Welcome to the T List, a newsletter from the editors of T Magazine. Each week, we’re sharing things we’re eating, wearing, listening to or coveting now. Sign up here to find us in your inbox every Wednesday. You can always reach us at tlist@nytimes.com. |
Relaxing Puzzles With a Sharp Design Sensibility |
 | | Left: a selection of Ordinary Habit puzzles. Right: a detail of a puzzle by the artist and graphic designer Marleigh Culver.Photos: Guillermo Cano. Prop Styling: Emily Karian de Cano |
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Just over a year ago — well before Covid-19 ushered in a renewed interest in indoor activities — Echo Hopkins found herself taking a few minutes out of each workday to complete a puzzle as a small way of escaping screens and refocusing her attention. This eventually led her, together with her mother, Teresa Hopkins, to co-found Ordinary Habit, under which the pair have now launched a limited-edition series of jigsaw puzzles that marries the mindfulness of play with thoughtful design. “We wanted to encourage a return to doing things that are a little more tactile,” said Echo, who is based in Brooklyn, N.Y. “There’s such a simple joy to finding one piece that fits in a puzzle.” Meanwhile, to engage the eyes, they have commissioned female illustrators based around the world, including Holly Jolley in Chile, Bodil Jane in Amsterdam and the New York City-based artist Shawna X, whose work adorns the exterior of the inclusive performance space House of Yes in Bushwick. There are six 500-piece options in all, each of which is made of recycled materials and comes in a box with a side resembling the spine of a novel that fits seamlessly on a bookshelf. A portion of the profits will be donated monthly to the Loveland Foundation, which provides financial assistance for therapy and other mental-health services for Black women and girls. $40, ordinaryhabit.com. |
10 Vessels From Master Potter Lucie Rie |
 | | Ceramics by Lucie Rie to be featured in the Phillips Design Auction on July 29, 2020.Courtesy of Phillips |
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In 1938, the potter Lucie Rie, then 36, fled Vienna with her wheel and a suitcase of her work. She found refuge in London, where she would live for the remainder of her life, making artful ceramics and becoming one of Europe’s most celebrated talents. Unlike other master English potters such as Bernard Leach, who was inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement, Rie drew her influences from both Modernism (in particular, the spare sensibility of the midcentury Austrian architect and designer Josef Hoffmann) as well as much older references, both European and Asian. As Rie told the American journalist Claire Frankel in June 1990 in The International Herald Tribune: “I was not so much influenced by the art school [School of Decorative Arts] as by a small country museum on the border of Hungary where there are Roman pots in the museum and maybe five Chinese pots that influenced me. My teaching in Vienna was ‘look at those beautiful glazes. You will never be able to do that.’ It was a great incentive. And I did it.” Rie experimented with various colors and textures, often applying the glaze directly onto the surface of her stoneware or porcelain works before firing them only once (other potters often use a more complicated process of bisque firing, applying glaze and then refiring the object again). She limited her decoration to sgraffito (using a needle to scratch on lines), subtle spirals, lips or inlay — and her pots are beautiful in their simplicity. Ten of them (from Frankel’s collection) are on view by appointment at the Phillips auction house as part of its Design Auction this week. Phillips, 450 Park Ave, New York, N.Y., 10022, phillips.com. |
Four DEET-Free, Moisturizing Bug Sprays |
As temperatures rise this July, so does the presence of pesky mosquitoes. And with the outdoors being the only safe place to socialize (from a distance) at the moment, a good bug spray is essential. These four DEET-free insect repellents promise not only to deter insects but also to moisturize and refresh tired summer skin. The Brooklyn-based personal wellness brand Kinfield created its Golden Hour ($22) spray using a strain of citronella sourced from Indonesia. Its fast-drying formula also contains lemongrass and clove, offering a more pleasing scent than your typical bug spray, as well as lauric acid for hydration. Alba Botanica’s Anti-Bug Spray ($18) uses lemongrass and citronella as well, plus peppermint oil, which provides a cooling sensation sure to alleviate any existing bites. Patio Oil ($30), a super hydrating balm from the Pennsylvania-based brand Jao, soothes skin with jojoba butter and vitamin E while warding off bugs with lemon eucalyptus oil. Beekman 1802, which crafts its goat-milk-rich products in upstate New York, carries a versatile bug repellent bar soap called Bye Bye Bugs Herbal Bug Repellent Bars, that can be used in the shower (the body releases the fragrance — citronella, lavender and lemon peel — into the air later) or simply rubbed on clothing or pulse points for shorter exposures. The bars are cut into small squares ideal for throwing in a weekend bag or having on hand for hikes. |
A Poet’s Visual Memoir From the ’70s |
 | | A grid from “Memory” (2020) by Bernadette Mayer. Courtesy of the Bernadette Mayer Papers, Special Collections & Archives, University of California, San Diego |
