This fall, Different Leaf will be back on the shelves with a fresh perspective on what print can be. We’re putting artists and creatives at the helm of each biannual issue, welcoming them as guest editors to bring their culturally resonant perspectives to our new direction. They’ll shape the stories, pick the contributors, and set the vibe — curating an art-driven, deeply personal issue that celebrates creativity and culture.

So why the change? Because cannabis culture doesn’t live in a vacuum — it intersects with art, music, food, and all kinds of creative movements shaping the world around us. We want to make a magazine that feels like a conversation with the very artists and culture-makers defining what’s next.

For Different Leaf’s fall relaunch, we’re handing the reins to two longtime creatives who know a thing or two about reinvention: Nick Cave and Bob Faust.

For over 30 years, Chicago has been home to Cave and Faust’s individual and collaborative work — multidisciplinary, genre-blurring, and always community-rooted. The lines between art, performance, design, and activism? They’ve been bending and blending them for decades. As partners in both life and work, questions around who gets to tell stories — and where those stories live — run through everything they create. From Cave’s iconic Soundsuits (those otherworldly sculptural garments that obscure identity to reveal deeper truths) to Faust’s design practice where type and pattern spark deeper conversations, their work invites us to see and feel differently.

Together, they also run Facility, their Chicago-based art space that uses creativity as a tool for connection, healing, and change.

Different Leaf invited the duo to channel that spirit into a whole new kind of magazine experience. They’re not just contributing — they’re curating the entire issue’s visual and editorial identity, in collaboration with our team and newly appointed curators Denise Markonish (Chief Curator at MASS MoCA) and Ryan Schreiber (founder of Pitchfork). While Different Leaf’s roots are in thoughtful cannabis journalism, this next chapter is about something bigger: culture at large, and the creative forces shaping it.

“We’re thrilled to debut our new platform with Nick and Bob, whose work embodies the kind of boundary-pushing creativity and cultural reflection that Different Leaf champions,” says Michael Kusek, founder and publisher of the magazine. “By inviting visionary artists to shape each issue from the ground up, we’re creating space for deeper dialogues around connection, social transformation, and the evolving ways we tell stories.”

From large-scale public art to intimate storytelling, Cave says he and Faust both approach creative practice as a kind of social act.

“We wanted to use this issue to amplify voices we admire, many of whom are shaping conversations in their communities in ways that feel personal, urgent, and expansive,” says Cave. “It’s also an opportunity to highlight a city and a region — Chicago and the Midwest — that often get overlooked in national conversations about culture.”

In an era when so much creative work lives and disappears online, Cave and Faust see printed magazines as a tactile, physical space for reflection — one that invites the reader to slow down, turn pages, and really live inside the stories.

“One of the safest and most intimate places is holding a printed publication,” says Faust. “We’ve lost so many, but the ones that remain are carrying so much weight — and possibility. This feels like a laboratory experiment fueled by the word: yes.”

At its core, Cave says, this issue isn’t about making a statement — it’s about extending an invitation to see, listen, and engage with creative work on a deeper level.

“I have great respect for Michael Kusek and Denise Markonish, and it’s a treat to be asked to help shape this moment in Different Leaf’s evolution,” says Cave. “For me and Bob, it’s about sharing our vision for a new kind of publication through a variety of creative practices, writers, and image makers who inspire us.”

The new issue will be released in three collectible editions: a softcover, a hardcover, and a limited-run premium version featuring bespoke extras curated by Cave and Faust. It’s a publishing model that treats the magazine not just as a container for content, but as a piece of culture in and of itself.

ABOUT NICK CAVE

Nick Cave (b. 1959, Fulton, MO; lives and works in Chicago, IL) is an artist, educator and foremost a messenger, working between the visual and performing arts through a wide range of mediums including sculpture, installation, video, sound and performance. Cave is well known for his Soundsuits, sculptural forms based on the scale of his body, initially created in direct response to the police beating of Rodney King in 1991. Soundsuits camouflage the body, masking and creating a second skin that conceals race, gender and class, forcing the viewer to look without judgment. They serve as a visual embodiment of social justice that represent both brutality and empowerment.

Throughout his practice, Cave has created spaces of memorial through combining found historical objects with contemporary dialogues on gun violence and death, underscoring the anxiety of severe trauma brought on by catastrophic loss. The figure remains central as Cave casts his own body in bronze, an extension of the performative work so critical to his oeuvre. Cave reminds us, however, that while there may be despair, there remains space for hope and renewal. From dismembered body parts stem delicate metal flowers, affirming the potential of new growth. Cave encourages a profound and compassionate analysis of violence and its effects as the path towards an ultimate metamorphosis. While Cave’s works are rooted in our current societal moment, when progress on issues of global warming, racism and gun violence (both at the hands of citizens and law enforcement) seem maddeningly stalled, he asks how we may reposition ourselves to recognize the issues, come together on a global scale, instigate change, and ultimately, heal.

ABOUT BOB FAUST

Working in the space between art and design, Bob Faust crafts work with typography at its core and viscerality on its surface. Additionally, Faust has over 30 years of experience as the principle and creative director of the eponymously named cultural branding studio, Faust. He makes his work with purpose first—to inform, empower and/or instigate in the service and celebration of human difference. Text, patterns, and the ideas of surprise and discovery emerge as throughlines throughout his conceptual art practice that defies categorization and genre. In addition to his own work, Faust is also the professional and personal partner of artist Nick Cave. Together they founded the non-for-profit Facility: a multi-use creative space in Chicago that seeks to build community and change the world through art and design. Faust has been recognized nationally and internationally for his inimitable creativity through many prestigious honors including a University of Illinois, College of Fine & Applied Arts, 2022 Distinguished Legacy Award and City of Chicago, 2022 Mayor’s Medal of Honor. Exhibitions have included Mass MoCA BY The Numb3r5 (Mass MoCA), For And Nor But Or Yet So (Poetry Foundation), WA/ONDER (167 Green), with all, and still… (The Peninsula Chicago), Rapt on the Mile (The Magnificent Mile Association), Ways and Means (Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events and The Chicago Transit Authority), About Face: Stonewall, Revolt and New Queer Art (Wrightwood 659), Great Ideas of Humanity: Out of the Container (Chicago Design Museum), gu lty / nnocent (MASS MoCA); Unfolded: Made with Paper (Chicago Design Museum), Betweens (Riverside Arts Center), and CHGO DSGN (Chicago Cultural Center). He has also received recognition from The New York Times, Fast Company, the Chicago Tribune, Newcity, NBC 5 News, the Chicago Sun-Times, CBS Evening News, and T: The New York Times Style Magazine.