Legacy Russel & Andreas L. Konrath

The shared world of New York-based Legacy Russell and Andreas Laszlo Konrath is shaped by language, images and history. Curator, writer and author Legacy grew up in the East Village, with Andreas arriving from London after a long, meandering education through skate culture, art school, and the early-2000s visual economy of magazines and music. Together, they model a way of living with work, rather than inside it. Their respective practices are distinct, but in constant conversation.

On Compatibility

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For Andreas, photography has never been about mastery in the conventional sense. As a photographer and educator, his instinct is to resist the idea that looking can be taught at all. "I see my role more as providing the conditions or circumstances for the students to make their own discoveries. You can't necessarily 'teach' someone to look – curiosity is inherently in them – but you can help them broaden their peripherals, make suggestions, and hope to provide some insights they can build on. I walk into the classroom without thinking that I know all there is to know about being a photographer. It isn't a one-way street. If I'm willing to also be a learner, then I can gain new vantage points from the students myself and hopefully become a better artist and educator."

In an era where photography is omnipresent, endlessly uploaded and perpetually scrolled Andreas still believes in its capacity to move us. He explains, "Photography gives people a language to express how they understand the world. The democratization of image-making is brilliant and fascinating, but it's also difficult. Images that truly illuminate or give you goosebumps still exist. It's just harder to find them amongst the digital noise. You have to tune in more, and maybe look less." His own practice has resisted preciousness. Early on, he embraced the zine format as a way of circulating work cheaply and freely, allowing images to exist outside of his control. "People should be able to bootleg things, remix them, recycle them. Once you put something into the public realm, you can't dictate how someone engages with it. I love that. It reminds you that meaning isn't fixed."

That generosity extends into the domestic sphere. Living alongside someone whose work is so resolutely language-driven has sharpened Andreas's own way of seeing. "Legacy's superpower is language. The way she processes information and responds in the moment is incredible. To do that, you have to be an active listener. Being around her encourages me to listen more deeply. When you slow down, you notice things you wouldn't otherwise see. You become more intentional. That shift changes everything."

Legacy's work moves between theory and feeling. Her books emerge from long arcs of research, conversation and communal exchange. She describes, "Many of my writing projects grow out of discussions within a community first. Presentations, exhibition-making, essaying – those spaces allow ideas to deepen before they take the form of a book." The manifesto remains one of the most potent and liberating of those structures. "It's a container and a vessel. A place where we can hold weird and wild imaginations about the world, and then carry them forward together, into forms of world-building that align with our future hopes."

This insistence on integration extends to pace. Her writing practice is slow by design and resistant to urgency for urgency's sake. Legacy refuses the idea that unhurried thinking is incompatible with a culture of rapidity. "Immediacy without intentionality is empty, counterrevolutionary, even." It's a statement that echoes through all her work, from book-length projects to the institutional horizons she helps shape. She believes poetry (which she calls her first love) can sometimes achieve more in four lines than hundreds of pages of theory. Across her books, certain questions persist, even as the language evolves: Who will remember us? What does liberation feel like? Can art history be equitable?

“When you slow down, you notice things you wouldn’t otherwise see.”

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Andreas unravels how his own work influences fluctuate between chaos and order. There's the messiness of film director Larry Clark and the shock of seeing Kids for the first time; and then there's the obsessive calm of the Japanese artist, On Kawara, whose archival rigour resonates with Andreas's love of collecting printed matter. "Those two poles – blurriness and clarity, disorder and structure, are a big theme in my work. Being educated in London taught me how to make do with very little and New York taught me how to grow up."

Living in New York offers Legacy equal parts friction and fuel. She mentions how the city's increasing unaffordability feels, to her, like a form of violence – an erosion of the creative ecosystems that once sustained it. Alongside this though, she speaks of waking each day to renewed wonder. "I'll go to bed feeling uninspired, and wake up to moments that awaken delight again. That tension gives me hope."

When she speaks about women-led institutions and businesses, Legacy is careful to dismantle easy narratives. "Change doesn't happen simply because a woman is in charge; change happens when supporters truly and fully invest in disrupting and overturning the barriers of advancement and access that keep female and femme-identified leaders and workers at every level of the work from being able to excel in their fields with real and true freedom to innovate fearlessly. This requires a community of support that understands that transformation within historical inequitable systems requires the community to act with tenderness and compassion, and also urgency. It requires more than putting on a suit and having a seat at the table, but really truly being able to exercise your voice and vision and be both trusted, allowed to make mistakes and be human, and also to be helped along toward realizing a vision. To truly love female-identified and femme people is to set them up for success – success through their wins, successful guidance through their losses, and everything in between."

Her work with The Kitchen sits firmly within that framework. Founded by artists for artists, this New York institution's legacy is expansive and radical. "When collectives become institutions, they take on a different responsibility to their publics," Legacy says. Accountability becomes part of the creative act. For her, leading The Kitchen is not separate from her writing — it is an extension of the same questions around care, access and historical responsibility.

Together, they model a partnership grounded in parallel enquiry. Using different tools (and shared values) Legacy and Andreas are both invested in how ideas circulate, how history is documented and how futures are imagined. A lifelong task worth taking seriously.

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Founded in 1971 as an artist-driven collective, The Kitchen today reaffirms and expands upon its originating vision as a dynamic cultural institution that centers artists, prioritizes people, and puts process first. Programming in a kunsthalle model that brings together live performances, exhibition-making, and public programming under one roof, The Kitchen empowers its audiences and communities to think creatively and radically about what it means to shape a multivalent and sustainable future in art. The Kitchen seeks to cultivate and hold space for wild thought, risky play, and innovative and experimental making, encouraging artists and cultural workers alike to defy boundaries and sending them into the world to remake art history and catalyze creative change.

www.thekitchen.org

Welcome to The Stance. A natural extension of the conversations, places and most importantly, the people who have long shaped the brand. This printed record celebrates our community – and takes a closer look at how the connections we've made have played a part in defining the shape and unique spirit of Marfa Stance.

Across its pages, are stories from our global collective. Long-form interviews with humans whose lives, practices and points of view reflect a shared sensibility, rather than one single aesthetic. United by the way they move through the world with curiosity, creativity, and conviction, these conversations lean into the value of slowing down.

A publication is the original anti-scroll – something permanent you can live with and return to, time after time. Forever evolving with enduring, timeless appeal, The Stance mirrors our approach to clothing. It's an invitation into the Marfa Stance world, their voices, values, and the rhythm of their universe.

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