spencer bailey

If there were a bard for our bewildering times, Saeed Jones would be a fitting choice. In his newly released collection of poems, Alive at the End of the World, Jones dances through grief, rage, and trauma—collective and personal—with acerbic clarity and sharp-edged wit. It is a book that gets to the heart of this confounding, erratic era, by turns reflecting on the tremendous amount of loss that has come with Covid-19; more broadly, the staggering, startling nature of living through a pandemic; the unignorable realities of climate disaster; the ongoing dangers of being Black and queer in the face of systemic racism, homophobia, and white supremacy; and, individually, the 2011 death of his mother and the past decade he has spent wallowing, mourning, mending, processing, and growing in the aftermath. Following his two previous books—the 2019 coming-of-age memoir How We Fight for Our Lives and the 2014 poetry collection Prelude to Bruise—Alive at the End of the World is only sort of a hyperbolic, if coy, title. “This human era we’re in is wild,” Jones says on this episode of Time Sensitive. “I am not here to tell people, ‘Oh, it has always been this calamitous.’ No! We are in an era of instability, destability. It’s bad, and I think we need to be real about that.” 

There’s a blunt, let’s-not-beat-around-the-bush quality to Jones’s work—he intentionally and directly addresses harsh, gut-punching realities that many of us would rather ignore. But he does so in ways that are alluring, and that draw readers in. Wading through the tough stuff, slowly, thoughtfully, and with good humor, Jones gets to higher truths and finds meaningful connection points. 

Also on this episode, Jones talks with Spencer about growing up Black and queer in the suburban city of Lewisville, Texas; how the murders of James Byrd, Jr., and Matthew Shepard haunted him throughout his teenage years and still do; and why, “in our culture right now, everything’s a proxy war, everything’s one-upmanship.”

Special thanks to our Season 6 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

• Saeed Jones
• [03:36] Alive at the End of the World
• [05:41] “Deleted Voice Message: Hey, Robyn—It’s Me, Whitney”
• [05:41] “A Spell to Banish Grief”
• [07:03] “Saeed, How Dare You Make Your Mother Into a Prelude”
• [14:18] “Okay, One More Story”
• [16:31] “The Dead Dozens”
• [25:05] “Diahann Carroll Takes a Bath at the Beverly Hills Hotel”
• [48:07] How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir
• [52:09] Prelude to Bruise
• [52:09] “Jasper, 1998”
• [01:13:55] “Self-Portrait of the Artist as Ungrateful Black Writer”

When Siri Hustvedt was 12 years old, she began reading 19th-century novels by Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain that were given to her by her Norwegian mother, and soon developed a passion for literature. She found great satisfaction in how these stories expanded her mind with new ideas and realms beyond. At 13, precociously enough, she decided she wanted to become a writer. Her interest in developing what she calls a “flexibility of mind” led her to eventually reading and studying works in a wide range of disciplines, including art history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience. Through her essays, poems, fiction, and nonfiction over the past five decades, Hustvedt’s aim has become clear: to bring together perspectives that might help her—and those who read her work—see the world differently.

Hustvedt’s efforts to break down barriers and build a diversity of knowledge have steered her toward an array of topics. Upon moving from her hometown of Northfield, Minnesota, to New York City in 1978 to attend Columbia University, from which she earned her Ph.D. in English literature, she worked as a waitress, a researcher for a medical historian, a model, and an artist’s assistant. She went on to write seven novels, including the international bestseller What I Loved (2004) and The Blazing World (2014), the latter of which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction in 2014. Since 1995, Hustvedt has written extensively about art and what comes from looking deeply at it, unpacking works ranging from Johannes Vermeer’s “Woman with a Pearl Necklace” (1662–1664) to the photorealistic paintings of Gerhard Richter​​. 

Often, Hustvedt’s subject matter comes to her because it hits close to home. In her 2010 book The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves, she investigated the violent tremors that she first experienced in 2006 while delivering her father’s eulogy. Hustvedt (who with her husband, the novelist Paul Auster, has a daughter, the singer-songwriter Sophie Auster) has also long been interested in the peculiarities of motherhood, and more recently, the placenta, a subject she plans to explore at length in a future book. 

