events

(Photos: UnBeige)

Hallucinations are par for the course at the Javits Center, particularly during the biannual New York International Gift Fair (NYIGF, to those in the know), during which the cavernous space is chock full of innovative gizmos, colorful homegoods, and enough “accent pieces” to sink an ably-piloted Italian cruise ship. And so when, shortly after selecting the Chick-a-Dee smoke detector as our pick for a Bloggers’ Choice Award earlier this month, we spied Queen Elizabeth II clutching her handbag and waving regally to passersby, we chalked it up to good ‘ol gift show burnout. But this was no monarch mirage! Kikkerland Design convinced the Queen to get a headstart on her Diamond Jubilee festivities with an appearance at their NYIGF booth, where she helped to promote a new limited-edition version of the company’s “Solar Queen.” Designed by Chris Collicot, the grinning figurine waves daintily when placed in sunlight, and the Jubilee edition is tricked out with a brooch and a crown. Meanwhile, Collicot promises that the Queen will soon have a companion in Elroy the Solar Corgi.

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“It had a great feeling of unreality. I mean, I was a designer of china; I was not in the business of killing Stalin. Imagine yourself! Most of the time I did not believe that I would have an opportunity to relate this to anybody. I really did not. There was very little probability that I would live—nobody wished me well.”

-Designer Eva Zeisel (1906-2011) in her prison memoir, published in issue 14 of A Public Space. On Thursday evening, Cooper-Hewitt director Bill Moggridge kicks off a new year of Bill’s Design Talks with a tribute to Zeisel. Joining Moggridge on stage at The Greene Space will be art critic Jed Perl (The New Republic) and the designing duo of James Klein and David Reid (KleinReid), who collaborated with Zeisel on a series of ceramics and prints. Buy tickets here.

“The audience was made to suffer. At one performance the only person allowed to sit was Duchamp. He said, ‘I am very old, and I cannot stand, please let me sit down.’ I thought, ‘Maybe it’s a trick. But then again, he was very old.’ I think Duchamp went to everybody’s performances. ‘Nekropolis I’ ended with us all becoming mice, dressed in burlap bags. We crawled out into the audience slowly; we couldn’t see. Then we were supposed to just drop somewhere and not move until they went home. According to the story I wound up on the feet of Duchamp. But I couldn’t see who it was. It’s a good story, but as time goes by you wonder, ‘Did this really happen?’”

-Artist Claes Oldenburg recalls for Carol Kino what actually happened at the Happenings, in an article published in today’s New York Times. A critic writing in 1962 described “Nekropolis I” as enjoyable for “the heavy slow clamor of these bulky creatures crawling and messing around in that bulky ‘environment’ of burlap, paper, paint, and other assembled junk.” Oldenburg was singled out for having “made wonderful nondescript jungle sounds and heaved his considerable weight from mound to mound like a natural denizen.”

Pictured: Lucas Samaras, left, and Oldenburg in a scene from “Nekropolis I,” from 1962. (Photo Claes Oldenburg; All rights reserved Robert R. McElroy/VAGA, NY)

Shepard Fairey does Dallas! The street artist is making his mark on The Big D with a series of murals that will be unveiled tomorrow. The citywide project is sponsored by Dallas Contemporary, which is celebrating with an “over-the-top, neon-inspired” Saturday night dance party (fingers crossed for glowsticks!). Fairey will balance DJing duties with signing merch from the on-site OBEY pop-up shop. Meanwhile, the Contemporary Art Dealers of Dallas are organizing an art bus tour for next Saturday, February 11. Stops include the current Rob Pruitt, David Jablonowski, and Failure exhibitions at Dallas Contemporary, several of the Fairey murals, and a studio visit with Dallas-based graffiti crew Sour Grapes. Don’t miss the bus: tickets are going fast here.

Lately we’ve been sleeping with a copy of Todd Oldham and Kiera Coffee’s wondrous Alexander Girard mega-monograph under our pillow, and next Tuesday, February 14, Pratt Institute welcomes the delightful Oldham for a lecture on all things Girard, from his iconic textile designs for Herman Miller and branding and environmental design for Braniff International Airways to his celebrated retail store Textiles and Objects and folk art-stuffed Girard Foundation. The 6 p.m. lecture is free and open to the public, but Pratt students get first dibs on seats.

