Category Arts

A strange thing happens to time during Stereophonic, playwright David Adjmi and director Daniel Aukin’s sensational play at the John Golden Theatre in New York. The show’s three hours and 10 minutes collapse a full year, from June 1976 to June 1977, that a band—made up of vocalist Diana (Sarah Pidgeon), lead guitarist Peter (Tom Pecinka), keys player Holly (Juliana Canfield), bassist Reg (Will Brill), and drummer Simon (Chris Stack)—spends recording their new album, with engineers Grover (Eli Gelb) and Charlie (Andrew R. Butler) manning the board. And, to be clear, those three hours and 10 minutes don’t fly by. This is a play that revels in silences—whether tense, shocked, or sad—as much as it does in rollicking sound. (Will Butler of Arcade Fire composed the songs, which the actors play on real instruments.) The meticulously rendered recording-studio set, by David Zinn, also never changes, so you’d be forgiven for having little sense of how much time has passed by the end of Act I (a month), or for missing that in Act IV, they’re no longer in Sausalito, but Los Angeles.

Yet the action, such as it is—rooted in the sometimes fraught, frequently tedious, occasionally revelatory process of making art—casts a heady spell. Stereophonic enjoyed a sold-out run off-Broadway last fall, at Playwrights Horizons, before transferring to Broadway this April, where it’s received still more acclaim (and four Drama League Award nominations). And both Sarah Pidgeon, 27, and Juliana Canfield, 32, invoke sweeping, unknowable forces (“the universe”; “a great deal of mysticism”) when asked to describe what first attracted them to the piece.

Before Pidgeon—best known until now for her roles in Prime Video’s The Wilds and Hulu’s Tiny Beautiful Things—auditioned for the show last May, she’d read for it in March 2020. (The pandemic scuttled plans for a spring 2021 production.) Those intervening years would prove essential to her interpretation of the searching, slightly neurotic Diana; emotional notes that she could only approximate at 23 had new resonance in her later 20s. “There were things that she was talking about that I could see in my own life more clearly,” Pidgeon reflects one Tuesday morning during previews. Not only did the fracturing love story between Diana and Peter—who talk, and then fight, about ambition and professional pressures and having children—seem a lot less abstract to her than it used to, but Pidgeon’s perspective on her own career as an artist had also evolved in important ways. Diana, who reckons more explicitly with her image as a rockstar than anyone else in the band, “doesn’t necessarily understand her agency and the power that she has [as a songwriter], because she relies so much on her boyfriend to help her make it happen,” Pidgeon explains. As an actor, she could recognize that self-consciousness. “There’s so much rejection in this industry,” she says. “I think it can open up a lot of self-doubt and second-guessing, this feeling that you can’t do this job unless multiple people say that they want to hire you and give you the opportunity.”

See all of Vogue’s coverage from Vogue World 2024 in Paris here!

Vogue World: Paris 2024 is just around the corner, and while we eagerly look forward to seeing what the City of Lights has to offer, there is plenty of already iconic fashion history to pore over from the first two installments, in New York (2022) and London (2023). So, ahead of Sunday’s show, revisit all the best moments from Vogue Worlds past, below.

Serena Williams kicking off Vogue World: New York in custom Balenciaga

For artist Jordan Casteel and fashion designer Batsheva Hay, it was love at first sight. While their husbands, both photographers, had been close for years, the two women struck up a friendship of their own during the early days of the pandemic, when the Denver-born, New York–based painter was hunting for her wedding dress. “I knew I didn’t want to wear a white dress. I wanted to wear something fun, playful, and representative of me,” says Casteel. After the artist’s now husband, David Schulze, recommended Hay, known for her flouncy, printed frocks, the designer wound up making Casteel two wedding dresses: one of blue and yellow wax-print fabric and the other of red moiré.

“Batsheva and I are both very interested in color and pattern and the way that our work can activate spaces and bodies. There’s a real playfulness in her clothing that I’m similarly interested in in the context of my work,” says Casteel. Known for portraits and paintings that Hay describes as “earnest, bright, and interesting,” Casteel has a knack for rendering patterns and textures—think heavily impastoed shearling coats and iridescent rubber Wellies you can almost hear squeaking. Like Hay, the artist delights in unexpected color combinations, often replacing her sitters’ natural skin tones with shades of red, green, and purple.

