Jonathan Anderson Only Wants to Be the World’s Best Fashion Designer (2024)

Jonathan Anderson, the creative director of Loewe and founder of his own brand, JW Anderson, photographed in Madrid on July 18, 2024.

Johnny Dufort

No other fashion designer today blurs the lines between the avant-garde and the commercial as imaginatively, or ruthlessly, as Jonathan Anderson, the creative director of Loewe.

By Nick Haramis

Oct. 17, 2024

JONATHAN ANDERSON WAS on an Italian movie set when he started to question everything. It was the spring of 2023, and the fashion designer was watching a playback on a monitor at Cinecittà, the film studio on the outskirts of Rome where he and the director Luca Guadagnino had been working on an adaptation of “Queer,” the autobiographical novel by William S. Burroughs, written in the 1950s but published three decades later. Anderson, the Northern Irish creative director of Loewe and the founder of his own clothing line, JW Anderson, was overseeing the costumes. The two friends had worked together before on Guadagnino’s “Challengers” (2024), about a love triangle set in the world of competitive tennis, but their second feature collaboration,which follows a gay American expat, played by Daniel Craig, from midcentury Mexico City into the Ecuadorean jungle on a search for ayahuasca, was more ambitious, requiring period clothing for hundreds of actors and extras. As they reviewed the footage, Anderson, who had stepped into the frame to fix something on Craig’s costume, realized that he’d been captured onscreen. What he saw disturbed him. The prodigy with tousled blond hair who’d started his brand in 2008 at age 23 had been replaced by a man on the verge of middle age. But it wasn’t just that he looked somewhat disheveled: Anderson had been so busy working that he’d lost track of time. “I was like, whoisthat person?” he recalls thinking. “And what have I done in the last 10 years?”

On a crisp morning this past February, Anderson is recounting the experience in his townhouse in the East London borough of Hackney. Although he’s warm and self-mocking, he gives the impression that he’s never not at least a little on edge. “When you’re working all the time, you end up being addicted to the next show,” he says. “You’re so busy outdoing yourself that you don’t realize what you’ve done.” The early light cuts across a Le Corbusier stool, a white linen sofa by Axel Vervoordt and a pair of Georgian-style yellow armchairs in the living room. “You’re trying to be a normal person,” he adds. “And people are expecting you to be happy all the time and have an idea.But sometimes you just don’t.”

Anderson’s restlessness seems particularly intense right now, perhaps because it’s the year he turns 40, or because, despite having more than a few fears, the thing that scares him most is feeling truly seen. “I’m more of a voyeur,” he says. “I’ve never wanted to be like, ‘Here I am!’” And yet, for the past couple of years, it’s been difficult to avoid hearing his name or Loewe’s, which, until quite recently, most people probably couldn’t pronounce. (In 2018, the brand released a video of models struggling to get it right; it’s “Lo-WEH-vay,” the actor and filmmaker Dan Levy tells his co-star Aubrey Plaza in a recent promotional short.) In February of last year, Anderson was in a motel in the Arizona desert dressing Rihanna for her Super Bowl halftime show. The performer, who used the occasion to announce her second pregnancy, wore a red Loewe boiler suit and leather breastplate. A few months later, Beyoncé kicked off her Renaissance World Tour in a bespoke Loewe bodysuit embellished with strategically placed sequined hands. And this past spring, the “Challengers” press tour felt like one long fashion show, with all three lead actors — Mike Faist, Josh O’Connor and Zendaya — wearing Loewe outfits, including, in Zendaya’s case, shoes made from 3-D-printed tennis balls. “Actors are strange people in a good way,” says Anderson, who once trained to be one himself. “They’re like vessels. You can pour in whatever you want.”

The same might be said of his clothes. If some designers have become famous for introducing a new silhouette or landing on a signature look and then finding countless ways to reiterate it, Anderson has a reputation for being more mercurial. With each collection, he’seither adding a new layer to an existing idea (a mesh slip dress with a balloon motif one season; shoes made of real balloons the next) or rejecting it outright. His take on fashion isn’t exactly theatrical — some of the garments can be quite subtle — but his clothes tend to come with an element of performance. As the actress Greta Lee, who has appeared in multiple Loewe campaigns, says, Anderson’s creations have a way of activating “an elevated version of your essence.”

Two days from now, he’ll present his fall 2024 JW Anderson women’s collection at a gymnasium in London’s Marylebone neighborhood. “The show we’re working on is very British woman in suburbia,” says Anderson, who’s in the process of rejecting his louder recent offerings and the attention they received. “When it gets too much, my natural reaction is to go for a silent year.” As he sets down a pot of coffee on an 18th-century oak dining table in his kitchen, he makes a face that reappears, not infrequently, whenever he’s feeling agitated: a look of dread cut with a smile, a sort of breaking of the fourth wall that indulges his neuroses while also attempting to undermine them.

In conversation, Anderson can be an exuberant and compelling catastrophizer, and the more time one spends observing him, the more one starts to feel that his own relationship to fashion might be read as a kind of performance, too: At the end of his runway shows, when he emerges to take a bow, it’s always with his head down and shoulders slumped, almost as if he’s been forced into receiving applause. Designers, he once told me, are “kind of biblically hated,” and his view of the entire industry can seem equally bleak, even if he’s stating it for effect: The magazines that once held such sway are increasingly irrelevant; connoisseurship is dead; everything is generic. But rather than dispirit him, all of this only pushes him to fight harder. “I feel like we’re in this amazing moment where it’s going to be survival of the fittest,” he says. His voice has intensified into a high-pitched whisper, every word delivered as if it were part of a lurid blind item. He smiles again.

His ambition is clear: He’s determined to become the world’s best living fashion designer. What’s sometimes murkier is why he wants this. “I’m sure people would say that I’m arrogant,” he says. His goals, though, are simple and practical. “Bag sales need to get to here; the stores need to be like this. But these are just actions,” he says. “The big thing is, ‘What am I getting out of it creatively?’” Another question might be: How long can he keep it all up?

Loewe viscose circular-sleeve parka and lambskin bracelet ankle boots from the fall 2021 women’s collection.

Photograph by Johnny Dufort. Styled by Suzanne Koller

Loewe two-layer mesh-and-knit top, cotton twill asymmetric pleated skirt with napa waistband and calf ankle-strap stiletto pumps from the fall 2016 women’s collection.

Photograph by Johnny Dufort. Styled by Suzanne Koller

JW Anderson silk A-line bonded top with flocked feather print, silk orbital layered skirt and cylinder-heel ballet shoes from the fall 2016 women’s collection.

Photograph by Johnny Dufort. Styled by Suzanne Koller

Loewe draped dress in viscose jersey, $4,600, and boots in patent python calfskin, $4,250, from the fall 2024 collection, loewe.com.

Photograph by Johnny Dufort. Styled by Suzanne Koller

JW Anderson multibow top in silk and cotton and Cleo accordion skirt from the spring 2014 women’s collection.

Photograph by Johnny Dufort. Styled by Suzanne Koller

Loewe half-cape silk dress with airbrushed squares, napa cross waistband trousers and patent leather train belt from the fall 2015 women’s collection and pumps from the fall 2016 women’s collection.

Photograph by Johnny Dufort. Styled by Suzanne Koller

JW Anderson windowpane check wrap cape with belt and high-waisted oversize trousers from the fall 2019 women’s collection.

Photograph by Johnny Dufort. Styled by Suzanne Koller

JW Anderson printed silk-Lurex scarf shirt from the fall 2015 women’s collection.

Photograph by Johnny Dufort. Styled by Suzanne Koller

IT’S BEEN JUST over a decade since Anderson was hired by LVMH to revive Loewe, a fashion house established in Madrid in 1846 as a leather-making collective. When the French conglomerate, which also has a stake in JW Anderson, fully acquired Loewe in 1996, clothing was responsible for about 10 percent of sales, which hovered around $200 million. For four years beginning in 1997, the American designer Narciso Rodriguez repositioned it as a ready-to-wear label, delivering simple, sellable clothes. Later, the British designer Stuart Vevers would shift the company’s focus back to handbags. So, unlike Saint Laurent or Gucci —where, some have speculated, Anderson might one day end up — Loewe was a bit of a blank slate. There wasn’t much of a heritage to adhere to, and Anderson started running it as if he were operating an experimental gallery, presenting customers with things they didn’t know they wanted and couldn’t quite understand. His debut women’s collection for the brand, held in an Isamu Noguchi-designed sculpture garden outside of the UNESCO headquarters in Paris in June 2014, featured baggy leather pants in pale blue and bright yellow, macramé halter tops and latex T-shirts with a mallard motif. In the years since, he’s become an uncanny illusionist, producing trompe l’oeil garments and incorporating surprising materials —from makeup brushes to sink drain covers — that can feel almost like sleights of hand or, as one critic put it, “decidedly normal things made abnormal.” At his spring 2016 women’s show, he sent models out in pants covered with shards of mirrored glass; his spring 2023 women’s collection included dresses with bodices shaped like anthuriums. His interests, which are communicated through each garment, are varied. “He can discuss an inspiration trip to Naples — and, like, napkins — forever,” says Lee. “You could be talking about [the pop star] Charli XCX and then he’ll be like, ‘Look at this amazing Venetian artifact I found,’” says the actress and writer Ayo Edebiri. “The problem with the world,” Anderson says, “is that there are so many things to discover.”

A decade in, Anderson has transformed the formerly sleepy Spanish label into one of fashion’s noisiest and most innovative hype machines — and, frankly, its most meme-able — almost single-handedly reinvigorating red-carpet showmanship and shaping online fashion discourse more than maybe any other designer of his generation. Some of the clothes almost seem to project hostility toward the enterprise at hand —models have struggled to walk in molded Plasticine shorts; one floor-length dress, pierced at the neck with a giant sewing pin, felt more like a dare than an outfit —but there’s a playfulness to them, too. Plaza, known for her deadpan humor, says she felt “spiritually connected” to the “soft, buttery gown with an aggressive spear cutting through it” that she wore this past January for the 2023 Emmys.

According to Anderson, Loewe is now a roughly $2 billion business. (He wants to grow the company to $3 billion. It’s “really American of me,” he says.) In his ability to make clothes that are both avant-garde and commercial, Anderson has something in common with Rei Kawakubo, the Japanese designer of Comme des Garçons. Pieter Mulier, the Belgian creative director of the brand Alaïa, says that the two designers also share a sense of modesty. “The public doesn’t know much about Jonathan’s private life,” says Mulier, who lives near Anderson in Paris. “And I think that’s much more respectable than, let’s say, the older generation, where designers were nearly as big as the brands they worked for.” Describing her first impression of Anderson, Lee says, “This sounds kind of insulting, but he was so normal,” and compares his look (he’s almost always in jeans and a T-shirt) to that of a “hot fraternity brother” from a Midwestern college. “He’s not one of those reclusive artists who’s in his own cave.”

Levy, Anderson’s friend, says, “In an industry where test audiences and algorithms dictate a lot of what we do creatively, he’s somehow managed to work within the system but challenge it at the same time.” The Scottish stylist Joe McKenna, an early supporter of Anderson’s work, says, “The clothes weren’t repeating an idea, but you believed [they were] from the same hand as the previous collections you’d seen. A bit like Miuccia Prada, he’s constantly rummaging through his own language box to pull out new things.” Also like Prada, a hero and former employer of his, he’s more interested in exploring different materials and fabrication techniques than in creating another pretty dress. (Whether a garment is flattering is often beside the point — awkwardness, if not the goal, is encouraged.) “For some people, their drug is the idea of continuity,” he says. “That is not my drug. We have bags for that.”

But not everyone can pull off a stiletto with a cracked-egg heel (spring 2022) or a coat and shoes sprouting living grass (spring 2023), and Anderson also designs things for clients who aren’t quite so bold: The Loewe Puzzle, a handbag introduced in 2014 and made by jigsawing together geometric pieces of leather, has become the brand’s answer to the Hermès Birkin or Fendi Baguette; in 2022, a padded Loewe bomber jacket, shaped a bit like a leather-wrapped Hershey’s Kiss, sold out after Kendall Jenner posted a photo of herself wearing a green one. There are few designers who can exploit the internet so deftly: This past June, days after someone on social media described an heirloom tomato as being “so Loewe,” Anderson revealed a red leather Loewe handbag that looked much like the fruit in question. In 2022, the night before her album “Crash” came out, Charli XCX was photographed carrying the JW Anderson Bumper, a rectangular shoulder bag outlined with tubular padding; two months later, she became the face of the accessory. “The reason he’s able to attract all these different creative people,” she says, is because he’s one of them.

