 Photo: THE FASHION MAP FROM THE MCA: The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA) presents Virgil Abloh: "Figures of Speech," the first-ever museum exhibition devoted to the work of the ultramodern, genre-bending artist and designer Virgil Abloh. Raised in Chicago by parents who emigrated from Ghana, Abloh was trained in engineering and architecture but cultivated an interest in music, fashion, and design. While pursuing a master’s degree in architecture from the Illinois Institute of Technology, the artist connected with a then-emerging Kanye West, joining a fledgling creative team to work on album covers, concert designs, and merchandising. Abloh’s influence grew and expanded as West’s profile increased, pioneering a new creative discipline that ranges across media and is at its core deeply collaborative—connecting visual artists, musicians, graphic designers, fashion designers, and architects to craft an all-encompassing artistic universe. Abloh then began his own fashion brand Off-White. Designed in a studio in Milan, Italy, both men’s and women’s Off-White collections are presented at the seasonal shows of Paris fashion week alongside the luminaries of the high fashion world. In March 2018, his profile expanded when he became the Artistic Director of Louis Vuitton’s men’s wear collection. Abloh’s approach to fashion is equally inspired by contemporary art, his architectural training, and the style-conscious world of music. His inspiration is so-called streetwear, the looks that emerge spontaneously and organically from trend-setting youth. Likewise, he celebrates the ethos of street fashion, where high culture is appropriated, sometimes corrupted, and served up as something fresh and new. Set in an immersive space designed by Samir Bantal, a Director of AMO, the research studio of Rem Koolhaas’s renowned architecture firm OMA, the exhibition focuses on the creative process and collaborative work of Abloh who is redefining fashion, art, and design. Chicago artist Abloh is pioneering a new creative discipline that ranges across media and is at its core deeply collaborative, connecting visual artists, musicians, designers, and architects. Virgil Abloh: "Figures of Speech" is organized by MCA Chief Curator Michael Darling and runs from June 10 to September 22, 2019. ARTIST’S STATEMENT For me, “Figures of Speech” is an art exhibition rooted in advertising and “the projected image.” Any time an idea takes shape on a particular surface—a photo print, a screen, a billboard, or canvas—it becomes real. This exhibition demonstrates how I wrestle with this concept freed from any one medium, looking for personal and specific solutions. This twenty-year survey shows how I am constantly looking for a way to transform myself from consumer to producer, navigating a path between “Tourist” and “Purist,” between the literal and the figurative. —Virgil Abloh THE EXHIBITION This survey exhibition covers seven areas of Abloh’s work over the past twenty years, chronicling the different pillars of his work in fashion, music, art, furniture and graphic design. EARLY WORK Shaped by the culture of streetwear, Virgil Abloh is one of the leading designers to revolutionize high-end fashion by inserting elements such as sneakers, hoodies, and denim into his collections. The language of streetwear defines the identity, status, and preferences of many young people who value uniqueness and creativity, and have a rebellious stance against the mainstream. Abloh pays homage to the contributions streetwear has made to contemporary culture and uses many of its techniques of borrowing, remixing, and ironic commentary to guide his work. In 2012, Abloh used graphic t-shirts to hone his visual language of texts, numbers, and logos; first as a guest designer with the independent brand Hood by Air, and then creating his own brand Pyrex Vision that relied on simple graphics loaded with coded meanings. Subliminal and often subversive messages were a staple of Abloh’s upbringing as a skateboarder and consumer of rock and hip-hop music. Pyrex Vision featured mass-produced sweatshirts and plaid shirts onto which he screenprinted “Pyrex,” (the glassware used in home drug labs) “23,” (Michael Jordan’s basketball number) and images