To the cult British interior and furniture designer Ilse Crawford, interiors too often take a backseat to architecture. Through her humanistic, systems-thinking, “Frame for Life” approach, however, Crawford has shown how interiors and architecture should instead be viewed on the same plane and, as she puts it on this episode of Time Sensitive, “walk hand in hand.” Widely known for creating indoor spaces that are notable in their tactility, warmth, and comfort—environments that incorporate, to us...
Mar 20, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Season 9Ep. 107
The Italian chef Massimo Bottura may be a big dreamer, but he’s also a firmly grounded-in-the-earth operator. Based in Modena, Italy, Bottura is famous for his three-Michelin-starred restaurant, Osteria Francescana, which has twice held the top spot on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. He also runs Food for Soul, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting social awareness about food waste and world hunger. With its first Refettorio opened in 2015, Food for Soul now runs a network of 13 Refettorios a...
Mar 13, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Season 9Ep. 106
To Helen Molesworth, curating is much more than carefully selecting and positioning noteworthy artworks and objects alongside one another within a space; it’s also about telling stories through them and about them, and in turn, communicating particular, often potent messages. Her probing writing takes a similar approach to her curatorial work, as can be seen in her new book, Open Questions: Thirty Years of Writing About Art (Phaidon), which culls together 24 of her essays written across three de...
Dec 20, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Season 8Ep. 105
In another life, the German-born architect Annabelle Selldorf might have been a painter or a profile writer. In this one, she expresses her proclivity for portraiture as the principal of the New York–based firm Selldorf Architects, which she founded in 1988. Renowned for its work in the art world—from galleries such as David Zwirner and Hauser & Wirth to cultural institutions including The Frick Collection in New York, the National Gallery in London, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Ga...
Dec 06, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Season 8Ep. 104
To the landscape architect Walter Hood, “place” is a nebulous concept made meaningful only through the illumination of its history and the people who have inhabited it. Hood has dedicated his career to this very perspective through his roles as creative director and founder of Hood Design Studio in Oakland, California, and as chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning at UC Berkeley, where he has taught since 1990. His projects include a series of conceptual g...
Nov 29, 2023•1 hr 16 min•Season 8Ep. 103
Min Jin Lee could be considered an exemplar of the old adage “slow and steady wins the race.” The author’s bestselling 2017 novel Pachinko —a National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestseller that was adapted into a television series for Apple TV+ in 2022—took 30 years to write from its inception as a short story. Her debut novel, Free Food for Millionaires (2007), took five years. These extensive periods of time become understandable, or even seem scant, within the sprawling, multigene...
Nov 15, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Season 8Ep. 102
In art and design circles, the name George Nakashima is synonymous with expert woodworking, exquisite furniture, and high-quality craftsmanship. Over the past 30-plus years, his daughter, the architect and furniture maker Mira Nakashima, has not only artfully built upon his techniques and time-honored traditions, further cementing his legacy, but also stepped outside of his shadow and carved a name for herself. Having worked full-time at George Nakashima Woodworkers since 1970, Mira took over as...
Nov 08, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Season 8Ep. 101
Behind every unforgettable space and every extraordinary experience is a certain je ne sais quoi . If anyone has an idea of what exactly that is, it’s the hospitality impresario and Studio 54 co-founder Ian Schrager. For more than four decades, Schrager has been a defining cultural catalyst and beacon across industries, from hotels and nightlife, to art and architecture, to fashion and food, and beyond. Since the early 1980s, Schrager has devised and developed more than 20 ahead-of-the-curve hos...
Oct 25, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Season 8Ep. 100
To Sanford Biggers, the past, present, and future are intertwined and all part of one big, long now . Over the past three decades, the Harlem-based artist has woven various threads of place and time—in ways not dissimilar to a hip-hop D.J. or a quilter—to create clever, deeply metaphorical, darkly humorous, and often beautiful work across a vast array of mediums, including painting, sculpture, video, photography, music, and performance. Among his standout works are “Oracle” (2021), a 25-foot-tal...
Oct 18, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Season 8Ep. 99
The London-based artist, master potter, and author Edmund de Waal has an astoundingly astute sense for the inner lives of objects. Each of his works, whether in clay or stone, is imbued with a certain alchemy, embodying traces of far-away or long-ago ancestors, ideas, and histories. This fall, two exhibitions featuring his artworks are on view at Gagosian in New York (through October 28): “to light, and then return,” which pairs his pieces with tintypes and platinum prints by Sally Mann, and “th...