Designers have a long history of collaborating with artists, but what separates Anderson, who identifies as a snob, from some of his peers is that he’s genuinely curious about objects and other art forms, and deeply knowledgeable about the references he deploys in his work. A compulsive collector of art, he’s kept a portrait of a man sitting on a chair, by the mid-20th-century American photographer Peter Hujar, next to his bed in London; a large assortment of his other works — many of them by gay artists, including 1940s photographs of male nudes by George Platt Lynes and a 1960s Paul Thek wax-and-steel sculpture that resembles hunks of meat — will eventually reside at a house he’s been building in North London.

In 2016, Anderson, who’s also a trustee on the board of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, inaugurated the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, an annual award recognizing excellence among potters, textile artists and other makers. (The latest recipient was the Mexican-born ceramist Andrés Anza.) Over the years, he’s reinterpreted the work of other underappreciated or overlooked gay artists, including Joe Brainard, an informal member of the New York School in the 1960s, whose collages of pansies were printed on shirts and woven into cardigans for Loewe’s fall 2021 men’s collection; the homoerotic Finnish illustrator Tom of Finland, whose estate has partnered with JW Anderson on a few occasions; and the American artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz, who died of complications from the disease in 1992 and whose work, including “Untitled (One Day This Kid … )” (1990-91), was repurposed for a clutch and a custom suit with ballooning sleeves worn by Levy at the 2021 Met Gala, which was dedicated that year to American fashion.

A cynical reading of Anderson’s work might accuse him of cultural vampirism: By positioning himself alongside history’s great embattled artists, he makes his own output feel all the more subversive. But there’s a delicateness to his approach; few designers, if any, care or know enough to challenge the artists they’re working with to try something new. The 82-year-old American artist Lynda Benglis, famous for her wax paintings and poured latex sculptures — and whose massive fountains dominated the set of the spring 2024 Loewe men’s show — ended up designing jewelry for the brand. The Los Angeles-based artist Richard Hawkins, 63, whose collages of young heartthrobs, often either bloodied or sexualized,adorned sweatpants, beaded leather bags and knitted tunics for Loewe’s fall 2024 men’s collection, was skeptical when he was asked to collaborate. His concern, he says, was that his work would be reduced to “coffee cups and mouse pads.” Instead, Anderson added another dimension to Hawkins’s pinup universe,inviting the artist to create video works for the show featuring actors such as Jamie Dornan and Manu Rios, who sat nearby in the front row. He and Anderson included at least one actor with an OnlyFans page, but Hawkins says he was told to avoid depictions of masturbation. “I think Jonathan pushes [LVMH] as far as they’ll go when it comes to sexuality and queerness.”

A spring 2016 look from Loewe.

Firstview

A fall 2018 look from Loewe.

Firstview

A spring 2018 look from Loewe.

Firstview

A fall 2019 look from Loewe.

Firstview

A fall 2022 look from Loewe.

Firstview

A fall 2022 look from Loewe.

Firstview

A spring 2022 look from Loewe.

Firsview

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A spring 2023 look from Loewe.

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A fall 2023 look from Loewe.

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A spring 2023 look from Loewe.

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A spring 2024 look from Loewe.

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A fall 2024 look from Loewe.

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TWO WEEKS LATER, I arrive at the Loewe offices in Paris’s Ninth Arrondissement. When we last met, in London before the fall 2024 JW Anderson show — which ended up telegraphing an uneasy vision of English nostalgia, with models, some of them in curly gray wigs, wearing stodgy underwear and minidresses made from skeins of knitting wool — Anderson was edgy but focused, maybe even a little cocky. Now, three days after his fall 2024 women’s show for Loewe, he seems ready to murder someone.

“After a show, you don’t want to be near me,” he warns, smoking next to an open window on a cloudy afternoon in March. The Loewe collection, which offered a quirky take on aristocratic style with morning coats embroidered with tiny caviar beads and a crepe jersey shift dress with a blurry tartan motif, had been a success. (One of the three fashion critics whom he pays much attention to called the show “great” and “inspiring.”) But he’s standing next to his antique wooden desk — uncluttered except for a white vase of Creamsicle-hued buttercups and a mug with a drawing on it of a five-man orgy — trying not to explode. Before the pandemic, Anderson would fly to Miami or Argentina after his final show of the season; this year, he stayed in Paris with his boyfriend, the Catalan artist Pol Anglada, 33, with whom he frequently collaborates, succumbing to what he describes as nonverbal “death spirals.” That some of his fellow designers had gotten similar praise for work that Anderson sees as inferior to his — “You can’t just fake a formula”; “It’s the same product”; “It looked like Neiman Marcus” —infuriates him, as if the approval is meaningless when it’s not only his to receive.

As energized as he is by winning, Anderson feels like there’s no one to outdo. “I’m looking out there and there’s nothing,” he says. When that happens, he creates his own challenges. With “Queer,” for example, he decided that the cast would wear almost exclusively vintage clothing from the 1940s and ’50s. (“Down to my boxer briefs,” says the actor Drew Starkey, who plays Craig’s love interest. “It was nerve-racking,” says Craig. “If you spill coffee all over the suit, it’s ruined.”) One of the few times Anderson was jealous of someone else’s work —“It’s so amazing when you see a show and you’re like, ‘Damn it,’” he says — was in 2021, when Demna, the provocative creative director of Balenciaga, came out with his first couture collection. “I thought it was groundbreaking in terms of proportion and silhouette and nostalgia and non-nostalgia and angst,” he says, “and what couture could mean.”

Andrew Webster, an old friend of Anderson’s and the brand image director at JW Anderson, says, “Jonathan is an overworker, to the point where, even if we’re all fatigued and exhausted, he’s like, ‘I’ve got another idea.’” Unlike many members of his generation, Anderson doesn’t feel a compunction to find something nice to say about others’ efforts in the office. More than once, he’s interrupted a design meeting to tell the team that “everything’s a disaster”; he’s also been known to scrap social media posts and entire campaigns. The French stylist Benjamin Bruno, one of Anderson’s most trusted creative partners, admits that they’ve had some “extremely fiery and dramatic” disagreements over the years. “If you don’t argue,” says Bruno, “it means you don’t care.”

Each year, Anderson releases a total of eight runway collections for Loewe and JW Anderson, traveling between Paris and London. While it’s rare for a designer who runs a business the size of Loewe to still have their own label with a fully realized identity and fan base — Anthony Vaccarello suspended his brand after being hired at Saint Laurent in 2016; the late Virgil Abloh kept Off-White going following his Louis Vuitton appointment, but he didn’t design women’s wear there —Anderson treats JW Anderson as a kind of creative laboratory. If Loewe is eccentric and unpredictable, JW Anderson can feel downright volatile. The same year that a Loewe dress was structured into a car shape, BMX handlebars and broken skateboards were incorporated into JW Anderson tops and sweaters. “This is someone who has something quite bold to say,” Matthieu Blazy, Bottega Veneta’s creative director, recalls thinking after attending one of Anderson’s shows. “If you really want to push the boundaries of clothing,” says Anderson, “you have to be a bit obsessive.”

IN A WAY, Anderson was raised to win. He was born in 1984 in Magherafelt, a small town in Northern Ireland, during the Troubles, the sectarian conflict that lasted from the late 1960s to 1998 between the largely Protestant unionists, who wanted the province to remain part of the United Kingdom, and the mostly Roman Catholic nationalists, who wanted to secede. His mother, Heather, taught high school English. His father, Willie, was a star rugby player. (To this day, Webster, who describes the Anderson clan as “salt-of-the-earth people,” says, “It’s a very slow journey if you’re out with Willie because everyone wants to chat with him or buy him a drink.”) Before heading off to school, Anderson would check underneath the car for bombs. “I was so lucky that I grew up in that because [it makes] you realize you can lose everything in a heartbeat,” he says.

As a teenager, Anderson, who has an older brother, Thomas, now the operations director of JW Anderson, and a younger sister, Chloe, would trawl the racks of a local department store for dead-stock Jean Paul Gaultier. “In Ireland, the idea of standing out is a very unusual thing,” says Anderson, who nonetheless belongs to a long line of eccentrics who grew up there; like Oscar Wilde and Francis Bacon, who were antagonized or jailed for being gay, he’s learned how to wield his wit like a weapon. “Sometimes you can only reflect on how amazing a country is by getting out,” he says. “[James] Joyce had to leave Ireland to write about it.” At 18, Anderson relocated for a couple of years to Washington, D.C., to study performance at the Studio Acting Conservatory. Although his parents were supportive, he recalls their telling him, “Do what you want. Just don’t spend money you don’t have.”

Back in Northern Ireland, Anderson was kind of a loner, but in Dupont Circle, the gay neighborhood where he was living in the basement of a George Stumpf-style townhouse, he felt like everyone was his best friend. Instead of focusing on honing his craft, Anderson says, “it was literally Girl Gone Wild.” Within a week of being there, he’d started drinking and smoking. On one occasion, he went to a party in Baltimore for what he thought was one night; only afterward did he come to realize that three days had passed. “I’d gone from being this polite child to being a mental person,” he says.

A couple of years later, Anderson, who’d run out of money, returned to Ireland. He moved into a rental apartment in Dublin with Willie, who had been commuting from home to coach the Leinster rugby team. (“My dad was only there two days a week,” says Anderson with a smirk. And at that point, “I know exactly who I am.”) He got a job as a sales associate in the men’s wear department at a clothing store. It was an exciting time in men’s fashion: Tom Ford was doubling down on louche glamour for Gucci; Hedi Slimane had been proposing a new superskinny silhouette at Dior Homme. After work, Anderson would borrow outfits to wear clubbing and hope that no one accidentally burned them with a cigarette; one assumes that even if they had, he’d have put the garments back on the rack the next morning.

Eventually, when the luster of late nights had mostly worn off, he put together what he calls “a weird mood board of stuff” and applied to various universities. The one school that accepted him was London College of Fashion. Between classes, he worked as a visual merchandiser under Manuela Pavesi, Miuccia Prada’s close friend and trusted colleague, at Prada. Pavesi, who died in 2015, liked to wear pajamas with diamonds; knowing this, Anderson arrived for his interview in a vintage paisley dressing gown that he’d cut above the knee — “almost sort of slutty,” says Webster, who would become his manager at Prada — with tight Dior jeans underneath and a pair of Prada boots. While they were working on a window display one day, Webster recalls, Anderson disappeared; he later found the designer on the street, wearing a long coat covered with accessories that he’d designed, getting his picture taken for i-D magazine. “Jonathan was always a bit of an opportunist, really,” says Webster, later adding, “He has this ability to wrap you up into his orbit, and you’re not quite sure how you got there sometimes, but you’re in it.”

A spring 2024 look from JW Anderson.

Firstview

A fall 2024 look from JW Anderson.

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A spring 2012 look from JW Anderson.

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A spring 2023 look from JW Anderson.

Estrop/Getty Images

Anderson presented his graduate collection —which he describes as “woeful” and “the most ridiculous” — at a London nightclub in 2005; the cabaret star Justin Vivian Bond, in an ermine stole and a headpiece made from netting and plastic flies, sang as the models came down the runway. (Anderson and Webster still play the recording of Bond and Kenny Mellman’s 2004 show at Carnegie Hall, “Kiki and Herb Will Die for You,” on a loop at the JW Anderson studio.) “Jonathan has the discernment to know that [the drag performer] Divine, although queer and much more contemporary than, say, [the 18th-century English painter Thomas] Gainsborough, is also, in their way, a masterpiece,” says Bond. “Knowing what’s extraordinary in many contexts —he’s really good at keying into that.” In his JW Anderson designs, some of which took inspiration from the early 20th-century Russian mystic Grigori Rasputin and William Gedney’s 1960s photographs of American teenagers, Anderson, who doesn’t sketch, laid the groundwork for what would become his pastiche approach. Even now, he says that the part of the process he loves most is “trying to get this weird thing — a color or a painting —out of my brain.” Seldom do the clothes come from something as straightforward as “shearling” or “sci-fi,” says Bruno, who has a background in art criticism and literature. “It’s a little more psychological than that.”

Not coincidentally, Anderson’s closest friends and collaborators —among them Bruno, Guadagnino and the rapper and fashion designer ASAP Rocky, who shares, he says, an “innate search for the peculiar” —are magpies and polymaths with strong but ever-changing visual identities. “He’s the right kind of crazy,” says Rocky, who created a JW Anderson capsule collection in 2016. “Anytime I’m hitting a brick wall, my guy is always like, ‘Maybe you should do this, maybe you should do that.’ And if he needs some advice, like, ‘Maybe you should think twice about inviting these corny-ass celebs to your next show,’ I’m there to voice that, too.” Bruno observes, “Jonathan trusts people, but only if he thinks they excel at what they’re doing.” As a leader, Anderson believes in “turning up the temperature just enough without breaking people,” he says. “You’ve got to be able to get people to go down your vision hole, and you’ve got to hold their hand to make sure they don’t waver.”

