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SEE THIS
Ceramic and Glass Lamps With Playful Personalities
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| From left: Carmen D’Apollonio’s “It’s Good to Be Here,” which features a classic cloth shade, and “It’s All a Big Mystery” (both 2025), for which the artist experimented with glass. Courtesy of Friedman Benda and Carmen D’Apollonio. Photo: Evan Bedford |
The Swiss artist Carmen D’Apollonio primarily makes sculptural lamps whose globular clay bases often cling to the corner of a table, their shades askew. She considers each one a character. This week, she’s debuting a new collection at Friedman Benda’s New York gallery, many of which feature glass lampshades. D’Apollonio says she likes that the material “drips and is unpredictable.” One of the new pieces looks like a glass mushroom; another resembles a person wearing a hat bent toward the ground, or maybe a drooping, bell-shaped flower on a thick black arched stem. Another new work incorporates fabric (D’Apollonio, who’s based in Los Angeles, was previously a fashion designer) stuffed to create a massive pillow in the shape of two legs, which forms the base of a wall-mounted light. “It’s my new baby,” says D’Apollonio. “Carmen D’Apollonio: Salut, Ça Va, C’est Moi” will be on view at Friedman Benda New York from Sept. 11 through Oct. 16, friedmanbenda.com.
CONSIDER THIS
For a New York Photo Exhibition, These Artists Used iPhones
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| Inez and Vinoodh's “Think Love” (2025). The work will appear in an exhibition curated by The New York Times Magazine’s former director of photography Kathy Ryan, featuring images shot on the iPhone 17 Pro. Inez and Vinoodh |
When the fashion photographers Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, better known simply as Inez and Vinoodh, were asked to capture joy, they decided to record their son Charlie and his partner cavorting in the desert surrounding Marfa, Texas. The pair’s cinematic photos will appear in a New York exhibition, “Joy, in 3 Parts,” curated by The New York Times Magazine’s former director of photography Kathy Ryan and organized by Apple. (The show will also take place in Shanghai on Sept. 20 and 21.) Each participant was given a new iPhone 17 Pro and asked to evoke the show’s titular emotion. The artist Mickalene Thomas created black-and-white compositions of Black leisure. Her subjects dance, lounge and embrace in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park. The Chinese photographer Trunk Xu went for a meta approach, portraying subjects taking selfies and documenting loved ones at the beach and at a billiards bar, among other locations, in Los Angeles. Ryan herself used the iPhone for her “Office Romance” series (2012-24), which depicts former co-workers in The New York Times building. For this exhibition, Ryan says she chose the theme of joy to counter our intensely anxious moment, and because she felt it would be “expansive enough for the artists to be free.” “Joy, in 3 Parts” will be on view at 456 W. 18th Street, New York, from Sept. 19 through Sept. 21, events.apple.com.
WEAR THIS
A Collection of Los Angeles-Inspired Clothes
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| Sanderlak’s new capsule collection includes a shearling coat (left) and tailored jackets and trousers (right). Dominick Sheldon |
The fashion designer Sander Lak, who helmed the colorful label Sies Marjan for five years until its 2020 closure, has lived in a number of countries including Brunei (where he was born), Scotland and Gabon, as well as in traditional fashion cities like New York and Paris. When he began creating his new line, Sanderlak, which will debut this fall, Lak decided to lean into a theme of globe-trotting. Each year, he plans to explore a new locale through clothing, with multiple collections that will be released in periodic drops rather than in accordance with a traditionally rigid seasonal schedule. For year one, the label will revolve around Los Angeles, though the designer cautions there will be no western wear, yoga pants or other stereotypical Hollywood garments. Instead, Lak plans to approach his inspiration more abstractly with relaxed silhouettes and supple fabrics that reflect the ease of West Coast dress codes, and a sun-bleached palette that evokes the painted exteriors lining Melrose Boulevard. Ahead of the first full collection’s arrival in stores this December, Sanderlak will release an 18-piece unisex capsule exclusively on its website. Pieces include striped pajama-like shirts and drawstring trousers, an unlined blazer and matching pants, and a boxy shearling coat dyed a deep magenta. Also on offer will be hoodies and sweatpants made from dead-stock fleece, in shades inspired by Californian nature with names like Desert Sage, Matcha and Mud. From $195, sanderlak.com.
