Latest news with #MadeInAmerica
Straits Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Straits Times
Oscar-winning actor Adrien Brody unveils art show in New York
Adrien Brody and his mother Sylvia Plachy at his solo exhibition at Eden Gallery in New York, on May 31. PHOTO: SAM HELLMANN/NYTIMES NEW YORK – 'I'm a little in a daze,' actor Adrien Brody said recently, the skin around his eyes slightly crinkled, but his gaze soft and present. He had been up since 5am and had spent most of his day crouched on the ground at Eden Gallery in Manhattan, putting the finishing touches on his collages ahead of the next evening's opening of his latest solo exhibition, Made In America. The floors and walls were covered with canvases, themselves covered with old newspaper advertisements, erratic splashes of graffiti and darkly rendered cartoon characters. Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse and Marilyn Monroe were in attendance. As were the Hamburglar and a toy soldier. In a nearby corner was a gum wall, soon to be covered in wads of chewing gum straight from the mouths of attendees in an interactive 'expression of rebellion and decay', according to the wall text. Adrien Brody, the Oscar-winning actor, is also Adrien Brody, the impassioned painter, is also Adrien Brody, the beats-mixing sound artiste. Those mediums converge in a collection of more than 30 works. Accompanied by Brody's soundscapes, the show features large mixed-media art in what he calls an autobiographical display of the gritty New York of his youth, and the culture of violence and intolerance today. It is an approach that has been met with some derision both in the art press and on social media. Made In America, on view until June 28, also includes photographs of and by his mother, acclaimed Hungarian-American photographer Sylvia Plachy – a role model for Brody, who was never formally trained in visual art. A gum wall by Adrien Brody for his art exhibition, Made In America. PHOTO: SAM HELLMANN/NYTIMES It has been nearly a decade since Brody, 52, last showed his work publicly, at Art Basel Miami. So, why now? 'I'm an unemployed actor at the moment,' he said with a half smile. Though it is difficult to picture Brody as unemployed, especially when his artworks sell for six figures, this is not untrue. The last film Brody shot was in 2023 – The Brutalist, for which he won the best actor Oscar in 2025 – and nothing definite is lined up next. 'I know that if I don't do it now, I won't do it for another long period of time,' he said of the show. 'It's kind of time to let it go.' Adrien Brody's solo exhibition Made In America at New York's Eden Gallery is his first art exhibition in nearly a decade. PHOTO: SAM HELLMANN/NYTIMES Brody had been steadily working on his collages for the past decade. In the fallow periods, years-long stretches when he was not landing the acting roles he yearned for, he turned inwards and painted. The method in all of his mediums, he said, is a combination of layering – be it the incorporation of studied hand mannerisms for his character in The Pianist (2002) or the added thumps for a recorded track – and peeling back, such as using chemicals to degrade paint for a visual work. Brody, who credits his mother as his greatest artistic inspiration, grew up accompanying Plachy on photo expeditions as she chronicled the city's beauty and chaos on assignments for The Village Voice, where she worked for 30 years. 'He came along and he saw the world,' said Plachy, 82. In her darkroom, set up in their home attic in Queens, they would talk to each other through the curtain while she developed her photographs, moving the images from tray to tray, swirling them around in Dektol. 'He still associates me with those bad chemicals,' she said, laughing. Adrien Brody and his mother Sylvia Plachy at the gallery. PHOTO: SAM HELLMANN/NYTIMES His father, Elliot Brody, was also a painter, but focused on his career as a teacher. It was onto Plachy's discarded photo prints that Brody began painting as a child. As a teenager, Brody attended Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts for drama, after being rejected for visual arts. 'It was a good thing, obviously,' he said. 'I'd definitely be a starving artist, most likely, if I didn't have an acting career. So, it's funny ho w that happened.' In Made In America, many works feature a cartoon character – Lisa Simpson or Yosemite Sam or Bugs Bunny – brandishing a weapon. It is a depiction of the violence Brody said he grew up with culturally: an American diet of toy guns, video games an d McDonald's. In Brody's vermin series, oversized black-and-white images of rats appear to pixelate behind street art tags. People are 'either grossed out by them or they are antagonistic towards them', Brody said of the scores of rats in New York City. 'And I always felt like, 'Why doesn't anybody see what they're going through?' Weirdly, I really kind of feel for them.' Rats feature in Adrien Brody's artworks. PHOTO: SAM HELLMANN/NYTIMES That compassion, he said, comes from his mother. Plachy's sensitivity towards animals rubbed off on him. So much so that he has had a pet rat – twice. The first he bought as a child and then gifted to a friend. The second, a few years ago, belonged to the daughter of his girlfriend, designer-actress Georgina Chapman. 'They're forced to kind of hide and scurry about and forage for themselves ,' he said. 'And people are nasty to them and that always bothered me.' That message, though, appears to be muddied in its reception. 'Brody is trying to do something with mice and rats, but there's no attempt to marshal this imagery towards contemporary critique,' professor of art history Claire Bishop at the CUNY Graduate Center said in an e-mail, calling his collages 'too pretty and too even' and 'lacking bite'. 