Things were much simpler all those years ago, when Anderson and Bruno would sit on the floor of Anderson’s London studio late at night, constructing what Bruno refers to as “ghosts of garments” with as many swatches of fabric as they could afford. Anderson was an early practitioner of genderless dressing —he has separate men’s and women’s lines, but the sense has always been that anyone should wear whatever they like —although that, too, was partly a practical decision. “We were just sharing the same patterns because he couldn’t afford to have the atelier make two,” says Webster. “His enthusiasm was so contagious and so naïve that you could only say yes to him,” Bruno says. “There was that kind of youthful hope that you have when you don’t know too much about life.” A decade into his time at Loewe, Anderson has learned some difficult lessons. “Nothing will ever be good enough,” he says, sounding just like an uncompromising artist. “It’s quite lonelyworking two jobs in two different countries every week for 10 years.” Still, the idea of giving up fashion seems just as impossible. It’s been the vehicle for all his creative explorations and collaborations. The product might be clothes; the point, though, is craft.

“FEEL IT, IT’S so hard,” says Josh O’Connor. In a suite at the Carlyle hotel on New York’s Upper East Side on the eve of the Met Gala this past May, the 34-year-old British actor is gesturing toward his custom Loewe white vest, which is covered with thousands of tiny caviar beads. But the 10 or so other people in the room, including Anderson, are distracted by his pants. Someone reports that Harry Lambert, O’Connor’s stylist, thinks his boots, which are also intricately beaded, with a floral motif, are too big, causing the pants to buckle at the ankles.

Lambert’s assistant enters the room holding a pair of plain black boots. “Is she kidding?” says Anderson — flowers must remain on the footwear somehow to adhere to the gala’s theme — redirecting his attention to O’Connor, who looks down at his legs with an exaggerated display of shame. “Let’s add more satin,” says a member of Anderson’s team, instructing another to widen the pant legs. But it’s Sunday night, they’re told; all the fabric stores are closed. “Then cut the top of the boot,” says Anderson with a measured impatience. “Well, no,” the employee says. It would create too big of a mess. “But we could try buttons?”

Except for the faint sound of a Dolly Parton song playing in the background, the room goes silent. It’s almost like watching the final set of a tennis match; neither opponent is prepared to yield. After what feels like forever, Anderson is the first to relent. “Buttons on the back,” he says with a shrug. “But make sure they’re not too round.” In the end, they agree to tighten the top of the boot with a string. Having averted a crisis, the crew starts packing up. It’s time for dinner and then a meeting with Lee, who will be wearing what Anderson describes as a “new type of structure” at tomorrow’s event —a white Loewe gown with floral appliqués and a neckline that extends upward and outward like an aerodynamic shield.

Anderson’s phone buzzes: His mother has been reminding him to send her some pictures from the party. The following week, he’ll be needed back in Paris to award the winner of the 2024 Loewe Foundation Craft Prize. Then he’ll unveil his latest collaboration with the running brand On and, shortly after that, he’ll present his new men’s wear collections for JW Anderson and Loewe. (The latter, titled A Radical Act of Restraint, is partly inspired by the work of Hujar and Thek.) In the coming months, he’ll release new Loewe campaigns starring Craig and Starkey — an unofficial kickoff to the “Queer” press tour, which could be even bigger than that for “Challengers.” As he goes through his schedule, a look of foreboding washes across his face. “You’re trying to be the son and the brother and the boyfriend, and you want to be a nice person,” says Anderson, who’s been doing breathing exercises when he gets stressed out. Then a big, boyish smile spreads across his face. “I’ve never had so much fun in my life.”

Model: Achol Ayor at Women Management. Hair by Gary Gill at Streeters. Makeup by Yadim at Art Partner using Valentino Beauty. Casting by Piergiorgio Del Moro at DM Casting. Production: Dobedo Represents. Local producer: Alana Company. Lighting tech: Alberto Gualtieri. Digital tech: Paola Ristoldo. Photo assistants: Dani Torres, Javier Roman. Hairstylist’s assistant: Rebecca Chang. Makeup assistant: Paloma Romo. Manicurist: Lucero Hurtado. Stylist’s assistants: Carla Bottari, Léo Boyère

The musician Florence Welch, photographed in London on July 5, 2024. Valentino dress, price on request, (212) 772-6969; and Welch’s own shawl and jewelry.

Photograph by Luis Alberto Rodriguez. Styled by Vanessa Reid

For nearly two decades, Florence Welch’s songs have offered a mythic view not only of pop musicbut of the glories and rages of being a female artist today.

By Lauren Groff

Oct. 17, 2024

O winged Lady,
Like a bird
You scavenge the land.
Like a charging storm
You charge,
Like a roaring storm
You roar,
You thunder in thunder,
Snort in rampaging winds.
Your feet are continually restless.
Carrying your harp of sighs,
You breathe out the music of mourning.

— from “Hymn to Inanna” by Enheduanna,
translated from the Sumerian by Jane Hirshfield

PROPHETESS

ONE RISKS ANGERING the gods if one visits an oracle empty-handed. When I rang the Camberwell, South London, doorbell of Florence Welch, I held a tribute: “The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse” (2022), edited by Kaveh Akbar. It has a poem in it by Enheduanna, the first named poet in written historical records, a Sumerian princess and priestess who lived over 4,000 years ago. Ancient priestesses made their bodies a conduit for collective transcendence and, now that the old gods have abandoned us, we secular souls tend to find our collective transcendence at concerts. I’ve never seen Welch’s band, Florence and the Machine, perform live, only on YouTube, I’ve only heard her music streaming on repeat for years, and yet I often find myself carried out of my body by Welch’s enormous voice, her rage and power. There’s a sizzling line that starts with Enheduanna and runs all the way to Welch; they’re both performers of spiritual enormity who, through incantation of words, open a channel to vast mysteries.

What was I expecting? Impossibilities. A modern Madame Blavatsky all dressed in gauze, trembling shadows, eyes like dark whirlpools. Instead, on that July day, after her assistant let me in, Welch ran up from her garden a creature of flesh and blood, wearing a prim prairie dress with flowers speckled all over it. She is tall — somewhere near 5-foot-10 — ardent and elegant, with long red Pre-Raphaelite hair and the strong-boned face of a medieval saint. She has an incredible vigor to her speech, which is frequently crowded with images. She was talking even before coming into the room and spoke nonstop for hours, thoughtfully, in loops and circuits; I only interjected a few times. With other people, being monologued at like this might have been hellish, but Welch was a little goofy, quite funny —her laugh is deep, sudden, frequent and startlingly loud. On multiple occasions during our hours together, she paced in excitement. Once she sped off upstairs to fetch something, coming down the staircase with such fast footsteps that I was briefly afraid she’d tumble the rest of the way.

“Poems!” said Welch, flipping through the book I brought. “Great!” And then in a flash the book vanished, never to be seen again.

In fairness, a single book would be easily lost among the stuffed bookshelves everywhere in her house. Welch is a real reader: She presides over a book club called Between Two Books and, in full disclosure, drew from my 2018 short story collection, “Florida,” when she was writing lyrics for the song “Florida!!!,” her 2024 collaboration with Taylor Swift. Her rooms replicate her maximalist, ecstatic music: high ceilings; many paintings and drawings; thick woolen Oriental rugs. Everything is layered and made of complex patterns, with William Morris prints and hand-marbled boxes in intense colors like peacock blue, goldenrod, raspberry sorbet.

Because the best way is often straight through, I tried to start our conversation with a question about mysticism, but she refused to be boxed in. She said, laughing, that she can read tarot, but she refused to define her spirituality, beyond repeating a quip of her mother, Evelyn Welch’s, a Renaissance expert and currently the vice chancellor of the University of Bristol, who called her daughter “an animist.” Maybe she meant that, to her daughter, things like sunlight and the ocean have a soul. Welch’s earliest spiritual moment came when she was an imaginative small child in Camberwell — where her parents lived, not far from her current house — just looking at beams of light coming through her bedroom window and feeling connected to something larger.

Chanel coat, price on request, (800) 550-0005; Valentino tights (worn underneath), $1,000; and Welch’s own dress, headband and jewelry.

Photograph by Luis Alberto Rodriguez. Styled by Vanessa Reid

This resistance to being pigeonholed would become a motif of our weekend: Welch wouldn’t say whom she was dating, only that he was a British guitarist, so that she wouldn’t be defined by her relationship (honestly, good for her!); she’s as vulnerable and honest as an incredibly famous human could possibly be: She gently but firmly resisted every time I tried to ask if she considered herself a pop star, or even what kind of music, actually, she would say she makes.

An aversion to definition is a great gift to an artist like Welch. It allows her to change and grow in public. But it’s an equal source of confusion to critics, who’ve struggled to place her since the first of her five albums, 2009’s “Lungs.” Of course, no artist is truly sui generis — art is built out of other art — but it’s odd that Welch so confounds critics with her mix of soul and goth-punk and ethereal power ballads, as well as the way that she presents herself as closer kin to 1960s rock goddesses than to the hyperproduced pop stars of today, that the aforementioned critics have only rarely likened her to the musicians who’ve been her truest influences. Among these are Nick Cave, Patti Smith, Stevie Nicks, Tom Waits, Jeff Buckley, Sam Cooke and Otis Redding, whose live version of 1967’s “Try a Little Tenderness” Welch watched obsessively on YouTube in her early 20s when she was teaching herself how to perform, his energy building as the song goes until, she said, “he just tears the stage apart.”

Perhaps it’s enough to say that Welch has one of the most distinctively powerful voices in popular music. My friend the 33-year-old performer Ganavya Doraiswamy, who’s trained in both jazz and South Asian devotional singing — the only other person I’ve ever met with a voice whose power and distinctiveness could match Welch’s — said that she has uyir, Tamil for “life breath,” in her voice, which Doraiswamy was trained to listen for as the soul of vocal art. “It sounds sometimes like [she] is singing to herself and we get to listen in, like we are privy to someone singing to themselves, and they’re making the world less unbearable,” she said. Uyir seems to be something like Federico García Lorca’s duende, of which the great Spanish poet said in a 1933 lecture, “All that has dark sounds has duende. … The duende is a force not a labor, a struggle not a thought. I heard an old maestro of the guitar say: ‘The duende is not in the throat: the duende surges up, inside, from the soles of the feet.’ Meaning, it’s not a question of skill but of a style that’s truly alive: meaning, it’s in the veins: meaning, it’s of the most ancient culture of immediate creation.”

Uyir and duende may be lofty claims to make of a creator and performer of pop songs, but we have all been brainwashed to discount popular culture because of its very popularity, to believe that anything beloved by the masses is inherently lesser than esoteric art. This is a begging-the-question fallacy disproved all the time by great popular geniuses like Shakespeare, Mozart, Toni Morrison, Lorca himself. The music of Florence and the Machine is ubiquitous — the night before I left Florida for London, some stranger covered 2008’s “Dog Days Are Over” at karaoke; the band’s 2011 “Shake It Out” was piped over the loudspeakers while I waited for my plane in the airport — and it is excellent. It’s absurd to have to insist that both popularity and excellence can coexist.

The music’s ubiquity is perhaps because of the fact that Florence and the Machine sound like nothing else out there in the musical landscape. It’s also, perhaps, because of the spooky vastness of Welch’s vision. Jack Antonoff, the 40-year-old producer and musician with whom Welch worked on her last album, 2022’s “Dance Fever,” said that she might be “literally clairvoyant.” And it’s true: Over and over, her songs predict the world to come. For instance, she wrote the lyrics for several of the album’s songs in 2019, including those of “Choreomania,” a song that Welch based on the 1518 dancing sickness in Strasbourg, where people actually danced until they died. The lyrics, with their frantic repetition of “Something’s coming, so out of breath” became prophetic when Covid-19 started spreading in 2020. “I didn’t know exactly what was coming,” Welch said, “but I knew it was dark.”

Welch may not call herself spiritual, but the thing she kept pulling herself away from speaking about is the thing at the center of her, which she sometimes calls “the monster,” sometimes “the beast.” She struggles to control it, but it seems to be the source of her creative energy. “The beast is very good when it’s onstage. The monster is really useful and full of rage and glory and power,” she said. But as soon as she began talking about the beast, she grew agitated; it felt wrong. Her spiritual sense “doesn’t feel like something I should advertise, because it’s really sacred,” she told me, and changed the topic once more.

