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Gagosian Quarterly

Spring 2022 Issue

Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Questionnaire:Precious Okoyomon

For this new series, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has devised a set of thirty-seven questions that invite artists, authors, musicians, and other visionaries to address key elements of their lives and creative practices. Respondents are invited to make a selection from the larger questionnaire and to reply in as many or as few words as they desire. Additionally, they are invited to provide an additional question of their choosing that will be added to the list for future participants. For the inaugural installment, we are honored to present the artist and poet Precious Okoyomon.

Installation view, Precious Okoyomon: Earthseed, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, August 22–November 1, 2020. Photo: Axel Schneider, courtesy the artist and Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Installation view, Precious Okoyomon: Earthseed, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, August 22–November 1, 2020. Photo: Axel Schneider, courtesy the artist and Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Hans Ulrich Obrist is artistic director of the Serpentine, London. He was previously the curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show, World Soup (The Kitchen Show), in 1991, he has curated more than 350 exhibitions. Photo: Tyler Mitchell

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Precious Okoyomon

Precious Okoyomon is a Nigerian-American poet and artist who lives in New York. Their second book, But Did U Die?, will be copublished by Serpentine Galleries and Wonder Press in 2022. Okoyomon was a 2020 artist-in-residence at Luma Arles and received the Frieze Art Fair Artist Award in 2021.

Hans Ulrich ObristWhat is energy?

Precious OkoyomonThe love that keeps us all grounded.

HUODoes money corrupt art?

POAbsolutely.

HUOWhat is time?

POThe love that makes us free.

HUOWhat music are you listening to?

POJustin Bieber, Messiaen, Standing on the Corner.

HUOYour favorite color?

POThe color of pomegranates and the soft blue/pink when the sky and the sunset start to kiss and god comes to bless us.

Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Questionnaire: Precious Okoyomon

Installation view, Precious Okoyomon: A Drop of Sun Under the Earth, Luma Westbau, Zurich, February 21–April 21, 2019. Photo: Nelly Rodriguez, courtesy the artist and Luma Westbau, Zurich

HUOWhat was your first museum visit as a child?

POZaha Hadid’s Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati.

HUOWhom are you working with/thinking with?

PORight now, I’m working and thinking with Toussaint Louverture through Édouard Glissant’s play about his life and the revolution he led, Monsieur Toussaint.

HUOAny miracles lately?

POMy miracle is the unending love of everyday life, the magnetic energy of love, a whirlwind of encounters, the wind kissing my face and brushing me anew; today I wrote a poem while walking my dog and it felt held, and held in the world itself.

HUOWhat is the role of titles?

POTo confuse, to trouble.

HUOWhat is your definition of art?

POEntangled organic movement and everyday life.

Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Questionnaire: Precious Okoyomon

Installation view, Precious Okoyomon: Every Earthly Morning the Sky’s Light touches Ur Life is Unprecedented in its Beauty, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado, June 11, 2021–September 21, 2022. Photo: courtesy the artist and Aspen Art Museum, Colorado

HUOWhat is your unrealized project?

POMy unrealized project is a new way of everyday life, a movement of errant roots, a forest, a series of communications, of rhizomes spreading information into the world, a new language created by an environment, a new way of breathing and an ability to breathe. I want to make a space for fragilization, a utopia to feel in! That manifests in what one might call an existential healing center, a place outside of time in the middle of a forest.

HUOWhat couldn’t you live without?

POChoosing love.

HUOWhat ought to change?

POEverything.

Artwork © Precious Okoyomon

Self portrait of Francesca Woodman, she stands against a wall holding pieces of ripped wallpaper in front of her face and legs

Francesca Woodman

Ahead of the first exhibition of Francesca Woodman’s photographs at Gagosian, director Putri Tan speaks with historian and curator Corey Keller about new insights into the artist’s work. The two unravel themes of the body, space, architecture, and ambiguity.

self portrait by Jamian Juliano-Villani

Jamian Juliano-Villani and Jordan Wolfson

Ahead of her forthcoming exhibition in New York, Jamian Juliano-Villani speaks with Jordan Wolfson about her approach to painting and what she has learned from running her own gallery, O’Flaherty’s.

portrait of Stanley Whitney

Stanley Whitney: Vibrations of the Day

Stanley Whitney invited professor and musician-biographer John Szwed to his studio in Long Island as he prepared for an upcoming survey at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum to discuss the resonances between painting and jazz.

