To Our Childhood Selves

For photographer Leilani Mitchell, childhood meant the scenic expanses that decorate her home in Hawaii. For Mitchell, childhood was sand between her toes, frolicking without obligation. Like many of us young adults trying to hold onto even the tiniest glimmers of our past selves amidst maturation, Mitchell’s inner child is something she never wants to lose sight of. This past summer, she departed on a trip full of friends, fulfilling memories, and fun (sans rules) — and during this adventure, those memories didn’t seem so distant. Surrounded by her closest friends in the romantic backdrop of Mallorca, she felt maybe she had never grown up at all.

office spoke to Leilani and each of her close friends, Molly Manier, Alison Dowd, Gabriella Koppelman, and Emily Young, about the meaning of connecting to their inner children — but there are some parts of this trip that are best conveyed visually. Dive into their escape.

Where do you go when you close your eyes and picture your childhood?

Molly Manier: I grew up with two older sisters who played a massive role in shaping who I am today. So, when I close my eyes and journey back to my childhood, they're the first to come to mind. I loved watching them as they styled their hair, applied makeup, and chose their outfits. We also had our playlist-making ritual, crafting and burning CDs for our drive to school, with me taking charge of the cover art. The impact of female influences and friendships resonates with me, and I'm fortunate to have seen those bonds not only endure but also grow stronger as I've matured.

Leilani Mitchell: I close my eyes and I'm swimming, lungs burning, trying to stay underwater for as long as I can as I let a set of waves pass over me. Then, I pop up, laughing with my friends, and take another set on the head. This is the type of stuff we did (and still do) for fun; get absolutely worked by the ocean and let it throw our bodies around, giddy in the lack of control. I was born and raised on the North Shore of O'ahu, where the ocean was the center of the universe; all my firsts happened there. We grew up completely unafraid — I played in waves so huge that as an adult I look back and I have no idea how we never got seriously injured. We jumped off cliffs, dove in the caves, and let it take us for hours. I remember my childhood being so much about trust in nature.

Alison Dowd: When I am in the ocean, in a bathtub, or painting. Also sleepovers.

Gabriella Koppelman: Going to summer camp and riding on the bus, listening to Drake’s “Best I Ever Had,” making friendship bracelets, and making up dance routines. Walking to ballet after school every day and stopping at the corner store for snacks, being silly, and cutting each other's bangs in the dressing room while we talk about our crushes. Putting on shows for my family after dinner, where my little brother and I would dress up in different costumes and put on different music.

When you do feel most connected to your inner child?

Leilani Mitchell: I feel the most connected to my inner child when I'm playing in the ocean; surfing, jumping, flipping, diving. The ocean's gift is that no matter what age you are, how high-pressure your job is, what you look like, or where you come from — you have the right to play. I think playing is one of the most essential parts of our lives. And when I say essential, I mean just as essential as breathing air, eating healthy, or sleeping well. You have to let your body relax and play.

Gabriella Koppelman: When I’m spending time in nature because I grew up going on hikes most weekends and my brother and I would make up these stories while we walked. So whenever I’m in nature, I feel free to think and dream. Also, when I’m spending time with my family because they’ve known me my whole life; I can be my truest genuine and free self around them. My grandpa always comments on how I still twirl my hair with my finger like I did when I was a kid and that reminds me of times I was able to spend with him growing up that are such cherished memories now.

Emily Young: Building sand castles. Coming home with dirt and sand in between my toes, and sweat and sunshine on my face. Making a fort when it rains. A tight hug from loved ones. Waiting for cookies to come out of the oven. Losing myself in painting, illustration, and cartoons.

If you could go back and tell your past self one thing, what would it be?

Molly Manier: Embrace everything about yourself — no exceptions. Don't let yourself get consumed by body image concerns, chasing what's considered cool, or seeking universal acceptance. Sooner than you think, you'll genuinely love who you are, and you'll have people in your life who celebrate you each day for exactly that reason.

Alison Dowd: That things work out. Never be embarrassed to be a beginner or ashamed to ask for help. And make art as much as you can.

Emily Young: You don’t need to dim a single light within yourself to fit in. You are dazzling.

