My pieces begin as titles. Titles come to me when I’m washing dishes, or running, or showering. A recent example is Aloha Sadness (2023): I thought, That’s so dumb, but also so real. Aloha means goodbye, but also hello. I asked what would Aloha Sadness look like? I did a little research—looked up tiki culture, watched Lilo & Stitch, played that song “Hawaiian Roller Coaster Ride” in the studio.

I’m driven by curiosity, and I can get interested in literally anything. I’m less interested in judging whether something is good or bad, right or wrong, than I am in asking, What is this thing? Why is this thing? Exhibitions are a helpful way of focusing my curiosity. I can point to one and say, “That’s my oceanography era,” or that’s my how-TVs-work era.

For me, “artist” is kind of like a catchall term. Takashi Murakami’s 2008 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum drew me to art. He was making mugs, pins, paintings… I thought, Maybe I could do one of those. I’m also a writer, but there’s something about the authority of language that feels daunting, whereas in art there’s more wiggle room.

The title of my recent show at Tara Downs gallery in New York was “Live,” and I left it deliberately unclear as to whether I meant the noun or the verb. I wanted to permit the viewer/reader to take it however they want. There’s something beautiful about the state of not-knowing, and I want my viewers to feel curious. I never want it to be, “I’m the artist, listen to me.”

I started making my quilt works in 2013, hoping to combine my love for making with my interest in painting. I wanted to be able to physically pick up colors and move them around. I also love learning how things work, down to the molecular level. If you’re dyeing something, you have to ask, Is this a cellulose fiber or is it a protein fiber? Some pieces incorporate resist dyes using wax. Since wax is nonpolar and water is a polar molecule, the two materials don’t interact.

Recently I was Duolingo-ing Norwegian, and decided to make a Norwegian-language web drama called Svak. I wanted to write a script in Norwegian to explore the materiality of weakness; I’m weak in that language. The project was about carving space for curiosity without utility, learning just for the sake of it.  

Fascinated by dolls from a young age, Harper began making his own as a child and developed his hobby into an intricate practice. After a brief stint at Glasgow School of Art, he began to sell work online, and received commissions from people including R&B star Elah Hale and movie director Lee Daniels that encouraged him to quit art school to put all his focus into his work. He makes his busts and full figures from polymer clay, presenting them in contexts ranging from rethought myths to sex scenes, addressing race and power through a lens that elevates Black strength and beauty to godlike status. “This is all about an appreciation of the feminine,” he said. “I don’t do drag. I communicate through making, and this is my way of communicating my appreciation.”

Part of Harper’s inspiration comes from his desire to move Black figures from supporting roles to stardom. He grew up watching his late grandfather, the two-time Mr. Universe Paul Wynter, in sword-and-sandal films. But while he admired his success, he would have loved to see him as a main character rather than in the “helper” roles in which he was usually cast. In Harper’s artistic world, all characters are the main attraction, as super-beings evoking both ancient Greek myths and 1970s Blaxploitation films.

On Instagram, where Harper’s handle is Pig.malion, a nod to the Greek myth, Harper has racked up nearly 100,000 followers, and his online success has recently converted to the real world: This past December he had a solo exhibition at Good Black Art in New York. The power in his work, he said, “comes from [certain] influences initially. Then, once I work on a piece, the way it has been created takes on a whole new power of its own.” 

Born in Baghdad in 1984, Sami was a teenager when he got a job painting propagandistic murals of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. After the United States–led invasion, Sami briefly worked for the Iraqi Ministry of Culture, helping recover looted artworks, before migrating to Sweden in 2007, and then to London, where he completed an MFA at Goldsmiths in 2018. Since showing at Luhring Augustine in New York and in the most recent Carnegie International, he has become known for his quietly haunting paintings. The small windows and skewed perspective of the domestic spaces in many of his works are a nod to his childhood interest in Islamic miniatures. Even in these intimate spaces, the presence of Saddam can be felt. In Infection II (2021), an image of Saddam hangs in a home. Once again, his face is cast in shadow; a spidery houseplant likewise imparts a creepy profile. It’s an unsettling image in which the prospect of violence seems to infiltrate the family home.

In Sami’s work, latent images tinted by time and trauma represent history. “The things I articulate in my artwork are memories hidden in the brain cells that are waiting for a trigger,” he told the Guardian this past March. Domestic scenes and roiling landscapes, which may nod subtly to war or sectarian strife, hover on the edge of abstraction. In A barricade against bombs … 23 Years of Night (2022), for instance, a crosshatching technique redolent of Jasper Johns materializes at a distance into two pieces of plywood protecting windows from a blast. Painted mostly on linen, these works often feel stained or rubbed raw.

