NO JACKET REQUIRED Meet Nusi Quero, the artist who designed Beyoncé’s Renaissance cover costume. BY TYLER FRANCISCHINE Photo by Nusi Quero and Tyler Francischine J une 30 began like any other day for Orlando-born, Los Angeles-based artist Nusi Quero. The summer sun rose and scorched a few passing clouds, and he rolled out of bed to check his phone. What he didn’t expect to happen next was receiving a bar- rage of text messages, all singing a similar tune. “Congratulations, you made the cover.” One of Quero’s pieces of handcrafted, wearable art adorns Beyonce’s chest, torso, hips, and legs on the cover artwork for her much-awaited return to music — her seventh studio album, Renaissance, dropping July 29 through the Queen B’s own Parkwood Entertainment and Columbia Records. Quero was floored. A couple of months earlier, an assistant of Beyoncé’s head stylist, Marni Senofonte, asked Quero to pull a look featured on his Instagram account that affixes a patterned system of spikes to the body using skin-safe adhe- sive. He sent over the piece accompanied by an instructional video of how to don it and waited to hear back. He learned his work was being used for album-related purposes, but he had no idea where the piece would ultimately land until Beyoncé premiered the artwork on her Instagram on June 30. “It’s an honor. I’m very humbled,” he says. “It’s surreal. I don’t even know how to process it, but I do feel thankful and proud.” Quero, who grew up in Orlando and studied architecture at the University of Florida in Gainesville before dropping out of graduate school to move to Los Angeles with his band Hundred Waters, uses digital tools and methods like 3D printing to create pieces that sit where bras, corsets, and un- derwear do on a body, though the comparison ends there. Employing ornate patterns and complex geometric systems, his work recalls the beauty and order resplendent in nature and inside each of us while simultaneously ushering us out- side Earth’s orbit. His work has been noticed by designers and celebrities alike: SZA reached out to him directly for a piece to wear at the 2021 MTV Video Music Awards, and he designed a large back tattoo for Grimes. “I have this inclination not toward maximalism but to- ward intricacy and systems and geometries,” he explains. “My absolute favorite thing to do in the world is to pick up two shapes and sit there and figure out how they’re supposed to go together. That’s at the root of what I do, digitally or physically. I look for this harmoniousness between shapes to form a composition or system.” That quest for compositional harmony traces its roots back two decades to Quero’s time as an Orlando high school student obsessed with the work of graffiti artists. He’d scour the online forum 12ozProphet to learn more about the graffiti coming out of cities like Miami and Los Angeles, eventually giving it a shot himself. More than just an adrenaline rush, creating graffiti provided Quero an opportunity to develop and refine his artistic expression. “My friends and I started out timidly, throwing up stickers on signs and looking around us, all paranoid. We eventually worked our way up to throw-ups in illegal places. At first, it was about the rush, that youthful nutrient of being bad,” Quero re- calls. “It was when we started to find Florida’s network of high- way underpasses — clean, concrete walls where you could take your time and have the capacity of thought to paint — that we started to do what we called ‘pieces.’ That was the first time in my quasi-adult life when I created something, and I wanted it to be different for some reason I couldn’t explain.” In later years, as an architecture undergraduate in UF’s College of Design, Construction, and Planning, Quero learned elements of design that continue to inform his cur- rent dialectical approach. >> p8 77 miaminewtimes.com | browardpalmbeach.com | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NEWS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | miaminewtimes.com | CONTENTS | LETTERS | RIPTIDE | METRO | NIGHT+DAY | STAGE | ART | FILM | CAFE | MUSIC | MIAMI NEW TIMES NEW TIMES MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2008 AUGUST 4-10, 2022
