Author: Stephanie Janssen

FERRAN ADRIA

Posted on by Stephanie Janssen

FERRAN ADRIÀ NEVER INTENDED TO BECOME A CHEF, LET ALONE ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL OF OUR TIME.

But by the time the high school dropout worked his way up from washing dishes to earn extra money as a teen to a joint chef de cuisine position at Spain’s El Bulli in 1984, Adrià had already realized “my life would revolve around the kitchen”—an understatement if ever there was one. In the decades that followed, the Catalan chef not only racked up three Michelin stars and pioneered the modernist cooking movement but also landed the now-shuttered El Bulli on the map as the world’s most celebrated restaurant. And he’s just getting started.

Adrià might not have imagined his career path, but his unique approach and dedication to his craft has been nothing if not unwavering. In 1987—the same year he became sole chef de cuisine of El Bulli—Adrià attended a cooking demonstration by Chantecler chef Jacques Maximin, who stated “creativity means not copying,” a mantra that would shape Adrià’s innovative take on cooking and become the cornerstone for his world-renowned avant-garde cuisine. Familiar dishes and their ingredients took on new textures, temperatures and forms through his groundbreaking deconstructivist methods, most famously his oft-imitated nitrogen-infused culinary foams.

“When we created the foams, no one really knew us apart from the gourmets who came to the restaurant,” says Adrià, who never imagined himself at the forefront of a culinary renaissance. “I’ve always said it, I am a cook. I don’t have an education in science, even though I’m interested in scientific processes and methods in our research. And I am not an artist, although some may have that type of emotional response you get from seeing an impactful work of art at El Bulli.”

Perched on Spain’s Costa Brava overlooking the picturesque bay of Cala Montjoi, two hours north of Barcelona, the original El Bulli was the vision of a German homeopathic doctor and his wife, who, at the turn of the ’60s, had an idea for a mini-golf installation that quickly morphed into a beachside bar and then a restaurant. In 1976 the dining destination was decorated with its first Michelin star, followed by a second in 1983. That same year, a 21-year-old Adrià, fresh from military service, arrived for a one-month internship and accepted an invitation to join the team full-time the following season. There he remained for the next 27 years, forever altering the course of gastronomical history.

Open for only six months a year from June till December, the 50-seat establishment fielded more than 2 million reservation requests per season at its zenith. For the remainder of the year, Adrià and his team channeled their efforts into inventing new culinary techniques (think spherification, which enables liquid to be shaped into flavor-packed spheres, held together by a thin gel membrane), reimagining the role of ingredients in dishes (parmesan-flavored air) and dreaming up unconventional flavor pairings (bone marrow and oysters, anyone?).

“A cook works for the end result. At El Bulli we were always interested in the result but also the process,” says Adrià, often dubbed the culinary world’s Salvador Dalí. In 1997 the trailblazing restaurant garnered its third Michelin star, and from 2006 to 2009 it held the prestigious title of the world’s best restaurant according to the widely regarded British trade publication Restaurant. Adrià’s harshest critics called his cooking pretentious and in some cases unsafe due to its chemical components.

“The biggest pressure we felt at El Bulli was the pressure we put on ourselves—to innovate to the ultimate level and always satisfy our customers,” says Adrià. And while that steadfast commitment to creativity continued to inspire Adrià to redefine gastronomical boundaries, it also led him to shuttering the restaurant in 2011. Partly inspired by a desire for more balance in his personal life, the decision was also driven by Adrià’s desire to overhaul the restaurant concept and shift his focus toward culinary research and development. No surprise from a man who’s spent his professional life experimenting with form. Now the greatest challenge of his career still lies ahead, he says.

Since El Bulli turned off its stoves, Adrià has poured his creative juices into his El Bulli Foundation, a think tank based in Barcelona. “We’re hoping [it] will be a reference for all things concerning gastronomical research,” explains Adrià. This includes Bullipedia, an all-encompassing online encyclopedia devoted to gastronomical knowledge. The motivation behind it, he says, is the same line of thinking that brought him to ending El Bulli’s phase as a restaurant—“the conviction that if we want to keep being creative we need to make a big move, change our formula and no longer investigate directly in the kitchen, as would be practical, but by getting to know the world of gastronomy.” Additional concepts he’s currently working on include El Bulli 1846, a visitor’s center featuring an exhibition and kitchen space to be erected on the grounds of the former El Bulli restaurant, and El Bulli DNA, which continues Adrià’s quest of experimentation and creativity in the kitchen out of his El Bulli Lab. “We are now dedicating ourselves to cocinar conocimiento, which is ‘to cook’ knowledge,” he explains. “In this way, the ingredients we work with are analysis, reflection, classification, order—everything applied obviously to gastronomy.”

To critics past and present, Adrià’s reaction has always been “to keep working, to carry on the projects that I believe in so much” (though his greatest critic, he says, is “without a doubt” his wife, Isabel). And though his current endeavors don’t signal his return to the helm of his own restaurant anytime soon, his work in the tiny coastal gem that rocketed him to fame is not done. “The thing I’ve missed most is getting up every morning in Cala Montjoi,” says Adrià. “But I will work in that beautiful place again.”

 

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FEDERICO PAGNETTI

Posted on by Stephanie Janssen

Growing up in Pesaro, a small seaside town on Italy’s Adriatic coast, Federico Pagnetti always dreamed of moving to the U.S. “My first visit to America was when I was 7 years old,” he recalls, “and I went to New York with my family. We spent a full month there, and I was amazed. Everything was so different from my hometown. I remember—and I probably still have somewhere—a picture I took at the very bottom of one of the World Trade Center towers, looking up. I held that childhood memory of those skyscrapers and the New York skyline in my mind, and I thought to myself, ‘One day, I want to live here.’ ” He’s since made that wish come true, only on the other side of the country: Pagnetti lives in L.A., where he’s been Citizens of Humanity’s COO since 2013.

Since he was a kid, Pagnetti’s been fascinated by understanding how things work. He spent his childhood tinkering with motors and gears—a true motorcycle obsessive, he and his friends would disassemble bikes in his garage and try to dream up ways to make them faster. “I wasn’t into fashion at all,” he admits. “I really didn’t care what I was wearing, and I didn’t know anything about jeans.” At 19, he moved to Milan to go to Bocconi University, a prestigious school, where he studied business economics, keeping one goal in mind: to travel and expand his horizons.

He got his wish when he graduated and—after a stint working at IBM—got a gig at the massive management-consulting firm Bain & Company. But his schedule was more grueling than he’d expected. “As a consultant, I traveled about five days a week,” he says. “Even though I was based in Milan, I didn’t have an apartment, because I didn’t spend any time there; I was in hotels and airplanes all week long. Luckily, my wife was patient enough to wait to see me on the weekends.” That gig also required a rigid dress code: “I wore a suit every day, like a penguin,” he laughs.

Pagnetti spent 10 years consulting with Bain, helping companies strategize and brainstorm growth opportunities, but he found himself yearning for something more. “I always wanted to work in a company that made products,” he says. “I wanted to be a part of the actual implementation of the ideas.” Finally, he got experience in fashion, via consulting jobs for designers like Valentino and Ralph Lauren. He was astounded by their creativity, and their ability to bring their ideas to the masses. “That’s when I fell in love with this industry,” he remembers.

