Credit where credit is due. ArtButMakeItSports has cracked the code. The account’s creator LJ Rader has found success beyond just going viral. He has built an audience, and kept it.
Rader spent quite a bit of time in art museums growing up. He now keeps a massive digital folder handy, filled with works of art. So when inspiration strikes in the sporting world, all he has to do is flip through and his memory retention does the rest.
We’ve compiled another batch of sports moments that are completely imitating art. Enjoy!
The Minneapolis VA looks more like an art gallery this week. The 2025 National Veteran Creative Arts Competition Showcase is underway.
“There is no loss for creativity within our veteran community,” said Ali DeCamillis, an art therapist at the VA.
The four-day event features paintings, photography, sculptures, creative writing and live performances. The top three finalists in each division go on to the national competition later this year.
“I love each piece of art because there’s always a story that goes with it,” said DeCamillis. “Their artwork isn’t always about their military experience, sometimes it is, but its more about healing as a person. Finding their sense of identity through art. making connections with each other and really beginning to see beauty in the world.”
Art is the best way to cope for Army veteran Delsita Day.
“I paint through pain sometimes,” said Day. “Being sad I just create something pretty and beautiful and that makes me happy.”
“Excellent, excellent it has been a great addition to my life, and I don’t think it would have happened without art therapy,” said Marine Dick Rettke.
“Our goal is to honor their voices, both their personal and their military experience,” said DeCamillis. “This event is really special, as are our veterans, we love them. we love what we do here.”
With the Eagles’ home opener against the Dallas Cowboys just days away, one local artist is flying high — preserving the team’s iconic status through a soaring symbol: the bald eagle.
Hayden Richard, a Chester-based painter, began a bold piece long before the Eagles lifted the Lombardi Trophy — envisioning a massive bald eagle bringing the championship home.
“This big bald eagle is coming home,” Richard said, spreading his arms like wings. “Before the Eagles won the Super Bowl, I started painting this.”
There are no players, no stadium, no fans in the frame — just strength, pride, and freedom embodied in the bird itself.
Richard layered the background with his fingers, then shifted to stippling — a meticulous technique using tiny dots of paint to build texture and depth.
“Think of all those leaves, one by one — whoosh,” he laughed, slipping into a line of song: “Don’t worry about a thing… every little thing gonna be alright.”
His “All States” series celebrates American landscapes — from towering redwoods to protective mama bears — a love letter to the country’s beauty.
After losing his job as a chef when Crozer Medical closed, Richard returned to his first love: art.
“I felt connected with the Creator… and art is like creation,” he said.
He’s also the author of The True Awakening of the Mind, a book that mirrors the spiritual artistry he’s carried since childhood. Richard started drawing at age 7 in his native Trinidad, sketching in the earth with coconut branches. Today, his pieces hang on official walls back home.
Closest to his heart is a body of work he calls the Colorless Collection.
“There’s no black and white,” Richard said. “We’re one human family.”
He describes the series as a way to unite people — beyond skin tones and team colors. “The one color we all share is red,” he said, “The blood that connects us.”
And when it comes to Philly, there’s another connection close to home: Bird Nation.
Richard is holding the bald eagle painting for what he calls “Eagles royalty.”
“I’m hoping the owner of the Eagles — and Mr. Hurts and the rest of the team — will contact me and buy the paintings,” he said, with a laugh that lingers in the studio.
You never quite know what to expect from a Nostalgia & Noise event. You could walk into the “living room” of the W Hotel lobby while Soul Train plays on a TV as you’re advised to choose from a selection of classic vinyls to paint…
Most of our favorite bookstores are barely still standing. For some reason, when it comes to art, there’s a certain appreciation that comes with something being decrepit or unkempt, intentionally or not…
Urban sketching movement turns sidewalks into studios around the world – CBS News
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Flash mobs started as a playful social experiment in the early 2000s. A new movement sweeping the globe is urban sketching, like a flash mob with pencils. Itay Hod has the story.
PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania (WPVI) — Karen Harris was born and raised in South Philadelphia. Following her career in the healthcare industry, she has focused her energy on developing the new ‘African American Market’ at FDR Park.
FDR Park is already well-known for being home to the Southeast Asian Market, among others. Now, on Saturdays, guests can find African American vendors just down the road in Picnic Areas 13 and 14.
The market first opened on June 14, 2025 and will pop up each Saturday through mid-to-late October. They then plan to return in June of 2026.
OAKLAND — For nearly 20 years, Diane Williams has seethed whenever she walked by a street mural depicting the genocide of Ohlone people by Spanish colonizers — artwork she finds demeaning because the Native American men are depicted as fully nude.
Just this week, plans to remove the wall art were halted at the last minute, after tenants of the building’s apartments at 41st Street and Piedmont Avenue demanded that the history on display be left alone.
But on Friday morning, Williams finally had a reason to smile as she gazed at the mural. Someone had defaced it overnight with paper cutouts and red paint.
Now, the Franciscan missionaries oppressing the Native Americans in the painting had arrows piercing their heads and bodies. Blood spilled out of the white men. In the same red color, a declaration had been scrawled over the artwork: “THERE, I FIXED IT.”
It was the latest twist in a saga that in recent weeks has divided the North Oakland community surrounding Piedmont Avenue. On Friday, the debate shifted from online circles into public view, engulfing the sidewalk facing the mural.
These arguments mirror a broader discourse about artistic interpretations of history, with shared consensus about the horrors of Indigenous genocide, but more nuanced — and often fierce — disputes about how those stories are remembered, and who should be allowed to tell them.
The mural, painted by artist Rocky Rische Baird, is titled “The Capture of the Solid. The Escape of the Soul.” Baird, who completed the work in 2006 with help from a $5,000 city grant, at the time described the 25-by-10-foot display as a testament that the “spirit of a person can’t be boxed.”
At the center of the painting’s complex imagery are missionaries bringing traditional Western clothes — blue pants, brown boots and a belt with a buckle — to a naked Native man.
Alex Brand, left, Hong Nguyen, and their six month-old baby, Walker Brand, who lived accross the street and recently moved to Hayward, take a selfie with the mural “The Capture of the Solid, Escape of the Soul,” by artist Rocky Rische-Baird, as seen on 41st Street near the corner of Piedmont Avenue in Oakland, Calif., on Monday, Sept. 1, 2025. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
The man stands just beyond a vivid swirl of similarly unclothed American Indians with discolored bodies, a jarring imagining of the senseless violence and disease that ravaged the Ohlone people, who first settled in the coastal Northern California land that now comprises much of the Bay Area.
Williams, a 77-year-old Alaskan Athabascan Indian who has lived in East Oakland since the early 1970s, finds plenty of reasons to despise the artwork, the most visceral being its nudity.
“I saw this big old life-sized penis on this Native American, and I was appalled,” said Williams, who often passes the mural on the way to breast cancer treatment at the nearby Kaiser medical centers.
“It’s just culturally inappropriate,” she said, “and historically inaccurate — those Indians weren’t frolicking around naked. Any man would take care to cover his penis.”
Williams, who insists she is “no prude,” reveled Friday in the newfound defacement, saying it retained the Indians’ agency, though she took no credit for the graffiti. The mural has been vandalized before, and already the Native man’s genitals were barely visible because someone had previously tried to obscure the paint.
“The Capture of the Solid, Escape of the Soul,” mural by artist Rocky Rische-Baird, was vandalized with red paint and paper arrows made r on 41st Street near the corner of Piedmont Avenue in Oakland, Calif., on Friday, Sept. 5, 202. The mural, which was painted 20 years ago, depicts Spanish Franciscans clothing naked Ohlone Indians of the San Francisco Bay Area for work in the mission fields. The building’s property manager plans to paint over the mural after receiving complaints from Ohlone native Diane Williams regarding its nudity. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
A woman strolling by on the sidewalk stopped to point a finger directly at Williams.
