who produced and managed Lou Reed among many other famous artists. 

You have so many talents. Which came first? 

I started out primarily as a visual artist. I had a lot of health issues growing up, so I wasn’t well enough to play an instrument—even though I really wanted to. I was interested in the saxophone and super interested in the drums. My oldest brother played the guitar, which I loved, and I was fascinated with that, too. But I missed a lot of school, and I would just draw a lot. 

I had a talent early on for capturing exactly what I saw. People didn’t really talk to me unless I was drawing. I would be sketching the pencil sharpener or something on my desk, and that would be the only time that boys talked to me. They looked at my art and would be like, “Whoa.” Or the cool girls would come over and be like, “Oh my God, look at this.” And then I got a little more into surrealism in middle school. By the time I was 14, I was making fifty dollars a drawing, which was a lot of money for me.

When did you pick up an instrument? 

The first time I think I ever picked up a guitar was in 2016. It’s not that long that I’ve been playing. I was totally self-taught—like, I can’t read sheet music. I didn’t have voice lessons or music lessons, so I developed my own language with this instrument and when I would talk with other musicians, they would be like, “That’s so creative. I never would’ve thought I could do that.”

Tell me about your record deal.

It’s a dream come true. It’s with Tom Sarig who was the head of A&R at Universal. He was one of the last people to work with Lou Reed, a hero. Tom was recommended to me by our mutual friend in PR, who said to him, “I think you would really like this artist.” I got an email from him asking for a Zoom call and we talked for an hour. He had already listened to a bunch of my stuff. I really liked his energy. The next day, he asked if I was interested in focusing on an album because he knew I did a lot of things. He thought that my lyrics and music were both pushing boundaries, but still very accessible, and he was confident that he and his team could take this to the next level. It honestly took me about two days to even digest.

You have so many exciting projects going on. Do you ever feel overwhelmed?

I get stressed by mundane things like laundry. In terms of my work, the more that I have going on, the more creativity just comes out, and so if I’m working on a VR painting that might inspire a song, then I kind of double down on that. The best way I found not to feel overwhelmed is to say, “no” to things that are not absolutely “yes.”

You have this beautiful line from your single, Fly. “Through the prism of weakness, my strengths were born.” Can you elaborate on that?

I’ve had chronic migraines and, when I get them, I just can’t do anything. I think it makes you more empathetic when you go through something like that. You’re kind of in a forced meditation. You can’t talk. You can’t watch or listen to anything. You’re just sitting alone, just thinking.

Joan Didion has this great essay, “In Bed” about surrendering to her migraines and then feeling a sense of renewal afterward.

Yeah, you don’t get to be a great writer, or a great artist, without going through the things that create great art. I wrote the song “Shield” from bed, trying to be grateful that I was inspired to write because I was constricted and couldn’t do anything else. That energy had to go somewhere. I think with that song, I wanted it to be inspiring—like you can go wherever you want in your own mind. I had a virus and a headache, and I remember just thinking, “Is this ever gonna end?” And that is actually the song that is the most viral of anything I’ve ever released. 

Will “Shield” be one of the songs you perform on May 11th at the Cutting Room?

Yes, it’ll be my first-ever full-band show in Manhattan. It will also include my long-time collaborators in dance, Pink Supakarn and Kate Griffler. This will be the single release event for my new song “Paint the Silence.” 

Getting back to your artwork, what’s your process like, painting and making sculptures in VR? 

Painting in VR is more like drawing a sculpture in mid-air than it is painting. I wear a VR headset and paint with a virtual palette where I can literally paint with light or use sound-responsive brushes. The headset tracks my hand movements in the air, and I am free to work without concerns of scale or gravity. 

Do you think artists will be replaced by AI?

What I’ve been saying a lot—which I think has hopefully calmed a lot of artists down—is that AI can create a new Picasso, but it cannot be the next Picasso. So it can be trained on the past, on an existing voice, on an existing writer, or on an existing artist, but it cannot amalgamate something to be transcendent of the human experience.

I believe humans and computers are the strongest together. A mediocre human with a mediocre computer will outperform an advanced computer or an exceptional human. Machine learning does not have feelings or sentience, so the danger is not the AI itself but how it will affect human behavior.  As we saw the unintended consequences of social media algorithms creating a divide and highlighting confirmation biases, AI when trained with biased information will give biased results. 

What’s it like to be a pioneer in that space, as a woman? 