As part of its burgeoning “Fashion at FIAF” programming, our friends at the French Institute Alliance Francaise here in New York have invited agnès b. (née Agnès Andrée Marguerite Troublé) to curate a month-long series of films that have most influenced her life and career as a designer, photographer, and more recently as a film producer and director. Among her picks are Godard‘s Vivre Sa Vie and Pierrot le Fou, while Valentine’s Day revelers can be transported to St. Tropez at one of three V-Day screenings of …And God Created Woman, starring Brigitte Bardot. The fashionable French fun kicks off on Tuesday, when agnès b. will appear in person to present the first film in the series, The Crime of Monsieur Lange, directed by Jean “Yes, he’s my dad” Renoir. Buy your tickets here.

Art and design fans have much to look forward to in the coming weeks. Here are our picks of the latest and greatest not-to-be-missed events in NYC:

What’s more fun that art forgery? A talk about the colorful history of art forgery by Milton Esterow. The ARTnews editor and publisher takes to the stage tomorrow evening at 92nd St Y for “Fakes, Frauds, and Fake Fakers” (we adore that title), a sure-to-be-fascinating look at how forgers have created convincing imitations of masterpieces, as well as works that mimic the styles of great artists, duping collectors, dealers, and even the experts themselves. Don’t bother trying to forge a ticket to this talk; buy a real one here.

On Monday, January 30, Moleskine hosts an evening of interactive portrait-making at Exit Art. Stop by the reception (6-9 p.m.) to “explore the many ways to capture a portrait using Moleskine objects” with featured artists including Emilie Baltz and Nathan Sensel. Text-portraits, sound-portraits, taste-portraits, photo-portraits, and more are promised. RSVP here to be sure that your name in their little black (guest) book.

Cooper-Hewitt director Bill Moggridge kicks off a new year of Bill’s Design Talks with a tribute to Eva Zeisel, who died a few weeks ago at the age of 105. Joining Moggridge on February 9 at The Greene Space will be art critic Jed Perl (The New Republic) and the designing duo of James Klein and David Reid (KleinReid), who collaborated with Zeisel on a series of ceramics and prints. Register here to attend. There will be also be a live webcast.

But back to people named “Milton”! On February 16, Milton Glaser comes to Brooklyn’s terrific powerHouse Arena for an exclusive discussion and signing of his new book In Search of the Miraculous (Overlook). A $10 ticket saves you $10 off the price of the book, in which Glaser highlights work, largely created by him over the last five years, to demonstrate how one concept leads to another. Bring on the fascinating juxtapositions.
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Prada has teamed with two of its favorite collaborators to present an ephemeral museum experience in Paris. Puckish Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli and AMO, the architectural think tank-cum-consulting arm of Rem Koolhaas‘s OMA, are the minds behind “24 h Museum,” which opens Tuesday, January 24—and closes 1,440 minutes later. The project will transiently commandeer the Palais d’Iéna. Designed by Auguste Perret between 1936 and 1946, it currently houses the French Conseil Économique, Social, et Environnemental. What Vezzoli and AMO have in store for the historic property remains anyone’s guess, but they’ve picked a fetching Pepto-Bismol pink for the identity of their pop-up “architectural intervention,” which now has official Facebook and Twitter accounts. According to Vezzoli, who has worked with everyone from Gore Vidal to Lady Gaga on a string of genre-straddling meta-spectacles, the art in 24 h Museum “will dangerously resemble advertising tools.” Meanwhile, AMO is fresh from another Prada project. The OMA offshoot designed the palatial-mod sets for the house’s fall 2012 menswear show, held Sunday in Milan. Audience members surrounded a grand expanse of carpeting, a woolly collage of red, white, and black piles dotted with geometric flower shapes. Above them hung a half dozen massive chandeliers, illuminated by 300 neon tubes.

It’s shaping up to be another eventful year for Tom Dixon and his addictive forms. On Friday, the self-taught designer-maker will debut his collection of everyday home accessories and design objects at Maison & Objet in Paris. “Eclectic by Tom Dixon” includes gift-ready goodies made of materials such as copper, marble, cast iron, and wood. But that’s nothing compared to what he’s got in store for Milan Design Week. Come April, Dixon and friends will transform the National Museum of Science and Technology Milan into MOST, a new cultural hub that will showcase the creations and wares of a handpicked group of designers, curators, and companies.

