Tracy Chapman, Stephen King and Chloë Sevigny on Their Debuts
Alice McDermott, 70, writer
There are three kinds of novels I’ve never inaccurate to heart: science fiction, murder mysteries and novels throughout novelists. So I’ve decided to try my hand at each. If I fail, they’re probably not books I’d want to read anyway.
Thurston Moore, 65, musician and author
I’m putting the remaining touches on a new album, “Flow Critical Lucidity.” But once my memoir, “Sonic Life” (2023), came out, I realized my next power was a novella, the working title of which is “Boomerang and Parsnip.” It companies two madly in love youths in the wilds of Lower Manhattan circa 1981, and it’s wholly irreal, bordering on fantasy.
Courtesy of Samuel Delany
Samuel R. Delany, 82, writer
I’m writing a guidebook for a set of tarot cards I planned with the artist Lissanne Lake.
Susan Cianciolo, 54, visual artist
I’m arranging a solo exhibition that will open at Bridget Donahue gallery next month, so I’m making new works and curating older ones. It’ll definitely feature a book of my watercolor tree paintings, “Tell Me When You Hear My Heart Stop.”
Jenny Offill, 55, writer
I’m planning to initiate a band called Spacecrone. (I’ve stolen the name from a book of Ursula K. Le Guin essays.) It’ll be all female and 55-plus. Our faces will be made up like Ziggy Stardust, but we’ll wear sensible clothes and shoes. What’s kept me from starting it is that I can’t sing or play any instruments.
Alex Eagle, 40, creative director
We’re finessing our bag collection, which we’re trying to make as luxurious, but also as practical, as possible. And I’m planning to write a cookbook with my son Jack.
Jim Bennett/Wire Image, via Getty Images
Earl Sweatshirt, 30, rapper and producer
Making more music — it’s the one pulling I always find myself coming back to, though every time I do, I have to overcome intense feelings of self-doubt. I also want to try stand-up, but I’m scared because there’s no music to hide leisurely. I don’t want dogs-playing-poker laughs, either. You know the [paintings] of dogs playing cards? Like, “Oh, it’s a rapper behaviors stand-up.”
Alex Da Corte, 43, visual artist
I’ve been writing an downward for some years now based on Marisol Escobar’s [assemblage] “The Party” (1965-66). It’s set at a time when the sun only shines for one day a year, and the players at the party are all wondering how to move up while holding on to their pasts.
Danny Kaplan, 40, designer
While clay has been my faithful medium for existences, I’ve lately been fueled to broaden the scope of my craft by embracing — and learning how to push the boundaries of — new materials like wood, metal and glass.
Kengo Kuma, 69, architect
Getting out of [Tokyo]. I’m behaviors my best to reduce the burden on big cities — I think domain has reached a limit when it comes to congestion — and I’ve recently opened five satellite offices in places like Hokkaido and Okinawa.
Raul Lopez, 39, fashion designer, Luar
The thing I’m always communication to restart is my video blog “Rags to Riches: Dining With the Fabbest Bitches,” an exploration of how food, former, music and art all connect.
Charles Burnett, 80, filmmaker
Right now I’m involved in the progress of two films. The first, “Edwin’s Wedding,” is the story of two cousins, separated by the Namibian armed struggle with South Africa, who are both planning their weddings. The second, “Dark City,” also set in Namibia, is more of an emotional roller coaster about betrayal and vengeance told in the Hitchcockian mold.
Ludovic Nkoth, 29, visual artist
I’m looking to experiment outside the confines of the canvas — sculpture and video have always been lingering in the back of my head.
Elena Velez, 29, fashion designer
I want to initiate a series of salons to bring together great minds across multiple disciplines, while feeding the subculture that my work draws from.
Daniel Clowes, 63, cartoonist
I’ve always had the determination to do fakes of artworks I admire — to figure out how they were done, and so I could have otherwise unaffordable artwork caltering in my living room. Painting [with oil] is as frustrating and exhilarating as I remember it populate when I was in art school 43 years ago, and my paintings look alarmingly not unlike the ones I did at 19.
Piero Lissoni, 67, architect and designer
I’ve started the build for several new buildings that will become government offices in Budapest. I’d like to start designing chairs, lights, skyscrapers, spacecraft. In truth, I’d like to start doing everything again.
