Oceanwide Plaza was covered in graffiti by dozens of artists. (photo by and courtesy Leonardo Manzano)
LOS ANGELES — Dozens of graffiti artists painted over at least 27 floors of an abandoned luxury real estate project in downtown LA last week. Spanning an entire square city block, Oceanwide Plaza was supposed to be a massive mixed-use development featuring more than 500 luxury condos and a five-star hotel occupying three towers reaching up to 55 stories.
Begun in 2015, the $1 billion project was put on hold in 2019 when the Chinese-backed developer Oceanwide Holdings ran out of funding, and has sat vacant ever since.
It’s not clear why exactly the artists chose this moment to use the long-deserted construction site as their canvas. Merch, one of the artists who tagged the towers, cited a graffiti blitz on another abandoned building, a 20-story healthcare facility already slated for destruction that was tagged during Art Basel Miami Beach last December, as inspiration.
The bright, bold lettering can be seen for blocks. (photos by Cairo103; left courtesy DR1, right courtesy Aker)
“Once people realized it was able to be painted, they’re going to do an LA version,” Merch told Hyperallergic. “Miami set the tone.” He also mentioned that another artist, Aqua, hit the LAsite at the end of last year, but his tag was high up and hard to see, so it garnered little attention until images of it started circulating on social media.
Whatever the reason, once artists began contributing pieces to the half-finished towers on the last weekend of January, they didn’t stop for several days, covering the buildings in bright, bold lettering that could be seen for blocks. “Once I saw more writers were hitting it, I knew it was now or never,” Aker, another artist involved, told Hyperallergic.
“Shit is a skyscraper playground,” said Hopes, who took the center spot on the top of tower 1. “Let’s all get together and paint it up. Make LA graffiti history.”The Oceanwide Plaza mixed-use development was put on hold in 2019. (photo Matt Stromberg/Hyperallergic)
Artists contacted by Hyperallergic said they were easily able to evade the few guards patrolling, not surprising given that a security firm hired to protect the site sued the developer recently for not paying them. (Oceanwide has not yet responded to a request for comment.) After entering through holes in the chain link fence, the artists huffed up several flights of stairs, carrying buckets of paint, rollers, spray paint cans, and ladders. DR1 was one of the first to hit the building on Saturday, covering three low floors of tower 1 with his crew NCT and returning on Monday to head up to the 48th floor where he added his own tag over three of the upper windows. Several artists said that police helicopters circled the building while they painted, but saw little police presence otherwise. On social media, users posted majestic drone footage, or stunning nighttime scenes of artists perched on ledges, rapt in deep concentration or enjoying the view, as the city lights twinkle far below them.Social media users shared majestic drone footage and stunning nighttime scenes. (image courtesy Phoull)
After the first few days, police presence increased. Two people were arrested on Tuesday night, cited and released. A rather sensationalist NBC video came out on Wednesday, followed on Thursday by a statement from the Central City Association, an advocacy group for downtown businesses, that cited the “vandalism” as a “representation of the very real neglect that DTLA has gone through over the past decade.”
On Friday night, rifle-wielding police officers swarmed the site after reports of shots fired, only to find two shell casings on the second floor. No injuries were reported. Earlier that day, Los Angeles City Councilman Kevin de León introduced a motion to remove the graffiti off the buildings and secure the area, saying that the developers were given until February 17 to clean up the property.
The artists and their supporters, meanwhile, view the unfinished buildings, not their contributions to their facades, as the real examples of urban blight.
“With all due respect, shit’s abandoned, doing nothing. Let’s put some color on this bitch and do what we do if they ain’t gon finish the job,” said Hopes.
“This building has needed love for years,” said Aker. “If the owners aren’t doing anything about it, the streets of LA are happy to make something out of it.”
Grace Powell was 12 or 13 when she discovered she could be a boy.
Growing up in a relatively conservative community in Grand Rapids, Mich., Powell, like many teenagers, didn’t feel comfortable in her own skin. She was unpopular and frequently bullied. Puberty made everything worse. She suffered from depression and was in and out of therapy.
“I felt so detached from my body, and the way it was developing felt hostile to me,” Powell told me. It was classic gender dysphoria, a feeling of discomfort with your sex.
Reading about transgender people online, Powell believed that the reason she didn’t feel comfortable in her body was that she was in the wrong body. Transitioning seemed like the obvious solution. The narrative she had heard and absorbed was that if you don’t transition, you’ll kill yourself.
At 17, desperate to begin hormone therapy, Powell broke the news to her parents. They sent her to a gender specialist to make sure she was serious. In the fall of her senior year of high school, she started cross-sex hormones. She had a double mastectomy the summer before college, then went off as a transgender man named Grayson to Sarah Lawrence College, where she was paired with a male roommate on a men’s floor. At 5-foot-3, she felt she came across as a very effeminate gay man.
At no point during her medical or surgical transition, Powell says, did anyone ask her about the reasons behind her gender dysphoria or her depression. At no point was she asked about her sexual orientation. And at no point was she asked about any previous trauma, and so neither the therapists nor the doctors ever learned that she’d been sexually abused as a child.
“I wish there had been more open conversations,” Powell, now 23 and detransitioned, told me. “But I was told there is one cure and one thing to do if this is your problem, and this will help you.”
Progressives often portray the heated debate over childhood transgender care as a clash between those who are trying to help growing numbers of children express what they believe their genders to be and conservative politicians who won’t let kids be themselves.
But right-wing demagogues are not the only ones who have inflamed this debate. Transgender activists have pushed their own ideological extremism, especially by pressing for a treatment orthodoxy that has faced increasedscrutiny in recent years. Under that model of care, clinicians are expected to affirm a young person’s assertion of gender identity and even provide medical treatment before, or even without, exploring other possible sources of distress.
Many who think there needs to be a more cautious approach — including well-meaning liberal parents, doctors and people who have undergone gender transition and subsequently regretted their procedures — have been attacked as anti-trans and intimidated into silencing their concerns.
And while Donald Trump denounces “left-wing gender insanity” and many trans activists describe any opposition as transphobic, parents in America’s vast ideological middle can find little dispassionate discussion of the genuine risks or trade-offs involved in what proponents call gender-affirming care.
Powell’s story shows how easy it is for young people to get caught up by the pull of ideology in this atmosphere.
“What should be a medical and psychological issue has been morphed into a political one,” Powell lamented during our conversation. “It’s a mess.”
A New and Growing Group of Patients
Many transgender adults are happy with their transitions and, whether they began to transition as adults or adolescents, feel it was life changing, even lifesaving. The small but rapidly growing number of children who express gender dysphoria and who transition at an early age, according to clinicians, is a recent and more controversial phenomenon.
Laura Edwards-Leeper, the founding psychologist of the first pediatric gender clinic in the United States, said that when she started her practice in 2007, most of her patients had longstanding and deep-seated gender dysphoria. Transitioning clearly made sense for almost all of them, and any mental health issues they had were generally resolved through gender transition.
“But that is just not the case anymore,” she told me recently. While she doesn’t regret transitioning the earlier cohort of patients and opposes government bans on transgender medical care, she said, “As far as I can tell, there are no professional organizations who are stepping in to regulate what’s going on.”
Most of her patients now, she said, have no history of childhood gender dysphoria. Others refer to this phenomenon, with some controversy, as rapid onset gender dysphoria, in which adolescents, particularly tween and teenage girls, express gender dysphoria despite never having done so when they were younger. Frequently, they have mental health issues unrelated to gender. While professional associations say there is a lack of quality research on rapid onset gender dysphoria, severalresearchershave documented the phenomenon, and many health care providers have seen evidence of it in their practices.
“The population has changed drastically,” said Edwards-Leeper, a former head of the Child and Adolescent Committee for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the organization responsible for setting gender transition guidelines for medical professionals.
For these young people, she told me, “you have to take time to really assess what’s going on and hear the timeline and get the parents’ perspective in order to create an individualized treatment plan. Many providers are completely missing that step.”
