A New (Natural) Neighborhood Wine Store
It was one night around two years ago when Dennis “DJ” McNany — who formerly ran the Williamsburg, Brooklyn, wine institution Uva — went down to the neighborhood restaurant Marlow & Sons, where he saw its owner, his friend Andrew Tarlow, and the two decided they should open their own wine shop together. They had known each other since the mid-aughts, sharing both a social circle that revolved around Marlow and many wine-world connections: At the time, the two men (with their respective jobs) were among the only buyers in Brooklyn of the kind of biodynamic, organic, natural wine that has since changed contemporary drinking patterns and palates in nearly every city around the world — and which now fills the shelves of Stranger Wines, their Havemeyer Street storefront that opens this week. Here, inside a 1,000-square-foot space that was, in fact, previously a wine shop (they even kept the same shelves, lightening up the room by adding several Noguchi lanterns and buckets of white paint), McNany and Tarlow are selling bottles from people “who actually grow the grapes and farm the fruit,” says Tarlow, whose restaurant portfolio (Diner, Roman’s, Achilles Heel) has long heralded a similarly intimate, person-to-person ethos. “I would say 99.9 percent of all the bottlings here are done by people who tend to their own land.”
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Of course, so-called natural wine can be found all over these days, but the Stranger difference lies in, perhaps, trying to eliminate a bit of the pretense inherent to the industry by focusing on education: The back of the shop is dedicated to a bar of sorts and a massive wooden table, at which the owners hope customers will participate in ad hoc tastings as winemakers swing through town. “As much as you think you know, everybody’s just learning,” McNany says. “That’s the main thing I want to highlight: It’s not snobbery. It’s a living thing, and everybody’s trying to figure it out.” The store’s knowledgeable staff is largely composed of writers, artists, performers and musicians (like McNany himself), and so one goal is that this becomes a kind of community creative hub; to that end, there is bread from Tarlow’s She Wolf Bakery for sale, and McNany has brought hundreds of vinyl records from his collection — another thing to study — for employees to play as locals shop (prices range between $12 to $100). Next up is a radio station, ideally, and definitely more wine: They’re currently trying to track down rare bottles from the producer Grape Republic in Yamagata, Japan, and are soon launching their first proprietary cuvee — a natural red blend — made in collaboration with Absentee Winery in Point Reyes, Calif. The bottle, like the neon sign outside the shop, is emblazoned with the word Stranger: “It’s inspired by trying to find a word in the English language that signifies something new everyday, something always changing, being humbled in what you know,” McNany says, before Tarlow adds his own interpretation: “Let’s get strange.” 132 Havemeyer Street Brooklyn, N.Y., strangerwinesnyc.com — KURT SOLLER
A Major Artist’s Miniature Sculptures
John Chamberlain, who died at age 84 in 2011, was best known for his enormous sculptures of crumpled scrap metal, usually sourcing the materials for his designs from auto bodies. The metaphorical — and, in many cases, literal — power of these objects, which could weigh hundreds of pounds and be well over 10 feet tall, is hard to overstate: as much as the American-made car has been a prideful symbol of this country’s ingenuity and freedom, Chamberlain managed to make its discarded remains into a running commentary on materialism as much as materiality, even though he resisted such mythology. (As he told a curator in 1986, “For 25 years I’ve been using colored metal to make sculpture, and all they can think of is, ‘What the hell car did that come from?’”)