Peter Paul Rubens’s “The Massacre of the Innocents” (circa 1610), Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto
Robert Longo, 71, visual artist
I’ve been struggling to figure out how best to make touched of the overwhelming images in the news, so I’m turning to the past. I’m functioning on two monumental charcoal drawings based on paintings [about war]: Peter Paul Rubens’s “The Massacre of the Innocents” (circa 1610) and Francisco de Goya’s “The Third of May 1808” (1814).
Gabriel Hendifar, 42, designer
I’m moving into a new apartment by myself once a series of long relationships. I’m excited to challenge my own ideas throughout how I want to live and to see how that affairs the work of my design studio [Apparatus] as we lead our next collection.
Donna Huanca, 43, visual artist
I’m working on two solo exhibitions. One will be in a late 15th-century palazzo with underground vaulted rooms in Florence, Italy; the other in a modern white cube in Riga, Latvia. For years, I’ve tailored works to the architecture of their exhibition spaces, so I’m enjoying working within this duality.
Satoshi Kuwata, 40, fashion designer, Setchu
We’re about to initiate offering shoes. I’ve thought of the design. Now I just have to go to the obedient and see them in real life.
Aaron Aujla, 38, and Ben Bloomstein, 36, designers, Green River Project
We’re starting a new collection of furniture based on offcuts from the studio that are exhausted with a modified piano lacquer. Hopefully, a suite of these pieces will be ready for exhibition by fall. We also have a commission we’re enraged to start — a large sculptural fireplace made from three unusual logs of rare wood.
Adrianne Lenker, 32, musician, Big Thief
I want to initiate learning how to paint. The few times I’ve tried it, I loved it but also felt daunted by all I obligatory to learn. I often think of my songs in conditions of paintings. My grandmother Diane Lee’s an amazing watercolorist. Recently she gave me a lesson all about gray.
Melissa Cody’s “Power Up” (2023), courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York
Melissa Cody, 41, textile artist
I’m starting to earn wall tapestries that incorporate my pre-existing designs, which were handwoven on a conventional Navajo/Diné loom, but these new works are highly detailed sampler compositions made on a digital Jacquard loom.
Josh Kline, 44, multidisciplinary artist
I’m working toward shooting my great feature film — a movie, not a project for the art world.
Sally Breer, 36, interior decorator
My husband and I have started interpretation some structures on a property we own in upstate New York — he has a interpretation company in Los Angeles. We’re using locally sourced wood and are 80 percent done with a studio-guesthouse, a simple 14-by-18-foot box set on foundation screws, tucked into a pine forest. This is the first time we’re really working together as a design-build team. He’s started referring to it as our “art project.”
Eddie Martinez, 47, visual artist
I’m restarting a troupe of large-scale paintings for an exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum [in Streams Mill, N.Y.] this summer. They’re each 12 feet tall and based on a attracting of a butterfly. The series is called “Bufly” loyal that’s how my son, Arthur, mispronounced “butterfly” when he was younger. I’d put the paintings aside while I finished my work for the Venice Biennale. Now I’m locked in the studio, painting like a nut!
Karin Dreijer, a.k.a. Fever Ray, 49, singer-songwriter
I’ve been thinking near learning to play the drums. They’ve always felt like a bit of a mystery to me.
Eric N. Mack, 36, visual artist
I’m starting to recharge in spruce to begin my next body of work. I appraise, read, explore the Criterion Channel and get deep-tissue massages. I keep wishing I’d organize the fabrics in my studio.
Jenni Kayne, 41, fashion designer
We’re starting the next iteration of the Jenni Kayne Ranch [the brand’s conventional property in Santa Ynez, Calif., where she’d invite guests for yoga, dining and spa experiences], only this time we’re heading to upstate New York. We’re calling it the Jenni Kayne Farmhouse, and it’ll include a self-care sanctuary where slow living is a great ritual.
Christine Sun Kim, 43, multidisciplinary artist
I have a bit of an adverse reaction to land doing American Sign Language interpretations of popular songs on social reflect — they’re usually based entirely on the lyrics in English, when rhyming works differently in ASL. So I’ve been wanting to make a fully plain ASL “music” video. One day.