Before Pagnetti moved to the U.S. in 2010, he’d visited several times for business and for fun. On one vacation, he and his wife did a massive month-long West Coast road trip. “We drove from San Francisco to Yosemite, Vegas, San Diego, L.A.,” he says. “We thought, ‘L.A. is nice, but maybe not the top city we’d want to live in.’ Then we moved here and we love it—we’re enjoying every day.”

Despite his change of location, Pagnetti hasn’t abandoned his first love, motorbikes. “I still go to the racetracks to ride.” He’s also a fan of a decidedly more retro pastime. “I do a lot of rollerblading on the boardwalk in Venice and Santa Monica. In Italy, I was the first one to use rollerblades, back in the ’90s. I bought them from the U.S., because they weren’t even available there. People used to stare at me and say, ‘What are you doing? Are those ski boots?’ ”

Otherwise, he spends his free hours doing a lo-fi activity that doesn’t require any equipment at all. “I love to walk, which is quite unusual in America, and especially in L.A.,” he says. “But I think it’s the best way to get familiar with your neighborhood. So I put my earbuds on, and I might walk for a full day on the weekends, looking around and taking pictures. I’m just observing normal life, and the differences between the U.S. and where I grew up. It’s funny, because while I technically grew up in Italy, after I graduated from university, I literally spent more time in other countries. So I feel more like a citizen of the world.”
 

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ALICIA KEYS

Posted on by Stephanie Janssen

HUMANITY: Your new album seems inspired by New York. Are you ever concerned with the idea that people try to regionalize your sound, your music?

ALICIA KEYS: Do you think people still do that? I think music is so homogenized now. But maybe there’s something cool about that. I actually feel like in some ways that’s changed a little bit over the years. There’s something awesome about the ability for everyone to have access to it and also something so cool about the ownership, the culture of it too. But I like that you got that from the music. That’s definitely an energy.

HUMANITY: It sounded very early-’90s New York hip-hop to me. It made me think of Nas’s album Illmatic. That’s what popped into my mind.

AK: That’s one of my favorite albums.

HUMANITY: This may sound funny but that record was sort of dreamy to me—the best word to describe it would almost be “romantic.” Different than most other hip-hop albums, you know? Being from Los Angeles, I think that record made me think, “Oh, New York is cool.”

AK: Yeah, definitely. I love that record. I was in New York, so I can’t imagine what it felt like for people who weren’t in New York, but that’s so cool that it translates regardless. “Romantic” is an ill word. I wouldn’t have thought to put that to it, but it does fit.

HUMANITY: So it’s been about four years since you last put out an album. What’s the inspiration and why so long? Why a hiatus?

AK: I never meant to take a hiatus. It wasn’t the intention. In fact, the music for this album was created so fast—the fastest I’ve ever created music before. It was like raining down every night, like storms of music was just coming out. It was crazy because I never experienced creating like that; I came in already knowing what I wanted to start to talk about. I knew the topics that I wanted to address and I knew who I wanted to assemble to help me create this very powerful sonic and lyrical journey. So everything I did was with so much intention that when the music began it made sense that it just came so fast. We did probably 30 songs in like 10 days.

So I was like this album is going to come out real quick. And then I found out that I was having a baby—my youngest, Genesis—and that put a different time spin on things. And then it became kind of an exercise in patience, and that was really important for me because it allowed me to look at the album—really look at it and live with it and then step away from it, and that was the first time I had ever been able to do that, and it’s really actually empowering because I think for me, I’m pretty much going to venture to say for our society that we’re very fast. Everything is very fast—before we even experience the one thing we’re on to what’s next, and so it was really an incredible exercise for me to be able to have that amount of patience and creating, making sure that everything was in the right space before I was ready to step back into the world.

So it wasn’t intentional and it wasn’t really meant to be a hiatus, but I guess it turned into that a little bit. I imagine a hiatus is when you’re on a beach, and I can’t recall a moment like that. But it’s definitely just the right time now regardless.

HUMANITY: When I was being played the music I was told, “You have to hear these as a body of work.” I thought that was interesting, in contrast to today, where you mostly get singles from artists. It’s kind of refreshing to actually listen to a narrative. As an artist, I’m thinking it’s got to be frustrating if people don’t take it in as it’s intended.

AK: I’ve always wanted people to hear all of my albums. I feel like they deserve to be heard all together, and I think that people actually enjoy that about my music—that they can experience the whole thing and get into it, bringing them into the world. I actually care about creating a body of work that really lives in that way. But I think people find their way to it, and there’s also interesting ways now to do things that allow people to hear it the way it was intended. You’ve just got to think about it a little bit differently.

HUMANITY: When you’re making music, who do you go to for perspective? Who gives you feedback?

AK: I have a tight crew that I go to. In this case there was four of us that wrote the music, and those four people were such an interesting mix—very different than how I normally do. So that kind of brought forth more people into the room than usual. I’m kind of notoriously reclusive when it comes to the creation process. I like to be alone; I like to kind of get my thoughts together. I don’t like to be distracted, I don’t like to have a ton of people around. It just feels like a distraction.

But in this case because it was the four of us all together really creating this music, there would be more people around, and I actually enjoyed it. I enjoyed having them around because it was these very creative beings all together. So it was almost like this electricity. Even just their energy in the room was so kinetic because they were connected to the creative process, and I found that actually allowed me to get a lot more loose and be a lot more in the moment than I have in the past.

There’s an organic thing that happens when you play something for people and they receive it, you feel them receive it. You see it in their face and that is something that spoke in volumes with this album.

And then definitely my husband [rapper and producer Swizz Beats]. I throw things off of him, like, “I don’t know if this is right yet.” He was also one of the four creators of this music. Him, myself, Mark Batson and Harold Lilly. There’s a few other really special groups that came together, but that’s the main group that created the majority of the album.

And then my manager, Erika [Rose], who is a very close friend—she’s somebody who has known me so long, and she’s known me through all of my albums. She just knows my thing. So I’m always listening to her and her feelings. But mostly I like to play it for people who don’t have the connection, because that’s when you get the truth.

 

Alicia Keys - Humanity

 

HUMANITY: How do you judge success for yourself now?

AK: Success to me mostly is happiness, and when I say happiness I don’t mean that in a generic way. I mean if I’m going through a day and I’m feeling good, I’m feeling that I’m on my path, I’m feeling invigorated, I’m feeling inspired, I’m feeling at the end of the night that it was a good day. To me that’s success, because there is so much in the world that wants to take you out of your happiness, you know, and to figure out a way to maintain that and to maintain inspiration and to maintain excitement, vigor for life and the next thing for yourself—whatever that is, to me that’s success. So happiness to me is success. Honoring myself and honoring my family and making sure that those things feel like they’re in the right order and balance, it can be difficult but it’s possible. But to me, that’s success.

Are you going to bed happy? Are you waking up happy? Because if you’re not then it might be time to change something. I’ve been there plenty of times, and you know what you have to change. You’re like, “This is not good for me,” and then you have to figure out how to unwind it and unravel it and undo it, you know? And it is hard, but you know until you do that you’re not going to be happy.