Black and white portrait of Katherine Dunham leaping in the air

Border Crossings: Exile and American Modern Dance, 1900–1955

Dance scholars Mark Franko and Ninotchka Bennahum join the Quarterly’s Gillian Jakab in a conversation about the exhibition Border Crossings at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Cocurated by Bennahum and Bruce Robertson, the show reexamines twentieth-century modern dance in the context of war, exile, and injustice. An accompanying catalogue, coedited by Bennahum and Rena Heinrich and published earlier this year, bridges the New York presentation with its West Coast counterpart at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Black and white portrait of Frida Escobedo

Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Questionnaire: Frida Escobedo

In this ongoing series, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has devised a set of thirty-seven questions that invite artists, authors, musicians, and other visionaries to address key elements of their lives and creative practices. Respondents select from the larger questionnaire and reply in as many or as few words as they desire. For the first installment of 2024, we are honored to present the architect Frida Escobedo.

Black and white portrait of Maria Grazia Chiuri looking directly at the camera

Fashion and Art: Maria Grazia Chiuri

Maria Grazia Chiuri has been the creative director of women’s haute couture, ready-to-wear, and accessories collections at Dior since 2016. Beyond overseeing the fashion collections of the French house, she has produced a series of global collaborations with artists such as Judy Chicago, Mickalene Thomas, Penny Slinger, and more. Here she speaks with the Quarterly’s Derek Blasberg about her childhood in Rome, the energy she derives from her interactions and conversations with artists, the viral “We Should All Be Feminists” T-shirt, and her belief in the role of creativity in a fulfilled and healthy life.

Portrait of artist Kelsey Lu

Kelsey Lu

Art historian and curator Olivier Berggruen reflects on his trip to Berlin to see a performance by the multihyphenate Kelsey Lu. Following his experience of that performance, The Lucid, Berggruen caught up with Lu in New York, where they spoke about the visual elements of their work, dreaming, and the necessity of new challenges.

Portrait of twins Frances McLaughlin-Gill and Kathryn Abbe in front of a beach, one of them sits in a lawn chair and the other stands behind looking out of a spyglass

The Art of Biography: Mary Gabriel and Carol Kino

Carol Kino’s forthcoming biography of Frances McLaughlin-Gill and Kathryn Abbe, the identical twin sisters who blazed new trails in the world of photography—Double Click: Twin Photographers in the Golden Age of Magazines—charts a critical moment in the United States, bringing to the surface questions around aesthetics, technologies, and gender through the arc of the twins’ lives. Here, Kino meets with award-winning biographer Mary Gabriel, whose 2023 publication Madonna: A Rebel Life described the unparalleled significance of the musician’s life and career, to discuss the origins of their most recent projects, as well as the specific considerations that underpin the process of narrating a life.

Portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat sitting inside his studio and in front of his paintings

Jean-Michel Basquiat: Los Angeles

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s sisters, Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux, met with filmmaker Tamra Davis, art dealer Larry Gagosian, and author and curator Fred Hoffman to reflect on their experiences with the artist during the 1980s in Los Angeles.

Painting in gray tones of a man in a suit and tie holding an industrial-looking carousel from which identical suited men hang as if on a dilapidated carnival ride

Nostalgia and Apocalypse

In conjunction with My Anxious Self, the most comprehensive survey of paintings by the late Tetsuya Ishida (1973–2005) to have been staged outside of Japan and the first-ever exhibition of his work in New York, Gagosian hosted a panel discussion. Here, Alexandra Munroe, senior curator at large, Global Arts, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, and Tomiko Yoda, Takashima Professor of Japanese Humanities at Harvard University, delve into the societal context in which Ishida developed his work, in a conversation moderated by exhibition curator Cecilia Alemani.

Titus Kaphar and Derek Cianfrance both wearing large headphones and tee-shirts on a film set

Titus Kaphar and Derek Cianfrance

Titus Kaphar and director Derek Cianfrance spoke on the opening night of Titus Kaphar Selects, a film program curated by the artist as part of a series copresented by Gagosian and Metrograph in the spring of 2023. The pair discussed their respective practices, including Cianfrance’s film Blue Valentine (2010) and Kaphar’s film Exhibiting Forgiveness, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 20, 2024.

Black-and-white photograph of two women having breakfast in bed and reading newspapers with a tapestry of an abstracted face hanging on the wall behind them

A Flat on Rue Victor-Considerant

Lee Miller and Tanja Ramm’s friendship took them from New York to Paris and back, in front of and behind many cameras, and into the Surrealist avant-garde. Here, Gagosian director Richard Calvocoressi speaks with Ramm’s daughter, art historian Margit Rowell, about discovering her mother’s early life, her memories of Miller, and the collaborative work of photographers and models.