On this episode, Hustvedt talks with Spencer about the mysteries and misunderstandings around gestation, maternity, and being a mother; books as friends; and the problems with putting up walls between disciplines.

Show notes:

• Full Transcript
• sirihustvedt.net
• [05:01] Mothers, Fathers, and Others (2021)
• [47:53] A Plea for Eros (2005)
• [53:24] “The Future of Literature: The Anatomy of the Novel” (2017)
• [01:03:31] The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves (2010)

The poet, educator, and scholar Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, views her work as an urgent political act. Following in the footsteps of her father, who was a civil rights advisor and special counsel to President Lyndon B. Johnson, Alexander has witnessed the sometimes exasperatingly slow pace of progress, particularly when it comes to racial equality, and the resoluteness required for the vital work of pressing on. She approaches each day as an opportunity to do as much as she can, with all she has. 

Through her teaching, scholarship, and poetry, Alexander built the foundation for her role as a philanthropic leader. She has held professorships at the University of Chicago; Smith College; Yale University, where she worked for 15 years and chaired the African American studies department; and Columbia University. From 2015 to 2018, she served as director of creativity and free expression at the Ford Foundation, and last year, launched the Mellon Foundation’s Monuments Project, a $250 million initiative that aims to rethink and transform America’s commemorative landscape. 

Alexander’s consciousness and compassion are especially apparent in her writing, which often weaves together biography, history, and memory to potent effect. In articles for publications such as Time and The New Yorker, she has reflected, with great acuity, on racist violence in America. Her collection American Sublime (2005) and memoir, The Light of the World (2015), were both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. At President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, she recited her optimistic, clear-eyed poem “Praise Song for the Day.”

On this episode, Alexander discusses the vast possibilities of social justice, talking with Spencer about using language to promote change, how monuments and memorials shape collective memory, and the profundity of grounding oneself in the present.

Show notes:

• Full transcript
• elizabethalexander.net
• [10:34] “‘Can you be Black and Look at This?’ Reading the Rodney King Video(s)” (1994)
• [25:05] Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
• [25:05] The Monuments Project
• [49:05] The Clifton House
• [50:11] The Venus Hottentot (1990)
• [50:15] Body of Life (1996)
• [50:15] Antebellum Dream Book (2001)
• [50:15] American Sublime (2005)
• [50:42] “Crash” (2001)
• [55:37]  The Light of the World (2015)
• [55:37] Ficre Ghebreyesus

Entrepreneur and writer Emilien Crespo, founder of the publishing company Ordinary Flame, talks with us about the importance of getting out of one’s comfort zone, how an increasingly digital culture can intensify real-life experiences, and an adventure in Tokyo he went on with the artist Harold Ancart. 

Episode sponsored by Grand Seiko.

Artist and designer Debbie Millman has been fascinated by the power of branding for most of her life. And as the host of the Design Matters podcast (which was recently translated into a book, out next month) and chair of the School of Visual Arts’s Masters in Branding program, she constantly has branding on her mind. For Millman, part of the allure of logos, identities, and marketing stems from the exercise of clearly and confidently expressing a purpose and meaning—a challenge that she has concurrently grappled with on a personal level. The parallels between aims in her work and life are no coincidence: Millman’s professional projects are often her way of searching for answers to life’s deepest questions.

Millman has long considered how design can reveal people’s innermost desires. She has worked at several prominent New York City agencies, including Sterling Brands, for which she served as chief marketing officer and president of its design division for 20 years, and was part of teams that created identities for brands such as 7Up, Burger King, Tropicana, and Twizzlers. She even moonlighted as the first-ever creative director of the pioneering hip-hop radio station Hot 97. Over the years, her career has helped her recognize the importance of slowing down, and of trusting that she doesn’t have to approach everything—writing, teaching, special projects, love—as if it’s her last chance to experience it.

On this episode, Millman describes her quest to feel comfortable in her own skin, talking with Spencer about the benefits of being a good listener, branding and marketing as ways to manufacture meaning, and why she doesn’t want to peak until the very end of her life.

