Anastasia Samoylova at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

I kicked off January with a press tour to the Met to see Floridas featuring one of my favorite photographers, Anastasia Samoylova. Samoylova, who is based in Miami, has spent her time in the Sunshine State documenting its changing political, ecological, and cultural landscapes. I ended up loving the show so much I reviewed it for The Brooklyn Rail. Paired with images and ephemera from Walker Evans, another documentary roadtrip photographer who captured Florida and one of Samoylova’s influences, I loved how her images capture this unique subtropical fever dream.

Agustine Zegers at hatred 2

One of my favorite olfactory artists, Agustine Zegers’s ability to create immersive speculative scents continues to amaze me. I was particularly moved by their show Aire Interno at hatred 2 in Gowanus. Zegers took inspiration from office building HVAC systems and the particulates that circulate through these enclosed systems of people, machines, and plastics. Along with a scent they created, separación atmosférica, whose distillation of industrialized air wafted up through a hole in the floor, the space became a deconstructed office lined with HEPA filters and carpeting. If you’re intrigued by their work, you should definitely check out their project Agar Olfactory where they make perfumes inspired by the Anthropocene (think Y2K bugs, wheat grain shortages, and human extinction).

HOMESICK AGAIN (F/W25) by JRAT

I’m going to include a fashion show in this list because clothing has always been a form of self-expression, an entry into performance, and a way to experiment with sculpting the body. I was invited in the spring to attend a presentation by zero waste designer Janelle Abbott for her brand JRAT that was styled by my dear friend . These weren’t just garments. They were collaged assemblages of fabric, textured stitching, and found objects. The discarded parts of our lives reworked into dreamy layers of memory. I especially loved how models began their walk down the runway by waking up from a bed, evoking a sense of tender comfort and nostalgia.

Taylor Simmons at Public Gallery

On my trip to London back in March, I wandered by what I thought was an abandoned storefront. It turned out to be the home of Public Gallery, and quickly became one of my favorite art institution finds of the year. On view was HangTime by American artist Taylor Simmons. I loved the way Simmons captured the vibrancy of 90s Black subcultures with such expressive brushstrokes and dimensional hues. I know the phrase “hidden gem” gets thrown around a lot, but this truly felt like it.

Donald Rodney at Whitechapel Gallery

I was not familiar with Donald Rodney’s work before I saw his show Visceral Canker at Whitechapel, but it ended up being one of the most moving exhibitions I experienced in London. Before his untimely death from sickle cell anaemia complications, Rodney spent his artistic career producing a multimedia array of works that grappled with Blackness and disability, medicalized racism, police violence, and Britain’s violent colonial history. He used blood and x-rays as his medium, mechanized wheelchairs and sports trophies for sculptures, redesigned for his blistering social critiques. What a powerful legacy he left behind in his brief life.

Arpita Singh at Serpentine Galleries

I was also lucky enough to an invitation to the press preview for Arpita Singh’s retrospective, Remembering. This presentation marked her first solo exhibition outside of India, and it was a beautiful culmination of work spanning six decades of painting. Each piece felt like a map and a puzzle all in one, vivid assemblages of figuration, abstraction, and symbolic motifs that reflected Singh’s fascination with Bengali folk art, her Surrealist influences, and her ongoing concern with Indian politics. Stepping into Singh’s inner world, I found a playfulness and a deep vulnerability in the way she uses her canvases to capture life for women living under conflict and social upheaval.

Mariana Ramos Ortiz at Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program

In April, I spent an afternoon with friends wandering to different buildings participating in DUMBO Open Studios. One of them ended up being the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, which offers a year of rent-free studio space as part of their annual residency. One of the studios I got to visit belonged to artist Mariana Ramos Ortiz. She uses sand in sculptures and installations to wrestle with Puerto Rican identity and the island’s colonial legacy. I love how her practice balances these political and cultural histories of precarity and permanence, using sand to embody tensions of ownership, displacement, instability, and autonomy.

New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) New York City — Embajada, mimo, FIM, KDR, Massey Klein, RAINRAIN

Then in May, I got to attend my first NADA art fair here in New York. I lost track of how much time I spent wandering among the booths and learning about emerging artists and independent galleries from around the world. My highlights: Embajada (San Juan) and their amazing presentation of painterly sculptures by Joshua Nazario. Amber Toplisek’s ethereal encasements of video stills in glass and soldering for mimo (NYC). FIM (Seoul) showed some amazing insect-like wall pieces by Kyungwon Yoon. KDR (Miami) featured a dizzyingly awesome sequence of paintings by Susan Kim Alvarez. I got to meet Jude Griebel who contributed a menagerie of ecocritical sculptures to Massey Klein (NYC). And RAINRAIN (NYC) won my heart with their beautiful installation of Maya Perry’s paintings.

Mark Dion at La Brea Tar Pits

While in Los Angeles the day before a wedding, my visit to the La Brea Tar Pits led to a surprise encounter with Mark Dion’s installation for the museum. I’m obsessed with Dion’s installations, which often center around fictionalized scientists and their subjects. These immersive spaces use the aesthetics of archeology, field ecology, specimen collections management, and the study of natural sciences to critically reflect on how we acquire knowledge and make sense of the world, the threats to our public institutions, and what life is like for researchers on the frontlines of the climate crisis. This particular iteration reflects Dion’s fascination with the museum’s taxidermists and the workers’ ongoing labor of conserving, collecting, cleaning, and excavating fossils around the site.

jo Valdés at NEW INC DEMO Festival

Every year, I love attending NEW INC’s DEMO (something that used to be a single day that has since expanded into a multi-day festival of programming). Their 2025 version featured a series of exhibitions in the lobby of WSA’s Water Streets Projects and I was particularly moved by this installation by jo Valdés called I can’t sleep because my bed’s on fire. Valdés is a writer and intimacy coordinator interested in exploring kink and sensuality. This intimately ephemeral piece, with its burnt mattress and disco ball, represented erotic liberation and bodily autonomy.

Clearly Indigenous at the Chrysler Museum of Art

The Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia quickly became my favorite museum visit of the year with the exhibition, Clearly Indigenous: Native Visions Reimagined in Glass. It featured approximately 120 glass pieces by Native American, Aboriginal, and Māori artists working in a number of different styles and techniques like glassblowing, flame-working, fusing, and sandblasting. These pieces were so beautiful, often merging traditional motifs with contemporary forms of visual storytelling. I’ll never look at glass artwork the same way again.

Hilma af Klint at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

I always love a good Hima af Klint exhibition, and her show What Stands Behind The Flowers was one of quiet, yet poignant, power. MoMA displayed her portfolio of botanical watercolor illustrations she created obsessively over 1919 and 1920. It was amazing to see how, even in such a traditional form, she was still defying conventions by incorporating her love of abstraction into her naturalism and incorporating writing about the spiritual and symbolic wisdom of these blooms.

Rashid Johnson at the Guggenheim

Rashid Johnson’s complete takeover of the Guggenheim’s rotunda was a sight to behold. I experienced plants suspended from the ceiling, mirrors painted with graffiti, sculptures with blocks of yellow shea butter, films of multigenerational performance. A culmination of 30 years of art-making, Johnson uses poetry, music, literature, and philosophy to explore histories of Black culture and how we navigate a society still shaped by racial injustice and oppression. This show went in so many different directions, it was a treat to take my time wandering through and analyzing each piece.

Jolie Ngo at R & Company

If I could pick a favorite design show of the year, it would definitely be Jolie Ngo’s presentation, Power Clash, at R & Company here in New York. Jolie’s style of ceramics combines the unique texture 3D-printing with clay techniques like airbrushing to create these dreamy pieces that merge materiality with fantasy. I love how her inspiration ranges from the landscapes of her hometown in Santa Barbara to Vietnamese silk lanterns and Southeast Asian bronze bells, using these cool clay fabrication technologies to express her whimsical imagination.

Christine Sun Kim at the Whitney Museum

In her Whitney survey, All Day All Night, Christine Sun Kim uses sound as a medium to express her life as a deaf person. Even in the absence of hearing, her illustrations project their volume through gestures of abstraction and smudged charcoal that mirror the movement of ASL. Big, bold, and often quite funny, I love how Sun Kim plays with vibration, diagrams, and musical notation, reconfiguring elements from the hearing world into the framework of the deaf experience.

Duane Linklater at Dia Chelsea

12 + 2 by Duane Linklater greets you with a series of giant buffalo sculptures engaging in different stages of wallowing. These acts of rolling around on the earth are repeated with each season of migration, leaving permanent indentations. A First Nations artist, Linklater notes how the Indigenous-led movement to bring back the buffalo has also revived this ecological process, a sign of their safety. Along with the buffalo, Linklater materializes the wallow, while also putting these animal rituals of care in conversation with the complicated legacy of Pendleton’s appropriation of Native motifs in their wool blankets (objects of comfort that also reflect cultural histories of oppression).

Superfine at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Of course, I had to go see the Met Costume Institute show, Superfine: Tailoring Black Style. Co-curated by Monica L. Miller, author Slaves To Fashion which inspired the exhibition theme, this exhibition takes you through centuries of Black menswear through the lens of dandyism, with particular focus on tailoring and how fashionable presentations of Black masculinity have evolved over time. I loved how works by contemporary designers like Wales Bonner and Telfar, and influential figures like André Leon Talley and Dapper Dan were placed in conversation with historical paintings, objects, and figures like Frederick Douglass (whose sunglasses I adored).

Ana Mendieta at Marian Goodman Gallery

Stepping into Back to the Source was a revelation. Ana Mendieta remains one of my favorite artists and projects like her Silueta series have been so influential in my work as an environmental art historian and writer. This show was the perfect mix of her most recognizable work and lesser-known photographs, drawings, and films. My personal favorite work in this show was Ñañigo Burial (1976), an ephemeral sculpture of Mendieta’s silhouette formed by the continuous melting of burning candles.

New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) Miami — Oolite Arts, Sargent’s Daughters, SPILL 180

And then I went back to Miami for Art Week in December. Hours after landing, I made my way back to NADA and into the art fair chaos. It was amazing to see my friend Lee Pivnik present their chimeric sculptures on behalf of Oolite Arts (Miami) that speculated on Florida’s feral futurisms. Sargent’s Daughter (NYC) had a stunning booth with works by Scott Csoke, Debbie Lawson, and Wendy Red Star complimented by a gorgeous patterned wallpaper. I also got the chance to see (and ran into) my friend and brilliant artist Agnes Walden, whose viscerally ephemeral paintings were exhibited with SPILL 180 (NYC). Such a celebratory, inspiring experience!

Morgan Leigh at Queue Gallery

When I wasn’t in the art fairs, I did some Miami gallery hopping and found a new local favorite: Queue Gallery. Their solo show by Phoenix-based artist Morgan Leigh, Teething, was an awesome first introduction. Leigh creates these experimental wall sculptures out of found desert animal bones, claws, raw hides, archival materials, and fabrics, creating these elaborate entangled topographies of the natural and manmade.

Fared Manzur at the Rice Hotel

Another gallery on my radar when I was in Miami, Rice Hotel was converted by artist Fared Manzur from an abandoned building into his studio and exhibition space. When I was visiting, I got to see Manzur’s awesome globe sculptures, accompanied by the curated group show The Body is the Body. I loved how Manzur left so much of the building’s decaying interior intact, complimenting not only his work but the array of sculptures and paintings in the exhibition. Spending time chatting with Manzur about his practice and how he’s been using the space was so exciting, and an important reminder that we all have the power to create our own creative opportunities.

Alcova Miami — Strat Coffman, AB+AC Architects

The second iteration of the Milan-based design fair, Alcova, was a great way for me to learn about a bunch of emerging designers based across the United States and Europe. I first got to check out a stunning sculptural installation by Strat Coffman, whose practice draws inspiration from industrial systems and queer culture. The juxtaposition of these plush-lined safety railings with the singular flower was to die for. Lisbon-based firm AB+AC Architects also had a stunning full-room takeover with a floor covered in wood chips and a stunning collection of steel candle holders. I still think about the rich smell of dark beeswax that hit my nose when I walked in.

Sten Studio at Design Miami

I saw lots of cool booths at Design Miami, but I especially adored the presentation by Sten Studio. Based in Mexico City, their pieces depict the beauty of the natural world through gorgeous stonework. It was like walking into a botanical wonderland full of organic motifs and textured furnishings. A true feast for the senses and a brand new source of home decor inspiration.

Art Basel — Anne Samat, Maya Man, Widline Cadet

Did I have a panic attack at one point walking around Art Basel because I couldn’t find the exit? Maybe… But the overwhelm of Miami’s most bustling art fair didn’t stop me from spotting some old loves and discovering new faves. First, there was this awesome sculpture by Anne Samat which was on view in their large-scale display space. Presented by Marc Straus (NYC), the Malaysian sculptor employs traditional weaving techniques to create these vivid assemblages made of mass-produced, everyday objects. Resembling a circuit board, Samat reinterprets systems of heritage and globalization. For bitforms (NYC), Internet artist had an amazing algorithmic installation dedicated to the quirky language of Depop. Every time I see her work, I remember that the digital world can be a fun, whimsical place for me to experiment with and explore. Widline Cadet’s gorgeous photographs and their sculptural framing caught my attention as I passed the Nazarian / Curcio (LA) booth. I loved how her precise, vivid compositions embody her family’s diasporic experience with memory and migration from Haiti to the United States.

Untitled Art Fair — HAIR+NAILS and Homework Gallery

Eventually, I made my way over to beachfront art fair Untitled and finally got to see two booths I heard other people recommending at other art fairs I had attended. Based in New York, HAIR+NAILS presented a stunning series of paintings by Emma Beatrez. In that moment, I felt like nothing had captured the dystopian feeling of American culture today quite like some terrifying portraits of cheerleaders against backdrops of hellish flames. Then there’s local hero Homework Gallery and their exhibit of work by Roscoè B. Thické III. Based in Miami, I love how his practice materializes the texture of Miami’s cultural life, with this particular work drawing from the power of tambourines in Black spiritual tradition. Both were great to see.

Es Devlin at Faena Beach

The Faena Hotel invited designer Es Devlin to create a site-specific installation on the sands of Miami Beach. Named The Library of Us, it was rotating display of over 2,500 books that have inspired her practice as an artist. I won’t lie, people were definitely treating it like another Art Week photo op, but it was still cool to sit and listen to Devlin’s voice recount the insights she’s gained from reading. Shaped like a compass, I couldn’t help but think about how books have become so politically contentious in recent years and how the silencing of knowledge is ongoing. But also how books act as gateways into new worlds and opportunities to form community even when we’re so divided. I appreciated how Devlin turned something as mundane as the book into a beautiful, timely experience of social critique and critical self-reflection. What a phenomenal end to my time at Art Week—and an end to my artistic year.

Hello. Welcome back. I don’t even know where to begin catching you all up with what’s been going on in my absurd little life. I just finished my first semester of my PhD program—an experience that challenged me in the best way. I ended my summer camping and dancing in the Catskills. Worked in niche fragrance then quit said job in fragrance. Dressed up as Little Edie from Grey Gardens for Halloween. Went through a breakup. Then went art-hopping in Miami. Drank martinis to soothe my heartbreak. Started reading more books than I can finish. Still collecting perfume.

I’ve spent the past few months all over the place, so much so it felt impossible to categorize what I’ve enjoyed under a single, cohesive theme. So enjoy the delightful disorganization of what’s brought me comfort during these difficult times.

TOUCH

I haven’t had time to read many beyond class assignments, but I knew I had to drop everything for ’s The House of Beauty. I’ve been lucky to know Arabelle through the NYC scent scene, and couldn’t wait to finally get my hands on a copy. Sicardi taps into their years of experience as a beauty writer and consumer to tell us about the invisible labor exploitation that creates the ingredients for our favorite product, histories of injustice and resistance woven into hair we braid, finding solidarity and community in salons, and the ugly connections between the beauty industry and fascism from Coco Chanel to Silicon Valley. Although we see how beauty is commodified and weaponized, Sicardi’s moving essays remind us that beauty isn’t just what we buy, but tools for our collective survival and ways we assert our power. As they write: “May we embrace the terrible and also its transfiguration.”

In November, the Studio Museum finally reopened after years of renovation and I was lucky enough to pay a visit before the general public. Of course, the new building with its stoop-inspired lobby and sleek stonework were treats for an architecture lover like me, but the real highlight was seeing how the museum presented its permanent collection. I saw many heavyweights like Lorraine O’Grady, Romare Bearden, David Hammons, and more legends from their Artist-In-Residence program. I could go on, but you should take this as a sign to get to this amazing Harlem institution.

Don’t ask me how, but for some reason I have 6 (?) samples of Acne Studios by Frederic Malle. An aldehydic peachy sandalwood, this smells like summer in decay. The sun-bleached pastels of Miami Beach’s Art Deco buildings. Plastic neon pool floaties left to rot in the swimming pool of a tropical resort. The condensation of a melted cocktail sticky between your fingers. This scent is so weird, but I keep gravitating towards it. I brought it with me to Miami and every time I was near someone they’d ask what I was wearing. Sunset on a fantasy. Give it a sniff.

Dress, Dreams, and Desire at the FIT Museum takes up psychoanalytic theory as its curatorial guide. Beautifully strange garments were organized by themes like the fetish, repression, and the pleasure principal, exploring the intersection of Freud and fashion. I loved how these pieces from the Victorian era to the present played with gender presentation and sexual expression. Highlights included a dress made of hair, Galliano’s Freud-themed A/W 2000 Dior collection, and Anouk Wipprecht’s robotic Spider Dress designed to attack those who get too close.

LOOK

I first got introduced to artist Rosie Clements through her gallery McLennon Pen Co. at this year’s NADA Art Fair in Miami. I nearly wandered past by the booth, until the vibrant texture of her bubble wrap images caught my attention. Her unique UV printing technique snapped me out of my boredom with photography. Knowing that Clements’s subjects often come from scenes of queer nightlife and dance music culture, I’m struck by the bubble wrap’s protective, yet precarious, nature.

David Lynch. Iconic film directer but also maker of peculiar lamps? Shortly after his death earlier this year, I became a little obsessed with Lynch’s sculptural practice. Save for a show at Pace Gallery and a couple of write-ups in PIN-UP and Mubi, there’s been very little discussion about these works in the context of his larger art practice. I honestly still don’t know how I feel about them. These weird, unsettling Bauhaus-like grotesque forms merge steel beams and plexiglass with the fleshiness of plaster and resin, turning the rational geometry of modernist design into something uncanny.

Every time I go back to Florida, I feel like the photograph Shell-Hand (1934) by Surrealist artist Dora Maar. I first came across this image in an old MoMA catalog and left wondering how Maar created such a lifelike photomontage. Turns out Maar crafted the illusion by using a mannequin’s hand, transforming the Parisian fashion photo studio she worked out of at the time into a stormy beach scene. I know it’s winter, but there’s something so chillingly provocative about this image.

LISTEN

Amidst the stress of life, listening to Taylor Noelle has been like a breath a fresh air and a step into sunlight. We’ve been TikTok mutuals for a minute but I’ve found her music to be exactly what I needed lately. Each song has this infectious nostalgic groove, with lyrics that contemplate cycles of love and heartbreak. The perfect soundtrack for daydreaming and dancing around your room. My faves: “Facade,” “Right Back In It,” “What Can I Do,” and “Loser.”

United States of Kennedy is one of those incredibly niche podcasts that completely sucks you in, even if you didn’t think you care about the subject. Hosts George Civeris and Julia Claire, and the experts they invite to their episodes, make the pervasiveness of the Kennedys in our popular and political culture so fascinating. I ended up binging most of the show, and I remain struck by how deep the nation’s obsession with the Kennedy family goes. Not sure where to start? A look at Grey Gardens, Taylor Swift’s relationship with Conor Kennedy, a primer on Rosemary Kennedy, and understanding who Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy really was beyond her fashion mythicism.

LICK

God, Pluribus. Where to begin? I’m struggling with how much I want to talk specifics without spoiling anything. All you need to know is this: an alien hive mind virus infects the whole world and one woman discovers she’s immune after losing her partner in the violent chaos of its spread. Now, she has all of humanity willing to do anything to make her happy. This is slow television at its finest, the story unraveling carefully through drawn out scenes of quiet apocalypse. It’s a masterpiece in showcasing the misery and the beauty that makes us uniquely human.

Like many, I became obsessed with the costumes of Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein. I’ve really enjoyed designer Kate Hawley (who also did the gorgeous wardrobe for Crimson Peak) sharing the inspiration behind the film’s iconic garments. From Caravaggio paintings to malachite to Victorian obsessions with bugs, it’s been so fun to learn about these little details that bridge historical fashion with fantasy.

I finally got the chance to visit the iconic Dale Zine when I was in Miami earlier this month after years of seeing them at art book fairs. At their massive new space in the Design District, I found so many amazing publications from tiny local zines to art books from an international array of publishers. It felt like a community hangout as much as it did a bookstore with lots of fun little decor objects, an art gallery in the back, and an absurd array of bumper stickers. I ended up going home with the latest issue of Forgotten Lands and a hat fitting for my Floridian childhood.

