NYCxDESIGN 2019

NYCxDESIGN, New York City’s yearly festival of design, highlights the unique creative, cultural, educational, and economic opportunities in the city. The festival showcases over a dozen design disciplines through exhibitions, installations, trade shows, panels, product launches, and open studios that in total will engage more than five million visitors and residents. This week we stopped by a few of the festival’s exhibit locations. At the Design Pavilion in Times Square, the headquarters for the festival, the highlight for us was “Chairousel,” a collaborative art piece by the students from the School of Visual Arts’ (SVA) 3D Design and Interior Design Departments that features a collection of chairs — each of which is a representation of what inspires each design student — that spin around on a refurbished 1960s carousel, on top of which is a twenty-six-foot high chair. At the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), we stopped by two exhibits. The Graduating Student Exhibition is a culmination of each artist’s unique experience as a student of FIT, and The Future is in the Making exhibition reveals both the “processes of thought and ideation” behind artwork that took several years to create along with the final artwork itself.

Viewfinding

Viewfinding is a public art installation and queer poetry collaboration by Sarah E. Brook, a New York-based artist whose work utilizes “translucency, layering, color gradients and architectural references to investigate the relationship between expansive external and internal (psychic) space.” Located off the 68th Street Entrance to Riverside Park South, the interactive light sculpture is comprised of five wooden trapezoidal panels within which are strips of cast acrylic painted in colors from rich blue to fiery pink, all meant to reference the sky at sunset. Twenty-six poems by queer poets are attached to the bench below the panels. Through her art, Brook invites the viewer to explore “how vastness can dismantle limiting narratives of being” and “offers viewers the opportunity to seek their own resonant orientation to the work through chosen sightlines, alternately illuminating, obscuring and revealing corridors of visibility.”

Designer of Dreams

Located in the recently-opened Sainsbury Gallery in London’s Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum, “Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams” features over 500 pieces that trace the house of Dior’s work and influences beginning with the inception of the fashion house in 1947. Focusing specifically on Dior’s fascination with British culture, the exhibition celebrates the designer’s successful revival of high fashion in the years following World War II, when countries throughout Europe were still being forced to ration their resources. “In 1947, Christian Dior changed the face of fashion with his New Look, which redefined the female silhouette and reinvigorated the post-war Parisian fashion industry,” explains V&A’s Curator of Modern Textiles & Fashion, Oriole Cullen. The display of 200 rare couture gowns “showcases the ways in which Dior’s succeeding creative directors have been inspired by his legacy,” from the daring designs of Yves Saint Laurent to the ebullience of John Galliano and the minimalism of  current Creative Director, Maria Grazia Chiuri. A collection of Christian Dior’s personal possessions is presented alongside the gowns, including accessories, photography, film, perfume, make-up, illustrations, and magazines, to give visitors a deeper understanding of the man behind the successful couture house.

Earth Day New York 2019

This week the Earth Day Initiative hosted its annual Earth Day New York Festival in Union Square, meant to inspire attendees to make increasingly environmentally-friendly choices. This year’s festival was a special edition of the event — the start of a year-long countdown to Earth Day’s 50th anniversary in 2020. In addition to the dozens of exhibitors, including non-profits, green businesses, kids' activities, and live performances, the outdoor festival featured artists who created works of art — live and on-site — surrounding environmental themes that were inspired by the recent Green New Deal proposal. Among those featured was Molly Egan, a Philadelphia-based artist who, in anticipation of the art installation, said that her artwork depicts “people making more sustainable choices like recycling, composting, replacing plastic water bottles with reusable ones, and eating more environmentally friendly foods.” John Oppermann, Earth Day Initiative’s executive director, emphasized the importance of interactive events like Earth Day New York and noted how important the event has been since its founding in 1970: “That was a time when people really raised their voices and said, ‘We need to do something about these environmental issues.’ A lot of the safeguards we have in place today, we take for granted.” He added: “That is something we should keep in mind…when we see attacks on environmental protections we have now.”