Quick note before I jump in to today’s paid post. There was a lot of love for my last What I’d Buy series with pieces under $500, so I’m shifting the Collector’s Circle cadence to include pieces under $500 once a month and higher end pieces once a month.

The goal is to help you see what you love and start your collection with what makes your heart sing, at prices that work for where you are. From looking at a ton of art over the years, I know that great art lives in both of these bands.

Not everything is for everyone. That is not the point of art. But great art will make you think, dream, scream, and feel alive so the more of it you see and feel, the more you’ll discover about what you love.

For this edition, I pulled some of the most-saved rooms from Houzz, a tool people use to find design inspiration from home offices to living rooms and bedrooms, and added artworks to them. The goal wasn’t to match the art to the interior, but to think about what the room can actually take and how art can unlock it.

When designing a space, the old principle of form follows function still holds true. Buying a sofa is expensive, but you know the constraints. You can prioritize comfort, durability, size, material, color. You also know what you need it to do. It is a place to sit, entertain, watch a movie, take a nap. You get the point.

Buying art for your home doesn’t fit as neatly into ideas of form and function. It is subjective, often expensive, and hard to know when you’ve gotten it “right.” So it gets deferred. Or placeholder art goes up until the time feels right to replace it.

The irony is that art is often the thing that takes a room from furnished to finished.

If anything catches your eye, reply to this email or send me a note.

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When I saw Tavassoli’s work at The Other Art Fair a few years ago, I was completely mesmerized. Walking through rows and rows of artist booths, the colors and composition caught my eye. I expected it to be landscape art or some form of abstraction, but as I got closer, I didn’t expect it to feel so scientific and topographical.

So I started chatting with Moti and learned that the works visualize the invisible networks of plant life—the nutrients moving through mycelial networks underground, the chemical signals plants send each other, the way information travels through a single plant.

Ok, back up. How did we get here?

I needed to know more, so today I’m excited to share a conversation with Tavassoli about how she came to create these worlds of plants, how growing up in Iran and moving to LA shaped her relationship to nature, and, of course, what this all means for where her work is headed.

Let’s get into it.

When did nature become your “home base”?

Some of my earliest memories are tied to nature — family trips to the lush forests of northern Iran and summers at my grandfather’s orchard, harvesting mulberries with my extended family, eating sour cherries straight from the tree while the juice ran down my arms. Those moments were brief but grounding. Otherwise, we lived in the heart of the city with little access to nature.

The moment it truly clicked came during college in San Luis Obispo. After an especially difficult evening, I went on a solo sunrise hike. As the sun lifted the fog off the hills, I saw a deer grazing peacefully. It was completely quiet except for the subtle sounds of the landscape. In that stillness, I felt myself soften. By the time I walked back down, I felt lighter, clear-headed, and able to move forward.

Everything around me was in slow but constant motion—the sun rising, the fog drifting, the deer moving through the field. That sense of gentle, continuous movement has stayed with me and often appears in my work through line and form.

As someone who moved from Iran to Los Angeles, I experienced a deep sense of rootlessness. Nature became the one place that felt stable, neutral, and accepting. Today, I return to it through weekly hikes and daily walks, observing plant life, collecting textures and colors, and grounding both my life and artistic practice in that relationship.

You trained in architecture and design. How does that influence your studio practice now?

First, thinking in essence and abstraction.

In design, I was trained to move beyond the literal and identify the underlying concept or system at play. In my art practice, that translates into distilling what I observe—whether it’s plant growth, decay, or networked systems—into forms, lines, and gestures that hold multiple layers of meaning rather than direct representation.

Second, attention to tactility and visual language.

Material, texture, repetition, and pattern deeply matter to me. Whether I’m working in clay, fiber, or pigment, I’m constantly testing how texture reads up close and at a distance, how light interacts with a surface, and how repetition creates a sense of harmony or tension.

Third, systems thinking and modularity.

I often approach creating as defining a unit and then aggregating it through a set of rules—similar to how a product or architectural system is developed. This allows forms to emerge through process rather than total control. It mirrors ecological systems and plant networks, where individual parts create complex wholes.

Ultimately, my design background gives me a structured way to explore intuition—balancing systems and experimentation to create work that is both rigorous and alive.

Your work balances precision with much more fluid, atmospheric forms. How do you think about that?

I think of my work as existing in the space between two truths: nature appears chaotic on the surface, but underneath it is highly structured, precise, and measurable. That hidden order fascinates me.

My training in architecture and human-centered design taught me how to synthesize complex systems and translate them into visual, digestible forms. I bring that same approach into my paintings. I’m not trying to represent nature literally—I’m trying to make its invisible intelligence legible and felt.

I use systematic line work, repetition, and structure to suggest those underlying systems, while allowing color, gesture, and material to remain fluid and responsive.

You talk about the “intelligence of plant life.” How does that show up in the work?

The “intelligence of plant life” shows up in my work through line, rhythm, and structure as a way of visualizing invisible processes.

In different paintings, lines stand in for different forms of plant communication—sometimes they trace the movement of nutrients through mycelial networks between roots, sometimes the spread of chemical signals within a species, and sometimes the way information travels through the body of a single plant.

These lines are repeated gestures rather than literal diagrams. Broken lines feel slow and steady, continuous lines feel fast and forceful; dense passages suggest speed or intensity, while sparse marks feel like drift or evaporation.

I think of the compositions like flocks of birds or schools of fish—local interactions that produce a larger, emergent system.

I don’t assign fixed visual codes to specific plant processes; the translation is intuitive. My goal is not to illustrate science literally but to make its intelligence felt.

What does the research behind that look like?

Books were my entry point into this world. While talking about my houseplants with a colleague, they recommended The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan. Learning that plants can shape their own evolution by domesticating humans completely shifted my perspective.

From there, The Hidden Life of Trees, The Light Eaters, Underland, and The Serviceberry have each offered different ways of understanding plant life, its intelligence, and our relationship to it.

Alongside reading, walking is central to my research. Weekly hikes and daily walks to my studio are part of my practice, allowing me to observe shifts in color, blossoming, decay, and invasion over time. I collect fallen plant parts, document color relationships I see in flowers, and record patterns and textures in plant bodies.

These observations go directly into my sketchbook as drawings, small sculptures, and color studies. In the studio, I translate these observations into material—sometimes literally, sometimes in an abstracted way—through clay and surface work.

Ultimately, I share this research through my work by visualizing and embodying scientific ideas—making visible the unseen exchanges and systems that plants inhabit and create.

What question are you chasing next?

What does it mean to be in a balanced relationship—with nature, with material, and with the systems we participate in—and how can that be made visible through form?

On one level, that’s leading me deeper into sculpture and spatial installation. I’ve been working more in clay and I’m interested in scaling up—creating pieces that don’t just sit in space but create an environment the body can move through, the way we move through landscapes or ecological systems.

At the same time, I’m researching the relationships humans choose to form with nature—models of reciprocity, care, and coexistence that contrast with extractive systems. I’m asking what we can learn from plant communities about cooperation, communication, and long-term thriving, and how those ideas can be translated into visual and spatial language.

And finally, I’m turning that question back onto my own practice: what is my relationship to my materials? Am I choosing them intentionally, in alignment with my ideas and values, or defaulting to what is convenient or readily available?

All of these threads come back to the same inquiry: how can my work embody the kind of relationships I want to see in the world—interconnected, responsive, and alive.

Love Moti’s work but not sure what would work in your own space? Art Office Hours is a one-hour session built around one room or one specific art question.

Book Art Office Hours

LOTA Fast Three

A color you can’t quit — what does it do inside your work?

Blue—both Ultramarine and Cerulean. Those hues feel simultaneously grounding and otherworldly. I find myself reaching for them when I want a sense of quiet and calm that is expanding at the speed of light.

Studio object — one non-art thing you keep nearby?

An oxtail bone I found in my pho. Its form is strangely sculptural—intricate, functional, and balanced. The smooth surfaces where the bone is exposed contrast beautifully with the crinkled joints where it once connected to another.

I keep it close because it reminds me of a boney orchard—organic structures repeating themselves in mysterious, elegant ways.

An artist who inspires you — who, and what do they teach you?

Ruth Asawa. The gorgeously complex forms she created from the simple act of looping wire feel endlessly inspiring to me. There is something powerful about how she transformed a repetitive gesture into structures that are both delicate and grand.

Her sculptures feel like rhythm suspended in space—they occupy space while also creating it, all the while allowing other things to breathe and be.

She was also incredibly prolific across media, constantly experimenting and pushing the limits of her materials. That spirit of curiosity and play is something I try to carry into my own work. She was deeply inspired by nature, and I’m drawn to how her work echoes organic growth, cellular structures, and natural systems.

Thank you to Moti for sharing her practice with LOTA. You can follow Moti’s work on Instagram, learn more through her website, or see available works here.

Photos courtesy Moti Tavassoli unless noted otherwise

P.S. New here? Start with the art quiz to discover your style.

More from LOTA

And yes, you can. It requires a little more looking and taking the time to understand what you are actually buying. At this price, you are often choosing between small original art, vintage works with very little information attached to it, a limited print by a working artist, or something larger that comes with a practical catch. It may need framing, stretching, or a little imagination to see what it could become. For me, the search and possibility is part of the fun.

If you are part of Collector’s Circle, you know What I’d Buy is my monthly edit of works you can actually buy now, with context on the artist, why I think the work is interesting, and how it could live in a space.

Today’s free post is a peek into that series at a more accessible price point, with room studies and the practical details worth knowing before you buy.

Let’s get into it.

Paula Craioveanu | Blue Tears, 2026 | $500

Ultramarine tempera and ink on paper
27.5 × 19.5 inches
From the NeoMythology series

The colors in this work stopped me in my tracks. The juxtaposition of the classical Greek subject with the loose strokes and dripping paint make it feel equally modern.

Blue Tears is part of Craioveanu’s NeoMythology series, where Greco-Roman figures show real, raw emotion. Typically these subjects are shown regal, otherworldly, and unencumbered by the struggle of daily life. Craioveanu reshapes that narrative, using color and gesture to bring urgency and vulnerability back into the image.

Room Studies1

Framing
A generous mat gives the work more scale and gravitas, while the slim dark-walnut frame keeps it feeling modern and connects back to the wood elsewhere in the room.

Placement
This space is serious and fairly formal. The classical subject fits that mood, while the loose lines, dripping paint, and bold color introduce something less expected.

Color palette
The warm, earthy tones in the room give the orange and blue somewhere to land and are the focal point of this space.

Robert Langley | Avalon 81, 2026 | $380

Acrylic on canvas
55 × 50 inches

Abstract art is often treated as the easy option for any space and often used when you can’t find anything else to fill a wall. I think that completely oversimplifies an art form rooted in interpretation, emotion, and real skill.

Avalon 81 by Robert Langley is a piece that stops you in your tracks and has much more to offer than a pretty painting used to fill a wall. The graphic nature of the piece feels like jazz to me with a bit of improvisation, held together with control of the color, composition, and movement.

The dark border gives the work the structure it needs, while the shapes inside are open enough to be anything and everything.

I see a windowsill on the far right. The sun rising and a sailboat in the stars in the middle. A face looking back at me. A banister at the top of the stairs on the far left. Someone else will find something completely different based on their own experiences, narratives, and worldview. That is the magic of abstract art and part of why it is so easily misunderstood. The meaning is what you make of it.

Avalon 81 is also special because it is a large-format original that can hold a room for an incredible price. The only caveat is that the work ships rolled, so you will have to find a framer who can stretch the canvas onto stretcher bars and then decide if you want to frame it or not. More on that below.

Room Studies

Framing
For canvas works, if the edges are clean (i.e. painted), you can leave it unframed. If you were to place it in a more formal space or wanted to give it a more finished presence, I would recommend a float frame with a quarter-inch gap between the canvas and the frame. Here, I chose a dark wood similar to wenge or ebony to echo the darker border of the painting.

Between stretching and framing, you would likely spend more than the cost of the artwork itself. In this case, I think it would be worth it and still a steal.

