Ann-Derrick Gaillot

26.01.21
Forever, Ya Girl was one of the defining albums of 2020, but the work is just beginning. And KeiyaA is more than ready.
The Abalone shell KeiyaA holds up to her laptop camera still shimmers though it’s dusted with ash. That sooty residue is a testament to how often she uses the ashtray when she needs to get her mind right. “I usually always have some sort of resin or incense burning,” she says during our afternoon call this past autumn. “Palo Santo, frankincense and sandalwood; those...

Tattoo artist Jalen Frizzell discusses the importance of setting boundaries, centering Black people in her practice, what she learned about herself by starting her own business, leaving space for play, and remembering to prioritize mental health.
How do you get in the zone to draw versus to tattoo someone?
Right now I am really trying to draw less for tattoos. Tattooing requires a certain amount of refinement. To get myself in the drawing zone, I’ve been trying to do a daily practice of just ...

Ana Benaroya is an artist from New Jersey. From a queer perspective, she explores notions of power and desire by exaggerating and distorting the human body, playing with its form and its relationship to other bodies. She draws from the languages of comics, caricature, and pop culture and is influenced by images of bodybuilders, cartoons, gig-posters, and artists such as Tom of Finland, Robert Colescott, the Chicago Imagists as well as children’s artwork.
Visual artist Ana Benaroya on shifting...

“Compton—and Los Angeles as a whole—was chock-full of great lyricists with something viable to say,” Marcus Moore writes about rapper Kendrick Lamar’s hometown, “so what made Kendrick the one to rise above it all?” It’s a question at the heart of his new book, The Butterfly Effect: How Kendrick Lamar Ignited the Soul of Black America, out in October, and one Moore uses to guide readers through wider discussions of artistic achievement and what it means to be the voice of a generation.
As a cu...

An interview with Congresswoman Ilhan Omar for the International Network of Street Newspapers.

The day before my phone interview with Jodie Turner-Smith, the actor had a copy of her English birth certificate overnighted to her in Topanga, California. “I’m a Virgo, Scorpio rising, Libra moon,” she says excitedly, noting, however, her current astrological chart’s basis on her mother’s best guess of her birth time. The rising star is home on a rare break from work, fresh off of shooting a film with Colin Farrell in New York City. But like many millennials, she needs to know the exact time...

In moments of stress, Chika cleans house, literally and emotionally. The night before she spoke to NYLON via phone from Los Angeles, where she’s been living for the past year and a half, the 23-year-old rapper and social commentator had stayed up late wiping down every crevice of her apartment. The act of cleaning, she explained, was a way to channel the excess energy and anger she had been feeling since George Floyd, a 46-year-old father of five, was killed, while handcuffed and pinned to gr...

On a recent Friday night on the streets of the city of Great Falls, Montana, there’s a deceptively cold stillness. The sidewalks are nearly empty, but the Sip ‘n Dip Lounge on the upper level of the O’Haire Motor Inn attracts the town’s nostalgia-thirsty drinkers like moths to a lantern. A time capsule of the 1960s tiki craze, the bar’s only window looks into the motel’s pool, casting an aquamarine glow over the yellow and blue vinyl chairs and thatched grass wallcoverings of the interior. Be...

In 1920s Wyoming, rancher and homesteader Jim Edwards found that no matter how successful he became, his white neighbors would never look past the fact that he was Black. Edwards and his wife Ethel had moved to the area in the earlier part of the century, seeking opportunity in the region’s booming cattle industry. Thanks to hard work and a bit of luck, they were able to build a noteworthy fortune. A once humble cabin grew into a proper house with a garage, porch, library, multiple bedrooms, ...

A review of MHYSA's album NEVAEH

For the high school students who graduated in spring, what began as a temporary interruption to senior year soon stretched into a strange, anticlimactic ending. As the coronavirus tore through the United States, forcing schools to close and cities to shelter in place, the students of the class of 2020 found their long-awaited proms and graduations canceled, their final sports tournaments replaced by solitary workouts at home, ...

On her debut EP XOskeleton, Jasper Lotti creates a soundtrack for the anxieties of the digital age, threading lyrics about connection and disassociation through pop melodies and rhythms that are as captivating as they are nerve-wracking. It’s a sound that Lotti has dubbed dys-pop or “dystopian pop.” But while many works about dystopia focus on totalitarian powers and cities in ruin, on XOskeleton, Lotti considers a more personal, existential type of imprisonment.
“It’s not like we walk out an...

On her self-titled sophomore effort, Laetitia Tamko leaps with both feet into new sounds and new horizons.
In crafting her self-titled sophomore album, Laetitia Tamko (aka Vagabon) was hyper-cognizant of how the context around her had changed. The unexpected success of her 2017 debut Infinite Worlds meant more resources at her fingertips, but also heightened scrutiny from a public that so often defaults to consuming black women as prophets of oppression and pain. “I was growing really weary o...