The Brooklyn Museum will host the “Virgil Abloh: ‘Figures of Speech'” exhibition starting Friday. Its centerpiece is Social Sculpture, a wooden cabin placed in the middle of the Great Hall where workshops, talks, and other activities will be held. It is completely empty save from a sizable speaker and a Louis Vuitton marketing photo of a little Black child wearing a Wizard of Oz sweater from Abloh’s spring 2019 debut for the LVMH company.
Antwaun Sargent, the exhibition’s guest curator, compares the picture, which fills a window frame, to a “Virgil self portrait.”
The late designer expressed his hope that this exhibition will result in “at least seven more Virgil Ablohs in the future” when a previous version of it was presented at the Museum of Contemporary art in Chicago, Abloh’s hometown.
As the first African American man at a French luxury goods company, he founded a streetwear company that became the highest top of luxury fashion. He was a designer of advancement. The great sadness of his death at the age of 41 in November last year is that it has denied fashion—and the rest of the world—decades more of his own creative thought. His accomplishments are certain to inspire many more would-be Virgils.
“What would it have meant for him to live for another 41 years? How would he have changed? his 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.”
– Antwaun Sargent
To assist rework the show for Brooklyn, Abloh worked with writer Sargent, who in 2019 published The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion. Although it was supposed to open in 2020, the epidemic caused a delay. Until the designer’s final days, the two continued to communicate via WhatsApp.
Not the only new inclusion is Social Sculpture. Visitors are first exposed to a sound system project with Braun that was never finished and features a 45-minute loop that blends Houston slab rap with 1960s jazz. Sargent explains, “We all know that Virgil was a prolific DJ.
Thus, in a sense, you are welcomed by his voice and this notion of community, of tearing down the walls between various kinds of canons.
The exhibition is then organized roughly chronologically, starting with a college sketchbook labeled Vergone (his nickname), moving on to tennis dresses and gowns he created for Serena Williams and Beyoncé, respectively, and ending with an art project he collaborated on with Takashi Murakami. The museum’s director, Anne Pasternak, claims that “Virgil had this enormous thirst for all these relationships, whether it was Ikea, LVMH, or Mercedes.” Whatever it was, he wanted to demonstrate to others that they could be, and indeed, should be, in these places.
One of the three angel-inspired designs from his posthumous fall 2022 Louis Vuitton collection, which was unveiled in Paris in January, serves as the show’s finale. The exhibition breaks a variety of institutional regulations in classic Abloh fashion. The tables themselves are the first thing to mention; made of unfinished wood, they are Abloh’s creation and are intended to have a more retail-like appearance and feel than a museum-like one.
They are described as “a leveling technique” by Pastenak. Furthermore, most of his work, including his wildly successful Nike shoe collaborations, is placed on those tables without glass vitrines to protect it, as if it were for sale. Off-White clothing racks that run the length of one wall of the room are probably going to tempt more conversation.
Most annoying of all? The exhibition store and the show itself are hardly separated. No “escape through the gift shop” situation exists. Abloh disagreed with the lofty (read: antiquated) division of art and business. Church & State, the name of the store, is a wink-wink reference to the show.
The real way out is through Virgil Abloh’s “wall of heroes,” a mural in Federal Plaza in Chicago that includes images of people like Michael Jordan, Pharrell Williams, Marc Jacobs wearing an LV cap, and a Calder sculpture. The show’s title makes reference to Abloh’s use of quote marks and language, but those heroes were also his “figures of speech,” according to Sargent. The discussions Abloh ignited seem destined to go on.
“Virgil Abloh: ‘Figures of Speech’” opens at the Brooklyn Museum on July 1.
