6 Artists Reveal The Detais of Their Creative Process

Like a captivating movie or a disarming novel, a piece of artwork has the immediate ability to inhabit and transform a moment into a reverie, or a mood. Here, we present six artists who have engaging culturally and globally significant stories to tell. Personal materials, lived experiences, and dedicated missions prompt their visual languages, while the audiences applaud their invitations for transformation. Keep scrolling to discover six artists and the details of their creative process.

Subtlety is a driving force in Clare Rojas’s paintings of women inhabiting quaint interiors, disarmingly familiar dreamscapes, and absorbing abstractions. “As a woman, I feel as though I have to imagine and create a world where I am respected, safe, secure, protected, free, and believed out of thin air, because this is a place that does not exist within the patriarchal society,” she says. “From my perspective, the male-dominated world in general is surreal.” The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art’s [located in Charlotte, North Carolina] ongoing survey, Past the Present, open now through January 20 of next year, focuses on the work that Rojas has created in the past five years, with  recurring themes of isolation and contemplation.

“I live a very monastic lifestyle,” says the 48-year-old. Rojas’s fall 2024 exhibition, Stem, at Charlotte’s SOCO Gallery, features new paintings of flora. Occasional sparrows or piles of books accompany the painter’s gentle illustrations of flowers, with botanic precision and unrestrained whimsy. A collaboration with Peg Norriss x Schumacher for a series of floral wallpapers pushes Rojas’s horticultural curiosities to three-dimensional spaces. “I love the variation in colors, form, texture, the scents, gardening, the birds and bees and butterflies they attract,” says Rojas, who considers her flowers “humanized, because they are creatures that have personalities, that dance and look with eyes, and bend and wake and sleep, and feed themselves from the sun and water.”

Otobong Nkanga’s new mural in a yard of a co-op at 519 East 11th Street in the East Village assimilates into the neighborhood’s East Village’s gritty architectural landscape. A sprawling network of houses, people, and trees creates a cosmology of possibilities and harmonies. “A smell of a place could actually trigger a work,” Nkang says. Places echo with social, terrestrial, and historical narratives for Nkanga, who travels the world not only to exhibit at museums but also to study the Earth and humankind. Through textile paintings, earthy sculptures, and allusive performances, she mines human behavior in the face of a struggling nature. “There are many kinds of encounters with materials,” she says. “Looking at a stone, you’ll see patterns and think of the geopolitical influences of things that can also inspire ways of working a material.”

Back in New York, the Museum of Modern Art has recently unveiled Cadence, a mammoth tapestry and installation of dyed ropes, hand-blown glass, and ceramics, on view in the museum’s highly trafficked atrium through June 8. This is only the beginning of Nkanga’s colossal American jaunt. In April of next year, Nkanga will accept the prestigious Nasher Prize, awarded to an accomplished sculptor every two years by the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. “It is crucial to be able to have the palpitation and deep interest in wanting to do something,” she says. “You must have a desire to imagine that you can do something with a place, with people, with other entities.”

Jean-Michel Basquiat and Ouattara Watts met in Paris in January 1988 when the former was celebrating his meteoric career with a solo show at Yvon Lambert Gallery in Paris. The friendship was instant yet short-lived (Basquiat died seven months later). Within those months, however, the duo squeezed an intense emotional and creative bond. “Our paintings shared a foundational vocabulary—a web of interconnected symbols, textures, and rhythms—that allowed us to understand one another,” says Watts, who lives in New York today. More than 36 years after their first encounter, the two painters are the subject of a joint show at the Currier Museum of Art in New Hampshire.

Featuring six of Basquiat’s paintings and seven large mixed-media canvases by Watts, the show draws parallels between their kinetic handling of a surface with quick but dense impressions that capture a turbulent association with ancestry, memory, urban chaos, and the self. “I am interested in how symbols transcend their origins and become universal references, bringing cultures into conversation rather than keeping them apart,” Watts says. “I find many of the textiles that [eventually] appear in my paintings at flea markets, and sometimes organic matter like leaves and shells make an appearance.” Among the show’s standouts is Intercessor #0 (1989), which Watts painted a year after Basquiat’s death. “Together, we aimed to develop visual languages that embraced a multiplicity of perspectives—we are two sides of the same coin.”

“The initial appeal of tires was the surface texture, the designs and patterns created by the manufacturers for grabbing the road and wicking rain and snow away,” Chakaia Booker says of her early years collecting materials on New York’s streets. After more than four decades, she continues to be fascinated by the traces of time, use, burn, and neglect on tires’ hefty rubber skins. “You see and feel all these aftereffects in the material, and that carries over into my repurposing and reimagining.” Booker’s larger-than-life sculpture, Shaved Portions, was on display from April through October in New York’s Garment District, with deconstructed rubber tires as the star material. At a 35-foot-tall height, the sculpture is a love song to the discarded, with thrown-away tire cuts assembled into a rhythmic grid.

“I like the interaction with the world that public art provides, in contrast to the gallery’s personal, almost private viewing space,” she says. The expansive structure rose in the heart of Midtown Manhattan, where traffic and chaos ceaselessly run their course. “If an artist has done their job well, their work will speak to people and will engage them in something bigger than themselves, a wider humanity,” she says. The 71-year-old artist’s modest scale sculptures also currently occupy David Nolan Gallery in New York with a similarly powerful aura, yet more intimately through their smaller sizes. “The goal for me is that each person can engage with the work in a way that resonates with them personally, and that changes over time,” she says.

In 2019, Bony Ramirez was a construction worker in New Jersey. Now, he will wrap up 2024 with two public art commissions in Miami and a solo exhibition in Shanghai. Ramirez was quietly painting at home in his off hours when he garnered gallerists’ attention on Instagram during the COVID pandemic. An art-fair presentation led to a group show, which paved the way tor solo exhibitions; Ramirez’s paintings of joyously unfettered and ambiguous figures in elaborate attires began entering every major collector’s home. The 28-year-old’s instantly recognizable visual vocabulary includes fantastical gestures and comical expressions. “I put Brown and Black figures into positions of power by presenting them in the classical portraiture fashion,” says Ramirez, who was born in the Dominican Republic. Dark undertones also emerge through his tropical color palette: besides markers of colonialist impact, beach resorts maintained by invisible staff members suggest a criticism of the Caribbean’s exploitation through over-tourism.

A multifaceted depiction of the Caribbean experience is vividly embodied in Ramirez’s new permanent outdoor sculpture, which will be unveiled in Miami’s Underline park during the buzzy Art Basel week. A circular pile of coconuts and shells with a hollow center celebrates Vice City’s large Caribbean population, while emphasizing its profile as a getaway destination. Titled Is Blue the Color of the Ocean?, the fiberglass and metal ring reaches a six-foot height and gloriously cements Ramirez’s growing profile. The outing coincides with another monumental outdoor project, located a fifteen-minute drive north in the glitzy Miami Design District. A mural version of Ramirez’s 2021 painting Musa Coccinea rises at a colossal sixteen-foot height amidst the neighborhood’s posh restaurants and high-end shops. The Ramirez effect stretches to the opposite side of the globe, too. Shanghai’s closely watched gallery Bank hosts his first solo exhibition in Asia.