Show notes:

• Full transcript
• debbiemillman.com
• (03:50): Roxane Gay
• (06:34): Millman’s “Together Apart” poster for #CombatCovid
• (08:15): RAND Art + Data
• (11:58): Master’s in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts
• (13:19): Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World’s Most Creative People (HarperCollins)
• (13:19): Design Matters podcast
• (33:52): Look Both Ways (HOW Books)
• (50:09): Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits (SkyHorse Publishing)
• (54:35): Millman’s 2019 TED Talk, “How Symbols and Brands Shape Humanity”
• (01:17:16): How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer (Simon & Schuster)

For curator and scholar Glenn Adamson, craft isn’t a quirky hobby that sits on the outskirts of contemporary culture. Rather, it’s a vital, timeless tool for teaching us about one another, and about humanity as a whole. This belief fuels his writing, teaching, and curatorial projects, which seek to unpack the many ways in which the age-old activity shapes our lives. Adamson’s work shows that craft is bigger than any single skillfully handmade object—each of which itself can serve as an important symbol of the human capacity for honing expertise over time—and influences countless aspects of society, from the Japanese tea ceremony to farming robots devised by Google’s parent company, Alphabet X. In this way, craft acts as a lens for understanding people and places across time.

Adamson, 49, has explored the virtues of craft throughout his two-decade-long career, which has included roles at Milwaukee’s Chipstone Foundation, London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, and New York’s Museum of Arts and Design. In his 2018 book Fewer, Better Things, he positions craft as a means of connecting with fundamental issues and ideas (as opposed to those that hold only momentary or superficial relevance), and explains why taking the time to appreciate handmade objects from a maker’s or a user’s perspective holds particular spiritual and psychological value. Adamson’s account of the discipline in the United States, neatly laid out in his latest book, Craft: An American History (Bloomsbury), reveals how artisans—whose trade often includes people who are disempowered by their ethnicity, gender, or both—have been consistently suppressed throughout the nation’s history, but, paradoxically, are integral to many of its greatest achievements. 

His latest endeavor takes a more forward-looking approach. “Futures,” an exhibition Adamson co-curated that opens in November at the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries Building in Washington, D.C. (on view through summer 2022), considers how craft can signal where we might be headed, and why we should be optimistic about the time to come. Over and over again, Adamson demonstrates how skilled making is about more than just beautiful objects. “Craft stands in for the whole idea of what it means to be human,” he says, “and why that matters.”

On this episode, Adamson discusses the various facets of skilled making, talking with Spencer about the value of hand-formed objects, the relationship between time and craft, and the discipline’s essential, often complicated role in the history of human progress.

Show notes:

• Full transcript on timesensitive.fm
• @glenn_adamson
• glennadamson.com
• (16:20): Fewer, Better Things (Bloomsbury, 2018)
• (52:57): Chipstone Foundation 
• (53:33): Milwaukee Art Museum
• (54:16): “Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990” (Victoria and Albert Museum, 2011)
• (55:56): The Journal of Modern Craft
• (56:04): Museum of Arts and Design
• (59:50): Craft: An American History (Bloomsbury, 2021)
• (01:17:23): “Futures” (Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building, Nov. 2021–Summer 2022)

Over the past decade—and especially in the last year—the Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama has swiftly risen to become one of the most prominent African voices in art. At age 32, he has already exhibited at the Biennale of Sydney, on Cockatoo Island (his work “No Friend But the Mountains” is currently on view there through June 8, though that date may change because of the coronavirus pandemic), as well as at the 2019 Frieze Sculpture presentation at Rockefeller Center in New York and the Ghana Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. He’s created large-scale public installations around the world, including in Milan (with the Trussardi Foundation, also in 2019) and Athens (during Documenta 14, in 2017). Mahama’s work has also been shown at the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester (also in 2019), the Norval Foundation in Cape Town (yet again in 2019), and the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University (2015). He is represented by the highly respected White Cube gallery. The Africa Report, a Paris-based news magazine that focuses on African politics and economics, recently named Mahama one of the 100 most influential Africans today. In addition to his art-making, he is the founder of an artist-run nonprofit cultural institution and exhibition space, the Savannah Center for Contemporary Art (SCCA), which opened a year ago (yes, also in 2019) in Tamale, a city in the north of Ghana.

