Time Sensitive

Alfredo Jaar illuminates truths that often escape popular consciousness. Through his work, the artist and filmmaker raises awareness about sociopolitical issues that have been forgotten, suppressed, or ignored, including genocide and the displacement of refugees. Simultaneously, he informs and engages viewers, urging them to be present for those who need their attention most. With all that he make...

Dan Barber is on a mission to quite literally plant seeds for a better future. Around a decade ago, after learning that the nation’s largest food companies rarely breed food for flavor—and instead select for self-serving characteristics, such as the ability to produce high yields or endure long-distance travel—Barber, a chef and the co-owner of the restaurants Blue Hill in Manhattan and Blue Hill...

John Hoke, Nike’s chief design officer, intimately understands how to move design from an object to a feeling. At the company over the past three decades, he has refined his approach to center around creating designs that serve wearers in practical yet unexpected ways, and that often redefine what sportswear can look like and do. Hoke often tells his team that “the goal is goosebumps”—to develop i...

Claudia Rankine cuts to the chase. She does not mince her words. The poet, essayist, playwright, and educator—whose recent body of work analyzes white supremacy in America—looks closely at its subtle and not-so-subtle manifestations, personal and systemic. Her forthright attention to the unspoken runs across three plays and six collections of poetry, in which Rankine works through subjects of trag...

Kenny Schachter has an insatiable appetite for all things art. The polymathic art dealer, curator, teacher, writer, critic, collector, and self-taught artist brings a Tasmanian Devil–level energy to all that he does, but always with great, arms-open passion and, even within his whirlwind of ideas and projects, deep focus. For good reason, he has become a sort of enfant terrible in the art world, s...

For Reginald Dwayne Betts—a poet, lawyer, and activist who supports and contributes to prison decarceration efforts—reading and writing have a mind-expanding power that never wanes. The author of three books of poetry and a memoir, his prose is intimate and raw. Even when he’s not writing about himself, Betts finds ways to build personal connections with his subjects for his award-winning work in...

Maggie Doyne, who co-founded the BlinkNow Foundation nonprofit at age 19, discusses how, over the past 13 years, she has developed a school, children’s home, health clinic, and women’s center in Surkhet, Nepal.

Michael Murphy believes in architecture that promotes connectivity, collectivity, and health, in the broadest sense of the term. As the founding principal and executive director of MASS Design Group, a 14-year-old nonprofit architecture and design collective with main offices in Boston and Kigali, Rwanda, he creates buildings with the aim of aiding individuals and communities, and addressing compl...

David Wallace-Wells, author of the best-selling book The Uninhabitable Earth and New York magazine’s editor-at-large, wields vivid language that makes people pay attention. But his writing isn’t hyperbole. Wallace-Wells’s clear-eyed, cinematic storytelling provides coherence and context around some of today’s most complex issues, from California wildfires to Covid-19. His writing demonstrates his...

Trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis, the managing and artistic director of New York’s Jazz at Lincoln Center (JALC), is a man bursting with endless energy. Throughout his four-decade career, he has never seemed to run out of steam. He signed his first recording contract at 22, and has gone on to release more than 100 jazz and classical recordings, win nine Grammy Awards, author six books, and e...

When Siri Hustvedt was 12 years old, she began reading 19th-century novels by Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain that were given to her by her Norwegian mother, and soon developed a passion for literature. She found great satisfaction in how these stories expanded her mind with new ideas and realms beyond. At 13, precociously enough, she decided she wanted to become a...

Throughout his life, Daniel Humm has constantly pushed himself to the edge. So when Covid-19 arrived, he understood the importance of a quick pivot. Forced to close Eleven Madison Park—his three-Michelin-star Manhattan restaurant, named No. 1 in the world in 2017—he had to lay off all of his staff. Facing bankruptcy, Humm reflected on the many food-related issues that the pandemic was heightening,...

The poet, educator, and scholar Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, views her work as an urgent political act. Following in the footsteps of her father, who was a civil rights advisor and special counsel to President Lyndon B. Johnson, Alexander has witnessed the sometimes exasperatingly slow pace of progress, particularly when it comes to racial equality, and the re...

