“The Hair Appointment,” by Jeremy Rodney-Hall, 2018 (All images courtesy of Sunday School)

At 24 years old, Josef Adamu was an aspiring model struggling to gain traction in his career. Then he had an idea: if he wanted to find a path forward in his industry, he should carve one out for himself. Adamu initially wanted to start a modelling agency, but found the concept too restrictive. Instead, while working out of his mother’s basement in Toronto, he conceived of Sunday School, a creative brand agency that would work with companies on visually striking projects. His agency’s services include corporate campaign art direction, social media marketing, photography and videography, with a strong focus on stories and subjects from the African diaspora.

At first, Adamu wanted to control every shoot and project himself. “I didn’t leave much creative breathing room for people working with me,” he says. As the agency’s only permanent member, he primarily worked with freelancers, whom he hired on a project-by-project basis. Over the years, as he built up an international network of photographers, cinematographers, stylists and makeup artists, he learned to embrace bona fide creative collaboration. 

“The people behind the scenes are part of my culture,” he says. “Because the work is coming from our community, it’s easy to be intentional with every detail.” Soon, major brands noticed something special about Sunday School: the agency has worked on campaigns for Nike, Converse, Topshop and Sony, and celebrities like Lupita Nyong’o have recognized its work.

Sunday School’s first major Toronto exhibition, Feels Like Home, debuts at the Art Gallery of Ontario in May. The exhibit, which will run for a year and showcases the collaborative efforts of at least 40 people, features work from three projects. 

The Hair Appointment looks at the practice and ritual of natural hair braiding, exploring salons as community spaces. Ten Toes Down depicts a Black ballerina who has finally found pointe shoes and tights that match her skin tone—a meditation on identity, representation and belonging. And Jump Ball, a five-part series, is about the intersection of basketball and the African diaspora. “These three pillars are ways for us to tell stories around what it means to feel at home, far beyond a place where you rest your head,” says Adamu. It’s also a literal homecoming for Adamu, born and raised in Toronto, who has been working in New York for the past few years. 

The exhibition reveals the fruits of Adamu’s transformation as a creative director: after relinquishing some of his control, he’s become more open to spontaneity and improvisation during photo shoots. In an image from Jump Ball, which shows two Ghanaian youths wearing traditional garments on a basketball court, the use of colour is striking. Between their clothing, the basketballs and the hoop, it’s a veritable spectrum of orange—a happy accident, it turns out, and the type of creative coincidence that Sunday School has come to embrace. “I dropped my ego,” Adamu says, “and there’s real power in that.”

“Ten Toes Down,” by Kreshonna Keane, 2021

For much of her dance career, this young ballerina from Philadelphia had to use tights and pointe shoes that were too light for her skin tone. She would “pancake” the garments, applying makeup to them to match her complexion. For this photo shoot, Sunday School partnered with Freed of London, a British company that was one of the first to offer shade-inclusive ballet wear. The project’s name has a double meaning, referencing both the position of the dancer’s feet and a message to focus on what you love to do.

“Jump Ball: Toronto,” by O’shane Howard, 2019

Jump Ball is a five-part series about the cultural intersection between basketball and African tradition. Photographed on a basketball court in St. James Town, Toronto, this image is from the series’ first iteration. It depicts two Ghanaian youths wearing traditional garments that they would normally wear to a family function or special occasion. Adamu met the pair through friends, and he is interested in the way members of the African diaspora shed or don traditional attire—and in turn, parts of their identity—to adjust to their environment.

“Jump Ball: Mighty Migration,” by Joshua Kissi, 2020

The Gabriel family, photographed in their Manchester, New Hampshire, living room, escaped the civil war in South Sudan for the United States in the ’90s. Several children in the family are basketball stars, including Wenyen (not pictured), who plays for the Los Angeles Lakers; Piath, the young woman holding a basketball, is the next prospect to go pro. The house is filled with basketball jerseys and trophies, and the living room is the site of a family tradition: gathering in front of the TV on NBA draft night and waiting for a family member’s name to be called.

“Jump Ball: Mighty Migration,” by Joshua Kissi, 2020

This young man is a close friend of the Gabriel family, who are the main focus of the series. This shot was taken on a New Hampshire basketball court during a casual weekend game. Adamu chose this subject in part for his large hands—posed on the ground with his hands over the ball, looking dead centre into the camera, he suggests the strength and empowerment imparted by the game. On his left wrist, he wears a bracelet depicting the South Sudanese flag.

“The Hair Appointment,” by Jeremy Rodney-Hall, 2018 

An intimate image of an auntie and her niece during their Sunday night hair-braiding routine. They are real relatives, and Adamu met the woman through a casting call for an early project. She connected Adamu to her aunt’s hair salon, which became the inspiration for The Hair Appointment series. The child mimics her aunt’s movements on the doll’s hair, depicting how this knowledge is passed from generation to generation. Adamu intentionally centred his subjects between two picture frames on either side of the mounted mirror, and kept the colours muted to pull focus towards them.

