In-convo with Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack and Ike Onyewuenyi

Onyewuenyi

The exhibition title, YOU CAN HATE ME NOW, immediately made me think about Nas — and specifically the “Hate Me Now” video. My brother-in-law still lives near the deli where they shot some of it.

Gaitor-Lomack

Up on the deli?

Onyewuenyi

Yeah.

Gaitor-Lomack

That was an iconic moment for 1999.

Onyewuenyi

Iconic.

Gaitor-Lomack

You know, it’s funny. I almost created some kind of custom awning situation for this show, something I could climb up onto during the performance. I did something like that years ago — climbed onto this narrow stone ledge — but that was tied more to a St. Michael moment I was having.

Onyewuenyi

What was the St. Michael backstory?

Gaitor-Lomack

There was a period where St. Michael kept appearing to me in these strange metaphors and traces. Everywhere I turned, something was pointing back to him. I ended up at Popular Jewelry on Canal one afternoon and came across this vintage St. Michael pendant — 14k, Italian-made, just an incredibly crafted piece. One of the most beautiful objects I’ve ever owned. It hung on a gold rope I bought back in New Haven when I was putting in serious work. I felt like I was back in ’96 wearing that thing. I wore it for years.

Onyewuenyi

What was going on at the time?

Gaitor-Lomack

It was right after one of the best openings I’ve had — at PPOW. I was dressed in off-white; Michelle was with me, also in off-white. Then later that night, something shifted. It was Fashion Week on 9/11/2021. The streets had this thirsty energy. Tribeca was on the edge of a new rebirth — designers, artists, people chasing proximity, trying to squeeze into whatever they thought the moment was. Still happening. I made the decision later that spring to move back to L.A.

Onyewuenyi

You’ve talked about having these spiritual encounters — these visions. Some people might dismiss that. They might call them hallucinations. But I think when I look at your work, and how you move in the world, it’s very clear these encounters shape your practice.

Gaitor-Lomack

Right. And when you’re tapped into that kind of process, you’re not imagining things — you’re receiving them. There’s something extraordinary about making the unseen present, passionately and uniquely, through the work. These aren’t hallucinations. They’re visions. They pull you into different places and experiences that most people never step into.

I remember one time in Palermo, I got lost wandering through this old town. I ended up inside this beautiful church — glowing like I’d never seen before. I had this moment like, How did I even get here? Because back home? I’m not stepping into a church. I avoid those structures entirely.

Onyewuenyi

It’s funny because before your show here, you’ll probably pass through Queens, which puts you right back into the orbit of Nas and that whole lineage. YOU CAN HATE ME NOW.

Gaitor-Lomack

Exactly. YOU CAN HATE ME NOW.

Onyewuenyi

One of the major works you’ve been describing is the elevator sculpture — Only Way Up. What is it about that piece that holds such weight for you?

Gaitor-Lomack

It’s a turn-of-the-century birdcage elevator. I’d been imagining doing something with a lion’s cage at first — I kept thinking about Charlie Chaplin’s silent performance inside a lion’s cage. There’s this magical moment where metaphor meets sensory fear and fantasy. That’s the energy that originally drew me toward the elevator. And these elevators were hand-cranked — there was always someone stationed inside. A handler. A guide. Someone controlling your ascent.

Onyewuenyi

Almost like someone deciding what floor you deserve.

Gaitor-Lomack

Exactly. But in Only Way Up, there’s no one inside. It’s empty. There’s an authority missing — or maybe it’s being reclaimed.

Onyewuenyi

Can people enter it?

Gaitor-Lomack

Who knows?

Onyewuenyi

What I love is how you take objects we think we understand and you shift their meaning — make the unseen visible. Like the Black & Mild tips. There’s something alchemical in how you transform something discarded into something symbolic.

Gaitor-Lomack

Those Black & Mild tips — that’s a special moment in my practice. Where I’m from, cigarettes were around, but Blacks were the thing. Champing a Black: removing the cancer paper, putting the tobacco back, tapping it down. Ritual. And then when I went to New Haven — it felt like Jersey in the ’90s. Everything in slow motion, very familiar. Productive. Corner stores everywhere. Hustle everywhere. And on the ground? Black & Mild tips everywhere. I used to go out with a brown bag and a glove and just collect them.

The first piece I made was Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire: a Christmas tree with every branch replaced with Black & Mild tips. Then I wrapped a fire extinguisher during a performance at a solo exhibition and placed it under the tree.

Onyewuenyi

It reminds me of something Fiona Duncan asked during an artist talk: “How does your work help Black liberation?” I’m curious how you respond to that.