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In July 1971, the avant-garde poet and photographer Bernadette Mayer embarked on an “emotional science project,” documenting each day of the month with a roll of Kodachrome film and a journal entry. Mayer created a seven-hour audio recording of the text, and the result — which was shown by gallerist Holly Solomon in 1972 and then not again until 2016 (at Chicago’s Poetry Foundation) — is now being published in book form by Siglio Press. Who, really, can resist New York City in the 1970s — the elongated yellow taxis, shop signs and hot-dog vendors, the World Trade Center rising? Mayer captured the Big Apple before the gloss, before Starbucks and bank branches colonized the streets and artists and writers fled, first for the other boroughs, then for other cities entirely. But “Memory” is first and foremost a deeply personal exercise in observation, its pages filled with shopping lists, friends, interiors of diners, evidence of trips upstate, breakfasts, trees, a shaggy-haired lover. (There’s even an analog selfie.) Seen in another light, the project seems to anticipate the way we think about representing life today, whether we’re sharing snippets of our days on Instagram or unpolished fragments of thought on Twitter. Mayer, who became the director of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project in the early 1980s, was a rebel of form who refused to see life as a continuous, unspooling narrative filled with straightforward meanings. In her thoughts and images, we find an immersion in quotidian minutiae, synecdoche for a lost era that feels almost eerily contemporary. $45, sigliopress.com. |
Paul McCarthy’s Alpine Sketches |
 | | Left: Paul McCarthy’s “A&E, EVA, Santa Anita session” (2020). Right: the artist’s performance still “A&E Drawing Session, Santa Anita” (2020).Left: photo by Damon McCarthy. All images: © Paul McCarthy. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth |
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The artist Paul McCarthy is currently the subject of two shows, one online at Hauser & Wirth, and another at the exhibition space Tarmak 22 in Gstaad, the resort town in the Swiss Alps. These are, in many ways, ideal locations for this artist, who has always had a heightened awareness of detail and context. (On a recent Zoom call to discuss these shows, McCarthy sat in a mostly unadorned room, the only remarkable feature of which was a wooden cutout of Santa Claus, propped up against the wall behind him; McCarthy, with his big white beard, shared a certain resemblance.) As an early adopter of video-based art, he seemed to predict the random, frenetic qualities of a mind poisoned by the internet several decades before the fact, and McCarthy has often darkly satirized Alpine culture and German fairy tales, Hollywood’s appropriation of both and the fascist tendencies of all three. The online show, in particular, functions a little like a summary of McCarthy’s stylistic quirks. Nominally an exhibition of drawings, its contents in fact resulted from a series of improvisational performances McCarthy began filming with the actress Lilith Stangenberg in early 2020: “drawing sessions,” as the artist refers to them, while the two were in character as versions of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun for McCarthy’s new film project, called simply “A&E.” The results are messy, uncomfortable, confrontational and ultimately fascinating — convincing evidence that, even in the supposedly simple gesture of making a mark on a piece of paper, McCarthy is never as simple or straightforward as he might seem. hauserwirth.com. |
#TArtIssue: The Story of Ruth Asawa |
 | | Ruth Asawa as a young artist in 1954, surrounded by several of her wire sculptures, which she began making in the late 1940s.Nat Farbman/The Life Picture Collection/Getty Images |
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Seven years after her death, the Japanese-American sculptor Ruth Asawa has finally made her mark. Following the time she and her family spent in a series of internment camps, Asawa attended Black Mountain College and made work that incorporated the use of negative space, beauty in repetition and a deep awareness of the material at hand. She often worked with coiled lines of metal wire that she wove into undulating, biomorphic shapes that hung from the wood rafters of her house in San Francisco’s Noe Valley. For six years, these works were also shown at New York’s Peridot gallery and were acquired by top collectors including the Museum of Modern Art, the architect Philip Johnson and Mary Rockefeller. Asawa’s last show with Peridot, however, was in 1958, and for some time afterward, she had all but disappeared from the New York art world. Today, Asawa (@ruthasawaofficial) has returned as a subject of rediscovery — someone who has been given the kind of international recognition that was owed during her lifetime, and whose legacy reflects both her own contributions as an artist as well as the singular path she forged for herself as the child of immigrants, a woman and an Asian-American. Read the full story by @Thessaly La Force on tmagazine.com, and see more highlights of T’s art issue, “True Believers,” on our Instagram. |
A picture caption in last week’s newsletter misstated where the design firm Stitch is based. It is in South Carolina, not North Carolina. |
And if you read one thing on tmagazine.com this week, make it: |
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