Placement
This work is large enough to fit as a centerpiece on a large wall as shown here. The space is designed to feel both inviting and elevated and the painting adds energy and interest without disrupting the calm.

Color palette
The darker tones in the painting stand out against the bright white wall and connect back to the deeper colors elsewhere in the room. The mustard, pale yellow, and blue keep the composition bright enough without feeling to heavy, keeping the colors in balance.

Em Kay | 55 Collage | $180

Original collage made from hand-painted paper on cotton paper
8.3 × 11.7 inches

What I love about collage art is that the process stays visible. You can see the imperfections, the cuts, the seams, and the changes in material rather than having them disappear beneath a finished image.

Em Kay says of her work, “What ultimately draws me in are the spaces that emerge in between the negative shapes that were never planned.”

That sense of discovery is what makes this piece work. The painted paper gives the work movement, while the white space gives the composition balance. The shape feels architectural or like an object that is familiar but you can’t name. The uncertainty of material and form is what gives the work its teeth.

Room Studies

Notes on the room study:

Framing
Since the artist created so much white space around the collage by design, I would skip a traditional mat and frame the full work without an additional mat. That said, if the paper has enough weight in person, I would consider float-mounting (where the paper sits slightly above a mat) so the edges remain visible and the texture becomes part of the full work.

I chose a slim walnut frame to echo the wood tones elsewhere in the space without competing with the color and texture of the work.

Placement
At about the size of a piece of paper, this is a small but mighty work. It needs a place where the scale feels intentional, like a nook, a small wall between rooms, or a tightly edited gallery wall. The mix of modern curves, patina, and playful furniture makes the collage feel like a punctuation point rather than the center of the room.

Color palette
This is a great piece to add color to your walls if you want a pop of color, but still want to keep it more minimal. There is enough of a saturated palette with the pinks, blues, corals, and green that add energy without overwhelming the space.

Em Kay | 55 Collage, $180

Laure Noetzin-Azam | Paris Café Scene | $455

Vintage watercolor on paper
14.75 × 12.25 inches

Laure Noetzin-Azam is a French modernist artist who trained under André Lhote, an influential Paris-based Cubist painter and teacher. Lhote was known for his emphasis on structure, encouraging artists to understand how a painting is built before deciding how to work in it. Noetzin-Azam takes cubist principles, but loosens them.

In this café scene, you can see how Noetzin-Azam organizes the room into simplified planes in the background, but in the foreground the focus is the woman eating alone. Her pale pink top, floral scarf, and more casual posture separate her from the darker, more formal figures behind her. There is something unsaid about who she is and why she is there that makes me want to know more.

This is the type of piece I could see myself finding while traveling and then thinking about once I got home.

Thankfully we have the internet.

Room Studies

Framing
The condition report notes some wear and perforation along the edges. I would lean into this history and imperfection by float-mounting the work so the full piece is visible. Additionally, given the age of the work, I would use museum-grade, UV-filtering glazing to protect the watercolor and paper from further fading.

For the frame itself, I chose a warm wood frame to connect with the shelving and table. A curved wood profile would play well with the curves of the table and chairs if you wanted to push it in a more modern direction.

Placement
I love this at the kitchen table, but could also see it above a reading nook. In this particular space, I love it off-centered with as a counter point to the art on the shelf and gives the dining room a more grounded feel. Honestly, I can’t fully explain it, but the whole combination feels like ease personified.

Color palette
The watercolor keeps the color soft enough to work with many rooms. This piece is more about the style and story rather than matching the room’s color palette.

Laure Noetzin-Azam | Paris Café Scene, $455

Hanan Ramadan, This Lake Is Not Water | $255

Oil on paper
8.3 × 11.7 inches

I love the beautiful, ethereal world Egyptian artist Hanan Ramadan creates. Ramadan’s work moves between abstraction and figuration, often featuring female figures to explore themes of vulnerability, strength, and transformation. This work feels as though it were plucked from a memory or dream.

The color and composition have so much depth and warmth that they make me want to cozy up with the art. Because it is painted in oil, the surface will have even more texture and feeling in person than you can see online.

Framing
This is another smaller piece, but because the composition is busy, I would opt for a large mat to really help focus your eye on the art.

The frame itself here is a thin metal frame to create tension with the textures in the space. If you were to choose wood, I would keep the frame thin to offset the thicker mat. A hot tip is to make sure the frame and mat are different sizes to give your eye a clear place to land.

Placement
I love this in a more intimate room given the context of the piece. I’d place this over a dresser, in a bathroom, or over a small console. The dreamlike setting feels better suited to a private space than a larger, shared room.

Color palette
I would place this in a moodier room with darker woods, earthier colors, and layered textures. It could still work in a brighter space, but I would want enough texture and contrast around it so the painting feels connected.

Hanan Ramadan, This Lake Is Not Water, $255

As you can see, there is a lot more to just a pretty picture. There is the frame, the placement, and the story. Together, they can make your home feel more connected and considered.

This post includes affiliate links. If you purchase something through one of them, LOTA may earn a commission at no additional cost to you.

I get a lot of questions about where to start with art collecting - what to spend, what size to look for, where to even begin. One recent client is a perfect example of how you can start small, make a big impact, and continue to hone your style and taste along the way.

Where we started

This client has a stunning classic colonial home outside Boston with bay windows, crown molding, and warm wood and furnished in a much more modern, minimal way. She came into Art Office Hours after taking the Art Style Quiz where her style was given an initial name, Warm Minimalist.

When we met, she knew she wanted nature photography that fit her style, but once we started looking at work together, what she responded to was more specific - hazy light, muted blues, deeper greens, soft pinks, water, and landscapes that felt organic and abstract rather than literal.

After Art Office Hours, she received a full plan with the suggested directions, artists within budget, recommended sizing, and framing advice—everything she needed to go bring her vision to life. I shared two directions with her in the recap. The first was nature-forward photography filled with soft light, a sense of place, but nothing too postcard or just a standard landscape. The second direction was botanical and organic work that felt graphic but still loose and modern. The through line was calm, warm, nature-inspired, and a little romantic.

The bigger shift I suggested was scale - moving from the gallery wall to one large piece. The dining room is one of the first spaces you see when you walk in, and the client imagined it as a place for late-night dinners and game nights. They wanted the art to bring energy, still tap into nature, and have real presence.

Anchoring the space with a single piece of art would give the sideboard more weight and set the tone for the room. The gallery wall read more like a pass-through, while offering one singular point of view made the space feel more inviting and grounding.

The piece they landed on

Armed with the plan, the client decided to go with Lou Mora, one of the artists I had shared with her. Mora is a commercial and fine-art photographer who captures the in-between moments of landscapes in the most beautiful way.

The work she chose is recognizably the ocean, but there is no horizon line or obvious scenic view. The light is soft and the movement from the waves that are forming and crashing gives the work the energy the client was looking for.

They framed it in dark walnut and float-mounted against a white mat. What I love about float mounting is that it allows you see the full piece, but the white mat around it still gives the work a moment to breathe. When all the elements are taken together, the art shines.

If you look closely, the shifts from where the client started are subtle, but significant. The original grouping of five frames included several ocean scenes, but none had the same level of depth and at the smaller scale there was nowhere for the eye to rest. The larger work takes a similar idea and gives it more tension, movement, and presence. Ultimately, it changes the mood of the room.

Make it Yours

Here are a few other works with the same mix of movement, hazy fields, and natural references that I love.

Notes on sizing and framing:

• For one artwork above a console, sofa, or other piece of furniture, aim for the finished framed work to be around 70–80% of the furniture’s width. This creates a clear relationship between the art and what sits below it.

• When framing photography, a mat can go a long way. It gives the image breathing room and can add the extra inches needed to make a smaller (and often more affordable) work fit the scale of the space.

• When installing art above furniture, aim for roughly five to eight inches between the top of the furniture and the bottom of the frame. This is one of the rules I see broken most often, usually because you’re trying to align the art with something else in the room - a windowsill, a light switch, or the natural sightline. But the artwork and furniture should read together first.

Here’s a post from last year that goes deeper on framing:

What are you stuck on?

Over the next few months, I’m going to answer a few art questions here. One wall, one frame, one piece you already own, one decision you keep circling. What are you wondering about? Leave it in the comments. I’ll work through it in an upcoming post.

Artwork by Lou Mora. Photos courtesy the client.

Summer group shows are categorically fun. Caught somewhere between the end of the spring solo season and the Fall openings, summer show are looser with galleries bringing together artists who might not otherwise share a room. They test new names, pull out smaller or stranger works, and take chances they may not take in serious buying season.

For someone looking for art, that creates a real opening. Prices are often lower than they would be in a solo show. Smaller works appear by artists who are already well known. Emerging artists get their first serious gallery context. And occasionally an established artist shows something unusual enough to feel like a real find.

Below I break down a few shows that caught my attention and what I’d buy, why, and how it could work in a room. Some of the artists are already in museum collections. Some just finished graduate school. Others are still building the context around the work.

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I have kept some version of a diary since I was in first or second grade. At first, it was mostly lists of my best friends, crushes, favorite movies, and songs. Eventually, it became the way I processed my life. At the beginning of every year and around my birthday, I still find myself writing about where I have been and where I think I am going.

The LOTA anniversary post has become a more public version of that ritual. It is where I take stock of what I have learned, what has changed, and what might be next.

At the beginning of this year, the word I kept coming back to was transition. Not all of the transitions I imagined have happened, at least not yet. But the year has still taken on that shape.

I was recently talking to someone standing at the edge of a transition of her own. She is preparing to leave a comfortable tech job to pursue something more personal and do the whole solo-entrepreneur thing. I told her the truth. It has been one of the most fulfilling things I’ve ever done. It has also been much harder than I expected.

I have always thought of myself as ambitious. But this work has required a kind of ambition that is not always recognized as ambition. When I started LOTA, my two kids were still tiny. Some weeks, it felt like I was solving for time with them, a hobby for myself, and something else that did not have a name yet. Now they are both in elementary school, and that something else has become a real business, a body of work, and an increasingly large part of who I am.

I’ve learned to have more grace with myself. I’ve returned to me in more ways than I can list, and I feel more tapped in, more connected to myself through the work, through the ways I get to express myself, and even through the ways I’m seen.

Being called a creative is still something I am learning to accept.

Growing up, one of my favorite pretend games with my sister was not House-House. It was Office-Office. My vision of making it involved a skirt suit, a briefcase, and high heels in the big city. I wanted to be a serious person, and somewhere along the way, I came to believe that seriousness and creativity belonged to different kinds of people.

Later, working in design-adjacent roles across advertising and product, I learned to revere design and defer to it. I would give feedback and begin with, “I’m not a designer, but…” Or I would say, “This palette feels…” and trail off, as though I needed permission to trust my own eye.

It has been fun, surprising, and honestly life-affirming to begin seeing myself as an actual creative.

I also think the entire framing is a fallacy. Everyone is creative. Whether we get to inhabit that identity often has more to do with what we were told about ourselves than what we are capable of making, especially when you layer societal and cultural expectations on top of it. But I digress.

My work at LOTA itself feels like it is finding its stride.

One of the most satisfying moments of the year was seeing an Alex Maceda painting installed in a client’s home. My client had seen Alex’s work early in our process, but it did not immediately feel right for her. As we looked at more art together and talked about the role it could play in her home and her family’s story, her eye started to shift toward bolder color and more abstract forms. In the end, she came back to Alex. She needed to look at enough art to understand why Alex was right for her.

Seeing the work installed felt like the full arc of LOTA coming together: discovering artists, telling their stories, helping someone develop confidence in her own taste, and ultimately seeing the work become part of a life and a home.

LOTA is also beginning to expand beyond individual clients and into collaborations with interior designers and hospitality projects. That has pushed me to think beyond what belongs on one wall and toward how the whole space comes together. What do you notice first? How does the art relate to the light, architecture, and furniture around it? How does one room lead you into the next? And most importantly, what role can art play in shaping the experience of being there?

I have a few case studies coming in the next few months that I can't wait to share. More than the milestones themselves, I can feel my own eye sharpening. I am looking at the art, but also at everything happening around it.