Gaitor-Lomack

Liberation isn’t ordinary. Using your imagination is its own form of liberation — showing people that freedom is available in different forms. But you have to liberate yourself before you can liberate anyone else.

There are artists who get close to something powerful, and the moment they feel that proximity, they start talking too much — leaking things before they’re lived. When you leak information, you can destroy the operation. In my work, a lot of things are coded. The nuances of a Black & Mild tip — those are encoded forms of experience.

Onyewuenyi

Someone brought up Glissant — how he supposedly held a gun in Cuba during liberation movements. His friends later said it never happened. It became a myth he told himself. That myth-making is powerful.

Gaitor-Lomack

Myth is essential. And I’m moved constantly by things people don’t see. But we’re also dealing with what we do see — the aggressions, projections, rhythms of the street, the past, the future. Everything collides. It becomes an equation. I was never great at math, but when I slowed down, I realized: it’s all about how you see the problem. So now, in the work, I’ve simplified the equation. At one point I might’ve used many objects, but now sometimes it’s three moves. Two. One. That’s a life lesson.

Onyewuenyi

And there must be things you see that you choose not to turn into artwork.

Gaitor-Lomack

A lot. Because I move with sensitivity and discipline. Just because something is part of the Black experience doesn’t mean I get to exploit it — especially commercially. If it’s not mine to tell, I leave it alone. There’s so much bad tracing happening — bad work using Blackness as a shortcut or shield. Awards, representation, museum talks — none of that justifies poor taste. I don’t exploit my people. And it has to meet my taste at the moment. Everything is not for the world.

Onyewuenyi

I remember sending you a photo of a thrift-store piece thinking you’d like it, and you said no. And that felt like part of your code.

Gaitor-Lomack

It’s like walking down Canal Street. Everything’s labeled. Everything’s screaming for attention. I’m drawn to the things without the label — objects with a story. And that’s what I invest in: the unseen value, the unfamiliar.

Onyewuenyi

That connects to the Table of Patrons project — people supporting something they can’t see yet, trusting the unseen.

Gaitor-Lomack

Exactly. You trust the vision. You trust the person delivering it. Shiny objects aren’t always what they seem. Some of them have dark histories. Sometimes the loudest thing isn’t the best thing.

Onyewuenyi

You once said you get 16 bars with a person — just like in music — to make them see the vision.

Gaitor-Lomack

You do. And those 16 bars need to hit. People need to visualize themselves within what you’re building.

Onyewuenyi

Does every artwork feel like your 16 bars?

Gaitor-Lomack

Not anymore. I’ve simplified. Sometimes one clean line is worth more than a whole verse. One work can be enough. One show every three years can be enough. I don’t need four solos a year. My pace matters more than the industry’s hunger.

Onyewuenyi

Yet you’re always making.

Gaitor-Lomack

Always. That’s the life I chose.

Onyewuenyi

The chairs in this show stand out. They feel like warnings: don’t get comfortable.

Gaitor-Lomack

That’s exactly right. Get up. Move. A Chair for a Powerful Curator — the tilt, the missing leg, the balloon that says “congratulations” — it’s all coded. Nothing is meant to hold you for long.

Onyewuenyi

And then there are works like I’m Indigenous Too. People see an American flag being pierced, but it’s actually an Angels hat.

Gaitor-Lomack

Right. People assume. But I’d never disrespect the flag like that. It’s corny. This hat had stars and stripes, and I made it into a viper — nails in every star. Nails are historical: without them, nothing gets built. That’s part of the language.

Onyewuenyi

And Pope Dealer — the sculpture in MacArthur Park.

Gaitor-Lomack

That’s Pope Romero. God bless his soul. Mink coat, gold rope. Another kind of altar.

Onyewuenyi

Religion is everywhere in your work — Catholicism, Islam, Judaism. Did you grow up religious?

Gaitor-Lomack

I grew up around all of it. New Jersey exposed me to everything — synagogues, Five Percenters, Nation of Islam. My mother cared for an elderly Jewish man, Ivan. He taught me things about his culture while we watched TV and talked cars. I’m an ally to it all.

Onyewuenyi

Your work feels like it embraces spiritual multiplicity — syncretism — without submission.

Gaitor-Lomack

Exactly. There’s no submission in my work. That’s the difference between art and religion. These symbols are man-made. I can reorient them. Transform them. They move us daily whether or not we practice the religion tied to them. And I’m free in that. Total freedom.

Onyewuenyi

That ties back to the title — YOU CAN HATE ME NOW. There’s a directness to it.

Gaitor-Lomack

The title is a response — not an explanation. To the past, the present, and what’s coming. I’ve taken a code of silence around explaining it too much. The work is the response. Whether you walk in or walk out, whether you question my intention — I’ve already responded.

