Yoors Truly

Abstract floral imagery is featured in many of the tapestries of Jan Yoors, whose picaresque life and multi-media creations were the subject of a feature in the Summer 2010 issue of Modern magazine. And, appropriately, the work of Yoors—as well as that of his life partners Marianne Yoors and the late Annabert Yoors, who brought his designs to existence on the loom—is experiencing a re-efflorescence via a series of exhibitions currently on view, or upcoming, in New York City, and in Europe. Last month, the downtown New York gallery ReGeneration Furniture installed its second exhibition of Yoors work shown this year: Tapestries, Drawings, and Gouaches from the Estate of Jan Yoors, (the show runs through March 26th 2011). It includes a selection of whimsical paintings executed by Jan Yoors in 1947, which depict a variety of mammals, insects, birds, crustaceans, and reptiles. Among the tapestries on view is Cobalt Mountain (1977), simple in design but grand in scale—it measures over twenty feet in length. Other tapestries include one of Yoors’s early figurative works, Wolves Howling at the Moon (1956), as well as The Ploughshare (1977), and Vermilion Tantra (1976).

The gouaches on view, selected from a collection of hundreds in various stages of completion, are intriguing. It is unknown why Yoors painted so many of these small works while living in London after World War II and attending classes at the School of Oriental and African Studies. But a flip through one of his notebooks reveals that the idea for several of these simple renderings came from days of wandering around London’s museums—which is where he found much of his inspiration. Notably, a postcard depicting the migratory locust (Shistocerca gregaria), from the British Museum of Natural History, is inserted next to a sketch in a notebook of the same year, complete with a color schematic labeling different areas of the radically simplified insect.

Jan Yoors was very much interested in all of life’s details, some of which he chose to capture in photography. Opening on Thursday, December 17th, at New York’s L. Parker Stephenson Gallery is Jan Yoors: Harlem, c. 1963 (on view through February 24th), which documents the life of the neighborhood during the time of the civil rights movement. This is the first time in thirty-five years that the artist’s photographs will be featured in a gallery exhibition. An opening reception will be held on December 16th from 6pm to 8pm. Lastly, make a note on your calendar for the forthcoming exhibition at New York’s Museum of Art and Design entitled Crafting Modernism: Midcentury American Art and Design (opening in October 2011), which, among works by a variety of artists and designers, will include one Yoors tapestry. And on the European front, several shows are being planned, including a photographs exhibition in Belgium at FelixArt museum, which is slated to open in 2012. -Beatrice Thornton

Design Miami 2010 (part two)

Design Miami 2010
Part Two

Talking Furniture
“Creating a dialogue” between furnishings, or between works of art, is one of the stock phrases used by dealers to explain the way they curate their galleries. It’s an unassailable bit of jargon because it can mean anything: the “dialogue,” after all, can be a shouting match.

Johnson Trading Gallery of New York, however, has devised a space in which the phrase actually makes sense. Owner Paul Johnson is displaying both mid-century and contemporary pieces made of materials as diverse as wood and Delaware bluestone, but which spring from the same mindset. In Johnson’s booth is a Sixties George Nakashima desk paired with a zebrawood “Writing Chair” by studio designer David Ebner. These pieces stand in contrast and in harmony with stone pieces—chairs, a table, and a desk—by the contemporary designer Max Lamb. Sitting amid these pieces is a burlwood coffee table made by the late northern California designer and sculptor J.B. Blunck, under whom Lamb studied. If, in Nakashima’s famed apercu—he and designers like Ebner and Blunck seek to reveal “the soul of a tree,” Lamb has found the soul of a stone.

P.S. There is work by another Lamb on display at Johnson Trading Gallery—Walter Lamb, a midcentury California-based designer best known for his outdoor furniture made from surplus bronze tubing garnered from the U.S. Navy. Johnson has a pair of chairs that, at first glance, appear to be to be Paul Frankl rattan pieces—the well-known design with an oblong sandwich of bentwood forms that make up the armrests and skids of the chair. That’s what I thought they were, anyway. When I reached down and felt cold metal instead of warm wood, I thought I might have had a stroke.

