Kevin Beasley thinks a lot about objects. In particular, specific objects that relate to notions of American-ness and Blackness—and ones that are often linked, subtly or not, with violence. Whether with a Cadillac Escalade, a pair of Air Jordans, or an N.F.L. helmet, Beasley finds deep connections to each item he chooses to work with, rigorously studying their multifarious contexts, meanings, and histories. Happy to let artifacts sit in his New York studio for long periods of time, the 36-year-old artist allows them to slowly gestate in his mind until he feels ready to express whatever he has deciphered out of their nature. From there, he turns them into exquisite, alchemical works of art, from tightly packed “slab” sculptures—large, flat resin blocks that embody the density of the symbolic articles that comprise them—to evocative sound installations and performances. Beasley’s prolonged approach isn’t mere research; it’s his way of making space to reflect, to pay more attention, and to grapple with the nuances of the complex, loaded subject matter that’s embedded in many of the things that permeate our everyday lives. For Beasley, unpacking subjects charged with underlying connotations is a necessary means for transformation. “You don’t have to fully understand what it is you’re dealing with,” he says. “It takes time. It takes a revisitation. And that’s okay, because that speaks very specifically to a process of learning and understanding.”Beasley’s work often draws from his personal history, which has included growing up in admiration of the handiwork of his mechanic father, deejaying at house parties at Yale University, and attending annual family reunions in rural Virginia. It was at one such reunion, in 2011, when Beasley came across a cotton field and picked the plant for the first time—an eerie experience that was, as he considered his ancestors and enslaved peoples who once performed the act, all at once distressing, pleasurable, haunting, and illuminating. The following year, Beasley took his fascination with cotton further—and into the deep South. After finding and purchasing a mid-20th-century cotton gin motor on eBay, he drove from New Haven, Connecticut, to a farm in rural Alabama to collect the object. Beginning as part of an M.F.A. project at Yale, the motor would later evolve into an encased artwork, whirling and surrounded by microphones, inside a pristine, clear, soundproof box at the Whitney Museum of American Art—the potent centerpiece of the artist’s breakout exhibition “A View of a Landscape” (2018–2019). (The raw, rancorous noises the motor produced were pumped into an adjacent room that served as a listening gallery.) Later this year, Beasley will extend the project further with a monograph and double LP of the same name, which features sound contributions from artists, musicians, and writers such as Kelsey Lu, Jason Moran, and Fred Moten, whose tracks sample recordings that Beasley made of the churning machine.On this episode, Beasley talks with Spencer about contemplating these particular objects, sound as a means for greater understanding, and the role of repetition in reshaping history.

For Grammy Award–winning singer and songwriter Rosanne Cash, processing the past is a constant, endless journey. She’d been thinking about race and reparations long before the Movement for Black Lives gained momentum last year, as both racism and African-American ancestry exist in her family history rooted in the American South, where she was born to country music legend Johnny Cash and his first wife, Vivian Liberto, in 1955. Cash channeled her anguish into “The Killing Fields,” a haunting single that reckons with the United States’s legacy of lynchings, and “Crawl into the Promised Land,” a blistering yet optimistic response to the tumultuous events of 2020. Last month, she released both tracks on a seven-inch limited-edition vinyl, the sales from which will benefit the Arkansas Peace and Justice Memorial Movement, a nonprofit that raises awareness about the state’s history of racial injustice.  Over the last four decades, Cash, who now lives in New York, has established herself as one of the rare voices in popular music who sings from the uncut perspective of a grown woman, fraught with opinions, mixed emotions, and battle scars. With each album she releases (there are 14 to date), she seems to gain a deeper understanding of herself. After earning 11 number one hits on Billboard’s country music chart during the 1980s, Cash released Interiors (1990), a dark, reflective album that marked a departure from her commercial work. While country radio stations and her label all but ignored the record, she’s embraced the honest, deeply personal approach used to make it as her modus operandi ever since. Her recent work is increasingly intimate: Cash confronts her Southern roots and grapples with her life as a wife, mother, and former country star in the 2014 album The River and The Thread; her 2018 album She Remembers Everything—released against the backdrop of Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings and during the rise of the #MeToo movement—tackles the plight of women in America with songs about divorce, ingrained social hierarchies, and death, including a track about a boy killed by gun violence told from the viewpoint of his mother. She has also written articles for The Atlantic, The Nation, and The New York Times about subjects that matter to her, such as the need for country music artists to speak out in support of gun control. Eschewing any self-righteousness, these efforts, whether singing, songwriting, or prose, are her way of working through the complexities of life. “I have to keep showing up for the things I believe in,” she says, noting that she often feels like a fraud. “That’s part of being an artist. You come up against that, and you still show up, because you have to. The world needs it.” On this episode, Cash discusses what it means to reckon with history, talking with Andrew about her long-standing work as an activist, the healing power of music, and continually revisiting the past as a means for personal and artistic evolution.

