Tate Modern

But he was, you know, an incredibly well-revered artist.

He had a retrospective at the Tate.

I think it was in 2017.

It took over 13 rooms in the Tate Museum and and attracted nearly half a million visitors.

And then this was outdone the following year by another larger iteration of this retrospective at the Met in New York, where even more people came.

He was basically Time magazine named him when he was, you know, 82 in 2019 as one of the world's 100 most influential people.

So I think in terms of my origin story and day, month, year, I think it was that period that I think nudged me to form a studio again.

And in part also I wanted to fund the nonprofit stuff we were doing myself because I think I was – applying for grants and things like that and they were always erratic sometimes we would get grants and as we were like at the time doing publishing and some of our publications were you know being ending up in places like the Tate Modern or you know MoMA in New York to maintain the relationship with that particular community and those distributors meant that we needed a more consistent form of funding and that could only come from some of the commercial gigs you know because it was a bit of a lottery with with arts funding yeah so all of those conditions or factors kind of dovetailed together and the studio being born was the result of all the conditions at the time.

And over time, we shifted a lot of our emphasis.

Maybe we did a lot of art fashion stuff to begin with, and then we started to, maybe as part of that existential crisis of realizing that maybe I'm a better brand designer than someone that's like a designer in the art or fashion world, is that there was a pivot to go, okay, maybe we'll focus more on working with entrepreneurs, founders, and marketers instead of working purely with the creative communities.

She's a Cuban-American artist.

And there's a retrospective of her work at Tate Modern that just opened this week.

Could you tell us about the writing of Dog Days?

It took me a long time.

That harkens back to another fucking Iñárritu movie, which is Children of Men, which that happens as well.

There's the scene in the Tate Modern where the billionaire has been like, oh, I rescued all of these crucial elements of world culture from the heaving, unwashed masses outside.

It would have burnt them for fireworks.

Right.

So I'm obviously bringing some kind of nature vibe.

Have you been to the Anna Mendieta exhibition at the Tate Modern yet? Okay, I would recommend, yeah, do go.

It's brilliant.

I loved it.

I've got thoughts on that separately, but I went to see it.

I found it very...

So Anna Mendieta was an artist who made a lot of work where she looked a lot at nature and her bodily reaction to nature and literally lots of performance embodiment and that's like a whole nother world in which we can dive into but I'd just been to see this exhibition it moved her work moves me quite a lot and I'd never seen it in person before and I left and went to the Tate modern shop just to have a little debrief and a browse and I came across this magazine

Oh, called Weed.

Um, [laughs] Dr. Anne Coxon is an internationally renowned curator, writer, and researcher with a specialist interest in textile practices and tacit knowledge within modern and contemporary art.

As a curator at Tate Modern, she organized two full collection rehangs and curated over 40 collection displays, as well as a significant number of temporary exhibitions.

Notably in this context, she cu- co-curated the landmark exhibitions on the Polish, uh, textile artist Magdalena Abakanowicz, um, was involved in Every Tangle of Thread and Rope, Dorothea Tanning, and Anni Albers in 2018.

And she has recently completed a doctoral study on New Tapestry in Europe 1962 to 1970, funded by the AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership Scheme with Tate and University College of London, supervised by Professor Briony Fer.

So we, we are very delighted to have you in this company.

Thank you.

So it's really just sort of what, you know, you have this wider world, you know, wider hinterland really within modern and contemporary art, and you're international in that-

Yes