HUMANITY: Obviously it’s a cliché, but when you become a parent your life just completely changes. I think for me it was the first time I really felt I had a real purpose, you know? Your perspective changes—how you view work, how you view family.

AK: How you view yourself too. I think that was the biggest change for me when I had my first son. I really kind of respected myself for the first time. I know that might sound weird, but I feel like in a lot of ways I did: I respected my time for the first time, and I respected the value of what that meant and what I was giving up when I spent it incorrectly or when I used it correctly. I just knew when to draw the line more, when I didn’t know how to do that before.

I didn’t feel concerned about what I was going to miss out on or what I was going to lose by not doing whatever. Like choosing to be present. That was a big lesson—you grow up. You need to grow up like that.

HUMANITY: When you have someone that you feel responsible for, you have to grow up.

AK: Yeah. And it’s wild. It’s amazing. So good. But it’s true, it’s just crazy. Especially when they first come into the world and you’re like, wow, they’re so delicate, like they need everything. They can’t even move yet. They can’t eat without me. They won’t live without me. Like, if I don’t make sure that they’re good they won’t live. It’s pretty powerful.

HUMANITY: It’s crazy that you can love someone so much that you don’t even really know, you know what I mean?

AK: Right, right. Like, we haven’t really spent any time together.

HUMANITY: They don’t even have a personality but you love them so much, you know?

AK: It’s true. It’s true.

HUMANITY: What’s been your key to a successful relationship, especially in entertainment?

AK: I think the most important thing in any relationship is presence—being present and really choosing to make the time and take the time for the people that you love; not letting everything else be more important, or everyone else be more important, not letting a part of your job be more important or a part of your career be more important, you know?

And communication—really talking about who you are, because we grow, and we should be growing together. There’s no way in the world you’re in a relationship for seven years, 10 years, and you’re going to be the same person you were at the beginning. No way. In fact, that would be horrible. That would be awful, right? So you’re both growing and both evolving and learning more about yourself and learning more about each other, and I think when you give each other the opportunity to continue to know each other, that really strengthens it.

Me and my husband, we have this thing, we’ll call it Keep It Real Tuesdays if it’s Tuesday, if it’s Friday we’re like Keep It Real Fridays, and we just have to be honest, whatever it might be. And I think that’s a really big deal too, because I think you get deep in relationships and you start loving somebody so much, and you don’t want to hurt their feelings, and you know maybe what you’re going to say will be uncomfortable to them so you don’t say it, but you feel it and it’s festering. But whatever it might be, you have to be best friends.

 

Alicia Keys - Humanity

 

HUMANITY: And you work together—that must add another layer to it as well.

AK: It’s that same thing—as long as we can be truthful. There might be times where I’m like, “I don’t agree with that. I’m not really feeling that,” and he’s like, “You sure? Because I think if we did it this way it could be really good.” And I’m like, “I know what you mean, I just think this,” whatever it might be. I think that’s another thing that happens in relationships; suddenly you can’t have your own opinions anymore. You do have to be an individual as well.

HUMANITY: What have been the lessons of motherhood thus far?

AK: The lessons of motherhood? Damn. This is serious. In what capacity?

HUMANITY: What have your kids taught you? What have you learned from your children?

AK: A lot. The great stuff, like the wonderment of it all, remaining in wonder of the world and of life. My youngest is learning all these words now. So everything is “Hot tea. Tree.” All these simple things, and I’m like, “Yeah, that’s hot tea. Yeah, that’s a tree. Yeah, that’s a sock. Yeah, that’s a shoe.” It seems so mundane and simple and silly, but when he looks out and says “tree,” it is so beautiful. Like, look at that tree. That tree is in the ground and it grew, and it’s tall and it’s huge—how did that happen? All the elements of the earth came together and made this tree. So to not forget to be in wonder of all the things around you, as simple as they might be. Not taking them for granted. It’s so special, you know?

Another big lesson I’ve learned, and it’s a hard one—as a parent, I’m still figuring it out; I can’t say I’ve mastered it or anything but letting go, letting your kids have their own path. They are going to discover and they have their own journey, their own way they’re going to figure out how to express themselves in the world and who they’re going to be, and I think a lot of times as parents we project our thoughts or fears or images on them, and we have to let them be a little bit. We can’t always answer every question; you don’t have to tell them how to do it. They can figure it out, and we should give them the space to figure it out.

So what it’s taught me is to not be so quick to tell them what to do or how to do it or what’s the right way or what’s the wrong or what’s good or what’s bad. Let them figure it out, because they will, but it’s hard. You want to protect them, but sometimes you protect them more by allowing them to learn for themselves.

HUMANITY: You’re both very successful. Are you ever concerned that the two of you could overshadow them as they get older?

AK: I have thought about that before and I have met children of successful parents and it goes many different ways. Some are really interesting, go-getters and forward thinkers, and some are really almost nervous and shy and almost crippled. Maybe they haven’t felt the presence of their parents or the stability and that’s crippling in its own way as well.

But I think as long as we are giving them the proper guidelines and teaching them how to put in the work—because it won’t matter what I do, it won’t be real if they don’t put in the work and to me that’s important. You can’t be afraid of work.

HUMANITY: But at the end of the day your kids are going to grow up with a completely different reality than you did.

AK: True. True.

 

Alicia Keys - Humanity

 

HUMANITY: So as a parent, how do you keep them grounded when they have so much access?

AK: I’m big on limitations. I’m all about earning it. He actually has a point system that he has to earn in order to do certain things. So I think earning is very important.

The value of a dollar is very important and that’s something that we talk about now. He has what he saves and what he’s going to spend and what he gives away.

Surely it’s going to be different for them. But if we go to the toy store, he can’t just get everything that he wants. “What one thing would you like today?” And he answers, “I want that one and that one and that one.” “But you got to pick one. What are you going to pick?”

So just limitations, and we talk a lot about what other people might need and how he could be helpful to that. Every year on his birthday it’s time for him to look at the toys he has and figure out what is he ready to give away to somebody else. Just consciousness about how it all flows. We all have to give to receive and receive to give, you know?

HUMANITY: It’s refreshing to see somebody lending themselves to something bigger than themselves. Can you tell me about your work as a founder of Keep a Child Alive and the We Are Here movement?

AK: I got involved about 15 or 16 years ago. It was the very first thing I ever got involved in, and I’m so blessed to be able to learn that so young. Keep a Child Alive provides medicine for children and families who have AIDS who can’t afford it. We also provide surrounding care around that as well. There are just not a lot of places you can go and get treated or get tested or get food even, and you can’t take AIDS medicine and not have eaten. It’s important; at this point we’ve helped almost 2.5 million people.

With the We Are Here movement I was just personally angry—angered by turning on the TV and every second seeing this constant disrespect or inequality, and that’s really what the main focus of We Are Here is about; it’s really about inequality and justice all over the world. So We Are Here focuses on different organizations that focus on issues that I believe, when we look at them all together, will really be part of what will change the world for the better in so many ways.