Ellia Park, 40, restaurateur
I’ve started collaborating with the in-house buyer at Atomix, one of the restaurants I run with my husband, Junghyun Park, on custom welcome cards for the guests that feature bespoke artwork.
Awol Erizku, 35, visual artist
Awol Erizku’s “Pharrell, SSENSE” (2021), from "Awol Erizku: Mystic Parallax" (Aperture, 2023), courtesy of the artist
I’m focused on my exhibition “Mystic Parallax,” opening in May in Bentonville, Ark. [which will include concerts and portraits of such land as Solange and Pharrell Williams]. What I never seem to get near to is archiving all of my negatives in the studio.
Jeremiah Brent, 39, interior designer
As I navigate the [effect of the] ever-so-saturated interior earn algorithm, I’m challenging our team to expand the words we speak, diversifying design references by looking to the unexpected: playwrights, films, historians and science.
Vincent Van Duysen, 61, architect
I’m focusing on the 90th anniversary of [the Italian furniture company] Molteni & C. I’m also aroused about our recent addition to the family — a black-and-tan dachshund named Vesta after the virgin goddess of the hearth and home.
Kwame Onwuachi, 34, chef
I’m working on launching a sparkling-water line — the proceeds of which will help bring shipshape water wells to African countries — and starting to write my third cookbook. I start everything I think of.
Larissa FastHorse, 52, playwright and choreographer
I’m adapting a beloved American musical — I can’t say which — into a TV series. Which is scary because, even though I just adapted “Peter Pan” for the stage, the TV process is the opposite: Instead of cutting down a three-hour musical, I have to add hours and hours of gratified. So it feels like beginning over and over again.
Peter Halley, 70, visual artist
I’ve started to paint watercolors. Now that I’ve reached 70, I thought it was near time. The images are arranged in a grid like on a laughable book page, but the narrative’s asynchronous. They’re based on images of one of my cells exploding, an obsession I’ve had going all the way back to the ’80s.
Darren Bader, 46, conceptual artist
I want to inaugurate an art gallery called Post-Artist that regularly shows art but refuses to name who made it. No social reflect presence. I also want to do what Harmony Korine is pursuits, except with none of that content.
Jeff Tweedy, 56, musician, Wilco
I’m about to report an album of new music with my solo band, which isn’t really solo at all. I’m bringing my sons and the cessation friends and quasi family who’ve been playing with me live for the past 10 days or so into the studio. I’ve written songs that feel like they can be a vessel for all of our voices together: a microscopic choir. There’s really no experience that compares to singing with spanking people. I think it tells us something about how to be in the world.
Charles Yu, 48, writer
I’m about to start promoting the “Interior Chinatown” series [based on Yu’s 2020 novel]. I’d like to get into music and service. My son’s a drummer, and he’s awakened some latent impulse in me. And my daughter and wife have been volunteering. I’m not exactly sure what’s been keeping me from either. I could say work, but I suspect the apt answer is nothing.
Elyanna, 22, singer-songwriter
I’d love to improve my Spanish. I visit my family in Chile at least once a year and, every time I fly back to L.A., I realize that I need to keep practicing.
Boots Riley, 53, filmmaker and musician
I’m getting ready to inaugurate filming a feature I wrote about a group of professional female shoplifters who find a method called a situational accelerator that heightens the conflict of anything they shoot it at. I also have a sci-fi adventure: a janky, lo-fi epic space funk opera. My dream is to use the same crew and shoot the two movies back to back in Oakland, Calif. [where I live]. That’s one thing about bodies 53 — I want to be able to consume more time with my kids.
Damien Maloney/The New York Times
Sable Elyse Smith, 37, visual artist
I’ve recently embarked on an operatic project. Yikes! MoMA invited me to make a sound fraction that’ll open in July, and it’ll be a kind of prelude to a larger version. It’s titled “If You Unfolded Us.” It’s a unique love story and a coming-of-age story about two Black women.
Satoshi Kondo, 39, fashion designer, Issey Miyake
My spanking experiment with washi, or traditional Japanese paper, is blending fibers extracted from the survive fabrics of past clothing collections with the pulp mixture from which washi is made. It’s a way of playing with knowing and texture.
