Next month, Nick Ozemba and Felicia Hung, the co-founders of the Brooklyn-based design studio In Common With, plan to open Quarters, a shop housed in a 19th-century TriBeCa loft. The 8,000-square-foot space is laid out like a well-appointed home: Guests enter through the library and can wander the great room, bedroom, dining room, kitchen, bar and lounge at their leisure. Everything within — furniture, lighting, art and even the pantry provisions — is available for purchase. Ozemba and Hung collaborated with several of their creative friends on the objects and décor that fill the space. They designed the tiling throughout with the New York City-based artist Shane Gabler, while a fresco depicting eels with earrings by the painter Claudio Bonuglia adorns a portion of the bar and lounge, which will open for evening service beginning this summer. The furniture on display is a mix of restored vintage pieces and new designs by Ozemba and Hung, some of which can be customized with imagery drawn up by various tattoo artists. “We’ll be able to sit down with people and play,” Ozemba says of the space’s potential to spur conversation and inspire new projects. “Retail shouldn’t be so serious. Take off your shoes and have a glass of wine.” Quarters opens May 13, shopquarters.com.
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Spiraling Sculptures Made Out of Recycled CDs
Throughout her career, the New York-based artist Tara Donovan has explored the transformative potential of recycled materials, questioning whether they can surpass their origins. In a new exhibit at Pace Gallery in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood entitled “Stratagems,” Donovan presents 11 towering new works constructed entirely from CDs, most of which she scavenged and salvaged from eBay. “We live in an age that feels increasingly defined by cycles of ingenuity and obsolescence,” says Donovan. “The archives of human experience have moved from paper volumes to clouds just during my lifetime, and the CD is probably the last vestige of our understanding of data as an object.” She left the discs intact, strategically overlapping and adhering them one another, resulting in structures that get up to nine feet tall. They’re meant to allude to the architecture of skyscrapers, an echo that’s visible from the windows of the seventh floor where the show is mounted. On a sunny day, Donovan’s towers sometimes have a prismatic effect, throwing rainbows of light onto the floor. On May 4, during Frieze Week in New York, Donovan’s friend the choreographer Kim Brandt will stage a performance with six dancers within the exhibition. “Stratagems” is on view from May 3 through June 15, pacegallery.com.
Greenpoint, Brooklyn’s northernmost neighborhood, has long been a destination for bakeries in New York City. There’s the decades-old Polish standby Peter Pan, which was immortalized as the part-time workplace of Zendaya’s MJ in “Spider-Man: No Way Home” (2021), and Syrena bakery, another Polish staple since 1993 selling everything from bread and babka to tiramisù and holiday cookies. Several more purveyors of baked goods have opened in the past year, including Radio Bakery, led by the pastry chef Kelly Mencin with a menu that focuses on New York “flavor memories,” as she puts it, like bacon, egg and cheese focaccia, scallion sesame twists and Earl Grey morning buns. In November, Taku Sando opened on Greenpoint Avenue, making decadent Japanese sandwiches served on homemade shokupan bread that’s also sold by the loaf. In a cinder red building on Norman Avenue, there’s Pan Pan Vino Vino, a bakery and wine bar from the owners of Nura, an Indian-inspired restaurant a few blocks away. The designer and co-owner Nico Arze has adorned the pastry case with volcano paintings in a nod to his native Chile. Within it, there are loaves of caraway rye bread — the pastry chef Sam Short remembers her Polish grandmother making liverwurst sandwiches with it — alongside guava cream cheese Danishes made from croissant trimmings. And as of February, the sea of coffee cups and pastry-laden bags at McGolrick Park has taken on a white and red hue — Paloma Coffee’s signature colors — since the roaster opened a bakery outpost on Nassau Avenue. Its single-origin beans are now complemented by innovative pastries (get the artichoke, olive and potato bear claw).