When an oracle hears the voice of God and shares what she heard with others, she’s doing the same thing that an artist does while making art. Art is the alchemy by which grand abstractions become material. More than anything else, art requires the body of the artist, readied through time and practice and effort and some sort of innate spark, to become a sort of portal. Welch steps onstage and this portal is immediately available to her. To have the kind of transparency and vulnerability that allows such immediate access to the eternal, mysterious energy requires a great deal from the artist. Which is to say that art so powerful and immediate is demonic in its demands on the small, fleshly human that holds it.

Ferragamo dress, $5,000, ferragamo.com; Chanel hat, $4,500; and Welch’s own shawl.

Photograph by Luis Alberto Rodriguez. Styled by Vanessa Reid

HARP OF SIGHS

HOW DO YOU build a modern priestess? Welch was born like ordinary humans in August 1986; she’s currently 38. Her father, Nick Welch, is a former British advertising executive and, as his daughter called him, “bohemian”; he was the one who introduced her to bands like the Ramones and the Smiths when she was little. Through her mother’s specialty in Renaissance history, as well as family visits to ancient churches, Welch was deeply impressed as a child by the glorious, gory, vermilion-and-gold Catholic imagery, with its St. Sebastians pierced by arrows and St. Agathas with breasts on platters. She loved Greek mythology, she loved history. But nightmares plagued even her daylight hours, and her only escape from the monsters, ghosts and demons that her anxiety summoned was into books. Her mother wanted her to be an academic, but Welch was a daydreamer and had difficulty at school, having dyslexia, dyspraxia and something close to dyscalculia, and she would sneak out of the classroom to sing in the school hallways where the acoustics were good.

Even when Welch was small, she had a Big Voice. She showed me a photo of herself as this little girl in a gingham dress, clutching a trophy for singing. The voice that “came out of that was oddly adult, sensual,” she said. Her mother was always yelling at her to shut up because she’d be singing at the top of her lungs while her mother was trying to write her books. It turns out that the Big Voice is as much a physiological gift as it is a vocation: Welch has a strong diaphragm, a large rib cage with huge lung capacity — which makes finding the vintage dresses that she loves tricky — as well as vocal cords of titanium. Once, fearing that she was losing her voice on tour, she went to see a specialist in Toronto, who looked down her throat only to respond, “Oh, yeah, your vocal cords are like a tank. You’re never gonna lose your voice,” she said. Music was the only thing she ever wanted to do, “Like, I will die if I don’t do it,” she said; singing was the companion that kept her from being alone with the terror. She longed to be in musical theater, but her mother was “the opposite of a stage mom,” Welch added dryly, and only reluctantly conceded to classical voice lessons. The singer trained in opera as a soprano and was only allowed to belt out a Disney song or show tune at the end of her lessons.

The first time she appeared onstage, it was in a school performance of the musical “Bugsy Malone” (1976), and she blew everyone out of the water. “From a really young age, probably like 10, we knew that she was going to be really famous,” said her sister, Grace, who is younger than Welch by three years. (They have a brother, as well, and three stepsiblings.) Welch was hurt after their parents divorced when she was 10, the couple suffering from “simmering, silent resentment but no fights,” she said. She developed an eating disorder when she was a young adolescent. Then, when she was 14, she had her first taste of vodka and felt herself rise, transcendent, out of her anxieties. “Somehow alcohol allowed me to expand, to have freedom from the constraints of the body,” she said. “The first time I had hard spirits, it felt spiritual. I felt warm, I felt free, I felt at peace. It freed me from the relentlessness of thoughts.”

All Welch wants is the grace that male performers get. The grace to age in public; the grace to put art at the center of one’s life and not have to be a woman or a mother first.

Suddenly she was a party girl, dancing barefoot over broken glass in nightclubs in ripped vintage dresses. She bartended for a year after secondary school and got deeper into the “doomed Dickensian pirate ship,” as she described it, that was the South London music scene in the early 2000s, when rebellious young artists lived in squats. Welch, like the rest of them, drank to excess and screamed onstage in punk bands. She entered Camberwell College of Arts but dropped out after one year. As a teenager, she also experimented with folk, country and hip-hop-influenced rock. She got her first gig by singing in a nightclub bathroom — more good acoustics — and called her band the Machine after the nickname of one of its long-term members, Isabella Summers, who was a close co-writer, producer and collaborator on the first few albums but hasn’t been involved in the most recent ones. While still a teenager, Welch co-wrote the first song —the punk-pop “Kiss With a Fist” —that, after the band was signed in 2008, became big for them worldwide.

“Lungs,” released the next year, is very much a first album, exuberant in its range of styles. “Dog Days Are Over” was the second single, and the first song that would contain everything that Welch’s music has become known for: intense and pure feeling; elliptical lyrics; strange, catchy drums; a tune that starts soft and builds into a great crescendo of sound. Again, critics didn’t get the album — they likened Welch to Fiona Apple, Kate Bush, Regina Spektor, Annie Lennox, Joanna Newsom, Sinead O’Connor, artists whose music has very little to do with one another’s but, well, they’re songwriters and women at the same time, so they must be similar! Some critics were weirdly condescending in their incomprehension: One wrote in Rolling Stone that the “best bits feel like being chased through a moonless night by a sexy moor witch,” which … what is that supposed to sound like? Screaming in terror while trying to run with an erection?

The pressure of new fame was so intense that the singer kept dancing with self-destruction. “In order to protect myself from the public gaze,” she said, “I shrank myself offstage.” When she and her band were working on what would become their first singles, her partying was so out of hand that she nearly blew it with the record company; she was too much of a liability, disappearing for three days into a bender and showing up at a pub mysteriously covered in blue paint. She was also in thrall to an eating disorder, a way to try to impose control on a life that felt uncontrollable. Grace became her personal assistant, and a great deal of the burden of the singer’s bad behavior fell on her. Grace loved her sister, looked up to her and now regrets bitterly how she enabled her. Welch lost days partying, blackout drunk, on drugs. Grace says now that the family has “this joke, like, ‘Thank God she was famous.’ She’s always been supercreative and supercomplicated and supertroubled, and if she didn’t have all that money and, like, a team of people propping her up in her 20s, she’d totally be dead.” Back then, Welch still lived at the family home in Camberwell; she’s an artist who needs to be rooted in place to make her art and hasn’t ever moved away from the neighborhood. Still, no matter how drunk or brutally hung over she was, she was always able to get up onstage and perform.

There’s a rigid cycle in music making: One starts in the studio, creating the songs, which at this point with streaming are practically given away for free; to make money, one has to embark on a grueling two- to three-year schedule of performances, a lifestyle that lends itself easily to drugs and alcohol. Performing in massive venues is hugely physically taxing, particularly when one does it with Welch’s commitment. She throws her entire body into her songs, dances barefoot because she needs to feel the ground beneath her. She has twice broken her foot midway through her concerts but never stopped, instead singing through the pain. A great performer is something of an energy worker, creating a collective experience through her voice and body, and energy needs to be rebuilt before it’s expended again. She tried to control her alcoholism by not drinking when she was performing, but that was worse: She began to binge when she wasn’t on tour.

In 2011, the band released the album “Ceremonials,” which Welch described as a “wall of sound, a wall of aesthetic,” a tumultuous wrestling with her addiction. “I was wandering around like a superhigh Gustav Klimt painting,” she said. The recurrent imagery is that of drowning; in the single “Shake It Out,” the line “It’s hard to dance with a devil on your back” repeats so often it becomes almost frantic.

Not long after, on the singer’s 27th birthday, her mother gave a moving speech, begging her daughter not to join the 27 Club, the group of tormented artists who’d died as a result of addiction, the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle and the radical exposure it requires to be an artist at that age: Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain. Welch had shown up to her birthday party drunk and high. Perhaps because of the immensity of her shame, she smashed her whole face into her birthday cake.

There was a moment in the months afterward, lying on the floor of her room, that Welch began to tell me about, saying that she was praying, “Help me, please help me, help me, help me,” but then she trailed off. One doesn’t speak about the holy. “It feels like a betrayal to the thing that helped me,” she said. In any event, after that night, Welch became sober.

For a year, the singer was a “completely broken person,” she said. She’d always loved clothes, had delighted in her dresses onstage, but now she wore the same “horrible blue tracksuit” everywhere. Later on, she had treatment for her eating disorder. When I asked her what had taken the place of the addictions, she told me matter-of-factly, “The performance. The music.”

The albums that came afterward were a kind of resetting. For 2015’s “How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful,” Welch had just been broken up with and had herself broken up with drugs and alcohol. As a result, the music was stripped down instrumentally, the cover image was black and white and onstage she wore a more masculine suit instead of her previous flowy dresses. Welch was, perhaps not coincidentally, taken more seriously as an artist. When Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters broke his leg and the band had to pull out of headlining the 2015 Glastonbury Festival, Florence and the Machine were asked to replace them. She began to write more poetry. In 2018, Florence and the Machine released “High as Hope,” which is even more stripped down and intimate, with Welch’s poetry becoming its lyrics.

In addition to her albums, the singer has been working for eight years on a musical version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, “The Great Gatsby,” called “Gatsby: An American Myth,” which I saw in June at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. She was drawn to the book, she said, by the drunkenness and hangover in it, the doomed romanticism, “the way the page sings.” The show got a standing ovation. I thought it was fine. At times, everything was so on the nose that I felt I was being hit with a soft right hook. The set is half nightclub, half car crash, just like the Roaring Twenties; all the characters’ costumes have dirty hems, as though to semaphore that none of them have quite risen above the muck of the American dream. The music is a collaboration between Welch and Thomas Bartlett, who, in addition to being a co-producer and co-writer on some songs on Florence and the Machine’s “High as Hope,” is a gifted musician who’s worked with everyone from Nico Muhly to Yoko Ono and Sufjan Stevens. The songs they made are excellent and surprising, with exciting and slithery Jazz Age rhythms. But art gets in trouble when it becomes polemical, which many of the songs were. I began to wonder if a musical would ever be the right vehicle for a story like “The Great Gatsby.” Musical theater is the most American art form that exists, all dazzle and jazz hands, but Fitzgerald’s novel draws its power from the lightness of its allusions. Things that are hinted at in the book — like Nick Carraway’s crush on Jay Gatsby, or Gatsby’s gangster past — get their own numbers. That said, songs are still being made and discarded. The version I saw, which might one day move to Broadway, hadn’t settled into its final form, and it’s a sin to judge art before it’s finished.

Welch’s most recent album, “Dance Fever,” is my favorite; I played it so often that my younger son began to call it “Mommy’s church.” I find it almost unbearably beautiful, a confirmation that Welch’s songwriting keeps getting more powerful. She had already written the first two songs — “King” and “Free” — and was in the studio in New York City in March 2020 with Antonoff when the pandemic hit, and they had to flee to their respective corners. The rest of the songs arrived as Welch’s anxiety spiraled in her London home, the project something of a diary of those years of isolation. Listening now, it feels like a wild, anxious, terrified, hedonistic catharsis of that awful time, a ritual cleansing of the collective grief that we still haven’t fully processed as a culture.

Louis Vuitton dress, price on request, louisvuitton.com; and Welch’s own dress (worn underneath) and jewelry.

Photograph by Luis Alberto Rodriguez. Styled by Vanessa Reid

PORTRAITURE

THE DAY AFTER I visited her house, I met Welch at the Tate Britain to see a John Singer Sargent exhibition. The turn-of-the-20th-century portraits were huge and dramatic and vividly emotional, the rooms thickly crowded. I said I loved the subjects’ expressions; Sargent was a master of distilling character in the subtle look on a face. “I love the fashion,” Welch responded and gestured at “Portrait of Miss Elsie Palmer” (1889-90), depicting a young American girl with reddish hair and bangs like Welch’s, wearing a layered pale pink dress with a pleated underskirt and bodice, her waist tightly cinched.

As we walked, astonishment took hold in me that nobody seemed to recognize the superstar beside me. I’d been sure we’d be so swarmed that I’d had fantasies I’d have to double as a bodyguard, fending fans off with my enormous Muji notebook. But no one did, despite the fact that Welch was on such a state of hyperalert that, when I once tried to take a photo of a stunning Sargent dress on a dummy and her head happened to be in the frame, she swiveled so fast toward me and gave me a look of such searing disdain that I felt flayed. The monster had risen up in her face for a moment. It was terrifying.

Perhaps people in crowds at art museums are deeply unobservant of those around them, only anxious to see the works on the wall; perhaps it was because, with her pale, thin elegance and her feminine dress — delicate flowers on a green field, discreet ruffles and a filigree of off-white lace — she looked as though she were herself a Sargent subject stepping out of the frame. Most likely, however, it was because Welch has built such a powerful public image, a glamorous pagan priestess hologram, that the human person behind it simply didn’t square. Maybe her fans didn’t recognize her because the performer is a giantess and the person is merely person-size.