“In a fit of spontaneous madness we decided that the world’s most important meeting place for global design obsessives needed a new epicenter, a space for quiet contemplation or chaotic energy—a platform for the exchange of big ideas,” said Dixon in a statement announcing the project, which kicks off on April 17. “We have created a place where we can demonstrate the new democratization and hyperactive innovation of technology in art, food, fashion, manufacturing, and communication.” His creative partners on the project are Design Miami veteran Ambra Medda and Milan native Martina Mondadori, who is working with TAR Magazine to assemble a slate of lectures and seminars that will take place in the museum’s gorgeous auditorium (pictured). MOST will provide each exhibitor with an individual space within the approximately 400,000-square-foot museum, and there will be an overall exhibition theme. Exhibits of various sizes, positioned inside and outside of the museum, are expected to create a carnival-like environment. Interested in exhibiting? Contact Alice Foster (Alice.Foster@tomdixon.net) for more information and an application.

In a move that we hope will land him the network-TV variety show he so richly deserves, Chip Kidd will give a talk at this year’s TED Conference, which gets underway on February 27 in Long Beach, California. The charismatic author, editor, art director, book jacket designer, Batman expert, and rock star will lead off a March 1 session entitled “The Design Studio,” according to the program line-up released today. Kidd will be followed onto the TED stage by Andrew Bolton, curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, who may shed some light into the global phenomenon that was “Savage Beauty” (he organized the McQueen blockbuster) or just help to get the audience thinking outside their boxy polos and khakis. Rounding out the session is IDEO founder and Stanford professor David Kelley, who is expected to address his passion for “unlocking the creative potential of people and organizations to innovate routinely.”

Meanwhile, New Yorkers have a couple of imminent opportunities to get their Kidd fix (and wouldn’t Kidd Fixx be a great name for that TV show?). Tomorrow evening, the Museum of Comic & Cartoon Art hosts an evening of Bat-Manga. Kidd will discuss the Japanese Bat-mania phenomenon, the basis for his 2008 book, amidst the museum’s current exhibit of original artwork and lavish cover art from the Batman-manga comics. And on Thursday, January 26, he’ll be on hand for “The Next Chapter,” an AIGA/NY-sponsored look at e-publishing dynamics. What does Kidd know about digital publishing and the future of the book? Absolutely nothing, so he’ll be moderating a panel of people who actually do, including Carin Goldberg, Craig Mod (500 Startups, Flipboard), and Jeremy Clark (Adobe).

With dynamo conductor Gustavo Dudamel at the helm and the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall as a venue, the Los Angeles Philharmonic is a cultural force to be reckoned with. This year, the LA Phil kicks off a three-year project celebrating the operatic collaborations of librettist Lorenzo da Ponte and composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with some impressive collaborations of its own. The upcoming production of Don Giovanni will feature sets by Gehry and costumes by Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte.

“This is a project very close to Gustavo Dudamel’s heart. He knows the music like the back of his hand, and has a unique vision that I find very exciting,” said Gehry in a statement issued by the LA Phil announcing the creative team and cast for Don Giovanni, which premieres on May 18. “Kate and Laura’s work reminds me of my early days—it is free and fearless and not precious.” This marks the Mulleavys first foray into operatic costume design, following their show-stopping tutus for the film Black Swan. “Opera has always been a part of us; our grandmother was from Rome and studied it as a young girl,” said the sisters, now at work on costumes that will create “a timeless context” for Mozart’s characters. “Working with Frank Gehry in the concert hall that he designed, alongside Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, is a dream.”

The new, even-numbered year is upon us and with it a new world design capital: Helsinki (along with the Finnish cities of Espoo, Vantaa, Lahti, and Kauniainen). Following in the footsteps of Turin (World Design Capital 2008) and Seoul (2010), Helsinki kicked off its year-long designfest with a “New Year’s Eve of Design” bash in the capital city’s Senate Square and is now getting down to business with a slate of 300 events, projects, and initiatives that “explore the benefits and value of design, and showcase the various ways it can improve all of our lives.” Meanwhile, the organizers are working to improve visitors’ experiences with a mobile app. Launched today and developed in collaboration with Fjord, the WDC 2012 app provides on-the-go access to the program of events, related news, and a map, all in your choice of Finnish, Swedish, or English. So whether you want to doublecheck the dates of the Lapland Snow Design Event (read: igloo-building competition) or browse a listing of related events around the world, there’s an app for that—and, in keeping with the WDC theme of “Open Helsinki,” the app is free and available on four platforms: Meego, iOS, Symbian, and Android.

Got an app we should know about? Drop us a line at unbeige@mediabistro.com