Will This Brooklyn Museum Show Produce a Future Virgil Abloh?

Nicole Phelps, Vogue, June 29, 2022

The centerpiece of the “Virgil Abloh: ‘Figures of Speech’” exhibition opening at the Brooklyn Museum New York this Friday is Social Sculpture, a wood cabin built for purpose in the center of the museum’s Great Hall where lessons, lectures, and other activations will take place. It’s bare save for a large speaker and an Inez and Vinoodh-lensed Louis Vuitton campaign image of a young Black child in a Wizard of Oz sweater from Abloh’s spring 2019 debut for the LVMH house. The photo occupies a window frame and the exhibition’s guest curator Antwaun Sargent likens it to a “Virgil self portrait.”

When an earlier version of this show ran at the Museum of Contemporary art in Chicago, Abloh’s hometown, the late designer said he hoped it would produce “at least seven more Virgil Ablohs in the future.”


Photo: Landon Phillips

 

He was a designer of progress—the founder of a streetwear brand that rose to the very pinnacle of luxury fashion, as the first African American man at a French luxury goods house. While his achievements are likely to inspire many more would-be Virgils, the great tragedy of his death at 41 last November is that it has deprived fashion—and the larger world—of decades more of his own original thinking. “What would it have meant for him to live for another 41 years? How would he have changed?” Sargent asks. “This traveling show is in effect his first museum exhibition. I want to know: What’s his fifth museum exhibition? How do the brands evolve? Would we have had a Black heritage brand? Would he have made real paintings? Those are the questions I can’t get over.”

 

Abloh enlisted Sargent, a writer who published The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion, in 2019, to help reshape the show for Brooklyn. It was scheduled for 2020, but the pandemic delayed its opening. The two were working via WhatsApp right up until the designer’s final days. Social Sculpture isn’t the only new addition. What visitors see first is a sound system project with Braun that Abloh didn’t get to see completed, featuring a 45-minute loop that fuses ’60s jazz with Houston slab rap. “We all know that Virgil was a prolific DJ,” Sargent explains. “And so in a way, you’re greeted with his voice and this idea of community, of breaking down the barriers between different sorts of canons.”

 

From there, the show is arranged more or less chronologically, from a college sketchbook tagged Vergone (his nickname), to a tennis dress and gown he designed for Serena Williams and Beyoncé respectively, to an art project he made with Takashi Murakami. “Virgil had this incredible hunger for all these collaborations, whether it was Ikea, or LVMH, or Mercedes,” says Anne Pasternak, the director of the museum. “And whatever it was, he wanted to show people that they could be in these places as well, and that they needed to be in these places.”

'Anyieth as the Statue of Liberty', 2019 © Inez & Vinoodh / courtesey The Ravestijn Gallery

The show ends with one of the three angel looks from his posthumous fall 2022 Louis Vuitton collection, presented in Paris in January. In trademark Abloh style, the exhibition flouts a number of institutional rules. First there are the tables themselves; in unfinished wood, they’re of Abloh’s design and they’re meant to look and feel more retail-like, than museum-like. Pastenak calls them “a leveling technique.” Then there’s the fact that much of the work—his uber-popular Nike sneaker collabs included—is displayed on those tables as if it were for sale, without glass vitrines to protect it. The racks of Off-White clothes that line one wall of the space are likely to tempt further interaction.

 

Most disruptive of all? Little delineates the exhibition store from the exhibition itself. There is no “exit through the gift shop” scenario. Abloh rejected the lofty (read: old-fashioned) separation of art and commerce. With a wink, the store is named “Church & State” and it’s absolutely an extension of the show. The actual exit is via Abloh’s wall of heroes: a mural featuring Michael Jordan, Pharrell Williams, Marc Jacobs in an LV cap, and a Calder sculpture in Chicago’s Federal Plaza, among other things. The name of the show nods to Abloh’s use of language and quotation marks, but those heroes were his “figures of speech, too,” Sargent explains. The conversations Abloh started seem sure to continue.