Art

every cell met with instant ease: Female Pentimento

when i speak to myself i use the kindest language i can summon, i am allowed the same grace i give others

and once i gave myself permission i was radiant

Find more of this story in Issue 21.

Art

Nari Ward Loves Objects

May 01, 2024

Nari Ward loves objects. Many people love objects — shoes, books, chairs, mugs with their children’s faces on them, etc. — but Ward thinks about things a little differently. For him, the object is not an artifact of life but life itself: it is something to be held, treated with care, respected. His work, which spans the realms of sculpture, installation, video, and drawing, insists on this care as much as it wrestles with another, separate desire: to burn it all down. These impulses are not entirely different; rather, they represent a deep and enmeshed relationship to the general bric-a-brac and cacophony of stuff that populates our lives. Each and every room, whether real or imagined, is filled to the brim with items that signify empires crumbled and pasts abandoned. For Ward, these items speak, dance, engage in secret affairs of their own. Even the mugs with the faces.

By Phoebe Roberts
Portrait courtesy the artist and Lehman Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London. Photo Axel Dupeux

The Jamaican-born, New-York based artist has long been fascinated by objects. His best-known work, Amazing Grace (1993), featured over three-hundred baby strollers that the artist scavenged from the streets of Manhattan and then installed in the walkway of an abandoned Harlem fire-station. A statement on the AIDS crisis and drug epidemic ongoing in New York at the time (the strollers were often used by the city’s homeless population), the piece foregrounded Ward’s focus on utilizing found materials to tell stories that their human counterparts could not. Over the next three decades, the artist continued to work with such materials — shopping carts, bottles, doors, television sets, cash registers, and shoelaces included — and translate their silent language into a more readily accessible dialogue. The resulting practice is one filled with intimate links to the world around it: it sings of previously undiscovered connections, alerting us to the unspoken ties between us and our possessions.

Nari Ward Hunger Cradle, 1996 (detail). Yarn, rope, and found materials. Site specific installation. Installation view, "Global Vision: New Art From The '90s (Part II)", Deste Foundation, Athens, 1998. Private Collection. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Fanis Vlastaras and Rebecca Constantopoulou

Nari Ward: Ground Break (28 March- 28 July 2024), a retrospective at the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, offers an up-close look at this practice through a number of Ward’s sculptural installations and video works. Curated by Roberta Tenconi with Lucia Aspesi, the show begins with Hunger Cradle (1996-2024), one of the first large scale installations that the artist created in the 90's as part of the “3 Legged Race” exhibition in New York. A complex network of interlaced threads, Hunger Cradle unveils found objects — car parts, fire horses, a piano — that Ward collected from around the original show’s building and then embedded in the piece’s structure. Here, the work has been further enriched by new materials sourced from around the Pirelli HangarBicocca, including bricks used in the exhibition’s titular piece, Ground Break (2024), a sprawling floor installation made of over 4,000 concrete bricks and topped with decorative spiral motifs that resemble celestial bodies.

Nari Ward Happy Smilers: Duty Free Shopping, 1996. Awning, soda bottles, fire hose, fire escape, salt, household elements, audio recording, speakers, and aloe plant. Variable dimensions. Installation view, "Nari Ward: Happy Smilers," Deitch Projects, New York, 1996. Courtesy the artist and Lehman Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London, and GALLERIA CONTINUA

Although not the exhibition’s center piece, it is Hunger Cradle (1996) and its implied sense of support that best serve as a metaphor for what Ward, or so the viewer might be led to believe, is trying to express. From the dead fish whose carefully skinned flesh line the floor of Super Stud (1994/2024), a small house propped up on metal studs in the exhibition’s main room, to the tangle of stray shoelaces that make up Tumblehood (2015), a spherical sculpture that mimics a tumbleweed, what emerges above all is the artist’s desire for preservation amidst the never-ending flux of life. There is a dash of the mad collector here, or perhaps something of the old Proustian goal: to regain what is lost. Still, Ward goes beyond merely accruing disparate materials or using objects to recount past experience; instead, he takes things in, provides shelter, then suffuses them with his particular magic, which is also his art.