Growing up in the 1950s in the only Chinese family in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, Billie Tsien always felt like an outsider. She would seclude herself in the shower of her family’s home’s master bathroom, behind closed doors, escaping into books for hours before her parents, who had originally moved to America from Shanghai to study at Cornell, would find her. Through this Tsien developed a deep understanding of the value of a rich interior life—a concept she has gone on to apply to her work at the New York–based architectural practice Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects Partners (TWBTA), which she co-founded with her husband, Tod Williams, in 1986. The ethereal craft inherent in TWBTA’s structures, which include parks, libraries, museums, and other people-focused places, emanates from Billie and Tod’s belief that architecture is an act of service, and an opportunity to create quiet moments where visitors can indulge in the simple yet powerful emotions that can be stirred when encountering beauty. When Tsien, now 72, reflects on her firm’s philosophy—which entails making buildings that transcend solutions, that respect the earth, and that are measured by the lives lived within them—it’s clear that she profoundly, even poetically, shapes each project’s awe-inspiring energy. Tsien’s deliberate, unhurried methodology is apparent in everything she does. She advocates for listening and community engagement—a central part of her firm’s high-profile, often controversial public works, such as Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation (2012), Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum of Art (2019), and Chicago’s Obama Presidential Center, which is slated to break ground this fall. Tsien and her staff spend time with the craftspeople who create many of their materials—including Dutch textile artist Claudy Jongstra, whose vibrant felt paintings grace the walls of New York’s David Rubenstein Atrium (2009), and Danish brick-makers whose product features on the facade of dormitories at Pennsylvania’s Haverford College (2012)—and select them according to the emotional responses they elicit. She gives the same focused attention to the holistic experience of a building as she does the handrails that will go inside it. When it comes to the planet, Tsien thinks buildings should embrace measurable ways to minimize their environmental footprints as well as immeasurable ones, such as the meandering pathways of the LeFrak Center (2013), in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, that invite people to appreciate the natural wonders around them.On this episode, Tsien details the origins of and rationale behind her approach to the built environment, talking with Spencer about designing structures as containers for life, why history doesn’t unfold in a straight line, and architecture as both an honor and a responsibility.

For 37 years, Eileen Fisher has faithfully followed a vision: to create simple, timeless clothes for women that make it easy to get dressed. Soft-spoken, polite, and a self-described introvert, the 70-year-old Fisher is the unlikely CEO of an approximately $500 million fashion company that bears her name. The operation is owned by 42 percent of its largely female staff, and is praised for its longtime environmentalism and progressive business model. Headquartered in Irvington, New York, the brand embodies Fisher’s view of what a contemporary clothing business should be, and acts as her way of giving back to the world.Though Fisher prioritized natural materials in her designs from the beginning, she didn’t fully understand how making clothes affects the planet until a 2012 trip to China, where she visited the company’s factories and saw the severity of the water crisis firsthand. Upon returning home, she created an internal “Sustainable Design Team,” composed of representatives from key departments, including supply-chain management and production, with the goal of minimizing their work’s environmental impact. Today, the brand uses organic cotton and linen almost exclusively, and between 2015 and 2018, it offset all of its carbon emissions when transporting garments between its factories and distribution center. Seventy-nine percent of its wool is responsibly sourced or recycled. The company’s initiative that buys and sells vintage Eileen Fisher pieces, called Renew, has collected more than a million and a half garments, and Waste No More, an in-house studio that uses a felting machine to transform leftover fabric into home decor, accessories, and art, nods toward Fisher’s goal of creating a circular production system. She’s constantly looking for ways to reduce the brand’s environmental footprint. “The whole industry has a very long way to go,” Fisher says of fashion’s contribution to global economic and climate crises. But solving the problem, she adds, is a “huge opportunity.” On this episode, Fisher describes her efforts to build a clothing business that serves women and the environment, talking with Andrew about collaboration as a preferred modus operandi, solving the fashion industry’s pollution problem, and the remarkable effects of staying true to one’s vision, and to oneself.

