Kim Gordon is standing on a wooden platform in Reena Spaulings Fine Art, a gallery on the second floor of an unassuming building in Manhattan’s Chinatown that is rumored to have once housed a brothel. She is surrounded by white plinths displaying painted small-scale sculptures — upended cans and funny-shaped boxes — all fabricated from cardboard by the Swiss artist Peter Fischli. The work seems to be, in part, a vaguely Duchampian commentary on the line between everyday object and valuable sculpture. “It’s almost kind of a takeoff of art for people who are afraid of art,” Gordon appraises. She carefully makes her way around the room, and it’s hard to ignore the symbolism: The co-founder of the groundbreaking experimental rock band Sonic Youth, the godmother of grunge, the feminist icon, is quite literally wandering around a field of pedestals.

It is an unseasonably hot and muggy June day — New York at its most New York — but Gordon, languid and cool, seems to exist within her own ecosystem. At 65, she wears her choppy blonde hair in girlish bangs and has the surfer drawl of a native Southern Californian. A few years ago, after three and a half decades on the East Coast and the thunderous breakup of both her band and her long marriage to Thurston Moore, her collaborator in Sonic Youth, Gordon moved back to her childhood hometown, Los Angeles.

Kim Gordon appears on one of the seven covers of T’s recent Culture issue. Read more about New York City, 1981-1983: 36 months that changed the culture.

“After my marriage ended, I think my biggest fear was actually having to get a real job,” she says once we’ve sat down to lunch at a Greek restaurant a few blocks from the gallery. But the post-divorce years have proved creatively prolific. Musically, she’s embarked on a series of collaborations (with Stephen Malkmus and Peaches, among others); recorded her first-ever single under her own name, “Murdered Out,” a “sort of trashy” industrial track with producer Justin Raisen; and thrown herself into a new band, an improvisational noise guitar duo with the Western Massachusetts-based musician Bill Nace called Body/Head. There have also been modeling gigs — for Ugg, Proenza Schouler and Rodarte — and acting gigs: small roles on “Girls” and in the new Gus Van Sant movie, “Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot.” In 2015, Gordon published the New York Times best-selling memoir “Girl in a Band.”