CLICK

In times of despair at the fucked up state of the world, I return to one of the last interviews Southern California urban historian and political theorist Mike Davis gave before he died of cancer back in 2022. Dubbed by some as a kind of ‘prophet of doom,’ Davis always reminded us that disasters are rarely natural, their impact on everyday people compounded by the greed, racism, and inequity perpetuated by the political powers that be. Davis wrestles with the scariness of our climate future, the environmental destruction and loss we probably won’t ever be able to recover, but his message is one of hope for social activism that will live on after him. “What keeps us going, ultimately, is our love for each other, and our refusal to bow our heads, to accept the verdict, however all-powerful it seems,” he reminds us, “There is so much unmobilized love out there.” All we need to do is tap into it.

When doing research for one of my finals, I came across the essay “The Black Beach and the Anthropocene” by Black geographies scholar Farai Chipato. I loved how Chipato articulates the beach not just as a literal geographic space but as a conceptual site for thinking of Blackness, mobility, agency, and diasporic subjectivity under the erosion of geological time. Chipato situates us within the beach’s material entanglements and cultural flows as a site of departure and arrival from enslaved Africans forcibly taken to the Caribbean to African migrants arriving to the shores of the United Kingdom today. “By putting liminal spaces and ideas at the center of our thought,” Chipato writes, “we might begin to find new ways to understand and address the crises that face us in the era of the Anthropocene.”

We end with a brief poem by Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton. Titled “Like You,” the force of its poignant emotionality grabs you by the throat. Dalton’s attention to life’s vibrancy makes you want to embrace the beauty of the everyday and let it mobilize you to fight for a better world. A revolutionary and journalist who spent much of his life in exile yet always remained dedicated to class struggle, Dalton’s poetic practice was deeply entwined with his political activism. These lines stuck with me: “I believe the world is beautiful / and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.”

Minor Detail

This book took my breath away—not just because of its gut punch of an ending, but how Adania Shibli expertly crafts together a stunning narrative of Palestinian life under brutal Israeli military occupation in post-Nakba 1949 and in the present day. A young woman from Ramallah becomes engrossed by the rape and murder of a Palestinian-Bedouin woman by Israeli soldiers over half a century ago. We follow her as she attempts to investigate this overlooked crime, navigating the apartheid state’s severe travel restrictions in a haunting quest for truth and justice.

Sphinx

Set in the dark glamour of Parisian nightclubs, Sphinx is often praised for its innovations as a “genderless” love story. I personally adore this book not only because of the narrative’s innate queerness, but Garréta’s ability to stage the story in the theatrics of nightlife without falling into cliche stereotypes. Sure, you have the classic tale of a DJ falling in love with a dancer, but their story unfolds with a deep care for the sensual and the dance floor’s hypnotic rhythms.

Bonjour Tristesse

When I travel to a new place, I always like to buy a book from a local author. Last time I was in Paris, I picked up Bonjour Tristesse from Shakespeare and Company. I hated this book on first read (I was in high school and the exact same age as Sagan’s frustrating protagonist). However, it’s really grown on me as I’ve gotten older. The story is simple: a teenager and her widowed father spend their summer days lazing around at the beach, only to have their carefree lifestyles disrupted by her father’s new mistress. A messy, melancholic coming-of-age story that doesn’t shy away from budding female sexuality and the cruel manipulations of angry teen girls.

The Factory

Every time I hear people craving books like Severance, I always recommend The Factory. We follow three corporate employees as they embark on strange new jobs on the sprawling campus of a industrial factory. The more they try to figure out their role in this mysterious company, the more we’re plunged into a surreal story that blurs the lines between science fiction and magical realism. A bizarre, yet very fun, read.

Dark Matter

I don’t usually see poetry recommended on these translated books lists, but I had to shoutout one of my favorite poets, Swedish experimental writer Aase Berg. I like to describe her style as post-industrial ecopoetics. She has this ability to build uniquely disorienting, hallucinatory worlds where nature and machine become entangled together, like deliciously monstrous hybrids of mundane modernity.

My Brilliant Friend

Of course, I had to share the first book from the Neapolitan Novels. Yeah, I know, this book has gotten a lot of buzz over the years (and an HBO adaptation) but it has really held up for me long after the hype died down. This sweeping epic explores the friendship of two young girls growing up in the poverty of Naples and the different paths they take into adulthood amid the pressures of class, marriage, and motherhood.

Mars

I first came across this collection on a Soviet/Post-Soviet science fiction class in undergrad and was completely engrossed by her writing style. A working multi-lingual translator herself (Spanish, French, English, and German into Croatian), this book was her debut. If you enjoyed Her Body and Other Parties, you’ll really like these feminist stories that infuse Balkan folklore with magical realism and surreal sci-fi.

The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa + Mouth: Eats Color

I’m kind of cheating with this 2-in-1 but I couldn’t decide which Chika Sagawa collection to go with. She’s the only non-contemporary author on this list, having died tragically at age 24 in 1936. In recent years, she’s gained more attention for her experimental free verse, modernist style (considered avant-garde at the time in early 20th century Japan). That recognition is due, in part, to the amazing work of poet and translator Sawako Nakayasu who continues to bring the deceased writer’s archives back to life and to new international audiences.

The Employees

The Employees is technically an epistolary novel, with the narrative unfolding over a series of corporate management reports and worker testimonies. Set a century into the future, we slowly piece together the peculiar destruction of a space ship operated by a human and android crew who become influenced by their mysterious alien cargo.

Paradais

I prefer my summer reading to be dark and unsettling, and this ticked those boxes for me. Set in a luxurious gated housing development in Mexico, we follow two boys: one, who works there as a groundskeeper and struggling to escape his working class life and the other, a spoiled rich kid dangerously obsessed with a female neighbor. As their fantasizing takes a violent, sadistic turn, Melchor exposes the dangerous of toxic masculinity in this searing class critique. I have an in-depth review of this on TikTok.

Almond

Catapulted to viral fame in 2020 after members of BTS were spotted reading it, this is a poignant coming-of-age story about a boy born without the ability to feel emotions (a real condition known as alexithymia). When he loses the family who helped him navigate the world, he is thrust into a journey of friendship, love, trauma, and self-acceptance. I adore this thoughtful meditation on what it means to be “normal.”

Don’t get me wrong, living in New York is great if you work in the art world and love going to shows like I do. But there’s something so special about traveling to a new place and experiencing all their different institutions and galleries. You get exposed to new artists you otherwise might not know, either locally or from abroad, and discover what kind of cool artworks live in their museum collections. So let’s take a little tour of the London art scene…

“Heavy Ground” by Özgür Kar at Emalin Gallery

First stop was to Emalin in Shoreditch to meet up with a mutual friend who works there. This show was located in the Clerk’s House, one of the oldest standing buildings in the neighborhood. Located next to a churchyard, it was once a watch house and a funeral parlor before becoming a place for artists. Özgür Kar is a Turkish artist who uses cultural tools of production to reflect on the contradictory feelings of isolation and belonging. On the lower levels, to-scale drawings of ladders blur the lines between functional object and theater prop. Upstairs, I watched an animated short film about flies falling in love while caught on glue traps. Weird yet wonderful.

“Eyes Open In The Dark” by Peter Hujar at Raven Row

The late, great Peter Hujar was known for his street photography and poignant portraits of New York City luminaries like partner David Wojnarowicz, Cookie Mueller, and Susan Sontag. I was recommended this show not just because I enjoy Hujar, but because it’s in another historic building in Spitalfields dating all the way back to 1690 (although its current facade is from 1827). The show presents his work from the 1970s and 80s before the AIDS crisis devastated him and his community. Primarily portraits, we watch how the downtown scene comes alive through his lens.

“HangTime” by Taylor Simmons at Public Gallery

I came across this show purely by chance as I was walking back to the tube: an unassuming storefront with a fascinating painting hanging in its window and the title of the show spray painted above where a formal sign should be. Located in a new expansion of the gallery, I loved how the pieces were hung among the old shop’s abandoned shelving, linoleum floors, and emptied vitrines. Simmons’s portraits also enhanced this feeling of visual wandering. Through his thoughtful abstracted style, he remixes motifs of the Black American cultural mainstream with images of his friends and scenes of performative masculinity, rendering the personal as inherently political.

“Visual Canker” by Donald Rodney at Whitechapel Gallery

It’s so difficult to distill the depth and scope of Donald Rodney’s multimedia practice into a single sentence, much less a posthumous retrospective, but Whitechapel managed to succeed in creating a moving tribute to the late artist. Rodney created drawings, sculptures, installations, and paintings with materials like x-rays, computer-hacked power wheelchairs, computer desktops, and blood to explore how his experiences of social injustice as a Black British man intersected with the prejudices of disability from living with sickle cell anemia. Critical self-histories.

Farah Al Qasimi at Tate Modern

Spent a day at the Tate Modern with a friend and ended up in a gallery of Farah Al Qasimi’s photographs. Wallpapered with lush floor-to-ceiling closeups and collages of her images, Qasimi renders entangled histories of identity, colonialism, immigration, and globalization through the vivid textures of technicolor. Shot primarily in the homes and workplaces of her family and friends, Al Qasimi captures intimate scenes of her community between New York and Abu Dhabi, with remnants of British and Portuguese colonial influence in the UAE symbolized through fabric and food.

Noah Davis at Barbican

I knew I couldn’t leave London without going to visit the Barbican. Beyond its stunning Brutalist architecture, I was so excited to see their retrospective of artist Noah Davis. Davis, who died suddenly in 20215, left behind a monumental legacy from co-founding the Underground Museum (uplifting Black artists and expand local arts education to L.A.’s working class) to his experimental painting practice that found magic and myth in the mundane of the everyday. Each vignette Davis paints feels like a memory suspended in time, balanced between the realms of dreams and reality.

“Remembering” by Arpita Singh at Serpentine

I was so generously invited to attend the opening of Serpentine’s solo exhibition dedicated to the legendary feminist painter, Arpita Singh. Singh, who is now nearing 90, has spent six decades depicting her experiences as a woman in India over periods of violent sociopolitical upheaval. I was shocked to learn this was her first show outside of India, and she should be an artist on more people’s radar. Her textural paintings depict moments from her own life as a mother and aging woman amid symbols from Bengali folk art and nods to Indian court painting and Surrealism. You could spend hours deciphering how each motif reflects her emotional inner world.

“These Networks In Our Skin” by Mimi Ọnụọha at the V&A

Mimi Ọnụọha is one of my favorite artists, so this was a lovely surprise to find in the galleries of the V&A. She explores how technology, data, quantification, and globalization define our modern systems of labor, race, and ecology. This short film and accompanying sculpture reflect on how information is transmitted through dual acts of rewiring computer cables and hair braiding. These valuable modern and historic materials of the information age are handled with loving human care.

“Hexen Tarot” by Suzanne Treister at the Warburg Institute

Part of a larger exhibition exploring the history of Tarot and its creative contemporary afterlives, Suzanne Treister’s interpretations of the classic deck uses the major and minor arcana to explore histories of scientific research, regimes of government control, and legacies of countercultural activist movements. Themes for each card span subjects like cybernetics and futurism and feature thinkers like Octavia Butler, Ada Lovelace, Ursula K. Le Guin, Robert Oppenheimer, and William Gibson.

“The Suffolk Collection” by William Larkin at Kenwood House

Somehow the only non-contemporary art I saw on this trip, I was completely stunned by these full-length portraits painted by William Larkin that are hung in the period rooms of Kenwood House on Hampstead Heath. Active in the 17th century, Larkin was known for capturing the dazzling textures, intricate lace patterns, and metallic sheen of the garments and textiles of the English aristocracy. I may or may not have gotten yelled at for getting too close to get a better look at each gorgeous detail.

“Saccharum officinarum and Queen Anne’s Lace” by Annalee Davis at Somerset House

I got the chance to visit Somerset House for the first time and experience their marvelous bioart and environmental art exhibition, SOIL: The World At Our Feet. Living and working on a former plantation in Barbados, Annalee Davis’s work tells the stories of enslaved people and the ground they were forced to tend, entangling their experiences through the roots of sugar cane that mimic the veins of human lungs. Lace crochet patterns gesture to the gendered labour and inherited cultural knowledges of the women and men who worked the land. Included in a group show about soil as medium and muse, Davis uses the paper from an old sugar plantation ledger to reflect on the landscape’s memories of extractive colonial violence.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the botanical world, especially as we slip into midsummer. It’s a time that brings an intensity of the senses, punctuated by the sap-like feeling of sweat on your skin and the cool relief of finding shade under leafy greens. So for this month’s newsletter, let’s plant some seeds of wonder.

TOUCH

Did you know that Hilma Af Klint, beloved abstractionist, was once obsessed with flowers? I recently saw an amazing show at MoMA of Klint’s botanical illustrations. Created over a year of profound fascination with the natural world and plant science, it was amazing to see her spiritual abstracted style come through these vibrant watercolor studies. In addition to the drawings, Klint would describe each species and their power, interconnecting the human soul and the plant world. My favorites were the Yellow Iris (belief in the creation act) and Forget-me-not (longing for tenderness).

I can't talk about the botanical without mentioning a few of my favorite floral perfumes. When I first smelled D.S. and Durga’s Brown Flowers, I was reminded of the graceful rot of my family’s orchids when we brought them inside for hurricane season, and it’s become a go-to ever since. I got Heretic Parfum’s Dirty Violet in a discovery set recently and it’s now one of my favorite interpretations of violet with its glam punk seductiveness. Fulton & Roark’s The Window smells like opening a window out onto a hot desert in bloom with an array of native plants, ylang ylang, and lavender. Then there’s Little Flower by Regime Des Fleurs, made in an iconic collaboration with Chloe Sevigny, whose delicate rosy musk makes me feel like a princess. Kismet Olfactive’s Tuberose Tantra is a gorgeous wave of white florals, rich with dreamy jasmine and tuberose—one of my most complimented scents. Future Society’s Floating Forest takes a greener, more aquatic turn with notes of freesia, water lily, and papyrus thanks to its inspiration from an extinct Borneo forest.

Zoë Schlanger’s The Light Eaters is a thoughtful study of dramatic changes unfolding in the field of botany, especially around theories of plant intelligence. As Schlanger, a climate journalist, falls deeper into this experimental scientific world, we meet the researchers at the forefront of this emerging (and controversial) field who are radically re-shaping our understanding of how plants socialize, communicate, feel, and relate to the world around them. You’ll never look at your ordinary houseplants the same way again. Schlanger writes: “It is hard to underestimate the drama of being a tree, or any plant. Every one is an unimaginable feat of luck and ingenuity. Once you know that, you can't unknow it.”

Back in May, I was in Pasadena for a wedding and ended up visiting The Huntington. This sprawling estate of botanical gardens was established in 1919 as an educational institution, research library, and over a dozen themed gardens for visitors and scholars to explore. Despite the hot California sun beating down on us, it was amazing to wander through each curated landscape and take in the lush diversity of our botanical world. Can’t wait to return to explore their Octavia Butler archives.

LOOK

On my lunch break last week, I slipped into Salon 94 to check out their exhibition by Korean artist Sally J. Han. Titled “Wallflower,” Han uses flowering botanical motifs to depict the richness of young girls’ inner worlds. These larger-than-life paintings are intimate scenes of private curious creativity, welcoming you to spend time closely examining the little details Han hides among her lush foliage and blooms. As researcher and curator Fabiola Alondra writes in an exhibition essay: “Wallflowers are, above all, quiet witnesses, rooted in the margins, attentive to life.”

For the second time, I encountered one of Rashid Johnson’s monumental plant installations. This time at his Guggenheim solo show, “A Poem For Deep Thinkers.” Titled Sanguine, the piece appears to spill out of its containment on the top floor of the museum’s rotunda, sending a cascade of suspended plants, palm trees, and vines down its central core. Known for his gridded-steel structures packed to the brim with vegetation, ceramics, books, shea butter, and other found objects illuminated by the harsh neon of grow lights, this built environment also houses a film by the same name that explores the intergenerational relationship between Johnson, his father, and his son. Flowers and plants are regular motifs in Johnson’s work, appearing as symbols of growth, protection, and sustenance alongside his exploration of Black cultural and intellectual histories. In this instance, their inclusion in the gallery is also a nod to Frank Lloyd Wright’s original desire to decorate the museum with plants. Through Johnson’s careful staging, the galleries become vivid spaces for living.

Alissa Alfonso is a South Floridian artist that renders the resilience of plants in our polluted, ecologically-disconnected world through dreamy soft sculptures that seem to bloom out of discarded sports balls and plastics. Alfonso constructs the works in her series “Nature’s Medicine” by hand-dyeing textile waste and stuffing them recycled fibers and salvaged materials. I love how Alfonso captures the likeness of these flowers (which include healing species like hibiscus, black cohosh, and pipewort) but uses fabrics to play with the geometry and texture of their forms, entangling together the natural and the artificial.

For a month, a bouquet of cryogenically-frozen lilies sat in the window of art gallery Blade Study. Know as Lilies Into The Void, the piece was part of a solo show by artist Jo Shane that explores the commercialization of “life” through the medical and wellness industries. By prolonging the flowers’ existence in a zombie-like state of suspended animation through a refrigerated coffin-like structure, Shane reflects on economies of aging, mortality, bodily disruption, and the modern business of staying alive.

LISTEN

Last year, the New York Botanical Garden launched Plant People, a podcast that looks at the role of plants in our lives from science to society. It’s quickly become one of my favorite listens, with episodes full of accessible plant education and fascinating interviews that feature botanical researchers, historians, and creative people from around the world. A few of my personal highlights from their first and second seasons: extreme botany, Black histories of gardening, bettering our grass lawns, an environmental history of the Bronx, and learning to love decay.

And then there’s the gorgeous “God Turn Me Into A Flower” by Weyes Blood. I remember first hearing this song and being so struck by the lyric: “It's good to be soft when they push you down.” Such a haunting melody that poignantly lingers on the hard and beautiful bloom of being alive in this world like a petal about to be plucked.

Memory Garden is an ambient album by Early Fern that was composed during their time as a farm worker. Each track feels like a moment of life spent outdoors translated into sound, gorgeously cultivated with layered textured of vibrant feeling. You can pick up the nostalgic nods to plant and insect companions, daily farming routines, turns in the weather, as well reflections on rural life’s hardships. A lovely listen.

LICK

Back in March, I got to attend the stunning play Lavender, Hyacinth, Violet, Yew at the Bush Theatre in London. This was one of the most moving pieces of theater I’ve experience in a long time. Written by lead actor and wildlife educator Coral Wylie, the show is a poignant look at one family’s multigenerational experience with queerness, grief, and finding one’s self through the care of gardening. By the end of this moving exploration of parent and child relationships and reconnecting with queer elders in the wake of violence of the AIDs crisis, there was not a single dry eye in the room and a stage full of plants and flowers. I highly recommend picking up a copy of the script.

Founded by ikebana artist Kosen Ohtsubo and carried on by Berlin-based scholar Christian Kōun Alborz Oldham, Flower Planet is a studio known for their experimental botanical compositions that arrange twisting foliage and blooming flowers into surreal scenes of ecological beauty punctuated by more unusual materials like vegetables, bones, and manmade objects. Their freestyle approaches regularly defy the constrictions of typical vessels and the rigidities of the craft’s traditional aesthetic conventions. By turning to mundane things for sculptural inspiration, repurposing invasive species, and incorporating discarded plant clippings into their body of work, these artists unravel the pretentions of the practice, turning floral arrangements into moments that celebrate the beauty of everyday botany.

Battlefield is an ongoing multimedia, garden-based project by artist Gabriella Hirst that traces the official naming of plant cultivar names that make reference to armed conflict, war zones, and the military industrial complex. These varieties span 500 years of breeding in Western gardening, sourced primarily from across Europe. As Hirst writes, “With each plant carrying the language of violence and conflict, the garden asks us to consider how we may tend to difficult histories over time.” In addition to an online index, the physical Battlefield garden continues to crop up at new sites. These naming conventions, a planting guide, and Hirst’s reflections and research documentation are also archived in a gorgeous risograph publication.

One of my highlights of this summer was definitely going to the launch of Clue Perfumery’s newest scent, Dandelion Butter, at Stele. Inspired by Midwestern memories of the childhood game “Do you like butter?,” the fragrance itself is a treat of stemmy, sappy golden deliciousness. I loved how this event and perfume buttered up the lowly dandelion weed into a symbol of joyful, nostalgic whimsy.

CLICK

Flowers are not just frivolous symbols of aesthetic beauty. Oftentimes, they are embodiments of political struggle, representing cultural histories of violence and resistance. Journalist Marta Vidal shares the story of one particular flower, the Faqqu’a Iris, and how it’s caught up in the brutal colonization and military occupation of Palestine. A rare and historic plant, Vidal reports on how the Israeli construction of separation walls and settler attacks have decimated the fields of blooms and threaten the region’s native biodiversity. While the physical and cultural genocide of Palestinians continues to be documented, Vidal invites us to extend that same awareness to the destruction of Palestine’s natural heritage. Even in the face of dispossession and displacement, human and flower alike remain resilient and refuse their oppression, growing together in hopeful defiance of extermination.

