3 Highlights From This Year’s New York’s Salon Art + Design Fair
Early last month, the New York fair brought together a diverse array of collectible works from established and up-and-coming talents.
Black Folks in Design
Taking full advantage of its strategic location—the Park Avenue Armory on New York’s Upper East Side—this year’s Salon Art + Design fair had record-breaking sales and attendance: 2,500 on opening night. Attracting a discerning clientele largely from the neighbourhood, the annual event brings together an eclectic collection of contemporary, vintage, and historical artworks, collectible designs, first-edition books, and even miniatures: an installation by the popular interiors practice Studio Giancarlo Valle. The Female Design Council made its fair debut with a vignette featuring new works by eight of its members.
From the extensive exhibits, NUVO has selected three standouts that displayed playful applications or delved deep into timely topics.
New lighting and wool-thread-wrapped wall sculptures by Thomas Cooper Studio
The long-established Los Angeles lighting design practice Thomas Cooper Studio returned to Salon Art + Design with three new luminaire collections, as well as the Gala mirror and a triptyque of colourful geometric woven wall sculptures called The Sagas. Forged through the long-standing collaboration of creative and life partners Sally Thomas Cooper and Jason Kai Cooper—who both cut their teeth in theatre and production design—the company excels in decorative fixtures for residential and hospitality projects and emphasizes material experimentation, the reimagined use of age-old artisanal techniques. These latest pieces demonstrate that experimental approach in different ways. A marked deviation from their other work, The Sagas draw inspiration from ancient Viking storytelling and carry a talismanic quality.
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Black Folks in Design: Spotlight III presented by Verso
Debuting new explorations by noted designers Nifemi Marcus-Bello (Nmbello Studio), Studio Ker, Jonas Damon, Asmite, Shoshanna Weinberger, Swallow and Tea, and Studio & Projects, the multifaceted collective Black Folks in Design teamed up with the itinerant gallery Verso for its third Spotlight showcase. Curated by Little Wing Lee, the exhibit explored the potential of range, scale, and perspective in a variety of hand-crafted mediums: wood and metal furnishings, fibre, carved stone, and drawing. Nmbello Studio’s new M2 is a dynamic reinterpretive combination of all five.
“With any of the Spotlight shows, my approach is to showcase the breadth of the quote ’Black aesthetic’ across mediums and formats,” Lee says. “There are, of course, sympathies and interplays between the pieces I have selected, but each stands clearly on its own. For example, I love that while there are certain formal moves, materials, or motifs shared by many of the pieces, they each arrive at a very different place and represent a uniquely exciting idea. I selected all of these objects because of their beauty and story. Some were born simply out of aesthetic exploration. Others are grounded in a larger narrative idea.”
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‘11’ presented by Zarlot
Participating in Salon Art + Design for the first time, the Brooklyn-based architecture collective and gallery Zarolat mounted the ‘11’ exhibit, a selection of 11 furniture pieces and artworks by seven local talents arranged as if in a home interior. “These pieces demonstrate skilful manufacturing methods, questioning the nature of materiality and its boundaries,” founder Zeynep Arolat says. “Utilizing the physical qualities of the space we inhabit, each curation we orchestrate offers a unique experience by not only highlighting the individual objects but also by creating a dialogue among the pieces, challenging the ordinary ways of viewing art.” Exhibitors include Aimee Sy, Berk Ilhan in collaboration with Adem Önalan, Edoardo Cozzani, Giulia Archimede, Maja Dlugolecki, and Robert Thiele.