The seamless transitions from abstraction to figuration in Sami’s paintings, along with various shifts in scale in their interiors, recall the unsettling and enduring imprints politics leave on everyday life. Over the painted plywood in 23 Years of Night, Sami rendered a gauzy curtain dotted with stars—the protected portal seen from inside. Bearing witness to totalitarianism and war, he seems to say, requires more than just courage. Trapped in darkness, he dreams of the sky.

Art in America’s Summer 2023 New Talent issue includes a series of interviews with five New York–based artists to watch. A.i.A. senior editor Emily Watlington and photo editor Christopher Garcia-Valle visited each artist in their studio to learn more about their art-making process, inspirations, and influences. Below, in an edited version of the conversation, sculptor Catherine Telford Keogh explains how she conglomerates trash and landfill into striking sculptures.

Hardgood & Dolly (2023) is a piece of compressed landfill I extracted from Dead Horse Bay [between Brighton Beach and Fort Tilden in Brooklyn]. In the Industrial era, it was also home to fish oil factories, and garbage incinerators. In the 1950s, a series of highways decimated a number of low-income neighborhoodsin Brooklyn, and they moved all of those folks’ goods to Dead Horse Bay, then used them to extend the shoreline. The trash and their belongings were compacted, then covered with sand. Recently it’s been eroding.

Because this was the 1950s, there’s more glass than plastic. I extracted a hunk of landfill that included all these products that have been vitrified over time. It contains rubber, cement, plant matter, packaging, sand, and other miscellaneous objects. My students helped me drag this piece back, and it spawned my most recent show, “Shelf Life,” at Helena Anrather Gallery in New York.

Another piece in that show, Compost Index 3 with Volumes 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 4.1, 4.2, 5.1 (2023), involves repurposed tiles I got from Marble Expo on Facebook Marketplace. The onyx tiles were originally extracted from Karachi, Pakistan, and brought to Marble Expo in the Bronx, which then sold them to corporations, a bank, and a Best Western. I purchased the leftovers. The multicolored onyx has all this depth, so you can really see the earth processes that happened over eons. I wanted to position them [on the floor] so that they signify earth or ground, but also a countertop at the same time. I waterjet-cut different advertisements in the tiles, borrowed from things like moisturizers that promise a healthier or more efficient body. I also sandblasted images of things that I found on the ground in my neighborhood: lottery tickets, gum, cigarettes, Modelo beer cans. I photographed them, turned them into stencils, and then sandblasted them into the tiles. Sandblasting is almost like a mechanized geologic process, but it also creates this ghostly or fossilized image of the waste.

I also remade plastic vessels in glass that you can carry around—like detergent bottles, milk jugs, or motor oil containers. I work with containers a lot. I’m interested in how they promise space cordoned off from temperature, climate, and decay, but are also everywhere in landfills. Positioning vessels on the onyx tiles, I wanted to point to deep geologic processes that have happened over years and years.  —As told to Emily Watlington

Spades, snow shovels, pitchforks, and mops likewise droop from pegs, their ends sometimes looped through handles in impossibly pliable ways. Giving new insight to the phrase “soft sculpture,” Raul de Lara’s so-called “tired tools” anthropomorphically evoke exhausted workers. In a conversation with me, de Lara referred to them as “portraits of invisible labor,” with the absent though implied laboring bodies being those of domestic and agricultural workers, who in this country are frequently undocumented immigrants from Latin America.

De Lara understands aspects of this population intimately; as a child he immigrated to the United States from Mexico, and remains here thanks to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) Act. (Unfortunately, DACA does not provide a pathway to citizenship, and those “dreamers” like de Lara who came to the US as children must reapply for status every two years. He has not been able to leave the country in the nearly 20 years since his arrival, for fear of not being allowed to reenter.) When he and his family arrived, they initially worked in jobs typical of the undocumented: those in food service, construction, and landscaping. De Lara’s parents having been college-educated white-collar workers, this shift to physical labor presented a somewhat rude awakening to the material properties of the tools of manual labor.

De Lara explores the inexorable relationship between work and weariness in a series he has recently undertaken, producing functional but ersatz chairs. Soft Chair (2022), for instance, is not at all soft, and its uneven legs made from stocky bark-covered branches project an inherent unsteadiness. It seems a quite rough-hewn and rustic object, except for the ostensibly plush dimpled fabric of its seat and back lovingly worked from solid live-edged slabs of elm. This trompe l’oeil cushioning pushes wood into an imagined zone of comfort, while retaining its inescapable rigid materiality.

