Can you hear me, Major Tom? The instructions that greet visitors to Tom Sachs’ “Space Program: Mars,” which lifts off today at the Park Avenue Armory.

• Design Hunting is now on newsstands, just in time for the International Contemporary Furniture Fair. The new stand-alone home design title from the publishers of New York magazine and tireless design huntress (and New York design editor) Wendy Goodman is stuffed with lush photos of eye-popping dwellings—from a dentist’s office-turned-studio to an indoor treehouse—as well as advice from industry experts and a handy-dandy guide to NYC design resources. Three versions of the cover (red, yellow, and blue), photographed by Hannah Whitaker, are being randomly distributed.

• The Society of Illustrators will add eight members to its illustrious (ha!) hall of fame this year. The eight artists to be recognized for their “distinguished achievement in the art of illustration” are contemporary illustrators R.O. Blechman, John Collier, and Nancy Stahl, along with posthumous honorees Ludwig Bemelmans, Edward Gorey, and John Sloan. Elected by former presidents of the Society, the hall of fame recipients will be honored at a dinner and induction ceremony on June 22.

• The New York Photo Festival kicks off this evening with a opening preview and a reception featuring a guest set by DJ Spooky, who is contributing “Dumbo ice floes” to the festival as part of his Book of Ice-themed project (in October, he starts a year-long residency at the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Other must-see exhibitions include curator Glenn Ruga‘s “On the Razor’s Edge: Between Documentary and Fine Art Photography,” which features the work of Bruce Davidson, Reza, Platon, Rina Castelnuovo, and Eugene Richards. The festival opens to the public tomorrow.

Author and journalist Susan Orlean (left) has written two nonfiction pieces that have been turned into films. She’ll discuss her new book, Rin Tin Tin, in Mediabistro’s first online Literary Festival & Workshops starting July 16. Other speakers include Rebecca Skloot, Jason Boog, and Jason Allen Ashlock. Register now.

As the go-to guide for seven-day snapshots of local arts and events listings, Time Out Chicago boasts service-oriented stories that help urban explorers find the best ways to spend their free time.

And if you’re a freelance photographer, TimeOutChicago.com is wide open for those looking to add to their portfolios. The site gets over 3 million page views a month and features lots of photo galleries that speak to the mag’s cultural core.

“We have the broadest, most in-depth cultural coverage of Chicago of any media outlet and the largest cultural reporting team in the city, so if it’s about Chicago culture, we’d like to hear about it,” said editor-in-chief Frank Sennett. “Our target readership is anybody who actively consumes culture in the city of Chicago, people who are going out and doing things. They tend to be people in the city, but it could be anybody who wants to go out and do something fun.”

For editor contacts and more details on breaking in, read How To Pitch: Time Out Chicago.

This article is one of several mediabistro.com features exclusively available to AvantGuild subscribers. If you’re not a member yet, you can register for as little as $55 a year and get access to these articles, discounts on seminars and workshops, and more.

Marina Abramović and OMA’s Shohei Shigematsu with a model of the Marina Abramović Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art (Photo: OMA / Loren Wohl)

Artist Marina Abramović began her Met Gala Monday in Queens, inside MoMA PS1′s geodesic Performance Dome, where she detailed her plans to transform a crumbling old theater in Hudson, New York into the Marina Abramović Institute for the Preservation for Performance Art (MAI for short). Hours later, having sharpened up her all-black ensemble, she was striding up the red carpet at the Metropolitan Museum of the Art on the arm of James Franco. “Today is a big day for me,” she told the morning assembly of press, curators, critics, and friends after a warm introduction by PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach. “In the life of an artist, it’s very important to think of the future. When you die, you can’t leave anything physical—that doesn’t make any sense—but a good idea can last a long, long time.”

Her good idea is to channel 40 years worth of pioneering performance art into a living archive-cum-laboratory that will explore “time-based and immaterial art,” including performance, dance, theater, film, video, opera, and music. The focus will be on “long-duration” performances, those lasting for between six hours and…forever. “Only long-duration works of art have a serious potential to change the viewer looking at it and also the performer in doing it, because the performance that is long becomes more and more like life itself,” she said. “There’s no division between normal daily activity and the performance. This is what I experienced especially at my [2010] performance at MoMA, which was three months long. That really changed me mentally, physically, in many other ways.”

