Eliana Willis

The stretch of 19th Street west of 10th Avenue was clogged with construction on a Monday in January when Honor Titus, wearing a North Face puffer and green-striped white Adidas, bounded up the steps to the Chelsea townhouse of Timothy Taylor Gallery. His first solo show in New York opens there on Thursday. A week ahead of the opening, it had already sold out.
Titus, who is 31, had on a plaid mask and asked the gallery’s director, Columbus Taylor, about what kind of tea they could give to gallery-goers coming by the all-day opening.
“Japanese tea, chamomile, green tea, mint tea,” Titus proposed.
“Do we need to get, like, teacups for everyone, like Alice in Wonderland?” Taylor asked.
“Actually—not mint,” Titus replied, thoughtful. “Mint is not an outdoor tea.”
Honor Titus, Artist Portrait. Photographer Kingsley Ifill. Courtesy Timothy Taylor Gallery.

Honor Titus likes tea—he drank quite a bit of herbal tea a few nights earlier while we ate dinner at Dr. Clark—and likes playing tennis and watching matches, especially if they feature the American phenom Naomi Osaka. Particular arcana gets sucked into his insatiable creative diet and spun back into his paintings. There are eight works in his show at Timothy Taylor, “For Heaven’s Sake,” and they each bottle a world.
Priced between $12,000 and $25,000, the paintings have been snapped up by top collectors such as Beth Rudin DeWoody, as well as an Asian institution and buyers in New York and the UK. It might be the best painting show in town.
“I like work that’s almost, but not really, journalistic,” Titus said, walking through the slim, chic townhouse that the London dealer Timothy Taylor took over in 2016 as a stateside beachhead.
“With the situation we’re in, I wasn’t doing much—I was painting, and playing a lot of tennis,” Titus said. “So there’s an element of nostalgia for movement, for dancing, for embrace.”
Honor Titus, Sock Hop (2020). Photo courtesy Timothy Taylor Gallery.

The paintings: a girl at a sock hop alone with other people’s unworn shoes near her pivoting ankles; a couple slow-waltzing in an apartment window; tennis players fwopping topspin-heavy forehands; a couple on the lawn of the Brand Library in Glendale, California, where Titus lives.
“I want to make paintings that a wide audience can enjoy,” Titus said. “I have a thing that I like to say: from Rikers to the Ritz. I want people to appreciate my paintings at Rikers and I want people to appreciate them at the Ritz. Those are both places that I’ve been in my personal life.”
Honor Titus. Courtesy Honor Titus.

Titus is staying at a hotel downtown. He used to live in the city, where he did frontman duties in the great spazz-punk outfit Cerebral Ballzy. (We figured out my band opened for his band once, at the Wreck Room in Bushwick, in 2008.) After working as a studio assistant for Raymond Pettibon, Titus left to begin his own practice, without an art-school degree but with a keen eye for observation in portraiture. He draws from the both the Chicago Imagists and Les Nabis—there’s a thrilling dollop of Félix Vallotton in Sock Hop. In January 2020, he had a show at Henry Taylor’s, the exhibition space the eponymous artist—a mentor of Titus’s—sometimes sets up in his downtown LA studio.
By then his style had emerged, with striking paintings of a dog in a convertible at a health food store, of two strangers in a cold movie theater on a hot summer day. Later that year, two new large paintings were among the highlights of an acclaimed floral-themed group show at Karma, “(Nothing But) Flowers.”
Honor Titus, Jazmine Perfume, shown in the Karma show “(Nothing But) Flowers.” Photo courtesy Karma.