Central to Mahama’s inspiration is a specific material: jute sacks. Working with a team of collaborators to repurpose the burlap bags, which are traditionally used to transport cocoa beans, he sews together installations that range from wall- or room-size to monumental, often draping the fabric on, around, and over prominent architectural sites. Though his pieces have often been compared to the “wrap” work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, that is not necessarily an apt analogy, or at least it’s just a surface-level one. While similar in scale and scope to Christo’s ambitious environmental artworks, Mahama’s creations, like his overall practice, are socially oriented and focused on concerns such as labor, migration, globalization, and economic exchange.

On this episode of Time Sensitive, Mahama discusses with Spencer his fascination with jute sacks as a material; his views on “Ghanaian time” and Africa’s global influence; his unorthodox upbringing (he grew up among nine siblings and with a polygamous father who had four wives, and was sent to boarding at age 5); and his dreams for the SCCA.

Nathan Myhrvold is no ordinary chef. With two master’s degrees (one in mathematical economics, the other in geophysics and space physics) and a Ph.D. in theoretical and mathematical physics, he is also a technologist who did postdoctoral research with Stephen Hawking. From 1986 to 1999, Myhrvold was the chief strategist and chief technology officer at Microsoft, where he worked closely with Bill Gates on future planning and developing the company’s software. (During this time, he also co-authored Gates’s 1995 best-seller, The Road Ahead; in 1999, at age 40, he retired from the company.) Now, as the CEO of the firm Intellectual Ventures, which he co-founded in 2000, he develops and licenses intellectual property. The company owns upwards of 30,000 assets, nearly 900 of which were invented by Myrhvold himself. So where does cooking come in? Long a gastronomer and foodie (before the latter term was even a thing), Myhrvold began to pursue his passion for cuisine early on. During his Microsoft years (with Gates’s blessing), he took time off to attend the La Varenne cooking school in Burgundy, and later even apprenticed part-time at Rover's restaurant in Seattle. For a time, he was the “chief gastronomic officer” of the Zagat Survey.

It wasn’t until about a decade ago, though, that things really took off for Myhrvold on the food front. In 2011, he established a full-fledged publishing platform with the release of his six-volume Modernist Cuisine, an encyclopedic whirlwind into the science of contemporary cooking. A behemoth of a book, at 2,438 pages, it took about three years to produce, with several dozen people involved. Subsequent iterations have followed: Modernist Cuisine at Home (2012), The Photography of Modernist Cuisine (2013), and Modernist Bread (2017). A Modernist Pizza book is currently in the works. The series has become a cult favorite, highly respected by many of the world’s top chefs, including Thomas Keller and Heston Blumenthal. Especially remarkable about the project—aside from the inventive recipes—is the hyperrealist, meticulously executed photography. Many of the pictures are made through a “cutaway” technique involving machinery to that slices pots, pans, and ovens in half to offer a literal inside look into the processes behind the dishes—a pork roast atop embers, say, or broccoli steaming in a pot. It is through these images that Myhrvold's many talents and interests in science, food, and art collide, and to potent effect.

On this episode of Time Sensitive, Spencer speaks with Myhrvold about his journey into sous vide cooking, the problems he sees with the Slow Food movement, why food photography has never been considered a high art, and more.

Since launching her eponymous label in 2015, the Uruguayan-born, New York–based designer Gabriela Hearst has become known for her sincere, forward-thinking approach to sustainability; her slow-growth business ethos; the long waiting lists for her limited-production handbags; her impeccable tailoring; and her high-quality collections that, season after season, have consistently been hailed as critics’ favorites. For her, sustainability isn’t just a buzzword or an item to tick off a list; it’s something essential and, most importantly, actionable. 

Last year, Hearst presented the industry’s first-ever carbon-neutral runway show. A collaboration with Bureau Betak and EcoAct, the presentation was done completely sans blow dryers, straighteners, or curling irons, models were sourced locally, and a carbon-offset fund for the energy-related production costs was donated to the Hifadhi-Livelihoods Project in Kenya. Hearst regularly uses deadstock in her collections. She recently made all of the brand’s packaging biodegradable and compostable, and also tweaked her supply chain to ship by boat instead of by air freight. Hearst’s new eco-conscious store in London’s Mayfair neighborhood, designed by Norman Foster, includes custom furniture made from a tree that fell in a storm and herringbone oak flooring reclaimed from a military barracks. Her preferred word for sustainability? Accountability. 