Artist and designer Debbie Millman has been fascinated by the power of branding for most of her life. And as the host of the Design Matters podcast (which was recently translated into a book, out next month) and chair of the School of Visual Arts’s Masters in Branding program, she constantly has branding on her mind. For Millman, part of the allure of logos, identities, and marketing stems from th...

For curator and scholar Glenn Adamson, craft isn’t a quirky hobby that sits on the outskirts of contemporary culture. Rather, it’s a vital, timeless tool for teaching us about one another, and about humanity as a whole. This belief fuels his writing, teaching, and curatorial projects, which seek to unpack the many ways in which the age-old activity shapes our lives. Adamson’s work shows that craft...

Trevor Paglen aspires to see the unseen. The artist explores the act of looking through various angles—such as how artificial-intelligence systems have been trained to “see” and categorize the world, or the disquieting sense of being “watched” by a security camera—and creates scenarios that frequently implicate viewers in the experience. At other times, he’ll take pictures of places that are typic...

When describing experiences, New York–based artist and author Maira Kalman almost always goes for the extremes: an instance can be at once stupid and smart, miserable and hopeful, sad and delighted. A bittersweet point of view forms the throughline of her work—which spans more than 30 books for adults and children, as well as performance, opera, film, and industrial and set design—and gives each p...

Kevin Beasley thinks a lot about objects. In particular, specific objects that relate to notions of American-ness and Blackness—and ones that are often linked, subtly or not, with violence. Whether with a Cadillac Escalade, a pair of Air Jordans, or an N.F.L. helmet, Beasley finds deep connections to each item he chooses to work with, rigorously studying their multifarious contexts, meanings, and...

For Grammy Award–winning singer and songwriter Rosanne Cash, processing the past is a constant, endless journey. She’d been thinking about race and reparations long before the Movement for Black Lives gained momentum last year, as both racism and African-American ancestry exist in her family history rooted in the American South, where she was born to country music legend Johnny Cash and his first...

Growing up in the 1950s in the only Chinese family in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, Billie Tsien always felt like an outsider. She would seclude herself in the shower of her family’s home’s master bathroom, behind closed doors, escaping into books for hours before her parents, who had originally moved to America from Shanghai to study at Cornell, would find her. Through this Tsien developed a deep...

For 37 years, Eileen Fisher has faithfully followed a vision: to create simple, timeless clothes for women that make it easy to get dressed. Soft-spoken, polite, and a self-described introvert, the 70-year-old Fisher is the unlikely CEO of an approximately $500 million fashion company that bears her name. The operation is owned by 42 percent of its largely female staff, and is praised for its long...

Last year, after more than three decades of practicing and teaching Ashtanga yoga, Eddie Stern found himself wondering if he should continue in the discipline. He’d amassed a considerable following through the classes of his New York yoga studios (with celebrity students such as Madonna; Gwyneth Paltrow; and Mike D, of the Beastie Boys), authored two books, launched a successful app with Moby and...

Simon Critchley has seen his share of accidents. In his younger years, he damaged his hands while working in manufacturing plants, and ruined his hearing by rehearsing with a punk band in spaces with subpar acoustics. At 18, he suffered significant memory loss, and most recollections from his childhood in rural England temporarily disappeared. The experience of forgetting, Critchley realized, was...

New York–based jewelry and object designer Monique Péan sees fossils and extraterrestrial materials as portals to another time, space, and place. Pyritized dinosaur bones, woolly mammoth tooth roots, meteorites, and lunaites are among her work’s mediums. She sources these from remote locations—including the Arctic Circle, where she located fossils with Native Alaskan Inupiat and Yupik tribes, and...

Artist Dan Colen built Sky High Farm in the same way all his ideas are realized: intuitively, and with the faith to see it through. A 40-acre self-sustaining ecosystem in New York’s Hudson Valley, the farm helps underserved communities by donating everything it produces to local food banks. Since 2011, Colen and his team have given away more than 70 tons of organic vegetables, fruit, eggs, and mea...