Isn’t it Good—Korean Wood

The design world, at least, is doing its part to level the trade deficit with South Korea. The collecting market for classic American modern pieces is booming in the Asian country. In turn, work by contemporary Korean designers is appearing with more and more frequency in U.S. galleries, or being exhibited abroad by Korean dealers. Case in point: Gallery Seomi from Seoul, which has participated in Design Miami events—in Florida and in Basel, Switzerland—for the past three years.

Previously, Seomi had presented pieces composed of ceramics, stone, metal, and other “cold,” so to speak, materials. This year, however, the emphasis is on wood-based works that—judging by the fact that the gallery has sold almost all its stock—is very appealing to a Western aesthetic. Of particular note is the 2010 “Steam Series” by the 30-year-old designer Bae Sehwa. The designs are made of stack-laminated strips of walnut, which are steamed until they are pliable. The wood is then molded to create curved seating sections, opening up interstices between the walnut strips. On a more luxurious plane are the “From Glitter” tables and seating pieces by Kang Myung Sun, who painstakingly applies broad swathes of mother of pearl to a black-lacquered wood base. The pieces glow and sparkle in a way that would have made that past master of exotic materials, Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann, fume with envy.

Bold Face Names

Yes, the moment you’ve been waiting for: celebrity sightings (although many of these luminaries were not personally eyeballed by your humble correspondent).

At the Design Miami preview night, Calvin Klein and model Naomi Campbell were spotted making the rounds of dealer booths. Pharrel, the hip-hop star/fashionista/budding furniture designer, has also been a popular presence. Others making the rounds at Art Basel and other Miami Beach venues: Steve Martin, a longtime and astute art collector, flush with the critical success of his new novel, “An Object of Beauty,” which is set in the art gallery world. Ben Stiller (whoda thunk it?), Danny Glover, Adrien Brody, Julian Lennon, and, bless him, George Hamilton—still working on his tan.

—Greg Cerio

Design Miami 2010

Design Miami 2010
Part One

You could say, jokingly, that the Design Miami fair, inaugurated six years ago, has been a tick, riding on the big dog that is the Art Basel Miami Beach extravaganza.That metaphor had, until this year, one flaw: Design Miami was held nowhere near Art Basel. The design fair was located across Biscayne Bay in Miami proper, and the distance was an inconvenience to the art collectors, the brain trust behind Design Miami hoped to attract.

Finally the little bug has cozied up to its host. This year,Design Miami is located in a 40,000-square-foot tent, set up on a parking lot a tee shot away from Art Basel’s home in the Miami Beach Convention Center. The tent—designed by the New York firm Moorehead & Moorehead—is pretty cool, as tents go. The vinyl walls in the outdoor entry area are slit horizontally, and the resulting bands are pinched together at points, creating a cross-hatched effect. It makes for a nice backdrop for the forest of hammock chairs (the work of Konstantin Grcic, the fair’s “Designer of the Year”) and for the models representing Veuve Cliquot champagne, whose job is to stand in the entry area, twirl orange umbrellas, and look pretty. It’s a living

Above: Views of the 40,000 sq ft tent and hammock chairs designed by

Konstantin Grcic, winner of the Designer of the Year award. Below: A view of Grcic's booth.

Two highlights from the fair:

Award for most attractive space goes to Galerie Patrick Seguin. The mighty Paris dealer is only selling work by Jean Royère, and the booth—put together by architect India Mahdavi—is arranged as a household room wrapped in bright floral wallpaper and furnished with pieces such as Royère’s famed Polar Bear sofa and club chairs. The one flaw may be that the space is so inviting that you want to sit down and read the newspaper there. And that would be frowned upon.

Above: Detail of the floral wallpaper at Galerie Patrick Seguin

Above: The booth for Galerie Patrick Seguin

For several years, the crystal maker Swarovski has sponsored installations at Design Miami. While past pieces were dizzying and dazzling arrays of faceted glass, this year, the firm took a new course towards technology. The installation, titled “Falling Light” and created by the London-based design team TROIKA, incorporated a ceiling mounted network of motorized moving armatures. At the tip of each armature is an LED, and the rods are synchronized to dip down towards small crystal lenses. The effect is that seeming random pools of light appear momentarily on the floor: light falling like raindrops. It’s mesmerizing…

Above: Ceiling view of "Falling Light" designed by TROIKA for Swarovski

—Greg Cerio