The Goods is my running list of what’s caught my eye lately: shows, essays, artists, decor. Think of it as the grab bag. Some things will push your collecting eye, some will just be good to know, and all of them shape how I’m thinking about art right now. It all ties back to the idea that taste is a moving target. What matters is building the muscle to notice, and then notice again.
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: RIALTO, 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 Merie Subryan. 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 Kelly Williams, Joyce Lee , and even Sarah Shapiro - 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. EMILY DAWN LONG, 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.
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