After abandoning her studies in chemical nuclear engineering, Pivi shifted her ambitions and attended the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan. As a student there she made her first artwork in 1994. The aspiring artist gathered ready-made objects to assemble, in her words, ‘a shirt, in which I put knives, with the blades sticking out like a porcupine, which I wore’.²  The pierced purple blouse, perhaps suggesting costume or armour, also hinted at a future practice of making art with the animal kingdom in mind. ‘The first animals that came into my art were the two ostriches on the boat…I never had any inclinations towards animals, and then all of a sudden they started popping up everywhere,’ Pivi states.³  Since 2003, an exotic cast has taken centre stage in her work. From ostriches, horses and sheep to donkeys, bears and zebras, wildlife invaded Pivi’s imagination. As ringleader she organizes impossible tableaux vivants starring magnificent creatures in unusual settings. For example, a leopard (safely) paces an encaged gallery around 3,000 fabricated cappuccino cups or an alligator meanders through 10,000 litres of whipped cream in the Florida Everglades.⁴  The final images, printed at various scales, emerge from intimately staged and meticulously detailed performances that are professionally filmed and photographed.

Everybody has their own America, and then they have the pieces of a fantasy America that they think is out there but they can’t see. When I was little, I never left Pennsylvania, and I used to have fantasies about things that I thought were happening in the Midwest, or down South, or in Texas, that I felt I was missing out on. But you can only live in one place at a time. And your own life while it’s happening to you never has any atmosphere until it’s a memory. So the fantasy corners of America seem so atmospheric because you’ve pieced them together from scenes in movies and music and lines from books. And you live in your dream America that you’ve custom-made from art and schmaltz and emotions just as much as you live in your real one.⁵ 

Warhol was born Andrew Warhola in 1928 into a poor working-class Carpatho-Rusyn family. The Warhola family had recently immigrated to Pittsburgh, then an industrial Goliath in steel production, and settled in the Ruska Dolina, a neighborhood of compatriots anchored by Saint John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church and adjacent to steel mills and the Monongahela River. His father, Andrej Warhola, a laborer, died in 1942, when Andy was thirteen years old, leaving his mother, Julia, to support the family with the assistance of his two older brothers. Julia herself was not only a hardworking, pious caregiver but also a self-taught artist who made flowers from old tin cans and crepe paper, which she sold door to door, and produced hundreds of drawings, mostly of cats and angels. Warhol, a sickly child, spent copious amounts of time with Julia, who nurtured his physical health and spiritual well-being as well as his artistic side. This would get them through the Great Depression and World War II, and in 1945 Warhol entered Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), where he would earn a degree in pictorial design. The young graduate made a swift relocation to New York City in 1949.

Warhol’s first-known rendering of JFK appears as a rough sketch in one of his early drawings of a newspaper front page, Pirates Sieze Ship (1961). In his book Popism (1980), Warhol remarked, “I’d been thrilled having Kennedy as president; he was handsome, young, smart…” yet in this drawing Kennedy appears sweaty and tired after a “tough day” of cabinet meetings shortly after his inauguration.⁶  The attractive and dynamic Kennedy that we tend to remember shows up in Warhol’s artworks from later in the decade. Kennedy’s smiling face is partially visible in some of Warhol’s Jackie portraits, in which Warhol had appropriated a photograph of the happy couple greeting their supporters in Dallas.

—Edwidge Danticat

Perhaps America doesn’t exist, or it shouldn’t. The conditions of possibility for the assemblage of the United States are rooted and routed in settler-conquistador violence. This means that without the exploitation and dispossession of Indigenous lands, slavery and indentured servitude, war, and the surveillance of gender, the United States wouldn’t exist. The title of this exhibition, Fantasy America, is fitting for the moment we are in: a moment that is not necessarily new but one in which people have more access to the language that would allow them to recognize that the concept we have come to understand and accept as “America” might actually be a creation myth.

For someone like Andy Warhol—born a US citizen to immigrant parents in 1928—the promise of Americanity (the feeling of being included in America) was high. The artist was raised during the Great Depression, a time when futuristic envisioning and hope were necessary tools of survival. During these times America and Americanity were taking on a new meaning because of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 (also known as the Snyder Act), which granted US citizenship to all Indigenous people born in the United States.

Powell, the photographer who chronicled early hip-hop and Downtown New York in the 1980s, died on Monday, February 1 at his home in the West Village. He was 59. His conversation with Interview turned out to be his final interview.

Powell, a fixture of the downtown scene, was rarely seen without his point-and-shoot Minolta camera, which he used to take iconic images of the Beastie Boys, Run DMC, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, and countless others.