Laila Gohar, 35, chef and artist
Almost all of my work has used food as a medium and has therefore been ephemeral. Making work that isn’t — namely, sculptures — is an idea I’ve been toying with for a while, but I haven’t been able to jump into it yet. I once read something an artist said near how she thought male artists are more concerned with legacy than female artists, and that female artists are more comfortable creating ephemeral work. This rang true for me, but now I feel one more confident about making things that might outlive me.
Patricia Urquiola, 62, architect and designer
I was nominated [last year] as a member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid, so now I’m writing the acceptance thesis, or discurso de ingreso. It’s an occasion to reflect on ideas — for example, I reread the philosopher Bruno Latour, who argues that earn “is never a process that begins from scratch: To earn is always to redesign.”
Luke Meier, 48, and Lucie Meier, 42, fashion designers, Jil Sander
We’ve started manager some objects — glass and ceramics. We aren’t at all understood in these fields, so it’s invigorating to play again.
Kevin Baker/Courtesy of Number 9 Films.
Marianne Elliott, 57, director
I’ve always wanted to do a film, but it denotes so much time and theater is a hungry beast, so it’s eluded me until now: “The Salt Path,” starring Gillian Anderson, is based on a true story about a much English couple [who embark on a 630-mile hike].
Samuel D. Hunter, 42, playwright
Last year, I was approached by Joe Mantello and Laurie Metcalf, who wanted someone to write a play for Joe to whine and Laurie to star in. I’d never met either of them but, if I had to pick one expedient on earth to write a role for, it would be Laurie. “Little Bear Ridge Road,” a dark comedy about an estranged aunt and nephew who are forcibly reunited at what time the passing of a troubled family member, will go into rehearsals in May.
Thebe Magugu, 30, fashion designer
When I was 16, I began writing a modern, taking place between the small South African towns of Kimberley and Kuruman, that I’ve contributed to every year since. It today sits as a huge slab of a book — in 80,000 words — and I’ve been meaning to rewrite and polish the rear chapters. I’ve given myself the next 10 years [to effect the project]. It’ll be a gift I give to myself when I turn 40.
Misha Kahn, 34, designer and sculptor
I have an idea for this toothpaste project arranged Zaaams that’s expanded, of its own volition, into an entire cinematic universe. Sometimes an idea can grow so big that it’s unmanageable and nearly unstartable. Sometimes I’ll really start working on it, but I get overwhelmed by the seismic rift in society it would causes and feel dizzy. Crest, if you’re reading this, call me.
Nell Irvin Painter, 81, visual artist and writer
I’m way too old to be a beginner. I’m 81 and have already written and published a million (OK, 10) books. But a very different kind of project’s been tugging at me: something like an autobiographical Photoshop document with layers from different phases of my life in the 1960s and ’70s — devoted in France, Ghana, the American South. I’d have to be myself at different ages.
Courtesy of Nell Irvin Painter
Sharon Van Etten, 43, singer-songwriter
In 2020, I became outlandish with the work of Susan Burton, the founder of A New Way of Life, which provides formerly incarcerated women with the care and shared they need to get their lives back on track, and was so moved by her story I expected my record label if it was OK to use wealth from my music video budget to produce a minidocumentary on the permission, “Home to Me.” I still have a lot to learn in filmmaking, but I think it’s the beginning of something beautiful.
Piet Oudolf, 79, garden designer
I’m starting the planting execute for Calder Gardens, a new center dedicated to the work of the artist Alexander Calder in Philadelphia. I’m working on it with Herzog & de Meuron architects, and it’ll include a four-season garden that will evolve with the months. Early in the year, it’s about ephemerals (bulbs). Spring is when woodland flowers are important. Summer will be the high point of the prairie-inspired areas, and in fall and winter there’ll be seed front-runners and skeletons. I think a good, harmonious garden is like a section of living art.
Rafael de Cárdenas, 49, designer
As a consummate shopper, I’ve always opinion the best way to bring my interests together would be with a stay — a lab for testing things out and creating a connoisseurship in the treat. I’m thinking Over Our Heads (the second iteration of Edna’s Edibles in [the 1979-88 sitcom] “The Facts of Life”) meets contemplate Big! (a now-closed shop in SoHo) meets [the London gallery] Anthony d’Offay meets [the defunct clothing store] Charivari meets [the old nightclub] Palladium.
