As its name implies, Hacienda Los Milagros is a haven of magic and wonder. Perched directly on the azure waters of the Bay of Banderas in Punta Mita, Mexico, the house synthesizes myriad narrative threads and cross-cultural influences, which collide and coalesce to exhilarating effect. The deftly layered decor speaks to Mexico’s ascendant status on the contemporary art-and-design scene; the enduring appeal of the country’s extraordinary craft traditions; the fusion of American and Mexican attitudes toward hospitality; and, perhaps, most of all, the power of place. At the end of the day, it’s also a pretty swell spot to sip a copita of mezcal while gazing out on a pristine stretch of the Pacific Ocean. A Tanya Aguiñiga wall hanging commands the main living room. Read the full story here.

Most have focused their attention this week on Art Basel’s new Paris+ fair, which has more than 150 exhibitors and is taking place near the Eiffel Tower. But a smaller, more tightly curated affair just a half hour’s walk away offers a much different vision of what it looks like when galleries converge.

On the second level, Volume has two distinct spaces that face each other via a courtyard. In one are sparkling chandeliers by New York–based artist Sam Stewart, who worked in collaboration with a couture seamstress to achieve the intricate hand-pleating necessary to pull them off. Hung torso-level, they resemble the tops of jellyfish.

Across from them, also via Volume, are intricately knotted textiles sculptures by Tanya Aguiñiga, who is having her first presentation in Europe through the fair. The L.A.-based artist and activist creates these works, which speak to the experiences of those living in the borderlands of the U.S. and Mexico, in a very specific way: after she has knotted the raw cotton, she packs them with ice and then drops dye atop it. As the ice melts, the dye seeps into the fabric to create these kaleidoscope-like color fields.

“These works act as a space of respite, especially after the last two-plus years of the pandemic,” Volume cofounder Claire Warner said. “They’re celebratory, in a way, and are contending with the history of this space.”

The sculptures seem to weave themselves into the walls, and thus into the history of Paris, as worlds collide. Read the full article here.

Image Courtesy Samuel Spreyz for Novembre Global

Suburbia is where I grew up, but I don’t think you realize the meaning of the word until you live in a city. People drive everywhere to get anywhere. Having that kind of experience growing up feels like that cheap Hollywood special effect where someone appears to be driving but the car is stationary, since a projection on a screen provides the illusion of motion. This is even more convincing when you add to it the metronomic repetition of vinyl-clad tract houses and neatly trimmed fescue lawns. But I guess the same could be said about Manhattan anywhere North of 14th Street, and I would further argue that Los Angeles is an amalgamation of suburbs posing as a city. Read the full interview with Sam Stewart here.

Tanya Aguiñiga at Volume Gallery, Chicago

Tanya Aguiñiga is a Los Angeles-based artist, designer, and craftsperson originally from Tijuana. She sees craft as a performative medium and has collaborated with various border groups in activism and community-based public art. Her work is currently on view in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery exhibition, This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World. There is a beautiful formal quality to her work, which also plays with double entendres and language, all related to her experience with indigenous communities and speaking to the history of craft. There is also a powerful resistance to the limitations of craft. Please have a look at the artist’s website to see the broad range of themes, places, and spaces Aguiñiga has addressed. Read the full article here.

Tanya Aguiñiga

Presented by Chicago’s Volume Gallery, LA-based artist, craftsperson and performance artist Tanya Aguiñiga transformed ice-dyed cotton rope and synthetic hair into twisting, knotted wall-hung sculptures. Among the multi-textured works, “Azulito Sonriente” (2022) and “Barragán Tierno” (2022) mesmerize with their use of color and form. Vibrant and meticulously crafted, these artworks are unlike anything else at the show. Read the full article here.

For this episode, we asked artist, mother, and activist Tanya Aguiñiga which artist she would most wish to speak with and she chose visual artist and curator Julio César Morales.

The pair discuss the versatility of the border experience, unlikely influences, and functional art practices.