We care about gun violence, about justice reform, children in war-torn environments, poverty and hunger; we care about women’s empowerment and equal pay. We’re in 2016 and we’re still talking about inequality of women in the workforce. Give me a break.

HUMANITY: Your “Hallelujah” video is obviously a look at the refugee situation, forcing us to think about it as if it was affecting us personally. Oftentimes we here in the States think it’s not here so it doesn’t affect us, so when you put it in that context you have to think of it as just a mother and a child who are going through this together, and that’s the takeaway.

AK: That was exactly the point of doing this video—to set it right in our backyard. It’s just so important how we’re dealing with the immigrant issue here in this country and just to think about if this was happening to us—would people on our borders be willing to open their borders to us?

They should; we all should. It should not be this way where we’re treating people as if they don’t belong or we can’t figure out how to help them, while they are suffering and going through this drastic, horrid circumstance. We have to look at each other with more compassion. It’s kind of turning us into monsters. It’s pretty scary. This election year is definitely displaying that mentality. It’s just so important that we are not turning into monsters.

HUMANITY: Your place in music history is cemented. But what’s important to you? How do you want to be defined? What’s the legacy that you want to leave—how do you want people to see you beyond just a musician?

 

 

AK: I definitely want to be remembered as one of the greatest artists of all time that created timeless music that will live forever; like, how I feel about some of the great artists that inspired me, I definitely want that.

But I also want to be known as somebody who really was a part of change, you know? Some of the greatest artists that I have admired really spoke out about issues and things that they believed in and what was wrong in the world, and I want to be remembered for that.

One of the things we’re working really hard on now is justice reform, because there is so much that has to be changed about our justice system. It’s broken. Young people are being locked away for their entire lives for a nonviolent crime. We have to think about how we can treat people and how we can actually rehabilitate people as opposed to just locking them away and throwing away the key. It’s a very old concept.

I want to be able to have the ability along with all of us together to change those policies and to hopefully have a voice to say look at what’s going on. I think that’s why I have been given this opportunity to speak and to sing and to relate to people; it’s so that we can also change shit. It doesn’t have to be the same forever.

HUMANITY: Who are some of your heroes?

AK: My mother. She’s obviously a personal hero. She’s definitely a very powerful woman to me who has taught me so much.

My partner in the We Are Here movement, Leigh Blake, she’s the one that decided to open my eyes to activism and to be an active citizen, not just standing back but being bold and brave and swaggity and fly about it, you know? So I really admire her very, very much.

Maya Angelou is a personal hero for me—those beautiful words and those poems, and that way to look at life in triumph is really powerful to me.

HUMANITY: Last question: What’s something that maybe people don’t know about you that you’d like them to know?

AK: They’re going to find out. They’re going to find out right now.

HUMANITY: That works. Thank you very much. Unless there’s anything else you want to cover?

AK: I think that’s everything. Well, maybe just one other thing I’ve learned more recently is how to be fully yourself and how to just be at peace with imperfection, and really letting go of that. Because I think that the more I live, the more I see. We get very caught up trying to please everybody else and trying to look like everybody else and be like everybody else. And I just personally am in a comfortable place where I really don’t want to do that anymore. I feel so different than I’ve ever felt before.

HUMANITY: It’s funny you say that because my perspective on you was different before meeting you and hearing this last record. I think before I saw this artist on a stage, and this record, it just feels so relatable.

AK: Yes, yes. And that’s because I’ve finally let down the curtain. I’ve let go. I didn’t mean to be that way before; I definitely didn’t mean to do it.

HUMANITY: It’s funny, to me in the ’60s and ’70s it almost seemed like artists were the peers, the voice of that generation, and I don’t know if it was MTV, but at some point it just kind of disconnected, you know?

AK: That’s how I want to be remembered, as the voice of a generation. Thank you, sir. That was what I was looking for.

 

Fashion Credits:

Look 1 – Xuly Bet Black Bodysuit

Look 2-4 – Louis Vuitton Silk Bomber Embroidered Jacket, Dries Van Noten Silk Bra

Look 5 – The Estate of Jean Michel Basquiat Cotton Scarf, Denim Jacket and Customized T-Shirt by Citizens of Humanity

 

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ABBY WAMBACH

Posted on by Stephanie Janssen

Abby Wambach played her final game with the U.S. women’s national soccer team on December 16, 2015. It was blustery in New Orleans that day, though she and her teammates were sheltered inside the city’s Superdome. By this point, after 14 years with the team, she’d scored more goals than any other soccer player in international history, male or female. The U.S. team hadn’t lost a game on home soil in over a decade. For Wambach’s last hurrah, they assumed they’d win again, against China’s national team. Insatiable scorer that she is, Wambach tried a few times to connect ball with net. But it was China’s Wang Shuang who scored the game’s single goal.

The loss seemed almost fitting, however. Wambach has two Olympic gold medals and a World Cup championship to her name, but she has long treated failure as fuel. She still talks about an anguished loss at a high school championship as if it opened her up to her future. “I’ve been trying to prove myself ever since,” she told USA Today a few years ago. “There’s going to be things that go wrong. It’s always about how you handle them.”

After the game with China, Wambach returned to the field, microphone in hand, to address a crowd that included eager young girls with glittery signs that said things like “Thank You Abby” or “My Hero.” She fought back tears as she spoke, in her typically candid way, before dropping the mic on the AstroTurf and turning into the arms of her teammates.

No one would have faulted Wambach for disappearing from the public eye after that. She’d been playing professionally for 15 years and deserved some time to regroup. But in the months since winning the World Cup in summer 2015, she has been taking every chance to speak out about gender disparities, finding her voice as if spurred on by newly discovered fervor.

“Mostly, I’m angry at myself,” Wambach explains, talking by phone from her home in Portland, Oregon. She has just returned from speaking about income inequality at the U.N. headquarters in New York. Soon, she’ll be lecturing at a number of universities, as part of a speaking tour that came together almost organically. “When you’re inside of something, you don’t see what it’s like until you’re outside of it …”

When she started planning her retirement, she realized she would have to create her own 401K and probably launch a second career to support her family. Male players, even those with résumés that pale in comparison, face no such concerns.

“These guys make hand over fist what we make,” she says. “I think I was trying to fool myself into thinking I wasn’t being mistreated. I should have spoken up. Maybe I was scared. Since retiring, I don’t have that fear.

Wambach, born in 1980, is the youngest of seven siblings and grew up in what she calls a “team environment.” As a 5-year-old, she scored 27 goals in three consecutive games. Her mom put her on an all-boys team when she was 9, to challenge her. Wambach’s coach at the University of Florida, Gainesville, Becky Burleigh, would boast that Wambach didn’t play like a girl, knowing even as she said it that it was both a compliment and a quandary—a reminder of how stigmatized “playing like a girl” still was.

Wambach joined the U.S. women’s team in 2001, the year she turned 21. Her glory moments abound: the time she headed a ball into the net to beat Brazil during the 2011 World Cup; the time she had a gash across her forehead stapled shut fieldside so she could keep playing. But in the lead-up to the 2015 World Cup, she wanted to transition into a supporting role, let her younger teammates take the limelight. She’d just married her partner, Sarah Huffman, and had started thinking about her future. She knew 2015 would probably be her last season. “I wanted to completely accept a selfless role,” she says. “It seems frivolous to do things like pick up cones, but in life these small little things matter.”