Oct 04, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Season 8Ep. 98
The artist and photographer Trent Davis Bailey (our host, Spencer Bailey’s, identical twin brother) continually seeks to unearth the tangled roots of his identity through his intensely personal and place-based work. This summer, his first-ever solo museum exhibition, “Personal Geographies” (on view through February 11, 2024)—a photographic exploration of memory, family, and place—opened at the Denver Art Museum, and this fall, he will release the corresponding project, “The North Fork,” in book ...
Sep 20, 2023•1 hr 28 min•Season 8Ep. 97
For each and every performance the theater director, playwright, choreographer, and sound and lighting designer Robert Wilson creates, time isn’t just of the essence—it is the essence. Perhaps best known as the director of the four-act opera Einstein on the Beach , which he composed with Philip Glass and debuted in 1976, Wilson now has nearly 200 stage productions to his name. These include Dorian , which premiered last year in Düsseldorf, and The Life and Death of Marina Abramović , which opene...
Sep 13, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Season 8Ep. 96
Through his abstract paintings, the Miami-born, Brooklyn-based artist José Parlá explores themes ranging from memory, gesture, and layering, to movement, dance, and hip-hop culture, to codes, mapping, and mark-making. Coming up in Miami in the late 1980s and early ’90s, Parlá spent his adolescence and young adult years steeped in hip-hop culture and an underground scene that involved break dancing, writing rhymes, and making aerosol art. The art form still manifests, in wholly original ways, in ...
Jul 26, 2023•1 hr 14 min•Season 7Ep. 95
The renegade British designer Tom Dixon has long had a roving obsession with raw materials—everything from cast iron, steel, and copper; to clay, glass, and stone; to felt, plastic, and marble; to, more recently, cork and aluminum. Entirely self-trained and without any formal design education, Dixon emerged in the design sphere in the 1980s by creating unusual welded salvage furniture that was at once antique, experimental, beautiful, and punk in spirit. Never short of bold, forward-looking idea...
Jun 28, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Season 7Ep. 94
Dr. Jessica B. Harris is renowned as the grande dame of African American cookbooks. One of the world’s foremost historians, scholars, writers, and thinkers when it comes to food—and African American cooking in particular—she has, over the past 40 years, published 12 books documenting the foods and foodways of the African diaspora, including Hot Stuff (1985), Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons (1989), Sky Juice and Flying Fish (1991), The Welcome Table (1995), The Africa Cookbook (1998), and High on the...
Jun 14, 2023•1 hr 14 min•Season 7Ep. 93
The term “polymath” is unquestionably overused, and often just plain wrong, but it suits the multi-hyphenate British designer, creative director, and artist Samuel Ross, whose hard-to-pin-down practice spans high fashion, streetwear, painting, sculpture, installation, stage design, sound design, product and furniture design, experimental film, and street art. Best known for founding the Brutalism-tinged fashion label A-Cold-Wall, which sits at the nexus of streetwear and high fashion, and for hi...
Jun 07, 2023•1 hr 28 min•Season 7Ep. 92
To Jelani Cobb, reading, writing, and education are inherently acts of empowerment, and sometimes even ones of defiance. A staff writer at The New Yorker since 2015 and recently appointed the dean of Columbia Journalism School, where he has been on the faculty since 2016, Cobb has written on subjects ranging from the power of Dave Chappelle’s comedy, to the vital lessons of Martin Luther King Jr., to Donald Trump as a rapper. Cobb is also the author of the books The Substance of Hope: Barack Oba...
May 24, 2023•1 hr 17 min•Season 7Ep. 91
Over the past 50 or so years, Marilyn Minter has been on a roving exploration of feminist, sex-positive thinking. In her art-making, she harnesses the power of sexual imagery—a realm long controlled by men—and presents it through the lens of female desire. Among her most acclaimed works are her “Bathers” series, which reimagines classic female bathers; her “Bush” series, originally a Playboy commission; and a group of new portraits, currently on view at the New York gallery LGDR (through June 3)...
May 10, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Season 7Ep. 90
As the co-host of NPR’s flagship news program All Things Considered , Ari Shapiro is a go-to source for tens of millions of Americans for essential deep-dives into some of the most critical stories unfolding across the globe. At NPR for more than two decades now, Shapiro has made it his mission to serve as an informational and emotional conduit—or even a translator of sorts—between the subject and the listener. On this week’s episode of Time Sensitive, he talks about his new memoir, The Best Str...
Apr 26, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Season 7Ep. 89
Over his 25 years as CEO of the Danish textile company Kvadrat, Anders Byriel has turned what was once a small, fairly dusty family design business into a global giant. Perhaps just as notably, he’s taken a radical, and even artistic, approach to building and cultivating the brand’s culture, partnering with designers such as Raf Simons, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, and Peter Saville; arts institutions like the New Museum in New York, the Tate Modern in London, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern A...