A few weeks ago, my family and I were in Alaska. I got truly lost in the wildness of it.

The mountains are the tallest I’ve ever seen, and unlike most places where one or two mountains define the space, in Alaska, mountains are the spine of the state. We spent ten days driving between fjords, glaciers, and wildlife and, honestly, watching or listening to whatever World Cup match we could find.

It felt like being on another planet. Everything slowed.

Back in Los Angeles, I went to LACMA to see the block-printing exhibition, which traced the form from its origins in India and Japan through German Expressionism to contemporary art. The world slowed again, but differently. Alaska made me feel small. LACMA made me look closely.

I’ve been thinking about this all week because The Wall Street Journal ran a piece by a psychiatrist about exactly what I was feeling (shout out to my dad for the send). She wrote about a friend in her 90s who, after a hard day, walked into a Caspar David Friedrich exhibition at the Met and experienced “a major mood change which seemed beyond happiness.” Friedrich once said of his own painting, “It reminds me how small I am, but also how miraculous this life is.”

Which is what Alaska did for me. And what the block prints did for me. And the thing art and beauty have always done for me, especially as I’ve taken the time to slow down and notice it more.

There’s now research suggesting what a lot of us have felt for a long time. A study out of UCL earlier this year found that people who engaged with the arts at least weekly appeared to age 4% more slowly on one measure of biological aging.

An earlier study from the same group followed 6,700 adults over fourteen years and found that frequent arts engagement was associated with a 31% lower risk of dying. The researchers have compared the effects of cultural engagement to exercise. And in Montreal, doctors have been able to prescribe free museum visits to patients and their families since 2018.

Not to turn art into one more thing we are supposed to optimize (please, please don’t do that), but engaging with art does have real, measurable benefits, and there are so many ways to tap into them. It does not have to mean going to museums, attending the theater, or participating in any formal version of ART. It can be taking ten minutes to doodle, knit, write, or do whatever engages a different part of your brain.

If I zoom out on the four years, LOTA started as a way to celebrate artists I loved. It became an advisory. It became a way to help people name and develop their taste. It became something many of you return to each week here on Substack. And increasingly, it has become a way of thinking about how art can shape not only a wall or a space, but the energy and mood of everyday life.

Last year, I wrote that in a world chaotic on every vector, art gives us hope and offers a way forward. It helps us connect and collectively hold space for the nuance and beauty around us.

This year, I’m starting to think it might also be a way to simply be alive.

What does this mean for what’s next? I think more of the same. Continuing to go deeper with artist stories, studio visits, and building community around art.

I cannot say I know exactly what is coming, but I have a clearer idea of where this transition is leading me.

Thank you for being here for four years.

On to the next.

P.S. If you’re new here and trying to figure out where to begin with art, the LOTA Art Match Tool is a good place to start. It’s free, takes five minutes, and gives you three words to help name your taste, plus a set of artists to explore.

The process of writing this is always so fun for me. I cast a wide net and then dig around until I find the threads and stories that are worth sharing. It is also why the timing of these are random: if there isn’t enough worth sharing, I just wait until there is. All of that said, it’s my favorite series, so let’s get into it.

The things that have piqued my interest lately are all about how objects, images, and places carry meaning once they move out into the world. A presidential portrait built from private memory. A subway line doubling as an underground gallery. A few writers thinking seriously about walls, materials, and taste. And the summer tote, which somehow became the clearest object lesson of all.

Art: The first official portrait of Barack and Michelle Obama

When I wrote about Frieze LA earlier this year, Njideka Akunyili Crosby was one of the artists I was immediately drawn to in the chaos of the fair. I wrote then that memory is the real medium in her work, especially the way time, place, intimacy, and history are always doing something active inside the image.

Crosby’s magic is how she turns a domestic interior into something much larger than a room. On first look, her scenes are familiar, everyday, almost private. But they hold multiple histories at once: personal references and cultural memory, private life and the politics of place, the way “home” can become the place where all your worlds collide. You feel it in the layering, and in the way the image refuses to flatten itself into a single read.

This week, the Obama Foundation unveiled Crosby’s commission: The Obamas: Springing Forth, the first official portrait of Barack and Michelle Obama together. It opens this Friday, on Juneteenth, in the main lobby of the new Obama Presidential Center in Chicago.

A window frames the scene, its arches echoing the Oval Office. The view through the window centers Mrs. Obama’s childhood home, her father’s Buick parked out front. Public office and private childhood, layered into the same surface. Slow, hand-pieced, with no detail there by accident.

She joins a roster of commissioned artists at the Center that includes Martin Puryear, Lorna Simpson, Rashid Johnson, Jeffrey Gibson, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Curated by Virginia Shore.

Public Art: An underground gallery on the LA Metro

Last month, ahead of the World Cup, Section 1 of LA Metro’s D Line extension opened, adding three new underground stations on Wilshire: La Brea, Fairfax, La Cienega. Each station is also a public art commission.

Art in metro stations isn’t a novel concept, but for a city that has historically underinvested in public transit, I wish we were all screaming this from the rooftops.

Four I’d ride out to see now:

Eamon Ore-Giron at Wilshire/La Brea, Infinite Landscape: Los Ángeles Para Siempre. A bright, geometric work drawing from the Art Deco architecture of the Wilshire corridor. His abstraction always feels both ancient and futuristic, which feels right for a train station: movement, pattern, past, future.

Karl Haendel at Wilshire/Fairfax, Hands and Things. Local hands holding objects from nearby museums and cultural institutions, spanning the prehistoric era to today. Part portrait, part neighborhood archive. This is also the LACMA stop, where the new Geffen Galleries open this Saturday. The train and the building feel like part of the same civic moment.

Soo Kim at Wilshire/La Cienega, Night / Quartz. Buildings from the Wilshire corridor, cut into stencil-like silhouettes and layered with images from cities around the world. A dreamlike cityscape that makes L.A. feel horizontal, porous, and connected to elsewhere.

Todd Gray at Wilshire/La Cienega, Mining the Archive: S. Charles Lee, Architect. Archival drawings of the Saban Theatre, once the Fox Wilshire Theatre, turned inside out with vivid blue ground, chalky white lines, historic interiors, and textile patterns. Landmark architecture as something that absorbs migration, memory, and the lives moving around it.

The whole program is essentially an underground gallery on a train pass.

Read: What Makes An Object Worth Living With?

Two Substacks I came back to this week, both circling the same question from different directions - what makes an object worth living with?

New to me: , a Substack doing a bi-weekly Q+A series on the actual physical books creatives love and return to for inspiration. Their series this week is with Seetal Solanki, a materials translator and founder of Ma-tt-er, based in London and working at the intersection of materials, craft, and migration.

The line of hers that stayed with me:

I’m less interested in things as possessions and more interested in the stories they carry. Many of the textiles I own come directly from makers and craftspeople I’ve encountered, so I know where they came from, who touched them and the landscapes they belong to.

That’s close to how I think about advising people on what to buy. The object has to hold up visually, but it carries more when you understand where it came from, who made it, what landscape it belongs to, and why it found its way into your life. Solanki has been working in this lane for years, and her book recommendations are so good. It is clear she is a slow, intentional collector.

The other is Section Plane by Brooklyn-based curator . Her piece titled “What Are You Hiding on Your Walls?” is such a great read on collecting. The whole post is about wall discipline. The choice to leave space alone instead of filling it with something that does not deserve to be there.

You can have art. You can have objects. You can have a home with a point of view. But not everything needs to compete for the same wall.

Together, they get at the part of collecting that is harder to teach than “buy what you love.” One is about where an object comes from and what shaped the eye behind it. The other is about whether the object has earned the space you are giving it. Both feel useful if you are trying to build a home with a point of view instead of just filling walls.

Style: The tote convergence, and the ones I keep circling

I’m getting ready for a family vacation to Alaska and, as one does, I’ve been in a shoppy mood and keep thinking about TOTES. What felt like a literal sign from the universe to pull the trigger on a purchase was not one but three Substacks talking about the glory of a tote (looking at you , , and even - who I am so thrilled to have back on Substack).

From my vantage point, summer bags seem to be splitting in two directions: large and functional, or tiny, beaded, and ornamental. Sometimes both in the same day. People are moving around more, carrying more, dressing with less structure. A tote is an accessible way to enter a brand at any price point, but also an easy way to shift the whole mood of an outfit.

The thing that gets me excited, and what I think is missing from most of the coverage, is gear. I love the outdoors and, ask my friends, buying gear is one of my favorite things for said activity, usually before I’ve done said activity. It runs counter to my slow art collecting strategy, but we are who we are.

A tote is a simple way to bring that part of myself into an outfit, especially when the rest of what I’m wearing is more dressed up. Joyce caught it from the other direction in one line: “the things that make an object special are the imperfections, the evidence of a human hand.” Objects you use have a different relationship to taste than objects you wear.

Four totes I keep coming back to that sit somewhere between utility, design, and summer personality:

Topologie Marche Tote Medium. Build-your-own body, rope-loop handles, color blocking. I keep coming back to the moss body with bright orange braided cords and blue denim rope.

HAY Weekender. A big, simple, color-forward carryall that feels more design store than fashion bag. Good for the exact category of summer life where you need one bag to hold snacks, layers, books, sunscreen, and the random things everyone hands you, but still want to feel like YOU.

Epperson Mountaineering Leisure Tote: Vintage mountaineering silhouette, canvas with leather trim, and the kind of bag that looks better once it has actually been used. The Crazy 2 colorway with olive, rust, red has that slightly odd, useful, story-built-in quality I always want from a bag.

Phoebe’s Blue Raffia Tote by Emily Dawn Long. Handmade in small batches, Phoebe Philo color palette, Mediterranean modernist. The artisanal version of the raffia trend that is back every summer. , a newly minted CFDA finalist, wrote about her inspiration here.

Design-minded utility. Story, patina, personality, usefulness. The tote as the thing you actually carry your life around in.

P.S. New here? Start with the art quiz to discover your style.

This post contains some affiliate links, which means LOTA may earn a small commission if you purchase through them, at no additional cost to you. I only include things I genuinely think are worth looking at.

More Goods Posts to Dive Into

Access is starting to split.

AI will make it easier to fill a wall, decorate a room, generate a look, or approximate taste. For a certain kind of need, that will be enough.

But collecting is different from filling space. If you want to build something with discernment, context, and relationship, you still need the slower things: people, rooms, questions, and the chance to understand why one object carries weight while another only looks good in a mockup.

The next phase of the art market will not be online versus offline. It will be about what each one is actually good for.

And thoughtful collecting should not only belong to people buying six-figure works in VIP rooms. The more interesting space is lower price, earlier entry, emerging art, with the kind of human attention usually reserved for the top of the market.

That is the larger shift I see underneath Art Basel’s new no-preview initiative. In April, Art Basel announced Basel Exclusive, an opt-in initiative asking main-sector galleries to hold back at least one major work, and in some cases an entire booth, from pre-fair previews, online viewing rooms, and pre-sales activity. The first unveiling is during Preview Days, beginning Tuesday, June 16.

Three galleries told me this week what they are holding back for Basel Exclusive. David Kordansky said they will “unveil extraordinary historic works by Sam Gilliam and Keith Sonnier during the VIP opening.” James Cohan said they are pleased to present “a new work by Tuan Andrew Nguyen, unveiled during the opening of the fair.” P·P·O·W said they will include “the public debut of a work by Hew Locke” in their Basel Exclusive showcase at Booth B10.

As of this week, 193 of 232 main-sector galleries are participating, covering roughly 230 artists. Acquavella, Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, Lévy Gorvy Dayan, Lisson, Pace, David Zwirner, and Sadie Coles HQ are in. The named held artists include Basquiat, Mitchell, Fontana, Bridget Riley, Bourgeois, Frankenthaler, Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, and Maia Ruth Lee.

Vincenzo de Bellis, Art Basel’s Chief Artistic Officer, framed it as a return to first principles. “The overall idea is to restore the value of being present and being present in that moment in Basel, which is our mothership.”