Last year, after more than three decades of practicing and teaching Ashtanga yoga, Eddie Stern found himself wondering if he should continue in the discipline. He’d amassed a considerable following through the classes of his New York yoga studios (with celebrity students such as Madonna; Gwyneth Paltrow; and Mike D, of the Beastie Boys), authored two books, launched a successful app with Moby and the alternative-medicine advocate Deepak Chopra, and lectured around the world. But issues within the industry have loomed large: The Western yoga scene—with its high-priced classes, stadium-size festivals, “rock star” yogis, and self-aggrandizing instructors—trouble him. They distort yoga from its origins, he believes, imposing false narratives onto participants. Meanwhile, in the era of #MeToo, multiple allegations of sexual misconduct against his peers—including the late Pattabhi Jois, under whom he studied for 18 years—have brought about a reckoning in the community. Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and Stern began giving classes over Zoom, a format he found conducive to creating the personal, noncompetitive, altruistic side of yoga that initially attracted him to the practice. He soon discovered his passion for teaching all over again.Stern’s dedication to yoga is rooted in a desire to understand who he is, which is apparent in each step of building the life he currently leads. His ninth-grade English teacher challenged him to contemplate his identity and purpose, which he explored early on by hanging out in New York’s 1980s punk music scene, skateboarding, and taking psychedelic drugs. When a co-worker at a record store introduced him to yoga, Stern quickly saw that the practice was a direct line to the insight and self-realization he longed for. Eager to immerse himself in the discipline, he moved to India, where he spent nearly two decades, on and off, studying with Jois, who had developed and popularized the vinyasa style of yoga known as Ashtanga. Jois also, as Stern acknowledges on this episode of Time Sensitive, abused some of his female students. But the sense of self Stern drew from being close to the guru, coupled with a fear for his own survival, caused him to remain largely silent until now. “Fear doesn’t lead toward treating people well,” Stern says. “Not just in accordance with yoga principles, but with human principles.” Today, he’s using what he’s learned from this dark experience to help inform how he approaches instructing his own students: as spiritual friends, who learn and grow together with their teacher. On this episode, Stern describes his profound experiences with the yogi tradition, talking with Spencer about the beauty of breathing and the body’s natural rhythms, yoga as practice of selfless concern for others, the problem of fear, and how slowing down shifts our relationship with ourselves.

Simon Critchley, a philosopher at the New School, combines deep thought with humor, bringing clarity to complex ideas. He shares personal experiences, like recovering from memory loss and his journey through adversity influenced by punk culture. Critchley discusses the connections between disappointment, creativity, and social upheaval while highlighting the transformative power of mentorship. He reflects on the therapeutic nature of writing and the joy of engaging with students, all while exploring the philosophical dimensions of music and humor.