The image of Florence and the Machine is a curious thing. It’s intricate and carefully constructed, vivid and clear in its referents and set intentionally outside of the contemporary moment, which allows the singer to change and refine the way she presents herself to the world. She seized on it early, after some industry people’s unhappy experiments with trying to market the young singer-songwriter in miniskirts and high-heeled shoes. But she couldn’t sell sex. “I’ve always looked like a haunted painting,” she said, and it’s true that, though she’s beautiful, a bad photograph would show her features as harsh, stern. She also didn’t want to sell sex: “I wanted to be scary when I was younger, not sexy.”

To refuse to do so was intentional; it was also lucky. A female artist who’s marketed as sexy must stay at the same level of sexy even as she ages, which is increasingly hard to do, what with gravity and slipping hormones and the frankly fascinating processes of living beyond the body’s natural fertility. Britney Spears will never not exist in the public imagination as a nubile teen in a schoolgirl kilt. Dolly Parton is closing in on 80 with the same blond bouffant and enhanced breasts that she once, at an awards ceremony, called “Shock” and “Awe.” I’d never judge any performer for using her sexuality to sell records; trying to sell art at all is a grind, particularly at the beginning of one’s career, and if the universe has given you a gift of such reach and power, it would be difficult not to use it. But this form of beauty is something of a gilded cage, a safe place for a little time, though also a trap that a woman can’t escape.

Chloé dress, $6,490, and dress (worn underneath), $3,990, chloe.com; and Welch’s own crown, shawl and jewelry.

Photograph by Luis Alberto Rodriguez. Styled by Vanessa Reid

Instead of selling a sexualized image, Welch, with the collaboration of music video and photography directors, has created a visual world that’s been seized on by her fans and replicated at her concerts, which can resemble teeming fantasy fashion shows. From the stage, she can look out on a sea of bloody prairie maidens with flower crowns, mermaids with sharp teeth, weeping martyrs, witches in purple silken cloaks, Jesus, tattered ghosts, all images from her songs and videos. Autumn de Wilde, 54, first directed Welch in the 2018 music video for “Big God,” which is shot as though in outer space, on a stark black stage in a shining one-inch pool of water pierced with high-contrast light. As Welch sings, the dancers’ colorful veils darken as they get wet, then are discarded, until at last Welch levitates the dancers with her voice. “Given the opportunity,” de Wilde said, “if you put her in any world, she will make it iconic and gigantic. You can’t have that without her vulnerability.” The Florence and the Machine aesthetic draws from Pre-Raphaelite tawny goddesses; photos by the 19th-century artist Julia Margaret Cameron; Surrealist 20th-century paintings by Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo; the modern dancer Loie Fuller; exhausted cancan dancers; pastel moths. All come from the same spiritual universe, as dark as true fairy tales tend to be, confections of extreme beauty with neon venom laced through.

It wasn’t until I spoke with de Wilde that I changed my mind about Welch’s image; at first I thought she wielded it like a shield, meaning that she’d constructed it purely to protect the fragility beneath. After, I saw it was something of a seashell, all spikes, dazzling colors, mother-of-pearl gleam. Both shield and shell are created in order to protect the tender flesh within, but a shield is the result of a huge amount of human labor, mining and refining and beating of the hot metal, and a shell is a natural emanation of the beast that builds it. Florence and the Machine is the singer’s true self, but writ large, her imagination allowed freedom to play. The child who spent hours gazing at the light in her room has taken her visions of monsters and saints and demons and graces and made them real.

One of the final portraits at the Sargent show was the well-known “Ellen Terry as Lady MacBeth” (1889), the actress bloody mouthed, with long red braids to her knees, wearing a shining green-and-gold dress, placing a crown upon her head. “We drew on this painting a lot to build our look for ‘Dance Fever,’” Welch told me quietly, smiling.

At this — seeing the queen, her face become a stark mask of ambition — I had a powerful moment of déjà vu. I thought of the lyrics to “King,” when, at the beginning, Welch sings in a low register: “We argue in the kitchen about whether to have children / about the world ending, and the scale of my ambition / And how much art is really worth / The very thing you’re best at is the thing that hurts the most.”

Christ on a stick! Show me another popular song that speaks in such a compact way of such vast things: the moral burden of bringing children into the Anthropocene, huge ambition in a female artist, how it’s all complicated when one considers a baby’s hijacking of the body for 40 weeks —and beyond, if the mother is nursing. There are so few examples of female musicians who were able to uphold a rigorous touring schedule after they’d had children that Welch and I could only think of one: Beyoncé. Exacerbating the mixed craving for and fear of having a baby and what it would mean for her art, Welch feels the intense pressure of aging as a female performer. “At 40, what are you supposed to do? Die?” she asked, then laughed darkly. “King” goes on to insist, “I am no mother, I am no bride, I am king.” She isn’t a queen, accessory to power; she’s power itself. “I was also thinking of the King of Rock,” Welch said, referring to Elvis Presley; she was thinking of the right of male artists to let their art be separate from the body, to let the art be so central that everything else is peripheral. In the latter part of the song, Welch raises her voice in a long howl of rage. Maybe I revel in her work because so much of it is simply overflowing with rage, her perfect voice embodying all that subsumed rage that I swallow every day and allowing it to bloom out into the world, a gorgeous shining pitch-black flower.

All Welch wants is the grace that male performers get. The grace to age in public; the grace to put art at the center of one’s life and not have to be a woman or a mother first. If the universe gives an artist the nearly unlimited ability to become a conduit to the astonishing eternal mysteries, what a grinding check to her momentum when she bumps up against human-imposed boundaries of misogyny. How much worse must be the body’s own betrayal! How enraging that, even as an artist earns more wisdom and depth and artistry — begins to understand how to pull the uncanny powers of the beyond down into constant display on the earth — the body begins to lose its vital energy, and the cost of being alive begins to wear you down.

Art begins in the body; art is limited by the limitations of the body; at some point, art exceeds the body and can live beyond the scope of flesh. I watched Welch look deeply at the gothic, gory Sargent painting of Ellen Terry, and I saw — or imagined I saw — the beast in her surfacing for a moment, hungry for the magic that Sargent enacted on his subjects, allowing them to be fully seen, to be held in the brightest of colors, to be shown to the world eternal in the moment of their greatest glory. Among the many other things Welch refuses to be defined by, she refuses to be defined by time. The tragedy of the Cumean Sibyl, according to the ancient Roman poet Ovid, was that, though the god Apollo did cede to her pleas to give her life beyond the scope of the mortal span, over a thousand years her body shrank until only her voice remained. This is the fate of all artists. All have to come to terms with it at some point. Welch, preternaturally gifted as she is, isn’t exempt.

But until then, oh, you gods who power her, oh, you humans who make her life hum, just let the woman sing.

Hair by Anthony Turner at Jolly Collective. Makeup by Thom Walker at Art + Commerce. Set design by Afra Zamara at Second Name. Production: Farago Projects. Lighting technician: Jack Symes. Digital tech: Sam Hearn. Photo assistants: Daiki Tajima, Federico Covarelli. Manicurist: Emily Rose Lansley at The Wall Group. Hairstylist’s assistant: John Allan. Makeup assistant: Samanta Falcone. Set designer’s assistant: Ollie Kariel. Tailor: Pip Long at Karen Avenell. Styling assistants: Andreea Georgiana Rădoi, Sam Wright

The artist Lorna Simpson, photographed at her Brooklyn studio on July 24, 2024, with new works that will appear in a forthcoming solo show in New York.

Ming Smith

Throughout her genre-bending career, the artist Lorna Simpson has always made marginalization a source of power.

By Dean Baquet

Oct. 17, 2024

It might be best to understand Lorna Simpson — a chameleonic artist whose work bridges various media and genres, from photography to video, sculpture to painting — as an archivist, cataloging the lives and images of generations of African Americans. Some of her work is based on old photos that she finds rummaging through bookstores, or on social media and eBay. Ebony magazine — the chronicler of Black fashion and achievement whose issues were long a staple of Black households, including hers and mine — is a recurring source of material. She’s cut up old advertisements from the magazine and made them into elaborate collages or incorporated them into paintings, just as Picasso used newspaper clippings to embellish his works.

Much of the work in Simpson’s upcoming solo show at Hauser & Wirth in New York (opening Nov. 2) was inspired by a book about meteorites and gems published by the Smithsonian in 1929, “Minerals From Earth and Sky.” The book includes tales of encounters that people have had with meteorites, and one image and story stayed with her: A Black tenant farmer, whose name she later learned was Ed Bush, had discovered a meteorite in 1922 — still warm to the touch — that had smashed into a farm in Baldwyn, Miss. What struck Simpson about the story was that it didn’t name the man who found the meteorite but rather the white gentleman farmer who owned the land.

Simpson’s work is about a lot of big topics — race, gender, identity, language — but perhaps above all it is about who gets to be the storyteller. Her exhibition will feature massive and lush depictions of giant meteorites; Bush, the tenant farmer, is also a subject: Simpson’s exhibit returns his story to him.

Simpson, 64, grew up in Queens in a working-class family. Her father was a social worker and her mother a secretary. Her parents took her to museums and made sure that art was a part of her life. Initially a street photographer in college, she went on to earn an M.F.A. at the University of California, San Diego. By the time of her first solo exhibition in New York, at Just Above Midtown gallery in 1986, she had already begun to change the language of photography, creating a body of conceptual works that are often characterized by a combination of imagery and text. Sometimes she’d photograph braided hair against a black surface, including spare text panels that read “tug” or “weave.” “Waterbearer,” from 1986, is a black-and-white photograph of a Black woman in a white shift dress viewed from behind. She’s holding a pitcher in one hand and a plastic jug in the other, with water spilling out of both. Beneath the image are lines by Simpson addressing the marginalization of Black women in America: “She saw him disappear by the river, / They asked her to tell what happened, / Only to discount her memory.”

As a Black woman herself, Simpson knows what it’s like to be left out, undervalued, overlooked. But she turned this feeling of marginalization into a source of empowerment: With no assurance of success or even attention, anything was possible.

Simpson now splits her time between New York and Los Angeles. We met in July, two days after an attempted assassination of Donald Trump, at her cavernous studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, not far from her house in neighboring Fort Greene. The studio was surprisingly tidy given the work that goes on there. (We spoke a second time in August, three weeks after Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race and was replaced on the ticket by his vice president, Kamala Harris.) Simpson’s studio was filled with paintings, some new, some old: Looking at them all, it was hard to imagine that she decided to paint for the first time only 10 years ago. (A survey of her paintings will go on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in May 2025.) Indeed, her ability to move so successfully across genres is one of the reasons she is now regarded as an essential artist of her generation.

“Reoccurring” (2021). Simpson had been a celebrated photographer for almost three decades when she decided to start making paintings in 2014. As a painter, she revisits many familiar themes, like collage and found imagery. She made this work, a landscape with rocky cliffs at the edge of the sea, a face seen in profile superimposed over it, during the Covid-19 pandemic.

© Lorna Simpson, courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Dean Baquet: Do you think your work is influenced by the political moment?

Lorna Simpson: I can’t say that it’s not. But I don’t think I assign a specific political narrative to the work.Political work — and I’m not speaking about my work, because I’m not sure my work accomplishes this — needs to be subversive on some level.

D.B.: What do you mean?

L.S.: So that you’re questioning somehow the viewer’s assumptions about something.

D.B.: As an artist, is it too soon to start processing, say, this election?

L.S.: I don’t know. I have two paintings that are kind of side by side in my new show that are of bullet holes in walls. So I mean, yes, a lot of that has to do with the American relationship to violence and guns and [with] foreign policy. But I don’t think the fact of Kamala Harris’s candidacy as the first Black woman who will be president — hopefully — has trickled down into my work. I don’t think about my work like that.

D.B.: I happened to sit in a seminar two weeks ago at the Aspen Institute, and they were talking about what makes a photograph iconic. I’ve thought a lot about the assassination-attempt picture of Donald Trump in recent days.

D.B.: You’re always looking for photographs, aren’t you?

D.B.: You mean it’s intentionally missing context?

L.S.: It’s to serve a particular political agenda. I mean, that’s true of all news outlets.

D.B.: I think of you as courageous, frankly, moving from street photography to conceptualizing photography with words to doing video and collage and finally painting. Most people would have been comfortable mastering one. Is it that street photography didn’t hold your attention long enough?

D.B.: So you felt like you as a photographer needed a way to put your stamp on a photograph. …

L.S.: Or disrupt that reading.

D.B.: I see.

D.B.: You wanted to make sure that people understood there was a difference between you and Davidson.

L.S.: Yeah.