He also said the quiet part out loud. “There is already a practice for galleries to withhold works from their previews but a lot of people don’t know this.”

If you are trying to solve a blank wall, have art but don’t know what to do with it, or need a second set of eyes, I offer a $99 strategy consult: 30 minutes to talk through what you are seeing, what is missing, and what may be worth following.

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For years, galleries have been figuring out how to make the online art world work, stumbling through how to open up a world that has long been undemocratic. PDFs became storefronts. Viewing rooms became booths. Collectors learned how to make decisions from a screen, or at least how to begin there.

Now the pendulum is swinging back.

In many ways, the online art world made the art market more legible, more global, and more accessible. But as everything becomes easier to preview, forward, screenshot, and pre-sell, physical presence becomes more valuable again.

Being there becomes the scarce thing. The real exclusive.

Where the field still feels open

As with any major anchor fair, Art Basel pulls a constellation of smaller fairs into its orbit. The one I’m watching is Liste.

Founded in 1996 to make room for younger galleries outside Art Basel’s main hall, Liste has long been where the next layer of the market starts to come into focus. Maureen Paley and David Zwirner all showed there in the early years. The 2026 edition is the largest yet, with 106 galleries from 36 countries, including 41 showing for the first time.

So while the main fair is making presence scarce at the top of the market, Liste is where the field still feels more open.

Read on for a few works I’m excited about at Liste, plus the public projects I can’t wait to see unveiled next week.

Read more

A lot has changed since the last World Cup in 2022 (peep my ranking from 2022). Athletes are not just wearing fashion now. They are driving it. Tunnel walks have become runways, jerseys have become styling objects, and fans are cutting, cropping, collecting, and reselling shirts with the same intensity once reserved for sneakers or handbags. Football journalist Joey D’Urso has a new book, More Than A Shirt, that looks at kits as windows into money, politics, and power. Hoping to read it during this World Cup season as the premise feels exactly right for this moment.

All that to say these kits have earned their place as cultural objects.

The 2026 tournament is the first 48-team expansion, which means more federations on the design board than ever before, and the spread between who showed up with real design intent and who phoned in a refreshed template is wider than I expected.

6. Exploring National Heritage: South Korea (Away) / Nike

Nike is clearly treating Korea like one of its top creative priorities this cycle. The colorway is “Space Purple” with an all-over floral graphic inspired by traditional Korean art and the Mugunghwa national flower. The theme across the Home and Away kit was to take heritage motifs (the Home jersey draws from the symbolism of the white tiger), flipped into something bold and streetwear-aware. Shop it here (currently sold out with restock planned soon).

Choosing purple for a national team away is a real risk (and has divided fans), but it works because everything Korea touches culturally right now lands. K-pop, K-beauty, K-skincare, K-dramas, K-pop Demon Hunters (an enduring fit aesthetic in my daughter’s world). This jersey is honestly a better K-statement to bring to your next birthday party than another Demon Hunters fit, and it has the design depth of a shirt you can wear past the tournament. Love the styling inspiration from Megan Reyes above.

5. The Threat of Joy: Brazil (Away) / Jordan Brand

Brazil’s away is the first World Cup kit ever made under the Jordan Brand umbrella. The concept is “Alegria Que Apavora” (The Threat of Joy) with colors pulled from the poison dart frog of the Amazon, with the Air Jordan 3 elephant-print texture worked into the construction. Royal blue base, black accents, a Jordan-specific build that photographs differently than a standard Nike Brazil shirt would. Shop it here (smaller sizes sold out).

The other Brazil story worth knowing. Neymar made the squad. After everything (the ACL, the long road back, the question of whether he’d even physically be there), he’s playing. That’s its own kind of joy that threatens. The kit feels like it was made for that moment.

4. Surrealism Takes Center Stage: Belgium (Away) / Adidas

Belgium’s away by Adidas is “Frozen Blue” with carbon, white, and light pink accents, and the joke is in the neck print: “Ceci n’est pas un maillot” (“This is not a shirt”). It is a tribute to the Surrealist Belgian artist, René Magritte, and his work The Treachery of Images with the script: Ceci n’est pas une pipe (“This is not a pipe”). During its launch, the Belgian soccer federation shared, “True to the surrealism theme, the kit sparks the imagination and invites conversation.” The Belgian artist questions the relationship of mind and eye, reality and language - love the depth of this work and excited to see it live. Shop it here.

3. All in the Details: Morocco (Home) / Puma

Morocco’s home kit by Puma reads quieter on first glance than the 2022 jersey that ended up everywhere. Deep red, green side panels, traditional Moroccan embroidery patterns referenced at the collar and cuffs. The collar detail is what holds it. Actual embroidery references from Moroccan craft heritage worn into a contemporary football shirt without being precious about it. It is the perfect balance of thoughtful borders, collars, and emblem without screaming MOROCCO. My favorite type of aesthetic. Shop it here.

The Morocco storyline is also a personal one for me. In 2022 Morocco beat Spain on penalties in the round of 16 and I watched crying. They went on to beat Portugal 1-0 in the quarters, and made it all the way to the semifinal - the first African team ever to do so. So to say I am rooting for them is an understatement.

2. Color as a National Language: Ghana (Away) / Puma

Ghana’s away kit is “Sunny Yellow” with market-stall color blocking referencing the textile and food stalls of Accra’s Makola Market. A red crew neck collar is combined with a green back neckline, reflecting colors from the national flag. A large black star sits centrally on the front, referencing the national symbol. A small Ghana flag is placed on the upper back below the collar. This jersey is sold out, but you can see the rest of the kit here.

The bigger story is the creative direction credit: Prince Gyasi, the Ghanaian visual artist known for hyper-saturated photographs. Gyasi has synesthesia, a condition that overlaps the senses in unusual ways. In his work above, The Last One, pink becomes a field of hope. For Gyasi, yellow carries the warmth and energy that define Ghana, which makes his role in this kit feel especially fitting.

1. The Kit Waiting for Its Moment: Curaçao (Away) / Adidas

Butter yellow has been trendy for a few years and every summer it pops again (Hermès just did their show in LA with a full butter yellow set). The team that nailed it is the team you might not have known qualified. Curaçao, a Caribbean island nation of 155,000 people, currently FIFA ranked No. 82, is in their first World Cup ever, courtesy of the 48-team expansion. Their away kit is a soft pastel yellow with pink, turquoise, and orange stripes that, per Adidas, “celebrates the capital city Willemstad and the colorful buildings that reside in its Punda and Otrobanda districts.” Anyone who has seen the colonial-era pastel facades along the Sint Anna Bay knows exactly what they’re referencing. It’s a UNESCO Heritage waterfront in shirt form.

The kit sold out in six of seven sizes on the Adidas US site within weeks of release. Adidas has confirmed a restock for later this summer. Football media has been quietly treating it as a design win all spring.

Here’s the cruel twist. Per the FIFA group-stage color designations guide released in late May, Curaçao is scheduled to wear their HOME shirt for all three of their Group E matches. Which means unless Curaçao advances to the knockout round, the most popular away kit of the cycle may never actually appear at the World Cup.

That’s a fitting climax to this list, somehow. The kit that lands hardest is the kit that may never be played in. Football fashion and football itself have always been only loosely related, and Curaçao clearly demonstrates that gap.

The tournament has not even started yet, and the shirts are already doing what good design does best: telling us who wants to be seen, what stories they want to carry, and what gets left just outside the frame.

I’ll be dropping more of my favorite collabs (there. are. so. many.), storylines, and styling ideas over the next few weeks. And of course, my favorite USA jerseys, the only ones I’ve actually bought so far. Stay tuned for more.

Cover image via GQ.

Note: This post contains some affiliate links, so if you choose to purchase something via a link with an affiliate fee I make a small commission at no cost to you

I’ve gotten used to the fair cycle now: the anticipation, the preview PDFs, the over-scheduled days, the list of artists I want to see for myself and the ones I’m already thinking about for clients.

But once you are there, the experience can start to feel like browsing at an impossible scale. Booth to booth, fair to fair, opening to opening. Everything feels urgent until, a few weeks later, most of it falls away.

After LA Art Week, I kept thinking about memory, the hand, and the strange power of the containers art was shown inside, from repurposed 99-cent stores to the hotel rooms of Felix Art Fair. New York left me with a different set of questions.

What does it mean to collect with conviction? How do you understand the breadth of an artist’s practice? And why does work that demands physical presence feel more necessary than ever?

New York Art Week reminded me that buying art well requires a different kind of attention. Less scanning. More conviction. Less “what should I get?” and more “what am I willing to keep looking at, learning from, and living with over time?”

Conviction collecting beats browsing

The clearest antidote to fair browsing was the Hort Family Collection.

Susan and Michael Hort have been collecting for more than 40 years. Their collection now includes over 5,000 works, with a deep focus on emerging artists and new voices.

Susan Hort has described their approach this way:

“When we fall in love with an artist’s work and when we have the opportunity we like to collect their work in depth. [We] do not feel that we ‘collect’ an artist until we have at least five major works.”

Five major works is a wild threshold in a market trained around the language of discovery, access, and getting in early. It is also clarifying. The Horts are not talking about liking something, or buying one piece because it fits a wall, or adding a name to a list. They are talking about committing deeply enough that the artist’s practice has room to unfold inside the collection and to give these early artists what they need to keep going.

Read more

This feels like the perfect place to start with artist . In a world that forces you to pick a side on everything, Alex’s work feels like a pause. You don’t have to choose left or right, hot or cold, activist or apathetic. You can just be with the work, and every time I see her paintings, that is exactly what I feel.

Alex didn’t arrive at her practice through the clean mythology of certainty.

In 2019, she was promoted to VP of Marketing at the startup where she had spent years building toward that exact title. She was thirty, ambitious, and by all external measures, moving exactly as planned. Then she got the job and realized she didn’t want it.

So she left.

A few weeks later, San Francisco shut down for COVID, and the six-month trip she had imagined became something else entirely - time alone in an apartment, painting again for the first time in nearly a decade, posting the work online even when it felt terrifying, and slowly making her way toward a word that took years to feel true: artist.

Now based in New York and fresh from her time at the New York Studio School, Maceda makes paintings that hover between body and landscape, desire and restraint, mysticism and structure. Her forms feel fluid, but not loose; sensual, but not easily consumed. They carry the warmth of morena skin, the afterimage of the desert, the pressure of observation, and a newer, cooler light that she describes as cosmic or mythic.

What I love about her work is that it refuses to resolve too quickly. I have one of Alex’s works in a nook near my dining table, and I love hearing each visitor’s interpretation of what they see. It becomes a kind of modern Rorschach test, revealing as much about the viewer as the image itself.

Last week, I had the chance to see her newest body of work in person at her MFA thesis show at the New York Studio School.

In our conversation, Alex and I spoke about stillness as a creative necessity, what painting from life has taught her about abstraction, the vulnerability of ambition, and why ambiguity is not a failure of communication.

Read on for our full interview.

From Startups to Studio

Was there a clear sliding-door moment that made you choose art as a life, not a hobby, or was it more of a slow internal shift?

Fall 2019, I got promoted to VP of Marketing at the start-up I was working at. I was 30 and it was the job I had been gunning for for years. I finally got it, and realized I didn’t want it. Instead of taking it, I quit. I didn’t really have a plan, I just knew I wasn’t happy and that I wanted to do something more creative. They asked me to stay until February and I left the day before my 31st birthday. 3 weeks later San Francisco shut down for COVID. I was supposed to travel for 6mo and instead got trapped in my apartment and started painting again, basically for the first time in a decade. Started an Instagram for my art and forced myself to post everyday, which was extremely panic-inducing at the time. It probably took me another year and a half to feel comfortable calling myself an artist. It was probably 3 years before I really thought, oh maybe I could do this. I thought painting was something I’d pursue after I retired. I thought my path was going to be more of a collector and patron, but that’s the thing about a vocation – you can’t help but do it, even it takes you a while to realize it’s calling you. It was always there unconsciously, but it took me awhile to consciously get comfortable with it.

Stillness as a Practice

You’ve talked about actively seeking quiet in New York — even making drawings in saunas. What is it about those spaces that helps you access the work?