Over the years, Casteel’s practice has expanded to encompass city scenes, landscapes, and still lifes, reflecting her move from Harlem to upstate New York in 2021, though no matter the subject, her brilliant mark making remains incredibly consistent. Through November 23, the Hill Art Foundation in Chelsea is presenting “Jordan Casteel: Field of view,” a solo exhibition featuring 25 works spanning the last decade of her career. Curated by Lauren Haynes, head curator at Governors Island Arts and vice president for arts and culture at the Trust for Governors Island in New York City, the show includes important loans alongside four monumental portraits from the collection of J. Tomilson Hill, the nonprofit organization’s founder. (Two of these portraits are promised gifts to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.)

While the show’s title, “Field of view,” references Casteel’s process of photographing her sitters prior to painting them, it also sets the tone for what is arguably the artist’s most personal show to date. “My mom sent me a text saying, ‘I don’t know about you, but I think this is your best show yet.’ There’s an element of that that I completely agree with,” says Casteel. “This show feels so of me, and the way that I engage with my work on a day-to-day basis. It’s the crux of how I feel when making these paintings and experiencing them when they’re all together. It’s the full embodiment of me in the practice.”

“It wasn’t about me. It was about the clothes.” That’s a statement from Naomi Campbell, which—in light of the subject of the V&A’s latest fashion exhibition—doesn’t exactly follow through. In recent years, the South Kensington museum has enjoyed record-breaking success with retrospectives dedicated to legendary designers (see 2023/2024’s “Gabrielle Chanel. Fashion Manifesto” and 2019’s “Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams”), but never before has it dedicated an exhibition to a single model, one whose teenage success was so meteoric—and whose image-making is so iconic—she’s referred to by her first name only.

“Naomi: In Fashion” chronicles the astonishing 40-year career of the Streatham-born catwalk star, who spent her early years grooving in music videos for Bob Marley and Culture Club before being spotted in Covent Garden in 1985 at age 15 by the model agent Beth Boldt. Since her first cover shoot in 1987 (the photographer, Patrick Demarchelier; the fashion, exquisitely embellished gold and turquoise Chanel Haute Couture designed by Karl Lagerfeld), Campbell has gone on to grace the cover of Vogue US and British Vogue several times. In August 1988, she was the first Black woman to be shot for the cover of Vogue France; she represented the stratospheric era of the supermodel on the 1991 cover of Time (complete with the cover line “Beauty and the Bucks”), and in 1997 became the first Black model to open a Prada show.

“I can’t imagine debuting my retrospective anywhere else but London—this is where I was born, raised, and discovered—but it is, I’ll admit, more than a little nerve-wracking to think of it as a homecoming,” Campbell wrote in the March 2024 issue of British Vogue.

“It’s hard to think of any other model that warrants their own dedicated museum exhibition,” says Sonnet Stanfill, senior curator, fashion, at the V&A, at a preview of the exhibition, where we are greeted in the ground-floor gallery by a joyful montage of Campbell’s catwalk appearances. Bringing together pieces from the supermodel’s own extensive fashion archive, personal ephemera (including one of her first Concorde tickets, and her profile pages in Elite’s 1997 model directory book), and photography spanning decades, Stanfill has created a multi-sensory sojourn through the milestones of a singular career—one that has seen Campbell form longstanding collaborative relationships with designers including Azzedine Alaïa, Jean Paul Gaultier, and Karl Lagerfeld, photographers from Steven Meisel to Peter Lindbergh, and evolve after a certain George Michael music video from a supermodel with a capital “S” into a social activist and philanthropist, who bonded with Nelson Mandela and founded the Black Girls Coalition in 1989, alongside Bethann Hardison and Iman. As Campbell previously told Vogue: “To stand in front of my wardrobe is a humbling experience; vivid memories replay bygone conversations with the legendary designers who were among my closest friends and collaborators.”

A hunky country star, weary of fame and longing for the simple life, chucks it all to open a farm store in his hometown; there, romance, rippling pecs, and existential wrangling ensue. Though this could be the landing-page synopsis of the latest Hallmark Channel offering (a 2015 film called A Country Wedding comes pretty close), it is actually the plot of Hold On to Me Darling, a 2016 play by Kenneth Lonergan. A new revival of it is now playing off-Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, starring Adam Driver as Strings McCrane, a troubled crooner. (Neil Pepe directs.) Despite the schmaltzy setup, it is a thoughtful rumination on the hazards of celebrity with rich performances—including a wonderful one from Driver.

We first meet McCrane in a Kansas City hotel suite, where he is grappling with the recent death of his mother, a formidable woman he could never quite please. Enter Nancy, a local masseuse he engages for some stress relief, who quickly sees McCrane as her ticket out—and who could blame her? (For interested parties, a muscly Driver is in boxer briefs within 10 minutes of curtain.)

