The Get Down paints the story of black kids in shades of extravagance and opulence, rebuilding the crumbling Bronx into a dreamscape burning with color and sizzling with energy—as bright and angry and political and explosive as it would’ve felt to live in it.
In this photo essay, Viviana Illanes explores the absolution of loneliness and intimacy of human connections through film photography. It’s heartbreaking and raw in all the best ways.
My father used to be a painter and would encourage me to read into the lives of famous artists, whose works always surrounded us as if family portraits. These are a few picks of the reads that have impacted me the most, the ones I will always find myself drifting back to when in desperate need of inspiration, the ones I hope you find a part of yourself in too, with luck.
The internet is a most gorgeous tool for the suburban art enthusiast. It is, in its scope, the liberation of the artistic narrative from the exclusivity of galleries and museums, putting power not in the hands of the curators, patrons, and donors, but in the everyman equipped with Google images and Instagram. For the first time in human history, art is free. Art is accessible. Art is shareable.
Meet Penny—one of the coolest 17-year-olds on the east coast. She began her work in fashion and culture journalism editing and writing for Things Mag, a Boston-based indie mag “dedicated to giving underrepresented East Coast artists a space to thrive.” Now, she’s a junior in high school and a co editor-in-chief of her own publication, Nether Magazine, a fashion magazine run by teens, for teens that “aims to take back fashion from top-tier corporate magazines” and embodies “the rebellious spirit of those underage, underground, and underestimated.”
This past Friday, Chaia and I got to experience a new exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston called “In Search of Vanished Blood” by Indian installation artist Nalini Malani. The piece allowed us to be a part of the art; the installation was not complete until we were in it. Malani’s work moved the both of us so much that we decided to share some of the visuals and our own words below.
Unless you have been trapped in the Upside Down for the past month, you have heard about The Duffer Brothers’ new series Stranger Things. Set in the early 1980s, the Netflix original follows the story of a mother trying to find her missing son, everything his spit-sworn best friends turned brothers will do to save him, a Sinéad O’Connor-channeling, waffle loving, telepathic runaway, and a government conspiracy with a little classic John Hughes teenage love triangle thrown in for good measure.
In a continuing celebration of the 15th anniversary of The Strokes’ “Is This It”, Modern Girls brings you the original track-listing as viewed through The Inflammatory Essays.
Blankness is not a void because we come from nothing, in the form of Big Bangs and stardust, and yet we have the power to be everything – sometimes art is the place to remember that.
There’s few things as rock ‘n roll, versatile, and unabashedly customizable as a classic denim (or leather! or fur!) jacket – or, if you’re Justin Timberlake, a denim-on-denim-on-denim tuxedo. For Modern Girls, a signature jacket is more than just a statement – it’s a story. Even if our personalized jackets didn’t make the 2001 AMAs red carpet (and the scrutinizing gaze of early 2000s fashion blogs), their stories are still worth being told.