When I talk about quiet, I’m really talking about stillness, which I think about as a state of being in which things can emerge. When everything is moving so quickly – people, e-mails, social media, events – you are activated in a way that is often not generative for creative work. I’m looking for a place, which is a mental/energetic place, where things get still enough for new ideas to reveal themselves. Some ideas hit you like a truck, you can’t miss them, and that is great but more often for me, ideas are more like a wisp of a thing, right on the tip of your tongue. Almost a shadow. I’m trying to get to a place where I can be quiet enough to notice those wisps and start to cultivate them.

Do you think of this stillness as a luxury, a discipline, or a necessity? How has that relationship changed since Joshua Tree?

It’s a necessity that is readily available in some places, like Joshua Tree, and requires discipline to find in places where it is not so readily available, like New York City. I think many people here would say it’s a luxury in that way, but it is absolutely necessary. Shout-out to all the artists working in the city! We really have our work cut out for us.

Observation Feeding Abstraction

When you’re drawing/painting directly from life, what are you paying attention to most: edge, temperature, rhythm, proportion, something else?

When I work from life, i.e. am not inventing the composition purely from imagination, I ask myself, how can I compose what I see in a way that excites me? I pay most attention to – or at least get most excited by – negative space and the space between things. What is the shape made by the crook of the model’s neck, what is the shape made between two neighboring flowers and their leaves? Formally, that is as exciting as the object itself. Conceptually, I also love the idea of the space between things, the third thing that is created between you and me. Both are what enliven a composition for me. I’ve taken to painting a still life of flowers from life every couple weeks. It’s been a great addition to my practice.

What makes it back into the abstract work and what never translates, no matter how hard you try?

There are an insane amount of observable colors when you’re painting someone, especially a person’s bare skin, from life. The undertones, the way their skin color shifts in the light, the slight reflections from the colors of their clothes… it’s really hard to replicate that amount of subtlety if it’s not in front of you. But I think about that variety when I paint my forms – there is a lot of subtle layering and color mixing that goes into a swath of color that might just read “orange” at first glance that is highly influenced by painting bare skin from life.

A classmate called your work “fluid cubism.” Do you feel that description fits? If so, what’s “cubist” in your mind — structure, fragmentation, multiple viewpoints, time?

I love to hear what my work recalls for people because I pull from such a wide range of references, both aesthetically and conceptually. I always say it’s not not (fill in the blank). It’s not not fluid cubism, it’s not not orphism, it’s not not futurism. The cubists definitely have a seat at the table – I am often actively thinking of multiple viewpoints flattened into a 2D space. I love Duchamp’s early paintings, somewhere between cubism and futurism. I love the depiction of movement in futurism but I am almost always depicting organic, rather than industrial forms. I was recently in a group show at Harper’s focusing on neo-surrealist figuration, and I loved that too. I pull a lot from my own dreams and visionary experiences.

Bodies as Landscapes, Landscapes as Bodies

You often describe your forms as bodies, landscapes, or something suspended between the two. Are there moments you want the viewer to toggle between those readings, and moments you want them to stay in ambiguity?

I currently have a note tacked on my studio wall that says, “ambiguity is not a failure of communication.” This feeling of toggling, suspension, push/pull, things not being here nor there, is one that is currently very important to me in my work. I think ambiguity is probably the goal in that I think it opens the work up more to interpretation, which is more interesting. I think what the viewer sees is infinitely more interesting than whatever I want them to see. Is a shape a thigh, a hill, a finger, a flower, a wing, a vagina? Is it sexual, erotic, spiritual, or simply geometric? Or is it all those things?

Color as Identity, Without Being Literal

You’ve spoken beautifully elsewhere about mixing morena skin tones and how that opened your palette. What are the undertones you’re chasing now, the ones that aren’t obvious until the painting is done?

I hope there is always a certain type of light in my paintings; light and color are inextricable for me. For a morena skin tone, there is a warmth or light emanating from the browns. When I was working in the desert, there was a lot more literal moonlight and dawn-over-the-horizon type light in my paintings. Now I am working more inside and have had to dig deep internally for source material. As I step back from the body of work I’m working on now, the undertones and light feel a bit more mystical – bright light that emanates from inside a form rather than shines onto it. I’m doing a lot more grounds in turquoise rather than yellow, so the undertones are cooler - cosmic or mythic, rather than solar or earthly.

The Studio as a Container

You mentioned being able to identify classmates’ work by “touch and language.” How would you describe your own touch now and how has it changed this year?

I am a lover of a fluid gesture: a wave, a curve, a sweep, a wash of color, and a sensitive touch, everything just so. Over the past year I have added more straight lines, horizontal and vertical, and now start more paintings on a grid. I’ve found the contrast actually enhances the fluid gesture by offsetting it.

I’ve added more types of mark-making: more paint, oil stick, drawing. My color palette has also opened up. I am still interested in tonality, sensitivity, and light, but I’m also more interested in adding something unexpected and breaking up the grace of it all.

I don’t think it’s possible to ever really lose or get away from yourself. Despite the newness, there is always still an essence that remains.

Desire, Ambition, and the Next Turn

You’ve talked about being inspired to go bigger. What makes a painting “ambitious” to you — scale, complexity, emotional risk, something else?

It is all those things – I associate ambition with vulnerability. It is admitting you want to take up more space than you currently do and risking the potential failure or rejection that comes with that assertion. That could be literal space, like size of canvas, but more often I think it is subject matter, palette, composition – space in the conversation. Energetic space. Space outside the space that people associate with you and your work.

What are you trying to protect in your work as your visibility grows?

My work is incredibly earnest. I have sometimes found the art world, especially on the east coast, to be quite cynical. I hope to keep the vulnerability that is at the heart of it.

What are you most excited about for this upcoming year after graduation?

School is a pressure cooker. You get so much feedback, wanted and unwanted, and are expected to produce at a pace concurrent with an academic calendar, which can be thrilling but is also unsustainable.

It has been extremely generative, and I am grateful for the experience, but it has also felt like a yearlong inhale: taking everything in, absorbing. I think graduating will feel like an exhale, and that is when the most exciting work happens. You let go and things settle and unfurl.

I felt it happen last summer after my first year. Those few empty months were extremely generative and helped me understand what had just happened. I’m excited to settle into a studio here in NYC more permanently and see how the work evolves. I’m showing at a couple art fairs the same month as graduation and am excited to see how those relationships evolve. I’m also excited to go on a proper vacation.

LOTA Fast Three

A color that keeps returning and what it signals for you right now – Payne’s Grey. It used to be my favorite color to paint with and I associated it primarily with melancholy. I left it to the side for a year or so and recently brought it back to paint nocturnes. I still associate it with emptiness, but the emptiness that makes space for possibility vs. emptiness associated with lack. I find it to be quite warm now.

One non-art object you keep near you in the studio and why – I have a deck of Rider-Waite Tarot Cards. Most mornings I pull three cards and ask, “what do I need to know about my practice today.” It is a very centering practice and aspects of the cards often make their way into paintings.

An artist (or writer / filmmaker / musician) who’s quietly shaped your way of seeing – I’ve read Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” 8-10 times, first time when I was 16. His writing is magical realism meets philosophy and has profoundly shaped how I experience the world.

Thank you to Alex for sharing her practice with LOTA. You can follow Alex’s work on Substack and Instagram, or learn more through her website.

P.S. New here? Start with the art quiz to discover your style.

Recent Artist Interviews

I also lived in New York right after college, briefly enough that I probably talk about it more than I earned the right to, but long enough for the city to imprint itself on me. New York has always held that charge of discovery, chance encounters, and the feeling that something could happen if you just kept walking.

Looking through the previews this week, I felt that same buzz.

Just like LA art week in February, Frieze is the anchor this week with international, blue-chip, museum-level art. The real density is spread across the city: Independent on the Lower East Side, NADA in Chelsea, smaller fair ecosystems like Future Fair and Esther III, plus the auction previews at Sotheby’s.

I spent the last few weeks going through previews across all the fairs to figure out what made me stop and why. Each work I’ve picked here has at least one of three things going for it: a practice that rewards slow looking, a story that gives the work staying power, or a price point that means a real person could actually live with it.

These are my picks going in. I’ll be at the fairs all week and will update this post if anything shifts.

At New York Art Week, here’s what I’d buy.

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Bettina at Ulrik

Frieze Focus, Booth F4 — The Shed

Bettina Grossman
From the Series, Phenomenological New York, 1970s
Silver gelatin print
7 5/8 x 5 in.
$6,000
Ulrik, Frieze Focus, Booth F4

Bettina Grossman, who went by her first name only, was a Conceptual artist whose work refused the idea of a singular fixed art object. She lived at the Chelsea Hotel for the last fifty years of her life and made work the entire time, much of it never shown during her lifetime.

A 1966 fire in her Brooklyn Heights studio destroyed everything she had made up to that point. She went to Europe, wrote “1970-Paris-Reborn,” and started over. Phenomenological New York is one of two major projects she made about the city in the 1970s and 80s, focusing on movement on the street as seen through distorted reflections in glass and metal. She was included in Greater New York at MoMA PS1 in 2021 and has recently been shown at GTA Zurich, the Hessel Museum, and Stedelijk Amsterdam.

Why I love it:
I know it is so cliché, but the Chrysler Building has always been my favorite, and this image had me at hello. The building is one of the most photographed Art Deco icons in the world, but here it is refracted through window panes and adjacent buildings until it bends, warps, and almost dissolves.

It’s less an image of a building than an image of perception itself: the city bending, reflecting, refusing to sit still. Which, honestly, feels like the most New York thing possible.

The rest of the picks are for paid subscribers only - six more works I’d seriously consider, from a concrete wall object about colonial memory to a painting built from the floor plan of a vanished Chicago cabaret, a tiny crying ceramic blob, and a denim landscape that makes decoration the whole point.

Paid subscribers also get $20 off their first 1:1 Art Consult. Details about the subscription here.

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Curator Andrew Bolton said he wanted to showcase fashion’s “materiality and the indivisible connection between our bodies and the clothes we wear” over its visuality. In other words: the point isn’t how fashion looks next to art. The point is how it feels on a body.

Here’s what I’ll be watching for on the carpet.

The Obvious References

These references are classic fashion-meets-art. You may see a Mondrian dress. Someone will reference Warhol. At least one person will show up looking like a picture frame, which Viktor & Rolf already did perfectly in 2015 when they unhooked jacquard paintings off a wall at the Palais de Tokyo and draped them onto models as garments.

These are on the nose, not wrong, but not joyfully right (I mean if you got your pretty paws on one of the six Mondrian YSL dresses ever made, then yes, please wear it).

Painterly Dresses

The obvious move is to put a famous painting on a dress. The better move is to make the dress feel painted: brushstrokes, smears, raw edges, layered color, fabric that looks worked by hand.

Dries Van Noten has done this for decades, and it never feels like costume. His AW09 womenswear came from a Francis Bacon retrospective at Tate Britain — he transposed Bacon’s shrimp pinks, ochers, and mauves directly into textiles. His SS09 menswear was built entirely around Elizabeth Peyton’s painting Democrats are More Beautiful. He’s pulled from Rothko, Vasarely, Van Dyck. The references stack and collide, but they always resolve into something you’d actually want to wear. Now retired, he’s opened a foundation inside a 15th-century Venetian palazzo dedicated to handmade craft. He lives with art the way most people live with furniture.

Designer Raf Simons and artist Sterling Ruby are the stronger version of the art-fashion collaboration. Simons developed fabrics from Ruby’s paintings for his first Dior couture show in 2012. The 2014 collection looked like two people working in the same visual language with patchwork coats, paint-splattered suits, stuffed American flag sculptures, and clothes that carried the mess and charge of the studio.

On the historical end: Sonia Delaunay’s “Simultaneous Dress” (1913) was a patchwork of contrasting fabrics based on her painting theory. Apollinaire called it “a living painting.” She later designed a Citroen car to match her coat. The dress as canvas has been here for over a century.