“The Hair Appointment,” by Jeremy Rodney-Hall, 2018

In this image, choreographed by Sunday School, a little girl leans on her sister, both sporting perfectly coiffed braids and posed in front of their Brooklyn apartment building. The girls are sisters (though these aren’t their real school uniforms), and the image is all about their kinship. The older child keeps her fist loosely clenched and her expression stoic, as though she’s protecting her sleepy little sibling. One child wears high white socks, while the other is bare-legged—an intentional detail meant to highlight their contrasting personalities.

“The Hair Appointment,” by Jeremy Rodney-Hall, 2018

This installment in Sunday School’s series features natural hair braiding, which takes place in salons and living rooms—spaces that have long been community hubs within the African diaspora. The image, taken in Alima’s Hair Braiding Salon in Brooklyn, recreates the moment before a client leaves the appointment, in which a stylist will often document their work with a final shot against the salon wall.

Feels Like Home is on display at the Art Gallery of Ontario until May 2024. 

It’s hard to believe that Vienna’s own tourism board is behind a new series of strange A.I.-generated spin-offs of some of Austria’s most iconic artworks starring the internet’s favorite animal, the cat.

Once they’ve got our attention with these viral-ready images, however, the city is offering a different proposition: visit Vienna and “see the art behind A.I. art.”

“With so much artificial intelligence invading lives—particularly with programs like DALL-E or Midjourney that allow anyone to create ‘works of art’—Vienna wants to remind visitors of who made that all possible in the first place,” explained the tourist board’s CEO, Norbert Kettner, in a press statement.

The tongue-in-cheek marketing campaign risks significant backlash, as has been the case for other cultural institutions venturing into A.I., like the San Francisco Ballet and the Mauritshuis in the Netherlands.

Vienna’s UnArtificial Art campaign. Photo: © Vienna Tourist Board, Michael Nagle.

Despite these good intentions, the campaign saw fit to address each modernist master on a first name basis, issuing a slightly offhand apology for mutating their work. “Sorry Egon, but your art made A.I. art possible,” reads one Schiele-style image of a decidedly despondent-looking feline. Another offers its heartfelt condolences to Gustav (Klimt) for ripping-off The Kiss (1907–08).

The board is also releasing a video in which art historian Markus Hübl introduces us to Vienna’s world famous masterpieces by Schiele, Klimt, and Bruegel, before offering a comically far-fetched scholarly analysis of their A.I.-generated derivative.

If the campaign succeeds, it will encourage the fast-growing audience for A.I.-generated images to redirect their attention to the real thing, which can be found at Vienna’s celebrated cultural institutions: the Belvedere, Kunsthistoriches, Albertina and Leopold Museum, to name but a few. There, they can learn about the radical achievements of the Vienna Secession, co-founded by Klimt in 1897.

“The Viennese Modernism movement that revolutionized the art world over a century ago continues to live on and affect today’s art through the algorithms that guide A.I. creations,” said Kettner.

Check out more of Vienna Tourist Board’s A.I. creations below.

Bruegel, Tower of Babel (c.1563) and A.I. picture generated on Midjourney by Vienna Tourist Board. Photos: © Kunsthistorisches Museum and Vienna Tourist Board.

Gustav Klimt, Beethovenfries, (1901/02) at the Secession. Photo courtesy of Vienna Tourist Board.

Picture inspired by Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, generated in 2023 using Midjourney by Vienna Tourist Board.

Colorful Facade of Hundertwasserhaus, apartment house designed by Friedensreich Hundertwasser in Vienna, Wien, Austria. Photo: Petr Svarc/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

Picture of a facade inspired by Friedensreich Hundertwasser generated in 2023 on Midjourney by Vienna Tourist Board

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In the 7th or 8th century, Chinese artisans devised a way to combine feldspar and kaolin and fire it at a very high temperature to produce the first porcelain, which was traded globally and highly sought-after for its elegant surfaces and ornate designs. The precise process wasn’t easy to replicate: not until the early 18th century did makers in Germany first achieve the right mix of materials and methods to produce the ceramic in Europe. Around the world, the bright, white surfaces of dinnerware and decorative vessels provided canvases for the painstaking craft of porcelain painting, emphasizing numerous patterned layers of colorful glaze. For Ukrainian artist Julia Pilipchatina, the craft of hand-embellishing plates connects her to a rich creative legacy and to personal stories and family heirlooms.

Formally educated as a historian, Pilipchatina is fascinated by the profound ties to ancestry and culture that tableware represents. “By choosing a unique plate for ourselves, we draw upon our own values, and—I hope—these objects remain in our families as testament to the lives of past generations,” she says. As a refugee from Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine, the artist was forced to close her workshop, leave all of her belongings behind—save for her two dogs—and start from scratch. Now in Belgium, she’s developing a series of plates depicting detailed, chromatic insects with spotted wings, serrated legs, and feathery feet. She says:

The Beetles series was born out of an attempt to overcome my fear. It’s difficult for me to approach the topic of war. It’s too painful and feels like a black hole that drags me in as soon as I focus on it. But I suppose the nature of fear is the same, and I decided to take on a somewhat safe but strong and irrational fear of insects.

