The Goods #1

First, some news: I’m expanding my art and styling services. If you're inspired by the artists and designers I've featured on LOTA and want to better define your personal style—for either your home or yourself—you can sign up for a 30-minute consult. These sessions will be free for a limited time. Learn more here.

This month, I'm also revamping my Substack content, kicking off with a monthly list, The Goods, featuring a curated list across art, fashion, trends, and more that I’m excited about and interested in.

Read on to discover more:

1. Art: Made in LA at the Hammer Museum

“Refuge” by Tidawhitney Lek weaves familiar scenes of Southern California homes with Camodian Genocide. “In Lek’s work, memory is a collective force, and global histories are personal, always shaping the present.” - Hammer Museum | PC: Hammer Museum

The Hammer Museum’s sixth edition of the “Made in LA” highlighting LA-based collectives and artists opened this past weekend. The exhibit, “Art of Living”, was taken from a quote by LA artist Noah Purifoy which is inscribed on the Watts Towers, a project the Purifoy supported the preservation of: “One does not have to be a visual artist to utilize creative potential. Creativity can be an act of living, a way of life, and a formula for doing the right thing.”

Jackie Amézquita gathered soil from 144 LA neighborhoods for “El suelo que nos alimenta” (2023), mixing it with masa (corn dough), salt, rain, limestone, and copper to create sculputres of urban life and transformation | PC: Matt Stromberg/Hyperallergic

The exhibit features moments of life in LA - stories of migration, displacement, and finding community. There is also a focus on using non-traditional materials, often found objects that literally brings the streets to the gallery. As co-curator, Diane Nawi shared with Hyperallergic, “For everyone here, the Western canon is just one arrow in their quiver amongst so many other modes of knowledge, that might be material, intellectual, biographical, or linguistic”. Can’t think of a better love letter to the city I call home.

Made in LA 2023: Acts of Living is open now through the end of the year

2. Music: 1970s Indian Electronic Music

The NID Tapes: Electronic Music from India 1969​-​1972 releases this Friday

“There’s a playful quality to many of the tracks, capturing the “dreamlike moment of possibility” of “a perfect, utopian moment of India post-independence,” - Paul Purgas on discovering Indian Electronic Music tapes from the 70s

British Indian sound artist and curator, Paul Purgas, discovered the tapes | PC: Paul Woodhead for the New York Times

I’m not much of a music buff, but there’s something about the blending of electronic music with Indian beats that I love. Paul Purgas, a British Indian sound artist and curator went to the National Institute of Design in India (a place close to my heart), in search of lost Moog synthsizer that was used at the now defunct experimental studio. What he found was boxes of tapes containing never heard before Indian Electronic music. The full album comes out on Friday of which you can listen to a few tracks here (Recordings for Osaka Expo 70 is my favorite) and read the full article here.

3. Fashion: The Fashion Week Debut of Torishéju Dumi

Naomi Campbell and Paloma Elesser at Torisheju Dumi’s Debut Fashion Show

Torisheju Dumi is a British-born designer with Brazilian and Nigerian roots. She graduated with her Masters from Central Saint Martins in London in 2021 and on Tuesday was the only black fashion designer to have debut at Paris Fashion Week. Naomi Campbell opened the show and Paloma Elsesser closed it out, styled by none other than Gabriella Karefa-Johnson.

“I want to bring a new voice as a Black woman to fashion,” Dumi shared with WWD. Her process is “an obsessive study of pattern, shape and form.” The pieces were deconstructed tailored suits with pops of color peeking out and wrapped skirts referencing the traditional Nigerian Lappa.

View the full collection here.

4. Trends: Are checkerboards the new chevron?

The checkerboard print seems inescapable from rugs to pillows to throws to towels. A now viral TikTok asks if the checkerboard print will become the new chevron that as Millennial we painted the town red in. (FWIW, I don’t think this is true for more classic uses of checkerboard like floors)

@siececampbell@summer

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Share

5. Interiors: Sad Beige Houses

The new Banana Republic Home catalog as captioned by For Scale: “They mean “come home to the world” because allegedly they’ve scoured the world for good ideas, but it’s more like “come home to the world” because EVERYWHERE IN THE WORLD IS STARTING TO LOOK THE SAME.”

One of my favorite reads from : The Poo-ification of the Domestic Colorscape. It is a look at why the beige-grey-brown movement of interiors is making us crave more - not a rainbow of colors, but more nuance, more reminders of our own individuality and experiences.

And a second plug for my art and style advisory to help you out of the brown space. I love the idea stolen from Beata Heuman’s wonderful interiors book - that every room should sing and ideally it should sing your story.