of a painting by the Italian artist Caravaggio. These references allude to stereotypical ways disadvantaged youth can overcome their hardships: by selling drugs or becoming a famous athlete. The video “A Team with No Sport” (2012) helped to promote the launch of Pyrex Vision and included members of the then-emerging rap collective A$AP Mob. FASHION Abloh launched the brand Off-White in 2013, bringing a formula of texts, graphics, and logos to men’s and women’s clothing. The name was meant to suggest a post-racial reality, neither black nor white. Connecting his architectural roots and interest in urban design elements, much of Off-White’s imagery comes from roads, signage, buildings, and uniforms. Nearly every collection has been guided by a theme Abloh wants to investigate, functioning as discreet essays on the codes and rules of fashion or topics of the day. Key motifs in the collections include the diagonal black-and-white stripes that have become the brand’s signature, long nylon belts borrowed from the shipping industry, and caution stripes that symbolize that the wearer of the garment is part of the city. This section includes highlights from Off-White’s men and women’s collections from 2014-2019. Some of the representative elements include Abloh’s interest in word play in the titles of his collections, such as “Moving Still,” “You Cut Me Off,” and “Nothing New.” In “Off Day,” the idea of casual dress in the workplace is compared to how put-together one should be on one’s day off. The deconstructed and asymmetrical tailoring also plays with the idea of having an “off day” when things aren’t going according to plan. In “Blue Collar” Abloh uses the phrase as a way to explore the potential of blue-collared shirts and jackets while mixing in signifiers of working-class jobs such as logos of mail carriers and construction workers. Abloh also includes fine art references in his fashion designs, from incorporating a Caravaggio painting in his early Pyrex Vision line, to using a reproduction of a Surrealist painting by Giorgio de Chirico on a dress, to referencing the Italian modernist artist Lucio Fontana, known for slashing his canvases, with roughly cut patches affixed to overcoats and scraps of fabric attached to bags. Abloh is inspired by people from popular culture such as Princess Diana, and enlists artists such as Jenny Holzer, who created video projections of poems about the plight of refugees that scrolled across a screen as one show’s backdrop. Abloh’s designs incorporated materials from emergency and rescue professions. MUSIC Abloh’s attraction to music has led him to professionally DJ at prestigious venues and festivals around the world, such as Lollapalooza and Coachella. His work is branded by a comprehensive visual language that draws on his love of graphic design and his experience working as musician Kanye West’s creative director for over a decade. Working for West’s firm DONDA, Abloh oversaw the creation of concert merchandise, album packaging, and stage designs, for West and other artists. Highlights from this section include a large-scale version of the album art for Kanye West’s Grammy-nominated sixth album, Yeezus (2013). The design by Abloh reduced the packaging to only the necessary elements, such as the single red sticker that kept the CD’s jewel box closed and displayed the album’s name. In another work, One-of-a-kind DJM and CDJ turntable, (2018) Abloh worked with audio company Pioneer to make a transparent version of the turntables he favors when deejaying, which reveals all the internal parts that make up this sophisticated device. There is also a set of gold, diamond-encrusted accessories by Jacob the Jeweler that mimic the jewelry worn by hip-hop personalities. INTERMEZZO Abloh compares his design activity to prototyping, constantly testing new ideas. The sculpture, Pink Panther: Scales of Justice (2019) represents one of these ideas using insulation foam to fashion a modern sculpture reminiscent of those by the artist Alexander Calder. Foam is a material regularly used in architecture and design offices when rehearsing new concepts, and for Abloh it also recalls the teenage practice of salvaging construction materials to make skateboard ramps and other structures. BLACK