'To say they look like AI-generated images resulting from search terms '19 90s LES graffiti', ' Americana' and 'Disney nostalgia' would be too generous,' she added . 'What they actually resemble is the kind of sanitised street art that's sold on 53rd Street outside MoMA or on the sidewalk in SoHo – work aimed at tourists seeking an arty yet unchallenging New York souvenir.' And viewers on social media have not taken too kindly to Brody's painterly side. In May , one of his creations, a blue-eyeshadowed Marilyn Monroe, the Hollywood sign poking out behind a puff of her blonde hair, sold at the amfAR Gala Cannes for US$425,000 (S$546,600) . The painting became a source of mockery online, and drew criticism for being derivative. Adrien Brody preparing for his art show at the gallery Gallery. PHOTO: SAM HELLMANN/NYTIMES But Brody has his defenders. 'He's real,' said Eden Gallery's chief executive Guy Klimovsky. 'He is himself.' 'Yes, people will come because it's him,' he added, 'but they will forget. Because when I see an artwork, without knowing who made it, the artworks are rich. They're interesting. They have a story connection to the US, the story of the US, to the icon of the US.' It is all part of being an artist, his mother said. 'I think when you stick your neck out into the world, you'll have good and bad comments and that's the risk of it,' Plachy said. Sitting outside the gallery the day before the opening, Brody looked down at his hands, covered in acrylic paint. 'It's a lot of pressure to reveal this,' he said. 'I've literally been hiding the works.' 'Hiding maybe isn't the right word,' he added, 'but working quietly for a very long time and not showing, intentionally, to kind of develop this and do it at my pace. And so this is kind of ripping a Band-Aid off.' NYTIMES Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
The only ‘Made in America' smartphone maker has a message for Apple about manufacturing in the Trump tariff era
Todd Weaver has an important message for Apple as it faces growing demands by President Donald Trump to reshore some of its smartphone production: Don't listen to the conventional wisdom. Experts have long said that manufacturing iPhones in the U.S., rather than Asia, as Apple does, would be logistically impossible and ridiculously expensive. But Weaver argues companies can indeed do it successfully, and at a similar or only slightly higher cost—if given several years to navigate the inevitable complications. Weaver should know: His startup, Purism, is among the few, if not the only business, that assembles smartphones in the U.S. In fact, the U.S. pedigree is the main selling point of his company's Made in America device, the Liberty Phone. 'It is challenging to do this in the U.S.,' Weaver acknowledges. 'It's probably the reason I'm the only one.' And yet, he says his company has managed to make it work and has been profitable for the last two years—a real world example of what's possible on a hot-button topic in which political talking points and vested interests often dominate the debate. President Donald Trump recently put U.S. smartphone production in the spotlight as part of his global trade war. On May 23, he used social network Truth Social to publicly attack Apple for importing iPhones into the U.S., rather than making them domestically, and then threatened the company with a 25% tariff if it continued to do so. Whether any of the import taxes will become permanent is unclear given Trump's whiplash decision-making and court challenges by third parties. Still, Apple has long assembled its iPhones overseas, mainly in China, and has resisted relocating any of that production to the U.S. In April, when Trump announced his tariffs, Apple went so far as to shift the sourcing of most U.S.-bound iPhones to India, which faced lower import taxes. U.S. assembly was never publicly mentioned as a possibility. In the past, Apple CEO Cook explained the reluctance by saying the abundance of skilled labor and top-notch suppliers overseas would be difficult to reproduce at home. Weaver's company, of course, is no Apple, which has sold more than 2 billion iPhones globally since introducing the first models in 2007. The devices unleashed a new era in the tech industry in which mobile devices became the prime focus. Purism, in contrast, has sold just tens of thousands of phones since debuting its first model in 2018, according to Weaver. And the company is barely-known outside the world of tech nerds. Its Liberty Phone, manufactured near San Diego, comes with U.S.-made electronics installed on a metal chassis from China. It retails for $1,999. Another phone, the Librem 5, is mostly the same design, except it's made in China with Chinese parts, and costs $799. The company also produces tablet computers, laptops, and servers. Purism pitches its Made in America device as more secure and privacy friendly than those from major manufactures like Apple. Because all the critical parts and assembly are domestic, it's easy to verify that they haven't been tampered with by a foreign adversary that wants to snoop or stuff them with explosives. The phones also run on a Linux-based open source operating system. Anyone with technical know-how who is worried about the security can review the code—unlike with more popular phones, which come with operating systems that can't be easily inspected. Additionally, Purism's phones come with three kill switches that lets users physically disconnect their device from cell service, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, along with