Four recent graduates are included in Forbes’ annual roundup of emerging talents.
Forbes Recognizes Trailblazers
Image
Four RISD alums are among the young movers and shakers included on Forbes magazine’s just-released 2022 30 Under 30 list. Fine artists Kate Pincus-Whitney MFA 20 PT and Nicole Xu 16 IL made the Art & Style list, climate activist Tara Gupta 19 FAV was selected in the Energy category and entrepreneur Caspar Nagel 18 ID appears in the Consumer Tech category. These latest commendations bring the total number of 30 Under 30 honorees who attended RISD to 49.
“We published the first edition of the Forbes 30 Under 30 a decade ago, with one clear goal: to identify the new guard, the young innovators, trailblazers and disruptors remaking our world,” the editors note. “Much of 2022 was being freshly created by this group back in 2012. Ten years from today, it’s a good bet we’ll all be living in a new world being imagined today by the 600 entrepreneurs, innovators and entertainers that make up our 10th Anniversary class.”
“I started Anamakos by turning a house in Providence into a seven-unit complex for sustainable living.”
Based in Washington, DC, Gupta began remaking the world while she was still a student, conceptualizing both of her current startups—sustainable real estate development agency Anamakos and carbon-tracking platform Map-Collective—while she was at RISD. “I started Anamakos by turning a house in Providence into a seven-unit complex for sustainable living,” she says. “Now my team is working on planning and orchestrating several multimillion-unit development opportunities here in DC.”
Map-Collective, her green-tech startup that digitally tracks and maps environmental data and users’ carbon footprints, has garnered $130,000 in funding to date and is in talks with some 200 companies with plans to grow a robust system of carbon tracking within the next 10 years.
Nagel is also focused on reducing our carbon footprint via Pave Motors, the Brooklyn-based electric scooter company he started with his brother Nicolaus in 2019. “Growing up in Berlin, we always had the desire to get around town quickly and independently, but our only options were loud, heavy and environmentally unfriendly combustion engine scooters,” he says. “After moving to Brooklyn a few years ago, we realized that recent developments in electric drive trains and batteries opened opportunities for a new vehicle class.”
Pave is housed within Newlab in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which gives the team access to a wood shop, a metal shop, free printing and an electronics lab. “You also become part of a network of New York makers, which is huge,” Nagel says. “It reminds me of being back in the ID studio at RISD!”
“Recent developments in electric drive trains and batteries opened opportunities for a new vehicle class.”
Across the US, painter Pincus-Whitney is making waves in Los Angeles, creating colorful tableaux celebrating food, the sharing of meals and the theater of the dinner table. “My work integrates social commentary with personal referents in a complex visual form that includes pattern and color to convey what cannot be said in the usual dyadic forms of language,” she explains.
Pincus-Whitney recently returned from Berlin, where her latest solo exhibition, Paradise à la Carte, was on view at GNYP Gallery from September 21–October 3. She is currently showing work in Untitled Miami with her NYC gallery Fredericks and Freiser and in Bad Girls, a group show curated by Gaelle Alexis focused on female artists who “misbehave” creatively, challenging viewers to set aside cultural conventions. She is also preparing for a solo exhibition at Fredericks and Freiser tentatively titled The Gods Are in the Kitchen and set to open next September.
“My work integrates social commentary with personal referents... to convey what cannot be said in the usual dyadic forms of language.”
Also based on the West Coast—in Portland, OR—Shanghai-born illustrator Xu earned accolades for illustrating sensitive themes like police brutality, abuse, and gender and racial issues for such publications as The New Yorker, Time and The Washington Post. Her debut picture book, All of a Sudden and Forever: Help and Healing after the Oklahoma City Bombing by Chris Barton (Lerner Publishing), was released in 2020, and she is currently working on a new book by Gloria Day called The Sound of Change inspired by last summer’s George Floyd protests.
Xu credits her RISD experience for “setting [her] on a path to making art with thought and intention. It was so valuable to have the space and time to create anything and get feedback from so many creative people,” she says.
“It was so valuable to have the space and time to create anything and get feedback from so many creative people.”
After graduating, she freelanced in Brooklyn for four years before relocating to Portland with her dog Rami, who is grateful, she says, to have a big backyard to himself.
—Simone Solondz
December 10, 2021
Related Stories
Seven artists and designers from RISD are recognized in the annual roundup of young entrepreneurs.