D.B.: That’s a lot of confidence.

L.S.: No, that’s a lot of discomfort, because I was like, “What is Bruce Davidson thinking? Who’s the subject?”

D.B.: Do you know who took the pictures?

L.S.: No, I don’t. It’s a man and a woman, and he’s the artist, intellectual, plays the guitar, plays chess. And she’s the beauty and could be a model or an actress.

D.B.: Is that the narrative that was going through your mind, or is that the evident narrative?

L.S.: They’re all slightly different arrangements of the same image. So there’s a lot of repetition and a lot of thematic choices that’re clearly being made for the camera. I looked at them on my wall [and thought], “What would I do with this? Do you give this to an institution as an archive? How would I intercede as an artist?” [Starting in] the summer of 2009, I decided to recreate all these different scenes and become the man and the woman. It’s over 300 photographs. I reproduced all the original images, but then I also inserted myself into them. So you get this time lapse from 1957 to 2009. It amplifies their performance for the camera.

But I really hated doing it. I don’t like being in front of the camera. So that’s an example of a work that makes me uncomfortable. The solution was to do the thing that I hate the most.

D.B.: Any desire to find out who they were?

L.S.: To be honest, I like the mystery of it. People would ask me, “Well, who is it?” Maybe she posed for Ebony.

L.S.: Oh, yeah. If you look at Instagram and the way people chronicle their lives, it’s with a vengeance about persona and aspiration. People are posting something every day on their feeds about the quality of their life. But that has a different kind of feel to me than looking at Ebony.

D.B.: As a little kid, I thought that only we were looking at those magazines. Like there was a private channel.

L.S.: Oh, yeah, absolutely. For and by Black people.

D.B.: And Instagram isn’t like that. Even though it was easy later on to criticize Ebony for only showing this polished world — everyone was beautiful. On the other hand, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized there was a value to that that I didn’t understand as a 16-year-old.

L.S.: I also grew up with Right On!, which was a music magazine —

D.B.: That didn’t make its way to the South.

L.S.: What?! What part of the South were you in? New Orleans?

D.B.: Yeah. At least it didn’t make its way to my house.Talk a little about your upbringing.

L.S.: My father was a social worker for foster kids in the Bronx. And my mother was a secretary downtown. We lived in Queens. My dad was from Jamaica and Cuba and immigrated here [from Oriente Province, Cuba], and my mother was from Chicago. They met at a Black university [Wilberforce University in Ohio] and decided to move to New York. And the reason for being in New York was the culture. I was an only child, and there’s a picture of my mother pregnant with me at the Guggenheim.

“1957-2009” (2009). For this work, Simpson acquired an archive on eBay of some 200 black-and-white photos featuring two unidentified people — a Black man and woman — in Los Angeles in 1957. They seem to adopt personas, which led Simpson to think of the images as proto-Cindy Sherman, the artist known for depicting herself in the guise of various characters. In 2009, after purchasing the archive, Simpson restaged the photographs with herself as the subject, creating a dialogue between the artist and the anonymous models 50 years in the past.

© Lorna Simpson, courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Colin Davison

D.B.: How old were you when you started going to museums and galleries with your mother and father?

D.B.: You saw “Hair” with your parents at 7?

D.B.: What was it about their upbringing that made them like that?

L.S.: My dad was exposed to a lot of music and art in Cuba and Jamaica. And my mother, I don’t know. They were both raised by their aunts, not their mothers. They each had a very distant relationship with their mother. So in a way, I think that kind of similar upbringing brought them close.

My grandmother was from New Orleans. In a way, talking to her was like reading Ebony magazine, right? She’d talk about J. Edgar Hoover, Chicago politics, you know, the South writ large. She’d talk for hours about politics. But I could not get any of the people in that generation, on both sides of my family, to talk about themselves personally. In their 20s or their teenage years, the South was so violent, and there was so much secrecy, just to protect people. And to have to move at the drop of a hat: In remaking one’s life somewhere else, those narratives had to be concealed.

D.B.: I had the experience of being in my 40s and realizing I did not know my father’s father’s name. He had never told me.

L.S.: I didn’t know my grandfather.

D.B.: Black families don’t often know those stories because they were too painful.

L.S.: And everybody takes it to the grave. I would just say I’ve learned that being uncomfortable is important.

D.B.: To you and to the viewer?

L.S.: To me. I need to be uncertain. It makes me more curious and pushes the boundaries of what quote-unquote makes sense. And I’ve just noticed when [it does start making sense], you’ve got to stop. Do something else.

D.B.: So you major in photography in art school, then become a photographer. Was it that kind of discomfort you were seeking when you went to painting much later in your career?

L.S.: Oh, absolutely. I was like, “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, but here we go!”

D.B.: Describe that.

L.S.: [I was doing] video and installation work, which takes a lot of planning and crews and getting everyone in alignment. And it’s very collaborative. But I wondered, “Why can’t I just sit in the studio and think for a minute and just play?” So I started doing these works on paper and, to everyone’s chagrin, they thought, “This isn’t interesting.” Gallerists would say, “Oh, please, this is like so-and-so’s work.” But my father had died, and I’d pulled out this big plastic storage bin of Ebony magazines that were from my grandmother and just started looking at them.So I [began using them in the paintings]. But then I thought, “Well, what if I went up in scale?” Having so many friends who are really important painters, you feel a little bit like, “Yeah, I want to.”

D.B.: Who were some of those painters?

D.B.: So you had no fear about jumping in.

L.S.: My life belief is that you cannot be afraid. Fear is not good —

D.B.: As an artist?

L.S.: As a person. I don’t think fear is a good decision maker.

D.B.: Why did you go to California for graduate school?

L.S.: Because I wanted a change from New York. But what was interesting about California was that I worked in isolation. None of the professors there understood what I was doing. U.C.S.D. was very conceptual, predominantly white. I was in a film course and we were given a dilemma: You find tons of footage by an unknown filmmaker and you, as a class, have to restructure this material and make a film out of it. Everybody would then [go out and gather images and] put all of this footage and different things into a pot and we as a group would all edit it into a project and call that the project of an unknown director. So we’re going around the room and me and my New York ass, I have pictures from Harlem that I found and different things that are so New York. I remember one of my fellow classmates said, “Yeah, but if we use your images, that means the director’s Black.”

D.B.: And what did you say?

L.S.: I didn’t say anything. I just did not go back to the class. I was like, “[Expletive] this, fail me.” I dropped the class. Because I instantly saw, “Oh, so, being in graduate school, I have to be able to read all this work and all this art history. I have to be so sophisticated to be able to read all these thousands of years of art. But I put in a photograph from the 1950s or ’60s and all of a sudden it’s unmanageable or too specific.”

D.B.: Did you feel like it was a challenge?

D.B.: You didn’t need the affirmation.

L.S.: I don’t need it. And it showed me: Just focus on what you’re doing, and really take it seriously and see what happens. It doesn’t mean that it’s not good or important.

D.B.: So people talk, of course, about your work in terms of race and gender. Are you comfortable with that? Does it limit you? Do you ever want to say, “Just look at the work”?

L.S.: No, I think that’s true. I would say yeah.

D.B.: And you wanted to be seen that way, right?

L.S.: Yes.

D.B.: So who is your work for? And maybe this is the journalist in me because, when I write a story, I’m aware that I have an audience, right? Do you think like that? Who do you want to make uncomfortable?

D.B.: Because of Sept. 11.

L.S.: Because of Sept. 11. Everyone was like, “Oh, that’s kind of dark. That sounds like a dirge.” So I can never control how people come to the work and how they read it.

D.B.: Are there critics or people who get your work better than others? Do you read your critics?

L.S.: No.

D.B.: You don’t? Really?

L.S.: I don’t.

D.B.: Why not?

L.S.: It spoils it in a way. I [also] can’t watch myself give a lecture. Why? Because I have to be in it extemporaneously and just go with it. The moment I become self-conscious, I can’t. Praise or deep criticism about the work — those are the things I can’t control. They’re out in the world. But I don’t need to engage with them.

“Waterbearer” (1986). Simpson started out as a street photographer but soon became known for her highly conceptual works, like this image of a Black woman in a white dress facing a way from the viewer, holding two vessels of water. The accompanying text seems to speak, however ambiguously, to the history of exclusion that Black women have faced in America.

© Lorna Simpson, courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth

“Tulip” (2014). This work is part of a long-running series in which Simpson cuts advertising images out of old issues of Ebony magazine, collages them on paper and embellishes them with ink.

© Lorna Simpson, courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth

“Easy to Remember” (2001). In this video piece, Simpson filmed 15 people’s mouths in extreme close-up as they hummed along to John Coltrane’s rendition of the jazz standard “It’s Easy to Remember.”

© Lorna Simpson, courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Zak Kelley

“31” (2002). Using 31 video monitors, one for each day of the month, Simpson follows a woman throughout her day, from morning to night. The work is a homage to one of Simpson’s major influences, Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film “Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.”

© Lorna Simpson, courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: James Wang

D.B.: Did you ever have anybody see anything in the work that appalled you or upset you or surprised you?

L.S.: A couple of years ago in Los Angeles, I did a show at Hauser & Wirth during the pandemic. It was a big show. And the guard there —

D.B.: The security guard?

L.S.: The security guard walked me through the show and he was seeing [so many] different things in the images — on a magical level but also on a political level — that it scared me. I went to Manuela [Wirth, the gallery’s co-owner] and said, “I need a drink, please.” Because it was overwhelming.

D.B.: Did you invite the guard to walk through the work with you or did the guard say, “Can I tell you what I’m seeing?”

L.S.: Well, we’d had a relationship [because he was] present for a lot of the installation. And I think someone told me, “He really wants to walk through the show with you.” It was a conversation that was unnerving for me. Not that he was wrong, but the depth was just … I was really shocked. And it’s not anything about naïveté. I don’t mean that.

D.B.: Shocked in a good way?

L.S.: He scared me about my own work. He was like, “Don’t you see a skull in that part of the piece?” And I was like, “No. OK, but no.” So I think there’s a darkness to the work that I’m clearly not aware of.

L.S.: I don’t really think I’m that different, to be honest. I came from [the mentality of] if I can live through this, then the world is my oyster. And so when I think about my ambition or applying for grants or internships, it was done with the thought that if I got a no, it just didn’t matter. I wasn’t attached to outcomes, for some reason. The momentum was more important to me. I had to be very self-reliant. So therefore, my success was also a surprise to me.

D.B.: Your success surprised you?

L.S.: Yeah, absolutely. In my 20s, I didn’t know how to think about what success means. I didn’t think I’d be making a lot of money from this.

D.B.: How do you think about the art market now?

L.S.: To be honest, having experienced the kind of art world that I did in graduate school, I was like, “OK, so I’ll work as a secretary during the day for six months and I’ll quit, then I’ll work on my own thing.” I had no idea what success meant as a Black woman. Part of that to me is also occupying space in a particular way. To this day, people will go, “Why do you need so much space?” It’s about occupying space in a way that I think white men have occupied without it being a problem.

I also understand [that] from the ’80s till now, my work would be spoken about in acquisition meetings at a museum like, “Oh, we don’t need to buy that,” or, “That should be cheaper.” Or [I’d be on] the board of an institution and [other members would be] talking about women’s work and how we could get that for cheaper. If you’re not a white male artist, there’s that mentality.

D.B.: Is that still the case?

L.S.: That’s kind of changed now, but that’s very recent.

D.B.: What’s it like to sit down with a gallery and talk about the financial aspect of your work?

L.S.: I’ve gone through several galleries. I’ve not been a happy customer my entire life. There are different levels of galleries, and depending on where your career is and how old you are, certain other things are required. It doesn’t work if you’re midcareer and your gallery doesn’t have their [expletive] together, they don’t have their finances together or they’re sloppy in terms of just the pragmatic side of pricing or reaching out to collectors.

I’ve learned that being uncomfortable is important.

D.B.: Have you had conversations with a gallery about what to charge for works?

L.S.: Absolutely. I’ll give you an example. I started doing collages [in 2010] just thinking, “Let me try to do this.” And I had a little folio, not framed or anything. I took it to the gallery and asked, “What do you guys think of this?” And that’s when they say, “Oh, I think this is very derivative of duh duh duh. … I really just don’t think we’re interested in that.” And so I left the work out in this open space, and we went to another area to talk business. And because they were sloppy, they had clients coming in while they were talking to me because they couldn’t get their freaking schedules right. And while I was in there talking with them, the clients [saw the collages and] wanted to buy all of them.Moments ago, this wasn’t shit. Half an hour later, someone wants them.

D.B.: Did you feel triumphant in that moment?

L.S.: I felt like, “This is not the place for me.”