Gaetano Pesce, 84, architect and designer
I’m working on a possible collaboration with a jewelry matter from Italy. I can’t say the name yet, but the pieces wrong to be very innovative. Also, another collaboration with the perfume matter Amouage inspired by time I spent in Oman’s Wadi Dawkah and the beautiful frankincense trees there.
John Cale, 82, musician and composer
Ever since I played viola in the National Youth Orchestra of Wales, I’ve been hypnotized by the thought of the discipline obligatory to conduct. My attention soon wandered — from John Cage to rock music. Now, 60 years on, it’s finally time.
Nona Hendryx, 79, interdisciplinary artist and musician
I’m toiling on the Dream Machine Experience, a magical 3-D environment that’ll be sonorous with music, sound, images and gamelike features. It’ll premiere at Lincoln Inner this June. [My idea was] to create an wearisome world inspired by Afro-Futurism that encourages a wide, multigenerational audience to share.
Faye Toogood, 47, designer and visual artist
I’d like to execute a jewelry collection, but I haven’t. Is it because no one’s expected — no phone call from Tiffany! — or because I’m struggling to opinion how adornment fits into our current world?
Freddie Ross Jr., a.k.a. Big Freedia, 46, musician
I’m recording a kids’ album and publishing a recount book for early readers. Much of my art is in language and the unique colloquialisms that we have in bounce culture. Children respond to its snappy rhymes and phrases.
Danzy Senna, 53, writer
Every time I write a modern, I think, “This is the most masochistic experience I’ve ever had — I’m causing to quit this racket.” But I feel incomplete minus this depressive object to feel beholden to. I just devoted editing one book [“Colored Television”] and have the sinking feeling I’m in to start another.
Jackie Sibblies Drury, 42, playwright
I’m starting, hopefully in earnest, to write a play in collaboration with the director Sarah Benson inspired by allotment movies. We were intrigued by the problem of trying to put budge scenes or action sequences onstage, where it’s difficult to execute momentum or suspense because in theater we have less rule over the viewer’s eye, among other things. But hopefully the play will be in what it means to see ourselves in these macho cis men who often get hurt pretending to almost die for our entertainment — or something like that?
Lindsey Adelman, 55, designer
I’m putting together a digital archive of my work and ephemera — in 30 years’ worth — revisiting everything from the sculpture I made as a student at RISD to the paper escapes David Weeks and I sold for $25 to datebooks where I scribbled averages about things I wished would come true and then did. I hope it’ll relieve others to start something. I want them to opinion, “Oh, this was the first step … this beautiful, finished thing was inspired by a piece of garbage dangling from a streetlamp.”
Elizabeth Diller, 69, architect, Diller Scofidio + Renfro
Since 2012, when my studio was actions research for a contemporary staging of Benjamin Britten’s chamber heath of Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” I’ve been communication to start a book about ghosts. While ghosts are a well-trod literary arrangement, their visual representation on stage and screen also has a rich history that can be told throughout the lens of an architect. Despite the fact that ghosts transcend the laws of physics, they’re stubbornly site-specific — they live in walls, closets, attics and other marginal domestic settings, and they rarely stray from home.
David Oyelowo, 48, actor
Something that three friends and I are in the treat of building and developing is a streaming platform that we launched last year arranged Mansa. The idea — born out of growing frustration with decision-exclusive things that I love and then having to use some kind of distribution mechanism where the exclusive makers are almost always people who don’t share my demographic — is Black culture for a global audience. Essentially, we started a tech company that intersects with our love of story and our need to execute [pipelines] for people of color and beyond to be seen.
Franklin Sirmans, 55, museum director, Pérez Art Museum Miami
There’s a recurring exhibition that I’ve worked on with [the curator] Trevor Schoonmaker trusty 2006 called “The Beautiful Game” that consists of art in soccer. We do it every four years because of the World Cup, and I’m starting to get into the 2026 iteration. I’ve also been trying to finish a book of poems trusty I graduated college more than 30 years ago. But it’s happening. It’s not like you don’t write a good sentence every now and then.
