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The Noun | Global Arts & Culture Magazine

@thenoun.mag

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Making it easy to love our Global Neighbors
ART | CULTURE | PHILOSOPHY
No. 001 The Archivist: digital + print
No. 002 Swells & Soul Food: loading

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I had one hour to stroll through Balboa Park (@explorebalboapark) today and this is what I saw.

No. 5 on our list of 100 Museums, Libraries, and Cultural Districts to Travel For in The Noun Issue 001 is the Balboa Park Cultural District—home to 18 museums, gardens, theaters, archives, and cultural spaces all within one place.

This was just the walk from parking to the San Diego Museum of Art because I wanted to see their new exhibit. On the way, we passed through the Japanese Friendship Garden—also featured in The Noun.

Inside the museum, we came across Ala Ebtekar’s One Thousand Years of Light and Alejandro Cartagena’s Car Poolers #21—both featured in Issue 001.

A few favorites from the hour:
• Pablo Picasso (Spain)
• Wifredo Lam (Cuba)
• Utagawa Hiroshige (Japan)
• Gwynn Murrill (California)

The final 360 video was taken standing in Plaza de Panama where, within 30 seconds, you can feel languages and cultures all merging together in real time.

One hour somehow turned into centuries of printmaking, sculpture, surrealism, architecture, migration, and cultural memory.

Escape into No. 001 THE ARCHIVIST — Only 40 collectible, ad-free print editions of The Noun Issue 001 remain before they disappear into private shelves forever. Digital editions also available.

Magazine cover
Model: @gigi.b
Photography: @studio.luniste
Set Design: @totoandtess taken in Balboa Park by @thenoun.mag

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5 months ago

What these slides don’t tell you is that the grandfather who first put tools in Massimiliano Pelletti’s (@massimiliano_pelletti) hands, Mario, was one of the master carvers called to the Vatican to restore Michelangelo’s Pietà after it was attacked with a hammer in 1972.

We don’t hand out the word “master” lightly around here—a masterpiece should be rare, or the word means nothing. Massimiliano is the exception we’ll name without hesitation: a true master of his craft, carrying generations of skill forward and pointing it somewhere entirely his own.

We are grateful that he let us into his world for a while. The full conversation is on the blog and in The Noun No. 001—The Archivist, link in bio.

📍 Pietrasanta, Italy taken in Pietrasanta, Italy by @thenoun.mag

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4 months ago

Ever wonder what Alice felt the moment she went down the rabbit hole?

Spend a day at LACMA (@lacma)’s Block Party and you’ll know.

To celebrate the David Geffen Galleries—20 years in the making—they shut down Wilshire Boulevard and turned the whole campus into a free, all-day wonderland: DJ sets and live music from artists including Flying Lotus (@flyinglotus) and DJ Harvey (@djharveysgeneralstore), a street food market by MAMA (@mama.eatme), hands-on art workshops, and nearly 150 artists marching their work down Wilshire for the Jeffrey Deitch (@jeffreydeitchgallery) Art Parade.

I went alone and fell right in, and everyone felt like a character—the baby greeting DJ Harvey, cool grandmom with the best moves on the floor, Doh Ho Suh’s (@dohosuhstudio) a full-size palace made of fabric, @rediscoverctr’s cardboard boombox robot waving down the street. Down in the crowd I felt small—then I stepped into the galleries and the scale flipped.

Inside, the noise fell away. The galleries were packed but hushed—everyone moving slow, talking low, taking their time. I found a seat, opened The Noun No. 001, and watched the party through the glass—Alice in Wonderland meets The Great Gatsby.

6,000 years of art live under that roof, ancient sitting right beside contemporary. Reading our first issue in the middle of it, I couldn’t help the thought: the gallery pairs the ancient with the contemporary, and that’s exactly what Massimiliano Pelletti (@massimilianopelletti) does in one sculptor. He’s from Pietrasanta, the same Tuscan town where Michelangelo once worked the marble—ancient lineage, contemporary eye. His work would fit seamlessly into that mix. More on him soon.

I lived across the street at Park La Brea almost twenty years ago, back when these galleries were still drawings and zoning meetings. Months ago we sat in on the virtual behind-the-scenes tour and Saturday we finally stood inside.

By the next morning the whole day felt like a dream I wasn’t sure I’d actually had. Pics or it didn’t happen 👆⬅️

📍 David Geffen Galleries · LACMA (@lacma)
Photos: @thenoun.mag

#lacma #lacmablockparty #losangeles #summer thenoun taken in LACMA by @thenoun.mag

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4 months ago

SUSTAINABLE SUNDAY: 🇯🇵JAPAN | A cultural study of how Japan builds beauty through care.

