Quil Lemons, Shane Fu and Khyati Trehan: Tickets now available for February’s Nicer Tuesdays in New York!

It’s been a good few months since we last headed to New York, and after two sell-out events we thought it was about time for the third instalment of our stateside Nicer Tuesdays!

We’re kicking off 2024 with an incredible line-up, including a talk from Shane Fu, the motion designer widely known for his hypnotic visuals, and a Q&A with one of America’s most gifted young photographers, Quil Lemons, who will be sitting down with our US editor-at-large Elizabeth Goodspeed to talk about his career so far. There are more speakers to be announced soon, so watch this space.

The event will take place on Tuesday 20 February at a new venue this time round: the beautiful School of Visual Arts Theatre in Chelsea. Doors will open at 6pm and the talks will begin shortly afterwards. The full address is SVA Theatre, 333 West 23rd Street, New York, NY10011.

Please be aware that photography and filming may be taken at this event for marketing and promotional purposes. If you do not want to be photographed or filmed, please speak to our team on the day. Also, if you are in need of disability access, please email [email protected] so we can arrange assistance with the venue team.

The photographer Quil Lemons has shown himself to be a master of the craft from a young age; at just 23, he became Vanity Fair’s youngest cover photographer in a shoot with Billie Eilish. Since then, Quil has been an advocate for raising more respect and opportunities for younger photographers who are often overlooked. His relationship with his hometown of Philadelphia is a key inspiration throughout his personal work, in 2021 he produced a stunning photo-‘diary’ of his time spent in the state. Just last year, Quil released his black-and-white series Quiladelphia, which traces his documentation of the Black male form and his experience as a Black gay man – “Quiladelphia is the emancipation of Quil Lemons,” he says. He will be discussing the prescient series at Nicer Tuesdays, while surveying key moments from his career so far.

Khyati Trehan’s transfixing work lies somewhere between the world of graphic design and visual art, bouncing from editorial illustrations, to 3D kinetic structures to typographic explorations. She’s never been someone to stick to one thing, and while many may see this as a ‘weakness’, Khyati sees versatility as one of her biggest strengths, and we’d have to agree. While much of her previous work focused on 3D elements, recent work has seen her keep things fresh by delving into more flat, analogue techniques – proving she’s not just capable in both, but talented too. To boot, despite having completed commissions for a number of big commercial names, Khyati also likes to keep things more close to home. One of her longest running projects is with her sister, the singer songwriter Kavya, whose unique visual world she has helped to craft.

When it comes to immersive 3D visuals, few do it better than Shane Fu. He’s well-known for transforming everyday settings – like Grand Central Terminal – with otherworldly, immersive VR designs, and last year he collaborated with street artist Hoxxoh to bring his analogue work to the digital world, transforming one of his murals with CGI. At February’s Nicer Tuesdays he’ll be talking us through his recent AI animation project, which has seen him conjure beautiful foliage and technicolour fungi. Shane will shed light on how he got into the medium, hoping to resolve some of the misunderstanding of generative AI, and to prove that it can (in some cases) elevate a designer’s work, rather than invalidating it.