Some of his other chair sculptures are even less welcoming, comprising hundreds of sharpened spikes that, set in pinewood stained bright green, emulate cactus spines. A few, like The Wait (2021) and The Wait (Again), 2022, are large bucket chairs on rockers; others, like Sugar and Torito (both 2021), are smaller cactus rockers, outfitted with toddler-size saddles. In For Being Left-Handed (2020), a high-backed cactus chair takes the shape of a school desk, a writing arm made of particle board attached to its left side, complete with wads of chewed gum stuck to its underside. If employed, many of de Lara’s objects would harm their users. Literally bending the possibilities of carpentry in new directions, de Lara’s work imbues woodcarving, that most ancient craft, with a new stake in representing conditions for people often unnoticed in the US, for whom laboring to stay in place requires a sometimes painful resilience to intense physical and mental hardship.

Art in America‘s Summer 2023 New Talent issue includes a series of interviews with five New York–based artists to watch. A.i.A. senior editor Emily Watlington and photo editor Christopher Garcia-Valle visited each artist in their studio to learn more about their art-making process, inspirations, and influences. Below, in an edited version of the conversation, painter Madeline Peckenpaugh explains how she creates her beguiling paintings. Her show “Farsight” is on view at Alexander Berggruen through May 17.

I start by mixing a palette, and as I mix, I get an idea of what the painting will be. I’ll have a general sense of the palette within a few minutes: they usually involve interactions between earth tones and bright, saturated colors. But I spend a lot of time figuring out the light and contrasts, and a palette can take a sharp turn quickly if it’s just not feeling right.

Lately I’ve been starting with the background, then working my way to the surface of my paintings. I like making the background look like it was the last thing that happened, even though it was first. I’m often building up thick paint, then wiping it away, and the wipes leave marks. But I change the process up from painting to painting—I always want to stay surprised and spontaneous.

I mostly draw imagery from everyday experiences: memories, places I’ve lived, things I see on walks. Sometimes, I’ll see something I liked in one painting, and then I’ll try it again in the next one.

For Convergence (2023), I started off building up layers of dark acrylic dye washes. But I couldn’t figure out the space at all: it was too abstract and looked almost underwater. Eventually, I flipped the canvas over and started painting on the back. You see the stains from the reverse side at the top, and at the bottom, I painted over them in oil. The harsh horizon line helps both parts feel like they’re in the same space, even though, material-wise, they’re very different.

I keep paint skins in my studio, made from paint I took off old paintings. I’m often holding them up to canvases to see what needs them. Sometimes I’ll throw in paint from another palette. I almost want it to feel like you could just peel it off.

Usually, I’m working on four or five paintings at a time. It’s helpful to bounce between works. I can finish a painting in one day, and usually I find those to be the most successful—it means I got the full idea out and I don’t have to go back in and fix it, which sometimes makes me feel on the verge of “designing.” For me, it’s always about spontaneity. —As told to Emily Watlington

Wang began carving these animal sculptures in New York in early 2020, working outdoors in the city’s parks. When a monthlong trip to his native Dalian, China, for Lunar New Year turned into two years there under lockdown, the sculptures became a source of succor, the sweet scenes depicted in them a respite during a difficult time. A video he made at that time, Seven Star Road (2020), alternates between close-up shots of him carving the pieces in his apartment and views of the streets of Dalian from his window. The peaceful sculpting process is a stark contrast to the turmoil and distress in the city outside. Lockdown was still in place when Wang first unveiled the pieces, along with the video, in a virtual exhibition on 47 Canal’s website. Alongside them, he displayed poems he’d written that refer obliquely to the sculptures, and to the circumstances of their creation: “Outside the glass wall, on the lawn, on the ceiling,” one reads, “statues and art / Nothing to do with me.”

Like much of Wang’s work, the animal pieces are a way of confronting the history of classical figurative sculpture, a tradition Wang knows well, having been trained in realist sculpture at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing before earning an MFA at Columbia University. After Columbia, Wang returned to a historic quarry in China, recovered a couple of discarded sculptures of biblical figures, and re-carved their faces as portraits of the Chinese workers who made them. Those sculptures became embroiled in a controversy over the attempt of a Los Angeles arts nonprofit to place them in a public park in an area of the city that had once been white-dominated, but had become majority Asian; a staunch group of locals nixed the project. (The sculptures were eventually exhibited at LA’s Vincent Price Art Museum.)