I feel a really big responsibility in the sense that some of my male colleagues have said that as a minority in the space, people are more likely to listen to me. But there was one time that a guy I was on a panel with at a FinTech conference (it was all men—like five men) came up to me right after we got off the stage, and in this very mean tone said, “You don’t really belong here.” I said, “Oh, well, I don’t belong. I don’t really fit in anywhere.” He laughed, and I could tell that he softened. But we shouldn’t have to do that.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Linda Scott is a social scientist and activist whose new book, The Double X Economy: The Epic Potential of Women’s Empowerment, sounds the alarm on the systematic economic exclusion of women and their jaw-dropping subjugation throughout history. What Scott sketches in this volume is an economy that not only empowers and protects women, but increases the global GDP. Why haven’t economists considered a model like this before? “Because economists mostly have a tendency to think that women don’t make much of a contribution,” Scott tells Observer over Zoom in late June.

With a  background ranging from history and anthropology to finance and marketing, Scott is an Oxford scholar who works with multinational corporations, international agencies, national governments, and global NGOs “designing and testing programs to better include women in the world economy.” From Scott’s research in collaboration with Avon to her work distributing sanitary pads in Ghana, which proved to extend young girls’ schooling and financial independence, Scott is a feminist force.

Scott spoke with Observer about actionable changes we could make to our economic system and what the global pandemic should teach the world about childcare, with a cameo from her granddaughter in the background. Like the perfect metaphor for working women, Scott has been balancing childcare while her daughter is at work as an ER doctor, battling COVID on the frontlines.

Observer: Tell me if I’m describing what you term “the Double X Economy” right. It is an untapped economy that can bring trillions of dollars to the GDP and greater peace and humanity to our world. Women’s equality creates prosperity and not the other way around. When women spend money they are more likely to spend it on their community and family. For instance, you write that domestic violence against women costs the nation five percent of the GDP, and that the World Bank estimates that, because of unequal pay, the local economy loses US$160 trillion every year. Basically, male domination is bad for the world and for the economy.
Linda Scott: It is. The only thing I would qualify is that women are largely untapped in the sense that they’re underutilized. When so-called “advanced nations” let women into the workforce there was a big bump in GDP. However, married women, in a very traditional economy—including women in the United States—normally look askance at married women working outside the home. In Bangladesh they practice a form of seclusion where they don’t even get out of the house. So they have not been included in the economy yet. It is important to say that women who work in countries where there isn’t that much formal work, all the women work. They work in the fields and they’re largely exploited. So sometimes it’s tapped, but it’s exploitive. 

SEE ALSO: ‘Shortlisted’ Is the Story of 9 Women Who Would Have Changed the Supreme Court

That’s a big distinction. Often it is women who work on the lower tiers.
The way I often think about it is the percentage of female labor force participation starts on one end of the spectrum with the Scandinavian countries and China and goes to a smaller percentage through the middle and then jumps up real big again when you get to the very poor countries because those countries don’t have any industry developed and those women are just out there breaking their backs.

You write that 80 percent of the Earth’s farmable surface is owned by men and that their economic dependency leads to violence. As I was reading your book, every page was another hell-hole of what women have gone through and continue to go through. So how do we change the culture of violence towards women?
I thought so too. I think we should be rooting out anything about warriors in boys’ toys and not encouraging warrior worship in girls. We need to move as far away from it as we can. There is no question at this point that the whole package of traditional masculinity is poison and is very damaging to little boys. It leads them to think manhood equals violence. 

A culture of violence has a big impact on women’s ability to engage economically. Economic empowerment can protect women from some forms of violence because it gives them the means to get out, whether the toxic environment is home or work.

We have seen a phenomenal purge and uproar over the egregious murder of George Floyd. It feels like there is a real possibility for systematic change. You wrote that it was only due to civil rights that certain protections were made for women. While second wave feminism was notorious for excluding women of color, how do you believe the feminist movement and the Black Lives Matter movement will intersect on a policy level?
They are absolutely intertwined. All the women’s rights have come under civil rights, specifically designed for race. It is also the case that people who have issues with gender equality almost always are racist and homophobic. Those kinds of prejudices do tend to travel together, so the fact that that’s the case should help these movements move together. 

