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@read.bureau

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A new platform exploring creative culture & practice

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Meet Bureau: a new platform exploring the culture of creativity.

If you have ever been fortunate enough to spend time around artists and other creatives, you know that there is a distinct kind of conversation that occurs. It happens behind studio doors, across shared meals, and within the notebooks of people who make things. The conversation is thoughtful, and more often than not, we come away having learned something that stays with us. Bureau was born from the desire to document those conversations– and to create a space where process, place, and the people behind creative work can be explored with care.

We believe that art, design, food, and creativity in general don’t exist in isolation. They are shaped by context: the texture of daily life, the political moment, personal history, and everything we keep close. Our goal is to trace those connections– to uncover the undercurrents that influence how and why people create.

Each issue of Bureau is built around a central theme. Rather than trying to pin meaning down, we let the theme unfold slowly. It’s a point of entry, a prompt, that invites contributors and subjects to reflect on the intersection of everything that influences their work. The result is a thoughtful collection of stories, images, and interviews that feel cohesive without being prescriptive.

At Bureau, we are drawn to the less obvious forms of resistance. To rigor and experimentation. We’re interested in how creatives build a life around their work– and how that work, in turn, responds to the world around them. Artists have always been there to tell the truth about our world, and at a time when established norms have been unmoored, we need creatives more than ever. We want to tell their stories.

Word on the street is that attention spans are a thing of the past. Here, we’re not sure that is the case for everyone. If you agree, we hope that each issue of Bureau feels considered– something to return to, something to sit with. This is the beginning. We are building this with intention, and with the knowledge that meaning is created slowly, in dialogue. Welcome to Bureau. We’re glad you’re here. by @read.bureau

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a year ago

What makes you stop and look twice?

For more than two decades, Scott Speh has built Western Exhibitions around a deceptively simple idea: trust your eye. The Chicago gallerist follows what surprises him, what challenges what he knows, and what makes him want to look closer. The result is a gallery that feels less like a fixed aesthetic and more like an ongoing conversation between artists, ideas, and ways of seeing.

We spoke with Speh for our new issue about the instincts behind his program, the value of discovering something unfamiliar, and why a good gallery should leave room for you to make up your own mind.

link in bio.

images: Scott Speh at Western Exhibitions and work by artist Deb Sokolow installed at Western Exhibitions in 2023. Courtesy of Scott Speh. by @read.bureau

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Margaret Hamilton and the Imagination of Science

Creativity can look a lot different when the canvas is the unknown. Margaret Hamilton, the pioneering computer scientist who led the team behind the Apollo mission’s flight software, understood that imagination and rigorous problem-solving belong together. Her work helped make the first moon landing possible, turning an extraordinary idea into something humans could actually do.

Her legacy is a reminder that creativity reaches far beyond the arts. It lives in curiosity, experimentation, and the determination to imagine what doesn’t yet exist, then find a way to make it real.

Margaret Hamilton died in September at the age of 90, leaving behind proof of the expansive possibilities of a curious mind.

image: Hamilton with her printed computer code in 1969. Photo: MIT Museum by @read.bureau

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3 days ago

Our new issue FRAME, an exploration of the ways we look at the world, begins with food. As all good things should.

For Kyle Yoshioka, Founder and Editorial Director of Portland-based magazine Provecho, food is never just food. It's a way into memory, migration, identity, labor, community, pleasure and the histories carried from one generation to the next.

“We need to feel understood,” Yoshioka tells us. “We want to share what we think are the best parts of ourselves.”

In our first piece from the issue, Yoshioka talks about building a publication that uses food as an invitation: the photograph draws you in, the story asks you to stay and pay attention. His editorial philosophy is rooted in specificity, vulnerability and the belief that the deeper you go into one person’s experience, the more universal it can become. The plate is only the beginning.

link in bio. by @read.bureau

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7 days ago

Sunday. John and Yoko at home in Tittenhurst Park, July 1971. Photo by Michael Putland/Getty Images. by @read.bureau

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12 days ago

We know the photograph: Louis Armstrong, trumpet raised, smiling into the camera.

But there was another Armstrong. The one bent over a desk making collages, writing letters, documenting his travels, collecting photographs and leaving behind an archive that continues to reveal new layers of his life.

Today, The Louis Armstrong House Museum opens Armstrong in Ghana, an exhibit exploring his 1956 journey to Accra and the unexpected connections between music, place, memory and belonging.

We spoke with curator and museum executive director Regina Bain about looking beyond the familiar image, what Armstrong found in Ghana, and what an archive can reveal when we take the time to look again.

link in bio. by @read.bureau

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15 days ago

Tuesdays at work: the North London studio of designer Faye Toogood. Photo by Genevieve Lutkin, August 2024. by @read.bureau

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17 days ago

Friday Notes: Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko spent decades trying to get closer to the feeling itself.

He stripped painting down with a ruthless determination, moving away from recognizable figures and toward vast fields of color, reducing the image until what remained was shape, light, atmosphere, and emotion.

The rectangles were never simply rectangles. Rothko wanted color to do something: to create a physical, emotional encounter between the painting and the person standing in front of it. His ambition was almost impossibly pure: to make a painting that could communicate something profound without telling you what to feel.

There is something strident about that pursuit. He kept narrowing the vocabulary, asking how little a painting could contain and still hold an enormous amount of feeling. If you've ever stood in front of a Rothko, you know the feeling.

Mark Rothko was born on this day, in 1903.

It's a good day to spend some time with Rothko’s work. To look long enough for the color to stop being color and become something else.

image: Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1968
Oil on paper, on canvas 99.1 × 64 cm
Artworks on paper by Mark Rothko Copyright © 2020 by Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko. by @read.bureau

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21 days ago

More press for @split_level_fair 🙌

Thanks @read.bureau for the these thoughtful briefs 💛

OCT 1 - 3 / 2026
RIMADESIO / 102 Madison Ave / New York NY

TICKETING link and full articles in bio 🔗👆
www.splitlevelfair.com/visit2026

https://www.readbureau.com/category/bureau-briefs/ by @read.bureau

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23 days ago

Who gets to be an art collector?

For many first-time buyers, the biggest barrier isn’t necessarily the price of the work. It’s the feeling that there’s a right way to do this, and that everyone else already knows it.

Our latest story looks at the art fair SPLIT LEVEL’s approach to collectorship, and at the ways the art world might make buying a first piece feel less intimidating and more personal.

Because collecting doesn’t have to begin with expertise, a certain kind of home, or knowing the right people. It can begin with simply finding something you absolutely love and want to live with.

link in bio.

image: install of SPLIT LEVEL in 2025. by @read.bureau

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24 days ago

Thursdays at work. Alice Waters on opening day of Chez Panisse, August 28, 1971. by @read.bureau

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a month ago

How much of the art fair experience is actually about the art?

Returning next month for its second year, SPLIT LEVEL is reconsidering the familiar formula of booths, white walls and quick encounters, creating a fair where art, furniture, conversation and performance can overlap.

Founded by artist and gallerist Jaqueline Cedar, the project actually asks a more interesting question: what is worth preserving about the art fair, and what is ready to be rethought?

We look at SPLIT LEVEL, the pressures facing smaller galleries, and why changing the room might change the way we encounter art.

link in bio. by @read.bureau

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a month ago