D.B.: Do you feel a sense of community with other artists? Is there a group that you feel a part of?

L.S.: I’m too much of a loner to be part of any groups.

D.B.: Are there people who you think helped make you the artist you are today?

D.B.: You met him at the Studio Museum, right?He was an artist in residence?

L.S.: And I was an intern in college. He’d be working on hammering these bottle caps into a telephone pole that was five blocks away from the museum in an empty lot. He was always out in the world making things.

D.B.: What was it about him that makes you think of him as a forebear?

D.B.: Who are some other influences?

D.B.: How does the mundane show up in your work?

L.S.: I did a piece that’s very much a homage to that film called “31” (2002). It’s a video piece on 31 monitors, so 31 days in a month. And it follows a woman every day from morning to night, and what happens in her life. She’s a curator because I always just get people around me who have charismatic personalities to do things for me.

D.B.: What do you mean?

L.S.: Oh, you know, they got personality. I can tell when someone has a bit of an actor thing to them.

D.B.: You have that.

L.S.: No, I don’t. I hate every moment of it.

D.B.: Do you hate being interviewed?

L.S.: That’s different. I’m not acting. In that film, you follow her going to work, and I used the old Studio Museum offices. She’s at the Xerox machine and she’s running back and forth through these offices or on the subway or in the grocery store, in the drugstore, at home, going to bed. And as it goes through the month, you see that she’s at a funeral parlor and she’s waiting. So someone has died. The duration of the piece is, oh, I don’t know, 20 minutes. You can’t watch all these screens at the same time, but you cue into seeing different things. It’s a New York work. A time in a young woman’s life when certain things happen, and you’re just getting a section of it.

D.B.: Is there any California in your work? Do you have a house in California because it’s a beautiful place to have a house? I mean, you can ask me the same thing.

L.S.: You go first.

D.B.: Well, I mean, look, I like the differences between the two. And I think people underestimate California’s culture. I do. I think California has youth and possibility.

L.S.: It’s changed a lot in the past 15 years.

D.B.: Yeah. I first went there in 2000. I spent almost the whole pandemic in New York. Where were you for the pandemic?

D.B.: Did the pandemic influence any of your art?

L.S.: I realized through the pandemic that I’m actually an introvert. So maybe that’s the answer to your earlier question: How have I changed? I’m much more aware that I’m an introvert. I was just good at faking it [before]. So this show in L.A. opened in 2021. And I had to do a talk and was taken aback. I was a little terrified. Why was I getting nervous?

D.B.: Do you usually get nervous before a speech?

L.S.: Never before.

D.B.: Why then?

L.S.: I think because I really enjoy the quiet and to not be public.I used to [make many public appearances], but I also saw it as a necessity. I felt very much, in the beginning of my career, I had to be assertive about the choices I made. I feel really privileged to make art, to have this creative life that I treasure.

D.B.: What do you treasure about it?

L.S.: The freedom.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Photo assistant: Chris Cook

Theaster Gates, photographed at his studio in Chicago on July 23, 2024.

Jon Henry

More than any other artist working today, Theaster Gates — ceramist, urbanist, archivist, sculptor — has earned the title “multidisciplinary.”

By Siddhartha Mitter

Oct. 17, 2024

THE BUREAUCRAT

THEASTER GATES IS the kind of artist whose work is perpetually on view somewhere in the world. When we met for the first time, in May at his studio in Chicago’s Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood, he had just returned from opening exhibitions at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. His practice is all-encompassing. He is known for installations that use supplies and furnishings from old buildings, paying tribute to their past lives — as homes, stores, churches. These installations serve double or even triple duty: They are works of art in themselves, but they can also become venues for parties or performances. His sculptures and paintings employ construction materials like wood, rubber and roofing tar. He’s a master ceramist and a musician and singer who performs with his experimental group, the Black Monks, in which he’s known as the Abbot.

For years, Gates has acquired archives, and he sees their stewardship as integral to his work. Many preserve Black American cultural memory, like the roughly 20,000-volume library that once belonged to the Johnson Publishing Company, publisher of Ebony and Jet, and the 5,000-record vinyl collection of Frankie Knuckles, the Chicago D.J. at whose late ’70s parties house music was born. He is currently advising an arts-led redevelopment project in Philadelphia and an initiative to preserve Houston’s Freedmen’s Town, a historically Black district in the city’s Fourth Ward. He chairs the diversity council at Prada, where he runs a mentorship program for designers of color, and he is developing partnerships in Japan with small family-owned businesses to produce incense and sake. In his studio, a 30,000-square-foot compound that occupies two former factories that he bought in 2019, he served me tea from Horii Shichimeien, a venerable Kyoto maker, in a stoneware cup.

In his hometown, Gates is recognized as an entrepreneur who buys and restores properties on Chicago’s South Side. He puts these properties to unusual, sometimes less than practical use. The core of his holdings is a quiet half-mile stretch of South Dorchester Avenue, where he started acquiring run-down houses in 2006. He filled some with archives — thousands of art books purchased from a shuttered bookshop; LPs from a defunct record store. One house became his residence.

Gates’s business dealings and art making are not at odds: Salvage from the buildings goes into his art installations; proceeds from his art sales fund his building renovations and community programs. But they also stem from shared soil — his upbringing as the son of a roofer on Chicago’s West Side, his training as an urban planner — and commingle in his projects to the point where it would be artificial to separate them. Gates himself draws no distinction: He hopes to demonstrate, he told me, “an open model for what an artist can be.”

Gates took a highly unusual path into the art world and, as an artist, though inspired by multiple movements and histories, he’s created somethingsui generis. He rebuffs categories like “social practice” — jargon for participative art with civic goals — but cites predecessors like Donald Judd, who made furniture as well as geometric objects, and the Fluxus movement, with its interest in everyday materials and spontaneous performances. He’s an inheritor of the legacy of Marcel Duchamp and his readymades, mass-produced and utilitarian objects that the French artist displayed as art. In a sense, Gates has scaled up the method. Duchamp’s readymades include a snow shovel and a bicycle wheel; Gates’s are old factories and homes. To some extent, he doesn’t think of them as property at all. “The beauty of these buildings gives me a tremendous amount of joy,” he said. “It’s an artistic idiom of its own.”

Raw material at Gates’s studio in Chicago.

Jon Henry

Recently fired ceramic sculptures from Gates’s studio, as well as from Dorchester Industries, the artist’s manufacturing platform that uses materials sourced from around Chicago.

Jon Henry

Images from the archives of the Johnson Publishing Company on a wall of the studio.

Jon Henry

Some of Gates’s large ceramic pieces.

Jon Henry

A bureaucrat before he was ever an artist, Gates worked as an art planner for the Chicago Transit Authority from 2000 to 2005. After that, he began investing in Grand Crossing when he moved to the South Side to become an arts administrator at the University of Chicago, where he’s now a professor. “The neighborhood had stigma, but the people were great and interesting,” he said. He recognized the terrain: Black neighborhoods that faced disinvestment and crime but were once self-contained and self-possessed — places where, he said, “the Black doctor and lawyer and bus driver and maid were all on the same block, and they all went to the same church.” By revitalizing these quotidian spaces — homes, a bank, a school, hardware stores that he has bought, often with their contents, when they were going out of business — he is summoning a kind of utopian memory in the service of new functions. “It’s not just the bourgeois dimension of ‘He owns a building,’” Gates’s friend the artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa, 63, told me. “It’s more about a transgression of some primary interdictions with regard to Black people, which is that you cannot manage material. You will be material. But to manage material is a whole other thing.” Through his investments in Grand Crossing — even when they take unconventional forms — Gates sees himself as helping Chicago to “hold its Black self together.”

He took me down a side street edged by commuter rail tracks where in 2021 he opened Kenwood Gardens, a sanctuary with lawns, wildflowers and a pavilion that hosts house-music parties in the summer. It occupies 13 lots that were in decline — notorious, he said, for burned-out cars and prostitution. A wall encircling the garden is made partly from bricks that he saved from St. Laurence Catholic Church, a neighborhood anchor that the archdiocese sold and that was razed in 2014.

“When I built the perimeter wall, I didn’t own the property,” Gates said. “I built the wall to stop the bad stuff.” He then bought the lots, many loaded with tax arrears. “The city was quite happy to help us negotiate the land sales,” he said, “because they would finally have a steward.” Building his unauthorized wall, Gates said, was a case of tactical urbanism, as citizen initiatives that bypass city bureaucracy or goad it to action are called in the planning business.

Gates is compact, with a shaved head and salt-and-pepper beard, and he dresses comfortably in collarless shirts, loose pants and leather loafers. When he gets excited about a topic, he can take on the tone of a minister addressing his congregation. He is too obviously sincere, even earnest, to come across as an operator. And yet he has both an aptitude and an appetite for policy and negotiations. In a famous deal, he purchased the former Stony Island State Savings Bank, a 1920s edifice facing demolition, from the city in 2012 for $1 and the commitment to restore it — which he funded in part by selling salvaged marble slabs at Art Basel for $5,000 each. It now hosts collections, exhibitions and events. “You learn policy, you know the rules, you play with it,” he said. “Then you can make a case.” Romi Crawford, 58, a professor of visual and critical studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, described how Gates enfolds transactions into his art as “contract aesthetics.” Gates has fielded periodic criticism that he is too amenable to the rich and powerful. He rejects this, returning to the word “tactical.” “If you’re talking about protesting, there are people who are better protesters,” he said. “If you’re talking about getting [things] done in the city, I can do it better than most artists. I can do it better than most developers.”

We arrived at the bank building. Outside was the gazebo where the 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot dead by a police officer in Cleveland in 2014; working with Rice’s mother, Gates brought the structure to Chicago to save it from demolition. (It belongs back in Cleveland, he’s said, but its temporary care is his “duty as a Black man,” he told the Guardian in 2019.) Inside the bank some 50 people had gathered for happy hour — including Frederick Dunson, the president of the Frankie Knuckles Foundation; Yaw Agyeman, one of the Black Monks, who performed with the musician Sharon Udoh; and the D.J. Celeste Alexander, a house-music veteran.

Gates greeted the assembled in his preacher mode. “I was telling the sisters in the congregation, ‘I want to be free from the things that hinder me,’” he said. He likes his gatherings “underprogrammed,” like his buildings. “There is absolutely no agenda,” he continued. All he wanted was someplace “where we can just be together.”

“We Will Save Ourselves” (2024), one of the artist’s paintings made with roofing materials and recently on view at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.

© Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and Theaster Gates Studio. Photo: Alex Barber

THE TRAVELER

GATES RECENTLY TURNED 51; a Virgo, he notes. He still lives on the South Side, although now in an apartment closer to Hyde Park. He travels constantly. He has never married or had children, but he is in a relationship that he and his partner prefer to keep out of the spotlight. “I have love in my life and I’m extremely happy,” he said.

He was born in 1973, the sole boy after eight girls. He describes a close and dense family life in the East Garfield Park neighborhood on the West Side shaped by the labor and small property acquisitions of his father, Theaster Gates Sr., and by the devout values of his mother, Lorine, a schoolteacher. His parents had bought their four-apartment home amid late ’60s white flight for $23,000, paying installments to the seller, who eventually forgave the balance.

Gates toggled between worlds, as he has done ever since. He was bused to the North Side starting in fifth grade, then attended Lane Tech, a selective public high school; in that respect, he told me, “I’m a child of integration and affirmative action.” In the neighborhood, he said, “every summer, more of my friends were in gangs.” He was different: churchy, charismatic, coddled by his big sisters. In lieu of an allowance, his father paid him to help on roofing jobs and fixing buildings. “I was around serial entrepreneurship and prayerful way-making,” Gates told me. “It wasn’t a way to get rich. It was a way to look out for your family and have control of the emotional environment, not have an outside force telling you what to do.”

Summers in Mississippi reinforced that idea. In a classic Great Migration pattern, his parents had come up from the Delta — his father from Yazoo City, his mother from Humphreys County nearby. Most of her siblings remained there, and Gates would spend summers with his uncle Herbert, who owned a 500-acre farm, growing corn, cotton and soy beans and raising cattle and hogs. It was an education in the land and its stakes: Other Black families lived on the farm — “The only word we have for it is ‘sharecroppers,’” Gates said — and the surrounding white farmers were trying to squeeze Herbert out. Mississippi, Gates said, is where he learned to appreciate scale: “I understand square blocks because I understand acres.” It’s also a recurring reference in his art. For a 2022 exhibition of contemporary takes on the Great Migration at the Mississippi Museum of Art, he designed an installation called “Double Wide” inspired by the trailer on his uncle’s land that was a candy store by day and a juke joint after dark.