Onyewuenyi

You’ve mentioned the Carmina Burana — Lady Fortuna — as part of the architecture behind the show.

Gaitor-Lomack

Yeah. These last years have been about luck, fortune, cycles, the wheel turning. I sample that energy. It’s how I choose to spin everything now.

Onyewuenyi

You’ve said you don’t fit in, and you don’t want to.

Gaitor-Lomack

Never fit in. I’ve danced around people who do, but only because I can. That’s my gift. I know too much to fit in. I’m in a different place with it now — almost like an art of letting go. If success means becoming something I don’t respect, I don’t want it.

Onyewuenyi

And so much of the work becomes a forecast — a guide for others, even when you step back.

Gaitor-Lomack

Exactly. I’ve helped so many people see the next step in their race. Now it’s my turn to walk my own walk. What I’ve been forecasting is here now.

Onyewuenyi

Artists often talk about community, responsibility, representation. But with you, it feels like it all returns to vision.

Gaitor-Lomack

Vision, and the unseen. And trusting it.

Onyewuenyi

Well — thank you for walking us through this world. It’s powerful.

Gaitor-Lomack

Thank you. I love speaking about the work — and I love not speaking about it. But I always enjoy giving someone the experience.

Self-Portrait by Daniel T Gaitor-Lomack

Art

Stone Island x Frieze by Reika Takebayashi

May 13, 2026

At large-scale art fairs, clothing usually exists to disappear. Staff uniforms are designed for functionality, neutrality, invisibility. But when Stone Island invited Reika Takebayashi to design the uniforms for Frieze, something quieter and stranger emerged instead. Takebayashi’s practice drifts somewhere between memory, geology, atmosphere, and hallucination. Her paintings and ceramics rarely depict landscapes directly; they feel more like emotional residues of places, unstable fragments suspended between reality and imagination. Translated onto clothing, those same sensibilities begin moving through space differently — no longer fixed to canvas or object, but absorbed into bodies, gestures, labor, circulation.

The collaboration also speaks to a broader collapse currently happening between fashion, art, and utility. Not the tired luxury-industrial crossover that dominates contemporary culture, but something more subtle: the idea that texture, atmosphere, and personal mythology can survive even within functional systems. That uniforms, too, can carry memory. That movement itself can become part of an artwork.

We spoke with Reika about imagined landscapes, touch, repetition, and what happens when art stops existing as an image and starts existing in motion.

Interview by Andriy Zozulya

Your work sits somewhere between real and imagined landscapes, it feels almost like memory that never actually happened. Are you trying to reconstruct something, or escape it?

I begin my work from landscapes I have experienced. Rather than simply reproducing what I see, I try to re-examine the atmosphere of a place and the layers of memory embedded within it from multiple perspectives, and to reconstruct a landscape on the canvas. I am less interested in reconstruction than in the process by which fragments of memory and landscape transform over time. By valuing the feeling of “something that seems real,” I believe this is a way of approaching reality.

You’re working with painting and ceramics, both very physical, material processes. How important is the idea of touch and texture in your practice?

It is very important. Touch and texture carry information that cannot be captured by vision alone, giving a sense of time, weight, and resistance to the work. Like clouds in the sky, ripples on water, or peeling paint on a wall, the natural world is full of abstract phenomena that never repeats itself. By finding scenes within them, I feel that our sensibilities are shaped along the way.

When worn, the work is no longer fixed, but changes along with movement and environment. I see this as a kind of extension.

Designing staff uniforms with Stone Island means your work becomes something people wear, move in, and work in. Does it lose something in that translation, or does it gain a different kind of life?

Rather than losing something, it feels like a shift into a different context. When worn, the work is no longer fixed, but changes along with movement and environment. I see this as a kind of extension.

Uniforms usually erase individuality, but your work is very personal and intuitive. Did you try to resist that, or lean into it?

Instead of being completely uniform, I hope subtle differences emerge depending on the person who wears it.

Your work often explores natural phenomena and imagined landscapes, where do these worlds originate from for you?

They originate from memories of landscapes and natural phenomena I have observed, which gradually merge and transform over time.

More broadly, how do you see the relationship between art, function, and everyday use in this kind of collaboration?

I see art, function, and everyday life not as separate, but as continuous. In this kind of collaboration, I find interest in how those boundaries gradually dissolve.

Frieze Week returns to The Shed in Hudson Yards of New York. From May 13th-17th, browse over 65 galleries spanning 26 countries and discover today's most compelling artist within New York's vibrant and irreplaceable art scene spirit.

