In Search of Virgil Abloh

off the walls and pedestals as a critique of art world consumption and consumer culture. As the readymade objects were bought, messages, written in V's signature quotation style, would reveal themselves in the emptied-out galleries of the museum's Great Hall. After some research, though, we abandoned the plan. Takashi Murakami, the acclaimed Japanese Pop artist who collaborated with V most recently on a trio of shows at Gagosian Gallery, had explored a similar premise with former Louis Vuitton creative director Marc Jacobs at the Brooklyn Museum in 2008. V had no problem sampling ideas, but this approach had to be fresh.

Over time, the chat became a stream of reference images for the exhibition design, a place for V to share old and new work, and a space to think together about the relationships between, say, billboard advertisement and painting, garments and architecture. In January 2020, I visited V in his large and messy Louis Vuitton atelier in Paris, a sprawling, mazelike laboratory that was like an entryway to the artist's brain. There was DJ equipment for impromptu office sets, bags and racks of his LV clothing, a large mirror framed with the red Time magazine logo. In between fittings for his fashion presentations, V shared ideas for our show. On an orange table was a foam model of the Brooklyn Museum's Great Hall and, displayed inside, the objects he wanted to present—shoes from his Nike collaborations, his first ad campaign for LV, mannequins wearing his designs, sculptures he'd built, chairs he'd designed, silkscreens from Pyrex Vision, his first fashion label. It was a survey representing every chapter of his career as a maker.

This was right before the pandemic and the racial protests, which would make us rethink the show. By July of that year, we realized it needed to be more responsive, have a more direct social dimension. We started thinking about the idea of a social sculpture, a contemporary take on what V called “a Trojan horse.” It would be a Black space, populated with V's work, designed with the principles of what the artist David Hammons once termed “negritude architecture,” which he defined as “the way Black people make things, houses or magazine stands in Harlem, for instance. Just the way we use carpentry. Nothing fits, but everything works. The door closes, it keeps things from coming through. But it doesn't have that neatness about it, the way white people put things together; everything is a thirty-second of an inch off.”

The idea became concrete in October 2020, when V dropped into the chat a rendering of a one-story black house with exaggerated proportions that lightly took direction from the Herzog & de Meuron–designed furniture museum Vitra Schaudepot, in Weil am Rhein, Germany. The building would occupy the center space of the exhibition hall. As visitors moved around it, they would encounter a black tactical ladder—a metaphor for the way V was storming the museum, with metal steps etched with the names of various “figures of speech,” from the Pan-Africanist musician Fela Anikulapo-Kuti to the rapper Ghostface Killah. One side of the house would be lined with pedestals displaying, say, a shoe or a bag or a kite V had designed, as a way to elevate objects of culture (whether low or mass or luxury) into the realm of sculpture, which is to say art. At the entrance would be a black-and-white sign that said “colored people only.” The interior would have dark wood flooring, conveying a note of intimacy and history. It was a living sculpture that would double as a house museum, a nod to Black interiority and a reminder that before museums let Black folks into them, we used our living rooms as places to show off our art and our histories. Above all, the space would be autonomous; V and his collaborators would set the rules for what was displayed and why.