Arriving at Iowa State University in 1992, Gates decided to major in urban planning (in which he’d later earn a master’s degree) with a double minor in studio art and religious studies. He learned about nonconformists like Samuel Mockbee, the architect who in 1993 co-founded the Rural Studio program, known for designing homes from recycled materials in the Alabama Black Belt. On the side, he discovered pottery, becoming close with a ceramics professor, Ingrid Lilligren, who would remain a mentor.

After college, Gates won a scholarship to study for a master’s degree in traditional African religion at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Then, following a brief stint in Seattle, he returned to Chicago in 1999 when he was hired by the transit authority. After hours, he’d rent kilns at the Lillstreet Art Center. He wanted, he said, to become good at something. “I went to my day job, and I would come home, go to the studio and make pots,” he said. “That unromantic development was very helpful for me. I was gaining skill in darkness, with no one interested.”

Once, he recalled, he made three soda-fired bowls to sell at the DuSable Museum’s market devoted to Black artisans. A customer offered $75, less than Gates thought they were worth in view of his costs, leading to an epiphany. “I decided I would no longer sell the vessel,” he said. “If you believe in my world, then you might get a vessel free. But believing in my world is a greater investment than the cost of a bowl.”

In 2004, Gates took an unpaid leave and traveled to Japan to attend a summer workshop in Tokoname, a coastal city in the central region and one of the country’s designated Six Ancient Kiln towns, with a nearly thousand-year ceramics history. He lived with a host family and learned from master potters. “I wouldn’t call it instruction, though instruction was part of it,” he said. “I got something more akin to what the Bible would call impartation, where it felt like I was touched or moved.” He added: “It was permission to be a better potter, and that’s really what I needed.”

In the United States, his instruction on ceramics history had privileged European and American decorative arts. Japan, to which he’d return many times, presented a rich ceramics tradition. He was particularly interested in the Mingei movement, which started in the 1920s and celebrated the beauty of everyday craft objects and advocated support for folk artisans, joining Buddhist precepts with a critique of industrial mass production. The potters Kanjiro Kawai and Shoji Hamada, who were key Mingei figures, embraced solid, rustic forms, local clays and natural glazes, and welcomed imperfections in the finished work.

All of this gave Gates an idea that would prove pivotal for his own development as an artist. What if, he imagined, following World War II, a Japanese potter had found his way to the United States and landed in Mississippi, drawn to its soil and possibilities? What if he had married a Black woman there, perhaps a civil rights activist? What if, years later, they had died in a crash, leaving behind his body of work?

At his first major exhibition, at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago in 2007, Gates served a soul food dinner for 50 on his stoneware plates that he attributed to the potter, whom he named Shoji Yamaguchi in tribute to Hamada. The guests were a mix of wealthy Chicagoans, artists, South Side neighbors. He hired a biracial actor to play Yamaguchi’s son. Only later would Gates reveal that the work was his own.

Gates’s friend Hamza Walker, 58, the director of the alternative art space the Brick in Los Angeles who was living in Chicago at the time, told me that back then Gates called himself a “confused potter-performer.” But if anything, the show, titled “Plate Convergence,” proved his seriousness about ceramics. And it revealed Gates, suddenly, as a full-fledged conceptual artist, not averse to a little sleight of hand. Yet far from a gimmick, the story of Yamaguchi would blossom into a larger synthesis of Black and Japanese folk aesthetics that he now calls Afro-Mingei. “I imagined Yamaguchi as a speculative theory,” Gates told me. Afro-Mingei, he added, “has been a self-fulfilling proposition.”

“Shoe Shine Stand” (2012) is part of a series of sculptures featuring materials sourced from abandoned homes that Gates purchased on the South Side of Chicago.

Courtesy of Theaster Gates Studio

THE HOST

THIS PAST JULY, I met Gates in Arles, France, where he’d organized the Black Artists Retreat, a gathering that he has hosted annually at various venues since 2013, and that overlapped this year with his exhibition at LUMA Arles, a sprawling art complex in a former railway yard.

In its early years, BAR, held at Gates’s studio in Chicago, was a chance for established and rising, mostly Black American, artists to connect more or less privately. It grew and eventually traveled — to the Park Avenue Armory in New York for a large, semipublic edition in 2019, and to the Serpentine Pavilion in London in 2022. But in Arles it tacked small again, with some 40-odd artists. Most were European, recommended by the London-based curators Jareh Das and Bianca A. Manu; several barely knew Gates at all. His underprogrammed spirit was back: loose scheduling, good meals, dancing. The French Ghanaian artist Eden Tinto Collins, attending BAR for the first time, told me the vibe felt like “faire foyer” — creating a hearth or home.

At LUMA, Gates had set up a pottery workshop where he and a small team were making works in public to exhibit on-site — a kind of accumulative installation that would fill the hangarlike space by the show’s closing in early November. They included tall, urnlike vessels and abstract, almost gnomic clay works. “It’s very ancestral,” the Nigerian artist Ranti Bam, 42, said.

Maja Hoffmann, 68, the Swiss contemporary-art collector and LUMA’s founder, had invested in two kilns — including an anagama (a Japanese “cave kiln”), hand-built on the grounds of La Chassagnette, the restaurant that she owns in the countryside. There, at rosé hour, Gates gathered his guests to witness him unloading the anagama after its inaugural, seven-day-long firing. The kiln, 20 feet deep with an arched fire mouth, resembled a brick dragon. Gates, in blue workwear, sang a gospel tune as pots of various shapes came out, glazed by the ash in ocher, gray and green hues: “You who are weary, stop by the potter’s house. … The potter wants to put you back together again.” There were broken shards, too, which he extracted with equal reverence.

During the early years of Gates’s rise, his ceramics were largely unknown, eclipsed by his property acquisitions and works like “Civil Tapestries” — wall-mounted sculptures made from strips of decommissioned fire hoses — and his so-called tar paintings, created from roofing materials in homage to his father. Hoffmann, now a major patron, met him in 2013 at Art Basel, around his installation of a sloping wood surface covered with tar. “I saw him more as a carpenter, a roofer,” she told me. “I didn’t realize the ceramics thing. And then we went to Chicago and I understood.”

In fact, he had been making ceramics all along, including in his own anagama in Chicago. At his studio there, Gates had shown me rooms of ceramics and pointed out techniques — cobalt-and-red iron shino glazes, mustard washes, manganese stains. There were vessels and abstract sculptures, utilitarian black bricks and even figurative warrior protectors inspired by African statuary. His recent exhibitions have increasingly featured pottery. “Black Vessel,” at Gagosian gallery in New York in 2020, included a room of ceramics, many set directly on the floor. His 2022 New Museum survey in New York, “Young Lords and Their Traces,” whose signal theme was mourning — for his mother and father, and for his friends the curator Okwui Enwezor and the writer bell hooks — made space for a large display of ceramics, as well.

His first craft, Gates suggested, had forced him to work with rigor at times when his career felt too permissive. “After you get to a certain point of ascendancy in the art world, you’re just making up your own truth,” he said. “You don’t have the burden of people even liking you. You’re entering a free fall.” He added: “I’m after a world of rules. I want somebody to say, ‘Your tea bowl is too heavy, Theaster. You can trim a little bit more off the foot. It doesn’t have the depth and dimension that it should. Keep working.’”

As part of a recent solo exhibition at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Gates displayed nearly the entire archive of surviving works by Yoshihiro Koide, a potter from the city of Tokoname, which is known for its master ceramicists.

Courtesy of Theaster Gates Studio. Photo: Wyatt Naoki Conlon

THE STUDENT

IN AUGUST, I visited Gates in Japan, where he’s been spending more time of late, collaborating with other artists and craftspeople. “I started building an intentional artisanal network,” he said. We were on the mezzanine of Farmoon, a tea salon and chef’s table on a side street in Kyoto. It was hot out, and the chef Masayo Funakoshi had sent up corn ice cream with tomato-infused orange blossom water, ricotta and lemon basil. Funakoshi had cooked a meal at BAR in Arles with the chef Armand Arnal; now she was preparing sweets for a tea ceremony to be held the next day inside Gates’s exhibition in Tokyo and led by Reijiro Izumi, an heir of the centuries-old Urasenke tea ceremony tradition. For the show, Gates also commissioned 30,000 bricks from the Mizuno Seitoen Lab, a company in Tokoname, plus sake from a Kyoto-based company.

We took the Shinkansen train to Nagoya, then drove to Tokoname on the Chita Peninsula. In the Meiji era, the town’s ceramics tradition, its robust high-iron-content clay and harbor location had made it a manufacturing hub for earthenware sewer pipes. But the transition to industrially manufactured metal pipes undercut Tokoname’s clay-based economy. Craft ceramics, however, endured.

The town gave off an air of permanent quiet. “When I go back to Tokoname, it’s like going back to the West Side of Chicago,” Gates said. “What’s there for me are memories and ghosts. Places that used to be open. Clay supply stores. People’s studios that, when you walk along the pottery path, you could just stop in and say hello.” Japan’s aging population has meant fewer successors and more empty workshops. “In a place that’s as culturally significant as Tokoname, there’s a need for a kind of cultural infrastructure,” he said.

Not long ago, Gates took over a seven-building compound in town and, in 2022, as part of the Aichi Triennale, he welcomed visitors to a listening room there. “I didn’t want to bring pots to Tokoname; that would be like bringing sand to the beach,” he said. “So I decided to bring my other wheels” — turntables, plus the record collection of Marva Lee Pitchford-Jolly, the Chicago potter who died in 2012. “She always wanted to go to Japan,” he said. “And so I brought her albums so that she could be here with me.”

Driving up the hill, Gates spotted a neighbor, Mr. Matsushita, 66, a bonsai artist and potter, shirtless in the window of his ground-floor study. He invited us in. Around his desk were his plants and writings, along with old fliers for exhibitions involving the German social-sculpture artist Joseph Beuys.

Some of Gates’s own stoneware pots, on view in an installation called “Doric Temple” in a 2022 solo show at the New Museum in New York.

Courtesy of Theaster Gates Studio. Photo: Chris Strong

“Matsushita-san might be one of the greatest living thinkers in Tokoname,” Gates told me. “Just that kind of wizardlike intentionality. He takes a pine wick that’s growing in the asphalt, pulls it up, builds its root, plants it in his pot. That’s a beautiful thing.”

Through a back door lay a vast ceramics workshop with two kilns. “In Tokoname there’s no wind,” Matshushita said. “For me, Theaster brings the wind.” He added, “It’s not easy to live freely like Theaster.”

In Tokyo at the Mori Art Museum, wall text by Gates explained that Afro-Mingei was “a speculation.” In Mingei’s assertion of pride in folk craft, Gates recognized an impulse that felt similar to the Black Is Beautiful movement of the 1960s and ’70s. But the show was also his expression of thanks for Japan and its potters. “I’m a different artist in Japan,” he told me. “And I love myself here.”

The exhibition mixed familiar forms from Gates’s repertoire — ceramics, tar paintings, salvaged-wood installations — with neon sculptures and slate boards marked with names of Black and Japanese artists and movements. There were shelves laden with thousands of small sake jars. Most strikingly, on racks of wooden shelving he’d placed one of his readymade archives — almost the entire body of work that Yoshihiro Koide, a Tokoname potter, left behind at his death in 2022. The nearly 20,000 ceramic pieces, many wrapped in paper or contained in boxes, were a monument to labor and to the duty of care.

The exhibition’s organizers, Mami Kataoka and Hirokazu Tokuyama, had wanted to show a selection of these works in vitrines, Gates said. He insisted otherwise. “They were being museological,” he said. “I was being propagandistic. I’m trying to show you a world, and you can’t show a world through four objects, or taking the best specimens and presenting them. If you want to have a Theaster show, you bring all 20,000 things.”

But despite the busy world Gates has built for himself, its center is paradoxically calm. At the studio in Chicago, I’d been struck by the quiet. His operation has downsized, he said — from 65 employees at its peak, around 2016, which he admitted overwhelmed him, to just 15.

Next to go might be his collection of buildings, though it could take a while. “I did not attempt to amass a real estate holdings situation,” he said. “I was simply trying to prove the point that artists can change a place.” Now, he added, “I have to learn how to shed. In the same way that I spent two decades accumulating, I feel like I’m going to spend two decades shrinking.” At that point, he fantasized, we might find him in Kenwood Gardens, giving tea bowls away.

“As a 30-year-old, buying a building meant something,” he said. “It meant, ‘I’m a man, I’m a mature person, I can stand on my own feet.’ The second building was like, ‘I can have a studio, I can contribute to a block, I can be useful to my people.’ Now I can be useful by giving it away. I don’t need any footprint.” The goal for the next stage of his career, he said, “will be that no one needs me anymore.”