Familiar faces are part of And Just Like That’s… DNA. After all, the series—airing now on HBO Max—is a new chapter for characters audiences met when they became cultural touchstones on Sex and the City. It isn’t only actors who are recognizable, however, especially if you’ve got a sharp eye for contemporary art.
On a recent episode, Kristin Davis’s character Charlotte York Goldenblatt, cements a much-desired friendship with Lisa Todd Wexley (played by Nicole Ari Parker), a glamorous documentary filmmaker whose kids attend school with Charlotte’s, when a dinner party goes awry. The scene is tense: guests are crowded around Wexley’s dining room table when the hostess’s mother-in-law (Pat Bowie) begins taking shots at her son (Christopher Jackson) and daughter-in-law’s art collection, which includes pieces by Gordon Parks, Mickalene Thomas (whose "Racquel avec Les Trois Femmes Noires" is seen above), Deborah Roberts, and Derrick Adams, among others, but still doesn’t meet her approval.
Summoning her background in fine art—and a burning desire to tighten her bond with Wexley—Charlotte delivers a crash course in the importance of the works in the apartment, their cultural significance, and, perhaps most importantly to mom, their value as investments. It’s a win-win; Charlotte makes a fine display of backbone, Wexley gleefully sees her mother-in-law brought to heel, and audiences are exposed to an exceptional array of artwork that’s actually discussed instead of quietly lurking to add gravitas.
It was a scenario for which And Just Like That… writer and supervising producer Keli Goff and curator Racquel Chevremont planned every detail. Here, the pair tells T&C about why art was essential to telling the story, and how they pulled off building a world-class collection for a fictional family.
What was the beginning of the idea to use these kinds of works for the series?
Keli Goff: It started with the development of these characters, Lisa Todd Wexley and her husband, Herbert. Michael Patrick King, my boss and the show runner on the series, first talked about wanting to introduce this character of LTW as a friend of Charlotte’s and a version of black womanhood that we haven't seen a lot of on television, if ever.
I'm from a suburb in Texas. I had never met Black art collectors, and when I moved to New York and started going to The Studio Museum in Harlem’s gala—one of the most fabulous galas in New York—I started being introduced to this world of Black collectors, and it was incredible. I thought to myself, why didn't I even know this existed? And when Michael talked about introducing the character of Lisa Todd Wexley, that became an important part of her character to me.
One small detail: I know very little about art. I go to museums, but that's about the extent of my knowledge, so I knew I wasn't the person qualified to select the art for these characters' homes. I called a lot of people who would know, and one name kept coming up: Racquel Chevremont. So, I reached out to her on email, and she could not have been more gracious and warmer.
Racquel Chevremont: When Keli reached out, I wanted to know, who are these characters? What are they? LTW’s husband is a banker, she's documentarian, and I thought, OK, I can handle this. As Keli said, you almost never get to really see a couple like this on television, but there are so many couples like this, and I work with a number of them. Immediately I knew I was going to handle this as if they were my clients. And so, I sent out to the team, to Keli and everyone else, some artists to choose from that I thought that this couple would be collecting, essentially, so I could get an idea as to what the television show was really looking for, what Keli was really looking for, and then I said, "I can't promise I can get these artists…”
KG: But she did!
RC: I sent out numerous bodies of work from each artist and Keli got back and said, "I love all of this, but really I'm going to let you decide." It was like having the perfect client. She said, "I'm going to defer to you, but this is the direction that I like, and this is what I see." And these are her characters, and so I went in that direction.”
KG: One of the things I kept saying is that I see LTW’s collection as that of someone who wants to celebrate Black womanhood in its many forms. She's also someone who has a fairly conservative mother-in-law and who has small children around, and so when we talked about that, for instance, that took some of the edgier pieces out of the running. But then the thing that Racquel said to me that was such a light bulb moment was, "Well, what about Herbert?" And I said, "What about him?" She said, "Well, does he collect, too?" And I said, "I don't know? Does he?"
It was this hilarious back and forth, and Racquel started talking about couples who are collectors and how one might collect one thing and the other might collect another, and that was a total breakthrough for me. In that conversation, we decided that Herbert collects photographs and that LTW collects extraordinary artists depicting Black women. And then that was off to the races; every day was like shopping for art I wasn't paying for.
RC: When you have a platform this large, everyone is going to see it. To have the representation of brown and Black bodies on the walls… When you get that opportunity, you have to go for it. So, I was going to make sure they were big paintings, beautiful, just glorious, celebrating our lives, and that you were going to really be able to see them when the camera was on, that there was going to be no denying what was on these walls.
Part of the scene is also that Charlotte goes from work to work explaining why each is important, calling out the individual artists and what makes them unique.
KG: That was what we talked about. Like, wouldn't it be cool if after the show airs people are Googling this? Because Racquel was on set that day that we shot, and she will attest that it wasn't an easy shoot, because dinner parties are hard. But also, making sure that the art, which really was a co-star of this episode, got its due was really the priority, and that's not easy.
Racquel is the expert, I'm not, but I'm a huge Gordon Parks fan, and when she sent an email and asked, "Well, what do you think about Gordon Parks?" I said, "Obviously, I worship him, but I know you're not asking what I think about us getting him, because I can't even imagine that that's possible." And she said, "Let me see what I can do." She didn't just get us a Gordon Parks photograph, she got one of the most famous Gordon Parks photographs, and it could not have been more perfect. It's the image of Joanne Thornton Wilson, a black teacher in Mobile, Alabama, who is standing under a colored entrance sign, and she's dressed to the nines with her niece. I said to Michael, "She is the LTW of the 1950s."
It's so powerful and profound. And one of the things I learned researching the photograph is that Life magazine wouldn't publish it; it was too controversial. And I was thinking, the fact that the image of a beautifully dressed Black woman who's defying stereotypes of what people thought of Black women, particularly then, was more controversial than protesters, water hoses, and dogs, says a lot. We had it hanging near the entrance, as you walk into this extraordinary Black power couple's extraordinary home, which is bigger than Charlotte and [her husband] Harry's. It was awesome.
There’s also art nearly everywhere you look—you had to build what felt like a real collection that took time for the characters to construct.
RC: We already had a lot of pieces, but we didn’t want the camera hitting anywhere where there's wasn’t a painting in the scene. And so, to the show's credit, to Keli's credit, that was very important. And that usually isn't the case. I was happy to rush out to the artists and say, "Hey, can I get another piece? We don't want any empty walls." I think in the end we ended up with maybe 16 pieces. Some of them are original, like the Gordon Parks image, and others are reproductions, but they're reproduced to a level at which I've never had any other show reproduce. All of the photographs are reprinted on photographic paper and framed exactly as the artist would have it framed.
You can't use originals on a show because the insurance would be astronomical. I mean, we have paintings and they're worth excess of hundreds of thousands of dollars, so that wasn't a possibility. However, with reproduction you can get the quality if you're willing to put in the money, so they spared no expense. They took it as far as they could, even with the Mickalene Thomas, the painting that you see, they painstakingly repainted... They bought Swarovski crystals to put the crystals where they were. They brought in glitter for the amounts that they couldn't just try to get this as close to the original as possible.
There's so much art out there, and so many ways you can go when you're building a collection. When you're advising someone, you want to help them collect things that they will love. Because yes, artwork is an investment financially, but it's also a personal thing and you have to love what you live with, and it has to tell your story. You want it to tell the world who you are.
Adam Rathe is Town & Country's Deputy Features Director, covering arts and culture and a range of other subjects.