New York–based jewelry and object designer Monique Péan sees fossils and extraterrestrial materials as portals to another time, space, and place. Pyritized dinosaur bones, woolly mammoth tooth roots, meteorites, and lunaites are among her work’s mediums. She sources these from remote locations—including the Arctic Circle, where she located fossils with Native Alaskan Inupiat and Yupik tribes, and on Easter Island, where that site’s aboriginal Polynesian inhabitants helped her hand-carve cosmic obsidian, found on local terrain—and then transforms them into striking, sculptural works of art. Recently, Péan began working on a larger scale, expanding her practice to sculpture and furniture. One of her first pieces in this vein, a bronze vessel incorporating part of a rare meteorite, is included in “Objects: USA 2020,” a forthcoming exhibition at New York’s R & Company gallery (now opening on February 16, 2021, due to the Covid-19 pandemic), curated by Glenn Adamson, Abby Bangser, Evan Snyderman, and James Zemaitis. Péan wants viewers to experience the wonder she feels when holding a piece of the universe in her hands: a transportive, calming energy that signals the vastness of deep time—and illuminates her role in harnessing it. Péan traces her draw toward these specimens to her younger sister, Vanessa, who died in a car accident at age 16. The loss prompted her, then in her mid-20s (she is now 39), to approach life with urgency and intention. She quit her job as an analyst at Goldman Sachs and, a year later, in 2006, launched her eponymous jewelry line. Each piece is, in a way, a memorial to her only sibling. They’re also a means for the designer to explore the origins of life, and to express not only herself but also gratitude toward the planet: Péan donates a portion of the proceeds from every accessory sold to Charity: Water, a nonprofit that provides clean drinking water to communities in need, and avoids using materials that require mining, opting for antique diamonds and recycled gold or platinum instead. The ancient materials she uses are found lying on the Earth’s surface, collected by simply picking them up off of the ground, and in Péan’s hands, they’re turned into wearable reminders of natural phenomena.On this episode, Péan details how she came to understand time through geology, talking with Spencer about her fascination with fossils, rocks, and meteorites; her profound experiences working with indigenous peoples to locate age-old materials; how her Haitian-Jewish background has shaped her worldview; and the ways in which her jewelry pays tribute to her late sister.

Artist Dan Colen built Sky High Farm in the same way all his ideas are realized: intuitively, and with the faith to see it through. A 40-acre self-sustaining ecosystem in New York’s Hudson Valley, the farm helps underserved communities by donating everything it produces to local food banks. Since 2011, Colen and his team have given away more than 70 tons of organic vegetables, fruit, eggs, and meat. As the pandemic exposes the urgency of the farm’s raison d’être—spotlighting food insecurity and small-scale farming—Colen has sought new avenues to give back. This past August, he launched a Go Fund Me to double its production, scale up distribution, and increase its donation capacity by buying more food from other regional farmers. He’s also been working on a partnership with concept shop Dover Street Market—a collection of naturally tie-dyed, vintage-sourced T-shirts, hoodies, hats, and bandanas printed with the logos and slogans of the farm’s partners—and funneling the proceeds to farm beneficiaries. When the merchandise promptly sold out, Colen, a former skateboarder, realized fashion was an effective tool for spreading his message, particularly with a young, engaged audience. This fall, he unveiled the first in a yearlong series of covetable collaborations, created pro bono by 12 brands, including Awake NY, Noah, and Supreme. All profits will go toward running the farm. Colen, who’s represented by the Gagosian and Lévy Gorvy galleries in New York, and Massimo De Carlo in Milan, bought the plot of land nearly a decade ago after moving upstate, which gave him the space, access to nature, and the sense of freedom he needed at the time: He’d just gotten sober, and cultivating the land was an opportunity to do something bigger than himself. Colen long struggled to understand his draw to the property. But after nearly a decade, as he says on this episode of Time Sensitive, he’s come to see it as an extension of his creative practice: making things to alter perceptions, or to act as a mirror. Like his art—which varies in style and often employs perishable materials such as flowers, feathers, and chewing gum—the farm is an inquiry into ephemerality and slow, constant change, a canvas for Colen to work out experiences that made him the person he is today. On this episode, Colen recounts the circuitous journey that brought him to the farming life, speaking with Andrew about Sky High Farm’s efforts to combat food insecurity, how skateboarding introduced him to art, his profound relationship with the artists Ryan McGinley and the late Dash Snow, and the wide-ranging body of work he has created while grappling with life’s big questions.

