Monthly Recap :: June 2025

Peace Everyone,

I hope this finds you steady. June has been a fascinating month—maybe the most clarifying one of the year so far. Below are some notes and updates on my work, a few emerging thoughts, and the kinds of questions that continue to guide me forward.

1) What I’ve Been Thinking About
This month has certainly given me a clearer rhythm between my art practice and professional practice. While the two are deeply connected, I’m becoming more intentional about how they diverge and overlap. In both, I’ve been thinking a lot about measurement and legitimacy—not just as abstract concepts, but as active forces in the world. I’ve started to articulate them as twin pillars of my broader practice:

The Politics of Measurement — Who gets to define, quantify, record? How do tools like seals, stamps, patents, and tallies become devices of belief?

The Politics of Legitimacy — How is authority constructed? Who gets to claim a narrative as true? And what are the consequences when legitimacy is denied?

To say my work is political doesn’t mean I’m telling people what to think. Instead, I’m more interested in provoking people to think through objects, language, space, and systems.

2) Updates from My Art Practice
This month I had a quiet but meaningful private viewing of new work at a Chicago-based gallery. It gave me the space to test how I want the work to be shown—not at a high-stakes institutional level, but at a human scale that feels appropriate to the stage I’m in. That clarity has been energizing.

After this showing, I’ve been reflecting deeply on my work’s relationship to the black radical tradition. Artistically speaking, I’ve never been too interested in classic ideas of reappropriation, subversion, or alternative uses. Instead, I’m interested in recontextualization—how an object (like a 20" rim or a ledger book) transforms when seen as sculpture. This is an exercise in what might be called “affective proximity”—what happens when two things, seen side-by-side, create new energy simply by being next to each other.

3) Ongoing Work in My Professional Practice
In addition to this showing, I’m currently leading a quarter-million-dollar research initiative on food system resilience—focused on how regional infrastructure and procurement laws might be redesigned for more of the outcomes we want. This work sits squarely within architecture—it’s about the form, function, and financing of urban systems. In other words: form following finance, not just function. Two main questions are guiding this work:

• What are the conditions, business models, and impact models needed for resilient food systems to take hold?

• What kinds of investment strategies support long-term change?
  We’re looking at ways to align supply-side readiness with actual demand signals—so we’re not just scaling, but expanding with purpose.

4) Thematic Anchors
These are questions that return to me often—questions that shape my attention, my pacing, and my making. They’ve surfaced more clearly this month as I’ve sat with my journals, my voice memos, and the quiet in between.

• Probing Infinity
  What does it mean to create from a place that is simultaneously known and unknown?

• Precision and Folly
  I’ve always found this tension to be ever-present in my life. For example, I have a persistent yearning to find the exact word to describe an emotion, yet I’m equally aware that these words are just streams of air in the end.

• The Measure of Things
  Why do we place so much faith in what can be tallied—and who gets to decide what’s worthy of measurement?

• Prolonged Inquiry and Attention
  What happens when I let the work breathe longer than the world expects?

• The Beauty of the Ordinary
  Can an object be transformed just by where we place it, and what we ask it to hold?

5) Best Things I Saw In June

🎥 Robert Longo: Work Process - A clean, almost surgical look into Longo’s method and philosophical approach.
🎥 Walter Hood – Interview
🎥 How D’Angelo Recorded Voodoo - Unfiltered studio footage. Black genius in its most natural state—ritual, repetition, pressure, play.
📚 Ken Grimes: Evidence for Contact - The physical manifestation of his drawings—very inspiring for me right now.
📚 Martin Rees – On the Future - Big systems thinking. How to hold both planetary risk and responsibility in one breath.
📚 Giuseppe Gabellone Book - Very inspiring artist/architect
📚 Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of Migration - A brilliant collection of work.

6) Priorities In My Holistic Practice Right Now

• Strategic advising for mission-first organizations exploring urban development, sustainable business, and uncertain futures

• Projects that treat art as civic or ecological infrastructure

• Collaborations at the intersection of land, design, and long-term investment

• Precision Fabrication for sculpture 🙂 

Thanks, as always, for following along. If your own work is circling similar questions—or if you’re wrestling with slowness, systems, or scale—I’d love to be in conversation.

Blessings,

JCM