Apr 12, 2023•1 hr 17 min•Season 7Ep. 88
Across her 40-year-long career, the photographer Tina Barney has become internationally renowned for capturing her particular milieus—family, friends, and neighbors in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, most notably, but also in New York and Sun Valley, Idaho. On this week’s episode of Time Sensitive, she talks about her new book, The Beginning (Radius Books), and corresponding Kasmin gallery show (on view through April 22), which bring together some of her earliest images, taken between 1976 and 1980; w...
Apr 05, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Season 7Ep. 87
On this week’s episode of Time Sensitive—our first of Season 7—Chicago-based artist Nick Cave talks about his career-spanning retrospective, “Forothermore,” currently on view at the Guggenheim (through April 10), which takes over three floors and features installation, video works, and sculpture, including recent iterations of his famous Soundsuits; his improvisational approach to work and life; how his art seeks to find brightness in darkness; and what the world might be like if everyone sat in...
Mar 29, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Season 7Ep. 86
From the archive: The late artist, jewelry-maker, and metalsmith Daniel Brush, who died on Nov. 26, 2022, at age 75, talks about memory (and interpretations of memory); his deep, monkish engagement with a wide variety of materials; and some of his most valuable tools—breathing, language, and light.
Feb 01, 2023•1 hr 25 min
For the American-born chef and restaurateur Ruth Rogers, owner of the Michelin-starred River Cafe on the north bank of the Thames in London’s Hammersmith neighborhood, food is a portal: to memories and cultures. To conversations. To meaningful connections. Since Rogers, who goes by Ruthie, co-founded the celebrated Italian restaurant with Rose Gray in 1987, it has become a well-trod stomping ground for a bevy of artists, filmmakers, writers, actors, architects, and other movers and shakers—many ...
Dec 21, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Season 6Ep. 85
One small step for Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen, one giant leap for mankind. So goes the story of several of the entrepreneur, philanthropist, and humanitarian’s pursuits over the past three decades. At present the founder and CEO of Sceye, a company building stratospheric platforms to help prevent human trafficking and monitor climate change, Vestergaard has a long history in developing catalytic products that have quite literally revolutionized the humanitarian and public health landscapes. Thr...
Dec 14, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Season 6Ep. 84
The artist Hank Willis Thomas is a voracious reader, not only of books, but of the world around us—and particularly, of images. Through his practice, Thomas interrogates and investigates, probes and prods, and ultimately helps make sense of various strands of visual culture—advertising, photographs, videos, clothing and ephemera, monuments—to tell necessary stories and shape new forms of meaning and memory. While Thomas’s roots are in the medium of photography, his work also extends far into oth...
Dec 07, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Season 6Ep. 83
The Swiss-born, Brooklyn-based designer Tina Roth Eisenberg has, over the past 15 years or so, built a cult following of creatives around the world who, like her, constantly seek to connect, reflect, and grow together—and who view her as an inspirational curator and guide. In 2008, Eisenberg founded Creative Mornings, an egalitarian platform that hosts free talks and events, with chapters currently in 225 cities and 67 countries. A serial entrepreneur and the creator of the widely followed Swiss...
Nov 30, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Season 6Ep. 82
Across his four-decade-long career in graphic design, Michael Bierut has amassed an impressively robust tally of bold-faced clients. From The New York Times , Saks Fifth Avenue, and the Robin Hood Foundation to Mastercard, the New York Jets, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Bierut and his team at the multidisciplinary design firm Pentagram—which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year with a two-volume book from the publisher Unit Editions , and where he has been a partner since 1990—hav...
Nov 16, 2022•1 hr 43 min•Season 6Ep. 81
As the New York restaurant Le Bernardin celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, chef Eric Ripert humbly reflects on his three-plus decades there. Over this time, he has brought his artistic vision fully to life, subtly evolving it season to season and year to year, creating an exquisite experience for those guests lucky enough to sit in the dining room of a restaurant that has managed to maintain its four-star rating from The New York Times since shortly after its stateside opening in 1987 (i...
Nov 09, 2022•1 hr•Season 6Ep. 80
The architect Brad Cloepfil views his work as less of a job and more of a calling. Sites speak to him. He listens with his eyes. When embarking on a project, Cloepfil slowly feels out the place, studying its particularities closely in order to understand its truest, deepest nature. He and his Portland, Oregon- and Brooklyn-based firm, Allied Works, craft buildings as much as they design them. His are finely tuned, well-wrought structures, elegantly proportioned, and unforgettable in their tactil...
Nov 03, 2022•1 hr 20 min•Season 6Ep. 79