He made these new paintings in isolation in Los Angeles, and the phantom limb experience of missing friends and family is a looming mood. One work still to be hung was a painting of a picture of his grandmother that used to be in his old house, lovingly rendered. Elsewhere, there’s a tennis player knocking a forehand and a painting of Miles Davis on a tree stump.
“Miles would just go to the woods and practice his trumpet,” Titus said. “With jazz musicians, the more common thing was practicing in the woodshed, but Miles was out in the literal woods. That image, of one the greatest musicians ever, playing alone in the woods, is a beautiful one to me.”
Honor Titus, Grounds of the Brand Library (2020)

I asked about the couple on the lawn in Glendale, white spots twinkling on the green like stars. Titus said that, about a year ago, he was dating a daughter in a prominent art-world family, and so the couple in the painting is of the artist and an old paramour.
“It didn’t end happily, but we had a moment at the Brand Library that was really perfect, self-contained,” Titus said. “I’m not one for self-portraiture, but maybe this is the closest I’ve come.”
Titus and I were staring at the impossibly sunny California landscape when one of his friends walked in from the New York chill to check out the show. After lunch, and more tea, we started a long walk east. At Fifth Avenue, we saw the arch at Washington Square Park in the distance. Some 15 blocks away, Titus remembered the quote on the top verbatim: “Let Us Raise a Standard to Which the Wise and Honest Can Repair.”
“Should we try to play tennis tonight?” Titus asked, taking strides by the fountain. There was a bubble in Midtown where he could get a court for cheap.
We popped into Punjabi Deli on Houston Street to get chai, then walked up Avenue A to Mast Books. Titus bought a book of work by Pierre Bonnard and a small chapbook of Richard Brautigan poems, and we left the store to dump empty Anthora cups in the bin on East 5th Street.
Mid-stroll, Titus took out his bounty and recited to all on the street a particularly bawdy Brautigan poem. He laughed loudly enough to be heard in Soho. Then, he decided he’d head back to his hotel instead of playing tennis get some sleep.
“I want the show to convey a certain warmth, a certain joie de vivre,” Titus said. Rather than capturing a pre-lockdown past, “it’s about being hopeful. The title of the show is ‘For Heaven’s Sake,’ and it’s all about the intonation in how you say it. The phrase can be a profanity. It can be an appeal to something higher. Or it can be about, ‘let’s get through this.’”
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“Mernet Larsen”at James Cohan Gallerythrough January 23, 2021
What the gallery says: “For over six decades, Mernet Larsen has created narrative paintings depicting hard-edged, enigmatic characters that inhabit an uncanny parallel world filled with tension and wry humor. Larsen employs various spatial systems that often contradict: combining reverse, isometric, and conventional perspectives, she casts everyday scenarios into a vertigo-inducing version of reality akin to our own.”
Why it’s worth a look: In the topsy-turvy vortex Larsen composes, the constructivist themes of El Lissitzky are pushed to an almost farcical level. In mixed-up narratives, cartoon-like characters, all hard edges and angled features, populate a world of bisecting planes and surreal situations. Every straight line, from the spokes of a wheelchair to a sidewalk crack create individual paths that traverse the canvas. Stems of flowers, stems of wineglasses, scissor blades, all are points of departure in a world turned upside down.
What it looks like: 

Mernet Larsen, Solar System, Explained (after El Lissitzky) (2020). Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery.

Mernet Larsen, Solar System, Explained (after El Lissitzky) [detail] (2020). Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery.

Mernet Larsen, Astronaut: Sunrise (after El Lissitzky) (2020). Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery.

Mernet Larsen, Astronauts: Sunset (after El Lissitzky) (2020). Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery.

Mernet Larsen, Beach (after El Lissitzky) (2020). Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery.

Mernet Larsen, Gurney (after El Lissitzky) (2019). Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery.

Mernet Larsen, Departure (after El Lissitzky) (2019). Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery.

Mernet Larsen, Intersection (after El Lissitzky) (2020). Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery.

Mernet Larsen, Deliverance (after El Lissitzky) (2020). Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery.

Mernet Larsen, Spy (after El Lissitzky) (2020). Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery.

Mernet Larsen, Dawn (after El Lissitzky) (2012). Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery.

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When it comes to making his work, the Kurdish-Iraqi artist Hiwa K has no interest in the flashiest, most expensive equipment or in expounding on the most complex theory. In fact, the artist says his measure of success is whether or not his mother can understand his work.
In an exclusive interview filmed as part of Art21’s new season, the artist explains the process of making the video The Bell Project (2007-15), which was included in the exhibition “Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011” at MoMA PS1 in 2020.
In the video, the artist explains how he worked with a Kurdish man named Nazhad who owns a scrap yard. Nazhad was melting down cast-off weapons from the US and European militaries into bricks of metal, which he then catalogued and recorded, noting where and when each weapon had been brought into the country.
“These weapons are made by the West and sent to our countries,” Hiwa says in the video. “Nazhad is somehow melting it into possibilities of transformation.”