Chamberlain has always been a more mercurial, unclassifiable artist than he gets credit for: He could be part-Abstract Expressionist savant, part-Minimalist philosopher and part-Pop Art mad scientist, and sometimes all at once. A new show at Hauser & Wirth, which opened this week, unveils a subtler, if not exactly softer side, through a series of small-scale sculptures the artist called “Baby Tycoons.” These sculptures are also made of scrap metal, but they are measured in inches and not feet (one of them, 1992’s vibrantly colorful “Sugarcake,” is less than seven inches tall). Chamberlain began making them in 1988, using materials he had around his studio. They’ve been exhibited sparingly in the time since then. The show is not unlike watching what would happen if The Hulk made jewelry, and is an intriguing glimpse at a lesser-known side of one of the great American sculptors of the last century. “John Chamberlain: Baby Tycoons” will be on view at Hauser & Wirth, 32 East 69th Street, New York, through October 19, 2019, hauserwirth.com — M.H. MILLER
From Dover Street Market, a Different Kind of Beauty Department
With its displays of avant-garde clothes and conceptual art installations, Dover Street Market has never been an ordinary department store. So naturally, the soon-to-open beauty department of its latest location — a single-story warehouse in Los Angeles’s Arts District — is similarly eccentric. And just as garments of divergent moods and price points are presented side by side elsewhere in the store, so too are the offerings here (and in the e-retail space): You’ll find high-end items like Oumere serums (held in delicate glass beakers) and Meo Fusciuni fragrances on the one hand, and pharmacy-grade items like Tweezerman tweezers, Bayer aspirin and even Okamoto condoms from Japan on the other. The idea, says Race Willard, a Los Angeles-based artist and photographer who conceived of the 100-square-foot, pegboard-paneled space with Dover Street Market founder Rei Kawakubo, was for it to feel like a cool person’s medicine cabinet, the kind you might be tempted to peek inside of during a private moment at a party. It also nods to our gender-fluid moment by privileging unisex products, and to the widespread proliferation of drag culture — in the works for holiday are hair dyes in a rainbow of hues and an exclusive collection of wigs. “This customer isn’t about conforming,” says Willard. “They’re about expressing themselves through a very personal vision.” losangeles.doverstreetmarket.com — ARDEN FANNING ANDREWS
New Moves Bring a Modernist Landmark to Life
For the newest installment of “Modern Living,” a series of dance works conceived of by the American artists Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly and set in iconic homes — the Schindler House in Los Angeles, the Glass House in New Canaan, Conn. — the duo, who go by Gerard & Kelly, has taken the show on the road. Later this month, they will debut a new piece in and around Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, in a suburb west of Paris. With its ribbon windows and open plan, the villa is well-suited as a stage, but while Gerard & Kelly are adept at reading physical space, they found themselves most interested in the history embedded beneath the surface: In 1929, as Le Corbusier was designing the house, he traveled from Rio de Janeiro to Bordeaux on an ocean liner and, while onboard, had an affair with the star performer Josephine Baker (he sketched her in bed and wrote letters to her years later). What if, the artists asked themselves, this relationship played a part in shaping the architect’s vision?
“Some of Corbusier’s writings reveal a very Eurocentric and patriarchal gaze, which is something we wanted to guard against in the piece. And yet I do think that social change often happens on an intimate level and that this encounter radicalized him,” says Kelly. In addition to mining Le Corbusier’s archives, he and Gerard watched and rewatched footage of Baker in action, noting, as Le Corbusier did, that her dancing was not just sensuous, but also polyrhythmic and mathematical. It’s impossible to hear this and not recall the architect’s famous assertion that “A house is a machine for living in.” At the same time, the villa’s vibrant interior palette, and the feeling that comes with moving through its suspended rooms — as if one is floating at sea — are proof that this paragon of Modernist architecture is not quite as stark, straight and rationalist as we might think. While doing a deconstructed version of the conga, one of Baker’s signatures, and chanting fragments from her songs, a diverse group of seven dancers will make their way up the ramps to the house’s solarium and then down its spiral staircase. “There are also smaller duets and trios that articulate different kinds of relationships that could potentially exist in the house,” says Kelly. “It was a chance to ask who’s not included in the story and complicate the narrative.” “Modern Living,” which is presented by the Festival d’Automne à Paris, will show at the Villa Savoye in Poissy, France, September 28-29 and October 5-6. festival-automne.com — KATE GUADAGNINO
The Next Generation of i-D
Alastair McKimm bought his first copy of i-D, the British youth culture magazine, in the late ’90s in Nottingham, England. He had recently moved to the city from his home in Northern Ireland to study fashion design and still wore the kinds of baggy pants and severe haircuts of his skateboarding and surfing crew back in Belfast (he had a long center part with an undercut). “It was real and relatable,” he recalls of the world captured in i-D’s pages, referencing shoots by the photographer David Sims and clothes by Raf Simons that took inspiration from emerging subcultures. “It was the first time I’d seen myself and my friends in a magazine.”