This episode is in partnership with The Armory Show. Both artists appearing in the episode are part of the curated sections of the fair’s 2022 edition. Tanya Aguiñiga’s work is presented by Volume Gallery in Focus, curated by Carla Acevedo-Yates, while Julio César Morales’s piece La Linea is presented by Gallery Wendi Norris in Platform, curated by Tobias Ostrander.

Listen to the episode here.

This week the Armory Show returns to New York for its 2022 edition in its new, post-pandemic home at the Javits Center. But for the first time in the storied art fair’s history, the event brings together three voices with related curatorial practices, offering a distinct, unified lens to engage transcultural questions in contemporary art. Heavyweight curators Carla Acedevo-Yates of the Museum of Contemporary Chicago, Tobias Ostrander of Tate, London, and Mari Carmen Ramírez from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston each lend a Latin American and Latinx viewpoint to this year’s iteration of the Focus and Platform sections, as well as the fair’s curatorial leadership symposium. Galleries in the Armory’s wider programming have also stepped up and taken the initiative to present artists that compliment this year’s speciality mission. Ahead of this year’s exhibition Cultured highlights five of the most dynamic legacy and emerging Latin American and Latinx artists on display throughout the fair this week.

Tanya Aguiñiga
Volume Gallery, Chicago

Growing up in Tijuana, Tanya Aguiñiga, 44, recalls crossing the Mexican/California border daily to attend school in San Diego, witnessing people sacrificing their lives every day trying to make it to the United States. As a child, she struggled to understand why being born on one side of a line determines a person’s ability to move freely. Along with collaborators in a massive quipu project (an ancient Andes system of record keeping comprised of fibrous strings) along both sides of the divide, Aguiñiga captured the liminal realities on the brink of the two countries by asking U.S./Mexico commuters about their perspectives: thousands of people from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas that each contributed a knot that represents their individual borderland experience. Read the full article here.

Chicago is alive with creativity – we pick three of the top design shows this summer.

Abigail Chang creates works informed by the interaction of material and detail. Her approach takes elements of material culture and the built environment to make conceptual statements that reflect on the current zeitgeist. Her recent ‘Skeuomorphic Screens’ installation explored the aperture-like qualities of screens as undervalued architectural components and her work has been shown at the Lisbon Architecture Triennale, the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. Chang is currently visiting assistant professor at the University of Illinois Chicago College of Architecture, Design and the Arts, and this is her first show with the renowned Volume Gallery, which often works with architects developing object design.

“Jonathan Muecke’s rigorous practice and mind-bending objects challenge how we understand design as a creative discipline,” says Irene Sunwoo, Curator of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago, “and at the same time encourages experimental display strategies that rethink what a design exhibition can be.” This exhibition surveys the designer’s most experimental pieces. Read the full Chicago Dispatch here.

The minimalist exhibition set-up adds a sense of mystery. The objects serve as invisible portals wherein one rethinks contemporary lives, challenging authenticity, values and the aesthetic and social aspects of material culture. Chang’s reflective surfaces affirm the viewer through their own reflection: When one moves, the reflection changes, pulling them into questions of perspective as they acknowledge the power to shape what we see. Turning the viewing process into a personal experience one cannot help but rethink issues of truth and illusion, beauty and vanity, confidence and skepticism—and ultimately the Self. Read the full review here.

Designer Jonathan Muecke thinks he is in the practice of making the same thing over and over again. It’s not true, of course, but his liminal objects — arcing textile sculptures that have no fixed function, chairs made from braided carbon tubes, a rock with holes — are unified by their oblique simplicity. Wyoming-born Muecke studied architecture at Iowa State University, interned at Herzog & de Meuron in Basel, Switzerland, and studied 3D design at the Cranbrook Academy of Art before establishing his own office in 2010. Most of his abstracted pieces are made entirely from one material, be it aluminum, carbon fiber, or stainless steel, and they’ve inspired a group of hyper-specific devotees. The 39-year-old currently shows with Maniera in Brussels and Volume Gallery in Chicago, not too far from the Art Institute of Chicago, which is currently staging his first major museum show until October 10, 2022. The exhibition consists of a selection of works that Muecke calls “open objects,” which investigate color’s shape, texture’s scale and the possibility of eliminating surfaces entirely. Read the full interview here.