Yet those health care professionals and scientists who do not think clinicians should automatically agree to a young person’s self-diagnosis are often afraid to speak out. A report commissioned by the National Health Service about Britain’s Tavistock gender clinic, which, until it was ordered to be shut down, was the country’s only health center dedicated to gender identity, noted that “primary and secondary care staff have told us that they feel under pressure to adopt an unquestioning affirmative approach and that this is at odds with the standard process of clinical assessment and diagnosis that they have been trained to undertake in all other clinical encounters.”
Of the dozens of students she’s trained as psychologists, Edwards-Leeper said, few still seem to be providing gender-related care. While her students have left the field for various reasons, “some have told me that they didn’t feel they could continue because of the pushback, the accusations of being transphobic, from being pro-assessment and wanting a more thorough process,” she said.
They have good reasons to be wary. Stephanie Winn, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Oregon, was trained in gender-affirming care and treated multiple transgender patients. But in 2020, after coming across detransition videos online, she began to doubt the gender-affirming model. In 2021 she spoke out in favor of approaching gender dysphoria in a more considered way, urging others in the field to pay attention to detransitioners, people who no longer consider themselves transgender after undergoing medical or surgical interventions. She has since been attacked by transgender activists. Some threatened to send complaints to her licensing board saying that she was trying to make trans kids change their minds through conversion therapy.
In April 2022, the Oregon Board of Licensed Professional Counselors and Therapists told Winn that she was under investigation. Her case was ultimately dismissed, but Winn no longer treats minors and practices only online, where many of her patients are worried parents of trans-identifying children.
“I don’t feel safe having a location where people can find me,” she said.
Detransitioners say that only conservative media outlets seem interested in telling their stories, which has left them open to attacks as hapless tools of the right, something that frustrated and dismayed every detransitioner I interviewed. These are people who were once the trans-identified kids that so many organizations say they’re trying to protect — but when they change their minds, they say, they feel abandoned.
Most parents and clinicians are simply trying to do what they think is best for the children involved. But parents with qualms about the current model of care are frustrated by what they see as a lack of options.
Parents told me it was a struggle to balance the desire to compassionately support a child with gender dysphoria while seeking the best psychological and medical care. Many believed their kids were gay or dealing with an array of complicated issues. But all said they felt compelled by gender clinicians, doctors, schools and social pressure to accede to their child’s declared gender identity even if they had serious doubts. They feared it would tear apart their family if they didn’t unquestioningly support social transition and medical treatment. All asked to speak anonymously, so desperate were they to maintain or repair any relationship with their children, some of whom were currently estranged.
Several of those who questioned their child’s self-diagnosis told me it had ruined their relationship. A few parents said simply, “I feel like I’ve lost my daughter.”
One mother described a meeting with 12 other parents in a support group for relatives of trans-identified youth where all of the participants described their children as autistic or otherwise neurodivergent. To all questions, the woman running the meeting replied, “Just let them transition.” The mother left in shock. How would hormones help a child with obsessive-compulsive disorder or depression? she wondered.
Some parents have found refuge in anonymous online support groups. There, people share tips on finding caregivers who will explore the causes of their children’s distress or tend to their overall emotional and developmental health and well-being without automatically acceding to their children’s self-diagnosis.
Many parents of kids who consider themselves trans say their children were introduced to transgender influencers on YouTube or TikTok, a phenomenon intensified for some by the isolation and online cocoon of Covid. Others say their kids learned these ideas in the classroom, as early as elementary school, often in child-friendly ways through curriculums supplied by trans rights organizations, with concepts like the gender unicorn or the Genderbread person.
‘Do You Want a Dead Son or a Live Daughter?’
After Kathleen’s 15-year-old son, whom she described as an obsessive child, abruptly told his parents he was trans, the doctor who was going to assess whether he had A.D.H.D. referred him instead to someone who specialized in both A.D.H.D. and gender. Kathleen, who asked to be identified only by her first name to protect her son’s privacy, assumed that the specialist would do some kind of evaluation or assessment. That was not the case.
The meeting was brief and began on a shocking note. “In front of my son, the therapist said, ‘Do you want a dead son or a live daughter?’” Kathleen recounted.
Parents are routinely warned that to pursue any path outside of agreeing with a child’s self-declared gender identity is to put a gender dysphoric youth at risk for suicide, which feels to many people like emotional blackmail. Proponents of the gender-affirming model have citedstudies showing an association between that standard of care and a lower risk of suicide. But those studies were found to have methodological flaws or have been deemed not entirely conclusive. A survey of studieson the psychological effects of cross-sex hormones, published three years ago in The Journal of the Endocrine Society, the professional organization for hormone specialists, found it “could not draw any conclusions about death by suicide.” In a letter to The Wall Street Journal last year, 21 experts from nine countries said that survey was one reason they believed there was “no reliable evidence to suggest that hormonal transition is an effective suicide prevention measure.”
Moreover, the incidence of suicidal thoughts and attempts among gender dysphoric youth is complicated by the high incidence of accompanying conditions, such as autism spectrum disorder. As one systematic overview put it, “Children with gender dysphoria often experience a range of psychiatric comorbidities, with a high prevalence of mood and anxiety disorders, trauma, eating disorders and autism spectrum conditions, suicidality and self-harm.”
But rather than being treated as patients who deserve unbiased professional help, children with gender dysphoria often become political pawns.
Conservative lawmakers are working to ban access to gender care for minors and occasionally for adults as well. On the other side, however, many medical and mental health practitioners feel their hands have been tied by activist pressure and organizational capture. They say that it has become difficult to practice responsible mental health care or medicine for these young people.
In 2021, Aaron Kimberly, a 50-year-old trans man and registered nurse, left the clinic in British Columbia where his job focused on the intake and assessment of gender-dysphoric youth. Kimberly received a comprehensive screening when he embarked on his own successful transition at age 33, which resolved the gender dysphoria he experienced from an early age.
But when the gender-affirming model was introduced at his clinic, he was instructed to support the initiation of hormone treatment for incoming patients regardless of whether they had complex mental problems, experiences with trauma or were otherwise “severely unwell,” Kimberly said. When he referred patients for further mental health care rather than immediate hormone treatment, he said he was accused of what they called gatekeeping and had to change jobs.
Gay men and women often told me they fear that same-sex-attracted kids, especially effeminate boys and tomboy girls who are gender nonconforming, will be transitioned during a normal phase of childhood and before sexual maturation — and that gender ideology can mask and even abet homophobia.
As one detransitioned man, now in a gay relationship, put it, “I was a gay man pumped up to look like a woman and dated a lesbian who was pumped up to look like a man. If that’s not conversion therapy, I don’t know what is.”
“I transitioned because I didn’t want to be gay,” Kasey Emerick, a 23-year-old woman and detransitioner from Pennsylvania, told me. Raised in a conservative Christian church, she said, “I believed homosexuality was a sin.”
When she was 15, Emerick confessed her homosexuality to her mother. Her mother attributed her sexual orientation to trauma — Emerick’s father was convicted of raping and assaulting her repeatedly when she was between the ages of 4 and 7 — but after catching Emerick texting with another girl at age 16, she took away her phone. When Emerick melted down, her mother admitted her to a psychiatric hospital. While there, Emerick told herself, “If I was a boy, none of this would have happened.”
In May 2017, Emerick began searching “gender” online and encountered trans advocacy websites. After realizing she could “pick the other side,” she told her mother, “I’m sick of being called a dyke and not a real girl.” If she were a man, she’d be free to pursue relationships with women.
That September, she and her mother met with a licensed professional counselor for the first of two 90-minute consultations. She told the counselor that she had wished to be a Boy Scout rather than a Girl Scout. She said she didn’t like being gay or a butch lesbian. She also told the counselor that she had suffered from anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation. The clinic recommended testosterone, which was prescribed by a nearby L.G.B.T.Q. health clinic. Shortly thereafter, she was also diagnosed with A.D.H.D. She developed panic attacks. At age 17, she was cleared for a double mastectomy.
“I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m having my breasts removed. I’m 17. I’m too young for this,’” she recalled. But she went ahead with the operation.
