I first met Preston Douglas, aka CultureBitch, aka Houston's favorite cowboy, aka Givenchy's future creative director, aka contemporary-multidisciplinary-artist-extraordinaire, in February during New York Fashion Week. As a young, aspiring designer, Preston hired me as a design assistant for an upcoming project in Paris - which, as I encountered, ended up being released sooner, in LA, in tandem with his album, "Repurposed Religion." Preston not only has a keen eye for design, but is, underneath the cowboy hat and full set of diamond grills, a true artists, one who incorporates sculptural, sensory, and physical elements into his practice, such as contemporary dance and audio elements. His signature paintings are manipulated, digitized iconography printed onto fabrics, which are stretched over hollow steel beams. Zippers, both open and closed, adorn these paintings, pushing us to question, and imagine, what is behind them. Just as important as the paintings themselves are the modes in which they are presented - draped over chairs, the furniture becomes a body which the "garment" is enveloping. Wrapped around the steel beams, the skeleton of a canvas, the paintings transcend the physical, rectilinear constraints of typical presentation. And through this process, intertwined with Douglas' experience with addiction and recovery, he becomes a spiritual channel, a manifestation of a higher power's vision for him as a visual artist. I sat down to catch up with Preston, give him my takes on his past exhibitions, and hear all about his artistic practice.
GRACE MISKOVSKY: I was having trouble deciding what direction I wanted to go in for this interview. You’re one of the more complex and ideologically driven artists I’ve met in the last few years. So I wanted to start off by asking who or what you see yourself as. At your core, are you a painter? A fashion designer? A sound engineer? A curator? What is the “seed” of all of these mediums? How would you describe Preston Douglas to someone who didn’t know you?
PRESTON DOUGLAS: I’m an artist. If we want to get slightly more specific, I say I’m a multidisciplinary artist. And that has been a realization in the past six months through spending a lot of time and energy thinking about and writing about my practice, then simplifying it in two sentences. That was one of the hardest things I’ve had to do creatively in the past few years, honestly. It’s really important to do. One of my friends is a curator and a really amazing young woman in New York who knows everything about contemporary art, and I hired her to force me to sit down every few weeks and get these two sentences out. This word “multidisciplinary” came out of those conversations. It was something I was pretty resistant to, but it’s the truth.
GM: One thing I’ve been really interested in is thinking about artists’ roles in society. What the role is of the curator, of the gallerist, of the artist. In the art world, there’s all of these titles and labels that, at their core, are these two sentence definitions, like you’re talking about. Can you define what it means to be an artist, and what do you see the role of the artist as in society?
PD: I believe artists transcend the medium that they work in. The work itself transcends the medium. The work I’m attracted to, whether its music, painting, fashion, film, performance - all has a deeper sense of spiritual connection that underlies the physical embodiment of that work. There’s a lot of amazing painters, but I don’t believe that every painter is an artist. I don’t believe that because you put paint on a canvas you’re an artist. It’s quite an extreme position, not a very democratic one, but there has to be some delineation in today’s culture where everyone is a content producer in some capacity.
GM: I want to ask you about your most recent project, “Repurposed Religion.” Will you tell me the story of its conception, and how it ties into your move from NYC to LA?
PD: Yes, and you were in the very beginning stages of it, in my last Brooklyn studio, in the formative conceptual beginnings of what this project has become. On New Years Eve, I was in Austin, Texas, and I was in the car with a few of my friends, and I had this realization that I needed to do a friends and family mixtape of some sort. I had been thinking about writing contemporary worship music. There the idea was born, and for a number of months this idea and another idea existed separately. I worked on this Alyx studio project with Mark Flood in January, and I got invited to the Givenchy show - it was my first real luxury fashion show that I had attended. There was such a palpable energy in that space. It made me really miss my formative years as a young artist. I wanted to be able to recreate some semblance of that energy in a gallery context. When I got back to New York, I was re-inspired by fashion. 2024 will be ten years of me being involved in fashion, which is crazy. I started to work on this project that I was going to do in Paris, this performance, and Paris is the ultimate fashion city. The album I was kind of working on in New York with my main producer while I was working on this, what I thought was more of my return to fashion. As the album progressed, and my idea around it got more clear, I realized that this performance I was working on, which was going under a different name, was supposed to be “Repurposed Religion,” which is this album. I realized that my chapter in New York was up. I really felt compelled to take this project and make it happen here in Los Angeles. I had come here a number of times on art trips, and there’s just something that drew me to this city to make this event happen.
GM: Can you tell me about the performance and the process in LA of making it happen?