Rising up from the atrium all the way to the third floor of the Wrightwood 659 gallery, “American Framing” fills the space with light-brown soft wood. The structure, previously by the U.S. Pavilion at the seventeenth International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2021), marks the first time this project will be seen in the United States. An exploration of the architecture of wood framing, the installation is a nod to the most common construction system in the States—a 2019 survey found wood is used in more than ninety-percent of new home construction, making it one of the country’s most important contributions to building practice. Read the full review of American Framing featuring Ania Jaworska and Norman Kelley here.

Tell us about your greatest inspirations or influences please. 

For me, traveling and working in different contexts is an exciting way to exchange ideas. I previously worked at architecture firms across the US and abroad in Tokyo and Basel, and these experiences impacted the way I practice and think. I also look closely at the everyday, at things and places that are familiar to distill ideas.

How are the current trends in technology and innovation affecting your work as a creative?

I am interested in how technology has impacted our daily life. For example, I have been writing about our reliance on screens and how screens are found everywhere in and outside our homes. I did a project for the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism called “Skeuomorphic Screens” that expands on this idea.

Read the full interview here.

Marta Los Angeles exhibition pays tribute to New Mexico

‘Tino’s White Horses’ by sculptor-designer Ross Hansen at Marta Los Angeles (until 6 August 2022) explore the desert landscapes of Ojo Caliente, New Mexico

With Ross Hansen based between California and New Mexico, his newest pieces are inspired by the equine neighbours dwelling in the remote desert landscape of the latter. The functional pieces, which range from seating, lighting, furniture and vessels, specifically reference the unincorporated Ojo Caliente community, best known for its distinctive geological formations and its mineral hot springs. According to Tewa tradition (a group of Pueblo tribes indigenous to New Mexico), the pools provide access to the underworld and so hover mythically between this world and the next.

Such duality is also present in Hansen’s new pieces, which expressively merge biomorphic and architectonic forms and furniture typologies, with an exquisitely fleeting materiality derived from his use of epoxy resin, faux-leather upholstery and sewn hemp fibreglass. As much evocative of the natural world as a spiritual one, the collection almost resembles an evolved species, cohabiting in a new realm. Read the full piece here.

“What is the texture of scale? Can a surface be eliminated? Can space expand?” Viewers encounter these and other questions, which are printed on a wall, upon encountering the Art Institute of Chicago’s exhibition “Objects in Sculpture” (through Oct. 10), Minnesota-based designer Jonathan Muecke’s first solo presentation in a major museum. For Muecke, a graduate of the Cranbrook Academy of Art who has worked at the Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron, objects are vessels through which to explore the connections between spaces, materials, and perception. Through his output—pared-down pieces in evocative forms and tactile mediums—he encourages viewers to think about how objects can shape the ways we interact with our surroundings. Read the full review here.

Volume Gallery is thrilled to announce that three works by Aranda\Lasch and Terrol Dew Johnson have been acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago. Horse Hair and Wood 01, 2018, Horse Hair and Wood 02, 2018, and Corrugated Vase, 2018 exemplify the collaborators’ approach to basket construction as a framework for experimentation and expression.

The San Francisco–based Maxwell/Hanrahan Foundation has established a new Awards in Craft program to recognize “individual craftspeople and artists for their work that honors and expands their roles as stewards of cultural traditions, innovators, and integrators,” according to a release. Administered by United States Artists, the pilot program is meant to address the dearth of funding for crafts art. Each winner will receive a $100,000 unrestricted grant. The inaugural five winners are Antonius-Tín Bui, Christine Lee, Jamie Okuma, Kristina Madsen, and Terrol Dew Johnson. Read the full award roundup here.

