The multidisciplinary creator Miranda July recently authored the novel All Fours and has an art exhibition, titled “New Society”, on view at the Prada Foundation in Milan through October 14. Below, she discusses self-expression and creative collaboration.
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Nico B. Young
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist Nico B. Young is a Los Angeles–based artist who takes meaningful preexisting objects, such as a series of tabletops that he found on the streets of LA or demo recordings of his late father, who was a musician, and fashions these things into sculptural works. His art often retains what it was, while becoming a whole new thing. As a kind of art collaboration, I asked him to work on the kitchen in this small house behind my studio. He put his own spin on the cabinetry with an Atelier Van Lieshout–inspired lacquer in a pale yellow reminiscent of a stick of Robert Gober’s butter.
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The King School Museum of Contemporary Art
Image Credit: Courtesy King School Museum of Contemporary Art The King School Museum of Contemporary Art in Portland, Oregon, is a contemporary art museum and social practice art project for children from prekindergarten through fifth grade at the public Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School. It was started by a longtime friend and collaborator, Harrell Fletcher, and Lisa Jarrett in 2014. The racially and socioeconomically diverse program teaches art and curatorial practices, with artist talks and exhibitions. In what’s usually such a rarefied space, they’re giving kids an incredible sense of power and agency, as well as a different lens through which to look at the world and themselves. In pulling off something so out of bounds and unlikely, they’ve created a rebellious model of social practice.
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Sherazade Gharbi
Image Credit: ©Sherazade Gharbi/Courtesy Créahmbxl, Belgium Sherazade Gharbi is a Belgian painter and animator. I have mixed feelings about saying that she’s developmentally disabled because I don’t want her incredible work to be sidelined; on the other hand, as with so many great artists, the work and the marginalization can’t and shouldn’t be pulled apart. She has an impeccable use of color and interesting way of rendering people that relates to race. I first encountered her work in the [2023] video The Search for Total Silence by filmmaker Ilke De Vries. I learned that De Vries gave Gharbi notebooks to write in and, from that, she created the narration. It’s tricky to have someone’s voice shape a documentary, especially if they have difficulty expressing themselves in that manner, but it was a great way to have Gharbi tell her own story.
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Offer Up
Image Credit: Courtesy OfferUp Offer Up is an online classified for both jobs and people selling things. I enjoy the whole laborious experience from initially texting a stranger about their item to eventually going to their home, which may be somewhere I’ve never been before, to retrieve it. On the app, I got a burnt-orange velvet L-shaped modular couch, and made a friend in the costume designer who sold it. I also bought a new door with glass panels after probably two months of text messaging. Then, on the flip side, there’s the lacquered credenza I did not get. There’s something so enlivening about interacting with an individual instead of a company. And, with all the money I’ve saved, I can now buy more things seamlessly on Amazon. Sigh.
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Isabelle Albuquerque
Image Credit: Photo Genevieve Hanson/Courtesy Jeffrey Deitch, New York The whole time I was writing All Fours, I was in conversation with the sculptor Isabelle Albuquerque. She has this preternatural ability to make exquisite sculptures. As I was writing, she was making an incredible series of work called “Orgy for Ten People in One Body.” Much of what we discussed had to do with having more desires than seem viable for one life and for the structures we live within—romantically, spiritually, and economically. As such, the work was in conversation as well. Even the title of my book picks up on a piece she made of a headless woman on hands and knees. All the bodies she sculpts are morphed with animals in classical poses. My book is dedicated to her.