13 Things for June 2025: Confessions of a Microinfluencer; Being Old, Being Inspired; Emotional Support from Robots, Rilke, Rogers and More!
read this with your cup of coffee saturday morning <3
Hello friends, new and old!
If you’ve been here awhile, you know I’ve gone in and out of writing consistently, and that I start almost every year on here by saying that I’m (shocker) going to write more consistently. So here’s my newest attempt, lightly inspired by my friend Brian Madden’s fantastic (and consistent…) newsletter First Fridays — I give you 13 Things my monthly newsletter chronicling my pitter patters, notes, feelings, and intrusive thoughts, i.e. all things in and out of the studio, the goings on of my mind! The list will come out on the 13th and always start with a recent art thing and end with a new painting, but the messy middle… who knows what you’ll get in there. 😜
I think this will be good!
I think this will be fun!
I’ll still be writing longer-form essays and sending out updates on new work but I hope this will be a more expansive and light-hearted space for a variety of interests. Let me know what you think in the comments or if private is more your thing, reply to me via the e-mail.
xo Amac
13 Things, June 2025:
1 — Recent Art Thing: Future Fair (I’m Famous Now)
In May, I participated in my first art fair, Future Fair at Chelsea Industrial in NYC. I was part of the Visionary Projects booth, alongside glass blower Austin Fields and mixed-media artist Amelia Briggs. The curation was fantastic (see above) and the work was very well received, with half of my paintings selling on VIP day alone (mentioned in press coverage in The Observer - I’m famous now, try to keep up). Haylee and Blayne at Visionary Projects were the first curators to ever show my work in New York, back in December 2023 at The Highline Nine Galleries. It felt very poetic to have them be the first gallery to show me at an art fair and for the art fair to open the same day as my final day of my school year. The fact that it is called Visionary Projects and Future Fair wasn’t lost on me either. It’s all feeling very aligned. ✨ A few paintings are still available, including the large one on the left, so if you’re interested, please reach out!
2 — Currently on the bedside table: Great Black Hope by Rob Franklin
I am super excited to read Rob Franklin’s debut novel, Great Black Hope, which was published this week. Both Stanford alums, Rob and I were introduced by a mutual bestie in 2017 when we were both living in Berlin — me, in between years at business school contemplating what a more creative life would look like and him, recently out of Bain New York and working on a novel idea. Fast-forward to today, and it is moving to realize we are both doing what we hoped all those years ago. 🥲
Great Black Hope follows a recent, Black, queer, Stanford graduate, “caught between worlds of race and class, glamour and tragedy, a friend’s mysterious death and his own arrest, from an electrifying new voice.”
Buy it from your local bookstore or here to fund Katy Perry going back to space.
3 — Begrudgingly I Finally Downloaded ChatGPT but
I will literally un-alive myself if one more dude tells me they’re want to disrupt therapy with AI.
Just kidding, I won’t, but this has legitimately happened to me like 3 times already this calendar year, twice on a first date. Can we please stop trying to automate human connection?!
4 — I’m Sorry for What I Said When I Was Cold
This was my first east coast winter in a decade and I did not handle it well. But all is forgiven/forgotten now that it’s spring/summer. My feelings summed up, exactly:
5 — “Confessions of a Micro-Influencer”
I’ve had the beginnings of an essay with this title in my drafts folder since 2023, when I realized I had crossed that invisible line where your online followers are more people you don’t know personally than people you do.
I recently broke 5K on Instagram, which is small by social media standards, but big enough that strangers have started coming up to me at my shows because they’ve been following me for awhile or stopping me at art openings.
Presumably this is what I’ve wanted, but it is very strange to find yourself on one side of a parasocial relationship; there is an inherent mismatch in access to personal information between me and many of my followers. They see me, read my content, engage with my art, or watch my process, and I often see nothing about them. I am not talking about other artists, aspiring or established, or even passive readers like some of you, but about the people that are often hidden behind private profiles who will interact with me with familiarity, consistently liking and replying to my stories, despite my not knowing or being able to see anything about them.
I used to post a lot more about my day-to-day life. Then, one weekend, when I didn’t post (I was camping), I had multiple strangers from accounts I didn’t know DM me to see if I was ok. This was sweet I suppose, as it is flattering I suppose to have people invested in you, but honestly it was more rattling — I realized some people were watching me so closely that they noticed a 2 day gap in posting and felt the need to reach out. A couple of these people were men and it got very uncomfortable very quickly. Being known, and in the public eye, is a double-edged sword for sure and one that I have had to keep a very close watch on.
For the most part, this is more a blessing than a problem, but over the past few years I have experienced the rare and in one case, very scary, problem. One account that was watching closely became a local stalker in Joshua Tree, and the situation got bad enough that I sought (and failed to get) police intervention.
I’ve spent a lot of the past couple years rethinking how and what I share online and what it means to be online, increasing or decreasing my personal posts, deciding when and if I share. I was recently asked what my relationship to fame was and I’m been reflecting on it more deeply. I don’t know if a full essay on this topic will ever come to fruition, so here’s the seed of the experience anyway. If you’re in the same boat, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
5 — Feed Cleanse 🪄🪄🪄 Inspiring Quote ~
“[T]hat which we call destiny goes forth from within people, not from without into them.”