Volume Gallery is thrilled to share that artist and activist Terrol Dew Johnson is being recognized with an Award in Craft. Dew Johnson is a basket weaver and knowledge-keeper of Tohono O’odham traditions. The Maxwell|Hanrahan Foundation has partnered with United States Artists to establish this major award of unrestricted funds.

“Exploration and insight require time and commitment. The Maxwell/Hanrahan Foundation Awards in Craft seek to make both possible for devoted craftspeople and artists from around the country who strive to express what we see and experience in our world through engagement with material. The award recognizes practitioners committed to material mastery and exploration with practices encompassing the stewardship of living cultural traditions, unique insight in material study, and the advancement of craft at the intersection of other fields including science. We recognize that arts funding, especially for craftspeople, is lacking in the US, and we encourage others to commit to these fields.

2022 marks the first year for the Awards in Craft, and each year we aim to give five craftspeople $100,000. These are one-time, unrestricted awards intended to amplify the voices and work of each craftsperson and give them time and funding as they grow in their careers and propel their work forward. This year’s award winners were selected by a committee of panelists for their unique and visionary approach to material-based practice, their potential to make significant contributions to their craft in the future, and the potential for this award to provide momentum at a critical juncture in their career.” More about the Award here.

Chicago-based couple duo, Petra Bachmaier (b. 1974, Munich, Germany) and Sean Gallero (b. 1973, The Bronx, New York), founded their practice Luftwerk in 2007 to create immersive ephemeral installations using interactions of light, colour, sound, video projection, and space design to manipulate, trick, play, and enrich our sensory perception and spatial experience. The artists initiated their collaboration on all sorts of new media-based installations, while still being students, years before forming their professional practice, Luftwerk. The artists’ most representative works include the dual presentation Geometry of Light at the Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois, and at the German Pavilion in Barcelona, both designed by Mies van der Rohe; Fallingwater: Art in Nature, an animated performance projected over Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater; and Luminous Field at the Millennium Park in the heart of Chicago. In the following conversation over Skype between New York and Chicago, we discussed their idea that light can be sculpted as a material, the difference between light art and lighting design, the artists’ inspirations, and their joy in playing with the materiality of buildings. Read the full interview with the artists here.

Last year, the Ford Foundation and Mellon Foundation, two of the country’s largest philanthropic funders in the arts, joined forces to establish the Latinx Artist Fellowship, which will support the work of 75 Latinx artists at various stages in their careers over a five-year period.

Now, the foundations have announced the second cohort of artists who will each receive an unrestricted grant to support their careers. Administered by the US Latinx Art Forum, each 15-person cohort is composed of 5 emerging artists, 5 mid-career artists, and 5 established artists.

“As the Latinx Artist Fellowship enters its second year, we at Mellon are energized by the extraordinary sweep of work these fifteen artists envision and create, and the powerful perspectives and stories they bring to the visual arts,” Mellon Foundation president Elizabeth Alexander, said in a statement.

Grantees include some of today’s most closely watched artists, like painter Jay Lynn Gomez, the video collective Las Nietas de Nonó, and Tanya Aguiñiga, who won the $250,000 Heinz Award in 2021 and oversaw an initiative known as the BIPOC Exchange at this year’s Frieze Los Angeles. Read the full article here.

Wonderfully intriguing, Jonathan Muecke’s objects blur the lines between art, design and architecture; what is and what isn’t. Considering scale, form and function only to defy and redefine them, Muecke challenges what normal looks like. “There’s something about them that makes perfect sense and something about them that doesn’t make any sense at all,” he has said about the objects that include an enormous rock with holes, a solid wood block, a carbon tube bench, a dark green textile box and a wooden zigzag shape. In his work, furniture design meets sculpture, natural materials (rock, wood) meet carbon and Kevlar fiber, steel and epoxy resin, and functionality becomes obsolete. But Muecke is right. Somehow it all makes perfect sense. Read the full preview of Jonathan Muecke: Objects in Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago opening May 26 here.

Two things can be found everywhere at NADA New York in Lower Manhattan: painting and ceramics. This makes sense, since the younger generation of digital natives (people who grew up with the internet and social media) that NADA generally features tend to favor art that is pointedly nondigital and handcrafted.

