Next month, Nick Ozemba and Felicia Hung, the co-founders of the Brooklyn-based design studio In Common With, plan to open Quarters, a shop housed in a 19th-century TriBeCa loft. The 8,000-square-foot space is laid out like a well-appointed home: Guests enter through the library and can wander the great room, bedroom, dining room, kitchen, bar and lounge at their leisure. Everything within — furniture, lighting, art and even the pantry provisions — is available for purchase. Ozemba and Hung collaborated with several of their creative friends on the objects and décor that fill the space. They designed the tiling throughout with the New York City-based artist Shane Gabier, while a fresco depicting eels with earrings by the painter Claudio Bonuglia adorns a portion of the bar and lounge, which will open for evening service beginning this summer. The furniture on display is a mix of restored vintage pieces and new designs by Ozemba and Hung, some of which can be customized with imagery drawn up by various tattoo artists. “We’ll be able to sit down with people and play,” Ozemba says of the space’s potential to spur conversation and inspire new projects. “Retail shouldn’t be so serious. Take off your shoes and have a glass of wine.” Quarters opens May 13, shopquarters.com.
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Spiraling Sculptures Made Out of Recycled CDs
Throughout her career, the New York-based artist Tara Donovan has explored the transformative potential of recycled materials, questioning whether they can surpass their origins. In a new exhibit at Pace Gallery in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood entitled “Stratagems,” Donovan presents 11 towering new works constructed entirely from CDs, most of which she scavenged and salvaged from eBay. “We live in an age that feels increasingly defined by cycles of ingenuity and obsolescence,” says Donovan. “The archives of human experience have moved from paper volumes to clouds just during my lifetime, and the CD is probably the last vestige of our understanding of data as an object.” She left the discs intact, strategically overlapping and adhering them one another, resulting in structures that get up to nine feet tall. They’re meant to allude to the architecture of skyscrapers, an echo that’s visible from the windows of the seventh floor where the show is mounted. On a sunny day, Donovan’s towers sometimes have a prismatic effect, throwing rainbows of light onto the floor. On May 4, during Frieze Week in New York, Donovan’s friend the choreographer Kim Brandt will stage a performance with six dancers within the exhibition. “Stratagems” is on view from May 3 through June 15, pacegallery.com.
Greenpoint, Brooklyn’s northernmost neighborhood, has long been a destination for bakeries in New York City. There’s the decades-old Polish standby Peter Pan, which was immortalized as the part-time workplace of Zendaya’s MJ in “Spider-Man: No Way Home” (2021), and Syrena bakery, another Polish staple since 1993 selling everything from bread and babka to tiramisù and holiday cookies. Several more purveyors of baked goods have opened in the past year, including Radio Bakery, led by the pastry chef Kelly Mencin with a menu that focuses on New York “flavor memories,” as she puts it, like bacon, egg and cheese focaccia, scallion sesame twists and Earl Grey morning buns. In November, Taku Sando opened on Greenpoint Avenue, making decadent Japanese sandwiches served on homemade shokupan bread that’s also sold by the loaf. In a cinder red building on Norman Avenue, there’s Pan Pan Vino Vino, a bakery and wine bar from the owners of Nura, an Indian-inspired restaurant a few blocks away. The designer and co-owner Nico Arze has adorned the pastry case with volcano paintings in a nod to his native Chile. Within it, there are loaves of caraway rye bread — the pastry chef Sam Short remembers her Polish grandmother making liverwurst sandwiches with it — alongside guava cream cheese Danishes made from croissant trimmings. And as of February, the sea of coffee cups and pastry-laden bags at McGolrick Park has taken on a white and red hue — Paloma Coffee’s signature colors — since the roaster opened a bakery outpost on Nassau Avenue. Its single-origin beans are now complemented by innovative pastries (get the artichoke, olive and potato bear claw).