Raised on a ranch that has been in her family for six generations—which her father bequeathed to her in 2011 when he passed away—Hearst, early in her life, became interested in where things come from and how they’re made, and in understanding the true value of utility, namely that making well-constructed things that stand the test of time matters. Now, in the age of climate change, her less-but-better mindset has become all the more relevant and pressing. Creating timeless, long-lasting clothing, she says, is the only reasonable (and yes, sustainable) way forward. Eschewing a trend-driven outlook in favor of one that’s about creating fewer, better items that her customers will keep forever, Hearst continues to be informed by her upbringing on the farm. It’s an approach that appears to be working: The company had a turnover of between $15 and $20 million in sales revenue in 2018, and last year LVMH Luxury Ventures bought a minority stake in it (the majority is owned 
by Hearst and her husband and business partner, John Augustine “Austin” Hearst, a TV and film producer and media executive who is the grandson of William Randolph Hearst).

On this episode of Time Sensitive, Hearst speaks with Spencer about everything from her youth on a ranch in rural Uruguay, to her personal definitions of sustainability and luxury, to her roundabout path to becoming a fashion designer, to her mother’s Zen Buddhist teachings.

Suketu Mehta tells a story about pinkie fingers, dancing and kissing. It is as confounding as it sounds. And utterly heartbreaking, too. In his assertive and essential new book, This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto—as well as on this episode of Time Sensitive—he describes the scene: Friendship Park, a half-acre fence on the U.S.-Mexican border. A Mexican man living in the U.S., who hasn’t seen his mother in 17 years, and has been working hard to send money back to her all that time, at last reunites with her at that fateful fence. But because of its thick and rigid design, he can’t see her clearly. Through the holes in the fence, mother and son can only fit stick their pinkies, wagging them back and forth, gently touching, caressing, connecting—but only for a few moments. This small act serves as a greater metaphor about immigration, one with vast implications and consequences, and not just in America but around our world today.

Mehta, a Calcutta-born, New York–based journalist and N.Y.U. professor who was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his 2005 novel Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, is full of stories like this one. (The dancing, kissing pinkies, however, may be among his most gut-wrenching and tear-inducing tales.) As a reporter and writer, Mehta is slow and methodical in his approach, and it shows in his rich and varied body of work, which spans decades and is written with the elegance and grace of a poet. A sort of modern-day Walt Whitman, he has the rare ability to home in on deeply personal human stories and craft narratives around them that reveal larger truths about culture, politics, and society.

On this episode, Mehta speaks with Spencer Bailey about his challenging high school years as an Indian immigrant growing up in Queens, his belief in how the future of democracy “rests on storytelling,” and the importance of considering historical time frames when thinking about today’s contentious immigration debates.

The Dutch-born trend forecaster Lidewij Edelkoort, founder of the Paris-based consultancy Trend Union, has a knack for being ahead of the curve. In fact, she kind of is the curve, the rare mind who—with her sharp eye, wide-ranging tastes, and quick wit—is able to situate herself within past, present, and future. She astutely understands historical markers of time and often predicts, with surprising precision, what the Next Big Thing is. Working for clients across a variety of industries, from fashion and textiles, to interiors and hospitality, to cars and cosmetics, to retail and food, Edelkoort travels the world studying the subtle market shifts that shape our lives. A sociocultural omnivore with a deep design knowledge, she’s the dean of the Hybrid Design Studies program at Parsons School of Design, where she’s spearheading a new M.F.A. in textile studies.

Since founding Trend Union, in 1975, Edelkoort has gained a cult following as a sustainability-minded soothsayer. For more than three decades, corporate leaders have gravitated toward her, as one would a shaman, for strategic, big-picture advice. In the late ’80s, she started giving her now-infamous trend presentations, in which she unpacks, interprets, and predicts the market movements developing before us. An archaeologist of the modern day, Edelkoort is part curator, part sociologist, digging up vast amounts of information, much of it visual, so as to infer, intuit, and map out complex explanations of the now. Her findings aren’t fanciful, even if on the surface they may appear to be high-minded. They are indeed quite often pragmatic, if not also paradigmatic. Sometimes—as was the case with her 2015 “Anti-Fashion Manifesto,” a treatise against the wastefulness and greed of the global fashion industry—they also tend to be refreshingly direct and pointed. 