Displaying thriving plants in your home has long been an expression of social status, dating back centuries. Better Homes & Gardens looked at a century’s worth of houseplant interior design trends from the magazine’s own archives. This piece was such a delight to read, seeing how our taste in plants evolved with our changing society. Some examples: trailing plants were big in the 1970s, Depression-era decor scarcity led to more botanical furnishings, and the rise of terrariums in the early 2000s.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote that the “earth laughs in flowers.” I was thinking about those words when I read Heather Swan’s piece about the Forest of Orchids, a cultivation project in the mountains of Colombia that heals environmental destruction through the planting of native orchids. I didn’t realize this, but Colombia is the world’s second largest exporter of flowers. This has resulted in industrial farming practices that pollute landscapes and harms to local soils and wildlife. The Hincapié family’s initiative doesn’t just bring beauty to what was once a barren landscape; their work represents an important revival of multispecies interconnection and cross-pollination that can resist ecological exploitation through beloved blooms.

I end, as always, with a poem. This time by Nate Klug, “Jasmine” blurs the boundaries between inside and outside through the drift of the flower’s fragrance. Reading this, I’m reminded of the jasmine bush that sprouted up under my window of my childhood home in Florida. Its interwoven encounters with the artificiality of our built world are reflected in Klug’s observations about the plant’s strange entanglements with plastic, wires, and wildlife. Klug muses: “While nothing changes; while the scent of jasmine / flutters and drifts, like sympathy, living for itself.”

Jimmy Fay joins our call the day after their first Lower East Side tour of the year. One of the six founding members of Close Friends Collective, Fay co-leads walking tours across the LES that center on the stories of lesser-known LGBTQ+ New Yorkers whose lives and legacies have shaped the city we know today. Fay, also a poet, actor, and playwright, first took an interest in interactive historical storytelling after working as a costumed educator at the Tenement Museum. Currently at Brown University pursuing an MFA in Theatre Arts & Performance Studies, Fay’s practice as a writer, researcher, and historic interpreter focuses on excavating queer pasts and imagining queer futures along New York City’s streets and sidewalks.

Close Friends Collective is composed of educators, artists, and historians with a deep passion for queer history and public education. Since the collective’s formation in 2021, the group’s pedagogical work has expanded into zines, events such as gay love letter readings, and, of course, more walking tours with new additions like the East Village and Green-Wood Cemetery. Close Friends Collective takes a communal, cooperative approach to public history, with members working collaboratively to research and uplift queer narratives of New York City often underrepresented and overlooked by traditional historic institutions. By bringing tour groups directly to these sites where events of queer protest, joy, community, violence, and discrimination unfolded, Close Friends Collective maps an alternative understanding of New York City through these queer historical figures and their communities—one that encompasses the diversity of their lived experiences with art, labor, policing, and social welfare.

During our conversation, Jimmy and I discuss their journey of becoming a queer historian of New York City’s Lower East Side and how these walking tours put Close Friends Collective’s mission of queer urban education into practice.

EB: When did you become interested in public history, specifically educating folks about New York City history and the people who’ve brought its neighborhoods to life?

JF: I started working in public history at the Tenement Museum as a part-time educator focusing on the history of the Lower East Side. I worked there in that capacity until I was laid off along with like 90-95% of the front of house staff in August 2020. When I and almost all of my colleagues were laid off, it was this emotionally difficult thing because we had gotten attached to the neighborhood and we knew so much about it. The job required this incredible depth of knowledge from us. I didn’t have any prior experience with public history. I started at the Tenement Museum in my capacity as an actor, actually. I was a costumed interpreter there, which was this bizarre job where I dressed up in garb from 1916 and played a 14-year-old immigrant from the Ottoman Empire—but that’s another story from another life.

EB: When did you decide to co-found Close Friends Collective?

JF: In 2021, a group of us who used to work at the Tenement Museum as well as our colleague Salonee Bhaman, who is an academic historian, were approached by a mutual friend that we all knew, Katie Vogel. She does public history stuff over at Henry Street Settlement, which is a social services organization on the Lower East Side. The staff at Henry Street wanted some kind of programming for Pride but they weren’t finding anything rooted in the history of the neighborhood. They commissioned us to write a walking tour that was supposed to be a one-off for Henry Street staff.

It’s something my colleague Nat Hill and I wanted to do for a really long time because we had, while working at the Tenement Museum, taken it upon ourselves to dig up a tremendous amount of queer history of the neighborhood and had been advocating for the museum to take that research and do something with it, programming-wise. During our tenure there, they never did. So, yeah, we were very frustrated by this lack of queer history in the neighborhood. Most of New York’s queer history tends to be concentrated in the West Village for understandable reasons. It’s where Stonewall and the Chelsea Piers are, stuff like that. But there’s queer history everywhere. The Lower East Side is this remarkable neighborhood that has had so many identities over the years and so many different identities at one time and continues to. We wanted to fold queer history into that because we saw a kind of lack.

EB: Why was the walking tour as a format so important to your practice?

JF: I really love it. In terms of why we do the walking tour, I think it’s nice to learn these stories standing in the place where they happened. I think that can be its own emotional experience where you’re communing with the past, but it’s also a nice way to be confronted with the realities of the present while we tell these stories. Yeah, there’s something about being out in the neighborhood among the people who actually live there that feels important to me. Like not being sequestered in an institution. It’s the kind of relationship we want to have with the past.

EB: Could you describe what the walking tour is like? Do you have any stops that feel always important to acknowledge when you go on these tours? I’m curious about how you structure it and where you go throughout the Lower East Side.

JF: It’s different every time. We have a repertoire of stops at our disposal and then, depending on the size of the group or the particular interests of the group or things like access needs, we’re able to tailor the tour to that specific iteration. We tend to give four, sometimes five, stops on a tour.

Henry Street itself is its own stop. Henry Street, as an institution, has this remarkable queer history because its founder Lillian Wald was herself queer. She was one of those incredibly ambitious and successful women who was married to her work and, you know, lived with all women. When your brain starts to catch on to little things that traditional historic interpretation will say about queer people without calling them queer, you start to see them everywhere, It’s like the “they were roommates” thing. That’s where our name comes from. Close Friends Collective is a cheeky nod to the erasure of queer people in the past. Anyway, Henry Street Settlement has this amazing queer history and continues to be a beacon of social services, mutual aid, and has, we think, this very queer ethos in the present.

Yesterday, we did a stop about a young person from 1856 called Charley, who was tried in this court case at Essex Market Courthouse for vagrancy. The New York Times published this article implying that the reason that they were arrested was because they were an “unfeminine freak” because they were assigned female at birth and were wearing male clothing. It’s this incredibly early instance of trans history there, and that stop dovetails with so many things in the present. It’s actually a bit frightening how relevant a lot of it has become.

Then we talked about S.T.A.R. house. S.T.A.R. was an organization founded in 1970 by Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. It stands for the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, and they had their headquarters for a time on 2nd Street. We talk about the artist Martin Wong and also a one-time lover, collaborator, and friend of his, Miguel Piñero who was one of the founders of Nuyorican Poets.

Bluestockings is our other institutional partner in the neighborhood. We also talk about the photographer Alvin Baltrop. We talk about political funerals during the AIDS crisis. There’s so many, but that’s the Lower East Side tour. We also have an East Village tour that just launched over the summer, so that’s a whole other one.

EB: There’s something beautiful in not just having one circuit that you do, but having it adapt to the kind of audience as well as also what you as historians are thinking about and researching, and making it timely. You can interchange these histories and tailor these tours in a way that, in a more traditional institutional format, you can’t or you’re more restricted.

I have a question about audience. What has your experience been like with the participants who come on these tours? Who is interested in them?

JF: The vast majority of the people who come on our tours are locals. Not exclusively. We do get tourists and that’s its own kind of fun experience, but most of the people we get on tours are from New York City. Many live on the Lower East Side, which is really cool. Part of the reason we reserve a section of free tickets for every tour is because we want people who actually live in the neighborhood to have access to the tour. It’s also a lot of people who are brand new to the city. Our tour has become this kind of homing device for newly arrived queers in New York to find each other. We get to see people making friends on the tours. Sometimes they’re flirting and it even gets a little cruise-y.

EB: That’s so fun. As someone who has worked in public history for a long time, I think those are my most favorite moments, where the people on the tour are talking to each other and also learning from each other and making friends, making community. It really demonstrates the power of Close Friends Collective bringing people together in this way.

JF: Yeah, I think it’s really nice to be able to tell these stories to a population who live in the neighborhood where it happened or the city where it happened and who have their own stakes. It’s a different goal that we have for this project than I think a lot of museums have.

EB: Is there any research you’re currently working on? A specific site or specific historical figures that you’re interested in including in the tour or expanding on in the tour?

JF: The stop on our tours that we’ve had the most breakthroughs with newly-discovered information has probably been Charley. That person we might today identify as trans, who was arrested in 1856. Their history intersects with this massive media matrix about trans people in the 19th century. Trans people, or people we would today call trans, were media sensations back in the 1800s all over the country in ways that are so surprising and also not surprising at all. Charley was part of this network of other trans masculine people who were famous in the newspapers for being continually arrested for being trans.

There was a person, whose birth name is Emma Snodgrass. They were arrested in Boston and I think again in New Hampshire. They were from New York, where their dad was a cop. So every time they got arrested, they were brought back to New York City and then they would abscond again to go live some trans life somewhere else. It seems like Charley and this person, Emma Snodgrass, were friends. So now we’re doing research about Emma Snodgrass.

Simultaneously, my colleague Daniel Walber and I are doing research at Green-Wood Cemetery for our Green-Wood tour, because that’s one of our other partners in the city. Daniel’s looking to see if any of the people we talk about from the Lower East Side have any connections to Green-Wood. We discovered this lot at Green-Wood that does have the Snodgrass name and then we went into further archival research and found that we do think this person who was born as Emma Snodgrass is probably buried there. We’re not 100% sure, but that’s an exciting update.

Also for our Green-Wood tour, I went to Washington D.C. to the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian and did a bunch of research about this muralist called Violet Oakley who was pretty famous in Philadelphia in the early 20th century. She did all sorts of massive-scale commissioned art that, for her time, was a really big deal because she was a woman. She was one of those people who had this lifelong assistant and friend who lived with her, an artist called Edith Emerson. Historic interpretation of Violet Oakley’s life, even from in the copy that is on the Smithsonian website for her finding aid of her archives, describes Edith as her lifelong companion. Most historians have shied away from calling their relationship romantic but—because I’ve been doing this work for so long—I’m like, this person is gay. There’s no doubt in my mind. So when I was working at Green-Wood as an educator, I went to the Smithsonian to get concrete proof. I and CFC, as an organization, don’t believe in this idea of needing proof to call somebody in the past queer. But if these institutions want proof, I’m sure it exists. So I went to the archive and found this incredibly romantic and beautiful love letter between them. As far as I’ve seen, it has never been digitized or published. So, yeah, that’s the type of work we are currently invested in.

EB: How are you and CFC planning on expanding your work? Are there other parts of New York City whose queer history you’re interested in exploring? Or bringing these kinds of walking tours to those neighborhoods and finding community partners there?

JF: I think we definitely all have ambitions to reach other parts of the city. We are really interested in a Brooklyn tour. We’ve been researching different neighborhoods for where it might be possible. It’s harder in the other boroughs because the neighborhoods are less concentrated, so a walking tour can become more difficult geographically. But Park Slope has this really rich queer history, so does Brooklyn Heights. We’ve talked about that. We’ve talked about doing a Queens tour. With Queens, there’s so many different neighborhoods with such rich and interesting histories. Yeah, a Harlem would be amazing, too, but we have talked the most about a Brooklyn tour and a Queens tour.

We don’t want CFC to grow more quickly than we have the capacity for and we’re very happy with our present repertoire. It’s something all of us are so passionate about that we want to be able to sustain it for a long time. So we’re careful not to expand beyond our means at the moment. But those are some dreams that we have.

EB: Could you speak to what your experience has been like working collaboratively and in this collective mode to tell these stories of New York City Queer history? Community also feels really important in this context where you’re drawing these connections between past and present, but doing it in this communal way.

JF: Yeah, I keep pinching myself and being like, “Why is this working so well?” Because it’s hard with collectives, you know. It’s not like our work is without conflict, but I think what helps is that all of us are genuinely really good friends. When we do get together, we certainly spend some time talking about the Collective and we have agenda items and everything, but we also just vibe and hang out. We all love each other and I think, crucially, we all respect each other.

EB: What does it mean for you, personally, to do this work of queer urban history? Especially in this time when LGBTQ+ rights are being so threatened and these histories are being erased. Like when the T is getting dropped from government archives, you know, and stuff like that. What has this work has signified for you as a historian and also as a queer person?

JF: I was one of those children obsessed with history, but I never encountered anything resembling queer history. If we learned about queer history, I’m sure it was a paragraph about Stonewall. And I’m sure I did not see myself—a tiny closeted dyke from rural Arizona—in that story at all.

I hope that what these stories do for people is plant this idea that queer people have always existed, and all kinds of queer people have always existed. I am particularly moved by the story of Charley at the moment because seeing such an explicit example of trans history from as early as the mid-19th century is, for me, proof positive that transness has also always existed. Even at a time when people didn’t have language for it.

At a time when the government and so many empowered and emboldened people hold this line that being trans is some kind of new language that has this agenda and is seeking to infect the innocence of American body politic. It’s just patently not true. Any queer or trans person could tell you that is not true. So that’s the work of history, right? Let me go back and find specific examples where that’s true and put it in your face and be like “Look, how can you tell me that isn’t real?” How can you tell me that we didn’t exist?” I think that’s the emotional connection I feel to it, especially right now.

EB: How has the work of CFC changed how you experience and see New York?

JF: I remember working at the Tenement Museum and giving a tour to this group of school kids who, I think, were in the fourth grade. The Tenement Museum is partly housed in this old crumbling tenement, which is this amazing and fascinating and gorgeous building. But sometimes it would really freak kids out. This one kid was really losing it and he kept being like, “Did somebody die here?” As a historian, I wasn’t going to say no because obviously tons of people lived there. Certainly, people died there. So I didn’t know what to say. But his teacher was like, of course, somebody died here but somebody died everywhere in New York. I watched these kids’ eyes go big with this revelation. I think that’s analogous to how I see queer history now. It’s like, somebody gay was here. Everywhere. On every corner. Even in the neighborhoods that weren’t thought of as these big gay hubs, there were gay people everywhere.

EB: Yeah, it’s like one of those moments when you’re meeting up with your friends on the street corner and you’re thinking about other queer people who also probably met their friends on the same street corner. There’s something really poetic about that.

I think what it also does for me, emotionally, is that I see my own ancestry everywhere. It’s nice to be able to connect with these historical figures, in the way that queer people are always making their own families. I see something of myself in the story of somebody like Charley and any of the other queer or trans people who have lived in the city that I call home. When I’m hanging out with my t-boy friends, I’m part of a legacy. We become part of this lineage.

I've been thinking about my labor a lot these days. What do I contribute? How do I work? Who do I want to work for? Or with? It didn't take me very long into adulthood to realize I'd never be a corporate baddie or an office siren or whatever. I've never been able to hold on to a regular 9-to-5 for longer than a few months. The prospect of the same commute to the same office every day makes me feel crazy. Teams and Slack notifications make me shudder. Jargon like 'PTO' and 'ROI' make me want to rip my hair out. Yet, my time as a multi-gig worker in the art world, museums, and academia has been fraught with its own labor struggles for living wages, creative agency, and the never-ending quest for a healthier work-life balance. Even if what we all choose to do is different, our fights for dignity and survival remain the same.

For this newsletter, labor in all of its myriad messy forms. From workplace dramas to corporate corruption to overlooked histories of workers' rights, systemic sensoriums and commodified collapse and unraveling economies abound.

TOUCH

I was in London a few weeks back and saw Hard Graft: Work, Health, and Rights at the Wellcome Collection. The exhibition centers the experiences of underrepresented workers whose dangerous, marginalized, and precarious labor also invite collective healing and resistance. The show was divided into three sections: “The Plantation,” “The Street,” and “The Home.” Each looked at these sites of racialized, gendered, and classed labor from colonization to the present day. There was something so poignant about seeing these multi-generational, global struggles interconnected in this way, whether it be the fight for paid domestic work, sex workers rights, or revolting against enslavement. The show spoke not only to the toll these kinds of work take on the body, but how amplifying these stories creates a healthier world for us all.

Hiroko Oyamada’s The Factory follows three employees as they begin new jobs in a sprawling, mysterious factory campus. As they settle into their seemingly mundane roles, they begin to question the purpose of their labor and discover peculiarities about their new employer. I don’t want to spoil too much, but I love how this novella embraces the strange and surreal. Science fiction has always been my favorite genre for critiquing the modern workplace, and this is another read to add to your list.

I realize I never talk about theater on here, but I wanted to share a piece I saw a couple of years ago that still haunts me to this day. Titled Job, the play follows a therapist and his patient, a young woman Jane who had a viral public meltdown and is forced to take a leave of absence from her job as an online content moderator. Over the course of their session, as the two gradually learn more about each other, we see how Jane got pushed to the brink and how her tech job has drastically shaped her worldview. A sharp, disturbing thriller.

Last time I was in Boston, I got to catch a retrospective of the artist John Wilson. Known for works like Young Americans (1972–75) and his keen eye for portraiture, Wilson was a beloved figure in the local art scene and spent much of his career teaching at Boston University. I was struck by the focus on Wilson’s work as an artist, how his creative labor as maker and mentor reflected his political values of racial equality and social justice and his experiences with the Civil Rights Movement. Sketches and iterations of paintings, sculptures, and illustrations lined the walls, revealing his process to us. A video nearby plays clips of a community clean-up of Wilson’s bronze bust Eternal Presence (1985) at its location outside the National Center for Afro-American Artists in Roxbury. We watch as neighbors wash the statue and polish it to a shine, enabling Wilson’s artistic laboring to live on.

LOOK

In 2024, fiber artist created Mill Town, dedicated to the 1934 strike by workers at the Coosa-Thatcher textile factory. Arnold’s embroidered tapestry tells their story of labor organizing and their continued fight even when threatened with brutal crackdowns. I’m struck by the ode to the protest song, We Shall Not Be Moved, which continues to be sung by activists and workers today. Arnold’s practice weaves together legacies of labor struggle and political liberation, transforming the tapestry into a documentary of lesser-known working class histories. Some other favorites? These Hands (2024) made for Volkswagen workers at IBEW Local 175 and I Walk (2025) dedicated to the 1918 Chattanooga carmen’s strike and streetcar riots.

When designers Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen learned from a handbook for mechanical engineers that workers can sustain an output of about 75 watts over the course of an 8-hour shift, they partnered with choreographer Alexander Whitley to create the sculptural-performance, 75 Watts. This assembly line dance, performed by workers at the White Horse Electric Factory in Zhongshan, China, draws our focus not to their products, but the process of their making. Set at the center of the world’s manufacturing and global supply chain, the parts they assemble while they move are designed to support the movement of their bodies, not to create a new commodity for the market. As the artists note in an interview with MoMA: “Within the huge complexity of industrial manufacturing processes, the biological behavior of human bodies on an assembly line is not always predictable enough to fit…[This] feels relevant again in these times of neo-feudal economies and precarious labor.” Timely in this moment of trade wars, you can watch a section of the performance here.

In his ongoing series, Dark Gardens, photographer Md Fazla Rabbi Fatiq documents the complex history of tea farming across Bangladesh. When tea production began under British colonization in the 19th century, workers faced brutal working conditions and extreme weather, leading to protests that resulted in the deaths and continued enslavement of many. Fatiq charts this industry’s continuation into the present, where the afterlives of these plantations still perpetuate unsafe and exploitative working conditions. Fatiq has a sharp eye for this industry’s contrasts and contradictions: We see a worker’s hand permanently disabled after an accident in a tea-processing factory, an eye blinded from pesticides, the land aglow with fireflies, and a goat balanced precariously on terrain bare from over-harvest.

At first glance, Liza Lou’s Kitchen (1991–1996) appears to just that, an ordinary kitchen rendered in a glittering sculptural technicolor. Yet the closer you look, you’ll start to notice that this full-scale replica is decorated with thousands of hand-glued glass beads. The sheer scale of time and energy that went into making this artwork might be hard to wrap your head around, but Lou made it to acknowledge the value of domestic work and challenge the dismissal of gendered craft. By merging these two historically feminine domains, Lou invites you to reflect home, labor, and dignity.

LISTEN

“Work, work, work / Die, die, die,” Shilpa Ray croons in her song, “Add Value Add Time.” Playing off the questions posed by every MTA MetroCard machine, Ray contemplates the senseless cycle of the work commute and the futility of trying to survive in a dehumanizing economic system. The upbeat melodies under her frustrated lyrics feel like that moment when you try to smile through your anger.

Back in 2019, photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier spoke with the Modern Art Notes podcast about her series, The Last Cruze, about the General Motors’s Lordstown, Ohio plant and the UAW workers’ lives amid the plant’s shutdown. I really appreciated how Frazier talks about her process documenting this working class community’s fight for survival and their grief over the closure, challenging labor stereotypes and building in this current political climate. Not mentioned in the podcast but still interesting, the photographs are displayed in an installation that mimics the factory assembly line.

My go-to podcast recommendation is always Busted Business Bureau. If you’re looking to laugh while also learning about wild stories of companies behaving badly, corporate scams, and batshit behavior businesses try to get away with, this is definitely the show for you. A few particularly wild episodes to get you started: The Salvation Army, ShotSpotter, Toys ‘R’ Us, and Southwest Airlines.