“The damage that they did now is inexcusable,” the woman, Julia, who provided only her first name, said in reference to the defacement. “Someone had had the guts to put this (mural) here for everyone to see — it should be an honor to you, as a Native!”
“I apologize that it upset you,” Williams responded, “but I’m the one who complained — and I wish we would have spoken when it was painted in 2006.”
Julia declined to give her age but described herself as the building’s oldest tenant. Indeed, many of the residents here had urged the property manager to cancel a planned removal of the mural.
Their anger carried over to the social media website Nextdoor, where in the heat of debate, Williams’ account was recently suspended.
The owner of the building, Albert Sarshar, had earlier been lobbied by Williams to get rid of the artwork but called off the paint-over job this week to give himself “more time to investigate.” Days later, he remains confused about what to do.
“I just want everyone to be happy,” he said.
The owner even consulted with City Councilmember Zac Unger, who declined to weigh in on the debate, telling this news organization, “I don’t think it’s the role of government to dictate speech on private property.”
Williams, meanwhile, insists that there were enough disgruntled Native Americans in the area to stage an upcoming boycott of the building’s primary tenant, a Japanese restaurant named Ebiko. But her earliest protest, in 2006, drew only a handful of people.
Jacqueline Hackle, left, expresses with Ohlone native and activist Diane Williams on “The Capture of the Solid, Escape of the Soul,” mural by artist Rocky Rische-Baird, which was vandalized with red paint and paper arrows on 41st Street near the corner of Piedmont Avenue in Oakland, Calif., on Friday, Sept. 5, 2025. The mural, which was painted 20 years ago, depicts Spanish Franciscans clothing naked Ohlone Indians of the San Francisco Bay Area for work in the mission fields. After complaints from Williams about the mural’s nudity, the building’s property manager plans to paint over it. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
Reached this week, several officials at the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe seemed unaware of the mural or the debate surrounding it, even after being provided the Piedmont Avenue address.
“When art is offensive, it stimulates thinking, reflection and responses,” Alan Leventhal, the tribal archaeologist and ethnohistorian, said in an email.
“Although some of the images are indeed provoking,” Leventhal added, “it still sends a message that the history on the genocide of California Indians has been swept under the rug and rendered invisible.”
On the sidewalk, Williams found some allies Friday, including a woman passing by who called the artwork “problematic” and a man who said he had disliked the depiction of brutality since it was first painted two decades ago.
“If this were a picture of slaves and slave owners, what’s really the purpose of that?” said the man, Nedar B., who is Black and gave only the first initial of his last name. “Why does a white person want to put that on display?”
Baird, the original artist, did not respond to interview requests. While painting the mural, he consulted with Andrew Galvan, an Ohlone Indian and curator at the Old Mission Dolores Museum in San Francisco, who defends the advice he gave Baird originally.
“Art provokes conversation,” Galvan said in a statement. “The mural needs proper context. It doesn’t need to be defaced and destroyed.”
“The Capture of the Solid, Escape of the Soul,” mural by artist Rocky Rische-Baird, was vandalized with red paint and paper arrows on 41st Street near the corner of Piedmont Avenue in Oakland, Calif., on Friday, Sept. 5, 202. The mural, which was painted 20 years ago, depicts Spanish Franciscans clothing naked Ohlone Indians of the San Francisco Bay Area for work in the mission fields. The building’s property manager plans to paint over the mural after receiving complaints from Ohlone native Diane Williams regarding its nudity. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
Others who engaged Williams on Friday shared that view, including Jacqueline Hackle, who arrived to retrieve a pair of scissors stashed in a newspaper distribution box on the sidewalk.
Earlier in the week, Hackle had cut and duct-taped a formal description of the mural to the wall below, where it identifies views held by Spanish soldiers that Native Americans “needed to be clothed and directed to work in the missions’ fields.”
