An Exclusive Look at Kelly Wearstler’s Upcoming H&M Home Collaboration
Plus, urban garden-inspired wallpapers, a new Four Seasons in South America, and more AD discoveries this month
By Hannah Martin, Julie Coe, and Sam Cochran
Exhibitions
At Nina Johnson Gallery, Atlanta-Based Artist Robell Awake Explores Black Craft, One Seat at a Time
In the 19th century, brothers John and Hugh Finlay pioneered the Baltimore Fancy Chair, modeling its klismos back not after firsthand encounters with the ancient Greek perches but after representations on Grecian urns. “It’s a copy of a copy,” says Robell Awake, an Atlanta-based artist who is now continuing in that grand American tradition, sampling and remixing forms from the past. His reinterpretation of that Maryland muse incorporates pay-phone keys as embellishments and pictures the Egyptian deity Neith, who many call the blueprint for the goddess Athena. It’s the first of a new series that will star in his show this month at Nina Johnson gallery’s new Manhattan outpost.
Awake’s work all behaves like this, stirring references and ephemera into narrative assemblages. That practice started on a 2018 visit to Ethiopia, where he encountered Jimma thrones, hewn from a single piece of wood with graphic cutouts. Four years later, a Center for Craft grant brought him to Tennessee to study the ladderback chairs of enslaved craftsperson Richard Poynor. Awake then began making perches of his own, mixing the sculptural quality of the Jimma with Poynor’s signature slats, all using green woodworking. “It’s a preindustrial way of making furniture,” he says of the technique, which entails “starting from a log, splitting out your parts, and then using hand tools for basically everything.”
Having worked as a carpenter, Awake welcomed functional sculpture as a medium for storytelling. Safari, an oak-and-hickory piece sporting a blue-and-yellow bedazzled monster, interrogates cobalt and copper mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. With its graphic slits, Quilt Back Poynor Chair No. 1, meanwhile, interprets the improvisational quilts of Gee’s Bend.
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