While insects have long appeared in ceramic tableware alongside other popular motifs like birds, trees, and bucolic landscapes, Pilipchatina renders each critter in a style mirroring her watercolor illustrations, inspired by an encyclopedia depicting exotic, jewel-colored specimens in intricate detail. The more she studied the images, the more the creatures ceased to be a source of anxiety as she noted their elaborate patterns and found beauty in their vibrance and textures.

Each bug’s bold, saturated color emerges through the meticulous layering of thin coats of paint, or overglaze, to the surface, then firing the piece at 800 degrees Celsius. “The cycle consists of heating and cooling to room temperature, which means that one firing can last 12 hours,” Pilipchatina says. “Since the paint is semi-transparent, achieving brightness, depth, and contrast requires many layers, and therefore many firings.”

Emphasizing beauty as a reprieve from the loss of her home and the ugliness of war, the artist focuses on tenderness and fragility in the natural world and humanity’s relationship with it and one another. Combining art and utility, an elegantly crafted dish emphasizes longevity, continuity, and tradition while connecting loved ones around the table. She says, “Having an item that belonged to a grandmother or great-grandmother is of great value and rarity. Now, I am creating such objects for the future.”

Pilipchatina explores a range of decorative ceramic designs in addition to a few series of illustrations about her dogs and children’s stories. You can find much more of her work on Behance, Instagram, and in her Etsy shop.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Ukrainian Artist Julia Pilipchatina Draws on the Centuries-Old Tradition of Porcelain Painting with the Future In Mind appeared first on Colossal.

By Dina Weinstein

A new exhibition of work by graduate students in the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts is a first-of-its-kind show fully curated by fellow graduate students in art history, history and museum studies.

The multidisciplinary exhibition, called “(Kin)dred Ties,” opens May 5 with a 5 p.m. reception at the Murry N. DePillars Gallery, 1000 W. Broad St.

Lisa Freiman, Ph.D., an art history professor in VCUarts, designed a new graduate seminar, Curating Exhibitions, to guide students in curating the works of living artists. In addition to readings and insight into the hands-on production process, Freiman emphasized to her students the need for an overall logic to the exhibition.

“Once they started realizing that there were a lot of works that were addressing family – whether it be memories both traumatic and positive, or histories or any number of associations that come with that – [her students] chose specific works, and it was the works that stood out,” Freeman said.

The seminar matched eight art history, history and museum studies graduate students with about 30 VCUarts studio art graduate students in the departments of Craft/Material Studies, Painting + Printmaking, Photography + Film, and Sculpture + Extended media who volunteered to be a part of the project.

“It seemed like such a logical thing to have an exhibition be the medium for cross-pollination between the two programs,” Freiman said.

Among other readings, her seminar included the book “The Curator’s Handbook” by Adrian George, but the face-to-face meetings with fellow graduate students in their art studios were a highlight for the curators.

“The most exciting part of it was when they came back from their studio visits and were doing presentations of each of the MFA candidates,” Freiman said. “They said, ‘The studio visits were amazing. It was so interesting to look at this work and to hear what the artists thought about it, and to be able to have a conversation with them about it.’”

The seminar’s history and museum studies students scheduled group meetings outside of class to parse out and organize the exhibition theme. Fifteen VCUarts graduate students were highlighted initially, with about a dozen featured in the final exhibition.

Mary McLean, a master’s student in history in the College of Humanities and Sciences, took the Curating Exhibitions class to broaden her interpretive skills, and the assignments took her out of her comfort zone.

“One of the biggest challenges has been knowing how to communicate with artists,” she said. “I tend to like to stay in my office, do my research, maybe share it with a couple people. And what this class has challenged me to do is actually reach out to artists and ask them hard questions about their art, like, ‘Why did you make this? Why was this important?’ Those aren’t really questions that you ask somebody. It’s their precious art that they’ve spent so much time on. You’ve got to be a little gutsy. And it’s definitely challenged me.”

McLean said she learned to ask the artists: What are you trying to communicate? How can the audience interact with this? The answers often would make conceptual art relatable.

She was matched with Stacie Sabady, a craft/material studies graduate student in the School of the Arts who used yarn that pays homage to the matriarchs in her family.

“The yarn that she used was from her great-aunt who had passed away,” McLean said. “It’s a sentimental piece. So when I’m writing my interpretation of the piece to go into the exhibition, I want to make sure that I’m not being disingenuous to the memory of her great-aunt.

I want to make sure that I’m getting her rendition correct. And that’s really challenging because I want to be able to convey it to the audience that this is a sentimental piece without exploiting it.”

McLean, who is focusing on Colonial America for her thesis research, added that working with living artists, unlike historical studies of objects, has helped bring empathy to her interpretations.