“Transition felt like a way to control something when I couldn’t control anything in my life,” Emerick explained. But after living as a trans man for five years, Emerick realized her mental health symptoms were only getting worse. In the fall of 2022, she came out as a detransitioner on Twitter and was immediately attacked. Transgender influencers told her she was bald and ugly. She received multiple threats.
“I thought my life was over,” she said. “I realized that I had lived a lie for over five years.”
Today Emerick’s voice, permanently altered by testosterone, is that of a man. When she tells people she’s a detransitioner, they ask when she plans to stop taking T and live as a woman. “I’ve been off it for a year,” she replies.
Once, after she recounted her story to a therapist, the therapist tried to reassure her. If it’s any consolation, the therapist remarked, “I would never have guessed that you were once a trans woman.” Emerick replied, “Wait, what sex do you think I am?”
To the trans activist dictum that children know their gender best, it is important to add something all parents know from experience: Children change their minds all the time. One mother told me that after her teenage son desisted — pulled back from a trans identity before any irreversible medical procedures — he explained, “I was just rebelling. I look at it like a subculture, like being goth.”
“The job of children and adolescents is to experiment and explore where they fit into the world, and a big part of that exploration, especially during adolescence, is around their sense of identity,” Sasha Ayad, a licensed professional counselor based in Phoenix, told me. “Children at that age often present with a great deal of certainty and urgency about who they believe they are at the time and things they would like to do in order to enact that sense of identity.”
Ayad, a co-author of “When Kids Say They’re Trans: A Guide for Thoughtful Parents,” advises parents to be wary of the gender affirmation model. “We’ve always known that adolescents are particularly malleable in relationship to their peers and their social context and that exploration is often an attempt to navigate difficulties of that stage, such as puberty, coming to terms with the responsibilities and complications of young adulthood, romance and solidifying their sexual orientation,” she told me. For providing this kind of exploratory approach in her own practice with gender dysphoric youth, Ayad has had her license challenged twice, both times by adults who were not her patients. Both times, the charges were dismissed.
Proponents of early social transition and medical interventions for gender dysphoric youth cite a 2022 study showing that 98 percent of children who took both puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones continued treatment for short periods, and another study that tracked 317 children who socially transitioned between the ages of 3 and 12, which found that 94 percent of them still identified as transgender five years later. But such early interventions may cement children’s self-conceptions without giving them time to think or sexually mature.
‘The Process of Transition Didn’t Make Me Feel Better’
At the end of her freshman year of college, Grace Powell, horrifically depressed, began dissociating, feeling detached from her body and from reality, which had never happened to her before. Ultimately, she said, “the process of transition didn’t make me feel better. It magnified what I found was wrong with myself.”
“I expected it to change everything, but I was just me, with a slightly deeper voice,” she added. “It took me two years to start detransitioning and living as Grace again.”
She tried in vain to find a therapist who would treat her underlying issues, but they kept asking her: How do you want to be seen? Do you want to be nonbinary? Powell wanted to talk about her trauma, not her identity or her gender presentation. She ended up getting online therapy from a former employee of the Tavistock clinic in Britain. This therapist, a woman who has broken from the gender-affirming model, talked Grace through what she sees as her failure to launch and her efforts to reset. The therapist asked questions like: Who is Grace? What do you want from your life? For the first time, Powell felt someone was seeing and helping her as a person, not simply looking to slot her into an identity category.
“It is extraordinarily frustrating to feel that something I am is inherently political,” Powell told me. “I’ve been accused multiple times that I’m some right-winger who’s making a fake narrative to discredit transgender people, which is just crazy.”
While she believes there are people who benefit from transitioning, “I wish more people would understand that there’s not a one-size-fits-all solution,” she said. “I wish we could have that conversation.”
In a recent study in The Archives of Sexual Behavior, about 40 young detransitioners out of 78 surveyed said they had suffered from rapid onset gender dysphoria. Trans activists have fought hard to suppress any discussion of rapid onset gender dysphoria, despite evidence that the condition is real. In its guide for journalists, the activist organization GLAAD warns the media against using the term, as it is not “a formal condition or diagnosis.” Human Rights Campaign, another activist group, calls it “a right-wing theory.” A group of professional organizations put out a statement urging clinicians to eliminate the term from use.
Nobody knows how many young people desist after social, medical or surgical transitions. Trans activists often cite low regret rates for gender transition, along with low figures for detransition. But those studies, which often rely on self-reported cases to gender clinics, likely understate the actual numbers. None of the seven detransitioners I interviewed, for instance, even considered reporting back to the gender clinics that prescribed them medication they now consider to have been a mistake. Nor did they know any other detransitioners who had done so.
As Americans furiously debate the basis of transgender care, a numberof advances in understanding have taken place in Europe, where the early Dutchstudies that became the underpinning of gender-affirming care have been broadly questioned and criticized. Unlike some of the current population of gender dysphoric youth, the Dutch study participants had no serious psychological conditions. Those studies were riddled with methodological flaws and weaknesses. There was no evidence that any intervention was lifesaving. There was no long-term follow-up with any of the study’s 55 participants or the 15 who dropped out. A British effort to replicate the studysaid that it “identified no changes in psychological function” and that more studies were needed.
In countries like Sweden, Norway, France, the Netherlands and Britain — long considered exemplars of gender progress — medical professionals have recognizedthat early research on medical interventions for childhood gender dysphoria was either faulty or incomplete. Last month, the World Health Organization, in explainingwhy it is developing “a guideline on the health of trans and gender diverse people,” said it will cover only adults because “the evidence base for children and adolescents is limited and variable regarding the longer-term outcomes of gender-affirming care for children and adolescents.”
But in America, and Canada, the results of those widely criticized Dutch studies are falsely presented to the public as settled science.
Other countries have recently halted or limited the medical and surgical treatment of gender dysphoric youth, pending further study. Britain’s Tavistock clinic was ordered to be shut down next month, after a National Health Service-commissioned investigation found deficiencies in service and “a lack of consensus and open discussion about the nature of gender dysphoria and therefore about the appropriate clinical response.”
Meanwhile, the American medical establishment has hunkered down, stuck in an outdated model of gender affirmation. The American Academy of Pediatrics only recently agreed to conduct more research in response to yearslong efforts by dissenting experts, including Dr. Julia Mason, a self-described “bleeding-heart liberal.”
The larger threat to transgender people comes from Republicans who wish to deny them rights and protections. But the doctrinal rigidity of the progressive wing of the Democratic Partyis disappointing, frustrating and counterproductive.
“I was always a liberal Democrat,” one woman whose son desisted after social transition and hormone therapy told me. “Now I feel politically homeless.”
She noted that the Biden administration has “unequivocally” supportedgender-affirming care for minors, in cases in which it deems it “medically appropriate and necessary.” Rachel Levine, the assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, told NPR in 2022 that “there is no argument among medical professionals — pediatricians, pediatric endocrinologists, adolescent medicine physicians, adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, et cetera — about the value and the importance of gender-affirming care.”
Of course, politics should not influence medical practice, whether the issue is birth control, abortion or gender medicine. But unfortunately, politics has gotten in the way of progress. Last year The Economist published a thorough investigation into America’s approach to gender medicine. Zanny Minton Beddoes, the editor, put the issue into political context. “If you look internationally at countries in Europe, the U.K. included, their medical establishments are much more concerned,” Beddoes told Vanity Fair. “But here — in part because this has become wrapped up in the culture wars where you have, you know, crazy extremes from the Republican right — if you want to be an upstanding liberal, you feel like you can’t say anything.”
Some people are trying to open up that dialogue, or at least provide outlets for kids and families to seek a more therapeutic approach to gender dysphoria.
Paul Garcia-Ryan is a psychotherapist in New York who cares for kids and families seeking holistic, exploratory care for gender dysphoria. He is also a detransitioner who from ages 15 to 30 fully believed he was a woman.