Almost paradoxically, Wambach’s candor doubles as a form of modesty—a commitment to honesty over showmanship. Even when she says she wants to change the world, it’s as if she’s saying it because it’s the obvious task: “All of us—women, men, transgendered people—we have certain proscribed paths, social pressures.” If no one talks about the inequality such paths and pressures breed, nothing changes.

On April 2, 2016, Wambach was arrested for driving under the influence while heading home from a dinner in Portland—an unexpected interruption to the momentum she had been building since her retirement. She posted on Facebook the next day: “Those that know me, know that I have always demanded excellence from myself. I have let myself and others down. […] This is all on me.”

The post racked up 7,500 comments, some saying how they respected her accountability, some telling stories of their own encounters with drunk driving or drunk drivers. One high school student commented, “You made a mistake. That will not change how I or my teammates look up to you.” The overwhelming message was one of support: Nobody thought she was perfect; she is a hero nonetheless.

Three weeks after her arrest, Wambach headed to Silicon Valley to give a keynote lecture on workplace equality at the Watermark Conference for Women. “I want to be the same person in whatever room I’m in,” she says on the phone, explaining that she didn’t really have to adjust her approach when addressing policymakers and business people. “It’s not really that hard to be authentic. You say what you mean, and go after what you want.”

 

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DARREN BECKETT

Posted on by Stephanie Janssen

DRUMMER DARREN BECKETT SHOWED UP IN NEW YORK WITH TWO SUITCASES, HIS DRUM STICKS, AND HIS IRISH CHARM. HE WASN’T SURE HOW HE WAS GOING TO MAKE IT IN THE BIG APPLE, BUT BEFORE LONG HE WAS SITTING IN ON JAM SESSIONS AT SMALL’S JAZZ CLUB ON 10TH STREET, JAMMING WITH JAZZ GREATS LIKE WYNSTON MARSALIS. THESE DAYS HE TOURS THE WORLD WITH THE SINGER MADELEINE PEYROUX, AS WELL AS WRITING AND PERFORMING WITH THE KILLERS FRONTMAN, BRANDON FLOWERS. IT ALL STARTED WITH HIS FIRST KIT, A GIFT FROM HIS FATHER, ALSO A DRUMMER. “IT WAS HUGE, MY DAD’S OLD PREMIER RESONATOR WHICH WEIGHED A TON,” HE REMEMBERS. “I COULD BARELY REACH THE PEDALS. IT WAS A RUSTY GOLD COLOR AND SOUNDED LIKE THUNDER. HE WOULD SHOW ME THE BASICS AS I SAT ON HIS KNEE.” HE PROMISED HIS MOM THAT ONE DAY HE WOULD PLAY CARNEGIE HALL. THEN, IN 2008, THE DREAM CAME TRUE. WAS IT THE LUCK OF THE IRISH? OR PURE TALENT? BECKETT THINKS IT’S A COMBINATION OF THE TWO, AS WELL AS DOING WHAT YOU LOVE. NATURALLY, HIS MOM WAS VERY PROUD.

What’s the greatest drum solo you have ever witnessed live?

Elvin Jones at the Blue Note in NY. He was on an oxygen machine, and he didn’t have long to live. He touched my soul and everyone’s in the room.

Who was your drumming inspiration growing up?

My Dad, Keith Moon, John Bonham, Stewart Copeland, Elvin Jones, Buddy Rich, Steve Gadd.

Is there a personality trait that is common to drummers?

We tend to be a little nuts. I certainly lived up to that in my twenties when I was in this indie shoegazer band. I thought I was Keith Moon after seven pints of Guinness. Being a wild man didn’t always fit the vibe.

The gift of rhythm and timing is almost inexplicable, and so rare. Do you think it can be taught, and if so, how?

I think it’s a combination of the two. And of course, it’s something you have to practice. Listening is key to everything. Using a metronome can improve your timing, as can playing along to pivotal albums. Ultimately, I believe ‘feel’ and ‘groove’ are an expression of your personality and soul.

What has been the most formative live performance experience of your life?

It would have to be playing at Carnegie Hall in 2008. My Mother used to say when I was a wee lad in Belfast, “Son, the only way get to Carnegie Hall is practice, practice and practice!” A formative one that inspired me would have to be Paul Simon in Belfast, Rhythm of the Saints tour. Session great, Steve Gadd was playing drums and I met him briefly afterwards. I was 13 years old.

How did your relationship with Brandon Flowers come about?

I met Brandon 10 years ago when The Killers were just starting. We were both in London. I was with my band, Ambulance Ltd, and he still reminds me that I was a very “confident person”. We ended up supporting The Killers on many tours. He called me up in 2009 and said he wanted me to play drums on his solo album. He’s a great person and unbelievable songwriter singer and performer. I was recently in Vegas working on some new material with him.

Tell us a story about working with Lauryn Hill.

I remember we had a show in Senegal, West Africa. We rehearsed at Youssou n’Dour’s studio. He’s pop royalty over there. She didn’t show up for any rehearsals. But, she would call our hotel room at 3am to rehearse in her room. I would bang on plates and glasses with spoons. It was hilarious. We had this huge studio, but she wanted to rehearse in her hotel room. She was a bit of a night owl.

You lived in Cologne, Germany for a while. What are the main differences in attitudes towards music in Europe compared with the US?

I think the main difference is musicians are respected more in Europe. Conditions are usually better, clubs have better dressing rooms, nice catering, they really go the extra mile. Music like Jazz is more respected. After all, it’s America’s classical music, and America doesn’t seem to care much. Oh, and the tour buses have wifi.

You are touring with Madeleine Peyroux, whose voice has been compared to Billie Holiday’s. How do you drum to complement a beautiful female vocal?

Playing softer than soft, I use brush sticks a lot which are wire brushes that sweep across the snare drum. You have to listen and make sure you don’t breath too loud, because that can be louder than your playing sometimes! You are trying to compliment the singer, to make them sound better. They do what they do, just don’t get in the way. And of course, smile.

 

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ROSSON CROW

Posted on by Stephanie Janssen

Rosson Crow’s paintings, usually large and based loosely on haunting historical events or locales, have a brash, moody fullness to them. In her 2008 painting, “Lincoln’s Funeral,” the wheel of a dark carriage lurks in the shadows, beside blurred U.S. flags and behind drooping bouquets of pink roses and  yellw- white drips that recall sputtering fireworks. Her 2011 exhibition Ballyhoo Hullabaloo Haboob, at L.A.’s Honor Fraser gallery focused on mythic American tragedies, and included the black-and-white painting “Jackie’s Strength,” where a multitude of flowers blur together into a tornado-like swell on what must be the White House lawn.

Crow, who grew up in Dallas, moved to New York to attend the School of Visual Arts in 2000 and appeared in her first major exhibition, the elaborate K48 Klubhouse at Deitch Projects in 2003, before she had received her BFA. She enrolled in Yale in 2004, graduated with an MFA in painting in 2006 and moved to Los Angeles that same year. Since then, she’s become a staple of this city’s art scene—she’s always dressed memorably, in bright prints, leotards r vintage ruffles, and usually smiling.

