The beguiling illustrations of Niki De Saint Phalle come alive to the sound of French starlet Soko’s “Love Letter,” a song directly inspired by the late Franco-American artist’s 1988 book, My Love, Where Shall We Make Love? “When the idea first came up to do a film based on Niki’s artwork, Soko was the first person I thought of, as there is something very tough and tender in everything she does,” says artist, curator and filmmaker Aaron Rose, who made the short based on the drawings found in Saint Phalle’s accordion-folding book that muses on the quirks and intricacies behind human devotion. “The way Soko took the feeling of the text in the book and completely transformed it into her own just blew me away.” The video forms part of a collaborative series of art-inspired lyric videos created by Rose and MOCAtv: he has so far worked with LA-based musician Sam Spiegel, hip-hop pioneer Fab Five Freddy and Brazilian-American songwriter Kool Kojak on a lyric video based on the graffiti of Jean-Michel Basquiat, and on a film based the work of conceptualist Sol Lewitt with Tim Armstrong from US punk group Rancid. “The whole idea is to package an artist’s writings in a pop format,” says the filmmaker, whose 2008 documentary Beautiful Losers looked at the art movement that he helped to spearhead along with Harmony Korine and Shepard Fairey. “Sometimes their words are only heard in lectures or read in the pages of academic catalogues; I thought it would be fun to reframe them and turn people on to writings that they would never have read before.”