Nana Ferdnance, a seminar student who is studying art history with a museum studies concentration, relished learning about the artists’ passion and the significance of their work.

“Sometimes when people see contemporary modern art, it may look simple, but there’s so much meaning behind that,” she said. “And sometimes for artists, it could be a process of processing trauma, family, emotions and relationships. And that was a through line in our theme where we talked to a lot of artists. They were expressing their family connections and their relationships through their artwork. It was just really gorgeous.”

With a keen interest in diverse contemporary artists, Ferdnance enjoyed interacting with painting/printmaking graduate student Ali Kaeini. His work in the “(Kin)dred Ties” exhibition is a drop cloth framed with Iranian-style miniature objects and architecture, along with poetry painted on it that conveys the experience of displacement.

Ferdnance said the hands-on seminar echoed her recent experience as an intern at the National Gallery of Art and will support her career aspirations in the museum world. In addition to working with people of different backgrounds and interests, she got insight into creating exhibition proposals and contracts, coordinating with artists for delivery of their work, and event production and promotion.

Freiman said her seminar students responded robustly to interacting with artists close to their age, and in turn, the MFA students were excited at having peers look at their work.

Shannon Kurzynec’s piece in the exhibition, “Pill Pack Brooch Two,” is crafted of bronze, silver and steel.

“My experience with pills all started with my grandmother,” said Kurzynec, a first-year MFA student in craft/material studies. “When I was younger, she broke her neck, and I remember sitting at the kitchen table with her and watching her take pills by the handful – and her not being able to swallow them because of the accident. I couldn’t even tell you how many she had to take a day. That really impacted the way I viewed pills.”

Losing family members and friends to opioid use and disposing of many pills after her grandmother passed away, also made a big impression on Kurzynec. By creating art out of pharmaceuticals that abound, she wants to make a statement about the commodification of medication.

“It was a great experience getting to have a conversation about my work and the ties to my family,” Kurzynec said of the seminar students and the “(Kin)dred Spirits” exhibition. “By my work being chosen to be in there, it’s quite fantastic for me, because that’s a side of my work that isn’t always shared. It’s not a family portrait. It’s my version of a family portrait. Or a family tree in a really indirect way. It’s been an experience to be able to share that with others.”

“(Kin)dred Ties” will run through May 10. Gallery hours are 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. daily.

Imagine being paid for your homework. 

Every year, students in the College of Communication’s CM423 and CM424 advertising portfolio classes are asked to dream up creative work for real-world clients, albeit with lower stakes: These are imaginary campaigns, and the “client” will never see the finished work. But students come out of the classes with portfolio pieces that showcase their talents in art direction, copywriting, and strategy, crucial for landing those first internships and jobs. 

However, two recent projects were so stellar that Doug Gould, a COM professor of the practice of advertising and longtime industry pro, knew they had professional potential. 

“The work was so impressive that I said, ‘I don’t know if we’ll be able to sell this idea, but it’s so good, we need to get it in front of the client and see if they are interested,’” Gould says. 

His instincts were correct: student work created for the World Wildlife Fund, the world’s largest conservation organization, and Night Shift Brewing, located in Everett, Mass., have now become actual campaigns for the clients. And the students, who have now all graduated and are working in the industry, were paid as freelancers.

Photos courtesy World Wildlife Fund

One of Gould’s assignments called for students to choose a nonprofit they were passionate about, and then craft a campaign to market it. Caroline Richardson (COM’21) and Amanda Berman (Questrom’21) began their WWF campaign in the spring of 2021. 

Richardson, now an associate art director at TBWACHIATDAY, and Berman, currently an art director at RAPP, say they chose WWF as their hypothetical client for several reasons, among them the organization’s large reach. They also both happen to be animal lovers. 

“Their project, which officially launched in March 2023, is a set of gorgeously illustrated alphabet flashcards for elementary school children that intertwines letters and animal photographs (“A” is for African elephant, “B” is for bison, “C” is for coral, etc.) on one side, and a short description of the animal on the back. The flashcards are being used in more than 1,000 classrooms throughout the country as part of WWF’s Wild Classroom program, which provides free resources to guide teachers in developing lessons about conservation.

To get their concept in front of the WWF, Gould cold-messaged the organization’s art director on LinkedIn. The strategy worked. “We hopped on a bunch of Zooms with [the art director] throughout this process, and he was really great at showing us things that we weren’t super well versed in, such as photo editing techniques,” Richardson says. 

The client also helped focus the concept. “Our original idea was more adult-oriented, and was designed to appear on subway posters,” Berman says. It was conversations with the client that led to the illustrated cards. 

Richardson and Berman’s work recently won a Young Ones prize, given for outstanding student design and advertising work, as well as a Hatch award, which recognizes creative branding and marketing created in New England or for a New England client.

