![]() ![]() As a teenager, she wrote poetry inspired by the Black Arts Movement writer Nikki Giovanni, read science fiction novels by Octavia E. The sensitive, magnetic kid who would come to be known as Queen Latifah was a quick study. There, where culture was being made in real time, D.J.s tested out records on the crowd before playing them on the radio, and Owens picked up moves that nobody at Irvington High School knew until she brought them back across the river. Once inside, she recalls, “it’s tight and it’s hectic and the energy is crazy.” Up on the stage were M.C.s like Melle Mel and Big Daddy Kane - artists she’d dreamed about seeing live - whose faces she knew from posters or album covers (rap videos were still rare in 1985). She’d finish her shift at Burger King, change into her Swatch tracksuit and take the commuter train under the Hudson River and the subway up to Times Square, where a bouncer would pat her down for weapons. HANYA YANAGIHARA Read more about the making of the issue.ĭANA OWENS was just 15 when she and her friends started “going over,” as they called it, from Newark, N.J., to the Latin Quarter, a nightclub in Midtown Manhattan. But everyone begins with something humble. Not everyone can make something that changes how we see the world. But most of all, we can take comfort in their reminders that art is rarely effortless, at any age or any stage in one’s career, and that a life in the arts is always riven with doubt, no matter how it looks on the outside. And there are further lessons, too: in Queen Latifah’s composure, in Taylor’s determination, in Bening’s instincts, in Prada’s ambivalence. It takes a special kind of self-possession to make something new, or to rebel against what you’ve been taught to want to create. Those of us trying to live artistic lives of our own can find plenty of inspiration in those of this year’s honorees: especially about defiance, which all artists find themselves becoming expert in. Then there’s Annette Bening, whose long, diverse, unpredictable career feels the result not of long-term strategy but of everyday curiosity, the kind that, if you’re lucky, takes you to unexpected places. Some, like the artist Henry Taylor, who for years painted in obscurity while working as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital, found creative or critical success later in life others, like the fashion designer Miuccia Prada, had to grapple with the gap between her political convictions and commercial and artistic talents (Prada has considered herself a socialist since university). When you look at our Greats honorees over the years, you see that the path for many of them was meandering, the journey fitful. Makeup by Raisa Flowers.īut I’d say that that conviction is the exception, not the rule. ![]() Queen Latifah: Photographed by Rahim Fortune. ![]() Annette Bening: Photographed by Katy Grannan. Miuccia Prada: Photographed by Collier Schorr. Clockwise from top left: Henry Taylor: Photographed by D’Angelo Lovell Williams. ![]()
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