At one point, several people were simultaneously engaged with Williams in a fierce debate, including neighborhood resident, Valerie Winemiller, who took matters into her own hands — manually ripping off the paper arrowheads while angrily telling Williams to “find another wall and paint your own mural.”
Winemiller had backup, calling to the scene Yano Rivera, a self-described “mural doctor,” who said he specializes in removing graffiti.
“We’re going to very selectively and carefully reunify the painting visually,” Rivera explained. And then he got to work, using cotton balls and varnish to clean up all the blood.
An Argentine federal court announced Wednesday that authorities had recovered the long-lost “Portrait of a Lady,” an 18th-century work by the Italian painter Giuseppe Ghislandi that was looted by the Nazis in World War II and rediscovered when it appeared in an online real estate listing last month.
Before the presentation of the giant gold-framed portrait Wednesday in the Argentine coastal city of Mar del Plata, the painting had not been seen publicly in 80 years.
The first-ever color photo of the portrait surfaced in a real estate listing unwittingly posted by one of the daughters of Friedrich Kadgien, the fugitive Nazi officer accused of stealing the painting from one of Europe’s most prominent prewar art dealers and collectors.
Daniel Adler, center, federal attorney general of Mar del Plata, Argentina, and federal attorney Carlos Martinez, left, give a press conference in front of a painting identified by Dutch newspaper AD as “Portrait of a Lady” by Italian baroque portraitist Giuseppe Ghislandi, allegedly stolen by the Nazis from a Dutch Jewish art collector, at the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Mar del Plata, Argentina, on Sept. 3, 2025.
STRINGER/AFP via Getty Images
“We’re doing this simply so that the community to whom we partly owe the discovery of the work … can see these images,” federal prosecutor Daniel Adler said in a press conference to display the full-length portrait of Countess Colleoni, her hair ink-black and dress embroidered with pastel flowers.
“It was people from the community, specifically journalists, who prompted the investigation,” Adler said.
Dutch journalists made the shocking discovery while investigating Kadgien’s past in Argentina, where the high-ranking official fled after the collapse of the Third Reich, and later died in 1978.
News of the find thrilled historians the world over and eventually reached the heirs of the painting’s original owner, Dutch-Jewish art collector Jacques Goudstikker. He died in a shipwreck after fleeing Amsterdam ahead of advancing German troops in May 1940.
His descendants have sought to recover an estimated 1,100 paintings missing since the forced sale of Goudstikker’s extensive inventory to Adolf Hitler’s right-hand man, Hermann Göring, who built up a major art collection during WWII.
The sudden reappearance of “Portrait of a Lady” last week was fleeting. Within hours of the story’s publication in Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad last Monday, the real estate listing was taken down. Police raided the rustic Mar del Plata home of Patricia Kadgien, the Nazi officer’s daughter, but the painting wasn’t there.
Visual arts teacher Ariel Bassano speaks in front of a painting identified by Dutch newspaper AD as “Portrait of a Lady” by Italian baroque portraitist Giuseppe Ghislandi, which was allegedly stolen by the Nazis from a Dutch Jewish art collector, as it is displayed at the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Mar del Plata, Argentina, on Sept. 3, 2025.
STRINGER/AFP via Getty Images
Authorities earlier this week raided other homes belonging to the Kadgien sisters in Mar del Plata, seizing paintings and engravings that they similarly suspected of having been stolen during the 1940s.
Argentina’s federal prosecutor’s office placed Patricia Kadgien and her husband under house arrest pending a hearing Thursday on charges of concealment and obstruction of justice.
Adler, the prosecutor, told reporters that the couple’s lawyer had handed over the painting to authorities earlier Wednesday. He did not specify where the portrait would go next.
An art expert invited to assist with the investigation, Ariel Bassano, said the painting was being “stored in a special chamber” for safekeeping.