Elsewhere, the focus on craft reigns. Jessica Campbell offers carpets that nod to spirits and deities at Western Exhibitions (Booth 3.02). Al Freeman’s simultaneously lovable and ominous soft-sculpture men-without-pants hang at 56 Henry (Booth 4.07); and fronds of bear grass, horsehair and copper are curled into elegant mobile sculptures, made by Aranda/Lasch and Terrol Dew Johnson, at Chicago’s Volume Gallery (Booth 5.02). Read the full fair review here.

The two-person display by Volume, a local Chicago space, is far from loud. The words meditative, contemplative, and serene all come to mind when standing amid Jonathan Muecke’s sculptures and Christy Matson’s acrylic-colored, woven geometric textiles.

While Muecke is best known for furniture and architectural design, his works on view here are aesthetic pieces above all else. They float on the edge of contradiction, with heavy materials made to feel light and more frail ones made to feel solid. These tensions never reach too far, though, and his works seem fully comfortable with themselves. The same can be said of Matson’s wall-hung pieces, which are as rooted in modern and contemporary art history—elements of minimalism, color theory—as they are in the lineage of craftwork that undergirds weaving. In her pieces, we see new and old balanced in a reflective harmony. Read Artsy’s picks for the 10 best booths at EXPO Chicago here.

Françoise Grossen
Volume Gallery, 1709 West Chicago Avenue Second Floor
5 March–23 April 2022
Known for suspended knotted-rope works made with braiding and plaiting techniques learnt in West Africa, Françoise Grossen has been looking for alternatives to fine materials and traditional textiles since the 1960s. See Ocula’s picks for the exhibitions to see during EXPO CHICAGO here.

“I don’t subscribe to the idea that there is a special and separate world in which sculpture exists. To me, it’s an extension of everything else that humans produce.”

BY WORKING WITH his preferred medium, ceramics, polymath Anders Herwald Ruhwald can engage with the skills he’s honed since the age of 15. Clay provides Ruhwald with the profound satisfaction of direct creation – seeing something useful or expressive be made from start to finish with one’s own hands. Working with this natural substance serves as a kind of literal and metaphoric grounding, a return to the earth, especially in an age dominated by digital detachment and virtual distraction. “My body intrinsically knows the clay’s properties,” the Chicago-based, Danish-born artist explains. “The material seems to offer endless possibilities that I can’t always predict.” Read the full review here.

The exhibition, curated by Love Jönsson, is on view at the Rian Design Museum through April 24th.

“To me, ceramics is a language. It is a way of bringing meaning into the world through form and material. It is a methodology.

I have been making ceramics for more than 30 years. I began when I was 15, and since then, the opportunities presented by clay, glaze and firings have been an important aspect of my life. It is my primary language, as an artist and as a person.

Ceramics has taken me to other countries, built a global circle of friends and given me an anchor in life that is not attached to a place but to a material. I feel that I know people through the ceramics they create.

When I first saw one of Carl-Harry Stålhane’s vases from the 1950s in the collection of the Cranbrook Art Museum in the United States, I experienced a deep sense of kinship. I was drawn to it and wanted to understand it better. It made sense. It felt right and well-considered. And the glaze was infinitely beautiful.”

Read the entire piece here.

Morán Morán is pleased to present Anders Herwald Ruhwald’s first solo exhibition in Mexico City and his second with the gallery, titled This is the Living Vessel: Body. Ruhwald’s work is primarily based in ceramics, a medium he engages as both a methodology and a historical framework to process his ideas. His works traverse sculpture and utility indiscriminately, often in a contradictory and paradoxical way. The title of the show is a quote taken from The Black Mountain School poet and potter M.C. Richards’ countercultural classic, Centering, from 1964. In this book, Richards explores the poetry of humanity through the metaphor of centering – a core aspect of making pottery. Likewise, Ruhwald sees the act of making as a way of being, a way to make sense of the world. More about the exhibition here.