Art

Putting the Woman Back in Womanizer

"Womanizer" - a word visually literally dominated by “woman”, yet by definition focused on a male character, defining how males manipulate multiple women for sexual gain - is an accurate notion of the patriarchy which Capozzi dismantles through her work. She takes back this word and through her redefinition, Womanizer solely focuses on what it means to be female, both challenging and leaning into societal standards. Her lawless compositions find celebrities juxtaposed against the mundane, suburbanites against the surreal. Her art clashes absurdity and elegance, naturalism and idealism. These pairings work to disrupt the legacy of the male gaze and in place establish the female point of view. Her involvement to create dreamlike, spontaneous, feminine worlds uplift the raw, fierce, and playful emotions that exist innately and uniquely underneath the structured and polite female persona.

The exhibition will include eight large scale prints and a series of eight unique polaroids featured in the book. The opening reception and book signing on May 14th will run from 5-8 p.m. at 113 Eldridge St, New York, NY 10002. Womanizer will stay open to view during the same hours until the 23rd, with the book available for purchase.

Art

Form Without Formula: Ruth Asawa At Guggenheim Bilbao

May 01, 2026

Ruth Aiko Asawa believed that every minute attached to the earth should be spent doing something. That mantra is breathed into life into a new exhibition celebrating her work, Ruth Asawa: Retrospective, now open at the Guggenheim Bilbao.

The first major coverage of the artist’s work on the European continent, it comes alongside a wider appreciation of her craft and attention to space and form, coinciding with the 100th anniversary of Asawa’s birthday. Organised in partnership with the Museum of Modern Art, SFMOMA, and Guggenheim Bilbao, it is the first major museum retrospective to fully examine her six-decade practice containing 240 of her works, opening her practice up to a new generation and reaffirming her place as one of the defining American artists of the postwar period.

Words by Christine Ochefu

Bilbao’s Guggenheim is maybe an ideal setting for an artist so deeply concerned with space, movement, and form. Asawa’s work sits among other legendary names: Jenny Holzer, Yayoi Kusama, Rothko, Richard Serra’s gargantuan steel structure hovering nearby. Yet her sculptures feel entirely their own; her signature hanging forms, made from brass, copper, and bronze wire appear almost weightless. Often untitled, unnamed, and without obvious formula, they move with light and air despite their industrial materials. Still, there are repeated motifs: visually emulating woven baskets and craft weaving, her suspended forms use endless loops of wire to create “forms within forms,” often resembling cells, fruit, flowers, or planets suspended in space.

And in the exhibition there is a deeper appreciation of Asawa’s life and artistic principles. Born to Japanese American farmer parents, Asawa was busy from childhood, balancing schoolwork with life on the family farm whilst holding a strong work ethic from youth. During World War II, her family was forcibly placed in Japanese American internment camps under the Roosevelt administration, she and her siblings becoming separated from their father during the process. But even in the midst of her detainment she kept making, and her creativity was never separate from labour; she took life drawing classes and was inspired by the practice of fellow detainees, some of whom had worked as animators for Disney. She sourced any materials she could find— discarded rubber sheets, leaves even— to make her art.

It was only in later years she would become introduced to the looped wire technique she is widely known for, spending a summer in Toluca, Mexico, where she would take to traditional woven baskets sold at a craft market. But what makes the retrospective especially powerful is its attention to Asawa beyond the now-iconic wire sculptures. The exhibition offers a vision of Asawa as a woman whose private life was intimately reflected in her art, speaking to the age-old tussle between art, womanhood and motherhood and how she overcame it

For Asawa, the two were never separate. Her work was not made despite domestic life, but through it, with family, children, and home forming as part of the practice itself. Pieces drawn from her later years in San Francisco intimately bring her private life into focus and reveal the breadth of her multidisciplinary practice: paintings, drawings, prints, and notably clay and bronze casting. There are children’s feet cast in bronze, such as that of her grandson Henry, as well as casts of her own tools, her hands. Asawa famously plaster cast the faces of people in her home studio at the kitchen table, usually taking to a subject if she thought they looked interesting. And littered across the exhibition are some selections of those thousands of faces she cast in her lifetime. The artist once said that “an artist is someone who can take ordinary things and make them special.” It feels like both an artistic principle and a metaphor for her life.

Asawa spent much of her career defying the boxes placed around her— racism, wartime incarceration, discrimination, and the tendency to overlook women artists whose work was seen as too domestic or decorative. At the Guggenheim Bilbao, Ruth Asawa’s work feels both delicate and radical in reminding us how she turned those assumptions inside out. It reminds us that form does not need formula, and that the most powerful art can come from repetition, domesticity, and the refusal to stop making.