In spring 2022, Gould assigned his students to choose a microbrewery and create a campaign to help grow its business. Classmates Hannah Glickenhaus (COM’22), India Pearman (COM’22), and Olivia Strauss (COM’22) say they chose Night Shift Brewing because they were impressed with the company’s existing branding and were familiar with the product, having seen it at the BU Pub, as well as at local bars.Each ad in their campaign starts with the words, “So you…” and ends with a funny, head-scratching conundrum: “So you dropped your ballpark frank and still ate it,” “So you tried to adopt a squirrel on your walk home.” The tagline for each ad reads, “Not every idea brewed at night is a good one. We are. Night Shift Brewing.” The campaign launched on social media in March 2023, and digital billboards featuring the ads published around Boston this month. 

Originally, the trio pitched the “So you…” lines as raucous moments that happen when you’ve had too much to drink. When they pitched the idea in class, Gould encouraged them to find funny moments that could happen even without a drink, in an effort to make the campaign more relatable…and legally less problematic, Strauss says.

Gould had a mutual friend at Night Shift and was able to find the contact info for the company’s founder, Michael Oxton, who loved the work. Oxton and his team then worked with the students to develop the campaign. 

“We landed on the premise of the idea—‘The best stories are brewed at night’—through our conversations with Michael,” Strauss says. “From the first week we pitched the idea in class, to the end of the freelance campaign, it’s unrecognizable,” says Glickenhaus, currently working as a junior copywriter at MMB in Boston. “It went through a lot of iterations, for sure.”

“We sold the idea to them to use in any capacity they want,’ Pearman says. “And they told us it’s going to live on as an evergreen campaign for them, and they can apply it to product launches or events they have.” Their idea was short-listed for this year’s Young Ones award. 

“Honestly, it’s just a brilliant campaign idea,” says Oxton. “It connects what we do and our origin story [homebrewing at night] to funny, relevant anecdotes that everyone can identify with. The best campaigns are ones where people think, ‘Oh I gotta take a picture of that!’ or ‘Oh I gotta share that!’ and I think this campaign achieves that. It’s also constantly refreshable—there are nearly limitless examples of funny, great stories or ideas that people ‘brew’ at night. Everyone identifies with it. We love it.” 

Beyond the classroom, students say their COM portfolio classes prepped them for life in the advertising industry, teaching them, for example, how to negotiate pay as a freelancer. And the pieces they produced helped them land that all-important first job. 

“In my interview for my current job [as a copywriter at RPR in Santa Monica], the hiring manager said, ‘I called you because I saw your Night Shift Brewing campaign in your book, and I think that’s really great work,” Strauss says. “The campaign jump-started my career.”

Pearman, currently an associate social strategist at Digitas in Boston, says Gould’s feedback wasn’t dictatorial, but rather made the students think. “The class emulates real-life professional work because it’s all feedback based, and then you develop your idea further,” she says. “That’s the same process we do over and over in our day-to-day lives.”

“Our goal is to have our students be as creative as possible—not to create middling advertising, which the world is full of, but to demonstrate that they can produce at the highest possible levels given their relative lack of experience,” Gould says. “We often have students create work that is every bit as good as what is made in the professional environment.”

Happy Friday,

It’s not every day journalists find themselves translating Morse code, so when Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey responded to a recent Forbes inquiry on his $10 million donation to nonprofit OpenSats in all dots and dashes, I was delighted to see that my colleague Michael del Castillo was up to the task.

Sure beats the “💩” emoji (ahem).

BREAKING NEWS

Senate Republicans are casting doubt on Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s June 1 deadline for raising the debt ceiling—a sentiment that bolsters their bid to buy time to negotiate spending cut demands, and one that aligns with views among financial experts.

It’s not just PacWest: Regional bank stocks plummeted amid contagion fears, including Phoenix-based Western Alliance Bancorporation, falling by more than a third, its lowest point since 2013, and Memphis’ First Horizon, falling more than 32% after it announced a mutual agreement to terminate a merger with TD Bank.

BUSINESS + FINANCE

Seattle transplant Chris Howard carved out a spot among the world’s best seed investors after a decade of grinding his way to Silicon Valley’s inside track. He launched Fuel Capital in 2013 and uses his marketing background to define the pitch—after an early investment in Teespring, he moved into their office to help run its marketing team. More: The Midas Seed List 2023

Adidas is still feeling the financial impact of cutting ties with Kayne West and his Yeezy brand last year after the rapper’s antisemitic outbursts. Despite reporting better-than-expected first quarter profits of $66 million, the discontinuation of Yeezy led to a $441 million year-over-year drop in overall sales.

WEALTH + ENTREPRENEURSHIP

It sure is good to be king. Ahead of his coronation this weekend, King Charles III oversees a $46 billion portfolio of assets held in trust for the kingdom—including billions in investments, opulent palaces, glittering jewels and priceless art. Charles also inherited an estimated $500 million from Queen Elizabeth II. The late monarch’s will likely be sealed for at least 90 years, so the exact distribution of her personal assets is unknown.