Garcia-Ryan is gay, but as a boy, he said, “it was much less threatening to my psyche to think that I was a straight girl born into the wrong body — that I had a medical condition that could be tended to.” When he visited a clinic at 15, the clinician immediately affirmed he was female, and rather than explore the reasons for his mental distress, simply confirmed Garcia-Ryan’s belief that he was not meant to be a man.
Once in college, he began medically transitioning and eventually had surgery on his genitals. Severe medical complications from both the surgery and hormone medication led him to reconsider what he had done, and to detransition. He also reconsidered the basis of gender affirmation, which, as a licensed clinical social worker at a gender clinic, he had been trained in and provided to clients.
“You’re made to believe these slogans,” he said. “Evidence-based, lifesaving care, safe and effective, medically necessary, the science is settled — and none of that is evidence based.”
Garcia-Ryan, 32, is now the board president of Therapy First, an organization that supports therapists who do not agree with the gender affirmation model. He thinks transition can help some people manage the symptoms of gender dysphoria but no longer believes anyone under 25 should socially, medically or surgically transition without exploratory psychotherapy first.
“When a professional affirms a gender identity for a younger person, what they are doing is implementing a psychological intervention that narrows a person’s sense of self and closes off their options for considering what’s possible for them,” Garcia-Ryan told me.
Instead of promoting unproven treatments for children, which surveys showmany Americans are uncomfortable with, transgender activists would be more effective if they focused on a shared agenda. Most Americans across the political spectrum can agree on the need for legal protections for transgender adults. They would also probably support additional research on the needs of young people reporting gender dysphoria so that kids could get the best treatment possible.
A shift in this direction would model tolerance and acceptance. It would prioritize compassion over demonization. It would require rising above culture-war politics and returning to reason. It would be the most humane path forward. And it would be the right thing to do.
Enter the world of art by meeting artists, collectors, and gallerists who will tell you how and why they love their creative life with the Art Lovers Forum podcast, hosted by Lois Whitman-Hess
Episode 4 – Jane Wesman
If you want to start collecting art, or you want to know what collectors have learned over the years, put aside one hour to listen to the advice of Jane Wesman. You will not find a better master class anywhere that will give you the ins and outs of collecting. I was very fortunate to secure this interview.
Jane has been successfully collecting art since the 1980s when New York’s East Village art world was in full swing. Artists like Jeff Koons, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cindy Sherman, and many others were making waves and launching their careers. And Jane was part of the scene.
Today, Jane and her husband, Donald Savelson, continue to be deeply engaged in the world of contemporary art.
They are supporters of many non-profit art organizations and avid collectors of work by new and emerging artists. They believe there is much more to art than its monetary value. Art is an immersive experience. As Jane says, “Art is about everything. It opens up new ways of thinking about the human condition and what is meaningful in life.”
In addition to underwriting a program at Simmons University for students seeking careers in arts management as well as helping to fund various museum exhibitions and the Miami-based artists residency Fountainhead Arts, Jane is passionate about introducing people to the world of collecting new and emerging artists.
Aside from her enthusiasm for art, Jane is an expert in public relations and marketing. She is the president of the New York-based PR agency that bears her name, Jane Wesman Public Relations, Inc. a leader in book promotion. She is a determined, career-focused woman who has served as president of the New York City chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners and as program director of ArtTable. She is currently an active Board member of the Women’s Media Group, overseeing the organization’s programming. She and her husband divide their time between New York and Miami.
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“Stories like this leave me flabbergasted. Thank you Miami Herald for bringing this to our attention.”—LWH
BY CLARA-SOPHIA DALY AND ANA CLAUDIA CHACIN
In the span of just over a decade, Key Biscayne police received a series of complaints about a gymnastic coach’s allegedly abusive behavior with young girls, police reports and interviews with the Herald reveal.
The coach’s name: Oscar Nicolas Olea. He is 38. He has not been charged with any crimes and continues to teach gymnastics to girls, teenage and younger. He and his lawyer deny he has done anything wrong and several parents reached out to Herald reporters to offer their praise for the coach.
But a Miami Herald investigation has uncovered at least five alleged victims, all of whose stories were brought to the attention of the Key Biscayne Police Department.
Three of the five are now adults. Two of those adults were students: one who alleges she was sexually assaulted on at least 10 occasions when she was 13 during private lessons and the other whose mother went to police to say her daughter had been violently raped when she was 17. Another alleged victim worked with Olea at the Key Biscayne Community Center, known as “The Rec”, and says she was underage when she had a sexual relationship with Olea, who supplied her with liquor.
“We knew we had a bad seed,” said Charles Press, the police chief then, who learned about the 17-year-old’s alleged rape from the girl’s mother. But, he added, “there was no victim, no crime, no proof,” because of the refusal of the accusers to make their complaints official.
All of this would be ancient history — forgotten, except by the alleged victims and their families — if not for a disturbing post on the social media app Nextdoor.
AL DIAZ • ADIAZ@MIAMIHERALD.COM
This is Flipout Workout at 971 Crandon Blvd., Key Biscayne, Oscar Olea’s gymnastics studio.
Social media post stirs ghosts
One day last September, a mother had a complaint about her 7-year-old’s gymnastics coach. Expressing herself on Nextdoor, she said the coach had touched her child inappropriately and made sexual comments during practice.
Olea whispered to the 7-year-old in Spanish: “look at that big ass, I’m hungry,” the family complained, according to a police report.
“We have already filed a report with the police and they suggested that we raise our voices and invite any mother or father who has gone through this situation here in Key Biscayme[sic] and REPORT,” the Nextdoor post read.
The post was soon taken down but not before other Key Biscayne parents began questioning their kids about how Olea treated them.
INSTAGRAM
A screenshot of an Instagram post shows Oscar Olea’s students in a beach workout.
The Key Biscayne Police Department, with the help of the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office, began an investigation.
A second current student — a 4-year-old — showed her mother, using a doll, where he had touched her. The mother contacted police, telling a Key Biscayne investigator that Olea, while playing “Oscar Games,” lifted her daughter off the ground by her ankles and licked her buttocks, according to a police report. She also said Olea told them in Spanish, “Run or I will bite your ass,” the report says.
When messages started circulating in WhatsApp chats about Olea’s language, Olea sent a message to at least one group including parents of students:
“I would never speak to a student or anyone in this manner,” he wrote. “The only thing I have ever said is squeeze your butt or I will bite it and what I do is tickle them on the stomach or rib cage,” Olea wrote.
Screenshot of Olea’s message on WhatsApp to a group of gymnastics parents.
This month the investigation was closed with no charges. The state attorney’s office cited four reasons: Olea denied the allegation, inconsistent statements made by the victims, contradicting and or no corroborating witnesses, and insufficient evidence.
Beatriz Llorente, Olea’s lawyer, said in a statement that her client “vehemently denies any sexual remarks to any student or touching them in any inappropriate way in connection with the recent anonymous social media post or otherwise. He further denies each and every allegation of sexual misconduct contained in your list.”
She added: “My client’s innocence is confirmed by the conclusion of this investigation without charges.”
Adriana Alcalde, a former prosecutor for the Broward County State Attorney’s Office who had no involvement in the case, said Olea wouldn’t have had “unfettered access to children,” resulting in the recent complaints, if police had acted correctly years earlier.
COURTESY OF INSTAGRAM. •
Oscar Olea with three of his gymnastics students.
A 13-year-old’s private lessons
One of the women who spoke to the Herald says now that back in 2011 she saw Olea, who is 12 years older, as an older brother. That ended when Olea began molesting her, she told the Herald.
She’d started taking gymnastics classes at around age 12 at American Gymsters, which had a gym in Key Biscayne and also held classes at The Rec. The village contracts American Gymsters to run the gymnastics program at The Rec.
She told the Herald after a year of taking classes with Olea, she started taking private lessons with Olea and the two became close. She said Olea knew her daily routine and would pick her up from school before her lessons and take her to his mother’s apartment, where he lived. Sometimes, the former student told the Herald, they watched movies and cuddled on his bed, often while Olea’s mother was home in their small, one-bedroom apartment.