Surrealism on the Body

No art movement has understood fashion better than Surrealism. Surrealism treats the body the same way fashion does - as something unstable, part object, part dream, part joke, part threat.

That connection starts with Dalí and Schiaparelli. They met in Paris in the early 1930s, shared a love of technical artistry and shock value, and spent the rest of the decade making clothes that felt like dreams you couldn’t quite explain. The Skeleton Dress (1938) used trapunto quilting to make bones protrude from the outside of the body. Dalí’s note to Elsa: “I like this idea of ‘bones on the outside’ enormously.” The Lobster Dress — Dalí painted the lobster directly on silk organza — was worn by Wallis Simpson for Vogue. These weren’t art printed on clothes. They were Surrealist logic applied directly to the body.

Daniel Roseberry has turned Schiaparelli's house into the most visible Surrealist fashion project working today. His Spring 2026 Couture closing look: Awar in a sharp-shouldered "Elsa" jacket whose collar turns into a wing — thousands of hand-painted sfumato feathers, four hand-sculpted 3D bird beaks in browns and mauves, defying gravity at the hip. Schiaparelli has owned the red carpet for the past few years, and expect more on Monday.

And if you want the purest example of Surrealist logic in fashion: Hussein Chalayan's coffee table dress (AW 2000). A functional wooden coffee table that unfolded into a hooped skirt. Chairs that folded into suitcases. An airplane dress that bloomed open via remote control. Everyday objects becoming clothes, the body becoming furniture becoming the body again. Dalí would have wept.

The Body as the Subject

The real risk Monday night won’t be who wears the biggest dress. It’ll be who lets the body itself complicate the fantasy.

The exhibition organizes garments around body types: the “Pregnant Body,” the “Aging Body,” the “Mortal Body.” Fashion is catching up. Matthieu Blazy just sent a pregnant model down the runway at Chanel’s resort show. Rihanna’s Loewe Super Bowl look, eight months pregnant in a leather bustier, was the most visible version of this shift. Paloma Elsesser, on this year’s hosting committee, has been one of the most consistent forces for body diversity on runways and covers.

Nobody understood the body as the subject of fashion and art better than Alexander McQueen. Honestly, when I was pulling this together, McQueen could have gone in every section. But the body was the work: the spine corsets, the jaw prosthetics, the shows where models walked through rain or on water. The body was never just wearing the clothes. It was negotiating with them. Sometimes that was romantic. Sometimes it was dark, obsessive, protective, or frightening. But it was never passive.

I love this quote from him, “I design clothes because I don’t want women to look all innocent and naive. I want women to look stronger. I don’t like women to be taken advantage of. I don’t like men whistling at women in the street. I think they deserve more respect. I like men to keep their distance from women, I like men to be stunned by an entrance. I want people to be afraid of the women I dress”.

Headpieces and Adornment

The Met Gala never shies away from a lot of extra moments - long trains, elaborate headpieces, and over the top accessories. Headpieces have already been having a moment in the fashion the past few years, and this year I expect to see many versions of hats, veils, crowns, sculptural earrings, and pieces that make the body feel composed from the neck up.

Sarah Burton’s Givenchy debut this season featured Stephen Jones headdresses, satin T-shirts twisted into head-wraps evoking Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. Leandra flagged them in her Paris recap and she’s right: dramatic but surprisingly wearable. Louis Vuitton and Miu Miu both closed the season with hat moments too.

The historical lineage is rich. Peggy Guggenheim wore one Calder earring and one Yves Tanguy earring to the 1942 opening of Art of This Century. One artist per ear. A tiny, perfect act of wearable curating. Eileen Agar flipped a fruit basket upside down and declared it Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse (1936). Grace Jones and Philip Treacy turned hats into architecture. Frida Kahlo’s flower crowns were cultural armor, a Tehuana identity statement and a way to conceal the effects of her spinal injuries beneath beauty.

If anything from Monday actually trickles into how people dress, I think it may be this.

The best looks Monday night won’t paste a painting onto a dress. They’ll understand fashion as something living: made by hand, worn on a body, shaped by history, and completed in public.

As Anna Wintour has said in the past “Fashion should be recognized when you see how it touches people and moves people. I mean what more can you ask for from art?”

Tell me who understood the assignment, and who just wore the museum gift shop.

Recent Posts

There was so much hype about the new Geffen Galleries at LACMA, and for good reason — it is the biggest opening for an American county museum in a generation. LACMA’s director, Michael Govan, came on twenty years ago to manage this transformation, and the Pritzker-winning architect Peter Zumthor designed it.

The LA art scene has always played on the sidelines. The collections, the investment, the institutional muscle have never been at the same scale as their East Coast counterparts (not to mention abroad). This is a moment for the city — and as LA prepares for even more investment across its cultural and infrastructural ambitions ahead of the World Cup, Super Bowl, and the 2028 Olympics, the Geffen Galleries set the stage for what is to come.

Today's post is six things you should know about the galleries — my favorite behind-the-scenes stories, moments, and details that made it come alive. Attending the opening events a few weeks ago, there was a real buzz among fellow attendees, a sense of possibility and joy in engaging with art in this new space.

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Priyanka Rana’s work struck me immediately because I rarely encounter sculpture that feels this formally modern while still carrying the symbolic, ritual, and ecological textures I associate with South Asian ways of seeing. Her practice moves fluidly between ritual and climate consciousness, memory and material intelligence. Working primarily in wood, Rana creates sculptures that feel both ancient and distinctly modern - charred, carved, stitched, hollowed, and at times bound with vivid sari thread. Across the work, wood is never passive material. It arrives with history, resistance, and its own intelligence.

Rana’s sculptures hold multiple temporalities at once: the lifespan of a tree, the violence and tenderness of human intervention, the memory of migration, the possibility of healing.

Seeing Rana’s use of sari thread, I kept thinking about the symbolic life of tying thread to trees and other acts of binding as gestures of protection, devotion, and hope. In India, those meanings run deep, including in practices where trees are consecrated with thread as part of collective vows of care and stewardship. At Purvai Rai’s opening at Rajiv Menon Contemporary, Rai shared a similar connection to how acts of tying string and sowing seeds as small acts of hope, meditative gestures that ground you in the present while offering something toward the future. Rana’s use of thread carries some of that same charge. In her work, these gestures are never ornamental. They are intimate acts of relation.

Read on for our full conversation.

Was there a moment when working with wood stopped feeling like “material” and started feeling like a collaborator?
Yes. That was a turning point in my practice. I began to honor the memories and history of the wood. Instead of hiding cracks or seeing them as flaws, I started embracing them.

I remember working with an untreated log, grinding it down to remove infestations. I was frustrated because it felt like nothing would be left after a full day’s work. But when I stepped back, I saw a beautiful abstract form. It felt like a partnership with the bugs, which had in some way led me toward that shape. That was when I realized the wood would participate and bring its own history with it. Reading about other wood sculptors, like David Nash, also deepened my understanding of the material.

You speak about attunement to wood. What does listening look like in practice?
I sometimes pivot from the concept I had in mind depending on how the grain responds to a particular form. Wood is such a beautiful material that, while working with it, I am always asking whether I am adding to what is already there.

I often char my pieces, but with one redwood sculpture I decided to keep it raw once I finished shaping it. Redwoods have a high concentration of tannin, which gives the heartwood its golden-red hue. When I taper a log, I am able to reach that tannin-rich heartwood. After seeing the variation in color across the piece, I realized it needed to remain raw rather than undergo controlled charring. Clearly, that is what the piece was asking for.

Are there times when a piece resists you? What do you do when the material’s intelligence contradicts your initial intention?
I often come across a shape that resists what I have in mind. When that happens, it leaves me with an uneasy feeling that I take to bed with me. I have learned to lean into that feeling and make micro-adjustments to the form. Often, it is the smallest changes that make the biggest difference.

I have also used illusion to reach the shape I want. My first sculpture was a sphere, and I wasn’t happy with the form, so I sliced it, creating the illusion of a continuous line. Charring can also help make a form feel more supple while masking some irregularities. If I am truly stuck, I use clay to make a small maquette so I can better understand the reductions I need to make.

You’re trained in mathematics and economics. Where does that analytical training still show up in your sculptural decisions today?
Sculpting is mostly problem-solving. You are always analyzing center of gravity, torque, and balance, especially with larger works. That requires an analytical mindset.

Your work holds multiple temporalities — growth rings, charring, stitching, healing. How conscious are you of time while working?
All the time. Wood as a material contains epochs of time within it. The species I work with, especially redwoods, can live for thousands of years. They have been on this planet longer than humans have. So yes, time plays a great role in my work.

Is there a piece that taught you something only after it was finished?
One of my largest works was a commission from the city of Dublin. It was a thousand-plus-pound log, more than six feet long and around five feet wide. I hollowed it out and installed steel wires on the top rim so it would carry the feeling of a musical instrument.

It was a daunting task to complete on my own. I would literally sit inside the log to work on it. Once I finished it, I realized that if I keep working on something every day, I can do what initially feels impossible.

How does your thinking change when a work enters public space or a civic context?
I think of public sculptures as birds — a sign that a place is well loved. When I approach public art, I am always thinking about engagement. I attend local city meetings, visit the sites, and read about the place so I can become familiar with the location and the community.

I also like to involve local communities in public art, whether through interaction with the sculpture itself or by inviting them to contribute to its making. In two public projects, local community members contributed old toys that I installed within wooden forms. Those toys spoke to lineage. For instance, someone donated a toy shaped like a peacock. It was clear that it had traveled from South Asia, speaking to the migrant community in that area. I also sourced the wood locally for those projects.

What does responsibility look like to you when working with land, community, and ecology at scale?
I come from a community of farmers, where connection to land is emotional. I feel the same way about trees. Each tree carries its growth rings, and those rings are like a map of ecology worn on the body. The circles that I highlight through carving and controlled charring tell us about the climate conditions the tree lived through.

I am always aware of that while working with wood, and I feel it is my responsibility to bring that forward and help people see trees differently.

You’ve lived across continents. How do those geographies live inside the work, even when they aren’t explicitly referenced?
Living across different continents, the one thing I could always count on carrying with me was memory. The idea of memory comes up frequently in my practice.

In Indian cultural frameworks, trees are often seen as sentient beings. How did that belief shape your practice early on, and how has it shifted living in California?
To be honest, I did not begin with that mindset, even though it was present in the culture around me growing up in India. The more I investigated this material and the deeper I went into my attachment to it, the more my practice began to converge with both ancient ways of seeing and modern knowledge: that trees are intelligent and sentient. They live in communities, help one another, parent their young, and evolve in response to their environments.

Do you feel your work is translating something between cultures, or creating a third language altogether?
Yes. My work carries the way of seeing and living that I absorbed while growing up in India, together with the materials and material knowledge that came from living in California. You could say it is creating a third language in the process.

I would argue that this new language is also universal and easily accessible. Controlled charring, for instance, is very ritualistic for me because fire plays a key role in Indian ceremonies. But in California, fire also carries the meaning of climate change. Those ideas blend together and create a new meaning in the work.

When you add materials like sari threads, thorns, or fabric, what changes emotionally or symbolically for you?
Everything. Each material brings its own tactile memory, and the way I need to handle it changes too. Even between thread and fabric, the emotional reaction is different. Wrapping thread around wood feels more ritualistic, while making memory pods with fabric feels closer to a craft passed down through generations.

Charring, stitching, piercing — these gestures feel both violent and tender. How do you think about harm versus care in your work?
Care appears frequently in my work, but it comes with tension. I created a series about healing when both my husband and I had to undergo surgery. I realized there were healing rituals I had grown up with but had since forgotten. These sculptures became reminders that healing is a gift that needs to be opened slowly.

For the first sculpture in that series, I used a chainsaw to make cuts in a nine-foot-long piece of wood laid flat on the floor. Later in the series, the sculptures stood vertically, and I used a handsaw to make cuts that felt more like sutures or scars. I also think about the expectations we place on ourselves, and I have used rose prickles harvested from my backyard in the work.