New financial disclosures show that former President Donald Trump is flush with cash after leaving the White House, thanks to refinancing a San Francisco office tower and the sale of his D.C. hotel. Most of his estimated $425 million war chest is held in safe investments, which makes sense for a guy who is 76 years old, maintains a portfolio of riskier real estate assets, and might need a few hundred million to handle legal issues.

TECH + INNOVATION

No company has done more than ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, when it comes to getting VCs onto the Forbes Midas List, including No. 1 Neil Shen. But Washington politics and regulatory limbo still cast “dark clouds” over the world’s most valuable startup.

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey announced he will donate $10 million to help bitcoin “become the native currency of the internet,” with $5 million set aside to further develop the decentralized social protocol Nostr. It levels the playing field after a $13 million investment he made into a similar open-source social protocol before leaving Twitter last year, which is now being developed as Bluesky.

Coinbase took to the courts last week hoping to force the SEC to act on its request for broader federal regulation of cryptocurrency and digital assets, a move that appears to have paid off, at least for now. A federal appeals court gave the agency 10 days to explain why it sat on the leading U.S. crypto exchange’s July 2022 request. It’s “not a signal that Coinbase will win,” a lawyer cautioned, and another predicted the agency is likely to keep its response as vague as possible.

SPORTS + ENTERTAINMENT

A jury found singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran not liable in a copyright infringement lawsuit that alleged his hit “Thinking Out Loud” stole elements from the iconic 1973 Marvin Gaye song “Let’s Get It On.” It’s a victory for the music industry—in closing arguments, Sheeran’s lawyer warned the alternate decision could have “a devastating impact on future musicians.”

New York and California launched a joint investigation into allegations of workplace discrimination within the NFL. It will focus on the league’s alleged “hostile work environment” at its offices in the two states, including potential violations of state and federal pay equity and anti-discrimination laws.

TRAVEL + LIFESTYLE

The cruise industry is officially back. Royal Caribbean dramatically upped its earnings forecast for 2023 by nearly 50%. Shares for the world’s largest cruise line were up 8%, and competitors Carnival and Norwegian also saw a 4% bump on the optimistic forecast. Cruise bookings are at their highest level ever, and occupancy is on pace to hit a record rate by year’s end, according to analysts.

DAILY COVER STORY

Ben & Jerry’s Cofounder Gets Fully Baked With New Nonprofit Cannabis Company

TOPLINE Ben Cohen, the “Ben” from Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, was smoking a joint one summer night in 1970 when he and a friend got busted by the cops. At that time, marijuana was just as illegal in New York as heroin and a small doobie could land you in jail. “Eventually, as we were white middle-class guys, we ended up getting tickets for littering a lighted cigarette butt on the beach,” he told Forbes.

The experience stuck with Cohen, who believes that if he had been Black, that night would have ended very differently. He’s not far off: Even as 38 states have legal medical marijuana programs and 22 allow adult-use sales, Black Americans are still more likely to be arrested for possession than white people in every state that has legalized or decriminalized marijuana possession (through 2018).

And with only about 2% of cannabis businesses being Black-owned, Cohen wanted to do something to address the harms of America’s prohibition on pot and help more Black entrepreneurs get a foothold in the industry.

Cohen’s newest venture, Ben’s Best Blnz (or B3), is launching its first sales of cannabis and pre-rolled joints in dispensaries throughout Vermont. While Ben & Jerry’s donated about 8% of its pre-tax profits to human rights, environmental and social justice causes, B3 is set up as a nonprofit and will donate 100% of its profits to organizations focused on funding Black-owned cannabis companies and helping get people released from prison on cannabis charges.

WHY IT MATTERS “I don’t need more money,” Cohen says. “But I’m an entrepreneur and what motivates me is justice. I’m very motivated by the idea of trying to create a more just world. And it’s a beautiful pairing of using this substance that had created all this oppression for Black people to create, hopefully, wealth for Black people.”

MORE Meet The Billionaire King Of Rolling Papers

FACTS AND COMMENTS

Apple beat Wall Street expectations for its first quarter earnings, thanks to its strongest ever-sales in its services unit, which includes iCloud, the App Store and its credit card business:

$94.8 billion: First quarter sales, smashing analyst estimates of $92.9 billion.

$2.65 trillion: Apple’s market capitalization, making it the most valuable company in the world.

$555 billion: How much market cap Apple has gained this year, alongside a 32% rally in share price.

STRATEGY AND SUCCESS

While there are benefits to having a higher credit score, before you stress it’s worth understanding their purpose and how they’re calculated. Credit scores measure whether you’re good at borrowing money, not managing it. Here are the five components of a credit score, according to FICO, and it says it all about you and your money.

VIDEO

QUIZ

The Biden administration outlined plans to tackle which one key emerging risk in the technology space over growing calls for regulation?

A. Semi-autonomous robots

B. Artificial intelligence

C. Drones

D. Facial recognition

Check if you got it right here.

ACROSS THE NEWSROOM

Deadline next week: The Forbes Cloud 100 recognizes the leading privately-held cloud companies in the world. Know a company that deserves a spot? Submissions for the eighth annual list are now open through May 12.