One time, the former student told reporters, while she was taking a shower at his house after school, Olea walked in. He opened the shower curtain and looked at her bare body. She froze, but after a few moments told him to get out. She said he would often change his clothes in front of her, showing his naked body.
One evening, when one of the private lessons was ending at the American Gymsters gym, Olea started putting some of the gymnastics equipment up against the glass windows, so people couldn’t see in, she said.
AL DIAZ • ADIAZ@MIAMIHERALD.COM
Former site of American Gymsters at 328 Crandon Blvd #204 on Key Biscayne, FL 33149, on Wednesday, Jan. 3, 2024.
Olea turned off the lights and forced himself on her, she told the Herald. He kissed her neck and lips and pushed her leotard to the side and inserted his fingers inside her.
“I was in shock. I just froze until I reacted and asked him to stop, but I was scared,” she said.
He told her that there was nothing wrong with what they did, but that she couldn’t tell anybody. He told her he loved her and when she was older they would be together and get married, the former student told reporters.
She said roughly the same thing happened at least 10 times within a span of three months.
One day, the young teen’s mother found three love letters in her backpack— two from Olea and one written by her daughter. She took her daughter and the letters to the Key Biscayne Police Department to report it, according to a Key Biscayne incident report obtained by the Herald from late March 2012. Neither the mom nor her daughter were named in the report.
From the police report narrative describing the letters: “In the notes from Olea he mentions kissing her lips. In the 2 paged letter from her daughter to Olea she states how she is so in love with him, and how she wants to please him the way he pleases her. She goes on to say that they will be together forever even though she is still a little girl.”
The police asked the girl whether Olea had a sexual relationship with her, had kissed her, or had touched her in her “private areas.” She replied no in each instance, according to the report. She told police he was “just friendly.”
Eleven years after the visit to police, the former student told the Herald she lied to protect Olea — and because she was scared.
“I don’t remember exactly what he said, but he made it seem as though if I said something, he was going to do something to me,” the woman said.
When asked by the Herald about the letters referenced in the report, the department said it did not have them. .
“The fact that he’s continuing to teach little girls and do this, I think, is really concerning,” the former student told the Herald.
The mother decided to not move forward with making a formal report, but told police then that she wanted to “shed light on the situation and prevent this from happening to other girls,” according to the report.
There’s no indication that police ever questioned Olea about the love letters or anything else.
Following a father’s footsteps
Oscar Olea may have inherited his affinity for coaching from his father, also named Oscar, a man who was barely in his life. The elder Oscar was a well-known tennis coach who was found dead in his Honda Civic in Key Biscayne. He’d been shot in the head through the window of his car. His son was 3. The murder remains unsolved 35 years later.
Over the years, the son has coached gymnastics at six different venues on the iconic island of Key Biscayne, including at two church schools, and, most recently, at his own studio, Flipout Workout.
Complaints followed him. Geysa Guarconi, a former manager of American Gymsters, one of Olea’s early employers, told the Herald Olea was suspected of giving alcohol to young girls and that parents felt he was “too affectionate” with students.
AL DIAZ • ADIAZ@MIAMIHERALD.COM
The Village Green Park at 450 Crandon Blvd., Key Biscayne, where Oscar Olea sometimes coached.
Multiple moms told the Herald — and one told police — of feeling uncomfortable that he allowed little girls to sit on his lap after class.
In November, the father of the 7-year-old who went to police also made a complaint to the U.S. Center for SafeSport, a nonprofit organization created in the wake of the investigation of Olympic gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar, who was convicted of criminal sexual misconduct.
In that report to Safesport, the father noted that Olea followed his underage students on social media. Safesport told that father that his case would be assigned to an investigator.
His oddly close relationships with students was not a new feature. While in his mid-twenties, Olea would tool around the Key — or take a jaunt to Coconut Grove — with a carload of teenage girls. On Facebook is a video of three teenage girls doing a “Chinese fire drill” where passengers pile out of a car and run around it before getting back in, all while the car is stopped at a red light. Music blasts in the background. Olea was in the driver’s seat, said a woman involved in the stunt.
She said no
Olea also allegedly had a close relationship with one 17-year-old student, who had been taking lessons with him for a few years.
The mother of the now 30-year-old spoke to the Herald and said her daughter was brutally raped by Olea in 2011. He was eight years older than her daughter.
When her daughter was old enough to get a cell phone, the mother spotted messages from Olea and thought they were “really inappropriate,” the mom told the Herald.
“He was likely doing some grooming there,” she added.
One day, she found a suicide note in her daughter’s possession.
The daughter started therapy. Her mother told the Herald she was invited to one session in which her daughter shared that she and Olea had been growing closer and that one day she had gone over to Olea’s mother’s house under the presumption that they would have sex. But when the moment came, she said “no,” the girl’s mom told the Herald.
The way her daughter described it, Olea wasn’t deterred — raping her, including forcing her to have anal sex, the mother told the Herald. When she screamed, he covered her mouth.
The therapist advised the two not to go to the police, according to the mom, warning that it would retraumatize her daughter since it would be a lengthy process in which she would have to relive her pain. In recent years, police and prosecutors have tried to make it less traumatic for victims of sex crimes to navigate the criminal justice system. But victims say it remains dehumanizing.
Nonetheless, Florida’s mandated reporting law would’ve required the therapist to report, without revealing the patient’s identity.
MARSHA HALPER • MHALPER@MIAMIHERALD.COM
Charles Press, center remembers a woman and her friend coming to see him when he was Key Biscayne police chief. They were very distraught.
Accompanied by a friend who urged her to take action, she met with then-Chief Press in his office. She and the friend described the alleged incident but told the chief she didn’t want to file a report.
Key Biscayne police have no record of the meeting. But the chief remembers it. He recalled how “anxious and scared” the two visitors were “because of [Olea’s] stature in the community as a gymnastics coach.” He said he believed them.
But he did not bring in Olea for questioning even though Olea worked right across the street at the Village Green Park. He didn’t search police files for any other complaints.
He did, however, talk to Parks and Rec Director Todd Hofferberth, whose department had responsibility for goings-on in the park.
“It was hearsay,” Hofferberth says now. “There was no charge.”
Hofferberth was so unmoved that when the village began requiring permits to conduct business at the park, his department issued one to Olea.
The Herald spoke to Press on three separate occasions. The first two times, Press said there was nothing he could do because the mother did not want to file a report. The third time, he told a different reporter a different story. Upon reflection, he said, he may have sent undercover detectives to watch Olea’s practices at the park, but could not say for sure since it all happened over 10 years ago. “It would’ve made sense,” he said.
Current Chief Francis Sousa, who’s been on the job two years, said he wouldn’t comment on how things were handled in the past.
The Herald asked the police department for e-mails or “watch orders” — any evidence that would confirm that surveillance was requested or occurred. Nothing was provided.
‘I didn’t want to be shamed’
On June 24, 2011, at 2:56 a.m., Key Biscayne police were dispatched to Galen Drive in response to a call about an intoxicated teen stumbling down the sidewalk. The caller: Oscar Olea.
Upon arrival, police found an 18-year-old slurring her words, wearing her pants inside out. She ran away from the responding officers, waving her arms wildly, and threw herself on the ground, according to reports. Olea, who was with her, told police he was walking her home from the Grand Bay Beach Club when he became concerned about her well-being. Apparently traumatized, she spoke of being raped in the past, according to first responders.
Officers subdued her, handcuffed her and called fire rescue.
According to police reports and the woman herself, who talked to the Herald, she had been drinking with friends in the Jacuzzi in the Grand Bay when she Snapchatted Olea, inviting him to join them. He showed up with a bottle of liquor, she told the Herald.
Olea told police she’d drunk a Four Loko alcoholic beverage before he arrived. He said she asked him to have sex with her. She told the Herald that’s not true. She said he leaned over and fingered her while she was in the hot tub, which disturbed her. A friend who was sitting across from them in the hot tub told the Herald she saw that happen and remembers her friend being distraught.
