Lifestyle
'We are like one artist': These identical twins are in sync from graffiti to gallery
The Hirshhorn Museum will soon host an exhibit named OSGEMEOS: Endless Story, by twin brothers Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo and curated by Marina Isgro. Shown here is “Retratos (Portraits),” 2023-2024.
Maansi Srivastava for NPR
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Maansi Srivastava for NPR
They finish each other’s sentences. They say they don’t need words to communicate. Their creativity is in sync. “We are like one artist,” says Gustavo Pandolfo. His identical twin brother Otavio nods in agreement, adding, “There is a conversation in the air flying there, but only we can listen [to] each other.”
The Pandolfo brothers are best known as the artist duo Osgemeos. Os gemeos means twins in Portuguese. Their fantastical, playful artworks have graced murals, parks, trains, bridges, an airplane and countless other outdoor spaces around the world. Major museums, galleries and private collectors have acquired their works. For the 2004 Olympics in Athens, they painted a ginormous, 82-foot-high giant in his underwear.
Portrait of OSGEMEOS.
Filipe Berndt
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Filipe Berndt
OSGEMEOS: Endless Story at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden will be the largest U.S. retrospective of their work when it opens Sept. 29 in Washington, D.C.
“These guys have a way of just using their imagination to create all kinds of magical and unexpected renditions of things,” says Dr. Nancy Segal, a psychology professor at California State University Fullerton, who first encountered a mural by Osgemeos in São Paulo’s Ibirapuera Park.
As someone who studies twins, she is not surprised that the connection between Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo is so strong.
‘Twin culture’ with roots in hip hop and graffiti
“Many twins have what I call a special twin culture with their habits and rituals and ways of doing things and understanding things,” she says, “and that’s understandable, because they are genetically alike. They respond to the world the same way. They process information the same way.”
The exhibition will include art from across their careers, including their early days as street artists.
Maansi Srivastava for NPR
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Maansi Srivastava for NPR
The Pandolfo brothers were born in 1974 into a family of artists and art lovers in São Paulo, Brazil’s most populous city. As kids, they spent their free time breakdancing, DJing and listening to rappers. They also wanted to dress like them. They once showed their grandmother a photograph of LL Cool J and asked if she could sew them a similar outfit.
“And she did in two days. Like crazy,” remembers Gustavo.
But it was the Pandolfos’ distinctive graffiti style that gained them art world recognition in Brazil and beyond. Eventually, their graffiti evolved into full-scale, eye-popping illustrations of human characters and mystical landscapes.
The mystical world of Tritrez
When they were kids, Gustavo and Otavio invented a fantastical universe they call Tritrez, a kind of colorful, trippy wonderland that Lewis Carroll might appreciate.
OSGEMEOS, Untitled (Zoetrope), 2014, installed at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Mixed media. Courtesy of the artists.
Rick Coulby/Smithsonian Institution/Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
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Rick Coulby/Smithsonian Institution/Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
For the Pandolfo brothers, Tritrez is a “magical, beautiful place full of love… We feel very comfortable inside and we like to share [it] with the people.”
Anything is possible in Tritrez. Animals, humans, boom boxes, UFOs, break dancers, railroad tracks and all kinds of other creatures co-exist.
The Hirshhorn retrospective features more than 1,000 artworks including large-scale installations, paintings and sculptures including a huge, mechanical zoetrope decorated with tulips, mushrooms, little rowboats, human hands and bodies.
Decades of ‘can control’ practice
Mastering the art of graffiti requires a deft touch with a spray can, also known as ‘can control.’ When I visited the Hirshhorn as Endless Story was being mounted, I watched as one of the brothers steadily spray painted a thin black outline of one of their trademark human figures.
Curator Marina Isgro poses for a portrait in front of a finished portion of the exhibition, with “Gramaphone, 2016” and “ Untitled (92 Speakers), 2019.”
Maansi Srivastava for NPR
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Maansi Srivastava for NPR
Marina Isgro, associate curator of media and performance art at the Hirshhorn, says the brothers have honed their “can control” over decades of practice.
They create “these extremely thin lines, these very subtle shadows,” says Isgro. “You think of spray paint as being sort of big and bold, but they get this incredible amount of detail and they just have this amazing technique.”
While Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo began their artistic lives in the underground world of graffiti and hip hop, they say they’re happy to see so much interest in their work from institutions like the Smithsonian. They can reach a wider audience and, hopefully, says Gustavo, help people “see more and more what they have inside of themselves, to see these imagination worlds that sometimes you forget…that everybody have. This magical thing is inside.”
Shown is “1980” made in 2020. Mixed media with sequins on MDF.
Maansi Srivastava for NPR
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Maansi Srivastava for NPR
As for their deep, almost spiritual, connection, the Pandolfo brothers are just as curious about it as anyone else.
“We have these questions very early in our life,” says Gustavo. “What [is] the reason to be here, born together, two guys, twin brothers…We are here for what? To do what?”
For Osgemeos, “artwork is a portal and a mirror,” they explain, “You have to open yourself up in order to feel it.”
Inde Navarrette and Michael Johnston in Obsession.
Focus Features
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Focus Features
Two big horror films, Obsession and Backrooms, just smashed all box office expectations. So much of their success has been driven by Gen Z, which is now the biggest moviegoing demographic. But what makes a movie a Gen Z movie? Today we’re bringing you an episode of NPR’s It’s Been a Minute. Host Brittany Luse talks about this trend with Sam Adams and Reanna Cruz.
If you want to hear more about these movies, check out these episodes:
In ‘Obsession,’ love hurts. It really, really, really hurts.
‘Backrooms’ brings YouTube horror to the big screen
Zendaya brings ‘The Drama,’ we bring the spoilers
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I regret to inform you I’ll need to keep this introduction brief. Not because there’s any lack of things to say about July’s crop of notable new releases; it features award-winning journalists and several different flavors of anxiety about our bleak ecological future and data-dominated present, as well as the welcome returns of several beloved novelists.
No, these books certainly deserve some love, dear readers. It’s just that I’m finding it a bit tough to type while bearhugging a box fan. And since it seems that may be my last best chance to get through this latest U.S. heat wave here on the east coast without sweating through my shirt, I feel some urgency to get back at it.
So enough with the ado. With any luck, you’ll soon be cracking open one of these great reads on the beach — or in front of a decent air-conditioning unit, at any rate.
You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, by Rachel Aviv (July 7)
Aviv, New Yorker staff writer and finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize, has a fairly extensive purview in her role as reporter at large. Still, when reviewing her latest work, Aviv noticed a crucial throughline: “I realized that, to some degree, I’d been writing about mother-daughter pairs for the last decade,” she explained to the Paris Review. Seeing this, she decided to collect and revise half a dozen of those stories, which cover ground from a daughter’s troubling fugue states to the immigrant nannies who must leave their own children behind, to Alice Munro’s daughter, whose claims of sexual abuse went unheeded yet regularly resurfaced in her mother’s fiction.
Country People, by Daniel Mason (July 7)
In Mason’s first novel since North Woods, 2023’s critical darling and book club stalwart, readers are plopped right back in the New England woods but the time scale has shrunk considerably. Whereas North Woods spanned centuries, his new novel confines itself to a single year, during which Miles, loving family man and lackadaisical Ph.D. candidate, plans to finally buckle down on that derelict degree of his and reassert his worth to one and all! At least, that’s the idea. But plans don’t stand much of a chance when there are eccentric neighbors to befriend and mysterious local legends to investigate.
Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast, by Pamela Colloff (July 14)
This is the first book from Colloff, a veteran investigative journalist for ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine. She has won multiple National Magazine Awards for stories focused on miscarriages of justice – such as her 2019 piece about Paul Skalnik, a grifter, fabulist, sexual predator and snitch, whose fabrications can be linked to dozens of wrongful convictions in Florida, including some sending the innocent to death row. Here Colloff expands upon that investigation, which gets a lot more room to breathe in the transition from magazine article to full-length book. What emerges in this disturbing account is a portrait of one man’s callous cruelty, and the law enforcers who had no problem tolerating a deal with the devil, provided it kept juicing the conviction rate.
