Happy New Year from Soft Labor
2024 — a Dragon year, in the lunar calendar — was a true banger. (In short: I moved, married, and changed my name! I also adopted a dog.)
Otherwise, Soft Labor devised the editorial strategy for the digital version of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s 2024 Smithsonian Design Triennial, Making Home. The exhibition’s graphic identity, by Office Ben Ganz, played nicely with the Cooper Hewitt’s digital exhibition platform whose designer, Linked by Air, introduced some new moves to feature Making Home’s wide array of projects by an extraordinary cast of contributors. The digital version of Making Home will continue to evolve as the show remains on view through August 2025. More to come.
Soft Labor also began new collaborations with the Brooklyn graphic design studio Other Means; the creative agency Digital Counsel; and longtime comrades Related Tactics, the San Francisco and DC-based artist collective — projects that will go public in 2025.
I wrote some bits for Hyperallergic (an if not the last digital bastion for independent arts journalism) in 2024 — mostly reviews that weren’t reviews at all, but exploratory sketches of sorts. My favorites included a piece on Filterworld, New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka’s book about the algorithmic homogenization of culture; a brief meditation on artist Shana Moulton’s tremendous MoMA debut, Meta/Physical Therapy; and a homage to comic artist, graphic novelist, and filmmaker Adrian Tomine’s latest work, Q&A. New projects-in-progress — a catalogue essay that I’m particularly enjoying, for one — will publish in 2025.
If you were kind enough to meet, speak, and think with me in 2024, I thank you truly. Thank you for your candid insight and generosity of thought; thank you for your solidarity. I don’t forget people.
Just the other day, I was confiding in a trusted friend who bought Apple stock on the ground. “How would you value Soft Labor?,” I asked. “I’d buy it now.”
Copyright 2024 Sarah Hromack; all rights reserved.