Kintsugi (金継ぎ)
Repairing what breaks. A practice that treats cracks as part of the story, not something to hide.

Mottainai (もったいない)
The sorrow of waste. A belief that objects carry usefulness, spirit, and dignity. To waste is to forget gratitude.

Furoshiki (風呂敷)
Cloth wrapping as daily art. One square of fabric becomes a bag, a gift wrap, a carrier—endlessly adaptable, endlessly reused.

Tsugite (継手)
Joinery without nails or screws. Wooden joints cut so precisely they interlock like puzzles. Craftsmanship built to last generations.

Kamikatsu (上勝町)
Japan’s zero-waste town. A small mountain community sorting its waste into 45 categories, treating recycling as a shared craft rather than a chore.

Tatebiki (立曳)
Moving trees instead of cutting them. A slow, deliberate practice of preservation: relocating nature rather than erasing it.

Daisugi (台杉)
Harvesting wood without destroying forests. A forestry method where straight cedar shoots are grown from a single mother tree, creating a living, renewable source of timber.

The MUJI Philosophy (無印良品)
Design made to last. Simplicity, longevity, and restraint over constant consumption.
In Japan, sustainability isn’t a trend. It is culture — a rhythm of care woven into everyday life. 
 Sustainable Sundays Series | @thenoun.mag by @thenoun.mag

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a year ago

A bridge between raw material and fine art—worn on the bridge of your nose.

Let’s Dive Deeper:
House of Marjón (@onemarjon), a Nigerian design house, hand-wires eyewear from gold-plated copper wire, freshwater pearls, cut crystal, and cowrie shells—each pair built with the detail of a sculpture.

What catches our eye is that the powerful beauty is the function: the cowrie sits over the pupil and its narrow natural opening works like a pinhole. Squint through a small aperture and blur sharpens—the same principle that helps the farsighted see without a lens.

Creativity and craft doing the one job glasses were made for. We are absolutely enthralled.

Original Photos/Videos Credit: House of Marjón
Reel Design: @totoandtess by @thenoun.mag

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3 months ago

THE DISTANCE ART TRAVELS

Art rarely stays where it begins. It moves through artists, collectors, curators, and audiences. It spans across mediums, places and generations. Meaning is not preserved unchanged along that journey—it accumulates.

RM × SFMOMA: Between You and Me brings together 200 works from the collections of RM (@rkive) and SFMOMA (@sfmoma), curated by RM with SFMOMA co-curators América Castillo (@americamcm) and Hyoeun Kim (@hyoeunkim_).

General-public tickets go on sale tomorrow, August 11 at 10 AM PT. The exhibition runs October 3, 2026–February 7, 2027.

From Phetru (@phetru) and (@sket.chboo) in Las Vegas, to ARTE Museum (@artemuseum_lasvegas), to SFMOMA, this story follows how art moves through people, places, collaboration and memory—through generations and around the globe.

Read our conversation with @sket.chboo in The Noun No. 001 The Archivist and our conversation with @Phetru in The Noun No. 002 Swells + Soul Food.

As we’re members of SFMOMA, we will be there October 1st during Members Preview—let us know if you’ll be there!

CREDITS BY SLIDE
01 — Photo: RM Indigo Photo Sketch · Courtesy BIGHIT MUSIC · Audio: “Yun” — RM feat. Erykah Badu
02 — Images: Courtesy SFMOMA · Audio: “No. 29” — BTS
03 — RM portrait + quote: Courtesy HYBE / SFMOMA · Audio: “Change pt.2” — RM
04 — Artwork: @Phetru · Signs + Video: The Noun · Audio: “Aliens” — BTS
05 — Artwork: @Phetru + @sket.chboo · Photo: The Noun ·
06 — Artwork: @sket.chboo · Signs + Video: The Noun · Audio: “2.0” — BTS
07 — Video: The Noun · Audio: Original concert audio
08 — Video: The Noun · ARTE MUSEUM × BTS, Las Vegas · Audio: Original reel audio
10 — Photos: The Noun · SFMOMA / KAWS / HUMAN MADE / j-hope “Creativity as a Language” case-study in The Noun No. 001
11 — Images + exhibition information: Courtesy SFMOMA · Audio: “Still Life” — RM feat. Anderson .Paak
12 — Photo: RM Indigo Photo Sketch · Courtesy BIGHIT MUSIC · Audio: “seoul (prod. HONNE)” — RM by @thenoun.mag

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23 days ago

Philosophy is one of The Noun’s pillars, so when these two endlessly curious women came together our brains started firing off connections we couldn’t stop making. If you’ve ever heard Eileen Gu speak, it feels a lot like watching Iris van Herpen design. Both of them take something everyone thinks they already understand, like a body in motion or a dress, and pull it apart down to the physics until you’re seeing it for the first time.

