HOME AS MEDIUM

Inside the Homes of Artists: For Art’s Sake by Tiqui Atencio Demirdjian, Photographs by Jean-François Jaussaud (Rizzoli)

Among the most enlightening stories to write and edit at MILIEU are those about the homes of interior designers. We have the chance to actually go through their front doors and experience the rooms that reflect their creativity. But as writer Tiqui Atencio Demirdjian relates, some artists, unlike interior designers, choose “not to have their own work on their walls at home.” As one of his subjects said to him, “I have enough of that in the studio every day.” Yet, most do display what they make, including Julie Mehretu who purchased a deconsecrated Harlem church, large enough to hold her canvases. The very rafters of Claire Tabouret’s LA home are as polychromatic as her canvases. Guillermo Kuitca’s Buenos Aires home is, as he says, “a large house, but the studio has been invading the house through the years.” Artists rarely run out of subject matter, only space in which to make it. —David Masello