GAZE This section explores Abloh’s approach to fashion and art through the lens of black cultural experience. The launch of the Off-White brand appealed to a diverse new generation of consumers with collections that celebrate black artists, athletes, and musicians. In 2018, Abloh assumed the position of artistic director of menswear at Louis Vuitton, becoming one of the very few black designers to helm a major Parisian fashion house. He now uses his high-profile platform to forge a more inclusive vision for high fashion. Highlights include Abloh’s collaboration with filmmaker Arthur Jafa in the work Wakanda Never (2018). The text on the back of the jacket is a play on the black nationalist rallying cry “Wakanda forever” from the 2018 film Black Panther—with a twist that implies that a black utopia is an impossibility. Also included are Abloh’s designs for the Nike “Queen” Dress for tennis star Serena Williams in the 2018 U.S. Open, and an Off-White dress for Beyoncé for her 2018 Vogue cover photo shoot. The dress combines a traditional flowing silhouette with Abloh’s signature black-and-white diagonal stripes. A neon sign, “You’re Obviously in the Wrong Place,” (2015/19) originally welcomed attendees to the Off-White Fall/Winter 2016 runway show, referencing a line from the film Pretty Woman (1990) where a woman is dismissed by a snobbish saleswoman at a high-end clothing store. DESIGN Abloh’s design practice—covering architecture, furniture, painting, sculpture, and shoe design—embraces many of the techniques used by modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: transparent materials, emphasis on function, and attention to detail. Abloh’s focus on process and ideas allows him to question the use of images, structures, and materials in new ways, using techniques such as appropriation and wordplay. Abloh’s Color Gradient Chair (2018) embodies transparency, the key principle of his design philosophy. The open frame is inspired by the aesthetics of Mies van der Rohe’s architecture, with rational distribution of weight and the exposure of the gridded structure in plain sight. A literal pile of furniture prototypes displays Abloh’s experiments in making modifications to familiar designs to give them new life. Abloh also reinterprets the idea of luggage personalization in his collaboration with luggage brand Rimowa. As a conceptual alternative to tags, stickers, and monogrammed initials on luggage, he created a transparent suitcase so that the owner’s belongings are on display as a statement of identity. In Abloh’s words, “You become a performance art piece just by using the thing.” Prototypes for rugs designed for IKEA in 2018 are also featured, which reflect his interest in wordplay and provoking viewers to question what they are seeing. Nike asked Abloh to redesign ten of the company’s most famous shoe styles. Abloh used collaged elements, transparent materials, self-referential labels, tabs, and zip-ties to emphasize the shoes’ construction, inviting people to take a second look at these iconic sneakers. The display of shoes also features unreleased designs from subsequent Off-White × Nike collaborations in various stages of prototyping. “advertise here” (2018) plays on available billboards that encourage interested parties to call and inquire about leasing the sign. Reimagining that billboard, Abloh provides a phone number that, when called, lets visitors hear a voicemail he recorded to explain one of his Off-White collections. THE END This final section presents recent works critiquing the influence of advertising, and how the phrase “The End” is only a figure of speech. In “Keep All,” (2019) Abloh re-imagines several of Louis Vuitton’s signature products, including the classic Keepall bag that was originally released in 1930. His new version adds heavy ceramic chain links, which have appeared across Abloh’s clothing and accessory designs. The chain refers back to Abloh’s origins in streetwear while offering a sly commentary on the wearer’s enslavement to branded luxury. A reproduction of a Newport cigarette billboard addresses the insidious power of advertising, offering unrealistic fantasies of the good life. “Newport ads are a Chicago thing I grew up with—black people looking happy