Visitors expecting shiny new things from the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s first design-focused exhibition will be in for a surprise. “Ai Weiwei: Making Sense,” which opens at London’s Design Museum on April 7, features broken ceramics and historic relics, including spouts of wine ewers from the Song dynasty (960 to 1279) and fragments of the artist’s own sculptures destroyed in 2018, when the Chinese authorities demolished his Beijing studio. Born in 1957, Ai grew up during the Cultural Revolution in China, a time when the government, as he puts it, went to great lengths to erase evidence of the past that might contradict its rule. Now based in Portugal, the artist says that ruins are slices of history that are essential to human development. “Every ‘advance’ is built on failures,” he explains. “It’s only through these fragments that we have the possibility of redefining history.” As its title suggests, the show will encourage people to make sense of these objects, which are strewn across the Design Museum’s floor alongside Stone Age tools and Lego bricks that Ai has collected over the years. While viewers explore the exhibition, Ai wants them to question what they value and why. Sculptures of toilet rolls — mundane objects that became almost sacred during the pandemic — cast in marble and glass should bring home the point. “Ai Weiwei: Making Sense” is on view from April 7 to July 30, designmuseum.org.
Drink This
Natural Wine That’s Fermented — and Spray-Painted — in Berlin
The Berlin native Marleen Franke first learned about winemaking in 2018 when a friend suggested she lend a hand harvesting with the brothers Jonas and Daniel Brand, fifth-generation vintners in the Pfalz region of Germany. The Brand brothers had some unorthodox ideas, and Franke, a former impact investing consultant, had access to a cellar in Berlin below a building owned by her family. Later that year, she launched the wine label Chateaumoabit, selling natural, or low-intervention, wine — so called because there is minimal handling or filtering of the wine. Named after Moabit, a multiethnic, mixed-income area in Berlin, the wine is meant to represent a blending of old and new Europe. Rather than labeled, each bottle is spray-painted in a homage to the city’s graffiti. Chateaumoabit has built a cult following among the country’s environmentally conscious consumers eager to upend a sleepy German wine culture. At open cellar events, Franke serves hummus from the Turkish deli in her building and invites visitors — both connoisseurs and natural-wine neophytes — to do blind taste tests. From about $24 a bottle, chateaumoabit.com.
The title of the painter Lauren Quin’s first solo museum show, at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kan., is, aptly, “My Hellmouth.” The phrase is inspired by “The Visions of Tondal,” a medieval manuscript that recounts a knight’s visit to the underworld, and to look at Quin’s paintings is to traverse a tangle of abstract openings and tunnels that ominously seem to lead nowhere. To create one of her works, Quin, who lives in Los Angeles, uses both sides of the canvas; the marks she produces on the back influence what is on the front. Her use of this technique grew out of her early days in the studio when, to save on materials, she doubled up works on one canvas. “I started to feel like I had all this work on my side, and that I was imbuing the pieces with secret notations,” says Quin, though she happily, if a little cryptically, shares some of the symbols that she embedded in the pieces for this show: “It’s a game of visual telephone. A spider bleeds into the sun, which bleeds into an eye.” Quin likes when “one symbol cuts off another and creates a third.” “My Hellmouth” is on view through June 18, nermanmuseum.org.
Eat This
An Italian Easter Pastry With a Balsamic Twist
The Italian pastry colomba pasquale, whose name translates to “Easter dove,” has a few legends surrounding its origin, one of which dates back to the Battle of Legnano in 1176. As the story goes, after Lombardian troops declared victory over the Holy Roman Empire’s army, two doves appeared on the battlefield — the spongy cake, made to resemble a flying bird, was supposedly made to mark the occasion. The colomba as we know it today was created by the Milanese bakery Motta in the 1930s as a springtime counterpart to panettone. The bread contains candied orange peel and raisins, and is finished with an amaretto-like sugary glaze that’s studded with almonds, then drizzled with dark chocolate. As of this Easter, the Modenese balsamic vinegar producer Acetaia Giusti will bring the colomba stateside. Its balsamic is both added to the colomba’s dough and used to soak its raisins. In Italy, colombas are often served sliced alongside Easter lunch, with leftovers eaten the following morning with a cappuccino. At the New York City restaurant Lucciola, the chef Michele Casadei Massari, an Acetaia Giusti ambassador, serves it up for dessert with warm caramelized blueberries and raspberries, plus a couple more drops of balsamic. About $45 for a whole colomba from Acetaia Giusti, giusti.it.
View This
Works by Yoko Ono, Louise Bourgeois and Miles Greenberg, Shown Together in Brooklyn
Hiding in plain sight on a residential street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, is the 17,000-square-foot industrial warehouse turned private museum Faurschou New York. Founded in 2019 by the Danish art collector Jens Faurschou (who also has a museum in Beijing), the sprawling space will host, starting this Saturday, “Embrace the World From Within,” a group show of work by Yoko Ono, Louise Bourgeois and Miles Greenberg. Each artist occupies one of three adjoining galleries: Greenberg’s piece “The Embrace,” featuring two nude performers who hold each other for six hours while sitting atop a shared rock, leads to Bourgeois’s hanging bird nest sculpture “Fée Couturière” (“Fairy Dressmaker”) around the corner. “I love big installations, but they also have to talk to you. They should have a political view or a point of view about identity,” says Faurschou of his approach to choosing which art to show. “It has to hit the stomach.” Ono’s grand-scale “Ex It,” on display alongside her installation “We’re All Water,” seems likely to do that: It’s 100 coffins, each with a tree growing from it. “It takes the biggest room,” Faurschou notes. “Embrace the World From Within” is on view April 1 through Sept. 17, faurschou.com.
Over the past decade, Puerto Escondido has developed into an art and design hub thanks in large part to the Mexican artist Bosco Sodi, whose nonprofit art foundation Casa Wabi has had a lasting impact on the Oaxacan beach town. In February, Sodi opened his newest art space in Mexico City, located in the industrial area of Atlampa. “Art has the power to help change the dynamic of a neighborhood,” he says. Sodi worked with the Mexican architect Alberto Kalach to transform his former studio and warehouse into a four-floor Brutalist building divided into two sections: The first features the new Casa Wabi studio, with an exhibition space for young Mexican artists and a terrace for sculptures. The second will showcase selected works from Sodi’s 30-year career. He plans to host weekly tours for students from the nearby public schools and universities, and the exhibitions will also be open to the public by appointment. boscosodi.com.
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