“It’s in good condition given its age,” Bassano said, dating the portrait to 1710 and valuing it at roughly $50,000.
It’s not clear exactly how the painting came into the possession of Kadgien, who worked as a financial adviser to Göring.
In their own way, animals are works of art — vibrant pops of color, intricate patterns and tangible personalities. They are perhaps our greatest muses, and the Dallas World Aquarium is highlighting that in the very best way by debuting a collection of rare Andy Warhol portraits…
It takes cojones for a contemporary artist to look at decades of paintings and decide they have something to add to the conversation. However, with The Whale, Venezuelan-American artist Alex Da Corte’s first survey at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, twists and (literally) flips some of the museum’s most iconic pieces sideways with aplomb…
When Alex Katz began painting more than 75 years ago, he ignored what was popular then, to pursue his passion: figurative art. “Most people didn’t like my work,” he said. “It was figurative, and everyone was abstract, and everything was pop art. But a lotta people didn’t like it.”
But he says he didn’t care that much what they thought: “If they liked it, swell. And if they didn’t like it, go to hell.”
Katz depicts recognizable figures and objects from the real world. Using unfussy backgrounds and large areas of color, he emphasizes shapes and outlines, and paints massive pieces, often with his wife, Ada, as his subject. “I did the figures on a flat ground,” he said. “I did the double portraits of Ada. I did the big heads before anyone. And that’s really aggressive. And the big compositions. No one had done anything like it.”
Katz grew up in Queens, New York, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Maine. He’s been honing his technique ever since.
These days, the art world has caught up to Alex Katz’s talent. His paintings can sell for millions of dollars, and exhibitions around the world have highlighted his work, including a show in 2022 at New York’s Guggenheim Museum.
Now famed for his portraits, Katz is also highly-regarded for his landscapes, often inspired by the picturesque scenes near his summer studio in Maine. “It’s a long way from Queens,” he said, “but it is like Queens. It’s all kinda small!”
Artist Alex Katz.
CBS News
Katz says painting the outdoors heightened his creativity: “I thought I was connecting with outdoor painting, but actually I was connecting with myself,” he said. “The painting was no longer cerebral. It was coming from the inside.”
This summer, Katz turned 98, and after a lifetime painting, he’s focused on the work of other artists. He gifted a collection of more than a hundred paintings by emerging and established artists to Maine’s Portland Museum of Art.
“As the art world has moved in different ways and fashions, Alex has always stayed true to his self,” said museum director Mark Bessire. “I see his love of artists taking chance and his love of artists emanating that sense of energy that he likes in a painting. He doesn’t like a painting because it looks like his or it’s figurative. He likes it ’cause it’s got the energy, and it pops.”
The exhibit is called “Painting Energy.”
The exhibition “Painting Energy” at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine.
CBS News
Asked to describe the sensation of looking at some of those paintings, Katz replied, “It’s just like a pow! You get it right through the air. It’s very quick. Sometimes you can get a whole show – as they open the elevator door, blink, and they shut it, you know what this painting’s about.”
“Central Character,” a 1983 work by Martha Diamond (1944-2023), is featured in the exhibition “Painting Energy,” at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine.
CBS News
One painting that gave Katz that “pow” was Katherine Bradford’s “Shadows.”
Bradford said that when she learned Katz had bought one of her paintings, “I just felt, ‘Oh, wow! Maybe I am a little good!’ And Alex Katz, he certainly is really good. Good eye, good person.”
Bradford didn’t start painting until her 30s. Now she’s 83, and her pieces typically sell for tens of thousands of dollars. “Alex Katz is a leader in contemporary art,” she said. “But in the state of Maine, he’s king. And we all look up to him. He decided to use what he had gained to give back to artists, to buy artists’ work.”
Artist Katherine Bradford shows her work “Shadows,” part of the exhibition “Painting Energy.”
CBS News
Asked why he wanted to collect other artists’ paintings, Katz said, “Well, I wanted to help other people who went through the same difficulty that I did, you know? I know every little help I got in that period from 25-35, I really appreciated.”