and joyful, but they’re living in circumstances that don't look like the adverts,” said Abloh. PUBLIC ART As an extension of the exhibition, Virgil Abloh has created a series of public art projects that reach outside the museum exhibition space. The front facade of the museum will be adorned with the tongue-in-cheek phrase “CITY HALL” in ten-foot-tall white letters across the windows. The front plaza will have a 50-foot-tall flagpole with a large flag that reads, “QUESTION EVERYTHING.” Through this phrase, Abloh wants to empower visitors to think for themselves as they enter the MCA. Around the city, there will be graphic artworks created by Virgil Abloh using photographs by renowned photographer Juergen Teller. The public will be able to view these on the CTA Red Line train cars as well as on a large billboard on Lake Street in downtown Chicago. When visitors enter into the museum’s fourth-floor lobby, Abloh has created a monumental “Culture Wall” mural together with Samir Bantal. The graphic announces the title of the exhibition and serves as a roadmap to understanding Abloh’s influences starting from his adolescence. Its subjects range from music to architecture, and from the unfamiliar to the everyday. This breadth of influences captures the balance Abloh sees in himself as being both a “tourist” or enthusiastic novice, and a “purist” or expert insider. VIRGIL ABLOH STORE: CHURCH & STATE A special Virgil Abloh pop-up store which Abloh named “Church & State” is another extension of the exhibition, and is located on the fourth floor of the museum. Abloh and his team provided the concept and design of the store, which features chromed stainless steel finishes on the shelving and retractable accordion doors, with industrial PVC plastic curtains for the fitting room, and colored plastic palettes serving as fixtures. The walls of the store are covered with large graphics of photographs related to the exhibition taken by German fashion photographer Juergen Teller. The store will feature a variety of products related to Virgil Abloh, many created exclusively for the MCA, including limited edition collections and a retrospective of best-selling Off-White™ items. Collaborators on the limited edition collections include influential designers such as Simon Brown, Futura, Brendan Fowler, Cali Thornhill DeWitt, Some Ware, and Tom Sachs, among others. TRAVEL SCHEDULE After its run at the MCA Chicago, the Virgil Abloh: “Figures of Speech” exhibition goes to the following museums:
HOURS AND TICKETS The MCA presents Virgil Abloh: "Figures of Speech" from June 10 to September 22, 2019. Timed admission tickets to view the exhibition are on sale online at www.mcachicago.org. These advance tickets are available for the regular admission price ($15). Admission for anyone 18 and under is free. For the first time, the MCA will be open every Monday throughout the run of the exhibition from 10 am to 5 pm, in addition to regular museum hours: Tuesday and Friday 10 am - 9 pm; Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday: 10 am - 5 pm.
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BY: LOTTA YANONG
I had the opportunity to attend the Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Mexican Modernism exhibition at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Tennessee on opening day, May 24th, 2019. The photographs and paintings are from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection and the exhibition was curated by Trinita Kennedy. The exhibition was organized by the Vergel Foundation and MondoMostre in collaboration with the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura (INBAL).
From the Frist Art Museum:
This exhibition captures the vitality and expressiveness of twentieth-century Mexican art with iconic works by Frida Kahlo, her husband Diego Rivera, and their contemporaries, including Manuel Álvarez Bravo, María Izquierdo, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Among the more than 150 works on view will be seven painted self-portraits by Kahlo, Rivera’s Calla Lily Vendor, and numerous portraits of the Gelmans, plus more than fifty photographs that provide insight into Kahlo and Rivera’s passionate love affair and how the couple lived, worked, and dressed.