Though she worked out of a downtown studio when she first arrived, she now works out of a barn-like building adjacent to her Laurel Canyon home—“I always wanted to live on a farm,” she told us. The day we visited her, she had just returned from Coachella, where she had seen the rapper 2 Chainz perform in the exact same Jeremy Scott print she had been wearing at the time, a testament to her taste’s eccentric range. We spoke with her about painting, style and living as an artist.

How do you pick the themes of your exhibitions?

It is all pretty organic. Most of my work comes out of the love of history and researching historical places and events. I’m very interested in how time changes the way we view these events, and how histories get layered onto one another. I enjoy the process of excavating that history, finding the hidden spirits underneath.

When you paint, are you meticulous? Or do you paint freely and see what happens?

I am definitely more of a “free” painters…I always start off with a loose plan but I like to allow for things to happen that cannot be planned out. If you let the painting work its own magic, it will teach you things.

Like your paintings, you have a very unique style—wigs, Sequin leotards , showgirl headdresses. What  influences your your personal style?

I have always loved to dress up ever since I was a child, and I have always loved the idea of “glamour.” Like with painting, I often look to historical time periods for my fashion inspiration, whether it is 1920’s flapper, 1960’s show girl or [a women in] Civil War era mourning gown.

 

 

Do you see your paintings as stages?

I do see my paintings as theatrical, but not always a stage. I like to make the spaces large enough so the viewer can enter and experience them. In a way, [the viewers] are more like characters in the painting [than I am].

In the last 10 years, since your inclusion in Deitch Projects’ Kult 48 Klubhouse, how has your work changed?

I think the work has more depth to it now. I think much more about what is really behind the paintings… An artist always has to be questioning oneself in order to grow, so I try to do that.

In your last exhibition at Honor Fraser, Ballyhoo Hullabaloo Haboob, the paintings were monochromatic—is this a new direction for you?

I think that work was just asking to be monochromatic. The subject matter was very dark and the inclusion of bright colors didn’t make sense to me, so, again, it happened organically. I’ve been working on paintings with more color now!

In various interviews, you’ve said that you respect artists who have no fear, and that it is important to be fearless as an artist. Why?

Well, it’s sometimes scary to put yourself out there. I guess what I mean is it is OK to feel the fear but to not let it limit you.

Do you think you are a fearless artist?

I try to be, but it’s only human to have fears. What matters is how well you push through it.

 

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MAST BROTHERS

Posted on by Stephanie Janssen

There is something magical about a candy factory. Whether it’s the tour you took of the Hershey’s plant during a family trip to Amish country or that formative teenage acid trip in your best friend’s basement watching Willy Wonka—staring into a massive, spinning sugary vortex of creamy dark chocolate is one of the few glimpses behind the curtain of industrial production that is amazing, not disgusting. But there’s something even better: watching small batches of supremely luscious cocoa batter churn in simple, carefully watched gallon drums inside the Brooklyn factory of the Mast Brothers.

The image of chocolate makers Rick and Michael Mast toiling at their craft is a whimsical one, like elves in their workshop. They lug big burlap bags of unprocessed beans. They stand over unfinished bars sprinkling them with gold leaf. They  tend to their pots in pressed white linens and their extruding red beards covered with hairnets. And they gingerly stack their store shelves with the finished product, dark rectangular bars wrapped in handsome, hand-printed paper labels that feel like the hefty paper stock butchers use to wrap pork chops. The operation is clearly a labor of love; a hobby that’s become something more, propelled by a fierce commitment to cocoa craftsmanship and a Wonka-like obsession.

“A lot of creative people are always trying to reconnect with their curiosity—childlike curiosity,” Rick Mast says in a video documentary posted to Vimeo by The Scout magazine. “I think that maybe [we] as chocolate makers are constantly trying to reconnect with that more than your average person.” out to elevate the candy bar to a graceful, storied object decked out in plaid, gingham and pastoral prints. Mast Brothers deals mostly in single-origin chocolate, which is to say they know where their beans come from because they’re grown on a single estate. It’s an attention to detail now familiar to most coffee drinkers, a way of coaxing complexities out of what’s otherwise become a commodity product. But it’s a relatively new approach to snacking for most eaters whose relationship to chocolate is keeping a sweet treat in the freezer door for after dinner. Theirs are bars of handcrafted riches. There’s the Dominican Republic, a dense chocolate that’s uber-rich and earthy tasting, and there’s the sweeter Brooklyn Blend, a tangy and balanced bar that one could mistake for an agave coco latte. Even the more gimmicky flavors work well, including their “Dark Chocolate with Chili Peppers,” which starts off sweet and almost creamy but ends in a building, low-grade burn from serrano chilies and ended up being the most addictive of the bunch.

The company has grown quickly, opening a second retail location in New York and now boasting a backlog of online orders from all over. (Allow a week for delivery.) But like the food artisans we’ve become familiar with—those behind smallbatch coffee, liquor or handmade pickles—the Mast Brothers are peddling a luxury commodity that aspires to become a medium for something greater than just salty, savory or sweet. “The chocolate itself represents more than just a candy bar,” Rick tells the camera. “It represents a new way of handcrafting food—an old way that’s now new again.”

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LAWRENCE RINDER

Posted on by Stephanie Janssen

In the third week of July, Lawrence Rinder returned from vacation to find a full-size van in the Berkeley Art Museum galleries. “I have no idea how this happened,” says Rinder, the museum’s director and the co-curator of its upcoming show. Last he heard, no vehicle that big would fit through any of the museum doors. “But I’m glad it did,” he says.

The van will be installed to look as if it crashed over one of the museum’s parapets and landed on its nose in the main atrium gallery. Standing on the back of the overturned van will be a tower of four animatronic taggers—standing on each others’ shoulders to reach up and spray paint an upper balcony. There will also be a life-size replica of a bodega, some early prints and drawings, and a number of older and newer wall-hanging works, like McGee’s “radically colorful clusters of paintings that boil and bump, extruding from the wall like a life form,” Rinder describes. All this is part of the soon-to-open Barry  McGee retrospective, for which Citizens of Humanity is a presenting sponsor.

Even though Rinder was working in the Bay Area in the 1980s, when McGee began making art in the streets of San Francisco, McGee didn’t grab his attention until years later. In 2001, Rinder had moved from the Bay Area to New York to work for the Whitney and was curating the museum’s 2002 biennial exhibition of new American art. He planned to include Margaret Kilgallen, a “Mission School” artist like McGee—McGee, Kilgallen and a few others acquired that name because they worked on walls and buildings on and around San Francisco’s Mission Street. Kilgallen had been McGee’s wife until her death from cancer just months earlier. So it was McGee who arrived to rebuild and install her work, which meant he and Rinder worked closely together. Seven years later, after Rinder returned to the museum world after a brief hiatus and become the director of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, he began planning the McGee retrospective.