BEYOND THE NEWSROOM

• The 2023 Forbes Future Of Work Summit will take place in New York and virtually on June 1. Here, we’ll explore the forthcoming impact of artificial intelligence, shifting dynamics between workers and employers, and more. Sign up to stay tuned for updates.
• The Forbes Iconoclast Summit will convene the world’s most iconic visionaries, financial titans, pioneering technologists, and key executives for high-level conversations on the most critical issues impacting our economy and markets today. Join us in New York City on June 12.

Thanks for reading! Follow along with us on Twitter for by-the-minute updates on the latest business and financial news throughout the day.

Photo: Dan Miller

GOD IS GOOD
YOU ARE ———— SPECIAL
-YOU – ARE- SPECIAL-
GOD IS GOOD
FUDGE BROWNIES
YOU ARE BLESSED
WQUY…, M3031L-KIXYJJK
FUDGE BROWNIES

For years, this little poem, made up of vinyl letter stickers and labelmaker tape affixed to paper on a plastic door display, has greeted visitors to Kim’s Corner Food in Rogers Park. While weathered and sun-bleached, this litany on religion, affirmation, nonsense language, and snack cakes—in short, the whole order—has prevailed as a kind of prelude to the ecstatic collaged world that Thomas Kong built inside of Kim’s. As many visitors quickly discovered, the “Food” aspect of Kim’s seemed a secondary thought.

Thomas Kong outside of Kim’s Corner Food/Photo: S.Y. Lim

Sure, one could buy cigarettes, soda or packaged foods, but Kong’s collages—recycled cutouts from product signage and boxes—cover almost every inch of the counter and wall space of the store. I’ve often wondered what visiting corporate reps or delivery drivers must have thought about what Kong did with Kim’s. How flummoxed these visitors must have felt upon seeing corporate-mandated signage hacked to bits and reassembled into austere collages.

Thomas Kong and Dan Miller, May 2017/Photo: Ruby T.

Kong’s works number well into the thousands, and he turned Kim’s into a gallery, museum, archive and, up to just a little over a week ago, one of the greatest ongoing artworks in Chicago. Kong’s endless and restless production made from repurposing the glyphs from the equally endless and restless production of the marketplace, ended with his passing last week.  “A part of me is incredulous that he won’t be making collages at Kim’s Corner Food every day until the end of time,” Kong’s longtime collaborator Dan Miller wrote in a tribute Instagram post. Miller’s sentiment is the one that seems the most unbelievable: Kong seemed to have ameliorated the alienation of being constantly on capitalist time for survival. He would not have ever expressed such a statement himself (at least not out loud), but there was something old-school in Kong’s move, a kind of Situationist or Michel de Certeau-inspired tactical re-maneuvering of the impositions of a life bound up in retail. Consumption “does not manifest itself through its own products,” de Certeau wrote, “but rather through its ways of using the products.” We could use all these things that hold us in their obeisance in ways they weren’t meant to be used, minute coups into the drudgery of everyday life that might feel like it belongs to anyone but us. Kong was never so proscriptive. In an interview a few years ago with Jisu Lee, Kong said his collages were “to give happiness to people for the rest of my life.” Any politics in Kong’s works could only ever be at the level of the inferred. God is good, but also fudge brownies. Regardless, Kong’s model at Kim’s presents an intervention that shows us a way that art can transform circumstances favorably, an invaluable model.

Passing Time: Kim’s Corner Food with Thomas Kong, installation view, 2018/Courtesy of 062

Kong turned to art-making only in middle age. Before purchasing Kim’s in 2006, Kong had a busy life in multiple trades. After receiving his degree in English Literature at Sogang University in 1972, he worked in the marketing department at Korean Air Lines. His 1977 marriage to Sandy (Han Sang Sook) provided him with a familial connection to the United States, and after his move, he was employed as a gas-station attendant, travel agent, shoe-repair-shop manager, and briefly, the owner of a dry-cleaning business. In the years at Kim’s, Kong was dissatisfied with the permanent shelf grime that becomes part-and-parcel of a formerly owned business and decided to cover it up by papering over the shelves with pictures. Satisfied with this aesthetic, Kong created more of these works, using merchandise material to make collages that would expand off of the shelf and onto corners and wall spaces of the shop. Kim’s became, to use Kong’s words, “an art store,” and customers, particularly young ones, expressed admiration for his work. Galvanized by this reception, Kong dedicated himself to being two places at once: behind the counter at Kim’s for twelve hours a day and as a working, prolific artist.

Untitled, no date, Thomas Kong

By the mid-2010s Kong, aided by fervent supporters from Chicago’s art scene, was showing frequently in more stable exhibition spaces in the United States. His work would find its way to the walls of galleries in Germany, Australia and Tokyo, and in the pages of art world journals like Artforum and Art Papers. Yet, as Kong’s recognition advanced, his works remained intimately scaled, still composed entirely inside of (and made up of materials from) Kim’s, and with little regard for self-editing. While Kong openly expressed his desire to become an art star, he seemed to have had very little interest in amending his working or thought process to satiate the rehearsed mechanisms of the art world and its market. Kong’s was a work created for happiness, and it was up to others to figure out where in their respective art ecosystems such a compulsion might (or could) fit.

