Home

13 Oct Neve Be

In summer 2013, there was only one song that mattered: Lana Del Rey’s “Summertime Sadness.” Not because a remix of the track was on the radio or because the Born to Die backlash was starting to meet its own end.

No, dear babe-readers, it was because that was the summer I met Neve Be, and their performance of that song at an open mic night would mark the end of our brief but beautiful time spent in the same town in New Jersey. Since that lovely summer of midnight wanderings through dark small-town streets, impromptu crazy-dancing in otherwise empty bars, and incessant, mind-expanding conversation, Neve has moved to Oakland, a place that they say allows them to be all of the things they are, and things they didn’t know they were. Now, Neve has gone from being an incredibly busy and engaged artist, thinker, and activist to an almost inconceivably prolific version of all of the above...aka a full-time babe.

07 Oct Stephanie Brown

Meeeerrroooowwww. A pained howl erupts out of Chicago tattoo artist Stephanie Brown’s “very rude” cat from time to time, interrupting us as we chat in her comfortable home studio in Logan Square.

As we sip hot tea on one of the city’s first chilly weekends, I get to look around at Stephanie’s space. Objects that vaguely resemble artifacts from some untouched corner of the world reflect and complement Stephanie’s sketches, drawings, and paintings, reminding me how much Stephanie loved drawing at the Field Museum when we met years ago. Now, Stephanie’s drawings of birds, flowers, bats, bugs, and much more are no longer confined to two dimensions—they live eternally on the skin of her clients. In just four years, Stephanie has become an incredibly successful tattoo artist, achieving creative autonomy at an unprecedented pace in a world that places heavy emphasis on seniority and experience by making some of the most beautiful tattoos I have ever seen.

20 Sep Corvas Kent Brinkerhoff II

“I should do more site tours at midnight with a flask of whiskey.”

By this point in the night, we are buried deep in the imaginings of Santa Fe art collective Meow Wolf with one of its founding members, Corvas Kent Brinkerhoff II. Sipping from a small silver flask, we have traversed Meow Wolf’s major workshops, empty except for Golda Blaise. Blaise, another Meow Wolf artist, was logging late-night hours creating tiny, spiky sea creatures out of a strange, plastic goop. The scenes inside the workshops were haunting in the near-stillness. A disembodied eye that will later be inserted into a watchful forest of aspen trees sat lazily on an orange chair. A half-built tree house loomed over spiraling chunks of cardboard. The skeleton of an inter-dimensional portal cast shadows of what was to come.