PD: I had been dating this woman for about a year and a half, and she’s from Houston also. She’s a dancer and a choreographer, and we were doing long distance from New York, and we were like, “We should move to Los Angeles together.” To me, it was like God putting this person in my life at the exact right time when I’m doing this performance. That relationship inspired me to incorporate my love for contemporary dance. I fell in love with contemporary dance in my last two years in New York. I started taking some dance classes, doing Gaga. Dance is so important in contemporary Christian worship music, but also at Basement, or Paragon. Paragon was my home club, and there is a form of worship in the body in a ceremony. Dance became more and more important to the performance. And of course, returning to fashion. I met this guy - I sold a pair of Ann Demeulemeester sneakers I had for about 12 years, since I was in high school. I had them on Grailed to help fund the LA move. This guy in LA was like, “Hey, do you live in LA?” And I was like, “I’m moving there next week.” We started talking, we did the transaction off the app, sorry Grailed. We shared some work with each other, and he’s a fashion designer. I went to his studio about two weeks after I moved here, and we just hit it off. He’s in Downtown, he’s young, he’s hungry, he’s twenty-two, he’s really smart and we’re really spiritually and physically aligned with where we see our practices going and what we want from fashion. He became the Design Director for this project. My friend Jesse-Fox Hallen, who produced the show, really encouraged me. Right when I touched down, he was like “We need to meet. We need to do something together.” He was working for LA Fashion Week, and he was like, “I want to do a disruptive fashion show with you.” And I was like, “Fuck it.” And we made it happen, for next to nothing. I made five hundred phone calls over the course of two months, and met this person who knew this person who had this space who had this lighting equipment, and everything just came into place. It took a ton of work but it just kind of happened.
GM: I am a big fan of your first UK exhibition, CTHRUME - I thought it was very concise and cohesive, it’s really well done. It looks like a small space which seems out of your comfort zone. I enjoy how you condensed your installation work into this small cylindrical install, “The Path of Most Resistance.” What role did the immersive installation play in the exhibition? Why was it important to give people the ability to physically step into your work and your world?
PD: One person was invited to sit in the space and zip themselves in the fabric. It was this idea of going through the zipper paintings: what is on the other side? What is this world that I’m entering? Worlds can exist in the rectilinear painting context, but I see my practice as much more expansive than that. What really inspires and challenges me is - what is that world behind here? I think of Duchamp's famous “Étant Donnés” piece in the Philadelphia Museum, where you look through a peephole and you see this whole world. I think of Robert Gober and his work. Doing that in a much more hyper-contemporary, futuristic, experiential, and gestural way, is interesting for me to think about.
GM: I think one of my favorite installs you have ever done was “77EAVEN.” I have some thoughts about it. First - it’s kind of a diverse collection of methods and mediums while still adhering to a super consistent aesthetic. You have the classic, fabric zipper works with this dark, religious imagery, as well as the stretcher beams which are printed on, and the chair used in the UK exhibition. Then you have this avant-garde AA meting x intimate mass service chair installation. It’s somber, sinister, but completely spiritual. The chairs become bodies in the same way the steel beams of your canvases become skeletons to drape fabric over. How does the message change when draping paintings and fabrics over chairs versus the beams? There’s a different story being told here - what is it?
PD: I’ve always liked chairs. To me, they are so in relation to the body. Of course we sit on them, but they’re these totems that we have in our homes. Often times when I’d run out of a stretcher bar I would just drape fabric over the chairs. It’s this exercise in sculptural draping and dimension, there’s this physical component. On a deeper level, I always have wanted to have an AA meeting hosted in my exhibition. I think about how art can be of service to people, but it’s more so bringing that energy into the exhibition space. I see myself, when I’m showing at bigger galleries around the world, recreating versions of these installations for the attendees where they get to actually drape the fabric onto the chair. The thing that the photos don’t communicate is that there’s a speaker in the middle of the [circle of] chairs where I created a 15 minute sound installation work. That really created this ambiance - it was a dark, but also hopeful atmosphere. The big painting in that show, the 8x8 ft. zipper painting, it’s called “Repurposed Religion.” That is the album cover for the album, “Repurposed Religion.” That painting was made two and a half years ago, and it has become this project. I’m relaunching “77EAVEN” in 2024 - you were in the very beginning phases of that, when it was getting hashed out in my mind conceptually in New York.
GM: Tell me about it.
PD: “77EAVEN” is a spiritual couture experience. I became a certified addiction recovery coach in New York, and it opened my mind completely to what the purpose of my practice and my work is about. Especially in fashion, people are sick of luxury brands. It’s so mass market now, it has become so easy to acquire these pieces. As someone who loves punk rock, loves the underground, I’m attracted to what I can’t have or not supposed to say, I want to create these very special experiences for people through a new lens of thinking, where I can actually help people transform their lives on an individual basis. This is what “77EAVEN” will be. I’ve always had this dream of having my dealer, Larry Gagosian, sell one of his clients a custom Preston Douglas dress. I knew I was supposed to start this business myself, thus began the journey. 10 months later here we are, I’m seeking investment for the first time in an actual business I’m starting. And I have a degree in entrepreneurship, so I’m stepping back into my entrepreneurial life. I hope “Repurposed Religion” is a healing experience, a healing ceremony for the attendees, and I hope that “77EAVEN” can be this, but in a much more one on one, intimate capacity. In these experiences, clients will end up with, maybe it’s a jacket, at the lower levels. Maybe it’s a whole installation photoshoot, outfit, custom creation in a client’s private institution or their home. My team spans not only designers but also spatial designers, architects - we’re thinking much larger than just, “You get a custom dress.”