Like when a paint manufacturer who recognized Katz’s talent early on gave him art supplies as part of a deal: “He got five or six little paintings, and I had free paints,” said Katz. “But the big thing was someone believed there was something in me.”
Katz still works seven days a week, and is still taking risks. “Sometime, in about a week, I’ll do the first painting of a new series,” he said.
“And you seem excited about that?” I asked.
“Excited and frightened,” he laughed. “Yeah, I’m scared it really won’t work out.”
“So, after all that you’ve accomplished, you still worry?”
“Uh-huh. I want to go where I’m scared. And the new things might be better, they might be worse, but I have to do ’em.”
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Story produced by Robbyn McFadden. Editor: Lauren Barnello.
Elaine Quijano is a weekend mornings anchor for CBS New York and a correspondent for CBS News and Stations, contributing to all CBS News, Stations and Streaming.
Right now, Garland seems as if an art museum was broken into pieces and sent back out into the world to be put back together. Art Vibe Garland presents this challenge of sorts, debuting eight unique pop-up exhibitions solely by North Texas artists…
Julian Sol Jordan is an artist to his core. A multihyphenate in the process of breaking big, the 24-year-old has written, edited and starred in his new film, Real Life, which he dubs an “experimental documentary.”…
new video loaded: Try Spending Two Minutes With This Painting
By Larry Buchanan, Coleman Lowndes, Estelle Caswell and James Surdam•
Our reporter Larry Buchanan invites you to spend time staring at a single work by the surrealist painter Gertrude Abercrombie, guiding you through the painting and revealing how Abercrombie used her art to bring you inside her mind.
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Larry Buchanan, Coleman Lowndes, Estelle Caswell and James Surdam
When people hear the word graffiti, many no doubt think of vandalism, but these days a growing number of enthusiasts are calling it art. Rita Braver tours a N.Y. museum exhibit of graffiti, some of which is worth upwards of $100,000.
The 430-square-foot mural by Sandberg, also known as Seymor, now covers the side of Noxx Cannabis at 23622 Woodward Ave., where thousands of motorists pass daily.
His design, a teal-accented mural featuring a wispy white tree with mist-like roots and glowing square leaves, was selected in May through a public vote after more than a dozen local artists submitted proposals.
“I’ve been painting murals seriously for about seven years, but the last couple years have really picked up,” Sandberg, who lives in Detroit’s Bagley neighborhood, tells Metro Times. “I’ve been painting since I was born, but once I started focusing on these trees, it gave me a little niche to keep pushing and defining my work.”
The piece is part of Sandberg’s signature style of surreal trees with geometric shapes and an ethereal background that blends natural forms with the abstract. Over the past few years, he has refined his theme into what he describes as both a metaphor and meditation – tree leaves that double as neurons and perhaps vessels of a “collective unconscious.”
“All the trees have their own personality,” Sandberg says. “I haven’t figured out if it’s the collective unconscious or the Earth. It kind of gives me liberty to be a little bit more playful.”
The Noxx contest, hosted in partnership with the Pleasant Ridge Art Council and partially funded by cannabis tax revenue, required artists to use the company’s teal color, avoid cannabis imagery, and create a piece that spoke to Detroit’s character.
Sandberg embraced the restrictions, using black, teal, and grayscale tones to create a layered design centered on a sprawling tree trunk, fog-like textures at its base, and shimmering, square leaves along its branches.
Sandberg worked on the mural over the past three weekends and recently finished it.
The result is a vibrant, whimsical and head-turning mural that brightens up Woodward Avenue.
Sandberg says he was inspired by Detroit street artist Jordan “Tead” Vaughn,” who died in 2017 after falling through a roof while painting a mural. Vaughn was known for his unique, dreamlike bursts of color and hallucinatory landscapes.