No story of worker abuse terrifies me quite like the Radium Girls. In the 1920s, female painters at a watch dial factory started falling sick and dying of mysterious, gruesome illnesses. The cause? They had been instructed by their bosses to touch the tip of their brushes on their lips, causing them to ingest deadly amounts of radium-laced paint. Criminal goes into this dark history and goes beyond the horror of these young women’s fates to explore how their legal fight for justice impacted modern labor laws.

LICK

Of course, I have to talk about Severance. A visually-stunning thrill ride, Severance creates a scathing labor critiques of the modern workplace by immersing us in an elaborate late capitalist sci-fi dystopia. For the uninitiated: the show follows a team of workers who have undergone a procedure to separate their work selves from their outside selves. As we follow these “innies” and their mysterious tasks at the sinister biotech corporation Lumon Industries, we wrestle with issues of bodily autonomy, workplace organizing, and corporate greed. Having just finished its second season, the show delved into even deeper, more nuanced explorations of Lumon as a metaphor for mega-companies we know today, from the aftermath of company towns to racist respectability politics. Highly recommend pairing your watch with discussions about the show’s office and corporate design.

If you’re looking for breaking news about ongoing labor issues and investigations into harmful companies and economic policies, I can’t recommend More Perfect Union enough. This platform first got on my radar when Starbucks workers were striking and unionizing a few years back. I remember noticing that they were one of very few outlets who actually went out there to speak with workers, asking about their demands and their lived experiences, and I’ve kept up with their journalism ever since. With focuses on topics like climate, rural America, and corporate accountability, they have an admirable dedication to sharing workers’ stories and shedding a light on underreported, overlooked parts of the working class economy.

I first watched Barbara Kopple’s 1976 documentary Harlan County, USA for an Intro to Film class in college and was forever changed after. The film follows Kentucky coal miners on strike and the company’s attempts to break them with police, scabs, and hired agitators. Kopple’s style of nonlinear narrative that merged interviews with archival footage, jumping forward and back to explore internal political drama and corruption at United Mine Workers, and her inclusion of local folk songs and the experiences of the miners’ wives in sustaining the strike help place the struggles of Harlan County within a larger, significant continuum of American labor history.

The time I spent in my local mall’s Wannado City felt like a fever dream. Kids running around roleplaying different jobs like airplane pilot and dentist and fire fighter in a playground version of the grown-up world. I was reminded of this bizarre phenomenon in a video essay by Defunctland. This episode explores the rise of the ‘kid city,’ their absurd logistics, the corporate sponsorships that helped sustain these projects, and the eventual downfall of these playsites in the Great Recession. The hilarious archival footage of kids acting out serious jobs like lawyers is worth a watch.

Lizzie Borden’s 1987 film Working Girls follows several women working their shift at a brothel in Manhattan. Set mostly within the confines of the loft, we watch as they interact with clients, chat in between sessions, and determine how they value their labor in a freelance economic system that would sooner exploit them. The women all find ways to reclaim their agency and push back against the capitalist greed of their madam, such as encouraging each other to pursue their dreams and mis-reporting sessions in the brothel’s ledger. Yet we also see how they are repeatedly disrespected as workers, being made to pay for their condoms, pressured to stay overtime, and, in the case of Black sex worker Debbie, told that her race will mean less pay than the other girls. By turning her feminist perspective to an industry that is so heavily stigmatized, policed, and rendered invisible in America, Borden tackles the dehumanization of sex workers with a deep care for their lives and their labor rights.

CLICK

Amidst the Oscar buzz, I really appreciated reading Marla Cruz’s critique of Anora in Angel Food. For all of the film’s praise for its dark comedy and charismatic acting performances, Cruz brings a different a perspective to the film’s narrative arc based on her own experience as a sex worker, finding frustration and triggers in the physically and emotionally violent ways Ani is treated throughout the film. Regarding the film’s labor critique, Cruz notes, “Hypnotized by dreams of assimilating into the capitalist class rather than toiling to entertain them, Ani miscalculates the boundaries between herself and her labor at her own peril.” Where Baker might have had opportunity for greater complexity, Cruz laments that “boundary between Ani the person and Ani the worker” is rendered inaccurately non-existent and that “Anora embodies the dehumanizing consumer fantasy of a devoted worker who loves the consumer so much she does not conceive of her servitude as labor.”

Back in 2013 for Strike!, anthropologist David Graeber coined the term “bullshit jobs” to describe a new kind of phenomena where, rather than seeing the reduction of working hours as technology advanced, we’re now taking on paid roles that appear to just take up time in our day with little meaning or contribution to a company’s operations. “How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one's job should not exist?” he writes, “How can it not create a sense of deep rage and resentment.” There’s a Kafka-esque pointlessness Graeber alludes to, one that feels especially relevant in this moment where senseless layoffs and a terrible white-collar labor market have caused many to reflect on the purpose of their work.

Anna Wiener recounted her experience working at a Silicon Valley start-up for n+1, and this piece eventually grew into her memoir, also titled Uncanny Valley. As someone who grew up witnessing the wealth of the tech boom and now its decline, I appreciate how Weiner reflects on employees’ anxieties about company culture, the precarity of their jobs, and their uncertain futures. Weiner renders the tech industry’s chaotic unprofessionalism and rampant misogyny in searing detail. “They need to know: Am I down for the cause? Because if I’m not down for the cause, it’s time,” she muses, “They will do this amicably. Of course I’m down, I say, trying not to swivel in my ergonomic chair. I care deeply about the company. I am here for it.”

At last, we conclude with a poem: “13 Questions For The Next Economy” by Susan Briante. Although originally published in 2018, there is something so prophetic about Briante’s contemplations on the current economic state of the world and the radical possibilities of working for better future in the face of system that seek to destroy us. Lately, I’ve been sitting with lines like “What revolution will my daughter feed?” Observing a sign begging for diabetes test strips and advertisements for help navigating Social Security benefits, she wonders, “Who will read / this / in the next economy, the one that comes after the one that kills us?”

Her earliest memory was not of human faces, the touch of a parent, or even the plush hand of a doll. No, her first memory of the material world would be that of a doorway. A doorway which, upon the sunlight striking its stained-glass ornamentation as her infant bundle was carried beneath it, painted her skin with a flaming dance of reds and yellows.

Despite protests from her scandalized mother, Mina continued to make, crafting worlds for herself from anything she could get her hands, finding pixies in wallpaper patterns to making meadows from landscape prints laid on the floor. Beginning with drafting classes at art schools scattered throughout Europe, the contoured flesh of the human body quickly unravel itself beneath her pen. Loy, shedding the confines of Victorian sensibilities, would strip herself not only of corsets, but do away with rigid meters and rhyme schemes of past poetics. What she came to do with the human bodies in her poetry can be described as objectification. Despite its oppressive connotations, this objectification of the painter-poet is more of a (dis)assembling of the world around her, recording the people and places through verbal reconstruction. As a woman who would later model for her male photographers and be the subject of gossip over her appearance and behavior, Loy was always aware of how her body was reduced, scrutinized. Her particular poetics, her ornamentation of language and the fragmentations of bodies (including her own), acts not only as an extension of her work in the decorative arts, but a way for her to reclaim the autonomy of her being.

Loy’s bodies are many things. A body can be a “skin-sack / in which a wanton duality / packed,” “eyes full of kohl,” a “chiffon voice” or “sailing, flailing limbs / of disequilibrium.” She sees young lovers only as their clothing “buttoned up in black / to black / cravat / to the blue powder edge dusting the yellow throat.” She cannot help but ask, “What color could have been your bodies / When last you put them away,” as though they are made of stained glass. As Loy writes, “all the virgin eyes in the world are made of glass,” one becomes unable to differentiate between the lifeless dolls in a shop at the Louvre, or a living woman. As though united in being, a pair of female patrons “see the dolls / and for a moment their eyes relax” in mutual recognition. Loy’s poems are like the reminder that your tongue is sitting in your mouth right now, providing an uncomfortable awareness, an estrangement, from one’s own skin.

Loy’s fragmentation does not just unsettle the way the reader perceives themselves. Her modernist language internalizes the cacophony of urban life in collages of free verse. Living for many years along the impoverished, crowded Bowery, Loy, ever the craftswoman, would liken the masses to jewels, “the infinite facets / of the unique unlikeness / of faces.” She collected trash to assemble collages she would later dub “refusees” — a hybrid of refuse and refugees — likened after the “shuffling shadow-bodies” of “sweat-sculptured” homeless men. One work, ​Christ on a Clothesline,​ shows the emaciated savior hanging from a tenement roof. Loy refuses to transcend into abstract holiness by forming him from detritus. Whether language on paper or scraps glued to canvas, Loy’s collaged surfaces are catalogs of fractured bodies.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that she would fall in with Filippo Marinetti and the Futurists in her earlier years. Despite their proto-fascist, hyper-masculine calls for destruction, Loy found a kinship in their kinetic paintings of machines, their automatons, their radical desires to depict the industrialized, rapidly accelerating material world (like the Futurist’s fascination with cars, her lampshades would be decorated with ship motifs). She would describe Marinetti like something factory-made, “man of absolute physical equilibrium.” While Loy acknowledges a certain frigid quality to these mechanized bodies (“human cylinders / revolving in the enervating dust”), her Feminist-Futurism is one of active female independence and ecstatic expressions of explosive sexuality: “Only the impact of lighted bodies / knocking sparks off each other / in chaos.” Loy’s objectified bodies are living products of the Universe’s fabrications, their parts laid out on the page.

One of Loy’s greatest materials as a painter-poet will always be light. Perhaps, to her, light was the flesh of the universe. Are the figures we see not, after all, just light reflected off surfaces into the lattice of our eyes? With only two books published during her lifetime, her greatest source of income came from her lampshade business. Shaped by the dazzling colors of her childhood, Loy dressed herself and her crafts with reflective surfaces, donning satin and velvet, gemstones, decorating shades with cellophane, noting in her poems how on the street, “the angle of the sun / cuts the whole lot in half.” She made lamps in the shape of swirling globes, stars like “that imperious jewellery of the Universe.” She, too, would furnish her own body with light. Writing of the pain of childbirth, she described herself as “the centre / of a circle of pain / exceeding its boundaries in every direction,” a lamp of human life and feeling radiating outwards. Here we can consider Loy’s body as a home, her interior soul furnished by the light of language. Loy’s poems, echoing the objects she made, makes us question how we furnish ourselves.

In a poem she wrote about Loy, Marianne Moore would ask, “Are these feminine arts ‘weapons or scalpels?’” For Loy, they were always both. As she worked towards documenting and interpreting the material and social conditions of the societies she was a part of. While Loy repeatedly denied being a poet, wanting to be seen as a maker first, her “experiments in junk” — collages not just of objects, but of language smashed together with great intensity — produced many bodies of work that came to fill pages and line gallery walls. Loy’s faceted identities as a female maker were the tools she needed to craft a “laboratory / of vocabulary.”

Quotes, sourced from her book ​The Lost Lunar Baedeker​ (reprinted in 1997), come from the following poems: “Songs to Joannes,” “Three Moments in Paris,” “Hot Cross Bum,” “Nancy Cunard,” “Mass-Production on 14t​h​ Street,” “On Third Avenue,” “Human Cylinders,” “Aphorisms on Futurism,” “Italian Pictures,” “Apology of Genius,” “Patruition,” “Gertrude Stein.” All historical quotations and journal entries from Loy come from Carolyn Burke’s 1996 biography, ​Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy​.

I first noticed these pops of color on the fingertips of Twin Peaks’ Shelly Johnson. Dropping out of high school to work at the Double R Diner after marrying abusive trucker Leo Johnson, Shelly has to live a very different life from the town’s other young girls (who are often seen sporting bare nails or the palest of pinks). She’s forced to grow up faster than the rest of them, more of an ‘adult,’ and expected to conform to Leo’s expectations as the attractive, young housewife. Yet, there’s also a rebelliousness to her, a willingness to fight for her own survival and the life she truly desires.

Red nails appear again and again in the larger Twin Peaks universe. You have the chipped cherry polish of Teresa Banks, a teenage drifter and sex worker whose demise at the hands of BOB/Leland Palmer we see in the 1992 prequel Fire Walk With Me. In Twin Peaks: The Return, we see middle-aged Audrey Horne caught in a kind of purgatory, all dressed up and nowhere to go trying to convince her husband to join her at The Roadhouse. After performing one final dance, it’s revealed that Audrey has been in a mental institution this entire time after her beauty salon business closed down. For these women, red reflects their attempts to assert their independence and autonomy, but also their inescapable confinement within brutal patriarchy.

Lynch populates his movies with the color red—shades of lipstick, high heels, the velvet curtains of the Black Lodge, roses, and blood. It’s a hue that symbolizes moral ambiguity, dichotomies of purity and violence, expressions of sexuality. Red represents Lynch’s fascination with 1950s-esque small town America just as much as it does the glamour of Hollywood, where the lines between fantasy and reality blur into great beauty and tremendous terror. Painted nails are fairly mundane, but their presence in Lynch’s films imbues them with this sense of the macabre as these troubled women caught up in the darkest underbellies of American life.

Perhaps the most obvious example is Rita from the 2001 neo-noir Mulholland Drive. A survivor of a car crash that left her with amnesia, Rita names herself after the iconic Rita Hayworth (known for popularizing the crimson manicure in the 1940s) and has the red nails and lipstick to match. This film wrestles with the rot at the heart of the film industry, with characters who cling to the romantic allure of Hollywood and its possibilities of self-invention. Rita/Camilla Rhodes embodies these anxieties. She is the ideal sexual fantasy of the damsel-in-distress, a vulnerable feminine object ripe for misogynistic consumption by ogling directors and film executives. Yet Rita/Camilla’s red manicure disappears when we emerge from Diane Selwyn/Betty’s apparent post-breakup fantasy. She ultimately represents Diane’s failure to achieve the American dream as a movie star. She wants to be the lead of the story, but fails to ‘get the girl’ in the end as Rita/Camilla takes her film role and a new lover. Rita’s red manicure symbolizes a kind of classic Hollywood beauty that remains out of reach for the women caught up in this monstrous system of jealousy and self-destruction.

Of course, there’s Dorothy Vallens from the 1986 classic, Blue Velvet. She is simultaneously dangerous and in danger, a modern-day femme fatale whom Lynch reminds us is also a victim of sexual violence, an abducted mother and wife forced to perform the part of a singing seductress to evil men. Blue Velvet concerns itself with the undercurrents of toxic masculinity and gendered violence within suburbia, especially seen through Jeffrey’s entanglement with Dorothy and his drive to save her from this sadomasochistic abuse. Dorothy’s red nails are a warning about this illusion of safety, the abuse and misogyny that manifests under this facade of seductive beauty. She appears as a fantasy, but is really living a nightmare.

In the 1990 romantic comedy crime thriller Wild at Heart, Lula Pace Fortune’s red nails have a punk-ish edge. On the run with her Elvis-obsessed boyfriend Sailor, Lula’s Southern drawl and bouncy blonde pin-up model curls and cherry manicure embody a quintessentially American beauty. So much so that Barry Gifford, author of the book that Lynch adapted, described her iconic style as akin to Marilyn Monroe. It’s this very youthfulness that sparks the jealousy of her mother. Fortune hardly conforms to proper gender norms a la old Hollywood. She’s eager to rebel. She loves speed metal. She’s boldly sexual, loving, and flirtatious. She’s earnestly passionate, emotional with a naive optimism that makes her a ray of light capable of surviving this dangerous world.

Red has long been a go-to manicure color for centuries. We know that members of Chinese royalty in 3000 BC used vegetable dyes to stain their nails red. The highest-ranking women in Ancient Egyptian society also colored their finger tips red as a show of status. In America, red nail polish first became popularized in the late 1920s and the early 1930s after catching on among European socialites. With the invention of nail enamels during the Great Depression, early shades like Revlon’s Cherries in the Snow and Scarlet Slipper allowed women to imitate the manicures they saw on famous actresses from World War II onwards. This particular nail polish shade has come to be associated with sex workers, celebrities, girlbosses, rebels, and housewives.

While the trend fell out of style in the 1970s, red nail polish never truly went away. It remains a popular choice at nail salons for those seeking something bold and beautiful. We still associate it with sexuality, luxury, and confidence. It’s the color you wear when you want to make a statement, express your ferocity, or seek a certain kind of American nostalgia. A renewed fascination with this color led to the viral “Red-Nails Theory,” where a TikToker speculated that men are attracted to women with red polish because it reminds them of their mother (a chilling parallel to the villainous Frank Booth’s repeated calls of ‘Mommy!’ in Blue Velvet). While the theory itself might be some Freudian bullshit, it speaks to the color’s contradictory symbolism and its complicated associations with femininity. At times, red nails can evoke a campy, countercultural subversiveness; other times we associate it with the national decline into fascist conservatism and the return to ‘traditional’ beauty norms.

When I went to the salon shortly after Lynch’s death, I knew I wanted do something to honor his passing. Caught between my love of red, Valentine’s Day just a couple of weeks away, and my grieving of David Lynch, I ended up with a manicure that inadvertently complimented the chevron of the Black Lodge floor.

I learned afterwards that David Lynch filmed a bizarre short film for Christian Louboutin about their first shade of nail polish inspired by their iconic red soles. The bottle constructs itself from the sharpened tip of a stiletto heel. The red of the polish floats around in an orb. We see a series of images of painted hands a la Lynch’s starlets, washed out by the camera’s flash like crime scene photos. We end up in these glitchy 3D-rendered landscapes which are so absurd that I can’t help but remember the special effects of Lynch’s Dune (1984). The soundtrack is some strange stuttering deconstructed jazz. Odd, impractical, yet entrancing—just like my choice in manicure.

Writer Francesca Segal noted in a 2016 British Vogue article that “For all the timeless optimism and glossy perfection of a fresh red nail, sometimes real life intrudes.” In David Lynch’s movies, red always symbolize that intrusion, that crossing over between dreams and fantasy. On the nails of his rebellious heroines and doomed victims, red marks the spilling of blood, the vibrancy of life, the brutality of death. It is a hue so saturated and artificial it can signify health, vigor, power, seduction, exploitation, pain, suffering, and paranoia—the paradoxical dualities and contradictions at the core of his cinematic storytelling. The red nails are worn by young women donning personas and trying to grow up, as well as older, exploited women ready to fight their way out of the world’s great evils. Lynch’s women can be dangerous, but they also symbolize the danger of being women. The American dream rendered into red lacquer masking the dirt under your fingernails.

It wasn’t until I started writing this that I realized how much I did in 2024. I finished grad school, applied to do more, and got a design criticism fellowship. I also embarked on a bunch of writing projects that enabled me to interview artists I love, publish my first academic book review and journal article, get back into art criticism, and revisit my poetry practice. I learned how to crochet, got more tattoos, and picked up a new obsession with perfume along the way. I have more gratitude than I can put into words for the friends, old and new, who guided me, inspired me, and saved me from one too many bouts of burnout. Sustaining that kind of creative community feels more important than ever.

As we face a terrifying future in 2025, let’s begin the new year by taking a look back.

TOUCH

When I finished Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, I spent the rest of the afternoon in a stunned silence. Don’t be fooled by its slim page count, this compact novel takes you through nearly 75 years of history, beginning with the brutal rape and murder of a Bedouin girl by Israeli soldiers in the Negev Desert in 1949 to the present day, when a young Palestinian woman learns about her story and decides to embark on her own investigation. Shibli’s precise, unnerving prose reckons with this historical haunting, as well as constricted life under occupation as her protagonist evades Israeli travel restrictions in her journey to uncover this erased wrong.

I always include an item of clothing I loved to wear, and this year’s fave goes to the Wooly Bonnet by sønderhaus. I never thought I’d be a big wearer of pink, but this bubblegum blush tone has felt so cute since the temperature dropped and keeps me so cozy. Makes me feel like an adorable little medieval peasant-slash-Slavic-babushka.

A. Laurie Palmer’s The Lichen Museum was one of those books that completely reframed the way I thought about my academic writing. Blending her personal observations during field research with philosophical, historical, and scientific musings, Palmer invites us to pay closer attention to lichens and discover what they can teach us about adaptation, survival, and resilience. I especially love how Palmer uses the unique biology and morphology of lichens to explore alternative relations to time, economic systems of commodification and consumption, and each other.

2024 was definitely the year of the blind box for me. If you’re not familiar, blind boxes are collectible figurines. Each time you open one, it’s a mystery as to which one you’ll get. My personal favorite series is Nyota’s Fluffy Life from Pop Mart. The art style for these is so whimsical and delightful and I love how they look on my desk. These were the best motivators every time I finished a grad school deadline or writing project.

LOOK

Virginia Hanusik’s photography practice first got on my radar after I saw her document Louisiana’s bayou stilted architectures, attempts by communities to adapt to rising waters and rapid land loss. Hanusik captures the raw, precarious edges at the frontlines of the climate crisis, where built environments and changing ecosystems get all tangled up in each other. Being from Florida myself, I’m always moved by the poignant care that comes across in the composition of her scenes and the framing of her images, capturing moments, sites, and communities on the verge of disappearing.

