Market Log #2
A monthly roundup of books, podcasts, articles, art exhibitions and movies/documentaries I consumed in March.
March was a good month. Against the onslaught of bad news, I managed to host a retail panel, see some good art, plan two upcoming spring events, and finish Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book The Message. I was also featured on two major outlets, most notably The Cut. I get into that plus everything I consumed ahead:
In the Press:
If you opened The Cut on March 26, then you saw Chris and I on the homepage. This article raised interesting questions about the culture you become part of as an immigrant or transplant. Although I wasn’t born or raised in New York, I consider myself a New Yorker because I uphold the values that make the city a welcoming, tolerant and liberal place.
There are so many tidbits from our conversation with the editor that I wish were included (we touched on parasocial relationships, how social media recreates hegemonic systems of power, and the authoritarian nature of the relationship some influencers have with their audience), but it was a great honor to be recognized!
I love that this feature happened in the same month The Cut asked me to comment on the NYC influencer discourse. As I told the editors at Marmalade, what I love most about living in the Big Apple—and what I feel makes me a true NYC creator—is my active engagement with the cultural scene, whether it be through consuming new works of visual arts, attending literary festivals, patronizing its museums, or cultivating my own community through events.
It was a pleasure to be featured in one of my go-to African media sites! A fun fact that came up: I speak four languages (Creole, French, English and Spanish). And I am also a very good fashion sketcher!
About Town:
Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature (On view through May 11 at the Met)
Friedrich was a leading painter in Romanticism, a cultural, artistic and intellectual movement that rejected cold-hearted rationality in favor of emotional subjectivity and the sublime. This exhibition is a timely (yet timeless) meditation on our relationship with nature and what we stand to lose when we trade our connection to the world around us to a technology-mediated one.
I also took away a new favorite German mantra: Fernweh, or the yearning for distant places and for experiences of the unknown.