In a 2019 show at 47 Canal, Wang showed a small-scale version of the Athena sculpture that currently stands in the park—a figure carved, ironically, in stone from the same Chinese quarry—along with a video documenting the aborted park project and, particularly, the local backlash. He is interested not just in artworks, but in their supply chains. He uses his own productions to challenge the lofty ideals of beauty, civilization, and human achievement often associated with stone sculpture. Instead, he unearths traces of what we tend to think of as comparatively minor quotidian themes: humor, cuteness, a sense of belonging, and, of course, kindness.

The computer (as a graphic tool) is relatively new in the current rush of technology. In America, widespread use of the computer dates approximately from 1955, when a line of commercial units first became available.

In 1963 computers began to develop possibilities for making graphics. An electric microfilm recorder was introduced; it can plot points and draw lines a million times faster than a human draftsman. This machine and the electronic computer which controls it thus make feasible various kinds of graphic movies which heretofore would have been prohibitively intricate, time-consuming and expensive.

The microfilm recorder consists essentially of a display tube and a camera. It understands only simple instructions such as those for advancing the film, displaying a spot or alphabetic character at specified coordinates or drawing a straight line from one point to another. Though this repertoire is simple, the machine can compose complicated pictures—or series of pictures—from a large number of basic elements: it can draw ten thousand to one hundred thousand points, lines or characters per second.

This film-exposing device is therefore fast enough to tum out, in a matte r of seconds , a television-quality image consisting of a fine mosaic of closely spaced spots, or to produce simple line drawings at rates of several frames per second.

As a technically oriented film-artist , I realized the possibilities of the computer as a new graphic tool for film-making in 1964 and began my exploration of this medium. I have since made nine computer-generated films. To produce these films the following procedure was used: an IBM 7094 computer was loaded with a set of sub-routines (instructions) which perform the operations for computizing the movie system called “Beflix” devised by Ken Knowlton of Bell Telephone Laboratories. The movie computer program is then written, in this special language, and put on punched cards; the punched cards are then fed into the computer; the computer tabulates and accepts the instructions on the cards calculating the explicit details of each implied picture of the movie and putting the results of this calculation on tape. To visualize this: imagine a mosaic-like screen with 252 x 184 points of light each point of light can be turned on or off from instructions on the program. Pictures can be thought of as an array of spots of different shades of gray. The computer keeps a complete “map” of the picture as the spots are turned on and off. The programmer instructs the system to “draw” lines, arcs, lettering. He can also invoke operations on entire areas with instructions for copying, shifting, transliterating, zooming, and dissolving and filling areas. The coded tape is then put into another machine that reads the tape and instructs a graphic display device (a Stromberg-Carlson 4020), which is a sophisticated cathode-tube system similar to a TV picture tube. Each point of light turns on/off according to the computerized instructions on the tape. A camera over the tube, also instructed when to take a picture by information from the computer, then records on film that particular movie frame. After much trial and error—during which time the computer informs you that you have not written your instructions properly—you have a black-and-white movie. This is edited in traditional movie techniques, and color is added by a special color-printing process developed by artists Bob Brown and Frank Olvey.

Movie-making was for long the most revolutionary art form of our time. Now television touches the nerve-ends of all the world; the visual revolution sits in just about every living room across America. The image revolution that movies represented has now been overhauled by the television evolution, and is approaching the next visual stage-to computer graphics to computer controls of environment to a new cybernetic “movie art.”

For the artist the new media of movies, TV, computers, cybernetics, are tools that have curved the perspectives of vision, curving both outward and inward. The revolution of ideas and the ecology of the senses began in 1900 (movies were “invented” about the same time as psychoanalysis). Trace the path of ideas of painting over the past sixty years: the breakup of nineteenth-century ideals, step by step; the obj et d’art to nonobjective art; cubism-simultaneous perception; futurism—motion and man machine metaphysics; dadaism-anti-art, pro-life; surrealism—the dream as the center of the mental universe; action painting—synthetic time-motion; happenings—two-dimensional painting comes off the wall; op art-illusion as retinal “reality”; pop art” reality” as reminder of reality; minimal art-illusion of reduction; conceptual art-the elements of illusion.

In other words, we have been moving closer to a “mental” state of art/life. Now we move into the area of computers, an extension of the mind with a tool technically as responsive as ourselves. In the developing mental art/life, to “think” about the work is the process of doing the work.