Vues/Views by Amie Siegel was an artwork that resonated profoundly with me in 2024. Maybe I’m a little biased since this currently being exhibited at the museum I work at, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this piece since it was installed. The suspended panel presents fragments of the Zuber 1834 wallpaper Les vues d’Amérique du Nord (Views of North America) on one side and, on the other, a film that takes us to different sites where the wallpaper remains. Over the course of the movie, we observe tourists, empty rooms, and performers invited by Siegel, whose presence provide critical interventions into the colonial pastiche the wallpaper originally presented. A continuation of Siegel’s practice of revealing hidden narratives in architecture, this work grapples deeply with issues of race, privilege, class, and cultural exploitation.

And then there’s the work of design studio, Wretched Flowers. Ever since I encountered their frames inspired by Depression-era Tramp Art, I’ve been obsessed with the practice that draws from rich art histories in America and beyond. Their beaded chainmail riffs on Medieval aesthetics. They use laser-cut steel to create their ‘Crown of Thorns’ joinery. They’ve also pulled inspiration from the Met’s Japanese art collection. Archives of material culture are their opportunities for experimentation.

LISTEN

My first favorite album of the year goes to Charm by Clairo. This was what I’d put on when I’d lounge around the house all day or when I wanted to slow dance in my living room. Delightfully daydreamy and softly tender, each song feels like a little hug, enveloping you into a lovesick warmth. This is one of those albums that you should listen to from start to finish each time, but I have a few highlights: “Thank You,” “Terrapin,” “Second Nature,” and “Juna.”

Mix of the year was, without a doubt, “Iranian music by women” curated by DJs Nesa Azadikhah and AIDA for Crack Magazine. Released in 2023 for International Women’s Day amid women-led, anti-government protests across the country, this mix seamlessly blends together so many different genres and performance styles to uplift the talented female artists making music in Iran and across the global diaspora.

Among the many podcasts I listened to in 2024, I still think about Blowback. With 5 seasons spanning topics like the Cuban Revolution and the Iraq War, this show explores histories of covert U.S. political and military intervention and the impact of the American empire on the world today. Each season reveals stunning histories with a ruthlessly thorough attention to research, introducing us to the behind-the-scenes actors, schemes, and conflicts that shaped the outcome of these global events.

I would be remiss if I didn’t name Magdalena Bay’s Imaginal Disk as another fave. They’ve always been so underrated, and I’m glad their weird and wonderful sound is finally getting time to shine. Like many, I got “Image” stuck in my head, and I think “She Looked Like Me!,” “Death & Romance,” and “Vampire in the Corner” are also worth checking out. Sci-fi electronica that kept me company on my daily commutes.

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If there is one recommendation you take from this newsletter, it should be to watch Scavengers Reign. This science fiction series transports us to a mysterious planet where a spaceship has crash landed. Split up across the landscape, we follow different crew members as they try to survive in this lush, yet hostile, alien ecosystem. With a Moebius-esque animation style, we get immersed into this surreal, vibrant world with some of the most beautiful visuals I’ve ever encountered on television.

While I didn’t do a whole lot of dining out in 2024, one of my most memorable meals was when I finally got to try Little Grenjai’s Krapow Smash Burger. Pad Krapow is one of my favorite Thai dishes so I absolutely ate up their Thai-American interpretation (extra runny egg and all). I went there during lunch and loved every attention to detail in the decor and ambiance. Even just writing about it now makes my mouth water.

One of the coolest events I went to last year was the preview of a new lecture performance by Mindy Seu about the history of sex on the Internet. As we all sat in the dark gallery of HEART, our faces lit up with the glow of our phone screens as we followed along with Seu’s talk through Instagram stories. From the cool experimental format to its fascinating subject matter, Seu invited us to reflect on the online sex work infrastructures that shaped the development of the early Internet and how our devices become sex toys, giving us digital access to pleasure.

If I could pick one piece of architecture I saw and loved in 2024, it would be the new offices of Socrates Sculpture Park. Located on the Queens waterfront, this structure was meant to provide new space for staff, while also channeling the outdoor museum’s unique ethos of mindful reclamation. This series of stacked shipping containers, designed by LOT-EK, add a sculptural, modern industrial edge to the park’s expansive greenscape. I especially love the diagonal window cuts along each side, balancing the need for workplace privacy with constant connection to the outside.

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As Elizabeth Goodspeed wrote for It’s Nice That, 2024 was the year of the Future Medieval. Personally, this was the aesthetic I gravitated to the most when it came to curating my style and home decor. I love how Goodspeed unpacked this graphic design trend of aesthetic Renaissance whimsy and Blackletter typography, whose intricate ornamental flourishes and calligraphic script reflect greater desire to challenge societal design norms of clean minimalism. Ye Olde Vibe Check, indeed.

If I could pick a single poem to sum up my year, it would be Ayisha Siddiqa’s “On Another Panel About Climate Change, They Ask Me To Sell The Future And All I’ve Got Is A Love Poem.” Siddiqa is a climate justice and human rights activist, known for her work consulting for the United Nations and mobilizing young people to climate action through activist training. In this moment when everything feels so bleak and it’s one horror and tragedy after another, Siddiqa’s words radiate with an endearing collective hope for the future. I still ruminate on these particular lines: “Love is still the only revenge. It grows each time the earth is set on fire.” and “What if the future is soft and revolution is so kind that there is no end to us in sight.”

It’s been a strange winter here in New York. On most days, I can get away with wearing my lightest jackets and my fewest layers. The forecast has been a volatile one: sharp plunges into throat-aching frost, afternoons of toppling wind, sunny mornings that’ll have you sweating through your jeans and turtlenecks, with random bursts of gloomy overcast in between. When the new season began, the trees on our block fought to change their leaves, dappling the sidewalk with their frustrated sheds of red and gold. Now, their bare branches stab at the sticky snowfall and the soil around their roots freckle with salt a neighbor recklessly scattered.

You would think that growing up in South Florida would make me hostile to winter, but I treasure the moment when I can finally start pulling my sweaters out of storage and begin brewing big steaming pots of tea every morning. Yet, even now in January, I still occasionally find myself wearing t-shirts and skirts, cracking a window try and cool down, and I regularly find my commute filled with people uncomfortably dressed for climates their weather forecast apps struggle to predict. I decided to make a playlist to capture the feeling of being in this peculiar season of in-betweens.

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The year’s end has become an absolute whirlwind. I’m wrapping up the first few months as a fellow at the Architectural League of New York and Urban Design Forum, in the midst of finishing my PhD applications, and have had freelance gigs galore keeping me occupied ahead of the holidays.

Now that I’m back in Florida defrosting for a little bit before I go back to the gray slush of New York, I thought I’d give you a little present of my own: a shortlist of the things that have kept me sane and entertained during this chaotic holiday season.

TOUCH

Back in November, I went with a friend to the Noguchi Museum in Queens. This is a criminally underrated museum, located in an old industrial building across the street from Isamu Noguchi’s former Long Island City studio. Its design—a mix of open-air galleries, sculpture garden, and indoor exhibition spaces—reflects the principles of organic geometry seen in Noguchi’s work. You can spend a whole contemplative afternoon meandering around and studying his sculptures. Some highlights from this visit? A wearable Spider Dress for Martha Graham’s 1946 production of Cave of the Heart and a model of Noguchi’s 1976 Playscape designed for Atlanta’s Piedmont Park.

Carnival of Souls by Marissa Zappas has become a beloved winter scent for me. A blend of mimosa, incense, saffron, and amber, it has a ghostly vintage feel that’s like a velvet dressing gown drawn over a translucent white night gown. Inspired by the 1962 horror movie of the same name, the perfume’s coconut note adds an unexpectedly cozy, warm softness to New York City’s dreariest days.

Lately, I’ve been in the mood for nostalgia dressing. Doesn’t help that every young Gen Alpha and Z on TikTok is obsessed with romanticizing the mid-2000s. After Tyler the Creator dropped his newest album, I became obsessed with tracking down an old Odd Future sweatshirt from my Huf socks Tumblr aesthetic days. I managed to track down the exact style I used to have on eBay and it felt like reuniting with an old friend. Highly recommend returning to the corny style of your teens.

I’m embarrassed to admit I hadn’t read Samuel R. Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue until it was assigned to us by author Carina del Valle Schorske for one of our fellowship meetings. Over two long essays, Delaney documents the disappearing porn theaters of 42nd Street and the patrons who frequented them. This book breaks every rule of journalistic observation, with Delaney regularly paying for sex and buying meals for his interviewees. By refusing objectivity, Delaney presents the dynamics of these marginalized spaces and his gay subjects with great care, depicting these theaters as sites for cross-cultural encounters and communal pleasure for men of all races, classes, and sexual identities. Knowing these theaters’ ultimate fate (death by gentrification), this book is a reminder to preserve queer urban histories.

LOOK

I’ve been thinking about Caleb Hahne Quintana’s paintings since I saw his piece Moments Where We Met at the High Museum. Quintana renders his subjects in hues reminiscent of dusk and sunset: soft blurs of pinks, oranges, and blues from those moments at the edge of darkness. Tender portraits often staged in vast deserts and mountainous landscapes, Quintana explores his upbringing in the Southwest and seeks to reclaim his Mexican heritage by challenging the Americanization his family endured during their migration. His scenes are nostalgic, ethereal, and subversive, with mundane memories and images of cowboy iconography rendered through a dream-like glowing haze that’s deeply sensual and marvelously transcendent.

Nina Hartmann’s work refracts archival imagery through a diagram-like geometry. Printed on wood panels, vinyl, and resin, Hartmann poetically connects images and their cultural and political meanings, reconfiguring iconographic structures of critical theory, graphic design, and mysticism through works that blur the lines between painting and sculpture. As Hartmann puts it: “Some of the ones I’ve been most interested in are repetition, allure, mysticism, redaction, suppression, and disinformation. Like how does a beautiful and seductive object affect your consideration of its legitimacy or authority? What about its composition, the quality of the photo, the colors, its level of obfuscation, and the quality of the object?”

You wouldn’t know it by just looking at photos, but Otobong Nkanga’s monumental 2021 tapestry Tied To The Other Side immerses you in its elaborately woven landscape. Her colorful, shimmering threads of gold and deep blue evoke the depths of the ocean or the celestial night sky, evoking ecological cycles of life, regeneration, and decay as your eyes move from right to left across her scene of dense vegetation. Nkanga places viewers in this moment of pure energy, drawing on humanity’s long and complicated relationship to the natural world. As she told MoMA: “Everything comes from nature.”

Cody Schulund, floral director of Fresh Cut Flowers, has been putting candles into his floral arrangements lately. I love the juxtaposition between their organic blooms and the flickering flames, especially on the videos Schulund posts on TikTok of their melting wax and elaborate sculptural presentations. That’s the beauty of floral design: elaborate botanical constructions designed for ephemeral enjoyment.

LISTEN

In the midst of my own academic career quarter life crisis. I’ve really enjoyed making my way through the Ologies archive. Hosted by science communicator Alie Ward, each episode features an interview with a expert about the subject they’re most passionate about. This show is a reminder that no scholarly niche is too small or boring, and that there’s always more for us to learn about the world by sharing what we know and speaking with one another. Don’t know where to start? I’ve personally enjoyed “Experimental Archeology” with Angelo Robledo, “Teratology” with Dr. W. Scott Poole, “Detroitology” with Aaron Foley, and “Bryology” with Robin Wall Kimmerer.

From the moment I first listened to “Jerkin’,” I knew I was going to be a fan of Amyl and the Sniffers. Hailing from Melbourne, this band has a brash punk rock song with punchy feminist lyrics to match. Each electrifying tune (see also “Chewing Gum” and “Motorbike Song”) is a glorious middle finger to the world.

For her NTS radio show Soup To Nuts, host Anu created a special episode dedicated to the late and great Ryuichi Sakamoto. This is a thoughtfully curated, touching tribute, condensing his decades-long career into a 2-hour medley of his compositions and experiments intercut with interview clips. There’s something so playful yet also deeply intimate about this mix, taking us through the polyrhythmic layering of texture and tension in electronic and acoustic sound that came to define his vibrant musical work.

Although I haven’t had time to finish watching the League of Legends show Arcane, I can’t stop listening to their soundtrack for Season 2. These are catchy songs that thrust you into the techno-political tumultuousness of this world and its cast of spirited, destructive characters. The artists on this track list include gems from Stromae, Woodkid, and Ashnikko. Great for some heroic daydreaming escapism.

LICK

Dune: Prophecy is one of those “if you know, you know” sleeper hit shows. This story takes place 10,000 years before the birth of Paul Atreides as the burgeoning Bene Gesserit seeks to expand their knowledge and authority in the Imperium. Leading the order is Valya Harkonnen, who has gone from suffering in exile with her family to a powerful political player with a superhuman knack for strategic manipulation. Along with her sister Tula (another fascinating character in her own right), we watch as their motto “Sisterhood above all” gets tested through ideological divides, murder, betrayal, and sandworm-induced sorcery. A slow start, but well worth the six-episode watch.

One publication on my radar lately has been Title, a Berlin-based magazine covering fashion, art, music, and culture. I was drawn in by their retro website design and love the thoughtful curation that goes into the release of each creative essay and trend think piece. It’s a reminder that criticism doesn’t have to be pretentious and boring.

Maybe it’s the weather that’s gotten me in a gothic mood, but I’ve loved revisiting Olivier Theyskens’s 1998 Fall RTW collection. Blending rich velvets, leathers, and antique lace, Theyskens sent models down the runway with veiled faces, embroidery that mimicked veins, pointed shoulder pads, and high necklines. Accompanied by a soundtrack featuring famous women from cinema screaming and breathing and over-powdered makeup punctuated by bright red lips, the effect was otherworldly vampiric.

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Like many of you, I saw Wicked earlier this month. Like many of you, I also read “How Does My Divorce Make You Feel?” authored by Dr. Lilly Jay, the ex-wife of movie cast member Ethan Slater. In it, Jay recounts the breakdown of her marriage during her harrowing pregnancy and her new unwanted visibility due to Slater’s on-set affair with costar Ariana Grande. In a situation that’s been plagued by speculation for months, Jay chooses not to play into celebrity gossip, opting instead to focus on her experience as a mental health professional blindsided by a sudden divorce and inescapable movie promotion featuring her ex’s mistress. Jay grapples with losing one’s privacy, realizing your high school sweetheart was no longer the man you married, and finding peace and comfort in her newborn son. I’ve been ruminating on this particular passage: “Some of what you loved most about your partner was actually your own goodness reflected back to you; it’s yours to keep and carry forward.”

I’ll end with a piece fitting for my mood during this current political climate: “Poem in the Shape of the Poet Beating Henry Kissinger to Death with Their Bare Hands.” Its title comes from Anthony Bourdain writing about his experience visiting Cambodia. I love how the poem’s form literally mimics this act of fury and outrage, mirrored by the actual content of its text. In a time when we continue to bear witness to violence (ongoing, intergenerational, systemic, inescapable), it’s okay to sit in those feelings of anger, talk about it, and turn it into actions of solidarity and resistance.

I don’t have a particularly large perfume collection, preferring to sniff rather than shop around. But I do like to keep track of my 'to-smell’ list of fragrances and brands I want to try on my Notes app. It’s a long, disorganized list, but one that continues to come in handy when I stop by perfume stores or get lost in the chaos of having too many products in my shopping cart. Exploring my relationship to fragrance has also required confronting my relationship to consumption, especially as I figure out which scents I want to add to my vanity or spend more time with, and which ones I’d rather just get a whiff of every once and a while or pass along to a friend.

Here are some fun smells and brands that I’ve been dying to try or totally fascinated with lately. Who knows, maybe you’ll find something to add to your own wish list.

Listen, there’s nothing more than I want than to smell like a gothic Victorian beauty getting lost in the dark, dank caves of an ancient vampire lair. Described as an “Eau de Macabre” I love how it opens with the delicate florals of lilac, violet, and orris before dragging you down into the wet, antique incense-y muskiness of ambergris, oud, and labadum. Never hurts to smell a little sinister.

I first discovered Thin Wild Mercury through their Los Angeles Collection over the pandemic. Since then, I’ve been dying to get my hands on their tribute to New York City’s counterculture during the 1960s and 1970s. The scents that most intrigue me? Sheep Meadow (lavender, blueberry jam, and denim), Chelsea Staircase (lemon, earl grey, sunflowers, and stretched canvas), and Girl of the Year (lipstick and leather).

I’m always on the hunt for scents I can wear while I’m writing or researching in the library, and I’ve gone through more samples of this than I can count. I would call this more of a minimal scent, but far from boring or one-dimensional. Drawing inspiration from A Room of One’s Own, this is a thoughtful, intoxicating scent with notes of pear, carrot seed, and cashmere that pairs perfectly with the smell of books.

When I go to Mexico City, I’ll definitely be stopping at one of Xinú’s beautiful stores. A coworker went to them recently per my recommendation, and I’ve been treasuring the Monstera sample they brought back as a thank you gift. The brand draws inspiration from Mexico’s native botany and scent cultures. This perfume smells like lush dankness of a jungle after a rainstorm, with moments of sudden sharpness that remind me of dirt under your fingernails and the bite of vegetal decay. A delight.

Fantôme has been on my watchlist for a long time, but this collection in particular makes me so nostalgic for the time I spent in Romania as a child. The notes for these fragrances are so wonderfully weird, like mushrooms, wolf fur, steel, beets, and hay. I’m most excited for Marya Morevna, Baba Yaga, and Koschei the Deathless.

Andrea Maack is an iconic brand. Inspired by the landscapes of Iceland and Maack’s own performance art practice, each scent is an immersive olfactory experience. Magma draws its power from the island’s volcanic activity, warm and smoldering with saffron, rose, myrrh, patchouli, suede, and tonka bean. Where Magma is more bodily, Craft is pure atmosphere. In my quest to find church-like scents, this one ticks the box with its blend of cedar wood, aldehydes, and metal. It smells like sitting in the pews and watching snow fall through the stained glass. Witchy and wonderful.

I currently have a solid of this one, but I’m eager to take the plunge and splurge on an extrait. Calle Ocho was the gourmand that made me enjoy gourmands again (no joke). Cinnamon, rum, chocolate, tonka bean, jasmine, and tobacco leaf? Warmly nostalgic and richly sophisticated, it reminds me of the excitement of going to Miami as a kid.

has totally influenced me to trying out SYD Botanica. I love how each sample comes with an illustrated card, connecting the fragrance notes to the sensory experience of each perfume. All of them sound great, but I’ll shout out the ones I’m most eager to sniff: Wavey Tulip, Butterfly Tamer, Meteorite, and Liminal Creatures.

Do you ever have a perfume that comes into your life for a brief moment and then you keep thinking about it long after its finished? That’s how I feel about Orris Tattoo. I want this to become my rotting in bed signature scent. It’s a cool, powdery ode to iris, one that sits so softly and intimately on the skin. While I usually gravitate to scents that feel like a sucker punch, sometimes I crave a little ethereal softness.

Two amazing scents with two completely different vibes: The Point will have you smelling like a shipwreck washed up on shore or an ancient sea creature emerging from the ocean’s abyssal depths. Mineralic and ever-so-slightly fishy. With The Candlestick is like “Hark! Who goes there?” wandering around a haunted castle in fragrance form. Cherry communion wine and melted wax. For the days when I want to pick between smelling like a science fiction story or a gothic horror novel.

D. Grayi is a really exciting Vietnamese American fragrance house known for their fun interpretations of Asian foods (like Jasmine Rice and Pandan) and their playful series of cat-themed perfumes (like Matcha Cat, Low Carb Cat, and Black Cat). Strawberry Support was originally inspired by picking strawberries in Tokyo, but has since evolved to honor Gaza’s rich history of strawberry cultivation and the land’s ongoing genocidal devastation. Proceeds go to the Palestine Children Relief Fund.

Amphora has quickly become one of my favorite brands and I can’t wait to upgrade my little samples into full-sized bottles. Primal Yell’s blend of cherry, hot iron, rose, and vetiver always has me feeling feral. Baby Boy takes you on a journey, from its sweet opening of grape juice and candied peach into civet (my favorite funky musk).

I tried French Poetry on a whim at Stele a few months ago and, on the entire commute home, I couldn’t stop sneaking whiffs of my wrist. This perfume smells like romanticized heartbreak: long afternoons at an outdoor cafe spent hunched over a notebook sipping coffee and smoking cigarettes contemplatively.

While I’ve smelled this before in candle form, I can’t wait to wear this on my skin. The citrus notes of lemon, mandarin, and orange flower meet plum, basil, and cardamom to tell a nostalgic story of making flower crowns and running through open fields.

I’ll admit it, I’ve fallen for the hype around this collection after I’ve seen so many reviews on Perfumetok. I personally want to get my hands on this because I’d like to be transported back to my first trip to Japan I did last year. D’Annam first made a big splash with Vietnam-inspired scents, and I’m curious how these will compare. Tokyo Nights, Matcha Soft Serve, Arashiyama, and Moonlight Samurai intrigue me most.

Listen, I love a good horse girl perfume. Something that captures the feeling of equestrian joy and power. Epona fully commits to the vibe with a horse skin accord and notes of leather, saddle soap, and green petitgrain. Named after the perfumer’s horse, this is long trail rides through sweet grazing meadows under a clear blue sky.