America’s Wall by Tanya Aguiñiga is featured in the traveling group exhibition, LatinXAmerican. LatinXAmerican is an intergenerational group exhibition on loan from the DePaul Art Museum (DPAM) Chicago that features Latinx artists from Chicago and beyond. This exhibition reflects a multi-year initiative to increase the visibility of Latinx artists and voices in museums, working towards equity and lasting transformation. More about the exhibition here.

Volume Gallery is delighted to share that Christy Matson’s solo exhibition, Currents 38: Christy Matson, will be on view at the Milwaukee Art Museum from February 25 to July 17, 2022.

Currents 38: Christy Matson presents woven works of art that pair new technologies with centuries-old craft knowledge to create distinctive, painterly compositions. On view in the Museum’s Bradley Family Gallery, the exhibition features more than 40 woven objects by the Los Angeles-based artist who has helped reshape the traditional medium of weaving into a contemporary art form.

Though Matson (b. 1979) works with textiles, the artist views herself as a painter. Using a digital jacquard loom and her knowledge of historic weaving techniques, Matson creates woven pictures that are rooted in minimalism, abstraction, and decoration and are intended to hang on the wall. She also utilizes these weaving structures and techniques to explore memory; the gendered history of textile production, long considered a feminized form of labor; and issues around sustainability. Her work honors the traditional medium while reflecting the strong, recent embrace of fiber by contemporary artists. More about the exhibition here.

On March 5th, Chicago’s Volume Gallery will open a solo show dedicated to pioneering Swiss-American textile artist Françoise Grossen. Since the 1960s, Grossen has been experimenting with textile techniques and industrial materials to create large-scale installations. Her work can be found in international collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Museum of Arts and Design, Museum Bellerive, Renwick Gallery Smithsonian Institution, and the State Hermitage Museum, among many others. This don’t-miss show runs through April 23rd. View Design Miami’s roundup of design world news here.

After a year-long hiatus, Frieze Los Angeles opened on Thursday, offering the usual mix of international galleries and local spaces alongside less expected programming, such as a dedicated space for social justice. As part of a collaboration with artist Tanya Aguiñiga, ten BIPOC-led art and advocacy organizations from across the city gathered at the fair for a BIPOC Exchange, a program of performance, installation, and education that will span the run of the fair, which closes on Sunday. “Visitors will be expecting a certain kind of art, and instead find us,” Aguiñiga said in an interview.

When Aguiñiga spoke with ARTnews, she was en route to the Wilshire Garden inside the Beverly Hilton Hotel, where the BIPOC Exchange is located. The space comprises booths and an area for performances designated by a stage of flowers—which the artists believes make the space more accessible than a raised platform, she said. Trees transplanted from a nearby nursery are scattered throughout. The flowers she picked up from florists herself, temporarily transforming her car into a movable meadow. Read the full interview here.

The Los Angeles artist and activist Tanya Aguiñiga has brought together several artist-led projects across different disciplines for a special section at the fair.

Ahead of Frieze this year, the director Christine Messineo approached Tanya Aguiñiga, the Los Angeles artist and activist, about creating a project to coincide with the fair. “I had the idea to search for different Bipoc, artist-led projects across different disciplines,” Aguiñiga says. “I wanted to organise something that was really expansive in the way that we think about art, and the ways that art can address the most pressing issues in our city.”

With the support of Santa Barbara’s Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation, Aguiñiga created the BIPOC Exchange, a community-centric space in a garden adjacent to Frieze’s venue, the Beverly Hilton Hotel. There, for the duration of the fair, ten organisations are raising money for, and awareness of, various artistic pursuits throughout Los Angeles. For each, art might provide a means of financial support: the People’s Pottery Project, for example, puts the proceeds from selling ceramics toward job training and placements for formerly incarcerated women, trans and non-binary people. Read the full article here.

The Felix LA Art Fair returned to the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel this week for its third full-scale edition, after a slimmed-down one last summer that featured mostly hometown galleries. An international selection of 60 galleries was split between ground-floor cabana suites surrounding a David Hockney–painted pool, and hotel rooms on the 11th and 12th floors, harkening back to an earlier generation of hotel fairs before the rise of the current global art fair circuit.

