I love paintings when it feels like you're intruding," says Anok Yai.
We are standing in front of Kerry James Marshall's Untitled (Studio), which hangs in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The painting is a glimpse into an artist's workspace, with a model seated, her head in the hands of an artist's assistant who is staring at the viewer.
It is as if you've disturbed something-or maybe the viewer is the artist, about to tackle the half-completed canvas that sits to the left of the frame.
"I fucking love this," Yai says and immediately sits on a bench in front of the painting. It makes sense she'd be drawn to it. In addition to being that rare cultural phenomenon-a bona fide supermodelYai is also an artist. She taught herself oil painting a few years ago.
"I started off painting a portrait of myself," she explains. "Every month, I would add a detail." She describes the work as "a time capsule in a painting of myself."
Yai chose an extraordinary period to document herself across.
Over the past six years, she has climbed to the top of the modeling industry. She is the second Black model, after Naomi Campbell in 1997, to open a Prada show. That assignment is a coronation for a model, and Yai has accepted the crown. Since then, she has walked for Louis Vuitton and Mugler, and she's also been featured in short films for Chanel and Saint Laurent and campaigns for Estée Lauder. This spring, she became the face of Mugler's fragrance Alien Hypersense. "They gave me a lot of artistic agency on the shoot," she says. "I think the stunts were supposed to be CGI, but I asked, 'Can I do it for real?"" And so there she is in the ad, scaling a wall with ease.
That kind of success could easily be overwhelming. Yai says her love of art, though, is "part of what has kept me whole..... I didn't feel like I was really losing myself as I got into the fashion industry."
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