(Rendering: OMA)

Abramović commissioned OMA to transform the crumbling theatre that she acquired in 2007 into a space for training artists and audiences alike. “It has an interesting level of decay,” said OMA partner Shohei Shigematsu, pointing out a rotted column and ghostly baselines from the building’s post-theater incarnation as an indoor tennis court. “The project has to house a very specific program of long-duration performance, so the first thing we decided to do was insert a very monastic box inside that can house many things. It’s actually slightly bigger than the tennis court, so you can still play tennis if you wanted to.”
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Admit it. Your seven-year-old nephew could out-HTML tag you any day and you think that a Cascading Style Sheet is something with a thread count. That’s where the mediabistro.com mothership comes in. They’ve asked us to tell you about the upcoming online course in HTML fundamentals. Over four fun-filled weeks, web design design guru Laura Galbraith will guide you through a variety of web page production techniques, from column-based layouts and search engine optimization to semantic markup and advanced CSS styles. The online learning fun begins Thursday, May 31, and by Independence Day you’ll have brought a pre-designed webpage to life through the magic of HTML. Preview the course syllabus and register here.

Remember those commercials featuring Zack the Legomaniac? His real-world, adult equivalents are known as LEGO Certified Professionals, a designation that only a dozen people worldwide have achieved. One of them is Adam Reed Tucker, a Chicago architect-turned-“architectural artist” that now builds exclusively with tiny plastic bricks. “Working with my hands, creating art and sculpture, the freedom to create and explore my own vision of design without computer reliance, and to share architecture with the world all made this a natural move for me,” he says. “I wanted to work on ways to inspire and motivate those familiar with architectural elements and those with no design knowledge at all.”

Tucker is to thank for the LEGO Architecture product line, launched in 2008 with kits devoted to the Sears Tower and the John Hancock Center. He’s also the tireless brickbuilder behind “LEGO Architecture: Towering Ambition,” on view through September 3 at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC. Tucker’s 15 globe-spanning LEGO landmarks (including the Empire State Building, Frank Lloyd Wright‘s Fallingwater, and the Burj Khalifa) recently got some new neighbors, as the museum welcomed LEGO versions of 15 Central Park West (downsized by its original designers, Robert A.M. Stern Architects) and a couple of hometown favorites: a Metro station (ZGF Architects) and a traditional center hall colonial home (Gulick Group). Total brick count on the three models? 77,000. This weekend, Tucker returns to the museum to put the finishing touches on his LEGO White House. Stop by between noon and 4 p.m. on Saturday or Sunday to join in the architectural fun. Can’t make it to Our Nation’s Capital? Build your own LEGO White House (considerably smaller than the museum version) with this 560-piece kit. No word as to whether the gift shop also sells a LEGObama figure to place inside.

“Calvin actually once said to me that he never looked back. I think it’s probably the genius about him. I try not to look back. I try not to look in the archives or at stuff I’ve done. I think it’s so much more interesting what’s to come. I never consider myself a minimalist. But another word is reductionist, and that’s something I’m beginning to understand….What bothers me about the term minimalist is that it is so connected with a distinct period. It links me to the past. But I design for today. I’m a book freak. I’m buying five, six, seven books a week. I just want to feed myself. So I start with a lot—millions of pictures, millions of fabrics, millions of colors. Then as I work, it starts to be reduced and I pin the things that are relevant up. So, yes, those words carry a lot of weight and I don’t want them to be misrepresented, but I try not to associate myself with terminology. I want to be free to some extent.”

-Francisco Costa, women’s creative director at Calvin Klein Collection, interviewed by art photographer Ryan McGinley in this month’s issue of Interview with a stunning portfolio by Patrick Demarchelier. Click below to watch the fall 2012 Calvin Klein Collection runway show.
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At the Herman Miller pop-up shop, a family of Alexander Girard figures implore visitors to peruse Todd Oldham and Kiera Coffee’s mega-monograph on the designer. At right, an Eames lounge and ottoman with pedestal tables and an asterisk clock designed by George Nelson. (Photos: UnBeige)

The International Contemporary Furniture Fair doesn’t kick off until next Saturday, but Herman Miller is getting a jump on New York design week with a pop-up shop in Soho. The 6,000-square-foot showroom, open to the public through July 1, is arranged as a series of vignettes sprinkled with whimsical objects and designer-friendly books as well as art from Portland’s PDX gallery. It’s also the first place to see the Herman Miller Collection, a mix of classic pieces (Eames chairs, Noguchi tables, George Nelson‘s enduringly endearing Marshmallow sofa) and the work of contemporary designers such as Konstantin Grcic, Jasper Morrison, and Naoto Fukasawa. The portfolio of freestanding furniture for home and office is a revival of sorts. Ben Watson, executive creative director of Herman Miller, looked to heed Nelson’s 1948 call for “the continuing creation of a permanent collection designed to meet the requirements for modern living.” And so Ward Bennett credenzas mix with Stefano Giovannoni‘s swooping Paso Doble chairs, and BassamFellows’ elegant Tuxedo sofas cozy up to Nelson’s own mod tables. Watson has lined up future Collection pieces from the likes of Leon Ransmeier and Ayse Birsel and Bibi Seck.