The show, on view at the Pirelli HangarBicocca’s cavernous space north of Milan’s city center until the end of July, affords us a previously undisclosed peek into the minds of one of America’s most compelling contemporary artists. It —and its many oddities and beauties— is not to be missed.

Nari Ward Ground (In Progress), 2015. Copper, darkening patina, 702 bricks, 9 sections of 78 bricks 6.4 x 121.9 x 121.9 cm (each section) 6.4 x 365.8 x 365.8 cm (overall as installed). Installation view, "Nari Ward: Breathing Directions," Lehmann Maupin, New York, 2015

Art

All Roots Lead to the Imaginary

During the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale, London-based gallery Unit London presented In Praise of Black Errantry. The show comprises 19 modern and contemporary Afro-diasporic artists, including the likes of post-modern pioneers and New York City natives Jean-Michel Basquiat and Romare Bearden, alongside post-post-modern artists such as Rachel Jones, Hilda Kortei, and Jonathan Lyndon Chase. Based on French philosopher and writer Eduard Glissant's definition of errantry, "a mode of freedom and resistance, evoking a spiritual or purposeful wandering beyond national borders," the show celebrates the boundless Black imagination in contemporary art.

In Praise of Black Errantry will be displayed from 17 April–29 June 2024.

Curated by art historian Indie A. Choudhury, the exhibition offers an expansive interpretation of errantry: "Errantry opens up alternative ways of thinking and perceiving, affording creative disorder and the reordering of narratives, histories, and temporalities. All roots (routes) lead to the imaginary." Errantry, as shown by the artists in the exhibition, is the unbridled ability to dream and create without the constraints of nationhood, predefined borders, or colonial inheritance.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Samo I and Samo II (1981)

Never is errantry more apparent than through the works of Basquiat and Romare Bearden, two New York artists at the center of In Praise of Black Errantry. Basquiat's work uses movement and broken imagery to create his errantry, rejecting the typical Western perception of what constitutes 'good art' and making his distinct visual language. His two works on display, Samo I and Samo II (1981), show fragmented images, a monstrous figure, and an explosion on a flat, dark background.

Romare Bearden, Seance (1984-86)

Bearden mirrors Basquiat in his use of fragmentation, using collages and bold colors to portray movement, music, and displacement themes. In Seance (1984-86), Bearden employs a blend of watercolor and gouache, resulting in rapid drying that gives rise to several figures distorted into monstrosity by their fluid interaction with colors; though not fully formed, their presence remains distinctly palpable. Bearden creates no divide between the figure and movement, blurring the lines between classical figuration and abstraction.

Rachel Jones, !!!!! (2024)

The influence of Basquiat and Beadern can be seen throughout the exhibit, as fragmentation, movement, and color are employed to explore post-postmodern errantry. In Rachel Jones's painting !!!!! (2024), bright, rich, abstract color islands float across the canvas, reminiscent of the ever-moving watercolor of Bearden. The artwork is unstretched, and the bottom is uneven, emphasizing its imperfection and materiality. As the title suggests, the painting is pure, intense emotion conveyed by the unbridled joy of her color and movement.

Hilda Kortei, Demur (2023)

Similarly, the painting Demur (2023) by Hilda Kortei uses a mixture of mediums, oil, acrylic, and charcoal, on fragmented collaged canvas to create a sculptural and layered painting. It defies the traditional conception of how a painting should be constructed and instead utilizes its flaws to create a multilayered cacophony of movement. While the hesitant title Demur is at odds with the excitement of Jones's !!!!!, both works employ similar techniques to build errantry. Neither work is static; each feels like it is ever evolving, a sentiment shared by all works in the exhibition.

In Praise of Black Errantry is a striking and unique exhibit. Within the larger context of the Biennale, whose theme this year was "Foreigners Are Everywhere," Unit London takes the opportunity to celebrate the non-conformity and limitless creativity of Afro-diasporic artists. By foregrounding the voices of marginalized communities and embracing the ethos of errantry, the exhibition transcends the limitations of cultural persistence and political containment. As curator Choudhury describes, the artists in the exhibition "take up errantry as a radical strategy that defies boundaries and advocates for spontaneity and experimentation beyond cultural fixity or political containment."

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