When McKimm releases his first issue of i-D as editor in chief tomorrow, at Dover Street Market in New York, it will be the culmination of his two decades working for the magazine, first as an assistant to Edward Enninful, then the fashion director, and most recently as fashion director himself. “This has been a 20-year journey,” he says, “i-D is in my blood.” Now, he hopes to give a new generation of readers the same experience he had when he first picked up the magazine — the feeling of being seen. On the six covers of the redesigned 450-page issue will be the genre-defying British musician FKA Twigs, the American actress Zoë Kravitz, the American rapper Kevin Abstract, the 17-year-old Danish model Mona Tougaard, the Spanish model Fernando Lindez — and, in a nod to McKimm’s own roots, the 20-year-old American skateboarder Tyshawn Jones.
Founded in 1980 by Terry Jones, a former art director at Vogue, and his wife Tricia, as an alternative to prescriptive glossy fashion publications, i-D has continued to speak to young people — including teenage me — about culture, politics and fashion in imaginative ways for nearly 40 years (I later worked at the magazine for three years). “The DNA of i-D is so strong,” says McKimm, “Every answer we need is there.” Accordingly, his redesign of the magazine draws on its history: “Issue 1 was the perfect magazine,” he says. Working with the New York design office Studio 191, McKimm has created a minimalist, impactful format that feels like a book in tone and is laid out to let photography — including photojournalistic projects (the new issue includes a story on Venezuelan migration by the photographer John Guerrero) — shine. There is one thing, though, that he knew he’d never change: “Obviously the logo would never be touched,” says McKimm, referring to i-D’s signature wink. i-d.co — ALICE NEWELL-HANSON
Is a Chair Just a Chair?
When the American artist Joseph Kosuth presented “One and Three Chairs” — a tableau of a wood folding chair, a photograph of that chair and an enlarged photocopy of a printed definition of a chair — at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965, he was asking if the physical makeup and concept behind a work, as well as the viewer’s experience of it, changed the work itself: Is a chair a purely utilitarian object, or is it more than that? Last year, Raquel Cayre, the New York-based curator and founder of the downtown design exhibition Dream House, saw Kosuth’s piece in person at the Centre Pompidou and found that it challenged her very understanding of what art can be. “The chair is unique in its ability to remind us that experience is something negotiated,” she says. “It has agency and plays a role in shaping our lives, the decisions we make, and how we inhabit space.” Inspired, she returned from her trip and began inviting artists and designers to conceive of their ideal chair.
The result, “Chairs Beyond Right and Wrong,” is a show of 50 or so works that takes its title from a 2017 installation by the multidisciplinary artist Seth Price (who is among the featured artists) and will open at R & Company in TriBeCa next week. It’s wonderfully wide-ranging — you’ll find parts of a maple spindle chair encased in clear acrylic by the Houston-based designer Joyce Lin alongside a series of paintings by the New York artist Nate Lowman — though the majority of the pieces are united by the fact that they stress form over function. They’re also mostly original designs, though Cayre included a few reinterpreted classics: The American artist Jordan Wolfson covered a Josef Hoffmann chair in bumper stickers while the contemporary artist Daniel Arsham bronze-casted a ’50s-era Pierre Jeanneret one. Artists and collaborators Margaret Lee and Emily Sundblad are responsible for the raffia-covered “Zebra Chair #2,” which seems to sidestep the contested line between art and design altogether and imagine the chair as a living being. “Chairs Beyond Right & Wrong” will be on view at R & Company, 64 White Street, New York, from September 10 through October 19, 2019, r-and-company.com. — NORA GRUBB
Exclusive Pieces From Today’s Most Exciting Designers
What is the future of fashion? According to the LVMH-owned luxury e-commerce site 24S, it looks a lot like a pair of simple brown corduroy pants, updated with puckish illustrations of flowers and fairy-tale frogs by the Brooklyn-based designer Emily Bode. Or it might be a Technicolor track jacket crafted from a patchwork fabrics by the Japanese brand Anrealage. These garments are just two among the collection of 51 exclusives pieces by eight designers from the LVMH Prize shortlist that 24S unveiled this week.