Thomas Kong’s “Be Happy”/Photo: S.Y. Lim

In his last year, Kong was sending near-daily text messages of images of recent collages to friends and former collaborators (a mode of sharing that he had also taken up with gusto on Instagram). The collages he shared were full of his signature iconography: the jumping cow from Horizon brand milk, Camels and horses from cigarette and tobacco products, shapes and squiggles from blocks of color, and straight from the label-maker, the words “be happy.” Repeatedly, Kong presented different combinations of the same, a tweaked angle for an image of a Twinkie or a different shape combination to frame the American Spirit cigarette logo, and these serve as a reminder that repetition need not be a dirty word. In the immortal phrase of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt in their “Oblique Strategies” card deck, “repetition is a form of change,” and this is something Kong inherently knew. Things might get stuck in a loop, but there was always the possibility to change. This may be why Kong’s oft-repeated “be happy” labels almost always stayed the same, a stable mantra (or maybe reminder) inside a forever-evolving world of repurposed merchandise imagery. Kong seemed to insist that there was a space for joy wherever one found oneself. This was, among many other things, what he told us via signage upon entering his space: you are blessed. Indeed, we are, and to have known Thomas Kong, we were.

You can contribute to a GoFundMe set up by Kong’s family to help sustain Kim’s Corner Food here.

As a part of the Art Walk 2023, a weekend-long, interdisciplinary arts festival on the DePauw campus, the “Inner” art exhibition is set to open on Monday, Apr. 21 and close on Friday, May 12. first-year Nol Nguyen, “Inner” arts director, described his solo exhibition as inviting visitors to “reflect on the different stages of life and the inner concept of everything.” 

The exhibition features five different types of arts, including photography, projection mapping, digital sculpture, drawing, and painting. According to first-year Marketing Manager Annie Tran, each of the artworks connects to a different aspect of life, like family, friendship, love, and hard feelings that people may experience growing up. 

Nguyen wants the exhibition to be an opportunity for everyone to explore their inner self and thoughts that they do not usually share with the outside world. 

“In our core team, all five of us are non-Arts majors,” he added. “So, I want to see how people who are non-Arts majors and who do not have any prior experience in arts can actually do an exhibition and how people in different fields represent themselves.” 

Nguyen said the exhibition benefits from having organizers in different majors and expertises as there are people to take care of arts, marketing/public relations, budgeting, and technology. 

Working with students from different fields also presents communication challenges, according to Tran. She said that most of the team are first-years discovering various interests and learning new skills, so the exhibition is their opportunity to explore themselves. 

“It’s like I have my idea, and you have your idea, and it’s really hard to collude the ideas to bring the best outcome for the exhibition,” Nguyen added. “But, I think the exhibition is going to answer that question and I’m going to learn how people interact together.” 

Another obstacle, according to Nguyen, is the time constraint. He said that “Inner” had been put together in four months, while artists typically spend one to two years preparing for their exhibitions. “Inner” also makes use of sophisticated technology for projection mapping and digital sculpture, which complicates the process. 

When asked what motivated him to carry out such a large project in his first year at DePauw, Nguyen said that although it is an arts exhibition, other components like marketing, audio, and organizational communication have come together to actualize the project. “Anything like this really helped me gain more experience in my major [in economics and organizational analysis].”

“There are a lot of talented people and I don’t think age matters in art. So if you want to do it, just do it,” Tran added. 

What would artists create if all of the world’s surfaces could become a canvas? Joseph Ford—of Invisible Jumpers fame—responds to this question in a new project called Double Take. Collaborating with eight street artists including Peeta (previously), Levalet (previously), and Victoria Villasana (previously), Ford reimagines the possibilities of public spaces that are otherwise inaccessible due to scale, safety issues, or restrictions.

To begin the project, Ford photographed the locations, which include the Panthéon, the Seven Sisters cliffs in Sussex, and the center of a highway in Los Angeles, and then handed over enlarged prints to the artists. Once their additions were complete, he returned to the original sites and documented the altered images against the original backdrop. Playful and imaginative, the juxtaposed photos envision “a parallel universe where (artists) have complete artistic freedom.”

Shop the limited-edition prints and find behind-the-scenes looks at Ford’s process on his site.

Levalet, Brighton Marina, U.K.

Ador, The Pantheon, Paris

Peeta, Shoreham Cement Works

Ador, Seven Sisters, U.K.

Denis Meyers, National Theatre London

JanIsDeMan, Balcome Viaduct, U.K.

Morely, Los Angeles

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article A Collaborative Photo Project Imagines a World Where Street Artists Have Free Rein appeared first on Colossal.