GM: I want to go back to what you touched on about addiction and recovery and the role of art in that. Do you want to tell your story with addiction and how art has been an outlet for you? Or, what connections do you see between the process of recovery and the catharsis of creating art?
PD: I got sober when I was 19. I grew up in Houston and was involved in the rap industry there, sneakers, fashion. I was a celebrity stylist, so when people would come to Houston, they’d call me. It was part of the lifestyle. It was really fun for a little while, then it became fun with problems, then it just became problems. I did some outpatient rehab programs - the guy who owned that rehab facility came to my studio in Brooklyn. That was such a beautiful, full circle moment. We had become really good friends, he helped sponsor the “Repurposed Religion” show. I’m 28 now. Recovery is a huge part of my life. I love helping people, I love helping young men in particular, find a way through these life challenges. For me, it's been really integral in my life to have older men to help guide me through life. The 12 steps, I feel like everyone should have them in some capacity - we’re all addicted to something. I’m grateful that mine was drugs and alcohol because it was such a clear, easy thing. But really, drugs and alcohol are the symptom, and there’s a deeper spiritual thing happening. In that deeper spiritual thing, that hole in the soul, that proverbial hole, I try to fill that with art. Art becomes an addiction in some way. There’s so much connection there, but my work is really about, of course my experience, but, through recovery it ties more towards a collective experience. There’s this book called the “Artists’ Way” based on the 12 steps in AA, and one of its main points is that the act of creating is like manifesting or channeling the act of God’s initial creation. Through us creating [we are] a channel of God. Artists sometimes are just mediums and channels of something coming through them.
GM: Let’s focus back to fashion - from my understanding, you were a fashion designer first, and then had this shift to art. In your mind, was there a clear “shift” from fashion to art, or, because you tow the line between these two things so well, was it a seamless transition? Was it a transition at all? Or was art just an expansion of the world you created with fashion?
PD: There was a lot of pain and suffering in not so much the transition from art to fashion but the realization that I’ve been an artist the entire time. I started in 2014 - I was an artist, but fashion was my medium. I had a meeting with Vogue in 2017, where they invited me to bring my third collection up. I met with Selby Drummen, the Chief Marketing Officer at the time, and she said, “Preston, you’re an artist. You’re not a designer.” And I was so offended. I walked out of 1 World Trade Center with my clothing rack like, “That didn’t go how I expected.” Over the years I came to realize that she was totally right. The truth hurts in the moment but I'm grateful for people like that telling me something that I couldn't see for myself. Mark Flood, who is one of my main mentors, encouraged me to make work about and through what should disqualify me as being an artist. I come from fashion - let’s make work all about fashion. The art world and fashion worlds are two different worlds. I’m an Eagle Scout - let's make tent sculptures. I didn't go to art school - let's work through that lens. These propositions really challenged me but also it helped me get to my unique sense of perspective and true originality much quicker.
GM: What a cool experience to work with Mark Flood. He’s an interesting character as I understand it, as are you, and I must say I see some similarities in your work - the use and distortion of iconography as well as the incorporation of the canvas’ frame into the work itself. How did you get connected with him?
PD: We followed each other on Instagram and we met at a Paul Lee opening at this gallery in Houston called David Shelton. I was obsessed with Mark, he was one of my favorite artists, and still is. This guy was living in Houston and had this big art career - he gave me inspiration and hope. Like, I can make it out of here, and this can be real. I think he just turned 65, so he’s like your dad: old, cargo pants, button down shirt, but he makes these super transgressive, revolutionary, truth-sayer type work, predicting literal future events. His work is so connected, art historically, but at the same time he is such a punk rocker.
GM: My last question is: what are you working on, what are you excited about, and what does the future hold for you?
PD: There’s a lot happening. January 8th I have an exhibition in Houston. It's a week-long thing with the two major art consultants in Texas. I’m showing a new zipper painting there which I’m really excited for. I’ve never really had a proper solo show in Houston, so this is some semblance of that. I’m being honored as the Art for All Homes Emerging Artist of this year, which is a great nonprofit in Houston. I have a group show here in LA with this awesome young gallery called Bozo Mag, who I’ve been working with for about a year and a half. They are really LA tastemakers - everyone who shows with them ends up getting represented by a bigger gallery here in LA. In February I’ll be having a solo show in New York at this new space during New York Fashion Week, and I may incorporate some performance in that. I’m having my first institutional show this spring at Longhouse Reserve. And I think I might be doing costume design and set design for this major dance performance in Berlin. That’s all surface level stuff. On a deeper level, I’m launching “77EAVEN,” I’m stepping back into my entrepreneurial light and fundraising for that, and we’ll be taking our first client within the next 2 months. I’m also in the process of fundraising for the next “Repurposed Religion” performance which will be in Paris, hopefully. There is some talk about Milan, there is some talk about Berlin, we might do a little European tour. But more will be revealed on that - I have to fundraise until that becomes date-set-able. I’m working here with my design team for the next outfits for the show and fully moving forward the album “Repurposed Religion” which releases January 1st. That’s all I have going on.