Looking back five years, what belief about your practice have you let go of?
Working with wood is rewarding in many ways — the joy of creating, the intuition of the material, even the beautiful smells that accompany the work. But it can also be physically demanding. I am a prolific artist, and in the beginning I pushed my body hard. Now I work at a more sustainable pace: I stretch, I take breaks.

In the beginning, I saw wood as something I had to control and shape. I have learned instead to see it as a participatory material. It will shift and move even after I have stopped working on it, and that is part of what makes it so unique.

Is there a risk — material, conceptual, or emotional — you haven’t taken yet but feel drawn toward?
I am drawn to the possibility of animating my sculptures with smell, video, and audio. I do not yet know how I want to do that, but I feel pulled toward it.

What question is currently guiding you in the studio?
Branches. Lately, I take every chance I can to look at branches and ask myself what they are saying. It is clear to me that they are asking us to play.

I am experimenting with the idea of extension — how branches reach outward, defying gravity while staying rooted.

Fast Three

A color that keeps returning — and what it signals for you
Black. It absorbs everything and helps you focus on what is essential.

One non-art object in your studio you keep nearby — and why
A photo of my kids when they were babies. It reminds me how fast they are growing.

An artist or thinker who has quietly influenced your work
David Nash, for his approach to wood. Ruth Asawa, for her approach to living a full life as an artist, mother, and community member. And Noguchi, for his curiosity.

Thank you to Priyanka for sharing her story and practice with LOTA. You can follow her wok on Instagram or learn more through her website.

P.S. New here? Start with the art quiz to discover your style.

Most people don’t buy art because they don’t trust their taste yet. You know when something pulls them in, but turning that instinct into an understanding if they can live with that piece, and an actual purchase, can still feel intimidating.

That’s where we both come in, from two different angles.

is a collector in the making who recently acquired her first large-scale work. She shares her journey on and Instagram, documenting the process of becoming a collector from the inside. She explores both the what: how taste is shaped through studio visits, conversations with artists and gallerists, and learning what she is truly drawn to live with. And the how: the questions, decisions, and negotiations that come with it - from pricing and navigating galleries and art fairs to understanding what to ask, what to read, and everything that often feels unclear at the beginning.

is building LOTA, an art advisory practice rooted in the belief that taste is something you develop. She spends a lot of time looking closely - in studios, in conversations with artists and gallerists, and in the research that helps connect what moves you emotionally with what might actually make sense to buy and live with. A big part of her work is making the art world feel less opaque and helping people build confidence in their eye.

Different paths, same goal: helping our readers feel ready to purchase the first piece and bring art home.

So we each picked three artists we genuinely are drawn to - three from LA and three from Berlin. Six artists we think are worth knowing if you want to start building a collection with feeling, curiosity, and conviction.

Berlin

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Berlin has a very specific energy. It’s not polished. But it gives artists space to experiment, and you can feel that in the work. It is also a top 3 city with the amount of galleries after New York and London.

When I choose artists, it’s never just about the visual. It’s very much about what connects me with the artist’s story, and whether I can actually imagine making it part of my life, where it will stimulate me intellectually or emotionally every time I see it.

Jorinde Voigt

If you want something intellectually stimulating

The first time I saw her work, I didn’t fully understand it.

Her works often begin with something invisible: emotions, memory, movement, or even sound. She translates these into visual systems of lines, structures, and compositions that feel incredibly precise, yet still deeply human.

What I find especially compelling is her analytical approach. Voigt treats her subjects as dynamic systems, bringing together perception, relationships, and even scientific or philosophical ideas into one visual language.

Her works often begin with something invisible: emotions, memory, movement, or even sound. She translates these into visual systems of lines, structures, and compositions that feel incredibly precise, yet still deeply human.

What I find especially compelling is her analytical approach. Voigt treats her subjects as dynamic systems — constantly shifting — bringing together perception, relationships, and even scientific or philosophical ideas into one visual language.

That connection to music feels very Berlin to me. The city has a deep relationship with sound and experimentation.

Collector note:

• Style: Known for large-scale drawings and works on paper

• Price: Works on paper can be a more accessible entry point: mid scale editions from 2.500-6.000€

• Context: Strong institutional and international presence, professor in University of Art Hamburg

• Where to find: Jorinde Voigt Website - List of representing galleries

Johanna Dumet

If you want something easy to live with

Her work is the opposite kind of entry point. You don’t need time to understand it.
You just respond to it emotionally.

Bright colours, expressive compositions, a balance between abstraction and figuration that feels intuitive and easy to live with, while still holding a story.

It’s also the kind of art that changes a room immediately. And that’s something I think is underrated when you’re starting to buy art. Not just what you like, but how it actually lives with you and shapes the mood of your space.

If you’re buying your first piece, this kind of work can make it easier to trust yourself. You don’t overthink it. You know quite quickly if you want to live with it.

I also really like that her practice starts to expand beyond canvas. Her hand-painted plates, for example, make her work feel more approachable and connected to everyday life.

Collector note:

• Style: Works across figurative painting and functional objects

• Price: Different formats offer accessible entry points: unique mid scale works around 6.000€

• Context: Represented by renowned König Gallery Berlin

• Where to find: König Gallery

I also absolutely loved Johanna’s last solo-exhibition with König, read more here.

André Butzer

If you want something that bridges Europe and the US

Butzer is one of the more established painters working out of Berlin today, with his studio in Wannsee, a place that has long attracted artists looking for space and focus just outside the intensity of the city.

His style is often described as science fiction expressionism. Strong colours, simplified, almost cartoonish figures, and an energy that fuses European expressionist painting with American pop culture.

At first glance, it can feel playful, even Disney-like. But it’s more than that: the vibrancy and immediacy of the work are deliberate choices, developed over decades as he explored how to combine narrative, emotion, and visual impact.

Butzer often paints wet-on-wet, layering brushstrokes quickly while the paint is still drying. This technique gives his figures that bold, slightly exaggerated, and alive quality. It’s part of why his paintings are so instantly recognisable and why they resonate both in Berlin and internationally.

For collectors outside of Germany, this kind of work travels well. It carries a strong visual identity, but also a clear connection back to Berlin. It’s also a way into collecting an artist who is already internationally recognised, while still finding entry points through works on paper or smaller formats.

Collector note:

• Style: Known for expressive, colour-driven paintings and works on paper

• Price: Works on paper offers accessible entry points: small and mid scale editions 3.000-5.000€

• Context: Distinct and recognizable painterly language developed over three decades, widely regarded as one of the leading painters of his generation, strong institutional presence and established international collector base

• Where to find: Gallery Max Hetzler

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LA

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LA has its own kind of art energy. It may not have the institutional weight or auction-house gravity of New York or London, but it has something else: artists building serious practices, collectors learning in public, and a city full of people still trying to make culture on their own terms.

That doesn’t mean the work finds you easily. In LA, you do have to look. But if you’re willing to search a little, somewhere between the strip malls, the sprawl, and the traffic, there is incredible work here.

These are three local artists I’d start with.

Iris Yirei Hu

If you want layered art rooted in craftsmanship

IIris Yirei Hu is a Taiwanese Hakka American artist whose practice moves across painting, weaving, natural dye, porcelain, and textile. What makes the work feel so grounded is that it doesn’t just borrow from tradition aesthetically. She has actually learned from the people and communities connected to those materials and processes, and you can feel that depth in the work. She studied Navajo weaving with Melissa Cody. She traveled to villages in southwest China and Mexico to learn natural-indigo dyeing from the women still doing it. She has collaborated with Tongva elders Julia Bogany and the late Megan Dorame on site-specific work in Los Angeles.

In 2022 she was commissioned by LA Metro to create a permanent mosaic for the new UCLA/Westwood Purple Line station — nineteen California native plant species, native animals, the ecological story of Southern California — set to unveil in time for the 2028 Olympics. She calls it her love letter to the city.

She’s just had her debut group show at Luis De Jesus, and the gallery has brought her to both Felix LA and Dallas Art Fair.

Collector note:

• Style: symbolic, textile-rooted, materially rich

• Price: available linen works currently $6,500

• Context: LA Metro public commission; strong institutional support including Headlands and Kohler Arts/Industry

• Where to Find: Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

Kevin Yaun

If you want to bring the outside in, but don’t want a basic landscape

Kevin Yaun is a painter whose work is shaped by a life lived across multiple countries. He has lived in eight places in twenty years — Georgia, Colorado, the Netherlands, England, Thailand, Singapore, California — and the constant relocation made home an idea he had to chase rather than inherit. The paintings are what came out of that chase: hillside houses seen through hedges, Pacific coastlines glimpsed through sliding glass, single houseplants on windowsills with the entire LA sky reflected back.

Collector note:

• Style: atmospheric painting; architecture, landscape, mood

• Price: primary oils previously $3,200–$5,800

• Context: Megan Mulrooney representation; Felix and Aspen visibility; work in institutional collections

• Where to Find: Megan Mulrooney Gallery

Nicole Anastas

If you want something that adds texture to your walls

Nicole Anastas is the kind of artist whose path makes the work more interesting, not less. She studied textiles, worked in display and decorative painting, painted murals and furniture, raised a family, and came into this body of work later. You can feel all of that accumulated hand knowledge in the pieces.

Her surfaces are torn, stitched, rebuilt, and painted, and what I love is that the process never overwhelms the result. The work still feels clear, composed, and livable. The softer palettes are especially strong because they let the texture do the heavy lifting.

She’s also a good example of an artist who gives you a real entry point into a bigger conversation. The broader return to textile, handwork, and so-called craft in contemporary art is very real, but much of that market is already expensive or institutionally locked up. Anastas lets you participate in that conversation at a level that still feels possible. It’s also one of the more interesting ways to bring texture onto your walls without defaulting to something purely decorative.

Collector note:

• Style: tactile abstraction; painting + textile crossover

• Price: available work currently roughly $1,700–$9,000

• Context: Uprise Art representation; MacArthur Place residency; installation at Modern Citizen NYC

• Where to Find: Uprise Art and Tacit Collective

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Each of the presented artists offers something that’s both approachable and aspirational, works you can live with, and stories you can carry with you.

We hope this gives you a sense of how your own collector’s story could start, whether in Berlin, LA, or anywhere in the world, and encourages you to take that first step.

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So here are five prints I’d buy right now, each one chosen using the lens I shared last time: the artist’s trajectory, the structure of the release, the publisher behind it, market data, and of course whether the work itself actually earns a place in your life. There are a lot of terms in here too, from print processes to auction data, so I also dropped in a glossary at the end.

This was such a fun curation because it really played with both sides of my brain - what art I loved balanced with the hard facts of market data.

Five different artists, five different stories, and five different ways to think about investing in art. The first one is free, and the last four are for paid subscribers.

Let’s go.

Shirin Neshat — Fervor, 2000

Avant Arte · €500 (~$651) Unframed · Time-Limited Edition dropping April 28 · 9”x16.5”

With everything unfolding in Iran, this release hit me differently. I just finished The Lion Women of Tehran, and even that only reminded me how much I cannot fully understand from a distance — how much is lived, carried, and survived inside ordinary lives experiencing extraordinary circumstances.

What I do know is that Shirin Neshat has spent decades making work around exile, gender, repression, and the psychic cost of power, and she continues to insist on art as a place where those histories can still be seen. Iran is in another period of severe repression amid wider conflict, which makes her work feel less like a market story than a human one.

I promised numbers, so here are hers: In November 2022, Phillips London hammered a single gelatin silver Fervor print, edition of 10, for $41,900. A year later, Sotheby’s New York sold a three-part Fervor for $21,590, 44% above the high estimate. On April 28, Avant Arte releases the same image at $651 (€500).

The release also lands at a moment when her career has unusual institutional force behind it. PAC Milan staged a major survey last year, the Parrish Art Museum gave her her first New York-area solo museum show in twenty years, and her new film trilogy Do U Dare! opens at the Venice Biennale in May.

Below are four more incredible artists, stories, and prints available for sale.

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Last week, in the morning scramble, I was doing my daughter’s hair when she told me she wanted to be like everyone else. She was tired of being different.

