LeBron James, Cube Portrait
The NBA’s biggest superstar, forward LeBron James, is one of the most dominant players—and personal brands—in the game’s history. A star since his high school days in Ohio, he was one of the most-watched players in the country and appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated before he had even graduated. Selected in the first [...]
Elon Musk, Cube Portrait
After minting his fortune during the Internet boom of the late nineties, Elon Musk is building businesses in three 21st-century industries: space exploration, solar power, and electric automobiles. While there may be wealthier entrepreneurs who are still in their thirties, few can match the breadth or audacity of Musk’s vision. In 1999, at the age [...]
Craig Venter, Cube Portrait
One of science’s most outsized personalities, Craig Venter is also one of its most important researchers for delivering on his ambitious goals and propelling other scientists forward in the process. Venter has been making important advances in the study of genes since he was a National Institutes of Health researcher in the 1990s when he [...]
Mehmet Oz, Cube Portrait
Dr. Mehmet Oz has built a reputation as one of the world’s top heart surgeons for his willingness to incorporate alternative therapies—such as energy healing and hypnotherapy—into traditional surgery. His idea is thus: treat the whole patient, not just the isolated trouble area. The vice-chairman of cardiovascular services and professor of surgery at Columbia University, [...]
Meghan O’Sullivan, Cube Portrait
When she was 33 years old, Meghan O’Sullivan entered Iraq as part of the first civilian convoy into the country after Saddam Hussein fled Baghdad. Over the next 15 months, she worked with the Iraqis to help them rebuild the political institutions of their country and was a key political advisor to the Coalition Provisional [...]
M.I.A., Cube Portrait
With politically provocative lyrics set to category-defying beats, M.I.A.’s innovative music is ushering in the future of pop. Born in London, she moved to her parents’ native Sri Lanka as a child, only to return at the age of nine as Sri Lanka was torn by an ethnic civil war. Originally a filmmaker and an [...]
John Maeda, Cube Portrait
Designer, artist, and computer scientist John Maeda is a leader in creating design solutions for the digital age. The newly appointed president of the Rhode Island School of Design, Maeda focuses his work on answering the question, “How do we simplify increasingly complex technologies?” Frustrated that computers tend to become more complicated and difficult to [...]
Parag Khanna, Cube Portrait
An expert on geopolitics, Parag Khanna, 31, is the Director of the Global Governance Initiative and a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation. For his 2008 book, The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order, Khanna interviewed people—experts and taxi drivers alike—in 50 countries. The result was a book that [...]
Jay Keasling, Cube Portrait
Keasling is a professor of chemical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He spent his time in the Cube demonstrating the construction of a genetic circuit using basic techniques of synthetic biology. As a pioneer in the field of synthetic biology, Jay Keasling is using new approaches to genetic engineering to tackle some of [...]
Marc Jacobs, Cube Portrait
In 1987, when he was just 24, Marc Jacobs became the youngest designer ever to receive the Council of Fashion Designers of America’s prestigious Perry Ellis Award for New Fashion Talent. Twenty-one years later, he has lived up to that early promise. Few would dispute Jacobs’ status as the world’s most influential designer. A Marc [...]
Ken Griffin, Cube Portrait
As the founder and CEO of Citadel Investment Group, Ken Griffin has turned $1 million in seed money into the Goldman Sachs of the hedge fund industry. One of the most powerful and wealthiest investors on Wall Street, Griffin started Citadel in his early 20s. Known for its astonishing technological capabilities, Citadel’s use of computer [...]
Noah Feldman, Cube Portrait
Noah Feldman is a professor at Harvard Law School and one of the world’s foremost experts on the intersection of religion and the law: a specialty that regularly takes him beyond the ivory tower and out into the world. For example, in 2003 Feldman helped draft the interim Iraqi constitution as an advisor to the [...]
Danger Mouse, Cube Portrait
Danger Mouse (Brian Burton) has parlayed the accidental success of an illegal pet project into a career as one of music’s most sought-after producers and collaborators. In 2004 Burton, then a DJ who had released three electronica albums, mashed up The Beatles’ White Album with Jay-Z’s Black Album for some friends and techies who he [...]
Santiago Calatrava, Cube Portrait
Santiago Calatrava has devoted his career to bridging the gap between structural engineering and architecture by bringing artistic flair to functional civic buildings. Already well-respected in Europe for his train stations, airports, and bridges, Calatrava is moving to the forefront of American architecture with several major U.S. projects. His first U.S. building was an addition [...]
Jeff Bezos, Cube Portrait
As the founder and CEO of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos defined—and continues to reinvent—electronic commerce. In 1995, Bezos launched Amazon as an online bookseller from his garage. Today, it is the world’s largest online retailer that sells everything from digital music downloads to groceries. The site accounts for six percent of all Web commerce in the [...]
George Clooney, Cube Portrait
America’s top leading man has moved well beyond that role in recent years, having leveraged his clout as an actor into a second career as a writer, producer, and director, and a third career as a philanthropist and diplomat. In 2005, he co-wrote, directed, and starred in Good Night and Good Luck, about Edward R. [...]
Anthony Atala, Cube Portrait
Anthony Atala, M.D., is among the world’s foremost researchers in the areas of regenerative medicine and tissue engineering. As the director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Atala was behind the 2006 announcement of the first successful transplant to human recipients of organs grown in the lab: bladders that were transplanted to young [...]
David Chang, Cube Portrait
David Chang, the chef and owner of the four Momofuku restaurants in New York City, is the most celebrated young cook in America. Chang’s food, with its blend of French technique and Asian flavors, is not merely delicious: it is delicious in an entirely new way. After training at the French Culinary Institute and high-end [...]
Esquire’s Portrait of the 21st Century featured in “Americans Now” at Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery
“Americans Now,” drawn from the National Portrait Gallery’s collection, features portraits of outstanding individuals in the realms of science, business, government and the arts. The exhibition opens Aug. 20 and will be on view through July 10, 2011. The show includes such familiar names as Erykah Badu, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Tom Hanks, Tony Hawk, Jay-Z, [...]
National Portrait Gallery Acquires Esquire’s Portrait of the 21st Century
The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery has selected Lincoln Schatz’s 2008 commission for Esquire magazine, Portrait of the 21st Century for inclusion in its collection. The series of nineteen portraits, which includes George Clooney, Jeff Bezos and LeBron James, will be on view beginning Aug. 20 in the exhibition “Americans Now” through 2011. Curators and historians [...]
First Public Exhibition of Esquire’s Portrait of the 21st Century at PULSE Art Fair Miami
Esquire’s Portrait of the 21st Century is a massive video art installation commissioned by the Hearst Corporation in celebration of Esquire magazine’s 75th anniversary. The installation includes generative portraits of Marc Jacobs, Samantha Power, Santiago Calatrava, LeBron James, George Clooney, David Chang, Jeff Bezos, Danger Mouse, Elon Musk, Ken Griffin, Noah Feldman, M.I.A., Jay Keasling, [...]
This man at his best: For Esquire’s 75th, Lincoln Schatz mounts his Cube project of mutable video portraits
George Clooney danced with 10 slightly giddy women. LeBron James played basketball—using his own avatar—on an Xbox. David Chang and four friends got monumentally, rip-roaringly, take-your-shirt-off drunk. Above them, 24 digital cameras captured every dip, dunk and sip, funneling the images into whirring computers, which in turn dissected every frame, pulling them apart like silk [...]