The late Bay Area artist Bernice Bing was 25 years old when she had her first solo show, at San Francisco’s edgy but short-lived Batman Gallery, in 1961. Her abstract paintings were a hit; San Francisco Chronicle critic Alfred Frankenstein said Bing had a “remarkable gift for fluid line,” among other bits of praise. Not bad for a recent MFA grad. “People were somewhat surprised at my work because I hadn’t made a lot of noise at school,” Bing once reflected. “So, when I had that exhibition, people were rather taken aback by it. I liked that; I like surprises!”

Sixty-three years later, Bing is the subject of another astonishing debut: her first-ever solo show in New York. “Bernice Bing: BINGO,” on view at Berry Campbell gallery through October 12, brings together more than 30 works spanning from 1961 until 1998, the year Bing died of cancer at age 62. It’s a long-overdue moment for an artist whose ferocious paintings rank right up there with the other greats of mid-century American art.

In her lifetime, Bing had a whole lot stacked against her: She was gay, Chinese American, orphaned, abused, a woman. And she was an Abstract Expressionist living some 2,500 miles away from the center of that scene. But she persisted, plumbing art history, the lush California landscape, and her own complex history in her searing paintings.

While she was well-known in Bay Area artistic circles, wider acknowledgement of her work was limited—as was the case for so many non-white, non-male artists of that era. “She was this incredible artist who’s been hidden because people were too afraid to go there with her,” says Martha Campbell, who, along with Christine Berry, founded Berry Campbell in 2013.

The life of a war photographer may sound like the elegant, globe-trotting stuff of office-cubicle daydreams, but as celebrated conflict photojournalist Lynsey Addario notes in her 2015 memoir, It’s What I Do, the reality of the job is often less flashy—and more emotionally driven—than it appears. “I see images in newspapers, magazines, on the internet—refugee camps in Darfur, women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, wounded veterans—and my heart leaps,” she writes of pursuing the work that regularly separates her from her family and often puts her directly in harm’s way. “I am suddenly overcome with this quiet angst—a restlessness that means I know I will go.”

Now, Addario’s first solo gallery exhibition, “Raw, curated by Danny Moynihan, is on view at the Lyles & King gallery in New York City, where it will run through November 9. Vogue spoke to Addario about making the leap from photojournalism to fine art; the importance of capturing the subtler, less violent parts of war; and her advice for other women in similar fields. The conversation has been edited and condensed.

Vogue: How does it feel to see so much of your work in one place?

Lynsey Addario: I mean, it’s a tiny collection compared to 25 years of war photography, but it’s really interesting to see the curation and these images of war and climate issues framed and on the walls of a beautiful gallery in New York.

What was it like working with curator Danny Moynihan?

It was amazing. Danny is actually my husband’s father’s cousin, so I’ve known Danny for years, but he also has always been a really big advocate of my work and is obviously very established in the art world as an incredible artist and writer. It was a great process; it was very collaborative. I started by dumping decades [worth] of my archive on him—some of my favorite images that have sold in the past but also ones that have resonated with me over time. And then I just allowed him to do his curation because I thought it would be interesting to see how someone who’s not at all in the world of journalism would curate this body of work for a fine-arts space. One of the things that I always try to do with my work is to get people who wouldn’t normally pay attention to conflict or humanitarian crises to stop and see a photo and ask questions and engage with the issue. So crossing that boundary from journalism to fine art is a really exciting process because it’s a whole different audience.

In this time of seemingly unceasing global conflict, is there anything you wish viewers of the news—and your work—understood better or differently?

Five years (and eight Tony Awards) after its Broadway premiere, Hadestown, Anaïs Mitchell’s arresting musical retelling of the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, has never sounded better. This is thanks not only to Jordan Fisher (Hamilton, Dear Evan Hansen, Sweeney Todd) and Maia Reficco (Max’s Pretty Little Liars: Summer School), who star as the searching, hopeful, ultimately doomed young lovers from Greek mythology, but also to the resounding talents of Stephanie Mills, who joined the cast this summer as Hermes.

In a role originated by André De Shields—the Wizard to her Dorothy in the original Broadway production of The Wiz, the show that launched her career—Mills lights up the Walter Kerr Theatre like a bottle rocket, endowing the story’s de facto narrator with both a moving maternal empathy and the warmly soulful timbre that fans of her work as a recording artist know so well.