I get it. Trying to swim upcurrent is hard, even when you’re proud of who you are. So I tried to explain it the only way I could - if everyone were the same, all the food would taste the same. The music would sound the same. The dancing would be the same. Life would get very boring, very fast.

Everything in this edition circles back to that conversation—the things that resist being flattened. The stuff that only exists because someone chose to make it their way. Like my little lady and her mismatched clips all over her head.

Photography: Szilveszter Makó and the world that’s actually there

You’ve probably seen Szilveszter Makó’s work everywhere, and yet it never feels stale. Every time one of his images hits my screen, I get that jolt of joy and curiosity, then immediately zoom in to see all the little details.

Makó is a Milan-based photographer and former painter who builds elaborate handmade props for shoots—surreal set pieces, sculptural headpieces, entire environments assembled from recycled materials and cardboard painted to resemble marble. It sits somewhere between fashion editorial and fine art, like Dada theatre with museum lighting (though he insists on natural light only).

The detail that matters most right now is the human touch. Someone built it, placed it, composed it. In a moment where so much imagery is frictionless and generated, that visible hand is exactly why the work lands differently.

Culture: Taste is the last thing that can’t be copied

I’ve been stuck on a question lately: what happens to taste when everything can be copied? AI can replicate visual styles on command. Counterfeits are getting indistinguishable. The algorithm already turned an entire design era into templates—beige serenity on one side, blobby dopamine decor on the other.

’s take on Jony Ive’s Ferrari “Luce” interior made the point in a way I can’t unsee: five years of work and the result feels like a giant Apple Watch bolted inside a half-million-dollar car. His distinction is the knife twist: Ive has style, not taste. Style repeats. Taste makes something that didn’t exist before.

The thing I keep coming back to is that taste is what you choose when no one’s watching. The references you don’t post. The room you make for yourself, not for a feed. We spent more than a decade training the algorithm on our preferences, and now it can mimic the surface of them. Fine. That just means the interesting part moves deeper, into interior life, into the slow accumulation of what you actually care about when there’s nothing to perform. And I think there’s some immense freedom in that.

Art: Julia Stoschek Foundation, Los Angeles

I went to the Julia Stoschek Foundation in LA a few weeks ago and I haven’t stopped thinking about it. The exhibition What a Wonderful World just closed, but I need to tell you about it anyway, because it changed how I think about what art can do.

The show was housed in the Variety Arts Theater downtown, an Art Deco building left empty for years, and it used the building like a body. The main stage as the heart: expansive, emotional, the works you’re meant to sit with. The basement as the id: raw, visceral, unprocessed. I went down there and felt genuinely shaken.

In the main auditorium, there was Marina Abramović’s The Hero, slow, poetic, haunting, followed by Arthur Jafa’s Apex featuring clips from all corners of life moving at a frenetic pace. I loved the juxtaposition, and the idea that there is, and should be, space for both at once. Each floor of the five floors sent me on similar spirals. It was freeing and confusing and, most importantly, it kept me anchored firmly in the moment. I walked in expecting a quick visit and stayed for hours.

If they open something near you: go.

Design: Clarks — from Somerset to the world

A real left turn, but there’s a new book—From Somerset to the World by Alexander Newman—that treats Clarks like a cultural document. One shoe refracted through decades of subculture, migration, identity: Desert Boots as beatnik uniform, Wallabees as hip-hop staple, Clarks as rudeboy essential in Jamaica.

This is the kind of design story I love - objects that endure not because of branding, but because people adopt them and make them mean something the original designer never intended

(It is the same idea for where the inspiration for LOTA comes from too).

My personal favorite take on Clarks is Andy Spade’s desert boot looks—effortless in a way newer interpretations don’t quite hit. (Also: the men’s sole is so much cooler than the women’s, IMO.)

There are a million versions now—Jamie Haller’s, Everlane’s (edit: I couldn’t find these apart from on resale - they probably got killed for duping Haller’s, rightfully so), The Row’s—but the original still resists improvement. That’s real design.

Collecting: Is most art now just too expensive?

The Art Newspaper ran a piece recently that asks the question most people already feel: is most art now just too expensive for most people? The article argues the gallery system has priced out the majority of potential collectors.

The data points that stuck with me: 96% of postwar and contemporary art transactions happen below $50,000. 77% happen below $5,000. And online platforms dominate that range, 62% of sub-$50k auction sales now happen online.

But the million-dollar sales, which only account for 0.5% of auction lots, still get most of the cultural oxygen. The market people read about and the market people can actually participate in are two different worlds.

I get that the allure of the art world is its exclusivity and glamour, but if most people can’t participate, there will be no market to speak of.

If you read my last post, Prints as an Investment, this is the same thesis. Prints and editions are one of the few places where access, quality, and transparency can coexist. BTW - for paid subs, next week I’m going into what limited-edition prints are actually worth spending on.

Happy digging! Tell me what you find!

P.S. New here? Start with the art quiz to discover your style.

You’ve probably heard someone call art “a good investment,” whether at a dinner party, from a gallery, or from a friend trying to make themselves feel better about a large purchase.

The market certainly behaves that way at the top. The Art Basel and UBS global art market reported $59.6B in sales last year. Additionally, a Deloitte Private and ArtTactic survey in 2024 found that 51% of wealth managers now offer art-related services, up from 25% in 2011. And yet, unlike real estate or equities, there’s no MLS, no ticker, no standardized way to know what something is actually worth.

Sometimes art does function as an asset, but the truth is that most of the art market is incredibly difficult to evaluate in any standardized or transparent way. For all the sophistication projected onto the art world, a surprising amount of the market still runs on selective information, relationships, and a mix of ambiguity and elitism that people often mistake for depth.

That doesn’t mean art can’t hold value. It means that most people buying art are doing so inside a market that gives them very little usable information, especially once you move beyond the small circle of people with deep context, established access, or someone to call.

This is part of what makes prints and editions, especially when you’re starting out, so interesting. They are one of the few places in the art market where you can actually begin to understand and track market value. You can look at the issue price, the edition size, whether it sold out quickly, whether it resurfaces at auction, whether there’s real demand behind it, and whether that demand holds. You are still dealing with taste, timing, and risk, but you are doing so with more data than you get in most other corners of the market.

Below, I’m breaking down the Danielle McKinney edition I wish I’d bought, the cautionary tale every collector should understand, and the six things I’d look at before buying a print now.

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You can see more in a day than you’d normally see in months, but everything competes at the same volume, and the conditions aren’t neutral. Layout, pricing, ticketing, VIP systems, even the architecture, shape who shows up, how long you linger, whether you feel comfortable asking a question, and ultimately, what you end up buying.

I wrote about this in my LA Art Week debrief, and I’ve been thinking about it even more since. That’s why I’m excited to share this conversation with Jacob Barnes, founder of Season 4 Episode 6 and co-founder of — a London “cultural programme” that currently takes the form of a hotel-format fair with free entry, heavy programming, and a deliberate refusal of the sterile white-booth maze.

I wanted to talk to Jacob because he’s unusually direct about those mechanics without getting cynical. We talked about what the fair model assumes, what “success” actually means for galleries, and how to stay human when you’ve seen 10,000 artworks in a week.

What I keep coming back to is how the current art-world system, from museums to blue-chip galleries to high-end fairs, leaves most people out. Minor Attractions feels like a real attempt to reset the norms and ask a more interesting question - what if the art world was designed to be fun again, so more people could actually enter it?

Below is our Q&A, lightly edited for clarity.

When you say the established art fair model runs on assumptions that aren’t as likely anymore—what are the 2–3 assumptions you’d name first?

I would say the idea that fairs are primarily economic events, or that what drives any fair is the capacity to do business is outdated. Of course, we want all of our galleries to sell work and to make money, but when considering the audience, buying work may be just one part of a broader experience, or may be a complementary factor to a different experience.

I think an art fair needs to be viewed a little more holistically — how are people having a good time beyond simply doing business? More than that, how can people who didn’t enter the building expecting to buy art — or who had never thought about buying art — see that practice as one that resonates and interlocks with other industries, mediums, and passions?

Additionally I would say that I resent the notion that the best way of presenting work is in a white-walled booth. We’ve all had enough of it, and no one I talk to actually likes it, but we keep doing it — why?

You’ve pointed out that the fair model assumes things like cheap real estate, gallery liquidity, and an expanding collector base, but that’s not how it plays out. What does it actually look like on the ground?

It goes without saying that a successful fair will be different for different people depending on their needs and expected outcomes — there can never be one set metric of success. I also can’t answer this question without noting that a successful fair includes strong sales for our galleries; it would be very difficult to run an art fair if we didn’t think through that lens.

However, beyond that, I think a successful fair for galleries pairs affordability with access: Can you, for a reasonable price, get your name and your artists’ names out there and into the mouths of the right people? But beyond that, can you reach new audiences that may have previously been unavailable? With regard to my fair, Minor Attractions, we really find our purpose in exposing new audiences to rising artists and galleries.

Minor Attractions uses a hotel format rather than a booth maze. You’ve said it’s not about a sterile white-cube space—it’s about making an experience. What does “experience” mean to you without drifting into spectacle, and what does this format make possible for galleries/viewers that the traditional model doesn’t?

Well, a little spectacle never hurt! But, yes, we never want spectacle to come at the expense of quality. But it’s about showing people things that they find exciting and engaging, creating new and exciting curatorial opportunities, and connecting new audiences — the range of programming that we have brings in a bunch of people who might not have otherwise gone to an art fair, and so that is a real benefit for galleries, I think.

Free entry is a real stance. What does removing the ticket price change and how do you keep the fair economically real without recreating the same old incentives?

It just creates opportunity for people. We work to reflect the best of emerging London culture, and part of that is understanding that some of the next generation of artists, musicians, etc. might not be able to afford tickets right now. So why keep them out?

Regarding the economics, it definitely invites critical thinking, but by expanding our audience we’re also able to partner with projects that align with our vision and see themselves reflected in the audience we have.

Programming (performances/film/radio/parties) can get dismissed as “vibes,” but it feels central to your model—almost like infrastructure. What role does it play in building a healthier fair ecosystem?

I’ve been adamant that Minor Attractions is not an art fair — instead we’re a Cultural Programme that finds its current realization in an art fair. The distinction is important: these “additional elements” are introductions to other areas of interest for us, while being inroads for people in those communities to enter into our world.

I think of advising as sensemaking + access (not just “what looks good” or “what’s an investment”). In your view, what’s the healthiest role advisors/consultants can play in the fair ecosystem—and where does it go off the rails?

I think advisors need to better understand the intersection of art (and art collection) and lifestyle. Maybe thinking of an advisory as an opportunity to help people navigate how they want to express themselves, who they want to support, and what kind of communities they want to be in is a healthy start. While I balk a little bit at the resurgence of “patronage” as a concept, the best artists have varied influences and communities, and advisors can help parse that.

You’ve said growth is the nature of it. So—what are 2–3 concrete signals that tell you Minor Attractions is working? What does “good” look like?

Good is working when:

• Artists and galleries feel genuinely seen and represented, and they feel able to successfully reach their target markets.

• We’re getting a meaningful mix of audiences in — from seasoned collectors to people who’ve never been to an art fair before.

• We’re making it financially accessible for everyone involved, without compromising on quality or ambition.

Collectors see 10,000 artworks in a week during fairs and everything is fighting for attention. What’s your advice for staying human at a fair—seeing clearly, filtering noise, and buying with conviction?

People typically know what they want the moment they see it and become dissuaded — at best because they’re busy, or at worst because people in their ear tell them what they’re “supposed” to like. This is fun: be curious, ask questions, and trust your gut.

One reason I keep returning to conversations like this is that they make something visible - fairs are more than marketplaces, they are filters. They decide who enters, what counts as “serious,” what kind of attention gets rewarded, and what kind of work can land.

My hope is that more fair models start naming their assumptions out loud and then design around the world as it actually is (and can be).

Thanks to Jacob for the candor and insight. Minor Attractions returns October 13–17 in London during Frieze Week. You can follow along here.

Images: Courtesy of Minor Attractions (The Mandrake Hotel, London). Shared by Jacob Barnes.

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