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I walk through the narrow, lively streets of Bastille, hearing chatter from full café terraces. I turn right, passing a small independent bookstore, onto the historic Rue de la Roquette, long known for the presence of its workshops. A marvelous sight appears: neo-Gothic wooden walls lined with a series of large windows, draped in vines and early spring cherry blossoms in the Paris afternoon sun. I step forward and gently push the door; the playful tinkle of a small bell above announces my arrival into Kostia’s atelier. Kostia is an art and design studio founded in Paris in 2012 by Constantin Laan ’97, who named it in honor of the nickname his Russian grandfather had given him as a child.

“Create your own myth,” Jamea Richmond-Edwards fondly advises as we stand beside my newly bisque-fired ceramic sculptures in the Junior Seminar art studio. “Your childhood cartoons, favorite books, and movies—they were someone’s myth, someone who had the agency to write themselves into the future,” she adds.