By Aileen Kwun
Bees, seeds, metal and stone all made appearances for the event that makes the city a design hub. By
NYCxDesign, a design festival held each May in New York City, wrapped up its 11th edition last week with a strong array of group shows across boroughs — in Soho showrooms, artist studios and backyards in Brooklyn, vacant office spaces in Chinatown and galleries in between. Though officially billed as a weeklong festival beginning May 19 and anchored by the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) and WantedDesign at the Javits Center, the event circuit seemed to begin in earnest a week before, with a packed roster of adjacent art and design fairs in town — including The European Fine Art Foundation (TEFAF), Frieze New York and the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA). Below are a few highlights from this year’s edition.
Raw Materials
Several design galleries presented solo exhibitions that emphasized the heft and beauty of stone and concrete. In Chelsea, the Friedman Benda gallery presented “Coarse” by Samuel Ross, a British product and fashion designer and founder of the label A-COLDWALL*, who cut his teeth working for Virgil Abloh. For his new works, Mr. Ross glazed and embalmed stone surfaces with turmeric and honey in a ritual gesture and joined them with contrasting accents of industrial materials colored in bright neon hues.
