187RADICAL
equalse of true minds is rare enough, but it’s rarer
en they come from opposite ends of the earth.
Sze was born in Boston, Siddhartha
herjee in New Delhi a year later. Sze, a 2003
cArthur Fellow, is an internationally
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Her intricate and sometimes very large struc-
tures are made from simple, everyday mate-
, string, Q-tips, clay, congealed paint, frag-
otographs, video screens—fantastical
constellations that appear to grow and change as you look at
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digital age. Mukherjee is a brilliant oncologist, scientist and
writer whose 2010 book The Emperor Of All Maladies: A
Biography Of Cancer won the Pulitzer Prize and was made
into a three-part television documentary by Ken Burns. The
Gene: An Intimate History, published this year, is a daring
and highly personal voyage into the future of genetic re-
search. “You have to choose your equal in life,” says their
good friend the artist Rachel Feinstein, “and Sarah and Sid
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In Sze’s industrial-size studio on Manhattan’s West Thir-
ty-seventh Street, she has six projects under way. A vivid,
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so Rodriguez jacket, she meets me at the elevator with Gin-
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February. The place feels a little like a science lab, with ex-
periments going on in different rooms—strings dipped in
paint, hanging from the ceiling; an assistant cutting hard
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preparing for her September show at the Rose Art Museum,SARAH SZE is an artist redei ning
sculpture. SIDDHARTHA
MUKHERJEE is a pioneering scientist
and author. Together, they may just be
rilliant couple in New York.
DODIE KAZANJIANhed by INEZ AND VINOODHMukherjee
and Sze,
photographed
in her New York
studio next to a
sculpture
in progress