Their crafts couldn’t look more different. Van Herpen builds couture with physicists and biologists out of magnets, living algae, and for this year’s Met Gala, 15,000 hand-formed glass bubbles made with the art duo @a.a.murakami. Gu is the most decorated freestyle skier in Olympic history, with six medals and three golds, which means a life spent calculating rotation, speed and gravity in midair, and she’s done it all while studying at Stanford.

The Airo gown is where they meet. Van Herpen started from the fact that the human body is 99.9 percent empty space and designed the dress to show it as “transient, fluid, and always in flux,” with hidden machines under the skirt that let real bubbles drift off Gu as she walked. Gu saw her sport in it right away—to her motion, nature and the body are inseparable, which is why she called the gown “the purest distillation of my art.”

Videography @mr.mcdaniels
Gown @irisvanherpen × @a.a.murakami
Worn by @eileengu by @thenoun.mag

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9 days ago

RHYTHM-AL-ISM // There’s an interesting tension between being a role model and introducing the next generation to art and culture that may challenge our own sensibilities.

Growing up with an older brother, West Coast hip-hop and R&B were part of my childhood soundtrack. This past summer, watching DJ Quik (@djquik) and Warren G (@warreng) perform at the FIFA World Cup Fan Zone at LA’s historic Union Station (@unionstationla), I heard those familiar lyrics differently with my seven- and nine-year-olds beside me.

I doubt the language I grew up hearing had much influence on my character or values. My musical taste, on the other hand, is another story. Hip-hop and R&B remain my genres of choice and I still gravitate toward their influence in languages I don’t yet understand such as Korean songs like @bts.bighitofficial’s Cypher series and Look Here to @mamamoo_official’s Taller Than You.

There’s a distinction between appreciating art and agreeing with everything it expresses. One that becomes particularly interesting when you’re introducing it to your children and having them capture it alongside you.

-Field Notes (in preparation for Issue No. 003, exploring fashion and music) by Amelie Ray Mayumi | Photo/Video © The Noun & KẽMa Mo (@kemamo.29) by @thenoun.mag

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4 hours ago

A hug is one of the oldest human gestures—recognized across cultures, religions, and histories as a symbol of trust, grief, reunion, protection, and care.

In fact, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (@carnegiemellon) found that people who received more hugs during periods of stress were less likely to get sick after exposure to the common cold virus—suggesting that human touch may play a measurable role in stress regulation and emotional resilience.

In “Hugger 2025,” Germany-based artist Jakob Grosse-Ophoff (@ja.ko.moh) transforms that universal instinct into something mechanical and participatory: a work that only responds once someone chooses to lean in.

This immediately prompted us to question whether comfort is something we seek, give, or build.

Nonetheless—this is the type of artwork and concept that makes us feel more human. It feels therapeutic even to simply witness.

#jakomo #artist #philosophy #installationart #thenounmag by @thenoun.mag

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5 months ago

We’ve had some flava in our ear since 1994, but these artists are adding some extra seasoning.

Artists in order of feature:

@callmechoko

@a_re_1123

@herbiehunkele

@dominiquehammonsviolin

@somelinez

@chazzviolin via @soundsofartists

@madisoncalley by @thenoun.mag

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a month ago

In recognition of National Fossil Day, we’re revisiting KēMa Mo’s (@kemamo.29) explorations through San Diego and San Francisco, where encounters with fossils, natural history collections, and museum exhibits offered a closer look at Earth’s history

Looking for more museums and cultural destinations to explore?

Discover our list of 100 museums, libraries, and cultural districts worth traveling for, available to read for free at the-noun.com. Link in bio.

LOCATIONS

Slides 1–11 | San Diego, California
San Diego Natural History Museum (The Nat), Balboa Park — @sdnhm

Slides 12–14 | San Francisco, California
The Field Station at Presidio Tunnel Tops — @presidiosf

#NationalFossilDay #NaturalHistory #MuseumTravel #TheNounMagazine by @thenoun.mag

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a day ago