Production still from the Art21 “Extended Play” film, “Hiwa K: ‘The Bell Project.’” © Art21, Inc. 2020.

Inspired by this process of converting one object into another, the artist decided to do the opposite and melt weapons down to turn them into a church bell. In pre-industrial Europe, the reverse happened: Church bells were made into cannons for war.
“I was thinking about the circulation of materials,” Hiwa tells Art21. 
Ultimately, the artist sourced the metal bricks from Nazhad and sent them to a small Italian foundry where they were cast into a bell inscribed with Assyrian imagery. The project encompasses a complicated and fraught history related to the transfer of weapons and power, international relations, and the affect on localized businesses—not to mention the scores of individuals whose lives are affected by geopolitical wars.
“I don’t want to overdose my work with philosophy” the artist says, “When my mom understands, I am happy.”
Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s series Extended Play, below. The brand new 10th season of the show is available now at Art21.org. 
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This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org

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What’s the most ludicrous art-world marketing campaign of all time? Is it Maurizio Cattelan’s $120,000 banana, duct-taped to a wall at Art Basel Miami Beach? Is it the sale of Salvator Mundi, the portrait of Jesus supposedly by Leonardo da Vinci that sold for an absurd $450.3 million at Christie’s in late 2017?
Or is it the one unveiled today at Grand Central Terminal in New York?
That campaign, titled Da Vinci of Debt, is made up of a suspended mass of 2,600 authentic college diplomas provided by real college graduates across the US.
Confused? The idea is that, with the cost of an average four-year college education at about $180,000, the cumulative value of the diploma display rings in at near $470 million, surpassing the cost of the record-shattering Salvator Mundi.
Even more surprising is the force behind the show: Natural Light, the cheap and popular beer brand affectionately dubbed “Natty Light” by its fans—mainly college students drawn to its lower calorie count and, most importantly, its lower price point.

Natty Light’s “art installation.” Courtesy of Natural Light.

The brand is now in the fourth year of a 10-year, $10 million commitment to distribute $1 million annually to students and graduates “who are weighed down by the burden of debt,” said Daniel Blake, vice president of value brands at Anheuser-Busch, which owns Natural Light.
Those interested in getting some of that money must tell their story for why they attended college by March 21. Forty winners will each receive $25,000.
“College debt is one of the most important social issues in the country today,” Blake said in a phone interview with Artnet News. “More than 45 million Americans have college debt. The total debt amount is more than $1.7 trillion and is continuing to grow. We felt strongly about putting a stake in the ground and supporting those people who really need it.”
So why call the project an artwork?
“The art world is filled with absurd price tags that most people find impossible to justify,” Blake said. “That’s what made it the perfect medium for this campaign.”
The diplomas are suspended in mid-air “as if a gale of wind had just scattered all 2,600 of them throughout the cavernous, 6,000-square-foot space,” according to a press release.

Natty Light’s “art installation.” Courtesy of Natural Light. . Courtesy of Natural Light.

The installation is meant to stress the enormous scale of student debt, and the chaos it creates for those saddled with it.
Blake told Artnet News that the brand was surprised at the eager response they got from graduates who sent in their diplomas—especially considering the company never told them how the certificates would be used. (Students received $100 in exchange for “renting” their diplomas.)
As part of the stunt, Natural Light said in a release that it is “calling on the deep pockets of the fine-art world” to considering bidding “on the historic artwork.”
So is it for sale? And what about those students who temporarily leased their diplomas and are expecting them back?
“If it means giving more people the opportunity to enjoy the college experience without the debt that follows, we’re all ears,” Blake said.
“Natty is dedicated to doing everything we can to provide real solutions to college debt, and if there is a serious bidder, you know where to find us. If there is a bidder willing to pay $470 million for the piece, we’ll consult with every participant who loaned their diploma to us to see if they would be open to selling this piece.”
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