Wooden bears by David Weeks prowl a table of books and accessories. At right, Grcic’s new Medici chair, produced by Mattiazzi, has a mod Adirondack vibe.

A rainbow of Eames molded plastic chairs around a Nelson X-Leg table.
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I’ve got no strings. Maurizio Cattelan’s “Daddy Daddy” (2008), which sold for $2.5 million this evening at Phillips de Pury in New York.

• Congratulations are in order for Michael Silverberg, who has been named editor-in-chief of Print. In addition to the magazine, he’ll direct content for the regional design annual competition, Imprint, and Print Books. Silverberg previously served as managing editor of Print.

• Entertainment Weekly is getting a new design director: Kory Kennedy. He’s held the same role at Runner’s World for the past six years and previously worked his design magic for publications such as Spin, Rolling Stone, Interview, and Sports Illustrated. Kennedy starts at EW on May 30.

• The juries have spoken, and on Tuesday evening, the Art Directors Club celebrated the winners of its 91st annual awards at a cocktail-laden gala in New York emceed by John Boiler of 72andSunny. Pulling off the elusive three-peat were a couple of hometown favorites, The New York Times Magazine and the School of Visual Arts, which won the cumulative awards honor in their respective categories (ADC Design Team of the Year and ADC School of the Year) for the third year in a row. Click here for the full listing of winners or better yet, stop by the ADC 91st Annual Awards Exhibition, which opened today at the ADC Gallery and is on view through May 24.
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(All photos courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

“I never thought people would want to wear clothes with monkeys and bananas on them,” said Miuccia Prada of her spring 2011 collection, a retail smash that featured madcap cotton separates printed with baroque scrolls, embroidered monkeys, and thick stripes. And the bananas? A wink at Carmen Miranda and Josephine Baker. More than 70 years earlier, when Miranda was still working the carnaval circuit in her native Brazil, Elsa Schiaparelli was feeling a circus theme. The designer described her summer 1938 collection as the “most riotous and swaggering” one she had ever created, and illustrator Christian Berard immortalized the “circus parade at Schiaparelli’s” in Vogue. “Clowns, elephants, horses, decorated the prints with the words ‘Attention a la Peinture,’” said Schiaparelli of her Barnum-infused couture. “Balloons for bags, spats for gloves, ice-cream cones for hats, and trained Vasling dogs and mischievous monkeys.” The two fanciful collections meet at long last in the “Naïf Chic” gallery in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s spring Costume Institute exhibition, “Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations,” which opens today.

Curators Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton reveal the striking similarities between Schiaparelli and Prada by focusing on seven areas of aesthetic kinship, from “Ugly Chic” and “Hard Chic” to “The Classical Body” and “The Surreal Body.” That last one is the showstopper, celebrated in a final gallery of mirrors (pictured directly above) that tricks the eye into perceiving an infinity of Dali collaborations, trompe l’oeil accents, furs, feathers, and pailletes, which Prada believes are irresistible to women. (“Paillettes are a typical form of eveningwear,” the designer has said. “Because I hate eveningwear, I try to make pailletes problematic—by making them so big or so heavy, for instance, that they become problematic.”) It can be a challenge to tell a Prada from a Schiaparelli, particularly when hefty fabrics and exotic textures are involved, but as Judith Thurman writes in an essay in the masterpiece of an exhibition catalogue designed by Abbott Miller of Pentagram, “Prada’s citations of Schiaparelli are an exercise in sampling, not imitation. They enrich and complicate, rather than merely translate her models, and they illustrate the way that critics and artists of every generation reinvent the formal language they inherit.” Prada is neither a copycat nor someone who is interested in translating the work of the contemporary artists she collects into covetable clothing. For her, art is an entirely separate barrel of monkeys.
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It’s shaping up to be a spot-on summer. Dot-loving artist Yayoi Kusama is the subject of a retrospective on view through June 5 at Tate Modern. The show arrives stateside, at the Whitney Museum, on July 12, just days before Louis Vuitton debuts a collection of ready-to-wear printed with two Kusama patterns. Vuitton stores around the world will be filled with displays of red and white spotted tentacles created by the artist, who recently celebrated her eighty-third birthday. Wallpaper* is right on the dot with this cover of its June issue, on newsstands today (subscribers received the limited-edition Kusuma cover, which is otherwise available only at newsstands in Japan). The photo shows Kusama at the National Museum of Art in Osaka, Japan, where she stands with one of her favorite works, “With All My Love for the Tulips, I Pray Forever” (2011), a trio of dot-covered tulip sculptures. The artist has personalized the cover with a “message of love” to Wallpaper* readers along with her Gustonian doodles.