VISIT THIS
Robert Rauschenberg’s Experimental Fabric Work, on View in Houston
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| “Robert Rauschenberg: Fabric Works of the 1970s” opening at the Menil Collection in Houston this month, will showcase the artist’s experimental textile works including, from left: “Gull” (1976) from the “Jammers" series and several works from the “Hoarfrost” series, like “Mint” (1974) and “Glaze” (1975). Photo: Caroline Philippone |
Opening this month at the Menil Collection in Houston, “Robert Rauschenberg: Fabric Works of the 1970s” will be the first museum survey to consider the American artist’s midcareer use of textiles. Highlights include the “Jammers” series (1975-76), large, sail-like panels hung in graphic constellations that nod to Rauschenberg’s affection for windsurfing, and “Sant’Agnese (Venetian)” (1973), a sculptural piece in which transparent mosquito netting is draped between two chairs and held in place by shoelaces, a meditation on ephemerality. Organized in collaboration with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation to celebrate the artist’s centennial year, the show will highlight a less familiar part of his oeuvre: “Even for folks who know Rauschenberg’s legacy really well, these works reveal his ability to aggressively experiment in new terrain,” says Michelle White, the senior curator of the Menil Collection. In the early 1970s, Rauschenberg moved from New York to Captiva Island, off the Gulf Coast of Florida, beginning an exploratory period during which fabric came to the foreground of his practice in pieces — including set and costume designs — that were minimalist while still engaged with light, form and color. “This period was perhaps Rauschenberg at his most restrained and elegant,” says White. “Robert Rauschenberg: Fabric Works of the 1970s” will be on view at the Menil Collection, Houston, from Sept. 19 through March 1, 2026, menil.org.
WATCH THIS
An Opera Set on 1970s Fire Island, With Music by Mozart
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| A rehearsal for “Figaro/Faggots,” which will run for four performances in late September. Zach Nesmith |
Two hundred and thirty-nine years since it premiered in Vienna, the opera “Le Nozze di Figaro,” by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, is still among the most popular productions in the world. A 2025 analysis of the calendars of major companies by the database Operabase found it to be the sixth most frequently staged opera globally in the 21st century. Now, its score is being revisited in “Figaro/Faggots,” a new chamber work by the director and choreographer Kevin Carrillo that marries Mozart’s music with a libretto of text from Larry Kramer’s 1978 novel “Faggots.” Carrillo first had the idea to combine the two works in 2020, when the U.S. Supreme Court seemed likely to re-examine the landmark 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges that federally enshrined the rights of same-sex couples to marry. Carrillo found parallels between “Faggots” and Pierre Beaumarchais’s “The Marriage of Figaro” (the 1778 stage comedy from which Mozart adapted his opera) both in their investigations of social codes and the institution of marriage, and in the controversy they elicited upon their releases. (“The Marriage of Figaro” was blocked by French censors for its veiled critique of the aristocracy for six years before it was finally staged, and Kramer was ostracized by groups within the L.G.B.T.Q. community for his novel’s portrayal of gay promiscuity.) The 90 minutes of action in “Figaro/Faggots” is set on New York’s Fire Island in the 1970s. Naturally, elements of Mozart’s opera had to be adapted — the barber of Seville becomes the barber of Sayville (a Long Island hamlet from which many Fire Island ferries depart), and Count Almaviva’s palace becomes the Ice Palace disco, a 55-year-old nightclub in Fire Island’s Cherry Grove district. “Figaro/Faggots” will run at the Jerome Robbins Theater, Baryshnikov Arts, New York, from Sept. 25 through Sept. 27, baryshnikovarts.org.
VIEW THIS
Glass Sculptures That Evoke the Inner Workings of the Eye
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| From left: Andrea Ursuta’s “Private Dancer (Pink)” and “Private Dancer (Pesto)” (both 2025). © Andra Ursuţa, courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner |
The Romanian-born sculptor Andra Ursuţa has long been interested in themes of physical decay and the lingering nature of disaster. Her sculptures to date have incorporated casts of the artist’s body with everyday objects like salvaged trash and Halloween costume masks, and suggest bodies falling apart, leaky organs and uncanny appendages. “Retina Turner,” Ursuţa’s new solo exhibition at David Zwirner’s 20th Street gallery in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, focuses on “the demise of vision,” she says. The artist was inspired by entoptic disturbances: floaters, flashes and other visual debris that drifts across the retina. The exhibition consists of 16 egg-shaped slabs, each nearly eight feet tall, cast in translucent and murrine glass in a range of vibrant colors and opacities. Ursuţa creates the murrine surfaces using an ancient technique that fuses colored glass rods, which produces densely patterned designs of small opaque circles that shift from earthy tones to vivid blue, yellow, red and green, and encase objects that resemble hybrid alien fossils. The artist’s fascination with faux historical objects that blend references to antiquity and science fiction is also central to her concurrent solo show at the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art’s Project Space in Hydra, Greece, called “Apocalypse Now and Then,” which features playfully grotesque relics like earthenware jugs with sunken breasts and a pair of disembodied skeletal bronze legs. “Retina Turner” is on view at David Zwirner 20th Street, New York, from Sept. 10 through Oct. 18, davidzwirner.com.
FROM T’S INSTAGRAM
In Sydney, an Artist’s Apartment With Hand-Painted Walls
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| Josh Robenstone |
The artist Martyn Thompson’s sunlit apartment in the harborside suburb of Elizabeth Bay in Sydney, Australia, is both a refuge for him and a showcase for his creations. From the beginning, he has treated the space like a living art installation, hand-painting the walls in the plant-filled dining room and connected sitting room in what’s become a leitmotif: a large-scale checkerboard, here in beige and a creamy white. In another corner of the room, anchored by a turmeric-toned Turkish rug, a wall is covered in checked wallpaper he designed in shades of warm brown, russet and yellow; it was printed from a photograph he took of one of his paintings.
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