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A Vase Inspired by Alice Waters’s Home Kitchen
When Fanny Singer, the writer and founder of the design brand Permanent Collection, was looking for a muse for her next housewares collection, she turned to her mother, the pioneering Californian chef and seasonal slow food champion Alice Waters. The pair had already worked together to release Waters’s egg spoon, a hand-forged iron utensil for frying eggs over a hot flame. The newest piece in their collaboration, which coincides with Waters’s 80th birthday this month, is a supersize statement vase with wide, sweeping handles. The piece is inspired by an antique Italian urn, which sits in a pleasantly cluttered corner of Waters’s home kitchen in Berkeley, Calif., that she often fills with branches. “I associate flowers with her always — crafting these beautiful creations with whatever she cuts from the garden or a friend’s cherry blossom or plum tree,” says Singer. To recreate Waters’s beloved item, the duo turned to a local ceramist, Niki Shelley, who glazed the vessel in a deep, earthy green. Waters says it’s the aspect of the amphora she loves most: “For me, it’s the color of nature, and it pulls the greens of the garden into the kitchen.” $740, permanentcollection.com.
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An Artist’s Photographic Arrangements, on View in New York’s Chinatown
The Mexican-born, Vancouver-based artist Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez is preparing to mount “Survey,” his first solo exhibition in New York, on April 26 at David Peter Francis, a Chinatown gallery that opened in March. The show features a new suite of giclée prints in which Rodriguez juxtaposes found photography with some of his own iPhone snaps, making various compositions atop grids, arcs and zigzagging lines that resemble bar graphs, invoking a sense of scientific or taxonomic connection between images that are, in fact, unrelated. The body of work was born from the frustration Rodriguez experienced while living and teaching in Chicago: When working on a video piece that required extensive archival research, the artist found some institutions’ regulations around photo usage to be creatively stifling. As he puts it, “The images had to be tied down to a specific narrative that the archive was trying to uphold, and there was no space in there for art.” Though Rodriguez still makes use of established archives, he more regularly sources imagery from encyclopedias, eBay and, every now and then, the sidewalk. (“The ones I’ve found on the street are surprisingly good,” he says.) In “Sleeping Boys I” (2024), Rodriguez places an image of a person sound asleep and awash in sunlight across from a photo of a slumberer carved in stone, while “Unmade Beds” (2024) presents multiple views of crumpled sheets and lumpy pillows (one image is, in fact, a photo of a photo of a photo). “Survey” is on view from April 26 to June 1, davidpeterfrancis.com.
When Simone Bodmer-Turner moved from Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, to a farmhouse in rural Massachusetts last spring, the 34-year-old ceramist suddenly found herself at a professional impasse. Separated from her kiln for the first time in her career, “I had absolutely no idea how I would work,” she recalls. Turning to a range of new materials, she gradually began imagining a collection of purposeful pieces that seemed a better fit for her traditional New England surroundings. In a departure from the abstract, bulbous forms she once routinely shaped in her Brooklyn studio, “It’s now about function first,” she says, “and sculpture second.” Her latest works include a patinated bronze lamp that bears the texture of the original hand-molded clay model from which it was cast, while a simple wooden side table — similar to one she encountered in a local Shaker museum — is offset with whimsical, Surrealist-inspired feet and an urushi lacquer finish courtesy of the artist Yuko Gunji, Bodmer-Turner’s former neighbor and frequent collaborator. The pieces will be shown in the upcoming exhibition “A Year Without a Kiln” at Emma Scully Gallery on New York’s Upper East Side. Editions of the larger furniture, along with a handful of decorative objects — from fireplace andirons to a silk standing screen conceived to conceal an air-conditioning unit — are now available for purchase, with the hope that they’ll become heirlooms. The artist moved into her new home with the intention to stay there forever, which, she says, “really brought about a desire for timelessness.” “A Year Without a Kiln” will be on view from May 2 through June 22, emmascullygallery.com.
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