Husband-and-wife collectors Jacques and Natasha Gelman were glamorous and wealthy Eastern European refugees who married in Mexico in 1941, took part in Mexico City’s vibrant art scene, and acquired art mostly from their artist friends. In 1943, Jacques commissioned a full-length portrait of Natasha from Rivera, Mexico’s most celebrated painter. “The Gelmans formed close friendships with many artists in this exhibition, often acting as patrons and promoters of their careers and assembling one of the finest collections of modern Mexican art in the world along the way,” says Frist Art Museum curator Trinita Kennedy. Born in 1907 in Coyoacán, a suburb south of Mexico City, Kahlo had a difficult childhood, facing a bout with polio at age six and a bus accident at the age of 18 that left her disabled and often bedridden. “It was during her recovery from the accident that Kahlo began to paint, in part because she was bored in bed. She spent hours alone with an easel and a mirror painting her own face,” says Kennedy. “She never attended art school, but as she considered a career as an artist, she sought out several of Mexico’s leading painters, including Rivera, whom she had met several years earlier.” Their friendship became a courtship, with the two marrying in 1929. Unfaithful to each other, the pair divorced in 1939, only to remarry in 1940. In the early twentieth century, Mexico’s artistic avant-garde was closely tied to political and social revolution. Following Mexico’s civil war from 1910 to 1920, the government enlisted male painters to produce monumental murals in public buildings. Rivera was a revered figure in this muralism movement and an avowed Communist. “Using art, which could be understood by the masses, Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros and others helped Mexico fashion a new identity rooted in its own unique history,” says Kennedy. Rivera’s artistic works, as well as his vocal opinions on the role of art, would shape the development of Mexican culture throughout the first half of the twentieth century. “His depictions of Mexican traditions and everyday life soon came to epitomize Mexican culture at home and abroad, including the United States where he created murals in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York,” says Kennedy. Rivera also created easel paintings representing poignant scenes of everyday life and labor in Mexico, such as Calla Lily Vendor, a luminous painting that celebrates the beauty and strength of Mexico and its people. Like Rivera, Kahlo infused her work with mexicanidad, an identification with Mexico’s distinct national history, traditions, culture, and natural environment, but in a much more personal way. About a third of her paintings are self-portraits, the works for which she is now most celebrated. They accentuate her distinctive appearance, characterized by a v-shaped unibrow, deep brown eyes, mustache, carefully coiffed hair with braids, and indigenous Mexican clothing. In Diego on My Mind(Self-Portrait as Tehuana), for example, she crowns herself with a festive indigenous Mexican headdress known as a resplandor. Known primarily in artistic circles during her lifetime, Kahlo’s paintings began to attract widespread international attention in the decades following her death. Her work and life story continued to resonate in pop culture with the success of Frida, a 1983 biography by Hayden Herrera, and the 2002 biopic Frida, starring Salma Hayek. The exhibition includes more than fifty photographs of Kahlo, most of which were taken by noted photographers, such as Lola Álvarez Bravo, Nickolas Muray, and Edward Weston. There is also a special gallery focused on Kahlo’s unique personal style, which offers insight into her wardrobe, hairstyles, and jewelry. An interactive touchscreen allows visitors to explore elements of her clothing and to learn why she wore them. The exhibition concludes with haunting black-and-white photographs of Kahlo’s crutches, corset, and bed, taken recently at the Casa Azul, her former home in Coyoacán, by contemporary artists, including Patti Smith. “Directly associated with her pain, these objects are venerated as relics,” says Kennedy. “As the photos attest, Kahlo’s ability to create magical paintings despite the suffering caused by her broken body captivates and inspires many of us today.” The works collected by the Gelmans offer an unrivaled opportunity to encounter the chaotic and creative Mexican art world of the first half of the twentieth century in all its complexity. Modern Mexican art exerted a key influence on modern art in the United States, and its impact continues to be felt throughout the world today.
The exhibition is on view from May 24–September 2, 2019. For more information:
https://fristartmuseum.org/calendar/detail/frida-kahlo-diego-rivera
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BY: LOTTA YANONG
I had the pleasure of viewing the Chicago History Museum's current costume collection exhibition with a private curatorial tour hosted by Nena Ivon and led by curator Virginia Heaven. The tour was part of Retrospect Vintage Chicago's weekend from May 2 through May 5.
From the Chicago History Museum:
Meet the Original Influencers | Showcasing fashions from Paris, New York, Chicago, and Hollywood, Silver Screen to Mainstream tracks how Hollywood's glamorous reach extended to all classes in the 1930s through the 1940s. The Chicago History Museum exhibition tells a tale of making it big, making do, and maintaining appearances during a tumultuous era in American history.
Featuring thirty garments by designers such as Chanel, Vionnet, Valentina, Paul du Pont, Howard Greer, and Adrian, we'll be introduced to a time when sophisticated design lent a perception of stability as the nation grappled with its reinvention. The exhibition will be on view from April 8, 2019 through January 21, 2020. For more information: https://www.chicagohistory.org/silverscreen
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