“He did these really trippy industrial landscapes,” Sandberg says. “I remember seeing those for the first time, and I always loved graffiti, but it wasn’t necessarily how my brain worked. But seeing how he used spray paint, like my brain works, I decided I’m going to learn this, and I started figuring it out.”
For the first six months or so, Sandberg began experimenting with graffiti, and the results, he says, were some “bad paintings.” But Sandberg persisted and found his style. He’s been painting beautiful murals since.
“I’m not a big nostalgia person, because I think it’s a waste of time,” says the renowned photographer Pamela Hanson—whose 40-plus-year career includes shooting Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez, Sofia Coppola, and countless stars. Her images of Kate Moss, Christy Turlington, Claudia Schiffer, and Naomi Campbell in the 1990s were integral to shaping our perception of the supermodel era. She’s just not typically one to look back: “We are all in our lives where we are, when we are,” she says. That is, until now. With her book The ’90s, available September 2 from Rizzoli (along with an exhibition at Staley-Wise Gallery in New York titled In the ’90s,) Hanson cracks open her archives to revisit the decade that transformed not only her groundbreaking career but fashion media writ large.
Hanson moved to Paris in the 1980s, and started photographing her roommate, former model and editor Lisa Love, along with their friends. She found herself right in the middle of the fashion crowd. “It was a very different but incredible time,” says Hanson. “It was a bohemian kind of life. There was a lot of creativity and energy in fashion. There was money and an enormous amount of freedom.” The photographer, who was born in London and is now based in New York City, would go on to shoot for Vogue, Vanity Fair, and ELLE, and land work in the permanent collection at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “But I fell into fashion photography,” Hanson explains. “I wanted to be a curator; I studied art history. After college, I worked in a photo gallery in Boston for a couple months. We went down to the auctions in New York, and we met a fashion photographer. I was like, how do you become that?”
She researched the craft through magazines and gained experience by assisting on sets of local department store ad shoots. Love—who wrote the book’s poignant foreword and is “like my sister,” Hanson says—was modeling in Paris with the legendary photographer Arthur Elgort. “I met with him in New York; he had no idea who I was. He took me out for lunch and looked at my portfolio. He was like, ‘I don’t think you’d be a very good assistant, but if you move to Paris, I’ll hire you as a second assistant.’ I ended up being his third assistant—I was basically his driver. I would get him chocolate.”
Meanwhile, on her own time, Hanson was capturing candid moments among her close cohort. “All of my friends were models,” Hanson recalls. “And I just was recording them, getting dressed, putting their makeup on, hanging out and in the streets.”
The bonds Hanson formed with her subjects give the photographs in The ’90s a warm, relaxed feel amid all the glamour—an almost documentary-style approach that has become her signature. “There’s an intimacy with my pictures,” she says. “Being a woman, I was like, let’s hang out. And at that time, there weren’t that many women photographers.”
“What I wanted was real life, and I wanted to create an environment for the girls: you’re in your apartment, you’re flirting with your boyfriend. It was more driven by that than by the clothes. And they all had their own personalities. Kate was a minx. She was that funny, English kind of quirky, but really cute. And Christy was more like an American beauty—that smile. And Claudia was definitely more German.”
The 1990s were a time of economic growth and prosperity, and Hanson’s book reflects that reality. Vintage editorials show Turlington jumping into a pool in Florence and Tina Chow dripping in Chanel jewels. “In the old days, you would’ve had a week to go somewhere and do a shoot. It was just relaxed,” Hanson says. “We used to shoot in Miami and be like, ‘Let’s go to a café. We’ll tell the owners we’ll buy lunch as payment.’”
But what resonates most is the level of ease, comfort, and rawness Hanson captured in each scene. “What I respond to is really emotional,” she says. “I loved the girls, and I loved having a connection with them. It wasn’t an intellectual decision. It’s what I still like now: I like life. I have enormous respect for all kinds of photographers who create their own contrived images. For me personally, I just respond to the girls.”
