From left: Joshua Woods, Hai Zhang and Luis Alberto Rodriguez
For T’s annual celebration of the people changing the culture, we profile three artists united in their dedication to taking risks.
Over the years of editing the Greats issue, I’ve noticed something that all our honorees have in common. It’s not that they somehow shifted their artistic genre (though they did); it’s not that they managed to capture, or speak to, the culture of the moment (though they did that too) — it’s the equanimity with which they look back on their earliest creative efforts. Anyone who makes art of any kind has a work (or many works) from when they were just starting to think of themselves as an artist that makes them cringe, but the people we profile tend not to dwell on these nascent attempts. Why?