I don’t really know how to do my hair that well. I don’t blow dry it or anything like that. I just started seeing Dana Ionato at Sally Hershberger for my color and I’ve liked working with her because the color grows out well.
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In Oxford, England, a Hotel Opens in an 18th Century Department Store
Oxford, England — home to the country’s oldest university, founded in 1096 — is getting a new hotel to match its beauty and history. The Store, a 101-room property, opens today in the building that once housed Boswells, a beloved local department store that opened in 1738. “Before we started the project, we interviewed dozens of local people to find out what Boswells meant to them. Their affectionate stories and memories had a big impact on the look and atmosphere of the hotel,” says Imshan Jamal, managing director and co-founder of the EQ group, which developed the Store in partnership with the London based Reef Group. The shop’s name remains on the Art Deco facade, as do its display windows, which will be used for art exhibits. Inside, the materials used in the rooms’ design — among them oak parquet, brass and leather — are meant to echo the traditional college aesthetic. Treadwell, the hotel’s restaurant, serves what Jamal calls “British food with a twist,” including the Ruby Murray, a short-crust pie filled with creamy butter-chicken curry and served with a side of chili-infused gunpowder potatoes. In the cellar, a walnut-paneled spa offers yoga classes, sound baths and treatments using products from the Welsh brand Oskia.
Before a stay at the hotel, guests will receive a questionnaire asking about any special requests or interests. That’s when you can arrange a visit to some of the university’s colleges or book a literary-themed tour of the sites around town, taking in the spots frequented by many of the writers who attended Oxford, including T.S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh and Oscar Wilde, who famously quipped “the two great turning points in my life were when my father sent me to Oxford and society sent me to prison.” Rooms from about $360, thestoreoxford.com.
Monica Khemsurov, a co-founder of the design publication Sight Unseen and a T contributing editor, has long been obsessed with the vintage hardware she’d spot on 20th-century buildings in Europe. “Whenever I find cool doors and handles on my travels, I’ll post it on Sight Unseen’s Instagram with #doorporn,” she says. This fixation led to an idea: an online store dedicated to expressive hardware. The shop, named Petra (it means “stone” in Greek), will launch with statement-making knobs, pulls, handles, switch plates, curtain tiebacks and towel bars made in collaboration with 27 independent designers known for their inventive aesthetics. The lineup comprises both exclusive and existing designs made from materials like metal, glass, wood, resin and clay. The Los Angeles jewelry designer Pamela Love created pomegranate-shaped bronze knobs encrusted with rubies as the fruit’s seeds. The artist Chris Wolston, based in Brooklyn and Medellín, Colombia, supplied metal handles inspired by leaves, daisies, spiders and snakes. The Spanish furniture brand BD Barcelona will sell licensed reproductions of Art Nouveau-era hardware designed by Antoni Gaudí as well as Salvador Dalí’s iconic Rinoceróntico door handle from 1937. Each fixture is made to order and will ship from makers’ studios. “Hardware is so fun and easy to play with as an artistic moment,” says Khemsurov. “You just stick it on really plain furniture and all of a sudden it’s got vibes.” petrahardware.com.
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In a Houston Exhibition, the Artist Theaster Gates Considers the Precarity and Necessity of Black Spaces
The Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates has long been interested in uplifting underserved communities and Black cultural output. While much of his work centers on his hometown, he recently shifted his focus to Freedmen’s Town, a district within Houston’s Fourth Ward that was established in 1865 by newly emancipated Black people. In 2022, in partnership with the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) and the Houston Freedmen’s Town Conservancy, Gates launched Rebirth in Action, an initiative designed to preserve and promote the area with walking tours, group art shows and community meetings. On May 17, CAMH will open “Theaster Gates: The Gift and the Renege,” an exhibition of new and recast pieces that considers how to honor and preserve Black spaces amid the threat of gentrification. One towering installation comprises unsold inventory from a now-shuttered family-owned hardware store in Chicago, while another piece features four 15-foot bookshelves turned in on each other to create a cramped space akin to a phone booth, each shelf packed with bound volumes of Ebony magazine. “Artists can be a driver of public imagination,” says Ryan N. Dennis, the museum’s senior curator and director of public initiatives, “reimagining what’s possible for the future we want to see.” “Theaster Gates: The Gift and the Renege” is on view at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston from May 17 through October 20, camh.org.
Covet This
Handblown Glass Oil Lamps That Set a Soft Mood
Before Lindsey Adelman became a lighting designer, she could be found passing out candles at college parties. “I was like, ‘No one’s going to have fun with this fluorescent light on!’” she recalls. On May 9, she’ll be debuting her new collection of glass oil lamps at Tiwa Gallery in TriBeCa alongside hand-stitched hanging panels by the textile artist Sarah Nsikak. The table lamps on ceramic bases, created in collaboration with the glass sculptor Nancy Callan, were handblown in black, clear and gold glass; some feature rippling surfaces created by murrine, a Venetian glass-blowing technique, while others have a crackling gold exterior produced when glass reacts to fire and oxygen. The amber hanging lamps swing from brass chains in a variety of configurations, illuminating the gallery in a constellation of flickering light. “My work centers on the environmental mood of a room,” Adelman says, “and the flame, often used in ritual and ceremony, sets a tone different from electric light.” “A Realm of Light” will be on view at New York’s Tiwa Gallery from May 9 through June 8, tiwa-select.com.
The artist Clifford Owens is best known for live performances that often include audience interaction, like his 2011 MoMA PS1 exhibition, “Anthology,” in which he carried out instructions — such as “Be Very African American” and “experience regret” — written by 26 different artists. But this week at the Independent New York fair, he’s showing an assortment of unusual drawings in the curator Jay Gorney’s exhibition. He pierced one with a dowel and made others by placing small sheets of paper in his pockets and sliding oil pastel sticks into them. The nine pieces on display focus on labor and leisure: a bleach- and ink-scoured work was inspired by Owens’s childhood spent cleaning marble floors ($1 per step), while a piece titled “Spitballing” calls to mind absent-minded fiddling. And a cheekily titled “Obligatory Self Portrait of Crying Performance Artist” depicts Owens with red eyes and snot dripping from his nose. “I think art is all about play,” he says, “and play is about giving oneself certain permission to be free.” “Clifford Owens” is on view from May 9 through 12, independenthq.com.
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