To make her namesake womenswear line, New York–based designer Angel Chang had to forget everything she knew about fashion. Her label’s clothing is made using age-old techniques developed by China’s indigenous Miao and Dong ethnic minority tribes, whose procedures are at risk of disappearing because a younger generation has, in recent years, largely been indifferent to learning them. Chang, who was born in central Indiana to Chinese immigrants, first encountered Guizhou Province’s garment-making methods while visiting the Shanghai Museum, where she saw traditional costumes—vivid, elaborately detailed attire akin to haute couture—and spent the next 10 years developing a supply chain to make them available to a wider audience. She tracked down artisans (many of them grandmothers) in far-flung villages, learned Chinese, and even moved to the region, immersing herself in its way of life. There she discovered a distinctive relationship with time—one that depends on nature in lieu of a clock—that informs the slow, faithful process by which her clothes are constructed. Chang never set out to run a sustainable fashion label. But the system she created, which involves waiting six months for cotton seeds to grow and a weaving process that yields barely 10 feet of fabric a day, produces zero-carbon clothing. Each piece, from “seed to button,” as she puts it, is manufactured within a 30-mile radius, without the use of electricity or chemicals. It’s too complicated for fashion companies to become “sustainable,” Chang says on this episode of Time Sensitive; they need to build new supply chains from the ground up. The one she devised serves as a model, even a noble, alternative to fast fashion.On this episode, Chang describes the journey of patience and persistence that forged the infrastructure for her brand, talking with Spencer about persuading high fashion houses to preserve these traditional garment-making techniques; the prolonged, enlightening process of befriending Chinese artisans; harnessing wit and WeChat to build supply chains for her collection; and why indigenous knowledge is key to addressing climate change.

Asked how the coronavirus pandemic has affected his relationship with time, Daniel Boulud chokes up. The New York–based French chef—who owns 13 restaurants, including the Michelin-starred Daniel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and the fast-casual café Épicerie Boulud—laments the ways that Covid-19 has uprooted his staff, suppliers, and customers, deeming it the worst experience of his five-decades-long career. The response reveals a defining trait of the ardent chef, who cares deeply not only for his personnel, but about everything his work encompasses. At 65, Boulud continues to derive his energy from perfecting his craft: reading old French cookbooks, experimenting with his team in the test kitchen, embracing the spontaneity of making food for someone on the fly. When the coronavirus shut down New York’s restaurants this past March, Boulud turned his white-tablecloth flagship inside out, providing takeout and food service on the sidewalk of East 65th Street for patrons, and through converting Épicerie Boulud’s Bowery location into a prep kitchen for Citymeals, he's  been helping feed first responders and elderly and food-insecure New Yorkers. Now, as New York officially begins its return to indoor dining, he's introducing Boulud Sur Mer, a pop-up environment designed by architect Stephanie Goto that reimagines Daniel’s interior, nodding to the South of France while elegantly incorporating safety protocols. The chef perks up when discussing Le Pavillion, the seafood restaurant he’s opening next year, a project he sees as a way to contribute to the regeneration of a city he loves after a harrowing period of downtime. His work transcends the kitchen: For Boulud, his legacy isn’t so much about what he’s accomplished, but about how he’s helping others. His profound interest in the wide-ranging potential of food is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that Boulud is not only a chef, but a restaurateur. Work beckons constantly, as he points out in this episode of Time Sensitive, but it doesn’t seem to bother him. It’s all an extension of himself. His balanced, steady work ethic has enabled him to perpetually grow while maintaining consistency and standing the test of time. On this episode, Boulud’s generous spirit shines through as he details his journey to culinary success. He talks with Spencer about growing up on a farm near Lyon, France, that produced everything his family put on the table; how a “grande dame” facilitated his entry into fine dining; learning about food, mentorship, and entrepreneurship from several legendary chefs; and the humbling satisfaction of seeing his life’s work come full circle.