Elorea is already responsible for my go-to vacation scent. If I’m going to add another one to my collection, it will definitely be this fragrance inspired by Korean fermented sauces. There’s something so cozy and comforting about its notes of jinjang, soybean, charcoal, ylang ylang, and petrichor. Pair this with a read of Crying In H Mart.

Honestly, I want to try all of Pearfat’s offerings, but their discovery kit makes for a great introduction to the brand. Every scent has such a strong, exciting concept and a willingness to play with experimental notes and whimsical accords. My most desired ones are Big Floppy Flowers, Stomped on Bed of Lettuce, and Multiball.

For the entire time I had a sample of Tuberose Tantra, I never stopped getting compliments. I wasn’t super familiar with tuberose when I first tried this, but it’s still my favorite interpretation of the note. There’s ginger, clove, and patchouli too that wraps you up in a sensual, ethereal cloud of blooming florals.

Byredo’s prices make me wince (and they don’t offer this in travel size), but I have yet to find a dupe that captures this scent’s unique essence. Academically androgynous, the mix of plum, cinnamon, leather, violet, birch, and vanilla keep things woody, yet warm. This smells like carved antique furniture, aged paper, and a cluttered desk.

Perfumes inspired by dance music history? I’m sold. Gillie, a DJ and a Chicago native, started making perfume during the pandemic when his gigs dried up, and he quickly developed a cult following. While his newest release Jazz looks like a lot of fun, I’m so curious about Techno’s evocation of Detroit in the 1980s, Disco’s electric 1970s celebration, and House’s ode to Chicago’s ‘80s underground scene.

Earlier this week, Urban Omnibus published excerpts from our first writing assignment. We were tasked to take a walk around our respective neighborhoods and reflect on what we encountered on our strolls around the block. The endeavor was framed as “criticism as an act of love,” a practice of experiencing, discoursing, and sense-making rooted within relations of care and connection to a particular place.

As we embark on the holiday season, many of us are wrestling with the idea of home and all of its tangible and emotional complexities. In light of this, I’ve decided to publish publishing the full piece I wrote here. I hope you’ll join me as I share what I noticed about my beloved little slice of Brooklyn living on Kosciuszko Street.

When a single heavy rainstorm has the potential to bring New York City to a standstill, Kosciuszko Street offers a different kind of flow. Sitting inland at around 14 to 16 meters above sea level, this neighborhood has not dealt with the same anxieties of rising waters and flash flooding that’s overwhelmed its coastal and low-lying counterparts. Kosciuszko Street sits on a high ground that’s become especially desirable in this present moment of climate crisis.

“How do you pronounce it?” The river of letters always tumbles out, from the bureaucratic green of street signs, in responses to taxi drivers looking for directions, spilling across the 10-block strip that runs from the very outer edges of Clinton Hill eastwards to the beginning of Bushwick. Attempts to sound out the peculiar combination of consonants usually lead to two variations: “Co-shoe-sco” and “Cah-si-ah-sco.” Pronunciation gradually smoothes out on the tongue and jaw with a fluid ease.

Entering onto the street from Bedford Avenue often requires a careful dance over a miniature tributary of viscous, pungent liquids leaking from the rusted dumpsters of the grocery store around the corner. There’s the gay bar that opened a couple of years ago, where one sees the sticky chaos of broken cocktail glasses and polychromatic sprays of vomit from the night before. The daycare next door that washes away flurries of chalk art with frothing bucketfuls of mop water. Further still, the auto body shop that lets wiper fluid and oil bloom across the asphalt.

When it rains, the temporal torrents along the curbside recall the moats of the street’s namesake, Thaddeus Kościuszko. A Revolutionary War-era military engineer known for incorporating water into his fortifications, he dammed streams and dismantled bridges to block the advance of British forces and give American troops time to retreat across the Hudson River. He scouted safe passage over water crossings and established defensive lines along the banks of the Delaware.

In the hotter months, waterfalls trickle down from cheap air conditioning units, anointing the sidewalk the erosive of their mechanical comfort. There are the summer block parties, where open hydrants send a soothing iridescent mist into the air and fill kiddie pools and water guns that keep the brutal heat away. The neighbors who set up their grills on the sidewalk and pass around paper-cupped libations so cool it makes your teeth hurt. There are the basketball courts where the players of P.S. 256 send graceful arcs of sweat and steam into the air no matter the season.

When the Parks Department finally responded to queries for a sidewalk tree planting, the block welcomed Kosciuszko Street’s newest resident with regular waterings from their kitchen taps. Now, its mulched surround absorbs the excesses of what the rest of the neighborhood cannot.

The street’s other green infrastructure is a scattered patchwork. Concrete-covered infiltration basins or rain garden bioswales channel runoff through openings along the curbside or into micro-landscapes of native pollinator plants. Bright blue signs along the rain gardens’ metal fencing draw attention to their unique, beautifying presence on the street—even as their curated fissures of soil, drainage stones, and vegetation become clogged with accumulations of plastic detritus.

Continue to walk and the fluid dance continues: couples who sit on their front steps and sip their steaming coffee together before the start of the work day (or share a drink when the sun goes down). Aunties and grandmothers who gossip between sips of iced beverages and drags of their cigarettes. Old men lumbering back from the bodega with sagging bags of liter bottles. Friends welcome the weekend with uncorked bottles of wine and cans hugged by brown paper bags. In the early morning hours keepers of the Kosciuszko Community Garden maneuver their hissing hoses and watering can cascades over their carefully-tended plots.

Passing by the Kosciuszko Pool between Nostrand and Marcy Avenue, one can smell the chlorine radiating out from its monumental, sun-bleached blue. Opened as the Bedford-Stuyvesant Community Pool in 1971 (at the cost of displacing 88 families who lived on the property), the city sought to expand public access to water-based recreation through a growing network of public pools. On a summer’s day, one can hear the splashing laughter of children, the scolding of lifeguards, and the metered plunges of exercise laps. Spent swimmers trudge back towards home, leaving wet trails of flip-flop footprints and wrung out hair in their wake.

Thaddeus Kościuszko traveled hundreds of miles across the open ocean between America and Poland. Like many New Yorkers, he called several places home. One wonders if he ever traversed this piece of elevated earth that, centuries later, someone decided to paved over and name after him.

As the temperature drops, those puddles and streams are replaced with the drippings of discarded coffee, the grease and spillage from bagged takeout, and the splatters of urine from territorial dogs and humans cursing the absence of public restrooms on this mostly residential street. The sidewalk becomes an artificial hydrology of reds, greens, and blues from melted popsicles, stalactitic drips of fresh graffiti paint or scattered salt dissolving the slick of fresh fallen snow.

Did Thaddeus learn to map the contours of Brooklyn’s waterways through currents that flowed between his fingertips? Drink in the surprise of cooling rain on a hot summer day? Seek shelter from storms under the same species of trees replanted now into angular cuts of concrete? What would he have thought of the new movements of our liquid effluent? The fluidity of our lives re-engineered into dislocating rivers of drainage pooling together the excess spillages of our urban lives? On Kosciuszko Street, even the smallest trickle can become a transformative force.

Over this week, I’ve been turning to art to find moments of beauty, resilience, and resistance through this turbulence. Artists like Ana Mendieta, David Wojnarowicz, Jeffrey Gibson, Wendy Red Star, Sonya Clark, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Christine Sun Kim have lessons for us to learn and stories to tell. Even if these works were not all created in the present moment, the stories of struggle they tell and the lessons of liberation they share address feel especially urgent.

Thornton Dial, “Don't Matter How Raggly The Flag, It Still Got To Tie Us Together,” 2003

Thornton Dial was born the child of sharecroppers in Alabama, gradually becoming a painter, high construction crew member, pipe fitter and metal worker over the course of his life. In his free time, he began to make complex, bold sculptural assemblages from cloth, wood, and metal scraps he’d find, painting with abstract allegorical brushstrokes that confronted American histories of racial oppression. In his own words: “My art is the evidence of my freedom.” It’s hard not to think about the symbolic weight of flags in this present moment, but Dial’s re-interpretation provides a much-needed disruption to nationalist power through destructive entanglement.

Ana Mendieta, “Untitled (Blood Sign #2 / Body Tracks), 1974

Ana Mendieta was no stranger to using blood in her work. Its eye-catching materiality represented a number of fluid political and cultural contradictions of death, violence, and healing visceral life force. Mendieta spent much of her practice experimenting with the body through gender play and her earth-body works. The year before this piece, she staged performances in response to acts of sexual and physical brutality against women. Her body tracks are acts of visceral creation. The traces of her blood-soaked arms could represent a sprouting tree or gruesome sacrifice.

David Wojnarowicz, ““Untitled (One Day This Kid…),” 1990

I remember seeing this piece for the first time at his Whitney retrospective. Standing there, swallowed up by the portrait of David Wojnarowicz as a child, you can’t help but seek out the subject’s hopeful, smiling innocence. As you take in the words framing him, you begin to read about how the artist and AIDS activist will eventually have to confront homophobic violence, political oppression, and being socially ostracized for his sexuality. It’s an important reminder that we do not just fight for ourselves. We fight for the next generation to have a better future, too.

Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello, “Teeter-Totter Wall,” 2019

All of the anti-immigrant rhetoric thrown around this past election cycle made me incredibly nauseous. What does give me hope, however, are radical interventions like Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello’s Teeter-Totter Wall. Rael and Fratello have spent several years designing ways to challenge the oppressive, divisive violence of the border wall, and this one welcomes children on both sides of the harsh partition to connect with their separated families and play with each other. 

Jeffrey Gibson, “OUR FREEDOM IS WORTH MORE THAN OUR PAIN,” 2017

Jeffrey Gibson uses elements of Choctaw and Cherokee beading tradition to redesign garments, punching bags, flags, and wall-hangings with punchy, colorful messages of Indigenous power and cultural resistance. There is a beautiful catharsis to these provocative pieces, the reflections they incite with their sculptural title, and their authoritative assertions of Native resilience under threat of colonization and genocide.

Tabitha Arnold, “These Hands,” 2024

I first became introduced to ’s political textile art through her piece Mill Town, about the 1934 Textile Workers’ Strike. I’ve since been thinking about the tapestry she made for IBEW Local 175 ahead of a vote to unionize at a Volkswagen plant. During the work’s creation, Arnold reflected on histories of interconnected struggles for labor rights and social justice she memorialized in the piece, and got to observe the workers see themselves represented the artworks when it was unveiled. As Arnold wrote in an essay about the piece, “But the antidote to fear is solidarity.”

Tourmaline, “Salacia,” 2019

In 2019, Afrofuturist artist Tourmaline released Salacia, a short historical-fiction film set in Seneca Village. Once a thriving free Black community in the heart of Manhattan, Seneca Village was destroyed in 1855 to make way for Central Park. Tourmaline transports us back into that time with trans woman and sex worker Mary Jones as her protagonist. Jones was a real person, jailed in 1836 for stealing and quickly became a salacious tabloid sensation. Rather than centering Jones’s brutal incarceration, Tourmaline reimagines her as a resident of Seneca Village, and interweaves this story with archival footage of trans activist Sylvia Rivera. Where generations of systemic oppression aim to wipe out Black trans histories, Tourmaline seeks to develop important new intergenerational lineages. The film isn’t currently online, but you can listen to the artist talk about the film here or read about it here.

Barbara Kruger, “New York Magazine Cover, “ 2022

This piece was one of the first saw in the immediate aftermath of Roe v. Wade getting overturned. I still think about it now two years later, in the wake of traumatic stories of mothers miscarrying in hospital parking lots, some even dying under restrictive abortion bans, those crossing state lines to seek care, and pregnant people getting criminally investigated for the loss of their fetus. Barbara Kruger put this new text over her 1989 iconic work, Untitled (Your body is a battleground). In a time when rights to bodily autonomy and medical privacy are being violently ripped away, those most vulnerable will bear the brunt of the punishment and the blame.

Miguel Luciano, “Shields / Escudos,” 2020

Puerto Rican artist Miguel Luciano turned sections of decommissioned school buses into protest shields emblazoned with the black and white Resistance flag that has gained popularity on the island. Luciano’s choice of medium reflects the impacts of the territory’s ongoing fiscal crisis that has led to the closure of schools, the collapse of infrastructure, and new waves of anti-government protest. Luciano explains: “The metal bus armor that once protected children while in transit to local schools are here repurposed into protest shields to protect those fighting for the future of our children’s education, and for our right to be self-determined, and free.” 

Wendy Red Star, “The Soil You See…,” 2023

Last year, Wendy Red Star installed a sculpture on the National Mall. The piece was commissioned by Monument Lab, a public history nonprofit that reimagines monuments as opportunities to uplift values of justice, equality, and democracy. While she’s known for her photographs that challenge Indigenous stereotypes, this blood-stained fingerprint reflects Red Star’s interest in the difficult legacies of treaties Indigenous tribes signed with the American government. Tribal leaders signed these documents with their prints and Red Star inscribed this memorialized gesture with the names of several Crow nation chiefs who brokered treaties between 1825 and 1880. This sculpture was placed by the Signers of the Declaration of Independence Memorial, raising further reflections on how Native peoples have been forced into land dispossession, displacement, and assimilation.

Sonya Clark, “Unraveling (Performance),” 2015-ongoing 

Since 2015, artist Sonya Clark has invited museum visitors and gallery viewers to join her in undoing the durable cotton fibers of the Confederate flag. It is a physically and psychically challenging form of labor, with the cloth acting as a potent symbolic metaphor for the persistence of white supremacy until it becomes nothing more than piles of red, white, and blue thread. As she told the Nasher Museum, “[I’m] more interested in picking apart and undoing and understanding the fabric of our nation and trying to really understand the roots of racial injustice.”

Justin Brice Guariglia, “Climate Signals,” 2018

It was surreal to hear climate change come up so little during the election, especially after brutal hurricanes and a warm autumn affected the country. This absence reminded me of when Justin Brice Guariglia set up solar-powered LED highway signs around New York. The provocative pieces were meant to act as warnings, conversation starters, grabbing the attention of anyone passing by. Messages ranged from “Fossil Fueling Inequality” to “Climate Denial Kills.” Brice’s project continues evolving, with more eye-catching site-specific highway and marquee installations.

Christine Sun Kim, “Too Much Future,” 2017

There are two versions of Kim’s artwork: the initial charcoal sketch and the public billboard that once sat across the street from the Whitney. A deaf visual artist, Christine Sun Kim is known for her practice that merges ASL with musical notation and bodily gesture. Created in a tumultuous political climate, Kim emphasizes this sense of uncertainty by thickening the normally thin line that represents the sign for “future” and re-shaping it to mimic the hand movement. In a later interview, Kim noted, “When thinking about deafness and/or disability, this 'struggle' is a social construct. It is other people that make us have barriers and face issues.” How can we confront these obstacles and imagine alternative, more inclusive futures?

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Forbidden Colors,” 1988

Known for his heart-wrenching paired sculptures of queer love and grief, this under-discussed Felix Gonzalez-Torres unfortunately still retains its relevance. At the height of the AIDS crisis, Gonzalez-Torres drew connections between the censorship and stigmatization of gay communities and the Israeli military’s ban on the colors of the Palestinian flag. In the artist’s words: “This work is about my exclusion from the circle of power where social and cultural values are elaborated and about my rejection of the imposed and established order.” I’m reminded of the jarring moment outside the DNC where attendees plugged their ears to avoid hearing protestors read the names of dead Gazans and when a Muslim speaker was ultimately prevented from giving a speech at the convention. I am thinking about how Gonzalez-Torres refused the complicity of silence then, and how we should continue to refuse it now.

Firelei Báez, “On rest and resistance, Because we love you (to all those stolen from among us),” 2020

I’ve been thinking about this Firelei Báez painting since I first saw it at the ICA Boston earlier this year. This piece embodies the current moment for me, a time for us to care for ourselves while also not losing sight of the political and economic devastation looming ahead. Recently, my social media feeds have been full of people sharing passages from the Octavia Butler book Báez’s subject is reading and identifying parallels between the 1993 sci-fi dystopia and today’s turbulent racial division. In a time when we’re all burnt out, resting feels like a radical political act.

I’ve been thinking water lately. How it pools, soaks, floods, and flows. It is a force that cleans, corrodes, contaminates. Gives you life in one moment. Drowns you the next. 

As summer gradually bled into fall, I found myself contending with this liquidity. My family and I were on a road trip through the South and, after stopping at Atlanta and its famous aquarium, we found ourselves caught up in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene with washed out roads and the complete absence of water (save for some extra bottles we packed for the long drive). This year’s hurricane season was a fluidly brutal dance of shifting storm paths, great swells of storm surges, ceaseless rain, and reignited discussions of climate adaptation. I’ve also spent hours swimming laps at my local community pool this year until, exhausted and sunburnt, I’d make my way home, leaving a trail of wet flip-flop footprints and wrung out chlorine water in my wake. There’s the leak in our building’s hallway that leaves behind tiny puddles every time it rains. Rivers of smelly ooze from ripped trash bags on the sidewalk. The sticky spill of cocktails on a night out. Splattered drippings from cheap air conditioner window units. The steaming coffee and tea I consume morning and evening. Once I noticed, I couldn’t ignore it—whether the delicate beads of blood on a nicked finger or the slick gloss of wet graffiti paint I pass by on my commute. 

At a recent talk I went to about coastal resiliency on the 15th anniversary of Hurricane Sandy and the influential MoMA exhibition Rising Currents, one of the architects posed this question: “What happens when you go to the water rather than retreat?”

For this newsletter, some reflections on fluidity—from exploring the materiality of this state of matter and the complex hydrological systems that sustain us to diving into waterlogged histories and the dynamic flow of being and surviving in the world.

TOUCH

No book has haunted me in recent years quite like Julia Armfield's Our Wives Under The Sea. This eerie tale (of a deep-sea researcher who suddenly returns home after she went missing on a submarine expedition) dances between the genres of the Gothic, queer romance, eco-horror, magical realism, and grief fiction. I don't want to give too much away, but I remember feeling so profoundly thirsty, yet also slick and waterlogged as I took in Armfield's surreal prose—a testament to its fluid power.

Described as “a cup of jasmine tea, brewed in ocean water,” The Point by Clue Perfumery is the most interesting subversion of marine scents I’ve encountered in fragrance. When we think of aquatics, we think of something fresh, blue, oftentimes more masculine. This blend of notes includes elements like crushed porcelain and wet sand, resulting in an androgynous scent that’s more like a briny encrusted shipwreck than your standard clean cologne. Bright and mineralic, it reminds me of that brief moment of calm when you dive under the frothy tumble of ocean waves.

Last year, I had the chance to attend a dress rehearsal for Newtown Odyssey, a contemporary opera about and set on Newtown Creek. For those unfamiliar, Newtown Creek is a 4-mile waterway between Brooklyn and Queens that has been used as an industrious port for hundreds of years. Yet generations of oil spills, metal and chemical dumping, and sewage runoff from the refineries and factories along its shores have left it so contaminated that it’s been designated a Superfund Site. When we think about climate change storytelling, we usually think of documentaries or news reports, but opera proved to be a compelling medium for telling the story of this creek, its human and non-human inhabitants, and the pressures of gentrification and clean-up shaping the composition of its water. I also loved that the Newtown Creek Alliance did a presentation beforehand (with a tank of water from the creek itself).

Duck: Two Years In The Oil Sands is a graphic memoir about Kate Beaton’s experience working in Canada's fossil fuel industry. Beaton's narrative is loaded with tensions: her struggle to sympathize with her fellow workers while also becoming the victim of sexual violence amidst this predominantly male workforce; trying to survive financially as a young person saddled with student loan debt and few job prospects while also wrestling with the morality of working at a place that is actively decimating Canada's landscape; becoming a migrant worker drifting from temporary oil field camps while also witnessing the industry's displacement of First Nations communities. Oil itself appears very little in Beaton's story, but it doesn't really need to. Beaton grapples, instead, with the undercurrents of extractive power that sustain these harmful systems that the destroy people and ecosystems who encounter it.

LOOK

I encountered Firelei Báez’s painting Untitled (United States Marine Hospital) (2019) at her ICA Boston retrospective and it’s been on my mind since. This massive painting swallows you up with its turbulent blue as you go up close to see the details at the bottom. Báez’s sweeping brush strokes are layered over a WPA architectural diagram of the historic New Orleans hospital built to care for injured seamen. The United States Marine Hospital eventually became a psychiatric facility, and prioritized mental health treatment for victims in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Standing in front of this painting, you can’t tell if the water is the storm surge crashing over the hospital, retreating floodwaters, or a representation of New Orleanians’ collective emotional turmoil and healing trauma. Maybe the water depicts all of them.

I first saw New Public Hydrant in MoMA’s 2023 New York New Publics Show. The bright, welcoming blue of these prosthetic fire hydrant attachments made them impossible to miss as your roamed the gallery. Co-created by Tei Carpenter and Chris Woebken, this project sought to hack the city’s water infrastructure and reevaluate our relationship to this vital public utility. New York City boasts some of the best drinking water in the world, yet access to it when you’re outside can be a messy patchwork of broken fountains, sealed hydrants, and shutoff faucets. These sketches and prototypes currently include a bottle filling station, a water fountain with various heights for pets and people, a solar hot water station, and a sprinkler boombox.