L.A.-based artist Tanya Aguiñiga grew up in Tijuana and San Diego, and much of her practice—in particular her ongoing project AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides), which seeks to address issues related to communities along the U.S.-Mexico border—relates to the duality of border life. Her textile sculptures and wall works have their basis in traditional Mexican weaving but are also in dialogue with fiber artists like Sheila Hicks. They also incorporate the border, sometimes quite literally, as with Corazón Fronterizo (Border Heart), 2021, which includes a real fragment of the fence dividing the U.S. and Mexico woven into the piece’s rope and terracotta lattice. Read the article here.

A highlight for Frieze Los Angeles 2022 is a collaboration with Tanya Aguiñiga to present BIPOC Exchange.

This communal space, located within The Beverly Hilton Hotel, inside the Wilshire Garden, will present 10 Los Angeles-based, artist-led social impact projects including People’s Pottery Project, Tierra Del Sol, AMBOS, Las Fotos Project, Classroom of Compassion, Tequio Youth/MICOP, Contra Tiempo, GYOPO, Los Angeles Poverty Department, and Urban Voices Project.

Watch the artists talk about community empowerment ahead of Aguiñiga’s BIPOC Exchange project at Frieze Los Angeles 2022 here.

After a two-year hiatus, Frieze Los Angeles is back. Tickets are already sold out, but even if the admission prices are beyond your price range, the art fair has opened another avenue to enjoy a taste of L.A.’s cultural riches: the BIPOC Exchange.

Set up in a garden area inside the Beverly Hilton hotel, the BIPOC Exchange features 10 organizations handpicked by artist Tanya Aguiñiga. Her artistic practice empowering communities especially at the border made her a natural choice for the daunting task of winnowing down L.A.’s multitude of artist-led projects serving our society. Visitors can expect performances, workshops, but also items available for purchase. Profits will go towards the advocacies of the organizations.

KCET asked Aguiñiga about how she made her selection and her views on the role of art in communities. Read the full interview here.

“There are certain techniques that take an entire lifetime to learn,” says Christy Matson, who for the past two decades has been working as a fiber artist. Matson’s practice blends thousand-year-old weaving traditions with 21st-century innovation. She designs her textiles through Photoshop, then weaves them by hand on a Jacquard loom that tracks her progress on a computer. The works, she says, exist between an “analog, physical version of life and this sort of hybrid space of being online.” Read the full portrait of the artist here.

The dawn of a new year feels like the perfect opportunity to scan the design landscape for standout forms, materials, and approaches. In our new series The Edge, Design Miami/Editors spotlight contemporary objects that define our current moment.

New York designer Sam Stewart similarly specializes in creating witty and well considered objects that lend tons of personality to their surroundings. His new, uncharacteristically demure Lamellae Lamp is an understated beauty and quite the conversation piece. Produced in collaboration with expert New York tailor Victoria Yee Howe, it’s composed of intricately hand-pleated, hand-stitched raw muslin—nearly 18 yard per lamp—layered over a hidden steel structure. So simple, so elegant. The warming glow emanating from its exquisite folds has a welcoming, comforting effect. View The Edge’s selections here.

Now Showing: Chicago’s Volume Gallery presents Private Quarters III, the latest in a series of group exhibitions spotlighting the gallery’s creative roster. This iteration features reflections on domestic space, presenting work by Ross Hansen, Jennefer Hoffmann, Christy Matson, Jonathan Muecke, and Thaddeus Wolfe. Highlights include, among others: Hoffmann’s new pillar-shaped ceramics, referencing both the rolling hills and steeples of North Carolina, as well as the wasps and bees in her studio; and striking dark glass work by Wolfe. The latter, cast in a crystalline pattern and topped with windows that reveal chromatic insides, call to mind both otherworldly geological formations and, for us, the relationship between one’s interior and exterior worlds. On view through February 22nd. View Design Miami’s roundup of design world news here.