its microphone and camera. When turned on, the switches sever the electrical circuit to the features they control and make it impossible for them to be accessed by hackers, Weaver said. Toggling on Airplane Mode, as users often do on more mainstream phones, is less secure, he said, because it's a purely software feature that doesn't cut power to the device's chips. Customers who are especially security conscious can pay extra to have their devices shipped with 'tamper evident tape' on the packaging, among other options, to flag any monkey business during transit. Purism's biggest customers are government agencies, many of which require high security, and individual consumers. The company's clients, Weaver said, include the FBI and the House Select Committee on Intelligence. Weaver said the cost of manufacturing the Purism's two phones is largely the same, despite one being made overseas and the other domestically. The phone that's made in China costs around $600 for parts, manufacturing, and assembly while the U.S.-made one comes in at $650. 'Producing goods in China vs. the U.S. is the same plus or minus 10%,' said Weaver, based mostly on automation. The difference between what Purism charges customers for its two phones is partly due to the higher profit margin the company collects for its U.S.-made device. People who want stronger security are often willing to pay extra for it, Weaver said. It also covers the extra overhead from some customers wanting to verify that Purism's supply chain is secure and the small additional cost of U.S. manufacturing. Purism's assembly line is in Carlsbad, Calif., where up to a dozen workers put together devices. The area is home to a pool of skilled labor thanks to the local defense industry and manufacturing for other mobile carriers. That relatively modest assembly line is a major contrast to the factories that make iPhones, operated by contract manufacturers, mostly in China. Those facilities can be the size of several football fields and employ over 100,000 people who work around-the-clock shifts. Weaver said the U.S. is at a huge disadvantage to China when it comes to skilled workers, who make up a significant part of the workforce in smartphone factories. The only way to reverse the shortage and lay the groundwork for companies to reshore their production is to encourage more people to learn skills that are useful in the manufacturing process, he said. 'If you go over to China you can find buildings and buildings of thousands of electronics engineers. If you look here, you can find maybe five total,' Weaver said. Apple, for example, would risk a catastrophe if it suddenly, in 2026, needed to ramp up staffing in the U.S. to produce millions of iPhones, he said. Training enough people for such a massive undertaking would take years. Weaver said Purism, founded in 2014, took several years to develop its domestic supply chain. The company's small size means it only needs limited quantities of components, which makes it impossible to achieve the economies of scale that come from producing huge numbers of devices. Manufacturing in the U.S. also comes with higher labor costs than in China. But with the help of automation, those extra costs can be kept to a minimum by reserving human labor for tasks performed after production is complete, such as soldering, assembly, repairs, and testing. Apple, on the other hand, would need vast amounts of components to keep its assembly line humming. While the company would likely be able to cut deals with domestic suppliers for most iPhone parts, some, such as high-quality cameras, may be impossible to quickly source in the U.S. and it would therefore have to import them, Weaver said. One analyst has said iPhones could end up costing $3,500 if made in the U.S., to account for the extra costs and hassles. Weaver agrees that it would cost Apple substantially more to produce iPhones in the U.S., if it had to move production quickly. But given enough time, Apple could substantially reduce the cost after developing a new supply chain, finding enough workers, and by relying on extensive automation. For Apple, opening a domestic manufacturing plant would therefore need to be a years' long process, Weaver said. That's why he criticized Trump's tariffs for taking effect almost immediately. Yes, many of those tariffs have since been delayed. But the takeaway for businesses is that they can't plan ahead. And yet, that's exactly what's required for something as complex as shifting manufacturing to the U.S. Trump's tariffs would be far more effective if phased in over many years, Weaver said. In that scenario, companies would have a clear and increasing incentive to reshore production—without being punished right off the bat. Weaver argues his U.S. manufacturing effort is already paying off and that it will gain momentum over time. He hopes the recent scandal involving U.S. officials using the chat app Signal to discuss a military strike against Yemen, and then accidentally inviting a journalist to join them, will help lift sales by encouraging the federal government to focus more on security. Weaver wouldn't get into the specifics of Purism's financials other than to say it has millions in annual revenue and turned profitable in 2023. The Liberty Phone is its biggest seller. Wayne Lam, an analyst with market research firm TechInsights, gave a mixed take on Purism's prospect. In an email, he said: 'They can be a successful niche player, but the odds of success are lower thanks to the bigger brands. They won't be able to compete in the consumer market but government/enterprise/military are all niche markets they can address.' To fund the expansion of his business, Weaver is trying to raise additional investment after taking in $16 million in funding over the years. Some of that money would go to fixing a shortcoming with his phones. Because they don't use Apple's iOS or Google's Android operating systems, they are incompatible with many of the most popular mobile apps like Uber. To get such apps work on its devices, Purism must make technical tweaks for each one. Purism can at least claim one small advantage over the giant companies that dominate the smartphone industry. If Trump's tariffs become permanent, it won't feel much impact from its U.S.-made phone, while the big players and their foreign-made devices could be hammered. This story was originally featured on