Ani Liu’s 2022 sculpture Untitled (Feeding Through Space and Time) is an artwork that is in constant motion, circulating 5.85 gallons of synthetic milk across a network of tubes programmed to the rhythm of Liu’s own breast pump. The work (whose liquid quantity equalled the amount of milk Liu produced each month) came out of her experience trying to balance re-entering the labor force with the demands of her maternal care work. Liu uses these circuitous rivers to wrestle with the invisible labor of motherhood as well as the intimate relational tensions of the biological and the mechanical that emerged between herself, her child, and her machine. A great addition in the impactful lineage of breast milk as artistic medium.

LISTEN

At just 10 episodes long, Scaffold’s audio series Power & Public Space remains one of my favorites. A personal highlight is their interview with artist Lauren Bon of Metabolic Studio about her project Bending The River. Bon seeks to divert polluted water from the Los Angeles River, remediate it, and redistribute it back into a network of green spaces to help restore the area’s original floodplain. The L.A. River is notorious for its concretized flood control design, initially built in the 1930s to send city wastewater out to the Pacific. Bon provides a vital ecological intervention through adaptive reuse infrastructure that will redirect the channel’s flow back into native wetlands and local parks, creating a healthier, more sustainable relationship to urban waterways. I highly suggest pairing this discussion of Bon’s creative vision with recent updates of the project’s construction to see how it has grown.

Addison Rae’s “Aquamarine” is an absolute gem of a pop song—and one that’s been stuck in my head since it dropped a week ago. Rae’s iridescent vocals and breathy lyrics like “Swimming in the sea with the salt in my hair / Kissed by the sun, it’s a love affair / Heart of the ocean around my neck / I don’t have to say it, you know what’s next” evoke a nostalgia for the dreamy mermaid-themed imagery we all reblogged as teens on Tumblr. I remain forever fascinated by Rae’s career trajectory from cringey viral TikTok dance star to cool girl pop princess. 

Depending on where you live, how you get and consume water usually means either going to the tap to refill your glasses or using water bottles and gallon jugs to quench your thirst. Food science podcast Gastropod dove into this history of personal hydration with a look over the ongoing fight between bottles and tap. What seems like a straightforward journey into bottling water for the personal convenience of portability ends up becoming a much more complicated tale of corporate greed, unsustainable consumption, the invention of PET plastics, and the environmental cost of privatizing a valuable natural resource and selling it back to us.

A while back I listened to a phenomenal interview Outside/In did with science writer Sabrina Imbler about their book How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures. Growing up on the coast of Florida I always knew the ocean was a diverse, strange place, but Imbler invites us to find a queer kinship with these norm-defying undersea organisms. The conversation moves from Imbler’s own discoveries (like finding jellyfish while with a trans surf club on Rockaway Beach) to bigger reflections on how we can evolve science journalism to include dynamic insights from lived experiences.

LICK

Murina (2021) is a tense coming-of-age story set on the isolated, rocky islands of the Adriatic Sea. It follows Julija, a young girl with a passion for spearfishing, as she tries to extricate herself from the suffocating control of her father. When an old family friend comes for the weekend with the promise of buying their land and turning into a luxury resort, Julija begins to clash with her parents over their conflicting desires for her future. The film uses the rich blue water and harsh landscape of Croatia’s Adriatic as an extension of Julija’s psyche, a place where she can find escape, empowerment, and freedom amidst her imprisonment in paradise.

Artist and architecture researcher Imani Jacqueline Brown’s fluid practice seeks to untangle the continuums of extractivism—spanning centuries of slavery, genocide, settler-colonialism, and fossil fuel production—in order to drive us to realize futures of repair, resistance, and collective liberation. One of my favorite projects of hers is Follow The Oil. Users can explore Brown’s maps documenting Louisiana’s oil and gas infrastructure with permit data taken from the Department of Natural Resources or learn about this polluted coastal history by following the path of a single pipeline.

Sound artist Ioanna Vreme Moser’s piece Fluid Memory (2019) is a kinetic sculpture that’s activated by saltwater. As liquids move through its glass structure, the piece is able to conform computational processes and generates patterns of flow movement as the water cycles through the system. As the salt comes into contact with copper coils, it generates sounds that reflect these rhythms of computer memory. Moser’s design draws inspiration from fluidics, a technological approach that sought to use liquid hydraulics and pneumatics to perform operations. While fluidics was popular in the 1950s, it became replaced by the electronic circuitry we know today. Moser offers us an alternative, less resource-intensive computing system where saltwater can program.

In 2003, confused attendees were shocked to find that the models for Carol Christian Poell’s SS04 show were not emerging from Milan’s alleyways or streets, but rather floating down the Naviglio Grande. Titled “Mainstream Downstream,” the presentation featured a collection soaked in the rancid, polluted water of the canal. The human models (no, they were not mannequins) kept a corpse-like stillness thanks to inflatable float supports as they went down the water. You can still find recordings of the show, and I suggest pairing it with this guide and this commemorative article.

CLICK

Walking around New York these days has me thinking of Emily Raboteau’s essay “Daylighting a Brook in the Bronx.” The five boroughs were all built on many buried creeks, streams, and lakes, but Raboteau explores one area by her neighborhood that will soon be home to one of the city’s biggest green infrastructure restoration projects. As more intense storms overwhelm our streets and sewers, Raboteau takes us on a walk to contemplate how bringing back this historic native ecosystem can usher in a new era of environmental justice after generations of harm by highway construction, redlining, asthma-inducing pollution, and the paving of green space. She writes: “The water never really went away. It still remembers where it used to be.”

Cultural historian and public servant Sergio Lopez explores the musical traditions that emerged after the devastating Great Flood of 1927 that destroyed thousands of square miles of land, killing hundreds and leaving many more displaced across the Mississippi Delta. Abandoned by the government in the wake of this horrific pain and devastation, musicians from these poor Black communities turned to song to express their traumatic experiences as refugees and remember what they lost. Lopez deftly weaves together song lyrics with historical accounts from flood victims.

Alice Towey’s short story “Dark Waters Still Flow” is told from the perspective of a sentient water treatment plant. Perhaps this is unsurprising given Towey’s background as a civil engineer specializing in water management. As NEWT regulates its everyday filtration processes, like churning digesters and sending oxygen into aeration basins, it notices things like the chill of autumn, the presence of owls and other animals along its waters, and reads poems to itself as it works. This is a delightful tale about more-than-human care and futuristic infrastructures.

There’s something so marvelous and whimsical about Amy Gerstler’s poem “Sea Foam Palace.” Here the body becomes gelatinous, porous, euphoric with sludge and slick as fleshy beings collapse and bubble into each other. I love her playful, conversation tone as she addresses her lover with an invitation for fluid mischief: “Forgive my word-churn, my / drift, the ways this text message / has gotten all frothy.”

Scent is a powerful tool. It can trigger memories and spark feelings. It transport you out of yourself, or sends you back into your body through a visceral gag or shudder. Often when I write, I find myself using scent to help map out the worlds of my poems and stories. I might smell a sample of a fragrance to help set the emotional tenor of a scene, or use them to recall certain experiences. Lately, I’ve been associating perfumes with books I’ve read, too, using the olfactory to enhance the sensorium settings and characters described by their authors. So I thought I’d share a some of my favorite compositions of impactful novels and their fragrant counterparts.

Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under The Sea is split between the perspective of a marine biologist and her wife. When the marine biologist gets stuck underwater on a submarine expedition and suddenly reappears at home, it becomes clear that she’s been changed by what she encountered in the dark oceanic depths. Clue’s The Point has this delicate, almost iridescent, mineral quality to it that reminds me of Armfield’s ghostly story. Like the insides of an oyster shell flaking off onto your fingers with its blend of jasmine, crushed porcelain, wet sand, ambergris, patchouli, and ocean water.

Dubbed a “fragrance of the night” by its creators, Diptyque’s Orphéon may have been named after a Parisian jazz club, but every time I smell its chypre arrangement of tonka been, juniper, and cedar I feel like I’m wandering around lost in a dark forest. The Secret History by Donna Tartt is a book full of little sensory details that denote the unraveling of a group of college students on their elite, private college campus in rural Vermont. One might think of fancy leather book bags, the stale paper smell of old library books, the sharp wetness of spilled ink, bacchanalian booziness, or the rasping warmth of smoked tobacco. And yet I keep thinking about what trespassed in those woods in the aftermath of a shocking murder. 

Rose petals, pepper, cashmere, amber, musk, and sandalwood. A combination that is spicy, delicious, and seductive in a way that reminds me of the protagonist in Raven Leilani’s Luster. Edie is in her twenties, works in publishing, and begins hooking up with an older man in an open marriage. She’s caught in the precariousness of early adulthood, entangled by the pressures of capitalism and the everyday cruelties of misogynoir. Fugazzi’s Cash Flower captures that sense of trying to act mature yet feeling so young (not entirely unlike trying to make it as a twenty-something in New York). A sensual and effervescent scent that’s surprisingly resilient on the skin.

Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca begins with a young newlywed’s arrival to her widowed husband’s grand estate. It is manor so grand and beautiful, yet also deeply haunted by the mistress who once roamed its halls. Blended with cardamom, lapsang souchong, tobacco, cedarwood, patchouli, and amber, I’d describe Universal Flowering’s Pleasure Portrait as having that same Gothic, romantic flair as Du Maurier’s thrilling tale. Every time I smell it, I’m wrapped in the dated beauty of a fancy fur coat.

When I think of Marianne and Connell’s relationship at the heart of Normal People, I crave a perfume that’s grounded, that finds a balance between opposing forces, and develops into beautiful complexity long after first spray. Rock River Melody by Regime Des Fleurs captures this sense of youthful, misfit androgyny through its opening burst of ivy, and bergamot, gradually giving way to something earthy and floral like wandering through rained out garden with its blend of galbanum, green sap, musk, and sandalwood. It’s an intimate act of continuous becoming. 

Andrew Joseph White’s Hell Followed With Us presents us with a devastated, monstrous post-apocalyptic world where one trans boy’s escape from a religious cult leads to a devastatingly beautiful story of queer found family. Amphora’s Primal Yell—with its notes of hot iron, bitter almond, cherry, and vetiver—captures not only the narrative’s angst and rage, but also those silly coming-of-age moments (like having a first crush and figuring out who you are) even when the world is burning around you. 

Olga Ravn’s The Employees is a strange book. Told through a series of recorded testimonies, it recalls the journey of a spaceship back to earth as its human and android crew become affected by the mysterious alien cargo they have onboard. Another 13 by Le Labo’s emphasis on synthetic animal musk, punctuated by wet and earthy notes like moss and jasmine, transports me to the sterile walls of the spacecraft and the raw emotional power of the humanoid uprising that takes place within. 

As I barreled my way through R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy War, I became engrossed in Rin’s journey, fighting her way into her country’s top military academy and gradually building her power through rage and despair as the nation falls again into a devastating war. Etat Libre D’Orange’s La Fin Du Monde opens with the playful warmth of popcorn and black pepper before gradually setting into biting notes of cumin and gunpowder with a little floral vulnerability from freesia and iris. A fascinating parallel to Rin’s growth from abused war orphan to god-like fighting force. 

Almond by Sohn Won-pyung follows a boy with alexithymia, a condition that makes it difficult to understand and feel emotions. In the wake of losing his mother to a tragic violence, alienated Yunjae gradually befriends the hotheaded bully Gon, gradually learning how to feel through their budding relationship. This book explores the coming-of-age awkwardness of adolescence and the importance of love in shaping the person we become. Escentric Molecules’s Escentric 01 is dominated by Iso E Super, a velvety woody note that often acts as a scent enhancer. Yet, like Yunjae, there’s more to this perfume than this one muted note. Lime, pink pepper, aldehydes, orris, and incense add a fresh depth to what could be a straightforward skin scent. 

When I think of the short stories in Carmen Maria Machado’s collection Her Body and Other Parties, I think of fairy tales turning sinister, monstrous women, and finding subversive power in the strange and the unsettling. Sheep’s Clothing by Henry Rose opens with a ferocious bite of pink peppercorn before gradually revealing delicately feminine notes of rose, orange flower, ambrette, and amber. It’s that kind of magical sleeper hit fragrance that catches you by surprise and defies your expectations. 

N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season is set in an apocalyptic world marked by ecological calamity. There, orogenes have the power to manipulate the energy of the earth, triggering seismic events by extracting heat from their own bodies that leave circles of frost in their wake. When thinking about this chilling tectonic power and the fracturing of earth, I find an olfactory counterpart in Pineward’s Icefall. Its frigid crispness, like waves crashing into rocks, is thanks to its notes of white grapefruit, seaweed, juniper, pine, and blue cypress, leaving you feeling metallic and glacial. 

The first time I smelled Elorea’s Jang, I immediately thought of Michelle Zauner’s poignant memoir Crying in H Mart. An exploration of Zauner’s complicated relationship with her mother, this story of grief, cultural alienation, and reconnection is charted through food. Zauner describes the meals her mother would make for her as a child, and how she sought to keep the traditions of Korean cooking alive when she became her mother’s caretaker in the last years of her battle with cancer and after her death. Composed of charcoal, jinjang soy sauce, myrrh, ylang ylang, and petrichor, Jang is an umami gourmand with a rich, nostalgically smoky body that comes alive with the vibrant, bustling energy of a family kitchen before lunchtime. 

I’ve been trying to pinpoint where my fascination with histories of perfumery and fragrance began. Perhaps as early as wandering around department stores with my mom as a little kid, sampling their inventory when my head could barely reach the top of the perfume counters. It may have been a trip to a museum, like when I went to MAD’s groundbreaking exhibition The Art of Scent—where I got to smell my way through olfactory design history through scented indents in the wall—or when I stumbled across Folie À Plusieurs’s perfume inspired by the New Museum. Since then, I got to try making fragrance and continue sharing my olfactory opinions and recommendations online.

I have been so lucky to meet many great artists and creative perfumers throughout my journey into cultural histories of olfaction, and I continue to train my nose today. For this newsletter—on a subject dear to my heart—I didn’t want to just share a shopping list and affiliate links. Instead, I hope I can bring you into this complex sensory ecosystem I’ve been immersed in, using scent to make sense of the world around me.

TOUCH

Earlier this summer, I embarked on ’s Perfumed Pages, a month-long program of creative prompts, workshops, and conversations with perfumers and fellow perfume-lovers. From July to August, we were encouraged to produce responses to a number of exercises in active smelling, sensorial immersion, and explorations into memories and feelings. I embarked on Perfumed Pages because I found myself in the classic post-graduation rut of wanting to jump back into creative, non-academic writing but feeling totally unable to actually do it. I found such a fun little community in my cohort, and I’m so grateful I got the opportunity to give feedback on work others generated over this period. I found these prompts really helped me flesh out some world-building for a science fiction short story I’ve been working about scent-making (no spoilers), giving me the experimental push I desperately needed. Can’t recommend it enough.

Of course, I had to read Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind for this month’s newsletter. It’s a cult classic among fragrance lovers for a reason. By far, some of the best descriptions about the experience of scent and the craft of perfumery I’ve encountered in literature to date. I was surprised at how satirically funny this book was throughout its brutal, grim story, with Suskind poking fun at French class hierarchies particularly in their fragrance industry. A gruesome feast for the senses.

Every once and a while, someone on the hunt for a new signature scent or a friend visiting from out-of-town will ask me where to go perfume shopping in NYC. My go-to recommendation has become Stéle. This place is so thoughtfully curated with perfume, incense, candles, and body care from an international array of indie and niche brands. Oftentimes, shopping for fragrance can feel really intimidating but I’ve found each experience to be wonderfully unpretentious and enriching with expertise about each brand’s unique storytelling and perfumery education more broadly. I highly suggest also signing up for their newsletter to catch one of their in-store events.

Hsuan L. Hsu’s The Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics explores histories of olfactory literature and art and how smell has been used as an atmospheric tool of socioeconomic oppression, environmental harm, but also as an opportunity for decolonization and political resistance. Hsu draws on perspectives from disabled, Latinx, Asian, and Indigenous scholars and artists, as well as disciplines such as critical race theory and ecocriticism to make connections between the regulation of smells and their embodied role in social marginalization. At times a dense academic book, it should be a must-read for anyone interested in the olfactory.

LOOK

Once I heard that the Met Costume Institute’s Sleeping Beauties exhibition was going to feature sensory experiences designed by olfactory artist and historian Sissel Tolaas, I knew I had to go. Since the show explores this idea of reawakening fashion through the conservation and care for delicate garments and fabrics, I was curious about scent’s role in this historical exploration. Tolaas took an unconventional approach, with olfactory displays made from scent molecules extracted from individual pieces and recreated for visitors. You had a touch-and-sniff wall that released odors, could smell the remnants of a old wearer’s perfume, and see biochemical analyses of fragrances accumulated from years of wear and storage. Rather than recreating the obvious lovely, flowery scents, I liked that most smells were odd, off-putting, and sometimes downright rancid. A reminder of finding beauty even in fashion’s decay. 

Tucked into a corner of MoMA’s contemporary art wing is Montien Boonma’s House of Hope (1996–97). Signs around the gallery acknowledge the scented artwork, but it still doesn’t prepare you for stepping into the richly spiced room. Boonma constructed thousands of prayer bead strands with herb pigments and aromatic materials from Thai medicinal practices. The immersive smell experience is designed to envelope you like a temple and other kinds of protective, holy spaces. Boonma began this piece in the wake of his wife’s death after he turned to Buddhist rituals of healing to cope with her cancer diagnosis. House of Hope invites viewers to enter, inhale, and use the experience for an intimate moment of contemplation. 

Last year, I got to see the premiere performance of artist M. Dougherty’s Odor Organ and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. This olfactory work infuses the construction of fragrance with the language and playability of a musical instrument. For those not familiar, scents are constructed from individual notes and notes are blended together to form accords (example: rose, an accord, might be comprised of base notes like ionone beta and damascenone). The Odor Organ released scents of single notes yet, when multiple keys were played together, they produced familiar scents like leather and fig. I loved how Dougherty also explained the history of natural and synthetic notes and their production in perfumery as they activated the Organ, making the science of perfumery more accessible through sonic notation.

LISTEN

Every time I tune into an episode of Smell Ya Later, I feel like I’m joining a conversation with friends. Whether they’re interviewing perfumers and frag-heads, recapping the latest scent and beauty news, or reviewing perfumes, hosts Sable Yong and Tynan Sinks always have refreshing takes on smells and their role in our culture. Rather than solely focusing on the buzziest new releases, I love how their talks explore labor issues in the industry, histories of perfumery, and intersections of gender and race in expressions of fragrance. I always leave this podcast with new scents and brands to check out. A must-listen for newbies and smell veterans alike.

 In a recent trip to D.S. & Durga, I noticed a QR code by their checkout for the first time inviting me to check out playlists inspired by their different fragrances. Smelling can often feel like a synesthetic experience, with its embodied experience enhanced by the incorporation of other senses like taste, touch, and hearing. These playlists are just that, curated sonic explorations of some of their most iconic perfumes. My personal favorites? St. Vetyver, Cowboy Grass, and I Don’t Know What. 

I couldn’t talk about the intersection of perfumes and music without acknowledging the great work of Maxwell Williams of UFO Parfums. Williams is an olfactory artist, researcher, and DJ based out of L.A. Known for his “scent raves” (where fragrances are released onto the dancefloor), Williams’s explorations at this intersection have included collaborations with artists like DJ Python and the Institute for Art and Olfaction’s Nose Music project. In 2023, Williams curated 165 BPMs, a compilation dance music album and scent that rearranges scent molecules and sound waves.

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When people asking me for perfume spots to visit in New York City, I always encourage them to step away from the usual selection of retail stores and pay a visit to Olfactory Art Keller. This contemporary art gallery is unlike others found in the city, with founder Andreas Keller focusing on showcasing olfactory artists and perfumers. Each show is a unique sensory experience, with the smells acting as creative mediums and tools for artistic exploration. In addition to regular exhibitions, Olfactory Art Keller also has great programming, like performances and workshops, that further enhances their curatorial mission to educate and experiment with fragrance.

Perfume Area, created by artists Laurel Schwulst and Sydney Shen, is a collection reviews of fragrances through brief, poetic text posts dedicated to “the savory funk of life triumphs.” Clicking through the site, you’ll come across surreal musings like “Mysteries are family” (Aesop’s Hwyl) or “This national park is confusing” (Le Labo’s Jasmin 17). My particular favorite page is their dreamy list of perfume concepts.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how smells can help orient us in the places we live and how different food cultures or environmental practices give neighborhoods unique scentscapes reflective of their residents’ history. Back in 2016, architect Annie Barrett and her research team created a scent map of Gowanus. Inspired by seeing litter when walking her dog, Barrett wanted to chart the olfactive human impact on Gowanus and its notoriously stinky, highly polluted canal. Members of her studio collected their olfactory data by sniffing over several days at different times and weather conditions to account for their subjective varied experiences. I find it very interesting how Barrett ultimately categorized these different odors, like the organic smells of Gowanus’s marshy ecosystem and their contrasts between pleasant urban smells like lumber and food and unpleasant odors like exhaust, metal, and sewage.

