4 Must-See Design Exhibitions to Catch While You Still Can
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The last days of summer are upon us and, though a traditionally slow season on the art world’s calendars, there are still exquisite exhibitions aplenty. Below we’ve laid out our favorite shows on view at the moment, each chock-full of fodder for beach-day contemplation or perhaps as a reason to visit a place you haven’t yet been. Don’t let the heat dissuade you from a discovery...there’s always something to glean from these restful midyear months.
Charlap Hyman & Herrero’s “Widow’s Walk” at Winter Street Gallery
Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts
Nothing is as it seems with Charlap Hyman & Herrero. The singularly skilled architecture and interior design firm’s practice is vast, counting opera sets and art and design exhibitions among their oeuvre. Most recently the firm curated a site-sensitive show “Widow’s Walk” at Martha Vineyard’s Winter Street Gallery. “A widow’s walk serves a kind of mythical function as a place for the wives of sailors or ship captains or merchants to look out to sea and watch for their loved ones,” says firm cofounder Adam Charlap Hyman of the dainty, platformlike structure that sits atop many American coastal residences. Similarly, the show—a collection of photographs, sculptures, paintings, drawings, and decorative objects—explores longing and loss. Some of the works speak to a cherished memory now impossible to return to, like a black and white photograph of Jean-Michel Frank in a hospital bed, taken by his lover Thad Lovett, or Andra Ursuta’s drawing Man from the Internet. Elsewhere a startling 1946 portrait by Argentine-Italian Surrealist painter Leonor Fini of Bachoo Dinshaw, Countess Woronzow (her girlfriend at the time), hangs around the corner from a flambé case from the early 20th-century.
In true Charlap Hyman & Herrero fashion, the firm used decoration as a means to communicate complex or verbally indescribable feelings. With her trompe l’oeil charcoal treatment on the walls, artist Jenny Jeski created an effect that hovers somewhere between smoke damage and fog. Highly evocative and sensitively presented, the exhibition is worth a trip to Martha’s Vineyard. Through August 27. —Camille Okhio
Klara Kristalova at Lehman Maupin
London
On view at Lehmann Maupin in London, Klara Kristalova’s “The Cold Wind and the Warm,” an exhibition of hand-built ceramic sculptures and works on paper, happens to be the artist’s first solo show in the city. While there is a playful, uninhibited side to the pieces on view, which often meld a slanted self-portraiture with elements of the natural world—take, for instance, Lust for Life, an ironically rather mummified-looking log woman—the work is born from Kristalova’s preoccupations with climate change and natural disaster and society’s general malaise about it all. Crafted in isolation in the artist’s studio in rural Sweden, the pieces grapple with our collective downfall with wry humor and a childlike remove, threatening and comforting at the same time. How else to process the state of things? Through September 9. –Sean Santiago
“The Commercialization of Shaker Knits” at Shaker Museum
Kinderhook, New York
Open now at the Kinderhook Knitting Mill is a show of knitwear designed by the aesthetically inclined Shakers. Curated by designer Emily Adams Bode Aujla, the exhibition includes knitwear designed by the religious group in the middle of the 20th century, along with examples of the machinery and materials used in their production. Known for their industry and attention to detail, the Shakers experienced a boom in their knitwear studios at the end of the 19th century, contributing massively to the subsequent varsity sweaters and jackets that have grown synonymous with 1950s Americana. Through September 10. —C.O.
Artist Rug Series at TRNK
New York City
Textiles have long bridged the gap between art and design; a new show at TRNK brings that marriage even further to the forefront. The exhibition serves as the first entry in an ongoing initiative, one that will translate the work of emerging artists into beautiful rugs. Its first chapter adapts the work of Jesús Perea, who hails from Spain; Louis Reith from the Netherlands; and Zackery Abernathy from the United States. Each rug speaks to the artist’s individual medium and style. As a painter, Abernathy’s work focuses on color and form first and foremost, while Louis Reith’s rugs draw from his geometric ink drawings. Pieces by Perea, a multimedia artist who works in wood, cardboard, and paper, instead emphasize pattern and composition above all else. Those looking to bring a piece of these artworks home can shop them now via TRNK’s website. Through September 30. —Helena Madden
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