COURTESY OF THE KEY BISCAYNE POLICE DEPARTMENT
Photo of Oscar Olea taken by Key Biscayne police in June of 2011 at the time he called in a report over a companion walking drunkenly down Crandon Boulevard. He was not arrested.
The woman who got so publicly drunk that night with Olea is now 30. She told the Herald she and Olea had been having sex on and off since she was 16. She related one particularly traumatic incident in which Olea put a glass bottle up her vagina and “it hurt.”
They had met when she was around 15 and working at The Rec at the same time as he worked there. He was fired from that job when someone complained that he was walking around carrying a young student whose legs were wrapped around his waist.
Today she says she feels “grossed out, resentful and angry that he took advantage of my young mind and took advantage of my vulnerability.”
There is nothing in the police report to indicate that anyone asked the adult Olea about the booze that sent a drunk, wobbly and disheveled 18-year-old wandering down a dark road in the wee hours.
“Honestly, it’s just baffling to me. If you see an underage girl and you see that she’s intoxicated…the first question you should ask is where did you get the alcohol from?” the woman told the Herald.
“He knew how old I was,” the woman said. “And obviously he would be like, ‘you can’t tell anybody about this.’ He made it seem like he cared about me. And I never told anybody because I thought that I was going to get in trouble… I didn’t want to be shamed.”
Epilogue
When the latest complaints about Olea emerged, he stopped coaching at Flipout Workout, leaving those duties to others, but continued to coach a small group of competitive female gymnasts at a facility in Kendall. In a brief encounter with a Miami Herald reporter, he said he would like to talk but his attorney advised him not to do so.
CLARA-SOPHIA DALY •
Oscar Olea coaching his competitive gymnasts at Leyva Gymnastics in Kendall on Friday Jan. 12, 2024.
By Wednesday afternoon of this past week, some of the signage on the Flipout Workout gym windows had been removed.
“He’s been the best coach that my daughter’s had in any sport,” said Sofia Jacobs, a mother of a current competitive gymnastics student.
Chief Sousa said if there are women or girls who have abuse to report — even involving older allegations — he stands ready to listen and will take what they say seriously.
The woman who says she was repeatedly molested when she was 13 said she’d be willing to help if the police reach out to her.
Anyone wishing to speak to a reporter about this matter can email csdaly@MiamiHerald.com or achacin@MiamiHerald.com
Miami Herald investigative reporter Julie K. Brown contributed to this report.
Leading Museums Remove Native Displays Amid New Federal Rules
The American Museum of Natural History is closing two major halls as museums around the nation respond to updated policies from the Biden administration.
The American Museum of Natural History will close two major halls exhibiting Native American objects, its leaders said on Friday, in a dramatic response to new federal regulations that require museums to obtain consent from tribes before displaying or performing research on cultural items.
“The halls we are closing are artifacts of an era when museums such as ours did not respect the values, perspectives and indeed shared humanity of Indigenous peoples,” Sean Decatur, the museum’s president, wrote in a letter to the museum’s staff on Friday morning. “Actions that may feel sudden to some may seem long overdue to others.”
The museum is closing galleries dedicated to the Eastern Woodlands and the Great Plains this weekend, and covering a number of other display cases featuring Native American cultural items as it goes through its enormous collection to make sure it is in compliance with the new federal rules, which took effect this month. That will leave nearly 10,000 square feet of exhibition space in the storied museum on the Upper West Side of Manhattan off-limits to visitors; the museum said it could not provide an exact timeline for when the reconsidered exhibits would reopen.
“Some objects may never come back on display as a result of the consultation process,” Decatur said in an interview. “But we are looking to create smaller-scale programs throughout the museum that can explain what kind of process is underway.”
Museums around the country have been covering up displays as curators scramble to determine whether they can be shown under the new regulations. The Field Museum in Chicago covered some display cases, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University said it would remove all funerary belongings from exhibition and the Cleveland Museum of Art has covered up some cases.
The changes are the result of a concerted effort by the Biden administration to speed up the repatriation of Native American remains, funerary objects and other sacred items. The process started in 1990 with the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, which established protocols for museums and other institutions to return human remains, funerary objects and other holdings to tribes. But as those efforts have dragged on for decades, the law was criticized by tribal representatives as being too slow and too susceptible to institutional resistance.
This month, new federal regulations went into effect that were designed to hasten returns, giving institutions five years to prepare all human remains and related funerary objects for repatriation and giving more authority to tribes throughout the process.
“We’re finally being heard — and it’s not a fight, it’s a conversation,” said Myra Masiel-Zamora, an archaeologist and curator with the Pechanga Band of Indians.
Even in the two weeks since the new regulations took effect, she said, she has felt the tenor of talks shift. In the past, institutions often viewed Native oral histories as less persuasive than academic studies when determining which modern-day tribes to repatriate objects to, she said. But the new regulations require institutions to “defer to the Native American traditional knowledge of lineal descendants, Indian Tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations.”
“We can say, ‘This needs to come home’ and I’m hoping there will not be pushback,” Masiel-Zamora said.
Museum leaders have been preparing for the new regulations for months, consulting lawyers and curators and holding lengthy meetings to discuss what might need to be covered up or removed. Many institutions are planning to hire staff to comply with the new rules, which can involve extensive consultations with tribal representatives.
The result has been a major shift in practices around Native American exhibitions at some of the country’s leading museums — one that will be noticeable to visitors.
At the American Museum of Natural History, segments of the collection once used to teach students about the Iroquois, Mohegans, Cheyenne, Arapaho and other groups will be temporarily inaccessible. That includes large objects, like the birchbark canoe of Menominee origin in the Hall of Eastern Woodlands, and smaller ones, including darts that date as far back as 10,000 B.C. and a Hopi Katsina doll from what is now Arizona. Field trips for students to the Hall of Eastern Woodlands are being rethought now that they will not have access to those galleries.
“What might seem out of alignment for some people is because of a notion that museums affix in amber descriptions of the world,” Decatur said. “But museums are at their best when they reflect changing ideas.”
Exhibiting Native American human remains is generally prohibited at museums, so the collections being reassessed include sacred objects, burial belongings and other items of cultural patrimony. As the new regulations have been discussed and debated over the past year or so, some professional organizations, such as the Society for American Archaeology, have expressed concern that the rules were reaching too far into museums’ collection management practices. But since the regulations went into effect on Jan. 12, there has been little public pushback from museums.
Much of the holdings of human remains and Native cultural items were collected through practices that are now considered antiquated and even odious, including through donations by grave robbers and archaeological digs that cleared out Indigenous burial grounds.
“This is human rights work, and we need to think about it as that and not as science,” said Candace Sall, the director of the museum of anthropology at the University of Missouri, which is still working to repatriate the remains of more than 2,400 Native American individuals. Sall said she added five staff members to work on repatriation in anticipation of the regulations and hopes to add more.
Criticism of the pace of repatriation had put institutions such as the American Museum of Natural History under public pressure. In more than 30 years, the museum has repatriated the remains of approximately 1,000 individuals to tribal groups; it still holds the remains of about 2,200 Native Americans and thousands of funerary objects. (Last year, the museum said it would overhaul practices that extended to its larger collection of some 12,000 skeletons by removing human bones from public display and improving the storage facilities where they are kept.)
A top priority of the new regulations, which are administered by the Interior Department, is to finish the work of repatriating the Native human remains in institutional holdings, which amount to more than 96,000 individuals, according to federal data published in the fall.
The government has given institutions a deadline, giving them until 2029 to prepare human remains and their burial belongings for repatriation.
In many cases, human remains and cultural objects have little information attached to them, which has slowed repatriation in the past, especially for institutions that have sought exacting anthropological and ethnographic evidence of links to a modern Native group.
Now the government is urging institutions to push forward with the information they have, in some cases relying solely on geographical information — such as what county the remains were discovered in.
There have been concerns among some tribal officials that the new rules will result in a deluge of requests from museums that may be beyond their capacities and could create a financial burden.