In my quest to find a great perfume education, the Institute for Art and Olfaction continues to be such a great resource. I cannnot recommend them enough if you’re interested in scent history or learning perfumery. They have a great selection of online courses (a personal highlight was a scent and cultural history class I took over COVID lockdown with the wonderful Nuri McBride) and in-person materials workshops in their L.A. location (only time I’ve ever been sad I don’t live in California). There’s lots of offerings for novices and experts alike and their website has so much information on suppliers, perfumers databases, and their collabs, exhibitions, podcast, annual awards, and reference library. Truly for the creative scent nerds.

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Earlier this year, Are.na and Dirt collaborated on Scent Access Memory, a series of 12 essays that explored the role of scent in how we remember, how we experience, and how we present ourselves. The project featured a manifesto, techno-poetry, a generative art project, and an interview. Subjects grappled with smelling spirtual, carcinogens, scents inspired by cities, childhood memories, meanderings through a mall, scent and illness, fragrance and death, and traces of cherry chapstick. Each is a unique response to and interpretation of the smells we wear and inhale around us.

If you’ve ever been on a dancefloor, you may have caught a glimpse of people passing small bottles with phrases like RUSH on them under their noses. You may have even gotten a whiff of what they’re inhaling: sharply chemical that gives way to a sense of giddy, light-headed warmth. Despite being such a prominent olfactory staple in queer nightlife today, I realized recently that I knew very little about the history of amyl nitrites (known, more affectionately, as poppers). Writer Annie Howard also reflected on this for Them, which led me to Adam Zmith’s book Deep Sniff. Both writers seek to unpack this scented material beyond its associations with hypermasculine gay nightlife, inviting us to consider it as a fluid olfactory tool for embodied queer liberation and subversive pleasure inherited throughout the generations.

In 1992, the legendary Brian Eno shared his thoughts about perfume and scents with Details Magazine. “Scents and Sensibility” charts his exploration into fragrance from a collection of 50 strange scents he made with his friend in college to oils collected on his travels. Eno uses his obsession with fragrance to tease out bigger self-reflections on the state of the world, on finding fluidity amidst pressures to conform to organized systems, on letting oneself get lost in the creative process. Perfumery can be an unpredictable, volatile art, as ephemeral in the air as music. I’m still ruminating on this particular passage: “And the point for me is not to expect perfumery to take its place in some nice, reliable, rational world order, but to expect everything else to become like perfume.” Paired best with his 1993 album, Neroli. 

Like other facets of the beauty industry, the fragrance world has also been grappling with issues of sustainable sourcing and ethical labor. For Atmos, explored how perfumery’s supply chains and love of natural and synthetic processes of harvesting and extraction intersects with issues of ecological crisis. By focusing on the pervasive ingredient of alcohol found in nearly every kind of fragrance, Suen sparks a fascinating (and much-needed) conversation about brand accountability, controlling greenhouse gas emissions, and thoughtful consumption.

I’m still trying to make sense of Heather Warren-Crow’s prose poem “Automatic Teller, 2010.” Warren-Crow recounts fascinating attempts at the conversation of ATMs into machines capable of dispensing fragrance. In a time when our economy can feel so abstracted from our daily lives (just numbers and graphs on our screens), Warren-Crow’s fragrance management system distributes ephemeral, yet vibrant, sensory experiences that brings users back into embodied feeling. Warren-Crow writes: “Fragrance is an active countermeasure to the injury of national currency.”

In one of her iconic journal entries, science fiction writer Octavia Butler declared herself a “WORDWEAVER / WORLDMAKER.” I’ve always been envious of people who can knit and crochet. There’s something utterly marvelous about watching the choreographed movement of hooks and needles, the rhythmic swing of arms pulling yarn across a flat knitting machine, a spool’s careful unraveling. These crafts have their own poetic language, manifested in the geometric designs of punch cards or the abbreviated sets of letters and numbers found on patterns. Weaving is another world of its own with looms that take up a whole room, be the size of your palm for darning, or anchored to the body, raising its warp and weft from floor to ceiling with varying degrees of manual labor and automation.

Within these choreographies of making, stories are spun, songs are plucked from threads, knowledge is shared, community is made. We become bound not only to each other, but to legacies of craft that go back generations. Entwined between hands and machines, these wondrous arts of making have crossed tremendous distances of space and time through the simple twist, tuck, and knot of a single piece string.

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Earlier this month, I got the chance to experience the work of textile artist Cassandra Mayela Allen. Her show at Olympia, Desahogando: Undrowning, features an array of weavings and quilts that map out the experiences of New York City’s migrant communities amidst socioeconomic precarity and threats of further displacement under gentrification. I was struck in particular by Color Studies I (2022) and June (2024), each created from up-cycled clothing donated to Mayela Allen by fellow Venezuelan migrants. The closer you look, the more you find recognizable symbols of the weaving’s past material lives: a tag from a pair of Levi’s jeans, shiny strips of corduroy, and polyester patterns. Along with her hand-sewn quilts (which feature images of bodegas, barber shops, and hair braiding salons), Mayela Allen invites us to reflect on how we consume resources and find community, showing us how these textiles help preserve immigrant histories through acts of making and mending.

Needlebound is a zine by and for experimental fiber artists created by the brilliant knitwear designer Hayley Mortin. This interwoven collection of interviews, essays, and images with artisans and makers offers an expansive look at textile production. From artists’ soft sculptures and wearable garments to scientific experiments with bio-materials, digital tools, and wool farming, Needlebound brings together so many different perspectives on the craft, providing a valuable resource for skilled artisans and curious novices alike. In a time when our consumption of fashion and art is so influenced by the fleeting whims of social media, I appreciated how many of these stories invited readers to slow down, to think of knitting as a process more than a finished product, and to find community in these acts of creativity.

Created as as an exhibition catalog, I Weave What I Have Seen: The War Rugs of Afghanistan analyzes 40 rugs produced by Afghan weavers in reaction to the Soviet invasion of the 1970s and 80s and the United States invasion in 2001. They incorporated symbols of modern warfare into traditional Afghan iconography as armed conflicts devastated the country. Scenes of combat, weaponry motifs, and regional maps quickly became mass-produced for collectors and tourists. Each rug features detailed descriptions of their origins (such as the weaving family who made it) and of their rich iconography, providing much-needed analysis to items that were often seen as mere novelty souvenirs. The Afghan war rugs became not only a tool for political storytelling, but a resilient way to keep these weaving traditions alive. 

Melissa Cody is a Navajo weaver whose practice that infuses traditional Diné imagery with chromatic pixelation inspired by 1980s video games. Her show, Webbed Skies, was one of the best exhibits I saw this year. Rich geometric tapestries merge traditional craft with digital technology, with particular nods to the mid-1800s Navajo Germantown weaving technique that was born from the unraveling of blanket rations during the U.S. government’s territorial expulsion. Under Cody’s hands, weaving becomes a site for cultural experimentation and reclamation. A 4th-generation weaver, I love that the curators included a display with images of Cody at her loom, along with her wooden tools and samples of her colorful synthetic-dyed yarn. 

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Ophelia Arc is a textile artist whose body work often feels more like flesh than fiber. As yarn is flayed out, bunched up, stuffed, suspended, and interlaced, it takes on a corporeal sensation, connecting the material to psychological threads of memory and trauma. Each piece has a meat-like, beautiful metabolic rot to them, suggesting cycles of unmaking, digestion, and regeneration. I could stare at them for hours (even if some are rendered so uncannily that it makes me a little squeamish. As Arc describes her process of crocheting and tapping into that muscular memory of making: “It got me thinking about the idea of a rumination loop that exists in the mind, like when you’re stuck in a thought pattern. A lot of my work applies this form of soft logic to a hard fact, and considers the paradox that happens there.”

Known as “the mother of modern weaving,” textile designer Dorothy Liebes made a name for herself thanks to fabrics she produced in collaboration with people like Frank Lloyd Wright, Doris Duke, Bonnie Cashin, and companies like American Airlines, the Plaza Hotel, and Chrysler. From wall hangings to upholstery, Liebes used weaving to reshape modern interiors, film sets, and commercial design, and was a pioneer in using synthetic threads in the post-war period. In a time when most female makers would go unnoticed and uncredited, Liebes asserted herself as a powerful weaver and a transformative force in the textile industry.

Mrinalini Mukherjee’s vibrant hemp and jute sculptures tower over you, resembling a hybrid mix of organic ecological forms and something divine-like, bridging traditional Indian craft traditions and folklore with a contemporary sensibility of abstract design. Some might remind you of a blooming flower, while others an estranged humanoid figure through their layered folds and twisting forms. Each is a technical marvel, created from elaborate patterns of knotting and weaving with a dimensionality Mukherjee was able to achieve without the use of a loom.

Katya Budkovskaya is a Russian textile artist who uses knitting to make glitching, kaleidoscopic tapestries. Budkovskaya’s design process is so fascinating to me: each pattern sketch is first dropped into Photoshop where painted pixels are gradually built up to represent every stitch she will make. Her color palettes skew from pastel retro nostalgia to neon, eye-straining hues, creating fascinating optical illusions with light and shape that remind me of broken computer screens and heat maps held together by the soft weight of yarn fibers.

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Immaterial by the Metropolitan Museum of Art explores a single material’s role across thousands of years of art history. I really enjoyed their episode on linen, a ubiquitous fabric that many of us are reaching for now during the summer. With contributions by curators, cultural critics, and fashion historians, we explore how flaxseed is woven into this material and its many uses over the years from Egyptian burial offerings to expressions of masculinity and colonial power in modern suiting.

A.G. Cook’s track “The Weave” off his recent album Britpop is a synth-y spindle of a song. There’s a soft rhythmic magic to its rolling melody and repetitive lyrics. It reminds me of working thread in between the warp of a loom, gradually building up to the image of something beautiful and whole.

Every year, Planet Money embarks on their ‘Summer School’ series, looking at moments in economic history that have shaped how we live today. Their episode, “The golden age of labor and looms,” begins in 1348 with the Black Death and eventually takes us to the Industrial Revolution to show how textile workers’ protests transformed labor power in response to the rise of new manufacturing technologies.

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Recently, I attended a talk through the Tatter Textile Library on the topic of ‘Queering The Loom.’ The event featured three presentations by weavers John Paul Morabito, Indira Allegra, and Jovencio de la Paz on their creative practices. I love how each of them discussed weaving as an embodied act, one capable of untangling binaries and generating expressions of queer time, memory, and thinking through the use of beading, performance, and experiments with digital software. Tatter is a fantastic resource if you’re looking to learn about textile crafts, with hands-on workshops here in Brooklyn and a great accessible schedule of virtual lectures.

I have no idea how I’ll get there, but I absolutely need to visit the World Famous Crochet Museum in Joshua Tree. This tiny building hosts a treasure trove of handmade soft sculptures and whimsical pieces collected over the years by its founder Shari Elf (who has yet to learn how to knit and crochet herself). A delightful odd archive of woven pieces smack dab in the middle of the desert.

@knitmombethcollaborating with nature is my happy place. still waiting on one more sample to cure, then round 3.5 of develeopment for the homegrown root biotextile will be all wrapped up. in the meantime enjoy the first sample from the round, its my favourite one yet by far. #sustainablefashion #biomaterials #soiltosoil #yarntok #biodesign #biotextiles #bioplastic #roots

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Beth Williams is a UK-based textile artist known for growing bio-yarn and textiles from algae and plants. This is some of the coolest experimental work with fiber arts I’ve ever seen, and I love how Williams meticulously documents the ephemeral process from first bloom to their spinning and knitting to decay. While pieces might only be worn or handled for a brief moment, they are thoughtfully produced and deeply cared for, evoking profound questions about sustainability and fashion consumption. Williams has also talked about how their environmental knitting practice also allows them to explore questions of accessibility and disability.

El Anatsui has gained significant acclaim over the years for his bottle-top installations, made out of aluminum caps and foil he first found when working as a professor in Nigeria. His abstract pieces are instantly recognizable thanks to their metallic, iridescent sheen. This video from Art21 documents Anatsui’s process and the tremendous labor that goes into creating these recycled compositions. 

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Did you know that female weavers were employed by NASA software engineer Margaret Hamilton to make computer memory storage cores for the Apollo missions? I recently ended up in a rabbit hole about this forgotten history. Although we don’t know the names of these women, we know that they were chosen for their dexterity with this hardware and ability to recall what each line of computer code did in order to document their threading and remove errors. Hamilton (the “rope mother”) dubbed these core memory weavers as LOLs (“little old ladies”). Thanks to interventions by feminist textile artists, their legacy of technoscientific work persists today.

Back in 2022, archeologist Michèle Hayeur Smith spoke with Scientific American about her research findings that revealed the vital role of women’s weaving and textile production in the growth and expansion of Viking society. Smith gradually pieced together these histories from fabric fragments in museum collections and quickly learned how their labor at the looms contributed to the survival of their communities in harsh climates and garnered power as social and economic currency. I also appreciate that Smith (a knitter herself) often demonstrates how their looms were used, giving embodied life to the Viking women’s traditional craft.

In her piece, “At The Loom,” poet Linda Pastan invites us to come sit with her, to allow ourselves to feel the sensation of weaving through the plucking of threads, and the choreography of the shuttle, finding a fibrous musicality along the way. Pastan balances transporting us back into histories of textile creation with keeping us rooted in this intimate moment of making. Her call to create with care: “You weave a spell, / I wear it on my back, / and though the chilly stars / go bone naked / we are clothed.”

Traditionally associated with literary craft—particularly science fiction and fantasy genres—this concept has permeated into other media like TV, film, video games, and even theme park experiences. World-building demands holistic planning and realization. Michel notes that it “expects the author to have ‘rules’ that are ‘logically’ followed to their conclusions.” This means developing specific technologies, ecologies, languages, human and non-human communities, historic traditions, and religious systems. The inclusion of little details and aesthetic minutes can often make or break the realization of a constructed world. Some are obvious (like inventing your own word for ‘champagne’ since France shouldn’t exist in your fantastical realm), while others might be more subtle (like inventing manners of speaking and dressing oneself within the confines of this setting). By establishing these spatiotemporal, political, cultural, and psychological parameters, you create a setting that scaffolds the narrative of your story, gives something for characters to navigate through and react to and for the reader or viewer or consumer to reflect on their own realities. 

When it comes to the world-building of science fiction and fantasy stories, we tend to assume that there’s an element of escapism built into it. Even if the setting isn’t exactly a peaceful break from reality (think: post-apocalyptic wastelands and war-torn kingdoms), really good world-building sucks you into an alternative world and gets you so immersed that you can pause thinking about your own life. But I find that’s rarely the case. The most effective world-building I’ve encountered doesn’t just handle little details with great thoughtfulness and care for its story; it actively reminds me to look at what’s happening in my own world, to draw parallels and make connections to these fantastical settings and present-day struggles and past histories.

Science fiction and fantasy have always been fundamentally political genres, serving as opportunities to explore ideologies and enact thought experiments with rearrangements and inventions of new social, economic, spiritual, and political systems. Far from neutral genres, SF&F grew out of and in response to histories of colonialism and imperialism, often wielded as a tool for propaganda. Yet world-building within these genres also gives us an opportunity to dismantle the systems that be, to find resistance through imagination, to incite social critique and critical self-reflection. As Ursula K. Le Guin once mused, “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings…Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”

World-building has been on my mind lately. How can it not be with the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the political chaos here in the States? Amidst horrific reports that rebuilding Gaza will take decades and billions of dollars, the devastation of entire families and their histories wiped out in relentless bombing and sniping, testimonies of navigating an apartheid state not designed for you (something I witnessed firsthand navigating checkpoints to enter the West Bank and Occupied East Jerusalem in 2016), I’ve been thinking about the work of Palestinian science fiction writers.

Back in 2019, the short story collection Palestine + 100 invited authors to imagine what Palestine would look like in the year 2048 (100 years after the Nakba), while Reworlding Ramallah curated stories created during science fiction writing workshops at Disarming Design. The forthcoming speculative fiction anthology, Thyme Travellers, also seeks to bring together voices from across the Palestinian diaspora, infusing futuristic worlds and alternate realities with Palestinian folklore and history.

The writing of queer Palestinian performance artist Fargo Tbakhi, in particular, has taken on a profound new poignancy for me over these past 10 months. I recently revisited Tbakhi’s story “12 Words Interrupted By The Drone” (published in 2020) and, as I read about the military machine encountering a young boy on its journeys of destruction, I thought about the “zanana” or the terrorizing buzz of Israeli drones that have haunted the children of Gaza since childhood. In a poem for Strange Horizons’ 2021 Palestine Special Issue, Tbakhi declares: “PALESTINE IS A DREAM OF THE FUTURE! / FUTURE IS A PALESTINE OF THE DREAMING!” Will we join him in this radical act of resistance through imagination?

Beyond the page, I’ve been reflecting on Larissa Sansour’s speculative creative practice. Sansour uses the storytelling tools of science fiction to grapple with Palestinian histories of displacement and erasure, while also inviting us to dream of reunification and sovereignty through the creation of alternative homelands. I think about A Space Exodus (2009) and how it imagines the first Palestinian in space through the aesthetics of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, taking a politically playful look at space exploration as both a symbol of human progress and a problematic neocolonial venture. Archeology in Absentia (2016) and Revisionist Production Line (2016) take up archeology as a tool and victim of warfare while also exploring its potential influences on national identity formation. Nation State (2012) offers a subversive solution to the ongoing resistance to Palestinian statehood: a single skyscraper that houses the world’s entire Palestinian community. Sansour shows us that ‘home’ isn’t just a past place or a present feeling. It is a powerful call to envision futures of belonging, to move forward as well as to return.

If world-building makes us roll our eyes, evokes images of destruction and domination, or restricts us to strict rules of regimented construction, then I propose ‘world-making’ as a way to counter this feeling of creative confinement. World-making is fluid, dynamic, and responsive to the urgency of this current political moment. It weaves, knots, entangles. World-making invites us to bind our histories and our dreams to each other, to bridge distances in a time when we have become more divided than ever.

Like many students across the country, my spring semester was shaped by the presence of campus solidarity encampments. Even in the face of angry donors, threats and acts of expulsion, withheld degrees, attacks by fellow students, and brutality inflicted by administrators and police officers alike, students from the youngest of freshman to the most senior of faculty stood their ground, demanding disclosure and divestment from the U.S. military and from companies and individuals who have been financially, culturally, and politically complicit in the ongoing occupation of Palestine and the current scholasticide in Gaza.

It was a beautiful thing to witness. These student-led encampments offered us a glimpse into a possible, improved future of higher education. Alternative forms of educational communities rose up in opposition to decades of corporatized bureaucracy and the whims of benefactors. Students and faculty pooled resources together to buy and distribute food, bail out their peers, and provide mutual aid to the campus’s most vulnerable members. There were hours for religious prayer services and free libraries, teach-ins, readings, and film screenings all with an open invitation for everyone to join, share skills, or to simply come and learn. 

As Samuel Caitlin notes, “the future of the nation itself is taken to be at stake in what happens ‘on campus.’” While others saw these solidarity encampments as a threat to the status quo, protestors took this opportunity to draw connections between the struggles in Palestine and injustices faced here. Discussions about Israel’s illegal military occupation, apartheid, human rights abuses, and flouting of international law are interwoven with reflections on America’s longstanding racial segregation, police brutality, and contemporary legacies of colonialism and military imperialism. This fight for liberation has and always will be a collective one. Students were no longer theoretically debating what a more just and equitable future might look like on their campuses and beyond. They were working together to make that better world a reality.

Palestinian SF editors Nadia Shammas and Summer Farah tell us that “the ability to imagine another world is vital to producing a better future. The ability to imagine another world is vital to processing the pains of this one.” World-making is not just about crafting something better and new, but a call to return, to reflect, to reckon with the past in order to understand our present and explore our future. 

As I was preparing this essay, I realized we had arrived at July 20th, 2024—the date that opens Octavia Butler’s 1993 apocalyptic novel Parable of the Sower. Unsurprisingly, people have a renewed interest in the book’s seemingly prophetic depictions of America’s sociopolitical collapse. Can you blame them? We’ve been witnessing a tremendous unmaking in our country: the dismantling of legal protections and of our basic human rights, the rise of fascist racist and religious extremism and the oppression that comes with it, attempts to impede democratic processes through suppression and corruption. But we forget the opening words of Butler’s fictional Earthseed ideology: “All that you touch / You Change. / All that you Change / Changes you.” Her speculative novel signals warnings, yes, but not that our doomed fate is sealed. It’s okay to feel despair about the state of our society, but world-making reminds us that what we have now is not the be all and end all. There is always more we can do to fight back and take care of each other.

In a 2022 interview, just two months before his death, writer Mike Davis posed a question and an answer: “How do people resist in the dark ages? What keeps us going, ultimately, is our love for each other, and our refusal to bow our heads, to accept the verdict, however all-powerful it seems. It’s what ordinary people have to do. You have to love each other. You have to defend each other. You have to fight.” In world-making, that form of resistance through love can take on the form of creating something new, stronger and more beautiful, and sharing with others. We have the power to decide collectively that we don’t accept this situation as it is. We deserve something better.

So go out there and make worlds. Make them powerful and beautiful and welcome to all. Make them just and kind and peaceful. Make worlds with love, fear, and compassion. Use world-making to resist through radical acts of imagination by thinking, critiquing, doing, and dreaming together.