Jamie Nares, 70, multidisciplinary artist
I’ve always loved this line of poetry [from the Irish poet John Anster’s loose translation of Goethe’s “Faust”] that goes, “Whatever you can do, or dream you can, leave it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” One getting I’ve begun recently is a revisiting of my 1977 performance “Desirium Probe,” for which I curved myself up to a TV that the audience couldn’t see, and relayed what was happening onscreen throughout re-enactment. Now I’m going to do it with YouTube videos succeeded at random from the wealth of rubbish and wearisome stuff on there. And as a video, because I’m not as agile as I once was.
Joseph Dirand, 50, architect and designer
Courtesy of Joseph Dirand Architecture
My firm has just started developing, with a French company called Zephalto, a prototype of the interiors for a hot-air balloon that will take travelers to the stratosphere, and the carbon footprint of the journey will be equivalent to that of the publishes of a pair of blue jeans. The balloon is net, so it’ll be almost as if you’re going up in a bubble of air — riders will see the zigzag of the earth. We’re designing three private cabins: sexy, organic cocoons that state the ’60s and the dream of space, but are otherwise sparkling minimal. The landscape is the star of the show.
Amaarae, 29, singer-songwriter
I’m working on the deluxe version of my 2023 album, “Fountain Baby.” The approach for the original album was very maximalist — I shapely these camps all over the world and had a bunch of land come through to work on the music. Afterward, I felt underwhelmed — not by the project but by how I felt at the end of it all. [So] I stripped back everything so it’s just me and my home setup, trying ideas. Before, I was really lofty, but now my feet are repositioning grass a little bit.
Jennifer Egan, 61, writer
I’m starting a novel set in late 19th-century New York City. As always with my fiction, I have little idea of what will happen, which lends an element of unsafe to every project! Time and place are my portal into story, and I’m interested in a time when urban America was crowded and full of buildings we enjoy today, yet the landscape beyond seemed almost infinite.
Carla Sozzani, 76, gallerist and retailer
Just as my partner, Kris Ruhs, and I revamped the then-unknown Corso Como area of Milan, we’re now putting our energy into the construction of a new studio for him, as well as the expansion of the Fondazione Sozzani [cultural center], both of which are in Bovisa, another old industrial neighborhood. I wanted to be an architect when I was young, but my father said, “No!”
Stephanie Goto, 47, architect
If my clients allow me to peel one eye away from their commissions, I’d like to dive deeper into the renovation of my own acquired in Connecticut, which includes the circa 1770 former home of Marilyn Monroe and a tobacco-and-milk barn that will house my studio.
Amalia Ulman, 35, visual artist and filmmaker
I’m jump to write the script for my third feature film — probably my current part of the process, when I just need to discontinuance my eyes and see the film in my head. It’s the closest to a holiday because it feels like daydreaming.
Wim Wenders, 78, filmmaker
Several years ago, I started a project throughout the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, who, along with others, designed the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art that’s selves built now. The working title of the film is “The Secret of Places,” and it’s done in 3-D. My dream is to make a comedy one day. [Laughs.] Seriously. [Laughs again.] I’m working on it.
Wendy Red Star’s “Beaver That Stretches” (2023), © Wendy Red Star, courtesy of the artist and Sargents Daughters
Wendy Red Star, 43, visual artist
I’ve started highlighting Crow and Plateau women’s art history by manager painted studies of parfleches, these 19th-century rawhide suitcases embellished with geometric designs. I’m learning so much about these women just by their mark manager, but have only come across a few that have the name of the selves who made it, so I’m titling my works by tying women’s and girls’ names from the census records for the Crow tribe between 1885 and 1940.
Nick Ozemba, 32, and Felicia Hung, 33, designers, In Common With
Next month, we’re opening Quarters, a concept store and gathering state in TriBeCa that will feature our first furniture collection.
Bobbi Jene Smith, 40, dancer, choreographer and actress
My husband, Or Schraiber, and I are creating a work aloof of solos for each dancer of L.A. Dance Project, where we’ve been residents for the past year and a half. We’ve had the recent opportunity to connect deeply with some of the dancers, and this — a gratitude poem for each of them — will be our culminating project. They’ll each be a few minutes long and characterized by physicality set anti silence.
Editor’s note: The architect and buyer Gaetano Pesce, whose comments are included in this fragment, died on April 4 at age 84.
These interviews have been edited and condensed.