On this episode of Time Sensitive, Edelkoort speaks with Spencer Bailey about a movement back toward the farm and nature; the notion of animism (i.e., that a soul is embedded in everything); combatting fear in a time of prolific fear-mongering; and her reasonably optimistic belief in a more collaborative future.

Craig Robins strongly believes that all good things take time. Since launching his vast real estate enterprise Dacra in 1987, at age 24, he has, with this ideology in mind, become one of Miami’s shrewdest mover-shakers. Intimately involved in the revitalization of South Beach in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Robins helped restore—and save from demolition—several now-prized Art Deco properties, including The Webster (designed in 1939 by Henry Hohauser as a hotel and now home to Laure Hériard Dubreuil’s flagship fashion boutique). From there he began to quietly shift his focus across Biscayne Bay, to the Design District neighborhood, unveiling the beginnings of his ambitious plans in 2002. A visionary thinker, tinkerer, and doer, Robins also got involved in bringing the Art Basel fair to Miami in the early aughts and in 2005 co-founded the Design Miami collectible design fair.

Thinking about things slowly and holistically, Robins—unlike so many others in his line of work—does not follow a build-it-cheap-and-fast-and-flip-it edict. His is a long-haul, less-but-better vision. Robins cares deeply about the urban fabric and the textures of the city, about architectural serendipity and surprise, about moments of wonder and beauty and joy. A finger-on-the-pulse master of cultivating culture, he has thoughtfully constructed a synergistic amalgam of art, architecture, design, dining, fashion, and urban planning within the Design District, a New Urbanism–infused neighborhood that seems to subtly morph every month, if not every week, bit by bit. While it hasn’t been without its detractors and naysayers, the Design District clearly offers an alternative, human-scale approach to city building. Now home to standouts such as the Institute of Contemporary Art (which opened in its new location in late 2017) and the Pharrell Williams–owned Swan restaurant and Bar Bevy, the Design District is beginning to show its potential not as just a luxury shopping mall—though it’s certainly that, too—but as a dynamic cultural hub.

On this episode of Time Sensitive, Robins talks with Spencer Bailey about his big-picture vision, his early career helping rejuvenate South Beach, his forward-thinking approach to bolstering Miami culture and his obsession with river rafting and disconnecting in nature.

Growing up in Evanston, Illinois, the artist Rashid Johnson had a “mixed bag”—racially, at least—of close friends. There were, he says, “four black guys, two Asian guys, two Jewish guys, a white English guy.…” They still keep in touch today via a text chain. This perspective, combined with the one ingrained in him by his Ph.D. history professor mother, who introduced him from a young age to the works of 20th-century African American writers such as Amiri Baraka, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington, and his tinkerer father, who owned a Wicker Park electronics shop, led to a deep, contextualized curiosity about the human condition: who we are, how we got here, and where we’re going. 

This multicultural (and intellectual) background continues to feed Johnson—as water and light would a plant—growing his insatiable appetite for better understanding the richness, complications, and contradictions of being human, each of us with our own roots, carrying our own energies—no one necessarily a part of any “monolithic experience.” It has also naturally led him to explore the social, cultural, and political realities of being a black man in today’s world. His multidisciplinary practice, which spans painting, drawing, sculpture, filmmaking, and installation art, is both biographical and collective. Underlying much of Johnson’s work is the idea of escapism—that each of us, on some level, yearns for another reality. Such a narrative is at the core of his directorial debut, HBO’s Native Son, released earlier this year and based on the 1940 Richard Wright novel of the same name (the screenplay was written by the playwright Suzan-Lori Parks). It is also at the heart of “The Hikers,” a ballet film shot on the side of a mountain in Aspen, currently on view at Museo Tamayo in Mexico City (through Nov. 10) and opening on Nov. 12 (through Jan. 25, 2020) at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, where it will be shown alongside several other works by Johnson, including ceramic mosaics, paintings, and a large-scale sculpture.

On this episode of Time Sensitive, Johnson talks with Spencer Bailey about the steep challenge of turning Wright’s famed novel into a feature film; using materials such as shea butter, black soap, and plants in his artworks; why he remains somewhat ambivalent about the idea of “wokeness”; and his ongoing fascination with the complexity and diversity of not only blackness but also whiteness.