An abstract notation system for making movies and image storage and retrieval systems opens a door for a kind of mental attitude of movie-making: the artist is no longer restricted to the exact execution of the form; so long as he is clear in his mind as to what he wants, eventually he can realize his movie or work on some computer, somewhere.

What shall this black box, this memory system of the world, this meta-physical printing press do for us? Compare the computer to driving a fast sports car; it is difficult to control; although the irony is that at higher speeds less effort is needed to alter and change directions. However, more skill—a complex man/machine understanding—is required.

The future of computers in art will be fantastic, as amplifiers of human imagination and responses, of kinetic environments programmed to each of our interests; in short, computers will shape the overall ecology of America.

It’s not very far from the Gutenberg press of movable bits of type to the logic “bits” of the computer. No doubt computers will be as common as telephones in our lives; art schools in the near future will teach programming as one of the new psycho-skills of the new technician-artist-citizen.

As with most of his works, a voiceover accompanies the dance. It has a narrative that doubles as prompts for the dancers, but also bleeds into the realm of description. This comes naturally for Núñez, who is visually impaired, though he also includes a separate, live audio description track conceived specifically for blind audiences. For The Square, Núñez, who was born and raised in Costa Rica and is currently a fellow at Princeton University, instructs his dancers to feel the elements, the vibrations of their ancestors, and their third eye. He sounds more like a yoga instructor than a ballet master, encouraging dancers to listen to their bodies rather than dominate them. He wants them to get into a trance.

Núñez says he is unlearning his training in the school of German expressionism as typified by Pina Bausch; in that context, he was taught that to dance is to suffer, an attitude he regards as both Western and ableist. When his dancers generate momentum, they’re instructed to let the energy carry them where it may—a method he describes as decidedly decolonial. Rotations and undulations mark his choreography, dancers revolving around one another as they move, their spines billowing like inchworms. Núñez said his “vortex” method evolved from his trouble judging distances: when everyone rotates around one point, it helps him predict their positions to avoid collisions.

The Square has a score by Alfonso “Poncho” Castro, who uses indigenous Central American instruments like the carraca, basically, a donkey jaw modified by ants; the insects slowly remove the flesh and loosen the teeth. Played with a stick, the carraca produces a sound that Poncho mixes electronically to intone at 432 hertz, “the frequency of the universe,” as Núñez describes it. He presents the frequency as a gift to both the dancers and the audience, saying it “automatically invites people to rest.”

Despite all this, Núñez insists his practice is not one of healing. “I want to nurture and energize my body,” he said, “but I also love this state of feeling the wounds.” He added that, “in marginalized communities, when you are communicating to the world that you are healing, you risk removing the responsibility from all the oppressive structures.” His nuanced approach to the dynamic is a sort of extension of his “vortex” method, with a focus on neither nurturing nor wounds but, rather, both, swirling together. 

In a time when so many artists dabble in video, Nguyen-Chi stands apart for her mastery of cinematic storytelling. Like a true filmmaker, she collaborates with skilled cinematographers and musicians in beautifully shot works built around compelling narrative structures. In Violet Belly, her mother is onscreen telling her story, so it’s understood that she survived, but we’re never told how—just left suspended in blue.

Before studying at Germany’s famed art school Städelschule, Nguyen-Chi, now based in Berlin, worked for a Swiss NGO helping people exposed to Agent Orange. Violet Belly completes a trilogy that deals with Cold War history from her Vietnamese and German perspective. All three personal, poetic videos ensconce viewers in a blue expanse, and she plays with modes of display. When she showed Violet Belly last year in a former refugee center in Amsterdam, now an art space called de Appel, Nguyen-Chi shoved a large, jagged mirror through a slanted projection screen. One evening, a musician performed a live version of the soundtrack on a cello as the projection danced across her instrument. 

This summer, Nguyen-Chi will cover the floor of Norway’s Kunsthall Trondheim with hundreds of ping-pong balls, where she will show two works from the trilogy together for the first time. A mirrored game table will bounce the light from video projectors instead of balls, in reference to Cold War “ping-pong diplomacy.”

Meanwhile, Nguyen-Chi is at work on a new trilogy about three Vietnamese women: her mother (once again) plus an activist and a filmmaker. She said that each of them “embodies some form of resistance, and defines their own freedom despite limitations.” She has borrowed footage left behind by the filmmaker, who documented the Vietnam War, some of it literally drenched in blood. Nguyen-Chi is an artist who handles haunting stories without reducing or sensationalizing them, so it’s hard to imagine such delicate material in better hands.