Rainier Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, Letter 8
One of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite writers from one of my favorite books — I think of it often and for months it was on a post-it note on my mirror in Joshua Tree… this idea that destiny is not something we search for and find out in the world, but something that we gradually uncover within ourselves through deep listening and courageous work.
This year I read an epistolary project modeled after this, Letters to a Young Painter by Rosemarie Beck, one of the founding artist of New York Studio School. It is also a fantastic and quick read, particularly great for artists!
7 — Over My (Millennial, Emo-kid) Head
If you, like me, were a child of The OC Soundtrack and the indie rock of the aughts that surrounded it, you have likely noticed that in the past ~year many of our favorite bands are doing (😭 SOB 😭) 20 YEAR (😭 C R I E S H A R D E R 😭) tours of their iconic albums. I am simultaneously mortified and of course, desperate to get tickets.
The two currently on my radar:
“The Resurrection of Rilo Kiley” — less an album tour and more a reunion tour by possibly my favorite band of all-time — and the NYT article to go with it for good measure. Intrusive music thought: many of Sabrina Carpenter’s less popular tracks really give old Jenny Lewis, particularly Slim Pickins'.
The Fray — ‘How to Save A Life’ 20th Anniversary Tour — fun fact, one of the only and the first times I ever blacked out was from drinking margaritas at this tour in high school (sorry Mom). I literally blacked in for the last song, “Over My Head (Cable Car).” Like I said, iconic.
8 — In Which I Continue to Kick Millennials When We’re Down
I think most of you, like me, are millennials so some additional little funnies for you —
I went to drinks with my friend and his 20-something sister and she was wearing a “vintage” Abercrombie top, as in the spaghetti strap one with the lace around the top and the bottom. VINTAGE. Like the ones we wore in high school. 😭 Tbh it looked way better on her than it ever did on me, but in that moment, I saw my mortality flash before my eyes.
There was a Limited Too pop-up recently in New York. I overheard a teenager saying it’s what her mom used to wear…
One of my dear MFA friends, who is 25, told me and my other friend, who is 40, that he had never even heard of The O.C. He had also never seen the greatest Disney franchise of all time, The Mighty Ducks. I told him never to say something like that to me ever again. 😂
I end like all of my texts with emojis which I guess is super millennial fml (see what I did there).
To balance this all out, one of my classmates guessed that I was 28 and seemed legitimately shocked to hear I was 36, so I think we can count that as a win.
9 — NYC Show to See: Sarah D’Ambrosio at MARCH Gallery
High-brow — last night I met a friend at Sarah D’Ambrosio’s solo show, Brooklyn, Berlin at MARCH gallery. It was my first time at MARCH and it’s a beautiful, spacious but not overwhelming, light-filled gallery right on the edge of the East Village. I wasn’t familiar with Sarah’s work but I was truly taken by her paintings — striking, figurative works in the modernist tradition, mostly of males in water-based scenes, exploring varying states of freedom.
For my painting nerds, these days I rarely see phthalo blue turquoise used in general, let alone in an elegant way and/or as a central color to a body of work. It is one of my favorite colors but it is extremely overpowering but was used masterfully in Sarah’s show.
For my normies, galleries are free and you can walk-in anytime during opening hours. The attendants will often be quiet, but you should feel free to ask them to tell you about the show. More likely than not, if it’s not busy, they’ll give you a private tour. :)
Sarah’s show runs until July 25th at MARCH, 62-64 Avenue A, NYC.
10 — Why Did I Decide to Get an MFA if I had Already Started Showing in Galleries?
This is the question I get most frequently, both from artists and friends who don’t know much about the arts. I recorded and shared my answer via video on Instagram, which you can watch here. I also shared how I cobbled together a non-MFA-MFA before I decided to get my full-time MFA here.
This is the first time I’ve spoken to the camera in awhile, which was very anxiety-inducing! I don’t really know what I’m going to use ChatGPT for but I decided to start by feeding it my one-off thoughts, as if it was my private Twitter (RIP) feed and it had this to say, which was actually quite sweet for a robot.
11 — Product Recommendation You Didn’t Ask For
If you’re not already using them, the Dieux reusable eye masks (+Auracle eye gel) really work and are easy and mess-free to use. These are for everyone! Guys you should be using them too! Dieux’s co-founder is also a Filipina!
I am no beauty influencer, but I use these everyday and did just get called 28 so I think you should trust me.
12 — “The Truth About Dreams” — NYU Tisch 2025 Commencement Speech by Maggie Rogers
Singer-songwriter Maggie Rogers recently gave an inspiring speech about dreaming and art as a vocation to the NYU Tisch graduating class of 2025. It’s only 14m and absolutely worth a watch or you can read an adapted version published in the New York Times as an Op-Ed. From the speech:
13 — ‘Embrace’ — New Painting
‘embrace’
colored pencil, oil, and beeswax on canvas
16” x 20”
Brooklyn, NY
I recently moved my studio to Greenpoint for a couple months and this was one of the first finished paintings coming out of the new space. I wouldn’t say no to a little bit of cash over the summer, so I’m immediately making this work available — please reply with inquiries or to see all available work!
💓💓💓 You made it down here! I think it was fun!? I had fun. I think I’ll do it again. Sorry about the typos, wrote this on the plane. Probably miscounted. Didn’t check. Good enough. Lmk what you think. Til next time 💓💓💓