Morgan Becker

New Museum. Photography by Jason Keen. Image courtesy of New Museum. Born in 1977 in a one-room office, the New Museum grew up with the city’s downtown scene. At 105 Hudson, a team of five got to work, imagining who and what they’d show once they had enough room. Back then, south of 14th Street was gritty, graffitied, loud, and, by today’s standards, a ghost town, just a couple years past the peak of New York’s fiscal crisis. Studio 54 opened its doors.

Portrait by Darío Castillo for PIN–UP. Isaiah Davis’s solo exhibition, Confessions of Fire, is about many things: music, film, slang, sex, class, and the image of the Black artist. But at its core, he says, “it’s a show about steel — about how the steel came to be.” You might also say it’s about how a boy comes to be a man.

Stylist Yashua Simmons and photographer Emmanuel Sanchez-Monsalve capture groups of relatives contemplating ideas of the classic Black American family. This story appears in Justsmile Issue 7, What We Carry Forward. Yashua Simmons is a storyteller first—photographer, stylist, whatever else following that. “I think it’s just my language,” he says.