Speaking in June to a committee that reviews the implementation of the law, Scott Willard, who works on repatriation issues for the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, expressed concern that the rhetoric around the new regulations sometimes made it sound as if Native ancestors were “throwaway items.”
“This garage sale mentality of ‘give it all away right now’ is very offensive to us,” Willard said.
The officials who drew up the new regulations have said that institutions can get extensions to their deadlines as long as the tribes that they are consulting with agree, emphasizing the need to hold institutions accountable without overburdening tribes. If museums are found to have violated the regulations, they could be subject to fines.
Bryan Newland, the assistant secretary for Indian Affairs and a former tribal president of the Bay Mills Indian Community, said the rules were drawn up in consultation with tribal representatives, who wanted their ancestors to recover dignity in death.
“Repatriation isn’t just a rule on paper,” Newland said, “but it brings real meaningful healing and closure to people.”
In an internal note about the job cuts at Business Insider, the company’s chief executive cited its plan to shift focus solely to news coverage of business, tech and innovation.
Business Insider said on Thursday that it was laying off 8 percent of its staff, the latest in a wave of sharp job cuts in the media industry this month.
Barbara Peng, Business Insider’s chief executive, said in an internal note that the job cuts were part of a plan, announced late last year, to shift focus solely to news coverage of business, tech and innovation.
“We have already begun to refocus teams and invest in areas that drive outsize value for our core audience,” Ms. Peng wrote. “Unfortunately, this also means we need to scale back in some areas of our organization.”
Ms. Peng added: “We’re committed to building an enduring and sustainable Business Insider for the coming years and beyond.”
In November, the company changed its name from Insider back to Business Insider, and its co-founder Henry Blodget stepped aside as chief executive. At the time, the publication’s top editor, Nicholas Carlson, wrote that it was a “new era” for the company: “It’s now about recommitting to what we do best.”
A Business Insider spokeswoman declined to comment on Thursday on the specifics of the layoffs.
Business Insider previously laid off 10 percent of its staff in April, citing economic pressures. At the time, Business Insider had about 950 workers around the world.
Business Insider is owned by the German publishing giant Axel Springer, which also owns Politico. It recently became embroiled in a dispute with the billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman after it published an article saying his wife, Neri Oxman, a prominent academic and architect, had plagiarized in her dissertation.
After an internal review, Business Insider defended the article. “The process we went through to report, edit, and review the stories was sound, as was the timing,” Ms. Peng said this month.
If your art collecting has been focused on paintings and drawings, please don’t miss this episode of Art Lovers Forum with Artist Robin Schwalb. Robin is a quilt maker who introduced textile art into the world of pop culture. Her creations make you stop, stare and think “I would like to look at that every day.”
That is exactly why Robin has become so popular. She loves combining her graphically compelling quilts with the digital realm of manipulated photography. She then adds the extremely analog craft of stenciling, screen-printing, patchwork, appliqué and quilting. She also explores the rich variety of the written word, balancing an appreciation of their abstract beauty with the desire to include the “found art” of relevant texts. Subject matter might be drawn from her travels; the urban environment; film and/or video technology; or even mannequins.
Schwalb’s quilts have been widely shown in both juried and invitational exhibitions in the United States, Europe and Japan including The Gold Standard of Fiber and Textile Art (2020); “Deeds Not Words”: Celebrating 100 Years of Women’s Suffrage (2020); Semper Tedium: The Slow Art of Quiltmaking (2015); Art Quilt Elements (2012); Outside/Inside the Box (2012); Crossing Lines: The Many Faces of Fiber (2011); Talking Quilts (2004); Language Arts: Text as Imagery (2003); Six Continents of Quilts: The American Craft Museum Collection (2002); Seeing Yellow (1999); 9 x 9 x 3; Edge to Edge: Selections from Studio Art Quilt Associates (1998); Visions: Quilt San Diego (1996); Five Perspectives: American Art Quilts in Moscow (1996); Artists + Language (1993); and eleven Quilt Nationals, from 1987 to 2017. She was a juror for Art Quilt Elements 2010 and 2020. She curated the 1991 Manhattanville College exhibition Essences and Presences: Art Quilts and wrote the catalog for this six-artist show. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including American Craft; The New York Times; Canadian Surfacing Journal; Fiberarts; The Detroit News; and Patchwork Quilt Tsushin. The artist received the Quilts Japan Prize from Quilt National ’05, the Award of Excellence from Quilt National ’89 and Jurors’ Choice from Tactile Architecture 1992. She was awarded a grant by the Empire State Crafts Alliance in 1989.
A native of New York City, Schwalb studied painting at the State University of New York at Binghamton, receiving her BA in 1974.
Today Robin is going to tell us what we need to know about textile art and why we should pay more attention to it. Robin thank you so much for taking time to speak to us today.
From runways to grocery runs, bottomless looks are everywhere
A classic coat and knit polo blend perfectly with the daring sans-pants trend. Miu Miu coat, $9,200, and polo, $2,600, MiuMiu.com, Live the Process briefs, $128, LiveTheProcess.com, Marlo Laz earrings, $1,200, MarloLaz.com. PHOTOGRAPHY BY IAN KENNETH BIRD FOR WSJ. MAGAZINE; STYLING BY JENNY HARTMAN
By Rory Satran
Was Edie Sedgwick the first “it girl” to ditch her pants? In 1965, Life magazine wrote that the Warhol muse was “doing more for black tights than anyone since Hamlet.”
Sedgwick might be pleased to see that the sans-pants look she pioneered is now reigning the runway, with designers from Coperni to Ferragamo to Victoria Beckham to Valentino showing very dressed-up looks missing one (some would say) crucial element. Stars have taken up the pantsless mantle too. Emma Corrin donned green Miu Miu briefs with a matching cardigan at the Venice Film Festival. Even in the dead of winter, Hailey Bieber left a leather jacket orphaned on a January walk in New York City. On Jan. 2, the artist Ye posted a picture of his frequent companion Bianca Censori in a fur top, thong and heels, captioned: “No pants this year.”
“Listen, I hate pants,” says Beverly Nguyen, a New York stylist and founder of the home-goods store Beverly’s—who is, admittedly, lithe, brave and fashionable. At a recent dinner party at her house, she wore a spin on a Bottega Veneta outfit Kendall Jenner wore in Los Angeles in 2022: navy sweater, black tights, black heels. She thinks the look works best with a conservative pairing; business up top and party on the bottom.
Celebrities including Kendall Jenner, Tessa Thompson and Emma Corrin have sported the no-pants look, while designers such as Miu Miu and Alaïa have sent the trend down their runways. PHOTO: FROM LEFT: ALIX NEWMAN/SHUTTERSTOCK; MIU MIU; ZACK WHITFORD/BFA.COM; ALAÏA; FRANCO ORIGLIA/GETTY IMAGES
Nguyen, who has worked out on the treadmill wearing a silk slip skirt from The Row, is somewhat inclined to think outside the confines of dress codes. “It was definitely main-character energy” to forgo pants, she says, but she doesn’t think it’s that wacky, especially since brands like Miu Miu are going all in on the trend. Nobody was asking her, What happened to your pants?
Miu Miu, the sassier sister to Prada, has been a vanguard of the style since it first sent Kate Moss down the runway in a bathing suit and a trench in 1996. In recent years, the brand’s designer Miuccia Prada flirted with increasingly disappearing skirts: a viral mini-kilt followed by a fully sheer polka-dotted pencil skirt. For spring, the brand returned to its ’90s roots, with many looks featuring boy-brief-style underwear and bare legs, grounded by preppy boat shoes.
Consider the pantsless look with a conservative pairing; business up top and party on the bottom. Ferragamo jacket, $2,400, cardigan, $1,190, earrings, $410, briefs, $590, bag, $3,700, and shoes, $995, Ferragamo.com; Miu Miu coat, $9,200, polo, $2,600, and shoes, $950, MiuMiu.com, Live the Process briefs, $128, LiveTheProcess.com. PHOTOGRAPHY BY IAN KENNETH BIRD FOR WSJ. MAGAZINE | STYLING BY JENNY HARTMAN
Clare Vivier, the Los Angeles designer and founder of accessories brand Clare V., was also inspired by Miu Miu, which she says has “hit a cultural nerve.” So when she was getting ready for a recent party, she put on a new pair of flat Mary Jane shoes, an oversize hoodie and blazer, and then called it a day. She says she was not the only one at the party who’d left her pants at home.