Rinder gravitates toward artists like McGee, artists who invalidate high-low, street-gallery divides so effectively that few, even among the snootiest of art connoisseurs, can discount them as “serious” regardless of where their art appears. Rinder has worked with plenty of artists the establishment loves, of course: Louise Bourgeois, Tim Hawkinson and Felix Gonzalez- Torres. But he also spent time in Papua New Guinea learning about the tapa painting of the Maisin tribe, championed little known, reclusive quilt artist Rosie Lee Tompkins and was the first Whitney curator to travel to Puerto Rico to visit an artist’s  studio.

“Museums labor under tremendous institutional inertia,” Rinder wrote in an essay in his 2005 book, Art and Life. “For the viewer, however, change can be instantaneous, as swift as the opening of one’s eyes.” For this reason, it’s a curator’s job—Rinder’s job—to challenge those worn-out high versus low distinctions. Why can’t you go to a museum and see painted cloth from Papua New Guinea hanging next to a mural by a San Francisco street artist? Couldn’t such a juxtaposition, seemingly so simple, change the way a viewer thinks about geography, taste and themselves in relation to the rest of the world? And isn’t that the whole point?

Rinder came to this position through trial and error, much like he came to art in the first place. Growing up in the East Village in the 1970s, he had dreams of becoming a lawyer. His father thought otherwise, and when Rinder tells the story, it’s so counterintuitive you think he must be joking. He wanted to go to college but his father said no, and offered to helphim fund his education only if he wanted to live in Greenwich and apprentice informally with poets there. He rebelled at first, enrolling in Reed College in Oregon, but his father’s disapproval affected him so much he dropped out. He moved to New York and enrolled in the School of Visual Arts (SVA), a place more to his dad’s liking.

In his time at SVA, he overlapped with Jean-Michel Basquiat and studied with visceral artist-choreographer Simone Forti, performer Joan Jonas and film critic Amy Taubin. He saw the graffiti scene emerge on the Lower East Side. But none of these brushes with New York art-world greatness kept him from returning to Reed after two years, with no real plan other than a vague ambition to work in TV. He was struggling to find work acting or even waiting tables when a friend from college said, “Why don’t you talk to my mother?”

This friend’s mother happened to be Alexandra Anderson, editor of the magazine Art and Antiques. The day Rinder met with her, he had just told her he might want to work in museums when a call came in from Philip Yenawine. Yenawine ran the education department at the Museum of Modern Art. He was looking for someone to help him bring art to schools, and that’s how Rinder began traveling from one New York City school to another, with a collection slides in tow. “It was kind of like Mission Impossible,” he recalls. “I’d be told, ‘P.S. 29 wants to know about Futurism.’” At first, he approached his job solemnly, like a scholar. “I’d put up a slide of Cezanne, for example, and start to explain the brush strokes,” he says, “but it only took one or two classes to break me of this habit. What interests people is what matters to their lives.”

It’s been over 25 years, yet he clearly remembers the feeling he had when he presented art to youth so that they “got it.” He started wondering what could happen if he presented art to the public in museum galleries. He enrolled in Hunter College’s Art History department, received his Master’s degree from  there, took a curatorial internship at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and then secured his first job as assistant curator of the Matrix Program at the Berkeley Art Museum, a program that features small exhibitions of new or experimental work. He stayed in Berkeley for a decade. That’s where he learned how to be brave, to let himself respond to art gutturally.

Rinder gives artist and writer Nayland Blake credit for teaching him the art of curatorial bravery. In 1994, when Rinder still worked in the Matrix Program, the two of them curated a show together, hoping to capture the lively energy of the San Francisco queer community. Rinder’s instinct was to lay out the important issues and then choose work that addressed these. “But Blake relied on the logic of seduction. He approached  curating as a ‘surrealist game,’ assuming that through juxtaposing different artworks, we could reveal truths,” Rinder remembers. “I found a lot of power in that understanding.”

This instinct-driven approach baffled the New York art world when Rinder began curating the 2002 Biennial. So did the fact that he traveled all over the United States, visiting artists he’d heard about and looking for ones he hadn’t. “Why bother  to go outside of Chelsea?” one New York art insider asked him in complete seriousness, and days before the Biennial opened, Newsweek critic Peter Plagens published a profile of Rinder that mused on the curator’s “unabashed enthusiasm for stuff that’s way outside the fine-arts box.” Plagens titled his article “This Man Will Decide What Art Is,” suggesting that Rinder hadn’t relied on institutional precedent at all and he had “decided” that artists who weren’t necessarily “museum artists” belonged in his show.

Rinder stayed at the Whitney until 2006, when he took a job as dean of California College of the Arts. He thought he might happily stay in academia, until the directorship at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive opened up four years ago. He already knew the museum’s collection and many of the board members. He also believed he would be able to champion the kind of smart, experimental, audience-aware shows he cared about.

Rinder doesn’t curate many of the shows at the museum—his role as director keeps him busy with fundraising, building and programming concerns—but the Barry McGee exhibition is different. It’s a project he’s dreamed of doing for years with an artist who, like Rinder, sees no clear division between art and daily life. McGee comes to the galleries nearly every day and, in the run-up to the show’s opening, Rinder and his co-curator Dena Beard, are keeping a careful balance between intervening and letting McGee be. It’s more like McGee is remaking himself for this exhibition than re-presenting past work.

When the Barry McGee retrospective opens on August 24, it will begin with intricate, careful drawings. McGee began his career making such drawings and prints, and his remarkable draftsmanship might surprise viewers who associate him with a “street” aesthetic but have never really looked at his handwork up-close. The first galleries will also include some cluster pieces. In these, McGee’s small paintings of elongated, cartoonish heads or loose lettering are framed and hung close together so that together they look like a single, awkward body. Then, in subsequent galleries, you will see McGee’s mid-career work, ambitious sculptures, like the bodega and tower of taggers.

But at the end, the show will come full circle. You will encounter McGee’s most recent renderings, gorgeous patterns and figures surprisingly similar to those he drafted decades ago. These will be installed alongside drawings by McGee’s own father on napkins, which the the artist kept all these years for inspiration, and you will likely leave thinking about how baffling yet beautiful it is that life can have so much continuity despite all the detours and discoveries that shape it.

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MARK MAHONEY

Posted on by Stephanie Janssen

“Where the underworld and the elite meet” is the slogan for the Shamrock Social Club, a tattoo parlor that mixes street-shop values with the glamour associated with its Hollywood location. The slogan also applies to its proprietor, Mark Mahoney, who is a master of fine-line black-and-gray tattoos and the person  celebrities such as David Beckham and Lady Gaga go to for new ink.

Mahoney’s road to success began in Boston. As a teenager, he gravitated toward the city’s underground punk scene, hanging with a greaser gang and beginning to cultivate his signature look. Tattooing was illegal in his home state, so the gang had to go to Rhode Island to get tattooed. “As soon as I walked into Buddy Mott’s tattoo shop in Rhode Island, I knew that was what I needed to do,” Mahoney told Inked magazine in an interview. “It was like an epiphany. I could always draw, and I knew I was going to end up doing something with art, but not until I walked in there did I know for sure. It took me awhile for somebody to give me a machine, but the seed was planted right then and there. It never wavered. I never wanted to be a rock star or anything after that. I wanted to be a tattooer.”