Let’s talk about patriarchy and capitalism. Many feminists argue feminism and capitalism cannot coexist.
I’m not a big fan of capitalism either, I have to say. I think it’s just gotten really untethered to anything reasonable and that process has been going on since Reagan, but has gotten so much worse in the last five or ten years. On the other hand, I don’t think socialism is the solution either. So basically where I stand is sort of a controlled capitalism Elizabeth Warren called “markets with rules,” and that’s where I think we need to be. 

I am basically arguing these days that patriarchy is the main piece, that’s the main problem for women,and that capitalism is just a plug in. So is socialism. 

Do you have hope that we really can shift? I mean, do you think the Double X Economy is actually doable?
Oh gosh yes. I would not have written this book if I didn’t think it could be done. I absolutely think it can be done, and now is this time. Economics is such that there’s so much drive to growth. It’s crazy if you’re about growth to be ignoring, in some cases, almost half your economy. It’s just nuts!  That’s the other thing I wanted to say about untapped potential. In the United States, for example, you only have about 66 percent of the women working, but it’s not [untapped] in the sense that they produce 40 percent of GDP. Right now with the pandemic there is a need to get the economy going really fast, to get the GDP back up, but there’s not very much attention being paid to how the women need to be handled to get back in, and it’s becoming very clear all over the world right now, at least across the western nations, that women are being differently affected.

So how do we get women to raise the GDP and how are women being differently affected?
There are two lessons I hope come out real strong during this pandemic. One is the value of unpaid labor—that those are serious demands—and the second is childcare. The idea that you are ever going to solve this whole inequality problem by letting women work from home—I don’t know, I’ve been with a four year old for three months and I had three big deadlines coming when the pandemic hit, and trying to work those deadlines and take care of her with no babysitter, no nothing—how do people expect that to be done? Well, you can’t.

How do we solve that?
The answer to that is always childcare. The answer to everything, honestly is universal, affordable, high-quality childcare.

How do we pay for that?
So as far as I can tell, it really does look to me like you can pay for it, and you can pay for it almost immediately. But the government thinks of childcare as an unarmed gift to women, something that has to come out of the pocket change at the end of the budget. I think one of the things that is going to come out is the idea that childcare is infrastructure. Not only because it allows female work, but also because you really need to have a better investment in children than what we have.

Do you think unpaid labor can be paid for?
I don’t necessarily think it can be paid for. A lot of other economists and people in this area are saying we need to at least attach a dollar figure to it so we can value it [for the GDP]. You know even when women work, they still do more of the unpaid labor. So there’s a big drive to try and quantify that, because it’s invisible to people. And I kind of think this experience of everybody having to go home and either do it themselves—or watch it being done by their partner, mother, or sister or whoever it is—is going to really slap people in the face. I mean, I have not done this many loads of dishes… I don’t think ever. 

So obviously we need more women in power—women judges, women in politics, women CEOs. But what should women be fighting for on a policy level?
I think it’s really important to start being very specific so you know what you need done. One thing we’ve just been talking about is that women who stay at home really have not been addressed by the feminist movement. There was a bifurcation that should have never happened and I really feel like those women have become more vulnerable not less. They are hugely vulnerable at the time of divorce, and if they start working again, they’ll have smaller pensions, smaller social securities, smaller everything when they retire.

I’ve heard some men complain about how the divorce laws are all in favor of women, which can’t be true. I really liked that you distinguished the good men from the bullies throughout history.
There have never been as many good men as there are now, so I think it’s really important not to tar everyone with the same brush. But yes, I’ve heard those kinds of things too. “Oh, well she cleaned my clock,” kind of thing. I’ve got to tell you. That just really doesn’t fit with the statistics. The statistics say that the women really take a slide, the children take a slide. They are very likely to fall into poverty. So that is just BS. I think another thing I would want to see is women taking a better look at the issue of capital. People don’t invest in them, and women also don’t exercise as much control within the family over family assets. And that has to do with custom, really. And it’s something that did come up in the second wave, but that nobody really follows as much.

So if you look at the epilogue, I’ve listed what I think the priorities should be. I’ve listed them according to how low the fruit is hanging. The first one is this business about these contracts that nobody notices, especially in the press, so let’s fix that.

You mean the arbitration contracts that many American companies force employees to sign? You wrote that those laws were held constitutional by the conservative Supreme court.
Yes. That’s the first thing. Those have to go and that’s in everybody’s interest. The second thing is childcare. It’s difficult, but doable. There’s no question that’s going to make the most difference. They need to push on that until they win. I mean seriously until they win and don’t ever give up.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.