“There’s a whimsy about the look, a lack of preciousness,” says Leandra Medine Cohen. The New York writer has sported several pants-free outfits recently: an embellished jacket over a turtleneck and sheer tights; a white boatneck T-shirt with a funky belt and polka-dotted stockings; a baggy gray sweater tucked into sparkly Calzedonia tights.
The no-pants style requires more courage and effort than its nonchalant appearance lets on. The Row blazer, $4,350, shirt, $1,150, and briefs, $1,050, TheRow.com, and Marlo Laz earrings, $1,200, MarloLaz.com. Model, Georgia Moot at One Management; hair, Edward Lampley; makeup, Stevie Huynh; production, Harbinger. PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHY BY IAN KENNETH BIRD FOR WSJ. MAGAZINE; STYLING BY JENNY HARTMAN
She admits that the air of nonchalance is a bit deceptive, as the style requires quite a bit of courage and effort to plan the proper full-coverage underwear, find the perfect tights and coordinate an appropriate top. “And yet it still exudes this sense of unfinished business,” she says. Right—the whole putting-on-your-pants business.
“I do like how it looks,” Paris stylist Ondine Azoulay says, “but not for real life.” When she styles models in pantsless looks for magazines, that’s a “fantasy,” she says. But out on the street, it’s weird. “Can you imagine if guys started walking around in Speedos?”
New York stylist Beverly Nguyen. PHOTO: BEVERLY NGUYEN
If you’re going to try no pants for yourself, choose your venue wisely. Nguyen and Medine Cohen have both done it to entertain at home, which is as low-stakes as it gets.
“I’m not trying to walk into the synagogue attached to my kids’ school in just a pair of tights,” Medine Cohen says.
And the right attitude is just as important as the right underpinnings. “You can’t have no pants on and be a bitch,” says Nguyen
There’s an old saying about the news business: If you want to make a small fortune, start with a large one.
As the prospects for news publishers waned in the past decade, billionaires swooped in to buy some of the country’s most fabled brands. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, bought The Washington Post in 2013 for about $250 million. Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a biotechnology and start-up billionaire, purchased The Los Angeles Times in 2018 for $500 million. Marc Benioff, the founder of the software giant Salesforce, purchased Time magazine with his wife, Lynne, for $190 million in 2018.
All three newsrooms greeted their new owners with cautious optimism that their business acumen and tech know-how would help figure out the perplexing question of how to make money as a digital publication.
But it increasingly appears that the billionaires are struggling just like nearly everyone else. Time, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times all lost millions of dollars last year, people with knowledge of the companies’ finances have said, after considerable investment from their owners and intensive efforts to drum up new revenue streams.
“Wealth doesn’t insulate an owner from the serious challenges plaguing many media companies, and it turns out being a billionaire isn’t a predictor for solving those problems,” said Ann Marie Lipinski, the curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. “We’ve seen a lot of naïve hope attached to these owners, often from employees.”
Losing Money: In the past decade, billionaires like Marc Benioff and Jeff Bezos swooped in to buy some of the country’s most fabled brands in media. Now, they are struggling just like nearly everyone else in the industry.
Pitchfork: The music criticism website will be merged with the men’s magazine GQ, leading to layoffs within the online publication, according to a memo from Anna Wintour, the chief content officer of Condé Nast, their parent company.
The Baltimore Sun: The largest newspaper in Maryland has been sold to David Smith, the executive chairman of the nationwide Sinclair network of television stations and other media.
The losses may have the most immediate impact at The Los Angeles Times, where journalists are bracing for bad news. Kevin Merida, the newspaper’s widely respected editor, announced last week that he was resigning, a decision made after tension with Dr. Soon-Shiong over editorial and business priorities, according to two people familiar with the matter.
In the middle of last year, The Times was on track to lose $30 million to $40 million in 2023, according to three people with knowledge of the projections. Last year, the company cut about 74 jobs, and executives have met in recent days to discuss the possibility of deep job cuts, according to two other people familiar with the conversations.
Members of The Los Angeles Times Guild met in an emergency meeting on Thursday to discuss the possible job cuts. By the end of the day, the workers had planned to walk off the job on Friday in protest.
A spokeswoman for Dr. Soon-Shiong declined to comment on specific financial figures for The Los Angeles Times but said in an email that the company had “a significant gap between revenue and expenses,” even with the layoffs and other cost-saving measures from last year.
She said his family had invested “tens of millions of dollars” each year since acquiring The Times. “They are committed to continuing to invest,” the spokeswoman, Jen Hodson, said in the statement. “But relying on a benevolent owner to cover expenses, year after year, is not a viable long-term plan.”
Mr. Bezos hasn’t fared much better at The Washington Post. Like many news organizations, The Post has struggled to hold on to the momentum that it had gained in the wake of the 2020 election. Sagging subscriptions and advertising revenue led to losses of about $100 million last year. At the end of the year, the company eliminated 240 of its 2,500 jobs through buyouts, including some of its well-regarded journalists.
Patty Stonesifer, who filled in as chief executive last year, called the buyouts “difficult,” but said they were necessary to “invest in our top growth priorities.” Employees at The Post sent a letter in recent weeks to their top editor, Sally Buzbee, and their new permanent chief executive, Will Lewis, expressing concern over the lack of research firepower for their articles in the wake of the buyouts.
A spokesman for Mr. Bezos did not respond to repeated requests to arrange an interview for this article. In the past, Mr. Bezos has said he purchased The Post because it was an important institution but wanted the company to be profitable.
“I said to myself, ‘If this were a financially upside-down salty snack food company, the answer would be no,’” Mr. Bezos said of his decision to buy The Post in a 2018 interview.
A Time spokeswoman had no comment on the company’s 2023 finances, citing a note to employees from Jessica Sibley, its chief executive, proclaiming growing audiences and advertising revenue. In a statement, Mr. Benioff said Ms. Sibley was making “lots of exciting changes based on an amazing vision.”
“We are fortunate to have an amazing new C.E.O., Jessica Sibley, and she has done an incredible job restructuring the company over the last year,” Mr. Benioff wrote. “We have never had a bigger year, including Taylor Swift, driven by Jessica’s vision for the company.”
Time is exploring brand licensing deals overseas, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions, who said the efforts mirrored approaches by magazine companies like Forbes and Condé Nast, which have been reliable moneymakers.
Still, there are some bright spots in the firmament of traditional news organizations owned by billionaires. The Boston Globe, purchased by John W. Henry, the owner of the Boston Red Sox, from The New York Times Company in 2013 for $70 million, has been profitable for years, according to a person familiar with the company’s finances. Those profits have been reinvested in The Globe, the person said.
The Atlantic, which Laurene Powell Jobs bought in 2017, has set a target of reaching one million combined digital and print subscribers and achieving profitability. The company said it had more than 925,000 subscribers as of last summer, though it was not yet profitable.
The difficulties facing the companies are getting only more severe. Web traffic has waned for many publishers as referrals from search engines like Google ebb, and the rise of new applications powered by artificial intelligence has the potential to erode readership further.
“These vitally important news publications still find themselves ‘transitioning’ from print to digital — with major ongoing legacy business costs — as they build brick by brick a mainly digital future,” said Ken Doctor, an analyst and media entrepreneur.
Mr. Doctor said the billionaires in the news industry were showing “greater signs of fatigue,” stemming from challenges including “news anxiety and avoidance and fierce advertising competition.”
“The very rich find it very difficult to lose money year over year,” Mr. Doctor said, “even if they can afford it.”
Benjamin Mullin reports on the major companies behind news and entertainment. Contact Ben securely on Signal at +1 530-961-3223 or email at benjamin.mullin@nytimes.com. More about Benjamin Mullin
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