Now that you're starting to think about building out your budding art collection, let's meet a few of the up-and-coming players in the scene. Introductions will be made by stylist, makeup artist, and ITG Contributing Editor Stacey Nishimoto whose personal style alone should illustrate why we take art advice from her (her well-curated Instagram follow list also helps with finding emerging artists before they're Koons-level). So under Stacey's tutelage, prepare to become much more cultured and integrated into the world that is art now. It'll be much more interesting than that one art history lecture you snoozed through in college. Promise.
'We've really fixated on loving ourselves—there's this ethos of excess and approval, making it cool and fun to be a girl. The problem is: it isn't really cool and fun to be girl. it is an experience of brutal alienation and constant fear of violence. All the amazing parts of girlhood (of which there are many) are survival tactics that that girls have created in this face of reality. I want to stand with the girls who are miserable, who don't love their body, who cry on the bus on the way to work. I believe those girls have the power to cause real upheaval, to really change things.” —Audrey Wollen, in i-D magazine.
Audrey Wollen of Los Angeles, her Sad Girl Theory catching on like wildfire has created a time, look, and place for the advanced femme fatales of the world. Sad Girl Theory is as much a history project as it is an exploration of art—it pivots around the idea that a woman's sadness is a form of rebellion from society's expectation that they be happy all the time. She objectifies her own body through her art and Instagram account as a way of dismantling the objectification she experiences daily at the hands of others. Through this, she is a leader leaving her followers a strong desire to unite. She treats women as queens with the ultimate respect, which is so rare as women today battle each other as they battle themselves.
—Stacey Nishimoto
Photos courtesy of Audrey Wollen.
