to Frank Ocean’s breezy “Pink + White,” which is playing
in the background of a cavernous Brooklyn photo studio.
Congestion and all, her complexion remains inconceivably
poreless. “My relationship to beauty has always been a
bit confused,” admits the new Dior makeup ambassador.
“I didn’t ever think I’d be the face of anything,” says the
22-year-old, who grew up in Walsall, West
Midlands, with a British mother and a
father of Jamaican descent. “At school,
the majority of the girls were white
and slim with long hair, so that’s what I
wanted to look like.” Learning to embrace
her hourglass figure and pillowy pout,
however—while nurturing a raw talent
that saw her write her first song when she was just 11 years
old—has helped the London-based singer earn international
attention not just from designers such as Maria Grazia
Chiuri, who designed three custom Dior gowns with Smith
for her performance at the Guggenheim International Gala,
but from Kendrick Lamar. And Bruno Mars. And Drake,
who reached out to Smith on Instagram two years ago to ask
her to be a part of his More Life mixtape.
“There’s something new that’s happening now,” Smith
continues of the cultural landscape. “Everything is being
celebrated—different looks, hair, and bodies. Everyone is
beautiful,” she explains, nodding to a long-overdue, industry-
wide pivot toward broader representation that makes her
more than just an ambassador for primers and foundation.
“She’s a role model for women around the world,” says Peter
Philips, creative and image director for Dior Makeup, who
has already begun working closely with Smith to expand her
face-painting repertoire. “I’m definitely getting experimental
with color and doing more with my eyes,” she promises.
Fans who witnessed the Toronto finale of Smith’s recent
North American co-headlining tour with
Colombian-American artist Kali Uchis—
a girls-only bill that made a powerful
statement about who can sell tickets in a
male-dominated genre—likely noticed this
evolution when she sported a rusty wash
of eye shadow and a matte brick-red lip
to cover Erykah Badu’s “On & On” with
Uchis. “But skin is my main thing,” she insists. “As long as
my skin looks natural, we can play with the rest.”
Smith will have plenty of opportunities to get creative
as she braces to release her first music since Lost & Found,
which made her something of a red-carpet fixture on the
awards circuit. “She can wear streetwear and she can wear
gowns,” the designer Olivier Rousteing said of dressing
Smith for the Grammys in a gold, curve-hugging custom
Balmain dress. “You cannot put Jorja in a box.” It’s an apt
description of what to expect from her impact on the beauty
world, and her new material. “I can’t wait to put it out,” she
says of the songs she’s been writing over the last two years
while ruminating on growing up with the scrutiny of fame.
“This is a new chapter.”—lau r en valenti
“There’s something new
happening. Everything
is being celebrated.
Everyone is beautiful”
The exuberant canvases
of Sam Gilliam unfold at
Dia :Beacon.
In the late 1960s, Sam Gilliam
began filling rooms with
massive lengths of unprimed canvas,
soaked and stained in riotous hues and
slung from walls and ceilings in site-
specific combinations. Soon enough,
Gilliam realized if he wanted to make a
living—with three children, he had to—it
would behoove him to work on a more
collector-friendly scale. Thus evolved the
draped paintings for which the artist, 85,
is now best known: comparatively small
derivations of the same idea that could
be displayed alone against a wall.
Lately, though, a surge of interest in
his career—Gilliam jokes by phone from
his D.C. studio about his “rediscovery”—
has led to opportunities to revisit the
earlier work. This month, the painter
takes over a gallery at Dia:Beacon with
two of his massive drapes, both created
in 1969 as part of his Carousel series.
It’s a new mash-up of old work, installed,
says Courtney J. Martin, who curated the
show, to make the viewer feel as if she’s
“walking into the painting.”
The Dia collection, with its focus on
minimalist and conceptual work from the
’60s and ’70s, provides an opportunity
to showcase the artist alongside his
generational peers—many of whom
achieved the kind of mainstream
success that eluded Gilliam for decades.
(It’s easy enough to surmise why:
He’s black, resisted pressure to make
representational, socially conscious art,
and lived a couple hundred miles from
the art world’s beating heart.) “This was
a collection that Sam could have been
in,” says Martin. Arriving there now “feels
great,” attests the artist. He cites Rothko,
Newman, Pollock, and de Kooning,
pioneers of abstraction who forged their
own path, going out on a limb before
spaces existed to exhibit their work.
“There’s a film called Field of Dreams,”
Gilliam says. “If I make it, they will come.
It’s about optimism.”—JULIA FELSENTHAL
ART
50 AUGUST 2019 VOGUE.COM
VLIFE
Life in Color
A WRINKLE IN TIME
SPREAD, BY SAM GILLIAM, 1973.
SAM
GILLIAM
. S
PR
EA
D, 1973. ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 69 X 113 1/2 X 1 3/4 IN. PHOTO: FREDRIK NILSEN STUDIO COURTESY OF DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY, LOS ANGELES.