Cloudthief, by Nathaniel Rich (July 14)
Though it’s his fiction we’re discussing here, it’s important to note Rich’s reporting has earned plaudits, too, as well as a few film adaptations. No matter the medium, climate change is usually on his mind, as well as the blunt, rather bleak, prognosis he offered on Fresh Air in 2019: “There’s a huge range of outcomes … ranging from the not very good to the apocalyptic.” Which is to say I’m surprised to find myself describing his newest response to global catastrophe as a rollicking good time – and not just because I’ve never said those words, in that order, in my life. This spry, funny caper features a freelance environmental reporter who inadvertently breaks bad, careening under the influence of lust and a light wallet toward the novel’s big centerpiece: the planned heist of a massive data center.
Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate, by Roopika Risam (July 14)
And now, for another book centered on data – albeit from a rather different angle. This illuminating history from Risam, a Dartmouth professor, traces the practice of collecting information – and the power conferred by possessing it – from the bones that were humans’ first archives, to the omnipresent systems that shape (or outright determine) life today. As Risam asks, “What has it meant – and what will it mean – when records that once served only to help us remember, come to rule?” A pressing question (see: those data centers), which you’re probably better served trying to answer with the help of Risam than, say, Alexa or Claude.
It Will Come Back to You: Stories, by Sigrid Nuñez (July 14)
For someone with nine novels to her name, Nuñez got a later start than you might expect, having published her first book when she was already in her mid-40s. More than three decades later, now a spry 75 years old, the National Book Award winner has gotten around to publishing her first collection of short stories. The 13 stories here have been culled from across her career, but each one resonates clearly with the warm timbre of her voice: simple, unadorned prose and mundane setups, from which she consistently manages to tease out glimpses of truth, elusive and profound.
They Stole a City: Wilmington’s White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live with Its Legacy, by Lauren Collins (July 14)
The only coup d’etat to succeed on U.S. soil is, at most, a distant historical afterthought these days. To be honest, I can’t recall reading a single textbook entry that even remarked on the 1898 race massacre in Wilmington, N.C., an action led by white supremacists that left many (historian estimates say up to 300) Black Wilmingtonians dead and permanently scarred a community newly aware of its simmering animus and vulnerability to violent overthrow. So I’m grateful for Collins’ new chronicle of the infamous event, which fills in some serious gaps in the American collective memory and explains how its perpetrators cultivated the disorienting silence that persists in the historical record today.
Yellow Pine, by Claire Vaye Watkins (July 21)
I don’t think I’ve ever actually laid eyes on the Mojave Desert but after reading Watkins’ latest novel, it feels like I can picture it more vividly than some streets I’ve actually lived on. No, it’s “not a beginner’s wilderness,” as Watkins concedes in Yellow Pine, but this landscape so redolent of death is also deceptively robust with life, if only you’re patient enough to find it. Too bad, then, that it’s also on fire. And choked by drought, irradiated by military test sites and soon to be sacrificed to a massive new solar array named, inexplicably, Yellow Pine. But those aren’t the only complications confronting the book’s main character, Rose, whose aspirations of becoming a kind of climate hermit warp a bit under the pressure of a rekindled love and the pendulum swing of rage and despair at the state of the world.
Cool Machine, by Colson Whitehead (July 21)
Ray Carney is back, for what regrettably appears to be the last time. The lifelong Harlemite, hard-luck furniture dealer and ambivalent crook starred previously in Harlem Shuffle and its sequel, Crook Manifesto. His perspective is our window on the changing eras of the historically Black neighborhood, from the mid-1950s on. In this, the final installment in Whitehead’s brisk, exceedingly entertaining Harlem Trilogy, readers catch up with Carney around the start of the 1980s, following him deeply into Reagan’s decade. The novel also represents the end of an era for Whitehead, whose attention has been exclusively occupied with these characters since he won Pulitzer Prizes for consecutive novels, The Underground Railroad and Nickel Boys.
Beginning Middle End, by Valeria Luiselli (July 28)
The gifted young Mexican writer returns this month with her fourth novel, the second she has written in English and her first since Lost Children Archive launched to widespread plaudits more than seven years ago. Her new book, like her previous one, also concerns the travels of a small family – only this time, the road leads not through the American Southwest but Sicily. And the history sought by its mother-daughter main characters is not a record of bureaucratic cruelty but something much more intimately personal: the links shaped and tested by generations of shared heritage and experience.
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