Furniture Inspired by Georgia O'Keeffe's New Mexico Home

New York Times

02-05-2025

Herman Miller and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Collaborate
Since 1997, Georgia O'Keeffe's adobe home in Abiquiu, N.M., has been a museum where visitors can see exactly how she lived. The artist decorated the modern space with pieces by her designer friends like the architect Alexander Girard and the designers Charles and Ray Eames. 'She was in constant conversation with Girard to get furniture and textile recommendations,' says Kelsey Keith, the brand creative director of the furniture company Herman Miller. Now the museum is collaborating with Herman Miller on a set of O'Keeffe-inspired furniture pieces. The limited-run collection consists of Girard's Snake Table, which features a steel top on an aluminum base, finished in white enamel and printed with a coiled snake motif, and a new configuration of the Eames Wire Chair with a triangular seat pad (known as a bikini) upholstered in Girard's signature striped pattern in an ocher-and-sienna colorway that's inspired by the New Mexico desert. To accompany the launch, Herman Miller is exhibiting recently discovered photos that Girard shot of O'Keeffe's house, alongside archival images from the Eames Office, at its Park Avenue South location in Manhattan through May 29. The New Mexico collection will launch on May 20; from $895, store.hermanmiller.com.
A Perfume That Evokes a Yucatán Getaway With Notes of Guava and Lime
Carlos Huber, the Mexico City-born founder of the fragrance brand Arquiste, first traveled to Mérida, the Yucatán capital, on a school outing to the nearby Mayan ruins. Next came a road trip in his early 20s ('very 'Y Tu Mamá También,'' he says), then a visit several years later, when the honeyed scent of a guava tree lodged in his mind. A 2021 vacation with his now husband rekindled his fascination with the city. They rented an airy Modernist villa — called La Tropical by its owner and designer, Antonio Salazar — with a bedroom that opens directly onto the garden. 'It's a stone city but, when you step inside this house, you're in the jungle,' says Huber. The couple ended up buying the place from Salazar when he moved back to Spain, and now it has inspired Arquiste's new fragrance, Tropical: a decadent homage to the home's surrounding flora. This is Huber's latest collaboration with the perfumer Rodrigo Flores-Roux, another Mexico City native who knows his way around the local fragrant plants. Tropical is ripe and enveloping, with notes of guava paste and champaca flower alongside white plumeria, Yucatán lime and a caoba, or big-leaf mahogany, accord. For those who want to experience the scent in situ, the villa is still available to rent — and Huber is working on custom-scented shower products for a full Tropical immersion. $225, arquiste.com.
In Northern California, a Mother-Daughter Show of Textiles and Stone
In 2021, Mariah Nielson, the daughter of the artist JB Blunk, founded Blunk Space — a gallery in Point Reyes Station, Calif. — to preserve the legacy of her father, who died in 2002, and exhibit work by artists who were influenced by his practice. This Saturday, Mariah and her mother, Christine Nielson, will present a joint show of their own work, cheekily titled 'Soft Rock.' Christine, a textile artist and the founder of the bedding company Coyuchi, will display her weavings alongside Mariah's stone furniture. 'I had been nagging my mom to show her cushions at the gallery, and she said, 'I'll show the cushions if you make the display surfaces.' So it turned into a design challenge,' Mariah says. Christine, who in 2018 returned to weaving after a 40-year hiatus, has created 66 naturally dyed cushions and two rugs — inspired by Navajo, Cherokee, Iranian and Peruvian designs — from spun sheep yarn. The textiles will decorate six pieces Mariah has assembled from granite, basalt and sandstone offcuts she sourced at the sculptor Roger Hopkins's stone yard in Desert Hot Springs. These rocks were hauled to Marin County, where Mariah cut and polished them into tables, benches, a stool and pedestal. Even though the two worked independently, Mariah says, 'there has been a creative conversation between us, and it's impossible for me to have not absorbed all of the ways that my mother was weaving when I was treating the stones.' In the spirit of the 'Soft Rock' theme, the duo encourage visitors to touch and interact with the contrasting textures. 'We're going to play Phil Collins at the opening,' Mariah adds. 'Soft Rock' will be on view at Blunk Space from May 3 through June 7, blunkspace.com.
A Ceramist's Fluid, Wood-Fired Forms
The ceramist Chris Gustin works out of his studio in a renovated industrial chicken coop on the southern coast of Massachusetts. At 8,000 square feet, the space provides enough room for Gustin's anagama kiln, a wood-burning apparatus popularized in Japan around the fifth century, when it was introduced from China via Korea. In what's typically a four-day process, Gustin facilitates the interaction between wood ash, metal oxides and his secret-recipe glazes to create unexpected combinations of color and translucency. The result of this approach will soon be on view at Donzella Gallery in Midtown Manhattan, where Gustin will present new and archival works. Among them is his 'Spirit' series (2023-24), which comprises bulbous forms (the tallest of which is five feet), glazed in a range of colors, from bright blue to earthen shades of red and pewter that feel almost atmospheric with their textured specks and streaks. Gustin says he wants the viewer to feel that the works aren't just stationary objects 'but energies in motion, rising upward and breaking free from the physical world.' 'Ascension' is on view from May 7 through June 5, donzella.com.
A Book of Exuberant Flowers — With Advice on How to Grow Them
Frances Palmer has amassed an Instagram following for her beautiful portraits of flowers in various ceramic containers. And unlike others who post pretty pictures of various flora, Palmer not only grows all the flowers she photographs but also makes all the vessels in her ceramics studio. Her latest book, 'Life With Flowers,' is a 288-page tome filled with these portraits, personal musings and guidance for those interested in how to grow, arrange, maintain and cook with flowers, as well as a garden tools glossary, a list of suppliers and inspirational gardens to visit all over the world. But Palmer didn't intend for this to be a how-to-garden book. 'I wanted it to be how I think about flowers in relationship to my work,' she says, which is why she structured the book according to growing seasons. 'I think of the garden as a tapestry,' says Palmer. 'I want things to come into bloom, be at their peak and then die as others appear. So there is a constant movement and waves of flowers.' 'Life With Flowers' is available May 13; $35, francespalmerpottery.com.
Sam Moyer's Abstract Art, on View in Manhattan
The Brooklyn-based artist Sam Moyer's new exhibition, 'Woman With Holes,' takes its name from one of Isamu Noguchi's anthropomorphic marble sculptures. When the exhibit opens at the Hill Art Foundation in New York this week, Moyer's own abstract stone paintings and paper works will share space with the show's namesake. The foundation has arranged her work in conversation with pieces from the Hill Collection, including those by Brice Marden, Jasper Johns and Noguchi. In one memorable example, Moyer's 'Fern Friend Grief Growth' (2024) — a 20-foot stone painting, her biggest yet — has been paired with Liz Glynn's stainless-steel 'Untitled (Tumbleweed XIII)' (2017). Both sculptures take inspiration from the natural world, but with an almost industrial edge. Moyer produces her pieces according to a choreographed series of movements as demanding as they are balletic: After she finalizes the composition, Moyer inlays it into hand-cut wood that is then covered in canvas and plaster and painted. But her relationship to the intensive process has softened with age. Moyer used to maintain a rigorous workout routine to accommodate the slog. 'Now,' she says with a laugh, 'I mostly just complain.' 'Woman With Holes' is on view from May 1 through Aug. 1, hillartfoundation.org.