NUVO’s Best of the Decade
The multiplicity of voices, styles, and concepts that have filled NUVO’s pages have shaped the publication and its direction as it heads into 2020. Here are 10 profiles that really stood out to us and our readers, in chronological order.
Photographer Jody Rogac.
David Altmejd
Altmejd creates unity in space through materials, energy, and contrast, and incorporates many pieces, new and old, into each show. “It’s important for me that an object is able to generate energy,” he says. “The fact that contrast leads to tension, which leads to the production of energy, makes the object function more like a living being. In the giant, for example, I could fill a cavity with ants,” he says pointing to the figure he’s currently working on. “They could actually go down his leg and start travelling in space. I’m not sure yet.”
Photographer Sarah Soquel Morhaim.
Bret Easton Ellis
To be surprised, of course, one has to have expected something in the first place. That there are so many expectations as to how and where the author of American Psycho and a slew of other equally misanthropic works might live is testament to the power of his work and the heft of his public persona.
Photographer Alessandro Furchino.
Dimore Studio
Making literal their view of space as a collage of creative disciplines and influences, Dimore assembled a mood board–like catalogue—or, rather, a vaguely catalogue-like mood board—for gallery visitors during April’s Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan. It took their furnishings out of any ordinary context by collaging each piece into photographs of random places: end tables in a derelict WC, a pendant light in a pet store, a coffee table in a gym’s weight room, a bench beneath a delivery truck, or a daybed in the middle of the street.
Photographer Christopher Sturman.
Anthony Bourdain
In the streets of Tbilisi or Addis Ababa, he walks slowly perhaps not from creaking bones but to actually see. “When I ask simple questions like, ‘What do you like to eat,’ people all of a sudden start telling you the most extraordinary things.”
Photographer Tom Schirmacher.
Christina Ricci
For the last decade, Christina Ricci has quietly been doing the best work of her career. Those famously large eyes, so round they look decoupaged from a Margaret Keane painting, once communicated childhood innocence, then insouciant teenage lust, and now, as a master of her craft, they flash with the full palette of emotions.
Photographer Jason Schmidt.
Massimo Bottura
In a political landscape darkened by clouds of revanchist nationalism, it’s a message that’s even more relevant today. “Especially now,” says Bottura. “Slavery to nostalgia is the most dangerous, because it generates the old past.”
Photographer Norman Wong.
Emily Haines
Just as we are primed to distrust ambitious women, we are primed by the star-making machinery to see talented, charismatic women as somehow entirely made from the adulation they get. One of the most striking things about Haines in person is her strength of character and the solidity of her belief in herself.
Photographer Jeremy Liebman.
Dapper Dan
Dap tapped into a vast and growing market. Soon he was churning out everything from car interiors to sweatpants to custom fur-lined leather jackets. There was no mistaking a Dapper Dan creation—the chimera of high fashion brands and Dappian swagger was immediately recognizable. Something new had been born.
Photographer Marie H Rainville.
Grece Ghanem
And when in Canada, her master’s in microbiology didn’t translate to the Canadian system. Having subbed for a fitness instructor in Beirut, she turned to Montreal’s YMCA and completed a one-year program to become a personal trainer.“I had to take care of myself and my daughter,” recalls Ghanem. “I had to start again from scratch.”
Photography by Sasha Arutyunova.
Zadie Smith
This sense of connection to, and responsibility for, one another manifests in small acts of collective kindness: in the brusque brigades that form on the street when a stroller gets stuck on the curb and loses a wheel, or when an old woman falls down, dislodging a shoe.
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