“The aim was to provide visibility to these creative talents, and connect their work with shoppers who are curious for newness and excited about young design,” says the retailer’s chief executive, Eric Goguey, of his decision to promote wares from these emerging labels to coincide with the award ceremony — a first for the company. Participating finalists include the Nigerian men’s wear designer Kenneth Ize, whose sharp tailoring features Crayola-colored African fabrics and European suiting silhouettes, and the British designer Bethany Williams, known for her collaborations with social enterprises including homeless shelters in London. It was the South African designer Thebe Magugu, though, who won the prize this week, as awarded by Dior’s Maria Grazia Chiuri and Louis Vuitton designer Nicolas Ghesquière among others. At 26 years old, Magugu was the youngest participant in the 2019 selection. His 24S capsule seamlessly intertwines masculine and feminine references; a structured sky-blue blazer comes with a cinch-waist belt, while a traditional collared shirt with an affixed businesslike tie in emerald green is rendered in a daring see-through mesh. “We feel it’s our responsibility to support the talents of tomorrow,” says Goguey. 24s.com — GRACE COOK
An Experiential Play With a Purpose
Despite inroads in both treatment and prevention since the 1980s, American black men are still disproportionately affected by H.I.V.; a CDC report in 2016 found that, if infection rates don’t improve by 2020, about one in two black men who have sex with men will contract the virus in their lifetime. That harrowing statistic is necessary context for a new theatrical work, “As Much As I Can,” which will next be performed in New York at the Public Theater’s Joe’s Pub from September 12 to 16. The piece, a sort of activism, has traveled the country since its original inception more than three years ago, when it was developed following conversations with men in Jackson, Miss., and Baltimore, Md.; their experiences form the bedrock of the production, which has been rescripted for its new venue (in New York, it was last shown in Harlem in 2018), but still blurs lines between audience and performer, stage and real life.
“We love experiential theater — such as ‘Queen of the Night’ and ‘Sleep No More’ — but they have no real broader purpose, other than to make you feel entertained,” says the play’s writer, Sarah Hall. “But that format is extremely useful in changing perceptions, even if no one really uses experiential theater that way: It helps us bear witness, which completely changes our relationship to black gay men.” Hall herself is not a typical theater-maker, but a partner at the New York City creative agency Harley & Co, which often plans immersive live events; the benefactors of this work are also not the usual art patrons, but an H.I.V.-focused health care company called ViiV that wanted to use the story of a group of friends — as well as neon lights, glitter and scenes of both faith and conflict — to address the realities of H.I.V. in black communities and, by doing so, help ameliorate this health disparity. As might be expected, the health care executives are not really involved in creative decisions, and Joe’s Pub is hosting the show on its regular calendar (rather than renting out the space), which speaks to the power and importance of the piece itself: “Part of the reason for bringing it downtown is really just making it clear that this is everybody’s issue,” Hall adds. “The shame and stigma is so profound, and yet we’re all complicit in some way.” amaicny.com — K.S.
A New Lanvin Store, Outfitted With a Designer’s Sprawling Artwork
Since launching his studio four years ago, the British artist and interior designer Luke Edward Hall has enjoyed an unceasing demand for his whimsical, taffy-colored palette and illustrations of classical Greek architecture and mythological figures. But his design objects, which range from tablewares and ceramics to embroidered velvet slippers, will seem diminutive in scale compared to his latest endeavor: a 72-foot mural that spans the length of Lanvin’s newest retail space in New York’s Soho neighborhood.
The 3,000-square-foot boutique, which opens this weekend with both women’s and men’s apparel and accessories, will be the brand’s first store since creative director Bruno Sialelli’s appointment earlier this year (and its first new location in New York in eight years). For Hall, the project marks a second collaboration with Sialelli, who recently enlisted him to illustrate the invitations for his spring 2020 men’s wear show. “Bruno wanted to do something classical,” Hall explained during a recent visit to the store, as he applied final accents of gold leaf to the wall. The request was an easy one for the 30-year-old artist to fulfill. “Growing up, I was obsessed with Greek mythology — I loved the stories, and that’s always stayed with me,” he said. “When I first started making things, I was making a lot of ceramics, fabrics and cushions, and a lot of inspiration came from classic motifs and mythology. It’s always been a common thread.” So too are specific ancient figures, such as Emperor Hadrian’s lover Antinous, who drowned in the Nile and was later venerated for his exceptional beauty. Depicted as a curly-haired figure with a down-turned face, Antinous also appears here, in Hall’s tableau of mostly nondescript Grecian characters, all rendered in single strokes of blue paint — a nod to the brand’s signature “Lanvin blue.” 150 Mercer Street, New York, lanvin.com — LAURA NEILSON