One of the older guys from his neighborhood, Mark Herlehy, had joined the Navy and brought back some tattoo equipment from his travels. He let Mahoney do his first tattoo on him, a back piece. “It was more like half a back piece,” Mahoney laughs.

Mahoney started tattooing professionally in 1977, but because the art was still illegal, tattooing was relegated to the underground. He tattooed in a motorcycle clubhouse in Boston, then went New York’s Lower East Side, and finally settled in California in 1980. “It was really the first time I saw the fine-line, black-and-gray tattoo stuff,” Mahoney told Inked. “I think I had seen one fine-line tattoo that Johnny Thunders had. It was just some initials that I think Bob Roberts did on him. I had never seen any of that East L.A. black-and-gray shading until I got here. I flipped my wig when I saw that.”

For tattooers at this time, the West Coast was the prime location for a revolution in the trade. From Southern to Northern California, inventive styles were being refined and new standards were being set. Don Ed Hardy and Lyle Tuttle lead a charge, but they weren’t alone. As Hardy was redefining Western conceptions of Japanese tattooing, Leo Zulueta was pioneering his own vision of neo-tribal, and in East L.A., Jack Rudy and Charlie Cartwright were turning a prison-born single needle style into a legitimate niche. Of course, the legendary Pike in Long Beach was still a bastion of classi American styles, and tattoos produced in shops owned by Bert Grimm and Bob Roberts were inspirations for Mahoney.

 

 

 

He tattooed at various shops in the Southland, including Tattooland in East L.A., and eventually landed in Hollywood, where he opened Shamrock on the Sunset Strip in 2001. “I worked hard at it,” Mahoney says in his Just Like You video for Citizens of Humanity. “Find out what you want to do and work hard at it. I’ve been working six or seven nights a week for 35 years because I love it. There’s nothing else I’d rather be doing.”

Mahoney speaks slowly, deliberately, and with a slight air of mystery. He maintains a tough exterior, but Mahoney is friendly, charming and completely genuine. When Johnny Depp met him for the first time, years ago, Depp said in a video, “It was clear to me that he was, without question, the real deal.”

Mahoney’s personal style mixes rockabilly pomp with classic Hollywood, and is influenced by Dean Martin, Willy DeVille and Robert Evans. And his style has captured the attention of the fashion elite—from designing clothes for Betsey Johnson in the 1980s to a 2011 campaign for Yves Saint Laurent.

Through hard work and dedication, Mahoney has become an icon, a fixture on Sunset Strip, and has stories of visits from actors, rock stars and rappers—just days before his death, the Notorious B.I.G. visited Mahoney for a tattoo of a Bible psalm.

Despite all his success, Mahoney still revels in being at the shop. “One of the things about the process that I love, is that while I’m doing it, I can get into the spot where I’m not thinking, I’m not feeling, it’s kind of like a spiritual state,” he says. “People mediate for years, trying to get themselves to that zone, that by the grace of God I’m lucky enough to get into just about every night.”

Being around other artists at the shop, such as Freddy Negrete and Rick Walters, also encourages Mark to push himself as an artist. “I really feel like I’m still learning, and it’s constant and ongoing, and I don’t feel like I’m half as good as I want to be,” he says. “I’ve succeeded in some things, but I feel like I’m just getting started in all this.”

 

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WAYNE LEVIN

Posted on by Stephanie Janssen

Photographer Wayne Levin, long celebrated for his gorgeously luminous underwater images of surfers and sea life, came of age seeing pictures all around him. From the time he received his first Brownie camera for his 12th birthday, he began viewing the world in terms of the way it could be broken down into separate frames. “I remember always driving around with my family in the car, looking at the world through the viewfinder of the camera,” Levin says by phone from his home in Hawaii. “I was kind of entranced by that. I always loved trains, and the way you’d look out a train window and see a rectangle that would contain the world as it went by, like re-creating the experience of looking through the camera.”

Always a fan of the beach and fishing with friends while growing up in Los Angeles, Levin became even more devoted to the ocean as a teen when his family got a sailboat. Yachts and sailboats were among his earliest models. At age 16, he took what he considered his first masterpiece: a photograph of a sailboat’s mast reflected in the water. “It was kind of an abstract image that said something about the water’s surface, and the way light and reflected light plays on it,” Levin says. “That was the first photograph I felt was really a success.”

No matter where life took him, Levin never put down his camera. After high school, he attended Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara for two years before leaving to become active in the civil rights movement. Facing the draft, he enlisted in the navy. Although unable to join their photography unit, as he had hoped, he credits these years with inspiring his lifelong love  of travel, which became another major influence on his work. Also, during a trip to Japan while in the navy, he acquired his first Nikon. Photographing under all different circumstances, he honed an approach that mixes planning and fluidity. “I’d say it’s one third luck, tenacity and ideas,” he says. “And being open to new things happening.”

When Levin’s family moved to Hawaii, he joined them there after his discharge from the navy in 1968. He soon began surfing and body surfing and lost whole days to catching waves. This obsession entrenched his passion for the ocean even more. He acquired a Nikonos IV underwater camera in 1983 and began taking his iconic underwater photos of surfers, which have a euphoric beauty and transcendence that goes far beyond a goal of rendering their subjects in an artistic way. “What I’m trying to do is communicate the mystery of the ocean, rather than describe the ocean,” Levin says. “[My work has] really given me a love for the ocean, and I know a lot about how threatened the ocean is. Maybe I don’t really feel like I’ve yet communicated that part of it as strongly as I would like to, and I’ve been thinking about how I can do that in an even more powerful way. The idea of just shooting beautiful pictures of something and saying that’s going to help protect it, I  don’t know if I buy that.”

 

Wayne Levin - Humanity Magazine

 

Wayne Levin - Humanity Magazine

 

Over the years, Levin has continued to develop his knowledge of photography, both as a student and a teacher, studying at the San Francisco Art Institute and Pratt Institute, and teaching at the University of Hawaii; La Pietra, Hawaii School for Girls, where he founded the photography program; and the Dayton Art Institute, where he was an artist-in-residence.

The range of subjects Levin has photographed in his nearly  six decades as a photographer has been vast, from the Leprosy Settlement at Kalaupapa on Molokai (which became two books,Kalaupapa: A Portrait and most recently, Ili Na Ho’omana’o o Kalaupapa) and the Hospice of Dayton to the Hawaiian island of Kaho’olawe, which became the photo book, Kaho’olawe: Na Leo O Kanaloa .

Always questing to improve and expand his work, Levin remains devoted to black-and-white film for his underwater images, but has begun using a digital camera for his other photos. As with everything else in his artistic life, his decision is based on a thoughtful and studied contemplation of the art form. “I think the spirit of the photograph is communicated just as well in a good digital print as it is in a darkroom print,” he says. “There is a little bit of difference because the digital print is ink on paper, so it’s more on the surface, while the darkroom print is particles of silver suspended in a layer on the surface of the paper, but the  difference is really small.”

Having by this point traversed the globe several times over, always with his beloved camera, and always in search of images that communicate something of both beauty and substance, Levin has accumulated quite a life’s work. “Photography is kind of like a passport to special experiences, special places, so I’m  really grateful to have had that,” Levin says.

 

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