Daily Mail
2 days ago
- Business
- Daily Mail
Brands are claiming to be 'Made in America' and then they're getting sued
Brands are desperate to emphasize that they are 'Made in America' as President Trump continues to wield tariffs to push for a homegrown manufacturing renaissance. However, some companies have been accused of misleading customers by claiming their product was made in the US, when in fact it was in part made overseas. As a result, dozens of brands are now facing legal action over their advertising and packaging. The litigation is being driven by a California law firm Kazerouni Law Group which has already launched 10 of the 13 class action suits filed so far this year. By comparison there were only seven similar cases brought in the whole of last year, according to consumer advocacy group Truth in Advertising. 'One of the platforms the administration was running on was how important American-made things are,' Abbas Kazerounian, founding partner of Kazerouni Law Group, told the Wall Street Journal. 'So the American public has out and out said, "This is something that's important to us."' Kazerouni's cases allege that popular brands have used that sentiment to sell more products and justify higher prices, without their origins being entirely in the US. High profile consumer goods makers have been drawn in to the fray, including Goya Foods, French's Mustard, PepsiCo's Pure Leaf Teas and Dude Wipes. Only Dude Wipes has spoken publicly of their case, telling the Journal that they are confident it will be dismissed. The brand now puts 'Assembled in the U.S.A.,' on their men's toiletry products, to reflect the fact that some components come from overseas. Last year Kazerounian sued the hair care brand Olaplex, for claiming to be made in the US. The case resulted in a settlement, and while Olaplex does not admit wrongdoing it agreed to pay Kazerouni's $1.05 million fees and give the plaintiff $5,000. Another high profile case, brought by another firm, saw a jury award $2.36 million in April to class action plaintiffs that sued the maker of Bigelow Teas. The case argued that the tea company had inaccurately put 'Manufactured in the USA' on its packaging. The odds are certainly in Kazerounian's favor. Of the 80 'Made in America' class action suits brought since 2011 only five have been dismissed, according to data from Truth in Advertising. Abbas Kazerounian, founding partner of Kazerouni Law Group is leading the legal charge Pure Leaf teas made by PepsiCo have also found themselves in the firing line No juries have ever come out in favor of defending companies either, the group said. Companies are so concerned about the threat of legal action that they are preemptively amending their advertising and packaging materials. The maker of Jeep and Ram vehicles changed a new ad campaign to avoid saying their vehicles were built in America because they contain imported parts. 'I think it's important to educate the public, and the businesses for that matter, who are more sophisticated than consumers generally, on why these cases are important,' Kazerounian concluded.
Globe and Mail
12-05-2025
- Business
- Globe and Mail
Subsidiary of Budweiser-maker Anheuser-Busch to invest $300-million in U.S. facilities
Anheuser-Busch InBev's BUD-N American subsidiary said on Monday it would invest $300-million in its manufacturing operations in the United States this year amid a push for local production under President Donald Trump. The St. Louis, Missouri-based Anheuser-Busch, which said it invested nearly $2-billion over the last five years in 100 facilities across the country, also announced the launch of a new plant in Columbus, Ohio. 'Anheuser-Busch has been a shining example of what 'Made in America' means, and their latest investment of $300-million builds on their longtime commitment to grow our workforce and expand U.S. manufacturing,' U.S. Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer said. AB InBev reported a rise in first-quarter profit last week that was more than double the increase expected by analysts. Its profit margins were also higher despite a fall in sales volumes. The company had previously said it was boosting investments in key brands such as Budweiser and ramping up efforts to grow at-home consumption, as spending elsewhere – including in bars – remains pressured. U.S.-listed shares of Anheuser-Busch were down 1.7 per cent in midday trading.
Washington Post
11-05-2025
- Business
- Washington Post
Why one man hopes tariffs give a boost to his Made in America Store
ELMA, New York — The Stars and Stripes lining the driveway and the giant Constitution plastered to the wall offer a very clear welcome to the Made in America Store. Here you'll find 18,000 square feet of stuff, all 100 percent made in the U.S. of A. What's for sale: Wind chimes. Tootsie Rolls. Socks. Toilet paper. Kazoos. Frozen DiGiorno pizzas. American flags. T-shirts printed with his favorite slogan, 'Because China is a Long Drive to Work!'