Daniel Brush’s acute eye for detail, as well as the rigor and vigor he brings to his craft, comes through loud and clear in all of his creations. A poet of materiality, he is at once a metalworker, a jewelry-maker, a philosopher, an engineer, a blacksmith, a painter, and a sculptor. The late Dr. Oliver Sacks, a friend of Brush’s, once said that Brush’s work is “the result of years of incubation, years of isolation and complete immersion, which have produced his unique and mysterious objects—they are made objects, and yet they seem found.” Sacks was not exaggerating when he said years. Brush’s oeuvre—on full display in the new Rizzoli book “Daniel Brush: Jewels Sculpture”—is the accumulation of four-plus decades of steadfast, heads-down, solitary work in his Manhattan studio, alongside his wife and accomplice, Olivia, allowing for only select visits from his closest friends and certain patrons, scholars, and students. 

Brush’s imagination has always run wild—from his beginnings as a concert pianist in his youth, through his early years as a painter, to now, he has always demonstrated a rare intensity. For those who have laid eyes on his intricate cuffs, brooches, necklaces, and other pieces, it may be somewhat surprising to hear that it wasn’t until making a wedding ring for Olivia, in 1967, whom he had known for just three days before marrying, that he became interested in jewelry-making. Now, his work—colored by influences from a life of painting and drawing as well as his astute interests in Japanese Noh theater and Asian art—centers around jewels and objects made from a vast assortment of materials, including Afghan lapis lazuli, aluminum, amethyst, gold, Madagascar sapphire, malachite, steel, tektite, topaz, and tourmaline. 

Brush, not surprisingly, also has a deep appreciation for history and collecting. His own made objects, as well as a large library of books and found objects, are stowed or situated around his home and studio, serving, for him, as a record of passing time. Given that his pieces are not traded on the market and rarely available to acquire, Brush’s work decidedly has, as he puts it, “no value.” Instead, he suggests that the value he derives from his work comes from the connections he has developed with patrons and peers who show respect for the complexity of it all. For Brush, it is the most minute connection—the tiniest detail—that so often reveals the largest truth.

On this episode of Time Sensitive, Brush’s use of language and storytelling approaches the poetic. He and Spencer Bailey talk about memory (and interpretations of memory); his deep, monkish engagement with a wide variety of materials; and some of his most valuable tools—breathing, language, and light. 

David Duchovny may be swooned over as the hunky special agent Fox William Mulder in The X-Files and Hank Moody in Californication, but it should be noted—and, in our opinion, more widely known—that he is also an accomplished novelist. Yes, novelist. In fact, he has published three novels with the highly esteemed publisher Farrar, Straus, and Giroux since 2015. A fourth novel, called Truly Like Lightning and publicly revealed for the first time on this episode, is in the works.

Primarily known for his acting—which also includes a well-known, ahead-of-its-time role, in the early ’90s, as the trans FBI agent Denise Bryson on Twin Peaks—Duchovny has carved out a name for himself as a screenwriter, director, producer, and musician, too. With an extensive literary pedigree—his father, Amram, was a “closet” writer until late in his life, when he published the novel Coney—Duchovny graduated with a B.A. in English from Princeton in 1982 and began (though never finished) a comparative literature Ph.D. at Yale.

His mastery across both dramatic and comedic acting, as well as his prolificity in writing and music, is impressive in its breadth and wide-ranging in its subject matter. Less than a decade ago, Duchovny began singing and playing guitar, and in 2015, nearly 30 years into his film and television career, he released his first album, Hell or Highwater. That same year, he also published his first novel, Holy Cow. Since then, he has released a second album, Every Third Thought (2018), and published two more books, Bucky F*cking Dent (2016) and Miss Subways (2018). Now, at age 59, Duchovny’s creative energy continues apace across all these mediums—acting, writing, music—with his next novel soon to come out and plans to turn Bucky F*cking Dent into a film.

On this episode of Time Sensitive, Duchovny speaks with Spencer Bailey about novel writing, the need to better understand proposed solutions for the climate crisis, his role as Denise in Twin Peaks, and the various twists and turns of his multifaceted life and career.